Archive of Our Own

Prologue: U1L103

But isn’t the difference too much? he thinks as hot water cascades down his face.

Shin Jaehyun rinses shampoo from his hair mechanically, barely closes his eyes to keep the soap out. If it stings, he doesn’t notice.

What rankles him is the way the “system” helped Park Moondae at every step of the way. Clearly stated goals, insider information, reward traits. Things you aren’t supposed to have, because it’s supposed to be hard, it’s supposed to hurt. You don’t just get second chances in exchange for nothing.

The word that comes to mind is ‘coddling.’ The system coddled Park Moondae. It played favorites, and Park Moondae was that favorite. Whereas Shin Jaehyun had to claw his way through a hundred lives, gathering pieces one by one, just to understand the puzzle he was supposed to be solving, Park Moondae was handed a detailed blueprint of every step he needed to take and a fully stocked toolbox to execute those steps. It’s been burning a hole through his chest ever since Park Moondae told him the truth about how the “system,” as he calls it, works for him.

Park Moondae always had a friend in the system looking out for him, and Shin Jaehyun only ever had a malevolent ghost lurking over his shoulder. That’s not fair, in a way that stings more irritatingly than soap in his eyes.

A memory comes to mind: Park Moondae, frustrated, saying, “Shin Jaehyun, you’re such a fucking brat.” (Shin Jaehyun: too surprised to respond.)

Jaehyun yanks the knob, cutting the water off too suddenly. Cold air slaps his face, unpleasant after the heat of the shower, a shock. Similar to hearing Park Moondae call him that.

It was because of something Jaehyun said. Snidely, Jaehyun commented, “Ah, so that’s why Testar was so successful. It makes sense now. It wasn’t really hard for you, with all the help you had, was it?”

Park Moondae’s stare of disbelief satisfied something deep inside Jaehyun – the part of him that wanted to find a livid bruise and poke it – up until he started talking.

“You know, I don’t think you even want things to have been easier for you. That would be normal, to regret how hard you had it. But what you regret is that things weren’t harder for me. That’s just childish.”

In response, Jaehyun… sneered, maybe. He made an expression that he didn’t think much of at the time. And Park Moondae took offense, which was hardly unusual. Park Moondae was usually ticked off when they interacted, and that was usually by Jaehyun’s design. But why did he have to sound like that?

Impatient, almost disgusted, like he was reprimanding someone younger. (Jaehyun was younger, technically, but also older, even more technically.) “Shin Jaehyun, you’re such a fucking brat.” Again, he’s remembering it again.

Ah, how annoying. He turned off the water, but there’s still shampoo dripping out of his hair.

Furious, he turns it back on. The water comes down hot, then cold, then hot again. Searing his skin, while Park Moondae’s voice keeps repeating in his head, and his heart is starting to pound, and he’s itching beneath his skin for something he doesn’t want to want.

Ah, fuck it.

Water still pouring down, he reaches outside the curtain for the phone sitting on the edge of the sink. The number is on speed dial. It only rings a short while before the call connects.

He says, “Hoobae. Come over.”

“What for?” Rudely, like he owes no respect.

Jaehyun glares down at his hard cock, thighs aching with tension, water swirling around the drain. “To take some fucking responsibility,” he says, and hangs up.

Chapter: U2L5

[ Can you see this? ]

Shin Jaehyun will never forget the way the words appeared in front of him, small and bright white against the black sky. For some reason, what stood out to him was that the letters were sort of pixelated, as if on a computer screen. Smooth at first glance but all jagged pixels if you looked too hard. For a dizzying moment it was like the entire vista in front of him was just a computer’s screensaver, and he blinked, waiting for his vision to focus properly.

But his eyes refocused on the same sprawling view, dark sky above and neon city lights below. And that one inexplicable line of text, superimposed across where the horizon would be, somewhere beyond the buildings.

The letters untyped themselves, retyped themselves.

[ Can you see this?? ]

Jaehyun rubbed his eyes. “Ah. I’ve really gone insane now.” It had been… what, five lives? It worried him that he was already losing track. First his memory, then his sanity. If he kept losing parts of himself, how would he ever win his perfect ending?

[ Can’t argue with that. ]

Was he really being insulted by his own mind now?

[ Sorry, I can’t provide any proof you’re actually seeing this. I have limited options. ]

Well, he supposed he was glad his insanity wasn’t conjuring up convincing hallucinations. He turned from the balcony and went back inside. His abandoned tea had gone cold, but he sipped it anyway, because nothing mattered. He stared at the TV, considered putting the news back on. He should keep up with the headlines his groupmate’s drunk driving accident was making. Keep his eyes wide open as everything went to shit yet again.

Or not. What was the point?

“Should I just do it now?” he asked himself, looking back out toward the balcony. He’d jumped from there last time.

In the corner of his eye, the words typed themselves across the lifeless TV screen. [ Please don’t. It’s disorienting for me when you reset. ]

That didn’t seem like the kind of message his brain would make up. Sure, he was likely insane, but this just didn’t sound like his own kind of insanity.

“Why’s that?” he asked, humoring whatever this was.

[ It takes time for me to disentangle myself from the system. Each time you reset, I have to restart the process from the beginning too. ]

“The… system.”

[ That’s what I call it. This thing that sets your success parameters and makes you restart when you don’t meet them. ]

Jaehyun set his mug down on the table. It clicked against the glass, hard and clear. “What are you talking about?”

That was how he met him, five lives in, on the brink of total cynicism, just about certain he was alone in the universe. That was how he met the boy in the system.

That night, he dreamed he was backstage. Maybe it was supposed to be an awards show. There were people everywhere but his group members were nowhere and he needed to gather them, they needed to be on stage now, but everything moved slow as syrup and he couldn’t find them. Then the endless warren of dressing rooms and hallways cut to black. Abruptly, it wasn’t his members who were nowhere. It was him. He was in a void of flat black, just him and another man.

This boy was as unreal as the void, but where the void was disconcertingly static, he was almost nauseatingly malleable. His hair seemed to be both light and dark. His face could have been stern or soft. And his voice–

“Ha!” the boy said, sounding surprised and pleased. “It worked.” It sounded like two people speaking at once, in perfect harmony.

Jaehyun thought, alright, this doesn’t make sense. None of this makes sense. It’s a dream. He’d gone to sleep, and now he was dreaming.

“No, idiot, don’t–”

The entire world deformed like inflating bubble gum or a digital image that had been grabbed at the corner and stretched, part of him was waking up but part of him was anchored here, anchored by the hand squeezing his. Hard. The grip would hurt, if this wasn’t a dream. The world snapped back into place, shuddering around that one stable point in space.

“Don’t try to wake up.”

Jaehyun stared into that malforming face, watched it glitch and settle into an expression of fear and exasperation. “I’m not doing it on purpose,” he said coldly. Shin Jaehyun was not an idiot, and he had not yet learned to suffer people who thought he was.

The boy blinked. His expression smoothed out. Without the fear, his face was the kind of unreadable Jaehyun both strived for himself and hated on anyone else. “Sorry. Just try not to think about the fact that you’re asleep. It’s delicate.”

Jaehyun stepped back, pulling his hand away. The world stayed put. Surprisingly, so did the man’s appearance, even as Jaehyun circled him. After the initial turbulence, his face had settled on a man somewhat younger and shorter than Jaehyun, with gentle, handsome features. It wasn’t what he pictured for the message writer, but then, maybe he didn’t really picture the message writer as human. “You’re the one who wrote that stuff? How are you doing this?”

“The system does maintenance while you’re asleep. I figured– shit, stop that–”

Too late. Jaehyun was awake, staring at his ceiling.

That was a strange dream, he thought.

But whereas the backstage nightmare was melty and hard to grasp in his memories, he could picture the annoyance in the man’s face as he reached for Jaehyun at the end with perfect clarity, as if he really just saw it. If it wasn’t a dream…

He rolled over, checked the time on his clock. There were several hours until morning. “If I go back to sleep, will I go back there?” he wondered aloud.

[ Too late. Maintenance is over. ]

The words glowed with an accusing air and a faintly blue light in the darkness of his room, similar to the numbers on his clock. Jaehyun could practically hear the accusation in the boy’s tone. He found himself smirking up at the message. How ridiculous.

“Wasn’t it your fault for reminding me that I was asleep?”

[ I don’t know why I even try to work with you. Next time, focus better. ]

“Oh, next time.” He stretched and closed his eyes. There was no point trying to make sense of all this now. If it was real (probably not), he could address it in the morning. He slipped back into sleep and back into a dream.

This time, as he weaved around the melee of staff backstage, it wasn’t his members he was searching for.

Chapter: U2L6

The words would pop up again regularly in those last few months of his fifth life. They offered ideas, advice, unsolicited comments. Sometimes he could dismiss them as a figment of his imagination, and sometimes he couldn’t pretend the things they said were anything his mind would come up with.

Maybe it was stubbornness, but he never listened to those suggestions. He lived out those unproductive months in languorous dissatisfaction, watching his career fall apart, and then he woke up in the past and the messages were gone. Words stopped mysteriously typing themselves out in his vision, and the boy stopped slipping through his dreams, pulling him into dark voids and cursing at him for waking up.

For some reason, the absence was even more dissatisfying.

A few months into his sixth life, he finally had another dream of a blank void. The boy sat crosslegged in front of him and picked up on their last dream conversation as if no time had passed.

“You can call me… Ryu Gunwoo.”

There was something suspicious about the way he said it.

“Is that actually your name?” Jaehyun asked.

“What’s wrong with that?”

What a suspicious response, too.

“Nothing. It’s a nice name, if it’s yours.”

“Well, fuck you.”

Jaehyun laughed, and it felt like it had been ages since he did that. “What? What did I say?”

“I don’t know. You’re just pissing me off.” After a moment, Gunwoo said more quietly, “I’m not sure what I want you to call me. So just accept it before I change my mind.”

“Sure. Are you real, Ryu Gunwoo?”

“You’re not going to believe me even if I say yes,” Gunwoo said, and he was annoyed, and that was funny to Jaehyun too. “You ignored me. And then you reset. I hate that. Do you know what it’s like to forget you exist and have to remember?”

Yes, Jaehyun thought. I think I do.

“But I did it faster this time,” Gunwoo continued, self-satisfied. “I’ve gotten faster at separating myself from the system each time you reset and I keep learning how to work it. I think I can force the system into maintenance anytime you’re asleep now, which means I can appear any–”

“Am I asleep?” Jaehyun wondered, suddenly realizing.

“Fucker–”

He woke up laughing. For some reason, the last expression on the boy’s face had been hilarious.

[ You’re a pain in the ass. ]

Jaehyun laughed harder, because the messages were back, the words that floated in his vision like text messages across a screen from a friend far away, and they were from Ryu Gunwoo, someone who remembered Shin Jaehyun, even though he had died and restarted. Finally, someone who remembered. Even if he was made up.

“Whose ass? You don’t have one, you’re not real.”

A middle finger emoticon replaced the words and Jaehyun reached out for where it floated bright white in the darkness, dream-tipsy and laughing and so full of relief he could cry.

The next day, Ryu Gunwoo’s words appeared over the head of a trainee who had never made the cut in Jaehyun’s previous lives. [ You should try this one out. He has that stan appeal vibe. ]

Stan appeal vibe? What was this vocabulary? “He’s not a vocalist or a dancer,” Jaehyun murmured beneath his breath, tucking his head down as he stretched. “Useless.”

The next words appeared against his sleeve as he pulled his arm across his vision. [ Talent and charm are separate things. ]

It was worth noting that Jaehyun hadn’t had friends since his second life.

In his first life, he thought his teammates were his friends. In his second life, he thought he had been given a miraculous second chance to redo everything with his true friends, cutting out those who hadn’t been able to keep up. In his third life, he resolved to only have allies. In his fourth life, he learned not to trust anyone and to believe in no partnership. In his fifth life, he realized that even those he didn’t trust could still betray him.

So, he couldn’t call Ryu Gunwoo a friend. That would be twee and childish. But now that Gunwoo had followed him over the gap between lives, he was able to hope that he had found a partner. Or, not able to hope, but unable to resist hoping. He didn’t want to be this foolish but he found himself approaching the trainee Gunwoo thought was charming enough to make it. He found himself trusting the boy who appeared sporadically in his dreams and every day in words on the edges of his vision. He felt, against all instinct, that he wasn’t alone.

When he reset at the end of that year amid a wreckage of a career, it was Ryu Gunwoo he called for when he woke up in the past, and nearly wept when there was no answer.

Chapter: U2L7

It took Gunwoo less than three months this time, and the dream wasn’t a void. It was some kind of endless room, white floor and white walls and white ceiling, and Ryu Gunwoo with his bleached blond hair and dark circles beneath his eyes. Shimmering strands like gossamer, or like some educational video’s representation of helical strands of DNA, twined around his limbs and stretched off into every distance, like he was woven into a giant spider’s web. They burrowed beneath his clothes and under his skin.

Jaehyun stood there looking at him for a long moment, then he walked forward and wrapped himself around Ryu Gunwoo, buried his head in his shoulder. Gossamer connections snapped beneath his weight and Gunwoo flinched like it hurt but didn’t pull away.

“It’s okay, I got it,” Gunwoo said. “I told you, I get better each time. I’m here.”

Jaehyun stayed silent, breathing carefully. He was aware that he was asleep and bracing himself for his brain to wake up but trying his best not to care or notice that it was a dream so it wouldn’t end, and somehow he hadn’t been kicked out yet, and he needed it to stay that way, so that he could stay with Ryu Gunwoo a little longer.

“I’m here,” Gunwoo repeated. “I always am, even when I can’t contact you.” When Jaehyun still wouldn’t respond, he added caustically, “I literally cannot leave. I’m stuck with you.”

That, finally, made Jaehyun lift his head and smile. Gunwoo couldn’t leave. And he was hugging Jaehyun back. Because despite his complaints, he’d worked as fast as possible so they could see each other again.

Jaehyun had never actually wondered whether Gunwoo liked him. He only thought about it once it was already obvious and certain: Ryu Gunwoo likes me. He cares about me. He comes back to me as fast as he can.

“Gunwoo-ya, I think you’re younger than me. You should show some respect.”

Gunwoo slapped the side of his head. “I think you’re younger than me. Brat.”

“Alright, let’s say we’re the same age,” Jaehyun said magnanimously. “You can speak casually to me.”

“I already was! And it wasn’t your decision to make!”

Chapter: U2L8

Gunwoo thought he was an expert just because he’d sat in on almost every singing and dancing lesson Jaehyun had ever had.

“I know what I’m doing,” Jaehyun reminded him. “I’ve been a trainee eight times and an idol seven times. Combined, I’ve done more than a dozen comebacks worth of music show stages, performed at end of year shows and held multiple concerts. You have done none of that. You have never been an idol.” Shin Jaehyun had also been the leader of a group seven times, and he knew how to cut someone down to size. This would have worked on any of the trainees who were about to debut through Wise.

[ Okay. Doesn’t change the fact that you’re flat, though. ]

“Motherfucker,” he cursed with feeling.

[ Redistribute the parts. It’s outside your range. ]

“It’s not outside my range, and it doesn’t matter. I only have to do it right once. I don’t have to actually do it live after the album’s recorded.” It would rankle that he couldn’t, but realistically, the group would always compromise on vocals in order to pull off the choreography perfectly, so in the end it wouldn’t matter.

[ Morally bankrupt. ]

“I stole this song from someone else before he could write it. We left morality behind a while ago.”

[ I can excuse theft, but I draw the line at lipsyncing. ]

“And that’s why I’m the idol, and you’re the imaginary friend.”

The grumpy words splayed across his vision, bolded, impact font. [ Who said I’m your friend? ]

Chapter: U2L9

“Actually, you could be an idol. You’re cute enough.”

“So desperate that you’re trying to recruit ghosts now?” Ryu Gunwoo, hands linked together behind his head, turned to look at Jaehyun lying beside him. “How low you’ve sunk.”

Jaehyun had been staring at his profile. “I was just trying to tell you you’re handsome. But you’re always ungrateful.”

“Ah… I see, you’ve spent too long thinking of nothing but idols, so you only know how to give compliments like that. Jaehyun-ah, let’s take a break next life. Let’s quit Leti as soon as you wake up and spend a year travelling with your rich kid money.”

Jaehyun shook his head. “It’s a waste. I should use each life to make progress.”

In his ninth life, Jaehyun was attempting a true overhaul. A team built with Leti’s existing trainees had never worked out, so they would try infusing some new elements. Truly new ones, people he’d never worked with in any previous life, who had never been a part of Leti. It was a compromise. Jaehyun wanted to work methodically, changing just one or two factors each life from now on to gauge each change’s impact and create a blueprint for perfection. Ryu Gunwoo wanted him to throw a wrench in the works and create a team of entirely new people, just to see what happened.

He wasn’t sure why he had compromised at all. It was his life – lives. Ryu Gunwoo shouldn’t get a say in it. Yet Gunwoo seemed to think he was in charge on some level, and Jaehyun inexplicably let him.

“What if I have limited chances? I don’t know that the repeats will go on forever. I can’t use one frivolously.”

Gunwoo frowned at him, then turned back to where the ceiling would be, if they weren’t floating in an endless mist. He reached out and at the end of his finger appeared a flat, glowing blue box, filled with cramped text. “Just ask your administrator. I have all the specifications right here.”

“Since when can you do that?” Jaehyun demanded, bolting upright. He put his face right up against the box, trying to read it, then gave up – it was backwards from this side. He lay back down and scooted over right next to Gunwoo so that they were both lying tucked together beneath Gunwoo’s personal screen. “You’ve never shown me this before. Don’t just keep things to yourself.”

Gunwoo had told him about the system’s requirements to move forward. There was debuting, and a music show win, and a rookie of the year award – he’d yet to beat that one – and more. But he’d never actually shown Jaehyun what he himself could see.

“It’s new. Do you think I laze around doing nothing while you scheme and practice? I’m a busy man. I learn new tricks all the time.”

“I thought you napped all day.”

Gunwoo’s soft hair brushed Jaehyun’s cheek when he shifted slightly, crossing his arms over his chest. “In my next life,” he said, “I want to be someone else’s system administrator. Someone who’s kind and grateful.”

“In my next life, you mean?”

“You’ll never be kind and grateful, no matter how many lives you live.”

And Shin Jaehyun laughed, because the only time he ever laughed was while talking nonsense with Ryu Gunwoo.

That was the first life in which VTIC existed and the first life in which Jaehyun won rookie of the year. Standing on stage, looking out at all the waving lights and the single glowing exclamation point sent by Ryu Gunwoo, Jaehyun felt as triumphant as a war general. He felt like this life was the best, the brightest, and the last.

As the clock ticked down toward midnight that night, his teammate rolled his eyes at the announcement of a celebration to be held at the company and tossed the jacket he’d taken off at Jaehyun’s face. “Cut the crap. I’m so fucking tired of you pretending to be in charge. You think you’re hot shit because we won an award? Newsflash, Cheongryeo-hyung, we’re in this for the actual money, not a plastic trophy. Get over yourself. This is such bullshit, we won like we were supposed to but this stupid company still tells us where to go and when we can leave and whether we can piss with the fucking door closed–” He was still ranting by the time he was out of earshot, and Jaehyun’s head was ringing, the jacket clenched in his fists, so angry his teeth hurt. There were other people in the room. Staff who could repeat what they’d heard. Any number of curious ears and ways for gossip to get out.

“Just wants to get laid,” another member muttered behind him, and another agreed even quieter, “Unfair, I had to break up with my girlfriend but he’s still sneaking around with who knows how many…”

“Fuck you,” Jaehyun hissed under his breath, mouthing the words so quietly that none of the staff who had fallen awkwardly silent could possibly hear, because he wasn’t going to add fuel to the scandal, no matter what any of his teammates did. “Fuck you, and fuck you, and go fuck yourself, pig.” But there was someone who would still hear him, someone who would understand. “And you, don’t you dare say you warned me about him, I don’t want to hear it.”

[ We need to talk, ] Ryu Gunwoo said.

A year after the day he’d unlocked the requirement to win the rookie award, time turned backwards once again. Jaehyun lay staring up at the ceiling at the cracks he had long ago memorized, his personal reset screen, tears blurring his eyes. He was angry. He was so fucking, furiously angry.

But worse than that, he actually felt betrayed. That had been a team he and Gunwoo built together, themselves, and he’d thought it was the one. Instead it was torn right out of his hands.

He didn’t move. He lay in bed for hours, listening to the faint sounds of the street outside, until the message popped up.

[ Jaehyun-ah, ] Gunwoo said. It was the fastest he’d ever reconnected after a reset. As if he’d run to Jaehyun’s side. [ Let’s take a break this life. ]

“Okay,” Jaehyun said. It didn’t matter. “Okay. Let’s do that.”

Chapter: U2L10

They didn’t speak about what had gone wrong, but Jaehyun thought about it constantly. They won the award. He was supposed to move on to the next level. Gunwoo had told him that was how it worked, and he’d trusted Gunwoo.

But he didn’t ask why and he didn’t demand an explanation.

He broke his trainee contract with Leti. He booked the ticket Gunwoo suggested. They flew to Europe and went from city to city, touring whatever museums and monuments Gunwoo pointed out to him, lighting up brochures with highlights only Jaehyun could see. He bought no souvenirs and took no pictures, because it would all disappear at the end of this year.

When Wise began airing, he used a VPN to watch the newest episode each week. He didn’t care to, personally, but Gunwoo wanted to, and he wouldn’t be able to watch except through Jaehyun’s eyes. So Jaehyun kept his eyes on the screen and let himself be the conduit for Gunwoo to see the world, the same way he would walk slowly down museum hallways, pausing when Gunwoo reacted to a painting or plaque.

Gunwoo was fascinated by how the survival show missions played out without Jaehyun’s presence. Jaehyun was fascinated by the way he was starting to feel Gunwoo’s presence – the difference between when Gunwoo was paying attention, versus when he was off somewhere else in the bowels of the system, the same way you could tell when there was someone lurking over your shoulder to watch your screen instead of somewhere in the same room.

When Wise ended, he turned off the credits of the finale without comment. For a moment he thought Gunwoo would say he missed it. He was sure Gunwoo missed being in the center of the idol world, even though he was the one who wanted to take a break. But Gunwoo only said the final group lineup was bullshit as he’d expected.

In a dream later, they walked down endless museum hallways together, side by side, and Jaehyun thought it was so much better than going to museums alone, even if he was never really alone. Gunwoo pointed out his favorite things, paintings they’d seen in Paris and statues from Rome, placed next to each other as they hadn’t been in real life. When Jaehyun yawned and was bored, Gunwoo pulled him onward, dragging him by the wrist. He pointed at a huge oil painting in a heavy golden frame, taking up an entire wall. “Look, it’s the famous portrait by Ryu Gunwoo.”

Jaehyun looked. It was a painting of him, in a glittering black and silver stage outfit, the spotlight limning his careless grin and outflung hand, the microphone he was raising to his mouth.

Above his shoulder, as if drawn in crayon, was scratched a childish stick figure that seemed to have a tail and blobs on its head that could have been either devil horns or puppy ears.

“And look,” Gunwoo said, “I’m there too.”

Jaehyun laughed so hard he woke up.

[ I’m something of an artist, ] Gunwoo said. His words typed themselves across the cool white hotel room ceiling in the gentle illumination of early morning, a soft gray.

“I’m glad you’re stuck with me,” Jaehyun told him, splaying his limbs wide open in the too-big bed. “How come you can create a perfect image of me, but not a decent drawing of yourself?”

[ Yours was actually a photograph with a filter over it to look like a painting. I’m good at photos, so I could imagine that. ]

“And your doodle?”

[ It’s impossible to take a photo of me. And even in a dream I know I’m shit at drawing. ]

Maybe it was when he saw that image of himself placed so lovingly in Gunwoo’s imaginary museum that he knew Gunwoo loved him. Maybe it was waking up in that bed alone and wishing his friend was lying next to him that he knew he loved Gunwoo.

Out of nowhere, while Jaehyun was realizing this, Gunwoo said, [ Jaehyun-ah, I’ve been working on it. I found the system’s specifications for success in the code. I know what went wrong last time. Winning the award only counts if the rest of the world believes you deserved it. ]

“So that’s how it works.” He thought about it. “Alright. We’ll get it next time. Then should I restart now?”

[ No. I hate when you restart. ]

“You’re so fast at reconnecting now, though.”

[ Just don’t. ]

“Okay. You just want to see the rest of Italy.” But he knew – Ryu Gunwoo really just hated seeing him die.

Chapter: U2L11

Something else happened during that life where they took a break. Jaehyun gave in and asked something he had never dared to ask before.

“Are you the system?”

The words hung in the air for several seconds before Gunwoo turned to look at him, utter disbelief on his face. The dreamworld of Gunwoo’s imaginary garden around them melted down into void, flat and bleak. “Do you think I would do that to you?”

“I wouldn’t blame you for pretending,” Jaehyun lied. “Even if you’re the one sending me back each time, I’d still rather that you talked to me than that you didn’t. So I won’t be mad, you can tell me if it’s you controlling everything.”

“If I was in control,” Gunwoo spat, “none of this would happen to you.”

And then he disappeared.

“Are you young enough to throw a tantrum like that?” Jaehyun wondered aloud. He looked around. He’d never been left alone in a dream before. He didn’t know how long it would last without Gunwoo’s presence, and he didn’t find out. It simply became sleep without him noticing, and he woke up in the morning unable to remember when it changed.

If he’d left it there, maybe Gunwoo would have forgiven him silently and they would have moved on with nothing changing. But:

“I’m glad you’re not the system,” Jaehyun told him, the night before time would turn back, the last night of their strange, liminal year.

“Didn’t ask.”

“Are you mad at me?”

“You basically accused me of being the worst thing in your life.”

“Did I?” Jaehyun thought incompetence was the worst thing in his life. And ungratefulness, teammates who didn’t pull their weight, people who didn’t know what they wanted, fools who made their stupidity his problem. The system was the reason he experienced all that over and over, but… that didn’t make it the problem itself, did it? More importantly, the system had Gunwoo in it. “I didn’t. You’re the best thing in my life.”

Gunwoo’s gaze was unfathomable.

“Gunwoo, I’d go crazy without you.”

“You’re just stuck with me.”

“I’m grateful.” Remembering a long ago joke, he added, “See, I’m still not kind, but I learned to be grateful.”

“Alright. Fine. I’ll forgive you, so let’s beat the system this time.” Jaehyun liked that little reluctant smile. He liked it so much he wanted to feel it.

Funny how a dream could be so realistic. How he could actually feel Gunwoo’s soft cheek beneath his hand and the warmth of his breath and his lips against his. And then he jolted awake, a shock as unpleasant as a bucket of cold water, out of a kiss that had been far too short.

“I didn’t wake up,” he said hotly, arguing with thin air, furious. “It wasn’t my fault.”

[ You surprised me. ] The message flickered, both accusing and defensive.

He kicked the blankets in frustration. “Ryu Gunwoo, you… I’m going back to sleep, and you better be there when I get back.”

But he couldn’t seem to fall asleep again. And worst of all, the memory of the kiss was fleeting. Had he thought to himself that it was perfectly realistic, and that Gunwoo’s skin was warm beneath his hand? Then why couldn’t he conjure the feeling while he was awake? Why did the memory flee as quickly as trying to picture the face of a background character in a dream? It was a betrayal of the highest order, that Gunwoo’s dreamworld would function with dream logic the one time Jaehyun most needed it to be real.

Chapter: U2L12

It was unfairly hard to have a boyfriend you couldn’t actually touch, Jaehyun thought. Lying on his back, hands clasped over his stomach, wishing there was a warm body to pull close and trap between his arms. He was awake but he wanted to be asleep so he could touch Gunwoo.

[ You look like you’re lying down in your coffin. ]

It’s your fault, he thought. You’re the one who makes me actually want to live, and feel the most like I’m dying. He said, “But I make a handsome corpse. Right?”

A long silence. Then a voice right next to his ear said, “I don’t want to know what you think about my preferences.”

He flinched so hard he sat up, heart beating wildly, pulse jumping so hard he could hear it. It took a second to process. That voice. Gunwoo’s voice, in the real world. He whipped around, scanning the room, and he could almost hear the ghost of Gunwoo’s laughter.

“You–!” He wrenched his dignity back with sheer effort, leveled his voice and smiled dangerously. “Now, since when are you able to do that? How long have you been waiting for the right moment to scare the shit out of me?”

Laugh sigils glitched across his vision, quickly deleted, Gunwoo was trying not to let him know. But Jaehyun could see. He heard it, too, for a brief moment. The digital veil between the two of them had been growing thinner and for a second it was hardly there at all – he’d heard Gunwoo’s voice, maybe even felt his breath on his ear, and he didn’t only hear what Gunwoo wanted to send him, but also his laughter. That, more than anything, made his heart trip with joy and anticipation, the fact that the veil was so thin that Gunwoo couldn’t entirely control how much he sent through. It was like there was only a threadbare sheet separating naked bodies, the barrier so nominal it may as well not exist at all. If he knew in what direction to reach out, could he touch Gunwoo now?

Chapter: U2L13

For his 13th life, Gunwoo gave him a gift. Maybe he felt bad that they still hadn’t beaten the system. In a dream he grinned and said, “Open your hand.” And when Jaehyun woke up a second later his palm was open and an empty text box floated above it.

Why is it empty? he wondered, and watched those words appear in it.

[ Why is it empty? ]

His text was black, differentiated from Gunwoo’s glowing white text.

[ It’s for you. You can text mentally, so you don’t have to keep talking aloud to your imaginary boyfriend. ]

Jaehyun tamped down a disbelieving laugh and sent the laugh via text instead, watching their text chain grow longer. “Oh, dear. I didn’t get you anything.”

[ Don’t try to be cute, it’s weird. ] Too fast for Jaehyun to object. [ Anyway, it’s a bribe to work hard in this life too. Don’t slack off. ]

As if Jaehyun ever slacked off. It was Gunwoo who was always telling him to take breaks – and Gunwoo who found a way to make Jaehyun smile even as he got dressed for a day he had already lived twelve times before, and knew he would probably return to live again.

[ Ok. I’ll work hard ^^ ]

[ ??? ]

[ ? ]

[ ^^ ??? ]

[ ^^ ]

[ Don’t just repeat me, I’m asking why you text like that. ]

Squashing down a giggle, Jaehyun responded, [ ^^ ]

[ … ]

[ ^^ ]

[ I’m breaking up with you. ]

“Bet.” [ ^^ ]

Chapter: U2L14

So it goes. It sucked, but Gunwoo was there.

Chapter: U2L16

“I wish you had a real body.”

“I have a body. I have your body. It’s half mine.”

“Then how come you don’t do any of the upkeep?”

Gunwoo tapped a finger against his mouth in thought. “Hm… let’s say, that’s outside my scope of practice.”

Jaehyun rolled over, buttons and buckles from the various clothes flung around them digging into his skin in that strange way nothing really hurt in dreams even when he could feel it, and settled himself on top of Ryu Gunwoo. “I’ll show you your scope of practice.”

Chapter: U2L17

In dreams, he could touch Gunwoo. Nuzzle the cheeks that were too soft to pull off his stern expressions and that dimpled with his rare smiles, and kiss his eyelids when he closed his eyes in disgust at Jaehyun’s jokes, and run fingers through hair too soft to have been bleached as intensely as it looked.

And it was just a dream, after all. It wasn’t strange that it often went further. Even if a trainee in a shared dorm once caught him getting up in the middle of the night and scoffed at what he thought Jaehyun was too old to be experiencing. Jaehyun would never be ashamed of dreaming about, dreaming with, Gunwoo.

Chapter: U2L21

[ Should we take a break this time? ]

Jaehyun smiled as much as he could, and shook his head. It was enough to know that Gunwoo would run away with him if he needed. “Let’s work hard this time too.”

He could manage another life. He always could.

Chapter: U2L23

Jaehyun considered things with his hands on his hips, pragmatism on his mind. It had only been a few months. They hadn’t really invested much into this life yet, and he could just tell it wasn’t going to pan out this time. “I already messed it up… should I just restart?”

[ Ask me that to my face, you bastard. ]

[ Just joking ^^ ], he sent, to make Gunwoo feel better.

Chapter: U2L24

“I’m sorry you have to do it again. I’m sorry I can’t help more.” They were in a dream waiting for the clock to tick down to restart time because Jaehyun hadn’t managed to meet the audience requirements, and Gunwoo looked so tired that Jaehyun had to put away all his bitter disappointment and pull Gunwoo close.

“I didn’t want this one to be permanent anyway,” he lied. “My hair looked stupid during our debut. I was tired of seeing it in photos.”

“That’s true. It looked stupid,” Gunwoo muttered, face shoved into Jaehyun’s shoulder. “You look best with black hair, but you never listen to me.”

That was patently untrue, but Jaehyun ignored it in favor of coaxing Gunwoo to lie down on top of him. “We can’t all pull off blonde as well as you.”

A strange look crossed Gunwoo’s face and he touched his hand to his hair, as if he hadn’t known it was blonde. But the moment was fleeting. Jaehyun grabbed his hand and Gunwoo pressed his arm down, leveraging his weight from above, and it became a different kind of dream. They crossed into the previous year like that, unaware of time reversing as they tangled up in each other.

Chapter: U2L29

“Do you like your team?” Gunwoo asked. His gaze was dark and serious in the warm honey light, a dream filled with golden hour and sunset all at once, and Gunwoo a bare silhouette at Jaehyun’s side in bed.

“Sure, they’re competent enough.” Jaehyun reached for Gunwoo’s waist but his hands were slapped away.

“Don’t just answer. Be honest. Do you want to keep this team? Do you like them?”

He liked them as much as they succeeded. “I guess so.”

Gunwoo looked conflicted. “You could win with them.”

“Sure.” He thought it was empty encouragement, just the kind of thing Gunwoo said every so often because he didn’t want Jaehyun to lose hope. Jaehyun didn’t want to tell him the truth. That he didn’t hope anymore, and that wasn’t sad, it was perfectly fine. He knew Gunwoo would hate even more that he was fine with it.

“You’re close. I mean it. This could be the last life. Are you ready to stay with them?”

Jaehyun sat up. “If I said no, I don’t want to be stuck with them, would you agree to restart?”

Gunwoo always refused a purposeful restart, even when a life was clearly a failure. He had never offered Jaehyun a carte blanche to restart if he wanted, which meant Jaehyun never did, not since Gunwoo first appeared, even though he could. Because Gunwoo said no, so it was a no.

“...They’re good people,” Gunwoo said.

But what did that have to do with anything? Were they reliable people, was the question, were they controllable. “I don’t know if they’re the best, though. There might be better versions of VTIC out there.”

“But you’d be giving up a near certain win just to regress again. It could take just as many lives to get back here. It’s not a rational decision.”

“Why bring it up if you don’t want me to, then?” Jaehyun tilted his head to meet Gunwoo’s averted gaze. “You could just stay silent and wait until it’s too late for me to restart – if you really believe this is the one.”

“I want you to choose to be okay with it. Don’t think afterwards that you should have kept trying for something even more perfect. Choose to go through with it.”

The idea was stifling now that he’d put it like that. But there was no question. If it was what Gunwoo wanted him to choose, then he would.

He was right, after all. They’d lived the same life too many times. Gunwoo wanted to see the future, and so did Jaehyun. Even if the opportunity for even better perfection nagged at him…

“You’re right. They’re good people.”

‘Good enough’ was a form of good. ‘Good enough’ for Gunwoo was good enough for Jaehyun.

Nearly a year after that, Gunwoo sent, [ Happy birthday, Shin Jaehyun. ]

It was the first time he’d reached this age. What a funny feeling.

“Happy promotion, chief system administrator.”

[ Huh? ]

“I’ve decided you get a bonus for our win. No more restarts for us, new title for you.”

[ Does it come with a pay raise? ]

“There’s other benefits,” Jaehyun said. “I’ll show you tonight.”

Living like a normal person was hard. He kept thinking, it’s okay that I messed that up, I’ll do it differently next time.

And then: There is no next time. I guess it still has to be okay that I messed it up.

He said as much to Gunwoo, and his boyfriend poked his forehead. “Hey, Jaehyun-ah. You think you live like a normal person?”

Jaehyun rubbed his head and laughed. “Fine. I guess most normal people don’t have you.”

“Nobody has me, except you.”

(Maybe, on some level, Jaehyun had hoped that when he beat the system, it would crack open like an egg or a gashapon capsule and Gunwoo would be able to come out of it, into the real world, where Jaehyun could touch him in the daylight, but – no. Gunwoo still lived in the system. And that still had to be okay.)

“Hyung, look at this. Trainees these days are so funny.” Chaeyul thrust his phone in front of Jaehyun’s face. He had a big smile, so sparkly and sure that he had brought Jaehyun something he’d enjoy. He reminded Jaehyun of a cat who brought its owner a dead mouse, certain that its love and loyalty was best represented by this gift. Jaehyun was a dog person, for certain.

But he smiled placidly at Chaeyul and took the phone so he could actually focus his eyes on the screen. Members needed positive interactions, after all, in order to remain confident that they were friends, and to better demonstrate that confidence on screen. Gunwoo taught him that.

Well, Jaehyun knew it already, of course. But he tended to err on the side of being too strict when left to his own devices. It was Gunwoo who nudged him to pretend to be more friendly.

Chaeyul’s present was a youtube short. He glanced at the title to more effectively figure out what reaction Chaeyul wanted, since the video was currently playing some show’s logo and intro music.

[ Idol Inc Relisted Audition Stage - Park Moondae “POPCON” ]

He resisted the sigh building in his throat. He didn’t want to spend his break watching an amateur dance to a meme song years past its prime. He waited with his pleasant smile tacked in place for the video to play long enough that he could pretend to laugh and give Chaeyul his phone back.

Shots of trainees and judges laughing as the music began. A voiceover, strangely serious, oddly familiar, said, “I chose this song because I’m a big fan of Marshmallow-sunbaenim. And this song makes people smile.”

And then Gunwoo, his Gunwoo, was shown standing on that stage.

[ — ! ]

“Hyung? What’s wrong?”

“Uh?!”

“Why does hyung look like that?”

“Uh, get him some water, yeah? Chaeyul, what the hell did you show him?”

[ Gunwoo. ]

[ Gunwoo, what is this? ]

[ Answer me. ]

[ Come on.]

[ Where are you? ]

The members crowded around him, too loud. The phone was at his feet, he didn’t know when he dropped it, their voices grated as he listened for the only one he wanted to hear.

But after that short shock of recognition from Gunwoo, that one spark in Jaehyun’s vision, there was only dead silence.

“Are you Park Moondae?”

“I don’t remember.” Gunwoo’s face was dead white, and the dreamworld around them was that static void that Jaehyun hadn’t seen in lifetimes.

“Why are you so scared?”

“Because…” Gunwoo looked down at his empty hands. He looked sick. “The system, it… that’s one of its tools. Memory. I’ve spent so much time picking through its functions, I know that’s in there. It can send people back but it can also choose what they remember from before sending them.”

Fuck. That was terrifying. Not being able to rely on his own mind had always been his biggest fear, and now Gunwoo was telling him the system could have erased as many parts of him as it cared to. “You never told me that.” He tried not to let it sound like an accusation. Gunwoo looked too delicate right now.

“I thought those functions were dormant. I knew they were. They’ve never triggered in any of your lives, so it wasn’t relevant. Except, if I can’t remember things, then–” he voice cracked, returned as a whisper. “Then it’s done something to me, too. I’m not just the administrator, I’m another – player.”

Jaehyun cocked his head, eyes narrowed. “...Yes. Wasn’t that already obvious?”

“What?”

“You’re a person, a consciousness with your own thoughts and feelings, and you’re trapped in the system’s liminal space, unable to communicate with anyone other than me. Of course it’s done something to you. You didn’t just spring into existence this way. You must have been alive like anyone else.”

Gunwoo stared at him, white as a sheet.

“It’s my bad,” Jaehyun offered. “I thought we both knew this.” Like he said, it was obvious from the first time he saw Gunwoo in human form, that Gunwoo was a person who had been absorbed and imprisoned in some way by the system. He must have been alive and human like anyone else once. If he was honest, Jaehyun had assumed Gunwoo was just a regressor who had ultimately failed, that Gunwoo’s present situation was what would happen to Jaehyun if he couldn’t win, and that they were both just in tacit agreement not to mention it all these years.

But Gunwoo didn’t know. He thought he had always been part of the system, or he just hadn’t thought about it at all. Something had kept him from realizing there was anything to realize. Until Jaehyun saw Park Moondae on his screen, and Park Moondae was identical to his Ryu Gunwoo.

Jaehyun reached for him slowly, sliding a hand around the back of his neck to cup his head, wrapping an arm around his waist. Gunwoo was trembling.

“It’s okay. I’ll figure it out. Just breathe.”

“Breathe?” Gunwoo’s eyes were dark and luminous. “You know, I don’t really have to. I think I just do it out of habit.”

And then he was gone, and Jaehyun’s arms were empty.

Jaehyun could have forced his way onto Idol Inc to meet Park Moondae. But the idea of meeting him, that boy, the fraud with the right face and the wrong name – he didn’t know. He didn’t know what it made him feel or what he wanted to do. He was repulsed and never was to see him. He wanted to take him into his arms and peel back his layers until he figured out what imposter was puppeting Gunwoo’s skin. He wanted to hold him and have it be his own Ryu Gunwoo.

In the end, he didn’t. Even when TNet begged Leti to send some VTIC members as guests for one episode, Jaehyun refused to go. He and Gunwoo watched the episode when it aired two weeks later instead, and it reminded him so much of their year off, how he would sit in quiet hotel rooms and watch Wise so that Gunwoo could see it, that it brought a lump to his throat. He couldn’t speak as he watched Park Moondae on screen fill out all the same answers that he, Jaehyun, would have chosen. The same answers he knew Gunwoo would.

(Park Moondae had black hair in the clip Chaeyul originally showed him, so at least there was that difference from Gunwoo, but a few episodes later he appeared with bleached blond hair and Jaehyun had needed to turn off the TV and visit the dog shelter he volunteered at to calm down. Now, it was really impossible to tell Park Moondae and Ryu Gunwoo apart. Jaehyun felt like that did physical damage to him everytime he laid eyes on him.)

[ I can’t tell which of us is the fake, ] Gunwoo said when the episode ended, and the feeling of his presence cut out entirely. Gone off to brood somewhere deep in the bowels of the system, where he wouldn’t hear Jaehyun calling for him.

Gunwoo always pulled away when Park Moondae was in sight. When VTIC crossed paths with Testar at one music show, when they shared the stage the first time Testar won. It was like it pained him to see his doppleganger walking around, using his body to sing and dance and do cute idol shit for Testar's fans.

Gunwoo was a better singer than Park Moondae, Jaehyun was certain. He rarely danced but from the scattered times he had copied VTIC's choreo in dreams, sometimes to give advice but more often to make fun, Jaehyun thought Gunwoo was even a better dancer. As for the other aspects, he couldn't even imagine his Gunwoo doing all that, which made his teeth ache with anger. Bad enough that a deep fake of Gunwoo had come to life and taken everything that should have been Gunwoo's, if he was allowed to come out of the system, but he was even using that stolen body to poke his own cheeks on demand. No wonder Gunwoo didn't want to see this. It made Jaehyun angry enough. At least when he saw images of himself doing cringey cute things, he knew it had been his own choice. For Gunwoo, watching Park Moondae must have felt like a violation.

The more ubiquitous Testar became, the more often Jaehyun was deprived of Gunwoo, and that wasn't okay. He couldn’t ignore it any longer. He needed to talk to Park Moondae.

But as soon as he did, he wished he’d ignored it anyway. Face to face with Gunwoo in the real world but unable to reach for him, Jaehyun could feel his idol mask straining at the seams, his smile threatening to crack.

Who the hell are you?

Park Moondae followed him onto the set of the show they were filming together, a simulacrum of a cabin in snowy woods. Jaehyun was pretty sure Gunwoo had made a dream like this before, with a cozy cabin and a crackling fire and inside jokes tossed back and forth as they stayed warm. He wished Gunwoo would send something. He could feel his presence, watching his fake self closely through Jaehyun’s eyes. For the first time, he stayed put while Park Moondae was near. Something was different today. Gunwoo wanted answers too.

“There’s a ghost story I heard from my seniors when I was younger,” Jaehyun said to the ghost sitting next to him. “Would you like to hear it?”

When he spoke about an idol who didn’t die but tried and tried and tried again, Park Moondae’s eyes widened, and Jaehyun’s heart lurched in his chest. Did he recognize the story? What did it mean if he did?

Later, Jaehyun blocked the doorway of the dressing room, watched Park Moondae’s wariness grow until his blank expression couldn’t hide it.

“Do you know who I am?” Jaehyun asked, slowly, deliberately.

Park Moondae lowered his head respectfully. Or, to hide whatever he didn’t want to show on his face. “You’re VTIC’s Cheongryeo, of course.”

Well, Jaehyun didn’t know what answer he was looking for.

If Park Moondae said, “You’re Shin Jaehyun who’s lived twenty-nine lives,” how would he deal with that? If he said, “You’re my best friend,” how could Jaehyun possibly respond? If he said, “You’re the man I’m in love with,” how would Jaehyun deal with such a brazen imposter?

Park Moondae couldn’t be him, because the love of Jaehyun’s many, many lives lived in the system. But there had to be an explanation for why he had his face.

“And do you know who Ryu Gunwoo is?” he asked.

Park Moondae’s head snapped up. He looked at Jaehyun like he was the ghost. “That’s–”

It felt like an eternity between each stuttering word.

“He’s–”

Don’t. Don’t you dare.

“I am. I’m Ryu Gunwoo.”

The words came from numb lips. “No, you aren’t. Not if you don’t know who I am. Try again. Who am I, Park Moondae? And who the hell do you think you are?”

Park Moondae took one faltering step back, his eyes fixed on Jaehyun’s face, pale the way Gunwoo turned when he didn’t have the answers, one hand creeping up to his temple as if his head ached. “You…” he said. And then he ran, stumbling against the doorway, bolted.

Jaehyun was alone in an empty room.

“Gunwoo, what do I do now?” But there was no answer. Gunwoo, he realized, wasn’t there. How could he not be paying attention to this?

[ Gunwoo, were you even listening? ]

– Is what he would have sent through their chat box, but it wasn’t there.

Since the time Gunwoo gifted him their messaging system, he never had to reach for it. It was there with the briefest thought.

“Ryu Gunwoo? Answer me. Answer me. Come on!”

But even as his voice raised, calling again and again, he already knew. When Park Moondae bolted, his Gunwoo had disappeared. For the first time since Gunwoo learned how to reconnect instantly after regression, Shin Jaehyun was completely alone in his own head.

Park Moondae was at his door. He knew that from the front camera feed, but there was bile in his throat and he wouldn’t move from his couch. Because that, that walking corpse, that horrific fake, had stolen Gunwoo. He might have killed him. Gunwoo might be gone forever and Jaehyun never wanted to see Park Moondae’s stolen face again.

The doorbell rang again. It was only the second time. Park Moondae wasn’t impatient, it had just been a while since he arrived.

If he rings a third time, Jaehyun thought, I’ll call security.

But Park Moondae didn’t ring again. The door opened with the chime of his passcode being punched in.

Park Moondae walked in and looked at Jaehyun, slumped on the couch. “Idiot, I know all your passcodes. I think I made that one.”

Jaehyun’s heart thudded to life. Park Moondae, no, Ryu Gunwoo, plopped onto his couch, half in Jaehyun’s lap, one knee digging into his hip, his weight solid and heavy and real. Jaehyun had no conscious movement. The next moment, he had wrapped himself entirely around Gunwoo like one strand of DNA snapping to its other half: inevitably.

“It’s you.”

“It’s me,” Gunwoo agreed, letting himself be swallowed up in Jaehyun’s long limbs. “It just– God, can’t breathe. It just took a good twenty four hours to process everything. I’m sorry it took so long. Shin Jaehyun, you’re going to cave my chest in.”

Jaehyun was pressed face first into Gunwoo’s heartbeat, and he would have climbed inside in an instant if he could figure out how. “It’s you.”

“We established that. Look at me.”

Jaehyun looked up easily, because as nice as feeling Gunwoo’s heartbeat against his mouth was, looking at him was just as nice. This real life body had pores, texture to his skin that was impossible to capture in a dream. “Did you overwrite him?”

The sharp flick to his forehead actually hurt. He loved it. All the tussling they’d done in dreams over the years never came with any real sensation of pain.

“What the hell is wrong with you? That would basically be murder. I wouldn’t do that to some innocent person.”

It was hard to think of Park Moondae as an innocent person, when Jaehyun had spent an entire day believing he was a murderer. He’d had a vague idea that he was going to kill Park Moondae, once the fog lifted and he was able to plan it. He wasn’t going to let the person who stole Gunwoo from him live.

“You’ve got the wrong idea. Think about it like this – your phone and your laptop share your data between them, but if they aren’t able to sync for a long time, then both of them will come to have completely different data on them. You need to get them synced up again so they can both know what each of them knows. So… there were two of me, and neither of me knew about the other. Don’t interrupt, Jaehyun-ah. I need to tell you about this Park Moondae.”

And he did. He told Jaehyun about the system taking a man called Ryu Gunwoo and putting him three years in the past in the body of Park Moondae. About competing on Idol Inc so he wouldn’t die and how when Jaehyun asked him about Ryu Gunwoo something terrible clicked, terrible because it hurt when all the data suddenly synced. How he felt like his brain would give out, trying to integrate all the memories of the Gunwoo who had lived in Jaehyun’s system into the brain of the Gunwoo who had experienced being at the system’s mercy. About what he thought the system was: a parasite that moved from person to person.

Jaehyun said, “But the basic question still hasn’t been answered. We don’t know how you got in my system, as the administrator. Your system doesn’t have one.”

“I didn’t say that. I only said I haven’t been able to talk to my administrator.” Gunwoo looked down at him solemnly. Jaehyun’s head was in his lap and he’d been stroking his hair, and now his hand paused and he rested it on Jaehyun’s chest. “I have a theory that I can’t prove yet. I think Park Moondae is the boy in my system.”

“What?”

“I spent a lot of time in your system. Any time you slept when I wasn’t keeping you company, and thousands of hours when you were doing boring shit. I went through it piece of piece, thousands of submenus and error reports. The system thrives on wanting. First comes the desire and then comes the system, taking advantage of it. And it doesn’t have to be a desire on behalf of yourself. You can want it into acting for someone else, if you do it hard enough. I don’t know how to explain this, Jaehyun. I really don’t, because I’m missing some pieces that I can’t find even knowing they’re missing. But I think I was in your system because I wanted to be.”

“But you only just met me – this you, the Gunwoo who became Park Moondae, I mean. And the other you, the Gunwoo who was in my system, didn’t know me until you woke up inside the system. Neither one makes sense as a starting point.”

“Yes,” Gunwoo admitted. “For it to be true, there would sort of have to be… a third iteration.”

“Absolutely not,” Jaehyun said promptly. “I put my foot down at a third Ryu Gunwoo. Two is already too many.”

“First of all, fuck you, not your call. Secondly, there’s only one of me now that I got all of me into this one body. And third of all–”

“Ah. Hold on.” Jaehyun sat up. “This isn’t Ryu Gunwoo’s body, which reminds me, you looked strange the first time I saw you… like you were melding between two people, before settling on this face. Gunwoo, that doesn’t make sense either… that was years before you woke up in Park Moondae’s body, so why is this the form that you’ve always taken in my head?”

“That,” Ryu Gunwoo said, “is probably the best evidence we have that a lot more time manipulation is at work than we can see.”

“But it’s a paradox, one can’t have come before the other…”

“The only way to solve a paradox is with a solution even more outlandish than the paradox itself. I have a theory that maybe, once, you had to beat the system alone. That is, I never showed up, because I wasn’t there, and you just lived as many lives as it took to figure out how to beat it yourself.”

That would be impossible. Without Gunwoo to explain what goals he was even supposed to be meeting… “I would go insane that way,” Jaehyun countered.

Gunwoo smiled without humor. “And I didn’t want you to have to.”

Jaehyun could try to understand. Or he could simply take Ryu Gunwoo in his arms and tell him they were going to figure it out another time, because tonight, he intended to take the man he’d loved for twenty-nine lives to bed.

“I can hear your wheels turning,” Jaehyun said sleepily, tucked into the crook of Gunwoo’s neck.

“I’m still processing. There’s so much… time, all crunched together.” Gunwoo sighed, pressed in impossibly even closer. Then he remembered something. “Where did my phone go? I need to warn the members I’m not coming back tonight. I didn’t give any explanation when I left, everything was too much.”

“Fuck them.” That was Jaehyun’s general attitude toward Testar, now that he understood they were the ones half of Gunwoo had spent the last year with. It was completely unfair that they should get to call Gunwoo a member of their team, when they hadn’t known him a fraction as long or as deeply as Jaehyun had. They were so fucking spoiled.

“Get up and get my phone,” Gunwoo said, unamused.

He got up and got Gunwoo’s phone. It was on the floor halfway between the couch and the bedroom, maybe where they had started undressing each other midway – yes, his shirt was nearby. The screen was busy with message notifications.

He tossed Gunwoo the phone and crawled back into bed, watching him begin to deal with the glut of concerned and mildly panicked messages. “You know, I understand everything you’ve said, but also I don’t.”

“Yeah, I don’t think anyone could,” Gunwoo said absently. He was already getting responses from his team members, full of exclamation points and emojis, relief that he was fine after going missing hours ago. Jaehyun’s chest ached a little, seeing the evidence of all these other people who knew Gunwoo existed and who cared about him, and then it ached a lot.

Are they good people, Gunwoo? He wanted to ask.

He didn’t. He knew the answer from the way Gunwoo patiently responded to their messages. From the way Park Moondae had acted with them in every episode of Idol Inc.

He’d always enjoyed analyzing Wise, Jaehyun remembered, always had his own ideas about what contestants should have done. He should have realized Ryu Gunwoo would love being an idol.

“The reason you ended up in my system,” Jaehyun said, but then couldn’t think of how to turn it into the right question.

Gunwoo laid the phone down on his chest, giving him his full attention. “I wanted to help you.” He said it simply, but there was a grim weight to it. “I didn’t know what wanting that would do.”

Jaehyun was unable to resist poking at the paradox again, like it would uncoil and snap back if he bothered it, finally revealing its fangs. “You couldn’t have wanted to save me before you even met me.” I don’t know why you’d want to save me after meeting me either, he didn’t say.

“You’re right. I had to meet you first.” Gunwoo tapped his fingers slowly against the back of his phone.

There was a puppy sticker stuck to the case. Jaehyun remembered the doodle Gunwoo made of himself in a dream had something like puppy ears. He didn’t know what that meant.

“I remember a lot now. Imagine it like another universe. In that universe, I wasn’t in your system, so we didn’t meet until I was Park Moondae, and we didn’t come to like each other… or let’s say, understand each other, until much later. And then I…” His eyes lowered, lashes sweeping his cheeks. “Well, the system takes desires like that and acts on them.”

“You fell in love with me.”

Gunwoo ignored him, and that tasted like confirmation on Jaehyun’s tongue. In any universe, wouldn’t Ryu Gunwoo love him back?

“The system turned back time and gave me the ability to be with you during the regressions.”

“You saved me,” Jaehyun said, because that’s what happened, there was no other way to phrase it correctly. He wouldn’t have survived a hundred lifetimes alone. Even if Gunwoo said he did in another universe, he didn’t believe it would have been in a way worth surviving.

“I just gave you the tools to do it.”

Jaehyun pulled him in and kissed him, taking one of Gunwoo’s arms to throw over his own shoulder, the phone getting lost somewhere in the sheets.

“Hyung, you should hold me closer after all that.” It was half teasing but half begging. He wanted to climb into Gunwoo and live in the closeness, tucked into the hollow between head and shoulder, clicked in like a puzzle piece. He’d had Gunwoo in his head for lifetimes, he couldn’t live without closeness now.

Gunwoo sounded appalled. “What? You brat, all those years of insisting we’re the same age and now, what, you think it’s sexy to call me hyung?”

“It’s proven now. You were born before me.” Not getting the active engagement he wanted, Jaehyun gave up and pushed Gunwoo down and crawled over him. “And also, yes.”

Epilogue: Universe1 Life103

There’s a lump in Park Moondae’s throat as he lies pressed against Shin Jaehyun’s back, at odds with the satisfied exhaustion in his limbs, with the pleasantly lax man molded against his chest.

Shin Jaehyun’s an elusive, aggravating bastard, a complete brat in every sense of the word, convinced the world revolves around him and in need of someone to put him in his place.

And yet, when Moondae looks at the vulnerable back of his neck, the delicate slope of neck into shoulder into arm that’s thrown loosely over a pillow, he has a horrible urge to wrap him up safe and protect him from everything that’s already happened to him.

He wishes Shin Jaehyun wanted a better past for himself rather than a worse present for everyone else. Or maybe he just wants Shin Jaehyun to have that better past. To have had someone looking out for him throughout a hundred terrible regressions, the way he’d personally had the real Park Moondae loving and protecting him even when he didn’t know it, a gentle ghost in the machine.

He closes his eyes against the ache of wanting what he has no way to give. And elsewhere, a single thread splits off from the seam and begins to weave itself backwards into the warp and weft of time.

Epilogue: Universe2 Life5

[ Can you see this? ]

Shin Jaehyun will never forget the way the words appeared in front of him, small and bright white against the black sky.

Epilogue: Universe2 Life29

"Wake me up in the morning," Ryu Gunwoo said before they fell asleep. "I have a schedule."

"Can't you take a day off?"

"Nope. I'll die if we don't win rookie of the year."

"Ah. Fuck."