Chapter Text
Ga-yeong had always known that the time moved too fast for some people.
She had learned it the hard way, watching life slip through her fingers like grains of sand. Yet, for her, time had a peculiar delicacy— a stretchiness only she could feel, a rhythm that seemed to bend at her touch.
It all began on the day Ji-hoon died. The only other Korean girl in their high school, her friend.
She remembered it with unflinching clarity: the screech of tires against asphalt, the sudden flash of metal, the abrupt, impossible silence that followed. They were sixteen. Barely grown, and yet, in the instant the world ended for her, for her, it began. One heartbeat later, she was back. The intersection was empty. The car hadn’t arrived yet. Her hands shook uncontrollably, the taste of iron heavy on her tongue, and a sharp point of pain pressed against her temples: power always came at a price.
She could move through time. She could rewrite endings. But each change left her weaker; her nose bled, her mind screamed against the unnatural rhythm of the universe.
Years passed.
She learned to hide it, to control it, to use it only for small mercies: stopping a fall, rescuing a stranger from a burning building, saying something different in a fleeting conversation.
It had been exactly thirteen years since she last saw her father, and ten years since a stranger handed her money and told her that he was dead.
He was gone, and she had grown. She had become a woman, studying law at a prestigious university to help people in a world that had shown her its cruelty. Though she had money, she never let herself think she could live like the other wealthy.
What was the point of money if it could never bring her father back?
How could she ever explain what had happened? The only things left of him were the money, a strange box covered in symbols she couldn’t decipher, and a tracksuit with the number 456 stitched on it. Her father had been tangled in something dangerous. Something dark. Something that got him killed.
And yet… one thought haunted her relentlessly. If she could turn back time for small things, could she do it for him?
For her father. The man who had given everything for her. The man she had left behind, believing that his absence would keep her safe while he carried the burden alone.
That night, in her small UCLA dorm room, she pressed her palms against her eyes. She felt the pulse of the past beneath her fingertips, a thin, delicate thread of possibilities.
She whispered his name. And the world shuddered.
Time opened like a wound. Light and shadow collided, and Ga-yeong found herself suspended between heartbeats, in a space without scent, sound, or shape—but one that knew her.
And there, in that floating, impossible silence, stood the girl she had once been, wide-eyed and curious, staring back.
“I… I think I can save him,” she said, her voice trembling with tentative hope.
Her younger self tilted her head, eyes wary yet shining with fragile trust. “But… what if we break everything?” Ga-yeong swallowed hard.
She didn’t know. She didn’t know how far back she could go, or what the cost would be.
She knew only one thing: she could not live in a world where he no longer existed.
And when they reached for each other, the fragile boundary between past and future shattered. One body remained, and the world waited—hungry, relentless, and unforgiving.
Ga-yeong fell. And as she did, the nightmare she had once only watched unfold before her eyes became her reality.
The city lights blurred into streaks of color, the air thickened with the scent of rain and asphalt. The roar of traffic grew louder, each sound magnified in the warped fabric of time. She could feel the moments stretching, twisting, and threatening to snap around her.
Every heartbeat was a hammer against her chest, a reminder that altering fate came with consequences she had yet to understand.
And in that dizzying descent, a single thought anchored her: she would not let him die again.