Present Day

“So, how was your vacation with EXO?” Fei asks, when Yue walks in to the dorm with her luggage looking exhausted from her trip.

“You will not believe any of what I’m about to tell you, but I’m going to anyways,” Yue says plopping on the couch and taking a deep breath. “How should I even start…. how about, I met my sons from the future, and I need to invent a time machine so I can get them back. Oh, and I also supposedly married one of the Chinese members of EXO. Wait, scratch that, different versions of me married all 3 Chinese members of EXO.”

Fei’s mouth drops. “Spending a week with EXO has clearly made you lose your mind. I blame it on fangirling feels.” She’s go back to surfing the web on her laptop.

“Well, I expected you would react that way.” Yue takes another deep breath. “But that doesn’t change what the truth is.” She proceeds to explain the entire thing to Fei, and finally gets through to her.

“So, our whole time traveling conversation became a reality.” Fei nods, a bit in denial, but nevertheless, trying to take it all in. “So is your plan to build a time machine…possible?”

“It’s going to have to be” Yue replies. “But I was thinking about it all throughout my train ride back here, and things don’t add up. It’s like I’m missing something plainly obvious, but I can’t put my figure on it.”

“What do you mean?” Fei walks over to sit on the couch next to Yue, now really focused on the conversation.

“If people travel between timelines, what happens to the timeline they came from?” Yue says in deep thought. “It can’t just keep going without them. It must somehow stop or something.”

“Why stop? The person who time traveled still exists, that means the timeline is still going, right?” Fei asks confused.

“Fei! You’re a genius!” Yue says jumping up.

“I am?” Fei asks even more confused. “Well, I guess I’ve always been gifted in the area of intelligence.” She flips her hair.

“The 3 timelines of each of the members of TFboys collapsed into this one.” Yue explains. “That means, the separate timelines they came from, all merged into one. Which explains why all 3 of them cannot exist together.”

 “So you have to choose 1 out of the 3 to keep, while the other 2 end up never having existed…” Fei says.

Yue nods sadly. “I’m still banking on the fact that I’ll be able to build a time machine, though. But it’ll be significantly harder now that the task is to restore 3 timelines, not that it was even close to easy to begin with.”

EXO’s dorm

“I’d thought I would never be able to say this, but I’m proud of you Tao” Lay says, while laying on his bed thinking.

“For what?” Tao asks while fixing his hair in the mirror.

“For not making this a competition anymore, and not making Yue choose between us.” Luhan answers while walking into the room after over hearing their conversation.

“And for admitting that TFboys is the top priority” Lay adds.

“You guys agreed to the competition because you wanted to trick me into believing you would ever play with love like it’s a game?” Tao asks in disbelief.

“Well, I wouldn’t call it a trick. It was more of a test.” Luhan grins.

“A test for us to see the real Tao, the man behind the douchey comments.” Lay laughs.

“You did well Tao, you did well” Luhan says patting Tao on the shoulder. “The whole situation is still very concerning though.”

“Yeah, I don’t want to loose any of the kids.” Tao says lowering his eyes.

“The thing is” Lay begins to say. “Even if she does make a time machine and sends them back, for us, it’ll feel like we lost them either way. They go back, and we never see them again.”

“Well, there’s technically only a chance for one of us.” Luhan says. “But bro code agreement says it’s too unfair for only one of us to grab hold of that chance.”

“Yeah, we agreed we wouldn’t from the beginning.” Lay adds.

“I plan on upholding that code, but I’m just of living the rest of my life after seeing and knowing what could’ve been” Tao finally says looking like he’s about to cry.

“I know how you feel Tao” Luhan says, holding back his developing tears by telling himself he’s a real man. “But for the sake of those boys, we have to endure this.”

“I think we need to go help, Yue” Lay says. “We can’t just leave her with the job of building a time machine all by herself. Although, we probably can’t help with the technical aspects, I’m sure she’ll need us when she has to make tough decisions.”

Luhan and Tao nod.

“We should bring the TFboys too” Luhan adds. “They are her sons, after all. And these might be the last years she has with them. The last years we all have with them.”