Chapter Text
He met him in his wanderings around the Seongbuk district of Seoul. Well, met was a strong word. He saw him from across the street. Beautiful cheekbones and sharp eyes. A smiling fox on that strange boundary between adult and child, an age Seungmin had grown too old to recognize by any specific number. He wasn’t dressed well. Slightly stained trousers and a thin shirt that didn’t hide his lean frame. He almost looked like one of the many university students in the district but he lacked the trendy denim and neat hair. He stood on a street corner talking to another man who looked to be older than him. Seungmin left the boy and his companion behind and wandered along his way.
He didn’t see him again until a week later. He was following a man into a dilapidated building that he didn’t recognize. One of the old buildings that had yet to be replaced with the new brick populating the district. Both were relaying on the cover of night when they looked over their shoulder but Seungmin’s vampire eyes thrived in the dark and he saw all. He saw the slight break in the fox’s smile.
The boy kept popping up. Always in the center but still somehow always feeling like he was on the fringes. Seungmin wondered if he only went out at night or if he wandered and popped up during the day too. The same man was often with him, curving a possessive hand around his waist, around his neck. There were other men sometimes too. Just as possessive in their actions but it was different from the usual man. Sometimes he was alone. Those times were the best. He was so quiet but still smiled. Just let it drop every so often when it all became too much. He was too wrapped up in himself, in this life he was living to ever see Seungmin watching even as he began to seek him out every night.
His clients called him Ayen but he overheard the man call him Jeongin once. That must have been his actual name.
Some nights he wondered if the others knew what he was doing when he went out. Probably not. He hardly knew what he was doing. He had been sullen the last few decades, closed off and the other three had taken to mostly letting him stew in it like he wanted. But something about this boy and his fox eyes drew him in. He couldn’t leave him alone. Lurking in shadows, always watching as different men met with him, sometimes multiple a night. Maybe he wanted to protect him. Maybe he wanted to drink him until he had nothing but a husk in his arms.
He met him when he didn’t mean to. He wasn’t planning to ever meet him. He had learned long ago that such a strong pull towards a human only ever ended with a broken and bloody body.
A slender finger tapped his shoulder. It surprised him. Vampires didn’t get surprised.
“Excuse me?” the fox asked when Seungmin turned to him. “Do you know the time?”
It was odd to see him so close. He would have thought that his beauty might dull when so near to him but if anything it only shone more brightly. In his fascination with his sharpness, even his keen eyes had missed the softness in his face. The duality in his features made his chest tighten. He told the boy it was ten minutes past midnight and watched as he visibly relaxed.
He couldn’t stop himself. “More time that you thought you had?”
He shrugged. “You could say that.”
Seungmin wished he was better with human ages. How old was this boy? Eighteen? Twenty? He couldn’t tell. That range seemed about right.
Jeongin bowed and walked away. An odd mixture between polite and not.
They didn’t talk much the next time they interacted, but Seungmin felt far closer to Ayen than he ever had before. He was taking a rare night off from following the boy––he was trying to tell himself he wasn’t so attached that he couldn’t leave him alone––and had found himself in a small club. He sat himself at a table in the corner of the room and watched the singer who was currently performing on the small stage at the front of the club.
He could admit that the guy was good but he’d heard better. That was the problem with getting old. Maybe that was why humans died of old age––they already heard, saw, ate, and did everything they could and the world had nothing left to offer them. It was the young ones who died without eating their fill of all life had to offer that were the real tragedy and Seungmin had taken so many of them from the world when he was still young and hungry for everything and control eluded him.
Still, live music was live music and he let himself sink into it. Their coven was made up of four very different vampires but a love for music united all of them. Chan, the leader of the coven, especially had indulged Seungmin’s love for live singing in the past, taking him to countless concert halls across continents as soon as he could be trusted around large crowds.
The performance ended and the next singer took the stage. The singer’s tone immediately soothed Seungmin’s ears. His voice was clear and bright. He was singing trot of all things but he sounded nothing like the typical deep male voices that sang trot. The sound was pure, mournful.
Seungmin looked up at the stage only to be met with sharp cheekbones and sparkling fox eyes. Those eyes found his and narrowed slightly. They never left him. They just dug into the empty place where he was sure his soul was supposed to be, making him feel its absence and mourn for it. He never really wanted to be human since the first few years after his transition but now he wanted it so desperately he could almost taste it in the bitter notes of the song. He could see the boy’s soul in the air. He wanted to touch it, seize it, merge with it. Those eyes were still watching him. They flicked away every once in a while, probably to avoid detection from anyone that wasn’t Seungmin, but they always came back.
He should have left. He should have run as soon as this man burrowed into him, but the sheer thought of it ripped at his heart. He would kill to hear that voice again. Perhaps that wasn’t saying much given his vampire nature, but he would kill the whole world if he could listen to that voice forever. He nearly did kill when the last song ended and the fox boy stepped down, allowing a new singer to take his place. It had been nearly an hour but that wasn’t enough, it never could have been enough.
He made his way out of the club almost immediately unable to listen to the new singer after the beauty he had just heard.
“Fucking golden songbird you are,” he heard a man say. He turned the corner outside of the club spying Jeongin and the man he was so often with in a nearby alley. “Do you know how many offers I get for you when they hear you sing?”
“I do know,” the boy replied. “It’s the only reason you let me do it.”
The man slapped him slightly. “Don’t get smart with me, Jeongin.”
The boy bowed his head. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to.”
“I know, darling.” He rubbed the cheek he had just slapped with gentle, almost caring strokes. “You’re always so good for me.”
Seungmin couldn’t watch any more. He tore himself away from the alley with all the strength he possessed and returned home to a confused and concerned Chan.
“You heard me sing,” Jeongin said. He had come up behind Seungmin the next night.
“I did,” Seungmin said once he turned to face him.
Jeongin rocked slightly on his feet. “Well, did you like it?” This nervousness was new in him. At least for Seungmin.
“Yes.” It was such a simple word for all that he had experienced the previous night, but how could one put all that Seungmin had felt into a socially acceptable number of words?
“I could tell you did.” He said it like it was a secret between schoolchildren. “You were crying.” He must have seen Seungmin tensed because he quickly reassured him, “it was only a litte I doubt anyone else saw. Just two small lines of red. It was blood, wasn’t it?”
“How on Earth would anyone cry blood?” He asked in a deadpan, matter of fact voice.
“Exactly, it’s not an earthly thing,” Jeongin said. “And if you aren’t earthly, then you must be an angel.” His tone was slightly glib but there was a solemness too. Like he was aware he wasn’t supposed to believe such things but still did deep within him. There was so much of his youth in it, the bright eyed naivety that not even his current circumstances had managed to stamp out.
Seungmin should have laughed. He should have mocked this boy to his face and set him straight on any supernatural happenings being entirely imagined. Maybe he should have killed him to cover his tracks. Chan and Minho probably would have. But when he looked into those eyes and saw the barely hidden and unflinching sincerity in them, saw the grasping need for it to be true that Seungmin was an angel, all he could do was sigh and say, “I’m not an angel.”
“Then what are you?” Jeongin pushed.
Seungmin just shook his head. “Not an angel.”
“I think you are,” the boy said. “I think God sent you to me.” He looked down and kicked a patch of dirt, almost spraying Seungmin’s leg with pebbles and sand.
“God doesn’t like me very much,” Seungmin confessed.
Jeongin snorted at that. “Me neither.”
Seungmin can’t remember being human very well but he was pretty sure that if human him had met a strange man that always seemed to lurk around him and cried blood, he would have avoided the man at all costs and quite possibly done his best to move villages or even provinces. But the modern youth were different or at least Jeongin was. He only sought out Seungmin more and more. Sometimes he just asked for the time, whether he needed it or not, Seungmin had no idea. Other times he was able to slip away from his keeper for longer and they had actual conversations. Music had become a safe topic.
Jeongin had dreams of becoming a famous trot singer with albums selling across Korea and even in the United States and Europe. He admitted sheepishly that he knew trot was not very well known outside of Korea but his imagination had him touring far and wide, seeing thousands of new people and new places and learning all there was to be learned.
“You want to travel?” Seungmin asked.
“I want to explore,” Jeongin beamed. “Don’t you?”
Seungmin laughed but it was dry, without body. “I used to.” He had been everywhere, six continents both with the rest of the coven and on his own, seen everything. “I did.”
“What’s it like?” Jeongin demanded, his manners slipping in his excitement.
“Tiring,” Seungmin said honestly.
“I don’t believe you,” said the younger. “You may be tired now, but you can’t have always been. There must have been a time where it was wonderful, all that music, all that art, all those people.”
“I don’t like people very much.”
“But that doesn’t mean you never like people. You like me.”
Seungmin raised an eyebrow at him. “Do I?”
“You do.” He spoke so simply. Like Seungmin’s affection for him would never be in question, could never be. It was an odd thing for someone so young to be so sure, especially someone like him to whom life had been so unkind.
“I do,” Seungmin admitted. He didn’t see the point in hiding it. Jeongin had already laid him bare so efficiently.
“What was your favorite thing about traveling?” Jeongin insisted. “There must have been something you liked. Before you grew tired.”
Before he grew tired. Before the current decades long cloud had descended upon him.
“Music. It’s so different and yet all the same across the world. Some of it makes you laugh, some of it makes you cry or scream but at its core it’s the same.”
“My singing made you cry,” Jeongin said, slightly smug.
“And with so little ego too.”
The boy smiled that bright, dangerous smile. “I can’t help it. I made an angel cry with something other than my life choices.”
Seungmin winced at the reference to the boy’s career if it could even be called that. They didn’t really talk about it much. He didn’t know if Jeongin knew that he knew. The boy imagined him as an angel and at times seemed to think Seungmin knew everything there was to know and at others seemed keen to hide all the less savory elements of his life from the vampire. Seungmin himself hadn’t given any hints that he knew anything about Jeongin, even his name. Jeongin never introduced himself and Seungmin never asked for it. Seungmin himself never gave a name and Jeongin had taken to calling him his angel whenever he needed to call him anything.
“Music is a life choice,” Seungmin chose the safe reply. “Perhaps the most important one a person can make.”
Jeongin laughed bitterly. “I don’t know about that. I can think of some more important ones. Ones with bigger consequences and fewer rewards.”
“Like what?”
“Like telling the truth,” he said. “Telling the truth to the wrong people at the wrong time.”
‘You should travel,” Seungmin said looking him over. He would take him, he would take this boy anywhere he wanted. Show him all the music and the art that the world had to offer. Take him away from the dreariness of his everyday life that made him dream of meeting angels and show him real wonders. Seungmin had never traveled in his human life but his centuries as a vampire had shown him things Jeongin could never even dream of. He knew he couldn’t offer to take him, it wouldn’t come across well. It would be too much like asking him for something.
It was cold the night that everything went wrong. Seungmin had only seen Jeongin once that night, early on and only from a distance, leading a much older man into yet another dark building. Jeongin hadn’t seen him.
On nights like those he didn’t know if he would see Jeongin again, if he would be kept inside until the dawn chased Seungmin away. He hated those nights especially since the next night the boy would always seem to be hiding some extra fatigue, sometimes he flattered himself that not seeing Seungmin had something to do with the weariness, most times he told himself to get a grip.
At around three in the morning Seungmin had given up on seeing Jeongin again that night, much less speaking to him when the scent of blood caught his attention, then he heard the whimpering. It couldn’t be. It was. He rushed to the source of the whimper as quickly as possible without using any of his vampire speed or drawing unwelcome attention.
In a small dark alleyway behind the old building Jeongin had been in earlier, stood the boy, slumped against the stone wall of the building nose and cheek bleeding, clutching at his ribs and quietly whimpering like he was terrified of making any noise but too in pain to stop himself.
Swearing under his breath, Seungmin rushed to his side and began to check him for injuries as best he knew how.
“Hey, angel,” Jeongin breathed. “Come to see me off to hell?”
Seungmin scoffed distractedly as he checked his pulse on his wrist and then felt over his ribs for any breaks while doing his best to ignore the sharp winces beneath his finger tips. The blood on his face was hard to ignore but Seungmin was centuries old, not some baby vampire. He could keep his fangs from dropping at the sight of blood even if he did have to try a little harder than he usually would in a situation like this one.
“You’re not dying and you’re not going to hell.”
Jeongin tried to laugh but immediately stopped. The pain must have been too great. “Is that the official word from God, angel? No hell for me despite all my sins? I can’t have gotten into heaven.”
“Seungmin, my name is Seungmin.” He tried to keep the annoyance out of his voice. It wasn’t Jeongin’s fault that he was in pain or injured and talking like a mad man.
Jeongin ignored him. “Sodomy, buggery, prostitution, adultery, perversion, those all okay now?”
“Heaven isn’t only for those who have never sinned.” Seungmin half mindedly played along while slinging the boy’s arm over his shoulder so that he was supporting most of his weight. “Can you walk like this?”
The boy shifted his weight back and forth on his feet and didn’t protest when Seungmin began to move them out of the alleyway. “Idolatry,” he said tracing Seungmin’s face as best he could with a shaky hand. “Can you hear my confession, angel? Cleanse me of my sins before I die?”
He couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. “Will you stop? You are very far from dying.” He did his best to look put upon by Jeongin’s weight as they made their way out onto the fairly empty street that still wasn’t empty enough for Seungmin to be unaware that he should have been struggling with his burden. “Your ribs are bruised, your cheek is cut, and your nose might be broken, but none of that will kill you or warrants the current level of dramatics.”
“I’m entitled to dramatics. I’m a gay catholic.” A shadow fell over Jeongin’s face as if he just realized what he’d said. “I mean . . .”
“C’mon,” Seungmin said. “We need to get you cleaned up.”
With vampire strength the journey to Seungmin’s Seoul apartment wasn’t too difficult. Jeongin was pretty much silent the entire time, his earlier energy seeming to have worn off, leaving him almost lifeless to the point where part of Seungmin started to wonder if the boy had been right and he had been dying.
With one sideways glance from the doorman, he pulled Jeongin into his arms and carried him up the stairs to his apartment that he had bought maybe twenty years before. Unlike the coven’s main Seoul house, which was largely underground for ease of avoiding sunlight, his apartment was on the top floor of the building with heavy blackout curtains doing most of the work of blocking out the sun. There were some rumors about the benefits of actually sleeping below ground level but Seungmin had never felt a real difference.
He laid Jeongin on the couch in the darkened sitting area and left him to go rummage around in the unused bathroom for the old first aid kit he gotten twenty years again when Hyunjin lost control with one of his human flings and was too scared to tell Chan.
Once he found it, he brought it back out to Jeongin who had now pulled himself into a sitting position on the couch and was holding up his shirt to inspect his ribs. Seungmin held out the first aid kit to him, unsure what to do with it. Jeongin took it from him and began rifling through it, pulling out what looked to be some sort of cloth bandage.
“You’re sure they’re bruised and not broken?” he asked.
Seungmin nodded. “I didn’t feel any breaks.”
Jeongin sighed in what seemed to be relief and put back the cloth bandage. Seungmin dipped into the kitchen to run a rag under cold water. When he came back, he sat down next to Jeongin and gently dabbed his face with the rag where his cheek was cut, he dabbed under his nose for good measure cleaning up with the blood there.
“I still want to confess,” he said. “I haven’t confessed in almost a year.”
“I’m not a priest,” Seungmin said still dabbing at the blood.
“No, but you’ll do. It’s better this way. Less formal.”
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been eleven months since my last confession. I have lain with other men and sold my body. I disobeyed and disappointed my parents and led them to cast me out from under their roof because I was so consumed with desire for the flesh of another boy. Since then I have fallen into a life of prostitution and depravity.”
“I won’t absolve you,” Seungmin said. He put down the rag and selected a bandage for Jeongin’s face.
“What, priest outranks angel when it comes to sins?” His smile was crooked, almost believable.
He pressed the bandage to the boy’s cheek where it looked like a hand with a ring had cut it. “I didn’t say I can’t absolve you although as I said before, I’m no angel. I said I won’t absolve you.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t see you as a sinner,” Seungmin said simply.
Jeongin raised an eyebrow at him. “Do I not shock you?”
“You don’t.” He placed the supplies back into the first aid kit and set it aside.
“You knew, didn’t you?” He was trying hard to hide the trembling in his voice, Seungmin could tell.
The vampire sighed. Perhaps now was the time for honesty. “I knew some of it. I knew you, or at least that man, were selling your body to various men. I didn’t know you were a homosexual for certain though I did somewhat suspect on the basis of your clientele and your predicament. I knew nothing of your parents or your past desires however.”
“Right.” Jeongin looked down at his lap. “You’ve been watching me. I always felt it but I could never be sure.”
Seungmin shrugged. “Yes.”
Jeongin pulled back slightly. “What do you want from me?” He hid his fear well, Seungmin almost couldn’t see it.
“Nothing,” Seungmin said. That was a lie. He, in some base part of him, wanted to drain the boy dry. But as far as what he was actually willing to take, it was true. “I appreciate when you give me your time and I adore hearing you sing but I’m not angling to take anything from you, Jeongin.”
“You know my name, of course you do.”
“Do you finally believe me that I’m not an angel, then? If I frighten you so.”
Jeongin scoffed. “God terrifies me. Of course angels would too.” His posture relaxed slightly. “That’s why you’ve always somewhat frightened me.”
The pain of that statement lanced through Seungmin like poison. “I don’t have to be frightening. My name is Seungmin and I’m not going to hurt you.” He bowed slightly in greeting.
Jeongin bowed back but immediately stopped because of his ribs. “Hello, Seungmin. I’m Jeongin and I’m pretty sure everyone is going to hurt me but you’re still the man that scares me the least.”
Seungmin busied himself putting away the first aid kit and trying not to look so pleased at the barest minimum of compliments.
Eventually he built up the courage to ask what happened. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know. Wasn’t sure he could keep himself from flying out in a rage and murdering whomever was responsible. But the not knowing was worse.
Jeongin gave a wry smile at the question. “Oh well you know, homosexual whores are not the most popular group of people. If people even know gay people exist. Some men want to satisfy their desires but hate themselves for doing it. So they take it out on me. Like if they beat me, it’s as if they never fucked me.”
Seungmin tried to control his rage. He was pretty sure he succeeded too. Jeongin at least didn’t seem to notice. “That’s terrible. I’m sorry.” He looked around the apartment, helpless to quell the rage and fear surging within him. “You can always come here if you’re hurt. If you need to recover. Hopefully it won’t happen again but just in case.”
“It will.”
Seungmin hated the certainty in his voice.
He went to hear Jeongin sing whenever he could. Whenever that man would let him perform, Seungmin would be there. Sometimes it felt like Jeongin, his voice, was the only thing keeping Seungmin alive. Then he would remember he was already dead and a fresh wave of melancholy would consume him.
“You seem better,” Chan said to him one night before he left. He sounded tentative like he was worried commenting on the change would make it disappear.
Seungmin shrugged. He didn’t know why he wasn’t telling Chan about the boy who had lit up his world that for so long before had been dark. Maybe he was worried that if he said anything Jeongin would vanish like he had never even been there. Maybe he just knew Chan would get overbearing and overprotective and try to run interference before Seungmin self destructed by killing yet another human that he held dear.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, hyung,” Minho chimed in as he passed through the room off to cause some mischief or other. “He always looks bad to me.”
Chan rolled his eyes. “You are doing better,” he said with more confidence. “Something about those nighttime walks of yours.”
Seungmin looked longingly at the door. Jeongin was somewhere out there waiting for him. “Perhaps. Only way to know is to keep at it.” He bid Chan farewell and made his escape from the coven house or so he thought.
“Where are you going?” Hyunjin asked as he stepped out the door. Seungmin always hated how Hyunjin was just the slightest bit taller than he was. It always seemed to give him the advantage somehow even though Seungmin was more than a century older.
“Out.” It was best to keep details with a minimum when it came to Hyunjin’s questions.
The other vampire stepped in front of Seungmin, preventing him from moving forward. Which was fine with Seungmin, he didn’t plan on going anywhere when there was still a chance of Hyunjin trying to follow him.
He should have known that either Hyunjin or Minho would have gotten too curious eventually and make his apparent improvement in mood and mysterious nighttime jaunts their business. He was honestly surprised Minho hadn’t joined in on this attempted interrogation.
“What are you going to do?” Hyunjin asked.
“Walk around,” Seungmin answered simply.
Hyunjin groaned. “And what else? What’s got you so cheerful when decades of us trying didn’t do anything?”
“Hyunjin!” Chan barked from the hallway. “Leave him be.”
“But hyung!” Hyunjin whined.
“Come back inside,” Chan said. His voice was softer now but there was a power behind it, his maker influence. Seungmin felt the pull of it, urging him to move back inside but it wasn’t directed at him. Hyunjin wasn’t so lucky and he didn’t bother to fight the power that compelled his body to move.
“Seungmin,” Chan called once Hyunjin had retreated fully. “Be back by sun up.”
“You’re late,” Jeongin complained when Seungmin finally arrived.
Seungmin laughed. Even to his own ears, it was a foreign sound. “I’m sorry I didn’t know we had decided a specific meeting time.”
“Not a specific one, but a general one has been created through habit,” Jeongin said. He looked thoughtful. “Where do you go when you’re not with me? What do you do?”
Well wasn’t tonight just a night of questions. “Why do you ask?”
Jeongin shrugged. “You know what I do, who I see. I’ve been honest with you. But you’re a mystery. Besides following me, I have no idea what you do.”
“I wander,” he answered honestly. “I drift. Sometimes I read.”
“Sounds depressing,” Jeongin said.
Seungmin didn’t respond.
Seungmin had taken to staying in his apartment as often as he could get away with. The place had become his refuge from his coven’s prying. He didn’t have to worry about relentless questions about the source of his mood change and he didn’t have to worry about the ever increasing chance that one of them would follow him and discover just what he had been up to.
Jeongin had been in the apartment a few times since that first awful night. Twice because he had been hurt like the first time and the other times simply because he hadn’t seen Seungmin about that night and had been curious about where he was. On those nights, Seungmin’s mood had trapped him in the apartment and the bold knock on the door was a balm to his centuries old wounds.
He figured it was another curiosity visit when almost immediately after the sun set there was a pounding on the door. He was admittedly slow to open it having just woken up. He immediately regretted his lack of speed when he heard a body slump against the door. He opened the door catching the limp body that fell on him as soon as he did.
Blood, there was blood. How the hell did he not smell it before. It was everywhere, coating where their two torsos met. The warmth of it spread through his shirt, wetting his skin.
“Shit,” he whispered. “Shit what happened?”
There was too much blood. He couldn’t stop his fangs from descending, his eyes from darkening. Thankfully Jeongin’s head was still slumped against his shoulder and he didn’t see anything before Seungmin could regain control of himself.
“Jeongin? Jeongin?”
The boy didn’t answer except for a low groan. His hands were pressing over some sort of wound Seungmin realized.
Seungmin lifted him gently and carried him to the same couch where he had first treated his wounded cheek and bruised ribs many nights ago.
He was dying, Seungmin realized. He could smell it. Could hear it in his weakening heartbeat. His hands were pressed over a leaking wound in his abdomen but it wouldn’t be enough. It was a wonder Jeongin had even had the strength to make it to the apartment.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Seungmin shouted.
“Quit cursing, angel,” Jeongin muttered before his eyes fluttered closed. His breathing grew even more shallow.
He was running out of time. And there was nothing Seungmin could do. He wasn’t a doctor or a witch. He was completely adrift. Unless . . . there was one thing he could do. But couldn’t he really put Jeongin through that?
“Jeongin?” The boy didn’t answer. He was slipping away and Seungmin was just sitting there watching.
In the end, there was no decision at all. He couldn’t lose him.
“Forgive me,” he begged as he leaned over Jeongin, allowing his fangs to drop. The only response was Jeongin’s shallow breathing. His fangs sank into Jeongin’s neck, rich blood filling his mouth. He needed to stay alert, for Jeongin’s sake. He couldn’t let himself go too far. He listened for the weakening of his heart until it was barely a whisper before he pulled back and bit into his own wrist and held it to Jeongin’s mouth. He massaged his throat to make sure it went down.
“Forgive me,” he begged again and drank the last few drops of blood from his veins. He listened for that weak heartbeat and shallow breathing but there were gone. It was over. The boy was dead.
The hours afterward were torturous. Seungmin sat on the floor beneath the couch with his head in his hands. Jeongin’s body laid above him, wound still wet with blood. For the first time since when he first turned, the smell of blood made Seungmin sick. He got up eventually to wet a rag and he lifted off his torn and blood stained shirt to wipe down the area around the wound. The remains of Seungmin’s blood around his mouth had to go too. He only left the body briefly, to get another shirt for him as well as change his own blood stained shirt.
His mind wouldn’t quiet down during those long hours. How could Jeongin ever forgive him for doing this to him? How could Seungmin ever forgive himself? He’d taken this boy who was so full of life and turned him into a creature of the night. And then there is as the matter of Chan. The coven leader had strict rules about turning new vampires, namely don’t do it. Coven members other than Chan turning new vampires messed with the balance of power in the coven. Seungmin was completely and utterly fucked.
He tried to occupy himself while he waited but once everything was clean, he couldn’t bring himself to move away from the body. The transition would probably take, hopefully. Seungmin needed it to take, needed to wonder if he could’ve gotten Jeongin to a hospital in time from the comfort of an awake vampire Jeongin, not a mutilated corpse. He’d only seen a failed turning once but once was enough. Back before Chan turned Hyunjin, when it was only Chan, Seungmin, and Minho. They were visiting another coven that had been trying to replace one of their members. Seungmin had wanted to leave but Chan forced him to stay, forced him to watch what happened when a turning went wrong. That way he would know not to try it himself. Well so much for that. He’d tried it. And now he could only hope to a God he didn’t even believe in that he’d succeeded.
A low groan broke through Seungmin’s silent prayers at around two in the morning. Seungmin shot up from the ground and loomed over Jeongin. He was moving now. Fingers flexing, legs twitching. He sat up slowly, opening his eyes as he moved.
“What?” he asked looking around. “Where am I?”
Seungmin kneeled down next to the couch, hesitantly reaching out his hand to the other. “You’re in my apartment. You’ve been here before, remember? You came here tonight after you were stabbed.”
“I remember.” He looked down at himself with slight confusion. “This isn’t my shirt.”
Seungmin could’ve laughed at his disordered priorities but he was too stressed. “I gave you one of mine. Yours was torn and covered in blood.” He griped Jeongin’s hand. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m starving,” Jeongin said. He looked down at his stomach again, pulling his shirt up to inspect himself. “I was stabbed. I remember it. But there’s nothing there.”
Seungmin brought his other hand up to join the hand that was holding Jeongin’s. The situation was difficult. How does one explain to someone so full of light that they’ve been turned into a vampire? But he also couldn’t contain his relief that the transition was successful. Jeongin was awake. “You were stabbed, that’s right. And you were dying. I had to do something to save you and I understand if you can never forgive me. It was selfish, but I couldn’t lose you.”
Jeongin stared at him, eyes filled with urgency. “What happened?” He flinched suddenly. “I’m so hungry. Please it hurts. Why does it hurt?”
He’d been spending enough time in the apartment that he had supplies there thankfully. He released Jeongin and made his way over to the fridge, pulling out two blood bags. He gave one to Jeongin and watched as the boy’s fangs descended for the first time. Jeongin tore into the blood bag gulping it down greedily without even really registering what it was it seemed. As soon as he finished, Seungmin gave him the second which he devoured in much the same way. When he was finished, he licked the excess blood off his fingers, his fangs still out.
He reached a finger up and felt his fangs. “What are these?” he demanded. He looked down and finally registered the carnage. “Was that blood? Did I just drink blood?”
Seungmin pulled his finger away from his fangs. “They’ll retract eventually. After a while you’ll learn how to retract them on command.”
“Was that blood?” Jeongin repeated.
God, how did Chan do this? Seungmin barely remembered his own turning, everything was such a blur. And he was barely around for Hyunjin’s.
“It was,” he admitted. “Remember when I said I had to do something selfish to save you? You’re a vampire. Like me.”
“A vampire?” Jeongin’s eyes bulged out of his head, his still present fangs making him have a slight lisp. “I’m a demon.” He turned to Seungmin. “You’re a demon. God, I’m such an idiot. Here I was thinking you were an angel. Guess it was just another trick the devil played on me, pulling me into sin.”
“You’re not a demon,” Seungmin insisted. “I’ve been around for centuries and I’ve never seen hide nor hair of a devil or any demons. You’re a vampire which is an entirely different thing. But I promise everything is going to be okay.”