Too early, Hyunjin woke up five minutes before his alarm.

He lay in bed until the alarm told him it was time to get up and go looking for his last clean set of dance clothes, because – surprise surprise – he had absolutely no time for laundry. Opting to not brush his hair (despite knowing it would be Not Good and he would regret it in the evening), he tied it out of his face as well as possible and texted Jeongin, asking if he was awake yet.

When he walked into the kitchen to get a coffee and find something to eat, he froze. Changbin was standing next to the coffee machine, taking a cup away and holding it towards Hyunjin, the coffee still steaming.

He blinked.

"Good morning, Hyunjinnie," Changbin smiled.

"Is this a dream?" Hyunjin pinched himself. "Oh no. What if I wake up and realise I overslept?"

"Hyunjin," Changbin replied, brow furrowed. "You're awake. Drink the coffee."

"That's exactly what you would say in a dream, too," Hyunjin argued, but took the coffee because coffee was great no matter if he was awake or asleep.

"Really?" Changbin asked, then shook his head. Then he grinned. "I went to sleep at ten, and I slept so well I honestly don't know why I don't do that every day."

"Are you sure you slept, hyung?" Hyunjin squinted critically. "You're not good at making me believe in being awake, by the way."

Changbin laughed. "You're cute. Do you mind if I come with you to the kpop dance thing?"

"Um, please come with me," Hyunjin said, finding some cereal at last. "That means I'm one step closer to getting Stray Kids to cover a Got7 song. It's my grand master plan."

"Okay," Changbin nodded, like this was a totally normal thing to say. Another point to this being a dream.

Turns out it really wasn't a dream, because dream!Hyunjin could never remember choreographies, while awake!Hyunjin may have difficulties sometimes but at least with kpop he usually managed just fine. It was when he was kneeling on the floor next to a handful of high school girls, all of them with a makeshift tie around their wrists, that he realised: he was actually awake, and Changbin was not only with Jeongin in a corner, he was also talking to Taeul and Euntak and the other middle school girls.

The older dancers, who had memorised the choreo, had been subtly threatened into attempting to perform it as a group before teaching it to the younger dancers in small groups.

It went okay, considering the little time they had.

Someone suggested learning the entire choreography for the next few weeks, and when Euntak looked at Hyunjin using her most pitiful puppy eyes, who was Hyunjin to refuse them? He had a feeling Jeongin was behind the agenda, but watching Changbin try to navigate in a practice room was more entertaining than Jeongin anyway.

The girls (and Jeongin and Changbin) struggled with the choreo, but Hyunjin was certain that with a few simplifications and practice, it would be fun and look good.

Around midday after they left, Jeongin made Hyunjin take a selca with Changbin and post it to his Instagram with the caption #2ndDate. They were cute in the picture.

"Minho said he'll bring lunch and Chan said he's bringing snacks," Changbin recited after a look on the groupchat. "We're meeting in the studio."

Hyunjin had barely set foot into the studio when Felix dragged him to a corner where Minho was waiting. Jisung and Chan sat around a computer and shot wary glances to their corner. Hyunjin shared a wide eyed look with Changbin and shrugged, because there was literally nothing he could do. Jeongin just cackled and went to greet Chan and Jisung.

"I'm thinking," Felix whispered.

"Oh no, please don't hurt yourself," Hyunjin replied, but Felix just shushed him.

"I'm thinking," Felix repeated, showing a crumpled piece of paper with a mix of Korean and English letters and ink stains (a letter soup!), "that I want to make Chan horny just from listening to this. And he'll be arranging this, so he'll listen to it a lot. It'll remind him to come to bed when I tell him to. Bonus points if he sees me dancing to this and literally falls on his face."

"I like it," Minho said, a dark spark in his eyes. "Jisung is great at what he does, but I love it when he shuts up for a second, you know? He's very hard to fluster, especially in public."

Hyunjin groaned. "This is way too much information. What the fuck. Okay, we want to make this sexy but in a teasing way?"

"Yes!" Felix yelled, but quickly lowered his voice. "Like, Chan sometimes walks into street lights when he's talking to me, you know? It's quite funny for me, and slightly embarrassing and painful for him, but I just developed a third eye to protect him. I want this song to be the streetlight he runs into because he's too focused on me."

Hyunjin's first instinct was to grimace and try to move on with his life. Felix and Chan were a power couple, and Hyunjin admired what they had. When he was lonely, he'd even allow himself to be jealous, because – he wanted to be loved like that, he wanted to love someone so much they were best friends who lived together and shared their lives with each other, and he wanted to wake up in that person's arms and know that this is the single human who owned his entire heart, and whose heart he owned too. Not because it was some kind of exchange, but just because they loved each other.

Then Hyunjin remembered when Changbin walked in on him practising the Criminal choreography and tripped over nothing.

"So like..." Hyunjin started, then continued in his less-than-perfect-but-very-improved-English (thanks to international friends and memes), "you got me tripping like..." and that's it, that's where his thought stopped. It be like that sometimes. He continued in Korean because fuck English, actually. "We could like, sing about wanting to be closer to a friend, but like in a bi and gender neutral way?"

Minho was already nodding, scribbling down words. "Lixie, I need you to write the English lines into real words, but I have an idea for a first verse here."

Minho's words were, as everything Minho did, amazing, and Felix took the English lines and wrote a full rap verse out of them. Hyunjin was not shy to criticise and rephrase, adding some ah and wow noises because Felix got stuck on an I'm in love with this man but I don't understand my feelings yet storyline, and Minho laughed a full minute about 'let's be friends, you and I.'

"I think it's cute," Felix said, and Hyunjin agreed.

"Is this the friendzone?" Minho mumbled, to which Hyunjin replied by writing 'I wanna know how you feel, bang bang' upside down on Minho's sheet of paper.

"Is this the friendzone, hyung," Hyunjin repeated, exchanging a high five with Felix.

"Okay then, baby bis," Minho said fondly and underlined Hyunjin's handwriting, sketching hearts around it.

Felix pouted. "I'm not a baby bi!"

"No, you're just baby," Minho teased back, sending them all into laughter.

An hour later of writing and listening to the track, they had a first draft of the lyrics and with 3Racha staring at them suspiciously, they got into the recording booth.

"Can we just," Felix asked, "record a first take of this, so that we have something to compare the final result to?"

Chan, whipped for Felix that he was, agreed. And it went horrible, but they had fun, and then Jisung and Changbin helped with the lyrics and Chan rearranged the original instrumental track to fit the structure of the text. Hyunjin learned more in five minutes of listening to Chan talk than he had all semester in his music lecture, even though this was the exact topic of the music lecture.

"Maybe this was a mistake," Changbin murmured quietly when they all took a snack break. Unfortunately, nobody was talking, just thinking about the track in silence (for once).

Chan hummed. "I'm enjoying this. I like it."

Jisung cackled. "It was literally your idea, Binnie-hyung."

"Lixie is rapping," Chan said and sighed wistfully. "You don't understand the kind of religious experience I'm having."

"I'm literally right here," Felix said, elbowing Chan lightly.

"Oh, I do understand," Changbin whispered, unheard.

"I'm looking forward to the choreo," Jisung wiggled his eyebrows at Minho.

Chan blushed violently. "Um. Yes. That will be – fine. Totally. Yeah. Uh. Mhh. Yes. Okay. Er – should we get back to work?"

"Smooth, hyung," Jisung laughed, "but yeah. Hyunjinnie, I think your 'yeah ah, I won't avoid it, at your slight smile I'm like bang bang' in the second verse could do with more confidence, you know?" He giggled. "I'm also thinking that if each of you does one line after the other, your voices would sound really good together."

Changbin coughed. "With our rap, we usually just do our verses for like a full minute, so we don't really sing together like that. But your voices do sound very good, so let's uh."

"Experiment with the line distribution," Hyunjin supplied, smirking. "Knowing kpop terms is really helpful, did you know?"

Changbin just sighed.

By the time night fell, they had an acceptable track done. Though Hyunjin would bet that they hadn't seen the last of the studio. With both Minho and Chan being the perfectionists they were, there was bound to be a second day of recording. Minho left both Felix and Hyunjin explicit instructions to practice singing and rapping whenever they had a chance.

And well, who was Hyunjin kidding. He, too, was a perfectionist. They all were. They'd make this song the best song they ever made.