To be fair, Minseok made his first scream-complaint only after Chen haphazardly swung a bucket of ectoplasm, which was after they had come back from physical training in the park. The demon had made him run, bench, lift, stretch, and burn for eight hours, only taking breaks when the demon approved. More than once, some couple or passerby and an even a police officer stopped them to ask if Minseok was okay and if Chen was pushing him too hard. The demon pulled on a sickeningly sweet smile and charmed them out of their concern, and Minseok shuddered at the sight of it.

Chen told them that he was training Minseok for a big physical competition, and he supposed that he wasn’t entirely lying if the demon counted survival as a competition, but Minseok also didn’t understand why he had to be out on display for everyone to see. There was a perfectly spacious and relatively empty grass field near his house, but Chen directed him to a popular park.

The worst part of having people around had to have been when he was doing upside down pullups and chin-ups on the monkey bars and some kids tried to imitate him. He luckily caught them before they broke their necks and gave them a stern lecture without their parents noticing. And the ogling—that made him feel self-conscious.

Especially when a certain demon would not stop raking his eyes up and down Minseok’s torso. No matter how much exercising heated his body, that burning gaze worked him up in weirder ways. The accompanying smirk didn’t help either.

After he pulled Chen to rest with him on the daybed, Minseok tried not to think about what he meant or could’ve meant by that action. That day had been a wild rollercoaster, and after Chen came to talk to him, he… felt a little bold. He also wanted a little security, and he pulled Chen close because he was just that.

Literally.

Plus, he had been just a tad too happy when the demon said that he didn’t hate him. Minseok had dwelled so hard on the fact that Chen probably did hate him that Minseok forgot to entertain the idea that maybe Chen didn’t. He felt embarrassment creep in when looking back on it now, but it worked out in the end.

Training worked out too. Because he was still finding the limits of his human strength before it transitioned to demonic, Chen had him do his usual workout before adding more sets and miles and minutes. Minseok was a bit surprised with himself when he did twice his usual set and didn’t feel winded. Halfway through the third add-on though, he started feeling the burn, and by the fourth and fifth, he was dangling off the park bench with exhaustion. According to Chen, he couldn’t rest often or else his body wouldn’t be able to endure later.

They stopped for the day when the sun started to set. Chen stopped monitoring him to watch, so Minseok stopped and plopped into the grass. He heaved while watching Chen and the evening reflecting in his eyes, and the same inappropriate compliment slipped into Minseok’s mind through the blankness of exhaustion.

Now though, instead of physical training, they had to work on his aura—hence the bucket of ectoplasm.

Minseok nabbed the bucket from him and told him to sit in the corner and wait, because apparently they had to practice the magic stuff with ectoplasm that stains while in his living room (his poor TV stand permanently glows now).

“Demons and other supernaturals will sense it outside of this house, and you don’t want your precious plants decimated. It’s the only place we can do this.”

“Face the corner!”

Chen hmphed but turned his face back to the wall, and Minseok finished setting drop sheets over his furniture and the walls. When he started taping them down, he let Chen move from his timeout to help.

“Where the hell do you get empty sheets this big?”

“Art or home improvement stores.”

“Why would you need to go to either of those? Your home is blessed. It won’t fall into disrepair.”

“How could I have known that when I bought these?” He raised an eyebrow at Chen, who just waved a hand. “I bought them for art projects.”

“Where’s the art?”

“Nonexistent. I didn’t get to do them since I got busy. I’m a terrible artist though, so the world’s eyes were spared.”

He held out his hand for the next piece of tape, but it didn’t come. Looking back at his demon tape dispenser, Minseok saw that Chen stared down at the tape with his head lowered and his back hunched. He looked… upset. As soon as Chen saw him though, he bristled and just cut off another piece of tape for him. Wondering but guessing that Chen didn’t want to say anything about it, Minseok finished taping down the sheets.

“Okay, sit,” Chen said.

Minseok did on the covered couch as Chen put the bucket on the table.

“Dip your hands in it.”

Minseok let out another scream-complaint that was more scream than complaint.

“You said that this came from a creature that eats and s out unformed aura matter. I’m not touching that!”

“It’s not dirty, you clean freak. Seriously—I’m a cat, and even I don’t think about cleaning as extensively as you do.”

“Hygiene is important!”

“You panic at the sight of dust. Ugh, anyway, dip your hands in and keep them there.”

“Can you at least tell me why?”

“No, because I need to see how you’ll do without my instruction. Instinct isn’t something humans have, so I have to beat every demonic instinct into you until it’s second nature. I have to know where to start and what of your human habits won’t work anymore.”

Minseok grimaced and peered into the bucket. The ectoplasm undulated like fog but had a thicker form of liquid as far as he could tell. The fluid also whispered indistinct words that he couldn’t make out even when he leaned close. For something that came out of a hell creature’s digestive track, it didn’t smell like anything. 

Making one last disgusted noise, he inserted his hands in and cringed at any incoming sensation, but nothing much happened. The ectoplasm gave him a small chill, and part of the fluid crawled up his wrists in an unnatural way for a moment, but nothing else other than that. He looked to Chen.

“Do something.”

Minseok gave him a flat look and turned back to the bucket. Chen said that they would test his aura so maybe he just had to put some aura in. Concentrating on himself, he found the dual presence of magic within him. The pillar of ice was still there but had weakened a bit, while the other grew in strength, a sort of flowy composite of tiny pieces that split and blended back together. Minseok thought that it resembled waves of granulated ice or snow. And sometimes Legos.

He wasn’t sure of which to draw from, so he just took a little bit of both and let them seep out of his palms. The stuff flashed, and Minseok flinched as it shot out of the bucket. Nothing fell on him as far as he felt, and when he peeked open an eye, he straightened in surprise. The two magics that he felt in him crafted themselves a representation out of the ectoplasm, the left sporting a block breathing out cold and the right a pool of billowing snow.

“Hm, you called them both out evenly even though there’s more of Hayong’s aura still.”

“What does that mean?”

“Manipulate first. Evaluation after.”

Chen waved for him to continue, and Minseok looked back at the fluid. Did the stuff just react to his aura? He imagined shaping a building but out of the snow, and it reacted accordingly. Spurned by play, Minseok thought of different things, from words to objects to plants to animals. He chuckled when he made a cat and willed it to move. The ectoplasm cat bounded through the air and swiped at an ectoplasm bird. Then Minseok got an idea. He directed the bird up and around Chen, breaking out into laughs when the demon swiped at the shape.

“Should I invest in some ectoplasm for your next cat toy? Could save me a lot in the long term.”

Chen stopped mid-swipe and pulled his hands back, shooting him a glare.

“Dummy human.”

Minseok snickered at the attempted bite in his tone when his eyes still followed the cat pouncing around the living room. He decided to try something else though, so he let the cat dissolve before calling on both the pillar and waves. He closed his eyes and painted out the place he saw in his memory—the cloudy sky floating above the jagged outlines of mountains, forests like mounds of pompoms on either side as they guided the gentle and blue-gray waters of that day. His most vivid memory of the place was gliding down the channel alone in a rented boat, the chatters of the crowded shore fading behind him, and then… just the breeze.

He opened his eyes, not really sure what he was expecting, but the scene before him glimmered so vividly that he gasped. Around his entire living room and even overlapping into the hallway, ghostly versions of the sky and mountains and trees rustled back at him. He looked down and saw the water actually ripple around his boat—that he was sitting in!—and when he touched it. The ectoplasm didn’t feel like water or the hard surface of the boat, but the color and depth matched. It looked so real.

“How the hells?”

Minseok turned to the voice and froze. He knew that Chen sat beside him, but he hadn’t known that the ectoplasm’s luminescence would reflect off his skin. Like silver in the clouds, the demon glowed in ethereality. His hair shone as night would against the moon, and the amber wisping through his eyes not of any scenery but of life made Minseok reach forward.

Chen’s cheekbones might have been sharp to the eye, but they were round to his touch. The chill of the ectoplasm wreathed about them, but Chen felt warm against his palm, his skin smooth and soft. Those flecked amber eyes focused on him, and Minseok realized that he just invaded a catty demon’s personal space without even a shred of excuse this time. He drew back his hand only for it to be grabbed. Chen tensed, looking away, but his grip on Minseok’s hand remained. Uncertainty and awkwardness prickled at Minseok, but then a thought popped into his head.

Minseok reached forward again, and, now too conscious of what he was doing to return to his face, instead reached up for Chen’s hair. He left gentle across the strands and fully intended to stop following what this strange trance had enchanted him to do, but then Chen leaned into his touch. His eyes closed as Minseok automatically shifted his hand to counterbalance the weight and rubbed his fingertips into the demon’s scalp. And just as Minseok could comprehend how the situation unfolded, a series of throaty huffs or maybe wheezes came out of Chen.

His eyes shot open and he pulled back, making Minseok jerk back his hand. Chen cleared his throat.

“You can stop now. I have a pretty good idea of your aura.”

Minseok nodded, turning back to the bucket. A spell of dizziness—maybe confusion—made him just blink at the supernatural matter for a moment. Oh, but his hands weren’t in the bucket.

“How do I stop it?”

“Feel for it and call it back to yourself.”

Focusing on the scenery, he felt the aura behind the illusion and teased them out of their shape, the clouds, trees, and water disappearing, settling within him. Chen stood, grabbed the bucket, and flicked out two fingers. A portal zapped into existence, and he practically jumped to get through it before pausing.

“I’ll return this and then come back. It’s not allowed to take these out for long.”

With that, he disappeared into the portal, and Minseok let himself slide off the couch, sink to his knees, and pitch his face into the floor.

What did he just do?! What the hell was he thinking?

He obviously wasn’t thinking to have just touched Chen like that! Was it a demon trick? Weren’t they known for seducing and tempting? But the lightning demon wouldn’t do something like that while they were training. And a lot of what he learned about demons and angels wasn’t anything close to human depictions.

Did… Minseok just reach out to touch Chen because he was beautiful and warm? Well, it was like Chen bragged about earlier—he looked good in everything. Even under the sheens of soul matter shat out from a hell creature. Minseok’s reaction was perfectly normal. Yeah.

Taking plenty of deep breaths, he rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling, reprocessing what just happened (and feeling his face flush at the recollection) as he waited for Chen. After ten minutes or so, there was a tingle in the air, and Minseok sprang back into a somewhat more intelligent sitting position, his brain unhelpfully supplying that Chen took longer returning the bucket than retrieving it. The demon stepped back out, rubbing a space behind his ear and sitting on the couch.

“You have good control. Freakishly good control. Most demons don’t get to that kind of unconscious level of it until fifty-something years. You still have to rely on Hayong’s share of aura, but that makes sense since you’re a proxy. You’re good with making concrete objects, stuff of the mortal world, but I don’t see you try to do anything abstract. Could be because no one asked you to do that yet. I’m assuming that that lake was someplace you’ve been before?”

Chen glanced at him, and like the awkward bun he was, Minseok avoided eye contact.

“Yeah. It’s the mountain-lake I went to with my family.”

Chen didn’t say anything for a minute, and he almost stole a glance when the demon started again.

“Was there wind when you were there?”

“Yeah, it was pretty windy actually.”

“The place you made didn’t have that. Did you think of it?”

“Yeah…”

“Then we work on abstract stuff. That’s tied to more forms of combat and more versatility. There’ll be a limit to what I can explain to you since I’m not a frost demon, but it’d be better than having an earth or fire angelic trying to teach you.”

“Why?”

“Earth shakes and crushes, too brusque for the delicateness of frost. Fire grows by spreading, overtaking, and consuming, the opposite of ice. Electricity has a flow similar to what you’re prone to using. I felt it when you worked with the ectoplasm.”

Chen glanced at his phone for the clock, and when Minseok tried to peek, the demon stuck a finger to his shoulder and halted him completely. He couldn’t move towards him at all, and he even tried wriggling a bit to get Chen’s finger to bend.

“When you know how to control your strength, this and maneuvering around it without breaking anything should be your first instinct.”

“That’s a lot of pressure.”

The end of Chen’s mouth quirked up in a smirk, and he slid down to sit next to Minseok, holding out a hand.

“Feel what I’m doing with my aura. Observe closely because you need to learn how to do something similar.”

Minseok stared down at his hand, already feeling a blush seeping into his cheeks. But bucking up, he laid his hand into Chen’s palm.

“Close your eyes.”

He did, and a shock jolted through him instantly. He kept his eyes shut and his hand in Chen’s though, and soon felt the same shocks flicking out of the demon’s aura, guessing that Chen hadn’t really shocked him or anything. They just felt more active. Still, they were softer than he initially thought, and the wild zips and zaps turned familiar.

He followed the soft waves that folded and danced to their whims between the flicks. They moved without pattern before abruptly striking. Minseok couldn’t tell to what, just a general direction away from them, but he still flinched.

But he focused in onto the feeling and thought that the way the aura moved outlined a shape. After that, Minseok found it hard to describe. The electricity thinned and faded to only the soft folds in between if he concentrated hard, and then it gathered like a cloud, finally dispersing in every direction. Minseok felt the slightest tingles in the air, sparking the most where it washed over him the first time.

“Keep your eyes closed. Tell me what you felt or what you thought I did.”

“Mm, your aura. It’s like last time, zippy zappy with that soft part in between. I felt it go out away from us, and it hit something and then… made a shape of some sort.”

“What shape?”

“I don’t know. Something with a lot of curves.”

“Anything else?”

“Then it disappeared but not all the way, poofed together, and went woosh.”

“Went woosh?” Chen drawled.

“Well, that’s what it felt like.”

Chen let out a small chuckle, and Minseok fought the urge to cover his face by blushing, evident by the heat in his cheeks. Great move.

“Okay, open your eyes. You can feel the motions, like when Yixing asked you what happened as he took out the earth poisoning from Kai, but you don’t feel the will behind them. If someone was trying to manipulate your confidence or mood, you wouldn’t feel it.”

“Is that bad?”

Chen shrugged. “If someone was trying to intimidate you through the strength of their aura or intention, it wouldn’t work as well, but if you can’t read intentions, then you’ll be relying on pure reaction to counter your opponent. Humans don’t have any internal tools to help them with that. They have to rely on the clues that their opponent lets slip, but demons and other supernaturals can detect it from aura. It’s like feeling malice from someone even though that person is behind a wall.”

That was a surprisingly easy way for Minseok to understand the concept. He nodded.

“The disappearing, that was me camouflaging my aura. Even if aura is inactive, you can still sense its presence without much effort, even if you can't tell the specifics. Most jobs require stealth, so there’s a skill where you camouflage it. High-class demons and supernatural creatures other than angels can’t blend it completely away because they have too much power and no other way to diffuse it. The only exception to this is Kai.”

Minseok couldn’t help the smile on his face when Chen’s voice lifted at the last sentence, like a proud sibling.

“Yeah, he showed me before. Must be handy for an assassin.”

Chen nodded, pride glowing in his cheeks.

“Humans can’t feel it regardless, but this skill is the first step to physically blending into your surroundings. Demons leave behind a residual presence, so the sharper humans might look again, but they usually account it to seeing something wrong. Angels don’t leave behind a presence, so they can completely disappear from human senses.”

“Is that what guardian angels do? Just constantly blending?”

“Yeah.” Chen raised his ‘I’m impressed’ eyebrow. “It’s one of the requirements of being a guardian angel.”

“So that’s why there’re no guardian demons.”

Chen opened his mouth, crinkling his nose in a rebuttal, but then blinked in surprise.

“Oh. I guess so.”

Minseok snickered, then laughed as Chen huffed.

“Anyways, the last thing was me putting out my aura. Depending on how you fan it out, it can be used for a variety of messages to other supernaturals. The one I did is a warning to stay away. It’s the one I’ve been doing to keep low-class demons away from you. Some don’t listen, but they’re easy to scare off once they show up.”

Minseok ran that sentence in his head again.

“You’ve been doing that ever since you started guarding me?”

“It’s protocol. Guardian angels do it too.”

“How often do you have to do that? Is it tiring?”

“Usually only every few hours, but for you, I have to do it about every five minutes when we’re not at your home, your car, or the places you visit the most at your workplace. I warded those areas so low-class creatures can’t get through. It’s more of a test of skill because you have to know how to pace yourself in how much you release. I’m not some newborn