2016/01/12 2016/01/15 EDIT: No major changes will be made during this edit, just checking for typos and fixing awkward sentences + editing/removing author notes (some comments may not make sense after this).

Chapter 1 – Fighting With Cats

The sound of the doorbell scares the crap out of Leo. He leaps a good foot in the air off of the kitchen bench before fleeing to a quieter part of the house, probably to hide underneath of something. Hakyeon would have laughed if he hadn’t also been startled. The doorbell was not a familiar sound.

He opens the door with a smile to a handsome young man who smiles shyly, revealing dimples and pearly white teeth. Hakyeon frowns when he sees the suitcase.

“Yes?”

“Ah, I’m Lee Hongbin.”

“Oh! Sorry! I completely forgot that you were coming today. I’m Hakyeon, come in, come in.”

Lee Hongbin was his new apprentice. A sorcerer friend of his lived in an area where a lot of people wanted to learn how to use magic. He could only take on so many apprentices though and had written to Hakyeon asking him to take one. Hakyeon had agreed easily enough, it would make things a little more interesting for a while at least.

“Did you have trouble getting here?” Hakyeon asks, motioning for Hongbin to follow him into the house.

“I ran into a few minor creatures in the forest but nothing too bad. My old teacher put a protection spell on me,” Hongbin explains, dragging his suitcase along behind himself.

“Sorry. I really should have met you in town and helped you get here.”

Hakyeon’s ‘house’ was about an hour out of town and only had a crappy little path that minor creatures liked to hunt along. They weren’t too much harm to anybody who knew simply defensive spells but people in town usually refused to come here, instead they would send a letter in the enchanted letterbox Hakyeon had set up in town.

“It’s okay, they really weren’t too much trouble thanks to the spell.”

“Good.”

Hakyeon leads Hongbin up several slights of stairs and down a number of hallways before going down another flight of stairs that seemed entirely random to Hongbin.

“Sorry, it’s a bit of a maze in here. Rooms just randomly swap where they are. It’s a security measure my predecessor put on that I can’t seem to break. You’ll figure it out soon enough.”

Hongbin nods to show his understanding and Hakyeon glances over his shoulder at him. The letter from his friend had said that Hongbin was twenty and had been learning for two years. That should put him at the end of the beginner level.

“Do you know any spells yet?”

“My teacher thought it would be better if I started learning spells from you. He said it was jarring to start with one teacher and then swap to another.”

“He’s right. So you’ve only done potions until now?”

“Yeah. I’ve almost learnt all of the basic ones.”

“Good, good.”

Hakyeon was glad he knew where to start and he’s also glad his friend has some sense. Hakyeon’s last student had been taught by three different people before coming to him and hadn’t had any consistency to her techniques. Her magic had been a mess. At least Hongbin would be able to be consistent with his potions because he should be able to teach himself the last few.

“Let’s start tomorrow so you can recover from walking so far and have the rest of today to get used to being here.”

“Ah, thank you.”

Hakyeon makes one more random turn before getting to a hallway that had only two doorways in it. The first is open and leads into a small reading room.

“The potions you don’t know should – Ah, Leo.”

Hongbin’s eyes fall on a medium sized cat that is fully black except for his left front paw, which is white. If Hakyeon hadn’t said anything Hongbin is certain he wouldn’t have seen the cat as he was barely visible under the couch in the reading room.

“Hongbin came today, Leo,” Hakyeon says. “You got scared for nothing.”

Slowly, and with no small amount of suspicion, Leo crawls out from under the couch. Hongbin can’t help noticing how sleek his fur is and how round his face is.

“He’s cute,” he mutters.

Hakyeon laughs at that and Leo runs straight at the wall. At first Hongbin is completely confused when Leo doesn’t make contact and then Hakyeon points out Leo retreating down the hallway.

“Did he... go through the wall?”

“He does that some times,” Hakyeon says, still chuckling. “He’s really shy, he probably didn’t expect to be called ‘cute’.”

Hongbin had never come across a cat that could do magic before. The closest he’d ever come to was his old teacher’s bird who could get a letter anywhere it needed to go. Before he can ask whether Leo was a special breed or something, Hakyeon points to the closed door.

“That’s your room. This reading room is stocked with potion and spell books. Please don’t touch any above your level and cause problems.”

Hongbin would have laughed if he didn’t know the kind of problems that could be caused. One of the other apprentices at his old teacher’s house had given himself a permanent skin change so now he had toad skin covering most of his face and chest. His teacher had been trying to find a way to reverse it for more than a year now.

“I won’t,” Hongbin promises with no prompting.

He puts his suitcase on his bed and quickly inspects his new room. It’s bigger than his old one and he’s glad he doesn’t have to share anymore. A door leads to a decent sized bathroom – no more sharing with six other boys – and another door leads out into the backyard. He doesn’t bother questioning how the door leads there – after all they had gone up more stairs than down – and instead turns to say thank you to Hakyeon.

“It’s no problem. If you seriously doubt your ability to find your way through the hallways, just go out into the garden and find the door that leads into the kitchen.”

“Wouldn’t it always just be quicker to go that way?”

Hakyeon smiles – it seems annoyed – at Hongbin and then sighs. “Sometimes the house won’t let you go outside. It’s a little temperamental.”

Hakyeon had been trying to remove it for six years now but hadn’t had any luck. In that time multiple sorcerers had visited and been similarly stumped. Everyone had come to the same conclusion, which was that Hakyeon’s predecessor had made up the spell himself and never written it down.

Hakyeon leads Hongbin back through the hallway, explaining that the layout of the house changed every day and that doors rarely led to the same room two days in a row. Eventually, after retracing their steps through the dizzying maze that was Hakyeon’s home, they find themselves in the kitchen.

“I was just making some tea when you came. You go make yourself comfortable through there and I’ll get it going again.”

Hongbin goes through where Hakyeon had pointed and finds himself in a sitting room that is a little on the dark side – probably because one of the giant windows was covered by thick curtains – but undeniably comfortable looking.

To Hongbin’s surprise Leo is sitting above the fireplace, watching him with wide, green eyes. Slowly, as to not startle the feline, Hongbin approaches him. He reaches out slowly and brushes his fingers along Leo’s shoulders. When Leo doesn’t protest to the touching Hongbin starts patting him earnestly.

“Ooh, he’s purring!” Hongbin says happily.

Hakyeon returns from the kitchen with the tea he’d promised and smiles at the sight of Hongbin rubbing Leo under the chin and behind the ears. As Hongbin had said, Leo is purring. It’s probably the most calming sound Hakyeon had ever come across and it always calmed him down. Hakyeon joins Hongbin in front of the fireplace.

“He loves being pet. He pretends he doesn’t, but he does,” he grins.

Hakyeon reaches out to pat Leo when Hongbin stops but Leo bats at his hand several times in warning, luckily with no claws. Hongbin raises his eyebrows in surprise. Hakyeon smiles sheepishly.

“We had a fight this morning,” he explains.

A fight? Hongbin wonders. What could you possibly fight about with a cat?

Leo stares flatly at Hakyeon and once again avoids being pet by the sorcerer. Hakyeon scrunches up his face at the cat.

“How long are you going to hate me for this? You didn’t do the dishes and I was busy, what did you want me to do, just leave them there? Please don’t be mad at me.”

Hongbin is so confused he doesn’t even know what to ask. Leo stands up, hisses briefly and then jumps down off the fireplace and stalks off. Hakyeon looks more offended than Hongbin thinks he should over a fight with a cat.

With a resigned sigh Hakyeon sits down in his armchair and motions for Hongbin to sit on the couch. Hongbin does as told and waits for Hakyeon to serve the tea, looking off to where Leo had disappeared into the kitchen.

“I suppose it is my fault he’s mad at me, I can’t really be annoyed at him.”

“B-because he didn’t do the dishes?” Hongbin questions, thinking he sounds crazy for even asking.

Hakyeon sighs. “The fastest way into darkness is to use magic unnecessarily. I used a spell to clean something that is easily cleaned by hand and made him angry with my carelessness.”

Hongbin takes note of what Hakyeon had just said, as an apprentice he needed to know these things. It was true that a lot of sorcerers ended up being a little morally questionably as they aged – that was why people thought they had to give up their heart to practice magic – but he’d never known what caused it. Using magic when you had no need to? Then what counted as a need? When was it okay to use magic?

Hongbin wants to ask those questions, but instead when he opens his mouth he’s asking something considerably less important.

“But he’s a cat! How can you fight with a cat about dishes?!”

Hakyeon laughs and then sips on his tea. “Well, he scolded me and then I tried to explain but he got angry and yelled at me, and that’s how we fought.”

Hongbin realises at that moment he isn’t going to get a straight answer. He was talking to a sorcerer who lived away from other people and who his old teacher had described as ‘interesting’. Besides, for all Hongbin knew, Leo could do the dishes. He could walk through walls, so why the hell not?

Plot actually begins around chapter 3 or 4...
 

Ages in this fic:
Hakyeon - 26
Leo - 24
Hongbin - 20
Ravi - 22
Jaehwan - 25
Sanghyuk - 18