They're in the store picking things out for dinner when the skull guy brings it up.

"So I just realized, you can't pronounce my name. No mortals are able to, unfortunately." He stares down at the display of various breads, frowning.

"Of course I can! Say it again, I just forgot what it is."

He does so, but the syllables pass right through Woohyun's ears without sticking.

"I'll just call you Skully. Like Scully from The X-Files, except you're not a redhead or Catholic."

"I... guess." Skully looks down and starts pouting. He's so cute when he pouts. Woohyun takes pity on him. (Now that he has a face, he's very expressive. Woohyun sees why he's stuck with the skull all this time: when he doesn't have eyes, he can at least pretend he isn't lame as hell.)

"Who was the dude you pulled identity fraud on? Maybe you can just use his name."

"Sungyeol. Do I look like a Sungyeol to you?" Sungyeol crosses his arms.

"Uh, yeah. You're wearing his face."

"Oh, right."

"Cool, so just tell people that's your name from now on, and when you get in trouble with the law, at least wait until nobody's looking to disappear."

"Why would I get in trouble with the law?" Sungyeol looks horrified even as he chews on a bread roll Woohyun hasn't paid for yet.

"Can't imagine why," Woohyun says sarcastically. "Why don't you know anything? Haven't you at least watched any TV shows?"

"I was in the Joseon dynasty before I met you, shut the hell up." He still looks grumpy. "And... I've never done this before. Why bother with human laws if they change all the time?"

(Fortunately, he's a regular shopper at this store and the lady at the register just nods and adds the roll to the total when he tells her about it.)

As they walk out of the store, Sungyeol accidentally slams into the door frame, despite the sliding doors. Woohyun just sighs. "You have a lot to learn."

"You're the one with a lot to learn," Sungyeol shoots back. He rubs his own forehead. "I am power! I am time itself, I am-"

"Gonna get left behind," Woohyun calls back, walking away.

 

 

"Hey, when am I meeting your friends, anyway?" Sungyeol asks later that night. "I'm bored and you don't shut up about them."

And by later that night, we mean in the middle of the night after Woohyun has already turned all the lights off and is in bed and had already fallen asleep, which means Sungyeol seriously just woke him up for that because, apparently, Why Not?

"Human beings sleep," he grumbles into his pillow, turning toward the weirdo who can't keep his questions to himself.

"I know, I spent some time on Earth before." He sounds impatient. Ha, join the club, Woohyun thinks.

"And you woke me up," he continues.

"Oh, I know. It was just a quick question." He genuinely seems not to understand, which makes it harder to be mad at him.

Woohyun wonders, and not for the first or last time, if signing that contract was a good idea after all. An eternity of service under this guy? Maybe he should go back in time far enough to leave a note for himself saying "Do Not Trust People Without Faces Especially If They Offer You Power."

"It takes time to fall back asleep," he explains. "I already stayed up too late and I want to get more sleep before I have to get ready for class."

"Okay?" Sungyeol's head tilts. "Are your friends in your class?"

"Why the hell do I bother..." he whispers to himself. Louder, he says, "No. Nevermind. I'm going out with some of them tomorrow. You can come along if you don't wake me up for random questions anymore."

"Alright!" He sounds excited. God, what a loser.

Woohyun sighs quietly and rolls over to go back to sleep.

"How long do humans sleep, anyway? I forget."

He gets a pillow straight to the face.

 

 

Back when this still sounded like a good idea, he was in deep . And by that we mean that Woohyun mortified even himself with how risky his greasiness got, and likely wished, fervently, he could take it back.

He just can't help himself when he has a major crush on someone, okay?

And with a setup like the one he got-

Sunggyu had sighed and said, "I'm bored of being alone. If anyone's secretly in love with me, lemme know."

- who could blame him for turning toward him and saying, completely deadpan -

"I've been secretly in love with you for years"

- and he is not against being petty enough to still hold it against Howon for immediately breaking down into a fit of laughter.

"I'm literally going to murder you, Lee Howon," Woohyun had said.

He'd just continued crying laughing.

Sunggyu patted his shoulder and went, "Well, thanks for trying, anyway. I appreciate the effort."

"Right..." Woohyun gulped. His voice lowered  "Maybe that was a bad joke." No it ing wasn't, how hard does he have to try to-

"What the hell was that," Howon choked out between laughs. Woohyun secretly hoped he choked for real and died. His friends .

"Some of us love and support our friends," he responded angrily. , he couldn't even confess right. He'd wished he could laugh too, but unfortunately he had taken himself too seriously. He briefly wondered at what point God had abandoned him.

On the bright side, Sunggyu had paid for his drink that day and kept his arm over his shoulders for most of the next hour. Now he just needs to get him to take him seriously.

 

 

 

So the next night when a literal skull had popped out of his bag of rice, he was less than unhappy. Sometimes he gets in these moods and he can take literally anything in stride as long as it's unrelated to the one thing that was really on his mind.

That thing, at this specific moment in time, being Sunggyu and wishing he could take that one back instead of, you know, being the fool of the year.

Everybody has moments like that, right?

But not everybody's rice bags have weird, perfectly smooth skulls inside of them.

"What are you doing in there?" he wondered aloud, absentmindedly, and reached down to pick it up from where it had tumbled out onto the ground.

"I'm stuck," a voice from the skull seemed to respond.

This startled Woohyun and he jumped backward, yelling, "I am never shopping at that store again."

"Do they have bad service?" the skull wondered as it began to levitate, stopping somewhere well above Woohyun's height, if he'd been standing closer. A dark cloud formed underneath the skull until it dissipated and revealed a plain black suit. A pair of skeletal hands slid down the sleeves and hung from the ends of it, though they seemed not to be attached to anything once the figure lifted its arms to inspect itself and smooth down its suit.

"No, they just- you-" Woohyun shook his head, bewildered. "What were you doing in there?"

"I told you. I was stuck."

"It's a giant, zipped bag, how did you get in there in the fir-"

"Oh, it was a trap!" The skull figure sounded like it was grinning, yet it had no lips and its jaw didn't move. "Yeah, I was just hiding somewhere I figured you'd find me. When I was on Earth last time, they were really into rice, so I thought you'd get around to opening that bag. And here you are!"

"That's... nice." Woohyun could feel a cold sweat down his back. "Well, if that was all, I think I need to pass out now."

"No, don't do that!" The figure snapped its bone fingers and Woohyun could feel himself being lifted into the air, successfully freaking him out ten times more than he had been a second before. "Sit down, you'll feel better."

He was forcibly pushed toward the ty, rickety thing he calls a "table" and into the chair aside it. It didn't make him feel any better.

"Are you okay?" The skull thing asked, as if it had literally any reason to care. "I didn't mean to scare you."

"What did you mean to do, then?"

"Well, like I said, it was a trap." It sat down on the other chair. "So I could borrow you. We just had a conversation, although I guess you don't remember anymore." Its sunken eye sockets seemed to stare directly into Woohyun's eyes and he couldn't look away. "That's normal. Don't worry about it. Here's the contract." A long sheet of paper floated down from the ceiling onto the table in front of them both.

He skimmed the passages - time travel, stipulations, and apparently a book list? His heart shook in his chest when he saw his signature at the bottom. "I didn't sign this," he whispered.

"Oh, you did. I already explained it all to you." Skull thing shrugged. "It's hard to explain where we were, but it was like... a pocket in space? It's a neutral area and the law says contracts must be signed in neutral space, it's this whole thing... Hey, you don't look so good."

"Always wanted to be told I don't look good," Woohyun responded automatically. His voice sounded weak even to his own ears. "So you're saying..."

"It's real. You'll be able to remember by tomorrow, I should expect."

"Right..."

"What you need to know now is you're my apprentice. I picked you because your soul is capable of learning what humans call time travel. It's a great honor, really."

That perked him up. "Time travel? So I can go back and..." His mind ran through every dumb thing he'd said even that week.

"Not yet, but soon." The skull thing held its hand out to Woohyun, and, strangely, he reached forward and shook it. "First you need to find your memory. I'll give you a shortcut for now and tell you where it is."

Woohyun has literally never felt this dumb in his life. "Uh... why?"

"It's this whole thing," it repeated. "Kind of a test to see if you can do some things. I think it's somewhere over there?" It pointed at the wall, but behind it was Woohyun's bedroom. "Yep. I definitely threw it back there."

"How did you even take it?"

"Memories are just as fluid as time is," it says. "I moved our first conversation to after our second conversation, which is right now. It's just for a fun test! Lighten up."

Without responding, Woohyun rubbed his face, made sure the goddamn skull man was still sitting at his table, and got up to go "find his memory." He shuffled down the hall, trying not to deny to himself that he was actually excited about the idea of.

A blinding blue light stopped him in front of his doorway. Suddenly he was floating... somewhere... again. The area was another shade of blue, but inside a black box he could see himself and a black cloud deep in conversation. When he focused on it, he could hear them.

"You want me to train to be you?" he heard himself ask.

"Not really. You're more like a test subject."

"What the ?" Memory-Woohyun looked very unimpressed.

"You haven't proven yourself yet," the skull guy responded flippantly, waving his hand. "Do you have any questions about the contract?"

"Yeah. What's the catch?"

"Catch?"

"It just says I have to let you train me. What are you making me do?"

"I see." The cloud - presumably the skull guy - paused for a moment. "According to my syllabus, this week I'm giving you three books and a crash course."

"On what?"

"Time travel, silly."

"So I'll be doing it for real?" Woohyun in the memory sounded extremely happy at the idea.

"I'll be doing it, but bringing you with me."

"Awesome."

"Out of curiosity, what time would you like to visit?"

He looked down at his feet, shy. The Woohyun watching the memory already felt embarrassed for what he knew he was about to say. "Yesterday, I said this really dumb thing to my hyung, and I want to take it back."

"Oh, no. No. We won't be changing anything yet." The cloud seems to grow darker. "For one thing, you'll be travelling with me, so you won't have the ability to do anything but watch. Secondly, what the hell? You don't want to see something actually cool, like the Normandy landings or the literal Big Bang?"

The rest of the conversation goes like so:

Woohyun: "No, I want to see my friend."

Cloud-and/or-Skull: "Your priorities are whack."

Woohyun: "Take me to a concert, then."

Cloud-and/or-Skull: "Deal."