time warlocks!au

*

damn... sungpil are my babes, and this does not do them justice T^T

(but sungjin's haircut, tho... its stole my wig)

***

Wonpil feels betrayed... And it's not because his boyfriend-since-one-day-ago's refusing to show him his baby pictures. No, that's not it at all!! It's just... He thought Dowoon trusted him, is all. They've been friends for years – Wonpil's always seen the boy as his younger brother, someone he should protect, care for with all his might – and the brunette didn't hesitate to make Dowoon's wish of dating him come true. Even though he's still getting into the whole groove of being in a romantic relationship with the boy, they're close enough for him to see Dowoon's baby pictures... Right?

"They're embarrassing!" his boyfriend warbles out with his mouth full of cupcake mush. "I wouldn't want you to see me in those days!"

"C'mon, Woonie – just one photo!! Pleaaaase – I won't ask anymore if you just show me one!"

The only answer he gets is an unsatisfactory grunt from the younger boy and the sound of a loud bang floating into the living room they're sat in from the kitchen. Dowoon's abeoji probably dropped something. Wonpil decides that he's had just about enough of his boyfriend's whining and finds that taking the matter into his own hands is his only remaining option – and oh boy, what an option it turns out to be... When he does take matters into his own hands, that is. It takes him a little while to come to terms with himself (he'd feel guilty if he didn't think it over for a few days, ya know?).

It's been five days since he last asked Dowoon to show him his baby pictures, and the younger boy has grown visibly more relaxed every time he is approached by his beloved hyung. His arm slings comfortably over Wonpil's shoulders as they walk down the school corridor; everything seems like it's back to normal, all the usual skinship they show fits right into the radar, everything's fine. A little too fine (for Wonpil). The brunette sighs out as he stops and shakes away his dongsaeng's arm – his boyfriend's touch lingers, but Wonpil persists in erasing the feeling from his mind. "I'm going to the restroom," he breathes out, and then he's walking away, the gentle tapping of his shoe soles on the tile floor bringing a pout to Dowoon's face.

As soon as he opens an empty stall, the brunette plops down on the toilet lid and heaves a huge sigh. He's never done magic in school, but something's telling him that he needs to right now; he's thought his plan over for a few days, let the guilt wash down the drain – but he planned to take action over the weekend... not now. Why is he burning to go now, of all times? Mm, it's probably just his impulsive stubbornness speaking, but eh. What's done is done; the boy has already warped the time grid and sent himself back to the time of Dowoon's early childhood – twelve years back, when the boy would have been only one. His hand finds the stall knob, unlocks it, twists... And then he's face to face with someone familiar, familiar in that fleeting type of way where you're seeing something you only glance at when you're forced to, so even though you know what that certain that is, you wouldn't be able to identify it until someone reminded you of its name. What is his name?? Where could Wonpil possibly know a student – a teenager from the time when Dowoon was but a baby – from? "Ya done, kid?" the strangely familiar boy asks, and that's exactly when Wonpil freezes in understanding.

"Sun-Sungjin—abeoji?!?"

"Eh?!" Dowoon's father's eyes widen considerably, and Wonpil sees how brightly they sparkle beneath the restroom lights, as if for the first time. "Abeoji??"

And there's the brunette's cue to push past teenaged-Sungjin and run away to god-knows where.

"It can't be him..." Wonpil whispers to himself while he sits in his class, just waiting for the bell to sound. "It can't possibly be him..." His jittering hands reach inside the desk he usually sits at (it's always been beside Dowoon's, but now another boy is seated in his boyfriend's seat) and he pulls out a textbook he's never seen before. He reaches inside once more – inquisitive, disbelieving – and he's met with a notebook full of his neat handwriting, rows upon rows of words and equations he swears he's never written, never even seen in his life. "I thought I turned time back to normal??" The confused brunette feels his heart croak in his chest; it's filled with dread. "Why?.. I'll try once more, I guess." With a scraping of his chair on the cherry-wood floor, the boy leaves for the staircase. He knows a nook there where he can be in solitude; hopefully he can set everything right before the bell rings for class to begin.

When he's three meters away from the stairs, a voice rings out from behind him.

"Where do ya think you're goin?"

His shoulders jolt up at the strict voice, legs turn to jelly. "N-Nowhere, Sungjin-ssi."

He's hearing the sounds of heavy steps walking around him. Then he's face to face with the man who's not yet a man, and Wonpil feels the air around him stiffen along with the tightening of the tie around his neck. "Ah, 'Abeoji-ssi,' it's not the time for wandering the hallways. Your tie's too loose – ya thinkin' of leaving school or somethin'?"

Wonpil frantically shakes his head. "No, Sungjin-ssi." His eyes travel up to the face glancing down at him, the sparkling eyes that are observing him, and his throat lets loose a gulp. It's all the same – those facial features set in the mature way he has always seen them, the slight traces of sweat on a well-shaven jaw, that big nose that doesn't ruin his features, all because of those huge, expressive orbs of brown floating above them and setting off like a snare with a simple raise of the eyebrows holding them down. But there's one thing now that Wonpil notices for the first time – Sungjin's posture, the way he holds himself... It's so akin to Dowoon's way of doing things. Sudden, unprecedented, yet cautious in their actions, they both seem to be... Like hard-boiled eggs – they protect their soft sides well, but are not hesitant to let someone special bite into their yolk once it's open to the world. Even their hair falls the same way, fluffy wisps of dark roasted coffee grinds flanking their high cheekbones and softening their strict features. But Sungjin... There's something about this guy that draws Wonpil closer than Dowoon attracts him – his confidence, his knack to protect. It's closer to a taste of security which he always has wanted in a partner, he feels safer than with the silly, puppy-like boy he likes to fool around with...

"Yah! Hey you!!" There's a loud snap, akin to the smack he heard from the kitchen a few days ago, and Wonpil's eyes lurch together with his frantic heart. "Ya gettin' lost in my eyes or somethin'?"

Wonpil's head frantically swerves from side to side, and he's off once more. Class doesn't seem so bad an option anymore.

"—Since twenty is on the opposite side of f(x), we can use our knowledge of f=10 to find out that x=2... Correct?"

"Nae..." Wonpil chortles with the rest of his new classmates, doing his best to hide his yawn behind his sleeve. It's been like this for a while: the teacher would say something blatantly obvious and the students – including Wonpil, the poor guy – would follow after with a curt (or drawn out) "Nae" depending on their mood at the time. Over the time he had been stuck in his chair, listening to this madness, Wonpil had drawn out some plans regarding his escape from this time space:

Plan No. 1 – try what he had tried last time

Plan No. 2 – panic

And that was it.

For now, plan no. 2 seems like the most likely solution... Dang it...

So panic he does.

It starts with his legs, twitching, jumping, toes running astray within the leather of his shoes while his thighs vibrate with a nervous energy much like a horse's who's wishing to flee from a stable aflood in flames. Then come his tittering fingers playing out chords alternated with the Hungarian March atop his spread-open textbook, then they in turn rise to his jittering lips, where his fingernails become the victims of his bunny-like incisors, nipping, nipping. His thick-lensed glasses join in the awkward dance, the gears to the malfunctioning clockwork – it's all too much for Wonpil to handle and he feels himself slipping out of it as his wires short-circuit. A bang sounds as he falls from his chair, a hollow corpse with a heavy bobble-head, then there's a chorus of worried shouts before he loses his senses.

The infirmary bed is nice and warm when Wonpil opens his eyes. Before that, it felt like he'd been sliding his fingers over a prehistoric rock – what a weird dream he'd been having while he was out...

There's the sound of a light cough, creamy with sleepiness, then his hand senses the roughness of foreign fingers hesitantly sliding over it. "Yah... Abeoji-ssi... Ya okay?"

It takes the brunette a moment to decipher the strange satori, but then his mind just clicks. The sound of a body falling to the floor in a heap of flailing limbs sets off like a trigger pulled on a handgun; his mouth shatters into a pile of word-debris, unintelligible phrases carry up to Sungjin from the brunette's place on the floor.

"Woah... Woah, there... Ya love the floor so much or what?"

A hand offers to help him up and Wonpil's own palm is drawn to it, an elephant to a relieving waterhole. The warmth of the fingers wrapping around his own courses through his veins like an electric shock, reaching all the way down to encompass his heart; in a flash, he's back on the infirmary bed, the blanket pulled all the way up to his chin. "Thanks," he murmurs out before his lips can tremble like last time.

"Eh, it's nothing. But tell me..." The voice that used to be a crackly mixture of toffee and sandpaper turns smooth as poison-lathered honey bread. Wonpil's throat bobs in a nervous gulp. "What are you doing here?"

"Wh-Whaddaya mean?"

"Why the hell didja leave the 21st century, ya dimbo? Ain' my baby bro, Dowoon, lookin' for ya?"

"Baby bro?" Wonpil's eyebrows raise, raise, a balloon in the sky that is his forehead. "But... But isn't he your son?"

Sungjin's nose wrinkles in distaste. All Wonpil can imagine at the moment is the candy wrapper Dowoon scrunched up in the loudest way possible last week. "Nothing of the sort! We're gonna find him in two years. Ya changed everythin' ya know? Silly boy..."

"Waddaya mean?"

The boy who apparently isn't Dowoon's father grasps onto his own chin and then looks back at Wonpil with a small glint in his reflective pupils. "Ya know what I mean. You'ra warlock, arencha?" Wonpil wishes he can just faint again. It's all too much for him to handle all at once like this. "Arencha?"

"Yeah..."

"So am I! But you're a time warlock, right? I'm a soothsayer."

"Then shouldn't you know what I'm doing here?" Wonpil finds himself rebelliously whispering before he can stop his forsaken tongue, then he's clamping shut his lips with a force unlike any other while a laugh rings out from beside him.

"'Course I do. You're here to see my baby bro in diapers!" The silence from Wonpil's end only continues to grow. Sungjin's tone is smug. "Too bad ya won't get whacha want today."

And here the one-sided silence is smashed to bits. "Whaddaya mean, I won't get what I want?!"

"Let's just say that you – by warping time the way ya did – weaved a new story for us! Now you're my boyfriend, and we're gonna find Dowoonie together in two years so he can unfreeze your magic!"

And out goes the soothsaying warlock with an ear-wrenching crack.

"So... Ya mean to say... Pirrie-hyung knockcha out wif the IV pole?!" Dowoon's eyes light up as he jumps up and down in Sungjin's lap, staring up at his adoptive brother. "How's dat even poss'bl?"

Wonpil tsks at his dongsaeng from the kitchen whilst preparing the boy's seaweed soup – Sungjin's eomma had a business meeting, so it looked like he would have to step in for her today – in lieu of his fourth birthday. "With a boy as wretched as your older brother, that's the only way to get things done."

Sungjin only swings a giggling Dowoon higher with the last strength left in his thighs. A grin tugs at his lips when the small boy wriggles and laughes at the incoming assaults streaming from his tickling fingertips, and he huffs out a breathy retort of, "S'not my fault imma soothsayer, snot-face."

It has been a year since the two convinced Sungjin's mother to adopt a foster child (particularly Dowoon), three years following Wonpil's mess-up of the century; with the aid of the soothsayer's glimpses into the future paired with Wonpil's abilities to warp the time grid, an ideal match was created, so seek out the small boy (who would otherwise be in danger of being hunted down because of his orphaned warlock-child status) they did... Even though Wonpil's powers were temporarily put on-hold because of said boy, well... Especially because of that. The two youthful time masters had to keep the third and final piece of the puzzle – Dowoonie, the time freeze warlock – safe and in the right hands, of course they did!

Wonpil's yelp streams through the kitchen. He'd been stuck too deep in his thoughts to remember that the top of the pot was always scaldingly hot when it was on the stove, always required him to pull a towel over it before he could safely lift it away to check the progress of the boiling soup. His fingers throb and the lid gives away beneath them, falling back into place. The soup is okay.

Sungjin runs in from the living room, a satisfied Dowoon already busy playing with his spider man action figure and taking no notice. The young man blows on Wonpil's scalded fingers, softly, softly, and the pain begins to ebb away little by little after a while. Wonpil's eyes never stray from the older boy's lips, his heartbeat is madly overexerting itself on an endless treadmill, his breaths make his chest rise and fall like a fish floundering about on the shore below the gaping hole of a sun. Then Sungjin's lips are growing into a smile as soft as his relieving exhales, he's cupping Wonpil's cheek with a thick palm, now, and that sweetly smiling mouth presses a gentle smooch to the brunette's. "Better?"

Wonpil's toothy grin is enough of an answer for both of them.