★★★ Dunk POV ★★★

I never thought I'd see my brother so in love. It's funny, but I'm starting to believe that karma comes back to us. As a little kid, Gem was a really sweet little guy with a big heart. He once found an injured sparrow in front of the house. He brought it to us and begged our dad to heal it. We were raised by a dad who hated the world of magic and completely shut it out of our lives, but Gemini showed incredible magical abilities from the start and after a while it was obvious where this was going. My dad couldn't heal the sparrow, after our mom left his magic disappeared completely.

“Get this shit away from me!”

Our dad screamed, pushing my seven-year-old brother's tiny hands away so hard that the sparrow he was holding fell to the floor and broke its neck. My brother crouched down and as gently as he could, picked the bird up from the floor, but it was already dead.

“No, please, no!  Dad! Daddy! Why did you kill him?!”

Gemini began to shake and sob. It was then that his own magic came out the most and he was the one who hurt our father. He didn’t do it on purpose and today I know that if my son had behaved like that, I would never have done the same as our father. It’s hard for me to call him “dad” because all my memories of him are so painful.

I remember that day my father got angry and couldn’t control himself. He shouted and hit us both blindly. I was older and I was responsible for both of us. When my father got drunk that evening, I packed our most precious possessions and ran away from home.

At the school for non-magical people I met a friend nicknamed Mixxiw. He told me that he went to “that muggle shack” because he wanted to be a vet. He was two whole years older than me. We became friends right away and lived with him for the next few years.  Mixxiw was nice, his family caring and loving, even if they weren’t rich. They wanted to take us to the police. I didn’t know if it was safe to tell them about the strange situations my brother and I sometimes accidentally caused, but then coincidence came to our aid: his brother Khaotung showed up at Mixxiw’s house and immediately “made a grand entrance”, literally riding a unicorn into the yard of a modest, single-family house with a small garden. Both Gem and I saw such a wonder for the first time in our lives. Gem was still a child, so he immediately fell in love with this animal.

“Hi mom, hi dad!” Khaotung, whose name we didn’t know at the time, was a young, not very tall, but already charming boy with plaid hair. He was dressed in jeans, a white top, and a red and black plaid flannel shirt tied carelessly around his waist.  He had an earring in his ear and several chains around his neck, including one with a dog tag with his name.

Both Gem and I looked at him with obvious admiration, although my brother was more interested in this strange animal, which we were both sure was just a figment of the writers' imagination, a complete fiction.

“Son! What do you look like?!” A woman of about 40, slim and beautiful, came out in front of the house and wrung her hands. She had just finished preparing dinner for our unruly group.

“What, mom, this is what teenagers dress like these days,” the boy laughed melodiously, and I immediately felt that this was someone who could understand us better than anyone else.

Meanwhile, Khaotung noticed us and approached to greet us.

“I heard about you from my stubborn little brother. I'll help you so you can stay here, but there's one condition”.

“What condition?” I asked, sensing trouble. Not knowing much else, I tried to help their mother in the kitchen, although I was not very good at it.  First I poured some of the flour on myself, which of course made everyone laugh except me. A moment later I made an egg wrong and instead of separating the white from the yolk, I threw the whole thing into a prepared bowl, including the shell. Finally, I burned myself on a hot pot that I wanted to take off the stove. I didn't cry, I tried not to show how ashamed I was of my failures.

“I want to know the truth. You don't look like thugs, but my family is still my family and I have to take care of them as the oldest son, and yes, yes, I am older than Mix, although he looks older. I don't know why he needs those glasses, in our world he could ask one of our magic doctors and he would fix his eyesight, but no, Mix has to show that he is different. Oh, this brother of mine...!”

I could hear both admiration and resignation in the teenager's voice.

At that time, P'Mix really did look more like an older brother, and a typical nerd at that.  Now he had changed, he had become more handsome, and he had finally given up wearing glasses.

So I left Gem busy befriending the unicorn, and I went with Khaotung to his tiny room. The room was cramped and rather gloomy. There was little furniture in it, only a bed, a wardrobe, a bookcase, a desk, and two chairs. The walls were white, and the sun was streaming in through the wooden window, illuminating and brightening everything, including a faded poster of the FC Barcelona football team. Back then, the FC Barcelona vs. Real Madrid games were always much talked about, and had caused arguments among my Non-Magic friends more than once.

“Okay, now the truth. Tell me the truth, or I will kick you both out of our house without batting an eyelid. I am not as gullible and naive as my little brother, first I have to know who to help.”

I sighed heavily and, without permission, sat comfortably on his bed.

The room seemed even smaller, but also more mysterious. Only after a moment did I notice the glass globe stuffed under the bed, some old, thick, dusty book lying on the very top of the shelf, a few handmade cat toys... And the people on the poster seemed to be moving and now, for a change, I had the impression that they were looking straight at me, that they were seeing me, observing me and judging me. A shiver ran down my spine.

“My name is Dunk Natachai Charoenrak, that little guy outside is my younger brother, Gemini Norawit Charoenrak. We ran away from home. We told your mother and brother that we were Boonprasert. I changed our last name for safety. Our father... I don't want him to find us, I don't want him to hurt us anymore”.

And here I told him everything.  About our father's alcoholism, about the violence at home, about what a monster he became when he drank and how he apologized to us later, bought us toys, spoiled us and even played with us, as if he wanted us to believe that he really loved us. And in the end he always did the same thing, just a little alcohol was enough to cloud his mind.

Gem took our escape from home very hard. To the point that he lost his memory and never got it back. Mix, Khaotung and their parents took care of us, but Khao blabbed everything to his mother. She didn't ask me to repeat what I had already told Khao, she only asked if it was true.
A week later we heard the news that our father had gone completely mad and was in a closed facility. I didn't tell Gem about it, it didn't matter anyway. To him, our father was as dead as our mother.

So we spent the next few years under the care of Khao, Mix and his family. Until we were old enough to go to work. I was 18 then, Gem was only 14, I didn't want us to impose ourselves on the family that had taken us in out of the goodness of their hearts any longer. I decided to look for a job and a place to live, but that was a huge problem. No one wanted to rent anything to someone so young. People didn't trust me. Finding a job was just as hard. Eventually I got a job at a company owned by P'Zee. The SuperSun brand mainly produced luxury clothing. But that was just a cover, P'Zee was actually a professor in the world of magic.

Two days later, Gem ran away from home. I didn't know the reason and I guess I never will, something must have happened, something that made him run away, although Mixxiw sometimes says: “Once you run away, you'll always be running away”. 

I don't want to believe it.  Maybe my brother and I will stop running away one day, maybe we will find our own place in the world? It seems like he has already found his home. It's just me, alone and unwanted. Unless I agree to be Phuwin's boyfriend. Or Archen's. This asshole just can't keep his hands off of me and he keeps haunting me even in my thoughts.

I couldn't find Gem for a long time. I also had no way of notifying the police. Khao and Mix were already studying and didn't have much free time, and what's more, they were accepted to the Knights of Light Academy at that time.

I was left all alone, and my world was falling apart. I felt that I had let my little brother down since he decided to run away from me. That was the first time I got drunk and spent my first night with a stranger. I didn't regret it, I didn't think about it, it was just the tip of the iceberg of my problems. Finally, after two months, Khao found Gem, but Gem didn't want to come back. He was a completely different teenager. He met Prim and her family. It turned out that her father liked Gem very much, I think he even thought about educating him and training him to be his obedient son-in-law. He gave him a job as a model. He paid for his studies.  He even let us live with P'Boun and P'Sammy in one of the buildings that he was planning to renovate and resell for a good price. P'Boun later bought part of the building and started running a bar called Gemini, where NuNew performed most often, and sometimes Jeff Satur, Nanon, or my disobedient little brother.

Prim's father forgot one important detail: Gemini hated it when someone tried to rule him. He always had his own opinion and defended it. I bet that when he sensed out that her dad wants to make him his son-in-law, he decided to do exactly the opposite just to piss this man off.

When I went to meet him, my heart was squeezed by a mysterious regret, or maybe it was sympathy mixed with a sense of guilt and disappointment in myself, because I should have taken better care of my own brother. For a long time I didn't allow myself to think that I myself was just a scared, hurt teenager who put too much pressure on himself that I couldn't handle. Usually I just smiled, waved my hand dismissively, and changed the subject. I didn't know how to talk about it.  It was Phuwin who slowly began to tear down the wall I had built around myself. I could tell him everything without hesitation and I knew I could trust him.

“Why don’t you want to go home?” I asked my brother then.

We were sitting on the hard and cold concrete floor in the apartment that Prim’s father had given to Gem for the time being. My brother didn’t have much to eat or drink, so he only gave me water. A piece of glass was missing from the window. The mattress on the bed looked like it had been used for several years. The green paint was peeling off the walls in patches, revealing the gray-white plaster. The room, unlike Khaotung’s warm and cheerful room, gave me goosebumps. There weren’t even chairs or a desk. The mattress was on the floor, and on it were two blankets and a poor duvet. Neither Gem nor I could conjure up anything we needed at that time, so it was really hard.

“A home? What home are you talking about?  We have no home, P'Dunk, I have nowhere to go back to”.

“How can you say that? And P'Khao's home?” I asked reproachfully. I didn't understand how he could prefer this little cubicle to the warm, loving place I could call home.

“It was never our home, P'Dunk. It's their home, and it's hard enough for them without us. It's better if we disappear from their lives.  Prim's dad gave me a contract, in a few years I'll be rich and I'll buy us a big, comfortable house and I promise you that you'll get the biggest room of all, but for now we have to live like this”. 

He wasn't a spoiled rich jerk back then, but the change had already started happening in him. And then it happened very quickly. Before I could even blink an eye, he turned into someone I didn't recognize anymore. He became someone who hated others, who thought he was the best and the smartest.

After three years in this industry, I had the impression that my beloved, gentle and kind-hearted little brother had died many years ago. I had lost hope of ever getting him back.
And that's when we got official orders to report to the Knights of Light Institute. We knew about this place from Khaotung's family, but Professor Earth Pirapat came for us that day anyway. The man was well into his thirties, dressed not in typical teacher's attire but in a forester's or  military.

Fourth was already a student at the Knights of Light Academy and one of the best. Always kind to everyone, very calm and polite, almost never got angry, no matter what. Gem immediately chose him as his victim. At first, it even seemed funny to me, because Gem didn't do anything dangerous and his jokes made almost everyone in the class laugh.

“You could at least pretend to like him, you don't have to hurt him so much, he's not a bad boy”, Phuwin, our new friend, tried to convince Gem during one of the breaks. Gem just crumpled a ball of paper in his fingers and threw it straight at Fourth's back, who was sitting at the front of the class. Nattawat looked around, looking for the attacker. He paused for a moment, as if to say, “I know it's you!”

To which Gemini replied loudly enough for everyone to hear.

“Hey, guys, the nerd is staring at me again. What do you think, maybe he's in love with me?”

Of course, his new buddies laughed as if it was funny, and I simply felt sorry for Fourth. He had done nothing wrong, and my brother treated him like trash.

“Don't think so highly about yourself, Norawit, you are not that attractive and not even a little bit kind and my type is kind, generous, lovely person, who loves the nature and doesn't hate anyone, you are not my type at all. Would be better if you started reading a text from professor Tay Tawan, I heard he wants to make us a quick quiz”, Fourth responded to him and went back to read a book he got from P'Earth. Half of the students began to klap their hands for what Fourth had said. Fourth was one of these who dared to say something against my brother.

They hated each other. Although the reason for it was unknown to me. The king elections made it even worse. I was afraid they're gonna kill each other. But turned out that English word ‘kill’ turned into word ‘kiss’. Or maybe they tried go kill each other with lips?

And then suddenly, out of nowhere, the news broke that Fourth was a hybrid, pregnant, and the father was my devil brother. I had no idea what to think about it. Collecting all the news and rumors and putting them together into a logical whole was very difficult, but in the end I managed to discover that it was all a well-planned conspiracy, behind which could be very dangerous in the whole of Europe, and even the whole world, the Squirrel Gang.

Phuwin and I discussed this for hours, but ultimately came to few conclusions.

“Maybe this Squirrel Gang has some sort of connection with the Perth Tanapon Gang? What if they planned this together?” Phuwin suggested quite wisely as we were already in bed late at night and none of us could sleep. Although it could have been because of the strong wind howling outside the window like a crying child lost in the fog.

“You think so?”

“Hmm. I have a feeling they have something in common. I wouldn’t trust our boss, P’Off, either. There’s something wrong with him.”

I thought about this as I rolled over. Now I was lying in a way that I could see the face of my late-night conversation partner perfectly, even though he was lying in a separate bed, separated from mine by a nightstand.

“Damn, that means we don’t even know who we can trust!  After all, if it turns out to be P'Off, it'll be a huge scandal!”

“Oh yes, it'll be a big deal!” I agreed. “But first we have to have as much evidence as possible. Aaaaaah!”

I yawned widely. Tiredness and sleepiness came quite suddenly.

“No, first we have to get a good night's sleep,” Phuwin ordered in an equally sleepy voice. “Good night P'Dunk”.

“Good night, nong Phu”.

And then I let myself be carried away to the land of dreams, where I met a beautiful girl who was walking through the ruins of some huge, old-world temple, one part of which was perfectly preserved. When the girl approached me, she handed me a rose as black as coal, only to turn into my enemy at least a second later, Joong Archen Aydin. Archen smiled at me enticingly and stretched out his large paw looking like dog's towards me. On his head he had ears resembling those of a wolf.  He bit his lip sensually as I gave him my hand.

I woke up with a loud cry of “NO! NEVER IN MY LIFE!” and the feeling of falling into an endless abyss, which also woke up the sleepy Phuwin. One glance at the glowing-in-the-dark clock next to the bed was enough for me to realize that it was only 2:33 a.m., and Phu looked especially funny with his disheveled hair.

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Me 1.11.2024 for Liam...