There was a bundle of excitement rested in the pit of Seokwoo’s stomach as he sought out the familiar Convex member. He’d been hoping to cross paths with him for the past week and when he’d spotted him during lunch, he’d planned to spend his free time in schedules finding him. The bundled gift folded and held to his chest, protected as he made his way down the halls and waited to hear the familiar excitement of trainees who were still in awe every time they happened to cross paths with one of the Convex members or their other sunbae’s inside the walls of Sphere building. To Seokwoo, a handful of them were friends and dongsaengs, and he couldn’t help but want to dote on them like a hyung.
It was the reason he had the item in his arms that he did, and why he brightly grinned when he spotted Seungcheol. His sneakers scuffing on the floor as he jogged to catch up to the younger male, bowing his head in greeting. “Sweetcheol! I was looking for you!” Seokwoo happily chirped, already moving to lift up the sweater that he had been carrying around for the past half an hour at least. The dark blue piece of clothing was mostly plain, except for the hand stitched cookie that was on the right side of the chest--bite generously taken from it--and the left side where crumbs in matching colour rested under the nickname that he’d given the younger male since their first meeting.
‘Sweetcheol’.
Seokwoo proudly grinning over the item, pressing it to his own body and pointing out the stitching. “I made this from scratch myself. It took me forever to get the stitching done perfectly -- but it looks cute, right?”
With two arms, wrapped around the bundle that was hidden in his jacket, Seokwoo shuffled his steps quicker down Sphere halls. He needed to find somewhere to hide and someone to help him, before he ran into one of the coaches or staff members. They would have never approved of what he had tucked into his jacket and Seokwoo was never good at making ‘plans’. Panic prickled up his spine when he heard a door closing somewhere behind him, twisting his head to glance over his shoulder and barely turning back to look where he was going in time to see Youngjae. Seokwoo’s body coming to a stumbled faltered, nearly colliding with the younger trainee who’d just stepped out of the room he was in and then staring at him wide eyed for a second.
“I need your help,” coming from his lips without a second thought.
He reached out, grabbing onto Youngjae’s older arm and tugging him back into the room he’d just come out of. If it were under any other circumstances, he might have paused to wait for the younger’s agreement. But this was an emergency. Seokwoo stopping once they were both inside the room walls, glancing around to see if it were empty and then out in the hall, before he tugged the door shut. That was how they did it in movies, and Seokwoo trusted them as learning material for whenever he had to work in covert operations. The bundled in his jacket squirming with the sudden activity, claws digging through the fabric of Seokwoo’s shirt and causing him toe flinch. “Ah..” exhaled slowly, one hand moving to cradle under the hem of his jacket and the other tugging up the fabric, revealing the orange ball of fur; barely three months old in shape.
Seokwoo glancing from the kitten and up to Youngjae. “It’s cute, isn’t it?”
★ AUGUST EVALUATIONS
song : < lullaby (english ver.) > by, got7 (lyric dist.)
group members : @rkdowoon, @rkhwanwoong, @rkyeji, @junerk, @bambamrk
Nervous might not have covered how Seokwoo felt as the evaluation approached. He did not feel ready to perform in English in front of the coaches, a growing uneasy tang of the foreign language weighing on his tongue as their practices as a group came to an end. It did not help that he knew he started the song for the rest of the group and if he messed up, it would ruin the whole performance. As they waited for their turn to perform in front of the coaches, he kept mouthing the lyrics to himself and pacing back and forward, hoping that he wouldn’t trip of the syllables. The sleeves of his jumper pushed up to his elbows and then tugged back down to his wrists every few minutes, hoping that no one else in the group would notice that he did not feel ready to go in there. Especially when they were finally called in by the coach and Seokwoo could feel his heart thud against the underside of his collarbones.
He’d studied that kit that Sowon had brought him, cover to cover, and trusted in his girlfriend’s guidance; she was the expert in English among them. Seokwoo truly wished she was the one performing in English, not him though. More and more as he got into position with the rest of the group to perform.
Seokwoo squeezed his eyes shut, mentally running over the lyrics again. His lips moving silently along with what he remembered, what he’d obsessed over for the last month in preparation. He only had the first five lines and then a couple more dotted through the song, but he’d treated it as if he had a whole three minutes on his own, putting in that much energy and effort. Still, he nearly jumped out of his skin when the start of the melody began and he knew he couldn’t miss the count for where to begin. The tip of his tongue pressing to the back of his teeth, eyes glued to the floor for a bit longer as if the words were printed on them and Seokwoo did his best to hit every word properly.
This girl is like a dream
My wildest fantasy
And right when I think I’m gon’ wake up
She’s pullin’ me right back in
To serenity
There was a rush of relief when he finished his last line. The most difficult part for him over with, and then he could focus on the choreography and keeping in time with those who were more successful at dancing. Despite his beginner nerves, Seokwoo managed to enjoy the performance as time went on, and he could easily get the one lines out that he needed as they came up. They were short, easily memorised as sounds rather than words, and strung together with an extra push of charisma to hide any mess ups from the coaches. If he sold it, then they might look over his lack of pronunciation skills and fumbled words when he lost track of the beat.
A few minutes passes by quicker than Seokwoo expects, coming to the end of the song sooner than he’s ready for and he’s almost taken aback when the music rings out around them. For all the hours he’d spend working on the lyrics, practising the dance moves, pushing himself to get every word correct -- it was over in minutes. Somehow the emptiness that was left over, when the nerves slipped away and the evaluation was no longer weighing on him, caused him a discomfort. There would be another evaluation announced soon, and then he would have another thing to be working on. But as he walked out of the room, following behind the group he worked with all month, he wondered if that feeling would go away completely or not.
Would he keep feeling that dissatisfaction and loss whenever the end results never were as filling as the effort he put in?
There was a smile on Seokwoo’s lips as he sat with Yerim in one of the empty studios, a handful of nail polishes on the floor next to them. Most from his own collection. It’d been earlier that day that he asked if Yerim would let him practice painting nails on her. He used to do it with his younger sister; facemasks, a movie and nail polish. Now that she moved out to be closer to university, he was left with his grandmother and she only liked one colour--or that’s what he preferred to blame as the reason, instead of the fact that her hands trembled more and more as she grew older.
“Thanks for letting me do this,” Seokwoo says, twisted at his waist to count how many colours he had set there to be picked from. Happily reaching the number nine, and feeling satisfied that he’d gotten all of them out of his bag. He turned to face Yerim more, hands clasping over his knees and sitting up straighter. “Just tell me what colours you want. You can pick any, and then I’ll paint them prettily for you. I did it for my dongsaeng all the time, but she’s busy with school and I can’t try out the new colours on her.”
All Seokwoo wanted to do was get through class without the teacher calling on him in front of everyone to practice his pronunciation. It was his one wish. Which was why his eyes were glued to the notebook set on the table, writing down far more notes than he truly needed. Every tiny piece of information he heard come from the coach, was filling the page, bit by bit. Various words underlined, as if they were matters of importance, but Seokwoo truly didn’t know. He wished Sowon was there with him, someone he could lean over to and ask if he was doing this ‘studying diligently’ thing correctly. High school had been a blur of part time work, sleeping through mathematics and apologising to the teachers for not improving his grades as he’d promised last time.
Another note scribbled down when the silence of the coach and the class made Seokwoo feel uncomfortable, lifting his gaze up to see everyone’s eyes on him. The familiar panic flooding through his system, knowing he was the one everyone was waiting for to answer and knowing--very certainly--that he didn’t know what he’d even been asked. An awkward and embarrassed laugh coming from his lips as he glanced down at the notes he was working on, hoping the answer was there and then around the room.
(More than before, he wished Sowon was there, so he could plead with her to give him the answer.)
Seokwoo swallows down, marinating in the silence that was around him now and then looking towards to coach, praying they would repeat what they wanted from him. A prayer that seemed to be answered in the seconds after, as the coach asked him to repeat an idiom they were learning and then explain the meaning. This might have been a nightmare that Seokwoo had regularly throughout high school, and was still not over, clearing the lump in his throat. English was not a class he had been good at. In fact, he’d scraped by with the help of those around him and decided never to speak the language ever again.
Yes. No. Please. Thank you. That was enough English for him.
He may have had regrets as he began to fumble through the English idiom, stressing over the syllables and watching the coach grimace at his pronunciation. But at least, he had the notes on the page for what it meant. An answer he could give cleanly in Korean, before lowering his head once more and feeling the abashed laugh rise up. Teachers never liked when he laughed at his own foolishness. He doubted coaches would either.
When Seokwoo had bought the handful of facemasks, he knew who he had in mind to try them with and he was hoping he would have the chance to. The smile which had broken onto his lips when he’d overheard that his first target had been spotted in Sphere, in one of the studios, had remained even as Seokwoo made his hasty way through the halls. Two wrong turns in excitement had deterred him from seeking the younger male out, a gut feeling that he would be right on his instinct on arrival. His bag was clutched onto, finding it the easiest way to smuggle the items into Sphere without anyone knowing what he was doing, and now the best way to transport them to where he needed them.
His steps faltered when he peered into the right room, spotting the familiar figure and excitedly biting onto his smile. It might have been his eagerness or the decision that this would be a secret operation in skincare, but he didn’t pause to knock. Instead he pushed open the door, slipping in, and closing it quickly behind him. “Ten! Ten!” Seokwoo whisper-yelled to get the younger’s attention, his sneakers squeaking on the floor with the haste of his steps and his hands fumbling to draw his bag around. “I got something for us to try!” He added, boyish laughter slipping out as he unzipped the bag--just enough--and came to a stop in front of Ten. The glints of mischief and delight sparkled in his eyes as he glanced from Ten and then to the handful of facemasks and the new moisturiser he got; collected with the face wash and cleanser, and various other hidden products as it went deeper.
“Want to try them with me?” Seokwoo continued to whisper. “They’re the new kind.”
Taking selcas was normal for Seokwoo, he’d been doing them for years and he knew every trick and angle that he could do. But there was a problem that regularly cropped up, especially when he wanted to do something new or show something off. He couldn’t get it entirely in the photo, whether due to needing two hands or it was a piece of clothing he was currently wear. The latter, being his current predicament. A new shirt and jacket that he had designed and put together for himself, and the fifty photographs he’d already taken, swiped past and deleted with a crinkle of his nose. Once again, he held out his phone again, turning around as he tried to find the best lighting in front of the Sphere building. His feet coming to a stop when he spotted the familiar figure in the corner of his phone screen.
“Taeyong sunbae!” He greeted loudly, his arm held up above his head and then shrinking down as he realised that he was much louder than he anticipated. Unlike him, the other was an idol and if someone overheard, they might have come and bothered him. Seokwoo’s hand clasping over his mouth, eyes wide for seconds, peering around them to see if anyone had heard or noticed, before he dare drop it slowly. “Sorry...” He apologised softly, closing the space between them and bowing his head. The smile easily coming back on his lips as he stood in front of the younger male. They had bonded over his sisters fangirl antics, over their fear of ghosts and dark Sphere hallways, and Seokwoo would admit that he considered Taeyong somewhat of a friend. Who else would protect him from ghosts? So he didn’t quiet hesitate as much as he should have when he followed up, holding his phone up between them. “Are.. are you busy right now? I have a favour. You know how to take good pictures, right?”
