Archive of Our Own

Sweat drips down Felix’s spine. He can feel the cold droplets rolling down each vertebrae painstakingly, like they’re trying to map the way his body moves in slow, deliberate twists and turns, carving a path through the expanse of his skin like explorers on the frontier. His breathing echoes in the practice room, bouncing around the walls without anything soft to absorb the sound, to lighten the acoustics. They’ve been at it for hours. Felix has been repeating the same routine over and over again, trying to get it so perfect that he could do it in his sleep. Only then can he go home. The problem is his body isn’t moving the way he wants it to. He wills his arm to go down and it goes up or his fingers shake and his elbows make awkward circles in the air, frustrating Felix to no end because his limbs won’t obey him. It’s like something is blocking the connection between his body and his soul.

He really just needs to sleep.

While Hyunjin and Minho continue dancing, their bodies following them smoothly somehow despite the hours they’ve spent just repeating the same tired moves over and over again, Felix sits down in the middle of the dance floor. His eyes close for a millisecond, just enough to blink, and for whatever strange reason, they don’t open again. He floats in space. For a minute, he allows himself to be self-pitying and mopey, until a clammy hand plants itself clumsily in his shoulder in some semblance of comfort. Felix is jolted back into reality.

“Felix? Felix? Are you okay?” Minho is saying.

“Felix!” Hyunjin calls. “Aye, Yongbok, wake up.”

“Don’t call me… I want… What time is it?” Felix asks.

Minho looks at his wrist before seeming to remember he’s not wearing a watch and looking to Hyunjin for guidance. Hyunjin slides his phone out of his duffel bag pocket. “Three.”

“In the morning?” Felix says.

“Yeah, in the morning,” Hyunjin says, like it should be obvious, “we didn’t stay up all night.”

“Yet,” Minho tacks on ominously.

Felix is too aware of his breathing suddenly. It doesn’t fill his chest correctly, like a square peg in a round hole. He wipes the sweat from under his eyes with a hand that’s pale and shaking, probably from too much adrenaline and not enough water. “Why can’t we just take a little break, and then we can go back to practicing?”

“If you take a break you won’t go back to practicing,” Minho drones.

“If that’s what you want, it’s okay, Jikseu,” Hyunjin says softly, adding the nickname for extra cushion, sweet and sugary. “We’re not judging you. We’re all tired, Minho and I are just better at keeping down coffee.”

Felix has a feeling he should laugh at this, but the laughter doesn’t sit right in his stomach, so he doesn’t. “No,” Felix says. He staggers, swaying on his feet as he gets up and takes a swig of his water bottle. He puts it back down on the floor. “I want to keep going.” He has no idea if his Korean grammar came out right, having the tendency to accidentally use direct translations when he’s exhausted. He’s been told by a slightly tipsy Chan that he sometimes sounds like Google Translate. Hyunjin and Minho exchange a look they think he can’t see, but there are mirrors everywhere in the dance studio, so Felix doesn’t miss it. He rolls his eyes. “C’mon. I can’t get that move with the…” Felix forgets the words, so he just does the dance move, rolling out his leg slowly from his hip to his ankle and then shuffling backwards, shifting his weight to his other leg with a hop (or what he’s come to know as the hip-hop kick-ball-change). He stumbles, grimaces. “Keep tripping.”

Minho shows him in half-speed. Felix copies him. Wrong. Try again. He gets it a little better, at least to the point where he doesn’t fall when he tries, but he still looks like a gangly horse— or, better and uglier yet, a donkey— next to his two elders.

“Let’s just restart the song,” Hyunjin says. And Minho presses play.

Felix goes through the first half of the song fine, though the subtlety in his body just isn’t there, but when it gets to the move they were working on, he falls on his ass. He trips and falls like a newborn foal and he just knows his tailbone is going to be bruised, and Minho and Hyunjin are looking at him with so much pity in their eyes, and he’s supposed to help teach the dance, not keep the two real dancers up way past a reasonable hour to teach him what should come naturally, what comes naturally to the people in their group who aren’t even supposed to be the dancers, and nothing he does is ever enough because he could practice for centuries and not catch up to the people around him. They even wrote a fucking song about staying in your own lane at your own pace but Felix can’t follow the lyrics he helped write and— and suddenly, it feels like he’s going to faint.

“Felix, hey, hey,” Minho says, trying to calm him down, but the slight nervous edge to his own voice betrays his worry. “Breathe.”

“I can’t—” Felix takes a gasping breath, and somehow his next exhale comes out as a half-sob, though no tears come out.

“You can’t breathe?”

Felix had asthma as a kid, could never run around the neighborhood park like an animal with his friends like all the other elementary schoolers, was never allowed to go anywhere without his inhaler in his pocket, and so when his lungs can’t fill with air his hands instinctively fly to the pockets of his brand-name sweatpants. Minho follows his gaze worriedly. When Felix’s hands are shaking too badly to zip open the pocket, Minho does it for him. He finds nothing but dryer lint and a loose thread.

“What are you looking for?” Minho says.

Hyunjin is still standing in the corner, completely out of his depth.

“My— my inhaler,” Felix says, even though it doesn’t make sense and he doesn’t know how to say it in Korean so he ends up saying something more along the lines of “breathing help medicine machine”.

“Your what?” Minho says.

“Asthma,” Felix gasps out.

“You have asthma?” Hyunjin yells from his reserved spot in the corner, their resident concerned citizen.

“I had asthma,” Felix says. He hasn’t had an asthma attack in years, but that’s what this feels like. It’s the same sensation. Like he’s drowning out of water.

“Call 911, Hyunjin,” Minho says, still gripping Felix’s arm tightly like he’s afraid if he lets go, Felix will fall over and that’ll be that.

“How the fuck—” Hyunjin starts to mutter as he dials. Felix can hear the phone ring across the room, but it sounds like he’s underwater.

“I think I’m having a heart attack,” Felix mumbles. His vision won’t focus on anything.

“You just said it was an asthma attack,” Minho says, completely lost. Felix closes his eyes, trying to focus on taking tiny breaths through his nose so as to not stop breathing altogether. Something clicks. Minho’s face completely changes. “Wait, Hyunjin, tell the operator it’s just a panic attack.”

“What?” Hyunjin says in disbelief.

“He’s fine,” Minho says.

Are you crazy? Felix wants to scream, but he doesn’t have the air for it. “I’m not fine, I can’t…” Felix draws the deepest breath he can, which is too shallow for his liking. A few tears trickle out of the corners of his eyes when he squeezes them shut this time. He doesn’t care. “I can’t breathe, Minnie.”

“I know,” Minho says. “Just breathe as well as you can, okay?”

“I—”

“It’ll pass,” Minho tells him, and then he starts rubbing Felix’s back in strong circles, the warmth of his hand reaching Felix’s cold skin under the fabric of his t-shirt. Felix can feel himself slowly lean back into his hand. He doesn’t know how he gets there, but he’s eventually laying on his back on the floor of the practice room, staring up past Minho’s concerned face to the ceiling. One of the fluorescent lights in the corner is flickering just slightly every five to six seconds; Felix has been counting, but it always seems to be just a beat off from where he last counted. It should be frustrating, but it keeps him grounded. At some point, Hyunjin’s sits down cross-legged beside him and Minho, fiddling with his phone in his hands. The operator keeps asking him little questions— “How warm is his skin?” “How long are his breaths?” “Can you take his pulse?” She proceeds to give Hyunjin instructions on how to take Felix’s pulse and then he cradles Felix’s head gently, pressing two fingers to the side of his neck. Felix flinches.

“What? What’s wrong?” Minho aks.

“Ticklish,” Felix mumbles. Hyunjin laughs cautiously, like he’s afraid to break the thick atmosphere they’ve created, but it brings a small smile to Felix’s face.

Hyunjin reports his pulse to the operator. She sighs, her voice full of static over the phone. There’s some kind of scuffling going on on the other end. “Okay, I’m going to hang up now, but if anything changes or worsens, you call for an ambulance.”

“Okay,” Hyunjin says, and the phone beeps as the call ends, leaving Hyunjin’s phone screen flashing the time. 4:17 am.

Felix is so tired. But, he realizes as he yawns, he’s finally breathing normally. “I don’t really know what just happened,” he confesses.

Minho smiles a little, still drawing circles on Felix’s back with a steady hand, maybe tracing the Hangul alphabet for all Felix can tell. “It’s okay,” he says. “I used to get panic attacks when I was younger. Hyperventilation is kind of a staple. But you’re okay. Promise.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever done that before,” Felix says.

“You don’t have to have a disorder or something to have a panic attack,” Minho tells him. “It’s probably just a one-time thing. Maybe two- or three-time, I don’t know.”

“I thought I was dying.”

“Me too,” Hyunjin says. “I couldn’t find where your pulse was at first and I thought you were dead.” Minho and Felix laugh, but Felix can hear the croak in his voice.

After a quiet moment, Hyunjin speaks again. “So, like, in a way, we were your inhaler.”

“You’re an idiot is what you are,” Felix says.

He closes his eyes, leaning his head back until it rests on Minho’s knee. All he wants is to curl up under a nice medium-to-large sized mountain of pillows and blankets and stuffed animals and go to bed. He wishes he was back in Australia with his mom, wants her to make him chamomile tea with too much honey in it. He wants the taste to coat his throat, edging on too sweet, just barely burning his tongue on the way down. Most of all, he really just wants his mom to sing to him. She used to sing Beatles songs when he was little to help him fall asleep. She’d sit on the edge of the bed and he’d drift off to the sound of her voice only to wake up and demand another when the song ended and she tried to make her escape, but somehow she never minded, and she never denied him a second song. “Can we sleep now?” he says, his voice soft and frail.

“Well, not here,” Minho says quietly. Felix can hear the smile in his words even if he’s not looking at the older boy. “We can go back to the dorms, though. If that’s what you want.”

“Can I do the dance one more—” Hyunjin starts, but Minho cuts him off.

“We only took one car here, and Felix and I are going home.”

Felix can almost imagine that when Minho says home , he means it.