Minseok woke up practically bouncing out of his daybed. An early riser from habit with his job, he was watching the bright blossoms of his trumpet creeper vine bob under the dappled sunlight when his phone buzzed with a text. Luhan had texted him about his morning woes of paperwork and grading and classes before ultimately deciding that texting took too much effort and that driving to pick up Minseok and then driving them to a mall to hang out was a much better option.

Texting back a cheerful yes, Minseok agreed to an afternoonish time after Luhan’s meeting and went to start his day. He had brushed his teeth and started making breakfast when a presence zipped behind him. He turned around, and a flicker of surprise held Chen’s expression for a second, then he smiled, almost sweetly, mostly sneakily, and slunk to hover at Minseok’s shoulder.

Neither said anything, but Minseok’s hold on his spatula twisted more clumsily as he stirred his fried rice. He felt the demon’s gaze burning into the food to the point that maybe he could just turn off the stove and let demon-stare power the fire for him.

With more rice grains than usual scattered around his stove, Minseok managed to transfer the fried rice to a container, setting a portion aside for himself, before having to face the inevitable question/demon. Lingering at the utensil drawer, he took his time in not-looking at the various spoons, forks, and chopsticks as he built the courage in his chest and his mouth.

“Do you want a bowl?”

He picked out a spoon because the time already dragged past the normal amount of time to pick a utensil and glanced back behind him. Chen’s face was blank though.

“A bowl? You want me to eat with you?”

“I was just offering since you were so intently trying to the fried rice into your eyeballs, so maybe you’d like to some into your stomach instead.”

Then he snorted, and Minseok felt the tension that he hadn’t known was building in his shoulders unravel.

“Just because I ate with you once doesn’t mean that I’m going to eat every little thing that you throw over a fire.”

“This would be the first thing you’d taste from both my cooking and from over a fire. A sushi roll as a whole isn’t cooked over anything. Plus, I didn’t make the sushi. Cooked things and mostly raw taste completely different. And my cooking isn’t that bad.”

Chen’s blankness slitted into narrowed eyes.

“Of course, you’d say that your own cooking is good. You’re biased because of the effort you put into it.”

“Well, true—that’s effort justification bias—but I didn’t say that it was good. I said that it wasn’t bad.”

“What’s the difference?”

“One has confidence in its tastiness, and the other is to make the cook feel better.”

“All the more reason to not try it.”

Minseok jut out his lower lip in a pout before he realized what he was doing. When he did realize what childish reaction he just gave to a demon, he flipped back around, rubbing his neck, and shut the utensil drawer. No better way to hide his embarrassment than to eat. He trudged to the table, munching on his fried rice and pulling out his phone to scroll through whatever biased newsfeed the default search engine was paid to show people.

Half-way through an article about some freak electrical outage in some small town, he lifted the spoon for another mindless shoveling of his mouth, but his hand felt too light and his fingers twitched around nothing. He looked over at the table and had to follow the trail of scattered peas and rice grains to find his bowl. And his spoon.

Chen’s eyes rounded out as he scooped up the last piece of meat from the bowl and snatched it into his teeth. Whether he brought the spoon to his mouth, flung the morsel with accuracy, or pounced on it, Minseok couldn’t tell. As the demon chewed, his smile grew wider and curlier, making his cheekbones well together in delight and his eyes close in contentment. Minseok couldn’t help the small chuckle that escaped him, and he whipped his head away at the same time Chen looked up, once again not-looking at his phone.

He flicked through the last of the article and put his phone away, taking the empty bowl and spoon from the table and starting the wash process. He heard the quiet scraping of a chair, but the ever-silent demon made no other noise for Minseok to guess his whereabouts. After setting the dishes to dry, he turned around and found the kitchen empty of demon and his phone. He had left it on the table. Sighing at the only possibility (unless there were also supernaturals who possessed phones and made them wander off on their own), Minseok moved out of the kitchen and through the halls of his house.

He searched every room and closet but found no demon or demon-cat and figured that the only place Chen could be while still fulfilling his guard duty was in his garden space.

Minseok mentally patted himself on the back and sighed as he spotted Chen spinning the device in his hand. The demon didn’t even turn around to acknowledge his presence until after he had flung the precious device into a knot of branches of his wisteria tree. When Chen did turn around, he had the gall to slip the end of his mouth up in a smirk.

“Going out to play? And without telling your very important guard with an impeccable record but assigned to keep your frail and danger-magnet human from becoming food? Little naïve human.”

“I was going to tell you, but you stole my phone and scampered off before I could. And didn’t they teach you that stealing phones and tossing them into a tree was rude at demon military school?”

“Do you think it’s practical for manners to be taught to demons when their survival and job depends on hunting down supernatural threats?”

“You never know. There could be a supernatural danger sitting in a corporate chair who can only be brought down from the inside.”

“Then an assassin like Kai would be sent on that mission.”

“So even the Liquid Lightning has to sit back sometimes?”

Chen’s eyes barely had any white in them as he squinted a glare at him, and Minseok snickered at the apparently potent jab to the demon’s ego.

“Just because assassination isn’t my specialty doesn’t mean that I can’t kill without a sound or leaving evidence.”

Minseok's brain chose that moment to remember that they were alone in his balcony garden where no one would hear him for half a kilometer and probably even further because of the secluded section of his garden and the sound absorption of all the plants. He cleared his throat and moved to sit on his daybed.

“Okay, so? What do you want?”

The smirk returned, and Minseok considered punting a foot up to knock Chen’s chin straight into it.

“I don’t want nor expect anything from you, but Yixing wants me to teach you how to use your accidentally acquired demonic power so that you can at least pretend to be able to defend yourself from anyone or thing that might want to kill you.”

“Okay, so you kidnapped my poor phone as your hostage why?

“It’s in a tree that’s easily climbable,” Chen said, all manner of condescension undisguised in his voice. Minseok glanced up at his fifteen-meter tree bustling in violet-blue blooms and sighed.

“And because it’ll be a distractor for when I, unfortunately, teach you today.”

“Today? But I have a hangout with Luhan later in the afternoon.”

“Then hurry and learn something so you can go out.”

Holding in a groan because he knew that that would only make the demon smirk even more, Minseok gestured for him to go on.

“Every time you used aura, it’s been unconsciously or by accident. Yixing said that it responds to your will, which means that your body should be adjusted enough to start feeling and manipulating it with your conscious control. Auras are unique to that specific demon or angel because they are the manifestation of one’s soul, which is indicative of their connection to their respective sphere. The stronger that connection, the stronger the initial aura and your potential. But anyways, in theory, even power obtained through the proxy process will change and adapt to that specific person.”

“Are proxies common?”

Chen glared at him, and Minseok leaned back and waved for him to go on. Apparently, Chen was a lecture-first kind of magic teacher.

“They’re not. You said that you felt a buzz as my presence. Did you ever feel anything else from a different demon or angel?”

“Once? When D.O told me to find the imp, I felt his power first. His aura felt… quiet? A little rumbly. But I could tell that it was strong. It felt like it was just sleeping.”

“D.O chooses to control his aura at all times. Most earth element angelics don’t have the restraint that he does. Usually, they’re all quaking all the time. They’re the counterparts to lightning element angelics, like yours truly. A buzz is the bare minimum of my and other lightning element auras. Water and fire are the counters of each other. Water more flows, while fire rises. Unique auras have their own kind of nature.”

“What does Kai’s aura feel like as a spatial person?”

Chen rolled his eyes.

“If you learn how to feel auras, you can feel for yourself when you see him again.”

“Okay, so how do I do that?”

“Concentrate on the energy in your surroundings. Feel it. Don’t use your eyes. Very few angelics can see raw aura or that connection to a sphere. Right now, you still have to focus all your tiny mind into your awareness to even sense something, but you should be able to feel everything without even having to think about it in time.” His lip peeled back in a sneer. “If you get the time.”

“Because I’ll be dead?”

The sneer transferred up to his cheekbones in disgust.

“No, because I’ll have caught Hayong. Don’t you dare look down on my skill, human.”

“You should add Yixing and the rest of your team to your skill too, Liquid Lightning.”

Minseok snickered at the way Chen looked like he so wanted to choke him. In addition to his usual glare, his lips hiked up in defiance or annoyance. Probably both.

“Shut your eyes and feel your stupid aura.”

Turning his head up at his aura being called stupid, he closed his eyes and tried to feel for the abstract sensation of energy like when he had found the imp. First, he felt the heat of the air, warmed from the waves of the late summer sun, then the plushness of his daybed against his back and bottom and all the small patterings within his body. In that space of calm, the curtain started falling over his shoulders, images flashing on the cloth. Minseok bolted up and shook his head.

Sitting in his garden space like this made him automatically slip inward, and he guessed that last night’s sushi interrogation had dredged up some of his buried memories. Now wasn’t the time to try feeling and processing his emotions though.

He took in another breath and focused on the outside. There was the heat again, then the soft breeze along his skin, and before him the presence of the lightning demon buzzed. A zip within the buzz caught his attention, and Minseok zeroed in on the new discovery.

Chen's aura zipped and zapped in erratic patterns within itself, but between each spark, electricity flexed and flowed, playfully teasing. Misneok wondered if this softnes represented the same gentility as when Chen brushed his hand down the lapel of the blazer. It... seemed nice.

After feeling the demon’s aura, he remembered that he should probably be feeling his own aura, so he turned inward—but not too inward—and found a core pulsing in weak waves. The core felt like a block of ice, sturdy and uncompromising, and wreathes of cold floated down as if the power actually condensed the air around it. Minseok frowned a bit. He didn’t know what to expect, but he must have been expecting something else because disappointment floated down his stomach. Chen and D.O’s auras had felt so alive and moving and reactive. And Minseok’s power was a literal brick of frozen water.

Sighing a little, he opened his eyes to see Chen watching him, arms crossed, eyes narrowed. Standard Chen expressions, except that he also had a raised eyebrow.

“Took you a while.”

“I, uh, got distracted.”

The demon rolled his eyes, but Minseok would take the cattitude over being taunted about how he was checking out Chen’s aura. He didn’t know if supernatural auras had any social(?) connotations like sleeping did, so he would play it safe.

“You won’t have the luxury of being distracted while in a battle. What’d you feel?”

“A block of ice.”

His eyebrow raised back up again.

“Is that it?”

“There were clouds of cold around it too, like when you look sideways at the freezers at the supermarket and the cold air billows over the top.”

Curiosity passed through Chen’s face before he sighed and leaned back against the wisteria tree.