Abandoned Fic Fragments pt. 2
Mar. 18th, 2026 12:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lachrymosyFic fragments part 2: Seventeen edition
These are all from 2024 so I'll leave off the years on these. Snippets get longer as you go down the list. This was def my genfic era but genfics really require more substance than any of these fics had which is probably why they all died, lol.
Going Seventeen humor fic. Barely started it.
Whoever pitched the episode theme for this recording of Going Seventeen clearly wanted to make Minghao miserable. Upon reflection, it was probably Mingyu who pitched it, which seems about right. Anyway, Minghao is miserable.
“Great work!” coos the art teacher, a very cool man in his early sixties who looks like an art teacher in a movie, destined to train a young artist full of raw, unpolished talent into his full potential.
Unfortunately, he’s chosen Wonwoo to focus on. Wonwoo! Minghao shifts on his stool, frowning at the canvas in front of him.
“Have you ever painted before?” asks the art teacher.
“No,” Wonwoo answers, bashful. He glances sidelong at Minghao. Minghao doesn’t dare look up.
“You should,” says the art teacher. “You have a real gift.”
Wonwoo bites down on a smile. Minghao stabs his brush against the canvas. Wonwoo!
Wonwoo watches videos from a parallel universe. Written pre-AI lol. Abandoned because it was directionless. From 2024.
Although it probably was not wise for Wonwoo to be watching videos of himself, this is what he was doing when he happened upon the strangest channel he had ever seen.
He didn’t realize it was strange at first. The video he clicked on was, he assumed, a fan-taken video of a performance of “Fire.” He wanted—or, rather, he felt obliged—to monitor himself, find flaws in his execution, do better the next time.
After a few minutes of watching, it occurs to him that his hair in the video is blonde, and the costumes are black trimmed with red, and the video says it was taken in Los Angeles, where they certainly have not yet performed this song.
He sits at his desk for a long time, staring at the paused video, goosebumps raised on his skin.
He should not go back to the video, but after a few days it feels like something he imagined in an exhausted stupor. It couldn’t have been real. He might have even dreamed it.
He waits until he’s in the practice room and nearly everyone else is on their phones, too. The presence of so many others feels like an anchor in reality, and he fully expects to find no trace of the video in his watch history.
But it’s there. He freezes, staring at it without opening it. Under the harsh fluorescent lights of the practice room he cannot explain this away as the hallucinations of a sleep-deprived pop star, who sees mirages of himself on every screen. It appears to be real.
After a few minutes, he thumbs it open. This time, he looks at the other members for some kind of clue. Maybe it’s AI-generated or edited. Maybe the lighting just looks weird.
Grad school AU, gyuhao I think? I eventually wrote a very different kind of grad school AU but in this one Scoups was majoring in atmospheric science.
When summer arrives, so do the storms.
Minghao stands outside the first time the clouds build, heavy and dark like an omen from the gods. The clouds stand tall as a mountain range in the distance, then slowly fill the dome of the sky, but no rain falls. He stands on a square of dry sidewalk, running the toe of his tennis shoe over the weeds pushing up through the cracks.
“What are you doing out here?” Mingyu calls out. Minghao turns slowly as if mesmerized, turning his eyes back to the house where Mingyu stands on the sagging porch, staring at him, his brow creased and his mouth open. A piercing siren wails in the distance. “There’s supposed to be a tornado!”
Minghao turns to look at the churn of clouds again and walks backwards up the path to the house. A car passes. Across the street, an assortment of flags flap wildly over someone else’s porch. Fat droplets of water spatter the sidewalk. Minghao’s heels hit the steps and he stumbles, falling ass-first against the porch.
Mingyu hauls him upward and all but shoves him into the house, the screen door clapping behind them. It takes Minghao’s eyes a moment to adjust to the dim living room. Jeonghan is sitting on the couch, staring out the window, tapping his fingers against the window sill.
“Fuck you guys,” Mingyu exclaims. “Don’t you have any common sense?”
Minghao laughs. Jeonghan is looking at Mingyu like he’s the one without any, and Minghao appreciates the irony of that. The absurdity of it. Rain begins to pelt the window and thunder rumbles in the distance. It is like an omen, he supposes. An omen of the silence that follows.
Jeonghan looks directly at him, then. There’s a storm in his eyes.
In the basement, Mingyu listens to the weather radio. Minghao and Jeonghan pull out character handwriting notebooks, the kind Minghao hasn’t used since he was a child. He’s been teaching Jeonghan Chinese since he moved in two months ago and Jeonghan asked, almost shy, if he’d be willing.
“Wait,” Minghao said, stopping Jeonghan’s pencil with a hand on his wrist. “You mixed this up. This line should be longer than this one.”
He demonstrates, still uncomfortable trying to explain what he means in English. Jeonghan frowns, biting his eraser between his teeth, and then copies.
“It makes a difference,” Minghao explains carefully, watching Jeonghan’s hand as he writes the character again, and again, in each of the boxes lining the page. “It’s little but it makes a difference.”
Jeonghan hums in agreement, either amused or annoyed, Minghao can’t tell. He can never tell with Jeonghan, who vacillates between jovial and somber, outgoing and reclusive, his magnetic presence heavy in the house even when he closes himself up in his room.
“Why do you want to learn Chinese, anyway?” Minghao asks, curious. Jeonghan is studying civil engineering, which as far as Minghao knows, doesn’t require knowledge in an additional language. Jeonghan’s English is functional, his Spanish supposedly better, but he stumbles through Chinese lessons with a resolve Minghao has never been able to figure out.
Jeonghan shrugs. “My mom always liked it,” he says, his eyes on his pencil. “Hanmun. She liked how each character was made. A set number of lines making a complex shape.” He puts his pencil in the next empty box. “One, two, three, four, five. Right? And it means something.”
“That’s true,” Minghao agrees, though he’s never thought of it that way. He looks at Jeonghan’s face, the gentle slope of his nose and the hair in his eyes. He looks more like a painting than a person, too beautiful to wear the grit of daily life, too brittle to bear it. Minghao has been wanting to paint him since he moved in, but he hasn’t touched a brush in—years, at this point. The want is more subtle, unlikely to be acted upon. Instead, he observes.
“There was a tornado that touched down twenty minutes south,” Mingyu announces. He says something in Korean to Jeonghan, who laughs.
“Seungcheollie will be happy,” Jeonghan says, in English. “Don’t you want him to be happy?”
“It’s not him that I’m worried about,” Mingyu mutters.
This was supposed to be a fic in the The Mountains Unfurl extended universe following miissedappointments' sequel remix, but I could not write it very well so I scrapped it. In retrospect it should have been Scoups POV...
On the first day after Jeonghan is discharged, he goes home and sits on the couch and flicks through the Dispatch photos of his reemergence into civilian society. The image in the photos doesn't look like what he thinks he looks like, but when he tries to think of what he expected, all he can think of is himself from over a decade ago, blonde hair flowing in the wind and the sunlight hitting his smiling face like the sky itself wanted to shine a spotlight on him. But that feels like someone else, too, so in the end he clicks off his phone, stares at the ceiling, and tries to decide who he should call to get drunk with him. Then he remembers that the civilian members are in Daegu filming something, he hasn’t heard from most of his celebrity friends in months, and he’d scheduled dinner with his family for the coming weekend, so—he stares at the ceiling and thinks of nothing until he drifts into semi-sleep.
He dreams thrice that Seungkwan has come into the room and tried to wake him up. Every time he recalls that he no longer lives with Seungkwan, hasn’t in over a year, the dream fades into a haze of images and then: a blank space where he only exists, without form, until the dream repeats. Seungkwan comes in, Hyung what are you doing! We have evaluations in ten minutes! and Jeonghan wonders all over again how he didn’t realize and why he didn’t prepare.
After the third cycle he dreams that he gets up, and he knows it is a dream even while he is doing it, and he tells himself it is a dream but he will get up for real. So he stands up and goes into the bathroom but it isn’t his bathroom, it’s the bathroom he shared with his sister when they were children. When he looks at his reflection he sees his younger self, long blonde hair and big smile and wide eyes. He touches his cheek and finds it is made of glass. The mirror shatters, or—no. He shatters. He watches his face fracture and then break into thousands of tiny pieces that fall, in glittering shards, to the floor.
Jeonghan wakes up. His tongue has gone dry in his mouth and it takes a long moment to settle into the reality, his dry tongue and painful throat, the itch for a cigarette, his growling stomach. The sun set while he was asleep and dusky shadows cling to every corner of the room. The light from a street lamp seeps in through the window. He should get up. He should get something to eat, or at least some water, or maybe soju. Soju, definitely.
He checks his phone. There’s a message from their head manager in the company group chat, the preview of which reads Welcome back! He clicks off the phone and stares at the square of sky outside his window until it turns to night.
When he wakes again it’s four in the morning and he has a splitting headache which the glow of his phone only exacerbates. But he thumbs open his notifications and blinks at the blurry text bubbles in the group chat with the members. Vernon has sent something with no caption, and after a second, Jeonghan realizes it’s a meme of himself.
It’s split into four quadrants. In the top left is a photo of Jeonghan before he enlisted, blonde hair curling around his face and his hair tied up in a pink bow. In the top right is a picture of him from the day he enlisted, saluting in his uniform, his hair cropped short and his face makeup free. In the bottom left is a picture of a poodle, and in the bottom right, a poodle with its fur shaved off.
Jeonghan laughs out loud. He scrolls through the replies from the members, all some variation of “our poodle hyung” or “wow so accurate,” and then he downloads the meme so he can change his photo to the shaved poodle before he replies. He starts to change it on his social media accounts too, but then he remembers he hasn’t been logged into most of them in two years, and he’ll have to ask one of the staff to do it for him. They’ll probably talk him out of it, too. Most of the staff who handle their social media, even the ones he truly likes, have no sense of humor.
His phone buzzes and he sees a text from Seungcheol. Back tomorrow. Let’s go eat?
He sends a thumbs up and clicks his phone off. Wonwoo will be discharged next week, Soonyoung in a few months, and Jihoon about a month after that. Mingyu and Seokmin still have another year. Seungkwan enlisted before Jeonghan was discharged, and Vernon is scheduled to enlist next month. They’re barely an active group right now. And he’s got a meeting scheduled on Monday so he can go back to work as soon as possible. You don’t understand, Seungkwan had whined the last time they met, how hard it is without you.
Because I’m helpful? Jeonghan had asked, teasing. Or you just like me that much?
Seungkwan had pursed his lips and poured more soju in Jeonghan’s glass. Because you’re the cutest. The stylists nunas keep trying to put bows in MY hair. I can’t pull it off! Come back and do your job!
Jeonghan, naturally, had made his eyes widen and his lip tremble and asked, so you don’t like me? And you think I’m neglecting my job? which both upset and flustered Seungkwan so much that Jeonghan had had to get him drunk before they could talk about anything else.
Jeonghan had specifically asked the company not to reveal the date he would be discharged. He didn't want photos. He didn't want his members trekking down to the local office for a photo op. He didn't want articles written about him, and he certainly didn't want speculation on his substitutionary service to make headlines. As with most things he wants, he got something in-between: not the worst outcome, but hardly the best, either.
In the morning he looks at the photos again. He'd worn a mask and a baseball cap to hide his face. He'd shown up in his regular clothes, because it was incredibly opportunistic for him to show up in uniform, regardless of how he'd had to dress daily these past two years. The actual process of being discharged had been anticlimactic, nothing more than a stamp on a paper and a salute. Then he walked back out the door and he was, once again, SEVENTEEN's Jeonghan. He snapped into posing the second the cameras started going off, his training as an idol more absolute and rigid than the military ever could have achieved.
His time in the military has been folded up and shoved into a far corner of his mind. Two years on autopilot, simply living through a repetition of familiar actions, with no direction except to endure. If he thinks about it at all, it feels as though it all happened to someone else.
"Don't lie to me," Seungcheol whines as he turns around, cue in one hand and phone in the other, his bottom lip stretched into an impressive pout.
"What?" Jeonghan laughs. "I wouldn't say I got a point if I didn't get a point. What do you take me for?"
Seungcheol is still pouting as he steps up to take his shot. "A liar who will do anything to make me pay for dinner."
Jeonghan sits down in a chair, lazy and loose, warmed through from the beer he's been drinking since they arrived. He can't help but grin; just looking at the back of Seungcheol's head, he can imagine the exaggerated frown on his face.
"You already paid," Jeonghan teases, "So I kind of already won, didn't I?"
Seungcheol completely flubs his turn and gesticulates at the billiards table as he walks back to take his seat. "Just go," he mutters.
Jeonghan is still laughing as he mentally calculates angles and pretends to himself he knows what he's doing. He does actually, but—well, no he doesn't, either. It's nice though, familiar but not in a way that makes him feel weird, like he's dreaming.
"It's been a year since we last did this, huh?" Jeonghan comments, taking his shot. He misses spectacularly and glances over his shoulder. Seungcheol is looking at his phone and surely didn't see. "Add a point for me."
"Liar," Seungcheol comments. "No, I won't. Has it been a year?"
"Our schedules never lined up," Jeonghan returns.
Now that he’s said it, his skin prickles and a lump forms in his throat. A whole year come and gone. Every year passes more quickly as he gets older, with fewer milestones to mark the transitions. He doesn’t feel as old as he is.
“Well, how was it?” Seungcheol asks, glancing back at him.
“What, the past year?”
“No, dummy. Yesterday. Getting discharged.”
Jeonghan thinks again of the nondescript office, fluorescent lights and bored-looking clerks. The one who filed his paperwork had only glanced up at him once in the whole process, and there wasn’t even a flicker of recognition in his eyes. It was then that Jeonghan had realized he’d had both hands clenched in tight fists the whole time he’d been standing there and began to slowly stretch out each stiff joint.
“Fine,” Jeonghan answers. He steps up to take his next shot.
“There were a lot of articles,” Seungcheol says. “Should make you feel good.”
“Yeah,” Jeonghan agrees. “Of course.”
Seungcheol is right. It’s their job to be famous and Jeonghan should be appreciative that he’s still relevant enough for news outlets to cover his return.
He can feel Seungcheol’s eyes on him. So he grins and says, “hey! I got a point!”
“I’m looking right at it,” Seungcheol exclaims. “Don’t you have any shame?”
Later, waiting for a taxi out on the street, Seungcheol turns and runs his thumb against Jeonghan’s cheek.
“You never talk about it,” he says, his thumb lingering at his jaw.
Jeonghan stares at his feet. There’s a puddle in the street, reflecting the shape of the two of them but not the details.
“You can barely even see it now,” Jeonghan says, his voice hoarse.
Laser treatments on every break and only the ghost remains.
“I wish you’d talk about it,” Seungcheol says, drunk enough to be loose-lipped and forceful. His hand drops to Jeonghan’s shoulder. In the puddle, their silhouettes are intertwined.
The taxi arrives then, saving Jeonghan the trouble of thinking up something to say to make Seungcheol forget what he was asking for.
Jeonghan adopts a cat AU. In retrospect the tone was too light to make the premise work, but this was a cute idea anyway.
For what it’s worth, the video looks far worse than Jeonghan remembers it.
He watches the fan-filmed video on his manager’s phone while the two of them sit in a waiting room at the hospital. The phone’s screen is tiny, but the image of himself, dressed in casual clothes for the sound check, is crystal clear. For the first few seconds, he’s smiling weakly into the late afternoon sun. He sways a little on his feet as he turns to head back to the main stage. Then he staggers. He takes a wobbly step, and drops.
It’s strange to watch himself fall to the stage like a limp rag doll. Because of where he’d been standing, it takes a full five seconds before any member—Chan, to be specific—realizes something is wrong. After that, the video loses its clarity. The members swarm around his pathetic looking body. Staff run onto the stage. A fan can be heard asking what happened in a hushed voice, like she can’t quite believe what she’s seeing. Seungcheol, having sprinted across the stage to kneel beside Jeonghan, lifts his microphone and demands a break in the rehearsal.
The screen goes black. Jeonghan hands the phone back to his manager. “Yikes. It’s a good video, though. Thrilling. This person did a great job filming it.”
His manager blinks but otherwise doesn’t react. “This is trending now,” he says, tone somehow bland.
“Well, yeah, look at the drama of it!” Jeonghan returns. “You can’t manufacture that kind of excitement!”
His manager looks at him sidelong, but says nothing. Jeonghan lapses into silence and glances at his watch.
The others will be going on stage right about now, and here he is in a plastic chair with his head leaned back against the wall.
He feels utterly useless.
His official diagnosis, unsurprisingly, is malnourishment and exhaustion. In idol terms, this is the same thing as—
“I’m fine,” Jeonghan says into the phone.
On the other end of the line, Seungcheol makes a scoffing noise in his throat, but he can’t see that Jeonghan’s lying in a hospital bed with an IV stuck in his arm, so it’s really unwarranted skepticism.
“You fainted on stage,” Seungcheol retorts.
“These things happen! I’ll be sure to do it backstage, next time.”
The noise Seungcheol makes at that sounds even more frustrated. Jeonghan wants to ask what he’s even doing calling him in between sets, but, well, he does know the answer to that.
“It’s fine, okay? They’re not keeping me overnight. I could even do the show tomorrow!”
Seungcheol sighs. “Jeonghan-ah,” he says, very delicately, in the tone he uses to soften bad news. Jeonghan’s stomach flips and he frowns at the needle in his arm.
“Come on,” Jeonghan says quietly.
“You don’t understand. That video is everywhere already.” Seungcheol sighs again. “Maybe you do need a break.”
Jeonghan can take a break when he’s thirty-five. Who knows if he’ll even have a career then? Might as well do everything now, while he’s actually wanted.
But he can’t tell Seungcheol that, at least not over the phone when Seungcheol has to be on stage in a few minutes.
“It’s fine,” Jeonghan says. “I understand.”
He doesn't, really. The only difference between now and any other point in time in the past is that this time, Jeonghan was caught on camera. It should be easy for the company to say he just had a little oopsie fainting spell! Why publicize his terrible stamina if not to have an excuse when something like this happens?
But Jeonghan can open the internet on his phone just like anyone else, which he does idly as he waits for someone to come take the needle out of his arm. There are, apparently, fans worldwide demanding the company do something. Normally Jeonghan would agree, but since he's relatively fine, it all seems a little ridiculous. Hysterics motivated by pity. He'd looked so very pathetic in the video, after all.
He feels sick all over again, thinking about it.
The doctor comes back and gives a bunch of instructions which Jeonghan only half-listens to, knowing that all the advice will be pointless in the end. He can't eat the way the doctor recommends, he can't sleep without medication, and he sure as hell isn't going to stop smoking, so really, this is all just a nice show the two of them are putting on for each other. Jeonghan even offers to sign an autograph for the doctor's daughter and acts very benevolent when the doctor protests that he couldn't possibly. He takes it in the end, and just as quickly, Jeonghan is free to go.
"I'm supposed to take you home," his manager says when Jeonghan finds him in the private waiting room. "I was told to tell you that we're going directly there, and not to let you manipulate me."
Jeonghan snorts. "I've never manipulated anyone in my life!"
With a roll of his eyes, his manager stands and nods his head toward the door. Jeonghan follows without any more arguing—because he is very agreeable and pleasant. Not because his head is pounding and he feels unsteady on his feet.
Once in the parking garage, Jeonghan successfully wheedles his manager into letting him smoke a cigarette first. They've all been banned from smoking in the vans since long before Jeonghan ever picked up the habit, so he adheres to the rule even though it annoys him. It gives him a moment to catch his breath too as he leans against the back of the van and stares out of the parking garage at a small square of night sky. The sun had still been up when they arrived here. The concert will be wrapping up about now.
What a waste of time. He should have been there.
A tiny squeak distracts him. He exhales smoke and glances down to see what looks like a shadow break away from the wall, heading right for him.
He yelps, expecting it to be a rat. But it's not a rat. No: it's a very small cat.
It looks up at him and mews, gold eyes glinting in the light.
"What are you doing here?" Jeonghan says softly, crouching down to get a better look.
The cat apparently takes this as an invitation. Its tail flicks up into a question mark and it darts forward, mewing again and stopping only to sniff at Jeonghan's outstretched hand. It looks up at him with quizzical eyes and gives another tiny, but demanding squeak.
It's very thin. The parking garage lights are dim and the cat's fur is black but none of that disguises the cat's slight limp as it walks. Jeonghan tentatively runs his fingers over the cat's head and down its back. The cat begins to purr as it walks around in circles trying to rub its face on Jeonghan's hand, but Jeonghan still made contact long enough to feel the bones through the animal's skin.
A wave of pity washes over him. Jeonghan straightens up and takes another drag of the cigarette. He looks around.
"Are there more of you?" he asks the cat. He scans the row of cars as the cat claws at his jeans. "I hope you don't have babies. I don't think I'll ever talk hyung into bringing a whole litter in the car."
He walks along the perimeter of the garage, keeping an eye out for cats. None show themselves, though. Well, none except the first, who seems to find a new volume with each meow.
"All right," Jeonghan announces. He looks down at the cat, who sits and looks mournfully up at him. "Yes, good. Keep that face when we go ask to bring you in the car, okay?"
The cat trots behind him as Jeonghan returns to the van, stamps out his cigarette, and opens the door. His manager, focused on his cellphone, hadn't even noticed Jeonghan's expedition.
"Hey so, can we make a stop before you take me home?" Jeonghan asks.
"No, I told—"
At that moment, the cat leaps up into the floor of the van and gives its most shrill, demanding meow yet. Manager-hyung blinks.
"I don't get paid enough for this," he mutters, turning the ignition. The cat wails in harmony.
"Isn't working with me its own bonus?" Jeonghan teases, gleeful.
As the car rolls forward, the cat sinks its claws into Jeonghan's bare ankle. Jeonghan yells out a number of words an idol should never be caught saying.
The cat looks up at Jeonghan and mews in a way he can only describe as mischievous.
When Seungkwan arrives home at three in the morning he knocks softly on Jeonghan's door.
"Hey, how are—"
He stops in the doorway and stares at Jeonghan, who is lying on the floor beside a black spot. The black spot moves, looks up at him, and meows.
Seungkwan's face contorts in a series of unspoken emotions. He finally looks at Jeonghan and says, "Yeah so, I'm drunk. Can I deal with this in the morning?"
Jeonghan waves him off. He looks down at the cat and sighs. In the light, the cat’s wounds are more obvious. It had scarfed down the food Jeonghan offered it and then sat meowing for more while he inspected it for injuries. Now he’s quite sure the cat had gotten in a fight on top of having to scavenge for food. He can’t imagine such a tiny thing fending for itself.
“Don’t worry,” he coos at the cat. The cat makes a little chirp and rolls over, stretching toward the empty food bowl.
Seungkwan knocks on his door. “Hyung,” he whines, “what if it has diseases? Or fleas?”
Jeonghan waves him off again. “I’ll take it to the vet in the morning.”
Seungkwan pouts but does not argue, and instead staggers off toward his room. Jeonghan pulls out his phone and texts Seungcheol, hey where do you take Kkuma to the vet?
Seungcheol, to his credit, texts the name of the vet first. And then he follows it up with why? and when that goes unanswered, five missed calls.
But Jeonghan has already fallen asleep, right there on the floor.
Jeonghan has never wanted pets.
He LIKES animals. But liking is not the same as signing up for ten plus years of responsibility. And with his schedule, he’d really be signing his family up for that responsibility. It’s so much better to simply have the freedom to get on a plane without wondering if your sibling remembers exactly how many treats to feed your animal, or whatever it is Seungcheol sends such long voice texts about these days. Jeonghan mostly tunes him out.
So he’s not going to keep the cat. And yet he’s up at seven the next morning—partly because the cat woke him with its claws in his neck, demanding food—and on his way to the veterinarian before Seungkwan has even emerged from his room. The cat complains heartily the whole time from within the cardboard box his manager had procured at a twenty-four hour convenience store the night before, and which Jeonghan poked holes in with a pair of scissors. The cat keeps extending his claws through the holes and lets out some impressive yowls during the trip.
Jeonghan clocks the moment the receptionist recognizes him. “Can I help you?” she asks, on autopilot, gaping a little.
The cat screams from within the box.
“Can someone take a look at this thing?” Jeonghan asks.
He doesn’t know whether it’s his celebrity status or just the time of day, but he’s ushered into an examination room moments later. After a few minutes (the cat crying all the while) the vet comes into the room.
“Let’s see what we have here,” she says pleasantly.
Her eyes widen when Jeonghan pulls the cat out of the box. “I found it in a parking garage,” he explains, setting it on the exam table.
“It does look like it’s been living outside,” the vet remarks.
She examines the cat thoroughly, murmuring to it all the while. “Well,” she announces finally, “he’s a little worse for wear, but most of the wounds are quite superficial. He’s limping because of a cut on his paw, but he doesn't have any broken bones. And no fleas. He’s also been neutered. Actually, I think this cat was a house cat.”
Jeonghan blinks. The cat looks mournfully up at him.
“What do you mean?” Jeonghan asks.
“I think he either escaped,” she says, “or his owner left him outside.”
“Like, abandoned him?” Jeonghan asks.
The vet gives a nod, then pulls out a contraption and scans the cat with it. Jeonghan didn’t even know you could register a cat—but it comes up empty, anyhow.
“We’ll call a local shelter,” the vet offers.
The cat looks up at Jeonghan and blinks slowly. His golden eyes bore into Jeonghan’s with such intensity, he could almost believe the cat might speak.
He imagines someone dropping the cat off outside and driving away. Maybe they got annoyed by all the meowing but—who could do such a thing? Who could drive away while their cat meowed in confusion, probably trotting along behind the car trying to follow, unaware that it had just been left to fend for itself? The very thought of it twists his stomach. A pressure builds behind his eyes.
The cat, either extremely perceptive or just very winsome, places a paw on Jeonghan's hand.
“Can I keep him?” Jeonghan asks.
He cannot leave this cat. No, this cat is his responsibility now.
“Cats need a lot of attention,” the vet says carefully, eyeing him. “They can’t be left alone like people think.”
Jeonghan looks up, firm now in his decision. “I’ll take care of him. He chose me.”
She looks down, running a hand over the cat's fur.
"Please," Jeonghan implores. "He needs me."
What he doesn't say, though it is obvious, is that he also needs this cat.
An hour after he arrives, Jeonghan emerges from the vet’s office into the mid-morning sun as a pet owner for the first time in his life. (Doljjang, so stoic and self-sufficient, had really been his roommate, more than a pet.) Now cleaned up, the cat—his cat—looks far better than it had when they’d entered.
"Well," Jeonghan says when they are settled in the car. A single eyeball peers through one of the holes in the cardboard box, accusingly. "Let's go spend money!"
He drives to the nearest pet store and drops an obscene amount of cash on an array of supplies that will make Seungkwan's eyes roll all the way back into his head. It takes two employees to fit all his purchases into his car, and when they're finished, one straightens up and asks, "Aren't you in a K-pop group?"
Jeonghan's arms tighten around the cardboard box holding his cat. "Ha, you must have me confused with someone else."
The employee's eyes narrow. "Really? Maybe you should think about becoming one."
Jeonghan smiles. "I think I'm a little old for that."
When he drives away, he sees the employees talking in his rearview mirror, gesturing toward his departing car.
"Let's hope they don't post pictures of me," he says to the cat in the box. "Fainted yesterday, buying cat supplies today? No one will know what to think! You gotta keep 'em guessing though, right, Cat?"
The cat meows in reply.
"I know," Jeonghan says in return. "I totally agree."
It takes him four trips to get everything into his apartment—he really should have had it delivered, but some sasaengs had found his previous dorm and made him leery of giving out his address, and anyway, he wanted to do it himself.
The first trip is just to deposit his cat in his bedroom. He makes the next two trips quickly, starts flagging on the third, and ends up sitting in his doorway with his head against the wall for about ten minutes after the fourth. But it's done: he has everything the cat could possibly need. He sets the large cat tree under the best window and then goes to check on the cat.
The cat chirps when he enters the room, its golden eyes turned up to Jeonghan with the kind of intensity that can only come from hoping a treat will follow. Jeonghan, fortunately, has a bag of treats in hand.
“Aigoo aigoo,” he croons as the cat eagerly devours the treats he puts on the floor. “Don’t worry Cat. I will spend so much money on you, you’ll forget the parking garage completely!”
After another rest (on his bed, with the cat nestled into the crook of his arm and purring contentedly) he begins arranging cat supplies around the apartment. Scratchers, toys, little beds, puzzle feeders—he’d pretty much bought everything the store had on the shelves. When he returns to his bedroom, the cat is sitting in one of the cardboard packing boxes.
Jeonghan tuts at it. “At least let me put out one of the Saint Laurent boxes! You’re not a parking garage cat anymore!”
The cat chirps, leaps out of its box, walks over to the bag of treats sitting on the floor, and meows.
Jeonghan looks into its blinking eyes and sighs.
“This is how I become a pushover,” he says, “and how you get fat.”
He doesn’t look at his phone much the rest of the day, but that can’t erase the schedule from his head. He should be doing soundcheck now. Sitting for hair and makeup now. Doing vocal exercises now. He has a bet going with Wonwoo where they try to flip water bottles and the loser has to do something weird on stage—Jeonghan won yesterday and he was going to make Wonwoo kiss his cheek, if the whole fainting thing hadn’t happened. The video would have been huge on TikTok! Now the other, much less funny video is trending. Grossly unfair.
He falls asleep on the couch after feeding the cat and wakes to the sound of the door keypad followed by the lock clicking open. The cat, hearing this, leaps from its perch and sprints in a black streak towards Jeonghan’s room. Something crashes as the door opens.
“Oh, Seungkwan-ah! You’re home!”
But it’s not Seungkwan who comes into the living room. It’s Seungcheol.
Jeonghan frowns. “What are you doing here?”
“Nice to see you too,” Seungcheol scoffs.
He sits down next to Jeonghan on the couch. He’s cold from the outside, which only makes Jeonghan feel more stuffy and closed in after his day at home. Seungcheol is also antsy with post-concert adrenaline, his legs shaking back and forth as he sits.
“Did Seungkwan send you?”
Seungcheol gives him a look. “No? I came over here because I wanted to see you.”
“Well, now you’ve seen me.”
“Jeonghan—”
“What?”
He can tell that Seungcheol is getting frustrated already, but he doesn’t like the look in his eyes: pity. Worry. He’d rather Seungcheol not have come if he was going to look at him like that.
“I brought you food,” Seungcheol says. “Be nice to me.”
“I’m always nice to you.”
This earns him another face, but he lets Seungcheol haul him off the couch anyway. They go to the kitchen where Seungcheol begins removing to-go containers from the plastic bags on the counter.
“I heard about the cat,” Seungcheol ventures.
Jeonghan can’t help but smile, imagining exactly how Seungkwan would have brought it up.
“I see Seungkwan is bringing out the big guns,” he says slyly. “Well, joke’s on him. You don’t scare me.”
Seungcheol looks up, his face contorted with confusion. “What? What would I even be here to scare you about?”
This seems obvious to Jeonghan, and there’s no use dragging it out like this.
“You’re going to tell me to get rid of the cat!”
Realization dawns on Seungcheol’s face. He hands Jeonghan one of the containers and a pair of chopsticks.
“Okay, first of all, Seungkwan knows better than anyone that you are stubborn as hell. He wouldn’t send me over here to order you to give up the cat. He knows that wouldn’t work.”
“But he talked about it?” Jeonghan says wisely, amused by the thought.
“Of course he did,” Seungcheol answers with a roll of his eyes. “And second of all, you’ve never done what I tell you to do once in your life, so why would Seungkwan consider me the “big guns”?”
Jeonghan stirs noodles around with his chopsticks and looks up at Seungcheol from under his eyelashes.
“I might do what you want if you ask nicely.”
Seungcheol heaves a tremendous sigh. “Fine, please get rid of the cat?”
“Absolutely not, he’s my son.”
These are all from 2024 so I'll leave off the years on these. Snippets get longer as you go down the list. This was def my genfic era but genfics really require more substance than any of these fics had which is probably why they all died, lol.
Going Seventeen humor fic. Barely started it.
Whoever pitched the episode theme for this recording of Going Seventeen clearly wanted to make Minghao miserable. Upon reflection, it was probably Mingyu who pitched it, which seems about right. Anyway, Minghao is miserable.
“Great work!” coos the art teacher, a very cool man in his early sixties who looks like an art teacher in a movie, destined to train a young artist full of raw, unpolished talent into his full potential.
Unfortunately, he’s chosen Wonwoo to focus on. Wonwoo! Minghao shifts on his stool, frowning at the canvas in front of him.
“Have you ever painted before?” asks the art teacher.
“No,” Wonwoo answers, bashful. He glances sidelong at Minghao. Minghao doesn’t dare look up.
“You should,” says the art teacher. “You have a real gift.”
Wonwoo bites down on a smile. Minghao stabs his brush against the canvas. Wonwoo!
Wonwoo watches videos from a parallel universe. Written pre-AI lol. Abandoned because it was directionless. From 2024.
Although it probably was not wise for Wonwoo to be watching videos of himself, this is what he was doing when he happened upon the strangest channel he had ever seen.
He didn’t realize it was strange at first. The video he clicked on was, he assumed, a fan-taken video of a performance of “Fire.” He wanted—or, rather, he felt obliged—to monitor himself, find flaws in his execution, do better the next time.
After a few minutes of watching, it occurs to him that his hair in the video is blonde, and the costumes are black trimmed with red, and the video says it was taken in Los Angeles, where they certainly have not yet performed this song.
He sits at his desk for a long time, staring at the paused video, goosebumps raised on his skin.
He should not go back to the video, but after a few days it feels like something he imagined in an exhausted stupor. It couldn’t have been real. He might have even dreamed it.
He waits until he’s in the practice room and nearly everyone else is on their phones, too. The presence of so many others feels like an anchor in reality, and he fully expects to find no trace of the video in his watch history.
But it’s there. He freezes, staring at it without opening it. Under the harsh fluorescent lights of the practice room he cannot explain this away as the hallucinations of a sleep-deprived pop star, who sees mirages of himself on every screen. It appears to be real.
After a few minutes, he thumbs it open. This time, he looks at the other members for some kind of clue. Maybe it’s AI-generated or edited. Maybe the lighting just looks weird.
Grad school AU, gyuhao I think? I eventually wrote a very different kind of grad school AU but in this one Scoups was majoring in atmospheric science.
When summer arrives, so do the storms.
Minghao stands outside the first time the clouds build, heavy and dark like an omen from the gods. The clouds stand tall as a mountain range in the distance, then slowly fill the dome of the sky, but no rain falls. He stands on a square of dry sidewalk, running the toe of his tennis shoe over the weeds pushing up through the cracks.
“What are you doing out here?” Mingyu calls out. Minghao turns slowly as if mesmerized, turning his eyes back to the house where Mingyu stands on the sagging porch, staring at him, his brow creased and his mouth open. A piercing siren wails in the distance. “There’s supposed to be a tornado!”
Minghao turns to look at the churn of clouds again and walks backwards up the path to the house. A car passes. Across the street, an assortment of flags flap wildly over someone else’s porch. Fat droplets of water spatter the sidewalk. Minghao’s heels hit the steps and he stumbles, falling ass-first against the porch.
Mingyu hauls him upward and all but shoves him into the house, the screen door clapping behind them. It takes Minghao’s eyes a moment to adjust to the dim living room. Jeonghan is sitting on the couch, staring out the window, tapping his fingers against the window sill.
“Fuck you guys,” Mingyu exclaims. “Don’t you have any common sense?”
Minghao laughs. Jeonghan is looking at Mingyu like he’s the one without any, and Minghao appreciates the irony of that. The absurdity of it. Rain begins to pelt the window and thunder rumbles in the distance. It is like an omen, he supposes. An omen of the silence that follows.
Jeonghan looks directly at him, then. There’s a storm in his eyes.
In the basement, Mingyu listens to the weather radio. Minghao and Jeonghan pull out character handwriting notebooks, the kind Minghao hasn’t used since he was a child. He’s been teaching Jeonghan Chinese since he moved in two months ago and Jeonghan asked, almost shy, if he’d be willing.
“Wait,” Minghao said, stopping Jeonghan’s pencil with a hand on his wrist. “You mixed this up. This line should be longer than this one.”
He demonstrates, still uncomfortable trying to explain what he means in English. Jeonghan frowns, biting his eraser between his teeth, and then copies.
“It makes a difference,” Minghao explains carefully, watching Jeonghan’s hand as he writes the character again, and again, in each of the boxes lining the page. “It’s little but it makes a difference.”
Jeonghan hums in agreement, either amused or annoyed, Minghao can’t tell. He can never tell with Jeonghan, who vacillates between jovial and somber, outgoing and reclusive, his magnetic presence heavy in the house even when he closes himself up in his room.
“Why do you want to learn Chinese, anyway?” Minghao asks, curious. Jeonghan is studying civil engineering, which as far as Minghao knows, doesn’t require knowledge in an additional language. Jeonghan’s English is functional, his Spanish supposedly better, but he stumbles through Chinese lessons with a resolve Minghao has never been able to figure out.
Jeonghan shrugs. “My mom always liked it,” he says, his eyes on his pencil. “Hanmun. She liked how each character was made. A set number of lines making a complex shape.” He puts his pencil in the next empty box. “One, two, three, four, five. Right? And it means something.”
“That’s true,” Minghao agrees, though he’s never thought of it that way. He looks at Jeonghan’s face, the gentle slope of his nose and the hair in his eyes. He looks more like a painting than a person, too beautiful to wear the grit of daily life, too brittle to bear it. Minghao has been wanting to paint him since he moved in, but he hasn’t touched a brush in—years, at this point. The want is more subtle, unlikely to be acted upon. Instead, he observes.
“There was a tornado that touched down twenty minutes south,” Mingyu announces. He says something in Korean to Jeonghan, who laughs.
“Seungcheollie will be happy,” Jeonghan says, in English. “Don’t you want him to be happy?”
“It’s not him that I’m worried about,” Mingyu mutters.
This was supposed to be a fic in the The Mountains Unfurl extended universe following miissedappointments' sequel remix, but I could not write it very well so I scrapped it. In retrospect it should have been Scoups POV...
On the first day after Jeonghan is discharged, he goes home and sits on the couch and flicks through the Dispatch photos of his reemergence into civilian society. The image in the photos doesn't look like what he thinks he looks like, but when he tries to think of what he expected, all he can think of is himself from over a decade ago, blonde hair flowing in the wind and the sunlight hitting his smiling face like the sky itself wanted to shine a spotlight on him. But that feels like someone else, too, so in the end he clicks off his phone, stares at the ceiling, and tries to decide who he should call to get drunk with him. Then he remembers that the civilian members are in Daegu filming something, he hasn’t heard from most of his celebrity friends in months, and he’d scheduled dinner with his family for the coming weekend, so—he stares at the ceiling and thinks of nothing until he drifts into semi-sleep.
He dreams thrice that Seungkwan has come into the room and tried to wake him up. Every time he recalls that he no longer lives with Seungkwan, hasn’t in over a year, the dream fades into a haze of images and then: a blank space where he only exists, without form, until the dream repeats. Seungkwan comes in, Hyung what are you doing! We have evaluations in ten minutes! and Jeonghan wonders all over again how he didn’t realize and why he didn’t prepare.
After the third cycle he dreams that he gets up, and he knows it is a dream even while he is doing it, and he tells himself it is a dream but he will get up for real. So he stands up and goes into the bathroom but it isn’t his bathroom, it’s the bathroom he shared with his sister when they were children. When he looks at his reflection he sees his younger self, long blonde hair and big smile and wide eyes. He touches his cheek and finds it is made of glass. The mirror shatters, or—no. He shatters. He watches his face fracture and then break into thousands of tiny pieces that fall, in glittering shards, to the floor.
Jeonghan wakes up. His tongue has gone dry in his mouth and it takes a long moment to settle into the reality, his dry tongue and painful throat, the itch for a cigarette, his growling stomach. The sun set while he was asleep and dusky shadows cling to every corner of the room. The light from a street lamp seeps in through the window. He should get up. He should get something to eat, or at least some water, or maybe soju. Soju, definitely.
He checks his phone. There’s a message from their head manager in the company group chat, the preview of which reads Welcome back! He clicks off the phone and stares at the square of sky outside his window until it turns to night.
When he wakes again it’s four in the morning and he has a splitting headache which the glow of his phone only exacerbates. But he thumbs open his notifications and blinks at the blurry text bubbles in the group chat with the members. Vernon has sent something with no caption, and after a second, Jeonghan realizes it’s a meme of himself.
It’s split into four quadrants. In the top left is a photo of Jeonghan before he enlisted, blonde hair curling around his face and his hair tied up in a pink bow. In the top right is a picture of him from the day he enlisted, saluting in his uniform, his hair cropped short and his face makeup free. In the bottom left is a picture of a poodle, and in the bottom right, a poodle with its fur shaved off.
Jeonghan laughs out loud. He scrolls through the replies from the members, all some variation of “our poodle hyung” or “wow so accurate,” and then he downloads the meme so he can change his photo to the shaved poodle before he replies. He starts to change it on his social media accounts too, but then he remembers he hasn’t been logged into most of them in two years, and he’ll have to ask one of the staff to do it for him. They’ll probably talk him out of it, too. Most of the staff who handle their social media, even the ones he truly likes, have no sense of humor.
His phone buzzes and he sees a text from Seungcheol. Back tomorrow. Let’s go eat?
He sends a thumbs up and clicks his phone off. Wonwoo will be discharged next week, Soonyoung in a few months, and Jihoon about a month after that. Mingyu and Seokmin still have another year. Seungkwan enlisted before Jeonghan was discharged, and Vernon is scheduled to enlist next month. They’re barely an active group right now. And he’s got a meeting scheduled on Monday so he can go back to work as soon as possible. You don’t understand, Seungkwan had whined the last time they met, how hard it is without you.
Because I’m helpful? Jeonghan had asked, teasing. Or you just like me that much?
Seungkwan had pursed his lips and poured more soju in Jeonghan’s glass. Because you’re the cutest. The stylists nunas keep trying to put bows in MY hair. I can’t pull it off! Come back and do your job!
Jeonghan, naturally, had made his eyes widen and his lip tremble and asked, so you don’t like me? And you think I’m neglecting my job? which both upset and flustered Seungkwan so much that Jeonghan had had to get him drunk before they could talk about anything else.
Jeonghan had specifically asked the company not to reveal the date he would be discharged. He didn't want photos. He didn't want his members trekking down to the local office for a photo op. He didn't want articles written about him, and he certainly didn't want speculation on his substitutionary service to make headlines. As with most things he wants, he got something in-between: not the worst outcome, but hardly the best, either.
In the morning he looks at the photos again. He'd worn a mask and a baseball cap to hide his face. He'd shown up in his regular clothes, because it was incredibly opportunistic for him to show up in uniform, regardless of how he'd had to dress daily these past two years. The actual process of being discharged had been anticlimactic, nothing more than a stamp on a paper and a salute. Then he walked back out the door and he was, once again, SEVENTEEN's Jeonghan. He snapped into posing the second the cameras started going off, his training as an idol more absolute and rigid than the military ever could have achieved.
His time in the military has been folded up and shoved into a far corner of his mind. Two years on autopilot, simply living through a repetition of familiar actions, with no direction except to endure. If he thinks about it at all, it feels as though it all happened to someone else.
"Don't lie to me," Seungcheol whines as he turns around, cue in one hand and phone in the other, his bottom lip stretched into an impressive pout.
"What?" Jeonghan laughs. "I wouldn't say I got a point if I didn't get a point. What do you take me for?"
Seungcheol is still pouting as he steps up to take his shot. "A liar who will do anything to make me pay for dinner."
Jeonghan sits down in a chair, lazy and loose, warmed through from the beer he's been drinking since they arrived. He can't help but grin; just looking at the back of Seungcheol's head, he can imagine the exaggerated frown on his face.
"You already paid," Jeonghan teases, "So I kind of already won, didn't I?"
Seungcheol completely flubs his turn and gesticulates at the billiards table as he walks back to take his seat. "Just go," he mutters.
Jeonghan is still laughing as he mentally calculates angles and pretends to himself he knows what he's doing. He does actually, but—well, no he doesn't, either. It's nice though, familiar but not in a way that makes him feel weird, like he's dreaming.
"It's been a year since we last did this, huh?" Jeonghan comments, taking his shot. He misses spectacularly and glances over his shoulder. Seungcheol is looking at his phone and surely didn't see. "Add a point for me."
"Liar," Seungcheol comments. "No, I won't. Has it been a year?"
"Our schedules never lined up," Jeonghan returns.
Now that he’s said it, his skin prickles and a lump forms in his throat. A whole year come and gone. Every year passes more quickly as he gets older, with fewer milestones to mark the transitions. He doesn’t feel as old as he is.
“Well, how was it?” Seungcheol asks, glancing back at him.
“What, the past year?”
“No, dummy. Yesterday. Getting discharged.”
Jeonghan thinks again of the nondescript office, fluorescent lights and bored-looking clerks. The one who filed his paperwork had only glanced up at him once in the whole process, and there wasn’t even a flicker of recognition in his eyes. It was then that Jeonghan had realized he’d had both hands clenched in tight fists the whole time he’d been standing there and began to slowly stretch out each stiff joint.
“Fine,” Jeonghan answers. He steps up to take his next shot.
“There were a lot of articles,” Seungcheol says. “Should make you feel good.”
“Yeah,” Jeonghan agrees. “Of course.”
Seungcheol is right. It’s their job to be famous and Jeonghan should be appreciative that he’s still relevant enough for news outlets to cover his return.
He can feel Seungcheol’s eyes on him. So he grins and says, “hey! I got a point!”
“I’m looking right at it,” Seungcheol exclaims. “Don’t you have any shame?”
Later, waiting for a taxi out on the street, Seungcheol turns and runs his thumb against Jeonghan’s cheek.
“You never talk about it,” he says, his thumb lingering at his jaw.
Jeonghan stares at his feet. There’s a puddle in the street, reflecting the shape of the two of them but not the details.
“You can barely even see it now,” Jeonghan says, his voice hoarse.
Laser treatments on every break and only the ghost remains.
“I wish you’d talk about it,” Seungcheol says, drunk enough to be loose-lipped and forceful. His hand drops to Jeonghan’s shoulder. In the puddle, their silhouettes are intertwined.
The taxi arrives then, saving Jeonghan the trouble of thinking up something to say to make Seungcheol forget what he was asking for.
Jeonghan adopts a cat AU. In retrospect the tone was too light to make the premise work, but this was a cute idea anyway.
For what it’s worth, the video looks far worse than Jeonghan remembers it.
He watches the fan-filmed video on his manager’s phone while the two of them sit in a waiting room at the hospital. The phone’s screen is tiny, but the image of himself, dressed in casual clothes for the sound check, is crystal clear. For the first few seconds, he’s smiling weakly into the late afternoon sun. He sways a little on his feet as he turns to head back to the main stage. Then he staggers. He takes a wobbly step, and drops.
It’s strange to watch himself fall to the stage like a limp rag doll. Because of where he’d been standing, it takes a full five seconds before any member—Chan, to be specific—realizes something is wrong. After that, the video loses its clarity. The members swarm around his pathetic looking body. Staff run onto the stage. A fan can be heard asking what happened in a hushed voice, like she can’t quite believe what she’s seeing. Seungcheol, having sprinted across the stage to kneel beside Jeonghan, lifts his microphone and demands a break in the rehearsal.
The screen goes black. Jeonghan hands the phone back to his manager. “Yikes. It’s a good video, though. Thrilling. This person did a great job filming it.”
His manager blinks but otherwise doesn’t react. “This is trending now,” he says, tone somehow bland.
“Well, yeah, look at the drama of it!” Jeonghan returns. “You can’t manufacture that kind of excitement!”
His manager looks at him sidelong, but says nothing. Jeonghan lapses into silence and glances at his watch.
The others will be going on stage right about now, and here he is in a plastic chair with his head leaned back against the wall.
He feels utterly useless.
His official diagnosis, unsurprisingly, is malnourishment and exhaustion. In idol terms, this is the same thing as—
“I’m fine,” Jeonghan says into the phone.
On the other end of the line, Seungcheol makes a scoffing noise in his throat, but he can’t see that Jeonghan’s lying in a hospital bed with an IV stuck in his arm, so it’s really unwarranted skepticism.
“You fainted on stage,” Seungcheol retorts.
“These things happen! I’ll be sure to do it backstage, next time.”
The noise Seungcheol makes at that sounds even more frustrated. Jeonghan wants to ask what he’s even doing calling him in between sets, but, well, he does know the answer to that.
“It’s fine, okay? They’re not keeping me overnight. I could even do the show tomorrow!”
Seungcheol sighs. “Jeonghan-ah,” he says, very delicately, in the tone he uses to soften bad news. Jeonghan’s stomach flips and he frowns at the needle in his arm.
“Come on,” Jeonghan says quietly.
“You don’t understand. That video is everywhere already.” Seungcheol sighs again. “Maybe you do need a break.”
Jeonghan can take a break when he’s thirty-five. Who knows if he’ll even have a career then? Might as well do everything now, while he’s actually wanted.
But he can’t tell Seungcheol that, at least not over the phone when Seungcheol has to be on stage in a few minutes.
“It’s fine,” Jeonghan says. “I understand.”
He doesn't, really. The only difference between now and any other point in time in the past is that this time, Jeonghan was caught on camera. It should be easy for the company to say he just had a little oopsie fainting spell! Why publicize his terrible stamina if not to have an excuse when something like this happens?
But Jeonghan can open the internet on his phone just like anyone else, which he does idly as he waits for someone to come take the needle out of his arm. There are, apparently, fans worldwide demanding the company do something. Normally Jeonghan would agree, but since he's relatively fine, it all seems a little ridiculous. Hysterics motivated by pity. He'd looked so very pathetic in the video, after all.
He feels sick all over again, thinking about it.
The doctor comes back and gives a bunch of instructions which Jeonghan only half-listens to, knowing that all the advice will be pointless in the end. He can't eat the way the doctor recommends, he can't sleep without medication, and he sure as hell isn't going to stop smoking, so really, this is all just a nice show the two of them are putting on for each other. Jeonghan even offers to sign an autograph for the doctor's daughter and acts very benevolent when the doctor protests that he couldn't possibly. He takes it in the end, and just as quickly, Jeonghan is free to go.
"I'm supposed to take you home," his manager says when Jeonghan finds him in the private waiting room. "I was told to tell you that we're going directly there, and not to let you manipulate me."
Jeonghan snorts. "I've never manipulated anyone in my life!"
With a roll of his eyes, his manager stands and nods his head toward the door. Jeonghan follows without any more arguing—because he is very agreeable and pleasant. Not because his head is pounding and he feels unsteady on his feet.
Once in the parking garage, Jeonghan successfully wheedles his manager into letting him smoke a cigarette first. They've all been banned from smoking in the vans since long before Jeonghan ever picked up the habit, so he adheres to the rule even though it annoys him. It gives him a moment to catch his breath too as he leans against the back of the van and stares out of the parking garage at a small square of night sky. The sun had still been up when they arrived here. The concert will be wrapping up about now.
What a waste of time. He should have been there.
A tiny squeak distracts him. He exhales smoke and glances down to see what looks like a shadow break away from the wall, heading right for him.
He yelps, expecting it to be a rat. But it's not a rat. No: it's a very small cat.
It looks up at him and mews, gold eyes glinting in the light.
"What are you doing here?" Jeonghan says softly, crouching down to get a better look.
The cat apparently takes this as an invitation. Its tail flicks up into a question mark and it darts forward, mewing again and stopping only to sniff at Jeonghan's outstretched hand. It looks up at him with quizzical eyes and gives another tiny, but demanding squeak.
It's very thin. The parking garage lights are dim and the cat's fur is black but none of that disguises the cat's slight limp as it walks. Jeonghan tentatively runs his fingers over the cat's head and down its back. The cat begins to purr as it walks around in circles trying to rub its face on Jeonghan's hand, but Jeonghan still made contact long enough to feel the bones through the animal's skin.
A wave of pity washes over him. Jeonghan straightens up and takes another drag of the cigarette. He looks around.
"Are there more of you?" he asks the cat. He scans the row of cars as the cat claws at his jeans. "I hope you don't have babies. I don't think I'll ever talk hyung into bringing a whole litter in the car."
He walks along the perimeter of the garage, keeping an eye out for cats. None show themselves, though. Well, none except the first, who seems to find a new volume with each meow.
"All right," Jeonghan announces. He looks down at the cat, who sits and looks mournfully up at him. "Yes, good. Keep that face when we go ask to bring you in the car, okay?"
The cat trots behind him as Jeonghan returns to the van, stamps out his cigarette, and opens the door. His manager, focused on his cellphone, hadn't even noticed Jeonghan's expedition.
"Hey so, can we make a stop before you take me home?" Jeonghan asks.
"No, I told—"
At that moment, the cat leaps up into the floor of the van and gives its most shrill, demanding meow yet. Manager-hyung blinks.
"I don't get paid enough for this," he mutters, turning the ignition. The cat wails in harmony.
"Isn't working with me its own bonus?" Jeonghan teases, gleeful.
As the car rolls forward, the cat sinks its claws into Jeonghan's bare ankle. Jeonghan yells out a number of words an idol should never be caught saying.
The cat looks up at Jeonghan and mews in a way he can only describe as mischievous.
When Seungkwan arrives home at three in the morning he knocks softly on Jeonghan's door.
"Hey, how are—"
He stops in the doorway and stares at Jeonghan, who is lying on the floor beside a black spot. The black spot moves, looks up at him, and meows.
Seungkwan's face contorts in a series of unspoken emotions. He finally looks at Jeonghan and says, "Yeah so, I'm drunk. Can I deal with this in the morning?"
Jeonghan waves him off. He looks down at the cat and sighs. In the light, the cat’s wounds are more obvious. It had scarfed down the food Jeonghan offered it and then sat meowing for more while he inspected it for injuries. Now he’s quite sure the cat had gotten in a fight on top of having to scavenge for food. He can’t imagine such a tiny thing fending for itself.
“Don’t worry,” he coos at the cat. The cat makes a little chirp and rolls over, stretching toward the empty food bowl.
Seungkwan knocks on his door. “Hyung,” he whines, “what if it has diseases? Or fleas?”
Jeonghan waves him off again. “I’ll take it to the vet in the morning.”
Seungkwan pouts but does not argue, and instead staggers off toward his room. Jeonghan pulls out his phone and texts Seungcheol, hey where do you take Kkuma to the vet?
Seungcheol, to his credit, texts the name of the vet first. And then he follows it up with why? and when that goes unanswered, five missed calls.
But Jeonghan has already fallen asleep, right there on the floor.
Jeonghan has never wanted pets.
He LIKES animals. But liking is not the same as signing up for ten plus years of responsibility. And with his schedule, he’d really be signing his family up for that responsibility. It’s so much better to simply have the freedom to get on a plane without wondering if your sibling remembers exactly how many treats to feed your animal, or whatever it is Seungcheol sends such long voice texts about these days. Jeonghan mostly tunes him out.
So he’s not going to keep the cat. And yet he’s up at seven the next morning—partly because the cat woke him with its claws in his neck, demanding food—and on his way to the veterinarian before Seungkwan has even emerged from his room. The cat complains heartily the whole time from within the cardboard box his manager had procured at a twenty-four hour convenience store the night before, and which Jeonghan poked holes in with a pair of scissors. The cat keeps extending his claws through the holes and lets out some impressive yowls during the trip.
Jeonghan clocks the moment the receptionist recognizes him. “Can I help you?” she asks, on autopilot, gaping a little.
The cat screams from within the box.
“Can someone take a look at this thing?” Jeonghan asks.
He doesn’t know whether it’s his celebrity status or just the time of day, but he’s ushered into an examination room moments later. After a few minutes (the cat crying all the while) the vet comes into the room.
“Let’s see what we have here,” she says pleasantly.
Her eyes widen when Jeonghan pulls the cat out of the box. “I found it in a parking garage,” he explains, setting it on the exam table.
“It does look like it’s been living outside,” the vet remarks.
She examines the cat thoroughly, murmuring to it all the while. “Well,” she announces finally, “he’s a little worse for wear, but most of the wounds are quite superficial. He’s limping because of a cut on his paw, but he doesn't have any broken bones. And no fleas. He’s also been neutered. Actually, I think this cat was a house cat.”
Jeonghan blinks. The cat looks mournfully up at him.
“What do you mean?” Jeonghan asks.
“I think he either escaped,” she says, “or his owner left him outside.”
“Like, abandoned him?” Jeonghan asks.
The vet gives a nod, then pulls out a contraption and scans the cat with it. Jeonghan didn’t even know you could register a cat—but it comes up empty, anyhow.
“We’ll call a local shelter,” the vet offers.
The cat looks up at Jeonghan and blinks slowly. His golden eyes bore into Jeonghan’s with such intensity, he could almost believe the cat might speak.
He imagines someone dropping the cat off outside and driving away. Maybe they got annoyed by all the meowing but—who could do such a thing? Who could drive away while their cat meowed in confusion, probably trotting along behind the car trying to follow, unaware that it had just been left to fend for itself? The very thought of it twists his stomach. A pressure builds behind his eyes.
The cat, either extremely perceptive or just very winsome, places a paw on Jeonghan's hand.
“Can I keep him?” Jeonghan asks.
He cannot leave this cat. No, this cat is his responsibility now.
“Cats need a lot of attention,” the vet says carefully, eyeing him. “They can’t be left alone like people think.”
Jeonghan looks up, firm now in his decision. “I’ll take care of him. He chose me.”
She looks down, running a hand over the cat's fur.
"Please," Jeonghan implores. "He needs me."
What he doesn't say, though it is obvious, is that he also needs this cat.
An hour after he arrives, Jeonghan emerges from the vet’s office into the mid-morning sun as a pet owner for the first time in his life. (Doljjang, so stoic and self-sufficient, had really been his roommate, more than a pet.) Now cleaned up, the cat—his cat—looks far better than it had when they’d entered.
"Well," Jeonghan says when they are settled in the car. A single eyeball peers through one of the holes in the cardboard box, accusingly. "Let's go spend money!"
He drives to the nearest pet store and drops an obscene amount of cash on an array of supplies that will make Seungkwan's eyes roll all the way back into his head. It takes two employees to fit all his purchases into his car, and when they're finished, one straightens up and asks, "Aren't you in a K-pop group?"
Jeonghan's arms tighten around the cardboard box holding his cat. "Ha, you must have me confused with someone else."
The employee's eyes narrow. "Really? Maybe you should think about becoming one."
Jeonghan smiles. "I think I'm a little old for that."
When he drives away, he sees the employees talking in his rearview mirror, gesturing toward his departing car.
"Let's hope they don't post pictures of me," he says to the cat in the box. "Fainted yesterday, buying cat supplies today? No one will know what to think! You gotta keep 'em guessing though, right, Cat?"
The cat meows in reply.
"I know," Jeonghan says in return. "I totally agree."
It takes him four trips to get everything into his apartment—he really should have had it delivered, but some sasaengs had found his previous dorm and made him leery of giving out his address, and anyway, he wanted to do it himself.
The first trip is just to deposit his cat in his bedroom. He makes the next two trips quickly, starts flagging on the third, and ends up sitting in his doorway with his head against the wall for about ten minutes after the fourth. But it's done: he has everything the cat could possibly need. He sets the large cat tree under the best window and then goes to check on the cat.
The cat chirps when he enters the room, its golden eyes turned up to Jeonghan with the kind of intensity that can only come from hoping a treat will follow. Jeonghan, fortunately, has a bag of treats in hand.
“Aigoo aigoo,” he croons as the cat eagerly devours the treats he puts on the floor. “Don’t worry Cat. I will spend so much money on you, you’ll forget the parking garage completely!”
After another rest (on his bed, with the cat nestled into the crook of his arm and purring contentedly) he begins arranging cat supplies around the apartment. Scratchers, toys, little beds, puzzle feeders—he’d pretty much bought everything the store had on the shelves. When he returns to his bedroom, the cat is sitting in one of the cardboard packing boxes.
Jeonghan tuts at it. “At least let me put out one of the Saint Laurent boxes! You’re not a parking garage cat anymore!”
The cat chirps, leaps out of its box, walks over to the bag of treats sitting on the floor, and meows.
Jeonghan looks into its blinking eyes and sighs.
“This is how I become a pushover,” he says, “and how you get fat.”
He doesn’t look at his phone much the rest of the day, but that can’t erase the schedule from his head. He should be doing soundcheck now. Sitting for hair and makeup now. Doing vocal exercises now. He has a bet going with Wonwoo where they try to flip water bottles and the loser has to do something weird on stage—Jeonghan won yesterday and he was going to make Wonwoo kiss his cheek, if the whole fainting thing hadn’t happened. The video would have been huge on TikTok! Now the other, much less funny video is trending. Grossly unfair.
He falls asleep on the couch after feeding the cat and wakes to the sound of the door keypad followed by the lock clicking open. The cat, hearing this, leaps from its perch and sprints in a black streak towards Jeonghan’s room. Something crashes as the door opens.
“Oh, Seungkwan-ah! You’re home!”
But it’s not Seungkwan who comes into the living room. It’s Seungcheol.
Jeonghan frowns. “What are you doing here?”
“Nice to see you too,” Seungcheol scoffs.
He sits down next to Jeonghan on the couch. He’s cold from the outside, which only makes Jeonghan feel more stuffy and closed in after his day at home. Seungcheol is also antsy with post-concert adrenaline, his legs shaking back and forth as he sits.
“Did Seungkwan send you?”
Seungcheol gives him a look. “No? I came over here because I wanted to see you.”
“Well, now you’ve seen me.”
“Jeonghan—”
“What?”
He can tell that Seungcheol is getting frustrated already, but he doesn’t like the look in his eyes: pity. Worry. He’d rather Seungcheol not have come if he was going to look at him like that.
“I brought you food,” Seungcheol says. “Be nice to me.”
“I’m always nice to you.”
This earns him another face, but he lets Seungcheol haul him off the couch anyway. They go to the kitchen where Seungcheol begins removing to-go containers from the plastic bags on the counter.
“I heard about the cat,” Seungcheol ventures.
Jeonghan can’t help but smile, imagining exactly how Seungkwan would have brought it up.
“I see Seungkwan is bringing out the big guns,” he says slyly. “Well, joke’s on him. You don’t scare me.”
Seungcheol looks up, his face contorted with confusion. “What? What would I even be here to scare you about?”
This seems obvious to Jeonghan, and there’s no use dragging it out like this.
“You’re going to tell me to get rid of the cat!”
Realization dawns on Seungcheol’s face. He hands Jeonghan one of the containers and a pair of chopsticks.
“Okay, first of all, Seungkwan knows better than anyone that you are stubborn as hell. He wouldn’t send me over here to order you to give up the cat. He knows that wouldn’t work.”
“But he talked about it?” Jeonghan says wisely, amused by the thought.
“Of course he did,” Seungcheol answers with a roll of his eyes. “And second of all, you’ve never done what I tell you to do once in your life, so why would Seungkwan consider me the “big guns”?”
Jeonghan stirs noodles around with his chopsticks and looks up at Seungcheol from under his eyelashes.
“I might do what you want if you ask nicely.”
Seungcheol heaves a tremendous sigh. “Fine, please get rid of the cat?”
“Absolutely not, he’s my son.”
