#snotsoo

25 Lives

Minho remembers the first time he sees Newt.

They’re not in love.

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The next, they are.

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The 5th, 7th and 20th times, they end up falling out of love.

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But its the 12th that Newt doesn’t know what love is as an android that Minho builds out of loneliness, thinking of the one he didn’t have only to never realise that he had been there all along, hiding under a layer of cold metal.

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In the 22nd, neither can love the other like the world expected them to and so they pretend.

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In the 10th, they have to hide it. 

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It’s not until the 23rd lifetime that they talk about this.

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In the 18th, Newt dies and if Minho could cry, he would.

Except he’s only a doll on a dollmaker’s shelf and can only watch helplessly as Newt gets thrown into the flames, his cracked wooden leg irreplaceable after a fall from the tabletop and it’s lives like these that Minho thinks he’d rather kill Newt himself, if only so he can kill himself after to end the suffering to his heart.

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It’s the 21st life that he gets the chance, gun barrel braced against the other’s skull, finger a millimeter off of the trigger when Newt smiles.

And it’s as if he has known, for ten, twenty lifetimes that this will be the perfect ending, leaving the world together, if not their happy ending.

A dozen robbed banks and now they’re marked by thirty, forty snipers, the red lasers dotting their bodies like battle wounds.

The crack of a bullet ripping through both their skulls ends their lives at the same time.

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In the 16th, they fight a war and the first time they see each other on opposite sides of the battlefield is also the last and they find that taking each other’s lives is a kind of mercy in itself.

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But then there are the ones where one kills the other and it’s heartbreaking but Newt is selfish in that he’d always want to be the one to die first because he’d never want to live in a world without Minho.

Because in the 8th, Minho was never born and Newt grows up cold and alone and feeling like there was a black hole where his heart should have been. 

And that was the end of that life.

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In the 17th, they meet at the end of their lives.

And even with the short amount of time they were given, they knew that next time, they would get all the time in the world.

Dying never felt better than when they died for the 17th time.

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It’s the ones like the 14th that Newt loves the most, when he can see the way Minho grows from an impulsive boy who almost fell out of a tree just so he could give Newt the apple at the top, to an impulsive man who faked Newt a sick day from work just so they could drive out to the beach and spend an entire day writing their names in the sand.

And it’s ones like the 14th that Minho loves the most, when he can watch Newt grow from awkward to graceful and can hold his hand through it all.

It’s lives like these that when Newt, by the age of ten, could reach out his bedroom window and Minho’s own ten-year-old fingers would be right there too, meeting him halfway between their houses, that they cherished the most. 

Eight years later and they no longer needed to hold hands outside their windows because they shared that, and a room and a dorm and two twin-sized beds pushed together to make a double. 

Because they can fall in love, step by step and take their time to be with each other. Because they have all the time in the world.

It’s ones like the 14th that they live the rest of their lives for.

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But it’s the ones like the 6th that Newt hates the most.

When they see a glimpse of each other—at a train station, through a store window, in the middle of a crowded airport—and only ever get that glimpse.

When, out of the millions of moments in each of their lives, they only get to share one.

And Newt didn’t know heartache until he spends a lifetime hurting for the one he knew could have been.

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For Minho, it’s the 13th that’s worse, when they’re separated by distance, by time, by a whole other dimension.

When they wouldn’t even get that one glimpse, that one moment—because they would never even get to meet.

Because then he would have to spend a lifetime hurting for the one that could never have been and for Minho, that was true heartache.

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The 3rd is the first time Newt wonders if this would be their last.

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Some like the 11th, they wouldn’t get to be with each other because Minho’s getting married to a girl with hair the colour of straw and Newt is holding hands with a boy with a constellation of freckles on his cheeks.

But they still smile, because this is enough, having Newt stand by his side as he says ‘I do,’ and kisses Sonya dressed all in white. And it is enough that Minho gets to be right there when Gally goes down on one knee and gives Newt a wedding ring in a velvet box.

It’s enough that they’ve lived two lives, separately but entwined far enough that the hole in their hearts are all but gone—barely there and barely felt. 

And that is enough too.

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In the 9th, it’s not and it hurts Minho to watch as Newt falls in love, because it’s not with him.

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In the 15th, they can only watch each other from afar.

Minho has never felt this happy and sad, all at the same time, to be able to see and know his love but never to touch him.

He dies with Newt’s voice on a recorder, sent through time and space from the other side of the galaxy.

It would be several hundred years before Newt receives the news but by then, he would have died too, and perhaps that would be for the best.

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But even in the ones where one of them does not exist, like the 4th when Minho sketches a picture of a boy that he sees in his mind and even though he spends decades drawing him in twenty, thirty different mediums, forty, fifty variations, it—he never gets old because there is still love.

But in the end, Minho can’t be satisfied with just a drawing on a page when the love he feels transcends every dimension, and so they spend this lifetime trying to close the gap between the second and the third.

And even though they don’t succeed, because in his lifetime Newt is only strokes of charcoal against paper and Minho is the artist who gives him life, they know that when Minho dies with black smudged on his fingertips, the next time they meet, it will be Newt’s skin there instead. 

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In the 24th lifetime, they’re happy.

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In the 19th, they’re not.

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In the 25th, they wake up without any memories.