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When Sicheng boards the plane that is going to take him across the ocean, a whole nine-hundred and fifty-two kilometers away, he wonders if he is going to regret it. Sicheng wonders if moving to a foriegn country, a place with a language he cannot speak and customs he will not be used to, is worth leaving his family, his friends, his education, and, most importantly, his entire life, behind. He wonders if this so-called hallyu success is worth it.
Sicheng wonders if it’s worth it as he sits down in his economy-class seat, folding his gangly middle-school limbs into himself, and wonders when he’ll return home. He knows, tucked away in a corner of Běijīng Wǔdǎo Xuéyuàn, there’s a girl with her head deep into a workbook in dance studio 2A, practicing her side splits while studying for the integrated calculus test scheduled to be on Friday. A test two days from now. A test Sicheng no longer has to take, not that he wanted to in the first place (math has never been his strong suit). A test that this girl will inevitably fail, if Sicheng’s intuition is to be trusted.
She’s the only reason Sicheng is here, really. She’s the one that had greeted the SM scouts with blinding smiles and broken Korean at the Academy doors every time, she’s the one who had written every phone number down on brown cafeteria napkins and kept every crisp business card, sneaking them safely away into Sicheng’s jacket pockets and dance notebooks, just waiting to be found, to be considered. She’s the one who had convinced Sicheng to go, telling him that being a Hánguó Míngxīng will make it easier for him to gain fame when he returns to China.
Because, of course he will return, “won’t you, Sīchéng?”
“Yes.”
This girl was the one who had stayed on the phone call with Sīchéng’s parents for three hours, convincing them that it was in “Chéng Chéng’s” best interest to go. She was the one to pack all of Sīchéng’s belongings neatly into his suitcase and tidy him up for his international flight. She had straightened his jacket, fixed his hair, bid him to “have a safe flight!”, and watched as her perhaps-we-were-in-love-if-only-the-time-was-right best friend flew away, taking everything with him, leaving her with nothing but the empty promise of return, “some day.”
Sicheng looks out the cubby-sized window, and closes his eyes.
The flight is projected to be two-and-a-half hours long. It took two-and-a-half hours just to travel from the Academy grounds down to the Wàndá shopping plaza, back in Beijing. Back in Beijing, because the moment Sicheng stepped onto the plane, he had officially left his home of the past three years. Sicheng had left everything he once knew.
Again, Sicheng wonders if he is going to regret it.
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When Sicheng steps off the plane, out of the airport and into the dusty Seoul air, the first thing he’s greeted by is a glittering city, and confusion. The sights around him form a swirling mass of unrecognizable characters and jarring syllables; and to Sicheng’s eyes, nothing is familiar.
There’s supposed to be an SM staff waiting to take him downtown to Hongdae, but if they’ve arrived, Sicheng hasn’t seen them yet. Standing here, at the mouth of Incheon International Airport, Sicheng is a kettle in a cabinet of china cups, his sharp, Chinese countenance stark against the round Korean-ness surrounding him. He stands there, lost and unknowing, for what feels like a lifetime, stopping his stall only to move his luggage, a mid-sized suitcase, a starchy new American backpack full with his electronics, and his old red-and-gold schoolbag, out of the way of the Terminal C doors and its patrons.
By the time Sicheng has stood there long enough for the other airport-goers to deem him strange and an eyesore, revealed in the way they keep sending him side eyes, followed by hushed whispers (perhaps standing in front of airport terminals is some taboo of Korean culture), he has never felt more alone.
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By some stroke of luck or will of Heaven, Sicheng actually makes it to the company doors. The SM staff had gotten lost, the other trainee that was supposed to arrive at noon had missed her flight, and a very loud, very entitled lady done up in fur had thrown a tantrum over a scratched suitcase in front of the taxi pickup service station. So, as one may guess, all the effort that had been put into Sicheng’s appearance that morning (in CHINA, a whole thousand miles away, could you believe!) had slowly drained away as the events of the day had passed, much like the remaining will in his body.
Which, is merely a roundabout way of saying (or perhaps just an excuse) that Sicheng no longer has a single bone in his body willing to plaster on a smile and keep up a nice-and-friendly personality, no matter how hard everyone had drilled into him that “first impressions are everything, Sīchéng. You know, right?”
So when the first person he meets the moment he steps in from the shady backdoor of a tall conglomerate building is an older boy with a quicksilver smile and rainbow-arched eyes, Sicheng immediately decides: this puppet is to be hated. Even more so after the other boy introduces, in the most horrid, rudimentary Chinese, that he too is a foreigner. It is detestable, because there is absolutely no way in hell someone would be so happy in a place where they won’t and never will fit in.
When this sunshine of a boy takes his hand and leads him down the sterile company corridors, Sicheng thinks: You’ll see. I know you’re just as skeptical about this as I am.
Sicheng knows now, he is almost sure, that he will regret this.
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After a year of being here, Sicheng has come to terms with the fact that he was wrong.
He was wrong about how horrible this “idol training” could be, because the only thing these dance instructors and language teachers have succeeded in doing is beating his years and years of formal dance training and birth-wrought culture out of him.
He was wrong about having to retain a happy flower-boy personality, because, as his media coach had told him, “Korea’s outgrowing this ‘innocence’ phase now! Tsundere is good, tsundere is trendy.”
He was wrong about Yuta (the smiley boy). Because of all things wrong in the world, the wrong-est is the fact that a Japanese kid had left his promising soccer career in his home country, in favor of grinding his bones into dust dancing in a basement in Korea. It’s wrong because Yuta actually loves it.
And, most importantly, he was wrong about regretting his decision to come, because after months upon months of hard training, Sicheng has come to entertain the dangerous idea that he, out of everyone else, might actually succeed.
In retrospect it seems the only thing Sicheng predicted correctly was his inability to know when he’d get to return home.
Now, every day, Sicheng wakes up to get beat down, and goes to sleep just to do it all over again, and somehow, he doesn’t find it horrible. Yes, his Korean is still “in the works” as his instructor likes to put it. Yes, his dancing still isn’t on-beat because no amount of practice can wear away a decade of professional theatrical technique, to the chagrin of their choreographer. And yes, Sicheng knows the only thing going for him right now is his background, personality, and face (which is, as Sicheng had overheard the trainee evaluator say one day, the most important point), not the vocal work and dance routines Sicheng had been practicing into the night, but he’s okay with it.
He’s okay with it because when he sees the faces of the boys he practices with, the ones who had walked him through each confusing Korean syllable and talked him around every syncopated rhythm, he knows this is where he wants to belong. Sicheng can recognize the brush of a hand on his during rehearsal, the silent looks of praise during weekly assessments, and the absolutely horrid penmanship and lopsided smiley-faces that sporadically appear on the backs of his Korean homework, although the latter two only ever come from one specific person.
Sicheng can try to convince himself again and again that he has gotten comfortable with all of his batchmates, but he knows he’s always searching for Yuta's face. The first boy he’d met in Korea is the only boy Sicheng finds himself looking at (not that he’s been looking at any girls, which is weird, isn’t it?).
Even when he’s sandwiched between Kun, Lucas, and Zeren after class (along with some other Chinese trainees), the lot of them talking smack like they’re at their Māmā’s dinner table, Sicheng forgoes the conversation in favor of studying Yuta, taking in the easy way Yuta talks with the other smrookie veterans, jealous of how he himself cannot compete with their years of companionship and brotherly love.
The boy catches his eye, and gives Sicheng a grin who’s brightness would rival the sun.
But Sicheng is a mere mortal under the rule of God, a sprout relishing under the light of Helios’s molten chariot, so he wilts beneath his sovereign’s delicate touch.
He sinks into the sight of Yuta’s smile. For some reason, it feels like a betrayal.
Only, Sicheng can’t remember who he is betraying.
“You’ll come back, won’t you, Sīchéng?”
“Yes.”
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There’s a boy, seven centuries into the past, that Sīchéng had watched march farther and farther away, into the ocean between two dynasties. He had whispered vows of glory and vassaldom, silken promises slipping from his mouth as he touched the inside of Sicheng’s skin in the dark, the night before his departure. His calloused soldier’s hands catching on the sides of Sīchéng’s robes.
亲爱的，我会回来。
In three months, the generals will say his body had drowned at sea, limbs blue and bloated, carried away by monsters of the water with their long weaving bodies and sharp boned faces. They will say he was killed by a god, 対馬の神, who had ripped Sīchéng’s lover up in their slender, sharp-boned claws, and carried him off land like the wind-whip of a hurricane.
But when Sīchéng looks up into the eye of the storm, the only God of Tsushima he sees is the God that had slipped into his room during the long, lonely nights and played checkers with him by the light of the moon, their immortal smile wiping away every last memory of the soldier-boy’s kiss.
Sīchéng is the Sun of the Empire, the First Prince of Heaven, but sitting here, wrapped in the arms of a foreign God, he is nothing more than a traitor to his nation.
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WinWin makes it.
Sicheng is left rotting away in a corner of NCT 127’s practice room, because out in the real world, there is no room for anyone’s real selves.
WinWin kills Sicheng the day NCT 127’s final lineup is announced, just like how Sicheng had killed Sīchéng the minute he decided to board the plane that took him away from China.
(Looking back, WinWin wonders if anyone had come to see him off. He can’t remember, but eventually decides that anyone taking time out of their day during finals week and the Christmas rush is highly unlikely.)
(“Chéng Chéng! Have a safe flight!”)
Even though WinWin still can’t speak Korean well, he gets the priority debut with Firetruck. Even though WinWin still can’t dance on beat, he gets center in the dance breaks. Even though WinWin still can’t not behave awkwardly on screen, the fans say it's cute and his popularity skyrockets.
Even in all of his idol mediocrity, everyone’s eyes are on WinWin.
WinWin’s eyes are on Yuta.
WinWin’s eyes are on Yuta because for all the exposure and diligence and skill Yuta has, he is being sold incredibly, incredibly, short.
WinWin has only slaved away in the company for a fraction of the time Yuta has, yet they got to debut together all the same (even Johnny’s nine whole years apparently couldn’t compete). WinWin’s Korean is nowhere close to the level of proficiency Yuta is at, yet they get the same, abysmal, amount of lines. WinWin thinks Yuta is the prettiest, brightest person he has ever met, yet only one of them hogs the screentime during live performances because “your face is just too good, WinWin.”
“Thank you.”
WinWin’s eyes are on Yuta because all of Yuta’s benevolent glory and kindness could never compete against the blatant unfairness of how things played out. But it does, because the look WinWin sees in Yuta’s eyes is no longer friendship. It’s something a little bit more, a little bit deeper.
And WinWin hates it, because deep down, he knows that no matter how much devotion and love he pours into someone else, WinWin will save himself first. WinWin hates it because Yuta’s forgiving endearment is something WinWin will never be able to reciprocate. WinWin hates it, because when it comes time for him to choose between staying to fight, and running away, WinWin will run away. WinWin will forget. WinWin has already forgotten.
(“Some day, I promise.”)
WinWin watches Yuta endure every unfair comeback and every scathing comment. WinWin pushes back against any of Yuta’s affections because he knows. He knows it’s not mutual and it’s not fair. Every time WinWin walks away, he imagines that Yuta must be so incredibly strong to endure loving someone everyday and getting nothing but scorn in return.
(Sicheng thinks that Yuta definitely knows they have already loved each other for an eternity.)
(Sicheng needs to remember that he’s dead, there’s only WinWin here.)
Three years into his career with NCT 127, WinWin is called up to the president’s office. He glances at the other eight boys in their dorm, and knows that they hope for good news. Yuta’s head is down, as if wishing for a miracle.
Turning back one last time, WinWin looks at Yuta, and thinks, the strong die young.
Perhaps, then, it is a good thing that Yuta has always been everything WinWin is not.
After all, WinWin has always been one to save his own soul.
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No matter how much he falls in love, Sīchéng wills himself to remember that Gods are Gods. They are fickle and cruel, they eat out the hearts of men like cherry pits and spit out the dregs onto the ocean floor.
But Sīchéng is experienced in this game of love, this game of war. His lover had taught him to kiss first, to give himself up in order to take. His father had taught him that the winners of war must always strike first in battle.
Sīchéng wonders what it tastes like, to eat the heart of a God.
He wonders if it would count as revenge, to devour the love of a sacred being, the way that same revered entity had devoured the body of his former lover, a mere boy lost out at sea. Sīchéng doesn’t know if the God of Tsushima had taken advantage of him, in the dark of night, or if Sīchéng himself had condemned his soldier-boy through the mere act of opening a bedroom window and turning a blind eye to the being that had slipped through the crack between the panes.
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“So I’m getting replaced.”
“Well… effectively”
“Basically, you mean.”
“Well, yes. But don’t you want to go back home? Isn't there anyone you wish to see?”
“...Yes.”
Sicheng thinks of a million ‘sorry’s’.
WinWin thinks of escape.
Sīchéng thinks of the girl left studying in dance studio 2A.
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“Winko-chan, you will call, right?”
“Yes. I promise.”
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On the plane ride away from Korea, WinWin is shed in favor of Sicheng.
Sicheng is the only one who has a mountain of regret and a debt of emotions left in Korea. WinWin is here to run away. Sīchéng is here to make amends. Sicheng wonders if any of these choices is what he truly wants.
In the months after their plane touched down into the cold, drizzling weather of Shanghai, Sicheng has gotten lines, mv screentime, and variety show appearances. He has gotten to mentor fresh trainees, to act in dramas, and most importantly, to communicate in the language he grew up with. The language his past lovers have spoken (except for a few).
In the months after their plane touched down, Sicheng finds that his highschool best friend that-possibly-could-have-been-more-if-only-the-time-was-right is engaged. But she’s happy for him and he’s happy for her and they quickly become friends again. (This unexpected outcome makes Sīchéng wonder if leaving Korea was worth it.)
In the months after their plane touched down, Sicheng gets at least ten messages a day from Yuta in varying levels of encouragement and support (and love), but he only replies with short, quick phrases. (Yuta’s persisting affection even from a thousand miles away makes WinWin wonder if leaving Korea was worth it.)
Sicheng entertains the idea that, finally, there has come a plane ride that he regrets.
(It’s times like these when Sicheng wonders if forsaking those you love is a skill. If it was, then Sicheng is a goddamned Olympic champion.)
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The God of Tsushima is absent the next time the Empire invades the Land of the Sea.
Sīchéng contemplates if this victory was worth it, if his father’s success was worth the lives of two lovers and an empty bed.
Historians will say the First Prince of Heaven succumbed to sea fever a-week-and-a-day after the invasion.
Sīchéng’s dead, stained hands say otherwise.
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Sicheng touches down in Korea, October of 2020.
His bright, smiling, summer boy is there to greet him.
This time, Sicheng thinks, this time, I will do everything right.
Sīchéng and WinWin are silent.