Archive of Our Own ^beta

“Do we have any eggs?”

“No,” Doyoung said, head in the fridge. He pushed aside a half-eaten loaf of bread to reveal a leaking take-out container from who knows when. Nasty. He took it out and put it on the counter.

“How about milk?”

Doyoung flicked his eyes up to the top shelf. There were three different bottles of milk, all open. The one in the back had some crusting around the top that implied it had been there a little too long. Doyoung pulled it out and put it on the counter as well.

When Johnny was a full-time DJ, he often didn’t start work before 8 p.m., and he often wasn’t done earlier than 3 or 4 in the morning, if that, so it wasn’t uncommon for Doyoung and Johnny to meet only in the ever-fluctuating hours in between the day and the night when Doyoung came back from work and Johnny was packing up his gear. Nowadays, Johnny had a job with a studio, so he only did clubs on the odd weekend here and there, but his sleep schedule was still fucked. Hence cleaning out the fridge at 7 a.m. on a Tuesday before Doyoung went to work and before Johnny went to sleep.

Doyoung was about to make a comment about how they really ought to move “clean out the fridge” higher up on the chore priority list when he noticed something hiding behind the second carton of milk.

“Wha—Ow, fuck.” Doyoung began, but unfortunately for him, he stood straight up, hitting his head on the top of the fridge. A stick of butter tumbled out of the second self with the force of the collision of the top of Doyoung’s skull and the bottom of the freezer door.

Johnny’s laughter carried loudly from the living room, the unsympathetic bastard. “You okay?” He called out halfheartedly from his position prone on the couch.

“Uh, Johnny? Is there a…rune in our fridge?”

Behind the half-spoiled carton of milk he’d just dislodged was what was unmistakably a rune. It was a combination of the rune for longevity and the rune for…ice, from what Doyoung could make out. It was actually quite clever. Doyoung hadn’t seen anything like it before, not that he had a particularly intimate history with magic runes, or anything.

Johnny brightened instantly, sitting up to peer at Doyoung over the back of the couch. “Yeah! My friend Ten did it. You know Ten, right? I can’t remember if you ever met him. Apparently, he’s a witch, though he keeps it on the down low. Isn’t it so crazy, like, how there are people out there who can actually do magic?”

Doyoung stiffened, bent over to rescue the lost stick of butter from the ground. “I mean, I, uh, it’s kind of unnatural, don’t you think?”

Johnny narrowed his eyes at Doyoung. “You’re not one of those people who are prejudiced against magic users, are you?”

“What? No!” Doyoung exclaimed, waving around the errant stick of butter. “I’m just saying, I don’t…participate.”

Johnny eyed Doyoung for another second before he let out a deep, full-bellied laugh and flopped back down onto the couch. The dust in the sunbeam he was lounging in swirled around in the air with his movement, and Doyoung watched the particles dance around each other.

“I know you’re not a witch, Doyoung.”

“Haha, right,” Doyoung said as the dust settled. “Not a witch.”

-

Doyoung was a witch. 

Emphasis on the was because he did not practice any magic of any kind at all anymore, and he really wasn’t planning on using magic ever again.

He was sure some covens were fine, great, even. He was sure there were some places out there in the world where magic was used for good, where spells for luck, encouragement, health, and love were the norm, but that’s not how it was in the coven Doyoung grew up in. Doyoung grew up in a necromancer coven where magic was used like a nefarious secret, and all he’d known for many years had been death and the dark aura that surrounded it like a hot, damp noose around your neck. Magic so dark it poisoned the soul, leaving deep imprints in every crevice of your body, a warning to anyone who crossed your path. Magic so dark it never saw the light of day.

One day, when he was 16, he met a young witch from a neighboring coven while in the forest looking for potion ingredients. He showed Doyoung the glitter charm that he was practicing, and Doyoung was stunned. The glitter sparkled in the air with an aura not unlike sunshine. Doyoung had never before met anyone who didn’t reek of deep purple malice; he didn’t even know that it was possible to live a life where the smell of death wasn’t ever pervasive, to practice magic so freely under the sun instead of clandestine, under the moon.

He ran away the very next day and hadn’t looked back since.

Doyoung spent the next several years trying to unlearn everything he’d ever known, keeping his secret close to his chest. He hadn’t done more than a simple charm for probably a decade now, and that’s how he liked it. If he wasn’t doing magic, it was nigh on impossible for other magic users to sense it on him. He didn’t really know if anyone from his old coven wasted their time looking for him, and they’d certainly stopped by now if they ever had, but it was better to be safe than sorry. He’d gladly never do magic again if it meant never being found. He hardly knew how to do anything that didn’t technically qualify as dark magic, anyway.

So, no, Doyoung didn’t particularly consider himself a witch anymore, but some things are so intrinsic to the nature of who you are that they are not so easily discarded. Some things leave scars that don’t fade with time, like the faint sensation of dread that Doyoung still felt at the sight of a full moon on a humid summer night.

Doyoung much preferred the sun, now that he got to choose.

-

The bookshop that Doyoung worked in didn’t see that much business, hidden away as it was on the third floor of a worn-out building on a quiet side street, but Doyoung didn’t mind. It paid less than bartending had, but he didn’t have to work through the night, and he never had to walk home under the light of the moon, which was worth any amount of money, really.  

The rest of his Tuesday had been predictably sleepy after all of the excitement cleaning out the fridge that morning. Only a couple customers ventured into the store, and Doyoung spent most of the day watching the sunbeams from the windows travel across the floor as the hours ticked by. They had made it all the way to the edge of the bookcase in the far corner, approximately 4pm, when the bell over the door rang, and Donghyuck walked in.

“Hi, Hyung!” He called out, smiling wide as usual. Donghyuck always had that expression on his face, like he had just gotten away with something that he shouldn’t have been doing. It made Doyoung as uneasy as it did fond every time.

Lee Donghyuck was Johnny’s younger brother’s childhood best friend. Johnny’s brother was currently studying abroad in America, but Donghyuck clung to Johnny with such ferocity that Doyoung thought he actually was Johnny’s brother for the first year or so he knew him. It had been a couple years since then, and now, he clung to Doyoung with that same passion. Doyoung still wasn’t sure exactly what he’d done to earn Donghyuck’s affection, but he was glad for it. Most of the time.

Loathe as he was to admit it, Donghyuck was probably the brightest part of Doyoung’s life. Doyoung was going to pretend that that didn’t imply anything particularly sad about him.

“Hi, Donghyuck. I don’t get off for another two hours, so you’ll have to come back if you want me to buy you dinner.”

“Actually, I’m here to get a book!”

“Oh?” Doyoung raised an eyebrow. Donghyuck stopped by to say hi all the time, but Doyoung didn’t think he’d ever actually touched a single book in the store, much less purchased one.

“Yes, and I don’t need your sass. I’m perfectly capable of reading.”

Doyoung suppressed a smirk. “I didn’t say anything.”

Donghyuck disappeared into the back of the store, calling out, “But you were thinking it!” over his shoulder.

Johnny often called Donghyuck a terror, and that was certainly an accurate description, but there was something else to it, too. Mischievous, yes, but Donghyuck had a happy energy that invariably brightened any room he walked into. The joy that always emanated from him was infectious. He reminded Doyoung of that fateful night when he saw that kid cast a simple glitter charm in the middle of the forest under the light of the sun: pure, clean, magic made solely out of joy. That was the kind of energy Donghyuck gave off.

Doyoung liked Donghyuck. Doyoung liked Donghyuck maybe a little bit more than he should, considering he was essentially his best friend’s little brother, but that was neither here nor there.

Donghyuck peeked out from behind one of the stacks and shot Doyoung a triumphant grin from underneath his messy brown fringe. “Found it!” he cheered, holding up a book in victory before clutching it to his chest.

Doyoung stared. It was a book he knew well, but hadn’t seen in a long, long time. The Annals of Rune-Based Magic was the principal text on the subject matter, after all, originally published over 100 years ago. His coven had had more than a half dozen copies in their library when he was a kid.

“You, uh, trying to learn magic?” Doyoung asked as Donghyuck skipped towards the register, his old, black Jansport backpack jingling as he went.

“Oh, well. I made this new friend, who’s, like,” Donghyuck paused, eyes quickly darting around to make sure no one was listening before he leaned over the counter into Doyoung’s space and said in a harsh whisper, “a witch.”

Doyoung just barely stopped himself from sniggering. He raised an amused eyebrow. “Oh, really?”

“He said he’d teach me a couple things if I had any knack for it. Obviously, I don’t really have any magic blood in me, or any training, but he said that it might be possible for me to do some simple, weak charms.” Donghyuck was practically vibrating with excitement, and Doyoung could feel it coming off of him in waves.

As cute as Donghyuck was in his excitement over runes, far and away the most boring kind of magic in existence in Doyoung’s opinion, it unnerved him that the topic of magic had come up for the second time in one day. In the ten years since Doyoung had left his coven and joined the non-magical society, magic had gained a bit more mainstream acceptance, but it was still considered mysterious and untoward. To have two of his friends bring it up in unrelated conversations in a single day was certainly atypical.

“Be careful. Magic isn’t all rainbows and pots of gold.”

“Of course, Doyoung! I am nothing if not careful,” Donghyuck said with a vicious giggle. He turned on his heel after Doyoung handed him his receipt, but when he stood in the doorway, he hesitated before turning back around. “Oh! Saturday!” he called out, an uncharacteristically nervous lilt to his voice. “It’s supposed to be nice. I was going to hang out by the river, maybe. I know you’re off. Come with me?”

Doyoung couldn’t fight the smile on his face even if he wanted to. “Yeah, alright, just text me.”

Donghyuck smiled so widely, he put the last dregs of the sunbeams on the floor to shame. He sparkled in the dim evening light filtering through the storefront windows like the edge of a glitter charm.

“Okay! Great! And, hey, maybe I’ll do a little spell for you.” He wiggled his fingers and Doyoung laughed.

The door closed behind Donghyuck as he said his final goodbyes, and Doyoung let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding in, a wistful sigh, something unnamable stirring in his chest. It had been nearly a decade since Doyoung had done any magic at all, and longer still since he’d enjoyed it, but something about Donghyuck made something very small in Doyoung want to try again.

-

Right before 6 p.m., when Doyoung had just begun to contemplate closing early, a book dropped on the counter in front of him, and The Annals of Rune-Based Magic stared blithely back up at Doyoung for the second time that day. He flicked his eyes up to see a kid who, curiously, hadn’t tripped the bell over the door when he’d come in. He was young, younger than Donghyuck, probably, and he had bright red streaks in his shaggy black hair. He was wearing a long, black coat, like the ones that were popular back in the coven when he was younger, but much more expensive looking.

There was an eerily familiar air to this kid, one that made all the hair on the back of Doyoung’s neck stand up.

“Thank you!” The kid said in a light voice after Doyoung silently rang him up. The door to the store closed behind him, and the air stirred, carrying back to Doyoung something he hadn’t sensed in a long, long time. The faint smell of a dark purple aura just barely wafted past Doyoung for a fraction of a second, and he froze, heart seizing up in his chest.

It wasn’t just dark magic that Doyoung breathed into his lungs like lead for the first time in a decade, it was necromancy.

-

Doyoung managed to make it to the door of Nakamoto’s Fine Things without panicking, though he’d certainly come close. He placed a hand on the door and tried to steel himself, taking in a deep breath to prepare himself for the one thing he hated doing the most: magic.

Clean, he thought to himself, just make it clean. Well, that was always easier said than done. He sent a tiny pulse of magic though the doorknob, and the second he did it, he knew he’d fucked up. The metal of the doorknob sizzled, and Doyoung withdrew his hand with a yelp. The mechanism glowed a deep, menacing purple for a moment before it faded to its normal color, and the lock clicked open.

So much for clean.

Nakamoto Yuta glanced up from the register, and his ever-charismatic face broke out into a smile. Doyoung braced himself. Yuta shook his long black hair out of his eyes to look at Doyoung more closely, like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “Well, well, well, if it isn’t Kim Doyoung! I haven’t seen you around in a hot minute.”

“Hi, Yuta,” Doyoung said, trying not to appear like he was shrinking away from Yuta’s burning gaze. Time had done nothing to soften the intensity of his eyes, and Doyoung still wasn’t immune to them, even after ten years.

The walls of Nakamoto’s Fine Things were painted a jade green, meant to purvey the innate quality of luck and longevity that the stone had to its customers. The shelves were mostly stocked with basic spell and potion ingredients, eye of newt, bat’s wing, etc., and the back had bookcases full of magic textbooks that put the single shelf dedicated to magic in Doyoung’s bookstore to shame. The real eye-catching part of the store, though, was the glass cabinet behind the register full of a wide variety of enchanted items. None of them had any actual dark magic, Doyoung would know, but Yuta had them all locked away and labeled with names like “EVIL PENDANT” and “CURSED BOX.” When he’d asked about it, years ago, Yuta just smirked and said that it gave the store intrigue.

“Should’ve guessed it was you,” Yuta grinned, leaning forward on his elbows. The loose wrap shirt he was wearing, presumably the height of modern witch fashion, dipped with the movement. “Not many witches use dark magic just to open doors around here.”

Doyoung felt the tips of his ears warm. “I’m a little out of practice,” he said sheepishly.

“You wouldn’t be if you’d just let me teach you, for gods’ sake. Not like I’ve been offering for the last decade or anything.”

Yuta was, in fact, the kid that Doyoung had met in the forest ten years ago, casting a glitter charm in an effort to reproduce the sparkling of the water in the river. He was the one who told Doyoung that there were plenty of other covens that did all kinds of magic, that there were covens that didn’t do magic at all, and his family had been the ones who’d given Doyoung a place to stay when he was 16 and alone in a brand-new world. He’d been trying to teach Doyoung all different kinds of magic since then, but Doyoung always refused. When he realized that he could just…not do magic, he felt a sense of relief so substantial that he almost started crying. No spell was worth the peace of mind he got from completely removing himself from the coven he grew up in, from being magic-free. 

“You wouldn’t happen to have seen any, uh, witches interested in dark magic around here recently, have you?” Doyoung said, changing the topic.

Yuta gave Doyoung a look. “Nope, just you.”

Doyoung rolled his eyes. “Haha, very funny.” He picked up a mini cauldron from a display to distract himself from the panic that had been building in his chest on the way over, simmering in the tips of his fingers. “I sold two copies of The Annals of Rune-Based Magic today.”

“Ew,” Yuta scrunched up his nose. “That’s, like, the most boring book in the history of magic.”

“One of them was to a kid. He had a…well, he had a dark aura.”

Yuta lost his easy smile and his expression became pensive. “Dark like necromancer dark?”

“Yeah, exactly like that.”

Yuta hummed, flaring his nostrils. “Like a kind of humid, purple aura with an accompanying inexplicable sensation of overwhelming dread.”

Exactly. “That’s the one.”

“I haven’t felt anything like that since I saw you in that forest ten years ago.” The teasing smile was back on Yuta’s face for a second before he schooled is face back into a serious expression. “Did you recognize him?”

Doyoung thought about the youngest members of his coven he could remember. Everyone’s faces were blurred by the years that had gone by, years Doyoung spent willfully forgetting. There were only a couple children he remembered who would have been around the right age, and he was fairly certain that the kid in his store wasn’t one of them.

“I don’t think so.”

They stood silently in contemplation for a minute before Yuta shrugged. “Well, I’ll let you know if I hear anything, but I haven’t heard a whisper of dark magic around here in a couple years. Aside from you, of course.”

Doyoung placed the cauldron back down in the display where he’d found it. Yuta had connections to pretty much every witch in the city, so if he said there was no one practicing dark magic, he was probably right. But still, he couldn’t quite convince himself that his encounter was just a coincidence.

He was just about to make an excuse to leave, being surrounded by so much magic made him uneasy, when his eyes caught on a cutely packaged set of calligraphy pens in the store’s rune magic section, complete with a mini hammer and chisel for stone etching. His thoughts traveled over to the stars in Donghyuck’s eyes when he talked about learning to do magic, and his resolve wavered.

Doyoung bought it, and he stubbornly ignored all of Yuta’s prying questions as he let himself out of the store.

-

“Oh, Yuta, by the way, do you know a witch named Ten?”

“Ten? Yeah, he makes tarot decks. I sell them, actually. Did you want one?”

“No, no, no, I was just curious.”

-

Doyoung finally got back to his apartment a little after 8 p.m., the moon chasing him all the way back home. Johnny was up, lounging on the couch in much the same way he’d been when Doyoung left that morning, as if the day of emotional turmoil that Doyoung just suffered through had simply never happened. He perked up when Doyoung opened the door, giving him an oddly knowing grin. It made Doyoung shiver. What could Johnny possibly know?

“You’re back late. Did something come up?”

“Oh, I just ran into an old friend. We caught up for a bit.”

Johnny narrowed his eyes at Doyoung. “Are you sure you didn’t go out with someone? Donghyuck, perhaps?”

Doyoung threw Johnny a questioning look. This was an odd line of questioning he hadn’t really expected. “He stopped by, but it was to actually buy a book for once.” Doyoung hesitated before he added, “We’re going to hang out on Saturday, though.”

At that, Johnny paused and gave Doyoung a curious look. “You’re hanging out with Donghyuck on Saturday?”

“Um, yes?”

“Interesting,” Johnny said cryptically without offering anything else. He pulled out his phone and started furiously typing.

“What? What’s interesting?”

“Nothing!” Johnny said, still typing while he moved slowly towards his bedroom. “Don’t worry about it!” he yelled, slamming the door.

Weird.

-

The park by the river on Saturday was absolutely wonderful. It was warm, almost unseasonably so for April, and a cool breeze blew gently through the trees. The sun shined brightly in the blue, mid-afternoon sky, and not a cloud was in sight. Doyoung and Donghyuck had gotten lunch at a nearby food stand and then strolled languidly along the water’s edge. Donghyuck grabbed Doyoung’s hand at some point along the way and hadn’t let go. It was nice. It was really nice.

Something about Donghyuck under the sun, swinging their entwined hands back and forth between them, just screamed, “perfect,” to Doyoung. A perfect afternoon.

They found a tree to settle underneath, and Doyoung took the opportunity to present Donghyuck with the rune calligraphy and etching set that he’d picked up at Yuta’s store. Donghyuck was delighted. He squealed and threw himself at Doyoung, nearly toppling them both over into the grass, and insisted that they try it out immediately, so now here Doyoung was, helping Donghyuck search runes on his phone while he set up the inkwells.

“Okay, so,” Donghyuck started, calligraphy pen hovering over a page in an old Crayon Shin-Chan notebook that he found in the bottom of his bag. His eyebrows were drawn together in extreme concentration. It was adorable. “This one is supposed to be for luck?”

Doyoung bit his tongue, stopping himself from laughing as Donghyuck crudely drew out fehu, the rune for abundance and success. Backwards. It was a good thing that Donghyuck didn’t have any magical inclinations, because drawing runes backwards was usually done to invoke their inverse meaning, and Doyoung could do without cursing himself with bad luck.

“Hmm.” Doyoung made a show of looking closely at the runes pulled up on Donghyuck’s phone. “I think you drew it backwards.”

“Dammit,” Donghyuck pouted. It was so cute that Doyoung couldn’t help but laugh, and Donghyuck pouted even harder. “Here, you try!”

Doyoung stiffened. How had he not seen this coming? He was an idiot. “Oh, I’m not really one for, uh, magic,” he tried, waving Donghyuck away. Well, he tried to wave Donghyuck away, but Donghyuck was very insistent when he wanted to be, and he wanted to be pretty much all the time.

So, that’s how Doyoung found himself holding a calligraphy pen with a notebook shoved in front of him, Donghyuck’s pleading eyes boring into his face, trying to tamp down the swell of panic in his chest that only hadn’t popped because the situation hadn’t fully hit him yet. He wasn’t going to do magic; he was just going to…draw. He carefully looked through the list of runes carefully before settling on the unassuming laguz, the rune for water, hoping it was simple enough that he couldn’t fuck it up too terribly.

Runic magic was actually very simple. If you drew precise lines and your intent matched the meaning of the rune, it was almost guaranteed that the rune would be at least weakly magical in some regard. Most runes held pretty weak magic, anyway, as the intent had to be very pure and very directed to instill a rune with even mildly powerful magic. Basically, it was probably not possible for Doyoung to do too much damage with a rune or two, not that that tempered his anxiety.

He took a deep breath in.

Doyoung put pen to paper and carefully drew out the rune in one purposeful stroke. He thought of the river, flowing steadfastly next to them. He let a deep breath out. Immediately after he lifted the pen from the page, it glowed, the ink on the page emitting a clean, white light, and Doyoung felt it: the unmistakable healing power of water, faintly washing over them, making them…unpleasantly damp.

Donghyuck stared in amazement at his notebook before turning his wide, sparkling eyes to Doyoung, a look of pure wonder on his face.

“Hyung,” he said, astonished, “you did it! Oh my god!”

Doyoung watched the white light slowly fade and ran his finger over the ink in awe. White. It had been White. Clean magic. Doyoung didn’t think he’d ever actually done non-dark magic before.

“Yeah…I did.” Doyoung turned to face Donghyuck, who was giving Doyoung a look like he was the best thing he’d ever seen. It made him feel nervous, out of his element. Never mind that Doyoung was sure he was giving Donghyuck the same look in return.

“Do another one!”

“Okay, okay,” Doyoung laughed disbelievingly. He felt a stirring in his veins that he hadn’t in a long, long time. “Which one should I do?”

Donghyuck placed a thoughtful hand on his mouth before he grinned mischievously and held out his phone to Doyoung, pointing at kenaz, the rune for fire. Doyoung laughed.

“Fire? Really?”

Donghyuck shrugged gleefully. “Why not?”

Doyoung didn’t particularly want to say, because I’ve only been trained in dark magic, and I don’t want to accidentally commit arson, so he stayed silent. He swallowed and looked back down the notebook, battling the strange combination of fear and excitement that was setting every one of his nerves on fire.

Kenaz was the rune for fire, but it was more accurately translated as, “torch,” which could have several different connotations. Doyoung glanced over at Donghyuck, giving Doyoung a look brimming with affection, and thought, sun.

This time, the entire paper glowed.

“Holy fuck.”

“Okay, I think that’s enough for today,” Doyoung said nervously, slamming the cover of the notebook shut. As terrifying and exhilarating as it was to do magic again, just for himself, not for anyone else, it was also way too public of a venue to be experimenting when the possibility of something going very, very wrong was astronomically high.

“Doyoung, what are you talking about? You’re magic! Did you know?”

“I…uh—” He cut himself off. How could he talk himself out of this one? Before he could even open his mouth, Donghyuck interjected.

“Oh my god, Doyoung, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“Donghyuck, it’s fine.” Doyoung couldn’t remember exactly the story Donghyuck had been given on Doyoung’s childhood, but it was probably something only slightly less pretty than the truth; abusive home life, running away at the age of 16, not really knowing his parents, etc. He probably felt guilty for bringing it up. Doyoung gave Donghyuck a smile and held out his hand. “Let’s just relax, yeah?”

They spent the rest of the afternoon lying in the grass, laughing as the sun creeped across the sky, painting Donghyuck’s skin a warm golden yellow as it dipped below the horizon. When Donghyuck walked Doyoung home, which he absolutely insisted on doing, there was a second, just a split second, when Doyoung thought that Donghyuck was going to kiss him, but he didn’t. Instead, Donghyuck wrapped his arms around him, tucked his nose into his neck and said, in a voice oddly serious, “Thank you for coming with me, Doyoung.”

Doyoung returned the hug, one of his hands finding its way to the back of Donghyuck’s head, and he tried very, very hard to ignore the hammering of his heart in his chest.

-

“So, how’d the date with Donghyuck go?”

Doyoung jumped. “It was good. It was—it wasn’t a date, though.”

Johnny raised an eyebrow at him, and Doyoung’s palms started to sweat. “Are you sure about that?”

Doyoung started towards his room, avoiding Johnny’s eyes. “Yes, absolutely, goodnight!” He shouted before slamming his bedroom door. Johnny’s laughter echoed from the living room as Doyoung leaned his head against the door, willing his heart to slow down.

-

The Annals of Rune-Based Magic may have been the principal text on runic magic, but it was large and quite heavy, and The Rune Pocket Guide was a lot easier to carry around. Also, it was a lot more discreet, which is the primary reason why Doyoung plucked it off the singular “Magic: How To” shelf in the bookstore after closing the following Monday. It burned a hole through his bookbag and into the side of his thigh as he walked, and he tried not to look too guilty when Johnny waved to him when he got home and immediately snuck into his room.

Doyoung sat down at his sad excuse for a desk shoved into the corner of his bedroom and took a deep breath. He opened the book under the light of dusk filtering in through his window, the moon big and low on the horizon, and skimmed over the introduction.

“Runic Magic is the most ancient known form of magic indigenous to Europe,” it read. “Its use is documented in several texts that predate 100AD, but it likely originated years earlier. Though not as sophisticated as other ancient magical practices known across Africa and Asia during the same era, Runic Magic has remained popular throughout the years for its simplicity and consistency, making it an enjoyable topic of study for witches young and old alike.”

Right. Simplicity and Consistency. Runes were simple. He could do this.

Doyoung didn’t have a fancy calligraphy set, but he knew for a fact that ballpoint pens worked just as well. He smoothed out an old crinkled sheet of paper that he found in the bottom of one of his drawers and took a deep breath.

He drew the rune for fire one more time, thinking, sun, just as he had on the river with Donghyuck to see if it wasn’t all just a fluke. The rune shined, a little less enthusiastically than it had the other day, but it still shined with that same bright, white light. He was doing this. He was really doing magic again, and for the first time in his life, it wasn’t dark magic.

Doyoung’s eyes flicked back towards the book, and the rune raido caught his attention. “Raido was used to signify a long journey to the ancient Vikings,” he read, though he already knew all the meanings of each rune by heart, “however, in runic magic, it is often used for its allegorical meaning: Destiny.”

Doyoung hesitated. Destiny was a big word, but it also oddly drew him in. He very carefully elongated the stem of kenaz and combined it with raido, trying to steady his shaking hands. Destiny, Doyoung thought, and then, before he could stop himself, Donghyuck.

At first, nothing happened. Just as Doyoung was starting to think that this had all been a little anticlimactic, he suddenly felt it: a dark purple aura laced with the inexplicable feeling of dread. Before he could even react, the paper spewed out purple light, filling the entire room with the cold, damp, overwhelming feeling of death.

The light faded as quickly as it came, but the feeling remained, as horrible as it ever was, and Doyoung’s hand burned. Underneath the skin on the palm of Doyoung’s right hand were the runes kenaz and raido, exactly as he’d drawn them, as if they were tattooed into his skin in shaky ball point pen.

Fuck.

-

“Kim Doyoung gracing me with his presence for the second time in as many weeks? To what could I possibly owe the pleasure?”

Doyoung would have rolled his eyes, but as wigged out as he was, all he could do in response was lay his palm out in front of Yuta, hoping it would do all the talking for him.

“Oh, fuck,” Yuta exclaimed, reaching out to trace his fingers over the runes etched into Doyoung’s palm. His hair fell into his eyes from where it had been pushed behind his ears when he leaned over to get a better look. “What did you do?”

“I don’t know,” Doyoung sighed. “I was just practicing some runes.”

Yuta whipped his eyes up to Doyoung’s. ‘You’re doing magic again?”

“Er, kind of? It was clean magic, too, until, well, until this.” Doyoung didn’t really need to clarify. His right hand was still emitting a faint, damp purple aura that Yuta was sure to recognize. Doyoung was worried it wasn’t going to go away. Aside from marking him as a user of dark magic to anyone sensitive enough to pick up on auras, the constant stream of mild unease that he’d been enveloped in for the last hour was already starting to fray his nerves. “I don’t really know what did it. I was trying so hard to keep it clean.”

Yuta looked back at Doyoung’s palm, considering. “Maybe your magic is trying to tell you something.” He traced the runes again. “Light and destiny?”

“Sun and destiny. Kind of.” He’d thought about destiny, but he’d also thought about Donghyuck. Doyoung tried not to think too hard about what kind of combination those two intentions had made in his mind in order to result in…this.

Yuta hummed and dropped Doyoung’s hand. “Well, I am neither a curse breaker nor a master of rune magic,” he said, turning around to riffle through a shelf of books behind the register, “but I can ask around. To be honest, I think you might have fucked yourself over with that destiny rune. You might have to, like, actually fulfill your destiny. Either that or it’ll just fade in a week, accidental magic and all that.”

Yuta pulled out a large tome with an even larger title. Curses, Misfires, and Spells Gone Wrong: A Witches Guide to the Management of Magical Maladies and Mistakes, it read in a thin, old script. Yuta pushed the book across the counter with some effort.

“You can see what you can find in here, but I’ll ask around to see if anyone’s seen anything like this before.”

Doyoung flipped open the cover and studied the table of contents. There wasn’t a section on runes, nor a section on necromancy, but way towards the bottom of the list there was a chapter on dark magic. Not promising, but he really had no other ideas, so this would have to do for a start.

“What made you start tinkering around with magic again, anyway?”

“Ah, well,” Doyoung tried not to sound too embarrassed, “one of my friends is trying to learn magic, and he—I don’t know. He roped me into it somehow.”

“Oh, a boy?” Yuta’s face pulled up into a wicked smile. “You should’ve said that first. Maybe he’s your destiny.” Yuta wriggled his eyebrows. “All you need to cure your rune curse is true love’s first kiss.”

Doyoung rolled his eyes and hastily grabbed the book off the counter. “Haha, very funny. Thanks, Yuta. I’ll let you know if I figure it out.”

“Oh, by the way,” Yuta called out as Doyoung turned to leave with the absurdly large book tucked under his arm, “someone came in here the other day asking if I had any books on necromancy, had red streaks in his hair, really rich looking. That the kid you’re looking for?”

Doyoung stopped dead in his tracks.

“Yeah,” he said, the ever-familiar sense of dread pooling in his gut. “That’s him.”

-

A week and a half later, the rune was not gone. If anything, it had gotten slightly darker, sinking further into his skin.

In Curses, Misfires, and Spells Gone Wrong: A Witches Guide to the Management of Magical Maladies and Mistakes, time was listed as the number one cure for miscast spells, and a carefully constructed counter spell was the ideal remedy for a curse, but when it came to dark magic, everything was a bit more complicated, because of course it was.

Dark magic had a life of its own in a way that other types of magic did not. Attuned to the phases of the moon, it had a certain temperament that influenced the casting of spells, and necromancers and other practitioners of dark magic spent years learning how to master it. Spells cast with dark magic were subject to not only the intentions of the caster, but also to the whims of the magic itself, which is what made it so dangerous for those unfamiliar to dabble with it.

Doyoung was very, very familiar with dark magic, but it had been years since he’d really been in tune with his own brand of it, and he was lost as to what it wanted from him. He knew that he didn’t have any particular intentions when he drew those runes, but his magic clearly did, and it had been slowly souring over the time that Doyoung failed to figure out what they were.

The moon had been in a waning gibbous when he’d done it. Not that that knowledge helped him figure out how to make the runes go away, but it was one of the only bits of information that he really had to go off of.

So, yeah, his lack of progress on the whole rune curse front combined with the presence of the mysterious red-haired necromancer and also the constant stream of mild dread radiating from his hand, well—

Doyoung had been better, that’s for sure. 

Yuta had not been particularly helpful in his search either since there were very few practitioners of dark magic in the city, and even fewer witches who had specialized training in magic runes, of all things, so it seemed like every lead was just a dead end. As the failed attempts to appease the runes on his hand piled up, Doyoung withdrew. Donghyuck texted him a lot since their date—or their, uh, not-date? But Doyoung resisted meeting up with him again. Donghyuck was practically the antithesis of dark magic, bright, sunny, and cheerful, not like how Doyoung was now, damp and dark purple. He craved Donghyuck’s light, but he dreaded tainting it even more.

However, it didn’t look like he got to decide for much longer. From his room where he’d been lying on his bed, staring up at his stucco ceiling and feeling generally miserable for the nth day in a row, Doyoung heard the front door open, and a voice, unmistakably Donghyuck’s, called out a greeting to Johnny. It wasn’t long before there was a knock on his bedroom door.

“Kim Doyoung, open this door right now!”

As much as Doyoung didn’t want any part of Donghyuck to be polluted by him, there was little point in trying to stop Donghyuck if he was determined to do something, and judging by the more recent texts that Doyoung had not quite gotten around to answering, he was very, very determined to see Doyoung. Doyoung lifted himself out of bed and opened the door.

Donghyuck really was like the antithesis of dark magic. Just the sight of Donghyuck in his bedroom doorway and the frighteningly adorable pout on his face lifted the dread from Doyoung’s shoulders instantly. His presence cleared the air in Doyoung’s damp, purple room like a purifying spell, and Doyoung, suddenly exhausted with relief, felt himself collapse into Donghyuck, throwing his arms around him.

“Oh!” Donghyuck startled before tentatively resting his hands on Doyoung’s waist. “Hyung, what’s going on?”

Doyoung, from where he was nestled into Donghyuck’s neck, could only huff out a laugh. “A lot.”

“Doyoung, I’m serious. Johnny says you’ve been calling off from work. That you’re not eating.”

The distressed tone in Donghyuck’s voice surprised Doyoung. Had he worried him that much? He didn’t think it’d gotten that bad. Doyoung reluctantly withdrew himself from the sanctity of Donghyuck’s arms and let Donghyuck scrutinize him.

Donghyuck carefully traced over every feature on Doyoung’s face before he scanned his room, frowning at the general state of his piles of dirty laundry, unkempt bed, etc. Then, Donghyuck’s eyes suddenly widened, and Doyoung followed his gaze to his desk. His desk where Curses, Misfires, and Spells Gone Wrong was left open, the sheer size of it overtaking the entire surface. The page it was open to was the chapter on dark magic, and the chapter title, unambiguously named, “DARK MAGIC,” was plastered very visibly across it in massive, cursive font, because of course it was.

“I can, uh, I can explain that?”

“You better! With what you’ve put me through these past two weeks, you better have prepared a dissertation on whatever’s been going on with you! You’re not allowed to stop talking until I personally award you a doctorate in ‘Minding Donghyuck’s Sanity!’”

Doyoung huffed out a weak laugh. The relief he was still feeling in Donghyuck’s presence was making him completely boneless. “I tell you anything you want to know, but can we lie down?”

That’s how Doyoung ended up curled up in his twin-sized bed, facing Donghyuck, who made himself at home in the sunbeam falling across Doyoung’s bed easily, like he belonged here.

“Tell me what’s going on?” Donghyuck asked gently, covering Doyoung’s hand with his own.

Well, it was now or never, wasn’t it?

“First of all…” Breathe in, breathe out. “I’m a witch.”

Donghyuck let out an adorable little gasp despite literally witnessing Doyoung perform magic a couple weeks ago. Cute. “Since when?

“My whole life. I grew up in a coven. It wasn’t a…particularly nice place to grow up. I ran away when I was 16. Writing those runes with you at the river, that was the first time I’d done magic in a very long time. I tried again when I got home, and, well—” Doyoung splayed out his palm in explanation.

Donghyuck gasped again and grabbed Doyoung’s hand. He gently ran his thumb over the runes, much like Yuta had done when he saw it, but when Donghyuck touched the runes, Doyoung nearly jumped. A jolt of electricity shot through his body at the contact, and judging by the look on Donghyuck’s face, he felt it too.

“What was that?” Donghyuck whispered, awed.

Doyoung…didn’t really know. “The magic, I guess.”

He and Donghyuck sat like that for a moment, curled in towards each other, Doyoung’s hand in Donghyuck’s, his magic humming in his veins, pleased for once.

“So, you’ve been holed up in here not eating because you’ve got a magic rune on your hand?” Donghyuck said finally, rubbing slow, careful circles over the runes.

“Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that. The coven I was in, they practiced dark magic.” Donghyuck let out yet another dramatic gasp, and Doyoung laughed in spite of himself. “This rune was cast with dark magic. I don’t really know how to make it go away. There aren’t really any other practitioners of dark magic in the city that I know of to consult. It seems pretty harmless now, all things considered, but I’m nervous. Dark magic never acts up like this without a purpose.”

Donghyuck considered that briefly. “Chenle hasn’t said as much, but I get the impression that the kind of magic he does is not exactly kosher. I can text him; maybe he can help?”

“Who’s Chenle?”

“My witch friend! Oh no, you were a witch this whole time! You must’ve thought I was so ridiculous! You should have said something!”

Doyoung smirked. “Yeah, but you were so cute.”

Donghyuck curled his face into yet another enormous pout, and Doyoung laughed at the force of it. “Thanks for coming to see me. It’s a lot better, just having you here.”

Donghyuck’s face softened into the shy look that Doyoung still wasn’t used to seeing on him, the same one he’d had in the bookstore that day, asking about the weather. “You know I’m here for you for anything, even magic curses. And hey, maybe Chenle knows all about dark magic and can fix you up in no time.”

Explaining to a random witch that he used to be in a necromancer coven was probably his worst fear come to life. It must have shown on his face, because the next thing Donghyuck said was, “It’s okay, Hyung,” tone light, but teasing. “You can hold my hand the whole time.”

-

“You’ll love him, Hyung,” Donghyuck said, cheerful as always, swinging their entwined hands between them absentmindedly. Doyoung still wasn’t so sure, but he’d gotten this far trusting Donghyuck, and it didn’t seem like he was going to stop anytime soon.

In the past couple days, Doyoung had spent as much time as possible with Donghyuck. His presence soothed the aura of dread that emanated from his cursed palm, which just seemed to amplify each time they were apart. Donghyuck had picked up on how much better his mood got when they were holding hands, so they held hands a lot. A lot a lot. Johnny had started wriggling his eyebrows at them while they sat on the couch cuddled into each other, but Doyoung was an expert at ignoring Johnny and thus had spent much of his time putting that expert skill to use.

The respite that Doyoung felt holding Donghyuck’s hand did little to tamp down the uncertainty he had at meeting Donghyuck’s mysterious new witch friend, though. They walked through the door of Donghyuck’s university library. Stacks of books towered towards the ceilings in every corner of the lobby, and the ceilings were just short enough that Doyoung felt them looming overhead. It was honestly quite a feat for a building so large to feel so claustrophobic inside. Donghyuck waved at the librarians behind the main desk as he pulled Doyoung along, making a sharp left at the elevators and instead heading through an unassuming door that Doyoung probably would’ve walked right passed. The door led to a fairly innocuous-looking staircase, except the stairs only went down, not up.

Donghyuck laughed at the look on Doyoung’s face. “I know it’s kind of sketchy, but this is where all the magic books are, so.”

They took the stairs down one floor, two floors, three floors before there were no more stairs, and they walked through a dusty-looking doorway three levels underneath the lobby.

If the ground floor was claustrophobic, basement level three was positively suffocating. The ceiling and its occasional fluorescent light were even shorter, only several centimeters above the top of Doyoung’s head, and unlike the ground floor, which was bustling with activity, there wasn’t another soul in sight. Donghyuck took them about the room, which seemed to go on forever, before they turned a corner and came to a small study area nearly completely enclosed by bookcases. At the lone table, there was a kid, younger-looking than Donghyuck, with faded pink-red streaks in his shaggy black hair. He was still wearing that same long, expensive, black coat, and the damp, purple aura, which had been so faint before, was stronger now, drifting off of him in clear, distinct lines.

It was the necromancy kid. Donghyuck’s witch friend was the necromancy kid, because of course he was. Every hair on Doyoung’s body stood straight up when they made eye contact.

Relax, Doyoung told himself, trying to tamp down the panic rising in his throat. This kid was Donghyuck’s friend, right? He wasn’t going to call up Doyoung’s old coven and tell on him. Probably.

“Hi, I’m Chenle! You must be Doyoung? Donghyuck’s told me so much about you.”

Doyoung distractedly watched Donghyuck shoot Chenle a death glare. Chenle snickered and Donghyuck just huffed, releasing Doyoung’s hand to sit down across from Chenle at the table. Doyoung instantly mourned the loss.

“Hi Chenle,” Doyoung started, cautiously sitting down next to Donghyuck, “I confess, Donghyuck hasn’t told me much about you.”

Chenle pouted, fiercely enough to match one of Donghyuck’s and whined, “Hyung,” at Donghyuck, who stuck his tongue out at him. Chenle rolled his eyes and turned back towards Doyoung.

“Donghyuck told me you cursed yourself with dark magic?”

Well, so much for subtlety. “Ah, yeah, something like that.” Doyoung clumsily launched into a brief explanation, laying his hand down on the table palm-up. Chenle thankfully didn’t question how he managed to accidentally use dark magic while casting something as simple as a rune, though his eyebrows certainly shot up.

“Okay,” Chenle tapped a pen against his lips while he contemplated Doyoung’s dilemma. “I think first we need to think about what kind of intent your magic had when you cast the rune. Dark magic is obviously known for being nefarious, but in my experience, it’s more mischievous than anything. It was probably trying to mess with you more than actually trying to curse you, considering you’ve not had that many deleterious effects so far.”

Doyoung exhaled. That was a very normal suggestion. It was more or less what Doyoung had been thinking for the last couple of weeks, but this kid was clearly a bit more up to snuff than he was, as he started jotting down ideas immediately. Maybe he would actually be able to help. Doyoung let himself relax, however minutely.

“So, you’ve got kenaz and raido. What were your intentions when you cast them?”

Doyoung glanced towards Donghyuck, who was looking at them with deep fascination. “I, um, ‘sun,’ for kenaz and, well,” might as well be honest! “I was thinking about Donghyuck for raido.”

Chenle’s eyebrows instantly shot up. He fixed Doyoung with a positively frightening look of glee. “Oh? Were you now?”

Doyoung failed to stop the blush from rising on his cheeks. “Uh—yeah.”

“Wait, Doyoung, you thought of me? What does that mean?”

“It means you’re his destiny,” Chenle giggled.

Donghyuck’s cheeks turned bright red. “Doyoung, what’s he talking about?”

Doyoung’s was about as close to spontaneously combusting as a person could possibly be. This was absolutely not the right time to have this conversation. “Donghyuck, do you want to go upstairs and get us some snacks?”

“Kim Doyoung, absolutely not! Tell me about our destiny this instant!”

Doyoung buried his red face in his hands. “Donghyuck, please.”

Donghyuck sighed and excused himself to go visit the vending machines in the lobby, muttering, “This isn’t over,” under his breath.

The door to the staircase shut loudly, and the reverberation made all of the fluorescent lights in the basement flicker. Within seconds after his departure, Doyoung felt the dread start to slowly seep back into him.

“Right,” Chenle said as soon as Donghyuck was out of the room, “so whatever destiny you’ve got that involves Donghyuck, you’ll probably have to fulfill it to make this go away.”

Doyoung sighed. That’s more or less exactly what Yuta had said. “Yeah, that’s what I was afraid of.”

Even though Donghyuck had only been gone for maybe two minutes at most, the aura of dark magic was already starting to pick back up around him, and Doyoung fidgeted with unease. Donghyuck’s effect of easing the strain his curse put on him was wearing off faster and faster each time they parted, and it was starting to stress him out. Doyoung was just thinking that maybe he should invite Donghyuck to just sleep over when Chenle’s eyes shot up to stare directly at him.

Oh no.

Chenle fixed Doyoung with the most intense look he’d ever been on the receiving end of, and that was saying something, considering all the time he’d spent with Donghyuck. “Doyoung,” he said, eyes raking him up and down slowly, “you don’t happen to know anything about necromancy, do you?”

“I, uh—”

“They had honey butter chips!” Donghyuck reappeared, tossing three bags onto the library table.

“I, actually, I have to leave—”

“Doyoung—” Donghyuck said at the same time Chenle said, “Wait—”

But Doyoung had already fled, dread overrunning from both the palm of his hand and the pit of his stomach.

-

Doyoung ran as far as he could, but considering he’d spent the last two weeks holed up in his room, barely moving, it turned out that as far as he could run was not very far at all. He stopped barely a kilometer from the library, hands on his knees, panting heavily as he tried in vain to catch his breath, the moon shining ominously above him.

After a few moments, he stood up straight only to realize that he was barely a block away from the cross street that his bookstore was on. Excellent, he needed somewhere to go ASAP because people were starting to look at him kind of funny. He dug in his pockets to pull out his keys and ignored the burning in his lungs as he jogged over to the main door of the building that he spent most of his time in. After climbing the two flights of stairs, he nearly collapsed right outside the door of the bookstore, but he managed to unlock it and collapse right inside it instead.

Doyoung took the time he spent on the floor of his workplace to contemplate how his life somehow came to this. He ran away as a teenager hoping to never have to interact with magic ever again, and he’d been successful for a decade, but somehow, in the last month, he’d gone from not having done magic in ten years to cursing himself with his own magic in just a couple of days.

He cursed himself with fucking runes, of all things.

Donghyuck. It all really came back to Donghyuck. Donghyuck smiled his beautiful, unassuming smile, and Doyoung protested but always ultimately did anything he asked, even, apparently, magic. Maybe Doyoung should have been a little bit more honest with himself about how he felt about him. Funny, stunning, incomparable Lee Donghyuck, who walked into his and Johnny’s apartment shortly after Doyoung had moved in and demanded that Johnny introduce them, barging into Doyoung’s life and making himself right at home. Donghyuck, who lit up any room he walked into like the sun, who made Doyoung feel like he was the most important person in any room.

Yeah, Doyoung was in love with Donghyuck.

If Doyoung had gotten his head out of his ass a few days ago and been more honest with himself about his feelings, maybe he wouldn’t have gotten into this mess. Or maybe it didn’t matter, and he still would have. There was little point in speculating about anything except what kind of destiny with Donghyuck he was going to have to fulfill to get this thick, dark cloud away from him.

Hopefully, Donghyuck wanted their entangled destiny, too.

Doyoung couldn’t say how long he laid on the floor of the bookstore, contemplating his fate. It could have been five minutes or five hours, but sometime later, a knock on the door made him jerk out of his reprieve.

Donghyuck was at the door, giving Doyoung the saddest eyes he’d ever seen. Doyoung smiled in spite of himself. Leave it to Donghyuck to have the most adorable pleading face in existence.

“Not like you to knock,” he said after crawling to his feet and letting him in.

“Well, I don’t think I could have opened the door without bashing your head in, with the way you were lying on the ground.”

“Ah, good point.”

Donghyuck looked at Doyoung for a moment, face serious before he sighed and relaxed into a small, unsure smile. He sat down on the floor, back against the checkout counter and patted the carpet next to him. Doyoung wordlessly joined him.

“So, do you want to tell me what’s going on? For real this time?”

Doyoung took a deep breath in.

“Well, the coven I ran away from—it was a necromancer coven.” Doyoung paused to look at Haechan’s face, but unlike the shock it’d shown when he’d first confessed to being a witch, it remained impassive. “The things they did were…not very nice, as I’m sure you can imagine. People who want to mess with death are not the best people, and the leaders of the coven were the worst of them. I’m not sure where they got their supply of bodies from, but we often did business with people who had bad intentions, raising dead slaves to do their bidding, that sort of thing. It was a dark life. I ran away and vowed never to do magic again, but then you came along,” Doyoung turned from where he’d been looking at his feet and gave Donghyuck crooked smile, counting the moles on his face, “and I forgot what it was that I’d been so afraid of.”

Donghyuck gave him a wide-eyed look. It was a hopeful expression, and Doyoung couldn’t help but feel that whatever their destiny was, it was going to work out somehow.

“Doyoung,” Donghyuck stuttered, the glow of his expression softening into something warm.

Doyoung soundlessly leaned his head against Donghyuck’s shoulder. They sat just like that for several minutes while Doyoung breathed in Donghyuck’s scent. It was a nice scent. Everything about Donghyuck was nice, even when he was being a menace.

Donghyuck’s phone chimed, breaking the silence. “Oh,” he said without looking at it, “Chenle’s really sorry for scaring you. He says he doesn’t have any ill-intentions, and he has something he really wants to explain. Is it okay if he comes over?”

Doyoung thought about it. He didn’t particularly want to talk to this random kid about his necromancer past, but the cat was already out of the bag, wasn’t it? After all, wasn’t it possible that Chenle was in a similar situation, looking for a friend?

“Yeah, alright. Tell Chenle to come over.”

Donghyuck shot Doyoung a genuine smile and tapped away at his phone.

Chenle arrived a short while later, knocking on the glass door under the light of the moon. He was jumping up and down on the balls of his feet in a fit of nervous excitement, and trailing behind him was another kid, someone Doyoung had definitely never seen before. The new kid looked anxious. Donghyuck opened the door to let them in.

If Chenle had smelt of dark magic, it was nothing compared to the dark rivulets of hot, damp, purple coming off of this kid in paralyzingly heavy waves.

He wasn’t a necromancer. He was undead.

Doyoung shot up to his feet and stepped in front of Donghyuck, putting his arm out in front of him.

Chenle put his hands up. “Wait—"

“Doyoung, what?” Donghyuck startled.

“What’s going on?” Doyoung demanded. He pushed Donghyuck further behind him.

The undead looked down at him, gray eyes sad and pleading. “I need your help.”

-

Park Jisung was an 18-year-old kid when he died about a year ago. He’d died in a rather meager car accident that really, by all accounts of his injuries, he ought to have survived, but it happened in the dead of night in the middle of nowhere, and by the time anyone saw it to call an ambulance, he’d already bled out. It was a very long and painful death, by his recollection. He didn’t remember the bits in between dying and becoming undead, of course, but after he closed his eyes for the last time, he opened them up again in an open field in the center of a pentagram. In a spectacularly botched rising, Park Jisung’s soul was not completely severed from his reanimated corpse, as the necromancer had intended, but it was also not tethered to it particularly strongly.

In a sense, his soul was a piece of paper flapping in the wind, tied to his undead body by a frayed kite string.

The original necromancer, after realizing his error, attempted to kill Jisung, but killing an undead, especially one with a soul of its own, is not so simple a task. Jisung spent the next couple of weeks wandering through the woods until he happened across Chenle, who, much like Doyoung was so many years ago, was looking for frogs by the river. The two of them then spent the last year or so searching for a necromancer who could tie Jisung’s soul back down to his body properly, but necromancers are very hard to come by if you don’t know where to look. They hadn’t found a single lead until Donghyuck brought Doyoung right to them. They begged Doyoung to help, like, properly begged on their knees.

Now Doyoung had to figure out how to stage a soul-binding ritual in the middle of Seoul, 10 years out of any sort of necromancy practice. Easy.

“So, what was that?” Donghyuck asked, hip cocked up against the counter after Chenle and Jisung had left in a flurry of grateful tears and bows.

“Hmm? The soul-binding ritual?”

“No, I mean the part where you threw yourself in front of me like a sexy bodyguard,” Donghyuck said, wriggling his eyebrows.

Oh. Blood rushed to Doyoung’s face. “I, uh—”

“Doyoung,” Donghyuck stepped directly into Doyoung’s space, “I don’t think I could be more obvious if I tried, and believe me, I have been trying.” He ran a hand up Doyoung’s arm to the side of his face and cupped his cheek gently. “Besides, we’ve got all this destiny to fulfill, don’t we?”

Then, Donghyuck leaned in and kissed him, and the world around them stopped. The whisper of Doyoung’s magic, which had been thrumming under the surface of his skin ever since he cursed himself, suddenly became a roar, a rushing in his ears, and his body tingled all over as the euphoria of it rushed through him. It felt like every molecule in Doyoung’s body was touching every molecule of Donghyuck’s. It felt like the sun was shining out of every one of his pores.

It felt like magic.

Donghyuck pulled away, eyes wide, as if he’d felt the same thing that Doyoung had. He probably did; Doyoung had long given up on trying to understand the whims of magic, his or otherwise.

“Wow,” Doyoung whispered, before he wrapped his arms around Donghyuck and pulled him back down for another kiss.

Doyoung kissed Donghyuck, and it was better than any magic in the world.

-

It wasn’t until Doyoung got home that he realized that the rune on his hand was gone.

His magic certainly had a funny sense of humor.

-

“Hmm, what was the phase of the moon when the spell was cast?” Doyoung murmured, crouched over a massive diagram of a pentagram on the floor of Yuta’s shop, Donghyuck draped over his back like a particularly cuddly shawl. Yuta had been positively delighted when Doyoung told him his official return to magic was going to start with a classic soul-binding spell and had offered his shop for all of Doyoung’s necromantic purposes. He’d been more than a little disappointed when Doyoung told him that the actual ritual would have to take place outside.

“Um, the full moon, I think?” Jisung scratched his head adorably. He was very unlike any undead that Doyoung had ever interacted with before. Even the ones that had kept their souls were usually a little odd; Stiff, like they didn’t quite know how to move their muscles, and slow, like every once in a while, they couldn’t remember exactly where they were or how they got there. Jisung came across as almost a completely normal kid, except for the gray-tinged skin.

And there was the thing where, when his soul pulled away from him, tilting on its axis, he couldn’t stop vomiting. Yeah, that was definitely unfortunate.

“Well, there’s half your trouble, at least. Most necromancy spells are cast with the power of the moon, but doing it during the full moon relies too much on the natural power of the moon and its influence on dark magic. It’s more unpredictable that way. If it’s done during the new moon, the spell is less powerful, but the magic isn’t in control of it.” Doyoung looked up from where he’d been scribbling notes down on the bottom of the diagram to see Donghyuck, Chenle, and Jisung looking back at him, hanging off his every word.

“Wow, Hyung, you’re so smart,” Chenle said, stars in his eyes. Doyoung fought the urge to laugh in his face.

“We can do the rebinding spell during the next new moon. Whoever did this seemed to mostly know what they were doing, so I shouldn’t have to redo too much of it, just kind of solidify everything.”

Doyoung put his pencil down and studied the diagram. It was a little complicated, but it was also fairly standard, and the incantations definitely hadn’t changed in the last ten years. He was going to do it. He was actually going to do necromancy again.

“What was it like growing up in a necromancer coven?” Chenle asked when Doyoung announced that all the preparations were essentially complete, and all that there was left to do was wait for the new moon.

Donghyuck stiffened from where he was draped all over Doyoung. “He doesn’t like talking about it,” he snapped protectively, curling an arm around his shoulders.

Wow, that was kind of hot.

“He never knew love as a child! He spent all his days hefting dead bodies around the compound! They made fun of him for being scared of the dark!” Yuta called out from where he’d been watching Doyoung from on top of the counter, legs swinging joyfully.

Doyoung sighed and ran a hand over his face while Chenle and Jisung giggled. “Thank you, Yuta, for your contribution.”

“I can’t believe Doyoung’s been hiding you away this whole time,” Donghyuck said, eyes glinting over towards Yuta. Oh no, that was a friendship he was definitely going to have to nip in the bud.

“Anyway!” Doyoung said loudly, “we can all reconvene here next Thursday afternoon, when the next new moon should be. We’ll probably have to drive out of the city to find a spot where no one will call the cops on us for drawing a pentagram on the ground outside their apartment building.”

“I can drive! My parents have a car I can borrow,” Yuta chipped in, and Doyoung gave him an exasperated look. “What? If you think I’m missing your glorious return to the world of magic, you’re dead wrong, Mr. Kim.”

“Plus,” Yuta said, eyes dangerous, “Donghyuck and I have a lot to catch up on.”

-

“I’ll be out today, by the way. I’m going out with Donghyuck,” Doyoung called out on the evening of the new moon. Johnny had been unwaveringly supportive of his relationship with his little brother’s best friend, almost suspiciously, like he’d known something that Doyoung didn’t. Doyoung tried not to think that it was because he’d been painfully transparent about how in love with Donghyuck he’d been.

Johnny just hummed from where he sat at the kitchen table, typing away at his laptop, but when Doyoung walked past him, he suddenly perked up.

“Oh, your curse thing is gone! How’d you cure it?”

Doyoung stopped dead in his tracks. “Uh, hah, what are you talking about?”

“Ten did a reading the other day and saw a dark cloud over you. He said you were cursed. Won’t say I noticed before he told me, but after I could kinda tell. It was just a little bit dimmer whenever you were around.”

Doyoung had absolutely no idea what to say to that, so he didn’t say anything.

“What did you do? How did you cure it? Ten said that it was a funny sort of curse.”

Doyoung laughed in spite of himself.

“I cured it with true love’s first kiss.”

-

The soul-binding ritual went like this:

Yuta made Doyoung sit in the back of the car, and let Donghyuck sit shotgun. They spent the entire 50-minute drive gossiping about Doyoung while Doyoung sat squished in between Chenle and Jisung. Chenle chattered away happily, asking Doyoung approximately one million questions about necromancy and dark magic. Jisung spent most of the ride trying not to throw up.

When they got to a place that seemed reasonably far enough away from civilization to perform dark magic in the middle of the night, Doyoung got to work setting up the pentagram. Jisung was stupidly tall, so it had to be quite big for him to be able to lie down in it fully. Donghyuck, as enamored with magic as he’d always been, ooh’d and ah’d at everything Doyoung did, which made it extremely nerve-wracking to attempt to draw several perfect concentric circles by hand. When the pentagram was finally finished, Doyoung gestured for Jisung to lie down in it. Jisung threw up.

Doyoung took a deep breath. He pulled a switchblade out of his pocket. Chenle was elated to get the chance to donate his blood to a necromantic ritual, and sliced his hand open and gleefully wiped his blood all over Jisung’s face. After that, it was just a matter of saying the incantations with the right intentions at the right time.

The new moon was indistinguishable in the night sky, but Doyoung felt it pulling at him as he chanted. He hadn’t done anything even close to this magnitude of magic in ten years, but somehow, he felt more in tune with his magic than ever before. A breeze blew through the grass at his feet, tickling the ends of his magic, and Doyoung grinned.

The pentagram glowed a bright purple, and the temperature dropped by several degrees. The air suddenly became sticky, humid, and a feeling of anticipation crawled over Doyoung’s skin. He guided his magic to Jisung’s soul and pulled with all his might, with the power of the moon.

Then, it was over.

Jisung sat up and wiped the blood off his face with a disgusted look. Then, he stopped. He turned to Doyoung with wide, tearful eyes and said, “It worked.”

They all cleaned up the site of the ritual as best they could and piled back into Yuta’s car. Chenle had even more questions than he did on the ride there. Jisung, face smeared with dried blood, kept looking at his hands in awe. Doyoung tried to ignore the buzz of his phone in his pocket, undoubtedly Donghyuck texting him lewd things from the front seat.

When Donghyuck and Doyoung got back to Doyoung’s apartment, Donghyuck wasted no time, immediately pressing Doyoung against the door and kissing him hungrily.

“That was so hot,” Donghyuck said before diving back in. Doyoung laughed into the kiss.

“What,” he managed to say between Donghyuck’s rather insistent kisses, “the part where Chenle got his blood on my shirt, or the part where Jisung threw up?”

“The part where my super sexy boyfriend performed a super sexy complicated necromancy ritual and looked super sexy while doing it.”

Donghyuck pulled Doyoung towards him and kissed him deeply, untucking Doyoung’s shirt from his pants and effectively cutting off intelligent conversation for the rest of the night.

Except—

“You’re my destiny,” Doyoung said somewhere between the door and the bedroom. “You know that right?”

Donghyuck huffed, slightly irritated at being interrupted during his very important task of unbuttoning Doyoung’s shirt. “Kim Doyoung, obviously I’m your destiny. Now save that for the post-coital cuddling and take off your pants.”

Doyoung did not have to be told twice.