There was a huge banner informing all present that tonight, the first installment of the “Frozen II” spectacle would be performed. Youngjae watched in dismay as the men and women clad in distinctly luxurious clothes entered the theater. He pulled down his collar, certain he wasn’t imagining the itching around his neck. Sunwha reached out and smacked his hand away from the tie almost instantly.

“Why am I here, again?”

“I need moral support,” she answered, distracted, looking for someone in the crowd that grew bigger by the second.

Watching her elegant presentation in a white, sparkly long dress, Youngjae doubted she needed any kind of assurance he could provide.

“Sunwha. You don’t do moral support,” he drawled. “Try again.”

She turned her attention to him completely.

“You have obligations. One of them is to accompany me in these kinds of events and be my arm candy.”

Now he rolled his eyes all the way up and snorted. “I seem to remember you releasing me from those ‘obligations’ you speak of, some good eight months ago. I think the conversation began with words like ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ and mentions of a Kim Himchan.” He even moved his hands to form the quotation marks to make his argument more pertinent.

“I released you from your boyfriend obligations. I never said anything about friend obligations. I keep coming to watch your stage performances all over the country; you have to do the same for me to keep this best-friendship healthy. So, stop whining and help me find Hana in this mob.”

Resigning himself to what would probably be the most boring night of his life, Youngjae let his ex-girlfriend take his wrist in an iron grip and pull him towards the entrance decorated with an explosion of flowers. He wondered, if their relationship had changed at all since the breakup. Sure, they weren’t romantic and whatnots, but he was surprisingly okay with it.

Either way, his only real fear regarding the end of their romantic relationship had been the possibility of losing their friendship as well. That was unfounded almost as soon as Youngjae got over his wounded pride.

“What was Himchan’s excuse for not coming, then?”

“He’s a busy model, he doesn’t need excuses. And there is Hana.”

She navigated then inside the building and towards the stairs to the left. Their friend was, as usual, looking exotically beautiful using a simple earth-toned dress with the feathers and wood accessories. She clapped her hands and smiled when they approached.

“Oh, there you are. We’re visiting the backstage before it begins. I want to wish Daehyun good luck.”

“And I want to see if anybody destroyed my stage designs while I wasn’t here.”

Both women started to walk surely in the direction of what Youngjae assumed was the way to the backstage, leaving the boy to follow in their wake. Some doors and corridors later, it was like he had entered in a parallel world.

He knew nothing about ballet, but assumed this spectacle must be kind of a big deal, with the number of people involved and the fact that Hana’s very famous and sought after mother had personally designed all the costumes he was seeing around. Also, Sunwha was very picky about projecting architectural designs and she had actually wanted to get involved with these ones.

The girls turned away from the open space to enter a corridor full of doors, probably leading to the private dressing rooms for the stars of the show. Hana entered one of the rooms without knocking, followed by Youngjae and Sunwha. Her mother was standing in front of a very large mirror, applying all sorts of colored dust in the face of a very wiry looking boy.

“Mum, is Daehyun around?” Hana asked Hyosung.

The woman did not look from her work to answer her daughter. “In the back, wrestling Yujin inside her clothes. He’ll be right back. I still need to finish his make up.”

Hana nodded and pulled Youngjae from where he was, standing by the door, half in, half out the room.

“Okay. Youngjae, you know my mum, and that’s Choi Junhong, our prima. He’s playing Jack Frost”, his friend explained in a teasing voice, winking at the dancer.

Junhong turned slightly to smile shyly at Youngjae, who liked him instantly. He looked almost frail in his ethereal clothing and he would have believed he could vanish in a gust of wind if he hadn’t seen already how high ballerinas could jump using only their legs.

“Daehyun is doing Elsa, then?” Youngjae asked, trying to sound interested for the sake of his friends, even though it was all the wrong things to say, because Daehyun as Elsa?

“Gods, no. He is too male and too heavy to do the part”, Hyosung explained, freeing Junhong’s painted face and nodding in approval of whatever she was assessing about her work. Youngjae agreed wholehearted with Hyosung’s assessment. Daehyun was like, yeah, how could he play Elsa, seriously?

“Elsa is being played by Yujin, Jongup’s sister. I told you that before”, Sunwha intervened, throwing a judge-y look at Youngjae.

He shrugged, feeling blameless. Ballet was boring. The closest he had come to like ballet had been while watching “Black Swan” and that film had left him uneasily scared of ballerinas.

Right on cue, Daehyun appeared from behind a folding screen, wearing grey skintight pants and his ripped, torso painted, well, grey. There was a stupid -colour hat on his blond hair. If Youngjae had to guess, he would say Daehyun was going to be Kristoff in the show.

“Hey, dude. Looking cool,” he greeted his friend, smirking a little. Daehyun smirked back and approached to engage in the mandatory male hand clasping and back clapping. “I hope Jongup is around with his camera.”

“You bet he is,” Daehyun retorted.

Youngjae opened his mouth to make his usual smartass reply when a girl came from the back of the room, wearing a dark shiny dress that looked painted on her skin. She was slim and absurdly pale, traits enhanced by the transparent-full-of-dark-feathers-thingy draped over her back and dark blue glittery corset.

“This thing was not this tight last rehearsal,” the girl grimaced, her voice soft and weightless like she had spent the week starving and fraying her vocal cords.

And, you see, Youngjae had a type. It was a tall, lively and ladylike type. Exhibit A: Sunwha. Exhibit B: Himchan, maybe. Anyway, it was a consistent type, he had never strayed away from it since puberty, but.

Maybe he could make an exception for this girl. She could totally make an exception, it really wouldn’t hurt.

He knew he was gaping when Sunwha discreetly tried to damage his kidney with a quick and vicious jab of her right elbow.

“No, it isn’t, sweetie. Maybe you got fatter?” Hyosung answered, smiling angelically while pulling Daehyun to the chair besides Junhong and starting to make his chiseled face more stupid. It wouldn’t be too hard.

“Last rehearsal was yesterday,” Yujin replied, her face contorting in disbelief.

“Yes. Maybe you shouldn’t have eaten anything since then.”

The girl slowly moved her head from left to right, watching Hyosung’s carefully innocent face like she was a poisonous snake. A shock of blonde hair moved to curl around the ghostly pale neck, distracting Youngjae from his thoughts as effectively as his comics tended to do during boring classes.

Then, the girl turned to pick up her ballet shoes from the floor and Youngjae almost gasped when she was presented with the very accurate contours of legs and body designed by years of ballet practice. Yep, those customs left nothing to imagination.

“Youngjae,” Hana began, regaining her friend’s attention and watching him with a calculating look, “This is Yujin, Jongup’s sister.”

Yujin straightened up, now holding her ballet slippers, and nodded towards Youngjae, staring at him as intently as a cat watching a mouse. Youngjae flashed her a helpless smile and stared back with the same interest.

Sunwha cleared and snapped Youngjae from his observation of Yujin’s dark, almost black eyes. They had a liquid light, like ink.

“Well, I need to see the stage. Good luck, guys! Break a leg! Unnie, marvelous work!” She pulled Youngjae to the door and kept chattering animatedly. “Bye!”

Youngjae tried to wave his hand to the room at large, but was still looking at Yujin and wasn’t able to be properly polite.

The door had just closed when Sunwha turned to him with a speculative look in her face. Youngjae tried to ignore her, which wasn’t hard with the sound of his blood rushing through his ears. It felt like he had been running a marathon.

“I can’t believe this,” she threw her hands up in the air, exasperated with whatever she was seeing in his expression. “Let’s go before you embarrass yourself, for gods’ sake.”

By the time Sunwha had inspected her work and shouted at whoever had broken the fake ‘unfrozen’ garden, Youngjae had already composed himself and was just feeling happy. They were already sitting on the places reserved for the important people involved in the production and their guests (that’s Youngjae) when she finally addressed the situation.

“Your timing is the worst.”

“I know.”

“She’s still underage.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t even know if she’s interested in boys yet.”

“Okay.”

A sigh.

“At least I know I won’t have to keep waking you up during the spectacle, since you’re probably going to pay attention.”

“Probably.”

And that was exactly what happened. The music and the dancing were not as sleep inducing as he was expecting them to be, what with the very different choreographies and styles presented in each arc. Hyosung’s costumes melted into Sunwha’s stage props and made animals appear and disappear behind strange trees, made flowers grow from the wood floor, made Junhong seemed contrast, what with being Jack Frost and all.

And Yujin.

Yujin swirled around the stage like she was a shadow herself, her feathered cape flowing around her flawlessly. Her movements were pragmatic, sharp and direct in that of what fitted the Queen, and she turned her head in a birdlike manner that made it easy to believe, for a second, that she was really royalty, inhuman and divine in her magical powers.

To say Youngjae was enraptured was an understatement. He watched the whole show. Jack Frost’s lively dance amid frosts and flowers as he chased after her. Elsa side-glancing him from the places the light wouldn’t touch. Their meeting, tentative and captivating. The boy convincing the young queen to visit his land, where all kinds of new adventures delved. The ice trailing and the consequences when Kristoff noticed the absence of Arendelle’s queen.

Then, after the interval, the anguish of Arendelle’s citizens, and Kristoff heavily dancing amid his ice blocks and sleigh, reuniting Elsa to Anna. In the end, Elsa and Jack Frost’s last dance, full of the contradictions that created their relationship.

Youngjae got up and clapped like everybody else, mesmerized, when the whole crew appeared in the stage together to thank the public. He was still dazed while Sunwha and Hana navigated him around the crowd to go backstage again. Among tired and satisfied half-dressed dancers, they found their ways back to the dressing rooms.

Impressed, Youngjae congratulated sincerely all the artists inside the room, joked with Daehyun and complimented Junhong’s skills. There were still more than twenty people in the room when he accidentally tripped on Yujin, who was sitting and being anti-social on the floor in the back of the room, nursing a bottle of cold water. After regaining his balance by putting both hands in the wall above Yujin’s head, Youngjae looked down and smiled.

“You were really great.”

Yujin watched him for long seconds, taking a sip of her water and never breaking eye contact. Youngjae watched her eyes sharp on his and her neck slightly bobbing when the liquid went down . Youngjae gulped reflexively as well.

“Thanks.”

They stayed like that for what seemed like years to Youngjae. Yujin’s make up was smudged and from chest up she was bare, and her collarbones were prominent, as she had thrown her cloak and feathery-thing elsewhere.

“You’re Sunwha unnie’s boyfriend, right?”

Youngjae laughed.

“Ex-boyfriend, actually. For months, now.”

“Oh.”

Yujin bit her lip and looked down, then up, then down again. Youngjae watched shamelessly.

“I really, really need to buy you a coffee. Or something.”

The almost inky black eyes moved to take Youngjae’s face, huge and earnest. The low lip, freed from the bite, was blood red in the middle of that pale face.

“A coffee?”

“Or something. Anything.”

A minuscule smile appeared on Yujin’s face, and Youngjae felt like he had just earned the most cheers in his stage performance.

“Okay. You can buy me ‘a coffee’,” Yujin shrugged, and would have sounded almost nonchalant if it weren’t for the red cheeks.

Youngjae smiled his best smile and thought Sunwha was wrong. He had the best timing ever.

-

pas de deux - french: "step for two"; n. pl.
1. A dance for two, especially a dance in ballet consisting of an entrée and adagio, a variation for each dancer, and a coda.
2. A close relationship between two people or things, as during an activity.

a/n: and if anyone hasn't watched frozen, you totally should. (i cried through the whole thing, 15 minutes in.)