Deer Luhan,

It was good while it lasted.

Leigh

I can’t say it was a terrible surprise that there were “room problems” when it finally came to sleeping that night.  For starters, Sehun had been unceremoniously chucked out by the others to force him to stay with me, so he didn’t have one, and everybody else was sharing in twos or threes anyway to keep the cost down.  Baekhyun and Chen insisted that Sehun and I take their room, which had a queen-sized bed, but it was vetoed by Luhan as his was the only other room with lots of bed space in it and, in his words, “I do not want to wake up in the middle of the night half undressed with a koala wrapped around me or an eyebrow missing.”  I pointed out that the eyebrows were usually Lay rather than Chen, who had wanted to move into Luhan’s room precisely because there was lots of bed space.  Taemin offered to sleep on the floor as he had been sharing with Kai and Suho – according to Taemin, Suho was “easily dealt with” – but Kai vetoed that with an outbreak of spluttering that had us wondering if he was allergic to dogs, because he’d had his face buried in Railing’s coat at the time.  It actually turned out his reaction was because Taemin had a habit of undressing in his sleep.  I have to admit it would have been rather disturbing to wake up to a boy in the room with me, but Sehun was too busy laughing at Taemin’s indignant exclamation of “my subconscious is clearly aware of its surroundings, okay?  Your subconsciouses all and if this was a thousand years ago you’d all get eaten by cougars in your sleep” for me to dwell on that.  Kyuhyun tried to adopt responsibility for me as the oldest and (his reasoning) most mature in the room, but that was a no-go because he only wanted me and Sehun was not a happy bunny that Kyuhyun was trying to monopolise me, even if he was blatantly doing it to get a rise out of the maknae.

“You really fail at the Evil Maknae stuff,” Kyuhyun sighed, slumping back on the floor.

“Just wait until tomorrow morning, then,” Sehun grouched.

“I have a great idea,” said Kris suddenly.

“Oh God.”  Chanyeol looked resigned.  “This isn’t going to be a repeat of your last great idea, is it?”

I looked between the two of them in interest.  “Why?  What was his last great idea?”

“Putting Wolf as our title track on the XOXO album,” Chanyeol said.

“That wasn’t me,” Kris defended himself.  “My last great idea was using all our empty soju bottles to set up a bowling alley in the dorm and it was a good idea.”

D.O.’s evil eye turned into an outright glare.  “Not when you decide to use a croquet ball as the bowling ball.”

“It got a little out of hand,” Kris said graciously.

“A little?”

It was clearly an issue that had not been resolved, because Suho quietly excused himself on the pretext that his toothbrush had been stolen by germophobe Luhan and he wanted it back, and Luhan and Xiumin started snickering quietly to themselves.  Baekhyun wisely moved to the other side of the room from D.O. and I was pretty surprised that Chanyeol didn’t follow him.

Kyuhyun and Taemin looked up with interest: this was clearly one that they hadn’t heard before.

“What happened?” Taemin asked.

“What the do you think happens when you use a croquet mallet to send sixteen-ounce ball into a bunch of bottles?” D.O. demanded angrily as Xiumin and Luhan high-fived each other and collapsed laughing.  Chanyeol bit his lip and started to edge away.  “Especially when nobody wears shoes in the dorm?”

“You didn’t even cut yourself!” Suho yelled from the room Lay was sharing with him, but nobody paid attention to him due to the wicked gleam that had entered Kyuhyun’s eye.  “All that happened was you nearly got hit by a ball and almost killed Baekhyun in retaliation!”

“I need to note this one down for our dorm,” Kyuhyun said, taking out his phone to write it down.  “How much do you need to have drunk for it to get interesting?”

“Not a lot,” Kris admitted.  “But that’s probably just because we all stink at croquet.”

Suho appeared with toothpaste smeared over his face and holding a toothbrush whose bristles had gone a lurid shade of blue.  “It’s not golf: the aim is not to get the ball off the ground.  But who—”

“But it’s more fun that way,” Tao protested.  Suho gave him a withering look.

“Forget about fun.  Who thought it was a good idea to switch the toothpaste and the shower gel around?”

Xiumin and Luhan instantly sobered up, giving themselves away.

“ you both,” Suho said tiredly.  “It’s so irritating trying to tell you to grow up when you’re both older than me.”  He wiped at his eyes.  “Do you have any idea how powerful toothpaste is when it comes anywhere near the eyes or synapses?”

“It’s not all bad,” Luhan told him hastily.

“Exactly.”  Xiumin nodded vigorously.  “It’ll nuke any zits on your face.”

Suho looked surprised.  “Really?”

The conversation after that devolved into the skincare benefits of toothpaste, and when my injuries got the better of me and I started drifting off, Sehun quietly snuck me away into Kris’ room, which also had a queen-sized bed, and put me down in it before locking the door.  Once he’d tucked me in, he went hunting in the cupboards for extra pillows and blankets and then started building a pillow-blanket fort with them.

I woke up with a puppy on my chest to find Kai sitting cross-legged on the pillow next to my head with a tacky fake beard I recognised from the dressing-up box my cousins still loved to raid when they came round, a tweed cap that really didn’t suit him, a bright red waistcoat with holly and London buses on it, and a white-haired wig poking out from under the cap.  He looked traumatised, and Taemin was laughing his head off at him from the pillow-and-blanket turret he’d built onto the blanket fort.

Speaking of the blanket fort, it had grown exponentially during the time I had been asleep.  Sehun had started it more or less under the desk, but it was now practically an urban sprawl of blankets and boys, some of whom – Luhan being a prime example – had curled up on my bed, presumably to invade the “hilltop fortress”, inasmuch as the bed could constitute a hill.  Lay, who had also ventured out of the comfort of the fort, was sitting beside Luhan and busily spitting out fur.  I wasn’t sure how it had got into his mouth in the first place, but it looked like Railing had trampled over Lay to get to me.

And sit on my injured ribs.  Kai was trying to coax Railing off me, but it really wasn’t working.

“You’re still alive,” I observed as Kai finally gave up trying to bribe the devoted Railing away and picked the puppy up.  Railing yipped unhappily and scrabbled frantically in midair as though riding an out-of-control bike with four pedals, but Kai kept the dog aloft.

In response to me, he shuddered.  “I feel like one of those military spies who has to sneak out of a place through an enemy siege to find his way over to the fort where his own side is.  My disguise nearly got shredded.”

“The waistcoat is a tad conspicuous,” I pointed out.  Kai glanced down at it.

“You mean you don’t normally wear this kind of thing over here?”

“We do around Christmas.”

“But it has buses on it.”

“Which is why it’s a Christmas present you give to somebody who’s not a Londoner.”

Kai contemplated this for a moment before he brightened.  “I’m not a Londoner.  Can I have it as a present?”

I internally cringed.  Not that I minded giving the boy anything, but there was a reason my dad had relegated that article of clothing to the dressing up box the second he’d won it in a summer raffle and that was because it was eye-wateringly hideous.  I just didn’t think it was fair to Kai to encourage him to wear it any further.

“My little cousin loves that waistcoat and will be horrible upset if it goes,” I managed.  “But how did you manage to get Railing into the hotel?”

Kai’s upset expression at denial of the gift turned happy in a split second.  “Oh, easy.  Said he was a guide dog.”

I pursed my lips.  “You don’t look blind.”

“I don’t think they bought it, but I was being chased by fans so they just kind of left it, really.”

Lay spat out the last of Railing’s fur, abruptly reminding me that Kai and I were not the only ones awake in the room.

“Your dog is moulting,” he told me.  Railing pedalled in midair again, turning his head towards Lay’s voice, and then freewheeled, panting happily.  “And possibly high.”

Railing gave another little yip, and I caught Kai grumbling some kind of complaint about not agreeing with Lay because he was a troublemaker.  Railing ducked his head and gave a little whine in response.

It was