Chapter Text
Mark would probably describe his days as comfortable. Relaxing. Watching light filter through flat gemstone discs hanging like wind-chimes by the tall windows and observing the dust he’d missed during tedious cleaning sessions drift through daylight, hearing the fizzles and pops of his dad’s old jazz records as the serene music fills the building. Mornings always start routinely—grab a piece of fruit for breakfast, shower and change and get presentable-looking, get downstairs by 6 o’clock. Unlock the shop door and flick the lights on, take a peek at which houseplants needed to get watered, bring out any new batches of remedies and potions made the night before and put the talismans back onto their stand. Then, set up a record, take a seat at the counter, and wait for customers to wander inside. Like magic, they always did; and, just as magically, the interactions rarely bothered him.
The building—with its potions-shop on the first floor, lovingly named The Healer’s Home—was passed down the Lee lineage of witches over the century, from Mark’s great-grandma to his grandparents to his father, and now to him. And he carries that responsibility with pride.
The outside walls are a sweet shade of honeysuckle yellow, picked out by his brother Donghyuck before the younger boy moved out to the west coast. The furniture was all either thrifted or taken from his mom’s old apartment, and the giant fronds sitting by the western windows and on the front porch have been there since he was a baby. The workshop in the back is simple, plain—just a stove and cabinets upon cabinets of dry ingredients and recipe books and storage for pots and stereotypical cauldrons, just like it‘s always been. The little living space on the second floor, once occupied in the summers by Taeyong, his cousin, when he drove home from his college in Sedona, has all its original creaky wood furniture and beaten-up rugs and sun-faded photographs, plus all the posters Mark stole from Taeyong through the years and a few busted, unplayable records and a clutter of succulents on the bathroom windowsill. Wistfulness fills every square inch of the house.
Mark loves every square inch of the house, too. Maybe those two things have something in common.
•
Early on a calm, quiet day, the bell at the door dings and a customer pokes his head inside. Mark instinctively looks to the front of the store as the cold outside air drifts in and the noisy bell cuts through a trumpet solo from one of the less scratchy vinyls.
The guy is tall—taller than Mark, at least—with half of his rosy-cheeked face covered up in a scarf and the fuzzy hood of his coat covering the rest of his head. His eyes, just barely visible through all of that, scan the shop as if he’s lost, or if he'd been stopped in front of a glistening waterfall.
“Hello,” he calls out—his voice is low and quiet, but admirably, it carries like a stage actor’s.
Mark waves him in from the counter. “What are you looking for?”
“Uh.” He pulls back the scarf, gives a sheepish grin, and takes off his hood, adjusting gold-framed glasses and waving his ruffled black hair away from his eyes. He starts to wipe his feet against the doormat, leaving little tracks of snow on it. “I wanted to ask you if you had something.”
•
The boy’s name is Lucas. Xuxi for short, he had said with a boxy smile, if Mark prefers it—most of his friends call him that.
Afternoon light sits like fresh snow at the windows, clean and bright and comfortably warm. The amethyst discs leave rosy shades against their faces and the tiny two-seat table. Mark finds himself playing with the overhanging leaves of a bush plant sitting on the tall windowsill, observing the strange sense of nervousness building in his chest as he watched the boy sitting across from him.
“I'm not your friend, though. Isn't it a little weird?”
Lucas gives him a look.
“Ah-h, fine. I'm Mark. But, um... what did you wanna ask me?”
Lucas hesitates for a moment before squirming in his seat, straightening up his posture. “Well, I was sure you didn't have it on your list, but... my issue is, one of my friends from childhood moved across the state last year, and before he left we had... started drifting apart?”
“So, you...”
“Do you think you could make a potion to help me, I guess, mend that bond?” A rock sinks in Mark’s stomach. He watches ruefully as the boy keeps trying to explain himself: “Not in the, like, forget everything I did and go and phone me way, but in the way that, maybe I can reach out easier and he'll listen for a little bit longer and... are you okay?”
“Uh... yes, I—” Lucas’ gaze bores into him. His heart starts racing. “I don't think I can do that.”
“Really?” The boy seems confused, as if all his preconceptions got uprooted. The same phrase starts repeating itself in Mark’s head: Nothing I do can make this better.
“Well, I… you see... potions—every magic, like spells, charms, anything—they need you to have gone through an experience that relates to it. Magic is personal, really personal, in that way. And, I don't have the experience to help make this. If I tried, even if I tried really hard, I'm worried it would make the issue worse.”
Lucas keeps staring at Mark’s hands; they're trembling, that's why, as if the pain of the situation had finally caught up to the rest of his body. His head is racing—is he overreacting? Is this why he doesn't talk to people?
“I understand.” The boy gives a smile—a gentle one, warm like the sun pouring in on them through the windows. “I understand. Thank you for your honesty.” He adjusts the sleeves of his grey sweater, then extends his grin up to the ceiling, scanning over the different plant holders and trinkets hanging from hooks tacked into the wooden beams. Something in Mark's brain lurches to a stop; he looks down at himself embarrassedly, his heart still thrumming but his thoughts devoid of any real fear. “It's so pretty.”
“Ah, yeah, it was all my family's job, pretty much. They put a lot of work into it.” The thought brought him a few years back, when Taeyong had pulled into the back driveway with his old rusty pickup truck filled with a bunch of plants and wood planks—the latter, he tinkered with in his grandpa's old woodshop, until they returned as a collection of simple but pretty shelves by mid-August. Then, when Hyuck was put in charge of installing them, half of them just so happened to have become the same yellow as the outside of the building. After that, his other more distant cousin, Johnny, who was taking a well-needed break from settling into his apartment in Toronto, painted a big purple flower onto one of them. Mark instinctively looked back at that mess of a shelf behind the store counter, at all its messy craftsmanship and chipped paint, and felt a little wistful pang in his heart. “I'm not the best with decorating, I think. I'm better with potions, magic stuff, cleaning, whatever. And growing plants—you know, green thumb and all.”
“Right. It's cool, how much you care for the place.”
“Well, I don't know why I wouldn't,” Mark says, edging around the compliment.
Lucas grins again, covering up a laugh, as he pushes himself off the chair. As if his feet led him more than his brain did, he starts wandering around the space; Mark watches tensely, thrumming his fingers against his legs and bitterly observing the way all these half-baked emotions still tugged at him.
The boy’s eyes stay fixed on the rafters. Purples and greens dance across his face, specks of color against his monochrome color scheme. “Ooh, they’re… little crystals?”
Mark follows the boy’s gaze. “Yes, yeah, they are.” A clutter of crystal rods dangle from one of the wood beams, glinting in the mid-afternoon sunshine. “The pink ones are rose quartz. My grandma loved crystals—she said that those bring love, or happiness. Something cozy.”
“And the yellow ones?”
“Mm... I think that's citrine. My cousin chose them. I think it was just because they're a pretty color, though.”
Maybe he did, but there's no real way of knowing. Mark hadn't ever had a chance to look it up; Johnny took their grandma's crystal book a long time ago. But when he had seen his cousin on the last day of his visit propped up on a stool with a contented smile, hanging the sparkly crystals across the ceiling, the guy only told him, They’re for you.
Lucas just grins to himself in response, then finally brings his gaze down from the ceiling as he kept strolling along, letting his hand float across the crowded tabletops. He stops at each of the displays, intently reading the little cards with lists of ingredients and powers, asking little questions as they popped into his mind. The knot of emotion in Mark’s chest fades away, slowly.
•
“You know,” Lucas starts thinking out loud, quickly making his way back to Mark from across the store with his stupidly long legs. “It feels like I’ve stepped into a whole different world.”
In a sense, Mark agreed. The boy’s voice and quiet footsteps did feel like a welcome intrusion into his afternoon, breaking through the strangely monotonous jazz music with a glimpse into the town surrounding him and his shop. Maybe, he got to thinking, he was a little too lonely, no matter how outrageous the idea was after all the years of solitude.
“I… guess so.” The words came out hollow; Lucas turned back to Mark, something like worry in his eyes.
“Hmm. Mark,” the boy asks, “can I ask a question? It might be uh, maybe a little too personal, though.”
Mark nods slowly, feeling a bit of dread writhe in him.
“When was the last time you went out and did something for yourself? Something, I guess, not work related?”
“Oh. Two months ago, my brother had a family Christmas party.”
Lucas snorts at him. “That’s a holiday.”
“And?”
“It doesn’t really count. Anything before that?”
Mark thinks for a second, a long second, and shakes his head.
“I know I don’t really know you all that much, but you should take a break.”
Mark opens his mouth to rebuke it, but no real argument comes to mind. “I… yeah, I don’t know what to do, though. There’s no reason to take a day off if I’m just sitting here, doing nothing.”
“Then…” Lucas contemplates with a little huff, looking out the window as if he was scanning the street for ideas. “Just, go out, take a walk, visit a café?”
Mark sighs, hesitant to give any answer. He can’t tell whether the presence of this mostly unfamiliar boy giving him some of the most helpful emotional support he’d ever been given is comforting or embarrassing.
“I—“ He stops himself, gawks for a moment in awkward silence, then continues: “I guess..?”
“I could give you some recommendations, if you want. Or,” he adds, trying not to let out a sheepish laugh, “I could just show you them myself.”
The back of his mind screams at him, warning it would be the dumbest choice of his life, but Mark still can’t help but smile at the offer.