Deer Luhan,

I wish you were on the receiving end of the lame puns and bad jokes.  Especially since the mess you’ve stuck me in is a bad joke.

On the upside, at least everybody except Kai, Sehun and D.O. will be calling you Really and demanding high fives in really creepy voices when you get back.  Enjoy!  It’s Karma’s aperitif.

Leigh

Sehun and D.O. wouldn’t let the puns on my name drop, so I tried to avoid them as much as possible.  Unfortunately, the others began to pick up on it, even though they had no idea what the joke was about (they just knew it really pissed me off and thought it was funny to torment me).

“You sound like Borat,” Kris told Chanyeol after the latter had cornered me in the living room with a creepy “hi, Five!”, holding his hand up for a high five.

“Really?” Chanyeol demanded in English, though it was directed more at me than Kris.  I huffed and shoved him away.

“Yeah,” said Kris, evading skilfully as I sent Chanyeol staggering back into him.  “Have you all been watching the movie or something?  Your imitation’s the best.  You’ve got the voice down.”

“What even is Borat?” Baekhyun asked, leaning around to the side so that he could see his Playstation character clearly as the force of my shove concluded in Chanyeol plopping down into Baekhyun’s lap.

“My love!” Chanyeol exclaimed melodramatically, flinging his arms around Baekhyun’s neck and nearly choking him.

“Happy Virus, get off!” Baekhyun wheezed, flailing.  His onscreen character dived into lava.  “You’re erting my cause for happiness!”

Chanyeol cooed and kissed him on the cheek.  Baekhyun yelled in horror.

“You guys do know that virus is Latin for poison, right?” I couldn’t help blurting out as Baekhyun threw aside his controller and tried to wrestle Chanyeol away, but Chanyeol held his ground, grinning impishly and pretending to his thumb like an oversized baby.

Baekhyun paused and all three of the guys looked up at me.

“Ree Lee?” Chanyeol couldn’t resist.

“Huh, suits you,” Baekhyun grunted.

“Baekhyun, you’re really grumpy today,” Kris observed.  “I’m going to have to put your face on the grumpy cat meme.”

“Tell Chanyeol to get off my lap!”

“Don’t wanna!” Chanyeol whined in baby talk.

“Chanyeol, seriously, I don’t want another HunHan to start up but between the two of us.”

Kris snapped his fingers like he’d just got the best idea ever.  “BaekYeol!”

“Oh my God, no.”

“Doesn’t sound too bad, actually.”  Chanyeol flopped about, grinning goofily.

“Chanyeol, poison me, please.  You’re a virus – you can do this.  As my best friend, you’re required to do this.”

Kris smirked and waved his phone at them.  “Prepare for dastardly NC-17 fanfics!”

I had to fight to keep my grin under control.  “Kris, you’re a legend,” I told him as I passed.

“No problem, Five.”

I smacked him on the back of the head.

Kai and D.O. had somehow managed to get hold of a chest compressor that fit me.  I wasn’t sure where, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to ask where, either.  But it had meant that for the past week, I hadn’t been in danger of fainting every time I went to exercise or dance.  It did make singing a little awkward, though, because I felt like I couldn’t fill my lungs properly, but D.O. assured me it wouldn’t be a problem as I’d have a microphone and the volume I was producing could always be matched to how loudly the others were singing electronically.

“But hopefully you won’t have to sing onstage,” he’d said, looking up from the recording equipment.  “Or record anything, for that matter.”

It had been a comforting thought, except for the fact that my mum hadn’t managed to find my passport yet – either because my room was a tip or because I hadn’t actually left it in my room, in which case I was screwed – and Luhan was being infuriatingly evasive about how long it would take him to get everything sorted.  Apparently a couple of employees had been shot, and the last time he’d rung, he’d asked me not to take up the week-long holiday he’d initially requested because it would put the pair of us in danger and potentially blow both of our covers.

Consequently, the eleventh day of my stay in Korea found me in a very bad mood, exacerbated by Chanyeol’s Borat-like shenanigans, and I ended up going over to the dance studio on what was supposed to be a day off for all of us as it was the only place I could vent stress in private without being followed everywhere by girls just a couple of years younger than me.  I say “day off”, but the past week or so hadn’t actually been that busy, despite what the manager had said.  The unmovable schedule that ‘Luhan’ wasn’t allowed to escape had turned out to be two commercial endorsements, one at each end of the week.

I hooked up Luhan’s laptop to the speaker system – he had a decent collection of music, but I missed some of my old favourites, so I’d managed to download them all from the Cloud – and brought up one of my time-honoured playlists so that I could start an anger-release workout.

Sehun and Kai had been forcing me to exercise a lot over the past eleven days, so it wasn’t long after I’d warmed up and hadn’t manage to dance away the initial burst of energy that I found myself doing tumble runs diagonally across the room.  I didn’t really have enough space to feel satisfied or to do them properly, and I was a bit rusty, but my muscles did at least feel properly stretched afterwards, and I bent over, panting, as the playlist moved on to the next song.

Perhaps it was because gymnastics was on my mind, but instead of jamming out to the song like usual, I found myself trying to remember a floor routine that my gymnastics club had done a long time ago to that tune.  It had been a group dance,