“I left you for two minutes, Dal! Two minutes!” Kai screams, ducking a branch that almost hits him in the face. “Why do you always have to lure them out?! It’s like they’re homeless cats and you’re trying to take them all home!”

"How is any of this my fault?!" you scream back. But then a burning tree trunk flies next to your head and you can't argue any further.

“What do we do?!” Chanyeol shouts. He’s running next to you, looking over his shoulder every two seconds. You don’t even want to look. There’s a monster flying somewhere above your head, spitting fire balls at you, and throwing burning rocks at your head; the knowledge of that is enough. You don’t need any further visualization.

“I don’t know!” you cry, trying to reach Siwon for the fifth time. “Siwon isn’t—oh, okay, Siwon!” you scream when you hear a rustle in the speaker.

“I get you found the Ifrit?” Siwon asks, completely unfazed by your screams and by the monster’s wild screeches.

“No, it found us, and please help?!”

“The good thing is: only magic creatures can see him!” Siwon says cheerfully. Okay, so that explains the crazy looks you got from a family out on a stroll when you ran past them, screaming like crazy. “The bad thing: they tend to get a little overdramatic.”

“Siwon!” Kai growls next to your ear, almost, as you sprint for your life. You don’t even know this forest, you’re probably long past lost, and the boys are all pretty panicked, if their faces of pure terror are anything to go by. You don’t like the sound the monster is making above your head, and you certainly don’t like the fire that erupts every few moments next to your head or foot.

The weird thing is that nothing catches fire. It burns, it’s hot, but the grass doesn’t get burned by it. Almost as if it were an illusion.

“You pissed it off!” Siwon announces cheerfully. “By using magic on its territory.”

“How do I fix it?!”

“Apologize to him!”

You stop short. Kai is running so fast he runs past you, unable to stop, and you raise your arms up high, as in surrender. You were right about not looking at the monster; it’s even scarier than you thought before.

“Dal, what the !” Kai screams.

“We’re sorry!” you shout to the monster. It suddenly stops mid-air, its huge wings beating in the air, enabling him to kind of just… hover above you, in front of you, a few meters up in the air, right above the trees. Its eyes are red and huge, and very, very hostile-looking; you stare at him.

“Oh, he hates it when someone looks him in the eyes,” Siwon’s tiny voice says in your phone.

Well, .

Kai snatches you away a second before the monster dives down to swallow your head. The boy throws you onto his shoulder unceremoniously and takes off into a run. Your head is bobbing up and down, teeth clanking, and you can barely see what’s happening, but you can surely see that a huge beast is running right at you, screeching furiously.

“I’m gonna kill you, Siwon,” you say forcefully, your whole body dangling from Kai’s shoulder like a sack of potatoes.

“You know what, this whole thing is quite grotesque,” Siwon says with a hum. “No matter what you do and where you go, you end up battling mystical creatures.”

“Help! We need help! There’s fire around us and there’s only that much forest we can run through!”

The beast screeches again, catching up to you by simultaneously flapping its wings around and hitting the ground with its huge paws. You look up, heart beating hard in your chest, when it breaths fire at you.

You stretch your hands out, therefore dropping your phone onto the ground. You create a barrier in front of you, and you watch as the flames hit it, waves and waves of fire just bouncing off of it. The Ifrit seems very angry with the fact that its fire didn’t reach you, and you know that if you’ve started using magic, you need to keep on doing it, because if you don’t, the pain will come earlier and paralyze you. So when he stops spitting fire, you let your magic flow free, and now you’re kinda glad that you’re currently touching Kai, because your powers are always stronger when he’s touching you.

(That sounds a bit weird in your head.)

You start muttering a spell that Father has taught you, slowly clenching your fists in the air, as the Ifrit jumps and bounces and flies, chasing you; Kai slows down a little, you realize, which is weird, but you don’t read that much into it, too focused on the task at hand.

You clench your fists completely, and that’s when water from the underground erupts onto the surface from several spots around the monster, soil scattering around. You’re not sure what you’re doing and if it’s even going to work, but you feel a bit triumphant when you see the water hit the Ifrit. It makes his skin hiss, steam erupting out of it, and the monster roars, stopping in its track, thrashing around crazily.

“I don’t know what you’re doing, but keep doing it!” Kai screams.

“Put me down first!” you scream back. Kai does, then grabs your hand, and you run. Just in time to see a road ahead of you, a road that you all know, because it’s the main road that stretches from your camp and to the nearest city.

“Okay, towards, camp,” you mutter. The boys all circle you. You can hear the Ifrit’s angry sounds coming from the forest. “We’re gonna go to the camp, and we’re gonna put wards around the place, and then we can figure out what to do!”

“Good plan!” Chanyeol says. “But the camp is another seven kilometers away, and we could probably run there, but it’s gonna be super tiring, someone is gonna have to carry you, and we might not get a chance to put on wards that way.”

“To sum it up: we’re doomed!” Baekhyun says and chuckles. You all glare at him.

“I think it burned all the hair on my calves,” Sehun says absentmindedly.

“Okay, okay,” you say, waving your hands around. You put them on your head, trying to think. “Uh. Uh. Okay. Okay, we’re gonna teleport. Easy!”

“Tele—are you mad?” Chanyeol asks. “You’ve never teleported in your life!”

“There has to be a first time! For everything!” you exclaim. “That water is not gonna stop him forever. I really hate to take water away from the forest, okay, and the further away I am from it, the less magical it is! It’s gonna be normal water in a second and I don’t think normal water is gonna work on that thing.”

“Okay, stop talking,” Kyungsoo interrupts. “Teleport us. It’s gonna be easy for you, right? You’ve trained with Father?”

“Sure.”

“You did?” Kai asks, surprised.

“Yeah. It never worked, but it’s a special case today.”

The Ifrit howls in the forest, and then you can literally hear its huge wings flapping around, and the sound is louder and louder.

“Okay, make a circle, makeacircle, makeacircle,” you say, waving your hands around to hurry them up. You join hands, making the said circle, and you close your eyes, trying to focus on your magic, on the spell, and on the place you want to be at. It’s super harsh, though, since you can hear that monster getting closer and closer, and it’s—yeah, it’s unnerving.

You start muttering the spell and gathering the magic around all of you. The air buzzes a little from it.

Then the Ifrit jumps out of the forest, howling even louder, batting its huge wings and almost swaying you off your feet by the wind it creates. You say the last word of the spell, ready for a jerk, something, anything, but the only thing you feel is your magic disappearing from air, just like during all the trainings.

Like you just destroyed a soap bubble, or something.

Then there’s fire everywhere. Kai and Kyungsoo both jump at you, curling a little, just to hide you from the flames, and it manages to them a little. They both scream and blood runs cold in your veins. You raise your arm to the side forcefully, anger bubbling under your skin, so wild and so sudden you can feel the adrenaline pooling off of you.

You send a tree flying right at the monster.

It hits it in the head. The Ifrit falls down onto the road heavily; it’s disoriented and confused. You feel your muscles twitch in your arm.

“,” you say, realizing what you’ve just done. You’ve literally ripped a tree out of the ground and soil, and threw it at a monster. Your head is hammering with pain after using that much force of telekinesis. Your mind spins. You wobble back, almost ending up on your again, but Kai catches you wrist and heaves you up.

“I don’t know what to fight it with,” you admit. You look at the monster’s skin; it looks like it’s mostly covered with feathers, but you can also see some very hard, dragon-like skin in some places on his body, so you’re pretty sure you wouldn’t be able to pierce it with anything more than a very fast arrow from a few yards away. “Don’t look him in the eyes!” you warn, looking away from the monster. The boys freeze completely. The Ifrit stands up from the ground, throwing the tree away from its body, and shakes himself off of leaves and soil, huffing out angrily. You try not to look at him, but you can feel his stare on you. The boys take a few steps back, so that you’re standing in a line, every person next to each other, shoulder to shoulder, not daring to look up at the Ifrit.

The monster watches you all intently, its body ready to pounce. You can feel it looming over you, but you try to keep in mind what Siwon told you. The monster is bigger than Kai in his wolf form, which makes it freaking massive, and it’s way more muscular than Kai’s wolf. The wings, though; the wings make it even more enormous.

And you know that the pain from using the magic can flood you anytime, making you unable to move.

“Don’t move,” you whisper. “Bow a little. As if apologizing to him.”

They do, they all bow slightly, slowly. Now you know how Harry felt when taming Buckbeak. Then again, Buckbeak wasn’t a massive monster spitting fire. Still, you can relate.

The Ifrit’s angry roar dies down to a very annoyed growl, then to a quiet rumble in its throat. You can hear it sniffing the air, getting closer. At some point, you can feel and hear the flames cracking on its head, and Kai suddenly grabs your hand. Suddenly, but slowly. And he squeezes it like a little boy.

You feel like crying.

You calm down a little, but your heart is still beating hard in your chest. When you think that maybe, just maybe, it’s gonna be okay now, maybe you’ve somehow made the monster calmer, Chanyeol’s phone starts ringing, ‘Who let the dogs out’  blasting so loudly you all jump.

The Ifrit’s whole body catches on fire. It arches back, obviously ready to jump at you all, and it roars, its spit hitting you in the face.

Then someone on your right grabs your hand. You yelp with surprise; all the boys are on your left, no one is on your right, and so you look to your side and snatch your hand out of the person’s grip.

Then you see it’s Jaejoong.

“Hands!” you scream on the top of your lungs. On cue, the boys join hands, scrambling backwards when the Ifrit throws its whole body around, its long tail piercing the air right in front of your noses.

Then Father’s magic, tingled with Jaejoong’s pure presence aura, or whatever it is you feel, fills the air, and in the next millisecond, you’re gone.

You don’t like teleporting. It always feels a bit jerky, a bit like all your insides are suddenly ripped out through your chest, and you never once managed to land gracefully once teleported. And today is not the day you land gracefully, either.

You hit the ground hard, landing half on Sehun, half on Kai, and you probably kick someone in the face judging by the sound and a painful yap. It takes you a few seconds to collect yourself, and when your brain finally catches up to what happened, you look up and scramble to stand up.

“What the hell just happened and why are we on a ing cliff?!” Baekhyun asks accusingly, standing up with a whoosh and almost knocking you off your feet. He was the one you kicked. There’s a bruise healing on his eye. You look around, realizing that you’re indeed on a cliff, sea visible in the distance, and a huge city below your feet.

“Next time we’re going to the beach,” Suho says. “I’m not camping ever again.”

“Holy guacamoles,” Chanyeol says. “Jaejoong?!”

You watch in horror as Kai snaps his head up, surprised. His eyes are wide, but he’s frowning, and he looks both ridiculous and freaking scary. His eyes flash deep shade of red, the kind of red that usually shows up when he’s about to kill someone, and you panic. You panic very hard, and the pounding in your head doesn’t help it at all. It feels like you’ve broken a few nerves in your temple, dammit.

Everyone is quiet. Kai stands up. There’s a huge burned-out hole on his back, and his bare skin is pitch black. You can see his muscles flexing. Jaejoong is standing in front of Kai, although keeping his distance; his own eyes are glowing shy baby blue, the color of both submission and guilt, and you swallow hard.

There’s this tense moment when nobody knows what the hell is gonna happen. And then Kai moves so fast he disappears from your sight, and shows up right in front of Jaejoong, arm raised high in the air.

He punches him. Of course he does.

Jaejoong probably saw it coming, since he made no move to react at all. You can hear his jaw actually crushing, and he screams as he flies to the side. You can swear that you see his feet hovering about the ground when Kai hits him.

Jaejoong falls onto the ground, silent, and Kai flaps his right hand around, hissing at the pain. You see blood on his knuckles, and now you’re almost sure that if he’s broken Jaejoong’s jaw, his own palm broke too. Or he at least cracked a few knuckle bones.

The pounding in your head gets unbearable then and you promptly vomit, not even caring to get your hair out of the way.

“Uh,” Kyungsoo says. “Are you okay?”

You cough, nodding. Kai is frowning at you.

“Uh-huh,” you say. “Telekinesis. Throwing trees…one out of ten, do not recommend.”

You start puking again. This time Kyungsoo gets your hair out of the way and Kai approaches you. He holds you up when you feel your knees give out, and then the pain comes, wrecking your body. It pulses through your every limb, making you completely paralyzed; you kind of freeze in a half-bend, and Kai holds onto you this whole time, embracing you from behind. He lowers you down onto the ground. You crouch down, not even realizing it, and wait for the wave to pass. When it does, you take a deep breath, completely exhausted.

“ing hate Ifrits,” you gasp out.

*

Jaejoong is sitting out on the porch of your house. The sun is setting and he’s enjoying a cigarette, staring at a cat on the other side of the road at its paw. He hears the door opening behind him and Kai’s slightly upbeat heartbeat.

He’s missed that heartbeat.

“That’s why she smelled of cigarettes sometimes,” Kai says softly, standing next to Jaejoong. The man glances at Kai’s shoes – black, worn-out Timberlands - and realizes, These are mine. He’s wearing my old shoes.

A wave of guilt, nostalgia and pure affection hits him all at once. Kai sits down next to him all of a sudden. Jaejoong is too afraid to look him in the eyes, though. He lifts his cigarette up to his lips, hand shaking way too hard. He curls his lips around the tip, discovering that his lips are trembling. He’s close to crying, God ing dammit. That wasn’t what he imagined their reunion to look like.

Kai snatches the cigarette away from his lips. Just like that. He just snatches it away and stares at it while holding it in his fingers.

“You should quit,” he tells him, as if it’s something he tells Jaejoong every day. As if Jaejoong didn’t leave their house eleven years ago after causing half of their family to die in a fire, including Taeyeon. “They smell nasty,” Kai adds, quietly, as if talking to himself. And then his lips close around the tip and Jaejoong hears his lungs inhale the smoke.

Kai chokes on it. Jaejoong can only imagine his sour face. His younger brother throws the cigarette away, onto a lower stair step, and crushes it with his boot, making a disgusted sound.

“Taste as nasty as they smell,” he sums up.

Jaejoong wants to do something. Say something. But his muscles don’t want to move at all. He can’t even look at Kai.

They sit in silence for a while. Kai doesn’t move much; he doesn’t move at all, really. They both stare at the cat that is now lying in the middle of the road, looking like a pancake. Its tail is flapping around nervously. The sky is deeply orange.

A car speeds up and stops right in front of the house. Jaejoong freezes when he sees who’s inside. Taemin’s side profile didn’t change at all, though Jaejoong is surprised with his blonde hair. He just didn’t think Taemin is the type to dye his hair. Then again, he was always a rebel. Jaejoong’s hair is blonde too. So that must be something Taemin got from him.

It surely is.

“We don’t blame you, you know,” Kai says as quietly as possible just as Taemin scrambles out of his car and jogs towards them. Jaejoong stands up. Taemin’s face is scrunched up, his eyes are red and teary, and when he reaches the porch, he throws his arms around Jaejoong’s neck, knocking him back onto the stairs in a fierce hug. 

Have some awkward touchy-feely Kim family reunion you saps.
Also, I recently checked my ask.fm after a while. I had a question there about not updating my other stories, so whoever asked it and is reading this right now, I answered it! Sorry it took so long (it probably did, I'm not sure XDD).

I love you! <3