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“Imagine if I would’ve been in Exo, though,” Taemin says idly.
Jongin grunts without looking up from his phone. Taemin reaches over the table to swipe at the phone, and Jongin deftly dodges.
“Stop it,” Jongin says.
“Imagine,” Taemin insists. “We could’ve lived together. Wouldn’t that have been fun?”
“God, no,” Jongin scoffs. “If we had to live together I would just hate you more than I already do now.”
“Aw,” Taemin coos. “You know what this is called? Tsundere. We’ve known each other long enough, you don’t have to pretend to not like me anymore, Jonginnie, I understand your true feelings, so you can be honest—”
“You are so annoying,” Jongin says. “If you were in Exo I would break contract and leave.”
“Then, what about if you were in Shinee?” Taemin says, out of the blue. Jongin’s on his phone again, scrolling through Instagram. This time he pauses to scrunch his eyebrows and consider the question for a moment.
“I don’t think I make sense in Shinee,” he says eventually.
“Yeah, probably not,” Taemin says, nodding right away, “in a smaller group you’d have to actually try to sing more.”
“I can sing, you dick,” Jongin says, whacking Taemin on the arm, even though he’d been thinking that too.
“Oh, sorry,” Taemin says. He puts on an exaggerated air: “Wow, you should have been the center of Shinee, you’re the best singer ever, dancing machine Kim Jongin, Kai oppa is so handsome and cool…”
“Asshole,” Jongin says half-heartedly.
“But that isn’t the point anyway,” Taemin says. “We could have lived together. We could have roomed together. I wouldn’t have been the youngest, then, either.”
“Why do you want to live with me so badly?” Jongin says.
“It’s not that,” Taemin says. “It’s just a what-if.”
“Okay, but what about this,” Taemin begins, and Jongin rolls his eyes.
“I don’t care.”
“What if we were both in NCT?”
“Then we’d have been training for like, ten years before debuting,” Jongin says. “I don’t think that’d happen.”
“Don’t you ever think, though,” Taemin says. “About, like. Becoming a celebrity as a full adult.”
Jongin does actually think about it sometimes, but probably not as much as Taemin does, and probably not in the same way. Jongin was still a kid in a lot of ways when he debuted, but he’s pretty sure fame only fucked him up the average amount for an idol. Taemin’s now been an idol for nearly half of his entire life, and for a while he made being an idol his entire life. Now, still, sometimes, he swings wildly between an almost manic focus on work and an impressively boneless lethargy, like he never learned how to live in the space between those two poles.
But they’ve been friends for long enough that Jongin thinks, maybe, Taemin was always going to turn out like that, like he was hardwired to house contradictions.
“Let’s be real, you would not survive as anything but the maknae,” Jongin says. “No one would find you cute. I think things had to be this way.”
“I’m super cute,” Taemin says matter-of-factly.
Jongin doesn’t even dignify that with a response.
“Are you satisfied?” Jongin asks, after SuperM promotions have wrapped.
“Hm?” Taemin says.
“Now that we’ve been in a group together,” Jongin says, “are you happy now?”
“Oh,” Taemin says. “I guess.”
“You guess?” Jongin says, affronted. “You were always going on and on, ‘be in Shinee with me’—”
“I never said that.”
“—and all, ‘live with me’ and shit—”
“I did not say that.”
“—and now we’ve been in a group together and you’re still not happy?”
“I am happy,” Taemin says, frowning. “I’m really happy. But I was happy before, too.”
Jongin blinks.
“I just thought it would be fun to work together more,” Taemin says, “and it was.”
Jongin can’t deny that it was fun. It was genuinely, purely fun to be on set with Taemin, and as a bonus, Taemin was just so good at his job. They’ve worked together a few times before, but never so closely together for such an extended period of time. It did, in a sense, give Jongin a sense of what it might have been like if they’d debuted together. Every time Taemin had brought it up before he hadn’t really seriously considered the idea, because what was the point? It was purely hypothetical. But now he can kind of understand the appeal of the thought exercise.
“Yeah,” he says. “It was fun.”
“I just feel like you know every side of me,” Taemin says. “The work side, and the off side. I just like that.”
Jongin gives a startled laugh. “You’re so corny, dude.”
Taemin laughs too. “Haha, sorry.”
“But me too, though,” Jongin says. “Like. I mean. You know what I mean.”
“I probably don’t,” Taemin says, still half-laughing.
“Whatever,” Jongin says, rolling his eyes. “Hey, are you hungry? Wanna order chicken?”
“Ooh, yeah,” Taemin says. “Your treat.”
“What the fuck?”
They argue about it for ten minutes. Jongin ends up treating.
“I’ll pay next time,” is how Taemin gets out of it.
“Holding you to that,” Jongin grumbles.
As fun as it could’ve been to debut together, Jongin thinks, he actually prefers this. He likes that the majority of the time they spend together is off-camera, out of the spotlight, without any expectations or obligations outside of who’ll pay for takeout. He likes that out of all his categories of friends, his celebrity friends and his normal friends and his band members, Taemin is simultaneously all and none of the above.
“Hey,” Jongin says suddenly as they’re digging into a massive order of fried chicken. Taemin looks up at him, halfway through opening a side of pickled radish.
“Hm?”
“This is the best,” Jongin says. “No what-ifs.”
Taemin cocks his head. “The half and half chicken order? Yeah, I guess.”
Not the chicken, you idiot, Jongin thinks, but honestly, it’s this part of him too. “The chicken. Yeah.”
“Uh huh,” Taemin says. “Pass me the soda.”
They watch Youtube and eat chicken and talk over each other. It’s mundane. It’s perfect. Jongin thinks that no matter how things shook out in their careers, they probably would have always ended up staying friends, but he’s happy it’s like this. Taemin’s sitting next to him with chicken grease on his lips, scrolling through an ungodly number of cat photos in his camera roll, and he’s probably never going to pay Jongin back for the takeout, and in spite of himself, Jongin smiles.
He really, truly, would not have it any other way.