Chapter Text
“Hey Eric, what’s up?” Kevin asks, suddenly popping up behind his shoulder.
Eric quickly turns off his phone and shoves it between his legs, his heart nearly jumping out of his chest.
“Hi Kevin hyung,” he gives him a shaky smile. There is a moment of silence.
“What were you looking at?”
Eric’s heart thuds louder.
“Nothing.”
He wants to smack himself. That’s the worst answer he could’ve given. Eric watches with unease as a smirk grows on Kevin’s face.
“Nothing, huh? You reacted like that because you were looking at nothing?”
He flinches when Kevin leans closer.
“Was it porn? It’s not a big deal you know, we all watch it, although we watch in private so maybe you’re a bit weird but tha-”
“It wasn’t porn!” He says, but not too loud because god forbid someone hear this conversation.
Ok, that was a lie. It was porn. Sort of. But before Eric could defend himself further, he heard a manager calling for Kevin.
“Be careful where you watch that stuff!” he exclaims before cheerily skipping out the door.
Eric slumps further into his seat, angry that he was interrupted right when he was getting to the good part. He’d suffered through 11 chapters of angst for Juyeon hyung to finally realize his feelings for him and they had just been about to fuck, goddamnit! He looks back down at his phone and contemplates opening it up right now to read. Or maybe he should wait till he’s sent back to his room so he can read about getting dicked down by his hyung in private. Yeah, that would be a better idea.
---
Eric sprawls across his bed the moment he gets back. He’d been told they were going to be filming another show. That was fine and all but he hated having to sit through hours of explanation and going over the script and whatnot. Oh well, what’s done is done. Now he can get back to the fanfiction he was reading. Chanhee hyung has lessons still so he has the room to himself.
He wiggles around to try and get more comfortable, but there’s something pressing into his side. He reaches for it and brings it closer to his face. It’s a red notebook. About a hundred pages thick, only a little larger than his hand, and entirely empty. Unsure of what it was doing here, he decides to place it on his nightstand for now. Then he opens a private tab on his phone to continue reading.
---
“Dude, don’t faceplant into the cereal.”
Eric blinks groggily at Hyunjae who is sitting across from the table before looking back down at his cereal, regretting his life choices. Staying up last night to finish the remaining 50,000 something words of that fanfic might have been a bad idea.
“Did you not sleep at all last night or what?”
His response was a shrug. Hyunjae sighs and shoves more food into his mouth. Meanwhile, Eric’s mind returns to an idea that came to him last night. The idea was: What if Eric wrote fanfiction? He turns the thought over and over in his mind. What if he did? It sounded like fun. He’d always liked writing silly little stories for himself. Why not write some fanfiction?
The bowl in front of him is empty now. He takes his and Hyunaje’s to the sink and runs some water into them. Today, he would write. After reading a few fanfics, he couldn’t help but want to make some of his own.
Eric didn’t know if his fellow members read their own fanfiction, or if they even knew about it. Honestly, Eric didn’t think he’d ever read it either, let alone enjoy it this much. At first, he was horrified to hear of it. Their fans were writing about them doing what with who? What made them think they had any right to use them like that, to fulfill their own desires? And then, he was curious. What exactly did they write about? How did they write about him? And after reading some, he was fascinated.
There was something so entertaining about reading about himself and his members in all these scenarios doing all these things that he can’t ever imagine them doing or being people he can’t ever imagine them being. Juyeon as a cold, hardened mafia boss, Chanhee as some kind of porn star, Changmin as a cat-human hybrid. Really weird shit. But some were believable and maybe, in an alternate life, even possible. Like Sunwoo as a highschool soccer captain or Kevin as a stoner college student or Jacob as a barista at a coffee shop. All of them were very revealing about what their fans saw them as and what they thought they could possibly be.
And, of course, some of them are very well written. Nearly as good as published books, and maybe, in the cases of erotica, better. So, he concludes, maybe fanfiction is a good thing. It’s pretty cool. And Eric wants in on it too, so here he is in the dead of the night after the day’s schedules, sitting at the kitchen with just the light of his table lamp and the red notebook he’d found earlier. Sneaking out of the room was surprisingly easy, and hopefully no one would disturb him at this time. He adjusts the light again so it illuminates both halves of the open notebook, setting his pencil in the crease at the center.
Writing by hand is always more fun than typing, so that’s what he’s going to do. He thinks back to when he saw Haknyeon and Sunwoo laughing over something today, staring at each other all sappy-like in the back of the van. He gets why they're a popular "ship", as it was called.
An idea comes to him. He grips his pencil and as soon as it meets the paper, the words rush out of him, filling the page. It’s only after he’s written an entire scene that covers three pages of the notebook that he feels his exhaustion catch up to him. That night, Eric sneaks back into his room, shoves his notebook under his bed where hopefully no one would ever find it, and goes to sleep.
---
Something weird is up. Eric can feel it. He felt it in the way Haknyeon and Sunwoo kept bumping into each other while they brushed their teeth, he felt it in the way they kept staring at each other during breakfast, and he feels it in the awkwardness between them as they sat behind him in the van. He has half a mind to ask them what’s going on, but no one else has mentioned anything, so maybe it’s just Eric. Maybe Eric just feels weird about them now that, underneath his bed in a red notebook, there’s a scene detailing Haknyeon and Sunwoo kissing written in his handwriting, by him.
He pulls his knees to his chest and dozes off for the remainder of the ride to the broadcasting station, basking in the warmth the sun provides through the window.
All too soon he is awoken, readied for the stage, and waiting in the waiting room with the rest of his members. The rest of his members except Sunwoo and Haknyeon, that is. And for some reason, Sangyeon hyung has decided it is his job to go find them, so he sets out to do just that. Walking the hallways that all look too similar to one another to be practical, Eric remembers that his fanfiction occurs when Sunwoo and Haknyeon get lost in a broadcasting building in which all the hallways look too similar to one another to be practical. His gut twists at the coincidence.
“Dude, just call them.”
“Ok wait, my phone has to power on.”
“Why did you power it off?”
Eric hears a smack after that sentence. He knows those voices. They’re the voices of his missing members, which is great and all, but why the fuck are they repeating the exact dialogues he’d written for them last night?!
He hides behind a convenient coat rack and watches them turn the corner into the hall he was in. Sunwoo and Haknyeon had rounded the corner and just like he’d written it, Sunwoo abruptly stops because his phone had finished powering on again and he was going to make the call. And just like he’d written it, Haknyeon trips over his laces and onto Sunwoo, not knowing he’d stopped. Sunwoo stumbles over his own feet, back hitting the wall behind him and Haknyeon has somehow caged him in, their bodies pressed up against each other. Haknyeon’s lips accidentally brush against Sunwoo’s cheek as he pulls back and then they’re frozen there.
He watches like the fucking voyeur he is as “something snaps between them and Sunwoo swoops in to capture Haknyeon’s lips and they kiss like it’s all they’ve ever needed and all they ever will need.”
Eric cringes hard. He cringes so hard he feels like he’s shriveled into himself and died. He really could have written this better. Then again, it was a first draft! And it was written in a delirious sleep deprived mood, mind you, so you have to cut him some slack here. His pulse pounds behind his eyes as he watches them make out against the wall and he can't help but notice that Haknyeon hyung is a really good kisser.
What the fuck. What the actual fuck is going on.
He slinks away back to the waiting room as soon as he can. Sunwoo's phone is working. Those two can find their way back themselves. Eric needs some time to process all this.