He wakes up, drenched in sweat and breathing heavily and incredibly, incredibly confused.

And then he's in an amount of emotional pain he wasn't aware a human being could feel. He thought he was suicidal before, but he really had no idea just how badly one could want to die. No idea at all.

The only problem is that he, he, he succeeded. He died. He cut his throat and he bled out and he died and now he's in—a bedroom?—and most surprising of all he's completely guided. When he told Nightmare he was going to want to die if he ever ran out of backlash, his prediction had been completely correct, too, but he, he died. He's already died.

A sleepy voice coming from the general location Jaeha's head had been before he sat up awake mumbles, "Hyung, 's 'v'rything 'lright?"

He freezes. 

He looks over his shoulder.

It is, in fact, Tae-gun. His eyes are slightly open but he looks mostly asleep and a bit confused.

...no, Tae-gun doesn't look confused, he feels confused, because Jaeha is using his powers. 

He stops. 

"Don't worry about it, Tae-gun-ah," he says, on automatic. "You can go back to sleep."

"Mmmmk."

And out again.

Tae-gun. 

This bedroom. 

This bed. 

His body, feeling not only rested and pain-free due to the guiding but also missing all of the chronic stiffness and discomfort that comes with age, that sneaks up on you and builds up over time and that you don't really notice until you're in a body almost six years younger.

This is a dream. He must've failed to kill himself (even though he felt it) and the medical team must've stabilised him (possibly with timely healer help?) and he must be in a coma or just dreaming. 

He's had dreams like this—has them reasonably frequently, actually. Dreams in which he's back to when things were good, back to when Tae-gun still loved him and he hadn't fucked everything up beyond repair, back to before he had ruined everything and had to spend six miserable years working towards getting this back.

Except...

Maybe actually it was a nightmare. Maybe he, he, maybe he didn't destroy everything good in his life with his own hands. That'd explain why he's so guided, he, he's still in the time he was with Tae-gun.

Except...

He doesn't know the date. He knows the year, of course, and the most likely months, but he doesn't know the date. If that was a nightmare it was far, far too realistic a nightmare, with far, far too strong memories, and it displaced his memories of what day it is. Of what he had for lunch yesterday. What he talked to Tae-gun about last night.

But then...

What's the alternative? He feels too awake, too aware. He can focus on every feeling on his body, he can follow his thoughts through, the few times he's had lucid dreams in his life they ended as soon as he stopped paying attention but this dream isn't ending. He's still here, in this bedroom, with Tae-gun, his Tae-gun, lying in bed next to him, peacefully asleep. His Tae-gun who just called him "hyung" in that adorable sleepy voice, his Tae-gun who looks so much younger, even younger than Jaeha remembered, in the low light.

He has thought this before, in his dreams: if it's a dream, please let it not ever end.

Because in this dream he isn't a monster. He was never a monster. He, he fucked up before he met Tae-gun, he did, but he was so, so much less bad than he eventually became. He'd been harmless, nearly harmless, at least compared to everything else he'd do in the future. In this dream he didn't spend a year gaslighting and isolating Tae-gun, his Tae-gun, out of some insane unjustified sense of fear and jealousy. In this dream, he didn't spend several years manipulating everyone around him for some deranged plan that involved causing Tae-gun—his Tae-gun—to backlash nearly to death so that he'd come back to Jaeha. In this dream, he didn't find a boy, he was just a boy, Kim Insoo was a kind, nice, insecure boy, and in this dream he didn't find that boy and make him go through neglect and abuse fine-tuned to make him not want to leave while still not giving him a good, happy relationship.

In this dream he didn't have Kim Hye-jin shot.

Given that he's not waking up then either he's in a coma or... or... something. He doesn't know. He is in some version of reality where, where—things aren't horrible.

He could start over. From, from—honestly pretty much every point in his life when Tae-gun called him "hyung" the way he just did—from now, he can definitely turn things around. Definitely make things go right instead of wrong. He can. He knows he can.

It will hurt, so, so much, but he can.

He grabs his phone, unlocks it—the passcode is the same as it's always been, Tae-gun's birthday, March 13—and checks the date.

June 25th. 4:37AM.

...ah. A week after the official end of the confluence. And... something happens today...

Ah. Yes. Park Yoo-min's birthday.

That was a bad day. And he can... make it go well instead.

He will make it go well instead.

But first things first. He has about two and a half hours before Tae-gun's alarm goes off, and there are things he can do before Tae-gun is awake to get project "make this coma dream go better than reality did" underway. Some of them he thought of over the years but there's a glaringly obvious one that nevertheless took him being guided again to think of. 

He's going to quit being an esper.

He cancels every dungeon he has scheduled, registers a request to not be assigned any new ones in the system, and starts writing his resignation letter. 

(This is practice for how he's going to explain it to Tae-gun later.)

It takes him longer than he'd expected. Even now, after having been shown the depths of the depravity of his soul in excruciating detail, he can't escape his pride and his fear. But if he wants to do the right thing this time around, he's going to need to actually try. Try hard, do the right thing every time, not slip even once. And unlike last time, "trying hard" won't be a thing he just does in his head. He needs to change everything around him. He needs to give himself no opportunity to fuck up.

None at all.

When Tae-gun's alarm's about to go off, Jaeha turns around and sits on his heels and turns his head down. If he's going to apologise, he needs to do it properly.

...wait wha huh.

"Hyung?"