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“Hyung,” Beomgyu sings. “I’m home!” He hangs his jacket up in the entryway closet and throws his backpack onto the floor, waiting to see if Soobin will venture out of their room to greet him.
Nobody responds, which isn’t unusual for a late night shift. Soobin’s probably holed himself up in their room playing video games while waiting for Beomgyu to return, and has his headset in. Beomgyu drops his bag and jacket off by the door and then bounds to their bedroom, ready to tackle his boyfriend—but he’s not there either, and Beomgyu begins to worry.
“Hyung?” he calls. The bathroom is unlocked and empty; the basement full of brewing potions but no Soobin; the kitchen sweetened with a pot of soup simmering and nobody to stir it.
Beomgyu’s palms get increasingly sweaty. They live in a relatively safe neighbourhood, and Soobin, being a magic user, has put a whole host of wards on their home. But it’s not impossible that somebody would be able to break in even then—Soobin’s good but he’s not some sort of security expert—and if that’s the case, then what the fuck happened to Soobin?
He hurries back to their bedroom, scanning for something, anything. Signs of a struggle, traces of magic, anything that could point him to where Soobin went.
But there’s nothing. Nothing except…
“A hedgehog?” Beomgyu mutters. He crouches down by their bed and picks up the cardboard box on the floor that he didn’t notice before in his panic. And yep, that’s definitely a hedgehog, spikes and all, but… why?
Somebody stole his boyfriend and left a hedgehog in his place? That makes even less sense than somebody just breaking in and kidnapping him.
Beomgyu squints at the hedgehog, as if willing for it to tell him what happened. It squints back with its beady little eyes, almost defiantly, almost like—
Almost like Soobin.
Beomgyu’s jaw drops.
Soobin is enrolled in a transformation magic class this term, and his final assignment is to transform an object into an animal of his choice. It’s not an easy task at all—the class has an eighty percent record of failure or something ridiculous like that—and Soobin has spent the entire past two weeks on and off attempting to create something out of nothing.
Beomgyu doesn’t know much about magic, being a boring magicless human, but he does know enough about it to know that it can backfire easily. Soobin normally doesn’t practise his magic alone for that exact reason. If something goes wrong, Beomgyu has to be there to call somebody for help, else the consequences could be disastrous.
But Beomgyu worked late tonight and the assignment deadline is coming up and more than somebody breaking into their home and kidnapping Soobin only to replace him with a hedgehog, it seems a lot more likely that this hedgehog is Soobin.
“Hyung?” he asks the hedgehog.
It—Soobin?—bristles, lifting his nose in acknowledgement, and Beomgyu screams, dropping the cardboard box in shock.
Oh my god. “Oh my god,” he whispers, out loud, in absolute horror. “Oh my god, I’m—I’m sorry, hyung, fuck, what the fuck—”
He scoops Soobin up off the ground and into his arms, holding him close to his chest. The quills are sharp, digging into his arm and pricking his skin, but he can’t find it in himself to give a shit about the pain. Not when his boyfriend turned himself into a fucking hedgehog.
He’s about to throw up.
“I don’t know what to do,” he says, panicked, like Soobin the hedgehog could answer him when he’s in this form. Would he even retain his human memories and knowledge? Or did he quite literally turn himself into a hedgehog—brain and all? Has his boyfriend been reduced to a literal animal? “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”
He sets Soobin down on his desk and then sits down in his chair, because he’s not sure he can keep himself upright any longer. Shaking uncontrollably, he pulls his phone out of his pocket, one eye on the screen and one eye on Soobin sniffing his keyboard.
“Taehyun. Taehyun. Taehyun…” His thumb keeps slipping and he scrolls past Taehyun’s name four times by accident before finally getting the call screen open.
Soobin perches himself right beside Beomgyu, and god, it is really difficult to tell what kind of emotion he’s feeling when he’s in this form. Soobin blinks at him, his very little face totally blank, and Beomgyu is literally crying by the time Taehyun picks up.
“Um. Hyung?” Taehyun questions, likely bewildered by Beomgyu calling him at ten o’clock at night, crying into his phone. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
Once the tears begin to fall, they don’t stop. “Soobin hyung—I think he turned himself into a fucking hedgehog. A literal hedgehog.”
There’s a painfully long pause before Taehyun says, not very smartly, “Is this a prank?”
“No!” Beomgyu screams. Soobin jumps, quills going straight up in surprise, and Beomgyu instantly quiets. “Sorry… sorry, hyung…”
“Are you talking to Soobin… the hedgehog?”
“Yes,” Beomgyu hisses, wiping his tears away with his free hand. “He can still understand me, right?”
“I mean… probably?” Taehyun answers, but he doesn’t sound too sure of himself. “Maybe? This isn’t exactly my area of expertise. It depends on the type of spell and how strong it was, I guess.”
“He was working on—on an assignment for a class.” Beomgyu hiccups. “Turning a normal object into an animal.”
“Oh, god,” Taehyun mumbles, which is the exact opposite reaction from what Beomgyu wants to hear. “I don’t know then, hyung. Honestly. A spell like that has to be pretty strong. He might not understand you now, but—”
Beomgyu chokes, “So he’s actually just a fucking hedgehog now?!”
“—But,” Taehyun enunciates, “I’m sure it can be undone. Everything can be undone. You should take him to the hospital, the one near the gym. They specialize in magical accidents.”
Hospital. Doctors. Right. They’ll know what to do. Beomgyu sniffles, looking down at his poor, animal-brained boyfriend. Literally animal-brained but also figuratively because how could he be so stupid as to attempt something like this alone?
“It’ll be fine, hyung,” Taehyun reassures him. “Just get him there as soon as possible.”
“Okay,” Beomgyu whispers, voice cracking. He clears his throat and tries again, “Okay. I’m going to go do that now.”
“Please text me when there’s more developments.”
“I will,” Beomgyu promises. “Thank you.”
Taehyun hangs up before he can, and Beomgyu wastes no time in picking Soobin back up and rushing back to the entryway.
It’ll be fine. It’ll be fine. It has to be fine, because there’s no fucking way Beomgyu is losing the love of his life to a misplaced spell and the mind of a fucking hedgehog.
He’s about to pull on his jacket when he breathes in sharply, catching a whiff of something savoury, and remembers the soup simmering on the stove. “Shit,” he whispers, and rushes to the kitchen, setting Soobin carefully on the counter. The last thing he wants is to come home to find out their apartment burned down because he left the stove on. “Why the fuck were you practising this shit while making soup? You’re the worst multitasker ever.”
Soobin sits on his ass and stares at him in response, which, really, isn’t all too different from what he would do as a human.
Beomgyu turns the stove off then sets the pot onto another burner, quickly washing his hands after. He’s pretty sure Soobin peed on him, which leads Beomgyu to believe he does not in fact have his human memories, but that doesn’t stop Beomgyu from giving him a piece of his mind.
“You’re so stupid, hyung. You’re so—I hope you can understand me so you know how fucking stupid I think you are!” Beomgyu yells.
“That’s not very nice,” Soobin says, and Beomgyu freezes in the middle of wiping his hands dry.
“Wait.” He looks at Soobin, who is still watching from his spot on the counter. “You… you can speak? You can speak the entire time and you let me freak out like this?! If this is some kind of sick fucking joke to you, hyung, you—”
“Yes?” Soobin answers, and his mouth doesn’t move as he speaks. “But why are you yelling at Odi?”
Beomgyu blinks down at him, bewildered, wondering absently if he’s dreaming and/or died. Maybe this is Hell.
“What?” Beomgyu says.
“Odi?” Soobin repeats. “Hello, Earth to Beomgyu?”
A large, very familiar hand waves itself in front of Beomgyu’s face, and he spins around to see the tall, very human version of his boyfriend directly behind him, looking just as confused as Beomgyu feels.
Beomgyu screams.
“Stop!” Soobin yelps, grabbing Beomgyu by the shoulders. “What is wrong with you? You’re going to scare him!”
“Him?!”
“Odi!”
“Who the fuck is Odi?!”
Soobin scoops up Soobin the hedgehog, glaring at Beomgyu, and—
Oh.
“Oh.”
Ooooh.
“Poor baby,” Soobin coos, petting the hedgehog. Who is not Soobin and is in fact named Odi and why the fuck was there a hedgehog sitting in a cardboard box in their room if it wasn’t Soobin? “Your dad is here to protect you.”
“First of all, if that’s your kid, isn’t he technically my kid too? Second of all, what the fuck?!” Beomgyu slaps Soobin on the arm and Soobin yelps, jumping back.
“I should be saying that to you! Why are you harassing my child?”
“I thought—” Beomgyu swallows, his face burning. “Ithoughthewasyou.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“I thought. He was you,” Beomgyu grits out.
Soobin tilts his head at him. Odi does the same. It would have been cute if Beomgyu wasn’t about to throw himself out the window in shame.
“I’m sorry, what?” Soobin says again, but a sick, amused grin is forming on his face.
“You heard me! Shut up!” Beomgyu yells. He stalks off, hands balled into fists at his sides, and god, he is so fucking dumb, Soobin is never going to let him live this down, he might as well just assume a new identity now and move countries because he’s not sure how he’s going to live with this embarrassment and—
“Gyu,” Soobin laughs, catching Beomgyu before he can run off by hugging him from behind. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I just—why would you think that?”
“Because you…” Beomgyu hides his face in his hands, refusing to allow Soobin to look at him. “You’ve been practising that animal shapeshifting spell, and… you weren’t here when I got home, and I thought…” He licks his lips. “Why is there a hedgehog in our room anyways?! What was I supposed to think!”
“Uh, that I got a new pet?” He can hear the smile in Soobin’s voice. “It’s okay. I understand. Shh, don’t cry.”
“I’m not crying!” Beomgyu shouts, while crying. Though it’s more out of embarrassment now than anything.
He feels like the single dumbest person in the world, and he might be in some form of shock. Soobin spins him around, forcing him into a hug, and Beomgyu sniffles into his shoulder until his throat is too sore to continue.
“I picked him up from the pet store earlier because I thought owning a hedgehog might help me transform an object into one,” Soobin explains, voice soft and soothing. He pets Beomgyu’s hair and Beomgyu gives a little whine. “But then I realised I didn’t pick up any food for him so I ran out really quickly to grab some. I didn’t think you’d get home while I was gone. I’m sorry, baby.”
Beomgyu makes himself as small as possible in Soobin’s arms and mumbles, “Not your baby.”
“Hm? Since when?” Soobin teases.
“Since today!” Beomgyu pouts. “You just called that stupid hedgehog your baby five minutes ago!”
“He’s not stupid,” Soobin admonishes. “That’s your kid. And you can both be my babies. You’re not the same type. There’s different levels. He’s the kid level, you’re more like the elevated sugar baby level—”
“I hate you,” Beomgyu says tonelessly, and Soobin laughs so hard he too almost cries.
(“So… would you still love me if I was a hedgehog?” Soobin asks later, right as Beomgyu is about to fall asleep.
“Fuck you,” Beomgyu says.
Soobin laughs so hard he almost cries, again, and while Beomgyu gives him the cold shoulder until the following morning, he is secretly, very, very relieved that his boyfriend is still the same stupid, idiotic, dorky, beautiful human he fell in love with and not a fucking hedgehog.)