Act I, Scene V: In Perieulo'so Negotio non est Dormitandum

Gangnam-gu, Seoul, South Korea - 1830 hours

Kyungsoo lands, much to his disgruntlement, right on top of a gently snoozing Yixing, who jolts out of his sleep with a snort.

“Uhhguff?” Yixing mumbles, rolling over and dumping Kyungsoo onto the dirt beside him. “Whuff ‘oing on?”

Dusting himself off, Kyungsoo stares disbelievingly at his fellow member. “That’s just not fair,” he says, frowning, “how come you get to nap and I don’t?”

Yixing groans and tries to cover his ears with Kyungsoo’s hands, curling into the fetal position. “Tryna sleep. EXO-L’za best. Radish .”

Kyungsoo blinks. “You mean Carat?”

“Mphh.”

Watching the dancer nuzzle into his hand like it’s a fluffy pillow, Kyungsoo decides he vibes on a visceral level with Yixing’s need for sleep. He always has - there’s a reason he gets on so well with the dancer, after all. Yawning, Kyungsoo wishes he could curl up next to his friend and nap. Traumatic memories of the last time he tried to sleep, though, prevent him from succumbing so easily.

Paranoid, Kyungsoo turns to look this way and that. No giant otter photo appearing out of nowhere. No boy group members on dragonback setting anything on fire. Not even a shrieking girl group member pulling out his friend’s hair. Is this reality? Will Neem himself come popping out of nowhere this time? He shudders.

“Yixing,” he says, eyeing a trash can around the corner that looks decidedly suspicious, “there’s something you ought to know about what might happen. There’s this dickhead of an otter named Neem -”

“Don’ give a flaming radish what might happen,” Yixing mumbles, rolling back over so he’s face-down in the dirt. “Need sleep to rewrite my song tomorrow. Minseok’s vacuum ate it. Hate radishes.”

Kyungsoo shrugs and tugs his hand back, leaning against the building behind him and closing his eyes. “Whatever. Don’t come crying to me when Neem ruins your life, then.”

Yixing’s only response is a snore.

Two seconds later, Yixing screams.

For exactly fifty seconds, Kyungsoo keeps his eyes shut, and most of it he spends contemplating feigning that he didn’t hear anything. If I pretend to be asleep, he thinks, then maybe I can convince myself this is all a horrible dream and that when I wake up, I’ll be able to go back to sleep for the rest of my life.

At some point during the forty-eighth second, however, he realizes his missing-in-action nanogram of giving-a- has somehow crawled its sorry self back into the control room of his moral compass and gone off on a diatribe about moral fiber and other esoteric topics. Therefore, the forty-ninth second is spent soundly cursing his prodigal son of a giving-a-, and the fiftieth second sees Kyungsoo opening his eyes to a very startled, very eyebrow-less Yixing staring at a certain otter named Neem’s newest Instagram post, which rather conveniently is once again on fire and shows Neem posing with a flaming radish.

“My name is Neem,” Yixing reads weakly, rubbing at his smoking ex-eyebrows. “I listen to a flaming radish scream. #limerick #deep #philosophy #shakespeereh2.0.”

“He’s escalating,” Kyungsoo says, grim, and grimaces at Neem’s immortalized grin. “That’s four hashtags. One more than last time.”

When Kyungsoo finally looks away from Neem and the screaming radish, Yixing’s eyes are welling up with tears, but Kyungsoo can’t tell without the eyebrows whether they're induced by anger or sadness. Huh. Never knew eyebrows were so important.

Hoping he’s not making a major mistake, he reaches out, pats his fellow member’s shoulder, and says in his best comforting voice, “There, there. We’ll go get T.O.P. to puke on him toge