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“A Christmas Eve party?”
Xion grumbles, casting his eyes up to the ceiling. “It’s dumb,” he sighs, “I know. Just another excuse to network.”
By now, Ravn knows better than to correct him and say it’s no big deal, Xi because the memories of the last and only party he’d attended at Xion’s house had definitely been a big deal. “And you have to be there?”
“Of course not,” Xion shrugs. “It’s just a party.” But there’s still a shadow of irritation in his face, that Ravn catches.
“But you are going?” he guesses, and sees the shadow darken, and knows he’s right even before Xion throws himself down on the sofa beside him. Ravn tries not to grin like a lunatic as the other boy leans against him, head against his shoulder, and fails pretty spectacularly.
“There'll be hell if I don’t.”
There’s a shuffle of feet and they both look up to see Seoho squinting down at them, rubbing at his eyes, hair standing in every direction. Ravn winces.
“Did we wake you?”
“I heard something about a party,” Seoho says, and then shivers. He shuffles closer to the coffee machine, but doesn’t do anything other than lean against the counter looking tired.
“Next week,” Ravn nods, “ for christmas eve.”
“Sounds fun,” Seoho yawns.
Xion raises a brow. “It’s my parent’s party.”
The beta blinks at him. “You know what, I think I’m busy.”
Ravn's head falls back against the sofa. “No, don’t be like that!" he cries. "This one could be fun.”
Xion shakes his head. “Do you even hear yourself?”
Ravn holds his hands up imploringly, laughing a little. “It’s Christmas Eve! Everybody’s nicer on Christmas Eve.” He throws a desperate glance to Seoho for support, and the beta stops rubbing sleep from his eyes and straightens, nodding.
“And they won’t try to set any of us up this time, right?” he tries, but the reminder of the last party they’d all been to does nothing but make Xion groan and shuffle further into Ravn’s shoulder, hiding his face.
“ No,” he groans. “Just because I have to be there doesn’t mean I’m dragging all of you with me again.”
Ravn draws back so he can look in his eyes. “You don’t want to spend christmas eve with me?”
“It’s- oh come on, you’re doing this on purpose,” Xion says, sitting up just so he can point accusingly at Ravn’s sly smile. “You know it’s not that.”
“Good," Ravn smiles. "Because I’m going to spend christmas eve with you.”
Xion grumbles, crossing his arms. He considers quietly for a moment, then feels Ravn's gaze on him, and sighs. “I’m never going to convince you this is a terrible idea, am I?”
“Oh, I know it’s a terrible idea,” Ravn laughs. “But I’m going to do it anyway.”
Xion guesses he should have saw that coming.
***
They’ve been wasting away in Xion’s living room for a little over an hour when there’s a thunderous crashing just outside the door. Even with all of Ravn’s convincing, Xion had still tried everything to get out of the party, but had, in the end, settled on bringing Ravn along with him, to help alleviate some of the boredom of chatting with all of the horrible people his parents still insist he talk to. The vultures are the same as always, and though having Seoho and Hwanwoong had helped a little, the hour had still been an agonisingly slow one. Hwanwoong visibly brightens at the sound of the ruckus outside.
“Is that-”
He doesn’t finish his sentence, but Xion stares wide eyed back at him, seemingly thinking the same thing, and Ravn looks between the two of them, frowning. The crash is followed with an ungodly shriek and a few roars of laughter, and Xion sighs and hangs his head at the sound of it.
“What is it?” Ravn asks, seeing a few of the party goers next to them shake their heads distastefully at the noise.
“Not what,” Xion grumbles, “ who. I swear, I didn’t know they were coming. ”
Just as he’s finished speaking and turns to place his champagne flute on the buffet table behind them, the doors open, and the laughter echoes even louder in the lobby.
Hwanwoong grabs Seoho’s wrists suddenly, making the beta jolt, a grin starting to grow wider and wider across his lips. “Is that who I think it is?”
“I guess that depends who you think it is,” a familiar lilt says, and they all turn back in the direction of the lobby to see Dongmyeong stepping into the cavernous space of the living room, a few guests glancing his way as he passes and turning to mutter to themselves behind their hands. He ignores them, sipping from a cardboard cup full of what looks like strawberry milkshake as he waves around at their little group.
“Caused any trouble?” he asks, mostly to Ravn.
Xion raises a brow. “Isn’t that your job?”
Two boys trail in after Dongmyeong as if on cue, and Ravn’s eyes widen as he realises this must be the infamous pack Xion is always trying to keep him away from, Dongmyeong’s band, that he’d only heard snippets about before Xion changes the conversation.
The boy that steps toward them first looks friendly, blond hair parted at the side and quiffed away from his face, a wide smile under warm eyes, exactly what Ravn had expected of a band member, leather jacket and string bracelet and skinny, dark jeans. Everyone around him is in suits and long skirts, whites and reds and golds, and he sticks out so much that Ravn thinks surely he must have planned to.
“What’s up?” he says, nodding to the group, as if he hadn’t just appeared out of nowhere, as if they were friends instead of strangers. There’s a milkshake in one of his hands and an ice cream tub in the other, though the latter might belong to the third boy, who’s hugging a bucket of takeout food to his chest with both arms.
Dongmyeong gestures to him over his shoulder. “This is Kanghyun,” he says, pointing to the blond, “and Harin.”
Kanghyun grins at them all again, raising his hand in greeting- spilling a drop of milkshake on the floorboards in the process. He giggles apologetically as Xion glares at him. The sound is loose and a little high-pitched for the tenor of his voice, and the boy with the bucket of chicken sways a little unsteadily on his feet.
Harin, Dongmyeong had called him. He’s dark haired and angular, with golden skin and dark clothes, and his lips stretch into a lazy smile as he sees them all looking at him, seeming perfectly comfortable with the attention, though he says nothing.
“You must be Ravn,” Kanghyun says, and Ravn’s eyes jump back to the blond boy to see his eyes unapologetically roaming up and down his body.
If he’d been in his usual good mood, Ravn would probably just laugh, but after so long in this room with the vultures, he feels strangely affronted. “Must I?”
Harin nods, adding, “Dongmyeong’s told us about you.”
Ravn winces. “That can’t be good.”
Kanghyun glances at the boy leaning against him with a sly smile. “Oh, don’t mind him. He’s all bark and no bite, right Harin?”
The dark haired boy’s lips twist in a smile, as if he’s fighting back a laugh, and he nods again. Dongmyeong turns from where he’d been saying hi to Hwanwoong and scuffs him on the back of the head, hard.
“Aw!”
“You know what that was for,” Dongmyeong says, pointing at him sharply, glaring.
“It was Kanghyun that said it!”
A butler circles around the new faces, swooping in with a silver tray of food and a polite, insincere smile. “Hors d'oeuvre?”
Kanghyun openly laughs. Harin holds the bucket of food he’s holding out in the air.
“Buffalo wing?” he asks, in the same tone of voice the butler had used.
Dongmyeong elbows him in the ribs. Xion rolls his eyes.
“You’re ridiculous,” Hwanwoong laughs.
“You’ve got butlers now?” Kanghyun asks, one brow quirking. “Cya’s going to go crazy when he sees this.”
Cya? How many of them are there?
Xion scoffs a harsh laugh. “Cya’s not allowed inside- wait. Where is he?”
Kanghyun swirls his straw around his cup nonchalantly despite Xion’s urgency. “I told Yonghoon to entertain him in the garden whilst we came to say hello, make the rounds, you know.” He takes a step forward, barely managing to move at all before Xion is pushing him back again.
“I don’t know what rounds you’re thinking of making,” he says, voice coldly diplomatic, almost making Ravn laugh, “but I think it’s best if we all got some fresh air.”
Harin’s deep voice is soft, close to a mumble, but he smiles as sharply as the rest of them. “You mean you’re herding us all outside so we don’t cause trouble?”
“Exactly,” Xion sighs, “I’m glad you understand.”
Though Ravn sees Kanghyun and Dongmyeong’s eyes travel around the room, none of them argue as Xion starts to shepherd them all outside, pushing them all out of the back door and then turning and walking back to the party in search of his parents.
Hwanwoong takes Ravn’s arm as he hesitates, pulling him into the garden and up to a table under a string of fairy lights. There are voices floating across the grass, and when they all make their way to the table it’s to see two boys already sitting there, one with their ankles crossed on top of the table, who’s speaking.
“What kind of wolf is afraid of dogs, Yong?” he asks, and the tall figure perched on top of the table groans.
“It wasn’t even a big dog,” Dongmyeong’s saying, walking up, and the boy on top of the table looks across at him sharply, betrayed.
“It barked at me!” he whines, as they all stop by the table, not seeming to notice any of the rest of them lingering there.
“Cya does that all the time, d’you think he’s scary too?” As if in agreement, the figure with their legs up on the table yaps, happily, a sharp bark of sound that makes the other flinch.
“Do you really expect me to say no to that?” the tall boy cries, throwing his arms out, gesturing to the sitting boy- Cya. “He’s a lunatic!”
Dongmyeong chuckles and turns back to their group, shaking his head. “This is Yonghoon, by the way.”
Yonghoon startles as he notices them all and wobbles hastily to his feet. He towers over all of them, black hair falling over his forehead, a dark blazer jacket over a plain black t-shirt. He looks cold and what Ravn supposes other people might call intimidating, though both effects have been thoroughly washed away now with the conversation they’ve just overheard.
Cya, the sitting boy, turns to greet them with a wide grin, silver haired and smaller than most of them, the cuteness of his features warring with the way his hair is styled almost over his eyes, the grey plaid jacket and grey jeans that are both artfully ripped and ruined, the grey denim collar around his neck where a silver tag is engraved with his name.
His eyes fly across the group standing behind his chair and he scrambles to his feet, laughing. As he comes to stand a little too close to Ravn, grinning like a maniac, Ravn just manages to catch a scent in the chaos, something sharp and bright like the spark of a firework.
“You must be the alpha,” he says.
Ravn groans. “People keep saying that.” Xion huffs a laugh by his side, the feeling of a hand comfortingly patting his back making him feel only slightly better about the fact that all of Dongmyeong’s friends seem to know about him before they’d met.
“Don’t worry about it,” the silver haired boy says. “Dongmyeong’s only joking when he says we should ship you off to Sweden without your phone or your wallet.”
Ravn gapes at him. “He says what?”
Cya fiddles with the metal of his collar and grins.
Xion tutts. “They’re joking. Probably.” Then his eyes trail downward, and he sighs. “Why are you covered in dirt?”
He’s right, Ravn realises- the bottom of Cya’s light jeans are grass-stained and ruined.
“Kanghyun pushed me into one of your plant pots,” he says, as if it should be obvious.
Xion glares at the blond boy now dragging Cya into his lap as he sits. “I guess that explains the noise.”
Cya smirks at the petulant grumble. “You’re not really annoyed that we crushed your begonias, are you?”
Dongmyeong laughs as he takes a seat beside them. “Please. He’s just cranky because he doesn’t want a lecture about surrounding himself with the right kind of people again.”
The entire group scrunch up their noses as if they’d caught a bad smell.
“I remember asking you guys to sit this one out for that exact reason,” Xion complains. He pulls Ravn to the opposite side of the table and throws himself into a chair. “But of course, you show up anyway.”
“We heard you snagged yourself a bad boy type,” Kanghyun says, peering over Cya’s shoulder. “We just had to meet him, Xi.”
As soon as Ravn’s sitting, Harin’s pulling up a chair right next to his, and Xion drops his head into his hands.
“Where’s Keon?” Harin asks, as if he hadn’t noticed the reaction, and Hwanwoong shoves Seoho into the empty seat next to him and sits on the beta’s other side.
“Saving himself.”
“He’s using his boyfriend as an excuse to escape the vultures,” Hwanwoong explains, talking in a low whisper as if sharing a secret.
“Oh, we heard about him too!” Harin says. “The omega, right?”
“Scandalous,” Kanghyun lilts, and Ravn turns with something biting on his tongue but stops when he sees the sly edge to the blond boy’s smile, the happy spark in his eyes.
“You’re gonna have to stop pretending your friends are so much better than mine, Xi,” Dongmyeong says, laughing through the words, no real malice to his voice.
“And it’s Keonhee we’re talking about,” Harin says, shaking his head. “Not even Hwanwoong.” He throws the alpha a mischievous wink, making him giggle with delight.
The tall boy they’d called Yonghoon nods thoughtfully. “Who’d have thought, huh?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Hwanwoong says, and Cya barks a laugh and ruffles his hair, making Hwanwoong squeal and hit at him. “Compared to all of you, I’m an angel.”
Seoho’s eyes widen with something that looks very much like terror. “R-really?”
Dongmyeong takes a swig out of a hip flask that had come out of nowhere. “Course not.”
“Besides,” Harin says, leaning closer to Ravn, “I hear we’re not the only ones causing fights anymore.”
Ravn fights back a wash of embarrassment at the mention of his terrible past decisions, but then starts forward excitedly. A snatch of an old conversation had suddenly came back to him. “It was you?”
Harin frowns. “What was me?”
“He’s talking about Jaemin,” Xion says, rolling his eyes, knowing Ravn’s curiosity about the fight had been unending since its first mention. “And no, that wasn’t Harin.”
“Then who-?”
“I’m pretty sure it was Cya,” Dongmyeong says, just as Yonghoon says, “Cya, probably.”
Hwanwoong giggles as Seoho gapes at the silver haired boy.
Xion peers at Ravn’s expression and laughs, too, at the shocked, owlish blinking. “Is it really that surprising?”
“I think they were expecting it to be an alpha,” Hwanwoong laughs, one of the insiders, only one of the many boys at the table who seem to think it’s hilarious, that Ravn and Seoho had thought it would be someone else to cause trouble, not the almost lanky beta who’s so much smaller than the rest of them. By the way Cya’s grinning sharply down at them, though, they’re quick to understand. Something bright and wild gleams behind his eyes.
“It’s always Cya,” Dongmyeong adds helpfully, “just so you know.”
“Not always,” the beta objects. Immediately, all of his pack open their mouths to oppose, but Xion beats them to it.
“No, no, he’s right,” he says, surprising them all, even Cya, who turns to stare at him with his mouth hanging open. “It’s not Cya I have to keep from trying to seduce my Father at every party he gatecrashes.”
Seoho lets out a small, confused squeak. “Se-what?”
Hwanwoong shakes his head fondly. “Kanghyun.”
Ravn looks across at the blond, who’s too distracted by Yonghoon whispering something in his ear to hear this part of the conversation. He leans closer to the pack member beside him. “He does that?”
“He’s joking,” Harin reassures him. “But you’d never be able to tell.”
“I’m starting to see why you guys aren’t invited to these things,” Ravn says.
Harin just laughs, but Yonghoon sulkily grabs the milkshake out of Dongmyeong's hand and stabs the straw around the cup, pouting. “It’s not our fault all the vultures are such bores,” he grumbles, and Dongmyeong rolls his eyes but puts an arm around his chair, looking small next to the taller boy, still exasperated and amused.
Vultures. Ravn wonders how many of these parties they’ve been to, before him, that they could know about that. Xion never wants to talk about them, though now it’s so obvious that the irritated front he puts up is mostly play, because he’d sat down after all, when he could have ignored them and gone back to the party, and even as he tries not to, Ravn can see that he’s smiling, the corners of his lips upturned almost imperceptibly.
“So…” Seoho mumbles, and then self-consciously clears his throat, when they all turn to him expectantly. “How often do you guys, um-”
“Show up to parties they’re not invited to?” Dongmyeong supplies. Seoho nods hesitantly. “Pretty much whenever I ask them to.”
“Great, so this was your fault,” Xion grumbles.
“Come on, they can’t be that bad,” Ravn laughs, and then tries not to cower as everyone at the table but Seoho raises a challenging brow. “Your parents don’t seem to like any of us all that much, either.”
“Apparently, we’re bad influences,” Harin mumbles.
Cya snorts. “ Apparently.”
It’s Kanghyun that actually explains, because Xion and Dongmyeong have shared a secretive glance and neither of them look as if they’re going to say anything, and with a surprising amount of seriousness the blond boy reaches for the collar of his shirt and tugs, tilting his head. The dark, semi-circle scar on his neck stands stark even in the dim light.
Ravn had heard them described as a pack before, but he’d thought nothing of the word. Groups of friends used it if they were particularly close, even if they weren’t bonded, and he’d assumed that Dongmyeong’s ‘pack’ was the same, just a group a little closer than the rest of his friends, always together. His wide eyes flicker to Dongmyeong himself, and Xion’s brother rolls his eyes.
“No,” he says, in answer to Ravn’s unasked question. “My parents would kill me.” But he’s the only one without a bite, and the others crowd around him, arms around his shoulder, hands on his knee, in a way that makes it clear it isn’t for lack of trying.
“Wow,” Ravn says before he can help himself, “you really are bad influences.”
Xion shakes his head, eyes cast up, looking at the fairylights strung above them. “It wouldn’t be so bad if they’d just act respectable every now and again, just for our parents.”
Yonghoon, as if he hadn't heard this, turns suddenly to Ravn, snapping his fingers in the air as an idea comes to him. “You've got a game, haven't you?"
"Huh?"
Cya's nodding very enthusiastically, sitting forward, understanding before Ravn does. "That Aces thing-"
"No," Xion yelps. "No. I can barely keep up with Ravn, there's no way in hell I'm playing Aces with all of you."
Kanghyun scoffs as if terribly offended, but Seoho agrees steadfastly and, to Ravn's surprise, so does Dongmyeong, who seems just as afraid of whatever punishment his pack could enact as Xion does.
Hwanwoong shrugs, unperturbed. "There's plenty of other ways you lot could cause trouble, isn't there?"
Kanghyun giggles. Dongmyeong and Xion share a look, and Xion sighs, looking away first. But when Cya winks at him across the table, he laughs before he can help himself. Ravn smiles, throws an arm around his shoulder, and settles in for a long night, far more interesting and memorable than he ever expected it to be.