A/N

Welcome to Rin/Len hell, Aloice.

This story is going to be bad. It's going to be bad because I suck at prose, because I haven't written prose for years, because I'm new to the fandom, and because it touches upon a lot of very real and complex issues. Proceed with caution because things will get heavy - we'll talk about poverty, misogyny, different cultures, exploitation, and just life when it isn't really pretty. I've done some research and am trying to stay as true to how things actually are as I can, but I will most definitely make mistakes, so this is all a very delicate and flawed learning process.

Tentatively dedicated to my IRL uncle's family. My cousins are such inspirational goofs (and huge Korean/Japanese music and drama fans) for what they've gone through.

The smell of burning hay and donkey dung fill up the air.

I retreat further back into the safety and warmth of my floral blanket cocoon, groaning. "Len."

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" My twin brother yells back apologetically through the open window and chilly air. Behind the rising, suffocating smoke, his figure is slightly blurry, but I can just barely make out his smile, his Northeastern winter blush, and his messy mop of light hair. He's shoo-ing and leading Josephine back into her little hut in the courtyard as he cleans up her mess. "I just have to do this before uncle comes back with friends. You know how it is. It's Chinese New Year Eve." A laugh enters his voice now, a nervous one. "Do you know when uncle's friends are coming?"

"In three hours or so," I respond, reluctantly looking away from the tiny TV to squint at the grandfather clock through the mouth of my little nest. "You better hurry. I'll start making dinner as soon as this song is done."

"Oh – do you know if EXO or BTS will be playing tonight? On the TV Gala, I mean?" He cranes his head awkwardly but eagerly towards the house, his eyes full of misguided hope.

"I doubt it, they're not Chinese, and geez, Len, you smell terrible." I make a playful face at him; he grimaces, and then deliberately reaches in through the window to pat at my head with his dirty hands. I scowl.

" – Still not as smelly as you!" A tease, and then a dance away. He always looks so adorable when he does things like that.

My name is Kagamine Rin, and I live in the backwater Chinese Northeast with my twin brother, Len, my aunt and uncle, a dozen chickens, a donkey, several acres of farmland and fruit trees, and no heating gas or running water.

It's a simple but hard life: our parents had passed away in a "workplace accident" in the Molybdenum mines half an hour down the road when we were around three or four, and we remember next to nothing about them. "Father always had a determined face and great drinking tolerance," Len would say sometimes, holding my hand as we hiked up dry and cracking tracks to reach our fruit trees on the top of the hill, but I know he's making it up. "And Mother always said you had the eyes of a prince," I would sometimes play along, if only because I know he would then stop to smile wistfully and ruffle my hair. The little bubbles of lies mean a lot to us.

Our uncle – our father's older brother – has been kind enough to take us in, to feed, clothe and shelter us, but he hasn't had enough energy to do much else, and it's hard to blame him. Our parents had borrowed a decently large sum of money from him just before they died, an amount that they for obvious reasons will never pay back, and he's also struggling with his own cirrhosis and black lung, not to mention paying for the university tuition of our cousin, a young man currently studying to be an engineer. The man tries, bless his heart; he has passed all the cousin's study materials, clothes and electronic equipment down to Len and me, but I'm not quite what you'd call university material, and Len doesn't quite want to leave me alone.

I still remember the day – uncle standing by the rusting iron gate, Len leaning by the crumbling stone walls just a few feet next to him, both of them smoking local cigarettes. My heart had sunk, and I had hidden myself behind the red house door, spying them unseen. Len never smoked unless he felt coerced and was also in a bad mood. He knew I hated the smell of it.

"Congratulations, Len," my uncle had said, patting Len's shoulder and lighting another cigarette. "Huludao No. 1 School. That's where your cousin went."

"I know," Len said sullenly, not looking at him. He exhaled slowly, blinking several times in a row as if he wasn't quite prepared for this conversation. I covered my mouth with my left hand in shock, forgetting for a second the wailing of the hot water kettle behind me. Len hadn't told me that he had gotten into the good school when I had failed the same test.

"You're smarter than Rin. A boy, too. You could get out, learn a trade, settle in the cities. I can support you through high school, and then you can try to apply for a scholarship. I will make a good match for Rin, don't you worry."

"I know," Len repeated slowly, and more than anything, I was alarmed by the monotone quality of his voice. My brother had a way to speak as if he was singing, and his voice was usually steady and incredibly sweet. Finally smelling something burning behind me, I yelped and scrambled to take care of the kettle.

"… More like your father. She's never –"

"We are twins, it's just a few points, just luck, I'll work –"

"… An apprentice of the hairdresser in the next town. Rin is lovely and has a good attitude. She'll make a good living."

"She doesn't know anyone there," my brother snapped, apparently suddenly angry. "And she's too young for those relationships, let alone getting engaged."

I stilled. They had brought up more things in the past three minutes than I had thought about my life for the past three years. Engaged?

Silence. As I placed the kettle back onto the shelf, I idly realized that Len had spoken to an elder out of turn. Usually the situation would call for a slap, a stern censoring, or worse. Instead, our uncle sighed deeply. "Kagamine Len, don't raise your voice at me."

"I know," my brother said again, his voice back to its normal volume. "I'm sorry, uncle. I'll set up the firewood for the bed-stoves tonight." He stalked off, past our uncle, past Josephine the donkey and the screeching chickens, and then past me within the house, not even looking at me as I scurried to wash the vegetables. That night, he didn't spread out his blanket bedroll beside me before I fell asleep, and before I could talk to him the next morning, he had gone out with the village men on an expedition to hunt for precious metal ores in the mountains.

I love my brother.

We are not the only pair of twins in the village, but whenever anyone speaks of "the twins," it's bound to be us. We are the pretty twins, the singers, the poor orphan darlings. Len is younger than me by less than a half hour, but deep in the mountains, he's the knight and fighter looking out for the princess. It's not like I enjoy appearing defenseless or weak – quite the contrary – but I enjoy being spoiled as much as every other young girl, and it's flattering to know that Len loves me best when all the girls of the village have a crush on him.

We have similar looks and similar interests. Hair too blond for ordinary Chinese but not blond enough to be actually golden. Unhealthy obsessions with Korean and Japanese music, from anime soundtracks to vocaloids and youth bands. A boundless love for nature and the land, dreams of seeing the world, a craving to climb up steel skyscrapers and take selfies in front of sparkling marble monuments. Len wants to visit European and Japanese castles. I want to one day visit Hollywood.

Dreams are childish dreams – their fakeness are ever apparent when we squat to use ancient non-flushing toilets or spend hours under the sun harvesting peanuts – so more often than not, we simply comfort and hold onto each other. My memories are full of waiting for Len or catching up to him, racing dirt bikes with him on the way to school or home, plastering cheap stickers of musicians together onto our walls, merging our bedrolls together in the bitter cold of January when even the steamy bed-stoves are not enough, wrapping our arms and bodies around each other in futile attempts to warm each other up. There's a mild arrhythmia to his heartbeat that skips once in a while like a musical semiquaver. We learned that word a year ago from a visiting teacher who kept complaining that only idiots wouldn't teach sheet music to the two of us.

Len didn't end up going to high school. I didn't take the bus to the next town to meet the promised hairdresser or dress up to woo some man I needed to marry. We sat in the house, worked in the fields, sold goods on the weekly market, watched TV. Len groomed Josephine and harvested corn as I fixed the holes on our uncle's socks and picked date fruits with our aunt.

Len had to know that I knew – he avoided me often after that day, refusing to talk to me about things, even going so far to always turn the other way when we rolled into bed to sleep. The whole thing bewildered as much as it hurt – I'd never known how to function without him, and I realized that he was right in claiming that I needed him, although he probably also needed me. If Len had gone to No. 1 while I went to No. 2 or became an apprentice, we would not see each other for perhaps months at a time, and even thinking about the possibility made my head hurt.

I thought about breaking the ice – I miss you, Len, I didn't hear anything, nothing is more important to me than just being able to talk to you – yet I was also upset that he had decided to block me out when he couldn't have known how I felt about that conversation, so I held my tongue. And he did crack eventually, one evening in November, as uncle told him to help me out with my final courtyard shower of the year. While we did not have running water, we did have two clumsily installed solar panels from the government, and they allowed for the occasional luxurious shower at home when the outside temperature wasn't absolutely brutal. As Len set up the apparatus for me and I hid behind the faded sheet of plastic we used in place of a shower curtain, he stopped and spoke up.

"Are you mad at me, Rin?"

I opened my mouth, and nothing came out. He had been a little slow in setting up, so it was already quite dark and cold in the courtyard, and as I shivered in the autumn winds, he sounded like he was about to cry. There stood my little brother behind a sheet of plastic, helping me to not appear too dirty in this donkey-dung-and-landfill back country and waiting to guide me back into the house with a tiny flashlight, and I just wanted to run out to hug him. Don't be stupid, Rin. I reached for my shirt slowly. "No, and why on Earth would you think that?"

He shrugged. Although I couldn't really see him, I might as well had been looking at him folding his arms together uncomfortably, the picture of a sad innocent puppy. "We haven't been talking."

I stared at the plastic sheet in utter disbelief. "You were not talking to me."

"Oh." The idea seemed to be new to him. "I'm sorry."

I nearly shoved the sheet towards him in exasperation. "Len, please."

"I haven't been thinking straight," he conceded sheepishly, and I envisioned him standing there like a potato. Even as I piled layers upon layers of clothing on myself, I felt lighter, relieved – at least Len wasn't truly mad at me. "I just… want to be with you, but I don't want to – uh – hold up your future."

If my eyes could have rolled into the heavens, they could have, but instead I walked out and put both of my hands on his shoulders. He winced audibly; my hands were freezing cold from the recent shower.

"Len," I breathed; he swallowed. "You could have gone to No. 1. You could have gone to college. I'm holding you back, not the other way round." Len as an engineer, a teacher, a doctor or businessman; he had confessed once to loving the black tuxedo look of young business magnates from Korean dramas – although I doubted that Len had the shrewdness to succeed as a company chairman, he likely could have obtained a white collar job somewhere. "You can't be with me forever –" now the audible wince was mutual, but I pushed on. Some things just needed to be said. "I'll be fine. The village is fine. It's not Hollywood, of course, but I've been fine the past fifteen years, I'll –"

"Is that what you really want, though? Can you tell me that?" He whispered, leaning in so our faces were nearly touching. "Rin, I don't think you understand how talented you are. I know this is sappy, I know that I'm your brother, but I'd hate to see you married off to a farmer or a pig breeder and, I dunno, just spend the rest of your life styling hair and raising kids. Those hairstyles are terrible, I wouldn't pay them to let them style your hair like that, you look and sing better than half of Girl's Generation –"

I couldn't help it; fresh out of a freezing shower several feet away from a donkey hut, with wet hair all tangled around and above my face and smelling of the cheapest fake shampoo and bath lotion in town, I absolutely owned flair and grace. I laughed quietly as he glared at me. "Len, the only people who likes to hear me sing are people from this village. We have no training, no connections, terrible Northeastern peasant accents –"

"You sing like an angel," he insisted, my pigheaded little brother, "no one thought Li Yuchun or Jane Zhang could make it either. Videos of migrant workers singing Wang Feng's life inspiration rock songs have gone viral. You just need exposure. A beautiful flower from a village covered in soot and garbage –"

"Very attractive, Len, very attractive." I poked at his face. He scowled but stood his ground. "Just find a job in the city, darling brother, and buy me a ticket to Tiananmen or EXO's next concert when you can. That's my entire bucket list for this life."

"I can do that for you in a few months."

"No, you can't."

"Yes. And then you have to listen to me and pursue your dreams for once."

I had laughed it off then, considering the whole thing to be impossible, just another display of Len's relentless idealistic naivete. But, by God, I was wrong.

Len is abnormally cheery as we snuggle up in our bed rolls to watch replays of the Gala. It's just a few hours past midnight; some stragglers are still setting off small firecrackers outside, and the house is filled with cigarette smoke and the sounds of adult men playing mahjong and cursing the bad harvest in the other room. Doubtlessly some families are now in debt and need the village's support. If they had come with the hopes that uncle might have some money to spare, they're in for a disappointment.

"No EXO, but I heard there's Henry Huo," Meanwhile, Len announces, apparently oblivious, flipping through the channels and glancing anxiously back at the satellite "soup bowl" in the courtyard. "Please tell me the chickens didn't poop on it or something."

"The chickens haven't been able to fly out since I repaired the fence," I comment drowsily, tired from all the cooking and cleaning. At least uncle hasn't made me drink a shot glass of that awful hard Chinese liquor like he's made Len. The thing had smelled like polluted river water mixed with methanol, which probably isn't even that far away from the truth. Oh sweet merciful gods, please don't let Len's liver die, I pray to no god in particular, as someone slams on the table and curses out loud from the other room. I'd have to clean up more of that stuff in the morning. "I liked Henry's first song."

"You, and everyone else," Len nods sagely. He seems to have found the correct channel. "He's the next big thing. Hey, Rin, don't fall asleep on me."

"I'm tiiiiiired."

"Hey, Rin," he leans in, gently pulling on a strand of my hair. How is he not exhausted to the bone yet? "Let's go to Beijing tomorrow."

I raise an eyebrow above half-closed eyes. "Hmm, no."

"Riiiin." He's doing that singing voice thing again. "Rin, I'm serious."

"Not funny, Len," I mumble, stretching a leg out within my bed roll. The bed-stove, for once, is comfortably hot – but not scalding – underneath me, and I desperately want to fall asleep before the temperatures change again. If I close my eyes, I can forget the smoke and inevitable scattered mahjong pieces and shattered glass, instead reinventing myself as a golden-haired princess or idol, filming the next big blockbuster or waiting for the perfect prince in a well-watered and flowering meadow. Or even in the heat of battle… in the heat of everything… kissing a golden-haired boy that looks just as cute as Len…

"Rin. I've got the tickets." Len's voice is slightly trembling now.

I blink. There, swimming into view, are two tickets, small and pink. I blink again; the Chinese characters fall into place like individual peanuts emerging from underneath the dark earth. Something stirs in my stomach; hunger, I register belatedly. Huludao to Beijing. Youth seat. Depart at 8:30 in the morning. I'm suddenly wide awake. "How?"

"My treat," Len sings, more than satisfied with himself.

"Len. That stuff must have cost like, a year of your No. 1 high school tuition. Or something. I don't know." I'm suddenly flustered and confused – almost feverish. The tickets are throwing glare onto me like BMW headlights, and I feel more naked than I've ever felt in my entire life. Everything about the situation just screams wrong, yet it's making my heart race. And saying no not because of not wanting but / because, you thought, what else can it be, so much / wanting, except wrong. "You can't – "

"There's a EXO concert tomorrow evening," Len continues, "get up early so we can make it."

"But –"

"Do it for me. Let's have a moment in spring. Like that song. In spring." Len places his hand-me-down MP3 player between us, and draws a little heart around the tiny thing with his hands. "We depart at dawn."