Gorgeous poster/graphic by Yifanforever. Thanks, darling!

Deer Luhan,

You should definitely get married in lace.  I would fly all the way over from England just to see it.

Leigh

The net result of Luhan’s appearance was Kris locking Super Junior into the dorm with us for the night so that he could explain the situation properly when they were all sober and able to take in the importance of not letting anybody else know.  He even nicked their phones and rang their manager to inform him that they’d all passed out drunk and that we were going to take care of them as no taxi would want to take them home.  It was all complete bullsh*t, of course, but as Lay had once told me, Kris was a master of the art of bullsh*tting and apparently it wasn’t too far out of the SuJu guys’ personalities to do something like that, so we ended up with a massive sleepover.

Super Junior M took it all like absolute champs, especially after Henry found out I could speak English, and just allowed Kris to bully them as they tried to figure out ways to tell me and Luhan apart that didn’t involve undressing.  That led to a very, very drunk Donghae suggesting a game of Truth or Strip (Tao looked like he wanted to beat him up for even thinking of it, which part of me couldn’t help finding ironic where I was involved), but EXO-M refused to take yes for an answer and sat on me until Donghae backed down and settled for a much tamer version of Never Have I Ever.  I excused myself about from it at about two in the morning, having learnt far too much that I would never have wanted to know about Eunhyuk in particular, who had either done everything there was to do or had reached the stage of drunk where he just wanted to drink everything in sight, rules be damned.  Some of the others weren’t much better.

Kris and Luhan gave them all the short version of the story as we sat around in the living room the next morning with mugs of cold soup.  It meant (thankfully) leaving out a lot of the awkward incidents such as Tao walking in on me in the shower, though Luhan did supply a lot extra about the mafia that the other members weren’t yet aware of.  From Xiumin’s reaction to that, I probably wasn’t going to be leaving the dorm until it was time for me to fly back home.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to escape the embarrassment of reliving my first meeting with Changmin, because about halfway through the story, Kyuhyun suddenly leapt up, clapping his hands.

“Oh my ing God!  Changmin knows, doesn’t he?  Didn’t you jump into his face or something?”

That ended in him giving me Changmin’s number (he scrawled it on the front of his Starcraft game that he’d retrieved from Chen and said I could keep the thing provided I learnt how to play it) and telling me to give the guy a call at some stage.

“I wondered why he was so desperate to get that CD to you,” Kyuhyun said as he sat back down.  “I was bracing myself for him coming out of the closet or something.  Fan girls everywhere would have cried.”

Considerably sobered up and having made promises on pain of all kinds of awful punishments that they’d never reveal my secret (or Luhan’s), the eight SuJu guys filed out of the door around lunch time, wishing us luck against the mafia.  I could still hear their incredulous laughter after Kris shut the door and slid down it with a groan.

“What a night,” he mumbled.  “What a morning.”

“Food, anyone?” asked Tao.  “Microwave only if you want it to be warm.”

“Leigh and I will grab something out in town,” said Luhan, tugging a beanie down over my hair.  I turned to look at him.

“Will we?”

“Yeah.  I’m going to take you along to the embassy to ask about visas.  Have you got your passport?”

I pointed to my room.  “But what about the fact I got in here without a visa?  Won’t they arrest me or something?”

“They might,” said Luhan, “but hopefully it won’t come to that.  If I have to, I’ll pull some strings.  It might involve a bit of bribery, but I can definitely pay for it, so it’s not a problem.”

We all just looked at him.

“‘Bribery’ and ‘not a problem’ should never be put in the same sentence,” Xiumin muttered.

“I probably won’t have to resort to that, though,” Luhan went on.  “I reckon we essentially have a choice between a sob-story of child abduction and trafficking and Leigh seeking asylum and desperately wanting to go back home or running with that whole thing about her being a spy and her life is in danger so she needs to go back home.  It’ll be British people we’re talking to, in any case; they should look after their own.”

Chen’s “dude, what the ?” came nowhere close to voicing the amount of judgement evident in everybody’s expressions.  Nor did Kris’ “Luhan, I really worry about the way your brain works sometimes”.

Luhan just held up two fingers in a peace sign and chivvied me along to get my passport so we could leave.  “This’ll all work out, never fear!”

The biggest problem with the embassy turned out to be a pair of stuffy bureaucratic aides wanting to take me into custody “for my own safety” because Luhan decided to run with an abduction story (which, in fairness, wasn’t too far off the truth).  In the end, we convinced them that Luhan and I were cousins, which was believeable enough, and that I’d escaped and searched him out on finding myself alone with the keys to the basement that I’d allegedly been held prisoner in.  Luhan made a point of stressing that I hadn’t been held captive in Beijing and that it would be safe to stay with him.  It was only when we got out of the building that he rounded on me, half puzzled, half annoyed.

“What the heck was that?” he demanded.  “They were right about it being much safer with them.”

I scuffed my heel against the pavement.  “But it’s fun with you guys.  I didn’t want to spend a week in that place while they get all the papers ready.  Besides, you went along with it.”

“I said I was related to you,” he muttered, scratching the back of his head.  “It would have been weird if I hadn’t said it was fine for you to stay with me when you said you wanted to, but I still don’t think it’s the best choice.  And I didn’t really understand what I was getting myself into anyway because most of the conversation was in English.”

I just grinned at him.  He was acting like a mildly grouchy version of my mum, only without China plates flying everywhere.

“At least it’s only a week,” he conceded eventually.  “Aren’t you looking forward to going home?”

“Of course.  But I’d much rather enjoy my last week rather than be on virtual house arrest with irritating people I don’t know.  I might actually get a chance to go out and see Beijing, because God forbid I step a toe out of the front door with those old fuddy-duddies around in case some erted person decides to lock me in his cellar again.”

It was enough to make Luhan grin as he reached for my hand and we started off down the street.

“You’re kind of good at making the best of a bad situation.”

“Oh, that only started when I found myself in a foreign country being mistaken for a guy, believe me.  It forces you to think fast.  I’m even learning how to function a little when I haven’t had my daily coffee fix because of you.”

This time, Luhan let out a small chuckle.

“And besides,” I added, “I still have 80000 kuai to spend on that card you gave me, and I plan to extort your money to the full.”

His laugh was loud and almost as beautiful as Sehun’s.  “Fine.  Once we’ve eaten, I’m taking you shopping.  I know some absolutely great malls—”

I tugged his arm, pulling him to a halt, and he looked around at me.

“No malls?” I requested in a small voice.  “At least, none in the centre of the city, please.  Kind of… well, things happened last time.”

Shopping with Luhan was good fun.  We started off with essentials, like souvenirs and presents for my family (Luhan knew some really cool little boutique stores off the beaten track and even doubled back to get me a pearl bracelet I’d been eyeing in one of them, taking so long about it that I began to worry he’d been abducted or something), and then went birthday-gift shopping on behalf of the other M members for stuff for Kai and D.O.  Kai was easy because Kris had relayed specific instructions over the phone when he’d rung to remind us, but we were stumped on D.O. for quite some time until w