Chapter Text
The earth just moved.
They both felt it.
Jenkins, Barry. Moonlight Screenplay Book. A24, 2019.
By the time the leaves had turned, the loss had settled into something recognizably comforting. The absence, as it was, became routine.
Hao and Yujin moved around the house in a careful, unfamiliar way, and the floorboards uttered new creaks—although whether to fill the newfound silence or to whisper a hushed consolation, Hao would never know.
The postcards Gyuvin sent—received sporadically and without fanfare—were unequivocally vague. They said things such as, “Seeing friends, eating well” and, “Tokyo is really not all that’s cracked up to be” and, "All okay over here." Each was addressed to the two of them, and each was signed off with love. Hao knew Gyuvin well enough to know that the writing was too curt and the details too few.
He grew their small postcard collection on the fridge: a tiny art gallery of foreign places and great sights and dreamy anecdotes. Although he never had difficulty speaking his mind, Yujin had very little to say about it. Gyuvin’s chair at the table was left pointedly vacant. Again, the house creaked.
It surprised Hao when Gyuvin left, for he had always seemed to cling to his youth tighter than Yujin did, but it didn’t surprise him how it happened: abruptly, in the middle of the night, with just a note placed on the kitchen table. “See you soon,” it read, words that Hao would repeat to himself when he couldn’t sleep, sick with regret. Yujin, who always settled his face into stoney-faced bravery that Hao knew he didn’t truly feel, had found it that morning. Hao will remember how he crumpled.
But he supposed that was the way of things.
The space where Gyuvin had been, gaping and frayed at the edges, remained empty, and the months dripped slowly downwards like molasses. In fact, the summer heat seemed particularly vengeful that year. Hao kept the windows open and the curtains closed, all in valiant hope that the cool sea breeze would find its way inside. Despite the stickiness, Yujin held his hand a little longer and embraced him a little tighter, and Hao loved him all the more for it.
Their aunt came and went sporadically, a quality of hers that increased in these later years. She cited business for these ventures, and while Hao was reluctant to speculate, he did still wonder about the truth of things. Regardless, she offered words of comfort that he never asked for, but always wanted.
“He’ll be back soon,” she had said, over and over. And over.
She draped herself in loose fabrics with clashing patterns, frequently hummed unrecognizable songs, and smelled of jasmine flowers and warmth. He could never pin down what exactly the scent was, but it lingered in rooms long after she was gone, like she was leaving parts of herself as she drifted.
But this was not a business trip or a spontaneous holiday. Gyuvin leaving was an escape plan.
Yujin spent that summer break trailing behind Hao. While it made the work harder (Hao had once again taken up odd jobs—albeit mostly tutoring—around town to pay the bills) and he nagged him about it, Hao was touched by the gesture. The townsfolk, who knew their situation, allowed him to fix their gate or run errands, or whatever else needed to be done, although Hao always felt it was not really done out of kindness. Before long, Yujin’s school bag was packed again, and Hao was sending him out the door against the weak morning sun.
As the seasons faded into one another, Hao had imagined a hundred, a thousand scenarios to pass the time. During these months, he had dreamed of Gyuvin miraculously appearing in the doorway on a sunny afternoon or simply sitting on the couch one morning.
It was not the flash of the headlights, nor the slam of the car door that did it. The night Kim Gyuvin returned, Zhang Hao felt his hurried footsteps upon the earth, felt the weight of his presence upon the sea wind as the gust changed its course.
It woke him from his sleep like lightning in the dark.
Hao’s heart thundered in his chest as he turned over the sheets, stuffed his feet into his slippers, and stumbled down the stairs. The house, in an answering cry, shifted.
Hao opened the front door with uncharacteristic force—funnily enough, the way Gyuvin often did it. For a moment, Hao thought he was still asleep. The yellow kitchen light washed over Gyuvin’s familiar frame, and the boy stood awkwardly two steps from the door, as if he was just about to reach out and open it himself.
Neither said anything. It felt consequential, the way the air hung still.
Then an exhale.
“Hyung,” Gyuvin said softly, kind of shakily. It was an unsure sound.
Hao took him in, in all his entirety. Gyuvin’s eyes, distinctively deep-set, had new shadows around them. More concerningly, there was a shiny redness around one of them that Hao knew would age into a nasty bruise. But he was here.
It was Gyuvin who took the last step forward, right into Hao’s arms. Immediately, Hao held him tight, his younger brother’s giant, lanky body curling around his own. He was solid, though a bit thinner, and underneath the stale smell of travel and sweat and old leather he was just the same.
“You took the fucking car,” Hao murmured. It wasn’t what he wanted to say, but it’s what came out. And for whatever reason it was the correct thing, because he felt Gyuvin huff out a weak laugh into his shoulder.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Hao said. Because it was. He shut his eyes and hugged his brother tighter.
A length of time passed, then Gyuvin drew back from the tight hug, although his hands had naturally reached out to hold Hao’s.
He looked strange. Antsy, even.
Hao wondered if he should ask—about Guyvin’s trip, his return, and the (currently forming) black eye. But Hao had the tendency to hold things in, especially if it would make things easier for others.
“Well,” started Hao. “Get in. I’ll make tea.”
But Gyuvin hesitated again. And there it was. The great beast reared its head: the reason he was here now.
Then Gyuvin asked for help.
The simple truth of it all was that Zhang Hao was cursed. The story went something like this.
A few hundred years ago, an ancestor of his was persecuted for witchcraft. The villagers assumed that because she was a woman familiar with medicine and healing, who was knowledgeable about a vast range of subjects, and who was uncharacteristically independent, that she was a witch. Though she lived relatively peacefully, and even found some small happiness with her new husband, she would be the target of relentless hatred.
Usually, angry villagers are wrong about the witchcraft stuff, but on this occasion, they were actually right.
They hunted her down and tried her, finding her guilty of all charges. She would survive her execution (although she had a flair for dramatics and went down screaming), and for her actions she was eventually banished to an island—a small rock, really—where she and her unborn child awaited rescue from her husband.
He would never appear.
Heartbroken at this betrayal, she wove together a spell that would ensure she would never fall in love again. After all, who would ever want such a thing, when all it caused was hurt? But as she cast it, her incantations turned vengeful, punishing, and the spell shifted into a curse—that all her descendants’ lovers would die.
So it goes, as they often said.
It was a ridiculous story, but it was true. Hao could never pin down exactly how old he was when he learned about the family curse, but it was earlier on that he probably thought. His childhood memories were often fragmented, dreamlike, and large chunks of things were missing. That’s the funny thing about things like that. The years seemed to fuse together.
It was his aunt who eventually told him, after taking him away as his parents once again fought too violently. As an adult, he now knew that his parents’ failing marriage probably had less to do with an old curse and more to do with the fact that they just didn't suit each other, but as a kid, the curse had become everything.
A few more years would pass before Hao would be whisked away from his home for good. His aunt, perhaps through persuasive magic or just simple logic, would convince his mother that it would be better if he spent some time elsewhere, in order for them to sort things out.
At twelve, Hao was off-kilter, the magic growing within him. He was too thin and too quiet, and he had difficulty maintaining friendships. Leaving felt both monumental and insignificant at the same time, both intimidating and not. He had gone from a bustling city in China to a large house on a hill in Korea. There, he bloomed.
His aunt never said exactly what spell was put on the house. She sometimes joked that she collected strays. Hao would wonder, for the rest of his days, if the house—three storeys, with white siding and wraparound balconies on the top two levels—attracted those who were lost. The house sat on the end of the road, at the top of a winding ridge, with one side shaded by a large pine tree. In front was a raised row garden and rose bushes, the latter of which pressed up against the house’s side and bloomed annually in an array of colours. Behind the house, the grass dropped off, and there was about fifteen meters of rocky cliffside before the ocean, endless.
The house was a bit of a mystery; not just how his aunt seemed to have acquired it, but in how it breathed like a living thing. It spoke in creaks and shifts, sometimes moving things around impulsively, and it seemed to listen in on conversations.
On the day Hao lit a candle by will, his aunt—utterly delighted by this—started teaching him magic. As a kid with too little friends and too much ingenuity, he all but threw himself into it. He learned how to make flowers bloom and objects levitate; learned how to cure the common cold and how to curse someone with chickenpox (although he only did that once); learned how to get his bedsheets to fold themselves and how to ease a broken heart.
Hao became familiar with his aunt’s seemingly endless library, the preeminent work in her collection being a book on practical spells and magic.
When he was fifteen, the stray cat he had struggled to nurse back to health for a few weeks finally passed away. Through watery eyes, he turned to his aunt’s books to find a way to save it, and found answers within one of her many volumes on darker magic. Hao landed on a spell in the back of the book, which emitted a haunting, unintelligible chant and sucked the light from the room when opened. Bugs crawled across the pages and the inky illustrations moved in subtle ways.
Here, he found a spell to bring something, or someone, back to life.
Hao had managed to gather the things the spell required, naïvely determined and so out of his depth, before his aunt had intervened.
“We shouldn’t try to bring things back to life,” she had said.
“Why not?” asked Hao, heartbroken, in tears.
“Because when they come back, they’re not the same. They’re…” she struggled. “They’re dark and unnatural. Once they’re gone, they’re gone.”
As the years passed, Hao would remember this.
“You’re not taking this well,” Gyuvin pointed out.
“Why is there a dead guy in our car?” Hao hissed, trying not to wake up Yujin. Or, god forbid, attract the attention of some nosey neighbour. As if there weren’t enough rumours.
There was, as it happens, a dead man in the car. Gyuvin had taken Hao around the back, popped open the trunk, and presented a man (tall, relatively handsome, mouth shut and hands bound with duct tape—a nice touch) curled inside and unmoving.
The facts were these: Gyuvin shone brightly. He was open, readable, and trusting—all things that Hao loved about him, but all things that worried him, too. When Gyuvin had first expressed wanting to leave the house, to set out into the world, Hao had bit down sharply on the parts of himself that fiercely protested. Gyuvin was so young and, unfortunately, it seemed the gods had bestowed upon him the weighty gift of helplessly attracting trouble.
The twisted parts of Hao longed for another year, another, another. He had expressed that, with as light of a touch as he could manage. In the end, after months of this, Gyuvin had fled.
“Well, good thing he’s not actually dead. Yet.”
“What?”
“Admittedly, I meant to kill him,” Gyuvin explained. He said it in such a flippant, casual manner, but Hao saw through that. He saw the way his hands shook. “I just kind of chickened out last minute, knocked him out good with some tea, and kind of hoped things would work out.”
Hao gaped. “We have an alive guy in our car.”
“Yeah. Yup.”
Down in the trunk, the man lay still. The waves crashed softly from down the cliffside below. The night air felt colder than it was, as a chill ran through Hao.
Gyuvin bit his nails nervously. “I feel no remorse, by the way. I think he should be dead.”
Hao didn’t know how to compartmentalize any of that. He had questions. He felt like he was in shock, like the events of the night were playing out like a performance, and he was forced to follow a script he hadn’t read. But more than that, he wanted to kill his utterly dopey, ridiculous, stupid brother.
He said that last part out loud.
Despite Hao’s frustration, Gyuvin had asked for his help, eyes desperate. Hao had two brothers in this world, and if they needed him, Hao would do whatever he could. Always.
His brain, sirens blaring, shuffled through ways to fix this, running through scenarios where they go into hiding, or get locked up behind bars, or get disowned by their aunt. Why the fuck was there an alive guy in the car?
Sorting through their options (and they didn’t have many), Hao eventually settled on this fact: that kidnapping was an objectively better scenario than first-degree murder charges. As such, they would have to act fast to correct this. Pushing down the rising panic, Hao decided to wake the man up, although he was not particularly excited about dealing with the aftermath.
Hao took a step closer to the car and reached out to touch the man’s stiff arm.
And then he did it again when nothing happened.
Hao frowned. He became bolder and gave the man a good shake. “Hey,” he said.
Gyuvin said nothing. The man said nothing. Hao said nothing. Somewhere across town, a dog barked, echoing.
“Maybe again, hyung,” Gyuvin said helpfully.
It felt like the night got five degrees cooler. Hao shook off the iciness, then took two fingers and placed them on the man’s neck, under his jaw, searching for a pulse. He waited thirty seconds to be sure. Then he jumped back.
“Gyuvin.”
“Um. Yes?” Gyuvin’s huge eyes darted around in the dark.
“What tea did you give him?” Hao shakily asked.
Belladonna, for all its practical uses, was a powerful drug. In small doses (when mixed with a few other ingredients) it was an incredible sedative, and it could knock out a man for a good number of hours—more if used alongside a spell. In larger doses, however, it was fatal.
Unfortunately, Gyuvin was never known for his light hand.
“Okay. Okay.” Hao repeated to himself, once he got the truth out of Gyuvin. A cold sweat was in the process of forming on the back of his neck.
Their aunt was once again away on a business trip, which left the house almost empty. The house itself was a lonesome property up on the cliffside, with their closest neighbour being just up the hill, but that didn’t mean someone couldn’t walk up the road and investigate any weird noises. There was a dead man in the car. This was still something he was processing.
Was self-defense reasonable in this situation? Probably not. A man was poisoned, locked in the trunk of a car, and driven halfway across the country—or wherever the hell Gyuvin had been last. No cop would ever believe this was an accident.
For a moment, Hao wondered why he never had normal problems. He never had the loving mother and father, the sister and the brother, the dog, the family trips, the sleepovers with friends. In his dark moments, he wondered what things would’ve been like.
But he also thought about their aunt, Gyuvin, Yujin, the white house on the hill, the magic books in the closet and strewn across tables, the smell of the sea.
He decided then that neither he nor Gyuvin were going to serve life in prison.
“Get his knees,” Hao said finally. “We’ll get him inside.”
“Hyung?”
“Just… We might be able to fix this. How long has he been dead?”
Gyuvin reached underneath the man’s knees and hauled his legs out of the trunk. Hao took the other end, the man’s arms, and together they ungracefully dragged-slash-rolled the man out. An inelegant affair, it was.
“Why is he so fucking heavy?” Hao swore, as they carried the man up the short walkway and into the house, the yellow light from the door guiding the way. “And how did you get him in there by yourself?” He had about three million questions for his little brother, but he supposed they would have to wait until they safely hid the corpse away. For Gyuvin, however, this was likely an average Monday evening. But oh, Hao wanted answers.
“I read once that you get lighter after you die,” Gyuvin said unhelpfully, dodging the question.
The house remained uncharacteristically silent, an interested spectator, and this was confirmed a moment later when the front door shut on its own behind them. Hao avoided the floorboard by the kitchen entrance that always squeaked too loudly. The two of them shuffled along, the man swinging slightly between them, before they laid him down on the floor beside their long dining table.
“Help me clear everything,” Hao demanded.
While Gyuvin wordlessly moved the clutter—roses in a vase, an assortment of books, and a teapot making up just part of the disorder—away, Hao returned with a large book. Its weathered cover had a faded design, and its pages were yellow with age.
Together, they lifted the man onto the table, grunting under his useless weight. He was wearing a leather jacket and clunky boots. There was light stubble on his face. He was also stiff, which kind of worked in their favour when lifting him, but also kind of freaked Hao out. Luckily, he hadn’t started to smell yet, but his clothes were so heavy with the scent of smoke that Hao figured no one would probably notice anyway. Hao wondered how such a man had come to know Gyuvin, who looked at him expectantly. His youth showed then, in the roundness of his face and how deeply he trusted.
“We’re going to bring him back,” Hao said. “But I’m afraid of what he’ll be when he wakes.”
Hao wasn’t proud of this. But what other options were there?
“What, dark and unnatural?” Gyuvin scoffed. “He was already dark and unnatural before he kicked it. Now let’s do this.”
And it was decided.
In retrospect, the demands that he had made were silly; conjured up from the mind of a child who had read too many books and watched too many daytime dramas.
At one point, months after he had settled into the house by the sea with his aunt, Hao decided he no longer wanted to be cursed. He was almost thirteen years old.
Alas, curses are quite difficult to break, and he was hardly the first one of his line to try. He wouldn’t ever know it, but his mother had tried, and her mother, and hers. A multitude of others, too. Each had searched for a loophole, and each had been let down in the worst of ways. For Hao’s family, death from a broken heart was the most common way to go.
Though his mother was also magically inclined, witchcraft was something she was reluctant to acknowledge. Hao would discover quickly that his aunt kept an extensive collection of books on magic; being curious and studious were most definitely traits inherited from her. The house was crammed with titles, piled high in room corners and stacked unceremoniously on whichever shelf still had space. When Hao was fourteen, he opened an old broom closet on the third floor and was promptly buried under an onslaught of falling books. His aunt used this as a teaching moment: no snooping.
While these books were filled with an abundance of spells, rites, rituals, and even a few tips on getting stains out of the wash, they were unfortunately lacking in not-falling-in-love-spells. Oh, there were spells to fall in love—of craftily getting a crush to notice you, of checking to see if they were the one, of conveniently taking care of a rival in love—but none to prevent the wretched act from happening.
For months, Hao poured through what seemed to be countless volumes before he settled on something that could work. It took such an effort that his birthday had come and gone unnoticed in the time that had passed.
Hao copied the spell down into a small notebook he had, that had otherwise been filled with childish dreams and thoughts and spells. There was a period of time where he had written a lot as a way of sorting out his feelings, but by this point he was starting to get older and beginning to need this less and less. As such, the notebook was almost full, and the spell was buried underneath the weight of about fifty full pages on either side.
It wasn’t that the spell was particularly simple. It was just that Hao, painfully resolute and too young, refused to consider that it wouldn’t work. In the end, most of it rested on belief, and Hao was so sure that this was something he wanted, more than anything. This would be the way he would secure his future.
So, on the next full moon, as the spell described, he did it.
“He can flip pancakes in the air,” he started, as he picked rose petals from his aunt’s garden and plopped them into a large bowl. “His favourite shape will be a heart.”
Although it was dark, the lights on the exterior of the house, alongside the clear night sky, allowed him to see well enough. The sea was deceptively quiet, as if it too was anxiously holding its breath.
“He’ll be handsome, like a prince,” Hao continued. “With warm eyes you could fall into and a smile so bright, it makes flowers bloom.”
At thirteen, Hao hadn’t really thought too much about why, when he thought of his future self, he only pictured happiness with a man. It would be a few years before he untangled all of that—mostly because he didn’t see it as a major concern, for the most part. When he did figure it out, it was a footnote rather than a Crisis, capitalized.
“He’ll be marvelously kind. Not just nice, but kind,” he said, and smiled sadly to himself, getting lost in his dreams. He picked another petal with each increasingly foolish wish. That last bit, he knew, was the most absurd of them all.
It was a true love spell—Amas Veritas. And from what Hao had read, it summoned the lover you described. Yearned for.
But that was the thing, wasn’t it? That was the loophole, the way he planned to break the curse. Because the man he was describing was perfect; so much so that it wasn’t going to be possible for him to be summoned, ever. A man like this was just fiction. He wasn’t real, and he certainly wouldn’t fall in love with Hao if he was.
It hurt to think about. Hao felt the ache of it like physical pressure on his chest: a sick, twisting, hopeless feeling. He couldn’t fall in love with a man that simply didn’t exist. And if he didn’t exist, Hao would never have to watch him die. Hao would never pass away from a broken heart. The Earth would continue to turn.
“And,” he whispered finally, clutching the bowl tightly with both hands, “he will possess the universe: the sun, the moon, the stars.”
Satisfied with this, Hao ended it there. He stood outside in the garden, under the moonlight, and the grass tickled his bare toes. The crickets chirped and the quiet hush of the waves below set the backdrop to the last part of the spell. Above, the stars twinkled, countless lightyears away.
Hao spoke the words he had memorized softly, and watched the rose petals rise and swirl, one by one, up into the air. They travelled on a new wind, far away against the ultramarine of the night sky, before fading away in the distance.
That was it. Hao thought about it no longer.
“Alright, now insert the needles through the eyes of the corpse.”
“Sorry what?”
Hao shoved the sharp points into Gyuvin’s palms, generously handing off the problem to his brother. “It says put a needle through each eye.” The spell book, as weighty (and as sleek) as a brick, sat open on the table beside them. A void spread out from the pages that plunged the room into an uneasy darkness. When they had first opened to the right page, a centipede had scuttled out. Hao wondered if he should’ve taken that to be a bad omen.
Gyuvin gulped, all prior conviction vanquished, but he bravely reached forward and gently lifted the left eyelid of the man on the kitchen table. The man’s iris was pure white, staring up at both of them blindly.
Gyuvin yelped, which, in turn, made Hao jump in shock and let out a surprised sound of his own.
“What’re you doing?” asked a voice from the doorway. Gyuvin and Hao both jerked around quickly.
Yujuin stood in his pajamas, arms crossed, an unimpressed look on his face. However, to be fair, this was a default expression for him when dealing with his hyungs.
“Ah,” Hao said intelligently. “This.”
“Go to sleep,” Gyuvin scolded, fear of the dead man temporarily overridden by the older-brother-authority clause. The middle child, Gyuvin enjoyed the privileges of being babied by Hao and forcing Yujin to do whatever he wanted.
But Yujin wielded the confidence of a teen who knew for a fact that his elder brothers were up to no good. He didn’t even mention the obvious: that Gyuvin had returned, abruptly, in the middle of the night, without informing him about it. As he stepped forward, he said, “If you’re going to try and do dark magic, I want to watch you screw it up.”
“We’re not doing dark magic, that doesn’t even exist,” said Hao. At the same time, Gyuvin said, “We’re not going to screw it up.”
Yujin, although more than aware of the existence of magic, had yet to develop any gifts of his own. Hao had patiently assured him, many times, that he was still young, that it could still happen, but even Yujin knew the sun was quickly beginning to set on that dream. Nevertheless, it didn’t stop him from meddling in Gyuvin and Hao’s business whenever possible.
“Whatever. Did that guy pass out or something? Or are you Frankenstein-ing your dream boyfriend?”
Hao looked at Gyuvin. “We can’t stop this spell. Needle through the eyes. Now.” He turned his attention to his other brother. “Yujin, go upstairs. You don’t need to see this.”
Gyuvin let out a pathetic sound. Yujin didn’t move from his spot in the entranceway.
“I’m not a child,” Yujin deadpanned. “This is ridiculous.”
“Yujin, please,” begged Hao. The logistics of whether or not Yujin was a child—he was—was not something he wanted to discuss (read: fight) about tonight. But Yujin, completely unwavering when he set his mind to something, did nothing but move closer to the body. Yujin looked at him carefully, unable to hide his slight trepidation. Hao made another shoo-ing motion before returning to the book. The candles started flickering and the shadows seemed to grow ominously.
“You look like a dork in those pajamas,” Gyuvin teased.
“Your breath smells so bad in the mornings, it’s like something crawled in your mouth and died,” Yujin, in fleece bunny pants, retorted.
“The instructions say we need something white to draw a star with,” interrupted Hao, trying not to let the stress leak into his voice. His authority in the household clearly ebbed and flowed. The magic in the air wavered as the spell lost its momentum.
Gyuvin, setting the needles down again, said shakily, “Maybe we should wait for Auntie to get back?”
“Why, to let him ripen a bit more?” Hao replied.
Yujin, silently watching this exchange, walked over to the fridge and grabbed a can of whipped cream. “Here. For the star.”
Hao caught the can as Yujin tossed it in the air, accepting it gratefully. Having Yujin here complicated things, though it would be a difficult task to get rid of him now. Hao made Yujin promise to follow Hao’s directions, that he could stay if he didn’t run and tell their aunt, and Yujin reached across the corpse to link their pinkies together in a promise.
He told himself not to think about the risk, to put aside their aunt’s words of caution about raising things from the dead. He looked at Gyuvin, whose expression was grim and focused, and thought about how much more dangerous it would be to try and get rid of a body. He was well-aware that this was reckless, that this was foolish. But if he deliberated too much, he feared he would back out. The flames in the candles trembled.
“Okay,” Hao stated, for the nth time tonight, more to ground himself than to attract the attention of the others.
He unbuttoned the man’s shirt all the way down, revealing a pale chest with a light dusting of hair, which trailed down the middle. Reading from the book, he chanted the written words softly, drawing a star within a circle with the whipped cream, right on the man’s exposed skin. It made that silly fffppt sound, at odds with the seriousness of the moment. Hao carried on.
After he recited the spell a second time, Gyuvin joined in, followed by Yujin. Neither of them stopped him, despite how ineffectual it would be. Nevertheless, the younger of his two brothers seemed to have smartened up enough to stop asking questions, though not enough to leave.
The smoke from the burning incense thickened, casting a haze in the room. The candles, which had been flickering, went out one by one, with the exception of a few located around the body, plunging them further into darkness.
Hao and Gyuvin laid their hands on the man’s forehead, joining their magic together, reciting the spell faster and faster. Hao felt the buzz of it run through him like a live wire.
Suddenly, the man’s lids snapped open. Hao jolted back in surprise, breaking contact. Then a split second later, as if lagging, so did Gyuvin. A purplish face and a pair of bloodshot eyes—with pupils far too large—stared up at them coldly. The room was eerily silent in the aftermath of the spell.
“Hi,” Gyuvin said finally. His voice wavered.
Hao’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t have time to ruminate on that before the man let out an inhuman snarl. In one stiff lurch, he sat up on the table, swung his legs around, then shot his hand out like a viper, wrapping around Gyuvin’s neck. Whether a side-effect of the spell or simply rigor mortis doing its thing, the man’s words were garbled and barely intelligible, but Hao got the gist as he shouted. His eyes were completely black: soulless, vacant holes. Hao backed up reflexively, stumbling at the sheer amount of energy the spell had stolen away from him.
Gyuvin tried to yell, his hands grabbing weakly at the man’s forearm. The man got up off the table, walked them backwards, and slammed Gyuvin into the kitchen wall. He hit the plaster and tile with a thud, a choked gasp coming through despite the man’s tight grip on his neck.
Hao didn’t think as he snapped into action. He vaguely registered Yujin shouting and grappling with the man out of the corner of his eye. As Hao turned, he zeroed in on the cast iron skillet on the stove and snatched it up tightly with both hands. Moving quickly, he came up behind the man, made eye contact with Yujin (struggling to try and remove the man’s grip), and roared, “Move.”
Yujin launched himself out of the way. Hao swung.
Because he only had one chance, one shot, to get it right, Hao threw his entire weight into it. The metal of the skillet met the back of the man’s head with a dull sound.
The room watched as the man released his chokehold on Gyuvin. He collapsed to the floor heavily.
Then, Hao swung again. And one more time to be sure. With his heartbeat pounding in his ears, he didn’t hear the sick thwack of metal meeting skull. Perhaps that was best.
Hao set the skillet on the kitchen table afterwards. He didn’t want to look at what the man (more so a hunk of flesh) looked like. The candles had all gone out, and cold moonlight seeped through the windows, casting the kitchen in blue light.
Gyuvin sat on the floor against the wall, breathing heavily. Yujin had frozen halfway across the kitchen from when Hao yelled at him to move, and clearly hadn’t since.
Hao moved towards his brother and sat down on the floor beside him. “Let me see,” he said softly, tilting Gyuvin’s head so he could assess the damage to his neck. Gyuvin let Hao gently press for a few moments before batting his hands away with mumbles that he was fine, hyung, seriously.
Hao sighed. “I suppose,” he said, “we’ve created a new problem.”
Yujin finally unfroze and silently sat down beside the two of them. Hao automatically opened his arms so his brothers could curl into his sides. His heart started to slow its panicked beats. He breathed them in.
“Let’s not tell Auntie,” Yujin whispered.
Hao nodded against his hair and placed a kiss on top of his head.
Was it a common misconception that digging a grave was a simple task, or was that just Hao’s impression? The reality of it was that it sucked. A lot. Nevertheless, they were lucky that the ground hadn’t completely hardened from the cold. It was still late autumn, and the coastal town was always milder than the northern cities.
After the first few bites of the shovel into hard earth, the soil loosened and became more tolerable, but it was still a concentrated effort that had Hao sweating through his pajama top and Gyuvin through his hoodie.
Hao had directed Yujin to stay inside, to clean up the mess in the kitchen. Yujin, who was deeply unnerved by the corpse, its head now a pulpy mess in the back, followed Hao’s instructions without pushback. Hao regretted letting him see that.
While that was being taken care of, Hao and Gyuvin wrapped the man in a tarp sourced from the entrance closet, where their aunt had sometimes stored gardening supplies. Sometimes these things shifted around, but the house kept everything where it was supposed to be tonight. Then they carried him out to the row garden.
If you got lighter after you died, then you seemed to get heavier the second time around.
And so, once more, Hao and Gyuvin found themselves outside in the yard. The night, cold and never-ending, pressed down on their backs as they unceremoniously started to dig a grave. Hao wasn’t really monitoring himself, more concerned with how his brother was holding up.
“Do you want to tell me about it?” Hao asked gently. Because despite all the events of the evening, he wasn’t angry. Confused, yes. Slightly panicky? That too. But not, and never, angry.
Gyuvin paused his digging for a moment before starting back up. He didn’t respond. Gyuvin was quick to share all sorts of things: how his day was, what he saw, where he went, how he scraped his knee that afternoon or how he saw something funny online.
The heavier stuff took some time, but Hao was patient.
Hao didn’t quite know how far six feet was—a bit above his own height, he supposed—but they definitely weren’t there yet. He settled into the motions, trying to lift with his thighs not his back, easily accepting that he wouldn’t be sleeping tonight.
“If you don’t want to, I won’t make you,” said Hao. He had to be careful about this. “But we’re burying a man in our garden after he attacked you. I don’t think it would be wrong for me to ask you to explain that.”
Gyuvin sighed. “I met him in some bar,” he started. His voice was low over the rhythmic stick of the shovel into tough ground and the thump of piling dirt.
Hao’s eyes narrowed. “Where?”
“Does it matter?” Gyuvin scoffed, but he answered the question quickly. “Tokyo. He was from Seoul though. We travelled back together.”
“Why were you in a bar?”
The heavy weight of exertion strained their speech. Gyuvin began to get frustrated. “I know it was stupid. I can’t even buy a drink there legally, which is why I asked him to. We started talking, I thought he was cool… and, well, you know. One thing led to another. He had some friends, too.”
“This guy has, like, a beard, Gyuvin. How old was he?” An exaggeration, but Hao didn’t care.
“Not so much older,” Gyuvin said, vaguely.
Hao didn’t like that. Typically, he wouldn’t push further, but he was tired—because gravedigging was exhausting—and he no longer cared about what would be polite.
“He doesn’t seem like your type,” Hao said tactfully. As far as he knew, Gyuvin had had one, singular relationship in his nineteen years of living. It had been a few years back and she had been a girl from his high school. After three weeks of holding hands, she dumped Gyuvin and told him she thought he was weird, and that his family’s off-putting reputation was ruining hers. He had cried into Hao’s pillow for several hours and Hao comforted him through it all, gently reminding him that life wasn’t truly over.
“Clearly my type is a result of greater, personal failings,” Gyuvin responded sarcastically. Hao could see that his words had accidentally hurt. Though vague, Hao could piece together enough of what happened from what Gyuvin said.
Hao stuck his shovel upright into the dirt. “Gyuvin. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I know he was nice at first. He told you he liked you. None of what happened, nothing that he did, was your fault.”
Gyuvin looked down at the ground. “Yeah. I guess,” he mumbled.
Hao closed the gap between himself and his brother, wrapping him up in a tight hug. His right hand, beginning to blister from the harsh metal shovel, patted his brother’s back soothingly. Gyuvin held him back just as tight.
“I didn’t mean to ruin your life,” Gyuvin said, voice shaking slightly. “I just had no one else to turn to.”
“Gyuvin,” Hao said softly. “You didn’t ruin anything.”
He held him like that for a bit until the moment passed. Gyuvin withdrew, wiped his face angrily, and said he was fine. Hao gave him the space he required.
When they finally decided they had dug far enough, they rolled the body (still wrapped in tarp) into the pit, then covered it back up again with dirt. They knew they were a little bit sloppy, the tiredness becoming overwhelming, but they made sure it looked alright from the road.
Hao felt the deep ache in his arms and back that promised greater hurts tomorrow. Gyuvin’s brown hair was stuck to his forehead with sweat, and he had dirt on his face from trying to brush the strands out of his eyes.
It was done.
In the row garden, with sunrise just an hour away, they said some final, half-assed rites over a messy grave. The rose bushes, crispy now that autumn had settled in, framed one side of where the man rested.
“Lee Junhyuk,” Gyuvin stated, voice monotonous. “I didn’t know you for very long, but you were a shitty person and you were deeply troubled. If I knew any of your redeeming qualities, I would list them now.”
The sea birds were starting to cry out. Hao said nothing, allowing him time to vent.
“You held cigarettes nicely and I suppose your face was pretty. I hope you rest easy now.”
After a long beat of silence, Hao clapped his hands. “Alright. Let’s wash up, make some food, and sleep this off. He’ll never bother you again. This I promise.”
Hanbin was born just as summer gained its full strength. In time, Hao would associate his warmth with the incandescence of mid-June.
Two days after Hao and Gyuvin buried the man in the garden, beneath the hibernating roses, their aunt returned. She walked in as she always had after a long time away—abruptly, and in a loud, celebratory manner. Six minutes before she arrived, Gyuvin whipped his head up and Hao smelled jasmine in the air.
Yujin, who didn’t have the same sense his brothers had, lifted his head from where it rested on Gyuvin’s belly. They were lounging on Hao’s giant bed in the afternoon sun. “What?” he questioned.
“Auntie is coming home,” Gyuvin explained. “Now.”
The door to the house opened to let her in—it always had seemed to like her the best—and she announced her arrival by calling out cheerily.
Yujin got all the way to the bedroom door before Gyuvin caught up with him, wrapped his arms around him and manhandled him out of the way with a laugh. “Too slow, Yujin-ah,” he said, and Yujin answered with an angry, offended noise. Hao listened fondly as the two of them chased each other through the house and all but tumbled down the stairs to greet their aunt.
Somewhere, somehow, “his aunt" became "their aunt", which was also the exact point at which they became a family.
Hao followed behind at his own pace, and when he got to the front hallway, his aunt had Gyuvin’s face grasped in her hands. Hao arrived mid-conversation, and she was already lecturing him about his abrupt departure and his unexpected return.
“—And you’ve gotten so thin while you were gone. What happened to your round cheeks? Oh, Gyuvin, seriously… And your eye… Does that hurt? What happened? Some mugwort on that, and you’ll be fixed right up.”
“Auntie—”
“You’ve been away far too long,” she continued, not hearing his protests.
“Welcome home,” Hao said, as he walked past and placed a light kiss on her cheek.
She let go of Gyuvin, who rubbed his face and grimaced after being released. “Come here,” she said, wrapping him in a cozy hug. As she aged, she seemed to get smaller and smaller in his arms, although it was possible that Hao just imagined that.
“Why is the energy in here so off? Smells like electricity.” She waved her hand to clear the air, then tossed her scarf over one shoulder. “Well, never mind. Tell me what happened while I was gone.”
Hao let Yujin and Gyuvin babble excitedly about the past few days—both, of course, conveniently leaving out the murder, the resurrection, and the subsequent re-murder. As the hours post-burial settled in, the anxiety slowly seeped away, and the trio finally allowed themselves to feel some peace. It seemed like a dream now. A bad one, but a dream nonetheless.
Their aunt puttered around in the kitchen, telling stories of her own. Apparently whatever conference she had gone to had been an uproarious affair, and her speech as a featured guest speaker had been well-received. Hao half-listened from the doorway, keeping an eye on his brothers as they weaved around her.
She was in the middle of a story about a man who had been cursed to be a cat because of his plans to take over the world, when she paused.
“Ah,” she smiled, after a long moment. “Geminis are always best in twos.”
Hao looked at her, wondering what the hell that was supposed to mean.
She did that sometimes. Their aunt was adept in a range of magical disciplines, most notably love spells, but on occasion she could divine the future. She explained it once like seeing fragments flash before her, some of which were clearer and longer and stronger than others. She also had the frustrating tendency to be cryptic about what she saw. Hao hadn’t inherited that gift, but Gyuvin was remarkably talented.
Her words may have phased Hao in the past, he may have spent days afterwards tasting them to try and draw out some meaning, but now he just pigeonholed that away for safe-keeping, sure it would probably make more sense in time.
He went about the day like usual: running after Yujin to finish his homework, and then completing his own. Hao texted some of his university classmates, but mostly Chen Kuanjui. Gyuvin, after his first forays into the great big world, had spent the last few days at home. He hadn’t seemed eager to go out, which Hao very much understood. Hao worried, though, about his brother’s future, about Yujin’s, and about his own.
He sat Gyuvin down on the closed toilet lid and applied ointment, made by their aunt, to the bruises around his eye. Gyuvin tried not to wince the entire time. His neck, luckily, was unblemished, and Hao pressed down lightly in places to test for any damage. When Hao was finished, he held his brother’s face in his hands and smiled gently, before pressing a kiss to the top of his head. Already the marks on his face were starting to fade.
The next days also passed uneventfully. He went to his online classes, practiced a rather difficult piece on the violin, grabbed groceries from the market (and kept his head down from the stares), and made passing conversation at the dock with Gunwook, a rather tall—and shy—boy. His father was a fisherman, and Gunwook had been a patron of their aunt’s spells on a couple of occasions, mostly involving the safety of his father on rougher seas and the success of their business.
Gunwook had always been kind, but Hao had, admittedly, found the boy kind of intimidating at first. He had a large frame and piercing stare, but the latter softened when he laughed.
As Hao made his way back to the house, climbing the narrow, winding streets that led uphill, he noted a strange feeling: pinpricks of awareness, and even maybe a shift in the direction of the wind. It was like he could sense something behind him, but when he turned there was nothing there, or maybe a peculiar sort of alertness, like he was being told to pay attention. An anticipation, perhaps. He wrapped his coat tighter around himself.
He observed the darkness arriving on the horizon right before he walked through the front door.
Inside, the house was warm. There was a pot of something boiling on the stove that he smelled all the way from the entranceway. A soup maybe? Gyuvin liked to experiment. He took his coat, scarf, and shoes off, slid his feet into some slippers, and started unpacking the groceries in the kitchen.
The house had a short entryway, often cluttered, that opened into a longer hallway with the main staircase, storage and a large bookshelf underneath. To the left was their living room, which fell under the shade of their pine tree outside most days. On the right side of the house was the dining room and the kitchen. The first floor also had a bathroom and a small library, as well as a back door that opened to a small deck and provided access to their back garden by the cliffside.
“A storm’s on the way, I think,” he called. “I feel antsy. Nervous, even.”
“Maybe you just did poorly on your last exam,” Gyuvin laughed from the living room. All one hundred and eighty-something centimeters of him sprawled out on the couch with a book in his hand.
Hao grunted in response, doubting that.
Outside, the wind picked up. A strong gust hit the house, making it creak in response. Some medical drama was playing on low volume on the TV. Yujin was upstairs studying. Their aunt breezed by him, checked the pot on the stove, and then fluttered away, humming.
Then—a knock at the door. Unsure at first, and then more confident the second go around.
Hao froze for a moment, hesitant. They weren’t expecting anyone. The house stood still in tandem.
It was difficult to describe the feeling, other than to say it felt like the entire universe held its breath in anticipation. Like the birth of a star, this moment would permanently change the landscape of things.
Hao walked slowly to the entrance, opened the front door, and let the sea wind in with it.
A man stood on their doorstep, just ahead of a late-autumn storm. Dark clouds rolled in from over the ocean, but he stood awash in the yellow light of the open door, framed by the sun setting behind him.
Hao took in the lone figure. The breeze pulled at him, the stranger’s dark hair falling into darker eyes. He had a button nose. A sharp jaw. His features harmonized in such a way that he was both startlingly handsome but also somehow approachable… or maybe that was just the way he held himself. He wasn’t from around here, that was for sure. Hao wouldn’t have forgotten him.
Hao felt the earth beneath him shift.
The man didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then he seemed to snap back into himself. “Hi,” he said. His voice was higher than Hao expected, but it carried a pleasant warmth. “I’m so sorry to bother you. I was wondering if I could use your phone?”
Hao, off-balance, answered with, “Phone?”
“Yeah,” the man laughed. “It’s a device that calls people.”
“I know what a phone is,” Hao snarked. “Just… what?”
“We saw your house on the hill from down below, and wondered if you could help us.” The guy looked sheepish, and Hao knew he wasn’t controlling his own expressions as well as he usually did. “Sorry, I’m explaining this all backwards. Me and my friend are a bit stranded, and I was wondering if I could make a call.”
For all intents and purposes, this would be the part where doubt would take its roots. Anyone who had seen a movie in their lifetime would, at least, exercise a little bit of caution when dealing with strangers knocking at the door. Hao had that feeling now, although it was so minute it was barely worth mentioning, and it was fading rapidly as the guy at the door continued on.
When Hao would finally settle in for the night, he would replay this conversation over and over, trying to make sense of why it all felt so cosmic.
In response to Hao’s silence, the man started nervously adjusting the sleeves of his jacket. He bit his lip, too, chewing thoughtfully. An anxious habit. Hao was instantly endeared by him. Perhaps naïvely, all worries about harm coming to Hao flew out the window.
The man looked about Hao’s age—though describing him as a man made him seem older than he was, and he certainly wasn't a boy by any stretch, so Hao stumbled over what to call him.
“You’re stranded?”
“Well, our car died, and my phone died, and then my friend’s phone died. Feels a bit like divine intervention. Or retribution?” he joked. He showed bunny teeth when he smiled. He blazed so bright that it was almost difficult to look at.
Hao was about to reply when he felt someone come up behind him, peering over his shoulder in the doorway.
“Of course we have a phone,” their aunt said. The man’s gaze shifted toward her and took in her eccentric appearance in stride. “Sorry, I couldn’t help but overhear. Please, come in. There’s a storm on the way.”
“I wouldn’t want to be a bother. I really only need to make a quick phone call,” the man explained politely.
Hao wondered if the man thought of them as dangerous. From his perspective, this scenario could also be similar to the setup of a horror film. “A family of cursed, reclusive magic users in a mysterious house invite a desperate stranger in” sounded worse when phrased like that. Hao would definitely be cautious. He saw how that movie ended.
His aunt was remarkably convincing, however. “Please do come in.”
Hao stepped aside to let him in the house, noting that they were about the same height, before closing the door behind him softly. The wind finally at bay, the house embraced them in warmth. For whatever reason, the floorboard—the one that always squeaked—was silent as the man walked over it.
Hao left to fetch his phone from the living room, passing by an exceedingly curious Gyuvin, who was still sprawled on the couch pretending to read. Gyuvin watched with amusement as Hao unlocked his phone, changed a bunch of his settings, and hid a few apps and photos. Just on the off-chance.
“Better delete Grindr,” Gyuvin mouthed. Hao raised his fist in threat. That was one time.
The stranger and their aunt were in the kitchen when he wove his way back, where they were in the middle of making introductions. Their aunt was pouring soup into a truly gigantic Tupperware container, because of course she was.
“Sung Hanbin,” he said.
Hao held out his phone for him to use. “Zhang Hao.”
Their fingers brushed as it was passed over. The stranger’s hands were soft and warm.
Hanbin excused himself, secluding himself by the front door to call a nearby mechanic. Hao wandered over to help their aunt, though he kept watch stealthily from out of the corner of his eye.
“What an eventful evening,” she murmured, so that only he could hear.
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” he replied. He thought of the split second that their hands touched.
Sometime during all of this, Gyuvin meandered in, maybe drawn in by the promise of dinner. He sniffed around the stove before digging for something in the fridge.
It wasn’t long before Hanbin returned.
“I called a mechanic just outside of town,” he said, “I think they’re closed? I left a message, though.”
Hao was quickly getting the impression that Hanbin was (simply, genuinely) exceedingly polite. Their aunt seemed to love this. Gyuvin looked at Hanbin with an unreadable expression. It wasn’t hostile, but rather curious. Hao didn’t have a clue what his brother was thinking.
“Is there somewhere around here we—my friend and I—could stay for the night?”
“There’s a bed and breakfast just down the road,” their aunt replied.
“Ah. Well. That will do. Thank you again.” He picked up the Tupperware that she gave him while Hao had hidden his mirror selfies. “For the phone and the soup. I’ll be going, then. I wouldn’t want to intrude further.”
“Nonsense,” their aunt said. “Hao will take you there.” She looked towards Gyuvin, who was still assessing the stranger with his wide eyes. “And Gyuvin as well.”
Gyuvin’s head whipped around. “What?”
“Oh, that’s—”
“We insist,” she said with finality.
Hanbin thanked her again, and waited awkwardly by the door while Hao got his coat and searched around for a flashlight in the front cupboard. It would be dark by the time they returned.
“Why am I involved?” Gyuvin hissed lowly into Hao’s ear.
It occurred to Hao then that maybe Gyuvin hadn’t felt the strange electric charge in the air, the tilt of the world on its axis, the disequilibrium of the Earth’s surface.
“Do you think he’s good-looking?” Gyuvin continued.
“We’re not doing this right now,” Hao whispered. He turned to Hanbin. “Let’s go.”
Back outside, the sun was no longer visible, but the horizon held onto a tiny bit of vibrant orange before nightfall and the darkness of the storm clouds overtook it. The seabirds were strangely quiet, and the wind alternated between relentless gusts and heavy sighs.
“Kim Gyuvin,” his brother said.
“Sung Hanbin,” the man repeated, clutching the Tupperware close. He didn’t mention the very different names between them. That was polite.
“Where’s your friend exactly?” asked Hao. That had been something on his mind for a while.
“Oh!” Hanbin said. “He’s with the car.” He then looked a bit embarrassed. “We kind of rock, paper, scissor-ed for who got to knock on your door, and who got to stay behind.”
“So you lost, then?” Gyuvin clarified.
Hanbin handled this adeptly. “He’s very shy.”
Hao laughed.
“It’s interesting, though. It’s not really tourist season around here anymore,” Gyuvin continued. Hao knew he was fishing for information, but he was ridiculously bad at being casual about it.
Luckily, Hanbin wasn’t offended by Gyuvin’s forwardness, and actually smiled. “We were just passing through. We’re both taking a semester off to travel. My friend has always wanted to do a road trip, and I don’t mind driving… So here we are.”
“Stranded,” Hao filled in.
“I am being escorted to my car by two kind gentlemen.”
“Well, I’ve had wilder Wednesdays,” Gyuvin said.
“As have I,” Hanbin laughed.
Hao never really understood the way Gyuvin flung himself into things sometimes, and how unguarded he was when he did it. It’s perhaps at this moment that Gyuvin settled on something, as if he had seen everything he needed and completely understood Hanbin’s character: that he was kind and reliable and meant no harm. Hao, in contrast, could form shallow relationships quite easily, but it usually took a great deal of time to earn his complete trust.
They made their way back to where Hanbin’s car broke down: a narrow, quiet street, which involved them making a tricky trek downhill, then uphill, and then downhill again. There, pushed off the side of the road amongst some unruly weeds, was an unremarkable silver hatchback. One of the rear headlights was duct taped in place. There were bumper stickers on the back, but Hao couldn’t read most of them in the low light.
Hanbin hurried over, going into a light jog, greeting the figure getting out of the car.
“Hyung,” the new guy cried, throwing himself into Hanbin’s arms. “I fucking thought you were dead.”
Hao watched this exchange slightly awkwardly. The guy that got out of the passenger door was on the shorter side, with disheveled brown hair. Evidently, the two were quite close, although Hao wasn’t sure why he thought this was a negative thing to point out.
“This is the shy friend?” Gyuvin asked playfully.
The friend, who had a slight accent (Hao immediately found him more approachable for it), introduced himself as Seok Matthew. Gyuvin and Hao repeated their own names back.
“Come on, get your stuff. We have to stay the night,” said Hanbin, allowing for no time for the conversation to become awkward.
“Oh, what fun,” Matthew said sarcastically, pulling on a backpack he drew out from the back seat.
The darkness of the evening had finally settled in, though the sky seemed deeper in colour due to the oncoming storm. While many of the roads in town had streetlights, most of the ones up on the hill did not. Hence, why Hao had the brilliant forethought to bring a flashlight.
Light guiding the way, Hao drew his coat tighter around himself to ward off the cold, naturally moving closer to Gyuvin—whose height and breadth blocked out some of the wind. His brother also tended to naturally run at the temperature of a space heater, or an active volcano.
Hanbin and Matthew chatted as they made their way back to one of the main roads. Hao kept his gaze pointedly in front of him, trying to put the pieces together of the nature of their relationship. Rationally, he knew that was none of this business. Tonight, he decided that didn’t matter.
“So, is it just the two of you in the spooky house?” Matthew asked from behind them, loudly, so they both could hear.
Gyuvin slowed down, allowing Matthew and Hanbin to catch up. “Do the ghouls count?”
“It’s us, our younger brother, and our aunt,” Hao explained.
“That’s nice,” Matthew remarked. “Also, I’m sorry I said your house was spooky, I didn’t mean that. I’m sure it’s lovely.”
Matthew struck Hao as a guy who seemed to put his foot in his mouth a lot, although obviously unintentionally.
“It’s just me and Hanbin hyung, by the way.” As he said this, Matthew patted Hanbin’s arm. “On the trip, I mean. It’s just us travelling together. It’s not like that.”
“I see,” said Hao, not sure how to respond to this. He glanced over at Gyuvin, who was staring back at him with a bewildered—but incredibly amused—expression.
“And it wouldn’t be cool if it was,” Matthew explained. “Usually, it would be cool, but not with Hanbin, because he’s just a friend, and that’s weird.”
Gyuvin let out a truly disgusting snort. “Where did you say you were from again?”
“He’s from Canada,” Hanbin groaned, cutting in before Matthew could answer.
“Ah,” Gyuvin said. Hao tried to keep his expression neutral as his brother carried on, full-speed. “Is it a cultural difference?”
“No,” Hanbin deadpanned. “He’s just like that.”
Matthew looked between all of them curiously.
“Have you ever seen a bear?” Hao asked.
“Here we go,” Matthew sighed. “No, have you?”
Hao bit the inside of his cheek, considering how bold he should be with a pair of strangers. “Well—”
Gyuvin immediately began coughing.
They kept the conversation light as they kept on, and Hao was happier to listen than he was to participate.
The bed and breakfast rose before them: two larger buildings and a row of small guesthouses, petite enough to be considered cottages, he supposed. It was hard to see in the dark, but from one side, guests had a view down into a small valley, while on the other side, one had a view of the sea. The houses were quaint and relatively clean, and therefore attracted a lot of tourists during the summer months.
Their town was relatively small in population, but generous in size. Over the years, its charming homes overlooking the seaside started attracting attention online, and from that grew a considerable tourism economy. Mostly it was wedding photoshoots and company excursions and influencers crawling about for a couple days’ trip before sauntering back home. But from this, the town had stabilized and the businesses had flourished.
“This is it,” said Hao. He hesitated. “We’d walk you closer but…”
Gyuvin picked up where he trailed off. “We have a dazzling reputation around these parts, and unfortunately, street cred can’t be shared. It has to be earned. Consider that.”
Matthew looked confused by this but Hanbin gave him a serious salute.
Hanbin waved back with one hand, the other still clutching the Tupperware, and they made their way up the long drive towards the inn.
Gyuvin and Hao made their way back to the house as the sky rumbled. The storm had caught up to them finally, and the sky threatened to open up in a downpour at any moment.
“And wasn’t that eventful?” Gyuvin remarked when they got back inside the house.
Hao shrugged, hanging up his coat and avoiding Gyuvin’s eyes. “I guess.”
“I wonder if we’ll see them again.”
Hao thought of the stranger Hanbin, and the way his figure, retreating from them, had seemed like a loss. “I doubt it,” he answered. Even he could hear that his voice had come out oddly.
That night, Hao dreamt of shadows in the dark and grave dirt and brain matter splattered on the tile floor. He dreamt of the howling winds and rose bushes and the feeling of being watched from behind. He dreamt in fragments, of hands caressing and the quick flashes of a smile and floral sheets. Despite it all, he somehow fell asleep in the early morning.
Hao felt extraordinarily aware of everything. He was pressed right up against Hanbin: their shoulders, the length of their arms, and even, under the dining table, their knees touched. It was like Hao’s brain zoomed in on every single point where they met and demanded his attention. Bolded, underlined, italicized. Look, his body said. Pay attention.
A split second after the shock of their first touch, Hao registered the summery warmth of him, even through the layers of clothing that separated their skin.
Hanbin was a solid presence, shockingly tangible. All they had done was brush up against each other, and yet Hao felt that same, strange stir inside himself that he felt the first time they met. His stomach twisted around and his heart raced.
The shame of his feelings made Hao immediately look down into his glass, as if he would find secrets down there that would explain what exactly was wrong with him. He pressed all of this down.
When Hanbin returned a few days later to return the container he borrowed, he was greeted at the door by Gyuvin, who had been more than delighted to see him again. Apparently, the car required a part that the mechanic needed to order in from abroad, and the delivery could take up to a few weeks. This effectively grounded Hanbin and Matthew, but they explained that it didn’t bother them too much. They hadn’t had any real plans when they set out anyway. Gyuvin, who was driven by chaos and intrigue and making Hao’s life as difficult as possible, had invited Hanbin and Matthew to come back in the evening for drinks.
Gyuvin had been incredibly proud of himself, bombarding Hao with this as soon as he had gotten back from running a few errands in town. Hao very much considered turning his brother into a toad.
And so here he was: sitting beside a not-quite-stranger, digging his fingers into his thigh to try and ground himself, schooling his face into something neutral.
Their family was supposed to be celebrating the full moon—although perhaps they still were. They just had additional guests who didn’t know that. It wasn’t a huge celebration for all witches, but their aunt had turned it into a sort of family fun night meets intense therapy session. Traditionally, it involved getting naked and dancing happily in the moonlight, however sensibilities in the magic world have changed over time, and most didn’t really subscribe to that anymore. Like anyone else anywhere, their customs were not unanimous. For Hao’s family, it was less bathing in blood and summoning the darkness, and more threatening violence over who was winning the board game of choice that night.
As it was, their aunt had once again left on some business, but encouraged the three of them to carry on without her. Yujin had never been enthusiastic about monthly family get-togethers, but even he wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to enjoy an evening completely unsupervised. Yujin also didn’t consider Hao or Gyuvin to be genuine supervision. Hao didn’t blame him.
Gyuvin had quickly gotten out the mulled wine—the spice, in this case, being that it was enchanted, not just cardamom and cinnamon—which Hao had immediately shouted at him to put back; they were not having that around non-magical guests.
For magic folk, the mulled wine offered all the lively confidence of girls at a bachelorette party, combined with an otherworldly, bubbly, floaty feeling—and none of the downsides of a hangover. For the average person, however, it bestowed the “feeling-like-a-cement-truck-hit-you” sort of wasted that had you waking up the next morning with a horrible taste in your mouth, the brief flashes from the night before, and the vow never to do that again. Hao did not want to deal with that.
Yujin, prodding Gyuvin incessantly for more information on how and why two random men were on their way over, brought out some cards and a selection of their easier board games. The most obvious magic books were stored out of sight or flipped around on the shelves for discretion. Hao’s playlists were on shuffle on the speaker system. The house played with mood lighting irritatingly, flashing different colours on a whim, until Hao took hold of things and set the lights to something more pleasant.
(“And an apple juice for our Yujin-ie,” said Gyuvin. “Fuck you, I’m not five.” responded Yujin. “Fight outside, please,” begged Hao. “Where did Jenga go?”)
Gyuvin had greeted Hanbin and Matthew with a, “Welcome back to the spooky house,” accompanied by some truly horrendous jazz hands, and that was it. Somehow they didn’t turn heel and flee.
Hao wasn’t a heavy drinker on most occasions. When he had too much alcohol, his “I Feel So Untethered And I Love Everyone Here” phase of drunkenness was too short-lived, while his “Are We Put On This Planet Only To Suffer?” phase of drunkenness snuck up too quickly.
Tonight, however, he felt it was best to keep his head as clear as possible. He told himself he needed to keep an eye on things—especially Yujin, who had sticky fingers and no fear—but maybe part of that was a lie.
Gyuvin, on the other hand, was a freer soul, and was currently toeing the line between being adorably tipsy and an emboldened drunk with no regard for consequences, and no handle on his brain-to-mouth filter… even if that last part was not so different from regular Gyuvin. His problem, like all others who get sloshed like this, is that they’re convinced they’re totally fine and completely sober. Hao recognized that this is often how situations get out of hand.
Such as this.
“I,” said Gyuvin, “am very good at reading palms.”
“Are you?” asked Matthew. “Is that really a thing?”
They sat around the dining table. Gyuvin across from Hao. Matthew next to Gyuvin. And Yujin and Hanbin on either of Hao’s sides. On the table, an assortment of beverages: soju, a staple for a night like this, a strange bottle of vodka coughed up by the back of their cupboard, and the finest wine the convenience store could offer. Some time after the third round of Halli Galli, the mulled wine manifested next to Gyuvin. Yujin was on his second Coke.
(“Yujin, why are you so good at cards?” Hanbin whined as Yujin stole the last of his. Yujin, in response, smiled with teeth. “I’ve studied my craft for years, just for these moments.”)
Gyuvin blew air quickly out of his nose. “It’s totally a thing. Here, give me your right hand.”
Matthew finished off his drink and laid his open hand in Gyuvin’s. Hanbin sat up in interest, cards forgotten, his eyes bright in the low lamplight.
“Gyuvin,” Hao started. A warning not to take this too far. Gyuvin waved him off.
The truth of the matter was that Gyuvin was especially good at divination. Much like how their aunt had her sporadic (and exceptionally accurate) visions, Gyuvin could read parts of a person’s future. If it was a genetic thing, it completely bypassed Hao. He only got small hunches, like itches, and usually they explained very little. Of course, the palm reading was complete bullshit. Gyuvin just needed touch as an anchor point. The rest was simply a love for showmanship.
“Hmm. That’s no good,” Gyuvin said, playing it up. “Are you happy with your current occupation?”
“I’m unemployed right now. So no.”
“Ah. That’ll be it, then.”
Matthew, tipsy himself, pouted. “Any hope for future me?” he asked, his disappointed tone reading cute as opposed to bothersome. And he was rather cute. Hao had observed Hanbin doting on him, squeezing his shoulders and pinching his round cheeks when Matthew also lost his cards to Yujin. Hao understood they were close, and as the night went on, he had come to recognize these actions as platonic. For some reason, this mollified him.
Gyuvin tsked. “Well, it says here that you’ll have a long and miserable life.”
Matthew’s eyes went wide. “No… That doesn’t… it doesn’t say that, does it?”
Yujin laughed.
“It doesn’t,” Hao explained kindly. “He’s messing with you.”
Hao had seen Gyuvin do this before, many times. It was a party trick, a conversation-starter, a white lie. The reading right now was pure nonsense, although Hanbin and Matthew didn’t have to know that.
Yujin shuffled closer, which pushed Hao right into Hanbin, who was sitting on his other side.
He inhaled sharply as they pressed together. From a quick glance to the side, Hanbin hadn’t reacted. Hao felt Hanbin’s warmth seep into him as they touched. It was nice, heavenly even, and yet the sensation was so new to him, as though he was discovering something. Hao let himself sink into the feeling for a few, breathtaking seconds before he swallowed that down and stared hard at the palm reading happening in front of him.
Gyuvin pretended to concentrate hard on Matthew’s hand, making an expression that had Matthew giggling. “Hmm,” Gyuvin said thoughtfully. “You don’t need to worry. You’ll find success. It won’t happen in the way you think it will, but it’ll happen nonetheless.”
Then Gyuvin took another sip of the mulled wine. Set the empty glass onto the tabletop with a soft sound. He tilted his head in thought, and held onto Matthew’s hand tighter. The air changed slightly. Hao watched as Hanbin leaned in closer in interest.
“There are many options for you when it comes to love. People easily fall for you. But be careful. I can see a number of different pathways, and not all of them end up in happiness. You might not make the right choice here, so think twice.”
Matthew looked up at him with wide eyes. “Huh. Wow.”
“And,” Gyuvin said slyly. “You’re kinkier than you think.”
Matthew’s cheeks turned red. “Wait, no… that’s,” he spluttered. Yujin hid his laughter into crossed arms, and Hanbin also found this hilarious, patting him on the back. As Gyuvin released his hand and poured everyone (sans Yujin) another round of drinks, Matthew continued to desperately try to explain his way out of the situation. This had the opposite of its intended effect.
“My turn,” said Hanbin, volunteering his own hand once Matthew had given up.
Hao watched as Gyuvin took his palm into his own, bent his head, and furrowed his thick brows. There was a long moment where nothing happened. When Gyuvin looked up, there was a newfound light in his eyes.
Hao immediately froze.
“Oh,” Gyuvin breathed.
“Oh?” Hanbin laughed. “That doesn’t sound good.”
“It means you’re also kinkier than you thought,” Matthew explained, sagely.
Hanbin hummed a bit, as if considering this, before laughing again.
But Hao knew different. He felt the electric sing of magic in the air. The house creaked (distant, soothing) as if listening intently and waiting for something. Hao wondered if he should intervene. Before he could, Gyuvin spoke, and when he did, his voice had taken on a distant and introspective tone.
“Your kindness,” Gyuvin said. “It has the potential to hurt you badly. You’re afraid to jump sometimes. You would suffer on your own, forever, if it meant you could ease the comfort of others.”
A silence had befallen the room. Hanbin looked at Gyuvin with his mouth slightly slack.
Maybe this was too much. Maybe this was going too far. “Gyuvin,” Hao warned again.
“You will find a great love in this life.” Gyuvin’s fingers pressed deeper into the flesh of Hanbin’s hand. His voice sounded far away, and he stared, unblinkingly, at the crisscross of lines that diverged and intersected across Hanbin’s palm. “The type of love found in screenplays, in poetry, in brushstrokes. The type to be remembered.”
The lights in the room flickered. Hao only noticed now that the music had stopped. No one moved.
Gyuvin continued. “It could go wrong, it could go so wrong. You both risk it all. And there are many different endings for you.”
Hao held his breath.
When Gyuvin didn’t continue, Hanbin gently prompted, “And?”
And then something broke. The music came back on, and the lights returned to full brightness. Gyuvin’s eyes had returned to their usual deep brown. He let out a shaky exhale, before laughing, “And you’ll read a really great book next year.”
“Good news,” Hanbin said, showing his rabbit teeth as he smiled. He retracted his hand and stared at his palm with an unreadable expression.
To reset, Hao clapped his hands and stood up. “I’ll get more snacks and drinks.”
The rest of the group looked kind of dazed, as if they had just woken up from a long sleep. Matthew rubbed at the spot between his eyebrows like he was easing a tension headache. Gyuvin, on the other hand, sat back in his chair with a satisfied look on his face.
Hao stacked a few of the bowls and balanced the necks of empty bottles between his fingers, before starting to make his way to the kitchen.
“Let me help you,” offered Hanbin from behind him, moving carefully and taking a few of the things out of his hands. To Hao, the air between them was charged, as if magnetic.
“There’s no need, really.”
“I want to.”
What could Hao say to that?
Hao nodded slowly, heart jumping, and led them into the kitchen, where he began putting the empty bottles away into the bin, which Hanbin held open. Hao then tackled refilling some of the bowls.
Matthew had arrived at their doorstep tonight wearing a well-worn, short-sleeved shirt underneath his jacket. Hanbin, however, was more warmly dressed, although over the course of the evening, he had removed his hoodie to reveal a t-shirt underneath. Hao noted that both friends had tattoos on the inside of their right forearms, and he had looked away immediately, as though he was intruding. Hao wondered if he misread them as platonic. He tried not to think about what the tattoos meant. Or perhaps didn’t mean. He felt odd about it, and he wasn’t sure why.
Hao pointedly focused on his task as Hanbin wandered around the kitchen. He kept some distance between himself and Hao. In the living room, the music changed over to something less upbeat and more sultry; some English song that Hao didn’t know. They both listened as Matthew cried that he loved this song, isn’t that fantastic? Whatever it was, it wasn’t on any of Hao’s playlists. Hao was slightly bothered at how the house had once again intervened.
“I’m sorry about that. With Gyuvin and all,” Hao said nervously. He was proud that his voice remained steady.
“You don’t have to apologize. I’ve never had my palm read. I found it fun.”
Hao didn’t really believe that. “Gyuvin sometimes takes things too far. He doesn’t mean to. He just likes to have everyone’s attention for a little while.”
Hanbin smiled. His face softened so much when he did that, and Hao felt himself soften in return. “I said it was fine. Honestly. I don’t take stuff like that too seriously. Although I think Matthew’s had some truth to it.”
Hao snorted. “Well, they say it’s always the innocent-looking ones.”
Hanbin circled the kitchen island so that he was standing just a few steps away from Hao. “I like your brother. I like both of your brothers. They both seem like good kids. You and your family have been nothing but lovely to us.”
“It’s really only a few drinks and some cards.”
“It’s more than just a few drinks and some cards.”
“I forgot,” Hao laughed. “They’ve also cheated you out of money, too.”
“Cheated?” Hanbin gasped, eyes wide. “Now that explains it.”
“How much have they set you back?”
“It’s truly embarrassing to say.”
“What was more devastating, the financial blow or how you can’t show your face around town anymore in shame?”
“Just one more game. That’s all I need. I can rebuild. I can recover.”
“If I knew you were this bad at cards, maybe I should’ve raised.”
Hanbin softened again. “But really, thank you. Even though I know Yujin shoves cards up his sleeves, and I will make him pay for that, I’ve had fun.”
“They’ll be happy to hear that. They like you, too.”
“Really?” Hanbin looked pleased at this.
Hao hummed. “Yujin is quite shy, especially with strangers, but he’s fine around you two. And Gyuvin wouldn’t have invited you if he didn’t want you here. Enthusiastically.” Hao once again thought of Gyuvin’s wry expression that signaled that he was up to something. Hao vowed to figure that one out.
“They look up to you,” said Hanbin.
“You’re acting as if I raised them single-handedly,” Hao laughed, flustered by the compliment. “I didn’t. My aunt—our aunt—took all of us in, and she did the work.”
Hanbin looked like he wanted to ask about this further, but instead he said, “You’re good with them.”
“We just learned to live with each other. It’s weird to think of Yujin as almost grown. He’s the age I was when we first met.” Hao looked down at the counter. He wasn’t sure why he felt weird explaining this. “I like kids, though. Hopefully you do if you’re studying to be a teacher.”
“Are you?” Hanbin asked interestedly. “I almost studied education.”
“And then what happened?”
Hanbin shrugged. “And I got lost. Found my way back to psychology, and I’ll be graduating soon. But I’m thinking of doing child counselling in the future. Not sure, though… hence the gap semester and the road trip.”
Something about that made Hao like him immeasurably more. It was sweet. He told him so.
Hanbin leaned a bit forward. “It seems we have a lot in common.”
Hanbin’s eyes looked right into his, and Hao could only hold that for a few seconds before looking away. Hanbin’s eyes were framed with thick, dark lashes, and he gazed upon him with such depth and intensity that Hao felt that flip-flop feeling (it had been happening all night) once again in his stomach. It must be the full moon. It must be the wine. It must be a sudden bout of insanity.
Hao breathed out.
Matthew shouted something excitedly from the other room that made both of their heads turn. Hao snapped back into himself in shock. Whatever tension had built between them broke, and even Hanbin retracted a little, shyly.
“Um,” Hao started. He didn’t know what to say. He felt so out of his depth, and this aggravated him to no end. “Can you maybe bring the…”
Hanbin picked up the unopened wine bottle Hao gestured to on the counter. “Yeah, of course.”
They both returned a bit awkwardly to the others. The television was now playing something on mute, and Matthew was crying dramatically into his hands as Yujin took more of his money in Blue Marble.
“Hanbin hyung,” Matthew whined. “Yujin must’ve swindled people out of vast fortunes in a previous life.”
Hao thought that was quite articulate for a guy who had downed a truly impressive amount of alcohol tonight.
Hanbin laughed at this. “I’m inclined to agree. He’s very good at this.”
“As I said,” Yujin said, moving his piece on the board. “Years of practice.”
“He’ll rob me blind before the car is fixed,” Matthew muttered. Then he yawned, huge. He was having difficulty keeping his eyes from drooping closed.
Gyuvin rolled the dice and moved his own piece, frowning. “How long did they say it would take?”
“They’re not sure,” Hanbin shrugged. “They said a few weeks maximum. We considered just ditching the car and hitchhiking, but Matthew is a delicate soul—”
“I’m too beautiful to hitchhike.”
“—and we really had no other plans other than to make it down to Busan eventually. Our cash might run out sooner rather than later, though.”
Matthew yawned again in response. Yujin took this opportunity to swipe some of his money when his eyes were closed.
“We should get going.”
Hao didn’t know what came over him then. It seemed a simple enough solution, and he had been coming up with a lot of those recently.
“Stay,” Hao said abruptly. “Crash here for the night.”
Gyuvin looked up at this, meeting his eyes. He raised an eyebrow at Hao from across the table.
“We really couldn’t,” Hanbin said politely. Hao had come to expect him to reject the first invitation. But Hao would make him accept the second.
“Seriously. Matthew looks like won’t make it.”
Everyone still awake turned to look at Matthew, who was resting his head in one hand and lightly dozing off.
“We have a guest room,” Gyuvin chimed in.
“Well,” said Hanbin. Which was the best they would get out of him.
Hao took care of tidying up while Gyuvin took their guests upstairs. The floorboards above them creaked alongside distant laughter at something Gyuvin said. Yujin, ever watchful, looked like he wanted to say something.
“Say it,” said Hao.
“No. It’s nothing, hyung.”
Hao sighed. “Now you have to say it. What’s on your mind, Yujin-ah?”
“We don’t have guests often, is all,” he replied. He looked down at the worn rug on the floor. “It’s weird when it’s not just us… but good, I think. I think I like that they’re here. The house feels more alive.”
Hao bumped his shoulder with his younger brother’s. “Yeah. Although, I’ll admit… I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know why… why I trust them so easily.”
He didn’t usually express himself like this to Yujin. After all, it was his job to solve Yujin’s problems, not dump his own on him. He had the feeling that Yuijin liked it, though, because he straightened up; pushed back his shoulders like he was grown and capable, like he was ready to take on this great weight. It made Hao smile, but Hao sometimes forgot how young he was. Yujin didn’t often like to show it; liked to pretend he was older instead.
“I get it, hyung,” Yujin said.
After ensuring Hanbin and Matthew had everything they needed (the house, in an uncharacteristic move, had actually helped them out by revealing some extra sheets, towels, and toiletries in one of the hallway closets), Hao sent off his brothers to bed. Gyuvin and Yujin didn’t often sleep together anymore—mainly because Yujin valiantly protested this at his big age—but tonight they were inseparable and utterly lethargic.
Hao muttered around his electric toothbrush, running his hands along some of the walls as he tested the protection spells in place as a precautionary measure. They held. No harm would come to them.
He was about to finally retire to his room at the end of the hall when Hanbin appeared, exiting the bathroom in a borrowed sleep shirt and pants. His hair was slightly damp. It flopped into his eyes and rounded out his face in an approachable, boyish way.
“Oh,” Hanbin said. “Goodnight.” He gave one of those smiles, the one that scrunched up his whole face and felt like the sun.
Hao’s mind went blank. “Goodnight,” Hao said back, softly.
He would lie in bed, staring at the ceiling, for hours yet.
As the eldest, and the first to have made the house home—after their aunt, of course—Hao was strategic in selecting his bedroom. He chose the larger one that faced the ocean, with big windows that let the morning light in. He had never been a morning person, really, but he loved the warmth of dawn on his face while he slept. He had his best sleeps like this, with one of the windows open just a crack, the ocean breeze sweeping in underneath and billowing out the curtains in a way that looked like ghosts.
Hao slept longer than he usually would, but he had expected this. He had a low social battery and found parties exhausting by the end.
When he finally woke, the sun had moved closer to the middle of the sky, and the seabirds’ cries could be heard through the open window as they migrated south for the winter.
Hao made his way down, rubbing his eyes sleepily, forgetting that they had guests until he was halfway down the staircase. The muffled laughter from the kitchen was unexpected and it startled him awake, jolting any lingering tiredness from him. He shuffled into the doorway curiously, only to see his brothers and their guests in the middle of destroying the kitchen.
Yujin was leaning forward on the island, eagerly watching the events unfold with Matthew beside him. Gyuvin hung onto Hanbin’s side as the latter gripped their medium-sized skillet with both hands.
“On three or after three?” asked Gyuvin. He was a lover of physical touch, but Hao was more surprised by how comfortable Hanbin was with his brother clinging to his shoulder like a koala. It looked easy, natural, like they had been close for years.
“After three,” Hanbin said, determined.
He counted under his breath with Gyuvin following along, before launching a pancake into the air and catching it perfectly with the skillet after it flipped.
Hanbin let out an excited noise while Gyuvin groaned dramatically. He then decided to let his knees go weak and make Hanbin take the brunt of his weight in retaliation. Yujin golf clapped politely.
“I’m glad I didn’t bet against you,” said Matthew happily.
From the doorway, Hao cleared his throat. “Good morning,” he said lowly. Hao suddenly felt a bit self-conscious about his appearance. It might be the old band shirt he was wearing, or the puffiness of his face in the mornings, or even his disheveled hair. He reached up to fix it, patting it down nervously, not even sure why it was a big deal all of a sudden.
“He lives!” cried Gyuvin, detaching himself from Hanbin and locking onto his new target, Hao. Gyuvin chipped away at Hao for years until he accepted his physical affection. Gyuvin also knew Hao was more placid when tired. He draped himself across Hao and guided him fully into the kitchen where Matthew had begun stirring batter in a bowl.
“What’s all this?” Hao asked.
“I hope you don’t mind,” Hanbin piped up. “I woke up kind of early, and so did your brothers. They asked me if I could make them breakfast—”
“Hao hyung’s terrible at cooking,” Yujin supplied helpfully. Hao glared at him.
“—and I asked what they wanted. Yujin wanted Western-style pancakes, so… I said I would try.”
“And then Gyuvin said there was no way that he could flip them, and Hanbin hyung said ‘bet,’” said Matthew. He said that last word in English, and Hao wasn’t completely sure what that meant.
Hao looked at the state of the kitchen: flour and sugar dusted the countertops, along with sticky substances (probably egg whites, sugar, the like) and dirty utensils were flung around carelessly.
Hanbin followed Hao’s gaze. “I’m usually cleaner than this,” he said bashfully.
Hao shrugged. “I’m not the neatest either. I don’t mind as long as you tidy up after.”
Gyuvin laughed at this, retracting his claws from where he gripped onto Hao’s arms. “You almost burned down the kitchen once when you tried making hangover stew. You also put ketchup in it.”
“I enjoy taking culinary risks,” Hao sniffed. “Cooking is an art form and masterpieces are created from taking chances.”
“From the sounds of it, it would probably cure a hangover, though,” defended Hanbin.
“Thank you,” said Hao. “You get it.”
Gyuvin made a disgusted noise. “If it didn’t kill you first.”
“Luckily you have two Michelin star chefs right at your service,” Matthew said proudly.
“Who is the other one?” Yujin deadpanned. He said it in the same tone as Gyuvin always did; borrowed his inflections like one might take another’s sweater.
Matthew pouted. “Hey.”
Hao took this opportunity to pour some coffee from their ancient machine. He hoped neither Matthew nor Hanbin realized that the thing wasn’t plugged in. Hao had cast a spell on it years ago to make it run by itself because he was tired of it breaking down. The downside was that it had the tendency to make way too much or too little coffee, but hey, nothing was perfect.
“Can you do pancake shapes?” asked Gyuvin, wandering back to Hanbin’s side.
“Of course,” he replied flippantly. “You doubt my abilities? Again? Or are you just interested in losing more money?”
Yujin made his way to Hanbin’s other side. “Make a rocket.”
Hanbin faltered slightly. “How about I make a heart!”
Hao smiled into his cup as he drank, fondness blossoming in his chest as he watched this interaction. The chill from outside left a fog on the windows, but inside the house it was oh so warm.
Hanbin carefully outlined a heart with batter, then filled it in neatly. “Hearts are the best shape,” Hanbin narrated to himself.
This made Hao pause. This tickled something in the back of his mind. There was an awareness, like he’d heard this before somewhere long ago, but he wasn’t sure where.
Hanbin proceeded to flip another pancake, the muscles in his arms flexing, and Hao drifted. The easy domesticity of the scene in front of him caused him to let his guard down for a moment.
He imagined waking up to Hanbin making him breakfast, maybe even with an apron on. Of Hanbin smiling at him in the enormous way that he did. Of Hao dragging him back to sun-warm sheets and them holding each other while they napped. Of Hanbin’s fingers tracing up along his arm, brushing his hair out of his eyes, sliding around to cup Hao’s face in his palm. Then Hanbin’s hand going back down again to his side, pushing up the hem of his shirt, sliding underneath, his hands warm against his skin—
Hao shook himself back to reality. He cursed at himself for thinking this way.
As the morning moved into noon, Hao made sure that his brothers had some actual, substantial food to eat. Yujin complained that pancakes were totally a meal, they did this all the time in America (Matthew chimed in that yeah, it really is a thing, but please, he’s Canadian), but Hao doubted this.
Truthfully, he was angry at himself. He didn’t like where his thoughts had wandered. He didn’t like to allow himself to dream like that. After all, Hanbin was a temporary thing. Only a couple of weeks in the vast expanse of a lifetime. He would move on soon, along with Matthew, and nothing that remained of them would linger. It would be like they were never here.
Hao would be left with the memories. And nothing else.
It was dangerous for him to get attached when it was all so fleeting. He had permitted himself a few seconds of this fantasy, but he could afford nothing more than that. When Hanbin left—because he would leave, this was a sure thing, like the changing of the seasons and rise of the sun each morning—Hao would be the only one who would feel the loss. It’s best to avoid that altogether.
It was afternoon when Hanbin and Matthew left. Hao stared at the closed door for only a few moments before he turned and returned to his room.
His aunt had steady hands. That was one of the first things he remembered about her.
Magic required both natural aptitude and rigorous training. And true, while it often ran in families, that wasn’t always a measure of whether you would be a capable witch—or even one at all.
Hao spent his teen years learning both who he was and what he could do. Under his aunt’s guidance, he developed his craft, even helping her out when she needed it as they both got older.
His aunt, for years, had been in the business of selling spells and charms, generally around love. Most of her customers had travelled quite some way in search of her services, but on some occasions, those who lived in their small town showed up on her doorstep, too. Hao never liked this. The residents of the town didn’t even bother to lower their voices when they talked about him and his family, then they turned around and asked for the very thing they had condemned. And as soon as they got what they wanted, they went back to talking poorly about them.
When he expressed this to his aunt, she only shrugged. “They would call us heathens, call us godless, call us devil worshippers regardless. Might as well get some money out of them.”
The first time he saw her with a customer, he was nearing thirteen years of age. He was getting ready for bed, and rain poured steadily outside. Then came a frantic knock at the door. Hao had tiptoed down the hall, made his way down the first flight of stairs, and then sat at the top of the second. From there, he could view the dining room and kitchen, along with the events that followed.
The customer, a woman from the town, begged for a spell to make the man she was in love with love her back. His aunt had warned her that although she could do this for her, it wouldn’t end well. The woman, openly crying, had said that she didn’t care, that she would do anything. Hao felt something in his gut twist at that.
He watched as his aunt took her money and cast the spell.
At that moment, Hao had vowed never to fall in love. He couldn’t imagine something so awful.
Hao wouldn’t know what happened to the woman, if the spell had worked and she got the man of her dreams, but it didn’t matter. The animosity of the townsfolk during daylight hours continued.
The house had more visitors than one might expect. While those seeking his aunt’s magic typically arrived under the cover of night, like they were ashamed, there were numerous daytime visitors as well. Something about the house drew people in who needed help—at least, that was Hao’s theory. Maybe it was simply their magic and nothing else.
Most people who came by didn’t experience anything out of the ordinary about the house, although they certainly noticed the unusual energy and the sheer multitude of books. Of course, normal people didn’t typically recognize magical energy for what it was, but if asked, they would describe feeling an odd, staticky sensation.
The house had a multitude of secrets behind its walls. Objects would appear and disappear randomly, and then show up days, weeks, or months later. In one particular, terrible instance, the house had stolen one of Hao’s socks while he was getting dressed. After searching around helplessly for about twenty minutes, casting summoning spells, he resorted to angry threats (read: loud, indignant whines and pleas). The sock had appeared, folded, on Hao’s pillow in apology.
In a year when Hao had felt particularly tired (exhausted by his classmates, school, and the general difficulties of adolescence), the house decided to present Hao with what would be a priceless gift. Looking back, he had forgotten what he was originally looking for, but he had been rummaging through closets and cupboards, as one does. Underneath a pile of books and clutter lay a violin case: grey, nondescript, and yet so beautiful.
Aside from his magical prowess, Hao would also grow into a proficient violinist, the instrument being a comfort in those few years when he felt so alone. In time, the violin would be replaced with one that was of higher quality and far more expensive, but the old one kept him company in its case in the corner of his room.
And if Hao and his aunt still felt alone, well, the house had another, greater solution.
Just as Hao had (sort of) settled into the new house, the new country, and his new life, a boy appeared on their doorstep. With all his worldly possessions in a single, dirty backpack, his aunt had immediately recognized him as a runaway. It was early spring then, and there was still icy frost on the grass in the early mornings. Gyuvin—because that was the boy’s name—had collapsed into his aunt’s arms, and it was decided right then that he would be staying.
Hao had wondered back then if his aunt had seen this future in a vision, because she had seemed to have expected the boy when she answered the door. Hao had asked her about it later, but she never provided him with a clear answer. He settled on some kind of intuition, and that was that.
Gyuvin had been lanky even then, yet to grow into his long limbs and large eyes. Hao remembered that he had trembled that whole first day. As a first impression, he had thought Gyuvin to be the quiet type, and he was pleased. Hao had imagined what a perfect brother would be like, and he decided that a fellow introvert would be a lovely companion to have.
It would take Gyuvin months for it to settle in his brain that they weren’t going to kick him out—and until Yujin arrived for him to realize that this was a family.
Just a kid, eleven years old to Hao’s fifteen, Gyuvin was a handful. Hao thought of him fondly, but it certainly took him some time to get used to his frenetic energy and propensity for making messes. The key, Hao realized, rested in how earnest he was: he looked at each day optimistically and saw the good in others, even when it might be a little bit buried. He had never been very open about why he had run away from home, but from the few things that he had said, Hao was glad he had made that choice.
Up until then, Hao had been an only child. He had always leaned quieter, especially as he had difficulty making friends in school. Gyuvin’s arrival tested him on new levels. Once Gyuvin settled in, he was loud, rambunctious, and prone to physical touch, all of which made Hao instinctively draw back. Like all things, though, they found balance over time: Gyuvin learned that sometimes Hao needed space, and Hao understood that Gyuvin sometimes needed someone to anchor him down.
Two years later, they would find Yujin curled up underneath the rose bushes. Thankfully, this happened during one of the summer months, but the nights were still cold once the sun set. They took him in, warmed him up, and let him know he could stay if he wished. Gyuvin was undoubtedly a runaway, but Yujin was quieter and less forthcoming with information. He was ten years old, and Hao was turning seventeen.
Yujin had started off more difficult to read than Gyuvin. This was a trait he kept even as the years passed, and as his resting face conveyed both impassive and unimpressed, many thought him cold and unfriendly because of it. Gyuvin, tired of only having an older brother, latched on quickly to the idea of a younger one that he could baby. Around Gyuvin, Yujin became infinitely more expressive, and Yujin even put up with Gyuvin’s antics more often than Hao would.
As Yujin grew older, he developed the dry humour that was typical of Gyuvin, alongside the introspection that was characteristic of Hao. When their aunt had asked Yujin if he would like to search for his family, he steadfastly refused, and said nothing more on the matter.
While more than happy to meddle in the lives of others, Yujin felt his own life was off-limits.
Yujin, like his two new brothers, fell in love with the house by the sea. With its white gable roof and russet wood trim, the three-storey house stood out from the smaller, traditional flat roof constructions that made up the town. The house rose from the cliffside like something out of a story book. Out of all of them, the house doted on him the most, despite Yujin not yet showing any magic.
(“You’re probably just a late bloomer,” Hao tried. “I think Auntie was, too.”
“We are not biologically related,” Yujin shot back, exasperatedly.)
Gyuvin had come of age at thirteen, months after Yujin had arrived. Of all magical debuts, he felt as though his was probably the least exciting in history. Nevertheless, as is conventional, It manifested out of a burst of strong emotion.
He would say that it isn’t an especially exciting story. Gyuvin had brought home a broken, portable radio from town one afternoon. It had a wonky antenna and a metallic finish that had darkened with age. It also ran on two large batteries, accessed from a compact panel in the back. The radio was sold to him cheaply because it didn’t work. Gyuvin, of course, took this as a challenge.
Hao watched him tinker with it for hours, growing ever more frustrated as it seemed to be broken, plain and simple, no way around it. Naturally, this turned into a few days of work and endless irritation. Hao came by and brought his brother snacks and talked him through it in a soothing tone, but Gyuvin was Gyuvin. Like Hao, he was always determined to make the impossible happen. Yujin, still shy in his younger years, watched him with wide eyes, without interference.
When Hao heard the tinny music from his brother’s room, he had found his brother lying on the floor with his hands tucked behind his head, a self-satisfied smile on his face. Gyuvin explained he made it work, he didn’t know how, but isn’t it great? After close inspection, Hao saw that there were no actual batteries in the back.
It was very much like Gyuvin to find something broken and put it back together by the sheer force of will.
Like most things, Yujin seemed unphased by any of this, and accepted the existence—and prevalence—of magic with begrudging disinterest. And, like Hao and Gyuvin, the people of the town were guarded (and sometimes flat out unkind) around him. His classmates whispered about him behind his back, and he was usually picked last for team sports. Later on, Yujin started showing real athletic talent, and opinions of him wavered, but the sentiment remained: they were different and were not really welcome.
They had each other through it, and this was enough.
Hao had online classes the next day. He had always loved studying, because he associated it with the pressure of a looming exam or other deadline. Somehow, the stress drove him forward, made him feel as though he was making progress. Gyuvin thought he was insane and told him so.
Hao also loved to learn on his own time, mostly about a multitude of subjects that were irrelevant to his degree, even without the compulsion to do well. He could spend hours curled up in their big chair downstairs, flicking through works of theory or romance novels or books on spells and magic. Sometimes Gyuvin would put something on TV and Hao would half-watch it with him, and this would qualify as bonding for them. Other times, Hao would snooze on their sofa with a book on the floor, where it had fallen from his fingers after Hao had started to drift off.
Work, errands, and school were exhausting, and therefore an excellent way to keep his mind from the events of the past few days. Their aunt had once again returned with her typical flourish and commented that the house seemed cleaner than when she left.
Yujin had almost blabbed to her about their guests because he was like that, unguarded and happy to share the things he loved, but Hao had managed to interrupt at the last second. He described the night instead as quiet and uneventful. Hao doubted she truly believed that though.
The familiar stress of the semester’s first round of exams forced Hao into laser focus. Whether he was successful at keeping his concentration was another thing entirely. As he stared at lines of dry, textbook jargon, his mind started to wander. He thought about Hanbin and his dark hair, his long eyelashes that fluttered when he blinked, his soft voice and his kind smile. He thought about how gently he treated his brothers and how his laughs sounded like they were bursting free from his body.
Hao shook his head to clear it like an etch-a-sketch.
His university allowed him to study abroad on the condition that he must be present in-person for all exams and assessments, as well as the first week of the semester. It wasn’t exactly a great situation to be in, but it allowed him to study what he wanted at the university of his choice.
Because of this, Hao travelled more often than he wanted to. He had always hated airplanes, and he didn’t like how this arrangement gave him less time to prepare than his peers. The tuition fees were high, he couldn’t participate in most extra-curriculars, and, somehow, he had to balance work on top of studying. Yet, despite it all, he had the comforts of home. When he felt stressed about it, he told himself that it was only for a short while. And that short while was almost over.
Though he rarely showed up to campus, Hao was still able to make a few friends. For the first time in a very long time, he had no reputation to precede him. No one knew who he or his family was. He was simply just another guy in their class, albeit one who was present almost exclusively online.
(Chen Kuanjui had sat next to him on the first day of class, first year, in some bogus elective he was forced to take for his major. Rather, he walked in, plopped himself down next to Hao, and said, “Oh thank god. I thought I was going to have to sit with some useless heterosexuals.” Hao had blinked at this, asked, “How did you…?” Chen Kuanjui had eyed him up. “Please. Look at you. Look at me.” Later on, Hao asked if it was the shirt or the shoes, and Chen Kuanjui had exasperatedly said, “Hao-ge, it was everything about you. But if you’re wondering if that shirt is gay, yes.” That pleased Hao immeasurably.)
He took a break after lunch to do a grocery run. Yujin would be coming home from school soon, if he didn’t have soccer practice. Hao could never keep track of that schedule. As Hao made his way out the door, he made a detour to the living room where Gyuvin was sprawled on the floor in front of the television. He smacked Gyuvin on the butt and reminded him that he was on dinner duty tonight.
As he stepped out of the house, Hao smelled cold in the air, which promised snow soon—the first of the season.
Bundled up and already feeling the chill seep its way into the gaps of his jacket, Hao made his way down the meandering roads to the center of town.
Nothing about this would be eventful, until he made his way back. Hao was not one to make two trips. If there were one hundred bags of groceries, he would complain the entire time, but he would still refuse to make more than one trip. He also refused to learn how to drive.
As it was, he had underestimated just how much he had to lug back home and was extremely miserable because of it.
“Hyung!” called Hanbin’s distinctive voice from behind him.
Hao turned to see Hanbin jogging to catch up. He was wearing a puffy, blue jacket and a thick scarf, which made him look exceptionally round. Hao felt himself smile before he realized he was doing it.
“Hi,” Hanbin said cheerfully when he caught up.
“Hi,” Hao said back.
“Are you headed home?”
“Yeah, I was just…” Hao tried to gesture with his hands full of bags. “Grabbing groceries.”
“Here, let me help you with those.”
And what could Hao say? No? He didn’t have that much pride. He also ignored the part of himself that adored attention like this, slightly ashamed of himself, though not enough to tell Hanbin to stop.
Hanbin took the heavier bags off of him. He didn’t even have the courtesy to pretend he struggled under their weight. “I can walk you home.”
Hao smiled. “If you’d like. But only if you’re going this way.”
“I just finished up at the mechanic. I’m not sure if he knows what he’s doing.” Hanbin winced. “I asked for an update and he just scratched his head. I think he makes up the numbers as he goes.”
“Probably best to pretend you don’t know me,” joked Hao. “That’ll keep costs low.”
Hanbin looked at him, confused. “Why would that matter?”
“It’s just a thing people around here do.” Hao didn’t feel like elaborating. “I’m sorry your car is taking so long to get fixed,” he said, adjusting the bags in his grip as they walked.
Hanbin shrugged, as best as he could with the groceries, anyhow. “It is what it is. Matthew was a bit pissed about the situation at first. He was really looking forward to going to Busan, I think? But he’s warmed up to the idea of being here for a while.” Hanbin looked at Hao with bright eyes. “Besides, maybe the universe is trying to tell me I’m supposed to be here instead of on the road.” He laughed as he said that last part.
Hao knew too much about the whims of the universe. He buried his nose into his scarf to try and warm it up. “I suppose you think you’re lucky that you knocked at my door and not anyone else’s.”
“Of course.” Hanbin turned, walking backwards so he could talk to Hao face-to-face. “By the way, I know I’ve only been here a few days, but I’ve heard a lot about you around town,” he said playfully.
Hao’s heart missed a beat. “Did you?” asked Hao. He hoped he was steady enough that his nervousness didn’t show.
Hanbin smiled wide enough that his dimples deepened into whiskers. “Oh yes. I’ve been told several deeply disturbing things.”
Hao let out a low laugh. “Such as?”
Hanbin adopted a faux-serious voice, as if he was sharing a very important secret. “Well,” he started. “I’ve been told that you’re all witches. Spell-casters. Magic-users? Sorry, I’m not sure what the right word would be.”
Hao hummed in response, unwilling to reveal anything. People talked in this town. Even so, that particular rumour reached Hanbin faster than he would’ve imagined. Despite it all his heart raced—partly because of apprehension, partly because Hanbin was so close to him.
Hanbin continued with his solemn tone. “A woman at the market told me you put hexes on children. That you’ve cursed them with chicken pox to get revenge on them. A fisherman down by the dock informed me that you’ve been known to cast spells that turn your ex-lovers into animals. And apparently you all live in that house on the hill to cover up the fact that you can never die.”
It was strange and awful and hilarious to hear all of these things directly, not just by hurried whispers. If anything, hearing Hanbin say it so directly eased all of Hao’s nerves around the matter.
“Interesting,” said Hao slowly, thoughtfully. “And what do you think?”
Without meaning to, Hao’s tone had turned flirty. He looked right at Hanbin, who in turn looked down shyly.
Hanbin let out a small laugh. “Hmm, difficult to say.”
“You don’t really think I’ve turned my ex-lovers into cats or toads, do you?”
“I’ve always loved cats, personally.”
“I swear I’m innocent,” Hao said. “Cross my heart. No animals were ever harmed.”
They were almost at the last turn before the last stretch of road home.
“I believe you,” Hanbin said. He considered something for a moment before continuing. “I think people feel threatened by things they don’t understand.”
Hao looked at him carefully. “Then you think you understand me?”
“I…” Hanbin started. “Yes. Maybe.” Hao noticed he blushed baby pink, high on his cheeks—and it wasn’t just the cold wind. Hao’s stomach flip-flopped in a way that made him feel like he had jumped from a great height. He felt fuzzy inside. The feeling threatened to burst free.
“Bold of you,” Hao teased.
Hanbin stopped walking, and Hao paused too in response. “Ah, I just meant that,” he stumbled over his words a bit, like he was nervous. “I meant it’s easy to talk to you! From the moment we had our first conversation, I’ve felt like I’ve known you. You meet me at every step. It’s… nice. It’s different.”
The air had shifted, the conversation had moved from playful to earnest without them realizing.
And Hanbin had summarized it perfectly, hadn’t he? Because Hao felt the same. Hanbin felt like his equal, like something familiar, as though they had history. Hao wasn’t usually so comfortable with strangers, but Hanbin was so forthright and so deeply kind. Hao felt hyper-aware of where Hanbin was whenever they were in the same room, and he had started to notice small mannerisms that he found helplessly endearing: the way he chewed his lip to shreds when he was nervous, how he blushed bright pink, and even the way his mouth fell open dramatically, eyes wide, when he gasped in shock.
“Yeah,” Hao answered breathlessly, inelegantly. “Yeah.”
Hanbin smiled back, crinkles deep around his eyes. Hao looked at him and saw the sun.
“You know, you could stay with us if you wanted,” Hao said. He quickly realized that didn’t sound casual at all, and rushed to say more. “The both of you. Until your car is fixed.”
Hanbin looked shocked at this, but pleased. “Wait really?”
“Yeah,” Hao replied. He didn’t mention that he had come up with this on a whim and he hadn’t even asked their aunt if that was okay, but he figured this was one of those times where it was better to ask forgiveness than permission. “You’ll save money that way. And then you can actually afford to have someone fix it.”
“Don’t remind me…”
Hanbin accepted his offer (on the condition that Matthew also agreed, of course). Hanbin also insisted on accompanying him all the way back to the house, even though it was a detour for him after a certain point. It was wholly unnecessary but utterly sweet. While Hao hadn’t thought Hanbin would do that, he had half-hoped he would.
As they made their way up the lane, they walked so closely together that their shoulders brushed every so often. Hanbin told Hao about his classes and Hao told Hanbin about his own. He asked about the places Hanbin had seen before he got stranded in the town and the places he’d like to see next. If Hao walked much slower than usual to draw out the journey back, then so be it.
Hao shivered in the cold. He tried to ignore it as best he could.
At the front door, Hanbin took the bags Hao had in his right hand so that Hao could fish out his keys from his pocket.
“Can we exchange numbers?” Hanbin asked. He said this in a rush, and the syllables came out a bit jumbled. “So we can confirm plans. If you’re still okay with us staying, of course.”
Hao’s brain powered off and then restarted. “Right. Yes.”
He aimed for casual as he drew his phone out of his pocket, though this may have been cancelled out by the charms that swung from it. They traded phones, Hao setting his contact information as simply as possible—just his name, no emojis—and returned it to Hanbin.
Their hands touched, Hao’s cold fingers meeting Hanbin’s warm ones, then they said their goodbyes. Hanbin turned back to wave over one shoulder just as the first snow began to fall.
Hao closed the front door, dropped the groceries where he was standing, and leaned back against the door with a heavy thud. It felt like he had been struck by lightning. He breathed out weakly.
The thing was this: Hao was trying his best to be normal, to not make Hanbin uncomfortable. But for whatever reason, Hanbin made Hao react in a way he never had before. Yes, he’d had crushes, even a select few flings (that were really just hookups with added steps, but nevertheless). Whatever those things had been were insignificant in comparison to this.
He tried to analyze things in his head to try and find a logical reason for what was happening. Was it something in particular Hanbin had done or said? Was Hao just lonely? Was Hao simply insane and none of this was real? That last one was a very real fear. He came up with nothing.
The fuzzy, flip-flop feeling in his tummy and the rapid beating of his heart were beginning to turn into an ache in his chest. This was starting to become something real, and that was dangerous.
What the fuck was he doing?
He had thought, at first, that it was just a burst of strong feelings which would eventually go away. It hadn’t been very long at all, yet the feelings were already strong enough to knock Hao off his feet. How was he supposed to stop this from happening?
Whatever he was feeling, it couldn’t happen. Not now, not ever. He had avoided this for so long, and yet misfortune seemed to find him anyway.
Hao sighed deeply. He scrubbed his eyes in exhaustion and frustration. He looked to where a single, dejected onion had rolled out of one of the grocery bags onto the hardwood floor. He wanted to cry.
The floorboards on his left creaked with the weight of footsteps.
Gyuvin appeared, looking harrowed. His hair was messy, sticking up at odd angles, like he had run his hands through it.
“Hyung,” Gyuvin said. “Hyung, there’s something wrong again.”
From his pocket, Hao’s phone beeped out a cheery text notification.
“He’s gone,” Hao whispered. “He’s really fucking gone.”
They stood over a mess of dirt and leaves, the wind howling around them. It had never been the neatest grave, but those things hadn’t mattered back then. And they really didn’t matter now, as there was an empty hole in the ground.
Hao swore again. They were so lucky Hanbin hadn’t seen this on the way up to the house.
“How?” Hao asked. “How is this even possible? The ground’s almost frozen. And he would’ve had to dig through dirt.”
“You’re asking me? Hyung, I was asking you!”
“Well clearly something happened!”
“Yeah, and I didn’t do it!” Gyuvin shouted, distressed. “I don’t even know why I went outside, something just felt off. And then I noticed that we were missing a body.”
Hao sunk to a crouch in the row garden. “This is bad, Bin-ah.”
Gyuvin groaned. “You only call me that when we’re in real shit.”
“I think this constitutes ‘real shit.’ There’s a dead guy walking around.” Hao buried his face in his hands. “Why am I being tested?”
“Maybe he’s not walking around. Maybe he fell down the cliff.”
“We would only be that lucky,” Hao replied. “We have to assume he’s completely fine. The worst case scenario.”
“I dreamed of this, you know. I’ve had nightmares since it happened. I knew it wasn’t over. We shouldn’t have brought him back in the first place.”
The stress of that first night, the night Gyuvin returned, came back full force. It hunched over Hao and loomed, and his mind raced, trying to figure out their next steps.
Objectively looking at the situation, it wasn’t good. Dead or alive, Hao just wanted the bastard out of their lives forever. But it didn’t escape his notice that the man had not gone after them. At least, he hadn’t gone to the house. Instead, he had disappeared entirely. Whether from some kind of self-preservation or a result of his brain injury (that Hao would not apologize for), they were at peace for the moment.
Who knew how long that would last?
Gyuvin bit his nails. He had already been going at it for a while and his fingers were looking worse for wear. Hao reached up and pulled his hand away, linking their fingers together. Gyuvin’s grip was tight in his own.
Hao could only imagine what his brother was feeling: the primal fear, the hopeless disquietude. Hao felt some of it, too. Should it come to it, Hao was prepared to kill the man again, and again, and again.
Hao’s phone beeped, shattering the moment. Hao stood up and let Gyuvin’s hand drop from his own.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Gyuvin said. “Who keeps blowing up your phone at a time like this?”
“I don’t know, I haven’t checked,” Hao replied. “Other things have been keeping me busy for the moment.”
Gyuvin groaned again. “Check your damn phone so we can have some peace and quiet while I lose my mind. I can’t believe we have to commit another murder. Is it the same murder if you keep doing it to the same person? Or does it count as another one? Or are we off the hook again?” He paused, thinking. “Actually, see if you can Google what to do in a situation like this.”
Hao pulled his phone from his jeans pocket and the screen lit up.
“Yeah, what should I search?” Hao said dryly. “Legal advice: does a third murder actually count in the eyes of the court when it’s only one victim? Also, it’s Hanbin.” He tucked his phone back into his pocket.
“Yes. Also, what? When? Huh?” Gyuvin looked at him with an unreadable expression that quickly turned devious. “You move fast.”
“It’s not like that,” Hao explained. “I asked him to stay with us.”
“I stand corrected. You move like a bullet train. And thanks for consulting your family.”
“Again, not what you think. I was trying to be nice.”
Gyuvin ignored that.
“Look at us,” Gyuvin said. “I killed my boyfriend and you’ve never had one in your life. And now we’re reluctantly hunting a man for sport. It’s that classic buddy cop dynamic, just like in the movies.”
Hao was a little annoyed about the boyfriend comment. That was a bit uncalled for. Gyuvin knew about the family curse, and he knew Hao’s reasons for what he did. He’d had boyfriends, they had just, well… lasted about two weeks maximum.
“You might find this hilarious, Gyuvin, but I don’t.” Truly, Hao wanted to have a good cry, which would be the second time he’d felt like this today.
“Hyung, I don’t find this hilarious at all. I’m just finding ways to cope.”
“We’ll find him, it’ll be okay. We’ll sort this out.” He said this with reassurance he didn’t feel. But he couldn’t let Gyuvin know that he didn’t have a plan. He was his elder brother. He had to help fix this.
Hao led Gyuvin back to the house with a steady arm around his back. Somehow, he managed not to tremble.
Inside, their aunt had open books sprawled across the table in front of the television. She was focused on annotating something whilst a romance drama played loudly. Hao wondered how she could concentrate on anything.
They slipped inside largely unnoticed because of this—before being intercepted by Yujin at the stairs.
Glass of water in one hand and notebook under one arm, Yujin took one look at them before his neutral expression darkened. Yujin was resolute, something he likely learned from Hao over the years, and he backed the two of them into the kitchen.
“Hyung, what’s going on?” Yujin hissed. Hao admired how, for once, he seemed to understand that alerting their aunt about this would make things exponentially worse. Nevertheless, Hao was the eldest and would protect Yujin from this if he could.
Which is why he hissed back, “Why would you think anything’s going on?”
Yujin responded with a threatening look.
“Nothing happened, Yujin,” lied Gyuvin. Which may have been convincing if he didn’t shift around and if could meet Yujin’s eyes.
“See? Something happened. Gyuvin hyung looks like he’s about to pass out, and you look like you’re about to cry.”
“Strange. I usually get that I’m adorable,” Hao replied shakily. Yujin didn’t laugh.
Their whispers had increased in volume, but Hao drew them back to hushed tones. Hao wanted to sigh. He wanted things to be okay. He wanted to sleep for one hundred years.
“I’ll figure it out, even if you don’t say it,” Yujin threatened.
“Try it then,” Gyuvin said under his breath.
“So there is something.”
“No, Yujin, it’s fine,” Hao reassured. “Gyuvin’s on dinner duty, is all, and he’s trying to get out of it.”
That didn’t work on Yujin. As he got older, he had developed an admirable determination that typically manifested itself in hard work at school or on the soccer field. Once he had fixated on something, he rarely let it go.
From the living room, across the house, the television continued droning on.
“Tell me,” Yujin said. He was getting angry.
“Just leave it alone, please,” Gyuvin begged.
“You don’t trust me? Is that it?”
“Yujin,” Hao murmured, completely stressed out. “That’s not it at all.”
The room darkened unnaturally. It was like the shadows in the corners grew and stretched down the walls. The lights seemed to dim, and the noise from the other room had taken on a muffled quality, like they were hearing the television distantly through a wall, thick plaster and beams.
“Tell me,” Yujin repeated. The room fell further under the cover of darkness.
“What—” Gyuvin started.
A vase shattered across the room. Hao covered his ears and ducked at the sound, gasping. These two things seemed to break the spell, because the shadows immediately pulled back into their corners and the lights promptly returned to full brightness. The volume of the television returned to its clear drone.
There was a quiet within the room where no one knew what to do.
“I’m sorry,” Yujin broke. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to.”
He said this desperately, begging, utterly confused at what happened. Then he ran right into Hao’s arms.
Hao felt Yujin press his face to his shoulder and his hot tears bleed into his shirt. Hao’s arms went around his brother easily. Hao was, self-admittedly, a crier, though in that moment (in moments of importance such as these), he held himself back to comfort Yujin.
“It’s alright,” Hao whispered. He stumbled back a little as he took the weight of Gyuvin, who had come up on Yujin’s other side. Hao felt this day was far too long.
The moment lingered, warm, then Yujin drew back and took Gyuvin with him. Yujin wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, and then he drew himself back to full height—as if he was trying to convince them that hadn’t just happened. Hao found himself smiling fondly at this.
Gyuvin took Yujin’s face in his hands, squeezing his round cheeks together. “Our Yujin-ie,” he said, “A magic-user at last.”
Yujin allowed this longer than he usually did: for a few seconds, at least, before he brushed his brother off. Hao reached out and fixed Yujin’s hair where it had gotten messed up in their hug.
“Can you tell me what’s wrong though?” Yujin pestered, not letting it go. “I think I should know.”
Hao sighed, effectively giving up. He no longer had the energy to protest. His words came out stilted. “You see… The man we buried? Well, he got back up again. We don’t know how it happened, if something went wrong with the spell, or if it wasn't strong enough, but now he’s missing.”
Yujin froze, a frown on his face. “And you were going to keep this from me?”
“Honestly? Yes,” Gyuvin said.
Having Yujin aware of what was going on didn’t mean that he would have a big part of it—Hao would make sure of that. In fact, Hao was set on leaving his little brother out of it as much as possible. They had no plan, and Hao knew killing the man wouldn’t be as easy as the other time they did it.
Then there was the magic. Newly presented, Yujin’s magic would likely be volatile. He would struggle to control it as he started out, and he might be prone to magical outbursts from strong emotions, such as the ones that broke the vase. Hao wasn’t sure what to expect.
In any case, Hao felt the pressure of too many things at once. Needing space, he shooed his little brothers away who, of course, immediately sped into the living room to announce the good news. As Hao muttered a repairing spell over the vase, he heard their aunt’s exalted cry from across the house. Like they had with himself and later Gyuvin, they would surely celebrate. Hao had several things on his mind.
There was a sick sense of urgency that settled in his stomach and twisted. He breathed deeply in an attempt to calm himself down.
He fished his phone out of his back pocket. He had several text notifications.
Sung Hanbin: hi! this is sung hanbin~
Sung Hanbin: thank you again for inviting us to stay with you. it really means a lot!
Sung Hanbin: matthew is up for it. let me know when it’s good for us to pop by… if the offer still stands, of course
Sung Hanbin: whatever it is that you decide!
Hao snorted. Hanbin was infuriatingly polite over instant messaging apps, even when disregarding double-text doctrine of the modern day—of which Hao wasn’t a particular follower of either. Hao wanted to get under Hanbin’s skin, to torment the man into nipping back. Hao leashed himself and sent over a curt message in response. He considered for a second, then sent over a cute emoticon to set the tone.
Hao was a firm believer that it was best to sandwich bad news in between good news—and boy was this ever a good time. He locked his phone again with a click, before wandering over to the living room to tell their aunt about their guests.
The first, foundational step to finding someone is picking your ass up and looking. At least, that was Hao’s theory. They were looking for a dead man walking around, so surely he might attract some attention. How difficult could it be?
Clearly quite difficult.
Hao had spent that night unable to sleep, alternating between staring at his ceiling and analyzing every moment of the last forty-eight hours in the transfiguring shapes behind his eyelids. He imagined the man terrorizing the people who lived in their small town, running through the streets rabid. And while all of this was happening, Hao still had final exams to study for, which seemed like some sort of cosmic one-liner.
Somewhere around four in the morning, Hao gave up, got up, and started flicking through some of the spell books that could be helpful. Gyuvin found him hours later barely lucid, no closer to an answer. Concerned, Gyuvin wrapped his arms around Hao’s shoulders and held him tight.
Trying valiantly not to spiral, Hao pushed for them to start their search around town. He forced a grumbly Gyuvin behind the wheel after Yujin had left for school, and ordered him to drive.
The town’s winding roads were perfect for cruising speeds. They passed people walking along the side of the narrower streets, glaring at them unpleasantly and with distrust. Gyuvin laughed and said maybe they wouldn’t be able to tell the recently-risen from the regular folks, and Hao found himself smiling before he smacked his brother in the arm.
They asked the Park son, Gunwook, down by the shore if he had seen anyone strange recently or noticed anyone new around town. Gunwook, always pleasant, had shrugged and said, “Not really.” He then resumed loading stuff into his father’s truck. Hao wondered if the man really had fallen off the edge of the cliff. Too convenient, he supposed.
Feeling utterly lost, the two returned to the house on the hill with nothing but rumbling stomachs and the ache of disappointment. Their aunt looked upon them with some suspicion—as Gyuvin especially wasn’t known to be up before noon, never mind driving ambitiously around town—but she let it go without comment. Somehow, Yujin’s magic had come at the perfect time; that is, it was an excellent distraction. It seemed to be the most important thing on her mind, anyhow.
Hao crashed upon return, head starting to ache. He briefly rose back to consciousness when he felt his bed dip beside him. Too exhausted to push him off or complain, he let Gyuvin cuddle up beside him. His nap stretched on.
It was the consequences that usually stopped Hao from taking naps in the middle of the day: waking up feeling wretched, dehydrated, and disoriented afterwards. When he woke a couple of hours later, Gyuvin was gone, and Hao felt atrocious, as if he himself had come back to life.
He could hear the muffled voices from downstairs, even two floors below, as he rubbed his eyes. On his desk, a number of books were carelessly strewn across the surface, some of which he’d left open. In his search, he had also found one of his old diaries from when he was younger, crammed into the back of a drawer, carefully hidden. He had quickly flicked through it and, seeing his juvenile penmanship and the ridiculous daily anecdotes he had thought were important at the time, slammed it shut in embarrassment. For some reason, he didn’t tuck it back into his desk drawer, and instead set it aside atop a pile of books.
The past twenty-four hours had left him a wreck of nerves and distress. He had poured over the spell that they had used to bring Gyuvin’s ex back to life but hadn’t found any answers. The best conclusion he could come to was that they hadn’t finished off the spell properly, and the blows to the head weren’t enough to kill him again.
He was out there somewhere, roaming around, and they had to find him before he attracted too much attention. The one comfort was knowing that of all places in the town, Hanbin and Matthew were safest here with them.
“Can I just say,” Matthew said. “I’m really grateful you’ve allowed us to stay with you for a bit.”
Although Hao’s aunt had never had children of her own, she had always had an open, affectionate, and motherly air to her. When Gyuvin and Yujin had appeared on her doorstep, it was never a question of whether they were allowed to stay. They just knew they could. Likewise, she had done the same for Matthew and Hanbin—that is, welcoming them both metaphorical and literal open arms.
They were finishing up dinner, which was more extravagant than normal on account of celebrating Yujin’s “birthday.” Hanbin had asked him what day it was, if he had missed it, and Yujin had responded that no, it’s in March, actually. This was met with stark confusion from their guests, whilst Gyuvin kicked his brother underneath the table. Hao had to bite back a laugh.
Hanbin and Matthew’s arrival had eased a lot of the stress. Around them, things felt lighter. Yujin, ever so quiet, loved the attention, as did Gyuvin, although the latter had never been the quiet type about things like that. If Gyuvin liked you, it was known.
Their aunt leaned back in her chair, settling. “Was the bed and breakfast up the road that bad?” she smiled.
“Can I be honest?” Matthew asked. He didn’t wait for an answer. “Yes.” Gesticulating wildly, face animated, he continued. “The wi-fi was spotty, the room smelled musty, and the pillows were lumpy. I shouldn’t complain, but you have to understand… I was not built for these conditions.”
Hanbin laughed. “We were built for modern comforts, like high-speed Internet.”
“Which is why I am ever so thankful that fate intervened.”
Their aunt looked amused at this. “That’s interesting. Matthew, have you ever had your future told, by any chance? It might reveal some things and answer some questions for you.”
Matthew blinked. He shifted his gaze towards Gyuvin. “You know, actually—"
“—He mentioned to us that he would love to do that one day. Maybe. In the future,” Gyuvin intercepted.
Across the table, Hanbin looked right at Hao, eyes sparkling with internalized laughter. Yujin kept his gaze down on his food.
“Yes,” Hao said slowly. “It’s such a shame that he’s never been told his fortune.”
“Hanbin, you as well. If you ever decide you want to know what the universe has in store for you, I’ve been told a lot of my predictions come true,” their aunt continued.
“I think I’ve had enough of the universe for now,” he replied. “Wouldn’t want to mess with anything.”
“Yeah see? Exactly,” declared Matthew, wagging his finger. “That’s the right perspective. Whatever happens, happens.”
“Well, I’d like to think that you can change things,” Hao said lowly. “That nothing is set in stone.”
Hanbin tilted his head curiously. “Then I suppose that when I have to make a decision, I’ll make the one that feels right. That’s all I can do, I guess.”
What was it like, Hao wondered, to be so completely, hopelessly virtuous? Hao had deliberated over his own bleak future, his destiny, from the time that he had been small. He had watched everyone he knew fall apart, and the ones that didn’t barely hold themselves together.
Hanbin had never had to worry about an inescapable curse and an unfavourable future, but Hao couldn’t resent him for it. That would be unfair. Instead, Hao could admire how firm and persistent he was in creating the outcomes, the future, he wanted. It would be nice to live that way. Hao felt positively reckless in comparison to how levelheaded Hanbin was.
But like Gyuvin, Hanbin was also way too trusting.
He pondered that as he looked out over the ocean, sipping hot tea on the back deck. He leaned over the wooden railing, the heat from the open door and the cup in his hands keeping him warm, despite the evening chill. Hao half-listened to the conversations that drifted outside. Yujin was on dish duty, but the others had retired to the living room.
The house used to be livelier, more like this, back when their aunt had invited over her fellow witches for full moon parties, magical get-togethers, monthly book clubs… or whatever other occasion called for such an affair. He had missed the lustre and the laughter of new people.
Footsteps sounded behind him and a shadow covered the light for a moment. Hao turned to see Hanbin stepping out onto the back deck.
“I was looking for you, hyung,” Hanbin said.
Hao felt his heart speed up, and he got that nervous and excited feeling, not unlike how it felt sitting on stage, first chair, waiting for the conductor’s cue to begin. Still, he went for a relaxed, “Really?”
“Mmm,” Hanbin responded. “It’s difficult to get you alone.”
Hao took a sip of his tea. “Did you want some? I can make you a cup if you’d like.”
Hanbin shook his head, bangs falling into his eyes at the movement. “No, thank you.”
There was a comfortable silence that Hao didn’t want to break. Hao was also amused at the fact that Hanbin had said he was looking for him, but did not continue or expand on that. Instead, Hanbin seemed content to lean over against the railing as Hao was, looking out into the vast dark of the night and the moonlight on the distant sea.
Hao looked at him, appreciating the curve of his forehead that led into his upturned nose, his pink lips, the round, gentle curve of his jaw. He was wearing an oversized grey hoodie, and it made him look softer. A boy-next-door kind of appearance. Hao thought about sinking his teeth into his shoulder, but quickly stopped his thoughts from progressing further.
“Do you ever think about leaving here?” Hanbin asked.
Hao was surprised at this. “It’s always deep conversations with you,” he joked.
“Has it been?” Hanbin laughed. “It wasn’t intentional. I can ask you about your favourite colour if you’d prefer.”
Hao snorted. “There’s balance, you know. First a question about my favourite colour, then a question about the universe’s intentions with me.”
“That’s good. That works,” Hanbin smiled, “Because I want to know both.”
Hao considered the question. Did he ever think about leaving? When he had first arrived here, maybe so. He had times when he had longed for normalcy, yes. But perhaps rather than leaving, he searched for a purpose, of a house that felt like home.
As their family grew, he settled into this life, he no longer felt that way.
But Gyuvin was beginning to long for adventure outside these doors, and soon Yujin might as well. And where did that leave Hao?
“I don’t know,” he answered truthfully. “I arrived here when I was twelve. This place has been my home for so long, and it took years for it to feel that way. I think what I’d like the most is to see things, to go places, and know that this will always be here for me when I get back.”
Hao had looked away from him as he said that, a bit shy at how honest he had been. Now he turned back to see Hanbin’s reaction. He was met with a soft smile.
“Was that too much?” Hao questioned, light-hearted. “My favourite colour is blue.”
That made Hanbin laugh—a rough, but pleasant sound that broke the night. “No, I liked it. Very profound.”
“Are you teasing me?”
“I would never tease you about that, because my favourite colour is also blue.”
Hao didn’t know what to do with him.
“Then tell me this,” Hao said. “What were your feelings when I asked you to stay?”
This time it was Hanbin who looked away. Hao slid sideways, towards him, so that their arms touched. It was a bold move for him, he could admit that, but he rationalized it by saying it could also just be brushed off as friendly.
“Be honest,” he prompted again.
Hanbin’s cheeks were flushed. “I was… happy. I wasn’t sure how long our stop here would last, but I wanted to spend more time with you.”
Hao’s heart pounded fast, blood racing. It sang in his ears and he felt electric. And yet, he wasn’t going to let him go yet.
“So you could find me alone,” Hao said. “And ask me deep, philosophical questions about leaving home, trying to avoid looking me in the eyes when you did it.”
“That was the plan,” Hanbin admitted.
“Where would you take me, then, when I leave?”
“Anywhere you wanted to go.”
“That’s sweet. I’d take your preferences into consideration, too, of course.”
“How benevolent of you.”
Hao finished off his tea. “You know, you confuse me.”
“How so?”
“I wouldn’t usually admit this to anyone else, but you’re nice,” he blurted out.
“And that confuses you?”
Embarrassed, Hao shook his head, not sure if he was willing to delve into that further and expose himself. He was trying to say that he seemed like Hanbin had stepped out of a dream. People like Hanbin didn’t exist, they were people written in storybooks or in dramas: the ideal being. They weren’t actually possible. They were just the kind of person someone wished for.
Hanbin was exactly the person who Hao could love. That intrigued him, but more than that it frightened him.
“Never mind,” Hao answered.
“If it helps, I don’t find you confusing at all,” Hanbin teased. “I find you quite interesting.”
The way he said it, Hao knew he meant it. He just wasn’t sure what to do when someone said something like that. Hao studied Hanbin before him: his upturned, smiling eyes, the slopes of his cheekbones, the redness blossoming on the tips of his ears. This was a face he had known for days, broken down into a sprinkling of hours, minutes, and seconds. Yet, he felt like he had known him a lifetime.
The wind picked up slightly, blowing in the briny scent from the ocean, and with it, the winter chill.
“Oh! You’re cold,” said Hanbin, noticing Hao shivering slightly despite the heavy knit sweater he was wearing. He had been trying to hide it, but it obviously hadn’t worked.
Hao smiled easily. “I run cold. It’s unfortunate.”
“Your only flaw so far, hyung,” Hanbin quipped. He looked down shyly, then. “Admittedly, I did also want to talk to you alone for another reason. See I… I got you something, just to say thank you.”
Hanbin drew out a pair of white, woolen mittens from the large front pocket of his hoodie. They had a little pink bow wrapped around them. Hanbin held them out to Hao.
“That first time we met, when my car broke down, I noticed you didn’t have any gloves. You had your sleeves pulled down the entire time.” Hanbin chewed on his bottom lip. “I just wanted to get you something small.”
He said that last part as if he was trying to justify it to himself.
Hao didn’t know what to say. With his empty cup resting on the wooden railing, he took the mittens from him. They were soft and warm, maybe a wool blend. He held them close to his chest protectively.
“Thank you,” Hao said softly. “You didn’t have to.”
“I wanted to,” Hanbin answered. He moved so his hand rested close to Hao’s free one on the railing.
“Do you give gifts to all the boys who let you stay in their house?” he asked.
“Only those who offer me tea and let me talk to them on their balcony.”
Hao sniffed. “And I would assume that would be many, then?”
“No, never. Sleep well knowing the sanctity of gift-giving and balcony philosophy have been preserved.”
They fell into a comfortable silence.
Hanbin’s hand reached out slowly to touch his own. First, just the extension of a pinky finger, then his entire hand covered his. Hao watched, entranced. Hao’s heart skipped a beat in his chest like a schoolgirl, which he immediately resented.
It wasn’t as though this was the first time they had touched each other. Hao had unconsciously reached out for Hanbin before, gently placing a hand on his arm or hand when he was focused on explaining something. It was automatic for him. He had only really noticed that he’d done it when he finished speaking. Hanbin didn’t seem to mind.
A touch of hands was nothing, really, when broken down into its parts. But this felt different. This felt intentional. Hao’s focus narrowed down to the point where Hanbin’s hand gently held his, then expanded.
He exhaled shakily and gazed at Hanbin, the distance between them only a few small steps or so. When had they gotten so close? When had the world fallen away?
Hanbin looked at him like he was trying to figure something out. He took a small step forward, the space between them shrinking further. Hao didn’t know if he could actually feel the heat radiating off of Hanbin, or if he was just imagining it, reacting to the closeness of him.
There was a rushing sound in Hao’s ears. He tried not to let his gaze fall down to Hanbin’s mouth, but he failed immediately. Like the poets would say, Hao craved.
He couldn’t do this, he couldn’t. He had promised himself he wouldn’t get involved.
“Do you…” Hanbin started.
“I…” Hao replied eloquently.
He remembered his own sobs as he left home, the last time he had seen his mother face-to-face, and his similar cries when he found out he would never see her again. He remembered the hollow emptiness when he learned that he was cursed, and the grim resignation that settled in when he knew things could not be changed. No matter how many times he had his palm read or his cards drawn, fate had nothing to offer him but a convoluted mess of a future.
He remembered every shitty hookup on campus, every bar night that ended with going up to some random guy’s place, and the somber mornings after. He remembered the bags underneath his eyes and the mild hangovers, the unsavory feeling of long-dried sweat on his body, and the vacant feeling that followed. This was, after all, everything he could look forward to forever.
Hanbin deserved better than that; Hao didn’t want him the way he had others in the past. He longed for pancakes from scratch in the mornings and coffee dates at cafes and watching television together in the evenings—not a quick hookup before Hanbin drove away from their town and never looked behind him.
Hao drew back a little bit, and Hanbin froze where he was.
“We shouldn’t,” Hao said. “We can’t.”
He stepped back, drawing his hand, still on the railing, back to him quickly. He did this so fast that his arm knocked into his empty cup, and it tumbled down into the bushes.
“Hyung, wait, I—"
“I’m sorry,” Hao said, continuing to back away. His other hand still clutched the white mittens. Hao turned into the light coming from the house and walked back inside, effectively turning his back on Hanbin.
As he passed by the front door, he hastily shoved the gloves inside the pocket of his jacket.
It marked a week since Hanbin’s car had broken down, and no more snow had fallen. The first dusting hadn’t even lasted very long; it had melted into the grass almost immediately, giving way to green. To Hao, that was a bit of a loss. He had always loved the snow, although he didn’t always love the cold that came with it.
Hao was not proud to say that he was quite useless in the mornings. For him, the heaviness of sleep had always been quite reluctant to dissipate, and this worsened in the wintertime when the days were darker and shorter.
But Hao was now operating on constant levels of anxiety, brought on by a multitude of things—mainly the missing dead man—that drove him to overcome his love for sleeping in. He hadn’t actually slept well in the past few weeks at all. Gyuvin had confided that he hadn’t either. It was one thing for Hao to be tired but another for Gyuvin to be. Hao set to work.
A while back they implemented the “Knock First” rule. Hao had grown up an only child, with two parents who had no boundaries, so this wasn’t a thing in his household. Then Gyuvin and Hao started sharing the same space, and the former had the tendency to stumble in suddenly, without warning, and frighten Hao half to death. Hao had put his foot down quickly.
Although Hao did knock on Yujin’s closed door that morning and wait the allotted two seconds for a sleepy “Yeah?” in response, he still effectively barged in.
“Morning,” said Hao, dumping a pile of books on Yujin’s small desk with a loud thud.
Yujin groaned, pulling the covers over his head. “What on Earth?”
“You wanted to be involved in the mess? Congratulations. You can celebrate your magic by going through these books with Gyuvin and trying to find something that’ll fix the dead guy problem.”
Hao outlined (rambled, counting points on his fingers) about how he had tried first to search for summoning spells, but those were iffy at best and most required the light of the full moon—time they probably didn’t have. Yujin blinked blearily from the covers as Hao tidied up absent-mindedly, picking up Yujin’s school blazer from the floor and muttering about dirt and wrinkles.
Yujin’s voice was muffled when he responded. “Hyung, I have homework to do, too.”
“Yeah, you do. And you also have to get ready for school now, so get up.”
Yujin groaned again and tried to turn over. The moment he did so, the alarm on his phone went off: a horrible, blaring, default sound that activated Hao’s fight or flight response. Hao took pity on his little brother and turned it off for him, softening at the sight of his messy, dark hair peeking out from under the sheets.
He reached over and patted Yujin’s head. Yujin, in response, stuck an arm out and swatted at him blindly, ineffectively.
Hao started to leave before he paused in the doorway and turned. “Make sure you eat something before you leave, Yujin. Don’t just run off. Take something with you if you’re running late, but I swear to god…”
Yujin grunted in response.
“And help us find a spell that’ll kill this guy dead,” Hao said over his shoulder.
Hao made his way up the second flight of stairs back to his room, the weak glow of the winter sunrise filling the hallway. It had been uncharacteristically sunny for the season. Typically, towards the end of the year, the colours seeped out of everything, leaving only the drab tones of grey, brown, and beige.
The house creaked as it distributed their new weight: once four, now six.
He checked his unread messages: one from Chen Kuanjui about an upcoming assignment, asking whether he would be back soon. He heard their aunt get up (her room was the other large one on the top floor, on the other end of the hallway, facing the road leading up to the house) and make her way down the stairs. Gyuvin, no doubt, would still be fast asleep.
Mornings with guests had taken on a new rhythm. Hao was usually the one to make breakfast, the task delegated to him because this was the one meal he rarely screwed up. Even half-asleep, breakfast was the easiest meal to make. When Gyuvin had first arrived, their aunt had been around more often. As Hao grew older, more responsibility was bestowed (forced) onto him, and he had tried his best to handle meals when required. It had only taken a few of his mediocre attempts for Gyuvin to crack and take over indefinitely, shooing him out of the kitchen with loud complaints.
In exchange for their stay, Matthew and Hanbin had enthusiastically agreed to take on a number of their household chores—which included everything from (finally) attending to the squeaky bathroom door to helping out with the cooking. This lifted a huge weight from Hao’s shoulders; he now had more time to worry about the laundry list of other problems in his life.
Breakfast, like all their other meals together, was a lively affair at the start of the morning rush, eventually settling into a lethargic quiet. With Yujin out the door (with his tie on correctly, mind you) and Gyuvin finally stumbling in (honouring each of them with a sleepy, clingy hug), Hao sipped his coffee in deep thought, while half-listening to his family at the table.
He tried not to make extended eye-contact with Hanbin. He tried not to find his ruffled hair and gravelly morning voice charming. He tried. In punishment, he vowed to try and stay out of Hanbin’s way as much as possible today, made easier because he had a few tutoring appointments after school ended.
The late-morning sun cast long beams of light across the wood floor of his bedroom, and specks of dust twinkled like stars in the air. He casted the spell to muffle noise—not so much as to dampen it completely, but enough so that it wasn’t distracting to anyone else in the house who would find it bothersome—then started open string work and scales.
(Gyuvin had asked about it once, about how he juggled playing an instrument on top of all else.
“How does more work help you de-stress?” Gyuvin had asked incredulously.
Hao had shrugged. “There’s something satisfying about visible improvement. And I tend to only focus on one thing at a time.”
Gyuvin shot him a distasteful look. “Something is very wrong with you, did you know that?”)
The honest truth was that sometimes playing helped clear his mind, and other times it made things worse. Like all days, today he hoped for the former. Regardless of his mood, he had always hated scales. Almost as much as he hated Schradieck.
Hao, once satisfied, quickly moved into the Bach his old teacher had always loved, good practice for his vibrato, and only then did he fully relax into it. As he made his way through his typical warm-up routine, he entered that headspace he was searching for with relative ease. His anxious thoughts, muddled and chaotic, had been replaced with steely focus.
He got tired of the classics soon enough, music flowing into more modern pieces: the popular wedding songs he’d often have to play and the odd pop song or two, making it up as he went.
Just like how he knew a lot of things—magical intuition, perhaps—he sensed a presence to his right and let the music slowly fade away.
Hanbin leaned in the doorway of his bedroom (a maximalist’s daydream of cluttered bookcases and shelves and every inch of wall space covered in something) a soft smile on his face. Hao put his bow down. Hanbin seemed to snap out of that slightly, straightening.
“I’m sorry,” Hanbin apologized. “I didn’t want to interrupt. You play beautifully.”
Hao’s knee-jerk response to compliments was often to outline exactly what he needed to do to improve. He didn’t know how to respond appropriately when people said things like this. Hanbin seemed so sincere that Hao felt raw, shy even.
Hao settled on a soft “Thank you.” He wanted to kick himself.
“Can we talk?” Hanbin asked, unsure. “If you have a moment?”
Hao set his violin down back in its case and nodded, hiding his fear easily. “If you’d like to.”
When he glanced back up, Hanbin was frowning slightly. He had stepped further into the room, closer to Hao.
Hanbin was wearing a loose t-shirt with a low neckline, the same he had been wearing at breakfast. The v shape revealed another tattoo Hao hadn’t known he had until this morning, and he had tried not to stare. Initially, he was just trying to make out what it was: a sun, a moon, and a star. The universe on his chest. Then, he found his eyes lingering involuntarily, tracing the fine, delicate lines, and he chastised himself for it, shame washing over him.
Faced with Hanbin again, Hao considered chugging several bottles of soju.
“I wanted to apologize for last night,” Hanbin started. “I… didn’t… I think I may have made you uncomfortable, and that wasn’t my intention. I overstepped and I’m sorry.”
Hao thought of the gentle warmth of Hanbin’s hand on his—nothing they hadn’t already done before, yes, but somehow it was an act so weighty. Every time Hanbin moved closer to him, he felt the tension between them rise. It wasn’t just attraction, though that was definitely there. It was like Hao became extremely aware of the other, of every movement, blink, and breath he took.
He felt it happening again now in this room. None of that, of course, was the fault of Hanbin. It was all Hao.
Hao let out a long breath. “Hanbin, it’s fine. You didn’t do anything wrong. You don’t have to apologize.”
Hanbin shifted on his feet. “It feels like we left things at an awkward place, though?”
It would’ve been easier if Hanbin was a little less selfless and a poorer communicator. But then, Hao supposed, he also wouldn’t be Hanbin. And Hao wouldn’t look at him and feel both at ease and extraordinarily alert—however that was possible.
Hao also didn’t want to discuss this anymore. He didn’t want to slip up and say something.
Hao shook his head. He let Hanbin’s words linger in the air for a long moment, then finally dissipate. “Tell me about Seoul,” he said instead.
If Hanbin was surprised by the quick switch, he covered it up well. “I don’t go there too often, I suppose. The campus is just a short drive outside my city, so there’s not much reason to.”
He started to drift through Hao’s room, looking at the books he had on his shelves by his desk and the trinkets placed in-between. He didn’t touch anything, a polite gesture, though he lingered in some places.
“Have you never been before?” Hanbin asked.
“Only once,” Hao answered. He sat back on his bed, the frame making a creaking sound. He watched Hanbin move around the room at an easy pace. “My aunt took me and my brothers when I was a teenager. I only remember the traffic.”
Hanbin snorted. “Well, yeah. But isn’t that true of most big cities?”
“You tell me. You’re so well-travelled.” Hao once again inadvertently defaulted to a teasing tone.
Hanbin, who had been glancing out one of the windows, turned to face Hao. “I think I prefer it here.”
“You prefer this small, uninteresting town to vibrant city life?”
“There’s something about this place,” Hanbin reflected. “Something that draws me in. Is that weird to say? Maybe it’s just this house, I don’t know. It feels like I could’ve lived here my whole life.”
It was probably the house. It had always worked its magic, after all, on lonely travellers and lost souls.
“Aren’t you a city boy? How would your family feel about that?” Hao knew he had a younger sister, around Yujin’s age, maybe a bit older.
This made Hanbin pause, but not for too long. “Don’t you think there’s something out there? Something that you’re meant to be doing? That’s what I had thought, anyway,” Hanbin smiled. “I guess that’s why I’m here.”
Hao didn’t know what to say to that. He couldn’t explain the magic of the house. Without him realizing, Hanbin had come to stand before him. It was like they were drawn to each other, unconsciously circling around and orbiting closer. He looked up at Hanbin. He felt the charge in the air.
From downstairs, Hao heard a loud knock on their front door. In the quiet of the room, he heard it clearly, a pounding sound that moved up the stairs. He ignored it.
Hao stood up, breezing past Hanbin, but circling back around the room. “You never dreamed about the white picket fence, the 2.5 kids, and the loving wife at home?”
Hanbin stared at him for a second before bursting out laughing. “Not at all. I had realistic expectations set from a young age.”
That stood out to Hao, confirming something for him. He hummed in response, then ran his fingers across the surface of his desk, partly to avoid eye contact. He felt the air shift as Hanbin moved so he stood behind him. His cologne was dusky, woody, and intimate. Hao breathed it in.
“Is that what you think of me?” Hanbin inquired lowly, close.
“Just wanted to know,” Hao exhaled. “And I never thought about those things, either.”
The knock at the front door came again—rapid, obnoxious, and snapping the heavy tension between them. Hanbin stepped back politely, but his scent remained.
“Gyuvin!” Hao shouted. He looked at Hanbin, who was staring at the ground intently. “Um,” he said. He wanted to say sorry, although he didn’t know what just happened. Unsure and unsteady, he didn’t say anything as he left the room, shame once again falling over him as he chose to turn away instead of addressing anything.
Shaking as he descended the stairs, Hao took a detour to pass by Gyuvin, who was on the couch flicking through a book with his headphones on. This earned a glare from Hao, and Gyuvin sat up with a confused, “What?”
The knocking continued. It was just him, Hanbin, and Gyuvin in the house that afternoon. Matthew had volunteered to help their aunt with some errands, and Yujin was in class. Hao smacked Gyuvin lightly on the leg.
“Maybe it’s the postman that Yujin has a crush on,” Gyuvin said. “Kim Ji-something.”
Hao rolled his eyes. “He doesn’t have a crush on the postman.”
“He does,” Gyuvin insisted. “He gets all shy, it’s hilarious.”
“He’s just shy in general, that doesn’t mean anything,” Hao called over his shoulder. He left Gyuvin on the couch and opened the front door.
Outside stood a policeman. Hao froze.
He had a cropped haircut and beady eyes. Although he wore a nondescript jacket, it would’ve been clear he was a cop just from the way he stood: stiff and at attention, shifty in a way that made Hao unsure of his next move.
“Can I help you?” Hao asked.
“Are you Kim Gyuvin?” the man asked. Behind him, on the road next to a police vehicle, stood his partner. She was a taller woman with her hair pulled back. She also wore the same jacket, with epaulettes, and a department standard baseball cap. Discretion didn’t seem like a concern for them.
“No,” answered Hao. He wouldn’t provide any more information than necessary.
The man frowned. “Does Kim Gyuvin live at this residence?”
Hao hesitated. “Maybe.”
Gyuvin came up from behind him, opening the door wider with one hand. “Is there something you wanted?”
Hao sighed inwardly. The man’s focus shifted to Hao’s little brother. “Is that your car?”
Gyuvin glanced over at their car, which was parked haphazardly in the ditch in front of their house. “You think I stole a 2012 Hyundai Elantra?”
This pissed the cop off. “Don’t get smart with me, kid.”
Hao gently touched Gyuvin’s arm in warning. Gyuvin, in response, held up his hands in surrender. “Woah, man. Just saying. Yeah, it’s our car.”
The policeman’s partner, Low-Bun, appeared beside him and handed him a folder. “Do you know a…” he read from slowly from the first page as if seeing this for the first time. Hao saw through that. “…Lee Junhyuk?”
Hao was curious about what kind of shoddy police work this was. “No,” Hao said monotonously. Gyuvin, sharply, said nothing.
Cropped Hair withdrew a photograph from the beige folder. “This jog your memory?”
It was indeed the man that Gyuvin had killed, though he cleaned up nicely. He had his hair styled and was wearing a dress shirt, not the leather jacket and combat boots combo of the night that they met. Must’ve been a photo provided by the family. He was definitely prettier than Hao had given him credit for, not that any of that mattered.
“I don’t know him,” said Hao. When in doubt, deny.
Behind him, Gyuvin shifted his weight. “I don’t know him either. Sorry.”
Cropped Hair smiled. “You sure? Because some of his friends described someone exactly like you, Kim Gyuvin.”
Gyuvin said nothing in response.
“Did something happen to him?” Hao asked. He made sure to raise his eyebrows in worry and add a bit of a tremble to his voice in order to play things up.
“He was reported missing a couple of weeks ago. We’re currently unsure of his whereabouts.” The cop looked between them. “I’m assuming you did know him.”
Hao cursed the bastard. He ran through all of the spells he knew, and considered casting one that would give him considerable, fishy body odour for about six months.
“Am I a suspect, officer?” questioned Gyuvin. To his credit, he kept his voice steady, but Hao knew him better than that. He knew there were alarms blaring in his head, confirmed by how tightly he gripped the doorframe.
“No,” the cop answered. He seemed disappointed. “Not officially. We just wanted to ask you a few questions.”
“I—” Gyuvin said.
“Perfect. It’ll only be a few minutes of your time.”
“I don’t believe we have to answer any of your questions, actually,” Hao interrupted. He wasn’t sure if this was true, but it was worth a shot.
Now the cop looked particularly ticked off. “I’d rather clear this up quickly, wouldn’t you?”
Apparently, Hao was correct in his assumption.
“When was the last time you saw him?” the cop continued. From behind him, Low-Bun stared right at Hao, as though she were scanning his vitals and response time with lasers.
“As I said,” Hao repeated. “We aren’t required to answer any questions at this time.”
Hao moved to shut the front door, but Gyuvin stopped him with a hand on the wood.
“I wasn’t actually a friend of his. I knew him for only a few weeks. We met in a bar in Seoul,” Gyuvin said. Hao internally groaned and considered kicking him to get him to shut up. “I left the city to return to my family here a week and a half ago. That was the last time I saw him.”
The cops stared at him, as if they wanted Gyuvin to continue. He did not.
“That’s everything,” Gyuvin grimly pronounced. “I haven’t seen him since.”
The police officer with the bun turned away to walk back to their car, but the other one glowered at them. Hao crossed his arms in what he hoped was a threatening way. He had a few inches on the policeman. Gyuvin had about a head.
“We’ll stay in touch,” the cop said, evidently giving up for now. “We’ll be in contact if we have further questions.”
“Thank you for your time, officers,” Hao said, and tried not to let the sarcasm bleed too heavily into his voice. He shut the door a little bit harder than usual. The house let out a strained creak in response, like it was stressed out.
Gyuvin turned right into Hao’s arms. “They know, they know, they know,” he repeated, just above a whisper, into Hao’s shoulder.
“It’s fine,” Hao reassured. Over his shoulder, he saw Hanbin standing by the stairs with a worried expression on his face. He must’ve followed Hao downstairs and probably heard the entire exchange just now. Like with all other things pertaining to Hanbin, Hao didn’t want to think about that right now.
It took some time to get Gyuvin to calm down fully, sitting him on the couch and rubbing circles on his back. Gyuvin maintained that he was fine throughout, but Hao wanted to make sure. Being around Hanbin seemed to help. He had such a reassuring presence, and he didn’t push for answers—although Hao knew he was trying to put the pieces together.
The problem with jobs is that you had to do them, and they often didn’t care what was happening in your personal life. Hao had found this out the hard way.
He left Gyuvin in Hanbin’s care after grabbing his violin case and bag. Yujin would be coming home from school soon, as well as their aunt and, assumedly, Matthew.
Hao thought about the events of that day as he tutored his students. It was difficult to concentrate on work when his head was deconstructing his conversations with the police (which was displeased about) and Hanbin (which he was even more displeased about—which displeased him further). The parents, however, always watched over him with a critical eye, so he pulled himself together and focused.
He got home when it was dark, the porchlight guiding his way back, and a flock of birds loudly flying overhead. Inside the house, Yujin was doing homework on their large dining table, while Matthew and their aunt laughed together in the kitchen. He greeted them both but denied the invitation for him to join them.
His body ached. He felt deflated, utterly worn out. On the way upstairs to his room, Hao passed by Gyuvin’s room. The door was open, and he subtly peeked in while walking by, where he saw Gyuvin and Hanbin in deep conversation on the floor. They had brought down large pillows and blankets, and it looked quite cozy. Hao continued upwards to his own room, where he put his things down carefully, then carelessly fell into bed.
“Get up,” said a voice.
Hao let out an angry sound, curling further into the warm sheets. The room was still dark, which meant it was far too early for this. He told the voice that.
“No way. We have work to do.”
Gyuvin stood over his bed with his no-nonsense hands-on-hips stance. Usually, Hao would take the opportunity to poke fun at him for it. This morning, he wasn’t feeling it.
“What happened to Knock First?” Hao groaned.
“Doesn’t apply in serious situations such as these.”
Hao huffed. “Shouldn’t the other party get a say in whether or not the situation is indeed serious?”
“No.”
“I’ve decided it isn’t serious, in any case,” Hao stated with finality, emphasized by him turning over and drawing the sheets up. It was not lost how similar this was to Yujin, just a day earlier.
“I’ve found something that could help,” Gyuvin said. “Actually, Yujin helped, too, but it was mostly me.”
“Excellent,” Hao said sleepily. “I’m sure it’ll still be there in two hours.”
It was a long time before Gyuvin replied. “What happened yesterday that made you like this?”
And damn Gyuvin for being perceptive on the rare occasion.
“Nothing,” Hao denied.
The thing was that Hao couldn’t really explain it himself. He was good at handling stress, and had balanced things well for years without showing any signs of fracturing. As he lay in bed, he told himself that he would allow this bone-deep exhaustion for only a few more hours before he had to get up and get his act together.
“I talked to Hanbin hyung last night. I don’t think he has a clue what’s going on, but he was so concerned, and so helpful. I told him I couldn’t say more about the…” Gyuvin gestured vaguely. “The situation at hand, and he still said he would try and find a way to help if he could.”
Hao had tensed at the mention of Hanbin. His face flickered in his mind: him laughing at dinner and then the look of resignation when Hao had left him yesterday. He held these two images close, as a way of burning every moment in his brain so that he wouldn’t forget.
He didn’t really know how he knew this, but he was steadfast in its truth, the same way he was sure of the planets orbiting the Sun. He knew it like the rote memory of his fingers finding the correct strings on his violin, or the way his body knew instinctively to breathe.
Hanbin wouldn’t be someone he could easily forget. Hao felt it in the marrow of his bones. The moment they first met, right on his doorstep, the Earth shifted so tremendously that it was like he had to find new balance. Hao defined himself as logical, that there must be a reason and explanation for everything. Which is why his first reaction was to deny what happened back then.
Yet every single second from then on, Hanbin proved why gravity changed that day.
Hao sighed, and then rolled back over to face Gyuvin. He sat up tiredly, sheets pooling around him. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and frowned in disgust at the crust in the corners.
“He really is kind,” Hao muttered. “Not just nice, more than that.”
Gyuvin looked at him oddly. Tilted his head, even, like a baby animal trying to figure something out. He’d usually find it cute, but Hao wasn’t as indulgent this morning. When Gyuvin said nothing, Hao found himself annoyed.
“What’s that look for?” Hao groused.
“Hmm? Oh,” Gyuvin replied. “That sounded familiar, I don’t know. There’s an itch in my brain and I have no idea what it means.”
Hao waved him off. “Alright, what did you find?”
Gyuvin reached over and opened one of the wispy curtains overhead, in hopes of letting in more light. Hao had enchanted the curtains long ago to block out most of the sun but still maintain the airy, feathery, light-weight texture that made them so, well, pretty.
The first rays of sunlight were peeking out from the line of the horizon, enough to see a bit more clearly. Hao blinked to adjust.
Hao hadn’t noticed the thick, dusty tome that Gyuvin was carrying until now, when he plopped down on Hao’s bed beside him and opened it up.
“You wanted a summoning spell that didn’t need the full moon to work? I found one.”
Before he could flick through to the right page, Hao grabbed his arm so he could see the cover. Gyuvin had removed the charm that Hao had placed on it to disguise the title.
“The Vengeful Witch: Curses & Hexes For Terrible Exes,” Hao read aloud.
“Apt, no?”
“I don’t want to know where you found this.”
“You wouldn’t believe it. Seriously, it was right under our noses. You know the front hallway closet by the stairs?” Gyuvin began to chatter excitedly before seeing Hao’s tired expression. “Actually, never mind. So, anyway…”
Gyuvin rapidly flicked through the worn pages before settling on a spell around the middle of the book. “Here,” he gestured.
Hao read it over. “’Compels one to return to a specified location in order for business to be settled.’ I’m assuming business could be anything from an ass-kicking to violent murder?”
“Let’s hope so.”
He continued reading through the requirements of the spell. Truthfully (and thankfully), it wasn’t too difficult, although it did need quite a bit of wine to work. Considering that Hao had seen spells which used a lock of hair, a prick of blood from a finger, or some rare herb with a horrifying overseas shipping cost attached, this was working out well for them.
“It’s certainly a start,” Hao said.
Gyuvin moved to lean his head on his brother’s shoulder. “We still need to figure out what we’re going to do when we get him here.”
Hao sighed. Unsolicited visions of that night flickered through his thoughts. He remembered the fear, the racing of his heart, the sick feeling of dread, the blood on the tile floor.
Gyuvin looked up at him from where his head rested, large eyes almost glowing in the lowlight. “If it makes you feel better, Hanbin gallantly volunteered to kill him.”
“What?” Hao’s head snapped towards him, jostling Gyuvin, who sat up straight.
Gyuvin chuckled, scratching the back of his head awkwardly. “Well, maybe not those exact words. He implied that if anyone had hurt either of us in the past and would try to attempt to again in the future, he would fix that problem for us.”
Hao huffed out a laugh. “How noble of him.”
“I told him as much.”
“There’s got to be a spell out there that can deal with him. I don’t want him showing up here unless we’re ready,” Hao murmured, letting his thoughts spill free from his head.
Gyuvin looked at him with big eyes. “We’ll find something.”
“Luckily the cops know absolutely nothing,” Hao snorted.
“To be expected.”
“Alright,” he sighed. “I’ll make breakfast. I have an essay due tomorrow at noon and I need several cups of coffee to finish it.” He shoved Gyuvin lightly as he said this, and Gyuvin retaliated by shoving him back with twice the strength, watching in delight as Hao tipped back onto his pillows with an “Oof.”
After Hao had begged the coffee machine enough times for it to stop making decaf—and it finally listened—Yujin sleepily made his way down the stairs to greet them.
“Hao hyung, did you see the summoning spell I found?”
“We found,” Gyuvin corrected without glancing up from his phone. “I showed him before you woke up.”
Yujin glared at him. “Not true. I found it.”
The utensils and cups began to shake on the table.
“Yujin, get a hold of yourself,” Gyuvin scolded.
“I’m trying,” Yujin snapped. “I can’t control sometimes.”
“Auntie bought apples,” Hao said to no one. “Yujin-ah, take an apple for a snack today.”
Yujin and Gyuvin kicked each other underneath the table.
“Matthew hyung is strange,” Yujin said, between chews. “He told me in Canada they eat the tails of beavers.”
Gyuvin looked at him weirdly. “Are you sure that’s right?”
Yujin nodded, serious. “That’s what he said.”
“What do they eat them with?”
“He said chocolate.”
“Now I know he’s lying,” Gyuvin grumbled. “As expected.”
Yujin shrugged. “He’s cool otherwise, though. He promised he’d play soccer with me today.”
Hao stirred a truly disgusting amount of sugar into his coffee. He sat down at the table across from Yujin. “That’s nice of him.”
This made Yujin pause. He looked around for a second at the quiet house behind him, before he said, “What do you think about Matthew hyung?”
Hao took a sip of his too-hot coffee. “I like him well enough.” In truth, Matthew seemed like a genuinely nice person. He didn’t always catch someone else’s jokes right away, but for some reason that made him more charming. He gesticulated in a frenzied manner when recounting even the most mundane events of the day, he defaulted to talking in pout, and he was extraordinarily bad at card games.
“Okay,” Yujin replied. He propped up his cheek with one hand, like he was listening to something particularly interesting. “What do you think about Hanbin hyung?”
Gyuvin, who had been scrolling through some social media site on his phone, paused, before tapping random icons and links to cover up the fact that he was listening intently to their conversation. Hao noticed this out of the corner of his eye and considered calling him out on it.
“I also like him well enough,” Hao deflected casually.
“Really?” Yujin asked.
Yujin usually kept to himself, so Hao wasn’t sure where this was coming from, or what he was trying to get out of it.
“What’s all this about anyway?” Hao complained. “Eat your food.”
“I think he likes you,” Yujin continued.
Hao shrugged that off, ignoring the twist in his stomach: a small hope he immediately crushed. This was none of his little brother’s business anyway. “That’s nice.”
“He laughs at all your jokes,” said Yujin. “You’ve never said anything funny ever.”
Hao chugged what was left in his cup, which was, honestly, quite a lot. Gyuvin was still listening to this silently, although he had long given up the pretense of reading social media updates on his phone.
“Not true. I’m hilarious,” Hao said.
Yujin frowned, and that was the last expression Hao saw before he got up again, removing himself physically from this conversation.
He wasn’t sure what Yujin’s angle was with Hanbin, nor how Yujin could possibly know any of that. “Like” was vague in and of itself. “Like” could simply mean he enjoyed his time staying at their house. “Like”, in this instance, meant Hanbin appreciated having a place to stay, and that he didn’t completely find Hao unpleasant to be around.
Hao had hoped he’d been able to hide his own affection well enough that the others couldn’t pick up on it. Facing down the awful realization that he liked Hanbin—in a way that wasn’t platonic, and also wasn’t just basic attraction—had felt like a drop kick to the stomach. It felt like dread, it felt like being stranded in the middle of the ocean without a raft. It felt like looking directly at his own downfall. It felt like the Fates were using his life’s thread as a yo-yo.
And yet.
They were effectively living together, sharing the same space and seeing each other almost constantly. And then there were the times that were just them alone. The quiet moment on the back deck had felt charged, and his visit to Hao’s room had made him feel like he was a live wire, like if they touched, he would spark and light aflame. But now he had his doubts about that.
Maybe everything he had felt was just him. Maybe Hanbin was just reaching out to be nice. After all, he was unflinchingly kind.
If Hao pushed them down hard enough, those feelings would eventually disappear.
Hao poured himself another cup of coffee. It wasn’t an appropriate morning to spiral like this. He had bigger things to worry about. The light of the morning had started to filter through the glass, the blazing, white-yellow sun peeking through the back door and leaking through the windows.
He spoke again, louder so that his voice would carry into the next room to his brothers. “I need to find a book with some genuine answers, and I was going to ask the house—”
Hao turned right into Hanbin. “Oh,” he said with a jolt, surprised.
Hanbin, lightning quick, reached out to steady his hand that was holding the cup. “Woah.” He said this in his rough morning voice, and Hao’s heart jumped again; beating hot without his permission.
“Morning,” greeted Hao.
“Morning,” Hanbin answered. He gestured to the stove, where Hao had some sausages in a skillet, staying warm on low heat. “Do you need help with that?”
From the other room, Matthew said his own “good mornings” to Gyuvin and Yujin.
Hao shook his head. “It’s fine. There’s coffee, though, if you’d like. Or I can make tea.”
“Coffee. Coffee’s good.” He said this in an exaggerated tone, an eternally grateful one, as if their coffee machine had been sent by the heavens.
Hao hovered, not wanting to return to the others just quite yet. He could admit to himself that he enjoyed, luxuriated in, Hanbin’s company. He directed Hanbin to the right cabinet that held their mugs, cups, and glasses.
“One time,” Hanbin boasted, as he poured himself a cup. “In my first year of university—in my more impressionable and audacious days, I should say—I was dared to pour a Monster energy drink into my coffee.”
“And did you?”
“Of course.”
He snorted. “How was that? Was it like being electroshocked?”
“It mostly just tasted terrible, but I remember it fondly,” grinned Hanbin.
“Reckless behaviour. I wouldn’t have expected it from you.”
“No?”
“No. You seem like the model child, the perfect son.” Hao sipped delicately from his cup. “What nefarious substances would be next, you wonder. Red ginseng, maybe? Did your parents know?”
“Ah, you tease me. You wound me.” He clutched his chest in faux pain.
“I bet you were first in your class and everything. How many first-place ribbons and science fair trophies have you won?” Hao gently teased.
“Less than you would think,” Hanbin replied. “I was just shy of being the golden boy of every family’s dreams. But only just. Seems like that would’ve been you, actually.”
“Me? Never,” Hao chuckled. “Too many shortcomings. I’ve always been garbage at physics.”
“You’re too modest, surely.”
“I would say my flaws are obvious,” he answered. “Or do you simply look past them?” He unconsciously reached out for Hanbin as he said this, brushing a hand down his arm.
Hanbin looked down into his cup, pink spreading across his cheeks. “And what do you mean by that?”
Hao glanced at him cheekily. “Nothing at all.”
“Well, I cannot see them, these so-called flaws.”
“Now you’re teasing.”
Hanbin smiled wider, his pointed bottom teeth making a welcome appearance. “Oh no. I’ve been caught.”
“It seems you have been.”
“How can I continue to show my face around here?”
If Hao found their continuous, flirty back-and-forth conversations to be unexpectedly refreshing and thrilling, well, he’d never admit it out loud to anyone. He thought back to what Hanbin had said, that they met each other at every step. It seemed like this only became truer as time passed.
“I—” Hao began.
“Morning, hyung,” said Matthew as he entered the kitchen. Matthew had a bright smile on his face, despite the early hour, and was wearing some oversized sleep shirt. Hao and Hanbin reflexively took one step back from each other, even though they weren’t doing anything.
“Oh, that smells so good,” Matthew continued, leaning over the sausages on the stove. “I know you said you’re not a good cook, but I think you were selling yourself short. Can I make some too, or are these the last of them?”
“I can make more for everyone,” Hao responded. “Let me take these to Gyuvin and Yujin first.” He moved to take the skillet off the stove, before Matthew stepped in.
“Hey, it’s cool. Let me do it?” When Hao didn’t say anything (he was unsure if this was a polite move and he should insist on doing it, or if Matthew was genuine), Matthew piped up again. “Seriously, I’m a guest, and I’ll feel bad if I’m not helping.”
“Now you’re making me look bad,” Hanbin mumbled.
“Serves you right, then,” Matthew laughs. “Sit down, I’ve got this.”
Whether Matthew was a good cook was up for debate. But over the time he’d spent in their home, he had certainly proven himself to be a competent one at best, much like Hanbin. Hao could respect that, as someone who, in truth, got nervous around hot pans, and worried that if he didn’t follow a recipe’s instructions down to each minute detail, he would blow something up.
So, he tapped out, gracefully, and sighed as he sunk down into a chair next to Gyuvin. Matthew followed close behind with the skillet, much to the joy of his younger brothers. It was like he took over complete credit for their meal and Hao grumbled about this internally.
“Can you make more eggs, too?” Gyuvin asked.
“Uh, if you have some?” Matthew answered wearily. Hao took back all of his prior grievances. He had decided he would enjoy this immensely.
Gyuvin and Yujin resumed their conversation about some television show they were watching. Hao liked this better than the other day, when they were trying to throw food into Matthew’s mouth from across the table.
He let his mind wander and eyes wander as he listened to the morning chatter, noticing something out of the corner of his eye. Hanbin had left his phone, face-up, on the table, just a handful of centimeters from where Hao was sitting. His eyes automatically flicked over to it as the screen lit up, a new notification coming in.
It wasn’t that he did any of this maliciously, or even consciously. He was simply curious by nature. And it wasn’t that he tried to justify it (by telling himself that it might be a text from the mechanic or some other urgent message). He honestly didn’t think anything at all, as he leaned forward automatically to sneakily take a glance at the screen.
He watched several text notifications appear.
Kim Taerae: you said he’s from a small town. maybe he’s just shy???
Kim Taerae: but if he was wearing a charli xcx tour shirt, i have some great news
Kim Taerae: anyway. i’m out here trying to get dick from a straight guy. again
That was enough of that. Hao leaned back into his chair and tried to look natural as Matthew and Hanbin returned. Gyuvin chatted excitedly as the two sat down, with Yujin adding a few short sentences of his own while prompted. It was a cloudy day today, with a chance of rain, but the house felt bright and warm.
He ran through the texts in his mind. Of course, there was an ounce of shame for reading someone else’s messages, but it didn’t clear up anything except that Kim Taerae (whoever that was) was making some poor decisions regarding his personal life.
Hao pretended to be very interested in his breakfast, chewing thoughtfully as he watched Hanbin (who sat to his left) check his phone, frown, and then type out a lengthy reply. On Hao’s right, Gyuvin tried to steal food out of Hao’s bowl. He smacked his hand, unimpressed, and Gyuvin grinned back playfully.
From the doorway, their aunt made her entrance, slightly flustered. She greeted all of them as she hastily tried to stick a dangly earring through one of her ears. Her gentle perfume wafted after her, the jasmine and warm tea soothing in comparison to how rushed her movements were.
As the others said their greetings in response, Hao thought about how perfectly they fit together. As the years passed, Hao and his siblings had learned to live with each other, made space so that they could mesh somehow and walk out the other end as a stable unit. They fought sometimes, but those fights usually didn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things, and they apologized even more.
But in the course of a week—a little over that now, though—Hanbin and Matthew had stitched themselves into the fabric of their household and managed to keep the balance. Perhaps they even worked better now, despite everyone having less space. Hao wasn’t exactly sure how that worked, nor was he sure how he felt about it. That is, there was always the deep-set knowledge that they would leave, and Hao was scared of what that meant for the rest of them.
She pressed a kiss to the top of Yujin’s head and ruffled his hair as she passed, and he made a frowny face in return.
“A-Hao,” she said. “Just a second?”
Hao was happy to get up and escape the table for a while. She led the two of them through the house to the front entrance way, at the base of the stairs.
“I’ve been asked to lecture at an event that’s coming up. It’s quite exciting, actually, all about the common misconceptions about curses, regular and abnormal and…” she waved her hand to gesture that it wasn’t important. “It doesn’t matter. It’s ridiculously short notice though.” She said this with some contempt. “I’ll be gone for a couple of days, leaving Sunday.”
It was a Thursday. He thought about how many days she typically considered to be “a few.” He had no idea how long she would be away.
“I can handle things,” Hao assured. “I always do.”
“Of course you can,” she replied. “I never doubted that you could.” Her features softened and the wrinkles around her eyes deepened as she smiled. “But make sure Yujin gets up on time and Gyuvin doesn’t mope around the house too much.”
Hao breathed air quickly out of his nose. “I’ll try my best.”
“And take care of yourself, too. You always forget to do that.”
Hao’s stomach twisted. He looked down. For some reason, that made him feel like he could cry.
“Yeah,” he said lowly.
“Don’t you have an essay due soon?”
He nodded. “Ancient history and myths.” A bit of a headache that was.
She reached up to squeeze his shoulders in a tender, comforting way. He felt some of the stress drain away from him, like the strings holding him up became looser. He didn’t know if that was some sort of charm, or just the reassuring character of their aunt, in her own way.
She told him he would do well if he had studied and paid attention in class. He sighed.
“You know, the house has a protection spell on it,” their aunt said kindly.
Hao looked at her, confused. “Okay?”
She laughed. “I’m saying that anyone with ill-intent would have a very difficult time trying to get in.”
He said nothing for a second. “I’ll keep that in mind?”
Their aunt sighed. “If you’re worried, A-Hao… don’t be. But always be careful. And always stay alert.”
With that, she grabbed her coat—exclaiming as she opened the front door at the chilly wind that swept up—and said her goodbyes over one shoulder.
Hao thought about the police at the door and their aunt’s customers who always show up in the middle of the night, of the ease in which the latter entered and the former did not. He thought about the floorboard in the entryway that always creaked when he stepped on it, but never when Hanbin did so.
“And if you’re making hot pot tonight, I’ll be home in time for dinner. If you’re not, then I’m afraid I’ll be home later,” she called, right before the door shut. Then the lock clicked behind her: the house’s doing.
Hao stood there for a moment after she had gone.
After making sure Yujin left for school on time (he was very determined to listen in to whatever nonsense Matthew and Gyuvin were discussing), Hao excused himself from the others. Then, he spent the rest of the day in his room.
He sped through the remaining word count of his essay—not because he particularly liked the subject matter, but because the sooner he finished, the sooner he could delve into another stack of spell books on his desk. These were teetering precariously on the edge of the table, threatening to fall off the edge every time he changed his mind and violently pressed the backspace key on his laptop.
The search for a spell was infinitely more difficult because of their guests. He and his brothers had tried their best to store their books and other magical materials away from curious eyes, before they had arrived, of course. But the house only had so much storage; that was simply an impossible task. To combat this, Hao had cast a masking charm on a number of the books so that, from the outside, they appeared perfectly regular.
Hanbin had looked at Gyuvin strangely when he was reading from Nuclear Fission: The Fundamentals this morning at breakfast. Hao struggled not to laugh.
“Is that… an engaging read?” Hanbin had asked.
And Gyuvin had looked up from the page, closed the book slightly to glance at the cover, and said, “Very. I love isophotes.”
“Isotopes,” Hao had quickly corrected.
“That’s what I said.”
“Were you lying about the physics thing?” Hanbin had asked, jokingly hurt.
“No,” Hao had huffed. “I’m just familiar with the fundamentals.”
Now he had to sort through books one by one, which proved to be an arduous and soul-crushing task. Yujin also seemed to forget what they’d already looked through and what they hadn’t, which resulted in them mapping out the house in zones and working clockwise.
Most of the books they were pulling were dusty and old. Hao had to wonder if the spells within them were outdated. The house routinely shuffled things around in their drawers, cabinets, and closets. Some of these books probably hadn’t seen the sun—never mind having been read by someone—in years, perhaps even decades. Sorting through them seemed hopeless.
Hao devoured the material that he found, skimming through spells for making it rain (although the instructions clarified that “rain” was an umbrella term here, and drizzle and a few drops should count as a success), charms for dyeing hair, and curses for unruly neighbours. The last one warned about potential legal implications, but Hao found that one very interesting.
He collected a small library on the floor of his bedroom, haphazardly strewn across the dark wood floors and his fuzzy carpet. He read one of his incoming texts from Chen Kuanjui: “Bro have you finished the essay? ” He texted back that he did. He received a response a split second later that he would be blocked soon.
As the hours ticked by, Hao was no closer to finding any answers. Frustrated, he lay on the floor, finding patterns in the imperfections of the ceiling, and listening to the soft sounds of people in the house. He heard the occasional burst of laughter, the scraping of a chair leg on the hardwood, the creaks and groans as the house moved.
Eventually, he got up and made his way to the hallway closet on this floor—the only one, but a large one, nonetheless. After scouring the cabinets and bookshelves on the previous two floors, this was one of the last remaining spots he could possibly look through.
The closet originally was supposed to house extra linens and cleaning supplies. It still did, but, like most surfaces of the house, those things were pushed out of the way for more books.
Hao dug around, whispering discontentedly under his breath. The words weren’t so much a spell as they were a way of reassuring himself. He could feel the first pricks of sharp anxiety taking root. It was a sick, awful feeling. What if he couldn’t find anything? What if there wasn’t anything at all?
He pulled out a book from between two blankets, patterned with something he would call bold on a good day, an arrestable offence on a bad one. As he did so, the mop that he had balanced in the corner fell and bonked him on the head.
“Fuck,” he cursed.
He stacked the book on top of two others, before retreating to his room like some kind of nocturnal animal. He heard Gyuvin and Matthew’s raised voices, excited, from downstairs before he shut his door again.
This is the way things went for Hao: nothing would be handed to him, but if he desperately put in the effort, he would succeed. Or, at least, that’s how he found it to be. So when he opened Hot Pot Recipes To Soothe The Soul, he did so with simmering desperation, and it stared him in the face.
“This is it,” he whispered. He said this so quietly, as if any higher decibel could make the pages disappear from this world.
It felt like it should be more monumental than this. As though the moment should have a swelling, emotional instrumental, like a motion picture soundtrack, or the sounds of people cheering, like at a sports game.
There wasn’t anything like that. It was just two pages written in messy, black scrawl. He wondered if this is how scientists felt when they finally solved an equation, or classical composers when they finished a piece of music—a sense of, “Oh? Is that all, then?”
He read through the requirements of the spell. See No, Hear No, Speak No Moreexplained that its purpose was to right wrongful spells and curses that had gone awry, in the case that the effects had inadvertently spawned a great wickedness.
True to many of the older volumes that he’d encountered, regardless of the author, the spells and their effects were vague. This one wasn’t even in print, but rather handwritten by, judging by the penmanship, a few different witches, who added on to the spell as they went along. Matthew had taught him the English slang word, “shady”, and that seemed perfectly appropriate for this.
Was he going to cast a random spell from a book found in the back of a dusty closet? Undoubtedly. One of his biggest defining traits was the scale of his ambition.
As if sensing the change in Hao’s mood, Gyuvin appeared in his doorway, head tilted in question. On his way up, the stairs had creaked, so Hao had been aware of him. But even if the stairs had been silent, Hao felt like he would’ve sensed his arrival.
“Hyung?” Gyuvin asked, unsure. Hao supposed he made quite a sight: his room, usually in meticulous order, was now a hurricane of books and journals and loose pieces of paper, and he sat right in the eye of the storm.
“I found it,” Hao said. “I found the spell that’ll fix this.”
Gyuvin exhaled sharply, then crouched down beside him. “Let me see.”
Hao handed him the book and watched carefully as his younger brother read it over.
“It’s… not as bad as I expected,” Gyuvin finally said.
Hao nodded. “I thought so, too.”
“What does that mean?”
Hao had no idea. What could he say to soothe his brother’s nerves? He told him the truth. “I have no idea.”
“At least you’re honest,” Gyuvin grunted.
“The good thing is that it’s doable, and doesn’t need much prep. The bad news is that…”
“… It doesn’t exactly specify what it means by ‘the evil will be vanquished.’ It also reads like the diary of a nineteenth-century traveller on a journey to meet a mysterious, Transylvanian employer.”
“What, antiquated? Lowkey ominous? Like trouble is afoot?”
“Yeah, man,” Gyuvin said. “When do we tell Yujin?”
“No need,” answered Yujin from the doorway. “I already know.”
Hao jolted in surprise on the carpet where he sat. Yujin was once again standing in the doorway, arms crossed. Unlike Gyuvin, he hadn’t heard his youngest brother. This scene felt far too familiar.
“Giving you magic was the universe’s mistake,” griped Gyuvin. “You should give it back.”
“Did you leave Hanbin and Matthew downstairs?” Hao asked.
“I helped them hook up the PlayStation. I don’t think they’ll notice I’m gone. Also, Hao hyung, I learned a spell to turn someone’s hair blue, can I try it out on Gyuvin hyung?”
“You will not do that,” Hao said, strained, as Gyuvin made a shocked noise at his younger brother’s audacity. “You will not do that now, but maybe some other day, because it would be really funny—"
“Hyung!”
“Can I see the spell then?” asked Yujin, gesturing to the book still grasped in Gyuvin’s hands.
Gyuvin reluctantly passed it over, Hot Pot Recipes To Soothe The Soul flashing obnoxiously as he did. Yujin looked it over as though he understood what the spell meant, or the strength it required. Hao watched him fondly as his eyebrows furrowed in concentration, visible even through his long, floppy bangs.
“Okay,” Yujin announced. “It looks good.”
“Yeah, you would know,” Gyuvin snapped. “You’re not even going to cast this.”
“What?” Yujin said, eyes huge. “Hyung, why not?”
“Because the other day you accidentally shocked me when we were fighting over the remote. You can’t control yourself yet, never mind cast a spell to rid this realm of evil of whatever the fuck—”
“Yujin,” Hao interrupted, voice gentle. “You’re just starting out. And I don’t want to put you in danger like last time.”
“I helped last time, though.”
“And that was wrong of me. You could’ve been hurt.”
“All of us could’ve been hurt,” Yujin protested. “That’s why we did it together.”
Hao sighed. He was both irritated and proud that Yujin had always been so argumentative and industrious.
“Besides,” Yujin continued, pointing to a line in the spell. “What about this part? This could be difficult, even dangerous. We’ll probably need extra help.”
Gyuvin frowned, swiped the book from him, and stared harder at the pages. Then he slowly looked up and locked eyes with Hao.
Hao put his face in his hands. “No. We’re not doing this.”
Gyuvin spoke slowly. “We’ll probably need Hanbin and Matthew is what you’re saying.”
“Yeah,” Yujin said.
“It’s one thing to involve you,” Hao hissed. “It’s another thing to involve them.”
“Looks like we’re fucked if we don’t,” he shot back.
Hao let out a groan, and Yujin smiled as though he had won something. “You can’t be sure they’ll help.” Hao tried. “ You can’t be sure that they won’t run screaming.”
“Maybe we don’t have to tell them what it’s for,” Gyuvin piped in. “We could say we just need them to pop in for a second. They could even close their eyes.”
“We’re not having them close their eyes,” Hao said. “That defeats the purpose of them being there to help. What if something goes wrong?”
“The only thing we’re not doing is telling Auntie,” said Gyuvin happily, pleased to find common ground.
“Of course not,” Hao and Yujin said at the same time.
“Sure, we don’t usually tell people about the magic stuff,” Gyuvin continued. “But they’ve already been living with us for, what, a week and a half?”
“No, about a week,” Yujin said unhelpfully, after counting in his head.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Hao answered, strained. “We don’t tell people for a reason, Gyuvin. This puts us at risk.”
Gyuvin’s head tilted, as if he was figuring something out. “Hyung, you don’t think Hanbin hyung would understand?”
Hao thought it was quite presumptuous for Gyuvin to go right to Hanbin and ignore the other, more glaring, problems. “That’s not the point,” he said coldly. “You should shut up.”
Yujin looked between the two of them. “What does he have to do with anything?”
“He doesn’t have anything to do with anything,” Hao said. “Gyuvin is assuming some things that he shouldn’t.”
“I can promise you that they’ll both be fine with it,” Gyuvin stated, hand raised as if swearing. “It’ll be my ass on the line if they don’t.”
Hao sighed, exhausted by the two of them. “I want us to be careful, Gyuvin. Do you understand? This isn’t something we can just do thoughtlessly. It needs exhaustive organization and risk assessment and a backup plan if things go wrong.”
Gyuvin’s body sagged in response as the fight left him as well. “We’ll be careful. That’s why we’re getting help this time.”
Hao felt like he had somehow lost. He had started out confident that he and Gyuvin would be able to do this alone and ended up with three others involved. He didn’t want anyone hurt; the burden of their safety rested on him. Especially now that two regular humans were involved.
A knock came from the doorway. They all turned in unison to see Matthew bashfully frozen in place, hand still raised from where he knocked on the doorframe. They were unsure how long he had been standing there. Hopefully not too long.
“I, uh, sorry,” he said. “We were wondering where you guys went?” He looked around the room at the mess and the three of them sprawled in the center of it, motionless, like a priceless Baroque painting.
When none of them said anything, Matthew continued awkwardly. “I can see I interrupted something, I can leave, I’m sor—”
It was Gyuvin who diffused the tension, standing up and draping an arm around his shoulder, quite easily due to their height difference, before turning him around in a single move. Gyuvin had always excelled at things like this. “Don’t worry about it, hyung.”
“Hao hyung was having a meltdown,” Yujin said cheerfully. In his head, Hao imagined what it would be like if he had normal brothers.
“What a coincidence,” Matthew said, brightening the mood tremendously. “So was I.”
Gyuvin steered Matthew out of the room, the two of them discussing the video game that they had been playing. Hao and Yujin watched them go in silence.
Yujin turned to leave as well, but Hao reached out and grabbed his sleeve to stop him.
“Hyung, what?”
“I’ll tell Hanbin,” Hao said. “And I tell him first. That’s my one condition.”
Yujin looked down at him with a frown. He looked at Hao like he wanted to say something, before ultimately deciding against it. “Okay,” he finally answered.