Day One - Day Two

The hotel they checked into later that night reminded Minseok of a particularly flaky friend of Tao's apartment he had crashed at once after a long night of partying. For one, there was a shortage of rooms so that meant he was stuck sharing a room with none other than Luhan. How did he manage to snag this guy when they drew lots?

The two twin beds that occupied the small space of the room were bare of sheets, a set of torn bug-nets were the only thing covering the tops of them. Everything was either layered with dust; the room itself reeking of mildew. Apparently, it didn't receive maid service often.

The straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak, was when a dull clunk was heard from the bathroom Luhan was in and he came out, scratching the back of his head and holding the shower knob to the hot water. Minseok could honestly feel the pressure of a migraine rising up behind his temples like wild-fire.

Trembling with aggravation, Minseok quickly unpacked his laptop. He had already guessed that the room had no outlets (which meant no blow-drying his hair in the morning) and he hoped his battery was charged enough to allow him to send a couple of emails.

After a particularly snarky-sounding email to Tao, Minseok felt a bit better and reclined cautiously on his bed with the computer, aimlessly surfing the web. He was lucky that he was even picking up a connection in these parts. Luhan was busy unpacking next to him and he could hear the boy swear softly as he dropped a bottle of cologne and it rolled under his bed.

A sudden yell brought his attention to the floor where Luhan was scrambling backwards out from under the bed. The boy's blonde hair was saturated in dust and his eyes shone with surprise. It took all of two seconds before he leaped onto the edge of Minseok's bed.

"What are you doing? You almost knocked my laptop off the bed! Get off, Luhan!" Minseok barked at him, quickly gripping his computer before it tumbled over the side.

"Swear to god, there is a humongous rat beneath that bed. It can keep my cologne for all I care," Luhan breathed out, trying to calm his nerves.

Minseok glanced warily at the twin bed next to him. Rats weren't really his thing, especially big ones.

"Well…why don't you go kill it?"

Luhan whipped his head around to face him, mouth dropping open. "I'm not going back under there! Are you crazy? Who knows what kind of weird jungle diseases it has! It could have bird flu!"

Minseok rolled his eyes and was in the middle of thinking up a biting remark to say about rodents not being able to have bird flu when Luhan picked up one of his shoes that was lying at the foot of his bed and chunked it at the opposite wall.

Almost immediately, said rat came darting from beneath the bed and paused in the middle of the floor, black beady eyes raised towards the two men and nose twitching sporadically.

Minseok heard a shriek erupt from his throat and he instinctively grabbed Luhan's shoulders and hauled the boy in front of him, in the form of a shield. Luhan wobbled, off-balance for a moment, before steadying his body and turning over his shoulder to glare at Minseok.

"That girly- scream just about ruptured my eardrums. You think you could warn me next time before you go letting one of those off, hm, Baozi?"

"Shut up. If you hadn't thrown the shoe at the ing wall, it wouldn't have come out in the first place!"

They both turned back to look at the rat who was currently sniffing around the floor in a circle, tiny whiskers swishing away dust like a miniature broom.

"What should we do about it?" Minseok questioned, cautiously pushing Luhan forward into a leap back to his own mattress. Luhan sunk back against the wall, rubbing his temples in despair.

"I don't know. We should probably just leave it alone and maybe it'll just… go…when it feels like it."

" I don't want it to go when it feels like it, I want it to go now," Minseok complained in his most prissy voice. "And don't call me that little pet name you did earlier ever again."

"What one? Baozi?"

"Yes, that one. Don't call me that."

Luhan scoffed quietly before poking said Baozi's cheeks, digging out a blanket from his backpack.

"Whatever," he muttered before lying down and turning his back to Minseok.

"Hey-hey, what about the rat?"

"If you have a problem with it, then you shoo it away. I'm going to sleep," Luhan snapped.

Minseok stared at the other's back for a long moment before briefly glaring at the filthy creature in the center of the room. Its pointy nose was skyward, whiskers twitching at some smell too faint for Minseok's senses to detect. Sighing tiredly, he pulled out his cellphone and quickly texted a message to Tao.

this place. -Minseok

Chien's booming voice was loud. Louder still at five-thirty in the morning, roughly four hours after Minseok finally managed to fall into a fitful sleep, awoken a number of times by a quiet scuffling he could only imagine that their furry roommate was making.

He wanted to take a shower but knew it wasn't worth the hassle of dealing with the broken shower knob, especially this early in the morning hours. He settled for getting dressed in a fresh change of clothes and running his fingers through his mussed hair, slightly oily from the amount of perspiration in it from the day before.

"Come on. Up and at them! There's a bright day ahead of us, full of surprises!" Chien's voice faded down the hallway and Minseok could hear the displeasured groans and whining of everyone else that was being awoken at such an ungodly hour.

A soft groan issued next to him and Minseok's eyes flickered over to see Luhan rousing from sleep, legs stretching out underneath the covers and fingers gripping and kneading the pillow beneath his head. A yawn came next followed by a loud smacking noise as the boy rose from the bed like a zombie and stumbled into the bathroom.

The sound of the shower turning on caused a smirk to gloss over Minseok's fine features as he counted down on his fingers.

Three… two…

"GAH! Holy , that's cold!" Luhan stuttered out from behind the closed door and Minseok could hear the shower curtain being pushed aside followed by the light thump of feet as he scrambled out of the tub.

The door cracked open and a dripping mass of bright-colored hair poked through, a pout on Luhan's features.

"You forgot to remind me that the hot water was broken. Do you have a pair of pliers I could borrow real quick?"

Minseok raised a lone eyebrow, in the midst of packing his laptop back up. "Do I look like the sort of guy to carry pliers around with them?"

Luhan bit his lip softly and glanced back behind him in the bathroom.

"Good point." The door shut with an audible click. Minseok was almost finished packing when a knock sounded on the hallway door and he moved to open it. Sulli stood on the other side, wearing low-cut denim shorts and a light blue tank top.

"Hey, is Luhan done getting ready? I wanted him to come with me to see if we could grab a bite to eat before we got going today. We have about an hour according to Jia."

Minseok glanced behind him at the still-closed bathroom door, noting with satisfaction that the shower was still going full-blast.

"He's actually in the shower but if you don't mind, I wouldn't mind going out to get breakfast with you," he smiled, leaning against the doorframe possessively, but also in a way that seemed to catch most women.

Sulli blushed minutely and smiled brightly.

"Sure, that'd be great!" Grabbing his wallet and his watch from behind him, Minseok shut the door