Pledge

“Where’s Taemin?”

“Didn’t he go to the bathroom?”

Hyungsik leans against the wall and sighs, and Kibum feels a twinge of pity for their manager. It’s been a long day for everyone; from their album concept and design meeting that had run continuously from ten in the morning to almost eight at night to the quick dinner they were supposed to have that had turned into a very long dinner because Minho had ordered a cut of meat that had run out and instead of asking him to order something else, the restaurant owner had decided to go out and buy it for him. Hyungsik had promised to be at home to read his daughter a story before bed. Given that he has to drop Jinki and Minho off at the dorm and Taemin off at his house, he probably won’t make it in time.

“You guys go ahead,” Kibum says then. “I’ll take Taemin home.”

“You sure?” Hyungsik asks. “Did you have anything to drink?”

“None of us did. Don’t worry, I’ll text you once I’ve dropped him off.”

“You’re the best,” Hyungsik says, and his relief is obvious. “Thanks Kibum.”

“Drive safely,” Jinki says as they leave. Kibum nods. These things, these assurances, they used to be meaningless conversation fillers once upon a time, but Kibum truly feels their weight now. Drive safely please don’t get injured or killed in an accident. Call once you’re home I won’t sleep if I don’t know that you’re safe.

Kibum runs through his notifications while waiting, but when he’s replied to all of the messages and seen all of the updates on his social media, Taemin’s still not out. He checks the lockscreen; 10.01pm. It’s been ten minutes. Worried now, Kibum heads back into the restaurant to look for Taemin.

The bathrooms are at the back of the restaurant, down a quiet corridor. It’s creepy. The bathroom isn’t large or fancy, just two stalls labelled ‘men’ and ‘women’.

“Taemin-ah?”

“Oh, Key-hyung?” Taemin’s voice sounds a bit muffled behind the door of the men’s room, but he sounds fine.

“Are you okay?” Kibum expects to hear a put-upon sigh or a frustrated ‘I’m fine, I’m 25, I don’t need my hyungs checking on me when I go to the bathroom’, so he really isn’t prepared for Taemin’s answer.

“I’m a bit dizzy.”

“Open the door,” Kibum demands. His heart is racing already. Why did he send Hyungsik home?

The lock clicks and Kibum pushes the door open the second he hears it. Taemin’s standing by the sink, hunched over slightly, but something’s off-

-and then Kibum feels dizzy too.

Because this isn’t his Taemin, not the Taemin that he just had dinner with and who excused himself to use the bathroom not fifteen minutes ago. He’s wearing the same clothes and he has the same hairstyle, but the person standing in front of him is the Taemin that he knew eight years ago.

Kibum’s mind goes blank.

He closes the bathroom door. Opens it again. And there Taemin is, all of seventeen years old, bent over the sink and watching him with confusion.

Don’t ask me, Kibum thinks. I’m just as confused as you are.

“Key-hyung?”

Kibum reaches out, just a little, and pokes this thing in front of him it has to be a hallucincation someone must have slipped him some drugs because there is no way this is happening for real but the body in front of him is solid enough and it’s face frowns in displeasure.

“What happened to you?” Taemin asks and isn’t that just the funniest question?

“Uh…” Kibum doesn’t know what to say. “I think… it’s not me that anything’s happened to.”

Now Taemin looks concerned. “Hyung, you look, like, ten years older. Are you okay? Where’s Jinie-hyung?”

“Uh, he took the others home,” Kibum answers lies, for want of anything better to do. Maybe this really is Taemin and Kibum has gone mental and is somehow seeing him as his younger self. Maybe this is some repressed trauma presenting itself in an unexpected form. “I’m supposed to take you home.”

“Oh,” Taemin replies. “Okay, let’s go. I feel better now.”

Oh joy, Kibum thinks. At least one of us feels sane.

He leads the way to the exit, needing some respite from the spectre following him. Maybe hopefully when he turns around, his brain will have adjusted itself and he’ll see Taemin as he actually is. And even if that doesn’t happen, if whatever he’s been drugged with is strong, all he has to do is drop Taemin off at his house and by morning, the drugs should be out of his system and all of this will be a funny story to tell. Or maybe, Kibum wonders as he pushes the front door open, maybe he should crash at friend’s place tonight, just to make sure that whoever has drugged him isn’t waiting at his place to kidnap him or something.

He heads to the parking lot. This is a lot to deal with, but at least he has a plan now.

That plan starts unraveling almost immediately. “Hyung, where are we going?”

“To my car.”

“You have a car?”

“What kind of question is that?” Kibum wants to erase this conversation right away. It’s precisely the sort of question that a seventeen-year old Taemin would ask. At that time, none of them had cars. It doesn’t make sense for his Taemin to ask him this – unless Kibum’s mind is so far gone that he’s hearing things too.

Kibum unlocks his car and climbs into the driver’s seat. If he’s so compromised, is it really safe to be driving?

The thing is, he feels fine. His vision is fine. He’s been drunk before and this feels nothing like that. His hands are steady.

Taemin fidgets in the passenger seat and that’s enough; Kibum starts the car and pulls out of the parking lot, needing to get rid of him before he stresses himself into a .

They hit the road and Kibum takes the exit to Cheongdam. Thankfully, SM’s headquarters, this restaurant and Taemin’s apartment are all within ten minutes’ drive of each other, so Kibum doesn’t have to deal with a long drive filled with awkward silence.

He’s just hit the main road when Taemin asks “Where are we going?”

“Your house,” Kibum answers.

“Not the dorm?”

And really, that’s another glaring red flag that Kibum’s theory is wrong. At seventeen, they were all living at the dorm. His Taemin wouldn’t even have asked where Kibum is headed.

“No.”

Taemin is quiet for a moment and then, in the smallest voice, he says “This isn’t the right way.”

Kibum looks over, and sees a younger, smaller Taemin, ashen-faced and plastered against the door as if he’s afraid of Kibum. And that’s it, that’s the end of his pretense that this is all a hallucination. It’s late and the road is empty, so Kibum pulls over in the emergency lane.

“Do I look different to you?” Kibum asks.

“Yes.”

And yet you followed me into this car alone, Kibum wants to remark. It’s really down to Taemin’s good luck that no one’s managed to kidnap him yet, given his serious lack of self-preservation instincts.

And now the poor kid looks terrified, as if the same thought has just occurred to him too.

“Taemin-ah…” Kibum sighs. How can he explain this situation to Taemin if he himself can’t understand it? “It’s me, okay? Like… you remember the time you threw your red t-shirt into the washing machine when it was halfway through a cycle and it stained Minho’s uniform?”

That makes Taemin smile, just a bit. “Yeah.”

“And I was the one to unload the washing machine, and I covered it up for you? And you promised to buy me jelly but you never did.”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“So it’s really me, right, because who else will know that? But…” and this is the hard part. Kibum really doesn’t know what to say.

“But you’re older?”

“Yeah.” Kibum watches Taemin, but he doesn’t seem too troubled by the sheer weirdness of that statement.

“Did you travel back in time or something?”

“No, it’s… it’s 2018.” Kibum fishes his phone out of his pocket, unlocks it and hands it to Taemin. “See?”

Taemin takes the phone from him, but he doesn’t even look at the screen. Instead, the turns the phone over in his hands and says “Wow.”

It occurs to Kibum that in 2010, they were using either the IPhone 3 or 4. “Yeah, that’s the IPhone 8. It’s overrated, honestly. You should Google a newspaper or something and look for the date.”

“It’s huge,” Taemin says, but he does as Kibum asked him to. It’s amazing, really, how well he seems to be taking this. It’s enough to make Kibum feel embarrassed about the way his blood still hums an anxious rhythm under his skin; the way he’s still waiting for someone to jump out of the backseat with a camera to tell him that he’s been pranked. Taemin nods to himself and hands the phone back. “So, what do we do?”

“I’m not crazy, right? You are seventeen-ish, right?”

“Eighteen later this year, but yeah. Or you know, eighteen later in 2010. But yeah, if you’re crazy I’m crazy too.”

Taemin’s response reassures Kibum, even though he knows that his drugged brain might be hallucinating what he wants to hear, and he takes a moment to breathe and accept the situation. He’s got a de-aged – forget how, that doesn’t matter right now – Taemin on his hands; what is he going to do with him?

“We can’t take you home,” Kibum says, almost talking to himself. Taemin’s parents will freak out. Ideally, this should be their managers’ problem. Kibum is just an idol, he’s not equipped to handle things like this. Still, he gets the feeling that if he calls any of their managers at this hour to tell them that Taemin has magically morphed into his younger self, they’ll all assume that he’s drunk. “It’s so late… I’ll just… you can come home with me, and we’ll figure out what to do tomorrow, okay?”

There’s still a small part of Kibum that’s hoping that this is just a temporary thing; that he’ll wake up tomorrow with a very confused Taemin in his apartment or he’ll wake up alone and realise that this was all a dream.

“Okay,” Taemin agrees. “That sounds fine to me.”

Kibum turns the car around, heading for his flat. Taemin fiddles with his fingers and really, it’s just a matter of moments before-

“So… I don’t live in Banghak-dong anymore?”

Oh, it’s been ages, Kibum thinks. He remembers the time he made the hour-long journey from SM’s headquarters to Taemin’s house on a whim because he had been so lonely only to find that Taemin was out for the day; it feels like it happened in a different century. “No. You live in Cheongdam now.”

“With my parents?”

“Yes.” Kibum tries to think how long ago Taemin made the move. “I think you bought the house sometime in 2012? I can’t really remember, but it was definitely before 2013.”

“I bought a house in Cheongdam?” Taemin wearing an expression somewhere between skeptical and impressed and Kibum’s heart melts. “By myself? Wow, we must have sold a million albums or something.”

Kibum laughs a little. “Actually, we make more money off overseas concerts than anything else. In Japan, mostly.”

“And we don’t have a dorm anymore? SM lets us live at home?”

“Well, we still have the dorm if we want to use it. Sometimes we do, when we have to work late one day and start early the next. Mostly we live at home these days. SM has sort of relaxed some rules over the years, none of the senior groups have compulsory dorms or curfews or dating bans, things like that anymore.”

“Really? That’s so…” Taemin shakes his head. “It sounds so hard to believe.”

“They can’t keep us all single and dormed well into our thirties. There’s been a lot of contractual disputes and stuff, so conditions for idols have improved a lot.” Kibum pulls into the parking lot of his apartment building and heads for his reserved spot. “We’re here.”

“So this is your own flat? Are your parents here too?”

“Yes, it’s mine, and no, they still live in Daegu.”

They ride up to Kibum’s floor in companionable silence. Taemin seems a little overwhelmed by the information Kibum’s given him, as well as the new environment, and Kibum’s overwhelmed whenever he looks at Taemin, so he appreciates the quiet.

When he opens the door, Comme des and Garcons start barking and Kibum’s fear that he’s been drugged for nefarious reasons comes roaring back; maybe his drugged brain recognises the person next to him as Taemin, but it’s actually a stranger a robber a kidnapper a sasaeng waiting to get access to his house. But then he notices that Comme des and Garcons are barking excitedly, trying to get around his legs to reach Taemin, and his frantic heartbeat slows.

“You have dogs?” Taemin says dogs the way someone might say alligators, or perhaps leeches, as if he can’t believe that it’s possible.

“Yeah, they’re about four now.” Kibum nudges Comme des and Garcons with his leg, moving them back into the flat, and holds the door open for Taemin to come in too. “I think they recognise your scent. You can pet them, they won’t bite.”

Taemin doesn’t hesitate at all to take him up on the offer; he plops onto the floor and lets the dogs climb all over him. “What are their names?”

“The brown one is Comme des-” Comme des perks his ears up at the mention of his name “-and the black one is Garcons.”

“He looks like Eve,” Taemin comments, cuddling Comme des to his chest.

Kibum can sense the question Taemin is too afraid to ask. He starts on the task of getting food out for his children and nonchalantly remarks “You wouldn’t believe it, but Adam and Eve are more famous than you.”

“What?”

“You brought them on some TV show or another. All of the comments were about them and now whenever you appear on a programme, the fans always ask whether you brought Adam and Eve.” Kibum clicks his tongue and the dogs come running, knowing that they’re about to be fed. “Are you hungry? Do you want something to eat or do you just want to go to bed?”

“I feel like I should be out exploring the future,” Taemin replies absently. He wanders around the living room and stops at the glass wall overlooking the city. “It’s… everything is familiar, like cars and phones and the road and everything looks the same, but look at this, we don’t live together anymore and you have this huge place and dogs and it’s so…”

The word you’re looking for is mind, Kibum thinks. “Okay Spaceman, your options are either food or sleep. I’ve been working since before the sun came up-”

“I’ll just sleep, hyung.” Taemin turns away from the window. “I’m tired too.”

Kibum makes up the guest room for Taemin and gives him toiletries, a towel and shorts to sleep in. As he closes the door, he wonders whether Taemin will be able to get any sleep at all tonight. In his own room, Kibum showers and slips into his pyjamas, but his mind is still racing.

Is he crazy?

Is this really happening?

What happened to 2018 Taemin?

As he lies in the dark, Kibum realises that the last time he saw his Taemin was when he went to the bathroom in that restaurant; if this is real, if he’s not drugged or crazy, then the restaurant should be the starting point to figuring this out.

It’s open for breakfast, Kibum remembers. It was around 6am and he had had dwenjjangjigae, freshly boiled not an hour earlier. He sets an alarm for 5am – giving himself barely five hours of sleep – and prays that when he wakes up, he’ll find his Taemin asleep in the guest room.

The buzzing of his phone draws Kibum out of an uneasy sleep. He turns the alarm off before music can start playing and scrubs a hand over his face, pausing to rub his fingers over the stubble growing on his chin. There’s little more he hates than shaving, and the prospect of doing it so early in the morning irks him. Damn Taemin and his perpetual baby-face-

-Taemin.

Kibum prays again please let Taemin be normal please let it be a dream or a nightmare or a figment of my imagination before rolling out of bed.

Comme des and Garcons are sleeping in their little baskets. Garcons wakes up when Kibum pads down the hall to the guest room, but he makes no other move. When they were puppies, Kibum could barely walk a single step without them clamouring around his feet.

Kibum opens the door to the guest room quietly and peeks in. There is a person sleeping in the bed, all rolled up in the blanket like kimbap. As anxious as he is, Kibum can’t help but smile; Taemin has so many quirks and habits which are just plain adorable.

“Taemin-ah?”

There’s no response. Kibum walks up to the bed and the copper hair visible over the top of the blanket immediately gives away the fact that this isn’t a dream, that somehow Kibum really does have a teenaged Taemin sleeping in his guest room in 2018.

“Taemin-ah,” Kibum calls again, lightly shaking the sleeping boy. Taemin stirs and tries to pull the blanket over his head. “Lee Taemin!”

That wakes him right up. “Huh? What-” he blinks at Kibum and looks around the room as if he can’t quite believe what he’s seeing. “I… I thought I was dreaming.”

“I wish,” Kibum mumbles. “Get dressed, we’re going back to the restaurant. If it brought you here, maybe it can take you back.”

Kibum showers and dresses perfunctorily; he refuses to let his mind wander, to contemplate what will happen if there are no answers to be found at the restaurant. It’s difficult enough to accept that Taemin has somehow travelled in time or has been de-aged by forces unknown. He refuses to let himself consider whether he’s lost his mind; that if he doesn’t find a solution at the restaurant and is forced to call their manager, this might end with him locked away in an asylum.

Taemin is waiting for him in the living room. He’s dressed in the same clothes he wore last night, sitting on the floor and petting the dogs.

“Come on, let’s go.” It occurs to Kibum that Taemin might be hungry, but he stomps on that thought before it can grow into sympathy.

For his part, Taemin just quietly follows him. Going solo really brought Taemin out of his introvert shell, and Kibum has had four years to get used to a more expressive, more assertive version of Taemin; so much so that he finds himself at a loss to deal with him now. How did he manage it when he was so young and confused himself?

The sky outside is still dark. The roads are quiet. Taemin takes a deep breath and lets it out while Kibum unlocks his car, but he doesn’t say a single word during the short drive to the restaurant. Try as he might, Kibum can’t read his expression, can’t begin to fathom what he might be thinking.

The parking lot outside of the restaurant is empty, save for one small truck. A man unloads a crate of leafy vegetables from it and heads towards the entrance. The lights are on, but it looks like they don’t have any customers yet.

Good. The fewer witnesses, the better.

“Okay, here’s the plan. We’ll go inside and you get into the bathroom, and I don’t know, try to wish yourself back into your own time period,” Kibum says. It’s a piss-poor plan, but Taemin just nods in agreement. “Good. Ganbatte!”

They leave the car and walk in, and Kibum’s plan hits a snag almost immediately.

“Good morning!” The ahjumma behind the counter greets them cheerfully and steps out to usher them to a table. Kibum guesses that she believes that old superstition about the first customers set the tone for the day. Luckily, he has his wallet with him.

He orders two servings of kimchijigae and waits for the ahjumma to bustle away to talk to Taemin. “Alright, you go ahead. I’ll wait until the food comes and then I’ll come check on you.”

Taemin nods grimly and sets off.

Time crawls by. Kibum checks his phone compulsively Three times he swipes the screen alive, only to see that one minute has ticked by. Another minute. He hears a bell go ding! in the background. Then the ahjumma comes to the table with their stew, along with an impressive assortment of banchan.

With his heart hammering away in his chest, Kibum says a prayer – his second one for the day, and it’s not even sunrise yet – and heads for the bathroom.

The door to the women’s stall is open, so Taemin is definitely not there. Kibum raps lightly on the door to the men’s stall. “Taemin?”

The door swings open. It’s still him, the same out-of-time Taemin, staring back at Kibum as if this is all his fault. “It’s not working.”

Kibum pulls the door shut, counts to ten and opens it again. Nothing’s changed, except perhaps for the severity of the distressed scrunch of

Taemin’s eyebrows.

“Is everything okay?” The ahjumma is standing just behind Kibum, one hand over . Scandalised. Kibum is suddenly aware how very inappropriate this looks; his adult self haranguing a teenager in a bathroom, said teenager visibly upset, both of them tugging at the door.

“Ah…” Kibum racks his brain for an excuse, but he can’t come up with anything. “Uhm…”

“You can use the ladies’ room as long as it’s not occupied,” she says. “You don’t have to fight over the bathroom.”

“Ah, it’s not that,” Kibum reassures her. “It’s just… has anything strange ever happened…” His face heats up with embarrassment; why has the universe put him in a position where he has to ask a shopkeeper ahjumma whether her bathroom has time-travel powers?

Understandably, she looks annoyed. But, just as Kibum is about to apologise and retract his question, her eyes widen and she glances between the two of them as if she’s seeing them for the first time. “Oh… oh, no,” she whispers.

“Eomonim?”

“Oh my world,” the ahjumma curses, massaging her temple with one hand. “Ah, this hasn’t happened in over a year, I thought we were finally done.” She sighs heavily. “Which one of you is it?”

And right there, Kibum finally stops questioning whether he’s going crazy. “Him,” Kibum says, pointing at Taemin. “We came here yesterday and he used the bathroom before we left, and-”

“Is he older or younger?” she asks, before answering her own question. “Oh, what does it matter? But that’s not him, right? He’s from the wrong time?”

“Yes!” Kibum and Taemin both exclaim.

She sighs again and suddenly, bows from the waist. “Please forgive us for the inconvenience.”

“Please, eomonim-” Kibum isn’t here for an apology; he just wants a solution. It hasn’t even occurred to him to be angry with the restaurant.

“I always close off the bathrooms but we get fined for not complying with regulations… ah, I thought the problem was finally over, it’s been such a long time since this happened.”

“Eomonim, it’s okay, just tell us how to fix this.”

“Well, usually what works is if you come back at the exact same you were here. Sometimes it works immediately, sometimes it takes longer, there was a poor man who had to keep doing it for 41 days.”

Kibum’s blood runs cold. 41 days? They have a comeback soon.

Taemin must have noticed his distress, because he says “Hyung, it’s okay, we’ll come back tonight and try again. It usually takes a shorter time, right?”

“Yes, usually,” the ahjumma replies. “Sometimes it takes longer because people don’t remember the exact time and they have to sort of try this time and that.”

10.01pm. The memory of his lockscreen flashes through Kibum’s mind. Kibum went looking for him then, because it had already been ten minutes. That means that Taemin has to be in the bathroom at 9.50pm.

“I remember,” Kibum says. “I know exactly when he went in. 9.50pm.”

The ahjumma looks surprised. “Oh, that’s lucky. You should come back tonight at that time.”

“Can I come out of the bathroom now?” Taemin asks.

“I’m sorry.” The ahjumma apologises and moves away, even though it’s Kibum who’s mostly blocking Taemin. He moves too and Taemin steps out.

“Please, go ahead and eat. There’s nothing that you can do now,” the ahjumma says, trying to usher them back to their table. “The food will get cold.”

Taemin walks ahead of him for the first time; he’s already digging in by the time Kibum sits down. He must really be hungry. Kibum picks up his own chopsticks, but somehow, his appetite isn’t quite back.

“It will work out,” Taemin says thickly, his mouth still full. “Don’t worry, hyung.”

Kibum feels a rush of affection for Taemin; back then, when they were promoting Lucifer, Kibum had felt so mature. Even Taemin, he thought, had matured as well, from the child that he was when they first debuted. But now, looking at him, Kibum sees just how young he was. Just a child, he thinks. He fishes the hunks of pork shoulder from his bowl and spoons them into Taemin’s. “Here, eat up.”

“Thanks hyung!”

Kibum smiles I’m turning soft in my old age and finally takes a bite of his own meal. The stew, hot and sour, goes down just right. He takes a few more mouthfuls, appreciating the taste and takes a look out of the window.

The sun is coming up. There’s more cars on the road now, too, though they still have their headlights on. The day is beginning.

***

hi! 

i just wanted to say that i know i have several ongoing stories and it's really not time for me to be starting a new one like i've just done here. 

usually, i don't start new stories without completing the previous one, unless it's a special event fic or a one-shot. but these days, i guess i just write whatever i feel like writing - if it means starting a new fic when another one still isn't complete, then so be it. i won't abandon any of my fics, i know what's supposed to happen etc, but sometimes there are just some things i need to write for myself and sometimes this will get in the way of other fics. 

thank you for your patience and understanding. 

love, 

sherleigh