Archive of Our Own

Morning in Donghyuck's cottage always began the same way – with sunshine on the windowsill, flower pollen in the air, and at least one minor magical incident before noon. He looked every bit the picture of fairy elegance if that included sleep-creased cheeks, a loose cardigan slipping off one shoulder, and pink sparkles stuck stubbornly in his hair from yesterday.

Today's incident involved a rosewater vial, three drifting heart-shaped sparks, and Jisung making the grave mistake of reaching for the wrong shelf.

"Careful," Donghyuck said, standing at the centre table with one hand on his hip and the other poised over a simmering copper pot. "That one is not moon-syrup. It's concentrated infatuation extract."

Jisung froze, clutching the bottle with both hands. "Why would you keep that next to the moon-syrup?"

"Because they're both pink," Donghyuck said, as if this were obvious. Then he leaned over his potion with a tiny silver spoon, gave it one precise stir, and watched as the liquid inside turned from pearly white to a soft blush gold. "Ah, perfect."

The cottage smelled like sugar and lavender, and glass bottles lined every shelf in neat, colour-coded rows that meant absolutely nothing to anyone except Donghyuck. The sun catchers spun lazy rainbows across the walls.

At the front window, a painted sign read:

LEE DONGHYUCK'S ENCHANTMENTS, APOTHECARY & DISCREET ROMANTIC ASSISTANCE

The word 'discreet' had been added after Mrs Kim from the bakery loudly announced to the entire market that Donghyuck's "second-chance sweetheart tonic" had saved her marriage.

Donghyuck lifted the finished potion carefully and poured it into a waiting bottle. He held it up to the light, examining the way it shimmered.

"Mild crush enhancement," he declared, and wrote it nearly onto a label in curling gold ink. He set it beside the two others drying on the table – 'confession courage' and 'absolutely do NOT use twice.'

Jisung squinted. "What happens if you use that one twice?"

"You cry for three days." Donghyuck didn't even look up. "Write terrible poetry. Choi, the barrel maker from the edge of the woods, started thinking pigeons are omens."

Jisung slowly returned the concentrated infatuation extract to the shelf. His sleeve caught on a bunch of dried baby’s breath hanging from a hook. He flailed, and an empty jar tipped off the counter and shattered on the floor in a burst of glittering pink dust.

Donghyuck gasped sharply. “Jisung!”

“I didn’t even touch it!” Jisung protested, already backing away from the sparkling wreckage.

Donghyuck pressed a hand to his chest. “Do you have any idea how delicate love magic is?”

Jisung stared at him. “You just threw glitter at that guy earlier.”

Donghyuck chose not to dignify that with a response. Instead, he flicked his fingers, and the broken glass rose neatly into the air, the pink dust swirling after it in obedient little streams. With another flick, everything swept itself into the rubbish bin by the door.

Honestly, apprentices these days.

“Love magic,” Donghyuck said, returning to his worktable, “is an art. It requires balance, intuition, and finesse. You cannot simply throw ingredients together and hope for the best.”

Jisung looked pointedly at the bubbling pot, then at the three open jars of sugar petals, star-anise pollen, and suspiciously glowing syrup. “Is that not what you’re doing?”

Donghyuck clicked his tongue. “No.”

Outside, somewhere down the lane, the town bell chimed the hour. A breeze carried in the smell of fresh bread from the bakery and the sound of market chatter drifting up the hill. Donghyuck smiled to himself as he reached for another clean bottle, his wings giving a pleased little flutter behind him.

There were heartbreaks to mend, confessions to embolden, crushes to encourage, and in a town this charmingly hopeless, everyone eventually found their way to his door. After all, if there was one thing Lee Donghyuck knew better than anyone else in this village, it was love.

Jisung was up on a stool by the drying rack, still looking unfairly nervous about the jar he had broken earlier, when the bell over the door gave a soft, polite jingle. Renjun stepped inside with two bundles of herbs tucked under his arm.

He stopped just past the doorway and narrowed his eyes.

“Why,” he asked, after a beat, “does it smell like a proposal in here?”

Donghyuck looked up from the counter, where he was carefully knotting a ribbon around a bottle of confession courage. “That,” he said, “is what success smells like.”

Renjun made a face. “It smells like roses got into a fight with a bakery.”

“Exactly,” Donghyuck said brightly.

He took the herbs from Renjun and held them up to the light. Silverleaf and heartvine, tied together with twine. Fresh. Good quality. Renjun always brought him the best herbs and then acted like it was a personal inconvenience to be appreciated for it.

“You’re late,” Donghyuck said.

Renjun slid him a flat look. “I said I’d come before noon.”

“It feels late to me.”

“It’s because you like to begin every day by waking up with Mrs Park's hens.”

Donghyuck gasped, scandalised in a way that would have been more convincing if there weren’t still pink glitter clinging stubbornly to his cheekbone. “That is such an ugly thing to say.”

Renjun’s gaze drifted to the row of bottles drying beside the sink. He leaned slightly closer, reading the labels in silence. “I believe one day the town council is going to chain your front door shut.”

“They’ve threatened that before. It only improved business.”

Before Renjun could answer, the bell above the door rang again; this time not politely at all, but in a bright little burst that sounded almost delighted.

Jaemin came in carrying an armful of flowers so vivid they looked enchanted even before Donghyuck touched them. Moon daisies, foxglove, blush peonies, and a spill of tiny blue blossoms that shimmered faintly at the edges, as though they had borrowed colour from the morning sky and weren’t inclined to give it back.

Jaemin set them gently on the counter. “Delivery,” he said.

Donghyuck eyed him immediately. “Why are you smiling like that?”

Jaemin blinked, wide-eyed innocence wrapped around a grin that gave him away at once. “Like what?”

“Like you’ve committed a crime.”

Renjun snorted.

Jaemin ignored him and plucked one of the blue flowers from the bunch. “These are new,” he said. “They opened in the greenhouse last night.”

Donghyuck leaned in before he could stop himself. The petals were so thin that light passed through them, and somewhere deep inside the flower’s throat, a faint silver glow pulsed like a held breath.

“What do they do?” he asked.

Jaemin twirled the stem between his fingers. “Nothing too dramatic. They react to strong feelings.”

Renjun, who knew that tone and did not trust it, said at once, “Donghyuck, don’t.”

“Define strong feelings,” Donghyuck said at the exact same time.

Jaemin’s smile turned angelic. “They bloom faster around affection. They glow when there’s mutual pining. They curl shut when someone is being particularly oblivious.”

For a moment, the cottage went still. Jisung stared very hard at the shelf in front of him, and Renjun pinched the bridge of his nose.

Donghyuck straightened slowly. “Get out.”

Jaemin laughed, not even a little sorry. “I brought peonies.”

“You brought insults hidden in botany.”

“That is still a gift.”

From outside came a voice loud enough to make the windchimes by the sink burst into a frantic little song. “I’m just saying, if both of them show up at the lantern festival again, that absolutely counts as couple behaviour!”

Donghyuck groaned before he even reached the window. He shoved it open and leaned out.

Below, on the lane that curved past the apothecary and down toward the square, Chenle stood with a paper bag tucked under one arm and all the confidence of someone who had never once been embarrassed in his life. The sunlight turned his hair bright, and his grin widened the moment he saw Donghyuck.

“Chenle,” Donghyuck called, “why are you shouting under my window like a badly raised crow?”

Chenle pointed accusingly up at him. “Why are you threatening me when I’m contributing to the local economy?”

“You are taking bets on people’s love lives!”

“It’s community engagement.”

“It’s deeply evil.”

“It’s fun,” Chenle corrected. “Anyway, Mark’s coming by later to fix your window again, so I’m adjusting the odds.”

Donghyuck blinked, then he folded his arms and leaned one shoulder against the window frame. “He just likes being helpful,” he said. “It’s a personality flaw.”

Chenle threw his head back and yelled, “You are genuinely the only person in town who believes that!”

Donghyuck lifted his chin, full of wounded dignity.

“Well,” he said, drawing himself up to his full, unimpressive height, “somebody in this village has to remain rational.”

The windchimes rang again, bright and disbelieving, while all around him the cottage gleamed softly in the late-morning light, sweet with herbs and sugar and magic, as if even the walls themselves knew he was lying.

The last of the sunlight lingered in the windowpanes like warm honey, gold deepening slowly into amber, then rose, then the faint bruised blue of coming dusk. The glass bottles on the shelves caught what was left of it and held it close, glowing from within.

Outside, the woods that curled around the little town were slipping into themselves, trees turning dark and velvety at the edges, the birdsong thinning into the occasional soft call. Inside, the cottage listened.

It always listened more closely when Mark was there.

The bell over the door gave only the gentlest little note when he stepped inside, as if even it had learned to greet him differently.

Donghyuck looked up from where he was standing on a stool by the front shelves, rearranging a row of heartvine tinctures by colour because the evening light had made one of them look slightly more peach than pink, and now he could think of nothing else.

Mark had one hand braced on the doorframe behind him, just for a second, as his eyes adjusted to the glow inside. In the fading light, he looked even more like something the forest had made by accident and then decided to keep.

In daylight, his hair carried warm brown through it, chestnut and bark and the rich, deep colour of tree trunks after rain. In the cottage dusk, it looked softer, almost velvety, with those tawny undertones catching where the lamplight touched it. Nestled in it, just above his temples, were the beginnings of antlers – small velvet nubs, not yet branched.

The sort of thing that made people in town lower their voices when they spoke to him, as if he might at any moment turn and vanish neatly into undergrowth.

Mark wore the woods the way other people wore perfume. Cedar. Moss. Evening air. The green, cool smell of leaves brushed under careful hands.

Annoying, really. Especially when Donghyuck himself was all brightness by comparison, because where Mark looked like the heart of the woods at twilight, Donghyuck looked like the last handful of sunset refusing to go quietly.

Together, if one were feeling particularly poetic and extremely irritating, they might have looked harmonious.

Donghyuck was not feeling poetic.

“What happened to knocking?” he asked, setting down the tincture bottle with a small clink.

Mark blinked, then smiled. “You said last time that if I knocked like a customer, you’d charge me.”

“That was a reasonable request.”

“You also said if I came in without announcing myself, you’d throw something at me.”

Donghyuck stepped down from the stool in one elegant motion and folded his arms. “That was affection.”

Mark’s smile tipped softer. “That’s not what affection usually means.”

“To you, maybe.”

Mark had brought his tool pouch slung over one shoulder, and when he set it down on the counter, Donghyuck caught the glint of twilight filtering over his hands – broad-knuckled, careful, faintly callused, a few thin green-gold lines of old forest magic threading the skin at his wrists. Guardian marks. Signs of the old kind of magic, rooted and patient and strong enough not to need showing off.

Donghyuck, naturally, believed showing off was one of magic’s highest callings.

“You’re late,” he said.

Mark glanced toward the window over the sink. “It’s barely sunset.”

“It feels late.”

Mark gave the crooked latch a look, then looked back at Donghyuck. “Were you waiting?”

Donghyuck scoffed. “Don’t flatter yourself.”

That earned him a laugh, quiet and warm.

The window had been sticking for a week now, which was not technically Donghyuck’s fault. A vine charm had gotten a little too attached to the latch and now treated every attempt to open it like a personal betrayal. Donghyuck had threatened to burn it off twice and sweet-talked it three times. The vine had ignored both methods.

Mark moved toward it with ease, ducking his head slightly as he passed beneath a row of hanging herbs. The lamplight skimmed along the line of his cheek and caught on the velvet at the base of his antler nubs. Donghyuck, who was not staring, noticed that the colour there was a little darker than the rest of his hair.

He hated noticing things.

“You didn’t have to come all the way out here just to fix a window,” he said, trailing after him anyway.

Mark crouched by the sill and opened his pouch. “It’s not far.”

“It’s through the woods.”

“I live in the woods.” Mark glanced up, eyes bright with amusement. “You’ve literally seen my house.”

Donghyuck leaned one shoulder against the wall beside the sink, wings brushing lightly against the hanging rosemary. “I thought that might’ve been an elaborate illusion.”

Mark shook his head, smiling to himself as he examined the latch. There was always something unfairly gentle about the way he handled things, as if broken or stubborn objects had never once annoyed him. He touched the wood with those quiet guardian hands, murmured something low under his breath, and Donghyuck watched as a faint green shimmer ran briefly along the warped frame like water through roots.

The cottage breathed in.

Forest magic always felt different from fairy magic. Donghyuck’s spells were bright, quick, sparkling things. Mark’s magic moved like old earth. Like branches bending under the wind and straightening again when it passes.

“Don’t make it ugly,” Donghyuck said.

Mark, focused on the hinge, only huffed a laugh. “I’m fixing the latch, not carving a monument.”

“You have no artistic vision.”

“You have impossible standards.”

“I have excellent standards. That’s why my shop is beautiful.”

Mark looked around the cottage then – the dried flowers overhead, the drifting specks of gold dust caught in the lamplight, Donghyuck himself half-lit by evening and annoyance and the soft glow that fairies carried when they were emotional, whether they wanted to or not.

“It is beautiful,” he said simply.

It should have rolled off Donghyuck’s back like every other compliment he accepted as his due. Instead, it caught somewhere inconveniently under his ribs and stayed there, fluttering.

He narrowed his eyes on instinct. “You’re distracting me.”

Mark looked genuinely startled. “You’re not doing anything.”

“Exactly.”

A moment later, the latch gave a neat, surprised click beneath Mark’s hand.

He pushed the window open. This time it swung wide at once, smooth and easy, letting in the cool breath of evening. The first night sounds drifted through – crickets beginning in the grass, a far-off owl, leaves shifting gently in the dark.

“Oh,” Donghyuck said before he could stop himself.

Mark glanced up at him from where he was still crouched, one hand resting lightly on the sill. “Is that okay?”

“Acceptable,” he said.

Mark’s smile softened into something impossible to look at directly. “Good.”

The evening breeze stirred Donghyuck’s wings. Somewhere in the rafters, a bundle of dried baby’s breath trembled and released three tiny white petals that drifted lazily to the floor between them.

Donghyuck ignored this obvious betrayal by his own house.

“You may go now,” he said, because the cottage was suddenly too warm and the twilight too lovely and Mark too much of the forest standing there in his little fairy-lit kitchen.

Mark rose, slinging the pouch back over his shoulder, but made no move toward the door.

“Do you want me to?” he asked.

The question was mild. Casual, even.

Still, it seemed to brush the room softly in passing, leaving everything a little altered behind it.

Donghyuck lifted his chin. “No,” he said, after a beat. “The window works now. It would be wasteful not to make tea.”

Something in Mark’s face eased, bright as first lantern-light.

“Okay,” he said.

And because Donghyuck was, tragically, a creature ruled by instinct as much as pride, he turned at once toward the kettle so Mark wouldn’t see the smile he couldn’t quite help – small and fleeting and warm as the last line of sunset disappearing into the trees.

Donghyuck made the mistake of believing he had perfected subtlety.

The spell had been sitting in his notebook all afternoon, circled three times in pink ink. It was elegant, restrained, and, in Donghyuck’s professional opinion, one of his better ideas – a soft attunement charm meant to heighten a person’s awareness of affection already lingering nearby. Just a little magical nudge, like parting a curtain and letting in more light.

He had tested it carefully.

Mrs Han had gone home with tears in her eyes after suddenly realising her husband peeled pears for her because she hated doing it herself. Two teenagers in the square had spent ten full minutes staring at each other over candied chestnuts as though struck by divine revelation. Even the grumpy cat behind the bakery had become briefly, suspiciously cuddly.

So yes, the spell worked.

Which meant that by the time evening gathered itself around the cottage and the windows turned dusky blue, Donghyuck was feeling both confident and curious in exactly the combination that usually led to trouble.

Mark arrived just as the last of the light was thinning over the woods.

He let himself in with that careful quietness of his, shutting the door gently behind him so the bell only gave one soft note. Donghyuck, who was at the counter pretending to sort dried rose petals, glanced up only long enough to acknowledge him with a cool look.

Mark set a small paper parcel on the table. “You said you were out of cinnamon.”

“I say a lot of things.”

“You do,” Mark agreed mildly.

That should not have been such an irritatingly fond answer.

He moved further into the cottage, bringing with him the faint cool smell of evening forest, and the little velvet nubs at his temples caught the lamplight when he ducked his head to look at the kettle on the hearth.

“Tea?” he asked.

Donghyuck, who had absolutely not been waiting for this exact moment, shrugged one shoulder. “Since you’re here.”

Mark smiled to himself and crossed to the hearth.

Perfect.

His back was turned. He was distracted. Donghyuck’s wings gave one small anticipatory flutter behind him before he firmly stilled them.

Carefully, he slid his notebook a little farther away so Mark wouldn’t glance down and read the title of the charm. Then he reached for the little vial he’d tucked behind the sugar jar earlier – small, clear glass, no bigger than his thumb, filled with a soft pink-gold shimmer that moved like light caught in syrup.

Mark, still facing the kettle, was rolling his sleeves back. “Did you eat today?”

Donghyuck pulled the cork free as quietly as he could. “That is none of your business.”

“It kind of is when you get meaner on an empty stomach.”

“I am always this charming.”

Mark laughed under his breath and Donghyuck narrowed his eyes at the back of his head.

Then, he tipped a single thread of the spell into his palm. It gathered there in a tiny swirl of warm light, hardly brighter than dust in the air. Completely invisible unless you knew what to look for.

Which Mark, obviously, did not.

Donghyuck flicked his fingers.

The charm drifted soundlessly across the room and settled against the back of Mark’s shoulder in a soft gold blink.

Donghyuck straightened at once, snatching up a jar of dried chamomile and examining it with theatrical concentration in case Mark turned around immediately in enchanted alarm.

He waited.

Nothing happened.

Mark lifted the kettle. Poured hot water into the teapot. Reached for the cinnamon parcel.

Donghyuck stared at him.

The spell should have done something by now. A pause, at least. A thoughtful little silence. Some visible sign of heightened emotional awareness. A softening. A flutter. A wonderfully embarrassing realisation.

Instead, Mark only frowned faintly at the lid of the teapot. “Did this crack already?”

Donghyuck kept holding the chamomile jar. “What?”

“The handle,” Mark said, glancing over his shoulder. “It looks loose.”

Donghyuck lowered the jar very slowly. “I don't think it did.”

Mark blinked. “Okay.”

Another beat passed. Still nothing.

Donghyuck couldn't keep his mouth shut, unfortunately. “Do you feel strange?”

Mark’s mouth twitched. “That depends. Are you asking generally, or is this about one of your experiments?”

Donghyuck’s wings twitched. “Why would you think this is one of my experiments?”

Mark turned to him fully, one hand still resting on the teapot handle. There was a faint pink spark on his sleeve where the spell had hit, glowing stubbornly against the fabric.

He looked down at it, then back up at Donghyuck.

“Because,” he said, very carefully, “you’re holding chamomile like you want it to burst into flames.”

Donghyuck stared at him in horror.

Mark brushed the spark away with two fingers. It broke apart and vanished before it could betray itself further. Then he looked at Donghyuck with infuriating patience. “Was that sneaky glitter, or should I be worried?”

“That,” Donghyuck said, drawing himself up, “was not glitter.”

“Right,” Mark said.

“It was a highly refined emotional attunement charm.”

Mark was quiet for a moment, as though giving this the serious consideration it absolutely deserved. “Should I be doing something?”

Donghyuck could have screamed.

“Yes,” he said instead. “Probably.”

Mark waited, but nothing happened. The kettle ticked softly on the hearth. Outside, the evening breeze shifted through the trees. Somewhere near the window, the ivy rustled with what felt suspiciously like laughter.

Mark’s expression softened into barely contained amusement. “Hyuck.”

Donghyuck set the chamomile jar down with care. “I hate this.”

“That seems a little harsh.”

“It’s my spell,” Donghyuck snapped. “I can be harsh to it if I want.”

Mark smiled then – small, warm, helplessly fond in a way that made the whole failure somehow worse. And Donghyuck, glaring at the complete and utter absence of magical reaction in the single most irritatingly unaffected person he had ever met, felt professional curiosity bloom into full-fledged outrage.

Interesting, he thought.

By the third failed experiment, Donghyuck had moved on from annoyance into something far more dignified and sustainable.

Obsession.

He refused to call it that, naturally. In the privacy of his worktable, with the shutters thrown open to let in the pale gold of late afternoon and his notebook spread before him like the site of an active investigation, he called it research. This sounded much better.

The page in front of him had already been filled, crossed out, and started over twice. The final version was arranged in neat, emphatic lines of pink-black ink, written with the kind of aggressive elegance usually reserved for declarations of war and very expensive invitations.

SUBJECT: LEE MARK
CLASSIFICATION: woodland guardian, half-stag spirit, chronically unhelpful
ANOMALY: immune??
NOTES: no visible response to attunement charm version four. mild response to tea (but possibly because it had cinnamon). impossible to determine whether naturally resistant, secretly shielded, or just deeply strange.

Donghyuck paused, tapping the feather end of his pen against his mouth.

Then, after a moment’s thought, he added:

additional note: keeps being nice. suspicious.

From the doorway came a long, patient silence. Donghyuck did not look up right away because he had already identified it.

Renjun’s silences were specific. They had shape. Texture. This one was narrow and judgmental, with the faint edge of someone preparing to say something both accurate and annoying.

He finished the line he was writing first, then he lifted his head.

Renjun stood in the doorway with a bundle of silverleaf under one arm and two jars of dried feverfew balanced against his chest, wearing the exact expression of a man who had walked in on a very small, very preventable disaster.

For a beat, his eyes flicked from the notebook to Donghyuck’s face and back again.

Then he said, “You’re obsessed.”

Donghyuck sat up straighter at once. “I am researching!”

Renjun stepped inside and placed the herbs on the nearest empty stretch of counter, which was not particularly empty at all. Donghyuck’s table had vanished under the weight of little bottles, loose petals, note pages, three failed ribbon charms, and a bowl of sugared plums he had forgotten he was eating.

“You wrote,” Renjun said, leaning over just enough to read, "that he's chronically unhelpful.”

“He is,” Donghyuck said. “He keeps not reacting.”

Renjun turned his head slowly. “Do you hear yourself when you talk?”

“Only when other people aren’t interrupting me.”

A breeze slipped through the open window and stirred the pages of the notebook. Renjun picked it up before Donghyuck could stop him and flipped back a page.

There, in even more damning detail, was a list.

POSSIBLE EXPLANATIONS FOR MARK’S IMMUNITY
hidden protection charm
unusual guardian resistance
emotional vacancy (unlikely. he apologizes to furniture.)
something else?

Renjun closed the notebook with one hand and looked at him over it. “You need a hobby.”

“I have a hobby,” Donghyuck said. “It’s love.”

“That is not a hobby when people pay you.”

Donghyuck snatched the notebook back with a huff. “You’re being unsupportive.”

“I’m being realistic. At some point, you’re going to have to consider that this is less a magical anomaly and more a personal issue.”

Donghyuck gasped. “You would say that in my own shop?”

“I would say it anywhere.”

Before Donghyuck could answer with the full force of the offence he was preparing, the bell over the door burst into a bright, delighted clamour.

Jaemin entered like spring, arriving with gossip. He carried an armful of flowers so fresh they looked barely separated from sunlight. The whole room changed around them, filling instantly with the green-sweet smell of cut stems and damp petals.

Jaemin smiled. Donghyuck distrusted this immediately.

“You look busy,” Jaemin said.

“I’m working.”

“You’re writing Mark’s name in a notebook.”

Donghyuck slammed the notebook shut.

Renjun, forever the traitor, said, “He’s documenting the immunity.”

Jaemin set the flowers down on the counter one by one, arranging them with care. He separated out three stems of the cream-coloured blossoms and held them up between two fingers. “These are for you,” he said.

Donghyuck narrowed his eyes. “Why?”

“Because I’m generous.”

“No, you’re not.”

“That hurts.”

“What do they do?”

Jaemin’s smile widened, which was answer enough.

Renjun began, “Don’t–”

“They’re romantically reactive,” Jaemin said over him.

Donghyuck leaned in despite himself. The blossoms were pretty in a suspicious way – their petals thin as silk, ivory at the base and dusted faintly gold toward the edges, with tiny clusters of pollen nested in the centre like powder made of warm light.

“Reactive how?” he asked.

Jaemin looked very pleased with the question. “The pollen responds to emotional undercurrents. If there’s latent affection, it amplifies awareness. If there’s mutual pining, it tends to cling.”

Renjun closed his eyes.

Donghyuck took the flowers from Jaemin slowly. “Cling?”

“Mm.” Jaemin plucked one of the little gold threads of pollen with his nail. It glimmered. “You brush it over somebody, and if the atmosphere is romantically promising, it’ll react.”

Donghyuck turned the stem in his fingers, considering.

Renjun pointed at him without opening his eyes. “No.”

Donghyuck ignored him.

Jaemin, emboldened by this, added, “It works best outdoors.”

That was how, an hour later, Donghyuck found himself walking the long path at the edge of the woods with Mark beside him and contraband flowers tucked into the basket hanging from his arm.

In his defence, the walk had begun innocently enough.

He had mentioned casually that he needed moonmint from the northern path because Jisung had somehow mistaken it for ordinary mint that morning and turned half his stock into tea for stomachaches. Mark, who was incapable of hearing about a task without immediately wanting to help, had offered to come with him before Donghyuck even finished the sentence.

Now they were following the little winding trail that curled between the meadow and the forest edge, where the evening light came through in long soft bands and turned everything gold for a few fleeting minutes before dusk.

Mark walked with his hands loosely in his pockets, looking for all the world as if he belonged to this exact hour. Every now and then, branches leaned toward him slightly, as if the trees were checking in.

“So,” Mark said after a while, glancing at the basket. “How much moonmint do you actually need?”

Donghyuck kept his voice perfectly level. “Enough.”

“That is not a quantity.”

“It is to me.”

The path narrowed where the meadow grass grew taller and brushed against their legs. Donghyuck waited for the right moment with the patience of a predator. He let Mark move half a step ahead, just enough that his attention was caught by a low branch hanging over the path.

Perfect.

With one smooth motion, Donghyuck drew out the cream-colored flower, brushed his thumb lightly over its centre, and sent a shimmering veil of pollen drifting through the air.

It was beautiful. Infuriatingly beautiful, actually. The dust caught in the lowering sun and turned molten, little flecks of gold floating toward Mark like a blessing. Some of it landed in Mark’s hair. Some along the shoulder of his jacket. One or two sparks caught at the curve of one antler nub before dissolving.

Donghyuck held his breath.

Nothing happened.

Mark slowed, only because a branch had caught briefly at his sleeve. He untangled himself from it and turned back. “You okay?” he asked.

Donghyuck stared at him.

There should have been something. Instead, Mark just looked at him, calm and normal.

Then his gaze softened. “Oh,” he said.

Donghyuck’s heart gave one startled kick. “What?”

Mark stepped closer, enough to close the small space between them, one hand lifting with absent care. “There’s something on your face,” he said.

Before Donghyuck could retreat, Mark’s fingers brushed his cheek; just the soft drag of callused fingertips skimming skin as he swept away a smear of golden pollen that must have blown back in the breeze.

Donghyuck felt the contact all at once – his cheek suddenly too warm, his wings twitching once behind him in pure betrayal. Mark’s touch was gentle in the maddeningly natural way it always was, as if he had never in his life known how to handle anything carelessly.

“There,” Mark said quietly.

He drew his hand back and looked at the little fleck of glowing pollen caught against his thumb. It shimmered once and vanished. Donghyuck, who had cast the spell, who understood the spell, who had personally weaponised the spell, stood rooted to the path like an idiot.

Mark smiled a little. “You missed.”

“I did not miss,” Donghyuck said, much too fast.

Mark’s mouth twitched. “Okay.”

The woods breathed around them. The last of the light slipped lower through the trees. Somewhere in the basket, the remaining flowers gave the faintest little tremor, as though offended on Donghyuck’s behalf.

That was the problem.

Nothing magical had happened, and yet Mark’s hand had lingered in the air for half a second longer than necessary, and Donghyuck’s pulse was behaving like a creature with no training whatsoever.

Mark tilted his head. “Did you want to tell me what that was for?”

Donghyuck lifted his chin and resumed walking before his dignity could collapse entirely. “No.”

Mark fell into step beside him again, still smiling to himself. “Was it one of your experiments?”

“No.”

“That sounds like yes.”

“It sounds,” Donghyuck said sharply, “like you ask too many questions.”

“Mm.” Mark looked ahead.

Donghyuck almost tripped over a root.

This, he thought furiously, was becoming a pattern. And patterns, unlike accidents, had to be studied.

By the time Donghyuck decided to attempt enchantment by pastry, he had convinced himself this was no longer about pride. It was about science. About the humiliating possibility that Mark – forest guardian, half-stag spirit, occasional bringer of strawberries and entirely too much peace – was somehow functioning outside the known laws of romantic magic, and if that was the case, then Donghyuck had a professional obligation to investigate.

Preferably with butter.

So that was how Mark found him on a golden Saturday evening, standing in the middle of the cottage kitchen, wearing an apron that read 'kiss the fairy,' with flour dusted up both arms and a bowl of charmed peach filling glowing softly on the counter.

Mark paused in the doorway, one hand still on the frame. “Should I come back?”

Donghyuck, who had just tipped a pinch of rose sugar into the filling, looked up. “Why would you come back? You’re already here.”

Mark’s gaze drifted to the apron, then to the four open recipe books, the little jars of enchantment powder, the rolling pin hovering obediently in the air by itself, and finally the tray of heart-shaped pastry dough resting under a dish towel.

His mouth twitched.

Donghyuck narrowed his eyes immediately. “Don’t.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You thought something.”

“I’m allowed to think.”

“Not in that tone.”

That did it. Mark laughed – sudden and bright enough to make Donghyuck’s kitchen feel smaller somehow, warmer. Mark’s quieter laughs were bad enough, but when he let go of them properly, when they slipped free and lit his whole face from within, it always struck Donghyuck as the sort of thing a person should warn others about in advance.

He chose, naturally, to be annoyed by it.

“What are you making?” Mark asked, stepping inside.

“Nothing for you.”

“Okay.”

Donghyuck hated how unbothered he was. “Peach hand pies,” he said after a moment, because being ignored was intolerable. “Charm-infused.”

Mark set the basket he’d brought by the door – blackberries this time, because apparently he could not cross the village without collecting something – and came a little closer to peer at the bowl.

“Charm-infused how?”

Donghyuck straightened. This was a question worth answering.

“Subtle emotional receptivity,” he said, reaching for the tin of rose sugar. “The pastry creates a sense of comfort, the peach encourages sweetness, the cinnamon supports emotional warmth, and the charm woven through the glaze increases awareness.”

Mark leaned one shoulder against the cupboard and smiled in that small, helpless way he had when Donghyuck was being especially brilliant in public. Or ridiculous. With Mark, the line between the two seemed worryingly thin.

The problem was that he stayed there. Watching, as if Donghyuck were some interesting woodland process, like mushrooms blooming after rain or foxfire in the dark. As if there were nothing else in the world worth looking at just then but Donghyuck, elbow-deep in flour, muttering to himself while he folded magic into fruit filling.

Donghyuck reached for the butter dish. Missed it by half an inch because Mark chose that exact moment to ask, “Is that why your wings are sparkling?”

Donghyuck looked up. “What?”

Mark lifted one hand, gesturing vaguely. “The edges.”

Donghyuck turned just enough to catch sight of one wing reflected dimly in the window. The fine translucent veining along the lower edge was, annoyingly, throwing off a faint rose-gold shimmer. Excess magic. A little sign that he’d overworked the charm mixture.

“It’s residue,” he said curtly.

Mark nodded. “Pretty.”

Donghyuck dropped the butter dish.

It hit the counter and slid. He lunged for it with a noise of outrage. The rolling pin, startled by the movement and apparently not bright under pressure, shot sideways in midair and knocked into the bowl of flour. A white cloud exploded upward in one dramatic, judgmental burst.

Mark stepped back, coughing into his sleeve as flour drifted gently down over the kitchen. Donghyuck stood frozen in the centre of it, white dust all over his cardigan, his hands, his face, and probably, by the feel of it, inside one ear.

There was a beat of silence.

Then Mark made the worst possible decision and laughed so hard he had to brace a hand against the table.

Donghyuck stared at him in betrayal.

“You,” he said, pointing a flour-coated finger, “are a menace.”

Mark was still laughing. “I didn’t do anything.”

“You called my wings pretty.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You should be!”

Mark tried to stop. He really did. He pressed his lips together and looked at Donghyuck’s face and then at the flour in his hair and immediately lost the battle again, laughing into his hand this time.

The enchanted filling, abandoned on the counter in the chaos, chose that moment to bubble over in the bowl with an ominous pink shimmer.

Donghyuck whipped around. “Oh, no.”

By the time he got the tray into the oven, the magic had gone sulky. The edges of the dough were too brown before the centres had fully set, and when he finally pulled the pastries back out, they had the dark, tragic look of something that had once had promise and had since made several poor decisions.

Donghyuck stared at the tray, and the pies stared back, burnt and unapologetic.

Behind him, Mark had the decency to be quiet for almost three full seconds. Then he said, carefully, “They look… Crunchy.”

Donghyuck turned his head slowly. “Get out of my house. This is your fault.”

Mark came to stand beside him, still smiling but softer now, the laughter settling into something gentler. “Because I said your wings were pretty?”

“Yes.”

“That feels like valuable information for me to have.”

Donghyuck opened his mouth, found nothing useful in it, and shut it again.

Mark looked at the ruined pastries. “We can make more,” he said.

Donghyuck scoffed. “We?”

“Yeah.” Mark nudged the flour bin back toward the centre of the table. “I know how to bake.”

Donghyuck eyed him with immediate suspicion. “No, you don’t.”

“I do.”

“You live in the woods.”

“I also live in a house.”

“That proves nothing.”

Mark laughed again, quieter this time. “My mom taught me.”

That took the ridiculousness of flour and burnt pastry and turned it suddenly warm at the centre, like a lamp being lit in a window at dusk.

“Fine,” Donghyuck said. “But if you ruin my kitchen, I’ll tell the trees you’ve become arrogant.”

Mark slid up his sleeves and reached for the mixing bowl. “Okay.”

It turned out that Mark did know how to bake. He measured without fuss, mixed without making the spoon clatter against the bowl, and kneaded the second batch of dough with the same quiet attentiveness he brought to fixing windows and coaxing stubborn vines off roof tiles. Donghyuck, who believed all worthy things should involve at least a little drama, found this both annoying and oddly mesmerising.

They worked side by side in the little kitchen while evening deepened outside. Donghyuck handled the enchantments, threading fine strands of charm through the glaze with his fingertips until the sugar shone faintly gold. Once, when Donghyuck reached for the cinnamon at the same time Mark did, their fingers bumped.

A tiny thing. Barely a brush. Still, Donghyuck snatched his hand back at once and glared at the spice tin as if it had engineered the incident personally.

Mark only looked at him for half a second, then passed it over without comment.

This was not better. It was, in fact, significantly worse.

The second batch came together beautifully. The dough was tender, the filling sweet and fragrant, and the little crescent vents Donghyuck cut into the tops opened in the oven like neat smiling mouths. When he brushed the warm glaze across them fresh from the heat, the charm woke properly this time – a soft rosy shimmer sinking into the crust before disappearing.

Perfect, at last.

Donghyuck arranged two on a plate with the solemnity of an offering and set them on the table. Mark sat across from him, the lamplight warm against his face, one sleeve still pushed up, a little streak of flour caught near his wrist. He waited until Donghyuck nodded once before picking one up.

“Should I be worried?” he asked.

“You ask that every time,” Donghyuck said.

“And every time the answer is somehow no and yes.”

Donghyuck took a bite of his own pastry first, mostly to prove moral superiority, and Mark bit into his.

Donghyuck watched.

He had refined the spell twice since the tea incident and adjusted the dosage to suit body weight and probable resistance. This should, at the very least, have made Mark look at him differently.

Mark chewed, swallowed, and let out a small sound of approval. “This is really good.”

Donghyuck narrowed his eyes. “And?”

“And what?”

“And how do you feel?”

Mark considered. “Hungry for another one.”

Donghyuck stared.

Mark looked down at the pastry in his hand, then back up. “Was I supposed to feel something else?”

There it was again – that unbearable, complete lack of magical reaction. No blush, no dazed look, not even a tiny enchanted lapse in composure. Just Mark, warm and calm and entirely himself, eating a charm-infused hand pie at Donghyuck’s table like he had not just invalidated a full afternoon of labour.

Donghyuck put his own pastry down. “This is absurd.”

Mark’s mouth twitched. “You’re upset because I liked it?”

“I’m upset because that is not the relevant outcome.”

Mark took another bite anyway, probably out of spite. “You know,” he said after swallowing, “for something that doesn’t work on me, you keep making really nice food.”

Donghyuck looked at the plate. At the oven. At absolutely anything but Mark. His wings felt too warm at the base, a sure sign of emotional agitation, which he refused to dignify by naming.

“The charm was probably destabilised by the oven temperature,” he said curtly.

Mark leaned back in his chair, smiling in that maddeningly fond way again. “Right.”

Donghyuck glanced up then, just long enough to catch the shape of Mark’s expression in the lamplight. There was flour on the table between them. Burnt pastries cooling on the counter. The kind of domestic softness Donghyuck usually sold to other people in carefully bottled portions, now sitting all around him in ridiculous abundance.

It had to be the failed spell. That was the only reasonable explanation for the strange fluttery unrest beneath his ribs and the foolish warmth of sharing a table while the last light faded and the oven clicked itself slowly cool.

Donghyuck reached for another pastry before the silence could get any softer.

“Well,” he said, with enormous dignity, “at least the baking worked.”

Mark smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “It did.”

And because Donghyuck was not, under any circumstances, prepared to examine the look on his face when he said it, he focused very hard on the pastry in his hands and blamed everything else on enchantment failure.

Donghyuck had already decided on two things. First, that the pounding ache between his shoulder blades was entirely manageable. Second, that if anybody so much as looked at his wings with sympathy, he would become impossible on purpose.

This was a perfectly reasonable stance to take.

He had spent most of the afternoon in the workroom at the back of the cottage trying to stabilise a ribbon charm that kept turning overly sentimental whenever exposed to direct sunlight. Then he had reworked the attunement notes from yesterday, because the original measurements were obviously correct, but perhaps the infusion timing had been sabotaged by humidity.

Then Mrs Han had come by in tears because her husband had brought her soup when she had a headache, and now she was “remembering their entire courtship in chronological order,” which Donghyuck had felt was, frankly, a success story and not the emergency she seemed to think it was.

By dusk, the cottage looked beautiful, and Donghyuck felt terrible. He was bent over the worktable pretending to reorganise a tray of dried petals when the bell over the front door gave a quiet ring.

He did not turn around immediately. He only said, with practised exasperation, “If that’s Chenle, I’m closed.”

A beat passed.

Then Mark said, “That seems oddly specific.”

Donghyuck’s shoulders loosened before he could stop them. He turned, slowly enough to imply indifference and not the embarrassing little jolt of relief that had gone through him at the sound of Mark’s voice.

Mark stood just inside the doorway with the evening still clinging to him. The fading light touched warm brown through his hair and caught softly along the velvet at the base of his antler nubs. He had a paper parcel tucked under one arm; probably food, because Mark had become distressingly observant about the frequency with which Donghyuck forgot to eat when he was working.

Donghyuck narrowed his eyes at the parcel. “What is that?”

“Bread,” Mark said. “And the plum jam from the market.”

“I never asked for bread.”

“No,” Mark said mildly. “You just said at noon that you were too busy to cook anything, and then you kept talking until it was clear you meant that as a challenge to yourself rather than a real plan.”

Donghyuck clicked his tongue and turned back toward the table. “I hate how you listen.”

Mark’s laugh was soft. “Good to see you too.”

He set the parcel down by the kettle and moved further into the room. Donghyuck tried to straighten fully and instantly regretted it – a sharp pull ran through the base of his wings and he hissed before he could swallow the sound.

Mark looked up at once. “What happened?”

“Nothing,” Donghyuck said it too quickly. He knew he had said it too quickly.

And even worse, Mark knew too.

“Hyuck.”

“It’s fine.”

Mark took a step closer, his expression changing in that quiet way it always did when he stopped humouring Donghyuck and started paying real attention. “Your wings hurt?”

Donghyuck lifted his chin. “They are mildly inconvenienced.”

“That sounds like yes.”

“It sounds,” Donghyuck said, “like my private business and absolutely not yours.”

Mark didn’t answer. His eyes flicked just enough to make Donghyuck aware of the way his wings were being held too tightly against his back. Fairy wings weren’t meant for that. They were delicate where they joined the body, sensitive to magic in the same way skin was sensitive to cold.

Overuse left them heavy, aching, and sharp at the roots. Which, again, was manageable.

“How much did you cast today?” Mark asked.

Donghyuck made a noncommittal sound.

“Hyuck.”

Donghyuck turned just enough to glare at him over one shoulder. “Enough to remain employable.”

Mark exhaled through his nose, amused despite himself, then glanced toward the little cabinet near the sink where Donghyuck kept all the practical things he pretended not to need. “Do you still have that wing salve Renjun made last spring?”

Donghyuck went very still. “No,” he said at once.

Mark looked at him.

Donghyuck sighed dramatically and pointed. “Second shelf. Behind the jasmine oil. But I can do it myself.”

Mark was already crossing the room. “I’m sure you can.”

“Stop laughing at me.”

“It just sounded like you hate asking for help.”

“I do not hate asking for help.”

Mark found the jar and held it up. “Then ask.”

Donghyuck opened his mouth, found absolutely nothing in it that would preserve his pride, and shut it again.

The salve jar was small and round-bellied, green glass with Renjun’s neat label pressed onto the front. Moonflower, comfrey, silverleaf, and a little cedar resin. Good for strain, cracks, dulling the hot pull that magic left behind.

Donghyuck had used it before. He could have used it now, alone. Instead, because the universe had apparently developed a personal grudge against him, Mark was standing there in the middle of his kitchen holding the remedy and waiting with patience.

“It’s easier,” Mark said after a moment, “if somebody else does the hard-to-reach parts.”

Donghyuck hated that he was right.

The worst thing was that Mark didn’t say it like he was offering charity. He said it like it was simple. Ordinary. Like helping Donghyuck was the most natural thing in the world, no more remarkable than opening a window or carrying water in from the well.

That was the sort of thing that could make a person reckless if they thought about it too long.

Donghyuck, wisely, chose not to think. “Fine,” he said. “But if you make it worse, I’ll curse your garden.”

Mark’s mouth twitched. “You like my garden.”

“That’s beside the point.”

He led Mark to the little sitting room by the hearth, where the light was warmer, and the old armchair near the window had enough space behind it to let his wings settle properly. Donghyuck sat on the edge of the chair with all the reluctant grace of a prince accepting medical treatment after battle. Which was, in his opinion, more or less what this was.

Mark pulled over the stool from beside the bookshelf and sat behind him. “Can I?” he asked.

Donghyuck looked down at his hands in his lap. “You’re being very formal.”

“Can I, Hyuck?”

Donghyuck swallowed once. “Yes.”

Mark touched the base of one wing first, careful and slow, just enough pressure from his fingertips to ask the body to loosen rather than force it. Donghyuck’s breath caught anyway.

It wasn’t pain. More, the opposite of being braced. He hadn’t realised how tightly he’d been holding them until Mark’s hands gave him permission not to.

Fairy wings responded to the mood more honestly than the rest of the body did. Donghyuck knew this. He spent half his life pretending not to know it. Right now, they gave one involuntary tremor and then loosened, unfurling by degrees behind him with a soft whisper of membrane and light.

Mark was quiet for a second. When he finally spoke, his voice had gone a little softer, too. “They’re really bad.”

Donghyuck twisted halfway around in outrage. “Excuse you?”

Mark blinked. “No, I mean– They’re beautiful,” he said quickly, and then, because apparently embarrassment could happen to him too, rubbed the back of his neck. “I meant the strain looks bad.”

Donghyuck stared at him.

Mark looked unfairly earnest. “That did not come out right.”

It should not, under any circumstances, have been funny.

Donghyuck turned forward again so Mark wouldn’t see the corner of his mouth move. “You’re hopeless.”

Mark opened the salve and the scent of moonflower and cedar rose into the air. Donghyuck felt the mattress of the stool shift as Mark leaned in closer, and then the first touch of salve at the base of his right wing nearly made him forget his own name.

It was cold at first, then warming as Mark smoothed it in with careful fingers.

Donghyuck inhaled sharply.

“Sorry,” Mark said at once, hand pausing.

“No,” Donghyuck said, too fast. “It’s fine. Keep going.”

And so Mark did.

Anyone else would have dabbed the salve on, but Mark touched him as the wings themselves mattered. Like each thin luminous line was something worth tending properly. He worked the salve into the strained joints with patient circles of his thumbs, easing the ache where it had gone hot and tight beneath the skin.

When he reached the fine framework higher up, he changed the angle of his hands instinctively so he wouldn’t bend anything wrong. He cleaned away the dull film of spell residue with a cloth dipped in warm water first, sweeping it from the shimmering veins with strokes so light that Donghyuck could feel every one of them.

It was intolerable. It was also, very possibly, the nicest thing anyone had done for him all month.

Donghyuck sat very still and concentrated on not making any sounds that could later be used against him in court. Every now and then, the cloth caught the light and left little clear paths through the dull glitter clouding Donghyuck’s wings, restoring them to their soft rose-gold shine.

“You overdo it,” Mark said eventually.

Donghyuck frowned at the opposite wall. “That is a rude thing to say while I’m injured.”

“It’s true.” Mark’s hands slowed at the base of the left wing where the ache was worst. “You don’t have to prove anything all the time.”

The words were quiet. So quiet, in fact, that Donghyuck could have pretended not to hear them. He watched the shadows from the lamp move gently over the floorboards and said, because this felt safer than honesty, “I’m literally a love fairy. My reputation is the local economy.”

Mark laughed softly under his breath, but his hands stayed careful. “Your reputation would survive a nap.”

“That is not the point.”

“I know.” There was a small pause. “Still.”

The ache was easing now. That should have been all Donghyuck noticed. Instead, he noticed everything else too.

The roughness of Mark’s fingertips where they had been working with wood or stone earlier that day. The precise restraint in his touch, like he was always aware of how easily he could mishandle something and had made kindness into a habit because of it. The way he never acted embarrassed by care, never made it into a joke or a debt.

The way the cottage had gone so still around them, even the windchimes quiet, as if the whole little house understood that something delicate was happening and had decided not to interrupt.

Donghyuck’s pulse felt strange.

When Mark finished one wing, he let his hand settle briefly between them at Donghyuck’s back, warm and steady through the thin fabric of his shirt.

“All right?” he asked.

Donghyuck could have said 'yes'. He could have said 'fine,' or 'better,' or something equally manageable.

What came out instead was, “You missed a spot.”

Mark leaned in again without question. This time, when his fingers found the place where the wing joined skin, just under the shoulder blade, Donghyuck had to bite back a sound and turned it into a glare at the bookshelf.

Mark paused immediately. “Did I hurt you?”

“No,” Donghyuck said, and then, because he could feel heat rising up the back of his neck and needed to direct it somewhere, “You’re just annoyingly thorough.”

A small smile entered Mark’s voice. “A high praise from the princess?”

When the salve was finished and the last of the spell dust had been wiped away, his wings felt lighter. Not entirely healed – overuse never vanished all at once – but no longer hot or dragging. No longer pulled so tight at the roots that every shift of posture threatened another sharp twinge. He flexed them once experimentally, and the movement came smoothly.

Behind him, Mark set the cloth aside. “There,” he said, quiet and pleased. “Better?”

Donghyuck turned his head just enough to catch him at the edge of his vision.

Mark was close. Close enough that Donghyuck could see the softened dusk-brown of his eyes in the lamplight, the faint shadow of evening at his jaw, the velvet dark of his antler nubs against his hair. He looked a little tired and entirely too fond.

That last part had to be a trick of the light.

“Yes,” Donghyuck said, and his voice came out quieter than intended. He cleared his throat. “Obviously. You’d better be useful for all the trouble you are.”

Mark smiled then, small and warm and almost shy, as if the words had not landed sharp at all. “Good.”

For a moment, neither of them moved. Donghyuck became abruptly, painfully aware that his wings were still open behind him, still catching the low amber light. That Mark was close enough for the line of his knees to nearly brush the chair.

That the space between them had filled up with something soft and unnamed and increasingly impossible to ignore.

This, Donghyuck thought with a sudden burst of defensive clarity, was frustration. Frustration that his body had betrayed weakness and that Mark had seen it. That Mark had then made everything better with those infuriatingly gentle hands and that careful, quiet voice and no expectation of being thanked.

Donghyuck didn’t turn around right away. “If you’re going to mock me,” he said, still reading the book, “I’d prefer you do it quietly.”

Renjun, who had let himself in, stepped into the circle of candlelight with a teacup in one hand. “You’ve been ‘making progress’ for four days,” he said. “At this point, I think the progress is a snail.”

Donghyuck looked up at once. “It's research.”

Renjun glanced down at the page in his lap. “You wrote 'chronically suspicious because nice.'”

“Because that's the observation I've made. Keep up, Junnie.”

Renjun handed him the tea anyway, because for all his judgment, he remained tragically decent. “If I help you find the answer, will you stop muttering about Mark in public?”

Donghyuck accepted the cup. “I do not mutter.”

“You do. And last time you did it in front of Jaemin, which is how Chenle now has a betting board.”

“That betting board is built on lies.”

“It is built on... How would you say it? Research?”

Donghyuck ignored this slander and reached for the oldest of the grimoires, a foxed little thing bound in faded green leather. It had come from the back shelf where he kept the more specialised texts – fairy works and practical emotional magic from before people had started trying to make everything sound respectable.

Renjun sat down opposite him with a sigh, one long leg stretched out into the candlelight. “What are you looking for?”

“A failure point,” Donghyuck said. “A condition that would explain resistance to affective magic without total immunity.”

Renjun lifted a brow. “In normal words?”

Donghyuck clicked his tongue. “I am trying to determine why love spells keep glancing off Mark like he is personally shielded from my entire craft.”

He flipped another page. The writing inside was cramped and delicate, a former fairy scholar’s script that curled around the margins as if she had trusted paper less than her own mind.

Donghyuck skimmed, muttering as he went. “...Bond reinforcement, no... Post-confession stabilisation, no... Absolutely not, that’s for widows...”

Renjun, leaning over his own borrowed volume, said dryly, “Very romantic.”

“I am in a crisis.”

“You are in denial.”

Donghyuck looked up sharply. “About what?”

Renjun, who had perhaps chosen life after all, only took a sip of his tea and said, “Turn the page.”

Donghyuck did.

Three lines down, midway through a section on receptive glamour and heart-directed workings, the text changed from explanatory to annoyingly concise, as old magical authorities often did right before ruining someone’s evening.

He read the first sentence once. Then again, slower.

Love workings may fail under three primary conditions: absence of emotional faculty, resistance by ward or contrary nature, or prior full devotion of the heart, wherein no borrowed enchantment may deepen what is already wholly inclined.

Donghyuck stared, and the candle beside him gave a soft pop in the silence.

Renjun, who had clearly noticed the dangerous stillness settling over him, said, “What?”

Donghyuck kept looking at the page and then, with the careful brightness of someone stepping around a trap, he said, “Well.”

Renjun leaned over. Read the line. “Oh.”

Donghyuck snapped the book half-shut on instinct. “No.”

Renjun’s mouth twitched. “You read it.”

“I read nonsense.”

“It’s not nonsense, it’s a standard principle.”

“It is melodramatic.”

Renjun reached for the book; Donghyuck yanked it away. “It says love magic can fail if the heart is already–”

“I know what it says,” Donghyuck cut in. “And that’s obviously ridiculous.”

“Why?”

Donghyuck stared at him.

Renjun, who had clearly decided to become intolerable tonight, spread one hand. “I’m asking sincerely.”

“Because,” Donghyuck said, “that would imply Mark is already in love with someone.”

Renjun looked at him.

Donghyuck looked back.

“And?”

Donghyuck’s entire body went rigid with offence. “And if he were, I would know.”

Renjun actually laughed. “You,” he said, “would be the last person in this village to know.”

Donghyuck drew himself up. “Stop laughing at me in my own home.”

“I'm just saying.”

Donghyuck opened his mouth, found that several possible replies had all become embarrassing for different reasons, and shut it again.

No. No, absolutely not.

Mark liked him. Fine. Everyone liked him. He was charming. He was gifted. He ran the only respectable emotional enchantment shop in town and looked excellent in pink. People were drawn to him all the time. This meant nothing.

Besides, if Mark were secretly and hopelessly in love with someone, there would have been signs.

There would have been symptoms.

There would have been... Well, something.

Not fresh bread brought over because Donghyuck forgot the meals. Not strawberries because he’d once made an offhand complaint about the market quality. Not patient help with stuck windows, aching wings, burnt pastries, moonmint walks, broken hinges, and every tiny domestic inconvenience in Donghyuck’s life. Those things were–

He stopped.

Renjun, watching his face with the unbearable calm of a man witnessing realisation attempt to claw its way through denial, said, “You just made a very interesting expression.”

“I hate you.”

“You don’t. What are you going to do?”

Donghyuck looked down at the half-closed book in his lap.

On the facing page, in smaller writing tucked beneath the main text, was a note about verification. Old fairy diagnostic practice: when standard affective workings failed, truth magic could be used not to create or alter emotion but merely to reveal its existing direction. A compass, not a push.

His heart gave one sharp, traitorous beat. “I am,” he said slowly, “going to perform a truth working.”

Renjun set his teacup down. “On Mark.”

Donghyuck ignored him. He was already reaching for his notebook, flipping to a clean page. “It’s purely revelatory. No coercion, no amplification. A neutral diagnostic.”

“Mm.”

“It will tell me whether this is resistance, shielding, or–” he waved one hand vaguely, as if the third option were too stupid to deserve proper language, “–something else.”

Renjun stood up. “I’d say good luck, but honestly, I think this is funnier without it.”

“Get out.”

Renjun paused at the door. “For the record?”

Donghyuck glared at him over the top of the notebook.

Renjun smiled, all sharp edges and ancient satisfaction. “You’re obsessed.”

Donghyuck threw a rose petal at him.

The next evening arrived washed in the soft blue-gold light of late summer, the kind that made even ordinary things look briefly enchanted. Donghyuck’s cottage had the front window open, the herbs stirring in the breeze, and three bowls arranged on the table with far more ceremony than the average diagnostic procedure strictly required.

He had chosen the components with care.

A shallow dish of spring water, because truth liked reflection. Silver thread, fine as spider silk, because the direction needed shape. A handful of Jaemin’s reactive flowers, because Donghyuck was willing to admit many things before death, but not that Jaemin’s flowers weren’t annoyingly useful.

And one small polished heartstone from the old fairy stores, pink-white and warm to the touch, to anchor the magic to sincerity.

When the bell over the door rang, he nearly knocked over the water dish with his elbow.

Mark stepped inside, and his gaze moved immediately to the table, then to Donghyuck, then back to the table again. “That,” he said, after a beat, “looks like I should be worried.”

Donghyuck folded his arms. “You say that every time, and every time I resent it.”

Mark’s mouth twitched. “Should I still worry?”

“No,” Donghyuck said. Then, because he had no business sounding quite that defensive, he added, “Probably.”

Mark laughed softly and set down the small basket he’d brought – pears this time. “What do you need me to do?”

“Stand there.”

“I’m excellent at that.”

Donghyuck ignored him and stepped into place opposite the table. The cottage had gone very still around them, attentive in that old house way it sometimes had when magic gathered. The bottles on the shelves seemed to hold their breath. Even the roses outside the open window had quieted.

Mark came to stand where Donghyuck pointed, just beyond the bowls, the evening light catching warm in his hair. He looked calm. Curious. And entirely too trusting.

“All right,” Donghyuck said, more to the components than to Mark. “This will only reveal what already exists. It cannot invent anything.”

Mark watched him with that infuriating steadiness of his. “Okay.”

Donghyuck dipped two fingers into the spring water. It flashed cold against his skin. Then he lifted the silver thread and let it run over his knuckles, murmuring the old words under his breath as the heartstone brightened in his palm.

The spell came awake beautifully. Light gathered first in the water dish, pale and silvery, then rose like breath off glass. It caught on the thread and turned it luminous. The reactive flowers trembled in their bowl, their petals opening wider all at once.

Mark’s expression changed, but only into stillness.

Donghyuck lifted the thread and the magic leapt. It did not strike Mark so much as reach for him, quick and sure as a compass needle finding north. Silver-gold light swept across the little space between them and touched the centre of his chest.

Donghyuck held his breath.

For one heartbeat, the whole spell hung there.

Then it changed its mind.

Every line of light that had touched Mark drew sharply back, as if finding no obstruction and no place to settle there except passage. The silver thread in Donghyuck’s fingers tightened with sudden warmth. The water in the bowl shivered. Jaemin’s flowers all turned in one silent motion, every open face angling not toward Mark, but toward–

Donghyuck.

It moved in a bright, impossible stream from the place it had touched at Mark’s heart, pulling through the air in soft living strands and winding toward Donghyuck’s hands, his chest, the restless flutter at the base of his wings. Warmth poured with it, filling the room with the feeling of something long established and quietly tended.

Donghyuck stared at the thread in his fingers, now glowing rose-gold, not silver.

Across the table, Mark had gone utterly still. Donghyuck looked from the thread to the flowers to Mark’s face, and the shape of the answer rose around him all at once, warm and terrible and gentle enough to ruin him.

“…Oh,” he said.

For one suspended second, Donghyuck could only hear the small sounds.

The last whisper of magic settling into silence. The faint clink of the silver thread bowl as his hand trembled just enough to tap its rim. The evening breeze moving through the open window. Somewhere outside, very far away and wholly irrelevant, a bird calling once from the darkening trees.

Donghyuck looked at the flowers first.

Traitors. Every cream-colored bloom Jaemin had given him was turned unabashedly toward Donghyuck now, their pale petals open wide and glowing softly at the edges.

Then he looked at Mark.

Mark had not moved. He stood where Donghyuck had told him to stand, shoulders gone still beneath the last of the daylight, his expression caught in that same impossible place between surprise and resignation, as if some small private hope he had kept tucked away for safety had just been gently dragged into the centre of the room and laid bare on Donghyuck’s table.

Donghyuck’s pulse stumbled.

No.

No, because that meant–

His gaze dropped, unbidden, to the basket of pears Mark had brought. Then to the windowsill where the latch still sat smooth and repaired under the fading sky. To the folded dish towel Mark had used three nights ago and, because this cottage had become a den of betrayals, placed back more neatly than Donghyuck ever did himself.

Donghyuck’s throat went tight.

It had never been indifference. That was the truly humiliating part.

Not magical immunity born of some strange woodland constitution. Not even that Mark had been unaffected. Mark had never needed any of Donghyuck’s clever little pushes and nudges and carefully measured enchantments because whatever lived in his heart had apparently settled itself a long time ago and then stayed there with the patience of moss growing over stone.

Mark had always chosen him. Over and over, in all those quiet, ordinary ways that were somehow turning out to be the loudest thing in the world.

Donghyuck let out a breath that sounded embarrassingly like he had forgotten how breathing worked and was only now attempting to remember. “This,” he said, because the alternative was standing there in silence until he dissolved into sparkles, “is extremely embarrassing.”

Mark blinked.

The spell-light had faded enough now that the room looked ordinary again, though Donghyuck would never trust ordinary things after this. Mark’s mouth parted slightly. “I’m sorry?”

“No,” Donghyuck waved one hand, still clutching the heartstone as if it might try to make a run for it. “For me.”

Mark stared at him for one bewildered beat. Then, against all decency, he laughed.

Donghyuck pressed the heel of his free hand to his forehead. “Don’t laugh. I’m in a crisis.”

“You said,” Mark began, and had to stop because he was still smiling, “you said this was a diagnostic.”

“It was.”

“And now you’re upset because the result–”

“The result,” Donghyuck cut in, “is a professional failure of the highest order.”

Mark’s brows lifted. “Because?”

“Because,” Donghyuck said, scandalised by the sheer scale of it now that he was saying it aloud, “I threw six separate magical interventions at you.”

“It was seven.”

Donghyuck froze.

Mark had the grace to look only a little sheepish. “I counted the pollen.”

For a moment, Donghyuck could only stare. Then he made a noise of pure offence. “You knew I was testing things on you?”

Mark rubbed the back of his neck, which would have looked guilty on anyone else and only made him look more annoyingly soft. “Not at first.”

“Mark.”

“The tea felt suspicious.”

Donghyuck opened his mouth, closed it, then pointed at him again. “You should have said something!”

Mark’s smile went gentler around the edges. “You seemed committed.”

Committed.

Donghyuck almost sat down on the floor.

The worst part – the absolute worst, most humiliating, catastrophic part – was that underneath the mortification and the ache of realising how badly he had misread everything, something warm and helpless and awful had begun to bloom in his chest.

Because Mark had known.

Maybe not every time, maybe not immediately, but enough. Enough to understand Donghyuck was circling him with spells and experiments and unnecessary walks and pastry enchantments, and instead of stepping away, Mark had stayed right there and let him.

As if even Donghyuck’s confusion had been worth holding.

“This is terrible,” Donghyuck announced.

Mark’s expression softened further. “Hyuck.”

“No, don’t ‘Hyuck’ me. I have been conducting research like a fool while you–” He stopped, because suddenly the rest of the sentence was waiting there in the middle of the room, and there was no version of it that did not require saying the thing.

While you loved me.

He looked down at the heartstone in his hand. Its warmth had gentled now, no longer urgent. When he spoke again, his voice came out quieter.

“How long?”

The question changed something in Mark’s face. Not the care in it, but the uncertainty beneath it. The shape of someone who had hoped privately and learned not to presume.

“A while,” Mark said.

Donghyuck lifted his head. “That's so vague.”

Mark’s mouth curved faintly. “It’s true.”

“How long is a while?”

Mark looked at him, and for one impossible second, Donghyuck thought he might dodge again. But then Mark’s shoulders eased, like he had made some small decision with himself. “The strawberries were not the first thing I remembered for you,” he said.

Donghyuck’s breath caught.

Mark glanced toward the window, his smile turning softer in memory. “The first time I came here, you complained for ten minutes because somebody had sold you old mint in a fresh bunch. You were so offended by it. And I remember thinking that no one should be that pretty while angry about herbs.”

Donghyuck stared at him.

“I also remember,” Mark went on, “that you forgot to eat lunch that day because you were making a calming tincture for Mrs Park’s daughter, and you were tired but pretending you weren’t, and there was glitter in your hair for no reason I could identify.”

Oh, this was bad. This was very, very bad.

Because once Mark had begun, Donghyuck could see it – each memory settling into place not as something newly invented, but as something that had already been there, waiting to be named. Mark carrying pieces of him around quietly in his mind like found treasures.

Donghyuck’s wings, traitors in every timeline, fluttered once behind him.

Mark's voice went softer. “I didn’t say anything because you never…” He stopped, searching for the shape of it. “You love people professionally,” he said, with a little helpless laugh. “You take care of everyone. I didn’t know if any of the things you did with me meant more than that.”

The words landed squarely in the centre of Donghyuck’s chest.

Because there it was. His own confusion turned gently back toward him.

Mark had not seen indifference in Donghyuck. He had seen kindness. All the little ways Donghyuck pulled him close without ever calling it what it was – and Mark, being Mark, had taken those things carefully instead of greedily. He had not assumed. He had not demanded. He had simply remained.

Donghyuck had no idea what his face was doing now, only that it felt unsteady. Heat was climbing up his neck. His chest had gone too full for comfort. “This is,” he said faintly, “still deeply embarrassing.”

Mark laughed again, quieter this time. “For you.”

Donghyuck looked at him, at the dusk-brown gentleness of him, and the small velvet antler nubs shadowing his forehead. The careful set of his shoulders as if he was giving Donghyuck all the room in the world to run if he wanted. As if even now, even after the spell had pointed unerringly to its answer, Mark would still make this easy on him if he could.

Something in Donghyuck’s chest gave way in the soft shift of a lock turning on a door that had apparently not been closed as tightly as he had thought.

He swallowed once. Then, because if he did not say something immediately, he might combust where he stood, he lifted his chin a fraction and said, “Say it again.”

Mark blinked. “What?”

Donghyuck’s fingers tightened around the heartstone. “You have been making me look stupid for at least a month. The least you can do is say it properly.”

A small, astonished smile touched Mark’s mouth. “Hyuck.”

“Mark.”

It was not a warning. More like a plea disguised badly enough that either of them could pretend otherwise later.

The room had gone still again. Outside, the last of the evening slipped lower through the trees. The bottles on the shelves glowed softly in the dim, patient as stars. Mark looked at him for one long moment, and when he spoke this time, there was nothing uncertain in it.

“I love you,” he said softly.

The words were simple. Just the truth, given plainly, as if Mark had been holding it warm in both hands for a long time and had finally found somewhere safe to set it down.

Donghyuck felt it everywhere at once. In the base of his wings, in the dip beneath his ribs, in the hot helpless thud of his heart. He thought absurdly of every failed spell, every glittering little attempt to make Mark feel something more, and could only stand there and realise that the room had been full of this all along.

That he had been walking through Mark’s love like sunlight through dust, visible only when it struck at the right angle.

His throat tightened in the worst possible way.

Mark, seeing something in his face, took half a step forward and then stopped. “Was that–”

Donghyuck put the heartstone down on the table before he dropped it and said, with as much dignity as he could, “That was okay.”

Mark stared. Then he smiled, slow and bright and so relieved it made Donghyuck feel strangely tender all over again.

“Okay?”

Donghyuck could feel himself melting internally and hated that for him. “Don’t push your luck.”

The realisation made him feel foolish. It also made him feel, rather inconveniently, like he might cry or laugh or do something equally catastrophic. So naturally, he said the only thing available to him.

“This is not over.”

Mark’s smile flickered into confusion. “What?”

He stopped directly in front of Mark, close enough now to see the fine shadow of lashes against his cheeks. “Oh,” Donghyuck said again, but this time it came out softer.

Mark’s eyes searched his face carefully. “If this is too much, I can–”

Donghyuck, who had finally had enough of other people talking when he was in the middle of a life-changing revelation, reached up and caught the front of Mark’s shirt in both hands.

Mark went very still.

“You,” Donghyuck informed him, “are terrible for my professional image.”

Mark’s mouth twitched. “Sorry.”

Donghyuck drew one unsteady breath, felt the answer to a hundred foolish little questions settle warmly beneath his skin, and thought, with a helpless rush of fondness that almost knocked the air from him, that of course it had been Mark. Quiet, patient, impossible Mark, loving him in all the spaces between the obvious things.

Then he tipped his chin up and kissed him.

Mark made the smallest sound, like the breath had been startled out of him by something too wanted to feel wholly unexpected, some quiet hope inside him suddenly finding itself held by both hands and turned gently, unmistakably real.

Donghyuck had intended to kiss him once in order to stop the expression on his face from becoming unbearable. Instead, the moment his mouth touched Mark’s, everything in the room changed. Mark’s breath caught against his cheek. One of his hands came up instinctively, settling warm and uncertain at Donghyuck’s waist as though he was still asking even now, 'is this all right? is this really happening?'

Donghyuck tightened his grip on the front of Mark’s shirt and kissed him more firmly, tilting his face just enough to feel the soft give of Mark’s mouth under his own.

Mark kissed him back carefully at first. He kissed like he handled every other fragile thing in Donghyuck’s cottage – with attention, with patience, and with the quiet promise that he would never rush what he could instead treasure.

Donghyuck, who had spent the better part of a month humiliating himself in increasingly creative magical ways, decided at once that this was intolerable.

He leaned in closer and Mark made that soft sound again, this time into the kiss itself, and then whatever care had been keeping him restrained seemed to falter under the simple fact of Donghyuck choosing to stay there.

His other hand rose to Donghyuck’s cheek, thumb just under the curve of his jaw, and the kiss deepened in the gentlest possible way, like stepping into water and realising it is warmer than expected.

Donghyuck felt his wings flare.

Fairy magic was a humiliatingly emotional craft at the best of times, prone to bright displays and atmospheric overreaction whenever strong feeling entered the room. Right now, as Mark kissed him with one hand warm at his waist and the other cradling his face like Donghyuck was something worth holding with care, the magic around him simply gave up any pretence of professionalism.

Somewhere behind them, one of the bottled charm tonics on the shelf let out a happy fizz. The windchimes by the sink, though there was no fresh breeze strong enough to move them, burst into a ringing chorus so smug it was practically commentary.

Mark pulled back barely half an inch, laughing softly against Donghyuck’s mouth. “Hyuck.”

“Don’t,” Donghyuck murmured, because his dignity could not survive being laughed at while he was kissing someone for the first time and accidentally enchanting the furniture. “None of this counts.”

Mark’s smile brushed his lips. “Your house disagrees.”

As if on cue, the roses outside the open window sighed and released a fresh wave of sweetness into the room. Light slipped through the bottles on the shelf in soft pink and amber bands. Somewhere up in the rafters, a bundle of dried baby’s breath shed three white petals that drifted lazily down around them like the world’s most self-satisfied blessing.

Donghyuck opened his eyes long enough to glare in the general direction of the ceiling. “Traitors.”

Mark laughed again, and the sound of it, low and warm and tucked this close between them, made something bright and foolish bloom in Donghyuck’s chest. It also made him want to kiss that laugh right out of him, which he immediately tried to do.

This time, Mark met him without hesitation.

Donghyuck could feel the smile lingering at the corners of Mark’s mouth even as he kissed him with quiet affection and the kind of wonder that said he still could not quite believe he’d been allowed this. Donghyuck, in return, could feel his own earlier embarrassment dissolving piece by piece beneath the steady warmth of Mark’s hands and the simple, astonishing fact that Mark had always looked at him with this kind of feeling in reserve.

It wasn’t a sharp thing, Mark’s love. It didn’t sweep into rooms demanding to be witnessed. It had roots and it had been growing quietly for so long that Donghyuck had mistaken it for background – something dependable and gentle and always somehow there. Now, standing in the centre of his cottage with Mark kissing him under a haze of badly behaved magic, Donghyuck could feel the shape of it everywhere.

No wonder the spells had failed.

There had been nowhere for them to go except home.

When they finally broke apart for air, it was only because the room had become too warm to ignore, and Donghyuck’s pulse was behaving like an animal. He stayed close anyway, hands still fisted in Mark’s shirt, forehead nearly brushing Mark’s as both of them breathed in the same small pocket of enchanted air.

“You kissed me,” Mark said quietly.

Donghyuck hated the way that sentence alone could knock the air sideways in his chest. He lifted his chin. “You seem surprised.”

“I am,” Mark said honestly. “A little.”

“Why?”

Mark’s hand at Donghyuck’s waist shifted just enough to pull him the slightest bit closer. “Because I thought there was a decent chance you were going to call me a magical anomaly and throw me out.”

Donghyuck stared at him in scandal. “I would never throw you out after fixing my window.”

That got him the look he deserved – a helpless, incredulous smile bright enough to make the whole room feel warmer. “Good to know where I stand,” Mark murmured.

Donghyuck should have answered with something cutting, but instead, he found himself looking at the little laugh still ghosting around Mark’s mouth and thinking that he wanted this again. Immediately. Repeatedly. Possibly forever, which seemed a bit much for a single evening but was, unfortunately, where the evidence pointed.

So Donghyuck did the only sensible thing available to him. He settled for narrowing his eyes and saying, “You’re lucky I like you.”

The words slipped out before he could adorn them with anything clever.

Mark went very still in that attentive, startled way of his, like a forest creature hearing music in the distance and not yet deciding whether to trust it.

Donghyuck felt heat rise instantly to his face. “Don’t–”

Mark smiled so softly it nearly hurt to see. “You do?”

Donghyuck considered lying for half a second. It died immediately under the weight of the evening, the kiss, and the flowers still glowing themselves silly on the table.

He rolled his eyes instead. “I am beginning to suspect,” he said with grave reluctance, “that my judgment has been compromised.”

Mark’s smile widened, and there it was again – relief, wonder, tenderness, all braided quietly together.

“Good,” he said.

Donghyuck frowned. “Why good?”

“Because,” Mark murmured, brushing his thumb once over Donghyuck’s cheek as if he still couldn’t quite help touching him gently, “mine’s been gone for months.”

That was such an offensive thing to say when Donghyuck had only just regained the ability to stand upright. Then, because he was absolutely doomed and apparently delighted about it, he laughed.

It came out bright and helpless and real enough that the bottles on the shelf answered with tiny chimes, as though pleased to hear it. Mark’s answering grin broke fully then and the sight of it made Donghyuck want to keep him in this little cottage forever, if only so he could keep drawing that expression out of him.