exomeme | part seventy six

part seventy six

EXO COMEBACK EUREUREONG

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continuation from that hp au with lay + mirror of erised, resurrection stone, and time-turner

first two "parts": http://exomeme.dreamwidth.org/22515.html?thread=94563059#cmt94563059 and http://exomeme.dreamwidth.org/22515.html?thread=94679795#cmt94679795

hahaha lay's life ;;

Tao's death is the final straw.

But it's the first death that Yixing remembers fully.

That's something that he comes back to, later. It starts his unravelling.

One day in the future it will be Yixing's 17th birthday. He will have spent the preceding day in an empty classroom, reading over a notebook, studying a photograph, and counting the seconds as a charmed hourglass on a pendant spins148920 times. At its146920th spin, Yixing will stand in front of an antique, cobwebbed mirror and not see his own reflection inside it. Instead he will see a row of five whole, happy teenagers, arms linked around each other like they'd just burst out of school to enjoy their summer holiday. There will be a very tall boy with bleached blond hair and dark eyebrows, laughing gently at a comment by another tall boy wearing an undone, yellow-striped tie. Beside him will be a shorter boy with a face of a doll, and he will be grinning, open-mouthed, up at his friend with the strong shoulders and the thin, shy smile. At the end of the line will be the last one, tidy-looking, with black hair and kind eyes, and he will wave eagerly at Yixing, like he's happy to see him.

The boy in the centre with the delicate face will say something, lips moving silently, as he presses his left hand up to the surface of the glass.

At 147920, Yixing will match that handprint with his own, palm over palm, finger over finger. If he closes his eyes, Yixing will be able to imagine that the mirror is a window, and his friends are right there, on the other side of the pane. If he lets it, the world can tilt, flip, until it is Yixing on the wrong side of the glass. Until that wrong side of the glass is the right one, where Yixing ought to be: his friends out here, and him in there, caught only in dreams.

When he reopens his eyes, the other boy's smile will have dimmed. There will be fear and sadness aging his face; the four behind him will echo his expression. They will watch silently, like Yixing is the photograph, an old memory preserved at this single instant, as Yixing lowers his hand and reaches for the hourglass, hovering in the air, nearing the end of its dance.

At 148920, the stroke of midnight, Yixing will grab the Time-Turner just as someone slams in through the classroom door, screaming his name. Too late to stop anything, but Yixing will be glad: it'll be Sehun's voice.

That's how Yixing will know this will work.

start

一

They start with Sehun because it's easiest to get to his body. They'd dredged him up from the lake not in the best condition, but he was intact. His parents had him buried with his great-grandparents at the family plot in Seoul; his funeral had been overflowing with people and their tears. Jongin had spent the entire service with his back as straight as a board but his gaze trained on his lap. It was only after it concluded, everyone ushering out in a sluggish march, that Yixing saw him lean heavily for a moment against Kyungsoo. His face was decimated; he'd looked like he was about to collapse.

When Yixing and Zitao land at the cemetery, still dizzy from the black market portkey they'd ordered from Knockturn Alley, the first thing Yixing notices is that the flowers on Sehun's grave are painfully fresh. Less than a day has gone by since his last visitor.

Yixing adds his own bouquet of white orchids to the offering and gets on his knees, bowing his head to the ground.

Behind him, Tao watches. "It defeats the purpose of being respectful if we're just going desecrate his memory in a few minutes," he says. Yixing doesn't respond, and after a moment, he hears Zitao stoop down beside him.

"Sehuna, hey," Zitao whispers, fingers brushing Sehun's tombstone. "Did you miss me? I missed you. A lot. But don't worry! It'll be good soon. We'll get to see each other again."

He looks to Yixing, who takes a deep breath.

Yixing takes out his pendant and flips it completely one, two, three times, thinking of Sehun: that awkward, quiet kid who sat in the back of the class; the disgruntled faces he would make behind Joonmyeon's back and sometimes right in front of him; his soft lisp, giggly laugh; his broad shoulders; his easy affection; the way he liked to kiss Yixing's shoulder before going to Yixing's lips; Oh Sehun Oh Sehun Oh—

"Sehun," Zitao breathes.

Yixing opens his eyes. A very pale, desaturated form of Sehun stands in front of him, looking around, then down at the two of them kneeling at his grave. He's wearing his school uniform; and though it looks heavy and waterlogged, he doesn't seem bothered by it.

"Um, hi," he says, a smile growing on his face. His voice sounds very far away, resonating fuzzily like the echoes at the back of a cave. "What's going on? I thought I died."

"You did," Zitao says. He's crying. He clambers to his feet and holds his arms out to Sehun, and Sehun hesitantly takes one of his hands. When their fingers lace together, Zitao shivers and Sehun frowns.

"Does it hurt?" he asks.

"It—no, it—feels like I'm holding something really, really cold. Sort of like, uh, that time I got frostbite from staying out all night during Christmas holidays."

Zitao looks at Yixing, still on his knees. Silent. In shock. Yixing feels lightheaded. His heart is about to burst out of his ribcage. He can feel Sehun's gaze on him, like he'd pushed his face into a muggle refrigerator.

"Hyung," Sehun asks quietly.

"I'm sorry," says Yixing, all in a rush. There's a storm shredding through his brain and it makes it hard to gather his thoughts. A million years wouldn't be enough time for him to say what he wants to say. "I'm so sorry. I didn't—it wasn't—I told you that you shouldn't stay near me, but you wouldn't listen, and it was too good to be true, Sehun. I'm sorry."

"Hyung," says Sehun, laying two ice-cold hands on Yixing's shoulders. It stings. Yixing feels so alive, and he hurts so much. "Stop. It's okay. I'm just really thankful to see you. You made it after all, then. That's—that makes me really glad."

Yixing's next question takes a while to come out. "Made it? What do... you mean?"

Sehun blinks at him. "Made it out of the pond. Got away from the Grindylows."

"No, that was you," Zitao interjects warily, when Yixing doesn't answer. "You went into the Black Lake at night by yourself."

"What? No I didn't," says Sehun. "I dove in the water because I saw Yixing hyung walking inside. I thought—" he swallows. "I thought he was going to do something totally, completely stupid. So I swam in to stop him."

Zitao shoots a glance at Yixing. "But Yixing was in the Ravenclaw dorms. I know he was. I went to wake him up the next morning after I heard—after the news about—uh, you."

"No way," says Sehun. "I saw him drowning. All these Grindylows were attacking him and he wasn't fighting back. I guess if he's okay right now, that means I saved him." He looks at Yixing for approval, eyes lit with something ethereal. "Right?"

Yixing doesn't remember anything about Grindylows.

The plan that he and Zitao came up with went like this: they would resurrect each person, ask them exactly how and when they died, draw out an exact timeline, then go back in time and stop them from dying. Simple enough, but execution would require every scrap of ability they possessed. Tao shared everything he knew about Time-Turners, generations of knowledge passed onto him from his family, and Yixing recorded what he could in a music ledger notebook that he always kept on his person. There were the self-explanatory rules. Each flip of the hourglass would pull you back an hour. Don't let anyone see you, especially not yourself. Keep your interference to the barest minimum. Time everything. Know where you're going. When the hours run out, always return to the place where you started.

It was the logic of time travel that was a bit harder to process.

Tao drew a limping circle on one side of the paper, and an ugly, harried tree on the other. "Lots of people think that if you go back in time, you'll go into an alternate reality," he said, pointing at the tree. "Comic books and stuff, and, like, Dragonball Z, right? Trunks came from the future, changed the past, then went back to his future," he tapped one branch of the tree, "which wasn't the future we see in the show," and tapped another one.

Yixing was a half-blood, but growing up he never watched Dragonball Z.

"Never mind," Zitao said impatiently. "It doesn't matter. The point is that there is only one reality. One whole. So if you go back in time, whatever happens must have already happened, leading to where we are now."

"Ah—does that mean since we already went back in time, theoretically... we haven't changed anything? Or that we can't?"

"No, we can," said Zitao. He was eager for this, intensely so. "I had to think about this really hard. It's really messed up but I think I figured it out. Okay, so right now, Sehun and Kris and Lu Han and Joonmyeon hyung are gone, but if we do our job right, they won't be. That means in that time, we'll never have the need to go back in time in the first place. So we'd end up wiping out ourselves at this current time." He waved his arms around. "This one."

"I'm... yes, that makes sense," Yixing said, even though he didn't really get what Zitao was getting at.

"So, if we go back and fix everything so in that future we don't need to use my Time-Turner, then the 'us' who have already gone back in time will, uh. Die. I think."

"Oh," said Yixing.

"We really have to make sure we know what we're doing." He drew several circles within each other, each one caught inside the previous. "Right now there's lots of ripples in the water. If we stop the first ripple though, then all these other ones won't even show up. So that's why," he said, tracing his finger outwards, to the biggest ring, "Lu Han's ripple should be our only stop. Based on how everyone died," he stuttered here, cleared his throat, then continued, "uh, we need to fix everything at Lu Han's ripple so that none of the future circumstances for the other deaths can happen. And we only have one chance to do it because any changes we make still might end up in a reality with us not using the Time-Turner. If—if everything works out, then at the end of it, we'll probably just... disappear."

Yixing looked at Zitao. Zitao shifted, uncomfortable. "I don't know a lot about how this stuff finishes because anyone who closes his own timeline obviously can't, um, write an account of their experience or anything. All we have to go on is some tokens left behind from the future that don't match up to the present. Like a photo of a person who doesn't exist, or a note about something that hasn't happened yet. I tried to find out more, but my grandma got suspicious."

It was already more than Yixing could have hoped for. Zitao perpetually asked for Yixing's help on assignments, but when he was passionate about a project, he couldn't be stopped. Lu Han used to cluck his tongue whenever Zitao got a better grade than he'd gotten in the same class. "How the hell did that guy cheat this time?" he'd ask jokingly, but they all knew Zitao's talent lay in action, not theory. Yixing admired that drive, spurred on by a core of optimism that made it seem like Zitao's body was fueled with something invincible.
.
"Thank you," said Yixing, catching Zitao waiting for his reaction. "I really wouldn't be able to do this without you."

Zitao's anxious expression lifted into a grin. "Nothing is impossible! We're going to fix everything." His smile lagged a little in deprecation. "Just don't freak when you end up killing yourself, hey?"

Actually, Yixing had never been scared of death. By age eleven, when he'd gotten his Hogwarts letter, he'd already accumulated a handful of near-death experiences: struck by lightning in a bad thunderstorm, a sturdy tree branch suddenly cracking under his weight, getting hit by a car during his first trip to London, etcetera. He'd never freaked out over any of them. Hospital staff commented on his serenity, his good nature, but Yixing had just always known with simple confidence that he'd be fine, no matter what happened: a child's illusion of immortality. His mother had been the worrywart in the family, fussing over his every injury, her wand always at the ready with an arsenal of healing charms. Yixing hadn't blamed her. He'd been a very weak baby, born with a congenital blood disorder that even China's best mediwizards couldn't cure—they'd all said he was lucky to even be alive. Maybe that had been how his mother felt, all the time, like her son was a ticking bomb, living on borrowed time, and that at any moment, the world would realize the mistake they made by letting death skip him over, and steal him from her.

He'd eventually learned that he really was a miracle baby—his heart had failed after being born, but he'd made an unprecedented recovery and survived. He had a charmed life. His mother had told him that he had a guardian angel looking out for him, making sure that when he got knocked down, he always stood back up.

Lu Han had always blamed Yixing for being so airheaded in the first place, getting himself into dangerous situations. "You have to watch where you're going! You'd lose your own head if it wasn't screwed on!" But Lu Han had been a hypocrite—at least Yixing could follow simple directions on a map. Maybe it'd been Yixing's fault for trusting where Lu Han led them that night when they went to stalk Puddlemere United after their fundraising quidditch match played for wizarding schools. One second Yixing had been following Lu Han's bobbing head and loud laugh through the buzzing crowd, the next he was staring at an unfamiliar street, no Lu Han in sight. Four hours later Professor Flitwick had found Yixing wandering lost in the murkier parts of Diagon Alley, disoriented and leaden, but it had taken a month to locate Lu Han's body—stuffed in a bin, his autographed Puddlemere Uniform stolen off his person, bruises lining his arms and torso. By that time, Kris had been missing for two weeks.

Zitao is sniffing again when Yixing drops the Stone from his hand and Sehun retreats like thinning fog. Neither of them want to leave him, but they've already overstayed their welcome; the sun lines the horizon orange and soon someone will be coming by to pick up the flowers left from the day. Sehun gave Zitao and Yixing each an icy kiss on the cheek and a frigid hug, for as long as they could stand it, before he nodded at Yixing to let him go. He hadn't liked their plan of going back in time. He told them that the dead were dead for a reason, even if it wasn't a very happy ending.

"But if fixing all that will make Yixing hyung not sad, then..." Sehun licked his lips. "Okay. I can see why you'd want to do it."

Yixing is dry-eyed by the time the sun fully sets. He waits for Zitao to stop sniffling, his hand on Zitao's shaking shoulder, and then the two of them touch the portkey for home.

In his notebook, Yixing has written: Sehun. Black Lake, south-east tip. Feb 25th 2008, around 11pm. Grindylows; drowning. (Me?)

i'm going to cry ):

:( sorry anon :( things aren't going to get much happier tbh

anon. this is so great

n__n thank you very much!

anon

u__u

this is my favorite kind of time travel AND perfectly saddening anon.

thank you kind anon ;; hope i will not screw up subsequent parts as the story "unfolds" lol

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part seventy six

hg: hp-theme; lay + dead bfs series. (team lay)

Re: hg: hp-theme; lay + dead bfs series. (team lay)

2,716 w ft. sehun

Re: 2,716 w ft. sehun

Re: 2,716 w ft. sehun

Re: 2,716 w ft. sehun

Re: 2,716 w ft. sehun

Re: 2,716 w ft. sehun

Re: 2,716 w ft. sehun

Re: 2,716 w ft. sehun

Re: 2,716 w ft. sehun