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. Two weeks 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?"

"Tae-gun-ah—" Oh, his name tastes so sweet in Jaeha's tongue, it's intoxicating. "I feel like I keep doing this," even though at this point in time it was, what, three months ago? Anyway. "I have more things to confess."

...oh no.

"Did you... slip up more...?"

"There is so, so much I need to tell you, but a lot of it doesn't make sense so I'll start with what does. I can't shield myself. I—hadn't originally meant to lie. I forgot. And then—Nightmare—I'm not immune to Nightmare. It can get to me."

Tae-gun feels like that is a pretty fucking glaring omission actually—

"And it did. It got to me. The reason I was—so tired, so wrecked, so upset every time, was because it kept showing me you. It showed me you dying, it showed me you leaving me. It showed me you choosing Ha Si-yeon-shi and Lee Juheon-shi over me. It showed me you growing tired of how clingy and needy I am. It showed me you growing past me, getting over me."

Oh.

Oh, no.

Oh, his poor hyung. "Jaeha-ya..."

"I didn't just slip. Over the past few weeks, I, I manipulated you again. I pushed you into spending less time with your friends, made you more reluctant to go out or be with them. I was scared you were going to see them and leave me. And I was too stupid to get over my own petty jealousy, I let myself be manipulated by Nightmare."

...there weren't that many opportunities for Tae-gun to interact with his friends, though, and he hadn't really felt up to doing anything with them, so whatever Jaeha did can't have been that big...?

He's not looking, and he's not using his power, but he does know his Tae-gun well enough to guess what he's thinking.

And he has knowledge of the future.

"I am quitting being an esper."

"—what??"

"I thought I could deal with it but I can't. I clearly can't. I'm not good enough, not strong enough. Not the way I've been going. There might be some way in the future to do this again but—I can't risk it. I can't even plan for it. I need to not give myself any opportunity to keep fucking this up.

"Tae-gun-ah, I don't deserve your love, not as I am, not unless something very big changes."

"But—but hyung—"

"I know myself well enough, now, to know that nothing less extreme than that will do it. I will not, I cannot keep doing this. I, I can't do it, and I can't, I can't—"

"—I can't do what I was going to do to you tonight. Not again."

"...should I cancel my dungeons? This is starting to sound like..."

"Yes, please." The version of Jaeha from that time would've refused, would've told Tae-gun that this wasn't that important, Tae-gun shouldn't change his day because of Jaeha. This version of Jaeha—isn't him. "Because I have a lot of very, very strange things to tell you."

"Okay." He opens his commscreen and gets to doing that. "...can we talk about this over breakfast?" Having a fraught conversation in the bedroom, in the dark like this, feels extremely uncomfortable and claustrophobic and, and, and too serious. And he's already committed to sticking with Jaeha, his Jaeha, he promised his Jaeha that they'd figure it out together and clearly it hasn't been enough and if his Jaeha feels like something needs to change, then, then Tae-gun needs to be there for him and support him.

"Of course." He can't ever refuse Tae-gun, is the refrain that goes through his mind, but now he knows that just not refusing isn't enough.

Okay.

Alright.

(His hyung is acting really weird. Really weird. Tae-gun doesn't know in what way but it's really really weird, like there's some missing step somewhere. He doesn't like it.)

Yeah. It's a lot.

"Please bear with me, here," he says after he's started with breakfast and Tae-gun is sitting at the table waiting for him. "Imagine you one day wake up and you find yourself six years in the past. In your own body, as it was then, in the same place you were, but with the memories of six intervening years that haven't happened yet.

"How would you convince everyone around you that that happened?"

...that is so extremely not where he was expecting this conversation to go!!!!

"I. Guess I'd. Try to remember things that happened that I shouldn't be able to know...?"

"Tonight is Park Yoo-min-shi's birthday reunion."

Wait, is it? Oh, right, yeah, he RSVP'd.

"In that party, I'm crazy with jealousy. Your friends are really close to you. I'm still not over Nightmare. Ha Si-yeon flirts with you a lot, and you don't push him away completely. He and Baek Hyun-jae and Min Woo-young make various comments that I interpret as being malicious, in my direction. They hint that I'm bad for you. It all goes over your head, I think, and so I decide to take matters into my own hands and make you understand what they really mean. You respond to those words, the imagined words that I put in their mouths, and they get surprised and dismayed. It goes badly. You leave the reunion early, and I comfort you, and I feel really really guilty about it but also vindicated. I feel like I just proved, to you and me both, that your friends aren't as good for you as you think they are.

"This isn't the last time I do this. When they text you, I edit what they say in your eyes, and I make you feel worse about it. When you meet, I make you dislike them, and I make them dislike you. Ha Si-yeon is angry, and thinks you're pulling away from your friends to spend time with your shiny new boyfriend, that you're being a dick. Lee Juheon is sad, and feels like you're making a mistake, but not one that he can do anything about while still calling himself your friend. You're confused and upset that they're acting so weird. Min Woo-young—I am so, so thankful for Min Woo-young. Right now, not back then.

"Back then, I didn't realise how much of a problem he was going to be. Min Woo-young never lets go of you, and I don't even know, because he isn't one of your ex-partners. And he can get to you when I'm not around, and he notices. He notices the way you're acting. The way you keep pulling away. On Christmas, you have no one but me. It's normal, isn't it, to spend Christmas with your boyfriend? But it's not normal to ignore your friends like that, and it's not normal to ignore them for your own birthday. I don't remember exactly, but I think that, by then, Ha Si-yeon has already written you off, and Lee Juheon only makes a token effort towards reconnecting. Min Woo-young, thankfully, doesn't let me get away with it. I don't know what he does, exactly, because the two of you succeed at hiding it all from me.

"And one day, when I get home from a dungeon, you're not there anymore. You're not there, and you left me a message saying you're dissolving our partnership, and telling me to never contact you again. Quasar abandons me, which shocks everyone, most of all me. I don't understand what's happening, not until much, much later. It hurts. It hurts so much. I don't understand what's happening, I keep trying to contact you and I can't. You block me completely. You move out of your house. You get a new house, somewhere, I never learn where."

He has absolutely no idea how to engage with literally any of this.

"Are, are you saying—what are you saying, hyung?"

"I'm saying that I systematically abuse you for nearly a whole year, I destroy everything good about our relationship, I do it for no fucking reason. I do it for no fucking reason except that I'm selfish and cowardly and jealous. I frogboil myself into thinking it's fine, and I frogboil you into burning every single other relationship in your life."

"I traumatise you. You stop going out in public, ever. You stop seeing your friends. You get one partner, six months after that, and you go to one dungeon with him and then break it off immediately. The thought of getting a new partner sickens you. You can't ever let anyone get as close to you as I did. You stop looking, and every new potential partner Quasar looks into for you gets mysteriously otherwise engaged, courtesy of me. I bribe them, I get them other partners, I arrange for them to just never even get to meet you. You don't get any new partners. For five years, you don't get any new partners.

"Someone else would have died, but of course not you. You have better backlash control than any other esper alive. You spend five years partnerless, and you are chronically backlashed, in pain, exhausted, and you're still one of the five most powerful espers on this planet. You overwork yourself, because you can't do anything else with your life. Min Woo-young is your only friend, and he's probably the reason you survive at all."

"Wh—why—why would you do that? Keep partners away from me? That—makes no sense—"

"Because someday you will have to face a choice between me and dying, and I am betting you'll choose me. Because you'll forgive me everything, afterwards, since I've done it under so much backlash—as I, myself, am not getting guided very much. More than you, but I am actively manipulating everyone around me into thinking I am doing so much better than that. I have a few partners, one of whom lasts the better part of three years, and I'm horrible to them. I'm horrible to him. He's a sweet kid, and he hero-worships me, and I make him love me, and I'm awful to him. His name is Kim Insoo, and he hasn't awakened yet, right now in the present. But I don't get guided very much, because that monstrous version of me feels disgusted by the idea of letting anyone but you touch me. There is no Kang Jaeha without Lee Tae-gun, I think, and so I focus my entire life on the goal of getting you back, so that I can exist again.

"I am so, so, so bad at knowing myself when under no backlash, though. I don't realise how much I will hate myself for everything I've done. All I can think of is getting you back, so that I can be."

That—that makes it sounds like Jaeha succeeds at this insane plan...?

"And then another person shows up, whom I am also so, so thankful for. Her name is Kim Hye-jin. Currently, she lives in Japan, and she's awakened recently. She's half-Korean half-Japanese, and her partner in five years is awful and they break up in such a messy and spectacular way that she decides to flee to Korea rather than stay in Japan with her guild. I imagine Quasar was jumping at the opportunity, since it seemed like there was a huge chance she'd be a good fit for you, and I can't imagine they didn't suspect something was weird about how every other lead of theirs kept failing. They wanted to jump on it and not miss their chance.

"I'm completely blindsided by her. She's everything I'm not. And the guild president bungles his introduction to her extremely badly yet she still—you two are so compatible you can guide each other across the room from each other."

"That doesn't happen in real life."

"...Tae-gun-ah, you can guide me from where you are. I can't guide you that far, but the reverse is true. Our compatibility is very asymmetrical in that way."

What.

"I never bring this up in the—original timeline—because it feels so scary. It feels so scary that I need you more than you need me, even though it's true, and I don't want to make it any more true.

"But you and Kim Hye-jin are more compatible than that. It's mutual, too. And you are so, so wary of her, and—I don't know what happens. I have no idea. But you accept partnering with her, despite everything, and you start getting close to her."

Food's done, so he starts to serve it and sits across the table from Tae-gun. "It drives me out of my mind. She's ruining my plans. She's fixing you, she's helping you, she's helping you live and bringing you happiness, and all I can think about is how much I hate her. How she's getting in my way. How she's an obstacle."

"It's so insane, Tae-gun-ah. It's so insane. I've driven myself to a point where I can't be happy for you. I can't see the good in someone making you live longer. Because it gets in my way, you see. Because if she helps you, I can't. If she has you, I don't."

Tae-gun's not touching his food at all. He's just—listening. He doesn't know what to make of it, it seems like whatever happened Jaeha believes it did and—and there are, actually, checkable elements of that story. If there is a half-Japanese esper called Kim Hye-jin, if they are that compatible, then, then...

...then something really horrible has happened and—hasn't. Somehow.

"I go after her. I try to push her away. I try to scare her. I make her feel unsafe. I make her unable to go out in public. I corner her, I trap her. I keep hoping she'll give up, she'll decide she can't deal with it, she'll leave you because I'm too much. But I'm planning to kill her. Because if she doesn't leave, she needs to be removed."

The scariest thing about this whole story is the way Jaeha's telling it in such a—matter-of-fact tone. A description of events. It sounds more real, for that.

"A new confluence starts. That's... six years from now, in autumn. And very early in that confluence—you've been to Volcanic Range this time, haven't you?"

"...yeah?"

"Kim Hye-jin's power is pyrokinesis, but she counters Volcanic Range in the weird way powers sometimes do. She can outburn its fuel. The two of you go into it, you notice her power seems to somehow be very effective at killing monsters, the dungeon realises she's an actual threat and tries to kill her personally. The dungeon tries to kill her personally by sending several dragons at both of you and then spawning a dragon golem the size of a building from underground to devour her."

And now we're back to not making any sense.

"You do something insane and waste a ton of backlash killing everything around you. And you know, somehow, that she's not dead, maybe because the backlash she's consuming to survive is so strong you can feel her.

"You dive into lava to save her."

What the fuck.

What the fuck?????

"Jaeha-ya, that's not believable."

"...Tae-gun-ah, what would you do if a dungeon had kidnapped me like that and you thought you could reach me by diving into lava?"

God, he hopes Tae-gun will give the right answer. If he doesn't—if Tae-gun loved Kim Hye-jin more than he ever loved Jaeha—

"...oh."

He loved her. He loved her as much as he loves Jaeha.

That's also impossible, for a completely different reason.

He lets out the breath he'd been holding.

"You have sex in the dungeon. It's probably the only reason you survive. That and... the fact that Kim Hye-jin has regeneration powers. I'm not sure if she knew at the time, but it was definitely kept secret. You have sex in the dungeon, and you guide each other enough that you kill it. The two of you destroy Volcanic Range."

"From the outside...

"The other espers that went into the dungeon with you saw the sudden unexplained attack the dungeon launched against the two of you personally, from a distance. They saw Kim Hye-jin be targeted, and they saw you shoot underground after her. They thought you'd killed yourself in grief, except the dungeon starts getting extremely hot, inhospitably so, and they have to leave.

"Everyone thinks you're dead. I think you're dead. I break down, for a while, and I manipulate Kim Insoo into leaving me alone, and I—mount a rescue. Some other espers go in and they notice that the dungeon has become a post-nuclear wasteland somehow, and the team I build is getting ready to go in when the portal turns green. No one has any idea what happened, not until you and Kim Hye-jin walk out of the dungeon together, wearing nothing but ice. You're actively backlashing, and the whole world now knows what you and Kim Hye-jin look like naked."

...oh my God that sounds horrible.

Why is he getting hard.

"I'm obviously livid, and I decide I need to kill her no matter what. I try to scare her again, and that doesn't work, so I hire a hitman to kill her."

Whaaaaat the fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

"They succeed. They put a bullet through her brain, one through her heart, and one through her leg.

"She survives, of course, due to aforementioned regeneration. She escapes the dungeon they tried to kill her in, she recovers, and esper organisations all over the world mobilise to tighten security around dungeons.

"And then you send me an email."

"You tell me that you want me to stop. That if I kill Kim Hye-jin you will never forgive me. That I need to move on with my life.

"Something breaks in me, then. In hindsight, that's when I realise I'd lost. I am extremely angry and upset that you would ever believe I'd do such a thing. Which I had done. But you weren't supposed to believe it. You were supposed to still love me. And so the only thing I could do was find the hitman—of course they were anonymous so I did have to search—and deliver them to the law. As a show of 'good faith'. Or something. Even now I'm not sure why I did it. I surely didn't truly believe you'd change your mind about whether I'd been the one behind it after all."

"And after that I realise that I have nothing to go on for. I lost. I'll never have you back, no matter what. And I also realise that if I ever got guided again I would feel horrified about all the things I'd done, and want to die. I do want to die.

"Nightmare asks me not to die."

Honestly he's no longer evaluating the plausibility of anything Jaeha is saying anymore.

"Nightmare drops kayfabe, completely. It uses Kim Hye-jin as its mouthpiece, and it tells me that I'm the closest thing it's ever had to a friend." Now he's starting to properly show emotions, because that was—just a few hours ago, to him. That was just now. That's the present. "I don't know if it meant it or if it was trying to drive me to suicide, but the conclusion is the same anyway; I exit the dungeon and I kill myself."

"And that's when I woke up, earlier today, here. Six years in the past. On the day of Park Yoo-min's birthday. Fully guided for the first time in years, with memories of this future that's never happened. Either I'm in a coma and you're not real or, or, or something very strange is going on. I'm in the past. And I can stop all of that from happening."

Now that he's done with it all he finally lets himself go, leaning forward and hiding his face in his hands and failing to stop a sob from escaping his lips.

"Tae-gun-ah, I need none of that to ever happen. I need, I need, I n-need to n-never, e-e-ev-ver, e-ever l-let myself d-d-o a-any of th-those th-things. T-Tae-gun-ah—"

...oh, his hyung. His poor hyung. The food is forgotten, untouched, and he walks around the table so that he can hug his hyung.

Oh, God, this is the first time he's hugged Tae-gun in six years and, and, and it feels better than he remembered, and he doesn't deserve any of it, he's been the devil himself for years, he shouldn't be allowed to have a do-over, but he can't refuse it. He can't refuse it, even if it's fake, even if it's a dream, he can do it right this time. He can, he can, he can just... not hurt anyone. He can be good.

He can be good.

It doesn't actually matter if it was real or not. His hyung is here, right in front of him, suffering so much, looking, looking—somehow looking more broken than he did every time he came out of Nightmare. Tae-gun didn't know it was possible, but he's never seen Jaeha stutter before, he's never seen Jaeha shake the way he's shaking right now. Bad dream or visions of the future, something has hurt his hyung and it needs to stop.

This is everything he's wanted, everything he's worked for for the past several years, and he did nothing to deserve it, he should've been denied it, and he doesn't understand why he's being given it. He should suffer in hell; instead, he's being offered redemption. What kind of fool could ever say no?

He's got a lot of practice comforting Jaeha by now, so he can wait, hug his Jaeha and wait until he's feeling alright again, or at least until hugging him isn't what he needs to do to help anymore.

"T-Tae-gun-ah," he says, once he's finally run out of tears.

"Yeah?"

"Tonight, you sh-should go to Park Yoo-min's party. A-and, and you should have a lot of fun. And, and if you want to flirt with Ha Si-yeon then, then that's fine. Or if you want to, to, to kiss him. Or more. Or Lee Juheon. Or, or anyone."

"...hyung...?" Is Jaeha breaking up with him?

"My, my stupid jealousy caused all of this. I can't let it keep doing that. I, I want, I, if you want to be with me, then. Then I want you to. And if you want to leave, then you should. Even if you're leaving me for them. But I don't want to, to. To keep you in a cage. I want you to be happy, Tae-gun-ah. Even if that's without me."

"—hyung, I—I am happy with you, hyung, I don't want to, to—!"

"—I'm not trying to break up with you." He's not sure he's physically capable of it anyway.

"Oh." Okay. "Then...?"

"...it's just stupid. It's so stupid. I, I wanted to keep you all to myself but I. I need a life beyond you. I need to have more than just you in my life, I need—my own friends. I need my life to not revolve around you. And it's, it's good that yours doesn't revolve around me. And you should cherish your friends and, and—it was always just fear. The jealousy. It was always just being scared that you'd leave. But I should want you to be happy first. Above everything. And if you won't leave then I don't—shouldn't—mind—whatever you do with anyone else. And if you will then, then, then I don't want to hold you."

...that's really confusing actually.

"...and I need to introduce you to Kim Hye-jin. I—she was so good to you, Tae-gun. So, so good. I want you to have someone that good with you.

"Especially since I'm not going to be an esper anymore."

Oh right he'd kinda forgotten about that due to how it's fucking insane—

"And I need to apologise to your friends because I've been rather less than good to them."