Chapter Text
i.
When Yoo Joonghyuk awakes at the start of his third regression, something is different.
It’s a feeling which he fails to pinpoint until the end of the first scenario. Standing alone in the train cabin, surrounded by burning bodies and the acrid odour of sizzling flesh, something tugs and tightens around his fourth finger.
The sensation is light, nothing compared to the adrenaline already pulsing in him, but the unfamiliarity still lures his mind away from its constant stream of calculations and plotting for the days ahead—and the shock of what greets him there pulls him back to the present entirely.
A thin, red thread loops tightly around the fourth finger on his left hand.
It’s a fragile thing, its shade light in its newness, not yet the strong colour of a reciprocated match, but not faded and frayed like an old or withering love.
Or, so he has been told. For Yoo Joonghyuk, this is the first time seeing it for himself.
Something is not right. Never once—not in any of his regressions, nor at any point in the life he led before—had a soulmate bond manifested for him. He had thought he’d always be one of the numerous ‘fate-less’ out there, eluded by this one mystery of the world, yet free to follow his own heart wherever it may lead. But now…
He feels his vision start to waver the longer he looks. It takes him a moment to realise that his eyes are just fine—it’s his hand that’s shaking.
How…? Did I always…?
A wave of abrupt fear overtakes him. He feels nauseous as he clenches his hand and struggles for a breath in the smoke-filled confines of the cabin. His whole body shivers, as if he’s gone cold inside, despite how his skin is warmed by the flames of destruction that blaze around him. He tries to numb his mind again, but the thought returns, relentless.
Had he always had a soulmate?
Had the fated day on the subway, the start of this tragedy, originally been the day his bond had been revealed? Had he never noticed before, because the drama of the scenario had taken up all his attention before he could even see—
—did his soulmate always die in this scenario, before Joonghyuk could even know they existed?
He had found the most efficient way to complete the scenario this time. He had been merciless but had gained not only the valuable additional coins for his actions. He had also been granted more time. A few spare minutes, which were all he needed to learn of this… Minutes intended for efficiency that he would now spend waiting for the person at the end of his thread to take their last breath.
And there was nothing he could do to stop it.
In that moment, all the pain and the hopelessness of his past regressions return to him tenfold. The unexpected regret of his choices turns the cackling of flames into white noise in his ears, and he feels more alone in that cabin than he has ever felt these last lifetimes.
He wishes he hadn’t ever known.
“I’m sorry…” Joonghyuk whispers mutely into the sweltering air, to the tight thread on his finger, to the person on the other side, just one of the many he couldn’t save.
He wonders where they are, just then. Somewhere on the other side of Seoul? Or somewhere else in this world entirely. Likely terrified and in danger. Have they even noticed him yet? Will they even wonder who… or where he was? From what he knows, learned through school or the media or from those who could speak from their own experiences, the thread never shows anything but the vague direction of the soul on the other side, dipping in between time and space and disappearing before the naked eye. Only soulmates who are within a short distance of one another can see their entire bond. Otherwise, there is no use in looking.
In a weak moment of his conflicted grief, he looks. Joonghyuk lets his gaze follow the thread, expecting to see where it fades into nothingness and to wherever his soulmate might be living out their last moments…
…but that is not what he sees.
Instead, the thread he sees is very intact. It runs from the knot in his finger and straight ahead—right through the thin gap in the doors separating cabin 3707 from its neighbour.
…no.
The commotion echoing from cabin 3807 is loud. The scenario is still in place. Lee Hyunsung and Kim Namwoon still have not killed the remaining passengers in their cabin.
He feels cold. Then, a surge of anger erupts through his turmoil as he comes to a realisation.
All this time, every single round, he had been one door away from his string of fate. He just had never learned… because they’d been killed before he had gotten to them.
A roar of madness tears out of his chest, from his throat, fuelling his every limb as he charges for the door and bears down on it with all his strength. The dokkaebi’s shielded wall shakes against his force.
He has to make it in time.
-
By the time the dokkaebi shield lets up, the first scenario has ended in cabin 3807.
And yet, the thread around Joonghyuk’s finger remains where it is. However, his relief at this unexpected turn of events is soured by his frustration and growing annoyance. When he finally breaks through the doors, metal bending and plexiglass shattering in the face of his onslaught, the thread stretches even further away, escaping though the next and out of the train altogether.
No one is waiting for him on the other side.
He grits his teeth so hard his jaw aches.
His hunt continues, leads him out onto the bridge and into the familiar sub scenario for Oksu station. The thread somehow feels alive, tighter than it had been before, like it is beckoning him to follow it…
So he does. Follows it through the rubble and screeching of the world as they know it ending around him, through the mass of the undead crowding the bridge that easily fall to his merciless strikes, and finally… there.
The body of his would-be teammate, Kim Namwoon, lies sprawled and bled out at the feet of a man in a slightly ill-fitting suit, wielding a knife that had been Namwoon’s as well. The shock of this information is enough to offset him for a moment, long enough for him to bark out a menacing, “Who the hell are you?”
But as he raises his hand to grab hold of Kim Namwoon’s killer, well.
The answer to his question becomes obvious.
The red thread that begins at Joonghyuk’s finger ends at the hand cautiously holding up the knife in a poor act of self-defence.
This man is his soulmate.
And somehow, despite all the times he must have died before, he is still alive.