Rise of a Star - a Minsung Story

Chapter 13

Felix was forced to move out a day later and Minho was no longer allowed to sleep over at Stray Kids' dorm. While the young Australian returned to his old trainee practice with Minho, the six remaining members were busier than ever. For some reason, the company wanted Chan to finish tracks enough to fill a full-length album by the end of the month. And although November had just started and the group's leader had 28 more days to follow the instructions of the company, he did not see any way to finish on time. Of course, Jisung and Changbin were writing and producing songs with him, but he had the most experience out of the three, therefore he was the one to arrange their songs. And unfortunately, a month was not enough time to contact professional songwriters to help them with at least 11 more songs. They had luckily already recorded the guide version for six songs before the elimination, but eleven songs in 28 days meant they had only two and a half days for each song. That was just impossible to do with their regular schedule.

"Changbin-hyung, listen to what I wrote", Jisung said once he finished writing the lyrics for the song they were currently working on. It was fortunate they had been spending almost every minute of their free time on track production over the past months. Chan had at least 25 rough versions of songs saved on his laptop, and although some of them would probably never be finished and published, most of these songs had a lot of potential. 3Racha had decided to split their work and while Chan fixed track after track and pulled all-nighters on a daily basis, the younger two spent every free minute coming up with lyrics, talking about them, erasing them and starting over.

"Sure, let me just find the audio of the song. Chan-hyung sent it to me earlier", the older said and Jisung nodded. Once the audio started playing, he waited for the part to come and sang his lyrics.

"That's amazing, Sung! It fits perfectly. Mind sending me the file, so I can add your lyrics to the other document?", he asked and Jisung immediately did so. "Sure thing. But I don't think we should record it tonight. Tomorrow's Saturday and we don't have school. It might sound better if we record it with warmed up voices and not at 11:30pm at night", the younger answered and Changbin agreed, it wouldn't make any sense to use their exhausted and rough voices for something like this right now. "Yeah, we have plenty of time tomorrow. And we also need Chan-hyung for the recording. Although, I'm really happy we only have to do the guide recordings for these songs and no actual studio recordings until November 30th. We would never be able to do that", Changbin exclaimed and Jisung let out an exhausted sigh. If he had a choice, he would just sneak into Minho's dorm to fall asleep in his arms, but no- instead he was stuck in his bedroom together with Changbin for at least three more hours or so. And it's not even like they weren't going to be busy on the weekend. They had a seven-day-schedule, just like every other trainee, and Jisung had therapy tomorrow. Neither of the two were expecting to be able to spend time with their loved one's any time soon, and it was frustrating. How could anyone choose to do this? Jisung had just joined the company because he was talented and he wouldn't have had a place to stay elsewhere, but Changbin and all the others auditioned for JYPE out of free will. Jisung really couldn't get behind how anyone would ever want to do this. Well, he too loved it at times, performing was fun and so was practicing singing and writing songs, but as much as he loved it, he also hated it. And at times like these, he probably despised being a trainee much more than enjoying it. Especially now that he couldn't see Minho anymore, that was probably what he hated the most.

"-sung? Jisung? Hello, you still in there?", Jisung was cut out of his thoughts by his hyung gently shaking him. "O-Oh, sorry. I was lost in thoughts for a moment, what did you say?", the younger apologized, making Changbin chuckle. "I asked which song you are planning to work on next. Because I'd personally prefer to fix some already existing lyrics for the rest of the night. And then I have to get Chan-hyung from our studio, or else he will never go to bed. Perhaps Jeongin can help me with that", the elder said, but Jisung only nodded. A wave of guilt washed over him at the mention of the group's youngest member, he had turned him down so many times now, he had to stop counting at some point. Jeongin had grown to be much more comfortable with regressing into his younger headspace and while Jisung was very proud of him and supported that completely, he felt his own urge to slip slowly fading away. And of course, that wasn't a bad thing, it was completely fine, but he felt bad for never playing with the other anymore. The fear of upsetting the younger stressed him out a lot, and usually he would've just regressed and coped with it like a toddler would, but nowadays this fear combined with the pressure of not being able to slip just made his anxiety get worse than it ever was before.