Ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3N-Ik1sXRw

-------------------

I visit Jonghyun again the following weekend. He’s doing a gig for the inmates and their families, just him with a guitar on a makeshift stage in the common room. When I enter he’s singing “Tie a yellow ribbon” matching the prison scenery. He nods at me.

Taking a break he meets me in the visitor area. I already told him about Taemin on the phone. We talk about a possible recovery and what that would mean for Taemin as well as for us ... if there still is an “us”.

I don’t want to go in deeper so I say:

“Nice show you were putting on out there. You still got it all, the voice, the looks the presence.”

Jong smiles and says “yeah, I’m still great but my dancing got a bit rusty.”

“It always was”, I and he laughs.

“Yeah true. I never was a match for Taemin or Minho.”

“... or Key”, I add.

“... or Kibum”, he nods, “not a chance.”

While we’re talking more prisoners enter the visitor room with their families. Many of them smile and wave at Jonghyun and he smiles and waves back. There is one guy though who just shoots him a glare and then looks away. I remember he’s the one who got in a fight with Jong shortly after he came here.

Jonghyun only told me because he had a nasty bruise on his jaw and I kept bugging him. It had been a short fight and despite the other man’s advantage in height and weight, Jonghyun had pretty much wiped him out.

The guy had told him that it was a shame that Jonghyun was convicted although the “fruitcake wouldn’t have survived service anyway”, referring to Key and his upcoming military-draft. Jong had immediately gone berserk at that but when he told me afterwards I was surprised that he didn’t care about the name-calling but instead got furious about the weakness claim.

Of course he was right. Kibum had never been weak, neither physically nor mentally and he was more adaptable than any of us. I guess he would have sent us letters with hilarious stories about his army adventures to brighten up our own dull days of service.

---

When it came to physical strength everybody had always first looked at Minho and Jong, me being third choice. And when Taemin got older and taller even he was considered to be stronger than Key. They were all wrong. What Kibum was lacking in muscle he had made up for with toughness and skill. He didn’t like to work out but if you stepped on his pride he was capable of pretty much anything.

When we had been filming “Dark mode killer” VCR there was a lot of wirework and stunt doubling going on. We had fun with the stunt guys, the guns and explosions.  I was struggling with a sub-machine gun and watched how the awesome double did one-handed cartwheels shooting it in my costume. This VCR almost made me lose my Onew Sangtae image.

There was a martial arts instructor showing Taemin how to do the backwards jump-kick, but our Baby kept kicking like a dancer. So they substituted him, too. Kibum had asked the instructor to teach him the move where he jumped onto his adversary, strangled him with his thighs and then did a back flip to break his neck, although nobody expected him to do it himself. And then he surprised everybody needing less than an hour to be able to perform the stunt decently. They actually made a shot of it but didn’t use it for the video because we were all faking. But I remember how we held our breath when Key was spinning around vertically and almost hit his head on the floor.

The instructor told him afterwards, that he had missed his vocation and should have become a martial artist. And Key kept teasing Taemin for a week with his “supreme taekwondo abilities”.

No, Key had never been weak.