#୨ৎ muse .ᐟ tbz

[ylangelegy]

some version of you ꩜ changmin x reader.

── .✦ 💌 reader uses she/her pronouns. includes: idol!changmin, reincarnation, soulmates, high school sweethearts, past lives, inspired by Goblin (TV), tbz ensemble. tw: mentions of death.

── .✦ 🚏 title is a reference to noah kahan's stick season. self-indulgent and inspired by a specific quote from Goblin: The Lonely and Great God! cross-posted from ao3.

── .✦ 📟 wc: 1,700+

When her friends take her to a The Boyz concert, she feels so inexplicably unwell the moment they step on stage. The nausea hits her with full force when her eyes land on the main dancer.

Before, when she was getting into the group, her heart would seize up at the sight of him. She never figured out why. But it was much more overwhelming now, unbearably so. 

She figures she just has to go to the bathroom. She’s breaking away from her friends, fighting through the crowd, when she looks over her shoulder and takes one more look towards the stage. The audience had broken into applause; the number was done and the boys were taking conservative sips of water. 

Their eyes meet.

She misses the look of recognition that passes his face, because her knees buckle and it all goes black. 

The concert screeches to a temporary halt as the medics usher out the poor girl that passed out. Later on, the boys talk about it backstage, mumbling things about crowd crush and dehydration. Changmin slips away to the bathroom where he splashes his face with water. 

He looks up in the mirror and sees himself in the school uniform of his past life. He blinks, and suddenly he’s back in the leather jacket of his present life. 

He never thought he’d find her. He had tried so hard to look for her, too, and all of it was useless. He had hoped and prayed that being part of a K-Pop group would make it easier for her to find her way to him. But not like this. Never like this.

He gets asked if he’s okay when he returns to everyone else. “I’m worried about the girl who fainted,” he answers. It’s a half-truth. He turns to their manager. “Can we find out who she is?” 

They tell him they’ll update him. “Please do,” he says, heart in his throat. The wait is the hardest part. Thankfully, he doesn’t have to wait much longer. 

Changmin insists that he can be the one to go to wherever she is, to make it easier for her. So they meet in some obscure cafe in her province, in Anseong. She can’t fathom why he’d go out of his way. She doesn’t know he’s traveled much farther in search of her. 

When she sees him, she feels the palpitations again. This can’t be normal, she thinks, but then he looks up from his coffee and the world goes quiet. 

It’s her, Changmin thinks. It’s really her. 

He always wondered what his first words would be to her after all the time and space. It turns out to be, “Please don’t faint this time.” 

She laughs, sits across from him. “I’ll try,” she says, and all Changmin can think is he’s home. He’s finally, finally home. 

There are archived newspaper articles and television reports about the incident that took their lives. The lives where they met, that is.

The one where he was Ji Changmin, class clown, no plans yet for college. She was the student council president with several scholarships to her name. 

Somehow, they made it work. Their relationship amused their peers, but Changmin was better because of it, Changmin was better for it. He was young, but he knew in his heart of hearts that he would marry this girl someday. And, by the looks of it, she thought the same. 

They had just decided to both aim for Yonsei University when the annual field trip happened, and the bus carrying their entire class careened off a cliff, and not a single soul aboard survived. 32 dead in Gyeongsang. 

Changmin and her were found side-by-side, their fingers intertwined. They had been sharing a pair of earphones just before the crash. She was half-asleep on his shoulder. It happened too suddenly, too fast for him to do anything but hold her hand. 

At the threshold of reincarnation, the two share a cup of tea with each other. 

They’re told that humans have four lives: A life of planting seeds, a life of watering the seeds, a life of harvesting, and a life of cherishing the harvests.

She has three more lives ahead of her. He has one left.

“Find me,” he begs. He doesn’t say, You are what I cherish. You are all I want. 

Her eyes sparkle with tears. She promises him, “I’ll find you.” 

When she goes ahead, he waits until his drink has gone cold. The Grim Reaper, taking pity on this forlorn boy, sneaks him the gift of memory. 

Ji Changmin is reborn in Cheongju-si. He knows the Grim Reaper meant well, but memory turns out to be more of a curse.

He spends half of his life avoiding buses and wondering where he’ll find her. 

It’s common knowledge that Changmin doesn’t need glasses. Fans find it endearing that his specs have no medical grade; sometimes even no lenses, just frames. 

Changmin the idol doesn’t need glasses, but the Changmin of Changnyeong Daeseong High School did. 

And so Changmin wore them on stage and in photos, in hopes that it would make him more familiar to her. If she ever saw a picture of him. If she ever looked him up.

Even when they reconnect, he cheats a bit by keeping them on around her, hoping it will jog her memory, if he looked exactly like the boy she once fell in love with. 

It gives her headaches and takes the wind out of her. Something inside of her screams every time they’re together, and she can never quite place why she’s so affected by him. 

On their fourth or so ‘date,’ she finally asks, “What are you doing here?” 

He’s booked and busy. He’s performing stages on music program broadcasts, preparing for a world tour. And yet. And yet here he is, sitting across from her in middle-of-nowhere Anseong, over 70 kilometers away from where he’s expected to be. 

Changmin shifts uncomfortably in his seat. “What do you mean?” 

“If you’re just here to check in on me because I passed out at that show—” 

“This—” He clears his throat and lowers his voice. “This has never been about that.” 

“Then what is this about, Q? What are you doing here?” 

He gives her a look, then, one that is inexplicably expectant and sad all at once. He looks like he wants to say something. He seems to decide against it at the last minute.

(In fact, all he wanted to say was that she should call him Changmin. Not Q. He didn't want to be Q, not to her.)

He settles on, “I like you. Isn’t that enough of a reason?”

It’s not.

She leaves first, then, refusing his offers to walk her home. The throbbing in her head subsides with each step away that she takes. Maybe this is for the best, she thinks to herself. Someone like Ji Changmin is bound to find someone else, someone better. 

Except he knows he won’t. Changmin gets himself so messed up that Sangyeon and Juyeon have to pry the bottles of soju out of his hands. They’re worried, they tell him. But they can’t help if they don’t know what’s going on. 

Changmin drunkenly blabbers on about reincarnation and the Grim Reaper, sufficiently spooking Chanhee and Sunwoo. They all eventually pick out the core of his issue: There’s a girl. There’s a girl who doesn’t like him back and he’s taking it hard. 

When they go on tour, they all try different approaches at helping Changmin heal. Sunwoo points out attractive fans. Sangyeon sits with Changmin and listens. None of it helps.

After the months-long trip overseas, Changmin gets over his fear of buses and shuttles straight to her. He had walked her home once or twice, so he knows which neighborhood to head for. He stands outside her gate for a couple of minutes before ringing the doorbell.

And when she emerges, wide-eyed with surprise, looking every bit as the girl he didn’t get enough time with, Changmin knows there is no someone else. There is no someone better. 

All he manages to say is, “Please.” What goes unsaid: I lost you once. I can’t bear to lose you again.

She’s staring at him like he’s insane. But then she sighs, steps aside, opens her door a little wider.

“Come in,” she says. “It’s cold outside.” 

It takes four months for her to be comfortable with him, and another six months for her to concede that she cares for him romantically. When she eventually tells him, he smiles so brightly that it almost hurts to look at him. 

The headaches never really go away. She brought them up to him, once, and he fell into contemplative silence before asking, “Do you want me to leave?” 

She thought about it for a moment. “No,” she decided. “I want you to stay.” 

Stay, he did. They go back and forth from Seoul and Anseong, though Changmin is keen on shouldering her expensive cab rides to his dorm instead of having her take the bus.

He likes sharing music with her and going on dates that are reminiscent of high school— afternoons in arcades, evenings along Han River. She finds it endearing; she indulges his every whim.

One day, she falls sick and he rearranges his plans to tend to her. He’s dabbing a damp handkerchief on her forehead when she reaches up and holds his wrist, her fingers pressing into his skin.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, panicked and worried. 

“Changmin,” she says in a voice that’s barely a gasp. 

“Yeah?” 

“Changmin.” 

He sees it, then. The recognition. The ghost of a memory. It might have been the delirium speaking, the illness taking over, but Changmin’s throat closes and he strokes her hair as he holds back tears. He’s not even sure if she’ll remember this in the morning, once the fever has passed, but it doesn't matter.

“Right. Hi. It’s me,” he stutters. His words fail him spectacularly.

She’s openly crying now. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she sobs. “I didn’t recognize you.”

“It’s okay. I didn’t think you ever would.” 

“You waited… For so long.” 

“And I’d do it again,” he says fiercely. “Hey, listen. I’d do it again. You found me. That’s what matters.” 

“I found you.” 

“You found me,” Changmin repeats.

In the distance, the radio is playing the song of some Western folk artist. And I'll dream each night of some version of you that I might not have, but I did not lose, the singer croons. 

Changmin is done dreaming. Changmin is done losing. 

“You found me,” he says, again. He presses a light kiss on her lips. Their first one in this lifetime.

She never has another headache again after that.