*2nd Person POV*
“Where the fuck is Tao? What happened? You guys were supposed to be watching her!” Luhan’s voice grows louder with each angry word. His aggression being thoughtlessly directed towards his younger friend who has done nothing to deserve it. Luhan’s fists clench making the gravity in the area around them start to waver ever so slightly.

You haven’t passed out; in fact, you appear to be wide awake. However, it’s obvious that you aren’t mentally there. Your gaze has frosted over and you continue to stare off into space as if you’re lazily watching something in the distance. Kris notices the sudden drastic change in your state, and makes a mental note to keep an even closer eye on you until you come to.

“The real question is how did you know that something happened before they even showed up?” Kris questions. He shifts the weight of your body in his arms and arcs a questioning brow at the angry male next to him. The older of the two had begun running outside before he even knew that you had returned. Kris wasn’t sure how he knew you’d gotten back, and by the confused look on Luhan’s, he didn’t seem to know either.

Luhan’s rant halts for the briefest second before he waves Kris off and returns to taking his irritation out on Jongin. Kris exhales and carries you up to your room before lying you on your bed, leaving the two others outside.

“Hey, can you hear me? June? Can you hear me?” His quiet questions go unnoticed. Your eyes are cast towards the ceiling, unblinking, and devoid of emotion. You look as though you’ve left your body in some kind of buffering mode. He lets out a breath before analyzing your state. He doesn’t want to sneak Yixing back here, but if he has to then safety be damned he’ll send Jongin immediately.

Your jeans are dirty, and he hesitates before he decides to just take them off himself and remove the sweater he gave to you. They’re just clothes and you can’t rest in those. After delicately taking off your dirtied clothes and shoes, he tosses them to the side.

“Come on, let’s get you under the covers.” He whispers. Quickly and quietly he pulls the covers over your sweating body, taking the opportunity to talk you through his steps to fill the silence. “I’m going to put a wet towel on your head. You’ll be back to normal in no time. Don’t worry.” Luhan’s voice can still be heard from outside, even from the second floor. He rolls his eyes and prepares a wet cloth to sit on your head while you sleep.

He frowns while looking at your unresponsive form.

What happened to you?

The sound of footsteps and yelling gets louder as Luhan shouts Jongin all the way up to the second floor.

“I don’t get how you both couldn’t do the one job you were given! Do you even realize what-”

“Jongin, what happened?” Kris says, cutting off Luhan. He closes the door to your room, and faces the two in the hallway. Jongin is nearly shaking in his spot and stumbles over his words searching for how to explain what exactly he saw. He isn’t too sure himself.

“I- we- u-um.” He takes in a calming breath and shakes his head before restarting. Luhan’s nonstop yelling has sufficiently scrambled his thoughts. “Everything was going fine at first, but then we got to one street and suddenly she took off running. Tao and I followed after her, but she was just so fast.” Luhan glares at the younger, and Jongin swallows nervously. “U-um, then we stopped at this place, but all I saw was burnt wood and stuff. She started walking towards it, and I was going to stop her, but Tao wouldn’t let me.

“We watched her walk around in it, and then she was screaming. I don’t know what happened, but one minute she was looking around, and the next she was on the ground screaming at the top of her lungs and crying. We ran over as fast as we could, and I picked her up so we could get her out. When we got her out she-she was still screaming. I tried shaking her out of it, and Tao was yelling her name, but she wasn’t responding. He slapped her really hard and then she finally stopped. I…I don’t know what she was going through while she was out of it like that, but I…I’ve seen enough people do similar stuff in the castle to know she really- she…she really…” he grabs his hair frustrated as the words fail to come to him. “She…really flipped out for a minute there.” He sighs at his own unsatisfactory explanation and rubs his arm nervously.

“Why would you idiots let her walk into a burning-” Kris steps in front of Luhan so that the elder can’t verbally attack Jongin any longer.

“You should go back to the castle. You’ve been gone entirely too long as it is. We don’t need you to get in trouble. We have enough to worry about right now as it is. Don’t we Luhan?” Luhan huffs in annoyance at Kris’s words. They both know that he’s right. Successfully quieting Luhan down, Kris turns back to Jongin and pulls the shaken boy in for a hug. “Go back and get some rest. We can handle everything here.” With one last worried look at your door, the teleporter vanishes back to the castle.

“What are we going to do? We can’t just leave her like that, can we?”

“We’ll have to for now. Until she either wakes up, or we figure out more about what happened…there’s nothing else that we can do.”

---

Tao returns to the house hours later, coming through the front door looking tired and dirty. He goes to find Kris as soon as he’s safely inside, his first question being whether you’re okay.

“She’s doing better than she was when she first got here. She finally closed her eyes and fell asleep about an hour ago.” Kris runs a hand over his face in exhaustion. The constant trips to and from your room had tired him out mentally, but you were getting better than before and for that, he’d worriedly walk back and forth to your room a thousand times more if he had to.

Kris goes to get Luhan, and the three boys settle in the living room for a meeting. With you out of commission a lot of questions are left unanswered, but there’s nothing to be done about that until you wake.

“Do you know what happened in the 3rd ring?” Luckily Luhan has had time to calm himself, and his approach to the question is much less aggressive than before. Like Kris, he is more mentally tired than he is anything else. His mind producing a thousand thoughts a minute, and
whenever Kris wasn’t in your room, he was.

Tao shakes his head. “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask her to explain, I’m not sure what I saw myself. I’d only ever seen her like that once before.”

“What happened last time?” Kris prods.

Tao tenses. “I don’t…think it’s something I should tell you all. Ask her later…”

“Well what did you see? Jongin told us his part.” Luhan continues. Tao scratches the back of his neck while recollecting the events from earlier in the day.

“We walked around…people were throwing themselves to the ground and bowing and stuff. She was holding my hand, but she wasn’t nervous or scared. I don’t know what you taught her, but she was almost an entirely different person walking around that place.

“We got to the street where her orphanage used to be, and then she took off. We got there and it was burned to ground. We let her walk around in the wreckage, and then she started shouting. I don’t really remember what happened afterwards because I started panicking myself. I slapped her though. It was like she had been somewhere entirely different. She looked scared and relieved when she finally opened her eyes as if she’d just returned from a nightmare or something.” He sighs as he recalls the panic he felt in that moment. You looked as terrified as you made him feel.

“What were you doing for the last 3 hours? Why didn’t you come back with them?”

Tao looks at Luhan with a pained frown. “I wanted to see what she saw. I walked back to where she started screaming to look around.” He pauses as disgust paints his face. “There were burned bodies all over the place. It was basically a body dump.”

“Do you think that’s why she reacted that way?” Kris asks. Tao shakes his head again.

“No. Something else had to have happened. Like I said, I’ve only seen her act that way once in my life, and that wasn’t her first time seeing something like that.” Tao answers with conviction. He knows you, and he knows that there had to be more to the story. The room quiets as everyone falls into their roaming thoughts.

Kris’s realization breaks the silence. “Luhan, you still didn’t explain how you knew something had gone wrong…”

“I don’t know. Gut feeling?” he replies, unsure himself.

“When did you feel like something had happened?” Tao asks.

“About half an hour before her and Jongin got back.”

“…What?” Tao asks in confusion.

“Yeah, it was like half an hour before they came back. I just…felt like everything had gone wrong, and then I got a painful ass headache.” He brings his hand to his temple as if to emphasize. Tao gives Luhan an odd look, to which Luhan looks at Kris confused. If what Tao was thinking is correct, then you had started screaming about 30 minutes before he told Jongin to take you home.

How would Luhan just happen to be in pain at that same moment?

A memory that he had labeled before as insignificant, resurfaces. About 2 weeks ago you had complained to Tao that your hand really hurt. You said that you weren’t sure why it suddenly started throbbing. He told you that you were clumsily and probably slammed it against something and didn’t realize it, but you were adamant. You hadn’t done anything that could have hurt your hand. An hour after that, Tao had encountered Luhan who had slammed a door on his hand by accident. Something about this happening coincidently twice doesn’t add up.

He decides to voice a theory that he had formed even before you had training with Luhan. “Is it possible…for Charmers…to bond or something with humans?”

The two older males frown in confusion. “What does that have to do with anything?” Kris asks. Tao’s mouth squeezes into a line. He casts a meaningful look towards Luhan. Luhan’s eyes widen in surprise. He starts to loudly cough after chocking on his spit. Kris squints skeptically at the coughing Luhan and then back to Tao.

“Yes, it’s possible. No one knows much about it, but it isn’t unheard of. There are stories of humans bonding with Gaia. I don’t see why the same wouldn’t apply to Charmers and humans as well.”

“Fuck.” Luhan mutters.

“What happened?” Kris is immediately alert at the alarmed look on Luhan’s face paired with the self-satisfied smile on Tao’s. When Luhan doesn’t answer, he turns back to Tao. “What happened?”

“Don’t ask me.” He holds his hands up in an ‘I don’t know’ gesture. “I wasn’t awake when he kissed her.” Kris’s mouth drops open. One look at Luhan and he knows that Tao is telling the truth.

“I didn’t kiss her! She kissed me!” Kris fumbles out of his seat on the couch only to look at Luhan in disbelief from the floor.

“What the fuck?!”

“I don’t know! It just happened. We were drunk, and she had finally stopped being angry at us all the time. I don’t- I just couldn’t help it. I swear she kissed me though…I just…I started it.” Luhan looks at the ground in embarrassment. He never thought he’d have to explain what happened that evening to anyone, much less Kris. He hadn’t even talked to you about it, and it was just as much your doing as it was his.

“I ought to fucking snap your neck you idiot!” Kris growls out.

In an attempt to ease some of the tension away from Luhan, Tao gently chimes in, “She really did kiss him. When she told me about it, she seemed to be totally on board with it. She definitely finished it.”

“You both knew about this and didn’t say anything about it?” Kris asks incredulous. “If you bonded to her or with her, do you know what this means?”

“…no.”

“…me either.” Kris says under his breath. “THAT’S THE PROBLEM! No one knows anything about bonding with humans because we don’t.” With an annoyed groan, Kris tosses himself back on the couch. “Is there anything else I need to know about?” He asks tiredly. He can’t take much more mental stress, but if he’s going to snap tonight he might as well hear any and everything they might be hiding. He runs a hand down his face as Tao raises his hand.

“I kissed her too.” He admits. Kris drops his hand and looks at Tao disinterested.

“Did you bond with her?”

“No?”

“Then I really don’t care.” Humans don’t bond with humans. That much is obvious. Why Tao felt the need to share was lost on Kris; however, the eldest in the room knew why Tao decided to share the fact. He was trying to get a rise out of Luhan. And boy, as much as he hated to admit it, it was it working. He glares at Tao for half a second before letting it go. He knows that he can’t pick a fight over something like this right now. Even if you might be bonded to him and not Tao, so Tao should keep his grubby little hands to himself from now on.

No, he won’t pick a fight about that…for now.

At that, Jongin appears in the middle of the living room. Now dressed in a new outfit as if he was going to bed soon. “Shouldn’t you be in the castle?” Kris asks exasperatedly.

“No, Kyungsoo is buying me 2 hours.” He looks towards the staircase. “Is she okay? Is she doing any better?”

“When did you get so concerned about her safety?” Luhan asks snappily. A sense of possessiveness is evident in his tone, and Kris makes a mental note to look up symptoms and causes of bonds between Gaia, Charmers, and humans. If Luhan is going to continue being this aggressive over you, then he needs to at least know how to calm him down.

Jongin looks taken back by the question. “Ignore him.” Kris looks at Luhan warningly, before looking back at the young teleporter. “Just please tell me you didn’t bond with her as well.” Jongin pouts and tilts his head in confusion. A relieved sigh leaves Kris’s lips. “Thank god.” Whatever it is that’s happened between you and Luhan, whether it be a bond or a weird fluke, you can’t know about it. Not until they can figure out what this all means. He just hopes it stays between the two of you until they know what’s happening.

“Luhan kissed June and now he’s her bitch.” Tao says with a smug smile. Luhan jumps up from his seat, ready to start throwing punches at the younger, until Jongin speaks up.

“Oh, well no I haven’t kissed her…but I did sleep with her the other day.” He confesses. The mouths of his elders drop open at what sounds like a not so innocent confession. Kris’s groan leads to shouting exploding all around the room.

“See! At least I didn’t fuck her!”

“But you want to!”

“I thought you were the innocent one!”

“I can’t believe you actually slept with her!”

“How can you come here and say that with a straight face!”

“You should be ashamed!”

“Why were you in her room?!”

“Ahhhhhhhhhh this is madness!”

“Wait, wait, wait! No, I didn’t…do that. We just slept. Nothing else! We didn’t do anything like that!”

“I can’t believe you idiots have made me age 10 years within the past hour.”

With the sounds of their yelling filling the house, no one hears your footsteps descending down the stairs. You had woken up not even 2 minutes ago, but the sounds of shouting had piqued your curiosity enough for you to head directly towards the sound after waking up. Rubbing at your eyes, you squint at the lights that are brightly shinning in both the kitchen and the living room.

At least you know where they all are.

You stand in the kitchen and try to adjust your vision while their noisiness persists. Jongin is the first person to see you, and he stops talking immediately. The other three follow his line of vision and follow suit. They’ve all gotten on their feet as they wait for you to say something. Anything to aid in explaining what happened to you.

You yawn.

“Good evening guys.”

Notes