Genre : Rom-com,fluff,Sci-Fi
Word Count : 8093
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Seungcheol was a mystery to most people.
To his teachers, he was the frustrating type of student who showed flashes of brilliance in one sentence and doodled engine schematics on test papers the next. To his mom, he was a walking headache with uncombed hair, grease-stained fingers, and a stubborn refusal to study for anything remotely related to school.
But in truth, Seungcheol wasn’t lazy. He just had different priorities.
He wasn’t interested in memorizing historical dates or solving for x when he could be solving how to stabilize negative mass. His bedroom was less of a “room” and more of a private lab — soldering irons on the desk, wires tangled like vines across the floor, LED panels blinking in patterns only he could understand. The air always smelled faintly of burnt plastic and fresh solder.
And right in the middle of the chaos sat his greatest creation.
A time machine.
Not a flashy DeLorean or anything out of a sci-fi movie. No — his looked more like a hacked-together fusion between a gaming chair, a medical scanner, and a microwave. But it worked. He called it the T.A.P. — Temporal Access Prototype — and it had taken him two years, eight mini meltdowns, and the illegal repurposing of a particle isolator from a decommissioned physics lab to complete.
The Temporal Access Prototype sat hidden beneath a false floorboard in his room, its shell dusty from disuse. After all, it wasn’t a toy. It was meant for emergencies.
Like the time he accidentally erased his Science Fair presentation the night before it was due. Or the time he forgot to do his homework for three straight days and needed to intercept his teacher before she entered the classroom. And yes — the one time he jumped forward just far enough to watch him open birthday gifts, so he could come back and get the perfect one.
The science behind it was solid. He'd built the temporal displacement field using magnetic flux compression, borrowing from theories in quantum gravity and closed timelike curves. The system was powered by a miniature tokamak reactor — yes, a contained nuclear fusion core, built with no official oversight and held together with recycled parts and desperation.
It wasn’t meant to travel centuries or anything. It could only jump a couple of days forward or backward — enough to fix a failed test, reverse a spilled experiment, or... more recently… figure out what someone might want for their birthday.
Because of him.
The boy who sat near the windows in homeroom. The one who always had a thermos of tea instead of coffee. The one who looked out the window during rainstorms with a kind of dreamy silence that made Seungcheol forget the laws of thermodynamics. The one who always smiled — gently, like it was carved from starlight — and whose laugh sounded like music from a place far kinder than this world.
Seungcheol didn’t believe in fate. He believed in physics.
But that boy? That boy made him believe in emergency time travel.
After all, how was he supposed to know his crush liked old jazz records and hand-decorated photo albums? It wasn’t like he ever talked about it. He was always soft-spoken, careful with his words, like he didn’t want to disturb the air around him. He had this gentle grace that made Seungcheol — all clumsy energy and impulsive grins — feel like a bull in a glass shop.
