Deer Luhan,

I’m beginning to wonder if Kris ended up with his “maybe next time” through observing your inability to meet deadlines, because you’re quite spectacularly bad at it.

Leigh

Suho had kind of been right when he’d been having a go at the others about holing me up in the dorm and potential trauma.  It had been fine when there was at least one other person to keep me company, but after a mere ten minutes by myself, I was fidgety and sweaty and wanted to be anywhere but there.  The place felt stiflingly claustrophic without the others, and before long I was itching to leave.  Of course, I knew that I couldn’t go out of the building – I wouldn’t have dared to solo in any case, not after the previous day.  I settled for the helipad instead, because I felt that fresh air would do me good, but I found myself unable to step past the closet in the hallway.  Every time I so much as tried, my throat tightened and my mind seemed on the verge of shutting down with flashbacks of panic, so I retreated and decided it was best to find something to occupy myself with.

Obviously, I didn’t have the possibility of releasing tension through tumble runs, and I’d been doing enough of them earlier in the day for it probably not to be effective if I tried.  Cooking was out as the oven still hadn’t been fixed, so in the end I reluctantly settled for packing.

What actually happened was a massive procrastination on packing that involved tidying up pretty much the entire dorm.  And not just tidying up: it was like I’d gone into super-cleaner mode on steroids.  Within half an hour, Chen and Tao’s room was almost unrecognisable because you could actually move in it and see the floor (Tao had gone back to a floordrobe).  Twenty minutes after that, Kris’ side of his shared room with Xiumin was no longer a bombsite (I wasn’t sure how Xiumin put up with him, because his side was extremely neat).  I skirted Lay and Luhan’s (and my) room in favour of cleaning the kitchen, but eventually found myself in there anyway, because I remembered that Suho had basically been collecting anything that was lying around in the wrong place to stash in the corner by Lay’s bed.  Suho could be a bit of a hoarder.

Most of the things belonged in the living room, where I sensed D.O.’s hand had been at work, because it wasn’t quite as much of a tip as it had been in the morning.

I was just moving a maimed sofa cushion – which was the one thing out of the fifty-seven or so that I actually remembered Suho bringing into the room – back to its original home on the sofa when my phone rang.

Human distraction!  I threw myself onto the sofa, semi-destroyed cushion in my lap, and picked up without a second thought.

It was almost a mistake.

“Leigh!” exclaimed a very, very happy voice.  “I’m drunk!”

I didn’t know whether to sigh or laugh.  “I can tell.”

There was a crash from the other end of the phone, and then I heard Changmin slurring, “no, Gyu’un, ’m fine.”

“You don’t sound fine,” I put in.  Changmin just made some kind of bleating “meeeeeh!” noise that sounded a bit like a whining goat.  It was followed by a drawn out “heeeeey!” before a new voice came on air.

“Sorry!” said Kyuhyun.  “Minnie’s drunk!”

“So are you,” I pointed out, deciding that I was now amused.

“Yep,” said Kyuhyun happily.  “I’m very drunk.”

I grinned to myself, settling back in the sofa and plucking absently at the cushion on my lap.  Several strands of thick thread unravelled almost immediately.  I was going to have to sew it up again before I left.

“Kyuhyun!  Want my phone back.”

I could actually hear the pout in Changmin’s voice.  It was almost Chen level in terms of potency.

“Minnie said,” announced Kyuhyun, ignoring Changmin’s pleas for his phone completely and speaking as though making a great effort to summon up the right words, “you’re leaving.”

“Yeah, tomorrow.”

There was a pause at the other end, during which I could hear Changmin mutter something that sounded like “you’re not coming to my birthday party anymore”.  I laughed quietly, picking out a piece of synthetic fluff from the rip in the cushion.

“Minho!” Kyuhyun shouted suddenly.  “Come and meet Luhan’s female!”

“Shh!” Changmin insisted in the background.  “He can’t hear her or he’ll know!”

I was too baffled at being called Luhan’s female to respond until another voice, which was vaguely familiar from somewhere, asked “what do you mean by ‘Luhan’s female’, hyung?”

“Luhan’s a girl!” Kyuhyun crowed.

“Luhan’s also a boy,” Changmin added sagely.

“…Right,” said the new voice, and just from that, I established a fair level of judgement in Minho’s tone and that he was also pretty sober.

“Not all Luhans are Chinese,” Changmin went on.

“He can make shadow clones,” said Kyuhyun excitedly.

“Hyung,” said Minho, “go home.  You’re drunk.”

“No.”  Kyuhyun sounded petulant.  “I won’t go home, and I already know I’m drunk.”

“Me too!” Changmin put in with enthusiasm.

The Minho guy gave a loud groan.  “I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.”

“That’s okay.”  Changmin and Kyuhyun were starting to giggle like a pair of schoolgirls.  “You can live on EXOplanet with the EXO aliens and with Leigh!”

There was a very audible sigh and something I took from Kyuhyun’s protests to be Minho snatching the phone out of his hands.  There was a pause before his voice came again.

“I’m really sorry about these two calling you when they don’t even know you,” he said.  “They can get a bit….”  His voice trailed off when he realised I was laughing.  “Wait, do you know them?  Because Changmin’s saved your name as ‘jincha?’”

I laughed louder, tugging more fluff out of the cushion and throwing it at an imaginary Changmin’s face.

“Oh my gosh,” said Minho, taking my laughter for a yes.  “I am so, so sorry you’ve had them both inflicted on you.”

“I’ve dealt with worse,” I assured him, thinking back to some of my friends’ drunken antics at university.

“And also,” added Minho, “isn’t your number English?”

“Er, yeah.”  I was kind of surprised he recognised it off the cuff.

“So you’re English?”

“…Sort of.”  I started picking more vigorously at the fluff.  Several pieces of dirt and a small circular plastic box came out.

“Then how come you speak Korean?”

“My parents are Korean.”

“Oh,” he said.  “Oh, right.”

“It’s not oh right, it’s Oh, Ree Lee?” I heard Kyuhyun scolding him in the background.  There was suddenly a lot of background noise and Minho’s voice became distant as it exclaimed: “No, Changmin, I am not letting you have your phone back to speak to some poor British girl when you’re this drunk!”

“She’s not some poor British girl, she’s female Luhan,” Changmin insisted, and then the background noise faded and Changmin’s chipper tone invaded my ears again.  “Leigh!  Do you like China?”

His choice of words reminded me that somehow, the mafia knew I was not male.  I stopped plucking out bits of cushion fluff and fiddled with the plastic fragment I’d pulled out earlier instead.

“Hey!”  Kyuhyun was audible protesting.  “China’s my country; I sing there!”

“Well, I… I went to the Great Wall yesterday,” I told Changmin, suddenly feeling unsure of myself.  If the mafia knew I was a girl, what else did they know?  Was it even going to be safe to fly home tomorrow?  “But oppa, the mafia found us on the way back and they know I’m a girl.  How would they have found out?”

“Easy,” Changmin said glibly.  “Luhan told them.  Or some other EXO alien.”

Minho said something in the background that sounded like not knowing either Kyuhyun or Changmin.

I went back to picking at the fluff.  “But they know it would get me or Luhan killed.”

“Then somebody else told them.”  He gave a happy little burp and I heard Minho groan, “oh God.”

“Yeah, lots of people know,” Kyuhyun buttered in.  “I know.”

I was pretty sure none of the Super Junior members would have got in contact with the mafia specifically to get me or Luhan done in, but outside the pop world, the only people who knew I was a girl were in the British embassy here in Beijing.  Granted, they didn’t know the whole deal about me pretending to be Luhan and Luhan’s family’s problems and what have you, but they were aware I’d been disguised as a boy.

I suddenly felt sick.  Pushing the destroyed cushion away, I got to my feet.  My hands were trembling.  I was supposed to be goi