You pulled at your fingers as an uneasy feeling struck up in your chest for no reason.

You went through with the plan and joined the boys on a window-shopping spree after school. It was mostly just them chatting while they walked through the crowd of a busy commercial street. Occasionally, they would stop by a shop or two when they found something interesting, but more often than not, they would take a look at the product of interest and just whine about wanting to buy it instead of actually buying it.

The only one who has bought anything was Felix and his boba milk tea, one that everyone else has taken at least two sips already.

The boys have been engaging you in casual conversations, all in hopes to make sure you could warm up to them more easily. Especially after Jisung spent the lunchtime making sure they wouldn't accidentally step over a sensitive line, and to warn them about you being rather alert around strangers. You could tell they were cautious about where topics were straying, though. The way they would change subjects, or when it felt like one of them was holding back a joke of sort had alerted you.

You appreciated their effort and have been engaging. But while having good intentions in mind, they were unable to detect the fact that you were only growing more and more anxious as time goes.

When you first met Jisung, you didn't have anyone else you were trying to please, and therefore, you have got more chances to distance yourself from him. With him, it was a gradual process of becoming friends; you did not immediately click with him, you did not see him every single day and you did not have full-blown conversations with him for longer than thirty minutes.

There were time lapses in between your process of getting closer to Jisung, which was what you were more comfortable with.

Hyunjin, Seungmin, and Felix were three people who kept dragging you into conversations. Seungmin lesser than the others, you realized, but he was a pain in the ass for being so good at holding onto a conversation you deeply wanted to end. Not to mention both of you have an argumentative nature. You were just less vocal about it.

It may be a misunderstanding on their part that you would find silence more awkward than sounds, but it was exhausting to talk for so long with people you barely knew, especially when you were in constant fear that what you said simply won't be entertaining enough for them. They were, after all, Jisung's friends. You would like nothing more than to leave a good impression and to make new friends, but not at such a quick pace where you needed to answer one curious question after another.

It was completely out of your comfort zone and not within your social capability. You needed to be away from them to recharge yourself, yet somehow whenever you tried to bring that up, you found the words being stuck at your throat.

These three were good and friendly people. You could not guarantee their reaction when you tell them you needed them to shut the hell up for a second, and frankly, you didn't want to have to say that to them.

Jisung noticed your micro-movements when you turned away to face the zooming cars out on the road. His smile faded and concern quickly flooded into his eyes. Discreetly moving away from his friends, who were bickering among themselves, he grabbed you gently by the edge of your wrist and pulled at you for attention.

When you looked at him, he asked, "Are you okay?"

His eyes have been home to you ever since the night you told him about yourself; calming, caressing, warming. You could tell him everything he wanted to know, and you have told him everything he wanted to know. But as you caught his eyes right now, all you could think about was how much you must have burdened him for the past few weeks and how much you wanted to stop doing that.

"Yeah," you replied. "I am just a little hungry."

He looked at you for a while, accessing your facial expressions, then he broke into a soft smile.

"We can go get something to eat, I know a store just down the street," he said before turning around and beckoning his friends over. "Let's go get something to eat! [Name] said they're hungry."

Felix perked up with a nod, agreeing to the idea. Then he stretched his arm out to you, the bottle of milk tea in his hand. "You can have some of my milk tea if you want," he said, shaking the bottle.

Seungmin chuckled as he pointed at the cup. "I think you drank all the milk tea already. It's just boba now."

Felix furrowed his brows as he raised his cup to glance inside. He let out a small yelp of surprise when all he saw was a pile of boba with the tea all drained from the cup. All the weight he felt was an illusion created by the weight of the boba! Clicking his tongue in annoyance, he turned to Seungmin and whined, "You drank everything! What about me? I bought this!"

"Me? What about Hyunjin? He was holding it for a good five minutes back there," Seungmin retorted as he shoved Hyunjin a little, looking at Felix in disbelief.

Seungmin then turned to Jisung and pointed at him as well. "Jisung drank a lot too! He just takes big gulps and stores them in his cheeks at a time. That's why it feels like he didn't drink too much but he totally did!"

"I saw that too! He's right!" Hyunjin chimed in, also pointing a finger at Jisung.

You watched them. Their tendency to start an argument over the littlest things were, needless to say, entertaining to you. Not only did it give you a chance to relax, but it also gave you free real-life drama to watch.

Amid their bickering, you relaxed a little upon the lack of attention fixated on you, and finally, you decided it would be a good time to help yourself out with some anxiety-reducing magic. You should have done it all along but there was never the right time to bring the strings out, and you didn't feel like lying about it.

You reached behind your at your bag and fished around blindly for the plastic board of strings. Your brows furrowed as you traced the bands of them with your finger, trying to feel their energy and to find the loose ends. As you did so, you also focused on the conversation that the boys were having, which seemed to be getting more and more heated—in a playful way—as seconds ticked by.

"You guys always drink my stuff! It isn't just this time!" Felix complained, pouting down at the bottle with angry eyes.

"If you don't like it then why didn't you say something?" Hyunjin asked. "We wouldn't have drunk it if you told us not to."

Jisung gave Hyunjin a faint, deadpan smile. "You know Felix is a people-pleaser, right? He can't say no."

"So you're saying he is a pushover?" Hyunjin snickered, causing Felix to glare at Jisung in shock.

Seungmin rolled his eyes. He didn't want to join the argument, it all seemed rather pointless to him, and he wanted to end it as quickly as possible. "I'll buy you one back then, you petty bastard," he said to Felix, once again not being the best conversation killer there is.

Felix grimaced bitterly, unamused by Seungmin's tone. "When you say it like that, it makes me sound like the bad person," he said. "If that's the case then I don't want it."

Hyunjin huffed out a laugh, turning to look at Jisung and shoving the boy on the shoulder. "People-pleaser, you say?"

"Oh–shut up!" Jisung groaned out, punching him back with an equal amount of strength.

Hyunjin gasped, not expecting Jisung to repeat his movements since he never really did. "No, you shut up," he retorted, returning the punch and thus, not killing adding a sub-argument to this seemingly never-ending cycle of heated bickering.

You were too focused on threading out a pattern with your fingers to care about what the boys were still talking about. You could hear their voices being thrown back and forth, though, just not quite the words they were saying. After all, there was no need for you to pay attention. Everything would be resolved quickly, just like all the other little quarrels they've had the past hour, about allowance money, parents, grades, and food.

As you concentrated on creating the pattern with your fingers, finding yourself growing less and less nervous when there was a complicated task at hand, you could hear a loud yelp coming from Jisung and a clumsy shout from who you guessed to be Felix. After that, it was an array of honks coming from the road just beside the pedestrian street you all stood on.

"Hey! Hey! Jisung, watch out!

You snapped your head up. That sounded urgent enough for you to finally break out of your own bubble.

Eyes trailing after the boys, who were all staring with blazing eyes towards one single direction: Jisung. His body was falling backward, presumably being pushed by someone who had miscalculated their strength, and he was close to falling to the ground below the curb when your eyes shifted up at where the honk came from.

A car was rushing forward at a seemingly slow speed but you knew it was only a problem of perceptive. Your heart rate picked up and your fingers had already started to undo the pattern on instinct. Judging by the way Jisung was falling, and by the distance between him and all of you, it would be impossible for Jisung to be pulled back to safety in time.

It would either be the driver slowing down, which was unlikely, or he gets tackled farther down the road, which would be equally as dangerous as this was a two lane street.

Without a second thought, as the car from behind tried screeching to a pause to no avail, you jumped out of your spot and onto the road. Your hand had immediately thought of the quickest spell you could think of, tying knots and moving fingers until an easy pattern was formed. The string moved quickly as if it could feel your urgency, and as soon as they wrapped around your forearm, they squeezed your skin with a piercing ache to churn out more energy.

Jisung could feel a hand around his head, a palm pressing against his hair and his face muffled in your chest. He could recognize your embrace anywhere and at any moment. But instead of feeling solace as he would normally when drowned in your arms, his mind was suffocating with the sound of shattered glass and beeping engine.

He breathed heavily, his eyes moving to glance to the side and his eyes widened at the trickle of blood that melted down the string on your forearm.

Magic have consequences. He remembered. This was the first time he has seen it.

The pain was relentless in its attack, spreading from your palm that broke the top hood of the speeding car to all the exposed skin of your forearm. You channeled too much magic, and even then it was not enough as your fingers felt numb under the impact of shielding the both of you. You've broken your hand with this, but the bone-shattering pain went unnoticed as you pulled yourself away from Jisung and stood up.

"[Name]..." Jisung muttered, his eyes wide at your lifeless hand as you clutched it with your functional one.

Your brows were furrowed, not registering his presence. The pain was finally starting to get to you, all after you have made sure Jisung was fine and safe from harm. Looking around, you sucked in a huge breath at the prying eyes and gossipy cameras those eyes have whipped out. And your new friends—if you could consider them that now—were all staring at you in horror, not sure from what you did or from what you received as a result.

There was too much attention plastered all over the crowd, targeted on you, your bleeding hand, and your swelling fingers. It felt worse than your broken bones. You couldn't move your hand at all without the help of the other one, and you felt your functioning hand slipping as the blood lathered itself all over your skin. The only thing keeping you from succumbing to the pain was the lingering magic sparing you an act of generosity.

Glancing back at Jisung, you huffed out a quiet breath and shook your head when he stepped towards you. "I..." You inhaled sharply, and all you could fathom to do was turn around and make a run for it.

"[Name]–hey, wait!" Jisung wanted to go after you but he was quickly stopped by the driver, who was half concerned about your injuries and half angry that Jisung had appeared out of nowhere.

Swinging around and swatting the stranger's hand away, his gaze was a pit of merciless black when he glared at the driver, wanting nothing more than to run after you immediately. "Look, sir, I don't have time to talk to–"

"Go, I got this," Seungmin chimed in quietly as he moved Jisung to the side. He gave the confused boy a firm nod, glancing behind his shoulder at where you had run off to before ignoring Jisung's questioning gaze and turning to the driver. He had it all figured out by now; a magic user in the land of mundane reality. A super-freak, as people may call you.

"Jisung, we can still catch up if we run now," Felix urged as he pulled at his hand, forcing him to move.

Jisung blinked for a moment, still trying to comprehend the situation that he already knew of. He needed to process it correctly. You got hit by a car–no, you did not get hit by it. You shielded both him and yourself so technically, a crash did not happen. But you were bleeding when you ran away, and the hood of the car was destroyed–it must have been you. He did see strings on your wrist, he believed. He also saw blood, a lot of blood, which entailed a lot of pain.

Jisung breathed heavily, looking around.

He realized you were alone.