Success and prosperity breeds jealousy and greed. The Capital City is both successful and prosperous, enjoying a healthy, happy society. Outside of the Capital City and its territories, there’s an enemy.

Ask the citizens, and they’ll list dozens of monsters and beasts and the worst of the worst, but, truthfully, no one seems to know who the enemy actually is. No one has seen “the enemy,” but they prepare for it through their younger generations.

Someone developed a partnership similar to K9 police units and built a school to nurture the partnerships. A child is paired with a young, but elder, shifter. Shifters train earlier and are categorized by speciality—the two big ones being predatory/hunting/working and healing/caregiving—based off of typical traits that are matched with their counterpart. The partnership develops companionship, friendship, trust, and ideally a healthy dependence. Lone wolves are not allowed.

The school is famous. Its structure and graduation rate have praises literally sung across media waves, and pairs of shifters and counterparts are frequent guests on national shows and grace glossy magazine covers.

Yixing dreams of joining the ranks of soldiers protecting the peace since he’s a small child. He’s his parents’ only child and his grandparents’ only grandchild; they’re nervous about sending him to the Capital by himself, but they put their trust in his trust in the school and its system. When he’s nine years old, he moves to the dorms and meets other children his age with similar dreams and beliefs.

Yixing fully expects to join the ranks of healers like his friends Kim Joonmyun, who has Lu Han the deer, and Kim Kibum, who has Lee Jinki the giant rabbit. They’re kind and nurturing, and Yixing thinks that fits him, too.

But he’s apparently alone in that thought, because he’s introduced to a shorter, compact shifter named Kim Minseok.

Minseok is a working-class, predator-type leopard cat. Leopard cats are not all that big, for being “big cats,” about the size of a house cat, a bit more slender with longer legs, but Minseok does his damnedest to make himself as heavy and obstructive as possible since day one.

“Minseok ge—hyung… please…” Yixing struggles to sit upright with all of Minseok’s shifted weight on his back and shoulders. He wonders how his friends handle their larger partners, but maybe because they’re not predator types, they’re easier.

Or maybe, like Yixing, they’re complacent because their partners are really handsome when shifted and are thus able to get away with a lot.

Shifted, Minseok’s small head is marked with two prominent, dark stripes with two more dark stripes running from the corners of his eyes to his rounded ears, and smaller white streaks run from his own his short, narrow white muzzle to his nose. His silver fur is covered in black rosettes with rows of elongated spots down his spine. His pride is his tail, which is only about half the length of his body but thickly furred and spotted with rings near the black tip. Yixing thinks the white chest and belly are rather cute—they’re super soft, too, but he only enjoyed it for half a second before Minseok swatted his hand away and spent forty minutes cleaning his fur.

He’s a very clean cat and person, which is wonderful, but there are times when they have assignments to do or places to be, and Minseok spends an hour, on average, cleaning his fur and getting ready. Yixing sometimes brushes his hair and calls it good.

Yixing finally sits up when Minseok leaves his back, just to walk around and climb onto Yixing’s lap. He settles with a throaty purr.

“This isn’t what we’re supposed to be doing, hyung!” The exercise is graded, and Yixing’s teacher said that if he misses another assignment, they’ll fail and have to redo the term. It’s supposed to be a simple sparring exercise with Minseok changing back and forth when appropriate to dodge his opponent, played by Yixing, armed and unarmed. They should get to the point of predicting one another, but they’re nowhere near that point, because Minseok finds a way to slack off every step of the way.

It doesn’t help that he very well knows Yixing is weak for his soft belly. They established that within days of knowing one another. Once he kneads Yixing’s lap to a comfortable softness, he settles on his side and stretches out, teasing with flashes of snowy white.

“Hyung...we’re gonna fail.” And Yixing cannot fail. This is his dream, and he definitely cannot let his family down. They went through so much just to get him here.

Minseok doesn’t seem to care about any of that, pawing at Yixing’s hand until he can catch it with his claws and pull it to his chin.

Sometimes Yixing wonders if recruiting children is a good idea. He understands that the earlier they get immersed in the system and introduced to their shifter, the stronger their bond can develop as their minds and bodies grow evolve, but they’re also children. Children love to play and goof off and have a good time.

Yixing finds himself falling for Minseok’s distractions and antics more often than not, unable to say much against and elder but also genuinely having a good time. It’s only when he realizes they’ve not done what they’re supposed to do that he’ll get up and plant his hands on his hips, declaring that they will get whatever it is done.

Then Minseok will point out how late it is, and shouldn’t they get dinner or go to bed early to make the most of the next day?

And Yixing will agree.

So the cycle continues—well into their teens.

Yixing has Minseok’s schedule memorized, and his age group and class only have a morning schedule separate from the other students. He responded to a message from Yixing about meeting up to complete a project with a frowny face.

“Yixing hyung...is everything alright?”

“Oh! Kyungsoo, hello.” Yixing squints back into the trees and sighs. He can’t see Minseok anymore. “Minseok hyung is hiding, again.”

“Again?” Kyungsoo is a sympathetic party. His own shifter is a goofball, but he’ll feel bad the moment Kyungsoo ignores him and just lets him run off. “Baekhyun hyung, can you find Minseok hyung?” Baekhyun nods eagerly and shifts, shaking his glossy blond coat and sticking his nose into the grass, inhaling deeply and starting to walk. He stops to pee behind a tree and keeps searching, finally barking and running around a trunk, standing up with his forelegs on it to bark into the leaves.

Squinting, Yixing can just discern Minseok’s stripes and spots from the dappled foliage. The cat shifter seems to be smiling.

Minseok changes on a low branch and laughs. “That’s cheating!”

Yixing stands beneath the tree, calling, “Hyung, please! We have to finish this, or we’ll fail!”

“It’s an easy exercise, Yixing. The key is to relax and enjoy it.”

“I...I really don’t think that’s right, but either way, I can’t when you keep running away like this!” He steps aside, and Minseok lands lightly beside him. Yixing picks a leaf from his hair. “Can we please just get this over with?”

“Xing Xing, don’t we always complete our work on time and complete it well?”

“Yes, but…”

“Your stressing over it is counterproductive. The more you push, the more I resist, right?”

Kyungsoo intervenes, holding Baekhyun—happy to have been helpful and enjoying his reward—against his shoulder. “He means to take your time, Yixing hyung. Rushing through the work will make mistakes more likely to happen; be patient.” He frowns a little at his shifter but rubs between his ears. “Trust me.”

“Exactly.” Minseok nods.

“Also,” Kyungsoo adds, “you’ll go bald if you worry so much.”

Yixing cautiously touches his hair. He doesn’t resist when Minseok slings and arm around his shoulders. “One day, you’ll look back and realize this was all for very good reasons. ‘When you take the small roads you see the life that goes on there, and this makes your own life larger.’”

He doesn’t know, because he’s never sat in on any of Minseok’s classes, but maybe they’re taught drastically different than Yixing’s own classes, because his teachers all emphasis getting to all things in life early and aggressively to make the most of their time and achieve the greatest measure of success for the Capital City.

Like usual, they finish barely before last minute but get exceptional marks. Yixing catches on and relaxes more by the time they’re in their mid-teens, no longer chasing Minseok but simply accepting his absence and knowing where he will probably be.

The end of another term, Yixing finds Minseok lying in the sun beside Kim Jongdae, an orange tabby cat shifter. He sighs and sits so his shadow falls over them both. “I figured you’d be here, hyung.” The cats stretch simultaneously; Jongdae rolls to his feet with a smile and shifts.

“Hello, hyung,” he yawns. “What’s up?”

“I wanted to practice enemy drills with Minseok hyung; I had a feeling he’d be sleeping outside.”

Minseok stretches, yawns, and shifts. “You need to sleep if you want to have any energy. The enemy won’t wait for you to finish a yawn. Studying all the time will ruin you, Yixing.”

“All I can do is study, if you’re not with me.”

Another student, Kim Jongin meanders over and sits nearby with a polite greeting. He’s no longer as shy as he used to be but is still quiet. He suits his caregiving-class assignment, and Yixing used to be jealous.

Jongdae smiles and shifts again, tail high as he approaches his boy and drags himself around his back and climbs onto his lap. They’re a good match, but Yixing sees a lot of Minseok’s bad habits in Jongdae, who can be just as naughty and mischievous. Jongin, at least, doesn’t seem to panic nearly so much as Yixing used to, and Jongdae responds to imminent tears with immediate rectification of his behavior.

Yixing extends an invitation to the duo. “Do you want to do drills with us?”

Jongin absently runs a hand down Jongdae’s back and shakes his head. “Not really.”

“Jongin.”

“I’m still tired from last week’s drills!” the boy whines. “It’s also embarrassing, like—I don’t know how to fake healing when the person is totally fine.”

“You don’t have to fake it. Treat them like the real thing.”

“It’s hard. And if they’re the same class, they can point out what I’m doing wrong.”

“Or, they can point out what you’re doing right.”

“See? Like that. I can’t think of how to encourage people on the spot. I never know what to say.” He’s a good student, on paper. In practise, he’s even better but can’t seem to recognize that.

Jongdae pulls Jongin’s wrist to hug his arm and settle on it with a noisy purr, his own show of encouragement.

Minseok leans over and ruffles Jongin’s hair. “It’ll come to you with practice. Don’t give up on yourself. You have good senses.” Even after years of partnership and friendship, he’ll still surprise Yixing at times like this. For being raised a soldier, he steps into an older brother or mentor role seamlessly, so maybe the school’s assessment and assignment isn’t as strict as they make it seem. Caregivers can fight; predators can heal.

Regardless, Yixing’s never seen either role in real practice. For all the media and propaganda about preparing for the future enemy attacks, there has been absolutely nothing.

“Xing Xing,” Minseok pats the spot of moss beside him, “come sit with us. We can do drills later.”

“You promise?” he quips, folding his legs obediently.

“Of course. When have I ever lead you wrong?” He shifts and tucks his paws beneath his body to lie like a loaf alongside Yixing’s thigh.

“Never.” Yixing sets a hand on his back, not petting him or pushing him, just being close. “Not yet, anyway…” Minseok side-eyes him, but there’s a catty grin on his face, and Yixing smiles with the sun warming his face.

I don't know if my foreshadowing really turned out as I'd hoped, and it was very hard to put into words my intention for their relationship, but it boils down to "haste makes waste." Minseok isn't just being like a con man and trying to get out of doing any kind of work, although there's that perk, too. There's a time and a place but also a real feeling to accomplish a task. Personally, when I'm under pressure, I will do anything but that thing. Odds are, if I'm cleaning the house, I should be doing Something Important. That's the undercurrent of what I hoped to write here.

Also, the quote Minseok says to Yixing is from Elizabeth Berg.