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HE STANDS ON the bridge, looking at the spot where she once stood.

Her absence leaves an empty ache in his chest, and he suppresses a shudder as the wind picks up. He glances around, surprised to find several people down by the river. A couple or two strolls down the bend, while a mother with two children sit under a large oak tree. He reaches into his pocket for the list of time-jumps that Hoseok had written for him.

Minus five.

He's back five years in the past, then. The thought of that makes his stomach churn. According to his brother, he and his colleague had submitted a thesis five years ago and spent the next four years making their thesis a reality.

By all logic, then, this is the year where it all went wrong.

Letting out a heavy breath, he squares his shoulders and slowly heads towards the house. His gaze darts around as he walks, missing nothing. Here, where the zombies had gathered in another jump, are a group of teenagers chatting over cups of coffee. There, where an angry crowd had mobbed him before, are cars trundling down the road. The store where he'd first discovered the existence of zombies is a bustling café, filled with customers and the aromatic scent of coffee beans.

His feet come to a halt.

This is a town with smiles and laughter and happiness. It's a town where couples fall in love and families are created and children grow up in. Where a child, with no one to play with, gets stuck climbing a tree. Where a girl, too absorbed in her book, crosses a road without looking. Where a teenager, still a misfit, finds herself cornered in an alley by her bullies. Where a woman, lonely for love, almost gets taken advantage of by a bastard.

It's still her home, though.

For better or for worse, this is the place she's grown up in. For every bad day, she must've had plenty of good ones. For every time she cried, she must've found something to laugh about. For every person who mistreated her, she must've found many others who loved her, for who she was, or she wouldn't have continued to remain here.

It's her home.

And I've destroyed it.

He drags in a painful breath and closes his eyes. Within months, weeks, or even days—this will all be gone. All the people, the town, the laughter.

What have I done? he wants to scream at himself, but on the heels of that comes another thought—I don't even remember.

"Taehyung!"

He opens his eyes at the unfamiliar voice. Across the street, a man rushes towards him. Cars screech to a halt at his mad dash onto the road, but he seems utterly unaware of them. As he draws near, Taehyung falls a step back. The grief-stricken expression on the man's face—so similar to his own—makes him brace himself for what is to come.

"Who're—"

"He did this! It was him! I swear, I didn't mean to. I didn't know that he would—"

Taehyung blinks. "What're you—"

"—take advantage of all the years of hard work that we put in!" the man cries, distraught, before twisting around to begin a frenetic pacing around him. "When I returned to our lab, the place was trashed, and I couldn't find our files. None of them! Not even the hard drives we saved over the years when we were working on the Strand—"

It's him.

Taehyung stares at the frantic man still pacing. This is the man Seokjin had been talking about—his colleague, the one who'd created Strand F alongside him. He shakes his head in disbelief and reaches out to clamp a hand down on the man's shoulder, forcing the latter to finally come to a halt.

"Who're you talking about?" he asks slowly.

His colleague whirls around in frustration. "Marlow, that's who!"

Taehyung stills. "What?"

"Marlow stole our research, destroyed our lab and used our Strand for his own experiment. But it must've backfired, because now he's dead and so is everyone at our university!"

4.6 | Dark Ages ✓Where stories live. Discover now