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Seconds had never ticked backward before, not until Jimin made them. Now anybody could take back anything they wanted, anybody and anything except one man. And that man only had so many seconds left. They weren't even his to claim.
Every second is a second chance. It had been a charming phrase on the grant proposals, a clever hook for the venture capitalists, and the closing line of a TED talk with eleven million views. He'd said it again at the Concert Hall in Stockholm, in a borrowed tuxedo, with a Nobel medal for physiology heavy in his hand. Now it lived on the glossy brochures in the waiting room outside. All those seconds behind you. Don't you deserve a second chance?
Jimin had written every word of it. These days he walked past those brochures and couldn't look at them.
The clock above the door ticked with the same indifference it always had, its second hand sweeping on under the flat fluorescent light. Jimin used to find the sound comforting, a steady baseline under the meticulous work of mapping human minds. Now it sounded like a countdown.
He straightened his coat. He hadn't been able to help himself that morning. He'd put on the shirt Yoongi always said made it impossible to keep his hands off him. Under it, the ring on its chain settled cold against his chest. He'd stopped wearing it in April. He hadn't stopped carrying it.
He opened the file for Patient MYG090393. Min Yoongi. Follow-ups were routine work for junior technicians, not for the man who had designed the extraction protocols. But Jimin had quietly rewritten the backend routing so that this one file came to him and no one else. He couldn't bear anyone else's hands in Yoongi's mind. No one had asked why. He'd been counting on that.
A light knock, and then Yoongi was in the doorway.
He looked rested. The procedure had worked. The heavy shadows under his eyes were gone. Jimin used to trace them with his thumb, back before Yoongi started turning his face away. He had watched those shadows deepen over two long years, one silent dinner at a time. He'd watched the man he loved wear himself down to nothing, working until dawn in the studio, sleeping in his clothes.
Then things started slipping at the edges. An anniversary dinner Yoongi slept through. Jimin's birthday, remembered at eleven at night. A promise to be home by nine, then midnight, then just soon. Every time, Yoongi would come to him afterward, cup Jimin's face in both hands, and look into his eyes so earnestly it hurt, as if he could fix it by holding still long enough. I'm sorry. I'll do better. He meant it every time.
Every night Jimin left a plate in the fridge with a sticky note on the lid. Eat something and take your medicine. You'll get heartburn if you don't. Love, little spoon. For the first year, Yoongi wrote back on the backs of them. You worry too much. Ate it deliciously. Big spoon on the way. Later: Thanks, it was really good. Slept on the couch, you were sleeping too prettily to disturb. Then they stopped coming back at all. Most mornings the plate was still there. Some nights Jimin scraped it into the trash himself, furious. The next night he made another one.
"Good morning, Seonsaengnim." It was the same honeyed, raspy drawl, only lighter now, with the exhaustion gone.
"Good morning, Min Yoongi-ssi." Jimin kept his eyes on the screen. His voice held a gentle, professional warmth; he'd practiced for an hour in front of the bathroom mirror. "How are we feeling after the initial extraction?"
Yoongi dropped into the leather chair and leaned back. The tension that used to hold his shoulders hostage was gone. He sprawled loosely, like a man who had finally set something heavy down. "Better. Much better. That heaviness you described is mostly gone. It's like I finally cleaned out a room I didn't know was full of junk."
Junk. Jimin swallowed and studied the graph of Yoongi's neural activity until the lines stopped swimming.
The anger came up fast, hot, and ugly. Two appointments. That was all it had taken Yoongi to get over twelve years. Jimin still couldn't walk past the cereal Yoongi liked at the grocery store without standing in the aisle too long.
"Well," he heard himself say, "I'm glad it was so easy for you."
It came out sharper than he meant it to. Yoongi's eyebrows lifted.
"Glad that the procedure was, I mean. Generally." Jimin cleared his throat. "Sorry. I haven't had my coffee yet."
"Say no more." Yoongi held up both hands. "I've been told I'm a monster before noon."
He had. Jimin had told him, most mornings, for six years.
"There's one smudge left, though." Yoongi tilted his head. His right thumb moved absently over the base of his left ring finger, turning a ring that wasn't there. Jimin had watched him do that ten thousand times, in meetings, at red lights, in the dark. He didn't think Yoongi knew he was doing it now. "It's blurry. No faces. But I can hear water running, and I feel..." He laughed, low and breathy, a sound far too intimate for a clinic. "Happy. Stupidly happy. It's distracting."
"The shower," Jimin said softly, before he could stop himself.
"Sorry?"
"The auditory component. Running water. It's common." It wasn't.
Yoongi watched him for a long moment, and a slow smirk tugged at one corner of his mouth. Even with Jimin scrubbed out of him, he still noticed everything. His gaze dropped to the desk, to the open chart and the row of pens lined up beside it.
"Four different colors," he said. "For one chart. Do you really need all those, or do you just enjoy making everything complicated?"
Heat climbed Jimin's neck. It wasn't a real blush, just a reflex his body hadn't unlearned yet. "I'll take that under advisement."
"I mean it. You seem too soft for a place this cold. And if you don't mind me saying, a little too pretty to spend your days digging through people's messy heads."
Jimin fought the urge to wince. A little too pretty. The procedure hadn’t helped Yoongi’s pick-up lines. And Jimin had married this man. On purpose.
"The science is very fulfilling."
"I'm sure it is." Yoongi nodded, unbothered, his dark eyes following Jimin's hands. "Maybe after you scrub this last bit out, I could take you for a drink. To celebrate my newfound clarity. You look like you carry too much on your shoulders."
Jimin's hand drifted to his collar, to the thin chain beneath it. He caught himself and turned the motion into straightening his lapel.
He'd been asked that question before. Twelve years ago, in the third-floor stacks of the university library, a grumpy, sleep-deprived stranger had leaned across a shared table and asked it about four pastel highlighters. He'd heard that voice over morning coffee for six years of marriage. Then he'd heard it less, and then not at all, and in April he had signed the papers so Yoongi could finally breathe.
Now here it was again, the same first line, fresh and unworn, aimed at a handsome stranger in a white coat. At his ex-husband.
"Let's get you into the chair, Yoongi-hyung."
The name slipped out, too tender. Yoongi's eyebrows rose, pleased. "Hyung already? That's promising." He settled into the headrest without another word. He trusted Jimin instantly, the way he always had, back when it was easy.
Jimin stepped close and fitted the sensors to his temples. His fingers knew the exact shape of that skull. They brushed the soft hair of Yoongi's neck, and for one unguarded second Yoongi leaned into the touch, the way he used to on the couch at midnight.
"Don't stop. That's... really nice." His voice dipped low, caught off guard by his own reaction. He let out a breath that sounded suspiciously like relief, then caught himself. "Sorry," Yoongi murmured, embarrassed. "Your hands are warm.
Jimin turned back to his monitor before his face could give him away. The memory surfaced as data, the one stubborn fragment his machines kept failing to pry loose:
Audio: water on tile.
Tactile: warm metal ring, damp palm.
Emotional certainty: 100%.
He didn't need the render. He had his own perfect copy.
He'd been twenty-four, mere weeks from his thesis defense, running on vending-machine coffee and panic. He'd stumbled into the shower at 7 a.m., and he had shampoo stinging his eyes when the knock came. Are you decent? Yoongi had called through the door. I'm in the shower, Yoongi. Obviously not. A long pause. Then the door cracked open and let in a draft of cold air, and Yoongi's pale hand came through the steam holding something small and silver. I was going to do this at dinner, Yoongi had grumbled, sounding terrified, but it's been in my pocket for weeks, and I can't. I can't bear one more minute without knowing.
Jimin had laughed and cried and said yes with soap running into his eyes. They'd joked about it for years: the most tragically unromantic, perfectly them proposal in history.
The cursor sat on Execute.
It was not the only button on the screen. Jimin had built this software from the ground up, and he knew every back door.
There was a checkbox: Flag: structurally anchored, removal contraindicated. One click and the procedure would stop. Yoongi would walk out into the world with a blur of running water and a happiness he couldn't explain. A piece of them would survive.
There was also an export function. Jimin clicked it. A dialog appeared: Save neural record to local drive? The filename field blinked, empty. His fingers shook as he typed us, and he stopped with his thumb over the Enter key.
Who would that copy be for?
He turned from the glowing screen to the man in the chair. Yoongi's eyes were closed. The pinched lines that had aged him over the last two years had smoothed into something peaceful. For the first time in a long time, Yoongi wasn't hurting.
Jimin thought about the consent form in the physical file. He had traced the handwriting more times than he could count. Most patients left the Reason for procedure field blank or wrote something clinical. Yoongi had filled it in by hand, in the cramped, slanted scrawl Jimin used to find on sticky notes stuck to his synthesizer:
I can’t bear the memories without you anymore.
Two lines above that, under Requested practitioner, in the same hand, he had written Park-seonsaengnim.
Jimin had rewritten the routing for nothing. Yoongi had already chosen him. Out of every specialist in the city, he had asked the one person he trusted most to help him set it down.
If Jimin kept the file, it would be for himself.
He deleted the filename one letter at a time. He closed the dialog. He left the checkbox empty.
"Seonsaengnim?" Yoongi murmured, eyes still closed, smiling faintly like a cat in a patch of sun. "We ready?"
"Ready." Jimin's voice didn't shake. "Just breathe normally."
"Make it clean. I want to start fresh."
Jimin pressed the button.
On the monitor, the certainty value began to fall. 100%. 91%. 74%. Jimin watched it the way you'd watch taillights disappear down a foggy road.
At 52%, Yoongi's lips moved. His voice was barely audible, fond and sleepy, and it came from a steamed-up bathroom years away.
"Are you decent?"
"No," Jimin whispered. "Obviously not."
In the chair, Yoongi's thumb went still against his bare ring finger.
Jimin pressed his own thumb to the base of his ring finger, where the skin was still a shade paler than the rest, and held it there.
He let out a long, quiet breath.
Yoongi's eyes fluttered open, lucid and bright. The sleepy, intimate warmth that had just been there was gone.
He blinked against the fluorescent lights and shifted his weight in the leather chair. "Park-seonsaengnim?" he asked, with a stranger's politeness. "Did it work?"
Jimin swallowed. He stepped closer, reaching out to unclip the sensors from Yoongi's temples. As his knuckles brushed the skin of Yoongi's jaw, Yoongi's hand came up. His fingers closed loosely around Jimin's wrist.
The grip was warm, heavy, and so familiar Jimin stopped breathing.
But a second later, Yoongi blinked. He looked down at his own fingers holding the doctor's wrist, his brow furrowing in mild confusion, as if he couldn't remember reaching. He let go quickly, dropping his arm to his side.
"Sorry," Yoongi muttered, a faint, puzzled heat touching the back of his neck. "Reflex, I guess. I'm a little disoriented. I just... felt like I was supposed to hold on."
"Perfectly normal, Min Yoongi-ssi," Jimin said gently, pinning his practiced smile into place as he pulled his hands back. "You're all clear."
Yoongi nodded and stood, pulling his phone from his pocket. The screen lit up, and his expression shifted immediately into that focused, working pinch Jimin knew in his bones. He shrugged on his jacket one-handed, his eyes scanning a message.
At the door, he paused and glanced back, with the look of a man trying to remember why he'd walked into a room. Jimin's heart lurched, stupid and hopeful, waiting for so, about that drink.
Yoongi's phone buzzed against his palm. He looked down, and whatever he'd been reaching for slipped away.
"Thanks for everything," he said, already halfway gone. "Have a good one."
The door clicked shut behind him.
Jimin pressed his palm to the leather. It was still warm, like steam off shower tile, or a ring held in a nervous, sweaty hand.
But now only one of them remembered the morning they decided to be a ‘we’.