The doorbell chimed and Minseok slowly put down the apple he’d been peeling. He contemplated keeping the paring knife in hand as he went to open the door—just to give the kids a little bit of a Halloween thrill, you know—but thought better of it last minute and let the knife drop onto the counter beside the curling apple peel.

“Happy Halloween,” he greeted jovially, pleasantly surprised to find a couple of costumed teenage boys waiting on his porch for the candy he kept ready in a wicker basket.

“Trick or treat!” The one in the black turtleneck and cat ears crowed, clearly the more excited of the two.

His friend, dressed in a white baseball uniform, shrugged noncommittally, but held his bag out for candy all the same.

“Sehun likes to pretend he’s too old for this,” the cat boy shared conspiratorially. The tips of Sehun’s ears tinted pink and he mulishly crossed his arms over his chest.

“Jongin! I do not,” he retorted, sounding grumpy, and Minseok heard amused laughter from behind his back.

“Nobody is too old for the magic of Samhain,” Yixing informed the boys gently. “Or Halloween, as you call it. Tonight even the most unenchanted of apples holds the secret of a future love.”

Minseok, long used to Yixing’s disjointed, almost mystical, speech patterns, smiled adoringly at his lover and familiar.

“Well said, Yixing,” he complimented, then returned his attention to the trick-or-treaters standing before him. “Besides, candy is good for the soul no matter your age.”

“My mom says candy rots your teeth,” Jongin piped up. “She doesn’t know we’re out here tonight.”

He set his gaze to the lights flickering behind Minseok’s window curtains and to the collection of black cats curled up under Minseok’s porch swing and added, “She wouldn’t like...it.”

Minseok heard the pause and the unspoken “She wouldn’t like you.” He knew some of the people in town thought him a witch and claimed his house was haunted; they weren’t wrong, but they had nothing to fear from him either, and Jongin’s eager acceptance was endearing.

Evidently Sehun agreed because his eyes were soft and his smile fond as he mumbled that Jongin overshares and that they really should be going—lots more candy to collect and houses to visit before their Halloween was through. Yixing dropped a few extra chocolate bars into each of their bags and sent the boys on their way with a wave.

“I liked them,” he informed Minseok as the door closed and they returned to the kitchen. “The kitten, Jongin, was simply precious, and the way his baseball player looked at him was adorable.”

Minseok snorted; it was not an attractive noise. “You just liked the look of his in that uniform,” he teased.

Sticking his tongue out in response, Yixing said smugly, “I think you’re projecting.”

“They’re just kids; don’t make it weird!” Minseok defended.

Yixing laughed, leaned forward to peck Minseok on the cheek, and then hopped onto the countertop. He watched as Minseok picked up his knife and resumed his apple peeling for the pie he was making.

“Your pantry is already full of potential offerings,” Yixing pointed out. “I don’t know why you insist on making something fresh every year when you’ve got plenty of already baked goods to choose from.”

Minseok glanced toward the heavily stocked cupboard in the corner of the kitchen and sighed. It seemed his list of vegetables to pick and pumpkins to roast and foods to can and cakes to bake was never finished. But there was always going to be another coven gathering, always another ancient holiday to celebrate, and Minseok wanted to save when he could. Besides, an offering left on his porch on Samhain wasn’t meant for anyone specific, and Minseok had an inkling about two teenagers who might later come back for more.

“You think so?” Yixing asked, in response to Minseok’s quietly murmured premonition. “There’s no way to know if they’ll come back for your apples in particular. You’re not the only one who grows them around here, you know.”

“Of course I know that, silly,” Minseok said, his tone almost patronizingly patient. “But that Jongin believes, I can tell.”

Yixing tapped his lip thoughtfully. When Minseok slid the pie into the oven, set the timer, and began to tidy up, Yixing jumped down to help.

“You didn’t make this mess, love,” Minseok chided gently. “You don’t have to help me clean it.”

Yixing grumbled at his witch. “Don’t you know that this is what a human familiar is for? To clean up after an absent-minded witch when he’s finished messing up the kitchen? It’s like you think I’m only good for magic or something.”

Grinning, Minseok pointed to the long curl of apple peels spread across the island counter. The letters of Yixing’s name were easy to read, and they both knew that, if Yixing had been doing the apple-peeling, it would be Minseok’s name spelled out in gala red cursive.

“You’re good for much more than just that,” Minseok replied.

“Mhmm,” Yixing hummed pleasantly. “And don’t you forget.”

“As if I could.” Minseok wrapped an arm around Yixing’s waist and led the other man into the living room, then pulled him down onto the couch.

“And now we wait,” Minseok mused.

“For the pie?” Yixing teased.

Minseok winked at him and said, “Among other things.”

As they waited, Minseok set to work on a scarf he was knitting for an elderly coven member, while Yixing manned the front door and offered candy to any children brave enough to approach the neighborhood’s “haunted house.”

Finally, when the hour got too late for anything but mischief to be out and about, Yixing collapsed back onto the couch, moving Minseok’s feet to find his seat and then placing them on his lap.

“Children are exhausting,” he said, his eyes closed and his fingers curling over Minseok’s ankles. “Let’s have a whole lot of them.”

Minseok was about to respond when the entry way lights flickered out entirely.

“Speaking of children,” he said, and mouthed a silent spell of goodwill and good luck for the two boys who had just jumped the fence into his back yard.

“We’re going to get in trouble for this,” Sehun whined. Jongin thought it was adorable; god, he was so whipped.

He shushed his friend’s complaints with a finger to Sehun’s lips and flushed brightly at the contact, even though he’d been the one to initiate it in the first place. When Sehun responded by Jongin’s finger, Jongin blushed even harder and yelped “Sehun!” through gritted teeth.

“It’ll be fine,” Jongin reassured his crush. “The guy with dimples, not Mr. Kim but the other one, practically told us to take these apples.”

Sehun was skeptical of this; he’d never heard of an adult who would encourage a couple of teenagers to commit a crime, but there also couldn’t be much harm in grabbing a fruit or two from off the ground, right? Fallen apples were fair game, Sehun decided, and he picked one up as quickly as he could before urging Jongin to do the same.

“We can peel the stupid things somewhere else, okay?” Sehun told Jongin. “Let’s just get out of here.”

Once he’d picked up an apple of his own, Jongin let Sehun hurry him back over the fence and down the block back to Sehun’s house.

(Though Jongin did catch a delicious whiff and a brief glimpse of an apple pie left out to cool on Minseok’s kitchen windowsill and wished he and Sehun could have stopped for a taste.)

“You’re such a delinquent,” Sehun informed Jongin fondly as soon as they’d entered the relative safety of Sehun’s room. “I can’t believe I just broke the law for you.”

He didn’t say that Jongin could probably get him to do all sorts of illegal things if he only asked. Sehun was a little to embarrassed by his own sappy emotions to come clean about something as heartfelt as that.

Jongin shoved Sehun good-naturedly and laughed when his friend landed in a heap on the unmade bed. “I consider any stress I might have caused you due punishment for your lazy Halloween costume.” He eyed Sehun’s baseball uniform critically. “I can’t believe you just put on your actual uniform and called it a day.”

“Hey!” Sehun grumbled. “I’ll have you know that my looks absolutely fantastic when I’m playing baseball in this uniform; I’m just capitalizing on that.”

“In other words,” Jongin translated, collapsing next to Sehun on the bed, “you’re hoping your costume will get you laid.”

Sehun shrugged. “It’s worked before.”

He held up his apple, rummaged around in his bedside table until he came up with a Swiss Army knife, and added, “Now let’s peel these babies and see who that lucky lay is.”

Jongin wasn’t sure that’s how the soulmate magic of these apples worked, but he was too eager to peel his own apple to bother arguing with Sehun about the difference between a casual ual partner and the future love of one’s life.

Sehun peeled his apple first and was suspiciously quiet and evasive about showing Jongin the name that his apple peels had shown him. After a while Jongin gave up on trying to guess or tease the name out of his friend and instead reached across Sehun’s body to make a grab for the knife.

“Are you sure you want to do that?” Sehun asked. “What if it’s not a person you like? What if the peels are wrong?”

“You’re the one who said this was superstitious nonsense, remember?” Jongin told Sehun. “Think of it like your horoscope: if you don’t want to believe in it, no one is forcing you to.”

“And if I do want to believe?”

“Then it’ll happen for sure!” Jongin responded, encouraged once more to peel his own apple and find his own soulmate.

In an ideal world, Jongin thought that his soulmate would be Sehun. But having his crush be reciprocated had been a mere fantasy for so long that, when Jongin’s peel started to curl delicately into an S, and then an E, and then an H, and so on, Jongin almost didn’t believe it. His foretold soulmate couldn’t be Sehun; could it?

Luckily, Jongin was not forced to ponder this for long because Sehun, upon seeing his own name spelled out by Jongin’s apple, was quick to confess that his own apple peels had written out Jongin.

“Truly?” Jongin wondered, still dazed by the magic of it all.

Sehun sprawled back out on his bed and tugged on Jongin’s shirtsleeve until Jongin joined him.

They lay there, face to face, and grinned shyly at each other as Sehun lifted his hand to cup Jongin’s cheek and said, “Obvi.”

Jongin dissolved into giggles at that; pretty soon Sehun did too.

(The next morning, Jongin begged Mrs. Oh to drive him and Sehun to the store so they could buy the stuff to make brownies. A few hours later, Minseok opened his door to go check the mail and found a pan of chocolatey goodness on his porch with “thanks for the apples <3” spelled out in frosting across the top.

“Told you,” he gloated to Yixing when he got back inside.

“Yeah, yeah,” Yixing said, waving a hand like his and Minseok’s good deed of Samhain matchmaking was no big deal. “They’d have figured it out themselves. Eventually.”

“Silly familiar. That’s what we have magic for,” Minseok replied to Yixing, and then kissed him.)