𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐓𝐖𝐈𝐍 𝐏𝐀𝐑𝐀𝐃𝐎𝐗 ✓

37: REQUISITION SLIPS AND HEADLINES

"A flower to the soul and a sniff of memory."

...

"You are who?"

And the old man threw a chuckle while glancing at him, taking the little photo frame on the table to hand it over, which Seojin accepted unhinged; a smiling and young Bailey and Tobias were imprinted on it.

"I am Tobias, Tobias Green. Sejin's best friend, Bailey's brother."

There was almost no movement at all. Instead of the peaceful silence one might anticipate, the entire floor was silent in an unsettling way. Not the comfortable silence everyone sleeps in. Too many prisons had become early coffins.

"It's been a long time," he murmured softly as he gazed down at his dark and blurry eyes, eyes that had been innocent and carefree but now revealed bitterness and the scars life had inflicted on him all at once.

"I'm sorry."

Seojin let out another heavy sigh before turning back to the window in turn, one hand reaching into his pocket for what seemed like its last shred of dignity, though it was barely possible given just how desperate they were right then.

He had a feeling that this was his fault, but he wasn't sure what he had done wrong.
There was so much to gobble down and too little time; he was too cloistered at the edge of his world.

Tobias kept voicing his thoughts loudly inside his brain. His mind had always tricked him into believing the wrong Kim, and now, after years, he could do nothing but regret.

"It was never your fault, Seojin. It was always him, your twin," he spoke up after a few minutes of strangling silence. His words were the balm that Seojin desperately needed.

Seojin wanted to linger on the unexpected intrusion that slipped past his heart's defences, scorching and simmering everything in its path, but his jumbled mind was filled with too many questions, too many doubts, and too many debauched scenarios to pay much attention to the pain.

He needed time to understand what he was feeling, and the only way to do it was by allowing himself to be honest about his emotions.

"I don't understand Tobias," he gripped his hair tightly, "all this, two realities: me still barely thirty, whereas you all are far down the lane, and in any reality, you absolutely hated me. I feel lost."

He had experienced something very deep, something he couldn't quite put his finger on, and in that moment of confusion and doubt, Tobias's words came as a blessing.
"The Twin Paradox, Seojin."

"Huh?" The gasp came out involuntarily.

Tobias held up both his hands against the window with one hand so they looked out into empty space just before he crashed them back together under his chin.
"The Twin Paradox, it is a thought experiment in the theory of relativity."

"Relativity?" Seojin's face was a portrait of concentration, brows furrowed as he tried to make sense of the concept he'd been introduced to, and he kept quiet, wanting the easiest explanation for the word.

"Yes, general relativity. It's really nothing—just three basic things, and you already know all of them. Like, you can't differentiate between an object moving with a constant speed and an object at rest. You can measure the velocity of an object or its momentum, but it is always in relation to something else.
As if your movement has something to do with me, like you are in motion in relation to me. Otherwise you just exist. Second, the speed of light is the same no matter who measures it in whatever condition, and three, nothing is faster than light."