little world fallin’ apart - sinkingmyships (2024)

Chapter 1: can't start a fire

Chapter Text

we moved in packs together
bounded by our oldest brother

The humiliation of a botched performance is a fractured-rib feeling in Chan’s chest. It’s sharp enough to puncture something important, like his lungs, or his ego. His shame is thick and gluey. If only he could secrete it through his pores like a poison dart frog.

He’s restless and unsupervised in his hotel room. He still has a full face of makeup on, awful nose contouring and all. Nothing is stopping him from starting an Instagram Live and ranting in English. Someone will inevitably be mad at him later for speaking so candidly, but he can handle a slap on the wrist from the company. That’d be nothing compared to how disappointed he is in himself.

Yet he sing-songs “hiiiii, hellooooo” at his phone’s front camera. Going live always forces his voice softer. He knows he’s not fooling anyone—anyone tuning in already watched him f*ck up in real time—but he also knows he’s not going to rant. He’s too good of an idol to complain about how bad of an idol he is.

He makes placating small talk about how grateful they are to have won a daesang as he skims the chat. Most of the comments are the same inane sh*t he always gets: when will they tour X country, where is Y member, can he wave if he sees this comment? But there are some undemanding things in there, too. Someone says they’re proud of him. Someone else says his point dance was the best part of the entire five-hour award show.

“Chan, do you regret anything from the performance?” he pretends to read from the fast-scrolling comments. He fakes a contemplative voice as if the question never occurred to him.

He stares into the hotel room like he’s thinking really hard about his answer. A black and white photo of sh*tenno-ji hangs above the desk, all symmetry. His backpack spills a tangle of chargers on the armchair, all mess.

Eventually he says, “Nah. The thing is, you know, nothing ever goes as planned. We try so hard, but there’s always something. Something always goes wrong! Sometimes we get hurt, or our mics malfunction, or—or our voices aren’t in the best condition, haha! So, like, if I let myself regret everything that’s ever gone wrong, I’d regret my entire career, and I don’t. I’ll use it as a reminder to work harder! So…yeah, nah!”

It’s strange how well he can tell lies and truths both in the same breath.

Suddenly there’s a gnawing in his stomach. It doesn’t feel like hunger, even though the last thing he ate was curry cup noodles fourteen hours ago. It feels deeper, somehow. Less like he needs to eat and more like he needs to reach down his throat and wrangle his guts like a knot of vipers. A notification pops up at the top of his screen. It’s from Felix. All the preview shows is “Hey so 🫠” because Felix never sends a single message at a time. For this Chan feels a different kind of almost-hunger. Cloying and illicit like dragging a finger through the buttercream before the cake has been cut. But at least he’s used to that kind. He’s felt it, constantly, for years at this point.

Still. He should probably eat.

“Anyway,” Chan says with a note of finality, “I’m gonna order food, yeah? What is Channie ordering? Mm, steak, of course!”

With a room service order placed, he hard-pivots to rambling about Pokémon. That’s a safe topic. But he’s distracted. The shame and the hunger and the restlessness—it’s all making his head hurt. He can’t remember names of Pokémon that he’s known his whole life. What is that little weather guy called again? He has no idea. He keeps thinking about Changbin patting him on the back after the performance, that “you tried” kind of gesture that a kid gets after losing their first rugby match. Did the entire audience boo him? Well, no, of course not, but he wouldn’t have blamed them if they did. He’ll have to find a fancam later just to see and—

He’s bitten by some reckless urge to ask, “Hey, should we listen to it? Haha, you guys know what! Should we? Should we? Haha!”

He holds his phone in one hand and navigates to YouTube on his laptop with the other. He doesn’t even need to search anything; right on his homepage is a video called “Their Mics Are ON And I Wish They Weren’t.” It was posted an hour ago. It already has 28,000 views. The thumbnail is an unflattering screenshot of his own face from tonight’s performance. His jaw looks tense. His eyeshadow is veering into black eye territory.

Chan clicks.

Bubbly pink text on the title card disclaims ✿these are just my personal opinions, no offense meant✿. He scrubs through the whole countdown, past idols that he knows personally, until he gets to the last title card: STRAY KIDS - BANG CHAN.

He turns the volume all the way up and lets the video play. He holds his breath as Seungmin’s perfectly measured voice leads into the worst voice crack Chan has ever made in his life. In the video, his eyes widen in mortification, and he flubs his next line. In the hotel room, he barely holds back a curse. It’s somehow even worse than he remembers. He sounded like a strangled donkey. Like a clown got into a fight with a seagull. Just the goofiest, ugliest sound any human has ever made. He remembers Jeongin whipping his head around to gawk at him in the middle of choreo, and he’s sure the others did, too.

It’s one thing to mess up at a pre-recording or a concert where STAY can laugh with him. It’s a completely different thing to mess up at an award show where not all the attendees like them as artists or even respect them as people.

He left-arrow-keys to play it again.

His ears are hot.

Again.

His kids are going to get bullied for his own mistakes.

Again.

So are STAY.

Again.

The live chat is moving too fast for him to pay it any attention.

Again.

It feels like a scraped knee every time.

“Ah, maybe if I kept my throat warm, like Hannie, or was better at staying hydrated, like Seungmin…” Chan trails off, and there’s a knock on his door. He forces himself to snap back to reality. “Alrighty, well, anyway? Food’s here! I’m gonna eat and then wash up! Get some sleep, okay? Okay, byeeeee, laters.”

It’s an inconsiderate sign-off, but it’s fine. Minho ends all his livestreams in terrible ways and STAY think it’s charming.

Sitting down to eat is a chore. The first cut into his steak seeps its juice into the takeaway container. It’s pink in the middle the way he likes, but something in him wishes it was even rarer. Blue. He makes himself take a bite and chews slowly. The fat is springy, slippery. It’s under-salted. He doesn’t have an appetite—he’s not hungry. He’s something else and he doesn’t know what.

The walls of the room feel like they’re closing in on him like a boobytrap in an old Saturday morning cartoon. He needs to escape. He needs to run. He stuffs his mostly-untouched dinner into the mini fridge, grabs his room key and phone, and makes sure the door doesn’t slam behind him.

In the elevator, he reads through the stack of messages that he missed from Felix, all fifty-four of them.

[Felix]
Hey so 🫠
You wanna
Get dinner?
Hungryyyyyyyy
Oh you’re live
I’m watching now~
ㅋㅋㅋㅋ
I’ll order food too
Dumpling soup
Buy it for me
Next time 😊
ㅋㅋ
The little weather guy
Is
Castform
Can’t believe
You
Forgot
A little
Sunshine Monster~
ㅋㅋㅋ
You keep
Ah
Hyung
Your face
You’re playing around
But
You’re also still upset
About the show
And I get it
I know
How that feels
Even so…
You did the best you could
Really
Sometimes that’s just
Showbiz baby
I’ve always wanted
To say that
That’s showbiz 🫠
ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
But anyways
I’m always proud of you
You know that
Right?
._.
Oh
You’re done?
Wanna
Bring your food
And hang out
With me~
And Hyunjinnie
😊?

Chan’s heart is a fly in a spider web, struggling and sticky. He loves how Felix’s sincerity flows too fast for the rest of him to keep pace and it comes out in little bursts like this. The first time Felix ever texted him as a brand-new trainee, he’d sent sixteen emojis over the course of nine typo-riddled messages, and Chan screencapped it because—because it felt like the start of something important. He still looks at it sometimes.

The smart move would be to march himself straight to Felix’s room and let his and Hyunjin’s chatter blanket him. He could ask a question in English just to hear Felix respond in kind. Hyunjin would parrot them, exaggerating all the non-rhotic sounds of their accent, and Felix would laugh, and Chan would feel better.

But he’s not in the mood for smart moves.

As the elevator dings at the first floor, he sends a quick reply.

[Chris]
What’s done is done! I’m ok
I’ll do better next time
I’m actually headed to the gym
Get a workout in before I wash up ya know?
But you guys have fun haha

The gym is empty at this hour, but he bets Changbin was already here this evening. They’ve been doing delts together recently. Chan eyes the rack of dumbbells but beelines toward the treadmill.

He starts slow. Every time the shame-hunger-restlessness co*cktail burns in his chest, he cranks up the speed. He’s jogging in no time. Then fully running. Going live didn’t help as much as he hoped. Why would it? All he did was damage control for STAY, not for him.

Soon the treadmill’s speed is maxed. It’s not safe. Chan knows it isn’t. It’s not like he hasn’t pushed himself enough today, either. His pride is battered, and so is his body. Award show days are horrible on them. His feet hurt. His back hurts. Whatever is clawing at him from the inside out hurts. Sweat sticks the collar of his t-shirt to his skin. His lungs burn. Half an hour, eight kilometers.

He catches a glimpse of his harried reflection in the mirrored wall and almost eats sh*t against the control panel as he does a double take. His eyes—what the f*ck is wrong with his eyes? They’re jarringly yellow like caution tape. And is that…?

Chan hits the emergency stop and sways on his feet. His heart slams in his chest. He might throw up. He stumbles in a circle to check his backside and—nothing. Of course he doesn’t have a goddamn tail, is he insane?

His panting breath fogs the mirror as he gets up close and tugs at his eyelids. The Chan staring back at him looks ten different kinds of f*cked up, but his eyes are brown. Normal. No more weird tricks of the fluorescent lights, or whatever. He sits heavily on a weight bench and hangs his head between his knees.

Once he feels less queasy, he grabs his phone and opens Naver. His thumbs hover over the keyboard. He laughs humorlessly. What’s he supposed to type into the search bar? How to tell if you’re hallucinating? Can stress turn your eyes yellow?

“Get it together, mate,” he mutters. He closes out of Naver and opens KaTalk instead. There are twenty-seven more messages from Felix. They’re mostly links to TikToks of sleeping ducklings, League streamers, and deeply cursed Stray Kids memes. It makes him long for the nights of laying in Felix’s bunk and mindlessly scrolling together before passing out under the same blanket. That was so long ago.

God. Get it together.

He needs a shower and some painkillers and a full twelve hours of sleep. Twelve is unfathomable, but if he’s lucky he could maybe get three. And so he calls it a night, feeling worse in almost all ways except for how he no longer wants to run.

○○○

They’re mobbed at the airport.

What’s worse is they’re mobbed after landing in Gimpo, desperate for lower-body baths and their own pillows. This is not a welcome home, Chan thinks bitterly. This is not love.

Still, he waves. Still, he smiles. Still, he bows.

He also counts his kids. He counted when they got off the plane, too, but he can’t help it. The pattern is soothing, one two three four five six seven, and he is number eight. He is always number eight, lingering in the back to keep an eye on everyone.

When he points to himself and he is number seven—his kids can handle themselves, and they have security if they can’t, but he still worries about them so much.

As he tries to figure out who’s missing, he’s clotheslined by a flood of sensory information. It makes him feel hungover. He swears he can hear every single wheel of every single suitcase whirring on the floor. Cameras flash bright spots in his eyes as people chase after them, snapping photos of their masked, barely-visible faces. He tries to breathe through his mouth to keep the jet-fuel-and-burnt-coffee smell out of his nose.

Dizzily, he counts again. One two three four five six, and he is number seven. Hyunjin Jeongin Changbin Seungmin Jisung Minho, and Chan is number seven.

“Felix?” Chan says, whipping his head around.

“Here, sorry,” Felix says from behind him. He sounds tired. He looks tired. If Felix looks tired, Chan probably looks close to death.

“You good?” Chan asks, slowing down until Felix is walking in step with him. He reaches out and links their arms together, keeping him close like rafting otters. Felix shuffles sluggishly as Chan pulls him along. No wonder he was falling behind.

“I dunno, I mean, yeah, just…you know. Airports.”

“Airport? I’m not going to the airport,” Chan says.

It’s a line from Bluey—Lily recently sent them a clip, and they’ve been watching episodes during weird schedule downtime like iPad kids. The joke makes Felix laugh unabashedly like Chan hoped it would. For a brief moment, the world quiets around them. Everything is alright as long as Felix is smiling.

“This is unacceptable!” Felix quotes back in a little shriek.

Ahead of them, one of their security hyungs puppets Jeongin by the shoulders as someone with a huge camera gets up in his face. The moment shatters. This is unacceptable. In his head, Chan is already drafting a terse email to their managers, maybe even to PD-nim. They can’t keep getting swarmed like this.

Felix makes a small, startled, Bingo-in-the-Yoga-Ball-episode kind of noise as someone shoves a phone toward him. He nearly trips as he recoils.

“I got you, I got you, come on,” Chan says, steadying him and tugging him closer. Indignation builds in his chest. Navigating airports would be so much easier if he could just move his kids around like plushies in a claw machine. Or wolf pups in a den. If he could scruff them by the backs of their hoodies, he would. If he could slink away to hide them somewhere secluded and safe, he would. No one would get in their way if he snarled and raised his hackles to say these are mine, leave them alone.

And—pain explodes in his mouth. Every movement of his tongue feels like firecrackers against his teeth. There’s too much pressure in his sinuses, in his eye sockets. His jaw creaks. His canines pulse. What is happening?

He blinks back tears and steels himself against it. Now is not the time to freak everyone out. He counts again. One two. Force of habit. Three four. Anything to distract him. Five six. His gums feel like they’re fraying. Felix is number seven. Does he taste blood? Chan is number eight.

He doesn’t remember maneuvering through the rest of the airport. Maybe he counts his kids again, or maybe he counts how many steps rattle his skull. Eventually, they exit the final set of automatic doors. The evening air is blessedly cool on his hot face. He would kill for an ice pack right now. He walks Felix to the van that Seungmin and Jeongin have already buckled themselves into.

“Thanks for taking care of me,” Felix says before Chan can leave for the second van.

Chan freezes. He has to speak. He feels like a wrestled crocodile with its jaw duct-taped shut. “Always,” he grits out.

“Are you okay?”

“Just ready to go home, mate.” He tries not to wince. He swears his mouth is full of broken glass.

Felix squints at him. “You’re so f*cking bad at lying. What happened?”

“Really. I’m good.”

“You’re not. Come on.”

“You’re in the way,” Minho says as he comes around the side of the van. He smacks Chan’s ass to move him over and piles himself into the remaining seat. “It’s been a long few days. Make sure the idiots rest well. That includes you, lead idiot.”

“Yes, hyung-nim,” Chan says. He does not turn it back on him, because he knows Minho will take care of his dorm.

He can feel Felix staring daggers at him, but he can’t bring himself to meet his eyes. If he did, he might do something horrible like cry into Felix’s shoulder and accidentally let the blood in his mouth drip on all that Louis Vuitton.

“See you later,” Minho says. The van door slides closed.

Later, sure. If Chan hasn’t already clawed his face off.

Yet when Chan throws his backpack into the backseat of the other van and climbs in next to Changbin, the pain in his mouth fades as fast as it came. Like slamming on the brakes on the expressway. He feels nauseous and lightheaded. He feels delusional. He tears his mask off and bares his teeth at his reflection in the van’s tinted windows. Everything looks fine. He shoves his fingers up into his gums. They’re not even sore. His fingers come away wet with just spit, not blood. He swears his mouth was being shredded apart.

“Motherf*cker,” Chan says under his breath.

“Who?” Hyunjin asks with a bit of nosy delight. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing, I just—” Chan flounders for a lie. His pulse is erratic. “I remembered I—I think I left my earrings in the hotel bathroom?”

“The Chanel ones?”

“Yeah?”

“Oh, that sucks, hyung.”

“It’s, ah, it’s fine. I’ll look for them later. Maybe I packed them? I don’t know.”

Jisung pipes up, “I call dibs on getting him replacements for Christmas.”

“We don’t get each other Christmas gifts anymore,” Hyunjin says.

“Fine, then his birthday.”

“It’s literally November.”

“And?” Jisung challenges.

“And what are you getting for my birthday first?”

“My eternal love, baby!”

“Why would I want that?”

Chan tunes them out, slumping into his coat and wishing he could wring out his brain like a dirty sponge. The weird sh*t in the hotel gym—he convinced himself he was just seeing things. It wouldn’t be the first time his sleep-deprived brain played tricks on him. But this? He knows what he felt. He didn’t just imagine the grease-fire blaze of pain in his teeth. Should he tell someone?

No. Like—two is a coincidence, three is a pattern, right? If there’s a third thing, he’ll tell someone. Until then, he doesn’t want to burden them with this. He’s okay, for now.

Once they’re home, no one wants to hang around. He bumps elbows with Jisung as they both wait for their instant ramyeon, but otherwise they all retreat to their own rooms. With every bite he takes, he half-expects his teeth to crumble like chalk. They don’t. He gets through his noodles just fine.

Later, Chan lets Changbin shower first so he can take as much time as he wants poking and prodding at his face in the bathroom mirror. There are dark circles under his eyes. His lips are chapped. He grimaces in the mirror and presses the pad of his thumb into the edges of his teeth. Everything feels so f*cking normal and that’s infuriating. If his gums ached, or if his canines sliced into his thumb, or if he could spit out a drop of blood, he would be vindicated. He wishes he’d tugged his mask down at the airport so Felix could have confirmed whether or not he’s going insane.

He washes up on autopilot. Afterwards, he climbs into bed with damp hair and picks up whatever mid isekai is in his Crunchyroll queue.

(Felix does not text him all night. Logically, Chan knows he’s probably just in decompression mode like the rest of them. He’s probably talking to his mum and pressing his massage gun into the back of his neck, his voice vibrating as he tells her about their never-ending jetsetting. Chan’s just surprised he doesn’t have a billion messages asking what’s going on with him, that’s all.)

He doesn’t expect to get much sleep, yet the next thing he knows, he’s having a nightmare.

He’s back in his high school, if his high school was also part aquarium. The hallways are packed with blurry faces and rockhopper penguins. A sea lion wearing a Supreme backpack slides in front of him on the way to the auditorium. Suddenly Jeongin is yanking his arm and shouting something that sounds like dolphin squeals. He sees the rest of his kids, but they’re so far away and getting shoved around by the shoal of bodies. Someone is going to get hurt. Jeongin warps into Seungmin like octopus camouflage.

One two three four five six, Chan is number seven. He can’t see Jisung.

One two three four five six, Chan is number seven. He can’t see Felix.

One two three four five six, Chan is number seven. He can’t see Minho.

One two three four five six, Chan is number seven. He can’t see Felix. He can’t see Felix. He can’t see Felix.

Someone yells hyung, where are you? and it sounds like all his kids at once.

He tries not to panic. There has to be something he can do. He’s the leader. He needs to figure something out.

His throat itches. Strangely, he knows exactly how to scratch it. He needs to howl. Yes, that’s it. If he howls, they will hear him, and they will come running. They will find him. He knows they will.

And so he takes a deep breath, tips his face up, and—

He’s jolted awake by someone pounding on his door and then flinging it open. “What’s happening?” Changbin asks frantically. His footsteps sound loud as thunder as he enters Chan’s room. Chan sits up and blinks at him in the dark, seeing him in oddly sharp detail. “Do I need to call an ambulance, are you dying, what—oh, sh*t.”

“It’s four in the morning,” Hyunjin croaks from the hallway. “Why are you both yelling?”

“Hyunjin-ah, I need you to get Minho-hyung. Right now.”

“Is he…” Hyunjin says, peering around the doorframe, but his words turn into a gasp as Changbin flips the lightswitch without warning. They all flinch against the light. Chan doesn’t know if he’s seen them look this traumatized since the survival show. He doesn’t know what’s happening, doesn’t know what to do, doesn’t know how to help them. “Oh my god.”

“I’m okay, sorry,” Chan says. He remembers flashes of his dream and desperately wants to hear Felix’s voice. “Just a nightmare.”

“Oh my god,” Hyunjin says again. “Yeah, I’ll try to, uh…I’ll get hyung. I’ll…oh my god?”

Hyunjin leaves and Chan hears him waking Jisung down the hall. His voice is clear even from the other side of the dorm. Chan can also hear a faint drumming sound as Changbin steps closer, and Chan realizes, instinctually, that he’s hearing Changbin’s heartbeat.

“Changbin-ah?” he asks. Then he feels it: his teeth are so big. When he reaches up to touch them, sharp nails catch on his top lip. There’s a weird tension in his back, muscles he’s never actively thought about using before, and if he concentrates hard enough, he can make his tail thump timidly against his mattress. “Oh. f*ck.”

“Yeah, hyung,” Changbin agrees faintly. “f*ck.”

○○○

It doesn’t take long to get used to wagging his tail.

Part of Chan is apocalyptically freaking out. But when Minho, Felix, Seungmin, and Jeongin show up at a bitter 4:29 in the morning, a different part of him is so relieved that he can’t stop swishing it back and forth. The instant Felix is through the door, Chan is in his space. He nuzzles into the side of Felix’s neck. He is overjoyed to feel the sleepy rumble of Felix’s voice when he says, “Hyung, let me take my shoes off first.”

Chan backs off and invades Minho’s space instead. Minho smells clean and cold, but his coat smells a bit like his parents’ house, like his mum’s fresh kimchi and his cats. Cats! Oh, there are too many new scents vying for his attention. Half a dozen shampoos, and the spicy ramyeon cups in the trash, and Hyunjin’s watercolors, and Jeongin’s expensive toner. There are too many sounds as well. Has he ever paid this much attention to the sounds of each of his kids’ breaths? Or their footsteps?

“You know I’m not a dog person,” Minho complains.

Seungmin barks, as if to say that’s demonstrably untrue, and Chan wags his tail in solidarity.

“I think we’re all being a little too calm about this,” Jisung says. “Look at him! He’s a werewolf! He looks like discount Halloween decorations!”

“Hey,” Chan says with a frown.

“Your eyes glow in the dark!” Jisung argues.

“He’s right, though,” Jeongin says. “You’re taking this awfully well.”

“I mean, it sucks that I won’t be able to post on Insta.”

Jisung clutches his head and squawks, “That’s what you’re worried about most?”

“Of course not.” Chan’s voice goes somber. He’s worried about so much. He’s worried about ruining his career. He’s worried about ruining all their careers. He’s worried about crumbling and taking the reputations of every company artist down with him. He’s worried about losing music, his greatest pride. He’s worried about losing his kids, his greatest happiness. He’s worried about losing everything he’s ever worked for and everything he’s yet to accomplish, prematurely taxidermied like a two-headed cow. But all he says is, “I’m worried that this is the end.”

Jisung sucks in a sharp breath. His bottom lip starts trembling. Chan can smell his panic spiking. “Oh, hyung. No. Sorry, I didn’t—I’m sorry.”

Chan and Changbin reach for him at the same time. Chan gets a good look at his claws—long, pointed, black, he’s kind of twinning with Ryujin now—and hesitates. The wolf overrides his hesitation. He tugs Jisung closer and kisses his temple. “It’s okay, Hannie, I know.”

“Nothing is ending,” Changbin says resolutely. “We’ll figure it out. Come on.”

They file out of the entryway and pile into the living room instead. Chan sits on the floor. That feels right. Jisung gets sandwiched between Jeongin and Felix on the couch. Hyunjin perches on the armrest like an owl, his fingers absentmindedly ruffling Jeongin’s hair. Minho and Changbin drag chairs in from the kitchen while Seungmin sprawls out next to Chan, committed to the dog-camaraderie bit.

They all stare at him like he’s in a fishbowl. He can’t blame them. He has claws and fangs and yellow eyes. He has a tail of black fur. But there’s something subtler, too—less predictable, like a jumpscare. Maybe it’s in the way he runs his tongue over his canines or flares his nostrils when they move. His body is on high alert like something wild.

“Okay,” Minho says. “Explain.”

“I, um. Don’t know how. I literally just fell asleep and woke up like this.”

“He was yelling in his sleep,” Hyunjin adds.

“Howling. In my dream I was…so I was probably…yeah. Never mind.”

“You dreamed yourself into a werewolf?” Minho asks.

“Maybe?”

Seungmin cracks a smile. “And Jisungie still hasn’t been able to dream himself into a magical girl.”

Jisung, still pouting, somehow pouts harder. He tries to kick Seungmin, but Seungmin is just out of his reach. “Ha ha.”

“Fighting, Sailor Senshi-nim, you can do it,” Jeongin says with a fist pump.

Chan can’t help wagging his tail. They’re so goofy. Even at a time like this, his love for them is so big. He watches them watch him: multiple pairs of eyes track the movement of his tail over his shoulder. He feels a little self-conscious, but he doesn’t stop.

“It’s not the moon, right?” Minho asks.

“Already looked it up,” Hyunjin says. “Full moon was last week.”

Minho frowns. “Was it something you ate?”

Today has been ten years long, so it takes a second for Chan to remember what he ate. “Don’t think so? I skipped lunch, and then Hannie and I made ramyeon. Didn’t even go to the coffee shop with you guys before we left Osaka.”

“Was it…aish, why do you have to make things so difficult? I don’t even know what to ask. Also, you’re dehydrated.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Wait,” Felix says like an epiphany. Everyone’s attention snaps over to him. “This happened before. At the airport. Didn’t it?”

There’s a beat of guilty silence. If Chan had prick ears, they’d be drawn low to his head in apology. “Not like this,” he starts to say, because at least that’s true. But suddenly there are so many voices talking all at once. It’s not worth trying to explain if he’s going to have to repeat himself a dozen times.

He meets Felix’s eyes. Felix doesn’t look accusatory, even though Chan thinks that’d be well within his right. Mostly he looks tired. Chan wants to curl around him and let him sleep.

Felix says so, so softly, “Chris?”

And then Chan snarls. It’s a sound he’s never made in his life—wasn’t aware it was a sound he could make. It’s deeper than Felix’s voice even when Chan is pushing him in the studio to go lower, can you go lower, this will be the killing part of the century if you can go lower.

Everyone shuts up. Someone’s teeth comically clack together in their haste. They all blink at each other in shock like they’ve woken up from a collective nightmare. To them, the room is probably dead silent. To Chan, the room is filled with jackrabbiting heartbeats.

“Wow,” Chan says in spite of himself. He swishes his tail. “You’ve never listened to me this well before.”

“Hyung. At the airport?” Changbin prompts. “Yongbok-ah?”

Felix fidgets. He tugs his hoodie sleeves over his knuckles. “He was being weird, and he wouldn’t tell me what was wrong. I don’t know.”

“It wasn’t like this. I think my, uh—my fangs came in after we landed?” Chan scratches the back of his neck. His claws scrape his skin. “But it was over so fast, and then everything was totally normal all night. And—okay, sorry, this wasn’t actually the first time.”

He backtracks. He gives them a play-by-play of the last two days. Everything from bricking it on stage to the treadmill to the blood in his mouth that was maybe imaginary but also maybe not. Part of his brain is kicking itself for dumping all this on them, for causing trouble, for being a burden. But the wolf wants them to know.

For once, his kids listen without interrupting. Several of them visibly struggle to reconcile his batsh*t story with what they can see in front of them. No one asks why he didn’t say anything sooner. They know him better than that.

“So…yeah. Now we’re here,” he finishes lamely.

“It sounds like a stress response, somehow,” Seungmin says. “But you’re always stressed. That’s your default state. What’s so different this time?”

“I don’t know.”

They’re all quiet for a long moment. Then Felix asks, “Does it hurt?”

Chan’s tail droops. All he wants to do is crawl to him. He wants to rest his head in Felix’s lap. He wants to close his eyes while Felix pets his hair. He wants to sit at Felix’s feet, so loyal it might kill him, like the dogs in the old coming-of-age books he had to read in primary school. Dogs who protect their boys even when they’re slashed apart and bleeding out: I will lose myself to keep you safe.

So he crawls. They all watch him. He is not ashamed. There is no shame in the wolf, no shame in this devotion.

The human part of him knows this is dangerous. The closer he gets to Felix, the closer he gets to doing something he can never take back. And yet, this is something that the wolf needs.

Felix sucks in a breath as Chan leans against his knees.

“Not now,” Chan says. “It did. But not now.”

He lays his cheek on Felix’s thigh. Felix’s hand comes up immediately, gentle on the side of Chan’s neck, stroking behind his ear and into his hair. “Hyung,” Felix says in a sad little voice.

“I’m okay.”

“I, um. Don’t know if being a werewolf counts as okay.”

But that’s not really what Chan meant.

He lets his eyes close. Felix’s fingers feel so nice. His attention feels so nice. Chan’s almost-hunger returns like a turtle to the beach, digging into his heart. There’s a whine in his throat that he won’t let himself make, but he does let his tail wag.

The rest of his kids let him have this. No one teases him. Maybe it’s because they’re all tired, or maybe they can tell he will come apart at the seams otherwise. Still, the obvious question hangs heavy in the air: what do they do now?

“I’m supposed to record with NiziU today,” Chan says eventually. Felix does not stop touching him. “I already had to reschedule once. There’s no way I can do it again.”

“It shouldn’t be too hard to hide it if you’re just in the studio, right?” Jeongin says. “Just need a big hoodie and a mask.”

“And contacts,” Jisung says.

“Yeah, definitely contacts,” Jeongin agrees. “Otherwise that’s what you always wear.”

“Would it help if someone went with you?” Changbin asks. “I don’t like the idea of you going out alone like this. I’ll go with you.”

“Thanks, Bin-ah. Maybe.”

Felix shifts. Chan reluctantly starts to lift his head from his lap, but Felix eases him back down. A pleased shiver travels all the way from his scalp to the tip of his tail.

“After that—well, I mean, after that me and Hyunjinnie are doing Vogue stuff on Tuesday,” Felix says. “But after after that…”

“The Nylon shoot. I know. And then I have deadlines, and we have practice, and—”

“Hey, maybe you’ll be back to normal tomorrow,” Hyunjin says.

For some reason, Chan hadn’t considered this. He assumed that he would be stuck like this, maybe for forever, because the wolf never wins in a fairytale. There’s always a pot to boil in, or a river to drown in, or a soft belly to sink a blade in. There is no redemption for the wolf.

But this is not a fairytale. He is not a villain, and he is not a hero, even though he usually sees himself as one and desperately tries to be the other. He is just the leader of this group of boys—boys who came when he howled—and together they are experts at clinging to hope. Hopefully he will be back to normal tomorrow. Hopefully he will be luckier than the wolves.

Chan steels himself to finally, unfortunately, sit up. He needs to focus on things other than Felix petting his hair. They have some other short-term issues to iron out before the sun rises, like whether they’re going to tell PD-nim (not yet), and what to do about his claws (cutting them feels scary, so he’ll pass them off as punishments for a game), and whether he should go to the emergency room (they have no idea, really, but Seungmin makes a dry joke about going to a vet and Minho shows them a photo of Doongi wearing a cone after being neutered, which is not helpful). They don’t plan on anything long-term out of exhaustion and blind optimism. Jisung somehow falls asleep on the couch. It’s nearly six o’clock by the time they agree Minho’s dorm should head back to try to squeeze in another couple hours of sleep themselves.

Hyunjin and Changbin puppet a bleary Jisung to his room, and Minho is already waiting by the elevator with Seungmin and Jeongin. Chan tugs on the sleeve of Felix’s hoodie to stall him in the doorway. He wants to pull Felix even closer, to tuck him into his body like a marsupial.

“Hey. I’m sorry. For earlier. At the airport, I mean. Like, really sorry,” Chan says.

“I was…pretty pissed, honestly. You weren’t even trying to hide that you were lying to my face.”

“Yeah...”

“I almost messaged you like, a billion times. But it felt wrong. So. I don’t know. I guess I was trying to give you the chance to tell me yourself.”

“Ah. Lix. I’m sorry for that, too.”

“Well, now I get it. I understand now.”

“Yongbok-ah,” Minho whisper-shouts from down the hall. “Come on, let’s go.”

“Coming,” Felix whisper-shouts back.

They look at each other for a moment. Felix pries Chan’s hand from his sleeve and looks at his claws. Chan starts to wag his tail. But then Chan catches the sound of Felix’s heartbeat. It’s fast. His tail falters. “You’re scared,” he says pitifully.

“I’m not.”

Except he is. Chan can tell.

“I mean, like, I’m not scared of this,” Felix clarifies, squeezing Chan’s hand. “I’m just worried that you’ll blame yourself and get really sad and shut us out and try to handle everything without us.”

“You know me so well. Haha.”

“Promise me you won’t do that.”

“Yongbok-ahhhhh, the elevator,” Minho says.

“You, uh. Better go.”

“Hyung. Promise. We’re right here.”

Chan swallows hard. “Yeah. I—promise.”

“I swear, I will personally get your League account banned again if you keep more stuff from me,” Felix says gravely, and then he’s shuffle-running to catch the elevator. Chan’s heart does something stupid when Felix waves from the end of the hallway. He waves back and closes the door when he hears the elevator descending.

He lingers in the living room. He can smell where each of his kids had sat, can almost visualize each of their scents crisscrossing like braids in the air. It’s comforting in a way he couldn’t have predicted. When he makes it back to his room, both dead tired and wide awake, he sighs. It really only smells like him in here.

His tail gets caught under him as he sits on the edge of his bed. He wiggles it out from under his thigh and stares at it. It’s his. Like, actually his. Tentatively, he pets it. The fur is rougher than he expected. Kind of oily. Mostly it scares him, this alien body part, but underneath his fear there’s a twinge of fondness. It reminds him of Berry which reminds him of home which reminds him of his family. The faces of all his kids get mixed in with his parents and siblings. They are his family, too, his—

Chan’s throat tightens as the wolf realizes how alone he is. All his kids have scattered and left him to curl up by himself. It’s a desperate kind of feeling, this naked loneliness. He thinks about snuggling with Jisung on the couch or Seungmin on the floor. He thinks about Felix in his bed, anything for the touch-scent-sound of him.

He whimpers once like a puppy left in the rain.

He should have asked the wolf’s pack to stay.

○○○

Chan settles into his loneliness. He lays awake making increasingly deranged Naver searches. None of the information he finds on werewolves or real wolves or lycanthropes seems to apply to him. What the f*ck is a werefrog? By the time he gets sucked down a YouTube rabbit hole on the killing of a famous grey wolf in the American West—she was trophy-hunted twenty-five kilometers outside her protected territory, which is about the distance from his parents’ house to Manly Beach—he’s about ready to give up completely.

Then he hears Changbin’s alarm through the walls. He reacts the same way he does when he hears a Stray Kids song playing in a 7-Eleven: jolting in delight before cringing in embarrassment. He doesn’t want to impose himself on Changbin’s morning.

The wolf is instantly exasperated. He just spent the cruelest hours of the morning wishing for company, and now he can go have company. It isn’t more complicated than that. The wolf has no concept of imposition. It is not an imposition to be a social animal.

The wolf is very persuasive.

Chan waits a few minutes. At least that way he won’t look like a pomeranian quaking with separation anxiety. He kills time by setting his bed. He makes crisp lines with his sheets and pillowcases the way his mum showed him. He’s way more careful than usual, worried that his claws will tear his bedding. His nose wrinkles when all the rustling sends his nightmare-sweat smell into the air. By the time he’s done, he’s nearly bouncing by the door. Someone might as well have held up a leash and asked if he wanted to go for a walk.

He finds Changbin in the kitchen, scooping protein powder into one of those swampy green juices packed with a trillion micronutrients. He’s already dressed to go to the gym, though his hair is still untamed. Catching him in the middle of such a familiar routine makes Chan feel better.

Changbin looks up and startles. He drops the plastic measuring spoon into his juice. “Hyung,” he says, eyes wide. “I forgot. Well, I didn’t forget, I just, uh…”

“Haha, yeah. It’s a lot.”

“Yeah.” Changbin plucks the scoop out of his juice and tosses it in the sink. He starts shaking his bottle, and the sludgy sound of it is so loud. “Sorry. How are you feeling? Better or worse than earlier?”

“Physically? Okay. I’m sore, but I don’t think that has anything to do with the wolf thing, haha.” Chan pauses as he opens the refrigerator. He eyes the eggs and thinks he could eat a whole dozen raw. His mouth waters as he imagines the silky slip of yolk down his throat. He looks at the meal replacement shakes, and the wolf turns up its proverbial nose. He grabs a water bottle. “And my teeth still feel very f*cking big. Haven’t gotten used to that yet.”

“At least you’re not feeling worse.”

“I guess.” He doesn’t bother saying anything more insightful. It’s barely worth mentioning if they both already know. “I did just think about eating a ton of raw eggs, though.”

“Ahh, the protein,” Changbin says approvingly. He raises his cup in a toast.

Chan wags his tail a little bit. Changbin is nothing if not consistent, and that’s comforting. Even when everything else is f*cked up and uncertain, it’s nice to know that some things will always be the same. Chan raises his bottle in return, and they just exist together in the kitchen for a while.

“What time are you recording?” Changbin asks eventually.

Chan glances at the clock on the microwave. “In like, three hours? Aish. Kill me now.”

“And leave me and Hannie? We’d be 2RACHA! That’s nothing!”

“You could be 2MATO. Or 2NKATSU.” Chan can’t help the melancholy that’s creeping in on him. This was supposed to be a joke, but it’s the kind of thing they might need to think about soon. Contingency plans. He keeps his voice light when he asks, “You won’t let this all fall apart, right? Even if you have to do it without me?”

Changbin smashes his nearly-empty cup onto the counter and crosses his arms. “On principle, I shouldn’t even entertain this. This isn’t going to fall apart, and we won’t have to do this without you. We’ll figure it out. Okay?”

“But—”

“Hyung, we will. I think you need to clear your head. Want to try coming to the gym with me before you record?”

Chan’s first instinct is to say no. That feels like a liability. But the wolf is interested. It wants to run. It doesn’t want to escape, not like the other night—honestly, Changbin would have been so disappointed by Chan’s irresponsible gym stint—but even a light jog would be nice. He wonders how far a real wolf moves in a day. It must be pretty far. “A run sounds really good,” he admits.

Changbin knocks back the rest of his breakfast sludge. In English, he says, “Good doggy.”

Chan pouts, but the wolf doesn’t actually mind.

○○○

Most of Chan’s day is a nightmare.

Putting in contacts? A nightmare. The smog-sewage-petrol smell of the cold city followed by the iron-sweat-disinfectant smell of the warm gym? A nightmare. Trapping his tail under an oversized hoodie and overheating halfway into his jog? A nightmare. Typing on his phone? A nightmare. Typing on his computer? A nightmare.

Finding an email from his vocal coach suggesting he book a few extra sessions to help combat voice cracking is a nightmare. Finding another email from a manager reprimanding him for “unauthorized livestreaming” is also a nightmare.

Changbin fusses over him all afternoon, which is not technically a nightmare, but Chan still feels bad about it. Especially when Changbin gets them both lunch before the recording, and Chan looks at the kimchi and grilled onions next to the galbi and feels sick. He eats the meat, leaves everything else, and gags down an energy drink to tide himself over.

(He gets really preoccupied scraping his fangs into the thin layer of hard-to-reach marrow. He doesn’t even realize he’s doing it until Changbin tells him hyung stop, hyung drop it, you’re going to ruin your teeth, and Chan drops the rib bone obediently.)

Recording with NiziU is somehow the least stressful part of Chan’s day.

The girls are great. They’re organized and eager. The studio is filled with the smell of coffee and steamed milk, fresh yellow highlighter on lyric sheets, and strawberry lip balm. The greater the swishing of their vanilla-mango-honeysuckle ponytails, the more determined they are to nail the next take.

Chan is more dialed in than usual. His ears are especially attuned to when the girls’ vocals are too breathy or unsteady. There’s a lot of English in this song, and Chan has to stop a few times to write out phonetic Hangul when their pronunciation slurs, but otherwise the afternoon goes about as smoothly as Chan could ever have hoped. No one even questions his claws. Horses, not zebras, he supposes. Idol bullsh*t, not werewolves.

When the session is over, though, he wants to wag his tail so f*cking bad. He wants to show the girls how happy he is with the work they did today! And how proud he is of how much they’ve improved since the last time he produced for them! But he can’t. It’s supremely unsatisfying, like losing a sneeze, or cracking every knuckle except the last one.

It makes him all restless again. He doesn’t know what to do about that. Going back to the gym is out of the question. He can’t work out in his hoodie again. He’s not about to jog down the street either, not when it’s already dark out. He doesn’t want anyone worrying about him getting hit by a car like a runaway pet.

He wishes he had something to sink his teeth into. Something to shred. Suddenly he understands why Berry destroyed his Converse once upon a time.

Before the wolf decides he should crunch into the studio soundboard, he shoves all his stuff into his backpack and goes home with Changbin instead.

For dinner he makes himself eggs (scrambled, not raw, like the wolf still wants) over rice. He does shirtless calisthenics in the safety of his own room. Burpees and mountain-climbers don’t compare to the thrill of a run, but when he’s done, he no longer wants to bite, so he’ll take small wins where he can.

It’s late by the time he bothers to check his phone. Everyone knows that Chan barely answers texts on a good day, and especially not on a recording day, but there are dozens of encouraging messages from all his kids waiting for him in their group chat. Changbin dutifully answered every time Jisung asked how things were going. Minho sent a screenshot of an article on wolfsbane, to which Hyunjin replied, “We’re not trying to kill him??????”

In their own private chat, Felix sent him 206 messages over the course of the day. The final handful are surprisingly succinct: gotta be up / early tomorrow / but / can we call / before bed?

Chan checks the timestamps. The last message came only a few minutes ago. Chan sends him give me 5, gonna wash up and rushes through his routine.

Five minutes turns into half an hour, but Felix still video calls him as soon as Chan says he’s ready.

“So f*cking slow,” Felix says. He flashes a dramatic pout from where he’s snuggled up in his plaid doona. He’s laying on his side, his bleached hair caught under his cheek, his freshly-moisturized nose shiny under his purple LEDs. He’s lovely. Chan’s insides are strung taut like a fishing line caught on a coral reef. The hunger is returning. The restlessness. No shame though, not like usual, not with the wolf.

“Had to blow dry my tail,” Chan mumbles. He rearranges his pillows so he can prop himself up against the shelf of his headboard. “Jumped in the shower without thinking.”

“Ah. Ew. Wet dog.”

“Yeah, haha. So. You okay?”

“Hey, that’s my line. Changbinnie-hyung said you did fine today, but you didn’t answer any of our messages. I wanted to check.”

“The recording went well. Way better than I thought it would, really.”

“Oh, yay. Christopher Chan, that’s very nice.”

“That’s very nice,” Chan echoes mindlessly. “The song is really fun. I’m glad they asked me to do it.”

“No trouble with the werewolf stuff?”

“If you mean like if anyone noticed, then nah, probably not. I think everyone in this industry is too desensitized to weird sh*t.” He leans over to grab his charger, but his phone slips out of his hand. It clatters onto the floor.

“Ow,” Felix says. “You dropped me.”

“You poor baby.” Chan fumbles as he picks up his phone and continues to fumble as he plugs it in. He curses. Once he’s all set and charging and settled back against his pillow, he raises his phone to see Felix frowning at him. “What?”

“You are having trouble.”

A moment passes. Too long to be anything but a confirmation. “Well, yeah,” Chan says eventually. “I feel like—like an alien. Everything smells different, and I’m hungry but all I want is raw eggs, and it’s so hard to do normal stuff with the f*cking claws. Almost scratched my eyes out taking out my contacts.”

“Yikes.”

“And if I think about tomorrow, I might throw up, so. Haha. That’s probably all you need to know there.”

Felix cringes in sympathy.

“Yeah, exactly.” He watches Felix’s hand emerge from the cave of blankets to tuck a wayward lock of hair behind his ear. Chan can see a sliver of Felix’s collarbones where his t-shirt droops. He nearly shudders. The wolf can so clearly imagine—no, he can so clearly remember what it’s like to nestle against the warm, simple comfort of Felix’s body. How they used to fall asleep in the same bunk. How they’d wake up groggy and stiff but peaceful. He swallows a lump in his throat as he adds, “The wolf was really, uh, upset. When everyone split up last night. This morning? Whatever.”

“The wolf was upset?” Felix echoes. “What does that mean?”

“Never mind. Doesn’t matter.”

“It does. Hyung. Is the wolf part of you? Like. Are you the same as the wolf? I mean…uh. I mean, were you upset, too? Not just the wolf?”

Chan’s ears burn. “Not just the wolf.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. I think I always feel like that, when we’re not all together,” Chan admits, which is really putting it lightly. How could he say that Felix is always at the forefront of his mind, on the tip of his tongue? That all he ever wants is for someone to be near so he might remember he’s not alone in this whole brutal thing? He laughs humorlessly. “But the wolf really noticed how lifeless it is in here. In my room. It smells empty. I miss having everyone so close. I know that’s stupid. You guys don’t need me like that.”

Felix purses his lips. Chan watches his cupid’s bow tense. “Not stupid and not even true. You’re the reason we exist. Maybe we don’t need you to like, fight with your life like you used to? But we still need you. Always. You’re our electricity, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Chan says, though he casts his eyes off screen. Pretty soon Chan might be a power outage of unfathomable proportions, but he doesn't say that. Felix tries to stifle a yawn and fails. His jaw trembles open so Chan can see his little canines. They’re sharp, but not as sharp as Chan’s. “You should go to sleep, okay?”

“Mm. You, too. It’ll be like Christmas. The faster you sleep, the faster Santa comes.”

“Sure.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah.”

“Yay. Okay. Text us in the morning.”

Chan nods. “Have fun at your shoot. G’night.”

“Night. Thanks for talking to me. And tell the wolf good night, too.”

Chan turns off his lights as they hang up. He lays awake and listens to the ambient sounds of the night. Someone in the dorm runs the tap in the kitchen. A car alarm blares a few blocks south. His breath whistles annoyingly through his deviated septum.

He wonders if it will hurt when he becomes human again. Will losing his fangs be like losing baby teeth? He lost his first baby tooth biting into an apple and didn’t feel a thing. Or will it be like getting his wisdom teeth removed, which hurt like hell? And what about his tail? At this point, he doesn’t know what to expect.

Midnight comes. Nothing happens. He’s not Cinderella, so he’s not surprised. His instincts tell him to hold out hope.

Felix was right. It’ll be like Christmas in the morning. He wills his brain to shut down.

When he sleeps, he dreams of nothing at all.

○○○

[Chris]
I have bad news
Haha

○○○

Chan holes up in his studio.

Coming to the company building was a risky decision, but he has a lot of work to do. He couldn’t do this amount of work sitting in his bedroom. If he ends up shredding his studio couch to bits, well—it’s not like this is going to be his studio for much longer, anyway.

It’s like he’s writing a will. Getting his affairs in order before he kicks the bucket. Other people will need to handle the larger-picture problems, like the voiding of his contract, but there’s plenty for him to do himself. He writes an apology letter to STAY. He drafts so many messages to so many people thanking them for all the chances they’ve given him. He triple-checks that he has multiple backups of all his stuff, just in case, and makes an effort to rename all the 3RACHA files that look like demo8aaaaaa1.mp3 to make it easier on Changbin and Jisung down the road.

He’s very productive, in a morbid sort of way.

(Less morbid are the abandoned lyrics that he finds for a song that he had wanted to write for Felix. To Felix? The chorus was so sweet. He could never bring himself to finish it—didn’t know what he would do with it if he ever did. The muse was too obvious, and so was the heart that wrote it.)

At some point, Seungmin forces himself into Chan’s studio. Chan scrambles to close his lyric doc. Seungmin doesn’t stay for very long and doesn’t say much while he’s there. Mostly Seungmin slides him the kimbap from the street stall around the block. The wolf is not interested in eating seaweed. They sit in strained silence as Chan feeds him the majority of it.

“Maybe it’s not as bad as you think it is,” Seungmin says. His English is measured and precise. “I think STAY could get used to it. They already think you’re a furry.”

“I wish I never told you what that meant.”

“Too late, Mr. Lucario.”

“Thanks, Kim Mong Mong.”

“Mong mong,” Seungmin repeats dutifully. “But really. I think we can figure it out.”

Chan halfheartedly wags his tail for him. When Seungmin leaves, Chan’s tail sags. He turns back to his computer and searches apartment listings, first in Seoul, and then, more realistically, in Sydney. This all feels too concrete, but staying busy keeps him from asking questions to which he doesn’t want answers.

(Will his unreleased songs make it onto future albums, ghostwritten? Will Stray Kids re-record their entire discography a second time? Will the industry mock the legacy of the prodigal son, or will he simply be politely brainwashed from everyone’s memory? Will Stray Kids even exist at this time tomorrow?)

Well. Maybe he’ll move back in with his parents. Maybe he should look up research centers instead. Hospitals. Cosmetic surgeons. Or like, a traveling circus? A zoo? He’s heard only good things about Australia Zoo, though it’d be easier for his parents to visit Taronga.

He rests his forehead on his desk and breathes out all the air in his lungs.

What’s f*cking him up the most is that this isn’t even the first time he’s felt like his world was falling apart. Not the first or second or third. When he was twenty, he cried over Minho and then cried over Felix even worse. When he was twenty-two and feeling ancient, he cried again, bitter and betrayed, as Stray Kids amputated a rotting limb. He remembers the aftermath of that fiasco so sharply. Scrolling through flagrant Twitter trends. Watching in slow-motion terror as his dreams circled the drain. Calculating how many more critical hits they could tank.

But he also knows that that’s not the whole picture, not the only thing that scared him then and scares him now: as much as he hates to admit it, there had been nine of them at the start, and he’s never stopped worrying when next he will need to guillotine someone out of his life.

It’s easy to look back and point fingers. Each stone thrown at them had to come from someone else’s hand, and there have been many stones. Once, PD-nim congratulated them for “overcoming hardships,” and all Chan could do was laugh. Hardships, like getting slandered and torn apart and threatened. God. How many times has Chan been sent to the slaughter and come back seething?

This time it’s different. There’s no one else to blame.

He’s going to be the one to ruin everything.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees his phone light up. Notifications consume his lockscreen. It’s Felix. He can tell. He unlocks his phone and reads Felix’s messages as they come in like pattering raindrops.

[Felix]
I’m really sorry
I couldn’t talk to you all day
I tried
To find time
But
Ah
Busy… ㅠㅠ
It’s a good thing
We don’t have to smile
That much
For photoshoots
Me and Hyunjinnie
We weren’t
In the best condition
Really
It was a very
Sexy~
Photoshoot
And the director
He actually
He said we looked
Mysterious
And we had
Good smolders
So I guess that’s good
But to people who know us
I think
We might just look sad
I was worried
About you
Don’t even
Say anything
Let me worry about you
Ok?
🫠
Anywaysss
Do you wanna
Hang out
Maybe
Just to be not alone
I’m at yours
Come home?

Chan gets goosebumps out of nowhere. He feels intensely homesick. The wolf tremors in anticipation. It—he—they both want to howl, to use their whole voice to tell Felix they’ll always come home to him. They want Felix to howl back and guide their way. Chan types out his replies as fast as his claws will let him.

[Chris]
Please
I think coming to the studio was a mistake
I got a lot of stuff done today, which is good
But now I feel…
Well I feel really bad haha
I shouldn’t have stayed so long
It’s messing with my head
Let me pack up and I’ll leave

Then he hesitates, but the wolf wants him to say what he’s thinking. So he adds,

[Chris]
Idk if this is weird but uh
And you can say no!
But I really liked when you touched my hair yesterday
Really helped me feel less insane haha
Can you maybe do that again?

The typing bubble appears. It disappears and reappears a few times.

[Felix]
Not weird
At all
Of course I will

Chan wrangles all his chargers into his backpack. He jams his beanie over his hair and checks to make sure his tail is sufficiently tucked into his hoodie. Then with a flip of the lightswitch, he’s gone.

○○○

At the dorm, the furnace is blasting, smelling faintly of burning dust. Chan’s nose is freezing, but the rest of him instantly breaks out in sweat. Every time he thinks he’s uncovered the worst of the wolf, there’s something new. Next thing he knows he’s going to contract mange or something. That would be just his f*cking luck.

He toes off his sneakers without untying the laces. When he kicks them into the mountain of shoes by the door, he pauses. His nostrils flare. He can smell his kids and dirt and rubber. The wolf knows that the lingering Felix-scent here is nearly an hour old. Honestly, Chan hates knowing that. It makes him feel like he’s in pursuit, like he’s hunting. That’s too much, even for him.

Farther into the dorm, Chan hears the Animal Crossing soundtrack. He heads straight to his room. He isn’t sure why he’s so surprised. Felix is exactly where he expected him to be: starfished in Chan’s bed, holding his Nintendo Switch aloft as he plays, his head bopping along to the music. One of his legs dangles off the edge, his bare toes nearly brushing the floor. He’s wearing a chunky baby blue sweater with sleeves that pool at his elbows and jeans with a huge LV belt buckle.

Felix looks up. Their eyes meet. Felix smiles at him. The wolf wants to leap, pin him down, lick his face. Heat shimmers in his core like he swallowed a hot coal. He’s going to suffocate if he doesn’t get significantly more naked really fast.

“Hi. Sorry,” Chan says as he drops his backpack and hastily strips off his hoodie and his shirt in one go. He hesitates for half a second before he kicks off his sweatpants.

“Oh,” Felix breathes. “Hi. Um. Hen party’s down the hall, actually?”

“Sorry, I’m just—gross.” He shakes out his tail. He shakes out his hair, too, tossing his beanie into the heap of clothes on the floor. They hold another brief and horrendously awkward second of eye contact as Chan stands stupidly in his boxers. He finds basketball shorts that might or might not be clean.

“Is that better?” Felix asks.

“Not really. Haha. I’m a billion degrees all of the sudden.”

“Like, a fever?”

“I think just the wolf.”

“Open the window.”

“You’ll get cold.”

“That’s what cuddling is for.” When Chan doesn’t move, Felix tosses his Switch aside and warbles, “Fine, I guess I’ll do it myself, even though it’s sooo far away and I’m sooo comfy and it will make me sooo sad if I have to get up.”

“Okay, okay.”

“Okay, okay,” Felix repeats, mocking him in his goblin voice.

Chan opens the window. The first burst of fresh air into his room makes him sigh in relief. He perks up his tail, wagging it slowly. His sweat is drying on his skin, and the world smells cold, and Felix is here. This is the only moment of peace he’s felt all day.

“You know, I thought it would look weird,” Felix says, “but it kind of doesn’t.”

“What?”

“Your tail. Or like, where your tail starts.”

“I guess I hadn’t really thought about it.”

“Yeah. It looks natural. I mean, it is, right, but like, um, not like a costume. Like I could kind of believe it’s always been there? It’s part of you.”

“Yeah. Haha. That’s the whole problem.”

“We’ll figure it out.”

Chan snorts. It’s very much an animal noise, derisive in a way he’s never been toward Felix, but he can’t stop it. “Everyone keeps saying that and it’s not true.”

There’s a long moment of silence. It’s pressurized, like the weight of an entire ocean is closing in on them.

Then Felix asks, “Do you really think that?”

Chan faces him properly. Cold air hits his back. It feels so good. He feels so bad. He doesn’t know what he could possibly say to him.

Felix sits up, attentive. His eyes get really big. “You do. What the f*ck?”

And—the tears come instantly. Burning and welling and falling. Like an infant whose each passing day introduces something that is, in fact, the worst thing they’ve ever felt in their tiny little life, and the only way to deal with the horrible novelty of the world is big, fat tears. Chan’s been so good about not crying. Crying feels too much like defeat. But if they’re calling it like it is, he sure feels defeated.

“None of us have any idea how to figure this out,” Chan says. His chest is tight. He sits on the edge of his bed, hanging his head in his hands. “We don’t even know where to start! We just keep waiting for something to happen, which is so f*cking stupid, because nothing is going to happen.”

“Chris—”

“You have to promise me you’ll keep going. Until the whole world loves you, okay?”

“Chris, wait. What are you even saying?”

“It’s starting to feel mean, you know? To pretend like it’ll be okay or whatever. Because how can it?”

“Because—because it’s always been okay before,” Felix says shakily. A whimper sticks in his throat. “You always make sure of it.”

“I don’t think I can this time.” Chan sucks in a wet breath. He chokes on it and cries harder. “Everything is going to come crashing down tomorrow. I won’t be able to do the shoot, and then the secret will be out to everyone at the company, and like, of course they won’t be able to keep a werewolf on as an idol. And then I—f*ck, I don’t know? They’ll make up some insane lie about why I had to leave Stray Kids, and everyone will know it’s a lie but what else are they supposed to say, right?”

“What about a hiatus? We could take some time off, and—and, like…” Felix trails away. He’s crying now, too. Chan made him cry.

“And what?” Chan challenges. To what end could he take time off? How long could he stand to watch Stray Kids suffer a slow exsanguination? Wouldn’t a swift decapitation be more humane?

“I don’t know,” Felix wails. “But you can’t just—we’re not just going to give up. We won’t do this without you.”

“Lix.” Chan’s voice breaks. “Please.”

Chan feels Felix’s hand on his arm. Finally he looks at him. Felix’s cheeks are blotchy pink, his eyes rimmed red. His chin wobbles. He’s never been a subtle crier. Chan teases him about it often: Not a single cloud for our sunshine to hide behind, huh? Usually Felix will flip him off, call him a bugger or a dickhe*d or a c*nt, and gratefully let himself get pulled into a hug.

This time it’s Felix pulling Chan in. They fold into each other wordlessly. It sucks how familiar this is, that they’ve been here before like a time loop. Felix’s hands are warm and clammy on Chan’s back, and his sweater is scratchy on his chest, but Chan doesn’t want to let him go.

“I’m sorry I’m not a better leader,” Chan whispers into Felix’s shoulder.

“That’s the worst thing you’ve ever said.”

“All I—”

“Don’t. Just don’t.”

So Chan doesn’t.

Slowly, they cry themselves out. Felix continues to hiccup through his mindful breathing exercises. Chan lifts his head from Felix’s shoulder. Felix’s eyelashes are clumped together, and his freckles are tadpoles on the drippy pond of his face. They’re so close. Chan barely has to lean in at all until he’s nuzzling against Felix’s hot cheek, dragging his nose through Felix’s tears.

This is muscle memory. This is normal. He’s done this dozens and dozens of times, during interviews and performances and vlogs, smushing up against Felix’s face like a kid trying to find a gecko in a terrarium, just to get him to laugh.

Felix is not laughing now. His heartbeat races. His breath catches on a latent sob. He tilts his head so Chan can bury his nose in his hair, giving the wolf permission for something that Chan is too drained or too selfish to police.

He breathes in. Felix’s scent is stronger than ever. Even with his human nose, Chan could tell by smell alone whose hoodie got left behind somewhere—it’s not that hard to differentiate between Changbin’s leathery cologne and Jeongin’s baby powder shampoo—but he’s certain that he could tell Felix’s scent apart from anyone in the world.

He can even smell Felix’s sadness, that sour dampness of having a meltdown. Smelling the chemical composition of despair on someone else should probably feel like too personal a thing. Yet it feels more like a privilege to know him like this. What does too personal even mean when it comes to them, anyway?

Chan presses his nose to Felix’s ear, neck, shoulder, armpit, elbow. The wolf is fascinated. It catalogs how Felix’s entire day lingers on his skin and his clothes. First the makeup remover. Then so much hairspray. Then the samgyetang Felix apparently dripped on his sweater at dinner—Hyunjin and their manager—the electrical heat of softbox lights—secondhand cigarette smoke—at least four stylists who put their hands on him—sterile corporate building air—coffee and caramel syrup—smoggy morning rush hour—lavender fabric softener—Bvlgari perfume and eucalyptus deodorant and shaving cream—and beneath it all, sweat and oil, boyish and warm and comforting.

The wolf wants to put its own scent on Felix.

Chan wants that, too.

He’s running on autopilot, on instincts he shouldn’t have. When he comes back to Felix’s neck, a shudder travels up Chan’s spine and reverberates in his canines. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. All he knows is that he could lick Felix’s jugular if he opened his mouth, could match his taste to his scent, and his breath is uneven, and his bottom lip drags on Felix’s skin—

Felix gasps. The air in the room shatters like thin ice under a careless step, jagged and cold. Chan jerks back. Suddenly they’re not touching anywhere at all.

“I’m sorry,” Chan wheezes. “I shouldn’t have—”

“No, you’re good,” Felix says. “Sorry I startled you.”

Chan’s face burns. He feels so human. He can’t look at Felix anymore. “I think…”

He pauses so long that Felix asks, “Should I go?”

“No,” Chan says immediately. “Stay. Please. But I think I need a little time. To myself. Just a little.”

“Um. Yeah. Sure. Um? Do you wanna like, wash up? I can make you hot honey water? Or something?”

“That sounds good.” Chan lets out a shaky breath. “I need to—yeah. I’ll wash up.”

Felix gives him a wary smile in that awkward post-cry kind of way. “‘Kay. I’ll be here.”

Chan gives him the same smile in return. It feels unearned. Stupid and tender, like he forgot sunscreen and was surprised that he got burned. But—he isn’t unmade by how stupid and tender he’s been with Felix. The wolf will not let him regret anything that connects him to his pack.

He runs a lukewarm shower. He spends a very long time taking his contacts out, then an even longer time standing under the water. He scrubs his teary face and takes care to keep his tail mostly dry. If he’s lucky, he’ll wash away every thought in his gunked-up brain. He’s tormented himself plenty today—he deserves a moment of mindless peace. When he can’t shake his pessimism, he tells himself that he doesn’t want to make Felix cry again. There will be an infinite amount of time for tears later on, so no more right now.

That works, mostly.

When he’s done, he doesn’t feel good, but he feels mercifully numb. No shame or hunger or restlessness or heat or pain or fear or much of anything. He might even be able to sleep tonight.

His room is cold. It reminds him of the whole winter where Jisung didn’t know his room had a thermostat. Felix is sitting up in his bed, nested into his doona. He’s balancing his phone on his knee, watching an ASMR hydraulic press compilation while he sips from a steaming mug. He must have showered as well—his hair is damp and ruffled like a little sparrow at the edge of a birdbath.

The wolf notices with immense interest that Felix is now wearing one of Chan’s hoodies.

Felix pats the space next to him. Chan climbs gingerly into bed and accepts a second mug. They watch quietly as alarm clocks and tubs of crayons explode under pressure.

“It’s been a long day,” Felix says when their mugs are empty and the video ends.

“Yeah. Haha. Tomorrow will be worse.”

“Don’t think about that yet. Tomorrow is tomorrow. Right now is right now. And right now you owe me a cuddle.” Felix turns off the lights. As the room goes dark, he adds, “Your eyes are so yellow. Like a Rayquaza. It’s actually pretty sick.”

Chan expects Felix to plaster himself to his side. That’s how Felix likes to cuddle with everyone, slinging an arm and a leg over his victims and squeezing. But instead, with some theatrical squeaking and grunting, Felix shuffles them around until they curve toward each other. He tucks Chan’s head under his chin and cradles him to his chest.

He smells blank-slate clean now.

“We haven’t done this in a while,” Felix says.

“Yeah. I miss this. Like, a lot.”

“Me, too.” Felix hums. He knocks softly on the crown of Chan’s head and spreads all five fingers outward like a firework on his scalp. “Eggy,” he mumbles. “Crack an eggy on your head.”

Chan shivers and slumps into him. Felix pets his hair and massages the back of his neck. Something important settles in the wolf. He has some kind of phantom memory of the nibble and lick of a meticulous mouth. Paws and ears and scruff and muzzle. Yielding to the care of another. He could almost cry again.

He breathes in—Chan will miss this—and out.

In—Felix’s heartbeat metronomes in his skull—and out.

In—the wolf, too, will miss this—and out.

As if Felix can read his mind, he says, in a wretchedly soft voice, “You’ll always have us, okay? No matter what happens.”

Chan just nods. He doesn’t trust himself to speak, too afraid of lying or telling the truth.

In—Chan is in love with him—and out.

Chapter 2: just about starvin'

Chapter Text

The first time Chan went home with Felix—home home, to Felix’s house, back when his childhood bedroom was still his childhood bedroom and not his mum’s office, left largely unchanged in case the whole idol thing fell through, shelves packed with taekwondo trophies and medals, a dresser drawer stuffed with bathers, goofy photos with his sisters and high school mates blu-tacked to the back of his door—he’d opened his stupid mouth and said, I think I was always meant to be here with you.

He hadn’t really meant here, in Felix’s room. Mostly he meant in their hometown. On their home continent. Maybe in Stray Kids, but for once he wasn’t really thinking about them. He remembers the beat of silence that seemed to go on for ages, like watching a balloon float higher and higher into the sky until it’s out of sight.

Then Felix said, Yeah, it was always meant to be us.

That was not the moment Chan fell in love with him. Chan doesn’t remember when that was, if it was a single moment at all. More likely it was a steady build through a thousand different lifetimes, like minerals crystalizing inside a geode. Crack him open and he would spill love like glittering amethyst. That was, however, the moment Chan realized it, which scared him in unquantifiable ways, until it didn’t.

Chan has had so many opportunities to tell him. So many quiet mornings or homesick nights or any number of spectacularly hectic in-between moments where he might have taken that leap. He’s imagined it happening in any season or hour, in every place they’ve ever stood together, in an infinite configuration of butterfly-effect chains of events. But he could never bring himself to do it, for a myriad of fickle reasons.

Look where all that moral obligation got him. Everything’s f*cked, anyway.

So on the last peaceful morning he’ll ever have, after years of telling himself no, of prioritizing and rationalizing and fantasizing, of being leader/hyung/best mate/coworker/home-away-from-home, of cooling off his white-hot heart just enough to maintain plausible deniability, he’s ready to let himself have this one thing.

Except: he feels like sh*t. He has no idea if he slept for ten minutes or ten hours. He’s sore in the weirdest places, fuzzy-headed, disoriented. His nose is congested. He forgot to close the window before they went to sleep, and the wind is flapping his curtains open, so cold it stings his eyes.

During the night, he and Felix shifted apart. They’re no longer pressed chest-to-chest. Chan tries to burrito himself in his doona.

Felix stirs and whines, “No stealing, give it back.” He grabs a handful of the blanket and tugs, worming his way back underneath and wedging his cold feet between Chan’s calves.

“Lix,” Chan whispers into the space between them. His voice is croaky. His head is so foggy that all he can hear is their breathing and not the comforting lull of Felix’s heartbeat. He clears his throat. “Felix?”

“Time is it?”

“Don’t know. But I, ah—wanted to say something.”

“Alarm’s set for eight. Sleep.”

“It’s important.”

Felix makes a quiet sound and stretches in just the right way to crack his neck. Chan watches him open his eyes: bleary, slow, scrunch-faced, like a disgruntled kitten waking up from his nap to find that that sunbeam in which he’d fallen asleep has slanted across the floor. He’s never been a morning person, and he’s wonderful, and if Chan never gets to wake up to this again, then at least Felix will know it’s not for lack of wanting.

But Felix blinks, and pouts, and scrubs the heel of his palm over his face. If he was a video game NPC, he’d have a big red exclamation point flashing over his head.

“Holy f*ck,” Felix says, breaking into his widest, wildest smile. That’s a smile for chocolate pancakes with strawberries and vanilla ice cream, or a group hug after a daesang, or staff members bringing their puppies and babies into work, or statistically improbable gacha luck, or a plane ticket to Sydney. “You’re you! The wolf is gone!”

Suddenly Chan has his arms full of squirmy, sleep-warm boy. Felix is nearly on top of him, smothering him, knocking the air out of him like he’s a deflating bouncy castle.

“What?” Chan asks, but he doesn’t think Felix hears him past his ecstatic crescendo of goblin noises. Chan struggles to make his body communicate with his brain.

He’s sore along the backs of his fingers because his claws are gone. His lower back spasms because his tail is gone. He’s fuzzy-headed and congested because he’s readjusting to human senses.

There’s no animal presence in his mind anymore.

The wolf is gone.

The shock of joy is like an ice bath. He’s frozen and drenched in sheer relief. His heartbeat rockets supersonic in the adrenaline rush.

Then he laughs. What else is there to do with a false-alarm threat of extinction? The force of it squeaks in his throat and stretches his cheeks like mochi. It catches in his sides and hurts his lungs. Felix laughs, too, in sharp, cackly bursts. Brighter than bright.

Chan crushes Felix to him. Their bodies shake as they cling to each other. They gasp for breath between disbelieving oh-my-gods and what-the-f*cks and I-don’t-knows. Right when they think they’ve calmed down, they start laughing all over again.

“Aish,” Chan groans after a while. “Now yesterday feels a bit—ah, dramatic, haha.” Felix pinches his bicep. “Hey? Ow?”

“You would never say that to me.”

“That’s different.”

“It’s not. It’s not dramatic to have feelings. And feeling bad doesn’t make you bad. Be nicer to my Channie-hyung, asshole.”

“No, I—I mean you’re right, I’m just like—like it’s so—f*ck, sorry, it’s so much I can’t think straight.”

“Mm. As long as you’re okay then the rest of it doesn’t matter? You are okay, right?”

Chan squeezes Felix’s shoulders. He’s all bird bones and compact muscle. “So okay. The best I’ve ever been, maybe. Nothing’s gonna change. Everything can go back to normal.”

Felix wiggles out of Chan’s hold and props himself up. He looks down at Chan. Chan looks up at him. Felix’s eyes are shiny. His hair is messy. The slope of his nose is a dainty masterwork, like the spout of a clay teapot designed for laminar flow. It’s too dark to see his freckles, but Chan knows where they all are, anyway.

“Nothing’s gonna change,” Felix repeats. His voice is—something that Chan can’t place. Distracted? Wistful? He smiles in much the same way as they breathe the same air.

His eyes dart down, then back up. He touches Chan’s face. His thumb strokes lightly across his cheek before settling at the corner of Chan’s lips. In his dimple, Chan realizes belatedly.

It seems uncannily like they are about to kiss.

The realization hits him like a train.

They are about to kiss.

Chan feels intensely stupid, betrayed by his own calculations, like missing a step on a staircase that he uses every single day. Tumbling and flailing-limbed. He doesn’t want to blink in case he misses something microscopically crucial.

The curtains flutter. Felix’s face lights in the grey haze like all the moon’s phases at once, new-waxing-full-waning. He wets his lips. Chan watches the shine of his tongue and mirrors him.

Then Felix’s alarm goes off.

They’re left staring at each other for a few excruciating moments before Felix twists to the side to hit the stop button. He might as well be moving light-years away. They don’t say anything as Felix’s lockscreen dims.

“Channie-hyung.” Felix doesn’t sound tense or even flustered. Just soft like fresh snow. “We should tell the members.”

Chan’s first thought is, That we were about to kiss? His ears are hot. He swallows, the dry click of it audible in his throat. It takes way too long for his next thought to be, Oh, about the wolf.

He sobers. The wolf. It really is gone. He’s human. He’s still allowed to be Bang Chan who, against all odds, still has a job and responsibilities and so many people depending on him. “Oh my god, yeah, good thinking,” he says. In a flash of clarity, he adds, “f*ck, we have a shoot today.”

Felix snorts. “Gotta be on set at 9:15.” He finds Chan’s hand and squeezes. Then he gets up, making a silly little show of shuddering and chattering his teeth, and closes the window. Chan finally sees that Felix has stolen his favorite pair of joggers as well as his hoodie. He’s not going to see those again for weeks. “Seungminnie’s probably awake already. I could text him. But also I need to like, brush my teeth. And stuff. I should go home and get ready.”

“Nah, yeah, totally! I need to do all that, too.”

“I’ll tell my dorm? You tell yours?”

“Sounds ace.” Before Felix can grab all his stuff and leave, Chan rushes to pull him into a hug. Felix breathes out long and slow. His cold hands bunch up against Chan’s back, leeching warmth. “Thank you.”

“Of course.”

“For like, everything.” That feels inadequate, but he hadn’t accounted for a best-case scenario. He doesn’t know where to go from here, like a doomsday conspiracy theorist coming to terms with all the ways the world hasn’t ended.

“I know. See you soon.”

When Felix is gone, Chan beelines to the closest bedroom. Changbin’s triumphant bellow is loud enough to shake the whole city block. Hyunjin’s sincerity is so palpable that he could smear it on his canvases like oil pastels. Jisung’s relief frazzles him so badly that he starts speaking in his unplaceable English accent.

They ask him how. They ask him why. Like before, he doesn’t have answers for them. This time it matters less. Apparently they had all put more faith into him than was probably fair, never questioning whether or not things would work out. It makes him feel very loved. That was never a question, either, but it’s nice nonetheless.

“Do not tell the others,” Chan tells them, and Hyunjin surreptitiously slips his phone back into his hoodie pocket. “Felix is going to tell them. Don’t ruin his surprise.”

Only after their group chat fills with varying sequences of exclamation points and keysmashes and cat stickers does Chan feel the idol-urge to open Bubble.

[It’s Ya Boi Christopher]
Today’s gonna be a really, really, reallyyy good day
Why?
Not telling ya, it’s a secret hehe
HAHAHAHAHAHA
Ah Y/N I’m just teasing haha
Today is good because…
It just is~
Let’s enjoy it together!!!

He adds a sleepy selca to the end. Moments after he finishes sending everything, the notifications that pop up from Felix look like glitches.

[Felix]
It really is going to be a good day
Really
Really
Really
Really
Really
Really
Really
Really
Really
Really
Good
💙

○○○

Not everything can go back to normal.

There are things Chan can’t unknow. He can’t unknow the shame and the hunger and the restlessness. He can’t unknow the nightmarish heat. He can’t unknow the fear that ached unlike anything he’d ever felt before, sharper than his vague imposter syndrome, direr than his omnipresent stress.

He also can’t unknow the satisfying wag of his tail or the rightness of his howl. He can’t unknow the acute animal awareness of Felix’s body, the touch-scent-sound of him as profound as a matter of survival.

And he doesn’t want to unknow any of that.

But most things go back to normal.

A company car picks them up and takes them to the photoshoot location. Their managers greet them like any other morning, none the wiser of their narrowly-avoided catastrophe. He sits in hair and makeup, chatting with a makeup artist as she pats mattifying powder to his T-zone with a puffy brush. A stylist pins his silky shirt in the back. The tone of this shoot is more formal than he’s usually comfortable with—who the f*ck is he to be wearing loafers—but he looks good and he feels good and it’s actually a little unnerving how chill he is considering how unchill he was yesterday.

First they take group photos posed like a still-life painting, like bunches of grapes spilling from a basket. They elegantly slump over the cushions of a leather couch, arms like vines connecting everyone to everyone else. When the photographer instructs Chan to lean even more against Felix’s shoulder, Felix knocks their heads together.

How are you doing? he seems to ask.

Chan brushes his pinky along the curve of Felix’s wrist. Really good, he answers.

The best part of the day is how his kids orbit around him more than usual. During breaks, Hyunjin accepts back-hugs with a content little hmm, and Seungmin barely even retches when Chan asks him questions in aegyo. Minho shows him a video of Dori hissing at a sock, and Felix pulls up the next episode of Bluey. Jisung asks him to open his water bottle for him, and Changbin lets him straighten his tie for him. He likes smothering them. He’s touched that they’re allowing him this.

“Hyung,” Jeongin says after an outfit change. They’re the first ones done, and Jeongin is ragdolling as Chan rocks him in his arms. He doesn’t let Chan do this very often anymore, his grown-up maknae. He gossips like a nosy ajumma: “Don’t tell them I said this, but Lino-hyung and Seungminnie-hyung were up all night researching.”

“Oh, really? Them? Were they abducted by aliens? Did they try to probe you? Blink twice if you need help.”

Jeongin cranes his neck so that Chan can see his exaggerated blinking. Chan laughs. Jeongin looks like a little bug in a suit. “They were looking up wolf stuff. Seungminnie-hyung was so cranky this morning.”

“I’m sure he was.”

“Lino-hyung called you a dumb dog.”

“I’m sure he did.”

“They care about you.”

“I know.” Chan squeezes Jeongin around the middle. As the rest of his kids start trickling out of the changing room, he does his best baby voice directly in Jeongin’s ear: “What about our Iyennie, does he love hyung too, does he, hmm, because hyung loves Iyennie heaps and heaps and—”

Jeongin reaches the end of his patience and squirms away. Felix and Hyunjin cackle at them from across the room.

The photoshoot goes on for hours. Chan’s getting tired of blinking into the hot studio lights, but it’s a familiar kind of tired, and he’s grateful for it. He’s grateful to be here at all. Staff change the set dressings. They get split up for unit photos. Minho and Changbin get called first. Chan watches fondly as Changbin sticks his ass out for Minho to smack.

While the rest of them wait their turn, they size up the service tables. There’s a tower of cup ramyeon and instant tteokbokki, protein bars and platters of fresh fruit, seafood crisps and honey cereal, Korean breads and Western pastries. Jisung dissects a chocolate doughnut into bite-sized pieces with disposable chopsticks. Hyunjin and Jeongin stare longingly at him before reaching for their coffee. They leave most of the food untouched, left for the production crew instead.

Chan furrows his eyebrows. His gums burn. There’s something not quite right—no, it’s fine. Everything’s normal.

He and Jisung are last to take their unit photos. A makeup artist rushes to dab chocolate frosting from the side of Jisung’s mouth and reapply his raspberry-tinted lip balm. They pose together, their several million won worth of jewelry glittering as they angle themselves this way and that. In the quick moments where the crew adjusts the lights or the camera settings, Jisung tells him about a new SKZ-Record he’s writing inspired by another anime.

The camera shutter clicks. Chan’s mind drifts back to this morning. He turns the memory over and over. Felix in his bed, Felix in his arms. Cold. Breathless. Tender. The dreamscape starts to feel kaleidoscopic, all the shapes and colors shimmering and shifting. They were about to kiss.

What was it to Felix? A celebratory, in-the-moment impulse? Or the flash of gunpowder finally igniting, its fuse lit years and years back?

He thinks he knows, but he isn’t certain.

He hopes he knows, but he wants more than hope can give him.

“Hyung,” Jisung says. “Where are you?”

“Hmm?”

“You’re not listening.”

“You were talking about Frieren again.”

Jisung rolls his eyes. “It’s a masterpiece, and—you know, I truly don’t understand how you do that.”

“What?”

“Listen without actually listening.” Chan almost answers, it’s a skill you learn when you have kids, but Jisung adds, “Anyway, noona said we’re done here, and you’re off in space. Everything good?”

“Yeah, haha. I’m good, Han-ah. Think I’m just hungry, or something.”

Jisung studies him for a second before he shrugs. “Yeah, man. Me, too. What I would do for another doughnut. Mm. Like, it slaps that they like it when my face is round, but two is a bit…” He laughs as he trails off. “At least I could have one. A bunch of the others were fasting.”

“I figured. Hyunjin and Iyen looked like they were ready to fight for your crumbs.”

“Mm. I think Minho-hyung too, and Yongbokkie. They’ve all been like, you know, my face is so puffy, guess I won’t feel any joy this week.”

It’s not like this is unusual for them. The balancing act is always tough: needing enough to fuel their grueling dance routines while also needing to cut back to look like a bunch of elf princes. Someone’s always frowning over a poached chicken breast. Someone’s always complaining about going low-carb, low-fat, low-sugar, low-sodium. They are models and athletes, and they do what they must. This is normal.

If this is normal, if today is so good, then why is something ugly splintering in him? Hunger, or something like it, both his and not his, both visceral and metaphoric. Primal emptiness, a lean winter, sacrifices to be made.

“Dinner’s on me,” Chan decides. The knifepoint of worry instantly lessens. It’s fine. He’s fine. “What do you want?”

“Fried chicken!” Jisung crows. He sings it over and over, pitched up and pitched down and so loud. “Chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken!”

“Yeah, I should have guessed.”

○○○

The work day isn’t over. They all end up back at the company. Chan still has deadlines: he’s supposed to finish four remixes for their year-end stages by tomorrow afternoon. He could probably get a couple extra days if he asked, but he knows there are a lot of people waiting on his work so that they can do their own—the live band, the choreographers, the LED artists, the laser programmers, the pyrotechnicians—and he’d rather die than hold everyone else up.

He heads to his studio, sets up all his devices, and hunkers down to work.

He’d already had some ideas for the tracks he wanted to make. In no time at all, he finishes the first remix with a noisy cyberpunk twist. This is what he’s good at. He takes a quick water break and sets out on the next track.

The second remix goes slower. He f*cks around with his MIDI keyboard. He skims through his go-to sample pack. He verges on something great for what feels like forever, never quite getting there, like building a spaceship in the backyard, like lips almost touching, like—

Writing ballads is something he usually leaves to his other kids, but the words start whirlwinding in his head unbidden. He has to write them down. He clicks around to find those lyrics he abandoned so long ago. The chorus can stay. The verses become something new. It’s like he sees the matrix, and the next time he blinks, he’s birthed an entire love song. 100 billion galaxies all with 100 billion stars but this universe still lets us touch.

If there are 100 billion galaxies each containing 100 billion stars, then there are 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the whole universe, and he doesn’t know how to say that number in Korean or English, but it’s the number of times he’s looked at Felix and thought, I can’t believe we ended up here together.

He does not care at all that this isn’t the work he should be doing.

He reaches for his phone. He’s missed some notifications. Five from Minho over the last half hour, sent at freakishly regular intervals:

[Minho]
Hyung.
Hyung.
Hyung.
Hyung.
Hyung.

[Chris]
Lino-yahhhhhhhhh

[Minho]
Hannie said you were buying dinner.

[Chris]
Ah ㅋㅋㅋ
I did say that, yeah
I will, just let me know when
Lots to celebrate! :]
Also, while we’re at it…

[Minho]
We’re not at anything.
Just buy dinner.

[Chris]
Iyen said you and Seungminnie were researching werewolves for me
ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ

[Minho]
Hmm. I’m going to turn him into panko.

[Chris]
Nooo it’s very thoughtful
I’m touched
ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ

Chan saves all his work. Several minutes pass. He assumes Minho is busy pulverizing Jeongin. But then he gets another notification.

[Minho]
I’m going to say this once and only once. And you will never mention it ever again or else I will stuff your pillows with Soonie’s hairballs. That is a promise. Okay. You’re so dedicated to being a hyung we can rely on. If things got really bad, the kids would look to me the way they look to you. It’s not that I wouldn’t take on that responsibility, because I would, but I don’t need it like you do. I could never love it like you do. It felt wrong that you could lose even that. So yes, I was trying to find anything that would help, because that’s the least you deserve, and the least the kids deserve. It’s also what I deserve, so if you think about it, this was all purely selfish. I’m done. Soonie hacks up a lot of hairballs, by the way.

Chan doesn’t have time to even think about replying before he gets a video call. He answers to a macro close-up of Minho’s eye and his voice yelling at him to come downstairs. There’s so much giggling in the background.

Someone yanks Minho’s phone away at what appears to be lightspeed. He gets a shaky, blurry glimpse of blond hair.

“You gotta feed us!” Felix says. His accent is thick. Chan sees flashes of mirror and red wall and laminate floor as Minho wrestles his phone back.

“Now!” Minho says, and then he hangs up.

Chan’s heart is a chrysalis, liquefying before growing wings.

His kids are waiting.

○○○

Everyone is goofing around in the practice room. They’re in this morning’s sleek makeup but also slouchy hoodies and baggy jeans. Jeongin and Changbin are doing what they do best: mocking PD-nim’s embarrassing dance cover of Le Sserafim’s latest title track. Minho chants an intense eight-count while Hyunjin films them. When Jeongin coquettishly shakes his butt, Felix and Jisung stagger into each other in a fit of laughter, collapsing to the floor like a house of cards.

“Finally,” Seungmin says when he sees Chan. Seungmin steps over Felix and accidentally-probably-on-purpose kicks Jisung in the ass. Jisung swipes a hand out and latches onto his ankle, getting dragged along as Seungmin gives Chan his phone. “Our order is ready to place. We just need your credit card.”

“Is that all I am to you?” Chan jokes.

“What else would you be?”

Chan looks at Seungmin’s delivery app. It’s from their favorite late-night spot, the one where the chicken-mu is never bitter and the yangnyeom sauce is never too spicy for his baby taste buds to handle. They’ve added half the menu to the order. Extra dark meat, extra kimchi, extra rice. He sees bulgogi fries at the bottom and just knows they bickered about the logistics of getting fries delivered, like they always do. He barely pays any mind to the price before he gets out his wallet.

“Thanks, grandfather,” Seungmin says with a salute when Chan hands his phone back.

Felix slithers across the floor until the top of his beanie stops centimeters from Chan’s feet. He scrunches his whole face in a smile. “I’m stuck,” he says. He flops his arms up and makes grabby hands. “Help meee.”

“Wah, wah, I’m stuck,” Chan teases, towering over him. He’s feeling bold. That should probably make him nervous. But it’s just Felix—just Felix like the moon is just the moon, extraordinary and beautiful and familiar in his sky—and the desire to kiss him is comfortingly familiar. Felix turns both grabby hands into middle fingers. Chan laughs and reaches down to haul Felix to his feet.

“How long ‘til food’s here? I’m done fasting and it’s been like, three days since I’ve had a proper meal. I’m so f*cking tired of broth and coffee.”

“f*ck broth!” Hyunjin echoes gleefully. “Felix fried chicken!”

“Hey, hey, hey, hey!”

And like earlier, the hunger rolls in fast like sickly storm clouds.

Chan’s jaw aches.

“Hyung?” Felix asks.

He remembers, suddenly, the trophy-hunted grey wolf and the war between her pack and a neighboring band of coyotes.

The grey wolf had pups, and she needed help feeding them. Her pack took turns ferrying meat from kill site to rendezvous site. But the coyotes schemed: a single wolf can take a single coyote, but not several at once. And so, like playground bullies stealing lunch money, droves of coyotes harassed solo wolves into surrendering their meat.

Soon the pups were hungry.

On and on this went—until the grey wolf led her whole reverent pack to the coyotes’ territory. She paid no heed to their warning barks and gnashing teeth. The wolves watched her. The coyotes watched her. No one intervened as she dug each coyote pup out of their underground dens and shook them all dead. Little yips aborted and little feet wilted as little necks snapped.

And then she ate them all.

In this moment, Chan understands her at a molecular level. He, too, would do all the dirty work if it meant his kids were happy and fed.

He would peel oranges for them and live with the pith slivered under his nails. He would pit cherries for them and tie himself in knots like the stems. He would seed pomegranates. Shave away spiky pineapple eyes. Carve the flesh of dragon fruit, kiwifruit, passionfruit. Open coconuts and hold the shells to his kids’ mouths so they might drink from his hands. Skin sweet potatoes straight from the campfire and burn his fingertips. Desilk corn, desand leeks. He would file off husk and bran and germ one grain of rice at a time until he had eight full bowls. He would shuck abalone and oysters. Devein shrimp. Crack crab legs. He would bleed eels of their poison and shear out their backbones. He would slice silverskin from pork ribs and gristle from steaks. He would—

“What’s wrong?” Felix’s voice sounds very far away. Is that even—yes, of course that’s Felix’s voice, Chan knows this. Chan tries to focus on him, but it’s so hard. He sways. Gravity feels off.

“Felix,” he says hollowly.

“Okay, now you’re scaring me.”

And like earlier: a splinter, a knifepoint, a burn in his gums.

His knees buckle. Loud music vibrates in his bones, until it doesn’t.

“Channie-hyung?”

“Hyung!”

“Don’t let him hit his head on the floor!”

So many voices in his ears. So many hands steadying his body, pulling on his clothes.

“Hey, come on, Chris, look at me, look at me.”

Chan looks up. Pain rips down his spine. He manages to get in a strangely lucid headcount—one two three four five six seven, and he is number eight—before his eyes roll back.

He would—

He wants—

He wants to bring down an elk six times his size. He wants the thrill of the chase and the glory of the kill. All he needs is one good lunge to collapse its esophagus in his jaws. Let him feel the crush of muscle between his teeth and taste hot blood weeping on his tongue. When it falls, and struggles, and finally surrenders, he will watch proudly as his kids finish off the dying beast. He has taught them well. Together they will revel in the ripping of pelt and rending of bone.

He wants to catch a rabbit especially for Felix. He wants it to tremble before he ends it all. Then he will lay its limp body as Felix’s feet like an offering to a wild god. He wants Felix to take the first bite. His little fangs should be enough to tear out the cheeks, extricate the purple liver. Only the best parts for him.

See how well he can provide?

He wants Felix’s mouth bloody, his hands, too, sweet and red as fruit juice when Chan leans in to clean him up. His tongue will remember the salt of Felix’s skin, and Felix will know to trust him even as Chan closes his lips around his fingers.

His canines pulse.

He can’t stop it.

So he stops fighting it.

Once he gives in, it’s over so fast that he wonders why he tried fighting it at all. The pain stops almost instantly. Everything goes bright and then dark. When he comes to, he realizes he’s on his back. He doesn’t remember—falling, or being laid out, he’s not sure, but he doesn’t like it either way. What is he, a yearling cowed by an elder? He’s the elder here.

Chan pulls himself to his hands and knees, then back onto his haunches.

“Hyung, easy,” someone says. Changbin, he thinks.

He shakes his head like he’s clearing water from his ears. The fuzzy world comes back into focus. He sees all his kids at eye-level, crouched around him. He hears their heartbeats, smells their worry.

He wags his tail.

The movement drags his eyes to his reflection in the practice room mirror. The fangs and yellow irises are at least familiar. But now the greatest shock is the dark fur peeking out of his pushed-up sleeves, on his forearms where he usually waxes. He can feel more fur beneath his hoodie, all over his traps like hackles. More on his ears, which have elongated in a way that might otherwise be elven, their fur so glossy they don’t even blend in with his damaged hair.

“Ohhh, haha,” he says casually. “Well, I guess this makes sense.”

His kids shoot each other concerned glances. The air in the room is definitely weird, a little dangerous, like smelling ozone before a lightning strike. He supposes there’s something starkly different now that they’ve all watched the wolf eclipse him. Yet he isn’t too worried about it. Besides, he knows his kids will take their cues from him—if it doesn’t faze him, it won’t faze them.

“What makes sense?” Jisung asks.

“It just felt familiar, you know?”

“No, I don’t know,” Jisung says. “You’re like—you just—I mean, it was anime as hell, I’m not gonna lie, like could you imagine if WIT Studio did—”

“Not the point,” Hyunjin interjects.

“Nerd,” Jeongin adds.

“You build Gunpla!”

“Han-ah.”

“Whatever, sorry!” Jisung says. “Just—you’re back on your werewolf sh*t, but worse!”

“Not worse,” Chan says defensively. “Just more.”

“Uh?” Jisung holds up his hands exactly like the shrug emoji. “What are we supposed to do with that?”

Chan lays his hand in Jisung’s hand, as if Jisung had instead been asking for paw. Jisung stares at him with big round eyes. Chan keeps wagging his tail patiently. “It’s not ideal,” he says, “but now that we know it’s not forever, it feels less bad.”

Seungmin and Minho share some sort of look that Chan cannot dissect. “You were a werewolf yesterday, and you’re a werewolf today,” Minho says, unimpressed. “Statistically, that’s pretty bad.”

Jisung lets go of his hand. Chan really should have gotten a reward for giving him paw. Even a scratch behind his ears would do. “You were all like, head in the clouds earlier. Was that the wolf?”

“That was, uh, unrelated, actually. Haha.”

“Did I…was this my fault?” Felix asks.

“Lix,” Chan says.

“I think it was,” Seungmin says at the same time.

Felix pouts. So does Chan. He hears someone’s stomach rumble and imagines that it sounds like three days, three days, three days. The wolf shudders encouragingly. He’s nearly there. His kids are still hungry. He still needs to kill—

It comes together suddenly and just a little too slowly in Chan’s head, like remembering the answer to a trivia question after someone else has already buzzed in to win the whole game.

“Yongbok triggered it this time,” Seungmin says, “but it could have been any of us. And I guess last time it was retroactively triggered by the airport? The wolf is a defense mechanism. It’s meant to protect us, isn’t it?”

The wolf squirms in delight. Yes! Protect them! He will protect them! From all things! Mountain lions, airport mobs, forest fires, Dispatch scandals, golden eagles, interviewers who all ask the same stupid questions, grizzly bears who camp on good carrion, jetlag, steel-jawed traps, overtime schedules, trophy hunting, diets, rival packs! That’s it!

It feels good to understand, finally, and to be understood.

“Wah, our puppy professor is so smart!” Chan coos. “Everything is to protect you, you know that.”

Minho makes a peevish sound. “Yah, that’s great and all, but you can’t just turn into a werewolf every time we’re hungry.”

“I know,” Chan says. With a wry smile just for himself, and maybe for Felix, he adds, “We’ll figure it out.”

The dwindling human part of Chan does recognize the danger of the infinite loop. How are they supposed to stop the wolf from appearing if they are constantly crossing its threshold? And yet, the details feel irrelevant. The wolf’s joy is far stronger than his human worry, burbling in his core like magma until his whole body is nearly vibrating. His tail swishes wildly. His claws tip-tap on the floor as he drops back down to all fours. He headbutts Seungmin’s bicep in gratitude.

“Aish, hyung,” Seungmin complains, clutching his arm like he’s been mortally wounded.

Chan just grins. Not yet satisfied, he headbutts each of his kids in turn. He wiggles indiscriminately. He commits their complex scents to memory. Minho stops him with an outstretched hand, but that’s fine, because he ruffles his hair into Minho’s palm instead.

Felix looks at Chan with pleading eyes when he makes it around to him. His mouth parts on a nervous breath, and Chan knows that he’s about to apologize. As if Chan could ever blame him. As if the wolf ever could. Gently, Chan nudges his head against Felix’s clavicle, near his heart.

The furrow between Felix’s eyebrows smooths out in understanding. Then he headbutts Chan back.

Nearly nose to nose, Chan wishes that Felix had kissed him this morning. The wolf does, too. He imagines a pinch collar digging into his neck to keep himself in check. As a compromise, he reaches out to rub Felix’s earlobe between his fingers. Felix lets him for a second before he snaps his teeth toward Chan’s wrist.

Oh! Is this a game now?

Felix scrambles away and looks back challengingly. It is a game! An excited grumble escapes from somewhere deep in his chest as he chases him. Felix feints and uses Changbin as a shield, much to Changbin’s squawking dismay. Soon the whole cluster of his kids disperses in a screeching mess as Chan bares his teeth and pounces.

They wriggle and laugh and dodge him, nearly sprinting the length of the practice room, back and forth like the beep test, ricocheting off the walls together. He catches Felix around the waist, and Minho by the arm, and nearly flattens Hyunjin into a corner. When his kids bark (mong mong!), Chan knows they’re just playing around, making a joke at his expense. But the joke is on them: this is what it means to be a pack.

He can nearly imagine springy, damp soil under their feet and a wide sky overhead.

The games only stop when Seungmin gets the notification that their food has arrived. He and Jeongin leave to meet the delivery driver in the lobby. When they come back, Seungmin calls from the other side of the door, “Someone help, please. My hands are full.”

“Me when I pee, ayo,” Jisung says from where he’s flopped, faintly panting, on the couch. There’s a beat of silence. Seungmin kicks the door. “I meant, like, of my dick, my hands are full of my dick, I don’t pee in my hands.”

Felix shrieks and slaps his knee and laughs so hard he chokes on his spit. Chan laughs at both of them. He’s starting to feel the sweet fatigue in his lower back from wagging his tail so much.

“Jagiya, you are so embarrassing,” Minho says. He opens the door for Seungmin and Jeongin, who are both balancing several precariously packed bags in their arms.

Jisung smacks both hands over his red face and wails like a shameful little ghost.

“What’s wrong with him?” Jeongin says as the door shuts behind him.

“I ask myself that every single day,” Hyunjin says, taking some of Jeongin’s bags.

“He pees in his hands,” Felix says through a snort.

“Nooo!” Jisung turns to Chan. Like a toddler tattling on his siblings, he says, “Hyung, they’re being mean to me!”

“Stop being mean to Hannie,” Chan says placatingly, “and come eat.”

Earlier, he’d been so focused on everyone else’s hunger that he’d ignored his own. But now, his nostrils flare as he helps Seungmin unpack their dinner. He’s overwhelmed by the scent of fry oil. He opens a greasy paper box filled with golden chicken pieces. It’s no elk, but it will do.

They sit in a loose circle on the floor and chorus I’ll eat well. Then there’s a flurry of reaching hands and chopsticks. Chan waits, watching. He makes sure they all get their prime bite: a lacquered chicken thigh, a dangling jumble of japchae, a chewy gizzard. He watches Felix especially closely, nodding in solemn satisfaction as Felix tears into a drumstick.

But then he can’t look away.

Felix closes his eyes as if in rapture. He lets out a long, low sound of pleasure. The grease leaves a perfect sheen around his mouth, melting through whatever is left of his foundation. He dislocates the flimsy fibula and threads tendons through his teeth. He shoves the whole kneecap into his mouth until his cheek bulges obscenely with it, then does the same thing with the ankle joint, meticulously cleaning the bone. If Chan twitches his ears just right, he can isolate the sound of Felix’s bicuspids working madly around the cartilage.

The wolf loves the predator that Felix has become.

Before he knows it, Felix has polished off the entire leg. Chan hasn’t even had his first bite yet. Finally Felix catches him staring. He lifts his chicken bone pointedly, almost proudly, like he’s making sure the wolf can see his handiwork.

Chan wags his tail approvingly.

Felix cracks open a soft drink one-handed and burps after he takes a sip. He stretches for another drumstick and presents it in front of Chan’s mouth.

Chan blushes. He is too aware of his fangs.

“Eat,” Felix says, gently coaxing him like he needs heartworm meds disguised in a slice of cheese.

Cautiously, Chan takes a bite. The wolf would still prefer something fresh and bloody, but it’s good. Crispy and succulent. He takes the chicken leg from Felix’s hand and gets a small smile in return.

Chan eats. He picks the bone clean like Felix did. He tries a cube of pickled radish. The wolf does not want that, too sour, nor does it want the pineapple juice that someone considerately added to their order. It does, however, accept rice and some fries that admittedly sogged out during delivery.

Belatedly, he realizes that Felix is the only one who has spoken in minutes. His kids are eating so well that they’ve been quiet save for a near-orgiastic euphony of slick mouth sounds.

They have done their job, then, him and the wolf.

They both relax and eat their fill.

○○○

At this point in his career, Chan is well-accustomed to functioning on a death sentence of a sleep schedule, so he’s not supremely worried about needing to stay late to meet his deadlines. He returns to his studio after dinner with an energy drink, a spare mask from Seungmin’s backpack, and Felix’s beanie. There isn’t a ton he can do about his eyes other than pray he doesn’t run into anyone while scurrying through the company building hallways.

(The beanie smells luxuriously like Felix, with a tinge of a human whose scent he doesn’t immediately recognize. No one on their staff, at least. He’ll have to ask about that later. Behind closed doors, he takes the beanie off and nuzzles his face into it. The wolf likes that. A lot.)

So far, the wolf hasn’t interfered too badly with this part of his job, the part where he sits in front of his computer until his eyes threaten to melt out of his skull, but he is mentally prepared for the wolf to make things hard on him anyway. Maybe the wolf will want to nap on his couch after such a large meal. Maybe it will feel restless, or claustrophobic, or lonely in this kennel of a room.

He is not, however, prepared for a Ratatouille moment when he puts his headphones on. He’s never heard their music like this. His music.

The remix he’d been working on earlier sounds brand new. Sure, he’s familiar with the bones of the song—he wrote the lyrics and composed the beat. But the wolf has never heard the song before. He listens to it multiple times. His face scrunches the way it always does when he hears good music. He needs more.

Nearly paralyzed with choice, he shuffles through their whole discography.

So sharp are the layers and layers of sounds that build into one narrative but are not necessarily meant to be heard in isolation. Background vocals are clearer. Gang vocals are more resonant. Bass drops hit harder. Here and there he catches compression artifacts that his human ears have never noticed. The static crackling in “My Pace” makes his spine tingle, and the eagle screech in “FNF” makes his ears twitch.

This is his strawberry-and-cheddar revelation. His reimagining and his fireworks. Chan knows they’re good—knows he’s good—but to be inspired, surprised, enchanted by his own work is astounding. He feels puppy-curious. He could hardly imagine a deeper intimacy with art than this.

He doesn’t have the time to sit with their entire oeuvre, which is tragic. But if he’s going to be here all night anyway, he replays some details for the wolf: the distortion in “3rd Eye,” the shattering glass in “S-Class,” the crow caws in “Awkward Silence,” the panning in “Super Board” as if Jisung is standing beside him making noises directly in his ears. Felix’s voice layered in “Astronaut” and “Deep End” and “Collision.” Felix’s voice, Felix’s voice, Felix’s voice.

By the time he finishes the third remix, it’s just after one in the morning. He’s about to take another break when there’s a knock on the door. The wolf gets so excited for company that he doesn’t even think to grab the mask and beanie. For several reasons, he’s relieved to see Felix standing in his doorway.

“You’re here late,” Chan says.

“Mm. I have like, a sh*tton of choreo to learn. But I’m done for tonight. I’ll feel it in my back if I go much more.”

“Yeah, don’t overdo it, haha.”

Felix gives him a look as he closes the studio door. “I could say the same to you.”

Chan spins around in his desk chair. Felix’s scent follows him through the air like a trail of incense smoke. He flops over on the couch and stretches out, bridging his back before he melts like an ice block in the summer. He smells like work, like sweat. The wolf wants Felix to leave his scent here. On the couch cushions, the herringbone pillow, the Spotify blanket. Everything. His tail thumps against the chairback.

“I’m actually so good right now,” Chan says. “I have one more thing that I need to do, but like, Lix—the music.”

“Wow, so true.”

“Shut up.” Chan giggles. “I’m listening with new ears. Literally. The wolf is. It’s the coolest f*cking thing.”

“Ohh,” Felix says. “Like those reaction videos you watch. Like, it doesn’t matter how many times you’ve heard it before. It’s different when it’s someone else hearing it for the first time.”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“I love when you get excited about what you’re making.”

Chan’s face warms. His smile turns shy. “I’m always excited about music.”

“Yeah, but sometimes it’s like you know you’ve done something great, not just good. You, um, have a certain smile for it. Can I listen?”

“Oh, yeah, uh? Sure. I just finished this.” He takes his headphones off and passes them to Felix. He hits play.

While Felix listens, the wolf and all its unselfconsciousness takes over. He lifts one of Felix’s hands from where it’s resting over his diaphragm and matches all their fingers up, from pinkies to thumbs. With a twisting sort of eagerness, he notices that his claws make Felix’s hand look extra small.

“I like this,” Felix says.

His voice is quiet, like a church after a wedding, where the feeling of something lovely lingers well into the night. Chan doesn’t know if he means the remix or how their hands feel like they were never meant to hold anyone else’s.

“Me, too.”

Three minutes later, he hears the song end. Neither of them move. It feels like they’ve been sitting here for hours, palm to palm.

He bows his head and tugs Felix’s hand up close to his ear. Felix understands immediately. He strokes Chan’s ear, following the grain of his fur. He pets through Chan’s hair, mindful of the tangles. He trails a finger from the crown of Chan’s skull, down the middle of his forehead, and then further down the whole length of his nose.

Chan thinks about comfort. About humanity and rituals. All around the world there are bronze statues of dogs, oxidized and dull except for the places touched by thousands of human hands, their noses and paws and tails rubbed golden by all the people who couldn’t help but think, What a good boy. He could only be so lucky to keep Felix’s hands on him like that, long enough to strip him of his weary patina, to leave him so affectionately changed.

As he leans into Felix’s touch, he realizes he has already been changed. No matter what else happens, Felix has left his fingerprints all over Chan’s soul, and it will be an honor to carry them with him for the rest of his life. Chan wants to say literally anything to stop a lump from forming in his throat.

“Who did—” Chan starts.

“Were you—” Felix says at the same time.

Chan laughs. “You first.”

Felix shakes his head. “No, you. And come here. This can’t be very comfortable.”

“It’s not, haha,” Chan says. Felix sits up to make room for him and passes the headphones back with an approving little nod. When Chan scoots from his desk chair to the couch, one leg tucked up underneath him so they can face each other, Felix goes back to petting his hair. “I was just gonna ask—ah, this is dumb, it has nothing to do with anything—who you were hanging out with earlier. I could smell someone near you. On your beanie, I mean. But it wasn’t any of the members.”

“Um? Oh, Jake filmed some TikToks with me. It's crazy that you can smell that.”

“He’s not one of mine,” Chan says noncommittally. As soon as it’s out of his mouth, he cringes. “Sorry. That was weird. Blame the wolf.”

“Hmm… Don’t take this the wrong way, but I really like the wolf, actually.”

“Aish.”

“I said don’t take it the wrong way. I don’t know. I just think it like, wants you to be more honest. It’s nice. You ask for things you want easier. I know that’s hard for you, but like, you want space, you ask for it. You want to be touched, you ask for it.”

As if to prove his point, Felix scratches just right at the nape of Chan’s neck, and Chan shivers as goosebumps ripple over his body.

“I don’t know if I’d call that honesty,” Chan says carefully. “Mostly it just wants me to be more animal. It wants me to hunt an elk for you. Where would I find an elk?”

“You want to…hunt for me?”

“I want to take care of you.”

Felix sighs. “You already do that. For all of us.”

“Well, yeah. I just mean it wants me to give into its instincts more and overthink less. It gets so annoyed with me when I overthink. And you could probably guess that it’s annoyed with me a lot, haha. So, yeah, in comparison, space and touch have been easy compromises. I reckon that is pretty nice.”

Chan listens to Felix’s heartbeat and the electrical hum of his computer. Then Felix takes a deep breath. “What about wanting me?”

Chan freezes. Enough time passes for entire civilizations to rise and collapse and rise again. Felix stares at him, all expectant eyes and exacting pout, and Chan doesn’t know what to do. He’s been orbiting around Felix for so long that he’s gotten used to the vertigo, but now his head swims. Is this what it’s like to drown in a riptide? To be lured by calm water only to get dragged out and pushed under?

“At least, I think you want me,” Felix amends. He drops his hands into his lap. “This morning. I’m sure you were thinking about a lot of other stuff, but. We didn’t, um. You didn’t, and I thought you would.”

“Felix,” Chan says helplessly.

“I was hoping you’d ask for that, too. Because you have to know, right? That I would always say yes?”

Chan’s tail swishes nervously. His hackles rise. He has never felt so speechless before. So hamstrung and dumb.

How is he supposed to say yes, he did know, but no, he didn’t know, but yes, he hoped, but no, he didn’t dare?

People have loved since the dawn of people, but this is different. No one has ever loved like this, he is positive, and therefore no one has invented the right words for him to use. Not a single language has words grand enough to describe the spectacle of existence: the sacred, the legendary, the true good, the infrasonic, the ultraviolet, the prehistoric, the intergalactic. The wildest of animals. This love for this boy.

His silly human vocabulary is not enough. But he is going to try.

“The wolf wants to be together,” Chan starts. “All of us, yeah, but you—you’re at the center of all things. It wants you to howl so I can answer. It wants to follow you home and make you smell like me. But it wants these things because I already know what it’s like to lose you, and I would do anything to never feel like that again. Me and the wolf, we just…need to know you’re safe and happy. Oh, no, little one, don’t cry.”

“I’m not, f*ck off,” Felix huffs. His cheeks are pink, and his eyes are shiny, but to his credit, he isn’t crying.

“We’ve cried so much together,” Chan says like a maudlin joke. His smile wobbles. “But I found you, and we became something bigger than I ever could have dreamed. That’s fate, right? This is fate? Out of every place in the world we could have gone, and any of the people we could have become, we’re here together. And just like, how could I not want that? Like, always? To be wherever you are? And look for you first in any room and hope you look back at me? And hear your voice last at the end of every day? So, ah, haha, I guess this is a lot of words to say that I would have. If I was actually honest.”

“You’re such a c*nt,” Felix says. There’s no heat behind it. It comes out more like an awed whisper. “Then ask? Please? Ask for what you want.”

Chan meets Felix’s starry gaze. He takes a breath. The wolf quivers.

“I want to kiss you,” he says. “Always. Now. Tomorrow. f*ck, I—I don’t know, I’ll invent time travel so I can do it this morning. And every single place I’ve ever wanted to kiss you, but I have to warn you, haha, we’d have to…go back…really far…”

He trails away as Felix leans closer, closer, closer.

“Now?” Felix murmurs, and Chan nods, and suddenly his insides feel carbonated, all fizzy and fresh, and their hands find each other again, and Felix surges forward and kisses him.

It’s rougher than Chan ever imagined for their first kiss. Giddy and a little desperate. He always imagined it would be cautious, maybe clumsy, maybe on a beach in the gold slash of sunset, and it’s definitely not any of those things—but then again, he also imagined tipping Felix’s face up to his, which is stupid, because even on a good day he’s just a hair shorter than Felix, so he was imagining it all wrong, anyway.

He wraps his arms around Felix’s waist. One of Felix’s hands slides into Chan’s hair, and the other fits below his jaw. For a second, Chan worries about his fangs. They’re so big and so sharp, and Felix’s lips are so soft. Then he recognizes the first kiss as a wrecking ball. Felix was making sure he couldn’t back out halfway through, as if to say, the damage has been done, so now we build.

Their mouths are eager. The meet-slide-part pattern of their lips makes Chan’s face burn. Felix grips the back of his head and kisses him purposefully. Each kiss is so decisive that it feels like he might be counting them. To what end, Chan doesn’t know, though as soon as he thinks about it, he wants to catalog the precise conditions of this moment like a science experiment. He could log the time down to the millisecond. Chart the stars over Seoul and the tides of Sydney Harbour. Measure his oxytocin levels and find the exact HEX color of Felix’s freckles that have lightened in the gloomy autumn. This deserves to be memorialized.

All he knows for now is that it is the middle of the tired night. He has a boy in his arms. He has had this boy in his arms so many times before but never like this. This boy tastes like vanilla lip balm and smells like his entire day. This boy wants Chan to want him.

He feels good. He feels animal. He’s never felt more like himself.

Chan holds Felix tighter. His fingertips sneak under the hem of Felix’s t-shirt. His skin is warm and downy where all his hair stands on end. Felix makes a perfect little noise, and the next kiss lands on Felix’s wet bottom lip.

The wolf rears its head.

Chan’s rhythm falters.

“You good?” Felix asks.

“Yeah, I just—” Chan cuts himself off. He doesn’t know how to explain. The wolf’s basic instincts are easy enough to understand, but there’s nuance here that he doesn’t get. “Didn’t think I could be this happy,” he settles on.

Felix scrunches Chan’s hair in his fist. “Get used to it,” he says ominously.

“Are you? Happy?”

“More than happy. If that’s possible.”

Chan wags his tail. It feels like the sun has chosen to shine only for him. Anything is possible now.

He stares at Felix’s mouth. He leans in, and Felix meets him halfway. Chan trails the tips of his claws so lightly on Felix’s skin, right in the dip of the small of his back. Felix shudders. Then several things happen very quickly and all at once.

First: Felix breathes out a little oh? as his fingers wriggle down the back of Chan’s hoodie and sink into the fur across his traps.

Second: Felix opens his mouth and drags his tongue past Chan’s lips.

Third: Chan whimpers frantically.

Fourth: Chan gets it.

He scrambles to lick into Felix’s mouth. Felix laughs, startled, but he lets Chan explore. Front teeth. Gums. Tongue. The ridges of his hard palate. Chan wants to know him from the inside out. Felix licks Chan’s fangs when he can. It’s all manic and slippery. Soon it’s less kissing and more like—politics. Hierarchies. Submission, and privilege, but also scrutiny and assessment. Chan hopes the wolf won’t be too disappointed that it won’t get the information it wants. Felix is not wolf. It won’t be able to taste in his saliva whether he can breed.

Doesn’t matter. Feels good, still.

He’s panting with greed, hot breath caught between them. His inhales are all Felix’s exhales. Their teeth clack together when he’s too reckless. Their spit is wet on his chin. Must be on Felix’s, too. He licks Felix’s mouth again.

“Hyung,” Felix says. His voice is deep and urgent. “f*ck, okay, come on, do it.”

Chan sucks on Felix’s tongue as if he means to siphon something vital for himself. Then, more gently, he kisses a freckle below his lips, down and to the left. There are so many freckles that Chan needs to kiss. “Do what?”

“Make me smell like you. Want you to have what you want.”

“God, f*ck, Felix, I’m not—”

“Want it, too. Please.”

“I’m not sure I know how.”

“The wolf knows.” Felix tilts his head back. His adam’s apple bobs. The column of his throat is so beautiful, pristine like the tundra before the beasts come trampling through. “Make me yours.”

Chan’s teeth throb exquisitely.

Felix is right. The wolf knows.

He buries his face in Felix’s neck and breathes in and—yes, this is familiar, he smells so good, like boy, his boy, make me yours, mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine. He parts his lips and presses the flats of his fangs to Felix’s neck. The corners of his mouth catch with too much friction as he drags his lips. He doesn’t try to hide his groan.

The mapping of Felix’s skin is meticulous work. Rushing any part would ruin the ceremony of it all. So he is slow and thorough, though not always gentle. He burrows against Felix’s pulse point, mashing his tongue hard enough to taste the tremor of Felix’s heartbeat. He licks up Felix’s cheek and leaves a horribly wet kiss next to his ear. He smears the sides of his nose and the corners of his mouth and his upper lip anywhere he can reach.

Mine, the wolf—Chan—they think. Yes. Mine mine mine.

Carefully, Chan crowds into Felix and lays him out on the couch. Felix plays the part of the deferential packmate so well, yielding to the whims of the wolf. He’s so pliant beneath Chan’s body. He drops his legs open so Chan can fit between them and cranes his neck so Chan can snuffle back into the hollow of his throat.

Chan drools. There’s spit everywhere. Enough that the loose collar of Felix’s t-shirt sticks to his skin like it does after a full sweaty concert set. Maybe his human brain would feel shame for finding this slimy mess so satisfying, but the wolf doesn’t. There’s nothing shameful in honoring Felix like this. The wolf simply imagines bedding down like this for many nights to come.

By now, Felix probably smells like him enough, but Chan doesn’t want to stop. Not until it’s inalienable: mine mine mine mine mine mine. He palms Felix’s ribs where his shirt has ridden up. Goosebumps prickle across Felix’s neck, under Chan’s tongue, and—oh, what Chan really wants is to get Felix naked. To lick the stubble of Felix’s shaved happy trail. To rub his face into his solar plexus and his armpits and his groin. All the sweetest parts of him.

“Oh my god,” Felix gasps when Chan licks up the whole length of his jaw. He squirms. Chan’s mouth slides through his own spit to nip at Felix’s ear.

The wolf feels supercharged. Proud.

This is love in all its sloppy, slobbering splendor.

Felix’s hands flutter from Chan’s back to his hair to his biceps. “I’m—f*ck, fu-u-ck.”

“Mhmm,” Chan rumbles mindlessly. He concentrates on nuzzling his cheeks against the jut of Felix’s collarbones. A reckless scrape of teeth. A broad sweep of tongue.

“Does it feel good?” Felix asks.

“So good.”

“I’m yours?”

“Yeah, baby, mine.”

Mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine.

Felix makes a strangled little mewling sound. Chan’s ears twitch. “Please, feels good for me, too—f*ck, Channie-hyung, Chan, wanna, ah—”

Chan has been focusing so hard that he has somehow failed to notice that Felix’s scent has changed. Or maybe the wolf has noticed and the human is just too dumb. There’s a difference in Felix’s sweat and each labored breath and the heat radiating off him and something carnal—

Felix writhes beneath him, his hips stuttering up. Finally, in a feverish flash of cognizance, Chan realizes he can feel Felix through their pants. Heat oozes through him like molten glass.

He drops his mouth open wide and puts Felix’s neck in a gentle holding bite. It’s not meant to leave teeth marks. He’s been so careful not to leave the kinds of marks that would make Felix’s life harder. But the same jaw that can kill can also protect and encourage. Just like that, baby, he means to say. Chan breathes directly into Felix’s hot skin, wet and harsh. Spit burbles from the corners of his mouth. The vibrations of Felix’s moans sing through Chan’s canines.

Like a good little animal, Felix ruts against Chan’s body. He thrashes. He curses through gritted teeth. His fingers curl like talons in Chan’s hair. His heartbeat sounds savage like many paws giving chase.

Chan can smell it when Felix comes.

His teeth ache. That’s his, too.

Felix’s breath rattles. His thighs tremble around Chan’s hips. Slowly, he uncurls his fingers from Chan’s hair. Chan pulls back until he’s loosely caging Felix in, drooling so much he could erode whole mountains.

They look at each other dazedly. The lower half of Felix’s face is shiny and tacky. Glazed like a fresh doughnut. His neck is even worse, Chan’s spit sliding into his hair and trickling down the back of his shirt, with one especially wet patch where Chan had been holding him between his fangs. Underneath all the saliva, he’s flushed such a wonderful, splotchy red, though it’s impossible to say how much of that is natural blush and how much of that is chafing.

“You really, uh…” Chan says faintly.

Felix snorts. “Yep.”

“You’re incredible.”

“I didn’t do anything special,” Felix mumbles through a lopsided grin. “I came in my pants.”

“That is special. Like, wow, f*ck. You smell so good.”

“f*ck,” Felix echoes as he yanks Chan back into him. He whimpers into Chan’s mouth as their lips meet first, and then their hips. Must be sensitive. Must be sticky. Felix’s fingers skate down Chan’s back. He strokes his tail in one long, languid pull, so innocent and indulgent that Chan shudders. Felix teases at the waistband of Chan’s joggers. “Can I?”

Chan is maybe the most turned on he’s ever been in his life. He’s so hard he feels stupid. His face has been smashed into a surreal layer cake of every decadent thing he’s ever wanted, and it’s left him reeling. Wonderstruck. He feels good. He’s thrilled that Felix feels good.

And yet, he hesitates.

Gracelessly, he sits up. He grabs Felix’s hand and brings it to his lips. He kisses Felix’s knuckles. Because he can’t stop himself, he drags the corners of his mouth and the flats of his teeth here, too, letting a thin trail of spit droop down Felix’s wrist.

“It’s not that I don’t want to, because I definitely do, haha,” Chan says, kissing his palm. “But I don’t want to share that with the wolf. I think I’d rather be just me.”

Felix’s forehead furrows. He looks Chan in the eye for a long moment before he smiles a small, gracious smile. “That’s very romance,” he says solemnly.

“Aish, don’t bring Bluey into this!”

“Sorry.” Felix snickers in a way that says he is not sorry at all. “Then can you get me a tissue? Or like, a bunch?”

“Uh, yeah, hold on.” Chan untangles himself from Felix, adjusts his erection, and grabs the box at the far end of his desk, next to his stash of eye drops and paracetamol.

Felix plucks a handful of tissues from the box and unceremoniously shoves them down his pants. “Jesus Christ,” he says under his breath. He takes a second handful. “It’s not gonna be fun going home like this.”

Chan is barely resisting the urge to bury his face between Felix’s legs to clean him up himself. To at least push his nose so deep into Felix’s inseam that his eyes might roll back as he inhales. He has the decency to blush. “f*ck, sh*t, sorry.”

“Worth.” Felix needs a third and a fourth handful of tissues to mop up the ungodly mess Chan made of his neck. There’s spit puddled in the craters of his collarbones. “Also, um. Just saying. I’d want any version of you. But it means a lot to me, actually, that you want it to be just you.”

Chan wags his tail so fast he might pull a muscle. “I’d want any version of you, too.”

Felix throws out his heap of tissues and then purses his lips for a kiss. Chan blinks. He’s used to seeing Felix do this for Jisung and Hyunjin, and sometimes even Minho, but never for him, and he wonders if it might have felt too real for Felix to try.

Chan pulls him close and leaves sweet kisses on his cheeks, his nose, and finally his lips.

With zero finesse, Felix licks into his mouth again.

“Wooow, okay! What a menace,” Chan says dramatically.

“Couldn’t resist,” Felix laughs. “Okay, like…I really don’t want to just like, ji*zz and dip? But now I need to wash up so bad.”

Chan nuzzles his nose below Felix’s ear and inhales loudly. “Gonna ruin all my hard work,” he jokes.

“Do I smell like you?”

“I can’t believe you even have to ask.”

“I don’t know! Just making sure.”

“Well, you do. It’s nice.”

“You can do it again. Later. If you want.”

Later. There’s so much to do later. So much they need to talk about, so many things he needs to clarify ten times to be absolutely certain no one is going to get hurt. But that would sour this sweet moment, and anyway, Felix is getting sleepier by the second. So—yeah. Later.

Chan kisses his temple and skims his nose along his hairline. “Thank you.”

“Mm. Ugh. I think you should carry me home.”

“I still have work, or I would. You know I would.”

“Yeah. I know.” He pouts and sighs. “‘Kay, I’ll let you know when I’m back.”

And he watches Felix leave, like he watched him leave this morning. The wolf wants to keep him here, keep him safe, lick his eyebrows and widow’s peak and the nape of his neck like grooming the rustling undercoat of a packmate—but in the end, even the wolf knows Felix shouldn’t sleep on the studio couch. He deserves to be clean and cozy somewhere that won’t f*ck up his back. Later later later mine mine mine.

The door crashes back open. Chan is in the middle of wiping his own spit from his chin. He hasn’t even had time to put his headphones back on yet. He looks up, perplexed, as Felix rematerializes in the doorway like the world’s cutest sleep paralysis demon.

“I like you,” Felix says. “You said a lot of beautiful things to me and I forgot to say even that. I think it was implied? I hope? But I didn’t want you to start wondering what it all meant. So I had to come back and tell you. I like you so much.”

Chan wags his tail. “For real life?”

Felix breaks into a devastating grin that crinkles the bridge of his nose. “For real life. Okay. Now I’ll go.”

Then he’s off again.

Chan yanks his blanket from the arm of the couch and drapes it over his head like he is both Little Red and Big Bad. It smells like Felix now. He rubs it against his cheek and shakes his fists happily. His face hurts from smiling so big.

Felix likes him.

This whole day has taken so many turns. This night alone has left him buzzing with enough energy to perform back-to-back shows, or bang out five whole albums of love songs, or swim all the way to Australia where he’d pull himself out of the water completely reborn like Venus. It takes a long while for Chan to get back into production mode. He checks his phone probably ten times a minute as he waits for Felix to message him.

[Felix]
Home
😇
[image attached]

[Chris]
Cuteeee hehehe

[Felix]
No one is awake
Sneaky sneaky
Ah?
Can you
See in the dark?
That would be soooo useful
Almost died
Just now
Tripping on Iyennie’s shoes
So many
Of them
ㅠㅠ

[Chris]
Oh nooo hahaha
Be careful!
I can kinda see in the dark
It’s not as cool as it sounds though haha
Everything’s just grey

[Felix]
Still pretty cool
Like a superhero
Need to wash up
I’m still
You know
Gross
In several ways
If you think about it
🫠

[Chris]
Oops haha
Sorry………………

[Felix]
You can’t be sorry
If I liked it
Too

[Chris]
Ok I take it back
………………yrroS
Like that

[Felix]
You are
Very lame
Actually

[Chris]
But you like meeeeee

[Felix]
Ye 🥰
Ok for real
Gonna wash up
Brb

He is not, in fact, right back. He’s gone for quite a while. Chan keeps his phone face-up as he works, trying not to think too hard about Felix peeling his damp underwear off, working shampoo through his drool-matted hair, and washing Chan’s scent away.

[Felix]
I’m back
No wait f*ck
Forgot
Serum
There
Now I’m back
And in bed
[image attached]

[Chris]
You look so comfy :]
Wish I was there
Wanna hold you

[Felix]
You know
When you’re done working
You can
Come sleep
With me
If you want

[Chris]
I wouldn’t wanna wake you up though

[Felix]
It’s fine
It’ll be like
A surprise party
I’ll love it
Even if I’m not
Expecting it
Please
For the wolf
And
For me

[Chris]
Ok baby haha

[Felix]
💙💙💙

[Chris]
💙💙💙💙

[Felix]
Rude
💙 x 100

[Chris]
That’s all??
💙 x infinity
HAHAHAHAHAHA

[Felix]
GOOD NIGHT

[Chris]
I’ll try to finish quickly 💙

Chan giggles to himself. Felix doesn’t technically reply, but he almost immediately sends a TikTok. He sends more videos until he presumably falls asleep, the notifications piling up as Chan focuses on the final remix. It comes together steadily. Even his claws don’t hinder him that much anymore. When he thinks he’s done, he saves his work and sits back to listen to all four remixes.

He listens a few times, through his headphones and speakers, making notes of parts that might sound too muddy in an arena and adjusting them. They’re good songs and good remixes. He can imagine how they will sound backed by STAY, their ear-splitting screams building with the new screaming synth guitar.

On the final playthrough, he sits back and scrolls through the TikToks Felix sent, watching on mute. There’s a really good Wriothesley cosplayer, then a bowling fails compilation, then Torchic-shaped cake pops with Felix’s commentary: “😱😱😱,” then an updated edit of Stray Kids being weirdly in sync with each other.

Delighted, he opens the comments for the SKZ video and laughs, until he sees one pathetic comment that rips him straight from the top of his happiness.

✧.˚◦○˚୨୧princess୨୧˚○◦˚.✧
why did they let felix back in the group kick him out again
15h Reply ♡1
— View 89 replies

It’s not the worst comment he’s ever seen, not by far, but in a single instant, all the rage of the world condenses in him, fury fracturing him in unimaginable ways ancient and unreasonable couldn’t fight it even if he wanted to burning like a supernova how can people be so cruel it f*cking hurts protect his own this is what it feels like to be a dying star blinding blazing breaking not gonna leave him behind what kind of monster—

Chapter 3: love reaction

Chapter Text

Felix’s first clue should be that his toes are freezing.

His second: he still has one earbud in, looping the lullaby that plays in Nook’s Cranny ten minutes before it closes for the night.

And his third: when he stretches, his fingertips reach the far edge of his mattress.

It’s not until he squirms, looking for a hot thigh to grind against or a mouth that he’s finally allowed to kiss, that Felix realizes he has woken up alone.

He worries for a horrible second that everything was just a dream. It’s been a while since he’s had one of those dreams, the ones where everything feels nostalgic and syrupy and real and waking up feels like losing something, but he’s sure had them before. In the best and worst of them, Chan always called him baby and meant it like a lover.

But, no, he didn’t just dream Chan’s tongue marking his throat, or waddling home at two in the morning in pants smeared with his own come, or jerking off in the shower when he couldn’t stop imagining sliding his dick into Chan’s mouth between the sharp frame of his fangs. Like, his crusty boxers are still on the floor, which is a problem for future Felix and more than enough proof.

He wonders if Chan was here, tiptoeing so painstakingly quietly that Felix slept through his coming and going. Maybe he got an hour or two of rest balanced at the edge of Felix’s bed, trying not to jostle him around, or maybe even on the floor like a faithful watchdog. That thought makes Felix sad. They belong holding each other. Then again—Chan might pull that sh*t, but the wolf wouldn’t. Felix is certain. Did Chan spend the whole night in the studio?

Felix blindly pats around his nightstand until he can disconnect his phone from its charger. He checks his messages. I’ll try to finish quickly 💙. That’s the last thing in their thread. He closes and opens the app again, just to be sure. I’ll try to finish quickly 💙. Sent at 2:42. Nothing else. Chan’s usually pretty bad at texting, but he would have at least said something if he wasn’t coming home.

[Felix]
Did you sleep
At all?
🙂

He squeezes his eyes closed like he’s making a wish on a birthday candle. He wishes Chan would open his bedroom door and say, Hey, little one, got you breakfast. He wishes Chan would come kiss him, and then wonders if god or whoever is in charge of granting wishes is sick of him asking for that. He wishes he wasn’t so tired. Technically he could try to get a few extra minutes of sleep, but it’s probably not worth it, and anyway, he’s wide awake with a growing pit in his stomach. There are no new messages when he opens his eyes.

Uneasily, he throws back the covers, shuffles into his house slippers, and pads down the dim hallway of the dorm. He finds Seungmin leaning against the kitchen counter, sipping coffee from Minho’s calico cat mug. There’s fresh rice in the rice cooker and something green-oniony rotating in the microwave.

“Seungminnie, hi,” Felix says.

“Mm,” Seungmin mumbles.

“Do you know if Channie-hyung was here?”

“Why would that old man be here?”

“He, um.”

Seungmin glances from the microwave to Felix and back to the microwave. They both watch the numbers count down 5-4-3-2-1, and Seungmin clears the timer before it beeps. “Uh huh.”

“He just…said he’d be here. Not like that. I mean, not not like that, but not like that, too.”

“I genuinely have no idea what you mean.”

“Oh.” Felix feels a blush starting on his neck, like he’s been caught in some kind of lie. “So you haven’t seen him?”

Seungmin furrows his eyebrows as he uses a kitchen towel to move a steaming takeout container of soup to the counter. “No, I haven’t.”

“Has he texted you?”

“Did something happen?”

That question is too vague. Yes, something happened: first there was light and then there was Chan. Yes: Felix fell in love when he was a scared and stupid teenager. Yes: part of him thought he’d grow out of it, but really he grew into it, stripping away the hero-worship of it all until he was left with something naked and good. Yes: for years he had to wonder if it was worth it to love and be loved like parallel lines, never intersecting exactly how he wanted. Yes: he learned that getting to love at all is worth it. Yes: he kissed other people first, and he would never say they didn’t matter, because they did, they do, but not like this. Yes: Chan is a werewolf and they kissed and Chan didn’t come home last night, and those things aren’t exactly connected, except they definitely are, and it’s hard to make heads or tails of that.

“I don’t know yet,” Felix says, a miserable twinge in his voice.

“Do you want breakfast while you figure it out?” Seungmin ladles half the soup into a bowl and digs a few banchan out of the refrigerator. They’re running low on blanched spinach. “I was going to split this with Iyennie, but you’re here and he’s asleep, so. What was that saying? The English one? You’re a snoozer, you’re a loser?”

“You snooze, you lose.”

“Yeah, that.”

Felix fidgets, clicking his phone screen on and off. No new messages. His stomach drops. “I’m actually…ah, there’s something I have to do before my schedule today.”

“Good luck, I guess?” Seungmin says with a shrug.

“Thanks, though. See you at the company?”

“Mm.”

Seungmin opens a drawer to pick out chopsticks and a spoon, but Felix is already retreating to his room to pick out clothes. Felix kicks yesterday’s boxers closer to his laundry basket but leaves them on the floor. He grabs cargo pants and a white LV shirt and Chan’s hoodie. The wolf will like that, he thinks.

With his toothbrush dangling from his mouth and toothpaste frothing over his lips, he sends Chan another message.

[Felix]
Are you ok?
Where are you?
😗?

And then as he’s rushing out the door and into the city, he opens his chat with Changbin.

[Felix]
Hi hi hyung~
Are you
At the gym?
Is there
Anyone
Else
With you?

Felix tries not to stare at his phone as he rushes down the street. He read somewhere one time that looking at the sky while walking to work is good for stress relief. But the sky is all clouds this morning, the kinds that drain the city of color, and he can’t take his eyes off his screen for more than a couple seconds at a time. He is so stressed in the suit-and-tied crosswalk crush. Maybe his phone is broken? Why is no one answering him?

But then he gets a reply from Changbin when he’s more than halfway to the company building. The first message is a selfie, Changbin’s free hand cupping his face in a flower pose. In the unfocused background, someone on an elliptical is giving him a peace sign.

[Binnie-hyung 💪]
Just me and Jihyo-noona~~~
I was supposed to spot Chan-hyung this morning but he never showed up
Are you gonna come work out with hyung~?
You’re more than welcome to~

[Felix]
So
You haven’t
Seen
Channie-hyung?
He isn’t
Responding
To me
And I’m getting worried…
Gonna check
The studio

Felix doesn’t get a reply until he’s waiting for an elevator in the company building.

[Binnie-hyung 💪]
Do you want me to go check since I’m already here?

[Felix]
Well
I just got here
In the lobby
Right now

[Binnie-hyung 💪]
Give me 2 minutes hyung will come too

Felix bites his lip. He gets the feeling this is something he should do on his own. He’s not really sure what happened in the last sevenish hours, but this seems like a them problem. A Chris-and-Felix problem, not a Stray Kids problem. Not a Stray Kids problem yet, anyway.

The elevator opens. He can hear Changbin singing from down the hall. A woman with an enamel NMIXX pin on her employee lanyard holds the door for him with a French-manicured hand. He bows to the woman in apology and waits. Better to go in together than have Changbin interrupt.

“Ah, Yongbokkieee!” Changbin says in aegyo as he rounds a corner. His t-shirt is slightly sweaty. His fluffy poodle hair peeks out from beneath a ballcap.

“Hyung,” Felix says, trying for an easy smile as they get on the next elevator. He pushes the floor button three times and prays the doors slide closed faster.

Changbin frowns. “Oh, our baby. You know how hyung is. He just loses track of time in the studio.”

“Yeah, I know, it’s just…”

Felix doesn’t know what to say that won’t make a giant flashing sign of his heart. How he feels about Chan is, probably, the worst kept secret in the group. They all know. Felix knows they all know. Even Jeongin, who pretends to be oblivious, and especially Changbin, who sniffed out his crush years ago like a romance-hungry shark. Everyone would be sickeningly supportive. But Felix doesn’t want everyone to know immediately. He wants some silly honeymoonish time that they don’t have to share with anyone else. He thinks it could be fun, sneaking around and whispering and kissing in secret the way he knows neither of them have ever really done.

“Instincts,” Felix finishes lamely. At least the wolf would appreciate that.

They reach the floor of Chan’s studio. Felix thinks it’s eerily quiet, except that’s not even true. It just feels like it should be true. Several people greet them politely in passing. There’s a Day6 song playing somewhere. A chorus of keyboard clacks comes from every direction.

Felix knocks on the studio door.

No answer.

He opens it carefully, in case Chan has his headphones on and his tail out. When he peeks his face through the doorway, his breath catches.

Inside is total carnage.

Chan’s couch has been shredded to pleather ribbons. Gashes in the cushions spill endless amounts of foam like rabid mouths. Most of his equipment is strewn all over the floor—his laptop screen is cracked, and his speakers are dented. His mic stand is bent like a broken arm. His desk chair is chewed up and missing a wheel. There are horror movie scratches in the drywall.

And, hiding under the desk, tangled in a jungle of electrical cords, is a wolf. Big and black and hunched in the corner like a child in time-out.

“Oh, god,” Felix whispers.

The wolf’s eyes glow yellow. It rises to its feet. Its movements would be scarily precise if not how it bonks its head against the underside of the desk. It makes a quizzical little yip.

Changbin grabs Felix’s arm. He tries to shut the door in the wolf’s face. “Yongbok-ah, get back! It could be dangerous!”

“He’s not,” Felix snaps. “You know he’s not.”

Felix pushes into the studio and ignores Changbin’s frustrated sigh. Changbin follows.

The wolf crawls out from its den. It lifts its head. Felix realizes with a chill that it’s even bigger than he first thought. Majestic. Imposing. Like standing awestruck at Musée de l’Orangerie with Hyunjin because seventeen whole meters of Water Lilies is a lot of Water Lilies. If the wolf stood on its hind legs, it could easily rest its huge front paws on Felix’s shoulders. His heartbeat pulses in his throat.

Felix crouches. He clicks his tongue and reaches out a hand, palm down, for the wolf to smell.

The wolf rears up in a little hop. With its tail wagging high, it zooms straight over to him. It sniffs his hand, and his sleeve, and all the way up his arm until it pushes its cold nose into his neck. The wolf loudly sniffs his hair and frantically wiggles between his legs. Felix ends up plopped on his butt, knocked off balance.

“Yah, be careful!” Changbin says. Felix doesn’t know if he means him or the wolf. Probably both.

The wolf makes a pleased, wet snuffle right into Felix’s ear. Then it zips away. It rummages around in a destroyed couch cushion. Proudly, it comes back with the pink Heart Tung plushie that usually sits on Chan’s desk. Heart Tung bounces on the floor when the wolf drops it.

Despite himself, Felix smiles. He wants to cry, too, overwhelmed and confused and powerless and selfishly relieved that Chan hadn’t flaked out on him. This is categorically worse than being stood up, but still.

“Hyung,” Felix says softly. “What happened?”

“Do you think he has human thoughts?” Changbin asks. “Can he even understand us? Hyung, sit?”

The wolf does not sit.

“Channie-hyung?” Felix says. The wolf co*cks its head. “Yeah, that’s your name. You remember? Channie-hyung? Sit?” Then in English he tries, “Sit? Down?”

Chan wiggles again, but he doesn’t sit. He picks up Heart Tung, chews on it for a moment, and brings it to Changbin.

“Thanks, hyung,” Changbin says skeptically, pinching the plushie by its damp foot.

Only then does Felix notice the tissues stuck to Chan’s hindquarters. His stomach drops. His face goes hot. He glances over to where the trash bin usually is and—yeah, it’s toppled over. Yeah, those are probably Felix’s come-tissues stuck to Chan’s fur.

That means…this probably happened soon after he sent his last text. He’s been a wolf all morning, alone and frightened. Felix’s heart falls, and falls, and falls.

This is too much. He’s going to cry. Chan seems to notice immediately, swinging his big wolf head with his big wolf muzzle and his big wolf fangs back toward him. Chan tips his snout up and lets out a sharp, painful howl.

“Shh, no, it’s okay, it’s okay!” Felix says at the same time Changbin goes, “Easy, doggy!”

Chan’s howl cuts off with a huff. Felix worries that the entire floor heard him.

Felix presses the heels of his palms to his eyes, just to give himself a moment to think. He’s never even had a dog before. Not unless he’s counting all the Nintendogs he had when he was seven, trapped inside the red Nintendo DS he got for Christmas. He remembers adopting Pocky the dalmatian, and letting Rachael name Sunny the chihuahua. But he also remembers the time he forgot his DS on a weekend trip to visit his cousins. He’d cried himself sick in the back of the car thinking he’d come back to a house full of dead, starved puppies.

Well. That’s not helpful.

“We need to take him outside,” Felix says, imagining a walking route drawn around the company building with his chewed-up stylus. Maybe Chan will bring him an RC Helicopter.

“And risk scaring some old lady?” Changbin says. “He’s huge. Someone is going to think a bear escaped from the zoo and call the police. Why don’t we deal with this here?”

“I meant to like, go to the bathroom.”

“Ah.” Changbin laughs nervously. “Okay. f*ck. Fair point.”

Chan snaps his teeth, does a tight turn, and kind of tumbles to the floor as he tries to nibble a hard-to-reach itch on his back. Felix crawls forward and scratches the spot for him. Chan pants goofily. As stealthily as he can, Felix snatches the tissues out of Chan’s fur and stuffs them into his hoodie pocket.

“We need to get him. Um. A leash.”

“Yongbok-ah.”

“Do you want to take him without one?”

Changbin looks between him and Chan. He takes off his cap, smooths his hair off his forehead, and puts his cap back on. He deflates in resignation. “Hyung will go buy one. Will you be okay here on your own?”

“Yeah. We’ll be okay. I guess I’ll…I don’t know. Clean up? And tell the others?”

Changbin takes out his phone. “There’s a pet store down the street. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Felix nods. Then it’s just him and Chan in the same place they kissed a few hours ago. How has it only been a few hours? It seems like a lifetime ago. Kissing Chan had been like a New Year’s Eve celebration. All anticipation and payoff. Sparkle and flutter and bubble, and a nostalgic song in major. It’d left him feeling grateful for the past and eager for the future, and now…

He doesn’t mean for it to happen, but tears burn in his nose. His throat goes all sludgy. The wolf is his Channie-hyung. His leader. His boyfriend? They didn’t even talk about that. He desperately needs a hug and Chan can’t even hold him, he doesn’t have arms, he can’t even tug on Felix’s earlobe like he’s always liked to do, and that’s what makes the tears fall.

Chan crouches and shuffles closer at an odd kind of diagonal. His tail wags in tiny, shy swipes. He licks Felix’s face in a puppy-innocent mimicry of last night. His tongue is rough, and he definitely has dog breath. The absurdity of it all makes Felix laugh around a pathetic sob.

“Sorry, sorry,” Felix says with a sniffle. He pets down Chan’s back to soothe them both. Chan’s fur is plush but not soft, a little scratchy. It’s almost familiar, not super different from his own hair after he gets too bleach-happy.

He wipes his face with his sleeve. He needs to get his sh*t together. They depend so much on Chan. He’s reliable and persistent and Felix knows, guiltily, that he couldn’t even make a complete laundry list of all the things Chan is responsible for on a regular basis. Chan could be in charge of maintaining the moon’s gravitational pull for all Felix is aware. Now they need to show him that he can rely on them.

“I’ll find a way to help you,” he says. “Just like you’ve always helped me. The members will, too. Let’s tell them, yeah? Channie-hyung, look here? Look at the camera?”

[Felix]
I don’t know
How else to say
This
It’s kind of funny
But also not funny
Actually
Like at all
If you think about it
._.

[Hyunjinnie 🌸]
???

[Felix]
Oh
Changbinnie-hyung is here
Or he was
He’ll be back
Soon
But he knows
And
Um
Technically
Channie-hyung too
But he can’t help
Ah?
This will make sense
More sense
I mean
In a moment

[Lino-hyung 😼]
Yongbok-ah…………………

[Hyunjinnie 🌸]
Did you commit a crime? Are you hiding a body?

[Seungminnnn 🐶]
What do you mean Chan-hyung can’t help? That’s his favorite thing to do.

[Felix]
Hyunjin-ah
You know
I would
Never
Do that
Without you
As backup

[Hyunjinnie 🌸]
🥰

[Felix]
But
Well
Ah
[image attached]
This is Channie-hyung
[image attached]
And this
Is what he did
To
His studio

It takes a few moments for anyone to respond. Felix gets it. What is there to say to something like this? They’re all probably stunned half to death like fainting goats. Hyunjin is probably shrieking, also like goats.

[Hyunjinnie 🌸]
What the f*ck

[Lino-hyung 😼]
This is…

[Seungminnnn 🐶]
Oh.

[Iyen 🍞🍞🍞]
Quick question
How would this be “kind of funny”

[Hyunjinnie 🌸]
What the f*ck

[Lino-hyung 😼]
Can’t we have just one normal day?

[Seungminnnn 🐶]
Was this what you were worried about??

[Jisungie 👬]
I only woke up like 45 seconds ago someone tell me this is an elaborate joke

[Hyunjinnie 🌸]
What the f*ck????????????????

[Jisungie 👬]
This would be a great time to say haha just kidding
I’m begging

[Felix]
I can’t
Do that
🫠

[Lino-hyung 😼]
Kim Seungmin. Explain.

[Iyen 🍞🍞🍞]
Why is Changbin-hyung not there anymore where did he go

[Seungminnnn 🐶]
He wanted to know if I saw Chan-hyung in the dorm this morning.

[Felix]
To buy a leash

[Seungminnnn 🐶]
Like that would be a normal place for him to be.

[Lino-hyung 😼]
Right, of course.

[Jisungie 👬]
Ok we’re f*cked!

[Hyunjinnie 🌸]
And a matching collar I hope

[Iyen 🍞🍞🍞]
I’m scared to ask but does he talk like a human

[Hyunjinnie 🌸]
Please say yes

[Jisungie 👬]
???? Please say no

[Seungminnnn 🐶]
Yeah, does he do any tricks?

[Iyen 🍞🍞🍞]
Are you competing with him

[Lino-hyung 😼]
Can you clowns shut up for a second?

[Felix]
He doesn’t even
Sit
ㅠㅠ
Oh
Sorry hyung
🤐

[Lino-hyung 😼]
Yongbok-ah. In 3 messages or less, I need you to tell me what’s going on.

[Felix]
3 messages feels
Targeted

[Lino-hyung 😼]
1 message!

[Felix]
Fine :( hyung said the wolf got lonely at night because of how things smell and I didn’t want him to feel lonely so I told him to come to our dorm after he was done working so I was really confused when I woke up and he wasn’t there and I know it’s not weird for hyung to stay at the studio all night but trust me I promise he was going to come home and I just felt like something was wrong so I came to the company to check on him and found him like this and now we’re here and that’s all I think
Oh wait
Also

[Lino-hyung 😼]
Yahhhhhhhhhhhh!

[Felix]
I literally just thought it
:(
Promise

[Hyunjinnie 🌸]
Stop making him :( it’s making me :(

[Felix]
When hyung turned human again
It was after I
Spent the night
At his dorm
Do you think
That’s
Connected?

[Lino-hyung 😼]
Ah f*ck.
Kim Seungmin.
It physically hurts to say this, but you were probably right.

[Seungminnnn 🐶]
Sorry that I’m always right?

[Jisungie 👬]
About?????????

[Seungminnnn 🐶]
It is connected, but it’s only a temporary fix. I think Yongbok was able to bring hyung back out of the wolf for a little while, but until we can get the wolf out of hyung, he’ll just keep shifting.

[Hyunjinnie 🌸]
Like a curse?
Have we tried kissing him yet
That always works

[Binnie-hyung 💪]
Did you know the pet store down the street only sells dog shampoo and nothing else? I had to find another store ㅠㅠ

[Iyen 🍞🍞🍞]
Read the room hyung!

[Binnie-hyung 💪]
Are you saying you don’t want to vote on which leash hyung gets~~~~
[image attached]
[image attached]

[Iyen 🍞🍞🍞]
The green obviously

They decide on the pink leash over the green in a 5-2 vote. Minho gives them strict instructions to bring Chan straight back to their dorm, no detours allowed. Anyone with free space in their day will wolf-sit. Felix has one schedule he absolutely cannot cancel, but he can flake out on PT. They’ll have to make excuses for practice later.

Felix picks himself up off the floor and starts straightening the studio with Chan on his heels the entire time. He apologizes to the broken laptop as he sets it back on the desk with the dented speaker and mic stand. He attempts to gather the shreds of couch cushion foam and upholstery batting into a pile, but Chan seems to think this is a game, pouncing through the pile like a middle school hooligan trampling sandcastles.

(It’s very endearing, even though Felix has to stick his fingers into Chan’s wolf mouth when he tries to take a big sponge cake bite.)

By the time Changbin comes back, Felix has managed to jam all the bits of couch stuffing into the trash bin. There isn’t much else he can do right now except maybe finally order new ergonomic furniture when Chan can’t object to him dropping that kind of money.

“I got him four kinds of treats,” Changbin says sweetly, showing off multiple shopping bags. “And one of those toys that’s supposed to be indestructible. I swear, I was possessed in the pet store. I finally understand Minho-hyung now. I think I’d buy anything for this dog. I even got him bows for his ears. Won’t he be the cutest?”

“Ohh, cute,” Felix echoes.

“C’mere, look what I got.” Changbin takes a pink collar out of a shopping bag. Chan sniffs intently, first the bag, then the collar, then Changbin’s crotch. “Hyung, get out of there,” Changbin says as he pushes Chan’s snout away.

“Um.” Felix pouts. “Maybe we shouldn’t call him hyung. Like, outside. Maybe not even Chan…or Chris… What if someone stops us? And we have to be like, oh, yeah, this is Chan, but not that Chan, a different Chan, except it is Chan?”

Chan’s head tilts each time Felix says his name. Side to side, side to side, like a metronome. Changbin tries to collar him. Chan ducks away and wags his tail. His movements are so fluid and confident. If Felix didn’t know any better, he could believe Chan’s been a wolf his whole life. Which came first, then? The wolf persona or the wolf DNA?

“What do we call him?” Changbin asks as Chan dodges the collar for the third time.

“Let me try,” Felix says. He kneels and Chan comes straight to him, tucking his face into Felix’s shoulder and whining innocently. Chan lets Felix buckle the collar around his neck with no fuss at all.

“Unbelievable!” Changbin says. “What a punk! Here, put the bows on him, too!”

“You don’t really look like a Bluey,” Felix muses. With a static jolt, he remembers that there’s a dog somewhere in the world named Felix Bang. Chan had named it in a fancall. Felix Bang. f*cking hell. That’s—maybe it’s best to ignore that. He stretches a headband over Chan’s snout and adjusts the bows so they sit nicely at his ears. A hellhound all done up like Barbie. Slightly less intimidating, but probably not enough to convince anyone that he’s a regular dog. “And I’m supposed to be Bingo. You could be Bandit, though.”

The wolf has no opinions, but Felix knows with a comforting certainty that Chan would call him annoying for this.

“Bandit?” Changbin asks, tearing open a bag of vaguely chicken-scented treats.

“He’s the dad. It means, uh.” Felix takes a second and totally blanks on the Korean word. “Person who steals things.”

“Ah.” They try valiantly to get Chan to sit again, going so far as squatting to demonstrate what sit means, but Chan is uninterested. He snatches a treat right out of Changbin’s hand, chomping away. “Yeah. That works.”

Felix clips the leash to Chan’s collar. It has that new-nylon kind of smell and he hopes Chan doesn’t mind it too much. He opens the studio door and peeks down the hall. It’s a straight shot to the closest stairwell, and the coast is clear. They scuttle to the stairs.

The studio is only a few floors up, but it takes them forever to find a speed at which Chan wants to move. One moment Chan nearly trips over his own paws in his rush. The next moment he staunchly stops in his tracks to sniff doorways and air vents and handrails. Every flight of stairs is its own ordeal, and even though Felix tries to keep the leash tight, Chan is stronger. They’re lucky they make it to the bottom without someone taking a tumble.

Multiple people see them as they hurry out of the stairwell and then down a hallway. No one says a word about it. Maybe everyone is just being polite. But maybe, in a lucky invisible-gorilla-experiment turn of events, no one is paying attention. It helps ease Felix’s mind a bit, seeing how people are so absorbed in their own little worlds that a massive wolf in pink bows might slip under the radar.

They exit the company through a side door. Felix’s knuckles strain as he keeps a deathgrip on the leash. Yet outside, Chan walks next to him with surprising restraint. He doesn’t look scared, but he is on high alert. His ears twitch and his tail is a rigid question mark. He keeps his head high as his nostrils flare. Felix remembers how Chan said he was listening to his track with new ears. It must be overwhelming to take in the city with new ears and eyes and an ultra-sensitive nose. When Chan tugs on his leash to inspect sewer grates and light poles, Felix makes sure he has plenty of slack to go at his own pace. He lets his grip on the leash loosen as Chan comes back to his side.

The three of them walk a few blocks, but then Changbin clears his throat. “You should go back,” he says.

Felix checks the time. He has fifteen minutes until his morning schedule. “Yeah,” he says reluctantly. He passes the leash to Changbin. Then to Chan, he says, “Will you be good for hyung?”

Chan looks between them and begins pacing, butting his head against Felix’s hip. His claws scratch on the sidewalk, and he licks his teeth restlessly. When Changbin gently tugs on the leash to lead him away, Chan tosses his head. He resists. He whimpers. The whimper builds to a whine, and the whine builds to a howl. People notice, this time. Passersby glance up from their phones and coffees to see what could be making such noise.

“Oh, no, please,” Felix says, desperately petting Chan’s flank.

Chan cuts himself off when Felix wraps his arms around his neck. He snuffles unhappily. He’s so big and warm—Felix has always loved how Chan radiates heat, how he wraps him up like a beach towel toasted all day in the sun. Felix presses his cold nose into the side of Chan’s face and misses the human shape of him.

“Aish, you two are gonna break my heart,” Changbin says, trying to joke around but falling flat.

“He isn’t going to make this easy for you,” Felix apologizes.

Changbin shrugs. “I’ll piggyback him home if I have to.”

“He probably weighs as much as two of me.”

“And I could piggyback three of you. Go on, Yongbokkie, don’t be late.”

“It’s just a few hours, promise,” Felix says to Chan, trying his hardest to telepathically beam comforting vibes into his wolf brain. Chan’s tail droops when Felix takes a couple of steps backward, but he doesn’t howl again. Felix turns and speedwalks back the way he came, but not before looking over his shoulder when he stops at a crosswalk. He doesn’t see a wolf through the crowd, and that’s probably for the best.

There’s barely enough time to straighten up in the company bathroom by the time he returns. He finally throws out the tissues in his pocket and washes his hands. He ties his hair up with the elastic around his wrist. It’s obvious he’s been crying this morning, which f*cking sucks, and he presses a wet paper towel over his eyelids and hopes it calms some of the redness.

A whole team is waiting for him in a conference room on the top floor. Managers and coordinators and videographers and their guest of honor, a Louis Vuitton representative who just flew in from Paris with her team of publicists and translators. Her name is…something with an E. Eloise? Elodie? Something like that. At one end of the conference table is a staggeringly massive bouquet of white flowers with a card that says “Little Star of LV Felix Lee” nestled in the greenery. Everyone looks so chic in their cashmere and corduroy and he showed up in the same CEEBS hoodie he wore to sleep the other night.

“Ah, bonjour,” he says, and instantly balks at the idea of conjugating French verbs. He reverts to English. “Sorry I’m late! I, um, stopped to pet a very cute dog.”

One of his noonas gives him an unamused grimace, but since he’s not truly late, she doesn’t scold him. He plasters on a smile. Their guests all laugh and stand up to shake his hand and kiss his cheeks.

After pleasantries, the LV team extends an invitation to collaborate on a new jewelry line. They want to guide him through designing a couple of pieces for a special collection. A launch party in Paris will be arranged, and an editorial with a cover feature, and an eight-part docuseries following the entire process. Of course, this meeting is basically fake. They finalized the collab offer weeks ago, through a long series of emails and video calls, but that would be a boring start to the docuseries. So he makes his eyes go wide as he listens intently and giggles and says profound thank-yous. His brain turns to scrambled eggs as he filters through the constant mix of Korean, French, and multi-accented English.

He wonders if Chan will want to go to Paris with him this time. They can stuff themselves full of fresh baguette slathered with good fleur de sel butter. They can make out in the hotel room as the Eiffel Tower sparkles in the distance.

His smile slips. Some form of Chan still exists in this world, but it’s not the one in his imagination. Not the one who should kiss him in Paris and Tokyo and Sydney. The original has been made to disappear, and he’s been left with a changeling.

I’m worried that this is the end, Chan had said in his serious leader voice, when this all began. Felix hadn’t believed him. Felix believed in him. That’s different. Felix had trusted that Chan would swoop in with his sword and shield and save the day because he’s always been their eleventh-hour hero. And now, Felix has to believe him. This could be the end, actually, of a hundred good things.

He feels heartsick. He needs to go home.

There are more handshakes and cheek kisses and gifts and autographs and Instagram Reels and TikToks and group photos and selcas and circle-jerking compliments and peals of laughter that Felix hopes sound normal and not like he’s one camera flash away from spiraling. Every minute feels like an hour, and when the meeting finally wraps up, he excuses himself as quickly and politely as he can. He requests a company car. This day has exhausted him and it’s only midafternoon.

On the drive home, he reads through the group chat. Changbin said the ajumma sweeping outside her kalguksu restaurant said wah, so pretty! and was decidedly not addressing Changbin. Minho asked when Jisung was coming over and if he would buy meat to feed the dog. Jeongin sent a photo of Chan gnawing on a fluorescent yellow chew toy. Felix rests his forehead on the cold car window, leaving a grease smudge on the glass, and does not cry again.

○○○

Chan is in Felix’s bed, tucked nose-to-tail like a cinnamon roll in a nest of his doona, fast asleep.

Minho is also in his bed, scrolling on his phone. Seungmin is sitting on the floor, playing Felix’s Switch. There’s dark fur all over his grey sweatpants. Jisung is using Seungmin’s thigh as a pillow and trying to backseat game.

His human members look at him with some weird mix of pity and relief. Chan hiccups. His ears twitch. Felix hopes he’s having nice wolf dreams.

“Yah, why are you here? Shouldn’t you be in PT?” Minho asks.

“I canceled. I couldn’t…um. Just wanted to be here.”

“You better reschedule.”

“I will. Not now. Why are you here?”

“It’s the only place Bandit-ssi wants to be,” Seungmin says exasperatedly. And then: “I restarted your island, by the way.”

“What?”

“He’s lying, baby,” Jisung says. “He gave Melba a really stupid hat, though.”

Felix rolls his eyes. “Great. You know talking to Isabelle doesn’t fix that.”

“Skill issue,” Seungmin says.

Minho sets his phone in the sheets screen-down. He pats his thigh, and Felix takes the invitation to clamber into bed.

All his jostling wakes Chan. Felix would apologize if Chan looked even the slightest bit bothered, but as it is, Chan just wiggles. He wags his tail. He sticks his nose into the crook of Felix’s neck and sniffs like he’s investigating for contraband. He’s at it for a long time, as if to say, where have you been who have you seen tell me all about your day. Felix swears all those teeth make something like a smile. It’s sweet to be welcomed home like this, though it’d be sweeter to be kissed.

“Big stretchies,” Felix says as Chan gets up to bow backward and then forward. Chan makes funny little wolf noises and plops down in Felix’s lap. He shows his belly. Here, his fur is not pure black but instead marbled dark brown like fudgy chocolate cake. He paws at the air and snorts until Felix pets him.

“He doesn’t let the rest of us pet him like that,” Minho says flatly.

Felix scoots around the best he can under Chan’s weight to cuddle into Minho’s personal space. “He knows you’re not a dog person.”

“But I am,” Seungmin says.

“You’re a person who is a dog,” Jisung replies. “Not the same.”

Seungmin barks and chomps his teeth. Probably too close to Jisung’s fingers, if Jisung’s nervous yell says anything. Chan takes this opportunity to lift his snout and attempt a howl, but Minho reaches over and splats his whole hand over Chan’s head. It works in stopping the howl before Chan can gain any momentum. Felix frowns. That felt strangely practiced, like they’ve already established some kind of routine. He missed so much and he was only gone a few hours.

“Jagiya. Kim Seungmin. Get lost. I need to talk to Yongbok.”

Seungmin considerately slots Felix’s Switch into its charging dock on his desk and ushers Jisung out with a hand on his lower back. Jisung blows Felix a half-hearted kiss and closes the door behind him.

Minho is quiet for too long. He plays with Felix’s ponytail, swishing it back and forth so it whips against Felix’s neck. Finally, he says, “Your dog has been cuddling with your underwear.”

Felix freezes. He doesn’t need to look to know that Minho means last night’s dirty ones. He hides his blushing face in his hands. “Hyung.”

“That’s freak behavior even for him.”

“He’s not—not my dog.”

“Isn’t he?”

“In a way. But also. Not. In a way. If that makes sense.”

“Hmm.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Felix whines. “Hyung, come on, are you just going to tease me?”

“Yes.” Minho sighs. Then he uses his soft voice, his gentle voice, the one he reserves mostly for his cats and for Felix, “We need help, Yongboks. We need to tell PD-nim and the managers.”

“What? No! We can’t! He’s ours.”

“Don’t be difficult,” Minho chides. “I have to make the decisions now, since he can’t, and this is me making a decision.”

Felix regrets sounding so childish. So unreasonable and scared. “I know…”

“I don’t know what else to do. Kim Seungmin and I were researching. We tried all the cures we could find.” Minho lists off all their attempted remedies. They tried two types of salt. Minho’s cast iron BBQ pan. Jeongin’s dumb keepsake bottle of holy water. All the silver jewelry they own. Repeating Christopher Bang Chan over and over, which mostly made him jumpy with excitement. Seungmin tried his best pronouncing a rebirth prayer and a Latin incantation. They tried ssukcha and garlic, like the bear and the tiger who asked to become human in the Gojoseon myth, and that method technically requires 100 days of hiding from the sun, which they obviously don’t have, but anything was worth a shot. “Keeping him a secret is only going to make it harder on all of us. I don’t want him to suffer. Well. That’s a lie. But not like this. Not because we’re stubborn and stupid.”

Felix buries a hand into the plush fur at Chan’s shoulder. He says, “Can I have some time to try, too? Seungminnie said I got him to shift back, so maybe I can do it again.”

“Of course. If anyone can do it, it’s you.”

“And what if…” Felix can’t find it in himself to finish that thought. Instead he says, “He wants us to keep going. Without him.”

“He’s a moron.”

“Sometimes.”

Minho cradles Felix’s head against his chest. Minho is warm, and Chan is warm, and in spite of everything, Felix feels like a little gosling tucked under a big goose wing. His eyelids and his soul feel heavy. All he wants to do is take a nap.

Wait. Is that it? Do they both need a nap? Like, together? If sleeping together brought Chan out of the wolf once, it should work again. Right?

It has to work again.

“You have until morning, okay?” Minho says. “And then we get help.”

“Yes, hyung.”

“And you need to reschedule PT.”

“Yeees, hyuuung.”

“Good. Well. I can’t be in here anymore. When my babies are stinky, it’s cute. He’s just stinky.”

“...He is?”

“Aish, I thought you had cat sensibilities.”

“Nyang?” Felix asks, tucking his fingers into a kitty paw.

“Better.” Minho tugs on Felix’s ponytail one last time and pats Chan’s hindquarters. “We’ll be here for a while, if you need us.”

After Minho leaves, Felix digs his underwear out from beneath Chan’s leg. “This was unnecessary, you perv,” he says, tossing them back to the floor. He imagines Chan’s warbly laugh and the way his ears blush red as neon lights.

But the wolf isn’t ashamed. He wiggles to his feet, shaking the bed like an earthquake. He rearranges the blankets with his nose and stomps into the eyes of Felix’s BbokAri cushion. He circles and circles and circles his spot before he finally settles against the headboard. His belly looks like the perfect place for Felix to rest his head.

So Felix cuddles up into him, pillowed against the bulk of Chan’s body. Something like hope begins to grow in his heart. “Hannie was right,” he whispers. “This is anime as hell. Like…you’re like Bond, and I’m Anya. You could be Totoro, too. Or, no. Wait. Do you remember that Pokémon episode where Houndoom takes care of Togepi? That’s us. I’m Togepi.”

He feels a tongue swipe at his hairline just behind his ear. He feels the hot breath of a long, contented sigh. And, with Chan curled around him like a big crescent moon, they sleep.

○○○

In a perfect world, this is the way things would go:

they wake up, body to body, and—surprise!—Chan is human again, full human, because Felix was able to separate Chan from the wolf once and for all through the power of naps or closeness or whatever, and they will probably cry, and definitely kiss, and soon they will be naked and warm, and Felix will touch Chan’s skin the way he’s always wanted, and he will see what it looks like when Chan comes, and maybe they’ll even make it to dance practice;

and then they will be boyfriends, and they will continue on, day after day, year after year, the wolf slowly fading out of memory, until they retire from idol life after a quarter-century run, and they will move back to Sydney, and Felix will propose with a platinum ring hidden inside a Master Ball, and they will get married on the beach, and they will raise three precocious kids who grow increasingly and delightfully embarrassed that their dads were once pop stars;

and finally, when it’s all over, they will be reborn as penguins who always return to the same pebble nest, or red river gum trees that grow so close together that their trunks fuse into one, or a distant planet with one little orbiting moon, or wolves from quarreling packs who leave their families to start a new pack together.

And this is the way it actually goes:

Felix flounders awake in the middle of a disorientingly half-baked dream, hungry, sweaty, stiff-necked, and Chan’s eyes glow yellow in the dark.

“God, sh*t, motherf*cking c*nt,” Felix says out loud. He digs his phone out of his hoodie pocket. The screen nearly blinds him. He hadn’t set an alarm, and he’s shocked to see that he’s been asleep for nearly six hours.

He was so certain that cuddling like puppies would do something. So why didn’t it?

Chan nuzzles his head against Felix’s ribs. Felix mindlessly strokes his ears.

It’s like the wolf is a three-phase boss fight. Felix hasn’t done enough damage to trigger the turning points. He hasn’t figured out how to deactivate its defensive aura or pierce through its +10 armor bonus. The mechanics are kicking his ass.

There is one thing, though.

He clicks his tongue.

Chan snaps his head up. He sniffs and licks. Felix sputters when he tries to lick his mouth with his wolf tongue. Felix waits until Chan is just kind of happily panting in his face to say, “Hyung. I love you. Like, not the way I usually say it. I mean in love with you.” He kisses the coarse fur of Chan’s muzzle.

Nothing happens.

Chan wags his tail.

Felix sighs. “I’m actually kinda glad that didn’t work. That’s not how I wanted to tell you.” He frowns. How is it possible to feel so many things that don’t make any sense together? He loves the wolf because it’s Chan, and he thinks he hates the wolf a little because it’s Chan. Chan left, but he’s also right here, and Felix is sad but also relieved but also nervous but also safe but also terrified.

He taps his phone on again, dimming the screen all the way down. There are more messages in the group chat and a couple of private ones, including:

[Lino-hyung 😼]
There’s dinner for you and your dog.
Please eat well.

and

[Iyen 🍞🍞🍞]
Minho-hyung covered for both of you at practice
He did imply Channie-hyung sh*t his pants
So that sucks for him ㅎㅎㅎ

and

[Hyunjinnie 🌸]
Wanted to check in before going to the company
You guys were dead asleep
[image attached]
Seriously the cutest thing I’ve ever seen 💖

In Hyunjin’s photo, Felix’s bedroom is lit only by a thin slice of light coming in through the cracked door like a shot in an indie film. His blond hair looks angelic-white splayed over Chan’s black fur. One of Chan’s massive paws is crossed over Felix’s wrist, so close to looking like they’re holding hands. They look peaceful.

It would be cute if Felix felt like he had a better handle on things.

Looking on the bright side is his specialty. He can find positives in just about anything, even when things are kind of objectively terrible. If there’s a bright side to all this, he’s struggling to see it. His idea bank is empty and he only has the rest of the evening to un-wolf Chan before things go from bad to really, really bad.

It’s hard not to feel frustrated. The one thing he told himself he’d never do is disappoint Chan. Chan had seen something in him all those years ago, back when Felix barely spoke Korean and regularly cried on the phone to his mum, and he has spent his entire career making sure Chan’s faith in him amounted to something. He’s not ready to lose what they’ve built together. He’s not ready to admit to Chan that he’s failed him.

Felix’s stomach growls.

Chan growls in return, like he’s teasing him.

“You think you’re so funny,” Felix says. “Are you hungry, too? Let’s go eat.”

Chan follows Felix to the kitchen. His paws thud on the carpet. He picks up the toy he left next to the couch and prances around like he owns the place. His tail swipes violently over the coffee table like a feather duster, knocking the PS5 controllers and empty sparkling water cans and Jeongin’s sunglasses to the floor. He’s so big that he throws off the scale of the dorm, their furniture appearing to have shrunk like a merino sweater in the dryer.

Unfortunately, he’s big enough even on all fours that he can rest his snout on the kitchen counter. He sniffs the coffee maker and the rice cooker vigorously. When Felix turns on the sink, Chan rears up on his hind legs and laps water straight from the tap. Felix doesn’t have the heart or probably upper body strength to shove him back down.

Minho left a bowl of soegogi yachaejuk for him and two kilograms of raw sliced beef for Chan. It’s a cheap cut of beef, not very tender, but he supposes the wolf wouldn’t care about that. Still, he wants to treat Chan to something nicer. He wants to take Chan out on a date. A real date, not just spontaneous hotpot in sweatpants. Something fancier. He’ll buy hanwoo ribeye for him. Several portions. He’ll have to tell him to shut the f*ck up about how expensive it is. They’ll cook it rare over charcoal and it will be soft and velvety with melting fat. But for now, he just unwraps the cling-filmed packages of grocery store meat.

He remembers Chan saying he wanted to hunt an elk. It’s hard to imagine Chan killing anything, but the wolf was built for it. Felix almost wishes he could see. What would it mean for Chan to turn feral? How fast can he run? How deep can he sink his fangs? Would Felix finally be afraid of him as his muzzle drips fresh blood?

Chan takes a slice of beef from Felix’s fingertips so, so gently.

Felix doesn’t think he could ever be afraid of him.

He tosses slices of beef in the air for Chan to catch, which Chan seems to think is great fun. His jaws make slobbery chomping sounds. Once, Felix throws a piece so high that it smacks the ceiling before peeling off unsettlingly. Chan catches that one, too.

When every piece of meat is gone, Felix lets Chan lick his fingers clean. Felix cradles his snout and rubs his jowls. Chan’s yellow eyes squint closed. He rumbles like a freight train. Felix thinks that might be his way of saying thanks, which is cute, until Chan barfs up a chunk of barely-digested beef onto the kitchen floor.

“Ew, what? Why? What’s the matter?”

Chan spins in a tight circle and sits next to his mess. His tail swishes. He doesn’t look distressed or ashamed. If anything, he looks like he expects Felix to do something about it.

Felix digs out his phone and searches wolf throwing up food.

“Oh,” he says as he reads the top result:

Adults feed puppies who are too old to nurse but too young to hunt for themselves by regurgitation. Puppies beg for food by pawing and licking at the adults’ mouths.

“I wasn’t, um. Begging for food. Promise. I’m not your puppy.”

It’s only when Felix heats up his porridge to prove that he does, in fact, have his own food that Chan cleans up after himself.

“You’re not allowed to lick my face anymore,” Felix says sagely.

He eats, and he does his best to keep Chan’s nose out of his bowl, and he washes his dishes. A post-dinner shower sounds so good, but he doesn’t think he could swing that without Chan getting up to some mischief. Who’s to say how he’d react to being locked out of the bathroom long enough for Felix to wash his hair, let alone how he’d react to being let in the bathroom. The last thing he needs is a soapy, soggy wolf on his hands.

Instead, he tosses some laundry in the wash to rid himself of the cursed dirty underwear. Every time Felix turns away, Chan steals his socks. Felix only manages to get all his clothes back once he starts playing an episode of Bluey like he’s babysitting a difficult toddler. Chan sits and stares at Felix’s phone with surprising concentration.

As the laundry spins, they watch a handful of episodes—ones they’ve already seen, because Felix is down for a cheap trick but not for skipping ahead by himself—until Chan gets restless. His ears twitch. He nudges Felix’s arm with his nose and pants expectantly.

“Okay, hyung,” Felix says. “Let’s go outside. Yeah? Outside? Where’d they put your leash?”

Chan’s leash is hanging by the front door, violently pink against all their black coats. He gets really excited as he realizes they’re going somewhere. He lifts his paws in a little dance like a show pony.

Felix tugs on his coat and stuffs his feet into a pair of still-tied shoes. He clips the leash to Chan’s collar and checks to make sure he has everything. Phone, keys, wallet, wolf. All the essentials.

He opens the door and narrates in his best Bingo voice, “This episode of Bluey is called Night Walk.”

○○○

They walk slowly like they have all the time in the world. Chan sticks so close to Felix’s side that his leash hangs lax between them. His shoulder brushes Felix’s hip every few steps. For a wolf who doesn’t obey commands basically at all, he sure acts like he aced obedience training.

When they get to intersections, Felix lets Chan choose which direction to go. Chan spends a few moments sniffing all around before swinging this way or that like a weathervane. Felix wonders if he’s following a particular scent. Maybe a stray cat, or a trail of grill smoke. As they zig and zag up and down city blocks, Felix loses track of where they are and how far they’ve gone. Then before he knows it, they turn a corner and he can see Olympic Park down the street.

Chan looks up at him. Traffic lights and flickering shop signs make his fur shine like an oil slick. It’s almost like he’s asking permission.

“You want to go to the park?” Felix asks.

There’s no indication that Chan understood him beyond a tilt of his head and a sneeze.

“Lead the way, hyung.”

They cross a bridge into Olympic Park. It’s winter enough that most of the trees are bare but not winter enough that it’s snowed and made everything all pretty. Seongnaecheon Stream is quiet and eerie. Felix can’t see any stars. Not that many stars are visible in Seoul even on the clearest of nights anyway, but the blank slate of the sky makes him feel so small.

Chan leads them along the stream for a bit before turning them up a trail. He picks up a stick and dutifully carries it all the way to the Lone Tree’s hill.

At this hour, in this dreary weather, the park is basically empty. No one is around to see them break some rules. With cold fingers, Felix unclips Chan’s leash and tugs the stick out of Chan’s mouth. Chan hops around and splays his front legs out in a play bow. His whole body wiggles.

Felix winds his arm back and throws the stick as far as he can. “Go get it!” he says.

For the first time all evening, Chan leaves Felix’s side. He bounds through the dry grass and comes right back. Felix wrestles the stick from the mouth of his big, sweet nightmare creature and throws it again.

Chan looks so happy, so free, running through the night.

And Felix is running out of time.

Over the years, Jisung has conned Felix into watching plenty of video essays and nature documentaries with the promise of snacks and cuddles. Normally Felix is also scrolling, or gaming, or scrolling and gaming, so he rarely pays super close attention. The soothing narration goes in one ear and straight out the other. Every now and then, though, his brain will tune in just in time to catch something interesting.

When they were in Los Angeles for something or another, fighting off jet lag with a party-sized bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, they watched a documentary about a dolphin. Felix does not remember the main point of the documentary. All the science stuff was overshadowed by the human researcher jerking off the dolphin.

It wasn’t phrased like that, but that’s what it boiled down to. The dolphin got horny. The researcher gave it handjobs. Regularly. Sensuous, not sexual, the researcher said. Precious, the researcher said.

“If I was a dolphin, would you jerk me off?” Jisung asked, and Felix shrieked with such laughter that Seungmin knocked on their hotel door to complain about the noise.

Wild as the story was, it ended unhappily. Funding was cut, the lab was closed, and the dolphin was moved to a new facility. A few weeks later, the dolphin died. Drowned itself, actually. The veterinarian said it couldn’t handle being separated from its human and died of a broken heart.

The thing is—

Felix isn’t sure that Chan could handle being separated from them, either.

But that’s what will happen.

Minho is right that they need help, but Felix has a sinking feeling about going to the higher-ups. If Chan can’t be Stray Kids Bang Chan, all the years of his life he’s sunk into the company will not save him. The company will not protect him. They’ll call someone in to take him away like he’s a colony of wasps that built a hive in the kitchen walls. Like a pest.

Felix remembers being a brand new trainee with nothing to lose but his pride and the cash for return airfare home. Meanwhile, Chan had already spent years losing every friend he’d made to the industry chopping block. But the seven of them—Chan made sure they would stay. He built them into his family with his own hands. It will break him in the cruelest of ways to be taken from them.

Chan brings him the stick and drops it at his feet. Felix throws it.

He wishes he knew what made Chan shift. What could have been bad enough to make Chan lose his humanity like this? It must have been so awful. If he knew, maybe he could reverse-engineer the solution like a puzzle platformer, but he can’t even guess.

This time, Chan doesn’t bring the stick back straight away. Instead, he trots toward the Lone Tree. If Felix wasn’t actively tracking him, he’d be difficult to spot in the dark. Yet Chan makes it abundantly clear where he is when he howls.

His howl is such a lonesome sound. Jarring and unmistakably wolfish. It’s the kind of sound one might make upon discovering their heart has been hollowed from their chest. Dogs out in the city howl back unimpressively. The sound is so coordinated and strange that Felix bets the local news will talk about it in the morning, like they did for the cat walking across the Han River.

Felix stands on the park trail with his hands stuffed deep in his pockets. Even when Chan stops howling, the cacophony carries on like an echo chamber.

He adds his own little awoo to the chorus.

Then he watches what he can only describe as a bug in Chan’s coding. His legs lock up so abruptly that he tumbles and somersaults to the ground. He faceplants in the grass. But he rolls right back up to his feet and—yellow eyes burning, breath heaving—begins rocketing toward Felix.

The speed he gains is terrifying. His paws barely seem to touch the ground, like a pegasus about to take flight, and Felix feels like he’s standing in the middle of the expressway. He worries that Chan is going to collide straight into him. He can already imagine gingerly icing those impact bruises.

“Hey, hey, hey, hey!” Felix shouts. He puts his hands out as Chan barrels toward him, like he has any chance of stopping him.

But Chan veers off at the last second, so fast and so close that Felix can feel his slipstream. He circles back and bounces around him. He bullies him with his snout. He tries to take Felix’s hand in his mouth, his fangs scraping his knuckles. Felix thinks for one dumb second that he can’t possibly be as tasty as an elk.

“The f*ck are you doing, mate?” he asks, wiping wolf slobber on his pants and jamming his hands back into his coat pockets.

Chan grumbles, distinctly annoyed.

“Hyung, what?”

Chan takes off in breakneck zoomies before he stops and howls again. More dogs sing back to him, but Chan’s voice cuts through them all.

Felix frowns. His eyebrows furrow. Every time Chan wanted to howl today, they stopped him. In the studio, on the street, in Felix’s bedroom. Suddenly he feels intensely shameful for it. Something else bothers him, but he can’t put his finger on it, until…

It wants you to howl so I can answer, Chan had said.

A shiver runs down his spine.

Chan wants him to howl. He’s supposed to howl. He’s never been more sure of anything in his life.

Felix gathers all his breath. He does the full wolf thing, tipping his head back so he can feel the stretch in his throat.

And he does what the wolf wants.

At first he feels silly. His howl is flimsy compared to Chan’s. He can’t manage the same resonance. The same power. But Chan joins him like a duet, and his conviction sets in. He keeps going as long as he can. When he runs out of breath, he wheezes, and his next inhale is deliciously cold in his lungs.

Chan comes running right back to him, snuffling and whipping his tail and stomping his paws. He pants frantically as if chanting Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!

“Oh my god?” Felix says. All the city’s dogs carry on, but they don’t belong in this howl. “That’s it, right? Oh my god. We need to—okay, f*ck, the members should still be at the company, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”

Together, they tear through the dark. Back through the trees, back up the path. Chan stays in precise step with him, loyal and leashless.

Felix fumbles for his phone. He tries calling Hyunjin first, then Jeongin, then Minho. No one picks up. That’s a good thing, he tells himself. It’s late enough that their choreographer has probably gone home but early enough that their members are still f*cking around. They’re going to need everyone for this to work.

Adrenaline spikes through his veins. He feels more animal than he’s ever felt. Dizzyingly, he realizes that this is what it would be like to lead a hunt through the wilderness side by side. Every time they’ve ever paraded around as a group has been like a wolf hunt.

Even though the company is across the street from the park, they are built for endurance and not reckless sprints. He hasn’t needed to move this fast in ages. He huffs and puffs and he swears he will blow the building down if he has to. They scramble inside through the underground parking garage, which they’re not technically supposed to do, but it’s fine.

And then it’s a mad dash through the corridors to the practice rooms. Chan’s paws struggle to find traction on the sleek tiled floor. He slips and skids cartoonishly as they race to the room that seeps low bass.

They burst in with the ferocity of a high-speed car crash. Jisung yelps, “What the f*ck?” and Seungmin says, “Well, this should be good.”

Felix scans the room. All his members are here, thank god. Chan prances around in sheer delight, sniffing and sniffing and sniffing. Somehow it sounds like he never exhales, only inhales. His claws click like ASMR on the laminate as he zips from one member to the next.

“Our Yongbokkie, our wolfie,” Changbin sing-songs, scratching behind Chan’s ears. “What have you been up to?”

“Did he want to dance?” Minho says, deadpan.

“We need—” Felix starts. His nerves make his voice shake. He coughs like a grubby preschooler with a juicebox.

“Deep breaths,” Hyunjin says gently.

“We need to howl,” Felix says. “All of us. Together. To get the wolf out.”

He looks around at everyone looking at him. Jeongin’s hair is tied up into an apple stem on top of his head. Hyunjin’s neck is sweaty. Seungmin’s pants have been meticulously lint-rolled. Changbin pouts as Chan leaves him to investigate his reflection in the mirror. Jisung’s bottom lip is bitten raw like he’s been running simulations in his head and inventing a dozen terrible futures. And Minho smiles at him, this hopeful little thing that a stranger might mistake for a mean smirk.

“He’s been trying to tell us all day and we weren’t listening,” Felix continues.

“To be fair, we usually aren’t,” Jeongin says.

“Seriously? We tried so many things—” Jisung starts.

“We did all the work,” Minho interrupts, gesturing at Seungmin.

“—that were way dumber and harder than this!” Jisung finishes.

Normally, Felix loves when they’re all weird and dorky like this, but he can’t go another minute with all this horrible nervous energy roiling inside him. He can’t go another minute without Chan.

“Guys,” he snaps. “He just wants his pack. That’s what a pack does.”

They all look at each other. Seungmin shrugs. “It’s not like we’ve got anything to lose,” he says, and he’s the first to howl.

His howl is steady. Elegant. Not like Felix’s howl, but not like Chan’s, either. Changbin is next, powerful. Jisung and Hyunjin and Jeongin and Minho follow suit, their howls all different textures.

Chan paces anxiously between them as each member joins. His hackles rise in a crest down his spine. His ears twitch. Felix crouches, and Chan comes to nuzzle his head into Felix’s chest. He snorts. Felix pets him, scrunching his fingers into the warmth of his fur.

“Sorry we didn’t figure it out sooner,” Felix says. He can barely hear himself, like when he takes his in-ears out at a concert and everything is just noise. “I know you think you need to save us all the time, but you don’t. We just need you to lead us. Let us save you for once, yeah?”

He imagines he can see the moon. He imagines sleeping under the stars. He imagines raising hell with his wild family.

(He doesn’t have to try very hard to imagine that last one.)

Felix howls.

And finally, Chan howls.

They are unbearably loud. And it feels good. Good and right. Hearing their voices blend into each other is the most natural thing. Somehow they harmonize, and it makes it sound like their pack is massive.

Felix feels the pressure building between them all like a balloon about to pop. He wishes the wolf a pleasant journey, wherever it may go. Then they seem to run out of air all at once.

As they catch their breaths, no one says a word. Felix’s ears ring. His chest constricts. His throat hurts. If nothing happens now, he doesn’t know how he’ll ever face his members again.

But something definitely happens, thought it’s impossible for Felix to make sense of exactly what. It looks like spider web cracks on a windshield or stock-image bokeh. Like swiping a hand across a shower-fogged mirror. Like an inkblot test that looks both human and animal. Like the evolution animations in old Pokémon games, 8-bit glitchy flashes, two creatures superimposed into the same space at once.

The wolf is there.

Felix blinks.

Then it’s not.

But Chan is.

Human Chan.

Human Chan in last night’s clothes and the bubblegum-pink collar hanging loose around his neck. Human Chan with his dark human eyes and pierced human ears and short human nails, handsome and disheveled, just sitting on the practice room floor like any normal day of the year.

All together, they are maybe the quietest they have ever been.

Chan’s eyes dart around them. Felix would bet everything he owns that Chan is doing a headcount. When Chan looks at Felix, he cracks a smile with his straight human teeth and sweet human dimples.

“Lix,” he says.

“Chris,” Felix says. His voice breaks. The biggest, happiest Ghibli tears well in his eyes. He reaches down, and Chan takes his hands. Felix pulls him up, straight against his own body. He tucks his face into Chan’s broad human shoulder and latches his arms around his tailless human back. “I missed you.”

“Me, too!” Jisung screeches, sandwiching Chan between them. Everyone joins in, the familiar shapes of warm bodies crushing in on all sides like a squirmy puppy pile. Felix laughs through his tears. Someone ruffles his hair. Someone pats his butt. They’re all so f*cking noisy. This is his favorite place to be.

“How do you feel, hyung?” Changbin asks.

“Tired. But also…settled, I think.” The relief in Chan’s voice is a physical thing, a waterfall that Felix could drink from. “How did, uh… I don’t remember a ton, haha. What happened?”

“Felix should probably give you the whole story. It was mostly him,” Hyunjin says, proudly.

“It’s always him,” Chan says, which is not subtle, but it really doesn’t matter. It was inevitable. There’s a smacking sound, and Chan goes, “What was that for?”

“You are so stupid, Bang Chan-ssi,” Minho says, “and you learned nothing.”

Felix remembers Chan saying that he was at the center of all things. That can’t possibly be true. Not when it’s Chan’s heart that beats for eight. Not when they all look to Chan like this, like he’s a faithful lighthouse in the dead of night. He is their cornerstone, their mastermind, their pack leader. Everything they have ever done and ever will do is to carry Chan closer to the top of the world.

“What he means,” Felix says, “is that it’s always you.”

Chapter 4: dancin' in the dark

Chapter Text

What lingers in Chan’s memories are sensations.

He doesn’t exactly remember shredding his couch, but he remembers the sound of fabric splitting and the squeaky feeling of polyurethane foam between his teeth. The metallic taste of raw meat and something satisfyingly bitter. The cold sidewalk and crinkly grass beneath his feet. The voices of his kids calling out to him in a way he understood in his bones.

At the company, the only other thing he and Felix did was grab his dead phone from his f*cked-up studio. It stunned him to see how much damage the wolf did. He compared his hands to the massive claw marks in the walls, choked on a manic laugh, and asked to go home. He’ll deal with that later. Now, they’re in his bed together, showered and hydrated. Chan’s wearing basketball shorts and little else. His pink collar is on his nightstand. His LEDs are set to purple. They’re holding each other, nearly touching at their noses, their legs entwined.

“Mostly I remember you,” Chan explains when Felix asks.

Felix rolls his eyes. “You’re so cheesy!”

“It’s just true!”

“Tell me, then?”

“Nah, you just said it’s cheesy.” Chan laughs when Felix makes a goblin war cry. “Just like, ah. Your voice. It was familiar. I mean, the members were familiar, too, but, uh… I don’t know. It’s hard to explain. Everything kind of blended together, but then you’d say my name, and it was like hearing one clear note in a lot of static. And your scent. You know. Haha.”

“Oh,” Felix says. “I guess I don’t smell like you now.”

Chan turns his head into his pillow to smell Felix’s hair. Beyond the fresh leave-in conditioner, he can’t smell anything in particular. “I mean, you are wearing my clothes,” he says. Felix gives a satisfied hum. “So probably a little, I reckon. But I can’t tell anymore. You just smell like you. It’s a relief, actually.”

“Too much?”

“Way too much.”

Felix wiggles a hand out of the doona and pets Chan’s hair. He pauses and grins ruefully. “Is this too much, too? Too wolfy?”

“No, this is nice.”

“‘Kay.”

Chan should close his eyes and let Felix’s touch lull him to sleep. His body is heavy with exhaustion. His brain is recalibrating. Yet all he wants to do is stare at his pretty boy.

It’s weird—every moment they were together, the wolf knew everything it needed to know about Felix. It could pinpoint his scent. His heartbeat. His body heat. But Chan can’t conjure an image of Felix’s face from the wolf’s perspective. The wolf couldn’t appreciate what makes Felix human: the flush in his cheeks, the freckles below his eyebrows, the sheen of lip balm creeping into his cupid’s bow. What a shame, he thinks.

They’re quiet for a long time. Felix does the egg-crack thing on Chan’s scalp, over and over. Chan almost makes a joke about cooking the world’s largest omurice. But first Felix says, “Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“You’re not gonna like it, I think.”

Chan tips his head up into Felix’s hand. “That’s okay.”

Felix pauses, like he changed his mind, until he asks, “Are we cowards if we needed the wolf to do anything?”

“You’re not a coward.”

“Aish, that’s not… I meant like, you were so open, with the wolf. I’ve never seen you let yourself feel that much. So. Would we be like this now without it? It’s not fair to ask that, but I don’t know, I just…I don’t know. ”

“Ah.” Chan sighs, long and slow. He understands. Without the wolf, he would have lived with the yearning itching under his skin indefinitely. He would have just watched Felix glow like the sun forever, praying the whole time that he might warm his hands in Felix’s light. That does make him a coward, probably. “Okay, how about this? I’m gonna ask you something you’re not gonna like, either, but it’s important.”

“Um. Okay.”

“Why did I shift?”

“Seungminnie said it was to protect us.”

“Specifically. The last time.”

“I don’t know? Something really awful, right?”

“Just people being c*nts on the internet.”

Felix’s eyebrows pull together sharply. He stops petting Chan’s hair. He blinks, hard. His mouth presses into an unimpressed line. “Be f*cking for real right now,” he says.

“I saw one sh*tty person say one sh*tty thing and suddenly it was like, oh, well, I guess there’s only one way to deal with this.”

“You motherf*cker. All that for that?”

Chan laughs. There was more to it than that, of course. Surely Felix will ask for more details later about what could have driven the wolf to intervene, and Chan will tell him straight when he does. For now, he just pulls Felix’s hand down to tuck it against his bare chest, covering it with his own.

“Yeah, I know, haha,” he says. “But how it happened doesn't change that it did. I think we could go on forever about what things might have been like without the wolf. Like, our lives are so weird and complicated that…ah, haha, well. Anyway. None of those things happened. We’re here now, yeah?”

Felix nods slowly. He shuffles his legs, snaring one of Chan’s ankles between both of his. His thumb strokes an arc on Chan’s collarbones. “Yeah,” he agrees resolutely.

“Baby.”

“Mm?”

“I feel the same now as I always have. Even with the wolf. I loved you then because I loved you before and I love you after.” Chan’s ears start to blush. Is it too early to say that? This is anything but news to him, but they only just kissed like, yesterday. “Wow, uh, haha, I’ve never said that. To anyone.”

Now Felix’s eyes crinkle. He makes some silly animal noise, like a kookaburra, or maybe a tiny monkey. “I said it first. You were just too wolf to notice.”

Chan’s heart skips like, ten beats. “Wait, that’s not fair!”

“Do you remember barfing up your dinner?”

“What?”

“Yeah, you wanted me to eat it.”

“This feels like the opposite of what I was saying.”

“And do you remember snuggling with my underwear? The ones I ji*zzed in? Because you also did that.”

“Alright, time to change my name and move to Antarctica. It was nice knowing you.”

“Channieee,” Felix says through a cackle that scrunches his nose. “I loved you then, too. And always and now and tomorrow. Or whatever you said.”

After so many years, Chan thinks he should be used to the way his heart is just a snowglobe in Felix’s hands. Felix shakes him into chaos, and then he settles right back down. He’s still not used to the topsy-turvy glitter-drift.

He hopes he’ll never get used to it.

“It’s still going to be weird and complicated,” he warns gently. “This. Us. Everything.”

“I know.” Felix’s hand slides up over Chan’s shoulder. He cradles the back of his neck and coaxes them closer. Their noses brush. “We’ll figure it out. It’ll be worth it.”

This time, Chan believes him, and he doesn’t worry about fangs or claws or anything at all as Felix kisses him, and kisses him, and kisses him.

○○○

Chan wouldn’t say that he’s friends with three in the morning, but they’re hanging out again. He’s laying in bed, awake. He’s doing work sh*t. Maybe this makes the nemeses, actually. That would explain why they rarely see any more than the worst of each other.

I hope I haven’t caused too much of an inconvenience, he writes, preparing to send his late remix assignments to the PDs. Please let me know if you need anything else from my end.

All things considered, he’s not even that late. Barely half a day. He doubts anyone will even question what held him up, though apparently he has a food poisoning alibi (thanks Minho) if they do.

If the wolf were still at all in him, he thinks he would feel some sort of shame for not being punctual. A hunger to do more do more do more. Enough restlessness to pull him away from Felix, who is cocooned next to him and snoring just a bit. But he doesn’t. Nothing feels wrong outside of some professional chagrin at having ghosted a few coworkers for a few hours.

He hits send.

As long as he’s awake, he could open Bubble, or rearrange his weekend schedule to fit in a leg waxing appointment, or try to funnel some of his complicated wolf-feelings into song lyrics. (Who is to blame, if anyone? How much of his heart is resentful, and how much is grateful? Would he have done anything differently knowing that pushing through to the other side of fear would land him in love?) Instead, he closes all his apps. He vaguely remembers Jisung talking about his new anime-inspired SKZ-Record, a song about how love passes like time. He finds his earbud case on the headboard shelf and opens Crunchyroll.

The YOASOBI intro is full of syncopated piano and intricate synth. Chan has the distinctly gentle thought that the wolf would have liked this song. If there’s anything he’ll miss about the wolf, it’s probably that. Hearing music through its lens. Especially his own music. There’s nothing he could ever do to replicate that novelty with his human ears.

Well. That novelty would eventually become a detriment. He’s already his own worst critic. If he had to appease both critics in his head every time he made something, he would never get anything done ever again.

He makes it halfway through the third episode by the time Felix wiggles and heaves himself over like a horseshoe crab on the beach. He hikes a leg up over Chan’s knees, worms under Chan’s arm, and plants his face into the give of Chan’s pec.

Chan pauses the anime in time to hear Felix ask, “What are you watching?” in a voice that could liquefy Chan’s bones.

“Frieren,” Chan says. “Did I wake you?”

“Mm, no. Not tired anymore.”

Chan raises an eyebrow. “Sure.”

“We napped like, all day.” After a second he adds, “The ending song makes Hannie cry basically every other episode.”

“Yeah, that tracks.”

Earlier, they’d fallen asleep with the LEDs on, too obsessed with holding each other to even hit the power button. In the dim purple glow, Chan can see the dark roots of Felix’s hair just starting to grow out. It’s nice like this, actually, more lived-in than a fresh bleach.

Chan smiles at the top of Felix’s head. He traces the shell of Felix’s ear and softly pinches his earlobe. Felix draws wobbly spirals in the dip of Chan’s solar plexus.

The ease with which they touch each other is really nothing new. Quick tangles of their fingers. Under-the-table bumps of knees or feet. Hugs in front of way, way too many people. There’s hardly ever been a day since they met without something small to say I’m right here with you. What is new is knowing that it’s reciprocal. Yes, Chan wants. Yes, Felix wants. How special is this, how absurd?

“Lix?” he says.

“Yeah?”

“I wrote a song for you.”

“Oh? Like, something you want me to sing?”

“No, like, it’s about you. A love song. For you. Haha.”

“Ohhh. I—wow? Really?” The genuine awe in Felix’s voice makes Chan’s heart do stupid things. He sounds so surprised, as if Chan couldn’t instantly improvise an entire dissertation defense on the healing properties of his smile.

“Mhmm. I mean, ah, I probably won’t record it, since I’d never be able to release it, haha, so maybe it’s a love poem, which—gross?”

“No one’s ever written a poem for me before.”

“That’s…not true.”

“True in all the important ways. To me. At least.” Felix hums. “What’s it about?”

“How like, the universe is so big that it’s a f*cking miracle I get to be this close to you.”

Felix nuzzles his face against Chan’s skin. He makes it seem unintentional, but it has to have been calculated. His lips are now just above Chan’s nipple. Chan can feel each of his warm, damp breaths. That also has to be calculated.

Chan watches in stark fascination as Felix trails the very tips of his fingers all the way down the center of his chest. Barely touching. His middle finger catches at his belly button. Then he comes back up, running his nails so lightly under the swell of his pecs.

“If it’s okay,” Felix says deliberately, and it’s like his voice creates a black hole, his gravity so strong that Chan could never leave, “can I touch you?”

“You’re already doing that,” Chan says, because he can calculate, too.

Just as expected, Felix whips his head up and delivers his most withering glare. He’s so cute with his snarky little lip curl and devastating side-eye. Chan abandons his phone in the sheets in favor of cradling Felix’s cheek and straining his neck to kiss him roughly.

“Please,” he says into Felix’s mouth, and Felix bites Chan’s lip.

Felix becomes a flurry of motion. He licks past Chan’s lips, sloppy and stupidly hot, and kisses his tongue when Chan tries to copy him. Then he hauls himself up with a hand braced on Chan’s chest. He nudges Chan’s legs apart and kneels between them.

He has his determined face on, like he’s monitoring a performance. Pinched eyebrows, parted mouth. He smacks both hands onto Chan’s pecs. When Felix squeezes, he makes a satisfied noise that sends a weird kind of pride bubbling through Chan’s veins.

Felix’s fingers dig in, uncarefully. They relent. Their imprints stay on Chan’s skin, if only briefly, flashing white before flushing red. Chan’s pulse races. All he wants is to point to his own body and think yes, Felix was here.

He feels possessed. Felix should possess him. Felix should leave scratches down his back. Crescents of teeth marks on his shoulders. Hickeys, too; if not on his neck then in places more tender, on his thighs, around his nipples, so purple they’ll take ages to disappear. Felix should come on his face, or inside—

All at once he understands why Felix had encouraged the wolf so readily, baring his neck for him. He understands what it means to bear the mark of another.

Make me yours, he almost says, yours yours yours yours yours yours, and he thinks about getting a tattoo, that’d be insane, right, an arrow shot through a heart with Felix’s name written in calligraphy? But Felix runs both hands down his chest, over his stomach, settling at his waistband and holding him there like—like—

It gets worse, or better, or overwhelming in a way he can’t explain. Felix hooks his hands under Chan’s knees, around the backs of his thighs, and pushes. Chan lets himself go boneless. He folds very nearly in half for him.

What really takes his breath away is how Felix wedges himself in closer. No space between them at all. Chan feels like a knife thrower’s assistant, shivering in anticipation on the target board, and Felix is striking so close it’s making him sweat. Felix is already hard. It won’t take much for Chan to get there, too. Felix makes sure their dicks drag together through their pants.

Chan laughs through a gasp. “Felix, f*ck.”

Felix grins at him. “Is that a good f*ck?”

“Yeah, I—you could, I don’t know, do anything and it’d be good, haha.”

“Anything?” Felix repeats in a sh*t-eating voice. He wiggles his hips into Chan’s ass. Chan squeaks embarrassingly as his dick leaks in his underwear.

They make eye contact. Felix’s hair tumbles over his shoulder. His eyes are dark and sparkly. This is not a fairytale—Chan is not a villain, and he is not a hero, and if he is anything at all he is the cursed frog, which is humbling—but Felix is mythic. Felix is a fairy, or a vampire, or a siren. Chan would give his name freely and drink the sickly fae wine to stay trapped with him forever. He would volunteer to be absorbed whole into Felix’s bloodstream. He would jump ship to the sound of Felix’s voice and tread water until Felix wanted him to sink.

“Anything,” Chan says, doubling down. He fumbles a useless hand to cup himself over his pants. He makes sure to angle his fingers so Felix can see the shape of his bulge between them.

Felix lets one of his legs go. Reluctantly, Chan lets it relax in the cradle of Felix’s hip. Then Felix lays a hand on top of Chan’s and grinds their palms down together. Felix strokes over the center seam of Chan’s shorts, over his balls, and Chan’s whole body locks up as he whines unsteadily.

“Are you going to come in your pants?” Felix teases.

“If you want,” Chan says, his voice cracking in the middle.

There’s a moment of silence like the whole world was put on mute. Felix opens his mouth. He closes it again. He clears his throat. “Sorry, I think I just blacked out. What?”

Chan blushes catastrophically hot, from his ears seeping down his chest. He buries his face in his hands. “I would, if that’s what you wanted me to do,” he says, muffled through his fingers.

“Jesus Christ.”

“Sorry.”

“No, what—stop hiding. What do you want?”

“You. You probably think I’m being difficult—”

“A little.”

“—but I just want you.”

“You have me. Come on, hyung, how?”

With the wolf, asking for Felix’s hands on him had never been easier. The wolf had rewired him. It knew exactly what it meant to be close. He’s not sure he can do that now, not yet, not in so many words.

“You were so perfect, you know?” he says instead. “How you, ah, wanted me. And took that for yourself.”

Felix studies him. Chan feels dazed under this intimate pressure. Eventually, Felix asks, “Did you get off? Last night? After I went home?”

“No, I, uh—no. I finished work and then. Uh. Wolf.”

Felix pouts. “You had a studio boner and didn’t even jerk off about it? Well, now I almost feel bad that I did.”

“You…did?”

“I jerked off like, immediately. In the shower. Thinking about your mouth. If you know what I mean.”

“Oh? Oh.”

“Do you want that?”

“Yes.” Chan’s voice sounds disembodied. His mouth waters like he’s still some stupid dog. His dick twitches beneath his hand, but he doesn’t do anything about it.

“Huh,” Felix says, like he’s solving a mystery. “Do you…want to f*ck me?”

“I—yes, god.”

“Do you want me to f*ck you?”

Chan whimpers. He just nods.

“Gonna take care of your mate?”

Felix’s voice is so low that Chan’s skin tingles. Animal satisfaction startles somewhere in his gut. The wolf may be gone, but humans are still just animals. They are both just animals. There’s a primordial understanding between their bodies.

“Always,” Chan insists.

Felix preens. He slides his hand away from where it’s still on top of Chan’s, back up his chest. He leans in impossibly closer, hitching Chan’s bent leg up even higher.

He’s so gentle as he runs his thumb up Chan’s adam’s apple and then over his jaw. He brushes Chan’s hair away from his forehead, smooths his eyebrows, traces the length of his nose.

These are all the places he has some kind of complex with, he realizes. His hairline, which has never fully recovered from all the dye. His eyebrows, which are sparse, and the longer he’s in this line of work, the more he tries to avoid seeing himself without them filled in with makeup. His nose, which he thinks looks crooked for something that cannibalizes his entire profile.

“It was so hot to be, um. Yours. The way the wolf wanted,” Felix says.

He keeps touching, and touching, and touching. Lingering at the thin skin of his inner elbows where his hypermobility bends his arms into bird wings. Egg-cracking his fingers on his stomach where he decidedly does not have abs currently. Dragging his palm down his stretched-out leg until he reaches his foot, big for how tall he is and flat-soled—his feet don’t arch cutely like Felix’s do, and they hurt after he’s been dancing in his unsupportive combat boots for too long.

“But I missed you,” he adds. “Just you. All you.”

Something blistering runs through Chan, trickling in his belly and building until it’s at his throat. He must have missed Felix, too, even if he doesn’t remember what the wolf felt, because he always misses Felix when they’re not in the same room. It’s just him, now. Just them. All them. Chan feels like he might die if they don’t touch in every imaginable way.

“Not going anywhere, okay?” Chan says.

“Okay.” Felix smiles, heartbreakingly soft, until it grows into something mischievous. Scrunched nose and canine teeth and devilish tongue. He squeezes the back of Chan’s thigh where he still has him pinned and returns his other hand to Chan’s dick. “Not letting you go.”

“You, ah, should maybe let me go so we can like, take our clothes off?” Chan says. “Wanna come with you, yeah?”

“Yeah, thank god.”

Felix does let him go. It’s really not sexy how Chan scoots himself back until there’s room for him to sit up. It’s also not sexy how they kind of tumble over themselves to get undressed. But they kiss, and they giggle, and it’s good. Doesn’t matter that Chan’s hands shake as he eases Felix’s pants off. Doesn’t matter that Felix clips Chan in the jaw with his elbow in his haste to whip off his shirt. Doesn’t matter that Chan’s dick awkwardly catches the waistband of his underwear. Still good. Still all them.

When they’re naked, Chan almost just wants to look. Tiny waist and sharp collarbones and peach fuzz on narrow shoulders. Wiry muscle all the way down. Pink all the way down. Felix reminds Chan of the platonic ideal of a beach day. Storybook clouds and glassy water. The sheer satisfaction of sinking his teeth into a massive wedge of watermelon, juice dripping sticky-sweet all over his face. Darkening freckles and sea-salt hair and home. No place else he’d rather be.

Chan leans in and kisses a freckle between Felix’s throat and clavicle. He thinks about his fangs. He thinks about making a mess here, a satisfying spit-slide. The wolf, he realizes suddenly, wasn’t the only one who wanted it wet and nasty. That was him.

Is it a vestige of the wolf, then, his desire to own and be owned? Or has that always been him, too?

Felix gets another insistent handful of Chan’s pecs. Chan reaches between them. He pries Felix’s hand away, only to bring it to his mouth.

Chan kisses his fingertips. Then he meets Felix’s eyes. He watches so attentively as he licks Felix’s palm. Felix’s lips drop open. He bares his teeth. He pants. Perfectly animalistic. Chan’s ears burn, but really he doesn’t hesitate to take Felix’s first two fingers into his mouth.

His fingers sink in, easily, to the last knuckle. They taste just a little like fancy moisturizer. Spit pools in Chan’s mouth, sounding wet as he sucks. He worms his tongue between Felix’s fingers, spreading them to touch his molars. His top teeth scrape Felix’s knuckles. He feels like a wildfire. A teething puppy. He’ll consume anything he can reach.

“What the f*ck.” Felix’s voice is half slaphappy shock and half desperate laugh. “What the f*ck, I—f*ck? You’re so hot, this is—oh.”

Chan pulls Felix’s hand from his mouth and leads it by his wrist down his own chest. He purposefully catches one of his nipples between Felix’s fingers. Lower still and snailtrailing spit. He lets go somewhere near his belly button and resumes kissing him.

Felix, however, keeps going. His slimy hand lingers at the crease of Chan’s hip for a moment. Then it curls tentatively around Chan’s dick. They break the kiss to sigh against each other’s mouths.

“Yeah?” Felix asks.

“Yeah,” Chan answers. He touches their foreheads together. “I think…this is how. For right now.”

“‘Kay.” Felix strokes him shallowly. It’s wet for a few moments, spit mixing with precome, but it doesn’t last. Soon his dick is uncomfortably tacky. All friction, no glide. Felix slows until he’s just holding him in his fist. “Do you have lube? Please tell me you have lube.”

“Of course I do. Uh. Somewhere.”

Felix’s grip loosens. “Somewhere.”

“Should have done this in your bed if quickdrawing lube was your main concern.”

“Mm, my bed is full of dog fur, thanks.”

“…Right. Haha. Give me a second.”

When Chan leans over the side of his bed to find the lube in his nightstand, Felix helps himself to a handful of his ass. He makes some rumbly purr in his throat as he squeezes and jiggles. Fine by Chan, really, if Felix wants to fidget-toy with his body. Anything that keeps his hands on him.

He finds the lube. It barely takes fifteen seconds, but when he turns back, his heart softens as though it took months. Felix is so pretty—hair fluffed, chest freckled, dick flushed—that it’s a tragedy in the making whenever he isn’t looking his way.

Felix snatches the bottle as soon as he possibly can. It’s a full bottle. New. So new that when Felix flicks the cap open and tries to dump it into his hand, nothing comes out.

He narrows his eyes. “Don’t tell me how long this has been sitting in there like this. It’ll make me sad.”

“It’ll make you sad?” Chan repeats, a grin pulling at the corner of his mouth.

“Yeah. Like. I mean. Don’t tell me it’s been a thousand years since you got off.” Felix sits back on his haunches, still kneeling between Chan’s legs. He twists off the cap and starts picking at the plastic seal underneath. He struggles for a second before he uses his teeth. The seal tears away and sticks to his bottom lip. He spits it somewhere on the floor. “Whatever. You have me now, so hopefully this will all be gone by—um. Let’s say next weekend.”

“Wow.” Chan skitters his fingers up Felix’s thigh and watches goosebumps flash across his skin. “Big plans, huh?”

“At least twenty centimeters, yeah.”

Chan’s eyes widen. He laughs so loud he startles himself. Way too loud. The last time he made a commotion at this hour, it’d ended in a full team meeting. He does not want a repeat performance. “Shut up.”

Felix snickers cartoonishly, like an evil wizard, heh heh heh, as he twists the cap back on the lube bottle.

It strikes Chan, in a way that sometimes takes a backseat to splashier feelings, how much he likes Felix. He’s in love with him, yes, but he also likes him. More basic than liking who he is as his friend or bandmate or soulmate. He likes who Felix is as a person. He feels so lucky that he gets to exist in the world at the same time as him.

He reaches out for Felix’s hips. Felix’s skin is so soft, so warm, and his pelvic bones fit so nicely into the scoop of Chan’s hands. He tugs Felix forward. It takes some clumsy rebalancing and rearranging, but soon enough he gets Felix settled in his lap instead of kneeling over him. Felix’s knees creak as he wraps his legs around Chan’s waist. There’s just enough space left between them to get their hands on each other.

Triumphantly, Felix uncaps the lube. “Give me your hand,” he says. He blinks. Chan can almost see his next thought forming like alphabet fridge magnets sliding into place.

“Don’t—”

“Paw?”

“You little f*ck.” Chan shakes his head fondly.

Still, he gives his hand, obediently.

Felix squeezes lube into Chan’s palm, then into his own, then clicks the bottle closed. He brings his hand down between them. Chan meets him in the middle, creating a closed circuit. The backs of their hands brush.

What sweet relief it is, to touch and be touched. Felix’s fist is tight and impatient from the start. Chan takes it slower, just so he can see every change in Felix’s expression. He didn’t get to see this last time. The flutter of his eyelids, the clench of his jaw. Chan slicks him up carefully and kisses a whimper straight out of Felix’s mouth.

It takes them a little time to find balance together. Felix quivers and sinks his teeth into Chan’s bottom lip when Chan smears his fingers over Felix’s tip. Chan’s brain starts to dissolve like fairy floss when Felix sucks on his tongue and strokes his dick with the same desperate rhythm. Once, Chan looks down between their bodies and feels lightheaded. Unreal, the way they look next to each other.

“f*ck, baby,” Chan says. He tucks his face into the crook of Felix’s neck. He inhales deeply. It’s not the same as the wolf—could never be the same, will never be the same again—but it still feels good. Smells good. Familiar. Tastes like salt. His baby. Perfect baby. His. “So close.”

“Yeah, close,” Felix echoes. He trembles in Chan’s lap. His free hand anchors in the back of Chan’s hair. Chan adjusts, a little tighter, a little faster, and Felix’s breath goes ragged. “Please, Chris.”

The steady glide of Felix’s hand wavers. His grip tightens and loosens unpredictably as he struggles to stay focused.

Chan puts his mouth to Felix’s neck.

Lips.

Teeth.

Nearly a bite.

He drags his tongue up Felix’s throat.

Felix curses. His dick pulses. It’s calculated, of course, how his come splatters up Chan’s chest. Wet and warm and so deeply satisfying that it prickles under Chan’s skin. Chan’s own org*sm blindsides him. He gasps around Felix’s name before his voice dies away into a shaky moan.

Everything goes quiet as their breathing evens out. Chan keeps his hand around Felix’s dick protectively and feels him soften. Felix’s come drips down Chan’s chest and pools in his belly button. He didn’t exactly pay attention to where his own come ended up, but he’s not terribly surprised to see Felix’s stomach glistening with it, concentrated near his hip.

To bear the mark of another, and all that.

Chan kisses the corner of Felix’s pink, panting mouth. “God,” he says, because he can’t think to say anything else.

“Mm,” Felix replies, just a puff of breath on Chan’s lips.

Then Chan gingerly bends Felix’s leg just enough for him to untangle them. Felix lets himself be manhandled until they’re laying side-by-side, their feet hanging off the edge of the bed together. They don’t say anything for a while, content to exist with each other in the afterglow.

“Do you,” Felix says eventually, low and lovely, “want to go on a date?”

Chan laughs. He nudges Felix’s ankle with his own. “Obviously.”

“I mean now. Hyung. Do you want to go on a date now?”

“What?” Chan asks. He pats his hand around the sheets until he finds his phone. It’s quarter past four. “Right now?”

“Yeah. Um. We could go to a PC bang. We have a film schedule in a few hours, but I would commit crimes for some jjajangmyeon.”

By now, Chan isn’t sure how his heart hasn’t burst out of his chest like a songbird in a cuckoo clock. He wants all the cheesy formal stuff, too, like making dinner reservations and bringing Felix a bouquet of red roses, but this feels so right. “I would love to take you on a jjajangmyeon date right now.”

Felix clucks his tongue like that stupid meme he likes. “Nice.”

“Let me clean us up real quick.”

Chan gets up and goes to the bathroom, still naked. No one else is awake—the whole dorm is dark, and the only sound is the kick of the heater turning on—but even if they were, they've seen it all before. They probably wouldn’t think anything of it if they saw his bare ass wandering around.

He wipes himself off over the sink. In the mirror, his reflection does not hide a speck of love. He sees it shining back at him in everything. It’s in the mess of his hair and the dip of his dimples. He can barely meet his own gaze without blushing. He really does feel settled. Like he ran so hard for so long that he’s finally able to rest.

To figuratively rest, at least.

Felix has hardly moved at all by the time Chan returns with a damp towel. The only thing that’s changed is that he’s scrolling TikTok as he waits. Chan cleans Felix’s outstretched lube hand first before moving on to his belly. He idly listens to the auditory disaster of someone else’s FYP.

“Hey, I think you should watch this,” Felix says when he’s all cleaned up.

Chan doesn’t want to get too comfortable—they have a date to go on!—but he tosses the towel to the floor and snuggles up into Felix’s space. A few more minutes here won’t hurt.

Felix clicks the volume up a couple times and angles his screen to show a clip of Lily livestreaming. Not really someone he wants to see while their dicks are out, but he’ll live. Bold white text in the middle of the screen reads SKZ HOWLING IN LILY’S LIVE 😭?

In the stream, Lily is reinventing Marxism again in braided pigtails when she’s interrupted mid-sentence. At first, it almost just sounds like yelling. But then it takes on the unmistakable lilt of their howl.

Even through multiple closed doors, they are extremely loud.

“Oh my gosh?” Lily says in English. “Wow, can you guys hear that? This always happens to me! Stray Kids sunbaenim are—oh, you can hear them? Right? They really are like a wolf pack, huh? Never beating those allegations. If you know, you know.”

The howling only gets louder and louder. Lily blinks owlishly at the camera for an eternity. It’s impossible to identify individual voices in this clip, but Chan gets goosebumps over his whole body when the wolf finally joins in.

It’s a desperate sound. Urgent and bare like the tides receding before a tsunami. The wolf modulates its howl to better fit his kids’ voices. Together they sound legion, like their pack might be fifty and not eight. The howling comes to a crescendo after maybe a minute and stops suddenly.

“Ooookay, uh, anyway!” Lily says. With an encouraging fist pump, she adds, “Wolfgang, woof woof!”

The video loops.

What luck, to have their howl preserved in this small, silly way. What luck to have proof.

Felix told him earlier that they took pictures, too, but Chan isn’t ready to see those yet. That feels too weird, still. Will he recognize himself in the wolf? Will it disturb him if yes, or devastate him if no?

Some kind of memory almost unlocks as they listen to the wolf howl again. He remembers something like pride: his pack’s howl was so beautiful. And something like helplessness: the leader was failing to lead his pack to safety.

Chan tries so hard to shake the rest of the memory free like the last coin in a piggy bank. The wolf didn’t howl until everyone else did. Wouldn’t, he remembers. But why? That makes sense as a human—one two three four five six seven, and he is number eight—but not as a wolf. It was like the wolf was waiting for something, like it couldn’t figure out where to go…

And then Chan understands with shocking clarity that it wasn’t helplessness at all. It was trust. The leader was trusting his pack to lead him to safety.

Oh.

How long has he been confusing helplessness with trust?

For so long, and by his own design, every burden has been his to shoulder. Every battle his to fight. He is the leader, striker, controller, and defender. He’s been lone-wolfing his way through every perceived threat.

He feels so stupid. He can’t have it both ways. He can’t be a lone wolf and the pack leader.

If the wolf howled itself awake to protect his kids, he has to accept that his kids howled just as fiercely to protect him.

Accepting help is the opposite of helplessness. How could something that takes such courage be a weakness? How could the strength of his whole pack ever reflect anything less than his own strength? The wolf knew that even if it took him ages to learn.

It’s unreasonable to think he’ll never succumb to the helpless freefall again. But maybe next he’s about to hit terminal velocity, he will trust that fourteen hands will reach out for him.

Before then, though, he will arrive on set in a few hours with seven coffees, one tropical fruit juice blend, and enough aegyo to make his kids squirm, and he will not apologize to the makeup noonas for showing up with sodium-bloated cheeks.

But before then, he will sneak out of the dorm, hand-in-hand with the boy who has always had his heart, and they will feed each other enormous bites of jjajangmyeon for their first official date, black bean sauce gleaming on their lips in the harsh blue light of two gaming monitors.

But before then, he will let his gaze linger on the delicate lines of Felix’s body as he gets dressed in Chan’s clothes, the shoulder seams of his baggy black t-shirt drooping halfway down his biceps.

But first.

First.

He pulls Felix against the entire length of his body. He tries to kiss all his gratitude into his mouth. Felix runs his hand through Chan’s hair, mindful of the tangles, and kisses him back.

Chan imagines getting to do this in every city in the world. During every season and hour. Under every wide sky.

The video loops again. A smile stretches so big across Chan’s face that it ruins the kiss. Felix smiles back, and they burst into giggles. Chan nuzzles his nose into Felix’s neck and holds him tight. He actually can’t imagine what could be better than getting to do this here and now.

“Do you hear that?” Felix asks over the sound of their howling. “How much we love you?”

He does. Of course he does.

“I do,” he says like a vow, and—

If Chan had a tail, it would be wagging.