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Hyeonjun wasn’t the type to date around or flirt shamelessly before. He wasn’t the boy who collected hearts like trophies or charmed the castle ghosts with a wink. Before everything, he was quieter. He was the kind of guy whose life was Quidditch. He would rather focus on Quidditch, or sleep somewhere hidden from the professors than get caught up in drama.
It was during their second year that Hyeonjun met Wooje—a Slytherin with sharp skill on the Quidditch pitch and an even sharper smile. If only smiles could kill he would've been long gone.
Wooje also loved Quidditch and sleeping. And for a time, Hyeonjun convinced himself that Wooje loved him too.
But then he met Wooje and got hurt. So bad. Okay, end of story. Thanks for reading.
But basically, he met Wooje and his life changed for the better and worse.
So, for a while, he convinced himself that casual dating was what was best. No attachments, no expectations. Just fleeting things that didn’t mean much—or so he told himself. People started calling him a player, saying he got bored too easily. But that wasn’t really who he was.
They were both obsessed with Quidditch. Played, lived, and breathed Quidditch. It was their life.
Hyeonjun was a Beater—fierce and protective, tasked with keeping his teammates safe from Bludgers while chasing the Quaffle. Wooje was a Chaser, swift and cunning, weaving through the air with predator-like grace.
Rival houses, but on the pitch, they found common ground. After one particularly intense match, Hyeonjun wiped sweat from his brow and called out, “Not bad, Slytherin. Almost caught me with that fake pass.”
Wooje smirked, flipping his broom in the air. “Almost? I thought I had you.”
“Yeah, almost,” Hyeonjun shot back with a grin. “Guess you’ll have to try harder next time.”
Their grudging respect after matches grew into casual conversations about Quidditch—sharing tips, and teasing each other over missed catches.
One afternoon, as they sat on the stands after practice, Wooje nudged him. “You’re actually not bad at defense.”
Hyeonjun laughed. “And you’re not just a pretty face. I might start believing the rumors.”
They respected each other mutually. And before long, they had conversations outside of the pitch.
They met more often, first for practice, then for late-night walks through the castle, plotting pranks on Snape and unsuspecting students or teaming up to hex each other’s housemates. They were living their best lives at Hogwarts—wild, free, reckless.
One night, crouched behind a tapestry, Wooje grinned and whispered, “Ready to give Slytherin’s table a little surprise?”
Hyeonjun smirked, pulling out a hex. “Let’s make sure they never sit still again.”
Their laughter echoed softly down the empty corridor as they vanished into the shadows.
Then, slowly, the unspoken happened.
They fell for each other.
Hyeonjun didn’t understand why they had to hide it. Both of them were half-bloods. Hyeonjun’s family had never cared about blood status, and Wooje’s family was surprisingly chill about it, too.
But for months, Wooje refused to make their relationship public. He wanted it to be kept a secret.
“Why do we have to hide it?” Hyeonjun asked one evening. They were at the Astronomy Tower and had been together for almost a year now.
“Better safe than sorry,” Wooje replied softly, brushing a stray hair from Hyeonjun’s forehead.
“You're not ashamed of me, are you?”
“What? No! Never.”
Hyeonjun sighed. “But it's not like we care about what other people think or say about us, and we're not breaking the rules.”
“The others won't understand, but you do, right?” Wooje said, cupping Hyeonjun's face in his hands and giving him a light peck.
Reluctantly, Hyeonjun nodded. “You're lucky your spell works really hard on me, Choi.”
Wooje held Hyeonjun's face and gave his lips a deeper, passionate kiss.
That was how their secret relationship began.
Hidden moments in the Astronomy Tower. Sneaky makeout and not suitable for work sessions in empty classrooms. Glancing at each other in crowded hallways.
Some people suspected they were dating, but others just chalked it up to them being really close.
But secrets don't keep being a secret for a long time. They have a way of unraveling and sometimes it reveals itself in a nasty way.
It happened a few weeks before winter break—the beginning of the end. How ironic that the weather had to be cold, just like their feelings for each other.
Hyeonjun had been heading back from a Quidditch strategy meeting late at night, walking through the quiet hallways trying his best to avoid being caught by Snape again. He wasn’t trying to spy. He didn’t mean to hear it.
But he stopped when he heard Wooje’s voice echoing down the corridor, harsh and cold in a way Hyeonjun had never heard before. He hid behind one of the pillars.
“Fuck, you lot are obsessed,” Wooje was saying. “It was a bet, okay? I won. Gryffindor golden boy’s got it bad. That’s all it was.”
Laughter followed. Someone clapped him on the back.
Another voice sneered, “Didn’t think you had it in you, Wooje.”
“Bet you five Galleons he’s crying over you right now,” another voice said.
Wooje’s voice dropped lower but still carried itself clearly. “Yeah, well… I told you I could do it. Satisfied?”
More laughter. “You’re crueler than we thought, Choi,” another muttered.
Hyeonjun’s stomach turned. He didn’t wait to hear the rest.
He didn’t cry. Gryffindors didn’t cry. He wouldn't give him the satisfaction of seeing him break.
Instead, he disappeared. Stopped meeting Wooje in their secret places. Stopped responding to the carefully folded notes slipped into his pocket between classes. Stopped looking at him.
And Wooje noticed.
He cornered Hyeonjun in the hallway outside the Charms classroom two days later. There was anger in his eyes and confusion painted over his face.
“What the hell is going on with you?” Wooje demanded, grabbing Hyeonjun’s sleeve before he could walk away. “You’ve been acting like I don’t exist.”
Hyeonjun stared at him like he was a stranger, a look that Wooje never saw from him before. “I heard you.”
Wooje blinked. “Heard… what?”
“Don't put that fake act on me. That night. In the hallway.” Hyeonjun’s voice was cold. “You should’ve just told me it was a game to you, then I would've played with you better. Would’ve saved me the trouble.”
The hallway was empty. Cold. Just like Hyeonjun.
Wooje’s jaw clenched. “You weren’t supposed to hear that.”
“Oh, great,” Hyeonjun snapped. “So it was true?”
“No.” Wooje looked away. “Yes. Not like that.”
Hyeonjun laughed. His laugh was bitter, sharp. “Is that your excuse? 'Not like that'? Are you fucking kidding me?”
“You don’t get it,” Wooje replied. “They were going to make my life hell. I couldn’t—I had to say something.”
“Ah. And you chose me. You chose to throw me under the fucking snake bus,” Hyeonjun said, voice cold.
“I didn’t mean to—” Wooje stepped forward, reaching for him.
“But you did.” Hyeonjun flinched, moving away from him, his eyes filled with tears. “You let me fall for you. I let you hide us—our relationship. I didn't want to hide us anymore, but because I love you, I let you. And when you had the chance to prove them wrong, to stand by me, you picked them.”
He didn't plan on crying in front of Wooje, but his emotions got the better of him. He felt so hurt.
Wooje opened his mouth, then shut it again. “I thought I was protecting us.”
Hyeonjun shook his head. “No, Wooje. You were being selfish. You were only protecting yourself.”
Wooje didn’t say anything.
He wanted to. The words were there, crawling up his throat, aching to be let out.
I didn’t mean it. I loved you back and it's real. I still do.
But he was a coward. He couldn’t stand up for himself against the other Slytherins. He couldn’t fight for him and Hyeonjun. That was the bitter truth. The words remained trapped behind his lips.
“Love is not like that, Wooje. Whatever your twisted version of it is, that's not love. You're just fucking selfish,” Hyeonjun said, and then he walked away.
And Wooje let him.
They never spoke again after that.
Not really.
They tried their best to act as strangers, but sometimes there were stolen glances across the Great Hall, moments where their eyes met in silence and the air felt too thick to breathe.
It wasn't the same anymore.
The weeks after the hallway confrontation felt like moving through a thick fog. Nobody really knew how to navigate it when it's their first time.
For Hyeonjun, it was like someone had turned the world down a notch—he was quieter, didn't laugh fully, and every time he passed a Slytherin in the corridor, he half-expected to see him. His friends noticed, of course.
“Something's off with you. I can feel it,” Minhyung whispered during breakfast, nudging him with a croissant in hand. “Bread?”
Hyeonjun shook his head. “Just tired.”
He wasn’t lying. It was exhausting—pretending that nothing had ever happened between them over the past year, that they were now nothing more than strangers with memories of each other.
But Gryffindors didn’t sulk. They were too prideful and arrogant for that. At least, not where anyone could see.
So Hyeonjun smiled, laughed too loudly at dinner, went to Quidditch practice early and left late. Dated and flirted around. And he told himself that was enough.
Wooje, on the other hand, was quieter and withdrawn than ever.
He didn’t hang around the Slytherin common room anymore unless he had to. He didn’t explain why he skipped dinner two nights in a row, or why he snapped at another Slytherin for teasing him about “his little Gryffindor project.”
What he did do was write.
Late at night, hidden behind his blankets, he filled a worn leather-bound notebook with the things he should have said. With the truths he didn’t get to explain because he was a coward.
I didn’t think you’d ever care.
I didn’t think I’d care.
But you looked at me like I wasn’t a Slytherin, or a Quidditch player, or someone to impress.
You just looked at me.
But he never gave him the letters.
Of course not.
Because how do you hand someone a truth after you’ve already let a lie destroy them?
It all came to a head in late November.
There was a joint Gryffindor-Slytherin detention. Someone had hexed all the suits of armor on the second floor to sing obnoxiously off-key love songs in the style of Celestina Warbeck. Nobody confessed, but both houses were punished equally.
Hyeonjun and Wooje were assigned the same corridor—of course they were.
They hadn’t been in the same room alone in weeks.
“You don’t have to talk to me,” Hyeonjun said as they started scrubbing the floors the Muggle way, “and I won’t talk to you.”
“Fine.”
But it didn’t stay quiet for long.
Because pain doesn’t like silence.
“You know what pisses me off the most?” Hyeonjun snapped after thirty minutes of tension so thick it was hard to breathe. “It’s not even what you said. It’s that you meant it enough to say it.”
“I told you—”
“No. You lied, Wooje. You didn’t just say something vague. You told them I was a bet. That I had it bad. You made me a joke.”
Wooje dropped the brush with a clang. “What did you expect me to do?” he hissed, standing up. “Let them rip me to shreds? Let them use you against me? Because that’s what they do, Hyeonjun. That’s what they’ve done to anyone who—”
“Who what?” Hyeonjun challenged, standing too. “Who feels something real?”
Wooje was silent.
“That’s what I thought.”
Hyeonjun turned, grabbing his cleaning supplies. “You can fucking lie to them all you want. Hell, lie to yourself, too. But don’t pretend like I was the one who fucking ruined this,” he pointed to both of them.
There was silence between them.
Hyeonjun paused. Just for a second. Wooje didn't say anything, but his expression told everything he felt.
Then Hyeonjun walked away again.
And like the last time, Wooje didn’t stop him.
He always watched him go.
They finished detention in silence.
Afterward, Wooje sat on the cold stone steps outside the castle for an hour, notebook heavy in his robe pocket, full of words he’d never be brave enough to say out loud.
And Hyeonjun lay awake in the Gryffindor dorm, staring at the ceiling, wondering how love could make him feel like he was falling and being held—and now, like he was being torn apart and shredded into pieces.
The library after curfew was the quietest place in the castle. It was quiet enough that Hyeonjun could hear his own heartbeat when he opened the door. He had taken Minhyung’s invisibility cloak to avoid being seen.
He didn’t expect anyone to be there. He never came to study after hours. He wasn’t fond of studying in the first place. But he couldn’t sleep. His brain wouldn’t stop thinking, wouldn’t stop replaying that hallway, that corridor, that pained look that Wooje’s face had.
So he came here, to lose himself in something—books, silence, anything that wasn’t Wooje.
But of course, Wooje was there too because fate seemed to hate him recently.
He sat alone at a table near the Restricted Section, a single enchanted lantern casting pale light across his face. His tie was loosened, sleeves rolled up, fingers tapping a nervous rhythm against the edge of his book.
Hyeonjun froze in the doorway. Something inside him screamed to leave.
But he didn’t.
Wooje looked up. “Is anyone there?” he asked quietly.
Hyeonjun took off the cloak. Their eyes met, but neither moved.
Then Wooje spoke, voice barely above a whisper, “You’re not supposed to be here.”
“Neither are you.”
A pause that felt like an eternity.
“Looking for something?” Wooje asked.
“Peace,” Hyeonjun replied. “But you’re here, so that’s ruined.”
Wooje didn’t rise to the insult. He just stared at him, eyes unreadable.
“I’ve been waiting for you.”
That stopped Hyeonjun cold. “What?”
Wooje closed the book in front of him and stood, slowly approaching him.
“I’ve been waiting. Hoping you'd come find me. Even if it was just to scream at me again.”
“I don’t want to scream,” Hyeonjun said, jaw tight. “I just want to understand.”
Wooje looked down at his hands. “That makes two of us.”
Another silence passed. Then Hyeonjun stepped forward.
“You cared,” he said, breaking the silence. “Don’t lie now. I saw it. I felt it. In the way you looked at me, the way you touched me like I was something you didn’t think you’d ever get to keep.”
Wooje’s voice cracked. “I did care.”
“Then why—”
“Because I’m a coward.”
The words were ugly. Honest.
Hyeonjun didn’t move.
“You don’t get it,” Wooje continued. “You, Gryffindors—you live out loud. You get to feel things and not apologize for it. But me?” He shook his head. “Slytherins turn everything into a weapon. And the second they knew about you—about us—they would’ve used it.”
“So you turned me into the weapon first,” Hyeonjun said flatly. “You beat them to it.”
Wooje’s voice dropped. “I thought I could protect you. Protect me. Protect us. But all I did was destroy what I wanted to keep.”
Silence again.
Hyeonjun stepped closer.
“You really felt something for me?”
Wooje met his gaze, bearing his true self for Hyeonjun to see.
“I still do.”
The words hit Hyeonjun like a punch and a hug all at once.
But it wasn’t enough.
“I don’t know if I can trust you again.”
Wooje smiled bitterly. “I know.”
He reached into his bag and pulled out something wrapped in parchment. It was worn at the edges, creased from being handled too many times.
“Here,” he said. “Take it.”
Hyeonjun looked at the bundle in his hand, then up at Wooje. “What is it?”
“Everything I didn’t say.”
He left the letters on the table and walked past Hyeonjun, not looking back once.
Hyeonjun stood there for a long time after he was gone, the parchment heavy in his hand, heart heavier in his chest.
He didn’t open it right away. Maybe he never would.