—Present life, year 2017—

I never told my mother.

It was a really close call, however, when I was sitting there in the dining room with my mother who was stubborn enough not to listen to her daughter, and Taehyung who was completely speechless and as terribly clueless as I was. But I managed to convince her enough to come with me to the hospital by the end of the week. Although I had to make a sacrifice of my own—

"I need to get a follow-up check myself sometime this year, don't I? I know it's too early for that, but I feel like I need one already before finals come up. Come with me, Mom. Let's take it together."

After a long series of convincing, whining, pleading, and heaps of lies about my health problem—which I was not having, by the way, but there was no need for her to know that—and making her worry about our health conditions, she finally gave in. Taehyung was there with us while my mother and I went through a whole set of procedures at the hospital. We both went through blood tests and all the lab tests we needed to take, all the things that involved being poked by needles and other unknown devices to take samples of our bodies, and a few X-ray photos.

Taehyung was always there as our driver and escort, while Kara came by to join us once and a while as a support. My father was never there.

Within the second week, we found out that while I was doing perfectly fine—so far, at least—they found that my mother's body held secrets of its own.

A dormant tumour.

It was found located on her left breast, pressing down her heart as if it belonged there like any other organs inside her body. Nobody knew when it had first come to exist, or how it had started to grow before it stopped at its current state. But the doctors had told us that if we ever had left it as it is, then it would mutate into a more active cell one day without our knowledge. As in, actively growing and giving her a life-threatening condition in the future.

One that—according to the faint memory I had—would start growing inside her, not only on the level of pain but also by size, many years after due to stress and thanks to a few medications which she took after getting a different kind of illness. We still had time to prepare for the latter one. But hopefully, after finding out about this so early in time, we could stop that one from happening too.

One month later, we had a surgery held to remove the mass, along with any suspicious tissue they had found surrounding it. She had to stay at the hospital during her recovery for the next two weeks. And it was a relief for me that I was having a midterm break that I was able to stand by and nurse her, making sure that she would never have to endure it all on her own.

I never cared about having to sleep on the floor at night if I had to, just because she wanted me close by her bed. I was happy that I had a chance to be close to her. It felt somewhat surreal to be by her side all the time, to be able to hold her hands when she felt pain, to listen to her talk at night before she fell asleep, to help her eat—just like how she did when she nursed me back to health when I was fighting my battles. It felt like I had gained something, as if there was a void to be filled when I had a chance to experience all the things that I was surely missing out on at my past life.

I was taking a break from watching over my mom at the public sitting outside of the hospital, where most of the nurses and EMTs would be lounging on their break. None of these people concerned me, however, when I had my full attention on the sandwich in my hands that I was hungrily munching over. The strong scent of mustard and pickles which would have been distasteful to some had become a salivating meal to me, a good change after having my senses and taste buds assaulted by the strong scents of disinfectants and antibiotics for the past twelve hours.

That was where Taehyung found me when he came. And I did not even have to lift my face to see him wince at the sight of me taking a giant bite of my pickled sandwich.

"What the hell are you eating?" he scolded me with an incredulous look on his face.

His facial expression nearly made me laugh, but I opted to hold it back and looked up with a feigned innocence instead and said, "Beef brisket sandwich with extra pickles and mustard. Want some? I also have a tuna sandwich if you want that one."

Taehyung merely scrunched his nose in disgust. "No, and no. I thought you hated pickles."

"Cue the past tense," I told him with a chuckle and then nodded at him so he could take a seat next to me. "That was before I remember how bland hospital food tastes like."

"Hospital food?" He frowned. "What are you doing eating hospital food?"

I shrugged and waited until I swallowed the last bit of food I had just eaten before I spoke, "Mom refuses to finish her daily meal, so I always have to eat her leftovers. That's actually why I got these sandwiches. Kara must have known that Mom would do that and what kind of suffering our taste buds are going through, so she came in with a huge container box filled with these sandwiches for us. She gave some for me and kicked me out of the room so she could take over nursing Mom while making sure she eats."

Taehyung leaned back while I finished my late lunch, and we both ended up sitting back on that bench looking up the sky. The commotion around us kept going as we fell silent. Until Taehyung spoke, "How are things with Kara around?"

"Okay, I guess—" I lingered, knowing that technically, things were going as they were in the past that I remembered, and everything that was supposed to happen had not yet started to appear. "She's still my Mom's best friend and my favourite, loving aunt. She has never met up with my Dad whether it was at the house or the hospital since they are never at the same place at the same time. It's mostly impossible for them to since Kara would never have any reason to step foot in our house when Mom is not around."

"And you made sure of that," he said, more like giving a statement, a conviction at best. And I merely answer with a quick nod. "That's good."

He looked away, not bothering to look over to me when he asked me, "Do you think you can salvage your parents' marriage this way?"

"I don't think so," I answered him grimly. "If there is one thing in this life I could never change, it would be my Dad," I said, stopping to exhale a deep breath. "But at least—this way, neither of us would lose Kara. And neither Kara or I would lose Mom."

Taehyung looped his arm around my shoulder and pulled me close, gently kissing my temple as he saw me nearly tearing up at the thought of salvaging my mother's old friendship and making sure that she would never be lonely. No matter what would happen to us in the future.

"Everybody deserves a second chance. And you did all you could to make sure of that," he muttered softly. "Now, let me have a taste of that tuna sandwich."

After two weeks of treatment, they allowed my mother to return home. Luckily, it was the same time when I was supposed to return to college, so there was no need for me to worry about having to leave my mother in the hands of foreigners down in the hospitals and I was able to leave with relief, knowing that my mother would be resting at home. My father had been more attentive to my mother since she was starting to get better, and had promised to take care of her while I was away.

I was still worried about leaving, but Mom kept telling me that she would always let me know if anything would happen at home. We had made promises of not keeping secrets from each other, another one that I knew as my past regret.

It was finally my last night back home. It was terribly late when I retreated into my bedroom. The whole day had been long and exhausting, but there was a good feeling inside my chest when I prepared myself to sleep.

The feeling went away, however, the minute I laid myself down on my bed. I looked up to the ceiling, enjoying the silence that was in my room. The only lights I had was the small night lamp next to the bed and the faint moonlight slipping through the curtains, but it was bright enough for me. Even brighter than what I knew I would be facing to once I would fall asleep.

It took me a long time before I finally fell deep into slumber. And I already knew what I was going to see next the minute I closed my eyes and let myself being drifted away into the dark.

There was no telling how often I have had this dream, or when it started. But after repeatedly getting one every night that I slept, I had even expected to find myself in it before I realised I was actually dreaming about it.

It always started the same way.

Darkness was the first thing I saw. I would always be surrounded by nothing but void. But the emptiness I felt was not only there where I found myself standing at. It was also there inside my heart, as if I was looking deep inside me.

The next thing I would see was light. One light sparkling from far away, calling me not with its voice but with a feeling. There would always be a feeling of love, longing, despair, and sometimes I would hear a faint cry coming from its source.

Then each time I wanted to reach out to it, another light would emerge from the darkness, somewhere on the opposite side where it would force me to leave the first in order to get to the second. This sparkle of light would be further away, as faint as the smallest star in a clear, dark sky, and the journey towards it would be much harder than the first. But it would always try its best to summon me closer, offering me warmth and security in its wake. My heart would be drawn to it, even if the pull was never as strong as the first and even if I kept being pulled back each time I tried to reach for it.

The cry from the other side would start to sound much louder the more I tried, and my legs would feel much heavier whenever I forced myself to keep moving forward. The darkness around me started to feel like a giant quicksand, pulling me down under and swallowing me whole. A faint whisper came out of the light as it withered away into the dark—

"Find me," the light said to me. "Come find me." And then it disappeared before I ever had any chance to answer or call its name.

The dream would usually stop there. Leaving me in the dark until I was pulled to wake. But the more it came to me when I slept, the longer it started to last before I would wake up. Sometimes all I would get was voices, whispers of names and familiar voices calling my name. Other times, I would start seeing images, sequences of what appeared to be parts of my life came to me like pictures or short movies, faint memories that I could recall as I woke up the next day. Despite whether they were my past, present, or future, I could never tell.

This time, for the first time after the last time I had it, after those images and voices started to fade, the darkness pulled me even stronger than before, so strong that I started to fall. I could not scream, or cry, or even question what was happening, when all I could see was emptiness and nothing to feel when I descend further into the dark.

And right the moment everything was about to halt, a different voice rumbled from within me, so deep that my whole body shivered when it spoke—

"Choose!"

The voice repeated itself over and over again, louder and more demanding each time it echoed. But there was nothing I could say or do as I kept falling into the bottomless void.

—First life. Jung Family's Residence, year 2027—

"Choose."

The voice echoed in my head, rumbling through the dark space around me that I could feel as if my whole body would fall apart.

"Choose!"

"I don't know what I'm supposed to be choosing from!" I tried to speak, but my words sounded muffled, as if I was in an airtight space or that I was covered in an invisible cloak that hindered me from making a noise. Nothing was ever making sense anymore, and I had no idea what this voice—whoever they were—wanted from me.

"Make a choice," it said. The voice echoed, bouncing from one spot to another, as if it was coming from everywhere around me even if I could not see through the dark and find its source.

"Of what?" I tried to speak again, sounding more like I was underwater this time as my voice came out just as muffled as before. "I don't understand," I continued, my voice sounded more like a whimper as I was feeling desperate and lost. "What do I choose from?"

But there was no answer. The voice disappeared without ever giving me any clue of what I needed to know. And I could only give in when I suddenly lost my footing and I started to fall.

I woke up with a start, breathing heavily as if I had just finished running for my life. Sweat was covering all over my body. My head was spinning so intensely that it took me a while to recover and become more aware of my surroundings.

It took a long time of controlling my breath and waiting until my heartbeat had settled down before I finally remembered that I was sleeping in my old bedroom. My childhood bedroom. On the bed that I used back when I was still in school.

I laughed bitterly when a random thought came to me, when I suddenly imagined waking up back in time, that my old bedroom would magically serve as a time capsule to bring me back to the past. Ridiculous, I laughed at myself, before I reminded myself that it was time to face my real life once again. Enough dreaming already, we should get the day started and going.

"You okay there?"

I raised my head when I heard my brother's voice, finding him standing in my doorway with a frown on his face and a tray of breakfast in his hands.

"Yeah," I said, shaking my head while pushing myself up to sit with pillows cushioning my back. "I'm fine. Just had a weird dream. A long, weird dream."

"Want to talk about it?" he asked me as he placed the tray on the bedside table.

"Perhaps later after I freshen up a bit. Who made breakfast?"

"Kara," Hoseok said with a smile. "She insisted that I should take this here instead of forcing you to go down for breakfast. We thought that you deserve to sleep in after last night."

I gnawed at my lips when I pictured us having breakfast together like how we used to. "Is Dad down there?"

Hoseok nodded. "He's having breakfast with Kara." He stopped and contemplated for a moment. "You're not thinking about going downstairs, right? I mean, I won't stop you, but—"

"No," I shook my head, deciding that I was too exhausted to face the aftermath of last night's drama, and it was too early for me to make an appearance either way. "Leave the breakfast here. I'll come down after I shower."

"Okay then." He leaned down to press his lips on my temple. "I should go back downstairs. Kara promised me an extra pancake as a reward for bringing this up. I'll be helping Dad to find Mom's old files, so at least now we know that he really is still keeping them here in the house. I'll come back up after we got it. We'll talk later, okay?"

I only nodded and watched his back as he left the bedroom. Glancing at my breakfast, the sight of the fresh fruits, pancakes and strip bacon made my stomach rumble, and my heart filled with gratitude. But I decided that it would be best to shower before I even dared to touch it when I noticed how my shirt was clinging to my sweaty chest. I had always hated it the most when it comes to eating while sweating buckets. Not to mention that I was still slightly shivering to the memory of the dream I had from my restless sleep.

Perhaps a cold, refreshing shower would help me wake up and stop thinking of nonsense, I told myself as I walked up to my bathroom.

"It's always the same every time, even though the details change a lot whenever I have them."

It was after lunch hour when I sat with Hoseok at the back porch. Our father had left the house to work while Kara had to do some errands after mealtime was over, giving us a few extra hours of privacy. We had made ourselves a special concoction of sangria as we sat there side by side, watching the drying green grass at the back of our house, as I told him about the dreams I kept having.

"What is it about?" Hoseok asked me. He had been curious since this morning, ever since he found me waking up in a shock and all drenched with my own sweat. Although there was no doubt in my mind that he had probably noticed about my nightmares while I was staying in his penthouse, since I would always end up crying or screaming when I had them the same way I did back in the hospital. It was only because he had caught me in the middle of recovering that he had a reason to question me about it.

I hesitated that I took my time, calmly drinking my cold drink before I finally said something. "It was the fall. In my dream, I was back to that night of my accident. It always starts with me running away from Jungkook. We were in a long, dark hallway that seems like it has no end. And it was just the two of us, no party or college kids around, and the only sound I could hear was him calling my name." I stopped the minute I could see Jungkook's face inside my head, how his face glowed between the darkness that was there around us, how he was the only thing I could see as the walls and everything else behind us disappear to the dark as we ran further.

Hoseok said nothing, letting me take my time to speak. "The stairs were waiting for us at the end of the hallway. In my dream, I stop to face him, to confront him. And instead of me pushing him away, he was the one to push me off the landing." My breath started to shake, and so did my whole body that Hoseok reached out to me and wrapped his arm around my shoulder to pull me close to his chest. I felt his palm rubbing my back, calming me down. When I felt his shirt dampening, I finally noticed that I was crying. But I could not stop. "The fall seems so far, and it always seems like it will never stop. His face is always the last thing I see, no matter how much further I was falling away, his face would always still be clear. He is always there, at the top of the stairs looking down on me as I keep falling, and I would still see his face in my head so clearly until I wake up.

"It always stays the same until that very point," I continued when Hoseok said nothing, despite how I could feel him stiffening beside me. "It changes gradually right after. Sometimes, it's followed by him reaching down to pull me up back to him, his eyes would be filled with this look of fear or sometimes he would cry with tears flowing down his face, while other times he would smile as he watches me fall. Many times, I could hear his voice, calling for me, screaming. Lately, the voice changes into one that I don't recognise."

"A voice?"

I nodded. "The voices I hear has also been changing. It started as whispering noises when it first came to me, then it started getting clearer and clearer that I have been able to hear what they are saying lately," I told him as the voice I last heard from the morning echoed in my head. "It speaks to me, either telling me things like—'wake up', 'come closer', or telling me all the things I had experience in the past, reminding me of all the pain. Lately, its been asking me what I want most, asking for my wishes, telling me that I should make a choice—"

"Of what?" Hoseok questioned me when I lingered, when I shuddered as I could hear the foreign voice in my head—

"Choose!"

I merely laughed it off as I brushed the unsettling knot in my chest away. "I have no idea. It's always a bunch of nonsense, anyway, so I don't think about it so much. Sometimes, I even forget what happens after I fall. I just remember falling, remember his face, and that's all I could think of even after many hours later."

"How long has this been going on? Don't tell me that it's—" he stopped. "The part when you dream of falling, I mean. Has it been going on since then?"

I shook my head and smiled at him. "No, not that long," I told him. "No, it didn't start until, I don't know—a year? Probably less? Either it started when I first started feeling unwell or once I felt like Jungkook and I were growing distant. I can't exactly remember. But it has gotten much clearer after I found out I was sick, I believe."

"You took therapies to heal from the trauma, remember? It's been long since you went through them, haven't you?" he asked, and I only answered him with a nod. It had been a long time since I went through all the therapies that were supposed to help me cope with my loss, with the traumatic event of my fall, that I have forgotten what it was like when I had to endure it back then. "Perhaps the trauma returned to you after those hospital visits?"

"It might be." I shrugged. "I never thought of it that way, actually. Normally, I just look at it as a reminder, that it was my deep consciousness telling me that my life has been falling apart ever since then. That the clues have been there to warn me about all the pain waiting to happen but I kept trying to ignore it. Or perhaps I have never truly recovered from the trauma or my past heartbreak at all. Perhaps I have only been blocking all the memory away to make myself believe that I was alright. That my life has been good."

Hoseok squeezed me close to his chest and whispered. "Your life will be good. We have all the time we need in our hands to make things better."

As much as I wanted to believe him, as much as I wanted to hope, there was a nagging thought lingering at the back of my mind that kept telling me how things would only keep repeating itself all over again. "Do we?" I asked him then. "Does time really on our side?"

Hoseok never said anything. And I never got my answer to my own question.