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Halloween.

It was a western holiday. Dae-hyun's memories of it mostly involved English teachers and English class, and he'd stopped going to hagwon the minute that debut started looking like more than just a pipe dream. He had never really thought about it much.

He hadn't expected to do anything. They hadn't debuted yet, just started training together, so it wasn't as if the company expected anything from them or that they could host their own event.

The whole thing was just Yo-han's idea.

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"It's Halloween. Let's do something," he'd said. And he'd said it in that offhand way that he said almost everything, as though nothing particularly fazed him, but Dae-hyun had been watching him more closely now that he had a reason--- if they were going to be working together for the next who-knows-how-many years, then Dae-hyun had to get to know him better, whether either of them liked it or not. And, maybe unsurprisingly, Yo-han turned out not to be quite as unflappable as he liked to look.

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It wasn't really that Dae-hyun ever thought he was. Dae-hyun had been through so many bullies that it bored him now, seeing the fronts people put on--- though it made him a bit of a hypocrite too, he supposed, since he was also pretending. But he just hadn't been sure what he expected to find underneath Yo-han's nonchalant veneer.

It wasn't nervousness.

Well, it also wasn't just nervousness. There was more to it, most of the time. He wasn't sure that it was nervousness this time either, necessarily.

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But the way Yo-han was holding himself had a certain restless quality to it, not doled out in small fidgeting movements but in the way that the whole line of his body seemed taut, as though he were a trap ready to be sprung at any second.

"What... What did you have in mind?"

It was Yeo-reum who bit first. It was just the three of them left in the practice room, Yo-han and Yeo-reum sipping water, still breathing a little hard, but not very.

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Dae-hyun, whose whole body had been burning almost as soon as they'd started, tipped his head against the wall, closed his eyes, and tried not to envy them too much. He forced himself to match their breathing, hard but not ragged, even though it made him dizzy to do it.

Still, he persevered. This pain was nothing new. If he didn't control himself, he would be panting like a dog; they couldn't know how tired he was, not when he did so poorly compared to them.

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Normally Yeo-reum was too shy to talk, but right now Dae-hyun was too breathless to give Yo-han an answer. And the silence, he supposed, must have gotten to Yeo-reum.

Out of the corner of his eye, Dae-hyun thought he saw Yo-han brighten a little. The flicker of joy lent him a briefly childish air. Which was as it should have been; Yo-han was only a few years older than Dae-hyun himself. Still a child. It was his usual self, the reservation and that enigmatic sense of weariness about him that was strange.

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Dae-hyun opened his eyes a little more, just in time to see Yo-han check himself. That spark was still there, brightening his eyes, but now it was tempered, just like the rest of his emotions. "Well, back when I lived in America, we'd go trick-or-treating, but I guess we can't really do that here."

"Trick-or-treat?" Yeo-reum stumbled thick-tongued over the foreign syllables, a small crease forming between his brows. Yo-han, to his credit, didn't mock him for it. He could have--- Yo-han, the wonder whiz kid who spoke three languages--- but he never did.

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He only nodded. "I don't know if you've heard of it, but kids dress up and go door to door asking for candy," he said. "It's a lot of fun."

"Little kids," Dae-hyun cut in, having caught his breath enough now to at least chime in. "We're too old for that anyway."

Yo-han turned to him, mildly surprised--- but only mildly. Everything about him was mild, even the restlessness that he was probably trying to hide. "Maybe," said Yo-han. "Some teenagers do it anyway."

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"What do the rest of them do?" said Dae-hyun. It was a moot point anyway, since they couldn't do that here. People didn't give out candy, and they didn't have costumes--- though it was just as well. The idea of dressing up in some cartoonish outfit couldn't have appealed any less to Dae-hyun.

Yo-han looked thoughtful for a moment. "I only lived there for a few years, but... Egg houses, I think. Throw toilet paper on people's yard plants, things like that."

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"Well, that's out too then," Dae-hyun said. "Even if we weren't trainees, we'd get an earful for that." And since they were, they'd likely get more--- turned off by management, maybe, if they thought it was a big enough deal. No way was Dae-hyun about to jeopardize his chance at debut for some lark of Yo-han's, even if he did look like he really needed a distraction.

Yo-han sighed a little, the corner of his mouth tugged up in a wry smile. "Yeah, I know," he said.

[Wild Pet Found]