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It was definitely not a good day for Hoshi or any of the members. For the past few weeks, they were really busy since they were preparing for their next comeback so everyone was tense and not really in a good mood. Especially the older members of the group because on top of their schedules and this stressful period, they had to take care of the younger members. Everyone was busy with their own schedules and no one was really spending time together anymore except the vocal or dance practices they had together to prevent the arguments that might happen if they spend time with each other while everyone is stressed about something and looked like a ticking bomb. So, when Soonyoung came back to the dorm from a solo late dance practice in the middle of the night, around 1 am, no one really paid attention to him since the younger members were already in their beds and sleeping deeply.
But the same thing couldn’t be said for the older members. Before Soonyoung came home from the company, the 95 liners and 96 liners, olders for short, had a meeting about Soonyoung’s working hours. According to them, it was too late to come home all alone in the middle of the night since Soonyoung was too nice to disturb someone else’s sleep so he preferred to walk home all alone without anyone protecting him. Also, it was disturbing others' sleep when he came home late by opening the door, showering and getting ready to go to bed. “Soonyoung, can you come to the living room for a second? We want to talk to you about something.” Junhui called out to the front door. Soonyoung froze in his place for a moment and then he slowly locked the door and headed to the living room to see what was going home.
Other members were always asleep every time he came home so he was confused why they were awake today. “Yeah?” He answered quietly while holding his bag in his hand still wearing the same black practice clothes that he left the house with. “Come sit here, we want to talk to you about something quite important like Junhui said.” Seungcheol said while pointing at the armchair placed right in front of the couch where everyone was sitting. Soonyoung rolled his eyes unintentionally and dropped his bag on the floor loudly before taking a seat on the armchair Seungcheol was pointing at. He crossed his arms over his chest and stared at his members annoyedly. “What do you desperately want to talk about?” He knew he was going over the limits and the respect boundaries of the members but it was the last thing he cared about right now.
He had an argument with the two choreographers about a move in the choreography in the morning that almost turned into a physical fight so he was already annoyed and quite mad. So naturally, he couldn’t maintain a nice attitude towards them. “Be careful with your words, Hoshi.” Wonwoo said in a tone that was basically giving Soonyoung a warning. “I am being careful enough.” Jeonghan just sighed and raised his eyebrows while rubbing his temples. He gestured to him to sit back down when Soonyoung proceeded to get up and go to his room. “No, I do not have time for this.” The younger frowned and started walking towards his room. Joshua went after him and held his wrist before he could leave the living room. “You are not leaving right now, Soonyoung. Come here so we can talk calmly then you can leave.”
Joshua tightened his grip on his wrist when he tried to get his wrist out of Joshua’s hold. Soonyoung had to gnash his teeth and keep himself from groaning in pain when the older’s grip tightened around his wrist. On top of the fight he had with the choreographers, he had twisted his wrist while practicing and now Joshua’s grip was on that wrist. He was sure that the throbbing pain he felt now was going to leave a really big and nasty bruise on there. He could tell them about his twisted wrist but it was not the right time to say it. “Soonyoung, come here. We are just here to talk, not do something else anyways.” Jihoon called out to him loudly, hoping that the other would at least listen to him but there was no luck left either. As Soonyoung persisted in not staying in the living room and leaving, the shouting began.
Now, everyone was shouting and trying to talk at the same time. As the shouting continued, the actual topic was also thrown away not so long after this argument started. All the madness and frustration that had built up over this stressful period was also a reason why this happened. As the time went by, everyone started shouting at each other about every little thing they could ever think of and only got louder and louder. Soonyoung was the first one to stop shouting and take a look around them. He felt tears slowly forming in his eyes when he took a glance towards the corridor, where the younger member’s rooms were. Chan and Minghao were awake and they were standing at the entrance of their room, quietly watching as the older members screamed at each other as if they were not even there.
Luckily, they were too sleepy to notice Soonyoung looking at them with tears ready to fall at any possible moment. Their eyes were sleepy and their bodies looked really tired in their pajamas. That Soonyoung wondered if they were tired of them, or because of their schedules. “Soonyoung! Are you even listening to me? I’m talking to you!” Wonwoo screamed as he stood up from his spot. Soonyoung flinched at his voice and felt that overwhelming guilt crawling in his stomach. The guilty feeling only got bigger and bigger when Vernon and Seungkwan opened the door of their shared room, looking around confusedly. Seokmin and Mingyu were also curious about what was happening as they walked to the living room all the way from their room, which was located at the ends of the corridor, the furthest away from the living room.
Seeing the opportunity, Soonyoung quickly grabbed his bag from the floor and unlocked the front door while the members screamed about where he thought he was going. He didn’t answer any of them, instead, he got out of the door as fast as he possibly could. He also heard them shouting after him about how they were going to come after him but he did not look back at them even once. And now, it had been a week since a fight broke out between the older’s and Soonyoung and it was safe to say that everything was a mess. Soonyoung came home an hour after everyone went to bed and left an hour earlier than them too. When they had schedules together, the car rides to the schedules were awkward, their vocal and dance practices were also very tense.
The members, especially the younger members, were scared to accidentally make someone mad and everyone looked like they could snap at literally anything that didn’t work the way they wanted or anyone they saw. When it comes to Soonyoung, he was ignoring all of them as much as he could even though they were living in the same house and went to the same schedules most of the time. He was changing his way every time he came across any of them, including the younger ones, for some reason. During this time, he still continued working at late times at night for hours. He knew that the others were aware of that so he was glad that they didn't try to take his keys, that opened the doors of the practice room and the dorm, away from him or ban him from entering the practice rooms since they have done both of these things before to Jihoon because he was overworking himself.
The older members were also quite distant from him too, which Soonyoung actually appreciated because he did not want to cause any more trouble. The dance practices were mostly led by Chan since things got quickly heated when it was Soonyoung. Of course they were aware that this was not the right thing to do and it was damaging their friendship and hurting their team but it did not seem like they were able to talk it out and solve the problem on their own. The olders were still ignoring Soonyoung as much as they could in this period. And even though they didn’t want to show this to their fans and the people around them, the ignoring got so bad that their manager had to ask them what was happening, which they only answered with “Nothing.”
So like every other day, Soonyoung left the dorm pretty early and headed to the company. He walked through the corridors of the company to reach their dance practice room to work on a choreography he was thinking about doing for a while, which was located pretty far from other places, except Jihoon’s studio, and isolated since they did not want anyone to disturb them while practicing. While walking towards there, his eyes caught a glance at his wrist. He sighed hopelessly and watched his steps. After he twisted it during the practice and Joshua held it pretty hard in his hand, all of that left a pretty big, nasty bruise with a throbbing pain that didn’t seem to go away no matter what he did or tried.
The throbbing pain was so bad that he was woken up by it a few times while sleeping. It also hurt when he moved it too much, unsurprisingly. He had wrapped his wrist with a bandage to hide the bruise and it was working perfectly until the morning. Since the bandage was tightly it hurt more so he had taken it off a few hours earlier. It was definitely not the best idea or even a slightly good idea to dance while having an injured wrist but he needed something to get his mind out of the fight he had with the older members of the group. Soonyoung opened the door of the practice room and let himself in. He quickly walked up to the computer that they used to play songs and started playing the song he wanted to create a choreography for for some time now. He took his phone out of his pocket and started to record a video. He put it right in the middle of the room on the floor and started going through the ideas he had for this song.
As he was roaming around the room, trying to do his best to put the ideas he had together, he noticed that the floor was a lot more slippery than how it was supposed to be. Soonyoung knew what time this room got cleaned and he was sure that it was not yesterday or this morning. Even if they had to clean it because an emergency happened, they would have to let Soonyoung know. Even though it was a pretty unusual thing, he just shrugged and started dancing. This was definitely not safe to do on a slippery floor along with his injured wrist but he just continued, he just couldn’t really care about how safe it was. The slippery floor did get in his way while dancing but he did not stop.
Right at that time, he felt the floor shift under his feet. Without even having time to understand what was going on, he hit the hard floor of the practice room. A pain-filled groan left his mouth when he felt a sharp pain somewhere close to his eye and a throbbing pain on his head like how he would feel if someone was constantly hitting his head hard with a hammer. Soonyoung put his shaky hand on the floor to lift himself off the floor but he felt a warm liquid on his hand. He tried to open his eyes but the pain only got worse. He started to get very dizzy when he proceeded to get his head off the floor. All of his muscles felt stiff and his body felt so heavy that he couldn’t even move even a little bit. Then, his arms went weak and his head hit the floor again, splashing the warm liquid in the process. He tried to open his eyes once again but his vision went blurry and suddenly, everything went black.
When this was happening, the things on the older members' side were equally stressful. Of course, 95 liners and 96 liners had talked between each other about if they were right or not. But after not reaching an answer, they gave up and continued their way in the week of “not talking to Soonyoung at all costs” Since the younger members couldn’t find a chance to talk to Soonyoung about the fight to hear his side because the dancer was always in the company and practicing whenever they needed to talk to him, they decided to talk to the younger members about the awkward silence between the olders and the dancer. And after a long talk about the fight with the younger members, they decided to find Soonyoung and try to talk to him about the issue calmly even though they haven’t forgiven each other yet.
When they reached their dance practice room, they started to get suspicious about something bad that might have happened. There was definitely something wrong even though it was not visible, they could sense it. No one dared to say a word even though everyone felt the tension in the air. Their suspicions turned into worries when they reached the door. Since he was in the front, closest to the door, Mingyu decided to open the door, the sound of the music could be heard through the walls but there was no sound or voice from Soonyoung, at least it couldn’t be hard from the outside. This was quite unusual for Soonyoung because he always liked to sing along to the song he was dancing to or shout different things while dancing, from the energy dancing gave him.
He did it when they were dancing with or without the choreographer, with other artists and even alone and it was usually loud enough to hear from the outside. They knew something was off but opened the door anyway. At first, everything looked normal. Soonyoung’s bag was sitting on the couch that was placed in the practice room by the dancers request so people could rest, the music was playing and everything else was the way it was supposed to be. Except Soonyoung, who was lying on the floor completely motionless in a little pool of his own blood. Jihoon was the first one to notice him, despite the fact that the motionless body was in the kindle of the room, no one other than Jihoon noticed Soonyoung before he pointed it out.
When he noticed Soonyoung who was unsurprisingly unconscious and did not move, his face went pale. His hands started to shake and he felt like he was slowly tearing up. When Seungcheol asked him “What happened?” he could only point at Soonyoung’s body with his finger, eyes filled with horror and worry. They all immediately rushed to Soonyoung’s side after finally noticing him laying on the floor by following where Jihoon was pointing at. “Soonyoung?” Junhui called out to him in worry while softly shaking his body. “Should I call someone to get help?” Wonwoo asked loudly, trying to be hard in the middle of the chaos. Jeonghan quickly nodded and handed him his phone. “Call an ambulance as quickly as possible, Woo.” Wonwoo nodded and typed the number.
While Wonwoo talked to the person on the other end of the phone, Seungcheol quickly ran to Soonyoung’s bag. He knew that the dancer always carried a small first aid kit with him whenever he went to practice alone just in case something happened. He opened the zip of the bag while still hoping that Soonyoung didn’t stop bringing it with him. He grabbed the red bag from the inside of the bag and ran back to where the others were. He handed it to Jeonghan and Junhui since they were the closest ones. They all tried their best to stop the bleeding and wake Soonyoung up until the paramedics arrived to help them take the dancer to the hospital to get better help there.
After Soonyoung was taken to the hospital, the other members had to go back to the dorm, since they couldn’t wait there. Instead of them, their manager was with Soonyoung the whole time they were there. When Soonyoung got out of the hospital and was taken to the dorm by their manager, the older members couldn’t care less about the recent fight they had. They all together, along with the younger members of course, took care of Soonyoung until he felt better. And eventually, they talked about their fight. After their talk, everything went back to how it was before. They all learned what was okay and not.