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Chapter Text

There were few places as entertaining to be as the spot next to the perplexity that was Han Yoojin.

But as Hyunjae glided behind wispy cloud cover hundreds of feet above the F-ranker embarking on his newest semi-suicidal venture, this was just as interesting. Yoojin had taken on a dungeon with nothing to protect him but Peace and his delightfully unfathomable sense of near-lethal confidence. Witnessing trouble in the paradise of the Han brotherhood over Yoojin’s ridiculous insistence on entering the dungeon alone was not as entertaining as the young master folding to his hyung’s will but privately contacting Hyunjae to tail him.

With such an opportunity to see what the odd little F-ranker was up to now, Hyunjae couldn’t possibly turn it down even if the young master insisted on a grossly one-sided contract. His right arm was at stake should Yoojin find out about Hyunjae’s tracking him, but Hyunjae found the price well worth it when he was being treated to the show of Yoojin trekking through miles of dense woodland before scrambling up over ten thousand feet of near-vertical mountainous terrain. The added S-rank materials as payment wasn’t bad either.

Moreover, Hyunjae got to witness some more curious things from Yoojin. He carried some lower-rank items with him, such as E-rank dual swords that weren’t much use for anything but low-rank stone monsters, but Yoojin repurposed them into climbing picks. It wasn’t the experience or skill that he should have considering he’d only been working as a hunter for around three years, according to his background checks. Yet Yoojin handled the swords like he knew exactly what their limits and capabilities were—like he’d used them in this way plenty of times before.

It felt like Hyunjae was learning some secret of Yoojin’s, of which he seemed to have an infinite amount. It was an endless hobby of Hyunjae’s, unraveling the little absurdity that only seemed to get stranger and stranger with each layer. At first it made Hyunjae impatient to cut straight through to see what could possibly lie at Yoojin’s core, but now he’d much rather study each ridiculously interesting side of the F-ranker. After all, if he’d successfully captured and accomplished the impossible feat of containing Yoojin, he would never get to witness him attempt to complete a dungeon not just alone but on a shoestring budget to boot. The F-class had been reduced to using earth-sourced materials and actually following through with lugging it across several dozen miles, displaying unusual economy and efficiency with such an archaic quality of dungeon gear.

The past couple days had supplied plenty of puzzle pieces about Yoojin, but the complete picture of him eluded Hyunjae when there seemed to be an unending amount of pieces to gather and decipher. Hyunjae enjoyed working them out even if he never received any conclusive answers from the man himself.

Despite Hyunjae engaging in nearly three days of constant surveillance from the skies, this deal was roundly productive for him. The novelty of the quiet cloud mist made for a decent working environment. He’d finished a decent amount of reading as he watched Yoojin spend hours trying and failing to find the mana stone he'd dropped in a lake while Peace stood aloof, unimpressed with his master for only bringing the barest minimum of rations for this trip.

It helped that there was nothing necessarily dangerous about the dungeon as of now. It was a C-rank dungeon Yoojin dug up from Unfilial-knew-where, so everything inside it could barely provide a light snack for Peace. Neither did there seem to be any S-ranked gifts sent from the Filial Piety Addicts.

Though that didn’t mean Hyunjae wasn’t paying close attention when Yoojin finally reached the summit—or rather, Peace dragged him up by the scruff—because there had to be something worth all of Yoojin’s time and trouble. 

Hyunjae had to descend a couple hundred meters to observe more clearly, but he made sure to keep downwind of Peace and remain out of sight. It was easier to remain concealed when the clouds thickened at the summit but somewhat more difficult to see exactly what was unfolding. 

The summit was unnaturally flat. As in the rugged vertical face of the mountain suddenly plateaued off into flat ground as if someone took a blade to the mountain and made a clean horizontal cut. The summit seemed to be roughly circular, too, but it was a couple miles in diameter. The top was mostly bare stone, some lichens and hardy trees and shrubbery clinging to the fractures of stone, but at the very center of the summit was a small glow. 

Something warm and bright and flickering, like someone left a small campfire there. 

Curiously, the cloud vapors seemed to swirl even more thickly around it as if drawn to the little drop of warmth in this cold slice of atmosphere. Yoojin also approached without a hint of caution, incomprehensibly confident in the lack of danger in such a suspicious place. 

Hyunjae had to draw in closer and activate his Broscin coat—one of the pieces of high quality dungeon loot that the young master offered in return for this favor. It blanketed him in a thick layer of mana, masking his presence and all tangible trace of him, even from S-ranked creatures like Peace. 

Yoojin reached the edge of the small bubble of opaque, swarming cloud vapor encasing the flame within. The diameter of the sphere had to be at least fifteen feet in diameter. The only thing one could see within was a faint glow and nothing else—even with Hyunjae’s superior senses. The fact that Hyunjae couldn’t perceive what was inside should have been cause for concern in itself, but Yoojin ordered Peace to remain outside and dropped his bags on the ground. He stepped inside without a beat of hesitation. 

Hyunjae had to rush down to step in with him, ready to summon his chains or his resistance potions in the rare case Yoojin’s intuition turned out to be wrong. 

He stepped foot inside and was engulfed in some cloying scent of incense. Near instantly, his senses started to slip out of place. His sense of direction skewed as if the incense was slowly tugging at the ribbon holding his senses together.

“You have been inflicted with the C-class Savastra’s Curse. You will suffer from transmogrification.”

Hyunjae read the text in a daze even as his wits were disorganizing as if the incense was starting to seep into his thoughts and begin to obscure the expanse of his mind, too. A flex of his fist spiked mana into the curse and poison resistance ring beneath his gloves. 

“C-class or higher resistances are ineffective against Savastra’s Curse.”

He blinked and redirected his focus on grabbing Yoojin and leaving. 

Perhaps if Hyunjae were an S-rank like the young lady Bak Yerim or his colleague Moon Hyuna, he could tolerate this better. It would no doubt just register to them as being slightly tipsy or just being somewhat loopy, but everything Hyunjae tried to mentally reach for just seemed to turn to smoke even though it would’ve been trivial for him to recall it otherwise. He tried to remember which direction he was facing but failed. All he could see was the fire’s glow and the thick vapor walls of floral incense. 

“Savastra’s curse is intensifying!”

As he hastened closer, he could see the faint shape of Yoojin only cut out by the light of the fire.

Hyunjae stepped closer, trying and failing to reason on whether he should trust his hunch that Yoojin knew exactly what he was doing or whether he should trust his instinct to seize him anyway and take him to safety. The fog was muddling his line of reasoning, and his split-second of hesitation might just be fatal.

The decision was robbed from him the moment Yoojin reached for the flames that flared open brilliantly and—

When the light receded, Hyunjae was so lost in disarray, he wasn’t quite sure whether he was alive. His mind had always been carefully organized, the finest details fixed in place and the steady flows of it ran in defined courses. The slightest upset was easily noticed—even the disturbances caused by a certain F-class’s activities—so Hyunjae didn’t know what to make of the fact his senses and body were all so drastically altered.

Hyunjae spent a stunned couple of seconds puzzling through a few shocking observations about his newfound situation and came to a single unimpeachable conclusion.

He was now a cat.

Hyunjae had once again confirmed that nowhere else was more interesting than the spot just beside Han Yoojin.

A few more moments of internal inventory revealed that the well of mana he once spun lightning from seemed to have been paved over, as if the ocean of it were never there. Hyunjae registered this with some concern but mostly fascination.

He lifted his head, burying his chin into the lush crest of blonde fur at his chest. He moved his paws, the sensitive five pads giving him a completely new type of input as they dragged across stone. It was cold but had a decent friction which could be improved if he flexed his paw and—unsheathed his claws.

Observing the strange novelty of having rather weak weapons instead of appendages at the ends of his hands, Hyunjae tried to organize himself into standing properly. Setting four paws under him, he also found his tail naturally swishing behind him to balance his shifting weight. Similarly alien was the sensitivity of his ears which were now situated on top of his head and constantly adjusting as he took in sound.

Hyunjae took all of one step forward before something odd started to happen. His back started to prickle—upward—until his fur started to spike, his spine raising to add more height. Hyunjae tried to decipher what his feline body was responding to until he realized that he was listening to the sounds of Peace in his colossal form prowling just outside. 

Ah, Hyunjae realized with the habitual satisfaction of resolving a question, he was afraid of confronting a stronger feline rival.

He tried anyway to make himself move forward, but Peace seemed to notice him, too. His ears twitched as they picked up Peace’s inquisitive sniff, just beyond the barrier. Then, the scrape of a massive paw that had to have been the size of Hyunjae himself.

Considering that the atmosphere no longer gathered and fizzled at the surface of his skin when he bade it to do so, Hyunjae was in the utterly exceptional situation of being clueless as to the next course of action. Normally he would have some strategy in mind, but he was in uncharted territory altogether when his normally well-maintained mental landscape was replaced with random feline impulses.

The tip of his tail flicked, seeming to mirror his intense deliberations.

Considering he had very little at his disposal and confronting a fire manticore that hadn’t been fed for a couple days, Hyunjae accordingly changed tactics. He turned and marched deeper into the flower-scented madness until he saw the outline of an ankle.

He pawed at Yoojin’s shoe.

The F-class jumped away from him, reflexes instantly bringing his hands to his pitifully weak swords, but his eyes locked with Hyunjae’s with pure bafflement. 

Hyunjae tried to approach again, but he saw the way Yoojin’s eyes narrow in suspicion, so he stopped in place, forced to execute his newest tactic.

He mewed. Flopped on the floor like he was expecting to be pet.

It would’ve been somewhat degrading to Hyunjae if Yoojin hadn’t instantly fallen for it.

Yoojin threw away all of that fine-tuned experience and instinct to dive to his knees at the sight of a docile, fluffy cat. “Oh, my God , what’s a little kitty doing here?”

The little kitty, Hyunjae amusedly supposed, was him. He was sure that Yoojin was a cat person judging by how he treated Peace, but he hadn’t expected him to be this utterly weak to them.

He reached a loosely closed hand toward Hyunjae’s face but stopped just shy of touching him. Hyunjae wasn’t sure what was happening until he realized Yoojin was offering his scent first.

Hyunjae obliged but found no real difference in what he already knew.

Yoojin took Hyunjae’s interest as consent to reach for his face.

Flinching backward, Yoojin took notice with a small frown. “Aw, you don’t like pets? Well, I guess you are feral. Let’s take a look at your profile, little guy.”

Hyunjae froze, but he had nowhere to run when Yoojin’s eyes were already defocusing and seeming to see something else. Instead of having his arm implode with lethal magics, all that came of Yoojin’s glance through was a small frown. He read aloud, “Domestic longhair? You’re just a regular cat?”

Hyunjae couldn’t participate much in the conversation beyond just staring up at him. 

“But you’re S-class. And you don’t even have any skills?” His brows furrowed, and the mind working behind it was beginning to pull apart a puzzle with rather extreme stakes for Hyunjae.

Once again resorting to what seemed to be Hyunjae’s only card, he sauntered forward and brushed against Yoojin’s ankle in the way that cats seemed to do as a kind of affection.

Predictably, all of Yoojin’s contemplations flew out the window, and he crouched down to coo, “Oh, my god , you’re so adorable.”

 Once again Yoojin reached for his head again, and Hyunjae forced himself to accept the palm sliding over his forehead and the top of his head. Baffled at how to receive such a touch, it was probably a bigger shock to discover he had more nerve endings there. It was the space where cats often groomed their young, and Yoojin’s thumb somehow tickled that feline instinct with strokes that mimicked a cat’s tongue. Hyunjae’s mind seemed to be sucked into the soothing sensation with a near primal strength, and the only thing that could break the thrall was Yoojin lovingly gushing, “Who are you, little guy? Are you the Light of Savastra?” 

Hyunjae remembered himself and jerked away from Yoojin’s hand. 

Recalling his broader mission, Hyunjae glanced around until he saw a faint glimmer of light overhead. Momentarily borrowing Yoojin’s shoulders, Hyunjae clambered up, his tail swinging behind him to keep balance, and leapt to catch the necklace floating overhead.

Bringing the item to Yoojin’s feet was a calculated move. Firstly, the contract was still in effect, so for now Hyunjae needed to hide his true identity and masquerade as an item. Secondly, he needed a guarantee that Yoojin would remain committed to protecting him while Hyunjae was indisposed. Thirdly, if Hyunjae brought him the item, Yoojin would smile and pet him.

Hyunjae paused at the third rationale and dodged away from Yoojin's seeking hand. By all accounts, it seemed to have arisen naturally from his mind. This was alarming.

And interesting.

Chapter Text

Although this situation was incredibly novel, Hyunjae had qualms about fully adopting the role of a housepet, so he would rather preserve some human dignity by not fully submitting to petting. After dropping the amulet at his feet, Hyunjae sat a particular distance away from Yoojin who looked disappointed but also startlingly determined. Hyunjae was getting a dim idea of what new resolve Yoojin found when he stated, “Alright, fine. But you’re coming home with me. And you’re gonna like it.”

Even if Hyunjae was able to speak, he wasn’t sure he would be capable of more than a stunned silence and a few blinks.

Yoojin scooped up the necklace, and the bubble of opaque smoke burst. The cold mountainous winds ripped away their cover and the cloying smoke, leaving Hyunjae terrifyingly vulnerable to the fiery orange gaze leveling on him. 

In one fatal mistake, Hyunjae first reached for his reservoir of mana. But he discovered he had nothing to protect himself from the massive threat bounding toward him claws first.

“ Stop! ” Yoojin threw his flimsy F-class body in the way of a ravenous S-class beast running full-steam toward an easy meal. 

It was a miracle that Peace was able to throw himself aside to avoid barrelling into his master, but it didn’t stop him from throwing Yoojin’s idiotically reckless stunt an offended look. 

“No!” Yoojin admonished with a stern finger even though Hyunjae and Peace were of the opinion it should be the other way around. “You can’t eat him!”

Peace picked himself up with a petulant rumble and stalked towards Hyunjae who was quicker to hide behind Yoojin’s ankles this time. This was the first time he’d been reduced to cowering behind an F-class for protection, Hyunjae mused.

“I said, no. ” Yoojin pulled open his inventory to hold out his Owner’s Token. “Peace, you can’t eat him.”

Peace eyed the token but refocused on Hyunjae crouched behind Yoojin with a predatory gleam. Then, he turned with a chuff. 

Despite the ceasefire enforced by Yoojin’s tenuous authority, Hyunjae didn’t feel much like straying more than a couple feet from the F-ranker or trusting Yoojin when he promised, “Alright, you’re safe with me.”

Hyunjae cocked his head—which was about as close as he could get to arching a brow.

“Well, maybe you’d be safer back inside your amulet.” He brought the item to Hyunjae’s face. “Come on. Can’t you go back in?”

It was an amulet on a golden chain. The brilliantly blue gem cradled in gold finery hummed, warm with divine favor and making the center glow like a spring sky. If he held it to his eye, then he could see the eternal spring fluttering within, a miniature looking glass into maddening beauty. Hyunjae raised a paw to try to assess how much mana was circulating within such a high-quality item.

He touched it, but he couldn’t feel his mana coming to interface with the mana inside the item. All he felt was a warm glow. 

"Aww, you wanna play?" He dangled the S-class amulet above him.

Hyunjae watched Yoojin try for a few moments more to interest him in the bright, shiny bauble on a chain. His tail swept behind him as he deliberated on whether he should play along. It was tempting given how hard Yoojin was trying to please him. He deigned to bat a paw at the gem.

It was enough to make Yoojin shower praise on him simply for smacking a rock. Hyunjae didn't have to suffer through much more mind-numbing baby talk before Yoojin finally stood up.

“Sorry, kitty, but more playtime will have to wait.” Yoojin summoned a stretch of cloth in his hands and began methodically wrapping it around his torso. "And if you don’t want to go back inside the locket, then I’m gonna have to carry you.”

There were very few places as interesting as being swaddled to Yoojin’s chest as he climbed back down the mountain. Hyunjae was caught between incredible amusement and a detached embarrassment at Yoojin carrying him around in a baby sling. Well, the biggest pity about this situation was that Hyunjae could’ve finished off that acquisition paperwork in the couple hours it took for Yoojin to get down to one of the caves he broke camp in a few days ago. 

“Oh, what a good boy! You sat so still all the way down here. Peace never lets me hold him this long.” Yoojin started to undo the sling as Hyunjae tried to figure out how to feel about being called a ‘good boy’. Usually, he’d be getting a sound dressing down around the F-class, so the sugary demeanor felt odd… but Hyunjae hadn’t ever had anyone treat him like a literal domestic house pet before. Yoojin’s easygoing brand of it had its own charm considering Hyunjae hardly had to lift a paw to get the man on his knees. 

Once Yoojin flipped him out of the wrap, Hyunjae finally landed on solid ground on his own four paws. He couldn’t enjoy much more than a few seconds of freedom before the fur on his back was prickling, and he had to dive behind Yoojin again.

“No! Bad!”

While Yoojin was warding off Peace, who was renewing his protests about prohibiting an easy meal that was right there , Hyunjae recomposed himself in the safety of Yoojin’s shadow. He shook himself off and raised his paw to his face. With his wrist in front of his snout, he wasn’t sure why he’d done that until he saw a spot of dirt—and licked himself.

Ah, Hyunjae blandly thought to himself, setting his paw down with a mysterious sense of defeat. He was a cat. He supposed these things were par for the course now.

As he trailed Yoojin around the campsite, he reassessed his strategy for this dungeon. Being that he was no longer capable of any self-defense, Hyunjae needed to start learning new tactics to keep himself and his F-class owner alive. 

Being a domestic cat, it seemed like Hyunjae’s primary directive… was to become domesticated. He was utterly dependent on Yoojin for protection, and it seemed like that was the case for his food and water as well. Hyunjae could count on Yoojin’s assumption he was a creature of the Light of Savastra, but he shouldn’t bet on only one horse. He had to give Yoojin an emotional stake in protecting Hyunjae.

Which meant he had to figure out what made Yoojin love a creature.

He would try to play cute again, but Yoojin seemed to have his mind dedicated to other matters as he erected a strange camp around them. 

At the mouth of the cave, he built a small, efficient pyre and tossed a handful of nauseatingly bitter herbs onto it before partitioning off the cave with a broad tarp. Hyunjae inspected the setup and the herbal blend smoldering in the efficient formation of firewood before realizing it was to ward off low-level monsters—particularly avian types in the mountains who avoided the poisonous fruits from such plants. He hardly had much time to sniff the pieces of herbs and contemplate how Yoojin had the experience to quickly and effortlessly build such a thing before Yoojin started scolding him about playing with fire. 

The rest of the camp was similarly constructed with odd tricks to better insulate the bedding, secure the food-stuffs, and erase potential tracks for monsters to follow them with. Yoojin’s skills and activities were not the ones befitting a hunter at his rank and field experience. 

Hyunjae pawed at a complicated knot holding together the canopy over the fireplace meant to prevent soot stains on the cave ceiling. He tilted his head at it, trying to remember where he’d seen that knot before when footsteps approached from behind. “Aw, do you wanna play, cutie patootie?”

The cutie patootie, Hyunjae amusedly deduced, was him. Well, he couldn’t exactly pass up a chance to bond with his new owner, so he blinked up at Yoojin and mewed.

“ Oh, my god! ” Yoojin shouted, startling both Peace and Hyunjae. “You’re so cute! Awh, you have the sweetest little meow.”

Peace rolled his eyes and settled his head back onto his crossed paws. 

Hyunjae was afforded no such dignity as Yoojin crouched down, knees folded to his chest and begged, “Aw, meow one more time? Wait, let me get my phone.”

Not particularly excited about the prospect of photographic evidence of this period in Hyunjae and Yoojin’s relationship, he looked away from the camera.

“Look over here!” In all his craning and coaxing, Hyunjae noticed that his ears had a distinct lack of Red Shield Earrings. The ones that Hyunjae specifically gifted him to protect his item. The ones that marked the beginning of their very entertaining, very lucrative relationship.

He huffed and turned away. 

“Aw, come on, look this way for daddy!”

Hyunjae would have laughed, but all that came out was a swish of his tail. Maybe this would turn out to be a decent piece of blackmail if Hyunjae could figure out how to forward this to one of his devices as a cat. He obliged his increasingly silly and desperate owner and looked at the camera.

“ Ah! Look at him! Sooo handsome.” Yoojin zoomed in.

Hyunjae’s tail swished back and forth behind him. He could get a decent amount of mileage from forcing Yoojin to hear himself gush over his least favorite Seseong guildmaster. Maybe even a favor or two depending on how Hyunjae played this.

Yoojin reached his hand forward.

Hyunjae flinched back despite the fact that his strategy called for “cuteness”. He realized his mistake only after Yoojin accordingly withdrew his hand with a patient smile. He shut off the phone.

In the next moment, Yoojin’s cat-dad brain flipped off, and something steelier replaced it, sealing off Hyunjae’s window of opportunity to win over Yoojin.

Hyunjae spent the twilight keeping watch over Yoojin, but he was equally keeping watch over Peace’s steady breathing in the event that Peace take advantage of his master not being around to stop him from eating Hyunjae. He sat next to Yoojin’s face and studied it. He’d seen the man passed out—beyond the edge of exhaustion—but he hadn’t seen him sleep yet. 

Oddly enough, he seemed to sleep rather restlessly. His brow was furrowed, lips pursed, eyes moving beneath the lids. He’d been like this nearly since he’d fallen asleep, and Hyunjae had nothing better to do than idly watch. 

But sometimes Yoojin would mumble. 

That piqued his interest, especially when Hyunjae could occasionally puzzle out some of it. 

But rather predictably, it was mostly about the young master. 

“Stop… Yoo…” He seemed agitated and rolled his face to the right. “No.”

Hyunjae observed closely, tail whishing behind him. The dream seemed to be reaching a peak.

“ No! ” The sound punched through the ragged windsong of the night up in the peaks, a sound of anguish shattering the frost. He gasped, and his head threw left again. He made another desperate, grasping sound like a whimper. 

Hyunjae laid his paw on Yoojin’s brow. He wasn’t sure why.

“Ah…” Yoojin’s dream churned his expression with a shifting mix of tension and pain. His whole body was locked in a persistent war against some specter of his subconscious, tossing and turning in his bedding.

Hyunjae considered his options. If he wanted Yoojin alert and ready to protect him tomorrow, he should take care of this nightmare.

He stepped over Yoojin’s head. Then, laid down on top of his face.

He waited as Yoojin wriggled under him until he flailed awake, half-suffocated. Hyunjae got tossed back onto the ground near his hip and watched mutely as Yoojin looked around in a half-asleep urgency and looked down at Hyunjae for a few moments of blank processing. 

“Ugh, what are you doing?” Yoojin flopped back down. “Fatty.”

Fatty? Hyunjae had never been called such a thing in his life. Floored, Hyunjae sat there as Yoojin went back to sleep after Hyunjae went through the trouble of ridding him of a nightmare. Letting out an emphatic huff, Hyunjae got up and shelved himself high up on one of the cavern’s ledges. It was thin, cold, and uncomfortable compared to Yoojin’s bedding, but it was small enough that a colossalized Peace would have a difficult time getting to him. 

As Hyunjae was working out how to curl up in a heat-efficient manner, Peace’s head snapped up. However, the object of interest wasn’t Hyunjae. His right ear flicked, honed in on the sound, and he stalked outside, footfalls utterly silent. 

He listened intently, but his feline senses didn’t have the scope that his S-class senses did. Though he’d retained his class, Hyunjae was nearly identical to a domestic cat in ability. 

Despite that, he had a contractual obligation to protect Yoojin. He dropped down from his perch and crept toward the tarp, peeking outside. 

The cave was embedded in the mountain face, and thirty feet below was a sizeable stretch of flatter land where hardy, wind-scoured trees took stubborn residence. There was no sight of Peace, but more disconcertingly, Hyunjae could no longer hear the small sounds of buzzing, chirping insects or the twitters and flaps of passerine. A predator was in the area.

Figuring that the F-class ought not to be caught unawares, Hyunjae went to Yoojin’s bedside. He gently smacked Yoojin's cheek. “Mrr.”

He frowned and twitched him off.

He laid on his face again.

Yoojin shoved him off. “Stop it.”

He couldn’t believe he ever thought this man was a seasoned dungeon veteran when he was sleeping through all these warnings.

Hyunjae sauntered over to his bag and pulled out a half-empty healing potion that the F-class was no doubt intending to drink later. A strange habit of Yoojin’s when he had enough money to buy several Olympic swimming pools of it and a Seseong guildmaster to finance an ocean’s worth more. 

Hyunjae had to grip the neck with his mouth and carry it over to the ledge, head tipping towards the heaviest side, and managed to haul it up. He dragged the astonishingly heavy bottle toward himself and watched the liquid slosh within. He nudged it off the edge.

He watched it roll off and shatter on the floor with an odd satisfaction, especially when Yoojin sat up, pissed. “Hey! Where did you get that?”

Hyunjae dropped down and rushed over to the opening at the tarp to monitor the situation. It was an interesting exercise to try searching for danger with handicapped senses.

“Where’s Peace?” Yoojin was finally and quickly getting his bearings as he pulled himself out of bed. “Agh, you little butt . I was going to drink that.”

Hyunjae let out a sigh. 

“Don’t sigh at me.” There was more rustling, and more concerningly, the sound of his swords scraping against the floor. “Stay here.”

Hyunjae watched in total disbelief as Yoojin got up half-awake with his swords and equipment on. He got up and stood in Yoojin’s way.

“No, stay here.”

“Mrrrrrr,” Hyunjae urged, twisting to block his way as he craned up at this reckless F-class flinging himself headlong into danger. “Meow!” 

“Wah.” Yoojin stopped, smiling like a fool. “How could I be mad at a little guy?”

Hyunjae bit the edge of Yoojin’s trousers and tugged him backward. “Mrrr.”

“Wait, not now.” Yoojin paused, turning his head as if to listen. 

He only got to enjoy the idea that Yoojin might be aware of imminent danger for just a brief moment until he realized that Yoojin was preparing to go outside and meet the danger without Peace . 

Hyunjae, being a cat , couldn’t do anything as Yoojin forced his way past and slipped out. 

He turned to look over the camp, trying to find anything that Hyunjae could use—and his eyes caught on the lump of bags that Yoojin had been carrying around because he somehow was still using earth-made materials instead of dungeon-sourced goods that could be carried in an inventory. He bit the edge of the bag and overturned it with a considerable heave.

Clothes, food, and equipment spilled out, and Hyunjae sifted through them until he found a black box—the very same one Hyunjae handed to Yoojin as an introductory gift. He pried a claw into the seam, flung it open, and grabbed the earrings before rushing out of the cave. 

It took more time than he’d like to tumble his way down, but he eventually landed on the rocky soil with few scrapes. It was unnerving to feel scrapes and cuts from something as mundane as a rock , but Hyunjae had more pressing matters to attend to as he hunted after Yoojin’s trail. He left a surprisingly sparse one given how fast he was moving, but Hyunjae easily routed his way toward him using scent and memory of his aerial view. 

He found his ward jogging between patches of shadow, sticking to the thickest parts of the canopy as he scanned for Peace, presumably. According to his memory, Hyunjae realized that Yoojin was somehow heading towards the only monster nest in the area. 

Confirming that conclusion, a distant cry sounded in that direction. 

Of course, Yoojin felt the desire to throw himself at the sound of violent conflict with nothing but two D-class swords.

It was astounding how this F-class fought every single effort all the S-class hunters around him made to keep him alive .

Hyunjae, being powerless to contain Yoojin otherwise, remained on the periphery of Yoojin’s perception but trailed him closely with the earrings in his mouth. Over the past few days of surveilling Yoojin’s activities, he’d made a few observations about the general type of monsters he was facing. One, that these harpies were extremely sensitive to particular scents, both to detect poison and also to scent blood. They’d no doubt caught Yoojin’s scent by now after he’d come out of the cave constructed with a scent screen. 

A flap of wings overhead. 

Hyunjae curled himself behind a tree as Yoojin whirled, scanning for the monster, and his instincts were faster than anticipated as a set of monstrous talons descended on him. 

The fur on his back had prickled up entirely, and the itching sensation of anxiety and danger urged him to leave, but a stronger sense of fear rooted him to the spot. His paws shifted beneath him as he watched Yoojin and the harpy engage dogged bouts of fighting as talon and blade angled against one another. 

A roar sounded off to the north, relaying Peace’s exact location to Hyunjae. 

Distracted from the call, Yoojin suffered a jagged graze of talons, spraying blood onto the soil. “Urgh!”

Even Hyunjae could scent so much blood at this distance, and it only meant that Hyunjae's job was going to become more difficult from here on out. He steeled himself around a ball of foreign anxiety welling up inside him, and he bolted from the safety of his hiding spot straight towards the superior predator frenzying on the scent of fresh blood.

“Mrr!” was all the warning Hyunjae gave before he pounced onto Yoojin’s leg, sticky and warm with blood. 

“Kitty! What are you—” 

Hyunjae twirled his body around Yoojin’s leg to coat himself in blood, matting his fur with it.

“Now’s not the time for pets!”

Hyunjae couldn’t decide whether Yoojin was more brilliant or more of a buffoon, but neither could he decide which he’d prefer more. Once he'd soaked up enough blood, he ran north and activated a shield over Yoojin, trapping him and his scent within until the life-threatening danger ceased.

It was a pity that the shield was soundproof because Hyunjae was sure that he would be able to hear something funny being shouted at his back. Unfortunately, Hyunjae also didn’t have the time to look over his shoulder to see the look on his face as he careened down the mountain toward where Peace was no doubt shredding into the nearest harpy nest in search of a snack. 

His ears flicked backwards as the sound of wings fluttered overhead. A cry of two—three. 

Hyunjae blitzed an abrupt right as two talons slammed into the forest floor next to him, and he weaved his way into the underbrush to obstruct their vision. 

He became a mere bundle of fear, anxiety, and instinct, none of his human instinct or knowledge helping him now as he raced through the brush. Branches, rocks, and bark scraped his fur, skin, and paws as he ran, and his body was also starting to fail as the exertion of walking and running for several miles was wearing down on a small, short-sprinter predator like a cat. He was running like that, bolting from cover-to-cover for what felt like hours but logically must have been just one. He was getting slower, his energy reserves running on fumes as he budgeted his energy against the demands of distance and time as he led a flock of harpies toward Peace.

It was a new experience. Being pushed to the limits of physical exertion. The edges of his mind fraying under stress. Fear of pursuit from infinitely stronger creatures. 

Hyunjae wasn’t sure what to make of it.

Neither was he sure what to do when he finally crashed into the open clearing soaked red with harpy gore and facing a predator who hadn’t been fed in days as Hyunjae stood before him spent and covered in his owner’s blood. This was the first time Hyunjae ever made a mistake out of exhaustion. 

Now, he had to choose between the harpies or Peace. 

In this particular circumstance, Hyunjae internally remarked, the manticore's name was rather ironic.

Peace’s lip curled as his whiskers twitched, and Hyunjae only barely recognized the signs to dive out of the way before a horizontal column of flame blossomed into the night, turning the once bitter wind into something molten and unforgiving as it washed over Hyunjae.

The harpies screamed out as they hit the ground like flaming meteorites covered in quivering, singed black feathers. 

Hyunjae sat stunned and utterly fatigued on the ground, the impetus of survival a distant thing when he had no energy to fulfill it. Once the screeching and snarling came to an ominous stop, there came the massive footfalls of a beast Hyunjae could neither outrun nor overpower.

All he could do was release the barrier.

He awaited Peace’s ruling from the ground. If he could last thirty minutes, he could put the shield back up, but he was incredibly doubtful he could last that long. It would be worth a try. 

He gathered up his nerve as an S-class presence came bearing down on him. Hoping that his muscles would work when he bade them, he steeled himself just as he heard distant screaming.

Peace and Hyunjae’s ears flicked right.

“ PEACE! ”

A rippling chuff. Peace deliberated for a moment before turning away to see his master. 

“ PEACE, DON’T YOU DARE EAT HIM! ”

An exasperated growl. He smacked a tree with his massive paw, felling it in one errant swipe.

Yoojin came hurtling into the clearing, faster than was possible for an F-Class—leave it to the F-class to bring a speed potion before a decent healing potion—and his eyes fell on Hyunjae. “Oh, my god!”

A flicker of amusement twitched into his tail as Yoojin fell to his knees and began panicking . “Kitty! Why—how could you just?”

Hyunjae rolled onto his back to show him some bad scrapes and pawed at Yoojin’s knee for a decent healing potion… if the headstrong little F-class even carried any. “Mrr?”

To his immense surprise, far tears dribbled down his face. “It must have hurt so much.”

Sobering, Hyunjae sat back up and watched Yoojin silently cry as he opened his inventory. After a moment, he elected to headbutt his knee. No better time to ingratiate himself to Yoojin than at his moment of emotional vulnerability. “Meww.”

Yoojin didn’t give up any more cloyingly sweet diminutives or mortifying sobriquets as he poured out a little dish of healing potion for Hyunjae, who lapped from it. He half-expected Yoojin to try petting him while he was busy healing, but nothing.

Maybe it was pity or something more feline that made him quit drinking to rub his face against Yoojin’s outer thigh in a bid to get him to stop crying. “Mrr.”

“I’m so sorry, kitty. You got so hurt because of me. You could’ve… Why did you do that?” A much more intense emotion colored his expression. Yoojin suddenly scrubbed at his eyes. “Ugh. You’re only a cat… there’s no time to be thinking of Yoohyun right now.”

Yoohyun? Hyunjae cocked his head at Yoojin. How did the young master relate to this?

“I’m sorry, sweetie.” Yoojin took out the cat-sling cloth again. 

Hyunjae’s tail flicked at the name. 

“I got it. This time I’ll do my best.” His eyes got a bit distant, and he seemed to be somewhere else—with someone else—as he promised, “I’ll protect you this time.”

He reached out to pick up Hyunjae, and he sat there for a moment before he decided—or more like his body moved on its own—to push his face into Yoojin’s palm. 

Seeking affection and taking it were two novel things, Hyunjae reflected as Yoojin stroked that peculiar, intimate space on his forehead. Novel indeed, he affirmed as a subtle-sweet warmth bloomed all over him, seeming to consume him until—

His throat began to vibrate.

“ Aw , my little guy is purring,” Yoojin chuckled through his crying-rasped voice.

The little guy purring, Hyunjae was forced to admit, was him. Yoojin slipped his hand down to scratch at a spot below his whiskers to pull the noise out with even more force. Unfamiliar with the all-consuming sensation of being pet, he was temporarily seized by his cat-like whims which desired to roll his face into Yoojin’s hand for more. “Goodness, if you love being pet so much, then why don’t you ever let me, hmm?”

Hyunjae quickly pulled himself away from the strange magic of Yoojin’s petting, out of sorts and disoriented from being made to purr . He would have more concerns about the potent affects of physical touch on him, but when Yoojin offered his hand again, loosely closed and waiting, Hyunjae couldn’t help but indulge it again.

Fewer places more interesting, indeed, than the spot beside Han Yoojin, Hyunjae concluded as a low, rolling purr unwound from his throat.

Chapter Text

True to his strange vow, Yoojin took every precaution to avoid every single area clustered with monsters on their way out of the dungeon. Moreover, Yoojin even partitioned off the house, so only Hyunjae could wander the area without needing to worry about any S-class monsters wandering around. 

With the exception of the young master.

“What is that thing, hyung?” The young master glowered down at Hyunjae, who was sitting at Yoojin’s heel, his tail wrapped around his ankle. 

“He’s my baby,” he informed firmly, picking Hyunjae up and tucking him against his chest. “He’s going to be living here now.”

The young master stared at Hyunjae for a long moment. “I don’t like the way it’s looking at me.”

Yoojin sighed and asked, “And how, exactly, is he looking at you?”

They locked eyes. Hyunjae innocently stared. 

“It’s obnoxious.” He scowled and broke eye contact to look down at Yoojin. “Get rid of that thing. You can’t even raise it into anything useful.”

“Don’t be petty. He’s just a little kitty, and he’s soooo sweet.” Yoojin started scratching his cheek, wiggling his fingertips right into a cluster of nerves beneath his whiskers. “Wah. Look at him; isn’t he adorable, Yoohyun? Look; he even has little white mittens.”

He frowned deeply at Hyunjae. “That thing is weird. Where did you get it? How do you know it’s not dangerous?”

“He’s part of the item I went to get!” A bit too soon, Yoojin let Hyunjae down before he could keep teasing the young master. “The Light of Savastra? It’ll protect me against S-class hunters. Once a year, I can transmogrify any creature or item above C-class. Which includes S-class hunters.”

“Transmogrify,” Yoohyun repeated blankly. “What does that mean?”

“Well…” Yoojin started, shifting on his feet and glancing about. “It changes the target’s form in a surprising way. So, it's a random effect, I guess?”

”You guess? Hyung.” It was a miraculous sight to witness the Hayeon guild leader pout. “You said that the tip you received was reliable. If you don’t know what it does, then why would you ever risk yourself for it?”

”I’m not risking myself over nothing. I’m absolutely certain this was worth the trip.” Yoojin bit his lip and tacked on, “T-the tip is trustworthy, okay?”

There was more beneath that blatant lie about how Yoojin came by this knowledge, and Hyunjae tilted his head at why, exactly, Yoojin felt the need to lie to his own brother. Clearly, Yoojin was quite aware of the effects of the amulet if he had the uncanny foresight to travel without high-quality items or escorts… but the question was how Yoojin could possibly know this before ever setting foot inside the dungeon. Hyunjae threaded himself between Yoojin’s legs, more intrigued than ever.

Blinded as usual by any notion of his hyung in danger, the young master didn’t care much for the glaringly suspicious details. “Hyung… we still don’t even know what it does exactly. Even if you do try to test it on an S-class creature, the cooldown will be another year before it’s useful again.” He crossed his arms, the familiar impassioned heat behind it longing to escape, but it softened as he spoke to his hyung. “Please, hyung. Can’t you think of me a little bit before you do things like this?”

Yoojin sighed. “Okay, okay, I’m sorry. I didn’t want to worry you, and I promise you everything was in control.”

Hyunjae’s tail swished.

One more time, Yoojin applied, “Please, can’t you think of this as a good thing since I can protect myself a little better?”

The young master set to the hard task of evaluating that statement but ultimately cracked and relented, “Fine. But get rid of that. It’s been staring at me.”

“He’s just a little guy,” Yoojin insisted. “And cats just stare.”

“I’m an S-class. It should be afraid. ” He glanced down at Hyunjae and flared his rank at him.

How childish. Hyunjae mewed and flopped at his feet, mocking his intimidation display with an invite to pet his stomach. 

“He’s not an it. ” Yoojin crouched down to stroke his belly, and Hyunjae curled up around his hand, resisting the strange urge to bite. “Actually, I haven’t given him a name yet.”

Hyunjae could see all the names bubbling up behind the young master’s steely gaze.

Yoojin perked up with a beam. “Oh, I know the perfect name!”

“Hi, Honey!” A familiar scent blossomed in his nose as an even more familiar touch landed between his ears, stroking all the way over the back of his neck and his spine. “Aww, so pretty in the sunlight. Just a little honey bun baking in the sun.”

Hyunjae stretched, the instinct reaching him first before any thought to stop it.

“Oh, big stretch.” A scratch below his chin.

Hyunjae was trying to wake up, but the warm afternoon sunlight was nigh inescapable as a cat, and Hyunjae was beginning to lose the ability to resist one whenever he saw the cat tree that Yoojin knowingly placed in the perfect spot for afternoon naps. And when Yoojin started petting him, Hyunjae was rendered incapacitated and helpless to just purr. 

“Sleepy? What a sleepy little guy.” Even Yoojin’s inane ramblings were failing to rouse more than a couple amused flicks of his tail. Although lately Yoojin had started kneading his paw pads and waving his arms around as a new and uniquely undignified tactic to wake him up.

Hyunjae had to hide his paws from Yoojin who, undeterred as usual, kept petting his weak spots on his head and neck. Trying to protest the continued petting, Hyunjae squirmed. He felt like he was creating a strange, strange habit over the past week. “Mrr.”

“Sooo sleepy. After a long day of doing absolutely nothing.” 

Hyunjae had some objections to that statement. He’d been corresponding with his secretaries through text using Yoojin’s phone about to look into possible solutions for his predicament, and today he’d finally closed out that merger that he missed yesterday… because of an afternoon nap. It took a couple days alone to figure out how to arrange an encrypted, anonymous communications line with them, and it didn’t help that Yoojin always liked to grab him and plop him on his lap while he did work. Neither did it help that Yoojin’s lap was comfortable and warm, and his hands were gentle and thorough.

“Mrrfmf.”

“Aw, little guy wants to laze around some more.” He massaged his hands into Hyunjae’s fur, fingertips seeming to tap directly into the incessant rumbling in his chest. “My little puddle of honey.”

Managing to break the enchantment, Hyunjae finally blinked his eyes open to a camera inches away from his face. This wasn’t actually uncommon for Hyunjae. He suspected that Yoojin had amassed a massive cache of compromising pictures of Hyunjae to the point where it might be best to delete the entire album rather than try to exploit it for blackmail. 

He sat up and tried to compose himself, setting to work on his fur with practiced licks. Though Hyunjae wasn’t fond of licking himself as a hygienic practice, it was a necessity when he had such a thick coat of fur. 

“Hehe.” Yoojin snapped another picture and put his phone away before leaning forward to kiss his forehead.

“Mrr.” Such a touch always left a warm, tingling spot on his forehead. And it always came and went like a spring zephyr, gone too fast.

“Alright, I’m going out just for a bit to go look for the little bastard. Be good, okay?”

Hyunjae blinked blearily before he registered Yoojin’s words. The little bastard? “Mew?”

Oblivious, Yoojin gathered up his keys and jacket before heading towards the door. “Be back soon, Honey Bun!”

Hyunjae stared after him for a long while… but the sunlight bathing his back was lulling him back onto the cushion that was already warmed from the sun… and he laid back down. 

Hyunjae carefully nibbled a piece of steamed salmon from Yoojin’s fingers.

“Does that thing have to eat with us?” the young master groused as he pulled more cuts of fish from the steamer. 

“He’s not a thing ,” Yoojin repeated as he scratched the back of Hyunjae’s neck, breaking off another piece to feed him. “Honey is supposed to eat, too.”

“Yeah, kibble . He shouldn’t eat at the table with us. It’s unsanitary.” The young master slid a glance backward.

"He's not unsanitary," Yoojin argued primly. "Honey even knows how to use the restroom and flush."

"That's creepy, Hyung. What cat knows how to do that?"

"Honey does. He even washes his paws." He thrusted a blurry, candid photo of Hyunjae wiping his paws on a towel toward his younger brother. "Look, I even caught him using a comb once."

Hyunjae had to look for more efficient ways to spend his time than licking himself all day.

"What?" Yoohyun cast a glare down at Hyunjae who busied himself with looking natural and innocent. "Is that why there was blonde hair in my comb? Hyung, cats can't use combs or operate toilets. That thing is weird."

"Honey's an S-class cat; I can buy it," Yerim input through a few bites of salmon and miso. She swallowed, a piece of rice on her cheek as she drawled, “And at least he doesn't leave the toilet seat up."

"Hey, be nice," Yoojin absently corrected as he had a sip of miso.

Yerim blew a strand of hair out of her eyes. "Besides, Honey’s just a little kitty. Here, Honey. I have a piece of fish for you!”

Hyunjae wasn’t fond of being called honey by a sixteen-year-old and even less inclined to being fed food from one. He politely declined with a turn of his face.

"Come on." To the young lady's credit, she was rather persistent, and she waved a rod at him with a piece of colorful plastic feathers and bells at the end. He spared a glance at her, not quite interested if it wasn't Yoojin going to cartoonish lengths to entice him into playing. "Don't you wanna play with your noona?

He turned with an emphatic sigh.

"Did you hear that? He just sighed at me." She tossed her spoon down and settled into a scowl. “Ugh, it’s not fair that the one cat that’s not afraid of me only likes Ahjussi."

"Just be patient, Yerim. Honey likes Yoohyun," he offered hopefully, referring to the many occasions on which Hyunjae took the opportunity to take naps on the young master's freshly washed dark overcoats. Hyunjae was well rewarded with press pictures of a distinctly annoyed Hayeon guildmaster very obviously covered in blonde cat hair.

The young lady let out a long-suffering sigh and propped a heel onto the edge of her chair. "I haven’t pet a cat in so long. I’ll even take a dog at this point.”

Yoojin pulled off another piece of salmon for Hyunjae. “He’ll come around. Unlike a certain someone.”

Hyunjae’s ear twitched as he gingerly took the morsel of fish from Yoojin's hand.

“Yeah, when’s the last time blonde ahjussi came over? It’s been forever since he came over and cooked something.” She ran her hands down her face with a groan. “No offense, Yoohyun, but his pancakes are soo good. He puts, like, cinnamon in them!”

“Yeah, it’s been a while since we’ve had those amazing pancakes…” Yoojin trailed off a bit, expression becoming hard and pensive for a moment until he looked back up at Yerim. “Don’t tell him I said that.”

His tail swayed back and forth beneath the chair. 

“Yoohyun, have you heard any sign of him? Do you know where he was and what he was doing before I went into the dungeon?”

Yoohyun rinsed off a pan in the sink. “Nope.”

“Don’t you have any documents or memos or something?”

Hyunjae’s tail waved with lazy interest as he watched the young master lie through his teeth, making it transparently clear that he was enjoying a vacation from the Sesong guild master. “No idea.”

“Ugh.” The other Han brother couldn’t be more different. He’d been in an odd state of anxiety for some time now, apparently agitated by the fact that Hyunjae was overdue on a certain favor. 

It slipped Hyunjae’s mind, exactly, what he owed to Yoojin, but he wasn’t opposed to indulging his item once in a while. Especially since he’d taken advantage of his hospitality so far.

Hyunjae indulged a bit of rice from Yoojin’s palm.

Sometimes Hyunjae would wake up in the middle of the night. 

He’d hear something, somehow, and be pulled to consciousness, and he’d be wandering down the hall to the room overflowing with that wonderful familiarity. 

He’d jump up onto the sheets and plop himself onto a heaving, convulsing chest filled with festering regret and achingly deep sorrow. And he’d lie there until his breathing soothed back to peace. And Hyunjae would drift off to sleep along with him.

Hyunjae… was bored. 

This was about his default state ever since he was born some thirty-odd years ago, and it always had been until about a couple months ago when something novel appeared.

Being bored was comfortable in a way. No real effort was required of him. A dull, listless state chained to the rote efforts of life, and feeding the same input for the same output. People became factors, a bundle of possibilities—the numbers and figures of it all dancing around him. His eyes experienced everything a couple minutes ahead, and his entire reality was just watching the same movie he’d already seen before. 

And then some perplexing oddity shattered the paradigm. 

He degraded him to eat a slice of raw white bread for breakfast, made flagrantly luxurious purchases on his credit card, took every turn to spite and insult him… and spent days worrying over where he’d been. Hyunjae watched him over the two weeks since he’d been living with Yoojin, indefinitely stuck as a cat as Evelyn made negotiations with specialist hunters to see him, and he also watched as Yoojin walked out of the door to search for him for three days straight. Hyunjae’s been home alone for so long that the boredom was beginning to encroach again.

As far as Hyunjae could tell, Yoojin liked “Honey” much more than he liked Hyunjae. Did it make much sense to stop spending as much time with “Honey” to go look for Hyunjae? 

Well, Hyunjae supposed drily, Hyunjae was considerably more employed and much wealthier than “Honey”. Perhaps he could arrange to fulfill whatever Yoojin’s favor was from his cat form.

He dropped down from the top of the fridge where Yoojin placed a strategic cat bed and wandered into Yoojin’s room where he kept a tablet on his nightstand—a bad habit that Hyunjae felt that the young master ought to know about. He pawed through some apps, tapped in a passcode, and opened an encrypted line. He typed in his item’s number. 

I hear you’ve been looking for me, dear item?

YOU BASTARD

Hyunjae sat, stunned, as Yoojin fired a dozen more expletives tailored to describe Hyunjae in the most degrading terms possible. His tail swept back and forth as Yoojin’s rage spilled forth.

I apologize, but I am unavailable at the moment. Could I assist with something?

UNAVAILABLE MY ASS
WHERE ARE YOU MOTHERFUCKER

Oh, my, Hyunjae internally commented as his tail increased tempo. He raised his paw to reply. 

I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to say.

Im going to kill you

Where are you

I hate to deprive you of my presence, but I will be gone for the indefinite future.

I could arrange to send funds, resources, or manpower if you must have it urgently.

YOU DISAPPEAR FOR THREE WEEKS

The typing bubble appeared and loaded a bit longer before disappearing and popping back up again. Hyunjae huffed, the closest thing to a laugh, and was glad he was struck by a good idea to alleviate this boredom. 

You disappear for three weeks, and this is all you have to say?

Something peculiar about being a cat was that there was less space between instinct and action. There was less of an impulse control mechanism to allow much hesitation when an impulse struck him. No rationality or reason to make him think better of an idea, so he often did as he pleased. Being a cat was very easy, but being a cat pretending to be human was much harder. 

That was why he sent such a text. 

I miss you.

There was a pause.

Where are you? 

Don’t text me that you miss me

Just let me see you

Say it to my face coward

Hyunjae watched in dull shock as Yoojin responded so much differently than he had estimated. The F-class didn’t adhere to possibility or established input-for-output. His battle sense never seemed to work against Yoojin whose actions are unfathomable even five minutes into the future… or even months in retrospect.

Hyunjae. 

Don’t just leave me on delivered. 

Are you really gonna make me do it?

Hyunjae didn’t even have time to type with his paws before Yoojin sent the last text. 

Please. Let me see you again.

His tail thumped, and Hyunjae closed the line as he started pacing, agitated. Please? The Han Yoojin saying please to Sung Hyunjae? Over a measly three week absence?

It was fascinating like the way a match was to a child. So full of heat and light in a dangerous way that had Hyunjae caught between wanting to reach for it and wanting to shy away. 

He felt this irresistible urge to touch the match. Feel what exactly was burning beneath Han Yoojin’s utterly baffling surface. Know what it was that made Yoojin love a creature like him. 

Circling back to the tablet, he opened another encrypted line with the young master. 

The salmon was a bit overdone last week.

Chapter Text

After an impressive five minutes, the young master returned home, darkening the doorway with murder in his eyes and his sword in his fist. “This is pathetic, even for you.”

Hyunjae swayed his tail back and forth, staring up at him from the floor where he’d been texting him on Yoojin's tablet. “Mew.”

“Mew, my fucking ass. Explain yourself.”

He slowly typed out an answer."Thinner salmon fillets cook faster, so they should've been taken out earlier."

The young master's fingers closed around Hyunjae's scruff with barely restrained strength, pinning a limp Hyunjae to the floor. " Tell me why the hell you're pretending to be a cat, you idiot. "

Once the young master deigned to release him, Hyunjae obliged him an answer. “It was an accident related to the Light of Savastra.”

“Light of Savastra? That necklace hyung was getting himself killed over?”

Hyunjae offered a "mrr" of affirmation as he typed. “Curse resistance potions don't seem to work. I'm unable to collect any resistances through items, potions, or otherwise. Likewise I am unable to gain skills or buffs though I could activate items."

The young master studied the screen for a moment before standing up. "I'm contacting Moon Hyuna to see if she has connections with any specialists."

"I sincerely doubt you two will know anyone that I don't already have in my payroll, but I appreciate the attempt. " Hyunjae dodged away from another attempt to scruff him. " Rather, using the Light of Savastra again may work."

Powerful items like the Light of Savastra, capable of felling any S-class hunter, often came with plenty of hidden catches like that. A year-long cooldown still seemed like too pithy a handicap, so Hyunjae was willing to bet that the item had a small quirk like that. If not, he and the young master may have to resort to the riskier business of tricking Yoojin into sharing his curse resistance with him.

Immediately after reading his message, the young master pulled out his phone. The charming thing about an S-class hunter like Yoohyun who never bothered to hide the kind of nature that most S-classes tried to keep under wraps was that he didn’t ask any questions about such a dangerous gamble. Didn’t think twice about the consequences it might have on Hyunjae. Didn’t think twice about immediately calling his brother to ask for it under the guise of having his team analyze it. 

“You worthless guildmaster,” Yoohyun started as soon as he hung up. “I don't want you anywhere near us once hyung’s done with whatever he needs.”

Hyunjae chirped and tried to rub against his shin, but he’d astoundingly forced an S-class hunter as obstinate as Yoohyun to move just by threatening him with a cat’s headbutt. Perhaps both of the Han brothers had a penchant for comedy. 

“You’re ridiculous, ” he hissed, scandalized by the attempt, hand falling on the handle of his sword. “Can’t believe a damn bastard like you is….”

He stormed out, leaving Hyunjae to carefully tug the tablet back up to the nightstand and take up his ordinary post in the cat tower. Hyunjae watched from the sun-bathed warmth of his perch, idly watching the fierce Hayeon guildmaster engage in a bit of baking. Hyunjae had more than a few things to say about the young master's technique, but the sun was making quick work of Hyunjae. He was surprised to actually fall asleep in the vicinity of an S-class hunter raring to kill him until his ears pricked at the sound of keys rattling at the front door. 

“Honey, I’m home!” Yoojin dropped all his stuff by the door and came straight over to Hyunjae.

Hyunjae stood up with a small stretch and dropped down to the floor to meet Yoojin where he'd sat himself on the floor to begin his usual routine of fawning head over heels for him. Hyunjae was especially indulgent with the petting now that the young master had even more of a reason to seethe over Hyunjae getting more attention.

Hyunjae rose up on his hind legs, pinning his ears back before pushing the top of his head up to meet Yoojin's hand. He landed back on his front paws as Yoojin's fingers stroked over his forehead and down his neck.

“Mrr.” Hyunjae basked in the petting. It wasn't hard to exaggerate the purring and the pleasure associated with the touches.

“Ah, you’re so sweet! ” Yoojin started petting him with both hands, the weariness in his eyes seeming to melt away as he lavished affection onto him. “Aw, did you miss me?”

Hyunjae’s ear twitched.

“I missed you, too.” He kissed Hyunjae’s face. Something metal creaked in the young master’s hand in the kitchen. “I missed you so much, Honey.”

“Stop that,” the young master eventually objected, tossing his bent fork into the sink. 

“Why? I haven’t seen little Honey Bee in three days!”

“Don’t touch him. He’s dirty.” He shot a glare at Hyunjae who was arching up into Yoojin’s indulgent palm. 

“He’s not dirty. He’s been lying in the sun and laundry bins all day; he smells like clean laundry and sunshine , Yoohyun.”

“Leave that thing alone and come over here. I made cookies.”

With a sufficient bribe, the young master was able to lure his older brother away with something more tempting than Hyunjae’s decadent coat… at least until Yoojin had one or two cinnamon cookies, dropped off the amulet, and circled back to pet Hyunjae. 

After three days of no contact, it was difficult to resist rolling his face into Yoojin’s adoring hand, but Hyunjae had long since given up attempts to resist what it meant to be a cat under Yoojin's care. Hyunjae was expecting the familiar barrage of embarrassing pet names to come out, but he opened his eyes and saw Yoojin’s pensive gaze. Hard, absent, and agitated. 

Hyunjae reached out to touch the space on his forehead, the spot where his brow wrinkled for some unknowable reason. “Meww.”

He gave a wry chuckle as he carded his fingers into Hyunjae’s fur. “I know. I can’t believe I worry so much over that bastard. I should just stay home and play with you all day, Honey Bun.”

Hyunjae? That wrinkle on his brow was dedicated to Hyunjae?

Yoojin sighed and extricated himself from Hyunjae’s fur. “Okay. I better go now. Get along with Yoohyun, alright? Be nice . Don’t chew his coat buttons off again.”

Seeing Yoojin take a step back, Hyunjae followed after the F-class so doggedly persistent on trying to find an S-class who, by all accounts, shouldn’t warrant so much concern. He wove between Yoojin’s legs, trying to crane up at his face and get another look at just what was in that hard expression he was wearing.

Noticing Hyunjae escorting him to the door, Yoojin crouched down with a chuckle. “As soon as I find that idiot, I’ll come back and play, okay? I just need to be gone for a little while longer. I love you!”

He pressed a kiss to the top of his head. 

Hyunjae watched him leave again, not knowing when Yoojin might come back to see him—and instantly missed him.

 The moment that the door shut, the young master was curt about crossing the room to blast him with the Light of Savastra. 

Another bubble of smoke encased him, whipping his fur around him and pulling his mind into loose disarray as a couple notifications alerted him to a curse taking root. He closed his eyes and felt himself come undone—

“Did you have fun, you damn pervert? ” 

Sung Hyunjae found himself prone on the floor of the Han household, and found the tile significantly less cool and comfortable as it once was when he was a cat. Moreover, he looked down and found black gloves instead of a set of white paws. More importantly, his chains came when called, and they wrapped around a blade quivering with the effort to impale Hyunjae’s skull. 

Hyunjae rebuilt himself onto his feet and straightened his Broscin coat. He turned to the mirror to fix his hair, the young master unleashing waves of heat and curses behind him. He spent a bit more time than he usually would to get his hair to fall right—perhaps a remnant from his days as a member of the Han Household. 

He turned with a professional smile. “I had a marvelous time. Thank you kindly for your generous hospitality, young master. I ought to return the favor sometime.”

“Like I’ll ever be your house guest. Get out of my house already!”

Sung Hyunjae snickered and breezed on through the Han living room to get to the balcony, shutting the sliding door behind him. On his right, a plushly cushioned wicker bench housed an indulgent number of pillows and cushions, all of them covered in golden fur and marked with his and Yoojin’s scent from several afternoons of reading and napping. The bench was now a relic of a rather fun episode of his relationship with the F-ranker. Falling asleep on Yoojin’s lap, receiving kisses goodbye, being showered in affection for no particular reason… Hyunjae couldn’t even use it as blackmail.

What a disappointing result.

He gently launched off the balcony, taking an amble through the Korean skyline as he reacquainted himself with the familiars of his mind again. Things that were once distant and insignificant came back within arm’s reach, and he began to build an itinerary through all the work he missed or neglected. His mind pieced together blocks of time dedicated to various problems with perfect efficiency, easily constructing the next two weeks of his schedule in a moment. He knew exactly what he was going to do, where he was going, and who he was going to meet as if he’d already lived through it once. It was simply a matter of going through the motions to carry out what he’d planned.

Discuss with this secretary. Organize these tasks. Meet with that press reporter. Extort this guild leader. 

Hyunjae’s monotonous, human life was unfolding in excruciating detail before him, but there was one little snag. 

“ ... AE! … DOWN… BAST… ”

A smile was blooming on his lips before he could even look down and see Yoojin on top of a parking complex below him, standing atop a foreign sportscar he’d extorted from Hyunjae a few months ago. His hands were cupped around his mouth screaming from the rooftops about how pissed he was at Hyunjae. Of course, he'd manage to spot Hyunjae the moment he stepped foot aside.

Hyunjae was more than happy to come confront the F-ranker who was calling for him so desperately.

He touched down next to the car as Yoojin hopped off the idling car with a stormy gaze.

Hyunjae stepped forward with a smile. He was about to say something, but it got caught in his throat. 

Something… about what he’d said gave him pause. Forced him to take pause as if his brain were asking, “are you sure?”

And Hyunjae ended up withholding on freely admitting, “I missed you” as Yoojin sallied forth, laying into him about what a bastard he was.

“How can you just show up out of nowhere after I begged you to come back?!” Here was the sound dressing down that Hyunjae knew and loved. “Coming and going like you’re not my personal skill? I can’t believe you’d drop off the map without a word!”

Something must be wrong about Hyunjae… or maybe something was different because all he could think to say was I missed you , but he couldn’t decide on whether to say such a thing or whether he should be handing him an easy, carefree apology to bait him into the banter he so missed. And something really must be wrong with Hyunjae because he didn’t follow his strongest whim. 

“My apologies, dear princess.” He inclined his head with a smile. “Your prince has returned from his quest.”

“Don’t you dare give me that princess bullshit after you disappeared for that long! Where the hell were you?!” He speared a finger at him, gaze nothing short of venomous and nowhere near how he was looking at him this morning. Hyunjae found himself entranced by the gap and wondered how he could get Yoojin to show him all his faces. “Are you gonna stare at me or answer me, you bastard?”

I missed you . Hyunjae opened his mouth but the words hesitated. How peculiar. I missed you, I missed you, I missed you . Ordinarily, Hyunjae wouldn’t hesitate to say something so unusual and uncomfortable to Yoojin for the sake of teasing him, but he was having a harder time saying it… because he wasn’t trying to tease Yoojin. He really, awfully missed Yoojin being away for so long. Such words were heavier to him, harder to throw around than they were before.

“Thank you for bringing the car around, dear item.” Hyunjae breezed right past him and opened the driver’s door. “I must be on my way now, so I will have Mr. Kim reach out to you for an appointment.”

“You asshole, you better answer me right now! And that’s my car! ” Yoojin shouted from the other side of the window. Then, he tacked on at the end, “ And you can fly!”

Hyunjae chuckled as he adjusted his mirrors. “I hate to decline any conversation with you, but if it’s any consolation, I’ll be sure to send you three new cars as recompense.”

“ Decline? ” Yoojin repeated with supreme offense before Hyunjae pulled the car around to navigate out of the complex.

Though he was sure he was digging a rather deep hole in Yoojin’s bad graces for himself at the current moment, he was unprepared for another encounter with his F-class associate when he couldn’t sort out what had happened to him or why this ache filled his chest the further he drove from Yoojin. 

Like some stinging reminder, his heart kept pulsing with, I miss you I miss you I miss you .

What a quandry he'd found himself in.

It took all three cars and a favor to win back Yoojin’s good graces by only the slimmest of margins, considering Hyunjae hadn’t satisfied his demands to know why he was missing for so long. In truth, Hyunjae wasn’t particularly keen on seeing Yoojin again anyway, but the F-class would only become more unruly if Hyunjae continued to neglect him. 

If Hyunjae was confident that Yoojin wouldn’t repay the offense tenfold, then he would have avoided Yoojin as much as possible. This feeling wasn’t for lack of wanting to see him. It was that things had shifted ever so slightly following his return to humanity as if the world rang one tone off.

He would wake up late. Not too late—just a few minutes past his regular time, but it was to be expected when he was accustomed to being awoken to specific scents and touches. 

The sound of his penthouse was different. Bleak, sterile, and sober silence. No movement, no voices, no intrusions. A perfect silence with only the sounds of a solitary life.

His bed felt different. 

His penthouse smelled different.

Other people’s hands felt different.

And sometimes, worst of all, he would hear Yoojin’s name on occasion, and he felt an empty ache in that sound. 

Hyunjae could only imagine that his experiences will only get stranger should he be around Yoojin, so he elected to hold the rear guard of the party as they traversed what seemed like an impractically long stone hallway of an abandoned medieval military fortification. Appending “Medieval” to the location was more an approximation of the style—large, arching ceilings, great, frost-frayed tapestries, and icicle-ridden iron chandeliers overhead—but inscriptions ran the length of the walls. Some in large, dominating blocks from floor-to-ceiling, but others in meticulous, rambling script to fill the space between. 

Here on his item's insistence, Hyunjae didn't resist when he was very well aware that the F-class would only become more unruly if he continued to neglect him. However, it seemed like Yoojin was much too occupied to pay much attention to him. Hyunjae had been observing Yoojin's doggedly following a particular line of inscriptions flowing across the corridor as it weaved around the other inscriptions in its path. His fingertips scraped against the wall, collecting frost as he gently carded them through the film of time and nature on the desolate walls. 

“Hyung, wear these.” The young master pulled his black dragon-leather gloves off and pulled his younger brother toward him.

“It’s fine , Yoohyun,” Yoojin insisted for what must’ve been over a dozen times now. “You need the fire-buff to fight the ice wyrm later, so you can’t get caught without them.”

“I can kill it, gloves or not,” he huffed, stuffing his gloves onto Yoojin’s hands. 

“The point is to interrogate it alive , Yoohyun.”

“Well, I could kill it with my hands tied behind my back , so don’t worry ahjussi—I’ve got it covered,” Yerim sounded overhead, taking off her scarf to wrap around Yoojin, who was now wearing more clothes than he walked in with.

“I said we’re not killing it!”

Hyunjae slunk along the wall behind the group of them, keeping to the young master’s back as he watched Yoojin’s hand resume brushing over the wall, making gentle disturbances across the delicate ice melting upon contact with his skin. Hyunjae glanced at the faint trail where Yoojin’s fingers had touched, and brushed a knuckle against it, glove coming back with a spot of dampness. 

He flexed his hand into a fist and tucked it back into the silk confines of his Broscin overcoat.

“Ahjussiiii, we’ve been walking for forever now,” Yerim tugged on his hood. “I think we’re lost.”

“We—we’re not lost ,” Yoojin sputtered even as he came to a stop to glance up and down the train of inscriptions his fingers had been riding for what must have been the past hour. He brought his face closer to the wall and squinted. “Yeah, see—this is the inscription for ‘ wyrm ’. We’re on the right track; we just… have to find the end of the script.”

The group of them glanced around the corridor which had no doors save for the one embedded into the wall of a cliff that they had entered. Only the occasional window admitted sun-starved white light into the dead, frozen space, but otherwise no other entry or exit points.

The young master drew his sword.

“Wait, wait, wait, Yoohyun stop! You can’t just start breaking things!” Yoojin screeched, wrapping his arms around his exasperated younger brother’s waist. “We need to follow the inscriptions, and we can’t do that if they’re all destroyed!”

“So, that means we could break a few? Let’s try this one.” Yerim came to one of the massive symbols, brandishing her spear.

“ No! ” Yoojin yanked her down by the ankle. “Just because you two are S-class doesn’t mean that nothing can hurt you! Be careful .”

Yoojin’s two family members shared a dry look at the advice that was so hypocritical that it ceased to be funny. 

“And you ,” Yoojin started by habit, turning his gaze on Hyunjae who stood quietly off to the side. He stopped mid-sentence, seeing Hyunjae had been well-behaved during the entire dungeon. He narrowed his eyes. “Are you gonna help out or what, you slacker?”

He chuckled wryly, but he was well aware of the F-class’s eyes on him—the first drop of attention he’d spared Hyunjae since the entered the structure. Even his gaze felt different. “If you desire my opinion, I would humbly offer that we are indeed lost.”

“Yeah, yeah, what did I expect from that useless guildmaster?” Yoojin grumbled, marching on as he took out his journal, scribbled with his notes about the inscriptions, the wyrm, and possible links to the Filial Piety Addicts. His fingers fiddled with the folds of the journal, his index finger delicately stroking along the edge.

Hyunjae would love to sit back and watch Yoojin rise to the task of teaching two S-classes the virtues of patience, but he would rather be done with this business as soon as possible. He turned back to the inscriptions that seemed to flow like water across the walls, and Hyunjae glanced at the large character carved into the wall on his immediate right. Floor to ceiling and perfectly spaced in intervals with the other massive symbols. Right where a door should be.

Following that train of thought, Hyunjae decided he ought to test the theory on a less dangerous rune. “Yoojin, would you let me borrow that journal of yours?”

Yoojin warily approached and dropped the book into his waiting palm. “Decided to help?”

Hyunjae flashed a smile down at him as he flipped to the page of rough translations. “It gets pitiful after the first thirty minutes of watching you three bumble around.”

He touched a sigil for “music”, and trickled a current of electricity within where it pooled into the old channels and redirected the flow of mana. An ever so faint melody seemed to bleed from the walls, singing something fluid and elegant but edged with something aching. The sigil and a few others around it lit a pale yellow.

“Oh, that’s so cool ,” Yerim gushed, slapping her hand to an identical rune and blasting something laden thickly with flowing currents of string instruments, a steady powerful beat underpinning the torrent of it.

“Easy on the volume!” Yoojin pulled her away from the wall, bringing them back to dead silence. 

Yoojin came back to the wall, brows furrowing as he took in the new information, and lifted a hand to confirm for himself. He put his hand to the wall and fed his mana inside. A single stream of sound poured out, like a bow traveling slowly across a taut string. The tension and focus occasionally broken by pops of accompanying music that incorporate themselves into the melody to pull it into melodic highs or thrumming lows—building it into something intricate, flexible, and captivating.

The sound made something resonate in turn within Hyunjae, but he would rather reflect on what exactly that meant later when it didn't feel like a wire pulling on his heart. He leaned down toward Yoojin. “Dear guest, I do believe we have other items on the agenda?”

Moving off of the wall, Yoojin moved on with their new knowledge and studied the wyrm sigil. Before the F-class could follow through on the very obvious impulse to activate the rune, the young master stepped forward and lit the inscriptions with fire.

Ominous tones of foreboding seemed to bare down on them as the windows flooded black and lightless. The sigils began to writhe on the walls as if they were serpents, and they began to coil in great whorls of fire around Yoohyun’s hand until the young master admitted a pained snarl.

“ Yoohyun! ”

“It’s sucking my mana out, that’s all. It wants to pull me somewhere.” The young master lifted his palm from the wall, starving the serpents of his flames, and they writhed and flickered in what could’ve been starved agony. He looked at his older brother. “There. Now we know what it does.”

There was nowhere for the argument to go when Yoojin was very nearly going to do the same thing, so Yoojin bristled and let his younger brother off with a warning, taking the opportunity to shove the young master’s gloves back onto his hands. They set about preparations for their upcoming fight, enjoying the rare luxury of early warning to get their equipment and potions in order.

The young master elected to go first, and Yerim insisted on following shortly after. The sigil portal flashed, compressing them into light and taking them within. 

Hyunjae glanced down at the F-class who was standing at his side, and said, “After you, dear guest.”

“Why were you gone for those three weeks?”

It wasn't often he found himself ambushed by an F-class hunter, but it would be far from the last time Yoojin would throw him off beat. Hyunjae spared a smile at him. “Did you miss me so much?”

“You missed me. ”

“Indeed,” Hyunjae easily admitted even though the word casted a much larger shadow inside him. The word rang wrong for the feeling it described. “It was becoming rather boring without my item to amuse me.”

“What were you doing that just bored you to death?” he pressed.

Hyunjae regarded him for a moment and left his side, widening a gap that plagued him even when it was a mere foot away from each other. He placed himself next to the sigil portal and gestured a hand at it. “Shouldn’t you be more concerned about the young master? Who knows? He might just be writhing in agony by now. Better hurry along, little F-class.”

The comment hit the nerve it was meant to, and Yoojin passed him a seething look as he set his hand to the sigil portal. The serpents began to stir. 

“You’re pissing me off.”

“I try.” 

Yoojin’s grimace only deepened. He quietly admitted, “I did miss you, bastard.”

Light swallowed their vision.

Chapter Text

They found themselves together inside a tunnel of ice that was monstrously cold. Hyunjae wasn’t sure why he was transported along with Yoojin until he realized that he’d grabbed Yoojin’s elbow after he’d admitted to such a thing. Hyunjae let him go and nursed his hand back inside his coat as if it were burned. Despite that, his body had already taken to shivering beneath his coat.

“A mere three weeks, and you were begging to see me. It’s quite obvious that you missed me, no?” Hyunjae snickered even though the thought didn’t really penetrate into a true understanding. There were still plenty of mysteries as to what it was about Hyunjae that induced such a reaction. 

“ Ugh , I can’t believe I’m stuck with you ,” Yoojin spat, rubbing his arms and glancing about the small tunnel, the walls smooth around them as if something had bored its way through. “What is this place?”

“You have entered Lord Haivada’s Domain. You will suffer chronic S-class ice damage within the realm.”

Noticing that Yoojin was faring much worse as an F-class, Hyunjae summoned a thick white overcoat from his inventory. It was an exorbitantly expensive piece of gear custom made to Hyunjae's size and taste, but his item would just have to make do with it for now. As Hyunjae wrapped it around his shoulders, Yoojin’s breath was clouding between them. He just needed to close a few inches, and that incessant distance between them would be gone. 

He stepped away. “That should give you resistance to S-class ice damage.”

Yoojin inspected the coat with no small amount of suspicion. “And what about you?”

Somewhere further down the tunnel, a pulse of hot air flushed through the cavern. Leaving the question unanswered, Hyunjae tilted his head toward the heat of what was undoubtedly one of the young master’s rampages. They traveled down to the entrance of what opened up into a much larger cavern, providing a generous arena for the ice and fire dealers to alternate attacks against a writhing mass of white, singed scales and razor sharp teeth. A hundred-toned scream ringed with frost reverberated throughout the ice. 

Hyunjae passively observed the fight and remained posted at Yoojin’s side for his protection while he broadcasted his teaching skill across the four of them. When Yoojin’s mana came probing at him, looking to sink a line into his mind, Hyunjae rejected it. 

The F-class winced, stumbled, and growled, “ Alright , what the hell is your problem?!”

He was surprised to find that he wasn’t quite in the mood for this even though provoking Yoojin was one of his primary pastimes. Hyunjae pulled his coat around him and stared blankly at the fight, fighting down shivers. “There’s not as much of a need to include me in the skill when the young master and young lady seem to have everything under control. Better to conserve your mana.”

“Let me look. Now .”

Because Hyunjae was in the business of keeping his arm, he blocked the next connection attempt. He set his jaw to keep from shivering and tightly stated, “You know I enjoy our little exchanges, but pushing the same topic is a bit of a faux pas. I will not be disclosing where I’ve been.”

It was one of the rare times Hyunjae denied something to Yoojin outright, and the abrupt shift from his usually indulgent demeanor had those two dark eyes burning right into him. “So, does that mean I’m never going to use the teaching skill on you again in case I find out? Get real. What the hell are you trying to hide from me? Why have you been acting so weird? Why are you being so distant? ”

He admitted to missing Hyunjae. He complained of distance. He sensed something was strange.

Hyunjae wondered if Yoojin shared an acute, aching awareness of this rift between them, literal and metaphorical. The words fermenting at the dam of his impulse control found a crack to slip through. Somehow answering all of Yoojin's questions at once, he said, "I missed you."

He tensed his brows and tried to compose himself, but the cold had penetrated so deeply that it was beginning to eat at the marrow of his bones.

Something softened in Yoojin’s eyes, and he came towards Hyunjae, pulling something from his pocket. “You rich moron. What’s all your money for if you can’t buy two ice resistance items?”

He chuckled. “I have no excuse.”

Yoojin pressed a handwarmer against his gloved palm.

“What’s this? Why do you have a handwarmer, dear item?” Hyunjae was smiling even though he was cold enough to feel miserable on its own because Yoojin was intent on scrubbing some warmth into his hands. It made him so very aware of this desperate hunger inside him.

“Because Yoohyun always gets frostbite from sparring with Yerim. I always tell him to stop taking her bait, but he never listens….” Hyunjae felt like he was being stripped naked when Yoojin slipped his fingers under the hem of Hyunjae’s gloves. Then, it was skin-to-skin as he put the pad between Hyunjae’s hands and sandwiched that with his own hands. He ducked down to huff hot air onto his fingers. 

"Oh, my." Hyunjae grinned at the priceless spectacle of Yoojin fighting off S-class ice poisoning with a handwarmer and his breath. "I didn't expect to land back in your good graces so soon."

"Yeah, don't get too comfortable." He gave him a venomless glare before going back to rubbing warmth into their joined hands. "I'm not giving up on the mile just because you gave up an inch."

Hyunjae watched with simmering interest as if he were entranced by a live flame. Yoojin’s hands stroking the backs of his hands on either side was sparking a different type of heat in Hyunjae’s chest. Yoojin’s hands didn’t used to feel this way. 

“Yoojin…” Hyunjae submitted himself to the petting as he clutched the hot plastic package like some stolen treasure. “... the young master’s hands will be cold, too, when he’s finished with the wyrm. He’ll be inconsolable when he finds out I took his precious handwarmer.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. How can I let you shiver right next to me?” Yoojin took off his scarf and wrapped it around Sung Hyunjae’s neck. “Dumbass.”

In what was shaping up to either be a bad habit or an amusing ritual, Sung Hyunjae received the trio of half-frozen house guests into his penthouse for a night’s stay and a cup of hot chocolate. The young master actually demanded coffee at first but quickly and shamelessly changed his answer when his hyung asked for hot chocolate. The night ended blurrily with all four of them posted in front of his fireplace in piles of cushions, so it was natural for them to start dropping off into sleep one-by-one.

Yoojin and Hyunjae were, eventually, the last ones awake, being the two who ended up doing the least. After determining it was incapable of speech or reason, Yoohyun and Yerim disposed of the Wyrm quickly, but Yoojin got his hands on some scrolls full of sigil scripts that was no doubt going to do numbers on his sleep schedule. Confirming that hunch, Yoojin gravitated to the dining room to lay them across the table. 

Faithfully accompanying him, Hyunjae brought a pot of floral blend tea which Yoojin quickly repurposed into a very expensive paper weight. Hyunjae poured a cup and placed it next to Yoojin's hand.

“Thanks,” he muttered distractedly as he unfurled a bit more text, his journal open to a hastily scribbled reference page above him and his phone open to a picture of a particular wall of inscriptions. 

Hyunjae made to sit, and it was the work of impulse that he chose the seat next to Yoojin. Though he was sitting much closer than was usual, Hyunjae still found the distance to be bothersome.

As he was busy with one of the scrolls, Yoojin’s phone fell asleep, so he tapped it awake, revealing his lock-screen to be a pair of golden eyes peeking up over the edge of the couch at the camera.

Hynjae couldn’t help but laugh.

Yoojin unlocked his phone and gave him a questioning grin. “What? It’s normal to have pets as a wallpaper.”

“I’m sure it is, dear guest.” Hyunjae suppressed another laugh as he poured himself a cup. “Even if it’s only been with you for three weeks.”

“He’s not an it. His name is Honey.”

A thrill coursed through him, and he smiled as he dropped a spoonful of sugar into his tea. “Right.”

Yoojin returned to his translations for all but a few more minutes before biting his lip and growing distracted. He hesitated a moment more before reaching in his pocket and unspooling the Light of Savastra on the table between them. “And while we’re talking about it... can—can you shorten the cooldown time on this?”

“Hm?” Hyunjae picked up the necklace that seemed duller than the first time he laid eyes on it, probably dormant after its use. His mind spun through some possibilities.

“Or—is it possible… to separate the guardian inside it?”

Hyunjae blinked. “The guardian inside it? The cat, you mean?”

“Yes,” Yoojin replied a bit moodily. “He’s—Yoohyun said that his research team messed up and set it off, and Yoohyun saw Honey disappear right after. Is it possible to separate the cat and the item… so the cat can stay outside indefinitely?”

”You want me to contact famous, reclusive international specialists,” Hyunjae began casually, slowly stirring in a splash of cream into his tea, “because of a cat?”

Yoojin scowled. “Can you do it or not?”

“Forgive me if I'm mistaken, but isn't it simply an ordinary house cat? As far as I'm aware, it has no skills or abilities besides being S-rank in all but name." He tapped his stirring spoon against the rim. "Isn't it a waste of time when you could probably see it again in a year?"

He looked up, and there was something bitter and sullen in his curious F-class's face. "Honey is my pet. I can't help it if I miss him."

Such words invoked the same empty, yearning note in his heart. "I see."

Yoojin scoffed and brought the cup to his lips. "I guess it's too much to ask a heartless bastard like you to understand it. If you don't wanna help, then I'll just figure it out myself."

Hyunjae hummed. He’d been human for nearly three weeks now, but there wasn’t nearly as much drama for Honey as there was for Hyunjae. So much mystery as to what was going on behind that furrowed brow, and Hyunjae wanted to spend his life unraveling it. He chuckled, and he could hear his heart thumping hard as he asked, "What makes you love a creature like that? So destructive, burdensome, capricious?"

A wonderfully sharp edge revealed itself in Yoojin's stare. Then, he shoved his phone at him after opening it to a folder of photos.

He couldn't resist grinning as he perused the wealth of candid documentation of Hyunjae's naps. Videos and photos of familiarly domestic scenes come washing back with a yearning nostalgia as he saw the absurd episode of Hyunjae's curse playing out from Yoojin's eyes. So many idle moments that Yoojin wanted to capture and keep.

"Honey is none of those things. If anything, it's more like you ." Yoojin huffed and glanced unseeingly down at the scrolls. "Even if he was a mischievous little bastard like you, he's still my cat, and I want him back!"

Yoojin’s hands were worrying the edges of one of the scrolls between his fingers, and Hyunjae finally came to a decision as he reached forward to grab the hand he’d been yearning after like an abandoned stray.

“What are you doing?” Yoojin asked slowly like his hand was between the jaws of a beast.

Hyunjae turned it over and stroked a thumb up his palm, feeling the soft flesh and rough calluses that used to ruffle his coat. The point where their skin made contact seemed to sing as if Hyunjae recognized the hand it belonged to, the only hand in the world that felt so right to him. What cruelty was it to teach a creature what it was like to be held and leave him like this? 

Touching Yoojin like this was ordinarily never something he would think to do. Perhaps it was time to accept a new ordinary. It could only get more entertaining from here. 

“You want to know where I’ve been?” Hyunjae showed him a faint smile as he held onto what felt like the center of his universe in Yoojin’s fingers. “Share your curse resistance with me, won’t you? I’ll tell you everything you don’t want to know.”

“Why… don’t I want to know?” Even so, the reckless little F-class activated his curse resistance and shared it with him.

Hyunjae grinned and lifted Yoojin’s hand to cup his cheek, finally closing that accursed gap that had been eating at him for so insufferably long. “Because I’m dying for you to pet and kiss me again. Won’t you call me Honey one more time?”

Something inside him slipped, twisted—and shattered . His contract fell away in tattered mana shards, and along with it, his impulse control. 

“Y— Are you Honey?! ”

“Are you disappointed?” Hyunjae leaned in. “Did you not miss me like I did? I missed you terribly.”

“You creep , I—” He blushed furiously. “—why the hell were you my cat anyway?!”

“I followed you in the dungeon where the Light of Savastra transformed me into your 'item', and you became my 'owner'." Hyunjae grinned. "I think we might have to swap pet names."

"You followed me in there? Wait, but I didn't even see you!"

Hyunjae chuckled. "I remained hidden up until I lost consciousness and woke up as your beloved ‘Honey Bun’.”

Yoojin curled over to hide his face. “ Oh, my god! ”

“What’s wrong?" Hyunjae leaned down toward him. "I miss the way you’d call me honey when you came home. Or how you’d kiss me for being such a good boy? ”

“ What the hell is wrong with you? ” Yoojin burst, face crimson . “And you—you just let it happen?”

“I can’t help it if I'm just an ordinary cat before the famous beast tamer of South Korea. There is nothing in the world more charming than you, so what defense do I have as a mere S-class, slave to my impulses for you?” Maybe he was different after being turned into a cat. Or maybe he was just the same, and having a taste of Yoojin was bound to turn him into this. Hyunjae knelt between Yoojin’s legs, resting his cheek on his knee and staring up at him with a sly grin. “I missed hearing your spiteful barbs, but I also miss the way you would dote on me."

Yoojin mouthed for words, momentarily speechless as he watched Sung Hyunjae , unreadably aloof and sadistically capricious, was drawing Yoojin's hand down to cup his jaw. He only had to leaned forward to press his mouth against Yoojin's wrist and inhale that scent he'd gotten into the debilitating habit of looking for whenever he entered a room. He was loathe to wake without it. He looked back up through his lashes, a small smile growing against Yoojin's skin. "Oh, my, what am I meant to do?”

“Wh-what…” Yoojin sat there for a long moment trying to process what appeared to be Hyunjae’s complete mental lapse (which Hyunjae conceded that it very well might be). Staring down into Hyunjae's eyes, Yoojin lifted a hand out of some morbid curiosity... and stroked his cheek like he had when he was a cat.

Hyunjae's lashes fluttered at the warm, gentle slide of skin, and he didn't know how, but his desire for Yoojin's touch was becoming stronger yet. He turned his face to kiss Yoojin's palm.

That shocked his F-class owner to his senses, and he ripped his hands away, clutching the one Hyunjae kissed to his chest. " What the hell— you can't possibly... what are you even saying right now?!"

“I’m saying that I’ve been completely domesticated by you. How can you expect me to live on my own when I’m so utterly dependent on you now?” All Hyunjae did was seek Yoojin’s affection, disgust, amusement, anger, happiness, love. He smiled up at him. “You've tamed me, so won't you please take responsibility for this stray, Yoojin?”