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The moment Jangjun steps into the dormitory proudly flaunting a glass tank, Seungmin gets a bad feeling. Nothing good ever comes out with Jangjun beaming like Christmas came early and Daeyeol looking like he's just aged 50 years.
"Youngtaek!" Jangjun shouts and the aforementioned boy pops his head out of the kitchen. "Daeyeol hyung got me a tarantula!"
Seungmin stiffens. A tarantula. Of all things, why a tarantula?
He whips his head around to stare at Daeyeol, highly betrayed. Daeyeol shrugs helplessly. "You know I have almost zero power over Jangjun," he whispers, leaning down to speak to Seungmin. (He's only slightly offended that Daeyeol feels like he has to practically kneel on the floor to talk to him; he's more upset over the monster that has just entered their sacred household.) "Besides, Donghyun has a goat, what's one more animal?"
Seungmin rolls his eyes. "Donghyun has a goat because Bomin is whipped and manipulative." He points a trembling finger at Jangjun's glass tank. "That is not an animal, that is a demon. A hairy demon of suffering."
"It's not that bad," Daeyeol reasons, "Jangjun's not good at taking care of animals. It's probably going to die within the next week, either by Jangjun's negligence or Jaeseok finally losing it and murdering Jangjun, which, would also result in the tarantula dying."
Sungyoon leisurely drapes himself over Daeyeol's shoulder and winks at Seungmin. "Hey, just look at Jangjun's smile. Isn't it sweet?"
Seungmin does look, and he sees that Jangjun's smile is evil bordering on sinister, nothing close to sweet.
"Would you have the heart to take away such happiness from him?" Sungyoon continues blithely as Daeyeol pats his head softly.
Seungmin glares at the tarantula (which he swears is staring at him with its beady eyes) and he thinks he doesn't mind taking away the "happiness" that is bound to cause him much sorrow. In fact, he would pay someone to let him do it.
Jaehyun nearly does later that day. "Jangjun hyung can't get mad at you," Jaehyun hisses, eyes widening as he starts everytime the tarantula so much as lifts one of its legs. "You're small too, Seungmin hyung, you can hide easily. We can pack you into a luggage and send you to Spain or something."
"No way," Seungmin says, "I'm not going anywhere near that thing. Over my dead body."
"Can't Youngtaek hyung help you? Jangjun hyung won't do anything to him, at least. Murder you maybe, but not Youngtaek hyung." Seungmin thinks he sees tears of desperation forming in Jaehyun's eyes. "Please Seungmin hyung!"
"Youngtaek's not going to be of any help," Seungmin says. Youngtaek is something like a wild card, you never know if he's going to side with Jangjun and cause chaos in the dormitory with the pranks they team up to play on the other members, or if he's going to quietly advise Jangjun against the latest psychopathic idea he's gotten. "I'm just as scared of the Bringer of Death as you are, okay? I can't do anything!"
"Bringer of Death- come on," Jangjun says, apparently having overheard the later part of their conversation, sauntering cheerily into the room to slide open the cover of the glass tank, "YT isn't going to hurt you. He's harmless." He balances the tarantula on his hand and swings it towards Jaehyun, who screams and pushes past Seungmin in his haste to get as far away from the tarantula as possible.
Seungmin eyes the tarantula, which is crawling in circles on an elated Jangjun's hand. He is going to have to die before he even touches a hair on that spider's body.
•·.··.·• •·.··.·•
As it turns out, Seungmin has a horrible habit of jinxing himself. For example, before joining Woollim, he'd looked at the heights of Infinite and laughed to himself, silently pitying the shortest in the group that he'd be in after debut (hopefully). Then he'd arrived at the Woollim building, looked at everyone else there (especially Daeyeol hyung) and promptly sat on the floor in defeat.
Now, Seungmin regrets ever saying that he'd die before having to touch Jangjun's pet tarantula.
(Was it TP? TY? Y hyung? Seungmin doesn't care, so long as it doesn't try to attack him.)
After a week of absolutely nothing happening, Seungmin finally let his guard down. In retrospect, it was the worst idea he's had (and he's had plenty of bad ideas, like that one time he went to ask Youngtaek to teach him how to do the splits and ended up walking in on Jangjun stealing all the air from Youngtaek's lungs and having a half-chewed shoe thrown at his head. It took him a week to get the traumatic incident out of his head and he still bears emotional scars from it.)
He wakes up slightly earlier one morning to the sound of whispering and a slight dip in the tiny (even by his standards) bed that he's lying on. He opens his eyes just a sliver and sees Youngtaek and Jangjun's faces hovering dangerously close to his. He's about to open his eyes fully and ask them exactly what they think they're doing when he spots something very strange.
It's a black mass of hair and it's wriggling, which is very strange- oh shit.
Oh no.
Oh hell to the no.
Seungmin clamps his mouth shut and squeezes his eyes shut, praying to whatever deity that will hear him for divine intervention. Only a miracle can save him now.
"It's surprising he hasn't woken up yet," Jangjun whisper-yells, being physically incapable of staying quiet. "How long more do we have to dangle YT over his face for him to wake up?"
"Keep quiet!" Youngtaek hisses back. "Jangjun hyung, you're going to wake him!" Seungmin's eyebrow twitches. He hears Donghyun shuffle by, the sound made unique by the accompaniment of tiny hooves click-clacking against the hardwood floor, and contemplates screaming for help. But that puts him at risk of Jangjun lowering his pet tarantula into his mouth, so that option is off the table.
(Seungmin refuses to call the monster by its name. "Fear of a name only increases fear of the thing itself," Jaehyun's voice echoes in his head, but Seungmin mentally waves it away. Jaehyun's scared of the tarantula too, whatever he says doesn't apply.)
Jangjun suddenly starts to coo under his breath and Seungmin feels the air around his nose move. He can't suppress the involuntary shudder that runs through his body when he feels slight hair brush gently against the tip of his nose and he scrunches his eyes shut tighter. He hazards a guess and supposes that Jangjun is currently swinging his tarantula like a pendulum over his face, and Youngtaek, that traitor, is too whipped for Jangjun to actually do anything.
"Hyung, be careful, don't swing him too hard-!"
An elbow plops right smack on Seungmin's stomach and he groans, mouth opening wide. Before he can snap it shut again, something slightly round and fuzzy and very much alive drops into his mouth.
Seungmin's eyes fly open with a speed he never knew he possessed and he spits out the tarantula that Jangjun unceremoniously (and completely accidentally) dropped into his mouth. He shoots out of bed, legs tangling in his blanket and he trips on his face, but he's too preoccupied with getting as far from his room as he can that he stands up and continues running, all while screaming bloody murder.
"Woah, Seungmin hyung, are you trying to take my position of main vocal?" Joochan yells over the din, hair mussed adorably as he steps out of his room. Bomin flops onto the sofa, completely unbothered by Seungmin's existential crisis and proceeds to fall asleep across Donghyun who makes a small noise of surprise but does nothing else. He doesn't ever stir as Gummy tugs on his blanket, only reaching up a hand to push the goat's snout away.
"Seungmin-ah, what happened?" Sungyoon asks, the only sensible one who actually cares for Seungmin's sanity.
"I- Jangjun- Spider- Mouth." Seungmin says lamely, face draining of all colour as he recalls the nasty feeling of something live and wriggly in his mouth. It's a horrible wakeup call and Seungmin is now absolutely terrified of spiders and the like.
Luckily, Sungyoon is able to decipher his gibberish and immediately calls for a glass of water and a blanket, both of which Seungmin gratefully accepts. Sungyoon also helps to defend Seungmin's honour by lightly scolding Jangjun and Youngtaek while giving Daeyeol the "this-is-all-your-fault-you-deal-with-the-wayward-children-this-is-why-we-don't-keep-tarantulas-as-pets-I-told-you-so" look, but that's a bit long so Seungmin just calls it the Look.
Seungmin feels like he's going to die. He's going to die early and it's all because of Lee Jangjun. That's right, he doesn't even deserve the "hyung" honorific for all the pains he's put Seungmin through. Youngtaek's not fully responsible, having only tagged along for the ride, but Seungmin hates him too.
Baejangtag is over. He's disowning all of them.
•·.··.·• •·.··.·•
Seungmin lives the next few days in a sort of twilight zone. He keeps seeing tiny masses of black hair and eight legs everywhere and he jumps involuntarily each time. He even mistook Jaeseok's hair for a spider and had to apologise when he whacked Jaeseok on the head with a rolled-up newspaper to defend himself from the tarantula that he knows is somewhere in the house.
(He's currently Jaeseok's slave for the next month.)
He mentally thanks Daeyeol for forcing Jangjun to hide his tarantula somewhere where he cannot see it. Seeing the actual perpetrator might make his trauma harder to get over.
Youngtaek is unsurprisingly the first to apologise. Or well, he tries to and Seungmin appreciates the sentiment. "I'm not sorry for pushing Jangjun hyung which made him drop the spider in your mouth, which, by the way, was hilarious," Youngtaek says, handing over a Melona, "But I am sorry that it had to be you. And that I didn't convince Jangjun hyung otherwise."
Seungmin sighs. This is the closest to a sincere apology he can get from Youngtaek so he accepts it graciously. His mother always tells him to be the bigger person (har, har) and to forgive easily, and so he does. "I forgive you."
Youngtaek brightens up. "Great! We can stop hiding YT from you now! I'll go tell Jangjun hyung!"
Seungmin knows it's futile to stop Youngtaek, especially for matters concerning Jangjun, so he sits back and enjoys his Melona.
And then later spits it out because Youngtaek and Jangjun somehow managed to pour as much salt as there is in the Dead Sea into his ice cream.
Over a few weeks, Jangjun's enthusiasm and excitement for the tarantula gradually dies down and he stops looking at it so often. This is a Huge problem for Seungmin, because the tarantula has now figured out how to break out of its glass tank and it wanders around the dorm until someone finds it and screams the dorm down for Jangjun to collect his errant pet tarantula.
There's a strange pattern that Seungmin has noticed, and it is that the tarantula is only ever found hiding amongst his things. It's only a matter of time before the tarantula comes for him. He voices this to Sungyoon, who laughs.
"Don't be paranoid," Sungyoon says, "But if you're this worried, switch beds with Donghyun for the night. I'm sure Bomin won't mind if it's just one night."
"Why are you sacrificing me?" Donghyun's voice carries from where he's seated with Bomin on the couch feeding Gummy carrot sticks. "I didn't do anything."
"Just for a night," Sungyoon says, voice saccharine sweet. "Or I'll personally find that spider and put her on your face." Seungmin is starting to think that Sungyoon is scarier than ten of those tarantulas combined.
That night, Seungmin goes to sleep easier than most nights. He burrows into Donghyun's extra thick covers and dozes off quickly. It's somewhere in the middle of the night that he feels an itch on his leg, so he reaches his hand down to scratch at it, but it bumps into something round and fuzzy. He throws the covers off and shakes his leg so vigorously that the tarantula flies right off (the perks of being a dancer).
Seungmin levels it with a death stare. "I can't live like this anymore," he whispers, having finally gone bonkers, "It's either you or me."
With a battle cry, he runs straight at the tarantula and bumps into the dresser as it scuttles away with the agility of a ballerina. Seungmin grunts and continues to run after it, chasing it under the bed, out the room, into the kitchen, out the kitchen, into the living room and finally, he corners the little demon right beside the window. "I've got you now!" He yells victoriously, diving in to catch the tarantula.
It wiggles desperately in his grasp as he picks it up and turns it over. A sinister smile that could rival that of Jangjun's the moment he brought the demon home tugs at Seungmin's lips. He marches over to the window, flips the latch and pushes the window open. "Goodbye, you little shit." With an air of finality, he throws the tarantula out of the window and does a little victory jig on the spot.
He imagines Jangjun's heartbroken scream and it's honestly the best thing that has happened to him since Jangjun brought back the little terror. He shudders from the mere thought of that hairy body and those beady eyes. Never again will he tolerate another arachnid in this house.
Except, Jangjun's scream isn't imaginary and Jangjun dashes to the window and lets out a heartbroken scream. "YT!" He yells into the crisp air. Youngtaek envelops him in a comforting backhug.
Seungmin's mouth dries and he turns to look at the rest of Golden Child nodding in approval at him. "And that is how Seungmin finally lost his mind," Donghyun cheerfully comments to the camera in his left hand. He turns the camera to Seungmin. "Seungmin hyung, how do you feel about this?"
Seungmin blinks, the cogs in his head still turning, trying to process what has just transpired. "...How much of that did you see?"
"All of it!" Jangjung cries. "YT! Come back!"
"And that is all we have for everyone! Remember, Let's Play! Golden Child is on MNET! Goodbye!" Donghyun waves at the camera before shutting it off. He then promptly turns to Seungmin and doubles over laughing. "This is so funny, Seungmin hyung, you just snapped and then went for YT-"
Sungyoon hushes him with a small pat and steers the youngest 5 back to their rooms to catch up on their sleep. With their resident mother gone, Daeyeol looks a little lost and unsure of what to do, but his doubtful expression is quickly wiped away as he straightens up and directs Jaeseok back to his own room and instructs Youngtaek to take care of a grieving Jangjun who, strangely enough, has found some clay and is using it to mould a small headstone for the tarantula.
Seungmin does not feel guilty watching Jangjun.
(he does.)
He sighs and resolves to do something the next day to make up for throwing Jangjun's pet out the window. He's actually lucky it's only Jangjun. If it were Donghyun (not that he'd ever throw Gummy out the window), he'd be found dead in a ditch and Donghyun would be found Not Guilty. (Bomin's got crazy manipulation powers and a weakness for anything related to Donghyun.)
•·.··.·• •·.··.·•
To say that Jangjun was surprised to see Seungmin calmly watching TV with a big, black, hairy tarantula balanced on his head is an understatement. "Woah! Seungmin!" Seungmin very carefully turns his head to face Jangjun. Again, shockingly, his eyes do not look dead and the grimace on his face can somewhat be passed off as a smile.
"What?"
"Is that... YT?" Jangjun looks afraid to reach his hand out and pick up the tarantula for fear that it's just an illusion.
Seungmin sighs. "Not exactly," he says, "I couldn't find YT. He might actually have died. Sorry," he adds hastily, "But I did go and get you a new one. He's called YTJUNIOR." Jangjun smiles so widely that Youngtaek appears out of nowhere.
"I felt my 'Jangjun-hyung-is-smiling-again' senses tingling, so here I am." He announces, placing his noodle-arms on his hips. "Fill me in. What just happened?"
"Since YT died," Jangjun says, "Seungmin got me a YTJUNIOR! As an apology! Which I accept," He plucks the spider off Seungmin's head and the boy's shoulders go lax, "Youngtaek, let's go raise our second child." They both head into the kitchen in search of something to feed their (replacement) pet tarantula that will not kill it and Sungyoon comes up to ruffle Seungmin's hair from behind.
"You did well," Sungyoon praises, "I don't have to disown you anymore."
"Disown me?" Seungmin splutters. "I thought I was your favourite child!"
"No, that's Jaehyun." Sungyoon points out. "I thought you knew. But still, good job on the tarantula. Don't Jangjun and Youngtaek look happy?"
Seungmin looks and he does see a happy family gathered in the kitchen. Admittedly, it's a dysfunctional one where the child is a tarantula that scares anyone within a 5-foot radius of it and where the parents think that dangling their child over it's godfather's face and then dropping said child onto said godfather's face is a good idea. But, nonetheless, it's a happy family.
Seungmin thinks he can live with the tarantula if Youngtaek and Jangjun stay happy.
And no, it's not because if Youngtaek and Jangjun are happy, he won't get slaughtered by Sungyoon. Absolutely not.