SBB 2011 Entry #07: Replay (2/2)
Title: Replay
Pairing/Focus: Onew-centric, Onew/Minho
Rating: PG-13
Final word count: 14,700
Summary: Where Jinki finds himself with a man he doesn't know, a cup of coffee (he hates coffee), and eight minutes to save the world. Sort of. Source Code!AU.
June 13, 20xx, 14:07
"No seriously, hyung. You can't keep running away from this."
Jinki bit back the urge to sigh or alternatively bury his face in his hands. Instead, he forced himself to look straight into eyes that were quickly becoming familiar. "I don't mean to," he said. He had a much better idea of what he was running away from now. Or wasn't. Or what Onew had been running away from. The thought sent a pang of guilt through his chest.
Something seemed to click in Minho's eyes, and he leaned forward, almost expectantly. Jinki swallowed. "Maybe we should actually, uh, talk about it. Or something. Yeah. That's probably the best idea." Inwardly, he cursed himself for his awkwardness, as he scrambled for more words to fill in the silence when Minho's phone rang.
Minho reached for the phone, checking the number, Jinki realised for the first time. "Sorry, I have to-"
"No you don't," Jinki said abruptly. He leaned forward and pulled the phone from Minho's surprised grip, ending the call. "You don't have to," he repeated. The moment over, any boldness that he'd been momentarily bolstered with seemed to drain from his body, as doubt assailed him. Jonghyun, his mind reminded him. Not this Jonghyun, he reminded his mind.
"It's work." Minho frowned, recovering from the surprise and retrieving his phone from Jinki's now slack grasp. Jinki made a vague effort to hang on, but he knew it was futile, even as Minho redialed the number, apologising for the inconvenience.
So plan A. Get the note, hope it was helpful, and find Jonghyun. Plan B. Ask Minho. If he were to be honest with himself, neither seemed particularly good. On the other hand, it was a start, and one that he didn't have when he'd first started with all this. Or when he first remembered starting with all this. Memory, he thought ruefully.
Minho was standing, and Jinki stood with him. "Sorry hyung, I have to go-" Minho started to say, when Jinki suddenly found himself with his hand around Minho's wrist, holding him back. Minho had been smiling at the end, Jinki suddenly remembered, and clenched his jaw. "No, stay. I... have something to tell you." I don't want to see you dead again, he thought, at the same moment he thought, disorder, and knew with a sinking certainty that Minho hadn't lived to see the end of his own eight minutes.
"Something's wrong," Minho said simply.
"Something is," Jinki agreed readily, and wondered briefly what Onew would've replied with. "What would you say if I told you I knew what was going to happen in the next few minutes?"
Minho opened his mouth to speak, and then shut it again just as abruptly, musing over the words. "It depends on what you said," he answered quietly, hand toying with the phone. "But this has to wait, hyung. I really have to go."
"No you don't," Jinki insisted. "You'd get there too late, and then it's all too late, but it won't be if you tell me about, um, about your past."
Minho went dead silent, so still that Jinki blinked in compensation under Minho's gaze. "What does my past have to do with anything?" he said slowly. "You've never brought it up before."
"It's... more specifically, were there any um, hide outs where they could hide a person?"
"They?" Minho asked with raised eyebrows.
Jinki nodded, wondering if this might work after all. "A man in a green shirt, right? And he's... someone who you knew at one point. And they're going to kidnap someone," or already have, he thought morosely, "and please, we need to find him. Can you trust me?"
Minho gave him another long, hard look, and Jinki suppressed a shudder. "I'll trust you," he finally said. Jinki grinned in elation, but stopped when Minho held up a hand. "But I don't know if I believe you yet."
"Believe me," Jinki said, and was struck by a burst of inspiration. "Behind the bakery. That's one of their places, isn't it?"
Minho looked taken aback. "You're not supposed to know that," he said.
Jinki nodded. "But I do. It's... hard to explain." Very hard to explain.
"You're not... you," Minho said slowly, with some sort of dawning comprehension that set Jinki on edge.
"It's hard to explain," he repeated, and grabbed him by the hand dragging him off, across the road, somewhere, anyway to show that he should be trusted. Not as Onew, but as him. Or as not him. "Just trust me on this."
Minho pulled away abruptly, and Jinki slowed to a stop, turning on his heel. "Why should I?" Minho asked. "What did you do with him?"
Jinki blanched, swallowing hard. "I... He's..." dead, he thought. And you'll be dead too. Except that wasn't particularly trust inspiring. "It's complicated," he settled on. "We're sort of the same, right now."
Minho's eyes were dark with an undecipherable expression, and Jinki wasn't sure if it was hatred or anger or something else altogether. Something twisted at the place just behind his stomach, and Jinki swallowed nervously. He found himself running his eyes down the other man's jaw bone instead, following it down the line of his body on the way to the ground. If his gaze lingered slightly too long on the toned shape of his arms, Jinki disregarded it.
"You're-" Minho started to say.
There was a screech of tires, and there wasn't enough time to react as Minho leaped forward, his full weight slamming into Jinki even as another force sent the two of them flying. Impulse, Jinki thought blearily, as Minho's arms went slack around him.
Sorry, he tried to say, but found he couldn't say much of anything at all.
-
June 13, 20xx, 20:13
"Sorry sorry sorry-" Jinki comes to saying, when he realises that he suddenly can say things all over again. His head hits the wall with a thunk, a groan not quite making its way out from between his lips. He forces his eyes open and is greeted with darkness. The screen is back, and Jinki blinks it into focus. "Taemin?" he calls tentatively, even while stars still swim in his vision.
"You're back early." The boy's voice is lightly teasing, but his heart isn't really in it. "Any progress?" he asks after a beat. He sounds tired-things probably weren't going great on his end either.
Jinki shakes his head. "Sorry," he says again. He frowns. He's been saying that a lot lately. "How much time?" he asks.
It's Taemin's turn to shake his head. "Depends," Taemin says. "I... we found the motorcycle, and you were right, the blood found inside the trailer matched the DNA of Jonghyun's, but-"
"Where?" Jinki cuts Taemin off. He can guess what Taemin's hesitating over, and he's not sure he wants to hear it. Wants to hear how much blood there is, wants to hear how badly he might be hurt. Taemin frowns at him, as if to remind Jinki that they don't know where Jonghyun was and wasn't that the whole point of all this-"Just a general direction. Area."
Taemin pauses, before he nods. "Near Avenue and Fifth."
Jinki nods to himself. That would have to be enough. "Let me try again," he says, and doesn't have to wait long before the world manages to invert itself all over again.
-
"Congratulations on graduating!"
Minho frowns at him, quirks his eyebrows. "It was just for show, hyung."
He laughs. "It's still the moment where the rest of your life starts. Look, you can see the future now!"
"Right," Minho deadpans, even though he's fighting a smile at the corner of his own lips. "The future."
Jinki nods, leaning back on his arms. "The future," he repeats.
-
When the time came this time, Jinki ended up letting Minho go. Not because he'd given up, but because the look in Minho's eyes sent his own heartbeat faster and honestly, Jinki wasn't sure what to do with that.
Memory, he reminded himself wryly, because he was fairly sure that some of the memories swimming in his mind weren't quite his own. He'd really have to find time to fix this bug, or it'd be definitely troublesome later. Especially if someone that wasn't him used it.
So maybe it was like a video game. A little. From what he could recall of the development at least, there'd been discussions involving the statistical likelihood of any given outcome-it'd been Taemin who'd brought it up, like the random number generator of a roleplaying game. Or something. It had mostly gone over Jinki's head at the time, but he could sort of understand the analogy now. Well, now that he was in the source code and wasn't just playing with the source code of the source code itself. That was another thing-they really should think about giving it a proper name, that could get confusing.
But a random chance of disorder was really the only way he can explain this, that when he strolled down the aisle as nonchalantly as he could, what greeted him wasn't the suspicious looking people talking (well, they were there, just further down), a white slip on the ground catching his eye instead. Jinki scooped it up and tucked it into his pocket-the other note was still there as well he realised, when his fingers met with even more paper-just as he catches them mentioning a dropped note.
Ah, Jinki thought.
"Hey," one of the men noticed Jinki standing there. He approached him. Rather menacingly.
Jinki pulled his hands out of his pockets and tried to look not suspicious. In theory, this was all in his mind-or, well Onew's mind, but he was pretty sure that he was losing the distinction himself-so he should be able to look not suspicious to himself. Another part of him reminded himself that that wasn't how the source code worked and will you please focus? That part sounds a little bit like Kibum, actually. "Hi," he said.
The man was taller than Jinki - nearly Minho height, really. Definitely a little menacing. "You didn't happen to pick up a sheet of paper, did you?"
Yes, his mind supplied. "Nope, sorry," his mouth said. Cooperating with him for once-that was a nice improvement.
Helpful.
He booked it out of there as soon as he could, resisting glancing back to where he knew Jonghyun was going to end up-he needed to rescue that Jonghyun, he reminded himself, until he was far enough away that he felt safe enough to pull out the slip of paper.
He frowned at what was written there-a series of numbers. He ran it through all the basic possible cryptography schemes he knew, but nothing seemed to match. If he had a little more time, he could look it up-
Except he never got a chance to. Jinki glanced up only to see a dark shadow, and thought that the second law of thermodynamics really did hold. Death by falling signeage. At least it was something new.
-
June 13, 20xx, 20:21
"So," Jinki says, as soon as his head's managed to stop throbbing, even though it shouldn't have a real effect at all. "Do the numbers 5249 5641 8592 3863 3400 9411 mean anything to you?"
Taemin frowns, pencil scratching on paper carrying through the microphone systems. "Not really," Taemin says.
Jinki shrugs. "I think they might be coordinates," he says. Sighs. "Let's try again?"
"Do your best, hyung," he hears Taemin say, before the world changes again.
He really is getting used to this.
-
June 13, 20xx, 14:07
"Don't go."
The first thing he said this time, before Minho had a chance to open his mouth. He was sure that it sounded a little ridiculous, but desperate times called for desperate measures.
"I'm not going anywhere?" Minho sounded perplexed. Jinki didn't blame him.
The thing was, Jinki had never been great at thinking on his feet. Or under pressure. And this was both. "So," he began, hoping that this time it would actually work.. "There's something I have to tell you. Um, other than what we have to, uh, talk about. It'sóif I gave you a series of numbers, would they mean anything to you?"
Minho looked at him blankly. "What."
So maybe it wasn't working. But you couldn't blame him for not trying. "5249 5641 8592 3863 3400 9431," he recited, and hoped that he actually got it right.
"9411," Minho automatically corrected-before he slapped a hand over his mouth.
Well. So he didn't get it right. But on the other hand-
"So you do know," Jinki said quietly.
Minho fixed him with a hard stare. "Where did you get it from?" he asked.
"The future," he joked, and then shook his head, expression sombering. "That's not important-and um when your phone rings I don't think you should pickitupbecausethenyou'regoingtogobecauseit'sforworkandIpromisethatthisisforthesamething." His words ran into each other as he tried to spit out the rest of his sentence before Minho's phone rang. He barely managed.
"Don't," Jinki repeated-and this time, a glimmer of hope took fragile shape in cavity tucked between his tongue and the roof his mouth, because there was the faintest hesitation in Minho's eyes. He felt a little bad about it, really, he did. He'd make it up to him later, he promised himself. "It's really not a good idea."
"Why not?" Minho asked. His hand was hovering near his pocket.
"Because you'll die," Jinki said simply. He didn't mention that Minho might, regardless. "It's...complicated," he explained. Without really explaining.
Minho frowned, and Jinki took it as a sign to continue. "What do they mean?" Jinki said before Minho has a chance to speak. The ringing finally stopped, and Jinki allowed himself a moment of relief before pressing on. "The numbers. They're a location, right? A hideout?"
"That's-"
"Avenue and Fifth," Jinki pressed on relentlessly. "In that direction."
Minho hesitated-maybe, just maybe, some progress. Their eyes met, Minho's unblinkingly large as they assessed Jinki, and Jinki wondered if Minho'd figured it out yet-again-that he wasn't quite who Minho thought he was. He held his breath.
"The harbour," Minho said eventually. "The first two refer to the harbour, the second two are time coordinates, and the last two are the exact location." He spoke slowly, enunciating the words.
Jinki allowed a smile of relief-because this was a start. The smile slipped away just as quickly when Minho frowned. "You're not him," he said.
"Sort of," Jinki admitted. He'd been expecting this. "Not really."
He was getting really good at this cutting people off business-to be fair, he'd never really had a chance to do this before. "There's...um something else too," he said just as Minho was about to say something more. Minho looked at him curiously, as Jinki reached into his pocket. He fumbled with the note for a moment, before pressing it into Minho's hands.
Minho's face went from displeased to perplexed to...Jinki wasn't quite sure, but the corners of his eyes were drawn and he was frowning a little, his bottom lip sandwiched between his teeth, leaving Jinki wondering if that was a good expression or not.
It was another few moments before Minho looked back up at him, their eyes locking.
"So. Yeah." Jinki shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He was wasting time-he knew he was, but.
"You're not him," Minho said simply.
Jinki nodded. He could guess what Minho meant behind those words. "I... thought you might want to know anyway."
Minho frowned at him, and Jinki wondered briefly if this really was all just a waste of time. "Just-"
"You look like him." It was Minho's turn to cut him off, and Jinki found himself momentarily speechless. Well, he supposed he must look like him, all things considering. They'd never managed more than one person in a source code even in simple test situations to be able to determine how it worked exactly. Minho's phone went off again at that moment. Minho broke eye contact just long enough to fish his phone out of his pocket. Jinki eyed the phone warily, but Minho simply leftit on the table, still ringing.
"You're...not going to pick up?" Jinki asked hesitantly.
Minho laughed, catching Jinki off guard. "You told me I'd die," he pointed out. "I can spare a few moments before that, I think."
"Oh," Jinki said simply. "It's... There's a guy in a green shirt, and they're going to kidnap a guy called Kim Jonghyun - or maybe they already have, but either way you would've been too late."
As if on cue, there was a screech of tires as the same car Jinki'd seen too many times already barrelled past. Jonghyun was in there, but at this moment, Jinki's focus only flickered there for a moment before reverting to Minho - not this Jonghyun, he reminded himself. "Too late," he confirmed with a wry smile.
Minho wasn't smiling as he stood, knocking his chair back. He stuffed his phone in his pocket, looking at Jinki. "I lied," he said abruptly.
Jinki blinked, frowned. Stood a moment later. "Sorry?"
"About the code," Minho said before Jinki had a chance to work his mind around things. "The first four digits refer to a highly classified message, only the second four refer to the harbour. And only the first four of the last eight refer to the Princess. The last four digits mean a kidnapping. 31 would mean nothing."
"Oh," Jinki said, but Minho had already taken off, great long loping steps that Jinki didn't have a chance to catch up to, but he chased after him anyway. "Where are you going?"
Minho glanced over his shoulder, an unreadable expression in his eyes, but if Jinki had to take a guess, he'd say it was something a little like anger. "To rescue him," he yelled, and only quickened his pace.
The distance between them lengthened, and Jinki slowed to a jog. His feet hit the pavement heavily, even as his brain worked around the past few minutes. He got it, he realised suddenly, where Jonghyun was. The Princess. By the harbour. But-
The sounds of a gunshot ringing out surprised him. And not just him, he realised. A child's cry, and Jinki foundhimself inside of the bakery. Bakery? he'd asked Taemin. Yeah, Taemin had said.
Jinki frowned, wondering at the futility of it all even as he walked into the bakery as calmly as he could. "Please leave this place," he says to the girl working behind the counter. There's a fear in her eyes, and he's not surprised. "Quickly," he says. "And everyone."
She nods, going into the back, returning with a number of employees and the person who he can only guess is the owner. "Is there a problem, young man?"
"There's..." Jinki nods. It's strange how calm he is. Like everything's already done. "There's a bomb," he says. "I think it's safest if... you leave for now."
"Better safe than sorry," the owner says amicably. "Although if this is just a prank-"
"It's not!" Jinki says quickly.
The bakery vacated, Jinki runs down the alleyway. He hesitates at the door, still open a crack. Nervously, he checks his phone-just under a minute left, in theory.
In theory.
He could see Jonghyun on the ground, still and unmoving. Minho was standing next to him, a gun held firmly in his hands. There was a conversation going on, but Jinki couldn't quite catch it. He slipped through the door-Minho caught his eye, and Jinki swallowed, pressing himself against the wall.
It was the same people from before. He could count three different guns trained on Minho-and to think he'd never seen a single real one before today. That must be what it meant when they said that whenever it rained, it poured. And-
"Shit." The word slipped out of his mouth before he could stop it, as he noticed a fourth. A fourth that Minho didn't seem to have noticed, because he was hidden behind a few old barrels.
He could feel his heart pounding now. He glanced at Minho, but he was still talking in calm undertones, deflecting questions with unwavering aim. He glanced at the fourth man, slowly getting to his feet.
So Jinki had made plenty of bad decisions already, right? So one more couldn't hurt?
He threw himself forward, their combined weight hitting one of the barrels in enough of a clatter that when Jinki looked up again, all eyes were in their direction.
"Minho!" he yelled, even as Minho reverted his attention, quick shots sounding out in succession. The man Jinki had been struggling with flipped them over, so now Jinki was pinned under his weight. There was a glint to his eyes that he couldn't say he liked. The sort of glint that really got his heart pounding, and his mouth was terribly dry.
And-shit, the gun. He tried to knock it surreptitiously out of the way, but the other man got there first. Jinki followed it with his eyes, wondering how long it'd been.
The gun disappeared. Or it seemed it disappeared, the man suddenly clutching his hand to his chest with a howl of pain. With a sudden burst of strength, Jinki pushed him off, scrambling to his feet. Minho came running over, gun still in hand.
"You okay?" he asked.
He was worried, Jinki realised. He nodded mutely, eyes scanning the situation. There were four limp bodies-one was Jonghyun, one was the first woman, so the other two were-
He looked at Minho, eyes wide. "There's still-" was all he managed to get out, before another gun shot split the air, and Jinki was being shoved out of the way, Minho's weight tumbling on top of him.
"-one more," he finished quietly. "Why?" he asked, even as Minho's grip on Jinki's shoulder was loosening. "I'm not...him."
"You're like him," was all Minho said. "I... you look like him."
"Oh," Jinki said quietly. He sighed, let his head fall against the floor. The gunman was standing, Jonghyun's body being carried out. Blue jacket, he thought-the guy with the detonator was the one wearing the blue jacket.
A movement caught his eye, and he squinted at the '19' on the clock-
-and then the world blew up around him.
-
"It's simple, we want the source code."
Jinki starts. Not that he wasn't expecting it. "Where are you?" he asks again instead. "You agreed that you would be here so we could discuss this in person."
A laugh. "Oh don't worry, we're here. In fact, we can see you right now." He looks around him instinctively, even though he knows he won't see anything. As if reading his mind, the person on the other end of the phone laughs again. "But you can't see us. See, it's simple. You're the main developer behind the source code, aren't you? So you can either give it to us, or we can take... you."
Kibum had been right. This had been a bad idea. "Or neither," he says. He's calmer than he feels, and he's a tiny bit grateful for that. "Not that I would build it for criminals in the first place, but it's not like I could have done it by myself anyway." The criminals part was a guess, but the last bit was true. Kibum had been, well, key to the entire organization.
"Criminals? Oh, we're much more than that. I thought you were smarter than this, but I guess not."
There's the distinct sound of a phone being flipped shut, and Jinki is left staring at his own phone in confusion. And then in the next moment, he's sinking, sinking, sinking and he's never liked the taste of water like this. His lungs are burning, but so is his back so maybe there's more to it than he thinks. Not that he's reall thinking.
He gasps, but his lungs flood cloistered instead. He tries to kick up, but he can't tell which way is up. Or down. Maybe he's kicking down. Or, nowhere, it doesn't seem to be working.
A strong grip around his wrist, his eyes fluttering open to see a familiar face-
-he coughs, spluttering. It hurts. He hurts. His eyes squeeze shut, but still, fire burns down his limbs, his back-
"This isn't what we agreed on!" A voice, low, urgent. Unfamiliar? No, familiar. Now.
He's tired. Fading. Falling.
"So? Are you going soft, Minho?"
Familiar?
Maybe.
Oh. Maybe.
-
June 13, 20xx, 20:37
Silence greets him when he opens his eyes. The room isn't dark, a small bedside lamp a steady source of lamp nearby. Jinki sits up slowly, eyes glancing around for the screen. "Taemin?" he calls, when he finds it.
The boy rolls into view, a worried expression on his face. Jinki smiles at him reassuringly. "At the harbour, the Princess," he says.
Taemin stares at him blankly, confusion written all over his face, before something clicks and an eager expression lights up his face. "Are you sure, hyung?"
Jinki nods. "I think," he says. "Where's Kibum?"
"I-let me tell him."
Taemin disappears, and Jinki's left by himself in the room. He flops back down on the bed, sorting out the memories flooding through his mind. It won't last for long-it's just the source code messing with his head, and more likely than not, he'll end up back to where he was, with nothing.
Man, he'd made a stupid mistake back then, hadn't he?
A clatter jerks him out of his musings, and he sits back up just as Taemin reappears excitedly. "Hyung said there were a few officers near there and they questioned a few people and-and I think we found him. We did it, hyung! The source code works."
Jinki matches his grin. "He'll be there. You'll find him," he says.
Taemin laughs lightly, dropping into the chair. "Yeah. I'm glad, especially for Kibum hyung."
"Source code works."
"It does, except..."
The smile falls off of Taemin's face, and Jinki nods, unconsciously mirroring the boy as he bites at his lower lip.
"It's okay," he reassures him. "I know. I'm pretty much dead, right? That's the only way source code could work, since we never got around to fixing the memory bug."
"Hyung, it's... we're... I'm-"
There's tears now, and Jinki feels suddenly guilty. "Don't cry, Taemin-ah, in the end, we found him didn't we?"
"But you, you're-"
"I'm stuck in here. Forever, probably, or at least until I die properly, right?" He shrugs, forces a smile on. "Hey Taemin, could you do me a favour?"
Taemin nods, hesitantly."If I can, hyung."
"Give me access to the code. I think I've figured out the problem."
"You mean-"
"Yeah, if we change the way we process the fermion spins-" he laughs, shrugs, even though he knows Taemin can't see it, that somewhere out there his real body exists, and here it's just the manifestation of his body that his mind is projecting. "Anyway, then we won't have the restrictions and it'll work like we planned it to."
Taemin nods again, and there's the tapping of keys, before a scrolling wall of code appears on one of the walls. Jinki hums as he stands, pulling out a keyboard from a drawer in the wall. He's pretty confident about this, an entaglement problem. Funny what dying a few times can do to your thought process.
It doesn't take too long, now that he knows what the problem is. The answer was always simpler to find when you knew it already. "There, that's done," he says, satisfied. He glances back at the screen, wondering if Taemin had heard him. "Check it, just in case, but that solves the problem we had, doesn't it?"
Taemin is rubbing at his eyes, but he nods and Jinki can hear him tapping at the keyboard again. His eyes open wide as he scrolls down the code, and Jinki laughs at his wonder.
"By the way, could I ask for one more favour?" he says.
Taemin looks up at the camera again. "What is it?"
Jinki takes a deep breath. "Send me into the source code again."
Taemin stared. "What. But we've already-"
"I have a hunch about this. I think it's possible. I mean, for the source code to last longer than eight minutes-sorry, Taemin-ah, it's... this is like abandoning you guys, but I mean, Minho, I think... I think now, he's... gone too. And I think he deserves a happy ending too. I can't really do anything about Onew, but if I can at least do something for Minho, I think... Onew would've liked that too."
"But it's the pas-"
"The many worlds theory. Every single possibility already exists, we just have to find the right one." Jinki cuts him off, shrugging offhandedly before he remembers that Taemin can't see.
"That's just a theory!" Taemin protests.
Jinki laughs. "Source code was just a theory too, and look where that's led us." He pauses here, a consideration taking root in his mind. "Tell Kibum sorry for me, okay? And tell him that he was right, I made a stupid choice. He likes being right."
Taemin is staring at him, realising that Jinki is completely serious about this. "...hyung."
Jinki smiles lightly at the serious look on the younger man's face. "Well, maybe tell him after you guys go out to celebrate, make sure Jonghyun's okay." Taemin is still staring at him silently, so Jinki continues. "By the way, I kind of lost your number when I, well, you know. I don't think my cellphone was waterproof. Mind if you give it to me again? I'll text you when I'm done, maybe we can meet up after. I think I'd like that."
"Yeah, I think I'd like that too." Taemin speaks quietly, even as he's tapping at the keyboard again, and a phone number blinks on the wall the source code of the source code had been on. Jinki commits it to memory, mouthing the digits to himself, before turning his attention back to the screen. Taemin is biting at his lower lip, but tears still pooled at the corners of his eyes. Jinki swallows, struggling to keep his smile in the face of Taemin's tears. "Good luck, hyung. And thank you."
Jinki shrugs. "It was the least I could do," he says. "And hey, smile."
"Yeah," Taemin says. He tries one tentatively, and Jinki beams when the corners of his lips tip upwards just slightly. "Yeah."
-
June 13, 20xx, 14:32
"Hey, hyung!" Taemin runs after the older man, finally in range to grab his wrist.
Kibum snaps around, eyes blazing in anger. "I'm going to kill them," he says, and Taemin takes an involuntary step back. They'd just gotten the call, Jonghyun's shaky voice not too reassuring over the line, but Kibum was taking the news of his friend's attempted kidnapping as well as could be expected.
"It turned out okay, didn't it?" Taemin says with a shake of his head. Someone had to be the voice of reason around here. Especially since Jinki hyung was-he shakes his head again, this time dispelling the stray thought, although he can't help the glance over his shoulder at the room where they're keeping him on life support. He looks back at Kibum, pursing his lips. "I know you're worried about Jonghyung hyung, but it's not like they actually kidnapped him, just tried to, right?"
"Like that matters," Kibum scoffs. He shakes Taemin off and stalks out the door before Taemin manages to stop him, the younger boy reaching after him before he sighs and drops his arm.
Taemin sighs again, and heads back to his desk to grab his phone and keys. He had one new message, but he figures he has time to check it later. "Be back soon!" he mouthes in Jinki's direction, before he follows Kibum out the door.
Testing the source code could wait for another day. For now, making sure Kibum didn't actually kill anyone seemed a little more important. Just a little.
Previous
Pairing/Focus: Onew-centric, Onew/Minho
Rating: PG-13
Final word count: 14,700
Summary: Where Jinki finds himself with a man he doesn't know, a cup of coffee (he hates coffee), and eight minutes to save the world. Sort of. Source Code!AU.
June 13, 20xx, 14:07
"No seriously, hyung. You can't keep running away from this."
Jinki bit back the urge to sigh or alternatively bury his face in his hands. Instead, he forced himself to look straight into eyes that were quickly becoming familiar. "I don't mean to," he said. He had a much better idea of what he was running away from now. Or wasn't. Or what Onew had been running away from. The thought sent a pang of guilt through his chest.
Something seemed to click in Minho's eyes, and he leaned forward, almost expectantly. Jinki swallowed. "Maybe we should actually, uh, talk about it. Or something. Yeah. That's probably the best idea." Inwardly, he cursed himself for his awkwardness, as he scrambled for more words to fill in the silence when Minho's phone rang.
Minho reached for the phone, checking the number, Jinki realised for the first time. "Sorry, I have to-"
"No you don't," Jinki said abruptly. He leaned forward and pulled the phone from Minho's surprised grip, ending the call. "You don't have to," he repeated. The moment over, any boldness that he'd been momentarily bolstered with seemed to drain from his body, as doubt assailed him. Jonghyun, his mind reminded him. Not this Jonghyun, he reminded his mind.
"It's work." Minho frowned, recovering from the surprise and retrieving his phone from Jinki's now slack grasp. Jinki made a vague effort to hang on, but he knew it was futile, even as Minho redialed the number, apologising for the inconvenience.
So plan A. Get the note, hope it was helpful, and find Jonghyun. Plan B. Ask Minho. If he were to be honest with himself, neither seemed particularly good. On the other hand, it was a start, and one that he didn't have when he'd first started with all this. Or when he first remembered starting with all this. Memory, he thought ruefully.
Minho was standing, and Jinki stood with him. "Sorry hyung, I have to go-" Minho started to say, when Jinki suddenly found himself with his hand around Minho's wrist, holding him back. Minho had been smiling at the end, Jinki suddenly remembered, and clenched his jaw. "No, stay. I... have something to tell you." I don't want to see you dead again, he thought, at the same moment he thought, disorder, and knew with a sinking certainty that Minho hadn't lived to see the end of his own eight minutes.
"Something's wrong," Minho said simply.
"Something is," Jinki agreed readily, and wondered briefly what Onew would've replied with. "What would you say if I told you I knew what was going to happen in the next few minutes?"
Minho opened his mouth to speak, and then shut it again just as abruptly, musing over the words. "It depends on what you said," he answered quietly, hand toying with the phone. "But this has to wait, hyung. I really have to go."
"No you don't," Jinki insisted. "You'd get there too late, and then it's all too late, but it won't be if you tell me about, um, about your past."
Minho went dead silent, so still that Jinki blinked in compensation under Minho's gaze. "What does my past have to do with anything?" he said slowly. "You've never brought it up before."
"It's... more specifically, were there any um, hide outs where they could hide a person?"
"They?" Minho asked with raised eyebrows.
Jinki nodded, wondering if this might work after all. "A man in a green shirt, right? And he's... someone who you knew at one point. And they're going to kidnap someone," or already have, he thought morosely, "and please, we need to find him. Can you trust me?"
Minho gave him another long, hard look, and Jinki suppressed a shudder. "I'll trust you," he finally said. Jinki grinned in elation, but stopped when Minho held up a hand. "But I don't know if I believe you yet."
"Believe me," Jinki said, and was struck by a burst of inspiration. "Behind the bakery. That's one of their places, isn't it?"
Minho looked taken aback. "You're not supposed to know that," he said.
Jinki nodded. "But I do. It's... hard to explain." Very hard to explain.
"You're not... you," Minho said slowly, with some sort of dawning comprehension that set Jinki on edge.
"It's hard to explain," he repeated, and grabbed him by the hand dragging him off, across the road, somewhere, anyway to show that he should be trusted. Not as Onew, but as him. Or as not him. "Just trust me on this."
Minho pulled away abruptly, and Jinki slowed to a stop, turning on his heel. "Why should I?" Minho asked. "What did you do with him?"
Jinki blanched, swallowing hard. "I... He's..." dead, he thought. And you'll be dead too. Except that wasn't particularly trust inspiring. "It's complicated," he settled on. "We're sort of the same, right now."
Minho's eyes were dark with an undecipherable expression, and Jinki wasn't sure if it was hatred or anger or something else altogether. Something twisted at the place just behind his stomach, and Jinki swallowed nervously. He found himself running his eyes down the other man's jaw bone instead, following it down the line of his body on the way to the ground. If his gaze lingered slightly too long on the toned shape of his arms, Jinki disregarded it.
"You're-" Minho started to say.
There was a screech of tires, and there wasn't enough time to react as Minho leaped forward, his full weight slamming into Jinki even as another force sent the two of them flying. Impulse, Jinki thought blearily, as Minho's arms went slack around him.
Sorry, he tried to say, but found he couldn't say much of anything at all.
-
June 13, 20xx, 20:13
"Sorry sorry sorry-" Jinki comes to saying, when he realises that he suddenly can say things all over again. His head hits the wall with a thunk, a groan not quite making its way out from between his lips. He forces his eyes open and is greeted with darkness. The screen is back, and Jinki blinks it into focus. "Taemin?" he calls tentatively, even while stars still swim in his vision.
"You're back early." The boy's voice is lightly teasing, but his heart isn't really in it. "Any progress?" he asks after a beat. He sounds tired-things probably weren't going great on his end either.
Jinki shakes his head. "Sorry," he says again. He frowns. He's been saying that a lot lately. "How much time?" he asks.
It's Taemin's turn to shake his head. "Depends," Taemin says. "I... we found the motorcycle, and you were right, the blood found inside the trailer matched the DNA of Jonghyun's, but-"
"Where?" Jinki cuts Taemin off. He can guess what Taemin's hesitating over, and he's not sure he wants to hear it. Wants to hear how much blood there is, wants to hear how badly he might be hurt. Taemin frowns at him, as if to remind Jinki that they don't know where Jonghyun was and wasn't that the whole point of all this-"Just a general direction. Area."
Taemin pauses, before he nods. "Near Avenue and Fifth."
Jinki nods to himself. That would have to be enough. "Let me try again," he says, and doesn't have to wait long before the world manages to invert itself all over again.
-
"Congratulations on graduating!"
Minho frowns at him, quirks his eyebrows. "It was just for show, hyung."
He laughs. "It's still the moment where the rest of your life starts. Look, you can see the future now!"
"Right," Minho deadpans, even though he's fighting a smile at the corner of his own lips. "The future."
Jinki nods, leaning back on his arms. "The future," he repeats.
-
When the time came this time, Jinki ended up letting Minho go. Not because he'd given up, but because the look in Minho's eyes sent his own heartbeat faster and honestly, Jinki wasn't sure what to do with that.
Memory, he reminded himself wryly, because he was fairly sure that some of the memories swimming in his mind weren't quite his own. He'd really have to find time to fix this bug, or it'd be definitely troublesome later. Especially if someone that wasn't him used it.
So maybe it was like a video game. A little. From what he could recall of the development at least, there'd been discussions involving the statistical likelihood of any given outcome-it'd been Taemin who'd brought it up, like the random number generator of a roleplaying game. Or something. It had mostly gone over Jinki's head at the time, but he could sort of understand the analogy now. Well, now that he was in the source code and wasn't just playing with the source code of the source code itself. That was another thing-they really should think about giving it a proper name, that could get confusing.
But a random chance of disorder was really the only way he can explain this, that when he strolled down the aisle as nonchalantly as he could, what greeted him wasn't the suspicious looking people talking (well, they were there, just further down), a white slip on the ground catching his eye instead. Jinki scooped it up and tucked it into his pocket-the other note was still there as well he realised, when his fingers met with even more paper-just as he catches them mentioning a dropped note.
Ah, Jinki thought.
"Hey," one of the men noticed Jinki standing there. He approached him. Rather menacingly.
Jinki pulled his hands out of his pockets and tried to look not suspicious. In theory, this was all in his mind-or, well Onew's mind, but he was pretty sure that he was losing the distinction himself-so he should be able to look not suspicious to himself. Another part of him reminded himself that that wasn't how the source code worked and will you please focus? That part sounds a little bit like Kibum, actually. "Hi," he said.
The man was taller than Jinki - nearly Minho height, really. Definitely a little menacing. "You didn't happen to pick up a sheet of paper, did you?"
Yes, his mind supplied. "Nope, sorry," his mouth said. Cooperating with him for once-that was a nice improvement.
Helpful.
He booked it out of there as soon as he could, resisting glancing back to where he knew Jonghyun was going to end up-he needed to rescue that Jonghyun, he reminded himself, until he was far enough away that he felt safe enough to pull out the slip of paper.
He frowned at what was written there-a series of numbers. He ran it through all the basic possible cryptography schemes he knew, but nothing seemed to match. If he had a little more time, he could look it up-
Except he never got a chance to. Jinki glanced up only to see a dark shadow, and thought that the second law of thermodynamics really did hold. Death by falling signeage. At least it was something new.
-
June 13, 20xx, 20:21
"So," Jinki says, as soon as his head's managed to stop throbbing, even though it shouldn't have a real effect at all. "Do the numbers 5249 5641 8592 3863 3400 9411 mean anything to you?"
Taemin frowns, pencil scratching on paper carrying through the microphone systems. "Not really," Taemin says.
Jinki shrugs. "I think they might be coordinates," he says. Sighs. "Let's try again?"
"Do your best, hyung," he hears Taemin say, before the world changes again.
He really is getting used to this.
-
June 13, 20xx, 14:07
"Don't go."
The first thing he said this time, before Minho had a chance to open his mouth. He was sure that it sounded a little ridiculous, but desperate times called for desperate measures.
"I'm not going anywhere?" Minho sounded perplexed. Jinki didn't blame him.
The thing was, Jinki had never been great at thinking on his feet. Or under pressure. And this was both. "So," he began, hoping that this time it would actually work.. "There's something I have to tell you. Um, other than what we have to, uh, talk about. It'sóif I gave you a series of numbers, would they mean anything to you?"
Minho looked at him blankly. "What."
So maybe it wasn't working. But you couldn't blame him for not trying. "5249 5641 8592 3863 3400 9431," he recited, and hoped that he actually got it right.
"9411," Minho automatically corrected-before he slapped a hand over his mouth.
Well. So he didn't get it right. But on the other hand-
"So you do know," Jinki said quietly.
Minho fixed him with a hard stare. "Where did you get it from?" he asked.
"The future," he joked, and then shook his head, expression sombering. "That's not important-and um when your phone rings I don't think you should pickitupbecausethenyou'regoingtogobecauseit'sforworkandIpromisethatthisisforthesamething." His words ran into each other as he tried to spit out the rest of his sentence before Minho's phone rang. He barely managed.
"Don't," Jinki repeated-and this time, a glimmer of hope took fragile shape in cavity tucked between his tongue and the roof his mouth, because there was the faintest hesitation in Minho's eyes. He felt a little bad about it, really, he did. He'd make it up to him later, he promised himself. "It's really not a good idea."
"Why not?" Minho asked. His hand was hovering near his pocket.
"Because you'll die," Jinki said simply. He didn't mention that Minho might, regardless. "It's...complicated," he explained. Without really explaining.
Minho frowned, and Jinki took it as a sign to continue. "What do they mean?" Jinki said before Minho has a chance to speak. The ringing finally stopped, and Jinki allowed himself a moment of relief before pressing on. "The numbers. They're a location, right? A hideout?"
"That's-"
"Avenue and Fifth," Jinki pressed on relentlessly. "In that direction."
Minho hesitated-maybe, just maybe, some progress. Their eyes met, Minho's unblinkingly large as they assessed Jinki, and Jinki wondered if Minho'd figured it out yet-again-that he wasn't quite who Minho thought he was. He held his breath.
"The harbour," Minho said eventually. "The first two refer to the harbour, the second two are time coordinates, and the last two are the exact location." He spoke slowly, enunciating the words.
Jinki allowed a smile of relief-because this was a start. The smile slipped away just as quickly when Minho frowned. "You're not him," he said.
"Sort of," Jinki admitted. He'd been expecting this. "Not really."
He was getting really good at this cutting people off business-to be fair, he'd never really had a chance to do this before. "There's...um something else too," he said just as Minho was about to say something more. Minho looked at him curiously, as Jinki reached into his pocket. He fumbled with the note for a moment, before pressing it into Minho's hands.
Minho's face went from displeased to perplexed to...Jinki wasn't quite sure, but the corners of his eyes were drawn and he was frowning a little, his bottom lip sandwiched between his teeth, leaving Jinki wondering if that was a good expression or not.
It was another few moments before Minho looked back up at him, their eyes locking.
"So. Yeah." Jinki shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He was wasting time-he knew he was, but.
"You're not him," Minho said simply.
Jinki nodded. He could guess what Minho meant behind those words. "I... thought you might want to know anyway."
Minho frowned at him, and Jinki wondered briefly if this really was all just a waste of time. "Just-"
"You look like him." It was Minho's turn to cut him off, and Jinki found himself momentarily speechless. Well, he supposed he must look like him, all things considering. They'd never managed more than one person in a source code even in simple test situations to be able to determine how it worked exactly. Minho's phone went off again at that moment. Minho broke eye contact just long enough to fish his phone out of his pocket. Jinki eyed the phone warily, but Minho simply leftit on the table, still ringing.
"You're...not going to pick up?" Jinki asked hesitantly.
Minho laughed, catching Jinki off guard. "You told me I'd die," he pointed out. "I can spare a few moments before that, I think."
"Oh," Jinki said simply. "It's... There's a guy in a green shirt, and they're going to kidnap a guy called Kim Jonghyun - or maybe they already have, but either way you would've been too late."
As if on cue, there was a screech of tires as the same car Jinki'd seen too many times already barrelled past. Jonghyun was in there, but at this moment, Jinki's focus only flickered there for a moment before reverting to Minho - not this Jonghyun, he reminded himself. "Too late," he confirmed with a wry smile.
Minho wasn't smiling as he stood, knocking his chair back. He stuffed his phone in his pocket, looking at Jinki. "I lied," he said abruptly.
Jinki blinked, frowned. Stood a moment later. "Sorry?"
"About the code," Minho said before Jinki had a chance to work his mind around things. "The first four digits refer to a highly classified message, only the second four refer to the harbour. And only the first four of the last eight refer to the Princess. The last four digits mean a kidnapping. 31 would mean nothing."
"Oh," Jinki said, but Minho had already taken off, great long loping steps that Jinki didn't have a chance to catch up to, but he chased after him anyway. "Where are you going?"
Minho glanced over his shoulder, an unreadable expression in his eyes, but if Jinki had to take a guess, he'd say it was something a little like anger. "To rescue him," he yelled, and only quickened his pace.
The distance between them lengthened, and Jinki slowed to a jog. His feet hit the pavement heavily, even as his brain worked around the past few minutes. He got it, he realised suddenly, where Jonghyun was. The Princess. By the harbour. But-
The sounds of a gunshot ringing out surprised him. And not just him, he realised. A child's cry, and Jinki foundhimself inside of the bakery. Bakery? he'd asked Taemin. Yeah, Taemin had said.
Jinki frowned, wondering at the futility of it all even as he walked into the bakery as calmly as he could. "Please leave this place," he says to the girl working behind the counter. There's a fear in her eyes, and he's not surprised. "Quickly," he says. "And everyone."
She nods, going into the back, returning with a number of employees and the person who he can only guess is the owner. "Is there a problem, young man?"
"There's..." Jinki nods. It's strange how calm he is. Like everything's already done. "There's a bomb," he says. "I think it's safest if... you leave for now."
"Better safe than sorry," the owner says amicably. "Although if this is just a prank-"
"It's not!" Jinki says quickly.
The bakery vacated, Jinki runs down the alleyway. He hesitates at the door, still open a crack. Nervously, he checks his phone-just under a minute left, in theory.
In theory.
He could see Jonghyun on the ground, still and unmoving. Minho was standing next to him, a gun held firmly in his hands. There was a conversation going on, but Jinki couldn't quite catch it. He slipped through the door-Minho caught his eye, and Jinki swallowed, pressing himself against the wall.
It was the same people from before. He could count three different guns trained on Minho-and to think he'd never seen a single real one before today. That must be what it meant when they said that whenever it rained, it poured. And-
"Shit." The word slipped out of his mouth before he could stop it, as he noticed a fourth. A fourth that Minho didn't seem to have noticed, because he was hidden behind a few old barrels.
He could feel his heart pounding now. He glanced at Minho, but he was still talking in calm undertones, deflecting questions with unwavering aim. He glanced at the fourth man, slowly getting to his feet.
So Jinki had made plenty of bad decisions already, right? So one more couldn't hurt?
He threw himself forward, their combined weight hitting one of the barrels in enough of a clatter that when Jinki looked up again, all eyes were in their direction.
"Minho!" he yelled, even as Minho reverted his attention, quick shots sounding out in succession. The man Jinki had been struggling with flipped them over, so now Jinki was pinned under his weight. There was a glint to his eyes that he couldn't say he liked. The sort of glint that really got his heart pounding, and his mouth was terribly dry.
And-shit, the gun. He tried to knock it surreptitiously out of the way, but the other man got there first. Jinki followed it with his eyes, wondering how long it'd been.
The gun disappeared. Or it seemed it disappeared, the man suddenly clutching his hand to his chest with a howl of pain. With a sudden burst of strength, Jinki pushed him off, scrambling to his feet. Minho came running over, gun still in hand.
"You okay?" he asked.
He was worried, Jinki realised. He nodded mutely, eyes scanning the situation. There were four limp bodies-one was Jonghyun, one was the first woman, so the other two were-
He looked at Minho, eyes wide. "There's still-" was all he managed to get out, before another gun shot split the air, and Jinki was being shoved out of the way, Minho's weight tumbling on top of him.
"-one more," he finished quietly. "Why?" he asked, even as Minho's grip on Jinki's shoulder was loosening. "I'm not...him."
"You're like him," was all Minho said. "I... you look like him."
"Oh," Jinki said quietly. He sighed, let his head fall against the floor. The gunman was standing, Jonghyun's body being carried out. Blue jacket, he thought-the guy with the detonator was the one wearing the blue jacket.
A movement caught his eye, and he squinted at the '19' on the clock-
-and then the world blew up around him.
-
"It's simple, we want the source code."
Jinki starts. Not that he wasn't expecting it. "Where are you?" he asks again instead. "You agreed that you would be here so we could discuss this in person."
A laugh. "Oh don't worry, we're here. In fact, we can see you right now." He looks around him instinctively, even though he knows he won't see anything. As if reading his mind, the person on the other end of the phone laughs again. "But you can't see us. See, it's simple. You're the main developer behind the source code, aren't you? So you can either give it to us, or we can take... you."
Kibum had been right. This had been a bad idea. "Or neither," he says. He's calmer than he feels, and he's a tiny bit grateful for that. "Not that I would build it for criminals in the first place, but it's not like I could have done it by myself anyway." The criminals part was a guess, but the last bit was true. Kibum had been, well, key to the entire organization.
"Criminals? Oh, we're much more than that. I thought you were smarter than this, but I guess not."
There's the distinct sound of a phone being flipped shut, and Jinki is left staring at his own phone in confusion. And then in the next moment, he's sinking, sinking, sinking and he's never liked the taste of water like this. His lungs are burning, but so is his back so maybe there's more to it than he thinks. Not that he's reall thinking.
He gasps, but his lungs flood cloistered instead. He tries to kick up, but he can't tell which way is up. Or down. Maybe he's kicking down. Or, nowhere, it doesn't seem to be working.
A strong grip around his wrist, his eyes fluttering open to see a familiar face-
-he coughs, spluttering. It hurts. He hurts. His eyes squeeze shut, but still, fire burns down his limbs, his back-
"This isn't what we agreed on!" A voice, low, urgent. Unfamiliar? No, familiar. Now.
He's tired. Fading. Falling.
"So? Are you going soft, Minho?"
Familiar?
Maybe.
Oh. Maybe.
-
June 13, 20xx, 20:37
Silence greets him when he opens his eyes. The room isn't dark, a small bedside lamp a steady source of lamp nearby. Jinki sits up slowly, eyes glancing around for the screen. "Taemin?" he calls, when he finds it.
The boy rolls into view, a worried expression on his face. Jinki smiles at him reassuringly. "At the harbour, the Princess," he says.
Taemin stares at him blankly, confusion written all over his face, before something clicks and an eager expression lights up his face. "Are you sure, hyung?"
Jinki nods. "I think," he says. "Where's Kibum?"
"I-let me tell him."
Taemin disappears, and Jinki's left by himself in the room. He flops back down on the bed, sorting out the memories flooding through his mind. It won't last for long-it's just the source code messing with his head, and more likely than not, he'll end up back to where he was, with nothing.
Man, he'd made a stupid mistake back then, hadn't he?
A clatter jerks him out of his musings, and he sits back up just as Taemin reappears excitedly. "Hyung said there were a few officers near there and they questioned a few people and-and I think we found him. We did it, hyung! The source code works."
Jinki matches his grin. "He'll be there. You'll find him," he says.
Taemin laughs lightly, dropping into the chair. "Yeah. I'm glad, especially for Kibum hyung."
"Source code works."
"It does, except..."
The smile falls off of Taemin's face, and Jinki nods, unconsciously mirroring the boy as he bites at his lower lip.
"It's okay," he reassures him. "I know. I'm pretty much dead, right? That's the only way source code could work, since we never got around to fixing the memory bug."
"Hyung, it's... we're... I'm-"
There's tears now, and Jinki feels suddenly guilty. "Don't cry, Taemin-ah, in the end, we found him didn't we?"
"But you, you're-"
"I'm stuck in here. Forever, probably, or at least until I die properly, right?" He shrugs, forces a smile on. "Hey Taemin, could you do me a favour?"
Taemin nods, hesitantly."If I can, hyung."
"Give me access to the code. I think I've figured out the problem."
"You mean-"
"Yeah, if we change the way we process the fermion spins-" he laughs, shrugs, even though he knows Taemin can't see it, that somewhere out there his real body exists, and here it's just the manifestation of his body that his mind is projecting. "Anyway, then we won't have the restrictions and it'll work like we planned it to."
Taemin nods again, and there's the tapping of keys, before a scrolling wall of code appears on one of the walls. Jinki hums as he stands, pulling out a keyboard from a drawer in the wall. He's pretty confident about this, an entaglement problem. Funny what dying a few times can do to your thought process.
It doesn't take too long, now that he knows what the problem is. The answer was always simpler to find when you knew it already. "There, that's done," he says, satisfied. He glances back at the screen, wondering if Taemin had heard him. "Check it, just in case, but that solves the problem we had, doesn't it?"
Taemin is rubbing at his eyes, but he nods and Jinki can hear him tapping at the keyboard again. His eyes open wide as he scrolls down the code, and Jinki laughs at his wonder.
"By the way, could I ask for one more favour?" he says.
Taemin looks up at the camera again. "What is it?"
Jinki takes a deep breath. "Send me into the source code again."
Taemin stared. "What. But we've already-"
"I have a hunch about this. I think it's possible. I mean, for the source code to last longer than eight minutes-sorry, Taemin-ah, it's... this is like abandoning you guys, but I mean, Minho, I think... I think now, he's... gone too. And I think he deserves a happy ending too. I can't really do anything about Onew, but if I can at least do something for Minho, I think... Onew would've liked that too."
"But it's the pas-"
"The many worlds theory. Every single possibility already exists, we just have to find the right one." Jinki cuts him off, shrugging offhandedly before he remembers that Taemin can't see.
"That's just a theory!" Taemin protests.
Jinki laughs. "Source code was just a theory too, and look where that's led us." He pauses here, a consideration taking root in his mind. "Tell Kibum sorry for me, okay? And tell him that he was right, I made a stupid choice. He likes being right."
Taemin is staring at him, realising that Jinki is completely serious about this. "...hyung."
Jinki smiles lightly at the serious look on the younger man's face. "Well, maybe tell him after you guys go out to celebrate, make sure Jonghyun's okay." Taemin is still staring at him silently, so Jinki continues. "By the way, I kind of lost your number when I, well, you know. I don't think my cellphone was waterproof. Mind if you give it to me again? I'll text you when I'm done, maybe we can meet up after. I think I'd like that."
"Yeah, I think I'd like that too." Taemin speaks quietly, even as he's tapping at the keyboard again, and a phone number blinks on the wall the source code of the source code had been on. Jinki commits it to memory, mouthing the digits to himself, before turning his attention back to the screen. Taemin is biting at his lower lip, but tears still pooled at the corners of his eyes. Jinki swallows, struggling to keep his smile in the face of Taemin's tears. "Good luck, hyung. And thank you."
Jinki shrugs. "It was the least I could do," he says. "And hey, smile."
"Yeah," Taemin says. He tries one tentatively, and Jinki beams when the corners of his lips tip upwards just slightly. "Yeah."
-
June 13, 20xx, 14:32
"Hey, hyung!" Taemin runs after the older man, finally in range to grab his wrist.
Kibum snaps around, eyes blazing in anger. "I'm going to kill them," he says, and Taemin takes an involuntary step back. They'd just gotten the call, Jonghyun's shaky voice not too reassuring over the line, but Kibum was taking the news of his friend's attempted kidnapping as well as could be expected.
"It turned out okay, didn't it?" Taemin says with a shake of his head. Someone had to be the voice of reason around here. Especially since Jinki hyung was-he shakes his head again, this time dispelling the stray thought, although he can't help the glance over his shoulder at the room where they're keeping him on life support. He looks back at Kibum, pursing his lips. "I know you're worried about Jonghyung hyung, but it's not like they actually kidnapped him, just tried to, right?"
"Like that matters," Kibum scoffs. He shakes Taemin off and stalks out the door before Taemin manages to stop him, the younger boy reaching after him before he sighs and drops his arm.
Taemin sighs again, and heads back to his desk to grab his phone and keys. He had one new message, but he figures he has time to check it later. "Be back soon!" he mouthes in Jinki's direction, before he follows Kibum out the door.
Testing the source code could wait for another day. For now, making sure Kibum didn't actually kill anyone seemed a little more important. Just a little.
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