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biffhofosho · 2 years

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The Voodoo That You Do

Fandom: Monsta X

Genre: Smut, natch.

Word Count: 9.7k

Pairing: Shownu x OC

Trope: Enemies AND Lovers

Synopsis: His whole life, Hyunwoo has known the difference between right and wrong and on which side he’s firmly stood; it’s what called him to enlist in the Mage Force, the elite squadron tasked with tamping out witches before they can disrupt the natural order of things. Yes, he’s always known the difference between right and wrong... except when it comes to the spellbinding Gray. He knows it’s wrong to keep showing up on her doorstep, but then why does it feel so right?

The Vibe: Wild darkwood, Pacific Northwest atmosphere duh, romantic setting like whoa, magical AU, snapshot of a moment in what is clearly a much larger story arc that I refuse to get into, good guy Shownu vs witchy woman OC, taboo feelings, stolen moments, stubborn MCs won’t give up and won’t give in, magic-enhanced sex say whaaaaat, erotic massage mhmm, soft femdom overtures for a spell (ba-dum-tss), angst but hope—always hope <3

A/N: I built way too much world in a oneshot for this to be mentally healthy probably. I just kinda want to live in this realm idk? Anyway, maybe it’s a little intense, but I hope you enjoy anyway. Last October fic will hit on Halloween!

“Ah, right on time,” Gray said as she opened the rickety wooden door, the uneven slats scraping against the flagstone floor. The breeze stirred her onyx bangs like reeds above her eyes as she sported a smirk on her slender lips. “Well, you coming in?”

When the man on the other side didn’t make a move, she sighed and left the door open behind her as she headed back to the kitchen. With a firm exhale, Hyunwoo pursed his lips and followed her as though he had a collar and leash around his neck. Sometimes he wondered if maybe he’d been enchanted, but he would know as would everyone else in his department. He couldn’t make that excuse even as he closed the door behind him.

He ran his hands through his hair as much to shake the dewy mists from his cinnamon locks as it was to tidy up for her (even if that was the last thing in the world he was willing to admit to himself, let alone anyone else).

Outside, the sea fog shrouded the moss-covered forest and the even mossier rooftop and pressed at the windows like a puffy-cheeked child at a candy shop storefront, but other than that, the one-room cottage felt more like a desert island, as far from prying eyes as it could get.

Though he knew he should always be on guard in her presence, Hyunwoo felt warm, dangerous familiarity settle into his bones. Firelight drove the dampness from the air as water dripped from the ferns along the overhangs. In the kitchen, Gray sashayed back and forth along the counter, her back to him while her skirts rustled with every step.

He cleared his throat.

“So, what is it this time, hm?” she asked as she returned to sifting flour through her fingers. “Are you here to plead with me again to change my ways or are we skipping that foreplay this time and going straight for what you really want?”

Hyunwoo ignored half her question and pressed ahead as determinedly as he could before he forgot himself in the swish of her ponytail. “I still believe there’s time for you to make a different choice, Gray.”

Her dramatic sigh cut him off. “You good boys are always so predictable. Fine, say what you need to say before we get down to our usual brass tacks.”

“Not this time.”

“Never this time, darling,” she corrected, “isn’t that what you always say? And yet, what is this? Your third visit in a month? You stop by any more, and I’m going to need to get a toothbrush for you.”

“I’m serious, Gray.”

“Aren’t you always?”

Hyunwoo sighed and sank into his now-familiar seat at the edge of the bed. From this vantage point, he could see the whole cottage. It was as rustic as a place could be, made of stone and mortared by mud, with windowpanes of warped and bubbled glass that let in the emerald green light of the deep woods. Under the thatched roof were thick beams studded with hammered wooden pegs adorned with bouquets of flowers and herbs and baskets of drying mushrooms along with every other thing a respectable witch could collect.

The focal point of the whole space was the hearth, ever crackling with fire and casting impish shadows in the dusty nooks. A cauldron swung from a hook nearby, simmering a rich roast of some wild game while two spears of salmon smoked on the other side.

A dining table stained in a wine-colored patchwork sat in the middle of the house cluttered with berries waiting to be mashed and jarred. Behind it, an array of plants and shells and scales and even bones bedecked the knotty kitchen counter, where Gray worked with her sleeves rolled up.

Under the ivory fringe of her handwoven shawl, her forearms flexed and rolled as she flattened little balls of dough. She pulled a bit of dough off and nibbled it, a sly smile pulling at the corner of her taupe lips.

“You want some?” she asked, nodding toward a cast iron pan heating at the foot of the fire.

“Mm,” Hyunwoo mumbled with a nod. He may have set out with every intention of being a Mage Force emissary, but with the fingers of roast and butter tickling at the tip of his nose, he couldn’t think of an excuse to refuse Gray’s hospitality.

With a fresh pad of grease dissolving on the hot pan, she placed several lumps of dough on top to sizzle, and Hyunwoo’s stomach growled embarrassingly loudly.

“They don’t feed you at the Academy?” she teased.

“They do, but it’s…”

“Soul-less?”

Hyunwoo nodded.

“Should be just a half hour. Here,” she said, waggling a plate of jerky in front of him. “To tide you over until then.”

The enforcement agent eyed it and she laughed. Part of him hated that laugh, wild and free, paddling on a breeze that wasn’t even blowing through the room. It always made him feel something he couldn’t name, yet he knew he shouldn’t be feeling it all the same.

“It’s just venison, I swear. I don't do shade magic, you know that, but you can test it if you like.”

“That's okay,” he said and downed a piece in three bites. Tenderness burst along his tongue followed by fireworks of pepper and dried berries. His eyes fluttered shut as the warmth and energy of homemade food tingled through every extremity.

“Pretending you trust me tonight, I see,” laughed Gray. “Is this a Mage Force tactic to build rapport?”

“Do we even need to bother with that at this point?”

She smiled wanly. “Better late than never, especially if you’re committed to giving me the old sermon again. In the meantime, do you mind if I settle in? I’ve been out all day foraging, and I just want to relax.”

“Of course.”

The mage washed her hands in a basin and dried them on her skirt before she stirred the cauldron and rotated the fish, flooding the cottage with more unctuous smells. She fished a long, thin stick from her kindling pile and thrust one end into the fire until it caught, and then carefully, she circled the room, lighting black candles in every corner. When she reached the one on the nightstand beside Hyunwoo, he stilled her wrist, and their gazes fastened to their skins melding into one another’s.

“A spell candle, really?” he chastised.

Gray raised one thick eyebrow. “Why would I need another spell when you’re already under mine?”

She let the thought simmer as she lit the wick in spite of his hold, and gradually, Hyunwoo’s hand fell away.

Gray pitched the stick into the fire before she cast a few sprigs of rosemary onto it, too. Sparks danced up the flue as bright and cleansing plumes of pinewood made Hyunwoo’s chest lift. Butterscotch and apricot and flares of apple red softened his host’s naturally round features even further while her toasted skin shimmered with diamonds of dried sweat. She caught his gaze as she plucked the leather band from her hair and let her waist-length tresses billow like the lichen beards that wreathed every tree in the forest.

Gray leaned against the table, her callused hands gripping the edge. “So, Agent Son, we meet again. It’s been a few visits. Last time you were here, you were just Hyunwoo.”

“I’m still Hyunwoo,” he insisted, but she shook her head.

“No, Hyunwoo is different. He’s sweet and simple. He doesn’t have pretenses. He doesn’t need them to see me.”

As he unpacked her words, Hyunwoo realized that maybe she was right after all. Last night, as he’d stared at the ceiling in his dormitory, he’d thought of her over and over again, polishing the memory of her lips on his until it was shiny and clear. Coming out into the Hoh Forest hadn’t exactly been part of his plan when he woke up, but then again, it never was.

Ever since Gray had first brought him here, it had been hard to forget. She had been impossible to forget. And maybe part of that was because she’d almost killed him that day, and maybe part of that was because she hadn’t, but whatever it was, the intoxicating swirl of her cognac eyes haunted him until he found his way back here.

“Either way,” she continued, “I’m glad to see you.”

And that, right there, summed up the exact reason Hyunwoo had recited his Mage Force oath the entire two-mile walk through the woods. As effortless as by a hex, he was bewitched.

Gray rifled through a collection of bowls on a shelf until she found the one she was looking for and crossed the room to the bedside. Her fingers dipped into the shadowy recess of the bowl and pinched a fine black powder she then sent showering to the floor.

“What are you doing?” the agent questioned and underlined it with a deeply furrowed brow.

“Protection,” she answered simply.

“Shouldn’t you circle the whole house?”

Gray hummed. “So now you practice magic instead of just outlaw it?”

“Sorry, I—”

“I’m teasing,” she said. When his brow didn’t let up, she added, “I have many wards for both my home and for me, as you and your seers no doubt know, but you’ve been here enough times that if someone hasn’t already suspected you of something, they soon will.”

“I’m careful.”

“So was I before I brought you here.”

Her words rang in the rafters.

“Feet up,” she said, and Hyunwoo obeyed. “Be careful when you put them back down.”

As she worked, Gray leaned over, and her familiar scent enveloped him. Years of living in the wilderness and working with the earth had absorbed into her brown skin, and she always smelled like a garden after the rain or sometimes, like today, she smelled of wild and forbidden things that people had only ever known in myth.

Hyunwoo pressed his lips together and turned away.

“There’s so much contraband here,” he mused as he looked around the cottage cluttered with drying herbs and packed jars and criss-crossed bones.

“Going to arrest me, Agent Son?”

“I could.”

Gray shrugged and finished sprinkling the circle of soot. “And you could have every other time you were here, but you were too busy cumming inside me.”

Hyunwoo coughed so hard he choked, and the mage smirked, but it faded like an ember.

“The day will come, Hyunwoo, all too quickly when you’ll have to make that choice for real, and all the calculations and recalculations and misdirections and cloaking spells won’t be able to stop it. One day, you’ll have to decide what you care about more: your antiquated laws drafted by crusty misogynists and cowards, or me.”

Silence hung, potent as one of her bouquets of sage in the rafters.

“Or maybe one day you’ll have to decide between tampering with the laws of the universe or me.”

“Maybe,” she agreed softly, “but not today, I suppose.”

At last, Gray withdrew the flat bread from the hearth and carried it on a plate to the table next to a jar of fresh blackberry jam.

“Sit. Eat,” she instructed and pulled out the chair. “And mind the circle.”

Compelled by his ever-ravenous stomach, Hyunwoo plopped down in the seat, forgetting all those carefully cultivated pretenses. They’d still be there when the food was gone; no sense wasting the stuff with an expiration. He ladled a heap of preserves on the bread and devoured it nearly as quickly as the jerky, and when his hostess came back, she surprised him with a bowl of the roast from the cauldron.

Mouth still full, he garbled, “You knew I was coming, didn’t you?”

Gray shook her head, that ebony hair flashing with firelight like the sunset on the back of a river. “No, but I hoped.”

His spoon sagged. “You did?”

“I think I’m growing used to you.”

That wasn’t something their sides should be saying to one another, but there it was.

Hyunwoo cleared his throat. “Everything tastes great.”

“I’m glad.”

Now, it wasn’t just the fire keeping him warm but her smile, too.

When he was finished, Gray cleared the table while Hyunwoo perched at the edge of his chair. His plans were falling apart with every twirl of her hair, and he wasn’t sure what he should do, so he returned to his familiar seat on the bed, careful not to disturb the soot circle.

Things were easier with her back to him, so while she washed the plates, he said, “This is the last time I’ll come here, Gray.”

“Mm,” she hummed over her shoulder. “You said that last time, too.”

“No, I mean it.”

“So you keep saying.”

“You’re not listening. You never listen to me,” he said resignedly.

Gray put down the last plate and whirled around, leaning against the counter with the full force of those untamed eyes upon him. “Of course I listen. I listen to the real you, the one underneath your persona, the one who sees the truth behind the indoctrination.”

Hyunwoo rubbed his temple and sighed. “Every time I leave here, it messes with my head.”

“Exactly!” she trumpeted as she slammed her hands on the table. “That’s because you know you belong here.”

“No, it’s because I know that I’ve let you continue to tamper with the laws of the universe. The world is not your plaything. Things were meant to happen in a natural order, and magic undermines and subverts that. You’re altering the course of the world to your own ends.”

He hadn’t meant to recite the Mage Force motto, but with her piercing gaze on him, he'd been whittled down to his basics.

She pursed her lips. “That’s a lot of fancy words that aren’t yours.”

“They are mine, Gray, they are, and I’m here begging you to walk away from this life before you can’t. You don’t need magic to change the world. I’ll help you find your place. If I vouch for you, the Director will listen. All you’ll have to do is swear an oath to the Force, and they’ll remove your wanted status. You can live wherever you want, and I—” Hyunwoo swallowed hard. “I can be with you.”

He felt a burst of satisfaction. Maybe he had started awkwardly, but he’d ended sincerely. There was no way she could mistake him anymore.

“You’re with me now,” said the mage with an equally satisfied smirk at the corner of her mouth. “And you know, this speech would be more genuine if it weren’t coming from the foot of my bed.”

His mouth hung open.

“Do you feel better?” she asked.

Hyunwoo didn't answer because he didn’t need to. He did feel better and certainly less guilty, but nothing else had changed.

“Gray, we can’t keep doing this.”

“You’re the one who’s doing it.”

“You have an answer for everything,” he griped.

Suddenly, she moved around the table, stoking the warm air as well as any fire poker. “For everything but the one thing I truly want to know. What makes you trust the rules of men you’ve never met over the woman right in front of you who can show you the true world beyond the pale? What makes you fear magic, Hyunwoo?”

He blinked, caught off guard. There wasn’t a corner of the country that didn’t have an anti-magic agenda. He supposed part of that was religion and part of that was superstition, but more than anything, he knew it was simply the fear of the unknown. People were afraid of what they didn’t understand. Hyunwoo wasn’t afraid of magic. He was fascinated by it, and that, more than anything, terrified him.

“It doesn’t belong,” he said. “It’s unnatural.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s more natural than your computers and artificial hearts and high-speed trains, so you tell me who’s really altering the course of the world?

“Magic exists whether we wield it or not. It’s my heritage, Hyunwoo. Generations of shamans have lived in these very walls. Their magic infuses me, not like those junkies who take Magicka enhancers to trick themselves into seeing what I can see as plainly as you see me right now. That’s artificial and just plain sad, but real magic, that has been guiding us since our creation.”

“And what would those shamans say about you using their ancestral magic to empty vaults and destroy careers and lives?” he challenged.

This made Gray pause for only a second before she said, “Our magic has always been about restoring balance. I’m not playing, you see. I’m equalizing.”

In his head, Hyunwoo ran through the litany of crimes they’d been hunting her for, including, most recently, the humiliation of a high-ranking Mage Force minister who’d been found wandering downtown Seattle naked and proclaiming his every sin like a perverted town crier.

Gray seemed to recall the same moment, and the corner of her mouth kicked up. “Okay, maybe I’m playing a little, too, but who wants to work without a little fun from time to time, right, Agent Son?”

Gray eyed him on the bed with a wicked smile, and it felt like she was looking right into his soul. To deflect, he countered, “What you do isn’t work.”

“Of course it is. What else would contract work be?”

Hyunwoo blinked. A thousand questions opened up, things he and his fellow agents had never considered.

“People contract you?”

She rolled her eyes. “You’re focusing on the wrong thing.”

“Am I? Gray, if you turn in the orchestrators behind this, maybe I can—”

“And who says I’m not the orchestrator? Who says this isn’t just a convenient means to the end I want? That the world needs? Am I above that? You know me well enough by this point, Hyunwoo. You tell me.”

He was too stunned to answer. Of course she was behind it all. She’d always sported with people because she could, but the first chance his heart had to give her an out, it leapt at it. If anything, the news dealt a far more devastating blow for that.

“You asked if my ancestors would approve of the things I do?” Gray continued. “Perhaps not, but they had that luxury. Their world was small. Mine is getting even smaller by the second. I have to defend it. If my magic is the only way to help me do it, then that is what I’ll do, and if I need to exploit the exploiters in the process, then I will.”

“And that means me, too?” Hyunwoo realized softly.

He felt a pull under his chin as though there were a finger there when there was not. His eyes drifted back up to the woman across the room, who dropped her hand the moment she had his attention. Their gazes met one another’s, inextricably linked in a way he could only describe as fated.

“You are the only balanced person I know, Hyunwoo,” Gray said.

Gone was the provocative, self-assured look in her eyes. For the first time in a long time, he felt like he could see the true heart of his adversary.

“If you experienced magic as it truly is, you would understand. Nothing could be more natural.”

With that, she eased forward, and with every step closer, Hyunwoo could feel his power ebbing. The tide was turning as it always did—he could feel it. The way the room warmed like sheets fresh from a dryer, the way the air sweetened with juice of a forbidden fruit, the way the rosemary dulled the last of his objections. He didn’t come here for this, he really didn’t, so if he didn’t take a stand right now, he knew he was doomed to repeat the same foolish pattern yet again.

“It’s the law, Gray, and I don’t want you to get—”

“Shownu,” she snapped, and he scowled. He hated when she brandished his Mage Force handle like a blade. Gray was one of the few who knew his true name, but when she was tired of their usual games, that was her signal. “Enough.”

In an instant, it was over, and sitting in the shadow of her proud shoulders and even prouder chin, Hyunwoo knew he’d lost, not just today but always.

Gray sensed it. She cocked her head to the side, catching the full dazzling glow of the fire, and her edges galvanized as they came toe-to-toe. Her fingers danced up her torso to her shawl, where she unhooked the clasp and shook it from her shoulders. In its wake, it revealed a leather bodice cinched closed with matching ties along with swaths of bare cinnamon skin just as silken as it looked.

She turned her back to him, arms out, taking in the breadth of the cottage. The place was already small, but filled with her devotion, it felt even more cramped.

“What about this looks unnatural?” she proclaimed, her voice alight with a hidden smile.

When Gray turned back, she held his gaze with a tender confidence. Nothing about her wavered even as she unraveled the first tie at her chest, followed by the second, and finally the third. As she slipped out of the bodice, her lips pursed. The leather thudded to the floor, leaving tawny nipples crowning soft breasts just out of reach. A feather and stone amulet dangled between them as it always did, the only remnant of the role she played outside this sanctuary.

Shadows danced across the gentle swell of her belly and the tantalizing mounds overhanging it just as they nestled in the valley of the scar at her ribs that Hyunwoo had put there the day of their first fateful meeting. Her skirts vanished next in a puddle at her feet, leaving only a dark patch of hair concealing his greatest weakness.

Color rushed up the agent’s throat to his cheeks, and there was her Hyunwoo, the man behind the big, bad witchcraft-siphoning law enforcement officer, now a wide-eyed fool with a head empty of everything but her.

Gently, Gray asked, “What about me looks unnatural?”

She stooped down to take his hand, which had been clasping his knee like the last handhold of his sanity, and placed it on her breast. No matter how hard his reason tried to regain control and snap his hand back, it was hopeless. Hyunwoo kneaded the warm skin there just as he liked to, reverently, with astonishment that such a woman would want him over and over again.

Gray’s hand closed over his, and together they squeezed her flesh until she unleashed a breathy sigh. “What about that feels unnatural?”

“Nothing,” admitted Hyunwoo, as he took her other globe in hand.

“It feels right,” she said.

“It does.”

“It belongs there.” And then she took the hand she’d been holding and pressed it against the soft curls at her mound. “You belong here.”

The last of Hyunwoo’s sensibilities crumbled. He didn’t care about them anymore. It wasn’t just lust commanding him, though he wished he could argue that was the case.

Where he belonged…

But his mind was too clotted with the delicious rosy stain of her expectant lips and the heady smell of her arousal to consider such an existential question. There would be time enough later for that when he invariably stared at his ceiling, trying to fall asleep after he’d jerked off to her memory.

They only had the here and now, and resistance was pointless agony.

Hyunwoo nudged his thumb downward to the crest of her sex and parted the peak of her seam. Wetness flowed forth, eager to prep her body for the inevitability of him. Gray threw her head back with a wail that showered over them like a fountain of longing, and it spurred his lust on until it reached the hidden hood sheltering her raging need.

Her hands raced to her breasts, pulling on the dark nipples to usher forth another wave of intensity. The way her body arched toward him in gratitude drove Hyunwoo to near madness.

“How long have you been like this?” he asked as he rubbed gentle circles on her clit.

“Since you left,” she admitted before unleashing another moan. “Do you like it?”

Did he like it? Did he like seeing the Force’s most wanted mage writhing naked for him in the center of her secret home, bathed in firelight and leaking honeyed lust all over his fingers?

“So much,” he murmured.

Hyunwoo traded his thumb for his index finger and slid it through the length of her slit, gathering her arousal on its tip before circling her entrance. As much as he wanted to, he didn’t press inside. He was saving that privilege for his cock, which was hard as granite inside his uniform slacks and already eager to unload. The wrongness of that—his insatiable desire for his sworn enemy straining against the last reminder of his sworn duty—only made him harder.

But then Gray swatted away his hand and stepped back to his absolutely humiliating groan.

“First things first, lover,” she said as she headed into her kitchen.

He savored his chance to ogle her lovely, round ass as she strolled to the far shelf and plucked a little clay pot from the top. She withdrew something small from it, and when she turned back to him, she was smiling that crescent moon smile of hers, the one that always told him when she was holding something back from him.

The moment Gray approached, Hyunwoo’s legs parted for her and she stepped between them. His face fell naturally to her stomach, and he nuzzled the tender skin there, feathering the occasional kiss with a taste or two from his tongue.

Her hand forked back through his thick locks, pulling just a bit to lift his gaze to hers. His breath was already shallow, his eyes hooded. In her sultry, spellcasting voice, she said, “Be the good boy I know you are, Hyunwoo, and open.”

The agent didn’t even have time to think better of it before he opened his mouth for her. Gray placed a little morsel on his tongue and closed his mouth with a finger under his chin.

At first blush, he tasted earth and the woods, and he jerked from her grip, pocketing her offering in his cheek as he garbled, “What is this?”

Gray soothed her hand over his knitted brow and down his cheek, thumbing the breadth of his flush bottom lip. With a tilt of her head, she asked, “You trust me, don’t you?”

Absolutely not.

“Yes,” he answered, honestly surprised.

“Then swallow.”

And Hyunwoo did.

“I don’t feel anything,” he said after a moment.

“Not yet,” said the mage, “but when you do, you won’t just feel—you’ll experience everything. Lay back now, lover.”

With far too much familiarity, Hyunwoo kicked off his shoes and scooted up the bed until his head rested on one of the pillows.

“You’re awfully stiff tonight,” Gray observed. “Let me fix that.”

She climbed onto the bed and straddled him, but Hyunwoo grabbed her waist just in time to hover her above his hips.

“It’ll stain,” he said with furious red cheeks as he glanced down to her wet thighs.

Gray laughed as softly as the mists that cloaked them today. “Hm. We wouldn’t want your Academy friends finding out you’ve been inside the notorious Scourge of the West yet again, would we?”

As was required, his uniform had been buttoned to the collar, but one by one, she remedied that until she spread his shirt wide to reveal his bronzed and toned chest. Hyunwoo had never kept his physique up for appearances—more for a matter of necessity for his strenuous field work—but he may have spent a few more hours in the gym over the last few weeks simply to delight in the way his woman’s eyes lit up at his broad expanse of chest and muscled waist.

His woman?

Too many things were running through his head that shouldn’t be, though Gray was quick to remedy that with a dusting of her fingertips over his nipples. He grunted, head empty now of everything that wasn’t her. Things were changing, tuning, within him. He wasn’t sure what, but it was coming on stronger by the second.

“There he is,” she mused. “My Hyunwoo.”

Her stubby nails scudded down his torso, and he felt the first flare of something new, something deep within him that he could neither define nor ignore. It made his heart quicken and his body vibrate. He could feel the woman hovering above him without a single touch, almost as though they were tethered together by silken threads. Just a pass of her hand through the air above him had him moaning, and the closer her skin came to his, the more exhilarated he was.

“What’s happening?” he asked shakily, afraid he would cum with one more touch.

“Mm, right on time,” she said. “Tell me, lover, what do you feel?”

Gray hovered her hand a few inches over his heart as she watched him intently.

“Heat,” he said through gritted teeth.

She lowered her hand an inch. “Now what do you feel?”

Hyunwoo squirmed. “A— A crackling? Something’s different. I don’t know.”

“Does it hurt?”

“I’ve never—I’ve never felt anything l-like it.”

As his voice caught, Gray hummed. Gradually, she lowered her hand to his pectoral, right over his heart. Hyunwoo arched immediately and groaned, flexing every muscle in his thighs to a near cramp just to stave off the rush of white-hot release that threatened to flood his pants. His eyes rolled back in his head as his fingers knotted in the blankets.

“And now?” She asked.

“Fuck, I feel— I feel you…”

“You feel my energy, same as I feel yours. This is what magic is, Hyunwoo. It’s energy. It lives in us. It connects us.” She lifted her hand, and the warm electricity in his chest fizzled and dulled. “And it can divide us.”

Satisfied, Gray sashayed naked back to the kitchen counter, though he could still feel their invisible binds lashing them to one another. She grabbed a bowl and brought it to the bedside table where she swirled a finger in the shimmering liquid and then lifted it, watching it drip golden and viscous back into a puddle. She recited something lyrical and low in her native tongue, and when she swirled her finger back through the oil, this time in a figure eight, she nodded to herself.

“You may want to remove that stupid thing,” Gray said with a pointed glower at the rest of his uniform.

Hyunwoo shimmied out of his shirt and slacks and laid back on the bed completely bare, cock stiff as could be and waiting with an embarrassing amount of expectation. He cleared his throat and focused instead on the mage’s every move.

Unlike him, Gray moved without a hint of shame, like her naked figure was more natural than a clothed one. She swept her head to one side, her glossy hair puddling over her other shoulder and offering an enticing view of her graceful neck.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Changing your mind about magic,” she answered with a sly grin. “Hold still, Hyunwoo.”

Gray scooped her hands in the bowl like a ladle. Oil dribbled from her fists and splattered onto his bare chest, and he hissed. It was warm and fragrant, but that wasn’t what had his muscles undulating on the bed.

“What is this, ah?” he managed as fireworks of the purest pleasure he’d ever felt exploded with each drop of oil.

“Just a little something to heighten your sensitivity and further open your mind—and heart—for me.”

Her hands glided over his chest, distributing the pools of fire-lit oil over every toned muscle from his throat to his feet excepting one very needy area. With his body glistening, her thumbs returned to flick once across each of his nipples again. Hyunwoo was generally a quiet lover, but there was no way to be today. He let out a monstrous groan as a shudder tore through him.

“Mm, that’s not so bad, is it?” Gray cooed. “How about this?”

Her hands traveled lower, over the smooth ripples of his abs, and this time, her nail traced the circumference of his navel. He was humming now. His eyes closed and his thick lips parted for heavy breath.

“You like it, Hyunwoo?”

The best he could answer with was a long, low sigh. Every nerve tingled, and even when Gray walked her fingers up his thigh, he could feel them just as strongly at his throat or over his chest. Coupled with whatever drug she’d dosed him with, his body thrummed with unreleased ecstasy. He was alive with her touch and so hard, it was agonizing.

Hyunwoo groaned again, this time miserably, and she laughed gently. “It hurts, doesn’t it? Poor little love. There’s only one place I haven’t touched you. Let me fix that.”

At last, she encircled his member with both hands stacked, her thumb pressing at the underside of his cock head. She stroked the valley there, massaging the oil over the pulsing veins and demanding ridges. Up and down, her hands glided, not missing an inch even at his base and balls. Just when Hyunwoo thought he was as worked up as he could get, those sinister fingers raced back to his neglected tip and circled it with a fine sheen of oil now muddied with precum. His whole body shook, and right at his absolute peak of desire, Gray let go.

Hyunwoo had never been an emotional guy, at least not one in a traditional sense. He felt everything deeply, but it didn’t often break the surface. Now, he was borderline ready to cry. The combination of her two spells entwined his every sense to have his whole body magnetized to her. It wasn’t just that his ever-present frustration for this woman had been dredged up but also his longing. He longed for her—to be inside her, to be with her, to be wanted by her—and now, there was no off switch. He was frayed and pathetic and simple, and she was sitting at the foot of the bed with a fire-etched smile on her face.

She knew it all.

Mercifully, Gray straddled his waist, and this time Hyunwoo was more than eager to let her sit on his stomach, his hands gripping her thighs to anchor himself more than anything. He felt the blaze between her legs soaking his abs, her body mercifully begging for him, too.

With a contented hum, she tipped forward and flattened herself against him. Their skin ignited like sparklers, and Hyunwoo’s every thought, intention, and dream drew to the surface, hoping to merge with hers.

Gray rested her cheek on his collar, her lips at his throat, and sighed.

“Do you like it?” she asked.

“It’s incredible.”

She kissed the base of his neck then, letting the flat of her tongue gloss through the chaste parting at her lips. It was like napalm, but it was nothing compared to the reward of her mouth on his at last. He tasted that same earthiness of the capsule she had dosed him with, and he figured she had taken one, too. With the spell magnified on their tongues, Hyunwoo swore he could feel a bit of his soul passing into her. Breaking apart was agony, but from the wanton cast in her eyes, he knew he was about to get his reprieve.

Gray sat up and swiveled around on top of him so her back faced him as well as her toned ass. She looked over her shoulder at him with that tempting smile of hers and said, “I want you to close your eyes now, lover. Let the magic in. Let me in.”

Hyunwoo nodded though his muscles tightened with unexpected nerves.

With her hand at his base to direct him, Gray shifted her weight to her knees and sat back on his cock, burying him within her warm cavern. He had promised to keep his eyes closed, but her indulgent voice beckoned them back open. She keened as she took him, each inch adding another tear in the wells of her eyes that spilled over the second she reached his hilt. She was stunning, her sinewy back tense with pleasure while the blossom of her ass billowed against his hips.

“Damn, so good,” she hiccuped.

“Intense,” he stuttered in agreement as his hands locked around her ankles for any sort of grip against the onslaught of decadence that had overtaken them.

Hyunwoo always felt most alive inside her, but this was so different. His shaft was ensconced in her velvet walls, yet he was hyper-aware of her like never before. He could sense where she needed him most inside her, and as Gray swirled her hips in the bowl of his pelvis, greedy for every last bit of him she could swallow, he thrust up just enough to pitch her forward with huge gasps for breath. Her nails dug into his knees as she steadied herself.

“Oh my god,” she rasped. “You know, don’t you? You can feel it?”

“Mm. I see this is as much for you as it is for me.” He meant it as a light tease, but there was nothing funny about how incredibly hot and tight her walls were around him nor was there about how close he already was.

“Never claimed magic couldn’t be selfish, too.”

Gray switched her hands to the bed and shifted her weight onto them so she could ride him in earnest, and the second she took full control, Hyunwoo’s brain blanked out. She had always taken his cock just as he liked, but with the addition of the enchantments, it was no longer just pleasure he felt but pure, unadulterated euphoria.

His senses were a jumble. He tasted colors—spicy reds and tart golds and unctuous tans—and he felt sounds—the pulsing bass of her groans, the trembling of his breath, the quiver of her cry for release. Everything culminated toward an impending explosion like he’d never felt before.

“I can’t hold it,” Hyunwoo warned, his fingers pawing at her back, “can’t.”

“Not yet,” she ordered, not letting up her pistoning for a second.

“Gray, I can’t—”

She lifted to his tip and pressed her fingertip underneath her to his tender, sticky flesh just above where his body united with hers. A sudden chill flooded his belly, and that immediate urge to blow numbed in a state of suspended animation.

“I said not yet,” Gray commanded. “I want to cum together.”

Hyunwoo bucked in frustration under her. All this maddening pleasure with no way to release it rolled back like the sea gathering strength. He could feel all of it, every ounce of desperation for her and every drop of sin within him, compounding with crushing pressure. He was almost afraid of what would happen when he was allowed to let it out.

Instead of a bounce, Gray switched to a determined grind, rocking his iron-hard rod along her frantic walls. Hyunwoo felt the glance of fingers against his balls and watched as her shoulders rolled with her every gasp.

“Are you touching yourself?” he asked as he felt yet another gloss of fingertips at his base.

“Mm-hm,” she purred, and something within him snapped.

His hands clasped her waist to still her as he thrust himself deep within her, spearing the inside of her belly with his twitching, desperate cock.

“That’s my job,” he growled.

Hyunwoo pulled her off of him then and tossed Gray back onto the bed to her surprised shout. Not a second later, he pounced, splitting her knees wide so he could take any part of her he desired.

“Yes,” she murmured, “take care of me, baby.”

In one smooth motion, he slid between her knees, his sticky length pressing heavy on her mound. He bent down and kissed her, savoring how cold her mouth was from panting. As his tongue slipped in, his length found its home back in her hot core. They sighed into each other as, this time, he controlled their rhythm.

Slow and sensual had been the pace Gray had set, but he saw it now for what it was: another game. She had wanted him out of his mind with lust for her, and she’d succeeded.

But Hyunwoo didn’t want games. He wanted her.

Begging. Bare. Open. Raw.

And he wanted her to want him as completely, too.

Out of the corner of his eye, Hyunwoo caught a glimpse of liquid fire, and he smiled. His fingers closed over the edge of the wooden bowl, where he wetted his fingertips and brought them back to her clit to polish it anew.

Gray chanted his name at the top of her lungs as her core seized around him. Through a tremulous laugh, she praised, “Such a clever boy.”

Hyunwoo grunted and focused his attention on her glistening, swollen button pressing insistently against his thumb. She looked so pretty like that, exposed and caramelized by oil and arousal and flame, that he worried even her spell couldn’t stop him from cumming at the sight.

At least he knew, as much as he felt, that Gray wouldn’t last much longer either. Her walls were quivering, pulling him deeper and deeper, while her composure evaporated. Her hands knotted against her scalp while her nipples peaked in dark, aching rosettes as she undulated and bucked and thrashed and whined.

“I need it, I need it, I need it,” she demanded so fast it sounded like one word.

Hyunwoo gritted his teeth and plowed faster into her, making sure he didn’t let his attentions on her clit wane for even a millisecond.

Where the city was noisy and overwhelming, here, only the symphonies of their bodies played, a crescendo of moans and whimpers backed by a dewy kiss every time their sexes met, and it reminded him it had been far too long since he’d tasted her mouth.

Hyunwoo fell forward so their bodies met along with their lips. Gray closed her arms along with her legs around him and held him as close as she possibly could while their breath intertwined. They were heat and sin and wrongness and rightness hopelessly and irrevocably entangled.

“Deeper. Deeper, Hyunwoo,” she mumbled against his swollen lips. “You feel so good. Please. Don’t leave. Don’t ever leave.”

There it was, the begging, and it was more powerful than he could have ever hoped for. Thanks to the enchantment, he felt her words like ropes binding his heart to hers. She could have said “don’t stop.” But she hadn’t.

Don’t leave.

“I won’t,” he promised.

Hyunwoo wrapped his arms around her in a bear hug and kissed her with the full force of his heart, and only when he ran out of air did he let up. He planted his hands into the mattress to utilize what was left of his strength and railed hard and fast into his woman.

Gray let out a vicious moan that shook the glazing in the windows, flared the fire in the hearth, and rattled the baskets in the rafters. Her nails raked down the expanse of his back, and as the skin broke, so did the dam within him. Hyunwoo rutted into her with the instinct of a wild animal, with sounds just as inhuman, and he came harder and longer than he’d ever imagined possible. Even buried to his hilt, it gushed around him in a mess of shame and perfect ecstasy.

His release triggered Gray’s. Her walls strangled him, as greedy for his offering as they were to lock him to her. Hyunwoo felt her cries vibrating in his chest, and it nearly spurred on a second jet of cum even as his balls twitched, completely emptied. At last, her every stiffened muscle slackened until she seemed to melt beneath him. Her arms flopped to the bed, and a laugh bubbled up from her stomach, jiggling her soft breasts and lighting her whole face.

“Go on, say it,” she prompted, eying him expectantly.

“Okay, I admit that was… Kind of cool.”

She belted out another long laugh, and her hand came up to cup his cheek. “You’re such a simple guy, Hyunwoo. You’re perfect.”

The tenderness was intimidating, and he averted his gaze to the bowl of oil. “That’s some powerful stuff.”

Slowly, Gray’s smile tempered. “It’s not the oil. I mean, I’ve used it before, and it’s good, but it’s different with you. It doesn’t just amplify pleasure. It amplifies feelings.”

“Hm,” was all he said as he buried his face instead in the hollow of her throat.

She didn’t seem to mind his weight pressing down onto her and took to wrapping her arms back around him. She rubbed idly along the expanse of his back until she glanced over the claw marks she’d left him. Hyunwoo hissed and she kissed the crown of his head.

“I’ll fix those before you go,” she said.

“Leave them. I’ll just make sure I wear a shirt in the gym.”

Neither said anything about the heavy implications of those words.

Instead, Hyunwoo thrust gently into her, savoring the way her cunt hugged his waning erection as tightly as her legs knitted across his. She hummed in the afterglow, followed by a contented sigh, and it was even more sensual than the lewd symphony between her legs.

Even though he would have done anything to linger in her heat, after the most ferocious orgasm of his life, he softened, and he was forced to withdraw along with a pitiful groan. Cream gushed forth from her hole the moment it finally could, lacquering her puffy lips and the meat of her thighs. Gray shivered and hurried to squeeze her legs shut before she soaked the sheets further.

She rolled on her side to watch Hyunwoo collapse onto his usual spot on the bed, hands folded on his belly and a silly, tight-lipped grin on his face as he stared up into the rafters.

“It’s times like this that I really wish I had a shower. The creek is going to be ice cold,” she said.

“I’m sure you have a spell for that,” he replied with a shrug, and she gaped at him.

Hyunwoo wasn't sure why until he realized it was the first time he had ever suggested anyone use magic.

Her gape morphed into a gentle smirk. Gray traced the jagged slashes at his chest where she’d sent a grab bag of shrapnel barreling toward him on the day they’d met. With her other hand, she touched the scar he’d given her in return.

“We’ve come a long way, haven’t we?” she said.

Hyunwoo didn’t answer, but he also couldn’t stop himself from leaning into her featherlight touches.

“I’m glad you dropped by,” the mage continued. “Next time you come, I’ll be sure to get some grey amber, so we—”

“I said there wasn’t going to be a next time.”

Gray raised a playful eyebrow. “I know. And I said you said that last time.”

Hyunwoo’s head thumped back onto the pillow as he sighed. The glow of everything, even the fire, faded all at once, and the damp chill of the Pacific fog seeped back into his bones.

“Do you ever think about what it would be like if we just skipped all these games?”

Gray propped up onto her arm to stare down at him. “Games keep it fun, Hyunwoo.”

“This isn’t fun for me,” he blurted, and her whole body tensed. “It isn’t fun feeling like the person I want most in the world could be the very next one I find twitching in an alley after a Magicka overdose.”

Indignant now, she snapped, “How many times do I have to tell you I don’t use Magicka.”

“It doesn’t matter. What if it’s worse? What if those people you think you’re playing figure it out? What if the Force deems you the next threat for termination? I can’t see that, Gray. I can’t watch that happen. Don’t you care what happens to me, too?”

“Of course I do.”

“As your plaything,” Hyunwoo corrected.

“Now who’s playing games?” she volleyed back. “I didn’t say that.”

“You don’t have to. Everything is a game to you, even the laws of nature.”

Gray was up and dressing without regard for the mess trickling down her legs, and with each stab of her arm through her sleeves, she spat, “What do you know about any of it, Agent Son?”

His pants came careening across the bed and into his startled hands as he took the unmistakable cue to dress, too, as the mage ranted.

“You, with your army of uniformed militants, policing the world against forces you couldn’t possibly comprehend. You think magic tears the universe apart and remakes it as the wielder sees fit, which only shows how little you know. I thought this,” she said, gesturing between them, “us, would shake you awake. Magic is older than any of us, older than our oldest empires, older than all the creatures walking this earth. My people know this. We are raised with it. Your people have forgotten it. Now, you’re locked out, and since you can’t have it, you fear it and those who understand it.”

Hyunwoo had never seen Gray like this. She was tall, luminous, with her glossy hair fanned out like raven feathers over her honeyed shoulders. The dark depths of her pecan eyes shimmered, lit by some torch of conviction he had only ever hoped to find in his own. As she closed the gap between them, an invisible buffer pressed him back until he collided with the wall. Her breasts flattened against him as the buffer transformed into a bubble ever-tightening around them, melding their bodies into one another.

“Magic is everywhere,” she murmured, her face millimeters from his, “even in a kiss.”

Her fingertips glanced across the bowl of oil on the nightstand and came up to his lips, anointing the bottom one with an elixir that sang of the earth, woodsy and grassy but with a bright tingling that lingered on the tip of his tongue. She drizzled a few drops on her own flushed tongue and coiled it into her mouth as Hyunwoo watched with drunken eyes.

Gray kissed him then. Their lips slipped along each other with their familiar ease only this time, fireworks exploded behind his eyes with all the colors he’d ever seen and maybe some he hadn’t. He shivered from head to toe as he threatened to cum again in his pants at a single gloss of her oil-coated tongue. She seemed to sense it and pulled back just enough to smirk at the way Hyunwoo’s mouth sagged and his tongue lapped up the last of the concoction from his lips.

“Would you have me give this up? Would you give that up? Even if I could, I wouldn’t.”

“If that’s true, if magic isn’t anything to be feared, then why not just keep it here? No one would even know you practice if you kept to your cabin, but instead, you’re contracting out to the highest bidder. It’s like you want to get caught.”

She stiffened and Hyunwoo blanched.

“Is that— Is that what you want?”

“I told you,” she muttered, heading back to the kitchen to toss bowls and utensils into the wash basin with far too much force, “I like my games.”

“That’s not it. Look at me, Gray.”

She didn’t, but at least she stilled.

“What is all this then?” Hyunwoo pressed. “Why are you running risky contract work when you could just do what you wanted without attracting the ire of the Force? What am I missing?”

Her eyes narrowed to slits along with her voice as she hissed, “Everything. You’re missing everything, Hyunwoo. What do you think tonight was about?”

“That was you trying to get me to see things your way, not you trying to see things mine. You may not like to admit it, but your magic hurts people.”

“They’re barely people,” Gray retorted.

“Just because you say a thing doesn't make it so. You are not judge, jury, and executioner. There are laws—”

“Please. What are laws but the swaddling blankets of insecure men,” she bit as she turned from him and stormed toward the door, her hand resting on the handle. “That’s not you, Hyunwoo. You think I would have invited you here—into my bed—if I believed this is who you really are?”

“You knew who I was the second we faced off on that rooftop.”

“I knew who you worked for, but I didn’t know who you were until you had me cornered, dead to rights. You could have finished the job you started,” Gray said, knocking the spot where her scar was with her fist, “and used your knockout gas to drag me back to your headquarters—that’s what you were supposed to do, isn’t it—but you didn’t. You let me turn the tables on you. That night, when I brought you back here to save you, and all these months since, I’ve wondered why you let that happen, but now I know.

“You don’t see things, Hyunwoo, you feel them. You feel everything. Even now, you can feel the magic flowing through this room, can’t you? Flowing through you?”

Unbidden, his fingers touched his tingling lips.

“Even now, you could put an end to this. If you truly believed what they taught you, I would already be in shackles. You've got me defenseless, yet I'm still free. You’re the only one handcuffed. So I’m here with you, Hyunwoo, nothing between us now. What does that tell you? What do you feel?”

Scared. No, terrified. He was terrified he was going to lose her in every way he could, but some ways were more permanent than others, and that was what spurred his tongue at last.

“You need to clear out of here,” he said, buttoning the last button at his collar. “I saw a memo on Director Yoo’s desk that we’re sweeping the Hoh next.”

His words couldn’t have been colder even if he possessed the magic to actually chill the room.

Her face fell, all the brightness gone from it. Even the gloss of her hair seemed to dull. “So that’s your answer…”

“I don’t know what else I can say at this point,” he admitted.

“Then maybe our ultimatum is already upon us after all.”

“Maybe.”

They stared at each other for a long moment, neither sure where to go from here.

“When you come back, I won’t be here,” Gray warned.

“Good.”

She yanked open the door with a loud snap, thick fog stampeding in to the forbidden zone. The mage trained her eyes on a spot across the cottage as she waited at the door like a sentry. Hyunwoo bowed lightly, his hands tugging the bottom of his uniform back into place as he stepped onto the path.

The door thundered closed behind him, and he flinched. It sounded so final. Hyunwoo felt like a fool standing there in the shadowy wood with nothing but the shifting ambiguity of the fog to engulf him. He swallowed hard and marched out very differently than he had marched in.

On the way to Gray’s place, he had cursed his weakness, but now, on his way back to cold reality, he cursed himself. He wasn't thinking about the sex, as mind-altering as it was; he was thinking about her.

He was thinking about the hearth alive with embers and the way she knelt to stoke them while tending her food. He could still taste the bannock and the warm spices of the stew. In that dusty cottage full of unprecedented contraband, Hyunwoo realized he had never felt more at home, not even as a bright-eyed, naïve recruit entering the Mage Force dorms for the first time.

As the fog rolled in eerily thick, more like a blanket than a mist over everything but a one-way path out of the woods, Hyunwoo realized with cosmic irony that everything had become so clear for him.

It wasn’t just Gray’s beauty or even her mystique nor was it the dizzying enchantments that had rent his consciousness wide and showed him things he could never have experienced otherwise. It wasn’t curiosity that had stayed his hand on that rooftop nor was it lust that had propelled his feet down the path to her cottage any of the times he had come, and it sure as hell wasn’t his duty that had tried to persuade her back to safety.

It was love.

And he realized one other thing with paralyzing clarity: he was breaking his precious laws, too, because in the end, wasn’t love its own sort of magic, maybe the most universe-altering of all?

Hyunwoo whirled around, stirring the fog like Gray’s skirts around him, but the cottage was gone, no doubt wrapped up tight in a cloaking spell. For all he knew, it could be right behind him, but he’d never see it. The path he’d just followed had vanished behind him as though it had never been there at all; there was only the road left ahead. Hell, he couldn’t even tell what time it was. When he’d arrived, it had been sometime in the mid-afternoon, but the mists were so thick, they blotted out what was left of the sun.

Going back wasn’t an option, but if Hyunwoo knew anything of Gray, he would meet her again. She was right, he didn’t see things, he felt them, and right now, in his heart, he felt he would have another chance to confess the truth. Maybe that was just the dying breath of the magic that tethered him to her, but as the last of those frail, silver strands of connection severed between them, his heart called to hers.

And somewhere, deep in the mists behind him, he heard the squeal of wood on stone as a familiar door opened.

#monsta x smut #shownu smut #oneshot #enemies to lovers #enemies and lovers #october vibes #highly specific AU ENGAGE!

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