Part One of (hopefully) Seven: In which Zico has an authenticity crisis and Kyung snaps him out of it in the way only Kyung can.

Contains swearing, kissing and slapfights. Also Zico being kind of a . Mild Zikyung shipping because I can't help myself.

He always told himself not to watch old interviews, but he always did it anyway - although this time, it was entirely ing Jaehyo's fault. He was the one who had been mindlessly channel hopping for the past three ing hours, because they had a day off and Jaehyo is a sad with no hobbies, apparently. Jiho had been curled in a corner of the rubbish dump they passed off as a living room, trying to get down some new lyrics which had been floating around his head for the past jam-packed, endlessly exhausting week, but with the flickering of the screen, the jarring snippets of dialogue that were being cut together like some terrible attempt at avant garde djing, and Jaehyo's occasional moronic guffawing when he saw something that amused him, it was beyond impossible to concentrate. Even more so when the skipping around finally ended and an all too familiar voice blared out of the screen.

"Hey look!" Jaehyo grins in his direction, like he should be proud of himself for finding the only channel still screening ty variety shows from a year ago. Then he squints back at the set with his head tilted to one side. "Wow, you look a lot bigger there than you are now."

One minute and twenty seconds later, Jaehyo is a gasping heap on the floor and Jiho is sitting firmly on his lower back, twisting his arm around mercilessly.

"Alright, I'm sorry!" Begrudgingly he allows the offensive pretty boy to reclaim the shreds of his dignity - but not the remote control, which he keeps firmly tucked inside his underwear (the best place to put Jaehyo off reaching for it).

"I hate seeing like that," he moans, slumping down on the sofa. Against his better judgement, the program is still playing and he can see what Jaehyo was talking about. But it's not that, so much as the twist of embarrassment in his stomach that he hates. It's easy enough, on stage or in the studio, to forget about this other side to their careers, and sometimes when the interviewers are polite and respectful, and just want to talk about their music, he can ignore the fact that they're supposed to be idols. They never really fitted the bill anyway, he always thought - they're a band first and foremost, and he works hard to make sure they're the driving force behind their own success, rather than some faceless record company who pimps them out endlessly. That's how they get away with being rowdy and ridiculous so much, and everyone understands that. But then he sees something like this, and that crawling sense of having sold out returns. Their smiles, on the screen, are too wide and plastic. Jihoon had a terrible cold that day, but there he is anyway, making his faces and acting up to the part of the cute younger member flawlessly - he had nearly passed out once the recording finished, Jiho remembers.

"Why do we do this sort of thing?" he says listlessly, waving his hand at the screen. "We look like a bunch of ing dancing monkeys. It's humiliating."

"It was sort of fun," Jaehyo replies absently - of course he would think that, Jiho thinks to himself, the female presenter had been all over him like the foundation on his handsome nose.

"I don't get it," he persists. "How are we gonna be taken seriously if we keep agreeing to do this sort of thing? It's kiddie stuff, that's what it is."

Jaehyo snorts and turns round with his eyebrows raised. "Really, man? You think anyone takes us seriously?" Jiho growls and gets up to stalk off, and Jaehyo pats his leg in an attempt to placate him. "I mean, they take our music seriously, sure. But you can't say we don't fit in with this sort of stuff. We all derp about like crazy anyway. It's what the fans like."

Jiho takes some pleasure then in thinking to himself, Jaehyo wouldn't understand anyway. He went from being a pretty boy in Busan directly to idol training, and he doesn't know anything else. To his mind, playing the fool on national television is part and parcel of a music career. But Jiho isn't the same: he has aspirations, standards, a history. He wants more than playing the part of the pretty pop icon, only to be tossed aside in a few years time when they all inevitably get too old to appeal to teenage girls. He wants more than to be asked over and over about his new hair colour or the size of his nose. It feels desperately ungrateful, and it's not that he doesn't enjoy writing music with six guys who are like brothers to him - really, he couldn't ask for more. But from time to time, he remembers the underground rap circuit, and the projects he had with Kyung and Hanhae, and the freedom of just being a young guy making music he loved, instead of being Zico, leader of Block B.

Jaehyo starts laughing like a foghorn then, at some other insane stunt they're being asked to perform, and Jiho furrows his eyebrows and leaves the room. The sound of his own forced laughter onscreen is painful.

As soon as he slams the door of the door room, an indignant muffled voice shouts, " off," at him. He traces it to a huddled pile of duvet which is, for some reason, occupying his bed. He punches the duvet pile with some interest. " off, I said. Some people are trying to sleep."

"It's five in the afternoon, idiot. You shouldn't still be sleeping. Especially not on my bed."

"It's our day off. I can do whatever I want." Kyung - it can only be him, since no one else would consider this remotely acceptable logic - shifts just enough so that his head pokes out of the pile. His eyes are a little red and his hair standing on end, and Jiho sniggers - he has actually been sleeping. "Where's everyone?"

"Kwonnie and Minhyuk went out somewhere. Jaehyo's watching some old interview with us in the living room." Jiho flops across his bed, and his friend, and stares at the ceiling. "I hate seeing old interviews. They're so..." He finds he lacks the word to describe the crawling sensation, and settles for shuddering. Kyung pulls the duvet down a little more and peers over thoughtfully, but says nothing. "Sometimes I can't believe what we agreed to, you know?"

"You mean on those shows, or just in signing up for this?"

"Both." He sighs and stretches his arms above his head with the fingers locked, until his shoulders pop. "It's like...it's like you can't have something really great without people trying to bring it down, you know? We can't just make great music and leave it at that, we have to keep going out and making idiots of ourselves as well, so everyone knows we're still humble and grateful for everything, as if we didn't work our asses off to get here in the first place." As he speaks, Kyung wriggles around in his duvet pile until he has enough free fabric to throw over Jiho's stomach.

"That's not really fair. Those shows are about displaying our personalities, giving the fans something. It's not their fault if we're just a bunch of idiots."

"But we're not, that's what I'm saying. There's more to us."

Kyung quirks an eyebrow - even though Jiho can't see his face, he knows that's what he'll be doing - and taps his friend's shoulder pointedly. "You don't ever let that get in your way when the camera's on you, though."

That stops Jiho dead for a moment, and he curses his luck in ending up with a childhood friend for a band member, because Kyung always manages to spot his bull straight away, and worse, takes a twisted pleasure in pointing it out. He glances away, twisting his mouth guiltily. He knows that for all his complaints, in this area he has rather less room to complain than any of them, with the possible exception of Jihoon - but Jihoon isn't a show off, he just naturally lights up rooms. Jiho himself, he knows, is an A Grade Attention Grabbing Show Boating Camera , as Kwon once succinctly put it. He's had enough rows with Kyung about it to last him a lifetime.

"I don't wanna do that sort of stuff," he protests weakly, cut off with a prompt shove.

"But you do. That's what I mean: we may not want to, but that's the way the industry works. Comes with the territory." Kyung's voice is not without a bite, and understandably; he's had to step back and let Jiho take the limelight too many times to meet his complaints with much sympathy. "Isn't this enough, though?"

"What, this?" Jiho throws his arms wide to indicate their utterly glamorous lifestyle: the dirty underwear on the floor, empty ramyun containers and coffee cups, and Taeil on the opposite bed with his headphones firmly plugged in, ignoring both of them with unparalleled stoicism. Kyung hits him again, with a frown that clearly reads, "cut the bull".

"I mean, the constantly performing in front of hundreds of people, and being in magazines, and on the radio, and actually earning money for doing something we really enjoy. How many people can say that?" He shows all of his too-many teeth in a cheesy grin. "Come on, Zi-A-Co. It was great when we could get hammered in gross bars every evening, but you can't say we had hundreds of girls screaming at us then."

"Of course that's what you think is the important thing," Jiho grumbles. Kyung manages to smile even wider and throws himself on top of the other boy, flailing under the duvet with a scream of, "OPPA!" It is an unnvervingly accurate impression, and once Jiho has wrestled him out of his personal space he doesn't forget to give him a good sidelong glare.

"Seriously though. Remember when you walked through that university and they had to call the ing security in because you were being mobbed? You can't say you don't take some pleasure in that. If we'd stayed underground we'd never have made it, but like this - " and this time it is Kyung who indicates the underwear, rubbish and the now slightly concerned looking vocalist. "Like this, we can really do it. We could actually go far."

Jiho has to concede this point, although he does so with a grudging shrug. "It feels fake though. Like, we're just two ugly scumbags who started out trying to do something real." It doesn't escape his notice that the unintentional emphasis he puts on the word 'real' has Kyung holding back a snigger, but he'll get him back for that later. "Doesn't it feel like selling out? Now we have to pretend to be all harmless and cutesy. I mean, , we're adult men now, and last week we had to hold hands and pretend to be in love."

"Are you saying that was a lie? You don't really love me?" Kyung clutches at his heart, fluttering his eyelashes in pretended shock, then drops the act and laughs. "Come off it man. It's not like we were so totally gangster before. We were scrawny and weird looking and couldn't get laid."

He has no reply for this, and not only does he have no reply, but he secretly sort of knows Kyung's right. Somehow, that's the worst part of it; he wonders if he'll ever get a chance to do anything authentic, now he's plunged himself into this world. Maybe success and integrity just can't work together. Jiho turns onto his stomach with his chin propped over Kyung's legs, and picks irritiably at the bedsheet. "Whatever. You're still scrawny and weird looking and can't get laid."

" you. I'm hot right now. Everyone says so." He flicks his eyes up to watch Kyung preen.

"Yeah, and that's completely real as well." It was a really low blow but he takes some vindictive pleasure in watching Kyung's face colour, and his hand unconsciously fly up to cover his chin. He can't say he's never thought about it - his nose, for instance, and ironically enough it was Kyung himself who told him not to do it, and that he'd look really weird with a smaller nose. It's just another part of the whole package. He was miserable for a good few weeks after Kyung finally decided he'd had enough of the cucumber jokes and went and got himself a new face. It wasn't that he felt like he was losing his old friend, as Minhyuk tried to tell him; when he thought about it long enough, he realised it was fear that this was only the top of a long slope for them, that before long he'd forget why he went into music in the first place and bury himself in the attention and adoration. Even knowing that he was totally fine with himself, and he had composing rights, and Kyungie had always had chronically low self esteem anyway didn't help. It was like a message from above: this world will make you its own.

Kyung is still recovering from the burn; Jiho shifts onto his side to look up, marginally apologetic. "I didn't mean that. Just." He lets out a rattling sigh. "It feels so unreal."

Kyung narrows his eyes and grits his teeth. "Woo Jiho, shut the up," and he gives him a short, firm smack on the cheek, which Jiho accepts as penance. "If you want something real that badly, the only thing to do is go out."

"I don't want to go out."

Kyung has never displayed such prodigious strength before as he does in throwing Jiho off the bed. He somehow further manages, without physically doing anything, to throw Jiho into some nicer clothes, out of the door and into a taxi, and soon enough they're headed for Hongdae, and a back streets place which they both read reviews of because Kwon wanted to take his girlfriend there, to make it up to her for cutting their dates short every day for a month so he could dash off to practise some more, and fussed for days about whether it would be to her taste. It's small and smoky, and serves excellent whiskey - not that either of them can tell the difference - but best of all there's a bunch of battered instruments in the back room, with several girls sitting about daring each other to play them. "Waiting for a serenade," Kyung says, and makes a beeline for them, leaving Jiho to get the drinks. He orders something strong, for his nerves and the fact that Kyung is a lot funnier when he's drunk (to him, at least) and wanders over.


After a few hours of drinking and flirting with these girls, who turn out to be extremely amusing and unconvincingly ignorant of who they are, Jiho thinks he should be feeling a lot brighter than he does. Instead, he's staring into the bottom of his fourth glass with a mixture of shame and disgust, ignoring Su-Ji (he thinks; she looks too much like the other girl, whose name might have been Min-Ji, and he doesn't want to mention it in case he's got it mixed up) pressing up to his side and looking up through the fronds of her silky hair with expectant eyes. Two of her other friends, whose names he didn't even bother listening to, are similarly attendant on Kyung, sitting on the opposite bench, and how much he's clearly enjoying the situation makes Jiho want to slap him. When he glances up and meets his eyes, Kyung gives him this corny -eating grin like this is somehow something which they should be proud of themselves for. He wants to vomit.

"I'm getting another drink," he spits out, and levers himself up and away from Su-Min-Ji. Kyung unexpectedly hops to his feet and follows, bidding the women a brief farewell with a kiss of his fingers, promising their imminent return. Two seconds later he has his arms wrapped around Jiho's shoulders and is walking awkwardly on his toes to breath into his ear.

"See. See what I mean. This is better than moping at home with Jaehyo, right?"

"This is ."

"Oh come on!" Kyung draws the word out for an unnecessarily long time and loops his arm around Jiho's waist, swinging around to stop him on his path to the bar. He leans right up into Jiho's face and grins, his eyes somewhat defocused. "You're having fun. I think Min-Su likes you."

"Is that her name?" Jiho brushes his idiot friend to one side and continues his mission to get as drunk as it's necessary to make this bearable, before he inevitably has to stop Kyung from committing some kind of public indecency and haul him into a car. The bar is two people deep at this point, and it only takes Kyung a second to catch up and grab him around the waist again. Jiho remembers, far too late, the downside to Kyung being drunk, just as his hand sneaks across his stomach a little too low to be comfortable.

"Aren't they pretty though? Come on, maybe if you did get laid you'd stop feeling like a fraud."

Jiho is caught between the sudden stinging truth of the second sentence, and the blatant shallow idiocy of the first. He settles for elbowing Kyung in the ribs. "If it's me you want to sleep with, just say so I can turn you down now."

"Maybe it is." Ever ready to take a bait, Kyung sticks his chin into Jiho's shoulder. He can feel the grin on his cheek. "If that's what'll satisfy you, I'm game."

Jiho elbows him again, hard enough to make him stumble back. He's not in the mood, and he hates waiting in this dank little place for over-priced drinks that he doesn't really want, talking to girls he doesn't know, and right now the last thing he cares about is getting a faceless . He wants to go home and write, or meet some of the old crew for a drink and an impromptu rap off, or call his brother for a few hours so they can both talk each other around problems they pretend not to have. He's tired; they've been going nonstop for weeks, and he doesn't want to spend his precious free time putting on another act so he can maybe get his wet. Without meaning to, he barges into Kyung as he leaves, ignoring his shock and heading straight for the exit.

It takes Kyung about five minutes to follow him - getting some phone numbers, he thinks bitterly - and he's almost considering just going without him when he appears, panting slightly and looking not at all happy. "Why'd you just walk off like that?" he snaps, shoving a bundle into Jiho's arms. "You forgot your jacket, idiot. What the hell is wrong with you?"

"I was sick of it," Jiho snaps right back. He's too drunk now to be diplomatic. "I can't believe you think this is real in any way. You know they wouldn't have looked twice at us if we weren't in this band. This is exactly the same I was talking about before."

Impressively, Kyung manages to let out a growl almost as deep as Jihoon's. "Will you shut up about that? Every time you it sounds like you ing hate our band. If you think you'd be so much more real as an unsuccessful with no money, then go do that!" Jiho wonders, not for the first time, how such a small guy can fit so much venom into so few words.

"I don't hate our band, that's stupid. I just hate - " He can't finish the sentence himself, because there's no way he can put a finger on what it is he hates. It's something ephemeral, tied up in the endless cycle of comebacks and goodbyes, new hairstyles and concepts, instructions from their managers and demands from fans, and never having time to just sit down and figure out what the hell has happened in the last three years. He remembers the terrible stomach ache produced by apologising so profusely and debasingly for something they didn't quite understand. He remembers the confusion of being filmed waking up, eating, sleeping, working and trying to relax, and always knowing the cameras were watching and people would be watching, later, long after they could change anything they did. He remembers their banned music.

"You hate the industry," Kyung says, more quietly. "We all do. But we're moving away from the poison in it, slowly. One day we'll be able to call all the shots. We just have to work hard before we can get there."

"It just feels fake," he says, with one more small strop left inside him, kicking a scrap of rubbish into the gutter. He's trapped by his friend's words, and he knows they make more sense than anything he's said so far. "It all feels like - "

He doesn't get any further than that, shut up quite promptly - and thank God, he was starting to get bored of himself - by Kyung's mouth, unexpectantly and firmly smashed against his own, with his hand fisted in Jiho's collar. His first reaction is to gross out, especially since Kyung's breath, now laced with alcohol, is less than pleasant; his second is to think fleetingly that this isn't too bad. Then Kyung pulls back, offensively wipes his mouth off, and glares at him, far more annoyed than he has any right to be considering he's not the one who just got a sloppy drunk kiss forced on him.

"Was that real?" he asks. Jiho is temporarily too baffled to reply. "Just because you're down on the idol industry, you don't have to sneer at ing everything. We work really ing hard, and that makes it real. Your songs are real, our talent is real. Our fans are real. Our friendship is real. Success doesn't invalidate any of that. What we do validates our success." Triumphantly he seizes Jiho again. This time, he knocks him back against the wall and halfway through kissing him, bites hard into his bottom lip, and this time, Jiho has long enough to admit to himself that it does feel pretty good after all, if a little disconcerting because Kyung should not be able to kiss like that, especially with other boys.