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The first time Jin meets Park Jimin, he’s lying in the dumpster in the alley behind his rundown apartment block, only semi-conscious and drenched in blood. Only some of it is his.
It’s Christmas day, which Jin has spent the better part of cooking up and then devouring a three-course meal complete with roast turkey, four veg, the perfect roast potatoes that are crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside, stuffing (his grandmother’s recipe), thick, meaty gravy, the works. He’s even made his own cranberry sauce – the crap you can buy at the supermarket is too sweet and synthetic. The Christmas pudding he made a week ago, because when made right they always get better over time, then soaked with brandy. He knows it’s not traditional, but he likes his with double pouring cream and an extra dusting of brown sugar. The starter was savoury mince pies and cheese, consumed soon after breakfast so that he’d have time to build up a good appetite for the star of the show.
Unfortunately, because he lives alone and doesn’t have a single friend to speak of – unless his main co-worker at the local supermarket counts, and Jin is not inclined to count him after he failed to turn up for their last shift and left him to deal with the pre-Christmas rush on his own – he enjoyed this culinary masterpiece alone, watching old reruns of 90’s sitcoms because he’s too broke for Netflix and every other channel was showing Christmas films. Jin can’t stand Christmas films.
Some time in the early evening, when his third helping of turkey is starting to weigh rather heavily on his spine and the mere thought of another Brussel sprout makes shoving a whole turnip up his ass seem more appealing, he labours downstairs to take out the trash, wondering if this is what it feels like to be pregnant. Stuffing is never as nice on day two, but his grandmother had drilled into him the evils of food waste from a young age, so he can’t bring himself to throw it away. Instead, to avoid making his already depressing Boxing Day meal more depressing via slimy stuffing, he loads the leftovers up into an old dog bowl to leave behind the bins.
There’s a soot demon that lives in that alleyway, a grimy ball of shadow, dirt, broken bits of plastic and that dusty fluff that clings to the underside of cars, all tied together with cobweb. It scurries about on an uneven number of ugly, bald little legs and stinks like a car exhaust – urban demons are always coated in pollution – and sometimes it tears open bin bags and scatters rotten food across the pavement like a raccoon. It’s hardly an endearing stray cat – at Halloween, when all creatures tend to get a little feisty, it even tried to bite him, running up his leg and leaving soot marks all over his favourite purple sweater – but Jin has grown rather fond of it, nonetheless. Plus it’s great for keeping the rats down.
“Come on out, you stinky bastard,” he calls, drumming his nails on the edge of the dog bowl to get its attention. Normally it darts out like a shot at the scent of food, making scratchy little sounds rather like static, but tonight it is nowhere to be seen. The alley is dead quiet.
Assuming it’s simply in hiding – sometimes a used-to-be-a-cat or a shade of some kind, a real predator, would come down this way in search of a meal and it would squeeze itself into a crack in the wall and hide there for a few days – Jin puts the bowl down and lifts the lid of the dumpster, rubbish bag held aloft ready to be thrown in.
At first he thinks he’s dealing with a wounded demon, something that had crawled in there to die, so strong is the stench of tainted blood, but then the shock fades a little and he notices the uneven rise and fall of a chest, a tell-tale sign that the body lying cushioned amongst a full block’s worth of garbage contained lungs. This is not something demons usually bothered with. A quick limb count, the glint of gold jewellery (a natural, if highly expensive, ward against possession) and a pale face splattered with red confirmed the initial realisation. Shifters could mimic the human form well enough, but the eyes always betrayed them – they always have the eyes of a predator.
“Could you close the lid, sweetheart?” Jimin asks with a crooked smile and slurred voice, meeting his stare of disbelief with a totally inappropriate wink. “I was just starting to get warm.”
“Why me?” Jin says, mostly to himself because Jimin is clearly well past the point of coherency and rapidly approaching unconsciousness.
It’s just the kind of thing he doesn’t want to get involved with, not anymore, but he knows a hunter when he sees one. It’s the unnatural gold of his eyes, a sure sign of a magical inheritance – Jin used to have eyes like that. He knows that leaving him here would be a massive mistake. A swarm of demons descending on his apartment block, zeroing in on the scent of all that fresh blood like a beacon, is bound to mean casualties (Jimin, for starters, judging by the state of him), and worse, it would mean more hunters.
So he does the stupid thing and pulls the stranger out of the dumpster to half drag, half carry him up to his flat. Though he’s small and weighs far less than the maximum Jin could bench press in the days when he could afford luxuries like gym memberships, this is a task made fairly difficult by the four month old food baby in his stomach and Jimin’s complete lack of cooperation. His feet keep going in different directions, when they manage to make contact with the floor at all, leaning all his weight on Jin’s side, his arm not quite managing to make it all the way round his shoulders.
“Don’t you event want to know my name before you bring me back to your place?” Jimin giggles as they stagger into the aged lift – he can only pray that it doesn’t break down on him like it’s prone to do.
Jin does not want to know his name, the less he knows about him the better frankly, but Jimin tells it to him anyway, trying and failing to execute a bow as he introduces himself.
He lays him down in the bath, cuts off his blood-soaked clothes (classic hunter black, of course) with the scissors he saves for unsavoury tasks – namely, pruning the Death’s Head caterpillars off his tomato plants, nasty little wraiths those – and then sets about putting all those healing charms he’s spent the last year learning to good use. After all that, the man his panicked brain had assumed was at death’s door turns out to have three cracked ribs, a claw wound in his shoulder that though deep, has not hit anything major, and a rash of shadow burns across his torso that would have cleared up with a little aloe vera. The whole passing out and scaring the shit out of him thing was more a result of a minor concussion and magical exhaustion than extreme blood loss.
To add insult to injury, though Jimin struggles to string even a semi-coherent sentence together, he insists on flirting with him through the whole ordeal. This includes such horrors as “what’s a pretty man like you doing in a place like this?” i.e. said man’s apartment, “you know, normally I want men to take me out to dinner before they start taking my clothes off,” after which he precedes to eat all the best cuts that Jin had been saving for breakfast, and the truly unspeakable “ooh, what else can you do with those hands, darling?”.
Having suffered too much to kick him out now and risk his hard work being undone by a passing shade, or frankly just Jimin accidentally wandering into oncoming traffic, Jin compounds his previous errors by offering him a bed for the night. Once he’s firmly established that no, they will not be sharing that bed, and then demotes him to the couch when he won’t stop babbling about “and there was only one bed! Hashtag strangers to lovers, hashtag slowburn” (whatever the fuck that means) he is left with the unenviable task of cleaning up.
Years of experience in getting blood stains out of clothes mean he is able to salvage his Christmas jumper – apart from the food, which would sell any holiday to him, this is the only aspect of Christmas he can tolerate. He respects how hideously tacky they are – and return the hall carpet to a presentable state (i.e. good enough for the landlord not to call the cops on him). There’s nothing he can do for Jimin’s clothes, which tragically means he’s forced to lend him some, if only to stop him from lying there in nothing but his boxers.
“Don’t worry, sweetheart, I’m comfortable with nudity,” he grins, wiggling his eyebrows about in a manner Jin is sure is supposed to be suggestive, but comes off as demented.
“Good for you,” he scowls, throwing some sweatpants at his face and telling himself that he’s just being mindful of Jimin’s ribs. It’s not that the view is bad per se, just that it’s ruined by the ego that comes with it. “I’m not.”
All in all, not the uneventful Christmas evening of heavy duty digestion he had wished for, but at least Jimin has vanished by the time he wakes up the next day, firmly hung over from the extra brandy he’d drunk. He’s taken Jin’s sweatpants with him, but he considers this a minor price to pay for not having to share another meal with the brat.
~
Jin thinks no more about the hunter until New Year’s eve, when he meets Jimin for the second time, yet again covered in blood and hiding in his dumpster.
“Oh hey gorgeous, I was hoping to run into you,” he greets him, probably aiming for sultry though his hoarse, pained voice means he only succeeds in sounding constipated.
“Am I hallucinating?” Jin wonders aloud, wishing he’d accepted the weed that dodgy customer in the supermarket carpark had tried to sell him that morning at the end of his night shift just so that there’d be a chance this wasn’t real.
He should have just gone straight up to his apartment to go to sleep, but he’s got a plastic bag full of cheese from work that’s gone past its sell-by-date and the soot demon loves a bit of stinky cheese. It’s a sign of how utterly deprived of social contact Jin has become in his self-imposed isolation that feeding Mr Stinky has become the highlight of his day – partly because the little bugger has gotten into the habit of grabbing at his ankles. And yeah, thinking about it, he might also be a little touch starved.
“Do I frequently feature in your imagination, darling?” Jimin asks with a disgustingly salacious wink. “I have to say I’m honoured that you think of me in your uh, alone time if you catch my drift… honoured, but not surprised! I do tend to leave an impression on people.”
On second thoughts, actually Jin could do with less social contact. Much less.
This time Jimin does not have the excuse of a concussion to explain away his constant flirting and unbearable behaviour. He lingers in Jin’s apartment for the rest of the day like he’s haunting the place, alternating between deeply unwelcome attempts to seduce him and extremely brattish demands to be waited on hand and foot. This includes frequent requests for a ‘midnight’ kiss even though it’s not even lunchtime and Jin has only had the one glass of wine that he’d hurriedly downed after wrestling the hunter into the bathroom (he’d need at least six to agree to that) and pouting and whining about feeling ‘dreadfully faint’ and ‘wasting away!’ until Jin gives up and feeds him.
He cooks him some of the stuffed pasta he’d made fresh that week, mushroom mezzelune, with his signature sauce – half tinned and half fresh tomatoes to get the right balance of texture and taste, slow roast aubergine and spinach for that depth of flavour, and mozzarella stirred in at the last moment, because if you’re going to put in the effort of making it yourself, you might as well be extravagant. He’ll regret wasting quality ingredients on the little brat later, when he gets tomato all over his blue blanket (he’d thrown it over him in a fit of undeserved kindness when he started to shiver – it’s hard to maintain a normal body temperature when you’ve overstretched yourself with magic). But Jin would never sink so low as to keep tinned soup or, god forbid, instant ramen in his kitchen, and he’d rather feed his honey roast ham from the deli to a wraith than make Jimin a sandwich with it.
Jimin is singularly ungrateful for the blessing that is Jin’s cooking, complaining about how long it’s taking and only lavishing him with compliments for a measly two minutes (he deserves at least ten). He then shows that he’s perfectly capable of using his legs and fetching things for himself by going into the kitchen to drink his milk straight out the carton before putting it back empty into the fridge. The only thing holding Jin back from strangling him there and then is the tentacle marks around his neck from where a sewer demon had got the same idea earlier.
This Jin deduces from the smell (thank god he was wearing his work clothes, something he will get actual joy from throwing out), as Jimin is ironically cagy about his job despite sharing all sorts of unwelcome details about his private life. He tries very hard to maintain a sexy air of mystery – Jimin’s words, not his, which tells you all you need to know really – and makes lots of comments about not being able to speak about his work whilst implying it’s highly important. Jin knows exactly what it is he does, of course, but plays dumb just to annoy him given his obvious disappointment at not being asked.
Jin can tell Jimin comes from old blood, was born into it the way so many of them are. He was probably taught to hold a weapon before he could walk, to mouth incantations before he knew even a handful of words, to draw protective sigils and banishing circles in crayon. No doubt he drew first blood, the demon wound that granted them true sight, when he was still in the cradle. He must be from one of the main houses too – it’s the mix of self-assured cockiness and the complete lack of respect for other people’s time that’s unique to the stinking rich. Not to mention all those gold rings and designer clothes trashed beyond repair, money carelessly thrown away.
Jimin clearly thinks he’s the James bloody Bond of the hunter world… though he has no idea who Jin is, so he can’t be that good.
“So…” Jimin says when Jin is pouring himself a third glass of wine and seriously considering calling an Uber and paying for it himself just to get him out of his apartment. “Any New Year’s resolutions?”
“Stop helping the weird idiots I find in my dumpster?” Jin suggests wryly and is pointedly ignored.
“Personally, I’m planning on working out more. I’ve been slacking a bit lately and it takes a lot of work to maintain an ass this good. Also, I want to become an even better kisser. What do you say, want to help me practice, sweetheart?”
Jin gives up and drinks straight from the bottle. Why do all the best asses have to belong to, well, asses?
~
On the third, fourth, fifth, and indeed dozenth time that they meet – or there abouts, Jin is starting to lose count – Jimin is, surprise surprise, covered in blood and in his dumpster! He has no idea where he finds the self restraint not to just dump his rubbish bags on top of that smug grin (or better yet, smother him with the ruined towel from two days ago that he’s only just gotten round to throwing out).
“You have got to stop doing this,” Jin tells him, the tension headache settling in behind his temples before Jimin has even had the chance to open his mouth.
He’s beginning to suspect that Jimin is getting injured on purpose, since it’s been happening more and more frequently – it’s either that or he’s the sort of stupid who’s too lazy, or too proud, to visit a healer unless they’ve started coughing up blood. Hunters heal quickly, even without the extra magical assistance, but Jin knew a few too many who were the self-destructive side of reckless, including himself. He’s surprised Jimin doesn’t get sent out with back-up, considering the number of scrapes he gets himself into, but what does he know? Maybe the guild are a bit thin on the ground these days. Maybe he’s too proud.
“Aw darling, it’s a real comfort to know you care so much,” Jimin smirks, wilfully misinterpreting him. Jin could threaten to stab him and he’d turn it into an innuendo about penetration. “I really ought to start coming by before my missions, so you can get your hands on me in, uh, better circumstances, shall we say? Maybe I’d get hurt less often with a good luck kiss or two…”
Over my dead body, Jin thinks, casting a quick diagnostic spell to scan the hunter for injuries and coming up with one dislocated arm and a handful bite marks that have done more damage to his skin-tight jeans than to him. He’s also pretty certain Jimin is wearing his shirt – the bloody cheek! – but he can’t call him out on it for fear of another comment about “I know you love seeing me in your clothes, sweetheart.”
“Though if you’re feeling generous, I wouldn’t say no to a quick –”
“I would sooner kiss a slug,” he interrupts him. Just because the stupid fucker has a pretty face, and a six pack, and the most absurdly toned thighs he’s ever seen on a man, and an ass like – whatever, Jin is not that desperate. “And to be clear, it’s not the getting hurt part that bothers me – go die in a ditch for all I care. As long as it’s not in my dumpster, I’m happy.”
“Oh darling, how could you? Right through the heart!” Jimin wails, melodramatically bringing a hand to his chest and exaggerating a pained expression.
“Stop calling me that and get out of the dumpster, Jimin,” Jin snaps, tugging at his good arm when he resolutely refuses to move on his own. “I’m not carrying you, you lazy bastard.”
“Well, if you won’t tell me your name, what else am I supposed to call you? Baby? Mr Worldwide Handsome? I mean you do give off real DILF energy, so I could always call you da –” he cuts off with a yelp of pain when Jin punches him in the leg right on top of a nasty bruise with two months of built-up spite. This provides him with only momentary satisfaction, as Jimin is quick to open his mouth and make things worse. “Kinky! Pain play isn’t really my thing, but for you I’d be willing to make an exception, dollface.”
“You are utterly insufferable,” he hisses, letting the words out slowly like he’s a heavily shaken can of coke. Any more of this and he’s bound to explode. He desperately wishes he could still cast some of those juicy curses he used to know, but alas they were taken from him along with every other scrap of his old magic. “And I don’t actually have to help you. Next time you do something stupid, go somewhere else!”
“But this dumpster is so comfy,” Jimin whines, abandoning the flirtatious act for petulance, his other specialty.
“You mean my flat is so comfy,” Jin corrects him with a scowl.
“I mean, your sofa isn’t that great – it’s basically all springs. I think I’d be a lot more comfortable in your bed, preferably with my head between your –”
Jin drops the lid of the dumpster.
A few minutes later, with a great deal of scrabbling and complaining, Jimin manages to get the lid open again, “come on, sweetheart, a bit of help would be nice.”
Jin will admit it’s pretty difficult climbing out of there with only one arm, especially since it was emptied this morning, but Jimin’s the contrary bastard who insisted on getting in there in the first place and his sympathy ran dry approximately oh, let’s see, five minutes into meeting him the first time around. He’s all out of fucks to give.
“You know what would be really nice? Getting all those clothes back you stole from me, freshly washed, ironed and neatly folded!”
“As I seem to recall,” Jimin huffs, firmly out of breath – Jin suspects he might have taken a few heavy blows to the solar plexus and at this point he’d like to applaud whatever hellspawn delivered them. “You were the one insisting I put them on. I was all for taking them off.”
Jin refuses to dignify this with a response, because it’ll only spur him on, and one of these days his perfectly constructed façade of disdain is going to slip and he’ll do something humiliating like actually blush at one of these outrageous comments and then he’ll be utterly fucked. And not even in a fun way, because he still has standards, goddamnit!
“Just hurry up and get out, I have better things to be doing with my time.”
In this case, better things means eating an entire chocolate orange cake, complete with rich ganache and his own candied peel – it’s the extra rum that really makes it – a batch of scones – clotted cream before jam, naturally – some raspberry blondies (so maybe he’s been doing some depression baking, what of it?) a box of Turkish delight from the local market, half a dozen chocolate brioche (store-bought, because by this point in the evening he’ll be too sick to tell the difference anyway), and possibly a tub of cookie dough ice cream if things get really bad. This he will consume around midnight, midway through his third bottle of wine (at a rough estimate), watching Titanic in his pyjamas so that he has a good excuse to be crying. Fundamentally, his aim is to give him self as much cause as possible to loathe himself the next day.
What’s the grand occasion? That’s right, it’s Valentine’s day A.K.A the absolute worst date in the calendar.
There are several reasons for Jin’s abhorrence of this wretched holiday. For a start, it’s an overcommercialised sham designed by corporations determined to boost sales at the expense of every involuntarily single person’s wellbeing. Secondly, all the chocolate and alcohol always get more expensive at the start of February, just when Jin needs to binge eat and get drunk watching nature documentaries the most. Thirdly, it always results in an uptick of obnoxious new couples engaging in PDA; working retail is bad enough without having to witness strangers canoodling in the frozen goods aisle. Fourthly, whilst some might find the lurid red and pink displays in shop windows charming, the effect is ruined for Jin by the swarms of succubi, glowing locust-like spirits that are drawn out of winter hibernation by all the raging emotions (and horniness) in the air. Jin has to spend half of his shifts sweeping them up and away from the flowers, otherwise the little beasts will eat the lot.
But most of all, Jin hates February the fourteenth with every fibre of his being (a being with an unnatural capacity for spite as it is) because it’s the anniversary of the absolute worst day of his life, the day his magic was taken from him.
Jin didn’t gain the true sight until his twelfth birthday. His parents were completely ordinary humans, accountants, in fact, who didn’t believe in anything that couldn’t fit into the rigid boundaries of a spreadsheet, and certainly not in magic, which belonged in children’s stories and even then was on thin ice. So he didn’t know that demons existed, that shadows moved and dead things came to life, that magic ran through everything and sometimes a thing in the shape of a deer was in fact a used-to-be or even a never-was, didn’t know there were predators out there waiting to be hunted. Not until such a monster came calling, attracted by the energy of untapped magic, and his grandmother sent it packing with a cross word and a well aimed spatula, just as she would chase a mouse from the pantry.
His grandmother was never a hunter – that wasn’t her style, even if she had been given the opportunity – but she had the gift, and over the years of summer breaks, Christmasses and Easters, half-term holidays and long weekends, every day that he could find to spend with her, she taught him things the hunters with generations of history behind him would never learn. That’s why Kim Seokjin was the best in the business. Was.
It was a moment of hubris, a terrible, stupid mistake brought on by carelessness, the arrogant belief that he was simply too good, that nothing could touch him. It was a rush, all that adrenaline and energy coursing through his veins, the thrill of obliterating things most people weren’t even powerful enough to see. He had a kill count nearly twice as high as his nearest competitors, who hated him, sure as a sky demon can fly, a mix of snobbish disdain at this upstart with no family and envy that he was so much better than them.
Somewhere in the midst of it all he’d forgotten the most important thing his grandmother had ever told him: that sometimes a monster was just another creature, doing its best to survive. ‘Leave them to theirs and they’ll leave you to yours’ is what she’d always say, but Jin was never one to just leave things be.
He’d walked right into a trap.
It was a curse of kinds, old magic that finds a host in dead things or forgotten places, clings to them until it can find something better or it fades away, a relic of a bygone era – and like all old magic, it was starving. It drained him dry and spat him out, taking only what it had use for. His life was beneath it, small fish, anyone else and it might have taken that too – or maybe it wouldn’t have touched them at all, who’s to say. As far as the guild are concerned, he’s long dead, but that’s the way he prefers it. Staying away from hunters is his best bet at staying out of trouble, and thus staying alive.
Stubborn as he is, Jin has tried countless times to earn back what was stolen from him, but he’s only succeeded in learning the few spells he’d never bothered with before, little scraps of magic that had never passed his lips. Curses tend to linger, you see, and it’ll only be broken once he’s found his True Love™.
In other words, it’ll never be broken, because as any person with a functioning brain can see, true love is utter bullshit. He’d have more luck searching for a crock of gold at the end of a rainbow or a bloody house made of gingerbread – a fairy tale, and nothing more. And out of three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, it seems the ultimate karma that this should have happened on Valentine’s.
“Oh sweetheart, don’t tell me, have you been seeing someone else?” Jimin asks him, tone halfway between intrigued and jealous. In the rare moments when he’s not testing Jin’s patience with dodgy pick-up lines and suggestive winks (something he has turned into an art form), he instead chooses to be invasive about his personal life. “Do you have a date tonight?”
“As a matter of fact I do. He’s tall, devilishly handsome, a great cook, and has just bought me the best five-dollar bottle of wine the corner shop has to offer!”
“Sounds cheap,” Jimin sighs like he’s personally offended on Jin’s behalf when the little shit knows full well he’s talking about himself. “I would have bought you champagne, treated you to an expensive dinner, booked us a five-star hotel for the night, something with a hot tub… well, there’s still time to change your mind. I’m just saying, I’d make it worth your while.”
“I hate you,” Jin tells him. Not for the first time, he wonders if the arrival of Jimin in his life heralds a previously unforeseen worsening of the curse, a new inventive form of torture devised by the fates to fuck with him, specifically.
“No, you don’t,” he smiles with the smug air of a man who knows he can be the most unbearable little fucker ever and get away with it just because he’s hot. Jin definitely hates him alright, it’s just the kind of rage where the sex would be really good.
Jin grabs a handful of Jimin’s (his!) shirt and tugs, hoisting him out of the dumpster and dropping him in an ungainly heap on the ground. He figures violence is a healthier outlet than giving in to his baser desires and shoving his tongue down his throat. Sure it would shut him up for a few minutes, but it wouldn’t be worth handing him the win. Also, he’s about as hygienic as Mr Stinky right now.
“Jeez, darling, you really –” whatever quip Jimin was about to make dies on his tongue, and Jin has no time to be grateful for the silence, because he’s suddenly grabbing him by the arm and dragging him behind him.
“Let go of –”
“Shhh,” Jimin hisses, staring into the dark void of the alley with a face devoid of colour. He suddenly looks very young without that smug grin. Vulnerable.
“Fuck,” he curses, voice soft and shaky, the first bit of genuine fear Jin has ever seen – and he realises abruptly that Jimin is not afraid for himself. “It followed me, it – fuck. You need to run.”
But Jin stands his ground as the shadows start to coalesce into a dense mass before them, the temperature in the alleyway dropping a handful of degrees until their breath is coming out in great plumes of white. Jimin’s hand tightens involuntarily on his forearm, knuckles turning white as he starts to mouth incantations he doesn’t have the energy to cast. He doesn’t even realise Jin is the only thing holding him up.
There’s a thunderous crack and the creature pulls itself into this reality from another. It’s a bone construct of some kind, clearly dragged its way here from the slaughterhouses down on the docks, a ring of cattle skulls surrounded by a radius of rib bones, branching out like spokes, several snapped in half or fractured, towering above them on three long legs – once four, Jimin has done his damage – just femurs grotesquely fused together. It’s fresh, all gleaming white streaked with red and flaking brown, chunks of gristle still clinging to the joints, charred black by an onslaught of hexes. And every inch of it bristles with teeth, these from no living animal, just clumps of bone marrow stretched out into spikes.
It bellows, a terrible hollow sound, an echo of the dying cries of a hundred beasts grating on his ears, bones rattling and shedding soot from magical blowback as it lumbers towards them. A long snaking limb uncoils from around its neck, half a dozen spinal cords sewn together, a barbed spike at the end like a scorpion’s tail, poised to strike.
The air buzzes with static and Jin can taste metal on his tongue, spots dancing across his vision, heavy pressure on his lungs. This thing is overflowing with thanergy, a necromancer’s wet dream, though it’s unintelligent, uncoordinated and random in its movements – it must have formed organically, a single lingering soul picking up others like a snowball running downhill. But it’s overwhelmingly powerful, even though significantly impaired by all the wounds Jimin managed to inflict. It will crush them with ease, subsume their energy into its unstable mass, and move onto the next meal.
Jin knows he was the one that brought it here, not Jimin. In his current state, running on fumes, the hunter would be as filling as a pre-dinner snack of plain crudité absent the all important humous, and Jin is the main course.
And still the stupid, brave idiot is telling him to run.
The creature roars, pawing at the ground and gouging long grooves in the concrete, preparing to charge. Jimin’s nose has started to bleed, his lips turning blue, eyes unfocussed, bloodshot, and sweat beading at his brow. A protective ward shimmers in front of them, ghost-like and paper thin. One strike of that rattle-snake tail and it bursts, gossamer threads of miasma floating away in the breeze. Jimin’s knees buckle, the aura of all that magic pressing down on them. Jin moves as if through treacle, barely catching him in time.
His heartbeat is pounding in his ears. The light is fading. The monster is bearing down on them. Jin –
Jin stares at the creature and tells it to fuck off.
It stops dead in his tracks. It looks at him, bewildered.
“You heard me,” he repeats, cradling Jimin tight against his chest. “Fuck right off! I am having a terrible day, I am desperately in need of a glass of wine, and I am not in the fucking mood! If you come even a step closer, I swear to god I will beat the ever living shit out of you and use your bones for stock! Don’t fucking try me!”
The bone construct seems to deflate, to turn in on itself like it’s trying to hide away from his fearsome gaze, like all of a sudden it’s terribly embarrassed to even be here. It starts to quiver and shake, writhing in shame, convulsing like an ant burning under a looking glass, screeching in horror – but Jin refuses to look away, to let it go. The spokes of its crown slide together like a closing fan, skulls spinning in frantic circles, unscrewing themselves one by one, femurs collapsing in on themselves like a concertina, scattering bone fragments across the alleyway that then disintegrate into fine white dust. There’s a howling gale and a powerful vacuum, unbearable sound and deafening silence, blazing light and oily darkness. A series of popping sounds, a sickening crunch, and it just falls apart as the souls making it whole are released.
When the air finally clears, the demon is gone, and in its place is a creature made of solid bone, roughly the shape and size of a small, wonky dog. Sort of a dog, anyway. It’s like someone described a dog to it, gave the basic details – four limbs, floppy ears, a tail – but described it poorly, and then it hazarded its best guess at what a dog should be. The overall impression is oddly reminiscent of the slightly malformed things you see in medieval paintings. Arguably a dog. Just a bit squashed.
It wags its tail at him. Or tries to, anyway.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jin mutters sourly, when it trots along at his heels as he carries a barely conscious Jimin out of the alleyway, but lets it follow him into his apartment. There’s a stern voice at the back of his mind that sounds just like his grandmother telling him it’s his responsibility now, what choice does he have?
It seems he has a habit for picking up strays.
~
“I’m thinking of calling it Jjangu,” Jin says with forced cheer. “When I was a kid I wanted a Maltese terrier. I begged my parents to buy me one for my… seventh? Birthday, I think. Maybe eighth. My memory is terrible, jeez. Anyway, they said no of course, but I was going to call it Jjangu, and I figure since it’s all white…”
He trails off awkwardly and stirs the soup he’s reheating – he hadn’t planned to eat a solid meal tonight to make room for all the misery cake, so he didn’t have anything in. Emergency courgette and pea soup from the freezer is the best he can do – as he waits for Jimin to say something. But the hunter just stares mutely at the bone dog that’s made itself at home at the other end of the sofa, curled up into a ball. It keeps accidentally kicking itself in the face when it tries to scratch behind its ear and it’s growing on Jin faster than he’d like to admit.
“Do you have any pets?” Jin asks, breaking all of his previous rules about not engaging Jimin in questions about his private life. This is his third attempt at striking up a conversation, but the hunter is being uncharacteristically quiet. He doesn’t find it as peaceful as he’d expected.
At least he’s awake. Jin spent a fretful three and a half hours sitting by his bedside watching the rise and fall of his chest whilst he slept, scanning his energy signature every five minutes looking for signs of recovery. As much as the brat drives him crazy, he realises he’s grown a little… he’s just used to his presence, is all. It’s just because he’s the only social contact he gets, and beggars can’t be choosers, things would be boring without him – he’s not attached, he’s not fond of him or anything. He’s not.
Jin sets a bowl of soup down on the coffee table in front of Jimin and stands there impatiently with his arms crossed. “Will you please say something? You’re starting to creep me out.”
“Are you a hunter?” Jimin asks, and there’s something almost accusing in his tone, something he can’t quite pick out. He’s used to Jimin being something of an open book – anything but subtle – the kind of book that you’d be embarrassed to read in public admittedly, not a literary masterpiece by any stretch, but still, easy to read. This is unsettling.
“Used to be.”
“Just used to be?” Is it anger? Is Jimin angry at him for something? Is he embarrassed?
“Lost my magic to a curse,” he shrugs, gulping down a mouthful of his own soup and burning his tongue.
“Then how. The fuck. Did you do that!?” Jimin says, looking at him with eyes wide with – with awe. Oh. Oh.
“It’s called working in retail,” Jin blurts out, because he hasn’t been looked at like that in a long time – and even then the amazement was always poisoned by resentment, never felt that great – and it’s a bit overwhelming. Also he has no fucking clue how to explain how he did that, just that when his grandmother got angry, she got properly pissed, and he’d never known a demon try to stand up to an angry woman wielding a rolling pin like a baseball bat. Like he said, she taught him everything he knows.
Jimin blinks at him for a moment, and then bursts into laughter, “Jesus, sweetheart, you’re really something.”
Ah there he is, the old Jimin. To think that Jin had actually missed him for a moment.
“Just call me Jin, would you?” he sighs, sufficiently fed up with the pet names to forget why he had persisted in keeping his name a secret in the first place.
“Jin,” Jimin repeats. “Like Kim Seokjin? The Kim Seokjin?”
“Uh, maybe?”
“Oh my god,” he says, voice rising a couple of octaves like he’s starved for breath. And if Jin had thought he was excited before, this is something else. “Oh my god, this is so cool, like a dream come true! You’re my idol! I have always wanted to meet you, I mean, you’re the best in the game! I can’t believe I’ve been sleeping on your couch for months and I had no idea who you were! And everyone thinks you’re dead, but all this time you’ve been working retail?”
“Got to make a living somehow,” Jin mutters into his soup, ears tinged red with embarrassment. The many different sides to Jimin he’s been seeing today are starting to give him whiplash. And all this time he’s been hiding a sweet, respectful, honestly kind of geeky version of himself underneath all that swagger? It’s utterly galling.
Next thing he knows, Jimin is on his knees before him looking up at him with a beseeching expression, “please teach me your ways.”
“Get off the floor, you’re making me uncomfortable, you weirdo!” he snaps, setting his bowl of soup down safely out of reach, before Jimin can accidentally knock it flying with his next grand gesture and ruin some more of his belongings. “I’m not teaching you anything. I told you, I lost my magic.”
“But you’re still the best!” he insists. “No one at the guild could do that! It’d take a whole team of hunters to take that bone construct down – all I could do was make it angry!”
“Speaking of, what the fuck were you thinking, you stupid bastard? You’re making a habit of trying to get yourself killed!” Jin scolds him, flicking him on the forehead. He’s aware that the raw concern in his voice is tantamount to admitting he actually likes the brat, but since Jimin was quite literally willing to die for him, he thinks he owes him this much.
“Error of judgment,” he says sheepishly. “I’m just trying to work my way up the ladder, so they treat me with a little respect. You know how hard it is when you don’t come from an old family.”
“You don’t? I assumed –” Jin cuts off. Really, he had only thought Jimin was born into it because he was so bloody cocky, but it’s not like Jin had been any different, always overcompensating for the fact that no one else was ever going to believe in him. Willingly getting the shit kicked out of him time and time again, just because he’s desperate to prove himself? It all sounds too familiar. God, Jin had forgotten just how much he loathed the guild, how glad he is to be free of it, even with the price he had to pay. “What’s with all the designer clothes then?
“Oh my family’s rich, they’re just human rich,” Jimin clarifies with a wink. “So the champagne and the five-star hotel room are still on the table, darling.”
“What a relief,” he rolls his eyes, deadpan.
“So will you teach me?” Jimin asks, pulling this cute pleading expression that Jin doesn’t doubt has never failed to get him what he wants. “Please? I’ll be the best student!”
“You’re not even a good patient,” Jin mutters darkly, already resigned to his fate. It’s not like he ever turned him down before, no matter how many times he threatened to. “Ugh fine! Bring me back my clothes and at least a dozen – no make that two dozen – expensive bottles of wine and maybe I’ll think about it. Maybe.”
“I’d be more than happy to buy you whatever you want,” he says with a sly smile. His hands have found their way to Jin’s legs, resting lightly on his thighs just above the knee, almost like a question. Jin could push them away if he wanted to – could slap him in the face if he felt so inclined, and he can’t lie and say he hasn’t ben tempted a couple times before – but he doesn’t. “But if it was a sugar daddy you were after, all you had to do was ask, sugar.”
“It’s literally impossible for you to keep your mouth shut, isn’t it?” Jin sighs, accepting the fact that he’s going to sleep with this man. He doesn’t have to, sure, but he’s going to.
Jimin smirks at him, “not unless it’s occupied, no.”
Jin places his own hand over one of Jimin’s and slides it up a little higher – his answer – cupping his cheek in the other. “Guess it’s a good thing I can think of more than a few ways to occupy it then, huh?”
For once, Jimin doesn’t have anything clever to say, but when Jin pulls him up into a kiss, he comes willingly, and puts that blessed mouth of his to good use.
~
The thing about True Love, is that it’s not a miracle. More often than not, real love, the kind powerful enough to break curses, is also the kind you have to work for, something you earn. It doesn’t happen at first sight, fully fledged and perfect, rather it grows on you slowly, until one day you realise the stubborn plant you mistook for a weed is bursting with flowers, and you grasp it with both hands and say this is mine.
It takes months for Jin’s magic to return to him, and it doesn’t happen all at once, doesn’t progress in a straight line but in fits and starts, grows stronger only to fade away again, but eventually, it returns.
And all throughout, Jimin stays.