Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Throughout the text, we read about searching. Not just in Sana’s search for her mother, but in the search for a home for the family, in the search for a meaningful relationship with her boyfriend, in the search for a sense of purpose once she has found what she was looking for. But more than that is the overwhelming sense one gets while reading that the world Min inhabits is in a constant state of looking and failing to find; the diaspora he captures so poignantly, the unsettled middle classes, the anxiety around the contemporary. It leads me to wonder - will he have found what he was looking for, when we hear from him next? 

• An excerpt from “My Top 10 Reads For The Booklover In Your Life This Christmas”, an article written by Mandy St. James for the New Yorker, December 2017. 

It’s a good full moon run, even if it does end with a bit of a fuss around it. 

Jeongguk is second to turn after Hoseok, and first to run into the woods, a celebratory noise clogging up the back of his throat, the knowledge that his family is behind him. The soft muck feels glorious between his paws, and even better once he gets past the regimental forestry trees and into the thick old woods proper, brambles scratching the skin on his back, burrs and sticking plants chasing after him almost as fast as the coven are. 

(Well. Hoseok, Namjoon, Seokjin. Jimin and Taehyung left a few hours earlier to set up their ritual, carrying a picnic blanket covered in cheerful gingham cloth (Jimin) and a long, wickedly sharp knife sharpened for the occasion (Taehyung). They’ve been discussing for the past week how best to collect the blood.)

But even without that, Jeongguk needs this. 

The wind of his speed courses down past his ears and along the hair on his back, and he’s been running for as long as he’s been truly living, and the moon is looking down on him the way he imagines an indulgent mother might, seeing her children playing. Beside him, slightly further down the line, he sees Hoseok in the same position - longer and sleeker, but with the same manic energy to him. He’s an auburn wolf, is Hoseok, with a dark snout that fades towards the colour of the rest of him. When he sees Jeongguk watching he barks.

The woods are feeling forgiving tonight, and it only takes Jeongguk half an hour, if even that, to make it to the circle. He’s the first to arrive and he stands, paws dug into the soil, panting, the moon and the circle and the woods all in the one place for him, the magic of the trees soaking into the grass. The circle looms. Around the base of the stones, mushrooms glow green and luminescent blue, giving off a soft and unearthly light. 

Jeongguk hates getting here first. Alone, the circle kind of creeps him out. 

He wishes it didn’t, and yet - 

Jimin is next, swiftly followed by Taehyung. Jimin’s still got most of his clothes on; Taehyung is wrapped in something a lot like Jeongguk’s spare bedsheet, nothing else, and both of them are completely covered in blood. Once Jimin sees Jeongguk, he beams with all his teeth and flashes him a thumbs-up - that way, Jeongguk can see the fingernails he’s missing, all along one hand, already growing back inch by inch across the soft pink flesh. 

Alone, Jimin also kind of creeps him out. 

(Well. On the full moon, at least.)

Namjoon is next, a lanky grey wolf loping through the trees, dark eyes staring straight up into the sky. He doesn’t make eye contact with anyone, but then, he doesn’t ever need to - he has their assurance they’re behind him, the leader of them all. After him, with only seconds between them, Hoseok and Seokjin slink through the circle, and there they stand. 

Four wolves. Two witches. As complete a coven as you’re likely to find, this side of the Atlantic. 

Jeongguk sits back on his haunches and waits to see what the circle will bring - what the moon will give - what the forest wants to thank them with. All are the same, even if they go by different names and live in different patches of the world. What will it be? 

And this month it is a doe, butter-yellow and downy, unmarked by the scars of rutting the native does have lined on their bellies, the deer that have been born the way all the others have and will die that way, too. The circle shines bright and spits her out into the grass, where she totters like a newborn, her fur still smelling sticky and damp with something a lot like supernatural afterbirth - it smells good, to the wolf Jeongguk is; smells appetising.

She looks first at the two witches (Jimin waves the knife at her) and then the four wolves (Hoseok growls; Seokjin snaps; Jeongguk’s belly rumbles hungrily) and she seems to make a quick decision about which side would be safest. 

This is how the circle repays them their protection. 

They gather under the light of the moon in the forms that suit them best, and the circle throbs like a heartbeat, like blood, like the way Jeongguk’s wrist does when he clamps his finger and thumb around the veins in his forearm. That’s life, and nothing less. The circle glows, sometimes, the mushrooms sprouting from underneath the stones - and that’s all it is. 

Just stones. 

Just stones. 

(Jeongguk wonders who placed them. He thinks they placed themselves.)

From within the circle some memory, or some link between the woods and the stones and the moon, creates a sacrifice for them. Something to bleat and bleed and kill and feast on, so that the circle loses almost as much as it gains from the company of the coven it lives beside. Exists beside. Is beside. 

Just stones. 

And here is the real unreal butter-doe, her soft eyes round and black with terror. She screams. Her narrow ankles, her slim body, breaks the bounds of the circle.

After that, as with all nights of the full moon, Jeongguk’s memory blurs quite significantly. 

He knows he had at least a little of the butter-doe, or whatever she was. Is. Used to be. Namjoon leads the hunt, and the rest of them give chase, and Jimin and Taehyung help in the ways they feel they want to; Jimin throws something that hits her on the rump, and Taehyung lets loose a word of magic that makes the air prickle with a cold, uncomfortable electricity. She runs, and they give chase, and the moon watches like an indulgent mother. Don’t run too fast, now. Don’t spoil your dinner.

Jeongguk gets blood on his paws and scratches down his back, and a mouthful of hind when they bring her down; she tastes cooked, seared meat over a fire, the richest venison in the world. He gets the exhilaration of the chase, and the winds and the moon whispering down through his ears, against his eyes and his wet snout and the length of his tail telling him he's doing well, she's proud of him. Run faster! Faster! 

And it gets blurrier.

The black, juicy berries of the bushes burst against his fur, and his paws sink so deeply into the mud that he's wet to the hind, to the tail, flecked with it. His teeth are dripping, his mouth is open, and the woods stretch for as long as he desires them to. 

(The circle does this to us - and to our woods. How big are they? Landscapes reflect thought a lot more than we think they do. A rainy day can be a happy occasion, and many many acres can fit inside one, like a puzzle box that you just need to find the knack to open.)

And so for the next six, seven hours Jeongguk finds himself swallowed in the delirious joy of being completely at home in his surroundings. He is a wolf, he has a coven, he is full and sated and he is the only thing that could hurt him, and that is something to celebrate indeed. 

And he can hear the wild-music Taehyung creates, the drum like a call to arms, and the screams. He can taste their blood on the air. 

He runs into Namjoon, Hoseok, Seokjin, all running abreast of him, and then he loses himself entirely in the thrall of the night. 

God, but does he love the full moon.

It’s technically the day after his move, but Yoongi has been awake all night, battling the fight between a trans-Atlantic crossing and being shoved forwards five hours on the clock. It is six in the morning and he is standing in a field, dew soaking his bare ankles, a cold September wind pressing through the holes in his knitted jumper. The full moon is still hanging in the sky, as though it hasn’t realised it’s time to go - it’s morning, now, technically, and still it’s there, the sun trying to push it out of the limelight.

(The size of it, the fullness of it, has always disconcerted Yoongi. He’s always felt like the moon at its peak signals something off about the world - that he shouldn’t be seeing it.)

In his hand, he’s holding an aluminium tin with Kitty written on it in flaking graphite. He’s filled this with bolts and other miscellanies, and now he’s shaking it, the noise rattling like gunfire around the valley. He’s miserable, and very cold. 

“Spanner!” He shouts, and shakes the tin. “Spanner! Spanner!” 

Under his jumper (which doesn’t really fit) he’s wearing the t-shirt he flew in, which smells of the stale plane air, the awful sourdough sandwich he had mid-flight, and a little bit of Gerry, who had spritzed him with his cologne before Yoongi got in the taxi. Ring me as soon as you land! He had sniffed. 

Yoongi hadn’t. 

“Spanner!”

He shakes the tin again, and tries not to wince at the echo; his new cottage is nestled in a dip between several bumps in the land, like the depression in a lumpy carpet, and any noise rockets around the little bowl, amplifying it horrifically. To one side of him there is the thin grey strip of a road, and beyond that the town, and on the other lip of the bowl there is a line of trees, curving all around, a huge green blot on the map he looked at on his phone on the bus from Dublin. The woods trail down like fingertips to stroke beside the back of his house, but he doesn’t want to think about going in there yet. Spanner isn’t that clever. 

He rattles. He shouts. His cracking voice replies to him, bouncing off the trees. 

Last night he had got in, and saw the mess his moving boxes were making of the new kitchen, and had decided he hadn’t the energy to sort through them. Maybe later. He had let both Spanner and Beanbag out of the cat crate they had flown in, and listened to their complains, and set them up with their cosy new bed, right next to the stove, and he had kissed Beanbag on her dark ears and he had stroked Spanner along the length of his ginger back and he had propped a window open to get rid of the smell of mould and he had gone to the bathroom upstairs to test out the water pressure in the shower. 

It was two minutes. When he came down the stairs, Beanbag was asleep in the bed, and Spanner was gone, and the window was open just a little bit further. Fucking cats.

“Spanner!”

The sky is pregnant blue, grey at the corners, so thickly spread with clouds that the sun could be anywhere behind them. He can barely see three feet in front of him, and he’s only vaguely aware of when the dark of the grass melts into the dark of the trees melts into the dark of the sky - and only that because he had the estate agent photograph the scenery for him, before he settled. 

“Spanner!” Yoongi shouts again, and rattles his tin, “Spanner, food! Din-dins! Breakfast time!”

He feels so stupid. He’s lost his cat, and he’s never going to find him again, and both he and Beanbag are going to die of loneliness. The grass is horribly damp. 

He shakes the tin, and the metal cracks, and someone very near him in the grass groans. 

“Jesus Christ!” 

There is a man lying face down in the field, and Yoongi could have stepped right on him - probably would have, if the guy hadn’t made a sound - and he’s completely naked, covered in bloody red scratches down his back, his shoulders, his calves, his thighs. He’s so muddy and grassy his whole body seems to have melted into the ground, like the dirt is claiming him back again, and Yoongi - 

Well, Yoongi might be sad, and he might have just moved across the world on a whim, but he isn’t actively suicidal. He starts to back away, and wishes he’d brought his phone. What’s the police number in Ireland? It isn’t 911. Is it 999, or is that just England? Fuck. What if those are Spanner’s claw marks? What if this guy killed his cat? What if his cat killed this guy?

His move rattles his can of metallics, and again the guy groans. “Shut the fuck up, Jimin.”

Yoongi backs away. Spanner isn’t here, that’s the main thing, and he’s probably either been eaten by something big and bad, or he’s hiding in a hedge or a hole or a tree or a - or something. He needs to go home and check on Beanbag. And what harm can this guy do him, anyway?

Just a guy. He’s just a guy. Not as scratched as Yoongi first thought when he saw him, though; the blood looks a lot more faded than it had appeared, and the cuts are silvery, half-healed. Must have been a trick of the light. “Who’s Jimin?” It hits him only after the words are out that he said them. 

Maybe he is crazy. He can imagine Izzy’s reaction to the news article - acclaimed American author found dead in a field mere hours after relocating to Ireland - and how pissed she would be. 

At his words, though, the guy leaps up as though electrified. “What the fuck - you’re not-”

He clutches first to his tattooed chest and then, on seeing how close his audience is, to the more essential parts of him, his cheeks flushing hurried pink. He’s saying something in rapid Korean (which Yoongi is as far from fluent in as it’s possible to be) and then switches to another language, not English, not anything Yoongi has heard before, and then starts swearing hard and fluidly in a variety of interesting ways. His arms aren’t cut up at all, and when he turns around in a fit of modesty, Yoongi blinks. The scratches which had seemed so prominent five minutes ago have completely vanished, with just the crusted brown blood there to say they ever existed at all. He must be tired, or the sky must be playing tricks on him. “Jesus fucking Christ,” the guy says, and Yoongi can see the moss and dirt clinging to his hair, “I - what time is it? Where am I?”

Yoongi takes another step back, and the man flinches away from the sound of the metal. A hangover? “It’s six in the morning, I think,” Yoongi says, “And I don’t really know where you are.” 

His hair is longer than Yoongi’s, but a lighter shade of brown. It parts in the middle and curves down past his pierced ears, stopping just shy of his jaw. “How close to town am I?” The guy moves his hands from his front to his back, as though that’ll preserve any more of his dignity. “Wait, shit, who are you?” 

At least he doesn’t sound like a murderer in training. Too panicked. Too concerned with how he looks. 

“I just moved in near here,” Yoongi says, and then scuffs his wet ankle with his toe, feeling oddly responsible, “Listen - do you - do you want clothes? Do you want me to call someone? Is your - are you feeling okay?”

“Oh, god,” the guy tilts his face up to the sky, and Yoongi can just see the slope of a rounded nose, “No, I promise I’m not - me and my family were partying last night, I guess, and it got a bit out of control. I thought I was in my garden. I thought you were my fr- my brother.”

“Jimin,” Yoongi says. 

“Um. Yeah.”

They stand in silence for a moment, but all Yoongi can think about is how scared his cat must be. “Clothes,” he says at last, more to break the silence than out of any real worry, “Do you want a shirt or something?”

“I live really near here.”

“And you’re gonna walk home naked?” 

“Um. Yes? It’s really close by, I promise.”

Even facing the other direction as he is, Yoongi can see how red his ears have become. “Surely you’re freezing.”

“I run hot?”

Yoongi really doesn’t know what to do with that. He misses his cat. He misses his friends. Around this time in the morning the city is waking up; the bakeries are opening, and the streets are flooding with the smell of warm dogshit, petrol, and bread. There are car horns and people shouting at each other and animals conveying displeasure at the top of their lungs, but in this field there is just him and this man and the complete lack of a cat, and a lot of space he doesn’t know what to do with. 

“What are you doing out here?” The guy says, eventually, such an innocuous question that it throws Yoongi completely off. 

“Looking for my - my cat,” he says when he recovers, “He… I just moved here, and he gets scared. He gets scared.”

“Oh,” the guy’s voice is softer, and the sun is rising rapidly now, brushing on his shoulders. “I’m sorry.”

Yoongi is completely horrified at how thick his voice feels, even to him. “No, don’t be. He’s - he’ll show up. He’ll show up.”

“I could keep an eye out for you? If you wanted me to?”

Yoongi plucks at the hem of his jumper, trying to pull it down a little further past his hips, trying to warm some of the other parts of him. “I… if you wanted to. Thank you. Please let me give you some clothes.”

“No,” the guy says, firm but not impolite, “I really live close, I promise, and it’s - nobody’s gonna see me this early in the morning.”

“I saw you.”

For some reason, that makes him blush again. “No - I meant - apart from you.”

“I know you did,” and Yoongi sets his tin down and pulls his jumper over his shoulders, instantly grimacing when the wind hits his bare arms and slides down the neck of his t-shirt. Before he can regret it, he flings the jumper at the guy. “Wear that anyway. For my peace of mind if nothing else.”

And that makes the man laugh, a breathy sort of giggle as he turns Yoongi’s jumper over and over in his hands. “If you’re sure. Aren’t you cold?”

“I live really close,” Yoongi says pointedly, folding his arms across his chest and clamping his jaw together so the guy won’t hear his teeth chattering. “Just - you can bring it back. You’re making me cold looking at you.”

“It’s Jeongguk,” the guy says, halfway through the jumper, his words muffled against the wool. It was Gerry’s before Yoongi stole it, and so on Yoongi it fits a little like a dress; on the guy, on Jeongguk, it fits only a little tight, sliding up his wrists, clinging to his shoulders. 

“Jeongguk,” Yoongi echoes, “I - pleased to meet you.”

Jeongguk turns again, a combination of the dark, his hands, and his jumper keeping Yoongi from seeing more than he needs to. His eyes are shiny, and his mouth is dark, dark red, as though he’s been eating cherries. “Thank you. I’ll - I’ll try and look for your cat. I’m good with animals.” And he smiles, as though he’s told a joke. 

“I-”

Through a sliver of cloud the sun snatches a look, only for a moment, before hiding away again under the blanket. But the moment is enough. A look of panic floats across Jeongguk’s face. “Nam- my family are gonna be so worried, oh my god - oh, fuck, I wasn’t meant to leave at all. I - thank you for the jumper, sorry for the - sorry! I’ll - I’ll see you around!”

Before Yoongi can react at all, Jeongguk turns and begins running across the field, his feet a blur of moisture and movement, the blood on his legs washing off with each step he kicks up. He never turns around and looks back, not once, although Yoongi stands shivering in the field until Jeongguk vanishes into the treeline behind the house. 

Fucking weird. 

Exhausted, upset, and very confused, Yoongi musters the energy to pick up his can and trudge back to his unpacked, unfriendly cottage. It doesn’t feel like a home. 

Beanbag is annoyed with him, and doesn’t come to greet him when he makes it through the door, but that’s okay. He doesn’t feel he deserves a greeting yet. 

“...And for the third night in a row, both Beaumont Hospital and the University Hospital report an unprecedented amount of animal attacks throughout the night. People in urban areas are encouraged to call emergency lines or local animal shelters with regard to stray or feral animals, and pet owners are being asked to reinforce closures, fences, and boundaries. The weather this week remains cloudy…”

Yoongi switches the radio off. 

He needs to go shopping. Beanbag is hungry, and so is he, and if he looks any more at moving boxes he’s going to go insane. 

“Stay put,” he says seriously to Beanbag, and he can tell there isn’t an ounce of sense in her pretty blue eyes, but she squeaks at him anyway and sits on his phone. He makes sure to lock her in the kitchen and close all the windows before he leaves - 

Although Spanner has always been the more adventurous of all three of them. No doubt he’s having a great time, chasing Irish mice or whatever it is cats do when they strike out on their own.

“Watch out for your brother,” he tells Beanbag through the letterbox, and immediately feels like an idiot. 

And now he’s off, walking to the shops. How very quaint - how very unlike anything he’s done before. This is what he imagined his life would be, moving to the country, away from the stress of New York and living within shouting distance of his ex, his manager, his publisher, and every single friend and hanger-on he’s ever accumulated. And the city had so many distractions. He was spoilt for choice with what to do instead of writing. 

(He hasn’t done any here so far, but that’s been conscious choice, not artisan coffee and then a meeting with some people who love what he’s doing for the diaspora and then a talk in some college halfway across the country to creative writing students and then more coffee and then a party somewhere fancy where the wine tastes like filtered shit and then more coffee and then Izzy ringing him up because that’s what she lives her life to do and then seeing Damien in the grocery store and being useless the whole day and more coffee and the publishing house sending him politely threatening emails about contracts and emails and coffee and tweets and coffee and emails and -)

Yeah. Okay. 

Yoongi’s problem is that he doesn’t want to write Pleasant Lands again. It was a book, and he wrote it, and now he’s written it and he’ll never write it again. 

Nobody else seems to have twigged that yet. 

He walks on.

The road beside the cottage and beyond is nice, quiet, and completely ruined. Potholes and briar bushes and mulched leaves make up the majority of the road surface, and Yoongi immediately regrets not buying boots before he moved; his soft canvas trainers are muddy ruins in seconds, and the cuffs of his jeans are flecked in rainwater brown earth, and grass stains. In the daylight the place looks a lot less creepy and abandoned - just abandoned, but that’s what he gets, he supposes, moving to a place renowned for the rural abandon of it all. The morning is cold and bright, and smells of October, and blackberries hang thick and fat on the bushes he passes; when he reaches out to pick one, it bursts against his thumb, and the purple drips underneath his nail so that when he sucks at it he can’t quite get the colour to leave. 

This is why he moved. Not to get away from the city, and not to find himself. He needed to breathe, and what better air to do it with? 

It takes Yoongi almost an hour to make it into town, although he suspects that’s got more to do with the speed of his pace and the distractions the hedge offers than any real difficulty, or distance, in the walk. 

(Twice he stopped because he’d seen a hare - ears shorter and body longer than a rabbit, standing alert and attentive in the middle of a field as though she’d seen something tremendously frightening  - and once he stopped to feed a donkey a handful of grass from the side of the road, and once he stopped to look at a calf headbutting his mother’s udder for the last few drops of milk.)

Well. Town is a lovely exaggeration for what it is, when he finally makes it there. 

The place is called Follie, and although on Google and on the maps it’s down as a large village, when Yoongi gets to it (and it happens accidentally, one step in the countryside, another in the houses) it’s just a street on a hill. There’s a church at the top and a sports pitch at the bottom, and a mossy sign telling him it’s a kilometre and a half to the school. There’s a petrol station, a little grocery shop, a post office, a few coffee shops, a bakery, the usual paraphernalia that sets a town out from a group of houses that happen to be beside one another. A bank. A library. A takeaway promising kebabs, pizza, and chips. A small veterinary office with a bemused cow on the shop sign, the door open, a woman in a blue coat and surgical gloves talking earnestly to an old man wearing fishing waders, suspenders, and a checked shirt covered in what Yoongi hopes is just mud. There are cars parked haphazardly down the length of the street in clusters so thick it looks impossible to actually drive down. People stand in groups of two or three chatting with the familiarity of neighbours - a mother with a stroller, a man walking his dog, someone asleep on the bench outside the buttermarket square, their newspaper over their face, wearing an old-fashioned brown suit and matching jumper underneath. 

Yoongi blinks and resists the urge to snap a picture for Izzy. She’ll never believe him. 

People greet him and he replies in kind, and smiles, and nobody recognises him.

(Almost true. One woman with a huge fluffy sheepdog asks him if he wrote that book, You know the one, oh this is so embarrassing, I know the title - um - Pleasant? Far Away? - and Yoongi smiles as nicely as he can and says yes. She pats him on the shoulder. Welcome to Follie, then, and I hope the next one’s just as good!)

So do I, he keeps inside his mouth, and walks on. 

The grocery shop is owned by a family called Robinson, apparently; a sign denotes this in elegant, hand-painted green script, with all the apostrophes in Robinson’s Grocery and Meats in their correct places. The shelves are wooden, stacked with crates full of loose vegetables (signs written in pencil say fresh from local Supplyers!) that melt into metal racks full of cereals, biscuits, tinned food, and packets of wilted onions and garlic and mushrooms browning in their plastic wrap. 

Yoongi smiles at the man behind the till, who is almost certainly a Robinson, and goes on the hunt. Cat food, milk, a few microwaveable meals in little plastic pots, a tin of peaches in syrup, a jar of honey, a half-loaf of seeded bread, that sort of thing. Sugar. Coffee, although he smiles when he sees only one kind of the stuff on the shelf, unflavoured, unbranded, just COFFEE - mix with water! written in bold green on a white sticker. He intends to. 

“Oh, I’m sorry-”

Too late, and lost in thought, Yoongi doesn’t manage to dodge out of the way in the narrow aisle, and a wildly swinging metal basket catches him right on the corner of his hip. Ow. He grimaces, but manages to turn it into a smile by the time the owner of the basket looks at him. 

“I’m sorry,” the man says again, sliding the basket down his arm to his elbow, “Oh my god.”

“It’s really okay,” Yoongi says. “Uh.” And he has nothing left, nothing at all to say, and he can feel the horrible red embarrassment climbing up his ribs to his cheeks. “Uh-”

The man (Korean, tall, broad-shouldered, dimples in his cheeks and a smile in his eyes) laughs anyway, kind and refreshing. “I’m sorry - I’m sorry. But I haven’t met you before, have I? Have you just moved?”

“You’re completely right,” Yoongi shuffles the load in his arms so he can shake the man’s hand, “Yoongi Min - I don’t live in town, exactly. The cottage beside the field with all the cows in it.”

“Namjoon Kim,” the man grins at him, “And you’ll have to be more specific than that. That describes every house from here to Dublin.” 

Yoongi starts working his way to the till, aware of Namjoon following him now. His basket is full of sweets, Yoongi can’t help but notice, and Doritos and energy bars and a pack of little cereal boxes and fizzy drinks. Huh. “Do you live in town?”

“Oh, no, I don’t either,” Namjoon says, and for a second he looks hesitant. “Me and my… my family, we have a house right next to the woods. I was here first, though, and then bit by bit the house filled up.”

“That must be so nice,” Yoongi murmurs, and his head is full of long windows and yellow mornings, and coffee and buttered toast and family. Namjoon never specified (and neither did Jeongguk, this morning) what either of their families were like, but in Yoongi’s head they become one, a huge mass of tumbling laughter and jokes and handshakes and smells and knowledge, and the whole mass just about fits into the building, and into the body. 

Yoongi has always wanted something like that. 

Or maybe just that, in whatever form he’s given it. 

They both checkout with the old Robinson relation at the same time, queued up one behind the other as the old man taps the prices into a mechanical calculator, but Yoongi doesn’t mind. He’s not had a conversation with anyone (barring a drunken neighbour in a field this morning) since he left New York. 

“We had a party last night,” Namjoon explains to the old man, when he makes some joke in an accent too strong for Yoongi to parse, but which makes Namjoon turn red at the ears. “We - well, you know. We like to party hard,” he explains to Yoongi, very sheepish, “And we woke up and there was… well, the only cure we had in the house was the hair of the dog.” For some reason that makes him smile. “I pulled the short straw to get something a little more substantial.”

“A party - why do I… oh!” In a flash, the morning comes back to Yoongi with more coherency, and he feels stupid for not connecting the lines sooner. How many Korean families live in rural Irish towns, really? 

“Huh?” Namjoon takes his shopping and waits, politely, for Yoongi. 

“Jeongguk! Are you related to him?” Yoongi starts tucking his own shopping into his backpack. 

Namjoon’s eyes widen and then narrow. “Jeongguk? How do you know him, then?”

“I-” Yoongi rubs his hand over the back of his neck, taken more aback than he wants to be at the sudden change in tone. “Um. I - well, I met him this morning. Last night? This morning. I was… looking for my cat, ‘cause he’s got out, and I saw Jeongguk in one of the fields beside the house. He was… well, he just mentioned he’d been partying, that’s all.”

“Oh, sure,” Namjoon says, but his shoulders are raised and as they both walk out of the shop Yoongi gets the feeling stronger than ever that he’s put a foot wrong, somewhere. “Did you find your cat?”

“Um. Not yet.”

There’s an old, muddy Land Rover parked outside the shop, and it’s into this that Namjoon climbs, flinging his bags of sugar and groceries into the seat beside him. “Good meeting you,” he says, his tone a lot more distant than it was just five minutes ago, “I hope - well, we’ll see you around.”

Who’s we? Is it the family? 

“Um. Yeah. Yeah, same,” Yoongi manages, feeling absurdly like he’s put a foot wrong, although he knows he hasn’t. “Good meeting - you too.”

Namjoon smiles, and when he starts the car music starts playing in a language Yoongi doesn’t know and can’t make out - floating, surreal music, even translated through the tinny car speakers. “Bye!”

“Bye,” and Yoongi is left standing on the street outside the grocer’s, alone, his shoulder already aching from the weight of his shopping. He misses his cat. He misses his friends. He is very tired. 

When he looks at the Land Rover, stopped to let the mother and stroller cross the road, Yoongi sees eyes in the rearview mirror trained on him, and it takes a long time for Namjoon to drive off. It doesn’t help with the sense of unease thrumming through Yoongi’s veins, and it takes a long time before he starts off on the road after him, on the long walk back to Beanbag. 

Weird. 

"Move to Ireland, they said," Yoongi mutters. "It'll be fun, they said."

It's the next day, now, and having woken up earlier than he thought he ever would, he's bundled Beanbag into a tote carrier-bag that came with a pair of shoes, put on his ruined canvas trainers, and while the light is still good he's diving into the forest to keep looking for Spanner. He refuses to start his life in a new country with one missing, presumed dead cat, even if Beanbag would love to be the only one getting spoiled and petted; Spanner will just have to put up with the inconvenience of spending his nights in a cat bed from now on.

Beanbag complains at him, so he readjusts the way she's sitting in the bag, her two paws hooked over the hedge. She's heavy. "Time for a diet, Beanie," he tells her, and in response she bats at his elbow with her paw.

The woods are not that terribly far from his house; just beyond the field where he first found Jeongguk, yesterday morning.

(Just yesterday morning? It feels like a million years ago.)

He knows the time is ticking on Spanner. He's been Yoongi's cat since he was a kitten only a few months old, and he's never been used to anything less than three meals a day and the warmth of an indoor heating system. By now he'll be terrified, and hungry, and out of his mind. "Spanner!" Yoongi tries, but he isn't really hoping for much. "Spanner?"

Beanbag lends her voice to the cause, squalling for half a minute before she loses interest and ducks back into the bag, curling up as a heavy weight on Yoongi's shoulder.

"Spanner!"

He really needs to buy a pair of boots. When he was in the city, he thought he was as hard on shoes as he could ever be, taken as he was to long and meandering walks around the packed blocks - but at least the worst of the muck New York had was slush, and puddles you could leap over, and muck that made itself known by scent far before you ran the risk of stepping in it. Here the only surface available to be stepped on is brown and squishy, coming in many varieties.

"Spanner!"

Yeah. He needs boots.

The woods are light and spacious, something Yoongi hadn't expected looking at it from the outside in. The trees are evenly spaced, conifers and firs, but he's been walking now for twenty minutes deeper in and they're melting from the long, straight trunks of the non-natives to trees far older, far thicker, more gnarled and wrapped up in each other than the ones he can guess must be used for timber. Sycamores, oaks, chestnuts, leaves with shapes he's seen in picture-books, the little helicopters spinning down in the soft morning wind. The whole place smells of musk, warm, fresh leaves, the scent released with every leaf he crushes under his foot.

Yoongi has never been one for nature before, or at least, he wouldn’t have said so. He would go to the parks on a weekend with Izzy and Gerry, and maybe go on a holiday or two to the woods, but by and large his opinion was that trees were going to do what they did best, and he was going to let them. 

But these woods - 

And this morning - 

He can feel himself unwinding. The ball of tension he’s held inside his stomach, present constantly since the publication of the damn book, feels like it’s slowly dissolving into the rest of him, pressing back into his body, flooding through his muscles again. 

And there are birds, up in the trees, balanced in the branches, singing quietly. God knows what they’re saying, but Beanbag has re-emerged, her dark head out of the bag and her ears pricked as straight up as they can get. Yoongi shushes her down. 

“Spanner?”

He could walk in here forever. He’s turned around, completely turned around, but he feels as though he knows where he is intimately; as though he belongs here. Funny, really. You write a whole novel about the concept, and then you walk five seconds through some trees and you realise this is what you’ve been missing. 

Shut up, Yoongi. He can imagine Gerry telling him to chill out and get some food into him, stop being so pretentious. 

“Spanner-”

“What are you doing here?”

Yoongi twirls on his heel, clutching Beanbag to him, and sees two things at the same time. “What are you doing he- oh my god, Spanner!”

Because there, between the trees, rubber-booted, boiler-suited, and holding a very grumpy ginger tomcat, is Jeongguk. He’s wrapped the cat in Yoongi’s - Gerry’s - jumper, which looks as freshly washed as it can be, covered in ginger hair, and he looks appropriately horrified, an expression Yoongi is sure he shares. 

“I found your cat,” he says. “Um.” 

Chapter Text

The loss of the community and of the family is what drives a wolf to moonsickness. In the same way we suffer from lack of the vitalities, so we suffer from lack of the familiar around us. In the same way power attracts those that would make them a victim, so does it correspond to the time it takes for a moonsick wolf to turn unrepentant to their path. The corruption of power continues ever on. 

• An excerpt from Beneath The Moone, written by Agatha of Boscastle and translated into modern English by Francie Baynton

Jeongguk always loves the moon at the beginning of the run. He feels the connection to her running from his paws to the soil to the sky above, and it’s all one, and he’s in the one and outside the one and defined by the one, and he loves it. 

And all the rest of it. Leave the poetic stuff to Namjoon. 

He loves it less when his head is hurting, and his whole body feels damp from his face to his toes, and cold, and someone is hitting something very near his head. Jimin, probably, who never feels the effect of what he takes in during full moon - not like Jeongguk, who gets hangovers something awful when he overdoes it. 

“Food! Din-dins! Breakfast time!”

Fuck off, Jimin, Jeongguk wishes he had the energy to say. He must be in his bed, although he has no memory of getting there, and Jimin - or Taehyung - has taken it upon themselves to rouse their resident wolves, with all the glee they usually show when they get to be annoying. He wishes he could get ahold of his pillow, to throw it, but his head isn’t resting on it; he must have been very wriggly during the night. 

God, his head hurts. God. 

Just as he can hear Jimin taking an in-breath to shout again, he groans.

He makes the noise as pitiful as he can, just in case Jimin is feeling nice today, and wants to stop bullying his poor, hungover, sorry covenmate. The groan is complex. It has sub-groans, and a noise that Jeongguk will never admit to sounding a lot like a squeak, just to top it all off. 

The reaction is a lot more ferocious than he predicted. From very close up, Jimin shouts: “Jesus Christ!” 

So he isn’t feeling generous this morning, and Jeongguk is going to die alone and unloved in this bed, all cold, all damp - he must have gone to sleep still in his other shape, and his fur must have soaked the sheets - unloved, yes, because Jimin is a cruel, cruel man who never suffers from the aftermath of the moon. Idiot. Jeongguk has never been more miserable in his life. 

The rattling, clanging noise starts up again, louder now. Jimin must have come into his room. Maybe he’s right by Jeongguk’s door. 

“Shut the fuck up, Jimin,” he mumbles, and flails his arm a little in the air, although he doesn’t hit anything. Ugh. He’s so fucking tired. It must be early - he can feel the scratches and scrapes on his human skin still healing themselves, the damage the run has done to him knitting back up perfectly. 

Even Jimin isn’t usually this sadistic. 

There is a very long pause. 

“Who’s Jimin?” 

The person who speaks is definitively not Jimin. For one, the accent is far rounder, softer, hailing from over the ocean instead of the hills - for another it’s deeper and scratchier, and for a third it’s unfamiliar and quite, quite timid. 

Oh, jesus. Jeongguk startles to his feet and begins blinking, trying to make sense of his surroundings, focusing just enough on the man in front of him to realise that he isn’t Jimin, is nowhere near Jimin or any of the rest of the coven. “What the fuck - you’re not-”

Namjoon is really, really going to kill him. 

In a split second, Jeongguk takes it all in; here is a guy, in a jumper too big for him and pyjama bottoms patterned with little cats. They’re just a little too short on him, and he isn’t wearing shoes; the damp around his ankles and his bare feet is making him shiver, and the tin in his hand is rattling too. He’s shorter than Jeongguk, Korean, dark-haired, his eyes thin and brown and wide at the moment, clearly in fright, because he’s found Jeongguk sprawled out in his garden, or something. He’s pretty, even now when Jeongguk’s in full panic mode, very slight, all neck and wrist and rolling shoulder and he -  he’s new. He must be new to town. New to the surroundings. 

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, do you speak Korean?” Jeongguk says in the language in question, and then in his rusty witchtongue, “Forget me, forget me, do you know how to know you are all alone?” Which obviously doesn’t work because he isn’t a witch and he’s always been absolutely shit at magic. Fuck. “Bollocksing bastarding shitting fucking-”

And he’s naked! In front of this guy! He spins as quickly as he can without falling in the mud, and he wishes it was Taehyung here, or Hoseok, or someone who genuinely doesn’t notice or care when they’re naked in front of other people. Fuck, fuck, fuck. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he says, staring at the treeline in front of him - he’s run right through the forest, then, and out the other side. “I - what time is it? Where am I?”

He can hear the man rattling backwards. “It’s six in the morning, I think,” he says softly - his voice is very pretty, very easy on the ear at least, “And I don’t really know where you are.”

“How close to town am I?” Jeongguk moves his hands from his front to his back, although he thinks all hope of dignity might already be lost. “Wait, shit, who are you?” 

God, he must sound so creepy. How can he possibly explain this?

“I just moved in near here,” the man says, and there’s the squelchy sound of him shifting position in the mud. “Listen - do you - do you want clothes? Do you want me to call someone? Is your - are you feeling okay?”

A good Samaritan. Bloody hell. “Oh, god,” Jeongguk says aloud, looking up to the sky as though the moon will still be up to help him out, “No, I promise I’m not - me and my family were partying last night, I guess, and it got a bit out of control. I thought I was in my garden. I thought you were my fr-” he almost says friend, but friends aren’t family - “my brother.” 

“Jimin,” the man says.

“Um. Yeah.” Not bad, Jeongguk. Good story. It sounds like the sort of thing someone might say if they were found naked and muddy in a field at six in the morning. Either way, of course, they’ll all kill him for endangering the secret, but he can keep it under his chest ‘til then, and he wasn’t actually found in wolf form, which is always the fear. There are no wolves in Ireland.

Right?

“Clothes,” says the man at last, his voice a little steadier than at the start, “Do you want a shirt or anything?”

“I live really near here,” Jeongguk says. Now his duty is done and he’s been established as not an axe murderer, he’d really like to just - go home. Mope. Get some proper sleep in.

“And you’re gonna walk home naked?” 

Apparently not. “Um. Yes?” Jeongguk tries. “It’s really close by, I promise.”

“Surely you’re freezing.”

“I run hot?” Which he does, to an extent. Right now he’s freezing - the wind is cold against his bare skin, and his sweat has long since cooled and hardened into long, sticky patches against his torso and in the crook of his back. When he’s a wolf he’ll have no problem, but he can’t very well transform in front of this total stranger without the others actually killing him. “What are you doing out here?” He asks eventually, more to break the silence than anything else; he can’t start walking away with an end like that. 

“Looking for my - my cat,” says the man, tripping a little over the subject, “He… I just moved here, and he gets scared. He gets scared.”

Doesn’t sound like he’s the only one. “Oh,” Jeongguk says, a little softer now. He doesn’t think a cat was involved in last night’s proceedings, but of course he could be wrong, and maybe they took something else down in the heat of the hunt for the butter-doe. “I’m sorry.”

Now the man sounds like he’s on the edge, his voice thick and heavy. “No, don’t be. He’s - he’ll show up. He’ll show up.”

Jeongguk isn’t sure whether it’s the headache or the sadness that makes him offer, “I could keep an eye out for you? If you wanted me to?”

“I… if you wanted to,” the man sounds hesitant, but in the way of someone who doesn’t want to seem too eager to accept, “Thank you. Please let me give you some clothes.”

“No,” Jeongguk says - it’ll be wasted, because as soon as he gets into the trees he’ll transform, “I really live close, I promise, and it’s - nobody’s gonna see me this early in the morning.”

“I saw you.”

Jeongguk can feel the blood rushing to his cheeks. “No - I meant - apart from you.”

“I know you did,” there’s a rattling sound, the tin clattering into the mud, and then a quick intaken breath, and then something thick and heavy lands on Jeongguk’s neck. “Wear that anyway. For my peace of mind if nothing else.”

Jeongguk can’t help but laugh, pulling the jumper to him, holding it between his hands; it smells of travel and of grass and of coffee, and it’s warm on his skin. “If you’re sure. Aren’t you cold?”

“I live really close,” the man fires back sarcastically, but Jeongguk can hear his teeth in his mouth, clicking together. “Just - you can bring it back. You’re making me cold looking at you.”

Obediently, Jeongguk pulls it over his head with the warmth of someone else’s body still clinging to the threads. “It’s Jeongguk,” he says, shrugging the thing down his arms, the cuffs at his wrists, the hem just above his hips. 

“Jeongguk,” the man echoes, “I - pleased to meet you.”

Jeongguk turns around, making sure everything is covered this time, using the jumper and a good amount of hands spread over the essentials. “Thank you,” he says, drinking in how the man looks; his t-shirt is a wide v-neck, and the removal of the jumper has forced it down one shoulder, climbing up the other side of his neck. “I’ll - I’ll try and look for your cat. I’m good with animals,” and he smiles. If Taehyung was here, he’d be in fits. 

“I-”

But then the sun shows her face through the clouds, and Jeongguk realises what’s really happened - he’s gone missing during a full moon run, and now it’s morning and nobody knows where he’s been. Fuck. “Nam- my family are gonna be so worried, oh my god - oh, fuck, I wasn’t meant to leave at all. I - thank you for the jumper, sorry for the - sorry! I’ll - I’ll see you around!”

He runs as fast as he can for the treeline, the mud splashing up his bare thighs, aiming for a bit where he knows the trees are thick enough to conceal a transformation just a few metres into the boundary. Namjoon will be panicking, especially if Jeongguk ran off on his own early in the hunt, what with this scare down in Dublin and Jeongguk’s - 

chequered, shall we say - 

history with the subject. Fuck. 

As soon as he’s in the trees he wrenches the jumper off again, careful around the collar not to tear at it, and he rolls it into a ball with the sleeves tucked inside the body of it. It still smells of the man. 

The man. He didn’t even get a name, just a mission, just a cat. What’s that meant to mean? 

Fuck. Again. 

Once the jumper is securely bundled up, Jeongguk shifts, his bones settling comfortably into the shape they’ve spent the most time in, and he opens his jaw to hold the jumper there as securely as a child might rest between his teeth. His fur wraps around him, far warmer than the thin skin he’s used to as a human, and he closes his eyes against the wave of embarrassment and regret at the conversation. He can’t do anything. 

And then he runs home. Simple as that. Before anyone can shout at him, he curls up on the sofa and goes to sleep, the jumper held comfortably along him, between his front paws and under his chin. 

Fuck. At least he can find the cat. 

When he makes it out of bed at one the next afternoon, everyone is in the kitchen already, and everyone is looking very much worse for the wear. 

(The house is big. Namjoon worked on it for years before Jeongguk joined the coven, back when the group was just Namjoon and then Namjoon and Hoseok working in terse silence, Hoseok with his bag full of secrets and Namjoon with a head full of regret. Seokjin was next, and then Jimin tugging Taehyung along with him and the other way around, and then Jeongguk a good few years after all the rest. The house shows its age; the stairs are dark, varnished wood, and the windows go speckled in the winter months. It smells of coal and fires.) 

Hoseok is asleep on the floor, but dressed, with half a croissant in his hand. Seokjin is still a wolf, lying with his back against the kitchen island. Namjoon is leaning most of his weight against the kettle on the stove, fighting back a yawn. Jimin is lounging, dozing, in one of the hanging baskets, his hand dangling out to hold Taehyung’s; Taehyung is sitting cross-legged on one of the cushions, trying and failing to crochet one of his many many squares (for the blanket that will never be) all piling up in the corner of the living room.

“Morning,” Jeongguk grunts, dragging his feet across the tiles, “Good night?”

“Good night,” Namjoon replies once the yawn has forced its way out his mouth. “You went for a fucking hike, though.”

“‘S okay. Was in a field.”

“I wish I was in a field,” Taehyung says wistfully. There’s still a muddy, bloody handprint on his cheek, and Jeongguk knows without having to test that it’ll match perfectly to the lined fingers on Jimin’s hand. His fingernails have grown back. They make a pretty couple, but for these discrepancies, the small, lithe thickness of Jimin beside the long allure of Taehyung, both of them unearthly beautiful in their own ways, the blood and the life of them reeking through their skin as though they can’t help but be the beating heart of any room they’re in. 

“Got a letter from the London ones this morning,” Namjoon says. He looks tired, still in his pyjamas, and his eyes are all ringed with sleeping bruises. “Was waiting on you.”

“On me?”

“Who else?”

Seokjin groans, and stretches his paws out as far as they can go, and they all wait for him to wake up - and then he slumps back down against the island, and resumes his gentle, dreaming breaths. 

“Just read the letter,” Jimin calls from the hanging basket. The ends of his hair, tucked behind his ears, are still brown and red from whatever he’d been doing the night before. “Hyung will wake up when he realises something important is going on.”

Namjoon’s kettle boils, and he pours the water into a huge coffee press, tightly pressed grounds already in the base. He smiles, and it stretches all across his cheeks. “Who’s for it?”

“Me,” Jeongguk slides into a barstool by the kitchen island, followed by Hoseok, yawning jaw-crackingly wide.

The smell of it is evidently enough to rouse Seokjin, who transforms from under their feet with a swear and the dull thunk of his head hitting the island. “What did I eat last night?”

“Among other things, lots of nettles,” Jimin sing-songs again. “And one of you drank a little of my blood, I think.”

“No, it was mine,” Taehyung doesn’t look up from his crochet. 

Seokjin makes a smacking noise with his lips, standing, and Hoseok snatches a throw from the sofa to wrap around Seokjin’s middle, just to try and preserve just a little bit of whatever dignity he still lays claim to. “It must have been me. God, all I can taste is death. Any food in the house?”

“I’ll make a snack run after the letter,” Namjoon promises, bringing the coffee press to the island, four mugs hooked on a finger each. “Do you want to hear it or not?”

“Read it out,” Jeongguk props his hand on his chin, waiting for his coffee. He doesn’t feel as terrible as he did this morning, and he certainly doesn’t feel as bad as Seokjin looks - although in all likelihood, Seokjin only feels so awful because he interfered with the witches, his normally-beautiful face bruised and battered, the marks stretching all down his body. The day after a moon run is a strange day, because while the moon gives you an immense amount of energy, that energy must be paid back in some way. Everything has balance. No other time of the month exhausts Jeongguk quite so much, and every other shift is normal. He’s perfectly comfortable in each of his forms. It’s just the exhaustion after the moon leaves you, and your bones remember what it is to hold the weight of your body up with no aid at all. 

“Read it out,” Taehyung says. 

(Undoubtedly, witches have their own price to pay, but Jeongguk has always been a little too scared of their rituals to ask.) 

Namjoon clears his throat, and pulls a single sheet of file paper out of his pocket. “Ahem.”

“Is that it?” 

“Of course that’s it,” he glares at Hoseok, who looks unimpressed. (Jeongguk, secretly, shares his feelings.) “She rang me last night. I guess there’s only one thing she wants to tell me that she can’t over the phone.”

“Very intriguing,” Seokjin says in deadpan, and takes a loud gulp of his coffee. “Go on, then.” 

The file paper is thin, and the pen Madeline uses is thick, so Jeongguk can almost read what she’s saying through the page itself, just flipped and inverted. Madeline’s handwriting is almost as bad as Namjoon’s; it’s taken them years to be able to reliably decipher it, at times like this when she obviously can’t trust the phones. 

“Hello, everyone,” Namjoon reads. 

“Hi,” the chorus chant in monotone. Jimin giggles. 

Jeongguk wishes he was out looking for the cat, instead. 

“First of all-” Namjoon reads on a little, and his eyebrows narrow, and slowly, slowly the humour drops from his face. “Oh, bollocks.”

And that’s like waving a glass of water in front of a man dying of thirst. “What! What is it! Oh, Namjoon, don’t be a dick-” 

“Shut up and listen,” says Namjoon. 

They (mostly) shut up, and (mostly) listen.

First of all (Namjoon reads), I want you guys to know if I could do this without being alarming I would have, but at the minute I just see no way to hold back without risking it. Don’t worry, though, the risk is far less than I’m making out. I think. 

Jeongguk laughs nervously. “What’s she-”

Three of them shush him at once. 

I don’t know what you’ve heard of Dublin, but I think it’s something bad. Animal attacks, rabid dogs, five nights in a row, and it’s starting to make its way into the news here too. You know as well as I do that when there’s smoke, fire comes looking for it. 

“Hold on,” Taehyung sets his work aside, “Is she talking about-”

I’ve heard nothing concrete (Namjoon continues, shrugging his shoulders), and that’s why I don’t think you guys should do anything, but I would feel bad if I didn’t at least let you know that something’s in the air. Amandi had another one of his dreams the other night, and he was pretty shaken up about it. Very shaken up, in fact. 

He didn’t dream about anyone we don’t know, and that’s why I’m not particularly worried yet. But he did dream about Follie, and about you, and the circle in the woods, and great, great danger. 

“She’s underlined it,” Namjoon says, and turns around the paper for them all to see. Jeongguk can see a little tear in the fibre, where the tip of Madeline’s pen has gone through to the other side. “Twice.” 

“Keep going,” Seokjin says. He looks totally awake now, no trace of the moon left on his cheeks, and Jeongguk is sure he looks the same. 

He dreamt about someone new to the town, connected to the danger. I’m sure I don’t have to spell it out for you but I will anyway - Daniel has spent some time on the continent recently, and he’s talked about power far beyond what he’s felt in years, moving through the circles towards you. Hunters are like flies to honeywater, all through Italy, up France. 

I don’t know what to say. Keep your wits about you. Watch out for anybody we don’t know. I couldn’t risk ringing you. I thought maybe someone might be able to catch the call. 

After Namjoon finishes, there’s a shaky, cold silence in the kitchen. 

“Jesus,” Hoseok says at last. “Fuck.” 

Jeongguk passes a hand through his hair. “I don’t… so what - so what do we actually know?”

“Amandi’s dream. That’s the only solid thing we have to work on,” Jimin says. He sounds a lot more serious than he had five minutes ago, and when Jeongguk looks over his shoulder, he sees Jimin has righted himself in the hanging basket, his face is clean of any stained blood. “We know he can be trusted, but what does Daniel know about - about any of that?”

It’s been almost a year since Jeongguk has seen the London coven. He rests his chin on his hands, and tries to think. 

There is Madeline, the leader of them, a wolf like most of the Follie coven, a friend of Namjoon’s from far, far back. Susannah, from somewhere in Normandy originally, a witch with a tendency to defensive charms and amulets - Amandi, a Londonder who’s lived there longer than any of them, a prophecy witch - and Daniel, Scottish, and the only vampire Jeongguk has the pleasure of knowing. 

Yes. Of any of them, Amandi is the only one whose word they can trust on this. 

“We have to be careful all the same,” Namjoon sets the letter down face-up on the island and stands, scooping his coffee mug into his hand. “I’m going to - I’m going to call Madeline.”

“I’ll text Daniel,” Seokjin says, phone already in his hand. “I’ll - okay.”

Jimin puts his hand on Taehyung’s shoulder, and Jeongguk watches as though transfixed, his thumb rubbing along the skin by Taehyung’s neck. “We’ll look into it. Is anyone near the circle today?”

“I guess I was planning to work near there this week,” Jeongguk forces himself to say, “But I - I mean, I have today off.”

“Don’t worry about it. Go tomorrow,” Namjoon says, eyes locked on Jeongguk’s. “But do go. And - and all of us, from now on, we have to be alert. Even if it isn’t hunters, Amandi’s never wrong, and I - it could be anything. It could be anyone. So watch out.” 

That night, Jeongguk lies awake, listening to the chanting coming from the room above him. Jimin and Taehyung share the attic, the whole floor theirs so they have space for the bed and the herbal table and the ritual space and all of it. Beside him, he can hear Seokjin several hours into a call with Daniel, murmuring through the wall. Below him he can hear the TV, Hoseok in the throes of restless anxiety that keeps him from sleeping. 

Jeongguk can’t sleep, either. 

He hadn’t thought of the man in the field until long after Madeline’s ominous note, and now he’s kicking himself for not doing so until now. Stupid of him. Be wary of newcomers, and how much newer can you get without arriving with the letter?

But he hadn’t got any sort of itch from him, no funny feeling, no sense of something off. Just a guy looking for his cat. 

He can’t sleep. He turns over to one side, facing his bookshelf, and then to his other, to the window, the curtains parted so he can see the forest. His work jacket is hanging ready for him tomorrow on the outside of the wardrobe, and his boiler suit is folded up in the washroom in the basement. 

Most of them have jobs. Jimin and Taehyung make custom potions on commission, mostly for people on the continent who want the authenticity of Irish-brewed remedies. Namjoon tutors the students from the high school through their exams. Hoseok works in town, at the bakery, packing the van and running deliveries to the smaller grocery shops in the area. Seokjin’s family gave him a bundle of money, amount undisclosed, and so he mostly stays at home, doing favours, running the house. 

And Jeongguk works for the Forestry Commission, as a sort of groundskeeper for the Follie Woods when the commission can’t be bothered to come and look at it themselves. It worked out perfectly - the coven had to have someone near the circle. 

He rolls over, and over, and over. Settles for looking out into the forest, eventually, the firs that melt into the native trees, and the circle somewhere in the centre, a comforting constant. 

He thinks about Amandi, and Daniel, and the news from Dublin. 

He thinks about that cat. 

It takes a long time for him to fall asleep. 

And next morning, Namjoon is odd at breakfast, and won’t meet Jeongguk’s eye. 

“He did something when he was at the shop yesterday,” Hoseok whispers quietly, on coffee duty today, “But he won’t say what. I think he’s gone paran-”

“Saw someone new to town, that’s all,” Namjoon looks up then, and for the first time since yesterday breakfast Jeongguk looks him in the eye. “He knew a lot more about us than I would have thought. I know I don’t need to tell you all to be careful.”

So it’s about the guy, then. Jeongguk can’t eat fast enough, get dressed fast enough - he climbs out his window with his work clothes tied in a bundle, and runs as the wolf all the way to the forest’s edge before he changes. He doesn’t want anyone to tell him not to help the man out, not obviously. 

He just wants to do a good turn. 

Yeah? Yeah. 

When he unwraps his boiler suit and his jacket and his boots from the heap he’s been running with, the jumper tumbles out of the pile, too. It’s nothing special. It doesn’t even smell of the man, now, just of the scent-free laundry detergent they have to use, and a little bit of the woods from the seconds it spent rolling around in the ground there. Weird, but he won’t - he won’t complain. He’ll just leave the jumper on the guy’s front doorstep, and that’ll be the end of that, and Namjoon won’t want to kill him. 

He gets dressed at the treeline, his paws scrabbling against the trunk of a tree as he changes, the rocky soil churned up by his paws getting all over the seat of his boiler suit as he wriggles into it. He works for the Forestry Commission, but mostly with remote work, checking the lumber sites before they’re ready, making sure the boundary of the protected forest is still intact. Their checking-guy. He hasn’t any real power over the woods.  

(The circle would see to it that no diggers come rumbling towards it, but Jeongguk still has to earn a wage, and he doesn’t mind having a magical tree-thing doing all the heavy lifting for him.)

He pulls his thick boot socks on, and shoves his feet into his lined wellies. There is some work that can’t be done without him, and this is one of them; checking the trees due for lumber. They’re harvested every ten years, and then the ground is ploughed and re-seeded the following spring, and the forests around Follie have been split into four segments surrounding the protected wood at its heart, so every two years there’s a harvest in at least one section of the forest. 

Jeongguk keeps walking, his hands in his pockets, a whistle caught between his teeth, the jumper slung over his shoulder. Every few minutes he finds himself crossing the muddy gravel of a forestry track, the paths cut through segments to let the diggers through, the paths he’s meant to take when he drives up here. He doesn’t drive to the woods.

The four segments have just been named for the points of the compass they’re closest to, and the part Jeongguk is meant to be testing today is Follie Wood West, the one nearest to town. He doesn’t even really have to do this job today, not with the air so bitingly cold, but Namjoon had been so off at breakfast, and the house had been so stilted with the news Madeline brought, that Jeongguk had been all but biting to get out of there. It isn’t his fault he works outside. It isn’t his fault he met someone after the full moon - it isn’t his fault he stole his jumper. 

“Fucking Namjoon,” Jeongguk kicks at a twig, hands in his pockets, as he moves from Wood South into Wood West, the trees immediately jumping up from their little adolescent shoots to fully grown, towering many feet above him. “Fucking cat.”

He’s still going to keep an eye out for the cat. Namjoon can’t stop him, and neither can Amandi, no matter how dire his predictions get. 

And Jeongguk feels contrary.

Although now he’s thinking about it, he can smell something like fur in the air, and not his own, and nothing from the other night. This smells more recent, and a lot more feline - but is he imagining it? 

He sees a slip of ginger through the trees, the barest hint of a tail slipping underneath a bush. 

Not imagining it, then. 

“Oi, you!” He hisses, throwing caution to the winds - as though anyone will be out here, anyway - and leaping far faster than he should be able to in his human form, his hands outstretched, his wellies slipping and skipping across the muddy track. “You! Snapper or Snacker or Sapper or whatever-”

The cat is fast. It makes a break for the clear, and digging its claws into the trunk of a tree it scrambles up there, and sits, looking smug, on a branch far above Jeongguk’s head. Can’t catch me now, it says with a twitch. 

Jeongguk has often wished that he could shift back and forth without tearing his clothes, but boiler suits are too expensive to rip up just to intimidate a cat. He lets his snout grow out all the same, feels the burn on the end of his nose, and his claws sneaking their way out from under his fingernails, and he growls a little. “Skipper,” he tries, “Come down here. Now.”

It doesn’t work. Now the cat looks like it’s hanging on for dear life. 

Jeongguk eventually has to do it the hard way, wedging his boot into one of the ruts between branch and trunk and pushing himself up, grabbing the cat by one of its paws and tugging it until it must decide that he is the lesser of two evils; with an annoyed mrowl, it falls into his arms and sits, still and placid as anything, as though it hadn’t been fighting tooth and limb to get away from him. “You’re an idiot,” Jeongguk tells it seriously, “And now you’re gonna get me in trouble. Do you want to come to work with me, huh? Scanner? Slipper? Scrapper-”

He wraps the cat in the jumper as he speaks, folding the sleeves around its head. Two birds with one stone. That’s handy. 

“Spanner!” 

The voice comes reeding through the trees, and Jeongguk immediately spins around on his boot, and the cat in his arms starts fighting defiantly to get down. “Oi - stop - stop it -” 

“Spanner!” 

The man comes following his voice, his dark hair, his dark clothes, blending so completely with the background of the woods that Jeongguk has a hard time seeing him, even though he knows he’s there. His hair is dark, even darker than Jeongguk had thought when he saw him first, and little silver piercings peek through where it folds over the delicate shell of his ear, winking in the green light of the sun filtered through leaves. He’s wearing a t-shirt, and over it a checked grey flannel, and over that a fleece that looks both warm and far too big for him, his hands just about finding their way out of the cuffs of his sleeves. His nose is small and his mouth smaller, and his eyes smallest still, thin and narrow - Jeongguk always heard that dogs resemble their owners, and so must cats, as the cat in his arms wriggles around, reaching for the man in front of him. He still hasn’t seen Jeongguk. His skin is pale, and it almost shines in the green. 

“What are you doing here?” Jeongguk asks, when he can find his voice again. He can already see Namjoon reprimanding him in his head, telling him to stay away, but there’s no way a man this slight, this unaware, can really mean him any harm. 

No way. 

The man jumps, and when he turns, Jeongguk sees he’s holding another cat, fur as dark as his hair, thinner than Snapper/Scrapper/Spanner and glossier, her eyes wide in the startled expression of an animal out of her depth. “What are you doing he-” and then his eyes flick from Jeongguk to the cat, and his whole face changes. “Oh my god, Spanner!” 

Spanner. That’s the name. 

Jeongguk totally knew that. 

“I found your cat,” Jeongguk says, and then the man looks at him, eyes at his, and he forgets how to speak. “Um.”

There’s a long, painful silence, during which the cat in the man’s arms jumps free and runs to Jeongguk, her paws on the tip of his boot, screaming up at the ginger monstrosity wriggling in his arms. Jeongguk makes the executive decision to save his sleeves from being torn up, and drops Spanner, who immediately starts a claws-and-teeth fight with the cat on the ground. 

“Aw,” the man coos at the pair of them, “Beanbag missed him.” 

“I - Beanbag? Spanner?” Jeongguk doesn’t want this to be the first thing he talks about, but somehow it ends up slipping out. “Are they their real names?”

“Beanbag Min and Spanner Min,” the man indicates with his foot which cat is which, and then looks up and smiles, his cheeks crinkling, his eyes thinning, “And I’m Yoongi Min. I didn’t introduce myself the other morning.”

“Yoongi,” Jeongguk repeats. “Korean?”

“Only by birth, I’m afraid,” and Yoongi does have the clear, enunciated accent of someone who’s grown up speaking American English, “But I’m second-generation, so I don’t even know the language. I - are you? You spoke some the other night.” 

“Uhm. By birth, again. My friend... was teaching me some Korean, so I think it slipped out. I was a bit… out of it.”

“Oh, really?” Yoongi smiles, and curls his hand into the elbow of his other arm, the soft fleece folding around his knuckles. Jeongguk watches, entranced, as the fibre tucks around his knuckles. “I would never have guessed. I - I - so do you work here?”

Jeongguk waves his arm around to encapsulate the wood. “I work for the Forestry Commission. Sometimes I’m here, sometimes I’m fifty miles away, but I’m lucky enough that today I was here - I think I would have died having to drive anywhere.”

“Hangover blues,” Yoongi’s face turns towards the sympathetic. “I get that.” 

Hunters could be anywhere, the Namjoon that lives on Jeongguk’s shoulder and ruins his life whispers in his ear, so ask who he is. Ask why he’s here. I bet he won’t have an answer for you.

“S-so,” Jeongguk forces out, watching Yoongi try and shoo his cats into his arms, folding the jumper up, “So, what brings you to Follie? Or to - to the surroundings, I guess. Uh.”

“Ah - a bit of peace and quiet. I’m from NYC,” Yoongi pats his lip with the pad of his index finger, “In case you didn’t guess. I’m… I can work remotely, and I was in a bit of a rut. And a bit of a crisis. I sort of… I bought the plane tickets before I bought the house, but it was all very rushed.”

See? Jeongguk says to the doubt on his shoulder, Perfectly innocuous. 

And yet Amandi’s dream…

“I guess we are a quiet sort of an area.” Jeongguk sets out to walk again, towards the direction he knows Yoongi’s cottage is, and he isn’t surprised when Yoongi follows, both his cats twisting around his ankles as loyal as any pair of dogs. “But I’m surprised you settled here. We don’t get any online traffic, y’know? A bit too back-of-beyond.” Hah. See how he responds to that. 

Yoongi shrugs, a fluid motion from one shoulder to the other, his fleece following the movement around his arms. “I picked it at random, too. I just… looked for the cheapest country cottages I could find. I only needed the space for me and those two, y’know? This was the first thing Google spat out at me.” 

Normal. He’s fine. 

But something tickles the back of Jeongguk’s neck. There’s something more here. Something wrapped up in this man, something he isn’t telling. “Do you mind me asking what you do?”

“I’m a writer,” Yoongi turns a little bit red, just the barest pink, right on the ridge of his cheeks. “Um. You probably haven’t read it. Um. Far Away From Pleasant Lands?”

“Sorry,” Jeongguk twists his face up, and he genuinely is. “I’m… I’m not much of a reader. You’d want to talk to my friend about that - he’s read, like, everything. Namjoon’s such a swot, I swear-”

“Namjoon?”

A creeping unease strokes down Jeongguk’s neck. “Do you… do you know him?” But of course. Namjoon bumped into him in the shop and went all paranoid. Great. Fantastic. 

“I just met him, is all,” Yoongi smiles, but it’s as fake and forced as Jeongguk has ever seen one. “I… huh. Small town, I guess.”

“Yeah,” Jeongguk agrees. The cats tickle against his boots, and one of their tails brushes against his calf. 

They reach the edge of the woods, and Jeongguk can see Yoongi’s cottage, the little roof, the wooden curlicue carvings along the spouting, the painted eaves. “Do you want me to walk you all the way?”

“Oh-” Yoongi startles, as though he’s only just realised how far Jeongguk has taken him. “Oh, God, I didn’t realise that’s what you - no, it’s okay. But thank you. I would have gotten lost in here, I just know it.”

The trunk of one tree creaks in the wind, loud, right beside them both. Jeongguk can see it in his mind’s eye, bending and bending over the years, until all it will take is one gentle breath for it to give up its grasp on the soil below it. It sounds like it’s complaining. “No problem,” he remembers to say, right before the pause gets too long, “It’s easy to get lost in here.”

Yoongi smiles at him, and presses his palm to Jeongguk’s elbow for a brief, electric second. “I’ll bring these two home.”

Jeongguk stands at the treeline and watches him go, listening to Yoongi murmur to his cats, long after human eyes would have ceased to see and human ears would have ceased to hear. His palm leans heavily on the trunk that had groaned. 

He doesn’t know why, but he feels something coming, the same way he feels right before a thunderstorm. The clouds are black and heavy, and the sky hums with the promise of activity that will leave the place different when it’s gone. 

But when he looks up the sky is cloudless and blue, and all around him the woods are silently settling. 

Chapter Text

Yoongi Min is a novelist, poet, and full-time parent to two cats, Beanbag and Spanner. His debut novel, Far Away From Pleasant Lands, has been widely lauded as the next contemplative masterwork for diasporic America, and can be found in all good bookstores and retailers. In his spare time, Min enjoys poetry readings and classical music. He currently lives in rural Ireland, where he is working on his second novel, and raising his cats. 

• The author’s biography accompanying the hardback first edition of Far Away From Pleasant Lands (Bloomsbury, 2017). It sits underneath a headshot of the author, pictured from behind and in greyscale; he is wearing a silk scarf tied tight around the neck, and a high-collared white shirt. Two cats watch the camera, one over each shoulder; Min’s face is obscured. He is looking out a window at an empty sky. 

The next week of his life can be defined by one word only: boring. 

Yoongi has two meetings with his agent, Annabelle, the contact with Bloomsbury. Both are unproductive and tense, and both feature Izzy desperately trying to play in-between with an obstinate Yoongi and an equally stubborn Annabelle, who keeps citing company figures, the contract Yoongi signed two years ago, and a list of rising stars she could replace him with. Yoongi refuses to budge. After both meetings, Izzy texts him, and he ignores her, feeling guilty every time. 

I’m trying my best, but you have to bend a little too. 

Yoongi, you have to work with me. I promise I’m on your side. 

He turns off his read receipts, and turns off his wifi, and starts ignoring his emails. Gerry tries contacting him on basically every device Yoongi owns, so he ends up switching them all off, or turning on airplane mode; he texts his contacts en masse, tells them he’s going off grid for a while. He looks at his empty notebook. He tries to phone a few people to sort out the house - a plumber, an electrician for the upstairs, someone to come and service the oven. He hangs out with his cats a lot. 

He goes into Follie twice, and the second time he bumps into Namjoon again. 

“Hey,” Yoongi calls up the street - Namjoon is hovering by the Land Rover, his hand on the door - “Hey, Namjoon!”

Namjoon’s shoulders square up, but when he turns around he’s all smiles. His arms are full of brightly coloured ring binders. “Hey. Yoongi, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, it was,” Yoongi reaches him but stops before the rear wheel of the Rover, watching how Namjoon paces a little bit back, as though there’s something stopping him coming forward. “Um. I was just… this sounds so dumb, now I’m saying it, but I don’t know anyone else in town.” (Which is true. And maybe he’s a bit starved of human contact, too, and maybe he wants to talk to someone who doesn’t have an ulterior motive, just this once, even if he is a bit weird.) 

“Shoot,” Namjoon says. His facial expression is still oddly twisted, but even in a frown Yoongi can see the arches in his cheeks where deep dimples must lie. His forehead is shadowed, his dark hair curling over and folding behind his ears, and his eyes are wide and pretty - he’s handsome, Yoongi can admit it, even if he is absolutely round the bend. He looks professional, too, more than he did the first day Yoongi met him, in a dark-patterned shirt and a pair of nice jeans that stretch him out, make him look every inch as tall as he is. Far taller than Yoongi, anyway, and broader of the shoulder and the chest. 

“Um,” Yoongi feels suddenly very stupid, “Uh - I was wondering if you knew anywhere near that would - you know, cars? Sell cars? I tried Facebook but it doesn’t-”

“Yeah, people ‘round here don’t go in for that online stuff, much,” Namjoon opens the passenger seat of the Rover and sets the ring binders in. Yoongi can see bags bursting with papers, a rucksack with a little charm hanging off the handle, completely at odds with how Namjoon looks. It makes him smile. “But I can keep an ear to the ground.”

“You’d be doing me a huge favour,” Yoongi says. Waits for the rest of the conversation.

“Cool.” Namjoon stands, then, the car door open, just looking at Yoongi, like he’s fulfilled his end of the chat in any way. “I’ll let you know.”

“Um. Awesome,” Yoongi says, and he’s about to make a comment about the weather, feeling incredibly foolish, when Namjoon darts around the front of the Rover and all but flings himself into the driver’s side. “I-”

But he’s already driven off, with his radio blaring too loud to hear anything Yoongi might have to say. Yoongi doesn’t want to look to see if he’s being watched - he’s sick of being outside of wherever he tries to exist. 

He’s sick of being the one to start conversations.

“His name is Yoongi Min, and he’s a writer,” Jeongguk tells Jimin. They’re in the kitchen, alone; Hoseok and Namjoon are at work in Follie, Taehyung is upstairs video-calling Susannah, and Seokjin is out in the woods somewhere, having been struck by a mid-afternoon craving for venison. “Namjoon thinks he’s-”

“I know what Namjoon thinks.” Jimin is at the Aga wearing a pink Mum’s the Best Cook apron underneath a plastic knee-length surgical gown, splattered with various viscera around the middle. He’s prodding at a whole heart, possibly cow, possibly horse, which sits on a little metal stand over the hot ring, softly sizzling every time blood drips from the prop onto the heat. “What do you think?” 

“I think that stinks.”

“Shut up. Not all of us can be portent in dreams,” Jimin says, although it’s with self-satisfaction. He’s always been very proud of his anthropomancy, and he used to claim he’d be a haruspex if he could only find the time. “Anyway. What do you think?”

Jeongguk is sitting at the kitchen island, a cup of tea between his hands, warming himself up. He has to drive to the nearest big town today, in the afternoon, for a meeting with a contracting company about the felling work in Wood West, and he isn’t looking forward to it. “I think Namjoon’s… I don’t know. There’s something weird about him, but I don’t think he’s a hunter, but what else am I meant to think?”

“Gukkie, do you remember what happened last time you said that?” Jimin slips a knife, so thin it sings as it splits the air in two, into the heart. He pries the upper layer of flesh away from the body, and makes a humming sound. “We’re not done yet.”

“I know, I know, but I-” Jeongguk stops, mouth twisting in frustration. “This is not about what happened before. This is about what’s happening now.”

“I don’t know why you care so much. You met once.”

“Twice.”

Jimin turns and raises an eyebrow, along with his knife, propping his elbow on his hip. “Twice, then, and forgive me for saying you didn’t make that great an impression either time. How many new people come to town, and how many times has Amandi been wrong? And is it worth the risk? Is it really?” 

“No,” Jeongguk stares into his coffee, at the lip of his mug where the granules have soaked against the ceramic and hardened. “I just…”

Jimin is back poking his heart again. “There’s going to be a storm, soon. And…” There’s the sound of wet, slopping around, and the smell of hot blood, not entirely horrible, but definitely not pleasant. It reminds Jeongguk of winter, when Jimin has nothing better to do than predict their Christmas presents with the innards of field mice and frogs. “Huh. There’s going to be a storm, and a surprise.”

“What kind of surprise?”

Jimin shrugs. He sets the knife down on the coolest part of the Aga, where it gleams under the light, as malicious as he ever could be. “I don’t know. A present, or a death, or just something one of us finds weird. They’re not that accurate if they’re not fresh.”

“Fresh?”

“Tae did it to me, last time,” Jimin catches that smile on his face, the one Jeongguk will always associate with their particular shade of blood magic - Taehyung is private about it, but Jimin enjoys splashing about the details of what they do for their power, enjoys freaking people out about it. “He read the portents, but this is just for fun. I screamed, you know, but we kept it in bottles. Some people would pay a lot for a potion with a scream in it.”

Jeongguk says nothing, swirling his coffee around the mug. Jimin isn’t great at being a comforting friend; he’ll just tell it how it is, or rather, how he wants to see it. 

“If it helps, he did read great joy in your future,” Jimin offers. He traces his bare finger through the gore on his plastic wrap, down across his belly, leaving a slash of green plastic in between the purplish red. “Great joy, great joy. Right beneath my liver. It tickled.”

“Thanks. I think.” 

Jimin moves to the kitchen cupboard, shucking off his surgical gown as he goes, wrapping it in an inside-out ball so that the blood inside shifts about, trapped but not dry yet, pressing against the plastic prison. He bends to grab the cling film in their drawer full of things, and as he passes the sink he dumps the gown in there. “You worry too much about the things you shouldn’t, and you don’t worry at all about the things you should,” Jimin offers that little kernel of wisdom like a gift, on his way to wrap up the heart, the film already stretched taut between the box and his small, delicate hands. 

Jeongguk has nothing he can really say to that. “I just… I wonder if we’re being too quick to really judge anyone, y’know?”

“I’d rather be quick to judge and alive than very welcoming and friendly and all that, and dead,” Jimin says. The kitchen echoes through with the sound of him crinkling plastic wrap around the hunk of meat and the radio, singing something quietly by the Cranberries. The whole air feels alight with a distinct something feeling that Jeongguk can’t place. 

“But I-”

“It isn’t like we’re very popular even with our kind,” Jimin interrupts. The heart has been put away now and his hands have been washed; but for the hint of red under his thumbnail, he would look completely normal. “I mean, not you and your lot, but me and Tae certainly aren’t. We’re not gonna find many supporters, if we appeal around for help beyond Madeline and the London group, especially not when we do what we do so blatantly. Don’t you think so?”

“I guess I do,” Jeongguk says, feeling a little like a scolded child. He forgets the lives Jimin and Taehyung led before they came to live here, chasing and being chased halfway around Korea and then Eastern Europe, Namjoon finding them at the minute pressed close against their last. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, Guk,” Jimin places his hand on Jeongguk’s wrist, right at the crook of the bone, “Just be careful.” 

The days tick on. Yoongi gets his plumbing sorted out, and his wifi he has sellotaped to his upstairs window, functioning enough for him to watch an entire season of something awful and dramatic and boring on his laptop, both the cats lying on his chest so they can watch the quick action scenes, too. He texts Gerry a little and Izzy even less, telling them only that he's working on it, telling them he’ll get there when he does, not before, not after, no matter how hard they prod. 

The notebook sits, glaringly empty. He refuses to feel anything for it - all he’s written in it is his name, on the inner leaf, as though that will prompt him down the road of putting anything of worth in there. 

The mould in his house begins to leave, replaced by the smell of warm linens. Yoongi lights candles at all hours of the day and night, feeling a bit absurd, walking around with a box of matches shaking in his hand like some invading conqueror wielding fire. 

Warm linens. He replaces the cold light bulbs with ones tinged orange, and he begins to think about getting someone in to clear out his chimney, so he can light a fire in December and maybe begin to feel a little warm. 

Or something. He’s getting ahead of himself. 

And next time he sees Namjoon in the village, it’s as Namjoon is hurrying away from him, clearly keen to avoid a stilted talk, or any sort of interaction at all. Well, that’s fine; Yoongi can take a hint, and it isn’t like he’s seen Jeongguk since, either, and he isn’t that desperate for human contact or friends - he has plenty of both, just a phone call away, and it’s his own decision not to call them right this second. He doesn’t have to, or even want to, befriend the weird, culty family of Follie. He’s not desperate.

He buys his bread. His milk. He makes his coffee. He isn’t offended. 

He replies to the emails he can’t avoid; he chats for a few days to a college student doing a masters in Asian-American literature, who wants a Skype interview for her dissertation. 

He cat-proofs his house, and ignores the looks of injured betrayal from Spanner, who sits beside the windows and paws at them as though he’s some sort of trapped martyr to the cause. Beanbag is happily, delightfully oblivious, content so long as she has Yoongi at her beck and call, shaking a few treats into her bowl every hour or so. He takes to reading passages aloud to them, failed half-sentences and abortive beginnings, these faltering and broken attempts to replicate something he never knew how to do in the first place. 

The cats are indifferent. 

At least somebody is. 

“The problem is the fucking book,” Yoongi says to Gerry one night, lying in his bed with both the cats on his feet, the only part of him that’s warm. 

“Go on,” Gerry says on the other end of the phone. He’s somewhere loud and chatty; the Starbucks near the office, Yoongi guesses, the one that knows all their orders by now, the one with the British barista who bought his book the day it came out and asked him to sign it. She had an undercut, and a girlfriend, and a promise ring on her left pinky. 

Yoongi swallows against a homesickness completely his own invention. “I don’t want to write it again.”

“Then don’t. We don’t want to publish it again. You’re overthinking this, you know you are, and you know - we’ll at least have a look at anything you send us. It isn’t a finished product. It isn’t a solitary fuckin’ task, Yoongi.” 

Yoongi exhales, pushing against the frigid cold of his sheet, trying to put into words what it is he feels, when he looks at the notebook. “...Ger, you don’t - there’s nothing left. Everything I wanted to say, I said it. It’s all in the book. You can buy it. Fourteen-ninety-nine in every reputable bookstore.”

“Yoongi-”

“I’m all empty. I’m scraped out.”

“Yoongi-” 

“The only thing I got left to do is, like, conferences. You know I barely knew what a fucking - about, like, politics. I don’t know. I just wrote the damn book, I don’t need to understand it, too.”

“Yoongi, you’re being a fucking idiot,” Gerry says, when Yoongi stops, having run out of words long before he ran out of breath. “You’re being so dumb. I am actually in awe of how stupid you are.” 

“Helpful, Gerry, very helpful,” Yoongi says. He looks up at his ceiling, at the popcorn paint and the spiderwebs in the corner, and he knows it’s just the late hour pressing tearful thumbs to the back of his eyeballs, but they’re there all the same. “You write the book, if you’re so smart.”

Gerry has moved now, somewhere quieter, and every so often he slurps. So he was getting coffee, then. “You’re pushing the morals, idiot. Sana doesn’t go around in the first one looking for morals, she doesn’t go looking for the journeys and shit, she’s just been given some problems to solve, and she does. Just - we won’t push. I promise we won’t push. I’m sorry we have been. But we just - we just - Yoongi, you know we know you can do it just as much as you know it. There’s a block, but there doesn’t have to be one.”

“I know.” Yoongi pushes his palm into his eye. “I do know.”

“It’s late over there.” 

“I know that, too.” 

“You should sleep.” 

“And that.” 

Gerry sighs. “Goodnight, Yoongi. Just - don’t forget I’m your friend first, and everything else second, even if I haven’t been-”

Yoongi hangs up on him before he can finish that sentence, and rolls over, staring out the window by his bed. 

The bedroom in his cottage is oddly-shaped. It’s tucked into the corner of the sloping roof, but someone has fitted a window at floor level, the foot and a half where the roof turns into wall before it cascades down into the ground floor and becomes a proper room. The window is neat, and the sill painted a pretty cream shade; Yoongi’s cleared it of clutter, and he’s discovered he likes nothing better than staring out of it at night, going to sleep to the gentle movement of the trees waving back and forth against one another, a constant, ever-changing rhythm of leaf and branch and shadowed owl, chasing after a field mouse. He likes to imagine himself in there, between the shadows, slipping like a minnow between two river rocks, never quite being noticed by whatever might be watching him. 

Whoever. 

But tonight, with his phone still clasped in his hand and fresh from the anxiety a chat with one of his old friends always brings him, sleep is slow to come. Yoongi stares at the woods, at one spot in the trees, for so long he stops seeing anything, just the rhythm of the wind in the branches. 

And then, quickly, so quickly he thinks he might be mistaken, the flash of something. 

He doesn’t feel tired at all. 

Scrambling out of bed he wrenches his jeans on from where he had flung them, on the chair beside the desk he hasn’t used. Both cats complain at him. He knows, dimly, that this is something stupid he shouldn’t be doing, that even if he has seen a wild animal in the woods that’s all the more reason to stay inside, but he feels manic with lack of sleep and lack of energy and lack of belief in anything but the fact that he’s washed out and washed up. He pulls a jumper on, and a puffed up grey coat over that, and fumbles with a pair of knit mittens he was given a few Christmases ago, still with the label dangling off the cuff. 

He thinks he saw - 

But of course, he couldn’t have -

Something bigger than a dog between the trees, but definitely something walking on all fours. 

But Yoongi did his research before he moved to Ireland. He knows. The biggest land predator here is the fucking badger, and next to that the fox, and nowhere there is there space for a wolf. 

There are no wolves in Ireland. 

So where does that leave him? 

The night is cold, but Yoongi barely feels it under the coat and the rush of inexplicable energy. Halfway across the field he realises two things: firstly, that he’s left his phone on his pillow on five percent, and secondly, that he’s being incredibly, undeniably stupid. Chasing shadows in the middle of the night? A shape that looked a lot like a huge dog, or a man on all fours, or maybe just a bush that the wind shook to look a bit frightening? Whatever way he plays it, there’s not much sense in it, and he can already hear Gerry shrieking at him from across the waves, and several time zones. 

He can feel the grass on his feet. Bare, again. He really, really needs to buy a proper set of boots, or at least remember to put his shoes on at the door. 

But he’s bored, and he’s cooped up, and he’s washed out, and the longest conversation he’s had this week has been an argument with Spanner about how good cats don’t climb out of open bathroom windows. And he’s never had a very good sense of his own self-preservation, has he? 

When he reaches the edge of the forest, he feels it like a snap around his body, clutching at his waist, like the force when you try to press two magnets together. “Oh, fuck-” he stumbles forward, both pulled and pushed by the weight. “Jesus-”

And then he’s inside the woods, looking along the regimented lines of trees, down as far as he can see before the night swallows him. Something sharp tickles his heel. The wind whistles through his ears. 

He can’t bring himself to feel stupid, yet, about what he’s doing. 

What was it Gerry said? She’d been given some problems to solve, and she did. Yoongi handed problems to Sana, the main character and long-suffering brain monkey of his first novel, as though they were sweets to be indulged in by the fistfuls. In the absence of someone stupid to act out through, he’s going to do it himself. 

Yes. This is sensible. 

He saw a dog. He saw a dog, and he wants to make sure the dog is safe, because everyone knows there’s no wolves in Ireland, and no wild dogs, either. 

(What about that man on the radio, now, the one who said he’d been attacked by something in Dublin? The one who had to get stitches all up his leg, the one who might never walk without a limp again?)

(Yeah, but that’s Dublin. This is Follie.) 

(Incredible how quickly you can claim belonging to a place you still know nothing about.) 

Yoongi tracks to the left a few paces, to where he thinks would line up best with his view out the bedroom window. He’s seeing only by the light of the moon, waning, and the adjustment of his eyes to the dark now he’s been in it for a few minutes; it’s a clear night, clear and surprisingly bright, and he almost doesn’t miss the torch on his phone at all. (Almost.) 

But he saw something here. He would swear he did. 

“Huh,” he mumbles, hand on the trunk of a tree, eyes seeking in the dark, “Huh. Weird-”

“You shouldn’t be here.”

And Yoongi jumps several inches into the air, stops breathing for a second, and makes a very undignified noise that technically falls into the realm of a squeak. “Oh my god-” 

“No, I’m serious,” and it’s Jeongguk, of course it’s Jeongguk, emerging from between two trunks in running tracksuit bottoms and a comically large t-shirt, “You shouldn’t - why the fuck are you out here? It’s three in the morning.” 

“I thought I saw something,” Yoongi stutters out. His heart is racing. In the dark, in the trees, Jeongguk looks a lot more menacing than he had holding a big fluffy cat and smiling. Even his teeth look sharper, and his eyes are shiny with reflective moonlight, yellowish and large, and there’s mud on his cheeks. High on his cheeks. Mud shouldn’t be able to jump that high. 

“You didn’t,” Jeongguk says. He comes closer. His feet make no sound in the mud.

Yoongi takes three reflexive steps back, until he hits one of the retreating trunks. He feels very stupid. “I - yeah. Okay. I - no, it must have been the light. I must have - or the wind.” But it wasn’t, he wants to say, I saw a dog and I thought it might be lost. Nothing threatening about that. Why are you - 

“This is a dangerous place to be at night. There are - things,” Jeongguk slips up a little, and Yoongi can see him thinking about what Yoongi was just five minutes ago. Biggest land predator. Deer? Are deer really going to attack him? 

“Things,” Yoongi repeats. 

Jeongguk comes closer again. Yoongi slips around the trunk of the tree and backs up until he hits another, his toes squishing into the mucky ground below, something wriggling against the length of his foot. “I don’t think it’s unreasonable to tell you it’s dangerous out here at night,” he says, sounding very reasonable and measured and convincing, and hey, Yoongi knows it’s dangerous. Jeongguk’s cheekbones haven’t always been that high, that prominent, have they? It changes the whole structure of his face, and casts it into a distinctly different light, along with the mud and the eyes and the weird trick the moon is playing with the length of his teeth. 

“I’m going home,” Yoongi says, and folds himself around the second tree, “I - I thought I saw a - something. A dog. I thought it might be - I thought-”

“Well, there’s nothing here,” Jeongguk says. Smiles, or tries to, and there’s a cut on his lip welling slow, dark blood. “See? Nothing at all.”

“Nothing,” Yoongi says, and hits the third tree, “I’m going home now. I’m going - home. Yeah.”

His hands brush against the fourth tree and the fifth tree and the sixth and seventh, and by the time he gets to the twentieth he’s out of the woods. He can hear the footsteps following him, even though he hasn’t the nerve to turn around and ask Jeongguk what the fuck he thinks he’s doing, freaking out a near-stranger in the woods in the middle of the night just because Yoongi did see something. He did. He did. He’ll go to his grave swearing he did. 

Don’t think about that. 

He’s climbing over the stile by the hedge before he looks around, before he can bring himself to do it, and he sees exactly what he expected to. 

Jeongguk standing right by the treeline, his muddy white t-shirt all but glowing in the moonlight, just watching him. Just watching him, and still as the trees surrounding him, and even from this distance Yoongi can tell his eyes are focused right on him. 

He opens his door. His hands are shaking. 

He wonders if Jeongguk can see them from there, and he doesn’t know why he thinks the answer is yes. 

“You could have been less creepy.”

“I wasn’t being creepy,” Jeongguk looks away, but his hands are white on the steering wheel, and the force with which he slams the indicator to the left is just a little too excessive. “I was firm. I was - yeah, I was firm.”

“I don’t really care,” Taehyung says, because he doesn’t, “But I think you scared him. Did you hear his heart?”

“No.” 

“I did.”

“I don’t care,” Jeongguk swings the car out and up, driving along the main street of Follie town. “I really, really, don’t care. I just wanted him to - I mean, seriously. He was so sniffing about in our business. Namjoon was right.”

“His heart was going fast,” Taehyung sets his hand on the dashboard and drums his fingers to demonstrate, up and down, one two three four five. “Like this. I know you heard it.” 

Jeongguk has to slow for a tractor, and then stop. “And what about it, then?” 

Taehyung shrugs. He really wasn’t lying - he doesn’t care, but he’s always been more attuned to the tension in the air than Jimin, soothing where Jimin is stirring, and all the unsaid bullshit in the house over the past week is fucking with how he goes about his brewing. “Talk to Namjoon about it, not me. I just want you to admit that you could have been less creepy, so we might actually be able to befriend him and see what he’s about. The hunters can see what you are, but I-”

“Jimin said-”

“Jimin is a lot more open about it,” Taehyung presses his thumb against his smile, because that’s one of the things he’s always admired about Jimin. His complete inability to hide who and what he is, or rather, his refusal; he wears it like a badge, a persona of honour, red on his lips and in his eyes, sometimes, when he smiles. “But Gukkie, you should know by now everyone thinks I’m the human one.”

“Daniel-”

“Madeline thought I was human for the first two years I knew her,” Taehyung says, “And Jimin liked me for six months before he found out what I was. Admit you were creepy.”

Jeongguk starts driving again as the tractor pulls in against the pavement. “I… could hear his heart going.” 

“Fast.”

“Faster than usual.” 

“Fast.” 

“I…” Jeongguk pulls in against the pavement beside the library, and wrenches on the handbrake. He leaves the engine idling. “I only talked to him, like, twice.”

“So you’re annoyed he’s probably a hunter,” Taehyung interprets. He sets his hand on Jeongguk’s wrist, his thumb tapping the pulse point, listening to the heartbeat - unlike the werewolves, Taehyung has to really try to hear things like that, and he can only do it with lifelines. Hearts. Wrists. Breaths. The sort of things that stop when you slice them. “I mean, Amandi did say-”

“I know what Amandi said. I just…” Jeongguk makes a frustrated noise, but Taehyung is good at waiting. “I just… he was nice to me. In the woods. And the first night, on the full moon.”

“I’m nice to you. Namjoon’s nice to you.”

“Oh, for fuck’s-” Jeongguk shoves the car into gear and sits, whole body pressing down on the clutch. “Go to the library, Tae. I’m not mad. I’m not - I’m not - I just thought we could be friends with someone who isn’t weird, and now he’s probably gonna try and kill us, and I’m a bit annoyed about it, okay? I’m - I’ll - I’ll pick you up later. Ring me. Or ring Hobi. I don’t - please?”

And Taehyung is also very good at knowing when to let it rest, for the moment. “I’ll call you.”

“Okay.”

“Love you.”

He gets out of the car before Jeongguk can reply - Taehyung hates to hear anyone answer, apart from Jimin, but he can’t bring himself to stop ending conversations that way. His boots hit the road and he walks around to the pavement and he waves, the way he knows Jeongguk hates, and then he fishes his library card out of his pocket and goes to get some books. 

Follie Community Library is one of his favourite places to be that isn’t home or the circle. It smells of eggs and old ladies, but you get used to that, and the only people that frequent it are oldies or kids; the retired minister, Wallace-something, Rachael Quinn and her triplets, people who know Taehyung and nod to him and smile, and who ask him how his brothers are and who sometimes offer him a cup of coffee, or a night babysitting for twenty euro and an apologetic smile, or a book recommendation and a knowing wink. 

Today the librarian on duty is Albert Phair, who says hello and hands him a flyer for the church social. “Yvonne’s arranging it,” Albert says, tapping his nose. “There’s going to be baked goods.”

Taehyung smiles and folds it into his pocket. “The arrangement continues?”

“Well, put it this way - you’ll throw a real wrench in her plans if you and Jin don’t at least provide the brownies.” 

“In that case, the arrangement is going good and strong.” Taehyung pats the pocket the flyer is in, and walks deeper into the stacks, already planning what he’s going to tell Seokjin; even if some of them (Jimin) are a bit too heart-on-sleeve to really engage with the community, most of them aren’t. Taehyung’s been a proud member of the Follie Community Knit And Natter since its foundation, and with Hoseok’s work in the bakery, he’s a known face around town, attached to cinnamon bread and a happy conversation. Namjoon’s schooled everyone under the age of twenty-five through their Leaving Cert, and Seokjin has cooked something for every event in the last five years at least. 

It’s nice to belong. Taehyung owes it all to the circle. 

He gravitates to adult fiction, and then to the little shelf with CLASSICS written on the metal rim in sharpie. Of course they have all the money they need to make a library for themselves - have made a library for themselves - but Taehyung wants to get out of the house, sometimes, and he likes seeing what’s been happening in the library. What Follie has been up to. He pulls out Far From The Maddening Crowd, and flips it open to the library card in its cosy wallet on the first page. It’s been quite popular over the years. 

He closes his eyes, and inhales. 

Twenty-seven heartbeats. 

Twenty-seven arrhythmic in-breaths and out-breaths. 

Fifty-four wrists, twenty-seven necks, a thousand thousand untold lines of communication running from their hearts to their toes to their heads and back again. 

He opens his eyes, and exhales. One of the sets of wrists is on the other side of this shelf, and he recognises it from last night. 

He stands up and reads the name on the spine. Yoongi Min - Far Away From Pleasant Lands. There are three copies in the library, one of them sun-spotty and faded, one of them in folded paperback, and one of them in pristine hardback with the plastic fold still wrapped around the paper. Taehyung grabs all three of them in one hand and pulls, and comes face to face with a pair of fine eyes - 

(In a pretty face-)

And a pale mouth, open in surprise. “I’m Taehyung Kim,” he says, and pushes his other hand through the gap, “I haven’t read your book yet, but I’ve been told it’s pretty good.”

“Oh, jesus,” Yoongi Min says, shaking the hand Taehyung offers him, “I - jesus. Nobody in this town can-”

“You should tell Albert who you are. He’d try and get you to do a talk for the primary school,” Taehyung says, Yoongi’s pulse reverberating through his arm like a series of sonic shocks. He doesn’t look much like a hunter, not one of any sort, but then none of the hunters Taehyung has met in his life have looked like they were, at the first meeting. 

Yoongi shudders into the sweater he’s wearing. His whole self is slight, the way the nymphs were in Greenland when Taehyung stayed there a winter or two. “I - that sounds awful, if you don’t mind me saying so. Um. Do you - are you - are you a librarian?”

Taehyung sets the books back in place and walks around the end of the shelf, holding his new find in the crook of his arm. Yoongi Min is shorter than him, considerably so, and maybe even shorter than Jimin - certainly shorter than Jimin wearing the chunky heels he prefers to, most days. “Nope. Just an interested citizen. Did you get the flyer about the church?” 

He’s already seen it, sticking out of Yoongi’s back pocket, rolled up, orange paper and running ink. But Taehyung has learned, through bitter trial and experience, to always be less observant than you are. 

“Oh,” Yoongi’s hand passes over it, “Yes, I - yeah. For a dance?”

“It’s to raise money for the church roof,” Taehyung explains, and then laughs, his disarming laugh, the one he knows will put people at ease. That’s what he made it for. “We’re a bit Agatha Christie, but nobody ever gets murdered.”

“Sounds fun,” Yoongi offers, clumsy but sincere enough. He pulls the paper out of his pocket and sets his thumb beneath the date. “A… harvest dance?”

“Harvest. Church festival. Giving thanks and all that,” Taehyung rolls his eyes and leans forward, conspiratorial. “It’s all bollocks of course, but it’s a chance for some fun, and it isn’t like we have many other places to have a good time. I just saw you here, and I thought I’d explain it a bit better than Albert probably did.”

“He did emphasise the church bit,” Yoongi admits, and Taehyung sees the thoughtful way he looks at the paper. 

“No pressure. But me and my cousin are probably gonna bake brownies for it, and they’re to die for,” Taehyung says. He smiles. “Welcome you to the town, and all that. Have you been chatting to anyone, yet?”

“Not particularly,” says Yoongi, and then frowns. “You don’t - you don’t - do you live in that house on top of the other hill? Around the woods?”

Ah. Here we go. “There’s six of us. We’re family,” Taehyung watches his face, the twitches underneath his eyes. “Namjoon’s a tutor, you might have seen him, and Jeonggukkie works with the forestry-”

Yoongi shoves the flyer back into his pocket. “I met them. In passing. I-” his heart is speeding up, but not in the way they do when people lie. It’s just going faster than normal. “I guess I just got off on the wrong foot with those two, then, but I… yeah. I might turn up to the dance. Beats watching Netflix in my pajamas.”

“Yeah,” Taehyung says quietly, “I suppose it does.”

They chat a minute longer, about nothing in particular, and then Yoongi checks his watch and his whole body irons out in a panic. “Oh, fuck - I have a meeting with Izz - my publisher, that is, I - do you mind if I-”

Taehyung flaps him away. He’s got what he wanted, anyway, just a heartbeat and a memory, and he wants to spend some time reading. 

But he takes two books home with him from the library that day, when Hoseok pulls up in the bakery van to drive him home; the Thomas Hardy classic, well-worn and well-read, and a copy of Far Away From Pleasant Lands, colour leached from it by the sun, the flyleaf telling him nothing about the contents. 

Jeongguk sits on the bonnet of his truck in the forest clearing, texting Seokjin, waiting for whoever the commission has chosen to show up so they can shake hands and get on with it. He doesn’t have any real power - he’s basically the groundskeeper, for the years the forest is left to its own devices - but all the same, contractors showing up and saying hi is a pretty basic formality he’s gotten used to, over time. When the sound of tires on gravel echoes through the trees, audible even without the hearing he can boast, he looks up. 

He expects Mikey Fee. Fee is an old man, sure, but he’s local and the commission likes to hire people with the bonus of not having to pay for their petrol. He does the hedges in springtime, and usually he’s the one the local farmers go to when the grass needs done; a sort of one-size-fits-all machinery man, with his thumb in as many pies as there is. 

The van that drives up is not Mikey Fee’s. It’s a white Ford Transit, badly muddied, with a small woman at the driver’s seat and two men sitting alongside her. None of the three of them are familiar to him. 

“Jeon, is it?” The woman pulls up beside Jeongguk’s truck and cuts the engine. She pronounces his name a little too close to john for his liking, but hey, nobody’s perfect. “Are we late?”

“Oh, no, no,” Jeongguk slips his hands into the pockets of his boiler suit, feeling a little hot under the silent eyes of the two men. “I just live close, so I was… I mean, I’ve been here a while. Don’t worry about it. What did you say your name was?”

“Deirdre Collins,” she offers her hand to him, and he shakes it - then the other two men, who don’t introduce themselves, and who Deirdre makes no effort to explain, either. 

“No connection to Fee, are you?” He already knows they aren’t, but this is some opportunity for village gossip. “Mikey Fee - he usually does the contracting for here.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Deirdre pulls a face. Her features are slim, her nose long and pointed, her lips thin and pale, and although her accent is rooted somewhere in Ireland it has a touch of the English around the vowel sounds. Her hair is dark and straight, pulled back into a plait along her neck. “I heard of him, but we work a county over. I couldn’t tell you why they sent us here, to be honest.”

The two men shake their heads, almost in sync. 

“Huh,” Jeongguk shrugs, and goes back to leaning against his truck, the cold metal against his spine. Deirdre smiles at him again. “So, when did you guys think you wanted to start? I’m easy. Like I said, I live, like, right beside the forest.” 

“We’ll let you know,” Deirdre says, and pats one of the men on the elbow. She looks comical, short and dainty in between them, but Jeongguk will be the first to say you don’t have to be a lump of muscle to work in lumber - not anymore, at least. “We just have some things with the firm to iron out, y’know - half our staff and half our stuff is in Cork, still.” 

“I’m easy,” Jeongguk repeats. They swap numbers, and Deirdre hands him a folded sheet of blue file paper, the stuff that’s supposed to make you concentrate harder, with a list of names and machine codes and mobile numbers. Jeongguk feels a little stupid, just writing his phone number on a post-it and giving it to her, but it isn’t as though he’s got a staff, or any stuff worth talking about. 

He just hangs around in the woods and gets paid for it. No complaints there. 

Deirdre Collins, the two men, and the dirt-blackened Ford Transit drive away from the forest meet-point ten minutes after they arrived, if even. Jeongguk waits a few minutes longer, fiddling with the lock on the wide metal gate, texting Seokjin to let him know to get the hot water on, kicking at a suspicious pile of leaves just in case somebody’s been dumping chippy bags here again. (It’s just a suspicious pile of leaves, that dissolves into a totally normal group of leaves, and Jeongguk hopes nobody saw him kicking them as viciously as he was.)

He can’t stop thinking about what Taehyung accused him of. Of being creepy. 

But he wasn’t. Amandi had a dream, and Amandi is never wrong, and there’s only been one suspicious newcomer to Follie found creeping about in the woods. Jeongguk won’t be sold on big eyes and cute jumpers and cats, even if Taehyung wants him to be - Jeongguk won’t be sold on the rhythm of one heartbeat. 

He drives home in as foul a mood as he came. 

Chapter Text

The young ones, they ask me, they ask me how the circles work. They’re only new, or they’re only small, so I don’t mind them asking, and I’ll write it down here so all you can read and know what I’m talking about, because it’s important. The circles are the very heart of what we do - of who we are and what we believe. Now, people have theories about them, but I didn’t come here to tell you who made them, or what they do. I just came here to tell you that they work because they’ve always worked, and our job is to keep them safe, and in return, they keep us safe. Nothing more to it. 

• An excerpt from the introduction to The Worship, a 2005 pamphlet printed in German by Inge Temmel and translated into English by Reid Reynolds. The Worship achieved cult status among its niche audience, gaining traction by word-of-mouth due to the spell on the paper that requires its owner to create and pass on a new copy, if they wish to keep their own. The Worship is widely regarded as the best introduction to magic there currently is in modern western Europe. 

Yoongi sets the flyer from the library on his kitchen table, and intends for that to be the last of it, the very final time he’s going to give any of the men from the house on the hill any thought. He might go to the event - he might not - at the moment, he doesn’t really care. He likes Follie. He likes his surroundings. He doesn’t like feeling watched. 

It was a lie, in the library, of course. He’s finally made his point final enough that it’ll last for Izzy and Gerry, and they’ve backed off to let him work, assuming he’ll do it. He goes home and puts the kettle on and feeds his cats and curls up on the raggedy sofa he ordered from the Oxfam online shop, and reads some of the books he hasn’t in years, the sort of books he used to comfort himself with when he was little. The Midnight Folk, and the third Narnia book, and the much-thumbed-over booklet of Seamus Heaney poems he bought during his undergraduate years and immediately imprinted on, a duckling to a swan. 

He feels very cold, and very small. Beanbag and Spanner are as attuned to him as it’s possible for cats to get to people (he hopes) and they curl up on his lap, two puddles of coloured ink never quite mixing, apart from in the middle where they swap paws and tails and little pink noses without a care in the world. 

He’s bought boots, and a better sort of coat that smells of wax and folds stiffly around him, and that has about a thousand million pockets, all for (apparently) stuffing different sorts of dead animals into. He fills it with pens and paper and sticky notes, and his big notebook and his little notebook and his littler notebook for eureka moments, and he doesn’t write in any of them. 

“I feel weird,” he tells Beanbag, because Spanner won’t listen. “Should I be feeling weird?”

After the third day with no human contact and no human conversation, and no natural light access either, he googles nearby walking paths, and finds a trek around a lake about an hour and a half’s walk away; perfectly achievable if he gets up on time, considering what he wants most is to exhaust himself, so he doesn’t have to think about weird neighbours or the way Jeongguk’s eyes had looked in the moonlight, or the sharp, sharp illusion of his teeth. Of Namjoon, the way he keeps running away; of Taehyung, who had been pleasant to the point of discomfort, smiling with Yoongi’s own book tucked under his arm.

None of that. He refuses to think about that. 

The day is crisp, clear, and bitingly cold. Yoongi lets both of the cats come with him simply because he doesn’t feel up to the fight he’ll have to have with them, to keep them indoors. They spill around his boots as he walks down the road, following a map in his head, a twisting ouroboros of colour and interested mewls with every frog, worm, and beetle they find in the puddles they splash through. Yoongi smiles down at them. 

He feels, for a while, serene. He almost feels like writing, but he knows if he pushes it now, when he isn’t ready to, he’ll crash down hard and nothing will happen. 

The birds are singing, bravely, despite the dawning October evening, and the sky is that brilliant-white colour it always is before winter settles in. Yoongi is snug inside his coat, and the only parts of him experiencing the weather at all are his cheeks, his nose, and his lips, almost-but-not-quite folded under his collar. He’s humming. 

He’s at the lake (which is called Heronry Lake, according to the wooden sign tucked into the bushes) when he hears the voices. 

“I bet you I can do it in five seconds.”

“I bet you I can do it faster than you.”

“I bet you you can’t do it as fast as I did last winter.”

“I bet you that time was a fluke.”

“I bet you’re just too chicken to do it with me now.”

“I bet you're chicken - cluck-cluck-” 

“I bet you both of you are idiots.”

“I wanna go first-”

“Jesus-”

And the sound of a splashing noise and a bigger splashing noise - exactly like a dog throwing itself into the water, in fact, which is what Yoongi suspects is going on. The reason he hops off the track and flattens himself against the trunk of the tree is that he recognises one of those voices - 

It’s Jeongguk. And two others, of course, but it’s Jeongguk. Even more brothers, or cousins, or whoever these people are to him? How many people live in the house? 

Maybe he’s being stupid, but Yoongi can’t stop thinking about the eyes and the teeth and the way Jeongguk had smiled at him, friendliness gone completely. No matter how hard he tries he can’t rationalise it, can’t find any explanation for it, no neat problem that makes it all make sense. 

“Will he make it?” The first voice asks, one of the ones Yoongi doesn’t recognise. It sounds excited.

There’s a sound like a fist hitting rustling coat fabric. “I think he already has. You know he’s faster than you - he’s faster than fucking all of us, he proved that the other night. Last winter was no fluke, y’know.”

“How could you! Allowing the youth to get the better of you,” and then laughter, carefree and lighthearted, as far away from sharp-toothed fear as it’s possible to get. 

Yoongi begins to relax. Maybe, he thinks, if he just walks away down the path and back home, they won’t see him and he can keep hold of his promise not to get involved. No more woods. No more lakes. No more creepy stares. He can go home, and curl up with his cats, and a cup of tea, and he can crack out his notebook and - 

“Oh, Hoseok - look, a cat!”

“Beanbag,” Yoongi hisses urgently, looking around and seeing only Spanner’s smug ginger face, “Beanbag, where the fu-”

“Oh, you’re cute,” says the first voice - Hoseok, apparently. “Look, he’s got a collar on-”

“She’s a girl, stupid,” says the second voice. “Can’t you tell?”

A silence. “Yeah, okay, maybe so. Ah, she’s adorable,” Hoseok coos at Beanbag, presumably. “But…” And then there’s a few more seconds of busy, pregnant silence, during which Yoongi scoops Spanner into his arms and debates the pros of rescuing his cat versus the cons of possibly being murdered by a silent Jeongguk, hiding in the bushes, waiting to kill him with his scary eyebrows. Or, of course, by one of his other family members, whoever they might be. 

The quiet is heavy and full, as though the two men are talking to each other in waved hands and raised eyebrows and things like that, speaking without words. Maybe it’s Yoongi’s paranoia talking. 

Yeah. Yeah. He needs his cat. He can’t just abandon her to whoever, just because he’s a bit freaked out by them - 

“Beanbag-”

“Oh, hey! Is this your cat?” 

Yoongi blinks. 

There’s a jetty built over the lake, at a little area where a car has been parked, the boot propped open, a plastic box full of cling film packages balancing on the rim of it - sandwiches, egg and onion, ham and cheese. On the jetty, standing leaning over the wooden stand to watch the rippling movement of a dog in the distance, are two men he doesn’t recognise - they have identical frozen smiles on their face, and the slightly smaller of the two is holding Beanbag out so that she cascades down from the shoulders, looking a little disgruntled and very long. 

They’re both in puffed coats and boots, bundled up warm against the cold October, both tall, both Korean, and both of them as offensively handsome as the rest of the house Yoongi’s met so far. Seriously. The only person he’s met in Follie who isn’t a supermodel is the old man who manages the library. One of them, the one with sleek auburn hair (and Beanbag), is tall and lean and clearly muscular underneath the winter layers, his eyes oak and smiling, his lips thin and curiously shaped, as though he can’t help but always be happy. The other is broader than him, his shoulders wide and strong and rounded, his hair dark black, his lips full and red and twitched off to the side as he smiles. Both of them look like they’ve been caught doing something they really shouldn’t. 

“That… is my cat,” Yoongi says slowly, approaching with Spanner climbing over his shoulder. “She’s… her name’s Beanbag.”

“Beanbag! What a lovely name,” says the first one, in the most forced voice Yoongi has ever heard, his mouth smiling all the while, “I’m Hoseok. This is my… brother Seokjin.”

“Hi,” says Seokjin, the broad and handsome one, wriggling his fingers Yoongi’s direction. “Cute cat you have there.” 

“Um. Thank you?” Yoongi says uncertainly. He’s aware that compared to these two, he’s a lot smaller and weedier and generally without the aesthetic appeal of two male models by the lake, and it’s only made worse by the ugly ginger tomcat balancing on his head. He must look so stupid. God. And here he was thinking one of them was going to axe-murder him. “Um. Can I… can I have her back? Only I think we need to get home-”

“Oh my god, yes, yes,” hurriedly Hoseok drops Beanbag, who scurries across the leafy mulch towards Yoongi and Spanner. “Sorry, we didn’t mean to, uh, to - to catnap. We didn’t - realise you were right there.”

“Didn’t realise,” Seokjin echoes, smiling awkwardly. “Yeah. We didn’t.”

Beanbag paws at Yoongi’s boot, and then, realising she can’t get any grip on the rubber, begins to complain loudly. “Shut up,” Yoongi prods her with his toe, and sighs in relief as Spanner leaps down to keep her occupied. “I didn’t realise you were here, either. I’m sorry.”

The three of them stand in uncomfortable, thick silence, until a very big and very wet dog - and it must be a dog, but it’s huge - emerges out of the lake, a long stick clamped in its mouth, the bark peeling off in waterlogged strips, mouth open around the wood as though to make a sound. “Oh-” Yoongi begins to back uncertainly towards their open car, his hands up in the air, “Is he-”

The dog, who is dark brown, the colour of black cocoa, growls at him in a sort of half-hearted way, but to Yoongi’s eternal gratitude, he decides to head for Seokjin and Hoseok instead of Yoongi and his cats. 

“This is…” Seokjin looks from Hoseok to the dog and giggles, covering his mouth with his hand. “This is Fluffy. Fluffy Munchkin. He’s really sweet, I promise.”

Yoongi looks dubiously at the so-called Fluffy Munchkin, now prowling behind Hoseok, clearly on guard, his ears flat against his skull. “Is he really?” 

“Come and pet him, if you like,” Hoseok is grinning, “We’ll make sure he doesn’t bite.”

“Uh…”

The dog growls. Yoongi highly doubts their claims of complete safety; he looks about two steps from going mad, and Yoongi can very easily picture him with the red eyes of cartoon wolves, the heavy paws and thick claws that rip out throats and slaver, spittle dripping down the length of long teeth. 

(Long teeth, flashing eyes. All he can think about is Jeongguk in the woods.) 

And maybe it’s that thought, that brief reminder that he needs a distraction, that makes him shrug and say, “Alright then, if you say so,” and step forward with his hand out at the level of Fluffy’s head. 

Fluffy growls, of course Fluffy growls, because this dog looks as close as you can get to being wild without having blood on its muzzle, but then Seokjin presses his knee into its side and it seems to give up whatever fight it was trying to have, whatever posturing it was trying to do; with an exaggerated yawn and a roll of its eyes, it sits, one of its front paws in the air, and waits for Yoongi’s hand to touch the top of its head. The eyes, dark and frighteningly intelligent, connect with Yoongi’s for a brief second before they look away, and all Yoongi can think is that they feel familiar. That this dog - he feels familiar. 

(Was that him, in the woods that night?)

(Don’t think about Jeongguk.) 

(And where is Jeongguk, anyway?)

“He’s very quiet,” Yoongi says to the two men, which seems to be the right thing; both of them start giggling, like kids that’ve been caught passing notes in class. “What breed is he?”

“Wolfhound,” Hoseok says promptly. His cheeks are very pink. “He’s a wolfhound.” 

“Hey, puppy,” Yoongi rubs his thumb along Fluffy’s head and down his snout, “Oh, you’re very soft, very soft, aren’t you?”

Under his hand, the dog is almost trembling. It looks from Hoseok to Seokjin, and then, with another eye-roll that could almost be human, it sticks its tongue out and licks Yoongi’s thumb. 

Yoongi can’t help it.

He giggles. 

For him, the laugh is the last thing to cement, as firmly in Seokjin’s mind as everything else he comes to believe, that Yoongi is not who Namjoon thinks he is. What Jeongguk swears he must be. Watching him now - small, bundled up in his coat and his gloves, Jeongguk even in wolf form almost as big as he is, there’s absolutely no way he can be the hunter Namjoon thinks he might be. He’s just small and pretty. 

(Very small, and very pretty.)

“He’s friendly,” Yoongi says, looking up at last from Jeongguk to meet Seokjin’s eyes, his own wide with happy sincerity. “I kinda thought he was gonna try and tear my throat out.” His accent is light, but distinctly American, in the sort of bland trans-Atlantic way Jimin used to sound before he settled anywhere. Already it’s growing roots in the Follie drawl, the snap-shut vowel sounds.

“He wouldn’t,” Seokjin says, squatting beside Jeongguk, slinging his arm around his tense neck. Yoongi’s hands are buried knuckle-deep in the fluff around his haunches, rubbing in soothing circles, the pet of a cat owner unused to big dogs. “He’s a real sweetie, I promise.” 

After a few seconds Hoseok comes a little closer too; Seokjin can hear the little intake of breath when he sees what Yoongi is doing. He can hear Yoongi’s heartbeat, quick with innocent anxiety and nothing more to it. “What did you say your name was, man?”

“Yoongi,” Yoongi says, and then frowns. “God, how rude of me - what did you say you were called?”

“I’m Hoseok, and he’s Seokjin,” Hoseok says - after his name, Seokjin waves across Jeongguk’s head at Yoongi, who smiles uncertainly back over at him. “Not many people come out this far.”

Yoongi withdraws from Jeongguk but he stays squatting, almost touching the ground, his arms wrapped around his knees, both cats pressed against him like a pair of overzealous bodyguards. A picture, Seokjin thinks, and then regrets it; he can feel the press of Hoseok against the coven bond, the little curious prod at why Seokjin’s begun radiating an odd sort of happiness. “I didn’t mean to come out here,” Yoongi begins, oblivious to the unspoken communication, “I guess I’d been feeling a bit cooped up, recently. I live in the-”

“Cottage by Wood North,” Hoseok interrupts. Seokjin glares over his shoulder. “Shit - sorry, man, but you gotta know there’s nothing for us to do but gossip. We’re good at it. It isn’t like there’s a terrible amount of news in Follie, these days.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” something wry dances around Yoongi’s mouth, “All I’ve heard for the past week is how great the church dance is gonna be. Y’know, I didn’t think they had churches anymore. Or dances.”

Seokjin, despite himself, chuckles. Jeongguk glares at him, but there isn’t much he can do in his current shape - he looks sulky, sitting to attention on his hind, his eyes flicking from the curled-up Yoongi to Seokjin and Hoseok, currently overtaking him on the neighbourly bonding scale. “Sadly, it’s church dances and swish new American neighbours. That’s all we got.”

“Hey, don’t knock it. It’s nice,” Yoongi takes the hand Hoseok offers him, standing with only a little overbalance, grabbing Hoseok’s forearm to steady himself. “Hah - thanks.”

Jeongguk growls. Seokjin looks down, and it takes a lot for him not to start laughing when he sees the muzzle pulled up and the eyes almost physically green with jealousy. 

(It’s just as he thought. He who protested too much, and all that.) 

“Don’t mention it. Hey, though, you’ll be walking ‘til past sunset if you’re going home from here,” Hoseok meets Seokjin’s eye over Yoongi’s head, and waggles his eyebrows, looking down at their sulky covenmate, “Fancy a lift?”

Jeongguk growls. Hoseok grins. 

Seokjin laughs. He’s having fun.

Yoongi looks from one of them to the other, brow knotting in confusion, clearly picking up on some unspoken communication between them, “Uh… what’s gonna happen to me if I say yes?”

“Some quality time with ol’ Fluffy here,” Hoseok pets Jeongguk’s head, “And Seokjin does a mean Adele solo, if that’s what you’re into. We’ve got one of those anthology CDs in the car, and you should hear him do Rolling in the Deep.” 

Yoongi grins. “Will Fluffy object to the cats?” 

“No, I’m sure he won’t,” Seokjin says, staring into Jeongguk’s eyes, and he can see the second the wolf in him gives up and he resigns himself to being Fluffy the Friendly Dog. “In fact, I guarantee it.” 

“It was really funny,” Seokjin slaps the table, tears drying on his cheeks, “And the guy just stood there and petted him! And acted like he was just a big fuckin’ dog! And then when we gave him a lift-”

“You let him in your car?!” Namjoon drops his bread roll into his soup, which splashes orange and bits of carrot on his t-shirt. “But he’s-”

“Harmless, or an insane actor,” Hoseok interjects. “He smelt fine. Fine. I mean, he was terrified - we heard him, he was listening in a while, but he just seemed freaked out when he heard Gukkie’s voice, and then we were racing-”

“I won,” Jeongguk can’t help but interrupt, and then he remembers he’s ignoring everyone, and goes back to dipping his bread in his soup. He did win, but everyone knows that anyway; he’s the fastest of them all, even out of Hoseok and Namjoon, the only two that could hope to race him. “I did win,” he says, under his breath, and beside him Jimin chuckles. But he won.

“He could just be really good at heartbeat moderation,” Namjoon protests, but it sounds half-hearted even to Jeongguk’s ears. “Hunters are good at that.”

“Yeah, but they can’t change their fucking smells, Joonie,” Jin puts his hand on Namjoon’s shoulder, and Jeongguk can see his thumb turn white, digging into the hard muscle there. “I promise you, the three of us didn’t smell anything off him but fear of Gukkie and love of the cats and then we were chatting and it was fine. He didn’t get anything off about us. He’s from New York, he’s a writer.”

“He is a writer,” Taehyung pipes up from across the table. He’s on his second bowl of soup and accelerating, and he’s wearing yesterday’s clothes; he’s in one of those kicks Jeongguk is all-too familiar with, where both he and Jimin burrow deep into some spellbook or other, searching for the perfect spell. “I got his book out of the library the other day, and I read it, and then I googled it. Did any of you type his name in? Namjoonie, not even you?”

Namjoon scowls. “I was too busy-”

“Panicking,” Jimin says, licking the concave side of his spoon, “You were all too busy panicking. And being menacing. Fluffy-Munchkin.”

“I’ll just kill you all,” Jeongguk snarls into his soup, prodding at a lump of unblended carrot, “I’ll make it look like an accident and go - go live in London-”

“Oh, shut up, let Tae tell us what he read,” Hoseok leans across Seokjin to pat Jeongguk gently on the back of the head. “Leave the teen angst in the last decade of your life, please.”

Jeongguk glares at him. And then bites another chunk out of his bread.

“It’s quite good, actually,” Taehyung hooks his spoon into Jeongguk’s bowl and drags it across the table towards him, “It’s a bit pretentious, but I liked it. It’s about this girl Sana, right, and her mother went missing twenty years ago, and she’s looking for her because she believes she’s still alive, and then she’s got this boyfriend and they fight all the time, and she’s got this car, and she wants to find a place to live, and it’s got really nice descriptions of the sunset. Apparently it was a big deal when he left New York. Like, it made the Guardian, and all these people speculate about what he’s gonna do next, and I really don’t think he’d have time to do all that if he was a hunter.”

“Amandi dreamt danger,” Jeongguk says sulkily. “Gimme my dinner.”

Taehyung sticks his tongue out, and deposits a spoonful of soup onto it. 

“Amandi dreamt danger, but we did imagine all the rest of it,” Seokjin says pointedly, looking between Namjoon and Jeongguk, as though that means anything. “Maybe you just scared the hell out of some guy for no reason. Wouldn’t that be a change?”

Namjoon huffs. “I think taking precautions-”

“I invited him to the church dance next Saturday,” Taehyung says. 

“You did what?” 

Just because Yoongi might have convinced Hoseok, Seokjin, and Taehyung that he isn’t dangerous, doesn’t mean Jeongguk intends to be fooled so easy. He’s done this before, he’s played this game, and he’s seen what happens when you let your guard down; just like Taehyung had, of course, but he’s always been eager to see the best in people, even when it isn’t there. The reports from Dublin trickle through every few days, repeated calls from the guards to lock up animals and call stray dogs into veterinary practices or animal control, and that story from a few days ago about the two girls who went to get a bite to eat after the pub, and who weren’t found until morning. People are starting to whisper about big dogs, about the dangers of pitbulls and rottweilers and people who don’t exercise their pets enough, but anyone with even a sliver of knowledge knows what’s really happening -

And Jeongguk is willing to bet Yoongi does, too. That’s the reason he’s come here. That’s the reason Amandi had the dream that he did. Jeongguk’s smart enough to know that.  

“Jeongguk, just get another bowl,” Namjoon waves at the huge pot on the Aga, scowling still at Seokjin, his ears a little pink. 

“I’m not hungry,” Jeongguk says, because he isn’t. “I’m - there’s something I gotta do on the lumber site. I’ll be home in a bit. Bye.”

He doesn’t slam the door, but it’s a very near thing. 

Yoongi meets Deirdre Collins when he’s sitting on a log, reading Great Expectations so he doesn’t have to write, his pen clipped onto the collar of his shirt and Spanner in his lap. (Beanbag refused to leave the house, curling up in front of the radiator, and Yoongi wasn’t going to force her - he’s just glad they’ve stopped running away.) 

He’s in the woods, just at the fringe of them, and the log is dry, and he’s about as content as he thinks he’s going to get. He’s been back to the library a few times, and to some of the other places in Follie, and apart from seeing Hoseok in the bakery and exchanging a few words about the weather, he hasn’t seen anybody from the weird house on the hill, which is exactly how he likes to keep it. His gloves are on and, although his breath fogs up the air in front of him, he feels contentedly warm. He’s peaceful. 

Which is when he hears the crashing through the trees, and the sound of something loud and mechanical, out in the distance, noise amplified by the straight bounce from trunk to trunk. He’s learned enough to know the forest is cut in four sections, but beyond that, he’s unsure - and he’s not blind, he’s seen the diggers, the trucks, the forestry logos, Jeongguk and his boiler suit darting around the pines. 

But this machinery sounds like it is where it shouldn’t. 

Resolutely, Yoongi shoos Spanner off his lap and shoves his book into his pocket, and marches off for some tree defence of his own. 

He’s in the old wood, the gnarled trees, the pretty patterned leaves and the conker husks on the ground, before he sees the woman. She’s in a dark, waterproof bodywarmer and a warm burgundy fleece, a scarf wrapped twice around her neck; her boots are grey, flecked with sawdust and sticky grey mud churned up by something mechanic. Her hair is long and black, tied back in a ponytail that bounces well down her back, and although her ears are bare he can see where they should have piercings in. “Hey!” He calls - when she turns, he can see how slim and pointed she is all over, from her elbows to her nose. “I was - oh, sorry-” 

That said as he trips on a branch, and barely stops himself barrelling into her. Spanner coils up at his ankles, unamused. 

“Didn’t know there was anyone else wandering around here,” says the woman, dark eyes flicking up and down him, drawing conclusions of her own. “I’m Deirdre with the loggers - what did you say your name was?” 

“Yoongi - I live in the house across from here,” he wipes his mossy hands on his jeans, “I just - I guess I heard the noise and I thought you might be - well, I don’t know what I thought. I just…” Weird. I felt like I needed to protect the place, is what he wants to say, but he knows how crazy that will make him sound. Something pulled me here? Even worse. 

“Yoongi, right,” Deirdre smiles and her teeth flash white against her dark lips, “Well, I was just seeing how close we were to the boundary, y’know? This place is… protected.”

“Protected,” he echoes. 

“Yeah, the council fines us hard if we harm protected woods,” she gives him a look again, and he gets the distinct impression this conversation isn’t going how Deirdre wants it to. “You don’t know Jeon, do you? The woodsman?”

“Um. Jeongguk? Yeah, a little.”

“Huh. What do you think of him?”

Spanner growls again. Yoongi feels distinctly as though he’s being interviewed, and for the second time in a week, he wishes he’d never dived into the woods. “He’s a bit weird, I guess,” he says after a moment, “But like - well, he seems to really care about this place, y’know? And his brothers-” 

“Oh, you know them, too?”

“I - kind of-” Yoongi stops. “Do you?” 

Deirdre laughs and rubs down her arm self-consciously, fingernails catching on a loose thread. “I’ve heard of them. Jeongguk talks about them a bit - and I ran into Jimin and Taehyung once, on the continent, but I’m not sure they’d really recognise me. We didn’t - well. We met in Germany, and we didn’t leave on the best of terms, and then there was the thing in Dublin, and when I was in France...” She finds a thread to pull and does so, and Yoongi watches her fingers over the padding, fascinated by the ragged line of her nail. “I’m sorry. This is definitely not something to tell a total stranger. Oh my god, I must sound mental.”

“No, no,” Yoongi assures, although she kind of does - but at the same time, he’s so hungry for something that might explain the weird goings-on with the house on the hill that he can’t bring himself to much care. Spanner is still making weird, irritated noises. 

“I’ll-” the sound of machinery gets louder, and yelling. Not stressed yelling, just the sort of noise you have to make when you’re working with chainsaws and tractors and diggers all with a higher decibel count than the human voice. “Damn. I’m working. Listen, it was nice bumping into you, yeah? I’m sure I’ll be seeing you around anyway.” 

“Yeah, completely,” Yoongi frowns, watching her head back away from the old woods and into the new, crossing over the boundary from his section of the forestry to the section they’re cutting and re-seeding. 

She blends well into the trees, and in only a few seconds she’s gone, a burgundy fleece among the trees, the jacket folding into shadows, her boots barely indenting the mud. 

“That was weird,” Yoongi says to Spanner, who looks back up at him, “That was weird, wasn’t it?”

But it’s the closest he’s got to finding out more, and despite himself - 

He’s interested. 

That night he finds himself so tired that it’s a real, genuine battle to make it up the stairs and into bed after his evening cup of tea. The cats follow him making little distressed noises, wrapping around his ankles, and he can hear their claws digging into the carpet and he hasn’t the energy left in him to care. He feels sluggish, and pulled to one side, and cooped in, although he’s spent more time in the woods today than out of them, and most of those hours peaceful ones.

He barely manages to get out of his jeans before he’s falling asleep, the pair of them on his chest, a relaxing weight; an anchor in the harbour. 

The window in his bedroom is open, and a stray autumn leaf, caught by a gust of wind, batters itself first against the ledge and then against the glass, falling with a crinkle into the room and stilling. 

Yoongi doesn’t notice. 

He’s dreaming already. 

He realises he’s asleep almost immediately, but somehow the thought doesn’t bother him like it ought to; he just takes it, and folds it up to consider, and keeps going. He’s back in the woods where he met Deirdre today, but unlike earlier the sun isn’t out and the birds aren’t singing, and there’s no merry light casting through the leaves. The whole world is in greyscale, the moss on the trees barely greening, the bushes dark, the shadows just black folded in on itself, without a sign of life to be seen beyond the woods and the trees and the bushes and the many miscellaneous foliage plants tickling his ankles.

And that doesn’t bother him. He moves on. He presses his hand to a palm-shaped chestnut leaf, a five-fronded fan dipping down in front of his face, and he isn’t surprised when the grey-green folds around his knuckles, stroking along the bones. A kiss? A handshake? The leaf lifts his hand to the branch it’s on, and he feels a warm shudder as bark scratches his skin. 

“Pleased to meet you, too,” he says, and something, some sense of the rules of dreaming, makes him kiss the tip of the leaf closest to him. 

The tree begins to shake, the air shaking through it loud enough for him to hear, and the sound catches, moving through the wood as far as the eye can see - he’s in the old wood, though, the twisted roots, the thick trunks, the bracken spaces between trees, but where usually he can see past it to where the regimental forestry begins, in this dream the world is the wood. There’s nothing but it, round and around until the trees meet him on the other side, front to back as wide as the earth can go. Yoongi can feel it from his feet, the roots of his heels in the soil, as at home there as the worms and the old bones and the stones and the slender hair-roots and the dry ones as thick as his wrist and the ones even bigger than that, far below the ground, the ones that think and feel and taste and hurt on behalf of the forest. 

He walks for a time. It feels like forever, but he knows he’s going the right way, deeper and deeper into the old wood. 

The further in he goes, the lighter his vision gets, the grey greening a little, the moss springing under his bare feet a little, the dew settling on his fingertips a little. He sees what might be a hare. He sees a caterpillar, curled up and resting on a holey nettle. 

The air feels lighter, and far less full. More space for Yoongi to move in it, and no resistance, if there ever was any at all. He lifts his hand and watches the residue, the golden glow around his skin, around the place where the tree kissed his skin; he smiles. He feels good. 

And deeper, and deeper still. 

He knows where he’s going, and because he’s dreaming, he doesn’t have to worry about the sense of it all, or how he knows it. He’s going to the circle. It’s where he’s meant to be. 

The circle?

What’s the circle?

He gets there, and stands in between two ramrod birch trees, a hand on either trunk, just looking at it. Hello, he thinks, and this is all sensible, and he isn’t surprised when the circle greets him back. 

It’s seven stones, roughly man-height, unhewn and set, apparently at random, in the mossy grass of the forest clearing. The space within the circle is large enough, maybe twenty feet across, with a complete lack of anything there to distinguish it from the rest of the wood - and that in itself is distinction enough. No rocks, no fallen branches, not even a crumpled brown leaf fallen astray; just a ring of grass, bright from the light the open clearing provides for it. At the base of the stones forming the circle, little field mushrooms sprout, pale and in their thousands, their slim caps curving and reaching upwards. Moss grows, but only on the sides of the stones facing away from the centre of the circle. 

Yoongi steps forward, and forward, and forward. All the while he waits for the dream to turn, to go sick, to hurt him, as he knows it must. 

His feet make no marks in the grass. The air he breathes does not distress. 

He steps into the circle. 

And he steps into the circle. 

And he steps into the circle. 

And he steps into the circle. The air around him is hot with friction, but not humid, not restricting; the heat of an open space, the heat of energy creating itself. 

And he steps into the circle.

When he wakes up he’s sweated an imprint of his back into the sheet, and his pillowcases are soaked, ruined. He wraps himself in a spare towel as he’s stuffing his bedclothes into the washer, shivering as the cold sets into his bones, the fever-heat leaving him as quickly as it had come, as inexplicably as it had been created. He feels like he could be snapped in half; if someone held his wrist, they could break the bones there, brittle and fine as spun sugar and ginger. 

When he wakes up he is in the trees, the leaves kissing his elbows, his knees, the bones of his ankles. 

When he wakes up he is lying on his couch. 

When he wakes up - 

When he wakes up, his feet are cold, and when he plucks at the shirt on his back, the cold air flows through him, pressed against his skin like a lover’s hand. 

When he wakes up he takes a step and swallows the urge to shout, as a thorn as wide and as pointed as a kitchen knife tears a strip down the length of his foot, and as he looks around and realises that this isn’t his bedroom - 

And when he falls against the trunk of a nearby tree, the stripped bark there reaches through his collar and against his skin - 

He can feel the bruises blooming on his shoulders. He can feel the wet heat already pulsing out of his foot, the only point of warmth on his body, the only thing he knows he can cling to.

That this, this greyscale is familiar, these mossed trees, this time, this place -

He hears the barking on the wind, and someone’s curdling scream. He knows that this time, he is awake.

Through the wood comes the sound of the earth-shattering, painful shout, so familiar as to be commonplace now to Jeongguk. He pays it no notice, busy with his own tasks, the cold wind fighting a losing battle against his thick fur, the ruff around his neck, the scruff at his hocks, the exposed skin on the inside of his ears, the warmth of his body wrapped around him like a blanket, like himself. He feels at peace now, although he was in a raging mood earlier.

They can all smell it, though, heavy as the fruit from the end of hanging branches. 

Something is wrong in the air. 

Jeongguk has taken Follie Wood North and that portion of the old forest for his scouting. He had seen the look in Seokjin’s honey eyes as he’d been heading in that direction, but he’d felt through the elastic snap of the coven bond too, thick as treacle; their humour, their entertainment, although they had no grounds to feel so. Hoseok had yapped a wolfish laugh before he’d dived into his own chosen sector, and even Taehyung looked amused before he’d picked up the knife. They’re all horrible.

Well, let them laugh. Even now he can hear barking in the distance, Namjoon and someone else, but Jeongguk knows - he knows - his choice of direction had nothing to do with the cottage downwind, and he doesn’t need to prove otherwise. He’s his own man. He’s independent. 

He doesn’t care about Yoongi most of all. 

He paws through a thick bramble patch, dock leaves under the pads of his paws, thorny branches wrapping around him like slippery grasping vines, digging in deep and holding on. Hooks. Yoongi had been oddly kind, earlier today, and soft, and his hand had been nice and calm through Jeongguk’s fur - 

But that means nothing, as he said. He doesn’t need to - to - to prove it, or anything. 

The thorns, thistles and brambles pull painfully at his fur and he shakes them off, rougher than he needs to be, Jimin’s scream descending into manic sobbing, the scent of familiar (and therefore unimportant) blood travelling through the air. It’s only when the smell of someone fresh, someone new emerges that he begins to panic. To turn, his run halted, and shove his nose in the air, catching at the currents with the whiskers streaming off his snout, to really try and distinguish the blood of the witches from whatever else is afoot - Jimin bleeds ritually, and his pain will never really last for long, nor mean very much. Jeongguk can smell the heaviness of it, the sort that only comes with a sliced artery or three, the sort that comes when Taehyung takes the serrated blade from the secret hiding spot beside the blender in the kitchen, and saws first through Jimin’s thumb, and then through each of his fingers one by one. 

They grow back by morning. It’s okay. 

But no - there’s something else, something faint under the smell of the fingers, floating around the tree trunks. 

Taehyung’s chanting rises over the treetops, deep, sonorous, and calm. Has he smelt it? 

Oh, god. Jeongguk begins to feel strange, the way he never does in the woods, in this shape, in this time. 

And he can still, still, still smell someone new, and afraid, and bleeding. 

He barks into the sky, but when he gets no response from any of the rest of them, no howling replies, no enchanted screaming, he makes the quick decision to turn away from his usual scouting path towards the new smell - the fear and the blood, his paws trailing the paths he and Deirdre went over with their jeeps earlier in the day. His tail tangles in a coil of fallen ivy, shed from the thick trunk of a sycamore tree; his mouth, hanging open, fills with night-time midges and the taste of greenish tree sap. He runs faster. Behind him, he can feel the reassuring warmth of the coven bond, all of them in one nebula connected, and behind that the circle, emanating outward, catching them all in its thick net. 

Outside that is the new smell. Not within anything at all - and alone, and frightened. 

He barks again, and then howls, and hopes one of them can hear him. 

Close to the site of the new smell he stops, snuffling around in the bracken and mulched leaves of this spot in the old forest, hunting for the clothing cache he knows is somewhere here, buried by Namjoon and Hoseok only a month ago, if even. He’d rather face a threat - if this is a threat, but Amandi’s dream is thick in his mind - in human form, and shock them with the wolf form, than the other way around - 

Yeah, that makes sense. The oilskin wrapping is under the tree he thought it would be, a few sets of jeans and some block-colour tees, some boxers, and in only a few seconds he’s changed and dressing, making less than no noise as he slides into the shirt and the trousers, his breath huffing silently, fog in the air. His hands are still, but he can feel them trying to tremble. 

Even in this shape, he can smell something new where it shouldn’t be - and yet, something weirdly old. No, not old. But known to him. Comforting, he might say, if it wasn’t coming at this time, with this strange feeling floating around. 

It’s near. 

It’s just through the trees. 

He really didn’t know who he was expecting. 

Yoongi Min, in an oversized navy shirt and a pair of flannel pyjama bottoms, is leaning almost all of his weight on the extended branch of a thick chestnut tree, one foot lifted off the ground, wincing in pain. He stinks of confusion and fear, and a not-unpleasant musk, his shirt still sticking to his back and the round of his shoulders, and his fingers - his foot - both wet with his own dark blood. 

Why is it always Jeongguk? 

This time he waits until Yoongi sees him, but he signals as much as he can, crashing through the brush, breathing as loud as he dares, watching Yoongi touch his fingers to his lips, brush his dark hair from his forehead, inhale shaky and tired, as still and as pretty as a painting. He knocks through a tree branch, lets it snap against his neck, doesn’t look away from Yoongi. 

“Oh, jesus-” Yoongi jumps, a sort of full-body shudder, his eyes wide and dark, his mouth open, his bloody hand pressed to his neck as though to defend it, “Jeongguk? Jeongguk?” 

“You’re hurt,” Jeongguk moves forward, and he can’t look away from the streaky fingerprints on the length of Yoongi’s throat, “You - what are you doing here? Again?” 

“I don’t know. I don’t - I don’t know,” and when Jeongguk looks Yoongi up and down, from his badly-shaking hands to his pyjamas to his mussed hair to his marked absence of feline companionship, and when he listens to the heartbeat in the air, he can’t find a word of a lie. 

Yoongi does not know why he is here. 

Jeongguk steps close again, hands out. “I’m - yeah. Okay. I’m sorry. I promise I’m sorry. D’you think you can step on that foot?”

“Yeah,” Yoongi does so, and immediately buckles over, his ankle twisting in an effort to stop the flaking forest floor from getting into the open cut, “Fuck-” and Jeongguk makes sure to be there, catching Yoongi by the forearms, propping him up again against the tree. “Fuck.” 

This close and Jeongguk can smell the bedlinens on him, the warm sleep, the fear and confusion. “Sleepwalking?”

“I don’t-” Yoongi is holding onto him tight, his nails digging in hard enough to score flesh, if Jeongguk was that sort of body. “I don’t - sleepwalk. I don’t-”

But Jeongguk has let this go on for two weeks now, two weeks of finding Yoongi in his woods and in his town and beside his lakes, and in the dreams of his London friends and the conversation of his coven. “I know you don’t,” he says, arm around Yoongi’s waist, eyes on his bleeding foot, “I know you don’t.”

“Then do you know what-”

“I don’t, but someone will,” Jeongguk says determinedly. Yoongi’s hand bundles and fists in the fabric of his t-shirt, pulling the collar tight around his neck, and he can smell the blood. “You’re coming back to ours. I wanna… I wanna... I wanna work out what’s going on here.” 

Chapter Text

WLS: So, what do you think is next for you? 

Min: I think it’s hard to say. Obviously the success of - of Pleasant Lands was way above what I predicted, what Izzy [Isobel Way, Min’s publicist and personal friend] predicted, but I’m not upset - like, this doesn’t ruin my plans, or anything. Far from it. It’s just a lot all at once. I mean, this time last year I was wrapping up Sana’s story, and I was looking into postgraduate work somewhere, and now I’m - now I’m, like, talking to you. So I think what’s next is to try and - [laugh] to beat the horse before it dies for good.

WLS: Is that really how you see it? 

Min: I mean, not really. No, no. Not really. I’m grateful for the success, and the security that lets me write full-time. But the ideas don’t come automatically, so at the moment I’m just… letting it come to me naturally, and whatever happens happens. I don’t expect it to be quick. But Sana’s book is closed. I don’t know who’s book I’ll open. Maybe no-one’s. I’m just happy this has happened at all.

WLS: And what’s your go-to comfort movie? 

• Part of an interview between Yoongi Min and the Washington Literary Society online blog, dated October 2017. The two-page spread is accompanied by a blurry phone picture of two cats, curled up in the sunlight cast through a thin city apartment window, their tails wrapped around one another. 

By the time they reach the house, or near enough the treeline to see it, Yoongi has become no more coherent than he was in the forest. His foot continues to bleed, leaving a clear path for anyone to follow as it drips and weaves unsteadily through the trees, and his grip gets only tighter, more desperate, the more they walk, the more he struggles to keep up with Jeongguk. “Wait, I can’t-”

But Jeongguk has had enough. “No,” he grunts, and ducks low to sling Yoongi’s arm firm over his neck, “We’ll be here all bloody night. Sit you down-”

“What are you do-”

Jeongguk stands, pulling Yoongi around and into his arms, cradling him against his chest, as secure as he can hold him. He staggers momentarily with the weight, and then adjusts, pleased with himself and how accurately he’d judged Yoongi’s weight. Lighter than he looks. “We’ll go faster this way,” he says, looking down now at the crown of Yoongi’s head, “It just makes sense.” He’s embarrassed, but he can’t put his finger on why - why he feels so open, in the middle of the night, in the woods. 

Should he have done that? He only wants to get home. He only wants to stop the little noises of pain every few seconds. And yet, still, the embarrassment continues.  

And it only gets worse when Yoongi very audibly gives up any fight he’s waging, exhaling in a soft sigh and resting his head against Jeongguk’s shoulder, his neck pressed against the bare skin of his bicep peeking past the sleeve of his t-shirt. Yoongi’s skin is cold, doubly so compared to the supernatural heat of Jeongguk’s. He must be freezing. “If you say so, I suppose,” he murmurs, clearly as  out of it as he can be while still retaining consciousness. “I… if you say so.”

So Jeongguk takes him the rest of the way in silence, the smell still fresh in his nose from the cut now sluggishly closing, the fear lessening in place of a gentle, sweet complacency. It’s a side of Yoongi totally new to Jeongguk - or at least, newer than Yoongi himself is - and one he doesn’t dislike. Can’t bring himself to dislike. There is nothing about this that could be dangerous, apart from the feeling swelling in Jeongguk, the one that he knows Yoongi isn’t doing on purpose. 

Really, he knows nothing about Yoongi at all. Nothing concrete. 

He likes to hang around in the woods, and he loves his cats, and he’s from somewhere in America but not really, and he’s a writer and he gets cold easily and he can drive, but he doesn’t have a car yet. He’s small and easy to aggravate and easy to calm down, too, and his heart beats like a hummingbird when he’s afraid, and when he’s steeling himself for a dramatic statement he swallows so heavily that Jeongguk can hear it in the air, and he isn’t a hunter. He can’t be. He mustn’t be. Amandi’s dream - the newcomer to Follie - it must be, must be about somebody else. Something else. Maybe this is the one time he’ll be wrong.

(Which raises a different question completely, but that’s one Jeongguk will save for the morning.)

At the treeline, Yoongi moves his hand from where it had been resting on Jeongguk’s shoulder to catch a branch in his fist, the tree shaking in his hold. “Stop-” 

And Jeongguk does. Immediately. “What? What have you seen?”

“I don’t…” Yoongi uncurls his hand, and three black and orange leaves flutter out, leaving wet debris flaking on his skin, the pink and white all wet with dew, “I thought I saw… I thought I heard something. In the woods. I thought…”

“What did you hear?” The hunter? The coven? Jimin?

Again Yoongi looks up, his eyes searching for something that Jeongguk isn’t sure he can give him. “Someone calling my name. Were you calling me - where did you find me? Why’m I with - with you?” 

“I found you,” Jeongguk says as patiently as he can. He doubts Yoongi will remember anything of the past half hour. He leans against the trunk of the tree Yoongi had grabbed, adjusting his grip, letting Yoongi sink a little further into his grasp, into the warm, secure crook of Jeongguk’s arms. “Do you want to go… do you want me to bring you home?”

“Home?”

“The cottage,” he says helplessly, “The-”

“Someone was calling me,” Yoongi looks back into the woods. He’s pale, very pale, and when he blinks his eyelids fall and rise languidly, struggling to move up and down. He looks about to fall asleep. “Someone was…” he tries to reach out again, and then seems to lose any energy he might have gathered. “Can’t you hear them? They’re in the middle of the forest. They… say they want to see me. We’re going the wrong way.”

Jeongguk strikes out for the final stretch to the house in silence, resolving to ignore whatever might come out of Yoongi’s mouth from now until then; he obviously doesn’t know what’s going on. (Not that Jeongguk does, either.) (But he’s used to that.)

In the woods, he hears a howl, and then a manic, bubbling scream. A set of barks. Hoseok, Taehyung, and Seokjin in that order. 

The house is unlocked. Jeongguk opens the front door with his elbow and closes it with his foot, glad at least that he isn’t wearing shoes to fight off at the door, and fling on the pile of trainers, boots, and wellies that rises waist-height beside the letterbox. (Shoes enough for seven people - it all adds up. Jeongguk’s lost whole wellingtons to the pile, eaten and swallowed and never seen again.) 

The kitchen light is still on, a thoughtful precaution taken by Namjoon before they left for their circuits earlier in the night; it’s a full moon habit kept and carried on, because nothing is worse than stumbling home in the dark drunk on blood magic or delirious from a long time shifted, and trying to take off shoes and fight with light switches and butter ten slices of toast all at once. The warm bulblight bounces off the warm wood cupboards and the walls, painted in neutral yellows, and the bright, cosy trinkets and pots and pans balanced everywhere, and the mismatched mess of the house at ease, and somehow just the colours of it make the room ten times as warm as it would be done in greys and blacks. The aga, radiating heat, seems almost to steam from where it sits in its cubby, the kettle resting ready to go on the warming plate.

“Okay,” Jeongguk says, mostly to himself, “Okay, and I’ll set you… here.” He bends by the sofa in the lounge, just around the corner from the open kitchen, and as gently as he can transfers Yoongi’s weight from his arms to the pillows, the heaps of crocheted, knit, and sewn blankets, Christmas projects collected over the years. Yoongi goes without complaint, seeming not to notice, his cheek rubbing rough against the fabric, his wrist folded across his stomach. His bones look scarily delicate.

“Okay,” Jeongguk repeats, “Okay…” Yoongi’s foot is still bleeding, slower but with unusual persistence, and although this sofa is no stranger to various bodily fluids - blood witches be damned - Jeongguk still stretches Yoongi’s legs out, draping them over the other end, letting the blood splash onto the floorboards, collecting among the rest of the brownish red stains there. “Okay. Okay. I know what I’m doing-”

“You called my name,” Yoongi whispers, eyes closed, “I know you did. I heard you.” 

Jeongguk moves silently from the sofa into the kitchen, scanning the closed cupboards. Various photos and keychains and whittled wooden icons hang from the handles, tied with twine; Seokjin got very into his carving last autumn, and made a heap of wooden wizards and ugly dogs and bones and the like, and then lost interest just in time to festoon them all over the house. Jeongguk heads for the medicine cupboard, the one next to the aga, the one the most heavily soaked in useless baubles; the handle has long since buried itself, and now to open it he has to seize one of the keyrings by the body and haul the door open. 

He knows what he’s looking for.

It’s Taehyung’s creation, really, and it’s something that comes along with the hazards of performing blood rituals on an almost daily basis - deep, dangerous wounds that have to be either dealt with or kept to heal naturally, and far too slowly. After a few years of blood magic, and a few close brushes with something a lot worse, Taehyung created what he calls sealing wax; a greenish paste to be applied with the pestle it’s made with, liberal across the cut or wound, that works within ten minutes to stop the bleeding, if nothing else. It isn’t a perfect cure, but it’s evidently useful enough that witches all across Europe and Asia contact Jimin and Taehyung for bottles of it - and it’s one of the most useful things they keep in their kitchen cabinets.

(Of course they keep all the good magic in the attic. Greedy bastards.) 

Their current pot is almost halfway used, and heading for the bottom of the jam jar Taehyung has bottled it in. The top has been sealed with a square of threading gingham cotton, and the pestle has been attached to the side of the jar with sellotape; Jeongguk grabs for it, and tears the ceramic stick from the side with a sticky ripping noise. 

He can hear Yoongi’s heartbeat, slower than it should be, and he can smell the open wound, and nothing else. Lethargy, maybe. Certainly not fear, or concealment, and although it is true hunters can hide their true feelings, Jeongguk is almost definite that Yoongi couldn’t in this state. No, he’s certain of it - he’s hiding nothing.

Which means he’s real. Just as he presents himself.

And Jeongguk refuses to feel guilty about that - he does. He has to. 

“Let me see your foot,” he says, loud in the quiet dark of the lounge, the only light whatever bleeds through from the kitchen. Yoongi has burrowed into the space between two sofa cushions, his eyes shut, almost buried among the homely blankets. “Yoongi, I have to - you’re still bleeding.”

“Mmrph.” 

Jeongguk takes that for permission and acts accordingly. “Let me see the cut,” he murmurs, snapping the band off the top of the sealing wax so the smell of green, medical paste fills the room. “Please?”

Yoongi turns, still looking incredibly out of it, but he does let Jeongguk take his foot and spread the paste across and into the bloody gash along the length of it. Jeongguk holds the heel in his palm, his thumb spreading up the arch, and Yoongi stays obediently still, although Jeongguk suspects that has more to do with the exhaustion than out of goodwill to Jeongguk. “That’s cold… ah. That feels nice.”

“Good,” Jeongguk says. He holds Yoongi’s foot in his two hands, his thumbs brushing one after the other across the arch of it, the soft skin against the rough scabs on his own thumbs, watching the cut slowly seize and stop weeping the red and the viscous. He sees it sealing. “Good.”

He stays there, doing that movement over and over, until he’s sure Yoongi has passed straight through from delirium into true sleep, his breath deepening and evening out, his rabbit-fast heart slowing to a thin, quietly reassuring drum beat. Yoongi’s foot is warming up, slowly, from the frigid cold of the woods, and Jeongguk traces his eyes up from the vein there, up through the leg, the body, to the beating heart at the centre. 

And he realises that Yoongi is pretty. 

Pretty - handsome - no, something more than that. In the light of the waning moon, the bright, supernatural white turns him ghostly, and he looks still as carved marble, like something wholly other. Even his breath fogs against the cold glass of the window behind the sofa, huffing gently, and he looks spellbound, as though his breath itself is part of some arcane ritual Jeongguk couldn’t hope to understand. Something more than he is. Something more than the present.

Yes. Something more. Jeongguk can see him framed, hanging on a wall, imprisoned behind red velveteen rope. 

He sits for a while, holding Yoongi’s ankle in the cup of his thumb and finger, just to feel how easily he could snap the bone, and then he stands and drapes a blanket over the whole display, burying the beauty under crocheted pink and orange. 

And then he goes to bed. 

Yoongi wakes up slowly, and then all at once, to the heavenly smell of someone making proper filtered coffee; a smell he hasn’t had the privilege to experience since leaving New York. It reminds him of Gerry’s flat. Is he in Gerry’s flat? Has he gone back to New York? What the fuck? 

Maybe it was a dream. It certainly feels like a dream, and has that otherworldly, fuzzy quality to it. As if he would ever move to Ireland. Yoongi doesn’t do things like that. But - although he must be with Gerry, the couch doesn’t feel like Gerry’s leather cushions below him, and the blankets don’t smell of Gerry’s detergent.

And he can hear the background chatter of many voices, many bodies, in a way Gerry’s flat is not. Gerry lives alone and is proud of it, and his parties are exclusively he, Izzy, and Yoongi getting drunk on white wine and watching nineties chick flicks on his huge, curved television screen. But the smell of coffee and the sound of chat - and laughter, and giggling - and the smell of something like pastry, and toast, and fresh air, is something he hadn’t realised he missed. He feels like he’s one in a crowd - one among many. 

And he’s warm. Cosy, under a heavy, comforting weight, a dull ache in his foot and behind his shoulders but nothing immediately wrong with him. 

He feels - happy. Content. 

“Ger,” he mumbles, rolling over, and then cracking his eye open, expecting to see Gerry’s flat the way it gets after they’ve been particularly drunk, wine bottles rolling around empty on the carpet, the shaggy throws on the sofa all cast across the TV, Gerry’s little sausage dog looking balefully at him. 

Instead he opens his eyes to a house entirely unfamiliar to him, warm, open, and bright, and a table full of faces he’s sore to be familiar to, and the smell of croissants and wet dog. Namjoon and Hoseok and Seokjin, and Taehyung and another man he’s not met yet, and Jeongguk, all of them so pointedly looking away from Yoongi that it’s as though they haven’t noticed him sleeping in their lounge, a mountain of scented blankets over him, something wet on the edge of his foot, his eyes open and darting from side to side like he’s hunting out an escape route. Have they really not noticed him? How did he get here? 

He looks around. He can’t help it. 

Stretching up above and behind him, casting streaks of hot yellow sunlight on the skin of his that he’s exposed, an airy window takes up most of the wall the sofa has been pressed up against, stretching almost to the skirting where the ceiling meets the bend of the wall. There are tea stains on the white-painted skirting, where a mug has been dropped and almost, but not quite, mopped up. And speaking of the walls: they’re the thing that draw his eye the most, painted that interior decorator’s shade of mossy green and absolutely dripping with hangings of all kinds, from embroidered hoops with gods bless this house stitched messily across the arch, to a beautiful, intricate watercoloured scene, a mountain with a thin, trembling waterfall cutting the rock in two. The colour continues through to the kitchen - the whole house seems to be open, but where the walls in the kitchen are neatly covered by pine cabinets and strung with a ridiculous amount of souvenirs, the walls in the lounge are covered in pictures and paintings. Behind the hanging basket chair there is a mirror almost as big as the window, the silver flaking at the edges and rimmed in elegant metal trim, reflecting the pictures back onto itself. Photos of the six of them on holiday, posing cheerfully on the peak of Scottish mountains or wrapped up warm on the stony beaches up north. Selfies printed out and stuck up with sticky paper tape, paintings in frames and outside them, thick daubed paintbrush marks, every single one of them an act of violence on the canvas. The paint is stained with chairmarks and black discolorations, rubber burnt at foot level, a spot in the corner where the painter of the room obviously lost interest and started applying the colour with odd swirls and slaps, popcorn texture in just that little square. The character oozes from the room. The age drips from it. It has been lived in, but more than that, it has been living; the house is old enough to reflect its inhabitants back onto themselves.

Digesting the walls takes him at least fifteen minutes, by which time Yoongi is almost certain they all know he’s awake; they’re just ignoring it. Is that polite? He guesses so.

So he does what he does best, when he wakes up in an unfamiliar house, on the couch, feeling a bit worse for the wear. “Good morning,” he says, taking the sofa blanket with him and shuffling through the lounge to the kitchen, “Would someone mind telling me what happened last night?”

The response to that is pleasingly electric. Namjoon, fighting to avoid Yoongi’s eye, knocks a mug with his elbow, and hot coffee sloshes partly over the table and partly over Seokjin’s elbow, which sets off a chain reaction of childish swearing and threats of retribution, and the sound of feet kicking under the table, and chairs squealing across floorboards.

Yoongi nestles deeper into the blanket wrapped around his head and shoulders, and feels a lot easier. It’s hard to be tense when three grown men are tossing flakes of wet croissant at each other and shrieking girlishly. 

Across the table, Jeongguk meets his eye and just as quickly looks away, flushing red from the neck up to the cheeks, a curious retraction from the total irritation, the dismissal he had felt from him these past few weeks. 

“We found you in the woods,” Taehyung, the closest to Yoongi, passes him a mug and half a slice of buttered toast, a look of beatific peace on his face completely at odds with the tableau. “You’d tripped on something and your foot was all fucked up. We - well, I say we, but it was Jeonggukkie who found you, and then we came home and you were all wrapped up on the sofa.”

“My - foot?” Yoongi looks down at his bare feet, wriggles his toes to make sure he can, but the only thing wrong with them is a long cut along the side, with the look of something healed a few days instead of a few hours. “Huh. That’s weird.”

“Magic,” says the only one he hasn’t met yet, a look of wickedly interested amusement on his - very - beautiful face. Symmetrical, full, rosy-cheeked and dark-eyed, his hair falling easily across his forehead, a bruise purpling at the base of his throat. “Only explanation.”

Yoongi knows enough to pinpoint when he’s being made fun of, and he blushes. 

“Jimin,” Jeongguk says in a low voice, “Don’t-”

“Come and have a coffee with us,” Hoseok interrupts, a smile clearly pasted over the real expression on his face. “Y’know, I think the seat next to Jeonggukkie is free-”

“No it isn’t,” Seokjin says, from his seat beside Jeongguk. He squawks as Hoseok prods him off the stool, and then the argument is back and cycling round again, like a wind-up doll you can’t help but twist the key of. In the midst of it, Yoongi takes the seat, after much flapping from Taehyung and the new handsome one - Jimin. 

“Yoongi,” Namjoon says, and smiles, and looks like he’s really trying to make it authentic, “Uh. Um. Good morning.”

“Yeah,” Yoongi watches Jeongguk pour coffee into the mug he’s been handed, and wonders when this has become his life. “Yeah, morning to you too. Um. Do you guys know how I ended up in the woods last night?”

“You seemed pretty out of it. I dunno. You were in your pyjamas,” Jeongguk brushes his hand in the air, encapsulating all Yoongi is, and then rubs the back of his neck, “You looked like you’d been sleepwalking or something, but I didn’t want to bring you back to - y’know, how you live alone and that. I would have felt bad. Don’t you remember anything?”

“Not a single thing. Not a single… this is really good coffee,” Yoongi can’t help the way his eyebrows shoot up his forehead after the first sip. “Where did you guys get this? Not from the shop in Follie?”

Jimin snorts, covering his mouth with his hand. “Taehyung makes it. It’s herbal.” 

“Herbal coffee?”

Taehyung glares across the table and there’s the thump of someone kicking someone else. “I just buy it online. Don’t listen to him. He thinks it’s stupid.”

“It’s nice, is what it is,” Yoongi takes another sip and lets the wakefulness wash through his whole body, down his arms and through his chest to his heart. It feels like a shot, going the opposite direction; brightening him up instead of soaking him in thick, drunken treacle. “Woah.” 

Jeongguk hands him more toast, buttered and slathered in marmalade. It feels like an apology, but Yoongi isn't sure what for.

"My cats-"

"Are fine," Hoseok says, looking across the table at Yoongi with a reassuringly serious expression, "I was working really early this morning, and I looked in the window when I was passing. Their bowl was still mostly full and they were sleeping on the kitchen table."

"Great," Yoongi grumbles, but he's pleased Hoseok had the forethought to remember - he isn't sure he would have, in his place. "Well, thank you."

The radio is playing some morning chat show, and it helps add a sense of normalcy Yoongi feels he might have been lacking, otherwise. The toast is perfect, just how he likes it, and the coffee tastes just as wonderful on the second sip - were it not for the brittle tension in the air, and the way Jeongguk won't look at him, Yoongi would have found himself perfectly at home. It’s almost frightening how comfortable he feels, in yesterday’s pyjamas among them all, a duck among six elegant swans.

“So, Yoongi,” Seokjin butts in after a few seconds of draining silence, “Are you going to go to the social?” 

“The… social?”

“I gave you the flyer for it in the library the other day,” Taehyung pours himself a cup of milk, and then sets the jug back in the centre of the table. “Yes, he is. I think you’d really like it.”

“And we’re baking.”

“And we’re doing stuff for it, too,” Hoseok says to the table, and then to Yoongi, “Yeah - I work for the bakery in Follie, and for harvest we always cook up a load of seedy bread and pastries and pies and things. Veggie and steak pie. Mmm. Chicken and gravy.”

“You’re making me hungry,” Jeongguk says, a little awkward but with a clear attempt to be easygoing, “I can’t wait for those little quiche things.”

“It’s fun,” Namjoon says to Yoongi directly. He smiles, then, an olive branch on his lips. “It’s tasty. And the whole village is basically slavering to meet you - you’ve basically only been to the library and the shop, and y’know there’s no gossip here but when new people move in.” 

Yoongi starts picking the crust off his toast. “I mean - I hadn’t really thought about it. Is it like... does everyone go?” 

Beside him Jeongguk nods seriously. “Oh, completely. Even Deirdre - that’s the woman doing work in the woods right now - even Deirdre and her crew were given invites, and I think she’s gonna go. If you’re around Follie and you’re not a complete weirdo, you’re basically expected to show up and eat a pie and have a good time, y’know? Sing a few songs. Jimin’s gonna stun us all with the dancing, all the rest of it.”

“Oh, you,” Jimin extends his legs, long and clean-shaven when his pajamas slide up to his knees, and props his feet on Seokjin’s shoulders. “I dance a bit and they go mad for it. All that black magic. You ever done it?”

“Black magic?”

“Dancing,” Jimin’s eyes are wide and serious, his mouth open, his tongue dancing across his white teeth, “We don’t do real magic in the church. But black magic, oh, sure. We do that. I do that. The Conway siblings do the music, and we all dance, and the older ones used to say it was blackest magic.”

Yoongi is beginning to feel distinctly wrong-footed. “Uh. Sounds… fun?” 

“It is fun,” Jeongguk gently nudges his shoulder against Yoongi’s, “Jimin’s just being a dick. But I’d - we’d really like to see you there, if you’re not busy. No?” And he looks at Yoongi in a way that Yoongi finds impossible to hate, or even to really dislike. 

“Yeah,” he says, succumbing, “I’ll see you there.”

Jeongguk is riding a high, that afternoon in the woods. 

There’s been no news from Dublin this past week, and no news is good news; either whatever rampaging creature down there has stopped, had their full, and retreated, or the hunters have all flocked to the city to do what they do best, or something else has stopped it from savaging - Jeongguk doesn’t really care, so long as Madeline can stop sending them worried texts about the safety of their secrets, and about Amandi’s nocturnal habits. (No dreams pertaining to them, but three correct predictions for the weather near Aberystwyth, a talent Amandi has that only presents itself when he’s stressed.) Hell, even Daniel has stopped texting them all so often with worried check-in messages.

And Jeongguk is almost confident in his belief that Yoongi is not the danger Amandi predicted. One might be coming, yes, but it doesn’t have to be now, and it doesn’t have to be him; one sleepwalking night does not danger make, and nobody could fake confusion that deep, nor awkward sincerity that genuine. 

And the forestry work is going smoother than Jeongguk could have hoped. So yes - he’s in a good mood. 

“Jeongguk!”

He sets his hand on the trunk of one of the thinner firs, turning his head; he’s almost at the border of the forestry wood, and the old trees beckon him closer, their branches curled towards him. He frowns at them, and then turns. “Deirdre, hey. What can I help you with?”

She’s in workboots and denim overalls, her hair scraped back over her scalp, dirt and sawdust clinging to her sweaty skin. “Never rains but it pours. Hey, listen, do you have any machine oil anywhere about? The fucking… the like, the wee handsaw has jammed and I must have left mine at home, ‘cos there’s none in the van. I’m sorry, I should have rung you, but I saw you through the trees-”

“Don’t worry about it,” Jeongguk assures her, running through a mental checklist of the stuff at home, “I think I’ve got some. Wanna-”

“Thank god,” she smiles, her eyes turning twinkly, her heart speeding up just a little, easily audible to him. “I’m on the quad just there - d’you mind if we run and pick it up now? We need it if we’re gonna finish the week on schedule. I’m so sorry to be a pain in the neck.”

“Yeah, yeah, sure,” with one last glance at the old forest, feeling the comforting throb of the circle in the soil below him, Jeongguk lifts his hand from the tree and waves it in the air. “Lead on, Macduff, or - or whatever. You know the way to my house?”

Deirdre has already started walking, and shoots him a strange look. “Sure I do. Can’t really miss it, up on the ridge like that, and I figured… well, you talked about having a fair few brothers, so I guessed that big place must be yours.”

“You’re not wrong.” Jeongguk watches her ponytail bob up and down with the movement, and a thought strikes him. “Hey, has anyone invited you to the social on Saturday?” He assumed someone had, but the conversation of this morning has it in the forefront of his mind.

And her heart quickens again - but maybe that’s just the reaction of anyone, to the overtures of someone else asking them to be somewhere. “Huh. You know, I saw a poster for that in the butcher’s, but I didn’t think to grab one. Open invite?”

“Sure,” Jeongguk says, casual chat in full flow, “It’s in aid of the church roof, y’know, and the harvest. Mostly just games and a bit of music and a boring old speech by the reverend, and then getting completely blasted, but it’s a good way to spend an autumn night. And you’d be welcome along. I mean… what, how long did your guys reckon this would take you?”

“Pretty much the most of the season,” she shrugs, and turns, and shows him her brilliant smile, “That’s really kind of you. Thanks.”

Deirdre’s quad bike is where she said it would be, parked on the nearest forestry lane beside a forlornly silent handsaw and one of the men she was with when Jeongguk first met her, silent and stolid as ever, his hands in the pockets of his work jacket. “Hey, Cullis, he’s got some,” she tells the man, “I’ll be back in, like, a second.”

He looks at Deirdre for a long time, and Jeongguk for longer, and then nods. Just once, a bob of the chin up and down. His beard is grown out just enough to look like the whorls of a thumbprint on his skin, his cheeks and his square chin.

Okay, weird. “Yeah, I live close,” Jeongguk says, mostly to bridge the uncomfortable silence, “I - you ready?”

Deirdre slings herself onto the bike, and turns the key in the ignition. “Best you hold on, I reckon.” 

Jeongguk hates riding passenger on quads; nothing is more dangerous than trusting yourself and your grip on someone else’s waist to the whims of four slim tyres and momentum, and the squeeze of acceleration against the handlebars, every twitch of the driver’s thumb another few miles to the counter. It’s frightening. Deirdre drives fast - clearly in control, but it’s still scary to be the one without his finger on the trigger, and Jeongguk finds himself praying to several deities all at once, resisting the powerful urge to leap off. The forest blurs past. Mud flecks up on Jeongguk’s thighs and his cheeks, and he knows without having to check that the back of his boiler suit will be a muddy mess. 

At the edge of the wood, the house in sight, Deirdre tugs on the brakes. “I don’t want to ruin the fields,” she explains, “It’s only a quick walk, right?”

“Yeah, totally,” Jeongguk assures her. He leaps off the quad, and sinks ankle-deep into fresh dirt churned up by the wheels of all the working vehicles. “C’mon with me.”

At the house, in the garage, he finds Taehyung pottering about with the sharpest cleaver and a screwdriver soaked in rust, wearing only a dressing gown and a thick bandage around his wrist, his hair unbrushed, headphones nestled over the unruly mess. “Tae,” Jeongguk calls, wishing Deirdre wasn’t so close behind him, “Tae, I-”

At the new sound Taehyung jumps and drops the rusty screwdriver, which rolls, staining the concrete, under the old tractor in the garage. More than just rust reddens the shaft, evidently, and Jeongguk quickly looks at Deirdre to see if she’s noticed - but her eyes are still focused on Taehyung. Thank God.

“Jeongguk!” Taehyung exclaims, quickly tucking the cleaver in the folds of his dressing gown, knocking his headphones down around his neck, “And - um. Hi, there. Miss…?”

“Deirdre,” Deirdre steps forward with her hand out, and Taehyung shakes it with his own, the bandage on his wrist sliding up his arm a little. “You must be one of the brothers, right? I’m Deirdre Collins. One of the contractors working in the woods, I’m sure you’ve seen us. Or heard us, at the very least.”

Taehyung smiles. He can be very friendly (and very human-shaped) when he wants to be. “He’s mentioned you. Nice to meet you - I’m Taehyung. Taehyung Kim.”

“Came here for some oil for the chainsaws,” Jeongguk says, shuffling away from Taehyung and Deirdre and towards the benches that line the walls of the garage, completely swamped by dusty cans of paint, old boxes full of nails, red folding toolboxes bought as Christmas presents and forgotten, stacks of National Geographics from the nineties - and a little grey bottle of machine oil, the cap still sealed and stickered shut, never used. “Found it!”

Deirdre has wandered further into the garage, and Jeongguk exchanges a worried look with Taehyung over her head as her gaze casts… and then keeps cruising right over everything Jeongguk was scared she might point out, high among them Jimin’s set of old serrated blades, and the empty bottles of dog shampoo lying in a heap beside the front wheel of the tractor. If she notices them she does a truly remarkable job of not letting it show on her face. “Real Aladdin’s cave in here, you guys. Woah.”

“We never throw anything out,” Taehyung says. His eyes flicker from Deirdre to the door. “Do you two want a cup of-”

“No, no, we’re okay,” Jeongguk interrupts hastily, not really caring how rude it’ll look to Deirdre. For some reason he can’t place, his skin crawls at that suggestion, and ever since Amandi’s letter he’s taken to trusting his skin. “I have stuff to do in the forest.”

“Yeah, so do I,” Deirdre says, hand trailing down from the body of the tractor to her pocket - is it his imagination, or does she sound disappointed? “But thanks for the offer.” 

Jeongguk sets the oil in her hand, and turns her down when she gives him the option of a lift back into the woods. “I’ll make my own way, don’t worry.”

“I won’t,” she says, and smiles at him. “Thanks for all your help.”

Back in the garage, there’s a clattering sound, and the wet thunk of something cutting into meat, and then silence. “Fuck it,” Taehyung announces loudly, and then, “Jiminie!” 

Jeongguk leaves them to it. 

Now, let’s turn our attention to the woods. 

Look at the trees and see September, August, July, the leaves flying up and reattaching from the pulp they’ve made of themselves on the ground, the branches unsnapping themselves back to their positions on their larger cousins, the treetops rustling frantically at the speed of a thousand breezes, the wind of four seasons rushing through them all at once. The leaves pale as summer retracts, and shrink and curl up on themselves, and vanish into buds on the whitening branches, and now they’re bare, and the brown rushes up to them again, and the whole thing repeats unending. 

A year in a second. Now two years in a second, three, ten, fifty. The colours flash and hurt your eyes, but you look at the woods all along, and you can’t pull your gaze away. No forestry anymore.

There is one spot among the trees that stays constant, despite the shifting seasons, the time peeling back from the world like skin across a new wound. Snow does not land there, rain avoids it, and even the shadows that the sun spreads over it at noontime look strangely warped, as though the space inside is different to that everywhere else. The stones are high, cold in the summer and warm in the winter, unchangingly grey, and never move nor tremble nor show any sign of growing older or younger, all the way through the centuries. 

A careful eye sees fires, orange glows in the night that appear and disappear in a flash, and the flickering burn through the years, and the long night, and figures slim and shadowy pulling each other through the long grass. The forest retreats. There are snatches of music, frenetic jigs, sweat and pale naked bodies holding hands, circles through the circle, hair and bone and weapons and sex all at once, everything that we are in a mirror. 

A thousand years. The forest shrinks, shrinks all the while, a bald man’s hair receding, the trees climbing up the hill and leaving a spread of lush green meadow in their wake. The stones stay. They shine oddly in the rain that doesn’t touch them, and stay dry and slick at the same time, as though they’ve been rubbed all over with snail slime, a film that never leaves. A thousand years again. 

A thousand years again. 

This far back and there are no trees at all, just the circle crowning the hill, stark against the grey sky. Flashes of single bodies appear and then vanish, wandering people on their way from someplace to someplace else, staying at the circle for a night, the smell of blood casting over the fields. Once or twice a crowd of people on horses and with rope and wooden branches march with purpose across the green, avoiding the circle with an act of purpose. 

This far back and there are no British encampments, there are no Viking rafts on cold and stony beaches, there are barely any Celts. Any people that are here don’t know enough to know they’re people. They exist with the oldest of the gods, walking alongside them, while giants build their bridges in the sea.

And still the circle stays. Yoongi’s eyes burn, but he knows if he closes them he’ll stop seeing whatever he’s been given the right to see, the curtain he’s been permitted to pull back. 

He feels so strange. He feels lighter than air. He had looked at his foot, when Jeongguk left him home, when he was in the private with just himself and the cats, and he had seen just a silvery scar of something long-healed. 

But the memories were coming back to him. The dream he had, running through the trees, and Jeongguk finding him in the woods. 

He had been scared of Jeongguk. He isn’t sure what he feels now, but it isn’t fear - it’s something in his gut telling him to find out more, telling him there’s something off about the woods and the men and the house and the whole lot of them. 

He can’t close his eyes. Yoongi had heard about things in Ireland, fairy rings and banshees and things like that, but he’d thought it was all spin for the tourists, leprechaun-green buses and dyeing the rivers green in March. This circle is something different, though, something new. Something a lot older. 

He’s three thousand years back now and it’s still there, looming, and now time is slowing enough for him to hear snatches of the music they’re singing. Mac tíre, mac tíre, over and over, and there’s a drum with the skin stretched taut over a frame, and a worn wooden stick, and it slides there like it was born to through the palm of the player, and drums and drums and drums. Mac tíre, mac tíre. 

He closes his eyes, and the tears building up in his ducts and over his cheeks spring happily to the surface, coating his dry eyeballs in a filmy liquid once more, his eyelids shut now and firmly refusing to open until they’re clean the way they should be. Blind as he is, he scrabbles on his desk for a piece of paper. 

He writes it down. He hears Spanner meow, curious. 

Yoongi won’t forget. There’s the scent of something weird in this place, and he wants to know what it is, and he isn’t in a mood to stop any time soon. 

Mac tíre, mac tíre. 

Chapter Text

Of course the circles are not known widely. We guard our secrets. But it cannot be denied that they hold a certain presence - they are magnetising forces, for the souls that have some lost quality to them, something missing the circle can fulfil. In my home village, Trockau, there are circles aplenty, and although I was raised myself in the faith and in the knowing, many who came to Trockau did not know why they came - the circle pulled them there for its own purpose, and they were introduced to the faith. Do you live in a village populated by the circle followers? Do you live in a town that tries to follow the old ways? Have you lived there always, or were you pulled by something you cannot mention? In the old places, it continues. The music, the dances, the festivities. Although they may not know it, all are in aid of the circles, and all the circles are in aid of the old places. 

• An excerpt from a chapter on community living in The Worship, a 2005 pamphlet printed in German by Inge Temmel and translated into English by Reid Reynolds. Temmel’s influence as one of the most well-known mind-witches of the 1970s and 80s continues in this pamphlet, written as an introduction to the many newcomers to magic during the circular boom of the turning millennium. Reynolds, an Irish-born vampire living in Surrey, introduced The Worship to the British Isles, where it gained much popularity. 

Seokjin, Taehyung, and Jimin drive up to the hall on Friday, the day before the social, a little past noon, to find the place already covered in cars. Hoseok’s delivery van is there, of course, but then there’s the usual appearances by all the Follie busybodies too retired or too nosy to stay away from the preparation. Seokjin eventually squeezes their town-car (a blue Corsa) between the delivery van and an empty flatbed truck on the main street, cursing as he does so; all the while Taehyung and Jimin giggle together in the back seat, doing something Seokjin doesn’t even want to think about. 

“You guys go on in,” Seokjin says when he’s finally heaved the car onto the pavement, “I got some things to sort out.”

In a different mood, Taehyung or Jimin might have questioned it further, but they’re both on one of their upticks, and so they wriggle out the back seat and onto the street, pinkies linked, Jimin limping slightly, heading up towards the hall already reeking busy preparation. Neither of them look back, but Seokjin can hear Taehyung hollering across the road to Mary, the old woman who used to own the florists shop in town, a greeting of some sort that Mary enthusiastically returns. 

Alone now and Seokjin reaches for his phone. 

Of the London coven, he’s closest to Daniel. Amandi is a dream witch, wickedly funny when he gets in the mood, intelligent enough to hold a degree in art preservation from Trinity, and he and Seokjin get on like a house on fire when he’s around - but equally, Amandi can’t really communicate online. He hates texting, and Seokjin hates dedicating hours of his day to phone calls, and so their friendship is solely one that springs to life when they’re together. Susannah, the other coven member, is a potions witch, but she doesn’t really like Seokjin’s sense of humour - doesn’t get it. Madeline and Namjoon are inseparable, two wolves of the old sort, and so that leaves Seokjin with Daniel, fifty years old with the body of a twenty-two year old, killed during an attack in the nineties after a rave night in London, and perfectly content in his vampirific afterlife. 

Daniel has texted him a screenshot of a webpage - not normal news, of course, but the closed and protected Facebook group, Vamps of GB and Ireland. Look at this, Daniel’s attached to the image.

Seokjin does. Werewolf gone riot in Dublin? The screenshot is titled, red font stark against the white background, and then a picture of some council bins knocked over and a pixelated arm, mostly in shades of red and white. Is this a risk to our society, or just a dog on the loose? This is the fifth attack within a month in Dublin city centre, and hospitals there are starting to panic about rabid animals, but I think we should all remain vigilant. To our members in Dublin or near it, please remember to keep an eye out for any wolves gone riot, or any covens/packs with missing members. I know it’s hard to be a snitch, but the fallout from something like this would be far worse than a little bit of tension between neighbouring covens. Stay vigilant, siblings. 

Seokjin frowns. What do you think? He types to Daniel, looking down at his phone as he slides out of the car. 

I think you guys should watch out, Daniel replies. Madeline’s getting worried again. This could be what Amandi predicted. 

TTYL more, Seokjin dashes off, just in time for Hoseok to emerge from the open hall doors, carrying three empty green crates in his arms. He doesn’t want anyone to know how seriously he’s taking this yet, in case they start to panic; not on top of everything Jeongguk seems to think is going on with Yoongi and the circle, and the work going on in the forest that means they have to watch themselves. There just isn’t time to worry about a feral wolf attack right now, someone way beyond rescuing, someone too far gone to even try to save - Jeongguk had been on the edge, and Seokjin can remember with frightening clarity how convinced he had been of the danger vastly outweighing the payoff. 

The church hall is alight with noise, and sound, and movement. Seokjin casts his eye over the bobbing heads, the movement, the three carved pumpkins sitting loose ready to be arranged, the sheaves of wheat someone has piled in a corner, the loaves of bread still gently steaming from the warmth of the oven on one of the nearby trestle tables. 

Any one of these people could be the one Amandi dreamed about. Any one of them could know. The silver fillings in the teeth, the vial of water around the neck, the gun with the copper bullets. 

Any one of them, and it’s like a needle in the haystack. 

In her head, Deirdre refers to the two of them as the Cullises. They were given to her by her patron, Claudia Badeaux, one of the hunters in France who tipped her off about this place, and mostly they do as they are told, sullen and silent as the clay they are made of. 

It isn’t witchcraft, Deir, Claudia had said, her thin fingers playing in the wet waterdish by the pottery wheel, her accent heavy round, her shirt unbuttoned all the way down so Deirdre could see the slashed scars across her chest, from her clavicle across one breast to her ribcage, We are using them to catch the witches. Catch the wolves. The things that go bump in the night. Claudia pronounced wolf like it should have been written with an x in it, and she kept the word against her tongue, and Deirdre had lapped it all up like nectar. 

Anyway. The Cullises. They are identical, although one of them has a dent in the shape of Claudia’s thumbnail in his palm, the only way Deirdre can tell them apart. Now they stand side by side, stacking chopped and split wood into the link box on one of the tractors; Deirdre stands watching them, an itch in her gut, something she needs to sort out. 

The church hall dance tomorrow. That will help her establish some of it, sort the wheat from the chaff, but already she has her suspicions about a few people. She can taste the air. She can smell the blood and the wolf and the witches, although she doesn’t yet know how it all comes together - 

But she will. 

She will. 

“Cullis,” she says, “I’m going on a walk. If anyone comes-” Jeongguk, she means, the dopey-looking groundskeeper the forestry has foisted on her - “Tell them I’m about, but that you haven’t seen me in a while.”

One of the Cullises nods, and then turns dull eyes back to his logs. The other Cullis hadn’t even looked up in the first place. Sometimes their silence frightens her, but Deirdre has been a hunter for longer than most still living and sane, and she still has all her fingers and toes and not even a scar to her name; it would take more than a frightening look from a man made of clay to turn her away from what she wants. 

And what she wants? She wants to put a stop to it. She will put a stop to it. 

Follie is the nicest place she’s been since France, and as Deirdre walks through the trees towards the outer boundary she thinks about Claudia. She’s often thinking about Claudia. Before she was anyone to Deirdre, Deirdre knew about the supernatural in the vague way someone does who’s never really let go of their love of it, still with their dog-eared Harry Potters and their wolf drawings from primary school hidden under the bed. Then she met Claudia - and Claudia told her everything. 

This scar I got was not an accident, Claudia didn’t like to hide her chest, and she would be seen most often walking barefoot around her kitchen in a shirt open to show her bra and her rose-quartz necklace. The one who did this to me, he was a blood witch, and he knew what he was doing. I got too close. You must not let yourself get too close, Deirdre, you must promise me. 

But I want to, Deirdre said. In her heart she harboured fantasies of revenge, of saying Claudia’s name to watch the witch freeze up, his eyes fill with fear, the memory come back to him. She knows they’re evil. 

The wolves in Dublin are just icing on the cake, but Deirdre won’t stop until she finds the witch that cursed Claudia - because she knows it’s the right thing to do. 

She stomps towards the edge of the tree. She hates thinking about Claudia too much, or the Cullises; it gives her a funny feeling, a tickle on her palms. She hates - 

“Oh, my god!”

The man she’s come across has startled badly, almost comically so, tossing a notebook into the mud, closely followed by a pen. He’s sitting on the ground, using his coat as a seat, and until Deirdre alarmed him he’d seemed to be writing as contentedly as anyone possibly could, his dark head, his slight features, buried in the pages of the book. “Oh my god,” he says again in a soft American accent, passing a knobbly knuckle over his lips, pink with tooth-shaped bites, “Why does everyone in these fucking woods walk like hobbits?” It’s Yoongi from the other week. Yoongi, who knows Jeongguk.

“Like hobbits?” Deirdre offers him her hand, judging the weight of him as she pulls him to his feet. Heavier than he looks, but not by much. “What, quiet?”

“Silent as the bloody grave, I swear,” Yoongi brushes the seat of his jeans off, and then looks up and gives her a broad smile, all teeth and gums. “Sorry about that. I.” And he wipes his hand on his jeans too, and offers it back to her, his nails picked down to the cuticles and the skin on the pads of his fingers red and curved with the way he’s held his pen. 

“You look busy, Yoongi,” Deirdre smiles, looking him up and down - he’s better dressed for the weather this time than he was last week, wrapped up so warmly he looks almost like a cartoon. “Working hard, and that?”

“I’m just a local busybody, I’m afraid,” Yoongi waves his hand towards a small white cottage, “I just wanted to get out of the house, have a walk, a change of scene, but I swear I can’t go five minutes in these woods without someone bumping into me.” 

Deirdre smiles. “Sometimes I feel the same way. What - uh, what are you up to?”

“Writing,” Yoongi picks up the notebook, and she can see the way his face downturns when he sees how the mud has stained the creamy paper. “Not successfully. I don’t think I’m gonna get much done tomorrow, so I was hoping today was gonna be my big day, but - nope.”

“Tomorrow?”

He smiles. “Church social. Very Agatha Christie, don’t you think?”

“Oh, I’ve been invited to that,” Deirdre says, mind ticking over. Who invited her? Jeongguk. It had been Jeongguk. “Have you been to one before? No offence. You just sound a bit-”

He laughs, rubs the back of his neck, little hairs visibly prickling. “Do I sound that bad? I’ve moved here just recently. Like, three weeks, I think. I got invited by Taehyung in the library - I think he wants to integrate me.”

“Community spirit and that,” Deirdre thinks about Taehyung, the man in the dressing gown and the bandages and the beautiful features, hiding a wickedly-sharp cleaver behind his back. “Well, I’ll probably see you there.”

He smiles at her again. The apples of his cheeks are pink, the same colour as the tips of his ears. “That’d be nice.” 

“I’m looking forward to it, to be honest. I’ve been in Europe for the last few years, so a proper social is - well, it’s been a long time,” Deirdre offers that little nugget of information for free, something she would never usually do. But it can’t hurt to say that. 

He grins. “And my first. New experiences all ‘round.”

She watches him head back towards the cottage, cutting a swathing path between the tall autumn grass, a little figure in his dark coat, his hair mussed in the wind. For a minute Deirdre is completely alone in the woods, Yoongi before her, the Cullises behind her, and she doesn’t know which way to think. 

Keep on task. Always keep on task. Something hunted is something gone from the world, and that’s all she needs to do. 

Yoongi still hasn’t got a car, so he strikes out on foot for Follie, more confident of the route now; it takes him an hour, maybe a little over, but he manages to leave just in time to hit the main street for the hour written on the social flyer. He had thought this would be like a party - maybe with a little more old people, a few more kids - but still, a party, the sort where the real start time is about two hours after the one written down. In reality the main street is already so packed with cars that people are starting to stop their on the road and get out, hazard lights winking; on the street there are packs of kids waving paper flags and cardboard swords and the sort of things Yoongi didn’t think people played with anymore, while their parents struggle the babies out of the backseat, or wrangle them a little further up the hill. All the shopfronts have closed early, dark and empty, but the street is awash with sound. Autumn has happened all at once, and for the first time Yoongi really takes note of the leaves on the pavement, the piles of crinkly, dry orange paper heaping up like snowdrifts - some of the kids have kicked them into even larger piles, and are taking turns to jump into them. 

Through the crowd Yoongi maneuvres, saying hello when he’s greeted, laughing at the jokes told in front of him, replying politely to queries about how his house is so far - about how he’s finding Follie - about how he likes Ireland - about whether he misses America. 

(Going good - really lovely - really lovely - no, not really.) 

Eventually he manages to get to the top of the hill and the church, and the hall beside it. The bell in her tower is tolling merrily to strike the hour, with a small crowd of (mostly) men below it jeering someone called Tom to keep pulling until they call stop. 

Yoongi smiles at them and moves on. 

There’s a familiar Land Rover parked almost as close to the hall as it’s possible to get, and Yoongi glares at it. So Namjoon is here, and Jeongguk, too. He can only hope that the rest of the family will be, to offset the weirdness - the strange, uncomfortable familiarity he has with Jeongguk, and the standoffish tension he’s managed to build with Namjoon. 

Yoongi doesn’t want to dislike anyone, in Follie. This is a fresh start, and not just for his book, not just for his career; for his life, too. 

There’s music pouring from the open doors of the hall. It’s a merry stone building, almost as big as the church itself, with a stone-chipped dedication over the door that proclaims: FOLLIE CHURCH HALL REBUILT 1799. Smoke pours from the squat chimney placed at one end, and the windows - closed, but with the curtains drawn - show a brightly-lit, colourful interior, autumn shades, old glass warping the objects so all Yoongi can really see are streaks of brown and orange and green. He stops. He breathes in. 

He makes sure his fly is done up. He double-checks his boots are laced. 

And then he walks through the doors. 

Inside the hall, the music is even loder, playing from a complicated microphone-and-cables-and-speakers setup from the stage into each corner of the room. The hall itself is plain, underneath the masses of decoration, the sheaves of wheat, the flowers stuffed wholesale in beautiful pots, stacks of apples in wooden crates, beautifully decorated bread covered in scored pictures, little clay models of farm animals painted and glazed bright colours, paintings hanging on the wall done on primary-coloured card, little hand turkeys and robin red breasts and dogs with five legs, all proudly signed and dated with a name and Follie Primary School. A banner draped across the top of the stage has been stitched with many different coloured linens, proclaiming FOLLIE COMMUNITY SOCIAL - KNIT AND NATTER CLUB, and then intricate stitching too small to read, curling names in lazy-daisy stitch. The floor is polished, old stains streaking the darkwood, and children slide in just socks along the length of it, screaming and giggling and crashing into one another. A crowd mulls around, busy in the way crowds get. 

Long, low tables stretch along the wooden floor, soaked in creamed scones, pots of jam at regular intervals, trays full of baked chocolate sweets, bread already sliced and buttered, cooked and glazed hams with cheese and peppercorn garnish, plates full of biscuits and brownies and all manner of baked goods. At either end of the hall sit two ladies beside metal vats steaming, both with sticky-notes placed on their body, letters in cheerful capitals saying TEA on one vat, and HOT WINE on the other. 

On the stage, playing a fast, blurred tune on the fiddle, his eyes shut and his whole body tilted into the instrument, is Taehyung. He’s dressed up too, in a green shirt and dark corduroys, his hair shining silver in the light from the stage - his fingers are moving so fast that Yoongi finds it impossible to place which note belongs to which fingertip, and his grip on the fiddle never slips. 

“Yoongi!”

Yoongi turns, his head spinning with the stimulation, and almost bumps into Seokjin. “Oh, hell. I didn’t see you there - this is crazy!”

“This is Follie,” Seokjin replies with a grin. He’s dressed up too in bleached jeans and an embroidered white shirt, the collar a striking navy that offsets his hair and his shining eyes. He’s holding two mugs, both of them steaming. “Wine or tea, which do you prefer?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever had hot wine,” Yoongi says, “Oh - oh, thanks very much,” as Seokjin passes him the second of the two cups. The wine is a dark red, shining with the puddled light from the ceiling, a sliver of orange rind bobbing at the top. “It smells… mmm.” Cinnamon, sugar, something dark and musky; even the scent warms Yoongi from the very top of his head all the way down again. 

“Smells of winter,” Seokjin raises his own mug to his lips, “God, I needed this. How long have you been here?”

“I just arrived. Only a second,” Yoongi looks around him again, mostly pleased that Seokjin is still the only face he recognises from the house. (And Taehyung, but does he count?) “How long have you been here?” 

Seokjin smiles, his eyes crinkling, his mouth full and pretty. Distractingly pretty, Yoongi notices with some irritation - not a single person in this family is anything less than model-standard beautiful, and it really isn’t fair. “Would you believe I’ve been here since nine? Hoseokie works in the bakery-” He points with his mug at Hoseok, who’s sitting at a table in the corner, slicing a mountain of floured and scored bread with concentration- “And I don’t work at the minute, so we both came to help set up yesterday and today. It’s satisfying work, y’know?”

“I’ll bet,” Yoongi looks around, openly admiring the decor, the carved pumpkins, the sheaves of wheat. “It’s nice. The flowers are beautiful.”

“Mrs Ashe runs the florist’s shop in town,” again Seokjin gestures, “But Taehyung and me did the arranging, which is why it all looks a bit flung-together. Still, it was fun.”

“I didn’t know Taehyung could play so well,” Yoongi can feel eyes on the back of his neck, but he flatly refuses to look around and see which one of them it is, “He’s brilliant. Really brilliant.”

“Ah, our Taehyungie’s a prodigy,” Seokjin begins slowly leading Yoongi towards the bread table, and Hoseok. The eyes only burn harder. “He can play just about anything if you give it to him and let him have it for a few days, but he’s a whiz for traditional fiddle. I think that’s one of the reasons he moved to Ireland in the first place.”

“One among many,” says a silky-smooth voice, and the last of the family - Jimin, the one Yoongi hadn’t met before breakfast - appears as though out of nowhere. 

If Seokjin and Taehyung are dressed up, then Jimin has catapulted himself into a whole league of his own. His shirt is white, fitted to his waist and buttoned, with sheer sleeves that blossom and cuff his wrists tightly. Both the collar (crisp) and the cuffs (neat) are a bloody red colour, and instead of a tie he wears a safety-pin on which a flurry of charms dangle, humming each time they touch. The shirt sits over a pair of dark dress trousers, pressed to within an inch of their life, and a pair of shiny red brogues, the same bloody colour as his shirt. His ears are pierced, and from them hang understated hoops; his eyes twinkle with the same something Seokjin’s do, and his nails have the glossy sheen of natural paint on them. “Yoongi,” he says, a mug of wine in his hand, “I thought we’d have scared you off by now.”

“Oh, fuck off, Minnie,” Hoseok says mildly. He offers his hand over the table, floury and normal, and Yoongi feels grounded again. “I swear we can’t take him anywhere. Good to see you, Yoongi.” 

“I’ve got to take a peek in at the brownies in the kitchen,” Seokjin says, “We were bringing them down in raw batches, ‘cause our oven could only fit so many trays. Mind if I-?”

“Go ahead,” Jimin twinkles, “Yoongi knows we won’t bite.”

Yoongi knows no such thing. Hoseok feels human to be around, but Jimin - Jimin - there’s something about him, something strange looming just behind him, like his shadow has grown too big. 

Not to mention the stares. When Yoongi looks over his shoulder in a casual movement, flicking dust from his elbow, he sees Jeongguk standing by the kitchen door, a mug in his hand, looking both incredibly handsome and incredibly downcast, like a puppy left out in the rain. He’s wearing well-fitted jeans and a shirt made of something black and iridescent; when he moves his arms, when he shifts in place, the whole thing moves with him, and it looks like oil spilt down his skin. Yoongi meets his eyes - and Jeongguk doesn’t look away. 

Yoongi is the first one to break contact, feeling strangely guilty about how downcast Jeongguk is. He hasn’t really done anything, since that first time in the woods - and he did help Yoongi out. (Supposedly.)

Onstage, Taehyung has finished playing, and Yoongi joins in the smattering of applause from around the room. “Thanks, everyone,” Taehyung says with a smile as bright as the lights above, “Um - I think Walter’s doing a bit next, yeah?”

Beside the stage, an accordion slung over his shoulder, an old man gives him a cheery thumbs up. 

“Okay, awesome,” Taehyung beams, “All yours, Walter!”

And he hops down the stage, taking the steps two at a time, the bow of his fiddle rapping against the wooden body of it. “What did you guys think!” He enthuses, landing at their little clump of people, “Oh - oh, hi, Yoongi.” He leans against Jimin’s chest where Jimin’s sitting on the table, so that Taehyung is in between his legs. “What did you think?”

“Really, really great,” Yoongi smiles around the rim of his mug, “I didn’t know you could play like that. It’s wonderful.”

“Aw, you,” but Taehyung looks confidently pleased with himself, with the air of someone who knew he was going to do well. “Still, I was getting kinda tired. I’m glad other people wanted to do something, this year. Hey, Yoongi, what do you think? What do you think?”

“I think it’s all incredible,” Yoongi replies, and then shudders as a draft from the doors opening and shutting strikes him right in the back of the neck. He turns. 

Deirdre Collins stands all on her own, in a checked shirt and brown cords tucked into high black boots, looking a little uneasy as she looks around the room. Her cheeks are red and her eyes are bright; she’s got a little makeup on, Yoongi can see that much, just a dark blush on her face and brown shading above her eyes, and a brushing of rouge on her lips. Her ears are unpierced and her hair has been tied tightly behind her head. 

“Hold on,” Yoongi says, empathy for her surging through him, “Sorry, you guys. I’m just gonna-” He sets his mug down by Hoseok, and moves his way towards Deirdre, ducking through a running game of kids playing tag, and an elaborate arrangement of chairs running down the side of the room. “Hey,” he calls, when he’s within earshot, “Deirdre!” 

She turns and when she sees him, her face breaks into a wide smile. “Yoongi - man, didn’t see you there. Woah. Didn’t realise this many people would be out for this. I should have dressed up.” 

“You’re plenty dressed up,” Yoongi says, “Want a tea? Mulled wine? I’ve been given the royal reception, and I want to pass it on.” 

Together they weave towards the mulled wine ladies, down beside Walter onstage, who is singing an old hymn and playing the accordion very badly. Deirdre collects her mug and blows on it, then closes her eyes contentedly. “Mmm. That’s so cosy. I -” And then she looks over Yoongi’s shoulder, and her eyes widen, “Oh, hey, that’s the forest guy! Jeongguk, hey!”

Jeongguk? Yoongi freezes. “Is he - coming over here?”

“Yeah,” Deirdre gives him a funny look, “Is that… not okay?”

But then it’s too late, and Jeongguk is beside them, his own glass of wine in his hand. “Hey, Deirdre, Yoongi. Good to… see you both.” His speech is awkward, slow and stilted, like he’s thought a lot about the words before they’ve come out. “I’m… yeah.”

Yoongi meets his eyes and then, just as quickly, looks away; Jeongguk looks mournful, sad, like he wants to have a heart-to-heart and he doesn’t know how to begin it. “The whole family here, then,” he says lamely, instead of anything else. 

“Um. Yeah,” Jeongguk mumbles, rubbing the back of his neck, “We… we… I came and helped set up with the others. Baked a bit with Taehyungie - with Taehyung.” 

“That’s nice,” Deirdre says when the silence spools a little too long. “How many of you are there?”

“Six of them,” Yoongi doesn’t know why he feels an ownership over the house on the hill, like he has insider knowledge that’s his to dispense, but he needs something to be attached to in this place. “Have you met any of them apart from-”

“Just Jeongguk and Taehyung,” Deirdre sips from her wine again. “You okay, Jeongguk?”

He looks like he’s sucking on a lemon. “Yeah. Fine. Fine. Yoongi - how’s your, how’s your foot?”

“Healed up. Like nothing ever happened,” Yoongi shifts his weight from ankle to ankle to demonstrate, and then feels like a fool. The conversation is suddenly claustrophobic, too full of awkward pauses and things unsaid. He wants to get out. “I think… I mean, speaking of, I think I left my wine over with Taehyung there. I’m gonna - I’m gonna go get it.” 

He detaches as quickly as he can, heading back to the clumped Jimin, Taehyung, and Hoseok, chatting in a cosy trio over the plate of buttered bread. “Did I leave my wine here?” When he looks over his shoulder, he sees Deirdre and Jeongguk, both staring after him like he’s their translator, and he’s rudely abandoned them in the middle of their conversation. 

He turns back around. He doesn’t want to look at either of them. 

“Hey, Yoongi,” Jimin leans across Taehyung, a crumb of chocolate slowly melting on his lip, “How do you fancy having a dance, in a bit?”

“A dance? To this?” Yoongi looks dubiously from Walter and his accordion to Jimin, “Huh?”

“Oh, this is just the warm up,” Hoseok cuts in, grinning. “Then Walter and his accordion go outside and the kids play a few games, and then there’s the dinner, and then the kids go home and the real party starts. It’s fucking great. A few people still do the Samhain fires and things, out in the fields. A few of us know how to play - the Conway sisters do this great harp-fiddle thing - and we have a dance, on times like this. You’ll love it, I promise.” 

Yoongi looks from Hoseok’s beaming face to Jimin, who’s wriggling his eyebrows questioningly. “Sure, I’ll dance with you,” he shrugs. “Can’t hurt.”

As Hoseok predicted, the night unfolds in that way. The children in their vast amounts, who had been darting around underfoot during the buns and traybakes section of the evening, are led outside by Walter and his accordion, and a young woman with a tin whistle, and another young woman holding a colourful swathe of fabric, all of them cheering, while people flood out of the kitchen holding folding trestle tables and stacks of wood chairs. (Seokjin is among them, and the man from the library, and some ladies who smile and are shaped like friendly raisins.) 

Yoongi helps with the chairs, joining in with everyone else to haul the food-laden tables away for these fresh ones, and then he’s waved back to the wall so one of the raisin ladies can drape a tablecloth across them, plain white linen embroidered with intricate dancing deer along the edge. “What-” 

Hoseok, who has kept hold of him in the rush, grins. “I hope you have some room left. Come on and get a seat before all the good ones go.”

And Yoongi is caught in the rush again for a good seat along one of the tables; he ends up with Hoseok on one side of him, an old man called Johnny on the other side, Deirdre opposite him, and Jeongguk just far enough along that they keep catching one another in furtive glances. The food comes out all at once, in a wash of smell and taste in the air, and loud laughter from the emerging chefs. 

There are cold round pork pies and homemade scotch eggs in mountains, sliced hickory gammon, sausage rolls wrapped in their blankets and steaming, dishes full of vegetables shining with condensation, fresh out of their boiled pots. Potatoes in jackets, peas springing from their pods, carrots both raw and softly boiled, sliced and roasted potato with a thick crust that crumbles into soft mash when Yoongi hits it with his fork - chicken wrapped in an elaborate parcel of stuffing and bacon, which has to be sliced up with a shiny knife Seokjin wields up and down the table - soup in tureens at intervals, full of pearl barley and soft beef that slivers away into nothing in the mouth. Cabbage done in cranberry sauce and bacon. Mince with parsnip and carrot peeking through it like treasure. 

Plates begin to make their way down the tables, and Yoongi, who has now accepted his place as participant whether he likes it or not, passes down cutlery until they land on him; he is handed a fresh mug of wine, even more pungent and aromatic than his first, and a plate covered in apples and pears, sliced and gleaming with juice, seeds still stuck to the pale white flesh. 

Music begins, drifting in from the open window. The night is firmly upon them now, the stars mere memories past all the light from the hall, but it makes Yoongi feel warm to be indoors in the brightness with such quiet cold outside. The children are singing to the music, and screaming occasionally, and there’s the windy sound of the cloth parachute being flapped around, and the sound of someone clapping along. Everyone seems to know the tune. Onstage, although nobody is paying attention now, two women are wheeling a wooden-framed harp up to the front, along with a black stool and a heap of wooden instruments - a mandolin, he thinks, and a fiddle, and a - a double-bass? A huge thing that takes both women to carry, anyway, and then a small drum with a prop inside, and a stick to beat it with that looks more like a miniature baseball bat. 

“That’s a bodhran drum,” Hoseok whispers to him, when he sees Yoongi staring. “You hit it - the stick goes through your palm, y’know? It’s just to keep the beat. Do you want any bread? Any soup?”

“Bread, please,” Yoongi passes his plate down the line and watches the woman beside Hoseok heap buttered slices on it. “Ah - thanks.” 

The stage becomes slowly, and without any announcement, covered in instruments. A family hovers around there, wearing floating black clothes; the two women, both with auburn hair braided around the crown of their skulls, and then a man in a black shirt and trousers, his hair, beard and eyebrows all the same shade. Every time Yoongi looks up, more activity seems to be swarming around them. 

Every time he tries not to look at Jeongguk, he finds himself doing so anyway, and Jeongguk always seems to be just about to look at him, or just turning his face away. His ears are blushing a lovely pink. 

Yoongi tries to just eat, and ignore it, but he feels more eyes on him than just Jeongguk’s. Deirdre, Namjoon, Seokjin, and Jimin all watch him with varying degrees of subtlety, and he’s sure that if he looked around he would see Hoseok and Taehyung doing so as well.

But the pearl barley soup is lovely. 

After almost two hours, the food is eaten and Yoongi is sipping on his third mug of wine, feeling almost sleepy and very content. The hall is dwindling of parents and the sound of shouting from the children has stopped; a few parents and kids remain, but the children have been corralled into the corner with a box full of toys, and the air begins to feel definitely more adult. The woman with the tin whistle and the cloth parachute has come back in and joined the musicians; Walter has given his accordion to another bearded man in black, and retired to nurse a mug of tea and a plate of hot sausage rolls and a slice of pie. Anticipation is building. 

Almost without Yoongi’s knowledge, the tables and the food are whisked away, and he’s helping to carry the furniture back into one of the myriad storerooms that line the hall. The finger food and biscuits and brownies and cold meats from earlier emerge again, but now the tables are along the walls, with a huge empty space vibrating potentiality in the middle. There is a hushed excitement in the crowd, and Yoongi finds himself pressed against Deirdre’s arm; her fingers are shaking, when he passes his knuckles by them. She looks very pale. 

“Conway!” Someone shouts, and one of the women onstage waves the bow of a fiddle, the sheer black of her sleeve floating wisps in the air. “Conway! C’mon, Rosie! C’mon, Odhran!”

None of the siblings (or at least, Yoongi assumes they’re siblings) make a sound, but the woman with the fiddle raises the bow to the strings of her instrument - another woman has the double-bass, her fingers taped with white bandages in preemptive protection - the man has slipped Walter’s accordion over his shoulders - the other man has settled himself by the harp - 

The third woman, the one with the tin whistle, sets it down and lifts the drum. The bodhran drum, Hoseok had called it. She lets the smooth wooden stick slide through her palm, and then she sets a rhythm going, a fluid and continuous beat that sits in the hall for a long, long second. Yoongi can see the rest of the siblings picking it up, their shoulders twitching and their knees bending, and then the woman with the fiddle launches into something and the accordion begins to go and the harpist has closed his eyes, his hands pale ghosts on the strings, the double-bass itself springing to life as though it’s playing the woman, not the other way around. 

Jimin whoops, and catches Taehyung by both hands, spinning him into the open space in the middle of the hall. For a brief moment they are the only two people dancing, two beautiful people moving together, predicting each other’s every act, and then as though the waters of some invisible dam have broken, the whole floor is awash with people and movement and light. 

Yoongi finds himself carried along too with it, pulled by Deirdre’s shoulder and Hoseok at his elbow, where he is caught almost immediately by one of the crinkly old women, dancing at a pace he feels he can just about keep up with. 

The music has reached into him somewhere, and got at a vital part of him. He feels bared. 

It could be seconds, minutes, or hours later that the woman passes him on to Jimin, who presses his cold, dry hands into Yoongi’s palms. “I’ve been promised a dance,” Jimin says in a voice that stands for no refusal, “You’ll give me one.”

“I will?” Yoongi says helplessly, and he’s pulled further in.

Jimin dances beautifully, smoothly, his whole body like the ocean trapped in skin, his eyes closed, keeping hold of Yoongi the entire time. Somehow this translates into him, through the fingertip connection, and Yoongi finds himself transported into someplace that moves slower than time, his own eyes half-shut, listening to the wind, listening to the trees, the bodhran drum in the forest. 

He looks around him, moving so slowly and so quickly and with such euphoria that he can hardly make out the faces around him. 

But there are eyes looking at him, all the time. Dark eyes, left out of the festivities. Jeongguk looks mournful at him, although he, too, is dancing, whirling Deirdre around him. He looks like he wants to dance.

They make a pretty couple, Yoongi observes. Deirdre is small and slight, light of dress where Jeongguk is dark, shadowed where he is bright, and she moves as though she predicts him. His hand looks at home on her waist, and Yoongi doesn’t know why it upsets him so much to think that, to see it. 

Jimin passes Yoongi off to Taehyung, with a wink and a smile, licking his lips. A trick of the light must make his teeth look far sharper than Yoongi knows they are; for a second, winking in the shadow of the music, Jimin has the teeth of a predator. 

And then Yoongi is with Taehyung who holds him like glass, who signals his every move, who dances with him as though there is nobody he would rather do it with. He is singing to the tuneless tune on the stage, a whirligig song about something leaping in the breeze, about something slipping into your bed at night, about something hot on your throat, about something wet on your wrists. 

And then the dance hands him to Jeongguk - or hands Jeongguk to him. 

For a second they press their forearms together, pulled and pushed, and then Jeongguk tries to grab Yoongi’s hand. “Dance with me,” he tries to say, but the music pulls them away from one another again. 

It’s for the best, Yoongi thinks, as he sways tamely in the corner with Seokjin and a willowy young woman called Aisling - he doesn’t want to dance with Jeongguk. He knows he doesn’t. 

The songs vary in pace and speed, and as the quick one dies down Yoongi finds himself whisked off to the side of the hall, mostly by Jimin on one side of him and the spin of the dancers on the other. Sweat clings his hair to his forehead, and his shirt feels uncomfortably close to his back; he feels drawn to the wine by the side, a desire to quench some of the unbearable thirst the dancing has risen in him for however long he’s been doing it. 

“Well,” Jimin says, and in the dark light and against the night and the music his smile is practically demonic, “And how are you finding it so far? Are you enjoying the dance?” 

Someone presses another mug into Yoongi’s hands. He doesn’t know how many he’s had so far, but he has no hesitation in drinking this one in most of one mouthful, the heat of the wine filling him up without warming him too much, revitalising him instead of sapping him of any more energy.

“I’m enjoying it, yeah,” he says when he’s done, wiping a drop from his chin with his thumb. It tastes of zest and of red wine and of warm things. “God, I didn’t know anyone could dance like that.”

Onstage, the Conway brother at the harp has left his stool and picked up the tin whistle his sister left there a while ago. He lifts it to his lips and again there are whoops and cheers; the accordion and the fiddle slow down, playing only drawn-out base notes until the tin whistle can get itself into gear. 

“It’s exhilarating. It reminds you you’re alive,” Jimin murmurs as the song kicks off in truth, and the dance jumps to match it. He has his own cup of wine, and when he drinks it Yoongi can see the red on his mouth, vivid stains on pink flesh. “You dance well.”

“Mostly I’m letting whoever’s got me do the dancing. It’s easy to follow on,” Yoongi sets the cup by his elbow. “But yes - I’m having fun. And are you?”

Jimin waits to reply for a long time, his hand trailing from his chin down his throat and resting there, cupping his own neck in a hold tight enough to have the skin white around where his thumb is gripping. There’s a scar there, Yoongi notices, thin and silvery and slipping around his jaw, just visible in the light. “I am,” Jimin says. “I like to be in places full of living people. It makes me feel… alive.”

“Alive,” Yoongi echoes, turning that statement over in his head, trying to see a way it can be anything other than ominous. 

“Ahh,” Jimin turns his head first to one side and then the other. Yoongi can hear it clicking. “And the blood pumping. Nothing is so iron as a dance. You know that’s why people would put horseshoes above their door, and touch the anvil for good luck? The iron scares away fairies, apparently, but there is iron in blood. Iron enough to make a nail. Did you learn that, ever?”

“No,” Yoongi says. He looks behind him, and for the first time tonight it’s a genuine reassurance to find Jeongguk watching him so keenly. “No, I never did.”

“Iron enough to make a nail,” Jimin whispers, the voice - the words - loud all the same in Yoongi’s ear. “Dance with me?”

Yoongi tries to head for Jeongguk, and he can see Jeongguk trying to come for him as well, shouldering as best he can through a crowd of strangers having fun, being pulled and then dancing in a circle while the Conway siblings pick up the pace again, all still without having spoken a word, all eyes shut and swapping instruments between themselves like it means nothing. Some of the tunes have snippets of words that the dancers sing, in English - she stole my comb - and in some other language - teir abhaile - before the music takes it away again. 

He feels like cresting a wave and then becoming swallowed by it, emerging just long enough to catch his breath each time before he is taken again by it. “Jeongguk,” he calls, and he can hear the reedy thinning of his voice now, “Dance with me!”

He realises that he’s been wanting it all evening, and fighting it almost as long. 

“Dance with me!” 

Deirdre watches the man by the table, who is watching Yoongi in turn, his eyes dark and bloody inside. She feels unprotected without either of the Cullises beside her, now she knows what she’s stumbled into - 

And she knows. She’s worked it out. 

They’re all in on it. Writer. Some writer he turned out to be. 

“Deirdre, my love,” Claudia says, her hand on Deirdre’s naked throat as they lie in bed, her thumb stroking along Deirdre’s trachea and down to the hollowed skin beneath it, “Did I ever tell you the names of them? There were two of them, those witches. Did I ever tell you their names?”

The Cullises had not been shaped, then, and Deirdre’s thoughts of avenging Claudia were still unformed and misty in the back of her head. The sound of Bayeux slipped through the open sash windows every night, and the smell of warm bread. “No,” Deirdre says. 

“The one that did this to me, I never found his name,” Claudia’s eyes close, “But I was hunting his partner. His mate, would you call them? I had been hunting them all through the country. I caught the partner, and the one who did this to me - he did it during the rescue, I suppose you could call it. I was so close. The blood witch. They’re just as bad as the wolves, you know. Just as uncontrollable.”

“The names,” Deirdre says. She holds Claudia’s wrist, just to stop the pressure increasing. “His name.”

“The one I had in my van was called Jimin Park,” Claudia enunciates clearly, although a moment ago sleep had been threatening to claim both of them. “Jimin’s a common name, though, so I gave no thought to it. His mate I never found the name of, but the blood witches are all the same. They haven’t a heart. They went to Ireland, and I couldn’t follow them, not with my chest the way it was. The curse, you know.”

“Claudia-” 

“Jeongguk, dance with me!”

Deirdre isn’t stupid. She can see Yoongi being watched, and watching in his turn, and the men around the room who are just a little more aware than everyone else, their eyes all the same as each other, cold and full of blood and fur and the damage they leave in their wake. 

Claudia taught her what Deirdre already knew, deep down. Things like that don’t have enough space in their wildness to care, not really, and unless she stops them, they’ll keep going. 

Deirdre watches Yoongi be watched, and she watches him reach for Jeongguk and be buffered back all the while, and she watches him watching them, and she comes to a decision. 

That’s what Claudia liked in her. Her ability to choose a side.

Chapter Text

 I found myself alone. 

Of course, over the past year, I had learned to be alone. I sat against the hood of my car - of his car in deed, but of mine in home, in everything that mattered - and propped my boots against the front license plate, and I thought about crying for a moment or two, but I couldn’t bring them to my eyes. Perhaps she was right, and there was something wrong with me. 

I didn’t know. I was alone, and it was my fault, and I couldn’t bring myself to be anything other than relieved about it. I watched the sun set behind the mountains, the vast and uncaring expanse before me, and all I felt was discomfort as the metal hood underneath me turned from pleasantly warm to cold in the light of the moon. All I felt was physical. All I was was physical, a container for something that had gone astray. 

• An excerpt from Yoongi Min’s Far Away From Pleasant Lands (Bloomsbury, 2017).

Jeongguk wakes up the day after the dance with an awful hangover and Taehyung and Jimin in his room, both sitting on the end of his bed and staring at him, unblinking, the way they used to do before they knew him and they were trying to see how far they could push him before he broke and started screaming. 

(Very far was the answer back then, and it still is now.)

(He mightn’t have been born to this as they were - his introduction to wolfishness may have come later in life to him than their magic, but that doesn’t mean he’s a coward.)

“Fuck the pair of you,” Jeongguk says as soon as he’s soothed his heart back down again, pulling the blankets up tight to his chin. “What have I done? What did you see in each other’s fuckin’ - fucking livers, then?”

“Oh, Jeonggukkie, idiot, it was his heart,” Taehyung makes a face, dangling his fingers across the skin by Jimin’s shoulder, his sharp nails pausing at the ball of the muscle and digging in, Jimin’s face betraying no sign of pain, no change at all. “I thought you would be better at this by now, you know.” 

“Okay, that’s fine, now fuck off and let me be hungover in peace,” Jeongguk tries to lift his foot and kick one of them, but Taehyung and Jimin have taken a leg each and his whole body feels dead from the knees down. His head is spinning. He probably shouldn’t have kept drinking the wine, after his tenth mug, after he knew the magic was setting in. “Seriously, get off.” 

“I had an interesting discussion with Yoongiyah last night,” Jimin says it with the Korean inflection, his fingertips tickling his lips, “And I discovered he’s been bumping into you a lot more than you’re letting on. He’s a bit frightened, I think, of the things that go bump in the dark, even if he doesn’t know why. He looked at me strangely. What have you been telling him?  Just what do you think you’re doing with our little resident writer-in-chief?” 

“Fucking nothing,” Jeongguk grumbles, “Trying to ignore him before he guesses - ow, get off-” 

“That’s not how Yoongi told me.” 

“Oh, yeah? What did he tell you, then? Does he dance with the pictsies in his spare time? Does he know about the wolves?”

“Well, he didn’t mention you too much, to be honest, but I could see it all in his pretty little face,” Jimin purses his lips, widens his eyes, makes a mocking coo with his chin cupped between his hands, “His eyes all following you around the room, our little Jeonggukkie, and he was far too polite to ask me what I meant about the blood, and the fairies, and the iron anvils, even though I thought I was being very clear about it all. I think something is about to itch his mind. Something about the dance and the magic. Oh, but it felt good to feed on it, didn’t it? Did you have fun?”  

Jeongguk lets his head fall back against the pillow and groans. “I hate when you do that. Stop scaring people off. He doesn’t know anything.” 

“Scare him off? Scare him off what, Jeonggukkie?”

“Stop doing that, too,” Jeongguk squints up at both of them, but he can’t tell which said the last sentence. “Stop being innocent. It doesn’t suit either of you. Just… go and cackle over a cauldron, or whatever it is you do in the attic, and leave Yoongi alone. Maybe I don’t want him to know about the magic.”

Taehyung smiles broadly. “We only came to say that we wish you all the best. You were mooning more than Seokjin does the night before a run, idiot, and it was so obvious - we wanted to say before Namjoon does, because he’s definitely gonna make a complete arse of himself. But the whole hall saw you being all sappy and trying to dance with the poor man. God, he didn’t know which way to look, between you and Hoseokie and Deirdre and the magic-”

And that makes Jeongguk groan even louder. Deirdre had confused him last night, and not in a good way; she had been awkward and quiet, far from her usual self, and he had chalked that up at first to her being a little uncomfortable in a new place, but it just didn’t stop. Every time he looked at her she was looking at Yoongi, or else at one of the members of the coven, and he didn’t like the intelligence in her expression. He isn’t looking forward to seeing her again. “Listen, I’ve enough to do without you fuckers meddling. And Yoongi was just - I was just checking on him. His foot-”

“His foot?” Jimin clutches his sides as he cackles, laughing so hard he all but falls off the bed. “You were checking his feet?” 

Again, Jeongguk tries to kick him. “Shut up, dickhead! He hurt his foot in the woods the other day in the middle of the night and you know damn rightly that’s why he slept over-”

“He turned over on his bloody ankle, he’ll hardly die,” Taehyung rolls his eyes. Jeongguk should have known. The pair of them blood and bone witches, with that awful green paste to fix them up; of course they wouldn’t consider the flesh and blood of someone normal. Someone untouched.

“He cut himself pretty badly, actually,” Jeongguk sniffs as he gets out of bed. He’s in nothing but his boxers from yesterday, and he ignores the scandalised screams from Jimin on the floor as he begins to root around in his drawers for something fresh to wear. “So there. You fuckers don’t have, like, a monopoly on wounds anymore.” 

“He mustn’t have cut himself that bad if he was able to dance as much as he did yesterday,” Jimin has taken Jeongguk’s place in the warm bed, spreading himself out languid in a puddle of limbs, his dark hair falling unstyled in his eyes. “He was a fuckin’ dervish, even when the time set in on him.”

“He was pretty,” Taehyung observes, and tickles Jimin’s bare foot where it hangs off the end of the bed. “If I didn’t know any better I’d say he was a nymph.”

“Pretty, yeah. I was feeding him wine the whole night - I really wanted to make him fall over, but he never made it,” Jimin pulls a disappointed face. 

Jeongguk pulls a long-sleeve top over his head, the small button at the throat hitting him on the nose. “Ow. Well, of course he was able to dance. I just used your magic thingy - you know the pot in the medicine cupboard? It was mostly full. By the way, it fucking stinks.” He sprays a little scentless cologne on his neck, and then turns his head from side to side, checking how badly his hangover is bleeding out into his expression. In the mirror he can see both Jimin and Taehyung now sitting up, staring at him with identical expressions of something close to shock. “What? I’m not that useless, I know how medicine works.”

“You used the green paste in the jar?” Jimin asks, “The balm? The one me and Tae use?”

“Well, I didn’t use bloody Vaseline-” 

“You used that one specifically?” Jimin presses, and Jeongguk stops. Neither of them are ever this serious for this long. “You really used that one? The one we make?”

“Yeah, but I-”

“And it worked?” Taehyung is holding Jimin’s ankle now in a firm, supporting grasp. “You saw it working? How badly was he hurt?”

“He couldn’t walk,” Jeongguk, dressed now and not so obtuse as to ignore when they’re up to something, turns around to lean on his windowsill, his thumb stroking the flaking paint under the sill and above the radiator. “He was bleeding - it was really bad. I found - he was sleepwalking? But he wasn’t. I found him in the woods, about to cross from the forestry to the proper, but he… he was really weird, and I said we’d sort it out and then we got to the house and he was so fucking out of it that we didn’t talk about anything, even though I thought he’d seen - I thought he knew - he was properly shaken up, though. He was terrified. He’d seen shadows, and something in the woods. And I - yeah, I carried him up here and I used the stuff, your stuff, and his foot healed up fine. And then we had breakfast. You were there for breakfast.”

Jimin and Taehyung exchange troubled glances. “Mine,” Taehyung says, after a very long pause, and he lifts up his shirt to pat the smooth plane of his stomach, “The scars are gone from the last time and all.” 

And without a word both of them leave Jeongguk’s bed in a fit of sober quiet, and don’t even bother to close the door behind them. He can hear their footsteps creaking up the stairs to the attic and then the music turns on, the loud nineties European pop music they play when they know everyone in the house is of too delicate a disposition to listen to body parts being rearranged. 

“Okay,” Jeongguk says to himself, “So that - that was weird.”

He doesn’t know what to do with it. Not when he’d just about let himself believe that nothing was going on with Yoongi beyond whatever happens to everyone in Follie - not when he’d just decided that Yoongi was someone okay to talk to. 

And Yoongi, he thought, had almost become aware. Certainly he suspects, or would be a fool not to at this point - the magic from last night had been difficult to ignore, and certainly his foot was no natural occurrence. 

Fucking Jimin. Fucking Taehyung. 

He leaves the house by his window, swinging from the outer sill onto the roof of the back porch and from there to the ground. He’s forgotten to put shoes on, but all of a sudden he doesn’t really care - he’ll walk from here into the cover of the woods, and then he thinks he’s due a run. 

Yes. He’s due a run. He wants to clear his head. 

And he badly needs it. 

When Yoongi gets home, he has texts from Izzy and Gerry, asking him how he is, checking in on him, which he ignores in a state of drunken self-righteousness. He feeds the cats, sitting down on the floor to scoop the food into their bowls when he can’t trust himself to do it standing up, and then he stands for a long, long minute with his whole body clinging to the kitchen counter, willing himself not to fall over. The world is spinning unpleasantly, and he knows he wants to be sick. He drank a stupid amount of wine. He wants a shower. 

He can’t find his anchor in the world anymore. He feels as though he danced it away, as though the woods took it from him, as though they’re dangling it above his head - he can smell Jimin. He can see Jeongguk. 

He wishes he could stop the world from spinning.

He wants a proper think, without anything in the way. He’s been ignoring a lot of obvious signs for a long time; the shadows in the trees, the strange way Jeongguk always seems to be where Yoongi is, the way his foot had closed up almost entirely by the morning after. 

The dreams. His cats, one beside the other. 

He doesn’t shower, but he doesn’t throw up either. He waits for Beanbag and Spanner to proceed him going up the stairs, and then he falls into bed, already asleep before his head hits the pillow. 

At first it’s nonsense, little flickering memories from the dance making sense of themselves in his head. A long speech by Taehyung, given in Gaelic up on the stage, and then a dance with Walter who plays the accordion and stands on Yoongi’s toes, and a brief, terrifying flash of a dream where Yoongi is running and running and running, and Jeongguk always seems to be both two steps behind and two before him, and he can’t work out which one he wants the most - which one he wants the least. He can hear bells ringing in the background, like windchimes, following him constantly. 

And Jimin, drinking wine, his hand around his throat. But it isn’t his hand, it’s someone else’s, and Yoongi blinks and sees the shape of a woman holding Jimin in the shadows, clutching him tight, and when he looks around nobody can see her. Over her heart there is a clot of thick, black, membranous substance, seizing it tight. 

Jimin winks at him and raises his mug. Wine spills over his lips like blood, and trickles down to meet at his chin, dripping in a steady and constant flow to the ground. “Won’t you dance with me?” He asks, and then he’s gone, whisked away by the woman - Yoongi can hear the screaming. He can smell the iron enough to make a nail.

He’s in the woods again, and in his dream it only makes sense that he is connected to the magic he knows is in the world.

Beanbag is on one side of him, Spanner on the other, and both of them seem bigger than usual; Spanner, Yoongi realises, is a rangy lion, thin and raggedy, and Beanbag is a slim, muscular panther, her every hair curled to pounce. They flank him, and they keep him warm. 

But of course, he’s only dreaming. He can smell the sleep in the air, and some part of him is still in bed, tossing and turning, two cat-shaped cats on either side of him meowling disgruntledly every time they’re disrupted. He’s only dreaming. 

But the magic is so real.

He leads them deeper into the woods. Past the new forestry trees only ten years old; the regimented lines seem to salute him as he goes by, their twigs wheeling around to face him, their needles swapping the news like an electric charge running through them from tree to tree to tree. Here he comes. Here they come. 

Beanbag purrs against Yoongi’s sleeping body, and in the dreamwoods, the black panther growls. Spanner’s tufted tail flicks against his back, fighting off biting midges that exist only wherever cats go when they sleep. Yoongi drifts his hand down Spanner’s spine and the raised hairs there, the coarse fur rubbing his skin, grounding him in the present - in the dream present. When he lifts his hand to his eyes, the skin is white and red. 

The woods stretch before and behind him as old and as young as they’ve always been. 

The music is quiet. A low, humming accordion, voices droning in harmonies so close they might be the same note, a fiddle being played so hard and rough that Yoongi imagines he can see the puffs of resin rising from the bow. Through the trees he can see light flashing on the trunks. 

He knows the circle is ahead of him. He feels like a compass, born to do nothing but point to the ring of stones that he has been given; everything he has done in his life so far has been in aid of this moment, of the satisfaction he will feel when he and the circle are one together. 

And he is safe with the big cats. Both of them seem at home here, although in Ireland - in Ireland, he knows the biggest land predator is the badger. They don’t even have wolves here. 

But these are not normal wolves, he knows, because these are wolves helped by the magic.

All the same, the cats pace, alert, and every quirk of the music has Beanbag twitching to the side, Spanner pushed closer to the edge. It never occurs to Yoongi to be frightened, only comforted and complimented by their loyalty to follow him even into his dreams - 

He can feel something pressing against his back and balanced on his shoulders. Not antagonistic. 

Not antagonistic yet. 

But something is there and it wants to know Yoongi is being watched. Eyes, feral and wolfish, look at him from the shadows of the treeline, but they are benign, practically friendly; this is some new force, so inhuman it doesn’t have the words to depict itself in a shape Yoongi could understand. 

Ssssssss says the thing, and Yoongi knows it is a judgement on him, ssshhhhhaaaaaaa, and the otherworldliness of it is far too much for him to comprehend - 

The cats are both growling, hair on end - 

The eyes become more interested - 

He wakes up 

He wakes up 

He opens his eyes to both Beanbag and Spanner sitting right on his chest, both of their tails flickering wildly, their paws flexing and unflexing in the material of his t-shirt, the claws pricking twenty little points across him, prickly red piercings on his skin. “Jesus,” he says and he becomes aware he’s sweating, “Okay, okay, I get the point…”

It takes a while to shoo them off him. He feels shaken up, and again he’s sweated a shape into his bedsheets; a glance out the window tells him he’s slept long into the afternoon, dozing off the effects of the dance and the wine and the unsettling dream. 

The dream he shared with his cats. 

He shared a dream with his cats.

Undoubtedly he did, undoubtedly he has, because no other explanation stands for their behaviour.

They follow him around the house, to the washing machine, to the drying horse for a change of clothes, to the kettle by the kitchen window for a cup of tea, rubbing against his ankles searching for comfort, or something he can’t give them. 

Yoongi isn’t sure when he realises it, but he knows he comes to this conclusion when he stares out the window at the woods, his tea a comforting warmth cupped between his palms. He’s shaken up, confused, and he knows now beyond shadow of a doubt that something funny is going on - 

He wants to be in the trees, and he wants to see Jeongguk. If he does those two things, everything will make sense, and he will be able to rationalise how magic isn’t real. 

Strange, how these things work out. 

Yoongi takes a slow, contemplative shower and dresses in a daze; he puts odd socks on and his worst trousers, and a shirt Gerry bought him as a gag gift one Christmas with an awful cartoon kitten on the front in fading, peeling print. 

He texts Izzy and Gerry the same message. Im ok. Ireland is busy, not much time to do much. Befriended some people nearby. How are you? He knows they’ll compare messages and realise they’ve been sent the same one, but he just doesn’t have the time, energy, or inclination for a long dissection of his activity since he’s left New York - this will have to do. 

He sets out. He locks Beanbag and Spanner in the house, ignoring their injured expressions, and squelches with purpose towards the familiar treeline. He doesn’t want a lion, or a panther. He wants his friends.

Today, the woods seem brighter than usual. The wind doesn’t bite into his bones quite so much, and the trees seem to have split to let the green light through the branches, to illuminate his path. Yoongi walks lost in thought, unaware of the mud and mulch at his feet - he can’t make sense of his dream, but he knows there’s some sense to be made. Beanbag and Spanner must have known something or they wouldn’t have woken him, and that’s the second time he’s dreamt of a stone circle in the woods that he’s never set eyes on, in his waking hours. He wonders if there’s one in the real life to be found; he wonders what he’d do if he ever got to it.

Deeper into the woods, thoroughly out of the rim of forestry trees, and Yoongi begins to hear crackling twigs and crunching leaves - but by now, he knows enough about the denizens of the trees that it doesn’t worry him; Deirdre, Jeongguk, one of the other brothers in the house, but any way he looks at it he’s safe. Safe enough. He can hear panting, animalistic breath from near him, but even that just reminds him of his dream. 

Maybe he’s still asleep and dreaming. Sometimes, he can’t tell. Maybe the dance was all in his imagination.

When Yoongi stops at the body of a thick, spreading chestnut tree, he finds to his pleasant surprise that the noises are coming from Hoseok and Seokjin’s dog around the other side - Fluffy, the huge wolfhound, standing over the roots of the trees, his breath crystal white in the air. 

“Oh, hey,” Yoongi murmurs, sliding his back down the trunk of the tree to sit on a knot, his coat between him and the damp, mossy wood. “What are you up to, honey?”

Fluffy looks at him, his eyes curiously intelligent for a dog, and then pads over to Yoongi, pushing his cold nose against Yoongi’s cheek. He’s a strange contrast to the lion of Yoongi’s dream. 

“Do I smell worried?” Yoongi laughs and tickles Fluffy under the chin. “Hey. Are you allowed out? Do they know you’re here? Should I bring you home?”

Fluffy blinks. And then, with a long, doggy exhale, he lays his head in Yoongi’s lap, his paws folded up over Yoongi’s ankles, and looks up at him - he couldn’t say i’m happy here with any clearer a message, unless he spoke the words aloud. Maybe he’s about to. Yoongi feels as though he might no longer be surprised. 

"That's okay," Yoongi moves his hand from Fluffy's chin to his head, and starts stroking from the crown of his skull down to the base of his neck, and then behind both ears one by one, and then back to the top of his head. "You can sit here as long as you want. Are you with anyone?"

Fluffy yawns, shuffles a bit further onto Yoongi's lap, and Yoongi feels oddly proud of it, like he's managed to gain something incredibly hard to find. "I suppose you aren't," he says, noting the absence of a collar, or of any sort of leash trailing from around his neck, "No dog parks in the sticks, huh? But I wish you'd get Jeongguk. I think I want to talk to him."

At that last part, Fluffy makes a whining noise that could almost be a question.

Yoongi keeps petting. Dogs amuse him - he's definitely a cat person, tried, tested, faithful and true, but dogs make him laugh, because he just doesn't know what to do with them. When they make those conversational barks and yaps, he wants to talk to them, just to reward them for their vocalisation where his cats are silent and unyielding. "Jeongguk, you know which one he is?" He says now. "Or do you just belong to Seokjin and Hoseok?"

Funny, really. All the other dog owners he knows have been besotted to an irritating extent with their pets, even Izzy and her awful little handbag chihuahua Felix; phone lockscreens, conversation starters, Facebook profile pictures. Nobody from the house on the hill has mentioned a pet, not even Jeongguk when Spanner went missing those weeks ago; only Hoseok and Seokjin, and only because Yoongi ran into them mid-walk.

Fluffy doesn't reply, but then, he never had done. Yoongi keeps petting him.

"Jeongguk was there for my first funny dream, so I think he should be here for my second, but he's probably very hungover," he tells Fluffy instead, rubbing the pad of his finger behind the furry ear. "So am I. Maybe that's why I had the damn dream in the first place. But I - he said he would work out what was going on, and he hasn't, actually. Is that unfair to put on him? I don't even know if we're friends. But I swear, there’s something more going on, I do swear it. My cats shared my dream. And last night - last night, if you told me fairies were real, I’d have believed you. Are Jeongguk and I friends enough to discuss that?"

Fluffy twitches on his lap, and his paws extend, like he's about to stand and then thinks better of it.

"I don't suppose we are," Yoongi continues, eyes unfocused, staring at something in the sky beyond the split trees. "But last night was fun, and it was... I think he wanted to dance with me." The clouds chase each other across the atmosphere, hiding and revealing the sun in wispy flashes. "I think I wanted to dance with him, but something always kept... Jimin pulled me out, a time. He was a bit - I don't think he meant to be, but he said something that - well, I think I'd just drunk a lot. It freaked me out, though."

He's stopped petting the dog, who butts his head into Yoongi's palm to prompt him into beginning again.

"I came here looking for him, I think," Yoongi tells Fluffy, knowing he can't help beyond warming his thighs, "Just to talk to. We wouldn't even have talked about anything. It would have been really awkward and - you know, I get on with all the rest of them. Well. Not Namjoon, but I think... but all the rest of them are friendly. Jeongguk is just... I don't know. I don't know. And he did that thing when I cut my foot, and I never even thought to wonder how weird it was, but it was weird, yeah? It was strange. It healed so quickly. And he found me in here so soon after I woke up - I never even thought why he was here in the first place. Surely a job with the forest people doesn't mean you come here in the middle of the night. Something’s weird."

Fluffy shifts. Maybe he's uncomfortable.

"There's something rotten in the state of Denmark," Yoongi mumbles, "That Deirdre woman is another one. I don't... she confuses me. She's a bit intense. I think she's here for something else, but I can't figure out what it is. Last night... last night was a lot."

The clouds are thickening. The night will be warm and muggy; the sun is setting quick and fast, and already Yoongi is getting a bit too hot in his layers and his coat. He wishes he hadn't slept in as late as he did; he feels uncomfortable, the way he always does when he sleeps past noon, the discomfort of having wasted a day where he could have done something.

He sits with Fluffy until the sun has set and the waning moon is high, high above him. The dog is the first one to move.

Yoongi goes home dissatisfied, and he can't sleep. He sits at his kitchen table and stares at his notebook, and writes lots of sentences that go nowhere, and ignores any texts Gerry or Izzy have sent him; he hasn't got the energy.

His cats sit on the sill of the window behind the kitchen sink, and stare unblinking at the woods.

Yoongi joins them, his head reeling. Something has shifted. He no longer knows what’s real.

Hoseok’s shoulders ache from a long day of shifting boxes full of frozen bread buns, delivering to the various takeaways and chip shops around the country who order from them. He tosses the keys of the van into the bowl by the front door, and kicks off his boots, shrugging off the jacket he wears with the bakery logo on it in favour of a housecoat, a warm crocheted thing Taehyung made a few Christmases ago. “I’m home!” He shouts. 

“Kitchen!” Seokjin’s voice yells back, “Madeline’s sent a letter for us!” 

Hoseok shuffles through the hall, the familiar smell of pinewood, burning red carpets, and dog hair a comfort to him. The pictures on the walls, family arrangements and blurry printed selfies, greet him with a comforting sameness - Jimin, always lurking, always slightly blurry, Hoseok and Seokjin pulling stupid faces, Jeongguk smiling widely, Taehyung and Namjoon earnestly trying to make the picture look good. 

In the kitchen, he finds them all sitting waiting for him. Taehyung is sitting cross-legged on top of the kitchen island, an embroidery hoop in his lap and an immense web of coloured threads in a ball beside him; Jimin is sitting in the stool close by, stroking his thumb over Taehyung’s thigh. 

Seokjin is leaning on the kettle, almost at the boil on the aga. Jeongguk, wearing only a dressing gown and bedsocks, is lounging in the hanging basket, looking weirdly thoughtful for Jeongguk. Namjoon is standing by one of the countertops, a letter in his hand, flicking his index finger against the staple in the notebook pages to make a dull metal clicking noise. 

“How was work?” 

“Grand,” Hoseok stretches until he feels his back click. It’s been almost a day since he’s shifted, and he can feel the tear on his skin, the pressure there to let the wolf out. “Busy. How are you guys?”

“Filling orders all day,” Taehyung says over his embroidery, “Potions for Inge. She ordered some more forget-me-lots.”

“Read a book, cleaned the house,” Seokjin gestures to the aga, “Made dinner. Curry sounding good?”

“Mmm, yeah,” the kettle boils and Hoseok moves towards the cupboard with the mugs, the chipped, mismatched miscellany, from Rome with love and one that Jimin had printed with just pictures of Taehyung’s elbow bent to look like his bare arse, and one shaped like an elephant, and one that’s incredibly hard to clean, and one hand-painted from some pottery shop down beyond Dublin. He and Seokjin move in a quiet tandem, making a potful of tea, sugar for those who want it, a squeeze of honey for Taehyung. 

“Got a letter,” Namjoon shakes it again, “I think it’s… well, have you been keeping in touch?”

“I talk to Daniel a lot,” Seokjin says. 

“Susannah rang me the other day,” Taehyung says, not looking up from his hoop, “And Amandi’s been asking us for haruspex advice.”

“I text Madeline sometimes,” Hoseok offers. 

“Daniel,” Jeongguk says from the hanging basket. He looks thoughtful, but Hoseok gets the impression he’s not thinking about the letter - he’s thinking about something else entirely. 

“So this must be something she didn’t want to trust to text, again,” says Namjoon, and he looks troubled. “Who do you think it’s about?”

Hoseok wonders if they’re all thinking what he is. 

He can’t stop seeing Yoongi in his head, and he knows that Jeongguk, at least, must be thinking about the same thing; the odd light on him, the magnetic pull to talk to him, to dance with him, to ply him with wine and buttered bread and thick-crust pastry, to make him happy. Hoseok only feels that way about a few things in life. The coven, the circle. Before last night, he thought that was it, and maybe last night was just the particularly strong batch of wine, but somehow he doesn’t think so - can’t think so. Somehow, he knows it was Yoongi. He wishes - he just wishes he knew why. 

He doesn’t even know the man. So why does a smile from him feel like a reward?

“I don’t know,” Seokjin says, as blatant a lie as he ever tells. “Read the damn letter, Joon, and then we’ll see what’s to be done.”

Tea is passed out and around. Hoseok finds a spot on the couch beside Jeongguk, and curls up with his toes tucked into the space between sofa cushions. “What’s she say, then?”

Namjoon clears his throat and shakes out the notepad sheets, pressing the crinkled corners against his thigh to straighten them out. “Dear Everyone, I hope you guys are well.” He pauses, and brushes his hand through his hair.

"Go on," Jimin says, "Stop stalling, come on-"

"I hope you guys are well," Namjoon glares at him, but doesn't bicker back, "I know we've been chatting to you guys, but I wanted to write, as well - Susannah says London is coming under watch, and I know there are a few hunters who know cyber as well as the witches do, and I didn't want to risk bringing any attention to us or to you guys, either. Basically, I have news."

"Nothing good," Taehyung says, setting his embroidery down to unpick a knot further down the thread, "Absolutely fantastic."

Namjoon doesn't look too happy either. "I know there's been no news of Dublin, but Daniel knows a few vampires in the city centre, and they've been talking a lot about a feral pack."

Hoseok can't help himself. He looks across at Jeongguk, and he can see everyone else looking, too, and Jeongguk just looks ill and unhappy, curled up far smaller than he should be, his arms wrapped around his legs. Feral packs in Dublin. Well, there'll be no prizes for who they might be.

"I know you guys have experience with stuff like that in Dublin, but I also know it's been quiet since Jeongguk arrived."

Arrived. That's a nice way of putting it. Hoseok can't make himself look away from Jeongguk's face, at the way the blood is slowly seeping out of it, replaced with a blank, greenish colour high on his cheeks and under his eyes, as though he hasn't slept in weeks. His eyes, focused on something on the ceiling, have dazed and glazed and drifted away, back down the lure of memory lane.

"Sorry, Gukkie," Namjoon says quietly, "I didn't know-"

"Just keep reading it," Jeongguk says, his voice a little hoarse, a little scratchy, "I want to know what she has to say."

Namjoon exchanges a glance with Hoseok, but it would be worse now if they stopped in the middle of the letter; he keeps going.

"Basically, Daniel has it in very good faith that there's a feral pack in Dublin. They've reigned their rogue in, and that's why the reports have stopped, so the rumours currently are that it's being led by a sane alpha, with a heap of rogue betas going mad in the city. I don't think so. I know I'm not one to talk, but in my experience, feral packs are just that - and controlled by base emotions. Lust, jealousy, rage. Jeongguk knows better than I do. I don't want you to be caught out of the loop, because Amandi is still convinced that a danger involving a newcomer to Follie is closer than we think, but my running theory is that it has something to do with the feral pack, or the feral loner, in Dublin. Either way, something's rotten. Something's gone wrong."

Jeongguk's breathing is too fast and too shallow. Hoseok can hear it, and so can every other wolf in the room, and the two blood witches are connected to his heart through the circle. They can feel the beat.

"Stop looking at me like that," Jeongguk doesn't growl, exactly, but he comes close, "Keep reading, please, Joonie."

"I know my last letter was pretty dire, too, and I don't want this one to be more of the same, but Amandi is really worried about you guys and I am too. Just keep an eye on each other, and keep safe, and don't trust anyone who isn't in the circles. Susannah wants you guys to know we're planning a Christmas trip to Ireland, but only if you think it's safe. We miss you all." Namjoon inhales, and folds the paper up. "Love, Madeline. Jesus Christ, it never rains but it-"

Jeongguk stands from the basket and bolts from the room. Hoseok can hear him taking the stairs up three at a time, and then the hiss of his sash window, and the whistle of wind through fur in the distance; all of them can.

"Fuck this," Seokjin says, still cupping a mug of undrunk tea. "Fuck this. So we have to be worried about that, now, too? First that man-"

Namjoon frowns. "I don't think Yoongi is anything to worry about, but this might-"

"Amandi said-"

Hoseok, saying nothing, doesn't miss the significant look Taehyung and Jimin share between them, and the exaggerated calm with which Taehyung lifts his embroidery hoop and the untangled lengths of thread.

"I'm going to check on Jeongguk," Namjoon stands, the letter folded and forgotten on the seat beside him, "I'd better, or he'll-"

Jimin's head is cocked to one side, his eyes peaceably shut. "Jeongguk's heading for Wood West," he says. "For Yoongi's cottage. I think you're probably a bit too late to jump on that train, Namjoonie. Good effort, though."

For Yoongi's cottage.

Great.

Deirdre sits perched up a tree just inside the boundary of the old wood, a pair of heavy birdwatching binoculars around her neck, both of the Cullises making lots of noisy busywork in the part of the forestry she’s meant to be working on. She’s freezing. Her knuckles are blue around the perimeter, and white inside, and she wishes she hadn’t left her nice hunting gloves with Claudia, but here she is. Here she is. 

She felt something last night, she knows she did. Claudia drilled the signs into her. Time slowing down. Well, that definitely happened, and Deirdre wasn’t so drunk on hot wine that she couldn’t feel the hours passing like treacle, a second and yet a week in between each point on the clock. It will look like a painting. She felt that one, too. Magic is hot on your skin, dearest. Claudia touches her spine, her stomach, her thighs, gently, making the point. 

Deirdre shivers just from the memory of it. When this is over, and when she’s done what she came here to do, Claudia can come to Ireland without fear of the blood witch that pushed her to Paris in the first place. Without fear of the witch that gave her the scar coming back to finish the job. 

Deirdre will do this. She will. 

She focuses her binoculars on the little white cottage over the hill, at the place she’s been looking for the last two hours. Yoongi is a shadow through the windows, an occasional black silhouette against the orange interior, occasionally one with a cat draped over a shoulder or cradled in his arms, and Deirdre isn’t stupid enough that she doesn’t know the signs there when she sees them. Familiars? 

Claudia taught her all about those, as well. Deirdre won’t be caught off guard. 

She’s watching so intently that she almost misses the dash of colour, the warm brown blur through the dewy grass splashing up a cloud of mist in the evening. What is that? Moving far too fast to be a dog, supernaturally large in the field, and yet the amount of fog it kicks up means Deirdre can’t get a close look at all. She squints through the binoculars. 

The thing, whatever it is, is making a beeline for Yoongi’s cottage. Called? Summoned?

Of course it is. 

Deirdre takes the binoculars down from her eyes just before she blinks, her vision strained, her eyeballs dry and weeping. She knew it, and now she just has to confirm it. Yoongi is at the centre of whatever’s pulled her to Follie in the first place, and Yoongi might even be the other half of the blood witch pairing - the mate to Jimin Park. 

“Cullis,” she calls, leaping down from the tree, uncaring as a knot on the branch she seizes scrapes a bloody mess on the inside of her palm, “Headway! We’re gonna bag us a witch tonight!”

Neither of the Cullises reply. Claudia didn’t need them to. 

Deirdre smiles. She knows - she knows - she knows what she has to do. 

And then the curse will be lifted, and Claudia and Deirdre will live happy, and nothing will ever harm them again. 

Chapter Text

[Image Description: A blurry photograph of a cave wall, the corners of the frame greying from grainy copier paper, a curl of blonde hair in front of the lens. The focus of the photo is clear, however; paintings on the cave wall, in brown-red ochre, applied in heavy, ancient brushstrokes. There is little light in the cavern, and the colour of the paint is very bright, as though it has been preserved in the darkness for a very long time. On the stone wall, there are four daubed circles, slightly bigger than the span of a human hand, each with a single thin figure inside the circle. In the space between each of the circles, someone long ago has lathered their hand with paint, and pressed it hard to the cave wall. These handprints track from circle to circle, connecting each of the four figures. Around the main diorama, a larger encapsulating shape has been painted; at each corner sits a crudely daubed tree. It has been captioned SIBERIAN CAVE PAINTINGS: PREHISTORIC CIRCLE CONNECTIONS.]

• an image attached to how low do we go? a single-sheet publication written by Nikola Sidorova and published in both English and Russian in 1987. Dr Sidorova of Corpus Christi, Cambridge, is a doctor of archaeology and a practicing stone witch. Her research in the 1970s and 80s into worldwide circle connections and the recurring energy surge phenomena remain relevant to the community’s understanding of power lines to this day. 

There is a knock on his door. 

Yoongi is sitting at the kitchen table wrapped in his warmest cardigan, tapping his pen against his bottom lip, Beanbag lying across his shoulders and Spanner curled up on the table beside his notebook. He feels warm for the first time in a while, as the Irish winter sets in around him; over the past few weeks he’s gone from t-shirts and tops to three layers and scarves, even indoors with heating and two feline hand warmers that follow him loyally. In New York, he never really managed to feel the cold, not when he was being shunted from office to office, flat to flat, but in Ireland, with all this space around him, the chill settles in deep.

Another knock. “Coming,” Yoongi calls, standing and wrapping his cream-coloured cardigan firmer around his waist, so whoever’s visiting won’t see the stupid cat on his t-shirt. “”Coming, hold a sec-”

“Yoongi,” Jeongguk is standing in the doorway, looking dejected and miserable, his shirt done up with the little buttons in the wrong holes, the ends not tucked into his jeans, his boots unlaced. He looks as though he dressed that very second. “I’m sorry, I should’ve called, but I got some - uh, bad news. I-”

Yoongi feels weirdly warmed by the implication Jeongguk would come to him for any sort of comfort. “Come in,” he steps back from the doorway, shivering as the cold outside air hits his skin through the holes in the knitwear, “Come in, I’ll make you a drink. Coffee? Tea? Uh… I think I have some hot chocolate?”

“Hot chocolate, please,” Jeongguk comes in and shuts the door, and then takes up residence leaning against the kitchen countertop, looking shifty and sad, both cats streaming to rub up against his ankles. “If it isn’t too much… bother.”

“No, no,” Yoongi stands on tip-toe to reach the unopened jar of powder, “Not at all, I - hit the kettle on, there, would you?”

“The kettle?” 

Yoongi turns around, the jar successfully reached, already feeling heat crawling up to his cheeks. “Do you… isn’t that how you make hot chocolate? Like coffee? Y’know, granules?” He shakes the jar for emphasis, and it rattles against the airtight foil at the top, still sealed. “No?”

“Warm milk and chocolate powder,” Jeongguk says, rubbing his hand across the back of his neck, his own cheeks blushing prettily. It’s no news to Yoongi, of course, that Jeongguk and all of the family on the hill are upsettingly handsome, but it is new for someone like that to be in his kitchen, which seems to almost dim and clutter itself in comparison to Jeongguk. He’s just a little too big for it, not in stature but in the air he gives off, in the way his hair falls, in the way he manages to make even a messily-done shirt and a pair of holey jeans look like the height of fashion. He pushes himself off the counter by his hips, and holds his hand out for the hot chocolate, and Yoongi shudders when their fingers brush. “D’you want me to show you? I promise, it’ll be the nicest thing ever. You’ll be thanking me yet.”

Dumbly, Yoongi passes him the jar. He wants to go change. He wishes he wasn’t in his flannel pyjama bottoms. Jeongguk has a groove in his top lip, as though someone has pressed their thumb there and left it soft and pliable, until the depression stayed. 

The radio is set to a classic rock station, an internet connection Yoongi settled on for the comforting American accents of the two hosts. He crooks it down a little, so he can hear Jeongguk humming over the music, lifting the jug of milk out of the fridge. 

“Do you want to talk about it?” Yoongi ventures, after a few minutes of comfortable, but full, silence. “I mean - can I help at all?”

Jeongguk shrugs. “I don’t think… it’s a long story. I don’t think it’s… I don’t… it’s to do with where I was before I came to live here, and I don’t want… it’s long. And boring. I just hate thinking about it, y’know, but they were talking about it and I didn’t expect it.” He pours milk into Yoongi’s smallest pan and shifts it onto the range, looking over his shoulder, a little embarrassed. “I’m sorry. You were probably really busy-”

“No, don’t be,” Yoongi holds his arms out, and Spanner leaps into them. “I shouldn’t have asked. You don’t need to tell me at all.”

With a shy, but pleased smile, Jeongguk reaches out to the radio and turns it up again. “I like this song.”

“So do I,” Yoongi finds himself saying, although in truth he’s never heard it before. It’s worth it for the look on Jeongguk’s face; happiness at a connection found. 

Jeongguk stirs the milk on the range slowly, rhythmically, nodding his head to the music. “Do you like it really chocolatey?” 

“Mm, I do,” Yoongi screws open the jar, and pierces the foil covering the top with the end of a spoon, shaking out the large lumps that have crept to the surface. “It smells nice.” Milk gently brought to the boil reminds him of being quite small, and of being at his grandmother’s house, and she would make him cereal with hot milk and sliced fruit, and honey, and smile at him as he ate as though it was the only thing that would bring her joy. 

He finds himself smiling at Jeongguk in that way, as Jeongguk shakes chocolate into the milky pan, dancing to the beat of the song, humming along. He wants Jeongguk to be happy, in his kitchen; he wants Jeongguk to feel content, at rest, to wipe the fearful look off his face, to just sit and drink his chocolate and be at peace. 

"Mugs?" Jeongguk asks, pointing at one of the cabinets at random. "Or do you-"

"Here," Yoongi nudges into the corner Jeongguk has made between his body and the side cabinets, bumping his hip into Jeongguk's, standing on the tips of his toes to reach the top shelf of his cabinet, where he keeps the nicest mugs, the ones that hold far more than a single serving. He takes them in his palms, passes them to Jeongguk along with a ladle and a smile. "Will those do?"

"Perfect," Jeongguk dips the ladle in the saucepan and sets both mugs beside the range. "Hey - I promise I'm sorry, about barging into here. I should've mentioned, or called, or-"

"You know I wouldn't have been doing anything anyway," Yoongi stays where he is, close to the warmth of Jeongguk's body, the heat coming from both him and the range, a bubble of comfort and safety. "I've done absolutely nothing since I moved here. So much for productivity."

"There's time," Jeongguk lets hot milk drip past the ladle, and then looks at Yoongi questioningly, "Isn't there? I'm not gonna lie, I don't know much about - like, books, and stuff."

"No, there's time," Yoongi says, although there isn't. "My publisher, my editor, they're on me quite a lot, but really it's on me. You can't... collaboratively write a novel. Izzy and Gerry, that's them, and they... well, I think they think I moved here to get away from them."

"Didn't you?"

Yoongi watches the bubbles boil to the surface and pop. He's leaning most of his weight on the counter, his elbow pushing against the half-drunk jar of coffee. "A little bit. Have you ever been to New York?"

"No, but I... spent a lot of time in Dublin, a few years ago. And - uh, London, before that. I've been in cities," Jeongguk swallows, and looks away, and Yoongi gets the feeling they're passing over some forbidden subject, something to do with the reason he’s here, "But I wasn't... I don't think I've been in cities the same way you have."

"Maybe not," Yoongi pauses, wonders whether to ask, and then decides not to, "New York is very - or at least, my bit of it is very - it's very known. Y'know. I used to go to parties Izz would hold, and she's this big editor, and she had all these friends from her old literature course, and she had journalist friends and then something I said would appear in the fuckin' New Yorker, y'know, and the world was so small. I never... I mean, I wrote the book in between my masters thesis, and I was gonna go hunt for a doctorate somewhere small and rural and kinda cheap, and then Gerry picked it up and ran with it and then I was someone people wanted to talk to, y'know? I couldn't go anywhere. Izz and Gerry meant well, but they used to shepherd me places and show me off to people, and so I just thought of the furthest place away from the city I could think of, and I Googled places for sale, and... I landed on Follie. I landed here. Completely random."

"So you did move here to get away, then," Jeongguk stirs the hot cocoa milk one more time and then ladles it out, two splashes into each mug, stirring the dregs into the remaining milk and pouring it out in equal amounts.

Yoongi laughs, and takes his mug. "When you put it like that, then, I guess I did."

The cats are waiting on the kitchen table, and Yoongi sweeps his pages and books and pens away with one cast of his arm to clear enough space to sit together. "Is there a chair - yes, yeah, grab that there-"

Jeongguk pulls up to the table with a screech of wood against the tile, reaching out to scratch Beanbag's head. "Is this all work?"

"All empty notebooks, at the minute," Yoongi rubs the back of his neck, a little hot for some reason. "I'm not... I can't figure what to write about. But I - oh my god, you really don't want to hear me whine about this. I could complain for hours about it. I have Izz and Gerry for that-"

"I want to hear," Jeongguk looks at him with a sort of bare earnestness that Yoongi doesn't quite know what to do with, "I think it's interesting. I haven't read it, but Tae - Tae's read it, and he says it's really good. He said he liked it."

Yoongi has never been good with compliments, especially to do with his book; he feels embarrassed about it, weirdly embarrassed, as though he's taking praise for something he hasn't done. "Um. Thank him for me, then. I... yeah. Thanks. Thanks very much." He sips on the cocoa, and closes his eyes, humming into the rich taste of hot milk on his mouth. "Mmm. You were right."

"Way better without the water," Jeongguk's eyes twinkle, and he drinks from his own mug. "Comfort drink, right?"

"Comfort drink."

The radio plays something not-quite rock, not-quite anything else, a sort of soothing new wave, synthesisers and a quiet man's voice half-singing, half-speaking. Outside night has wrapped firmly around the cottage, a thick, cloying blanket of darkness and stars, and Yoongi feels as much at home here as he ever has, sitting across from Jeongguk at his small kitchen table, the smell of chocolate in the air. He's smiling at Jeongguk the way he thought he might; the only thing he can think of that would bring him joy.

And Yoongi decides that spending time with Jeongguk is fun. 

“This is ridiculous,” Taehyung says, as Jimin draws a dotted black line around the meat of his own calf, “We’ve done the experiments, we’ve done the research, we know we’re not wrong, and I’m not going to cut off your stupid leg to prove a point.”

“It would grow back.”

“I know that, but I spent two hours yesterday sharpening this,” Taehyung waves the butcher’s bone-knife in the air, and the candlelight jumps against the white blade. “I’m not ruining it on your stupid tibia. We proved it.”

Jimin draws a sad face in marker in the middle of his dotted line, two long stripes and a curved black line. “You could go just a little bit in. You don’t have to hit bone.”

“There’s no point to that,” Taehyung sets the knife down on their bed, and settles down cross-legged in front of Jimin. Their bedroom is the attic floor, the whole of it, and nobody complained when they got it; although nobody in the house is averse to blood witchery, unlike much of the community Taehyung has become used to, the smells can float around unless they’re given the whole floor. When they moved in, Seokjin and Taehyung took a week to reinforce the underfloors and soundproof the walls, and although he knows it’s not completely perfect, at least nobody can smell the flesh of it at three in the morning when they feel like experimenting. 

Jimin kicks one of the little green jars. “Okay, fine. But consider, Taehyungie, cutting off my leg would be so fun.” 

“It could be.” Taehyung picks the jar up before it can spill, “But I want to check the forecast for next week.”

Jimin does not leap to his feet, because Jimin never does something as undignified; he stands like a ballerina, raising his hands over his head in a deep stretch and then twisting his legs around, up first to the knees and then to stand. Both of them are in their pyjamas, but where Taehyung likes matching sets from Marks & Spencer with unicorns printed on it, Jimin prefers comfortable bottoms and no top, so all who want to can see the fading scars across his chest from the past week of blood witchery - 

And, of course, the one wound that will never heal. The puckered scar like a kiss, pale and circular over one pectoral, and the exit wound on a spot a little further down on his back; the hunter, Badeaux, had painted her staff in the blood of a vampire before she impaled him through the chest, and nothing hurts a witch more than the blood of something that takes, as opposed to the blood of their own, blood that gives. Taehyung hates looking at it. It reminds him of his failure. Jimin, on the other hand, flaunts it. He’s proud of it. “You want the forecast he says,” standing over Taehyung, pushing his small hand into Taehyung’s hair and clenching just a little, “From yours or from mine?”

“You’re the best at it,” Taehyung says, closing his eyes. “And we used you, last night.” 

They’ve been testing their green paste ever since Jeongguk mentioned it. Used on Yoongi? Used on Yoongi? But both Taehyung and Jimin create their tinctures, salves, and potions to only have an effect on the magical; it’s the only way to keep their world even slightly under the radar. 

And Jeongguk wouldn’t lie. Jeongguk doesn’t know why he should lie. Which means either they messed up with their formula, or Yoongi is - 

Which means Amandi is - 

Taehyung lies down and pushes his shirt up to his collar, one hand holding it to his neck, one hand clutching the varnished floorboards, sitting inside a broad circle of candles. “I love you,” he says.

“I love you too,” Jimin says, and with a small fish knife, one that might have been used to gut a catch - and still is, if you look at it one way - he makes a direct downward incision at the top of Taehyung’s navel. 

As he always does when he feels the first pain of it, Taehyung can’t help but make a noise; it still hurts, no matter how much they do it, and Jimin is not as careful with Taehyung as he is with the hearts and winding guts they take from the abattoir; dead hearts can only be used once, whereas both of them are reusable - both of them can be fixed and taken apart and fixed again. Jimin cuts downward, creating a window to look in at Taehyung’s internals, the red, wet, flesh throbbing across one another. “You look healthy,” he says. 

“I love you,” Taehyung says through a red haze of pain, his hand spasming for something to grip on beside him, “What do you see?”

For a long time, or maybe a short time, Jimin is silent, hands up to the elbows in the bright red. Only deoxygenated blood is dark red, black red, the blood that bleeds, but the blood of the insides is cartoonishly red, the sort of colour that shouldn’t exist outside of crayon wax colours and imagination. Taehyung watches it spurt. He doesn’t feel dizzy, yet, but he will if Jimin doesn’t get a move on - blood witches are different in many ways to the conventional, especially when it comes to the sort of injury that would floor a normal mortal. Only hunters, really, know how to hurt a blood witch. A hurt that lasts.

Jimin is not gentle. He isn’t forceful, but he doesn’t bother holding back, and why should he? Taehyung can take it. Taehyung was made to take it.

“Rain coming in from the west,” he murmurs, wrapping a stringy flared piece of gristle around his index finger, “Over the sea. Hmm…”

“Look for the magic,” Taehyung gasps. His flailing hand lands in Jimin’s hair and seizes, pulling hard. 

Jimin makes no noise, no noise, no signifier that he’s heard or felt a thing. “There is great magic. Oh, fuck, a whole pile of magic… from someone here. Someone already here. A threat… a storm. The rain from the sea. A storm. Some foreign magic?” His hands are deep in the tangles of Taehyung’s large intestine, digging even further down, and Taehyung can feel it - the most intimate they will ever become, no matter what else they might do. “Something European. I recognise it. I - I - Tae-” 

Taehyung pulls harder. “We’ll deal with it,” he promises, and now the faint feeling begins to beg for his attention around the corners of his consciousness, “I swear it. What else do you see?” 

“Jeongguk,” Jimin says, “Jeongguk and… Yoongi. Something coming. Something’s coming during the storm.”

And Taehyung knows no more of what might be coming, of what the storm might bring; his grip loosens in Jimin’s hair and, as Jimin begins the incantations and to drip the healing wax onto the seams of the cut he has made through Taehyung’s belly, he falls deep into the sort of magical unconsciousness that cannot be easily broken. 

Everything has a price. There is always a toll to pay. 

The storm is rolling in from the west, over the wide expanse of sea between Ireland and everywhere else. Deirdre drives. One of the Cullises is in the front seat, and the other crouches in the back of the Toyota, in the open flatbed, sorting through the rolls of chicken fencing, barbed wire, and the box full of hammers and spanners and wrenches that could be passed off as lumber equipment, if anyone bothered to stop and check. Nobody will. They’ve been in Follie long enough to pass off suspicion, and even when they first arrived, even when Deirdre was very obviously sniffing for the trail of something magic, nobody wondered. 

So Yoongi is a witch. Or, rather, Yoongi is probably a witch. Deirdre has hunted before, dancing between the border of Scotland and England, chasing down the vampires there, but Follie has none of the hallmarks of vampire residence. No compliant, dreamy people, no animal attacks on humans. No banshee - no screaming, she would have heard it by now. Werewolves, maybe; the forest is full of deer, badgers, foxes, hares, rabbits, all manner of things to hunt without trace, and although Deirdre knows there’s a circle in the woods, she still hasn’t been able to find it. 

So Yoongi could very well be the mate of the witch that Claudia caught. The one that cursed her. If not that, then he’s definitely in the coven, and one of them is the witch.

If only she could find the damn circle.

(And that is something really quite strange. She’s looked at the OS maps, she’s looked at satellite pictures of the woods, she’s seen the overheads of the trees - she knows the woods aren’t that wide, even trimming the forestry space away. And yet anytime she goes in, with or without the Cullises, she ends up walking for hours without getting anywhere.)

“Make sure the rope’s spooled,” she grunts at the Cullis in the back. 

No, Yoongi is a witch. He summoned something last night. And although Deirdre suspects the house of freaks on the hill, she’s not an idiot. Yoongi lives alone. He’ll be easier to get, easier to secure, and then from him she can use the Cullises to get the rest of them. 

Jeongguk. Taehyung, in that shed, with a meat cleaver tucked behind his back. Whatever the rest of them are, lurking in the shadows of the dance. 

Witches aren’t like real people, Claudia says in her mind, wearing Deirdre’s shirt and nothing else, her bare feet on the windowsill as the sun rises over Paris, you must remember not to forget that, Deirdre. 

Deirdre doesn’t intend to. 

She had sat in the tree in the woods for an hour and a half after she saw the streak of blurred dew heading for Yoongi’s cottage, and had only gone to hail the Cullises and her van when she saw the light switch off in Yoongi’s kitchen. Either his supernatural visitor has slunk out without Deirdre seeing, as the light fades, or else Yoongi has banished it to some other plane; whichever way it turns out, she’s sure he’s alone. He’s told her he lives alone. 

Cullis, beside her, holds out his hand. In it there is an empty gun casing, plastic wrap around a brass end. 

“No,” she says, her stomach rolling uncomfortably because she knows what Claudia would do, and it isn’t this, “No, we’ll get him first. I need information.” 

Claudia would kill him. Claudia has no mercy. 

Deirdre pushes that out of her head. 

There is a field between Yoongi’s cottage and the main road with a little divot beside the gate, a place to pull up to offload animals into pasture. This late at night and this far into winter it isn’t in use, and Deirdre swings the Toyota into park there, feeling the front wheels sink a little into the muddy bank. The Cullis in the back grunts. The Cullis in the front, looking as disappointed as his clay body will allow, is unloading modified gun shells into Deirdre’s glovebox, with the clink and slosh of bullets filled alternatively with chunks of silver and vampire blood. Werewolves, witches. Deirdre can come back to that later. 

“Do you have the iron?” She leans across the back seat, holding her hand out to Cullis, who obediently hands her a linked pair of old horseshoes and a cloth sack that rattles nails. She puts both in her backpack, although she doubts she’ll have to use it. Iron only hurts those really truly powerful witches, and she doubts that some minor blood witch that hit lucky will have any reaction to it. “Cullis?”

The one beside her unfolds his palm to display a small white fold of paper. Inside, Deirdre doesn’t have to check to know, is a substance she bought in Calais, getting onto the ferry; a powder that, when blown in the eyes of a magical creature, will render it absolutely useless. Ground clover, daisy, and mountain ash. 

“You keep that,” she tells him, and folds the clay fingers back over the paper. “When I give the word, you go.” 

Cullis nods, his face betraying nothing. 

Claudia never told her what she did to make the Cullises. “They’ll ward against your injury,” she said, wrapping her coat around her waist as they left the apartment, heading to make a reservation. In Paris, for those few weeks she stayed, Deirdre felt like a queen. “If anything magical is to happen, if anything seems like it might harm you or I, they will do whatever it takes to protect you.”

Deirdre hadn’t thought much of it at the time. She laughed. “I won’t need a man to save me.” 

“Cullis is not a man.”

“I’ll be fine on my own, Claud, I promise.”

“All the same,” Claudia grabbed her arm, looking no more intense than usual, her lips beautifully red, her eyes shining blue off the streetlights, “You must promise me you bring them with you, when you confront the witches. The wolves. Whatever they happen to be, when you find them.”

“I promise,” Deirdre said, more to move the conversation on than anything else. “I do promise.” 

And Cullis nods, and puts the powder in the breast pocket of his shirt. 

The night is cold and frigid, dew settling on the gate, making it incredibly hard for Deirdre to leap over; she rattles the metal against the gatepin in the post, and freezes, one boot on solid ground, one foot slung over the wet steel. She waits for someone to shout trespasser, for the lights to blaze, but then she isn’t in Paris with Claudia, and she isn’t in Edinburgh alone - she’s in a field in Ireland, with nobody to see her crimes, and nobody to care much either. 

She exhales. 

Both Cullises make an almighty racket climbing over the gate, and with each rattle her heart goes wild in a way it never normally would. But this is not hunting in Paris, and this is not hunting unrelated vampires in Scotland; this is revenge for something she sees, something she holds dear, and that has her jumping at shadows in a way she would never normally allow herself. 

Yoongi’s bedroom light is off. If she focuses, she can see shadows in the windowsill, two cats curled up and sleeping, bathed in the white light of the moon. They look like they’re asleep, too.

She ignores both the stone men following her, and focuses only on herself. At the end of the night, she will have a witch and some answers, and that’s an upgrade on what she had previously. Yeah. Sure. 

Deirdre jimmies the lock on Yoongi's front door for a minute or two, pausing with every snick the mechanisms make as she fails to turn them. Cullis and Cullis stand silent as stone behind either shoulder, not thinking anything at all. Deirdre wonders if it would be quicker to get them to slam the door down, but no - she doesn't know what sort of a witch he is, and what sort of protections he might have around his house. She can feel the sweat sticking the hair above her ears to her skin, and her heart rate increasing, and although she thinks she might have to call it for this one finally - finally! - the knob turns on the door and the peeling-painted wood swings outward, knocking against the stone wall with a dull and quiet thunk. 

In the woods of his dream, the rangy lion that is Spanner in unwaking hours growls. His head, his matted mane, turns toward the boundary of the wood and he whines, but Yoongi does not know what he is trying to say.

Inside the kitchen is more cluttered than Deirdre might have expected. She holds her hand out with the palm up towards both of the clay men, and she can hear them stop dead in their tracks. 

Two mugs sit balanced on the table, and there's the sweet, heavy smell of old-fashioned cocoa in the air and crusted around the lip of the cups. The rest of the table is a heaving mountain of paper, rising as high as Deirdre's shoulder, with pens and pencils and sacks of writing equipment, crumbly grey rubbers and blunted sharpeners and half-used books of novelty sticky notes shaped like apples, and a yearly planner with most of the pages ripped out and the rest absolutely soaked in ink. He has pots of unopened, unbranded fountain pen refills in black, and a packet of pastels; a letter from Bloomsbury that looks official, but has tea rings all over the body of it. Several phone cables with no plugs, tangled up like a nest of sleeping worms. Loose file papers with things like who is the lightning but I, my love? and Sana gets up. Sana stands. Sana stood. Sana turns, saying…  

The rest of the kitchen has obviously not been touched since Yoongi took residence. An awful wooden cuckoo clock sits, unwound and drooping, over the range. The walls are a washed-out blue. 

Deirdre pads forward to the door she guesses will lead to the stairs. It's cream, with old-fashioned iron hinges, which gives her pause for a moment; if Yoongi is tied to the land in some way, which she guesses he must, he should be a very powerful witch indeed not to let the touch of iron hurt him. Or, alternatively, it’s what she thought in the van and he’s simply too weak to even let it bother him.

No matter. She knows he is magic. She doesn’t care what kind he is. 

The downstairs hall leads to a door on either end; one is a small sunroom she’s seen from the road, and the other must lead to a kind of parlour space, although the door is closed and suitcases are piled up beside it. It certainly doesn’t see much use. The walls out here are papered in sun-faded floral print, and the carpet is thick with dust and cat hair and dark, matted fibres. 

Now Beanbag takes up the call, and Yoongi sets his hand on her high, regal spine, the black panther all twisted and alert. Her long teeth are bared. Both of the big cats look towards the border, and he wishes more than anything he could speak to them properly. 

Deirdre hears one of the Cullises stop in the kitchen, and the other, the one with the long rope, follow her on feet lighter than you would expect, from a heavy lump of rock. She puts her hand on the curved end of the banisters and peeks up the carpeted stairs, but again she sees nothing - just a bookshelf, the wooden shelves heaving and bending under the weight of books stacked two deep, volumes balanced on top of the layers, piles of books on top of the shelf, all of them bristling with sticky-notes, the spines cracked and white, the pages crooked with hundreds of dog-ears. 

The upstairs is carpeted too, and Deirdre is thankful for it. Although she can walk quietly on tiles, Cullis has no such luxury, and already she’s dreading conflict with a witch without waking him up beforehand, too. She hasn’t ever faced one. 

The landing of the upstairs is pretty, the roof sloping with the cottage shape, a closed oak-built writing desk there by the opposite wall with a handsome key in the lock. There are two doors going out of the room. 

Something at the boundary, Yoongi realises. Something at the edge of the wood. His wood. Spanner and Beanbag, the lion and the black panther, are trying to warn him - something is in his forest. 

Both are closed. Deirdre, followed by Cullis, steps over to the closest and nudges it open with her toe, her hands out to catch it should it creak, or make a sound - but in the still, dark of the night, it doesn’t. Moonlight floods in from a window unshaded, revealing piles of cardboard boxes, tape ripped from the opening flaps, and the sort of things that always seem to follow people when they move houses. Rolled-up posters not yet flattened, empty photo frames, and stuff Yoongi seems to have moved from the rest of the cottage in here; a small three-legged table with legs carved as garish lions faces, a photo in faded sepia of two women sitting in front of a small piano, and another, larger cuckoo clock, painted in red and green. A bed with only an uncovered mattress on the wire frame, covered in more boxes and cases. 

No sign of Yoongi. Deirdre backs out of the room, and turns to face Cullis, who lurks at the top of the stairs. She covers her lips with one finger, and points to the remaining door. 

Their plan is simple; she will go into the room first and subdue him, by any means necessary, until Cullis can be brought forward to use the little packet of powder in his pocket. Once blown in Yoongi’s face, either blinked into his eyes or breathed or touched to his lips, he won’t be a problem, and they can bundle him down to the kitchen where both of the stone men can wrap him up tightly and carry him off to the van. 

Deirdre, with both her Cullises, has been staying in a converted gatehouse for the past few months, on the other side of Follie. The house it is at the gate of has fallen into disuse, ivy climbing up the walls to pull the bricks down one by one, but the gatehouse itself was cheap to rent and even cheaper to furnish, considering she only intends to stay here for as long as it takes to exact Claudia’s revenge. All she wants is to go back to Paris, and back to the warmth of the bed, and her arms. 

This is all in aid of it. She has to believe that. 

It’s half an hour away if they speed, nestled down a dent in the land where several streams accumulate into a pretty, if remote, lake. No, once she has Yoongi in the truck, she’s in the clear. 

She breathes in. 

Yoongi begins to run. He wants to wake up. Spanner and Beanbag are roaring, growling, trying to wake themselves up -

She can hear the damn cats start to scream - 

He is in danger, he knows that, he knows that, his cats and his woods have told him - 

There is no more time. Deirdre barrels into the bedroom, her arms out to hit the door open, and it bounces off the wall with the sound of ripping paper, and she hears Cullis thundering after her, all need for secrecy gone now. Blood thumps in her ears. 

One of the cats launches itself at her. The ginger one, the larger of the two, with the shorter hair and the claws, embeds itself in her upper thigh and clings on, tearing the denim of her jeans; with a curse, Deirdre smacks it off her, feeling a momentary pang of anger at herself as the cat hits the floor. She likes cats. 

Yoongi is sitting up in his bed, his eyes round and his mouth open with pure fright, pushing his back against the headboard as though that will help him get away. He has pulled the sheets almost up to his chin. “Deirdre? Deirdre? What the-”

Deirdre doesn’t say anything, but she feels wild, manic on the fear of what she’s doing, the knowledge that she will regret this, the worry that she’s got in over her head - all for Claudia, and what has Claudia done for her? No time to think. The cats both run for her ankles, but she leaps for the bed and grabs Yoongi, one hand at the base of his throat, kneeling on the middle of his chest. “Don’t talk,” she breathes. 

Yoongi makes a strangled ghrk noise, and freezes completely still, and she can feel him swallowing under where her fingers rest. His throat is terribly delicate. 

“Cullis,” she calls, not looking away from Yoongi, from the wickedness she knows must be behind the terror somewhere, “Come here.”

Silently, he does. Yoongi’s mouth opens and she sees the question forming around his lips, and she sees the moment he decides to keep calm, and she can almost watch the thoughts bouncing around his mind; the cats, the panic, the betrayal. Why are you doing this? 

“You know why,” she tells him, and leans a little more of her weight into her knee, into the pressure. He’s wearing a pyjama top with a reindeer on, and loose flannel bottoms. “Cullis. Come here.”

At last the clay man comes forward, the plastic bag in his unfurled hand, and Deirdre takes it from him, lifting her hand from Yoongi’s trachea. “Deirdre,” he chokes, and she can hear the bruising forming around the word, “What’s going on, I don’t -”

“You’re a witch,” she tells him, tipping the dust into her palm, “And you know who hurt Claudia Badeuax, and I intend to get it out of you. I’ve seen your summonsing. I know your familiars.”

That is a shot in the dark, but both of the cats are howling now, and Deirdre can see the shape of the target in the shadows. 

Yoongi looks genuinely terrified, and genuinely confused, too. Deirdre would be almost impressed, if she wasn’t keeping Claudia’s advice to the front of her mind; witches aren’t people, they are less than people, and witches are not capable of mortal depth of feeling - 

She blows the dust. She can’t think anymore. 

Spanner hits the latch on the window with the end of his nose. It hurts, but the window swings open, because it is old and almost-broken and he has taken it unawares. Beanbag lurks behind him, hissing. They leap out into the night, from the windowsill to the tree that hangs near the cottage, and from there to the ground. 

Yoongi has been frozen where he lies, his body stiff as a board, although his eyes still flicker back and forth, wet and red-rimmed, as though he cannot believe this is really happening to him. His hands are by his sides. He hadn’t even tried to fight. 

“Cullis,” Deirdre calls to the one downstairs, who lumbers up and begins the laborious job of tying Yoongi’s wrists behind his back and his ankles together, tight enough that no magical trickery will break them. Yoongi, at the sight of the two clay men, looks even more at sea, as though all this is somehow new to him -

But no. She can’t feel bad for him. The dust worked, the dust paralysed him, and that means he must be a witch. To a mortal it’s merely an irritating powder with a bad taste to it. 

Cullis lifts him like a ragdoll. He hangs, limp, from the stone arms, in pyjamas too big for him and mismatched fluffy socks. His eyes flit all around the room as though they will land on something that can help him, but Deirdre is in control again. She knows nothing will. 

Jeongguk is almost asleep, his mind pleasantly full of nonsense, when he hears the most almighty screeching right outside his window, like two feral badgers trying to murder one another. He has a brief fight with his bedsheets before rolling off the bed and onto the floor, blind with a blanket wrapped around his head. “What the-”

It takes him a second to stand and get his thoughts in order, but once he has he realises that he knows those sounds. That’s Yoongi’s cats. Sitting on his windowsill, although he hasn’t a clue how they’ve got there, they both have paws pressed to the glass, and both of them are screaming. 

He lets them in. “Hey, hey,” he coos, “No, now, why’ve you escaped? It’s so late, guys, you should be back at-”

Spanner, the ginger one, puts his paw on Jeongguk’s knee. Beanbag has curled up in a little black dot and is screaming disconsolately. 

And Jeongguk knows suddenly and without warning that the cats have come with a message. Yoongi is in danger - Yoongi is in danger, and they think he can fix it. 

Suddenly he is very awake, and very aware. He lifts Beanbag up and sets her on his shoulder, and holds one arm out for Spanner. “Okay, guys,” he says, “So I’ll go get him. No problem.” 

Chapter Text

From @IzzyWay4o3: Hey guys! As most of you know, Yoongi Min’s Far Away From Pleasant Lands hits shelves just over a week from now in our NA and EU markets! For readers in other areas, please check Bloomsbury Int. for more info. 

[Attached: A photo of the cover of a book. The title, Far Away From Pleasant Lands, is written in small, lower-case serif along the top of the picture, and the author, Yoongi Min, is written along the bottom. The image is of a stylized canyon with the sun setting behind it, a picture mostly done in purples and blacks, red and orange peeking in at the corners. A female silhouette stands to the foreground. She looks lost.]

• A tweet from Isobel Way (@IzzyWay403) dated 3rd April 2017. There are three replies, fourteen retweets, and three hundred and seventy four likes. 

Jeongguk writes the note in a hurry, and doesn’t even bother to dress; he just stuffs a pair of trousers, a shirt, and some underwear into a string bag and ties that to his ankle. Naked, bent over the kitchen table with the ink of the pen bleeding through the paper onto the tablecloth beneath, he can feel both of the cats rubbing against his ankles, tickling the backs of his knees, reminding him he has something far more important to be doing. 

He transforms on the first step out of the house, leaping out the threshold, one foot human on the bristly doormat, the paws that land on the ground firmly wolf, the cats beside him all the while. You won’t be able to keep up with me, he warns them in a mixture of growls and projected thought - he knows they can understand him as much as any other animal might, in this form. Wolves are pack animals, and pack is not just wolf. 

They know. He knows they know. 

For the second time in under twenty-four hours, Jeongguk streaks like a bolt of lightning through the dewy fields, headed directly for Yoongi. His paws sink into the mud, and his jaws are wide open, collecting the wet on the tips of the grass, and his eyes see all and don’t miss a blink. There’s too much at stake to miss anything. 

He doesn’t know what’s wrong, but already he can smell clay, and a woman’s perfume, and fear stinking up the air. And dirt tracks. 

So Yoongi really is in trouble, then. 

Hey, 

Not much time. Cats woke me up around 3am. Yoongi is in trouble and I have to help him. Not much time at all. I will be back soon. If I don’t come back within the day u can start looking for me. 24hr. Don’t worry. I have to help Yoongi. Something to do w/ Deirdre and France and Amandi.

Love you, JK

“Fucking typical,” Jimin flings the note back down on the kitchen table, where it sticks to a spilt puddle of orange juice, the letters starting to bleed black into one another. “Little bastard. Little shit. Little fucking idiot-”

“Jimin,” Taehyung catches him about the waist, wrapping long arms there and resting his hands on Jimin’s hips. “Jimin, stop, calm down-”

“Calm down?” Jimin turns, fiery and full of flame, and Taehyung catches his wrist before he can point at anything that might go up too easy. 

“Jimin has a point,” Seokjin says. He’s in his pyjama bottoms and nothing else, so they can all see the twisting lightning scar clambering up his ribcage. “Fuck. What are we doing?” 

“Going after the brat, I suppose,” Namjoon has his head resting in his hands, “Or do we trust him? Back within the day? God. He’s holding me to the fucking - the promise.”

Taehyung looks up at the clock. It’s just past noon. “He left at three, so we’ve already shaved nine hours off the total. I think we should trust him - trust him,” he says, when Hoseok and Namjoon both look like they might interrupt, “But not sit on our arses doing nothing. I’m gonna go find something to see the future in, and I suggest someone rings Amandi. Jimin?” Despite Taehyung’s calm words, he doesn’t look anywhere near peaceful. His eyes flash bright and terrible. 

Jimin is still heaving ferocious breaths, pulling against Taehyung’s grasp like a wild animal. “I want to do the killing,” he says through gritted teeth, “I want to get the throat, Taehyung, I want to drink the blood, I want to feel it on my mouth-” 

“And you will,” Taehyung murmurs, heaving both of them towards the door, the blood stirring inside himself, the circle calling them with tempting gifts of ripe deer and throbbing hearts. “You will, darling, you will-”

Namjoon is having a silent, but very in-depth, breakdown. Taehyung remembers Namjoon’s promise just as well as he knows Jeongguk will Hoseok and Seokjin begin to quietly argue about what they should do next. 

Taehyung trusts Jeongguk, but more than that, he remembers the woman that took Jimin, all those years ago in France. 

(And that must be what this is. Deirdre and France and Amandi. If the storm isn’t Yoongi, if the oncoming disaster isn’t his being a hunter, then it must be her and her connection to the Red Circle somehow - and he remembers her. He does.) 

He remembers the hunters and the bloodlust and the pain. This is not a fight he will enter into lightly; when he does, he intends to win. It might not be tonight. He won’t let her curse be broken - on hot days, in summer, he can feel it under his fingernails thrumming in her scar tissue, connecting them across oceans: as long as I live you will waste away until all you are is your black heart. Your hateful heart. He had been proud at the time that he had so many words in him; his whole vision had been seeped in red, burning hate, and all he could taste in the air was the iron enough to make a nail Jimin soaked the concrete floor with. 

Jeongguk has gone chasing hunters, and hunters have gone chasing Yoongi, and Taehyung and Jimin know what nobody else does - 

Whether she meant to or not, the hunter has found a witch. But not the right one. No, not the right one at all. 

He is dreaming, now.

In his dream, Yoongi is beside the stone circle, alone. No lion, no panther; not even a cat, and certainly no people, just himself and the timeless rocks and the mushrooms pale blue and green, and the lichen and the ancient soil in the cycle, dying and eating and being eaten and born again. He doesn’t know what time it is, what time he’s in, where he is, and he feels like it doesn’t matter - the circle is always was always will always be the circle, regardless of what actions are taken around it. 

The woods are talking to him. Trees talk incessantly, of course, gossiping in the rustle of their leaves, whispering between twigs, but this is more; they ask him have you worked out who you are yet? 

“I’m Yoongi,” he says to the sky. In his dream, it is black and starless and heavy, like a blanket, like a fist. The world ends at the treeline. 

Do you know about the magic? 

Does he know about the magic?

The things he has been trying to keep at bay are crowding at the edge of his mind, begging to get a look-in. The wild ferocity of the dance. The odd behaviour Namjoon and Jeongguk displayed, his first few weeks in town - the unnatural speed at which his foot healed - the strange way Jimin spoke, about magic and higher powers - the noiseless way Jeongguk moves - the shapes he sees in the woods on rainy nights, the silhouettes, the screaming, the howls from creatures that shouldn’t be native to this country at all. He hardly knows where to look first. He doesn’t want to. But, yes, he knows about the magic. He doesn’t know when he first knew. Maybe he always has, in the back of his mind, in the place that doesn’t want to know.

“My head hurts,” he says, leaning his forehead against the cool rock. His wrists and ankles ache. “Am I in bed?”

My dearest, says something, the wood, the rock, the earth itself, I would wish you nothing but the best, but you are beyond my reach, now. Other forces want you. I am not the only thing in this world with influence.

“Never,” Yoongi murmurs. “I am yours…”

You are hers, now. Keep on your guard, my darling boy, and come back to me. Come back to me. Your guard is coming - be strong. Something caresses his hair, hot wind, ghostly fingers pressing against his temples, and Yoongi is soothed, and Yoongi is peaceful, 

And Yoongi is frightened and awake and in a dark world that smells of used socks and looks like blackness, and the wood wants him to know about the magic, but he doesn’t. 

“You’re awake, then,” a familiar voice murmurs, and a small hand covers his wrists as he begins to jerk and shake, “Don’t do that, you’re blindfolded. Cullis is driving. It’s worn off quicker than it should,” and Deirdre sounds a lot more dispassionate than she ever has, and her skin is cold, and her fingernails are cut short and ragged. Her fingertip plays with something coarse and scratchy against the skin of Yoongi’s wrist; rope, presumably, if he’s blindfolded. His heart is in his mouth. He can barely think, barely breathe through the haze of horror that has descended, but through that fear there is clarity - as though he has sailed through frightened and landed on unemotional observation.

What does he remember?

Sleeping, a dream about the woods, his cats sharing his sleeping moments, but they were alert; they acted differently to how they had, any other time they had occupied Yoongi’s dreams. They’d been trying to tell him something. An intruder at our border! And the magic of the forest, the burning, warm sensation Yoongi has been used to feeling in his chest, was gone; in its place he had felt something like alarm, spreading through his shoulders down his elbows to his fingertips, trying to get out and do something. 

An intruder. Deirdre. Yoongi, sleeping in his bed.

He shudders against the hard metal he has been rested upon. There’s something in his mouth preventing him talking - a wadded ball of cloth that tastes of musty age and old washing-up. Mmmmh, he tries to scream, mmm-

“Now, don’t do that,” Deirdre puts her hand on his chin, tips his head back, stretches his throat against his skin until his skull hits a hard metal bar and he can’t make noise over the strain, “We’re still moving and nobody will hear you and all you’ll do is annoy Cullis.”

And then there’s a noise like a great beast, audible even over the engine of the car. A low, primal growl, like it’s the only noise the creature is capable of making.

“Keep driving,” Deirdre says, and they do. 

After a minute or two she lets his head fall back against his chest and this time Yoongi goes limply, aware that he’s got less than no power, and more afraid of the unknown than he’s ever been in his life. His hands hurt. His back hurts. His shoulders hurt. 

He thinks he’s sitting on a metal seat, or on the floor resting against a metal seat, one of the side-facing ones in those old-fashioned farm trucks. Deirdre’s hand came from a little above him, and the sharp metal pain seems to stretch a length across his skin; the edge of the seat, spanning down to the floor. He dares not move in case the thing that growled decides to make good on its threat, and he knows that this analysis, this compartmentalisation, is only putting off a dawning panic. 

He can’t panic. He’s been - 

Call it what it is. Kidnapped. 

Deirdre’s hand comes down again and pinches against the pulse point in his neck; after a full-bodied flinch, Yoongi stays still and quiet, although he knows his breathing is shallow, and he can feel his head spinning. 

“Your heart is beating far too fast,” she comments. Her fingernail digs in for a brief second. “Cullis, the-”

There’s a wrinkly plastic noise, and then two popping sounds as Deirdre opens the airtight seal on something. She sighs. “I didn’t want to use any more of this.”

Whoever Cullis is does not respond. The truck speeds up; Yoongi can hear the engine straining and shuddering under him. 

“You do it, Cullis,” Deirdre says, and her voice comes from a little further away. She sounds annoyed, and tired, and very much like she doesn’t want to be there. Detached, in fact. Removed.

The cloth is taken out of Yoongi’s mouth and instantly he clamps down on his lips, the dry, chapped skin sticking together, his tongue desperately trying to wet the roof of his mouth after so long separated. He can feel some presence coming near him, not Deirdre; something else. There’s the sound of plastic crinkling. 

“Yoongi, hold still,” Deirdre tells him, and her hand comes again to his neck, spreading across the base and holding the muscle there firmly. “Cullis-”

And a huge finger plants itself on Yoongi’s lips, something dusty and dry on the tip. Yoongi closes his lips even tighter, and he can feel the speed with which his heart thrums against Deirdre’s hand. Even though he knows he’s panicking, it’s one thing to know and one thing to feel it, like an outsider, like someone with no other stake in the situation. He can feel how difficult it is to take each breath. The finger rests on his bottom lip and with it, the substance, and Yoongi has never felt more powerless. 

A massive hand with the same span and the same cold, strange texture descends upon Yoongi’s face, and he fights down the urge to open his mouth and scream. He wonders what colour the fabric around his eyes is; he wonders if Deirdre will be able to see him crying. The huge fingers rest on his cheeks, his temples, and stay as a weight for a few moments before clamping on his nose - 

When I was small, I hated medicine. “Sana,” my mother would call, in a way I knew meant I was in need of a dose, “Come down here!” And of course I would, but I would hold my mouth shut tight, in fear of the awful stuff. It tasted like sickness. I hated it. 

“Oh, yeah?” He shuffled closer to me in the back seat, and I felt his warmth. His hands were drifting towards my shirt, but I was reminiscing. 

“One of her boyfriends said he had a trick,” I told him, as he kissed my neck, “His name was Derek and he was nice enough. He bought me a Barbie dreamhouse. He held my nose until I had to breathe, and then she poured the medicine down my throat-”

Coughing, spluttering, crying as much from the jab to his throat as the panic, the cold finger enters Yoongi’s mouth and presses down on his tongue, rough and uncaring. The stuff is powder that soaks into the saliva of his cheeks, and tastes of completely nothing - maybe a little salt, maybe a little medical. “Mmf-”

“Okay, cool,” Deirdre’s voice is coming from very far away, and again the cloth is bundled back into Yoongi’s mouth, keeping the substance inside, making sure he swallows. “See you on the other side, Yoongi.”

He wants to protest. He wants nothing more to protest. 

He can’t.

Yoongi’s home stinks of fear. Jeongguk paws through it, uncaring of the mud he’s tracking through the carpet with his heavy paws, unwilling to shift for even a moment - his eyes in human form are sharper than those of a regular mortal person, from what he remembers of the experience, but not half so alert as his vision on all fours, and he isn’t willing to sacrifice that. The door is hanging open, and the window from where the cats leapt out, and the bedsheets are unmade, still warm, a dent in the middle pillow. 

The storm brewing pours through the windows, filling the cottage with the cold smell of air before rain. He ignores it.

The two cats stand behind him, twisting around his hind legs, anxiety pouring off the stiff fur on their spines. Jeongguk leaps onto the bed, and smells who he dreaded he would - Deirdre, for sure, and foreign clay he doesn’t recognise from any earth around here, not even the quarry an hour away and up towards Derry. He growls. 

The cats are streaking already towards the door and towards the parking-place tucked into one of the gates, and Jeongguk follows, running faster than any human could. There are tyre-marks, and the smell of blood and chemicals and rope burn. It heads down the road, and when he raises his nose he thinks he catches a scent of petrol across the road, the potholed tarmac. 

This reminds him of hunting people, something he hasn’t done - or even remembered - in years upon years. 

He remembers the taste of blood on the air, and for a moment it's so strong that Jeongguk has to shake his head, his vision blurring, to make sure it's definitely just a memory and not something he's catching on the wind. Yoongi's bleeding, Yoongi's hurt, he's sure of that, but he doesn't think whoever nabbed him was interested in making sure he died before the night was over; this stinks of kidnapping, of a wider plot, and again Jeongguk thinks about Amandi's dream, and about Madeline's dire warnings from this morning. Maybe something really bad is going on, and none of them have bothered to recognise it by now.

He runs down the road. The tarmac hurts the pads of his toes, but he doesn't slow, and nor does he try and stop the weight of his body from flowing down his legs to his feet; he can hear the cats behind him, keeping up as best they can, bounding after him, following the petrol.

Following Deirdre.

He is so angry he fears he won't be able to think, when he finds Yoongi. He's scared of the ferality. Sometimes, at nights, he dreams that he's back there, and the streets and the stinking rubbish tips and the awful, awful stench is all that lives in his nose, and comfort and the shape of a human is a long memory away from what he is.

He won't go back to that. Already he has travelled miles. Wolves run faster than even dogs do. NO time to think about that.

Through Follie and out the other side, he has to stop to let both of the cats climb onto his back and wrap their claws in his long auburn fur, as unpleasant as it is for him and as undignified it must be for them. Something in Jeongguk tells him, however, that if he tries to leave either of them behind it won't be any better for him.

They hang on. They are silent.

Jeongguk continues the hunt.

He is alone, now.

Yoongi wakes up again tied to a chair in a kitchen, made all the more sinister for how faded and merry it is. There are no windows, but there is a cheerful floral-print wallpaper, and kitchen cabinets painted a very particular colour of seventies-pink, and a kettle just about to go off the boil; his chair has been pulled up to a table which is sturdy and dark, although when he looks down he sees the legs of the table are scarred deeply, criss-cross scratches that dig deep and desperate into the oak wood.

The rope is burning against the open wounds on his wrists now. He turns his body until he can see his arms, and when he does he winces; there are open cuts weeping a clear sort of ooze, something that stings and runs into his palms and drips off his fingertips, like plasma that hasn't had a chance to do its job. He's tied with similar strength, ankle to chair leg on both sides, and his shoulders are pressed so firmly against the back of the chair that he doubts he'll have much wriggle room.

Although the place is decorated nicely, it stinks of damp and mould, and Yoongi knows without question that they're someplace underground. In the background, under the sound of the kettle sliding down from the boil, he can hear water dripping off a metal pipe into a puddle. He wrenches his wrists against the rope, and then bites down hard on a scream.

Oddly enough, he doesn't feel as panicked, as disorientated as he was when they were moving, and he feels far less threatened - although he remembers seeing something online about a secondary location, or something or other like that. More dangerous? Less?

Either way, the distinct absence of any hulking, looming creatures is doing wonders for his heart rate.

He doesn't want to think about his dream.

He doesn't want to think about the dance, or the woods, or the fact that the cats have been living in his head for the past few weeks. He doesn't want to think about Jeongguk sitting at his table, sharing a cup of old-fashioned hot chocolate, both of them joking around, while all the time Yoongi is trying not to think about it.

But he saw Jeongguk in the woods. And the -

The atmosphere -

He had felt it in the house on the hill, and he had felt it during the dance. It was as though time stretched, like a rubber band about to split, and bounced back on him; moments lasted for centuries, and he watched his skin prickle with sweat in slow motion, and Jimin kissed Taehyung and all the lights in the room burned the bright orange of sexual fulfilment as he dipped him (who is he? who is him?) and as the dance wound down, the room panting, the room heaving, Yoongi had felt spent. Wrung-out. Like he had been used. He had stumbled back home and been shocked that the whole thing lasted less than a week; he had slept for thirteen hours and awoken in the afternoon, still sticky, filmy, odd, having experienced something much more than a few hours of dancing in a hall stinking of floor polish.

Call it what it is. Call it what it is.

Magic, for want of a better word.

Yoongi feels strange, but not scared, and somehow that lack of fear is making it all even worse. The kettle has just boiled, and that means someone is coming back in -

And then she does.

"I thought we'd given you too much, then," Deirdre Collins steps through a door that must be behind him, her boots squeaking on the rough, moulded linoleum floor. She's dressed in loose jeans and a t-shirt, a warm jacket wrapped around her, and Yoongi's attention is pulled to how cold he is; he can feel the goosebumps prickling up his inner arms, rubbing against his pyjama top. He's still in his pyjamas. She looks like she’s trying very hard to be unaffected. "Good to see you awake. I'm sure you know what's going on here."

Yoongi debates responses for a few seconds, while Deirdre opens a cupboard above the sink and pulls down a cup. "Not really," he finally settles upon, "Should I?"

"I was surprised Jeongguk invited me to the dance, but I thought he might not know how deep it goes. You, I was surprised by. The whole thing seemed to be for that - and the summoning last night?" Deirdre pours water into her mug, and drops a teabag there too, rattling a spoon against the ceramic, "Didn't you think you'd be watched?"

Yoongi frowns. Maybe he is still dreaming. "I don't know what you're-"

"Jimin Park," Deirdre says, like she's placing an ace on the table, watching his face. "Hah. Mean something to you?"

Jimin? In Yoongi's mind, Jimin is a whirl of moments, not a character in his own right. He smells of something masculine and woody, and in Yoongi's memory he is tactile, a hand reaching, a smile touching, a man who likes to move with the rhythm of the scene he inhabits. "I mean - I know him, I guess, but not very well-"

She makes a disgusted face. "So you're in the habit of cursing anyone you feel like, then? It wasn't even protection?"

Yoongi blinks. He tugs, again, on the rope. "Deirdre, I think you've mistaken-"

"I don't," there is nothing of the polite woodcutter left in her when she leans over the table, snarling, hands empty, face full of the promise of hurt later, "Don't demean me like that, you witch. I've chased you across half of fucking England to here, and if it takes your death to save her, I'll do it. You were there with Jimin. I know you were. You did it. How many of you are there? Who are you? Vampires? Witches? Sidhe? Werewolves? Tell me, and I'll make it quick. You won't even feel it. It's more than you deserve."

“I - what-” Yoongi struggles to gain control of himself for a minute, and he can feel the hysteria rising, “Werewolves? Can you hear yourself right now? Are you - is this what this is? Where’s the - the hidden cameras, the - you can’t be serious-”

“Cullis can come in here and do this instead of me,” Deirdre says, and reaches up and into Yoongi’s hair and balls her hand into a tight fist until he has to shout or jerk away, “And Cullis won’t be nice about it. Stop pretending. Tell me if it was you or not. Why don’t you stay in the house with the others? Who did you summon last night? Why can’t I find the middle of the woods?”

“I-”

She pulls harder, and Yoongi can hear his hair ripping from the roots, and he can feel it deep in his scalp, and tears are springing unbidden to his eyes and pouring down his cheeks, wet and hot and uncalled for. 

“Just think about it,” she says, still cold. She withdraws, and drops the lump of Yoongi’s dark hair on the kitchen table, and he feels another hot wetness on his head; has she torn his scalp? Can that happen? She takes the tea. He feels lost. 

“Just think about it,” she says again, and then: “The Cullises won’t wait as long as I will.”

The door closing behind her sounds like the casket swinging shut, but Yoongi doesn’t know what the rules are anymore, and he’s flying blind and mapless in a world where it feels like everyone else had a chance to study the rulebook. 

His wrists hurt. He wishes he knew who Claudia was. He wishes he knew what Jimin had done. 

He wishes Deirdre had left that cup of tea. 

He can hear someone shouting at someone else above him, their voice reedy and quiet through the stone ceiling. Distressed as he is, despite himself Yoongi is relieved that nobody more frightening than Deirdre has yet been down to see him; he hadn't been able to see whoever was in the truck alongside her, but the memory of those oppressive hands, the terrifying silence, the taste of cold clay, is still fresh enough for him that he finds himself completely fine with the threats from Deirdre, so long as he doesn't have to come into close contact with anyone else she might have with her.

He wishes he wasn't in his pyjamas. He can smell the sleep on his shoulders and around his collar, the sort of warm, comfortable slept-in scent he associates with being cosy in bed. Crucially, not tied to a chair in an anonymous basement.

He wishes he was in bed.

He isn't tired, and yet -

Yoongi is in the woods. He is dressed, now, his favourite pair of comfy bleached denim jeans and a warm flannel shirt that doesn't belong to him, but his feet are bare and the skin exposed feels flayed open, as though every touch of the woody air is a brand to him. He shivers.

Spanner is beside him, too, the rangy lion with his mane and his puffed tail, brown instead of the orange that Yoongi always thought lions would be. Tan. He's growling, but when he looks up at Yoongi he looks content. "Hey, honey," Yoongi says softly, bending to run his hands through the tangled mane, "Hey, baby, where's Beanbag? Where is she?"

The cat - the lion - lowers his forehead to touch Yoongi's, and Yoongi suddenly knows that Beanbag is with Jeongguk. Spanner gives him an image clear as day: Beanbag, the sleek black panther, and a huge wolf, brown and glossy, one that Yoongi knows is familiar to him by another name, but one that is clear to him - him dreaming, him awake and asleep - as Jeongguk. How could he have been fooled into thinking anything otherwise?

Beanbag and Jeongguk are running. "My dearest," Yoongi calls, not knowing which one he wants to hail, happy when both of them turn at the call, "Are you coming to find me?"

Jeongguk looks surprised. Yoongi doesn't know why this should be. He is beautiful, his fur long, his eyes bright and human, his paws firm against the ground. "Yoongi-"

And when Yoongi wakes up again, he finds the kitchen occupied once more.

A man is holding his neck, his finger and thumb wrapped around it as though Yoongi's whole throat is no broader than a slender wrist. He swallows, and chokes, and then tries not to scream. He smells of clay.

"Oh, let him go, Cullis." Deirdre is sitting on the worktop, a huge notebook on her lap, paging through the fragile leaves; Yoongi can see the ink bleeding through, and sketches, and grey on Deirdre's fingers where she's brushed against pencil drawings. Her fingers are shaking, just a little.

Cullis, the big man, steps away and Yoongi sees how featureless he is. He has eyes, and a nose, and a chin, and he is big, but that's where the identifying pieces of him stop; Yoongi is sure that were he a few feet shorter and a little less broad, he would have a hard time plucking him out of a line-up.

Yoongi makes no sound. His whole body aches.

And yet -

Under the smell of clay, and his own fearful sweat, and Deirdre's bitter tea, there is something like leafmould. Something cool and comforting and forested. He looks down, and sees - although his ankles are still lashed to the chair-legs - that the soles of his feet have been brushed in damp black soil.

He knows Jeongguk is coming to get him. He knows it.

He tries to relax, and finds it easier than it was the first time he awoke. This nightmare will end. Jeongguk will find him. The magic will make sure he’s fine. 

“It’s about what happened in France,” Taehyung says. He’s tied Jimin to their bed with a chain around one ankle, so Jimin is free to create and destroy all he likes up there, without cracking completely and doing something which can’t be undone. Taehyung sits at the kitchen island in his robe, a cup of hot chocolate tucked into his trembling hands, while around him the rest of the coven - all humans, apart from Seokjin - pace, or do something restless, or, in Hoseok’s case, cook an incredible amount of scrambled eggs and garlic mushrooms for only five people. 

“France,” Namjoon repeats. He makes no effort to hide the significant glance he shares with Seokjin. “Are we bringing this up now, Tae?”

“That’s what this is about,” Taehyung says stubbornly. He had cut open one of the human livers he and Jimin keep frozen, and it had told him all he needed to know; Deirdre is in some way related to Claudia, and this is just another of the spinning hydra heads, the beast that won’t die no matter how many times Taehyung slices at it. “The hunters - the Red Circle-”

“Tae,” Hoseok moves away from the aga, putting his warm hand on Taehyung’s shoulder, “You really don’t have to talk about it. We don’t care.”

“Well, Claudia obviously does, or she wouldn’t have sent anyone to get me,” Taehyung says. He sips. “Get us.”

“Claudia,” Namjoon says tentatively, “Claudia who? Tae, you-”

“I’m getting there,” he snaps, and closes his eyes, inhaling, exhaling, trying his hardest to steel himself into calm. He doesn’t like getting frustrated. He always feels as though Claudia doesn’t deserve his emotions, and she doesn’t deserve the amount of care both he and Jimin have for her, even after all this time. But then Jimin has the scar to prove it, and Taehyung has the habits, and it isn’t as though the circles in Ireland appealed to them more than any others, before she chased them out of Europe. 

“Did any of you spend any time in France?” He begins, knowing the answer will be no. 

Namjoon shakes his head. Taehyung knows his backstory intimately - how he tagged along with Madeline and their unnamed, unspoken-of mentor, before said mentor died and the pair of them bought coven houses in the places they felt most at home in. 

Seokjin is quiet about his roots, but he speaks Korean fluently, and although his accent at the minute is a neutral sort of clipped British thing, when Taehyung first met him there was the round of America in his voice. He’s a bitten wolf, that much he’s open about, but who bit him and how long ago is something Taehyung thinks he will never understand. He’s been living here almost as long as Namjoon has, and his comfort in the coven is a sprawling, warm thing, secure in his life. There’s that scar on his abdomen, of course; a fractal lightning-flash, like a tree root, like a mathematical problem, detailed in raised silvery flesh over his skin, pinching across his muscles and up across his ribs. 

Hoseok is a born wolf, and English. He knew Daniel before Daniel joined Madeline’s coven, and flirted briefly with joining it himself, and then went to Europe and did - something - and returned, and went to Ireland, and retreated into himself. 

So none of them have met Claudia, and none of them have been hunted in France. 

“Her name is Claudia Badeaux,” Taehyung says, “And I think she’s an offshoot of the Red Circle, but I never was sure.”

That name, at least, resonates. Namjoon blinks, Seokjin whines and covers his snout with one heavy paw, and Hoseok drops his spoon with a clatter into the pan. 

Taehyung smiles, but there’s no humour in it. “We’ve always thought the Red Circle tipped her off, but for all we know it was one of the witches who did it, or one of the vampires. The coven we tried to join in Moscow was mostly wolves, but they didn’t like blood and bones, so we moved to Stockholm - vampires, you know. Vampires and witches. We didn’t tell them about the blood and bone, but they found out anyway, and at the same time the Red Circle flooded into the city, so I guess it could have been either of them, but we ran - they got me briefly, but you know how Jimin gets - we ran to Berlin. Stayed there a year or two.”

The kitchen is warm, but Taehyung doesn’t feel it. In the winter the cold sets into his bones, finding cracks in the marrow and seeping into him, but that’s just one of the sacrifices he agreed to make when he flowered into his Calling. 

He sighs. “When we reached Paris, Claudia was waiting for us. We got to Calais, and we were going to run, we were going to set up in London - the Red Circle doesn’t care much about the islands outside Europe - but she grabbed Jiminie when I was… I was… I went to the vending machine to get some chocolate, and I came back and she’d grabbed him. It was dumb luck I caught where he’d gone - thank fuck - he pulled off one of his fingernails and left the blood on the seats in the waiting room, and I was able to pick it up and track him with that, y’know?”

Nobody speaks. Taehyung can smell the blood up his nose, spilled without meaning, like a sin. Calais smelt of iron and needles and sweat, and bodies. He had been almost overwhelmed - 

Almost. 

But he is Taehyung Kim. 

“So I tracked him,” Taehyung says, which sounds like a very short thing to do, instead of the hours - days he had spent in the middle of the hunt, running from Calais through the empty countryside of Normandy, his feet torn to ribbons, his form warping and wasting as he tried and failed to keep a grip on the human shape he prides himself on. He felt the black around his wrists. He felt the blood and bone and the heartbeats of farmers a hundred miles away, and he could hear the worms talking to one another from their homes under the soil. He tasted the blood, and he did not swallow for six days, keeping it against his teeth, letting the red stain the enamel and worm into his body, a bit of Jimin in him. “So I tracked him,” Taehyung repeats, and lets the experience drop out of his mind, “And I found him after a while.”

Six days, to be precise, but he doesn’t want to stress the point. 

Hoseok moves back to his eggs and mushrooms, but Taehyung can feel his anxiety pouring off him in waves. 

He continues; he has to. 

Deirdre is not in the room the next time Cullis comes down to see him, but now there are two of them. One of them holds up a page - a feminine, delicate hand has written tell me where the witches are in European cursive, in a thick, purplish ink. The other comes over to Yoongi and, without ceremony, grabs the back of his chair and pulls it until he’s balancing on the back two legs, his head wobbling above the hard concrete floor, hidden under the layer of bubbled linoleum. The jerk makes his wrists and ankles twitch, and he cries out, and then Cullis lets him drop another few inches and he screams again. 

The one holding the page waves it at him. 

“I don’t know,” Yoongi says desperately, “You know I don’t know - you know-”

Taehyung can smell it, still. “She had the thing covered in vampire blood.” Namjoon hisses in empathetic pain, but he continues. “And she had Jimin spiked on the thing, and if he hadn’t been blood and bone he would have been dead by the time I got to him. As it is he was almost dead anyway, just from the exposure, and he certainly wasn’t in any form to get away on his own.”

Cullis takes his hand back and slaps Yoongi, very hard, across the left cheek. Yoongi is too shocked to feel the pain of it, at first, but he knows it’s made an impact, and he can immediately feel the ache spreading through the struck point.

“Witches,” he says dumbly, his voice strained, “Witches can’t-”

“She didn’t see me,” Taehyung says. “I know she didn’t see me, or she would have run. I wasn’t very in shape, at that point, you might have guessed.”

Yoongi doesn’t know where Deirdre has gone, but he knows she’s too far away to find him. 

The Cullis with the page turns it around, and there’s a sentence written on that side too, in the same purplish ink, in the same pretty hand. Hunters have decided that everything which hurts the innocent must die, and witches are bad, and if you don’t know where the other witches are you must die.

Although it hurts, Yoongi can’t stop the trembling. 

“Jimin saw me, though,” Taehyung says, and thinks of Jimin restrained upstairs, pulling the heads off chicken corpses to try and see something in the future, “But he couldn’t do anything. I didn’t need him to. I just needed to get near enough to touch her. I knew what I wanted to do.”

“I didn’t even know witches existed until a second ago,” Yoongi says and he’s humouring them just to stop the vast approaching dread from getting to him, because the forest had said it couldn’t reach him here, “I swear-”

“I cursed her,” Taehyung says, “And then I took Jiminie, and we ran.”

Yoongi wants to run. He wants to go home, and write another bad book, and be in New York where there isn’t enough room to fit anything sinister, where nobody can find him, where everything is too jaded for real magic. But the Cullis with the page shakes it in his face again, insistently, and he realises that once he’s come this far, he can never go back, no matter how fervently he wishes he could. 

Chapter Text

I ask only that you consider my request for more information. The curse laid upon me has blackened my heart and left me too weak to hunt the witch in question for myself; until I am able to find an apprentice, some younger, fitter person to do my work, I will suffer and wilt. When I look at the rot in my soul I see how much time the witch has afforded me, and it is not much. I know you are pulled tight, but so am I. The centre of hunting in Paris, and therefore in France, is at risk. I found these two escaping via Calais, and I cannot promise that they do not represent some larger, hidden group. 

We know the circles are on the move again. I have a trusted friend in London who tells me the Irish circles are particularly active, from Tara to the meanest village green, and I have no desire to see the expulsion of power this will create. The witches were at Calais, heading for Dover or for Rosslare, and I do not wish to see wherever they land. My heart grows ever heavier, ever darker with the thick rot. Bless yourselves that you have not succumbed to it. 

This will not cause issues among the peace you have created with English covens, with European covens. The witch that cursed me was of blood and bone, and the mate that I had captured was of similar ilk. The witches harbour no love for these arts, and will not complain. I have enclosed the name of several of your people I think would benefit from being sent to me, to help me. In return, I will help you. They are: Daisy McKinnon, Deirdre Collins, Desiree Khan, Johann Baker. 

Yours in all faith, 

Claudia Badeaux 

• A letter sent by Claudia Badeaux, in English, to the Cardiff University Red Circle collective. Several of the names she requested were individuals not involved in the Red Circle, nor involved in the wider supernatural world. Her request was considered and eventually offered to all she requested, framed as an educational exchange to Paris. Two accepted, but the favoured candidate Johann Baker fell down three flights of stairs in the university library the day after his acceptance and fractured his tibia. Deirdre Collins, the remaining candidate, flew from Cardiff to Paris three weeks later, and a month after her arrival dropped out of her course in Modern Languages and Literature, of which she had completed three of the four years.

Yoongi had been left alone, then. 

Deirdre came down and shooed the Cullises out, but not before the cut on Yoongi’s lip and the bruise on his cheek had swollen, and not before he’d been thoroughly scared out of his wits. The two stone men had looked mutinous, but complied with Deirdre’s flapping hands, and now Yoongi can hear them pacing around upstairs, a twin beat heavy on the concrete, crossing the room and meeting in the middle. Deirdre, for her part, looks troubled. “You know Jimin,” she says, “And I saw him doing magic. I saw you in the middle of it. Aren’t you the one who cursed Claudia?”

“I’ve never met anyone called Claudia,” Yoongi says tightly. His face hurts, and his back is strained from the amount of time he’s spent with it stretched unnaturally across the chair. “I told you.” He’s passed through shock and abandoned fear several hours ago, and now the overwhelming feeling is just boredom, waiting for something new and horrible to happen to him, or for someone to realise he’s gone. 

(He fights down the dread in his stomach that tells him his best friends are in America, and he’s been ignoring them recently. Who would notice? How long would it take?)

“Paris, then,” she says, and she sounds a little desperate, “You were in Paris. Maybe there was a coven of them. Maybe this coven before they moved.”

“Ireland is the only European country I’ve been to,” Yoongi says. 

Deirdre looks almost like she’s about to cry, and the expression doesn’t suit the hard rockiness of her face. “I’ve spent two months here,” she says, “I’ve spent two months here - two years in Paris - I trained-” 

“To kill Jimin,” Yoongi says. He knows Deirdre is delusional, he’s resigned himself to that, but she isn’t the one tied to a basement chair; he’s decided to indulge the depth of her constructed world until he can get around it when he’s safe. When he’s safe. He will be safe again. This is not the end of it all.

Deirdre frowns. “Jimin’s - Jimin’s mate is the one that cursed Claudia. She’s been given the black rot, the black heart, don’t you know what that means? I - I was so sure you were him. The coven, then. Who is his mate? Who did he leave Calais with?”

And immediately, Yoongi’s mind flutters to Taehyung, smiling beatifically at Jimin across the dance floor, and the smell of summer wine, and the sound of time slowing down and heat rising and fog clearing on a cold night, and the pair of them dancing as though nobody else could possibly exist in the world they made for themselves. “I don’t know,” he says, with a heavy lie in his throat, “I don’t know them. I barely know Jeongguk. I’ve met him once.”

Deirdre makes a frustrated sound. “You summoned something the night I - the night. I saw it in the grass. It came from the woods. What did you summon?”

“What?” Yoongi is genuinely bewildered at that, more than anything else; the Jimin stuff he can see making sense in her head, but the only visitor he had that night was Jeongguk and his hot chocolate. “I didn’t summon anything-”

“Alright, then, but something visited you.”

“Only Jeongguk,” Yoongi sticks his chin out defiantly. He isn’t scared of Deirdre, not truly, not now he’s seen the broken confusion behind her eyes - so long as she stays here, and doesn’t send either of those cold men down, he feels as safe as he ever will be here. “Only Jeongguk, I told you.”

“So you summoned a wolf, then,” Deirdre waves her hand and her face smooths out, “Well, that at least makes sense.” 

Yoongi frowns at her. “Just Jeongguk. No wolves.”  

For some reason that confuses her even more. Yoongi wishes someone would take the time to explain to him what’s going on. 

Jeongguk can smell Yoongi below him. The cats are wailing on his back, and he kneels to let them down, whereupon they immediately streak away from him and towards the pump-house. Jeongguk himself is trying, trying very hard, to get a hold on himself to change and do something, but everything below his brain is telling him to stay in this form and go in and go mad. He can’t do that. He doesn’t want Yoongi to know about that. 

The cats have gone.

Jeongguk needs to calm down. 

The scent of Yoongi has led him to a small field set on a steep little hill, more of a bump in the landscape than anything else, miles across the other side of Follie. He could have been here sooner but for the other smells wrapped around Yoongi’s, keeping him hidden, keeping him tangled in a strange mixture of magic and clay and petroleum and sweet sawdust. He doesn’t know how he’s meant to feel about any of that, really, apart from a wary fear from Deirdre, and the little thing in the back of his mind kicking himself for not noticing sooner, for not clocking on to how obvious it should have been that it was Deirdre, not Yoongi, the whole village should have been wary of. He should have seen it. Her and those men. Things. 

The hill itself is scraggly, a few whin bushes clinging for dear life against the harsh horizontal grass, the ground flecked with mud where sheep have trodden into it. One sheep looks at Jeongguk now as though it hasn't decided yet whether to run, and where to run to; he's a ram, the head of a miserable flock of three old ewes, the lambs from this spring long grown up and taken into bigger fields to be the focus. Nothing is the focus here. Jeongguk doesn't even know who owns the place, but he knows it's nobody in the village - undoubtedly this field is one of many little corners of the world identical to it, shaved and sliced and diced a hundred little ways as the land separated and then forgotten, not useful enough to be fought over. In a way, though, that means more than anything else. Jeongguk can hear early-morning birds fighting in the dense treeline down at the base of the hill, along the little stream, and his wolfish eyes find no difficulty chasing the red squirrels up and down their branches, where they're fighting over the last of the October acorns, the hard, twisted November scraps. There is a kingfisher, flitting almost faster than the eye can see across the grass, and a little hole in the side of the hill that Jeongguk knows houses at least one den of foxes, the kits all curled up against their mother's tail until night falls again.

He sits and lets the nature wash over him, embrace him completely with its coming and going, until he thinks he's calm enough to transform without ripping his lips open on the teeth that remain, or something just as equally stupid and painful.

The squirrels are watching him.

Naked in the dawnlight field he reaches down to his wet ankle, where the cloth bag has stayed securely tied. The rope rubbed the soft fur of his paw off when he was a wolf, and the white line of raw-rubbed skin remains in his human form; he brushes his damp thumb against it, and lets the dew sink in until he heals. He dresses mechanically, bathed in the sound of birdsong.

So Deirdre and those two clay men are in the pump-house. They have something under the pump-house. It isn't too hard to guess.

He pads towards it. He didn't bring socks with him, along with the shirt and the loose jeans; no point at all, not when he wants the freedom to feel through his soles, the beats of the world telling him just as much as his eyes and ears tend to do.

"Come on, Yoongi," he mumbles, "I'm coming now - I'm sorry-" He wishes the cats had stayed with him. One of them, even, would have sufficed. Just enough to remind him he's not doing this alone, and that it isn't his fault.

The pump-house has been abandoned a very long time ago, the door still propped up on its hinges only by a length of twine tying it shut to a nail on the opposing frame. They're a pretty common sight all over Follie and the surrounds, a relic of the times before running water made it to the village; there's a pump-house for every section of land, connected to a well nearby, or a running river.

Jeongguk unhooks the twine from the door and sees just what he expected; there's a rusty hand pump set up on propped red bricks, and a wooden bucket knocked on its side, ivy growing around the settings in the handle. Back before the water service came to the houses, it would have been a common sight to see the strongest one of the family down at their pump-house at around this time in the morning, hauling pails of water to and from the home. Jeongguk inhales, and the rich, lush smell of wet earth fills his nostrils.

Of course, pump-houses would usually be connected to old wells, set by brick or poured concrete into a space below the house.

The trapdoor is propped open, and inside the dark well Jeongguk can hear cats wailing, and the low, inhuman grunt of something unable to vocalise any further. He shudders.

It wouldn't take much to convert and expand the space below a pump-house, he thinks, to distract himself from the swelling blackness. (His eyes in human form are a little sharper than others, but nowhere near as good as his canine pupils - but he can't risk finding Yoongi when he's wolfish. He doesn't want to freak him out any more than Deirdre - the hunter - already has.)

He can hear two heartbeats. Yoongi and Deirdre.

He isn't dead, then.

Jeongguk exhales, and then in one fluid motion he drops down through the open trapdoor, his hands on either side of the beams to support him before he lets go and enters freefall, trusting his legs to catch him however far he has to go. 

As it turns out, the well stops only a few feet under the trapdoor, the ceiling just high enough for Jeongguk to stand without stooping. It smells of dank must, and as he closes his eyes and inhales he thinks that this place is far older than Deirdre's life in Follie, and far less malicious. It smells mostly of leafmould and the damp that attracts snails, and a more recent smell, clay and a feminine perfume and the stark, obvious stink of someone's fear.

Not someone. Yoongi's fear. Jeongguk wonders how much Deirdre has told him, and how much Yoongi has believed. Maybe none. Maybe they'll still be okay when he comes out.

Spanner and Beanbag are two sets of winking green eyes, lighting up nothing but their own faces, twisting around one another and waiting on Jeongguk a little down the long corridor. "I'm coming," he breathes, wiping dirt from his palms onto his jeans, and following.

He wishes he could hear something, but all he can smell is clay.

Yoongi's head is spinning, and he can't breathe.

"Let him go!" Deirdre screams, her face ruddy red with anger, her small body vibrating, her hands bunched into violent fists, shock apparent above all else. Even in her boots, the thick rubber soles, both Cullises easily tower over her, and Yoongi can see how little power she has, really, without the confidence she was wearing like a mask.

At least, he thinks fuzzily, at least he's not tied to the chair anymore. Sure he's being held off the ground by his neck, but his wrists aren't screaming in pain - just the rest of him.

The Cullis that isn't holding Yoongi shakes his head, and points.

"He doesn't know anything," Deirdre says, and Yoongi makes the only noise he can right now, a burbling affirmation; he hopes she takes it for the fervent agreement it is. He wants to be back in the city. "I'm not killing him because we got the wrong witch. He isn't even - look, look, he isn't even fucking magic. Cullis. Set him down."

Cullis reluctantly drops him, and Yoongi sprawls on the floor, his hands instantly on his throat, massaging it up and down. He's coughing. He can feel the wet, but not the heat, of tears on his cheeks.

He wants someone to take five minutes and explain everything to him, but since when has he got what he wants?

And he feels weird.

He feels odd. He feels like he used to in the few minutes before he would throw up, back before he had a handle on his anxiety, back when he was in high school and he didn't want to go and eat lunch in the cafeteria with the rest of the student body. At times like that, and at times like now, he would feel as though he was looking at himself from above, like everything that thought for him was floating at a spot a few inches from his skull. He can see the sweat down his spine in this basement kitchen, the wet through his t-shirt; he can see the red rings around his wrists and ankles; he can see the blue-black bruising on his cheek and his throat.

He can feel it, but only in a distracted way. He feels so strange.

He is in the woods, and he is with Spanner and Beanbag. The lion and the panther are both growling, close to him as they can get, staring at something in the black beyond the trees, and he knows without knowing that they are aiming it at the Cullises.

And Jeongguk is here. "Hello," Yoongi murmurs. In the woods he isn't wearing his bloody, sweaty pyjamas; he's in a long, airy white thing, with long sleeves and a long hem, and his feet are bare. He feels refreshed.

Jeongguk is naked, but in the same way that this is how Yoongi should be, that is how he should be too, and so Yoongi doesn't even think to feel uncomfortable about it. "Yoongi," he says, confused, looking about him, "Where am I? Where are you? Where is this?"

"The woods," Yoongi says. It all seems so obvious to him, now. "You must be near me. I think I'm hurt."

"Hurt-" Jeongguk rushes forward until they're wrapped in the circle of the two cats together, his hands on Yoongi's forearms, "Where? I'm coming to find you. What is this?"

"I don't know at all," Yoongi says. He can feel his throat aching. He wonders what his body is doing; he wonders what Deirdre is doing, with the two huge clay men. He leans a little further into the heat of Jeongguk's skin. "I wish you'd hurry up. Are you magic?"

Jeongguk hesitates, Yoongi can feel it in his hitching breath, although he can't see his face. "Do you want to know? Really?"

"I think I must be magic, too," Yoongi confesses. His lips move over the bare skin above Jeongguk's pectoral, below his collarbone, the smooth, unscarred expanse. "I wish I'd known about it before tonight. I think I almost died, there now."

"Yoongi, you can’t be m-"

Yoongi does not know what possesses him to do it, but he stands back in the circle of grass and Jeongguk's arms, still holding his elbows, and stands on the top of his toes until their faces are level. Jeongguk in this form still has the little bite in the middle of his bottom lip, the place where he chews on it when he's worried. "Come and find me," he says, "You're not too far away," and he kisses him.

It is a strange kiss, because Yoongi feels floating while he does it, feels strange, feels oddly undone. He is not himself. He kisses like a charm, and Jeongguk tilts his face obediently to meet his mouth, and the heat compared to the cold of the grass and the air is electric. Not electric. Burning. Like a bonfire, like the burning orange on a dark December light, like the ash crumbling down onto the brown feathered grass. The kiss lasts for an hour and a second and an eternity all at the same time.

"Find me," Yoongi says, stepping back. Jeongguk was once close to him, but now he is far away in the woods, looking lost and scared and dark. "Please, Jeongguk."

His cats are gone, but Yoongi is in the woods, and he has all the power.

He knows that, now.

He knows that now.

"We can still find the witch that hurt Claudia," Deirdre screams, the phrase wet with spittle that flies across the room, "Cullis! I demand you leave me alone! Claudia would not want us distracted by this-"

Yoongi shuffles towards the wall until his shoulders hit it, content for now to watch the drama play out centred on someone other than him.

This turn of events happened quickly, so quickly in fact that Yoongi is only just realising they’ve occurred. Minutes ago, before his little jaunt in the woods of his imagination and nothing else, both Cullises and Deirdre had stormed into the room, the stone men in front of her, Deirdre cursing at them in desperate, heavily-accented French. 

“We need him still, we need him,” she’d been saying, “We need him to tell us about the others, Cullis, this is strategy! Listen to me!” 

One of them, Yoongi couldn't possibly tell which one, had torn the rope from his wrists and ankles as quickly and easily as tearing tissue paper. They can't talk, Yoongi knows that now, but it had been very clear what they were trying to do with him. Yoongi couldn't, or wouldn't, tell Deirdre anything about this Claudia woman, or about Jimin, and so they had been about to throw him out as a useless lead.

And so that led him to dangling by his throat from a sturdy stone grasp, and that had led to the woods -

Jeongguk, in the woods. Even now, his heart thrumming in his chest, more scared than he's ever been in his life, something about remembering the dream - the waking dream, whatever it had been - makes Yoongi just a little calmer, makes him believe even the littlest amount that he might get out of this basement and into the fresh air again.

(Although, if he remembers right, there had been a storm about to hit the west coast of Ireland when he went to bed the night before this one. If he remembers right, and if his timing is correct, they're right in the middle of it.)

"Cullis, I demand you stop," Deirdre says, the anger leeched out of her, a desperate calm in its place. "Claudia made you to help me. She did."

Yoongi looks up at the nearest clay man to him, and although he knows they don't feel or think or know anything, really, he would swear the thing is smirking. He - it - looks smug, the arms folded in front of the chest, a united front with his companion against Deirdre. She really is quite diminutive against them, and for a second Yoongi imagines she has been put in the room to fight with him against the two men - 

But that's stupid. Deirdre is as much his enemy as they both are. She controls the men.

He closes his eyes.

Behind his eyelids he can see the storm. It isn't grey, but white, white like cream spooned and whipped from the jar, white like the whiskers on a cat, white like the underbellies of the soft clouds that roam across the great meadow of the sky. It's on top of them. He knows he's under a hill somewhere, deep in the earth, in a cavern not of Deirdre's making. He knows Jeongguk is near. He can hear his heartbeat, and he can hear the thick, heavy paws of the lion and the panther beside him. A third set of paws, then, behind Jeongguk and within him - Jeongguk has not decided whether to have this fight on two legs or four.

The storm is coming. Yoongi opens his eyes, and sees one Cullis in front of him, and the other blocking Deirdre into the corner of the raggedy kitchen, while she kicks and hits and screams to be let go.

"Fuck off," Yoongi says to the clay face right beside his. It seems the only thing to do, the only thing apart from screaming; this close up and it's obvious that Cullis has been made, not grown; the prints from someone's thumb on his chin, stroking down his cheeks, do for a scruffy five o'clock shadow from a distance, but up close the facade can't hold itself up. Cullis is a thing of clay and wet-fingered creation, monstrous when he becomes the only thing Yoongi can see. "Fuck off," he says again, although he can feel his voice getting higher, "Fuck off-"

Cullis picks him up. Yoongi thrashes, of course he does, he's not an idiot, but he might as well be fighting a brick wall.

"Deirdre!" He shouts, the cuts breaking in his raw skin again, something in him telling him to call for her, "Deirdre-"

"Cullis, no! I forbid you!" Deirdre shouts. The other Cullis is holding her against the wall with one hand to her shoulder, with apparently no effort at all. "This isn't what Claudia wanted!"

Yoongi suspects, as he continues to struggle and kick, that this is exactly what Claudia wanted.

Cullis takes him away into the storm. Yoongi doesn't let that worry him, and he isn't frightened anymore, even as the kitchen fades into another, new set of tunnels away from the direction they entered, even as Cullis pushes open the trapdoor of an old well set into the side of the hill, even as the blood from Yoongi's myriad little bumps and scrapes mingles with the wet clay and soaks it brown - he can't be frightened anymore.

He knows Jeongguk is coming.

With the two cats, Jeongguk stands outside the door to the only room he could find, although the burrowing tunnels under the pump-house had wriggled in all directions, dozens of paths he could have taken - he just followed the smell of clay. He can hear only one heartbeat inside, and it takes a tremendous effort (and Spanner's paw, digging into his foot) to remind him that he doesn't want to frighten Yoongi.

Above all, he doesn't want to scare Yoongi off.

With a noise he knows is more frightening than he wants to be, he wrenches the door open, the flimsy lock no problem for him now he's too angry to control the strength that Namjoon has drilled into him. "Yoongi!" He shouts, and on either side of him he can feel the cats like little wisps of spirit flooding the scene -

"Jeongguk!"

He takes it in within the second, and he's too fucking mad to think about it before he springs for Cullis and Deirdre. "Where is he!" He growls, wet spit on his lips, his hands on Cullis, his claws fighting to emerge through the human flesh, "Give me him!"

The room at the bottom of the pump-house labyrinth is an old seventies kitchen, for all intents and purposes. There's a kettle, and a sink and a draining board with a mug on it, and one of those ironing boards that can be folded out of the wall. There's a table, bare and scarred, and a chair lying on its back, the legs and the bottom of the willow back covered in a thin, pale rub of red blood. Four torn knots of rope lie near it, and it smells of Yoongi. The whole room smells of Yoongi and of fear and of - rain before a storm, and of the woods. The woods near the circle. This place is not something Deirdre created, Jeongguk knows that instinctively, but he has no more time to think. No more time to do anything.

"You're a bloody werewolf, aren't you?" Deirdre writhes against Cullis's hard grip, unnoticed tears falling down her cheeks, the sleeve of her jacket separated from the body with the force of the struggle, "Fucking do something! He's taken Yoongi somewhere!"

That may as well be a magic word, and it isn't as though Jeongguk (and the cats) need any more prodding. He doesn’t stop to think about how much she might know. She’s a hunter, and from his - currently warped - perspective, that means she knows everything. Everything she needs, and everything he needs, to have permission to kill him. 

Beside him, Beanbag sinks her teeth in. 

Jeongguk's memory of ripping Cullis apart is patchy, even while he's living it. He knows that if Yoongi had been in the room, he wouldn't have done it, but as compromised as he is he doesn't stop to consider the strength of Deirdre's stomach; he comes to with a mouthful of clay and an arm in his grasp, his bare feet sticky, his shirt destroyed, Cullis armless on both sides and making a wordless howl as Spanner pierces the stone eyes out with his paws.

Deirdre is ripping her jacket from her body, left only in a streaky flannel shirt and jeans, her boots hopelessly muddy and clay-laden. She's shaking, Jeongguk can hear it - every impact her teeth make against one another resonates through his skull.

With effort, he pulls his muzzle back behind his skin.

He'd left them twenty-four hours before they could come and get him, and he knows they'll stick to that. Jeongguk isn't sure what happened to Taehyung and Jimin before they came to Ireland, and god knows they've never been very loose-lipped about it themselves, but he does know that Yoongi is his, and the coven will respect that. Yoongi is his to try and find, and his responsibility if it all comes toppling down.

He should have woken Namjoon. Fuck, but he should have woken Namjoon.

"Jeongguk," Deirdre hisses, "How the fuck are you here?"

Cullis is on the floor. He can't see anymore, and the cats on his torso are stronger than they look, stronger than their little bodies would imply. If Jeongguk squints, and tries very hard, he imagines he can see the outlines of them above them, the lion and the panther and the cats dwelling in the woods that should not be able to support them. If he strains his ears, Spanner's growling becomes a roar. The clay man doesn't stand a chance.

"You said it yourself," Jeongguk struggles to his feet, the wolf firmly tucked within him, "Werewolf. The cats woke me up. You were stupid, not thinking about them. Is this about the witches?"

"This is about Jimin," Deirdre says.

Jeongguk is only half-expecting that, and he can't help the flinch. "Jimin?"

"So he is one of you. I thought so, but Yoongi was so quiet-" Deirdre cuts herself off. An ugly, livid bruise is crawling down her neck and into her shoulder, where it's covered by her shirt. "He wouldn't say. I was going to let him go, I swear. But the Cullises-"

"Where's he gone?" Jeongguk can smell him somewhere close, but the scent is fading. He isn't here now.

Deirdre clutches her ribs. If Jeongguk cared enough, he could discern whether they're broken or bruised, but he doesn't at the moment, and he suspects he won't for quite some time. The cats are still destroying what is now no more than a pile of wet clay sticking to the lino floor. "Where's he gone, Deirdre?"

"The other Cullis took him," she gestures to the other door in the room, closed, painted the same seventies orange as the one Jeongguk entered through, "I guess he heard you - heard you coming. I don't know. I'm sorry. Claudia told me-"

"The others will be here soon," Jeongguk tells her roughly, clambering to his feet, wincing as his jaw resets into proper form, "You can explain it all to them. I'd start thinking of an angle to take, if I was you." He doesn't wait for her reply. He doesn’t even know if the others will be coming - he did tell them to wait a day, and they usually listen to him. He doesn't want to argue and he doesn't want to fight and he doesn't want to look cool; he just wants to find Yoongi before something more is done to him.

He leaves Deirdre in the corner, on the floor, beside the dead thing that never really lived. He doesn't have to look to know the cats are following him.

He wonders if Yoongi will appear to him again - he wonders where they'll be.

The storm is electric in his nose.

The clouds above are really gathering now, turning that pregnant navy-blue colour that signals a downpour. Yoongi is shivering violently and uncontrollably, and although he doesn't want to, he finds himself huddling into the little crook Cullis has made between his elbow and shoulder, just for the warmth. He doesn't know where he is, but every time Cullis's shifting pace shows him the edge of the treeline, he can't help but relax a little bit. The woods are near. He can't be that far from home.

He still feels strange, and stranger still as the wet clay running from Cullis's shoulders dries on his skin and then wets itself again, a neverending cycle that does nothing but make him shiver.

No matter how hard and heavy the clouds get, the storm won't break.

Yoongi doesn't know how he knows, but the certainty rests inside his mind anyway; the storm has broken fifty-odd miles away, on the next mountain over, on a patch of scrubby forest without a circle to her name. That strikes him as uncommonly unfair.

He also knows that Cullis is taking him somewhere out of the way. He is doing this so he can kill Yoongi without much ceremony, and get back to the task for which he had been made - finding Jimin, finding Taehyung, and killing them both with as much ceremony as possible. Yoongi is the small fry.

"Don't take me to the woods," he says, his voice croaky, his throat aching with the bruises massaged into it over the past day and night, "I hate - please don't take me into the woods."

A man made of potter's clay does not grasp the finer points of sarcasm, and he definitely doesn't understand manipulation. Immediately his track turns away from the muddy river and towards the line of trees, and this far away from Follie's forestry the old wood is practically bursting the banks of the new. Yoongi can see the regimental line of trees planted on purpose, only three or four trunks deep along the line, with the ancient oaks and the sprawling sycamores visible behind them, beckoning Cullis in, calling to Yoongi with pleasant, hollow whispers.

The wind is cold and dry. Not a single cloud sheds a tear for him.

Cullis dives into the woods, and Yoongi dives with him.

"It hasn't been twenty-four hours yet."

Namjoon is pacing. Taehyung has once more vanished, and the ABBA is playing loud and violent through the roof; he can only imagine what both of them are doing to one another, in an attempt to trust Jeongguk. "I know," he says. His teeth are gritted. "We can't."

"Joon, this isn't, like, a coven issue - this involves someone from the outside," Seokjin urges, leaning over the kitchen island. His hair is awry. "Jeongguk-"

"You know why we have to trust him," Namjoon counters. He wishes it wasn't so, but Jeongguk's been undermined in the past, and Namjoon promised. He promised. They sat in the circle, both of them, Jeongguk's nose twitching and his eyes running and his fur flat and matted, and Namjoon swearing as solemnly as he did to Jimin and Taehyung that this time will be different, while Hoseok and Seokjin flanked him just in case . This one will not be like the last one.

"It's about trust," he says again, lamely. "Jeongguk-"

"Hunters, Joon!"

"Jeongguk-"

Hoseok left twenty minutes ago, but he hasn't departed the area near the house; he's pacing a circle around the house in wolf form, growling at every shadow that emerges from the woods, at the stormclouds building across the sky and yet refusing to burst. The house is full of manic energy.

But Namjoon promised Jeongguk. He promised everyone else, and he promised Jeongguk, and he refuses to break that.

"I can't," he says. He folds his arms. "I trust Jeongguk."

The storm gets ever closer.

Yoongi will be heading to the woods. Jeongguk doesn't know how he knows that, or why he knows that, but as he runs through the second lot of twisting black corridors, he knows it as strongly as he's known anything. The cats are behind and in front of him like a guard. Deirdre has been left in the kitchen with the dead lump of clay.

Jeongguk's mind is running hot and feverish, now. This warren wasn't made by Deirdre; it smells far older than that. What lived down here, and why did they do it? He can feel something unalike any magic he's ever seen before, but then Jeongguk hasn't had much experience with proper magic - his time in Dublin he was far too out of it to know, and here he's only seen one sort, albeit the most powerful.

In front of him, Beanbag's shape is becoming ever more debatable, the closer they get to the surface again. She's ebbing and flowing, swelling and sinking, like the ocean tides.

He can feel the storm. It's buzzing under his fingernails.

This twisting path has no visible branches either, but Jeongguk doubts the hill is as simple as an entryway and an exit; he gets the feeling the paths have just shown him where he needs to go, instead of the truth to them. Maybe he'll come back and explore. But for now, as he feels the soft, rotting wood of an old field trapdoor above him, he just feels the overwhelming joy at being able to emerge into the air again much faster than he feels Cullis will. Stone men, especially stone men carrying another man in their arms, do not run fast.

Jeongguk is a werewolf, though, and he does.

It still isn't raining. The storm still hasn't broken.

Out in the air he stands still beside the trapdoor, his nose up, the hairs on his arms all rising in unison. The cats have no such qualms and have already run streaking towards the treeline but Jeongguk gets the feeling - the weirdest feeling - that he needs to find Yoongi. He knows the cats are attuned to him like compass-points, but Jeongguk needs to be the one to do it.

Luckily, the smell of earthy wet blood is strong here. On the grass, still damp, not dried brown and hard yet, Yoongi's blood has been splattered without care. Jeongguk feels it tickling his ankles.

That's really all the motivation he needs to run again. Yoongi's heading towards the trees, gradually, and then with a sharp turn that takes Jeongguk off guard. But the blood doesn't lie to him. It can't.

He follows.

Yoongi has lost track of directions, of sky and land and cloud and thunder, and muzzily he thinks he must be in shock, or hurt far worse than he had thought. (He will later find out that it's a mixture of an overdose of the magical paralysis powder and physical exhaustion, although for now all he has to go on is his spinning head and the pointy, nagging pains all over his body.)

The one thing he's sure of is his relation to the circle. For some reason, Cullis is heading obligingly into the woods, although Yoongi is certain his manipulation hadn't been that cunning; all the same, with a single-minded determination that would frighten Yoongi if he wasn't so drained, Cullis is heading deeper into the woods. They're in the old forest now, the proper old forest, with no sign of human touch, and the mushrooms are starting to peek out from behind the mossy blankets on the roots.

Yoongi can picture the place in his head.

A clearing in the old woods, a few hundred feet away from the circle. It isn't an official clearing, really. It's just a place where the tree branches were too thick to support any seedlings, hundreds of years ago, and now the trees are mature and spreading no seeds land there to sprout. It's brackish, mossy, coated in puffball mushrooms and twigs spread across from shed birds nesting over the decades. The rot seeps into the soil, and new life grows out of it, and there are worms in the ground chewing on old bones that have been there almost as long as the circle has. Yoongi knows it intimately. His bare skin has touched the boughs. His wet hands have felt the earth.

He knows they're close to it. Once they're there, it'll end.

(What will end? Please, tell me. He feels as though he's in two minds, and only one of them is in full possession of the facts, and is flatly refusing to tell the other any information at all.)

Cullis is rough, and with every step Yoongi's bruises bump against the wet, slick skin. Although the storm hasn't yet broken, his whole face, his whole body, is damp with perspiration, and water in the air that has found his skin a cold place to land on. The only things in focus are the trees.

When they reach the clearing, Yoongi knows Cullis has to stop, and as though he's being piloted by some external controller, he does - his whole body jerks suddenly, as though frozen, and with a startled grunt he looks down at Yoongi and lets him spill from his grip into the mud.

As soon as Yoongi's knees hit the forest floor he's alive. It feels like how he imagines an electric shock might be. It feels like the storm has rattled through him - he's a conduit for something much, much bigger than either him or Cullis.

He feels awoken. The question of whether magic is real or not isn't relevant - it isn't the right question, and he knows that now. It's far too shallow. He is in the forest with some cheap witchcraft, something made out of fright and corruption and fear of the unknown, and he is far more than a match for it. All he needs is the storm, and if the forest is on his side, then the weather must be, too.

It all makes sense.

He looks up, and the storm breaks, and the heavens open above him, and on top of him, and all around him.

The rain plasters Jeongguk's hair to his forehead, and he knows he can't transform like this; his brown wolf fur is thick and long and shaggy, and when it gets wet all it does is weigh him down. The water smells fresh, the clouds carried over the sea, and although he's quickly soaking and his shirt is sticking to his skin and his jeans are uncomfortable to run in, he feels all the better for the storm having cracked. It feels like a fresh start. Another chance.

He dives into the woods as soon as there's a break in the hedge, and then he's running. Beside him are the cats, flickering between sizes as though they can't quite muster the strength to stay in one or the other.

"Just another hour, I promise," Namjoon says softly. The coven have gathered themselves into the kitchen, although only Namjoon of the wolves is in his human shape, and both Jimin and Taehyung are pale and terrifying, two bulbous, cream-coloured creatures in clothes that don't fit them, smelling of decay and growth again. There's the sound of something squirming. "I swore to Jeongguk. I promised - he trusts me."

None of them reply.

“I won’t be Domhnall,” Namjoon says, quiet, “I won’t do that to him.”

And still none of them reply.

Jeongguk is running. He can hear something, but it sounds perfectly natural, like rain falling on leaves, like rocks slowly splitting over time, like trees cracking the ground their roots split above them.

Yoongi turns his face up to the clouds, smiling, as the storm rages down on Cullis. The rain is warm around him, but he can see exactly where the heat stops, a few inches away from the perimeter of his skin. It feels like a shower of soft kisses from the sky, nothing that could hurt him, nothing that could harm him.

He cannot say the same of Cullis.

Clay that has been baked but not glazed or painted will not last long when it's wetted. Magic performed incorrectly, Yoongi knows for a fact (although how he knows he isn't sure) will make a substance even more temporary, even more ready to shatter at provocation, than it already is, and although a body made of heavy carved clay will not shatter when a normal mortal tries to hit it, a body made of heavy carved clay will not survive long when soaked in the cold, unforgiving rain that came originally from the western coast and hasn't forgotten the biting waves it was drawn from.

Several hours of rain happen in a minute or two. Yoongi lies on the ground, nestled among the mushrooms and the leaves and the piles of twigs, and watches Cullis move toward him with an animal growl on his stone lips, his arms reaching and reaching -

But even as they stretch the rain worries away at his fingers until his wrists are stumps, and every step he takes finds his feet stuck in the clay quagmire of his own legs, melting and dripping and vanishing. The steps become sucking, painful noises. His nose falls off. His chin melts into his neck.

Yoongi doesn't even make an attempt to move. He can see the storm, and feel it above him, too, and through him and in him; not an extension of his limbs, exactly, but a shadow. A puppet. He feels as though, if he twitches his finger, a bank of clouds will sweep down from the north and twitch over Ireland, before returning to their point in the sky.

Cullis doesn't get near him. Yoongi knew he wouldn't.

He melts completely when his arms are up to his shoulders and his legs are down to his thighs, and then he sits in the ground, looking shocked and small, until the rain melts the rest of him.

The forest does its work very quickly after that. Clay is just earth and earth is just soil and soil is just the ground, and as Yoongi watches the grey, clogged stuff melts through the bracken as holes open up to meet it. The forest pulls the body in and folds itself around it.

Yoongi digs his fingers under the matted, half-rotted leaves, and he can hear the worms already getting to work, chewing and digesting and making parts of something whole. Deconstruction.

It is at that moment that Jeongguk gets there.

For a moment, longer than a second and shorter than anything else, Jeongguk thinks the woods have eaten Yoongi and replaced him with a body. He's in pyjamas, but his feet are bare and his hair is stuck in clumps with rain and dried sweat, and there are bruises all down one cheek, in a ring around his neck, and all over his arms and his ankles. There's the smell of blood. He's lying on his back, staring up at the sky, his mouth open to catch the rain. "Yoongi-"

The cats have stopped behind him. Very cognisant of them, he thinks, and then he's panicking too much to think that anymore, and instead he's on his knees in front of Yoongi, his hands on Yoongi's other cheek, "Oh my god - are you okay, where are you hurt, where's Cullis-"

Yoongi looks at him as sharp and bright as the sun behind the storm. It's still raining. "Cullis is gone, you know. I thought you'd come for me." His voice is clear, but hoarse, and something in Jeongguk tells him he has about half a minute before Yoongi stops making very much sense at all.

He bundles Yoongi up, his arms and legs arranged as gently as he can, and then lifts him. The cats look normal now, with absolutely no sign that they were anything else at all. They never were. "Of course I came. I - where are you hurt? What can I do?"

"Nothing at all," Yoongi rests his head on Jeongguk's shoulder, ignoring the wet. Maybe he can't feel it; both of them are so thoroughly soaked that it really makes no difference. "Deirdre's still in the well. She wasn't too happy about the whole thing."

"No," Jeongguk is already walking. They're closer to the circle than he had thought they would be, this near the edge of the woods; how did that happen? At least he knows his way home. "No, she wouldn't have been. But Yoongi-"

"At least she thought I knew," Yoongi murmurs, his eyes already shutting, his lashes kissing the skin under his eyes. "That saved some time. I wish you'd told me. The dreams were getting on my nerves."

"Yoongi, wh-"

But he's asleep, as though Jeongguk's arms are the safest, most comfortable resting-place he could have chosen. His breaths puff in soft clouds through the storm, which has broken and is softly drizzling as though there was nothing violent about it in the first place.

Jeongguk looks down for a long minute, and without knowing why he should, presses a kiss to Yoongi's forehead.

Then, flanked by two small housecats, he begins the slow, damp walk home.

Chapter Text

I took her by the hand.  Joshua was away and I didn’t care where he’d gone, but in the meantime I was here with this woman, with this beautiful person in this beautiful place, with only the two of us in the whole world. The wind brushed her hands over my waist. “I want to know your name,” I whispered. Like a prayer. 

She closed her eyes. “I don’t think I need to have one. I don’t think you need to know it.” 

I exhaled. Surrounded by the world in its entirety, there is nowhere else I would rather be, and nobody else I would share this moment with. Even when I thought about Joshua, he felt far away, far more a shade than I usually felt. For the first time in a long time, I was real. 

Her hand stayed in mine, and we watched the sun rise over the mountains. 

• An excerpt from Yoongi Min’s Far Away From Pleasant Lands (Bloomsbury, 2017).

This time, the circle has given them a beautiful brace of rabbits, their fur shimmering with iridescent blue when their feet turn towards the moon, their eyes wide with fright, their ears spiked tall and trembling with the certainty that none of them will survive longer than a few hours. They tumble over one another, their bodies churning like dry, shining liquid, and streak into the woods like a paintstroke across grass - the coven, the wolfish among them, wait the barest moment before they're off after them as well, leaving the two witches beside the circle, one up to his elbows in the chest of the other, the screams painful and echoing through the night.-

Seokjin and Namjoon quickly drop pace to catch the stragglers, and allow Jeongguk and Hoseok to chase on in front, the two faster wolves now free in the front to catch the strongest of the magical rabbits. Jeongguk's hungry. He's slavering. He can feel the wind whipping his eyes, and he knows that if he was in his other shape he wouldn't be able to see now; as it is, his wolf is just happy to be unleashed, to be allowed to run and run and run without anything holding him back.

When he bites down on the slim, snapping neck of the rabbit, the taste of cool, refreshing leaves and sugar streams down his tongue, palatable to both the human and the wolf sides of him. Hoseok has his paw on the spine of his own rabbit, and is happily chewing on the soft, squishy heart.

The last moon run, Jeongguk would have been single-mindedly obsessed with having more of the buttery doe the circle provided; now, all he can think about is whether or not Yoongi would like this.

Yoongi has still not opened his eyes long enough to do anything but drink, eat, and go back to sleep again.

It's only been three days since Jeongguk found him lying in the forest, with no sign of Cullis beside him and no sign of any sort of a fight beyond the marks on Yoongi's own body. Jeongguk had raced back to the house immediately, where he'd found the whole coven about to unleash themselves on the countryside; Jimin and Taehyung had been so wound up that they'd had to leave for almost the full twenty-four hours, and do something in the woods they won't talk about.

Let me at her, Jimin had been snarling, it's not fair, where did you hide her, where is she, let me have her! And Taehyung had held his arm, and his nails had dug deep into flesh, and Jeongguk had got the sense that both of them were only an inch away from snapping, and there was blood all over both their hands.

He has the terrible feeling that they won't let what happened sit. There has been no sign of a settling.

(And of course, Deirdre's gone missing. Jeongguk had led Namjoon and Seokjin back to the well under the pump-house, the warren of tunnels there, and all that had remained in the old kitchen was the pile of destroyed clay limbs and a ripped leather jacket.)

(Jeongguk knows Taehyung is only staying in the country for Jimin, and vice-versa.)

But Yoongi has been tucked into the bed in the spare room in their house, his cats keeping watch on his chest, with absolutely no sign of life beyond the rise and fall of his chest and the slow knitting of his skin over his scabs, and the fading purple of the bruises on his cheeks. Hoseok washed his hair in a pail, and Seokjin and Taehyung have been making thin soups that Yoongi drinks in the few minutes of consciousness he manages, once or twice every day.

Jeongguk's mouth folds around the rest of the rabbit. His stomach feels satisfied, but the rest of him most definitely does not.

Dublin, now. Somewhere near Temple Bar. Near the river. 

A flat. People in and out. Thoughts, in and out.

His name was Richard, he thinks, before he was bitten. Now his name is Richard only half of the time, only when he remembers; the rest of the time he's too out of it to remember that, and he can barely hold on to all of him, like his personality is sand seeping out from between his fingers. Domhnall reminds him of his name, though. Domhnall is responsible for keeping him safe, and Richard will always be grateful to him for that.

Yoongi has been sitting for three days now outside the circle, the trees around him, the cold sun of winter pouring down on his head, warming him from the very tip of him to his toes. On his left, a tan, rangy lion sleeps with his head on Yoongi's knee; on his right, on the watching shift, a sleek black panther sits upright and attentive, her orange eyes blinking through the trees to watch for anything that might get him. Come for him. Yoongi doesn't know.

"Come on, Beanbag," Yoongi murmurs, wrapping his arm around her neck and tugging her down, "Come on and nap, now. Nothing's gonna come for you."

He's wearing what he's become used to in the woods, the same long, white garment the trees dress him in every time he comes here. Although he knows exactly how much time has passed, and he's felt every minute on his skin, it hasn't felt like any longer than it has been. He feels more aware than he's ever been.

But he doesn't want to wake up. He doesn't feel ready for that bit, yet.

Jeongguk has been absent from his dreams since the kiss in the woods that exist in Yoongi's mind. Nobody has arrived for him apart from the cats in all the three days he's sat here, and he can't muster within him the energy to be worried about that. If he sees Jeongguk, he doesn't know what he'll say. Maybe he'll kiss him again. Maybe he'll run away. He doesn't know what he'll do until he'll get to it.

"Wake up, honey," he murmurs to Spanner, who immediately jerks up. Yoongi would be happy to let both of the cats sleep, but they get restless when one of them isn't looking out for him, so he's become used to waking one of them up when the other goes to sleep.

But Yoongi knows he won't be hurt in the circle, or near it. The thing in the forest is no match for something as old as it. The circle is older than the hill it's been built on, and older than the magic it's the source of, and older than any of the things that people would use it to care about, and Yoongi feels comforted with his hands so close to it.

He knows he should probably wake up, but he can't bring himself to know in his waking hours what he's barely allowed himself to believe when he's asleep.

Jeongguk won't stay far away from him, though.

He looks up, and the moon, full, looks back down at him

Taehyung and Jimin have been the people who, apart from Jeongguk, have hovered around the sickroom the most since Yoongi's been brought back. However, the day after the full moon, neither of them are in any fit state to play healer to anybody but each other, and with relief Jeongguk heads to the room with the knowledge nobody else will be. He's the only one awake at noon on their recovery day, and he knows for a fact none of the three senior wolves will be up and making breakfast for another hour or two yet; plenty of time to sit in the chair in the corner, between the window and the bed, and engage in a staring contest with the cats on the coverlet.

The spare room is the only place in the coven house that hasn't been touched by the clutter of family. It's airy, with a huge window taking up most of the outside wall, with full view of the treeline and the mountains far beyond it, in the clouds. The walls are papered, something Jeongguk is sure is a relic from before Namjoon bought the coven house, their pattern faded and garish in alternating pastel roses and tulips. The bed is narrow, but warm, and the small dressing-table beside it has a glass of water sitting ready. Every day Jeongguk replaces it with cold water, just in case Yoongi wakes up when nobody's around him and wants a drink. There's a pair of house slippers at the foot of the bed and a folded dressing gown, one of Taehyung's many fluffy sets, just in case Yoongi gets cold. There's a bowl with some crumbs of wet cat food by the window.

And the wicker chair, which Jeongguk settles into, before he gets to turn to look at the bed. He sighs. His stomach hurts from eating the rabbit too fast last night, and his head hurts from the intensity of the moon; he rubs his eyes, willing the dots inside them to fade so he can begin his watch.

He opens his eyes, refreshed, and finally sees what's wrong.

The lump that should be Yoongi in the bed is a pillow, plumped and propped as though it's a body curled on it's side, and the cats are both gone. The window is open just a little bit, and when Jeongguk presses his face to it, he can see indents in the soil where feet and knees have landed.

Shit.

Cursing, pushing the window open, Jeongguk transforms mid-jump, trusting Yoongi to have ended up somewhere near a stored cache of clothes. The December day is mild, despite the chill in the air, and the dew quickly accumulates and clings to the fur at his hocks and at the end of his tail. The forest contains a little rainstorm of its own creation, as the frost from the treetops melts and rains down onto the ground below. The grass crunches and then slides and slicks, transforming in a second from preserved, twinkling glass to a puddle of mud and churned nature.

Yoongi is only a few hundred feet into the woods, not even having crossed from the forestry to the old wood. Jeongguk makes sure he can be seen as a wolf before he paces away to the nearest buried oilskin of clothes; somehow, he knows the events of the last week have got rid of any need for a secret.

"You can come out," Yoongi calls. His voice sounds exhausted and reedy, the one part from a magical recovery, the other from the bruises still lining his throat, "I've seen you."

Jeongguk doesn't reply until his essentials, at least, are covered by soft cotton tracksuit bottoms. "I know," he says quietly, his voice carrying. Yoongi is sitting on a low stone that was once part of a famine cottage, the rest of the house just rocks strewn around this part of the forestry. His hair is plastered to his face with the melting frost. "Are you okay?"

"Physically, yes," Yoongi turns his hands over and back, and flexes his fingers. Jeongguk stays obligingly far away, hovering by the trunk of a slim tree. "Mentally, I suppose so." Both cats are puddled on his lap, watching Jeongguk with far less wary and more trust than Jeongguk thinks he deserves.

"I was going to tell you, you know," Jeongguk comes a little bit closer, using the cats as a weathervane; they don't move. "I was going to tell you but I figured that - y'know, I figured it wouldn't get spoiled for me by some ancient history."

(This setting - this place - is jogging his memory, although as far as he knows he and Yoongi have never spoken like this in the woods, about this.)

(A dream, perhaps?)

(No matter.)

"All the same you can see how it might have surprised me a bit," Yoongi says, staring blankly at his own knees, making no motion to notice Jeongguk at all, "You know. All the friends I've made since moving across the world are either big fuckoff wolves, big fuckoff witches, or someone who wants to kill the pair of them. Is everyone in Follie in on it apart from me?"

"No," Jeongguk hastens to say. He wishes there'd been something warmer than a t-shirt in the clothes cache; even with the werewolf blood, he's starting to shiver, "No, no, no. We're the only coven in Follie. And Deirdre - Deirdre was a surprise. But we - I was going to tell you. That night. At your house. I almost did."

Yoongi looks up at him, his soft eyes warmer than Jeongguk thought they would be, but tired. Very tired. "It was a shock," he mumbles. "And the cats are  also turning into lions, or something, so that's fun. Is it always like this, or am I just unlucky?"

Jeongguk takes his chance and kneels down inches from Yoongi, his hand out hovering over Yoongi's shoulder. "Uh. Depends how you wanna look at it? You're technically having an adventure, you know. It could be fun."

"No wonder Jimin was so fucking weird," Yoongi smiles, then, and his laugh is visible in the air. He shivers. "God, I'm cold. Are you really a-?"

"A wolf, only some of the time," Jeongguk finishes softly. Yoongi has a look on his face, something glazed and distant that tells Jeongguk he's taking almost none of it in. "Sorry. I am sorry. If you want to leave, that's okay."

Yoongi thinks about it for a worryingly long and silent minute.

(Jeongguk, quietly and carefully, panics.)

"I don't think I do," Yoongi says, "Is that mad? Is that stupid? You're a wolf. There aren't any fucking wolves in Ireland. Should I be panicking more?"

"You will, later," Jeongguk promises. "I did. It was kinda - it was kinda a lot, y'know? But... but I mean. Right now you're probably not allowed to, like, stay for a long time outside in the rain. I mean. I think I'm probably going to get killed a little bit by the others, if they find out you're missing."

Yoongi smiles wryly at him, and reaches one hand to Jeongguk for a help up. The cats leap out of his lap. "Wouldn't want that to happen."

Jeongguk just laughs, relieved beyond what he thought was possible that he's been allowed to keep Yoongi and his friendship.

The walk back to the house is long and arduous, but Jeongguk says nothing. Yoongi's holding his hand with an iron-tight grip, and his legs look a little wobbly, but he looks as though making it on his own is desperately important to him; either side of him, as his usual honour guard, the two cats pace with their heads up and their paws placed, with an air of self-importance around their ears and whiskers.

The cats, in fact, are the only things that don't slip in the mud. Jeongguk is better than Yoongi, but Yoongi can't go too far without tripping, and then gripping harder and walking with double the determination as before.

They're at the open window of the ground-floor bedroom, and Jeongguk is lifting Yoongi through, before Yoongi freezes. "Wait. Fluffy Munchkin is-"

And Jeongguk, suddenly, finds a scarlet blush climbing up his chest and his neck and resting on his cheeks. Yoongi, in his arms, is giggling.

Back to Dublin. The flat smells of takeaway bags that have sat in the bin for too long, and cheap candles burnt to mask the scent.

Richard knows he's special. Domhnall has told him almost as much, and the rest of them assure him, when Domhnall isn't around to say so. Apparently, Richard has lasted far longer than they usually do, whoever they are and whatever they do, and although he doesn't know anything about it, he feels a little thrill of pride all the same. Evie, Edie, and Saoirse are all pretty constant presences in his life, ducking in and out of the old house, never really seeming to sleep. They have a cycle of names they spit and curse in their mouths, and Richard fears the day his name joins the list. Hopefully never.

"I want to go get some stuff from my cottage," Yoongi says. Taehyung is currently replacing the white cloth bandages around his wrists and ankles, and Jeongguk is sitting on the end of his bed, petting Beanbag. "I mean. I assume you guys aren't letting me go home yet."

"No!" Taehyung drops the used bandages in a heap on the floor and glares at him. "What if she had more clay men?"

"There were only two," Yoongi says. He's sure of that.

"Okay, well, what if Deirdre goes back to Claudia and then she comes herself?"

"Then you'll just eat her and the whole thing will be behind us," Jeongguk says, still looking down at Beanbag. Yoongi finds his gaze lingering on the little slope where Jeongguk's neck meets his shoulder, the long curving ramp of skin. "Honestly, Tae, I don't get why you're worrying. Now we know she still wants to kill you, so we'll be ready."

"Amandi warned us last time, and we still almost killed our neighbour," Taehyung says sulkily. He folds the end of the fresh bandage into itself, and then holds his hand out for Yoongi's other wrist.

(Yoongi remembers, quite clearly, the green paste that healed his foot in a night last time, and he's been wondering for the past few hours why Taehyung doesn't just use that. Maybe it's something only Jeongguk can use. Maybe they ran out. He knows nothing about magic, after all.)

"Namjoon says we should lie low," Jeongguk says, looking up. "I think we should. I mean, you can go and get your revenge, but..."

"I already had it," Taehyung says. He still sounds huffy. "That's what this whole thing was about in the first place."

"So you're the witch that cursed her," Yoongi guesses, lifting his right foot out of the covers and placing it in Taehyung's lap so he can switch the bandages there, too. His skin is still tender, but it doesn't hurt anymore to touch; he thinks another day or so and he won't need the bandages at all. "What did you do?"

"I was quite angry, you know," Taehyung says. His fingers are long and delicate and gentle, unpicking the cotton oozy with plasma and yellowish goop, wrapping it backwards around his fingers and then dropping it with the rest. "I don't really remember, but I knew she had Jimin with her and so - well, I think I cursed her heart to be as black and cruel as she was. It's a complicated curse because it's blood magic, you know?"

Yoongi nods, although he doesn't. Jeongguk is smiling at him, and he's trying very hard not to look at him, his stomach doing flips inside. "Sure."

"Well, because of the blood of it, and I put the nails I had from Jimin - iron enough, you know, and the blood from myself. I think my shoes fell off somewhere near Carentan, to be perfectly honest with you. The more blood and the more you care, with bone magic, the stronger it is, and because I was so angry and Jimin was so hurt, I suppose... the curse was strong. It pulls on me sometimes," Taehyung's warm palm rests on the arch of Yoongi's foot, just sitting there. "As long as I am alive, the curse will hurt her, and it will eventually kill her if she doesn't get me first. I suppose that's why she was so urgent to get to you and so to get to me - that was a few years ago, before we came here, and I guess she must be getting close to that time when her heart is pulling at her. I didn't know she was so involved with the Red Circle."

"The Red Circle," Yoongi repeats, looking from Taehyung to Jeongguk. "Should I know what that is?"

Jeongguk, still petting Beanbag, shifts on the bed. "I dunno. It's just... I don't know much about it. They're based in Europe, I think. A group of hunters a bit more aggressive than most - most hunters just want to stop those who are actively, y'know, hurting mortals, but the Red Circle are zealots. They think the whole lot of us are a scourge on the world."

"Great," Yoongi blinks, and tries to slot this into the world as he knows it. "Really?"

Jeongguk smiles at him. It's soft, and gentle, and terribly kind. "They tend not to bother you if you stay out of their way. I haven't seen anyone from the Red Circle since I left Dublin."

And there must be a story, because Taehyung lifts his hand and touches him on the shoulder. "Yeah. Sure. Point is, none of us thought of Claudia - you know, Claudia, the Circle, all the stuff from France - me and Jiminie thought we'd left that all well behind us."

"Wrong time, wrong place," Yoongi frowns, and offers his last set of bandages for switching, "So how did Deirdre decide I was the witch?"

Jeongguk shrugs. Taehyung busies himself with the bandages.

"I mean, all I do is sit in the woods and fail to write a novel," Yoongi continues, and debates mentioning the dreams, but decides against it. Looking at Jeongguk, he can't decide whether or not he remembers the dreams he's shared with Yoongi, but he doesn't want to risk it. He doesn't want to further complicate everything. "She met me, like, three times before she - although she did think I'd been summoning something, the evening before she got me. What was that all about?"

"That... might have been me," Jeongguk says sheepishly. Beanbag leaps out of his lap and in place of the cat, Jeongguk shifts Yoongi's other foot onto his thigh, watching Taehyung work. "Remember? I wasn't exactly in - it would have been stupid for me to go to yours dressed how I arrived. I was... upset."

"Oh," Yoongi remembers the hot cocoa and the windswept, distracted way Jeongguk had arrived at his door. "That makes sense, I guess."

"Blame it all on Jeongguk, that's the way," Taehyung smiles at Yoongi and then stands, hooking the window open. The scent of hot, savoury cooking drifts in from the kitchen beside the spare room, and Yoongi can't hide his smile when both men in the coven immediately twitch towards the smell. "Seokjin is cooking," Taehyung mutters, "Oh my god. I'm so hungry. Breakfast was so long ago."

The clock hanging on the wall places them just after noon. Yoongi jerks his head questioningly at Jeongguk, who covers his smile with his hand and winks.

(And Yoongi feels warm.)

"If you want to go see everyone else, we could," he says, as Taehyung gathers up the bandages, a continual litany of hunger inspiring his monologue. "But if you want me to bring a plate in, I can. Whatever you want."

"Oh, hell," Yoongi shrugs, and tips his feet out over the bed, "I've just been told magic is real. Fuck it. Let's go have lunch."

Yoongi learns later that it is a Sunday.

(On Sundays, he figures out, the coven takes it as an excuse to go a bit mad. This day is close enough to the full moon that it technically counts as a recovery day, which counts even more towards the feast-related madness.)

"Werewolves eat a lot," Jeongguk says almost as an apology, open the kitchen door for Yoongi, "Just - um. Nobody will mind if you, uh. Eat all you want."

There are three dressed and roasted chickens in three deep red pots, and the aromatic scent of mushrooms, onions, and peppers melts into the air around the aga, hovering around several different pots holding potatoes, carrots, parsnips, and crisp snap-green beans. Seokjin is holding a small glass casserole dish with his bare hands, smoke rising where his thumbs cling tight to the glass handles, seeming not to care as he slides it onto the surface of the aga along with the pots of vegetables. It's sprouts, boiled so soft and smooth that their layers are shedding with warm puffs of steam; they've been covered in a thick layer of mashed cranberries and sliced bacon crumbs, and the smell is incredible. Beside Seokjin, wielding a fork and a bowl of chicken stock poured from the inside of the roasting pans, Hoseok is stirring up a pot of thick, dark gravy, flecks of chicken and onion worked through. "Jesus," Yoongi says, as the smells all hit him at once, "Fuck."

Namjoon is reading in the little hanging basket in the lounge, but when he hears Yoongi he falls out of it with a hurried crash and a toss of the book at the couch; Yoongi thinks he recognises the cover, but he hopes he doesn't. "Yoongi! You're down!"

"He wasn't hurt that badly," Jimin says drily from the kitchen island, where he's sitting eating Yorkshire puddings completely plain, ripping the flaky layers of pastry apart with his small, delicate fingers. "Hi, Yoongi. Sorry about the kidnapping."

"Um. It's okay," Yoongi says uncertainly. He stays at the borders of the room, aware of how close to Jeongguk he's floating. "Um. Sorry about... your kidnapping?"

Jimin waves his hand in the air, and then throws a Yorkshire pudding at Jeongguk, who snatches it before it can hit him on the head. "Bygones be bygones and all that. Honestly, I'm just sad you got to have all the fun."

"Um." Yoongi isn't quite sure how to take that, but thankfully, everyone in the room is talking brittle and bright, as though if they pay too much attention to him he'll fall apart.

He's fine with that, to be honest.

"You go sit down, I'll get you sorted," Jeongguk knocks his hip into Yoongi's companionably, and Yoongi wishes he hadn't dreamt those dreams with quite the detail he remembers; the touch makes his cheeks rise pink and flaming, and he scurries towards the kitchen table with both cats at his heels, trying his best to avoid the eye of anyone in the room.

To their credit, the coven is doing their level best to pretend nothing has happened over the last week. Namjoon, after his initial fall into the room, has struck up a loud and very stilted conversation about the weather with Hoseok, and Seokjin is cutting thick, juicy slices from the first of the chickens with beatific peace on his face. Only Jimin has dared to engage Yoongi in conversation, so far.

"Are you almost fixed up, then?" Jimin says, his eyes leisurely flitting over Yoongi's wrists and the fading bruise on his face.

"Almost, I suppose," Yoongi looks up as Jeongguk clatters around him, holding two plates, sliding one in front of Yoongi and the other placed on top of his. "I mean. Yeah, sure. Taehyung's really good at that."

"Pity you can't use any of our healing potions," Jimin says, and his eyes wander from Yoongi's injuries up to his eyes - Jeongguk still isn't paying attention, hanging onto the tail-end of a conversation with Namjoon. Jimin smiles. "You know, since they need magical activation to work."

"No, but I-" Yoongi stops as that hits him, his fork already stabbing into a thick slice of chicken. "Wait-"

Jimin's face is pulled up in a strange, daring smile, as though asking Yoongi to delve deeper. So he knows about Yoongi's foot, then. "Magical activation," Yoongi echoes, and takes a bite. The food tastes wonderful, and he wishes he could appreciate it more before being plunged into something else he hasn't got the energy for. "From the person who applies it, or the person it's applied to? That's cool. I didn't realise you guys did... that."

"The person it's applied to," Jimin says softly, and then twists around and accepts a plate from Hoseok, who smiles pleasantly at Yoongi, making his way around to sit on the other side of the table. "For magic to heal your blood and bones, magic needs to be in your blood and bones in the first place, otherwise nothing would be there to separate us from the other people in this world."

"The other people," Yoongi echoes. Jeongguk, although he knows he hasn't been listening, wipes his arm over the back of Yoongi's chair and rests his hand on his far shoulder. Just being there. "The normal people, right?"

Their conversation goes unlistened to, as the coven plates up and settles down. Taehyung fits into the seat beside Jeongguk, but not before kissing Jimin on the top of the head in passing.

"I wouldn't call them that," Jimin says. He spears a sprout and pops it in his mouth. "The other people, that's what we say. And hey, the division isn't as hard as you'd think. There are people in this room who've crossed from one designation to the other."

At that nugget of information, Yoongi can't help but jerk a little, and Jeongguk looks at him in concern. "Are you okay?"

"Fine, fine," Yoongi smiles at him, and then tries to eat another forkful of roast as normally as he can. "Fine. I promise."

He doesn't look back at Jimin, but he can feel those inhuman eyes on him, like Jimin is willing Yoongi to do something about the knowledge he's been given. To do something about - the knowledge that Jimin presumably has. Yoongi can only guess that this isn't commonly known among these people, or with Jeongguk at least, or he suspects more of a fuss would have been made at the time, but that hasn't happened. He thinks it hasn't happened.

Jimin might be messing with him, anyway. It's not real.

A churning, sick feeling in his stomach tells him he's kidding himself, but with determination Yoongi turns to Seokjin beside him and begins to compliment the chicken like he's never complimented anything before.

Lunch is - despite that -

Uneventful.

Hoseok turns on the car engine with a comforting thrum. "You really don't have to come if you don't want to," he says, for what feels like the millionth time, "But I promise I won't be long-"

"No, no, I said I was gonna," Yoongi's wrestling with his seatbelt on the passenger side, his wrists bandaged and weakened in such a way that he has to really press his thumbs down into the button. "I need some reference books out of the library, and then... I mean, if you don't mind, I wanna go home and get some of my books. I'm assuming Taehyung-"

"He's not gonna let you go home, I'm afraid," Hoseok swivels and begins reversing out of the drive. "I've never seen him so angry," he says, glad Yoongi's brought this up in the car when he doesn't have to make eye contact, "I really thought he was gonna transform."

"Transform," Yoongi echoes. Hoseok glances across at him, but if Yoongi's in discomfort he's doing a good job of hiding it; he just looks thoughtful. "Y'know, he and Jimin aren't saying much about that."

Hoseok wonders if he would have been this relaxed about everything, if he'd been bitten and not born. "Not surprised. Blood and bone witchery is, like, basically the most taboo you can get."

"And that's why Deirdre wanted Jimin."

"I guess."

Hoseok himself hadn't been too happy, the other night. Despite his new feelings springing up on him at the dance, he hadn't had the chance (or the motivation) to investigate them until Namjoon had read Jeongguk's note sitting forlorn on the kitchen table. God, but Hoseok had been angry, far angrier than he had the right to be for all that Yoongi was a stranger to him, and he'd looked into it once Jeongguk had come staggering back plastered in rainwater, Yoongi cradled in his arms. Hoseok had gone alone into the woods, as comfortable in his wolfish form as he is in his human one, and talked to the moon for most of the night and into the morning afterwards, and she'd given him the answer that satisfied him.

"It's all making more sense than it should, to me," Yoongi turns his dark eyes to Hoseok, and smiles, and the stark green bruise stands out all the more on his cheek. "Is that weird?"

He is a gift from me, the moon had said. Call it that.

Hoseok, who worships her more literally than most, has been riding a high ever since. It's all making sense, finally, their strange attraction to this newcomer, the way Hoseok had felt at the dance and all the days after it - Yoongi reminds him of Gwyneth, in a way, as she had been right before it all happened.

"Not weird at all," he says aloud, driving down the hill now, passing the drive into Yoongi's cottage, passing the sign that says Follie is two miles away, "I think that's how everyone feels, like, if they're new to it."

"Did you?"

Hoseok changes gear, and smiles. In the rear mirror, he sees the flash of brown fur; Seokjin is following them to the town limits, as though something is going to happen to them on the drive. "I was born into it. I've never not known. You should ask Seokjin about it, to be honest. But it's always made sense to me, and when... when people I know now, when they first realise what's going on, they always just know."

Yoongi hums. He's looking out the window, but if he's noticed their wolfish tail, he doesn't make a comment. "So Seokjin was bitten?"

"Yeah," Hoseok speeds up when he sees Seokjin heading back towards the house, satisfied they've made a safe journey, "Yeah, he was. He came here long after he'd been integrated, though - he came here when Namjoon had basically just bought the house, but he'd been in packs and covens before."

"Had you?" Yoongi's hand is tracing the bruises down his throat almost absent-mindedly, as though he doesn't know what he's doing. "Been in other covens, I mean. Are there many?"

"We're the only one in this county, maybe this whole province," Hoseok says, slowing down now he's coming to the main street, eyes scanning for a parking space, "But I was in... has anyone mentioned Madeline? Our friend in London? She has a coven, the four of them, and I lived with them for about half a year, I think. I almost joined for good, but I met Namjoon and I guess I was a better fit for him. For here."

"Huh." Yoongi sits back, arms dropped, eyes distant, mulling over the new information, before he realises where he is, "Oh - hey, I'm just gonna go to the library now, if you don't mind. When're you heading back?"

"Half an hour-ish?" Hoseok glances in the bakery window, "I have some things to sort out in there, but Anna is pretty good about letting me have - y'know, family time. I might have to come back out, but I'll be free to give you a lift in."

"Awesome," Yoongi opens the door and wriggles out, "Thanks so much!"

Hoseok sits in the car for a second longer, thinking about the moon and the circle and the way time works, and then he gets out and goes to sort out the bakery rota.

Forty-five minutes later, three cream eclairs, two strawberry-filled donuts, four croissants, and a praline bun packaged up and sitting in the backseat, Hoseok waves in through the library window at Yoongi, who's sitting at one of the desks with his head buried in one book, four piled up beside him. When he catches Hoseok's eye he beams and waves - Hoseok winces at the obvious battering and bruising on his visible skin - and carries most of the pile of books up to the desk, where Albert is sitting reading.

"What did you get?" Hoseok asks, handing Yoongi the paper bag with the praline bun as he helps him stack the books in the backseat. Most of them smell old and stale, like they haven't been taken out much, and quite a lot of them have no titles on the plain hardback covers; library books never keep their dust jackets long.

Yoongi shrugs, although he takes the bun with a smile. "Just some stuff on local folklore. I figure... while I'm like, out of commission, I might as well do what I came here to do."

"Write?"

"Mmm," Yoongi, praline cream on his thumb and his lip, looks distracted again, and Hoseok isn't sure whether to ask, as he starts driving up main street once again, steering the car towards the one-way loop around Follie and back towards the coven house. "Hey, Hoseok-" And he cuts himself short.

"Yeah?" Hoseok, checking in the mirror, sees their watchful wolf in the bushes outside the village bounds pick them up again. Seokjin catches his eye and winks, tongue lolling out of his mouth.

"Does this mean everything is real?"

"What do you mean?" Hoseok indicates into the small country road that will take them past Yoongi's cottage and through to the coven house. In the distance, the fields that lie between them and the forest, he sees the briefest flicker of two hares racing from hedge to treeline.

"Wolves. Fairies. Banshees. Magic," Yoongi says, his eyes on the hares, tracing the bodies now still and shuddering, upright in the field.

"Of course it is," Hoseok says. He turns into the cottage.

The hares dash away into the woods, but Yoongi keeps staring at the ancient trees, as though they're answering a question he hasn't asked aloud.

Chapter Text

Many mistakes have been made by the opposing side, considering the Red Circle an organisation. We are not as crass as that. The Red Circle is a meeting of many minds with one common goal and many individual goals - we do not have to like one another, get along with one another, play happy families with one another, so long as we keep in mind this goal at the front of us, all the time. Some of us believe more than the others. 

The Red Circle is made of people who have been shown the light. Some of us only want to see the removal of magical creatures which are destructive or harmful, but some of us believe all magical creatures are inherently so. It is not for me to tell you what to believe, dearest, but I think you are smart enough to think for yourself. I will say this - the Circle knows of magical creatures beyond this plane, of course. We are not what you may have heard.

Good luck. Do not ask me about the Circle again. 

Yours always, my heart, C. Badeaux

- A letter sent from Claudia Badeaux to Deirdre Collins, three weeks after Ms. Collins left Paris on a test-run challenge given to her by the Red Circle in Edinburgh, where she was tasked with eradicating three vampires. She completed this task within the time allotted to her, two months after receiving this letter, but it is not known by this author if she returned to Paris or if she went straight from Scotland to Follie, Ireland.

You are in the woods.

You are in the woods.

There is only one wood in the world.

There are many woods in the world, and each one has a thousand eyes and a thousand ears and countless feet under the soil, bearded and sleeping but never dying.

You are in the world, because the world is the wood.

The world is the wood, because soil never stops; it ducks under water and through concrete and many things grow from it, but if you dig deep with your shovel, you find soil. Are you ready to know my name?

You find worms chewing. Worms and woods are all a world needs to be one.

We give you what you want. I'll give you cats and a wolf and a man and the power to control them, if you want to. You can see whatever you want to see, and hear whoever you want to hear, and anyone you want to conjure will be here in front of you. Are you ready to know my name?

Yoongi reaches out, and the tips of his fingers graze across Jeongguk's cheek. "Why did you come here?"

Jeongguk is clothed, this time, but absent-mindedly, as though the thing that dresses you in dreams forgot to do it until the last second; his trousers and top are black, and slightly formless, without any definition to the edges. Underneath the clothes, Yoongi can see the fur and the muscle and the nakedness as clearly as though he's wearing nothing at all. "I'm asleep," Jeongguk says in answer, tilting his face down a little until his cheek is cupped in Yoongi's hand, "I think you called me here. I didn't come on purpose."

"I thought that's what I was doing. I wanted to be sure," Yoongi's palm is hot where it's touching Jeongguk, and the woods stretch for miles and meet each other around the curve of the soft world, like an embrace.

The cats wrestle. When Yoongi isn't looking at them, he can't tell what shape they're in.

"I was worried about you," Jeongguk says, putting a hand on Yoongi's waist just above his hip, "I thought I would kill you. I couldn't have done that again."

"You wouldn't kill me," Yoongi whispers. He wants to know about again, about the flapping story thread that Jeongguk has left like a trail of breadcrumbs through the woods, but now isn't the time. "Would you do it if I asked you to?"

"If you asked me to-?"

Jeongguk's hair is longer than it was when Yoongi first met him, and when he wraps his fingers around the strands that dangle at the bottom of his neck he's gratified by the softness he feels there. Jeongguk makes a noise. It is soft and full of want."If you needed to kill me," Yoongi says into his ear like a prayer. In the woods that are the world that are dreams, it seems far more likely than not. There are still bandages around his wrists, gripping him tight. His pulse throbs through the cotton.

"Why would I ever need to?" Jeongguk says. His fingers fold around Yoongi's wrist, his thumb stroking the skin under the bandage. Yoongi is so delicate. He snaps in half. "Why would I ever want to?"

"These dreams make me think something more is going on," Yoongi says in the same soft breath. If he speaks any louder, he thinks the trees will hear. The worms will pick up on the vibrations of speech through the soil, and something offers to tell him their name. "When I'm here," he says, confession on his tongue, "I don't feel human anymore."

Jeongguk leans back, his mouth open in shock, and Yoongi kisses him.

"Fuck!"

Jeongguk wakes up and sits bolt upright, his lips tingling and his cheeks bright red, his breath caught in his throat. "Fuck," he says again, and when he lifts his hand up he can feel the warmth of Yoongi's wrist, the way his bones feel against Jeongguk's thumb, the warmth of one palm cupped over his cheek. When he throws back the sheets, he can see the soil crumbling at the foot of the bed, and feel a more pressing problem a little further up his body.

Naked, he gets up and paces to the window, flinging open the curtains so he can see the forest and a white blip between two hills: Yoongi's cottage, quiet and content. For some reason the dream has distressed him more than the others had - the brief visions he'd had when he was running to rescue Yoongi, he's dismissed as pure imagination in the heat of the moment, as he was hardly in the best frame of mind then, but this he has more difficulty setting aside as something imagined.

The only thing he can think is that the circle, or the moon, is sending him a message. Hands folded behind his back, letting the cool breeze from the open window hiss against his sweaty chest, his heaving, catching breaths, Jeongguk stares through the trees.

Yoongi, he knows, is not magical. There isn't a hint of it about him, and if he was it would have presented when he was with Deirdre, or Jimin and Taehyung would have found it out about him. Jeongguk has to believe that for his own sake.

He really has to. 

So these dreams, then, following that logic, are someone else. They have to be. Some other thing wearing Yoongi like a second skin.

Jeongguk can feel the kiss as potent as though it happened a moment ago and is still happening and will still happen. He imagines some version of himself in the woods with Yoongi, the pale skin and the wet soil and the soft cheek and chest on his own, and the parting of those clothes and the sounds mingling with the growing trees and the worms and the earth and the stones. There is magic in the union, he thinks, watched by the moon. She would stop anything truly evil in the world.

The dawn is just arcing over the trees, but the winter moon hasn't left the sky yet, her pale face peering out of the greying air. The hole in the treeline where the circle lies is the only interruption in the skyline.

Jeongguk closes his eyes, and he sees Yoongi there again. The white clothes, the hair long and a little ragged, the pink in his cheeks, the light in his eyes. Would you kill me, he's asking, but when Jeongguk listens a little harder that isn't what he's saying. Would you kiss me?

He would. He strokes his wet, sweaty palm against his bare thigh, and then shudders at the contact - too hot, and at the same time, too cold.

He feels guilty, even considering Yoongi in that way, but how can he not? For the past two weeks, ever since he pulled Yoongi in from the woods, he's caught him at odd glances in the light and thought: he's pretty.

He knew that already. Yoongi is beautiful in the sunlight, moreso in the moonlight, the glimmer on his cheekbones and in his eyes and the smell of his bed, and fresh, cold air, and his hands in Jeongguk's.

Jeongguk closes his eyes. He doesn't think he should do this, and make it strange to be around Yoongi -

But he knows nobody is watching him but the moon, and she is always watching him. He folds his hand around himself, and opens his eyes and then closes his eyes, and thinks about the cool skin in the forest, and the warmth by the trees, and the soft way Yoongi's head tilts as he presses his mouth against Jeongguk's, the force, the gentle push as he kisses him, as his lips part Jeongguk's. He tastes of mint and chocolate, sweet and warm, and in Jeongguk's dreams they lie in the earth and Jeongguk's hands sit on Yoongi's hips and he can't tell where either of them begin and end.

He doesn't feel awful at the end of it, but he's tired. He cleans up in the bathroom, empty and a little embarrassed the way he always is, and it's only five in the morning; he goes back to bed.

He wishes he could dream again.

He doesn't.

Yoongi is writing in his kitchen, a cup of coffee by his left elbow, his cats sleeping above his right arm. He's built a little cave for himself out of the books he got from the library, and occasionally he has to swear and dig one out, cross-referencing the work in his notebook against one of the little pink tabs he's stuck into them. Banshee in Irish Gaelic, apparently, just means woman fairy. Bean sídhe.

He rubs his eyes with a knuckle. Last night he had a strange dream with Jeongguk, where he couldn't tell if they were about to fight in the woods or do something more intimate, and he couldn't quite work out if either of them were clothed, or if the kiss had gone beyond the closed mouth against his. He hopes Jeongguk isn't somehow in the dreams, but he doubts it - if he was, there's no way he would be able to act so relaxed around Yoongi.

I step into the woods. He's sure that'll be the first line of it.

Don’t you want to know my name?

Earlier he took a picture of his table, the piles of books and the open, empty notebook, and he'd sent it to Izzy and Gerry. Both of them replied with overwhelming happiness, and then proceeded to berate him for how distant he's been; Yoongi had replied as quickly and shortly as he could, and then muted their chats again. New York and his life before feels so remote, so removed, and he can't really imagine returning - he can't even imagine publishing this book, unwritten as it is.

I step into the woods, he has written, and after three hours of reading about the swan children of Lir, he has added, the woods step into me.

He feels tired. It's been months since Yoongi has written anything of any substance, something that feels like a door opening instead of closing, and although it feels good - it's tiring. He wishes he hadn't fallen out of the way of it all those months ago.

"Hey, honey," he whispers when Spanner butts his head against his cheek, "Hey, baby lion. How are you doing?"

It must be his imagination after sitting in the same place all day, but he can almost feel a reply. Happy. Warm. "'Course you are, honey," he kisses Spanner on the nose, "So warm, huh?"

He went home to his cottage after a week sleeping in the coven house, insisting that his cats needed the separation from the smell of dog, but in truth he needs the separation from the constant normalcy of living with people who routinely spend more time as wolves than as people.

(No. Always people. Wolves, not humans.)

And too close to Jeongguk for too long, and he starts blushing, and he knows Jimin was aware. And - and - and - that whole conversation with Jimin, and every single one since, has put him on edge.

No, Yoongi wants the distance. He has it now. He intends to use it.

He wonders what Jimin could mean. Although he is dangerous, the most obviously dangerous person Yoongi has ever met, he doesn't believe Jimin wishes him any harm. But then what value could he find from telling Yoongi what he knows about him? Something that even Yoongi didn't know?

"Hey, baby," Yoongi scratches Beanbag under the chin when she rouses herself, "Wish you could tell me, huh?"

Which leads him to a whole other area he hasn't investigated yet. He's - by now - accustomed to the fact that when he's not paying attention, his housecats like to spend their time as a lion and a dark black panther, wrapped around one another as happily as though they were born like that. Is that him doing it, somehow? But wouldn't he know?

No, it can’t be. It must be something else.

Spanner came to him first, two years ago, when he was editing Far Away From Pleasant Lands, as a shelter cat that Izzy had fallen in love with online and begged him to take, since her apartment didn't allow for any pets. Beanbag came six months later when Yoongi, who had fallen deeply in love with Spanner to a worrying extent, went to the nearest vet office wobbly-voiced and worried and said I think my cat is lonely. The vet had looked at him like he had three heads and had said, slowly and carefully, okay, well we have a litter of kittens coming in tomorrow, so do you want to put down something for one of them?

Yeah. Sure.

Neither of them had been magical when Yoongi took them in, he's sure of that. Beanbag had been named Felicity and the little girl whose cat was pregnant cried her eyes out when Yoongi took the kitten away in an overpriced, ultimately useless cat carrier. Spanner was already a year old when Yoongi adopted him, and mangy and self-serving and about as far from magical as Yoongi imagines a cat can get.

Which means that, following this logic, he is the one doing this to them.

No he isn't. He refuses to believe that.

His pen presses hard into the first page of the notebook, and he knows without flipping the paper over that it will have bled through.

He wants to talk to Jeongguk, although he doesn't know why. Talking to Jeongguk makes him feel balanced in a world determined to push him off it.

Yoongi dresses as warmly as he can, wrapping a scarf around his neck and chin and buttoning his coat up to his collar, slipping his hands into knitted mittens Gerry had given him as a parting gift. "I'm going to the coven house," he tells the cats, "You can come or stay. I won't mind."

He isn't surprised to find both of them leap down and curl around his feet, waiting for him to open the door and release them.

Deirdre. There was no sign of her in the place Yoongi was taken (apparently; he didn't go there, but Taehyung, Namjoon, and Hoseok did in the time before he had woken up in the coven house) and no sign of her anywhere else she might have been staying in Follie. Jeongguk had theorised, to the broad support of everyone else, that she and the two Cullis creatures had been living in the tunnels under the ground, underneath the pump-house. Although Yoongi has been assured by almost everyone, multiple times, that Deirdre has gone far away from where she will hurt any of them, that doesn't reassure him. She hasn’t been found.

He can't help thinking that she is a loose end in his life that refuses to be tied up. Where did she go? The Cullises are accounted for, one ripped to shreds in the old kitchen underground, one a melted puddle of earth in the forest, but Deirdre has gone without a trace, without any sign that she was there in the beginning.

Taehyung looks too murderous, every time they bring her up, to really debate, but Yoongi thinks she's gone back to Claudia. Back to France, at the very least. He can't imagine what her next step will be, but he knows he hasn't seen the last of her.

Still lost in thought, he tramps up the lane to the coven house and pushes his wool-covered thumb on the doorbell.

"Yoongi's here!"

That's Seokjin's bellow, from the kitchen, and before Yoongi can move or shout back the door opens to a red-faced Namjoon, flour dusted on his nose and through his hair. "Hey!" He says brightly, a little awkwardly still, "Yoongi, I-"

"Hi, Namjoon," Yoongi says with a smile, and kicking his boots off by the door he steps into the house. He hasn't got the time, nor the inclination, for a big soppy forgive-and-forget session with Namjoon; if he thinks he was acting for the safety of the pack, Yoongi will take that. He hasn't the energy for a fight.

"Kitchen!" Jeongguk shouts, and when Yoongi makes his way in there he's hit by the smell of ginger, honey, and warm baking. Taehyung is eating raw dough, which he's balled up in his hand and is taking bites out of like an apple, and Jimin is sitting on the kitchen island eating raisins from a cardboard box. Seokjin is beside the aga, stirring something that smells of nutmeg, and Hoseok is lying in wolf form at his feet, his spine pressed against the warm metal body.

"This is nice," Yoongi says, a little nonplussed, beginning to tug on the end of his gloves.

Jeongguk bounds up to him full of energy, holding a spoon, one side of it already licked. "We're making gingerbread things," he says, and offers Yoongi the wooden spoon, "They're fuckin' great. Have a bit."

It is great. Yoongi drags his tongue through the paste, smacking his lips, and turns to Jeongguk to ask him how he is - but Jeongguk has turned away, his cheeks and the tips of his ears turned pink. Probably the heat in the room; the kitchen is a lot warmer than the coven usually gets it.

"This just a social call, or are you-?" Namjoon trails off, his hand dancing in the air over Yoongi's shoulder before he drops it.

"I'm okay," Yoongi says, handing the spoon back to a still-mute Jeongguk, "I just fancied a walk. I should have called-"

"Don't worry about it," Jeongguk says hastily. "Tea? Coffee?"

"Um. Coffee?"

Yoongi ends up shooed towards the long green sofa in the lounge, beside the hanging basket; the sofa he had slept on, the night Jeongguk found him in the woods with his foot lacerated. He curls up with his toes under him, the cats leaping into the hanging basket a little way away, and while Jeongguk and Hoseok argue over which coffee press to use, Yoongi wriggles into the piles of blankets and cushions, sinking deeper into the soft sofa. He feels almost as though he could drift off here, if he was left alone for ten minutes longer.

"Coffee," Jeongguk emerges before Yoongi reaches that point, carrying two mismatched mugs, both chipped, one in the shape of a garish unicorn and the other with a picture of Taehyung printed on the front, his face smashed against clear glass so that all of the mug is just the expanse of his chin and his squashed nose. "How are you?"

"Good," Yoongi takes the mug and waits until Jeongguk's sat down before leaning against him; the sofa is so melted and old that the heaviest thing sitting on it attracts everything else. Magnets on rubber sheets. "Good - busy, I guess. I have an idea for the next book, but I need to let it sit, I think. How are you?"

"I'm good as well," if Jeongguk minds Yoongi against him, he's doing a good job of hiding it. He takes a sip of his drink. "We're just planning Christmas and then Imbolc - we think Madeline might be coming to see us in January, or around December-time. Have we told you about her?"

"Um. Vaguely?"

"She's our friend in London," Jeongguk lifts his arm very slowly and casually and drapes it across Yoongi's shoulders, tangling it in another free-floating blanket. "Her coven is a bit smaller, though - her, Daniel, Amandi, and Susannah. Two witches, a wolf, and a born vampire, I think. Usually we visit them or they come here once or twice a year, but it was June when we went to London, and they haven't been here in ages. I think they're coming here in the new year."

"Sounds fun," Yoongi nestles deeper into the warm, "Will I meet them?"

"I mean, probably. Madeline's super friendly. I know when I met her I was... y'know, I was really freaked out, but she was so lovely to me." Jeongguk's voice turns to the distant. "And then of course there was - Hobi almost joined their coven before he came to ours, and Seokjin stopped off with them before he got to Ireland, and Susannah and Taehyung go way back. He's born blood and bone witch, but he's a great potioneer, and she specialises in, like, protective potions and charms and things, so they collaborated a bit before he decided to go all-in with the blood and bone stuff. I think you'll like them."

"I think I will. Christmas, though? You guys celebrate that?" Yoongi drinks again, comforted by how little attention he and Jeongguk are being given by the rest of the coven.

Jeongguk laughs, but it sounds a lot closer to a giggle than anything else. "Not really - not really. But me and Seokjin and Jiminie weren't born into this, so we carry stuff on from what we were before, and Hobi is super assimilated. We do gifts and stuff, but we celebrate the full moon in January properly. It's like... you know. Binding. New Year, new us."

That makes Yoongi smile, which in turn makes Jeongguk smile, which makes Yoongi feel warm all over. Maybe the magic doesn't have to be complicated.

Maybe it can all be warm coffee and baking gingerbread while the cold rages outside, unnoticed. Maybe it can always be like this.

Yoongi smiles.

Richard only knows it's the full moon because he is left alone in the house.

When he is conscious enough to know that he is Richard and not a root-and-branch nervous system, he knows that he has been told by them all that the full moon will hurt him. He is not a true wolf because Domhnall had to bite him; the moon hates wolves that have been bitten into her world, he has been told, and he has no reason to disbelieve them.

His wrists rattle against the manacles on the bed. Domhnall will come back in when they're done, and he is kind after a full moon night. He is bigger than usual, although he is always big. Richard is small in comparison, a skinny, underfed graduate student who was wandering through the Trinity green at the wrong time of night. He was attacked by something, Domhnall told him, and he had to be bitten to have his life saved. He should be grateful.

Oh, he is grateful.

For the first few months after his bite, Domhnall and Saoirse let him out into the streets of Dublin almost every night, apart from the week either side of the full moon. But then something happened -

He thinks -

And now he is here. This is for his own protection. Edie bathes his forehead with a damp cloth, her fingers playing over his bare chest, and coos at him and feeds him hot soup with pearl barley and tells him he has been so ill, and Domhnall has been so worried about him, and he will be okay so long as he listens to her. Evie stands watch at his door, saying nothing, her burly arms folded, her teeth grown long and curved over her bottom lip. Domhnall comes into his room and asks how he's doing, and looks disappointed when the answer is always the same.

Richard wishes he could be normal, but he is ill, desperately ill.

"We think you've been cursed by the moon," Saoirse says, and he can hear Domhnall behind her voice, his strong faith in the moon and his care for Richard, "We think she's angry that you've tried to be a wolf when you weren't born one. But don't worry. Domhnall is taking care of her. He has such a good relationship there, you know? In the meantime, we can't let you... I mean, if you were out with the moon, she might kill you. And we've worked so hard to save you, Rich. You can't die on us now. Promise me you won't."

"I promise," Richard says, but it comes out like a snarl and his face is muzzled and long and his hands are heavy paws he can't control. He is so thin. When he angles his body he can feel his ribs running down his skin, stretched like animal-hide drums.

Domhnall checks on him every night. He is big and blonde and handsome, and so strong. His hands are the size of Richard's face; he doesn't like to wear clothes in the pack flat, but then none of them do, so Richard can see the bulging muscles on every part of his body.

"True wolves don't wear clothes," Edie coos. She strokes his head. Her hands are wet. His hair is wet. "We want to be as close as we can to our true forms, Rich. Do you want to be close to your true form?"

On the full moon, Richard whimpers and cries alone in the flat. He can feel the celestial body in the sky pulling on him, trying to get him out of the house and near her, but he knows - Domhnall has told him - that is part of the curse.

The moon wants him to want her. She will kill him.

Every day, he gets thinner. He cuts his lips on his own fangs.

Domhnall will be home soon, and then everything will be okay.

"Christmas is coming up, then," Seokjin says. Hoseok, who's carefully wrapping and labelling a wicker hamper to send to London, hums with a roll of tape in his mouth; Taehyung shrugs, Jeongguk looks mildly terrified. "Are we doing gifts?"

"You mean are we involving him," Jimin lies out against the raggedy carpet in front of the fire, a mug of hot mulled wine on his bare stomach, holding his hands in the air to compare one (whole, undamaged) with the other (currently missing, in the early stages of regrowth.) "Have none of you got him gifts? You're all terrible friends."

"I didn't know you were his friend," Hoseok prods him in the ribs with his foot. "Jeonggukkie's gonna get him stuff. I think he's getting us stuff. It'll probably be, like, wine. Baked goods. The like."

"I think we should get him a copy of his own book," Jimin says, and then giggles, and waves his mug in the air. Wine sloshes out and fizzles against the carpet before it can soak in; last time Susannah visited, she charmed all their carpeted floors to be impervious to water. "We should sign it. It would be so funny."

"I know what we should get him," Namjoon says. He's reading in the corner, his glasses having slid down his nose; the only members of the coven missing are Taehyung, upstairs filling an order, and Jeongguk, who's over at Yoongi's for their almost-nightly hot cocoa and chat.

Seokjin quirks an eyebrow. Although he knows Hoseok is the only one with any rationale behind why Yoongi was sent to them, Seokjin is also aware the moon has given him as a gift. It explains a lot about everything - his unerring, almost painful need to provide for Yoongi, to give him things he wants and make him happy when he isn't. The moon has sent him here.

(The moon has sent him here, and Seokjin and Hoseok follow her devoutly, unlike the others in the house, who only believe. A gift from the moon is a sacred thing. Treat the moon and her gifts right, and in turn you will be treated.)

(It brings back memories dearer to Seokjin than he’s willing to admit, Germany in the summer, the moon sending them everything she could just to see the worship in their faces.)

The moon has sent him here, anyway.

That explains a lot.

"He asked me - back when I thought he was a hunter," and Namjoon's cheeks briefly pink, and he looks down at his book, "He asked me if I knew where he could get his hands on a car. If we got him-"

"You want to buy him a car," Jimin drawls, and then giggles again. "Oh my god. That would be so funny. Jeonggukkie's gift will be terrible in comparison."

"That's not why I want to-"

"I know, but it'll still be funny-"

"We are not buying Yoongi a car," Seokjin says firmly. Hoseok holds his hand out and wriggles his eyebrows; Seokjin passes him the scissors. "That's ridiculous."

"Not a new one, idiot," Namjoon slips his finger between the pages of his book, "I mean dig out one of the old cars from the garage and give it a soup up. That's not without the bounds of possibility, is it?"

"We're buying him a car because the moon gave us him," Hoseok says reasonably.

Seokjin shrugs. "Do we buy everyone that the moon gives us a car?"

Wrong thing to say. Jimin stops laughing - Hoseok winces, the scissors in his mouth along with the tape - Namjoon smiles wryly and without humour. "Yoongi is the only one so far the moon's given me without dying," he says. "Think about it, Jin. Don't you remember?"

"We buy him a car," Seokjin says, because it hurts less. "Don't - that's low. Don't."

"You brought it up."

"You brought it up."

"I don't care who brought it up, but let's drop it," Jimin says brightly. "Wanna bet how long I can hold my hand in the fire before the alarm goes off?"

"No," Seokjin says, but Jimin does it anyway, and Hoseok starts a timer on his phone, and the tension diffuses as quickly as it came.

Namjoon's staring at the side of Seokjin’s head. He  ignores him.

He doesn't want to think about it.

He is back in the trees, and maybe he never left.

He is naked. He does not let that bother him. This is how he looks when there is nothing but himself to be shown, and in the forest nothing is anything more than what it is. The moss does not change colour and the trees do not dance except for when they do, when the wild December storms let them waltz among one another, holding soft hands and watching through knots in their bark, the oldest of them with the youngest of them with the broadest of them with the slender; the trees wrap around one another and grow.

But the people have left their touch. Yoongi can see a fence, built to keep a young man's sheep from straying. This was before Pádraig was called Patrick, and long before he'd set foot on the island in the first place; yet people have always needed wool and mutton, and sheep have always been woolly and fat. The trees grow with more determination than the people do, and he can see where this fence has been swallowed by the trunk of a great oak oozing his way across the soil. It took generations. The great-grandchildren of the shepherd, and the great-great-great grandchildren of the sheep, they were the ones to watch it happen.

Yoongi watches it now as though centuries take minutes. The tree picks up the fence and holds it within itself.

Although he is walking in the cold, frosty bracken, his feet don't feel a thing. His fingertips brush against leaves and raindrops, freshly melted, skip down the length of his arm like giggling schoolgirls running off the bus to get home.

He lifts one to his lips and drinks.

It tastes sweet and cold and endless. It lasts forever.

He wipes his lips.

The circle has never been built and never been unbuilt, and it takes him the work of a moment to get there, through the old, old trees and pathways and places where cows have broken bushes, and places where two girls from the village have hidden to swap secrets where their families cannot hear, and places where last stands were held, and places where magic was performed.

The fungi, growing steady out of the rocks and the logs and the ground, trembles when he arrives. "Hello," he says into the circle, and he watches the space inside glow yellow with the warmth of a summer six months and six hundred years away, in the past and in the future. He can hear wolfish barking, and a yellow doe, her antlers shining, breaks through the trees into the circle.

She vanishes. He imagines the sound of the chase and the hunt and the kill, but he doesn't feel anything about it beyond satisfaction at a meal well taken.

Hello, little thing. Are you animal, plant, or mineral?

Yoongi reaches up to touch his own cheek, surprised at how cold his own fingertips are. "Hello," he says, his voice deeper and slower than he's used to, "I am animal. I think. What are you?"

All three at once and many more. You cannot conceive the multitudes I contain, little thing, and you should not attempt to. You are mine, and I am yours. You contain multitudes of your own. Have you discovered the magic yet?

"I know about magic," he says. Out of the circle a troop of ants come marching, militaristic, to the beat of the faint breeze above the trees. They're carrying bones, one bone for each clustering platoon of ants, from the littlest bones inside the ears to the long, soil-yellowed leg bones and curved ribs, worried away at the ends. The skull is last, carried by a cloud of the things all solidly wrapped through the eye sockets and through the teeth. Yoongi can hear them singing a mournful marching song, but he doesn't know the words. "What are they saying?"

Can you not hear them, little thing?

"No," Yoongi says slowly, "But could I?"

The thing doesn't say anything, but all of a sudden the sad antish humming creates words of itself. Yoongi lies in the grass and the sticks and watches them move, their bodies swaying, fulfilling their task. We hunt the first and bury the last, they sing, and their voices are high and reedy and multiplied by thousands, w e carry the slow and we hurt the fast, and now Yoongi can see them as individuals. The oldest are at the front, he knows now, carrying the littlest bones and marching at the points of most significance. They've been through the worst. There are wars deeper in the woods, between other ant nests and other creatures, and these surviving ants hold places of honour. We hunt the first and bury the last, they continue. The old ones drone, the bottom note in the endless harmony, our swords are sharp, our wrath is vast.

The younger ants swarm around the heavier bones, the skull and the thick, rounded leg bones. They're eager to prove themselves. Yoongi knows they came of age too young to fight in the most recent battle, and they volunteered to carry the heaviest loot to prove that they could. Our wrath is vast, they cry above the melody, and Yoongi can see how the military precision falls apart towards the end of the march, where the youthful euphoria of finally being included in the army takes hold.

We hunt the first! We bury the last!

Our swords are sharp!

Our wrath is vast!

"Our wrath is vast," Yoongi repeats under his breath.

Indeed it is, little thing. Their wrath is vast. They have had great loss today. These ants are not from this wood, but a wood near here, a few lands over. They have killed fourteen human men and three human women, and one human child. They have suffered loss in the innumerable thousands. This is the barest amount of them that came back. I will return them to where they came from soon.

"Were they in the right?" Yoongi asks. When his mouth opens, water falls against his lips.

The ants or the human men?

"The ants."

I don't know. What is right, to you?

"I don't know," Yoongi says. The first phalanx of ants is through, and the second is incoming, with another set of bones carried triumphantly above their heads. "Did they win?"

I don't know. What is winning to you?

"I don't know," Yoongi says.

There is a long silence. The ants from the second phalanx must not be as important as the first - although they are attempting to sing a song, it keeps fizzling out, and the young ones at the end are weeping quietly, a great multitude of them needed to hold the skull aloft. Through the circle, the strange air inside it, he can see a distant and incoming third.

Touch me.

"No," Yoongi says, and he sees the mushrooms around the circle glow in irritation. "Not yet," he amends. "Not yet."

When?

"When I know what you are." The ants from the third set walk slower, and without that marching rhythm. Amongst them he knows there are a great many wounded, and a great many more that won't make it on the walk home. The circle is killing them, pulling them further away from their home, making the walk longer than it needs to be.

I could tell you now.

"You don't have to tell me the truth."

No, I don't. Little thing, you are not as smart as you think you are.

Yoongi says nothing more, and waits for the dream to end. 

Chapter Text

When I went to college, I didn’t really intend to go and have an experience. I switched my major halfway through my degree to focus on literature and creative writing, but even then I didn’t think I was going to write a book that anybody would read at all. When Izzy (Isobel Way, Bloomsbury) contacted me for the first time, I was still looking for places taking postgraduates with sponsorship, and if that failed I had stuff lined up for me to try and go into editing, or publishing in some way. 

But Sana was with me when I went to college. I had no friends. I didn’t want any. I used to leave class and go to a different coffeeshop every day and write little paragraphs of her journey on the napkins, not because I was down and out, but because I didn’t want to buy a notebook for her story because that would make it real. But she was going on a journey, and so was I. 

I wrote the scene where Sana meets the girl after I almost went clubbing with a society I had joined, and I was too cowardly to go. I imagined that it was a missed opportunity, and in a way Sana and I are two sides of the same coin. She meets the girl and there’s this missed chance, this whole life she could have lived. I thought that was like me. I just watched and watched, all the time, and Sana has the same problem. 

• An excerpt from an interview with Yoongi Min for the New Yorker, on his inspirations for the book Far Away From Pleasant Lands, which comes out later this year and can be bought from any respectable retailer for $14.99.

Namjoon spills into the kitchen wearing his glasses and a set of matching blue pyjamas, his finger keeping place towards the end of Yoongi's book. "Madeline says she's thinking of coming over towards the end of January," he says, looking up at Seokjin. "Oh. I thought - where's everyone else?"

"The demons are in the attic practising," Seokjin's fingers arc quotes in the air, "Hobi is at work, and Jeongguk is where he always is. And I'm here. But hey, I'm glad you told me."

Rubbing his eyes, Namjoon slides into one of the chairs at the kitchen island. He's tired, incredibly tired, between the run-up to Madeline's visit and the spring celebration, and the fuss of buying gifts for everyone, and the stress of looking for Deirdre and finding nothing but dead ends. "I've missed her."

"Yeah," Seokjin, who was fiddling with a cup of coffee, hands it to Namjoon and goes back to the kettle to fix one for himself. He's dressed down, post-shift clothes, the sort of loose shirts and sweatpants they prefer for ease of turning shape to shape. "I've missed them. I... talking to Yoongi reminded me about it. Y'know?"

"About...?"

"About how weird it felt, Joonie. Waking up and finding out all this was something to know about and how I couldn't take it back, and how - y'know, how everyone was acting like I was the odd one out for having to learn about it." Coffee made, Seokjin comes to sit opposite him, his lips twisted down. "I think it's the weather."

"It's fair enough to say," Namjoon says, although his stomach is flipping. He's never been in this position before - having to unravel the world bit by bit to someone who's never seen it before. "Are you okay, though? I mean - I mean, we could get you to Germany-"

"I don't want to be in Germany, idiot," Seokjin says softly. He reaches across the kitchen island and his fingertips, hot from the coffee cup, brush Namjoon's knuckles. "I want to be here, or I'd have gone back years ago. I'm just saying it's a funny situation to be in, y'know, for him. I'm glad he has Jeonggukkie."

"Oh, he has him," Namjoon smiles, watching Seokjin's thumb stroke his knuckle. "Wrapped around his little finger, if he knew about it."

Seokjin laughs. The kitchen smells of coffee and gingerbread, warm and wintry, and there's the anticipation of it in the air that always comes a few days before Christmas. "They get along, right? It's cute. Jeonggukkie's cute when he has a crush."

"He's obvious."

"Yeah, but still cute," Seokjin sips, and then his brows furrow, "Did Madeline say anything about... Deirdre? Anything?"

"Not exactly," Namjoon says. He and Madeline had been calling for a few hours while she worked through orders and he marked the mock exams from his students this term, and so their conversations hadn't been driven so much as they'd chatted every time one of them looked up. "She did say that Daniel ran into some trouble with vampire hunters up in Edinburgh a few years ago, and the name rang a bell, but he was at work so I didn't get to ask him."

"Maybe I will," Seokjin says. "He talks to me a bit, and if I ask him the right way he won't get freaked out. Hunters-"

"Touchy for everyone," Namjoon nods, licking a droplet of coffee from his thumb. "God. This is really what I needed. I.. thanks."

"Don't stress. Just... let it happen."

"Easy for you to say."

Seokjin closes his eyes, and for a minute Namjoon regrets being so callous. "If I could ever step in, you know I would. But just - just leave it alone, Joon. I promise you won't regret it."

Namjoon shuts his eyes and lets the dark of his own mind sweep down his vision. "I'll call Madeline and get the tickets sorted out. Will you ask Daniel about-?"

"Deirdre? Yeah."

"Anything else?"

Seokjin smiles at him, a little smaller and a little forlorn. "Oh, a thousand things. Jimin has something up his sleeve he won't tell me, and Taehyung keeps scuttling around muttering about Inge. They talk to her more than I do these days."

"Are you-"

"I'm fine. Go get the plane tickets. I'll text Daniel."

Namjoon hesitates, and then does so. He leaves the kitchen smelling of coffee and gingerbread, with the distinct feeling that there's something very important he's missing.

Jeongguk is funny.

They sit in Yoongi's kitchen for hours, until one day Jeongguk shows up with an old shopping bag full of dusty VHS tapes he bought in the library sale, and sheepishly suggests that they watch a film or two on Yoongi's TV, which is so old the only thing it can play are tapes and fuzzy, staticy news programmes. Jeongguk makes him laugh.

Jeongguk likes the sort of emotional programmes that are made for parents to engage with while they watch with their kids; he orders Howl's Moving Castle on VHS, and it comes with a fracture in the tape that means the beginning keeps skipping and the captions for the Japanese are very badly translated, but every single time they get to the finale, Jeongguk starts discreetly dabbing at his eyes with his sleeve and Yoongi has to pretend not to notice.

Jeongguk is funny, and he's kind, and he's so warm that Yoongi and both of his cats flock to him for warmth as the winter sets in. He lies on Yoongi's couch with his head pillowed on his arms, and slowly Beanbag, Spanner, and Yoongi migrate to lie around him, cups of hot chocolate and tea scattered around Yoongi's house.

Of course, Jeongguk still has his job, even though Deirdre and the Cullises had left halfway through the felling. Someone called Mikey Fee and his lot busy themselves around the forest, and Jeongguk is out quite a lot fielding the differences Mikey has with the Commission, and when Yoongi is left to his own devices he splits his time evenly between the library, the coven house, and his study.

But mostly he spends time with Jeongguk.

He goes into the woods, and Jeongguk is there in whichever form pleases him, and slowly the sight of him loses any fear for Yoongi. The shaggy brown wolf paces through the trees, his tongue lolling out of his mouth, and when he sees Yoongi he runs up and his great paws come crashing onto Yoongi's shoulders and Yoongi can't help but laugh, his warm body colliding, his tongue lapping Yongi’s chin.

Mostly, he spends time with Jeongguk.

There are times when he looks at Jeongguk and he can feel the kisses that stay in the dreams, the wide hands Jeongguk presses into his knee during the scary parts of the films, the soft breaths that puff out when he falls asleep on Yoongi's couch. There are times Yoongi feels as though he might burst with the knowledge that he's kissing Jeongguk - touching Jeongguk - being with him - but only in dreams. He feels as though he can't have both.

But he does. He still does.

He wonders what Jeongguk would do if he knew.

"I brought you coffee," Jeongguk says brightly, a few days before Christmas. Yoongi's been informed of the dawning full moon on Christmas Eve, and therefore with many apologies the coven have asked him to come over on St Stephen's day instead, to give them some recovery time.

"Thanks," Yoongi takes the warm paper cup from Jeongguk, wrapping his cold fingers around the edges. "God, I'm freezing. Where did you get it?"

"I was in town. Called in with Hobi and he gave me two," Jeongguk waves at Yoongi's, "That's a mocha and mine's a - a - a coffee. I dunno what he puts in it. It's sweet. I like it."

Yoongi hums, popping the lid and taking a mouthful. Jeongguk settles in around him, clattering with plates and cups and a loaf of bread from the cupboard and a carton of eggs in their friendly green cardboard and the kettle. "What, are you hungry?"

"I'm gonna make toast," Jeongguk says, and grins. "Yeah, I guess I must be. How's it going?"

"Okay," Yoongi says, although it's going better than that. He moves his elbow across the page he'd been writing on, looking up and down the script - ends of sentences that meander off into nowhere, yes, and words scribbled out with violent scratches, and whole sections he'd pasted over with white to redo, but the shape is starting to emerge. The clay brick has rounded at the edges. "Yeah, it's okay. Are you - excited?"

My name is [NAME HERE] and the world is bigger than I could ----- My hands touch hers, my eyes as open as I can make them, and suddenly I see her ---- I love you, I say, and I don't mean it.

"For the full moon?" Jeongguk is nibbling the heel of the loaf, leaning against the countertop. "Yeah, for sure. We're gonna get something good. Are you excited?"

"For the... full moon?" Yoongi says hesitantly, closing the notebook. He quirks his head to the side.

"No, no," Jeongguk is turning pink, and for some reason that suggestion means he can't look Yoongi in the eyes. "For Christmas. We don't celebrate it usually, but - but we, I mean, Joonie wanted you over to the coven house anyway, and... and so do I."

Yoongi grins. "I guess I am a little excited. For Seokjin's dinner, of course."

"Of course," Jeongguk nods, "I don't know what else it would be."

They look at each other for a long, silent moment, and then burst out laughing. The cats, who had fallen asleep in front of the range, jerk awake at the noise with a twin pair of irritated mrowls.

Later, toast made -

(Toast the Jeongguk way, which involves sliced bananas, chocolate, strawberries, fried eggs, and thinly-sliced green onions) -

They curl up on opposite ends of the sofa in the lounge, in front of a fire Jeongguk lit. (He brought Yoongi logs yesterday, his nose pink, his hair squashed under a green woolly hat, the logs in a wicker basket that Jeongguk had firmly denied the return of, all split into neat quarters that would easily fit into Yoongi's little grate.) It isn't warm enough yet to give off any real heat, and Yoongi shivers a little, his fingers wrapped around his mug of tea.

In moments like this, transient moments that aren't quite one or the other, Yoongi feels deeply awkward around Jeongguk without the barrier of other people. In moments like this, his dreams feel very close to the waking hours.

In times like this, dark scenes where Yoongi's skin seems to glow, Jeongguk can't help but feel uncomfortable. In times like this, looking at the curve of Yoongi's nose, the fall of his hair over his ears, Jeongguk can't help but recall his dreams, the effect they have on him.

Standing in front of the trees.

But Jeongguk is excited for the full moon. The circle will give them something really good for the end of the calendar year, the preparations for the Imbolc season, and last time the hares had tasted like biting through clouds; he can only anticipate what the circle will give them this time. Give him.

For some reason, and without his permission, his mind turns to Yoongi. He wonders if the circle would give him to him.

"How's work?" Yoongi asks, careful, delicate; Jeongguk looks askance at him, beginning to worry - although he can't imagine how - that Yoongi will somehow see through him and find out what he's thinking about.

"Fine, now Fee is working on the site," Jeongguk says, and then his brow furrows deeply, "But I... well, we've been looking for Deirdre. I know you know that, but we've been looking, we haven't stopped or anything, and there's still no sign. When Tae went down under the hill after I - after you came back, there was nothing. I think she's gone back to France."

"Back to Claudia," Yoongi closes his eyes. He wishes the tea he's drinking was stronger. "Do you think she'll come back?"

"The Red Circle... yeah, I think she will," Jeongguk admits, and reaches out his hand to lie on Yoongi's bare ankle, warming the cold skin. "Does that worry you?"

"I mean. Is it meant to reassure me?"

"It reassures me that she hasn't vanished into nowhere," Jeongguk says slowly, and his thumb begins stroking slow circles on the skin above Yoongi's ankle, "It reassures me that there's nothing bigger than this, y'know?"

Guiltily, thinking of the woods in his dreams, Yoongi nods and swallows.

For the rest of the night, they talk about nothing in particular, one cat per man sleeping on their chests. Slowly, Yoongi warms up, and he begins to think that maybe -

Maybe the danger is behind him. 

Jeongguk runs with the cold frost under his paws and his coven ahead of him, alive with the glow of the hunt, the moon talking to him all the while, soothing him, whispering sweet things in his ears as he takes the miles in stride.

He can hardly remember a time before he and her could talk like this. Together, wolf and moon and moon and wolf and man and wolf and moon and backwards again, as tightly tangled as the knots that form within grass and hay, wrapped amongst one another, bared to each other. She welcomes him. She's missed him, and he's missed her. Namjoon, ahead of him, is growling and snapping at a little field rat dashing out of their way. Taehyung has already begun to scream, and there is the sound of viscera splashing against stone somewhere near.

Namjoon runs to the left, chasing something only he can see, beginning to snap at the heels of the invisible thing the circle has given him. Hoseok and Seokjin are quick to split off to the right, neck and neck grey and brown, long legs and long snouts and bloody, fiery eyes.

Jeongguk still hasn't been sent any kind of vision. He licks his slavering lips, and all he can feel is the wind, and the low-hanging branches stroking along the back of his spine, pulling out tufts of dark brown hair.

He's almost to the circle by the time the stones give him something to hunt.

Mine, he barks, when he catches sight of a turned slip of white, the barest hint of colour through the trees, gone as soon as he sees it. The stones in the clearing are almost humming with the hunt around them, and Taehyung's screaming has reached a lyrical quality, words hidden inside the pleas for Jimin to either stop or continue. Jeongguk will never be sure.

He has a target now, and he runs twice as fast as he thought he could, mud and hard frost in his paws.

What is it? A rabbit? A fox? A hare?

It's something pale and slender and slipping through the trees almost as fast as Jeongguk can go, but he's gaining on it. During the full moon the circle makes sure they don't run out of the bounds of the forest, no matter how far they run in distance; Jeongguk has caught the scent and been on the hunt now for half an hour, and he's easily crossed the distance of the woods three times over. But this is not normal times -

These are not normal woods.

Jeongguk is close enough now to smell the thing he's hunting. It's sweet and fragrant, like fresh grass, like chocolate, like clean air after a long sleep in a stuffy room. The white is something else, an outer skin or a piece of fur; he's catching slips of darker hide, skin flashing through the frosty mud. He barks.

(Taehyung and Jimin are both singing now, a mournful harmony, and the stench of blood is thick and heavy twisting through the trees from their ritual. Jeongguk doesn't want to know.)

And then Jeongguk is bearing down on the thing he's hunting, the thing the circle has given him to sustain him until the next full moon, his teeth bared, his eyes slitted, his mouth over it's throat -

"Jeongguk," Yoongi says softly, unafraid. His hair is longer than it was when Jeongguk left him, and he's wearing a long white slip that seems to glow with a sort of luminescence that reminds Jeongguk of the mushrooms that cluster around the circle, and his feet are bare and his long arms and his long neck are pale and unmarred and crooked for ease of access. His body is warm.

Jeongguk stops with his jaws open over Yoongi's trachea. Every time Yoongi's heart beats, he feels the skin thud up and press against his longest tooth, his right canine; in the times between breaths there is a gap between them and Jeongguk aches to have it filled.

"What are you waiting for?" Yoongi asks. His hands are splayed out where Jeongguk has knocked him to the forest floor, defenceless, and although in his periphery Jeongguk can see the fingers twitching, Yoongi makes no effort to move. Jeongguk has a paw square on his chest, although it isn't muddying the white slip.

Breath huffs on Yoongi's neck. His skin is cold as marble; Jeongguk can see condensation forming on his throat and running down, at right angles with the ground.

"What are you waiting for?" Yoongi repeats, and his heart beats again and Jeongguk's mouth is full of the taste of him, "I want this as much as you do."

He tastes of milk and honey, desperately, painfully sweet. Jeongguk rips through him, looking for the meat, but all he can find are mouthfuls of white cloud and silk, totally devoid of substance. Nobody can see him but the moon.

Nobody bears witness to the crime. It is as victimless as it possibly could be, apart from the bloody clumps of hair that litter the forest floor. 

Yoongi is sleeping in his bed barely a mile away. Jeongguk put him there himself; he has nothing to worry about, and the meat is really, beautifully sweet. 

On the day after St Stephen's, Yoongi drags himself out of bed with a strange tender feeling in his stomach and along his neck. When he looks in the mirror he finds red arcs pressed into the skin, as though he's slept on something with a hard edge to it, although he shouldn't have; all the same, the marks fade to almost nothing within an hour, and after he's had coffee and a bowl of porridge for late breakfast, he packs his gifts into a shopping bag and sets out on the now-familiar walk to the coven house across the fields. The cats cling to his heels, needy for attention as though he's starved them of it for a long time, which is another strange thing - Yoongi's spent every day for the last three months in their company.

Maybe they're getting spoilt. They're getting really big, Izzy had cooed through the fuzzy video camera, last night when he and her and Gerry had called to have a virtual sort of Christmas party, Yoongi, what are you feeding them?

Yoongi had laughed, a little uncomfortably. I dunno. Maybe the Irish air agrees with them.

Spanner had stretched, and it had been so easy to enlarge him, to see instead of pedalling cat's paws the thick spread of a lion touching the camera, delicately touching only what he can't destroy.

He doesn't bother ringing the doorbell anymore; he knows it'll be lying open. There's nothing that can come for the coven that is more dangerous, more of a threat, than they will be, and Yoongi isn't even a blip on the radar. "Hey!" He shouts into the house, taking his boots off at the mat, "It's Yoongi!"

Jeongguk and Hoseok are the first to come barrelling down the stairs, and where Hoseok stops at the foot of them, Jeongguk continues on until he crashes into Yoongi, picking him up and squeezing him, his face buried in Yoongi's shoulder. "Missed you," he says, although it's been just over three days, "How are you?"

“Good,” Yoongi giggles when Jeongguk lifts him. “Tired. I slept funny the other night. How are you?”

“Good,” Jeongguk says, and then frowns, “Slept funny how?”

In truth, Yoongi had another one of those dreams that ended with him and Jeongguk on the forest floor, mostly naked, something Yoongi really doesn’t feel like admitting right now. “Weird dreams,” he says, holding out his bag of gifts for Hoseok to take. 

That seems to be the wrong thing to say. Jeongguk looks even more uncomfortable, and Yoongi wonders for a heart-stopping second whether he knows, somehow, but - 

"Yoongi!" Taehyung shouts, leaning over the banisters in only a pair of pyjama bottoms and fluffy socks with penguins on them, "Happy Christmas! Do you want your gift now or later or never?"

The coven floods down the stairs in bits and pieces, and as a collective somehow the kettle is set on the hotplate of the range and a large teapot is filled with four or five teabags, and mugs are retrieved from the cupboard above the sink and someone fills the toaster with an ongoing rotation of burnt toast and warm bread, depending on preference. Namjoon gives Yoongi a hug; Seokjin gives Yoongi a kiss on the cheek; Hoseok dances him around the kitchen as soon as Jimin fiddles with the radio, as an upbeat version of the Wild Rover fills the air. Jeongguk just smiles at him.

Yoongi wishes he would look a little less besotted. It makes all of this just a little bit harder than it needs to be.

"How was your full moon?" He asks, once greetings have been performed and he gets to sit down in one of the soft, sinking sofas in the lounge, while the rest of them spread out into the kitchen and begin to eat everything in sight. "I mean... was it fun? Did you... get what you wanted to?"

"End of year treat," Hoseok says dreamily, staring off into the middle distance with his chin tucked into his palm, "Usually we get one thing to hunt all six of us - four of us, I mean, but on full moons in December we get one thing for each of us. Me and Seokjinnie got this beautiful doe, and she divided herself into two of them towards the end, so we got one each. I've never been so full in my life. Namjoonie got - what, a brace of rabbits?" Namjoon nods, and Hoseok continues, "And Jeonggukkie got - huh. What did you get, Gukkie?"

"Um. Rabbits as well," Jeongguk says. He's leaning beside the toaster eating nutella with a spoon from the jar, but when the conversation turns to him he looks suddenly uncomfortable.

He's lying, something says in the back of Yoongi's head. What is he lying about? Why would he lie in the first place?

"Tea, Yoongi?" Namjoon calls from the range, "Or coffee? We're having dinner tonight. Turkey and ham."

"I got the coke," Hoseok adds to that, holding up a bottle of red cola in each hand, "We're gonna boil it in this for like... oh, if we put it in now it'll be ready for evening, right? For like six hours. It'll be really nice. What do you usually have?"

"Oh, not much," Yoongi lifts his arm to let Jeongguk wriggle into his side and put his head on Yoongi's thigh, "Me and my friends got together at my apartment last year, but we didn't really cook. My oven in the city sucked. I think we ordered Thai in the end and watched something really soppy with the cats. This is already so much nicer."

That makes both Hoseok and Namjoon and Seokjin glow with the sort of pride Yoongi is astonished he can provoke in anyone, least of all them. Jeongguk makes a happy little murmur and buries his face in Yoongi's leg.

"You're like wolf catnip," Jimin says to Yoongi, handing him a cup of hot tea and a plate with a generous slice of sweet, moist lemon cake. "You know, all they do is talk about you. It would be embarrassing if it wasn't, like, super endearing."

Yoongi burrows into the sofa, into Jeongguk, his cheeks flashing scarlet. "Uh-"

"Shut up, Jimin," Hoseok throws a teatowel at Jimin's head, coming to sit in the lounge himself. He settles in the hanging basket before smiling sheepishly at Yoongi. "Well, you know, it's kind of not our fault. Not - uh. You were given to us by the moon, right?"

"Don't say that to me like I'm meant to take that for granted," Yoongi points at him, sipping his tea.

Seokjin laughs. The migration is happening, slowly but surely, although Taehyung, Seokjin, and Namjoon are all setting up the parts of the dinner that need to slow-cook. "I thought Hoseokie would have told you. He's big into the moon giving gifts. It’s part of the religion, I guess. You know - you showed up just on time to stop everything happening last month, and there was this little space in the coven and you totally filled it up. The moon sent you."

"Exactly," Hoseok nods over his tea, his ears pink, "I told you I wasn't wrong. You can believe in the moon, you know, like a goddess - Jimin just makes fun because he's new-"

"No more new than me," Jeongguk says with his voice muffled by Yoongi's jeans.

"Nor me," Seokjin says. "That's not the reason, Hoseokie, it's just 'cause Jimin's a dick."

Yoongi laughs, but he burns to know.

Taehyung comes into the room in a thin robe and house slippers with pom-poms on the toes, his hair mussed with sleep and his eyes heavy; he spends ten minutes napping on Jimin's shoulder, and then walks across to the radio balanced on top of one of the cupboards in the lounge, and kneels down, pulling out a CD with something written on the front in red marker. "Good morning, Yoongi," he says, although it's a little past noon, "How are you? How did you sleep?"

"Fine," Yoongi says.

Taehyung winks at him and slips the CD on, and then shuffles back to lie against Jimin. Fleetwood Mac pours into the room; Yoongi stretches his leg out as far as it will go to kick the CD case into his sight, and smiles. It has taehyung's mix written on the contents page, and a heart drawn with an arrow striking through it. No prizes for who made it.

Yoongi almost falls asleep on the couch; he lies against the pillow, Jeongguk as good as any blanket, the smell of a warm cinnamon candle and the cooking ham filling the room, the soft murmurs as Seokjin and Hoseok chat, the sound of Taehyung singing, the sound of Jimin and Namjoon bickering over something. His eyes feel pleasantly heavy and his limbs pleasantly distant, and were it not for how distressingly close his dreams have been recently, he feels as though he might really have fallen asleep there.

"Madeline and everyone say they want to come over," Namjoon interrupts the ambient chatter, and both Yoongi and Jeongguk mumble into life, "She's about to book tickets for the start of January, but she says she doesn't know when she'll leave - Susannah's got something she's researching, and I think they all want a break. How does that sound?"

"Awesome," Jeongguk rubs a sleepy eye, "So... they're just staying?"

"For at least a fortnight," Namjoon reads from his phone.

In the kitchen, Jimin cheers.

"Good. I have shit to do with Daniel," Seokjin says, stretching out on the other sofa, "It's been ages. I miss them."

Yoongi angles his face down to Jeongguk. "How many of them are there?"

"Only four," Jeongguk says, and reaches his hand up to cover Yoongi's, almost unaware he's done it. Yoongi wants to freeze, but he doesn't want the attention to stop. "Madeline is a wolf, born, Daniel's a vampire, and Amandi and Susannah are witches, but they're different kinds."

"Mmm," Yoongi takes the risk and turns his hand so he's holding Jeongguk back. "A born wolf? Is there a difference?"

"Only in experience," Seokjin says in the silence. Jeongguk seems almost to have fallen back asleep on Yoongi's lap. "Born wolves and born, y'know, practitioners, they're just raised in the tradition. I was, um, I guess I was bitten, so I had this short sharp introduction, but it's not all like that. Like how your introduction was, I guess."

Yoongi wants to know. He doesn't want to ask.

"I was born," Hoseok volunteers, thankfully, "I lived in a wolf-majority pack in Wales. Little ways away from Aberystwyth. We had witches and magicians and a banshee and a girl who was a quarter faerie on her mother's side, but it was mostly wolves. About twenty of us, at our peak. I went to primary school in the village but I was homeschooled from eleven, just because of, like, growing up - y'know. Wolf things. It was fun. I can't imagine being bitten into it. I was always raised to respect the moon, just like… well, like a goddess. She is, you know. But being bitten… no, I can’t imagine it."

"Neither can I," Seokjin jokes, something that flies over Yoongi's head, but nobody else laughs.

"Witches can blossom at any time, too," Jimin pipes up from the kitchen island. He's got a bowl, and over it he holds a peach and a knife, and he's slicing chunks off in stripes around the circle of it. "Me and Tae are basically the same age, but he came into his powers when he was, what, eighteen? And we met when I was twenty and I'd had them barely three weeks. But then there are people-"

"Gwyneth in my old pack," Hoseok says -

"Yeah, sure, Gwyneth - people who are born witches just like wolves. Magic is really volatile. The host body needs to be ready for it before it presents."

"I never thought about that," Yoongi says, genuinely interested, making a mental reminder to try and read about it later. "That's cool." He looks down at Jeongguk's head, and strokes his thumb along Jeongguk's knuckles.

"I was bitten," Jeongguk says into Yoongi's knee.

He says nothing more, and Yoongi doesn't know why, but there's no more conversation after that.

Dinner comes later than Yoongi had expected; after toast and buns and coffee and tea are distributed, there's a period of about twenty minutes where they drift, half-napping together in the lounge, and then Jeongguk and Taehyung squirm up and vanish, returning in five minutes with a stack of yellowed cardboard boxes much-repaired, and a rattling tin that says Real Scottish Shortbread on the top in raised letters.

The real Scottish shortbread turns out to be a tin full of dice, sixes, eights, tens, and one sheepish twenty-sided one, as well as a pack of faded cards and rattling plastic counters for ludo, wooden discs for drafts, and small die-cast cars and hot-irons and single boots for Monopoly. "Ludo or Monopoly?" Taehyung holds up a box in each hand.

Yoongi makes a face. "I can't pick. They're both fun."

"Oh, don't worry," Jeongguk says, and grins, "We just need to pick which one we're playing first."

Yoongi laughs, and they all laugh with him.

Before they begin, Seokjin vanishes out of the house and returns with two buckets, one in each hand, full of neatly-split logs of the same kind Jeongguk had brought for Yoongi. "Lighter, anyone?" He asks, and Hoseok ducks around the back of the chair nearest the fireplace to find a block of something white and heavy that stinks of petroleum. The fire he lays is a neat little log-house, with a chunk of this white brick nestled inside it, and when he strikes a long match into his construction it doesn't take long for a merry little blaze to emerge. The warmth suffuses through the room quickly, and Yoongi finds he's able to shrug the blanket off his shoulders and join Taehyung, Jeongguk, and Seokjin all sitting on the floor, perching on his knees.

Namjoon sets the kettle and another coffee pot up while the rest of them start squabbling over who gets to have the red counter, and whether they should play with two of the red six-sided dice, or just one and roll it twice, or only move a little bit.

"Monopoly?" Yoongi guesses, sliding closer to the board Taehyung's setting up in the centre of the floor, as the rest of the coven arrange themselves in a circle around it. "Can I be the iron?"

Jeongguk flicks it his way. "Only if I get to be the dog."

As it turns out, and it's something that Yoongi finds helplessly endearing, they have four dog-shaped counters sourced from different boxes, and someone has painted each one a different colour on the top of the shiny heads - red, yellow, purple, and black. Jeongguk gets the red one, Hoseok snatches for the yellow, Namjoon for the black, and Seokjin for the purple.

Jimin takes the car. Taehyung uses a little ludo counter instead, a bowling-pin shape white with purple stripes.

The game begins, and instantly gets vicious. The house rules are bewildering and confusing and Yoongi instantly gets lost, but it also doesn't really seem to matter because every round is followed by intense, serious discussion about the legality of the actions taken. Yoongi buys a few squares, but he finds it's much more interesting to stop really trying with the game and just watch everyone fight as though there's nothing more important in the world. The room fills with the smell of sweet ham.

Yoongi goes out first, and then Seokjin; Yoongi because he finds it far more entertaining to watch, and Seokjin because he gets mercilessly trapped in the spaces Jimin and Taehyung have already developed. The competition grows fiercer - three more rounds of tea are made and viciously consumed - before Jimin is decreed the winner.

"Ludo next!" Taehyung waves the board over his head, and then frowns, "Or presents?"

"Presents, surely," Namjoon says, and suddenly Yoongi is bombarded with parcels.

His bag is unpacked and distributed, and wrapped parcels and folded gift bags and things covered in duct-tape and newspaper are retrieved from under sofas and inside cupboards - we play a game of who's stash gets found last, Jeongguk whispers - and every person sprawled on the floor or in the hanging basket ends up with seven packages, all in all. Yoongi feels the pressure of being the newest to the table, and suddenly hopes he's hit right.

Jeongguk unwraps his from Yoongi first, and flushes hot scarlet.

"What is it!" Jimin flings a ball of wrapping paper at his head, "Don't be a dick, what is it!"

"Just some hot chocolate," Jeongguk murmurs, but Yoongi can see his fingers dancing over the mug, pressing against the chunks of hardened chocolate, "Thanks, Yoongi."

He'd given Taehyung and Jimin a set of glass jars and wooden spoons that Albert in the library had told him about; for Hoseok, a warm yellow cardigan, which the lady in the bakery had told him Hoseok had wanted for at least a month, for Seokjin, a copy of the only Murakami book he hasn't read yet, and for Namjoon, a red-leather notebook with creamy, hand-bound pages. They go down well - Seokjin and Hoseok tackle him from both sides, and when he's caught on the ground the rest of them fling themselves on top, Taehyung giggling maniacally, and it takes Yoongi shrieking for the sake of his lungs to get them off.

"Open ours, open ours," Taehyung and Jimin hand him two wrapped presents of the same dimensions, and when Yoongi opens them he sees another layer of wrapping paper, taped tightly to the glass jars inside. "Don't open that layer 'til you get home," Jimin says, giving Hoseok a funny glance that seems to go unnoticed by everyone but Yoongi, "It's a secret."

"Okay," Yoongi says slowly, setting them aside, "Thank you guys."

Hoseok has given him a basket with a tartan covering; when Yoongi opens it he finds a loaf of poppyseed bread, four blueberry scones wrapped in brown paper, and two small jars, one of honey and one of gooseberry jam. He blushes when Yoongi thanks him, but when Yoongi hugs him, he hugs back just as tightly as he can.

Seokjin's gift is a small paper booklet, twenty or so pages, the printing wobbly and the stapling clearly home-done, the pages folded and faded and the cover bent out of shape. It's titled The Worship, and under that, Inge Temmel/Reid Reynolds. Yoongi looks at him, a question written on his brows.

"It was given to me when I had just been bitten," Seokjin explains, rubbing the back of his neck, "Inge gave me the translation. This is my copy. It - it's like, an introduction to everything. Magic. It really helped me out."

"Thank you," Yoongi says earnestly, and then again, "Thank you."

Namjoon gives him a rough smile and a small parcel; a wrapped bag of coffee beans that smell of nutmeg and chocolate, and another pamphlet, this one fresher than Seokjin's, called The Call of the Moon. It smells of fresh ink, and the pages are made of stiff card; the title is in a homemade serif, underneath a hastily-scribbled drawing of something that could be generously called a wolf. "I got it off Madeline," he says, not meeting Yoongi's eye. "Nobody knows who's written it, but it's pretty much the oldest guide to wolves specifically we have still written. I thought... it might be a help."

Yoongi sets it on top of Seokjin's pamphlet, genuinely touched. "It will be. I - thank you. It will be."

Jeongguk's gift is the last one, a slim box wrapped in brown paper. When Yoongi gets to it, Jeongguk shifts awkwardly, and smiles.

It is a thin bronze chain, with a small cat paw dangling from a link at the bottom. "Um-"

"It's protective," Jeongguk hurries to interrupt, as Yoongi untangles it from the box and Jimin wolf-whistles, "It's got stuff in it - charms on it - it's got stuff - it's protective. It'll stop you from - from magic, if anyone tries to do - what Deirdre did - it's protective. It stops that. It's protective."

"It's protective," Yoongi repeats, and turns around, holding the two ends out to Jeongguk. "Do it up?"

Jeongguk's warm fingers brush the back of his neck. Yoongi shivers.

He feels protected.

Chapter Text

The wolf and the moon are one. If you are wolf and man you are neither wolf nor man; you are something created by the moon, given to the world by her. She gives you gifts through the circles, through the trees, the places in the world where magic is allowed to leak through to the other side. The wolf and the man are one. 

The shape of the circle is the most holy one we have. Connection without disruption. Hands clasping hands. The world can be captured in a circle, and each circle is a reflection of the world it holds within and without it.

• An extract from The Call of the Moon, author and date unknown. 

December passes, and January comes to take her place, and a new year settles on Follie like a blanket of fresh snow. The soil still freezes under the trees, and the animals still shiver for warmth in their burrows, and almost every day there is traffic along the two fields that separate the little white cottage from the large house on the hill. 

(It is a pot, he discovers, full of greenish goop. When you are ready, Taehyung has written on a brown label.)

(He puts it on his window-ledge and tries to ignore it, sickness curdling in his stomach at the thought.)

Yoongi finds himself falling deeper and deeper. Jeongguk’s smile - his hair - the way his eyes dart from his hands to Yoongi’s face when he’s saying something a little private - the way he sits in space, sometimes, as though he doesn’t know yet how much of it he occupies. The warmth of his skin. The gentle feeling behind his touch. He is beautiful.

Yoongi knows he’s already fallen. He just wants to hold off the consequences for as long as he can. He likes Jeongguk. 

That’s kind of the problem. 

The circle stones don’t absorb heat, but neither do they reflect it, and so they sit hulking and cold chunks of old stone and wait for Yoongi to come to them. He still hasn’t managed to reach the circle in his waking hours, but asleep now almost every night, or every other night, he wakes up near the circle. Sometimes Jeongguk is there, standing prettily and blushing pink down to his bare navel, and sometimes the circle shows him scenes of the forest at rest - a war, fierce and battled, among the little blue-tit birds that fight for the rare nuts on the ground, and the architectural designs of the woodlice that build their home underneath the logs fallen to the ground. It becomes commonplace for him to spend most of his nights in the woods, learning. Always learning. 

Always Jeongguk. His kisses taste of the dreams they’re made of, but his hands are warm, and he acts just like Jeongguk does in the waking hours. 

Yoongi hates leaving his dreams on the nights Jeongguk is with him. 

The full moon in December is a frightening one. Richard is restrained, but he can hear the music coming from outside, and the crowds of people, and the lights, and the cold that floods through the crack in the window and blows across his exposed arms. He knows wolves are meant to run hot, but he doesn't. He doesn't know why. Domhnall says it's another failing of the bitten wolf - another proof, as if more was needed, that the moon hates him far more than anyone ever has, or ever will.

In a way, that comforts him. This is the worst it can get. This is the most he can withstand.

And then just as Richard has committed himself to spending another full moon struggling and shouting until his throat is slick with blood and his wrists are bruised with rope and burnt against the carpet he sits against, Saoirse and Domhnall come back in. Saoirse is a wolf, thin and ragged and grey, her eyes amber and slitted wicked with the high of the moon in her. Domhnall is in his man-form, broad and determined and naked as the day he was presumably born.

He kneels by Richard. "Don't," Richard says, out of his mind with fear, "Make it stop."

"I will, I will," Domhnall whispers soothingly, and he places one broad hand splayed across Richard's cheek and across his jaw, his thumb pressing down just heavy enough to remind Richard that he is thin and underfed and Domhnall is not. "Don't worry. This will all stop in a moment."

Saoirse pads out of the room, and returns with a pair of wire-cutters in her mouth; another second and she has the kitchen scissors, too, both of which she drops at Domhnall's side.

He thanks her. He can be terribly polite, Domhnall, when he's doing something for his own gain.

Richard lies still. He hasn't been let out at all since he killed all those people, Edie told him, since he went mad in Dublin and had to be restrained. This is all for his own good. Of course, he knows that, but it's good to be reminded sometimes when he sees the freedom the others afford themselves.

Domhnall, as nicely as he ever acts, cuts first the chains, and then the ropes, one limb at a time. Richard lets one hand and the other fall into his lap, staring limply and blindly ahead, willing for whatever Domhnall has in store for him. He doesn't have will anymore. He gave that all up when he made the moon angry at him, and now all he is is a vehicle for the desires of others.

"Hello, pretty," Domhnall says, and kisses him so hard it bruises, "Do you want to go and have some fun?"

Richard goes, obediently, and has some fun.

Animal attacks near Temple Bar on Christmas Eve. Five hospitalised, one in critical condition. Residents near this area are reminded of Dublin's laws surrounding large or potentially dangerous animals. Partygoers are warned to travel in groups, and where possible, use public or private transport as opposed to walking. Rosalind Burns, TD, will raise with the council the possibility of further infrastructure to protect those out after dark in the 'party districts' of Dublin.

"Madeline's coming next week," Jeongguk says, when Yoongi opens the door to him in the late afternoon, a few days after the new year. "She texted Namjoonie, and she's bringing everyone with her! Are you excited?"

"Um. Sure?" Yoongi hesitantly offers, stepping back from the door to let Jeongguk in before he shuts it behind him. "Yeah, I am."

"Are you okay?" Jeongguk is pink-cheeked, his hair flattened and barely peeking out of the woolly hat he has crammed over it. He's carrying a takeaway bag which he hands to Yoongi, the smell of fish and chips steaming into the room, "You seem a bit quiet."

"I guess." Yoongi sits at the table and starts unwrapping the food as Jeongguk fetches plates and cutlery. "I guess I'm worried about Deirdre. About the Cullises. About - did you ever tell Namjoon what you found me-?"

"I don't know what I'd tell him. What I'd tell any of them. So I just didn't," Jeongguk says placidly, handing Yoongi a plate, "As for Deirdre, I'm not going to worry until she comes back, if she ever does at all. We don't know if she was in the Red Circle or not - Taehyung didn't know if Claudia was, back when all that happened with Jimin, so I'm ready to bet it was just two crazies on a mission of their own, or with a totally thin connection to the whole thing. You got them."

"I got them," Yoongi says slowly. He tips half the chips onto Jeongguk's plate, and the rest onto his; they're hot, and the smell of warm vinegar and salt makes him cosier than anything could. "So you think I had something to do with -"

"Well, I got the one in the pump-house, but the one in the woods that had you was dealt with by the time I got there, definitely," Jeongguk says. He unwraps a fish, battered and hot, and a few long strips of chicken, "I don't know why you're worrying so much. It doesn't mean anything."

"If you say so," Yoongi mutters, reluctant still to mention anything about the dreams.

(If he talks about them he has to confess to Jeongguk's role in them, and he isn't sure he can face doing that yet. He isn't sure if he can handle it.)

And there's another thing he doesn't even want to think about, but of course, he has to. The green paste that Jeongguk used on his foot that night all those months ago - months? but it feels like years - the paste that Jimin claims must be used on someone magical to work. The secret Christmas present, something the two witches clearly think must still be kept secret from the rest of the coven. 

Yoongi doesn't know quite why, but he trusts Jimin in this instance. He's strange and tricky and meaning twists itself into shapes in his mouth, but he wouldn't lie.

Not to Yoongi, and not about this.

"There's something I haven't told you," Yoongi says. Many things. For a second, he forgets which one he's about to tell Jeongguk, and his tongue trips over his teeth trying to get the sentence out, while Jeongguk looks curious and wary over a forkful of fish. "I - Jimin told me something. That green stuff you used on me, that night you found me in the woods?"

"Yeah, the healing paste," Jeongguk nods, his brows sliding away from their peak, "Yeah. They use it all the time to hurry up the heals they want to get over them so they can get back to, like, making Frankenstein monsters or whatever it is they do in the attic. Y'know? It just speeds up healing. I told you that."

"I know you did, but Jimin told me something else," Yoongi kicks Jeongguk's foot under the table, and lets his socked toes sit on the cap of Jeongguk's boots.

"I'm listening."

"He said," Yoongi feels foolish to even speak the words aloud, as though this is the line in the sand he has drawn, "He said that it only works on people with magic. Or, like, magical. He said the stuff has to be activated by the body it's applied to. Was he just fucking with me?"

There is a very long pause, during which Jeongguk looks shocked - and then sheepish - and then worried. "I don't know."

"Jeongguk, you're a werewolf."

"Yeah, and I don't… I don’t know."

Frustration clambers up Yoongi's throat, from where it's been sitting for months now. "You can't just say that. I'm the one - Jeongguk, you're the one who gave me a big speech in the woods about magic. I - why don't you know? Is he bullshitting? Is it a secret witch thing?"

"I don't know that either," Jeongguk says, colour soaking his cheeks, a deep embarrassed red. "It might be. I... do you want me to ask the others?"

"No!"

"Well, I don't know, Yoongi. I don't know a lot of shit. I'm, like, two years in front of you with magic and shit - it was two years ago I was bitten in the first place, so I'm sorry if I didn't-"

"I just wanted to know if you were tricking me," Yoongi says. His mouth feels dry.

"Tricking you?"

"Jimin seemed to imply-"

"Jimin is a witch! He gets off on that sort of shit! Before he met Taehyung, he was eating people in clubs!"

"How was I meant to know that!"

"How am I meant to know this!"

Yoongi fights the urge to throw something non-violent, like a soggy chip. "I was just wondering. Y'know. Since Jimin implied I was a fucking witch and didn't know about it."

"You're not," Jeongguk says firmly.

And for some reason that gets to Yoongi more than anything.

"You're not," Jeongguk says, with far more finality than he means to. His neck feels hot and his eyes unfocused, the way he always gets when he has to think about how far behind he is compared to everyone else in this world, and he hadn't expected it from Yoongi. From everyone else, in little ways, but not from Yoongi.

Yoongi gets paler, when he's annoyed, and right now his cheeks have leaked colour like pierced clouds. His hands are gripping very tight to each other, his fingers white at the tips. "Forgive me for trying to, I dunno, work on a hint then. Deirdre thought I was a witch. Jimin said that about the stuff, and I thought you were trying to - I don't know, I thought you were trying to-"

"Fucking trick you? Into what? Into what? What would I have done if I'd gotcha, Yoongi, you're a witch!"

"That's the point, Jeongguk! I don't know! I don't know anything about anything, I'm completely blind here, and you don't know and you won't tell me!"

"I won't tell you because I can't! I was only just bit, like, two years ago. Nobody threw me a big party with fucking helpful booklets and Christmas music. You probably already know more about it than I do." And immediately he regrets it. Yoongi isn't the target of his anger, not really, but he is a great catalyst.

(And the frustration at night builds within Jeongguk until he thinks he might burst. They lie in the woods, and Yoongi on top of him, and Yoongi below him, and when he wakes up and remembers that none of it is real he feels so angry-)

"I just want to know what I'm becoming," Yoongi says, and he sounds far more subdued than Jeongguk had meant him to. "I don't want to ask them all. I don't want to set it off. I just wanted to see if you knew anything about it."

Jeongguk can feel something horrible and angry about to come out of him. He stands up. He hasn't thought about Domhnall, not properly, in months - almost a year, apart from those few bitter reminders the coven have tried to prevent from giving to him. He doesn't want to start thinking about him now.

He leaves. He has to. He doesn't want to say something he'll regret, and he doesn't want Yoongi to know. 

The door slams behind him.

Jeongguk stamps through the woods, the frozen ground of the new year unsatisfying under his feet, refusing to melt and bend the way he wants it to. He knows he hasn't been fair, entirely, but he's too annoyed to really consider that; at the moment all he feels is the raging, burning embarrassment of not knowing half so much as everyone else. As even Jimin, who came into his magic very late. As even Seokjin, who's meant to be like him, albeit bitten just a few years earlier. There's no excuse for the way Jeongguk is.

Healing paste. Of course it only works with magical activation - that's at the core of everything the two witches create, or otherwise they'd have no magic left within themselves. Jeongguk should know that anyway. That isn't information that's been kept from him, that's something he knows anyway.

Something he was too stupid and flustered to remember, evidently. Like that makes him feel any better.

The woods are thick, despite their bare branches, and it doesn't take Jeongguk long to lose himself in them, regardless of how often he comes to wander. He doesn't want to go home, and he doesn't want to go back to Yoongi and hash through the whole ugly thing, from beginning to end, as he knows he'll have to. Great. How long can he avoid him, before it becomes obvious?

Not long. He guesses he'll have to use it.

Helllo, little thing.

He isn't expecting the voice, and when it comes he's so startled he can't bring himself to really do anything but stare up above him, and then around him, and then below him, trying to source where it's coming from. It might be male, female, or something outside of that, and he gets a feeling the voice isn't even speaking any language he understands; the noises, outside his ears, sound like the leaves touching one another, the trees whispering, but as soon as they creep inside his head they form meaning. I did not expect to see you today.

And for some reason, the voice is familiar.

"I can move, if you like," Jeongguk says uncertainly. The circle is not the only ancient thing in the woods, near Follie, and the last thing he wants to do is annoy something older than time itself in favour of a good mope.

No, little thing. Do not trouble yourself. Have you fallen into disagreement with one other?

"I suppose I have," Jeongguk says. He doesn't want this to be the first conversation an ancient being has, after years of sleeping in the woods. That would never do. "Can you tell me who - what you are?"

No, I cannot. Can you tell me the nature of the disagreement? This other is familiar to me. His smell. His breath. His leaves, on the end of his branches. I know all this, more than you think, and I will find out about it one way or the other. Curse me for my curiosity, and my impatience to learn of it before tonight.

"Tonight-"

Tell me if you wish to. If you do not, I will let you home. A path presents itself to Jeongguk then, suddenly, but not with any shifting of the trees; it is his vision which changes instead, showing him something he feels foolish to not have seen before.

Tonight. That means something. Aloud, Jeongguk says, "An argument over which of us knew the least, I think. Over which of us deserved our ignorance more."

Was a conclusion reached?

"No," Jeongguk says. He feels stupid and small here against the trunk of the tree. "No, it was not."

Do you fear you are turning into Domhnall? Withholding information that has power to him, simply because he does not know it? Do you fear the ragged claws in the shadows? The chains, the metal pipes, the human flesh?

"Don't," Jeongguk says sharply, and then, "Do you know Domhnall?" Which is a mistake. Of course it is a mistake. He should never have admitted to knowing Domhnall in the first place, himself - and he doesn't. That is a different place and a different time and a different man, and Jeongguk is not there, then, or him anymore.

I know everything, little thing. Do you doubt me? And then: Can you bring him to me? He is mine, you know. 

Jeongguk gets up and begins staggering towards the path that he knows will lead him home, without bothering to reply to the last bit. He’s being used to get to Yoongi. Being used - that, at least, is something he is accustomed to. His brain feels like lead.

He doesn't want to remember.

You have to.

He doesn't want to.

(Domhnall is so kind to him. He brings him sandwiches from the Centra, bacon and chicken and mayo ones the way Jeongguk likes, and he soothes him when Jeongguk cries out in the night, and he reads him aloud the articles in the newspaper and online about the deaths that have happened because of him. It is because the moon doesn't love you, Domhnall says sweetly, his hand running through Jeongguk's hair, Not like we love you. We are a pack, you and me and Saoirse and Evie and Edie. The moon doesn't love you, but we do.)

(Domhnall is never kind to him. He hits Saoirse - Saoirse hits him - they have raging fights where Jeongguk can see, and neither of them win and neither of them ever start it.)

(Edie tells him that it's to do with the wolfish nature of their pack. Most magical pacts are made up of different skills, she says, brushing his greasy hair, feeding him soggy McDonalds chips. But not our pact. Our pack. We are all wolves, but it causes friction, because both of them have the instinct to lead.)

(Jeongguk shivers at night. Domhnall does not permit him a blanket. He says that the moon will feel his warmth, and punish him.)

(They let him out when the moon is hidden under a cloudy night, and Jeongguk does not know what he does.)

(Blood tastes so metallic.)

(Iron enough to make a nail. Nails enough to crucify a man.)

(He looks at his hands, but they are not pierced. Domhnall slaps him. He does not cry.) 

"Jimin, I want to talk to you."

Yoongi has been waiting almost a week to catch Jimin alone, an awkward week when he and Jeongguk smile at each other across the dining table and there's a distinct lack of him sitting on Yoongi's front doorstep. The cats aren't happy with him, he knows - Jeongguk's body is a lot warmer than Yoongi's, and their priority will always be the comfiest nap. But Yoongi is sick of having the least information, and he's sick of accidentally putting his foot in his mouth when all he wants to do is know something more. More.

So that leads him to here, in the middle of the night, sitting outside the coven house shivering in his biggest, warmest coat, his hands tucked into the mittens Izzy bought him. He knows Jeongguk probably knows he's out here, but he also knows Jeongguk is just as stubborn as Yoongi.

Jimin's window up in the attic is open, and it's the only one with any lights on. Yoongi had waited in the woods, pretending not to talk to the trees, until one by one all the lights in the other rooms had gone out.

"Jimin," he says again, at a normal volume. "I know you can hear me. I want to talk to you."

After a few minutes, a dark-haired head pops out the window and frowns down at him. Jimin has a white bandage over most of his throat, and something on his cheek; from his shoulders, Yoongi can see that his top half at least is clothed in pretty white pyjamas, the sort that button up the front and have a folded collar, rimmed in pink. "Don't rouse the whole castle," Jimin says, frowning, "I'm coming. I'm coming."

He climbs out the window and Yoongi has to swallow his shout to be careful - Jimin's hands grip the edge of the frame, and when his bare feet touch the roof they don't slip at all. His fingertips, Yoongi sees, are far sharper than they usually are, and they dig into the slate, and slowly Jimin is able to control his fall down the sloping roof; a glance across it shows thousands of similar scoring, curved, five-stroke patterns falling downwards. It isn't hard to connect the dots.

At the drainpipe, Jimin looks down and winks at him. The thing on his cheek is a patch of medical gauze, which has been heavily taped down, one end of it reaching the tip of his nose, the other, the extreme reach of his jaw. "Try not to make any more noise," he says, and jumps off the roof.

Yoongi manages to cap it off at an intaken breath, but it takes a lot of work. Jimin lands in front of him, his feet slamming into the pale stones that surround the yard in front of the house, and Yoongi can see how instantly the skin shaves off him, how quickly the cuts and bruises form and begin to weep. "Jesus Christ."

"This better be good, Yoongi," Jimin says, running his fingers - a perfectly normal shape, size, and length now - through his hair, "I was about to go to bed. There was a hole in my face half an hour ago."

"I guess I know what you used to patch it up," Yoongi says. He's freezing cold, and he's in a thick coat, three socks, and his warmest boots; he can imagine that for Jimin, this is fine, but all Yoongi wants to do is have this conversation and go to bed.

Jimin smiles. His teeth, sharp, dig into his lip. "Quite."

"Jeongguk isn't talking to me."

"Is that relevant?"

"I tried to ask him about it and he freaked out," Yoongi says. He stamps his feet into the stones, and doesn't care about how loud the crunching noise is. "He hasn't spoken to me since, not really. What's wrong with it?"

"What did he say when he freaked out?" Jimin sits down on the stones, apparently unaware of the cold. "About the stuff itself? About what that means for you?"

Ignoring that, Yoongi shakes his head. "About how he didn't know, about how he couldn't have been expected to know - which makes me think - Jimin, were you lying? Did you mean it, or are you just trying to scare me? Get rid of me? Why did you tell me?"

"Huh," and Jimin actually looks surprised, or at least thoughtful, his dark eyes staring at nothing in the trees, "Huh. Fuck. I never thought that he wouldn't know. 'Course he wouldn't. No, Yoongi, I wasn't lying to you, but neither was Jeonggukkie. He's probably upset, but it isn't at you."

"Sure fucking feels like it."

Jimin sighs. In the dark light, nothing but the pale waning moon to see by, he looks just as inhuman as Yoongi suspects him to be. "Maybe I fucked up telling you, but I didn't even think you'd ask Jeongguk. I thought you'd work it out on your own."

"I did. And then I asked him about it and-"

"And he freaked, yeah. I know. Listen, do you know how long it's been since Jeonggukkie was bitten - no, no, but since he came into the coven?"

"Not really," Yoongi casts his mind back, "No, I don't think he mentioned it."

"Makes sense. He doesn't really like to even think about it, never mind talk about it."

"Why not?"

Jimin gives him a look. A look. "If you really want to know, and you care about Jeongguk even a little bit, wait and then ask him. All I'm saying is there's history there, right, and that's why he was mad. It wasn't at you. Not even a little bit. It was all at himself."

Yoongi sits down on the ground too, uncaring of the rough texture below him. He wraps his arms around his knees. "I just want to know what's going on. What's happening to me," he whispers, "And I don't want the whole world to know about it. That's the only reason I asked him."

"The only reason?"

"What other reasons could there be?"

Jimin smiles and shakes his head. "Forget it. But you want to know what's happening to you? Nothing's happening to you."

"Sure doesn't feel like nothing from my end, I tell you," Yoongi stretches his foot out in front of him and circles his ankle, feeling nothing but a twitch from the top of his foot as the deadness works its way out. There isn't even a scar. "I melted a stone man, my foot fixed itself, and these dreams-"

"Dreams," Jimin interrupts, his whole face changing in an instant, "What kind of dreams?"

And still Yoongi feels like he shouldn't say. Like he's encroaching on someone else's privacy. Jeongguk's. "Dreams about the woods. About the forest. There's this weird circle of stones in the middle of the trees, but I don't know if it's real or just something I invented. A voice. Shows me things. I saw ants, last time, coming back from a war. Sometimes I sleep. Sometimes I run. I don't know, really, but it happens almost every night, now. It only started when I moved here, so like I said, it really feels like something's changed. I stayed the same."

"You stayed the same," Jimin echoes, "Are you sure about that? Completely sure?"

"Yes." Yoongi shutters, he can feel himself doing it, but he doesn't want to think about that. He doesn't have the space. "I moved here to write a book, Jimin, not to find myself. I know who I am and I'm fine with that. I just wanted to know more, not stir up a whole... thing I didn't know about. Step on the nest."

"Step on the nest. Well, you did that, but I know - he knows - you didn't mean it. These dreams, now-"

"I don't want to talk about them."

Jimin sets his hand bare inches from Yoongi's, and flexes his fingers one by one. When he sets each of them down, Yoongi can see as though it was always there - the fingernails have vanished, or merged somehow with the flesh, leaving five long stubs that don't end so much as round off, healed as though that was how they had always appeared. "You don't want to talk about them, maybe, but I promise you nothing gets sorted until you do. I didn't know what I was until I talked to another witch. Taehyung, as a matter of fact. I thought I was just super fucked up."

"Another w- that is not what is happening to me."

"Yoongi," Jimin looks almost pitying, and it isn't an expression Yoongi appreciates, "What else do you call this? What else is happening to you?"

Yoongi stands up. His head hurts, and he's freezing, and he feels strangely ashamed. "Nothing. Forget I ever came."

And he runs as fast as he can towards the treeline, and Jimin watches him leave, a lion to one side of him and a panther to the other.

The woods are constraining and constricting. Every time Yoongi tries to go somewhere, he ends up here. Every argument he has, every good thing that has happened to him, every morning and every evening he comes here, and now he knows not even his dreaming hours curled up in bed with his door locked - not even they are safe from the fucking woods. The trees loom over him, smug with age accumulated.

Yoongi runs as hard as he can. The roots move out of his way, and the cats keep pace easily, although errant branches whip his exposed neck and his cheeks and tangle in his hair, pulling strands loose out his scalp, like a reminder that they can hurt him if they wanted to.

Like he doesn't know that. Fuck off.

When Yoongi was younger, he was deathly frightened of the dark. He read a book with a phrase that was meant to be helpful - though you can see nothing, no thing can see you - and he would repeat it, obsessively, under his breath with his blanket pulled over his head and a battery torch in his sweaty palm. (The torch, he remembers, was one of the ones designed for shadow shapes, but the socket the frames fitted into had broken, and it was permanently stuck casting light in the shape of a heat-warped tyrannosaurus rex.) This had been darkness in the city, which wasn't real darkness at all; one of the things that struck him so hard about moving to Ireland in the first place had been the all-encompassing blackness of it. No shadows. No light to cast them. He feels like he can never go back.

This darkness doesn't scare him anymore. He doesn't know why. There's something else here, of course there is, some huge alive presence, but it doesn't scare him.

It's because of how large the thing is, and how small Yoongi is. Do fleas have cause to be frightened of the bodies they inadvertently travel across?

He breaks through a sharp line of old trees and suddenly, he is in the clearing. The clearing. The one from his dreams, where he has lain naked with Jeongguk, where he has watched the ants proceeding, where he has sat quiet and alone with his cats, where he has stayed when he thought he was going to die -

But he is awake.

He is more awake than he has ever been in his life. He knows where this is. He's been here before.

The circle oozes age.

The stones are big and grey and moss crawls around the base of them, moss and creeping blue mushrooms, and yellow grass starved of any true sunlight by the shadow of the stones and the vast expanse of the tree branches spreading out across the plain clearing. There are no sounds, here, no birds (even in January there should be birds), no crackling of animals against sticks and stones, no singing, no shouting, not even the sound of cars from the road, which isn't all that far away from where Yoongi is standing. He perches beside the tree that rings the clearing, strangely wary of coming closer to the trees, of risking himself to see them - something about them repels him, deeply, in a way he can't put his finger on at all. He knows only that he doesn't want to touch them, and at the same time, all the space in his head is occupied with the desire to be as near them as he can make, skin to stone, muscle and blood to grass, bone to matter. Ashes to ashes.

There is no wind. The moon has hidden herself behind a passing cloud. It is a little after three in the morning. Why is he here?

Why does he have to care so much?

Why him?

He stamps that thought into the ground firmly, before it takes root, and walks one - two - three steps into the clearing, towards the nearest of the grey stones. He feels stupid. These rocks are probably older than Follie, definitely older than Follie, and they have the feel to them of something older than people, too. What does he hope to contribute that won't already have been said?

"Hello," he breathes into the still, oppressive night air, "I'm here now. Really here."

There is a pause of several seconds, and then he lets out his inhaled, held lungful. "Stupid," he mutters, "This is so stupid, this is dumb-"

Hello, little thing. You are very far from home.

He looks up so sharply his neck hurts with the snap of his muscles, and sees light there, in the middle of the circle, where there was once only a dark, lurking shadow. Light, and although there is no tear, no ripple, he gets the overwhelming sense that the space within the circle is somewhere else. Disconnected. Not disconnected - never connected at all, something wholly separate.

The grass is far greener and longer than it is in these winter-starved woods, and it looks as though inside the circle it is the height of noon. Yoongi can see bugs, things with thin membranous wings and others with wide spreading colours, landing and then taking off on wildflowers, strange colours blue and cornflower yellow, their petals breathing and inhaling like sleepily blinking eyes. The light grows from the feet upwards, and melts, and fuzzes around the edges and gets brighter, and does all these things at once, and the sound of a brook, small and babbling, soaks into the air out of the circle, muted as though from a great distance away. You are here before you should be, says the shape that is only light and nothingness, Why are you here?

"To know what's being done to me," Yoongi says. "Once and for all."

Done to you? So you have truly not had any say in the matter?

"No," Yoongi says, but he doesn't have the confidence he began the night with. He chose to dream. He chose to move to Ireland. He could have pinched himself awake, he could have protested more, he could have turned away from the wolfishness happening in the house on the hill, he could have acknowledged the cats before their transformations became normal to him. "No," he says, "No, I didn't know this is what-"

The light laughs. It sounds like a summer's day. Yes you did. The circle does not take those unwilling. Someday, little thing, I will introduce you to Gwyneth. I believe the words of someone like you will be better than mine, regardless of the way my intentions turn. Come here.

"I don't want to," Yoongi says, and why does the name Gwyneth ring a bell? All the same, he comes there. His feet hardly touch the grass. The two cats, big and watchful, stand at the treeline.

Come closer. I won't hurt you.

"I know you won't," Yoongi knows it won't.

Come closer. Come on. The border is as much for my protection as it is for yours.

Yoongi does what is asked of him. The warmth coming from the summer inside the circle is almost unbearable, and fresh, and bright. It doesn't feel like winter at all. "What do you want?"

The light bends down, and a single glowing, shining, blurred finger comes out of the circle, breaching the border, touching first Yoongi's forehead and then his lips. Names are more important to us than they are to you, little thing, so I caution you against telling me yours. I will do the same. Know that for you, I am yours, and you are mine. Something is happening to the circles, and it involves you as much as it involves me. The Red Circle knows. They will not be happy, but I am happy with you.

"I-"

But the light in the circle has died, and the thing in the circle has gone. It is just Yoongi, the moon, and two animals that should not exist, and the empty night.

He turns around.

He goes home.

Chapter Text

I think what drew me first to Sana was that I had things to say to myself that only she could address. I mean, at the time I just didn’t know where I was going, or even who I was. I had almost no friends. [He laughs.] I had no friends at all. I was so broke, so broke, I was doing late-night deliveries to get by, so I was hardly sleeping because I was going to class during the day. The only time I got to relax was when Sana was having problems. But her problems were my problems, y’know? Her issues were mine. So I just made hers far bigger, far harder to solve, and I made her really work for them, and I made her suffer just to prove that I could do it too. And Sana taught me things. She did all this stuff I put her through, and she came out the other side still alive, still up for a laugh, and it made me think - that’s going to be me someday. She taught me that my problems were universal. I know I made her up, but in a way I think she was always waiting around somewhere, waiting for me to notice her. She followed me around everywhere in this little yellow exercise book from junior year math, so I just paid attention to her, and the more I did the more I was. I don’t know where I would be without Sana. She helped me. She made me. She is me, you know, but a little bit better in every way that counts. I guess everyone says that, though, about their characters. 

• Audio extract from Goodlier Readings, a podcast hosted by Kathryn and Elodie Ryans, twin sisters who have a minor following as book-centric YouTubers and podcasters. This episode was series three, episode eleven, titled Further Away From Pleasant Lands. For the first half hour, the Ryans deconstructed and summarised Yoongi Min’s novel, and for the final half the author was brought on for an interview on his inspirations and goals while writing.

Domhnall Leary is a frightening man, and he knows it. It isn't for nothing that he takes point on everything they do, and it isn't for nothing that he has kept control of them, nebulous but firm, for as long as he's lived in the city. Edie and Evie might ache to take him over, and Saoirse might plot his death with every beat in her body, but none of them could ever do it. Domhnall is unkillable, unbeatable, unhurt, and he knows it.

"I know you know what I am," he says, to the woman sitting in between Edie and Evie, her hands around a hot cup of instant coffee, all her limbs free in theory - in practice, she knows just as well as he does that a single move will have her back to the floor and her throat sailing through the air, unwrapped from the skin that surrounds it. "My question to you is, what are you?"

Her face twists. She is small and slight, with brown hair and narrow features, and a faint English accent. "A traveller. I have business in Paris. I stopped for a fucking sandwich before - I was going to Rosslare, I was going to Calais, not here-"

"You stink of wolves," Saoirse says, from behind the woman. Her dark eyes make contact with Domhnall's, and then dance away; her long, shining blonde hair has been braided, and all she wears is a pair of grey sweatpants and a tank top. More than the usual. Domhnall, too, has put clothes on for the occasion; in the unlikely event that this woman really is just passing through, and has no intent to find them, it would do good to present a fairly normal front.

(Richard hadn't liked the gag, but it was that or have the whole fucking street know about him. The full moon hadn't been a good one, even by his standards.)

The woman doesn't turn. "Yeah, sure, sure. Dogs, maybe. I was in a sanctuary a few days ago and I haven't washed my jacket."

Domhnall sniffs the air. He knows that smell. "You've been fighting wolves." He knows that smell. "Familiar wolves. What's your name, friend?"

"Collins," the woman says, her shoulders slumping. There's the ugly cast of a bruise on her cheek, high, green, and old, and she was walking with a limp when they found her, and he knows by her heart that she’s telling the truth about this bit, and she’s anxious. Terribly anxious. "Deirdre Collins. But you don't know me, and you haven't got a cause to know me, so can I go now? I've done what I came here to do."

"Drink up," Domhnall says, and over her head he meets Saoirse's eye.

She nods. She's smelled it too.

Edie and Evie are, despite their many faults, very good at fulfilling tasks they've been given. They squash up next to Deirdre, their shoulders pressing into hers, and begin a quiet and very thorough discussion about whether the cat they ate last night actually tasted nice or not. They dwarf the woman between them, although it isn't on purpose; neither of them are very aware, really, of the power they have. They leave that to the older two.

"I smell him," Domhnall says, once they're away from Deirdre and in the hallway between the kitchen and Richard's room, "Which is fuckin' funny, Saoirse, because I could have sworn you told me he'd died."

She doesn't have the strength to meet his eyes, and it sends a thrill of power down his spine. He can hear Richard crying on the other side of the door. "He was taken by one of the big wolf packs north a bit," she says sullenly, "They have two fucking blood and bone witches. How was I to know he wasn't going to die? I thought they’d killed him, Domhnall, and you know I did."

"You wouldn't lie to me."

Which is Domhnall's problem. Saoirse won't lie to him, won't do anything to him to warrant his getting rid of her, but at the same time he knows she doesn't entirely respect him. He knows she harbours dreams of running Dublin, the way he does.

"No," she agrees, "I wouldn't."

"If Jeongguk is still alive, we have a problem."

"Yeah."

Domhnall pushes open the door to Richard's room. Richard is sleeping, maybe, his head bowed over his bare chest, his breathing even and shallow. The bruises around his wrists aren't healing as fast as they should; he'll need to be let out again soon, before he's pushed too far and they have to get a new one. "Rich." He rips the tape from Richard’s mouth, and pulls out the balled cotton cloth.

Richard jerks awake, out of whatever doze he'd settled into. His dark eyes are hazy with pain. "Domhn-"

"If you're lying to me I will kill you," Domhnall says once Saoirse is in and has the door closed behind her.

"I know," she shrugs. "I'm not lying. I thought he'd died. Any coven would be mad to try and take in a disconnected stray-"

"Any coven is obviously not this one. Find out what she knows. Don't let her get to Rosslare."

"I wasn't going to," Saoirse rolls her eyes, her hand still on the doorknob, "She's up for it, you know. But she isn't magical herself."

"Red Circle, then. Paris," Domhnall has a friendly relationship with the Red Circle in Trinity and in UCD, friendly enough that he's never bothered unless he's a little too careless with the places he lets Richard into. "Who's in Paris?"

Saoirse shrugs a disinterested shoulder. "Why do I give a fuck? Let's just go there and get rid of him before he tells anyone."

"He would have in the last few years, if he was going to," Domhnall says, with a measure of reluctance. He would like to see Jeongguk again. He would like to do it himself, if he could, just for his own personal satisfaction.

"I'll see what Collins knows," Saoirse says. She opens the door, and then nods at Richard, now tugging weakly at the cuffs keeping him attached to the radiator. "Don't bang him up too much before Tuesday, 'cos it's meant to be cloudy."

"No promises," Domhnall says, and locks the door when she leaves.

They almost don't talk about it at all, and Yoongi is perfectly happy with that, but Jeongguk is clearly not. He looks out the corner of his eyes at Yoongi, and shuffles his feet when he walks, and doesn't talk to anyone, and he keeps moving towards private places and looking at Yoongi as though he wants to be followed.

"You had better go," Seokjin murmurs into his ear, one evening after tea and a dish of berries, "He's been awful all week. Go on."

Yoongi, glaring at him, goes.

Jeongguk has gone to his bedroom, and now he's sitting on the mattress, cross-legged, staring at a bruise on one wrist that's already fading far faster than Yoongi could ever hope to heal at. "Sorry," he says, as soon as Yoongi closes the door behind him. "I've been stupid. Sorry."

Yoongi leaves his hand on the cool metal doorknob. "I'm sorry," he says, staring at the back of his own knuckles, "I shouldn't have pressed. I just... yeah. I'm sorry."

There's a very long pause.

"Will you look at me?" Yoongi says, just as Jeongguk says, "Will you look at me?"

They both laugh, and something breaks in the air, like a careless boot over ice crystals formed over time and neglect. "But I really am sorry," Jeongguk says, holding his hand out for Yoongi, just snagging the corner of his thumb and curling his fingers around it, "I really am. I wasn't mad at you, I'm not mad at you, not really, not at all. Just at myself. You were there when it happened, is all."

Obediently, Yoongi allows himself to be pulled, and falls onto Jeongguk's bed, his leg brushing Jeongguk's. The mattress is warm, and absorbs him just as kindly as any other. "I'm sorry anyway. You didn't want to talk about it, and it isn't your fault that I kept pushing - and I am sorry. I missed you. You don't have to tell me anything."

"Can we-?" Jeongguk wraps his arm around Yoongi and tugs him down so they're lying together, face to face, side by side. "Comfortable. I want to tell you, but I - just, you know-"

"Don't," Yoongi says. He presses his forehead against Jeongguk's. "I haven't got a right to any information just because I'm your friend, Jeongguk. I know it's something you don't want to think about, and that's enough for me."

"Thank you," Jeongguk whispers. This close and Yoongi can see the eyelash that has escaped him and lies, resting, curved on his smooth cheek. His eyes glimmer with words unsaid. "I will tell you someday. I just have to... work my way up to it."

And Jeongguk is warm. Of course that isn't new to Yoongi, but he sort of wishes it was; then the observation would have more weight behind it than it does. Jeongguk's hand is still on his waist, broad and all-encompassing, and his mouth is just a little open, so that Yoongi can see the bottom of his front teeth, feel each breath huffing against his skin. "I know," Yoongi says, but he doesn't know anymore what he's responding to, and he knows his face is tilting upwards almost without his knowledge, "I promise I know."

He almost thinks he could do it.

Almost.

His dreams are full of this moment, in all the ways it could play out. They lie in the bracken, and Yoongi closes the gap and his lips touch Jeongguk's and it is virginial and hesitant; they stand, and Jeongguk has him pressed against the thick trunk of a tree near the circle, and he bends down to breach the distance and the kiss is strong and possessive and quickly develops further; they run towards each other, magnetised, two links, and when they crash Yoongi doesn't know which happens first, and he doesn't much care to remember.

This is different. Yoongi is awake, and so is Jeongguk. Jeongguk's eyes are trained firmly on his mouth, and his breathing is slower and deeper and with far more intent, and for a second Yoongi really believes -

"Jeongguk! Yoongi! D'you wanna come with me to get the London ones from the airport?"

And the moment breaks. Yoongi flushes down to his collar, and Jeongguk jumps off the bed like he's been electrocuted. "I-"

"Oi!"

But the moment is gone, and it won't return in a hurry. Yoongi isn't optimistic enough to believe it will.

Madeline is shorter than Yoongi had been expecting, and rounder, too. She unfolds from the passenger seat of Namjoon's Land Rover, jumping the few inches from the height to the ground, her platform boots crunching on the stones. Her backpack is covered in iron-on patches; from his position kneeling on Taehyung's bed looking out the skylight, he can see a unicorn, a rainbow springing from one cloud to another, and a flag. He can't make out the colours. Her hair is short and straight, shaved over her ears, and her cheeks are round with laughter, responding to something Namjoon is saying.

"That's Amandi," Taehyung murmurs, his fingertips gripping the edge of the skylight, even closer to the glass than Yoongi is, "He's a dreaming witch. He predicted trouble for us, way back before you moved here, and we all assumed - you know the rest."

"Hmm," Yoongi watches Amandi get out of the car, unfolding elegant limbs, dark skin under crisp white clothes, pointy black shoes, long dark hair tied with a green bow, the only sprig of colour he's permitted himself. He would be a representation of magic as mysterious as Taehyung sometimes is, but the veneer has been torn in two by his own laughter; his head thrown back at whatever the conversation provides.

"And that's Susannah, then, right?"

"Right."

Susannah clambers out at the same time as Amandi, on the other side of the back seat of the Land Rover. She's also tall, long-limbed and fae, as preternaturally beautiful as all the others Yoongi has seen under magical influence. Her hair is long, thin, blonde, curled and springing from a fountain tied on the top of her head; her cheekbones seem to sparkle when they catch the sun. Her clothing is loose-fitting, but falls in just the way to show Yoongi how slender she is, and around her neck is a small glass vial sloshing with some dark liquid. Her hands are drenched in slim golden rings. She's smiling.

"C'mon downstairs before Jeongguk wonders where you've gone," Taehyung holds his hand out for Yoongi, and smiles a little bit, his too-sharp teeth poking his lip, "And I want to talk to you about that, actually."

Yoongi pretends he hasn't heard, and bustles down the attic stairs before he can catch a good look at the last one.

Downstairs, in the hall, there is an explosion of sound. Hoseok and Seokjin have buried Madeline in a hug, Jimin has swarmed Amandi and is almost climbing him to embrace him, talking nineteen to the dozen; Namjoon is still laughing, spinning the keys around his hand, and Jeongguk is -

Looking at Yoongi. Smiling at Yoongi, as though he's the only thing in the room worth paying attention to. "Yoongi! I wondered where you'd been - hey, come on, let me introduce you! This is Daniel-"

Taehyung pushes Yoongi down the stairs, and he barely manages to catch himself on the banisters before he falls or does something equally embarrassing in front of yet more stupidly pretty people. "Hi," he says, and falls into Jeongguk's side, and breathes, and looks up, "I'm Yoongi."

"I've heard all about you," Daniel says, and offers his hand, his grip firm and pleasant. His hair is cut shorter than Amandi's, but longer than Madeline's, falling from a central part in waves over his high forehead and brows. His lips are dark, but his skin is pale. His eyes are dark amber, now the light shines on them properly, not the brown they must seem in the outdoors. His nose is long and defined, and his voice is trying hard to be neutral, but with a turn of Edinburgh in the ends of the vowels.

"And I you," Yoongi says, desperately trying to cast his mind back, to remember some tidbit about Daniel he can drop in. "I-"

"Which one are you, then? Have you finally added some flavour?" Daniel's hand turns from the handshake and, in one very strong and fluid movement, his thumb presses against the pulse point at Yoongi's wrist. "Heart still beating. A witch?"

"Yoongi isn't - he's a writer, he's a writer," Jeongguk is quick to wrap his arm around Yoongi's waist, and Yoongi feels vaguely claustrophobic when Daniel waits a few seconds to drop the touch. "We just met him by chance. He isn't magic or anything."

Over Daniel's shoulder, Jimin is trying very hard to catch his eye.

Yoongi ignores him, too. They think they have him with their little pointed Christmas message - they don’t. He’s ignoring it all until he can’t anymore, but that time hasn’t come yet, has it?

"Pleased to meet you in any case," Daniel says politely, but his gaze dances towards Jeongguk's arm, his hand, resting on Yoongi's hip. "I'm sure we'll get on."

"Yeah," Yoongi says. He feels weird, and weirder when Daniel just wanders away, aiming for Seokjin. "Jeongguk-"

"You're just his type," Jeongguk breathes, and manages to make the sound snappy, just quiet enough for none of the supernatural beings in the room to miss it, "And I don't want my... friend getting with my friend." His ire dies down to uncertainty at that last bit, and the weight of his hand lightens on Yoongi's waist. "Um. Tea?"

"Tea," Yoongi agrees, and it's with twin sets of flaming ears that he and Jeongguk wind their way into the kitchen to begin boiling a kettle for the army that's now staying in the coven house.

And Yoongi, apparently, is the new attraction.

Madeline and Daniel are the two most outspoken, bubbly characters here, and that much emerges within twenty minutes of him knowing them. Madeline has read his book, and grills him up and down about his college experience, and whether he intended for Sana to resonate with the lesbian experience as much as she thought he did, and whether he's staying permanently, and what he's writing the next one on. In turn he learns as much about her as he thinks is freely given; she's around Namjoon's age, and her and him go very far back, and she established her coven almost by accident as Namjoon did, and she's sheltered Seokjin, Hoseok, and the witch duo at various times during their travels to and from the Follie coven.

She's fun. Yoongi decides he likes her. She puts her warm hand on his shoulder, and kisses him on the cheek, and tells him he's good for the place.

He does feel a little bit like an ornament, but that's fine. Rather an ornament than a nuisance, or someone with any real power about him.

Amandi is quiet, and he laughs when jokes are made, and contributes only a little, but watches all the time. Susannah and Taehyung tuck themselves into the long green sofa, tea in their laps, and discuss something, Susannah talking in French, Taehyung with a haze of shimmer around his ears, replying in French himself, although his lips look as though they’re forming English words. 

“This is magic,” Madeline whispers behind her hand, her eyes crinkled merrily, “Oh, man, it took me so long to get used to when I was first bitten. I used to follow all the witches and sorcerers around, y’know, and just watch them do things with the magic. I liked it way more than being a wolf.”

“Do you now?” Yoongi asks, curious despite himself. 

She smiles. She looks perfectly content. “Not anymore. When Hoseok met me, he taught me a lot about the moon, and one of the things the moon does is she only gives you what she thinks you deserve. So I used to really wish I had been given a different sort of magic, but this suits me far better. It suits everyone.”

“I like the way you talk about it,” Yoongi says, “You and Hoseok especially. When he looks up…”

Madeline laughs. “It sounds a lot more mystic than it is. I’m just devout, but look at Namjoonie - we grew up almost together, and he doesn’t think that way at all. You pick and choose. That’s the beauty of the moon there, too, ‘cause she doesn’t care whether you believe in her or not - she’s always gonna be in the sky, regardless.”

Yoongi grins. “I suppose you’re right, there.” 

Now Taehyung and Susannah are both talking in fluid, fluent noises, a sound completely alien to Yoongi. It rings a bell for him, but only very vaguely, like perhaps someone said a sentence like this to him months ago; he turns to Madeline, a quirk in his eyebrows. "What's that?"

"Oh, witchtongue," Madeline nods, "It's a magical language, I suppose. I don't speak very much of it myself, but Namjoon-"

"He's been teaching me on and off," Jeongguk leaps in, nodding, looking pleased with himself. "It's complicated, though," and then to Yoongi, "Every word in witchtongue has magical weight as well as meaning, y'see? So when you say someone's name, that's technically invocation. Witchtongue is meant to be impossible to lie in. It's got space in the world."

"Witchtongue," Yoongi repeats, staring at the side of Susannah's head, at her springy, golden curls. "Interesting."

Daniel, Seokjin, and Jimin are having a loud and friendly argument over who out of the three of them can fit the most mini-marshmallows in their mouth. Through cheeks bursting with pink and white, Jimin is trying to yell at Seokjin, waving car keys in the air, to drive into Follie to get some more. Namjoon is making more tea, and Madeline has quietly departed from her perch at the table to talk to him. Amandi and Hoseok are talking over something Amandi has cupped in his palm. 

"He has these marbles," Jeongguk whispers behind his hand, "He can divine the future with them. He can divine the future with basically anything, though, but he has these preferred methods. Remember, that's how-"

"How you decided I was the devil incarnate, yeah," Yoongi finds his mouth quirking, turning up, in a way he wouldn't have thought was funny three months ago. "Madeline's nice."

Madeline turns over Namjoon's shoulder and winks at him, then gestures to her heavily-pierced ears. Wolf senses, she mouths, Don't say anything too raunchy.

Yoongi giggles.

As the day winds on, bags are slowly transferred from the Land Rover to inside the door of the hall; suitcases, bags, an old-fashioned hatbox, a terrarium with (apparently) nothing inside, but chains wrapped thickly around the top and a heavy lock connecting them, and a single leather-bound book, tied with a leather strap and buckle, like a belt. It's brown, and it doesn't have a title. "Of course you're all welcome to the attic," Jimin says like a purr, his body wrapped around Taehyung's in the hanging basket chair, "But we won't be leaving."

"It's soundproofed for a reason," Daniel quips, his hands folded over his bouncing knee, "I'll be fine wherever. Fuck, I'll be fine down here."

"You're a guest, you're not sleeping on the sofa," Hoseok says, scandalised. "We can bunk up, and there's two guest rooms-"

"Someone can sleep in my cottage, if you want," Yoongi offers, "I don't mind the sofa and it's perfectly warm."

"You can't do that," Jeongguk says to him, and presses his hand against Yoongi's shoulder, "You're busy!"

"Jeongguk could sleep on the sofa, though," Taehyung muses. His eyes are glimmering, strangely wicked. "Or on Yoongi's sofa. His room faces the woods, and you can see the moon from it. You'd be happy there, Maddy, I think, if you wanted it."

"Oh-" Yoongi looks uncertainly up at Jeongguk; he doesn't want Jeongguk to feel pressed to stay at his house, but he doesn't want Jeongguk to think that he doesn't want him to. Or something. "Oh, that might work, yeah-"

"I have to have a room to myself, I'm afraid," Susannah says in accented, but otherwise perfect English, "The creatures are volatile, and they don't like invasion of space." She curls her fingers upwards, her palm empty and cupped, and a mote of something gold and insubstantial winks there for a second, its appearance coinciding with a knocking bang from the empty terrarium.

"I would prefer privacy, also," Amandi, who so far has not spoken to Yoongi beyond perfunctory greetings, shrugs, his shirt rolling over his dark skin, "I have communing, and I don't want you two knowing how I do it."

"What makes you think I'm interested?" Jimin scowls, but his eyebrows are quirked upwards, as interested as Jimin ever becomes.

"Stay at mine," Yoongi says, turning to Jeongguk, the conversation folding towards the private, "It won't be much different to usual, y'know? It'll be fine."

"See? Fine," Seokjin says, and winks at him.

Yoongi doesn't know what to do with that. 

The thing in the circle wants to be Yoongi's friend, of that Yoongi is sure, or at least it doesn't wish him any harm right now. He'll take that. The light, the ambiguous voice, the beautiful alien landscape within it, mentions this Gwyneth again - someone to talk to Yoongi, someone to be his friend.

Like Yoongi is lonely. Like Yoongi needs friends.

That night, with Jeongguk curled up on the couch on the floor below him, Yoongi doesn't sleep. He sits bolt upright in his bed, and his cats stay cat-shaped, and his fists rest on his folded legs and he stares blankly at the wall and he does not let himself fall asleep, and the sun rises across his curtains and against his cheeks and he wills himself against exhaustion.

He can hear Jeongguk downstairs, fussing with the coffee pot, and Spanner leaps from the bed to the door to go and join him. Beanbag stays, loyally awake, her head on Yoongi's thigh.

He can feel the displeasure of the circle, but he is unwilling to do anything about it. He won't go there yet.

Deirdre has not been treated anywhere near their other captive, but neither has she been treated particularly kindly, and there has been no word, no indication, that Domhnall or Saoirse are about to let her get back to Paris. Slowly the itch of anxiety is burning the back of her skull, the throbbing knowledge that her last letter to Claudia was three weeks ago and the black curse on her won't be getting any better.

She had been well on her way to Rosslare, to the ferry, when the vampires reached her.

(She wishes now, of course she does, that she knew their names. The ones in Edinburgh. There had been a small, round one, a pretty woman with thin hands and curves, and a slender, pointy one, a man all angles and dark hair and a piercing in the left of his lip. There had been more in the dark, the ones she set fire to, but she never got close enough to see their faces.)

(The vampires caught up to her halfway down the country, in the vast green swathes between those odd Irish towns that never quite recovered from the war. They tried to kill her, she thinks, tried very hard, and then there was a fight - a long fight - a car ride, confused and dulled - another long and very one-sided fight - a negotiation, a desperate one, with someone identified with the Red Circle - a bus trip over the night to the early morning, a stopover to sleep on a chair in the train station in Monaghan - a long Bus Eireann trip to Dublin -)

And now this. She scowls into her coffee.

And now this.

Edie and Evie are the two silent members, and mostly what they do is skulk. Domhnall and Saoirse go out and stay in the flat in even amounts; Richard, the fifth and final member of the little pack in Dublin, stays in his room. He doesn't make any noise. The only reason Deirdre even knows his name is in mistake, one night, hearing Domhnall shout at him. You're a fucking idiot, Richard! You're stupid! You can't go out, you can't even suggest that you go out, when the moon is up - when the clouds are clear! Then she'll get you! And a long silence, and a muffled sob. I only want you to live, Rich, he had said, I only want you to live.

Deirdre curls up on the sofa and misses Claudia.

"We need to get to him," Saoirse says quietly.

(It is four in the morning. Everyone else is asleep. Deirdre should be asleep. Deirdre is sleeping, her heart rate low and peaceful, just as Claudia taught her to do. Undetectable. Wolves rely too much on their noses; it is their weakness.)

"I know," Domhnall says, and there's rustling fabric, "Loose ends, loose ends. If anyone tracks Richard-"

"They won't-"

"I know they won't, but Jeongguk and Richard, that's two in the one area, both nebulously connected to me. At best we'll have to relocate. I don't want to have to do that. There isn't another city on this island big enough to accommodate us without attention, Saoirse, you know that."

She exhales; she sounds angry. Deirdre just breathes.

"I know that, so we go to fucking Follie, then. We go to the stupid village and we get him. We have to make sure none of the other witches know - I know that Follie pack. I've heard of them. They have friends in high places, and I'm sure one of them is out of that pair of blood and bone witches that were racing across the continent a few years ago. If we get Jeongguk it has to be an accident."

"That's why we've got the fucking hunter. She's been hanging around him for the past month, she's bound to know something we don't about him, and if she doesn't-"

"Why would she tell us?"

Domhnall laughs. It's low and mean and ugly. "She wants to leave the country, doesn't she? We have that against her. Of course she's going to tell us."

Of course she is, Deirdre thinks. Claudia will be in bed now, sleeping, her hands pressed protectively against her blackening, rotting skin. Because some things are more important to her than whatever this is. Of course she will.

Jeongguk can't sleep. It's the second night of his stay (for however long that turns out to last) at Yoongi's, and just like last night, he can't sleep. He knows it isn't the loss of his bedroom, not really; he's never been particularly attached to places like that, and there isn't anything urgent in there he can't retrieve in the morning, and Amandi wouldn't really mind if Jeongguk woke him in the middle of the night.

This sleeplessness has to do with something else, Jeongguk knows it. Someone else, if he's being honest with himself.

(He hasn't had a dream with Yoongi in weeks, not for lack of trying, and his showers have grown longer and hotter in comparison, but still those visions elude him. He's beginning to think they never really happened at all.)

Yoongi's kitchen is different without Yoongi in it. Jeongguk pads from the living room, his nest of duvets and cushions on the sofa, into the kitchen, seeking a midnight cup of tea, unsettled by the lurking darkness of the room. It's like the place wants him out; wants him to come back with a chaperone or not at all. The kettle doesn't switch on until Jeongguk holds down the button, and every time he turns around to look at the pile of unread library books on the table, he feels as though they've grown taller.

"Mrow."

"Jesus!" The cat makes Jeongguk leap, clutching his t-shirt over his chest, but the only thing standing in the doorway to the hall is Spanner, his eyes flickering greenish-yellow with the dark. "Fucking warn me," he gasps, and then kneels down, rubbing his finger and thumb together, watching the cat pupils track the movement, "C'mere, then. What, you've been kicked out of bed? Why're you down here in the cold?"

Spanner pads forward. He meows again, a full-bellied, content sort of sound, and then rubs his head against Jeongguk's cupped palm. His fur is soft and deep and the hairs part for Jeongguk's fingers like the sea.

"Does Yoongi know you've escaped?" Jeongguk tickles behind his ears, "Why're you down, huh? What's up?"

"Mrow," Spanner sounds like a sentence, and then darts towards the hallway door, his tail flicking, his eyes dancing between Jeongguk and the stairs, his paws hopping between the forward and backward movement. He bares his teeth when Jeongguk still hasn't moved.

Jeongguk sighs. He's not as good with animal motion as he would be, were he in wolf form, but he's good enough to know what Spanner is trying to tell him. "Yoongi might not like it as much as you," he says, halfway across the kitchen, kettle boiled and ignored. "I don't think he'd appreciate me arriving in the middle of the night."

Spanner hisses, and his tail stands bolt upright. Displeasure. Jeongguk's answer isn't what he wanted.

"Go on, go on. Back up to bed."

But the cat stands in the doorway, and when Jeongguk goes back to the living room nest, he can hear Spanner scratching at his door. After ten minutes, he still hasn't stopped, and Jeongguk has no chance of getting to sleep with that sort of racket just outside him.

"What," he opens the door again, grumpier than he'd like to admit, "What do you want?"

Spanner runs from him to the stairs, and then Jeongguk would swear he rolls his eyes.

Well, that's him told. Jeongguk follows him as quietly as he can, up the carpeted stairs, past the little reading desk beside the window, through the door to Yoongi's bedroom, crooked completely open, light from the moon spilling into both rooms freely. Spanner streaks in; Jeongguk follows, stopping right before the entrance, his hand on the frame. "Yoongi?"

"I wondered where he went," comes the reply, dry but awake. Completely awake. "Fucking hell, Spanner. You may as well come in."

Jeongguk does.

Yoongi is sitting bolt upright in bed, fully clothed, Beanbag asleep and purring on his lap, Spanner splayed across his shoulders and smiling at Jeongguk in a decidedly smug way for a cat to smile. Yoongi is smiling, too, but he looks exhausted; his eyes look heavy in his head, and the dark shadows under them are deep and pronounced. "Trouble sleeping?"

"I should be asking you that, by the looks of things," Jeongguk steps further into the room, worried despite himself, the moon turning everything shades of silver and grey, "Are you okay? Can I get you anything?"

Yoongi looks small on his own in the bed, the blankets pooled around his waist. "I'm okay," he says slowly, as Jeongguk advances in stages across the floor, "I guess I... I've been having pretty weird dreams recently."

"Dreams," Jeongguk repeats. His throat dries up. He can feel panic beginning to pulse at the base of his skull.

"Dreams, yeah," Yoongi shoots him a look, "Weird shit about the forest. And dying. And, like, ants? And talking to things. I think it's just... something like coping, probably, from all the stuff recently, but they're starting to properly bother me, y'know? I don't want to have them on my mind after everything else."

Jeongguk takes the risk and sits on the end of the bed. The mattress bounces; Beanbag wakes up and shoots him a disgruntled look. "So you thought... staying up all night was the way to go?"

"When you say it like that," Yoongi drawls, wry smile on his face, "It does sound a bit stupid, doesn't it?"

(Nothing about Jeongguk. Not even a hint that Yoongi's been dreaming about anyone other than himself. Of course it's stupid to assume that they were sharing dreams in the first place, but Jeongguk can never be sure anymore, not when things like circles and the moon and fairies and vampires and werewolves are real and something he just has to know about, every day.)

Jeongguk in the real world puts a hand on Yoongi's ankle under the bedsheets. He can feel him, shaking. "Get some sleep, idiot. The world will still be here in the morning."

"I know," Yoongi says. He breathes in - hesitates - exhales. "I know."

Jeongguk moves towards the door, although he's never wanted to do anything less in his life.

"Jeongguk-"

"Yes-"

"Can you s-"

"Yeah," Jeongguk says, and Yoongi laughs the sort of breathless, embarrassed laugh Jeongguk feels like doing right now. "Yeah, I can." He's in his pyjamas and everything. He came prepared.

"Get in, then."

"Yeah - yeah."

The cats move as though they've understood the whole thing, and Jeongguk carefully, deliberately, like stepping onto a frozen lake without being sure of the depth, slides between the sheets next to Yoongi.

Chapter Text

I have been unavoidably held up in Ireland, but I expect to be back with you shortly after the New Year. I have a trace of where Jimin Park and his mate have gone, but there's been some confusion around the place I think they're staying. I'm held up, basically, but I will be back.

I just had some questions for you about the sort of magic that they're likely to be using. There is something circular in the woods near this village. I've been looking on satellite maps to try and find their coven house, and while I think I've found the house, I've also seen this circle. The woods aren't even 5km from start to end, but every time I try and walk into them to get to the middle, I could easily walk for hours without finding anything beyond old trees; as soon as I turn around and walk out, I'm out. The Cullises refuse to walk any further than the forestry planted trees, which aren't much over twenty.

I think there is something else going on here, but I don't know if it's connected to Jimin Park and his mate, or whether it's something else. They're a coven of wolves, mostly, and one man I don't recognise as anything at all. One of my questions was that; is it possible for non-magical beings to be part of covens? My second question: have you heard of these circular things in the woods?

I haven't contacted the Red Circle in Belfast or Dublin yet. I thought you wouldn't want me to.

I miss you more every day.

• A letter from Deirdre Collins to Claudia Badeaux, dated December of the year Yoongi Min first moved to Follie, around three weeks after the kidnapping and subsequent rescue of Yoongi by Jeongguk Jeon. Contemporaries of Collins and of the Follie pack have tried without much success to piece together their timeline, in between the kidnapping and the first attack on Follie, but lies and half-truths have meant that this is almost impossible. Collins was lying to Badeaux, that much was instantly clear, as Badeaux did not know about the kidnapping attempt until much later, although whether this was deliberate obfustication or embarrassment at her failure is uncertain. Badeaux was also withholding information from Collins, likely to make her own cause sound more attractive, but between these communications and the lies spun from the Red Circle to both participants, it is likely the truth of Deirdre Collins’ loyalties at this time will remain lost to us.

They’re heading north, and fast. 

“You know somewhere near him we can stay,” Domhnall says, his hand on Deirdre’s shoulder, just the rough side of friendly. He smiles, and his sharp teeth pierce his bottom lip, and a single long trickle of blood daubs into his strawberry-blonde beard, ignored. Unfelt. “You do, don’t you?”

Deirdre looks away for a moment, across the sparkling lights of the city on the Liffey. They’re heading north fast, but not right now; arrangements have to be made for the shy one in the bedroom, Richard, the one Deirdre suspects is responsible for those animal attacks that drew her here in the first place. They’ll leave at dawn. 

And she’ll be dragged with them, if she doesn’t tread very carefully. “I do,” she says at last, “But I’ll only tell you if you let me go my own way. I haven’t got any interest in Jeongguk, I have my own shit to do-”

“You might not have any interest in him, but I do,” Domhnall says. He leans over the railing, tipping his face to the river; the blood drips from his chin down into the water below. This late at night and even the revellers have gone home, chased out of the streets by the frigid January air. Dublin is as quiet as it ever gets, with the sun trying her hardest to peek through the horizon, the time barely past five. “You’ve seen him more recently than me, and that makes you interesting. What were you doing there in the first place?”

“Hunting,” Deirdre says. She hopes she looks fierce. She doesn’t feel it. “Witches, so you don’t need to bother about it. I was unsuccessful.” That’s what she’s written to Claudia, anyway, to explain the length of her absence; she doesn’t quite feel like getting into all the little details of her reasons for failure. “My benefactor is in Paris; she’ll be wanting to know how I am. It’s been months.” 

“Months,” Domhnall repeats. He doesn’t look up from the Liffey. “The Red Circle?”

“What will you do to me if I say yes?”

“I’ll let you go. If you come back, I’ll kill you,” Domhnall says. His voice never varies in tone or temperament. “You know that, though. All I want is information from you, and when you’ve given me all you have you can go.”

“Very polite.”

“More than you deserve.”

“Even so,” Deirdre copies his pose, leaning against the railings, every inch of her despising herself for what she’s about to say, “Get me on a train to Rosslare. Today. There’s a pump-house outside Follie, and when you go in there’s… chambers, underground, although I never explored beyond the first room…”

Domnall drinks it all in, his face every bit the politely fascinated listener, but behind his skin there’s a predator. Deirdre can’t let herself forget that. 

Why does she feel as though she’s been tricked?

Jeongguk wakes up to warmth pressed against his chest, and his arms around something soft and comfortable and perfectly made for him, and a problem pressing against the thing he's holding - the usual morning situation, he thinks blearily, something to go away or be taken care of in the shower. He has no pressing desire to do either. He is warm, far warmer than he usually is in bed in the depths of winter, and his bedsheets are curled around him in a very comfortable position, far better than they usually are. In fact - everything is better than the usual.

Where is he? What did he do last night? He shuffles in position, presses himself firmer against the hard thing he's holding, sighs in contentment. He remembers Madeline arriving, her and her lot, and tea, and an argument over who would be sharing what rooms. Did Taehyung win? Jeongguk must have been shunted somewhere, because this bed is lower and squishier than his. Ever since Dublin, he's preferred stiff, unyielding mattresses, and this one feels like sinking into a marshmallow.

Oh fuck - Yoongi.

Jeongguk's eyes fly open and he's treated to the sight of Yoongi's dark hair splayed across the white pillow, and an orange cat's paw sitting almost in Yoongi's ear, the body of the cat tumbling down Yoongi's shoulder and onto the bed. Yoongi's chest is rising and falling with the even depth of someone still asleep, but Jeongguk still stiffens, and tries to shift himself and his betraying body away from the possibility that he might be felt.

The other cat is on him, lying on his feet, her head curled up almost to touch her tail. Jeongguk is the only waking thing in the small, homely bedroom.

He stares at the crook of Yoongi's bare, exposed shoulder, wondering what he should do now. Should he get up? He can tell by the light spilling in at the window that it can't be much past dawn, but Jeongguk has always been an early riser. He doesn't want to stir either the man or the two cats, but what if waking up this way makes Yoongi uncomfortable? His hair is so soft where it touches Jeongguk's forehead, and it smells woodsy, of the green soap Seokjin buys for the house from some independent soapmaker in Wales.

On the windowsill, catching and distilling light, is a small glass jar of the same healing paste Jeongguk had used on Yoongi, all those months ago. It feels like a lifetime. There's a note, written on brown paper and tied with parcel string, and it doesn't take much for Jeongguk's wolfish eyes to concentrate. To Yoongi. Merry Christmas. We hope you take this with all the meaning it is intended. It's written in Taehyung's handwriting, but Jeongguk has no doubt about who the we is.

The healing paste. Which can only be used on those with magical talent.

He squeezes his eyes shut, feels crumbs of sleep trapped between his lashes. It's all become so complicated so quickly, and he doesn't want it to. He doesn't want to tell Yoongi about Domhnall; he doesn't want Yoongi's pretty eyes to see him like that. He doesn't care if it's selfish. 

He didn’t dream last night, but he has no idea whether that’s to do with himself, Yoongi, the circle, or just chance. He still hasn’t confirmed that the dreams are something they both share, but neither has he confirmed that they’re something completely out of his own imagination. If anything, that gift from the circle in December has only complicated things, far more than Jeongguk likes them to be complicated. Don’t kill me again, Yoongi said, his beautiful naked fingers on Jeongguk’s shoulders, Kiss me again, and he had tasted - 

Divine. He had tasted divine. 

With a groan, Jeongguk turns around and buries his face in the pillow beside him, his arm still flung over Yoongi, his morning problem safely away from Yoongi’s bare skin. 

“Mmh. Jeongguk?”

“G’morning,” Jeongguk whispers, “Sleep well?”

Yoongi wriggles around, dark hair everywhere, until he’s further under the blankets, further into Jeongguk’s arms. “Still sleeping. Still sleeping. Go back to sleep.” 

“Back to sleep,” Jeongguk mumbles, burying his face in Yoongi’s shoulder, “Yeah, that sounds good. Sounds good. Did you dream?”

“Mmf. No.”

Spanner makes a displeased noise at all the wriggling, and gets up to walk down the length of Jeongguk’s body to Beanbag at the foot of it, tucking the two heads together. The whole room feels like morning incarnate, pale yellow spiralling through the dust motes, pale blue peeking through the curtains. Jeongguk could get used to this comfortable warmth, this cosy homeliness, every morning. 

It’s a scary thought. 

“Stop thinking,” Yoongi’s hand finds Jeongguk’s thigh under the covers and slaps it. “Go back to sleep, Jeonggukkie.” 

So Jeongguk does as he’s told, and goes back to sleep - dreamless, and warm. 

Deirdre looks out the window, at the rolling countryside spilling down to the sea. Her head hurts, and in her hands she holds the latest letter from Claudia, just catching her up on what she's missed since she was last back. Home, Claudia calls it.

When Deirdre thinks of home, she is no longer sure what she pictures, but she knows it is warm and she knows it is dark and she knows it is quiet, and she knows nobody is relying on her.

She closes her eyes.

Amandi is in the kitchen when Yoongi and Jeongguk arrive, mid-morning the day after Madeline and her coven shuffled into the house. He is the only one there, pressing his hand into the top of a single-use cafetiere. "Good morning," he says mildly, his pretty brown eyes folding into a smile, "I'm the only one in. Everyone else went to say hello to the circle."

"It's been a while," Jeongguk says, pressing his hand to Yoongi's waist before vanishing to the fridge, hunting for something to snack on, "How is the London circle, anyway?"

"Oh, we manage," Amandi's smile focuses on Yoongi. "We manage," he says, and it feels as though it's directed at Yoongi, and Yoongi alone. "Your circle has always been more powerful, though, you must know that. I'm afraid without a circle witch, we do suffer."

"We don't have a circle witch either," Jeongguk says, voice muffled through a mouthful of muffin, "Unless you count Hoseok-"

"Hoseok is not a witch. He's just a believer," Amandi says, almost scolding, "Which you know, of course. But he is not a circle witch."

"A believer?" Yoongi perches on one of the barstools, on the opposite side of the kitchen island to Amandi. "A believer in what, exactly?"

"The moon as a goddess, of course. Hoseok is the most devout of both our covens, I would safely say," Amandi looks to Jeongguk for confirmation, his fingertips tapping on the roof of the cafetiere, waiting for the coffee to brew. Jeongguk nods vigorously, and Amandi continues, "Yes, the moon goddess. She's helpful, of course, but I prefer to believe in the fey as the dominant influence in my life. They certainly help me with my craft. Jeongguk, you don't-?"

Jeongguk swallows, and then winces, "I mean, the moon is real. I'm just not as into it as Hobi is. But I think, like... I think it's because he was raised in a pack, y'know, a proper one. A proper coven. They had a circle witch and everything."

"Gwyneth King, yeah. I knew her when I was small," Amandi nods, and begins to pour the coffee into his mug, "But then she..."

"Yeah," Jeongguk frowns again, "She. Sure. Hey, Yoongi, what do you want for breakfast?"

Yoongi debates for a moment or two whether he should bother calling out the avoidance, but he decides against it. "You got any pancakes in there?"

"I have more coffee," Amandi holds up his empty press, dangling by the handle from one long, delicate finger, "And I would like to get to know you, Yoongi. I believe it's my fault you started this off with such a hard time-"

"No, that was Namjoon," Jeongguk's voice echoes from inside one of the wooden cupboards.

Amandi smiles slightly. "All the same. I predicted an untrustworthy newcomer, but it certainly wasn't you, and for that I have to apologise. Namjoon can-"

"-Overreact-"

"-Trust me a little more than I deserve at times," Amandi finishes, and holds his hand out, palm up. "Still. It's very good to meet you. I sense a... an importance around you, perhaps I'll say that, if you don't mind me doing so."

"I'll take that," Yoongi shakes his hand, and smiles. "Thank you. If you hadn't predicted such a shitstorm, maybe I wouldn't ever have met them in the first place."

That makes Amandi smile. "The world has a strange way of making sure her players meet," he says, and shrugs, "So - coffee?"

The coffee is good, and the company is nicer.

Madeline stands beside Namjoon, bigger than even him when she's in wolf form; the three witches have left for somewhere further into the woods, and Daniel, Seokjin, and Hoseok have fucked off through the trees, leaving the two of them alone at the edge of the circle clearing. She looks well, Madeline communicates, the barks and yips and flickering tails that make up wolfish conversation, You must be taking care of her. Has he seen her yet?

He hasn't got any need to, Namjoon rests his jaw on her spine, just below her long, furry neck. He feels unsettled, and he wishes he wouldn't; he thought this feeling would leave, after Madeline arrived, but it's only got worse. Something is missing. He hasn't felt like this since he was tying Jeongguk to the branch of one of the trees here - and he can see it now, when he turns his head, the deep scars only half-healed on the trunk where Jeongguk's desperate claws had scored into the wood, hunting for freedom. It isn't a feeling he relishes. He and Madeline established themselves so firmly to escape this.

You know he does if he's serious about staying.

I don't know that he's serious.

She grunts. He's here. He's been here for months. That indicates serious, surely? You were with us for less before we split for here. What more can he do?

He isn't magical, Maddy, Namjoon noses deeper into her fur, smelling the moss and wood and earthiness of her, He doesn't really need to be here. He's from fucking New York. He's here on a glorified writer's retreat, and we've already got him kidnapped and bullied out of the village and - and Jeonggukkie -

Fancies him, Madeline completes. He fancies him so hard.

Namjoon sighs, air out his nose and through his teeth, I know.

She transforms, so Namjoon's jaw turns from resting against the back of her wolf-neck to sitting on her bare knee, her skin tan and pebbling as it hits the cold January air; Madeline seems unconcerned, stretching out on the bracken, touching her fingertips to her painted toes. "I think you should sit him down and give him a proper talk about what this all means," she says, "If Jeongguk hasn't already. I don't know, Joonie, because Amandi saw something a few weeks ago and he won't tell us what, but it has to do with you. And the circle. I can't think of anything else right now but-"

"Amandi predicted something for us before, and it turned out to be nothing," Namjoon shifts too, following her, her hand in his fur transitioning to fingertips running down his bare, sweaty skin, "I don't want to worry everyone when they don't need to be worried."

"Amandi wasn't technically wrong."

"I want his interpretation before I start initiating anyone," Namjoon looks up at her, her solemn face, pale-toned with the sky, "And I'm not biting anyone. Even if he asks me to. I won't do it."

"Nobody can make you," Madeline nods. She looks sad. "I know nobody can make you - nobody would make you."

"I know," Namjoon quickly finds himself too cold to comfort, and stands, paces, turns towards her without a hint of modesty - they've known each other too long for that, "I know. But still. He knows more than he was meant to already, and I feel weird - I feel like I'm robbing him of that, y'know? He's an author. He has a book."

"And Jeongguk," Madeline says with a knowing sort of smile, "What about him?"

"Oh, he's been besotted for months now. You should have seen him at the Halloween dance," Namjoon waves his hand in the air, the memories clouding around his mind hard and fast, Jeongguk and Yoongi and the music and the magic all one and the same, wrapped around each other. "It was kind of cute. Kind of sickening."

Madeline shifts again, clearly having the same sort of ideas he has. She is the biggest wolf Namjoon knows, her fur a warm grey, her eyes a warmer amber, her tongue lolling out between her jaws, her breath rising in a misty cloud. Namjoon shifts to follow her, and she pads into the circle clearing, the stones looming silent and unmoving and yet, somehow, aware of their presence. The two wolves split around the circle; Namjoon keeps pacing, until he's facing Madeline on the other side of the clearing.

She sits back on her haunches and howls into the soft evening sky. The people of Follie and the farms surrounding have long got used to wolfish noises where they shouldn't be; they have been attributed to the hunting dogs of one of the manor houses that live a few miles away, because that makes far more sense than accepting that wolves live in Ireland. (Everyone knows there are no wolves in Ireland.)

Namjoon follows suit, howling. There are replies from nearby, just far enough into the trees that he can't see them, but near enough for him to know they're there. And then:

"Stop flexing!" Daniel yells, and an inhuman, frighteningly loud cackle of laughter from one of the witches, somewhere to the south.

Madeline closes her eyes and howls again for the sheer happiness of it all. Namjoon copies her.

For a long, happy moment, Namjoon knows there is absolutely nowhere else he would rather be.

For a long, happy afternoon, Jeongguk knows there is absolutely nowhere else he would rather be. He's drinking hot chocolate, sitting in the hanging basket in the lounge while Amandi and Yoongi discuss poetry, on their third cafetiere and steaming ahead. Amandi, Jeongguk thinks, has the oddest capability about him, an intense aura of likeability. He may be mysterious, and he may keep his cards closer to his chest than anyone else knows, but he is very easy to get along with. In Jeongguk's first, fractured weeks with this coven, Amandi had flown over to Ireland with the aim of helping him, and help him he had - although Jeongguk would never tell anyone, least of all Namjoon, Amandi's frank heart-to-hearts had helped him get over what Domhnall had done to him more than anything else.

And when Yoongi leaves, citing an issue he wants to talk to Taehyung about, Jeongguk and Amandi are left alone.

There is a long, too-long silence, which must only be about half a minute long, but Jeongguk is so full of antsy tension that even a second would have been too much for him to bear. "Well?" He blurts, his hands resting on the table so he doesn't fling them everywhere, "What do you think of him?"

Amandi's handsome face forms a handsomer smile, and he takes a sip of his third cup of coffee. "You know I think highly of him, or you're less observant than I put you up to. I like him very much. He is clever and intelligent, and he hasn't run screaming yet, so I think you're in the clear. What do you think of him?"

"Amandi, I keep having these dreams," Jeongguk says. He can't bear it anymore. Yoongi woke up beside him this morning, so pretty and so unaware, and Jeongguk had torn his throat out in the night and feasted on the red within, the sweet, hot blood that tasted of addiction. "I'm in the woods. I'm near the circle. Yoongi is there."

And Amandi shifts forward with interest, as Jeongguk knew he would. Jimin and Taehyung might predict the future for the fun of it, but Amandi is a true scholar of the future, of predictions, of seeing things in dreams and sifting through the silt to get to the knowledge within. "Yoongi is there, you said? Did these dreams start before you met him, or after?"

"After," Jeongguk frowns, "I hadn't thought about that. A few weeks after. Maybe... it was before Deirdre grabbed him, I know that. It was weird. And when Deirdre had him, I kept seeing him, y'know? That was how I knew where to find him. Well. That and the cats."

"The cats?"

Jeongguk waves his hands behind him vaguely, to where he knows at least one of the cats will be waiting; Spanner is usually the one leaving himself behind, to guard Yoongi's perimeter, whereas Beanbag attaches herself to him like the shadow she so resembles. "He brought them with him from America. They... sometimes they don't look like cats. They came to find me the night Yoongi - the night Deirdre took him, and I know I was a bit... unstable that night, but I swear, I would have sworn they were bigger when they were running beside me. I mean, I was a wolf! Two housecats wouldn't have kept up with me. A lion and a... a big black cat. Like a panther. That's what they looked like. But that... they haven't looked like that since, except in dreams. And Amandi, you know what the moon gave me, back on Christmas Eve? It wasn't rabbits. I said it was but it wasn't, it was Yoongi, and I ate him. And he let me. And now sometimes if I'm not dreaming of him I'm dreaming of eating him-"

"Jeongguk."

Jeongguk stops. He almost puts a hand over his mouth, just to make sure nothing else escapes.

Amandi stretches his hand across the table and his soothing, slim fingertips touch Jeongguk's wrist. "Have none of you worked out what Yoongi is yet? I don't think he has, but surely you must have."

Jeongguk bristles, and if it had been anyone else, he would already be shouting. "No," he says, stiff and embarrassed. "What am I meant to have worked out?"

"Yoongi is being courted by something. No, no, not like that-" Amandi's smile is warm and knowing, and Jeongguk wishes there was a nearby pit he could fling himself into, "Not like that. I mean - I know your case was unique, and so I won't use it. Have any of the others, the witches especially, ever talked about how they came into their magic?"

"No," Jeongguk says, "I think they don't like to talk about it around me. Because of the - yeah. No, they haven't."

Amandi hums, considering, his hand still on Jeongguk's. "Being courted by the magic of the world is a very unique position to be in," he says, after several seconds of deliberation, "And it is different for every witch. For Taehyung and Jimin, I suspect the meat of the world started to attract them; not the literal meat, but the metaphysical, the guts and gore of the world itself. Then the magic begins to creep up their bodies. Jimin has told me he was draining people before he knew he was doing it; Taehyung's magic was a slower process, so he says, and he was fully aware the whole time. For me - I am a dream-witch, you understand, a seer, and for me, I was courted by the things in my dreams. By my companion. Her name is Sylviana, the name I've given her, and she lives only when I want her to, but she is not me. She is magic, you see? She's magic. She came to me when I was very young."

"But you were born into a coven," Jeongguk says. He can barely understand what Amandi is saying; he's never been one much for magic. "So does that not change anything?"

"Not at all. It only meant I was aware of what was happening to me," Amandi takes another long sip, his eyes shut, his face tilted in mild pleasure, "And that is why I wasn't afraid of Sylviana, or of the magic. When I dream, I'm taken to her. I made a deal with her when I was very young, as all witches have to do with their source. Jimin and Taehyung have a deal with the viscera of magic. Ask them about it sometime - I'm sure it wasn't as wordy as mine. I agreed to be a conduit for power, so long as I wasn't consumed, and the magic agreed in turn to thrust power through me, you know? I was a dreamer, I was attuned to them. Where are you in these dreams with Yoongi? Does he know? Does he share them?"

"If he shares them, he hasn't spoken to me about them," Jeongguk rubs the back of his neck, "I hope not. I'm not... I'm weird, in the dreams. He's weird, too."

"Where do they take place? Is it a place, or is it somewhere undefined?"

"Oh, no, it's a place," Jeongguk nods, on firmer ground, "It's the woods. The woods here, just outside the circle."