She's Finally Growing Closer To The Members!!! - Tumblr Posts
QUEENMAKER | CHAPTER 11
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pairing chan x reader
genre ninth member au, enemies to lovers, angst, fluff, coming of age, social media, cancel culture, anxiety, depression, forbidden love,
summary To JYPE, the solution is simple; take the sole trainee that will not debut with your brand new girl group, and use her to replace the missing vocalist in your male group that insisted on starting as nine.
Unfortunately, to the fans and the members themselves, it isn't that simple.
status ongoing
taglist OPEN
a/n getting kicked out my house this week, got a new job, blah de blah. here's a chapter. oh, and a shameless self promotion, go read my skzflix fic leave? pretty please? it aint my finest work but i promise it's good?
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The door is already open when you arrive, inviting you inside. Like someone had known exactly when you'd gotten in the elevator, or sensed the moment you stepped foot in their hallway. Or this was just how they lived, the door open to invite each other in and out, though that didn't seem likely. You shut it behind you when you enter anyway, the creak and slam of the heavy door loud enough to alert the occupants of the apartment to your presence.
The sound of Changbin shouting over someone follows, drowning out the noise of the door. Everything is normal, then.
The short hall by the front door is empty except for a pile of scattered shoes - you add yours to the line as you pass through, glimpsing a group of the boys sitting on a couch at the other end. It feels weird to stand there and see them at the other end, the way they've been for years before you came; your empty hands feel awkward, and your feet are too soft against their floorboards, and the closer you get, the more rowdy they become, their eyes so fixed to some game they're playing on the TV that they don't even notice you slipping into the room. You pause for a moment, listening to them howl as their game characters slip off the screen, and then continue on your way to the kitchen, your fingers twisting together restlessly before you.
Chan and Minho are there, sequestered away from the chaos erupting in the other room while they move between the benchtop and the stove, avoiding each other in a way that seems practised. The air is filled with the smell of food cooking, the steam rising from the bubbling pot on the stove warming the air in the small kitchen. Chan turns as he sees you out of the corner of his eye, smiles, and then points back towards the other boys.
"Out," he says, in a voice that brooks no argument; and you'd almost think that you'd broken some rule, except for the grin that eats at his face, amused at himself without even trying.
You stop in the doorway, hovering between the two groups. "I was just going to see if you needed any help," you say.
"Nope," he answers. "You're not allowed in here. Go and sit down."
You pull a face, one that must be funny if Minho glances away, a smile struggling to break through the blank face he's trying to pull. "I already physically kicked Felix out of here," Chan adds, a wooden spoon brandished in the air in warning. "I'll do it to you too."
Your hands come up, your feet backing out of the doorway, and yet, you can't help but laugh. You're feeling...relaxed, here, in a way you haven't since leaving Midnight those two months ago. Maybe it's because you'd spent those months grinding away at what seemed like an insurmountable hill of work, maybe because in the last week, the days that had passed since you'd walked home with Han and Chan, things had suddenly become easier within this group. The reason doesn't matter, you suppose, only that you know now that he's joking, and that it's something you can laugh at. That he's included you in the same joke he's used on Felix.
"Hey, hey, hey," a voice says behind you. "Watch where you're going. You have enough trouble walking forwards."
You turn on your heel, already rolling your eyes at the shit-eating grin on Seungmin's face. Funny, how easy it to fall into cameraderie with him once you've broken the ice between you; only a day ago, it'd still felt like you weren't much more than acquaintances, until you'd made the decision to fall over on the way to their shared vocal lesson, the only thing Seungmin had ever reached out to offer to you.
Well, made the decision is a stretch. Falling over is too. You'd only stumbled over the sidewalk, and you certainly hadn't planned to make a fool of yourself. Maybe the story that Seungmin was selling was so convincing it was starting to affect your memory. He wasn't mean about it at least, for all that he was known to pretend to be mean when the opportunity arose; if anything, the last few hours of him spreading increasingly wild tales and the others relaying them back to you had been fun. Something different than the usual grind of your days, a joke that might stick around longer than the few minutes in which it's being laughed at.
In this moment, you stand up a little bit straighter and hope that your cheeks don't turn red. "I'm great at walking," you posture, and then struggle not to laugh at how preposturous you sound, your lips fighting against you as they curve into a smile. Something to work on, maybe, if you wanted to compete with his and Minho's deadpan humour.
"Except for the part where you hit the concrete," Seungmin says, unaffected by the way your eyes crease and your mouth splits in two. "Then you're really bad at walking."
"I tripped," you insist, and you move forward as if to slide past him to get to the couch that the others sit on. He falls in beside you without hesitation rather than letting you pass by, a ghost at your side. "I wasn't even close to falling."
"Everyone says that you fell though," Seungmin insists. "You think everyone would lie?"
"I think you would lie when you told everyone else the story."
Grinning, Seungmin strides out in front of you, leading the way around the couch so that he can stand right in front of the TV. "Move up," he tells Felix, who sits at the end of the couch, neck craned to watch the game the others are playing around Seungmin.
His eyes slide from Seungmin to you, trying your best to stay out of the way despite having been dragged into mischief. "Y/N," he says, shifting over and patting the seat next to him. "You wanna sit here?"
A smile spreads out across your face. "I do," you reply, and slide past Seungmin to fit yourself in the small space he manages to make beside him. "Thanks."
"You said you would save my seat," Seungmin says, pointing a finger at Felix, who waves him out of the way. He sits on the arm of the chair instead, balancing precariously as he pulls out his phone.
"They kicked you out of the kitchen as well?" Felix asks sympathetically, one eye on the TV and the other on you.
You nod. "I was just going to see if they needed help."
"Yeah," Felix sighs. "I'm not even bad at cooking."
"I'm banned from the knives," Seungmin puts in without looking up.
You glance at him, staring intently at his phone. "Why isn't that surprising?" you question.
"Because he's Seungmin," Felix puts in. "Same way I know he's lying about seeing you fall over."
Seungmin sighs. "I didn't fall," you say, before he can decide which lie to seed this time. "I tripped. I didn't fall."
"It's no fun if none of you believe me," Seungmin grouses.
The game on the TV finishes with a fanfare that fills the whole room, drowned out only by the racous cries of cheating from the boys playing it. The sound makes you wince, leaning away from them; Felix's hands come up to cover his ears, his cry for help also disappearing under the noise they make. You wouldn't be surprised if the neighbours were doing the same thing, or marching towards their door with pitchforks in hand. How do they even have neighbours, when they're capable of noise like that?
"They're going to get complaints again," Seungmin says, like he'd been reading your mind.
"Hey, hey! Hey!" a voice calls over the noise, and you turn in unison to see Chan's head poking out of the door, the wooden spoon waving in his hand once again. "No yelling!"
"I'd say he looks like he's our dad, but he just kind of looks unhinged," Felix comments, only his eyes and the blonde hair that tufts up on top of his head peeking up over the back of the couch. The rest of him has slid down out of Chan's sight, like if he hides, he won't get caught up in whatever trouble the others are causing.
"He looks like my grandfather," Seungmin adds as the older boy disappears, making no effort to hide at all. "He was crazy too."
Felix grins, wild and wolfish. "He just keeps getting older."
"It's so sad he's going to die so soon," Seungmin agrees.
The noise dies down, the game switched back to a more neutral home screen as boys wander off this way and that. Felix shifts over, enough that you can give Seungmin a space on the couch - you think, for a moment, about making him go around to the other side, but Changbin is still sitting there, looking peacefully unbothered by whatever chaos Seungmin is surely capable of unleashing and it's much easier to just shift over and let him slump down in the corner than to set him off. It disturbs Changbin anyway, somehow; as Seungmin sits down, he sits up straight, leaning around Felix to look at you.
"Hey, Y/N," he says, drawing your attention over to him. "Where were you this morning? I didn't see you in the practise rooms."
"She left the room?" Felix questions, turning to stare at you like such a thing is unheard of.
"I was there for three hours," Changbin confirms, "and I didn't see her at all."
"I was tired," you say, trying to ignore the feeling of your cheeks turning red, "so I slept in. And I left the room twice today, actually. I went to a vocal lesson with him."
Seungmin nods as your thumb jabs towards him. "She won't be dancing tomorrow either. She fell over on the concrete."
You don't even think twice about reaching over to push him off the couch. It catches him so off-guard that he actually does fall, sliding right onto the carpet and staring up at you in disbelief. The other boys howl with laughter, loud enough that you glance back at the kitchen door to check if Chan is coming back.
"I'm glad you took the morning off," Felix says warmly, ignoring whatever Seungmin mutters under his breath as he drags himself up off the floor. "We've all been worried about you."
"So I've been told," you say. "I promise, I know what I'm doing."
"I trust you," Felix says, and there's a glint in his eye that says he's telling the truth. It warms you to your core, just as sitting here surrounded by these boys does, and the sound of Minho's voice calling for Seungmin from the kitchen. It's nice, to come into the middle of their group away from the stage or the dance floor and feel like you're just in the midst of friends, somewhere where you belong. It's nice to see how they live. You hadn't let yourself see this before, too tied down to practise and the dream they've achieved that you're still chasing.
"Seungmin-ah! Come and help!" Minho calls again, and then he can be seen at the door, waiting with an unnerving kind of patience. You're not sure if the smile on his face is supposed to be encouraging or threatening, and you don't really want to find out; mostly, you're just kind of glad that he's not calling for you.
Seungmin isn't bothered by it, dragging himself off the couch with a sigh that reverberates through the room. "Coming, old man," he calls across the room, and ignores the double take that Felix does beside you, his eyes growing wide.
"Ai-e," Changbin says, the sound whistling through his teeth. "Is he crazy?"
"You want to go in the oven?" Minho questions as Seungmin crosses the room.
"You'd have to get me in it first," Seungmin says, and then yelps as Minho's arm wraps around his neck, dragging him into the kitchen in a headlock.
"He's going to die," Felix says gleefully.
"Winning the bet was not worth it," you agree, your eyes still on the empty doorway to the kitchen. No one emerges except Chan, holding a pot of whatever they've cooked for dinner and looking disturbingly peaceful despite the chaos he has just left behind.
TAGLIST
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