exomeme | part seventy five

part seventy five

EXO COMEBACK EUREUREONG

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bratty ungrateful jbieb-status american pop star oh sehun and frontman of an altrock band park chanyeol

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oh this is 3045 words btw!

Sehun sings about love and girls and partying until 3AM (about going at it all night long until we drop, don't wake up before two in the afternoon and driving you crazy with just my smile, smile, smile) but he doesn't really know what all of it means. His lyricists give him the words to sing; the composers and producers give him sick beats and catchy hooks, a thick bass line that'll make everyone in the club want to get up and dance; his fans (the ones who buy merchandise, at least) give him a reason (and the means) to do it. Bubbly, manufactured pop that stays in people's minds for a couple of months—fleeting, forgettable. Fake.

It's hard to believe it's only been a year. He feels old (he shouldn't—you're only nineteen, Kris always tells him pointedly) and tired, concerts and fan meetings and press conferences and awards ceremonies all coming together in a chaotic jumble in his head.

All he's ever wanted to do is sing. Whether he'd become famous or not never mattered before, as long as he could just sing—for his mom, for his friends, for the cute kids down the street living in the house with the magnolia trees in their yard. But it wasn’t to be, of course, because (as these things usually go) after Jongin persuades him to upload videos onto Youtube, he’s discovered and picked up by some large company with money and endless connections—and then it’s all downhill from there.

The obnoxious humming from the other side of the room is slowly making Chanyeol go nuts. He taps a pen against the desk and leans back in his chair, annoyed. Jongdae just hums louder, amused, scrawling notes across a page of blank notebook paper.

"Will you shut the fuck up?" he announces finally, throwing the pen down and rubbing at his temples. "I can't concentrate."

"The door is over there if you want to leave," Jongdae replies, chuckling. "I'm actually working."

"You don't need to hum to come up with lyrics," Chanyeol snaps. "If anyone needs to hum, it's me—I'm the one writing all the music—"

"Break it up, you two," comes a placid voice from the doorway, and his head jerks to the side to see an impeccably dressed Kim Joonmyun. "Where are Kyungsoo and Baekhyun?"

"Decided not to come," Chanyeol grunts, waving a flippant hand. "They're not the ones writing our songs, so."

An outraged expression crosses Joonmyun's face. "How do you guys expect to come out with an album before your deadline?" he exclaims, gesticulating wildly. "Shouldn't Baekhyun and Kyungsoo have a say in the artistic direction of the band? What the fuck—"

"You're our manager," Jongdae interrupts, raising his eyebrows. "You figure it out."

"I can only do so much," Joonmyun replies coolly, "if only half the band shows up for practice."

"Well, technically it's not practice—" Jongdae begins, but Chanyeol gives a sharp shake of his head and Jongdae falls into reluctant silence. Chanyeol stands and walks over to where Joonmyun is fuming, arms crossed tight against his chest.

"Don't touch me," Joonmyun grumbles, but Chanyeol shakes his head again, takes a stack of crumpled-up papers off one of the music stands and hands it to him. "What's this?"

"We've polished up eight songs already," he returns, "and two more are almost done. We'll make the November deadline, so stop getting your panties in a twist over it." Joonmyun glares at him and he grins widely. "And Kyungsoo will be here tomorrow, okay? I'll make sure he is."

Joonmyun sighs and nods, makes his way to the door again. "Call if you need anything."

"Baekhyun shattered his cheekbone last weekend, that's why he's not here," Jongdae blurts out, and Chanyeol can actually feel the blood draining out of his face. Joonmyun swivels around on his heel and needs to grab the frame of the door for support.

"Wait—" Chanyeol tries, but it's too late.

"And you didn't think to tell me this earlier, why?" Joonmyun snaps, throwing his hands in the air. "What are you going to do without a drummer?"

Chanyeol groans and pinches the bridge of his nose where he can feel a headache coming on. "The doctors are giving him a Plexiglass mask to wear, and be thankful he didn't break an arm or something, okay? At least he can still play."

"Make it work," Joonmyun mutters tightly before stalking off.

"Nice job," Chanyeol hisses at Jongdae when their manager is out of earshot. "We're in the doghouse thanks to you."

Jongdae shrugs, unrepentant. "He would've found out eventually anyway. Baekhyun broke his fucking face. Now shut up, I'm trying to write beautiful, beautiful poetry."

"Fuck you," he says, sitting down at the desk and twirling his pen with a flourish.

"VMAs, huh," Jongin comments when he comes back to visit sometime in August. Sehun taps the side of his glass and sucks on a red straw, watches as Jongin inhales his food. "When are they, again?"

"Second week of September," he replies, before shoveling a spoonful of salad into his mouth. "I'm pretty sure we're going to start recording for my new album the week after that."

"Oh?" Jongin waggles his eyebrows. "Any chance of me hearing some of those songs?" He dodges Sehun's half-hearted swat to his head. "Fuck, I was just kidding. I know your manager would probably hunt me down and kill me if that happened."

Sehun nods. Kris could be very convincing when he wanted to be. "When are you going back to college?"

"Berkeley doesn't start till mid September," he says, shrugging. "Plus, I'm taking the semester off to do independent study."

"Are you even allowed to do that?"

"Who cares?" he grins. "I'll be here, in New York, whenever you need me." Sehun shakes his head, incredulous, when Jongin decides to spontaneously break into a glass-shattering rendition of Lean On Me.

"Shut up," he hisses, "people are staring."

"But people stare at you all the time," Jongin laughs. "Thought you'd be used to it by now."

"Yeah, well," Sehun snaps, "Kris usually deals with that sort of thing. Crowd control is more his area of expertise."

"Touchy, are we?" Jongin mumbles around a mouthful of breadstick. "Relax, Sehun, unless you want to get premature wrinkles. Not sure the fangirls would appreciate that."

"Since when have you been concerned about my fangirls?"

Jongin gives him an incredulous look. "I don't really give a fuck, but shouldn't you? I mean, this is your job."

He closes his eyes and exhales slowly. "I should, shouldn't I?" When he looks up again, a sort of half-apologetic, half-sympathetic expression is on his friend's face. "I never wanted this to be a job, an obligation. I used to enjoy singing."

"And you don't, anymore?" Jongin asks.

"I don't know," he mutters, sweeping his hair back with a hand and looking down at the tiled floor of the restaurant. Jongin lets it drop and their conversation moves to other topics (Jongin's long string of one-night-stands in California, the frat he'd joined, how Sehun's brother was doing), but that uncomfortable, nagging feeling stays in the back of his mind, the one that always asks him what the hell he thinks he's doing with his life.

I'm nineteen, he types onto the screen, and I have prepubescent fangirls. He pauses, considering, fingers hovering over the keys for a moment before the keyboard resumes its steady click-click-click, his laptop's fan whirring into his pillow. And prepubescent fanboys, for that matter. They go to all my concerts and buy all my shirts and posters. They make signs that say 'MARRY ME, SEHUN!' and 'I LOVE YOU' but all I really am is some contrived persona for them to idolize. That's all they really want. That's what they love.

They might say I'm the luckiest kid on the planet, but they don't know what it's like to do this day in and day out.

He tacks a No love, Sehun Oh on at the end and saves it to his email drafts, slams the laptop cover down and jams white buds into his ears. His rainy day playlist lulls him into uneasy sleep.

"Terrible," Chanyeol says bluntly. Jongdae casts him a mulish expression and Kyungsoo sighs into the bridge of his guitar. "Look, we're not writing music for teenage girls anymore, are we? These lyrics are shit."

"Yeah, well, they're the kind that got us famous, aren't they?"

"And here we are, four albums later," Chanyeol presses on, ignoring the question. "With absolutely no artistic growth to speak of."

"The music's matured," Kyungsoo murmurs, shrugging. "The riffs, the hooks, the bass line, Baekhyun's drumming—"

"Oh, okay," Jongdae snaps, "so this is all my fault."

"No, no," Chanyeol says hastily. "It's not. We have to work at it together."

"All this anger," Kyungsoo comments. "It's not good for you."

"Go away," Jongdae says. "Go find out when Baekhyun's getting out of the hospital or something."

Kyungsoo sinks down onto a chair and pulls his phone out, legs propped up on one of the desks. Jongdae sighs and rubs his face. "I'll try to rework some of the words."

"Good," Chanyeol replies, exhaling slowly. "These last two songs are the strongest musically, so there's a large chance we'll be promoting them."

"Excellent," Jongdae grumbles. "No pressure or anything."

He wins Best New Artist at the swanky awards ceremony in September. He's happy, of course—his fans in the audience are cheering and it's like the haters don't exist, and Kris's beaming and pushing him up toward the stage, whispers a quick good job, kid into his ear.

His speech is short and to the point—he's never been one to mince words, and he thanks the fans, his manager (Kris gives him a wink from his seat next to Kanye West), everyone else he's collaborated with and has helped him along in the past year. The trophy is hard and heavy in his hand and the eruption of applause and cheering when he steps down is tumultuous, rings loudly in his ears even as he makes his way back to his chair.

Sehun ignores the buzz of congratulatory texts from his phone and stares at the man on the moon in his lap, its bright silver surface reflecting the myriad of lights shining from the stage.

"I don't feel like I deserve this at all," Sehun sighs into the phone later.

"Why not?" Jongin replies.

"I just won an award," he says, "for work produced by everyone but myself. I'm just the mouthpiece—other people compose the music, write the lyrics, make and direct the music videos. I don't contribute creatively at all."

"So change that."

"It's not that simple."

"Isn't it?" Jongin counters. "Right now, you're just bitching about it to me, but if you actually tried to write music, I'm sure your managers and producers wouldn't object, would they?" A laugh crackles over the line. "If worst comes to worst, you could always refuse to sing."

Sehun blanches against the mouthpiece. "But—" he splutters, "—easier said than done—"

Jongin exhales. "Nothing in life comes easy, idiot. If you want to write music, just do it. Doesn't mean it'll be the greatest thing ever or that you'll even succeed. Fiddle with your instruments, scribble down a bunch of rhymes, see where it takes you. If you fail, try again."

Sehun closes his eyes and nods. "Maybe you're right."

"I'm always right," Jongin chuckles.

"We sleep all day and rock the night," Chanyeol reads, trying to decipher Jongdae's chicken scratch. "We just wake up to start another fight. We kiss and then we bite, we are train wrecks."

"Iambic pentameter," Kyungsoo says, contemplative. "Nice."

"Hush," Jongdae says, brow furrowed. "Keep reading."

His eyes scan the page and skip down to another almost illegible line. "Someday we'll cut our critics down to size," he says slowly, "and crash a Diddy party in disguise—these are really good, Jongdae. What's the tune?"

Jongdae hums a couple of bars and then Chanyeol's striding toward his guitar, melodies itching to flow out from beneath the pads of his fingers. "Kyungsoo. Keyboard. Now." Jongdae makes himself comfortable at the drum set.

Making music—real, raw music—is like solving a murder, or tightrope walking with no safety net: half developed skill and half innate intuition and almost all luck, adrenaline pumping through his veins and spiking whenever a hook or line just clicks. Shouts of no high-hat there and that needs to be louder, Chanyeol and maybe a half-step up? bounce off the walls of their small practice room, and God, it feels good to actually be doing something again. He can't help but think that this is their band at its finest, even when they haven't showered or eaten a proper meal in days, even when they haven't written any chords down yet. It has nothing to do with whether or not they're onstage playing a gig or accepting a piece of plastic under a spotlight, hundreds of cameras flashing their lenses at them.

And it's not important that Baekhyun won't be able to come in until next week to practice with them or that the stupid lamp has a faulty bulb and keeps flickering on and off—it feels like they haven't been this excited about anything since their debut album, and all that matters now is that they're here, and they're doing it again, doing what they do best. Exhilaration builds in his gut with every verse they finish and Kyungsoo's eyes are alive with animation as he fiddles with the chords and progressions, the brilliant cacophony of instruments blending together and wrapping around them with all the familiarity of coming home after a very, very long time away.

By the time Chanyeol's scribbled down all the notes and final nuances of the song, three hours have passed and Jongdae's stretched out on one of the couches downing bottles of water. "This could be better than sex, even," he says drily, and Kyungsoo throws a pillow at his smirking face.

His phone rings and Chanyeol jerks up from where his forehead's resting against the piano, fingers aching.

"Hello?"

"Your mom called." Joonmyun.

"What did she want?"

"She said something about Yura."

And just like that, the heady rush of elation after finishing a song disappears, swept away by real life. "We have another song for you," Chanyeol says flatly. "I think it's better than a lot of the shit we've put out before."

Joonmyun's sigh sends a few seconds of feedback over the line. "I'm sorry, Chanyeol."

"Don't be," he replies, ignoring his band mates' questioning stares. "It's not your fault."

New York City is beautiful in late October. Dry, colorful leaves swirl up on the streets as Sehun's cab passes by. When he steps out in front of the main company building, breezes playing tag sweep around him with the crisp smell of autumn.

"Hey, Sehun!" Jongin greets, smiling sunnily.

"What are you doing here?" he asks.

"Can't I drop by and say hello to a friend every once in a while?"

Sehun blinks. "But I didn't tell you I was coming to headquarters today."

Jongin laughs and throws an arm around Kris's shoulder. "I didn't mean you, I meant this guy—ow, Jesus Christ—" This last exclamation is the direct result of Kris's elbow digging into his side.

"Oh, thanks," Sehun says, rolling his eyes. "I wasn't even aware the two of you knew each other. What else have you been keeping from me?"

"Your new songs, man, they kind of suck," Jongin starts, leaping out of the way when Kris moves to grab at him, a menacing look on his face. "Just kidding, he didn't let me listen to anything—prickly man, your manager—holy shit, can't you take a joke—"

Sehun sighs and leaves them to it. When he strolls into the recording studio, there are sound people milling around already, fiddling with dials and boards and moving files. A couple of feet away, someone drops a stack of papers and they swirl onto the floor like the leaves outside; Sehun automatically moves forward and bends down to help pick them up.

"Thanks," is the only thing he catches before Kris sweeps in and whisks him away, clipboard in hand and Jongin nowhere to be found.

"You're going to be on the Tonight Show next month," Kris mutters, going down the list. His strides are long and purposeful, and Sehun feels like a little kid trotting beside him. "And a couple of other late night talk shows—Late Show, Today Show, Ellen Degeneres." He keeps flipping through the pages, trailing off.

And then—"Ah, here we are," he says, a smile playing at his lips. "A representative from Saturday Night Live called yesterday. They want to know if you'd like to be a musical guest or host for their Christmas episode."

Sehun blinks. "Really?"

"Yes, the final show would be on the 18th, a week before the holiday weekend. There's also the option of being both host and—"

"I want to host," Sehun blurts out. Kris looks taken aback and Sehun isn't sure himself where this sudden conviction is coming from—all he knows is that this is one of the oldest and most decorated shows in the history of television, and even though it's been over a year since he broke into the business, he's still a little star-struck at the thought of it.

"Are you sure?" he asks. "Higher management thinks it might be better if you were a musical guest, since you haven't had much acting experience aside from music videos—"

"What are you talking about?" Sehun scoffs. "I act all the time." The unspoken I become what the company wants me to be rings through the air between them.

"If you say so," Kris finally says, jotting something down onto his clipboard. "I'll be in touch with people from the show, so if you decide to change your mind or anything—"

"I won't," he says, a smile spreading over his face. It's the first genuine one he's had in a while.

anon you're a savior

omg anon anticipating so hard

omg seyeol <3

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part seventy five

hg: baby baby baby oh (team baek)

Re: hg: baby baby baby oh (team baek)

another collapse

sorry it's so long u__n

WOW TOO LONG FOR THE COMMENT BOX JESUS

Re: hg: baby baby baby oh (team baek)

Re: hg: baby baby baby oh (team baek)

Re: hg: baby baby baby oh (team baek)