Chapter Text
Changbin isn't sure when he started remembering. Maybe it was 40 lives ago. Maybe 3. Maybe he'd always remembered.
He does remember that in one of his lives, he had a grandfather who divined. The old man scattered a handful of charred bones on the ground and frowned.
"Grandson, in a past life you angered a god. You're cursed to remember your previous lives."
"Grandfather, is this not a boon?" he had asked. Naive. He'd been so naive.
"Only a fool would desire to remember all of the lives that came before him… And it seems you were once a fool."
"Why is that so?"
"A man can only lose a love so many times 'ere he go mad."
"I should like to stop, then. How would I stop this?"
His grandfather peered up at him as if he had grown two more heads. "Now how am I to know that?"
He doesn't remember every aspect of every existence, but the one constant through all of them—big brown eyes that knew him, loved him in every lifetime, a face painted with a galaxy. In this life… Lee Felix.
***
It always comes to him in pieces, in little flashes of memory. Sometimes he's sleeping and he dreams it. Other times he's just strolling down the street and comes across something—a place, a sign, a scent—that rockets him into another life. Every now and again he has a real 'main-character' moment, and a past life will just hit him like a truck when he is at his most vulnerable—naked and sopping wet in the shower. He wonders if one day he might get isekai'ed into one of his previous lives like some sort of protagonist from one of Jisung's inane animes.
If he thinks hard enough, latches on quickly enough to the trigger, relaxes his brain just right, he can sometimes speedrun the whole life like he's watching a movie reel. Those are always the hardest. But usually, it's just the important parts—the impactful ones—that he gets. Meeting his soulmate, falling in love with him. Chasing him… Losing him.
The important parts haunt him through every single life, stacking one on top of the other.
World's shittiest Jenga tower, he thinks.
The earliest incarnation he remembers—and the only one he remembers consistently across every lifetime—is ancient. So ancient that modern Changbin cannot actually read written text in the memories—he only knows what it means because the previous incarnation was fortunately literate. It's also the only past life he is certain he cannot remember in its entirety no matter how hard he tries—there are prominent important parts absent from the memories. Not forgotten, no. Missing.
He has a theory that this is the lifetime where he somehow cursed himself indefinitely. It starts like this: