The first time Seokjin falls through time he swears he sees the face of God picked out amongst the stars, such shimmering beauty, such glory. He doesn’t have a proper frame of reference, how could he? When he is from, the skies are as yet young and the scope of human imagination is limited.

It feels limitless. It is limited. Every time the wheel turns, a new cog flips on, lights up our brains with colours, sounds, thoughts previously impossible. We build, bit by bit. Seokjin had no idea of what we were building towards but then again who did?

Who does?

Who will?

The first time anyone falls through time it is an accident, misfortune that human kind will spend decades trying to recreate. They were here, then they weren’t, then history didn’t feel the same, then everything sprang back to normal.

Everyone is tethered to their own temporal anchorage. Seokjin got the twenty second century, and the first fall that was not a trip. He stands on the edge of eternity and feels the parts of him that cannot be removed from ten in the morning, the twelfth of May, twenty two thirty nine. He holds those parts of him the tightest, he needs them to get home.

“Press this,” Min Yoongi shoves a button into his hand.

Seokjin knows the drill. You press the button, you fall. This is not a ie trap set by the universe to watch him suffer, this is what giants are made of. Somewhere out there in the mists of time there is an apple waiting to fall upon a head and for all he knows, in two minutes time that could be his present.

Squaring his shoulders, narrowing his field of vision till it’s just him, and the button, Seokjin breathes deep, “See you, Yoongi.”

And then he is gone.

Where did he go you ask? Nowhere exciting, a hundred years into his personal future, he sees the beginning of the end for this little home world of ours, the taxis out to the edge of a brave new solar system already well underway. It's still Earth, it still feels like home, but it needs a coat of paint.

The paint never came, no one fixed the skyscrapers or repaired the electric cabling amassing great hordes of itself below ground. What would be the point? They used up all the energy.

Seokjin’s left knee, his solar plexus, his chin, they all demand to return. He gets a day, the first time, before the wire runs taught and ten in the morning, the thirteenth of May, twenty two thirty nine pulls him right back in.

“What did you see?” Yoongi stares at Seokjin, bewildered. He never really expected any part of this to work.

There were lights in the sky, one hundred years from now, that danced with the stars and overtook them, painted the heavens in colours he couldn’t name. Most of this is just pollution, some of it is real, the bright joy of humanity exploding across the night, even though they would not be around to see it. Even though they had used everything up. Beauty in the face of the end.

Seokjin blinks at his hands, feels his ribcage fall back into comfort, “I saw the most mighty-“ he doesn’t have the words. He’ll never have the words. He walks home that night with a knuckle on his left hand out of sorts, it misses the future.

It doesn’t matter where you go in this world, less so when you go, you will always leave pieces of yourself behind.

There is a future, there is a past. The past is easy, you know what to expect, there are books and books and oh so many books that can be read to explain the past. As Seokjin gets better at falling, so he gets better at choosing where to land. He sees Wu Zetian crowned Emperor of China, triumph dancing in her eyes. He sees Mansa Musa take cities, holds a young boy named Cualli as he cried over the untimely death of his mother, walks barefoot with half a hundred prophets through desert sands, buys a drink for a man who wrongfully shot his friend.

Seokjin can pick anything. When asked about the past he never knows how to answer, it is wild and bright and it beckons. That would be an easier way of living, to know all the answers ahead of time. He could be happy in that kind of confidence, if only his body could stop screaming at him not to leave and to leave at once.

He travels back to the same little peninsula on which he falls from. He searches for times of peace and finds few, he searches for prosperity and sees it come fast and late. He sees empires come and go, he is patient, waiting for the perfect time to land.

It is the south, it is 1860. Perhaps the country is at war, but today at least it feels at ease. There are men down by the docks, hauling in fish. It looks like hard, sweaty work, but they smile and sing, at each other and the world.

One smiles wider, sings more sweetly. Seokjin tries not to talk to the people of the past or future, they take pieces of him he will never be able to relocate. But dear lord that smile, like the sun striking the rippling waves across the harbour, like a million lights across an ocean of night that deserves to be seen.

“I’m Jimin,” the man beams. His voice is so light, his grip so strong when he takes Seokjin’s hand, “and I’m busy. I get off at noon, let’s meet for a drink.”

Seokjin can fall from the twenty third century to the nineteenth, he can’t fall from morning to afternoon. He takes a moment to breathe in the city, still mountainous and full of life and so much like the Busan he remembers from home.

Home is a time, or a time stream. Home is sweeping in to pick up the bits of yourself you have left behind and letting yourself feel whole for just a moment.

Jimin is true to his word. They meet, they drink, Jimin laughs like white water rapids, he makes bad jokes, Seokjin laughs. There is no talk of time, there is no need, soju tastes much the same no matter when you get it.

“You look…weird,” Yoongi grumbles when Seokjin returns.

Seokjin feels weird, like there’s a hole where the back of his mind should be. He tries to bring the present into focus but he can feel one foot still stuck four centuries ago, in a bar where he may have forgotten that there will always be parts of him that will bring him back here.

Three falls later, the feeling is still there. It feels like no part of his anatomy that Seokjin is familiar with, so he calls it his soul. Sometimes he imagines Jimin down at the docks, with it tucked into his pocket, singing songs of a traveler who never stopped long enough to put down roots.

The past is predictable, the future is terrifying. Steering is harder going forwards than going back, and there are horrors that await them all on the road ahead.

One time, Seokjin has barely finished falling when the heat rising from the parched ground beneath him proves too much, He bounces straight back, screaming for water.

Yoongi tries to persuade him to stay still, but not half an hour later Seokjin has pressed the button and fallen again.

He falls and he falls and he falls. Sometimes he sees flashes, in the future or the past, of a smile that could belong to Jimin. One of the nicest things you can learn about the universe, is that it has always been filled with dazzling smiles.

Seokjin leaves the final piece of himself three thousand years ahead of the point from which he jumped. By then the world is quiet, cool, calm. There are forests filled with plants and animals he doesn’t recognise covering the planet, and the humans who live here do so with the singular intention to understand.

They think the human home world is Mars. Seokjin will not spoil the surprise. Sooner or later they will find the bones of their ancestors in the bedrock of the understanding they have built of themselves. Perhaps they will be delighted, perhaps they will be shocked. They will handle it though, they are more level headed than the people of his time.

Namjoon leads a research group. A small unit, archaeologists, looking into traces of culture from the civilisations that used to populate the Earth. They set up base over what was once London, and is now anything but. In amongst the trees are the last few bricks left behind by the skyscrapers that had to fall when the forest took the city. Nature works so fast, and it takes everything back.

“I think you know more than you’re letting on,” Namjoon huffs, three weeks into Seokjin’s stay, when he has produced the casing of a now ancient Samsung smartphone and failed to wow his guest.

In Namjoon’s time, many people fall through time. The technology has been theirs for thousands of years, but they are unaware that it was first pioneered on a little peninsula poking out of a great continent that has since been swallowed by trees.

Namjoon is careful, methodical, meticulous. He carries his life’s work in clear plastic bags filled with samples of dirt and cracked pieces of the twenty second century. Of every century. Of everything that has been lost.

By now, Seokjin has learned how to stay in a place for six months before the pieces of him that do not want to be torn from time demand to be returned to when they came. Yoongi focuses on other projects, there is so little of Seokjin left to come back to, he only ever has time to debrief before he falls again.

It takes four months for Seokjin to be sure, to feel the weight of history behind him, pushing him down. Time tries to ground him, it wants him to stay still, but he is spread so thin that standing in once place for too long physically makes him ache. There is a whole universe out there, and if he is here now, for this long, it is only temporary.

Still, he feels the concrete weight of certainty sit heavier on him every day. Namjoon trips, though never through time; he smiles, but it is never electric; he holds Seokjin’s hand and tells fairy tales of a past he doesn’t fully understand. But he wants to, he has so much hope.

Seokjin sees deep, dark nights in Namjoon’s eyes, and bright stars in his brain. The space at the back of his mind, his soul, aches more profoundly every day, as his heart is slowly but surely tied to the mast of the sinking ship of this future.

“Come with me,” Seokjin pleads.

Namjoon takes one look around at everything he has built, little plastic bags compartmentalising achievements so they can be run off like video game scores. He nods, “ok.”

They fall together, hand in hand, and this time, Seokjin knows what to do. He sees the twenty third century rushing up to meet them, Yoongi shuffling around in his lab, through the university, onto the next project.

There is nothing for them there.

His left knee, his solar plexus, his chin, all ache, then burn. Seokjin screams, then he cries, as his birth year rolls past and the ties that bind him snap. There is no more safety harness, he spreads out his hands and for the first time feels himself fly.

Namjoon has so much to see, to learn. They see the dinosaurs and the fall of the British Empire and the pyramids in their modern glory. Seokjin’s soul still wails at him across the years, a tie less easily cut than those he discovered on his first fall.

“I want to meet him,” Namjoon says at once, when Seokjin explains that there is a man with a smile like burnished gold who hauls fish for a living.

“I was wondering when you’d show up again,” Jimin flashes that wonderful smile at Seokjin, then at Namjoon, “I’m busy. I get off at noon. We’ll go for a drink.”

The sun rides high over Busan. Seokjin tries to explain the history of this city, this little peninsula, as best he can to Namjoon. But there’s so much, and so much he doesn’t know. Oh well, they have time, they can go and see things as they happened, that sounds easier.

Jimin meets them after work, and they drink till long after the sun has set on Haeundae. The bridge won’t be built for so very many years, and the view is one of stars on water, with the moon hung between them like a great lantern for the heavens. He laughs, and Namjoon laughs, and Seokjin laughs hardest. Firm handshakes turn into fingers curled around each other, and sleepy heads resting on shoulders.

There is no part of him that demands this be another time. Seokjin drinks in the scent of finality, and decides to make the final fall. “Jimin, would you like to see the world?”

He need not wait for an answer. They dive together, into the inky black of the unknown and the bright lights of the future. In unity, as one, and all of time is their home.