>_____<;;

Victoria could see the house finally coming into view. She very quickly took the seatbelt off her ignoring Changmin’s comments.

“Whoa…slow down,” Changmin called.

“Yea? Maybe you should walk home from here if you’re looking for slow,” Victoria shot back realizing her retort really didn’t make any impact.

“What?” he asked.

“Ugh…forget you,” Victoria muttered before stepping out of the car and without a word ran up the steps.

She fumbled for the keyhole and finally unlocked the door, but when she walked in she felt a spark shock her hand. Letting out a shout she pulled her hand back and frowned before closing the door. Victoria slowed before she reached the stairs and turned to glance around. The rooms were empty. No one was there.

Breathing a sigh of relief she started up the stairs. The house felt weird in a way she couldn’t describe. It kind of felt like she was walking under water. There was that feeling that something heavy was against her chest.

The lights in the hallway were on as she’d left them. Victoria glanced at the closed doors. The girls weren’t up. They should have answered their phones when she called, so something wasn’t right. Victoria turned when she heard a voice coming from Namjoo’s room.

That was it. She knew something had happened. Reaching for the doorknob she opened the door and glanced into the room to see Luhan cradling her younger sister in his arms as if she’d died. But what he was saying was even more suspicious.

“Namjoo, listen to me,” Luhan said, “you have to wake up before it happens. Don’t go there, please don’t go there.”

“Go where?”

What place was he talking about? She was thinking now was the right time for him to be giving her answers. Chorong was right; there was something fishy about him.

Luhan stared back at her surprised. He’d been totally unaware of her presence. No word was traded between the two for a minute.

“You should go wake up your other sister,” Luhan suggested. “They’ve spent the last two hours in the past.”

Victoria stared at Luhan and figured it wasn’t time to be focusing him just yet. Since he had Namjoo, Victoria would get Chorong. Making her way down the hall she pushed Chorong’s door open to find her deep asleep on her bed.

“Chorong, wake up,” Victoria lightly shook her. “You have to wake up. Chorong, open your damn eyes and look at me godammit!”

Yet, her younger sister didn’t budge. Chorong who had been full of worries and loud these days refused to open her eyes. How far back had they gone in time? To what era? It was possible to get them back, wasn’t it?

“Chorong, wake up,” Victoria kept calling.

Victoria suddenly thought about the dying Woohyun in Chorong’s arms and wondered if Chorong had felt as helpless when she was unable to help him. But Chorong wasn’t Woohyun. Woohyun had given his life up for Chorong. Chorong had to return to the present.

“Chorong, wake up,” Victoria continued, “you remember Woohyun? He’s here, not there. You want to see him again, don’t you?”

She watched Chorong’s eyebrows deepen on her face. Victoria was suddenly sure Chorong was hearing her, but she was just unable to respond.

“Come on, Chorong. Get a hang of yourself,” Victoria urged. “Wake up. Open your damn eyes for me!”

“Namjoo!” Chorong shouted when her eyes opened.

Victoria felt her eyes widen before Chorong sat up and pulled her hair out of her face confused.

“Where am I?” Chorong asked.

“Home, you idiot.” Victoria answered before smiling gratefully.

Chorong still looked around as if confused. “21^st century, right?”

Victoria nodded.

“Oh thank god!” Chorong screamed before burying her face into her blanket. “My bed! Home and my sisters!” Then she shot back up. “Where’s Namjoo?”

“Namjoo?”

“She…she was crying…and she suddenly out on me,” Chorong rambled on with the confused Victoria listening closely. “Oh my god…she was pregnant!”

Victoria watched Chorong crawl off the bed before making her way down the hall.

>_____<;;

Namjoo woke up with a gasp before her eyes shot open and she looked around bewildered before turning to look up at him. A smile of relief crossed his face before Namjoo sat up. She leaned somewhat away from him with a confused frown on her face and Luhan felt his heart sink. Maybe Namjoo knew after all and it couldn’t be helped…

“Namjoo…” he started, but Chorong’s entrance cut him off.

“So you are awake after all!” Chorong said loudly. “Damn…I was scared for a moment.” Then she glanced at Luhan before realizing the sudden situation.

“I think, before I listen to what happened to you two, I’d like to hear some answers from you,” Victoria glanced at him.

Luhan peered back at Victoria and nervously shot Namjoo a glance.

>_____<;;

“It wasn’t a dream; we were both at the same place, right?” Chorong asked in the kitchen.

“Yea, I’m sure it was the same place,” Namjoo mumbled before putting a hand up to her head. “I have a really bad headache.”

“Look on the bright side, you’re not pregnant,” Chorong whipped a smile onto her face before turning the boiler off and poured it into two cups of tea for them.

“Very funny.” Namjoo was not amused.

“Look on the other side,” Chorong told, “this says you haven’t been able to get away from Chanyeol since over, I don’t know, a thousand years ago.”

Namjoo slightly glared at her. “And someone supposedly gets married.”

“To an old man.”

“You didn’t know that.”

“I guessed it.”

“Could have been someone you loved.”

“But I didn’t get those feelings.”

“Shut up.”

Chorong smiled and laughed before leaning across the table. “But it’s interesting, right? Everyone here has been somewhere in the past.”

Namjoo glanced at her older sister without any interest.

“But…why did you cry like that?” Chorong questioned.

Namjoo glanced Chorong before staring into her cup of tea. “Those feelings can’t have been mine, but why were we there? I mean, not us, but the other us. If we existed then…is that really our past?”

Chorong stared into her younger sister’s conflicted face before smiling. “It’s ok. We’re not there anymore. The past doesn’t matter.”

But even so, Chorong still couldn’t help but wonder why.

>_____<;;

Victoria tapped her fingers against her arm and stared at Luhan. While Chorong took Namjoo downstairs, she remained with Luhan upstairs so that their conversation wouldn’t have to be overheard.

“You know I don’t trust people very easily. You’re not an exception,” Victoria began, “even if you’re my sister’s guardian angel.”

“I know.” Luhan calmly replied.

“Since you’re probably not here to harm Namjoo, what are you doing here and why are you here?” Victoria interrogated.

They were standing in the middle of the hallway, Victoria’s back was to the stairs in case Luhan tried to escape, but it was quite a useless tactic since he could disappear into thin air.

“I was told angels aren’t quite who we think they are,” Victoria added.

Luhan stared back at her not intimidated by her strong presence.

“Answer.”

“Because I chose to appear,” Luhan said.

Victoria frowned. The words ran into her brain, but she didn’t understand.

“I was offered only one chance to appear in one of Namjoo’s lifetimes,” Luhan continued, “and I chose this one.”

“Wait…what do you mean?” Victoria asked. “Who gave you the chance?”

“The angels.”

“Angels?”

“The ones I met after I died.” Luhan didn’t seem hurt with even what he said.

Victoria was still confused, bewildered by hearing this, but there was no choice but to accept what it was that he was telling her.

“Why Namjoo?”

Luhan hesitated for a long minute as if he really didn’t want to tell Victoria why, but she waited. Silence droned in and out. During that long minute she watched his conflicted face fight the emotions inside of him.

“I love her.”

The hard frown on her face disappeared and eased with shock. Luhan and Namjoo?

No…

“You know her…” Victoria stated after recalling him begging Namjoo ‘not to go there.’ “How?”

Luhan gritted his teeth and pressed his lips firmly together. He remained in silence again for another long time.

“We were soul mates.”

Were…he used past tense.

“Why do you say ‘were?’”

“I can’t tell you that.”

At 1 in the morning her sisters were in the kitchen drinking tea when she walked in. Chorong immediately turn to see her and watched as she took a seat at the table.

“Doing ok?” Victoria started.

“Alive as ever,” Chorong replied.

“Luhan says it was the Dream Weaver who locked you in a dream state by sending you into a space in time,” Victoria explained. “No real harm done, but he takes energy from deep dreamers.”

“A space in time,” Chorong repeated, “what does that mean?”

“Obviously what it means,” Victoria explained, “a time portal. You two were locked in the past. So what time era was it?”

“The Joseon Dynasty,” Namjoo told. “Obviously not a very great time.”

“Namjoo, why don’t you go up to talk to Luhan?” Victoria suggested. “He hasn’t gone yet.”

Namjoo glanced at her before she quietly stood and walked out. Victoria turned to see the youngest leave before turning back to Chorong.

“So what happened?”

“I’m not sure,” Chorong answered tapping her finger on the tabletop. “I was getting prepared for a wedding; the worst part was the maid I had. Namjoo had a more exciting story. She was married to Chanyeol, pregnant, and had some kid running around. If you want details, I was rich.”

Victoria slightly frowned amused.

“But,” Chorong tossed her sarcasm away into worry, “Namjoo said her heart hurt a lot when she saw a picture of Luhan. She looked really tragic. It…was just so sad watching her cry.”

“I’m starting to think, you really are a novelist.”

Chorong snorted and laughed.

“No, I mean it,” Victoria stated, “what you said about Luhan sharing some kind of painful link with Namjoo might really be true.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Chorong felt her heart sink. “I didn’t really mean that.”

“They were soul mates, Chorong,” Victoria said, “he told me. Something really bad did happen, but hearing your stories you two probably made it there after it already happened. So we really don’t know how or why Luhan died.”

“He…died…” Chorong repeated struck by the impact of the word death. “Then why isn’t he her soul mate now? Why an angel?”

“I don’t know,” Victoria helplessly told, “that’s probably the other ‘bad’ thing that happened.”

Victoria saw the sympathy sketched on Chorong’s face. The only sister who could truly understand how it was to lose a lover. And she worried again how Chorong was coping with Woohyun’s second death.

“Chorong,” Victoria began, “about Woohyun…”

“Why?” Chorong chirped up. “What about him?”

“You…you’re ok, right?”

Chorong smiled and nodded. “But where were you? Since I’m guessing you probably left in the middle of the night.”

“Lee Shin Il is gone,” Victoria replied, “he left or someone got to him before we did.”

“What? That doesn’t make sense.”

“The other thing is there were things out there,” Victoria added.

“What things? Bad things?”

“Well they obviously weren’t good.”

“Oh…well yea…”

“It wasn’t too bad,” Victoria said. “But I don’t know what we should do now that Lee Shin Il is gone. We’re kind of…out of luck now.” 

>_____<;;

The paper, the sketch of Luhan’s face and why it’d been on that piece of paper, Namjoo wanted to know. Why seeing the sketch had hurt the Namjoo in the Joseon Dynasty so much was such a big mystery. Namjoo began wondering even more about why Luhan had appeared to her now. What kind of role did he have in her past life?

When she reached the top of the stairs she saw that the door to her room had been left somewhat open and she could see Luhan standing inside staring at the picture of her and mom. Her eyes sat on his back and she tried to picture him in a rich cloak, one that men wore back in the old days. It was difficult to imagine it in her head, but she was sure she could see him in something of that sort.

Luhan turned when she pushed the door all the way open and felt her heart flutter and cry again when their eyes met. Visions of seeing Luhan sketched out on that piece of paper appeared in her mind and she thought she could feel the pain she had experienced hurl through her. A very soft smile took over his lips and his eyes gleamed when he set the picture down.

“Are you feeling better?” he asked.

Namjoo quietly nodded.

“What part in time did the Dream Weaver send you to?”

“I only saw good things.” Namjoo didn’t want to be specific with Luhan until she was sure she could get something out of him first.

 “Ah…that’s good,” he smiled broadly, “Did you meet him?”

“Meet who?”

“Your husband and your son.”

Silence presumed and Namjoo suddenly wondered if it hurt him to ask. Namjoo was suddenly very sure that he knew what he couldn’t tell her. He knew of what happened before she married Chanyeol and he was very well aware of why Joseon Dynasty’s Namjoo ached so much.

“Luhan,” Namjoo began, “who are you?”

Their eyes locked and a very calm aura surrounded the atmosphere. “My job is to protect you.”

No. That wasn’t it. There was something there. It felt like she knew him, but she didn’t. There was this strong familiar connection she had with him that kept pulling at her mind, but she couldn’t figure it out. It was beginning to prick at her about why she didn’t know. After a long moment she finally stepped forward and grabbed his arm.

“Have we known each other since a long time ago?” Namjoo felt warmth spread through her very much like the same kind that she’d experienced when she first touched him.

He stared back at her for a very long time, “You shouldn’t have to worry about it. You have more realistic things waiting for you.” Luhan wrapped his fingers around her wrist before gently probing her hand away. “An angel never leaves who he’s guarding. Just rest now.”

Luhan gave her a last smile before he disappeared and Namjoo was left standing in her room with a very empty heart. 

***We'll see in a while if Chorong is really as 'Ok' as she claims to be. 

***And is Vic really out of luck yet? Huhu~ More Changmin for her xD

***Well we now know why Luhan is there and we know of his feelings, but he still refuses to tell his story. More problems for Namjoo as she goes into a desperate state to find out what happened.