fledarmûs || woosan

「chapter 9」: melting wax

Fixing his hair and shirt for the last time, Wooyoung rang the doorbell of San's apartment. He'd last seen him yesterday, but he'd been missing him ever since the man had left; their sleepover a week ago had turned into six sleepovers, and his bed had felt empty without his boyfriend beside him.

The door opened and he found himself faced with a tall, muscular, handsome young man; the man's angular face scrunched up a little in confusion, and the witch thought that though the man was attractive, he looked nowhere near as good as San.

"Uh, hi?" he greeted with a friendly smile, trying not to make his mild disappointment about not being met with San too obvious. If he remembered correctly, this was one of his boyfriend's roommates and closest friends, he didn't want to leave a bad first impression on him.

The confusion on the man's face made way to what the witch guessed was supposed to be disinterest but appeared more like badly hidden excitement. "Hi," the man returned the greeting, with a deep, surprisingly pleasant voice. "You're Wooyoung, right? San's boyfriend?"

Wooyoung affirmed this, his smile widening. His heart still got all warm and fluttery when someone said something like that.

The man nodded once, to himself, then inhaled deeply and turned his head towards the hallway. "San!" he yelled, "Your rat whisperer is here!"

"Go fuck yourself, Mingi!" the reply came from somewhere in the depths of the apartment, followed by a loud clatter and another curse. "I swear to god, if I didn't know better I'd think Smoothie is the poltergeist," San said to his friend as he entered the hallway, an orange kitten on his heels. Then his gaze settled on the witch and a wide smile carved dimples into his cheeks. "Wooyoung!"

As soon as San reached him, Wooyoung pulled his boyfriend closer to himself and kissed him. He'd missed this. He'd missed San. "Hi," he said quietly after they'd brought space between themselves, returning the other's lovestruck gaze with his own enamored one.

"Please, some of us are single," Mingi commented drily, trying to keep the scrunkly kitten from escaping his arms. It meowed its tiny meow in frustration, helplessly pawing at the man's hand; it was pathetic and made the witch love Smoothie from the deepest depths of his heart.

"Guess whose fault that is." San took his witch's hand and led him into the apartment, and Smoothie hissed a measly little hiss at Wooyoung as they passed the kitten.

'Cats really do have something against me,' Deimos admitted, though he didn't sound very sad about it.

The witch cursed him for that, though didn't linger on it; he was far more interested in his boyfriend's apartment than in whatever fucked up thing his demon had going on. The apartment was considerably smaller than his house - though still rather large for a flat near the city center - but it didn't seem as cramped as he had expected from San's descriptions of it. Aside from the occasional anti-capitalist or anti-governmental poster, it could even be somewhat cozy. Mostly, he just thought the assortment of plastic, brightly colored kid's cutlery stacked among several bottles of high-concentration alcohol was absolutely hysterical.

Through all of the little tour, he couldn't quite shake the feeling that he wasn't wanted here, however. There was something hostile here, something that would, without a doubt, happily hurt him if he didn't leave soon. He did note that it felt less like the hatred for an attacker and more like the hatred for a rival; whatever didn't want him here must think that he would take its place as the tormentor of the people who lived here.