Deer Luhan, With Love

3

Chapter 3 – In which the Sh*t Hits the Fan

Deer Luhan,

I will admit my respect for you is rising slightly at your ability to leave airports, because I thought I was going to die in Incheon.  I still don’t appreciate being put through this.  You suck.

Leigh

Sehun, the b*st*rd, forgot to warn me about what arriving in Incheon airport would be like.  It might have had something to do with the fact that even a warning could never fully have prepared me for the hordes and scrum, but it’s still something I hold against him to this day.  Not to mention that I probably should have guessed it wasn’t going to be safe after Sehun had awoken eight hours into the flight to find himself face to face with a drooling fan and yelled so loudly that I heard him through the dubsteb I was listening to.  But my God, the arrivals hall at Incheon….

First, there was the noise.  I’d been along to a couple of football matches in my time because my cousin was a Chelsea fanatic, but even the drunkest of football crowds never got to that volume.

Then there were the cameras.  It felt like being attacked by lightning.

And then there was the inability to queue.

“Flying fudgecakes,” I whispered to Sehun, tugging on his arm to get him to pay attention to me (cue a sharp spike in decibel levels).  “It’s like a human traffic jam.”

“A human traffic jam?” he repeated.

“Yeah,” I said.  “It’s like somebody’s taken away the invisible lines in the middle of the road and the country’s forgotten which side they drive on.”

He looked at me like I’d grown a second head.  “Where the hell are you from?”

“London,” I said.  “And in London, people queue.  It’s practically a national pastime.”

He looked at me like I’d grown a third head.

“And also,” I said, “where are visa control and the ticket desks and what have you so I can get home?”

“You’re joking, right?” he demanded.  “You want to stay in the airport with all this?  Much safer to do it from the dorm.”

I looked at the sea of fans again and had to admit he was right.  There was no way I wanted to do that here.

The security guards and managers were trying to force a way through.  The other members of the group, donning sunglasses (in winter, I might add), followed after them, and Sehun placed a hand in the small of my back (cue another sharp spike in decibel levels) to propel me forwards.

It was like being put through a clothes mangle while trying to wade through gloopy honey.  By the time we were a quarter of the way through the crowd, I had been squished up between Sehun and some other guy wearing a snapback and shorts (in winter), was in danger of inhaling a camera lens that had all but been shoved in front of my mouth, and was in the process of developing a mathematical formula pertaining to the actions of the other EXO members and the noise levels from the fans.  It went something along the lines of (a (k + m) + t(proximity))/OTP x no. of fans = loudness of scream, in which k and m are members and a stood for the action.

By the time we were halfway through, the snapback shorts guy had almost been trampled by rampaging wildebeest fans trying to get a photo of him, and Sehun and I, together with a panda-eyed boy, were crouched protectively over him, shielding our hair from snatching hands.