Minseok stared at his phone and ran his fingers through his hair. Jeong Jaehyun’s contact glared in his face, and he knew that he had to do it. Chen had been gone since before Minseok woke up, so this was the only moment that he would have uninterrupted and un-sabotaged by the demon. The attack at Champagne Lights had been out of fear, Minseok was sure, and so he just had to alleviate those fears.

Honestly, he was probably the least threatening human-turning-into-a-demon who ever existed. In that case, he might have been the only one of those who existed. Making a mental note to ask if there had been other proxies, Minseok took a deep breath and pressed the call button.

The dull ring buzzed in his ear, long dragging tones that simultaneously sounded low and high. Each one that droned made Minseok clench his blanket underneath him. He had moved to his bedroom and sat on the always immaculately made bed, notes of their contract open on his laptop. Everything had been fine before that moment he asked the raw food question, which wasn’t related to the non-supernatural business between them. He could do this, and if no one picked up, he could always leave a text or an email and—

“Hello, Minseok?”

“Jaehyun! Uh, I—uh.” He sighed. “I’m sorry about what happened a couple days ago. I have a… complicated situation, but I wanted to let you know that I’m not looking to out you or anybody, and I really don’t mean any harm.”

There was a silence, and Minseok held his breath. Then a voice that he would have never expected blared through the phone.

“What the ? He’s apologizing?! Stupid human, you were attacked and almost died, and you’re the one apologizing?! I’m going to kill him!”

Minseok blinked, then pulled back his phone to see if he got the right caller. Actually, he didn’t even have Chen’s number so how the hell did his voice shout from the line? Some voices sieved through, and Minseok thought he heard Yixing’s voice saying, ‘calm down.’

“Don’t you dare tell me to calm down! Human, are you at your house? You better start running because I’m going to GYAK—”

“Is that the proxy? Hi, I’m the one you kicked in the stomach! My name’s Kai!”

“Uh, hello.”

“Damn, he got guts. I wanna meet him,” an unfamiliar voice said in the background, melodious almost.

He… didn’t know how to respond to any of that. There was some shuffling and snippets of phrases before it sounded like the phone was finally handed to one person.

“Minseok?”

“Yixing?”

“Okay, good, you’re still there. I’m sending Kai to get you. Please wait outside your house, and I’ll explain when you get here.”

“Uh, sure.”

The call ended, and Minseok stared at the headboard of his bed, trying to process what just happened. He barely had that amount of time when a thud sounded above him. Through the roof.

“Kim Minseok, are you there?”

He slapped his laptop closed, threw it in its case, and dashed outside, locking the door. Backing up to look at the roof, he stopped once he saw someone standing on the roof tiles.

Wait, someone was standing on the roof tiles.

“Oh, hey!”

He opened his mouth to greet the person back when the person made a step, slipped, and fell face-first OVER the roof. Minseok ran forward, holding his arms out, but when he looked up to gauge their fall, the person was gone.

“Hi there!”

Spinning around, Minseok whipped out a punch out of instinct. His fist collided into the other’s stomach, and the person doubled over in a groan.

“Oh my god—I’m so sorry!”

“Gotcha!” The person rolled back, clutching his stomach in laughter. “You fell for it so hard!”

Minseok just stared at the person, first because of shock, then because he actually recognized them. Violet filtered through their eyes, clear when they pointed at Minseok, imitated the face that he had made, and rolled back in laughter again. The angles of their face contrasted the way their eyes scrunched as they laughed. Giving the person a once-over, Minseok sighed a bit in relief that they were unhurt. When the person finally sat back up, they let out a satisfied sigh.

“One of my best jokes of all time. Hands down. Oh, you punch pretty well for a human, by the way. Wow, I can’t believe that there’s a real live proxy in front of me. Did you know that proxies are so rare that you’re the second documented case of it happening ever?”

“I am? And uh, thanks. I think Chen said the same thing. About the punching thing.”

The person grinned, and Minseok found it very hard to remember that a demon sat before him.

“I’m Kai, demon under Commander Suho, Legion of Tehom. I had followed you to that supermarket because your demonic aura felt a lot like Hayong’s.” He stood and patted off his clothes. “The first time though, I felt something so I went to check it out, and I wasn’t prepared to see her like that. You were the one who took me out of there. Do you remember that?”

Minseok thought back to that time at Superstore Sung’s, and he vaguely recalled grabbing someone while racing out of the store then pushing them away as ice shards spat out of the dark fog. He shuddered.

“Yeah, I remember. That was you?”

“It was! You took me by surprise, but… you saved me too.” He rubbed his elbow, looking away, and Minseok couldn’t help the smile on his face. It was like looking at a shy university student trying to talk to their favorite professor.

“So I owe you one. If you ever need someone killed without a trace, I’m your guy. I’m an assassin!”

Minseok’s smile turned plastered as he internally fell through a blackhole whilst screaming.

“Okay! Enough of that mush stuff. Let me take you to NC Tech HQ, and Yixing will explain. We were ambushing the vamp and wolf when you called.”

Minseok whipped his head to Kai who took Minseok’s arm, his hand cool like a shaded rock in the autumn, and Minseok watched the world fold before his eyes.

~~~~~

Yixing slapped the report down and growled. He didn’t like this. He didn’t like that his friend had been so carelessly attacked by a vampire when he was just doing his human job. At least Chen had gotten in there in time and had the sense to bring Minseok to someone who could cure him. The pulled clot from when Minseok unknowingly healed Chen had been a lucky intervention as well. Yixing hadn’t even known that there was one.

The problem was that his sign had advanced—noted to have been triggered by the near-death experience—and finding a method to erase the mark was no longer an option. Removing a proxy sign after it was active would more likely kill Minseok than help him.

Yixing sighed.

He glanced at the signature of the sender—Suho. He was Chen and Kai’s commander and offhandedly known for his fiery red hair after losing a bet with a fire demon. That seemed highly improbable to Yixing from the way Chen and Kai spoke about him with such respect, but he wasn’t the person in charge of rumors.

Another thing bothered him. The demon commander had sent him a copy of a portal irregularity report, one that would explain how Hayong had escaped unseen with the kidnapped purgatory souls. The signature stagnation made Yixing worry the most. He knew the correct choice of action, but to involve Minseok anymore than what his unfortunate circumstance already him into seemed cruel.

That, and Yixing was selfish.

He was selfish and wanted Minseok to live a life out of danger, where he could just live for himself instead of for that disgusting crap that dared claim him as family.

Taking a deep breath, Yixing shook his head. That ‘family’ was gone, sadly not rotting in hell, but Yixing wouldn’t do anything more. He knew his friend well enough to know that he would react horribly if Yixing went to so much as submit a repeal for their positions in heaven.

That didn’t stop him from having the family members' locations handy though.

He was letting the anger dominate his mind. If he thought harder, he could justify himself by saying that his thoughts were out of righteousness. Minseok had been dealt an unfair hand in life, had been turned a blind eye to from above and below. So Yixing was determined to protect him as he could.

Sighing again, Yixing looked up at the ceiling of his apartment, then down at his phone. There had been a message earlier, but he didn’t check it because Commander Suho’s report had appeared out of a hell port. He was a bit surprised to see that the text was from Chen, and there were two of them two hours apart from each other.

The door to his apartment buzzed, and Yixing glanced again at the time. Four in the morning. Their team usually met late in the night at his flat for meetings, but Yixing hadn’t called for any today, and the only report he required from Chen was making sure Minseok made it home.

Wondering about the occasion, he opened the door and stepped back to let Chen in. The lightning demon walked towards the kitchen. Yixing watched him rummage through the cupboards for a knife, and before he could even ask what the demon would need a knife for, Chen slit the palm of his hand.

Yixing’s eyes blew wide open. Why the nine hells did he just cut himself?

Chen flexed his fingers as the blood pooled in his hand, some dropping to the floor. They both watched his skin close back up. The blood on the knife and tiles remained as Chen started to wash the knife. Sidling closer, Yixing raised an eyebrow when he saw the lightning demon look at him.

“You didn’t feel anything, right?”

“Why the hells would I have felt something when you were the one who cut yourself?”

“Yeah. And I heal faster than any human could even dream about.”

“Yes, that was a well-established fact that we both knew long before you dirtied my knife. You could've at least used a ceramic knife. Those are easier to replace.”

He nudged for him to clean the blood off the tiles too, pointing at the paper towels. The lightning demon rolled his eyes but started wiping the floor. When he finished, Yixing took it and threw it in his compost bin that Minseok had set up for him—he was cheating the no raw items rule, but supernatural blood held none of the pathogens that humans would have been worried about. Chen didn’t look and just looked back down at his palm.

“Humans have seen me heal right before their eyes too, and they always freak out and start calling me a monster.”

“Does that bother you?”

“No. It’s their loss.”

Yixing leaned back, crossed his arms, and took a closer look at his teammate. The demon still stared at his hand where the cut had been, a small frown pinching the ends of his mouth. Chen had never looked so distant. Even during their meetings, he at least showed his boredom with a curl to his lip and a lolled back head if he was. But this expression that clouded his eyes and dulled his reaction to everything around him was new to Yixing.

He glanced at the demon, his hand, the knife now set to dry, thought of his mention of humans freaking out on him when he healed, not minding being called a monster, and he wondered…

“You guys got home really late.”

“He got his car from the restaurant.”

“Still. It couldn’t have taken that long, right? Did you guys do something before heading back?”

Chen closed his hand and leaned on the counter with his elbows, looking out into the living room.

“He portaled into me and fell off a building.”

“What?!”

“He’s fine. I caught him. We landed in a parking garage.”

He rubbed a hand over his back, and Yixing noticed that dust created a square imprint in his jacket. Looking again, he saw that little scrapes roughed his clothes.

“So then I guess you guys went to get his car.”

“Yeah. He asked a couple things too, and I answered them. He has more to ask but he said later…” Chen looked down, tapping his forearm. “Why does he grab his arms?”

Yixing pressed his lips together. He had an inkling why. The day Minseok broke down in tears in front of him, Yixing couldn’t take it and peered into his mind. He saw Minseok’s past, how he perceived the events, how he perceived himself and his actions, but Yixing heard all the words that his brother and parents had said to him and had his own opinions.

Yes, he had an idea how Minseok’s habit had developed. Yes, he had also peeked into his sorrow without permission and maybe comforted him without solving the problem. With what he had already done, he had no right in telling Chen anything about Minseok.

At least, that was what the angel in him said.

“He does it unconsciously mostly. He scratches them if it gets bad enough.”

“What is ‘it’?”

“You should ask him yourself.”

Chen didn’t snark back, which surprised Yixing a little. Instead, the lightning demon rubbed the space behind his ear.

“Where’s his family?”

“He doesn’t have one.”

“I saw pictures in his bedroom, and the people looked related to him. He has to have one—humans don’t just pop out of the earth.”

“He did have one. They died.”

Chen’s eyes widened a little before they narrowed. “How?”

Yixing thought back to what he saw in Minseok’s memories and grimaced. “Unpleasantly.”

Chen looked back down at his hand before he straightened and leaned back into the granite. Yixing saw an amber color wisp across his eyes, and his aura stirred.

“Are we going after the people who attacked him?”

“It was my intention to investigate them, but I can already tell that Minseok would’ve wanted us to not hurt them.”

Chen frowned a bit.

“He did say that. Pretty much right after he woke up from almost dying to vampire poison.”

Yixing smiled a little and started towards the living room, Chen following.

“I had Kai do some scoping, and I did some research. We’ll set a trap to catch them then talk.”

Nodding slowly, Chen looked down at the work clothes Yixing had laid out to iron.

“Yixing, you can heal people, angel or not.”

“Yes.”

“Can you sense what’s wrong with them to do that?”

“I usually feel for their auras.” He paused, realizing Chen’s point. “Minseok’s aura was still mostly suppressed by the inactive proxy sign, and what I did feel from him still felt like Hayong. What most likely happened was that Hayong’s power knew to keep its new owner in stasis against vampire poison, but whatever Minseok managed to generate for himself wanted to heal you, hence the clot.”

Chen clenched his jaw.

“Your commander sent me a few reports, one on Minseok and the other about a portal irregularity near Purgatory.”

He led the way to his bedroom and handed the report for him to read. As Chen read it, Yixing smiled to himself. Someone was getting more curious about his charge; the number of late-night text complaints he got from the lightning demon had already decreased considerably.

“Stop smiling like that.”

“Rude.”

“I’m a demon.”

Yixing snorted to that and texted his other teammates, telling them to meet now for the investigation. He already had a plan in mind.

~~~~~

The plan had gone perfectly, actually. D.O had infiltrated the HQ and caught Jeong Jaehyun alone while he was filing papers, Luna had charmed her way to Kim Doyoung’s meeting and successfully lulled him to sleep, they had taken them to the CEO’s room, tied them to chairs, and started their interrogation. Neither of them would speak even after Yixing offered them pardons for technically attacking a human. When the room thickened with tension, of all people, D.O showed irritation first, kicking their chairs into the walls and wrapping the plaster in the walls to choke them.

And then Jeong Jaehyun’s phone rang.

D.O had plucked out the device from his pocket, put it on speaker after seeing the caller, and Minseok’s sudden apology silenced the room. Then Chen’s aura erupted in rage.

In hindsight, Yixing probably should have told Minseok their intentions with the vampire and werewolf first.

Aura fizzed before Kai and Minseok popped into the CEO’s office. Minseok held onto Kai’s shoulders, looking queasy, and the demon snickered.

“Do you get motion sickness?”

“Ugh, no. I just wasn’t expecting that…”

His eyes fell behind Yixing, to the two people stuck into the wall. Then they moved to the side, where Luna waved from where she sat on Chen, who was planted face-first into the CEO’s couch.

“Yixing, what’s going on?”

He scratched a finger to his cheek and helped Minseok sit down. Alarm crossed his face as Yixing tugged him to sit down on the demon. Kai practically jumped to sit on Chen’s .

“Is— Won’t Chen—”

“I put him to sleep, so don’t worry. Hi, I'm Luna, angel under Lord Baiying in the Glory Malakim. Nice to finally meet you. Oh! Chanyeol told me to tell you hi too. He’s guarding some people, so he couldn’t make it today.”

“Nice to meet you too. Uh, I thought demons didn’t sleep unless they chose to.”

“That’s true in most cases, but it’s my ability, so I can make even the most unpleasant of demons take a nap. Did Chen tell you about elements in the angelic world?”

Minseok lit up a bit and recited the bare basics, and Yixing gave a nod of approval that Chen had taught this to him at least. Leaving them to their now bubbling conversation, Yixing moved to the vampire and werewolf. They watched his friend with expressions that made him laugh—the light-haired,