Chapter Text
The morning after Seungmin left for school, Haneul sat on the porch steps with a piece of
toast in one hand and a plastic bunny hair clip in the other. She had already named the bunny Professor Fluffington and was currently explaining to him that breakfast toast tasted better if you imagined it came from a magic tree.
Father was inside, on a work call that sounded very boring (lots of numbers and phrases like "final invoice"), which meant Haneul was, for all practical purposes, unsupervised. A perfect state of being.
"Professor Fluffington," she told the bunny clip in her hair, "today we're going on an adventure."
The bunny didn't answer, but that was fine. He rarely did.
She wandered around the back of the house first. The garden was wild, full of weeds and flowers fighting for space. A row of stepping and beyond that, the forest waited - tall, green, and whispery.
Haneul picked up a stick. "Magic wand," she declared, waving it like she'd just been knighted. "Let's go."
The bridge creaked under her small feet. Below it, the stream trickled lazily over smooth stones, the sound like quiet laughter.
Halfway across, she stopped.
Something had moved in the trees.
At first she thought it was the wind, but then she saw it — a flicker of gray fur, just at the edge of the woods. She squinted, heart thumping.
"Hello?"
No answer. Just the leaves rustling, the light shifting.
She took a step forward. Then another.
The Forest felt alive, not scary alive but like it was watching her, curious. Shafts of sunlight filtered through the branches, turning the air gold. The path curved, leading her deeper in.
That's when she saw it: a small wooden gate, half-buried in moss. It wasn't tall, just her height, and looked like it hadn't been opened in years.
She crouched to peek through the gaps. On the other side was a hollow — a circle of grass and roots, with a single tree in the middle. Its trunk was wide and twisted, the bark patterned like a wolf's fur.
And sitting at its base was a Wolf.
It was big. Bigger than any wolf she had ever seen before with grey blue fur and bright amber eyes.
Haneul froze.
Then, to her surprise, the wolf smiled.
"Hello," it said softly. Its voice was deep and warm, like a lullaby through the trees.
She clutched her stick tighter. "Are you the wolf man?"
The smile widened just a little. "Maybe."
"You don’t look like a human though," she said.
"I don’t," he replied. "But looks can be tricky things."
Haneul thought about that. "Do you live here?"
"I used to," the wolf man said. "Before people forgot the forest had a name."
"What's its name?"
He tilted his head, as if listening to something she couldn't hear. "If you listen carefully," he said, "the wind will tell you."
The wind sighed through the trees — a long, soft murmur that sounded almost like words.
Haneul held her breath. For a second, she thought she understood.
But then her father’s voice echoed faintly from far away, calling her home.
“I have to go.” She said quickly.
The wolf man nodded. “We’ll see each other again.” His eyes glinted. “With your brother as well.”
It wasn’t a question, not the meeting again part or the seeing seungmin part.
Haneul smiled. “Okay.”
When she turned and ran back towards the house, the trees seemed to leap out of her way. By the time she reached the porch, the sunshine had shifted, and everything looked perfectly normal– just grass, wind and her father swearing at his laptop.
But as she sat down to draw what she’d seen, she noticed something on her sleeve: a single grey hair, too coarse to be human.
She grinned. “Told you, Professor Fluffington. He’s real.”
The bunny clip said nothing, but it looked slightly more smug than before.
By the time the sky had began to turn orange, the house was quiet again.
Haneul sat crossed-legged on the porch, a box of crayons spread spread across the step next to her. She was working very seriously on a picture: a big grey shape with pointed ears and kind eyes, lying under a crooked tree.
She paused to blow away a strand of hair that had stuck to her cheek, then held the drawing to the light.
“Hmm,” she said to Professor Fluffington “Do you think his tail was this long or longer?”
The bunny clip offered no opinion. Typical.
Haneul nodded anyway. "Yeah, me too." She added a few streaks of silver around the eyes and then a tiny figure of herself beside him, holding a stick. Underneath, she wrote in uneven letters:
THE WOLF MAN (NICE).
When she was finished, she lay back against the porch step and watched the clouds float past, feeling sleepy and warm.
That was when she heard the crunch of footsteps on the gravel path.
Seungmin.
He looked tired, his backpack dragging behind him like it was full of bad grades and crushed dreams.
Haneul bolted upright. "Oppa! I met the handsome wolf man today!”
Seungmin ruffled her hair. “Sure you did.”
“You don’t believe me?”
Seungmin let out a weary sigh. “Haneul, I’m tired. I honestly don’t care.” He gently shook her off and continued toward the house.
Haneul glared at his retreating back. He would see soon that she was telling the truth.