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When the light returns to your eyes, it feels final, and it’s with a gasp that you find yourself moving. There is a strong smell in your nostrils, and your throat burns, but your heart races and is undeniably alive. You feel hands on you as you try to sit up, firm and coaxing, but your eyes take a moment to catch up with the rest of your senses. As they slowly focus, you can only make out shapes in the warm light, and everything seems to glitter.
“She’s back,” a low voice floats to your ears and you turn your head in its direction.
You blink, urging your eyes to focus, and slowly the image before you sharpens until it is a clear figure. Slowly, it returns - a torso, legs, arms, a face, eyes. Eyes.
Immediately, the eyes trigger an almost painful sense of longing and nostalgia, but for what, you do not know. As you look into them, they flicker with something you are on the verge of identifying, until -
“You scared us, my lady!” comes another voice, and you tear your gaze away from those eyes that hold answers to a question you’re not sure of just yet.
A young man stands to your left, in what can only be described as a costume of some sort. You let your eyes wander over his jacket that positively sparkles, searching for his eyes behind the jewel-encrusted mask, then your vision slides to the room you seem to be in.
Everything does truly glitter - the chandeliers falling from the ornate ceilings, the candles dripping in glassy candelabras on every wall, the gilded edges to every detail.
“Where am I?” you croak, and you sense the person from before, the person with the eyes, move closer. You snap your focus to them, and see the man before you. His tall figure fills your vision, and again you are overcome with a misplaced sense of yearning for a past you’re not sure you have lived.
“She must have hit her head,” a quiet voice echoes from behind you, and the man in front of you nods. He reaches out a hand.
“Here, let me take you somewhere quieter so I can examine you properly,” he says softly, his voice impossibly deep.
Without a second thought, you take his hand and let him guide you to your feet.
“Thank you, Dr Kim,” the voice from behind comes again.
You allow yourself to be lead out of the grand room, then down corridors of paintings, gold, and flowers.
Dr Kim’s, as you presume, hand is warm around yours - firm, but comforting.
And as your eyes watch his back ahead of you, the light glimmering off the small amount of skin on show at his nape, you hear laughter.
You hear laughter, and gowns rustling, and see a corridor just like this - but it’s more sparse, and it’s daylight.
And then you see him, turning back to you with a dimpled smile as you chase him down.
You shake your head and blink, snapping out of it, and you’re back here, now being led into what appears to be a library of some sort. Dr Kim guides you into a chair, and its leather is cool against your back, exposed in the gown you’re wearing. You watch as he pulls up another chair in front of you and takes a seat himself.
He looks at you in a way that makes you feel like you’re truly being seen, examined to your depths, and clicks his tongue.
“You remember.”
You part your lips to question him, but are stopped as your mind is flooded once more; a face you only somewhat recognise looking back at you from a cracked mirror, the sulphur smell of the white paint being caked on your face. The feeling of immeasurable joy, but also the fear - the unbridled fear in every movement. The court and the ballroom, the laughs that burst from you, and him.
Glances across the room, those dark eyes always finding yours.
In that lifetime, all those years ago. In countless lifetimes before, the innumerable bodies your soul has inhabited, and now…now.
Somehow, without even knowing entirely where you are, you know who you are. You feel whole - you can feel it fill your chest and know that this is where you are supposed to be.
And he…he’s finally right here with you, your timelines aligning once more. But this time it feels different, it feels right. Like this time you’ll have a chance.
With your sense of self returned, you can feel it emanating from him as well. Kim Namjoon. Your one and only in every universe you have the privilege of occupying.
He knows and the feeling passes between you once again. And with six words, you show him it all: “I knew I would find you.”