Epilogue

The breeze is light and it’s a little too hot at this time to be on the rooftop, but he doesn’t care. He’s busy watching two men walk out of a café with their hands tightly interlaced from his vantage point hidden from pedestrian view. Sipping at the coffee he brought with him, he takes a photo for proof, but apparently he doesn’t need to, because the one he wants to send the photo to appears beside him.

“Did you think it was funny?” the guy says as he plops himself down beside him.

“Of course it was funny, hyung,” he answers breezily.

His hyung doesn’t look terribly amused, but then this is the same guy who has always been a bit of a stick in the mud about the ways they should be carrying out their duties.

“Well, can you at least tell me next time if you’re going to dump my charge into a parallel universe before you do it, Lee Sungyeol?”

“But hyung, it worked,” Sungyeol whines, and it did, because the red thread around the ankles of the two men walking on the street is now brighter than ever. He points it out to his hyung, but all it does is earn him a light smack on the head.

“Aish, Sungyeol. I know you were a Jokester before this, but you have been reassigned to be a Cupid, and you can’t do things the same way as you did before,” his hyung chides.

“But hyung, it’s fun,” Sungyeol grumbles, rubbing the sore spot on his head. “And besides, it did the trick, didn’t it? I saved you the trouble of doing the job twice, in two universes even.”

His hyung’s already small eyes narrows at him, and Sungyeol is about to raise his hands up to fend off another smack when he hears –

“Aish, fine. You’re right, it got two pairs of Nam Woohyun and Lee Howon together, but do you know how minute that is in the greater scheme of things? I still have infinitely many more Nam Woohyuns and Lee Howons to bring together in all the other universes.”

“But hyung, you love your job,” Sungyeol retorts jokingly, even though this is technically their job (to be fair, Sungyeol’s mostly the assistant doing odds and ends while most of the actual work is done by his hyung, but who’s minding the details, right?). Anyway, Sungyeol’s pretty sure he got himself into trouble by saying that, if he hadn’t already.

“Nice try, Yeolna,” his hyung grates out drily as he snatches Sungyeol’s coffee to take a sip himself.

“Oh my gosh, can you not? Don’t call me Yeolna when I’m not working! You know how much I hate being a woman,” Sungyeol huffs, and he grabs his coffee back. Buy your own, he thinks, but when the other sighs softly and coaxes an arm around his waist, Sungyeol lets him.

“I’m sorry. I was just frantic when I realized Nam Woohyun went missing in this world, and I had to search through all the other worlds before I found one where there’s two of him. Do you know how long that took me?”

Sungyeol bites on the straw for a while, but eventually he says, “I’m sorry. I’ll tell you next time.”

It’s a compromise, but that’s something Sungyeol’s learned to do because even hi