Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

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As a child, he’d watch the stars and wonder what it’d be like to touch one, to feel its presence; would it be soft and kind, a reminder of his place in the universe, or a fleeting fire lighting up his world for but a moment before fizzing out of existence, forever memorable as a moment in time.

‘Curiosity killed the cat,’ his mother would caution, yet ‘satisfaction could bring it back,’ his father would conclude.

‘Too curious for his own good,’ his grandmother would complain, chastising him for sticking his nose where it didn’t belong.

How could he not be, when there’s an endless amount of things to see and feel and hear and eat. It’s all brand new and wondrous, and Felix wants to experience it all; all the way from the plains of his home to the bottom of the oceans, to the stars and beyond.

‘He’ll find trouble before it finds him,’ his grandmother would warn when he toed the line of the property, staring into the unmapped wilderness beyond the fence. He’d linger, letting his imagination run free where he was forbidden to go.

‘Stay curious, little one,’ his father’s encouragement echoed in his head as he jumped the fence to roam the woods surrounding their land. The sun would set before anyone would come looking for the child long lost, no trace left behind but a few errant sparks.

Was it worth it to have his curiosity sated when all that remains is but memories of a rose-coloured past, the warnings of his elders, and the scars on his back? It should have killed the cat called curiosity for him forever, yet it keeps on being brought back.

One day, Felix thinks he’ll find his cat’s belly full and sated, and hopes, when he does, that it’ll feel like home again.

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Felix twists the top row of dials framing the face of his warp until the numbers tick down to display a sequence so familiar he could find it in his sleep. It might as well be etched into his very being by now. Pressing down, he watches a small blue line like lightning cut through the fabric the universe is made up of; a controlled tear that acts as a door to another world beyond his own. The portal extends until it’s big enough for him to comfortably step through.

He leaves behind the cold of the small hours and welcomes the warmth of early morning. The sun bounces off the many reflective surfaces towering far above him, reaching into all nooks and crannies, exposing what hides within. Felix stands on the edge of sunlight painted on the ground before him, and waits for the portal to close fully before shaking off the shadows and stepping out of the alley into the eyes of the public.

Morning rush hour has the roads congested with traffic, the streets similarly swarmed with people on the go. The city here is not so different from his current home, but it’s got something more… alive about it. Maybe it’s the people, lacking all the advanced technology he’s seen in other universes—such as hoverboards on U-217 and brain connected devices on U-325—or perhaps it’s all the greenery along the roads and the parks found every few hundred paces. 

It could also be the innate curiosity he sees in the people here. The way kids will stop and watch street performers with awe, or how a group of girls might study a shop window for several minutes, parsing everything on display like they’re hiding the secrets to their existence. Young or old, he likes watching them display these expressions of curiosity, big or small, and remind himself it’s human nature.

Felix can’t put his finger on exactly what it is that draws him to this place, but he likes it. Has come to love it.

Another reason might be the insistent tugging in his chest that makes its presence known every time he steps onto this plane, leading him along an invisible path. It remains dormant whenever he’s not here, mutedly calling out to him.

His feet follow the path through the throngs of people, across the road and past colourfully creative graffitied walls, back to what he’s come to think of as his regular visit. A haunt, as he’s heard it described before. A strange description he finds fitting, for he is not of this world so he may as well be haunting it with his temporary presence.

The café sits in the heart of this metropolis, near the main street but not right on it, off to the side like it wants to be seen but not heard. Tucked between two nondescript shops, a dry cleaner and a small-time insurance broker, sits Yellow Wood café, a small-business coffee roastery that's spoken about with reverence and care by its regular patrons. The sign is visible from the corner and it puts a smile on his lips every time. 

It’s become his pre-work routine after stumbling across it on his first visit to this universe, U-143, some six months ago. The smell inside is warm and aromatic, reminding him of his grandparent’s house, the one he’d run through the fields to reach on early summer mornings and late autumn afternoons. Bathed in light and smelling of love.

Sounds of whirring and grinding and steam puffing fill in the gaps between people’s chattering. It's a comforting white noise that Felix closes his eyes to enjoy to its fullest. A sweet lull before he has to return to his work. And through the monotonous soundscape pierces a voice that haunts his dreams, that he could have (and might’ve in the privacy of his home) cried with relief at hearing after so long.

Without opening his eyes, Felix can picture the man behind the counter clear as day. He’s wearing his perpetually stained apron with the café logo hand-stitched over his heart and the name Chris displayed on his name tag. Dark brown curls will frame his face, either loose and flowing or tied up in a bun if the heat is getting to him, and his grin will rival the moon and all the stars.

He is painfully familiar in an unfamiliar world, and Felix wonders if he is the only one able to feel Chris’s aura so strongly.

The customer behind him pushes Felix’s shoulder roughly, muttering angry insults about holding up the line and making him miss his meeting, so Felix reluctantly opens his eyes and catches up to the person in front. He catches sight of Chris working the till behind the counter, hair loose today and grin as bright as ever, and continues to bask in his soft glow while he waits for his turn. 

It’s a privilege that he’s able to do this as often as he does. Felix, like much in his life, stumbled into universe-jumping at a young age, an accidental choice in career that he’s made the most of at his young age of twenty-two. It had started as a means to an end, a way to search for his lost home. By now, he’s searched through hundreds of universes for his mother and father, his grandparents, their farmhouse and the fields, but it’s as if they never existed at all. Cut from the fabric of not just his own, but the entire tapestry making up the constellation of universes. The Weave, as others like him have come to call it.

He’s getting tired of finding dead-ends and phantoms, but he refuses to stop. Memories of his childhood remain at the forefront of his mind, and he’s hopeful he’ll find it one day. He’s found one person from his past already, the boy living in the house across the fields, that wasn’t afraid of anything and would play with him until his mother would call him back inside when it got dark. The boy that appears in his…

“Hi, what can I get you?”

Felix blinks, abruptly noticing he’s made it to the front of the line while engrossed in his runaway thoughts, only a counter’s breadth away from the one person that remains untainted and unscathed on his tapestry.

“Uh, I’ll get a…”

“Mango lemonade for Felix, right?” Chris assumes, correctly, and Felix nods bewildered. “You always order the same thing every time. You’re kind of memorable in between all the coffee orders,” Chris rambles sheepishly, realising how strange he must sound having taken note of Felix coming in so often, but it tugs a smile onto Felix’s parted lips.

“Or I’m just predictable,” he jokes.

“Every Tuesday and Thursday. Might be a pattern, even.”

Hyunjin would call him pathetic if he saw him now; practically buzzing in his boots, tamping down the excitement of Chris taking note of him whenever he comes in, enough to memorize his order. He might make this a daily habit from now on. It’s greedy, he’s aware, but he can’t help himself.

Felix pays the required amount in the physical currency of this universe. The cash register rings as Chris deposits the bills, then hands him some coins back and Felix drops them in the tip jar on habit. It makes Chris smile every time, so he’ll keep doing it forever, he thinks.

“Coming right up! Who’s next?”

Felix moves onto the pickup end of the lacquered counter, taking in the other customers sitting down inside, scanning their faces and features but coming up empty, as usual. He jostles his wrist to play with the latch on his plastic wristwatch beneath the warp watch, unlatching it and bending the plastic back and forth as he waits.

It’s going to be a lovely day, it’s a shame he can’t stay. He’s got a long list of commissions he has put off until the deadline, again, and time is of the essence, after all.

Hyunjin will have his parts by the end of the lunar cycle, as promised. He’ll groan and grumble about Felix leaving it ‘til the last minute’, but he’ll finish the commissions on time as always and they’ll get paid without deductions. Hyunjin can lament about Felix’s missing motivation and lack-luster work-ethic all he wants. It’s not like they’ll strike it rich doing this anyway so they should settle for whatever they can get. 

Felix is in need of credits too, mainly to appease his landlady for the damages caused by Bbokari after that time Felix had gotten lost in a jungle trying to find some ancient relic for a commission and had left him home alone too long. Speaking of, did he remember to fill his food bowl this morning?

“Mango lemonade for Felix!”

It isn’t Chris calling his name but, as he picks up the paper cup, it’s definitely Chris’s scrawled handwriting marking its side. ‘Have a mango-ificent day!’ it reads, with a small blob at the end that he assumes is supposed to be a mango. There’s some numbers beneath the text that he can’t make sense of. Two digits too long to be a portal sequence, and two digits short of coordinates.

He looks up to see Chris smiling at him, waving shyly once he’s got Felix’s attention. Felix waves back and takes a sip of the iced drink, enjoying the strange flavour. He’d never tasted a mango before coming here and now he can’t get the taste off his tongue. Chris goes back to doing his job, punching in the next customer’s order into the till and writing their name on the cup, movements practiced and sure. The line is still long so Felix will just have to ask him next time.

Leaving is bittersweet, only reassured by the knowledge that he’ll be back tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. Visiting the only person he’s found from his past keeps him sane on days when everything starts feeling meaningless again.

Cars will fill the roads, the streets will be crowded with people, the sun will still shine; and Felix will be in line to greet Chris, as usual.

He enters the alleyway again, balancing his cup in the crook of his elbow as he fiddles with his warp, trying to remember what sequence he was supposed to start with today without having to pull out his notes to check. The first destination is supposedly tropical in climate so he’ll take a moment longer to enjoy his drink on a beach somewhere before getting to work, he thinks, pressing the dial.

The portal sparks and whooshes as it opens from thin air, air surging in and out, creating a pressure unique to only this. It took a long while getting used to jumping from one universe to another, trying to keep track of time and space and not getting lost in its vastness, but Felix has become a right pro–give or take a few mishaps.

He ignores the shouting behind him, one foot through to the other side already, when the voice registers as Chris’s. Turning at the last second, he sees Chris barreling towards him with something red clutched in his hand, shouting his name.

All Felix registers in the next instance is hard muscle hitting him at full speed, the tingle in his skin from de- and re-materializing in the new plane, and his drink slipping from his fingers in the commotion.

They hit the ground. Hard. Blinking away the flurry of white particles dancing around his head, he realizes he must’ve input the wrong coordinates again, for it's not a sandy beach they’ve landed on, but a cold, wintry landscape devoid of any immediately notable landmarks. Only white and grey as far as the eye can see.

Chris groans in pain, and Felix’s eyes snap to the man sprawled over his lap in the snow.

“What the hell happened?” Chris pats his head to check for blood, hand coming back clear. Shaking his head to clear the confusion associated with universe jumping and blinking past the pain, he looks up at their surroundings with shock. “How’d we get here?”

Felix’s knee-jerk witty reply gets stuck on the tip of his tongue, refusing to leap off as his brain kicks him into high gear at the reality of the situation dawning on him. This can’t be happening.

“You idiot, why did you follow me!? You can’t be here, you have to go back!”

Chris looks around him, at the snow they’re laying in and the mountaintops visible through the fog of snowfall, finding no means of getting back from… wherever they are. “Easier said than done,” he chuckles sheepishly, like he does at the café when he catches himself rambling. The thought sparks another much more pressing issue at hand, giving way to a new panic.

“The time!” He rolls up his sleeve to find his warp, but not the–

“You left this on the counter.” Chris holds up the cheap plastic souvenir wristwatch, decorated with a pink cat character popular on 143. He’d bought it to remember Chris by, as well as keep track of the planet’s time zone. He must’ve put it down while he was lost in thought. “I was gonna return it to you, I didn’t mean to startle you.”

Chris passes it to Felix’s waiting palm. It reads half past nine in the morning, whereas his warp tells him it’s already past ten, which means time moves faster here than it does on 143. They need to get back ASAP before they lose any more time.

Latching his wristwatch back on, he goes for the dial on his warp but flinches away as it zaps him with painful blue lightning.

“Fuck, it’s broken.”

Chris sits up to look at it too, jerking away to avoid the sparks flying off it as Felix stubbornly attempts to get a signal. “Is that what transported us here?”

“Uh-huh,” Felix hums and winces as the watch zaps him again, more painfully than the last. The bars barely reach past one; no signal. Frustrated, he gets up to dust off the snow sticking to his now damp clothes. “We gotta get to higher ground to get signal. Think you can manage?”

“Higher?” Chris gulps and looks to the mountains reaching for the sky in sharp points and shivers violently. Right, he’s only wearing jeans and a branded t-shirt under a thin cotton apron. Felix sheds his jacket and wraps it around Chris’s shoulders. It’s not much but it’ll help a little.

Chris tugs it around himself gratefully before realising, “Wait, won’t you get cold?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Felix assures and pulls out a palm-sized metal box from a satchel hanging on his waist. It originally held mints, but now contains small glowing gemstones in various colours. Felix pops an orange one in his mouth and bites down on it hard.

Liquid warmth floods his mouth as the gemstone shatters and melts, flowing past his tongue down his throat, heating him from the inside as it travels throughout his body. The effect is temporary, so he has to make the most of it while it lasts.

“Whoa, you’re hot to the touch.” Chris startles, pulling his hand away from where it had inched toward Felix’s heated skin. He looks at him with unbridled wonder and curiosity.

“Thanks,” Felix smirks, winking for good measure.

“Not that. Way. You know what I- Ah, never mind.” Chris flushes and pulls the jacket tighter around himself to stop from shivering. “What are those things? They look like gemstones.”

“A condensed magma crystal. It’ll keep me warm for an hour or so, but I’m running low–” which reminds him that it’s been too long since his last visit to Jisung and Minho’s shop, “–and my doctor doesn’t like me taking too many at once. Again,” he mutters the last part to hopefully not be heard over the cold wind tugging at their hair. “So we gotta get a move on.”

“Can I have one? Being warm sounds really nice right now.”

“It could very well kill you, for all I know. Come on, climbing will keep you warm.” Felix powers on over Chris’s attempted rebuttal, pulling him up and pushing him towards the nearest cliffside with the visibly shortest way to the top. It’s gonna be a long day.

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“This is crazy!” Chris yells as he loses his footing once more, dangling from a rock as the icy breeze tears at his clothes. His fingers are red but not yet showing signs of frostbite. Felix nudges his foot a little to the left with his own, where Chris regains his footing easily. Climbing is an acquired skill, he assumes Chris doesn’t often utilize it in his convenient indoor job. He’s got the upper body strength for it, though.

“You’re doing great so far,” Felix yells back over the wind that picks up speed the higher they ascend in altitude. He’s had to catch Chris a handful of times, correcting his grip or footing to prevent him from falling, but he’s doing alright, all things considered. It’s taking a toll on him, and consequently, on Felix as well.  “There’s a landing up here, a few more feet.”

Chris grabs onto the landing gratefully once he reaches it, hauling himself up with the strength of his forearms. Getting this far is an impressive feat; Felix is proud of him. It’s not every day you get thrust into a life-or-death situation from your comfy job as a barista and handle it with so much grace.

“You’re doing good, let’s take a break here.”

Felix sits them down by the mountainside to hopefully shield them some from the cold and snow. He’s neither seen nor sensed any signs of life here; the only other aura he feels is sitting beside him. He hopes it stays that way; he doubts Chris has it in him to start running if something catches their scent.

“This is insane. Who the fuck are you?” Chris curses as he desperately tries to rub warmth back into his stiff limbs.

Who is Felix? He’s many things, and he’s nothing. A nomad, a shadow, a memory. World-less and worldly. Human and inhuman.

But that’s not what Chris is asking.

“Someone who should’ve known better. There’s no point in me explaining because your memory has to be wiped before we can return you home.”

“Like in Men in Black ?”

Felix frowns. He’s not heard of any men in black before; it’s not a faction he’s come across in any of his jumps before or heard mentioned by any bounty hunters or other jumpers. “Who are they allied to? Or are they an organization exclusive to Earth?”

Chris looks at him like he’s grown a third head before snorting, chuckling with mirth through chattering teeth. Felix is completely lost, yet so enamored with him that he doesn’t mind one bit.

“Forget it,” Chris laughs and waves him off. “Who’s we?”

“What?” Felix feels lost a second time.

“You said ‘before we return you home’. So who’s we?”

Chris is so earnest with his questions that Felix doesn’t even think twice before answering. “Oh, my partner Hyunjin.” Chris tenses next to him but Felix chalks it up to the cold.

“Partner. As in…?”

“Coworker. Technically my boss.”

Chris lets out a little ‘ah’ in understanding, his frame relaxing minutely before being wracked by shivers and tensing back up again.

“How’s this partner gonna get us home all the way from here? Do you even know where we are?”

Felix is already tapping through the controls on the warp, gritting his teeth through the pain of lightning crawling over his skin, until he gets to the emergency button Hyunjin had installed. The warp begins pulsing with the S.O.S., evidently having enough signal to halt the malfunctioning for a moment. Felix sighs and hopes it reaches its target with the barely two and a half bars up here.

“Just trust me,” he says at last.

Chris seems like he wants to say something else, but the wind decides to pick up again, so Chris instead burrows as much as he can into his borrowed jacket tighter. Felix scoots closer to share his waning body heat. They sit there, pressed close from ankle to elbow, waiting for any sign they’ve been heard.

Several minutes pass without any sign, and Felix thinks they must not be high enough. He wonders how in the world they’ll manage to get higher up before they freeze to death—when there’s a familiar whoosh and a portal, twice the size of his and purple in colour, opens up above them. The wind surges and flurries until it settles, the portal’s artificial gravity keeping the errant snow at bay for the moment.

Felix bumps their shoulders. “We’re saved, Chris! You ready?”

“Don’t think so,” Chris answers, shivering violently as he watches the large portal with drooping, tired eyes.

Felix laughs despite himself and hauls him up, holding tightly onto Chris as they’re pulled up by the portal’s gravity. Chris yelps as the ground beneath them disappears, floating them up, up, up until their bodies get warped through the rift.

They land on solid ground once more, now devoid of snow and several degrees warmer. The portal closes with a whoosh and stray glimmers of purple light.

“You’re early,” Hyunjin calls from his workbench across the room. Felix grins like a madman with the relief of hearing his voice. “I assume you got the wrong coordinates again? You know this is the third time this month you typed a six instead of a nine. Free education was really wasted on your ungrateful ass.”

“Hi, I’m Jared, and I never fucking learned how to read,” Felix recites the strange saying he’s picked up on from 143’s youth with glee.

“And get out of here with that meme bullshit,” Hyunjin says as he flings an alloy nut at him with his tail. He hasn’t looked up from his work yet; no doubt stressed about the upcoming deadline for the commission piece Felix is meant to be getting the parts for right now. “Messing up your schedule when you already leave everything to the last possible minute isn’t conducive for either of us, you know?”

Hyunjin finally lifts his magnifying glasses from the machine he’s putting together and does a double-take as he sees not one, but two people standing in his workshop, balking at the sight of Chris. “This has got to be the weirdest cat you’ve dragged in.”

Chris is taking in the workshop at large, gaze bouncing from one contraption to the next; from the devices and gadgets on display, to the unfinished or broken ones waiting their turn on the rack, and eventually landing on Hyunjin regarding him. He points to himself, “Me?”

“It’s a long story,” Felix says before Chris has the chance to say anything incriminating, and Hyunjin manages to figure out what’s really going on. “My watch broke when he passed through with me on accident. Can you fix it so I can finish your stupid errands?”

“Those ‘stupid errands’,” Hyunjin mocks, miming quotation marks. “Pay your bills, too, mister. Show me that.” He gestures to the warp, and Felix undoes the magnetic clasp, wincing as the stabilizing effect dissipates and his body tries to adjust to the wrong universe. Not belonging has its complications.

Hyunjin twists and turns the malfunctioning device over in his hands, the erratic energy not bothering him through his heavy-duty insulated gloves. “How many times is this now? I should’ve charged you for repairs from the start.”

“No take-backsies,” Felix sing-songs and takes a seat on an empty corner of the workbench as his head starts to spin.

“Bitch,” Hyunjin mutters, twisting the dials and examining the error messages popping up on the small screen. He’s broken it several times before, but never like this. It’s never spit electric at him, that’s for damn sure. Hyunjin’s tail swishes back and forth as he studies the thing, catching Chris’s attention.

“Is that a tail?” Chris points, stunned, holding onto Felix’s jacket one-handed like a lifeline, as if it would protect him should Hyunjin pounce like a feral cat. Felix snorts. That’s a fantastic mental image he’ll have to tease him with.

“The people native to this universe all grow tails,” Felix explains, as Hyunjin swishes his tail on purpose to show it off to Chris.

“It’s a very useful limb,” Hyunjin adds as he passes over a wrench from the toolbox behind him using said limb. Expertly, may he add. Felix’s envy is sure to be palpable. A tail is both useful and, just, über cool. Wings are the only thing that would beat a tail in coolness. Alas, he possesses neither, just his stupid aura sensing.

Chris’s awestruck look reminds him of how wrong this picture is. Having him here is wrong. He’s gone and mixed business and pleasure, his day-to-day and his escapism all rolled into an absurd game of find-the-differences with the glaringly obvious difference standing smack dab in the middle of the image in his earthy tones and curly hair, and Felix’s jacket around his shoulders that have stopped their shaking.

He prays to the Weave Hyunjin doesn’t catch on to who Chris is or why he’s important to Felix.

“This universe?” Chris pipes up, halting his downward spiral.

“What?”

“You said ‘the people of this universe.’” Their earlier conversation in the mountains replays nearly word for word, just a little to the left. It’s too soon to call it deja vu, surely.

“Right. We’re on U-801, more commonly known as Chrono. It’s one of a few ‘hubs’ for us jumpers, at least the ones looking for work.”

“And if it wasn’t for the credits you guys bring in, I’d have the lot of you thrown off this planet and let the void take you.”

Felix gasps in mock offense, clutching nonexistent pearls. “Is that all I am to you? A source of income?”

“Yes, and a lousy one at that.” Felix ducks as the expected bolt flies past his head. Hyunjin glares at him and Felix sticks out his tongue. It’s an old song and dance, a sibling rivalry the aunties call it. It warms his heart when neither of them manages to keep a straight face for long.

“What’s the name of my universe?” Chris asks timidly once there’s no more threat of objects aimed at anyone’s head.

The whiplash from being reminded of Chris sitting on the workshop floor is going to be killer on his neck tomorrow. “Universe one-four-three. I call it Earth, even though several planets call themselves that. It’s not named per se in our databases because it’s not a universe jumpers visit a lot. Or, at all.”

“But you do?”

Chris’s curiosity is getting to dangerous levels, and he sees Hyunjin raise his brow from the peripheral of his eye. He’s catching on. Fuck.

“On occasion.” The lie isn’t convincing to either party. At least Chris seems to realize he’s unearthed something not meant for the light of day.

“And here I thought you just went there for the memes.”

“Hyunjin!” Felix wails in vain as Hyunjin cackles at the gold mine made of Felix’s embarrassment and misery he’s struck. He’ll never let this go, it’ll hang above Felix’s head for years, no, eons.

Before they can devolve into a full on cat fight, Chris speaks up again, cutting through the squabbling effectively. “Felix, you said he could help me get home. To… 143?”

His hopeful tone tugs on Felix’s heartstrings. He’s right, they are meant to be getting Chris back home before his time is up.

“Hyunjin’ll fix the watch and then I’ll take you back.”

“No you won’t.” Hyunjin holds up his calmed down warp for the two of them to see. “This is no malfunction I’ve ever seen. I think you overloaded the travel capacity when freeloader here came through with you.”

“I didn’t bring him,” Felix interjects hotly, squashing the insinuation. “He nearly ran through me, there was nothing I could do!”

Hyunjin looks from him to Chris and back, disbelief evident. “Well, whatever the case, it’s not fixable. You won’t be doing much jumping for a while unless you can snag a new one. Or pay the portal fee at the station.”

“What? No. No no no!” Felix slams his hands down on the table, scattering a pile of loose screws, bits and bobs in the process. “I have to get him home before…” Before. Before he… he is…

“Okay, okay. Breathe,” Hyunjin says and leans over with a hand on his.

Felix tries but there’s no air left in his lungs, like it’s completely been sucked out of the room. One second he’s gasping for air, clutching his throat desperately, vision swimming with black spots. The second he’s laying on Hyunjin’s cot looking up at the glow-in-the-dark stars he’d got on one of his trips to Earth and glued to Hyunjin’s ceiling to annoy him.

He counts them, one by one on instinct.

…six, seven, eight.

Slowly his throat opens up enough to let in slow, wheezing breaths that after a while fill up his lungs fully, letting it out on a prolonged exhale, just like his mentor had taught him. He's softly guided to open his mouth and swallow the pill placed on his tongue.

Is he alright?

The voice is far away, like he’s deep underwater.

He’ll be fine in a bit. Do you want anything to drink?

His eyes close without a fight, body going lax. It’s not unusual for him to fall into a light slumber post panic attack, but it’s a whole lot more embarrassing when it happens in front of others than Hyunjin or Seungmin.

When he comes to, Chris is huddled by the kitchen table, swaddled in one of the spare throw blankets Hyunjin keeps around for Felix, with a glass of water cradled in his hands. He’s in much better shape now, lips no longer blue and skin back to its usual tanned pallor. Felix pushes himself up on his elbows sluggishly which startles Chris out of his deep-in-thought far-away stare.

“You’re awake.”

“Mm-hm. What time is it?”

“Time? Uhh…” Chris looks around helplessly until his eyes catch on the clock perched on the cabinets next to him, his head blocking it from Felix’s view. “Twelve to six.”

“Shit.” Felix drops back down, draping an arm over his eyes. He was out a lot longer than usual. Must be because of the climbing they did earlier.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’ve wasted so many hours of your time,” He peeks out from where he’s hiding behind his arm. “Did Hyunjin say anything while I was out?”

A rosy hue appears high on Chris’s cheekbones, crawling up his ears until it looks almost painful. Felix won’t like what he’s about to hear, he fears.

“Ah, nothing much, um. Just that, you’ve apparently visited my universe a lot. And mentioned my name in passing. Apparently.”

Felix drapes his arm back over his eyes with a mortified groan. “Kill me…”

“Not that that’s a bad thing. I’m kind of touched I’m someone worth mentioning. Eh, yeah. Anyway, Hyunjin filled me in on this place and explained you jumping universes, and the portals and–” He pauses in search of words, clearly overwhelmed by everything. “Okay, it’s a lot, honestly.” He laughs that sheepish laugh of his, and Felix lets his arm fall behind his head in favor of watching how cute he is, blushing and stuttering. “It’s hard to believe little ol’ me makes the list of coolest things you’ve come across.”

Felix feels his own face heat at his words, resisting the urge to cover it back up again. “You’re… memorable. Like you called me earlier.”

Chris looks confused for a second, backtracking to their interaction at Yellow Wood half a day and two universes ago. “Yeah, yes. Memorable.”

The workshop is so quiet without Hyunjin’s tinkering or machines whirring, his living unit so well insulated that very little of the outside sound bleeds in. They sit in the silence of their combined shyness at having admitted a little too much too soon. Thanks for nothing, Hyunjin.

“Oh, Hyunjin also said,” Chris falters, clearing his throat and fiddling in his seat, piquing Felix’s interest. Chris’s puts on his best impression of Hyunjin, as he quotes: “‘You’ll have hell to pay if you miss your deadlines.’”

.｡.:+☆*:.｡.

He has much bigger worries than commission deadlines at the moment, although he’ll have to scrounge up the credits for his landlady some other way before his things are found in boxes on the sidewalk. The biggest of his worries is his broken warp-watch. It was the only feasible ticket to get Chris home quick and easy. Warp-watches are tied to your biological make-up, with a single-person carrying limit, which is why his got overloaded the way it did. Hyunjin’s portal, on the other hand, is anchored to Chrono, more like a one-way street than a door to and fro, so it can’t send anyone out, just pull them back in. Convenient for transporting bigger cargo or groups of people.

A portal station is located three train stops away, but ticket prices are exorbitant and the paperwork is numbingly boring bureaucratic bullshit considering there are jumpers coming and going like Chrono is their own backyard. One-way is already expensive enough that even if Felix and Hyunjin pooled their credits together, they’d maybe barely scrape it together, leaving them in financial free-fall for months, if not years.

“Why is it so expensive?” Chris asks.

Short answer, bureaucracy and corporate greed. The longer answer is that there needs to be some limitations to universe jumping or there’d eventually be massive consequences to the fabrics making up the Weave’s tapestry, the building blocks holding the universes together. The Weave would suffer massively with a strong likelihood of collapsing entirely.

Not to mention what happens if you get stranded without something tethering you to your home universe or keeping you from disintegrating. Main reason why jumpers are either orphans or people who have nothing left to lose.

If they had the parts—and his warp was still in working order—Hyunjin could’ve added a single-use transistor to allow him a passenger. Unfortunately, the malfunction is beyond his capabilities to fix, and Felix can’t afford to get a new one on such short notice. Plus, his warp has great sentimental value to him.

All of that to say, that they’re left grasping at straws on how to fix the situation.

“So what are our options?” Chris asks dejectedly. The three of them are sitting at Hyunjin’s kitchen table in the adjacent living unit of the workshop. Their plates are empty and bellies full, even Chris’s, who had stared at the oddly coloured meal placed before him with not-so-mild disgust before he’d tasted it and then promptly inhaled the portion once he’d realised how hungry he was.

“Not much considering we don’t have the funds or means. The rest just refuse to help Felix.” Felix kicks Hyunjin’s shin under the table. “What? It’s the truth. Would you ask Lia for help after what happened last time?”

Felix’s retort dies on his tongue. “Yeah, you’re right,” he concedes instead, slouching in his seat and tapping the empty plate in front of him with his fork. 

Clink-clink-clink-clink.

It’s a real pickle they’re in and the guilt is slowly eating away at him in much the same way the Weave is picking him apart, thread by thread. The last thing he wants is for sweet, innocent Chris to have to go through the same horrors he did.

“So no other way? I’m just stuck here?”

Felix’s eyes zero in on Chris, his words sharp as he promises: “We’ll get you back home somehow. Just trust me.”

Chris is taken aback by his tone, and Felix would feel bad if it wasn’t the one cut that always bleeds. Chris drops his gaze to the loose thread he’s playing with on his apron he still insists on wearing.

“What dumbass here means,” Hyunjin emphasizes with a flick to Felix’s temple, “is that we’ll find a way.” Felix swats at his hand, which then quickly devolves into a swatting match that dies soon after as the fight bleeds out of him faster than usual.

He feels hopeless. Typically when he feels hopeless, he heads to 143 for a pick-me-up, which now only manages to make him feel worse.

“You really can’t fix the watch?” Felix asks for the tenth time and Hyunjin just sighs.

“I have no idea where to even begin. The only person I know who’d know how to fix it is Mori.”

Absolutely not!  “Oh hell no. I’m not apologizing to get him to help us.” He’ll throw himself to pit vipers before he goes crawling back to the man who got him into the mess that is his life in the first place.

“You don’t have to apologize, just tell him you need his help with this.”

“Oh, he’d love that. He’d have me groveling at his feet. I’d rather walk through Hell than put myself in that position,” Felix spits, mood effectively soured with the mention of his mentor.

Hyunjin throws his hands up in the air. “Then we’re shit out of luck, and your boyfriend here is added to the ever-growing population of people left universally homeless.” He leans back in his chair, lacing his fingers behind his head.

Felix splutters. “He’s not my–” 

“Who’s Mori?” Chris asks innocently, cutting through the conversation. Felix doesn’t mean to but bristles all the same.

“No one.”

“His dad.”

“Hah,” he scoffs derisively. “He wishes.”

“He showed you the ropes, just like a dad.”

“He’s not my fucking dad!” Felix growls, actually angry.

Their glares hold strong, both used to staring each other down, but this is the one topic Felix refuses to budge on, and Hyunjin knows it, tossing his hands up in surrender.

“If he knows how to fix the. The universe-warp-thingy.” He mimes the way Felix had used his watch before, giving a helpless little shrug. “Then can’t we at least try talking to him?”

Felix lets out a long-suffering sigh and rocks back on his chair until he’s balancing on the two back legs only.

He finds it strange how Chris hasn’t shown an ounce of fear, except when he’d landed in an icy wasteland and had to climb several feet of frozen rock, but besides that, he seems to jump into things headfirst with no caution for himself. Felix is reminded of the boy in the fields, walking him home at night when he was too afraid to walk through the tall grass, reassuring him that he’d find his way back on his own. Chris doesn’t understand what’s at stake here, and Felix wants to shake him by his shoulders and shout it at him, to make him understand that his existence on Earth will be wiped unless he’s returned within 72 hours, of which they’ve already wasted so much.

But that would be cruel, and he has a point, unfortunately. His mentor is the only person Felix, too, knows that’s had their warp malfunction by overloading. It’s unfortunately not a common problem jumpers have, weirdly enough considering it’s happened to Felix twice. If he had a nickel for every time…

“Felix could give you a list of reasons why, but the main one is we gotta find him first,” Hyunjin explains ominously, wiggling his fingers like the person they’re talking about isn’t real but a myth or urban legend the drunks and the touched will rant and rave about on the streets late at night.

“Okay. Let’s find him. Do you have any leads?”

Felix rocks his chair until all four feet are solidly on the ground again, stabbing his fork into the woodgrain of the table. “We’re not asking him. End of discussion.”

An oppressive silence falls over the dinner table.

“So, what? You’re already giving up on your promise?” Chris bristles. He stops his fiddling and squares his shoulders like he’s readying for a fight.

“No, but–”

“Newsflash, asshole. You are the reason I’m here, and I still don’t fully understand where the fuck I even am, but that’s not the point–” He stops his ranting to take a deep breath before addressing Felix with biting words. “You promised to get me home before I become universally homeless, whatever that means, so you better take some damn accountability.”

His fury is not un-founded, Felix was waiting for some kind of burst of emotion, but it doesn’t hurt any less to have his fuck-up thrown in his face by Chris, whom he’s been looking for for as long as he can remember. His aura is alight, part fury, part fear, and Felix hates that he’s the cause of this turmoil.

“The least you could do is try every avenue before giving up on me.” Chris pokes him in the shoulder to emphasize his point, his words hurting more than the gesture does. He’s a coward—he’s aware—but would never acknowledge it. Would never in a million years admit his faults and fears out loud.

“So what’ll it be?”

The brown gaze that normally brings him endless comfort is replaced with a steely, determined gaze that refuses to budge, daring him to disagree—to break his promise. To take the coward’s way out.

Felix has never been strong enough to resist him, and he isn’t now either.

“I’ll get you home, whatever it takes,” Felix says, with conviction he doesn’t yet feel but wants to, so he can make Chris proud. Chris nods and relaxes back into his chair, arms crossed and exhaling to dispel the remaining angry energy, aura evening out and settling down to a mild worry.

Felix hesitates in speaking the rest of the words that’ll nail his coffin closed, but he’s promised to fix his mistake, and this might be the only way. Rubbing his forehead, he grits out: “I might know a way to contact him.”