for inbrevity
Title: the world is a hundred to one
For: inbrevity
Pairing: jaehyo + kyung
Rating: pg-13
Word Count: 7984
Summary: he stops being just park kyung and becomes park kyung, time traveler and companion, instead (loosely inspired by doctor who)
Notes/Warnings: a special shout out to space-mom for talking this through with me and keeping me sane (and also making me a bit more insane with this near ridiculous story); you’re a peach. to my recipient: i had so much fun going through your prompts and playing around with them, so i hope you’ll enjoy this as much as i enjoyed writing it for you! knowledge of doctor who is not necessary to read. brief moments of (intergalactic) violence.
“The problem with time, you see, is that there is never enough.”
A pause. “Funny, I don’t think I’ve ever found that.”
The trouble with time traveling, Kyung knows, is getting all the pieces to line up; nothing ever seems to happen in the right order. There are time loops and rips and alternate realities to account for. One must also consider the fixed time streams and the pesky convergent timelines that happen at random because someone fumbles a plan or saves the doctor from an imminent death.
It makes telling a story rather difficult, but Kyung thinks this one should start from the beginning.
There isn’t anything particularly interesting about the day it happens; it’s sunny, warm, clear and crisp blue skies as far as the eye can see. There’s a stillness in the air, though, one that is nearly palpable. It covers Kyung, slow and easy like the ocean waves breaking upon the shore, and it’s a still and quiet he recognizes; he does not fear it anymore. He stalls in his steps, lunch soon to be over, and plucks his earbuds from his ears.
Kyung listens, and even the birds have ceased their constant chatter in favor of waiting.
There, standing rigid on the sandy beach, is a lone police box. The waves curl around the bottom, the water calm as it laps around the frame, and everything stills for that one brief moment. Kyung squints against the sunlight haloing out the box’s edges, waiting to see what happens next.
A man stumbles out, with very little grace, and trips into the sea. From where Kyung stands he can make out the solitary figure, arms held out to catch himself before he faceplants into New Zealand’s coastline, and the way his shoulders hunch beneath his gray suit jacket. Kyung inches forward, eyes ahead and on the sputtering man, and stops short before the water breaks the sand.
“Hello?” Kyung calls out. His voice comes out weak, clogged in the back of his throat; he coughs and tries again.
The man straightens-the sleeves of his jacket up to his elbows and pants stained with seawater-and yelps. He staggers back when their eyes meet. Kyung takes him in: gray suit, long limbs with an awkward sort of grace, elegant hands, the red bowtie. He appears oddly misplaced in this century, Kyung decides, better suited with old film grain and the backdrop of pre-war times.
The man’s expression clears. He turns toward the booth he tumbled out of to say: “I think we overshot again.” He taps at the side, fingertips clicking against medal panelling, and asks, “Where have you taken me this time?”
The way he says the words, how ruffled he looks with his wrinkled suit and wayward tuft of brown curls, feels familiar; it almost feels like something from one of his dreams, long ago.
“This isn’t 16th century Russia, is it?” Kyung shakes his head, and the man’s mouth curves into a displeased frown. “Dammit.”
“Who are you?” Kyung asks as the tide licks at the toes of his shoes. “What are you?”
“I’m the doctor,” the man chirps, good-natured despite standing in the sea in a suit. “I have many names,” he pauses here, face pinching. “You may call me Theta Sigma.”
“No way in hell is that a name or anything I’d ever call you.”
He grins, teeth straight and white and as blinding as the afternoon sun. “Then you can call me Jaehyo.”
“Kyung,” he finds himself saying during the lull in conversation. Kyung stuffs his hands in his pockets, the cord of his headphones curled in his palm, and swallows. “Have we-I. I’ve met you before.”
Jaehyo turns back to his blue police box; the sun glints off the metal and into Kyung’s eyes. “Kyung, would you like to come on an adventure?”
Kyung shifts one foot, to step back, but he doesn’t move. Neither does Jaehyo, and the distance between them remains the same.
“I have a time machine. We could go wherever you’d like,” he offers. It’s pushy, but it’s also a deal he thinks he might have been waiting for for a long time now. Run away, don’t look back, leave it all behind. “The TARDIS,” he stops and here he touches the blue panels of the box-the TARDIS, “she’ll take us there.”
“Is this a ‘come with me if you want to live’ moment?”
He briefly thinks about his mother, the family that shuffled and uprooted to stay here for a while, his friends, the people he has to prove wrong, and everyone else he may have to leave behind. Then he reflects upon his childhood, the dream he’s waited for to come true; he knows his answer.
“Maybe.” When Kyung glimpses his smile next, it’s rather sad; sad in the way goodbyes often are and at the end of an era. It doesn’t peel his lips back-rather it thins them instead-and it’s much different than the one he flashed before. “Yes.”
Kyung looks back, once. “I guess I can’t say no now, right?” His shoulders slump of their own accord, a weight lifting from him and a sigh leaving his lips, relieved. Jaehyo stares, stockstill, and all that moves between them are waves. “Yeah, yeah, I’ll come with you.”
He stops being just Park Kyung and becomes Park Kyung, time traveler and companion, instead.
This isn’t quite right. Time is tricky, and sometimes first meetings aren’t actually the first but rather the second or perhaps even the third. That may have been the start of the adventure, but the first point of intersection came years earlier, in the midst of July.
Kyung knows this because the date has forever filed itself away in his mind. The true beginning goes something like this:
It was a late Friday night in July, and Kyung was going home from the quick-mart closest to his friend’s, Hyunsuk, apartment. The streets were still shining with fresh rain puddles, reflecting the stars and the moon in the sky in a monochrome gray, and the glow from streetlamps nearby provided minimal but enough light to guide him home. It was quiet-the eery kind that preceded moments in horror films just before the killer attacked-and Kyung clutched his backpack straps tighter between his fists, humming under his breath to fill the emptiness around him.
He watched as the headlamps of cars without passengers flickered on and off, in time with the streetlights, and walked faster. From one of the back alleys appeared smoke, hazy and curling around his feet in wispy trails, and-despite better judgement telling him to leave right then and forget this ever happened-he stepped closer, warily at first but gaining newfound confidence with every step. A blue box-emitting a strange glow and the reason for the smoke crawling like vines around his legs-stood in the middle of the alley, in plain sight for any around.
And out came a man, dressed in suits he’d only ever seen worn to special Sunday church services; his first few steps over the threshold were stumbled, his footing not quite in place yet, before he righted himself.
“This doesn’t look like New New York,” the man said, seemingly to the box from which he tumbled. He combed his fingers through his bangs before he dusted off his jacket’s sleeves. “Where have you taken me now?” And, then: “Oh.”
Kyung tangled his fingers in his backpack straps; he was young, far too young to know what to do, but the man did not frighten him. There was a sense of calm that washed over Kyung in that moment when their eyes met, his quickened heart rate slowing into a light sprint instead of the marathon it ran before. The man smiled, a dimple in his cheek, and his eyes were bright like the starlight. There was something distinctly inhuman about the man, something purely alien.
“Who?” Kyung managed at the time; the man shook his head, finger pressed to his lips, as he said: “I can’t answer that.”
Kyung has a list-a binder-of dates; this day was on the list.
“So you did come back,” he says, conversationally, as Jaehyo tinkers with the centerpiece inside the TARDIS. He’s not quite sure where to stand, what his place in all this is, and frankly he’s still rather confused by the infinite space trapped within a finite police box.
Jaehyo pauses. “What?”
“I saw you before. You looked-” he motions at his own face, makes a sweeping gesture at his own body, tries to explain himself in actions rather than words. He settles on saying: “You looked different,” instead.
The blue, blue light-almost a green tint to it, like the sea-gives a peculiar glow to Jaehyo. It sharpens his the arch of his brow bone, hollows his cheeks, casts shadows across the right side of his face.
“I. Yes.” He smooths out his suit, dry and nothing like what it had been earlier. The jacket follows the indent of his elbow, creased and folded there. “I’m still getting used to this body. So is she.”
“She?”
“The TARDIS.”
“Oh,” is all he says in turn. They go back to staring at what they were before: the haunting blue glow in the middle of it all. “We met before when you,” he opts for casual nonchalance, “looked different than this.”
“Did we?”
Jaehyo’s expression is the shining definition of befuddled, lips curled down and brow furrowed in concentration, as though he were trying to recall their exact meeting. Kyung nods, and if anything this seems to only make Jaehyo more confused.
“I’m sorry.” Kyung swallows, already hearing the words before Jaehyo says them. “I don’t remember you.”
Kyung admits to being a rather unreliable narrator.
There had been another time and day, after the first. This was the day he tried to forget because it was the day that never happened: the day the doctor returned for him with more promises of an adventure he could hardly begin to imagine.
There was a boy standing out in the rain without an umbrella, staring up at the sky and waiting for the man in the blue box to come back.
There was a boy. He stood in the rain without an umbrella. He waited for the man to return in his blue box. The man never returned. The boy kept waiting.
Two weeks later he left Seoul, but, still, he waited.
It does not take long for Kyung to learn that the TARDIS does not take to Jaehyo’s coordinates well. She always tends to put them in the midst of a crisis or revolting planet; or if not that she places them in the middle of nowhere in some new and different planet, but all these planets are new and different to Kyung.
“I don’t know why I keep you around,” Jaehyo says, once. He raps his knuckles against the blue, blue framework in an offbeat tune. He lifts his hand to shield his eyes or to salute the TARDIS. “My rage meter is up to here.”
Kyung stands offside, watches him, and fiddles with his mp3 player. Jaehyo doesn’t remember him; he’s certain they’ve never met before, but how can this be? The wrinkled slip of paper in his pocket tells him otherwise, dates fading into one another but still legible enough for Kyung to read them.
“Are there any other.” Kyung stops himself short, and Jaehyo stops scolding the TARDIS for landing them in some desert wasteland. Kyung motions toward all of Jaehyo. “Are there any others like you?”
“No,” Jaehyo answers, face drawn. He stares ahead, expression carefully void of anything, as the dust kicks up again and dances around them. “It’s just me. I’m the only one.”
In his time with Jaehyo, travelling through space, Kyung has come across more near-death experiences than he would ever have hoped.
“Do you make everyone you meet angry?”
Jaehyo grips his wrist and drags him further down the sewer systems; it all looks the same, and Kyung doesn’t think that even Jaehyo knows which way is correct anymore. “Less talking, more running.”
Once in the safety of the TARDIS, the Daleks far behind them, Jaehyo says: “I don’t make everyone mad.”
“Uh-huh.”
They drift through space for what feels like hours, days, weeks; the measure of time passing is different here than on Earth, and Kyung cannot make up from down, left from right. There is so much unknown out there, galaxies that the scientists and astronomers back home don’t even know about yet, and Kyung looks out at the moons of Jupiter in orbit in awe.
As a child he’d always liked space, had bought a telescope (that never saw much use what with him living in the city), and cycled through a few screensavers and wallpapers of nebulae on his laptop. Seeing it, though, here and up close feels a lot different; it’s somewhat overwhelming to be so close to things that always felt so out of reach before.
They fall into orbit with the rings of Saturn, and when Kyung looks out he can see the sun cresting the side.
“Where to next?”
Jaehyo looks up and over at him. “I’m trying to find someone,” he says, voice low and soft; it catches in the corners of the TARDIS and echoes back even as quiet as it is. “You should go look around.” He stares up at the ceiling, and Kyung takes in the long line of his neck, the bob of his adam’s apple, and the slope of his nose. “I think there’s a swimming pool in here, somewhere. Or at least, one of my old companions told me that.”
Something in him, in his demeanor, changes at those words. Kyung eyes him sidelong for a moment. Jaehyo’s back to tinkering at the controls, pressing in coordinates, and formulating half-thought out plans; Kyung hasn’t been around long (no more than a handful of days in different galaxies and planets) but he knows how Jaehyo works already. He never stops talking, regardless of whether Kyung is listening or not, and it can be about everything and anything and nothing at all; when he’s not talking, he’s singing songs he picked up from other companions and travelers and worlds Kyung cannot begin to wrap his mind around.
He doesn’t quite fit into Jaehyo’s life, not yet; just as out of place in his blue jeans and black tee, sneakers and cap.
“Don’t drive us into a fucking Dalek army this time, ok?” Kyung says.
Jaehyo looks at him over his shoulder, the makings of a smile on his lips, and the light from the centerpiece shines his eyes almost blue too. “Aye aye captain.”
“If this is the so-called ‘lost planet of Poosh’,” Kyung says, even using the air quotes though he doubts Jaehyo’s paying him any attention or if he even understands what that means, “why do you know the exact coordinates and location?”
“Details, details,” Jaehyo says, sidling closer; Kyung feels Jaehyo’s long fingers curl around his wrist, pulling him in step with him. It’s hard to match his sloping gait as every one of Jaehyo’s is the equivalent of three of Kyung’s own. “You’ll like it.”
“You said that about the last place, too,” Kyung says, voice dry and hopefully conveying his annoyance. “The people of Salem wanted to burn us at the fucking stake, you know.”
Jaehyo knocks him with his hip, more playful today after finally locking on to to Poosh after a few failed attempts, and darts across one of the hills. Poosh’s landscape is different than Earth’s; it is filled with people in the area Jaehyo leads him through. No two people look of the same species, some near human and others humanoids; some even resemble the aliens from the grainy sci-fi movies Kyung used to watch with Hyunsuk back in Korea.
“I’d like to stay here sometime,” Jaehyo confides. “This or Paris.”
Kyung steps lightly on the pathway, and bumps elbows with an Ood man. “Kinda busy.”
The bar that Jaehyo leads them into is packed from wall to wall; the music is fast, heavy, deafening and rattles in Kyung’s head. He feels Jaehyo’s grip tighten on his wrist as they pick through the many bodies (some solid, others seemingly gelatin). The floor resembles ice, transparent and clear, and the blurred reflections of the overhead lights vaguely resemble starlight.
“Stay here,” Jaehyo says, mouth pressed close to his ear. His breath is warm against his skin, lips moving over the whorl of his ear, and even with their proximity Kyung has to strain to hear him. “I’ll be right back.”
Jaehyo leaves him in a flash, standing at the bar, and he sighs before he climbs onto one of the many stools. The gruff-voiced bartender grunts at him when he twirls on his stool, entertaining himself until Jaehyo comes back into view. There are so many languages being spoken around him, some he’s heard and others he hasn’t yet, but somehow he understands the words he catches. Jaehyo explained to him the effects of the TARDIS, once, but he hasn’t really understood what he meant until now.
“Are you with the doctor?”
“Huh?”
He turns to see a woman at his side, her black hair pinned back and red dress clinging. She smiles at him, and even her lips are red. She looks almost human, just like any girl he could’ve met on Earth, but there’s a peculiar sheen to her skin; she almost appears a shimmery golden-bronze in the light.
“Ma’thuula,” she says, lips barely moving, tongue rolling through the syllables. Her voice is husky, soft on Kyung’s ears.
“Ah, yeah. I’m with Jaehyo,” he says.
Kyung doesn’t know where to look. Her dress slopes low, but her eyes are dark and haunting, as black as a night sky; he settles on looking down at his lap, where her black-painted fingernails stroke over the backs of his hands. Maybe this is how other species communicate, and he doesn’t want to be rude and cause a scene; the last thing he or Jaehyo needs on their hands is another mishap to run away from.
“Jaehyo? Ah, I see,” she says, mostly to herself. “I’m an old friend,” and the word curls on her tongue differently. “Have a drink with me?”
Ma’thuula motions at the bartender with her right hand and then tucks it beneath her chin. She smiles at him. “You’re so far from home,” she says as the bartender places an odd-shaped glass before him, her fingertips tracing the inseam of his jeans at his knee.
Yeah I guess,” Kyung mumbles.
He stares down at the deep, dark red liquid in his glass; the smell sours in his head when he inhales, an almost metallic smell. Like money on Earth, like blood. Kyung’s stomach heaves, but Ma’thuula continues to look at him as though nothing’s wrong, eyes expectant. Kyung lifts his hand to the glass and brings it closer.
Another hand settles atop his own, placing the the glass back onto the bar top. He feels his skin prickle, the hairs at his nape stand on in, and a familiar warmth at his back. Ma’thuula’s expression hardly changes; if anything, her lips part even more, eyelashes lowering to shade her eyes, as she smiles over Kyung’s head.
“We were expecting you, Doctor,” she says.
Jaehyo tenses behind him; the aura in the bar seems to change, grow colder. “Sorry to disappoint you, but we can’t stay.” Jaehyo jerks him off the barstool; he doesn’t wait for him to right his footing before he’s tugging him along, grip tight and unrelenting.
Ma’thuula has her head tilted when Kyung glances back over his shoulder; her smile has not wavered, and Kyung can’t help but feel like more eyes on her him and Jaehyo all throughout the bar.
When asked, later (much later), Jaehyo says: “She’s from Pegasi Sector IV. Her people... don’t really like me much.”
“Oh.” Kyung grins and pats Jaehyo’s shoulder. The material of his jacket gives slightly beneath Kyung’s fingertips. “Does anyone really like you?”
Jaehyo scoffs. “We need to find Yukwon.”
“Is that who you were looking for?”
Jaehyo nods mutely. Then: “He told me to meet him there.” Jaehyo places his hands on his hips. “He moves around a lot, though.”
“Where else do you think he could be?”
“Korea?”
Jaehyo nods as they step through the TARDIS and into the alleyway. Kyung feels a gripping familiarity here, a jumpstart in his heart, and a sense of foreboding; it looks similar to where he met the doctor the first time, but there’s something else about the area. It unsettles him, and he trips over a stray can of spray paint into the line of Jaehyo’s back.
“It’s quiet,” Jaehyo says. “Where is everyone?”
“I like it after being locked up with you for so long.” He’s joking, but the way Jaehyo’s face is drawn is dead serious. “What’s wrong?”
Jaehyo falls to the ground in the next second, and his own body feels weightless, floating as he gets knocked into the nearby brick wall by a sudden force. His vision clouds, and he can see only the reds of his eyelids for a moment. There’s some shouting and the rustle of clothes, but Kyung’s head pounds and refuses to clear up.
Then two quick rings of a gun being shot fill the air. A steady silence falls over them.
“Hey, you’re awake,” someone says, and Kyung scrunches his face, trying to locate the sound.
His throat and mouth feel dry, as though someone stuffed them with cotton. “Where am I?”
“Back on the TARDIS,” he hears Jaehyo murmur, voice distant.
Kyung sits up, the back of his head still feeling rather bruised, and takes in his surroundings. It is the TARDIS, a room he hasn’t seen before, but there is someone he doesn’t recognize peering at him along with Jaehyo. Yukwon, he assumes and is proved right when Jaehyo begins speaking to him while Kyung adjusts to the whiteness of the room.
“Are you okay?” Jaehyo asks later on, after Yukwon’s retired to his room. He seems to be walking on eggshells, and Kyung rolls over on his bed suddenly feeling rather annoyed with himself and Jaehyo.
“Yeah. I’m not a fucking kid, ok.” His body responses are still off, jarred and shaken, and his eyes hurt from the pounding in the back of his head. He’s sluggish, a bit worse for wear, but he’ll live. He’s more tired than he’s ever been on the TARDIS, and Yukwon said that he’d have to take it easy while she restabilized his conditions. “Just. Leave me alone.”
He squeezes his eyes shut and curls into a ball when he hears Jaehyo’s footfalls fade outside his door.
It doesn’t take too long for life in the TARDIS to return back to normal. Jaehyo bounces back into high spirits, leading them on another most likely disastrous adventure, and Kyung is done feeling sorry for himself and his weaknesses. He spends time with Yukwon on board while Jaehyo directs them toward their next location, and he learns that Yukwon’s an old companion from years prior.
“He’s not much different,” Yukwon says, shrugging. “Still just as weird as ever,” and he laughs at this, smile wide and infectious.
“Why’re you no longer travelling together?”
Yukwon polishes his gun and tucks it back into his holster; it’s unlike the weapons he’s seen on Earth, but Yukwon’s human, just like him. “We parted ways. I didn’t have much of a life back in Suwon, and the scenery of Poosh was enough to draw me in. I went back to Korea because of your message.”
“My message?”
Yukwon sighs. “It’s a lot to take in and really fucking hard for me to try to explain, and if I asked Jaehyo to do it we’d be here all day.” This is true; Jaehyo’s tendency to speak slow and in elaborately detailed sentences would do little good. “Let’s just say future you was concerned about the doctor’s death.”
“That... doesn’t make any sense.”
Yukwon laughs and his eyes scrunch up as he does so. “No, but you could’ve been a bit more cryptic with your message. ‘Save the doctor’ isn’t really subtle.”
“But you have to admit it was effective,” Kyung says, picking at a loose thread in his jeans, studiously ignoring Jaehyo standing not too far away. “And we saved him.”
“Yeah,” Yukwon says, “yeah, we did.”
On there way back through the Milky Way, they catch sight of what Yukwon calls a ‘star whale.’
“I’ve never actually seen one,” he admits, “but there’s only supposed to be one left.”
Kyung stares out at it. It doesn’t look much different than the whales he’s seen on the National Geographic channel. “It must be lonely,” he says.
Yukwon nods. His presence at Kyung’s side is welcome, easy, relaxed; he feels like someone he would’ve liked to have known and befriended back on Earth. The star whale passes by them, its sound rumbling throughout, and Kyung tries to imagine being the only human left alive; no one to talk to, no one to share similar stories with, no one at all.
He glances back toward Jaehyo who talks to the TARDIS like she’s his best friend; when he thinks about it, she probably is. They’ve been together for a long time, and there’s something both a bit beautiful and a bit sad about that fact.
Kyung looks back out in time for them to pass by Pluto.
“Yukwon.”
“Mm?”
“What does Jaehyo like? You traveled with him before.”
Yukwon crosses his arms over his chest and looks up at the ceiling. His chin wrinkles when he pulls his lips to the side, thoughtful. “I guess he likes oranges,” he says, first, “He ate them a lot when we traveled together. He likes to be challenged, likes his privacy as much as he enjoys being with other people, and he likes to brag about not being very good at anything, I guess.”
Kyung hums and Yukwon pauses.
“But I guess, what he likes most,” and it’s hard to tell if Yukwon’s even talking to him anymore or if he’s just thinking aloud now, “is not being left alone.”
Yukwon takes over driving duties not too long after Jaehyo guides them into an asteroid storm.
“You’re driving with the brakes on, anyway,” he says good-naturedly.
Jaehyo huffs and leans against the wall beside Kyung. “He’s always like this.”
Kyung looks up from his cell phone game. He’s surprised the battery hasn’t died yet after so long away, but there are no messages on his phone or any calls to make. Figures that even in space, surrounded by satellites everywhere, he’d still have shitty service. He notes the way Jaehyo peers over his shoulder, watching him intently.
“Here,” Kyung says and pushes the cell into Jaehyo’s hands. “It’s fun.”
“What is it?”
“Anipang.”
Three hours later, Jaehyo says: “This game is fucking addicting.” In the next half hour, he says: “Hey, Kyung, I beat your high score.”
They receive a distress call to Jaehyo’s lightstick (“Sonic screwdriver,” he corrects, waving it around near Kyung’s face.) from some planet in the Andromeda galaxy.
Yukwon pilots them with ease, much to Jaehyo’s dismay, and lands them at the top of a hill. Or inactive volcano considering the geography of the planet. They file out of the TARDIS and survey the surrounding area; it’s desolate, a wasteland, and ash covers the dying grass beneath their feet.
“There are people down there.” Jaehyo waves at them, obviously uncaring as to whether they are the distressed people or the ones burning down what appear to be whole villages. “I can get their attention if I take off my pants.”
“Keep your fucking pants on,” Kyung says at the same time Yukwon says: “What, no, that’s a stupid idea.”
“Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.” Jaehyo waves some more, nearly catching Kyung in the eye with his fingers, before the group below notice him.
It turns out that the planet is at war. Kyung sits through boring political talk he doesn’t understand with Yukwon at his side. Jaehyo leaves them for a moment to attend a meeting with the elders, and the strange feeling bubbles up in Kyung’s middle once more.
“Where’re we going now?” Kyung asks as they make their way through centuries of sewage, following the path marked on the map given to them by the elders. “To find Spock?”
Yukwon hip-checks him, almost knocking him into the sludge below, but his smile lets Kyung know he caught the reference, that he still remembers life on Earth. “Captain Kirk?”
Jaehyo stops and turns to them, holding the map in his right hand and his sonic screwdriver as a light in his left. “No, and no.” He frowns at them. “We’re going to rescue one of their children from the enemy lines.”
It doesn’t take long to find the entrance into the city; Jaehyo works open the sealed lid and pushes it onto the ground, leading them into the enemy territory. The buildings are slanted, on the verge of falling, and everything is in ruins or flickering with still burning embers. Childrens’ toys litter the ground and some clothes hang outside, flapping in the wind; it’s as though the entire community uprooted and left everything behind all at once, in a hurry to leave-to survive.
“No one’s here,” Yukwon says, eyebrows knitting. “It looks like the work of the Pegasians, Doctor.”
The bad feeling in him wells up in his chest. “Is it a trap?”
They hear it, then; the faint sound of a small child crying nearby. Jaehyo darts off ahead of them both, long legs giving him an extra edge on arriving before them both, and Kyung tries his best to keep up even though his heart is about to pound out of his chest. He’s never been the fastest, the most athletic, but there’s a rush of adrenaline bursting through him; the child’s cries come closer.
And they find her, huddled in the corner of a collapsing building, a doll in her lap. Her knees are skinned and the palms of her hands are marked with a few minor scratches, but other than that she seems fine although a little shaken up. An adult lies on the ground, green staining the wood beneath the body, and Kyung kneels before the girl on instinct. He picks her up, pressing her wet face into his neck to keep her from seeing the sight any longer, and feels Jaehyo’s hand on his shoulder. It grounds him, quells his anger, calms his still racing heart.
Jaehyo quietly takes them back to the village camp, Yukwon in the rear with his fingers twitching over his gun’s handle, and Kyung rubs circles into the girl’s small back with his thumb to ease her cries into soft hiccups.
They reunite the girl with her father, and Kyung overhears Jaehyo instructing the people to stay in hiding. Kyung registers Yukwon’s fingers on his hip, but his mind is elsewhere as he watches the father rock the small girl in his arms.
These species resemble them, except their voices are lower, limbs longer, eyes smaller, ears pointier; with a quick glance alone, Kyung wouldn’t find anything particularly different about them from his own kind on Earth. It’s almost perverse-him watching them-but it reminds him of home and a part of him aches to return.
“Take me back,” Kyung says to Jaehyo as they leave, later.
The people of this planet are frightened even though the Pegasians seem to have moved on to another planet; it will take them many years to heal from this and to rebuild their lost cities. Jaehyo looks worn, the line of his shoulders and back rigid, and he’s been working for many hours healing the injured people. Yukwon stands by the controls, the eerie lights casting patterns across his skin, but he does not make a move to pilot them elsewhere.
Kyung says, again, louder this time: “Take me back.”
Kyung smells the seasalt of the breeze when they land first. He sees the darkness of the sky next.
“You’ll come back, right?”
Jaehyo stalls in the threshold, and he can see Yukwon’s form behind him. “Yes, if you’d like.”
“We still need to go on more adventures,” Kyung says. He looks out at his city, at his homeground. “But I need to be here right now.”
“If you need me, then I’ll come back.”
Kyung stands on the beach long after the TARDIS disappears from view, leaving him alone in a blanket of darkness.
When he steps into his home, his mother calls to him from the kitchen: “Kyung, where have you been? Wash up for dinner.”
He kicks off his shoes and catches sight of the calendar on his way to his room. It’s the exact same day he left with Jaehyo, but only hours have passed in Earth while he’s been away for what has felt like an eternity in space. He falls into his bed with all his clothes on, too tired to think about washing up or even eating, and stares out his bedroom window. He rolls over on his side and digs beneath his bed for an old binder, a gift from his first encounter with the doctor.
There’s a date not too far away, at the beginning of the new month, and Kyung bites his bottom lip and leaves the binder open on the page.
“Kyung, dinner!”
He sighs and scrubs a hand down his face. Jaehyo promised he’d be back.
The days on Earth pass by excruciatingly slow.
He attends classes, draws police boxes in the corners of his papers during lectures, and spaces out at lunch with his friends. He watches movies with his siblings on the couch, helps his mother in the kitchen with dinner, and makes an effort to talk to his father. He stares at the high score of Anipang, and he finds himself as addicted to it as he once was. It takes him a few days, but he beats Jaehyo’s score; he’ll challenge him to a rematch when they meet again.
He finds assimilating hard at first because in his mind he is still passing through the universe around them aimlessly. After the first week passes, routine dinners with his family and mall hangouts with friends come easier until the awaited day is merely the last thing he thinks about before falling asleep.
Soon the month ends, and the air around him feels different as he crosses off days on his calendar. The doctor may have forgotten once before, but this time Kyung believes he’s remembered. He’ll stand out in the rain again if need be; he’ll wait.
There’s a little over a day left till Jaehyo’s arrival, and Kyung takes the same path he did on that one fateful day before. The seabreeze and the scent of fruit and salt is heady; the birds are nowhere in sight, and the people at the beach have long drifted back to their homes. It’s a silent night.
Kyung hears footsteps behind him. “What took you so long?” he asks, joking, but he can’t mask the airy tone of his voice.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” he hears behind him in a distinctly feminine voice. It’s a voice he has heard before, but before he can place the sound he feels a grip at the base of his neck.
The world around him fades to black.
“Oh, so you’re awake now.”
Kyung moans, and he feels pin pricks of pain shoot up all over his body at the slightest movement. He can’t bring himself to open his eyes, but there’s no use trying to feign sleep at this point; his attackers already seem to know. The bones in his arms and legs feel broken, like they’ve splintered through his skin, and whenever he shifts a searing pain shoots up his spine.
“Come on you little shit,” the captor grumps. “Wake up. The leader wants to talk to you.”
The man jerks him up by his hair, and splinters of red dance across his line of eyesight as he struggles to gain footing. The captor pushes him along, shoving him through the door into a dimly lit room, and forces him down into the solitary chair in the center of the room. He makes quick work of tying Kyung’s arms and legs down, uncaring about the rope cutting and burning Kyung’s wrists, and holds his head forward.
He sees Ma’thuula on the wayside, her smile wicked, and then there is another man, taller than the others. “I’d like to speak with him alone,” he says, dismissing his guards who wordlessly follow his orders. “Alert me if the doctor shows,” he says to Ma’thuula and sends her away as well.
“Hello,” he says, an air of regality about him, as he steps light across the dirty ground. A hint of afternoon sunlight breaks through the wooden planks and creates a strip of gold between them. “Have you enjoyed your stay so far, hm?”
“Fuck you,” Kyung croaks.
The man tuts and touches the cool metal of his gun to Kyung’s cheek. “Such language and after all the care my men have provided you.” Kyung feels the barrel slide down his jaw and press against the hollow of his throat; the man is just toying with him. “You will tell me the doctor’s location, won’t you? You see, we have some unfinished business with him.”
Kyung swallows, but he does not speak. Instead, he glares up at the man looming over him; he will not be weak this time. No more running away.
“Not ready to talk?” The man pulls back and frowns. “I guess you need more time to think this over then.”
They leave him alone in the dark for the night, coming in only every so many hours to make sure he hasn’t somehow escaped. The binding is too tight and chafes his wrists when he tries to struggle with it, and once one of his captors caught him in the act; the pain in his cheek still tingles as though a tiny set of knuckles kept replaying the moment and knocked along his jawline.
The next time he sees the man, he learns more of why they’re after Jaehyo.
“He destroyed our home planet,” he says, and the way he talks about it sounds like they are exchanging pleasantries. “He deserves to pay.”
They also force him to drink the red liquid he remembers from the bar in Poosh, their black nails pinching the skin of his neck and cheek as they hold him steady; it’s disgusting, the taste, and a brief wave of panic fills his chest because it feels like he’s being held underwater, drowning.
Kyung’s head droops once they let go of him, and he coughs out what he can of the liquid. Their leader kneels on the floor before him, their eyes meeting, and the man looks decidedly happy, his smile twisted and cruel.
“I implore you,” he says, but nothing about him screams desperation; he’s hardly begging. “Where is the doctor’s location?”
Kyung coughs in response, and the man growls in frustration, his composure finally breaking as he calls for the guards to send him away again.
"Do you think you’re special? Do you think he'll come to save you?" the Pegasian man sneers. "The only thing your doctor is good for is running away."
Kyung's head lolls forward, feeling weighted, filled with lead. His vision blurs due to the effects of the drugs in his system, and-if he listens closely-he thinks he can hear it burning its way through his bloodstream, tearing him up from the inside-out.
He hopes, though, as much as he had all those years ago; Jaehyo will return.
“Your doctor is a monster.”
Kyung tastes blood on his lip when he licks them, and his right eye feels swollen. There’s a spittle of fire in him left, and he can make out the new morning sunshine trickling in through the holes in the ceiling and sides of the warehouse.
“No more of a monster than you are,” he says.
The leader paces before him, his steps measured and dignified, but Kyung can see that he is wearing down. “The problem with time, you see, is that there is never enough.” He stops in front of Kyung, leaving enough space for the light to draw a line between them, and looks him over. “Do you not agree?”
“Funny, I don’t think I’ve ever found that.” Kyung smiles despite the pain in his bottom lip and jaw; he aches everywhere, but he refuses to give up just yet. “Would you give it to me?”
“What?”
“The time.”
“In your pathetic earthtime I believe it to be around midday.” The man’s brows crease his forehead when they furrow, his face drawn, agitated by Kyung’s pointless question. “Why do you ask?”
Kyung smiles.
“Just wanted to know what time he’d kill you.”
His expression darkens, pupils becoming nothing more than slits, as he reaches for Kyung’s throat. “I can kill you now,” he says, “or I can wait and let you watch me kill your precious doctor. Which would be more enjoyable for me?”
Kyung squints, struggling to free himself, but he does not break eye contact with the man. The man squeezes more, his fingers pinching his skin and palm hard against the bones of his throat; Kyung’s vision blurs, head fogging, and he gasps for more air. He hears the doors slams open, the wind whipping the dust and dirt off the floor and around them, and his captor lets go of him. Kyung slumps in his chair, his binds keeping him in place, and tries to catch his breath.
He hears more than he sees.
There’s the cry of the leader, sharp and high-pitched, blood-curdling, and the crumpling of a body as it hits the ground. The bark of someone’s voice, ordering the other Pegasian people to stand down and drop their weapons. The sound of the sonic screwdriver loud near his ear. The whispers of Jaehyo assuring him that he is safe as he drifts in and out of consciousness.
“Sorry we’re late,” Jaehyo says later, screwdriver near Kyung’s skin. He brushes his fingertips over Kyung’s cheek and down his jaw; his frown deepens.
“No.” There’s a warmth to his skin where Jaehyo is using the screwdriver to heal him; his skin tingles, burns from the warmth but it’s a pleasant burn, and feels as though it is sewing itself back together again. Kyung touches his lip to the corner of his mouth, tastes the faintness of blood, and feels the tiny split; it’ll heal in another day or two. “You were right on time.”
Jaehyo works on the ties binding him next; Yukwon sprints over to help him after he has the Pegasians detained.
“Shit,” Yukwon says, whistling; their eyes meet, and Kyung smiles at Yukwon. Yukwon ruffles his hair in turn, hand light in his hair and affectionate. “They got you good, didn’t they?”
“Nothing I couldn’t handle.”
Jaehyo cuts the rope from Kyung’s wrists, and they fall limp at his side, chafed and numb. Jaehyo smooths his thumb over his pulsepoint, touch soft, and Kyung swallows thickly.
“So, you really did come back,” Kyung says, working the words out; the drugs are still in his system, but its effects have begun to wane. “Good thing you did, too, or else you would’ve missed the party. I could’ve kicked his weird alien ass.”
“I’m glad you can joke at a time like this.” Jaehyo rolls his eyes and knocks Kyung in the knee with his screwdriver. “Anyway, she doesn’t always take me where I want to go,” he says, “but she always gets me to where I need to go.”
Yukwon helps steady him when they pull him to his feet. His palm rests flat against Yukwon’s shoulder, and Yukwon reaches up to pull on his fingers; he knocks his forehead into Yukwon’s temple to show his thanks.
“Come on,” Yukwon says as Jaehyo supports Kyung on the other side. “We gotta get the hell outta here.”
Kyung, with Yukwon and Jaehyo, takes his first tentative steps outside. The sunlight is warm on his face.
“So there’s some sort of Intergalactic Space Patrol or some shit like that?”
Jaehyo smiles over the rim of his mug. “Yeah something like that.”
It’s snowing on this planet, and-although Kyung isn’t particularly fond of it himself-Jaehyo’s mood has brightened considerably, eyes crinkling at the ends and mouth widening into a smile that’s as white and beautiful as the snow collecting on the windowsill outside the diner. Kyung stares his murky chocolate reflection down.
“Good,” he says. “That’s cool.”
“The Pegasians will be held there until they can be relocated elsewhere.” Jaehyo runs his fingertip over the handle of his mug; his fingernail clinks against the ceramic. “They don’t really have anywhere else to go right now.”
“Since you blew up their planet?”
Jaehyo makes this strange sound-one Kyung has yet to hear during their travels together; it sounds much like a bird squawking. Jaehyo mumbles something beneath his breath, most likely a half-hearted insult, and the light glints off him in such a way that seems purely ethereal, a bit alien.
Kyung takes Jaehyo’s hand across the tabletop. “You’ll have to tell me the story behind that. How could one person destroy an entire planet?”
Jaehyo, mouth widening and nostrils flaring, says, “you’d be surprised by my many talents.”
“Ah,” Kyung says, reaching into his pocket and removing his cell phone. He slides it across the clear glass tabletop. “I beat your high score, by the way.”
Jaehyo glares at him, playful and challenging, from across the way, Kyung’s cell cradled in his left hand. “You’re going down.”
Kyung laughs into his hands. When he dodges Jaehyo’s swatting hands he sees the TARDIS in the distance, her blue frame covered in a light layer of snow.
“Here.”
“An orange?”
“Yukwon told me you liked them, so I saw it and thought of you.” Kyung retracts his hand. “But if you don’t want it, I’ll eat it instead.”
“No, no,” Jaehyo says, reaching for the proffered gift; he encloses his hand around it, his fingertips tickling Kyung’s palm. “I’ll take it, I’ll take it.”
“Anyway,” Kyung says as they trek through the snow to get back to the TARDIS. She’s buried in snowflakes. “Did you, like, trip and fall and hit a self-destruct button on that planet or something?”
Jaehyo shoves him, and he stumbles in the snow. “Go away; I have no time for you.”
Kyung catches up, darts through the snow and links his arm through Jaehyo’s. He smiles to himself.
“I still don’t know why you don’t remember me, you know,” Kyung says, to himself; Jaehyo peels the orange and shoves a slice into Kyung’s mouth. Around the orange slice, he manages: “I remembered you, but you said we hadn’t met.”
“Different time stream, maybe?” Jaehyo offers as an answer. He touches his sideburn and smooths it down. “I guess I went through a rip sometime in my last body and didn’t... retain that information.”
Kyung reaches over and steals another slice as they reach the TARDIS. “I guess it doesn’t matter. You know me now and you’re not getting rid of me anytime soon.”
“How unfortunate,” Jaehyo says, but he’s smiling as he says it. “I guess since I’m stuck with you: where to next?”
“Anywhere,” Kyung says. His hand falls from Jaehyo’s elbow and slips into his hand. “Everywhere.”
This is where this chapter in his life ends. This is where another begins.
For: inbrevity
Pairing: jaehyo + kyung
Rating: pg-13
Word Count: 7984
Summary: he stops being just park kyung and becomes park kyung, time traveler and companion, instead (loosely inspired by doctor who)
Notes/Warnings: a special shout out to space-mom for talking this through with me and keeping me sane (and also making me a bit more insane with this near ridiculous story); you’re a peach. to my recipient: i had so much fun going through your prompts and playing around with them, so i hope you’ll enjoy this as much as i enjoyed writing it for you! knowledge of doctor who is not necessary to read. brief moments of (intergalactic) violence.
“The problem with time, you see, is that there is never enough.”
A pause. “Funny, I don’t think I’ve ever found that.”
The trouble with time traveling, Kyung knows, is getting all the pieces to line up; nothing ever seems to happen in the right order. There are time loops and rips and alternate realities to account for. One must also consider the fixed time streams and the pesky convergent timelines that happen at random because someone fumbles a plan or saves the doctor from an imminent death.
It makes telling a story rather difficult, but Kyung thinks this one should start from the beginning.
There isn’t anything particularly interesting about the day it happens; it’s sunny, warm, clear and crisp blue skies as far as the eye can see. There’s a stillness in the air, though, one that is nearly palpable. It covers Kyung, slow and easy like the ocean waves breaking upon the shore, and it’s a still and quiet he recognizes; he does not fear it anymore. He stalls in his steps, lunch soon to be over, and plucks his earbuds from his ears.
Kyung listens, and even the birds have ceased their constant chatter in favor of waiting.
There, standing rigid on the sandy beach, is a lone police box. The waves curl around the bottom, the water calm as it laps around the frame, and everything stills for that one brief moment. Kyung squints against the sunlight haloing out the box’s edges, waiting to see what happens next.
A man stumbles out, with very little grace, and trips into the sea. From where Kyung stands he can make out the solitary figure, arms held out to catch himself before he faceplants into New Zealand’s coastline, and the way his shoulders hunch beneath his gray suit jacket. Kyung inches forward, eyes ahead and on the sputtering man, and stops short before the water breaks the sand.
“Hello?” Kyung calls out. His voice comes out weak, clogged in the back of his throat; he coughs and tries again.
The man straightens-the sleeves of his jacket up to his elbows and pants stained with seawater-and yelps. He staggers back when their eyes meet. Kyung takes him in: gray suit, long limbs with an awkward sort of grace, elegant hands, the red bowtie. He appears oddly misplaced in this century, Kyung decides, better suited with old film grain and the backdrop of pre-war times.
The man’s expression clears. He turns toward the booth he tumbled out of to say: “I think we overshot again.” He taps at the side, fingertips clicking against medal panelling, and asks, “Where have you taken me this time?”
The way he says the words, how ruffled he looks with his wrinkled suit and wayward tuft of brown curls, feels familiar; it almost feels like something from one of his dreams, long ago.
“This isn’t 16th century Russia, is it?” Kyung shakes his head, and the man’s mouth curves into a displeased frown. “Dammit.”
“Who are you?” Kyung asks as the tide licks at the toes of his shoes. “What are you?”
“I’m the doctor,” the man chirps, good-natured despite standing in the sea in a suit. “I have many names,” he pauses here, face pinching. “You may call me Theta Sigma.”
“No way in hell is that a name or anything I’d ever call you.”
He grins, teeth straight and white and as blinding as the afternoon sun. “Then you can call me Jaehyo.”
“Kyung,” he finds himself saying during the lull in conversation. Kyung stuffs his hands in his pockets, the cord of his headphones curled in his palm, and swallows. “Have we-I. I’ve met you before.”
Jaehyo turns back to his blue police box; the sun glints off the metal and into Kyung’s eyes. “Kyung, would you like to come on an adventure?”
Kyung shifts one foot, to step back, but he doesn’t move. Neither does Jaehyo, and the distance between them remains the same.
“I have a time machine. We could go wherever you’d like,” he offers. It’s pushy, but it’s also a deal he thinks he might have been waiting for for a long time now. Run away, don’t look back, leave it all behind. “The TARDIS,” he stops and here he touches the blue panels of the box-the TARDIS, “she’ll take us there.”
“Is this a ‘come with me if you want to live’ moment?”
He briefly thinks about his mother, the family that shuffled and uprooted to stay here for a while, his friends, the people he has to prove wrong, and everyone else he may have to leave behind. Then he reflects upon his childhood, the dream he’s waited for to come true; he knows his answer.
“Maybe.” When Kyung glimpses his smile next, it’s rather sad; sad in the way goodbyes often are and at the end of an era. It doesn’t peel his lips back-rather it thins them instead-and it’s much different than the one he flashed before. “Yes.”
Kyung looks back, once. “I guess I can’t say no now, right?” His shoulders slump of their own accord, a weight lifting from him and a sigh leaving his lips, relieved. Jaehyo stares, stockstill, and all that moves between them are waves. “Yeah, yeah, I’ll come with you.”
He stops being just Park Kyung and becomes Park Kyung, time traveler and companion, instead.
This isn’t quite right. Time is tricky, and sometimes first meetings aren’t actually the first but rather the second or perhaps even the third. That may have been the start of the adventure, but the first point of intersection came years earlier, in the midst of July.
Kyung knows this because the date has forever filed itself away in his mind. The true beginning goes something like this:
It was a late Friday night in July, and Kyung was going home from the quick-mart closest to his friend’s, Hyunsuk, apartment. The streets were still shining with fresh rain puddles, reflecting the stars and the moon in the sky in a monochrome gray, and the glow from streetlamps nearby provided minimal but enough light to guide him home. It was quiet-the eery kind that preceded moments in horror films just before the killer attacked-and Kyung clutched his backpack straps tighter between his fists, humming under his breath to fill the emptiness around him.
He watched as the headlamps of cars without passengers flickered on and off, in time with the streetlights, and walked faster. From one of the back alleys appeared smoke, hazy and curling around his feet in wispy trails, and-despite better judgement telling him to leave right then and forget this ever happened-he stepped closer, warily at first but gaining newfound confidence with every step. A blue box-emitting a strange glow and the reason for the smoke crawling like vines around his legs-stood in the middle of the alley, in plain sight for any around.
And out came a man, dressed in suits he’d only ever seen worn to special Sunday church services; his first few steps over the threshold were stumbled, his footing not quite in place yet, before he righted himself.
“This doesn’t look like New New York,” the man said, seemingly to the box from which he tumbled. He combed his fingers through his bangs before he dusted off his jacket’s sleeves. “Where have you taken me now?” And, then: “Oh.”
Kyung tangled his fingers in his backpack straps; he was young, far too young to know what to do, but the man did not frighten him. There was a sense of calm that washed over Kyung in that moment when their eyes met, his quickened heart rate slowing into a light sprint instead of the marathon it ran before. The man smiled, a dimple in his cheek, and his eyes were bright like the starlight. There was something distinctly inhuman about the man, something purely alien.
“Who?” Kyung managed at the time; the man shook his head, finger pressed to his lips, as he said: “I can’t answer that.”
Kyung has a list-a binder-of dates; this day was on the list.
“So you did come back,” he says, conversationally, as Jaehyo tinkers with the centerpiece inside the TARDIS. He’s not quite sure where to stand, what his place in all this is, and frankly he’s still rather confused by the infinite space trapped within a finite police box.
Jaehyo pauses. “What?”
“I saw you before. You looked-” he motions at his own face, makes a sweeping gesture at his own body, tries to explain himself in actions rather than words. He settles on saying: “You looked different,” instead.
The blue, blue light-almost a green tint to it, like the sea-gives a peculiar glow to Jaehyo. It sharpens his the arch of his brow bone, hollows his cheeks, casts shadows across the right side of his face.
“I. Yes.” He smooths out his suit, dry and nothing like what it had been earlier. The jacket follows the indent of his elbow, creased and folded there. “I’m still getting used to this body. So is she.”
“She?”
“The TARDIS.”
“Oh,” is all he says in turn. They go back to staring at what they were before: the haunting blue glow in the middle of it all. “We met before when you,” he opts for casual nonchalance, “looked different than this.”
“Did we?”
Jaehyo’s expression is the shining definition of befuddled, lips curled down and brow furrowed in concentration, as though he were trying to recall their exact meeting. Kyung nods, and if anything this seems to only make Jaehyo more confused.
“I’m sorry.” Kyung swallows, already hearing the words before Jaehyo says them. “I don’t remember you.”
Kyung admits to being a rather unreliable narrator.
There had been another time and day, after the first. This was the day he tried to forget because it was the day that never happened: the day the doctor returned for him with more promises of an adventure he could hardly begin to imagine.
There was a boy standing out in the rain without an umbrella, staring up at the sky and waiting for the man in the blue box to come back.
There was a boy. He stood in the rain without an umbrella. He waited for the man to return in his blue box. The man never returned. The boy kept waiting.
Two weeks later he left Seoul, but, still, he waited.
It does not take long for Kyung to learn that the TARDIS does not take to Jaehyo’s coordinates well. She always tends to put them in the midst of a crisis or revolting planet; or if not that she places them in the middle of nowhere in some new and different planet, but all these planets are new and different to Kyung.
“I don’t know why I keep you around,” Jaehyo says, once. He raps his knuckles against the blue, blue framework in an offbeat tune. He lifts his hand to shield his eyes or to salute the TARDIS. “My rage meter is up to here.”
Kyung stands offside, watches him, and fiddles with his mp3 player. Jaehyo doesn’t remember him; he’s certain they’ve never met before, but how can this be? The wrinkled slip of paper in his pocket tells him otherwise, dates fading into one another but still legible enough for Kyung to read them.
“Are there any other.” Kyung stops himself short, and Jaehyo stops scolding the TARDIS for landing them in some desert wasteland. Kyung motions toward all of Jaehyo. “Are there any others like you?”
“No,” Jaehyo answers, face drawn. He stares ahead, expression carefully void of anything, as the dust kicks up again and dances around them. “It’s just me. I’m the only one.”
In his time with Jaehyo, travelling through space, Kyung has come across more near-death experiences than he would ever have hoped.
“Do you make everyone you meet angry?”
Jaehyo grips his wrist and drags him further down the sewer systems; it all looks the same, and Kyung doesn’t think that even Jaehyo knows which way is correct anymore. “Less talking, more running.”
Once in the safety of the TARDIS, the Daleks far behind them, Jaehyo says: “I don’t make everyone mad.”
“Uh-huh.”
They drift through space for what feels like hours, days, weeks; the measure of time passing is different here than on Earth, and Kyung cannot make up from down, left from right. There is so much unknown out there, galaxies that the scientists and astronomers back home don’t even know about yet, and Kyung looks out at the moons of Jupiter in orbit in awe.
As a child he’d always liked space, had bought a telescope (that never saw much use what with him living in the city), and cycled through a few screensavers and wallpapers of nebulae on his laptop. Seeing it, though, here and up close feels a lot different; it’s somewhat overwhelming to be so close to things that always felt so out of reach before.
They fall into orbit with the rings of Saturn, and when Kyung looks out he can see the sun cresting the side.
“Where to next?”
Jaehyo looks up and over at him. “I’m trying to find someone,” he says, voice low and soft; it catches in the corners of the TARDIS and echoes back even as quiet as it is. “You should go look around.” He stares up at the ceiling, and Kyung takes in the long line of his neck, the bob of his adam’s apple, and the slope of his nose. “I think there’s a swimming pool in here, somewhere. Or at least, one of my old companions told me that.”
Something in him, in his demeanor, changes at those words. Kyung eyes him sidelong for a moment. Jaehyo’s back to tinkering at the controls, pressing in coordinates, and formulating half-thought out plans; Kyung hasn’t been around long (no more than a handful of days in different galaxies and planets) but he knows how Jaehyo works already. He never stops talking, regardless of whether Kyung is listening or not, and it can be about everything and anything and nothing at all; when he’s not talking, he’s singing songs he picked up from other companions and travelers and worlds Kyung cannot begin to wrap his mind around.
He doesn’t quite fit into Jaehyo’s life, not yet; just as out of place in his blue jeans and black tee, sneakers and cap.
“Don’t drive us into a fucking Dalek army this time, ok?” Kyung says.
Jaehyo looks at him over his shoulder, the makings of a smile on his lips, and the light from the centerpiece shines his eyes almost blue too. “Aye aye captain.”
“If this is the so-called ‘lost planet of Poosh’,” Kyung says, even using the air quotes though he doubts Jaehyo’s paying him any attention or if he even understands what that means, “why do you know the exact coordinates and location?”
“Details, details,” Jaehyo says, sidling closer; Kyung feels Jaehyo’s long fingers curl around his wrist, pulling him in step with him. It’s hard to match his sloping gait as every one of Jaehyo’s is the equivalent of three of Kyung’s own. “You’ll like it.”
“You said that about the last place, too,” Kyung says, voice dry and hopefully conveying his annoyance. “The people of Salem wanted to burn us at the fucking stake, you know.”
Jaehyo knocks him with his hip, more playful today after finally locking on to to Poosh after a few failed attempts, and darts across one of the hills. Poosh’s landscape is different than Earth’s; it is filled with people in the area Jaehyo leads him through. No two people look of the same species, some near human and others humanoids; some even resemble the aliens from the grainy sci-fi movies Kyung used to watch with Hyunsuk back in Korea.
“I’d like to stay here sometime,” Jaehyo confides. “This or Paris.”
Kyung steps lightly on the pathway, and bumps elbows with an Ood man. “Kinda busy.”
The bar that Jaehyo leads them into is packed from wall to wall; the music is fast, heavy, deafening and rattles in Kyung’s head. He feels Jaehyo’s grip tighten on his wrist as they pick through the many bodies (some solid, others seemingly gelatin). The floor resembles ice, transparent and clear, and the blurred reflections of the overhead lights vaguely resemble starlight.
“Stay here,” Jaehyo says, mouth pressed close to his ear. His breath is warm against his skin, lips moving over the whorl of his ear, and even with their proximity Kyung has to strain to hear him. “I’ll be right back.”
Jaehyo leaves him in a flash, standing at the bar, and he sighs before he climbs onto one of the many stools. The gruff-voiced bartender grunts at him when he twirls on his stool, entertaining himself until Jaehyo comes back into view. There are so many languages being spoken around him, some he’s heard and others he hasn’t yet, but somehow he understands the words he catches. Jaehyo explained to him the effects of the TARDIS, once, but he hasn’t really understood what he meant until now.
“Are you with the doctor?”
“Huh?”
He turns to see a woman at his side, her black hair pinned back and red dress clinging. She smiles at him, and even her lips are red. She looks almost human, just like any girl he could’ve met on Earth, but there’s a peculiar sheen to her skin; she almost appears a shimmery golden-bronze in the light.
“Ma’thuula,” she says, lips barely moving, tongue rolling through the syllables. Her voice is husky, soft on Kyung’s ears.
“Ah, yeah. I’m with Jaehyo,” he says.
Kyung doesn’t know where to look. Her dress slopes low, but her eyes are dark and haunting, as black as a night sky; he settles on looking down at his lap, where her black-painted fingernails stroke over the backs of his hands. Maybe this is how other species communicate, and he doesn’t want to be rude and cause a scene; the last thing he or Jaehyo needs on their hands is another mishap to run away from.
“Jaehyo? Ah, I see,” she says, mostly to herself. “I’m an old friend,” and the word curls on her tongue differently. “Have a drink with me?”
Ma’thuula motions at the bartender with her right hand and then tucks it beneath her chin. She smiles at him. “You’re so far from home,” she says as the bartender places an odd-shaped glass before him, her fingertips tracing the inseam of his jeans at his knee.
Yeah I guess,” Kyung mumbles.
He stares down at the deep, dark red liquid in his glass; the smell sours in his head when he inhales, an almost metallic smell. Like money on Earth, like blood. Kyung’s stomach heaves, but Ma’thuula continues to look at him as though nothing’s wrong, eyes expectant. Kyung lifts his hand to the glass and brings it closer.
Another hand settles atop his own, placing the the glass back onto the bar top. He feels his skin prickle, the hairs at his nape stand on in, and a familiar warmth at his back. Ma’thuula’s expression hardly changes; if anything, her lips part even more, eyelashes lowering to shade her eyes, as she smiles over Kyung’s head.
“We were expecting you, Doctor,” she says.
Jaehyo tenses behind him; the aura in the bar seems to change, grow colder. “Sorry to disappoint you, but we can’t stay.” Jaehyo jerks him off the barstool; he doesn’t wait for him to right his footing before he’s tugging him along, grip tight and unrelenting.
Ma’thuula has her head tilted when Kyung glances back over his shoulder; her smile has not wavered, and Kyung can’t help but feel like more eyes on her him and Jaehyo all throughout the bar.
When asked, later (much later), Jaehyo says: “She’s from Pegasi Sector IV. Her people... don’t really like me much.”
“Oh.” Kyung grins and pats Jaehyo’s shoulder. The material of his jacket gives slightly beneath Kyung’s fingertips. “Does anyone really like you?”
Jaehyo scoffs. “We need to find Yukwon.”
“Is that who you were looking for?”
Jaehyo nods mutely. Then: “He told me to meet him there.” Jaehyo places his hands on his hips. “He moves around a lot, though.”
“Where else do you think he could be?”
“Korea?”
Jaehyo nods as they step through the TARDIS and into the alleyway. Kyung feels a gripping familiarity here, a jumpstart in his heart, and a sense of foreboding; it looks similar to where he met the doctor the first time, but there’s something else about the area. It unsettles him, and he trips over a stray can of spray paint into the line of Jaehyo’s back.
“It’s quiet,” Jaehyo says. “Where is everyone?”
“I like it after being locked up with you for so long.” He’s joking, but the way Jaehyo’s face is drawn is dead serious. “What’s wrong?”
Jaehyo falls to the ground in the next second, and his own body feels weightless, floating as he gets knocked into the nearby brick wall by a sudden force. His vision clouds, and he can see only the reds of his eyelids for a moment. There’s some shouting and the rustle of clothes, but Kyung’s head pounds and refuses to clear up.
Then two quick rings of a gun being shot fill the air. A steady silence falls over them.
“Hey, you’re awake,” someone says, and Kyung scrunches his face, trying to locate the sound.
His throat and mouth feel dry, as though someone stuffed them with cotton. “Where am I?”
“Back on the TARDIS,” he hears Jaehyo murmur, voice distant.
Kyung sits up, the back of his head still feeling rather bruised, and takes in his surroundings. It is the TARDIS, a room he hasn’t seen before, but there is someone he doesn’t recognize peering at him along with Jaehyo. Yukwon, he assumes and is proved right when Jaehyo begins speaking to him while Kyung adjusts to the whiteness of the room.
“Are you okay?” Jaehyo asks later on, after Yukwon’s retired to his room. He seems to be walking on eggshells, and Kyung rolls over on his bed suddenly feeling rather annoyed with himself and Jaehyo.
“Yeah. I’m not a fucking kid, ok.” His body responses are still off, jarred and shaken, and his eyes hurt from the pounding in the back of his head. He’s sluggish, a bit worse for wear, but he’ll live. He’s more tired than he’s ever been on the TARDIS, and Yukwon said that he’d have to take it easy while she restabilized his conditions. “Just. Leave me alone.”
He squeezes his eyes shut and curls into a ball when he hears Jaehyo’s footfalls fade outside his door.
It doesn’t take too long for life in the TARDIS to return back to normal. Jaehyo bounces back into high spirits, leading them on another most likely disastrous adventure, and Kyung is done feeling sorry for himself and his weaknesses. He spends time with Yukwon on board while Jaehyo directs them toward their next location, and he learns that Yukwon’s an old companion from years prior.
“He’s not much different,” Yukwon says, shrugging. “Still just as weird as ever,” and he laughs at this, smile wide and infectious.
“Why’re you no longer travelling together?”
Yukwon polishes his gun and tucks it back into his holster; it’s unlike the weapons he’s seen on Earth, but Yukwon’s human, just like him. “We parted ways. I didn’t have much of a life back in Suwon, and the scenery of Poosh was enough to draw me in. I went back to Korea because of your message.”
“My message?”
Yukwon sighs. “It’s a lot to take in and really fucking hard for me to try to explain, and if I asked Jaehyo to do it we’d be here all day.” This is true; Jaehyo’s tendency to speak slow and in elaborately detailed sentences would do little good. “Let’s just say future you was concerned about the doctor’s death.”
“That... doesn’t make any sense.”
Yukwon laughs and his eyes scrunch up as he does so. “No, but you could’ve been a bit more cryptic with your message. ‘Save the doctor’ isn’t really subtle.”
“But you have to admit it was effective,” Kyung says, picking at a loose thread in his jeans, studiously ignoring Jaehyo standing not too far away. “And we saved him.”
“Yeah,” Yukwon says, “yeah, we did.”
On there way back through the Milky Way, they catch sight of what Yukwon calls a ‘star whale.’
“I’ve never actually seen one,” he admits, “but there’s only supposed to be one left.”
Kyung stares out at it. It doesn’t look much different than the whales he’s seen on the National Geographic channel. “It must be lonely,” he says.
Yukwon nods. His presence at Kyung’s side is welcome, easy, relaxed; he feels like someone he would’ve liked to have known and befriended back on Earth. The star whale passes by them, its sound rumbling throughout, and Kyung tries to imagine being the only human left alive; no one to talk to, no one to share similar stories with, no one at all.
He glances back toward Jaehyo who talks to the TARDIS like she’s his best friend; when he thinks about it, she probably is. They’ve been together for a long time, and there’s something both a bit beautiful and a bit sad about that fact.
Kyung looks back out in time for them to pass by Pluto.
“Yukwon.”
“Mm?”
“What does Jaehyo like? You traveled with him before.”
Yukwon crosses his arms over his chest and looks up at the ceiling. His chin wrinkles when he pulls his lips to the side, thoughtful. “I guess he likes oranges,” he says, first, “He ate them a lot when we traveled together. He likes to be challenged, likes his privacy as much as he enjoys being with other people, and he likes to brag about not being very good at anything, I guess.”
Kyung hums and Yukwon pauses.
“But I guess, what he likes most,” and it’s hard to tell if Yukwon’s even talking to him anymore or if he’s just thinking aloud now, “is not being left alone.”
Yukwon takes over driving duties not too long after Jaehyo guides them into an asteroid storm.
“You’re driving with the brakes on, anyway,” he says good-naturedly.
Jaehyo huffs and leans against the wall beside Kyung. “He’s always like this.”
Kyung looks up from his cell phone game. He’s surprised the battery hasn’t died yet after so long away, but there are no messages on his phone or any calls to make. Figures that even in space, surrounded by satellites everywhere, he’d still have shitty service. He notes the way Jaehyo peers over his shoulder, watching him intently.
“Here,” Kyung says and pushes the cell into Jaehyo’s hands. “It’s fun.”
“What is it?”
“Anipang.”
Three hours later, Jaehyo says: “This game is fucking addicting.” In the next half hour, he says: “Hey, Kyung, I beat your high score.”
They receive a distress call to Jaehyo’s lightstick (“Sonic screwdriver,” he corrects, waving it around near Kyung’s face.) from some planet in the Andromeda galaxy.
Yukwon pilots them with ease, much to Jaehyo’s dismay, and lands them at the top of a hill. Or inactive volcano considering the geography of the planet. They file out of the TARDIS and survey the surrounding area; it’s desolate, a wasteland, and ash covers the dying grass beneath their feet.
“There are people down there.” Jaehyo waves at them, obviously uncaring as to whether they are the distressed people or the ones burning down what appear to be whole villages. “I can get their attention if I take off my pants.”
“Keep your fucking pants on,” Kyung says at the same time Yukwon says: “What, no, that’s a stupid idea.”
“Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.” Jaehyo waves some more, nearly catching Kyung in the eye with his fingers, before the group below notice him.
It turns out that the planet is at war. Kyung sits through boring political talk he doesn’t understand with Yukwon at his side. Jaehyo leaves them for a moment to attend a meeting with the elders, and the strange feeling bubbles up in Kyung’s middle once more.
“Where’re we going now?” Kyung asks as they make their way through centuries of sewage, following the path marked on the map given to them by the elders. “To find Spock?”
Yukwon hip-checks him, almost knocking him into the sludge below, but his smile lets Kyung know he caught the reference, that he still remembers life on Earth. “Captain Kirk?”
Jaehyo stops and turns to them, holding the map in his right hand and his sonic screwdriver as a light in his left. “No, and no.” He frowns at them. “We’re going to rescue one of their children from the enemy lines.”
It doesn’t take long to find the entrance into the city; Jaehyo works open the sealed lid and pushes it onto the ground, leading them into the enemy territory. The buildings are slanted, on the verge of falling, and everything is in ruins or flickering with still burning embers. Childrens’ toys litter the ground and some clothes hang outside, flapping in the wind; it’s as though the entire community uprooted and left everything behind all at once, in a hurry to leave-to survive.
“No one’s here,” Yukwon says, eyebrows knitting. “It looks like the work of the Pegasians, Doctor.”
The bad feeling in him wells up in his chest. “Is it a trap?”
They hear it, then; the faint sound of a small child crying nearby. Jaehyo darts off ahead of them both, long legs giving him an extra edge on arriving before them both, and Kyung tries his best to keep up even though his heart is about to pound out of his chest. He’s never been the fastest, the most athletic, but there’s a rush of adrenaline bursting through him; the child’s cries come closer.
And they find her, huddled in the corner of a collapsing building, a doll in her lap. Her knees are skinned and the palms of her hands are marked with a few minor scratches, but other than that she seems fine although a little shaken up. An adult lies on the ground, green staining the wood beneath the body, and Kyung kneels before the girl on instinct. He picks her up, pressing her wet face into his neck to keep her from seeing the sight any longer, and feels Jaehyo’s hand on his shoulder. It grounds him, quells his anger, calms his still racing heart.
Jaehyo quietly takes them back to the village camp, Yukwon in the rear with his fingers twitching over his gun’s handle, and Kyung rubs circles into the girl’s small back with his thumb to ease her cries into soft hiccups.
They reunite the girl with her father, and Kyung overhears Jaehyo instructing the people to stay in hiding. Kyung registers Yukwon’s fingers on his hip, but his mind is elsewhere as he watches the father rock the small girl in his arms.
These species resemble them, except their voices are lower, limbs longer, eyes smaller, ears pointier; with a quick glance alone, Kyung wouldn’t find anything particularly different about them from his own kind on Earth. It’s almost perverse-him watching them-but it reminds him of home and a part of him aches to return.
“Take me back,” Kyung says to Jaehyo as they leave, later.
The people of this planet are frightened even though the Pegasians seem to have moved on to another planet; it will take them many years to heal from this and to rebuild their lost cities. Jaehyo looks worn, the line of his shoulders and back rigid, and he’s been working for many hours healing the injured people. Yukwon stands by the controls, the eerie lights casting patterns across his skin, but he does not make a move to pilot them elsewhere.
Kyung says, again, louder this time: “Take me back.”
Kyung smells the seasalt of the breeze when they land first. He sees the darkness of the sky next.
“You’ll come back, right?”
Jaehyo stalls in the threshold, and he can see Yukwon’s form behind him. “Yes, if you’d like.”
“We still need to go on more adventures,” Kyung says. He looks out at his city, at his homeground. “But I need to be here right now.”
“If you need me, then I’ll come back.”
Kyung stands on the beach long after the TARDIS disappears from view, leaving him alone in a blanket of darkness.
When he steps into his home, his mother calls to him from the kitchen: “Kyung, where have you been? Wash up for dinner.”
He kicks off his shoes and catches sight of the calendar on his way to his room. It’s the exact same day he left with Jaehyo, but only hours have passed in Earth while he’s been away for what has felt like an eternity in space. He falls into his bed with all his clothes on, too tired to think about washing up or even eating, and stares out his bedroom window. He rolls over on his side and digs beneath his bed for an old binder, a gift from his first encounter with the doctor.
There’s a date not too far away, at the beginning of the new month, and Kyung bites his bottom lip and leaves the binder open on the page.
“Kyung, dinner!”
He sighs and scrubs a hand down his face. Jaehyo promised he’d be back.
The days on Earth pass by excruciatingly slow.
He attends classes, draws police boxes in the corners of his papers during lectures, and spaces out at lunch with his friends. He watches movies with his siblings on the couch, helps his mother in the kitchen with dinner, and makes an effort to talk to his father. He stares at the high score of Anipang, and he finds himself as addicted to it as he once was. It takes him a few days, but he beats Jaehyo’s score; he’ll challenge him to a rematch when they meet again.
He finds assimilating hard at first because in his mind he is still passing through the universe around them aimlessly. After the first week passes, routine dinners with his family and mall hangouts with friends come easier until the awaited day is merely the last thing he thinks about before falling asleep.
Soon the month ends, and the air around him feels different as he crosses off days on his calendar. The doctor may have forgotten once before, but this time Kyung believes he’s remembered. He’ll stand out in the rain again if need be; he’ll wait.
There’s a little over a day left till Jaehyo’s arrival, and Kyung takes the same path he did on that one fateful day before. The seabreeze and the scent of fruit and salt is heady; the birds are nowhere in sight, and the people at the beach have long drifted back to their homes. It’s a silent night.
Kyung hears footsteps behind him. “What took you so long?” he asks, joking, but he can’t mask the airy tone of his voice.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” he hears behind him in a distinctly feminine voice. It’s a voice he has heard before, but before he can place the sound he feels a grip at the base of his neck.
The world around him fades to black.
“Oh, so you’re awake now.”
Kyung moans, and he feels pin pricks of pain shoot up all over his body at the slightest movement. He can’t bring himself to open his eyes, but there’s no use trying to feign sleep at this point; his attackers already seem to know. The bones in his arms and legs feel broken, like they’ve splintered through his skin, and whenever he shifts a searing pain shoots up his spine.
“Come on you little shit,” the captor grumps. “Wake up. The leader wants to talk to you.”
The man jerks him up by his hair, and splinters of red dance across his line of eyesight as he struggles to gain footing. The captor pushes him along, shoving him through the door into a dimly lit room, and forces him down into the solitary chair in the center of the room. He makes quick work of tying Kyung’s arms and legs down, uncaring about the rope cutting and burning Kyung’s wrists, and holds his head forward.
He sees Ma’thuula on the wayside, her smile wicked, and then there is another man, taller than the others. “I’d like to speak with him alone,” he says, dismissing his guards who wordlessly follow his orders. “Alert me if the doctor shows,” he says to Ma’thuula and sends her away as well.
“Hello,” he says, an air of regality about him, as he steps light across the dirty ground. A hint of afternoon sunlight breaks through the wooden planks and creates a strip of gold between them. “Have you enjoyed your stay so far, hm?”
“Fuck you,” Kyung croaks.
The man tuts and touches the cool metal of his gun to Kyung’s cheek. “Such language and after all the care my men have provided you.” Kyung feels the barrel slide down his jaw and press against the hollow of his throat; the man is just toying with him. “You will tell me the doctor’s location, won’t you? You see, we have some unfinished business with him.”
Kyung swallows, but he does not speak. Instead, he glares up at the man looming over him; he will not be weak this time. No more running away.
“Not ready to talk?” The man pulls back and frowns. “I guess you need more time to think this over then.”
They leave him alone in the dark for the night, coming in only every so many hours to make sure he hasn’t somehow escaped. The binding is too tight and chafes his wrists when he tries to struggle with it, and once one of his captors caught him in the act; the pain in his cheek still tingles as though a tiny set of knuckles kept replaying the moment and knocked along his jawline.
The next time he sees the man, he learns more of why they’re after Jaehyo.
“He destroyed our home planet,” he says, and the way he talks about it sounds like they are exchanging pleasantries. “He deserves to pay.”
They also force him to drink the red liquid he remembers from the bar in Poosh, their black nails pinching the skin of his neck and cheek as they hold him steady; it’s disgusting, the taste, and a brief wave of panic fills his chest because it feels like he’s being held underwater, drowning.
Kyung’s head droops once they let go of him, and he coughs out what he can of the liquid. Their leader kneels on the floor before him, their eyes meeting, and the man looks decidedly happy, his smile twisted and cruel.
“I implore you,” he says, but nothing about him screams desperation; he’s hardly begging. “Where is the doctor’s location?”
Kyung coughs in response, and the man growls in frustration, his composure finally breaking as he calls for the guards to send him away again.
"Do you think you’re special? Do you think he'll come to save you?" the Pegasian man sneers. "The only thing your doctor is good for is running away."
Kyung's head lolls forward, feeling weighted, filled with lead. His vision blurs due to the effects of the drugs in his system, and-if he listens closely-he thinks he can hear it burning its way through his bloodstream, tearing him up from the inside-out.
He hopes, though, as much as he had all those years ago; Jaehyo will return.
“Your doctor is a monster.”
Kyung tastes blood on his lip when he licks them, and his right eye feels swollen. There’s a spittle of fire in him left, and he can make out the new morning sunshine trickling in through the holes in the ceiling and sides of the warehouse.
“No more of a monster than you are,” he says.
The leader paces before him, his steps measured and dignified, but Kyung can see that he is wearing down. “The problem with time, you see, is that there is never enough.” He stops in front of Kyung, leaving enough space for the light to draw a line between them, and looks him over. “Do you not agree?”
“Funny, I don’t think I’ve ever found that.” Kyung smiles despite the pain in his bottom lip and jaw; he aches everywhere, but he refuses to give up just yet. “Would you give it to me?”
“What?”
“The time.”
“In your pathetic earthtime I believe it to be around midday.” The man’s brows crease his forehead when they furrow, his face drawn, agitated by Kyung’s pointless question. “Why do you ask?”
Kyung smiles.
“Just wanted to know what time he’d kill you.”
His expression darkens, pupils becoming nothing more than slits, as he reaches for Kyung’s throat. “I can kill you now,” he says, “or I can wait and let you watch me kill your precious doctor. Which would be more enjoyable for me?”
Kyung squints, struggling to free himself, but he does not break eye contact with the man. The man squeezes more, his fingers pinching his skin and palm hard against the bones of his throat; Kyung’s vision blurs, head fogging, and he gasps for more air. He hears the doors slams open, the wind whipping the dust and dirt off the floor and around them, and his captor lets go of him. Kyung slumps in his chair, his binds keeping him in place, and tries to catch his breath.
He hears more than he sees.
There’s the cry of the leader, sharp and high-pitched, blood-curdling, and the crumpling of a body as it hits the ground. The bark of someone’s voice, ordering the other Pegasian people to stand down and drop their weapons. The sound of the sonic screwdriver loud near his ear. The whispers of Jaehyo assuring him that he is safe as he drifts in and out of consciousness.
“Sorry we’re late,” Jaehyo says later, screwdriver near Kyung’s skin. He brushes his fingertips over Kyung’s cheek and down his jaw; his frown deepens.
“No.” There’s a warmth to his skin where Jaehyo is using the screwdriver to heal him; his skin tingles, burns from the warmth but it’s a pleasant burn, and feels as though it is sewing itself back together again. Kyung touches his lip to the corner of his mouth, tastes the faintness of blood, and feels the tiny split; it’ll heal in another day or two. “You were right on time.”
Jaehyo works on the ties binding him next; Yukwon sprints over to help him after he has the Pegasians detained.
“Shit,” Yukwon says, whistling; their eyes meet, and Kyung smiles at Yukwon. Yukwon ruffles his hair in turn, hand light in his hair and affectionate. “They got you good, didn’t they?”
“Nothing I couldn’t handle.”
Jaehyo cuts the rope from Kyung’s wrists, and they fall limp at his side, chafed and numb. Jaehyo smooths his thumb over his pulsepoint, touch soft, and Kyung swallows thickly.
“So, you really did come back,” Kyung says, working the words out; the drugs are still in his system, but its effects have begun to wane. “Good thing you did, too, or else you would’ve missed the party. I could’ve kicked his weird alien ass.”
“I’m glad you can joke at a time like this.” Jaehyo rolls his eyes and knocks Kyung in the knee with his screwdriver. “Anyway, she doesn’t always take me where I want to go,” he says, “but she always gets me to where I need to go.”
Yukwon helps steady him when they pull him to his feet. His palm rests flat against Yukwon’s shoulder, and Yukwon reaches up to pull on his fingers; he knocks his forehead into Yukwon’s temple to show his thanks.
“Come on,” Yukwon says as Jaehyo supports Kyung on the other side. “We gotta get the hell outta here.”
Kyung, with Yukwon and Jaehyo, takes his first tentative steps outside. The sunlight is warm on his face.
“So there’s some sort of Intergalactic Space Patrol or some shit like that?”
Jaehyo smiles over the rim of his mug. “Yeah something like that.”
It’s snowing on this planet, and-although Kyung isn’t particularly fond of it himself-Jaehyo’s mood has brightened considerably, eyes crinkling at the ends and mouth widening into a smile that’s as white and beautiful as the snow collecting on the windowsill outside the diner. Kyung stares his murky chocolate reflection down.
“Good,” he says. “That’s cool.”
“The Pegasians will be held there until they can be relocated elsewhere.” Jaehyo runs his fingertip over the handle of his mug; his fingernail clinks against the ceramic. “They don’t really have anywhere else to go right now.”
“Since you blew up their planet?”
Jaehyo makes this strange sound-one Kyung has yet to hear during their travels together; it sounds much like a bird squawking. Jaehyo mumbles something beneath his breath, most likely a half-hearted insult, and the light glints off him in such a way that seems purely ethereal, a bit alien.
Kyung takes Jaehyo’s hand across the tabletop. “You’ll have to tell me the story behind that. How could one person destroy an entire planet?”
Jaehyo, mouth widening and nostrils flaring, says, “you’d be surprised by my many talents.”
“Ah,” Kyung says, reaching into his pocket and removing his cell phone. He slides it across the clear glass tabletop. “I beat your high score, by the way.”
Jaehyo glares at him, playful and challenging, from across the way, Kyung’s cell cradled in his left hand. “You’re going down.”
Kyung laughs into his hands. When he dodges Jaehyo’s swatting hands he sees the TARDIS in the distance, her blue frame covered in a light layer of snow.
“Here.”
“An orange?”
“Yukwon told me you liked them, so I saw it and thought of you.” Kyung retracts his hand. “But if you don’t want it, I’ll eat it instead.”
“No, no,” Jaehyo says, reaching for the proffered gift; he encloses his hand around it, his fingertips tickling Kyung’s palm. “I’ll take it, I’ll take it.”
“Anyway,” Kyung says as they trek through the snow to get back to the TARDIS. She’s buried in snowflakes. “Did you, like, trip and fall and hit a self-destruct button on that planet or something?”
Jaehyo shoves him, and he stumbles in the snow. “Go away; I have no time for you.”
Kyung catches up, darts through the snow and links his arm through Jaehyo’s. He smiles to himself.
“I still don’t know why you don’t remember me, you know,” Kyung says, to himself; Jaehyo peels the orange and shoves a slice into Kyung’s mouth. Around the orange slice, he manages: “I remembered you, but you said we hadn’t met.”
“Different time stream, maybe?” Jaehyo offers as an answer. He touches his sideburn and smooths it down. “I guess I went through a rip sometime in my last body and didn’t... retain that information.”
Kyung reaches over and steals another slice as they reach the TARDIS. “I guess it doesn’t matter. You know me now and you’re not getting rid of me anytime soon.”
“How unfortunate,” Jaehyo says, but he’s smiling as he says it. “I guess since I’m stuck with you: where to next?”
“Anywhere,” Kyung says. His hand falls from Jaehyo’s elbow and slips into his hand. “Everywhere.”
This is where this chapter in his life ends. This is where another begins.