Semi- warning. Minor time skips, from one year after escaping the palace to two years.
Drabble - A Good Actor takes place during the period this chapter is set in too, primarily after though, I think.

Chapter 2 flashback:

…Why would the house put someone right in Hakyeon’s room? Isn’t that putting Hakyeon in danger?

“Ah, well, not to toot my own horn or anything, but frankly not many people would be able to beat me in a fight.”

He reaches out and slowly pats Leo down his back. “Leo’s only beaten me once and he cheated.”

The look on Leo’s face says he disagrees. He pulls away from Hakyeon and walks towards the bedroom door. With a sigh Hakyeon sits up…

Chapter 30 – Figured It Out

“Aah,” Hakyeon groans as he reads.

“What?” Leo yawns, woken up from the sorcerer’s sudden noise.

“The spell.”

“What spell?”

Hakyeon does his best not to give the Anyethi an unimpressed look because he knows that Leo knows exactly what spell, he was just grumpy because Hakyeon had told him he was eating too many sweets. Hakyeon had said that he could have one for every game of rock paper scissors won. So far Leo hadn’t ever won.

“The spell you had on you at the palace,” Hakyeon states, knocking the younger man playfully.

Leo smiles and lets up with the grumpy act. He’d win eventually, after all. “What about it?”

“I figured it out, look.”

The Anyethi takes the decrepit looking book off of Hakyeon, glancing briefly at the title. “‘Old Spells’?” he reads from the cover.

Hakyeon nods as Leo starts to read the paragraph that had led him to his revelation. In the end he can’t wait for Leo to finish reading and explains it anyway.

“I can’t believe I didn’t try that at the palace. Older spells are harder to break because more people used magic. They need certain details to be known like the caster and the components that make up the spell. Things I totally didn’t think of.”

Hakyeon groans again. “If I’d had more time there I would have gotten around to this eventually.”

In the twelve months since they’d left the palace he’d stayed on the original research path he’d always been on so he didn’t miss anything or try things twice.

Leo has never heard about ‘old spells’ before, he’d thought the spells Hakyeon used were complicated enough as they were.

For a second he gets his hopes up. “Can you break it then?”

Hakyeon sighs. “I can try, but I really don’t know who cast the spell on you or combined the components together.”

Leo can’t help but look back at the book, feeling dejected. He hated the way he was forced to change against his will and while he didn’t blame Hakyeon for it, he knew Hakyeon was the only one that would figure it out eventually.

A gentle hand in his hair and soft lips on his cheek draw him out of his thoughts.

“I’ll try,” Hakyeon tells him, voice firm. “We’ll get this. Okay?”

Leo nods.

“Are you still reading that?” Hakyeon asks, rolling his eyes at the Anyethi.

Leo tries not to feel annoyed. He’d spent the last month as a cat and hadn’t really gotten the chance to read the ‘Old Spells’ book Hakyeon had tossed aside.

After failing to break the spell properly, going through every sorcerer he knew, Hakyeon had cursed the book for being a false hope and moved on. Leo on the other hand had been curious about how deliberate magic and spells had changed over time because intuitive magic had always been the same.

“It’s interesting.”

It wasn’t really but he was bored. Hakyeon kept expanding his library but nearly everything was about magic.

“Do spells really break when the caster dies?” he asks.

Hakyeon raises an eyebrow. “Most do, even modern ones. Some of the spells on the house broke when Dohyun died but others didn’t. He probably designed them so they wouldn’t.

“What about the spell that was on me?”

The sorcerer blinks. “I…hadn’t thought of that.”

He can’t believe he hadn’t thought of that. For half a second a thought flitters across his mind, asking him why he was trying to invent a spell that removed magic. He should just kill all the sorcerers so the spell on Leo will break properly. Hakyeon shakes the thought away, trying to stifle the weird laugh that tries to rise up. No, he needs to make that spell.

For all of a minute the pair gets excited about the prospect of Leo’s spell breaking when the caster dies but then they remember that they have no idea who that is. This time it’s Hakyeon that needs consoling.

Leo wraps his arms around Hakyeon. “It’s okay,” he sooths. “It’ll break eventually. It’s not like the caster will live forever.”

“Why don’t you just make it happen?” Leo asks when Hakyeon goes to cast a cleaning spell on Ravi’s shop.

For a second Hakyeon doesn’t comprehend what the Anyethi means but after seeing Ravi nodding he gets it.

“With intuitive magic?” he asks back.

He had pretty good control over his intuitive magic thanks to Dohyun and watching Ravi all these years, but he’d seen Leo do things he wouldn’t even know how to try do, like the time Leo hadn’t even realized he was deflecting the rain off them. He did it unconsciously, without thought, but Hakyeon was still at the stage where he was tricking his magic into doing things.

Leo nods and barely a second later has the room begun to tidy itself up.

“How?”

The Anyethi considers it for a moment and then realizes this wasn’t going to be something easy to teach. “I’ll teach you but it’ll take a while.”

Hakyeon scoffs. “Because we don’t have time,” he says sarcastically, he’d hit a dead end with breaking the spell.

“Ooh,” Ravi grins. “Can you teach me too?”

Leo nods again. “But let me get Hakyeon up to your level first.”

The sixteen year old grins. “You hear that Hakyeon? You have to get up to my level.”

The sorcerer tuts and with one word Ravi is sprawled on his back on the floor, arms and legs locked in place.

“Just throw it?”

“Just throw it,” Leo confirms.

Hakyeon flounders around in his head trying to ‘just throw it’. “How?” he demands a minute later.

The Anyethi shrugs and throws one hand forward. A small amount of magic shoots out and hits a tree, knocking out some leaves but not doing any real damage.

The sorcerer frowns and tries to do the same, tries to feel the difference between his intuitive magic and his deliberate magic. It takes another twenty minutes before he manages to do what Leo did, shaking the tree a little less.

“Whoo!” Hakyeon cheers, clapping for himself since Leo doesn’t. “Oi, congratulate your students when they achieve things!”

Leo claps. “Good job.”

On completing the easiest, most basic step.

Hakyeon nudges the younger man and grins. “Thanks.”

The Anyethi scoffs and lets the sorcerer bump him around playfully. “Now learn how to do everything else.”

“Oh yeah,” Hakyeon grins, giving Ravi a thumbs up. “Leo said I’m ‘basically a creature’.”

If Leo had heard that he’d deny it but as it is he teleports back into the room only seconds after. “I got the roots,” he tells Ravi, dropping said roots onto the work bench.

“Thanks.”

Hakyeon ignores their exchange and tugs on the Anyethi’s arm. “Are you going to teach me how to fight now?”

Leo is legitimately confused by the question. “How?”

“With intuitive magic? You’ve talked about it before. You said it was hard.”

He was at a dead end with both the spell that had been on Leo and the new one he was trying to develop to take away magic. Training with Leo was a really good distraction and since intuitive magic only made him physically tired all of his brain power was still available to think about the two spells.

“I suppose I can. Don’t complain if you can’t do it. I’ve never heard of a human that can.”

“So it’s basically the exact same thing you taught me when I was first learning? I just throw out some magic?” Hakyeon asks, feeling a little skeptical.

“It’s the most useful attack,” Leo replies.

He’s tempted to tell the sorcerer that getting the right amount of magic to be released was the hard part but holds his tongue, kind of hoping to take Hakyeon’s ego down a notch.

“Okay then,” Hakyeon mutters.

“Shoot it at me.”

Hakyeon’s mouth falls open. “Shoot it at you?!”

Leo nods.

“What if you get hurt?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Okay then,” he mutters again, getting himself ready.

Hakyeon throws his hands out and absolutely nothing happens. Leo tries not to smirk.

Hakyeon pushes his hands forward and feels as a large amount of magic leaves his body, a lot more than he’d intended to throw. After finally figuring out how to do this he and Leo had often had little fights now and then as a way of practicing. So far he’d won every time.

 Leo attempts to block the blow but is pushed back, he hadn’t expected Hakyeon to unleash that much intuitive magic from the get go but luckily his own magic had stopped most of it. He still loses his footing and falls, landing several meters away from his beginning point completely uninjured.

Hakyeon screams his surprise and sprints towards the other man. “Are you okay?” he demands as he approaches, he’d never caught Leo off guard like that before, not once in the last six months.

Hakyeon kneels down next to Leo, ready to pull out any of the healing spells he knew – but wasn’t good at – if need be. Leo turns his head to look at him and Hakyeon can’t help noticing how mussed he is. His shirt has ripped off his shoulder to reveal his collar bones and his hair is rumpled. He’s panting because of the impact and probably the surprise too, and Hakyeon can’t help thinking of another situation in which Leo would be disheveled and panting.

Leo sees the look that Hakyeon is giving him and holds back a smile, he knows where that particular look usually got him but this time he could use it to his advantage. Hakyeon is still ogling his face and chest when Leo gently wraps his fingers around the other’s wrist.

Hakyeon knows an invitation when he sees one. Without a second of hesitation he leans forward and plants a kiss on Leo’s lips. Leo would never admit to it, but in those first few seconds he forgot what his plan was. It’s only when Hakyeon shifts to be hovering over him that he remembers.

When they pull away for air Leo seizes the opportunity and flips them, pinning Hakyeon’s wrists above his head. At first Hakyeon is excited because this rarely happened but then he’s excited because of the look on the Anyethi’s face. He doesn’t get to admire it for long, interrupted by Leo’s kiss, but he can see it very clearly still in his mind and it sets him on fire.

Leo breathes his way up Hakyeon’s neck, making him shiver in anticipation. Hakyeon turns his head further to the side, inviting any sort of contact. He doesn’t get it though.

“I win,” Leo whispers before pulling back.

Hakyeon stares at him in disbelief. “I-I… hey!”

The tiny smirk on Leo’s face is almost as much of a turn on as it is an annoyance. Before Hakyeon can even begin to complain Leo leans back down and initiates another kiss. He gently on the older man’s lip before breaking the kiss.

“Say I win,” Leo orders, tightening his hold on Hakyeon’s wrists.

Hakyeon’s eyes widen a little. Leo was usually a lot more submissive in these situations and Hakyeon usually liked it that way, but seeing Leo like this…

“No,” he murmurs, tempted to see how the younger man will react.

Leo’s eyes flash to his and in the next second Hakyeon experiences a falling sensation and then he’s surrounded by pillows and his comforter. His shirt is gone before he even knows it, pulled up to tangle his hands and then stuck there magically so he couldn’t move them.

Hakyeon’s first thought it that Leo has really great control over his intuitive magic, his second is that Leo’s tongue is really hot on his . Leo, who now has two free hands, takes advantage of their positions, letting his hands roam over Hakyeon’s body, pausing for way too long on that one spot on his hip that made him melt.

“L-Leo,” Hakyeon mutters, trying not to sound breathy in his desperation. He fails.

“Tell me that I win,” Leo says.

Hakyeon feels determined to never say that until Leo’s hand brushes against his crotch. “A-ah. You win, you win. Just–”

Leo’s lips on his stop him from saying anything more, and he presses up into the kiss in a way he normally teased the Anyethi for.

“Mmm,” Leo hums into the kiss.

He releases the magic holding Hakyeon’s hands and the older man flips them, pulling off Leo’s shirt before kissing him.

“You won,” he murmurs into Leo’s throat. “But you cheated.”

Leo disagrees but he’s not really interested in arguing right now.

“So you’ve given up?” Ravi laughs. “You beat Leo at it for months but he wins once and you give up?”

Hakyeon groans at the teasing. “I don’t have time, Yeongsik suddenly asked me to take on two of his apprentices.”

“And you agreed?” the potion maker asks, incredulous. He knew all about Hakyeon’s situation with Yeongsik.

“He caught me on the spot and I couldn’t think of an excuse! Besides, maybe this will be good, recruit some more sorcerers to help Minho.”

Leo meows, he doesn’t like it.

Hakyeon pats him soothingly. “It’ll be fine.”