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igotbulletproof-insomnia · 5 months

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Time Lord X TXT

This is basically me imagining if Hueningkai as a Time Lord, with Taehyun, Beomgyu, Yeonjun, and Soobin as his companions. A bit of crack treated seriously, if you will. As such this is written more as a summary/retelling, kind of scene-by-scene. I might write more. I might not. We’ll see.

So, we start with Taehyun and a slightly older male; he looks to be in his late twenties or early thirties. The two of them enter what looks like a medbay, and Taehyun is panicking. His demeanor is calm, he’s asking questions and offering solutions, but his hands are shaking and his words are coated in a thin layer of defeat. The older man is dying, and Taehyun can’t save him. But the older man smiles, bittersweet, and comforts Taehyun. He gives a brief explanation of regeneration, reassuring his friend that he’ll be the same person, just different. And then his skin is glowing, his features are morphing, and he’s changing in front of Taehyun’s eyes.

Now, we meet Yeonjun. He’s checking his socials, sharing his latest Youtube upload. He’s a mildly successful influencer with a sizeable following, but he doesn’t make enough money to live off of the internet alone. Accounts updated, Yeonjun checks the kitchen for food. His cousin, Beomgyu lays across the sofa, also scrolling social media. He whines about a friend of his who hasn’t had much time for him this semester. They shared almost all of their classes together, but it seemed like he just couldn’t be bothered to spend his free time together. Yeonjun listens while checking the cabinet and fridge. They’re all empty save for some spices and a nearly expired bottle of gochujang. He checks his bank account to see a few dollars, enough to ramen for the next few days until his ad revenue arrives.

On his way to the convenience store, a kid falls onto him. He’s giant, an almost stocky build and just as tall as Yeonjun, but a baby face, so it’s hard to place his age. Yeonjun thinks it’s safe to assume they’re in the same age group. So the kid seems to have passed out, which is probably why he crashed into Yeonjun. Yeonjun tries to wake him up, but he’s unresponsive. Yeonjun doesn’t exactly have money to pay for a cab right now, so he puts the kid on his back, buys a few fever tablets and enough ramen to last him and his cousins for the night, and takes the kid home.

Yeonjun passes by Taehyun, returning from the local pharmacy with an assortment of flu medicines and fever reducers. He doesn't know what he’s doing, is just getting off the phone with his mother, but he’s determined to nurse his Time Lord friend, Kai, back to health. He’s feeling confident about this task until he approaches the TARDIS, parked around the corner from a convenience store, to find the door open. Running inside, Taehyun finds the medbay is empty. He asks the ship to run a scan, hoping Kai has just wandered off somewhere else inside. Unfortunately for him, he gets a CCTV replay of Kai wandering out of the TARDIS, dazed and feverish.

Back home, Yeonjun unceremoniously drops the kid he found off onto the sofa. It’s late afternoon, going into early evening, so he calls his Jin-hyung and asks if he needs another delivery boy for the night. He starts to boil water for his ramen and agrees to come into the restaurant within the next hour. Soobin comes home and asks about the kid on his sofa. Immediately, he takes responsibility for his health, grabbing a wet towel to keep on his forehead and an icepack from the freezer. He tries to coax him awake to drink water; the kid becomes aware enough to not choke, but he’s still half asleep and can’t answer any questions. Yeonjun takes the opportunity to ask Soobin to watch over the kid while he goes to work. They talk about finances and bills for a moment, just communicating so that they’re on the same page and no one takes on a responsibility someone else already claimed.

Here, we cut to Beomgyu leaving a cafe with his friend, Jimin. The two of them say their goodbyes before he sees Taehyun, looking frustrated and lost. Taehyun is out searching for Kai, following a seldom-used sonic tool the Time Lord doesn’t normally bother with. He’s trying to use the setting to find a non-human/non-earthling, and, well, it’s working too well, if not efficiently. So the two of them continue tracking down what amounts to every intelligent, non-human life form within a certain radius, and it keeps leading them to every alien except for Kai. It’s chaotic, but fun. It’s clear the two of them have missed spending time together.

Yeonjun has been running deliveries for a while now. He drops an order off with a gruff looking man and picks up the returned dishes from the floor in front of the apartment door. In the process, he finds what looks like a small stuffed toy with a keyring around its wrist. He knocks on the door and asks the man inside if it belongs to him and receives a blank look in response. It was found between the dishes and the wall, so if the man won’t claim it, Yeonjun decides that he will. He grins at the cute trinket and attaches it to his own keyring, then clips the set to his belt. As he bikes off, the little bear seems to sigh with relief.

Taehyun and Beomgyu keep up their search for another hour or two. It’s getting darker and the aliens they’re running into are beginning to seem more and more threatening. They call it quits just when they run into a small group of aliens discussing a hostage and ransom situation they’ve set up, and how some human has gone and helped the being escape. The aliens are big, burly, humanoid and pissed, planning to sell said human on an intergalactic black market for interfering. Taehyun believes this is the lead they need to continue chasing, Kai’s name is written all over this scheme. However, it’s late and Beomgyu insists they go home to sleep. He’s tired and it won’t be easy to keep their wits if they’re falling asleep on themselves, even the aliens are retiring for the night. Reluctantly, Taehyun agrees, only because he interrupts his own argument with a yawn.

At home, the kid on the sofa is still asleep. Beomgyu startles at the sight, but ultimately shrugs off his hyungs’ antics. He checks his messages as he prepares for bed, and for once there’s a message from Taehyun, saying thanks for his help and setting a meeting time and place for their adventure in the morning. Beomgyu is giddy with the prospect of playing with his friend again in the morning. Yeonjun comes into the apartment soon after and checks on the kid, changing the cold towel on his forehead and exchanging the icepack under his back. Yeonjun shows off the little plush he found, and it’s noticeable to the audience that it’s posed differently from before. We get the sense that there is more to this little trinket than Yeonjun has picked up on, but before we can think too much more on that, we enter a new day. The keychain swings on Yeonjun’s belt once again, as he enters an older classmate’s studio.

Taehyung is a graduate fashion design student, but a senior undergrad for photography. Yeonjun often works as a model and “living doll” for this hyung when he has projects coming due, and today is no different. The two of them muse over some design sketches, and Yeonjun asks for feedback on his end-of-semester project. Yeonjun has a few outfit changes, modeling both “feminine” and “masculine” looks for Taehyung.

Meanwhile, Taehyun and Beomgyu meet at the apartment building where they overheard the suspicious conversation. Taehyun adjusts his tool to follow their biometric signature specifically. The aliens aren’t too far ahead, seeming to have just begun their day. In the daylight, their skin is a very pale orange, almost like someone with a weird tan, and their faces are reminiscent of a pug. Their clothes aren’t particularly strange, but seem almost pirate-like, the way the pants are baggy, the blouses billowy, and the jackets almost oversized. While they walk, Beomgyu asks Taehyun what happened to him over the past semester. They clearly still get along, and neither of them seem to hold any grudges, so why did they drift apart? Taehyun admits that he met a new friend, an alien who used a spaceship and time machine to take him on interesting adventures. Slowly, he just drifted away from his old friends and towards the alien. He stopped thinking about the few friends that he did have and gravitated towards his new friend. He didn’t realize he was hurting anyone when he pulled away. Beomgyu isn’t sure how to accept this explanation. On the one hand, it was all very exciting, so he understood Taehyun, but on the other hand… he was just told that he wasn’t supposed to care that Taehyun had all but disappeared from his life, that Taehyun didn’t find him interesting enough to keep his attention. The idea makes him want to punch his friend in his perfect nose, but before he can verbally express his frustration, Beomgyu realizes the aliens they followed seem to be zeroing in on one of the art buildings, the one Yeonjun is now exiting. Panicking, Beomgyu makes a split decision to distract the aliens from his cousin, drawing the attention to himself and Taehyun instead.

Chaos follows. Beomgyu is naturally loud and endearingly obnoxious, but he’s really making a nuisance of himself, the way he shouts insults and runs circles around the tan aliens. He tries to tackle one and whines about a bruise before running off, barely dodging a gold bangle and chain it tried to place on him. Yeonjun calls Beomgyu’s phone, warning him not to get himself killed playing too many games. Beomgyu claims he’s just acting for a videography student’s project. Taehyun laughs at the explanation and wonders why he didn’t just invite his best friend along on his adventures instead of avoiding him. The two of them manage to distract the aliens just long enough to lose sight of Yeonjun, which must have been Beomgyu’s plan all along, because when the aliens get bored and approach the fashion school, he lets them.

Yeonjun vlogs on his way home. He doesn’t do much, just records a conclusion to his day, having taken video of his time with Taehyung. He’s been recording the creation of his final project over the semester, hoping it might be a good video for the algorithm. His fashion and vlog videos seem to do pretty well. With the project on his mind, Yeonjun visits a fabric store to browse and maybe have some idea of what will be available when he’s ready to start. He attends an early afternoon class and bums lunch off of one of his friends. Across town, Yeonjun attends Hoseok’s dance class with Jungkook, another senior from school, and one of Taehyung’s photography classmates. All the while, the little bear doesn’t do a whole lot through the day, just peers curiously at the world around him, sneaks a bit of food from Yeonjun’s friends, and bounces along to the music during dance class.

Taehyun and Beomgyu feel like they’re running a wild goose chase across their corner of Seoul. The aliens don’t seem to have noticed their tail, but Taehyun is starting to feel a little hopeless. He should have been led to Kai by now, for sure. And yeah, this whole lost hostage situation feels like it’s worth his time, but what power does he have, really? He can’t accomplish anything without Kai. He doesn’t have the knowledge or the cleverness that his alien friend does when it comes to these sorts of things. When Taehyun expresses this, the two taking a small break for a late lunch of local street food, Beomgyu argues that he’s just not used to doing things on his own yet. He was clever enough to find a tool to track down non-humans, he knew enough to decide these aliens will lead him to Kai, so Taehyun will figure out how to save his friend when the time comes.

At the end of the day, Yeonjun returns home. Soobin has been taking care of the kid throughout the day and reports that there hasn’t been much of a change in his condition. The fever seems close to breaking, but he hasn’t woken for much more than a few sips of water every hour, and even then the kid barely makes the effort before passing out again. Yeonjun thanks his cousin and takes a shower. He checks social media again, uploads a few of the selfies he’s taken throughout the day, as well as a clip of the choreography he learned in class. He’s interacting with his followers when his front door bursts open and a trio of big, burly aliens snatch him up. They attach a cuff on his wrist and he goes stiff, unable to move. They find his keyset and retrieve the teddy bear trinket. One of them notices Kai and sniffs at him. “The Time Lord will bring us a hefty price too.”

When Taehyun and Beomgyu track our villains to the apartment building, Beomgyu is dismayed to see Yeonjun being dragged like a doll behind the big burly aliens, while Taehyun focuses on Kai, passed out in their arms. Beomgyu immediately runs inside to check on Soobin, worried he might have been caught in the crossfire of whatever happened in the apartment. Taehyun is torn between following Beomgyu into the apartment and rescuing Kai, but he still has no plan and feels better with Beomgyu by his side. He can always track down the aliens later, they have to be on this planet for a reason. Inside, they find Soobin is safe, napping in his bed through whatever altercation took place. Beomgyu is relieved, but overwhelmed -- Yeonjun has been kidnapped, the kid they were nursing is apparently a centuries old “traveler.” He takes a moment to scream into a pillow and sort his thoughts out, then decides to rescue his cousin. They gather a few things at the house, dense items that can serve as blunt force weapons, portable cell phone chargers in case of intergalactic travel, Yeonjun’s camera to record what happens, just in case things go south. Catching on, Taehyun wraps his hands with bandages, fingers sporting half of Yeonjun’s large ring collection. He doesn’t know what he’ll be able to do, knows that Kai likes to solve things non-violently when possible, but Taehyun is a squishy human who can’t regenerate, so if it’s a matter of using his fists or losing his life, he was going to make sure his fists hurt. Beomgyu locates his old boy scouts pocket knife. It was a trinket he packed by chance, had hardly used it beyond cutting open packages, but those alien guys are huge and he wasn’t above killing for his family. He just hoped it wouldn’t actually come to that.

Taehyun’s sonic tool leads the pair to another apartment building, one we recognise to be where Yeonjun found the small teddy bear being. They climb the stairs to the top floor, the previously bright white light dimming to a fuzzy soft yellow color. Taehyun stops at the top to determine a plan, and the pair argue; Beomgyu is more inclined to burst in and see what happens, while Taehyun prefers to have ideas prepared. However, when Beomgyu hears something like an initialization process, he shoves open the door -- heavier than it looks -- and finds himself in what seems to be a spaceship of sorts, not a hallway they expected. The room is dark and looks like a storage hull of sorts. Taehyun recognizes the various stages of aerial departure over the loudspeakers and panics. They have a lot less time to locate Kai and Yeonjun than they expected, less than five minutes if Taehyun remembers the sequence correctly.

So the pair run through the ship, doing their best to sneak around, but valuing speed over stealth. It doesn’t take terribly long to find the hostages -- a cell full with several species of beings stiff and standing like dolls, while Kai continues sleeping. Taehyun gives the sonic device to Beomgyu, who struggles to find the correct setting to unlock the ring keeping Yeonjun paralyzed. Taehyun kneels beside Kai, marveling at how young and small he looks now. The two of them could be classmates. He struggles to pull Kai onto his back. Kai might be younger and smaller now, but he’s still built solid. The speakers have announced a sixty-second countdown by the time Beomgyu finds the right setting and begins unlocking everyone’s cuffs. It’s at this point when Kai blinks, awake for the moment to praise Taehyun on a job well done. “Just make sure everyone gets home,” he says, then passes back out. Taehyun immediately feels the pressure of completing such a large task. There are at least ten other people here, not including his friends, and the spaceship might use an operating system Taehyun is familiar with, but he doesn’t know the ship model or the controls, let alone how to drive. Then there’s the group of aliens holding them hostage in the first place and Taehyun doesn’t even know how many there are! Sure, he came prepared for a fight, but he was only prepared to fight for as long as it took to get his friends and get back to the TARDIS. Which was also not an option because Taehyun for sure couldn’t steer that fancy ship if he asked it nicely.

“What do I even do?”

“There’s only five of them,” Yeonjun says.

“And if I free everyone, we’ll have a whole bunch of these things,” Beomgyu holds up Yeonjun’s ring. “Let’s cuff them.” He makes quick work of the rest of the hostages’ cuffs, collecting them between himself and Yeonjun

“Does anyone know what model ship this is?” Taehyun asks the group at large. “If we incapacitate those guys, could you steer yourselves home?”

“They stole this ship from me in the first place,” says someone with three pairs of eyes stacked atop one another and a vicious smile. “If you get me my ship back I’ll make sure everyone here gets home.”

Getting the cuffs on the kidnappers is easy, but not quick. The engines are at full roar and the countdown reaches ten before the last cuff is locked around a muscled arm and the ship secured. The original pilot aborts take off before thanking the boys for their help. They have their deputy -- someone called Fern with a long scar across their face -- take the thieves to the prison cells. The boys watch Fern press a couple of buttons on the cuffs, and the orange aliens shrink down to the size of a child’s “life-size” doll. Beomgyu blinks, excited at the display while it hits Yeonjun that his adorable keychain had never been a toy in the first place. Beomgyu vows to buy a new one for his cousin, but Yeonjun rejects the idea, heart broken and a little distrustful. What if it’s just another alien? Beomgyu looks down at his keyring, considering, but dismisses the idea. How likely would that happen twice?

So the three of them walk home, Kai still asleep on Taehyun’s back. It’s evening now, late enough that Taehyun might as well spend the night with them. Taehyun offers to buy takeout in return, and so the four of them are sitting on the apartment floor when Kai finally stretches and sits up, groaning over his good sleep. And Taehyun sits there staring because… Kai is adorable. He hadn’t been cute before -- the previous, middle-aged version of him and been stoic but kind, the Remus Lupin type if Taehyun could compare it to anyone. But this kid sat, drowning in his old clothes, pouting at having woken up. Even his pronunciation was cute. Taehyun couldn’t help the grin that found its place on his face.

“You,” he teases, “are a lot of trouble, do you know that?”

Kai blinks at him. “Oh. Was I?”

The two bicker until Kai drags the others into their fight.

“You found him,” Kai points vaguely in the direction of the cousins, “and he knew where I was!”

“I didn’t know who you were!” exclaims Beomgyu.

“Shhh,” Kai holds a finger up, only to get distracted by his clothes. He frowns, disliking how short the sleeves are, even while they pool at his elbow. He decides then that he needs to get back to his TARDIS. He wants to change clothes, and check his health since regenerating. His body feels the way it should, but it never hurts to be sure. Soobin offers to walk him wherever he’s going, and Kai tries to deny the offer, citing Taehyun as an adequate escort, but now Yeonjun’s insisting on making sure the two of them get to this ship in one piece and un-kidnapped, and Beomgyu insists on sticking with Yeonjun, so all five of them leave the apartment to walk Kai “home.”

“Home” looks like a storefront, next door to the convenience store the Choi cousins frequent. Yeonjun hadn’t paid attention to the dim lights and gated door when he passed the previous night, had only seen the sickly kid in a too-big sweater that fell into his arms. Kai pulls the door open with the gate and walks into the shop. The Chois frown, uncomfortable with where the night has led them. Taehyun easily follows, used to the various appearances of the TARDIS, and Beomgyu, trusting Taehyun trails after. Soobin and Yeonjun trade skeptical looks before entering the door last.

And the TARDIS is… not what they expect. They expected TARDIS to be a foreign word for “home,” and then expected to walk into an abandoned shop of some sort, complete with dusty floors and empty spaces. Instead, they find themselves in a very clean, very high-tech looking space. The walls are round and covered in a deep, bright blue, tile, similar to those used for sound proofing tile. Several sets of narrow staircases lead up to a balcony dotted with various lounge spaces, those walls covered with some sort of white square tile pattern over the blue. At the center of the room were several white tables, placed together to form a circle around a tall glass column. A holoscreen of sorts hovered above one of the tables, although the boys were all standing on the wrong side to attempt reading what it said. Kai stands in front of another screen, tapping and swiping away at whatever he reads there. Soon, each table has a holoscreen lit, numbers and readings scrolling too fast for any of them to read.

“So,” Kai begins, startling the Chois out of their awe. Taehyun seems to have disappeared somewhere further into the ship, through the dark doorway behind Kai, perhaps. “You’ve nursed me back to health. You rescued me. And now, you’ve walked me home. Thank you for taking care of me.” He bows, then turns back to his screens. He taps a few more times, swipes some shapes onto other screens, and then stops, sighing. The ship rumbles beneath his feet, and he feels safer, knowing that he’s in his ship and very little can get in without his permission. Kai suddenly seems much older than he looks. The lines of his shoulders don’t look like he’s just awoken from the great sleep he claimed.

“What did you do?”

Kai looks up and screams.

“Why are we shaking?” Yeonjun continues, eyes bugged, mouth pouting. He reaches for the nearest staircase, nearly tripping over his own feet in the process.

“What are you doing here?” asks Kai. He knows he dematerialized the ship, he wanted to let it hover somewhere in the time stream for a while, until he’s gone to the med bay and has checked on his companion. He knows he’s still exhausted from regenerating. His thoughts are still bouncing too fast in his head, he’s still in between two personalities, he isn’t thinking clearly. So when he finalized his destination, engaged the engines, and looked up, Kai didn't expect to still have four guests.

“We just walked you home,” says Soobin. “Where else would we be?”

“But I left you behind! We’re in flight! I just left your planet!”

“You didn’t, so bring us back!” Soobin argues.

“I can't, I just set her on autopilot!”

“Then unset it!”

Kai deflates. “She… really doesn’t like when I change my mind. We’ll be in flight for a while.”

“She?” asks Beomgyu. He’s the only one who doesn’t seem upset by the turn of events.

“I have a test next week!” cries Soobin, and it really does look like he’s on the verge of a panic attack. “I don’t have time to go gallivanting all over space, I need to be at home!”

“Oh!” Kai smiles, happy to offer a solution. “My TARDIS is also a time machine! I can get you home five minutes after we left, no problem. You’ll definitely be able to take your test.”

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