The warm hue of the morning sun cast an amber glow around the room, and Hakyeon slowly blinked himself awake. It was a Saturday morning, but that wasn’t going to set him in any sort of good mood. He stretched and yawned groggily, utterly powerless against the bitter reality of things as it gradually seeped back into his consciousness like a recurring, unceasing nightmare.

“I love you.” Taekwoon’s words from the previous night rang in his head suddenly like the pounding cacophony of a morning alarm clock, serving involuntarily as a glaring reminder of the things Hakyeon had clearly wanted to forget.

Hakyeon shuddered and let out a groan, then swallowed the stale air in his mouth. He wanted to kick at his blankets, but he remembered how there was precisely a cat curled up by his feet right now and that meant he couldn’t do just that.

Or could he?

He frowned at the empty feeling near his legs. What was supposed to be the sensation of warm fur slowly rising and falling with the rhythm of Taekwoon’s steady breathing had somehow, instead, been replaced by nothing more than the cold, raw feeling of untouched fabric.

He sat up, lifting his covers, the questions in his head immediately answered with the gaudy absence of Jung Taekwoon right where it was supposedly the cat’s usual sleeping spot.

What? His eyebrows shot up. It wasn’t exactly a comforting sight to behold.

“T-Taekwoon…?” He scanned the room, squinting as his eyes slowly adjusted to the blinding sunlight.

The room was silent and empty, as though Hakyeon had been its one and only inhabitant all along.

Hakyeon shrugged and got out of bed, then walked curiously over to the bathroom. He gingerly pushed the door open. “Taekwoon are you in th-”

The sight of a vacant bathroom meant there was no need to finish the sentence.

He gulped. What nonsense was Taekwoon up to now?

He wanted to check the closet, but shrugged and decided against that. Perhaps his cat had gone out for a walk or something, and it wasn’t exacty any of his business to be wondering about a stranger’s whereabouts.

He tidied his bed, then proceeded over to the sink to wash up, where the refreshing sensation of cold water against his face soothed his senses like the first celebratory initiative of the day. Hakyeon grinned. It felt liberating to finally have the room back to himself, to finally have all the space he needed, to-

He blinked away the wetness in his vision, and then his eyes unknowingly landed themselves on the spare set of toothbrush and rinsing cup at the edge of the sink.

He groaned again, inwardly this time. Because just when he was about to think that maybe, just maybe, living with a cat demon had all along been the mere nightmarish result of a bad night’s sleep, with the glaring traces of Taekwoon’s lifestyle right before his eyes, it now seemed that all this hadn’t been any bit fictitious, after all.

He really had a cat. And that cat really was Jung Taekwoon. And all this time he’d really been sharing a room with that cat demon that’d popped out of nowhere. As incredulous it seemed, and as much as he hated it, it was a still fact that his life had indeed somehow ended up like that. There was no room for doubt now, was there?

Hakyeon scowled. There was a growing sensation of emptiness in his chest. Because he knew that the spare set of toiletries also meant something else more disturbing.

If he did live with a demon, then the demon was clearly missing.

But he wasn’t about to be bothered by that, anyway.

He shrugged and patted his face dry with a small towel, then walked over to his desk. He grabbed his tablet and climbed back onto the bed, then turned it on, having decided that he’d spend his day surfing the net. A hollow sensation crawled in his stomach, and he silently prayed that if Taekwoon had somehow sneaked out in his human form, then it’d be best if he be back soon with some sort of breakfast for two.

But then Hakyeon gradually realised he spent more time glancing at the clock than concentrating on using the tablet itself.

Taekwoon was taking a little too long to return, wasn’t he?

And it was as though the empty feeling in his guts wasn’t something that’d arisen from hunger.

Minutes turned into hours, but the door hadn’t clicked open, nor had any cat appeared anywhere near his window. The room remained eerily silent and vacant, as though something was clearly amiss.

Hakyeon bit his lip. He was beginning to get a little worried.

He put the tablet aside, then reached over his bedside table for his phone, like an ordinary man would ordinarily do if he wanted to contact an ordinary friend.

But then suddenly a thought struck Hakyeon. Taekwoon was no ordinary friend and they had no ordinary relationship but most importantly that meant Taekwoon, as a cat demon, didn’t ordinarily own some sort of mobile device Hakyeon could contact him with.

Hakyeon let out a quiet sigh. Perhaps he should just give up and wait for Jung Taekwoon to eventually come back and tell him where the heck he’d been the whole morning.

He grabbed his tablet and reactivated the screen, but suddenly the webpage that stared back at him had become of little interest to him. He couldn’t focus. The numbers on the clock crawled with time, but with that, what had begun racing, instead, were the thoughts in his head and the relentless pounding in his chest.

He’d always thought it was Taekwoon’s presence he’d been uncomfortable with, but now it pretty much seemed like it was more of his idol’s absence that was bugging him, wasn’t it?

It was bugging Hakyeon more than he would’ve expected.

A crippling fear insidiously crept up his chest. What if he was too harsh the night before? What if his coldness towards Taekwoon was more hurting than he’d thought? What if Taekwoon’s sudden absence was linked to Hakyeon’s persistent, unwavering indifference? What if after all this time...Taekwoon had eventually decided it was the last straw?

Hakyeon swallowed. And what if...

Agony began to cloud Hakyeon’s eyes, mirroring the same grief he’d seen across Hongbin’s face when he talked about Sanghyuk. His heart raced with anxiety upon a horrifying thought. He threw the tablet aside and hastily climbed out of bed, then loosely slipped into his shoes and sprinted out of the room.

“Please don’t..?” he prayed, a tangled mess of emotions swarming in his mind as he ran wherever his legs carried him. Through his watery vision he couldn’t see where he was headed, and he didn’t know where he was supposed to start looking, but all he knew was he was going find Taekwoon no matter what.

He dashed across the lawn, scanning around anxiously for signs of his black cat, but with every empty corner that met his eyes, his heart sank further and further down into the abyss of devastation.

He pulled vexedly at the locks of hair on his head. The afternoon sun scorched his skin and his hair dripped with sweat, but Hakyeon knew nothing was more unbearable than the overwhelming fear of not knowing where Taekwoon truly was. Especially when he didn’t think Taekwoon was someone who’d leave without a single word.

He bit his lip nervously.

Please don’t.

He paced around, exhausting whatever was left of his rationality. If Taekwoon was a tagged cat, it was still possible to know of his whereabouts, wasn’t it?

Hakyeon’s eyes lit up slightly at the small glimmer of hope.

He pulled out his phone. He searched desperately for Shinjoon’s contact, then followed that with a long spam of messages asking for the location of his black cat.

“Taejwoon’s missinh,” he sent, not even bothering to correct his typing errrors. “Can you check where the hell he is pls!!”

He waited impatiently for a reply, but Shinjoon’s unresponsiveness was incredibly untimely.

“Come online now wtf!!” he prompted. “Or I’ll come bursting into your offoce personally”

The lack of response seemed to urge Hakyeon to just that.

He scowled. The worry was too overwhelming. He locked his phone and stuffed it back into his pocket, glancing around simultaneously for the direction to the club homeroom. But then, the vibration in his pocket suddenly ignited his senses like fire from a gas lighter, and his eyebrows shot up immediately.

He pulled out the device hastily to check for a reply.

“I can’t,” Shinjoon answered. “Whenever he’s human his location data just corrupts.”

Hakyeon felt his heart drop.

“Since when was there such a thinf??” he frowned. “You’ve got to be ing kidding me”

“I’m not. But what happened?”

“I said he’s missing.”

“Since?”

“This morning.”

“Maybe he’s out to settle some things.”

“He wouldn’t disappear withouy a word,” Hakyeon typed furiously. “And he usually doesn’t turn human until the evening??”

“...”

Hakyeon paced around impatiently. What was Shinjoon going to say now? Something was clearly amiss and he knew it.

“Hakyeon..?”

“What”

“Promise me you’d come and meet me when the time is ripe?”

“What the are you talking about”

“Just promise me.”

“I can’t even thinj straighy!!” he screamed. “I don’t even know where the f Taekwoob is and i dont want him to end up like Sanghyuk and now u want me t-”

He let out an exasperated sigh. He gave up typing and locked the screen, then stuffed his phone back into his pocket. He didn’t want to be rude and he didn’t want to just cut the conversation like that but his heart was swarmed with a myriad of mixed feelings and he just didn’t know what to do. He clenched his fists desperately, knowing very well that at this moment in time, the only choice he was left with was, well, wait.

He blinked back the tears in his eyes. He couldn’t wait, but what else could he do?

He lowered his head, then dragged his feet around, roaming headlessly around the campus in pointless attempts to locate Taekwoon. Part of him wanted for him to just return to his room, but he was more afraid of discovering what could be waiting for him in there - just like what Hongbin’d had described of his own lifeless cat back then. His heart clenched at the mere thought of history repeating itself, and it ate him up from the inside bit by bit like a cruel result of his own stupid actions.

He shook his head furiously. He didn’t mean to hurt Taekwoon like that.

Suddenly Taekwoon’s sweet vocals from the nights they’d been spending together rushed into his head like unwanted reminders of his absence, and Hakyeon found tears clouding his eyes once again upon the thought of no longer having Taekwoon by his side.

He trudged along the path, slowly recalling the past, from the first day he brought Shadow back into his room to the first time he’d decided to let the cat out; from the first time he found his cat in his bathroom to the first time he found his posters all clawed up.

He recalled the day the had a long conversation with Hongbin about how he missed his cat, and then how one day Hongbin decided to dump onto him the incredulous reality of things - how Taekwoon had suddenly appeared out of nowhere claiming to be Shadow, how he’d suddenly found himself living with the man who was once the man of his dreams.

It was a wild ride from the start to finish, but Hakyeon knew that somewhere, somehow, in the midst of all the crazy , he’d unknowingly grown to like the company of the cat demon he’d thought he could be better off without.

He scanned the surroundings, but not seeing any traces of his cat was undoubtedly heartbreaking. He knew he was probably too panicky to be thinking straight, and that it made no sense for him to be worried about some grown man who’d just been missing for half a day, but he knew he couldn’t take the wait any longer. With every passing minute, worry dug deeper and deeper into his chest like a nail being hammered relentlessly into soft wood, and guilt enveloped his heart and mind like the shrouding effects of winter fog.

But somewhere in the midst of the turmoil that clouded his head, an awakening consciousness had begun to stand contrastingly firm and distunguishable from the rest of his irrational thoughts, and Hakyeon wasn’t sure for how long he could continue suppressing it.

He gulped and took a deep breath, knowing clearly that it wasn’t mere remorse that he felt towards Taekwoon.

“It’s possible to fall in love with your pet.” Hongbin’s words sounded in his head, and like the opening of the floodgates, they cued the sudden onset of heart-wrenching sensations of loss and longing that Hakyeon was able to acknowledge for the first time that day.

Maybe Taekwoon was really someone Hakyeon couldn’t live without.

The hot tears that he hadn’t been aware of suddenly burnt his cheeks, as though it had finally come to his attention that certain emotions weren’t supposed to be suppressed any longer. He dragged his legs wherever he let his feet take him, allowing the realisation to slowly take over his mind – the realisation that this was exactly what Hongbin must have gone through, the exact experience that he’d used to think that only someone as mad as Hongbin was truly capable of.

But it didn’t matter any more, did it?

Because as Hakyeon noticed from the corner of his eye the amber hue of the setting sun, he knew that he probably was never going to see Taekwoon ever again. And it was cruel that it took him a long, painful day of Taekwoon’s absence for him to finally understand their relationship better, and it was cruel that he only wanted to cherish everything they’d had after it’d slipped away from him like loose soil at his fingertips.

It was cruel that Taekwoon had finally decided to step away from the game, and it was cruel that their relationship was even regarded like a game in the first place. Hakeyon wanted so much to slap himself, to turn back the clock, to do anything but suffer like he was right now, waiting and pining painstakingly for Taekwoon’s return – an outcome that he wasn’t even the least bit certain of.

He gazed blankly at the orange sky, the bright gleam of the sun mocking him from above. He wondered how he even made it through the day. If there were more days like this ahead, how he wished he could close his eyes and vanish from the face of the earth at this very moment, because he couldn’t take it any longer and he-

His vision suddenly darkened a little, although he was pretty sure he hadn’t yet shut his eyes. He squinted a little at the approaching silhouette in the distance, the contours of his frame so strikingly familiar.

“Hakyeon…?”

Hakyeon’s ears twitched at the sound of his voice – the voice that wasn’t only familiar but pleased his ears more than anything ever could at this point in time.

“T-Taek…woon…!” he gulped. Warmed swarmed his heart as the figure came closer, and Hakyeon took in with wide eyes every bit of detail, his heart racing with an insurmountable amount of elation and relief as he recognised the man who was standing before his eyes right at this instant.

Tears dappled his vision, but then suddenly Hakyeon didn’t need his eyes to know that Jung Taekwoon was very much well alive and kicking, because in an instant the two people found themselves in each other’s arms, embracing the warmth and relief that overwhelmed the rest of their senses.

“Where the did you go the whole day!!” Hakyeon yelled, although he wasn’t about to loosen his grip on Taekwoon, because holding him felt like home and he swore he wasn’t going to let that feeling slip away from him again.

Taekwoon blinked. “Hakyeon you-”

“I’m sorry for being such a scumbag in the past.”

Taekwoon’s eyebrows shot up slightly. Hakyeon was acting all weird, a little too weird, but he wasn’t about to complain.

“I’m sorry I’ve made you worry,” he began.

“Well you’d better be.” Hakyeon wanted to shoot him a dark glare, but he decided he’d continue holding Taekwoon like that because nothing else truly mattered as long as Taekwoon was back. “Where the have you been? You left without a word and I was so worried you’d followed in Sanghyuk’s footsteps and I just wanted to tell you that I’m so sorry for everything and I-”

“You missed me?” Taekwoon cut in with a smug smile. “Seems like you did. A lot.”

Hakyeon scowled at Taekwoon’s lightheartedness. This man had the audacity to go missing for a whole day and now that he was back the first thing he did was mock him?

“I’m trying to be serious, please,” he snapped, his voice cracking slightly. He hated himself for being so weak and being such a crybaby and being-

“But I thought you didn’t like me.” Taekwoon's words were quiet.

Hakyeon frowned. “I-Well. I…”

Taekwoon waited patiently for him to finish the sentence, but Hakyeon decided that holding him back tighter was enough to show him what he truly meant.

“You what…?” Taekwoon was beginning to pull away from Hakyeon’s arms, and Hakyeon scowled slightly at the diminishing contact.

“I…missed you. Okay?” Hakyeon sighed. He unwillingly let Taekwoon take a step back, and as he studied Taekwoon’s face for the first time since they met that day, the wetness in the man’s eyes was a clear sign that Taekwoon was also as serious as he was.

“You mean it?” Taekwoon began.

Hakyeon nodded meekly, then bit his lip carefully as he stared back into Taekwoon’s red eyes. He let all the courage build up in his heart before he opened his mouth again, finally allowing himself to convey more clearly what he truly meant. “I…I think I love you, okay.”

There was a long silence, but the dampness in Taekwoon eyes evolved into long stream of wet tears, and that was sufficient for Hakyeon to know that his words have already been heard.

“Hakyeon, you…”

Hakyeon eyed Taekwoon with a firm stare. “Hongbin’s…he’s right,” he added quietly. “It doesn’t matter what you are, Taekwoon. Cat demon or not.”

“Really…?” Taekwoon leant forward eagerly. “I-I’m not dreaming, am I-”

“I’m only going to say it once, okay.” Hakyeon felt his cheeks flush at Taekwoon’s intense stare on his face, and he lowered his head. He noticed for the first time the handful of bags in Taekwoon’s hands, and he gingerly pointed to them. “So I see you've finally decided to bring along some actual luggage.”

Taekwoon opened his mouth to say something, but decided against it and just nodded silently.

“Well...you can continue to wear my clothes, you know?” Hakyeon began hesitantly. “I’ve thought about it. I’m…pretty satisfied with the way things are now.” He looked back up at Taekwoon. “And that means you aren’t allowed to leave me behind without a word again, okay?”

“I-” Taekwoon began. He bit his lip and offered Hakyeon a genuine smile. “I won't.”

“So how much time do you have left?” Hakyeon continued eagerly. “Before you turn back into a cat, I mean.”

“W-why are you asking about this?”

Hakyeon rolled his eyes. “So that you won’t suddenly morph into a beast and freak everyone out, of course.”

“Everyone…?”

“In the cinema. Or mall. Or park. Whatever.” Hakyeon bit his lip slightly. “Where do you wanna go.”

Taekwoon’s eyes lit up. “You wanna bring me out?” He was pretty sure he’d told Hakyeon that he couldn’t leave the campus without returning to his cat form, but the silliness in Hakyeon’s eyes was too cute to ignore.

And also, it wasn’t like it mattered anymore, anyway.

“Hakyeon.” Taekwoon’s voice was solemn, and the look in his eyes was baffling.

Hakyeon cocked his head. “So how long more do you hav-”

“It’s okay,” Taekwoon interrupted. He regarded Hakyeon with a wide grin that silenced Hakyeon briefly. The knowledge that his feelings have finally been returned further amplified his high spirits, and he felt his voice cracking as excitement and joy overwhelmed him. “I have forever now, Hakyeon.”

***********

(A/N: Okay. I lied. There was too much content to be compacted into a single final chapter. But life’s getting really busy and I figured I’d at least squeeze the time out to update this. Actually you can pretty much stop reading here if you’re satisfied with the ending/already kinda know what happened, but I’m saying I will definitely still update with a final chapter sometime soon to explain things and wrap up the story for good.)

((By “sometime soon” I don’t actually know what I mean. Could take seven years from now, idk. Sorry if this is anticlimatic but I’m really, really trying my best to make time for this. For now, I hope you’ve enjoyed the story as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it. Thank you for all the support I'd never thought I’d get. Stay tuned for chapter 19.))