Chapter 5

Xiu Min is hunched over a half-empty bowl of cereal with low-fat milk. He is dressed in white pyjamas, with a matching white eye patch cover propped on his head. Unlike his stage persona, Min-seok is less of an adorable baozi and more of a reserved, mature hyung. He looks at Luhan solemnly, and Luhan gulps. He won’t be able to pull the age trump card on Xiu Min.

“None of us are supposed to have midnight snacks,” squeaks Luhan, buying time.

“We’re supposed to cut down on our bubble tea intake too,” counters Xiu Min, pushing the bowl away. He nudges the chair beside him with his foot so it skids back. Luhan cringes immediately and jumps to stop the chair from moving.

“Shh! You don’t want to wake the whole dorm!”

“You mean, Yixing?”

“Especially –” Luhan stops short.  It is all the evidence he needs to know that Xiu Min has eavesdropped on the entire conversation.

“I don’t get it,” Xiu Min says, sticking out his lower lip. He stretches his right leg and puts it on his chair, hugging it to his chest. “Why would you go to Sehun first before me or Kris? He’s seventeen and in Korea.” When Luhan doesn’t respond, he adds, “Which is quite far from China, in case something happens.”

Luhan hugs his Stitch toy and plays with its hands, behaving the furthest thing from a rational twenty-two year old man as he can. In fact, Sehun probably looks older too.

However, Xiu Min has seen Luhan fake his oblivion in Korea too often as well. Being in China meant that he is half a step behind everybody else except Chen, and he now recognises the different expressions on Chen’s face – on the level of I understand thank God, okay I kind of get it, and what is this. Luhan knows exactly what he is doing.

“Come on Luhan,” Xiu Min tries again. “Not only are we friends, but Yixing is our friend as well. If something is up, you would be selfish to keep it to yourself.”

Luhan’s eyes flash, and his eyes narrow. That’s more like it. Xiu Min subtly shifts the laptop away from his reach for safety. “Nobody would believe me,” Luhan comments finally, his voice barely a whisper, but there is a sad finality to the tone. “I don’t have proof.”

“You believe Yixing is dying,” Xiu Min says, making a face as if the words taste awful in his mouth. Luhan raps his knuckles on the stained wooden table immediately. Touch wood; a Chinese superstition that the act would take away the bad luck from stating something bad. “Are you sure?”

“I know he’s going to become very sick,” Luhan replies, and Xiu Min sees the pain in his face from keeping the thought and repeating it to himself dozens of times. Suddenly, Xiu Min is enlightened by the distance Luhan is keeping with Yixing these past few days. “I don’t know. This has happened only a few times before.”

“A few times?!”

“You can’t tell anybody,” implores Luhan, and he gives Xiu Min a wide-eyed glance. “Please. If I’m wrong, I’ll be upsetting everybody.

“But what if you’re right?”

Xiu Min keeps a close eye on both Luhan and Yixing the next day. They are going back to Korea to meet their EXO-K counterparts. Everyone is visibly excited. They only pack a few items of clothing for their week-long stay. It is the nearest they can get to the ridiculous notion of a vacation; they will still have vocal and dance practice, and will be prepped for their first Thailand appearance as EXO.

“No,” Kris says, before Tao can argue. “We’re not going shopping at the airport.”

“It’s duty-free!” Tao protests.

“We’re going to be mobbed –”

 “You want to be mobbed,” sings Chen, grinning cheekily, dumping clothes into his bag unceremoniously.

“You’re going to wear those glasses?” goggles Yixing, poking at the black round-rimmed spectacles sitting on the kitchen table.

“Y-style is more popular,” Tao advises Chen, before turning back to Kris. “Ge, shouldn’t we bring gifts from China to EXO-K?”

“You could have thought about that during the weeks we’ve been here, and gotten authentic Chinese goods and not airport gifts,” Kris answers mercilessly.

“But you did go shopping,” Yixing says, confused. He is sitting cross-legged on the sofa, watching the commotion, jumping from one conversation to the next like a spectator who couldn’t tell which tennis match to watch in the finals.

Tao gives a huff, clearly frustrated at his lack of success.

“Besides, you’re broke,” Kris says, sounding less stern now.

Tao simply looks at Kris – you pay, you’re the duizhang – and Chen has to sit down on the chair to laugh properly.  

“Where’s Luhan?” Kris asks finally, getting up from his perch on the sofa armchair to stand next to Xiu Min near the door, obviously thinking he is the saner party.

There is a pause. Everybody looks at Yixing, the roommate, who looks taken back and slightly hesitant. He looks perfectly healthy to Xiu Min; just a bit dazed, but they had long ago put it down as his default expression. “I’ll get him,” offers Chen, and disappears.

“Anybody going to get airsick on the plane better take their motion sickness pills,” Kris begins, looking down at the list the manager gives him. His expressions turns blank as he thumbs down the list, and then flips over to the back side. “You know what? All of you can read Korean, right?”

“Not all of us can speak four languages, duizhang,” Tao says dejectedly, sitting down next to Yixing.

“Here, translate,” Kris hands Yixing the note.

“Duizhang!” Tao says in a scandalized tone.

“What?”

“KRIS-HYUNG!”

“Luhan is running a fever,” reports Suho, looking down at his handphone to the message sent by their manager. “So we’re not supposed to disturb him or make too much noise.” Actually the message is more specific (Baekhyun and Chanyeol are BANNED from making too much noise), but Suho figures it couldn’t hurt to be more general.

“Luhan? Not Yixing?” Sehun asks. He is sitting down on the sweaty floor, with a towel around his neck.

Luhan is huddled underneath his blanket, shivering. He looks as pale as death, especially against the dark brown shirt he was wearing.

“I’m fine,” Luhan protests in Korean, trying to reassure Chen. “I just couldn’t sleep at night.”

Kris stares at Luhan, as the latter sponges away his cold sweat with the edge of his blanket. “We’re supposed to be downstairs waiting for the van. Are you packed?”

Luhan nods. Truth be told, he only crawled into bed an hour ago. He felt the fever creeping after the talk with Xiu Min and swore to himself. It gets worse in the bedroom when he is in close proximity to Yixing. He busied himself with packing then.  

“I’ll help you get changed,” Xiu Min says anxiously, and shoos everybody out of the bedroom.

Yixing’s face is contorted. He is standing up, but still hangs back from the rest of the crowd outside the bedroom door. “He wouldn’t talk to me in the morning,” bursts out Yixing, before Kris could say anything. “I said ‘good morning’ before I went to get breakfast and he didn’t move. I thought it would be better if I just… left him alone. And I honestly thought he was okay; and just taking longer than usual to change.”

Nobody has the heart to respond to Yixing. Kris closes his mouth and thinks twice about the warning he was about to deliver. He looks backs at the closed bedroom door.

“Anybody knows why Luhan is being a jerk to Yixing?” Kris says bluntly.

“He’s not…” defends Yixing immediately, but his voice trails off weakly. Chen and Tao shake their heads, wide-eyed.

“Okay,” Kris responds, and thinks ‘Then Min-seok knows.’

Kyungsoo frowns at the maknae. “That’s rude,” he remarks. “Nobody should want anybody to be ill.”

“Luhan might have gotten the flu again,” reasons Baekhyun, remembering the week when Luhan used up everybody’s tissue paper so that Kyungsoo felt obliged to bring a toilet roll to practice everyday.  “It probably just got worse.”

However, Suho peers at Sehun’s face. He vaguely remembers the late night conversation from yesterday. “Why? What’s wrong with Yixing?”

That got everybody’s attention.

“It’s getting worse,” wails Luhan, pulling on his pants. Xiu Min slaps a fever patch on Luhan’s forehead.

“Right now, you look like the sick one,” Xiu Min fusses. “Control yourself! You’re a grown man. What if your foreboding only happens years later? You can’t be like this forever!”

Luhan stops short, astonished. “It’s never lasted so long before.”

Xiu Min drags the luggage bag from under Luhan’s bed. “Oh?” he says without looking up. “What’s the time frame?”

“Two weeks. Two weeks is the longest.” Luhan pushes away the memory of his childhood friend. It is not the time for nostalgia and grief.

“How long has passed, Luhan?”

There is silence, momentarily filled by Tao yelling at them to “Hurry up!  Duizhang’s orders!”

“T-twelve days,” Luhan answers in a horrified whisper. “Today’s day thirteen.” Thirteen, the unlucky number.

Luhan really hates superstition.

Xiu Min pauses, and Luhan sees him weighing options in his mind. On one hand, if Luhan is right, it is decidedly time to panic. On the other hand, it is a chance to prove whether Luhan is right, in which case they could only wait and watch chaos unfold. If it unfolds. When it unfolds.

“You need to be nice to Yixing,” Xiu Min says instead, changing the subject. “EXO-K is bound to notice the distance between you both lately.”

“Yes,” adds another voice, and the door opens. Xiu Min freezes, and jumps back, causing the luggage bag to fall without the support of his legs. Kris looks at the both of them appraisingly. “Before we get on that plane, I’d like to know as well.”

Luhan feels dizzy for a moment, maybe because of the shock and panic. He sits back down onto the bed. “This family,” he says, before sneezing, “needs to stop eavesdropping on private conversations.”

“Five minutes,” Kris adds, “everybody else is in the lobby and the van is going to arrive soon.”

“Nothing’s wrong with Yixing,” Sehun answers, a moment too late. His lisp comes through again. It is something he has been consciously working on since debut, so if anything, everybody just stares even harder.

It is five in the morning in China, and Yixing had spent a good part of the night waiting for Luhan to return to the bedroom so they could talk – eventhough his past efforts were usually met with a sniff, or a mumbled ‘too tired’. Unfortunately, Yixing fell asleep before Luhan came back. There are circles under Yixing’s eyes. He chooses to sit down on the sofa in the lobby and read the morning papers scattered on the coffee table, his gaze more lost and worried than ever.

Chen and Tao are standing with the luggage by the glass doors. Chen is sitting on top of his luggage, shooting Yixing uncomfortable looks. Tao is standing awkwardly by the door, his hand carry in between his legs.

Tao feels someone looking at him, and looks down. Chen gives him an apprehensive look and mouths ‘Something is up’. However rusty Tao’s Korean is, he translates it perfectly. He nods back, and then shrugs his oblivion.

“Right,” Jongin says, unconvinced.

Sehun looks back at the floor. “Right,” he repeats.

“Huh?” Chanyeol pushes up his rectangle spectacles on his nose, and looks at the way Suho frowns at Sehun, and the tense stance everybody else is in. “Uhm. I don’t get it. What did I miss?”

TBC

A/N: I'm slowly moving fics to livejournal because of the scary way AFF is going offline nearly every other day. But I'm still posting here first guys ;A; Pls comment!

EXO K IS COMING INTO THE PICTURE OMG.