Chapter Text
The bell above the antique store door rang with a tired little chime every time someone came in, as if even the bell knew it was nearing the end of the day and would rather be left alone. Taehyung liked that sound. It fit the vibe of his cozy little shop. The place was narrow and deep, with tall wooden shelves that bowed slightly under the weight of too many years and too many objects that no one had been able to part with. Sunlight filtered through the dusty front windows in soft, slanted beams, catching on floating dust motes and turning them into something almost magical. The air always smelled faintly of old paper, polished wood, and whatever candle Taehyung had decided to burn that day.
Today, it was “rain on concrete.” At least that was what Taehyung would describe the scent as.
He wrote the label on the candle in crooked ink, the glass smudged with fingerprints right after Taehyung had found it in a box of unsorted stock months ago and lit it on a whim. It smelled like summer storms and wet pavement and the strange comfort of being indoors while the world outside was being rinsed clean. He liked to imagine that if his mother were still here, she would have laughed at the name and then bought three more of them.
Taehyung stood on the small step stool behind the counter, carefully rearranging a row of mismatched porcelain figurines. He wore an oversized cardigan with fraying cuffs and a soft T-shirt tucked loosely into worn jeans. His dark hair was pushed out of his eyes in the messy way it always ended up in when he forgot to look in mirrors. Thin-framed glasses perched slightly crooked on his nose, sliding down every time he leaned forward too far.
“Okay, you go here…” he murmured to a porcelain cat with a chipped ear, nudging it half an inch to the left. “You look less judgmental from this angle.” The cat did not respond. Taehyung nodded anyway, as if it had agreed.
Talking to inanimate objects was a habit he had developed without realizing it. The shop was quiet most days, and when it wasn’t, the conversations were usually brief—polite greetings, small talk about prices, the occasional customer who wanted to tell him the entire life story of a silver locket they’d found in their grandmother’s attic. When the store was empty, it was just Taehyung and the things people had left behind.
He liked it that way.The antique store had been his mother’s for as long as he could remember. Growing up, he’d done his homework at the counter, perched between stacks of yellowing books and trays of loose buttons. He’d learned how to dust delicate glass without breaking it, how to wrap fragile items in layers of old newspaper, how to smile at customers even when they treated the shop like a museum instead of a business.
After she passed, the shop became his. Not immediately. There had been paperwork (a ridiculous amount of it), a period of numbness, a few months where he seriously considered selling the place and moving somewhere where no one knew his name or his loss. But in the end, he stayed. The shop felt like the last place she was still close enough to talk to, even if she never answered back.
Taehyung also lived above ut. The apartment above the store was small and perpetually cluttered. It was filled with half-finished art projects, stacks of books he’d meant to read, and plants he insisted were thriving even when they were clearly on the brink of death. The shop below was more orderly, but only because customers could see it. His own space upstairs was chaos with sentimental value.
The bell chimed again.
Taehyung glanced up from the shelf, blinking as he registered the presence of a customer. A middle-aged man stood near the front display, turning a brass compass over in his hands with a frown.
“Can I help you find anything?” Taehyung asked, hopping down from the stool and straightening his cardigan.
The man hesitated. “This compass” he said slowly. “It doesn’t point north.”
Taehyung leaned over the counter, peering at it. “Ah. Yeah. It’s… decorative.”
“It’s a compass.”
“Yes it is” Taehyung corrected gently. “It’s very old. And possibly haunted by the spirit of someone who must have hated directions.”
The man stared at him. Taehyung smiled, soft and earnest. “I’m kidding. Mostly. It’s been demagnetized. It’s good for shelves, not navigation.”
After a moment, the man huffed out a reluctant laugh. “I’ll take it. My wife likes strange things anyway.”
Taehyung smiled as he rang him up, carefully wrapping the compass in brown paper and tying it with twine. When the man left, the bell chimed its tired little farewell, and the shop settled back into its comfortable quiet.
By the time the clock behind the counter ticked toward nine, the light outside the windows had dimmed into a soft evening blue. Taehyung moved through the shop with the practiced motions of someone closing up for the night. He started straightening displays, wiping down the counter, and turning off lamps one by one. He paused in front of a shelf near the back, one that held items he hadn’t sorted yet.
It was the shelf of mysteries. Boxes sat half-open, their contents spilling out in disorganized little worlds: tarnished cutlery, faded postcards, old keys whose locks were long gone. Taehyung crouched in front of it, tugging one box closer.
“Okay! Let’s see what secrets you’re hiding today” he murmured.
Beneath a tangle of necklaces and a cracked picture frame, he found a book.
The cover was thick leather, darkened with age, the edges softened by years of handling. No title marked the front, only a faint embossed pattern that looked vaguely like twisting vines or maybe horns? if he tilted his head the right way. The pages were yellowed, the spine creaking softly when he opened it.
Taehyung’s eyes lit up.
“Oooh” he whispered, delighted. “Interesting.”
He flipped through the pages carefully. The text was dense and written entirely in what seems to be Latin, accompanied by strange, intricate illustrations. Circles filled with symbols. Diagrams of creatures that looked like someone had tried to draw animals from memory and then given them horns for fun. One page, in particular, caught his attention: a detailed sketch of a small, horned creature with wide eyes and wings tucked close to its body.
It looked… cute. In a slightly unsettling way. But cute.
Taehyung laughed under his breath. “Okay, this is either a very committed fantasy journal or the worst attempt at a spellbook I’ve ever seen.”
He glanced around the shop, half-expecting one of the objects to contradict him. The porcelain cat remained judgmental. The rain-on-concrete candle flickered, releasing another soft wave of scent into the air.
“Guess you’re coming home with me” he told the book.
He tucked the grimoire under his arm, finished closing up the shop, and flicked the sign on the door to CLOSED. The bell chimed one last time and grabbed the candle as he locked up, the sound echoing faintly in the quiet street outside.
Up the narrow staircase to his apartment, Taehyung went, the old wood creaking beneath his steps. The hallway smelled faintly of dust and paint. Inside his apartment, the clutter greeted him like an old friend. He set the grimoire down on the small kitchen table, kicked off his shoes, and went about the familiar ritual of making dinner—instant noodles dressed up with a soft-boiled egg and whatever vegetables he had managed to find inside his
As the kettle boiled, he glanced back at the book, curiosity buzzing under his skin.
“Doing it for the plot” he told the quiet room. “It’s not like anything’s actually going to happen. Right?”
Dinner was eaten standing up in the tiny kitchen, Taehyung leaning against the counter while steam fogged the lenses of his glasses. He lifted them, wiped them on the hem of his cardigan, then promptly forgot and set them down beside the sink, squinting slightly as he slurped noodles and scrolled aimlessly through his phone.
Nothing interesting ever happened on Friday nights anymore. Not the fun kind of interesting, at least.
Most of his friends from college had drifted into adult routines that didn’t include spontaneous late-night visits to cluttered antique shops. The group chat was full of muted notifications like someone complaining about work, someone else sending a picture of their cat, someone asking if anyone was free next weekend and receiving nothing but read receipts in return.
Taehyung turned his phone face-down and sighed softly. The apartment hummed with quiet life. The old refrigerator rattled in the corner. The rain-on-concrete candle burned on the windowsill, its flame reflected in the dark glass. One of his plants—an overwatered monstera that was somehow still alive, leaned toward the light like it was eavesdropping.
“Don’t look at me like that” Taehyung told it. “I am trying my best to keep you alive”
He carried his bowl to the sink, rinsed it out, and then, almost without thinking, glanced toward the table where the grimoire lay waiting.
The book looked heavier up here than it had in the shop, its presence more… intentional. Like it hadn’t been meant to sit quietly on a dusty shelf at all. The leather cover caught the light from the overhead lamp, the faint embossed pattern seeming to shift when he looked at it too long.
Taehyung shook his head at himself. “I can’t believe I’m actually considering this” he said out loud, because hearing his thoughts spoken made them feel less ominous. “It’s just an old book. Probably some LARPer’s failed passion project from the nineties.”
He picked it up anyway.
The pages were thicker than modern paper, rough against his fingertips. He flipped through slowly, pausing at the illustrations that dotted the margins. One illustration, in particular, made him smile despite himself. The little horned creature from earlier stared back at him, its expression oddly earnest. It looked like something you’d expect to find in the margins of a bored medieval monk’s notes. Taehyung traced the outline lightly with his finger.
“You look like you’d apologize for scaring someone” he murmured.
The text around the illustration was dense and entirely unhelpful to him. His Latin knowledge extended to recognizing that it was, in fact, Latin, and absolutely nothing more. He squinted at the looping script, trying to puzzle out even a single word.
“Nope. Definitely not a grocery list.”
He carried the book to the living area and dropped onto the couch, tucking one leg beneath himself. The cushions sagged in familiar places, shaped by years of use. A half-finished sketchbook lay open on the coffee table, abandoned pencils scattered around it. He nudged them aside to make room for the grimoire.
There was something comforting about flipping through a book he couldn’t understand. No expectations. No pressure to comprehend. Just shapes, lines, and the sense of peeking into a world that had never been meant for him.
As he turned another page, he noticed that some of the symbols were repeated. Circles within circles. A pattern of runes that showed up again and again, always arranged in the same configuration. On one page, the symbols were laid out in a large, intricate circle, with instructions written around the edges in that same looping script.
Taehyung tilted his head. “Okay, that one looks… ritual-y.”
The word ritual made him grin. It felt spooky and dramatic in a way he enjoyed. He imagined himself as the kind of person who might perform rituals—lighting candles, chanting nonsense in a dimly lit room, accidentally summoning a demon because he’d mispronounced something.
He snorted at the thought.
“Relax” he told himself. “You don’t even believe in ghosts. Or demons. Or anything that can crawl out of a book and ruin your night.”
Still, the idea stuck.
The apartment was quiet. The kind of quiet that pressed in around the edges of your thoughts when you let it. Taehyung glanced at the clock on the wall. 9:37 p.m. The night stretched ahead of him, unstructured and empty. He could watch something. He could sketch. He could reorganize the shelf of oddities he’d been meaning to sort for weeks.
Or…
He flipped back to the page with the ritual circle.
The instructions were long, winding around the diagram like they were trying to hypnotize the reader into paying attention. He didn’t know what they said, but he could guess at the general vibe. Draw a circle. Light some candles. Say some words. Probably don’t die.
“I’m not actually going to do it” he said, already half-rising from the couch.
The rain-on-concrete candle flickered, as if in agreement. Or warning. Or maybe it was just reacting to the air current when he stood.
Taehyung padded into the small storage nook he used as a supply closet, rummaging through boxes until he found a piece of chalk left over from some long-forgotten art project. He returned to the living room, pushing the coffee table aside to clear space on the wooden floor.
“This is for aesthetic purposes only” he informed the monstera plant, which was, unfortunately, his only audience.
He knelt and began to sketch the circle from the book onto the floor, copying the shapes as best he could. The chalk scraped softly against the wood, leaving pale lines that looked more like an abstract art piece than anything magical. He had to keep glancing back at the page, tongue peeking out between his teeth as he tried to match the angles of the symbols.
By the time he was done, the circle was lopsided and the runes were… interpretive.
Taehyung leaned back on his heels, surveying his work. “Hmm... not bad, ten out of ten I must say”
He placed the grimoire open on the floor in front of the circle, the page with the instructions staring up at him. The candle on the windowsill flickered again, so he grabbed it and set it near the edge of the chalk markings. For good measure, he lit another candle from the kitchen and placed it on the opposite side.
“Okay I feel a little stupid right now…” he said, heart beating a little faster now, even though he still didn’t truly believe anything would happen. “But worst-case scenario, I feel silly and clean chalk off the floor tomorrow.”
He cleared his throat and peered at the Latin text.
“I don’t know what any of this says” he admitted to the empty room. “So if this summons, like, a raccoon spirit or something, that’s totally on me”
He took a breath and began to read.
The words felt strange in his mouth, the sounds unfamiliar and clumsy on his tongue. He stumbled over syllables, mispronouncing nearly everything, but there was something oddly rhythmic about the chant. The air in the room seemed to shift, the quiet thickening around him.
Taehyung laughed, a little breathless, halfway through. “Okay, this is ridiculous.”
He finished the last line anyway, because self-preservation had never been his strongest personality trait. And for a moment, nothing happened.
The candle flames wavered. The chalk lines on the floor gave the faintest pulse of light. So subtle Taehyung briefly considered pretending it hadn’t happened.
He blinked.
“…Huh.”
The air in the center of the circle bent inward, like heat rising off asphalt. Taehyung’s stomach dropped as the distortion deepened, shadow and light folding into each other in a way that felt deeply illegal to physics.
Okay, Taehyung has made a lot of poor choices and bad decisions in the past, but this one, tops all of them.
“Oh no” he said, very calmly for someone whose evening plans had just derailed into supernatural liability. “Wait! Nope. Actually. I would like to opt out. I revoke my participation in whatever this is. Please? Jesus? Hades? Mr. Lucifer? or whoever is in charge?”
The room filled with the sound of rushing wind, though the windows were closed. The candles flared violently, flames stretching tall and sharp. The chalk lines burned brighter, pulsing like a living thing.
“This is why you don’t read Latin aloud” Taehyung muttered. “This is definitely on me.”
And then something fell out of the air. It did not land with dignity.
There was a burst of dark smoke, a crack like distant thunder, and then a very solid thump as a body hit the floor inside the chalk circle. The coffee table rattled. A pencil skidded away like it was trying to escape whatever what was happening in Taehyung’s living toom.
For a brief, suspended moment, everything went quiet. Then the smoke thinned.
Taehyung stood there with one hand half-raised, heart going at a speed it had not consented to. His brain supplied several explanations in rapid succession:
You are hallucinating. Maybe you are dreaming. This is what happens when you trust unlabeled candles and mysterious books in the same evening you idiot.
The figure in the circle groaned.
“…Ow.”
Taehyung’s thoughts came to a full, dignified halt.
As the smoke cleared, the shape of a person came into focus. The figure gad dark hair, horns curling through it, black wings folded awkwardly against his back like they’d been assembled in a hurry. He looked… real. Disturbingly real.
The person pushed himself up on his elbows, coughing. “I, uh, okay, wow, they really oversold the ‘graceful transition between realms’ thing…”
He looked up. They locked eyes.
The mysterious figure stiffened like he’d just remembered he was supposed to be in character.
Taehyung, on the other hand, forgot how to breathe for a second and then compensated by breathing way too much.
The man-creature scrambled upright, wings flaring dramatically. He squared his shoulders, lifted his chin, and tried to arrange his face into something ancient and terrifying.
This attempt was immediately undercut when he stepped too close to the chalk circle, panicked about smudging it, and had to shuffle backward in a deeply unthreatening way.
“You!” he thundered, pointing at Taehyung with theatrical intensity. “You insignificant mortal vessel of fragile flesh—”
He paused.
“…Wait, that sounded weird. Sorry. Let me start over.”
He shut his eyes, took a deep breath, then opened them again, voice dropping into a tone that had clearly been practiced in front of a mirror.
“Mortal Kim Taehyung!” he intoned. “You have summoned Jeon Jungkook of the Infernal Realms, Scion of the Abyss, Devourer of Hope, Warden of the Thirteenth Gate, Bearer of Eternal—”
His voice cracked spectacularly on the last word.
There was a short, brutal silence. Okay, that was really embarassing.
Jungkook coughed, visibly mortified. “—Darkness. I meant darkness. The acoustics here are… bad.”
He straightened again, clearly determined to salvage what little dignity he had left.
“I would appreciate it if you used my full title when addressing me, mortal” he added, chin lifting. “It is… traditional.”
Taehyung nodded solemnly, like he was taking this very seriously.
“Cool!” he said. “Can I call you Jungkook?”
A long, wounded pause.
“…You may” Jungkook said at last, voice tight with what might have been the death of a small, proud part of his soul.
Taehyung’s fear tried to exist. It made a valiant effort. Unfortunately, it was competing with the overwhelming realization that the demon in his living room sounded like he’d rehearsed this speech in the shower. And it did not help that this said demon had wide eyes that resembled boba balls and bunny teeth that threatens to peek out of his soft pink lips. Kim Taehyung, snap out of it.
His gaze flicked over him in quick, startled passes. The man in front of him literally had horns, wings, and had sharp lines on his shoulders—and then he something snagged, weirdly, on the neat black button-down stretched across the demon’s chest.
It took him a second to place why it looked familiar.
“…Is that Prada?” he asked, squinting at the small logo stitched over the breast pocket.
Jungkook faltered mid-loom. “What?”
“Oh god” Taehyung breathed, apparently realizing he was supposed to be reacting to the demon part first. “You’re acrually real.”
Jungkook blinked, clearly thrown off script. “…Yes. Obviously. I am a high-ranking infernal entity of terror and ruin. You should be experiencing existential dread. Possibly screaming.”
Taehyung checked in with his body. Yeah, still in shock and denial.
“I think my legs are refusing to cooperate at the moment” he offered. “But hi.”
This was not in the handbook.
Jungkook cleared his throat and glanced at the open grimoire, then at the lopsided chalk circle. His gaze snagged on the uneven runes.
“…Oh no.”
“What?” Taehyung asked.
“That’s not uhm, that’s a containment sigil and..” Jungkook said faintly. “It’s supposed to be precise. Those lines regulate infernal resonance. If they’re uneven, it can cause magical feedback, unstable binding, dimensional slippage, spontaneous combustion…”
He stopped himself, eyes widening.
Right. Terror. Fear. Professionalism.
He straightened. “Regardless. By the ancient laws of binding, I am compelled to obey your commands. Speak your will, summoner, and I shall unleash unspeakable horrors upon your enemies.”
He spread his wings dramatically.
One feather caught on the coffee table.
Jungkook froze, quietly cursed, carefully unhooked himself, and then resumed looming as if nothing had happened. Taehyung on the otger hand, stepped closer, eyes bright with the kind of curiosity that got people eaten in horror movies.
“Your horns are kind of cute, Jungkook” he said, then winced. “Not cute-cute. Just… design-cute. Like, good character design.”
Jungkook’s scowl wobbled. “…Cute?”
“Yeah!” Taehyung nodded. “And your wings are really pretty. Although that might be a problem because my stairwell is very narrow.”
“You are supposed to fear me, mortal” Jungkook said, the words sounding increasingly like self-affirmations. “I am a creature of darkness.”
Taehyung’s mouth curved into a slow, disbelieving grin. “I summoned a demon, oh my God” he said softly, like he was afraid saying it louder would jinx it. “That actually worked. That’s… wow.”
He crouched near the edge of the circle. “Does it hurt? Being pulled out of wherever you were?”
Jungkook hesitated. “They said it would feel like stepping through a door” he admitted. “It felt like tripping down a staircase while on fire. But, you know. Professionally.”
Taehyung winced. “Yikes. Sorry.”
“You’re not supposed to apologize to demons, we aren’t exactly the forgiving type, mercy is for the angels” Jungkook said weakly.
“You’re not supposed to crash into my floor” Taehyung replied, “but here we are.”
The chalk circle pulsed faintly beneath Jungkook’s feet, like it was listening.
“So…” Taehyung said, excitement creeping back in. “You’re a demon named Jungkook, you fell out of my ceiling, and now you have to do what I ask? Like a genie, but with HR policies.”
“I am not a genie” Jungkook said firmly. “Entirely different jurisdiction. But yes. I can grant wishes. Inflict suffering. Bring ruin. Sow fear. Destroy lives”
Taehyung considered this.
“…Can you help me clean up the chalk dust later?”
Jungkook stared at him.
“…I can unleash plagues.”
“I live above an antique store” Taehyung said. “The biggest plague here is dust.”
Jungkook’s wings sagged. This was not how his first summoning was supposed to go.