CHINGUX 2014: möbius (2/2) for EVERYONE
← PART 1
2018, New York
New York is everything Kyungsoo’s dreamed of, but stepping out of JFK is a hard-hitting reminder that everything he left in Incheon is part of his past. It's Jongdae living, breathing New York next to him.
They'd hid it out in Japan for two years, but the small run-in with some people Kyungsoo thought he recognised from HQ had them on the next plane out. Kyungsoo hadn't given their destination a second thought when he'd booked the tickets.
"We should probably move around every two years." Jongdae's serious, and Kyungsoo nods. Between what Jongdae had experienced for himself just before being sent back in time and Kyungsoo's understandings of the workings of the mafia, it's better to be safe than sorry, especially since they've come so far. Two years worth of a completely new life he's been thrown into is a fucking long time, but Kyungsoo takes some comfort in the fact that as far as companions go, he could have done a lot worse.
The taxi ride they take to the nearest hotel zooms past the New York night, the lights and streets flying by like a filmstrip pulled too fast, and Chanyeol features especially heavily, painfully tonight. All Kyungsoo can think about is how this night was supposed to be, and he wonders if there are regrets to be had from that irrevocable step he took three years ago.
It's a silly question. Kyungsoo still wonders what Chanyeol would have said if he'd called him, what would've happened if he'd left a goodbye. Unanswered questions are the tiniest of thorns, and human hearts are raw. Kyungsoo has to swallow when the taxi pulls to a stop.
"Do you?" Jongdae asks quietly when the hotel door closes behind Kyungsoo to heavy, buzzing silence. "Regret not shooting me?"
The question cuts clean through Kyungsoo to find an answer immediately. He doesn't even have to think. "No." It's the bare truth.
Jongdae's quiet when he hears it. Kyungsoo's surprised Jongdae even picked up on his silence on the way to the hotel, but two years' worth of seconds is a long time to get to know someone, and Jongdae knows what Chanyeol means to him.
"I do," Jongdae chuckles, but it's a dead sound. "Regret building the machine. Building the pulser and accepting that anonymous sponsor's funding to build the deconstructor. Publishing that fucking paper on the pulser I was so proud of. Maybe it all comes down to greed - it was my dream come true, you know?"
Jongdae's story is much, much worse than Kyungsoo's. He's got a broken heart and a bunch of scrapes, maybe, but Jongdae had had to see his dream crashing down on him, everything he holds dear shred itself inside out. Jongdae’s been fascinated by time travel and the possibility of revisiting, reliving history since he was a young boy, and had gone to university in the local university under the only professor in Korea at the time who had research interests in time travel. Took three years to work out the theories in university, four more in his doctorate degree to build the first part that will eventually go into the machine - a pulser than can split light - and publish a paper from his thesis. He receives funding to build his second part, a human deconstructor, then in 2023 he's forced to build the machine in return for his and his family's safety. The mafia never kept up their end of the deal.
"If I'd known, back then when I was still working on the pulser, that it was going to be used in a machine for that purpose," Jongdae blinks down at his hands, "I would've destroyed it myself."
"It's not your pulser, or your machine," Kyungsoo tells him. "They took it. You didn't build it for that reason."
Jongdae's smile is heartbreaking. "Is there any difference, really?"
Kyungsoo has no answer to that, and It occurs to him that no matter what he’d decided on that day Jongdae arrived at the end of his blunderbuss barrel, there would have been regrets anyway. They were always going to be the loser in the game. The crushed light studding the sky past the hotel window is so piercing that Kyungsoo rather welcomes the hot lick of tears that follows on this night of regrets.
---
2020, New York
"You wanna grab some chicken at the bodega, then head back?" Kyungsoo asks, eyes darting to the stranger that walks too near. It's a habit; has been for five years now. One slip-up, one second of carelessness and they're bound for death. Kyungsoo can't have anything less than utmost trust that the mafia is everywhere, is relentless. He didn't leave Chanyeol for nothing.
"Yeah, hope they have those cookies today too," Jongdae says, turning, when there's a tap on Kyungsoo's shoulder that charges his blood cold.
"Excuse me?" Kyungsoo turns slowly. The crisp Korean is enough to rush the options through Kyungsoo's head: flight or fight, or both. It sounds like just one person; they could make it out. Jongdae has weight and strength, if not skill, and Kyungsoo's still got it.
What catches his eye, though, when he turns around, robs Kyungsoo of his heart so suddenly it feels like a forcible puncture in the chest.
Chanyeol is still exactly the same. The details that Kyungsoo drinks in instinctively, voraciously in that one second - the bridge of his nose, the slice that makes his double eyelid, the slight quirk of his eyebrow, his eyes widened are exactly the same.
The punch comes sharp, stinging in his jaw, but perhaps Kyungsoo had expected it in the second Chanyeol registered. It's still the same Chanyeol he knows, and it mirrors the sting, at seeing the very person featuring in his mind in last thousand plus days.
"Hey, hey," Jongdae says, shoving Kyungsoo behind him, holding his hand up to ward Chanyeol off. "Who the fuck are you?"
"Jongdae," Kyungsoo says, still holding Chanyeol's glare. "It's okay, it's Chanyeol."
Jongdae's mouth drops open, lets his hands fall, just as Chanyeol looks perplexedly between Jongdae and Kyungsoo. It’s jarring, that they don’t know each other; the reminder that Kyungsoo’s sandwiched between the future and his past is fuels the burn of the sting in his jaw.
"Look," Kyungsoo's voice comes out as a whisper. "Can we go somewhere else?"
Chanyeol perches awkwardly on the sofa in the apartment Kyungsoo and Jongdae are due to move out of in a month, as though ready to jump, to fight if need be. Kyungsoo swallows the lump that had stuck in his throat all the way back.
"Jongdae, this is Chanyeol, and Chanyeol, this is Jongdae - or Jongdae's loop. From the future."
The confusion crumples Chanyeol's features for a second, but before Kyungsoo can miss this look, they're ironed out again with understanding, comprehension.
"He was your job? That day? That’s why you left?"
Both Kyungsoo and Jongdae nod. They've been through the story enough times for Jongdae to know their version of 2015, too.
"Why didn't you tell me? I would have - fuck, I would have dropped everything and gone with you." It bursts a tiny firework of emotion in Kyungsoo's chest, when he sees that this is what Chanyeol has been angry at him for, not for what Kyungsoo had taken from him.
Kyungsoo blinks, looks back down at his lap. "I'm sorry." It takes a while to dredge up the words to say, but Chanyeol doesn't speak.
"I didn't want to drag you into this, too," Kyungsoo says quiet. Somehow he can't quite meet Chanyeol's eyes, but Chanyeol's bracing his fists on the sofa. On the offensive.
"That's why?" Chanyeol spits, more frustration in his voice than anger, and it surprises Kyungsoo into the match. "Some noble idiot bullshit?"
"You think this," Kyungsoo raises his voice, too, ignoring Jongdae's hand on his shoulder, but meeting Chanyeol hard is how he's always done it, and ruts are especially instinctive for Kyungsoo. "Sneaking around, never having a place to call home, living a life of fucking escape every single day is a walk in the park? You think I wanted this shit?" You think I wanted this shit for you? is too choking, too rough to make it out of his throat.
It stuns Chanyeol into silence, but Kyungsoo has never felt more shitty winning an argument, and it's trying keeping the hotness in his eyes. "No," Chanyeol says eventually, meeting Kyungsoo's eyes, "but at least I'd have been there with you."
Jongdae excuses himself quietly to the kitchen, but before the door closes Kyungsoo reaches for Chanyeol's collar and Chanyeol reaches for the hem of his shirt so they meet in the middle, in a mess of a kiss and a hug that Kyungsoo can't focus on. It's too much of Chanyeol at once.
"You fucker," Chanyeol says, pressing Kyungsoo so hard against himself Kyungsoo's heart might be beating Chanyeol's pulse. "Fuck you."
The sound that escapes Kyungsoo's throat is somewhere between a laugh and a sob, and when Chanyeol eventually lets him go, his glare is much more piercing than anything Kyungsoo's ever held.
"Don't you ever do that again," Chanyeol whispers, his voice hard. "I'm not going to travel the fucking world to look for you twice."
Chanyeol may as well have hit him again. Kyungsoo hadn't thought about the hows and whys of Chanyeol being here, but this reason is the last he's expecting.
"I thought you were the mafia when you tapped my shoulder," Kyungsoo manages. "I thought we were goners. How -"
Chanyeol's smile lodges cuttingly in Kyungsoo's heart. "First stop, New York, remember?"
---
2022, Singapore
New Year’s Eve crosses out another year in Kyungsoo’s mind - one year closer to 2034, when Chanyeol will cease to exist. He’d closed his loop, two years ago, before cashing in his silver and getting on a plane to New York. Twelve years sounds like a long time, but the past few had been gone in a blink. FInding what Kyungsoo had thought he’d lost was a lesson on cherishing.
Chanyeol and Jongdae had half-coaxed, half dragged Kyungsoo out to celebrations - fireworks and partying to loud countdowns. “It’s New Year’s Eve!” Jongdae yells over the loud music, blowing a party horn in Kyungsoo’s face. Chanyeol agrees enthusiastically, pressing a messy kiss to Kyungsoo’s cheek. “That one’s beautiful,” Chanyeol points at a shower of green and gold.
“Yeah,” Kyungsoo says, and their smiles are so infectious that he finds himself grinning, too. It’s dark anyway, and swarming with people. It’ll be a needle in the haystack even if the mafia is in the vicinity, and they’re long due for some cheer.
They have some cheap beer and soon Kyungsoo’s laughing, too, when they’re walking back, at Chanyeol’s loud rendition of Bar Bar Bar, complete with dance moves even though he has his arms looped through Kyungsoo’s and Jongdae’s. Right now it feels like the three of them make up the world. The man in the cap is just a passerby, until Kyungsoo places him through the haze of the cheap booze and takes a second to register, is the trigger to get the fuck out.
“Fuck,” Kyungsoo whispers as he grabs Chanyeol’s arm to make him stop, so hard and so suddenly his hand trembles with the rush of blood. “Run.”
In the second Chanyeol and Jongdae take to recover, the mafia activates. Three or four of them break into sprints, hammering down the street and Kyungsoo turns on the ball of his foot to veer into a side alley and wastes no time in looking back. They’ve gone through the protocol; split up, call when you’re safe. Head back only when you’re sure they’re off your tail.
The shouts and hammering of feet behind him are the only thing Kyungsoo lets himself focus on. He curses as he dodges a motorbike as he sprints across the main street, feeling the graze of a gust of air as the motorbike barely misses him.
He cuts right in front of another car, ignoring the screeches of tires on hot asphalt and the blaring honks, and turns sharply round a corner. The crowd dispersing after the celebrations is a good cover - Kyungsoo zigzags through people and senses the chasing presence ebb. When he does let himself catch his breath, crouching behind a bin as he rounds into an alley, the man that had been chasing him dashes past ahead. It feels like Kyungsoo’s heartbeat is the whole of himself, so loud and pounding in his head that there’s nothing else he can think about. It takes a few minutes to let his heartbeat, clear against his tonsils at the back of his throat, slide back into his chest.
Ten more minutes before Kyungsoo dares to leave his hiding place, ten minutes of imagining the terrain of the area and escape routes for Chanyeol and Jongdae. The street seems empty enough for Kyungsoo to slip out, his footsteps as quiet as he can make them, to orientate himself and make it back to their apartment. It’s empty.
Kyungsoo is on fire. It’s been twenty, thirty minutes? The chance that Chanyeol or Jongdae might have been caught in that time frame must be substantial, but this is the first time, in three years, that it’s real; Kyungsoo has no fucking idea. So many days of planning, going to such lengths to avoid this very day and it’s still much more disorienting, much more destructive than he could have expected. He feels pathetic, and it twists a knot of anger throbbing over the resignation that had flooded him.
Kyungsoo’s heart falls clean through when the door opens - then he’s giddy, almost limp with relief that it’s Chanyeol that comes barrelling through the door, eyes wild and panicky. They stumble into a half hug, before Chanyeol pulls away to hold Kyungsoo’s eyes. “They have Jongdae.”
The weight of the news is so hefty that Kyungsoo quite has to take a step back, Chanyeol’s hand on his arm an anchor. “You saw it?”
Chanyeol nods, swallowing. Kyungsoo parses the tremble in Chanyeol’s hold before, palpable even in the mere second or so of their hug. Desperation comes with the things you think you're closest to losing, the things that you're most afraid to lose. “We were running in the same direction, then I turned into this restaurant and went upstairs and Jongdae - they were going for him anyway. I heard them - it’s that one, and they hit the back of his head and stuffed him into a car. I didn’t even have time to head back downstairs.”
Chanyeol takes a deep breath, then looks down at his feet. “I guess - it’s because of the time machine? They need him so he’ll be around to build the machine in 2023, so the time machine can exist.”
Put it this way, Kyungsoo is intensely cognizant of the reason why they’ve been running away for so long, so fiercely, so glaring he can’t imagine how he hadn’t reacted to it before. Chanyeol and Kyungsoo are looprunners; they’d known what was coming for them with their decisions, however inevitable they'd been, But Jongdae had been literally held at gunpoint to build the time machine for the mafia, and they’d gone a step further and let Kyungsoo stain his hands for them. Thrown Jongdae in front of Kyungsoo’s gun like another inconsequential body.
Perhaps this decision is irrational and reactionary, too; there’s a lot more anger in the liquid firmness that floods Kyungsoo’s veins, that he’s not up for being a sitting duck anymore. Six years is plenty to stretch someone, and living escape every minute of the day - the culmination of Kyungsoo’s frustration is quite enough to steel his heart. Maybe at the end of it all, he's fucking sick of someone else wresting his life from him, being another job to take care of, another notch to add to the body count. Compress matter into a limiting space and it comes back at you with its full weight. There’s an idea, budding like a weed in the hardened soil after the rain, that takes root in Kyungsoo’s mind.
“They need him alive,” Kyungsoo cuts his eyes at Chanyeol. “at least, till 2023, that’s what they took him for. They already have the machine, just not the assurance that the person who will build it exists. So we have a couple months, till the future Jongdae builds it in 2023.”
Chanyeol’s eyes are dark - they remind Kyungsoo of the night sky right before lightning rips it apart. It’s all Kyungsoo needs; they’re on the same page.
“Chanyeol.” Kyungsoo’s voice is sharper than it’s ever been. “You game for fucking them up?”
---
2023, Incheon
Faced with the finality of an ultimatum, Kyungsoo is undeniably, overwhelmingly nervous.
They have a plan, an unknown deadline to execute it by, and the night before they put it into gear, all Kyungsoo can think about is the ways it might go wrong, and the ways they might die. They haven't been in touch with HQ in a while, and seven years of change is a lot to bank on.
Their plan is simple. Kyungsoo makes his presence in Incheon be known, get himself caught by HQ to be sent back to the past, convince the Chanyeol and Jongdae then to break the loops by destroying everything that leads up to Jongdae building the time machine. Kyungsoo's been through all the scenarios.
One: HQ holds Kyungsoo hostage, instead, to torture information on Chanyeol out of him, and kill them both in the present.
Two: Kyungsoo doesn't manage to stop his looper waiting for him on the other side. He gets shot.
Three: Everything goes according to plan, except Chanyeol refuses to believe him.
"You were really mad at me," Kyungsoo says it like a statement. There's nothing less he'd believe the Chanyeol he knows would have been. "You might be my looper."
"No," Chanyeol catches Kyungsoo's eye. "I was, when you left, but after too many nights of missing you, I wanted you back more."
It breaks Kyungsoo's heart, the way he says it, and it's all Kyungsoo can do not to reach over and press his apologies onto Chanyeol's lips. Chanyeol deepens the kiss into something else, something like the ash that crumbles after an explosive fire.
"You know, three years ago in New York," Chanyeol whispers, his mouth grazing Kyungsoo's. "That's what I realised. That's what I'll realise, when I see you back then. That's what I was mad at you for; the letdown, not the leaving."
Kyungsoo does remember, and Chanyeol catches Kyungsoo's tongue following a chuckle. "Have some faith in me," Chanyeol says, "You'd have a hell of a better time convincing me than I would."
Ash comes when phoenixes are ready for rebirth, too. Kyungsoo's smile unfurls easily, now with the heat of what Chanyeol means to him in his chest. "Why don't you come here, then," Kyungsoo says fisting his collar, and kisses him like he never has. There is no room for second chances, but this is the start.
Later, after Chanyeol jerks them off, Chanyeol kisses the inside of Kyungsoo's thigh for luck when they both come. It feels like a spill of courage.
---
On the taxi ride to where HQ is, Chanyeol slides his hand on Kyungsoo's thigh and squeezes. "Don't leave me here too long," he grins, "2023 really isn't much of a looker."
Kyungsoo snorts, presses a short kiss to his ear. Probably the last for seven years. "Please be cooperative, then."
"Throw in a couple blowjobs, maybe," Chanyeol wiggles his eyebrows, and Kyungsoo rolls his eyes. They're close now - they've scoped HQ out enough times for Kyungsoo to recognize the route, and at the precipice, the immediacy is enough to charge Kyungsoo up. He's never been very good at toeing befores.
"What if -" Kyungsoo manages, but Chanyeol leaves no room for Kyungsoo to entertain anything.
"I trust you," Chanyeol says, and here it is, what Kyungsoo needs more than any kind of goodbye. Kyungsoo turns to catch his eye, then smiles a small smile. I got it.
Pulling on his cap, Kyungsoo hops out of the taxi and heads straight for the convenience store on the corner, avoiding eye contact with anyone. The mafia isn't stupid - there's bound to be a catch with someone turning up at their doorstep to be found, but they'd figured that the mafia's also desperate enough for looprunners to be finished off. The secret they hold is much more dangerous than anything they could do.
Kyungsoo meanders into the store, keeps his head down. He has maybe five minutes - he knows for a fact that the mafia has tabs on everything within five miles of HQ, be it the enemy or perhaps police spies. They've always erred on the side of caution; action first, identify later. Kyungsoo pays for his shit without speaking and steps out of the door, still keeping most of his face hidden by the cap. Anytime now. He's gotta be prepared to run for his fucking life.
It's a bolt in time - the man across the street stops talking on the phone, the starter gun goes off in Kyungsoo's muscles, and they run. Kyungsoo has barely a headstart; this is favourably timed, and he cuts into an alley that he knows leads into a dead end just as he hears the cock of a trigger. Kyungsoo skids to a stop and freezes with the sense of being at the end of a shotgun barrel.
"Put your hands on your head," the man says, his voice cold, and Kyungsoo takes a second before he complies, slowly. The pack of cigarettes he'd gotten falls on the floor. One wrong step and -
What feels like a glass bottle smashes his head hard.
---
When Kyungsoo wakes, his legs and hands are tied, with a bag over his eyes and a gag in his mouth.
"Get this one in the machine later," he hears a gruff voice. "He's an old looprunner. Long due." His heart is thudding at the back of his throat with relief. They'd spent months calculating their enemy well; maybe being part of the works is sufficient priming to think the same way, too, but this is still early in the game. No space for anything but focus, especially not for complacency at what seems to have been too easy to pull off.
Nobody comes. The hours - days, it feels like - for which he's left alone are excruciating. He keeps himself occupied with his surroundings. Concrete floor, a cell, maybe. Jongdae has to be somewhere here, too, but the gag chokes back anything he could have yelled. Just a little more, buddy. We're coming for you.
There's inaction long enough for Kyungsoo's paranoia to kick in, wishing that Chanyeol had come too, but Chanyeol's their Plan B. It's a good distraction when rough hands finally toss Kyungsoo onto a rough platform, some sort of trolley, and, at the end of a long tunnel, into a cool metal chamber that hisses when the door locks shut.
He has ten seconds. Kyungsoo slips the small blade out of his back pocket, cuts the rope binding his hands, frees his legs, takes the bag off. Three. Two. He braces for impact.
---
2016, Incheon
"It was a stroke of luck, really, that you were my looper." Kyungsoo muses. "What were the chances?"
Chanyeol can’t find the words to speak, for a long time after Kyungsoo finishes speaking. Hearing the future from Kyungsoo - how he’d been exactly the same meeting Kyungsoo again for the first time, the sort of life they’ll lead, the way Jongdae will be taken. Chanyeol’s breath had been as ragged as Kyungsoo’s voice, in the pauses he’d had to take. It’s nowhere near what he’d expected, and it’s a lot to take in at once. The reason why Kyungsoo’s back, why he’d been Chanyeol’s job, how they’re trying to buck the system. What this will mean for them if they make it.
"I wasn’t - won’t be - much different from how I just was, then, huh," Chanyeol says, and he might have laughed, if his ears weren’t ringing. Kyungsoo manages a small smile.
“Bruised jaws hurt more than bloody noses, I guess.”
Chanyeol reaches over to dust the crusted blood near the edge of Kyungsoo’s lip, and his fingers land so soft on Kyungsoo that he wants to follow them with his own lips. This is all Chanyeol’s known; the way birds know the precise way home in the fall, the way a squirrel curls up in its tree hole so well-worn around itself it could only have been its home. He doesn’t do it, but in the quiet of the night with just the stars for company, Chanyeol can feel Kyungsoo on every inch of his skin, every stretch of bone anyway.
“So,” Chanyeol whispers, his voice cracking as though it might shatter the air between them, “guess the ball’s in my court, now?”
Chanyeol isn’t expecting the sadness in Kyungsoo eyes, but it pulls some of what’s bubbling inside Chanyeol to the surface. The raw thorn of anger that had started in himself when he’d heard, what the mafia will do to them, to their friend Jongdae. A similar steel stretching himself tight. Strangest is the realisation that all the time he’d spent missing Kyungsoo and wondering about what it’d feel like seeing Kyungsoo again will eventually manifest in getting on a plane to New York. The decision just hasn’t occurred to him yet.
“You know,” Chanyeol says, and they meet in the middle for a kiss that’s so light, yet so overwhelming Chanyeol can’t imagine he can take any more. “You already have my answer.” Perhaps the churning in his heart is too busy to break down, but the most prominent thing he’s sure of is that what Kyungsoo had narrated to him, lived and came back to tell him, is not the future he’s up for.
“That was a lot easier than I expected,” Kyungsoo whispers, winding his hand up to cup Chanyeol’s chin and nudge his chin down.
“You came all the way back to tell me the future sucks, I’d be a dickbag if I didn’t trust my future with you,” Chanyeol tells him, and it hits him that he’s never stopped doing so, even with all the anger he'd had for Kyungsoo leaving without a word, all the hate and bitterness that had quite surprised himself, because if you had love on a spectrum the negative would not be emotion.
Kyungsoo chuckles lightly. “That’s what I thought.”
Chanyeol’s phone rings before he can laugh, jokingly protest, and the sight of Jongdae’s name yanks Chanyeol back into the present: that he’s a looprunner, they’re being hunted down, and they have a time machine to destroy.
“Chanyeol?” Jongdae sounds worried, almost out of breath, and Chanyeol’s heart stutters - “You okay? Where are you?”
“In -” Chanyeol starts, finding his panic, alertness mirrored in Kyungsoo’s eyes. "What happened?"
"They - some of the chief's lackeys broke into my apartment and demanded for you - where the fuck are you? Did you get out okay? Shit, I wasn't expecting them to come so quick -"
"I'm with Kyungsoo," Chanyeol says, and Jongdae cuts himself off so suddenly the silence buzzes sharp in Chanyeol's ear. "What?"
Sometimes cliches are so because they've got worn truth in them - Chanyeol figures the mafia won't go back to Jongdae's house to look for him; at least not for a while. "We're coming over. "
---
Jongdae's speechless, when the story ends. His apartment is the quietest Chanyeol's ever seen it, so quiet it feels like every tile, every board is trembling with the sheer weight of silence it has to hold. Chanyeol keeps his eyes on the chest of drawers they'd pushed up against the door, wondering if he's imagining its stillness.
"You're here to destroy the pulser," Jongdae says slowly, quietly. His eyes on Chanyeol's and Kyungsoo's are not quite accusatory, yet dark, almost wary. "My pulser." It sounds fucking crazy to Chanyeol's ears, even if he's here to convince. Trust is something Kyungsoo's always had from him, but Jongdae didn't press his heart to Kyungsoo's hands.
Kyungsoo looks down at the gun cocked on his lap, then back up at Jongdae. "Yes." Bare-boned, cards plain out on the table is how Kyungsoo always does it, but like this, unflinchingly, Chanyeol winces on Jongdae's behalf too, and what he knows about Jongdae's work in the lab is very much secondhand.
"I've been working on the pulser for four years," Jongdae says. "And three more before that, on the theories."
They all know this. The quantum physics theories and the pulser that Chanyeol understands can split light are Jongdae's life story, and Kyungsoo's ironically used the culmination of what he eventually hopes to achieve - does achieve to travel back in time and tell him to destroy it. The very fact that Kyungsoo is here in the present, a living example of his dream, might be the precise reason why Jongdae should keep at it; if this were anyone else, Chanyeol might be afraid, but greed is not something that Jongdae lets settle well in himself, especially not next to loyalty and faith.
"It's not just the pulser," Kyungsoo releases a measured breath, presses his lips together. "Your entire research interest, all your work - especially the components that you'll eventually combine in the time machine - that needs to stop existing. The mafia can't know that you're building it, or they'll find you anyway, force you to build it, and then kill you. That's why we came to tell you."
"You would have done it anyway." Jongdae says it like a statement. "Destroy the pulser."
"I would've tried," Kyungsoo smiles a little sadly. "Shoot through the doors to get in and fiddle around enough till I trip the power, main and aux, to lift it from its magnetic holder and toss it in the sea or something." Jongdae's eyes cut sharply at Kyungsoo.
"Aux power - how did you know that? I couldn't have told you -"
Kyungsoo's smile dents one corner of his mouth. "You told me, in 2018. Said you wish you'd done that, before the mafia ever got wind that you were building something they'd wanted. Needed."
Jongdae doesn't say anything for a long while. Chanyeol swallows and wonders if words cut deeper than blades do, especially when they concern your future. Perhaps this is why he'd agreed so readily, bruised and wounded inside from the thought of the alternative to Kyungsoo's plan.
"You need me to get in the lab."
Kyungsoo's eyes are much softer, this time, when they hold Jongdae's. "We do, but that's not the point, Jongdae. Your research interest - there's no one else in Incheon, and a handful in Korea itself that's working on time travel, and you're definitely the first person in our time to build even a part of a machine. Even if we destroyed your pulser, you'd move somewhere else, Seoul National or something to rebuild it and continue your work, and they'd find you anyway. My coming back and destroying the pulser would just be a ripple in time. The decision needs to be yours, in 2016, to abandon this research interest."
They must have thought this through, in 2022, 2023. Kyungsoo's anger and resolve is so palpable in the room that Chanyeol feels it in himself; Kyungsoo's always had that pull on him. But it's not just about the two of them. Jongdae's capture was the turning point in 2023, the main reason why Kyungsoo's back.
"You're putting up a postgrad study proposal, aren't you?" Kyungsoo says quietly. "At the university for your deconstructor."
Jongdae's accelerating pulse resonates in the room. He doesn't speak.
"In 2017, an anonymous sponsor citing interest in time travel will fund your proposal, a million dollars for you to build the deconstructor, reconstructor, and after you do, they'll abduct you, your parents and brother in 2023 to make you hand the completed machine to them."
"Where will you guys go, if I don't agree," Jongdae cuts in suddenly, and - this is it,what they’ve come here for. Jongdae's trust is instinctive and solid for the people he cares about, for the friends he loves; it’s what Chanyeol’s always respected Jongdae for.
Kyungsoo shrugs, setting his gun on the table. "Never come back, probably. It'll be the years all over again, waiting for the clincher to drop, though I don't think they'll find us in the suburbs in the middle of nowhere. But I didn't just come back for that."
If he did, they'd be on their way now to get as maximal a headstart as possible on the mafia, after putting enough bullets in Jongdae's pulser. It's as plain in the open as it would have been if Kyungsoo'd said it out loud. Hearts on the table, nothing to hide.
When Jongdae looks up eventually, Chanyeol doesn't expect the slight amusement on his face. "Guess you guys are gonna be the reason I'm doing crazy shit, this time too?"
---
The lab is whirring and stuffy like any other day, but tonight is one of destruction. Jongdae's circuitry drawings are spilled all over the table, and Chanyeol can see the pulser glinting in the harsh fluorescent light, its metal shell sleek. He doesn’t understand the working principles of the pulser, but what Chanyeol does know is how much Jongdae’s put into building this component and how accomplished he’d felt to have it as the culmination of his graduate thesis. They’d been there drinking the problems with circuitry and programming off every step of the way with him.
Jongdae kills the main power, then, with a pause, auxiliary on the holder so the pulser rests in his hands, catching the only light from the emergency exit sign. In the faint green light, in the room that’s held and housed his dreams, Jongdae’s sadness seems most visceral, most heartbreaking.
“Jongdae -” Chanyeol blurts, maybe to say something reassuring, but what do you say to a friend who’s about to personally destroy his work for the last few years? Chanyeol’s hand catches Jongdae’s fingers in weak comfort, but Jongdae looks up at both of them.
“You know,” Jongdae whispers. “I’d never have expected my machine to be the very one in your HQ - I’m not prepared for it to become a tool for the mafia to kill. That’s not what I built the pulser for, not by a long shot.”
Chanyeol knows. Jongdae's dream is so big a part of him that Chanyeol can't quite imagine a Jongdae working on anything else. But the direct consequences of his creation, regardless of intent; the knowledge that something borne out of your dreams will be used to take human life - that must have been what it took for Jongdae to decide.
“The highway bridge, then? Saltwater would work to corrode it,” Jongdae asks, and squeezes Chanyeol’s fingers just tight enough to hurt.
They get into Chanyeol’s truck in the basement of the university, Jongdae holding the pulser in his lap. The truck is quiet for a long while as they hurtle down the expressway, past the vestiges of night hanging over their hometown.
“Jongdae.” Kyungsoo turns to look at their friend, smoothing his hand over his thigh, his eyes asking the question instead. The smile that Jongdae returns is much more reassuring than it is forced.
“I’ll be okay,” Jongdae says, “I can still stay in quantum physics, apply to SNU instead or something. I could just as easily have had nothing to show at the end of all the research I did - I got pretty lucky for my thesis, to be honest. And what’s three years, when this concerns the lives of all of us, everyone I love?”
“You’re the most brilliant scientist I know,” Chanyeol tells him straight.
“I’m the only scientist you know,” Jongdae laughs, but he hears the rest, too, and Chanyeol’s pride and respect for this friend is an electrifying rush.
“So we corrode the pulser,” Chanyeol says, looking at Kyungsoo. “And that’ll take us?”
“To the present,” Kyungsoo and Jongdae say in unison, both smiling. “The 2016 that we’d have been in, before the mafia abducted Jongdae to build the machine, before they came back to 2016 to recruit us as loopers. The only thing that will have changed is that Jongdae no longer has the pulser, will no longer work on this machine.”
The alternative timeline, in other words. Three years after university - Chanyeol remembers the very night in 2014 he’d been handed a card on his delivery rounds, told to come for an interview at HQ if he wanted a much easier job. Maybe he’d still be making rounds on his rusty bike if he hadn’t been a looper.
In the second Chanyeol takes to remember, the black Jeep, the men in it and their guns speeds up to place in Chanyeol’s rearview mirror so fast they may as well have appeared out of thin air. Chanyeol has no time to think. “Fuck - get down!”
The shot blooms cracks on the windscreen, rippling out from the clean hole the bullet punctures, and Chanyeol swerves to the next lane and jams his foot on the accelerator. Kyungsoo’s gun is out, too, and Chanyeol tosses Jongdae his.
“Can you lose them?” Kyungsoo yells over the wind as he reaches out of the window, backwards to shoot at the Jeep, but hurtling down the expressway there’s no way his bullets could have found target.
“I’ll try,” Chanyeol yells, swerving so his truck is less constant a target and it seems to work; the impacts on the truck lessen. But the Jeep is faster, now, so fast that it feels like it’s about to careen into Chanyeol’s truck, and all Chanyeol can feel is the panic choking him, immobilizing anything else in his mind, that they will have no chance to live if that happens.
“Fuck,” Kyungsoo says, turning.
“Kyungsoo -” Jongdae yells, but Kyungsoo’s already opening the door, leaning out of the truck cab before Chanyeol can force the words past his throat squeezed shut in panic, his gun firing at the Jeep. The only thing holding Kyungsoo bodily in the truck is Jongdae’s arm around his waist, but - miraculously, he gets a shot in - “one down!” Kyungsoo yells.
Chanyeol takes one heartbeat to swallow, looks back in front when - a truck coming in the opposite direction, headed straight for them clean jerks Chanyeol’s heart out of his chest and Chanyeol mashes his foot on the break so suddenly all he can hear is the squeal of tyres, but it’s too late - the truck looms almost too big to bear, and Chanyeol swerves as hard as he can in reflex so the truck careens onto the field, bumping to a stop as the Jeep crashes into the truck with a deafening boom behind him and Chanyeol whips around to see Jongdae hanging out the open door, Kyungsoo out of sight.
It feels like liquid panic is his blood, all the way to the tips of his fingers - Chanyeol can’t move. Jongdae’s already scrambling out of the door, yelling Kyungsoo’s name.
“Kyungsoo?” Jongdae’s kneeling, next to Kyungsoo on the floor, blood stemming from a fresh bullet wound in his arm, and there’s so much blood, so how can Kyungsoo’s lips be so pale? Nothing occurs to Chanyeol, not when Kyungsoo’s face is the only thing he can see, and the frown that knits his eyebrows -
‘I’m okay,” Kyungsoo manages, “they’re finished?”
Chanyeol only registers that the Jeep’s still upright, dented in the side of the other truck, and he can see them alive, but incapacitated. Jongdae’s taken his jacket off to wrap Kyungsoo’s arm tightly, an attempt to staunch the flow of blood. “Yes,” Chanyeol chokes out.
“Chanyeol, Jongdae.” Kyungsoo’s voice is still steady, his touch is still firm. “I’m from the future, so I’m going to disappear. Don’t worry about me, just destroy the pulser.”
Kyungsoo’s sent back from 2023 - this means that when they change history and destroy the pulser (and therefore, the machine in the future), this future Kyungsoo couldn’t have existed now, in the present. He’s right, but it is all Chanyeol can do to tear his eyes away from the wound in Kyungsoo’s arm. Jongdae grabs Chanyeol.
“I’ll just be a minute,” Jongdae says, darting to Chanyeol’s truck to grab the pulser, and Chanyeol looks up where Kyungsoo’s gaze is to see the bridge over the sea a little away, dawn breaking over the horizon. Chanyeol can’t hear the splash of the pulser this far away, over the howling wind, but -
"See you on the other side," Kyungsoo manages, cracking an eye open to catch Chanyeol's, and before Chanyeol can brush his lips over Kyungsoo's, there's only air where Kyungsoo had been, so suddenly that Kyungsoo’s outline seems branded on the ground, that Chanyeol's eyes burn from even the faint light from the coming dawn.
“They’re gone, too,” Jongdae says, jerking Chanyeol to the present after what feels like eternity. There’s still blood on the grass. Chanyeol looks up, at the direction Jongdae hooks his thumb in. They are; the Jeep’s empty, like there had never been anyone in it. Jongdae calls the ambulance for the truck driver, who seems shocked but otherwise fine. Chanyeol’s still staring at the ground before his knees.
“Hey,” Jongdae shakes his shoulder and smiles. “Kyungsoo’s waiting for you at home.”
This hits Chanyeol like a sledgehammer - that in this version of 2016, Kyungsoo is right here, not bleeding with a gunshot wound in his arm, not replaced by thin air. The 2016 Kyungsoo that he’d trusted the future for, to come home to.
Chanyeol can’t get to his truck quickly enough, even if he knows this. Today’s been a mindfuck if anything else, and timelines are hard to keep straight with the blood still fresh in his field of vision. Jongdae squeezes his shoulder and takes over the driving, leaving Chanyeol to work his fingers white in passenger. Everything on the way is just as they’d left it - the streets, Jongdae’s lab and Kyungsoo’s apartment. There are still a hundred and ten steps to Kyungsoo’s door.
"What," Kyungsoo says blearily, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. "It's fucking six AM."
"It's been a hell of a night," Chanyeol tells him, not quite helping the grin and hotness that floods his eyes in a rush of emotion and grabs Kyungsoo in a hug tight enough to choke. "I missed you."
---
2024, Seoul
“You up for a few drinks tonight, Prof Kim?”
“If you’re paying.”
“Hey, hey, hey,” Chanyeol says, but he’s laughing, too. “Am I hearing this right? Youngest professor awarded tenure in SNU trying to shirk on his dues?”
“What dues are you talking about,” Jongdae says, tucking the phone under his chin to pick his papers up.
“Not a good look, man,” Chanyeol tells him, “you think you can get out of treating us to goddamn caviar -”
“See you later, Chanyeol,” Jongdae laughs and hangs up. If he’s honest, Jongdae does owe Chanyeol and Kyungsoo - or, at least, 2023 Kyungsoo for his change in research career and eventually receiving tenure this early, but he’d put in his best damn application for lecturing at the university after destroying the pulser in 2016, and he’s a pretty good lecturer, if he must say. That he’s still working on quantum physics, the very core of what gets the fire in his eyes going, plays a big part, too.
It’d been a big decision, in 2016, but one he doesn’t regret a bit. He still remembers everything that had happened that night on the highway bridge, watching Kyungsoo risk his life to fight for the people he cares about, watching the carnage from the mafia’s destruction, and the overwhelming absoluteness of the precise thing to do. It’s still bold in him, now, so bold that he doesn’t think there could have been any other choice to make. The pulser had been a big thing for him, back then, but in the grand scheme of things Jongdae’s got a lot more to offer himself than he’d realised.
“Wanna have your ass trashed at pool again,” Jongdae asks Chanyeol when they meet up later, Kyungsoo handing him a mug to clink. SNU’s physics building has a killer lounge room with a pool table that Jongdae’s been spending a lot of time at, though he keeps telling Chanyeol he’d always been letting him win before. When he breaks it down, they’re all winners from the night he’d destroyed the pulser; sometimes the light comes only when you fight the dark enough to draw blood. With certainty, if he had a time machine, he’d do it all over again.
2018, New York
New York is everything Kyungsoo’s dreamed of, but stepping out of JFK is a hard-hitting reminder that everything he left in Incheon is part of his past. It's Jongdae living, breathing New York next to him.
They'd hid it out in Japan for two years, but the small run-in with some people Kyungsoo thought he recognised from HQ had them on the next plane out. Kyungsoo hadn't given their destination a second thought when he'd booked the tickets.
"We should probably move around every two years." Jongdae's serious, and Kyungsoo nods. Between what Jongdae had experienced for himself just before being sent back in time and Kyungsoo's understandings of the workings of the mafia, it's better to be safe than sorry, especially since they've come so far. Two years worth of a completely new life he's been thrown into is a fucking long time, but Kyungsoo takes some comfort in the fact that as far as companions go, he could have done a lot worse.
The taxi ride they take to the nearest hotel zooms past the New York night, the lights and streets flying by like a filmstrip pulled too fast, and Chanyeol features especially heavily, painfully tonight. All Kyungsoo can think about is how this night was supposed to be, and he wonders if there are regrets to be had from that irrevocable step he took three years ago.
It's a silly question. Kyungsoo still wonders what Chanyeol would have said if he'd called him, what would've happened if he'd left a goodbye. Unanswered questions are the tiniest of thorns, and human hearts are raw. Kyungsoo has to swallow when the taxi pulls to a stop.
"Do you?" Jongdae asks quietly when the hotel door closes behind Kyungsoo to heavy, buzzing silence. "Regret not shooting me?"
The question cuts clean through Kyungsoo to find an answer immediately. He doesn't even have to think. "No." It's the bare truth.
Jongdae's quiet when he hears it. Kyungsoo's surprised Jongdae even picked up on his silence on the way to the hotel, but two years' worth of seconds is a long time to get to know someone, and Jongdae knows what Chanyeol means to him.
"I do," Jongdae chuckles, but it's a dead sound. "Regret building the machine. Building the pulser and accepting that anonymous sponsor's funding to build the deconstructor. Publishing that fucking paper on the pulser I was so proud of. Maybe it all comes down to greed - it was my dream come true, you know?"
Jongdae's story is much, much worse than Kyungsoo's. He's got a broken heart and a bunch of scrapes, maybe, but Jongdae had had to see his dream crashing down on him, everything he holds dear shred itself inside out. Jongdae’s been fascinated by time travel and the possibility of revisiting, reliving history since he was a young boy, and had gone to university in the local university under the only professor in Korea at the time who had research interests in time travel. Took three years to work out the theories in university, four more in his doctorate degree to build the first part that will eventually go into the machine - a pulser than can split light - and publish a paper from his thesis. He receives funding to build his second part, a human deconstructor, then in 2023 he's forced to build the machine in return for his and his family's safety. The mafia never kept up their end of the deal.
"If I'd known, back then when I was still working on the pulser, that it was going to be used in a machine for that purpose," Jongdae blinks down at his hands, "I would've destroyed it myself."
"It's not your pulser, or your machine," Kyungsoo tells him. "They took it. You didn't build it for that reason."
Jongdae's smile is heartbreaking. "Is there any difference, really?"
Kyungsoo has no answer to that, and It occurs to him that no matter what he’d decided on that day Jongdae arrived at the end of his blunderbuss barrel, there would have been regrets anyway. They were always going to be the loser in the game. The crushed light studding the sky past the hotel window is so piercing that Kyungsoo rather welcomes the hot lick of tears that follows on this night of regrets.
---
2020, New York
"You wanna grab some chicken at the bodega, then head back?" Kyungsoo asks, eyes darting to the stranger that walks too near. It's a habit; has been for five years now. One slip-up, one second of carelessness and they're bound for death. Kyungsoo can't have anything less than utmost trust that the mafia is everywhere, is relentless. He didn't leave Chanyeol for nothing.
"Yeah, hope they have those cookies today too," Jongdae says, turning, when there's a tap on Kyungsoo's shoulder that charges his blood cold.
"Excuse me?" Kyungsoo turns slowly. The crisp Korean is enough to rush the options through Kyungsoo's head: flight or fight, or both. It sounds like just one person; they could make it out. Jongdae has weight and strength, if not skill, and Kyungsoo's still got it.
What catches his eye, though, when he turns around, robs Kyungsoo of his heart so suddenly it feels like a forcible puncture in the chest.
Chanyeol is still exactly the same. The details that Kyungsoo drinks in instinctively, voraciously in that one second - the bridge of his nose, the slice that makes his double eyelid, the slight quirk of his eyebrow, his eyes widened are exactly the same.
The punch comes sharp, stinging in his jaw, but perhaps Kyungsoo had expected it in the second Chanyeol registered. It's still the same Chanyeol he knows, and it mirrors the sting, at seeing the very person featuring in his mind in last thousand plus days.
"Hey, hey," Jongdae says, shoving Kyungsoo behind him, holding his hand up to ward Chanyeol off. "Who the fuck are you?"
"Jongdae," Kyungsoo says, still holding Chanyeol's glare. "It's okay, it's Chanyeol."
Jongdae's mouth drops open, lets his hands fall, just as Chanyeol looks perplexedly between Jongdae and Kyungsoo. It’s jarring, that they don’t know each other; the reminder that Kyungsoo’s sandwiched between the future and his past is fuels the burn of the sting in his jaw.
"Look," Kyungsoo's voice comes out as a whisper. "Can we go somewhere else?"
Chanyeol perches awkwardly on the sofa in the apartment Kyungsoo and Jongdae are due to move out of in a month, as though ready to jump, to fight if need be. Kyungsoo swallows the lump that had stuck in his throat all the way back.
"Jongdae, this is Chanyeol, and Chanyeol, this is Jongdae - or Jongdae's loop. From the future."
The confusion crumples Chanyeol's features for a second, but before Kyungsoo can miss this look, they're ironed out again with understanding, comprehension.
"He was your job? That day? That’s why you left?"
Both Kyungsoo and Jongdae nod. They've been through the story enough times for Jongdae to know their version of 2015, too.
"Why didn't you tell me? I would have - fuck, I would have dropped everything and gone with you." It bursts a tiny firework of emotion in Kyungsoo's chest, when he sees that this is what Chanyeol has been angry at him for, not for what Kyungsoo had taken from him.
Kyungsoo blinks, looks back down at his lap. "I'm sorry." It takes a while to dredge up the words to say, but Chanyeol doesn't speak.
"I didn't want to drag you into this, too," Kyungsoo says quiet. Somehow he can't quite meet Chanyeol's eyes, but Chanyeol's bracing his fists on the sofa. On the offensive.
"That's why?" Chanyeol spits, more frustration in his voice than anger, and it surprises Kyungsoo into the match. "Some noble idiot bullshit?"
"You think this," Kyungsoo raises his voice, too, ignoring Jongdae's hand on his shoulder, but meeting Chanyeol hard is how he's always done it, and ruts are especially instinctive for Kyungsoo. "Sneaking around, never having a place to call home, living a life of fucking escape every single day is a walk in the park? You think I wanted this shit?" You think I wanted this shit for you? is too choking, too rough to make it out of his throat.
It stuns Chanyeol into silence, but Kyungsoo has never felt more shitty winning an argument, and it's trying keeping the hotness in his eyes. "No," Chanyeol says eventually, meeting Kyungsoo's eyes, "but at least I'd have been there with you."
Jongdae excuses himself quietly to the kitchen, but before the door closes Kyungsoo reaches for Chanyeol's collar and Chanyeol reaches for the hem of his shirt so they meet in the middle, in a mess of a kiss and a hug that Kyungsoo can't focus on. It's too much of Chanyeol at once.
"You fucker," Chanyeol says, pressing Kyungsoo so hard against himself Kyungsoo's heart might be beating Chanyeol's pulse. "Fuck you."
The sound that escapes Kyungsoo's throat is somewhere between a laugh and a sob, and when Chanyeol eventually lets him go, his glare is much more piercing than anything Kyungsoo's ever held.
"Don't you ever do that again," Chanyeol whispers, his voice hard. "I'm not going to travel the fucking world to look for you twice."
Chanyeol may as well have hit him again. Kyungsoo hadn't thought about the hows and whys of Chanyeol being here, but this reason is the last he's expecting.
"I thought you were the mafia when you tapped my shoulder," Kyungsoo manages. "I thought we were goners. How -"
Chanyeol's smile lodges cuttingly in Kyungsoo's heart. "First stop, New York, remember?"
---
2022, Singapore
New Year’s Eve crosses out another year in Kyungsoo’s mind - one year closer to 2034, when Chanyeol will cease to exist. He’d closed his loop, two years ago, before cashing in his silver and getting on a plane to New York. Twelve years sounds like a long time, but the past few had been gone in a blink. FInding what Kyungsoo had thought he’d lost was a lesson on cherishing.
Chanyeol and Jongdae had half-coaxed, half dragged Kyungsoo out to celebrations - fireworks and partying to loud countdowns. “It’s New Year’s Eve!” Jongdae yells over the loud music, blowing a party horn in Kyungsoo’s face. Chanyeol agrees enthusiastically, pressing a messy kiss to Kyungsoo’s cheek. “That one’s beautiful,” Chanyeol points at a shower of green and gold.
“Yeah,” Kyungsoo says, and their smiles are so infectious that he finds himself grinning, too. It’s dark anyway, and swarming with people. It’ll be a needle in the haystack even if the mafia is in the vicinity, and they’re long due for some cheer.
They have some cheap beer and soon Kyungsoo’s laughing, too, when they’re walking back, at Chanyeol’s loud rendition of Bar Bar Bar, complete with dance moves even though he has his arms looped through Kyungsoo’s and Jongdae’s. Right now it feels like the three of them make up the world. The man in the cap is just a passerby, until Kyungsoo places him through the haze of the cheap booze and takes a second to register, is the trigger to get the fuck out.
“Fuck,” Kyungsoo whispers as he grabs Chanyeol’s arm to make him stop, so hard and so suddenly his hand trembles with the rush of blood. “Run.”
In the second Chanyeol and Jongdae take to recover, the mafia activates. Three or four of them break into sprints, hammering down the street and Kyungsoo turns on the ball of his foot to veer into a side alley and wastes no time in looking back. They’ve gone through the protocol; split up, call when you’re safe. Head back only when you’re sure they’re off your tail.
The shouts and hammering of feet behind him are the only thing Kyungsoo lets himself focus on. He curses as he dodges a motorbike as he sprints across the main street, feeling the graze of a gust of air as the motorbike barely misses him.
He cuts right in front of another car, ignoring the screeches of tires on hot asphalt and the blaring honks, and turns sharply round a corner. The crowd dispersing after the celebrations is a good cover - Kyungsoo zigzags through people and senses the chasing presence ebb. When he does let himself catch his breath, crouching behind a bin as he rounds into an alley, the man that had been chasing him dashes past ahead. It feels like Kyungsoo’s heartbeat is the whole of himself, so loud and pounding in his head that there’s nothing else he can think about. It takes a few minutes to let his heartbeat, clear against his tonsils at the back of his throat, slide back into his chest.
Ten more minutes before Kyungsoo dares to leave his hiding place, ten minutes of imagining the terrain of the area and escape routes for Chanyeol and Jongdae. The street seems empty enough for Kyungsoo to slip out, his footsteps as quiet as he can make them, to orientate himself and make it back to their apartment. It’s empty.
Kyungsoo is on fire. It’s been twenty, thirty minutes? The chance that Chanyeol or Jongdae might have been caught in that time frame must be substantial, but this is the first time, in three years, that it’s real; Kyungsoo has no fucking idea. So many days of planning, going to such lengths to avoid this very day and it’s still much more disorienting, much more destructive than he could have expected. He feels pathetic, and it twists a knot of anger throbbing over the resignation that had flooded him.
Kyungsoo’s heart falls clean through when the door opens - then he’s giddy, almost limp with relief that it’s Chanyeol that comes barrelling through the door, eyes wild and panicky. They stumble into a half hug, before Chanyeol pulls away to hold Kyungsoo’s eyes. “They have Jongdae.”
The weight of the news is so hefty that Kyungsoo quite has to take a step back, Chanyeol’s hand on his arm an anchor. “You saw it?”
Chanyeol nods, swallowing. Kyungsoo parses the tremble in Chanyeol’s hold before, palpable even in the mere second or so of their hug. Desperation comes with the things you think you're closest to losing, the things that you're most afraid to lose. “We were running in the same direction, then I turned into this restaurant and went upstairs and Jongdae - they were going for him anyway. I heard them - it’s that one, and they hit the back of his head and stuffed him into a car. I didn’t even have time to head back downstairs.”
Chanyeol takes a deep breath, then looks down at his feet. “I guess - it’s because of the time machine? They need him so he’ll be around to build the machine in 2023, so the time machine can exist.”
Put it this way, Kyungsoo is intensely cognizant of the reason why they’ve been running away for so long, so fiercely, so glaring he can’t imagine how he hadn’t reacted to it before. Chanyeol and Kyungsoo are looprunners; they’d known what was coming for them with their decisions, however inevitable they'd been, But Jongdae had been literally held at gunpoint to build the time machine for the mafia, and they’d gone a step further and let Kyungsoo stain his hands for them. Thrown Jongdae in front of Kyungsoo’s gun like another inconsequential body.
Perhaps this decision is irrational and reactionary, too; there’s a lot more anger in the liquid firmness that floods Kyungsoo’s veins, that he’s not up for being a sitting duck anymore. Six years is plenty to stretch someone, and living escape every minute of the day - the culmination of Kyungsoo’s frustration is quite enough to steel his heart. Maybe at the end of it all, he's fucking sick of someone else wresting his life from him, being another job to take care of, another notch to add to the body count. Compress matter into a limiting space and it comes back at you with its full weight. There’s an idea, budding like a weed in the hardened soil after the rain, that takes root in Kyungsoo’s mind.
“They need him alive,” Kyungsoo cuts his eyes at Chanyeol. “at least, till 2023, that’s what they took him for. They already have the machine, just not the assurance that the person who will build it exists. So we have a couple months, till the future Jongdae builds it in 2023.”
Chanyeol’s eyes are dark - they remind Kyungsoo of the night sky right before lightning rips it apart. It’s all Kyungsoo needs; they’re on the same page.
“Chanyeol.” Kyungsoo’s voice is sharper than it’s ever been. “You game for fucking them up?”
---
2023, Incheon
Faced with the finality of an ultimatum, Kyungsoo is undeniably, overwhelmingly nervous.
They have a plan, an unknown deadline to execute it by, and the night before they put it into gear, all Kyungsoo can think about is the ways it might go wrong, and the ways they might die. They haven't been in touch with HQ in a while, and seven years of change is a lot to bank on.
Their plan is simple. Kyungsoo makes his presence in Incheon be known, get himself caught by HQ to be sent back to the past, convince the Chanyeol and Jongdae then to break the loops by destroying everything that leads up to Jongdae building the time machine. Kyungsoo's been through all the scenarios.
One: HQ holds Kyungsoo hostage, instead, to torture information on Chanyeol out of him, and kill them both in the present.
Two: Kyungsoo doesn't manage to stop his looper waiting for him on the other side. He gets shot.
Three: Everything goes according to plan, except Chanyeol refuses to believe him.
"You were really mad at me," Kyungsoo says it like a statement. There's nothing less he'd believe the Chanyeol he knows would have been. "You might be my looper."
"No," Chanyeol catches Kyungsoo's eye. "I was, when you left, but after too many nights of missing you, I wanted you back more."
It breaks Kyungsoo's heart, the way he says it, and it's all Kyungsoo can do not to reach over and press his apologies onto Chanyeol's lips. Chanyeol deepens the kiss into something else, something like the ash that crumbles after an explosive fire.
"You know, three years ago in New York," Chanyeol whispers, his mouth grazing Kyungsoo's. "That's what I realised. That's what I'll realise, when I see you back then. That's what I was mad at you for; the letdown, not the leaving."
Kyungsoo does remember, and Chanyeol catches Kyungsoo's tongue following a chuckle. "Have some faith in me," Chanyeol says, "You'd have a hell of a better time convincing me than I would."
Ash comes when phoenixes are ready for rebirth, too. Kyungsoo's smile unfurls easily, now with the heat of what Chanyeol means to him in his chest. "Why don't you come here, then," Kyungsoo says fisting his collar, and kisses him like he never has. There is no room for second chances, but this is the start.
Later, after Chanyeol jerks them off, Chanyeol kisses the inside of Kyungsoo's thigh for luck when they both come. It feels like a spill of courage.
---
On the taxi ride to where HQ is, Chanyeol slides his hand on Kyungsoo's thigh and squeezes. "Don't leave me here too long," he grins, "2023 really isn't much of a looker."
Kyungsoo snorts, presses a short kiss to his ear. Probably the last for seven years. "Please be cooperative, then."
"Throw in a couple blowjobs, maybe," Chanyeol wiggles his eyebrows, and Kyungsoo rolls his eyes. They're close now - they've scoped HQ out enough times for Kyungsoo to recognize the route, and at the precipice, the immediacy is enough to charge Kyungsoo up. He's never been very good at toeing befores.
"What if -" Kyungsoo manages, but Chanyeol leaves no room for Kyungsoo to entertain anything.
"I trust you," Chanyeol says, and here it is, what Kyungsoo needs more than any kind of goodbye. Kyungsoo turns to catch his eye, then smiles a small smile. I got it.
Pulling on his cap, Kyungsoo hops out of the taxi and heads straight for the convenience store on the corner, avoiding eye contact with anyone. The mafia isn't stupid - there's bound to be a catch with someone turning up at their doorstep to be found, but they'd figured that the mafia's also desperate enough for looprunners to be finished off. The secret they hold is much more dangerous than anything they could do.
Kyungsoo meanders into the store, keeps his head down. He has maybe five minutes - he knows for a fact that the mafia has tabs on everything within five miles of HQ, be it the enemy or perhaps police spies. They've always erred on the side of caution; action first, identify later. Kyungsoo pays for his shit without speaking and steps out of the door, still keeping most of his face hidden by the cap. Anytime now. He's gotta be prepared to run for his fucking life.
It's a bolt in time - the man across the street stops talking on the phone, the starter gun goes off in Kyungsoo's muscles, and they run. Kyungsoo has barely a headstart; this is favourably timed, and he cuts into an alley that he knows leads into a dead end just as he hears the cock of a trigger. Kyungsoo skids to a stop and freezes with the sense of being at the end of a shotgun barrel.
"Put your hands on your head," the man says, his voice cold, and Kyungsoo takes a second before he complies, slowly. The pack of cigarettes he'd gotten falls on the floor. One wrong step and -
What feels like a glass bottle smashes his head hard.
---
When Kyungsoo wakes, his legs and hands are tied, with a bag over his eyes and a gag in his mouth.
"Get this one in the machine later," he hears a gruff voice. "He's an old looprunner. Long due." His heart is thudding at the back of his throat with relief. They'd spent months calculating their enemy well; maybe being part of the works is sufficient priming to think the same way, too, but this is still early in the game. No space for anything but focus, especially not for complacency at what seems to have been too easy to pull off.
Nobody comes. The hours - days, it feels like - for which he's left alone are excruciating. He keeps himself occupied with his surroundings. Concrete floor, a cell, maybe. Jongdae has to be somewhere here, too, but the gag chokes back anything he could have yelled. Just a little more, buddy. We're coming for you.
There's inaction long enough for Kyungsoo's paranoia to kick in, wishing that Chanyeol had come too, but Chanyeol's their Plan B. It's a good distraction when rough hands finally toss Kyungsoo onto a rough platform, some sort of trolley, and, at the end of a long tunnel, into a cool metal chamber that hisses when the door locks shut.
He has ten seconds. Kyungsoo slips the small blade out of his back pocket, cuts the rope binding his hands, frees his legs, takes the bag off. Three. Two. He braces for impact.
---
2016, Incheon
"It was a stroke of luck, really, that you were my looper." Kyungsoo muses. "What were the chances?"
Chanyeol can’t find the words to speak, for a long time after Kyungsoo finishes speaking. Hearing the future from Kyungsoo - how he’d been exactly the same meeting Kyungsoo again for the first time, the sort of life they’ll lead, the way Jongdae will be taken. Chanyeol’s breath had been as ragged as Kyungsoo’s voice, in the pauses he’d had to take. It’s nowhere near what he’d expected, and it’s a lot to take in at once. The reason why Kyungsoo’s back, why he’d been Chanyeol’s job, how they’re trying to buck the system. What this will mean for them if they make it.
"I wasn’t - won’t be - much different from how I just was, then, huh," Chanyeol says, and he might have laughed, if his ears weren’t ringing. Kyungsoo manages a small smile.
“Bruised jaws hurt more than bloody noses, I guess.”
Chanyeol reaches over to dust the crusted blood near the edge of Kyungsoo’s lip, and his fingers land so soft on Kyungsoo that he wants to follow them with his own lips. This is all Chanyeol’s known; the way birds know the precise way home in the fall, the way a squirrel curls up in its tree hole so well-worn around itself it could only have been its home. He doesn’t do it, but in the quiet of the night with just the stars for company, Chanyeol can feel Kyungsoo on every inch of his skin, every stretch of bone anyway.
“So,” Chanyeol whispers, his voice cracking as though it might shatter the air between them, “guess the ball’s in my court, now?”
Chanyeol isn’t expecting the sadness in Kyungsoo eyes, but it pulls some of what’s bubbling inside Chanyeol to the surface. The raw thorn of anger that had started in himself when he’d heard, what the mafia will do to them, to their friend Jongdae. A similar steel stretching himself tight. Strangest is the realisation that all the time he’d spent missing Kyungsoo and wondering about what it’d feel like seeing Kyungsoo again will eventually manifest in getting on a plane to New York. The decision just hasn’t occurred to him yet.
“You know,” Chanyeol says, and they meet in the middle for a kiss that’s so light, yet so overwhelming Chanyeol can’t imagine he can take any more. “You already have my answer.” Perhaps the churning in his heart is too busy to break down, but the most prominent thing he’s sure of is that what Kyungsoo had narrated to him, lived and came back to tell him, is not the future he’s up for.
“That was a lot easier than I expected,” Kyungsoo whispers, winding his hand up to cup Chanyeol’s chin and nudge his chin down.
“You came all the way back to tell me the future sucks, I’d be a dickbag if I didn’t trust my future with you,” Chanyeol tells him, and it hits him that he’s never stopped doing so, even with all the anger he'd had for Kyungsoo leaving without a word, all the hate and bitterness that had quite surprised himself, because if you had love on a spectrum the negative would not be emotion.
Kyungsoo chuckles lightly. “That’s what I thought.”
Chanyeol’s phone rings before he can laugh, jokingly protest, and the sight of Jongdae’s name yanks Chanyeol back into the present: that he’s a looprunner, they’re being hunted down, and they have a time machine to destroy.
“Chanyeol?” Jongdae sounds worried, almost out of breath, and Chanyeol’s heart stutters - “You okay? Where are you?”
“In -” Chanyeol starts, finding his panic, alertness mirrored in Kyungsoo’s eyes. "What happened?"
"They - some of the chief's lackeys broke into my apartment and demanded for you - where the fuck are you? Did you get out okay? Shit, I wasn't expecting them to come so quick -"
"I'm with Kyungsoo," Chanyeol says, and Jongdae cuts himself off so suddenly the silence buzzes sharp in Chanyeol's ear. "What?"
Sometimes cliches are so because they've got worn truth in them - Chanyeol figures the mafia won't go back to Jongdae's house to look for him; at least not for a while. "We're coming over. "
---
Jongdae's speechless, when the story ends. His apartment is the quietest Chanyeol's ever seen it, so quiet it feels like every tile, every board is trembling with the sheer weight of silence it has to hold. Chanyeol keeps his eyes on the chest of drawers they'd pushed up against the door, wondering if he's imagining its stillness.
"You're here to destroy the pulser," Jongdae says slowly, quietly. His eyes on Chanyeol's and Kyungsoo's are not quite accusatory, yet dark, almost wary. "My pulser." It sounds fucking crazy to Chanyeol's ears, even if he's here to convince. Trust is something Kyungsoo's always had from him, but Jongdae didn't press his heart to Kyungsoo's hands.
Kyungsoo looks down at the gun cocked on his lap, then back up at Jongdae. "Yes." Bare-boned, cards plain out on the table is how Kyungsoo always does it, but like this, unflinchingly, Chanyeol winces on Jongdae's behalf too, and what he knows about Jongdae's work in the lab is very much secondhand.
"I've been working on the pulser for four years," Jongdae says. "And three more before that, on the theories."
They all know this. The quantum physics theories and the pulser that Chanyeol understands can split light are Jongdae's life story, and Kyungsoo's ironically used the culmination of what he eventually hopes to achieve - does achieve to travel back in time and tell him to destroy it. The very fact that Kyungsoo is here in the present, a living example of his dream, might be the precise reason why Jongdae should keep at it; if this were anyone else, Chanyeol might be afraid, but greed is not something that Jongdae lets settle well in himself, especially not next to loyalty and faith.
"It's not just the pulser," Kyungsoo releases a measured breath, presses his lips together. "Your entire research interest, all your work - especially the components that you'll eventually combine in the time machine - that needs to stop existing. The mafia can't know that you're building it, or they'll find you anyway, force you to build it, and then kill you. That's why we came to tell you."
"You would have done it anyway." Jongdae says it like a statement. "Destroy the pulser."
"I would've tried," Kyungsoo smiles a little sadly. "Shoot through the doors to get in and fiddle around enough till I trip the power, main and aux, to lift it from its magnetic holder and toss it in the sea or something." Jongdae's eyes cut sharply at Kyungsoo.
"Aux power - how did you know that? I couldn't have told you -"
Kyungsoo's smile dents one corner of his mouth. "You told me, in 2018. Said you wish you'd done that, before the mafia ever got wind that you were building something they'd wanted. Needed."
Jongdae doesn't say anything for a long while. Chanyeol swallows and wonders if words cut deeper than blades do, especially when they concern your future. Perhaps this is why he'd agreed so readily, bruised and wounded inside from the thought of the alternative to Kyungsoo's plan.
"You need me to get in the lab."
Kyungsoo's eyes are much softer, this time, when they hold Jongdae's. "We do, but that's not the point, Jongdae. Your research interest - there's no one else in Incheon, and a handful in Korea itself that's working on time travel, and you're definitely the first person in our time to build even a part of a machine. Even if we destroyed your pulser, you'd move somewhere else, Seoul National or something to rebuild it and continue your work, and they'd find you anyway. My coming back and destroying the pulser would just be a ripple in time. The decision needs to be yours, in 2016, to abandon this research interest."
They must have thought this through, in 2022, 2023. Kyungsoo's anger and resolve is so palpable in the room that Chanyeol feels it in himself; Kyungsoo's always had that pull on him. But it's not just about the two of them. Jongdae's capture was the turning point in 2023, the main reason why Kyungsoo's back.
"You're putting up a postgrad study proposal, aren't you?" Kyungsoo says quietly. "At the university for your deconstructor."
Jongdae's accelerating pulse resonates in the room. He doesn't speak.
"In 2017, an anonymous sponsor citing interest in time travel will fund your proposal, a million dollars for you to build the deconstructor, reconstructor, and after you do, they'll abduct you, your parents and brother in 2023 to make you hand the completed machine to them."
"Where will you guys go, if I don't agree," Jongdae cuts in suddenly, and - this is it,what they’ve come here for. Jongdae's trust is instinctive and solid for the people he cares about, for the friends he loves; it’s what Chanyeol’s always respected Jongdae for.
Kyungsoo shrugs, setting his gun on the table. "Never come back, probably. It'll be the years all over again, waiting for the clincher to drop, though I don't think they'll find us in the suburbs in the middle of nowhere. But I didn't just come back for that."
If he did, they'd be on their way now to get as maximal a headstart as possible on the mafia, after putting enough bullets in Jongdae's pulser. It's as plain in the open as it would have been if Kyungsoo'd said it out loud. Hearts on the table, nothing to hide.
When Jongdae looks up eventually, Chanyeol doesn't expect the slight amusement on his face. "Guess you guys are gonna be the reason I'm doing crazy shit, this time too?"
---
The lab is whirring and stuffy like any other day, but tonight is one of destruction. Jongdae's circuitry drawings are spilled all over the table, and Chanyeol can see the pulser glinting in the harsh fluorescent light, its metal shell sleek. He doesn’t understand the working principles of the pulser, but what Chanyeol does know is how much Jongdae’s put into building this component and how accomplished he’d felt to have it as the culmination of his graduate thesis. They’d been there drinking the problems with circuitry and programming off every step of the way with him.
Jongdae kills the main power, then, with a pause, auxiliary on the holder so the pulser rests in his hands, catching the only light from the emergency exit sign. In the faint green light, in the room that’s held and housed his dreams, Jongdae’s sadness seems most visceral, most heartbreaking.
“Jongdae -” Chanyeol blurts, maybe to say something reassuring, but what do you say to a friend who’s about to personally destroy his work for the last few years? Chanyeol’s hand catches Jongdae’s fingers in weak comfort, but Jongdae looks up at both of them.
“You know,” Jongdae whispers. “I’d never have expected my machine to be the very one in your HQ - I’m not prepared for it to become a tool for the mafia to kill. That’s not what I built the pulser for, not by a long shot.”
Chanyeol knows. Jongdae's dream is so big a part of him that Chanyeol can't quite imagine a Jongdae working on anything else. But the direct consequences of his creation, regardless of intent; the knowledge that something borne out of your dreams will be used to take human life - that must have been what it took for Jongdae to decide.
“The highway bridge, then? Saltwater would work to corrode it,” Jongdae asks, and squeezes Chanyeol’s fingers just tight enough to hurt.
They get into Chanyeol’s truck in the basement of the university, Jongdae holding the pulser in his lap. The truck is quiet for a long while as they hurtle down the expressway, past the vestiges of night hanging over their hometown.
“Jongdae.” Kyungsoo turns to look at their friend, smoothing his hand over his thigh, his eyes asking the question instead. The smile that Jongdae returns is much more reassuring than it is forced.
“I’ll be okay,” Jongdae says, “I can still stay in quantum physics, apply to SNU instead or something. I could just as easily have had nothing to show at the end of all the research I did - I got pretty lucky for my thesis, to be honest. And what’s three years, when this concerns the lives of all of us, everyone I love?”
“You’re the most brilliant scientist I know,” Chanyeol tells him straight.
“I’m the only scientist you know,” Jongdae laughs, but he hears the rest, too, and Chanyeol’s pride and respect for this friend is an electrifying rush.
“So we corrode the pulser,” Chanyeol says, looking at Kyungsoo. “And that’ll take us?”
“To the present,” Kyungsoo and Jongdae say in unison, both smiling. “The 2016 that we’d have been in, before the mafia abducted Jongdae to build the machine, before they came back to 2016 to recruit us as loopers. The only thing that will have changed is that Jongdae no longer has the pulser, will no longer work on this machine.”
The alternative timeline, in other words. Three years after university - Chanyeol remembers the very night in 2014 he’d been handed a card on his delivery rounds, told to come for an interview at HQ if he wanted a much easier job. Maybe he’d still be making rounds on his rusty bike if he hadn’t been a looper.
In the second Chanyeol takes to remember, the black Jeep, the men in it and their guns speeds up to place in Chanyeol’s rearview mirror so fast they may as well have appeared out of thin air. Chanyeol has no time to think. “Fuck - get down!”
The shot blooms cracks on the windscreen, rippling out from the clean hole the bullet punctures, and Chanyeol swerves to the next lane and jams his foot on the accelerator. Kyungsoo’s gun is out, too, and Chanyeol tosses Jongdae his.
“Can you lose them?” Kyungsoo yells over the wind as he reaches out of the window, backwards to shoot at the Jeep, but hurtling down the expressway there’s no way his bullets could have found target.
“I’ll try,” Chanyeol yells, swerving so his truck is less constant a target and it seems to work; the impacts on the truck lessen. But the Jeep is faster, now, so fast that it feels like it’s about to careen into Chanyeol’s truck, and all Chanyeol can feel is the panic choking him, immobilizing anything else in his mind, that they will have no chance to live if that happens.
“Fuck,” Kyungsoo says, turning.
“Kyungsoo -” Jongdae yells, but Kyungsoo’s already opening the door, leaning out of the truck cab before Chanyeol can force the words past his throat squeezed shut in panic, his gun firing at the Jeep. The only thing holding Kyungsoo bodily in the truck is Jongdae’s arm around his waist, but - miraculously, he gets a shot in - “one down!” Kyungsoo yells.
Chanyeol takes one heartbeat to swallow, looks back in front when - a truck coming in the opposite direction, headed straight for them clean jerks Chanyeol’s heart out of his chest and Chanyeol mashes his foot on the break so suddenly all he can hear is the squeal of tyres, but it’s too late - the truck looms almost too big to bear, and Chanyeol swerves as hard as he can in reflex so the truck careens onto the field, bumping to a stop as the Jeep crashes into the truck with a deafening boom behind him and Chanyeol whips around to see Jongdae hanging out the open door, Kyungsoo out of sight.
It feels like liquid panic is his blood, all the way to the tips of his fingers - Chanyeol can’t move. Jongdae’s already scrambling out of the door, yelling Kyungsoo’s name.
“Kyungsoo?” Jongdae’s kneeling, next to Kyungsoo on the floor, blood stemming from a fresh bullet wound in his arm, and there’s so much blood, so how can Kyungsoo’s lips be so pale? Nothing occurs to Chanyeol, not when Kyungsoo’s face is the only thing he can see, and the frown that knits his eyebrows -
‘I’m okay,” Kyungsoo manages, “they’re finished?”
Chanyeol only registers that the Jeep’s still upright, dented in the side of the other truck, and he can see them alive, but incapacitated. Jongdae’s taken his jacket off to wrap Kyungsoo’s arm tightly, an attempt to staunch the flow of blood. “Yes,” Chanyeol chokes out.
“Chanyeol, Jongdae.” Kyungsoo’s voice is still steady, his touch is still firm. “I’m from the future, so I’m going to disappear. Don’t worry about me, just destroy the pulser.”
Kyungsoo’s sent back from 2023 - this means that when they change history and destroy the pulser (and therefore, the machine in the future), this future Kyungsoo couldn’t have existed now, in the present. He’s right, but it is all Chanyeol can do to tear his eyes away from the wound in Kyungsoo’s arm. Jongdae grabs Chanyeol.
“I’ll just be a minute,” Jongdae says, darting to Chanyeol’s truck to grab the pulser, and Chanyeol looks up where Kyungsoo’s gaze is to see the bridge over the sea a little away, dawn breaking over the horizon. Chanyeol can’t hear the splash of the pulser this far away, over the howling wind, but -
"See you on the other side," Kyungsoo manages, cracking an eye open to catch Chanyeol's, and before Chanyeol can brush his lips over Kyungsoo's, there's only air where Kyungsoo had been, so suddenly that Kyungsoo’s outline seems branded on the ground, that Chanyeol's eyes burn from even the faint light from the coming dawn.
“They’re gone, too,” Jongdae says, jerking Chanyeol to the present after what feels like eternity. There’s still blood on the grass. Chanyeol looks up, at the direction Jongdae hooks his thumb in. They are; the Jeep’s empty, like there had never been anyone in it. Jongdae calls the ambulance for the truck driver, who seems shocked but otherwise fine. Chanyeol’s still staring at the ground before his knees.
“Hey,” Jongdae shakes his shoulder and smiles. “Kyungsoo’s waiting for you at home.”
This hits Chanyeol like a sledgehammer - that in this version of 2016, Kyungsoo is right here, not bleeding with a gunshot wound in his arm, not replaced by thin air. The 2016 Kyungsoo that he’d trusted the future for, to come home to.
Chanyeol can’t get to his truck quickly enough, even if he knows this. Today’s been a mindfuck if anything else, and timelines are hard to keep straight with the blood still fresh in his field of vision. Jongdae squeezes his shoulder and takes over the driving, leaving Chanyeol to work his fingers white in passenger. Everything on the way is just as they’d left it - the streets, Jongdae’s lab and Kyungsoo’s apartment. There are still a hundred and ten steps to Kyungsoo’s door.
"What," Kyungsoo says blearily, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. "It's fucking six AM."
"It's been a hell of a night," Chanyeol tells him, not quite helping the grin and hotness that floods his eyes in a rush of emotion and grabs Kyungsoo in a hug tight enough to choke. "I missed you."
---
2024, Seoul
“You up for a few drinks tonight, Prof Kim?”
“If you’re paying.”
“Hey, hey, hey,” Chanyeol says, but he’s laughing, too. “Am I hearing this right? Youngest professor awarded tenure in SNU trying to shirk on his dues?”
“What dues are you talking about,” Jongdae says, tucking the phone under his chin to pick his papers up.
“Not a good look, man,” Chanyeol tells him, “you think you can get out of treating us to goddamn caviar -”
“See you later, Chanyeol,” Jongdae laughs and hangs up. If he’s honest, Jongdae does owe Chanyeol and Kyungsoo - or, at least, 2023 Kyungsoo for his change in research career and eventually receiving tenure this early, but he’d put in his best damn application for lecturing at the university after destroying the pulser in 2016, and he’s a pretty good lecturer, if he must say. That he’s still working on quantum physics, the very core of what gets the fire in his eyes going, plays a big part, too.
It’d been a big decision, in 2016, but one he doesn’t regret a bit. He still remembers everything that had happened that night on the highway bridge, watching Kyungsoo risk his life to fight for the people he cares about, watching the carnage from the mafia’s destruction, and the overwhelming absoluteness of the precise thing to do. It’s still bold in him, now, so bold that he doesn’t think there could have been any other choice to make. The pulser had been a big thing for him, back then, but in the grand scheme of things Jongdae’s got a lot more to offer himself than he’d realised.
“Wanna have your ass trashed at pool again,” Jongdae asks Chanyeol when they meet up later, Kyungsoo handing him a mug to clink. SNU’s physics building has a killer lounge room with a pool table that Jongdae’s been spending a lot of time at, though he keeps telling Chanyeol he’d always been letting him win before. When he breaks it down, they’re all winners from the night he’d destroyed the pulser; sometimes the light comes only when you fight the dark enough to draw blood. With certainty, if he had a time machine, he’d do it all over again.