The inside of the infirmary is something right out of an interior design magazine, or a Wes Anderson film. Two sets of three metal framed beds are aligned perfectly against both sides of the room, a railing attached to the ceiling curves round each one of them for a curtain to glide upon.

At the far back of the room are large square windows with the view of the garden quarters sprawling out into the distance. Upon the windowsill are a neat collection of cactus’ in white pots, and one aloe vera plant placed perfectly in the middle. Mark almost feels like he’s having a standoff with it when he reenters through the large double (and yes very white) doors.

“Is the nurse still not here?” Mark asks after finally peeling his eyes off the aloe vera plant.

Jinyoung was placed flat on his back on the first bed to the left of the room, he looks almost dead where he lays, the pale, striped blanket covering him to his chest. Mark tries to focus on the very important fact that Jinyoung is in fact breathing and makes his way to stand beside Youngjae, who watches Jinyoung from the foot of the bed.

“Youngjae?” Mark calls out again, offering him the coffee in a can he’d gone out to buy from the vending machine. Youngjae looks rather uninterested in it however. “Are you blanking out on me too?”

“Huh? What?” Youngjae jumps and looks at Mark, then looks down at the coffee in his hands and almost crumbles to the ground. “Oh thank you god.”

“My name’s Mark.”

Youngjae ignores him and plucks the can out of his hand to quickly open it and chug at it. Mark watches him with distaste, “Wow, it almost looks like you were the one who carried a grown man across the campus.”

“My body doesn’t handle stress very well, that was a very stressing situation,” Youngjae says with a shake of his head and takes the back of his hand to wipe at his lips.

“Yes, I was there.” Mark huffs and goes to settle himself at the end of the bed, just beside Jinyoung’s feet.

“I’m just worried about him…” Youngjae mumbles.

“Yeah...kind of like a scientist and his lab rat,” Mark remarks, very aware of the glare Youngjae was burning into the back of his head. “Anyway, you got any clues to why he passed out?”

“Anything that explains what just happened? No. But technically he just passed out due to too much stress,” Youngjae says, taking another swing of his coffee.

Mark let’s his lips slip slowly into a frown as a numb feeling begins to ebb away at his chest. He is staring at Jinyoung’s face with a harsh kind of concentration; there was barely any sound coming from him, his eyelids didn’t flutter and his chest barely rose a fraction to indicate he was breathing. Mark was pretty sure Jinyoung wasn’t dreaming, or ’remembering’, so he had some expectation that he’d at least look peaceful.

Instead Jinyoung just seems frozen, like someone put him on pause, he wasn’t sleeping and he wasn’t remembering. He was just there.

“Has it been reported before? Him speaking Japanese?” Mark asks staring down at Jinyoung’s hands which were laid out above the cover, turned towards his hips. His fingertips were grey, which Mark realises now are a result of rubbing against pencil graphite.

“No, not as far as I’m concerned,” Mark can hear Youngjae pace from behind him. “Why do you think he was asking for help?”

Mark’s scowl deepens. “I don’t know.” He says in both a lie and truth.

Although Mark is aware of the fact Jinyoung somehow has links to his past lives, not one, but several and that they come to him pieces, there’s nothing else, beyond that Jinyoung is still a mystery. A mystery Mark doesn’t want to solve but it’s been presented to him on a platter and he’s been tied to a dining room chair, so he knows he hasn’t got much of a choice now but to follow through with whatever he started.

Or what Youngjae started, he’s somehow pretty sure this is Youngjae’s fault.

“Why are you glaring at me like that?” Youngjae squeaks.

Mark rolls his eyes and looks back towards Jinyoung, and then jumps right out of his skin.

“Jinyoung?” Youngjae is the first to call out. “Are you okay?”

Jinyoung doesn’t move though, he just blinks and Mark thinks he sees tears.

“Youngjae, could you go find the nurse please?” Mark asks softly, placing a hand on Youngjae’s wrist. Youngjae gives Mark and Jinyoung a worried look before nodding and turning to leave the room.

There’s a brief silence after the door clicks shut and then Jinyoung let’s out a heavy haggard breath. His chest seems to cave in from under the covers and Mark wonders if this whole time he didn’t look like he was breathing because he was trying to hold himself up. He takes in several deep breaths, his eyes shut as if to hold back the tears but they slip out anyway.

“I can leave if you like-”

“No-” Jinyoung’s voice comes out rough and broken. “No, it’s fine.” He sighs and wipes at his face vigorously with the heel of his hand.

“Are you alright?” Mark asks, mostly out of politeness, he’s pretty sure Jinyoung feels anything but alright right now.

Jinyoung moves to sit up, the sounds of the bed creaking below him fills up the empty infirmary. Mark watches him closely as he takes his hand and rubs at his neck. His flannel shirt hangs from the head of the bed and his arms are exposed in the t-shirt he wore underneath.

“I’m fine, I think,” Jinyoung finally replies, brushing a hand through the little hair he has on his head, his eyes finally look up to meet with Mark’s. “What happened?”

“You don’t remember?”

Jinyoung’s fine eyebrows stitch together, his eye twitches like he was searching for something. “I don’t, I don’t remember anything.”

“Not even...the memory you had?”

“No, I don’t know what I remembered,” Jinyoung groans, pressing his palm to his forehead. “It’s like it’s there but all I see is...blackness- shadows.”

“It’s fine, don’t force yourself to remember.” Mark bites his bottom lip. There was an anxious feeling swirling around in his stomach, which was odd, Mark wasn’t one to feel anxious over anything.

“Was it bad? Like did I attack anyone this time?” Jinyoung asks.

“This time? You’ve attacked someone before?”

Jinyoung looks away and purses his lips a little, “Maybe threw a punch or two before. I don’t know either way the next day some guy in my sociology class ran up to me and got me right in the stomach.” Jinyoung grins this wide grin filled with mischief and a little bit of light heartedness.

Mark chuckles low and says, “No, you didn’t hit anyone. But I think it’s best you stay out of classes for the rest of the week-”

“Oh god it was bad,” Jinyoung whines and writhes around on the bed, his legs kicking up from under the covers. “What did I do? Did I strip? Did I run around like a madman? No wait, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know, no- I do- ugggghhh.”

“J-Jinyoung calm down, jesus,” Mark gets up from the bed and watches Jinyoung twist and turn on the bed like someone had poured a jar full of ants down his shirt. “Jinyoung!”

Jinyoung halts mid twist, his back arching in an awkward angle and his legs and arms sprawled out off the bed. He then falls limp against the mattress and stares up at Mark with a look of defeat. “Give it to me Professor, I can take it.” He says and crosses his arms across his chest.

“Are you always this dramatic?”

Jinyoung half grins, the point of a canine teeth revealing itself. “I haven’t heard that in a long time.”

Mark looks down at him for a moment, his own arms are now crossed over his chest and he wonders just how much Mark should tell him. To hide some facts seemed immoral, but Mark also didn’t want to probe at a memory that seemed to be better off forgotten.

“You were speaking Japanese,” Mark says and goes to settle on the next bed. “I couldn’t understand what you were saying but you sounded scared then you fainted.”

Jinyoung sits up on the bed, his short hair is all ruffled up, the strands sticking up in opposing directions and his t-shirt is crumpled and wrinkled up against his chest, exposing the faint lines of his hips.

“Fainted? Ah, this makes sense now.” Jinyoung mumbles, taking the infirmary in with a quick glance. “I’ve never fainted before.”

“Never?”

Jinyoung shakes his head and moves to let his legs hang off the bed. He looks small where he is, his fingers clasped together on his lap like a young boy being told off.

The double doors swing open then, a woman in long slim fitted trousers and a short sleeved button up top clicks her way into the infirmary, her eyes lay upon Mark for a moment before they turn to Jinyoung. Youngjae follows in from behind her, his face flushed.

“I’m so sorry,” She huffs and quickly turns to the desk that was settled in the corner of the room, behind it were three long glass cabinets filled with medicines, cotton buds, bandages and equipment. “I was in a meeting with the headmaster; budget talks, not my favourite conversation.”

Mark looks at Youngjae and raises his eyebrows in a silent question, Youngjae huffs and puts out a hand, indicating he was fine, or he wasn’t but there wasn’t much to do about it.

They watch the nurse pluck out several boxes from different cabinets and then swiftly turn on her heels to make her way to Jinyoung. “Hello Jinyoung.” She sings pleasantly, Jinyoung gives her a large smile back in response. “Professor Choi and Tuan, is that right?” She says, giving Mark a look. Mark stares at her for a moment, a sense of familiarity coming over him. “I’m Nurse Kim, Kim Bohyung.”

“Ah,” Mark nods, not recognising the name. “Nice to meet you.”

Bohyung pulls out a small machine from a box, attached to it is a tube and a long strap. She looks at Mark and blinks, “You don’t recognise me?”

“Have we talked before? I’m sorry I don’t usually come to this side of the university,” Mark awkwardly mumbles, nodding his head in apology.

Bohyung shakes her head, her long brown locks bouncing with her. “When you saved this guy outside of the university, I tended to you. Don’t you remember?” She then takes two fingers up to her face and grins. “‘Peace!’”

Mark blinks rapidly, the sudden memory of someone jabbing him in the chest resurfaces and he internally groans. “Ah yes...I remember.”

“You must have been in a lot of pain,” She laughs and goes to turn to Jinyoung, who seems to have zoned out again. Mark eyes him as Bohyung goes to push up at his sleeve and straps a velcro piece around the top of his arm. “How are you feeling now?” She asks Mark.

“I’m fine, thank you for your help back then,” Mark replies as Bohyung presses a button on the machine, and a loud noise bursts out of it. The strap around Jinyoung’s arm grows large, and tightens around his muscles. Mark always hated the feeling of having your blood pressure being taken, the need to relax even though you felt your muscle threatening to pop was incredibly unpleasant. Although Jinyoung sat very still, as if he didn’t feel a thing, not even his body twitched.

“Blood pressure...and heart rate are fine,” Bohyung mumbles under her breath. “But it’s been awhile since your episode, right? Heard you caused caught a spectacle.”

Jinyoung blinks at that and turns to look at Mark. “I’m not sure,” He says. “I can’t remember.”

“You don’t remember?” Youngjae says from behind, taking a step closer to the three of them.

Jinyoung drags his eyes away from Mark and shakes his head.

Youngjae looks up at Mark as if he had any more answers than Jinyoung, but Mark only shrugs back in response. The look of confusion and dissatisfaction on Youngjae’s face being immensely relatable.

“I’m going to take your blood okay?” Bohyung mutters closely to Jinyoung and he nods, they move together simultaneously, they’ve evidently done this several times before.

She takes out something similar to a plastic pen and unwraps a needle to place into it. Quickly, she pricks the point of Jinyoung’s grey fingers and Mark watches a bubble of blood emerge. Bohyung gets a thin strip of paper and scrapes it against his finger, it soaks up the blood until the tip turns a pinkish colour and then she places the strip into a small machine, seconds later a number beeps up onto its screen.

“Your sugar levels are really low,” The nurse states, giving Jinyoung a look. “You haven’t eaten today have you?”

Jinyoung frowns looking at Bohyung then Mark then the floor. Mark remembers the bowl of tteokbokki Jinyoung had left untouched early that afternoon, he’d figured he just wasn’t hungry and didn’t bother to force him to finish it.

“I’d go get him something but I have a class in ten minutes,” Youngjae says, looking at his very old watch. Even from the distance Mark was at he could see the leather strap peeling on all sides. He wonders if the thing was even ticking. “You guys okay for me to go?”

“Go, go, I’ve got no more classes for today anyway,” Mark reassures him with a nod. Youngjae nods back and with a wave he leaves the infirmary.

“And as usual, there are no other indications there is anything wrong,” Bohyung sighs and slouches where she is. “Do you want to try to go to a hospital? Get that MRI I was talking about?”

“No, no, no hospitals,” Jinyoung sighs. “Nothing will change.”

“You don’t know until you go,” She retorts.

“Believe me, I know.” He says and then twists his head around, looking around the floor. “I’m just going to get some food and head to my dorm- does anyone know where my shoes are?”

“On the other side,” Mark says.

“Thanks.” Jinyoung gets up and walks around the bed, Bohyung and Mark watch him as he nonchalantly slips into his shoes and then looks up at the two of them with a smile. “Thanks Miss Kim, and I’ll see you tomorrow Professor?”

“Make sure you eat something,” Mark says whilst Bohyung starts to pack up her equipment, she gets up to put them away in the cabinet, a displeased look on her face all the whilst.

“Will do.” Jinyoung jokingly salutes and heads to the door but then pauses. “You know Professor…”

“Hm?”

“I really don’t remember anything but…” His head tilts to the side in thought. “I remember your voice for some reason.” He looks over his shoulder and smiles innocently. “I wonder why.” He says finally before leaving.

“Poor boy,” Bohyung sighs under her breath and shuts the cabinets before heading back to the bed to fix the covers. “Oh, he forgot his shirt.” She says, picking up his flannel shirt from the bed.

“I’ll give it to him,” Mark says, his eyes still on the double doors that clicked shut a long time ago.

There’s always been something haunting about the hallow creak of a house. Where the wood groans in pain, it’s corners and pillars crying under the weight it’s been forced to hold. Houses can be lonely things, where their rooms are void of life and their floors are clean of foot prints. They’re brittle and fragile too, one kick here and the whole thing can crumble - it’s hard to keep yourself up when you’ve lost your heart and your will.

This house however is falling apart, not because it’s empty, not because it’s lonely but because what should be it’s heart has turned into it’s enemy. This house is alight. This house is turning into ash. It’s wallpaper peeling like skin, exposing it’s bone until they too turn into charred ash, brittle broken things falling apart.

This house is on fire. The flames up hungrily at the wooden beams, the smoke filling up the hollow rooms. This house is choking, it’s suffocating, and it’s legs are being torn out from under it. This house will crumble and turn into dust only for the wind to gather it up and bid it farewell. Only the wind will hear it’s last cries.

The cries of pain and loneliness, the cries of longing gone on for too long and the cries of immense ache of a love torn away.

The cries of a person. A person who has been set alight, and is burning to the ground.

Mark slams into his bedroom floor with a violent thump. He gasps, wheezes, the air struggling to enter his lungs as his nails scratch into the floorboards below him. He’s drowning in cold sweat, his shirt sticking to him like another layer of skin. His heart is slamming against his chest, aggressively and frantically, like it was scared of it’s confinements and all it wanted was to rip out against the bones that held it caged.

It’s early morning out, the sky is dyed in the colour of twilight; a ghostly blue hue slipping in through the windows drowns the room, and Mark feels like he’s underwater. He certainly can’t breathe, so he’s even contemplating whether it was possible for a flood to reach this deep into Seoul.

But the floor is cold against his cheek and the bed he clutches to is dry, so Mark quickly figures out this, this is an attack.

He looks up at the desk settled on the other side of his room, just a step away from his single bed and crawls his way to the drawers settled below it. The desk is old and dark, its legs wobbling with age and it’s drawers racketing with every pull from their loose knobs.

Mark quickly dives into the bottom drawer, and pulls out a small white bottle, it’s insides rattling with his hands. Quickly, he pops open the lid and shakes out what was meant to be two pills but finds seven come tumbling out instead, half of them falling to the floor. With a flash of his hand he brings his palm to his open mouth and urgently swallows the pills.

He counts in his head one...two...three… until he feels the urgent hum of his heart settle and his body goes limp. Mark feels his body give way, settling his back onto the side of his bed frame and lets his head lay back onto the mattress.

It’s four deep breaths later that Mark hears his room door open with a quiet creak. He turns his head and finds Insook in a thin robe and slippers looking at Mark with wrinkle heavy eyes. “Is everything okay, child?” She asks lowly and inches her way deeper into the room.

“I’m fine,” Mark says with a flick of his hand. He finds his throat dry as he swallows down his saliva, his lips chapped and brittle too and goes to his bed side cabinet, his hand tapping around blindly for his bottle of water.

Insook is there before him, she picks up the bottle and untwists it, then goes to settle on her knees to offer it to him. He gives her a shy smile as he takes the bottle to his lips and drinks the liquid in with desperation. He hears something rattle then, and looks to find Insook with the bottle of pills in one hand as she goes to pick up the pills that fell.

“They’re just vitamins,” Mark blurts out, it was a bad lie but Insook didn’t have any reaction to it. Instead she simply goes to close the cap and place it back into the drawer, giving it a final shut.

She then turns to him, her knees clicking as she leans into Mark and gives his forehead a soft press with the back of her hand. “You should go take a shower Mark...you look like a drowned rat.”

Mark blinks wide eyed, snorts, then bursts out into laughter. Insook heaves where she is, slowly straightening out her legs and holds herself from the small of her back as she steps over Mark and heads for the door.

“Thank you Ahjumma,” Mark hums from where he is on the floor. Insook doesn’t look back as she leaves through the door and shuts it behind her. Mark stares on for a moment before he looks down into his lap and at his open palms.

For a moment, he thinks he see’s pale palms covered in smudges of grey but the morning sun that seems to be slowly slipping through the blue sky shifts and then he’s just looking at his hands, clean and still. He flexes them, balls them into fists then relaxes them, they were definitely his hands, he’s pretty sure, but it’s always been so easy for Mark to feel detached, to feel like his limbs weren’t his, to feel like the room he sat in wasn’t real, to even question his own existence.

Mark knew he was here, and yet he felt like he wasn’t.

The hallway in Insook’s house is always dimly lit. Mark wasn’t sure just how long she went living on her own for, but he got the feeling that after a while she decided there was no point in putting on a light for people that were never going to come. Mark doesn’t know much, but from what he get’s out of a few postcards and some pictures in frames scattered across the house, he knows her husband has died, and that she refuses to acknowledge her only daughter's existence.

He’s never asked her about it though, never pried, there was a sort of silent agreement between them; they’d only ask when need be, and only tell when they wanted to.

After last night, Mark was more than thankful for that agreement.

But if there was one thing Insook got involved with continuously, it was with Mark and his parents. A very loud rule was applied three months into his tenancy, when Insook noticed he’d avoid all phone calls with his parents, she had made a very clear statement that if he were to continue she’d either shove the phone down his throat, or kick him out. Now Mark wasn’t fond of any of those options just as much as he was with answering his mother’s calls.

And his mother’s calls were suicide inducing.

“Yes mum, I’m fine mum,” Mark mumbles in English into the receiver, he’s got his fingers coiled into the wire of the phone. Somewhere in the back of his head he’s wondering just how old this machine is.

“Then why don’t you answer your phone?” She huffs, her English perfect as her Chinese is, Mark thinks his ease in picking up languages must have come from her. Mark leans into the banister of the stairs. The phone is placed on a coffee table in the hallway leading to the kitchen, beside it is a vase of freshly cut roses which Mark used to find pleasant, but these days it was just reminding him of these phone calls he hated so much.

“I’ve just been busy, I’ve got a lot of classes and stuff,” Mark replies, and winces when he hears his mother’s sigh loud and clear.

“Your sisters call me just fine, then again you were always different to your sisters,” She makes the comment under her breath as if she didn’t want Mark to hear. Mark heard. “Anyway, have you heard? My new book is being released in Japan and Korea next month, tell me if any of your students or colleagues would like a signed copy, okay? You must get hassled a lot because of me.”

“Not really…” Mark says low, secretly hoping she didn’t hear him, or chose not to.

“What?”

“I mean no one knows you’re my mother,” Mark mutters, his head bending lower and lower with every syllable that comes out of his mouth.

“What do you mean? Why wouldn’t they know? My books are famous down there you know- did you not tell anyone?” Her voice quickly turns bitter and Mark shuts his eyes, he hopes maybe out of some coincidence this specific piece of earth would just crack open and swallow him up.

“No one really asked and I didn’t make an effort to announce it-”

“Don’t you have- the facebook, is it? They’ll treat you better if they know you’re my son, take you more seriously,” She says.

“Mum, they take me seriously enough.”

She laughs then, and Mark flinches, the only times his mother ever laughs is when she was either really angry or found something incredibly ridiculous. Mark assumes this time it’s a mix of the both. “You? With your indirect words, and your scientific riddles, don’t be ridiculous Mark. I may write fiction, but you, you think you can make fiction reality.”

And amongst many other things, this was one of the main reasons he hated talking to his mother. It wasn’t like her judgmental attitude and narcissism was just refrained to strangers and others, to gossiping and the lot, but it was directed to her only son for the very fact he decided to pursue a path no one understood.

Sometimes he tries to understand her, most of the time though the hollow feelings inside him take over and his thoughts are only filled with the seconds that tick by for this conversation to end. It usually only did when Mark’s father finally decided to take over the phone.

“When are you going to stop talking to him like that?” Another voice says from the distance, Mark hums deeply, he can almost see his father’s old face, all filled with disapproval marching up to his mother and snatching the phone out of her hand. “Mark? Is that you?”

“Hi, dad,” Mark murmurs softly, the ends of his lips not feeling so heavy any more.

“How are you, my boy? I always seem to miss you when you call or...when your mother decides to call.” He says the last bit with a clear of his throat.

“I’m good, Dad. What about you?”

“I’m good now, Mark, I’m good.” He let’s out a large sigh of relief. “You sound tired, go get some rest and we can skype another day, hm?”

Mark nods to himself, “Yeah, say bye to mum.”

With that, the line cuts and Mark looks down at the phone, thinking the long, flat beep from the receiver sounded a lot like his insides.

Jinyoung’s flannel shirt has been hanging on Mark’s desk chair for three days straight now. He’s gone to bed counting exactly how much lines go up and down and across the dark blue piece of clothing and even went ahead and snipped at the fraying strands from the sleeves. By the fourth day, Mark’s had enough.

Like Mark told him, Jinyoung doesn’t come into class for the rest of the week, so now the flannel shirt is all wrinkled up in his shoulder bag. Although Jinyoung may not have come into lectures, Mark thought he’d still see him roaming around the campus one of these days, but he thought wrong.

So, finally having had enough of the scent of faded cologne following him around, Mark decides to make his way to the dormitory. Which was easier said than done because there were three different campus dorms, which each had another four separate buildings, which had about five floors worth of three different hallways and eighteen different rooms. Point being, Mark got lost.

The university reception was closed on Sunday’s so Mark had to make due with asking students around about either a Park Jinyoung or Im Jaebum, most of them rung empty bells. Mark got lucky every so often when he describes ‘the guy that speaks different languages and throws fits sometimes’, therefore managing to narrow it down to one of the buildings.

Now it was just a matter on ringing every single room in the whole building until finding Jinyoung’s room. He’s at the third room, having talked to about two different hung over students and one that really didn’t believe he was a professor at the university and hung up on him when he see’s Jaebum come out the door beside him.

“Jaebum?” Mark calls out cautiously. He has to admit no matter how comfortable he was with Insook, there was still something about Jaebum’s face that scared him off.

Jaebum stops mid step and looks over his shoulder to eye Mark, looking him up and down. “Who are you?”

“Ah Mark Tuan, I’m a professor,” Mark awkwardly introduces himself, bowing a little bit. He thinks Insook would hit the back of his head right about now, she almost killed him for bowing to a little kid the other day they went grocery shopping.

“Oh, oh, the Philosophy professor from America, right?” Jaebum jumps all of a sudden and holds out a hand. “Im Jaebum, I wanted to take your class this year but I missed the openings for this semester.”

Mark’s jaw goes slack for a brief moment before he clips it shut and throws out his hand to shake Jaebum’s, except Jaebum bows too and now Mark is stuck mid bow amidst confusion as to what exactly is going on right now. He decides to stand still.

“Ah, is that so?” Mark mumbles and quickly slips his hand out of Jaebum’s tight grip.

Jaebum looks up at Mark with a wide smile, throwing him off completely now. “Yeah, I’ve read several of your thesis’ but I’ve never seen a picture of you before, I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you before.”

“No, no, it’s really alright,” Mark says, scratching the back of his head. “I didn’t come here to bother you. I was just wondering if Park Jinyoung is in?”

Jaebum’s face falters then, but only for brief moment before he plasters a new smile on. “Yes, he’s been inside our dorm room for the past couple of days.” Mark thinks he hears bitterness in his voice but he can’t tell if he was just overthinking it. “Would you like me to show you the way?”

“No, it’s fine, just tell me the door room and floor?” Mark asks and Jaebum gives him a stiff nod.

Room fighty eight is on the second floor, the first corridor on the right from the flight of stairs. Mark feels a little sense of nostalgia wash over him as he walks through the hallways that are filled with the smell of burnt food and weed. He also feels a little conscious as he walks past students in jeans and hoodies while he sports on a pair of trousers and a vest jumper. Sometimes he wonders if he’s trying too hard to compensate for his baby face, but really no one believed he was a professor here at first.

When Mark finally reaches the door, he brushes a hand through his hair and then uses his knuckle to knock twice. There’s a loud thump that comes from behind the door and Mark hears his voice, “Jaebum? Did you forget something-” His voice is muffled as he opens the door and then Jinyoung is greeting Mark in the entry with nothing but a pair of boxers on and an ice lolly between his lips.

Mark opens his mouth, and then closes it. Jinyoung’s jaw goes slack too, his ice lolly slipping out, “Oh !” Jinyoung squeaks and goes to catch it but it slips, sliding out of his hand and then landing neatly on the carpet floor. “Oh, that’s bad. That’s very bad.” Jinyoung quickly goes to pick it up and looks up at Mark sheepishly.

“Professor, please, just give me two minutes- two minutes, okay?” Jinyoung demands, not even giving Mark a chance to respond before shutting the door in his face. This then is followed by an orchestra of sounds from clattering, banging, swinging, flying, landing from all corners of the room, there’s even the occasional high pitched scream from Jinyoung.

Exactly six minutes later, Mark was counting, Jinyoung swings the door open again. This time he’s in a pair of cargo shorts and a black t-shirt that hugs his body a little too tight. “Professor...what brings you here on this lovely mor-” He looks over his shoulder at the slanted clock hanging on the opposite wall and then swivels his head back round with a wide smile. “Afternoon.”

Mark an eyebrow and then goes to reach into his bag, pulling out Jinyoung’s shirt. “I came to give this back.” He says, handing it out.

“Oh, thanks, you didn’t need to come all the way for it, though,” Jinyoung says, taking the piece from Mark. “Come in, come in. Make yourself at home. Jaebum just left, so he won’t be here for a while.”

“Ah yeah, I bumped into him on the way out,” Mark says, walking into the room. The room was rectangular shaped, and split perfectly in half. Both sides mirrored each other, a single bed on either side of the wall, a walk in closet at the foot of it, and two desks placed directly underneath the large window where books towered, and endless files of paper were stacked across the windowsill.

Everything was almost identical however on the left side, every single inch of wall and ceiling was plastered with drawings, blueprints, large papers containing what looks like parts of a structure, and others looking like a sunset. It was overwhelming.

“Oh, did you? Yeah, he hasn’t been too happy I’ve been here for three days flat,” Jinyoung laughs and heads to his desk where he shoves away pencil sharpenings and residues of rubber. He then pulls out his desk chair and indicates for Mark to have a seat. “Would you like some tea- coffee, we have coffee...maybe.”

“It’s fine, I know student budgets,” Mark snorts as he goes to settle his shoulder bag onto the hook behind the door and heads towards the chair. He eyes the built-in closet, it’s white door creaking suspiciously and wonders just how much Jinyoung must have stuffed into it.

Jinyoung flops onto his made bed, his head leaning against what looks like a blueprint for a church. Mark wills himself to look away from the walls and turns his head towards the window, there wasn’t much in the distance but the woods that bordered this campus.

“So how are you?” Mark asks, dragging his eyes back into the room.

Jinyoung purses his lips and shrugs, “Well, better than usual. Slept like a baby after what happened, you know.”

“You remember anything after then? Anything related to it?”

“No, nothing Japan or Japanese related if that’s what you mean. Just the usual stuff…” Jinyoung says, playing with his thumbs. Mark just notices then that Jinyoung has a bit of gel in his hair.

“The usual? Are they one of those eleven ones you see often?” Mark asks. “Why don’t you tell me about one of them?”

Jinyoung half smiles and goes to lean against his cushion, “Are we having a session right now professor?”

“I wasn’t planning to but since I’m here, we haven’t had one in three days anyway.”

“Why don’t we spend today trying to get to know you Professor?” There’s a cheeky smile on Jinyoung’s face, and Mark can’t tell if he’s being serious or he’s trying to poke fun.

“What would you like to know?”

“Well for one your name,” Jinyoung says, sitting up.

“You don’t know my name?”

“There was never an opportunity...” Jinyoung puts his palms up in defence.

“It was on the sign up site when you applied for my class Jinyoung,” Mark deadpans, in fact he feels a little insulted that Jinyoung hadn’t bothered asking this whole time.

“Professor, I don’t think you know how sign ups here are like - they’re hell, I’m pretty sure I didn’t take in any oxygen for the whole process, I still can’t believe I managed to get into your class,” Jinyoung huffs, he even shivers a bit as if that memory of all of them were to render him traumatised.

Mark gives him a thin glare then slouches back in his seat, “It’s Mark Tuan.”

“Mark,” Jinyoung repeats it with a slight accent. “Mark Tuan. I wasn’t expecting that. No wait, yes I was, I read your thesis, that’s it! Your name was on your thesis.” Jinyoung says with a click of his fingers.

“Wow, for someone who remember’s other people’s lives it’s amazing how much you can’t remember anything about your current one,” Mark says with a shake of his head, he’s really not even trying to hide just how offended he feels.

Jinyoung shrugs, “To-may-toe, to-mah-toe.”

“That literally makes no sense.” Mark retorts and Jinyoung just replies with a wide grin. “So, what else do you want to know? Or can we start talking about you now?”

“No wait wait, I had a list of questions, give me a second,” Jinyoung goes to massage his temples and then suddenly bursts his eyes wide open. “Why did you become a philosophy professor?”

“That’s a pretty...broad question.”

“I know, I know but look I was thinking, I read your thesis’ right and even while talking to Professor Choi, I came to find out that you had started off mostly on psychology, understanding the mind and stuff, but then suddenly you switched and started focusing on philosophy. Why?” Jinyoung blinks, his lips pressed together with an immense look of interest. Mark feels uncomfortable.

“I don’t know...I guess at some point I realised I didn’t want to just understand the science of people but the reality of it all?” Mark trails off, he was usually pretty confident when it came to his profession, but nothing seemed to function well in front of Jinyoung.

“How do you do that?” Jinyoung gapes.

“Do what?”

“Say so much in so little?”

Mark cringes back and frowns, “You’re being a little much.”

“Oh, oh,” Jinyoung slaps his palms to his cheeks but Mark has already caught the faint redness in them. “Am I being a little too transparent? I’m sorry I mean I’ve kind of been a fan for a while but I was kind of out of it this whole time you never kind of sunk in- okay, now I’m sounding weird.” He whines and Mark can’t help but smile as he begins to thrash on the bed.

“You know what?” Mark says with a slap of his thighs. “Why don’t we forgot the session and order some take out? You haven’t eaten have you?”

Jinyoung looks up from under the arm he sprawled over his face, “I ate...yesterday...morning.”

Mark’s smile drops, “What?”

Jinyoung quickly scrambles onto his feet and hops off the bed, “I’ll go get the take out menus. You’re paying, right Professor?” He sings as he dashes out the room, and makes his way down the hall.

Mark shakes his head and gets up from his seat, a smile still playing on his lips. He walks around the room a little, eyeing the drawings plastered to the wall with a little more concentration. One specific drawing sticks out to him the most; it’s a pencil sketch of the sunset, the sun just above the horizon, it’s light dancing upon the river which is surrounded by several wooden houses. It takes his breath away and it also twists an anxious knot in his stomach. He steps closer to it, his eyebrows knitting together as the lines on the page become clearer, more vibrant, colours washing in and out as if he’d seen this drawing before, as if he’d seen this place before.

“I have seen this before,” Mark mutters under his breath, his hand shaking as he brings his fingers to the paper.

“Okay we got chinese and we got chicken, to be honest, I’m thinking chicken...” Jinyoung waltzes back into the room, nose deep in take out menus. Mark jolts where he is and swivels around as if he were caught doing something he shouldn’t be doing. “Professor, what do you think?” Jinyoung says looking up at the now empty seat. He double takes and finds Mark at the foot of his bed, his hands awkwardly locked behind him.

“I don’t mind, whatever you want,” Mark says, clearing his throat. Jinyoung gives him a wide grin which means that he’ll definitely be ordering from more than one menu. Mark watches him as he goes to flop back onto his bed, digging his phone out from underneath his pillow.

“Jinyoung…” Mark calls out lowly.

“Hm?”

“What are these drawings about? Or from?”

Jinyoung looks up briefly then back at his phone, giving Mark a quick shrug, “You know I said there’s eleven lives I can put together for definite? That’s from one of them, well one of the first ones I remembered anyway. I saw blue prints and paintings or drawings at first and I drew them like mad, thinking I’d forget them.” Jinyoung chuckles darkly. “If only.”

Mark swallows hard, he tries to wipe the sweat that’s accumulated on his palm onto his trousers, but he can’t seem to get them dry. “Can I ask where, what time? Do you know?”

Jinyoung looks up again, this time in thought, and then towards Mark as if he were asking a question, “Was it early 1800’s? Mid 1800’s? Yeah, I know it was in Finland, 1825 or something.” He says, and looks back down, focusing so much on the number he was typing in that he doesn’t catch the very tiny gasp Mark takes in.