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“I’m sorry, chicken,” Tae said solemnly as he raised the knife to slaughter the chicken he borrowed (read: stole) from the local farm stand.
Murdering an innocent chicken wasn’t what he had expected to be doing on this particular evening. In fact, he had been planning to spend this evening as he spent every other evening prior -- studying for twenty minutes, giving up on studying out of sheer boredom and lethargy, and then spending the rest of the night binging Netflix or mindlessly scrolling social media. Maybe eating too much ice cream. You know, exciting stuff.
But one night during one of his scrolling sessions, he stumbled upon a Tumblr blog that provided a step-by-step guide to summoning a demon to do your bidding. And at first, he thought it was complete nonsense. But then he started reading the replies to the post, seeing other people’s success stories. One girl apparently summoned a demon who agreed to go out with her and be her demon girlfriend. Someone else had a demon get revenge against an abusive ex. The more he read up on demon summoning, the more he realized that this might actually be legit.
To summon a demon, you first needed to make a blood sacrifice. The larger the sacrifice, the stronger the demon. Common sense, right?
Tae didn’t need a powerful, overly malicious demon, and to be honest the idea of summoning one like that was a bit scary. But a chicken sacrifice was small enough that he didn’t think it’d be too bad. He didn’t need violent revenge, and he didn’t want a boyfriend or girlfriend either. He kind of just wanted somebody to talk to, to hang out with now and then. He fell out of contact with his family a few years back, and struggled to make any new friends while in college. But if he could get a demon to hang out with him…
After killing the chicken, he had to read a Latin incantation over the corpse. And then using the blood, draw a sigil on the floor. Because he was nervous, his finger was a bit shaky and so the sigil wasn’t quite as perfectly drawn as he would have liked. But it resembled the picture on the blog well enough, or at least he hoped it did.
When he stopped chanting, he shut his eyes tight.
Please work, please work, please work--
There was a bright flash of light. And then, standing over him was a man. Well, a demon, not a man, but he looked human enough. The only thing unnatural about him were his crimson colored eyes.
He stayed on the floor a moment, dumbfounded (holy crap it actually worked?), but when he finally stood up he realized that the demon was actually shorter than himself. It would almost be amusing if he wasn’t terrified by the demon’s expression. His face seemed almost devoid of expression, actually, but that was terrifying enough.
“What do you want?” the demon asked, voice sounding almost bored. Oh but of course, he was just some random, insignificant human. And he didn’t have any real reasons to summon a demon, he was just bored. Wanted to try something fun. This was like Bloody Mary, even if you didn’t believe in her, you still called her name in the mirror just to see. Now he felt stupid. He was going to die--
“Well?”
“...t’surname...”
Silence.
“Pardon?”
“Um… Oh, sorry. I was just wondering, well, um, what’s your name?”
“Names have power, you know,” the demon said. “I don’t just throw mine around lightly. Why should I tell you my name?”
His death warrant had likely already been signed in chicken blood, so he might as well just go for it. “Oh, well my name is Taehyung! And I summoned you here because I want you to be my friend. If that’s okay with you, that is.”
The demon blinked. Never before had he been summoned by a human so meek, and yet so bold.
“You want me to be your friend,” the demon asked.
“Yes…?” Oh god this was it, he was so very dead.
There was an uncomfortable pause. And then...
...the demon burst into laughter. But Tae was even more startled to find that the laughter was nothing like what one would expect a demon’s laugh to sound like. There was nothing maniacal or cruel about it, but rather the sound was light and airy, and extremely contagious. He couldn’t help but start to giggle too over the ridiculousness of the situation, and of how adorable the demon really was, having laughed so hard he fell to his knees.
“You’re serious, though?” the demon asked, standing back up and trying to discreetly wipe the tears from his eyes. “That’s actually the reason you summoned me?”
“I’m sorry if I inconvenienced you,” Tae said, blushing. “You can just go, if--”
“No,” the demon replied. “I’m not inconvenienced. In fact, the past hundred or so humans who have summoned me have all been so painfully boring. You’re the first interesting person I’ve met in nearly a century. For that, I’ll offer you my name. I’m Jimin.”
Tae’s mouth opened wide in surprise, and then he quickly closed it. “I-- you said that names have power. What does that mean exactly?”
“It means,” Jimin replied. “you can go ahead and summon me whenever you want. All you have to do is call out my name.”
“Jimin!” Tae said, practicing. Jimin didn’t budge from the spot where he stood, but offered a smile.
Over the next few weeks, Taehyung consistently summoned Jimin every few days. Sometimes to play video games (Jimin seemed confused by them at first, but soon proved to be almost too good at Smash Bros), other times to watch and make fun of bad horror movies (Jimin hated the way demons were represented in the media, and had a lot of opinions), and occasionally just to sit and talk.
“So, what’s it like in Hell?” Tae blurted out one day, while he was introducing Jimin to his favorite takeout pizza. (“They put chicken and french fries on the pizza?” “Genius, right?”)
“Honestly not too different from up here,” Jimin replied. “You’ll be disappointed to know we don’t have any fire pits.”
“Not even one?”
“Not even one.”
“What about dragons?”
One day, Jimin didn’t show up right away. When he eventually did appear a few hours after the call, he promptly collapsed on the floor, bleeding. There was black blood oozing out of a wound coming from his stomach, and the rest of him didn’t look so great either. Tae was, understandably, horrified.
“It’s not as bad as it looks, really,” Jimin said, voice very unconvincing.
“Not as bad as it looks?” Tae gasped. “What happened?”
“Accidentally ran into some…” He winced in pain. “Ran into some demon hunters.”
Demon hunters existed too? No, this was the absolute worst time to geek out. Instead, he said, “are you gonna be okay? Can I help?”
“I heal pretty fast,” Jimin replied, offering a weak smile. “Honestly, you’re helping just by having called me. Sorry I couldn’t get here sooner. Was a little, y’know… preoccupied.”
“What happened to the demon hunters?”
Jimin’s eyes flashed bright red for a second, an eerie glint in them that would likely have struck fear in Tae’s heart if he didn’t already feel safe in the demon’s presence. Jimin didn’t offer any further response. He didn’t need to.
“So… do you want to watch a movie?”
And that was how the evening went. Tae helped Jimin to his feet and onto the couch, where they watched a few bad horror films before Jimin eventually fell asleep. Tae turned off the movie they had been watching, deciding to watch Jimin sleep instead. His chest slowly rose and fell peacefully, and Tae could tell that he had almost completely been healed. There were no more cuts and bruises on his face, and if he were to check, the wound on his stomach had probably already begun to fade into nothing. (He wasn’t too sure about the shirt though -- he had given him one of his own shirts to wear in the meantime, but he had no idea if demon blood even washed out of clothes with regular laundry soap, or if it would simply vanish away too). He wished he had fancy demon healing powers. He was always tripping and getting painful bruises and scrapes.
Still fast asleep, Jimin curled closer towards Tae, arms reaching out as if for a hug. Tae didn’t hesitate to cuddle closer. They had never been this physically close before, he noted. He wasn’t sure they were close enough friends yet to do this. They hadn’t known each other very long, and hadn’t discussed boundaries yet. But despite this, snuggling close to him felt natural. Felt right.
He did still feel a bit sorry for that chicken, though.