Put A Spell On Me - Taegyu

A Reversed Death Card

8:04 AM.

Taehyun felt a pair of paws on his face. He opened his eyes despite the heaviness of his eyelids and wasn’t surprised to see Kiki angrily staring down at him.

“Do you have to wake me like this every morning?” Taehyun whined in his slightly hoarse morning voice.

Kiki responded by softly slapping his nose and mewling.

“I know, I know. You just want food.” He smiled adoringly and lifted Kiki off his face so he could turn over on his pillow and get out of bed.

After a quick shower (during which the cat never stopped clawing at his door, still begging to be fed), Taehyun descended down the spiral stairs to the store.

He pulled out a bag of cat food from under the counter and poured it into Kiki’s small bowl. She stopped meowing and hungrily began attacking the food. Taehyun continued with his morning routine, first task being to change the sign in the door to ‘open’.

His first customers wouldn’t arrive until nine at least; Taehyun had grown familiar with their schedules. Since he wasn’t going to have anything to do for a while, he picked a book off one of the shelves at random and plopped himself down on the couch.

His mind couldn’t concentrate on the words on the page though, it was wandering off. First to store related concerns, then slowly to last night’s incidents. He realized he had never even gotten the boy’s name. What did he even look like? The face slowly reappeared in Taehyun’s head. The round, pink cheeks with high cheekbones. The messy, copper hair that framed his face. The rounded shoulders under a pink hoodie. At least he’d recognize him if he ever ran into him again.

Taehyun absentmindedly played with the corner of a page, lost in thought, only interrupted when he felt something soft touch his legs. He smiled down at Kiki, who was done eating and needed attention. Taehyun agreed happily by scooping her up into her arms and stroking and playing with her.

Somewhere close to nine o’ clock, he heard quiet bells jingle as the front door opened.

“Sorry, Kiki. Business calls.” He scratched the top of her tiny head and let her jump down to the floor, meowing one last time before scuttling off to wherever she liked to spend her days. Taehyun never had the time to find out where she went.

“Morning, Chwe!” a familiar fruity voice called from the front of the shop. Taehyun looked up and saw one of his favorite regulars, Choi yeonjun, waving at him. Yeonjun never directly mentioned it, but Taehyun could tell he was a proper witch too.

“Morning, Choi,” Taehyun smirked and put on his best dramatic voice. “What brings you here on this fine Saturday morning?”

"Oh nothing much, darling,” Yeonjun said, rolling the ‘r’ melodramatically before making a gross face. “Let’s never talk like that again. I have a boyfriend now. Anyway –”

“You have a bOYFRIEND?” Taehyun screamed suddenly, making Yeonjun retract in surprise and horror. “Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

“I don’t have to tell you anything, you’re not my mom. I just want my weekly tarot reading.” “Fine, whatever. Get over here then,” Taehyun said, gesturing for him to come to the couch.

Yeonjun sat on the armchair across from him. Taehyun’s customers usually sat on the couch while he took the armchair, but Yeonjun had his own way of doing things. That habit of which, not surprisingly, seemed to become apparent whenever Taehyun did the tarot readings and he got a result he didn’t like. Like right now.

“Did you seriously pull out a reversed Death card for my future?”

Taehyun groaned. “One, I don’t arrange the order of the cards specifically to torture you. Two, how many times do I have to remind you that the Death card doesn’t mean you’re about to die?”