Deer Luhan,

You know that quote “they said ‘smile! Things could be worse!’ So I smiled and they were”?  I think that’s applicable here.

Leigh

The immediate aftermath of Luhan’s announcement was total chaos.  He was clearly in shock and very, very worried, and Sehun ended up trying to explain what little he’d understood of the phonecall to Yi in limited Chinese.  It didn’t help that the manager barged in just a couple of moments after that and Yi had to fling me behind the sofa, Kris, Tao, Xiumin and Lay quickly going to stand over me so that the manager wouldn’t notice there was an extra person if he came too far into the room.  Then there was the inevitable pandemonium when Suho tried to hustle the manager out as soon as possible while he was trying to make sure that everybody was ready to leave within the next fifteen minutes, and then, once he had finally been locked out of the door, D.O. collapsed against the sofa and asked in a weak voice if somebody minded carrying him back to bed, because his chest hurt so much when he tried to breathe that he didn’t think he could walk there by himself.

While Kai busied himself with that, the rest of us were silent.  The only exceptions were Yi and Luhan, the latter of whom had regained enough of his senses to be able to explain his mother’s predicament himself.  I peeked out around Tao’s legs so I could concentrate on their conversation.

Yi was talking distances and transport.  Luhan seemed on the verge of a mental breakdown.

“I can’t go,” he kept saying.  “I can’t.  What if they suddenly decide they want me somewhere here and there’s only a half hour deadline or something?”

After watching their bickering for a couple of minutes or so, I wriggled out from behind the boys’ legs and approached Yi and Luhan, dusting myself off.

“—Not to mention the meetings – the press are going to be there; I can’t suddenly vanish—”

“Xiao Lu.”  I rested a hand on his shoulder and he jumped.  “Go.  It’s your mother.”

“But—”

I ignored him and turned to Yi.  “How long are you likely to be away?”

Yi did the mental calculations quickly.  “She’s in the process of being cornered rather than having been captured, so provided the situation’s still the same and we can just swoop in and out, I’d say we’ll be back by mid-morning tomorrow.”

“And nothing’s planned until tomorrow afternoon, right?”  I turned back to Luhan for confirmation.  Biting his bottom lip, he nodded.

“Then it’s fine,” I said.  “Go ahead, LuLu.  I’ll handle things here for today.  What’s a doppelganger for, after all?”

“Really?”  His voice cracked.  I nodded.

He swept me into a bone-crushing hug and started sobbing on my shoulder.  I didn’t know how to respond beyond patting him awkwardly on the back.  Just a foot away, I could see Yi mentally counting the seconds before he pulled Luhan off me.  Such a people person, that guy.  I don’t know how he does it.

“Okay, okay,” he said.  “We don’t have time.  Leigh, go with them, but I want the police that stays here to split half-half between accompanying you and making sure your ill friend is safe, and if anything at all happens you are to ring immediately, okay?  Come on, Mr Lu, we have a helicopter to catch.  It’ll take more than a few hours for us to get halfway across the country.”

Wiping his eyes and swallowing, Luhan nodded.  He leant back and caught my arm as Yi hustled him away.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

There was so much emotion and gratitude packed into that simple phrase that I thought the weight of it was going to bring me to tears.

Meeting with hysterical parents whose kids have gone missing is not pleasant.  The longer I was in their presence, the more I began to feel sorry for my mother when I’d stormed out of the house that night in December.  Granted, what had happened to me was no way near as bad, all things considered, but she must have been worried out of her mind.  At least after two days she’d had confirmation that I was alive and not kidnapped.

Even though, technically speaking, I had been kidnapped.  But it wasn’t the same.

I was also quite glad that Luhan wasn’t there.  Given his current mental state, I wasn’t sure if he would have been able to handle the level of vitriol one of the Korean mothers who’d flown across was pouring on me under the mistaken impression that I was Luhan.  Not that I was going to correct her.  I actually felt rather helpless when she started hitting me and then crumpled on top of me in tears.  Her son was more reasonable, gently telling her that it wasn’t EXO’s fault their daughter had been taken, though he still eyed me like I was some nasty disease.

In many ways, I would have preferred to deal with the Japanese parents who came.  The only person they spoke to was the interpreter when they were trying to communicate with the town officials and the manager, and it was clear that the interpreter was dissipating a lot of their aggravation in the way he relayed what each side was saying.  My problem was that I not only understood Korean and Chinese, but that the two Taiwanese families and the school teacher who’d come across to find out what had happened to their girls all spoke Chinese too, and they were even angrier than the Korean mother who’d collapsed on me.

The fact that I wasn’t actually Luhan helped.  It enabled me to put up a barrier because I knew that all the hatred and fear and terror wasn’t actually directed personally at me, but it hurt just as much as when Baekhyun’s fans had gone mental when he’d got shot.  I did my very best to assure them all that we were doing all we could to locate the girls (“well, you’re clearly not doing enough!”) and asked if there was anything I could do for them (“you can go die, that’s what!” “Mother!”), and then, thank the dear Lord, the seven-hour-long meeting was finally over.

“Let’s eat out,” sighed the manager as we bundled ourselves out of the building.  “I need a change of scene.”

It was an awkward meal.  Everybody was moody and nobody really wanted to talk, though as the evening wore on, I began to wonder if that was because they were all too caught up in the problem of the missing girls and how on earth Yi was going to locate them or if it was because they wanted to be able to talk to me openly, because Chen kept making eyes at me and Sehun, who was sitting next to me, and about the only talking that did happen was Chen, Lay, Baekhyun and Chanyeol constantly asking Sehun to pass them something that required him to lean past me every time, invariably brushing his arm against my body and either making me blush or flinch.

Eventually, the manager went to pay the bill.  Suho stopped pretending to read the message on the inside of his fortune cookie (it was upside down and I wasn’t totally sure if he understood it, anyway) and his head snapped up.

“Lay, what time’s the train tonight?”

Lay stopped eyeing the flowers to my right – I wouldn’t have put it past him to ask Sehun if he could pass the vase, as well – and considered for a few moments.

“After eleven.  We’ll need to leave the hotel at half ten.”

Suho turned to me.  “Are you packed?”

I grimaced.  “No.”

“It won’t take her long,” Kai said dismissively.  “I’ll help pack.”

“No you won’t,” said Xiumin.  “It’ll be a disaster.”

“Sehun can help,” Baekhyun volunteered at once, earning himself a whack to the back of the head from the leader, but nobody had time to say anything else beca