Hyejoo looked at the magic sparking from her fingertips, flowing in grey waves that were deadly. Heejin, by her side, cocked her head, staring at it.

“I’m so sorry.” Heejin said, in an almost mournful tone. They were sitting on Hyejoo’s hospital bed, and the too thin hospital gown she wore was itchy on her skin.

By the bedside, the machine Hyejoo was all but wired to beeped softly. It reacted to every time her body produced a surge of magic, absorbing it - a mechanical core. Hyejoo was disgustingly familiar with those. 

Hyejoo’s magical core wasn’t the biggest, but it made up by overproducing magic - but since it had no place to be stored, it tended to overflow and cause things to combust. It meant that she had to go down to the hospital for a three day stay so that the medimagis could drain her core back to non-magical levels.

Heejin had accompanied her today - out of guilt, she supposed. Heejin was a rare person, with little to no magic, leaning into the no magic territory. She was new to their school, and had latched into Hyejoo for no reason the girl could discern: Hyejoo was something of an outcast after having gotten in a particular bad feud with one of the school’s better spellcaster, Sooyoung. Ever since that time, people avoided her like the plague. That was… Fine, she supposed. A better punishment than Sooyoung’s hexes, at least.

When Heejin heard Hyejoo could do magic, she asked if Hyejoo would mind showing a little. She liked seeing magic, Hyejoo realized by the glint of her eyes: maybe because she had none.

So Hyejoo went against her common sense and showed a few tricks that she thought would be easy on her. 

They weren’t: magic was overproduced to respond to Hyejoo actually using it, she overflowed, and then she accidentally set fire to half the classroom before it was controlled. Now, here she was, in an hospital bed, overseeing another three day stay. Hyejoo worried about the school costs - her family didn’t have much money, and surely refitting an entire classroom would be costly.

“It’s not your fault.” Hyejoo said, with a tense smile. She twirled the extra magic in her fingers, and it dissipated like smoke. “It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have used magic. It happens.”

Heejin looked at her with quiet, guilty eyes.

“Still. Let me help you. I’ve asked my father to pay the school the repair.” Hyejoo opened , and Heejin shook her head. “No, I won’t hear it. My fault - I shouldn’t have asked to see magic. It’s just…”

She paused, lip wobbling slightly, and Hyejoo handed her the tissues that were set on the table by the side. The box singed slightly in contact, and Hyejoo cringed.

“I don’t know. It’s kind of like wanting what you can’t have, you know?”

Hyejoo, who wanted a slightly bigger core that could contain magic normally, nodded.

“Yeah.” Her fingers found Heejin’s, and their hands intertwined before Hyejoo could realize what she was doing; when she did, she pulled back her hand as if it burned. Her magic was unstable: touching other people when it was active burnt them from the inside out.

To her surprise, the magic emanating from her fingers disappeared. The machine made a final, long beep noise and turned itself off, just like it did when it Hyejoo’s magic was exhausted. She stared at the machine, baffled at its silence, and then looked at Heejin, when she gasped.

“Look!” She said, magic dancing in her fingers, a vivid pink shade that contrasted against Hyejoo’s pale gray. Tears shone in her eyes, quiet, and Hyejoo blinked. “I - I thought I didn’t have any magic.”

“I don’t think you have.” Hyejoo said, slow, trying to piece together what she knew. Heejin looked at her, a frown creasing her brow. “You probably have the contrary of what I have: too little magic for a too large core.”

Heejin cocked her head, a sound of confusion leaving her lips. Hyejoo looked at her hands again: she’d never heard of people who could actively benefit of her too productive core.

“So you’re saying that if I absorb your magic a little bit, you won’t have to worry about using magic?” Heejin asked, and then smiled, bright as a small sun: blindingly, impossible to look at. “And we can be friends?”

Hyejoo laughed with the absurdity of the situation, hands clasping Heejin’s.

“And we can be friends, yeah.” The nurses would soon descend on the two, whenever they noticed that the machinery had stopped working, but right now they had the little room to themselves, and that was enough.