Deer Luhan,

I think you must be my soul twin.  Partner in crime works too.  Or you were me in a past life and some amazing time warp thing has happened with wormholes that’s allowed us to co-exist in the same timeframe.

Leigh

Everything was on the wrong side of the room when I woke up.  Rubbing sleep out of my left eye, I pushed myself into a sitting position and bit back a hiss of pain as the injuries on my arms protested.  They weren’t that severe, but they were still bandaged.

It wasn’t until I spotted Luhan sitting on the bed that I’d claimed as mine while I was staying in China that I remembered Lay had volunteered to sleep on the sofa in the living room.  Apparently he’d done it several times before and really wasn’t bothered by it, and besides, in his words, “it means I can be like a watchdog if the manager walks in because it’ll give time for one of you to hide.” 

“That’ll be Leigh,” Chen had snorted.  “Luhan’s almost as bad as Kai.”

“What if he asks why you’re not in your room?” I’d asked.  Lay had just shrugged.

“Luhan and I had a mega-argument that requires your genius pub-solving technique?”

It was kind of odd that he’d come up with a coherent suggestion since he’d been pretty drunk at the time.  But anyway, after that, everybody had insisted that since I was the guest (prompting a round of Disney from Luhan and Chen in pretty decent English) I should have a bed, and Luhan had pulled the invalid card and insisted on having his own back in spite of Kris trying to insist I have the bedroom to myself, so I’d taken Lay’s.

“Morning!” said Luhan brightly, pausing from wrapping his arms in bandages for a moment so that he could grin at me.  “I put out clothes for you.”  He gestured vaguely to the end of my bed.  I leant forwards to take a look.  Lime green t-shirt, black jeans, and Pacman socks.  I narrowed my eyes.

“Luhan, with my hair, I’m going to look like a failed tic tac if I wear that.”

“What’s a tic tac?”

I blinked and looked back over at him.  “A kind of sweet.”  I blinked again, scanning his clothes, and then gave him a withering look.  “Really?  Couple clothes?”

Luhan’s grin broaded as he finished off the bandage close to the hem of the sleeve of the lime green t-shirt he was also wearing.  “Nope.  These are twin clothes.”

It took a couple of minutes to process, but when it did, I let out a burst of laughter.  “You’re a worse troll than Chen.”

Luhan took a moment to show me a mock-contemptous expression.  “Please.  Pulling a prank like this is an obligation when you have a doppelganger.  Chen could out-troll me any day; I’ve just been given a golden opportunity.”

There was a pause of several seconds as we just looked at each other.  Then the corners of Luhan’s mouth quirked up into a grin and I laughed again.  This was so different from the worried, stressed guy who’d broken down over the phone to me and much more like the one who’d asked me how my date with Sehun was when he’d seen that his credit card had been used to pay for a meal for two at Namsan Tower on his online bank statement.  Now that all the anxiety and responsibility surrounding the situation with his aunt had gone, it looked like he was determined to share the rest of the dorm’s mental age.

Luhan inspected his bandages again and then got to his feet, seemingly satisfied.  He didn’t quite manage to hide his wince as he put pressure on his injured ankle, but he at least seemed able to stand by himself.

“How are your injuries today?” I asked him, belatedly spotting the icepacks and the pillow at the foot of his bed that he’d used to elevate his injured leg and making a mental note to limp on my left foot for the day.

“Painful,” he said with a shrug.  “Ow.  I’ll manage, though.  Going to be sitting down most of the day for the train ride and the event and it’s not like I use my left hand to write or anything.”

“Shouldn’t it be in a sling regardless?”

“That would cause too many questions and draw too much attention,” he pointed out.  “It would be bad enough trying to explain it to the manager, let alone fans and the press.  Anyway.  I’ll let you get changed.”  Luhan left the room, stepping gingerly on his left foot and trying not to let the pain show on his face.  I surveyed the Pacman socks again, wondering why he had duplicates of some of his own clothing.

Lay was awake and sitting cross-legged on the sofa, eating breakfast, when I crossed the living room to go brush my teeth in the bathroom.

“Morning,” he yawned around a mouthful of food, then blinked and looked quizzically between me and the bathroom door.  “Wait, didn’t you just go in there?  How did you…?”

I just grinned at him.  He buried his head in his food with a grimace, muttering something about alcohol-induced blackouts and hangovers.

Xiumin wandered out of the kitchen at that moment, cradling a steaming cup of coffee.

“Hi,” he said, sounding even less awake than Lay had done.  He paused for a moment, scanning me up and down, and took a careful sip of the hot drink.  “Your arm’s not in a sling, so you must be Leigh.  Is Luhan up yet?  We need to go in about an hour or so.”

I pulled a face, gutted he’d caught me so quickly, but then the bathroom door opened and Luhan came out.  Xiumin glanced up, blinked twice, and nearly dropped the coffee.

“Seriously?” he demanded.  “Oh God, you guys, this really isn’t fair.”

“What isn’t?” asked Lay with another yawn.

“Which one of you is who?” Xiumin asked with resignation.

“What, you think we’d actually tell you?” I demanded.

“Xiu,” mumbled Lay around more food, “Luhan’s arm’s in a sling and he’s limping.  Leigh just has bandages and cuts.”

Xiumin just motioned for him to turn and look at Luhan.  Lay did so and jumped, upending dumplings all over the floor.

“Whoa,” he said to Luhan.  “You can teleport?”

I coughed to draw his attention back to me.  Like Xiumin had done, Lay spent some time blinking as reality processed; then he just gave up with a grumble of “you b*st*rds” and put his head in his hands.

“What’s with the early morning gathering?”  Chen had appeared in his bedroom doorway, rubbing sleep out of his eyes.

“LeighLu are giving us a mindf*ck,” Lay grumbled.

“Hmm?”  Chen stopped rubbing his eyes and squinted out across the room.  He started laughing almost immediately when he caught sight of me and Luhan beaming at him.  “You guys are cruel!”

I held up a hand.  “Whoa there.  One of the two of us is a girl, not a guy.”

Chen humoured us.  Sort of.  “That one,” he said, pointing to us both.

I turned to Luhan.  “The Sherlock is weak with this one.”

Xiumin’s eyes narrowed, but the remaining two members made their appearance before he could say anything.

“Okay,” said Tao, backing back into his room immediately, “I’m clearly still drunk.”

This drew laughter from everybody except Kris, who stood there with the most amazing bedhead as he folded his arms, squinting from me to Luhan and back again as though our names would suddenly appear over our heads if he looked hard enough.

“Luhan,” he began eventually, still not in the least bit sure which one of us was Luhan, “shouldn’t your arm be in a sling?”

Neither Luhan nor I replied.  Kris straighted up and tried to stare us down, but it was made difficult by the fact that he didn’t know who he should be directing his gimlet eye at.  After a while, he gave up.

“I hate you guys.”  He shuffled towards the kitchen.

There was a pause as Luhan and I tried to hold back laughter and Chen, Xiumin and Lay considered the best course of action.  Chen eventually flopped down onto the sofa beside Lay.

“So which one of you two is coming to Zhengzhou today?” he asked.

Luhan’s face became impassive as he responded.  “Luhan is.”

Chen snapped both his fingers and turned to me.  “Bingo!  Hi, hyung!”

“No Korean in the dorm,” Lay muttered, shoving a dumpling from the floor in Chen’s mouth.

“Lay, at least do it the proper way with shower gel,” Xiumin sighed as Chen spat the dumpling out, complaining about germs and five-second rules.

“Are you sure, Chen?” I asked him when he returned his attention to me.  “You want to do another Open, Sesame to check?”

Chen’s confidence faltered, and his eyes flickered from me to Luhan.  Luhan had been the first to know the story, though, so he didn’t react.  Realising neither of us were giving anything away, Chen gave up with a pout.

“Breakfast?” Luhan suggested to me, tilting his head towards the kitchen.

“Oh!” Xiumin suddenly exclaimed as I