When you arrived to the next universe you knew it was going to be the last. It had been six days already, making it the seventh and Hyungwon said if you didn’t make it back in two weeks, both of you would be erased from your original reality. So this was it, your last chance to turn back whether you found Seokjin or not. Or you could go forward and forward until the heartbreak lessened or the universe itself broke you - might even killed you. Or maybe you should have given up. Just stay and make a better life out of what you got. Most people didn’t get as many chances as you did anyway.

This time the first thing you saw was a stray cat and out of a reflex you didn’t know you had in you, you stepped on the brakes with two hands gripping on the steering wheel too tight.

“Holy ,” you cursed, panting hard in the stopped car, adrenalin still running through your veins. You watched as the cat frozen only a meter away from the car’s number plate fled unharmed and you let out a relieved sigh.

You subconscious only caught up with you then, realizing the words you had just said were Jungkook’s favourites to bring up whenever he was surprised. Thinking of him, his desperate voice calling your name and the sadness of his eyes, immense guilt washed over you. Maybe this was exactly how Seokjin felt. The realization of not being able to save anybody despite his power must have been tough for him.

You took a deep breath, monitoring your surroundings and you came to the conclusion that this city didn’t seem much different from the Seoul you knew. There were a few unfamiliar buildings here and there, new faces on the huge advertisements on the walls but overall it reminded you of home. Again. But of course, something was off about this reality too: for example the car in which you came to your senses. Even with the free driving lessons from your oh so patient boyfriend, you haven’t made it to the licence yet. However, this you probably knew how to drive and could also afford a car. Nice.

Sitting in the front seat, chest still heavily rising and falling, you were contemplating over what you should do. Would it be better to get out of the car and wander around? Hoping you would bump into a familiar face like you had been lucky enough in the earlier universes? Or should you follow the instructions of the GPS connected to the car and head to the place labelled as home? Maybe you could find there what you had been looking for.

Deep in thoughts, you got startled when somebody honked at you from behind and you decided in a whim to believe in fate. You stepped on the gas pedal and hoped that driving was all about muscle memory. It was a suburb area and the traffic wasn’t that bad either, you reasoned but luckily your brain also caught up quickly and provided you with all the info you needed to know to get home safely. You were taking a right turn when a song you didn’t recognize blasted through the speakers and you swiped right over the green button on your phone without actually looking there.

“Hey, honey, can you buy some eggs and milk on your way back home?” a nice feminine voice spoke up and you froze for a moment. It was familiar, the loving tone, the pause between vowels and your breath hitched.

“Mom?” you gasped bewildered, looking at the phone screen displaying the caller. When you took the call, it didn’t ever occur you it could be her, an older but very much alive version of your dear mother. “Is it you?”

“Yes, it’s me. Is everything, okay?” she sounded worried and gosh, you had to stop at a parking lot because your hands were shaking.

“Yeah, everything’s fine, almost perfect,” you replied forcing the sobs out of your voice. “I will be home soon,” you promised.

“Good. I’m making your favourite for dinner,” your mom singsonged and you giggled at her antics. You didn’t even remember ‘your’ favourite but it must have been delicious if she made it with love. Yet, you still had one worry choking you.

“Is.. is dad home, too?” you faltered out anxiously waiting. What if in this life he had been alone in the car when that drunk bastard had run into their car? What if that fateful night all those years ago hadn’t left you as an orphan but with a widowed mother?

You were ready to face the loss once again but the pain never came.

“He should be home soon but you know how it is with his colleagues on Fridays,” your mother laughed and even when she was scolding her husband, she sounded endeared. They clearly loved each other very much and you could finally understand why everybody was telling you that. As if she could hear your thoughts, your mom hummed happily. “Okay, I will leave you to whatever you’re doing…”

“I love you, mom,” you blurted out suddenly sentimental before she could hung up on you. It was the second chance you’d longed for without knowing and you didn’t want to make the same mistakes or have the same regrets.

“I love you, too.” The answer was immediate and it brought you close to tears.

You had been so focused on finding Jin that the possibility of your parents being alive hadn’t even occurred to you. But later in the evening having a lovely dinner with them, memories of this life erupting in your mind, you felt less and less ready to leave. In your mother’s welcoming embrace you felt safe but not quite home.

You needed his love for that.

“Mom, do you know anything about Jin?” you had to ask while you were drying the plates your mother just washed and handed to you.

“Jin?” she furrowed her brows, pouting. “I don’t think you have ever mentioned any Jin. Is he a classmate? Is he handsome?”

Ah and there it was: the teasing edge of a mother’s tone. It was what your classmates had complained about and you had never gotten to experience. You blushed violent red.

“Mom!”

Both of you left it like this, finishing the washing up giggles thrown in. But that night, tucked in your bed, you scrolled through your phone’s gallery and you had to realize that there was really no evidence of this you knowing Jin at all.

Maybe that was the point. With your parents alive, you had followed your dad into the business field instead of pursuing art so you had never met Jin at the university lobby. You hadn’t stood there dumbfounded, staring at the most handsome face you had ever seen while he’d handed you the pink notebook full of scratches that you had lost around the train station recently. You hadn’t gotten to know the other boys either so that presented the next best question: how do you find somebody you don’t even know?

You spent almost all night stalking every Kim Seokjin online but your boyfriend wasn’t one of them. You would have never thought that strolling in the city with no direction in mind would lead you straight to him. But you needed some air, a familiar place to think so you drove to the hill in the suburbs to watch the sunrise like you so often used to do with Jin. For the first time ever you were afraid of the twenty-four hours passing because you didn’t know what to do when the time comes. It would have been so much easier with Jin. If you had known what he had done.

After so many useless circles in the town, the car was close to be out of gas, so you pulled aside at the nearest gas station on your way home. It would have been the last place where you had expected to meet him but there he was, washing a silver Toyota clean like he had nothing better to do.

Your mouth fell agape as you parked the car and you stared at Jin not quite believing your eyes. Almost blindly you stumbled out of the seat but your confident steps halted soon. After a week of struggles, yearning to find him, you were finally here but you didn’t know what to do. Should you be concerned, angry or maybe just confused? Should you approach him gently or rather yell at him for leaving without anything more than a Sorry?

You were conflicted and as you stood there not knowing how to process the fact of actually finding Jin, he patted on the Toyota’s roof done with his job, wiping his hands clean in his work jeans as if he had done this all his life. It seemed so unbelievable and for a moment, you played with the thought of him forgetting, maybe suffering from amnesia but then he looked at you.

And he stopped in his tracks, too. Watching you with disbelief in his eyes.

Your name fell off his lips like a sweet, mellow prayer as he stared back at you unmoving. His initial shock was clearly written on his face and suddenly the burning feeling of missing him hit you with full force. So without thinking or caring about anything, you ran to him burying yourself into his chest.

“I missed you so much,” you sobbed into your boyfriend’s worn shirt. Sniffing of his clear linen scent and having his firm body close to you, it finally felt like a destination. Like home.

Maybe your confession was his breaking point because then Seokjin let out a deep sigh and his arms that hung stiff and rigidly by his side until now came up to caress your back and pull you deeper in the hug.

“I missed you too,” he admitted and for a moment you truly believed that everything could be the same. That all this was just a misunderstanding and once you talked it through you could go back living your lives as it was.

“Let’s go home. Please. To our reality,” you pleaded as you pulled back just enough to look him in the eye. This was what you originally came for, wasn’t it? But oh silly girl, haven’t you learned it by now that every universe was just as real as you wanted them to be?

“I can’t go back,” Jin shook his head relentlessly and the sadness in his eyes were haunting. It scared you. He wouldn’t send you home alone, right?

“Why?” you demanded an answer and even though your boyfriend knew how stubborn you could be, he remained silent, eyes cast down. “Why can’t you, Jin?”

It took one, two, three beats of your heart until the boy finally looked dead in your eyes and his words left chills all over you.

“Because in our reality you were dead…”

The silent after his words suddenly seemed loud and you tasted iron in your mouth as your throat closed up. It was already shocking enough to find out that in one of the universes you were slowly dying of cancer but it was a whole different thing facing with the fact of actually being dead in another one.

“I’m not, I’m here,” you muttered hesitantly, trying to prove a point but Jin’s dark eyes didn’t hold lies either. His handsome face fell and he gestured towards the employees’ changing room so you could have a calm talk without having a mental breakdown in the middle of the gas station.

After Jin locked the door behind you, the two of you sat down on the opposite sides of a small, old metal table and Jin let out a frustrated groan as he buried his head in his hands momentarily. Then chest heaving, he took a deep breath and straightened up in the creaking chair.

“It was our dinner date,” he spoke up in a shaky voice, never taking his eyes off of you. A faint smile tugged on the corners of his mouth as he went on telling the story with nostalgia lacing his words. “You wore a blue blazer and I brought a bouquet of flowers in a matching colour. I knew you would like them. I was waiting for you outside of the restaurant and when you arrived your eyes were shining. You were so beautiful and all I could think about was how lucky I am to have you.”

Seokjin’s voice was soft, sentimental and even if he stared ahead, he didn’t really saw you now. He looked through you. He was telling you this like someone tells a tale and even though you were one of the protagonists of this one, you couldn’t recall anything. You didn’t have any other choice than waiting so you could finally understand it. The reason why Jin had to leave and kept leaving.

“One moment you were smiling at me, running to me and a moment later,” Seokjin continued with a sharp intake of air. “I- I saw you get hit by a car and bleed out on the street.”

You gasped, grabbing the metal table for support, stomach churning. After watching your friends suffer in multiple universes you didn’t even doubt that Jin was telling you the truth. But then how? How were you alive?

“There was so much blood, god, I didn’t even think. I went back in time and cancelled our date. You remember that, right?” Jin’s gaze suddenly snapped back at you and you nodded. You remembered that night clearly. You remembered carefully choosing that blue outfit he just mentioned for the date but that never happened because Jin cancelled it out of the blue. Now you knew why. “But I wasn’t careful enough and it must broke the timeline because ever since then, somebody keeps dying and no matter how many times I go back, I can’t save everybody. So I decided to find a reality in which we are all happy.”

You were overwhelmed by dozens of feelings like disappointment, grief, anger and sadness. You wished you had known that Jin was having such a hard time trying to fix what had gone wrong. But Namjoon’s words echoed in your mind: I hope he doesn’t try to fix this mess because it will only get worse. Maybe your smart friend was right all along.

The first universe you entered was devastated, a lone place, a dying world and your fates were sealed, no wonder why he left. The second one was all about lies and dreams that never turn into reality, in a way it was just as sad. In the third, you were in love but also involved in adultery, you could have run away, start a new life but the god above all gods would have never let you. The fourth was a brutal world, an eternal fight for money and survival. The fifth was one full of past smiles and promises and a life too short not only for you but your friends too. And the sixth, the most fresh of them all was too scary, too unfair, too heartbreaking. Neither of them was the perfect world Seokjin had been looking for. Was this one good enough for him then?

“And is it the one? In which you didn’t even know me?” you threw your hands in the air more frustrated than you intended to be. You understood him, partly at least, but it still hurt.

“I hoped you were happy,” Seokjin told you softly, his honey voice soothing and washing the pain away. “That fate would somehow lead you back to me if we were meant to be.”

Oh fate, how funny it worked.

“And here I am.”

“Yes, you are here. I would have never thought you would follow me,” he nodded still a bit awe-struck as if he believed it was all merely a dream.

“How could I not? You just disappeared one day. It was selfish of you, you know? Deciding on something like that without telling me,” you snapped. All those thoughts accumulating in you in the past week now came to the surface. You have been through a lot while coming after him. You almost died, at least twice. But maybe both of you had been selfish in your own way: him leaving without talking with you and you not letting him go, clinging to him even now.

“Sorry,” Jin mumbled and seemingly he didn’t know what to do with his hands or this situation at all. The two of you had always been very open and honest with each other, so him hiding something like this from you was unheard of. Neither of you really knew how to face this problem. You were aware that it was hard on him already and you had no desire to make it worse but you couldn’t just ignore it.

“Yeah that was on the paper too,” you muttered picking on a nail mindlessly. The awkwardness between you two was such a foreign feeling and you hated it.

“If I had told you, you would have never let me do this,” Seokjin tried to reason but it felt more like an excuse. You weren’t having any of it.

“Because it’s crazy! Are you happy then at least? How is this universe different from the earlier ones? Did you find your perfect little world here?”

“Well everybody is alive, healthy and not at each other’s throats so yeah, I guess I’m happy and I’m finally ready to accept that I can’t run forever,” your boyfriend sighed with the weight of a world - or all of them - on his broad shoulders and you felt bad for lashing out at him. You didn’t even have to ask, he had more to say. “I went forth again and again because there was always something wrong. But with each travel my alter egos became stronger, sometimes their will overcame my own. Like the jump from the scaffolding. You cannot mess with the universe without having to pay a price. Even my kind can’t get away with this kind of projection. It drained my power.”

“You took you alter egos away from the universe they belong to,” you muttered understanding the weight of his actions.

“Yes, but if they are just a bit like me, they understand why I… had to leave,” he nodded a bit sad, apologetic, a crash of every version of him. “Even when all our friends were all there and you looked at me like I was all your stars, it… it wasn’t you. And our friends weren’t the same either.”

You were immediately relieved hearing him admit it because it meant that you weren’t alone with this odd feeling. Your posture went languid and your voice softened with the next question:

“What’s up with the others in this universe?”

You were truly curious about all of them and how they were doing. After seeing so many possibilities, you could only hope it wasn’t any worse than those but considering Seokjin’s fond smile as he started to talk, you doubted it would be any bad.

“Taehyung works as a cashier but his father is pretty okay this time. Jimin and Hobi are still the inseparable dancer duo and they are part-time workers at a nice restaurant downtown. Yoongi does delivery for the same one and he works on music in his spare time. Namjoon and I are at college and well, we work here,” he pointed at random sections of the gas station. Then his whole face lit up just like how it used to when he was telling you about something that fascinated him. “Oh and Jungkook is off to Japan with his girlfriend…”

“Wait, wait, wait… Jungkookie got himself a girlfriend?” you gaped at him surprised by the fact because in your reality, the youngest boy of all was so shy that he couldn’t get out a complete sentence without stuttering when girls were around, even around you for the first few months of your acquaintance.

“Yeah. Met her at some anime or video game thing apparently and it’s all internet romance since then,” Jin explained and you shared a meaningful look thinking about young love. It eased the atmosphere, turning it into something warm and mushy. You wanted to kiss him and make up but the boy reminded you why you originally came for.

“Look if you would like to go back, I understand, I can even help but I…”

“You won’t come with me,” you finished the sentence instead of him. That much was obvious. He looked settled here, content with his simple life and you had no time to get to know more about this universe and his life here because it would have been too late for you to return. Both of you understood that you had no time to waste.

“I couldn’t live in that world. I have seen almost all of you die and it was my fault,” your boyfriend nodded to your statement even if a little reluctantly.

You would have liked to argue that it was the same you and same friends here and there too but you knew it wasn’t true. The gang member Yoongi hated you, god Hoseok wanted to kill you and Jungkook with the key was in love with you, something you couldn’t imagine happening in the reality you came from. A different world, different upbringing, different life choices shaped you all differently, so it could have never been the same.

There was a pause. A heavy one filled with what ifs, shoulds and woulds. It was Seokjin and his genuine brown eyes that addressed the problem in the end.

“I don’t wanna pressure you into anything, because it’s your choice: what do you want?”

What do you want? You thought of your mother’s embrace, your father’s proud smile and the boys whom Jin just talked about. You knew there was only one right answer:

“Let’s be happy,” you took Jin’s hand in yours and smiled at him shyly. He smiled back.

It was just as real as the reality you had always known.

 

“Hello,” you greeted the familiar woodwork scent as an old customer as you stepped into the shop. It took you some time to find it, different stores, different street names and all but it was just like you remembered. A little bit of déjà vu.

“Hello, what can I help you with?” the lanky guy shifted behind the counter as you took a confident step forward. He most certainly looked at you like you were a stranger.

“I wanted to give this back to you,” you told him working the clamps off your wrist and putting the heavy watch down on the polished wood. You had gotten used to the weight and you had seen the lines it left on your skin making it a part of you.

Hyungwon seemed surprised, his eyes widened while taking in the sight of the storm-wrecked watch, then with a glimpse of recognition in his eyes, he looked back at you.

“Are you sure? Did you find what you were looking for?”

“Yes. Thank you,” you smiled at him lightheartedly and left the little store without further ado. It felt good, refreshing to have that machine off you.

On your way back to the parking lot you spotted that cute coffee place where you had your first date with Jin in this universe and the thought was enough to make you smile. You rummaged through your bag until you found your phone and dialled your boyfriend without a second thought.

“Hey Jin, mind meeting me up at that café we like when you get off work?”

“Anything for you, princess,” Jin chuckled at your impromptu idea of a date but had no objections at all. “Any special plans for tonight?”

“I was thinking… maybe we can have a little get-together with the guys?” you suggested zealously because you learned you shouldn’t waste time and it had already been a while since you all met up. It was actually hilarious getting to see each boys’ reaction twice to Jin bringing his girl to meet them. You got to know them all over again.

“Good idea,” your boyfriend agreed cheerfully and you quickly discussed the exact time and place before his boss yelled at him. “See you later then. I love you.”

Hearing him say it warmed you heart like always and you beamed at nothing in particular. You were simply happy.

“I love you, too,” you whispered back and just like that everything was alright.

You hoped that in any parallel universe, in all of those other realities, your alter egos were also okay in their own way.