Thank you to -doublemint- for the poster above!

The year was 2999, travelling past light speed was possible, living in virtual reality for months at a time was possible, and anything else remotely ambitious was possible, so why did Taeri think that Shinjuku was a good idea for vacation? Shinjuku might have once been an LED-lit jewel of a city, but that was so 2453. Its lights had considerably dulled since its peak in the mid-2450s, its towers’ paints were chipping away, and its glamor had gone glitzy. Shinjuku just spoke too loudly of gaudier times and photophilic souls.

Why hadn’t Taeri gone off to Mars, Venus, or the other exoplanets like everyone else instead of staying on the dull Earth?

It had seemed like a good decision at the time—to vacation in Shinjuku—because of a few things: eternal darkness/nighttime, frequent rain, and… Truthfully, she was just too cheap to spend extra money to buy a ticket to Mars or someplace just mildly riveting. But now she regretted it. She had forgotten that Shinjuku was one of those special places that she couldn’t enjoy without someone as company.

The shining, glimmering, diamond-like flicker of the outlying buildings, the enormous neon billboards that were as large as certain buildings on the Moon flashing with messages and propaganda, the fleeting aircraft thousands of feet in the air—all the things that shone with life (silicon or carbon based, it didn’t matter) didn’t and couldn’t shine as bright as they could without someone to enjoy them with. No matter how bright the billboards, how strobing the perpetually blinking road lights, and how ostentatious the vendor cars were, their lights couldn’t illuminate the darker places of Shinjuku—like her.

It was now, in that moment where she felt ever so alone that Taeri realized this—again. However, it wasn’t the sight of several lights that allowed her to come to that conclusion. If that were the case, she would have felt alienated each time she hung up and powered on her Christmas decor. No, she didn’t feel alone because of the lights; she felt alone at the sight of all the towering buildings—windows all lit up, signaling that they were occupied by people and other beings. Souls—each one just as important as her, if not, more important.

This feeling, of being surrounded yet somehow being alone, was not foreign to Taeri, but it certainly never got any less pleasant each time she experienced it. She wanted to be special, sure, but being in a city like Shinjuku—where a woman with a hideous red fedora, where a man with the purple beard, or where an AI had lime green skin—made her feel like she was just anyone else. A computer-generated face. A flickering lamp in a store of 100,000 other lamps. A fly on the wall. No one worth taking a particular interest in.

Taeri sighed as she kept walking, her movements sluggish with helplessness. In the grand scheme of things, who was she? In 15 years, would anyone remember her? Had she even done anything worth remembering?

But, in the midst of every terrible thing she felt, she recalled a faint, bittersweet memory.

The memory wasn’t hers, but rather, it belonged to her past friend—Park Chanyeol.

Five years ago, she, her ex-boyfriend Do Kyungsoo, Park Chanyeol, Kim Jongdae, Kim Jongin, and Byun Baekhyun ran away to Shinjuku to escape the harpies that they angered in Seoul, South Korea. They have been chased for over 500 miles, and Japan seemed like the best place to finally end the chase. Why it seemed like a good place eluded Taeri now, but she couldn’t forget how they all piped up with agreement when Jongin suggested it. They should have known, however, that since things were haphazardly planned, it would all end in disaster. Long story short, Taeri and Kyungsoo ended up in a police station, Baekhyun “accidentally” got “held up” in a brothel, Jongdae and Jongin ended up lost in the sewers, and Chanyeol thrillingly got chased through Shinjuku only to be thrown into a neon sign by an enraged harpy.

Oh, those were the times. Sure, Minseok and Yixing were more than furious to hear that they weren’t a part of the great expedition, and Junmyeon nearly lost his head worrying about them, but it was a ball. They had felt immortal and so youthful that none of them regretted that night. Better yet, no one—including Taeri—felt alone that night. That night, that night! It was on that night that the city lights were not imposing symbols of how useless one’s life was against several billion. In fact, they were not “city lights.” They were more like specks of the sun, cut by a master jeweler, thrown into a pressure chamber, and crafted into diamonds that were thrown and scattered like gold coins from a princess to a pauper.

That was five years ago. Five years since Taeri read Chanyeol’s mind and saw his marvelous adventure of being chased through Shinjuku as she waited in a police holding cell. Five years since the nine of them still talked. Everything was different now. Now, Chanyeol lived on Mars or some other planet, Jongdae and Minseok were most likely AI manufacturers, Baekhyun was doing god-knows-what (probably managing his own strip club), Yixing and Junmyeon had gone off and pursed careers as teachers, Jongin disappeared into Neptune, Taeri was a Senior Protector, and Kyungsoo was dead. That last night in Shinjuku was the last good and memorable night they had, because a week later, Kyungsoo died, and everyone became icebergs and drifted or melted away into the murkiness of the universe.

Taeri kept glancing up at the endless stream of aircraft zooming through the sky. Their diamond lights mimicked the stars above them. And the stars above them reminded her of her friends and how they considered themselves as celestial bodies born into souls. God, she missed the nine of them. They could have been so much. After all, they were all fit to be Protectors—Defenders of the Universe. But those hopes were gone now, thrown back up into the stars, dissipating like smoke against the sky.

As she continued to walk with the crowd that nearly encapsulated and suffocated her, more worries and regrets ran freely in her mind.

She wished that she wasn’t an angel. Being an angel meant that she was an empath, and she could quite literally feel the emotions of other people and beings without helping it. Whether it was anger, sadness, joy, or any other emotion, Taeri felt it all. Even as she tried to sleep, she could still feel traces of emotion drifting inside her home from the outside. The constant bombardment of these emotions was sometimes pleasant, and she felt like she was a part of something bigger, but tonight, that wasn’t the case. Tonight, she felt trapped by it all.

“Taeri!”

A cold shiver ran up Taeri’s spine. She had precisely one person she could call a friend, and she knew for a fact that friend was not vacationing in Shinjuku. Better yet, that friend was a woman, and the voice that called out for her belonged to a man’s. So, Taeri spun around, trying to trace where the voice came from. Perhaps it was someone from her garrison. As she tried to look through the crowd of AIs, humans, and other beings for a familiar face, she found a shocking surprise instead.

Do Kyungsoo? She gasped to herself. The man she found staring back at her had the same wide eyes, same heart-shaped, pouty lips, and same distinct tan from spending too much time on the Western Hemisphere. Yes, it was Do Kyungsoo—the same Do Kyungsoo who held her heart in a golden box placed on the same shelf where his heart was kept, the same Do Kyungsoo who promised her the world (when he could afford it), and most definitely the same Do Kyungsoo with eyes that held the night. But how could it be the same Do Kyungsoo? The Do Kyungsoo who died five years ago? In the car accident?

“Taeri.” Kyungsoo gasped once he had walked over to her. “Taeri.” He engulfed her in a strong hug that made her feel something that she could call hers.

A thousand or a million blinking lights flashed by her eyes, and they could have been anything, but she knew they weren’t. They were memories. In the hug that she received, she felt a sense of yesterday. Not yesterday when she bit into a donut and realized it was coconut. But yesterday, when youth still blossomed in her lips—showing up suddenly within the span of seconds in surreptitious sundries of scarlet smiles. That yesterday. A yesterday that didn’t happen yesterday, but rather years ago. A yesterday one would only call yesterday because it was too easy to miss. A yesterday whose admittance to the fact that it had happened would never want to be made because then it would feel almost like it didn’t happen.

Is he real?

Taeri’s body remained frozen, unable to fathom what stood before her, unable to conjure up something—anything—to make up for the lost time. Years of never-said words struggled to exonerate themselves from a throat that hadn’t anticipated so many forgotten visitors to show up at an unplanned gala of Do Kyungsoo is alive. Even her eyes searched over his body trying to look for some blur, some sign that maybe he was an illusion or a delusion or a hallucination—that maybe she was just losing her mind and that she wasn’t choked up on Debirium.

But he grabbed her by the arm again, and he felt real. If he was 3D painting, then it was a damn good painting with highly realistic graphics.

“Listen,” Kyungsoo breathed out, his eyes wide with some sort of desperation, “I need your help.”

“M-My help?” Taeri stammered. She had barely just met him after thinking for five years that he was dead, and yet here he was already seeking a favor. Well, the fact that he was alive still eluded her. She could sense the life aura emanating from him, but that could have been easily manipulated with the usage of certain elixirs.

“Yes!” Kyungsoo nodded in the same way a bobblehead did. “I need your help killing a vampire: Oh Sehun.”

⟡ ⟡ ⟡

Taeri had insisted that they continued their strange conversation in the dingy hotel room she w