Work Text:
Kim Doyoung doesn’t remember eating any laced brownies over the course of the past twenty-four hours.
He’s sure of it. All that he’s consumed over the last day or so was a random fruit salad he’d purchased at a local convenience store for lunch, half a carton of Jajangmyeon that Taeil had ordered into the dorm for dinner, a protein shake for breakfast the next day, and he hadn’t eaten lunch yet, so really, nothing weird.
So why was he currently looking straight at a mirror version of himself standing about five feet in front of him, somewhere within a random MCountdown hallway at eleven in the morning?
How did he even get himself into this situation in the first place, anyway?
—
“Ugh, Jungwoo, get off me, you’re so sweaty.”
Doyoung looks over his shoulder to see a clearly disgruntled Jaehyun trying to detach a lovey-dovey Jungwoo’s arms from around his upper body, wrinkling up his nose while forcefully prying a pair of flailing arms off from around his hips. The younger man didn’t seem to quite appreciate what he was doing and only moved his arms up to encapsulate the circumference of Jaehyun’s chest instead, interlacing his fingers just above the older man’s heart and letting out a cheery laugh as he delivered a series of light squeezes to the muscle around the area.
“Jungwoo! Doyoung-hyung, help me!” Jaehyun’s pained face fills up Doyoung’s sight when he sighs and spins on his heel to turn around and glare at the two younger men fighting around behind him, the blonde’s eyes wordlessly begging him for help as he thrashed around in Jungwoo’s grip, trying to throw the younger man off of him.
He sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose.
“You guys are so stupid. Jungwoo, let go of him before someone sees us and thinks that we’re high or something,” he tiredly tells his two bandmates, and lets out a long huff when the addressed man pouts but removes his arms from around Jaehyun’s torso, who springs out of his grasp and lets out a yelp of relief as he crashes into a nearby wall. Doyoung quickly does a brief scan of their surroundings for any lurking cameras or masked staff members who could be witnessing the absolutely buffoonery that his band members (in their mid-20s) had been indulging in, and lets out a sigh of relief when he finds none. After all, they’ve walked far away enough from the stage set to be within seeing or hearing range of any of the staff or cameras located around the dressing rooms and performance areas, so he relaxes when he realizes that there will be no headlines along the lines of Neitzens accuse NCT DoJaeJung of smoking weed after MCountdown Performance! in the news tomorrow morning. That would be horrible. Taeyong would have their heads again, and there were very few things in this world that Doyoung was more scared of than an angry Taeyong. The man might look cute and adorable on the outside, but when he really got angry, Doyoung would honestly rather eat an entire baby cucumber than face the wrath of his leader at any given time. And that said a lot, considering that he was deathly afraid of the vegetable.
Anyways, where was he? Oh yes, MCountdown.
NCT DoJaeJung had just finished yet another successful performance of Perfume on MCountdown, and Doyoung was still basking in the post-performance adrenaline that he always felt after coming off of a good performance as he strolled through the hallways of the building. Singing and dancing in front of NCTzens always gave him a type of joy that he could never quite find or replicate anywhere else, a warm, buzzing sort of feeling that hammered under his skin and made his mind feel like it was on Cloud 9 (which also kind of sounded like the side effects of being high, but he never really liked to do that, so, whatever), and it was a feeling that he constantly chased and looked forward to whenever he got the chance to be on stage. It was what he was born to do, he told himself, to be a star and fill the hearts of his Doiezens with his voice and face, and there was absolutely nothing else in the world that Doyoung liked to do better than to make his Doiezens and Nctzens happy.
Another thing about performing on stage was that it was always disgustingly sweaty. Feverishly dancing around a stage in layers of clothes under the shine of a dozen bright spotlights usually resulted in nothing else than a sheer layer of sweat coating over his skin once the ending fairy camera had cut out, along with hundreds of beads of salty drops running down every length of his body and pooling around in uncomfortable places ( cough cough, his underwear ), so right now, Doyoung wanted to do nothing else other than to get to the dressing rooms as fast as humanly possible and change out of his sweat-soaked clothes as soon as he could. But he couldn’t even do that , not with his two teammates currently catfighting with each other about three feet behind his right ear.
He was actually about to punch someone. Preferably Jungwoo, but anyone else worked, too.
“Guys, can we actually hurry the fuck up?” He turns around and snaps at his band members, who look up from their slap-fight to stare at him like a pair of deer caught in headlines and shoot him a couple of sheepish looks before straightening up and filing into a line beside him, but not without Jaehyun leaving one last tap on Jungwoo’s butt from behind Doyoung’s back.
“Sorry, hyung,” Jungwoo apologizes and shoots him one of his signature, gummy-like smiles that not even Doyoung is immune to. It was his hidden power, or ‘Jungwoo’s superhero capabilities’ as Yuta liked to call it, the way absolutely nobody could resist the man whenever he smiled like that, showing off his adorable features and looking like every baby puppy dog mashed all together into a single, candy-like human. Doyoung sighs.
“Whatever. Let’s just get to the changing rooms as fast as possible, I have to get out of this leather jacket.”
“I second that. These leather pants are fucking killing me right now ,” Jaehyun grumbles from his other side while picking at the material clinging to his thighs, “I can actually feel the sweat suctioning them to my skin like glue or something.”
Jungwoo grimaces, nodding in agreement as he uncomfortably fidgets in his own suit jacket, no doubt also feeling the sticky post-performance sensations that Doyoung and Jaehyun had been complaining about.
Doyoung’s head started to drift off to somewhere as he let his feet take him down through the familiar hallways of the MCountdown building towards the dressing rooms, having had walked down such a path for nearly seven years now since his debut in The 7th Sense. Jaehyun had been by his side back then, too, he realized as he turned a corner, when they had just been two freshly debuted nineteen and twenty year-old idols nervously following their manager through the giant hallways of the performance building, tightly holding each other’s hands as Taeyong had literally had to pull a seventeen year-old Mark through the building, who had been too overwhelmed by his nerves to even stand on his own two feet correctly. He’d come a long way since then, his debut performance with NCT U, as he was now twenty-seven and strolling through the halls with his two subunit bandmates with the absence of a manager and a Taeyong, the catchy tunes of Perfume ’s chorus still ringing through his head as he walked.
Not having any spacial awareness of his surroundings while he let his muscle memory take him through the halls, Doyoung rounded a corner and nearly ran smack into a person on the other side as he skidded to a stop, his flashbacks coming to a screeching halt as his mind was immediately thrown back into reality at the almost-impact.
“Oh, I’m so sorry!” A surprised voice apologized in his ears and Doyoung straightened back up to offer an apology of his own before the words died on his tongue when his eyes fell upon the face of the person he had almost run into.
Staring right back at him from no more than two feet away was a face that looked nearly identical to his own, wearing the same resolutely shocked expression that he was also probably making at the same moment.
Now, Doyoung knew that he had a general type of look, with nothing super super special that stood out compared to the rest of the Korean population apart from his devilishly good looks, but this was just out of this world. The man standing in front of him looked no older than twenty-three years old, with his young-looking features and the overall youthful glow that many freshly-debuted idols carried on themselves, but all Doyoung could think about while taking his eyes over his face was that he looked exactly like a mini-me version of Doyoung himself. Like, a mirror reflection.
Seriously, this man looked exactly like him. Looking at him, Doyoung saw himself in the identical tall, strong nose line that ran down the middle of his face, brown almond-shaped eyes, thin eyelashes (he’d always been a little self conscious about it), and the same exact heart-shaped lips and facial structure that seriously made him wonder if he had taken any sort of edibles within the past twenty-four hours, because this was just uncanny.
His entire body froze, and all that his unhelpfully-frozen mind could supply was that he was probably staring into a mirror or something, because there was just absolutely no way that he had just run into a stranger wearing his own face in the hallways of the MCountDown building. Seeing as it might be the only reasonable explanation left in his blank brain, Doyoung looked to his side expecting to find the familiar faces of Jaehyun and Jungwoo standing beside him, but no. Instead of seeing his best friend and boyfriend, his eyes fell upon a foreign-looking boy with raven-black hair and a pair of thin-rimmed glasses staring back at him, surprise evident in his eyes from where he stared back at Doyoung a couple feet away.
Okay, what the actual flying fuck was going on.
“Ah, NCT Sunbaenims!” Mini-Doyoung let out a gasp and immediately dropped into a perfect ninety-degree bow in front of them, harshly pulling down glasses-boy, who had gone into a state of frozen shock while staring at their faces, by his sleeve to make him drop into an identical position. Doyoung didn’t know how to react, his head was still spinning from the initial shock of oh my god it’s literally another me running through his brain, and could only default back to his next natural step which was to turn his head and look at Jaehyun. The younger man was staring right back at him with the same shocked expression plastered across his features, pupils quickly darting back and forth between Doyoung and Also-Doyoung who was rising from his bow.
“I’m so sorry about that! I swear, I wasn’t watching where I was going and-“
“It’s fine, don’t worry about it,” Doyoung quickly cut off Mini-Doyoung’s frantic apology and waved his hands in front of his chest as a sign to emphasize his point, “it’s also my fault. I should have been more careful about my surroundings.” Mini-Doyoung looked like he wanted to carry on with his apology before foreign-boy beside him nudged him in the ribs and shot him an unreadable look with his eyes, seemingly trying to wordlessly tell him something without saying anything. It reminded Doyoung of the way Jaehyun used to look at him when they were younger, youthful and blissfully uncaring about the people around them finding out about their relationship, and when his eyes trailed lower between their bodies to find a sliver of their entwined hands tightly gripping each other’s fingers while they nervously stared up at him, his suspicions were confirmed.
“Oh, um, yes, Sunbaenim,” Mini-Doyoung nervously stammered out, looking like he’d just suffered a bout of whiplash from the wildly dazed look that was clouding over his eyes. Doyoung was no stranger to idols and non-idols alike being nervous around him due to his celebrity status from being a part of NCT and all, but this particular rookie(?) looked like he was about to fidget out of his skin from the amount of shaking that his body was currently doing by just standing in front of them. Doyoung wanted to place a comforting hand on his shoulder and tell him that there was no need to be nervous, and that he should be the nervous one for meeting an idol that looked nearly identical to him, but was suddenly stopped by the sound of Jungwoo’s excited voice piping up from beside him.
“Wait, you guys are from Boys Planet, right?”
Both Mini-Doyoung and Glasses-Boy’s eyes immediately popped open at Jungwoo’s words, pupils bulging so far out of their heads that Doyoung was worried that they’d just fall out of their heads if they widened any further. The name Boys Planet sounded slightly familiar to his ears, as he remembered Jungwoo and Haechan having a conversation about it back at the dorms a couple months ago, but that was as far as his knowledge went. But judging by the excited expression on Jungwoo’s face and the shell-shocked look on the two younger men’s, they were from whatever Boys Planet was, and were extremely shocked that Jungwoo had watched it.
“Yes, Jungwoo-sunbaenim! My name is Hanbin, and this is Zhang Hao!” Mini-Doyoung squeaked out in a high-pitched voice as Glasses-Boy beside him quickly nodded and dipped into a little bow once again, the bridge of his glasses nearly flying off his nose by the speed that he bent down at.
“Oh yes!” Jungwoo happily chirped and took a step forward, “you’re the one that covered Kick It in your entry level test thing, right?” He pointed at Zhang Hao, who nearly jumped a foot into the air at the recognition but nodded all the same, and now Doyoung was seriously starting to get worried about his eyes popping out of their sockets from how wide they were blown. Both Hanbin and Zhang Hao looked like they were about to pass out at any moment from shock, and Doyoung didn’t blame them as he probably would have done the same in their shoes, and would have probably said something nice to comfort them if his mind would think about anything else other than the fact that he was literally staring at his mitosis brother in the flesh.
Now that he thought about it, he did vaguely remember Jungwoo showing him a video of a couple of guys covering Kick It a couple months back, and now that he looked closer at Zhang Hao, his face maybe did look just a little bit familiar.
But not as familiar as Hanbin’s. There probably wasn’t a single face that Doyoung had ever seen that looked more familiar than Hanbin’s, which was his own.
It seemed as if Jungwoo wasn’t done. “Oh, congrats on your debut, guys! Jaehyun-hyung, do you know that you’re Hanbin-ssi’s role model?” He happily chirped out, and as if Hanbin wasn’t initially nervous enough already, his face flushed a brilliant shade of pink as he shyly looked over at Jaehyun and looked at him in the eyes.
Doyoung looked over at Jaehyun, too, internally wondering about just how Jungwoo knew so much about the two random idols they had stumbled across in the MCountDown hallways. Jaehyun, who had never been too good at accepting praise or compliments despite being an idol, seemed to flush at Jungwoo’s words, too, looking at Hanbin with a surprised but warm smile playing across his lips.
“Oh, really? I’m flattered, Hanbin-ssi,” he smiled at Hanbin, showing off his deep cheek dimples that always made all of their Nctzens (and Doyoung, definitely Doyoung) swoon whenever they saw it, and Hanbin seemed like no exception. The news that Hanbin was an Nctzen only further sent Doyoung’s mind into a spiral of shock as it seemed too much like a wild coincidence for the man with Doyoung’s face to be a fan of his group (and Jaehyun. Doyoung was a fan of Jaehyun, too) to even be real . But alas, it was very real, very real indeed judging on the way Hanbin seemed to be truly very hard to suppress his inner fanboy while gripping onto Zhang Hao’s hand so tight that their knuckles started to turn white, and the way his eyes seemed to be unable to stop flying over all three of their faces over and over again, as if he couldn’t believe his look.
Doyoung agreed. He couldn’t believe his luck, either.
“I voted for you two, you know?” Jungwoo’s voice piped up again, “and I’m so happy you guys got to debut! Hanbin-ssi, you looked so much like Doyoung-hyung on the show and in your photos, but it turns out that the camera was nothing compared to seeing you in person. You two are basically identical!”
Doyoung’s mind completely skipped over the fact that Jungwoo had seen Hanbin before and never told him to focus back on Hanbin’s face in front of him, which was now looking more like himself than ever from the high raise of his eyebrows and the gentle parting of his lips. Hell, even his facial expressions looked the same as Doyoung’s own.
He was seriously second-guessing himself about those (not real) weed brownies.
“We’re so honored, Jungwoo-sunbaenim! We’ve been fans of NCT for a long time, and we really can’t believe that we’re meeting you right now!” Zhang Hao said and wow, his Korean was really good. It reminded him of his beloved Chenle, the way Zhang Hao’s Korean was slightly laced with a foreign accent the same way the Chinese boy’s used to be.
“Awh, the sentiment is shared! Doyoung-hyung, don’t you think that Hanbin-ssi really looks like you?”
It was then that Doyoung realized that he hadn’t even spoken a single word apart from apologizing at the very beginning from this entire interaction, where he then mentally slapped himself in the head for being so rude and formulated a response.
“Yeah, I feel like I’m looking in a mirror or something,” he honestly admitted, and Hanbin let out a breathy giggle.
“I’m really honored to look like such a talented idol, Doyoung-sunbaenim. It gives me hope that one day, I will be at least as half as good as you are,” Hanbin said and wow, did the man have a way with words. Doyoung was impressed (and flattered).
“Don’t you have a way with your words, Hanbin-ssi?” He complimented the younger man and gave him a grin, “should we take a selfie to commemorate this? You can go hug your Jaehyun-sunbaenim, if you’d like.”
Hanbin’s brain seemed to short circuit at Doyoung’s words, his facial features coming to a screeching halt as Zhang Hao started to laugh at his friend(?)’s inner fanboy coming out, Hanbin’s eyes looking straight at him (woah, were they even the same height?!) like he couldn’t believe the words that were coming out of his mouth. Doyoung watched in adoration as the man slowly walked over to Jaehyun who welcomed him into his embrace sigh a warm hug, internally feeling quite warm at the knowledge that his lookalike liked Jaehyun almost just as much as he did (not the same, nobody liked Jaehyun more than Doyoung did.)
The five of them took a couple selfies on both Jungwoo and Zhang Hao’s phones before exchanging a series of hugs with each other (yep, Hanbin was exactly the same height as him) and adding some Kalkaotalk numbers (Hanbin looked like he was about to pass out out of excitement during that part) before parting ways again, saying goodbye with the promise that they’d meet again soon.
Doyoung watched as Hanbin and Zhang Hao walked down the hallway towards away from them the stage rooms, eyes lingering on the way Zhang Hao’s arm was tightly wrapped around the other man’s waist as they walked, pressing a light kiss to his hairline when Hanbin let out a little squeal and practically started skipping, no doubt going internally crazy over the events that had just gone down over the past three minutes.
“Looks like me and Zhang Hao have the same taste in men,” Jaehyun quietly commented when the two of them finally went around a corner and disappeared out of sight, and Doyoung gave him one soft glare before punching him on the shoulder and walking ahead towards the dressing rooms.
“You guys have wonderful taste. So do I, though.”