Work Text:
“…A job,” Chenle states flatly. “You’re looking for a job.”
Lee Donghyuck offers him a bright beam. “Did I mention on there that I make a mean kimchi jjigae? The secret is my family’s scallion kimchi. It’s been in our bloodline for generations. You haven’t lived until you’ve had it.”
Chenle narrows his eyes. “How’d you find the shop?” Managing what’s essentially a pocket dimension opened to three major cities is only physically possible because of the obscene number of glamour spells keeping the pharmacy shrouded as a perpetually soon-to-open tofu store. Customers can’t see the true exterior unless they’re regulars, or they’re in dire situations. Chenle has never seen the mess of choppy hair, nerdy glasses, and unsocked slides standing in front of him, so— “What do you even need? This isn’t a shoe store. Or a barbershop.”
“Money, genius.” Donghyuck crosses his arms. “What, do you magicians not pay for rent? Groceries? Dameun Makgeolli? That stuff is addictive. I need somewhere to work while I figure out how the hell I’m supposed to conjure eleven years of experience out of my ass for a job in my actual field. If I don’t have something by the time I graduate this summer, I might as well call it quits and move back home to Jeju to become an orange farmer.”
“Are you severely injured but withholding the information from me for legal reasons?”
“No—what?”
“Do you have a terminal illness the National Health Insurance can’t cover for you?”
“No—”
“Is one of your parents severely injured or terminally ill?”
“No—”
“Are you about to go homeless from—” Chenle glances down at the resume— “buying too many Overwatch skins?”
Donghyuck winces. “Alright, when you put it that way…”
Chenle laughs and slides the resume—and the manila folder full of cover letters, references, photo copies of legal documents, and several print out pictures of 100% scores at what appears to be the same noraebang room—back across the counter. “I appreciate the thought, but we’re not hiring right now.” Nor does Chenle think he has the jurisdiction to hire anyone. He’s pretty sure his aunt would sooner cut off her right leg than let a mortal breathe near her shelves.
Donghyuck’s expression goes from confident to despairing in a second. “What?! Why not? Is it because I’m not a magician? I can help with packaging and finances! I can look pretty from the window and lure more customers in! Jeno said you’re the only one who works here, there’s no way you couldn’t use a helping hand! He’s helping me job hunt and he said you should consider me. I have receipts!” In seconds, he shoves a screen at Chenle’s face, opened to KakaoTalk.
Chenle blinks. The texts are so short and flat, it rules out any possibility of it being some other guy coincidentally named Jeno. “How do you know him?” In the few minutes he’s known Donghyuck, Chenle can’t imagine two people any more opposite. A guy like Lee Jeno would shrivel up in an hour if left in the proximity of a guy like Lee Donghyuck.
“He’s my best friend in university,” Donghyuck answers, waving an absent hand, “We go way back.”
The reminder that Jeno went to a mortal school has Chenle grimacing. For the first year, he couldn’t wrap his head around what Earthly force was strong enough to compel Jeno to study music composition of all things, especially after seeing the miserable textbooks he always lugged around. Now, Chenle wishes he could rewind the clock and make the same decision. While Jeno has beeps and boops due every other week, Chenle has frankly unnecessary online courses, mountains of essays about herbs that have gone extinct centuries ago, and the godforsaken “internship credit” his aunt keeps lording over to keep him complacent in his unpaid familial labour.
How is restocking display jars and arguing with middle aged ladies about the price of bai shao supposed to further his education in any capacity, anyway? Half of the crap he has to do around the pharmacy is just boring busy work with a funny hat on. He’s wasting his hours away doing the magician’s equivalent of retail. Last he checked, any semi-competent hand can weigh a few portions of this and that, with or without magic running through its veins. The most interesting thing he does since he started his “internship” as a manager is brainstorm different ways to expand the pharmacy in both locations and services—always the crusher of dreams, his aunt rejected both the medicinal fitness centre and the herbal spa cinema.
“Well?” Donghyuck asks, pulling Chenle out of his thoughts. “What do you think? You should read the recommendation from my last boss if you’re on the fence. I didn’t even ask her to write that whole paragraph about how great I am with kids.”
Chenle glances at Donghyuck, who still holds his phone out, even though the screen has gone dark, then at his hands, a little larger than his own. He thinks about his aunt, lounging in some beach resort in the Indian Ocean having the time of her life exploiting her lowly, humble employee from overseas, then about the ten bushels of wu wei zi he has to pick off the branches by hand tomorrow.
He can feel a migraine starting up as he imagines the phone call tonight, though Donghyuck’s ensuing beam when Chenle asks, “When’s the earliest you’re available?” eases the pain just as well as his mother’s chuan xiong tea.
For as much as Chenle’s aunt insists it’s the lasting pride of the Zhong legacy, the pharmacy isn’t all that much.
A few walls of drawers, the counter where he keeps all his tools, some cushioned chairs scattered around, and the money corner with a singular decorative vase make up the interior. His aunt’s taste for decor has always toed the line of traditional and tacky, the obscene amount of candles, lanterns, and knotted tassels collected over decades more a pain in the ass to dust than anything else. Coupled with the plants that need daily watering, the antique wood that needs weekly polishing, and the ink paintings that need to be swapped out every month to “retain optimal feng shui, Lele, it’s sacred”, the pharmacy stopped being impressive and started being a huge hassle ages ago.
At ten years old, when Chenle first started to grapple with his magic, he imagined himself in a CEO office suite at the top of a futuristic skyscraper—Zhong Enterprises, Inc, or maybe Golden State Medicine—modernising herbology across the world, not at some rinky dink mom-and-pop shop with a floorboard creaking problem. The sooner he graduates and gets the hell out of dodge, the better.
None of this seems to register with Donghyuck, who gapes at every corner with the excitement of a little kid.
“This is so fucking cool,” he gasps as Chenle pulls back the curtains of the window to reveal a sprawling lake with a pagoda stretching towards the middle, the mountains of Zhejiang in the distance. Gentle humidity seeps into the pharmacy, chasing away Seoul’s bitter winds. “Is this real? How did you do this? How does it work?”
It’s probably the twenty-fifth time he’s asked as much while getting a tour of the pharmacy, and Chenle would’ve been tired of explaining if Donghyuck’s rapt attention didn’t make him preen. Everything is basic magic, yet he acts as if Chenle is privy to the deepest secrets of the universe, and he can’t lie and say it doesn’t inflate his ego a little.
“It’s an enchantment,” Chenle answers, tapping at the engraving at the bottom of the window sill. Donghyuck jerks his hands back, then reaches out a tentative finger to trace the edges of the hanzi. “You can’t be seen but if you reach out, your touch is felt in the rivers, so don’t throw shit at fishermen that row by or anything. Sort of like those TikTokkers that project videos of scenery onto their walls, but in real life. This shop doesn’t have a physical existence in any set location, so the window needs magic to display something.”
“Wish you could always find these views in some random Seoul backroad,” Donghyuck sighs. He rips off a small piece of the gyeran-ppang he was eating for breakfast, stretching his arm over the window to drop it into the water. In seconds, a small carp swims to the surface and swallows the bread, swimming away in a flash of gold. When Donghyuck whips around to look at Chenle, his eyes are sparkling and he has a smile bright enough to rival the rising morning sun.
“Is this tteum? Like, the thing they put on your skin and set on fire?” Donghyuck’s hand hovers over a few stacked rolls of ai cao, too afraid to touch. “Is it actually legit? I’ve always wondered.”
“It’s called jiushu in Chinese.” Chenle waves a hand. “It’s all horseshit. We know from modern science that heat relaxes your muscles, which helps encourage tissue growth, and moxibustion is just the outdated, smellier, more painful origin of it. The fumes have mild hallucinogenic properties, though, which is probably why it was so popular to begin with.”
“Ancient weed,” Donghyuck says sagely, pulling a laugh out of Chenle.
“What is all this stuff? How do you use it?” asks Donghyuck, once he finally steps behind the counter and glances at the hidden shelves.
“Wheel pestles, balances, burners, and a bunch of other crap. They’re more for show. Some customers are anal about making sure you do everything by hand so you’re not scamming them, but an electronic scale and a spice grinder always do the job better in half the time.”
“But it’s so cool!” Donghyuck protests, lifting up one of the balances. He places his remaining gyeran-ppang on the hanging dish and slides the ten gram weight to the other end, mouth falling into a dramatic “O” when they’re perfectly level. “Why wouldn’t you do this every time?”
“You’ll see after your eighth order,” Chenle snorts. “I’m putting you on morning shifts every Friday, Saturday, Sunday, from nine to three. Are you ready to open in ten?”
“Remember the last time you tried to get a kid to drink one of your potions?” Jeno comments later in the week, as Donghyuck coaxes a toddler into drinking a metabolism tonic, one that hopefully keeps his uncontrolled shape-shifting in check. “I wish I took a picture of the face you made when she spit it out at your face.”
“They’re not potions, they’re natural remedies. There’s real logic and reasoning to what I do,” Chenle chides as he toasts Jeno’s weekly tea in a small pan over an open candle. Remembering a conversation they had on the phone earlier in the week, where Jeno mentioned hitting the gym for an extra hour, Chenle adds a few grammes of hong jing tian while Jeno isn’t looking. Chenle wonders how on Earth Jeno survived without becoming cripplingly vitamin deficient before they became friends. “You have no respect for my craft!”
“You text me how much you hate your job every other day.” Chenle sticks out his tongue and Jeno rolls his eyes. “Is Hyuck doing alright with everything else?”
Hyuck? Hyuck?
Chenle shakes his head and sniffs. “I was doing fine running the pharmacy alone! I can’t believe you’re going around telling all your university friends that your sexy apothecary best friend is struggling to operate the lamest business in the world!”
“Hey, he really needed the money. I bet you flexed your magic to him all week anyway.”
“Did not,” Chenle huffs, “Besides, you never told me you had mortal friends.”
“Is that what you’re worried about?” Jeno’s eyes crinkle into crescent moons and he reaches over the counter to ruffle Chenle’s hair. “You’re still my favourite, don’t worry.” Chenle bats Jeno’s hand away, but bites back a smile.
After Chenle finishes bagging and boxing all seven days worth of tea, Jeno slides a metal dosirak box over the counter, as well as a bright yellow bujeok. “From my mom.”
The hanja on the bujeok is clunky and awkward, clearly not from either of Jeno’s fortuneteller parents, especially given the doodle of a tiger at the very bottom that looks more like a cute cat with stripes than an actual tiger. “Good fortune, good studies, good—” Chenle narrows his eyes, trying to read the rest of the talisman— “good health? You forgot the beginning radical and wrote ‘construction’.”
“From my mom,” Jeno repeats, ears tinted red.
Jeno leaves with his box of tea close to his chest, though not first without giving Chenle a quick hug and dapping Donghyuck up on his way out. Chenle takes down the old bujeok above the front door reading “business prosperity” written with the wrong character for “business” so he can tape up the new one, placing it in a small envelope near the entrance, full of every other talisman “Jeno’s mom” has ever given him. The handwriting has gotten better and better with the past few papers, and the thought of Jeno hunched over his desk, tracing outlines of archaic characters in the calligraphy book Chenle gifted him with his cat topper pencils makes Chenle chuckle to himself.
Chenle puts the envelope away and turns around to see Donghyuck making kissy faces at him from behind the counter. Donghyuck wiggles his eyebrows and Chenle groans. “Get back to work!”
Chenle’s never gone through the hiring process, but he’s pretty sure new employees aren’t actually supposed to be as good as their application suggests—much less better.
Donghyuck gets delegated inventory checks, restocks, and other mundane tasks first, yet when he finishes everything in the first hour, Chenle teaches him how to calculate prices for teas, salves, and tonics. He whizzes through the entire month’s preorders with nothing but his phone calculator, the pharmacy accounting journal, and an overengineered pen. In the time it takes for Chenle to portion out orders for five customers, Donghyuck sweeps, mops, prunes the potted plants, feeds the carp, and sets up his bluetooth speaker to play a bizarre mix of RNB, American pop, and SHINee. He even volunteers to pick every shipment of wu wei zi by himself without protest, chatting about stupid anecdotes from his old jobs, stories of his friends from university, and detailed recounts about his Overwatch escapades.
Packing orders usually eats up time like a growing teenage boy, but Donghyuck seems to pick up a rhythm, going as far to scribble out custom messages on the back of business cards Chenle didn’t know they had in store. Instead of scrambling to finish before the delivery driver stops by, Donghyuck has everything folded and labelled all hundred and twenty-seven shipments without Chenle needing to lift a finger.
“How are you not bored?” Chenle asks during their lunch break. They’re splitting two platters of delivery sushi on Donghyuck’s insistence, a far cry from Chenle’s usually stir-fried fridge leftovers. “Typing up international addresses makes me want to shoot myself.”
“How can you be bored?” Donghyuck argues, mouth full of mackerel. “It’s math and magic plants! I swear they sting a little when I touch them.”
“That’s supposed to be a good thing?”
Donghyuck swallows and shrugs. “It’s way more interesting than making frappuccinos or kicking drunk salarymen out after closing. Plus, you pay way above minimum wage! I can finally trade out my old keyboard for something RGB.”
Once, while zoned out during a mandatory Zoom lecture, Chenle notices Donghyuck taking pictures of all the drawer engravings, and when Donghyuck notices him noticing, he rubs his neck sheepishly and mouths, “Papago translate.” They spend a couple of hours after that using the ancient label maker Chenle finds in the deepest corner of the storage room, printing out pinyin, English, and Korean translations to tape under his aunt’s calligraphic gibberish, Donghyuck writing the most popular ingredients down in a pocket notebook. Guo qi - goji berry - gugija. Yin xing - ginkgo - eunhaeng. Hong zao - jujube - ppalgan naljja.
“You used the wrong stroke order there,” Chenle points out from over Donghyuck’s shoulder. “You have to finish the stab radical before the ice radical.”
“Radical schmadical,” Donghyuck grumbles. “Why does it matter if it looks the same in the end?”
“It doesn’t look the same, yours are ugly as hell. Here, let me—” Chenle wraps his hand around Donghyuck’s, manually fixing his pen posture and guiding his pencil. “There, see? Now it’s actually legible. Why is your face so red?”
“It’s not—just tell me what the next herb is!”
The time Donghyuck accidentally leaves the notebook behind, Chenle rifles through and corrects all his sloppy strokes, adding a few notes of his own: antioxidant, key to fighting hexes and curses. Improves circulation, strengthens sorcery. No actual health benefits, just tastes good.
It doesn’t take long for them to develop an easy routine, and by the time Dongzhi rolls around, Donghyuck picks up enough to help with orders every now and then, perceptive in all the places Chenle isn’t, quick to think whenever Chenle falters.
“Donghyuck, hand me the—?”
“Huang qi, check!”
“And the—?”
“Da zao, check!”
“Also—?”
“Shan yao, check! You’re running low, add that to the shopping list.”
In less than a second, Donghyuck lays out all the ingredients for Chenle’s go-to lycanthropy stabiliser on the counter, all portioned out and measured. Chenle looks back up at Donghyuck with a question, and Donghyuck beats him to the punch. “Isn’t hyung a genius?” he brags. He’s been insistent on calling himself hyung since finding out he’s a year older, despite the fact that Chenle is more or less his boss. “I have all your most popular medicines memorised!”
“Luo han guo isn’t part of it,” Chenle points out.
“It’s not, but it doesn’t disrupt the other ingredients and it tastes pretty good.” Donghyuck shrugs. “The order is for a primary school girl, I’m pretty sure sweetening it is the only way she’ll drink it without throwing up. Most of the magic stuff here tastes like shit. No offence.”
Most of the stuff at the pharmacy as a whole tastes like shit, magic or otherwise. Like a mature adult, Chenle replies, “You taste like shit.”
“You wish you could get a bite of me, baby.”
If Chenle lets out an exaggerated scoff to hide the flush creeping up his face, Donghyuck doesn’t need to know—and if he sighs in relief when another customer pulls Donghyuck’s attention, Donghyuck doesn’t need to know that either.
Unlike Shanghai, teeming with quack doctors and overcharged services, or San Francisco, clogged with too many acupuncturists and gentrified boba shops to bolster a proper community, the Magic Lanes of Incheon’s Chinatown has always been Chenle’s favourite.
Here, magic beats to the pulse of the city, ancient and alive and as animated as the rest of the Seoul Capital Area—Chenle himself feels his veins hum from sympathetic resonance. The familiar smell of incense smoke mingles with sweet street food, and all sides are full of charm shops glittering with otherworldly energy, cultivators tracing wards into last night’s blanket of snow, and soothsayers handing out pamphlets as they declare baseless omens to passersby. While the pharmacy keeps all its magic sealed in porcelain jars, everything here is unfiltered, left to seep into the air and ground beneath their feet like its own nervous system, an intangible life force running parallel to electrical lines and underground metro tunnels.
Of course, the cultural significance of the enclave flies right over Donghyuck’s head.
“Check this out!” Donghyuck dangles a panda-sun bear yin-yang pendant from a nearby table in front of Chenle’s eyes. “Woooo, I’m hypnotising you! You are now talking to a heavenly official who’s gracing you with his presence!”
It’s beyond stupid, but Chenle plays along and lets his eyes roll to the back of his head. “Heavenly official, my blessed saviour,” he gurgles, much to Donghyuck’s delight, “Master of all planes…how can I fulfil your wishes?”
Donghyuck pitches his voice down so low, it scratches against his throat. “Give your favourite hyung a raise,” he declares, “and, uh, tell Lee Jeno to accept Lee Donghyuck’s Overwatch party invites!”
“Are you buying that?” the saleswoman snaps.
They dissolve into peals of laughter, though Donghyuck does end up buying it, the first item to be placed in his tote bag. Donghyuck twines their arms together, pressing right up to his side, and Chenle shivers from the newfound warmth.
As they make their way through the market, instead of rushing through to grab restock ingredients in under an hour, Chenle takes the scenic route full of his favourite booths and the vendors that know him by name. He ties Donghyuck’s wishing ribbon to the tree at the centre of the neighbourhood, holds his bag while he gets his ba-zi chart analysed, and lets him eat the last strawberry on his skewer of tanghulu, all while paying for half of everything behind his back.
It might be putting a dent in Chenle’s wallet, but it keeps a smile on Donghyuck’s face, and watching Donghyuck discover everything Chenle did a decade ago with stars in his eyes is almost—cute.
At the last stall is where everything comes to a screeching halt.
“Donghyuck…” Chenle trails. “Do you have a lucky number? Or a favourite number or something?”
“Fifty-eight!” he answers, barely audible over how aggressively he shakes his kau cim sticks. “It’s the year Michael Jackson was born.”
It was Donghyuck who suggested getting their fortunes drawn together; divination has as much merit as every other field of magic, but Chenle prefers to stay in his own lane. Glimpsing the future is a dangerous game to play, with self-fulfilling prophecies and the subject-expectancy effect, and he’s never felt dissatisfied in his life enough to seek extra guidance. Although drawing sticks and picking pre-written fortunes is nowhere near as true to self as scrying—or worse, Jeno’s parents and their terrifying collection of oracle bones—somehow…
Fifty-eight. Chenle glances down at his fortune, at the hangul and hanja written side by side.
One out of a hundred fortunes, a one percent chance of being drawn, and yet there it is, fluttering between his fingers from the breeze.
Chenle gets so lost reading and rereading the words, trying to make sense of the lottery poem, he doesn’t notice Donghyuck has finished until there’s a different paper fortune being waved in front of his face. Faintly, Chenle’s eyes catch onto the No. 30 label. His lucky number.
“Your wish will not come true, but you will not need it to,” Donghyuck reads. “I won’t get a new job, but I won’t need a new job? What the hell does that mean? Do these fortunes know anything about the state of the world right now?”
He crumples the paper up and shoves it into his pocket with a frown. It’s strange, seeing him genuinely upset, and Chenle scrambles for something to bring the smile back on his face. “Do you want to get dinner before we go back to the pharmacy?”
Love is a strong word, practically bitter on his tongue, yet when he looks at Donghyuck, at his chunky glasses that make him look like a nerd, at the unruly mop on his head climbing down his neck after so long without a haircut, at the way his eyes crinkle before his mouth does at the mention of food, Chenle can’t think of another word to describe the sudden stumble in his heartbeat.
Donghyuck grabs Chenle’s hand and drapes himself across Chenle’s shoulders with a dramatic sigh. “Today’s festivities have run my savings dry!” he cries, voice high pitched and airy, “If only there were a fine young man to regale me with the highest quality feast for tonight! To be wined and dined like the fairest of the people, I would be ever so grateful and indebted for life.”
Love is a strong word, but maybe…maybe Chenle likes Donghyuck a little.
At least, enough to lace their fingers properly together and fire back, “Don’t get used to it.”
No amount of magic can keep him alive through finals, and by the time Chenle turns in his last project, he’s far more husk than human, every step more laboured than the last. Caffeine and late-night cram sessions left his circadian rhythm hacked to shreds, and on his first official day of winter break he wakes up around the same time the sun sets. His arms barely have the energy to hold his phone over his face when he’s lying in bed, which makes recharging via NBA highlights a near impossible task.
Even his aunt feels bad for him, begrudgingly agreeing to close the pharmacy for a few days.
Despite this, Donghyuck is there, rattling the handle back and forth the moment Chenle finishes taping up a temporary break announcement sign to the door.
“You lost weight,” Donghyuck accuses, practically shoving Chenle aside. A massive duffel bag is slung over his shoulder, and he drags a cooler on wheels behind him. “What kind of lame ass New Year’s resolution is that?”
“Why are you here?”
“Jeno told me you were dying!” Chenle can’t duck in time fast enough to avoid Donghyuck’s cheek pinch. “Somehow, he understated your condition. Why aren’t you taking care of yourself?”
“Uni is kicking my ass—”
“Not a good enough excuse,” Donghyuck interrupts, dropping his bag on the counter. He disappears into the storage room and comes back with two stools, placing them around the counter like a makeshift table.
“Sit,” he orders, “We’re having a mandatory hotpot intervention.” From his bag, Donghyuck pulls out a portable induction stove, a yin-yang pot, several plastic quarts of soup base, a jar labelled “secret sauce” in his scrunched up handwriting, and every utensil imaginable. Underneath the cooler lid is a selection of meats, greens, mushrooms, and tofu as wide as any restaurant, along with several containers of instant rice and a few packs of ramyeon. Chenle’s stomach growls at the sight—in excitement or in protest, he can’t tell.
“The entire pharmacy is going to smell for days—”
“Sounds like the perfect way to draw in more customers!”
“I can use magic to reset my body—”
“Good food is basically magic, why go through the extra effort?” Chenle opens his mouth to keep protesting, but Donghyuck whines, “C’mon, don’t disappoint hyung! It’s his favourite meal.” His scowl is ridiculous and his eyes are far too watery to be genuine.
Chenle caves anyway, making his sigh as loud and audible as he can. “You’re picking extra xue song petals next shift to fumigate the store, no objections.”
It doesn’t take long for Donghyuck to get his setup up and running, both sides of the pot brought up to a gentle boil, beginning to cook the meatballs and fish cakes. As Chenle cooks his first strips of pork, his chopsticks knock into a knob of ginseng floating around at the top. Upon closer inspection, he sees an assortment of herbs he’s never found in the generic soup packets at the grocery store dispersed throughout. The tingling at his fingertips, which he initially attributed to the stinging heat of the steam, is actually his magic reacting to the ingredients, and the sudden warmth in his chest comes isn’t only because the flavours remind him of his mother’s cooking.
“You made the base yourself,” Chenle realises belatedly, “You used our herbs.”
Donghyuck uses aegyo more than anyone else Chenle knows, and he thought he was growing a resistance to it, especially considering how many times Donghyuck has tried to worm his way out of broken cups by fluttering his eyelashes and calling Chenle oppa.
None of that, not by aeons, has prepared Chenle for Donghyuck’s unconscious pout, the way his cheeks puff out the slightest like a little teddy bear. “Don’t tell me if it tastes bad! I’ve never made Chinese food before, okay? That’s my excuse.” He mumbles to himself, “I knew I should’ve used a recipe…”
“It’s gas,” Chenle says, voice cracking on gas, and he doesn’t even care that Donghyuck points and cackles at his face. Anything is better than the slightest chance of him being upset. “I didn’t know you were good at cooking.”
“When you’re the oldest brother, you learn the ropes,” Donghyuck says. The statement is humble, but they can’t hide his obvious smirk and the pride seeping into his voice. “Didn’t you read my references? Another year at the gukbap restaurant and I could’ve taken the whole place over.”
“Why did you change jobs, then?” Chenle asks. The question is one he’s been curious about for a while.
“Halmeoni sold the property to a hair salon and retired to Busan,” he replies lightly, “The only other food service position near me was Egg Drop, which is the exact opposite vibe I was looking for. I wouldn’t mind going back into the restaurant business in the future, maybe in management or administration. I’ll finally put that damn degree to use.”
“Like, operating your own place?” The moment the words leave Chenle’s mouth, his eyes widen. Restaurant. That’s it.
“More or less,” Donghyuck says, none the wiser to Chenle’s newfound revelation. “I have a few ideas, so maybe an investor will come along and you’ll see me with a Michelin star one day. For now, I like working here.” He shrugs and sings, “You better not be sick of me yet!”
“Actually—” Chenle’s brain cobbles together logistics at a mile a minute—new locations, an attached building, equipment, food safety testing, more time with Donghyuck, holy shit, profit! “What do you think about a full-time position?”
Donghyuck pauses, a slice of beef hovering a centimetre away from his mouth. “Like, seriously?”
Chenle can already hear the nightmare of a wordy WeChat voice memo his aunt is going to reply to him with. Still, it’s worth it at Donghyuck’s face of pure sunlight when Chenle says, “I’ve got—I’ve got this idea.”
There’s two lucky cats sitting on top of the card reader for the brand new register. They’re unassuming, one a calico pattern and the other white with black splotches, barely the size of Chenle’s hand. Chenle’s grown used to random decorations popping up all around the pharmacy, usually after they come back from Incheon and Donghyuck reveals another collection of magic trinkets he couldn’t keep himself from buying; however, these feel a little different.
“Those aren’t magic,” Donghyuck says from where he hangs a string of fake baozhu. “I saw them on my way here and thought they would be fitting since they look like Jeno’s cats, Seol and Nal. Get it?”
The joke is pretty lame all things considered, but Chenle laughs anyway, just to see Donghyuck’s resulting smug look of accomplishment.
He moves Seol and Nal to the money corner, the part of the pharmacy that received the most light from the window; instead of being occupied solely by a singular decorative vase, Chenle has brought in a small table to hold Donghyuck’s growing collection of statuettes. He puts them together so they aren’t lonely, angling them so they can watch over the carp, which dart underneath the thin sheets of ice settled on top of the water.
Winter has already settled in Zhejiang, the window displaying a soft blanket of white covering the trees and the shingled roofs right beyond the forest. Spring curls in hiding underneath the layer of frost, waiting for that part late into the year, when no one realises how much time has passed until lotus flowers and peonies burst into full bloom. It will take a few more weeks for the temperatures to rise again, for the air to stop biting and the skies to go blue again.
For now, Chenle hopes Seol and Nal enjoy watching the snow as much as he does.
Chenle takes a step back at the same time Donghyuck sets down his roll of packing tape, the pharmacy now officially cleaned and decorated for Lunar New Year’s. Interior design and taste in furniture is nowhere on Chenle’s skillset, his apartment full of gag gifts and basketball posters, and letting Donghyuck take the helm paid off. So much life bursts from the new red decor, Chenle almost wishes he didn’t have to take it all down in two week’s time. At this point, there isn’t a single part of the pharmacy that hasn’t been touched by Donghyuck.
“Is it weird that I don’t want to leave yet?” Donghyuck blurts out of the blue, as the two of them stand shoulder to shoulder, examining the new space. “I’ve never taken this much time off in my entire life. I put my whole Donghyussy into decorating and I’m being deprived of my own hard work!”
“It’s Golden Week, you’re still getting paid. I’m not a monster.”
“That’s not it, idiot.” Donghyuck shakes his head. “You know how you asked me way back when what I needed from this store?”
Chenle nods. In the span of a couple of months, he has so many more memories of Donghyuck, with Donghyuck, it’s hard to believe they met so simply.
“I needed work. For money, yeah, but mainly because I’ve always needed something to wake up for and get excited about. My life is so full of lectures and godforsaken interviews with people who are ten times less interesting than you, and this job and the promise of a stupid piece of signed paper are probably the only things keeping me going.” Donghyuck throws his hands up in the air. “Not even Overwatch gives me joy anymore! What the hell am I supposed to do with the free time now?”
The sudden honesty leaves Chenle blinking, unsure of how to respond, and he’s saved by a text message from his aunt, with a singular word.
Holy shit.
Donghyuck narrows his eyes. “Why are you smiling like that?”
In a flash, Chenle tosses his phone aside and grabs Donghyuck by the shoulders, shaking him back and forth. “You’re going to help me figure out how to get a food handler’s permit, that’s what!”
It takes a few seconds for the implications to register in Donghyuck’s head, then his eyes are widening and he’s beaming so wide, it stretches past his face all the way up to his ears. “No fucking way!”
“We need to get all the licences and permits ourselves,” Chenle rambles, recalling every conversation they’ve had since the hotpot night about the hypothetical situation that’s no longer hypothetical, “Then we have to hire actual staff and figure out the technicalities of installations and expanding the building space, but my aunt says she’ll invest in us if we can give her a concrete plan by the summer.”
“The fusion menu!” Donghyuck exclaims.
“The tableside service!”
“The hot pot specials!”
Their shouting dissolves into unintelligible screeching loud enough to blast the walls apart, and Chenle can’t help himself from reaching over and crushing Donghyuck in a tight hug. He can practically see the damn place, can see them bossing staff around and cooking side by side, maybe even scrawling out enough dishes to compile into a shiliao cookbook, all of the crazy ideas they’ve bounced off each other that have gone from impossible to arm’s reach in a matter of seconds.
When they finally pull apart, they’re both grinning at each other like madmen.
“I can’t believe my aunt upstaged me,” Chenle laughs.
“What do you mean?”
“I wanted to give you this, for being my best employee, but I think the restaurant news is way cooler and more exciting.” From his back pocket, Chenle pulls out a hongbao and taps Donghyuck’s nose. “A heavenly official said you deserve a raise. Happy New Year’s, hyung.”
Before Chenle can say anything, Donghyuck snatches the envelope out of his hand and yanks him by the collar, pressing their lips together. All the magic running in Chenle’s veins flares from the sudden contact, warmth surging through his body to light his face on fire. He doesn’t even remember to close his eyes, just stands there like a stupid rock, his brain forgetting how to move and breathe and kiss back like a normal person, because holy shit, holy shit, holy shit, maybe Chenle likes Donghyuck a little more than a little bit.
Donghyuck pulls back with a cheeky grin. “Payback.”
Dazed, Chenle mumbles, “If I knew that’s how you would react, I would’ve…given you a raise way sooner.”
Donghyuck laughs, long and hard. “Wait until you see how I react when you make me executive chef at the restaurant,” he laughs, and when Donghyuck closes his eyes and leans in again, this time, Chenle knows what to do.
Donghyuck tastes like too-strong tea and smells like expensive perfume with an undercurrent of too-strong tea, and Chenle knows somewhere deep in him that this might be what he needed all along.
For as much as Chenle’s aunt insists it’s the lasting pride of the Zhong legacy, the pharmacy isn’t all that much.
A few walls of drawers, the counter where he keeps all his tools, some cushioned chairs scattered around, and the money corner with a decorative vase and a table full of mismatched figurines make up the interior.
But as he takes down the bujeok to replace with a new one—“any flower blooming late, will have a fragrance ten times as great”—as he tapes up a sign reading “Renovating - look forward to a store extension soon!” in three different languages, as he looks over his shoulder waiting for the clock to strike nine, Chenle thinks he can imagine himself behind the counter for maybe…
Maybe a little bit longer.
scheznolez Fri 09 Feb 2024 04:43PM UTC
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