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It’s a rare occurrence for the dorm to be shrouded in silence. There are too many people, too many voices mixing together even when nobody is shouting—sometimes, it even got loud when they were whispering. Even at night, something managed to disrupt the silence; maybe one of them gets up to get a glass of water and inadvertently bumps into the person who woke up to use the toilet, or it’s one of those few nights where the two maknaes stay up too late playing video games, or just someone’s snoring echoing from down the hall.
So, it’s a rare and incredibly unsettling occurrence for the dorm to be shrouded in silence; therefore, when it happens, it’s probably for an equally unsettling reason.
Like for instance, the fact that Sicheng just called Taeyong a little bitch.
The entire room grows so still that you could hear a pin dropping. Or, moments later after the statement sinks in, Taeil violently choking on the chips he’d been munching on; next to him, Ten awkwardly pats him on the back, eyes wide as saucers and still fixated on the scene in front of them, where Taeyong and Sicheng are staring at each other with different kinds of blank expressions on.
Sicheng’s looks more like the one of a confused child (which, as far as the lot of them are concerned, he usually is), head tilted to the side, mouth half-way open and blinking owlishly. Taeyong, still as a statue, looks like he’s on the verge of crying.
That realisation is what snaps Jaehyun out of his own stupor because he knows from experience that dealing with his band-mates is very much like dealing with a bunch of overgrown children that, on a good day, act like obedient baby chicks following their mother hen around. Having said metaphorical mother hen break down into tears in front of the aforementioned metaphorical baby chicks falls right under Disaster Zone and it’s a guarantee that things will go to absolute shit unless he does some damage control, effective now.
Without missing a beat or taking his eyes off the two, he grabs at Doyoung’s arm and pulls him in closer, hissing through gritted teeth: “Go get Kun. Now.”
Doyoung is gone in a flurry of limbs and sputtering, footsteps thudding loudly down the hall. Feeling like he’d rather do anything but be in the in the situation he is in right now (even doing his own dental work with a pair of rusty pliers), Jaehyun approaches Taeyong like he would a wounded animal, hesitatingly placing a hand on his shoulder.
“Hyung,” he mumbles, voice soft, as he drags the other in the direction of the couch, recently vacated by a terrified-looking Ten and Taeil, still coughing. “There you go, you should sit down for a bit, okay?”
Somewhere behind him, Sicheng sounds like he’s trying to voice out his confusion but is unsure of how to articulate it. He ends up asking something that’s like a strange mix of ‘What’ and ‘Why’ as Jaehyun gets Taeyong to take a seat on the cough without much fussing on his part (in fact, it’s very much like handling some kind of straw doll with an astonishing likeness to Taeyong, which is a disturbing thought in itself).
Biting his lip and deciding it’s fine for the time being, he calls upon his English skills to provide him the simplest explanation to give Sicheng for what is clearly a terrible misunderstanding—and is eternally grateful when he doesn’t even have to use it, because Doyoung bursts back into the room, dragging along-side him a confused and slightly distressed-looking Kun.
“What’s going on?” Sicheng asks just before Kun ushers him out of the room with some hastily-spoken Chinese words.
That being taken care of, Jaehyun lets his shoulders slump, a tiny bit of tension dissipating. He lets himself reassess the situation: Taeyong hasn’t moved an inch from where he left him, staring blankly at the coffee table; Ten has moved over to one of the armchairs and he’s tapping on his phone, occasionally giving them furtive glances before looking back down; Taeil is nowhere to be seen; Yuta, whom Jaehyun kind of forgot was even present, is still gawking at the space Sicheng was previously standing in. But something’s not right.
Immediately, his eyes zero in on the two youngest standing farthest away from the rest of them, huddled together—or rather, they zero in on the very poorly concealed smirk on Donghyuck’s face and the way Mark seems to be whispering something frantically to him that makes the younger boy reach over to pinch his side and he fucking knew it he—
He crosses the distance to the other side of the room in two long strides until he’s in facing them and their twin looks of fear and apprehension. “Explain,” he deadpans, looking from one to the other.
“Explain what?” Donghyuck asks, trying and failing to look like the perfect picture of nonchalance while Mark spills out in almost one breath: “Oh my God, I swear I told him not to.”
“Explain,” Jaehyun repeats himself pointedly in Donghyuck’s direction (the other stops glaring at Mark and has the decency to look a little abashed), trying his best to make his tone match the exact amount of patience he has left for dealing with this—i.e.: none.
“Well, he needed help practicing his Korean and, uh—I swear we were helping but we got a little carried away playing around with him, and,” he doesn’t meet Jaehyun’s eyes the entire time he says this.
Mark lets out an indignant squeak of “Stop saying we. I was trying to stop you, you little shi—“ Jaehyun gives him a look, “—sheep’s skin-wearing wolf."
Donghyuck rolls his eyes. “Whatever,” he heaves a sigh. “Okay, I may have taught him a couple swear words and may have left out the meanings here and there, but I didn’t think he’d use them on Taeyong-hyung.”
“Oh? Who’d you think he’d use them on, then?”
The younger clamps his mouth shut, then opens it again, then closes it back up. Next to him, Mark groans.
“I’m sorry, okay?” he finally whines, shoulders slumping in defeat. “It was all in good fun, I swear.”
Jaehyun blinks several times, incredulous. “What part of this exactly is good fun?”
The answer he gets is in the form of shrill, breathless laughter that makes them all startle and turn around. Yuta is on the floor, curled up on his side and suffering from some kind of spontaneous hysterical laughter, like he’d been holding it in the entire time and a dam had just broken inside of him.
“Oh my God,” Jaehyun mutters without even wanting to, feeling like he’s mere seconds away from repeatedly slamming his head against the wall just to put himself out of his misery.
It’s proof of how fucked up the entire situation is when Donghyuck doesn’t even jump at the chance of saying something stupid like—“Well, Yuta-hyung looks like he’s having fun”—which Jaehyun is grateful for because given his mood and the fact Taeyong’s kind of Temporarily Out of Service, he might actually strangle the kid.
Instead, they stand a little more in awkward silence (ignoring Yuta’s obnoxious laughter), until he eventually asks “So… what? Do you plan on grounding me or something?” and scrunches his nose up in confusion.
Jaehyun opens his mouth, then stills. “…You know what? Yeah, actually. You’re grounded.”
The younger’s mouth drops open in disbelief. “What? Hyung, I wasn’t—you can’t actually ground me.”
“Oh yeah?” he raises an eyebrow, challengingly. “Watch me,” then he points in the direction of the door. “You’re fucking grounded. Go to your room, no video games for a week.”
Donghyuck just continues to look at him like he’s grown an extra head or insulted his entire family before cheekily pointing out “I thought we’re not allowed to swear in this house.”
Though he wouldn’t call himself a devout Christian, Jaehyun strongly believes there is a special place in hell for people like Donghyuck and that he’s going to personally escort him there if he continues to test his patience.
“Two weeks.” He turns to Mark, who has somehow stayed silent throughout this entire ordeal. “And you’re grounded, too.”
There’s not much of a reaction, considering that Mark already looked as resigned to his fate as humanly possible; he just gives a nod of acknowledgment and grabs Donghyuck by the sleeve, already starting to walk out the door.
“Oh come on, he can’t ground us—he’s not our manager and he’s like, two years older than you max,” Donghyuk protests in his direction, then turns his attention back to Jaehyun. “Also we’re—“
“Please,” Mark yanks at his arm even harder, making both of them stumble inside the hallway. “Stop making things worse for once since you already dragged me into this. Please.”
Donghyuck grumbles something incomprehensible and before Jaehyun can yank him back by the collar and tell him to repeat what he said a little louder, both of them fade out of sight.
Mentally bracing himself, Jaehyun approaches the thick of the entire fiasco.
“Hyung…”
To his surprise (and relief), Taeyong slowly lifts his head to look at him. “Jaehyunie.”
It’s definitely progress, considering that he’d been unresponsive for a good couple minutes after the incident, and Jaehyun allows himself to hope that he’ll come out of it any minute and he’ll get a break from babysitting slash damage control. Standing in front of the couch, he slowly bends his knees until his face is at the same level as Taeyong’s, forcing a smile he hopes looks encouraging. Doyoung hovers on the other side, anxiously.
“I feel like I failed as a parent,” he finally blurts out, so seriously that Jaehyun finds himself thinking that if he were even a little less fond of their leader, he would call it quits with the entire idol business and go back home to his actual, sane and considerably less dysfunctional family.
He’s suddenly grateful for Doyoung, who reaches over the back of the couch to give their dejected friend a reassuring pat on the back.
“You do know Sicheng’s not your actual son, right?” he asks, slowly like’s spelling it out for a child, followed by an awkward chuckle. Taeyong turns to face him, eyes wide and jaw dropping.
Or on a second thought, he will see to it that Doyoung accompanies Donghyuck on that one-way trip to hell.
“You—“ he makes himself take a deep breath, wondering if he was good enough at multitasking so he could simultaneously pull Taeyong in a hug and wring Doyoung’s neck.
To his credit, Doyoung seems guilty, like he’s noticed that was pretty much the worst thing he could’ve said considering the circumstances and now he’s trying to come up with something to undo his fuck-up. It’s just that, with his track record, Jaehyun knows he can only trust him to make it worse.
“Don’t, okay? Don’t,” Doyoung closes his mouth, nodding. “If you want to help, just—get him out of here.”
He nods towards Yuta, whose laughter has kind of faded into really disturbing chortling noises, kind of twitching on the floor a couple feet away from them. He’d actually be pretty worried if they all hadn’t seen him do weirder things before.
“Just… give him some water and get him to bed or something.”
Without another word, Doyoung locks his arms around Yuta’s shaking figure and drags him out of the room, ticking another item off of his devastatingly long list of problems for that day. The only saving grace is that the Minis are not here with them because if Jaehyun had to pacify them and make sure they aren’t scarred for life on top of everything else, he’s pretty sure he would have had a mental breakdown by this point.
“Hey, don’t let what he said get to you. He didn’t mean it like that,” he says, and it comes out so earnest and gentle that he thinks this is it—he’s cracked and finally losing his mind to this pseudo-family nonsense, like he’s been dreading the entire time.
“But Sicheng—“
“Hyung, Sicheng didn’t mean what he said, either. He doesn’t even know what that means,” he suppresses a sigh. “The maknaes thought it would be funny if they taught him swear words without telling him what they mean. I already took care of it.”
Just on cue and like the heavens awarded him a blessing for his infinite patience, Kun and Sicheng come barreling out of the kitchen, the former lagging behind with a look on his face that could only be described as tired and the latter nearly managing to make Jaehyun fall flat on his ass when he knocked into him in an effort to get to Taeyong.
“I’m sorry,” he cries, sounding more frantic than any of them had ever seen him. “I didn’t know—Sorry, hyung. I wouldn’t say something like that to you. I’m really, really sorry.”
A smile makes its way on Taeyong’s face and he reaches out to grab the younger by the shoulders.
“Hey, hey, it’s okay. I know you wouldn’t. I was just a little taken aback,” he reassures him, fondly and with so much calm that you’d think he didn’t just come out of a vegetative state of despair over what had just happened.
Jaehyun is really, really tempted to reach over and hit him upside the head.
Instead, he rises to full height and exchanges a look with Kun, who he feels might understand his internal suffering, at least to some extent.
“Do you want some coffee?” Kun asks him after a moment of—well, Jaehyun wishes it was silence instead of Taeyong cooing over Sicheng in a rather embarrassing manner, but he’s not that lucky.
“Yes,” he groans out, gratefully trudging his feet in the direction of the kitchen.
At least until Kun stops in the doorway and looks over his shoulder. “How about you, Ten?”
Of course. Ten. Jaehyun had completely forgotten that he was even in the room. To his great relief, when Ten looks up from his phone, he doesn’t look particularly traumatised. A little uncomfortable, maybe, but Jaehyun still counts that as a pass.
“Uh, no. I’m fine,” that being said, he gets up from his seat and scratches the back of his neck. “I think I’m going to my room.”
“You do that.”
Jaehyun and Kun spend the following hour drinking their coffee in silence, pouring each other an extra cup when they hear someone screaming about pineapples.
“That’s wild.”
That is the conclusion Hansol draws out of the entire situation two days later when they fill him in on everything he’s missed while he was away on a family emergency. Or rather, Johnny does (apparently Ten had been kind enough to keep him updated by texting him everything that was going on in real time) while Kun hangs back on the couch and tries to imagine himself in his happy place the entire time.
“Tell me about it. If Ten didn’t warn me, God knows what I could have walked in on,” Johnny muses. Kun tries really hard not to give him the stink eye. He does.
“Oh—there you are.”
All three of them look up as Taeil makes their way over, seemingly torn between amusement and exasperation.
“I think we should give you a list of swear words to go over with Sicheng. I tried to get Donghyuck to tell me what exactly he taught him but he refused to cooperate after I said I can’t get him un-grounded.”
Kun feels any kind of energy left in him after their brief dance practice fly to the very tips of his fingertips and disappear into thin air. “Oh, no. What did he say this time?”
“He uh—He called Jaehyun a trollop,” he snorts, then tries to cover it up by clearing his throat. Johnny, a lot less dignified, lets out a loud bark of laughter.
“Oh, man, I wish I’d seen his face. Is Sicheng still breathing?”
“Yeah, yeah. I mean Jaehyun kind of looked like he was about to pop a vein for a second, but he recovered pretty quickly and pulled him aside to explain,” Taeil takes a seat on the couch next to Kun, shrugging. “Can’t do much about it. You can’t yell at the kid when he doesn’t even know what he’s saying.”
Hansol frowns. “But Sicheng knows what that means? I taught him that.”
They all stare at him, silent.
“What?” Kun finally asks, gaping. On his left, Johnny’s losing his shit all over again, even going as far as having to wipe literal tears from his eyes.
“Dude, in what kind of context did you have to teach him the word ‘trollop’?” he asks, nearly choking with the effort of trying to keep his voice steady.
“Uh, long story.”
The conversation dies out as they wait for Taeil to stop playing with the remote and finally settle on something for them to watch—when he does, stopping on some documentary about eels with the remote still pointed out, his hand still in mid-air. Kun wants to call him out on his questionable choice of television. They all do.
It’s just that in that moment, the coin drops and the unspoken something dawns on all of them,
Taeil looks at Kun. Kun looks at Johnny. Johnny looks at Hansol. Hansol looks at all of them, open-mouthed.
From somewhere inside the room, Jaehyun’s voice rings out reminding them that Mark and Donghyuck are off practicing with the minis and then asking someone—likely Taeyong—if they could whip up dinner.
After what feels like an eternity, Taeil speaks. “What Jaehyun doesn’t know can’t hurt us,” he pauses. “Or Sicheng.”
“Sounds about right to me.”
“Yep.”
“Amen to that,” says Hansol, looking a little pale even after the disturbing eel documentary cuts to a commercial.