The music beats its rhythms into the lines of Taemin’s body but rising through the floor onto the raised platform he stands stock still, unable to move under pain of death. This is not his solo stage; it’s their show, Shinee’s, and he’s only one of five as he waits. Taemin finds elevator music—the kind he avoids by taking the stairs; and the techno variation that’s playing now—unbearable always but in this moment between arrival and beginning it’s almost worse somehow. What he hears does not belong to them, and he cannot hand himself over to the numbing hold of muscle memory and hours of exhaustive practice until—

Until this. The silence hits only long enough for him to catch his breath and step into position, and then “View” is straining to be heard over the screams that chant his name like a prayer to a god. He is their god and his own; Taemin’s voice wavers under the sheer power of it and he turns his face to the side, hiding the suffocating disdain beneath a poor veneer of charming arrogance. A closer look would unearth him in an instant, but no one is brave enough to get that far, and he lets Jinki take the lead with a graciousness he’s only pretending he has.

Taemin moves once he’s no longer constrained to sing. Point forward then 1, 2, 3, 4, and a 90 degree bend of the wrist. Down into an open-kneed squat and then back up again to slide backward with a shake of the shoulders that feels silly yet looks anything but when it’s SME’s golden boy dancing it. Child’s play, all of it; and if smiling weren’t more Kibum’s concept than Taemin’s, his would be sinful, but cynical at best. He’s done this a thousand times on stage—hundreds of thousands more times by himself—and this might as well be “Lucifer” or even “Hello” for all that Taemin’s weary of it.

He used to get by on the adrenaline rush—get off on it even—but now not even that is enough for him. Nothing in this world is enough for him. Taemin belts out a note during his part of the bridge and closes his eyes. Under his eyelids is only darkness; out there is the same.