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Every time Jisung spawns onto the track of the Royal Raceway, he has a routine.
First, smile that charmingly bright smile of his at the crowd. Then, as the camera pans towards him, flash the signature pose, throw finger guns at the camera.
He’s been doing this for years, but every single time he soaks it up, the glory of the beginning of a race. The way the crowds cheer his name, an overload sugar in his system.
Jisung takes a second to admire how decked out his kart is: light blue and pink, a pretty and decadent swirl of colours, with little tiny bubbles of gum as the handles. In sticky taffy, his name, Bubblegum Jisungie is pulled across the kart. He hops right into the kart, fluffy marshmallow padded seats cushioning him, and checks himself out in the rear view mirror.
His hair is extra blue today, and you could probably spot him from a mile away. If you’re fast enough to catch him, that is.
A flash of light green hair and bold red pulls up next to him. Jisung doesn’t even have to look to know who it is.
Chenle snickers. “Ready to lose?”
“Eat dirt , Cherry.”
“Aww,” Chenle coos tauntingly, and Jisung steps on the accelerator a little harder, knowing that the game won’t let him move anyway. “Don’t be so sour. Doesn’t fit your tooth-rottingly sweet branding.”
Jisung finally rolls his head to the right to look Chenle in the face, and almost regrets it when he’s reminded of how obnoxiously red Chenle’s kart is. It’s cherry red, and the wheels are made of graham crackers. Across the kart, the words Cherrypie Chenle are scrawled in a loopy cursive with bright white frosting and red gel on top of it. His eyes trail up to Chenle’s face, who’s still smirking, and it has Jisung seeing red. Literally.
“You only won last week because you used a cherry bomb on me at the finish line!”
Jisung and Chenle have been the top two racers in Sugar Rush for years now. No other racers even come close.
The two of them, though? They’re always neck and neck, and each week one beats the other by barely a hair. Neither of them have ever had a streak of more than three wins in a row, and Jisung was gunning for his fourth last week. He was going to do it: be the first racer to achieve a four-week streak, and he sure was ready to hang that over Chenle’s head forever.
Until Chenle had swerved in and dropped a cherry bomb on him right at the finish line.
Jisung had sworn the colour red was reserved for devils ever since. Devils like Zhong Cherrypie Chenle.
“Hmm,” Chenle hums, “it’s not against the rules though?”
The little marshmallow referee descends from the sky, dangling above them as he holds the traffic signal, cutting Jisung short of his response. He’s not letting Chenle distract him this time.
Ready.
Around him, the engines rev, and Jisung can see puffs of pucker powder dust the air, like pastel snow. It fills up his system, the smell of tart watermelon, and he can taste the zing on his tongue.
Set.
And no matter how many times he races, how many years of experience he’s got under his belt, his heart still hammers in his chest, and a bubble of adrenaline builds up and courses it’s way through his veins.
Go.
Jisung slams down on the accelerator, and whizzes past the first few kart racers that were alongside him at the start line. He mentally bids them goodbye; he won’t be seeing them for a while, considering the speed he goes. Still, Chenle is annoyingly at the same speed he is, but he can’t go any faster at the moment, so he grits his teeth and waits for Gumball Gorge— which he can already see coming up. Ahead, Jisung hears the sound of a metal clasp opening, a sign that the game has activated for the gumballs to drop along the gorge, and he swiftly moves to turn in.
When he approaches the gorge, the gumballs are already rolling up and down the valley, like a pendulum, and any beginner racer would start sweating at the sight. Not Jisung, though, far too experienced to let something this early in the race phase him, and he whizzes right past the all the gumballs with such precision and timing you’d think he was programmed to do so.
He looks in his rearview mirror, and hopes for a miracle gumball to take Chenle out. He sees an empty path behind him, and for a second believes that a miracle truly has descended on him.
“Over here, loser!”
Ugh. How naive of him to forget that Chenle is almost as talented of a racer as he is.
There’s a sharp bank ahead, and with the small headstart he has, Jisung takes the opportunity to close in on the bend, to clear the turn as quickly as possible. It seems Chenle has the same plan, and moves to overtake and cut into Jisung’s lane.
He senses danger, sure, but Jisung is competitive, and he’s not about to let that cherry-headed kid overtake him. So he slams down even harder on the accelerator, moving so close to the wall of the gorge you’d only be able to fit a single cube of sugar between the wall and his kart.
Chenle doesn’t let up, still determined on over-taking Jisung, and their karts are now only a hair apart. A replay of his loss last week plays in Jisung’s head, and he has a moment of tunnel vision; only a bit more til the turn is over, if only he can just hold out—
Then, he hears a rumbling, and whilst Jisung wants to chalk it up to his kart going into overdrive, or a stray piece of candy that’s being rolled up and crushed under his wheels, it’s far too loud for him to ignore. He turns his head to the right to locate the culprit of the sound, and, beyond Chenle’s car, he sees a bright orange ball barrelling towards them.
A gumball .
But it’s too late— the second both he can register it as such, before he has time to swerve away from it gracefully, said gumball is hurling towards them, cornering the both of them into the wall of the gorge.
The last thing Jisung sees is orange. He closes his eyes, and readies himself for the game to do it’s thing. It’ll be okay, he’s a good enough racer for him to be able to pick it back up. It’s not like he hasn’t done it before.
He closes his eyes, waits for the marshmallow referees to come pick him and his kart up and drop him off at the beginning of Gumball Gorge, ready to start again.
He closes his eyes and waits, but to his surprise he doesn’t feel the wind in his hair, the lightness of being lifted by the marshmallows. Instead, he feels out of place, and the air around him feels oddly still. Jisung cracks an eye open.
“What the-”
Jisung’s surprised to find himself not only not at the beginning of Gumball Gorge in the air, but he’s standing, and he’s kart-less .
He looks around, and in front of him is the wall of the gorge, and behind him is just a repetition of the terrain— chocolate floor, and a diet coke river that streams by peacefully.
Beside him, Chenle rubs at his head, wincing in pain.
Jisung blinks a few more times, still dishevelled and very much confused, looking beyond the diet coke river to try and figure out what’s going on.
The diet coke river, when you follow it with your eyes, doesn’t flow over the edge; it sits still, placid and unmoving. Jisung gets on his tippy toes, peering over the edge of the river bank, only to find… nothing. Just a blank space, an endless and infinite light blue that goes on and on. There are no clouds, not even a pixelated bird flying by.
Oh , he thinks, and also says aloud.
“We’re out of bounds.”
“Yeah,” Chenle huffs, arms flailing as he stomps his foot petulantly, “I’m aware!”
The gumball must’ve glitched the game, too many quantities in one area at the same time for it to process. Now he’s here, with Chenle of all people, standing right behind the wall, stuck.
“This is your fault.”
“Is not!”
“You cut into my lane! ”
“Whatever,” Chenle says, nibbling on a cherry gummy he pulled from his hair. “This sucks. I was so looking forward to beating you this week.”
From a distance, they can hear the sound of the other racers’ karts buzzing by, and Jisung sighs.
“We should figure out a way to get back in bounds. The race might end soon.”
Chenle’s eyes widen, and his mouth forms a comically large ‘o’ shape.
“Ohmygod,” Chenle rushes out, “ohmygod. Ohmygod .”
He’s slapping, no, smacking Jisung on the arm now, and Jisung rubs at the area as he winces in pain.
“Ouch!” Jisung exclaims, grabbing onto Chenle’s wrist to stop him from hitting the already sore patch of skin again, “that hurts!”
“We’re going to die, Jisung,” he says very dramatically and very, very loudly. “Ohmygod, I can’t believe I’m spending my last moments with you .”
Jisung rolls his eyes. Chenle is the epitome of dramatic and he swears the boy uses zero percent of his working brain. Like his entire brain is just made of popping candy that never. Stops. Popping.
“We’re not going to die,” he sighs, “and for the record, I’d be honoured to be dying with me.”
“No, don’t you get it?” he says, like it’s obvious, and Jisung really doesn’t get it. “They’ll finish the race and the game will restart and we won’t respawn with everyone else and ohmygod we’re going to die !”
Okay, so maybe Chenle uses some percent of his working brain.
Jisung stills. “Uh, do you mean… when the-”
“When the game restarts! We won’t respawn! It’ll erase us from the leaderboard and we’ll become unplayable!”
Unplayable. Every racer’s biggest fear. You go from being able to top the leaderboard to being a mere Sugar Rush citizen, confined to a couple pixels on the screen. Jisung shivers.
Suddenly, he hears an oof sound, and turns his head to see Chenle ramming himself into the wall repeatedly.
“What,” Jisung deadpans, “are you doing.”
Chenle huffs loudly, falling back onto his ass after another failed attempt at ramming himself into the gorge. “I’m trying to clip back in,” he gestures vaguely, as if Jisung’s missing something. “Duh.”
“You look like an idiot.”
“At least one of us is trying.”
Chenle moves to stand up, dusting the powdered sugar off himself. He’d fallen so hard the entire backside of his pants are covered in white powder, and Jisung honestly tries his hardest to contain a chuckle.
It doesn’t work. Chenle throws him an annoyed stare.
“Sorry,” Jisung says (but doesn’t really mean), then coughs the remainder of his laughter into his elbow.
Chenle rolls his eyes, then sighs loudly. He walks up to Jisung, and before Jisung can ask what he’s doing, he’s got both arms around Jisung, lifting him off the ground. Jisung curls up on instinct.
“Chenle! Put me down! ”
It doesn’t work. Chenle hoists him up over his shoulder, and rams them both into the wall again. It seems like Chenle was fast enough for the game to at least react, but clearly not in the way that they had hoped, because the wall sends them zipping backwards, farther from the race track.
He lands in Chenle’s lap, and it takes him a whiff of artificial cherry scent to process that he’s mere pixels away from Chenle’s face. Chenle’s looking at him through his green bangs, and Jisung’s ears start to burn uncomfortably.
Jisung scrambles to his feet, dusting himself off as casually as he can. “What was that for?!”
Chenle shrugs. “I tried.”
In a final moment of resignation, Chenle picks a cherry from his hair, and chews on it. Probably out of stress. Or habit.
Definitely habit, because he instinctively goes to knot the cherry stem in his mouth. Jisung’s seen him do it mindlessly before.
His tongue pokes through his cheeks several times, and Jisung tries really hard to fight the blush that’s creeping its way up his back, along his spine and right up to the tips of his ears. He feels warm, much warmer than before.
Must be because he hates Chenle so much.
Then, Chenle finally bites on the stem, and pulls the rest of the knot tight with his fingers much, much slower than necessary. He beams, shiny white teeth and gum showing, and Jisung coughs.
“Um,” he says, turning away to save himself, “that was lame.”
“I could teach you,” Chenle says, tossing the knotted stem somewhere into the diet coke river.
“No!” Jisung says, much too loud and frantic, “no. That’s okay. I’ll, uh, I’ll pass.”
He decides to save himself further embarrassment by distracting himself with the knot, as it floats it’s way towards the invisible boundary, where the river tapers off. It falls past the edge of the coke, and off into the white abyss. He mentally bids it goodbye.
But then, distantly, a tiny pixel catches Jisung’s eye, a dark green thing bunched up in the middle. A very suspiciously familiar skinny dark green thing, that almost looks like a—
“Cherry stem!”
“You called?”
“No, Chenle, do that again!”
“Why?” Chenle asks, wiggling his eyebrows, “I thought you said it was lame?”
Jisung, however, isn’t even looking at Chenle, so there’s no retort to the comment. Instead, he’s focused on the bright blue sky with the cotton candy clouds, and he smacks Chenle again.
“Just do it!”
“Okay, okay!” Chenle concedes, going to pick another cherry from his hair. Another one respawns in its place. He knots it carefully yet nimbly, then, he tosses it back into the diet coke river, and watches as it floats off to the edge of the border.
Chenle stares at Jisung expectantly, but Jisung only points at the sky. Chenle turns his attention to the vast space.
And it happens again; a green thing with a knot in the middle falls right through the sky, landing somewhere they can’t see.
“Huh?” Chenle has a confused expression twisted on his face.
“The game, it loops. As in, if you fall off the edge of the world, it’ll clip you back in from the top!” Jisung exclaims, excited by his own apparent intelligence. “All we have to do is fall off the edge of the world!”
“Very funny, Jisung.”
“Why?” Jisung teases, “are you scared?”
For the first time, Chenle goes quiet.
Oh.
Jisung feels his heart soften, something tugging at it, a rare moment where he feels pity for his years-long rival.
“Uh, it’ll be fine!” Jisung says, skipping over to the graham cracker bush where he breaks a large piece of cracker off, “we can use this as a raft, and it’ll be just like a mini-game!”
With the cracker under his arm, he sticks out a hand for Chenle to take. “Okay?”
Chenle swallows thickly. “Okay.”
Tugging on Chenle’s hand, they make their way to the river. From here, they can only see the light blue of the pixelated sky, and Jisung would be lying if he said he wasn’t a little scared.
They both take a seat on the cracker, and Chenle takes in deep breath. Hands still linked, Jisung squeezes his hand. He rocks the cracker back and forth, until it’s right at the edge of the river and border. Chenle clutches onto Jisung tight, head buried in his shoulder.
The cracker tips forward ever so slightly, and then they’re falling. Jisung feels light, and he can feel the cracker detach itself from him, and Jisung briefly thinks that the game devs did a great job programming the physics engine (really, though, spectacular work). Chenle’s still hugging tight, and Jisung ignores the warmth he feels in his gut that’s contrasting with the cold breeze of falling.
He’s expecting a hard fall, and a few of his pixels to go a little wacky, but it seems the game has decided to be nice to them today, because the cracker lands on a slope that sends the cracker flying right down and through the finish line. On cue, the confetti cannon goes off above them. Like a mockery.
Chenle cracks one eye open, and finally lets out a breath.
“...I’m not even going to question where you guys came from,” Renjun, the least enthusiastic announcer you’ll ever meet, deadpans. “Anyway. Last place for both of you. Crown goes to Butterscotch.”
Jisung looks ahead to see her on her knees bawling tears of joy, her first time winning a place above third ever , and she’s clutching onto her medal so hard Jisung’s worried it might crack (those chocolate coins are fragile; Jisung’s earned enough of them to know).
Renjun walks up to their cracker raft. “You guys really giving up your titles this week?”
Jisung shrugs. “Eh, we were feeling charitable.”
He moves to stand up, and extends his hand for Chenle to take. Chenle takes it gracefully, a small smile forming on his lips as he gets up from where he’d been curled in on himself.
“Thanks, Jisungie,” Chenle says, voice smaller than Jisung’s ever heard it, and he leans in to peck Jisung on the cheek, lips soft, sticky with his lip gloss. “You’re still going down next week, though.”
And when Chenle skips away, like a little kid on a sugar high, Jisung’s cheeks burn a bright, cherry red.