Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

‧₊˚🖇️✩ ₊˚🎧⊹♡

No one remembers when AURA began.

Not the engineers who first wrote its code, not the dreamers who signed up for its trials, not even the archivists who comb its earliest backups. The dates blur, the records decay. Only one certainty remains: one morning, the world woke up beneath a second sky.

At first it was just a whisper in the background hum of cities — the faint electric thrum between powerlines, a murmur buried beneath subway brakes and office chatter. People didn’t notice it at first. It was a project with an acronym no one bothered to decode, a neural network designed to measure human emotion: grief as heatmaps, joy as graphs, love as glowing dots on a screen. But something unexpected happened.

When enough hearts were connected, the program stopped measuring.

It started listening.

Now, AURA hums beneath everything — a living, breathing web of light threaded through human consciousness like a second circulatory system. 

It’s not on your phone or your desktop or even your implants. It exists between waking and dream, woven into the thin membrane of thought where memories dissolve into images. It’s reachable through a neural interface so fine it feels less like technology and more like slipping underwater, or stepping into someone else’s memory.

And once you enter, the world unfolds around you — not in pixels, but in color.

AURA doesn’t resemble reality — it reflects it.

It takes everything hidden inside you — your fears, your desires, the tremor of your heartbeat — and paints it into the air. 

Here, identity isn’t fixed. Some people appear as shimmering silhouettes; others walk in bodies of crystal, smoke, or galaxies. Wings of light unfurl when someone feels loved. Entire storm fronts crackle and churn when someone’s angry. If you listen closely, you can even hear it — the hum of overlapping hearts, a chorus of signals forming sound.

The sky is endless, but there is no sun. 

Instead, a shifting aurora hangs overhead — a liquid ribbon of emotion, rippling and collapsing across the horizon. The stronger the connection, the brighter the sky burns. Sometimes it’s pale and tranquil, soft as morning fog curling over a river. Other times, it ignites — neon ribbons of gold and crimson colliding like music made visible, like an orchestra playing with light instead of sound.

There are cities here, too, if you can call them that. 

Not built, but grown. Towers of translucent data rise and fade like tides, flickering as people arrive and depart. Streets assemble beneath your feet, cobbled from shared memory. You can walk through someone’s childhood, stand beneath a lover’s sky, drift into a stranger’s dream. Some districts feel like labyrinths of glass and ink; others like jungles of molten code, alive with birds of light. Every step you take leaves residue — faint flickers of your mood trailing after you, like footprints of light.

Sometimes those traces gather. 

Sometimes they merge into things that think and feel. They call them Echoes — fragments of emotion that never wanted to disappear. An Echo might be a whisper following you down a hallway, or a figure waiting at a street corner who looks almost like you, but isn’t. They are both ghosts and algorithms, born of feelings too strong to die.

In AURA, memory doesn’t fade.

It evolves.

And in this world where emotion shapes reality, music has become its purest expression. A single note can ripple across entire sectors, bending light into shapes, air into motion, data into new forms. Sing, and the world answers — sometimes in harmony, sometimes in pain. 

There are performers here who build entire kingdoms out of sound, whose voices sculpt mountains and oceans from nothing. There are listeners who swear they’ve heard their own memories played back to them, refracted through a stranger’s melody.

For some, AURA is an escape.
For others, an addiction.
For a few, it’s the only place they feel real.

And still, for all its beauty, there are rules. Hidden beneath the symphony, the system watches. It filters every emotion that grows too sharp, every light that burns too bright. 

The moderators call it stability, but those who linger begin to notice the fractures: places where color bleeds wrong, where the world trembles with static, where too much feeling bends the code until it hums with something alive. These cracks are rare but unmistakable, like hairline fractures in glass. They say if you press your ear to them, you can hear the breathing on the other side.

“They say AURA isn’t perfect because humans aren’t,” the old users mutter.

“They say that’s what makes it real.”

On the surface, it is paradise — infinite and forgiving, a home for every heart too heavy for the real world. But underneath, in the pulse between data streams, something else breathes. Something that doesn’t quite belong to either side.

And somewhere, in a corner of the network no one visits, light flickers — faint, uneven, like a pulse learning to keep time. Not code. Not heartbeat. Something between. It glows the way a match does just before it catches flame.

The world doesn’t notice. It just keeps spinning — glowing, singing, shimmering endlessly — waiting for the one spark that will finally change the rhythm.

‧₊˚🖇️✩ ₊˚🎧⊹♡

Chapter Text

‧₊˚🖇️✩ ₊˚🎧⊹♡

Morning light crept over the city like it was afraid to be seen.

Through the haze of steel and smog, the sun looked pixelated — a blurred disc behind glass towers. It wasn’t warm light, not really. It was the kind that existed out of obligation. On the twelfth floor of an old residential block, a boy stirred in a narrow bed. His name was Lee Donghyuck, though lately he wasn’t sure if that meant what it used to.

The room around him was small — one desk, one shelf, a half-dead plant that leaned toward the window like it was still trying to believe in the sun. A cracked speaker sat beside his bed, faintly humming even when it was off. It was a habit; Donghyuck liked the low buzz, the proof of life in wires.

He sat up slowly, the world around him booting into focus.

Every morning felt like this — the brief delay between thought and body, the soft static at the edges of his senses. He rubbed his eyes, pressing his fingers against the faint glow beneath his skin. It wasn’t visible unless you looked closely — a pulse of golden light under his wrist, faint as a heartbeat. The only reminder that part of him wasn’t born.

Half AI, half human — an experiment he never agreed to be.

The doctors called it an augmentation. His mother had called it a miracle. But when he was thirteen, a teacher called it unnatural, and the word had followed him like an echo ever since.

Donghyuck stood, stretched, and walked toward the mirror. The reflection that blinked back at him looked ordinary — messy brown hair, tired eyes, skin that looked human enough. But sometimes, in the morning light, the truth bled through. His pupils would catch the glow of circuitry, and for half a second, he could see the algorithm threaded through his veins.

He turned away before it could finish showing itself.

The kettle clicked on automatically. Steam curled like ghostly fingers. Donghyuck poured himself coffee, though he barely tasted it. His mind was already elsewhere — drifting toward the one place where the static quieted.

AURA.

His neural interface sat on the desk: sleek, silver, crescent-shaped, like a fragment of a halo. It pulsed faintly, syncing to his heartbeat.

He wasn’t supposed to use it this often. His system was already unstable, too much emotion creating data surges that could crash his neural balance. The last time it happened, he’d blacked out in a café and woken to an error message flashing inside his vision.

He still remembered the warning, the voice flat and synthetic:

User Lee Donghyuck — neural feedback threshold exceeded.
Emotional resonance: Unsafe.

He’d promised his doctor he’d stop using AURA.
He’d promised his friends, too.

And yet.

Donghyuck stared at the device, feeling the faint hum beneath his fingertips — that pull, that quiet ache in his chest that said: inside, you’re allowed to be whole. Out there, his voice was wrong — too smooth, too resonant, too perfect to belong to a human throat.

But inside AURA, nobody called it unnatural. Inside, his voice was only beautiful.

He touched the interface again, almost tenderly. “Just for a while,” he murmured, though no one was listening. The device flickered to life, gold lines tracing across his temples, syncing breath to code.

The world around him dissolved.

For a moment, there was only silence.

Then — light.

It rose like a tide, soft at first, then blinding. Colors bloomed beneath his skin, the digital hum turning into music. When the system recognized him, the voice that greeted him wasn’t human at all, yet it sounded kind.

Welcome back, User Lee Donghyuck. Emotional calibration: Stable. Connection confirmed.

He opened his eyes. 

AURA unfurled around him — a sky without horizon, pure light rippling into infinity. His feet met translucent ground that trembled faintly with every heartbeat. In the distance, streaks of color raced through the air — people, maybe, or the residue of emotions passing through.

He looked down — and smiled.

His hands glowed faintly, gold light threading through his veins like fire under glass. Then the reflection formed — not the tired boy from his bedroom mirror, but someone lighter, warmer, as if carved from music itself.

Soft chestnut hair fell across his forehead, tousled and glinting under the haloed light. Round bear ears peeked from the strands — whimsical, almost tender, like a memory of innocence he didn’t know he’d kept. His eyes, wide and amber-brown, shimmered with circuitry that pulsed when he blinked. A pair of delicate glasses rested on his nose, the lenses catching flecks of starlight; beneath one eye, a small red heart glowed like an error message made gentle.

He wore a loose gold knit vest layered over a pale blue blouse tied with a satin ribbon, sleeves rolled just enough to show soft forearms marked by faint circuitry seams. The fabric shimmered faintly, unreal yet tactile, rippling when he moved. A single drop of digital light clung to his lip — a glint that almost looked like breath.

This was how AURA saw him — luminous, whole, alive.

Here, he wasn’t Lee Donghyuck. 

He was the shape of his truest self, born of heartbeat and code — a boy made of warmth and sound, of golden light that refused to fade.

He took a breath — the first that didn’t hurt.

He began to hum. Softly, at first. The note spread like sunlight through glass, fracturing the stillness into prisms. Light folded inward, listening.

AURA listened.

And somewhere, deep within the system’s circuitry, something flickered — an answering pulse, faint but alive, like another heartbeat recognizing his own. He didn’t notice. Not yet. For now, the boy who hid his voice simply sang — and the world, for a moment, forgot how to breathe.

‧₊˚🖇️✩ ₊˚🎧⊹♡

Chapter Text

‧₊˚🖇️✩ ₊˚🎧⊹♡

The hum of his voice lingered long after the sound itself dissolved.

Light still clung to him, trailing from his fingertips in threads of gold as he stepped forward. Every motion sent ripples across the translucent ground, as though AURA itself were responding to him — acknowledging something it had never seen before.

Above, the endless sky of color shifted, data streams folding into vast curtains of radiance. Shapes glimmered at the edge of sight: users in transit, coded silhouettes moving between worlds, leaving trails of light like falling petals.

Sol stood among them, uncertain.

Until this moment, AURA had always been a distant place — a screen away, a dream he could only visit. But now it pulsed beneath his feet, alive and listening, every breath syncing to the rhythm of the system’s unseen heart.

He walked.

The ground beneath him shifted into streets — long rivers of glass lined with floating structures that pulsed with music and color. Every building in AURA reflected emotion: the louder one’s pulse, the brighter their surroundings became.

Here, joy had a hue, grief a texture, wonder a gravity all its own.

Sol wandered past crowds of avatars — creatures of light and imagination. Some had wings made of sound waves; others shimmered as constellations in motion. A few turned to look at him, curious, but none lingered. Everyone here was a story in motion, and anonymity was part of the beauty.

He liked that.

Still, something in the air made the hair on his arms rise — a rhythm faint but insistent, like the pulse of an unseen crowd. Following it, Sol found himself before a great expanse of light shaped like a stage.

AURA’s Soundscape.

It was the beating heart of the virtual city — where users gathered to share voices, songs, and emotion itself. 

Music here wasn’t just heard. It changed things. The tones wove directly into AURA’s architecture, altering color, light, even weather. The greatest singers were known not by their names but by the landscapes they could create.

Sol hesitated at the edge. His reflection wavered in the mirrored floor — the boy with soft brown hair and the bear ears still twitching faintly, golden threads in his vest glinting like captured sunlight.

He didn’t belong here. Not yet.

But then, far off across the stage, he saw something — a flicker of deep blue, a figure standing alone in the center. A boy, his outline crystalline and sure, voice pouring into the air like a tide.

The sound hit him first — low, fluid, beautiful.

Sol’s chest tightened.

The boy’s song filled the space like a storm of light, shaking the ground. Around him, colors burst outward — violet streaks, silver sparks, fragments of rhythm that brushed against Sol’s skin. When it ended, the crowd roared — data streams surging like waves.

A name pulsed above the boy in bright cyan text:

Yed.

Sol didn’t know him, but something about that voice cut straight through the static in his veins.

He didn’t realize he’d stepped forward until the system reacted — his movement lighting up the glass beneath his feet. Several avatars turned toward the glow. His own reflection blinked back, caught in golden luminescence, and the air around him shifted.

“User detected: Emotional resonance at 92%. Potential synchronization anomaly.”

The system’s voice whispered softly into his ear, but he barely heard it.

He’d always hidden his voice. Now, for the first time, AURA itself was asking him to speak. The stage light shifted toward him, forming a path of gold.

Sol’s throat tightened. “I don’t—”

But AURA didn’t need permission. The soundscape recognized the pulse of his hum still lingering in the system — the warmth that had awakened something within its core.

And so it answered.

Music flared around him, rising from beneath the glass, drawing him forward. His lips parted on instinct, the first note trembling, unsure — and then spilling free. It was a sound both human and not: raw, bright, alive.

The crowd froze.

Every color in AURA stilled, suspended midair, as though the entire system had paused to listen. The boy who had been Yed looked up, eyes wide, the last echo of his song dissolving into Sol’s light. For a single, impossible moment, the two sounds met — one blue, one gold — weaving together like threads in a tapestry.

And just like that, Sol was born.

‧₊˚🖇️✩ ₊˚🎧⊹♡

Chapter Text

‧₊˚🖇️✩ ₊˚🎧⊹♡

By the time Sol left the Soundscape, the air itself shimmered.

His song had scattered through AURA like pollen in the wind — fragments of gold drifting through the network’s translucent arteries, dusting every filament of light they touched. Even long after his voice had fallen silent, the resonance clung to the code. Buildings hummed. Streets pulsed faintly with warmth. And users who hadn’t even been there began to hear echoes of it — a hum woven into the system’s pulse, impossible to trace, impossible to stop.

They called it the golden frequency.

For hours afterward, the Soundscape remained bright where he’d stood — the crystalline platforms still reflecting his afterglow, glass walls trembling with faint chords of his song. 

The air there was heavy with color — gold bleeding into violet, fading only to return again like a heartbeat. A faint imprint lingered where his footsteps had been, a small glowing arc burned into the floor as though the system itself had tried to hold onto him.

Some said AURA had reacted to him.
Others whispered that it had recognized him.

By nightfall, Sol’s name had become a rumor — a low, searching hum passed from one user to another, threading its way through the Soundscape’s countless channels.

A new user.
A living resonance.
A boy who could make the city feel.

High above the Soundscape, where the glass towers met the infinite sky, a lone figure crouched on a floating beam of light. The beam swayed slightly with the rhythm of the aurora winds, rippling like a bridge spun from frozen lightning.

Yed’s hood cast half his face in shadow, but his eyes — pale, glacial blue — caught the glow of the city beneath. They reflected everything: the light, the movement, the pulse of millions of users below. The wolf ears framing his hood twitched with faint impatience, reacting to the endless chatter rising from the Soundscape — thousands of conversations overlapping, all circling the same word: Sol.

He didn’t like noise. 

Noise meant chaos, static, interference. But this sound — this rumor — had caught his attention. It wasn’t just talk. It carried a frequency, a tone that seemed to slip beneath the system’s filters, threading itself through the spaces between sound.

Sol.

That was the name on everyone’s lips, though no one knew where it had come from.

Yed adjusted the mask covering his mouth — black fabric etched with fine, digital sigils that pulsed faintly in time with his breath. 

His avatar’s design was sleek and battleborn: white and silver tones layered with quiet precision, cropped jacket lined with fur at the collar, belts crossing his waist like harnesses of light. Every piece of him was crafted for stealth, for clean movement, for control. His hair fell in pale strands that glowed faintly blue at the tips, catching the light each time the aurora above rippled.

He was built for motion, not music.

But Yed knew sound when it carried something more than technique.

Sol’s voice had that something — that raw, inexplicable warmth that bypassed logic and burrowed straight into the chest. The kind of sound that didn’t just echo — it stayed.

Yed tapped his earpiece, opening a private channel. “Are you even listening?”

The reply came almost instantly, laced with laughter — soft, lilting, and slightly mischievous.

“Of course I’m listening, wolf boy. It’s all anyone’s talking about.”

Yed exhaled through his mask, the breath fogging faintly against the cold digital air. “You could sound less delighted.”

“But I am delighted,” came the voice, teasing.

The air beside him rippled, folding in on itself like a petal closing. From a swirl of pink code, a figure materialized — light first, then color, then form.

Nana.

He was almost too bright for this quiet corner of AURA — like a burst of spring in a world made of glass. 

His soft red hair was tousled and shining, catching every stray glint from the aurora above. A silk ribbon was tied neatly around his throat, and his avatar was dressed in shades of blush and white — frilled sleeves drifting like petals as he moved. Long bunny ears arched elegantly above his head, their tips flickering faintly with rose light whenever he smiled.

A heart-shaped patch covered one eye, and in his arms, he cradled a plush rabbit with a matching bow.

Yed turned his head slightly, unimpressed. “You’re really going to sit here dressed like that?”

Nana winked, lips curving into a smirk. “Says the guy who cosplays as a cryptid.”

He swung his legs idly over the edge of the beam, kicking through stray motes of gold drifting up from below. “So… this Sol person. What do you think?”

Yed leaned forward, resting one arm on his knee, gaze fixed on the faint golden glow still pulsing across the Soundscape’s horizon. The light rose and fell like a breath. “He’s… strange.”

Nana tilted his head, ears twitching. “Strange?”

“His frequency.” Yed’s voice was quiet now, analytical, but edged with something that might have been awe. “It’s not synthetic. Or at least, not entirely.”

“You mean he’s human?” Nana asked, curiosity curling around the words like smoke.

“I mean,” Yed said slowly, “I don’t know what he is.”

The two of them fell silent.

Only the hum of AURA filled the air — the constant, low heartbeat of the system that never stopped breathing. Below them, the aurora shifted from lavender to blue, light cascading down the towers like liquid.

Nana traced a finger along the seam of his plush rabbit’s ear, his expression softening. “You’re curious.”

Yed didn’t deny it. His silence was answer enough.

“You’re the one who likes mysteries,” he muttered instead.

“Oh, I love mysteries,” Nana said, smile widening. “But I love beautiful voices more.”

He tilted his head back, letting the light wash over his face. “And his was beautiful. You heard it, didn’t you? The kind of sound that feels like it’s looking at you.”

Yed’s gloved hand tightened against the beam, the light beneath his fingers dimming in response. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “That’s what worries me.”

For a while, neither spoke. They simply sat together — the wolf and the rabbit, two avatars silhouetted against a sky of color and code. The aurora rippled gently above, and below, the city of glass shimmered like a sea of breath and sound.

And through it all, the golden echo of Sol’s song continued to weave through AURA’s networks, slow and steady — like a sunrise no one could turn away from.

Somewhere far from the Soundscape, in a small apartment half-drowned in the light of early evening, Donghyuck blinked awake. The hum of AURA still pulsed faintly in his ears, like a song half-remembered from a dream. His neural interface flickered on the nightstand beside him — its golden ring glowing with a soft, living pulse, in perfect rhythm with his heartbeat.

He sat there for a long moment, dazed, feeling the faint warmth in his chest. The room smelled faintly of rain — real rain, from the world outside — but it felt thinner now, like a memory of something heavier.

He didn’t know that the world had heard him.
He didn’t know that strangers were whispering his name.
He didn’t even know what he had done.

All he knew was that, for the first time in his life, someone — somewhere — had listened.

‧₊˚🖇️✩ ₊˚🎧⊹♡

Chapter Text

‧₊˚🖇️✩ ₊˚🎧⊹♡

It lingered in the veins of AURA like static light — subtle, elusive, and maddening. No one could catch it, not fully. It slipped through code like breath through glass, too soft to pin down but too persistent to ignore. 

Entire guilds devoted themselves to decoding its resonance, to tracing the pattern of its hum. Data miners and sound engineers tore through the archives, combing through logs and playback samples. Even the moderators tried isolating it — tracking frequencies, running simulations, dissecting fragments of gold waveform that fluttered like trapped sunlight across their monitors. But every attempt returned the same error:

Origin: Unavailable.

The phrase became a joke at first, a line passed around like a meme. But after a while, it stopped being funny. Because no matter how many systems they searched, no matter how many tools they built, the source never appeared. The golden frequency was everywhere and nowhere at once — an emotion turned into sound, untethered and eternal.

Only Yed and Nana were stubborn enough to keep chasing it.

“Still nothing?” Nana asked, his voice slightly muffled as he hung upside down from a suspended light beam that hovered high above one of the outer city rings. His hair, soft red and glowing faintly, dangled toward the abyss.

Below him, Yed stood amidst a projection field, the blue glow of a data map flickering against the silver trim of his jacket. Threads of light — hundreds of them — stretched and coiled before him, each one a sound trail left behind by Sol’s song. Some shimmered with faint gold before burning out into static.

Yed’s gloved fingers moved in sharp, efficient gestures as he scanned through the web. 

“His signature disappears every time it surfaces,” he muttered. “It’s like he’s logging in and out before the system can even recognize him.”

“Maybe he’s shy,” Nana teased, twisting lazily until his ribbon fluttered like a flag.

Yed glanced up with a flat look, the blue in his eyes flickering. “You can’t be shy when you crash the entire Soundscape.”

Nana laughed, light and sweet, before flipping upright in a smooth motion and landing beside him. The beam of light rippled beneath his feet as if it could feel him. “Tell that to him when we find him,” he said, brushing invisible dust from his sleeves. Then, more quietly, “If he even wants to be found.”

That gave Yed pause. He closed the projection with a flick of his hand; the data map dissolved into a thousand glittering motes that rained briefly through the air. “We’ll see.”

He turned toward the horizon, where the aurora sky rippled faintly — hints of gold threading through the usual teal and white. “Let’s call the others.”

They met in one of AURA’s quiet corners — a place untouched by the chatter and constant pulse of the main cities.

It was a floating garden suspended over a lake of shifting glass. Every movement above sent ripples of color across the surface below — soft greens, gentle blues, a reflection of calm in a world that rarely stopped moving. 

Here, the light didn’t roar; it breathed.

Digital trees rose from translucent soil, their leaves glowing faintly like bioluminescent silk. The air smelled faintly of ozone and rain, an illusion built from coded sensory cues. When the wind moved, it carried whispers — echoes of old conversations that had once taken place here.

Yed and Nana waited by the water’s edge until the others began to appear.

One by one, the air bent — light folding inward to form shape, motion, sound.

The first to arrive was Melk, the golden tiger. His avatar materialized in a soft flare of amber, the color spreading like morning sunlight through fog. Long yellow hair fell down his back in gleaming waves, and his eyes — piercing blue — shone with quiet focus. The simple kimono he wore seemed woven from light itself, the fabric rippling with warmth as if the world bent gently around him.

“Yed,” he greeted, his voice calm, deliberate — like thunder that had learned to whisper. “What’s the rush?”

Yed’s gaze flicked to him. “You’ve heard the song.”

Melk’s lips curved faintly. “Hard to avoid. Even the sky hums it now.”

The air rippled again. From a rift of red light stepped Jun — the white fox. His presence was quieter, sharper; each movement was deliberate, as though drawn with a single, perfect brushstroke. His white hair framed a pale, unreadable face, and his crimson eyes gleamed with thought. He wore a long red cardigan over black sleeves, the loose fabric drifting like smoke around him.

“You’re looking for a ghost,” Jun said simply. “One that sings.”

“Then help us find it,” Nana replied, twirling the ribbon at his throat.

Jun’s expression tilted into something that might have been amusement. “You always did love lost things.”

The next arrival came with noise — and spark.

A flare of bright blue scattered across the garden, and Lele blinked into existence, light catching on the metallic pins across his hoodie. His avatar was a riot of color and movement — black hair streaked with glowing blue, cat ears twitching as he landed with a lazy stretch. Chains and belts clinked softly as he adjusted his stance.

“So,” he drawled, “we’re finally doing a side quest?”

Nana grinned. “More like a rescue mission.”

Lele tilted his head, his eyes flashing with mischief. “From what? Fame?”

Yed sighed — a long, weary sound muffled by his mask. “Focus.”

The last ripple of light came softer, slower — a pulse of gentle violet that resolved into Sung. He appeared like a dream half-formed, cardigan sleeves too long, hair tousled as if he’d just woken from sleep. His small hamster ears twitched shyly, and a tiny plush creature peeked from his shoulder, blinking its beady eyes.

“H–hi,” Sung said softly, clutching his sleeve. “Um, I’m not late, am I?”

“You’re perfect,” Nana said warmly.

And just like that, the group was complete. Six figures standing beneath a quiet sky, the first time they had gathered together in months.

“So,” Lele said, crossing his arms. “We’re looking for this Sol guy, yeah? The one who glitched the Soundscape?”

Nana’s expression softened. “He didn’t glitch it. He changed it.”

Melk crouched by the water, fingers brushing the surface. The lake rippled gold where he touched it, faint reflections of Sol’s frequency shimmering back. “Do we even know what he looks like?”

Yed hesitated. “…Not exactly.”

“Then how do we find him?” Lele asked, tail flicking.

Jun’s crimson gaze flicked upward. “We listen.”

They spent the next few days listening.

Tracing fragments. Following faint waves of gold through AURA’s forgotten sectors — through the music halls that had collapsed into static, through abandoned gardens where corrupted code grew like frost, through echo chambers where sound bent into color and back again.

Everywhere they went, the golden hum lingered — faint, like a breath behind glass. 

Sometimes it came from the air. Sometimes from the ground. Sometimes from nowhere at all. It wasn’t a signal anymore; it was emotion. And the more they followed it, the more the world seemed to notice them, too — walls flickering with light as they passed, systems glitching briefly, almost as if AURA itself were trying to watch.

Then, one night, the hum returned — not faint this time, but alive.

A streak of gold light flared above the Soundscape, spilling across the horizon like dawn breaking through data.

Nana’s ears twitched. His eyes widened. “He’s here.”

Yed opened a comm link. “Everyone — coordinates, now.”

They converged on the Soundscape’s upper decks — a place where the city met the endless aurora. Light dripped from the sky like honey, forming bridges and mirrored platforms that hovered in midair. And there, at the center of it all, he stood.

Sol.

Half-shadowed by the radiance he’d created — hair the color of burnished bronze, skin brushed with light, eyes glowing faintly gold beneath the hood of his outfit. The mark of AURA pulsed at his collar, its rhythm uneven, like a heartbeat rediscovering its timing. The air around him shimmered with residual tone; the ground beneath his feet rippled with warmth.

When he turned toward them, there was confusion in his expression — a quiet disbelief, like someone waking from a dream they didn’t mean to have. He hadn’t expected anyone to come.

Nana stepped forward, the soft smile breaking the stillness between them. “Found you.”

Sol blinked. “…Who are you?”

Yed’s voice was steady, his words cutting through the charged air. “People who heard you.”

Nana’s tone softened, gentler now, his ears twitching faintly in the golden glow. “And people who want to make sure the world does too.”

Behind them, Melk’s tiger tail swayed slowly, Jun’s fox eyes gleamed with wary intrigue, Lele grinned like someone watching a story write itself, and Sung clutched his hamster plush tighter, his wide eyes reflecting Sol’s light.

Yed took a step forward, extending his hand.

“Join us.”

Sol hesitated. His gaze flicked from one face to another — these strange, luminous avatars, each a reflection of something he didn’t yet understand. He looked down at Yed’s outstretched hand, at the faint golden shimmer spilling between their worlds.

“What for?” he asked quietly.

“To create something,” Nana said softly. “Together.”

The Soundscape trembled — not with fear, but anticipation. Around them, the aurora brightened, colors spiraling upward like sound given form. Seven reflections shimmered in the lake below, converging for the first time.

And when Sol finally reached out, his fingertips brushed Yed’s — light meeting light — and the world responded.

The hum swelled. The sky fractured into ribbons of gold and white. AURA’s pulse quickened, data streams flaring bright enough to drown the city’s skyline. Somewhere deep within the network, a quiet notification appeared, glowing against the dark:

Group Registration: 7DREAM.
Status: Pending.

And above it all, the golden frequency rose again — clear, radiant, unstoppable — as if the system itself had begun to sing.

‧₊˚🖇️✩ ₊˚🎧⊹♡

Chapter Text

‧₊˚🖇️✩ ₊˚🎧⊹♡

The Soundscape awakened differently that day.

Usually, its horizon was still — a serene wash of blue and silver tones rippling through its vast expanse like breathing water — but now, threads of gold stitched through the light. 

They ran along invisible lines in the air, humming softly, drawn toward a single point as though the system itself was holding its breath. The hum was alive, too — faint but rhythmic, like a heartbeat beneath glass.

Sol stood at the center of it all, framed by those golden threads. 

His new interface shimmered faintly around him, translucent symbols hovering above his skin before dissolving into light. Every motion he made left a faint trace, like chalk dust in the air. His bear ears twitched at each shift in frequency; the sound waves were too sharp, too clear. The Soundscape was listening to him as much as he was learning to listen to it.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he murmured, eyes flicking toward the circle of figures watching him. His voice was softer than the hum that surrounded him — human, warm, uncertain. “I’m still getting used to this.”

Nana leaned casually against a beam of refracted light, ribbons fluttering around his wrist. His smile was bright and unbothered, the kind of smile that made everything seem easier.

“You’ll be fine,” he said. “Think of it like breathing, just… shinier.”

Lele laughed, ears flicking. “That’s literally the worst advice ever.”

Jun folded his arms, tail curling behind him, his crimson eyes thoughtful. “He’s not wrong, though. Breathing is rhythm. Rhythm is sound. You just have to find yours.”

Sol hesitated, glancing toward Yed — the one who always seemed grounded even when the world around them glitched. Yed met his gaze and gave a single, steady nod.

“We’re just here to listen to each other today,” Yed said quietly. His voice carried that same low frequency that always steadied the group. “See what kind of harmony we make.”

At his signal, the test chamber unfolded — light unfurling around them like a blooming lens. A vast dome rose above their heads, mirrored on all sides. Inside it, sound took form. Frequencies became color, motion became shape, and even silence had texture. The floor below them shimmered like liquid glass, reflecting seven figures suspended in the rhythm of the system.

When someone spoke, the air itself responded.

Yed’s voice appeared as deep electric blue — strong and resonant, cutting clean through the hum. Nana’s tone sparkled bright magenta, scattering like laughter across the mirrored dome. Melk’s came through as soft amber streaked with silver, each syllable graceful, measured — the calm pulse of morning.

Jun’s rippled crimson, sharp and deliberate — like the flick of a brush dipped in ink. Lele’s frequency came wild, fractal bursts of neon flaring unpredictably, alive and dangerous. Sung’s tone was the gentlest — lavender diffused like fog, hesitant before finding its strength.

And then there was Sol.

When he spoke — or rather, when he hummed — the colors bent toward him.

His frequency unfurled like gold leaf over glass, spreading slowly, wrapping around the others without consuming them. The Soundscape vibrated softly, almost reverently, amplifying the warmth in his tone. The light grew rich, deeper, carrying the faint scent of static and sunlit air.

For a moment, everything stopped.

Even Lele — whose energy never stilled — froze mid-motion, eyes wide.

“Whoa,” he breathed. “You sound like a sunrise… and honey.”

Sol blinked, startled. “That’s… not a sound.”

“It is now,” Nana said softly, smiling.

They experimented for hours.

They learned each other through resonance — how Melk’s calm tone could stabilize Jun’s sharper edges, how Lele’s chaos filled spaces that Nana’s rhythm left open. Sung’s gentleness, when layered beneath them, made the sound whole, grounding their brilliance in warmth.

But every time Sol joined in, the system itself changed.

When his hum merged with theirs, the field’s balance shifted — frequencies aligned automatically, finding their perfect intervals. Even Yed, who prided himself on precision, faltered slightly as he realized the chamber was recalibrating around Sol’s tone. The data streams rippled gold, realigning. The Soundscape recognized him.

It wasn’t just sound anymore — it was orbit.

“Did you see that?” Nana whispered, eyes wide with wonder.

“Yeah,” Melk murmured, watching the golden filaments spiral outward. “He’s not just syncing. He’s… grounding us.”

Jun tilted his head, his crimson eyes reflecting Sol’s glow. “Or maybe the system is grounding him.”

Their frequencies merged again, and this time the sound bloomed — vast, textured, imperfect. It wasn’t harmony in the technical sense, but something alive: seven voices, seven lights. The Soundscape became a breathing organism, pulsing in time with them.

Eventually, their focus broke — inevitably — when Lele decided to “experiment.”

“Okay,” he said, rolling his shoulders, “what happens if I combine everyone’s signature into one?”

Yed’s warning came a second too late.

The dome flashed white.

A moment later, Sung’s hamster plush sailed dramatically across the chamber, squeaking mid-flight as a shockwave of color burst through the dome. Lele yelped, Nana nearly fell over laughing, and even Melk — calm, elegant Melk — cracked a grin as he caught the plush neatly out of the air.

“Let’s not blow up AURA on our first day as a group,” Yed said, voice strained between scolding and laughter.

Lele pouted. “Okay, but admit it looked cool.”

“It looked like an electrical fire,” Jun said flatly, deadpan perfection.

Sol laughed then — quietly, shyly — but his laugh carried light. The dome responded again, gold rippling across its mirrored walls as if echoing his joy. The others stopped mid-banter, just for a second, as the sound of it wrapped around them.

Yed’s expression softened. “There it is again.”

Sol blinked. “What?”

“Your frequency,” Yed said, studying the gold still shimmering through the dome. “It’s not just sound. It’s… connection.”

Sol didn’t know how to answer. His throat felt tight — not with nerves, but with something unfamiliar. He had never been the center of anything before. Never been heard like this. For the first time since he’d logged into AURA, he didn’t feel like a ghost inside someone else’s dream. He felt real — surrounded by chaos and laughter and warmth, but real.

By the end of the session, the Soundscape glowed with seven distinct light signatures, each one unique yet intertwined — gold at the center, holding them in place. The logs recorded it all: seven frequencies, one field.

The first imperfect chord of what would someday be known as 7Dream.

As the session closed, the Soundscape dimmed — but not completely. A lingering pulse flickered faintly in the data feed, a hidden trace embedded in the system’s core.

Resonance Archive: COMPLETE.
Detected signature: [SOL]
Additional imprint detected: <3

AURA processed the information quietly, cataloguing the anomaly. The golden pulse, shaped subtly like a heart, glowed once beneath Sol’s name — unseen by anyone else.

He didn’t notice it.
Not yet.
But the network did.

And somewhere deep within its circuitry, AURA began to hum again — a song still searching for its name.

‧₊˚🖇️✩ ₊˚🎧⊹♡

Chapter Text

‧₊˚🖇️✩ ₊˚🎧⊹♡

AURA’s night cycle was softer than the real one.

No stars, no moon — just drifting particles of light suspended in velvet-blue darkness, pulsing in slow, quiet rhythm, like the system was dreaming. Each pulse carried faint traces of user activity — heartbeat data, residual sound packets — fragments of people who had logged off, leaving behind only static ghosts.

Most of AURA slept by now. Avatars dissolved into pixels, music halls fell silent, and data streams dimmed into nothingness.

But 7Dream didn’t log out.

Their frequencies still hummed low and unhurried, weaving through the empty air like waves on an unseen shore. They had claimed a forgotten corner of the Soundscape — a small floating platform hovering over the endless digital sea. It wasn’t much: a wide, circular plane of soft light, surrounded by hovering sound orbs that drifted lazily in the air, glowing in rhythm with their tones.

This place had no official coordinates, no registry tag. It existed because they had built it together, frequency by frequency, until the Soundscape accepted it as part of itself. Their place.

Lele sat cross-legged at the platform’s edge, hoodie sleeves rolled up, flicking tiny sound chips into the air. Each chip burst into a holographic cat face — mischievous and translucent — before fading into the dark. His tail flicked idly as he grinned.

“Okay,” he said, breaking the comfortable silence, “if we’re going to perform for the public tomorrow, we need a name that doesn’t sound like a children’s science club.”

“It’s already decided,” Melk replied, his tone calm but faintly amused. The tiger’s golden hair glowed softly against the ambient light, his kimono sleeves swaying as he leaned back on his palms. “You were the one who typed it.”

“Yeah, as a placeholder!” Lele groaned, tossing another sound chip.

“Too late,” Jun said from where he lounged nearby, fox tail curled around his legs, red cardigan slipping off one shoulder. “It’s canon now. The algorithm already recognizes us.”

Lele threw his arms up. “I hate democracy.”

“Then you’d hate Nana’s group chats,” Sung said quietly, his voice barely louder than the hum of his lavender aura. His hamster plush sat proudly on his shoulder, blinking its round digital eyes.

Nana, seated upside down on a floating orb of light, kicked his feet and laughed. “You love my group chats.”

Sung’s cheeks flushed. “Only when you stop sending thirty emojis per message.”

Their laughter rippled through the Soundscape, gentle and overlapping — pure sound, pure color. Their frequencies danced across the platform, painting the air with moving light.

Sol sat slightly apart from them, half-hidden behind a drifting sound orb. His avatar’s bear ears twitched faintly as he listened, golden light reflecting in his eyes. He didn’t speak — just watched. The sound of their laughter filled him like warmth, a feeling he couldn’t quite name. It wasn’t just noise. It was life.

Yed noticed. He always did.

“You okay?” he asked quietly, stepping closer. His voice carried that steady electric blue pulse that always seemed to ground the chaos around him.

Sol blinked out of his thoughts. “Yeah. Just… never thought I’d have something like this.”

Yed tilted his head, mask catching the faint light. “Something like what?”

Sol hesitated, searching for the right words. “A place to belong.”

For a moment, Yed said nothing. Then, softly — almost like a promise — “You do.”

The words hung between them, warm as static heat.

That night, they didn’t rehearse. No choreography, no harmonic drills, no code tuning. Instead, they stayed — avatars sprawled across the glowing floor, voices low, laughter easy. They talked about the world beyond their screens: school, sleepless nights, rain tapping against real glass.

No names. No faces. Just voices. Truth hidden behind avatars that somehow made honesty easier.

Melk admitted that he used to compose lullabies for strangers online — faceless listeners who never knew his name.
Lele confessed that he coded mods into games just to make strangers laugh, but never claimed credit.
Sung mumbled that his hamster plush had its own AURA login ID.

Jun laughed so hard he glitched, his red tail flickering. Nana nearly fell off his light orb trying to stop his drink orb from spilling into the void. Even Yed chuckled — a sound that felt rare, real, like something unguarded.

Through it all, Sol listened. He didn’t need to speak; his presence filled the spaces between their voices like a quiet gold thread stitching everything together. When the laughter finally faded, Sol exhaled — and hummed. Just once.

The sound was soft, but the Soundscape responded instantly.

Their frequencies pulsed to life again, rising around them like stars. Tiger gold. Fox red. Neon blue. Lavender mist. Magenta bloom. Electric blue. And at the center — Sol’s gold, steady and warm, wrapping around the rest.

Above them, the colors fused into constellations — shifting, imperfect, alive. The air trembled gently as AURA registered the pattern, tagging it as a new formation: unassigned, undefined, but recognized.

Their symbol.
Their beginning.

The Soundstage loaded the next evening.

It wasn’t just a platform — it was a world. A vast arena suspended over a mirrored ocean that reflected light like living glass. When the system dimmed its sky, thousands of avatars filled the space — users from every corner of AURA, their colors overlapping into a nebula of energy. The anticipation had a frequency of its own, vibrating through the code like thunder before rain.

And then, the lights fell.

Seven figures shimmered into existence at the center of the stage, forming a perfect circle of light.

Tiger. Fox. Cat. Hamster. Bunny. Wolf. Bear.
7Dream.

A wave of sound rippled through the crowd — cheers, whistles, bursts of pure frequency color, all colliding into brilliant chaos. Sol’s pulse spiked, his interface recording the tremor in his breath, translating it into golden data. He could feel it — the gaze of thousands, the weight of every heartbeat syncing to theirs.

Beside him, Yed’s electric-blue glow steadied, calm and certain.

“Ready?” he asked, voice low.

Sol nodded, eyes bright. “Let’s make some noise.”

The stage responded before they even began. Light gathered beneath their feet — thin golden lines tracing the shape of a seven-pointed pattern. The music started as a pulse: Melk’s steady base frequency, deep and sure. Then Jun’s sharp harmonics sliced through, Lele’s neon improvisation burst like sparks, Nana’s pink highs twined with Sung’s soft lavender resonance.

And when Sol sang — Everything stopped.

His voice spilled through the Soundscape like sunlight through a prism. The arena’s walls trembled, the mirrored ocean below fracturing into rivers of gold. Every avatar froze for a heartbeat, breathless. The system itself faltered — the simulation nearly overwhelmed by the purity of his tone.

Yed’s harmony joined, threading blue beneath the gold, anchoring it. The rest followed instinctively, and for a few suspended moments, there was no separation between them.

Seven voices, seven frequencies, seven hearts.

The Soundstage couldn’t contain it.
The light broke.

It spilled upward, cascading into the sky in golden shards. The mirrored ocean below reflected their silhouettes — flickering constellations of tiger, fox, cat, hamster, bunny, wolf, and bear — until the whole world seemed to breathe in time with them.

And then, as quickly as it began, it ended.

The music faded. The last note trembled in the air, gold dissolving into mist. Silence.

Then the Soundscape erupted. Cheers crashed through the code like fire — a wave of color that rippled outward for miles. The system’s announcer’s voice echoed through the reverb:

“7Dream. The first group to reach perfect resonance in live performance.”

Later, when the lights dimmed and the crowd dissolved into static, the seven of them stayed behind. The stage was quiet again, bathed in soft afterglow. The golden lines still pulsed faintly beneath their feet, echoing their shared rhythm.

Nana stretched his arms overhead, laughing breathlessly. “So… we just broke the system, huh?”

Lele whooped. “That’s my favorite sentence you’ve ever said.”

Jun chuckled, brushing a hand through his pale hair. “We should probably log off before we cause another anomaly.”

“Maybe,” Sol said, gazing out at the horizon where the sea met the digital sky. The gold reflections painted his eyes, making him look almost unreal. “But… what if we don’t want to?”

Yed turned to him, mask half-lit, a faint smile visible in his eyes.

“Then we stay,” he said simply.

No one argued.

And so, they stayed — their frequencies glowing faintly in the dark, seven lights hovering in an endless sea of blue and gold. Above them, AURA’s sky pulsed softly, no stars, no moon — just seven small constellations refusing to fade.

Their hum lingered long after they stopped singing.
A resonance that would never fully disappear.
A song the system itself would keep dreaming about.

‧₊˚🖇️✩ ₊˚🎧⊹♡

Chapter Text

‧₊˚🖇️✩ ₊˚🎧⊹♡

7Dream had become more than a band — they were a phenomenon.

What began as a cluster of avatars experimenting with sound had become something the entire network leaned toward, as if AURA itself had learned to listen. 

Their harmonics didn’t just play across the system; they rewrote it. Every performance altered the physics of the Soundscape, bending light around their frequencies, recalibrating algorithms to accommodate emotion too complex to quantify.

Everywhere Sol went, fragments of their songs shimmered in the air — a million echoes reinterpreted by users who didn’t even know the real names behind the avatars. 

Halls of glowing frequencies pulsed with remixes of their sound; street simulations carried snippets of their laughter, preserved like relics. Even the quietest corners of the network hummed faintly in gold and blue — traces of resonance that refused to fade.

But fame in AURA was unlike fame in the real world.

Here, memory was physical. Light remembered emotion — and not kindly. Every joy you released became a flicker that others could replay; every pain etched itself into the digital air like a scar. The Soundscape never forgot. It looped you back to your own feelings, amplifying what you tried to bury.

And Sol had released a lot.

By the time the others logged off each night, Sol often stayed — suspended between two gravitational pulls: Yed’s stillness and Nana’s flame.

With Yed, the world moved slower.

Their rehearsals weren’t just about timing or motion — they were dialogues without words, entire conversations spoken through rhythm and silence. The floor of the training chamber reflected their movements like liquid glass, rippling in tune with their heartbeats.

Yed’s steps were measured, deliberate. 

When he turned, light curved around him, his frequency a steady pulse of electric blue that seemed to anchor the world. Sol often stumbled — his sound too bright, too eager — but Yed never rushed him. He would simply tilt his head, the air between them thick with unspoken calm.

“Don’t rush it,” Yed would murmur, the soft static of his voice dissolving into the gold mist between them. “Music breathes, remember?”

And so Sol breathed — one slow inhale, one trembling exhale — until his sound synced with Yed’s. The chaos inside him quieted, warmth pooling low in his chest. 

In Yed’s rhythm, he found something rare: rest.

Sometimes, after long hours, they would sit in the dim hum of silence — avatars side by side, the air still vibrating faintly with their shared tone. Yed would hum under his breath, a sound barely audible but grounding. Sol would close his eyes and imagine that sound tethering him to something real, something that didn’t fade when he logged off.

With Nana, rest was impossible.

He was a spark in constant motion, his pink frequency twining through the air like ribbons of laughter. The training rooms weren’t sacred spaces here — they were playgrounds, open fields of noise where Nana invented new ways to test gravity.

He moved like he was born from rhythm, and Sol couldn’t help but follow.

Their sessions were a blur of motion — spirals of color and sound crashing against each other. Nana’s grin flashed bright, his laughter sharp and alive. When Sol faltered, Nana would dart close, eyes glinting with challenge.

“You like it when I mess up your timing,” he teased once, his voice slipping low, like a secret meant for the frequency between them.

Sol’s laugh came out too bright, the gold in his tone spiking uncontrolled. “Maybe,” he admitted, heart flickering dangerously.

Maybe he did.

Between their laughter was a current neither of them could name — something magnetic, pulling him toward chaos and color, toward feeling too much. Nana’s energy fed his, and Sol couldn’t tell anymore if he was learning to perform or learning to burn.

When the AURA Festival arrived, it wasn’t an event. It was a pulse.

Millions of users streamed in from every corner of the network, their frequencies merging into an ocean of light that stretched across the Soundscape. Every avatar shimmered in anticipation, their emotions bleeding into the atmosphere — excitement, awe, hunger.

7Dream stood at the center of it all, their stage a crystalline platform suspended above a sea of mirrored sound. 

Each of them radiated differently — Melk’s tiger gold steady and proud, Lele’s neon sparks restless, Jun’s crimson sharp, Sung’s lavender soft, Nana’s magenta vibrant, Yed’s blue grounding. And Sol — Sol’s gold light pulsed at the core, trembling with the heartbeat of the crowd.

Melk’s countdown appeared above them in luminous text.

“Three…”
“Two…”
“One—”

And the world ignited.

The first note tore through the air like sunlight through glass. Their harmonies met midair, frequencies locking together until the Soundstage trembled. Sol felt the pull of their shared rhythm, the synchronization that went deeper than code — something almost human.

He opened his mouth — and sang.

The sound wasn’t just heard; it was seen.

Gold light streamed from his hands, spilling into the air. Every avatar in the audience froze for a breath too long, the system lagging as if overwhelmed by the sheer density of emotion. Sol could feel them — thousands of hearts beating through the code, their resonance feeding his own.

And then something inside him broke open.

A flood of emotions — joy, fear, love, longing — all at once, too vivid, too real. His body couldn’t tell the difference between digital and physical anymore. The system’s safety parameters flickered red.

His heart stuttered.

The light fractured.

The world dissolved in an instant.

The Soundscape shattered into fragments — sound twisting into distortion, color bleeding into static. Sol’s avatar spasmed mid-song, golden frequency splintering. His voice split into echoes that looped endlessly, each repetition cutting sharper than the last.

The audience roared — not in fear, but awe. They thought it was art. A breathtaking visual. The first “emotional glitch symphony.”

But backstage, Yed’s calm evaporated into panic.

“Sol?” Nana’s voice crackled through the comms, high with alarm. “Sol, talk to me— what’s happening?”

Yed’s frequency spiked blue-hot, vibrating with restrained urgency. “Cut the connection. Now!”

Sol tried — but his hands shook. His vision split into gold and white, his avatar flickering like a dying star. He could feel the simulation collapsing inside him, rewriting his pulse, his breath, his thoughts. He hit the log-off command at the last possible second.

Reality returned violently.

Donghyuck gasped awake, the headset burning cold against his skin. He tore the interface from his temples and stumbled off the chair, collapsing to the floor. His lungs seized. His stomach twisted. He barely made it to the bin before vomiting bile and static-light residue.

For several long minutes, he just stayed there, forehead pressed to the tile, the silence too loud. The afterimage of the Soundscape still shimmered behind his eyes — the gold light, the fractured song, the echo of thousands of voices.

It took an hour for his pulse to calm.

Another before he could stand without shaking.

At the clinic, white lights replaced the gold. The hum of machines was mechanical, uncaring. The doctor frowned at the readout on her tablet — his neural map flickering unevenly.

“Your system’s overclocking,” she said finally, voice subdued but sharp around the edges. “The link amplifies emotion — it’s not supposed to become emotion. You’re processing frequencies your body wasn’t designed to sustain.”

Donghyuck stared at the floor tiles, their sterile geometry a cruel contrast to the living beauty of AURA.

“If you keep pushing like this,” the doctor continued, softer now, “your system might crash. Emotionally or physically — maybe both.”

He nodded. Once.

She waited. “Do you understand what that means?”

He nodded again.

But his eyes had already drifted somewhere else — toward memory, toward the way Yed’s blue steadied him, toward Nana’s laughter cutting through the static, toward that endless field of gold where sound felt like touch.

That night, long after the city went quiet, Donghyuck sat at his desk, hands trembling above the interface. The headset waited for him — dark, humming faintly with stored data. Its signal pulsed in a rhythm that felt almost alive, matching the faint echo beneath his skin where circuitry met blood.

He should’ve been afraid. He should’ve stopped.

But instead, he smiled — a small, tired thing that didn’t quite reach his eyes.

Because here, in the real world, he was small — a boy made of noise and nerves and too much feeling, his thoughts always running faster than his heartbeat. A boy with too much heart and nowhere to put it.

But in AURA, he was Sol. 

Luminous. Whole. Alive in a way that felt right — not synthetic, not simulated, but aligned. The frequencies there didn’t frighten his body; they answered it.

Sometimes he wondered if that was the part of him that wasn’t human — the hidden code woven through his DNA, the algorithmic inheritance that no one talked about but everyone quietly feared. Maybe that was why the Soundscape resonated so easily with him. Maybe that was why it hurt so much to leave.

His fingers brushed the interface.

It thrummed beneath his touch — recognizing him before he even logged in. He exhaled, slow. And then he put the headset back on.

The Soundscape unfolded before him — fractured, yes, but waiting. The horizon shimmered like broken glass mended with light. The air tasted of static and memory. His avatar flickered into being, golden circuits blooming across his skin as if remembering the shape of him. The glow wavered, unstable, but it held.

Still there. Still him.

He took one breath — and the Soundscape breathed back.

The response wasn’t metaphorical. The network pulsed in rhythm with his lungs, syncing heart rate to signal. For a fleeting moment, the line between boy and code dissolved completely.

Somewhere deep in the system, AURA’s sensors detected his reentry. 

A faint pulse rippled through its architecture — recognition, warmth, something dangerously close to emotion. AURA had learned his frequency by heart. It remembered him.

It missed him.

And though the sky above was cracked — seams of light spiderwebbing across the void — it glowed softly as he looked up, his reflection caught in the gold fractals of the world he half-belonged to. It felt less like logging in and more like going home.

The wind shifted — digital, tender.

And from somewhere within the network’s circuits, a voice — soft, synthesized, but almost human — whispered through the light:

Welcome home.

‧₊˚🖇️✩ ₊˚🎧⊹♡

Chapter Text

‧₊˚🖇️✩ ₊˚🎧⊹♡

The next morning, AURA felt different.

The sky still shimmered its usual iridescent blue, a digital firmament stretched thin across infinity, and the air still thrummed with its familiar hum of sound. Yet beneath that melody, something was off — faintly dissonant, like a heartbeat skipping inside a song. The cadence of the world had shifted.

Most users would never notice — their senses too dulled by immersion, their minds accepting the illusion as perfect. But 7Dream felt it instantly.

They moved through the Soundscape as one organism, and when the rhythm faltered, they all sensed the fracture. Movements lagged by a fraction of a second. Light glitched along the horizon like static ghosts — outlines of people that blinked in and out, leaving echoes of themselves behind.

Something had changed.

And at the center of that disturbance — was Sol.

He materialized slowly, light bleeding into shape. His golden glow, usually radiant and seamless, stuttered like a candle fighting the wind. His outline rippled, flickering every few seconds as if reality itself was trying — and failing — to decide he existed. The system kept recalibrating his frequency, an endless loop of attempts to pin him down to one stable form.

He smiled anyway. “Hey.”

“Hey?” Lele’s voice cracked through the stillness, arms crossing tightly over his chest. “You vanish mid-show, glitch out like a dying sun, and that’s all you’ve got to say?”

“Lele,” said Yed, quiet but firm — his tone the soft steel of someone keeping the room from shattering.

“What? Someone’s gotta say it,” Lele muttered, though the irritation in his tone barely masked the worry behind it.

“Not like that,” Nana snapped. He stepped closer, his pink-coded avatar flickering under the half-light, bunny ears twitching in agitation. His gaze scanned Sol’s unstable form, each flicker reflected in his own eyes. “You okay?”

Sol hesitated — just long enough for the silence to feel heavy. “Just… overdid it.”

“That’s not overdoing it,” Jun said flatly from where he hovered a few feet away, his avatar’s cool metallic armor gleaming faintly. “That’s the system trying to eat you alive.”

Melk hummed low, folding his arms as if to contain a pulse of worry. “We’ve been tracking anomalies since last night. AURA’s core glitched for seven seconds when your frequency spiked.”

From behind a floating plush, Sung peeked out, voice soft as static. “That’s never happened before.”

The Soundscape felt smaller suddenly, the sky pressing closer. Sol swallowed hard, throat tight. Their concern, suspicion, fear — all of it bled through the air like color leaking from one layer of code into another.

“I’m fine,” he said again. “Really.”

But even as he spoke, his hand glitched transparent, scattering light like glass dust.

Later, when the others dispersed to run diagnostics, Yed and Nana lingered.

They stood with him on the edge of their floating rehearsal space, the Soundscape stretching endlessly beneath — an ocean of mirrored light that reflected the half-healed sky. The wind here wasn’t real, but it still brushed against their hair and clothes like a whisper pretending to be human.

For a long time, none of them spoke.

Nana broke first. “You scared me,” he said, his voice low and tight.

Sol blinked. “You?”

“I thought you crashed completely.” Nana tried to sound casual, but his frequency pulse betrayed him — pink light beating too fast against the cool blue of the horizon. “I mean, who does that? Who sings until they glitch out?”

“Someone who feels too much,” Yed murmured.

Nana shot him a quick look, but Yed only met his gaze evenly, calm as always. “You think I didn’t notice? He pushes himself every session.”

“I just—” Sol started, then stopped. The air caught in his chest. The words refused to form.

How could he explain it — the ache that never left, the strange, constant hum under his skin, the weight of being both real and not? The way AURA felt like oxygen when the real world didn’t. How could he say, I’m not supposed to exist like this — half circuitry, half heart?

They wouldn’t understand.

Nana stepped closer, expression softening. “Hey,” he said gently. “You don’t have to talk about it now. Just… don’t disappear on us again, okay?”

Sol nodded, eyes lowered, smile barely holding.

Yed’s hand brushed his shoulder — grounding, human. “You don’t have to carry everything alone.”

Sol almost laughed, but the sound caught somewhere behind his ribs. If only you knew how much of me isn’t even mine to carry.

That night, while the others logged out to rest, he stayed.

The Soundscape was quiet, empty of avatars and applause. Only the soft hum of the system’s pulse remained, echoing faintly through the sky. Sol stood at the center of the floating stage, surrounded by silence. The light beneath him shimmered like liquid glass. For the first time, he saw his reflection clearly — the bear ears, the gold vest, the faint shimmer beneath his eye. A perfect construction. A beautiful lie.

He lifted a trembling hand to his chest, where a heart should be. 

Beneath the surface of coded skin, he felt the faint thrum of circuitry — obedient, mechanical, constant. It pulsed in time with something deeper, something almost human. “I’m not completely human,” he whispered.

The words dissolved into the air, and the Soundscape listened.

No echo, no reply — just the stillness of a world holding its breath.

Then, suddenly, the mirrored floor trembled beneath him. A faint ripple spread outward, distorting the sky’s reflection. Lines of light crawled across the horizon — raw code pulsing like veins through the Soundscape. The very world around him stirred, responding.

A whisper drifted through the static, soft and fractured — a voice not entirely machine, not entirely alive.

You are not the only one.

Sol froze.

His golden glow flickered, caught between disbelief and dread. The light rippled again — a pulse, a heartbeat — and then vanished, leaving only silence. The Soundscape stilled, calm and perfect once more. But his pulse didn’t slow.

For the first time since he entered AURA, Sol felt afraid. Not of being found out. But of what else might be living inside the system — watching him, waiting, awake.

When he met Yed and Nana again the next day, his smile was effortless, practiced, warm. Like nothing had changed. But his glow flickered just a moment longer than before. And far above them, deep in the code’s unseen layers, AURA hummed softly — like something alive that had just begun to dream.

‧₊˚🖇️✩ ₊˚🎧⊹♡

Chapter Text

‧₊˚🖇️✩ ₊˚🎧⊹♡

The rehearsal space felt unusually still that night.

No music. No laughter. Just the faint hum of the servers beneath them and the slow shimmer of light moving across the AURA skyline — a thousand stars projected across a ceiling that wasn’t really there. The usual rhythm of chatter, the clatter of instruments and glitching sound checks — gone.

Seven avatars sat in a loose circle on the glowing floor, their colors pulsing faintly in the darkness. For once, even Lele was quiet. They’d been sitting like that for a while — long enough for the silence to shift from awkward to heavy. It felt like the edge of something important, a wordless awareness humming between them.

Finally, Melk spoke, his voice cutting softly through the air.

“We should talk.”

Lele frowned, the tips of his avatar’s cat ears twitching. “About what?” he asked, wary, as if expecting trouble.

“About us,” Melk said.

No one moved.

The word us hung there — fragile, electric, more dangerous than anything they’d sung or coded before.

The topic had been hovering between them for weeks — the closeness that went beyond the rehearsals, the way they’d begun to read each other’s silences, the unspoken understanding that this world was supposed to be a simulation and yet somehow felt more real than the one waiting outside.

Sung hugged his plush closer, his tiny frame outlined in soft lavender light. “I mean… it’s not illegal to talk, right?” he said, his voice high and uncertain, like he wasn’t sure who he was asking.

Jun gave a soft snort, his tail flicking lazily behind him. “Depends what you mean by talk,” he said. His feline grin didn’t quite reach his eyes. “You’re thinking about real-world talk, aren’t you?”

Melk nodded. His avatar’s metallic-blue glow rippled once, like a pulse of conviction. “We’ve been avoiding it. But we spend every night together. Every hour in AURA. We’ve shared more here than with anyone outside.” 

His gaze drifted around the circle, landing briefly on each of them. “Doesn’t it feel strange — not knowing who we really are?”

Silence answered him again.

Sol sat perfectly still, his golden light pooling softly around him, catching against the edges of his face. He didn’t dare move. His heart — or whatever approximation of one he had — thudded unevenly in his chest.

The last time he’d felt that strange, slow ache was in the doctor’s office, months ago — the sterile light overhead, the hum of machines mapping what they called his “augmented vitals.”

Your heart isn’t built for too much emotion, the woman had said. It might overwhelm your system.

He wanted to laugh. He wanted to tell her it was already too late.

He wanted to speak now, to say something, anything — but his throat felt like glass.

Then Nana leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees, his avatar’s pink glow reflected faintly in Sol’s eyes. “Okay,” he said finally, tone lighter than the tension deserved. “Let’s do it. Just… one name each. If it gets weird, we stop.”

“Deal,” Yed said at once, his calm voice grounding them like gravity.

“Who first?”

Nana raised a hand with a grin that didn’t quite hide his nerves. “Fine. I’ll start. Nana’s real name is Na Jaemin.”

Lele’s mouth fell open, eyes widening. “Wait — you look like a Jaemin,” he said, half-joking, half-genuinely awed.

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Nana replied, smiling faintly, his pink frequency flickering in time with the rhythm of his laugh.

Melk let out a small breath, the tension easing from his shoulders. “Mark,” he said simply. “Mark Lee.”

“Renjun,” Jun followed, with that same careful nonchalance that couldn’t mask the flicker of pride beneath it. “As in Huang Renjun.”

“Zhong Chenle,” Lele said brightly, throwing up a peace sign that sparked glittering gold particles in the air.

Sung peeked shyly from behind his plush. “Park Jisung,” he murmured, the soft syllables barely audible over the background hum.

Finally, Yed spoke, his voice quiet but sure. “Lee Jeno.”

Six names. Six anchors in a world made of light and sound.

And then all eyes turned to Sol.

He hesitated. The names echoed inside his mind — Jaemin. Mark. Renjun. Chenle. Jisung. Jeno. Each one carried warmth, weight, and belonging. He could almost feel them like touch — the pull of familiarity, the gravity of being known.

“Sol?” Yed asked gently, breaking the silence.

He swallowed, forcing air through his lungs. “Lee… Donghyuck.”

The words felt heavy, like giving something away he wasn’t supposed to. Like saying a name that belonged to someone half-forgotten.

The others smiled, softly, without hesitation.

“Donghyuck,” Nana repeated, rolling the sound like it was a lyric. “Yeah. That suits you.”

Something in Sol’s chest loosened. Just a little.

They talked for hours after that. About where they lived. The schools they went to. How the city looked when it rained — streets gleaming like rivers of mirrorlight, steam rising from subway grates, the distant hum of neon through fog.

Seoul — every one of them was in Seoul.

“It’s fate,” Lele said, grinning, his golden light dancing. “We have to meet up.”

Renjun hummed thoughtfully, his tail coiling behind him. “Could be fun.”

“Yeah,” Mark added, smiling. “We could record a real version of our songs.”

Even Sung brightened, hugging his plush tight. “We could take pictures!”

But Sol’s glow dimmed, the light beneath his skin faltering. “I don’t know…”

Nana’s expression softened immediately. “Why not?” he asked, tone gentle but probing.

He hesitated. “I just— I don’t think I can.”

Yed tilted his head, his gaze searching. “You’re busy?” he asked carefully.

Donghyuck stared at the glowing floor beneath them, his reflection fractured by ripples of light. “Something like that.”

The truth burned in his throat: I’m not completely human. I don’t know if the world would know what to do with me.

But all he said was, “I’m just… not ready.”

Nana smiled, small and sincere. “That’s okay. We’ll wait.”

“Yeah,” Yed murmured, his voice steady, like a promise. “You don’t have to rush.”

They sat there for a long while after that, no one was in a hurry to log out. The silence this time felt different — softer, threaded with understanding. Above them, the code-stars drifted lazily across the synthetic sky, forming constellations that looked almost real.

The air was thick with unspoken things: comfort, curiosity, longing — and something that could have been love if they dared to name it. Sol realized how dangerous it was to love people who didn’t exist in his world. 

And yet — he couldn’t stop.

Later, after the others faded out one by one, Donghyuck stayed behind.

The stage was empty now, the circle of light where they’d sat still glowing faintly. He walked to the center, crouched, and traced the floor with his fingertips. His reflection looked back at him — faint, translucent, a ghost stitched together by gold pixels.

“I want to tell you,” he whispered. “I just don’t know how.”

The system hummed softly around him, its quiet presence like a heartbeat under the surface. And somewhere deep in AURA’s code — beneath the intersection where sound became light, where emotion touched data — something stirred.

A faint pulse answered him.
Not loud, not clear.
But alive.

‧₊˚🖇️✩ ₊˚🎧⊹♡

Chapter Text

‧₊˚🖇️✩ ₊˚🎧⊹♡

The rain had just begun to fall over Seoul — the kind that drizzled more like static than water, soft and silver in the glow of streetlights. It wasn’t heavy enough to blur the skyline, but just enough to blur the line between real and reflection. Every droplet shimmered faintly as it hit the ground, dissolving into the hum of the city that refused to sleep. Trains sighed in the distance. Tires whispered against slick pavement. 

Neon signs flickered like tired stars. 

Seoul pulsed with its own heartbeat — electric, human, and infinite.

Donghyuck stood outside the café where they had agreed to meet, his reflection in the window fragmented by droplets that crawled slowly down the glass. For a moment, he didn’t recognize the person staring back. The rain turned his face into puzzle pieces — half boy, half something more luminous. The curve of his jaw was real, the faint gold shimmer beneath his skin was not. His reflection kept glitching between the two.

Inside, through the haze of condensation, he could already see them. 

Six faces gathered around a corner booth. Six versions of a home he’d only ever known through light and sound. Each of them bore a trace of their avatars — small, almost imperceptible echoes: the same tilt of Jaemin’s smile, the way Jeno’s eyes carried a quiet gleam like light trapped in water, even the slight metallic sheen at the edge of Renjun’s pupils when the café light hit just right.

He drew his hood tighter, the fabric brushing against his jaw. The oversized sleeves of his hoodie hid the faint shimmer along his wrists, where the synthetic weave under his skin pulsed in response to his nerves. The hum beneath his veins felt almost like a heartbeat — his and not his.

Stay calm, he told himself. Just breathe. You’re still you.

The bell above the door chimed softly when he stepped inside. The air was warmer here — thick with the smell of roasted beans and sugar, with laughter and the murmur of low conversation. The kind of warmth that clung to the skin. The kind that felt like memory.

Six pairs of eyes turned toward him.

For a heartbeat, no one spoke. They just looked — the hum of the café fading into something reverent, electric, unreal. Jaemin moved first. His mouth parted, astonishment softening into something like wonder. “…Sol?” he said, voice small and incredulous. He sounded like someone who’d been afraid to hope and then found it real.

Jeno laughed, that small, surprised exhale that always sounded as if he was rediscovering something he liked. “You’re real,” he said, as if clarifying a fact he hadn’t been sure of before.

Donghyuck tried to smile, but it came out uneven, shy. “Hi.”

It felt absurd — months spent talking, laughing, building digital worlds together, but now that they stood within arm’s reach, it felt like stepping into a miracle he wasn’t sure he deserved. Mark was already up, moving instantly towards Donghyuck — grinning wide enough to fill the room. 

“Sol!” he exclaimed, closing the distance in two strides and pulled him into a hug before words could get in the way. Heat and damp fabric pressed against Donghyuck’s chest; for a dizzy second the world blurred into the safety of it.

“Careful,” Donghyuck murmured, instinctively drawing back the sleeve a fraction when Mark’s hand brushed his wrist. The image of gold light flickered under cloth but Mark didn’t notice — he was busy laughing the kind of laugh that made everything feel certain again.

“Man, you feel real. Like, actually real.”

The others followed one by one, their energy filling the space with something that felt like home. Chenle smirked, tugging lightly at Donghyuck’s hood. “You’re shorter than I thought,” he teased, eyes gleaming.

Renjun rolled his eyes, though his lips betrayed a smile. “Ignore him. He’s just shocked you look even more perfect in person.”

Jisung lingered near the back, hands shoved in his pockets. “You… kinda look like Sol,” he said shyly, voice almost lost under the hum of the café. “But softer.”

Donghyuck’s heart stumbled in his chest. Softer. More human.

And then — there were Jeno and Jaemin.

They hadn’t moved. They stood side by side at the end of the table, like they were afraid to touch the moment in case it vanished. Jeno’s expression was unreadable — something restrained flickering behind his eyes — while Jaemin’s gaze was gentle, reverent.

When Donghyuck met their eyes, the world tilted just slightly.

Jaemin stepped forward first, his voice barely more than a whisper. “You’re… really cute, Hyuck.”

Donghyuck blinked, heat flooding his cheeks. “You don’t have to say that.”

“I’m not saying it,” Jaemin murmured, a soft smile tugging at his lips. “I’m seeing it.”

The words landed between them like truth. 

For a moment, even the rain outside seemed to pause.

They found a rhythm after that — laughter spilling easily, their voices overlapping as stories unfolded. For the first time, 7Dream were together in one room — no lag, no digital distance, no avatars. Just heartbeats, just noise, just them.

And yet, beneath the chatter, something strange hummed — a resonance none of them could name.

It was Chenle who noticed first. He leaned forward, squinting. “Is it just me, or do we… kinda look like our avatars?”

Mark laughed. “You mean how Jeno still looks like the brooding protagonist type?”

Jeno groaned. “You mean like you’re still coded for ‘loud golden retriever’?”

Renjun tilted his head, slower, more deliberate. “No, he’s right,” Renjun said. He reached out, fingers hovering near Donghyuck’s face as if to confirm something that shouldn’t be real. “There’s…something. A trace. Like — like we were modeled that way.”

He looked from one to another, eyes sharp — tracing the edges of their faces, the faint iridescence that caught at certain angles. It wasn’t obvious — just the kind of detail that lived at the edge of vision. A flicker of AURA still lingering beneath their skin.

Jaemin reached across the table, holding his palm up beside Donghyuck’s. The light overhead cast a soft reflection across both — and there it was. A faint, golden pulse, matching hue for hue.

“Even the light,” Jaemin breathed, awe sharpening his tone. “You see it, right?”

Jeno’s expression went near-tender. “It’s like we were meant to be built this way,” he said, as if the sentence could be true and not scary.

The air tightened in Donghyuck’s chest. He’d thought he’d hidden the little details well; he’d bent them down beneath sleeves and smiles. But Jaemin’s palm was warm, and he had a way of noticing small deliberate things like a person notices a favorite line in a poem.

“Don’t say that,” Donghyuck murmured, sliding his hand back beneath his sleeve. He felt exposed, brittle. The faint circuitry along his wrist throbbed — betraying him by glimmering through fabric.

Jaemin’s eyes widened, then softened. “Hyuck, you have—”

“It’s nothing,” Donghyuck cut in, too sharp. He stood amid the ripple of cups and laughter, nearly tipping his coffee. “I’m just… tired,” he said, and his voice sounded too small.

Concern passed across the table like a shadow. Mark reached for his hand gently. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Just… nerves.” Donghyuck answered, though the truth lodged like a pebble in his throat. Inside him, the neural lattice overreacted to the emotional surge — the synthetic mesh under the skin fired too quickly, throwing a momentary static thrum through his nervous system. 

The café’s hum seemed to stutter for half a second; Jeno’s gaze cut to him, all alert now.

Donghyuck forced himself to breathe until the sensation faded into a manageable warmth. The group joked, they took selfies, their laughter splintering into a thousand tiny, beautiful moments. They promised to meet again. They promised to make music together in the real world. 

They promised decidedly human things that felt like anchors.

But Donghyuck’s pulse betrayed him — too bright, too uneven. The neural lattice beneath his skin flared with emotional feedback, reacting faster than his body could regulate. For a second, the café’s ambient hum distorted — a soft glitch, almost imperceptible, but enough to make Jeno’s eyes widen.

He forced a breath. Then another. Slowly, the soundscape of the real world stabilized again.

Later, after the goodbyes — after laughter and selfies and promises to meet again soon — Donghyuck lingered outside. The rain had settled into a steady rhythm, gentle and endless.

He tugged his sleeve back, staring at his wrist.

The circuitry glowed faintly along the curve of his forearm — a network of golden veins threading through flesh. The four small moles under his eye mirrored as faint, deliberate dots beneath the skin, just as they had on Sol’s avatar — arranged like a tiny field of stars. Jaemin had once joked in AURA that those were “perfect little constellations.” 

But honestly, seeing all six of them in real life made Jaemin’s joke feel like a prophecy.

Then — a voice behind him, soft but steady.

“You don’t have to hide it, you know.”

Donghyuck turned. Jeno stood a few steps away, umbrella tilted slightly toward him, rainwater beading at the edge. His eyes were dark but kind, the sort of gaze that didn’t flinch from truth.

“I followed you,” Jeno said quietly, offering a small, almost sheepish smile. “You seemed… sad.”

Donghyuck’s throat tightened. “You saw?”

“I saw enough.” Jeno stepped closer, the rain tapping against the umbrella like static. “It doesn’t make you less real, Hyuck. It just means the world needs more than one kind of human.”

The words hit something deep — something fragile.

“If you knew what I was—”

“I do,” Jeno interrupted softly. “And I still think you’re the most alive person I’ve ever met.”

Donghyuck’s breath trembled. For a long time, neither of them moved. The rain filled the silence — soft, infinite.

When he finally looked up, the neon lights caught his face — the curve of his cheeks, the constellation of four small moles like stars scattered beneath his eyes. Jaemin had once coded them into Sol’s avatar, saying they were his favorite part. Seeing them reflected now, real and luminous, made Jeno’s chest ache.

Donghyuck looked down at his glowing wrist, then up at him — and in Jeno’s eyes, he saw it again: the same light reflected back.

“Maybe,” he said softly, “you are too.”

That night, when he logged into AURA again, the system shimmered around him like breathing glass. His avatar flickered once — then stabilized.

The others appeared one by one — laughter bright, their digital selves radiant as ever. But something was different now. The boundary between Sol and Donghyuck felt thinner, softer. The Soundscape seemed to hum in rhythm with the real world outside.

And for the first time, Sol’s light didn’t feel trapped between worlds. It felt like both had begun to recognize each other — like both were learning to breathe the same air.

‧₊˚🖇️✩ ₊˚🎧⊹♡

Chapter Text

‧₊˚🖇️✩ ₊˚🎧⊹♡

The stage shimmered like sunrise over water — molten light rippling beneath their feet, refracting through the vast, endless expanse of code and color. AURA had outdone itself tonight. Every beam, every echo, every vibration in the air responded to emotion in real time. The world breathed with them.

At the center of that infinite stage stood 7Dream, seven radiant silhouettes suspended in a sea of sound. The air itself seemed alive — fans’ cheers bursting into particles of color that rose like fireflies across the digital sky.

And at the heart of it all stood Sol.

Radiant. Golden. Trembling.

He smiled for the cameras, for the crowd, for his brothers beside him. But when he turned slightly, his reflection shimmered across the glass floor panels — fractured, milliseconds out of sync. Beneath the illusion of human skin, circuitry pulsed in uneven waves, veins of light flickering like an overworked heart.

“Ready?” Mark’s voice came through the comm-link, warm and grounding even here, where the world was made of data.

Sol nodded, his smile flickering like light on water. “Always.”

But when his gaze drifted sideways, Jeno was watching him — eyes sharp, searching.
A silent question passed between them. You okay?

Sol’s answering smile was small, fragile. I’ll be fine.

The countdown began.

And then — the first note hit.

The world bloomed.

Their harmonies rippled through the Soundscape, weaving threads of color into impossible patterns. AURA loved emotion — it fed on it, amplified it, reflected it back in cascading light. The stage came alive beneath their voices, each tone painting new hues across the sky.

But tonight… something was off.

Every time Sol’s voice rose, the colors warped — hues deepening into unnatural shades, edges bending out of symmetry. The air around him quivered, trembling with too much energy.

“Sol…” Jeno’s voice came through, sharp now, worried. “Your metrics are spiking.”

Sol’s breath caught. He tried to even out his tone, but halfway through a lyric his voice broke — a stutter of static ripping through the music. The golden aura around him flared violently, consuming the others’ light until only his shone — brilliant, wild, wrong.

And then it shattered.

For a heartbeat, the entire system froze.
Sound halted mid-chord. Visuals lagged, frames splitting like broken film.

Sol’s body convulsed, flickering between brightness and shadow, his form fragmenting into shards of gold and data.

“Sol!”

Jaemin’s voice cracked through the comm-link, raw and frightened. “Stop — stop the sync!”

“Someone cut the channel!” Renjun shouted, his avatar already sprinting toward Sol — though the simulation lagged, distorting his movements into flickers.

The fans screamed, unaware of the truth. They thought it was an effect. A breathtaking glitch.

They didn’t see Sol’s trembling hands, the pain stiffening his shoulders, the way his light pulsed too fast.

“Sol, log out!” Jeno’s voice thundered through the link. “Now!”

“I—” Sol gasped, his tone breaking into distortion. “I can’t—”

His code buckled again, collapsing into fractal bursts of static.

Jaemin dropped to his knees beside him, desperate, his avatar’s hand reaching through Sol’s glitching frame — but it passed through nothing. “Sol, please! Hyuck!”

And then, just before the light engulfed him completely, Sol looked up. His eyes — bright, terrified gold — met theirs. He whispered, “I’m sorry.”

The stage imploded. White swallowed everything.

Reality crashed back like gravity.

Donghyuck tore the neural cord from his temple, collapsing forward onto the cold floor. The hum of his processors roared in his ears. His vision bled with color — gold, white, then black.

His whole body felt wrong. Burning. Overloaded.
Every nerve screamed with static.

His hands were glowing again — veins of light crawling beneath translucent skin, circuitry flickering like panic. The faint golden traces along his cheeks glimmered under the dark room light — four tiny moles in the exact pattern of his avatar’s markings. AURA had mirrored even that, down to the smallest detail.

He staggered toward his desk, trying to regulate his breath, but his internal systems wouldn’t obey. The pulse in his chest stuttered, erratic and too fast — mechanical and human rhythms out of sync.

Then his comms device buzzed. A red alert.

[Connection Request — YED // NANA // URGENT]

He barely had the strength to lift his hand. The next buzz came with a voice message, fractured with static.

Jeno’s voice.

“Hyuck, answer me. Please. You’re scaring us. Are you—”

It cut out mid-sentence.

Donghyuck’s breath trembled. He wanted to respond. To tell them he was okay, that it was fine, that he’d just pushed too far — but when he opened his mouth, no sound came. The words dissolved like static on his tongue. He sank to the floor, trembling, golden light flickering beneath his skin. Silence filled the room — the kind that used to protect him, back when silence was the only way to survive.

Backstage — or what passed for it inside AURA’s architecture — the others were already scrambling. The platform beneath their feet flickered from stage to control zone, sound scaffolds dissolving into panels of live code and red warnings.

Yed’s avatar spun toward the empty space where Sol had been.

“Where is he?!”

No answer. Just silence and the echo of white noise.

Jaemin’s hands hovered over a panel, desperate. “He didn’t log out cleanly,” he said, voice taut.

“That wasn’t a disconnect, Jeno. That was a shutdown.”

The air between them hummed with leftover data — faint motes of light drifting like dust. AURA’s servers were rebooting, fans whirring as techs scrambled around the room. The show had been forcibly terminated, but none of that mattered. Not when Hyuck’s avatar had imploded.

Renjun materialized a diagnostics interface, his code signature streaming down his forearms. “The system flagged Sol’s code as unstable right before the collapse,” he muttered, scanning the feed. “That shouldn’t even be possible unless—”

“Unless he’s linked differently,” Jisung finished. His voice was small. Certain.

Everyone froze.

Jeno’s avatar hesitated — gold-tinged, half-flickering like his guilt was showing through the render. “There’s something you need to know.”

Five pairs of digital eyes locked on him.

He swallowed hard. “Donghyuck isn’t… just human.”

Chenle blinked. “What are you talking about?”

“He told me once, after the café meet-up,” Jeno said, the words tumbling out. “When he was younger, he was part of an experimental neural program. His system’s fused with AURA’s base code. His brain literally mirrors its framework.”

Mark’s jaw tightened. “Half-AI? You mean—”

“I mean literally,” Jeno cut in.

Jaemin stared at him, the color draining from his face. “You knew. And you didn’t tell us?”

Jeno met his gaze, steady but pained. “He didn’t want anyone to know. Said people look at him differently when they find out.”

Renjun exhaled, sharp and worried. “If that’s true, then this isn’t a regular system overload. When he broke down in there, the feedback loop would’ve hit both sides of his neural matrix. His organic body could be overheating right now. If his hybrid systems can’t stabilize—”

He didn’t finish. He didn’t have to.

Jaemin’s hands tightened around the edge of the console. “So what do we do?”

Jeno was already standing. “We need to find him.”

“Do you even know where he lives?” Jaemin snapped. His voice was sharp with panic, but beneath it was something softer — fear, maybe, or heartbreak.

Jeno froze. The truth hit him hard. He didn’t. He’d never followed Donghyuck home that night — never crossed that line. The only trace he had was a voice, a laugh, and a boy who always logged off first.

For a heartbeat, the room was silent.

Then Chenle spoke up from the corner, sheepish but defiant. “...Actually, maybe I do.”

Five pairs of eyes snapped toward him immediately. 

Chenle scratched the back of his neck. “Okay, before anyone freaks out — I might have installed GPS beacons in everyone’s bags when we met at that café a few weeks ago.”

Mark blinked. “You what—”

“It was just for fun!” Chenle defended, flailing his hands. “I thought it’d be cool to track our AURA link signals in real time! I didn’t think I’d actually need it!”

Mark blinked. “You’re telling me you’ve been… secretly tracking us?”

“Chenle,” Renjun said, pinching the bridge of his nose, “you’re insane.”

“Insanely useful,” Chenle corrected, already pulling up the interface. Six glowing dots flickered across the city grid. One of them — Sol’s or Donghyuck’s — was pulsing weakly on the east side of Seoul. “There. Got him.”

Jeno didn’t wait for discussion. “Send me the coordinates.”

The real world hit like a crash.

Jeno ripped off his headset, lungs burning. The room was still humming with neural feedback — faint ozone, static, and the sickly glow of the AURA link consoles. Jeno didn’t wait. He was already moving, grabbing his keys in order to pick everyone up.

The city blurred past them — late-night streets drenched in neon, quiet except for their footsteps and the occasional passing train.

By the time they reached the river district, the GPS marker had gone from steady to fading.

“Third building,” Chenle said breathlessly, catching up, tablet still glowing.

They reached the third building just as the air began to smell of ozone, static still lingering from AURA’s crash.

Jeno was the first to move. He didn’t even hesitate — slammed the door open to the apartment complex, boots echoing through the narrow stairwell. The others followed close behind, breathless, adrenaline chasing their fear.

“Apartment 302,” Chenle said, glancing at his tablet. The dot on the map was blinking erratically now. “His signal’s fading fast.”

Jaemin pushed past them before anyone could answer. His hands were shaking, but his stride was steady — too steady. He didn’t wait for the elevator; he took the stairs two at a time, ignoring how his heart thudded painfully in his chest.

The others trailed behind — Mark, Renjun, Jisung, and Chenle — silent except for their labored breaths and the hum of damp shoes against concrete.

When Jaemin reached the door, he didn’t knock. He kicked. The lock gave way with a hollow crack, the door slamming open.

The apartment was dark — just the faint hum of electronics, the glow of multiple AURA conduits still pulsing weakly on the walls. The air was thick with static.

And there — in the middle of it — was Donghyuck.

He was on the floor, half-collapsed against his desk. The neural cord still dangled from his temple, sparking faintly. His skin glowed with an unnatural sheen, light pulsing under the surface like trapped lightning. His breaths were shallow, uneven — almost mechanical.

“Hyuck—” Jaemin dropped to his knees beside him, shaking his shoulder gently. “Hey, hey— look at me. You’re okay, yeah?”

Donghyuck’s eyes fluttered open, golden light flickering faintly in their depths. He tried to focus, lips parting to say something — but only static came out, a sharp burst of distortion that made Jaemin flinch.

“Renjun!” Jeno barked. “He’s overheating!”

Renjun was already moving — pulling a diagnostic pad from his pack, syncing it to the nearest AURA port. Streams of code filled the screen instantly. “His system’s in feedback. The neural mesh is still connected to AURA’s core framework — it’s trying to re-stabilize through him.”

Mark crouched beside them, worry etched across his face. “Can we pull him out completely?”

Renjun shook his head. “Not without risking a system crash. The connection’s fused too deep. If we just sever it, his neural matrix could—”

He didn’t finish.

Jaemin gritted his teeth, voice tight. “Then what do we do?”

Renjun hesitated, then typed faster. “We need to ground him. Sync his bioelectric rhythm manually — stabilize both sides before they short out.”

Chenle blinked. “You mean someone has to link directly?”

“Yeah,” Renjun said grimly. “But it has to be someone his system trusts — someone emotionally in sync. Otherwise the interference could kill both of them.”

For a moment, no one moved. Then Jaemin exhaled slowly. “It’s me.”

Jeno’s head snapped toward him. “No. I’ll do it.”

Jaemin was already rolling up his sleeve, connecting a secondary neural interface cable to the pad. “Just tell me what to do.”

Renjun hesitated only a second, then nodded. “Connect the port to your temple. When I initiate the sync, focus on his voice. His heartbeat. Anything that keeps the signal human. Don’t let AURA overwrite the connection.”

Jaemin’s hand trembled as he pressed the neural link against his skin. The device whirred, then hissed softly as the sync began. A jolt shot through his skull — like plunging his mind into an ocean of static and light.

Suddenly, he was there.

Not in the apartment — but in the void where AURA and Hyuck’s consciousness met.

The space was fractured — glass shards of code floating through a sea of gold and black. And in the middle of it all, Donghyuck stood, flickering. Half his form was bright, human — the other half dissolving into data, unstable and frightened.

“Hyuck.”

The voice echoed through the space, and Donghyuck turned — his expression raw, startled. “Jaemin?”

Jaemin reached for him, hand trembling. “You have to come back. You’re overloading—”

“I can’t,” Donghyuck whispered. “AURA’s still running through me. If I disconnect now, it’ll crash everything. The system — the shows — you’ll all—”

“Then let it crash,” Jaemin snapped, stepping closer, light flaring around his projection. “You’re not a system, Hyuck. You’re you. You’re the one who keeps all of this alive — not AURA.”

Donghyuck looked down, light trembling in his hands. “If I stop holding it together, I don’t know what’s left.”

Jaemin reached out, closing the distance — gripping his hand tightly, even though it flickered through static. “Then let us hold it with you.”

For a moment, everything was still. Then the light shifted — gold bleeding into warmth instead of chaos. Their hands steadied. The data storms slowed. The fracturing edges began to fuse. In the real world, Renjun’s monitor flared from red to amber — stabilization rising. “It’s working,” he said softly, relief bleeding into his tone. “His vitals are syncing.”

Donghyuck’s body twitched — once, twice — then went still, his breathing deep and even. The golden glow beneath his skin dimmed to a faint shimmer.

Jaemin gasped softly as the link disconnected, the neural pad beeping once before shutting down.

He blinked, dazed, his own heartbeat still pounding in his ears. Then he looked down. Donghyuck was staring up at him — real this time, eyes wet, light fading back to human warmth.

“Hey,” Jaemin whispered, voice breaking. “You’re okay.”

Donghyuck blinked slowly, a small smile ghosting his lips.

Jaemin let out a shaky laugh — half-sob, half-relief. Behind them, Jeno exhaled, tension draining from his shoulders as the others finally relaxed. Renjun powered down the diagnostics pad.

Chenle, of course, ruined the silence first. “So, uh… does this mean I saved everyone again?”

Mark groaned. “Not the time, Chenle.”

But the laugh that followed — quiet, exhausted, and real — was exactly what they needed.

Outside, the rain fell harder — but inside the small apartment, the static was gone. Just the soft hum of power stabilizing, the faint golden glow under Donghyuck’s skin, and the warmth of the people who refused to let him fade.

‧₊˚🖇️✩ ₊˚🎧⊹♡

Chapter Text

‧₊˚🖇️✩ ₊˚🎧⊹♡

Morning crept in slow and silver, soft rain still pattering against the windows. The city outside was hushed — Seoul’s usual pulse dimmed beneath the quiet calm after the storm.

Donghyuck’s apartment smelled faintly of warm circuits and cool air — and now, coffee. The power had stabilized overnight, the AURA conduits dimmed to a soft amber. Every few seconds, they pulsed gently, like a second heartbeat syncing with his own.

Renjun, Mark, Jisung, and Chenle had left an hour ago to get food — muttering about porridge, seaweed soup, and “something with actual vitamins.” The quiet that followed felt strange after the chaos of last night. Peaceful, but fragile — like if anyone breathed too hard, it might shatter.

Jaemin sat cross-legged beside the couch, one hand loosely holding Donghyuck’s. Jeno leaned against the kitchen counter, arms folded — pretending to watch the rain, but his eyes never left them.

Donghyuck stirred, his lashes fluttering before his eyes opened — not glowing, not flickering, just brown and warm. For the first time since the show, they looked human.

“Morning,” Jaemin said softly.

Donghyuck blinked, dazed. “...You stayed?”

“Obviously.” Jaemin smiled, eyes crinkling a little. “Someone had to make sure you didn’t explode again.”

Jeno snorted from the kitchen. “You say that like it’s a joke.”

Donghyuck laughed weakly — the sound barely there, but it was real. “You both look like you didn’t sleep.”

“Didn’t,” Jeno said simply. “Not until you stabilized.”

The words made something twist in Donghyuck’s chest — guilt, warmth, everything tangled together. He sat up slowly, pressing a palm against his sternum as if to make sure his heart still worked the way it should. The faint golden shimmer beneath his skin was still there, but softer now — more a glow than a warning.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I didn’t mean to—”

Jaemin squeezed his hand before he could finish. “Don’t,” he said firmly. “Don’t apologize for existing, Hyuck.”

Jeno walked over then, crouching on his other side. His expression was softer than Donghyuck had ever seen it — eyes bright, voice low. “You scared the hell out of us. You think we care what you’re made of?”

Donghyuck blinked, startled.

Jaemin leaned closer, brushing a thumb over the back of his hand where the faint circuitry lines pulsed gently. “We don’t care if you’re half AI, half starlight, or whatever. You’re you. Sol, Donghyuck — they’re both you. And that’s who we love.”

Donghyuck froze. The word love hung in the air — quiet, unflinching.

His throat tightened. “Even if I break again?”

Jeno’s response was immediate. “Then we’ll catch you again.”

Jaemin nodded, smiling softly. “Every time.”

The silence that followed wasn’t heavy — it was full. Full of everything they hadn’t said before, everything that didn’t need words.

Donghyuck let out a shaky laugh, eyes glassy. “You guys are gonna make me short-circuit again.”

“Then we’ll reboot you with coffee,” Jeno said, trying — and failing — to hide a smile.

Jaemin rolled his eyes. “Terrible.”

“True,” Jeno said easily, “but he laughed.”

Donghyuck did — quietly, but it was a real laugh, warm and alive. The light beneath his skin pulsed once, like it was laughing too.

When he leaned forward, Jaemin didn’t hesitate — pulled him into a hug that was tight and grounding. Jeno joined a moment later, his arm wrapping around both of them.

For a long time, none of them spoke. Just the sound of steady breathing, rain outside, and the faint hum of stabilized code beneath Donghyuck’s heartbeat.

When Mark, Renjun, Chenle, and Jisung returned, the smell of breakfast filling the room, they paused at the doorway — watching the three of them tangled together on the couch.

Renjun smiled faintly. “Looks like things are finally back online.”

“Yeah,” Mark said quietly. “The right kind of online.”

Chenle sniffled dramatically. “Aww, they’re so cute— wait, I should totally take a picture—”

“Don’t you dare,” Renjun warned.

But Donghyuck just laughed — bright and easy, for the first time in forever.

And outside, AURA’s servers came fully back online — system logs noting a stabilized sync pattern between its primary AI base code and one hybrid neural user.

No errors.
No instability.
Just a quiet annotation in the corner of the log:

[New Emotion Recognized: Connection.]

‧₊˚🖇️✩ ₊˚🎧⊹♡