Chapter Text
“Why would you lie to me like this Felix?”
Seungmin finds himself standing at the doors to a lecture hall, where many keen looking students stand outside or file their way into the room. Earlier that day, Felix had asked Seungmin to come to this building at this time, saying that they could meet up and grab dinner together when his classes were done for the day. Since it was only the first week of classes, Seungmin had taken his word for it and even showed up 5 minutes before Felix’s alleged lecture was supposed to end.
“I mean, I did have a class here earlier this morning… but I thought that it would be cool if we could join a club together,” Felix explains while being somewhat proud of twisting the truth, “there’s someone in my dance crew that’s in the club too. He invited me to the a cappella concert last year and it was a lot better than I could have imagined”.
“Maybe I’ll come to the concert then, but I don’t see why I would join,” he points out, “I don’t sing”.
“I hear you sing along sometimes when you listen to music...and every night in the shower. You have a nice voice Seungminnie”. Note to self, apartment walls are thinner than expected. His roommate giggles nervously, “also you kinda study... a bit too much... a club could be a good change of pace from being stuck at a desk all night. Plus we might be able to make some new friends, yeah?”.
Seungmin crosses his arms and pouts, feeling embarrassed, flattered, and attacked. Certainly Felix had good intentions, but going into his second year of legal studies, Seungmin seemed to have a lot on his plate as is. Taking on extra curriculars could interfere with his grades considering that he did spend most of his time studying like Felix had claimed. Maybe some experiences in a committee or student society related to his degree would balance out the risk of lower grades, but a cappella? Would you even put that down on a resume? Does singing have any evident transferable skills?
“I still wanna join though… we can get dinner after so maybe you could stay until it’s over?” Felix pleads and tugs at Seungmin’s wrist, “their presentation is only half an hour and you won’t even have to pay much attention”. Felix is now pouting, attempting to give him puppy eyes while batting his lashes.
Seungmin sighs out of resignation and nods. Felix cheers and hugs Seungmin’s arm lightly before pulling open one of the doors, and gesturing for his roommate to head inside. The two make their way into the medium-sized lecture hall and found a couple of seats at the side of the room. In his head, Seungmin is shuffling around his plans to study this evening, reallocating some time dedicated for readings to the day after since he was now spending up to an hour of time on other things. After sorting out his agenda mentally he pulls out his phone and opens his calendar app to finalize his schedule. He would have brought his laptop to maybe get a reading done if he had known that he would be sitting in a lecture hall for another half hour.
A PowerPoint presentation is projected onto the screen at the front of the room, and an older student fixes a microphone to his collar. The conversations in the room slowly die down before his voice booms through the room’s speakers, “Hello all! Thank you for coming out tonight, it’s aca-mazing to see you all!” Half of the room is ironically laughing like Felix, while the other half is cringing, like Seungmin. “I’m kidding, I will avoid any lame puns for the rest of the night. With that out of the way, welcome to JYP University’s A Cappella Club! My name is Bernard and I am this year's club president. For anyone who doesn’t know what our club is, we make music only using our mouths because our club doesn’t receive enough funding to buy instruments”. Seungmin forces out a smile while Felix slaps his knee.
“If you are interested in singing or even just performing on stage, a cappella is a great place to start and meet other students with similar music tastes. In a bit, we will introduce all of our talented groups, each with their own style and sound, so you can figure out which group might be the best for you. As a club we host an a cappella concert at the end of each semester where all groups come together to showcase the new music that they’ve been working on. Each group also tends to have their own showcase so there are loads of fun experiences to be had throughout the term. The time commitment for the club is dependent on the group, or groups, that you are a part of. Some of our groups have an audition process but the application for all groups can be found at the following link here,” he says gesturing up to the big bolded url on the slides behind him, ”without further ado I’ll hand the mic over to our first group, JYP Nation, our oldest and largest non-auditioned group.”
Over the next twenty minutes, Seungmin ends up paying more attention than he would have preferred, learning about each group, noting the differences in each. One by one, each group’s exec team came up and introduced themselves with their own set of colorful slides to explain their group’s primary genre, which songs they would be covering that semester, and what types of members they were seeking for their lineup. GOT7 was focused on their group choreography and putting on powerful performances. Twice took pride in being an all female group since it was objectively harder to pull off as an a cappella group since few female singers had access to a lower register. JYP Nation was a choir like ensemble that covered top 40 hits and accepted anyone that applied; it was mostly intended for students getting into a cappella but may not yet have what it takes to be part of a smaller group.
Day6 came up and introduced themselves as a small vocal-oriented group and the only group that didn’t dance...well. As part of their pitch, they sang a barbershop-quartet-esque sample which had Felix wanting to clap and left Seungmin with goosebumps as they listened to their harmonious blend of rich vocal colors. Seungmin was even more intrigued after finding out that they would be covering one of his favorite songs that semester.
“We are a more senior group and we take our music and arrangements pretty seriously. So we are looking for members that have either some a cappella experience, or some sort of vocal training as we would rather get straight to the music while skipping over some basic techniques”.
And so Seungmin’s hopes to join the group are demolished as quickly as they were built. Although he has been told that he was a decent singer by close friends, unless you count the piano lessons that he took growing up, Seungmin's not well versed with musical theory. He could tell that he wasn't tone deaf and since he could sing along with most of the songs in his playlists, he had an idea of where his vocal range had its limits. But with no training or performance experience as a vocalist, he was clueless as to how "technically" sound he was, lacking proper knowledge about effective breathing techniques, head voices, or whatever it was that singers worked on.
"Okay, now we have our final group to present. I’d like to introduce you to our rookie group, Stray Kids!"
“Did he just say ‘straight kids’?” Felix says to Seungmin in a whisper.
“Nah,” he replies, turning his head in the direction of the pair of students stepping up to the front, “definitely not”. Both were shorter than the average student, and despite their group name, they both seemed to be older students, probably close to graduating.
The president hands the mic to the taller of the two, his hair bleached blond with dark roots growing in, unnaturally curled, and altogether pretty damaged. He either has very broad shoulders or his black t-shirt that's two sizes too big. Or maybe both, he does seem to have long arms. The student to stand next to him is slightly shoulder but almost as broad. He wears his hair down as fringe with a black cap on top, covering his forehead and part of his eyes. The shorter wears all black as well except this shirt was well fitted to his torso, accentuating his arms and chest.
Felix’s gaze is fixed on the duo, seemingly analyzing how viable Seungmin’s implication might be. They stand under the screen with their hands held behind their back. The blond looks up at the screen, foot tapping in a jittery rhythm. Seungmin’s eyes took to another student who starts walking up to the front quickly before joining the pair at the front. Though dressed in black too, he looks unlike his peers due to his youthful face and lean stature. His face seems oddly familiar, mostly his thick eyebrows, but Seungmin can't quite place a finger on it.
“Step out. Hello we are Stray Kids,” they speak in unison accompanied by a cleanly rehearsed hand gesture. Only the blond’s voice, with an unexpected Australian accent, was picked up by the microphone. Seungmin turned towards Felix who is instantly intrigued. Unlike the groups before them, they don't have any slides to accompany their introduction, which gave Seungmin an overall impression of unpreparedness, but maybe as a new group they wouldn’t have much to present anyway.
“My name’s Chan and I am the leader of Stray Kids. This here is Changbin, who is one of our musical directors, and over there is Hyunjin, who will be in charge of choreography this term,” he starts. Changbin and Hyunjin both waved to the room, and for a second, Seungmin could have sworn that Hyunjin had looked directly at him and Felix for a bit, “we actually have one other MD but he’s sitting in a lecture right now. Anywho, like Bernard said, we are a brand new a cappella group on campus, but everyone on our team has been a part of JYP Nation before. I’ve actually been a member of the club for seven or eight terms now, uh...” Chan’s voice trails off and he looks up at the screen, “just a sec”. The other two lean forward to look at their leader who is now taking his phone out of his pocket. Seungmin leans back in his seat and sighs softly.
“Right, since we are a new group, the number of spots we have is dependent on how many people are interested in joining. But why join us you may ask? Well, what sets Stray Kids apart is that our musical directors and I produce music and write original songs outside of a capella. We explore a good number of genres but hip hop is probably our main one, pop a close second. We plan to make a cappella arrangements of our songs that we think will be a best fit for the whole team. We don’t want to define ourselves by a concept just yet, since our goal is to make music that really suits the individual talents of our members". Seungmin raises an eyebrow.
“Right now we hope to find members of low-mid to high ranges, as we have a pretty solid bass and percussion section,” he patted Changbin on the shoulder, who was nodding along, “and we are also open to members with any level of musical experience or ability, but uh, we would prefer having members that have flexible schedules due to the amount of music that we wanna get through this semester and uh… yeah I think that’s pretty much it? We’ll stick around if you have any questions for us. Our group should be one of the options on the application form, so you know what to do. Hope to see you at our audition!”
After handing back the microphone, the three returned to their seats. Then after sitting through the final remarks from the club president, students start to shuffle out of their seats including Seungmin until Felix taps his arm to get his attention, “I’m gonna say hi to Hyunjin, he’s the one I was talking about, from my dance crew. You wanna come?”
Seungmin shakes his head, “I’ll wait”. Felix nods while Seungmin sits back down again. He watched as Felix sidesteps through an aisle of chairs before approaching the so-called Stray Kids. Hyunjin is already talking to a couple of students, most likely friends of his, and so Felix stands nearby, not wanting to interrupt. Seungmin watches as his roommate waits for a couple of seconds, then approaches Changbin who is standing nearby. Seungmin realizes that this is probably going to take a bit longer than he thought. He continues to stare at Felix who at some point introduced himself to Chan, potentially bonding over being Australian, or peroxide-blond, or both. Seungmin’s eyes shift to Hyunjin who is now hugging one of the boys he was talking to earlier before they parted ways and wave goodbye to each other. He joins in the Australians’ conversation shortly after, greeting Felix with a hug as well.
He could now remember Hyunjin’s face from attending one of Felix’s end of term showcases from the previous year. While back then his hair was a light brown and he wore an all-white dance costume, now his hair was black and tucked under a white beanie while he was dressed comfortably in a hoodie and sweatpants. He could recall how Hyunjin’s on-stage charisma was so captivating, and how his movements and expressions made it hard to take his eyes off of him. In fact, Seungmin was so focused on Hyunjin’s performance that he had difficulty complimenting Felix’s efforts afterwards; he resorted to praising his team as a whole for their synergy, which was an honest opinion and a satisfactory statement for his roommate. Seungmin wouldn’t have guessed that Hyunjin was also a singer, but he definitely understood why he had become the choreographer of the group.
From his seat, Seungmin looks around and observes how he is probably the only one in the room still sitting down. He feels awkward but stays seated, leaning forward and itching to leave. He simply focuses on Felix, who is now talking only to Hyunjin, until he turns his head around and gestures to where he had been sitting. Felix and Hyunjin both smile and wave at Seungmin, to which he weakly waves back at them. They continue their conversation and after another minute of discussion they both hug before Felix is walking back towards Seungmin. He stands up from his spot and walks to meet Felix halfway before they made their way out of the lecture hall.
“What do you wanna get for dinner?” Seungmin asks. He pushes through the heavy doors and steps into the middle of the hallway, trying to remember from which direction he entered the building. Neither of them cooked seriously, so eating out or getting takeout was often a shared experience for the two roommates. It might not have been the most economical decision, but it was maybe healthier than eating instant ramen all of the time.
“You can pick, since I dragged you out here,” Felix responds cheerily.
“It’s fine, just don’t do it again,” Seungmin says, “there's this place I heard good things about in the plaza nearby, so we can go check that out”. The two frequently overtake the students in the hallways, both walking at their Gay™ pace and driven by the emptiness of their stomachs.
“So did you find any groups to be interesting?”
“Yeah, Day6 sounded like they’re the most put together. There was that one guy...” Seungmin goes on, “ugh, I wanna like… have sex with his voice, it was so good, like... I felt that inside”.
"That's one way to put it," Felix laughs, “gonna audition?”
“I don’t have enough experience”.
“Oh right... any other groups?”
Based on each group’s presentation Day6 was probably the only group that perfectly matched Seungmin’s musical tastes and range. Maybe Stray Kids could appeal to him, but they seemed a bit rough around the edges, and maybe a bit edgy for Seungmin’s button up shirt and khaki style. Surely JYP Nation would take him in, but the idea of playing a minimal part in such a large group felt unrewarding. Even if joining the ensemble could lead to an audition for Day6 the year after, it would be a pretty significant commitment for a mere chance. And who knows if he’ll even have time for clubs as a third year when all his courses start to pick up steam and he’ll have to start working towards law school applications.
“Meh”.
“Aww c’mon Seungminnie. I can tell that you lowkey want to try it. If you audition with me, it could be fun if we got into one together”.
He wanted to deny it but points were being made. He thought carefully as they descend the stairwell. Seungmin could hear Felix’s sincerity in his voice, but he doesn't want to cave in only because of that. Admittedly, there was only so much amusement one could get out of studying in the library all day every day, and if he was going to have any type of fun during his undergrad, this would be an optimal year for putting himself out there. By the time the two reach the ground level, they are both somewhat out of breath, “which ones were you going for? Stray Kids?”
Felix hums in approval, "I was considering GOT7 too, but Stray Kids for sure”.
“Do you think they call themselves kids because they’re all under 5’8?”
“Wow, you’ve cracked the code Seungmin, now they have to take me in since I’m 5’7," Felix replies sarcastically, “wait no, Hyunjin’s taller than you I’m pretty sure”.
Seungmin grunts while pushing open one of the doors out of the building, “if you pay for dinner I’ll audition with you”.