Chapter Text
He’s been with the group for barely minutes when he naturally slips into his position as the second in command. Everyone’s been in the group longer than he has, hell he’s only been a trainee for a little under a week while their leader has been haunting the halls of JYP for closing in on a decade. Even the baby of the group has been there for years.
But he’s one of the oldest, even though it’s the first time he hasn’t been considered a kid himself. They all clamor over his years of experience on stage, even if he was just in the background.
And Bang Chan could really use the help.
Everyone in the group is a chaotic mix of anxiety, stress, and excitement. The second oldest is just as manic as everyone else and Minho doubts he could ever be an enforcer. Two of the members seem to hate each other, one barely speaks Korean, and there’s a literal child thrown in the mix.
So he helps with corralling the members, he makes sure they eat and drink as much as their diets allow. He corrects them during dance practice, and when the announcement comes that they’ll be debuting he nods while the others scream and run around, carefully listening to the conditions of their debut.
When they calm down, the anxiety in the room is palpable. They’re not just debuting as a group like most other bands, they’re debuting on a tv show. It wasn’t a new concept for the label, but the instructions were specific: they were going to be judged. Evaluated. It will be just like being a trainee, but on camera.
He’s twenty, the time he’s been a trainee can still be counted in days, and he’s not sure he’s ready.
The weeks before the show starts, he’s part of the group guiding the younger members through what to expect. Chan and Woojin both have friends who have debuted before and they spit out anything useful they can remember being told, and he tells them about stage cues, where to focus your eyes, how to recover on camera.
He’s formally made in charge of the dance group, which is fine. He knows how to dance, he knows how to direct others how to dance. He practices his vocals late at night, because he doesn’t have the years of stage history with that. But the others are practicing at night too, everyone is sleep deprived trying to cram whatever extra improvements they can.
Chan is in charge of the rapping subunit formally, but he’s also in charge of everyone else. Especially Felix, whose Korean is improving but still reverts to English when nervous. And Minho really only knows minimal English.
So when he sees Chan trying to give a pep talk to the rap line after one of them dropped a mic during practice, he lets the formal assignments start to blur. He hovers around them, steps in with a recommendation on how to divert attention if they’re nervous. Pats their backs to show his support, his understanding. The songs are well picked, they work to their strengths. The choreography is intense, but it distracts.
And they make their way through the first showcase. The commentary on their performance was harsh, sure. But they’re moved forward, and when he’s forced to join the others in the dorms, he joins the other leaders breaking down performance videos, improving moves.
He’s not used to being charismatic on stage, with years of precisely the opposite requested of him, but his position in the unit is more of a support role anyway. He sings, sure, but he’s mostly there to make the movements cohesive, to make the others shine. He can create the choreography that makes their new song have more punch, he can make sure everyone follows it to a tee.
They’re all nervous, but they’ve been nervous for weeks, months, years waiting to debut. He works hard on his own, he works hard to reassure them. On more than one occasion he’s sat next to a member as they cried, he pats their shoulders. Ruffles their hair. Keeps them sane to keep himself sane.
And they keep surviving.
Until he doesn’t. Until he’s finally cut, for his weakest skill. For his lack of training.
It hurts. He tried so hard, they all tried so hard. It hurts that Felix was dropped despite trying even harder.
Everyone cries that day. On camera, off camera, quietly or in groups.
And it’s at three am the next morning that Jisung has the first panic attack he’s aware of.
The sound of someone running is not new in the dorms, but it’s not normally accompanied with cries for help. He’s up instantly, having spent the night carefully reviewing every single performance he’d even done and identifying all his faults.
There’s a small crowd in the bathroom the dorm rooms all share. There’s multiple people crying, crowding two figures on the ground.
“He’s not breathing!” someone wails, and he has to dodge to the side to get around two people that suddenly move to grab at each other.
Chan is crouched on his knees, next to Jisung that appears to be shivering, unresponsive, on the ground. He’s trying to talk to him, hand on his trembling arm.
He’s not new to this type of scene. No matter how much you practice, no matter how confident, your first big stage show will scare you. And some members of his old dance troupe could scare harder than others. None as bad as this, but close.
Once he makes it past the crowd he immediately slams into the floor between Jisung’s legs. Previous experience comforting the boy has told him he tends to respond better to physical touch than words, so he grabs his ankles and tugs them past his own hips, dragging the boy onto his lap.
“Up.” He orders as he bends to grab Jisung’s shoulders, Chan immediately helping to hoist him up. There’s still crying behind him, but it’s not important right now so he ignores it. Instead he places a hand on the boy’s chest, another on his nape and leans his head onto his shoulder.
He can hear that he’s breathing now, can feel the short breaths on his skin as he hyperventilates. The trembling is the force of his diaphragm as it works overtime.
His hand squeezes on the back of his neck as he shifts his head so that his nose brushes against Jisung’s short hair.
“Can you hear me?” he asks softly, mouth already nearly at the boy’s ear. He feels the boy swallow in between his rapid breaths and figures that’s as close to an answer as he’d get for right now. Chan’s eyes make contact with him over the shuddering boy and he nods quickly.
“I’m going to help you breathe, ok?” He murmurs as Chan gets up in his periphery, turning to the crowd he’d completely forgotten about. “Breathe in when I press, out when I release.” He adds, pushing with the hand on the boy’s chest.
For a moment, the puffs of breath on his skin come faster, panicked. He squeezed the boy’s nape reassuringly and pulls his hand back marginally off his chest.
“You don’t need to match it immediately.” He soothes. “I’ll do it with you ok? In one-two-three.”
He exaggerates his inhale and they both move with the movement. His exhale is loud and makes the boy’s messy hair tremble. He counts them through nearly a dozen breaths before Jisung even begins to match his. He feels tears seep through his shirt but he keeps counting, murmuring encouragements, as if they weren’t there.
Chan comes back at some point and that’s when Minho realizes the room had emptied.
“You breathing ok now?” Asks Chan, his hand rubbing up and down Jisung’s back. Something about the movement screams of familiarity, of repetition, and Minho can guess this is not the first time this has happened.
Jisung shifts slightly nodding against Minho’s neck but not removing himself. There’s a sniffle and a shuddering exhale against his skin and he moves his hand from Jisung’s nape to the back of his head. He presses lightly to indicate he’s allowed to stay like this as long as he wants. Jisung’s arms that have hung limp so far move to encircle Minho.
He moves his own hand away from the boy’s chest, wrapping around his waist instead to keep them close as he continues to exaggerate his breaths.
Chan is crying as he continues to rub Jisung’s back. “What are we going to do without you?” he mumbles, voice watery.
“You can always hire me as a backup dancer.” Minho huffs, half knowing the question was rhetorical. He just needs to fill the painful silence that followed, feeling the way that Jisung had tensed at the words. “I’ll send you my CV.”
He looks away from the tears rolling down Chan’s face and focuses back on Jisung’s breathing. He’s holding out ok, stuttering every so often but overall keeping steady.
“How are the others?” He asks Chan without looking up, seeing his hand retract from Jisung’s back.
“Felix, Jeongin, and Hyun are sleeping together now. Seung is in his own bed and Changbin refuses to sleep.” Chan states, hands wringing. Now that he thinks about it, he’s pretty sure two of the trio were the ones he had to dodge earlier.
“Do you want to go to bed too, Ji?” Chan asks, cautiously.
Minho can feel Jisung tense, his arms snaking around him even tighter.
“You don’t need to go alone.” He mutters into the boy’s ear and feels him nod minutely.
He pulls his legs back under himself, feeling Jisung’s slip off his thighs. He starts to stand, forcing their arms to finally loosen and it’s the first time he’s seen Jisung’s face since he first stormed into the room. He looks like the kid he is, scared and tear-streaked and just eighteen.
Chan looks worried, hands hovering around them as Minho hauls Jisung into his arms. Minho’s not worried though, he didn’t dance every day for the last four years to collapse when carrying a half-starved trainee.
He goes to his room, partly out of barely-solidified routine, partly because he can’t remember if Jisung has a lower bunk too. He slides into his bed immediately after Jisung, hand rubbing up his arms as he feels Chan throw a blanket on them as best he can.
Jisung resists sleep, but the exhaustion pulls him down eventually and Minho follows soon after.
He wakes up the next morning to a subdued dorm. Jisung is still asleep in his arms, but others are moving around. There’s a heated argument down the hall performed in agitated whispers. He catches what sounds like Woojin say something about moving on so the rest can debut, and Chan retorts something about being a team.
He can understand Woojin, the poor kid had seen all his friends debut and now it was all at risk because of two others who had been trainees for under a year combined. He can’t ask anyone to risk their dreams like that.
The argument ends with someone stomping away and the door to their room opens.
“How are you feeling?” He hears Chan say as he crouches next to them. There’s no response for a moment, despite everyone being awake now.
“Will they get rid of me next?” says the smallest voice he’d ever heard come out of Jisung, tears in the boy’s eyes.
“No!” soothes Chan before Minho even has the time to process the words. “They wouldn’t dare. You’re my first member. If they got rid of you, they’d have to get rid of everyone else too.”
“But… my...” Jisung continues. “I will mess up.”
“You haven’t though.” Minho interjects, hearing Chan’s mouth click shut behind him. “I’ve lived with you for two months and I didn’t know you had anxiety until today. You manage it well, you don’t let it affect your performances.”
He can tell the kid wants to fight him on it, but Chan’s hand reaches past him to ruffle Jisung’s hair.
“Come on, you both need to eat breakfast.”
He keeps waking up in the dorms. No one tells him to pack up and leave. Instead he’s told to come back on the show, the audience votes for them to come back. He suspects that Chan fought for him and Felix behind closed doors. The relationship between the two eldest grows colder as the competition continues, but Jisung and Hyunjin stop ghosting each other after the panic attack.
They make it through the competition intact. A true – not this elimination nonsense- debut date is scheduled. The rap line is busier than ever, Stray Kids intends to produce mostly their own songs after the success of their self-written ones in the competition.
They’re assigned a choreographer, but he can’t stop himself. He works with the choreographer to personalize the dances to their style, he the others improve their moves.
He works on his vocals, avoids being assigned any rapping lines, and keeps an eye out for any warning signs of another anxiety attack in Jisung. There isn’t anything nearly as big as the first one, but now that he’s watching, really watching, he sees when Jisung dissociates a little. When he gets caught up in his head.
He disrupts unruly thoughts with a tap to his shoulders, a hand on his arm.
He doesn’t need to do more for a while. The songs from the show were released in a mixtape and it did well on the charts. There were many meetings about how they were meeting the right metrics for their debut stage, audience perception was favorable, it was looking good.
Looking good also involved a lot of pre-debut promotion. They were a known entity already, so that means talk shows and interviews and livestreams. They spent entire days on media coaching, meetings with PR to develop and fine tune their stage persona.
Minho’s persona, Lee Know, wasn’t that much different than his regular life. Him, but turned up to eleven, louder, comically grumpy, tsundere. PR had said that Chan was already going to cover the caretaker role as group leader, so he didn’t need to fill that role too. The public would love that the attractive one was cold and bordering on mean.
He could do that.
Most of the kids got to be themselves but louder too. They were chaotic jokesters at home, and with the media team’s blessing they just became more. Except for Seungmin, who mostly kept quiet until he had something devastating to say. Sometimes he thought Min was his favorite just because he could hear the sweet sound of silence around him.
Everyone looked out for each other, but he and Chan subconsciously divided the 00-01s line between themselves. Just to keep an extra eye on them. And so he watched over Jisung and Seungmin when he could spare a glance their way. Sat closer to them, made sure they ate.
That’s how he was the first to notice Jisung’s bouncing leg. They were at their third public appearance of the day, a week out from their real debut. This radio show had a sizable audience, but they were all tired and their time would probably have been better used practicing their routine so that it was all pure muscle memory.
Subtly, so that the radio host wouldn’t notice, he slid his hand so it pressed down on Jisung’s leg, immobilizing it. Immediately, the boy’s head whips around to look at him. Minho flicks his eyes pointedly to the host, reminding Jisung of where they were. When Jisung looks forward again, he slowly removes his hand and interjects an answer to the host’s question.
A minute later he felt Jisung moving around next to him, dragging his nails across the material of his pants. A quick glance shows that he was staring forward blankly, his breathing a little faster than it should be.
This was a radio show, but there are cameras aimed at them. This would be online. He had to work subtly.
Trying to be as casual as he could he reaches over, grabbing the back of his chair and dragging it until it is flush with his. Luckily the wheels don’t squeak.
His right hand settles on Jisung’s left shoulder, rubbing at the joint casually. After waiting a moment to check if anyone was looking, he continues leaning into his space as he moves his left hand to intercept the one Jisung had on his thigh. The fingers are clenched tightly, nails curled to pierce through the fabric and into the muscle.
He presses along the lengths of his fingers, trying to flatten their palms open. Jisung’s breathing hitches and he hopes the mics didn’t pick it up. Slowly, keeping an eye out for a reaction from anyone else at the table, he works on interlacing their fingers so he could force the hand to relax.
He hears Chan wrapping up the interview and sat back up to say his own bit, right hand moving from his shoulder to squeeze softly at Jisung’s nape.
The cue to end the interview is said and Jisung bows along with the rest of the members as Minho returns his hand to his own space, his ability to intervene over for now.
They make it out into the hallway with minimal issues. The radio station doesn’t have a green room, and they’re herded directly to the vans so he loses Jisung in the crowd of members and managers. By the time he makes it to the vans he realizes that Jisung is not in his. Chan isn’t either, so it should be ok. Jisung existed in a stressful environment before he had joined, and Chan is observant.
He would have still preferred to be in the car with them.
He doesn’t know if its his perfectionism, but he wants to be the one to help Jisung. The others have too much going on, too many of their own anxieties, responsibilities, etc. He doesn’t have distractions though. He can multitask though, and he knows he won’t panic in a crisis like they did before.
Maybe he’s a little bit controlling.
The realization doesn’t stop him from marching through the apartment without acknowledging anyone else once their van finally drops them off. He goes straight past his room and into the one Jisung shares with Jeongin.
He saw Jeongin on his way to the room, so he knows the voice getting louder as he approaches isn’t the maknae’s.
“They’re going to keep happening. Interviews are a big part of promotions.” He hears through the door. “And most of them won’t be scripted.”
“I know.” A wet voice replies, and he instantly knows its Jisung. “I’ll get used to it. I have to.”
He sees Jisung with his face in hands, sitting on the edge of his bead, when he opens the door. Both he and Chan immediately turn to face him, but neither speaks as he closes the door and walks up next to Chan’s crouching form.
“How was this different than the show?” He asks, ignoring Chan completely and trying to look at Jisung in the eye despite the fingers in the way. “You didn’t seem to struggle then.”
Neither speaks, though he can see Chan trying to say something and deciding against it. The leader does look very uncomfortable, like Minho’s insertion is unwanted, but he ignores that.
When the silence extends too long he prompts again. “Was it because they were strangers? The setting? The fact that it was unscripted?”
Chan’s hand taps at his leg to tell him to stop, but he is validated when Jisung finally makes a noise.
“It’s not…” he starts, stopping immediately to push the heels of his hands into his eyes. He can hear a shuddering breath.
“What made the show safer then?” he asks, crouching down to try to crowd him a little less. Chan probably had the right idea with that one.
It takes a moment for him to answer, but they both watch as his hands migrate into his hair. “We practice so much that I don’t need to think during stages.” Jisung mumbles, eyes fixated on his feet. He takes a moment to continue, but they have nothing else scheduled today so Minho can wait him out. “When the spikes happen, my body just continues. I don’t need to think.”
“And today you had to be aware.” Chan adds softly, a hand patting Jisung’s knee comfortingly. The boy nods slowly.
Minho’s mind is already whirling, coming up with a plan. Chan seems to know a lot already, but he needs more information.
“When I touched you, did that help?” He asks, and Chan looks at him briefly before looking back to Jisung.
The boy nods, eyes never leaving his feet. It’s not nearly as much information as he’d wanted, but it’s something.
“I could tell you were… losing focus.” He is choosing his words carefully. “If it helps bring you back, I… we can sit next to you and ground you in the future.” He continues, amending his words when Chan looks at him pointedly. “Do you think that would help?”
Jisung still doesn’t look at them, but his arms finally fall away from his face as he takes a big inhale and nods once more.
He has more questions he wants answered, but Jisung looks exhausted. He’s bouncing his legs again, something they’ll have to talk about another day, but this is enough to work on for now.
Chan is very much the type of leader to love overtly, but make moves in silence. It’s two days after their talk that someone decides that their entry lineup needs to remain static, and they dedicate an entire hour to assembling in the decided order and performing their quick intro sequence.
It does not escape Minho’s attention that he’s at the end of the lineup, just behind Jisung.
He and Chan also end up within reaching distance of the boy for every interview they have. In one he quickly pats the small of Jisung’s back as the boy goes uncharacteristically quiet for a bit, and in another Chan loudly slaps Jisung’s legs as he laughs at something a tad too hard.
His plan is working, and their first performance as an official band goes well. There’s still problems, Felix has confidence issues that Chan frantically talked him through as the makeup artists hovered nearby in case tears ruined her work.
Most of them were giant balls of nerves to be honest, but this was a familiar nervousness. It was mixed with excitement and relief and the overwhelming feeling of having survived this far despite all odds.
Once on the stage, they did great. Their bodies knew when to move, when to sing. They had made it.