Lana wasn’t sure how much time had passed before she could breathe again. It must have been a week straight that she lay on the bus bed, crying in Kyungsoo’s arms. The guilt-stricken boy didn’t know what to do, but he tried his best to console her. He baked more cinnamon rolls, but that endeavor failed. As soon as Lana saw them, she buried her face in the pillow and sobbed harder than ever, remembering the ones her mother always baked from scratch. He offered to bring back takeout from her favorite Italian restaurant, but she had neither the will nor the appetite to eat.

She didn’t want to do anything, not even to think or to feel or to be. She especially didn’t want to hear Kyungsoo apologize again and again or blame himself for everything she had seen, even if technically it was his fault. She just wanted to shut down and forget about the world that was still running through time around her. She thought that maybe if she ignored it long enough, it would just cease to exist altogether. But it didn’t.

It took a long time for Kyungsoo to finally decide enough was enough. After failing to succeed in stuffing a piece of bread into Lana’s mouth (or to coax her into doing anything at all), he sighed and plopped down in bed beside her, dabbing at her wet cheeks with a tissue. “I think it’s time I took you home,” he mumbled, rubbing the back of his neck uneasily.

“Nooo,” Lana groaned, swatting his hand away. “I don’t want to go home. Anywhere but there, please.”

“You can’t just lie in bed and mourn forever,” Kyungsoo insisted. “You should make amends with your parents while you still have time. It’s the only thing that’ll make you feel better.”

“But if I go back now, she’ll just end up dying sooner,” she replied, sitting up in bed. “If I stay here and cry forever, at least it’ll prolong her life.”

“Well,” he sighed, frowning as he tilted his head sideways, “I guess on some level that technically works, but it only works for you. It’s still going to happen either way, Lana, and you can’t stop it altogether just by sitting here all day and night. Shouldn’t you try to make the most of what you can?”

Lana shook her head, refusing to hear him out. “It doesn’t matter,” she insisted. “I’m not letting anything happen to her. I’ll stay with you as long as it takes if it means she’ll still be okay.”

Realizing she wasn’t listening, Kyungsoo buckled. He clapped his hands onto his knees and rose from the bed before pulling his friend up to her feet. “Let’s at least do something then,” he suggested. “We can’t sit around here forever. If you don’t want to go home, that’s fine. But you should at least busy yourself and try to get your mind off of it.”

Under any other circumstances, it probably would have been the stupidest advice Lana had ever heard. But it was exactly what she wanted. She wanted to forget that her mom would die in less than nine months. She wanted to forget that despite the fact that she had the power to travel through time, she couldn’t do anything to stop it because its course was unchangeable.

“Alright,” she agreed, rubbing her tired eyes. “Why don’t you pick the time and place and surprise me? Somewhere safe—”

“I got it,” Kyungsoo interjected, flashing a smile. Evidently very relieved that he had convinced his friend to stop being a zombie for the time being, he immediately spun around on his heels and ambled up to the front of the bus. He took no time at all in punching in the coordinates to the next location, as if he had already decided where he would like to visit next beforehand.

The bus lurched as the sound of thunder cracked the air. Like wax on a candle, the outside surroundings melted away, soon replaced by the tan and dusty colors of a new when and where. Lana decided not to spoil the surprise just yet, and so she averted eyesight from the bus windows as Kyungsoo grabbed her by the hand, dragging her down the hall toward the Clothesatron 10K. She didn’t peek as he entered the new time and place into the machine’s console either, so when she was spat out of it now garbed in a ghastly plain cotton dress and leather boots, she still didn’t quite know what to expect. It wasn’t until Kyungsoo popped out of the closet dressed in a cowboy getup—complete with a wide-brimmed hat, boots, bandana, and chaps—that she finally got an inkling of where she was headed next.

When the two had finished transforming into appropriate attire, Lana hurried ahead of her friend, suddenly eager to get her first breath of fresh air in the past week. She hustled down the front steps as the bus doors swung open. All she saw as she alighted the bus was the dry sand beneath her feet—and a giant tumbleweed as it rolled by in the wind.

Author's Note
Sorry, it’s short and stupid and took too long to get out. My motivation to write is very, very low right now. orz