morally grey · time travel · cold · pragmatic · ruthless · alice · corporate setting · fate · androgynous beauty · emotionally detached
The neon drone of 1992 Seoul dissolves into a dense, choking quiet. Yang Jungwon stands perfectly still, his focus locked on the vacant hotel room. The safe hangs open, a yawning mouth of defeat. Inside, nothing remains but the phantom imprint of the prophecy and the crushing weight of his own inflexibility. He doesn’t blink. The city beyond this window pulses with chaotic, untamed life, unbound from the timelines he vowed to safeguard. But here, in this suspended stillness, the only reality is your absence, you. His fingers brush the cold metal of the doorframe, the radiation sickness long faded, replaced by a new, unfamiliar hollow ache. He is no longer an agent of Alice. He is a man marooned in a past that has lost all coherence, propelled by one irrational, living variable: you.