Work Text:
Kiin first met Jeong Jihoon in an out-of-the-way bar, trapped behind the counter with a sign that had glared equally back at the both of them, the word open flashing bold in neon green—open. 9pm - 2am. It was just past midnight, a bleak Tuesday in November, and Kiin’s usual clientele knew not to bother him on these sorts of days, at these kinds of hours.
Jihoon wasn’t his usual clientele.
Jihoon was pretty, in an unsuspecting sort of way. He’d walked with a slump to his shoulders, as if unaware of his height. It’d been sweet, as he’d ducked his head to wander through doorways to get to the back of the bar, fingers curled almost bashfully against his neck. He was alone, and he had smiled at Kiin. Kiin had almost wanted to smile back.
“Mister bartender,” Jihoon had said, before squinting at the platinum badge pinned to his chest, at the little kiin carved somewhat messily into the metal, a nametag Kiin had reluctantly taken to wearing, if only because his name carried enough weight to allow him to act as he pleased, even towards a paying client. Especially towards a paying client.
“Just Kiin.”
“Just Kiin,” Jihoon had repeated, eyes curving with his smile, and he had settled into a seat at the counter with a palm laid carefully at his cheek, elbows resting over wood still sticky from alcohol that had sloshed over the sloped sides of Kiin’s favored martini glasses. “I’m Jihoon. I’d like a love potion today, Kiinie.”
Kiinie. Kiin hadn’t bothered to react. “You don’t know me well enough for that.”
“I can pay,” Jihoon had offered, easily enough that Kiin didn’t doubt him for a second, but that wouldn’t change anything.
“Call me Kiin,” he had corrected him, reaching for the triple sec kept just below the bar top, “and start with something smaller.”
Jihoon had hummed somewhat curiously, watching Kiin make him a drink with an unnerving sort of focus. His fingers scratched absentmindedly at his lips—they were cracked from the cold, or the dry air, or one of the many unnamed maladies that plagued the vessels of the fair folk.
“Something for that?” Kiin had asked him, rolling a lime against the counter with his left hand and tapping at his lips with his right, almost regretting the action as Jihoon’s sharp gaze lifted instantly to his mouth, scanning lazily across his face until Kiin had to return his eyes to the lime in his palm.
Jihoon’s drink was obnoxiously pink. Kiin had added near ridiculous amounts of cranberry juice, caught up in peering at the red of Jihoon’s mouth, at the mottled bruising of his lips under his teeth.
“Sure,” Jihoon had agreed, fingers reaching to curl around the thin stem of the glass, brushing warm and dry, deliberate against the back of Kiin’s hand as he handed the drink over.
“Oil-based balms are usually better than wax,” Kiin had recommended, even as his hand had stretched far below the counter to pull out two small vials with a light clink.
Jihoon had stared at him. Blankly. Then his tongue had poked lightly into the drink, nose scrunching as he sniffed the rosy liquid, and he’d tossed Kiin a smile so bright it was almost worrying. “Mmm, sweet.”
Too sweet, probably, but he seemed happy enough, so Kiin settled the two empty vials in front of him with a slight nod, and disappeared into the back to find his ingredients. He wouldn’t usually be so open about his business, but anyone daring enough to ask him for a love potion, all of the terrible elixirs Kiin was known to brew, wouldn’t be likely to care about the reputation attached to the alchemist in the first place.
Not to mention—Jihoon was faeborn. It revealed itself in the shine within his pupils as they dilated and contracted, adjustments rapid, even under steady light. His irises flickered a lovely gold with every curious tilt of his head. Kiin would sell to anyone who paid him well enough, but he’d always been happier to deal with the changelings, so innocent in their open curiosity of the occult.
Kiin was rewarded with another beaming smile when he returned, Jihoon’s eyes sparkling in the dusty light of the bar as Kiin crushed herbs between his fingers and offered their names to Jihoon as he slid them into the vial.
“How should I pay you?” he asked, when the mixture was complete, after Kiin’s fingers against the glass had transmuted powders and poisons into a thin, bubbling liquid, crimson like the corners of Jihoon’s lips. Kiin slid a terminal across the counter, glaringly white, three tip options blinking innocently at the bottom.
“Tap,” Kiin gestured, pointer finger wagging over the option that suggested 30%. “The drink’s on me. Just don’t come back on another Tuesday.”
“But Kiinie,” Jihoon had whined, far too affectionate for a stranger, though Kiin supposed it was only to be expected from a changeling, “I’m off on Tuesday nights.”
“I’d like to be, too,” Kiin had muttered, and Jihoon had tapped his card with another cheerful grin, sweeping the vials into his pockets and pulling something out in return—a rock, perfectly smooth, stolen from one of the spiraling gardens out back.
“What’s this?” Kiin had asked, against his better judgement, and he had reached out to press his thumb to the solid stone. He’d felt something like resentment humming in its unflinching core, interlocked tight in its mineral grains.
“If I turned it to lead, could you turn it to gold?”
“I’d rather not work for my own payment,” Kiin had informed him, and Jihoon had simply laughed, had curled his fingers like claws over the stone, and collapsed the scattered architecture of its silicates with barely a thought. He’d left the resulting chunk of pure lead on the counter in front of Kiin and thanked him for the drink with a casual dip of his head, eyes flitting across the empty room as he stood up again, all lanky limbs and too-quick steps as he wandered back out into the night.
It was twenty minutes till close, time having warped itself under Jihoon’s thoughtful gaze and lilting speech, but Kiin was more than ready to sleep. He’d decided to leave the lead on the counter, and its dull sheen caught his eye again as he flicked off the lights, shrugged his jacket over his shoulders.
Kiin had never been able to turn lead into gold.
The best he’d ever managed was silver, pale like the moon and as weak as it too, washed out and sickly as it clung to his skin. He’d pressed his fingers together and blinked at the metal shavings through the cracked lenses of his glasses. He’d searched for disappointment, found a familiar sort of resignation in the tightness of his chest, and wondered if the pinnacle of alchemy had always felt so distant.
It had all burned away in a flash under last year’s summer sun, and Kiin hadn’t yet bothered to try again.
—
Kiin had never cared much for Tuesdays—or Wednesdays, or Thursdays, or any day for that matter, but he had clients that liked to schedule their weeks around visiting his bar at specific enough times that he had grown rather used to them. At least, he was well used to their wallets, adequately satisfied with their business—at how willing they all were to pay any exorbitant price for his services, no matter how unconventional his requests.
The fair folk had access to every inhuman ingredient a human alchemist could want for, and Kiin had long since decided that the convenience was well worth the hassle of social interaction.
“Social interaction?” Jihoon laughs, bright and easy enough that Kiin’s own lips twitch traitorously upwards as he leans precariously over the bar, neck craning awkwardly as he inspects the space where Kiin stands. “You’re the weirdest bartender I’ve ever met, Kiinie.”
Kiin slides a plate across the wood to him, maraschino cherries rolling haphazardly against each other, and Jihoon starts to pull them from the stem with his teeth, licking his fingers delicately after each bite of the fruit. His drink sits well within reach, a vivid gradient of oranges and reds, not unlike the sunrise it was named for. Kiin added too much grenadine at the bottom and arguably not enough tequila, but it’d take truly painful amounts of alcohol to successfully get a changeling drunk, and Jihoon seems to enjoy the sugar instead.
“Have you met many others?” Kiin asks, though the question feels somewhat idiotic as it leaves his mouth.
Jihoon considers him, contemplative as ever. “None as good as you.”
Whatever that means. Kiin scrunches up his nose as he bats away the cherry that Jihoon dangles at him, then gives in and eats it when the subsequent pout on Jihoon’s face is enough to concern him about losing a now-regular client—
However that happened. It’s Jihoon’s fourth consecutive Tuesday in the bar.
The second was uneventful, an evening quiet enough that Kiin had just about convinced himself to close early and give up for the night on the stubborn invisibility potion he’d been attempting to craft. The emerald wings of the lunar moths refused to blend easily with the viscous syrup that formed when Kiin gave the vial a small shake. No matter how much he’d coaxed the tiny scales to unwind from their layered mosaics, their verdant color had persisted, had stayed suspended and innocently glimmering in the otherwise translucent elixir. He’d worried that the effects would carry over. The promised invisibility would be marred by little flecks of green, circulating sluggishly through unseen veins—he’d have to discount the entire batch.
His fears weren’t unfounded.
Jihoon had taken a sip of the elixir, after all that remained of his mojito were a few chewed up mint leaves at the bottom of his glass, and then cringed so pitifully that Kiin had almost laughed. He’d disguised it with a hand over his mouth, let slip a tiny cough that Jihoon had looked entirely unfooled by.
“It’s a quarter-dose, but you shouldn’t be affected for the full fifteen minutes.”
“Tastes bad,” Jihoon had complained, and Kiin had watched the glittering gold in his eyes start to fade to a ghostly white.
Kiin had curled his hand around Jihoon’s wrist, flipped his palm upright so he could watch the steady disappearance of his skin into thin air, until all that remained of Jihoon were his clothes, worn around an invisible body—and millions of little green freckles, obnoxiously blatant as they floated through the outline of his bloodstream.
Kiin had scowled, annoyed at this confirmed defeat, and Jihoon’s fingers had wrapped themselves around his wrist then, voice a sly purr as he requested again, “A love potion, Kiinie?”
Kiin had declined, had offered him the failed invisibility potions on the house, and then declined again when Jihoon had asked for love potions on the third consecutive Tuesday, electing to instead offer his latest fire-resistance concoction, so that Jihoon could stick his entire head into the fireplace free of harm.
“It was nice,” Jihoon says, tracking Kiin’s gaze to the crackling fire in the corner, eyes wide and dreamy as he sways on the tiny seat at the bar. “Just not as hot as I’d hoped.”
“That’s kind of the point,” Kiin mumbles, but he resolves to add another pinch of the powdered drake scales next time, to let the heat of their eternal fire strengthen the comfortable warmth of his potion.
Jihoon offers him a second cherry, asks for an elixir of artificial love, and Kiin only rejects him for the latter.
—
It’s thirty minutes past midnight, on a frigid Tuesday in late December, and Jihoon is on his third strawberry daiquiri, lips stained pink as he presses them together.
The cracks in them haven’t fully healed, but Jihoon doesn’t seem to notice, and his fingers trace distractedly over the flaking skin as he peers intently at the lead on the counter in front of him.
“It just doesn’t work.”
Kiin shrugs. He’s never claimed to be a teacher, always preferred the formulaic experimentation of potion making to the more impulsive transmutations of precious metals, but changelings are notoriously gifted in mutations, and Jihoon is no exception. His instinctive transmutations rarely result in an intended material, but Kiin has a collection of small crystals steadily building on his shelves, and he’s growing somewhat attached to the rose quartz towers that Jihoon’s been carving out of stone recently.
“Is gold really that important?” he asks, and immediately regrets it, dropping his gaze from the crestfallen look that flickers on Jihoon’s face.
“I guess not.”
“I mean—” Kiin stops. He understands Jihoon’s frustrations. Kiin himself was a junior alchemist once, spent too many sleepless nights honing skills that some of the changelings in his year seemed to just fundamentally understand, stared at chunks of immutable lead that refused to bend to his will for years, and only tossed it aside for good when he finally left the academy.
Kiin understands the frustration, but he likes his poisons and potions. He built a reputation for himself easily enough as an apothecary on the outskirts of the city—his clients don’t need gold, so he doesn’t either.
“The quartz is nice,” he offers, and Jihoon’s eyes lighten even as his cheeks puff out again in an exaggerated pout.
“I wanted to make you gold, though,” Jihoon sighs, and his latest chunk of quartz almost seems to shiver in his hands, rutile needles spreading like silver stars under the surface of the crystal. Kiin accepts the glittering quartz as Jihoon presents it to him, traces the thin inclusions with his finger, and lets the heat of the transmuted stone warm his palms.
“I’ll make you gold,” Jihoon continues, “and that’ll pay for the love potion. Unless you wanna give it to me now? Kiinie?”
Kiin shakes his head, places the crystal gently on his shelf with all the rest, and disappears into the back to find eucalyptus extract to add to Jihoon’s health potions.
—
Kiin doesn’t get sick very often. It’s surprising to some that he’d get sick at all, but health potions aren’t generic, and he’s not sure if his clients always realize just how tailored his work is. At the end of the day it’s effort, brewing these elixirs. It’s effort, ingredients, time, energy—Kiin doesn’t like to be wasteful, that’s all.
One February Tuesday, at not even noon, he wakes up with a strange scratching in his throat, and decides to pretend that it doesn’t exist.
Jihoon shows up an hour before midnight on that same Tuesday in February, complaining loudly about the terrible chill in the air, and promptly chases away the two remaining patrons with his incessant chattering.
“You’re losing me business.”
Jihoon scoffs, hands cradled around a pale ceramic mug of apple cider, nose practically dipping into the amber liquid as he blinks up at Kiin through his lashes. “Your payment options lose you business.”
“Credit cards are so easy, though,” Kiin muses, snagging another orange wedge from the plate on the counter, and bending it at the edges. It’s firm, the peel just a bit too thick, and he presses his thumbs harder into its rounded back, nails digging into the rind. It sprays Jihoon in the face as he bends it a little too far. “Oops.”
The juice hits Jihoon on the cheek, and he hunches even lower over his cup, eyes squinted dramatically shut. “Ow… Kiinie, ah, my eyes—”
He recovers almost instantly when Kiin slides the terminal over to him, alongside the usual array of potions. He’s been testing transmogrification recently, and thinks that with enough trials, he could get Jihoon to turn into a cat.
“This is what I mean about payment,” Jihoon complains, but Kiin stares at him somewhat absently until he dutifully taps his card.
Kiin eyes the terminal, gaze sneaking away from the counter every other second until Jihoon gives him an exaggerated sigh, slumped so far over the bar that Kiin worries for a moment that he’ll slide right off the chair to the ground.
“I always tip you, Kiinie.”
Kiin drags his teeth along the inside of his cheek, and resolutely ignores the odd struggle it takes for him to swallow. “Okay. Drink the yellow one now. Just a sip is fine.”
“What am I, a guinea pig?” Jihoon asks, but he takes the sip without waiting for an answer.
No, Kiin thinks, eyes narrowed on Jihoon’s face for any unwanted changes. You’re kind of a cat, though.
The moment he swallows, Jihoon sits perfectly upright, back suddenly ramrod straight, and Kiin watches his pupils contract into a pinpoint.
“I feel weird,” he croaks out, and Kiin reaches for his hand, fingers laid on his wrist as he tracks the elixir slipping into his system.
“Less catnip, maybe,” Kiin notes, lips pressed together as he watches fluffy orange ears wobble piteously in Jihoon’s hair. Somehow, his human ears still exist—his human everything still exists, as Kiin dedicatedly neutralizes the elixir from manifesting random patches of fur over his skin.
Jihoon sways in the seat, mouth curling into a lazy grin, and Kiin catches a glimpse of little fangs poking out, his teeth extended to sharp points before Kiin takes it upon himself to reverse that too.
He leaves the fluffy ears. They’ll disappear themselves when the potion wears off.
“I feel weird,” Jihoon announces again, pupils a vertical slit, though they dilate as Kiin watches, and he’s left to stare into the abyss. Jihoon blinks, slow and sleepy, and his smile widens again. “Kiinie. Kiiiinie.”
“Another whisker,” Kiin says professionally, fingers still resting over Jihoon’s hand. “For a full change.”
Jihoon’s gaze drops, and his entire head tilts dramatically with every exaggerated blink.
“I smell things.” His hand flips upright, snatching Kiin’s fingers quicker than he can react, and Kiin’s face warms as Jihoon presses his nose against his knuckles.
“Less catnip,” Kiin says, somewhat faintly. “Way less. More blueleaf oil. Chrysoberyl instead of quartz, I guess. Honeysuckle was for the taste. Did it work?”
“Taste?” Jihoon’s tongue flicks out, sliding warm over the back of Kiin’s pointer finger, and he yanks his hand away with a startled noise.
Jihoon pouts at him, eyes still impossibly round, and his new cat ears droop sadly in his hair. “Tastes like oranges. Come back, Kiinie.”
Kiin gives his hand back, if only because Jihoon looks so pitifully confused at why he’d taken it away in the first place, and it’s still Kiin’s fault for apparently transmogrifying his neuroreceptors enough to get him mind-numbingly high on catnip.
“Just a few more minutes, Jihoonie,” he says, resigning himself to standing still behind the bar and giving up full usage of his hand as Jihoon pulls it to his cheek with a cheerful hum, head clunking down to rest against the counter. His ears twitch on his head, flicking rapidly as Kiin leans down to inspect them, and his breath ghosts over the soft fur.
When they disappear, folding themselves tinier and tinier until they can’t be seen through Jihoon’s hair, Kiin almost misses them.
It was a good enough start, anyways. It’s impossible to predict how someone will react to a full animal transformation, but it’s easiest for Kiin to establish a baseline—his clients aren’t usually this enthusiastic to try his half-baked products, but Jihoon’s trust is almost dangerously sincere.
And he tips well, Kiin reminds himself. I wouldn’t be able to tolerate Tuesdays if he didn’t.
—
What else could an alchemist ask for?
—
Not to get deathly ill barely three days later would be a nice start.
Kiin closes early on Friday, after he spends the evening sneaking away from the bar every thirty minutes to have uncontrollable coughing fits, and decides that his already standoffish reputation won’t be at all tarnished by a few days off. Fortunately, his more important clients all have weekday preferences, so he curls up under about three fleece blankets when he’s home and accepts the inevitably unproductive weekend.
If he had any foresight, he’d have grabbed some of the herbs from his shelves before closing up—ginger, he thinks, before the itch in his throat bubbles over, and he coughs desperately into his pillows. Honey. Lemon.
Not for any sort of health potion—ginger tea would just be nice.
At the end of the day, potion making isn’t throwing ingredients together at random. Leviathan venom and siren’s tears are both fatal in any isolated dose, but mixed together and with the proper herbal purifiers, Kiin can cure nearly any illness. Of course, the herbs chosen depend on the ailment, and Kiin himself has to babysit the elixir every step of the way so that the volatile mixture doesn’t corrode through everything it touches during neutralization—all that to say, it’s far too much effort for what probably amounts to a common cold, even as miserable as Kiin might feel.
Kiin stays in bed until Saturday has well and truly arrived, even if sleep never did. He debates the merit of dragging himself out of bed to do something healthy like eat food or drink water, and then immediately concludes that attempting more sleep—any sleep—is probably better, especially when even rolling to his side in the soft bed results in a sharp pain pulsing through his temple. The cough seems to have exhausted itself, but an aching chill has crept in in its place, and Kiin uses what little remains of his energy to snag his phone from the bedside table.
Jihoon’s texted him, unsurprisingly—he’s taken to updating Kiin about his daily life on a strangely regular basis since blackmailing him for his number almost two months ago.
“What if I die, Kiinie?” Jihoon had asked him, tone ridiculously solemn. “I’ll leave a one-star review before I go. I’ll do it, I swear.”
Kiin had bristled at that—the effects of his potions are temporary, and he’s a professional. “You won’t die.”
“I will,” Jihoon had insisted, and continued to insist, until his dejected whining finally snapped one of the few remaining strands of Kiin’s patience, and he’d practically chucked his phone at Jihoon’s face to get him to stop.
See, Jihoon had already left a five-star review, just two days after their first meeting. Kiin didn’t fully think he’d stoop low enough to edit it worse, but he also didn’t want to take his chances.
His clients that come to him for alchemy would never give him a rating lower than five stars. His bar patrons are another story entirely, but Jihoon doesn’t get that pass.
“I’ll kill you myself before you die to a potion,” Kiin had muttered, and Jihoon had pretended not to hear, waving Kiin’s own phone smugly in the air, contact name Jeong Jihoon already inputted, with about fifty little smiley faces and hearts in the notes section.
Kiin had resolved to clean that up later.
It’s been a decent few weeks—about seven Tuesdays, Kiin would guess. About seven Tuesdays, alongside the occasional Sunday, and then there’s the recent string of Wednesdays as well, not to mention the random Thursday afternoons—the point is, that later has yet to arrive. Kiin blinks blearily at the stupidly pink hearts surrounding Jihoon’s name as another string of texts come in—wake uppp, Jihoon’s saying, the text bubble permanently typing. Why’d you close early ystd?
How did you know that, Kiin sends back, squinting his eyes shut at the near painful brightness of the screen. He opens them again when the device buzzes in his hand.
Omg, Jihoon’s said. Omgomgomgomg, and then, KIINIE YOURE SICK, attached to a miserably sad gif of a rather wet cat, and Kiin’s brain barely processes it.
How did you know that, he replies again, intelligently. He wonders if a Friday client ran their mouth. More specifically, he wonders if it’s Siwoo or Jaehyuk that he needs to kill.
Jihoon’s messages pause for a moment, and then an essay appears. Kiin picks out maybe one sentence from the massive block of text—Kiiniiie if I show up at ur house u wont freak out right—and supposes that he’s become delirious from the sickness.
He texts Jihoon back, says something coherent and truthful like I’m healthy, and it’s not a cold, ignores the subsequent spam of panicked cat emoticons, and passes out.
He wakes up what feels like mere minutes later, but the texts on his phone are dated to over an hour ago, and he reads Jihoon’s latest message at least three times before even attempting to crawl out of bed.
Kiinie, Jihoon had sent him, just three minutes ago. I’m at ur house lol!
Kiin doesn’t want to get up, but Jihoon’s follow-up text threatens to pick his lock if he’s not shown proof of life in the next five, so he musters up the energy to react with a thumbs-down, and pulls a blanket off the bed with him as he stumbles to the door.
The door unlocks with a click, and barely even cracks open before Jihoon’s entire head is shoved into his house.
“Hi!”
Kiin still thinks he might be hallucinating a bit. “Why are you here?”
Jihoon almost looks offended, but Kiin waves him forward impatiently without waiting for his answer, and it’s nice, somehow, when Jihoon’s hand curls firm around his upper arm to lead him to the couch. Kiin sits with a sigh, heart feeling like it’s about to pound out of his chest from even standing up, and lets his eyes slip back shut as he leans against the cushions. The blanket slips down, half on the floor at this point—it’s unimportant, Kiin decides. He’ll fix it later.
Jihoon’s grip loosens around his arm, but he’s still hovering, so Kiin asks without bothering to reopen his eyes, “Tea?”
“Oh! I’ll just—just head to your kitchen, then?”
Jihoon sounds uncharacteristically flustered, voice a bit more hesitant than usual—maybe Kiin’s just slower to process everything. He gets there eventually, nods in response to the idea of tea, and hopes Jihoon catches the tiny movement. He relaxes when he finally hears the steps shuffle lightly away over the hardwood of his floors.
Kiin’s too tired to question why Jihoon’s here. It’s not like he hasn’t been over before, but that was because of work. A few weeks ago, Jihoon had wanted to start testing out Kiin’s more experimental elixirs in the afternoon, claiming that the constant evening mutations were affecting his sleep.
Kiin had refused to head to the bar early.
Jihoon had showed up at his house.
Kiin had questioned him then, gotten some vague description of real estate websites as an excuse, caught a glimpse of a familiar instagram profile opened on Jihoon’s phone, and considered the merit of poisoning Son Siwoo’s drink next Monday.
So, Jihoon shows up at his house every now and then. He shows up, pokes and prods incessantly at Kiin until he makes him a drink, and then pokes and prods some more until he’s offered the potion of the day. Kiin’s been exploring gravity adjustments lately, and Jihoon’s been crawling around on his ceiling while he calculates ingredients—a decent arrangement, all things considered. Kiin doesn’t have to leave his house early, has his own personal lab rat on call, and the sacrifice of some of his personal space has yet to become a bother.
Still, Kiin thinks to himself, as the ache in his head starts to pulse evenly enough around his skull that he drifts back down towards sleep, this isn’t even work related, Jihoonie.
Kiin wakes back up with zero concept of time—it’s about as annoying as it is unsurprising. Everything feels heavy, muscles lethargic as he shifts slowly under the blanket tucked neatly around his shoulders, and he grimaces at the cold sweat slicking his palms.
There’s a cool hand pressed to his brow, comfortable enough against his skin that he doesn’t lean away from the light touch. He doesn’t open his eyes, either. Sleep is important, Kiin repeats to himself, until the words all blend together into some kind of rushing waterfall of white noise and too-bright light, and gentle fingers card rhythmically through the bangs plastered to his forehead to send him tumbling over the edge back into unconsciousness.
Kiin thinks he wakes back up, but that doesn’t quite make sense, because his eyes open to quiet darkness, and the sun doesn’t still set that early these days, does it? Maybe he hasn’t woken up at all, and this is simply a very lovely dream, courtesy of his fevered brain.
Jihoon’s there, in his dream—which is nice, Kiin notes, offering dream-Jihoon a languid blink, just to watch him crouch down close enough that the gold of his eyes starts glittering like far-off stars. Predictable, though. Kiin just can’t escape work, can he? He never used to dream of clients this often, but if Jihoon himself isn’t floating through his dreamscapes, then cats are, clingy little monstrosities that wind around his ankles and smile all the same.
Dream-Jihoon is offering him ginger tea. Kiin wonders if this is also to be expected—men dying of thirst in the desert have visions of water. Kim Kiin, dying of an everyday illness on his couch, is hallucinating that his favorite client has brewed him tea.
“I’m your favorite?”
Did he say that? Kiin frowns, and dismisses apparent telepathy as an unfortunately inexplicable aspect of illogical dreams—either way, Jihoon suddenly looks far too smug. That can’t mean anything good, but Kiin doesn’t play favorites.
Right?
He assumes it’s bad for business.
“We don’t have to tell anyone,” Jihoon says, his voice a conspiratorial whisper, and Kiin takes another sip of his drink to avoid responding.
Aside from that, Dream-Jihoon is nice—not that regular Jihoon isn’t, but he seems so genuinely concerned that Kiin almost laughs as he curls up on the couch again and Jihoon immediately rushes to arrange the blanket back over him. Dream-Jihoon is sweet, promises to bring him food when Kiin rambles on about forgetting dinner, rests his hand along Kiin’s cheek again so he can lean gratefully into the cold touch, complains quietly enough that it doesn’t activate the underlying headache—
“Kiinie, I’m literally right here.”
“Sure,” Kiin mumbles. “That’s cool.”
Jihoon sighs again, and Kiin watches him settle awkwardly onto the floor, pouting as usual, lips downturned as he whines something about being real, and not a hallucination, hello—
“That’s what they want you to think,” Kiin gets out, forcing his eyes open just to see Jihoon chewing nervously on his lip. “Stop that, Jihoonie. You—Tuesday.”
“It’s not Tuesday,” Jihoon says blandly.
Kiin rolls his eyes. It takes so much effort that they end up slipping back shut. “Tuesday isn’t soon enough.”
“I’ll come on Monday,” Jihoon immediately promises, and the pads of his fingertips slide soft and dry under Kiin’s closed eyes, lifting to tug his glasses away. “You just want me to pay you more, hm?”
“No.” That’s not right at all, but Kiin doesn’t have the energy to explain, so he just sneaks a hand up to Jihoon’s wrist, and squeezes. “That isn’t—no.”
“Kidding, Kiinie,” Jihoon says, quiet and affectionate and painfully endeared, and Kiin wants to protest when he laces their fingers together, his palms still damp with sweat even as he shivers under the blanket, but then Jihoon’s lips brush against his knuckles, breath light over the back of his hand—
“Time to sleep, alright?”
Kiin goes back to sleep. He dreams of towering spires of quartz, stretching up from the fractured ground of a cave so dark and vast that the crystals clustered in its sky look like stars. He reaches for their mercurial light, and his fingertips come away golden.
—
Jihoon trots into the bar a few days later, smile widening on his face as he waves enthusiastically at Kiin, and then it all contorts rather rapidly into a grimace as an explosive sneeze takes over his body—Kiin’s eyes flatten into slits, and his fingers tap slowly against the wood of the counter.
“Are you getting sick?”
“No,” Jihoon says, indignant, and he bends to sniff at the glass Kiin places in front of him. “Is this a mimosa?”
“It’s almost midnight.”
Jihoon just stares at him. “It’s brunch time somewhere.”
“Drink your juice, Jihoonie,” Kiin sighs, and Jihoon mumbles sulky complaints into his cup but dutifully sips at the drink.
After the second sneeze hits, and after Jihoon removes his head from his elbow, his eyes flick up to Kiin. He averts them immediately after, intently studying the bright orange of his drink—Kiin isn’t fooled.
“You’re sick,” he practically hisses, and Jihoon looks up at him again, somewhat panicked.
“I’m not!”
“Wait here,” Kiin says, as threatening as possible as he points firmly towards Jihoon. He reconsiders that nearly instantly when Jihoon shifts minutely on the chair, eyes already darting around the room as if to run—
Kiin gives him one chance. “Jihoon. Come here.”
“I might have to go,” Jihoon says cagily, sliding off his chair with slow, careful movements. “I might, uh—be busy. I think I’m busy. Maybe even right now.”
“You’re not,” Kiin informs him. “It’s one potion, Jihoonie.”
“Tastes bad,” Jihoon whispers, tiny steps carrying him away from the counter, hands raised as if to placate Kiin as he rounds the edge of the bar.
“You’re not leaving,” Kiin says, tone leaving no room for argument, but he can still see the exact moment that Jihoon decides to be an idiot and take his words as some kind of challenge.
“I’ll see you next Tuesday,” Jihoon suggests, lips twitching in barely concealed amusement as Kiin glowers at him. “Was thinking that maybe Saturdays would work, too—”
“Jihoonie.”
He’s being ridiculous. He already comes in over half the days of the week, Tuesday is just the official day. If Jihoon gets sick, he won’t be stopping by on the unofficial days, and then Kiin won’t have anyone to trial his new shrinking potions. Kiin scowls at the thought, and Jihoon’s laughter turns nervous.
“I’m suddenly so busy,” he practically squeaks, steps getting bigger as he backpedals away from Kiin.
His fingers graze the doorway as he turns to dash for the exit, and Kiin kicks a vial across the floor—Jihoon pauses, steps stuttering for barely a second, but that’s more than enough for Kiin to whistle, high and piercing, and the fragile glass of the vial instantly cracks apart.
Jihoon lurches to a complete halt, clutching at the doorframe as he cranes his neck back to throw Kiin an offended glare. “Kiinie, are you cheating?”
“You agreed to try an airborne potion today,” Kiin reminds him, watching the wisps of smoke fully dissipate before walking closer.
“You’ve poisoned me,” Jihoon coughs out, tipping forward almost in slow motion. Kiin catches his outstretched hand, finds the elixir settled neatly against his neural circuits, and activates it with a light squeeze.
Jihoon disappears.
A cat lifts its head, eyes round, so cute, and wiggles out from the crumpled heap of clothes on the floor. Kiin crouches down, and its whiskers tickle the back of his hand as it gives him a curious sniff, and then ducks to press up under his palm until Kiin scratches lightly around the base of its fluffy ears. A soft purr vibrates against him as the cat’s eyes squint shut into familiar little crescents, though its innocent happiness might not last for long—
“Time for your medicine,” Kiin says cheerfully, fingers lacing together under the fluffy underbelly of the cat, and it goes stiff as a board, limbs outstretched as he lifts it off the floor. The potion was only meant to last an hour, but Kiin doesn’t think Jihoon would have ingested the full dose before it dispersed into the air, so he’s on a bit of a time limit.
Cat-Jihoon opens his mouth, and screams.
“Calm down, please.” Kiin resettles the cat on his lap, cross-legged on the floor so he can hold Jihoon on his back as he reaches for the health potion. He had brewed it yesterday, after Sunday was spent still recovering from whatever ridiculous sickness had swept through his system—Jihoon’s Sunday was also spent by his side, see, and Kiin wasn’t at all convinced by his insistence that his immune system was indestructible.
“Kim Kiin, you’re such a cheater!” Jihoon screeches, paws scrabbling wildly at the air, and Kiin nearly takes a swipe to the face as he leans closer to poke at Jihoon’s mouth. “Gross, get it away—”
“The dose is smaller like this,” Kiin explains, as patiently as he can, and Jihoon’s back legs kick into his chest as he tosses his head stubbornly in Kiin’s grip. “Hold still.”
“I don’t want it,” Jihoon whines, and Kiin takes advantage of his open-mouthed complaints to brace his fingers against Jihoon’s teeth and keep his jaw open to quickly dump the potion down his throat.
Jihoon’s eyes go wide in horror, and Kiin keeps both hands firmly around his face until he finally swallows, an audible gulp that culminates in another pitifully upset whine, and then slides boneless to the floor.
Kiin sighs, nudging a cup of water in front of him. “Jihoonie, I’m sorry.”
“You’re not.” Jihoon’s entire head squishes into the cup, and the water clings to his fur when he finally pulls himself free and gives Kiin another dejected stare.
“I’m not sorry for making sure you won’t get sick,” Kiin agrees, and Jihoon grumbles at that, head turning away with a haughty sniff even as he pads forward and clambers over Kiin’s legs to flop back down in his lap.
“Pet me.”
“Demanding,” Kiin muses, but his hands scratch through Jihoon’s fur, smoothing over his side until a light purr rumbles through his chest again, and the sweet smile returns to his face.
—
It’s a slow Saturday in March, and Jihoon is holding Kiin hostage in his own bar.
“I’m paying you,” he practically squawks, lemon drop cradled protectively in his hands, “so you can’t kick me out—”
Kiin flicks a lemon seed at him. It bounces off the rim of his glass to roll on the counter, and Jihoon pokes at it with his pinky.
“You’re loitering.”
The lemon seed starts to roll back towards Kiin with Jihoon’s light nudge, and turns into solid lead with an audible thunk after its third rotation. Kiin places his fingers over the metal and feels it stiffen under his touch, the cubic lattice of its internal structures resisting as he forces them to compact even further.
He loses his concentration midway through, when Jihoon takes a loud swallow of his drink, and it transmutes in an instant into electrum. Kiin frowns at the pale yellow of the alloy.
“Wait,” Jihoon says, already finished chugging the remainder of his cocktail, “that’s good, no?”
“It’s not pure.” Kiin picks up the metal, pinching it between his thumb and pointer finger as he inspects the elemental composition. There’s still more silver than gold, but it’s the closest to an even split that Kiin’s ever been.
“So?”
Kiin gives him the electrum and shrugs, gaze focused on the way it rolls in Jihoon’s palms, glittering under the warm glow of the lamplight.
When he looks up, Jihoon’s eyes are fixed on him, and Kiin can’t look away from the sudden luminescence of the aureate inclusions in his irises—like the flash of asterismal quartz under an open sun, striations clear-cut and striking, brighter than any gold an alchemist could dream of transmuting.
—
“So, a love potion,” Kiin starts, but he pauses at the way Jihoon immediately perks up, head lifted from his margarita. “Don’t be too excited. It’s not something you should test.”
“Why not?” Jihoon’s lips purse out as he complains, and Kiin notices that they look healthier these days. He wonders if Jihoon’s realized it.
“I only make them temporary, but they’re still not very good for you,” Kiin says, searching for an easy way to describe it all without sounding entirely like a loveless robot. “If you’ve never been in love, you’ll never feel the same.”
“What about someone who’s already in love?” Jihoon asks, and he looks suspicious enough with that familiar smile that Kiin’s reasonably sure he isn’t talking about himself, but he can’t yet figure out if the near-painful twist in his stomach is disappointment.
“Bad news,” he says, somewhat curt, and doesn’t bother to elaborate.
“It works on one person?”
Kiin shouldn’t have brought it up again. Jihoon hadn’t even asked about it for over a month, probably would have completely forgotten, but Kiin just had to go and make it an issue—he tries to ignore Jihoon’s obvious confusion as his answers grow more and more blunt, and reminds himself that it’d be a professional transaction, nothing more. Clients pay good money for love potions. Kiin doesn’t need to ask about the details.
“Works on everyone.”
Jihoon’s chin rolls against the back of his hands as he thinks. “You fall in love with everyone you see?”
“Mhm.”
“I guess that isn’t ideal,” Jihoon admits.
It’s not, Kiin thinks, eyes locked on the bright gleam of the cranberries bobbing in Jihoon’s drink. But why’d you have to say it?
“It’d be nice, though,” Jihoon says, and Kiin watches him reach into the drink to pinch his fingers over a berry.
“To fall in love?”
“Well, maybe,” Jihoon laughs, cheerful as ever, and his nails clink against the glass as he lifts the fruit. “I meant it’d be nice if you could get me the potion, though. If it’s not too much trouble.”
“Right,” Kiin says, distantly, and sees Jihoon’s head tilt at the edges of his eyesight. The cranberry between his fingers pops with a soft hiss, juice already staining his nails as it drips back into the cup, and the red of it all smears across Kiin’s vision.
“I’ll pay you,” Jihoon offers.
Kiin’s teeth dig into the inside of his lip, and he turns to leave the counter. “It’s on the house.”
—
“You’re not gonna ask me why I wanted one?”
“It’s not my business,” Kiin says, though his fingers dig into the counter with an almost painful pressure as Jihoon lifts the vial, tips it slowly in the air, and watches the translucent liquid color a vivid scarlet with every light movement.
Jihoon hums, blinking at the potion with open curiosity. “Looks like blood.”
“It is.” Kiin looks down at his hands when the dull ache in the pad of his middle finger reminds him to stop crushing the wood of the counter in his grip. The tiny dot on his fingertip has already nearly faded from the morning, but Kiin presses his thumb over the mark and feels it sting in response.
“Doesn’t taste like it,” Jihoon announces, and Kiin’s eyes snap back up to the now half-empty vial as it dangles between his fingers.
“What the—you idiot, Jihoonie,” Kiin snaps, ignoring both the self-satisfied grin on Jihoon’s face and the sudden heat in his ears as he snatches Jihoon’s wrist and finds the elixir already spreading through his system. “You already looked at me, so I can’t even neutralize it. Why would you do that—”
“Kiinie, it’s fine,” Jihoon says, chin propped up in his other hand as his smile never falters. If anything, it’s getting wider. “I don’t even feel any different.”
Kiin ignores him. “It’ll metabolize in fifteen minutes, with the sip you took. Twenty at most. I’ll track it.”
“Okay,” Jihoon agrees, tugging his hand back to circle his fingers around Kiin’s own wrist, and his thumb slides gently over the skin as Kiin continues to glare at him. “Kiinie, I’m serious. I feel normal.”
“That’s what you think.” Kiin sighs, a sharp exhale that seems to take with it all the rest of the frustrated energy vibrating in his body, and his shoulders slump as he gazes distractedly at the sluggish drift of the elixir in Jihoon’s blood. He’s not even fully sure why he’s so upset. Surely this is better—Jihoon isn’t poisoning anyone else with chemical infatuation, isn’t squirreling away a moderately illegal potion that would possibly get Kiin investigated. He isn’t falling in love with some stranger on the street, artificial adoration lingering even after the immediate effects disappear.
He’s just sitting at the bar like usual, chattering away about every mundane little detail of his Friday afternoon, as it’s one of the only days of the week that he didn’t used to have free to visit Kiin—when Kiin thinks about it, though, he can’t exactly remember the last time he didn’t talk to Jihoon.
“I feel the same,” Jihoon insists again, and again, when Kiin keeps interrupting his stories to reevaluate the state of the potion in his body. “I feel normal.”
Kiin doesn’t get it. At some point, he came around the counter to pull up a chair next to Jihoon, tapped his arm to check the potion’s absorption again, and Jihoon had stolen his hand right back again, fingers laced firmly together.
“I feel the same,” Jihoon says, when almost an hour has slipped by, and Kiin can’t find even a trace of the elixir altering his neural pathways. “Kiinie, are you listening to me?”
Kiin nods. There’s a persistent heat behind his eyes, a sort of throbbing pain as he squints again at Jihoon’s stubbornly immutable limbic network, because now he’s sort of convinced that it was his own mistake, the potion should have done something—
“You’re not,” Jihoon says patiently, lifting Kiin’s hand to squish it to his cheek, and Kiin looks at him.
Kiin looks at him and remembers for what might be the first time, that although Jihoon is excellent with half-truths and cheerful deflection, the fair folk cannot tell lies.
“I feel the same,” Jihoon repeats, decisive and assured, all the burning stars in his eyes unchanged. They’ve been set ablaze for months, and Kiin had wondered for a while if they’d ever dull. “I always feel like this. Kiinie, do I have to spell it out?”
Yes, Kiin thinks, because he’s selfish and silent and always still so greedy, and he wants to hear it out loud.
“I already love you, Kiinie,” Jihoon says, and his smile flickers radiant across his face before Kiin squeezes his hand and ducks his head and lets Jihoon pull him close, arms wrapped tight around his shoulders, words whispered out again into his hair, pressed with a kiss to his cheek—What could a potion give me, that I don’t already have? I love you, I love you, I love you.
—
…
“Platonically?”
Jihoon practically spits out his piña colada. “We’ve been dating for months?”
“Just checking,” Kiin says loftily, and expertly dodges the pillow that comes flying towards his head. His own pillow. Jihoon hoards them all, has them all piled around him on the left side of Kiin’s couch, and refuses to give them back unless Kiin manages to snag one when it sails right at his face.
“You’re weird,” Jihoon complains, which is pretty rich, coming from him, “but I still love you.”
Kiin clears his throat. “In a general, worldly sense?”
“Gonna kill you,” Jihoon announces, abandoning his drink and his pillow pile in favor of lunging towards Kiin, dragging him down into the cushions and exhaling out a long-suffering sigh until he’s practically smothering him with his body weight.
Jihoon’s lips press to his jaw, breath warm against his skin as he demands, “Tell me you love me.”
“You have questionable eating habits, but you’re a great roommate aside from that,” Kiin starts, just to hear Jihoon’s immediate groan of despair.
“Kidding, Jihoonie,” Kiin says, eyes drifting shut as his hand winds into Jihoon’s hair, combing lightly through the soft strands. Jihoon’s breathing steadies against him. “I love you too. Of course I love you.”
—