Poster is by NoOthers!  I'm so sorry I missed it before!

Deer Luhan,

To be fair, I’m probably going to miss you all and your shenanigans.  It’s been a very fun few months even if your existence has put me through hell, but what is life without living on the edge, eh?  But then again, most people wouldn’t return to that edge – either because they’ve fallen off it to a nasty metaphorical death, or because they’ve regained their sanity and realised that returning to that edge is a very, very bad idea.  Of course, I echo that latter sentiment as I survived getting stabbed, but I think that being a celebrity double of somebody caught up with the mafia is probably enough excitement to last me several lifetimes.  All I can say is I’d better be reincarnated as something awesome.

Leigh

The agreement was that the managers had until three in the afternoon to identify Not-Luhan, and they were not allowed to touch us, demand us to strip, feed us shellfish or threaten Sehun, who was the only one vaguely in with a chance of correctly identifying us.  In return, Luhan and I were not allowed to be out of their sight for more than half an hour at a time, and however long we spent away from them, we had to make sure we spent an equal time with them.  It was kind of like having somebody third-wheeling a date, except with regularly furrowed eyebrows and constant questions of “are you sure you’re Luhan?” and the fact that Luhan and I weren’t dating.  Sehun wasn’t too happy about it either, because it initially meant that he couldn’t really cling onto me like he’d wanted to because that would have given it away – until he realised that he could completely screw with them by clinging onto Luhan, leaving the room, and then clinging onto me, and then pretending to be totally confused about who was actually his girlfriend.

“Wait.”  One of the managers held up a hand as Sehun ‘gave up’, plonking himself down on a chair, and somehow managed to convince both me and Luhan to sit on his lap.  I was turned into a human sandwich because Luhan was heavy.  “So one of them is definitely female?”

Sehun began to reply with “I don’t know” but then probably realised that that looked really bad and settled for a simple affirmative grunt.  The result, when Sehun finally decided that he was also being horribly squished, was both managers scrutinising mine and Luhan’s chest areas, and then our crotches.  Eventually, one of the two moved forward, reaching for Luhan’s chest.

Luhan reacted with a dramatic squeak, batting the man’s hand away and almost falling off the back of the chair he was perched on.

“No touching, you ert!”

“Touch and you lose!” Minho yelled from across the room, where he and Xiumin were attempting to play football with a ping pong ball on the basis that it wasn’t going to harm any of the surrounding furniture.

“Are we allowed more than one guess?” demanded the second manager.

“No!” came the adamant and simultaneous chorus, including from, of all people, Suho.  He was becoming incredibly badly behaved, that Suho.

“That would be cheating,” Kyuhyun told them firmly.  He’d taken on the role of judge, reasoning that he was the best placed to do so (not that the position was particularly needed) since his father was a lawyer, and was sitting on the opposite side of the room, lounging in the armchair he’d taken up residence in.

The two managers retired to the other side of the room with paper and pens to work out what they knew.  Luhan and I followed them to provide extra stress.

It was actually pretty amusing watching them scratch their heads over it all.  To be fair, they didn’t have much to work with, which probably helped.  They knew from fan reports that Sehun was supposedly dating an English girl called Leigh Lee and they knew from us bullsh*tting them that Luhan had a twin brother in China.  Sehun could be dating either of them, or possibly Luhan, but the younger of the managers insisted that Sehun was straight.

“So basically,” he insisted in a quiet voice, trying to ignore me and Luhan leaning over his shoulders, “Leigh Lee is the girl and the boy is Luhan.  Heaven knows what’s going on with his twin brother, but Leigh obviously looks like Luhan.”

“Bingo,” said Luhan, batting his eyelids flirtatiously.  “Oppa, you’re so clever.  I’ve always liked clever guys.”

“Naw, Oppa, are you really sure that there’s a girl who looks like Luhan out of nowhere?” I asked with a large pout.  Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a highly disgruntled Sehun.  The manager closed his eyes, looking stressed.

“So, assuming that Sehun is dating the girl, he came all the way over here to see her....”

“Sehun’s English is fluent now,” added the other manager.  “My guess is that the girl speaks English.”

“Well, she has an English name,” I pointed out.  “It would make sense.”

“But how on earth would Sehun have met her in the first place?” Luhan put in.

Both managers shook their heads.

“I don’t even know,” admitted the first one.  The second one started doodling Venn diagrams, but I didn’t know how useful they were going to be.

Then his jaw slowly dropped open.  Luhan and I exchanged glances, knowing that it had clicked.

“ my life,” he gasped out, hastily scribbling out the Venn diagrams of Luhan’s ‘brother’.  “They met when EXO was touring in the UK.”

“There wasn’t really time to get to know each other then, though,” the first manager mumbled.

“No.  Jesus, look at all the ridiculous things that happened – Luhan went missing; he lost his voice and couldn’t sing; he forgot all his dance moves because he was concussed and had to relearn them; he avoided talking and stuck really close to the Korean members when they went to China—”  He looked up, eyes wide.  “Not-Luhan can’t speak Chinese!”

“And what about Luhan’s brother?” I asked in fluent Mandarin.

“Luhan’s brother is Not-Luhan, who is actually female!”  The manager was getting carried away in his excitement.

“Okay, you got us,” Luhan admitted, also in Chinese.  “Luhan’s brother never existed.  It was one of us.”

“So you kept her close by pretending she was Luhan’s brother,” said the first manager slowly.

“Nope!” Lay chimed in happily, popping up behind us and almost giving me a heart attack, “we kept her close by keeping her in the dorm with us!  Luhan was the one pretending to be his nonexistent brother.”

Both men turned to look at him.

“Why?  That makes no sense.”

“Exactly, Sehun wasn’t even in China.”

“Luhan did a bunk,” Luhan said, this time in Korean.

They fell for it.  Luhan looked sincere, eyes fixed on the paper, and it looked like a perfectly natural slip of the tongue.

“Ha!” exclaimed the first manager, pointing at me.  “Caught you!  You’re Luhan!”

Unfortunately, the second manager was brighter.

“No, no, no, that’s not our guess!” he almost screamed when the boys started springing up.  “For heaven’s sake, don’t be an idiot!  They’re trying to trick us!”

“Then you’re Luhan.”  The first manager pointed at Luhan this time.  Luhan tilted his head to the side with an amiable smile.

“The question is am I double or triple bluffing?”

“Or is he quadruple or quintuple bluffing?” I tacked on in my most sycophantic voice.  They both looked like they wanted to hit me.  To be fair, I didn’t blame them.  I would have wanted to hit me too for doing that.  I didn’t, though, because I liked my brain cells to be alive and functioning.

The manager considered again, and then looked back down at his Venn diagrams.

“Say something in English,” he said, speaking in English himself.

“Like what?” asked Luhan.

“Yo yo yo?” I tried almost simultaneously.

That was what really got them.  They practically pounced on me.

“Luhan!  That’s Luhan’s trademark!  We’ve got Luhan!”

I was unable to escape before I’d been pinned to the ground, Railing barking in alarm and Sehun and Luhan reacting almost in panic because of my injured ribs.

“Well,” said Kyuhyun, “assuming that’s actually Leigh, that’s a pretty dramatic forfeit.  What did we say about touching?”

Both managers looked up.  “But if this is Luhan—”

“You still touched Luhan without submitting a formal guess.”  Kyuhyun was adamant.  “We go very strictly by the law here.”  He assumed a better posture and crossed his legs as well, looking the epitome of a caricature of finesse and refinement.  All he really needed was a pair of glasses he could push down his nose so that he could stare judgingly