Archive of Our Own ^beta

It was busy for a Wednesday morning, especially in this sleepy part of the town. Customer after customer – the wind chime hung up above the upper corner of the entrance door barely stopped jingling.

Barely 10 am, and twelve potions sold already!

Just four more and Haknyeon would break his weekly record on just the third day – just the thought of that conjured a smile onto the skilled witch’s lips, paired with a carefree hum that filled the potion shop in the spare moments in which there were no customers.

Haknyeon’s shop was his pride and joy, his baby. His place and his alone, which he had found as a dusty forlorn little building squished between the Min family pharmacy and a stationary store, and over the span of a few months transformed into a quaint shop. By now, the Min family drug store had yielded a larger drug store, and the stationary shop had been replaced by a retail chain store for office supplies, leaving his little shop as one of very few small businesses left in town.

Haknyeon sold potions of all kinds. The shelves lining the walls that framed the main room were laden with pre-bottled phials of the most common remedies and brews and mixtures, and for the more… peculiar requests and more complicated and pricier potions, he had an entire back room to refer to, which had more ingredients and recipe books in store than most other potion shops in the area, perhaps even the entire East of the country.

In Haknyeon’s store, everything was in order. He was diligent and duly, neat and reliable. He knew where everything was, how everything was supposed to be done – he was good at his job, he had trained for years to come to this point – and he hardly ever made any mistakes. In the few cases that he had slipped up, it was never too grave.

Over the time that he had been running his potion shop, a certain routine had taken over his daily conduct. He whirled from shelf to shelf and back to the counter, disappeared in the backroom to come back with a lightness in his steps and his hands full of ingredients which he placed onto the table behind the counter where he brewed some of the potions that were on demand, all without thinking too much.

He heard the name of a potion, and every step of what had to be done for the respective customer to leave happy and satisfied was already written out in his head all by itself.

Haknyeon was preoccupied with finishing up an order of a dozen focus potions which were going to be picked up in just less than half an hour – he was running a little late with his preplanned schedule – when the wind chime jingled once again, and the door was opened to briefly let in the sound of cars passing by.

“Hello?”

Haknyeon glanced up while screwing shut one of the bottle caps, faltering as his eyes were caught on hands half hidden under long sleeves of a large, gray hoodie clutching a phone, a pair of headphones dangling around the neck, a sports backpack slung over the shoulder.

A human ?

He straightened his back swiftly and cleared his throat.

While humans were, of course, just as welcome in Haknyeon’s potion shop as magical beings, they seldom came here – and if there was a human coming into his store, it was certainly not a boy like the one standing in front of him.

Was he from the city? He had to be, from the looks of it. Haknyeon eyed the new customer for a second, took in the thick, raven black curls half hiding round, just as dark eyes that were now eyeing him with both curiosity and hesitance – an expression he was quite familiar with facing humans, who were often as unacquainted with the workings of the magical world as witches like Haknyeon were with human technology. In the shop ceiling lighting, the boy looked somewhat sickish, a little sallow with the hint of dark circles under his round eyes, as if he didn’t spend much time outside in the fresh air. Haknyeon had seen people from the city look like that before, it was nothing new to him.

“How can I help you?”

Haknyeon had his customer-service-smile on his lips as he turned his attention towards the boy that had entered his shop and was now approaching the counter with tentative steps, as if he wasn’t quite sure if he was at the right place. Haknyeon glanced at the clock hanging next to one of the shelves. If he wanted to finish the order of focus potions in time, he didn’t have much time to spend on the human.

“Do you,” the boy started, and Haknyeon swayed forward over the counter, supporting himself on his arms, tilting his head in question as he awaited the human’s commission, “do you sell sleep potions?”

Immediately, the wheels in Haknyeon’s mind began to rattle and clatter.

“Sleep potions? Yes! I do have those – what kind?”

The boy hesitated. He slid his phone into one of the pockets of his jeans, then moved up one now free hand to brush some curls out of his face with his index finger, fully revealing his dark eyes, which now flickered over the many phials on the shelves.

“Just something that makes me sleep,” he answered then. “Anything works, really.” His voice was quiet and timid.

“Oh, I have just the thing for you then!”

He stored ready-made sleep potions in the second cabinet to the right on the left wall of the shop, third shelf from the top – it took him mere seconds to find them. The shelf was high up and Haknyeon wasn’t exactly tall – he would have had to go onto his tiptoes to reach the bottle, if it wasn’t for his abilities.

With magic flowing in his veins, he only needed to flick his wrist towards the shelf, and the glass bottle, a bulbous one with a thin neck and a cork sealing it, came flying towards him.

He hesitated for the sliver of a second as he noticed that there was neither a label glued to the glass body, nor attached to the cork – Haknyeon was very organized regarding the labeling of his potions, after all, tidiness was extremely important in the business of potion-selling – but he didn’t let himself be deterred by that observation. He probably had just missed this one bottle while labeling the batch few weeks ago when he had stocked up on all kinds of household potions.

Somewhat pinkish colored liquid swashed against the green-tinted glass as Haknyeon placed it onto the counter. He then opened one of the drawers of his desk to pick up one of the small paper scraps that he used to label his sold goods and write out instructions or any further information that the customer needed.

In this case, it was simple – sleep potion, consume 30 to 60 minutes before bedtime, three sips for light sleep, if needed more .

Haknyeon felt the boy’s eyes on him as he finished off the order, though except for the rough scratching of his quill against the paper, it was quiet. Some of his customers were chatty, too chatty even at times, but those were mostly the older ones.

“Here you go,” he gently nudged the bottle towards his human customer, “if you need more, do not hesitate to come back, there’s a discount if you buy three bottles at once – though for now, one should be enough.”

The old, rusty cash register on the counter clattered as Haknyeon beckoned it to open the drawer in which he stored the money.

“Are you paying in mun or won? I accept both. Won, I suppose?”

Before he nodded, the boy stared at him in wonder for a moment, and Haknyeon realized that in the larger cities, where the percentage of magical beings was overall much lower than in the countryside, probably virtually nobody used that centuries-old currency anymore. Mun was still very much common in the magical world, much more so than won – little had changed since those times in which the entire country had used the currency, so why change it?

With a chuckle on his lips, Haknyeon typed the amount into the register.

“Can I pay with card?”

Now Haknyeon was the one to stare in wonder at the human in front of him, quietly asking himself how the boy could seriously assume he was in the possession of a card reader when there wasn’t even a power outlet to be seen on any of the walls. “… no.”

“Ah. Ah, yeah, s-sorry, cash is fine too.” The boy’s slightly sunken eyes flickered all over the place as he hurriedly pulled out a wallet out of his sports bag and counted the tattered banknotes with his slender, unsteady fingers.

The boy left the shop the same way he had entered, now holding the potion securely to his chest instead of his phone. Haknyeon took the time to keep his eyes on the boy’s curly head, strands dancing back and forth as he looked left and right before crossing the street, until he rounded a corner and disappeared from Haknyeon’s field of vision.

He had no time to dwell on the curious customer – he had orders to fulfill, lists of ingredients he had to stock up on to prepare, brews and simmering potions to check up on.

Busy as he was, comfortably immersed in his everyday life, Haknyeon hardly noticed time passing until he realized that it was time to close the shop. In the end, he had indeed managed to break his weekly record, ending the workday with nineteen potions sold, not counting the orders from the previous days that he had made ready today.

The sun had gone down by the time he had finished organizing his desk and tidying up the shop. He was short on a few plants and had run out of a few ingredients entirely, which only happened rarely, and in the middle of writing down today’s revenues and expenses in one of the tattered notebooks that he kept in one of the drawers of his desks.

Haknyeon had the habit of humming to himself while going about his daily life – aside from when customers came in or one of his friends stopped by, of which there were only few, Haknyeon found himself alone for the majority of his day. Looking at him from the outside, one might have thought that he was very lonely, but actually, he was used to it. Witches left their homes at an early age, they learned how to grow up and live independently quicker than most non-magical beings, and even many other magical beings did. With his family living far, far away, too rapt in their own problems to have the time to reach out to him much, and his none of friends being close and free enough to take part in his everyday life, Haknyeon was alone.

He didn’t know if he should consider himself to be particularly lonely, per se – there were people who had it much worse – but there was no use in denying that at the end of the day, he was alone. Music, and if it was just the soft sound of his own humming, sometimes managed to fill the silence that fell over his little shop so late at night, with nobody but himself around, and after years of spending his evening hours closing up the shop, he hardly even noticed that he was humming at all.

He was in the backroom, pestling dried hortensia blossoms to fill up the almost empty jar. A somewhat tedious work that required quite some arm strength if there were many ingredients to work through. One might have thought that using magic would have been much more convenient – making the pestle move against the mortar with his willpower alone would have been an easy task for Haknyeon – but anyone who was even just a bit familiar with potion-making knew that ingredients were best prepared with one’s own hands.

Haknyeon only had a handful of dried blossoms left to crush when he heard the first knock.

As accustomed to the silence and solitude as he was, he thought the first knock that he heard coming from the main room was just his imagination – or perhaps a stray cat jumping onto the windowsill outside. The second knock however, louder, more persistent, finally brought Haknyeon to divert his attention. Carefully setting down the pestle and mortar, he nudged open the door to the main room. He startled as his eyes noticed the silhouette of a person standing in front of the entrance door, which he had closed off over half an hour ago.

Soon after approaching with hesitant steps, Haknyeon noticed that the unexpected visitor was none other than the human boy from this morning, the hood of his grey sweater now pulled into his face to shield his face from the cold that crept in the dark alleys of this part of town, even on early summer nights like these.

Haknyeon unlocked the door quickly, pushing it all the way open to curiously tilt his head at the boy.

“Hello?”

“S-sorry to bother you so late, but I forgot my wallet. I must have left it at your shop.”

“Oh.” Haknyeon glanced over his shoulder, towards the counter in the back of the room. “Your wallet?”

The boy nodded. He had stepped down the few stairsteps that led up to the entrance as Haknyeon had opened the door, and his eyes that had flickered into Haknyeon’s direction as he had spoken to him were now wandering over the potions presented in the little showcase of his shop window.

“Come in,” Haknyeon said, demonstratively shivering as a gust of wind carried cold air towards them, “close the door behind you.”

The jingling of the wind chime ripped through the silence of his shop just like the boy’s footsteps on the creaking wood tiles did.

“Ah, there it is—” Haknyeon reached for the small wallet that he had spotted balancing on the small part of the desk between the edge and the cashier – out of his field of vision while standing behind the counter, which was why he had failed to see it sooner. The wallet looked old and used, with the brown leather smoothened after many years of regular use and the edges scuffed – it didn’t exactly take much imagination to assume that the boy, who couldn’t be much older than twenty, could have hardly bought it himself. Just as he had started to wonder whose it might have once been, the boy spoke up, and unknowingly answered the question that had formed on Haknyeon’s tongue.

“ Ah , thank you. It used to be my dad’s, it would have been a pity if I lost it. He would’ve—”

Haknyeon turned around to the other, wallet in hand, and just as he did so, eyes properly wandering over the other’s face for the first time since he had shown up again, the boy’s words and the relieved sigh that had accompanied them got stuck in his throat. He fell silent, and instead of continuing his sentence, he just stared.

Dark eyes wide, round lips parted slightly, hands clutching his phone to his chest almost the same way as they had when he had first entered – though he seemed more tense now.

Haknyeon hesitated, looking back. The boy stared, and stared, until Haknyeon, still standing in the middle of the room with his hand stretched out to hand the other his wallet, glanced over his shoulder to check if the boy was indeed looking at him – he was.

“Uh,” the witch stuttered, unsure what to do, “here—”

The boy didn’t react.

“Your wallet—”

He reached forward to gently nudge the other’s hand to bring him to take it. As soon as his fingers brushed against the back of his hand, though, the boy seemed to snap out of whatever strange trance he had been in and flinched hard enough for his phone to slip out of his grip. The loud, unexpected sound of the device falling to the ground seemed to drive away the little bit of quiet that had still lingered.

“O-oh, s-sorry,” the boy muttered, “’m sorry,” immediately crouching down to pick it up. Haknyeon looked at the boy in wonder, quietly handing him the wallet once he straightened his back again. There was something off about him, something about the look in his eyes, in the way his countenance had changed from generally timid and somewhat disinterested to a different kind of shy which seemed to be both linked to Haknyeon directly, and tied to a sort of flusteredness.

Haknyeon frowned, watching as the boy stifled a yawn, his cheeks tinted pinkish as he hid his mouth behind his hands. The pink on his cheeks strengthened as their eyes met once more, showing even brighter due to the sallow complexion of his sleep-deprived face. Haknyeon’s focus briefly shifted from the boy to the darkness outside. The moon was hidden behind thick clouds, and you could hardly even see the buildings lining the other side of the street.

Just as he wanted to ask the boy if there was anything else that he could help him with, the human spoke up.

“M-my name is Sunwoo,” he blurted out almost, a little awkwardly before he asked, “and yours is—”

Haknyeon’s eyes fell back on the other. “My name ? Haknyeon. Ju Haknyeon. Listen, I—”

“You’re pretty.”

Their reactions to his words happened spontaneously. While the boy, Sunwoo, slapped a hand to his mouth as if that last sentence should have never left his lips, Haknyeon’s eyes widened.

“Sorry, what?”

“S-sorry, that was… I shouldn’t have… it’s, um, it’s the truth, I—”

While the strange human tried to wind himself out of the awkward situation by starting and failing to finish one sentence after the other, Haknyeon noticed a strange feeling swelling in his chest, sort of like a presentiment.

Like he had been born with a predilection for potions and plants, some witches were born with the gift of foresight – his mother was one of them, she made her living with tarot readings. Perhaps Haknyeon had inherited more of his mother than he had ever thought, because in that moment, facing the blushing, stuttering boy standing in the middle of his shop long after closing time, a prickly feeling spread in Haknyeon’s stomach, until he couldn’t help but interrupt the boy’s rambling.

“Sunwoo?”

The boy reacted to his name like a well-trained puppy called by its master. He fell silent, his head whipped up, an enthusiastic nod caused a dark curl to fall into his face.

Haknyeon cleared his throat. “The potion that I sold you. Did you drink it already?”

Sunwoo nodded. Haknyeon noticed that he was still looking at him in that strange way. As if completely one hundred percent of his attention lay on him, as if he blocked out anything but him, as if he was all that he could see.

Haknyeon felt a lump in his throat.

“Did the effect not set in?” he asked, still appearing calm and collected while his mind had started to race. “It’s late… you’re not sleepy yet or anything like that?”

The boy shook his head, nervously fumbling with the case of his phone, then quickly corrected himself, “w-well, yeah, I am sleepy, I always am, but I just couldn’t sleep. I tried! I really did! I did everything that I was supposed to do, but… n-nothing. But maybe the effect just sets in late? O-or did I do something wrong?”

“Hm? Oh, no, I don’t think so, I just…” Haknyeon’s voice trailed off as a thought struck him that he just couldn’t shake off again. He lifted a hand to rub his fingers against his temple, feeling a prodding headache emerging. “Let me just… check something. You don’t have the potion with you by any chance, do you?”

Sunwoo shook his head, eyes widened now in confusion more than anything else, as he watched Haknyeon approach the cabinet from which he had taken the potion in question with quick steps, reaching for one of the other bottles.

The tinted red liquid made a gurgling sound as Haknyeon treated the potion quite brashly, hurriedly searching for the attached label.

On the small tag that he found attached to the cork, Haknyeon read exactly what he had expected to see – sleep potion, handle with care . The same held true for the next two potions that he took a look at. Just as he went onto his tiptoes to grab another of the bottles, one hand clutching at the side of the shelf to not lose balance, Haknyeon caught sight of something white standing out against the dark tone of the wood of the shelf, something he had failed to see looking up at the cabinet up until now.

A label, half-heartedly sticking to the rack. It made a quiet sshhtt sound as Haknyeon swiftly but carefully tore it off the wood, leaving a small glue stain. Haknyeon tilted his head.

Next to an x scribbled in red ink, he found words in his handwriting written on the two fine lines drawn on the square label.

FAIL!! love potion, dose too strong – less amaranth? do not use or sell!!

With every word and its meaning slowly sinking in, Haknyeon’s heart rate sped up. No. Oh no. Oh no no no—

He slowly turned around to the other, crumpling up the label in his closing fist. With his mind racing faster than probably ever before, Haknyeon felt the fervent wish that this situation turned out to be not what it looked like slipping through his fingers almost immediately as he looked into Sunwoo’s face.

With a clammy feeling near closing his airways, Haknyeon looked into eyes that looked almost dull with fatigue before and were now filled with ardent adoration, and the realization that he had truly fucked up hit the witch so sudden he felt lightheaded.

“When, um, when did you drink the potion?”

“An hour and a half ago.”

“And, um, how much did you drink?”

A deep blush now painted Sunwoo’s cheeks.

“The whole bottle.”

“ The whole bottle ?” Haknyeon gasped. Oh, this was not good. This was not good at all, this was bad .

He could hardly look at Sunwoo. The chaos that had to be going on inside of the poor boy’s mind right now… in potion school, they had gotten to know the effects of a love potion on one’s mind and body in a controlled environment in order to get a grasp on how powerful just such a potion could be. To this day, Haknyeon still remembered the numbness of his hands, the racing of his heart, the almost absurd ways that his warped mind had worked – sure, he wasn’t exactly the type for the feverish kind of infatuation, but no crush that he had ever developed naturally, even the big ones, had come close to that feeling.

Haknyeon let out a shaky breath.

How could this have happened? How could he have been so negligent?

Hand in hand with the realization of what had happened came the conclusion that he could not handle this right now. He neither wanted nor knew how to deal with this. He hadn’t made a mistake in… a long time. He hadn’t made a mistake as grave as this one seemed in forever . If the wrong people got wind of this, it could cost him his livelihood.

No. No way.

“Hyung? Is there a problem? C-can I call you hyung?”

“Y-yeah, sure,” Haknyeon mumbled, racking his brain for something that he could say – “a-and, I… I accidentally gave you an expired potion! Don’t worry, nothing bad is going to happen, the effect is just not strong enough.”

Haknyeon quickly grabbed one of the sleep potions – a correctly labeled one – and held it out to the boy.

“Here! Have that one for free, sorry about that. This one should work – it will work—”

“Oh.” Sunwoo took the potion from him with his lips parted in subtle surprise. “Thank you, hyung.”

“No problem.” Haknyeon gave him a smile, which he regretted a second later as it was reciprocated with a smile so bright-cheeked and full of hope that it hurt a little. “I have to ask you to leave now, though. I really must close up the shop now. Busy day, you know?”

“Oh.” The hope in Sunwoo’s eyes was replaced by meek acceptance. “Okay.”

Haknyeon half guided, half nudged the human towards the entrance door, pushing it upon to let the cold darkness outside peek in. Before Sunwoo left his shop completely, Haknyeon added, with guilt pricking him with every word, “that potion is much stronger than the other one, I only recommend a few sips each day. It’ll take a while until you’ve finished that one, so… yeah.”

Sunwoo looked small standing on the sidewalk that the stairs in front of the potion shop’s entrance led to, especially with the way he looked up at his. Something about the dark hair and rather dark clothes, though they were modern, gave him a somewhat ghostly appearance. Haknyeon pressed his lips into a faint smile that served as a goodbye.

“Thank you!” Sunwoo said once again. His voice echoed a bit in the empty street. “I, um… you—” A small sigh escaped his lips as he seemed to not be able to find the right words. “Sleep well, hyung.”

“Mh.”

Haknyeon closed the door before Sunwoo had even fully turned away, and he hurried through the shop to disappear into the safe solitude of the backroom immediately. There, he sank onto the next best stool he could find, burying his face in his head before he sank onto the table, supporting his torso with his forearms, head hanging between his shoulders.

He had done well at doing damage control, right?

It was good to not mention anything about the mixed-up potion, that would only cause more confusion. Yeah, he had done the best he had been capable of. Perhaps he was lucky, and he had averted a crisis entirely – as long as not even Sunwoo knew that his potion had been mixed up, there was nobody other than Haknyeon himself who could tell anyone else about this.

Sure, the label had said that the effect was permanent, but Haknyeon could make mistakes, he had proven that to himself today. If he was lucky, then he’d never see the boy again – perhaps the potion would wear off, perhaps there would be some other reason for why he wouldn’t return to Haknyeon’s shop.

Haknyeon could go about his work days as if nothing had ever happened, as if his perfect track record were still as stellar as it always had been. That was what he was known for! His flawless organization and professionalism, his reputation as the town’s main potion supply relied on the fact that simply none of his customers had anything bad to say about him. He was good at his job, plain and simple, and he wouldn’t let one human boy change that.

✨

The first hour of the next workday, Haknyeon spent reorganizing the entire shelf from which he had taken the faulty potion. It turned out, however, that the love potion had been the only one out of place.

By now, Haknyeon knew how the mistake might have happened – a few weeks ago, he had taken the time to experiment with new recipes. While some of the trials had been successful and he had been able to come up with quite a few new potions to sell, there had been a few failed attempts at improving potions as well. Haknyeon had thought to have discarded them all, but that had obviously not been the case.

After making sure that everything was in order now and there were no faultily unlabeled potions sitting on the cabinets, Haknyeon returned to his regular day.

It was a mellow Thursday, one like any other – there was not much going on, and Haknyeon probably spent more time giving water and treats to the stray cats gathering in front of his shop than serving customers.

It was almost 3 pm, and the busy witch hadn’t thought about the events of last night for quite a while, when the door to his shop was pushed open and he was promptly reminded again.

“Hi, how can I—”

Haknyeon fell silent as his eyes fell onto Sunwoo. He wore a shirt instead of a hoodie today, the black fabric made his skin look pale.

“Hi again,” Haknyeon muttered, barely keeping himself from asking “what are you doing here?”

“Hello.” Sunwoo gave him a shy smile, round eyes fixating on the witch. “Are you, um, are you busy?”

Haknyeon hesitated. “Yeah,” he lied then. “Sorry.”

“Oh. Oh, that’s okay, I—” He wavered – “I wanted to buy another potion!”

Haknyeon raised an eyebrow. “Another sleep potion? You didn’t drink the whole thing again, did you?”

“Uh, no, I—”

Haknyeon eyed the boy, noticing how his composure cracked whenever their eyes met even just briefly, and how despite that, it seemed to take him quite some strength to actually avert his gaze from him.

“I wanted to buy a potion against migraines.”

“One of those?” Haknyeon gestured towards the dozen phials lined up on the shelf to Sunwoo’s left. He had set those up just hours ago, before his thirty minutes of lunch break.

“… yes.”

“You have migraines?”

“My, uh, my roommate.”

Though Haknyeon didn’t let it show, he was quite convinced that Sunwoo had come up with that one the spot. Nevertheless, he sold him the potion – if that was what would help with getting him to leave…

He made sure to not have their fingers touch as Sunwoo handed him the money for the medicinal brew – strictly avoiding anything that could possibly stir up more problems – before more or less shoving him towards the exit.

Standing on the doorstep already, Sunwoo turned around once more.

“You look pretty today – the ponytail, it suits you so well.”

Haknyeon was stunned, silent for a moment.

He hardly ever received compliments, rarely found himself in situations which could prompt someone to say something nice about anything else but his business. The witch slowly raised a hand, stuttering fingers lightly brushing over the small, paintbrush tip-like ponytail that held back strands of his slightly wavy, auburn hair that would usually fall into his face.

Looking pretty hadn’t even come to his mind.

“Thank you,” Haknyeon muttered, snapping out of the brief moment of surprise as he saw another customer approach in the corner of his eye. A widow nearing 80 years of age who lived with his son’s family, which ran a pet supply shop a few blocks down, and regularly came here for a remedy against memory loss.

“Have a nice day,” he said.

Please don’t come back again , he added silently.

He came back again, two days later. Haknyeon coincidentally spotted him waiting for a carriage to pass at the intersection towards the street on which his shop bordered on led towards. Wearing a monochrome hoodie again, clunky headphones on, he looked so different towards most others roaming these streets.

He was so undoubtedly from the city that everyone crossing his path was surely wondering what led a boy like him to a place like this. Haknyeon – Haknyeon was the reason for why he came here.

The potion shop at 12 on Saturdays.

It was barely 11.

Why was he here again ?

Haknyeon cursed under his breath, causing the small girl that had just fetched the order that her mother had placed to look up at him over the counter in childlike astonishment.

“That’s a bad word.”

“I know, I know. Don’t tell your mom I said that.” Haknyeon gave the girl a rushed smile and handed her the small bag with all kinds of basic household potions. “Now go home, quick…” He glanced back outside. “Looks like I have to close the shop a little earlier.”

As soon as the door closed behind the little girl, Haknyeon turned around the closing sign with a wave of his hand before hurrying towards the counter, crouching down to search for his notebook at just the right moment.

Few seconds later, there was a light knock at the glass panel in the door.

Haknyeon let out a breath, counted to three and then reemerged from behind the counter, blowing a wayward strand out of his face as he saw, with no surprise, Sunwoo peek into the shop, with those hopeful round eyes and pallid cheeks, onto which just the sight of Haknyeon alone conjured a pinkish color.

Haknyeon gritted his teeth.

Get it over with quickly, he thought to himself. Tell him you’re closed for the day and tell him to not come here again.

He opened the door almost a little too determinedly, causing Sunwoo to stumble backwards.

“Good morni—”

“I’m closed for the day.” Haknyeon gestured towards the CLOSED sign, tapping against the painted wood demonstratively.

In reaction, Sunwoo glanced at his phone, frowning as he saw what time it was – “but—”

“I had to close the shop early. I have to… go somewhere.”

Sunwoo’s eyes widened instantly. “Did something happen?

“I don’t have the time to explain it right now, sorry—” Genuine concern in the human’s eyes met the witch’s concealed irritation. Haknyeon cleared his throat. “Sunwoo, I’ll be honest, you… um, you’re hindering me from work. Please leave.”

The words came out a little harsher than Haknyeon had expected. Sunwoo’s face mirrored surprise and puzzlement, then dawning disappointment.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t want to disturb you, I just—”

“Please leave.”

Haknyeon felt like a sham as he was hurrying down the road minutes later. He had, as he had told Sunwoo, closed up the shop and had then headed in the opposite direction from the boy. With no destination in mind – he didn’t have to go anywhere, after all, all of what he had said had been one big lie to not have to deal with Sunwoo any longer – he ended up at the fringe of a small stripe of forest at the border of the town.

He let himself down on the next bench that he encountered, leaning against the backrest and letting his head fall back until he saw nothing but the clear-blue sky.

What a mess…

With only the distant chirping of birds surrounding him and nothing better to do, Haknyeon finally had the time to think. Properly think, not just evade the issue to the best of his ability.

If only he knew how to get rid of the potion effect… He had learned in school that every potion, every spell, was reversible in some way, most of the time through time, often with the help of an antidote. Some antidotes were trickier than others, though, especially if you didn’t have much experience with the potion in question – and Haknyeon had zero experience with love potions.

What was even more worrying though was that failed potions were even harder to reverse, they were unpredictable and dangerous – and what if someone noticed Haknyeon’s mistake and reported him?

Just last month, a witch-run shop at the other side of the town had had to close in consequence to a much smaller slip-up.

These types of incidents had been going on for quite a while – shops and stores run by magical beings being forced to shut down for small reasons. It started with a rumor, then a letter in the mailbox, and a week later wooden planks blocked off the door and the display windows were cleared out.

While the government kept claiming the opposite, it was clear that their rigid rules targeted magical shops especially. The reason? They weren’t profitable, they were small shops meant for small towns, they didn’t stand a chance against big chain store companies.

Haknyeon, who already had to face prejudices in the modern world, had handed a dangerous potion to an innocent human citizen – yeah, if that story reached the wrong ears, it would be fatal.

Haknyeon let out a deep sigh.

Did he really have to find an antidote, be it another potion or a spell, that was strong enough to get rid of that false and, according to the label, permanent illusion of love and infatuation instilled in the boy’s heart?

Was it foolish to still hope that the problem would somehow solve itself?

A few days later, Haknyeon spent the last sixty minutes before he had to open the store with spring cleaning his apartment. Granted, very late spring cleaning – was early summer cleaning a thing?

The few rooms above the store were small but comfortable, Haknyeon had made sure of that soon after moving in – mismatching furniture met a slanted wooden ceiling and many, many houseplants. While the potion shop was as tidy and neat as possible, his own place was more of an organized mess. All kinds of books, recipe collections and handbooks and novels, stacked up into piles of books along the narrow hallway connecting his kitchen and the living room. At least three empty teacups were found in the living room, which served simultaneously as the bedroom. Heaps of different blankets and pillows clustered on the mattress floating maybe a meter above the ground in the corner of the room, below one of the windows.

In this homely chaos, Haknyeon now ordered brooms where to sweep with the wiggle of a finger and instructed the watering can to busily wander from each plant to the other, while he himself took care of the tasks that required delicacy and thinking.

A headband that he had found in his closet held back his hair as he stood hunched over the kitchen cabinet, trying to restore the order in which the spices had once been in.

He was so focused that he heard neither the windchime, the door opening, nor the footsteps leading up the stairs.

“Knock knock?”

Haknyeon whirled around so quickly he dropped the jar of chili flakes that he had been holding. It didn’t fall and shatter, though, as just before the small glass container made contact with the floor, an invisible force lifted it back into the air and gently set it onto the kitchen table.

The source of the magic that had prevented the near accident was a tall, ginger-haired witch leaning against the doorframe to the kitchen.

Well, half-witch, to be more exact.

“Juyeon hyung!” Haknyeon caught the unexpected yet welcomed intruder in a hug. “What are you doing here already? I didn’t expect you until later.”

“Starting off early today, I have to help my aunts with special deliveries in the afternoon.” Juyeon pulled a face at the prospect, then looked around curiously. “You’re cleaning?”

“Mh, but I can finish later.” Haknyeon untied the headband and tossed it onto the kitchen counter before making his way towards the staircase leading down into the backroom of the shop, with Juyeon following right behind him.

“How did you get in?”

“Key.”

“I gave you a key?”

“In January, when you were sick.”

“Ah, right.”

He hopped off the last two steps as he noticed the basket full of plants, elixir phials and other kinds of potion ingredients standing on the table in the corner of the room. With a pleased ooohhh Haknyeon started sifting through the basket.

“There’s some good stuff in there this time,” Juyeon noted off-handedly.

“I can tell! How much is it?”

“Ah, about that – I’ll be back in a second, I forgot the receipt and money pouch at the scooter.”

Haknyeon nodded, hardly being able to tear his eyes away from an exceptionally beautifully grown specimen of mandrake root which he placed next to a jar filled to the brim with poplar tree bark.

He was lucky to have Juyeon as a friend – the Lee family, consisting of Juyeon’s mother, a witch, his two aunts, also witches, and his father, a human, and Juyeon himself obviously, led the delivery service in town. Their services were highly sought after, and being so close to Juyeon – he was like the brother he’d never had, basically – had brought him one or the other perk over the years.

Juyeon was back in no time, Haknyeon saw him jogging through the main room with the receipt and a wallet in his hand, the short-sleeved opened button-down shirt that he wore over his t-shirt fluttering behind him.

Haknyeon came towards him half-way, heading for the counter.

“Same as usual.”

Juyeon placed the small receipt next to the cash register. Haknyeon squinted at the sum at the bottom, a little hard to decipher as it was written with a typewriter older than Juyeon and Haknyeon combined.

“Really? What about those fancy plants from the sea—” Haknyeon asked, already counting the large mun coins.

“On the house,” Juyeon replied, grinning.

A comfortable silence reigned between them for a moment, before Juyeon then spoke up again, “ah, by the way…”

“Hm?”

“There’s someone outside the shop.” A chuckle escaped Juyeon while he dropped the coins that Haknyeon had handed him one by one into the opened pouch. “A boy from the city, I’ve never seen him before. He was already there when I arrived. Just now as I passed him to get to the scooter, he kept looking at me, so I asked if he needed anything, and he said he’s here for you and then he asked if I was your boyfriend.”

Juyeon raised an eyebrow as Haknyeon didn’t respond already. He didn’t only not respond, but didn’t react at all, as if he had frozen for a moment.

“A boy from the city, you said?” Haknyeon asked, suddenly feeling very nervous. His hand trembled a little as he handed the other witch the last coins.

Juyeon nodded, a wry, curious smile broadening on his lips. “When I told him that we’re friends, he seemed quite relieved. Hak… who is that boy?”

“Nobody,” Haknyeon replied immediately. “Just… nobody. Don’t ask.”

Juyeon laughed. “Okay, I won’t. I can finish things off here, so—” He gestured towards the door, and Haknyeon shot him a glare – of course, Juyeon was misinterpreting the entire situation, as probably anyone would have without the context.

Sunwoo stood by the rusty water pipe leading down the side of the façade, kicking pebbles around on the sidewalk. As the door fell shut behind Haknyeon, he glanced up, and immediately the almost gloomy expression on his face brightened up into a smile.

“Oh! Hyung!”

“What are you doing here? The shop isn’t open yet…”

A rosy touch tinted his cheeks, “I wanted to make sure I wasn’t late again,” he mumbled, “I just wanted to… I-I dunno.”

Haknyeon looked at him.

He should have known that he’d come back… If he kept showing up here for no reason other than to see him, acting as obvious as he had with Juyeon, it probably wouldn’t take long until people started to speculate.

There was really only one way to make sure Haknyeon’s cover wouldn’t be blown until he managed to put an end to this – or at least only one way that came to the witch in that moment. If he couldn’t keep him away completely, he had to keep him close, and considering Haknyeon spent most of his time in the potion shop anyway, there was really only one way to do that.

“Come in.”

Sunwoo’s eyes widened as he immediately stumbled forward, following Haknyeon into the shop.

“I, um—” Haknyeon tried his hardest to ignore Juyeon’s curious eyes peeking in past the ajar door from the backroom. “I know that this is probably coming out of nowhere, but—”

Haknyeon faltered for a second.

Was this a good idea?

It was a rash decision, that he was aware of, but no matter how he thought about it, Haknyeon just couldn’t figure out a better way.

 He took a deep breath before he turned towards Sunwoo again, who was looking at him expectantly.

“I noticed that I could need someone to help me out at the potion shop. Could you… help me? As an… well, assistant, sort of?”

And with that, the damage was done. Sunwoo agreed so readily he kept stumbling over his own words, nodding so excitedly his curls flapped like the ears of a young puppy, and after Juyeon had left the shop and drove off with his scooter – not without shooting Haknyeon silent yet telling glances across the room – Haknyeon had no choice but to give the boy his full attention.

It was kind of true – he could need a helping hand, in theory. There was always a lot to do, sometimes a bit too much, which meant that he had to neglect other aspects of his life as a sacrifice. If he had someone who could take over the counter every now and then, someone who could pack up orders and go into town to fetch ingredients, then Haknyeon’s life could become much easier. He could search for a hobby, take an afternoon off every now and then, spend more time researching for new ingredients instead of having to recycle old ones again and again due to lack of time.

If Haknyeon had employed anyone, though, he would have chosen a witch or at least someone very knowledgeable about potions and herbology, someone calm, tidy, polite, and diligent.

Not some human boy he barely knew nothing of except for the fact that he was – without his will – ardently in love with him.

Sunwoo wandered from shelf to shelf, picking up phials asking about their contents, peeking into books that Haknyeon kept behind the counter, bombarding Haknyeon with questions of all sorts.

“When do I start? Today? Now?”

“Can I brew potions myself?”

“Who was that guy with the orange hair?”

“Can magic be taught?”

“Do you have Wi-Fi here?”

Haknyeon answered all of his questions – “yes, today, now”, “we’ll see”, “a friend”, “no”, “I don’t know what that is”.

“Listen,” he said then. He avoided Sunwoo’s eyes, avoided looking at him entirely – he wasn’t used to being listened to that attentively, to have someone’s eyes hanging on his lips at every syllable. “Brewing potions and all that, it takes time to learn. For now, it would be great if you could just help me with packing up orders, preparing labels, handling the cash register… you can do that, right?”

“Yes! Yes, I can do that! I can do everything that you ask me to, hyung.”

“Ah, um, g-good, then. That’s good.” Just as Haknyeon had stepped over to the counter, about to show Sunwoo what to do first, a loud sound suddenly resounded in the shop. Haknyeon flinched, confusion showing in his face as he couldn’t place where the continuous ringing was coming from – until Sunwoo, lips forming an o , reached into the back pocket of his pants and pulled out his phone.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, quickly accepting the call, “hyung? Why are you calling?”

With there being no other sounds despite Sunwoo’s voice, Haknyeon could hear the person on the other side of the line quite clearly – a male voice, young as well, and quite, well, loud.

“Sunwoo, where are you?”

“Why?”

“Ric said you left at seven ? Seven ? Don’t tell me you went to that potion shop again?”

“A-and if I did?”

“You have class today! You’ll be late again!”

“You don’t give a shit about your classes, so don’t care about mine,” he grumbled into the phone which he was holding more to his mouth than to his ear. “You’re not my mom—” His voice was hushed, hurried, and as he glanced towards Haknyeon, the witch quickly pretended to not be paying attention to the call.

“… you’ve got it bad, huh?” Whoever that was on the other line half chuckled, half scoffed.

“Shut up—” Sunwoo hissed. “Just… yeah, shut up. I’m hanging up, okay?”

And he did, pressing the red button on the phone screen almost aggressively before shoving the phone back into the back pocket of his pants.

“S-sorry about that,” he mumbled then. “I… that was my roommate, Jaehyun, he’s… yeah. Sorry.”

“Roommate? The one with the migraine?”

“H-hm?”

“Nevermind,” Haknyeon chuckled, “it’s okay. What did he mean with you left at seven?”

“Oh, I have to take the train to get here. I live in the city, you know, it takes a bit.”

“A bit?”

“An hour.”

“ An hour ? You drove an hour to get here?”

“It’s okay!” Sunwoo gave him a smile, then wiggled with his shoulder to nudge forward his backpack, tossing it onto a stool pushed towards the wall. “That means I can do all of my math assignments on the way.”

“You’re a math student?”

“Mhm!”

“And it’s really okay for you to skip your classes?”

“Mhm! No problem, really. I can clear out my entire schedule for you – attendance isn’t mandatory, and I can just work through the assignments at home.”

“Okay, then… come here.” Haknyeon hid a chuckle and beckoned the boy over to the table where all the unfinished orders lay ready. “I’ll show you what to do, okay? Just listen carefully and you’ll get the hang of it in no time.”

It was strange to have someone working alongside him during the day. To hear someone else’s calm breathing and footsteps on the creaking floor even when there were no customers.

It didn’t take long until Haknyeon realized that Sunwoo’s presence was half incredibly annoying, half bearable. He talked a lot , he was terribly clumsy at times, and Haknyeon just couldn’t get used to him staring all the damn time, immediately averting his eyes and blushing whenever Haknyeon glanced over his shoulder and accidentally locked eyes with him – not only that, but he also drew little hearts into the corners of labels onto which he was supposed to write the potion names on.

On the other hand, though, he was also very zealous, friendly, and for the lack of a better word, endearing. He was eager to comply with Haknyeon’s requests, making sure that he did everything correctly, that he was doing a good job. The smile on his lips hardly ever went away, though it changed depending on who he was looking at.

The customers coming into the store in those first hours took a liking to him almost instantly. Out of the five people that pushed open the front door, two of them – chatty regulars that had been visiting Haknyeon’s shop since its opening – asked who that new boy was, and before Sunwoo could answer and potentially say something unknowingly imprudent, Haknyeon brushed off the question with a simple, “oh, a new temp, he’s helping me up with some of the tedious stuff”, an answer satisfactory enough to keep them from asking any more questions – thankfully .

In the moments in which Sunwoo wasn’t staring longingly and worked diligently at whatever Hakyneon had told him to do in that moment, the witch found himself looking at the other instead.

He was still mulling over how to fix this situation. Why did it have to be a love potion, out of all the potions he could have mistakenly given him? Love was so tricky…

Haknyeon was lucky already that the poor boy being under the influence of a love potion mainly manifested in pining gazes and clumsily bold yet coy attempts to get closer – it could have taken a turn for the worse already.

As inexperienced with this specific topic as he was, how high were the chances of Haknyeon successfully removing the spell? No matter how low that probability was, he would never know if he didn’t try.

For that, he needed help, though, or rather emotional support – and he knew just the right person for that.

“Where are you going?”

Haknyeon had barely crossed through the backroom when Sunwoo peeked into the room, hands holding onto the door frame to keep himself balanced.

“Oh, uh, just outside—” He gestured towards the backdoor, “I have to send a message.”

“A message? Outside?” Sunwoo repeated curiously. “How?”

Haknyeon sighed.

“ How ? Per bird, obviously.”

Sunwoo’s eyes widened, and before Haknyeon could ask him to stay in the shop and watch over the counter, the other had already scurried over, waiting expectantly for Haknyeon to open the backdoor.

“Don’t tell me you’ve never seen a messenger bird before…” Haknyeon muttered as he unlocked the slightly rusty door chain locking the entrance to his backyard.

It was barely even a yard – just enough space for a patch of grass, a blackberry bush, and two animal enclosures. One of those was placed into the corner of the yard, a two-story rabbit hutch with a fenced-in pen attached. The other one was attached to the back wall of the house, a small birdhouse with straw sticking out of the small arched entrance.

Haknyeon was about to roll up the message that he had scribbled onto a scrap of paper just minutes before as he noticed that Sunwoo had crouched down in front of the rabbit enclosure, tilting his head as his eyes wandered over the hutch. There was no animal to be seen anywhere, not even under the hollow bark that served as a little hut in the corner of the hutch’s second floor.

“You have a bunny? Where is it?”

“Carrot. Oh, he could be anywhere.” Haknyeon chuckled as he gestured towards the small, opened gate at the side of the enclosure, then a small wooden flap in the backdoor.

Sunwoo’s eyes were wide. “You let your bunny roam around free?”

“He’s very smart,” Haknyeon said, “doesn’t like being caged in”, turning his back towards Sunwoo and the rabbit cage, bringing his attention to the bird house instead. Sunwoo was at his side within seconds, looking over his shoulder.

“Who are you sending the message to?”

“My best friend.”

Haknyeon held his hand towards the opening of the house, clicking with his tongue. Faint rustling could be heard from inside, then soft cooing.

A moment later, the head of a magpie appeared, dark eyes blinking, beak gentle picking at Haknyeon’s finger.

“Hi pretty,” Haknyeon mumbled, keeping his hand in front of the entrance until the bird hopped onto his index finger, slightly puffing its shiny feathers which the witch then caressed with his other hand. He hooked a red ribbon around the magpie’s thin leg, attaching the rolled-up piece of paper. “I’ve got something for you – bring it to Younghoon for me, okay?”

The magpie cooed, its jerky head movement resembling a nod.

“Why do you not just text each other?”

Haknyeon hadn’t realized how close Sunwoo was standing, and suddenly hearing his voice so close took him off guard. Sunwoo’s breaths tingled against the skin above the neckline of his blouse. He took a step away from him, frowning at the question.

Text each other? Humans indeed were strange.

Haknyeon was glad that the other didn’t ask what was written in the message, as he couldn’t have possibly admitted to the cry of help that the paper scrap had written on it, and he hated lying.

The messenger bird flapped its wings and took off straight away. Haknyeon noticed how Sunwoo tilted his head up to watch the magpie fly away until it disappeared behind the roofs of neighboring houses. When he eventually averted his eyes again, they fell onto Haknyeon.

Sunwoo’s face changed when he looked at him. A glaze fell over his already shiny eyes, his features relaxed and his cheeks glowed rosy.

He seemed so at peace, as if he trusted Haknyeon with his life when he didn’t  even know him properly, as if Haknyeon had put the stars in the sky for him although the witch had barely even shown him any affection other than simply tolerating him. It was against all logic, all common sense, all rational thinking, something out of a fairytale, something that didn’t happen in real life, this kind of instant love and trust and devotion. It was, perhaps, as magical as Haknyeon could have ever imagined an emotion to be.

Haknyeon felt a sour taste in the back of his throat, and welcomed the sudden ringing of the wind chime, signaling that someone had entered the shop.

“Coming!”

He slipped past Sunwoo, strictly ignoring his gaze, and hurried into the shop to welcome the customer.

From Mondays to Fridays, the potion shop closed for an hour at noon, which was just long enough for Haknyeon to hurry upstairs, cook himself a simple lunch and have some time for himself before returning to his job.

He had started this day thinking that it’d be like any other and hadn’t even thought about his lunch break until the clock hit twelve and his motion to turn the shop sign to closed was met with a questioning head tilt.

“Ah. We have an hour long break now, I forgot to mention that. There’s a convenience store just around the corner, so why don’t you—”

“I want to eat with you.”

Sunwoo’s request was met with a moment of stunned hesitance on Haknyeon’s side.

“I want to spend time with you.”

His honesty was disarming. Haknyeon cleared his throat. “Okay,” he said. “Sure. Come with me.”

As Haknyeon led Sunwoo up the stairs, filling the silence that he deemed as somewhat awkward with explaining how he bought the apartment years back, together with acquiring the shop. Sunwoo was listening attentively, which was why Haknyeon continued talking.

As they arrived at the kitchen, Haknyeon realized that he hadn’t talked this much in a long time, mostly since there wasn’t anyone there that would listen to him – his pets weren’t exactly very good listeners and he refused to become one of those shop owners that babbled on and on to random customers that merely wanted to buy whatever they had come in for and then leave.

As he saw Sunwoo looking around his place, he felt the sudden need to clarify – “just lunch, then we’re going back downstairs”.

Sunwoo nodded. “Okay,” he said, not sounding too offended thankfully, then adding, “do you not like having people in your apartment?”

No , Haknyeon thought, I just don’t like having you in my apartment, because your love-drunk mind will misconstrue and misinterpret everything I do .

Haknyeon sighed, and nodded to finish off the topic.

“I made sandwiches,” he said, turning his back on Sunwoo to open the fridge, squished in between a ceiling-high cabinet and a counter. “I hope that’s fine.”

“Sure! Everything’s alright! I’m not picky!”

Sunwoo had sat down at the small, round table located beneath the slanted ceiling window, nervously fiddling with the case of his phone once again as he watched Haknyeon retrieve the two sandwiches and place it onto a plate each.

Multiplication spells weren’t exactly the most difficult kind of magic, but for a witch like Haknyeon, who rarely ever had to do with incantations of that sort, it needed a copious amount of focus to be able to double the number of sandwiches in front of him.

He closed his eyes, flattening his palms directed at the two tables, only looking back at the counter again as he heard a stunned oooh coming from behind him – instead of two sandwiches, there were now four.

“That’s cool,” Sunwoo mumbled. “You’re so cool.”

“Doesn’t work in larger quantities, sadly,” Haknyeon hummed, bringing the plates to the table, “or else I could solve world hunger.”

“Tragic,” Sunwoo responded with a half-laugh, and the endeared nose scrunch did not go past the other.

Lunch break with him was almost… nice. Lacking a better alternative, Haknyeon continued the topic that he had picked up on the way up to the apartment. Haknyeon was pragmatic about this – he wouldn’t be able to get rid of Sunwoo at least for this day, so there was no use in making things even harder for the two of them.

He could have started a genuinely pleasant conversation with him if the love potion effect didn’t shine through so obviously, reminding Haknyeon at all times of why they were here and how they had gotten here. Sunwoo complimented his sandwiches – which were just plain average sandwiches – way too much, he giggled at jokes that weren’t even that funny, he rarely ever averted his eyes and whenever he did, he seemed so shy to look back at him that he had to gather up courage before attempting to do so.

In a moment of silence, Haknyeon found himself eyeing the other, and upon noticing the still existing dark circles beneath his eyes, couldn’t help but ask – “the sleep potion, does it work?”

“It does, yeah! Tonight, I managed to get six hours of sleep, almost! That’s rare for me—” He laughed nervously. “I’m not drinking the entire bottle anymore like you said, but even with a few sips each night, the bottle is slowly getting empty. I’ll need a new one soon.”

“You can’t sleep at all without it?”

“No chance.”

“… do you know why that might be?”

Sunwoo took a bit too big a bite from the second half of his last sandwich. He sat a bit hunched forward, elbows on the rough surface of the wooden table, black curls falling into his face and hiding his eyes almost completely as he shrugged, cheeks full of food.

“No idea. I wish I knew, then I could do something against – it sucks.”

“What exactly are you struggling with, though? Falling asleep? Staying asleep?”

“Both. I’m tired and yet I don’t fall asleep, and if I do fall asleep, it’s never more than maybe two hours?”

“That must be tough.”

“It is, yeah.” He gave Haknyeon a smile, eyes softening. “Your sleep potions are helping, though. Really. You’re amazing. You—”

His rambling was interrupted by a shocked squeak leaving his lips as he jerked backwards, almost toppling over on the wooden chair. The sudden movement startled Haknyeon, though following Sunwoo's eyes he quickly understood the situation.

Under the table, large front teeth currently buried in the fabric of Sunwoo's pants, sat a large bunny, which looked as if it was frowning as it blinked up at petrified Sunwoo with its beady black eyes.

“Carrot!” Haknyeon exclaimed. “There you are—”

“It’s biting me,” Sunwoo whimpered, his leg which the bunny clung to twitching, as if he was thinking of pulling it away but not having the guts to.

“Carrot, stop that,” Haknyeon said therefore, and although the rabbit usually listened to him quite well, the small animal hesitated this time, and only loosened its bite around Sunwoo’s pant leg.

He couldn’t help but laugh as Carrot, who Haknyeon saw as cute and harmless but surely had to look quite scary – as scary as a rabbit could be, granted – to Sunwoo, only thumped against the wooden floor.

“I don’t think he likes you,” Haknyeon noted.

“But why—” Sunwoo whined, fingers curled around the edge of the table as he frowned back at the sulking rabbit.

Haknyeon shrugged, thinking to himself that the only person he knew that could find an answer to that question was Younghoon, who knew how to deal with animals so well that he could practically read their minds.

“Carrot, let go of him,” Haknyeon tried once more, bending down to grab the bunny, who resisted half-heartedly before the witch pulled it onto his lap, trying to soothe it with calm, slow strokes along its soft back.

Sunwoo’s cheeks were reddened when Haknyeon looked at him the next time. He kept his hands around Carrot, in case the animal decided to jump the poor, confused human boy sitting at the other side of the table.

“He’s just not used to other people here,” Haknyeon told him, though he himself secretly doubted that explanation.

“Anyway,” he continued, “we should go back downstairs.” Heaving the bunny – Carrot was unproportionally big for a bunny, although he, according to Younghoon, could not be classified as a rabbit either – onto his arm, Haknyeon stood up.

The sound of his chair against the floor made a creaking, shrill sound. He placed his empty plate into the sink – he was going to wash the dishes, or rather make the dishes wash themselves, once Sunwoo was gone – and sat Carrot down next to a tray with two feeding bowls filled with water and rabbit food respectively.

Sunwoo reacted a bit slowly to Haknyeon’s sudden movement, blinking perplexedly as his eyes followed the witch, who now already stood in the passage from the kitchen towards the hallway, urging him to follow.

“Oh. Okay.”

He had his head lowered as he stood up, to not hit the ceiling – he was quite taller than Haknyeon, who didn’t have a problem with the slanted walls most of the time – and quietly followed the witch back into the shop; not without glancing back at the rabbit on the kitchen floor, which was now preoccupied with eating.

From the moment that Haknyeon sent off the message, it took him exactly two hours and twenty minutes to get to the shop. Haknyeon stood behind the counter, next to him two bottles of freshly made anti-dizziness potions hovered in the air, swaying back and forth by themselves to mix up the ingredients. He noticed Younghoon before he even pushed open the door, and a relieved smile flashed over his face. Just seeing the familiar face, the familiar silver-white hair a little disheveled from the early summer breeze wafting through the streets outside, the wry smile that reciprocated Haknyeon’s as soon as their eyes met.

Younghoon had to lower his head to get through the door – which, granted, had a strangely low door frame already, and it didn’t help either that he was tall – he towered a whole hand’s width over Haknyeon’s head.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” Haknyeon breathed, reaching for the sleeve of the other witch’s shirt. “Thank you—”

Younghoon grinned, bronze-golden eyes flickering over the room. “Your message sounded urgent, so no big deal – although I did have to close the clinic. If a deer dies while I’m here, it’s on you.”

Haknyeon blinked blankly.

“I’m kidding. So where is he?”

Haknyeon stifled a sigh, and signaled towards the closed door to his left, behind which Sunwoo was currently, charged with the task to organize and store away the ingredients that Juyeon had brought in this morning. “Backroom.”

“Can I see him?”

Haknyeon scoffed – “hyung, he’s not some rare animal that I want you to heal,” he replied, bestowing the other with an almost strict glance.

“Sorry, sorry,” Younghoon muttered, eyes fixed on the door to the backroom. “I’m gonna say hi to him.”

“Don’t—”, Haknyeon hissed. Before his best friend could close the distance between himself and the door, he held him back by his arm, fingers lightly digging into the pale skin – for a witch who spent most of the time that he wasn’t in his clinic in the forest, caring for the wild animals that lived there, he was surprisingly lacking tan.

“Don’t do that,” he repeated.

“Alright.” Younghoon shrugged, grinned again, and joined Haknyeon behind the cash register, leaning against the edge of the counter, crossing his arms in front of his broad chest. “Tell me how the fuck that happened first.”

Haknyeon sighed. “I don’t know ,” he whined, “I just… I messed up. He’s in love with me . He genuinely thinks that we’re soulmates or something, he kept showing up at my shop, and I didn’t know what to do so I just told him to stay and help me.”

“You said he drank the whole potion?”

“The whole bottle. It’s bad.”

Younghoon visibly held back a laugh.

“Take this seriously!” Haknyeon hissed. “I could get in so much trouble if anyone finds out…”

“I know, I know, sorry…” He grinned, nevertheless. “Maybe we can fix this. Have you tried anything yet? Reverse spells? Antidotes?”

“Not yet. I was hoping that you could help me.”

Younghoon nodded, rolling up his sleeves as he glanced back at the closed door. “That’s what I came here for. If—”

The two witches fell silent as the door creaked open, and Sunwoo came in. He stumbled to a sudden halt as his eyes fell onto Haknyeon behind the counter, and the tall stranger next to him.

“Oh. Hi.”

Younghoon waved. “Nice to meet you, Sunwoo.”

“You’re…” Sunwoo glanced at Haknyeon, head slightly tilted in question, and Haknyeon nodded in response, continuing the sentence that Sunwoo hadn’t finished, “the best friend, yup. Younghoon. He runs a pet clinic in the south.”

Sunwoo greeted the other half warily, half awkwardly, before he lifted up a tuft of herbs. “I didn’t know what to do with that, I don’t know what it is—”

“Oh, that’s sage. I’ll show you where to store it.”

Haknyeon threw Younghoon a pointed look, cocking his head to the side before reaching out for Sunwoo’s arm – the poor boy drew in a shaky breath at the simple touch and let the witch gently pull him along. Younghoon, who had understood Haknyeon’s silent message – I distract him, you try to use the spell on him – perfectly, followed swiftly.

Haknyeon felt pricks of conscience in the back of his head for the entire time that he was distracting Sunwoo. It was easy – stand a little closer than he normally would have, let their hands brush against each other, smile at him, that was all he needed to do to make Sunwoo forget about everything else around him. While Haknyeon was showing him where each of the herbs belonged to keep the backroom in order, Younghoon, who pretended to read through one of the books that lay scattered on the bench by the table in the corner of the room, focused on the spell he was about to cast.

Haknyeon’s best friend was more skilled at removal spells than Haknyeon was – whenever a maleficent force poisoned parts of the woods or an animal attracted the revenge of an evil spirit, which happened more often than assumed, Younghoon was there to help.

Haknyeon felt the surge of magical energy in the room rising, concentrating around Sunwoo, who was blissfully unaware of what was happening behind him. Not only were humans much less aware of the presence of magic, but the boy was also distracted enough to not notice anything other than Hakyneon, anyway.

The aura of magic grew stronger and stronger, until it manifested into a greenish shimmer in the air, vibrating in low hums that hurt Haknyeon’s ears, pressing against his temples, until the witch, despite not even being the target, felt Younghoon's spell so strongly that his fingers curled around the bundle of rosemary he was holding.

"Hyung—" 

With the touch of Sunwoo's soft fingertips against the back of Haknyeon's tense hand, the sound stopped. The air lost its heavy energy. Behind them, Younghoon let out a flat breath, and as Haknyeon looked up, the tenderness in Sunwoo's brown eyes had not lessened even one bit.

"Are you okay?"

"Yes," the witch mumbled through gritted teeth. "I'm… fine."

Haknyeon's fingers were still curled around the dried ingredients, and as eventually he let go, crumbs of the now broken plant stuck to his palm. Sunwoo's hand stuttered before he reached out to wipe away the leaf parts.

At the next opportunity, Haknyeon looked over his shoulder at Younghoon. A somewhat stunned expression had overtaken the formerly confident one as Younghoon returned his gaze with a shrug.

Okay, then.

First attempt – failed.

Haknyeon would not give up yet, though. He was going to get rid of that spell eventually, even if it took him months to do so. He was going to keep Sunwoo close by employing him at the potion shop, hoping that that would prevent him from accidentally revealing Haknyeon’s mishap, and in the meantime, he was going to search for a solution to put an end to this.

✨

Haknyeon tried everything . The next week, he took an afternoon off – much to Sunwoo's distaste – to dive into the pile of magical recipe books that he had gathered from several shelves. His research brought forth an array of different remedy potions, reversal brews, antidote spells, and Haknyeon realized that he had no other option but to go through every single one of these until one struck gold.

He was quite creative, Haknyeon had to give himself that.

The first antidote, a clear liquid consisting of the sap of basically half of all fresh flowers he had in his shop, Haknyeon put into a drink of lemonade that he handed Sunwoo.

Nothing.

Scribbled into the corner of a tattered book page about a recipe for another kind of antidote, he found a clue about a herb that, if dried a specific way, was very effective for dismantling failed potions. Said herb, which luckily Juyeon was able to get for him, Haknyeon baked into cookies. Fingers curled the corner of his table, he watched the human take a bite – then a second one – then another one.

Once again.

Nothing.

The third attempt took place in the backyard of the potion shop. Sunwoo was, after their rather unfortunate first encounter, trying to warm up to Carrot the bunny by sticking lettuce leaves through the grid of the enclosure. By now, Haknyeon knew why his pet had reacted to Sunwoo like that, or rather, Younghoon had told him – it was jealous, sensing Sunwoo's strong feelings for the witch, and saw him as, well, competition in a fight for Haknyeon's heart. 

Sunwoo knew nothing of that, of course, and with his endearing ingeniousness now tried his hardest to get the bunny to like him. He was so focused on the animal in front of him sniffing at his green offering that he didn't notice Haknyeon's palms directed at his back nor the energy flowing between the witch and him.

Nothing. Nothing but a small gust of wind blowing Sunwoo's curls into his face. Nothing.

Between each try, Haknyeon let a few days pass, and before he was aware of it, weeks had gone by ever since the potion switch-up. In that time, he came to two conclusions.

One – the effect of that failed love potion was incredibly durable.

Two – it wasn’t all that bad to have someone in the shop with him, even after closing hours.

Yes, Sunwoo’s devoted behavior could be tiresome. Yes, he was clingy and got jealous easily like a puppy with separation issues. Yes, he was annoyingly curious about anything that Haknyeon did. 

Nevertheless, it was nice to have someone around. Frankly, Haknyeon enjoyed the attention, the spontaneous little gifts – I saw these flowers growing at the train station, hyung, I thought you might like them , the caring words – you should go upstairs and rest, I can close up the shop. He enjoyed even the time together when they didn't have to spend it together – like on some Saturday afternoon, when the shop had closed over an hour ago, and Sunwoo was still there, with no intention of leaving soon. Haknyeon had just finished setting up a new batch of cooling potions for next week – perfect against the hot weather – when he joined the other, who he’d heard rummaging in the backroom.

He found Sunwoo sitting at the table, dark brows furrowed as he tapped relentlessly against one of many buttons of what Haknyeon knew was a laptop.

“What are you doing there?” Haknyeon asked, tilting his head as he stood in the doorframe.

“I was about to do my assignment…”

“Well, this thing doesn’t work here.” With a snap of his fingers, Haknyeon closed the strange device shut – Sunwoo had pulled his fingers away just in time – and with a wave of his hand, it flew back into Sunwoo’s backpack.

“Hey!” Sunwoo looked up with a glare, which softened into a heart-eyed smile when his eyes met Haknyeon’s face.

The witch sighed.

“Magic confuses technology, you know that…”

Sunwoo pouted. “‘kay.” He tilted his head, black curls swinging to the side. “Did you close up the shop?”

“Yep.” Haknyeon let himself down next to Sunwoo, uttering another sigh before letting his head rest against his arm. “All done for the day, at least concerning the shop.”

Sunwoo looked at him. Haknyeon glanced back hesitatingly, giving him a tentative smile.

“Do you maybe…”

“Yes?”

“Do you maybe wanna do something today? Go somewhere, the town, o-or the city, I could take you to the city and show you around, or—”

Haknyeon swallowed, hoping that Sunwoo wouldn’t realize. He avoided his eyes.

“I… I’m sorry, I can’t.”

Haknyeon briefly wondered when the disappointment showing on Sunwoo’s soft face had started to sting in his chest like this, like rose thorns clinging to his heart.

“Why not?” Sunwoo asked a moment later.

“I don't have time. I have to get ready, pack my things – I have to leave before 5 if I want to arrive before nightfall."

"Arrive… where?"

"There's this annual council in a town further East, all witches that own a magical store in the country have to attend. Terribly boring. It lasts the entire Sunday, starting in the early morning, so I'll have to spend the night there."

"So a business meeting, basically?"

Haknyeon nodded.

It was true. He had received the invitation a few weeks back, already dreading the letter's arrival. 

"Can I come with you?"

"Sorry, Sunwoo. No humans allowed."

Sunwoo's lips shifted into a pout, then a smile. "I'll be waiting for you to come home," he said. 

Haknyeon's heart ached at the other's words – or was it the expression on his face, which recently hadn't been as sallow and tired as the first time he had seen him? Next to the disappointment there was the kind of understanding that accompanied loyalty so naturally. 

Sunwoo started packing his things slowly, as if he didn't want to leave – which Haknyeon knew he didn't. He didn't want to leave Haknyeon, especially not with the knowledge that he wouldn't get to see him for longer than usual – he had come all the way from the city every day almost, neglecting his studies and pretty much the entire rest of his life, just to be here.

Why did Haknyeon have a lump in his throat when he looked at him? 

Guilt? Pity?

Whatever it was, the emotion continued to bother him even as he had long set off for the council. During the broom ride, after checking in to the inn that he'd stay for the night, Sunwoo's face kept showing up in his thoughts, like some pesky mosquito whizzing around his head that wouldn't leave him alone.

He followed him even into his dreams. The image of him standing behind the counter, smiling at customers and smiling even broader at Haknyeon. Of him glancing over his shoulder to look at Haknyeon when he heard him come into the room. Of his disheveled curls, black like the plumage of a raven, which danced around his face when he nodded, accompanied with the slow blinks caused by the sleepiness clinging to him despite the sleep potions that Haknyeon had instructed him to use every night.

At breakfast, Haknyeon wondered whether Sunwoo was still sleeping, in his bed in his room in one of those many, many apartment buildings in that big, big city. As he took his seat minutes before the first speech opening the council started, Haknyeon wondered if Sunwoo was working on his assignments, if he had found the self-discipline to go to the library and catch up on the classes he had missed. As his thoughts trailed off only few minutes into the first lecture, Haknyeon wondered if Sunwoo missed him.

As expected, the council went by awfully slowly. The schedule was tiresome, the discussed topics boring, and the other witches' attempts to do smalltalk the worst part of it all. Haknyeon didn't even particularly dislike any of them, they were quite nice, but after a few hours of being surrounded by people, his only wish was to somehow escape the situation.

Haknyeon arrived back home late on Sunday evening. It was dark already, but as he landed his broom at the intersection that led towards the road his store was located in, he saw a flickering light shining through the shop windows.

Though his legs were weary – believe it or not, broom riding was probably as exhausting as riding a horse – Haknyeon's pace quickened as he hurried towards the shop.

There were only three people that had a key to his store – Juyeon, Younghoon, and Sunwoo.

He had entrusted the latter with a key to the shop some days ago, in case Haknyeon was for some reason unable to open or close up the shop, though he hadn't expected him to come in when Haknyeon wasn't even there.

And yet…

He caught a glimpse of Sunwoo sitting at the table in the backroom, to which the door was wide open. He seemed to be brooding over a book, while Carrot sat on the table next to his arm, gnawing on a piece of lettuce. In the few seconds that Haknyeon stood there watching without the other's knowledge, Sunwoo reached out to the rabbit every few seconds to pet its fur, caress the spot between its long, floppy ears with his fingertips. Somehow, he had managed to make the jealous animal like him. Somehow, he managed to make everyone like him.

Haknyeon caught himself smiling, and pushed open the door. Sunwoo jumped up immediately as he detected the movement, coming towards him with a smile on his face, asking him about the council and the journey.

"What are you doing here?" Haknyeon asked, with genuine, pleased curiosity in his voice rather than suspicion or dislike.

"I told you I'd be waiting for you to come home," Sunwoo replied softly. "I was doing my math assignments – also, I was taking care of Carrot, making sure he had enough food and water."

Haknyeon looked at him, caught in a surprised trance before leaning his broom against the wall next to the door and putting away his bag.

"Have you had dinner yet?"

"Yeah! You?"

Haknyeon nodded.

Then, a question slipped from his lips that he would have never spoken out loud if it hadn't been for the weariness of coming home after a long day which had taken over his mind.

"Did you miss me?"

Sunwoo flushed hot red, plumb lips parting as his eyes flickered all over the place before gathering the courage to meet Haknyeon's eyes.

"A-a lot, yeah" he admitted, muttering. "I always miss you when you're not around, hyung. I like being around you."

Then, once again, Haknyeon said something that he normally wouldn't have.

"I like being around you too, Sunwoo."

The blush on Sunwoo's cheeks strengthened, and he quickly muttered some excuse to hurry back to his math assignment, tripping over the wooden plank of the doorstep leading to the back room.

As Haknyeon followed him, a thought occurred to him.

What if… what if more than enjoying that he wasn't alone so much anymore, he maybe… liked being with Sunwoo? Specifically Sunwoo?

He had been around people for the entire day and only wished to come home, and yet when he had seen Sunwoo rush towards him just now, his first reaction had been to smile back instead of wishing he wasn't there.

Had he, in the last weeks of being around him so often, actually taken a liking to the human, when really the reason for why he was here was actually finding a way to get rid of him? 

"Y-you should—"

"—leave, I know." Sunwoo's lips twitched into a smile before he lowered his head, fingers scrambling to pick up his belongings spread out on the table. "Do you maybe have some spare change? I'd pay you back on Monday—"

"Why?" Haknyeon asked, confused.

"The last train left an hour ago. I have to take a cab, and I—" He cleared his throat, scratching the back of his head before he continued, with his voice quieter than before, "I can't afford a cab ride all the way home."

Haknyeon's head whipped around to look at the clock. He hadn't realized how late it was. He already made the notion to go over to the cash register and hand Sunwoo however much he'd need for that cab ride, when he changed his mind.

"Stay."

"What?"

"Stay the night." Haknyeon gestured towards the spiral staircase leading up to his apartment. "You'd come in tomorrow morning anyway. Just stay, sleep here." 

"… are you serious?" Sunwoo whispered almost reverently, eyes wider than ever.

Haknyeon clicked his tongue, then nodded. "Of course."

From the moment that the door to Haknyeon's apartment closed behind them, Sunwoo was uncharacteristically shy. In the last weeks, they had warmed up to each other enough that Sunwoo's potion-induced infatuation didn't render him speechless anymore every time Haknyeon stepped closer – now, Haknyeon's invitation has undone all that progress, and Sunwoo was a flustered mess.

Had he gone too far? Haknyeon wondered.

Maybe he shouldn't have said that, he should have just given him the money for the cab ride, not get his hopes up that Haknyeon returned his feelings – because he didn't!! 

"So… you can sleep on the couch. I'll lend you clothes of mine. Take whatever you need in the bathroom."

The couch was located in the middle of the living room, facing a small chimney, which wasn't in use much in the warmer months. With a wave of the hand, Haknyeon made pillows and blankets fly onto the pale-blue cushions of the sofa.

Sunwoo stood next to him, hands clasped together behind his back, nervous eyes flickering back and forth between the door leading to the rest of the apartment, the couch and Haknyeon's floating bed.

Through one of the ceiling windows, the moon shone onto the two of them, illuminating the cozy room in a blue light, tinting everything in a magical hue. 

"Here."

Sunwoo startled slightly as air of  nightgown from Haknyeon’s closet came flying towards him, draping itself around his arm.

“Oh—”

The slightly incredulous look on his face didn’t go past Haknyeon, who laughed. “This is what witches wear, Sunwoo.” He tugged at his own clothes, the linen blouse and sturdy pants.

“It’s like you’re stuck in time,” Sunwoo mumbled.

“We are, somewhat,” Haknyeon replied.

Sunwoo hurried into the bathroom, to get ready, he said, and to change his clothes. When he returned, Haknyeon had also changed, and sat cross-legged on his mattress. Besides the moonlight, the room was lit by a kerosene lamp standing by the nightstand next to the floating mattress. One of the thin blankets swung dangerously close next to the lamp, though Haknyeon knew that there was no danger of it lighting on fire.

Sunwoo looked… adorable?

Like a little dark-haired ghost he stood there in the door step – though Haknyeon knew very well that he wasn’t little, especially not compared to himself. The piece of clothing was too small for him, ending at his mid-thighs, although it was quite wide around the hips.

He seemed to have washed his face, some of his black curls hanging into his face seemed moist, sticking to his temples. He looked very tired. Haknyeon tried to swallow down the feeling of pity – only that it wasn’t pity… whatever the feeling was, Haknyeon ignored it as he silently gestured towards the sofa that he had prepared into a make-shift bed.

Sunwoo had barely sat down, ogling curiously at the ivy originating from a large pot standing in the corner growing up the wall above the chimney, when his head whipped up again – “I forgot the sleep potion! I need it… Can I take one from downstairs?”

“Oh.” Haknyeon’s voice sounded as tired as he felt – the exhausting day had caught up to him eventually, and he was seconds away from letting himself fall against the big pillow next to him. “Of course. Take whatever you need.”

With no other sounds filling the silence around Haknyeon, he was able to follow the sound of Sunwoo’s bare soles against the old wooden floor all the way to the shop, where he then heard the faint clinking of bottles. A moment later, he was back upstairs again. His eyes shone in the darkness, like those of cats almost, as he reappeared and quickly made his way through the room, towards the sofa.

“I drank it. Thank you, hyung.”

“Of course,” Haknyeon muttered.

He hadn’t slept in the same room as someone in probably years. Haknyeon wasn’t used to it, to hear someone else’s breathing, the rustling of sheets that weren’t his own, to know that someone else heard his breathing and tossing and turning on the mattress. To his relief, though, Sunwoo fell asleep within minutes – thanks to the sleeping potions, to which Haknyeon had given an extra amount of care while preparing in the last few weeks.

Haknyeon, who, despite his sleepiness, still lay awake, couldn’t help but turn his head to the side and catch a glimpse of the sleeping human. Sunwoo’s chest was rising slowly and steadily, his plush lips parted. There was a small, high-pitched sound whenever he breathed out, as if his nose was slightly stuffed. It was cute. Haknyeon had a frown on his forehead as he shifted to the side even more, pulling one of the pillows to his chest and tucking an arm under the side of his face while his eyes stayed on Sunwoo.

He looked peaceful in his sleep, so calm and quiet and so vulnerable.

Vulnerable…

When a human or any kind of magical being alike, was sleeping, their mind was at its most vulnerable state. Unguarded, easy to infiltrate and manipulate.

That was exactly why using any sort of spell against or on someone else was strictly forbidden, even more so than doing it behind someone's back.

Haknyeon had his lips pressed together into a fine line as he carefully slid out of bed, and his feet touched the wooden floor.

He crossed the distance between the mattress and the couch swiftly, then halted as he stood in front of Sunwoo, towering over the sleeping boy.

He felt a lump in his throat.

Another try couldn't hurt, right? He'd read a lot about reversal spells in the last months, and by now he’d consider himself confident enough in his ability to successfully perform one.

Maybe, just maybe, the current state of Sunwoo’s mind was vulnerable enough for the spell to breach its walls and reach the potion effect that had settled so deep, much deeper than a regular one would have.

Sunwoo stirred in his sleep. He was lying on his back now, head slightly fallen to the side, cheek squished against the pillow. Haknyeon’s hands were shaking as he reached out to hover his palms above the other’s torso. Another deep breath, puffing out his cheeks, then the witch channeled the magic energy in his body to concentrate in his hands. Hot and cold it flowed through his veins, prickling right under his skin as he grit his teeth together for his breath to stop shaking.

He held his breath, pressing his lips together as pink-rosy wafts of mist started rising from Sunwoo’s chest.

The higher that those reached, the more Haknyeon could feel it. The warmth tinting his cheeks hot and engulfing his thoughts, a tingling akin to the excitedly nervous flapping of butterfly wings.

A glimpse of what the potion felt like for Sunwoo, a glimpse of what he experienced whenever his eyes fell onto Haknyeon.

After an almost trance-like moment, something stirred inside of Haknyeon and he drew in a sharp gasp, almost stumbling as he shied away from the couch, a jerky hand movement showing the attempt to shoo away those rosy wafts, which seemed to be sucked back into Sunwoo’s chest as soon as Haknyeon broke his focus.

With the rising fog representing Sunwoo’s emotions, the boy’s chest had risen higher and higher, as if he was taking a deep breath and even more, as if his torso was almost lifting off the blanket. With the spell stopping so abruptly, Sunwoo’s chest fell back down, though other than slight squirming and a faint sound escaping his lips, he didn’t seem to have noticed anything in his potion-induced sleep.

Yet another attempt failed – even at the mind’s most vulnerable state, no result.

Haknyeon blinked. Something heavy clung to his, so he brought  hand up to his eye – and only then he became aware of the tears spilling from his eyes.

He was crying?

Why was he crying?

Haknyeon swallowed, starting to harsly wipe away the unwanted tears. He couldn’t look at Sunwoo any longer. Something in his chest got so heavy when he had his eyes on him for more than just a few seconds. He couldn’t bear it.

Haknyeon crawled back onto his mattress, which swayed gently below him as he rolled to the side facing the wall, refusing to turn around again even just once.

Though the tears had stopped streaming down his face quite soon, the lump in his throat wouldn’t go away. What was it that was causing all this, he wondered – was it really the guilt and pity from bringing Sunwoo in such a situation? Was it the fear of being found out and exposed for his mistake, which would mean he’d have to own up to the consequences? Was it simply the guilty conscience of doing something illegal, which was applying a spell – even if he hadn’t been successful – on a sleeping human? 

Or was it something else? What if it had been the sight of Sunwoo’s feelings for him leaving his body that had shaken him to the core in this way? What if he had gotten used to being liked, and hesitance to let it go had built up inside of him?

The next day, Haknyeon was awoken by the smell of breakfast and the sound of sizzling oil and clanking cutlery. Haknyeon sat up slowly, a groan leaving his lips as he rubbed his eyes, blinking into the bright room. The couch was empty. The blanket that had covered Sunwoo’s sleeping body was pushed back to the arm rest.

“Hyung?”

Sunwoo’s voice resounded from the kitchen shortly after Haknyeon had stood up and crossed the creaking floor of the living room.

“Mh, it’s me.” Haknyeon yawned, one eyebrow raised as he peeked into the kitchen. “You’re cooking breakfast?”

Sunwoo stood in front of the stove. He had fished out an apron from somewhere and had just semi-successfully flipped an omelet when Haknyeon approached almost hesitatingly.

“Did you sleep well?”

Sunwoo nodded, keeping his eyes on the frying pan until he had safely set it down onto a coaster nearby and could give Haknyeon his full attention. As soon as their eyes met, Haknyeon was reminded of what had happened the night before. The rosy mist, the warmth that he had felt – was Sunwoo feeling that same emotion right now?

“It’s late already, hyung. You should open the shop soon.”

“Oh, I’m not opening until later this afternoon,” Haknyeon responded, blinking quickly as he averted his eyes from Sunwoo. “After breakfast, I have to gather ingredients from a meadow nearby – fresh ones, flowers and such, the kinds that Juyeon can’t deliver. It’ll take a few hours.”

“Can I come with you?”

Gathering ingredients in the meadow behind the town had been an activity that Haknyeon had always done alone. Nobody had ever come with him, and he had spent the hours humming to himself, lost deep in his own thoughts as he skimmed the rich ground for flowers and herbs.

Haknyeon looked back at Sunwoo, who had his head cocked to the side, the slightly stained apron hanging from his neck and a cooking spoon in one hand. 

“… s-sure.”

Leading Sunwoo to the meadow was almost like letting him into his heart.

This was, though not even that hidden from the rest of the town, his place.

The flowers that bloomed here smelled so familiar that Haknyeon’s heart ached whenever he stepped foot into the grass that tickled his shins so lightly. The birds that lived in the trees bordering onto the glade knew him and came flying, greeting the witch and the human with their ever-pleasant chirping. 

He didn’t come here often, he never found the time to, and yet it was like a getaway.

Somehow, Sunwoo seemed to know. Haknyeon hadn’t mentioned even a word about how special this place was to him, and yet Sunwoo seemed to know – he had to, judging by how gentle he treated every single plant, how in awe he seemed as his eyes wandered over the butterflies coming to welcome them.

Knowing what he needed by heart, Haknyeon handed Sunwoo the list of ingredients, and for a while they just worked side by side, wandering through the meadow with their eyes mainly kept on the ground.

When his hours here had usually been spent in silence, the early summer air was now filled with lighthearted chatter – not the smalltalk kind of chatter but the kind of conversation that had started to spark so naturally between the two of them over the last weeks.

It was not only easy to talk with Sunwoo, it was fun. Sunwoo told him about his classes, his roommates, his family, and Haknyeon let him in on stories about his life as well. Talking about the apprenticeship before he started his own shop, about his friends, about his mother and his grandparents, anything else that came to his mind.

Like this, three hours passed in a heartbeat. Haknyeon realized that in Sunwoo’s company, it took him much longer to gather all the ingredients, which Haknyeon didn’t mind – at all, even.

About half the ingredients on the list had been crossed off already when they reached one end of the meadow, where Sunwoo, who had let his eyes wander over his surroundings, suddenly stopped in his tracks.

“Is that a swing?”

Haknyeon followed Sunwoo’s gaze. A smile broadened on his lips as he saw the simple swing, consisting of simply a rope and a frail-looking wooden plank, hanging down from a sturdy oak tree a bit further away from the other trees. It stood somewhat on a border between the meadow and a field used by a farmer living further down the unpaved road that they had followed to reach the meadow.

Before Haknyeon could react, Sunwoo took his hand and pulled him towards the tree.

“I haven’t been on a swing in forever —” 

Haknyeon almost keeled over from laughing as Sunwoo climbed onto the swing too excitedly and almost caught his foot caught on the rope.

“Careful,” he giggled, jogging closer towards the swing, “careful—” 

Something bloomed inside of Haknyeon’s soul as he watched Sunwoo sway back and forth on the swing. He did it sitting down for a bit, leaning far back and kicking his legs up to gain motion, before he pulled himself onto his feet, thin sneaker soles steady on the surprisingly sturdy oak plank, hands curled around the tattered rope. His hair moved with the wind and his movements, the curls that he had tucked behind his ears while bending down to pick the needed flowers broke loose to frame his face.

Looking up at him, illuminated by the midday sun from high above, Haknyeon noticed for the first time that Sunwoo had changed a bit since they had first met. The eyebags had disappeared, the sallow complexion had yielded a much healthier, warmer skin tone. He looked happy, he looked content, and more than anything, he looked mesmerizing.

Haknyeon had spent most of his life in the belief that magic was what made life special, always wondering how regular humans got by without that beautiful spark of magic in their life, the wonder that came with it, only to now find all that in the eyes of a human. A human , a regular boy, as ordinary as everyone in that big, gray city that Sunwoo's train to the small town came from every morning. Suddenly, the witch found more magic in Sunwoo's eyes than in the entirety of his own world.

“Hyung!”

Sunwoo’s voice pulled Haknyeon back to reality. He felt dizzy, blinking rapidly as Sunwoo hopped off the swing which he had brought to a stop.

“H-hm?”

“Your turn,” he grinned, “I’ll push you.”

Haknyeon let the other nudge him onto the swing and place his hands to the rope before he positioned himself behind his back. Sunwoo’s hands were warm against his back as they brushed against his shoulder blades and then settled at the small of his back.

“Ready?”

Haknyeon tightened his fists around the rope to his sides and nodded, eyes glancing over his shoulder at Sunwoo once more before the other pushed him forward, bringing the swing back into motion.

Haknyeon sped up quite quickly, both because of Sunwoo’s gentle yet forceful help and his own body swaying back and forth in sync with the swing. The light breeze seemed to assist as well, bringing him far up into the sky. He felt as light as he hadn’t in a long time. He felt free from everything, having temporarily forgotten about why they had come here in the first place, or that they should continue with searching for the rest of the ingredients soon.

It was just him and the summer air and the high-up sun and Sunwoo down on the ground, cheering him on with shouts and clapping.

“Help me slow it down—” Haknyeon eventually pleaded in between bright laughter, stifling the swing’s continuous movement until it was slow enough for Sunwoo to be able to step in front of the swing and safely reach for the ropes.

Haknyeon thanked him with a giggly gasp, a little lightheaded from the fast movements, and was about to stand up when he realized that Sunwoo still lingered in front of him, fingers still curled around the ropes, right above Haknyeon’s hands.

Haknyeon tilted his head back to look at him. 

Coal-black strands of hair shielded his face partly from the light, casting a faint shadow over his features – his parted lips, his wide eyes, his rosy cheeks. Haknyeon tried to avoid eye contact with him, knowing what emotion he’d find reflected in them, and worried that he’d get himself caught in their maze. Yet he didn’t move away as Sunwoo’s hands stuttered down the rope, clasping over his own, warm and soft, neither did he flinch as Sunwoo bent down and pressed his lips against his.

Soft and gentle, slow but confident.

The kiss lasted for a second perhaps, two at most, before Haknyeon truly realized what was happening and jumped up, shoving Sunwoo away.

Sunwoo stumbled backwards, eyes even wider than before, about to stutter something – an apology? – before Haknyeon blurted out, “I–I have to open the shop—”

“But the rest of the ingredients—”

“I won’t need them now,” he stammered, before he picked up the wicker basket with flower heads and blossoms that he had set down earlier, and hurried off the meadow.

✨

Though it was perhaps not the best solution, Haknyeon blocked out what had happened at the meadow completely. He did not think about it, much less addressed it. He lived the next few days, which turned into over a week, pretending that nothing had ever happened.

Between Sunwoo and him, the incident lingered unsolved, though it didn’t stop either of them from keeping up the routine that had built up in the last months – Sunwoo coming in regularly to help him, their conversations over lunch, the time spent together in the small back garden. Sunwoo was too in love to hold anything that Haknyeon did, and if that was to shy away from his kiss, and Haknyeon didn’t blame Sunwoo for it either.

Everything was like it was before, and for a while, Haknyeon thought himself safe – safe from what, he wasn’t quite sure.

That was at least until one afternoon, when Sunwoo came into the shop with a handful of letters in his hand, which he placed onto the counter.

“Mail for you, hyung,” he announced cheerfully, before disappearing in the backroom. Haknyeon went through the letters one by one – new orders, ads, all the usual. With the exception of one pale-red letter.

Hakyneon opened it with a frown on his forehead, hooking his finger into the paper to rip it open. The letter that awaited him was short and simple.

Ju Haknyeon,

There have been concerned reports about your magical potion shop being involved in the peculiar change of mind of a human citizen, with good reason to believe that your sold goods are responsible for said change. 

A violation of the laws concerning the protection of humans from illicit use of magic can and will lead to the annulation of your retail license and the closing of your shop by the end of this month.

This accusation may be refuted if proven otherwise .  

Before Haknyeon had even finished reading through the letter, he had sunk onto the stool behind the counter, legs suddenly too weak to carry the weight of his body.

The thin paper slid between his shaky fingers, while the witch found himself in the exact situation that he had dreaded when he had first realized that he had messed up the potion.

Annulation of retail license. Closing of your shop.

“Hyung? Hyung, what’s wrong?” Sunwoo had reappeared, concern showing on his face as he reached out for Haknyeon’s arm. “You’re so pale – hyung , you’re shaking—”

He reached for the letter, though Haknyeon stopped him halfway. Under no circumstances did he want Sunwoo to read the first sentence of that letter.

“What happened ?”

“They want to close my shop. They w-want to take away my license, they want to—”

“They? Who?”

“The government, I—” A realization hit him so hard it took his breath away. He couldn’t let that happen.

He had to do something. 

But what?

What could he possibly do?

Haknyeon felt sick as he stood up onto wobbly feet, though he assured Sunwoo swiftly that he was alright.

“Can you, um, can you send a letter to Younghoon asking him to stop by this afternoon? I… need his advice.”

As always, Younghoon arrived swiftly, once again closing his clinic early to come to aid his best friend.

Somehow, Haknyeon managed to keep Sunwoo busy downstairs before he led Younghoon into his apartment, under the pretense of getting him a cup of lemonade – as soon as the heavy main door at the upper end of the spiral staircase closed behind the two, though, Haknyeon downright stumbled into Younghoon’s arms, clinging to his arm, pleading eyes looking up at the other, now quite perplexed, witch.

“Hyung, I’m in trouble.”

There was not much explanation needed. The letter said it all. Younghoon’s expression changed from surprised to concerned almost instantly, and when he looked back at Haknyeon, his brows were furrowed.

“What do I do?” Haknyeon breathed. “This shop is my life, I can’t let them close it.”

“What do you do? Get help, Haknyeon,” Younghoon responded. “Real help, not from me, from someone who actually knows what to do, who is capable of fixing this!”

“But who…”

The two witches shrugged in unison. They had sat down at the dinner table. While they were deep in thought, Carrot the bunny hopped into Haknyeon’s lap – perhaps sensing its owner’s distress?

It didn’t take long until Younghoon spoke up again. “Why don’t you pay our old teacher a visit? She’ll know what to do.”

Haknyeon returned his look with hesitance. Younghoon continued swiftly, “if there is one person you can confide in without the risk of being reported, it is her.”

The woman that Younghoon was talking about was their former mentor. An old witch whose name was unknown, a mysterious and powerful woman who chose to live in reclusion in a tower in the country’s north yet accepted students into her castle-like refuge.

Younghoon looked at Haknyeon with stern determination in his light, almost glowing eyes – it hurt a bit to look him into the eyes, other than for example Sunwoo, in whose eyes Haknyeon found a bottomless ocean of everything sweet in the world drawing him in deeper and deeper.

“You have to consult her!”

“But how could she prevent this?” Haknyeon asked, gesturing towards the letter lying on the table between them.

Younghoon frowned, hesitating to answer as if he wasn’t sure if Haknyeon was being serious — “how could she… Haknyeon, obviously she can reverse the potion’s effect! It says it right here, this accusation may be refuted if proven otherwise. Ask her to remove the spell from Sunwoo’s heart, and things go back to normal, how they’re supposed to be.”

Remove the spell.

Reverse the potion’s effect.

Refuted if proven otherwise.

How things were supposed to be.

Back to normal.

“—no,” Haknyeon gasped out, only a breath almost as the word slipped from his lips, lingering in the room with webs of fear clinging to it.

“No?” Younghoon repeated.

Haknyeon blushed. “N-no, I mean… I just… I don’t want to lo–” 

He lapsed into silence before finishing the sentence, realizing that he had spoken rashly, without thinking, blurting out the first thing that his mind had told him.

“You don’t want to what ?” Younghoon asked again, pressing though not pushy. 

Haknyeon hesitated for a second.

“Lose him.”

“Sunwoo?”

Haknyeon’s nod was pathetically small, frail, he noticed how his shoulders were hanging and how he was fiddling with the fringe of the table cloth, eyes restless, heart hanging somewhere deep in the pit of his stomach, heavy as if weights like those he used to measure larger ingredients pulled it down.

“Haknyeon…”

“It… it was nice to not be alone all the time, okay?” Haknyeon stammered before Younghoon, whose expression had completely changed yet again, could continue. “It was just nice to have someone around, it’s not like—”

“Not like you fell in love with him?”

If he had been blushing before, Haknyeon was now bright red. His head felt hot, his chest so heavy, he could feel magic flowing in powerful streams beneath his skin – a feeling similar to the outbursts of energy that had accompanied strong emotions when he’d been younger and still unable to completely control his abilities.

“I’m not,” Haknyeon spluttered, “that’s ridiculous!”

“Then there will be no problem in removing the spell?” Younghoon asked, head tilted, eyes piercing through Haknyeon’s heart, which now felt so vulnerable that he wanted to shield it somehow. “Employ someone else if you feel lonely. Some apprentice with magical abilities, someone who has knowledge about potions. You’ll find someone more skilled and fit for the job than a human.”

“It’s not about that—” Haknyeon protested.

“What is it about then? Enlighten me.”

“Y-you wouldn’t understand.”

“You like him.”

“I don’t !”

“Then why are you scared of losing him?”

“Because…” The kick of adrenaline that Younghoon’s words had induced into Haknyeon drained as quickly as it had come, leaving an ebb tide where there had been a sea before, revealing what the water had hidden. A spiraling feeling made Haknyeon sink into his chair, lowering his hands onto his lap. 

“Because?”

“Because…”

Haknyeon was unable to finish his sentence. His mind was racing suddenly, rethinking everything he did, everything that crossed his mind in the last couple of weeks, anything that had happened. His whizzing thoughts came to a sudden stop when they reached the memory of what had happened on the swing by the meadow.

The kiss. Lips brushing against each other, the look in Sunwoo’s maze-like eyes, the tingling of his hands where skin had touched skin.

Oh.

Suddenly, it felt hard to breathe.

Oh .

What if Younghoon’s words carried truth with them?

What if his intuition was, as so often, right? 

What if he had gotten it all wrong? What if the pity and the guilt when he looked at Sunwoo weren’t pity and guilt anymore? What if the enjoyment he found in spending time with Sunwoo was more than he had assumed?

Had he, by letting him in, bit by bit, more and more, into his shop and his apartment, his thoughts and memories, his meadow, let Sunwoo into his heart as well?

Had the affection that he had started to feel for the human taken hold, boring its way so deep that it had transformed into something stronger, wrapping itself around his heart and bearing thorns whose removal would tear his heart apart?

What other explanation was there to why the thought of reversing the spell, which had originally been his main goal, made him feel sick and dizzy, why it made his heart hurt, physically hurt .

Haknyeon didn’t realize that he was clutching at the fabric of his linen blouse at his chest where his heart was until his knuckles hurt.

“I can’t—”

“You have to. Your future depends on this.” Though Younghoon’s words might have sounded harsh, Haknyeon knew that he only meant best for him – the compassion in his voice showed clearly, though it was of only little help.

“But everything we have,” Haknyeon started again, pausing as he felt his bottom lip starting to tremble, “w-we have something, it’ll all be…”

“It was never real. You know that. You knew that from the start, you wanted to put an end to this from the very beginning. His feelings are an illusion.”

The brotherly-concerned look in Younghoon’s eyes grew almost unbearable. Haknyeon looked at the ceiling, blinking quickly.

“I know that,” he forced out between gritted teeth.

“You should set off as soon as possible,” Younghoon muttered. “It’s still early, you’ll be there by nightfall if you leave now.”

“But… but hyung,” Haknyeon whispered.

“Haknyeon, my friend…” Younghoon slowly rose from his chair. “I know I sound harsh but… it’s just wrong. You know that. These feelings were forced upon Sunwoo without his will, it is only right to get rid of them, anything else would be selfish.”

Younghoon was right. It was wrong. 

He had to put an end to this.

After Younghoon left – not without giving him more words of encouragement and a tight, comforting hug – Haknyeon didn’t dare to go downstairs for quite a while. 

He was scared. Scared that now that the realization had hit him, the true nature to his feelings towards the other, he wouldn’t last more than a second when confronted with Sunwoo before he’d break apart.

He tended to packing instead, tossing whatever he thought they could need on this journey, which would last half a day at most, into the closest bag.

Mainly two thoughts kept him focused – how unjust the situation was towards unsuspecting, innocent, unknowing Sunwoo, and how his livelihood and dream career was on the line.

“What are you doing there?”

Sunwoo’s voice made Haknyeon whirl around on his heels. 

He stood in the doorframe, in his monochrome shorts and hoodie, head tilted to the side in curiosity. 

“Are you going somewhere? What did you and Younghoon talk about?” He stepped closer. “Are you okay?”

“S-sunwoo.” Haknyeon mustered a smile and tried to not think about how pretty Sunwoo looked. “W-would you like to go on a little trip with me?”

It was easy to convince Sunwoo that Haknyeon's old teacher could give him advice on how to avert the crisis of which Sunwoo only knew half of the story.

The journey north was easy – just follow the river that led past the town until its origin in the mountains, from where you could see the witch’s tower already. As Sunwoo didn't have any magical abilities and therefore couldn't use a broom himself, Haknyeon had to give him a ride.

“Hold on tight, okay? Or you might fall off.”

Before he even finished the sentence, Sunwoo wound his arms around him tightly. He was warm, soft, and Haknyeon had probably never felt more comfortable with someone clinging to his back.

“Don’t fly too high up, okay?” Sunwoo muttered against his back as their feet had barely lifted off the ground, “it’s scary…”

It was scary, yeah.

Not the broom ride – Haknyeon had first flown on one before he had been able to read. The journey was scary. The distance soaring by was what was so terrifying, bringing them further and further away from the potion shop, and closer and closer to the northern mountains. Fields flew by, they passed small towns and farms and lakes. Time passing by, making the sun go down before Haknyeon even knew it, was so, so scary.

"Is it still a long way to go? It's late, hung…" 

Sunwoo's words were muffled against Haknyeon's shoulder. As he glanced over at him, the witch found their faces closer than he had thought, and shied back so quickly he lost balance over the broom for a second.

“Are you tired?” he asked.

“Mh,” Sunwoo hummed, tightening his arms around Haknyeon’s waist to inch closer and tuck his chin over Haknyeon’s shoulder. “Kinda, yeah…”

Haknyeon nodded in response, ignoring the eruption of butterflies that flared up in the pit of his stomach with every soft breath of Sunwoo’s against his cheek, every movement of Sunwoo snuggling closer.

He glanced down. The landscape was vaguely familiar to him – he hadn't been to the mountains in years – every now and then he came about a cluster of trees that he recognized, a forking road that he remembered.

“It's not much further," Haknyeon concluded then. "Hold on for a little longer, hm?"

It took about another hour. Beneath them, the hills became rockier, grew higher, rising from the ground more and more until they reached almost their altitude. On some of the mountain tops, there was snow even during the heights of summer. The tower that they were heading for, however, was located in a wooded valley between two high rising cliffs.

A reclusive place, almost impossible to reach by foot or car, or any other non-magical way or transportation.

They could see its crown, a high, slanted roof that reminded of the tip of a pointed head, from far away – easily distinguishable from its surroundings, as it was, even in the darkness that engulfed them now. The tower seemed somehow both out of place and like it had always been here – moss covered its outside and birds nested in the rain gutter leading around the base of the funky roof, yet there was no garden around the building, no sign of someone actually living in this part of the glade, no road leading here, nothing.

“Only your former teacher lives here?”

“Mh, well – she has her servants, but I don’t know if those count. Students live here as well, but those are on holidays currently.”

Sunwoo hummed in surprise, though remained silent, perhaps in awe, as they got closer and closer to the high-rising building and Haknyeon slowly started to lower their altitude. He remembered the patch of grass to the tower’s left – he had landed his broom there many times during his time as a student.

“Stick with me from now on,” Haknyeon muttered as they landed. “You’re probably the only human around here, which makes you vulnerable, and you’ve never been here either. I don’t want you to get lost.”

Sunwoo looked a little surprised, then nodded. 

The sun had gone down long ago, and with neither houses nor streetlights around obviously, the only light came from a kerosene lamp next to the heavy entrance door of the tower. Far up, there were narrow windows laid into the thick stone walls. Haknyeon spotted the faint flickering of candles through some of the milky glass.

Before Haknyeon knocked at the door, holding the broom in one hand, he reached for Sunwoo’s wrist with the other. Sunwoo visibly startled at the touch of Haknyeon’s fingers lightly curling around his skin, then sliding down over his palm to intertwine their fingers, though it took him only a second before he regained his senses and lightly squeezed Haknyeon’s hand in response.

Three , Haknyeon counted in his head, knuckles hovering in front of the door, two, one . 

At the other side of the wood, the knock echoed through what Haknyeon knew was a small hall that served as a sort of lobby. 

The door opened almost immediately, though very slowly. Haknyeon waited until it had opened far enough until he stepped in, gently pulling Sunwoo along.

“It is late.”

At first, the croaky, somewhat lofty voice seemed to come out of nowhere. The lobby, a large, mostly unfurnished base of a stairwell, with a cobbled circular staircase spiraling up the high walls, was empty – seemed empty. Only on second glance, they spotted an owl sitting on the winded railing. A gigantic bird, an eagle owl, with bright orange eyes and puffed-up plumage.

Then, with the next sentence – “it has been years since you’ve stepped foot in here, Ju Haknyeon” – the owl’s beak matched the spoken words. Next to Haknyeon, who was unbothered by the strange observation, Sunwoo gasped out loud.

“The owl— the owl t-talks ?” he stuttered out, head whipping over to Haknyeon before they fell back onto the owl.

“What,” the owl responded, “have you never seen a speaking owl, boy?”

“D-don’t mind him,” Haknyeon chimed in, giving the bird a pleading look as he stepped in front of Sunwoo, somewhat shielding him from the animal, “he is, um, he’s—”

“Human. I can tell. You bring a human here? Why?”

“I have my reasons,” Haknyeon responded between gritted teeth, “which I’d rather like to discuss with—”

“The mistress is not at home. She likely will not return until the early morning hours.”

“I need to speak to her, though.”

“Feel free to do so once she is back. Until then, wait. You can sleep in one of the empty student rooms for the night if you prefer a bed to the forest ground. Choose any room as you please.”

Haknyeon scoffed. Then, after a brief moment of hesitance, he nodded, and begrudgingly obliged.

On the way to the student rooms, Sunwoo kept so close to Haknyeon he almost tripped over his feet as he followed him up the winded stairs, footsteps echoing down the floor levels the higher they got. There were many doors lining the stone stairs, Haknyeon knew that behind those there were not only bedrooms for the students, but also kitchens, storage rooms, classrooms, and countless more rooms used for various purposes. 

"So the servants you mentioned are animals ? And they talk ?" he whispered under his breath, though his voice resounded and bounced back the thick walls nevertheless.

"Yeah… it's a spell. Owls are very intelligent, you just need to give them a voice that we can understand. There are a couple more, about a dozen in total, this one always watches over the entrance."

"And why is she not here? Your teacher? It's the middle of the night."

"She doesn't sleep – never has. I don't know why or how, but she uses the nighttime to gather ingredients. The ingredients that she needs are better to find in the dark than the type that I need for my potions." 

"Why?" 

Haknyeon shrugged. "It's easier to not be seen at night, I guess."

Haknyeon headed for a very specific room, the one with a chipped doorknob. 

Nostalgia hit him the moment he pushed open the door.

The room itself was very simple – a wardrobe, a single bed, a desk and a large bookshelf. The walls were bricks, though a candle holder on the uneven window sill made the room look not as cold despite the stone.

Sunwoo stepped past him. Neither of them had let go of the other’s hand yet. 

"This place is weird."

With his anime print t-shirt and mid-thigh shorts, Sunwoo looked more out of place than he ever had even in Haknyeon's potion shop.

"This is like Hogwarts in real life."

"It's like what ?"

Sunwoo sighed, hiding a smile. "Nevermind. So this is usually someone’s bedroom?"

“It used to be mine,” Haknyeon said.

“Really?”

“Mh.”

Haknyeon gave him a smile and nodded. “Yep. All mine, for three years. I studied for my finals at that desk, did my homework here, slept on that bed…”

“For three years? Wow.” Sunwoo stood in the middle of the room, inspecting every strange detail he noticed. The quill and ink by the desk, the ivy leaves half covering the already small window. Small phials rowed up on one of the shelves, behind which stood heavy, old books.

Haknyeon followed his eyes, pointing out aspects of the room that he added – the remains of stickers on the shelf, some of the books that he had borrowed and never given back…

Eventually, Haknyeon sat down on the bed. Sunwoo followed swiftly, eyes still wandering through the room. As he stifled a yawn, Haknyeon suggested that they should probably go to sleep swiftly. 

Haknyeon agreed with a nod.

The bed was just big enough for the two of them, and by now, neither of them minded having to snuggle a little closer to have enough space to sleep comfortably – after all, Haknyeon could have easily asked if they could occupy two rooms, which most likely wouldn’t have been a problem. Yet he had stayed quiet.

Of course, Sunwoo didn't mind either – the only reaction to the one bed and their proximity was the blush on his cheeks and the hazy eyes. 

Despite neither of them minding sharing a bed, it was almost a little awkward at first. 

Haknyeon blamed it on his newly discovered crush. How could he ignore how pretty Sunwoo was next to him, in the short nightgown revealing his legs and thighs, how could he not stare at how his warm eyes reflected the candle light that was illuminating the room barely enough? How was he supposed to just roll around and go to sleep – especially when Sunwoo slowly lowered his head to rest against Haknyeon’s shoulder.

They sat there for a while, and Haknyeon blamed the silence on their weariness when really, he was silent because immediately as he had set foot into the tower, a wistfulness had clasped his heart.

“I’m glad you’re here with me,” he mumbled. “Really, so glad.”

Sunwoo hummed in response. 

“In the last few weeks, you’ve… you’ve become very important to me.” Haknyeon felt a lump in his throat, wondering if his words came too sudden to the other. He didn’t look at Sunwoo, not sure if he could have gotten another word out if he found himself caught in his eyes again. He kept his gaze strictly fixated at the wall opposite from them. “I think I never realized how lonely I really had been before you came along. It’s… it’s strange. I’m sorry for being mean to you at first… it was complicated. Now, though… it’s still complicated, but I think I really…” He broke off mid-sentence.

“Nevermind. D-did you bring a sleep potion? Is it in your backpa—”

Another sentence went unfinished as Haknyeon glanced to the side, expecting Sunwoo to look up at him and instead seeing his face relaxed, his eyes closed, his chest falling and rising slowly. 

Oh?

He had fallen asleep?

Without needing a sleeping potion?

Haknyeon shifted his weight carefully, making sure he didn’t move too much, especially his shoulder against which Sunwoo’s head was leaning, and his right thigh against which his pulled-up legs were resting.

When had he fallen asleep? Had he even heard any of what Haknyeon had said?

Haknyeon let his head sink back. Almost simultaneously, Sunwoo snuggled up closer to him, the back of his left hand loosely resting on Haknyeon’s thigh.

Every evening could end like this, Haknyeon thought to himself, what a shame that it would remain the only one.

Haknyeon didn’t know how soon afterwards he drifted off to sleep as well, but as he opened his eyes the next time, bright sunlight was beaming into the room, and the comfortable weight against the side of his body was gone.

He blinked into the room, his vision still adjusting as his eyes searched for Sunwoo. He stood by the desk, peeking out of the window with his lips parted in awe.

“Good morning, hyung.” Sunwoo’s gaze wavered as their eyes met. “You look so pretty,” he added so quietly, and for the first of many, many times that Sunwoo had muttered a compliment, Haknyeon blushed.

While they got ready, Haknyeon asked if Sunwoo remembered anything from last night. 

“What do you mean?” Sunwoo asked, voice genuine and curious.

“You fell asleep without a potion,” Haknyeon said.

“I did?” Sunwoo’s lips formed a small o whenever he was surprised, while his eyes widened and his eyebrows lifted. Haknyeon couldn’t help but chuckle.

“Yes. You did. Was it because of…”

“You. It must have been because of you.”

“Me? Why?”

“I feel calm around you.”

They set off to meet Haknyeon’s former mentor swiftly afterwards. The tower seemed much larger from the inside than it looked from the outside – there was some kind of spell involved, Haknyeon was sure of that, though he had never gotten so far as to figure out what spell exactly could bend space in this manner.

The highest floor in the tower consisted of a huge cylindrical room with an open roof framework making the space even bigger. It was used as both a classroom and as space for experiments, enchantments and incantations, though mainly it was an office. 

A gigantic cauldron, almost as tall as Haknyeon, acted as the center of the room. There was a dark green board with chalk scribbles on it, an array of school desks, and an open space where there was pentagram painted on the wooden floor with an unidentifiable liquid that shimmered midnight blue in the sunlight. Although the sun shone brightly outside, the room was dim, it smelled musty and could use some fresh air.

A flap door fell shut behind them as soon as their feet stepped off the stairs. Haknyeon, and Sunwoo even more, flinched at the bang . 

It was completely silent up here.

The tower’s owner, the owl’s mistress, Haknyeon’s former teacher, stood at the other end of the room, in front of a massive desk with many piles of scripture rolls, books and papers cluttering its surface. 

Haknyeon cleared his throat, opening his mouth to explain why he had shown up and what he wanted to ask from her, when the witch spoke up first – “out of all of my students, you were always one of the most diligent ones. What a surprise it had been for me, to hear about that letter…”

She turned around.

The woman, who Haknyeon had never been able to assign an age to, wore a large cloak. Her hair, combed back into a low ponytail yet a bit disheveled, a sign that he had recently flown by broom, was pitch-black, even blacker than Sunwoo’s hair. She was tall, slender, with high cheekbones and long fingernails which absent-mindedly tapped against the dark-red cloth covering her arms.

“I assume the letter is what you’re here for? What a dire situation…”

For having such an imposing appearance, living in such a strange place and having attained such mysterious status, her voice was surprisingly normal. A normal woman’s voice, with a strict note reminding of her job as a teacher and a soft-spoken streak reminding more of a friendly aunt.

“Yes, y-you’re right,” Haknyeon answered.

“And the human, is he—”

“I just came here for… support,” Sunwoo responded timidly. Haknyeon pressed his lips together to hide the smile wanting to bloom in his lips.

The witch nodded slowly, almost amused.

“Stay here, okay?” Haknyeon muttered to Sunwoo. “You can take a look around, I think it’s better if I talk to her alone. From witch to witch…”

“Oh, sure.”

They should have long let go of each other’s hands when they finally parted, and Haknyeon turned his back towards the other and approached his former teacher with resolute – or at least trying to appear resolute – steps.

Haknyeon had never been good at admitting mistakes, which was why telling the story proved to be quite difficult to him, although really there was not much to it. It was quite simple to understand, after all - he had accidentally given a human a faulty love potion, had been unsuccessful in reversing its effect and thus had attracted the suspicion of the human higher-ups which were already averse to magic. That was all. 

“Now you want me to reverse the potion?” 

“I would appreciate any help.”

“Why did you not confide in me sooner?”

Haknyeon kept his head low. “I thought I could do it myself.”

“You surely must have realized, though, that your abilities do not quite suffice for a spell like this, before the letter arrived? Why wait until what you wanted to avoid happened?”

Haknyeon wavered. “I…”

“It does not matter. I will follow your request, and lift the spell.” Her eyes briefly wandered to Sunwoo, who was inspecting an opened spell book propped up on a lectern by the wall. 

“A human soul is not strong enough to handle a powerful spell like this one without losing energy. He will fall into a brief coma for a few hours. Once he awakes, he will remember everything which has happened, but all the feelings that the potion evoked will be gone and only seem like a hazy dream.”

A hazy dream.

Haknyeon swallowed hard. A hot stinging in his eyes told him that tears were rising up fast, and biting the inside of his cheeks until it hurt would soon not suffice to hold them back.

“Can I—”

He gestured towards Sunwoo, a weak motion, in response to which the witch nodded.

Haknyeon noticed Sunwoo’s subtly confused expression as he returned to him, fighting with his composure, on the brink of tears.

“Hyung, are you alr—”

Haknyeon pulled him into a close hug. Very close, wrapping his arms around his neck, body pressing against him, as if he wanted to melt into one with him.

Sunwoo made a croaky sound of surprise, though he didn’t say anything. Haknyeon broke away from the hug then just enough to look into Sunwoo’s eyes – bathe in the love he gave him, allowing himself to get lost in the maze of Sunwoo’s eyes one more time, to fully memorize every emotion, every movement, everything.

Every fiber of his being longed to press his lips against Sunwoo’s once more, like on the meadow, at least one last time, though his mind told him no, even in this moment it wouldn’t be fair to Sunwoo, who was without agency, who would wake up in just few hours and realize that he had never wanted to kiss Haknyeon, that the potion made him do it.

And so Haknyeon took Sunwoo’s face in his hands, felt the warm skin of his cheeks against the palms of his hands before he craned his head to leave a kiss against his forehead. Sunwoo leaned in to the touch immediately, pliant, his eyes fluttering shut even as Haknyeon had already leaned back again.

“What was that for?” he asked with a tremble in his voice, and Haknyeon made sure to take it all in, the surprised hesitance and the sure adoration, the teasing shyness and coy infatuation displaying so clearly and unmistakably in his voice and eyes and every detail of his demeanor towards him. “What’s going on?”

“Oh, I just…”

“Ju Haknyeon. We should act now, do not stall for time.”

“What is she talking about?” Sunwoo asked, taking one of Haknyeon’s hands still lingering on the side of his face into his, “act? You have already found a solution?”

Haknyeon hesitated, then nodded. He felt the witch’s eyes on him, silently telling him to step back and leave Sunwoo to her. He just had to let go of him and retreat. It was easy, in theory.

Suddenly, as he gathered the courage to let go of Sunwoo, there were words pressing against Haknyeon’s tongue, screaming to be said, all of what was bubbling inside of him encompassed in three words. 

He swallowed them back. There would be no use in confessing now, if any mutual feelings would fade in the next few minutes.

Sunwoo’s lips parted as Haknyeon let go of him, and the witch stepped forward to face him, slowly raising his arms in a strange manner.

Wind arose. Strong and sudden, a gust of wind blew through the room in spirals and started circling around Sunwoo. His hair was blown up, the breeze tugged at his clothes the same way it grabbed at Haknyeon’s blouse.

“Hyung?”

Flashes of light now joined the breeze, the crackling of magic manifesting in the air, whirring around Sunwoo, who now looked at Haknyeon.

His words were muttered, a fearful tremble accompanying his words, “what’s happening, why is it doing that—”

Haknyeon didn’t get a word out. He watched helplessly as Sunwoo shied back but couldn’t escape the whirlwind building up around him, flashing in different shades of green, more and more. 

He couldn’t do anything but clench his hands into fists and suppress the sobs constricting his throat as he watched how the same pink mist that had risen from Sunwoo’s chest at Haknyeon’s last attempt to remove the potion’s effect himself now escaped into the air. It seemed as if the green flickers dissolved the pastel-rosy billows, until none was left, and the wind and turmoil disappeared.

Sunwoo collapsed in an instant, and Haknyeon reacted just in time to keep his head from hitting the floor. 

That was when the dam broke, and Haknyeon started crying – despite his teacher still being there, watching wordlessly as Haknyeon huddled against Sunwoo’s unconscious body and pulled him into half a hug, hands around his head – as if he had to protect him from anything, vulnerable as he currently was – while silent tears ran down his cheeks, blurred his vision and soaked into his shirt.

“I’m sure you now understand why I warned about love potions in my lessons.” 

It took two hours and twenty minutes for Sunwoo to wake up. Haknyeon had waited by his side for the entire time, barely able to distract himself from the sleeping boy on the bed back in the room that had been given to them for the last night.

He had calmed down. His tears had dried, the puffiness of his eyes almost gone. He felt a little numb, but that he could deal with – right?

Sunwoo stirred only slightly at first. His eyes still closed, he slowly turned his head, a frown appearing between his brows. His hand moved, ever so slightly, and instinctively Haknyeon reached out to hold it, one thumb caressing the back of his hand.

“Hyung?”

Haknyeon swallowed.

“Y-yeah.”

Sunwoo let out a huffed groan before his eyes fluttered open and he pulled himself up to half sit up, half lean against the headrest.

“Ow,” he mumbled, bringing one hand to the back of his head. 

“Does your head hurt?” Haknyeon asked. He was on edge, tapping his foot against the floor, fiddling with the seam of his shirt.

“Yeah… hyung, what happened? Why… what was going on?”

He looked up.

It took not even a second of looking into his eyes for Haknyeon to realize that the reversal of the spell had been successful. He had gotten so used to seeing the adoration in Sunwoo’s eyes that its absence was striking, unsettling almost. While Sunwoo’s eyes were neither cold nor distant, there was something off about the way he looked at him. There was something standoffish, awkwardly aloof.

It was not the expression of someone looking at the person they had feelings for.

Haknyeon could tell that he was confused. What must have been going on in his mind at this exact moment? A whirlwind of daze and puzzlement, of feelings that he remembered yet didn’t feel, of memories of him doing things that he wouldn’t do now.

He stared at Haknyeon as if the answers to the yet unspoken questions lay somewhere in his face.

“I can explain it all to you. Just… know that I didn’t mean to. It was a mistake, a genuine mistake, I never…”

The frown between Sunwoo’s brows had deepened. He sat up straighter, with the movement slighting further away from the edge where Haknyeon sat. Perhaps the movement had been unintentional, but Haknyeon felt it like a stab in the heart.

“Really. I can explain it all to you.”

And he did. He explained it all, every detail, from the very beginning. He told him everything that had happened, and only left out the part in which he had caught feelings for Sunwoo as well.

Sunwoo’s expression barely changed throughout the story. He remained silent, motionless, listening to Haknyeon yet not reacting.

“… so I lied to you to bring you here. My teacher removed the spell, and… well, that’s it.”

Sunwoo wavered, lips parting though no words were leaving his mouth.

“You don’t have to work in the shop anymore. Any of that. I will bring you home, and then… yeah. I’m sorry. I should have done something sooner. I’m sorry.”

Sunwoo still didn’t respond. He blinked, continued to eye Haknyeon as if he was some stranger that he thought he had known, not sure if he was mistaking him from someone else.

Don’t cry again , Haknyeon told himself, don’t cry .

It was hard. It was so, so hard, when Sunwoo kept his eyes on him like that. Briefly, Haknyeon thought that perhaps it would have been easier if the reversal spell had just erased Sunwoo’s memory of him completely – this halfway situation, with Sunwoo remembering but not feeling, was like someone repeatedly stepping onto Haknyeon’s heart, which had no choice but to take hit after hit, mocked for his foolish feelings which had bloomed on ground that was destined to wither from the start. 

His former mentor offered to bring them home – light-traveling, that practice was called which Haknyeon himself was not too confident in but his former teacher excelled in. Sunwoo noticed dryly that it was basically like teleporting.

Haknyeon just felt numb. He refrained from talking to Sunwoo too much, fearing he’d come off as strange – it’d be best if he just left him alone, right?

Sunwoo packed his bags once they arrived back at the potion shop, and while Haknyeon stood in the middle of the room, Carrot, who had noticed that something was wrong, in his arms, Sunwoo hurried around the shop to pick up his belongings which had become quite a few scattered around the rooms in these last weeks and months. Even in his apartment, Sunwoo had left his traces.

Traces that were still so clear to Haknyeon even once Sunwoo was gone. He had said goodbye with a muttered “see you around” and closed the potion shop door behind him, taking everything that had given this place life with him.

That same day, Haknyeon hardly had the time to sit around in the silence that now once more reigned the little potion shop. He had to refute the threatening letter from the government, catch up and make up for missed orders.

The gaping emptiness turned into muffled sobs only late at night, when he lay in his bed and felt so alone that it hurt.

Haknyeon felt ridiculous.

It was pathetic, to mourn over a love that had never even gotten the chance to bloom, which had never been real at all on Sunwoo’s side, and yet he couldn’t help but yearn for all the little things he had slowly but surely started to take for granted. Things that had annoyed him at first even.

When he had felt Sunwoo look at him, thinking that Haknyeon wouldn’t notice. When he had made sure all of the orders had been organized neatly, waiting next to the sorted packages, swaying back and forth on his feet until Haknyeon had noticed and praised him for it. When he had given him that blinding smile when their eyes had met.

After crying himself to sleep, Haknyeon was ripped back into normal life so quickly it felt like whiplash. Life went on, potions had to be sold and made no matter what state of mind the shop owner was in.

Haknyeon was busy during work hours and bored in his free time, and lonely all around the clock. Though Sunwoo hadn't spent every passing minute with him while he had been working here, knowing that he would be in his company sooner or later had made the hours alone go by without Haknyeon being aware of how silent it was in this shop.

The bubbling of the cauldron and Carrot's sniffling no longer brought him comfort and company, now that he had heard Sunwoo's loud laughter fill the room.

Younghoon stopped by as often as he could with his own busy bustling life, and though he tried, even he couldn't help Haknyeon much. He had never been in his shoes, he didn't know what it was like, to slowly develop feelings for someone who adored the ground you walked on only to then see all that adoration be taken away.

Haknyeon missed Sunwoo with every fiber of his being, and thus when he saw him stand on the doorsteps to his shop barely a week after he had last seen him, the witch thought he was hallucinating.

But no – he was real. Haknyeon dropped the notebook he'd been holding and crossed the room with quick steps, his heart racing as he reached for the door handle and opened it.

"… hi."

"H-hi—" 

Sunwoo looked stunning. The sun beams made him squint a little and lit up his dark hair, made the curls look shiny and soft, made Haknyeon want to drop everything just to be able to run his fingers through the others hair.

Though Sunwoo stood a stair step lower, they were almost on eye level.

"How have you been?" Sunwoo started.

Haknyeon swallowed, grip around the door handle tightening.

"I've been… um." Pull yourself together . "I've been alright. I've—" 

"I miss you." 

Sunwoo's words, muttered rushed and quiet though clear for Haknyeon to hear, took him off guard. His lips parted.

What?

"I miss being here at the shop, but most of all I miss you. I've thought about what had happened a lot, about the last weeks, all that… I miss you. I can't stop thinking about you, but it's not the same. I remember what I felt like during those months, and this is not like that."

Haknyeon stared, eyes wide, his thoughts an indistinguishable mess.

"I felt like I was in a haze, my thoughts were always cloudy – now I know that that was because of the potion, I know now that what I felt wasn’t real, wasn’t mine . Now it's all clear, I can finally see clearly. And what I feel now is real, and they are my feelings."

A pause. 

Haknyeon realized he was holding his breath.

"I know I meant a lot of trouble for you,” Sunwoo said, “and I'd understand if you told me you wouldn't want anything to do with me anymore after all that you’ve gone through because of me, but if I didn't read the signs wrong… I don't think that's true."

"It's not," Haknyeon muttered quickly, "i-it's not."

Sunwoo gave him a relieved smile. "Then maybe during your lunch break… or after you close up the shop, would you like to—"

"Yes."

Haknyeon's immediate response made Sunwoo laugh, a giggly chuckle, before he tilted his head a little, "I didn't even finish my sentence, though?"

"Sorry," Haknyeon mumbled, replying to Sunwoo's airy laugh with a smile. "Continue?"

"Would you like to go on a date with me?"

“Yes,” Haknyeon breathed, and he had to keep himself from either throwing his arms around the other or kissing him right then and there.

✨

It was windy outside. The air carried red and brown leaves with it, blowing it onto the sidewalk in front of the potion shop, where it was warm and cozy in comparison to the cool breeze outside.

A fire crackled beneath a cauldron in the backroom, to which the door was opened to let in the heat that the flames gave off – upstairs in the apartment, Haknyeon had lit the chimney for the first time this year, which was always a sign that it wouldn’t take all too long until winter arrived.

It was mid-afternoon, Haknyeon had stood behind the counter waiting for someone to come for quite a while, when the door swung open.

“It’s so cold outside… I swear, it’s much warmer in the city, I almost froze to death on the way here, really—” Sunwoo started babbling before he even properly closed the door. He had a reddened nose from the weather, and his hair, which had gotten a great deal longer in these last weeks, was terribly disheveled – the only reason for why he hadn’t gone to the hairdresser yet was because he knew that Haknyeon liked to run his fingers through the curls.

Haknyeon leaned forward on the counter, resting his chin in the palm of his hands as he watched the other cross the room.

“How was your day?”

“Boring.”

“I’m here now.” Sunwoo gave him a broad grin before leaning over the counter to press a kiss against Hakynyeon’s already puckered lips. “I’ll keep you company – although I have to finish some assignments.”

“Can I watch?”

Sunwoo hesitated. “Sure.”

Haknyeon could have spent all eternity just sitting at the table in the backroom, watching Sunwoo mull over math questions. He couldn’t help him much, aside from basic multiplication and addition which he needed for his potions he hadn’t touched math in years and he would like to keep it that way, but he knew that Sunwoo enjoyed his presence.

Their feet were entangled beneath the table, sometimes Haknyeon scooted closer to lean his cheek against Sunwoo’s shoulder, to which Sunwoo responded by tilting his head until his cheek was resting against the other’s head.

On slow days like these, with all orders completed and nothing else to do, Haknyeon sometimes forgot that the stop was very much open, causing him to flinch when the door eventually did open, and the windchime announced a new customer.

He tripped over a chair almost as he stood up abruptly, letting his hand run along Sunwoo’s shoulders before he hurried into the main room, the “hello, how can I help you?” already on his lips.

The order was rather simple – a cleaning potion and another one to help against headaches. The latter he had stored in a shelf in the backroom, but the former he had run out of and would have to brew first – the customer could pick it up in an hour, if that was alright.

Haknyeon returned to the backroom to find that Sunwoo had overheard the conversation and already searched out all the ingredients that Haknyeon needed for the potion.

“Where did I put the remedies for headaches again,” Haknyeon muttered to himself, tapping his bottom lip as his eyes scoured one of the shelves. They fell onto an array of potions in the upper row.

“Ah. They must be up here—”

He swayed forward onto his tiptoes, hands reaching up to grab one of the bottlenecks.

“Mh. Mh.” The warm voice right behind him took Haknyeon off guard, and so did the tingling breath against his neck.

“Wrong shelf, hyung,” Sunwoo muttered softly, loosely curling an arm around Haknyeon’s waist to keep him steady before turning him around, bringing them face to face. A smile bloomed on Haknyeon’s lips as he let himself lean against the shelf.

“Everything health-related is now over there in those cabinets, don’t you remember?” He clicked his tongue. “We don’t want you to choose the wrong potion, hm?”

“No,” Haknyeon laughed, “we don’t…”

He looked up, then brought his hand up to cup Sunwoo’s face, fingertips resting against the warm skin.

In the last months, since he had been sleeping much better, the sallow complexion, the paleness and the dark circles beneath his pretty eyes had vanished completely – it turned out, that aside from one or the other sip of Haknyeon’s sleeping potions, sleeping in another bed with someone’s arms around him every now and then – though every other night would have been more accurate than every now and then – was also just as effective in fighting against his insomnia.

On a whim, Haknyeon leaned in, meeting Sunwoo’s lips for a slow and gentle kiss.

Sunwoo kissed back right away. arm still around his waist as the second one joined as well and brought them even closer together.

“Let’s not get too distracted, hm?” Haknyeon hummed against the other’s lips, “I have orders to complete, and you have assignments to do.”

Sunwoo pushed his bottom lip forward into a pout, then nodded. “Alright, alright. Just a few more minutes.”

“Just a few more minutes,” Haknyeon agreed with a hum, before he leaned in for another kiss, wrapping his arms around his boyfriend’s neck.