Archive of Our Own

It's creeping closer and closer to October. The days are shortening, the wind is getting that icy chill with the promise of winter, and the sky seems to stay perpetually cloudy.

It's arguably the most festive time of the year, wherein Hongjoong can blatantly flaunt his true nature to the world without risk of discovery. The time of year he can go all out and no one would be any wiser to the fact his ‘fake’ teeth were actually deadly weapons usually kept hidden and sheathed beneath his gums. Hongjoong has always had a soft spot for the month, and for Halloween in particular, but the majority of his peers? Not so much.

Little did he know October would be the beginning of his end.

Potentially.

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“I can’t believe you’re going to participate in that stupid haunted house attraction again this year,” San says with his arms crossed standing in the doorway of Hongjoong’s atrociously small studio apartment. “What’s the point? It’s not like you’re going to use it as a feeding ground like a normal person.”

Hongjoong sighs and decides to ignore San’s bitching in favor of trying to beat his newest video game into submission. Besides, it’s the same tired argument they’ve had for the last eleven years, ever since Hongjoong woke up from his several decades long rest to find the world had turned the concept of his kin into kitschy knick knacks and costumes to be paraded around on All Hallow’s Eve. He thought it was hilarious, but his covenmates San and Seonghwa thought it was tacky and disrespectful. 

“Because it’s fun and I can be myself without causing a ruckus.” He lets his fangs drop down just the slightest to give San a flash of what he means, cursing when his momentary distraction sends his on screen character tumbling off a cliff. “I can be like this all night and everyone thinks I’m just wearing prosthetics.” 

His inelegant button mashing refuses to yield favorable results. Hongjoong hisses low under in breath in frustration. 

San huffs, obviously irritated, and joins him on the couch. “This is so beneath you though! We’re vampires, we should be taking this holiday to hunt and feast while you’re out here making a bunch of barely pubescent humans piddle their pants.” San swipes the controller out of his hands. “And stop buying puzzle games when you know you’re horrible at them.”

Hongjoong doesn’t try to wrestle it back because this dungeon is really being a bitch and San has always had an eye for puzzles and the way things click together than Hongjoong ever has. Watching San lose himself in a game is relaxing: the slope of his shoulders unclenching from the tense edge he carries around like he’s dragging the weight of the world on this back, his face going slack and trusting in his presence. San used to be skittish and glared at anyone and everyone that wasn’t their sire, like a child always hiding behind his mother’s skirts.

Hongjoong rests his head in the cradle where shoulder meets neck. San only tenses for half a second before relaxing and Hongjoong has to bite the inside of his lip to keep from grinning goofily at the display of progress. “You’re just jealous I have a plaque and you don’t.”

“Literally no one cares about your stupid human plaque except for you,” San grumps. The television makes a triumphant ding! as whatever San did seems to unlock the next section. “‘Most Screams Collected’ or whatever isn’t impressive when you’re actually a spooky, scary vampire.”

Hongjoong pinches San’s thigh in retribution. “It’s ‘Best Scarer of the Month’ and I’ve earned it six years in a row through hard work, not just because I’m a vampire.”

San gives him a look that speaks volumes. Mostly ‘How to Wrangle Idiots’ books one through seventeen. “But the vampire bit makes it easier, you have to admit.”

“Shut up and give me back my controller,” Hongjoong says in lieu of answering.

--------

San isn’t wrong. The Best Scarer of the Month plaque is awarded to the character players that get the highest percentage of high jumps, faints, and terrified complaints filed through their online website. Being able to hide his presence by clinging to the ceilings or stalking guests through the hallways undetected was a definite advantage over the other humans attempting to frighten them. Hongjoong is especially proud of the last comment someone had submitted directed towards him specifically:

‘@ the vampire dude: WHY’

Wheein, the head director of Fright Nights hosted in an old abandoned hotel they’d repurposed, had laughed herself sick as she posted the printout beneath Hongjoong’s nameplate in the character dressing room. 

“I don’t know how you manage to do it, but every year the funniest comments always come flooding in about you,” she snickers into a fist splattered with a combination of body paint and faux blood while Hongjoong smugly admires his handiwork. “Are you going to try and mix things up this year? A ghoul concept this time around maybe?”

“I have to play to my strengths,” Hongjoong says with a flourish of his extremely tacky cape. He purchased it mostly to shove in San and Seonghwa's faces since they hated the cutesy way humans have adopted and changed the public image of their kind. He barely misses slinging the edge of it into another character actor’s eye, some guy he’d met in passing three months ago and immediately forgotten. Hongjoong bows politely with a sheepish, apologetic grin. Wheein coughs, it does a truly horrible job of concealing an amused snort. “Anyway, being the vampire is what I’m known for and what I’m good at, I can’t give it up now.”

“If you say so,” Wheein laughs. “At some point we’re going to pivot away from the classic horror tropes and try something new, you’ll have to give up the vampire schtick then, babe.”

Hongjoong pouts, makes his eyes go wide and dewy and innocent. “But—”

“No buts,” Wheein tuts and slaps his ass with the capped end of a dry-erase marker. “Next year we’re all dressing up as zombies and staging the hotel as a military base to ramble around in and fling fake limbs at the guests. Jackson figured out a way to make the rotting skin drip off in a really gross way if you twist your head just right.” 

Hongjoong shifts out of her reach in case she decides to slap his rear again. “You just want an excuse to hit the frat brats with that weird leg in your office.”

“You know me so well,” Wheein coos at him, “Now get in position, we open in less than an hour.”

“Sir, yes sir.” Hongjoong salutes and trots out into the hustle and bustle of the haunted house proper, dodging the guy he’s pretty sure is an actual werewolf dressed like a poor mimicry of the beasts.

--------

Eleven years ago, Hongjoong awoke from his self-imposed coma nap (aside from that brief window in the 70s no one is allowed to talk about) to find the world strange and bright and vibrant from the advertisements hung on every billboard, propped up against shop entrances, plastered on the side of buses. Even the air smells different, thicker somehow and cloying when the sunlight is hidden behind graying clouds. 

He finds Fright Nights when they were hosted in a small repurposed cafe and does four walkthroughs fascinated by the decorations and the actors dressed in various costumes from a time period he actually experienced. 

“Dude, you’re ruining the vibe,” one man dressed as a ghoul hisses at him from his hiding place beneath a counter covered in fake blood. “Either scream or scram.”

“I’d like to join your troupe of entertainers,” Hongjoong says in reply. “Who must I speak with?”

“Wheein at the front counter, she’s the one dressed like a zombie taking everyone’s money,” the ghoul shiftily eyes the group coming up fast on Hongjoong’s flank. “Just—get out of here so I can do my job, man. We have scream quotas.”

Wheein welcomed him with open arms, offered him a position as the local vampire since their previous one quit—a man named Donghun, who was definitely an actual vampire who was bored of playing pretend. Hongjoong met him once, let his eyes flash for a half second in deference to Donghun’s elevated position in their hidden society.

It takes Hongjoong five years to finally get the hang of the new language in this era; five years to find ways to sneak up on unsuspecting guests each time Fright Nights moves to a new location; five years to earn his plaque. Hongjoong is inordinately proud of himself for it. San and Seonghwa both roll their eyes when he shows them the picture of it on his phone but they don’t have an award hung on the wall—so. 

“Alright, everyone,” Wheein claps her hands in the makeshift meeting room that used to be the old laundry area of the old hotel, hidden from the rest of the decorated hallways by curtains of clear plastic. “Quick reminders before we start: no touching the guests. If a guest touches you, remove them from the main drag and deposit them by my stand so I can rip them a new asshole.” Wheein pauses to let the information sink in as if it’s not the same spiel every night they open. “Okay, that’s it. As always just have fun with it and whoever gets the most crying frat boys or comments on the website wins a stack of coupons to Starbucks and the honor of a plaque with their name on it.”

Several people give him the stink eye. Hongjoong preens at the attention, negative as it is, because being the best at frightening humans is something he’s good at. A hidden talent he never knew he possessed until he joined the scare crew and made at least seven different people faint and/or piss themselves in fear.

Hongjoong uses his inhuman strength to cling himself to the rafters above the hallway the crew tore down three years ago to make the shadows deeper and the echo of distant, fake screaming more terrifying. He’s found that dropping down from his higher position with his fangs bared is the easiest way to scare the absolute bejeezus out of unsuspecting guests too clueless to look up.

Halfway through the night, which is technically eating into his break time, a guest comes walking passed his vantage point. Alone. A tall man with a shock of dark hair that stinks of sadness more than he does fear, but he’s still somewhat jumpy around Hongjoong’s peers so he’ll probably be an easy enough target. 

Hongjoong bides his time, waiting for the right moment to strike while he watches this singular human wander aimlessly through the differently themed rooms. The guy pauses to examine one of the funhouse mirrors set up along a long hallways meant to lead into a room with nothing but a woman dressed in a bloody ballerina’s outfit and Hongjoong takes this as his opportunity to strike.

As soon as the man leans close to try and make his image focus, Hongjoong lets go of the rafters with a hiss—fangs bared, glinting in the low flickering light of the room; the combination of faux and very real screams echoing around them adding to the horrifying image he’s trying to present.

The guy takes one look at him and fucking laughs.

Hongjoong boggles at him. “What—what’s so funny?”

The guy covers his face with two huge, veiny palms to try and smother his laughter. “Sorry, it’s just—are you trying to scare babies?”

“Wh—” Hongjoong yells in offense, “Babies!”

“Yeah,” he snickers behind a cupped hand before folding in on himself howling laughter, though his scent still stinks of sadness beneath the bright crinkle of mirth. Hongjoong deflates because his laugh is kind of...it’s a little endearing as much as it royally pisses him off. “I’m sorry, this has been a really weird couple of days for me. You’re uh—” the man swallows back another giggle. “You’re plenty scary to someone, I promise.”

“Whatever, just go,” Hongjoong turns to stomp away.

“Wow, these mirrors are really something,” he hears behind him. “You don’t have a reflection at all!”

“Haha, yeah, so weird,” Hongjoong calls back as he almost-not-quite runs from the room. “Have a good night!”

Hongjoong spends the rest of his shift feeling off-footed and strange. It’s the first time anyone has ever laughed at him when he’s decked out in his costume and his face paint emphasizing the razor sharp teeth he has on display. One of his coworkers, Mingi—another person Hongjoong suspects is a vampire just by virtue of the astringent aftershave he seems to bathe in covering his scent—finds him slumped over the table in the break room with his head in his hands.

“Hyung? Are you okay?” Mingi gently prods at his back. “Did someone smack at you?”

“No, it's worse,” Hongjoong huffs into the table’s surface. “Someone laughed at me.”

Mingi chokes on a sip of water and send it spraying at the opposite wall. “Excuse me. Someone laughed at you? Who? Were they a psychopath or something?”

“I don’t know, man,” Hongjoong whimpers clutching at his forehead. “It was just some guy walking by himself but as soon as I tried to scare him he just started laughing.” He puckers his mouth from annoyance. “Asshole asked if I was trying to scare babies.”

“Wait, guy about my height with dark hair? Kind of dimply?” Mingi asks with his hand held at the level of his head. “I think I know who it was.”

Hongjoong jerks his head up to glare at Mingi who looks like a werewolf caricature dressed in ripped plaid and covered in faux fur. “Tell me about him.”

--------

The conversation with Mingi reveals a few things:

The guy's name is Jeong Yunho.

He's 21, one of Mingi's roommates, and a third year student at the community college. He's recently broken up from a long term relationship and, apparently, fearless.

Hongjoong sits in the middle of his apartment with the lights off and stews over the newly acquired information and the echoing memory of Yunho’s laughter. He’s not really sure exactly why being laughed at is affecting him so much. He’d gone twenty two of his own human years being the butt of every joke, taking abuse from uncles and neighbors for not—

He shakes his head to rid himself of the memory. There are some things better left in the past.

In any case, Hongjoong of the future has a plaque and his honor has been besmirched. There has to be something Yunho is afraid of, something or someone he’s weak to that Hongjoong can exploit to erase the invisible black mark on his record. He’s going to find out what that thing is and he’s going to see who starts laughing when he trots it out.

Not Yunho, that’s for damn sure.

--------

As a vampire, Hongjoong no longer needs (or can) to eat or drink anything that isn’t blood—or coconut water, like the community of ‘vegan’ vampires that subsist on all organic, non-GMO coconuts in Indonesia—but that doesn’t keep him from enjoying the smell of human food. This morning he’s decided he really wants a green tea frappe, something sugary sweet but still earthy that he can inhale until the whipped creme dissolves. His favorite coffee shop is unfortunately overrun, so he begrudgingly stomps his way three blocks down to enter the corporate hell that is Starbucks.

By some weird twist of fate, Jeong Yunho is the last person standing in line, scrolling through his phone with a pout on his mouth. Hongjoong honestly doesn’t recognize him until his scent hits; that unique blend of skin and cheap fabric softener overlaid by sadness he remembers from the previous night.

Without meaning to, Hongjoong blurts out, “You!” behind Yunho’s back so loud it nearly reverberates around the shop. 

Yunho startles, almost drops his phone, before turning to gift him with an expression of shock. “Uh, hey, do I know you?”

The room had gone silent at his outburst, but, thankfully, the low murmur of conversation and the drone of the coffee grinder start back up. Hongjoong feels a muscle twitch beneath his left eye, mortification and annoyance battling it out. “You laughed at me.”

Yunho squints at him like he’s trying to remember where, exactly, he’d seen Hongjoong last before bopping his forehead with the edge of his palm. “Ah! The guy from the gas station, right?” Yunho offers him a sheepish grin and a tiny bow in apology. “Sorry, my friend told me this really funny joke earlier in the day and—”

“Nevermind,” Hongjoong cuts him off. He doesn’t need to hear excuses, especially when Yunho obviously doesn’t even remember him outside of his costume. “Don’t worry about it, man. It’s fine.”

Hongjoong inwardly curses his luck. He knows face paint can change a person’s look, but this is ridiculous. Here he was so hung up on this one guy laughing at him and Yunho didn’t even have the courtesy to remember him.

The line moves up.

Yunho eyes him as they take a collective step forward. “What if I buy you a coffee to make up for it?”

And now the asshole dickbag is going to try and guilt trip Hongjoong into forgiving him. Hongjoong scowls fiercely. “What if I want something super ridiculous and expensive?”

Yunho blinks and answers with a bland, “That's fine.”

“Really?” Hongjoong asks in disbelief, squinting at Yunho just to be sure but Yunho only shrugs unconcerned.

“Sure, why not? It’s not like I have anyone else to spend money on these days.”

The barista takes their orders with the dead-eyed stare of a woman who’s seen and heard way too much in her lifetime. Not to mention the guy in front of them ordered a sweet tea with fifteen extra pumps of sweetener. She’s seen hell and Hongjoong’s green tea frappe alongside Yunho’s venti coffee with three shots of espresso is nothing.

Hongjoong awkwardly accepts his drink when they call his name and Yunho waves him goodbye. Though before he can get too far out the door, Yunho tugs the edge of his sleeve to ask, “Wait, Hongjoong-ssi, I really am sorry for laughing at you even if I don’t remember doing it.” Yunho bites at his bottom lip which is unfairly attractive. “See you around?”

“Maybe,” Hongjoong responds automatically. He’s never been good at dealing with anyone that looks this good and is this nice so he escapes the interaction with a wobbly smile and trips over his feet on the doorstep. 

Walking down the sidewalk through the sea of humans on their way to work or elsewhere, Hongjoong starts to feel a little guilty because Yunho is actually nice. Yunho might be a shithead for laughing at him while he was only trying to do his job, but he’s nice. Generous, too, for buying Hongjoong his drink of choice considering he's only going to sniff at it for an hour or two instead of drinking it. Yunho still needs to learn the meaning of ‘fear’ though and scaring him will be an adventure.

The green tea frappe is as sweet as he remembered when Hongjoong sticks his nose over the cap and inhales a greedy lungful.

--------

Using his higher senses and his ability to cling to the very top of buildings, Hongjoong manages to follow after Yunho as he walks through public places on his days off from school and work. He makes sure to keep the almost-not-quite stalking exclusively to public streets. Hongjoong gives Yunho as much privacy as possible because even if he’s trying to find out his weakness, Hongjoong has hard limits on what is and is not acceptable as a person—actual stalking is not one of them. He prefers to operate at the same frequency as street-level CCTV.

Though, so far there’s been no sign of fear directed at anything. Nothing. Even the furtive looking man in the greasy tank top, despite the chill of late September, doesn’t give Yunho pause. 

Hongjoong angrily kicks a pebble off the roof of his current perch and the man eyeing Yunho’s back, reeking of desperation and sweat, takes off down a back alley in fright. 

Hongjoong watches the man go with his gut churning. He’s never been a vigilante; he’s been a million different things to nearly as many people, but being the helpful dark knight has never really been one of them. Hell, most of his life before the Turn was spent in seedier alleyways than this, doling out street justice and offering up his body in return for a roof over his head or a bed that was only infested with fleas. 

Yunho startles at a few decorations decorating storefronts: some of those tacky motion detecting animatronic witches or bowls with hands that play ominous laugh tracks and shitty music. Cheap tricks. Yunho meets up with a group of friends just as the sky decides to start pissing rain, so Hongjoong sighs, calls it a bust for the day and goes home.

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“So you’re upset because this one specific human laughed at you instead of falling all over themselves in fear?” San asks as he kicks his feet idly against Hongjoong’s kitchen counter. “Hyung, get over it.”

“I can’t just ‘get over it’ while Yunho is out there walking around like he’s—he’s,” Hongjoong drags his palms down his face. “I don’t know what but it’s not right. He should have been at least a little scared by a dude dropping behind him from the ceiling!” 

Seonghwa, basking on Hongjoong’s couch with a face mask and a wine goblet filled to the brim with B- blood, blows a raspberry into the air. “Not all humans are terrified of vampiric little gremlins, Joong-ie.”

“Is that a dig at my height?” Hongjoong asks with a dangerous edge to his voice.

“Yes, obviously,” Seonghwa answers immediately because he’s also a fearless piece of shit, the bane of Hongjoong’s existence, and Eden’s not-so-secret favorite in their coven so Hongjoong can’t even get revenge by slipping silver into his goblet. Dick. “Seriously though, don’t let it get to you so much. You’re hyperfixating on a dude you’ll probably never see again.”

“What he said,” San offers from his vantage point. His feet pause with the heels of his sneakers pressed to the paneling. “Wait. How do you know his name?”

Hongjoong says nothing, which is apparently a guilty enough non-verbal cue that Seonghwa sits upright, heedless of his face mask dropping to the floor with a disgustingly wet flop, “Tell me you’re not trying to find him, Kim Hongjoong.”

“Um,” Hongjoong mumbles intelligently and casts around for a decent enough excuse that they won’t instantaneously see through the lie. 

“Oh my god,” San whispers at the same moment Seonghwa starts laughing so hard his goblet sloshes precariously in his grip.

“You’re actually trying to find him!” Seonghwa wheezes through his nose. “Just because he didn’t scream at you? Is he just that cute or something?”

Honestly, Hongjoong hadn’t even really considered the attractiveness factor but now that he thinks about it—yeah, Yunho is cute. He’s tall and dimpled and generous to a fault; not to mention his laugh, when not directed at Hongjoong specifically, is precious especially when he curls inward on himself. He files that thought away to a deep dark corner where he doesn’t have to think about it or Yunho ever again—beyond finding out his deepest fear, anyway.

“Did you just put him in the Cute Boy Dungeon?” San asks with a smirk and a throaty timbre in his voice that threatens laughter. 

Hongjoong blanches. “What are you talking ab—”

“Please,” Seonghwa has to hold his goblet with both hands at this point to keep the jittery giggles from making him spill his precious drink. “Please, every time you meet a guy that’s even half-way attractive, you go all tongue-tied and quiet until you can force yourself not to look at him again to get over the crush. We’ve been calling it the Cute Boy Dungeon for years.”

“Stop,” Hongjoong covers his head with a blanket pulled from the back of the couch so he can at least block out the sight of his asshole covenmates while they laugh at him. “Both of you fucking suck.”

“Well, we are vampires,” San says good naturedly. 

“And your crush is cute,” Seonghwa adds once he gets control of his giggling. Hongjoong can’t see either of their expressions but he’s fairly sure they’re both giving him the doe eyes they direct at small children and puppies. Revolting. “It’s adorable you want to romance a human.”

“I don’t want to romance him, though,” Hongjoong moans into the soft material, praying for this conversation and his torture to end.

“Sure,” Seonghwa coos.

“I don’t!” 

“We totally believe you,” San says right by his ear, even though Hongjoong hadn’t heard him leave the kitchen. 

He knows he looks like a drowned rat when the blanket is yanked from his head but Hongjoong still tries to keep some of his dignity intact with a glare and a seething, “He’s a shithead and I want to see him cry.”

San smirks. 

Before San can say anything though, Seonghwa interjects with a low whistle and an amused, “Kinky.”

Later, Hongjoong has to spend three hours cleaning blood from his rug and his carpet thanks to the flying kick directed at Seonghwa’s face that went wide and knocked into the coffee table instead. San stays only long enough to drip the last dregs of a blood bag over his head before disappearing out of Hongjoong’s window like a phantom in the night.

--------

By some coincidence or otherworldly divine intervention, Mingi invites him to a party being hosted by one of the other character actors in an apartment complex populated by college kids and their college kid shenanigans. Not to mention college kid cheap liquor.

“Yunho will be there,” Mingi says with shifty-eyed smile.

“I don’t like what you’re implying, buddy,” Hongjoong snippily replies. “Where and when?”

Hongjoong has a crisis in front of his wardrobe the night of because most of his options are either dry-rotted crushed velvet from the early 1900s he’d kept in storage or horribly tight fitting...things from his brief stint of waking in the 70s. He tries not to look at that corner of his closet and opts instead to bed San for an outfit that says, ‘I have sharp edges and you will be terrified of them’.

San brings him a leather jacket and ripped jeans. “I don’t know what this is about, but if you’re going to try and woo that Yunho dude, you might want to go shirtless under the jacket for easy access.”

“Fuck off and fuck you,” Hongjoong says with a hiss and his fangs bared. San only rolls his eyes and disappears over the railing of his small balcony. 

“Hey man,” Mingi greets him in the open doorway with bright neon body paint smeared over his cheeks and a red rolo cup of god knows how much alcohol gripped in one fist. “Come on in, hyung! Yunho is in here somewhere.”

His heels come unlatched from the invisible barrier keeping him anchored just in front of the entrance at the invitation. It’s one of the more annoying things that come with vampirism: there’s no way to enter a domicile without a clear, verbal welcome and it’s left him stuck standing awkwardly in hallways or sidewalks while he waits for someone to say the magic words. Mingi slaps him on the back, harder than Hongjoong was expecting so he stumbles, and disappears into the crush of bodies in the center of the room. 

“Hongjoong!” Someone yells over the music. “Bro, get your fangs out!”

“Ha, ha,” Hongjoong responds with as much sarcasm as he can muster. “The fangs stay at work!”

“Aayyyy,” the guy draws out with his hands waving in the air. Hongjoong vaguely remembers him wearing the bloated prosthetics of a rambling corpse on four nights ago. Jason? Jackson? Didn’t Wheein mention a Jackson during their last meeting?

Hongjoong does a circuit through the throngs of coworkers and their plus ones until he spies Yunho, swaying gently into Mingi’s orbit, and decides to try his luck sneaking up on him to see if maybe a jump scare in the middle of a party will make Yunho jump. He’s barely two feet away, hands raised to cup over Yunho’s eyes from behind, when Yunho glances back and smiles wide.

“Coffee buddy!” Yunho exuberates as he grabs Hongjoong’s hands midair to link their fingers together and pull Hongjoong in tight for a hug. “Hi! I’ve missed you!”

Hongjoong blinks. With his nose shoved into Yunho’s chest like this he can smell the enticing, intoxicating scent of Yunho’s blood pulsing hard just beneath the surface. It smells...god, he smells amazing. Hongjoong can’t remember the last time a human’s blood made his mouth water. 

“Wow, you’re really drunk,” he says to keep the conversation going over the sound of heavy bass.

“Yeah, I am,” Yunho hiccups and droops heavily against the top of Hongjoong’s head. “Anyone ever tell you you’re really cute? Because you’re really cute. Hi.”

“Wh—”

“Yo, Yunho there’s someone here I want you to meet,” Mingi intrudes on their—whatever this is and tugs Yunho away by the elbow. “He’s been asking about you.”

“Oh?” Yunho’s scent is curious when he releases Hongjoong to the wild, wandering off attached to Mingi’s arm like a limpet and giggling into Mingi’s neck.

It was nice while it lasted, Hongjoong supposes, but he still has no idea what to do with the idea that Yunho thinks he’s cute. And the fact Yunho still doesn’t remember his name other than as his ‘coffee buddy’. Hongjoong props himself up in a darkened corner not occupied by couples shoving their hands down each other’s pants and watches from afar as Yunho mingles in the crowd. He tells himself it’s just because he hopes Yunho will somehow let slip he was scared by something, but realistically…

Yunho is way drunk. He’s three sheets to the wind and still smells like a deep emotional wound and Hongjoong is kind of, sort of, maybe concerned—no. Hongjoong shakes himself and the thought out of his head. There’s no point in getting attached to humans when their lifespans are so short in comparison to his own. 

Hongjoong loses track of Yunho while he’s lost in his darkening mood. 

It’s a good thing he’s not claustrophobic because the room turns into a sea of undulating bodies as the surround system clicks over the the latest #1 hit. It’s boring, if he’s honest, just loud noise and louder chattering about nothing—

Over the sound of bass boosted hip hop, Hongjoong hears the unmistakable sound of a wounded gasp of Yunho’s breath and finds him pressed against a wall by another body—someone bigger and a little more handsy. Hongjoong would leave them alone but Yunho is scowling hard, fingers digging into the guy’s forearms trying to make him go away and something in Hongjoong’s brain just—snaps. 

His first step lands him in the middle of the room. The second has him standing close enough to the pair that Hongjoong doesn’t have to strain to hear the conversation.

“I told you a month ago it wasn’t going to happen,” Yunho slurs with an intense, angry tone. “Not then, and certainly not now. Soyeon just broke up with me you dick.”

“Yunho, don’t be like this, yeah? Let’s go find an empty room so I can change your mind,” the man whispers lasciviously next to Yunho’s ear, wet enough it makes even Hongjoong shiver. Fucking nasty.

He swoops in like a vengeful spirit to wrench the man away from Yunho’s front, who is still too drunk and glassy-eyed to be making memories. “I believe he said ‘no’.”

The man jerks his arm out of Hongjoong’s grip with a sucking hiss of his teeth. “Nobody asked you, bro, get lost.”

“It’s true that no one asked,” Hongjoong lets his eyes flash crimson in his anger for half a second so it could be explained away as a trick of the light if need be. “But I’m telling you anyway: Get. Lost.”

“Whatever,” he says with a huff. “I’ll talk to you later, Yunho.”

“Still going to tell you no, Jongin,” Yunho waves him away before draping his arms over Hongjoong’s shoulders again. “Coffee buddy, you’re back!”

“It’s Hongjoong, not ‘coffee buddy’,” he scowls and pulls Yunho away from the wall; away from the main room full of people dancing and swaying and into the hallway as some weird protective instinct takes over. “Let’s get you some fresh air, mmh?”

“Okay,” Yunho agrees cheerfully enough. “Hongjoong-ssi, that guy never knows how to take ‘no’ for an answer, I’m getting tired of it.”

“Really,” Hongjoong bites the inside edge of his mouth in annoyance. “Does he bother you a lot?”

“Only since my girlfriend broke up with me,” Yunho sighs and twists their hands together to swing them childlike down the street. “I guess he thinks now that I’m available it’s his big chance or something.”

Hongjoong takes a moment to consider the new information while Yunho sings Beyoncé off key, swings their linked hands in wide arcs, and the street lights flicker in the dark of early evening. “That’s awful. I’m sorry, Yunho.”

“For what? The breakup or Jongin being a dick?” Yunho asks curiously.

Hongjoong purses his mouth. “Both.” Yunho leans into his side to laugh wide open and happy. He’s a long line of heat against Hongjoong’s arms even through San’s leather jacket. “You’re really touchy for someone that barely knows me,” he adds a little worriedly.

“It’s fine. You’re nice and you smell good and you’re cute. Cute people are always good people,” Yunho says matter of fact trailing off with a hiccup hidden behind his other palm. His eyes are still far away and his cheeks are an adorable shade of pink Hongjoong immediately tries to forget. “Uhm, but mostly I’m just a clingy drunk, just ask Mingi.” 

They stop in the middle of the sidewalk, three blocks away from the party-goer filled apartment. Backlit by yellow street lights, Hongjoong listens to the beat-beat of Yunho’s heart in his chest as Yunho gently sways on his feet and recognizes he might be a little bit in trouble here. This is no longer a predator stalking his prey situation at all.

“You ready to go back?”

“Nooo,” Yunho moans long and drawn out. “Wanna stay with you! You’re more fun than the party.”

Hongjoong can’t help but laugh. “You barely know me and all we’ve done is walk down a sidewalk. How is that more fun than a party?”

“I don’t know it just is,” Yunho says with utmost sincerity. “You should give me your number.”

“You should go home and drink some water,” Hongjoong replies after a moment of hesitation, embarrassed and off footed.

“I will if you give me your number so I can buy you coffee again.” Yunho giggles behind a hand, “And if you walk me home.”

“Anyone ever tell you you trust too easily?” Hongjoong sighs deeply. “Yunho, this is really not safe—”

“And the fact that you’re worried about it tells me you’re a good person who can take his new drunk friend home,” Yunho smiles at him. “I live two streets over anyway, just make sure I get in the door and you can escape my evil clutches.”

“It’s not your evil clutches I’m worried about,” Hongjoong mutters under his breath but allows Yunho to lead him by the hand to the front door of his apartment. He stays rooted to the ground in front of the doorway until Yunho whispers in his ear, “You can come in if you want,” followed by a sort-of wink and another deep hiccup.

“Maybe another time,” Hongjoong says with a laugh before pushing Yunho inside his apartment, waiting for Yunho to quit pouting long enough to close the door. Before he leaves, before Yunho’s scent sways from the other side of the door, Hongjoong scrawls his number on a napkin he finds in one pocket with the end of an eyeliner pencil he scores in another and slips it under the crack at the bottom.

Hongjoong goes back to the party, this time with his presence concealed so he can watch and wait for Jongin to leave. It doesn’t take long now that Yunho is gone and Hongjoong follows at a distance, biding his time.

“Park Jongin,” he whispers like a threat, clinging to the crumbling brickwork from above, while the man spins around looking for the source of the voice beside a darkened alley.

“Who’s there?”

“Leave Jeong Yunho alone, Park Jongin,” he pitches his voice lower so it’s fairly unrecognizable. “There are consequences to your actions.”

“Is this a joke?” Jongin scoffs. “Dude, whoever you are, worry about getting your own dick wet. Yunho is going to give in eventually and then you can have a turn when I’m done with him like everyone else.” Jongin gives the inky blackness between the building one last misty-eyed glare. “I’m going home.”

Hongjoong lets the anger build and build. Jongin reminds him of his life in the long dark before Eden and Seonghwa, when he had to fuck his way out of situations just because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time; when the raids on clubs and seedy meeting places meant quick, furtive hookups in the dingy red light district and public restrooms. Hongjoong remembers the feeling of being so sick to his stomach from the emotional detachment thanks to men exactly like this prick. He was touch starved, love starved, and nothing and no one could fill the void. Jongin reminds him of the worst of his mistakes, a taker and a user of the worst quality.

“If that is your answer,” Hongjoong says horrifically, seethingly angry and drops down on Jongin’s head. He barely gives the man a moment to see the blazing crimson shift in his eyes before slicing into his neck with his fangs, draining him dry and leaving Jongin to fester against a dumpster. He makes sure to dig two sharp clawed fingers into his side to make it look like a mugging gone awry before booking it to his own apartment.

Hongjoong barely makes it to his bathroom without bothering with the lights before he’s vomiting up the contents of his stomach into the sink.

Park Jongin tastes worse coming up than he did going down.

--------

San and Seonghwa are horrible enough busybodies that they make a visit to check on him not three hours later when Hongjoong is still ill from drinking too much from one person and suffering from a distended stomach—not to mention the ash-like taste of poisonous blood still clinging to the back of his throat. It’s psychosomatic, he knows, but even thinking of Jongin’s blood in his mouth makes him want to gag.

Seonghwa shares a look with San over his head. 

“Why did you do that if you knew you were just going to end up sick like this, Hongjoong-ah?” His covenmate runs soothing fingers down Hongjoong’s back, down and then up until Seonghwa can card long fingers into the hair at his nape. “You’re not a vigilante.”

“I know,” Hongjoong burbles into the gap of his arms where he’s lying facedown on his couch. “But he was messing with Yunho—”

“Yunho? That human?” San asks sharply. “The one you’re trying to ‘scare’?”

Hongjoong can almost feel the finger quotes like a threat. He sighs again, louder this time. “Yeah.”

“I see,” San whispers low before stomping out of the room and out of Hongjoong’s apartment with a slam of his door.

Seonghwa is silent for a long time though he keeps up the movement of his hand along Hongjoong’s back, which is nice. A creature comfort. Even the silence is kind of nice considering Hongjoong has nothing to say for himself in his own defense—he was stupid and reckless, sitting here trapped close enough to a functioning sink and toilet feels like punishment enough.

“Hongjoong,” Seonghwa finally starts up again, “You know you really fucked up here, right? If the Council finds out about what you’ve done, it’s going to be your head. Literally.”

“Don’t be such a worrywart,” Hongjoong groans as Park Jongin tries to make a triumphant comeback in his throat. Ugh. “I made sure it looked like a human mugging or a crack deal gone wrong. It’s fine. Everything will be fine.”

Seonghwa stays to make frozen blood pops in his ice cube tray that came with the refrigerator Hongjoong keeps for form’s sake. His hyung feeds him frozen cube after frozen cube while wringing his fingers in worry. “We need to tell Eden.”

Cold dread trickles over the long withered nerves in his back. “It’s fine, I told you. Don’t get him involved in my mess.”

“Eden can protect you in case it’s not fine!” Seonghwa hisses angrily at him with his fangs bared. “What if it turns into an accusation? What if the Council finds out? What if they trace the death back to you and take you from us?”

“Too many what if’s, not enough feeling sorry for me.” Hongjoong moans pathetically into his couch cushions to avoid making any real effort to answer Seonghwa’s valid concerns. “God, fuck, his blood was vile, hyung. It tasted like—like that time in the 20s, you remember.”

“I do,” Seonghwa says throatily and sad. “You promised never again.”

“Yeah well,” Hongjoong hides his face away from Seonghwa’s pursed mouth worrying. “I promised a lot of things to a lot of people. What’s one more broken vow in my long history of ruination?”

Seonghwa hums. “I’m still telling Eden.”

Of course he is.

“You’re a fucking snitch, you know that?”

--------

Later that same night, bleeding into early morning when Seoul wakes up enough for the sound of traffic and the barely there thump of feet making their long trek to work begins, Eden calls him to inform Hongjoong he’s taken care of the would-be problem. Like a child being scolded, Hongjoong slides down to the floor with his cellphone tucked against an ear, wincing at the simmering anger he can hear in his sire’s voice.

“I turned you all those years ago because I saw in you a great potential, Kim Hongjoong,” Eden reminds him, conveniently hop skipping over the fact he'd also left Hongjoong to scavenge in the streets like an orphan for a month before owning up to turning Hongjoong into a vampire like himself. “Not so you could stalk cute boys and maim his enemies. We have an accord to worry about now.”

“Give me a break, I just woke up barely a decade ago.” Over the line, Eden sucks in an audibly tight breath through his teeth. Hongjoong wishes he could grab the words back from the air to stuff them back into his stupid idiot throat because he knows it was the wrong thing to say the instant they made it out of his mouth. “It was a momentary lapse in judgement. It won’t happen again, I promise, sire.”

“Promises are cheap,” Eden says quietly, deadly. “Jeopardize our tenuous treaty with the hunters and I will end your existence myself. Are we clear?”

Hongjoong shivers. “Crystal.”

--------

By chance, and not at all because he zeroed in on a whiff of his particular scent passing the Starbucks closest to Hongjoong’s apartment, Hongjoong spies Yunho through the window nursing a giant cup of strong coffee with dark sunglasses covering half of his face. As if in a dream, he walks in through the open double doors, around the line of people actually waiting to make an order, and ends up standing inches away from the chair on the other side of Yunho’s table.

Hongjoong clears his throat, a little embarrassed that his traitorous feet brought him here so quickly and Yunho jumps a little at the sound. “Long night?”

“The longest.” Yunho agrees before he takes another trembling pull from his drink. “Fancy meeting you here again.” Hongjoong watches his ears turn faintly pink. “I—I have your number now, by the way.”

“Do you,” Hongjoong says cryptically, and to avoid more awkward conversation offers, “Let me buy you a muffin.”

“I like chocolate,” Yunho says with a smile and then a wince as his sunglasses droop down the end of his nose and blinds him with early morning sunlight filtering through the green-tinted glass of the shop front proper. “Urgh.”

The criminally underpaid teen working the baked goods section forces him to buy a chocolate brownie (because the only muffins left were pumpkin and cream cheese—hard pass) and two cake pops shaped like a cat’s head on a pike.

“This is a little morbid, don’t you think?” Hongjoong grimaces at his tray of sturdy stoneware plates and plastic utensils. “The cats, I mean.”

“It’s just a cake pop, dude, it’s not that deep,” Bored Teen informs him with a flourish of extra napkins. “Good luck on your date!”

Yunho apparently doesn’t harbor the same sentiments about the cake pops. Hongjoong stares as he wastes no time in wrapping his pert mouth around the treats and bites into them with a satisfied little hum. Was Yunho’s mouth always that pearlescent pink? Did the thermostat get fucked with? Hongjoong may be technically dead but there’s a heat trying to spread its nefarious tendrils down his chest and into his groin.

“So,” Hongjoong crosses his legs and tries his best to make small talk. “Watch any scary movies lately?” His best is still a study in abject failure.

Yunho shakes his head around a mouthful of brownie. “Nope, I hate those kinds of movies.”

“Really,” Hongjoong shifts forward in interest. A possible lead? “Why? Too afraid of them?”

Yunho licks at the corner of his mouth to swipe away a dark smudge of chocolate, pink tongue flicking out lightning quick. Hongjoong considers the possibility that the thermostat is on the fritz. “I just don’t think they’re very believable, it’s hard to be scared of something you know can’t happen in real life. Like monster movies.”

“You’re trying to tell me not a single scary movie has ever frightened you?” Hongjoong asks curiously. “That’s...amazing.”

“It’s my super power, I’m not afraid of anything,” Yunho informs him with a smug upturn of his mouth. Hongjoong doesn’t tell him he’s still got brownie stuck in the corner—cute. 

We’ll see about that, he thinks while simultaneously trying to shove the kicking and screaming mental image of Yunho back into the Cute Boy Dungeon where he can't cause any real world trouble, we’ll just see.

--------

Yunho texts him first.

He kinda has to since Hongjoong never actually asked for his number in return, but still, the point stands: Yunho texts him first. He almost misses it too, so busy hyperfixating on playing with rolling bombs in the semi-open world of Zelda and his phone chime blends seamlessly into the background music.

The first text reads ‘thanks again for taking me home’ followed by another message ‘and for the brownie/cake pops the other morning. is there anything i can do to repay you?’

Hongjoong considers the message. He also considers the desperate googling for unconventional fears he did for at least seven hours the day before and thinks: I know what you can do. They’re friendly enough that Hongjoong thinks he can get away with an invitation without coming across as weird or needy or invasive.

‘How do you feel about butterfly gardens?’ he sends back.

‘????????????????’ Yunho responds immediately and then, ‘I’m free after 5 tomorrow as long as we can grab dinner before :D’

“What made you think of a butterfly garden?” Yunho asks him over greasy burgers and greasier fries. Hongjoong grimaces at the spread and secrets little bites of it away with his fingers to a hidden plastic baggie in his pocket when Yunho isn’t looking. He can’t eat, human food would just sit in his stomach until it rots. “I didn’t know we even had one operating this time of year.”

“I passed by on my way to Kobalt and it seemed neat,” Hongjoong makes up on the fly. “Felt weird going by myself so…” Yunho nods as if that’s a perfectly acceptable excuse.

Yunho looks radiant beneath the heat lamps dotting the roof of the covered pavillion. He also looks totally unaffected by the fluttering of insects around his head. Hongjoong grumpily stuffs his hands in his jacket—actually San’s leather one he still hadn’t returned—and pretends he’s not furiously tamping down on the urge to coo when a butterfly lands on the tip of Yunho’s nose.

Unfortunately, Hongjoong is a little bit of an idiot by not scoping out the flora  and the butterfly garden has a large section of flowering verbena near the back of the venue. Fun little tidbit: verbena is to vampires as wolfsbane is to werewolves. 

“Oh,” Hongjoong says when his hands start to visibly swell and the inside of his nose blisters from the pollen. “Whoops.”

“Aw, I think this moth likes me,” Yunho laughs for a half second before screeching, “Holy shit!”

Hongjoong winces as the itching burn of the adverse reaction creeps up his neck. “So, I might be allergic,” he starts, is cut off by Yunho throwing him over his shoulder and bullying his way to the water faucet outside the building.

While Hongjoong splashes his faces and hands with water from the tap, Yunho disappears to buy bottled water from a nearby vending machine. “Hyung, are you alright?”

“I’m okay, just,” Hongjoong sneezes and winces when it irritates the blisters along his nasal cavities. “Sorry that was my bad. I didn’t realize they had so many of those—those demon plants in there. Bad allergies, you know how it goes.”

“Yeah,” Yunho’s scent is a blend of skin and relief, fearful but not directed at the floating butterflies innocently fluttering around the hydrangeas just inside the entrance. Yunho holds the bottle of water to Hongjoong’s neck so the condensation drips into the collar of his shirt. “Let’s call it a night so you can go home and take a fistful of antihistamines.” 

“Probably for the best,” Hongjoong wilts, embarrassed by his fumbling and a little miffed that a goddamn flower turned him into a sneezing, itching, burning mess. Yunho doesn’t move out of his personal bubble immediately, stepped close enough that Hongjoong can feel his body heat radiating in the space between their bodies. “Have a good night, Yunho.”

“Be careful getting home yourself,” Yunho says and grips his shoulders tight. He fidgets for a moment as several guests give them odd glances, probably gawking at Hongjoong’s drowned rat slash rash monster appearance more than anything. Yunho’s blood pressure ramps up so hard Hongjoong can actually hear it. “Maybe next time I can pick the place?”

“Um, sure,” Hongjoong blinks. “Next time, yeah.”

--------

San and Seonghwa find out about the butterfly garden fiasco. Seonghwa laughs hard enough, long enough that he stops making noise while he rolls around on the floor over the stain of old blood he’d left the last time they were over at Hongjoong’s apartment. 

“You went on a date!” Seonghwa howls into his rug. “You took him on a goddamned date!”

“No,” Hongjoong denies, kicking at Seonghwa’s feet for being a dick. “Shut up, it was a failed attempt at trying to scare him.”

“You bought him dinner and took him on a moonlit stroll through a field of butterflies,” San drawls from his couch, no doubt playing Hongjoong’s save file and spending all his hard earned rupees. “Seems pretty date-y to me.”

“It was barely even dark,” Hongjoong says in his own defense. “It wasn’t a date.”

Seonghwa curls a hand around his foot to press a kiss to the jut of his ankle bone. “It definitely was, but don’t worry, we support you completely.”

“Speak for yourself,” San says. “And give me back my jacket.”

Hongjoong clutches at the leather covering his arms. “But I like it. Can’t you buy another one like it?”

San glares at him balefully over the back of the couch. “I bought that in 1982 from a now defunct brand run by mobsters.” The sound of the last digit of Hongjoong’s painstakingly collected currency being spent dings over the surround sound. “Give. It. Back.”

“Fine,” Hongjoong throws it at San’s head. “But it still wasn’t a date.”

--------

Yunho invites him out to a late night hangout at a bowling alley two days after their last meetup. Hongjoong agrees easily enough, it’s probably just a way for the human to get over the guilt of watching him have an ‘allergic’ reaction.

“What do you do for work?” Yunho asks him while Hongjoong is trying to concentrate on the best way to take out a 7-10 split. 

“I play the vampire at Fright Nights from September to November 1st.” Hongjoong glares down the lane. If he can hit the bowling pin on the right—

“Wait you play the vampire?” Yunho gasps theatrically from the hard plastic seating area and Hongjoong’s swing goes wide. His bowling ball trajectory goes in a wide arc; the 7-10 stands like goalposts on either side of the lane and the ball stays rolling gently down the left gutter. “Is that where I laughed at you?”

“Yes,” Hongjoong purses his mouth at the reminder of the blow to his pride. “I have a reputation. How very dare you, sir.”

“Sorry,” Yunho apologizes with a giggle hidden behind a hand. “Soyeon had just broken up with me and I was all mixed up emotion wise. You know when something so devastating happens your emotional responses go haywire? That was the reason.” Yunho taps the stubbed end of the scoring pen against the scorepad. His scent goes a little tangy with grief that Hongjoong recognizes from that night in front of the Mirror Room. “We dated for four years and she suddenly decided she didn’t want me anymore? I don’t know what happened.” His eyes go distant. Wistful. "She still hasn't responded to my messages." 

Hongjoong mood sours. Of course. Part of him—a tiny, repressed, muffled part of himself buried deep down in his emotional graveyard—had held on to the hope that whatever this is between them was going to end up with some kind of romance, however brief. They’re near strangers going on friend dates to occupy the lonely void Yunho carries with him day-to-day. Nothing more, nothing less. 

Hongjoong loses at bowling. Spectacularly. 

Yunho laces their hands together tender sweet when they exit. “How do you feel about ice cream?”

“Okay,” Hongjoong whispers while his once-beating heart cracks. "Winner's buying."

“Okay.”

-------- 

His week goes from okay to better to best. Not only did Hongjoong manage to make four—four! A new record!—frat brothers piss themselves in the Mirror Room, he also gets thirteen comments directed at him specifically through the Fright Nights website and an invitation from Yunho to come to a 70s themed Halloween party hosted in his apartment. 

It’s the perfect opportunity for him to break out the sequined hot pants and roller skates he bought during his brief period of waking in 1974, just three months before asking Eden to put him under again in his secure holding area because he hated the mustaches and the aesthetics of the era so much. The shorts make his ass look really good though, he has to admit. 

He can smell the waft of alcohol and the crush of bodies sweating even before the elevator dings to let him know he’s made it to Yunho’s floor. It makes him feel a little odd and out of place—anchorless in a storm. He knows nothing and no one here, except for Yunho and maybe Mingi if he’s around. Someone dressed as both Sonny and Cher pulls him inside with an excited, “Oh damn, love the skates,” and a solo cup shoved into his hands.

Yunho takes one look at him and says, “You should probably change.” Though that doesn’t seem very fair considering Yunho is sporting a hilariously long fake mustache and skin tight bell bottoms.

“But it’s period specific,” Hongjoong argues with a spin on his skates. One long sock slides away from his knee enough that he has to bend down to readjust. “I’m only keeping up with your theme, sir.”

“Yeah, that’s the problem,” Yunho grumps but leads him towards the makeshift DJ stand where Mingi is slurring an old motown hit into one of those wireless karaoke microphones—badly. Hongjoong also has the fun realization that his coworker is an actual, honest-to-god werewolf based on the smell of wet dog and dry earth wafting out of the drunk man’s pores. 

“Yo! Hongjoong-hyung is here!” Mingi enthuses into the mic and a few people turn their heads to look. “Give us a twirl, man!”

Hongjoong wishes he still possessed the ability to get drunk on liquor. “Absolutely not.”

“You tell him,” Yunho says. “Let me introduce you to my other roommate and his boyfriend.”

And that’s how Hongjoong meets Yeosang and Jongho: two scentless ghouls masquerading as innocent college-age humans. They seem nice enough, a little quiet, but harmless. Hongjoong wonders where Yunho has been finding so many supernaturals to cohabitate with though. He wonders if Yunho knows.

Someone else calls Yunho away and Hongjoong is left adrift in a sea of bodies, of people he doesn’t know, and the smell of so much humanity in one place makes his nose burn and his teeth ache. His plan was to stay for an hour or two, just enough to see Yunho laugh and pal around with the people he knows. Maybe long enough that Yunho will organically bring up something that scares him and then Hongjoong won’t feel compelled to stay in his orbit any longer.

He’s propped against the kitchen island next to the punch bowl full of questionable life choices when a new human dressed like a priest, one that smells faintly like woodsmoke and sage, leans in next to him.

“Hi! I’m Wooyoung,” the guy half-yells over the sound of music. “You work with Mingi at the haunted house place right? I’ve seen you work!” Wooyoung gives him a double thumbs up. “You’re really cool, man!”

“Oh, um,” Hongjoong blinks, a little tongue-tied at the compliment. “Thank you?”

“Of course,” Wooyoung says brightly. “Are your roommates here too or is it just you?”

Hongjoong feels his skin crawl a little from the questioning, but this is probably just normal human curiosity brought on by too much alcohol. “Just me. I live alone anyway.”

“Whoa, really? That’s lucky,” Wooyoung says awed and touches his elbow briefly. “Where do you live that you can afford an apartment with the character actor salary? Mingi is always bumming money from me and even the black mail I have as ammunition doesn’t get him to stop.”

Hongjoong pretends to sip from his cup. “Little jobs here and there.” He doesn’t say Eden essentially bankrolls himself and his small coven with money he earned and invested god knows how many years ago. Hongjoong has never been good with money himself, mostly just relies on Eden or Seonghwa to deposit enough in his bank account that he can afford the rent and utilities and a nice coffee shop drink to sniff throughout the day when he’s bored. 

“Ah,” Wooyoung says and drops the subject almost as fast. “What’s it like working at Fright Nights?”

Yunho finds them just as Wooyoung is passing Hongjoong his phone back, new contact in place and a promise to meet up some time when Wooyoung isn’t working or going to class with Yunho and Yeosang. From here, Yunho’s scent is warped and twisted with so many others, Hongjoong can’t tell if the sickly tinge of jealousy is wafting from him or someone else. 

“What are you guys doing over here?” Yunho asks suspiciously.

“Wooyoung-ie was just giving me his number so I can give him costume tips,” Hongjoong shrugs before turning back to Wooyoung, “Hey you could go with me to Fright Nights and meet the crew sometime if you’d like. I can introduce you to our director Wheein, she’d probably love to use you as a guinea pig for the zombie walk makeup.”

“That would be awesome!” Wooyoung clings to his shoulders and swishes Hongjoong around, since he’s on skates Hongjoong can’t really help but to allow his new friend to glide him around on the floor. “You’re so cool, hyung!”

“I am?”

“He is, but I need to borrow him for a minute,” Yunho grabs Hongjoong away from Wooyoung’s enthusiastic grip to  tug him closer to his side. Hongjoong shrugs and goes with it, stumbles a little—just enough to overbalance—and ends up using Yunho’s arms to catch himself before he faceplants. 

It gives Hongjoong an up close and personal lungful of Yunho’s scent: annoyance, jealousy, arousal. A not that pleasant combination but Hongjoong still subtly tries to keep the inhalation of scent locked in his lungs anyway. Bizarrely, Yunho pushes him gently out of the door to his own apartment and out into the hallway towards the elevators. “We need some uh...some more ice. Come with me for moral support.”

“‘Kay,” Hongjoong allows easily enough. “You alright?”

“I’m fine. Cool as a cucumber.” Yunho answers though it comes out harsh enough Hongjoong can hear his teeth clack. Hongjoong feels a little badly for the neighbors considering they’ve made it a long way down the hall and he can still hear the heavy bass thumping against the walls. “What was Wooyoung saying to you?” Yunho asks apropos of nothing.

“Just asking me about my job and stuff, why? You jealous?” Hongjoong nudges him with his elbow as a joke. Yunho doesn’t say anything back but his ears color and his grip around Hongjoong’s shoulders tighten just a smidgen. He accepts that as the ‘yes’ it so clearly is and wonders if Yunho is jealous of Hongjoong himself for horning in on Wooyoung’s friendship. 

A helpless little part of himself selfishly hopes it’s directed at Wooyoung for getting too close.

--------

Hongjoong will always be the first to admit he’s not a good person. He wasn’t a good person in life, he certainly wasn’t in death, but apparently admitting it wasn’t enough and the universe is a spiteful bitch.

He and Yunho are aimlessly wandering the streets in Hongdae, stopping to watch buskers perform to the amazement of crowds and dipping into pop-up shops for cheap accessories and a new leather jacket—Hongjoong really missed the one San made him return. Real leather is surprisingly hard to come by, most of the shops only carrying the plastic facsimile that reeks of sinus destroying chemicals.

They don’t hold hands this time around. Hongjoong lost the plot of what he’s actually trying to accomplish hanging around Yunho so much in their previous meetups, but finding out what scares Yunho and using that to his advantage seems...so unimportant these days. It’s strange how quickly Hongjoong found himself attached to the human.

“I’m kind of hungry,” Yunho admits when they leave the third promising clothing store. Hongjoong spies a woman doling out homemade soup dumplings from a food cart nearby and offers to buy some for the trek home.

When he turns back—

Yunho is openly gaping at a woman in a slinky red two piece outfit, pin straight hair curling around the twirl of her index finger. The soup dumplings are blazing hot in their styrofoam cup but Hongjoong is suddenly chilled to the bone, insides shriveling at the interested spark in the woman’s scent. She smells like perfume and pepper, like a spice created specifically to tempt Yunho away.

“Soyeon-ie,” he hears Yunho whisper.

Hongjoong’s insides wither further to the point the blood bag he drained before they met up for the day-trip curdled in his stomach. He doesn’t stand a chance in the face of someone so attractive that Yunho had already been intimate with, there’s no space for him here. Not with the nervous energy rolling off of Yunho in waves; not with the jittery way Yunho glances back in Hongjoong’s direction like he’s casting around for any excuse to get away.

Hongjoong takes the hint and leaves—turns his back on the scene in front of him and pretends to be interested in a storefront across the street. The soup dumplings are still warm, Hongjoong can’t bring himself to throw them away. As much as it hurts to walk off, Yunho and Soyeon deserve privacy to have the talk they so obviously need and he’d given up on his voyeuristic looming almost as quickly as he’d gotten attached to Yunho himself.

He feels so fucking stupid. He should have just ignored Yunho laughing at him and—

“Hyung! There you are,” Yunho finds him almost immediately. “I was looking all over for you.” Hongjoong stares at him mystified. What? Why is he here? Yunho takes the still covered dumplings out of his hands to replace them with his own fingers. “Were you pouting?”

This is way too confusing. A muscle twitches beneath Hongjoong’s eye. “No? I was just giving you some space to talk to your girlfriend.”

“She’s not my girlfriend, hyung, not anymore,” Yunho says with a tiny frown. “I’m sorry if that made you uncomfortable.” Hongjoong shakes his head, eyes wide because he has no idea how to respond. “Still want to look for a new jacket?”

“Yeah,” Hongjoong breathes. He can only imagine what his heart would be doing right now if it weren’t a dead unmoving lump in his chest. “If you do. You’re sure you’re not bored or anything? We can do something else.”

Yunho’s fingers tighten around his hand. “I’m never bored when I’m with you, hyung.”

--------

San and Seonghwa decide Hongjoong has been spending too much time alone playing video games in his dinky little apartment and bullies him into a family togetherness night out at their favorite vampire gathering place. Eden joins them so he can make contact with someone on the Council. Looking at it from the outside in, you wouldn’t think the plain gray brickwork housed a lush den of debauchery, but when the four of them step through the doorway—and through a series of interconnecting dimly lit hallways—it’s to the sight of deep burgundy decor more at home in a Victorian manor than a building in the middle of Seoul.

The Donor’s Den.

A seedy little slice of Seoul’s underbelly populated by supernaturals and their would-be hopefuls ready and willing to turn. For the most part it’s a relaxed atmosphere, a few humans mingling in between lounge seats doling out orange juice while vampires feed from other humans monitoring their blood loss. A group of ghouls occupy one corner—they’re the unofficial bouncers since they’re the only ones who can handle pure silver if needed in a fight.

“Oh look, it’s the daywalker and his troupe of merry men,” Someone hoots at them. Seungri, a horrible human in life and an even worse vampire in death, mimes lewd gestures in their direction while several vampire hopefuls rub at his shoulders and his chest for attention. “Who the fuck invited you into this club? We don’t take outcasts.”

“Well you clearly take assholes and that’s just as bad don’t you think?” San says mildly. “Go choke on silver, dick.”

Seungri scowls, expression thunderous and enraged. “One day your sire won’t be around to protect you.”

Eden steps in then, a whisper of cloth as he materializes in front of the group and only inches from Seungri’s nose. “I suggest you watch your tone,” their sire whispers low and light. “Threaten my coven again and the Council will hear about it after I’ve dealt with you myself, little boy.” 

Seungri snorts, though Hongjoong notes with pride he’s been thrown off by the clear dismissal, and stomps off in a toddler’s tantrum. Seungri hisses a last, “Whatever, freaks,” over his shoulder and snaps his fingers until the humans with him scurry to catch up.

“Don’t listen to him,” Seonghwa soothes a palm against the back of Hongjoong’s head as San wraps his arms around his waist and holds tight. “You’re not a daywalker freak.”

“He’s like a little yapping chihuahua, hyung,” Hongjoong pats at both of their backs. “I don’t think I’ve ever listened to a word the newbie says.”

Eden only observes them before motioning them towards a back office.

The trek is eerily reminiscent of the day they adopted San only a scant ten years after Hongjoong had been turned, a fledgling cast off from his own clan for not killing a pack of hunters sniffing around the much larger coven’s den. San had been stripped of his rights to stay under their domain and shoved into torn rags for clothes. The Council member who handed him over said he’d been found starving and barely functioning on the side of the road, withered to the point his limbs no longer worked.

The Donor’s Den was much smaller then, only a small building covered in black linen to masquerade as a death house.

He must be experiencing the memory too, because San’s nails dig into his arm until Hongjoong removes them to twist their hands together tight. Hongjoong had never been a touchy person until San—until he’d volunteered to nurse San back to health as penance for the horrible shit he did in life.

The Council member is a mousy looking man dressed like an accountant who welcomes them with a sweep of his arm and the oppressive weight of his much older presence bearing down on their shoulders. Seonghwa guessed he was a member of the very Old Ones—born or created before the years hit the quadruple digits. 

The man greets them with a wide sweep of his arms. “Welcome, welcome. It’s been a while hasn’t it, Yonghwan?” 

“It’s ‘Eden’,” their sire corrects demurely, “‘Yonghwan’ hasn’t been gone for a long time now.”

“A shame,” the Council member takes in the size of their little ragtag family. “Have you not added anyone else to your fold? Your coven is mighty small for someone of your stature.”

Hongjoong can physically feel San start to bristle until Seonghwa reaches around both of them to hold San by the back of the neck, waiting until San deflates. Eden remains impassive but asks why they’ve been brought in.

“There have been some rumors going around of rogue vampires mauling humans in the last few months. We think it may be influence from Red Mist, but we’re still unsure.” The Council member sighs while pinching the bridge of his nose between two fingers. “I have my guesses as to whom it may be, but you know how the bureaucracy goes sometimes.”

“Hmm,” Eden folds himself into the chair across from his desk. “I assume the hunters are on the prowl already?”

“You got it.” The vampire leans back in his squeaky office chair. “We’ve already had two visits about the treaty being thrown at us if we don’t solve this internally by the end of the month. We’d appreciate your cooperation.”

“Seonghwa,” Eden beckons him forward. “Take these two home so I may speak to our council leader privately.” 

“Of course, sire,” Seonghwa agrees with a bow and leads them away out of the office and out of the Donor Den proper.

“This blows,” San bitches as soon as they’re outside. “I was all geared up to bite someone for the first time in weeks and Eden sends us home like a bunch of teens in need of  curfew.”

“We could always go do karaoke,” Seonghwa tries to soothe him over. “You like karaoke.”

San scowls for a long time before admitting, “I do like karaoke.”

--------

Over the instrumental track to Lee Hi’s ‘My Love’, Hongjoong finally admits he may possibly be interested in dating Jeong Yunho.

“You’re a fuckstick moron, you know that?” San whines into the microphone while Seonghwa clutches his stomach from laughing too hard. “Introduce us to him.”

“You just want to scare him off,” Hongjoong pouts. “No.”

“Yes,” San agrees. “Because you’re a fuckstick moron.”

--------

“Yunho, this is San and Seonghwa,” Hongjoong introduces them outside of a standalone noraebang. Yunho is being weirdly shy about meeting them, had shifted close enough to Hongjoong’s side that Yunho could grip the back of his sweater just shy of the curve of his hip. “They’re the bane of my existence.”

“Nice to finally meet you, Yunho,” Seonghwa interjects smoothly and shakes Yunho’s unoccupied hand. “And he’s lying, we’re his best friends.”

“Terrible, awful people,” Hongjoong stresses while Yunho smiles shyly.

“I’m having a hard time believing you,” Yunho muses. “Anyway, hi!”

Seonghwa’s face does that Thing that spells trouble, usually for Hongjoong’s general mental wellbeing. “We’ve heard a lot about you,” his eldest covenmate grins sharp. “So very much.”

Yunho’s scent spikes with—with something. Hongjoong can’t quite parse the new dark smell circling the edges of skin and detergent. “All good I hope.”

San, silent until now with his face stonily blank, snorts. “It’s always something about how cute you are or—”

“San!” Hongjoong nearly jumps out of his skin in his haste to cover San's mouth while Seonghwa spins around to hide laughter under the collar of his shirt. “No, shut up!”

“What?” San says mildly with a roll of his eyes, still muffled beneath the curve of Hongjoong’s palms. “It’s the truth isn’t it?”

“Please don’t listen to him,” Hongjoong says in mortification once they find an empty room. San and Seonghwa wander off to order snacks in a bid to give them some privacy (a small mercy Hongjoong will have to thank them for later). “They’re literally the worst, oh my god.”

“Why wouldn’t I listen to them? You think I'm adorable enough to tell your friends about me,” Yunho smiles wide and leans low enough to gently touch their foreheads together. “I think it’s sweet.”

Hongjoong witnesses Yunho’s eyes dilate in a daze. “...Oh.”

“Mmm,” Yunho agrees. “Pass me the booklet, I want to see if they have the new Park Bom single loaded yet.” 

--------

Yunho has a rare weekend off from work and invites him out to an amusement park that’s just been revamped with spooky decorations now that Halloween is on the horizon. 

“We can go once it gets dark,” Yunho excitedly tells him over the tinny phone connection. “You can critique all the actors dressed up like serial killers trying to scare people.”

Hongjoong joins him on twirling teacups, walks with him down the halls of horror houses (which are not up to his standards and he’s fairly certain Wheein would be horrified by the cheap plastic rats lining the walkways), and buys Yunho cardboard tubes of spun sugar dyed black while they wait in line for the swinging pirate ship ride. 

“Want some?” Yunho offers a pinched piece of the sweet treat. “It looks gross but it tastes pretty alright.”

“I’m good, thanks,” Hongjoong denies. He doesn’t even want to know what rotten sugar would do to his innards if he attempted a taste—or how far he’d projectile vomit once he added blood to the mix. “I bought that for you anyway.”

Yunho briefly gives him a furrowed eyebrow look of concern before finishing the last of his cotton candy, throwing the black and white swirled cardboard into a nearby bin, and lacing their hands back together, heedless of the sticky mess of his fingers. "Remind me to win you that giant stuffed bat at the ring toss before we leave."

It’s well after sunset. The sun was a fading orange line in the distance hours ago taking with it its rays of heat, but even so:

Hongjoong burns.

--------

Hongjoong isn’t sure what to call this particular not-date because it feels too...something. Domestic, maybe. Yunho had called after his shift at the convenience store begging Hongjoong to come with on a journey to IKEA for a new bedside table because his idiot roommates broke his roughhousing.

“I always get lost in here without someone holding my hand,” Yunho confesses in the space between furniture aisles. “Like, I legitimately wandered around for four hours once looking for a lamp.”

“That’s sort of hilarious,” Hongjoong pinches the fullness of Yunho’s cheeks between his fingers. “You’re like a baby.”

Yunho’s cheeks color, whether from embarrassment or the squeeze of Hongjoong’s fingers he’s not sure, but he smiles anyway. The small one where Yunho mostly rolls his lips between his teeth while dimpled lines appear on either side of his face. It’s so cute, Hongjoong can’t resist the urge to make soft cooing noises.

“Stop,” Yunho whines at him with his ears blazing red. “You’re embarrassing me.”

“Stop being precious and maybe I'll consider it,” Hongjoong laughs, unwilling to release his grip on Yunho’s face. Yunho just rolls his eyes, mimes biting at his hands and lands a wet smacking kiss to the center of Hongjoong’s left palm. 

“Whatever, none of these are really doing it for me,” Yunho tugs him away from the displays of stark white and light wood end tables. His scent is skin and clean wool and the bright cotton candy flavor of happiness. “Let’s go look at the stationary instead.”

‘Oh shit,’ Hongjoong thinks as Yunho hums happily a step ahead of him. ‘Oh fuck.’

--------

“San, what do I do,” Hongjoong moans into his covenmate’s lap after dropping Yunho home. “I actually really like Yunho and he has no idea I’m a vampire.”

He feels the tiny pinpricks of San’s nails dig into his scalp before they slide through his hair in soothing drags. “Hyung, you know I don’t like you becoming so attached to one human,” San sighs warm breath over his neck. “But if he makes you happy, then you might as well grab hold of him while you can.”

“So what you’re saying is run away and pretend I don’t have feelings?” Hongjoong asks hopefully.

“You’re not a coward, Hongjoong,” San huffs. “Stop acting like one.”

--------

Yunho sends him a message asking Hongjoong to meet him outside of his apartment building in the little park offset from the parking lot. It has a small swing set, a bench, and a rusty, creaking merry-go-round that saw better days fifteen years ago. Hongjoong reads the message four times before he can stop his fingers from shaking long enough to agree, and then a nerveless twenty minutes hiding a squeal behind his hands because he’s an idiot. 

He’s never been this anxious about seeing a human, not once, but the smile backlit by the sunset Yunho gifts him with is gorgeous and the jittering of his nerves finally seem worth the hassle.

“Hey,” Yunho waves him over. “I wanted to talk to you.”

“Hi, I—uh,” Hongjoong coughs to cover up his stumbling. “What’s up? Why’d you call me out here?”

Yunho stands in one fluid movement that would have made any vampire a tad jealous, back straight so his shadow looms in a stark line across the landscape. “Look, I’ve noticed some things—” Hongjoong stiffens. Holy shit, he thought he was being subtle and covert but...maybe not? “—about your eating habits and I’m really concerned about you, hyung. I’m pretty sure you already know how I feel about you but I just wanted you to be aware that if you want to get help, you have my full support. I accept you. I like you a lot regardless of—”

“Let me stop you right there,” Hongjoong jumps in before Yunho can continue his confession slash bleeding heart spiel. “I don’t have an eating disorder.”

Yunho runs his palms down the length of Hongjoong’s arms until he can link their hands together. “Hongjoong, I realize this is hard to hear, but all I want is for you to get better. You’re perfect, you don’t need to do this to yourself.”

“That’s sweet, really it is, and I appreciate your support,” Hongjoong squeezes their clasped hands with a sigh that feels as if it comes from his toes. “But I seriously do not have an eating problem.”

Yunho’s mouth is a tight pucker and his eyebrows are furrowed deep enough to form craters in the middle of his forehead. “Enlighten me.”

This is it. The moment he’s been dreading but, at the same time, Yunho did sort of confess first so Hongjoong should at least return the favor. Still though, he’s so afraid of Yunho’s reaction that he’s starting to stink of fear so horrifically Hongjoong can smell himself. “I’m a vampire.”

He expects Yunho to drop their hands in fear or to turn tail and run, but instead Yunho scowls fiercely and gently kicks at the edge of Hongjoong’s sneakers. “Be serious, dickhead. I care about you and your health and this is how you’re going to treat me?”

“No, no, I’m actually a vampire!” Hongjoong grips tight to Yunho’s hands so he can’t storm off in a huff. With a shaky inhale, Hongjoong allows his eyes to flash disturbing, intimidating crimson; opens his mouth so Yunho can watch the slow unsheathing of his fangs from his gums. “See?”

“Nice,” Yunho says flatly. “Where are Mingi and San hiding with the camera equipment?” His scowl twists further until Yunho looks on the verge of crying. “This is low, hyung. I’m just worried about you.” Hongjoong winces when Yunho sniffs dangerously. “And I just confessed which you’ve also ignored for this dumb...prank or whatever it is you’re trying to do.”

“Yunho, I—I’m being totally truthful here!” Hongjoong hastily places the tip of each of Yunho’s forefingers against his teeth so Yunho can feel his fangs drop and retract for himself. “This is real, I swear!”

Yunho’s scent loses a little of the embarrassed dejection that had started the slow creep inwards—deep saltiness trying to invade Yunho’s otherwise comfort in a storm presence. “Oh.”

“And I like you too. Obviously,” Hongjoong blurts with Yunho’s fingers still trembling on the edge of his mouth.

“Oh. Wow,” Yunho sways, trips over his own feet and has to grab at the bench behind himself to keep upright. “What—how?”

“You’re just really cute,” Hongjoong says a little helplessly. 

“No, not that—I mean, kind of that, thank you,” Yunho laughs with his eyes wide, a little hysterically. “But I meant...how are you a vampire? How is this real?”

“Well, I turned in the usual way, I think,” Hongjoong tugs at the end of his sweatshirt to give his hands something to do. This is not going at all how he thought it would, though there is considerably less screaming involved. “An old vampire bit me, gave me his blood, and ta-dah! Here I stand before you!” He spreads his arms wide for emphasis. 

Yunho gapes at him open mouthed like a fish out of water gasping in the air. “When? How—How are you here? It’s still daylight!” Yunho hyperventilates. “This is in no way a real thing that is happening right now. There is no way you exist, I’ve been hallucinating going on dates with a super hot, funny guy for the past month.”

“You think I’m hot?” Hongjoong grins.

“Leave me alone,” Yunho’s cheeks instantly turn an interesting shade of pink. “Since when do vampires even exist? They’re supposed to be make believe!”

“Look, I don’t know all the, like, intricacies of vampire lore. I’m new at this, alright? Cut me some slack, Yunho.” Hongjoong says with a whine tinging the edges of his voice. 

Yunho’s scent goes haywire, a mixture of fear and amusement Hongjoong has no idea how to parse—good or bad. “How new?”

“Uh—”

“Hongjoong.”

“Only...seventy or so years? Give or take a decade?” Hongjoong strikes a pose, hands on his hips cocked saucily to one side. “Not bad for a grandpa, eh?”

“Please,” Yunho wheezes at him. “Please stop talking, you’re just making this whole situation so much worse.”

Hongjoong pouts, chest aching hollowly in a way it hadn’t managed since his biggest loss and he’d gone into his long slumber by choice. He likes Yunho. He really likes Yunho and not at all as a source of nourishment. If he’s honest with himself, Yunho has been his number one choice of companionship almost since their first meeting and definitely after the horrible run-in with Park Jongin. 

He hopes being vampire isn’t a deal breaker but Hongjoong steels his nerves against the incoming blow of fearful rejection regardless.

Yunho sits down heavily against the bench. “I don’t—”

“You don’t have to say anything right now,” Hongjoong interrupts hastily, a coward to his core and unwilling to hear the rejection face to face. “Go home and think—or stay here and think it over—I’ll just go home and you can text me your answer.”

Yunho’s hand strikes out lightning quick before Hongjoong can retreat and snags his sleeve in a vice grip. “Oh no you don’t, you’re not getting out of this that easily.”

“Yunho, please have mercy on an old man,” Hongjoong pleads.

“No,” Yunho smiles at him. It’s all teeth and, somehow, even though they’re blunted and unmistakably human, the sight of them makes Hongjoong’s skin crawl in fear. Maybe the slightest bit of arousal, too, but for the most part it’s fear. “And stop calling yourself an old man, you’re going to give me a complex about our age gap.”

“What’s an age gap matter if you’re just going to reject me anyway,” Hongjoong grumbles but lets himself be guided down to sit next to his...his Yunho, who may or may not be his friend that he wants to date for real. 

Yunho seems to wait until Hongjoong relaxes totally next to him before releasing his grip on his sleeve and sliding their hands together sweetly, hidden in the space between their hips and if Hongjoong still had a functioning heart, he’d bet it would be going 90 to nothing right now.

“So,” Yunho says.

“So,” Hongjoong parrots back and busies himself with staring at the blades of grass at their feet. There’s a ladybug climbing the long stalk of a weed growing tall by the edge of the bench, a long tendril of some errant seed that she’s steadily making her way to the tip. Hongjoong counts her spots and prays for a swift death—second death, anyway.

Yunho distracts him from his beetle induced focus session by hooking their ankles together and swinging them gently to and fro. “So, what are the rules for dating a vampire? I’m assuming no eating garlic and throw out any crosses I might have in the apartment.”

“I—” Hongjoong whips his head around to stare gobsmacked at Yunho’s profile. “You—you want to? Date me, I mean. You want to actually date me.”

“Yeah,” Yunho says still looking towards the low light of the sunset. “I wanted to date you before I learned you were a vampire, I don’t see why that’s going to change now that I know your secret.” His eyes scrunch adorably when he grins. “You’re still you. And I happen to really like you the way you are now. Unless this is a really long and drawn out attempt at luring me into your vampire den to kill me.”

“Oh,” Hongjoong breathes. He sucks in a lungful of air as if he needs it, as if his lungs didn’t cease functioning when Eden turned him so many years ago. “It’s—it’s really not. I don’t, uh, kill people anyway. It’s pretty much a death sentence for a vampire to actually kill people this day and age, there’s a treaty and shit you have to abide by unless you want a stake through your chest or your head on a pike.” Hongjoong fiddles with the edge of the bench where a piece of jagged wood is popped up, probably swollen from rain and losing shape after a subsequent drought. “Also San says I’m too soft.”

Yunho finally looks at him then. The ladybug takes flight. Hongjoong stops trying to breathe. 

“What do you eat?” Yunho asks curiously.

“Blood bags, mostly,” Hongjoong screws his face up in remembrance of the rats he used to chase for sustenance back when he was newly turned and Eden had yet to reveal himself. “Um, and you can buy cow and pig blood at the markets these days and that’s generally pretty okay to feed on, assuming the human hasn’t added anything gross in it like corn syrup or food coloring.”

“I see,” Yunho stops the slow back and forth of their hooked together ankles. “So you don’t drink from humans?”

“Sometimes,” Hongjoong feels Yunho tense hard next to him, distress bleeding into the bulk of his scent, and is quick to add, “But only if they’re a willing participant! We have rules about that now.”

Yunho hums and his scent evens back out to the reassuring haze of comfort Hongjoong has come to know and...highly appreciate. It’s a human scent, obviously, but it’s warm and weighty on the back of his tongue and makes the urgency of panic slide away as if it had never been there to begin with. Hongjoong inhales greedy mouthfuls to get as much of Yunho in his body as possible. Maybe, even if Yunho decides this thing they have isn’t necessarily for him, Hongjoong will still be able to remember him by sense memory alone.

Yunho finally starts gently swaying his legs again after a long pause. “Does garlic actually affect you?”

Hongjoong laughs. “No, that’s just something we made up for humans to feel better about their chances at survival. Our noses have a keener sense of smell so the odor isn’t super pleasant but it’s not going to kill us or drive us off.” He reaches over with his unoccupied hand to tap a nail against Yunho’s watch face. “Pure silver, on the other hand, gives us something close to a chemical burn. And a silver stake through the heart would kill any one of us instantly.”

He watches Yunho mull the new information over before nodding as if he’s accepting this new worldview as fact. “What about the sun?” 

Hongjoong feels Yunho’s thumb drag absentmindedly across his knuckles. He’s suddenly exceedingly glad he hadn’t fed in a long while or else the blood in his system would have turned his cheeks to neon red. “The sun is a miasma of incandescent plas—” 

Yunho pinches his mouth closed before he can finish with a glare.

“No jokes. The actual answer, Hongjoong, please.”

“Sorry,” Hongjoong mumbles against Yunho’s fingers. “I’m nervous.”

“You’re a vampire, what is there to be nervous about?” Yunho deadpans and releases his fingers. “If anyone should be nervous here it’s me, the guy who’s currently sitting at the bottom of the food chain. Answer the question.”

“It gives me a headache but that’s about it,” Hongjoong admits. “We don’t actually turn into dust at the first hint of sunlight. Most vampires I know just avoid it because they’re really into the goth aesthetic and think daywalkers are traitors to the imagery.”

“Wow, so literally none of the vampire myths got it right.” Yunho laughs, easy and free instead of terrified and upset like Hongjoong expected going into this. There’s hope. 

“And you’re okay with this? With me?” Hongjoong presses but makes sure to keep his fingers lax in Yunho’s grip in case he needs the escape. He might be a quote unquote apex predator but he’s not cruel, Yunho deserves an out and Hongjoong isn’t going to force him to stay. “Because you don’t have to be, we can pretend I never, uh, pursued you in the first place and go back to being friends. Or not friends. Up to you.”

“I mean, I still think a hidden camera crew is going to pop out of the bushes at any given moment, but I’m not afraid of you if that’s what you’re asking.” Yunho shifts on the bench so they can better face each other, Hongjoong wills away the urge to flee. “I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again: I like you. A lot. I want to try if that’s okay with you, Hongjoong.”

“It’s okay,” he croaks back, throat closing against a swell of emotion that threatens to swallow him whole. “Totally awesome.”

“Okay,” Yunho says with a crooked grin and blushing cheeks. “Show me your teeth again.”

--------

Hongjoong finds dating a human is similar to dating a vampire, but with the caveat of Yunho has to eat and sleep and breathe, which makes a lot of his usual haunts no-go’s. He spends a lot of time on the internet researching how to date in the 21st century; locating restaurants and parks, tiny pop up galleries and where to find the best waffles at 7 o’clock in the evening. In between Yunho’s obligations at school and work—not to mention Hongjoong’s own shifts at Fright Nights—they find themselves in coffee shops where Yunho inhales enough caffeine to take down a giraffe.

Yunho smiles with every stuttering suggestion.

“Hyung, you know we can just hang out at my apartment or yours, right?” Yunho leans down to smush a kiss into his temple in the middle of the street, right outside the latest cafe on their way to a small concert being held in a park. “We don’t have to constantly be going somewhere. I just want to spend time with you.”

“I—” Hongjoong gulps down his feelings as Yunho hums and slides his lips over to press a kiss to his cheek. “Really? You won’t get bored?”

“Really,” Yunho’s voice takes on a new quality, silken and smooth, while his scent darkens with arousal just enough that Hongjoong nearly bites off his own tongue to keep from getting hard in the middle of the fucking street. “I can think of a few things we can do to pass the time.”

They don’t make it to the park.

They don’t make it to the concert or the art gallery the next night or the piano recital a week after that either. Hongjoong has to drain copious amounts of blood bags to compensate since without them he’s not ‘hydrated’ enough to perform. Hongjoong forgets exactly once and ends up riding Yunho into filthy oblivion on his couch while his boyfriend made guilty, punched out noises into his back for not being able to make Hongjoong cum too.

(It’s Yunho’s own fault considering he was still a little leery about Hongjoong’s teeth going anywhere near his dick, which—fair.)

--------

There are days when Hongjoong forgets Yunho isn’t like one of the donors at the clubs. Yunho doesn’t want teeth breaking through his skin—not that Hongjoong blames him, he only experienced it once and fucking died —

He still smells so enticing though, especially now when he’s turned on and grinding against Hongjoong’s thigh, whimpering shy little cut off phrases as Hongjoong cruelly keeps Yunho from undoing his zipper while his boyfriend’s cock chafes from the dig of the metal teeth at the tip. 

“Hongjoong, please,” Yunho begs in his ear while circling his hips for any kind of soft friction. It’s fucking adorable to watch desperation turning Yunho’s cheeks cherry red, tears dotting the fan of his eyelashes, the hiccuping little screams he’s trying so hard to hold back when Hongjoong lifts his leg to grind harder against Yunho’s dick. “Please be nice to me.”

“I’m always nice to you,” Hongjoong can’t help but coo and wipes away a tear with the edge of his thumb as it slips over Yunho’s cheek. He drags his thumb down and down until he can run the wet tip of it over the throbbing pulse in Yunho’s neck. Here, just beneath the surface, Yunho’s lifeblood pounds urgently in his veins. Hongjoong loses a little bit of himself—loses who knows how much time—counting the beats of Yunho’s heart until his boyfriend mewls loud and twitches hard in his lap.

“Hyung, hyung,” Yunho slurs wetly into his neck. “Hongjoong—god—”

Hongjoong places a carefully closed mouth kiss to Yunho’s neck at the same instant he tugs away the zipper and fists Yunho’s erection in a tight grip. It takes only three little barely there tugs of his hand before Yunho cringes in on himself and comes in aching pulses.

“See? I am nice to you,” Hongjoong tells him sometime later, after they’d washed up and Yunho arranged Hongjoong to his liking for a post-orgasm nap on the couch. 

“No, you’re really mean and I don’t know why I put up with you.” Yunho drops a sloppy kiss to his cheek to let Hongjoong know he’s joking. “I’m gonna take a nap, don’t move.”

Yunho falls asleep in seconds. Hongjoong clenches his mouth tight to keep from making a shameful noise at the fact his wonderful human can relax enough in his presence to sleep. Even wild animals know not to come within ten feet of Hongjoong when he used to stalk through the woods outside of town in search of animal prey, the fact Yunho is here sleeping so soundly while Hongjoong could so easily rip Yunho’s throat out with his teeth—

Hongjoong loses a nebulous amount of time counting each individual eyelash barely touching the edge of Yunho’s cheeks while the sound of late evening traffic slows down to a crawl. He doesn’t actually need to sleep himself, but Yunho breathing slow and even and warm against his chest is enough to lull Hongjoong into slumber; drags him down into the deep dark unconscious void almost against his volition.

For the first time in nearly a century, Hongjoong dreams.

--------

Yunho is on the floor. Around them are the screams of humans and supernatural creatures alike, the cacophonous sound of disaster and ruin echoing in the space. Someone bumps into Hongjoong’s back with a snarl before jolting away again to join into a fight. 

Yunho is on the floor.

There’s blood on Hongjoong’s hands. He can taste blood in his mouth as his lips curl into a manic grin around his fangs—sharp and white and deadly. Hongjoong looks down and his nails are claws, wicked daggers at the end of each finger covered in wet gore.

Yunho is on the floor. Hongjoong is standing over him.

Yunho is bleeding from his neck, expression stricken and pale, slowly losing all color until his face and his hands are sheet white. He falls—not asleep. He’s unmoving, cheeks the color of death. There’s a howl of anguish and then—

--------

Mingi and Yeosang are thankfully spending time elsewhere for the night when he and Yunho stumble into the entrance of Yunho’s apartment, lips locked and hands wandering deliciously over heated skin. Hongjoong remembered to drain and entire carton of cow’s blood this time—and to scrub his mouth raw beforehand so Yunho didn’t taste any of it on his breath—so he was ready and willing, hot little zips of intense pleasure already starting to pulse in his groin when Yunho pulls him in tight by his hips. Yunho moans through the cracked open seam between their mouths, one hand wandering up Hongjoong’s shirt and the other dipping low to cup the jut of one hip, pulls their groins together tight to rut against one another through their jeans. 

It excites Hongjoong so much, so fast that his fangs drop down without his realizing to slice into the thin skin of  Yunho’s lip.

“Ow!” 

Hongjoong watches the blood bubble up transfixed like a moth so a flame. “I—s-sorry, I didn’t mean to—” He swallows when his mouth fills with saliva at the sight. “Yunho, I’m so—”

“It’s alright,” Yunho quiets him, blotting the deep red droplets away with his thumb. Hongjoong can’t stop staring at the crimson beads welling and sliding across his skin, mouth watering and eyes blurring with want from the smell alone. If smells could be attractive, then Yunho’s blood was gorgeous—it’s red silk and champagne; it’s every bad decision Hongjoong ever made in his youth all tied up in a neat little ribbon. Yunho pulls him in by his belt loops. “Accidents happen, just be more careful with your teeth. Come back here.”

“N-no, I think I need to go, I can’t—” Hongjoong forces himself to stop inhaling. Yunho sucks his lip to clear the blood away and Hongjoong has to forcibly stop himself from stepping forward to suck it down himself. “I’m sorry but I need to take a step back for a bit.”

“Are you seriously about to blueball me because your teeth cut my lip,” Yunho deadpans

“Yes,” Hongjoong says with no small amount of guilt attached. It comes out throaty and low, dangerous in a way he’s never allowed himself with Yunho present—hissed between his teeth like a knife’s edge waiting to slice. Yunho shivers and Hongjoong is aware of himself to know it’s not from being turned on. “I need to go, text me later?”

“Of course,” Yunho opens the door for him with his back pressed up tight to the nearest wall. “Text you later.”

--------

Hongjoong runs at full tilt from Yunho’s apartment directly to Eden’s home where Seonghwa is luxuriating on a giant cushion upside down scrolling through his phone held inches away from his nose.

“Seonghwa-hyung, please, you gotta help me,” Hongjoong begs as soon as he’s within reaching distance. “I’m in trouble!”

Seonghwa leaps up, phone clattering to the floor forgotten. “Where’s the body? I know some ghouls who can take care of it and then we can hide you in the safe room for—”

“No, no, not that kind of trouble,” Hongjoong grabs at Seonghwa’s shoulder before his hyung can dart off in preparation for—whatever he was about to plan. “I need help with Yunho.”

“Like, performance issues?” Seonghwa grimaces. “Because I love you but I’m not going to be a stand-in for you just because your dick doesn’t work or whatever.”

“Not that, either,” Hongjoong mentally vomits at the thought of sharing Yunho. “I meant—I’m having a problem. With my teeth.”

“Your teeth?” Seonghwa blinks and drops back to his oversized cushion. “What, like a cavity? I didn’t think we could get those…”

“Not a cavity, my fangs just keep—they keep dropping against my will.” Hongjoong joins Seonghwa on the floor, the actual carpet, and whimpers pathetically at the memory of accidentally hurting Yunho. “It’s dangerous but I can’t make them stop.”

Seonghwa hums. “I don’t see the issue, Joong-ie. Just give the boy a little nibble, what’s the harm?” He starts snickering when Hongjoong angrily slaps at his thighs at the suggestion. “Sounds like vampire puberty.”

“You are so unhelpful,” Hongjoong glares. “I don’t know why I bother coming to you for these things.”

He avoids Yunho like the plague for exactly 56 hours before his boyfriend demands an explanation. Hongjoong is weak, weaker still when Yunho is angry, and invites him over after draining at least two containers of blood from his fridge so take the hungry edge off, like maybe if he drinks enough now he won’t be tempted to drink from Yunho later.

“Well?” Yunho demands with his hands on his hips. “Tell me what’s wrong or I will call Seonghwa right now.”

“Why do you have Seonghwa’s number?” 

Yunho purses his mouth. “We’re not talking about that, we’re talking about you. What’s the problem?”

Hongjoong fidgets with the rings around his fingers while Yunho looms over him on the couch. “You smell—”

“I smell?” Yunho cuts him off. “Is it bad? Do I need to shower more or something?”

“No, it’s the opposite! The complete opposite,” Hongjoong is quick to defend Yunho from himself. He could already see his boyfriend self consciously folding inward to make himself as small as possible, already taking small steps backward to save Hongjoong from his ‘stink’. “You smell so good my fangs keep trying to slip down. Did slip down. It’s how your lip got cut the other night, I’m really sorry.”

“Oh,” Yunho gasps with a blink. And then he starts giggling.

Hongjoong kicks at Yunho’s trembling kneecaps. “It’s not funny! You should be upset!”

“Why should I be upset that I smell so good my boyfriend can’t control himself?” Yunho smirks, leans down until he’s close enough that he can slip his fingers through the loops in Hongjoong’s jeans. “That’s cute.”

“Fuck off,” Hongjoong says dazedly from the proximity. “Seonghwa says I’m going through vampire puberty.”

“Adorable,” Yunho says in all seriousness before leaning down to press their mouths together quick. Hongjoong’s fangs bite into his own bottom lip almost instantly.

“Dammit.”

Yunho laughs at him

--------

Several dates later, bleeding close to actual Halloween, they’re huddled close together for warmth on Hongjoong’s couch watching a marathon of bad made for TV movies. Hongjoong made sure to drink twice as much before Yunho came over again, not only because it helped stave off the cravings for his boyfriend’s blood but also makes his skin hot to the touch now that the temperature outside is dropping like a stone.

Out of nowhere, in the middle of a somewhat gory werewolf transformation scene, Yunho asks him, “Does it hurt?”

Hongjoong doesn’t think he’s talking about the on screen werewolf. “Does what hurt?”

“Getting bitten.” Yunho plays with a loose thread in Hongjoong’s favorite quilt. “The internet can’t seem to agree one way or the other.”

“Yunho, it’s teeth going into your skin. Of course it’s going to hurt.” Hongjoong soothes the shudder of Yunho’s shoulders with a palm as best he can. “There are things you can do to distract yourself but it’s not like getting bitten by a mosquito or getting a shot.” Yunho stays silent, but his fingers tremble around the edge of their blanket, movie almost totally forgotten. “What’s brought this on?”

“I uh, I just thought—you were so messed up about your teeth coming out when we make out, I thought we could—”

Hongjoong has to stop him right there. “No.”

“But—” Hongjoong pinches Yunho’s mouth closed to keep him from speaking, too much temptation all at once.

“No, Yunho,” Hongjoong repeats. “I can’t do that to you. I won’t.”

Yunho shakes off the fingers on his mouth. “But you can bite some rando on the street that offers up their neck? Why can’t it be me?”

“Because I—because I just can’t,” Hongjoong feels tears well in the corner of his eyes and is mortified by it. “When you hurt, I can smell it and it makes me—”

“It makes you?” Yunho presses.

The apartment isn’t quiet, not with the television blaring the sound of werewolves fighting over something stupidly human and trivial, but Hongjoong has to stop talking to gather his thoughts. There’s so much he could say—all of his fears about Yunho’s age, about his humanity, about the tender skin barely separating them from absolute ruin.

“When you hurt, I hurt,” Hongjoong admits, finally. “I don’t think I could handle being the cause of your pain even if you want to give in willingly.”

Yunho stays quiet for a long time in response, chewing over the information. “What if we work up to it? Like barely press your teeth against my skin one day, harder the next, and see how it goes from there.”

“That’s insane,” Hongjoong laughs, watery and weak willed. It sounds like the worst plan he’s ever heard and still the hopeful slant to Yunho’s mouth makes him want to try. “You’re a crazy person.”

“No, I just like you a lot.” Yunho climbs into his lap, arms wrapped around his shoulders and fingers playing with the hair at the base of his skull. “Now, pucker up, I wanna make out.”

“Bonkers,” Hongjoong says fondly.

Yunho leans in and Hongjoong meets him half-way.

--------

As a way to combine his two friend groups, Hongjoong invites the entire group out to see him work his magic at Fright Nights the night of Halloween. He makes sure to let Seonghwa and San know that Yunho is still ignorant of the facts he lives with other supernaturals, asks them to keep it hush hush unless the other parties say something first.

“Just, for the love of god, don’t embarrass me,” Hongjoong begs them outside of the venue. “I will pay you with so many blood bags if you two will just not be yourselves for a few hours.”

“You have so little faith in us my little gumdrop,” Seonghwa coos at him before squishing Hongjoong’s cheeks a tad harsh between his fingers. “Chill.”

Hongjoong needn’t have worried, because everyone—Yeosang’s boyfriend Jongho and Wooyoung included—get on like a house on fire. There’s a little hiccup when San takes one look at Wooyoung and says, “Hunter” like he’s spitting poison. Hongjoong assumes it’s a case of mistaken identity, like maybe the cloying incense from Yunho’s party is still clinging to Wooyoung’s scent by chance, until Wooyoung nods.

Hongjoong has to reevaluate his life when Wooyoung adds, “Yeah, but I’m not a fuckin’ snitch.”

San continues to glare while Seonghwa mimes something lewd behind his back in Hongjoong’s direction. Hongjoong debates reevaluating his dedication to his little band of pseudo-brothers, too. “I like you,” San says finally. “What’s it like to be on the other side?”

They wander away from the group. Yunho whispers worriedly into Hongjoong’s ear, “Is that safe?”

“They wouldn’t try anything we haven’t done,” Hongjoong assumes, cracking the face paint around his mouth with an attempt at a reassuring smile while Yunho pouts. He doesn’t even try to resist the urge to squeeze Yunho’s jaw so his mouth puckers awkwardly. “You’re cute when you’re worried.”

“Shut up,” Yunho bashfully brings a hand up to cover most of his face on a laugh. “Hyung.”

“It’s the truth!” Hongjoong winds his arms around Yunho’s waist while their horrible, awful, no good friends all pretend to gag in the background. “You’re the cutest person in the world, Yunho-yah.”

“You’re horrible,” Yunho sniffs but drops a kiss to his mouth, careful not to smudge Hongjoong’s meticulously applied face paint. His gums tingle from the slow unsheathing of his teeth at the contact.

“That’s not a very nice thing to say about your boyfriend,” Hongjoong reprimands, but it comes out lisped and muffled by his teeth refusing to cooperate in his mouth. Yunho smirks. 

Asshole.

Hongjoong leaves the group to take his place outside the room of mirrors and waits for everyone to make their way to his position. Mingi, hidden three doors down, shoots him a thumbs up and drops his werewolf mask down over his face. There’s a new face in the crowd of character actors tonight, one Wheein has failed to mention at the meeting before they opened. Hongjoong assumes it was a lapse in memory, Halloween night is always busiest so it’s all hands on deck for the duration of their operating hours.

Except, the new face isn’t new at all—it’s Seungri, poorly disguised beneath layers of faux gore, creeping behind the framework of decorations and hidden corners. Hongjoong had all but forgotten about him. This doesn’t seem like his sort of scenery either: Seungri was dark leather and new-money hideaways. He wasn’t popculture zombie paint and haunted houses.

The first group passes beneath him without issue. Hongjoong mostly ignores them in favor of watching Seungri lurk in the shadows and dropping—something. Could be stink bombs if he’d gotten approval from Wheein beforehand but something in his gut tells Hongjoong he hadn’t.

Hongjoong loses track of him when he’s contractually obligated to scare a group consisting of four muscleheaded guys trying to act tough for their partners. Hongjoong relishes the screams that come from the largest of them, a man four times as large as him who instantly clings to his girlfriend’s neck while she rolls her eyes at all of them.

When he returns to his post, Seungri is gone. Mingi is busy chasing another group down a separate hallway, and Hongjoong is—alone. Until he twigs on to Yunho's breathy laughter coming around the corner with Wooyoung and San desperately clutching at either side of his shoulders. Hongjoong has a moment—a singular, instantaneous moment—where he sees his family come together. Supernaturals and humans alike, a group he could lean on while allowing them to lean on him and maybe—maybe—they won’t end in disaster like his actual human family torn apart by Hongjoong’s penchant for violence and his terrible need for carnality in the worst way.

That is...until he spies Seungri swoop down from a rafter he’d concealed himself in, grip at Yunho’s elbow to jerk him out of San and Wooyoung’s hold, and swipes a clawed hand in a jagged arch down Yunho’s front. As if watching through radio static, Hongjoong sees blood blossom from the wound as it soaks into Yunho’s shirt—

The last thing he remembers is the sound of screaming.

--------

Yunho is on the floor. There’s blood in Hongjoong’s mouth; there’s blood on his hands; someone in the background is screaming for help. He can smell heat—a fire. 

Yunho is on the floor.

He’s alive, thank fuck, but he’s shocked and wounded and so intensely scared that Hongjoong can taste it over the poisonous creep of tainted blood seeping over his tongue—Red Mist. Whoever he bit, and he hopes it was Seungri, they were under the influence of the drug—an insidious little spice that makes vampire senses go haywire, makes them lose their restraint until all they can do is bite and kill. 

Hongjoong can’t remember anything. Yunho is on the floor but his eyes are open. Wooyoung is there, suddenly, blessedly in his field of vision applying pressure to the worst of the gash bubbling threateningly in Yunho’s chest.

Mingi’s roar echoes down the hall, along with the panicked screams of other groups as Seonghwa lights a few papery decorations on fire to help clear out the worst of the Mist settling like fireflies near their feet.

Yunho is on the floor, whimpering pathetically when Wooyoung applies more pressure to the wound, and Hongjoong finally starts trembling. He hurts, everything hurts. There’s a blackness creeping over his vision that doesn’t seem like it’s his own.

San pulls him away. “We have to go!”

“But, Yunho,” Hongjoong stumbles over his feet. “Yunho—!”

“The hunters are on the way, if they find you here you’re as good as dead!” Hongjoong refuses to leave when San tries to jerk him forwards. “Wooyoung has your boy, he’ll be alright!”

“He’s on the floor, San,” Hongjoong says stupidly. “I can’t—”

“You can and you will,” Seonghwa says tightly from his other side, and together with San manage to drag him bodily away from the scene. It’s only when they’re nearly around the bend that Hongjoong takes notice of Yeosang and Jongho standing like immovable pillars around Yunho for protection, eyes blazing white and silver chains wrapped around their fists.

Yunho is on the floor, bleeding out and pale, and it hurts too much to leave. 

Hongjoong blacks out before they reach the nearest exit.

--------

Wooyoung texts him the all clear once they make it from the burning inferno of the haunted house and again when Yunho is discharged from the hospital two days and one blood transfusion later. Hongjoong waits for minutes once he knows Yunho is home before running as fast as his legs and his vampire strength can carry him to the block of apartments where Mingi is standing watch. 

“He’s still really pale, hyung,” Mingi warns him gently. “Don’t be too upset, yeah? It wasn’t your fault.”

Mingi was right. Yunho is a pale ghost beneath the sheets of his bed, eyes open but glazed over like he’s withdrawn into himself for safety. Hongjoong knocks first, so at least Yunho has warning that someone else is here.

“Hongjoong,” Yunho says once, quietly devastated before his face crumples on a sob and he reaches desperately in Hongjoong’s direction.

Hongjoong holds him close, mindful of the bandages and the long cut that still smells like antiseptic and scabbed over meat. “I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you,” Hongjoong whispers once the worst of the crying is over. “If I hadn’t invited you out—if you hadn’t been there—”

Yunho shakes his head. “If you hadn’t been there protecting me in the first place, I’d be dead.” Hongjoong can’t hold back the whine of grief. “Shh, this could have happened at any time or at any place.” 

“But if it weren’t for me being around, you wouldn’t be—”

Yunho cups a hand over his mouth. “Too many what if’s, not enough feeling sorry for me.” He grins, it comes out more of a grimace but it’s something and at least Yunho is putting forth the effort to try. “Listen to me, Kim Hongjoong. I’m safe. I’m alive and most importantly I’ll heal.” Yunho takes a shuddering, shaky inhale. “But I was so scared.”

“I know,” Hongjoong buries his head against Yunho’s shoulder. “I’m so fucking sorry, Yunho. Tell me to go and I’ll go, I won’t bother you with my vampire bullshit ever again. I swear it.”

“Fuck that,” Yunho declares. “You’re stuck with me, idiot.” His scent is still fear and pain and cotton laundry detergent all knotted together. Yunho pats the space beside himself on the bed. “My pain meds are wearing off, though. Come take a nap with me so I know I’ll wake up safe.”

--------

Two weeks later, Eden calls to inform him Seungri is being dealt with by the Hunter-Council team (an update fed to him by Wooyoung’s unit). Apparently he was in charge of a larger ring of rogue vampires working in tandem with an equally vicious group of shapeshifters attempting a coup of the Council’s stranglehold over the supernatural underworld. They’d been trying to spread doubt over the efficacy of Council policies by leaving the maimed corpses of their victims, covered in Red Mist, in highly visible places as glaring warning signs.

Seungri is in a hunters’ prison, his subordinates are singing like songbirds in a Council’s conference room, and the shapeshifter group has already jumped continents with Wooyoung’s group hot on their heels.

Hongjoong lets Yunho know the good news over text and receives cheering stickers in reply, a question mark, and several heart emojis interspersed with flowers—it’s possible Yunho is still enjoying the aftereffects of some really excellent pain killers.

--------

Yunho makes a visit to his apartment a few days after his phone call with Eden, once the worst of the stitches have dissolved and the bandages are mostly out of the way. The gash along his chest is still an angry crimson line, but Yunho is no longer that horrifying sickly pale from fear and blood loss.

“Missed you,” Yunho sighs into his chest while they cozy up on the couch watching god only knows what late night variety shows. Cuddled in tight like this, Hongjoong can smell the mouth-watering scent of healing flesh over the sluggish pounding of blood so close to the surface.

Guilt hits him like a freight train.

Yunho is lucky to be alive, lucky to have made exceptionally useful supernatural friends who protected him while rogue vampires tried to slash him open to bleed out in the dirty floor of a tourist attraction. Hongjoong is sitting here holding his boyfriend and all he can think about is sinking his own teeth into the tender flesh of Yunho’s gaping wound. 

Yunho snaps his fingers in front of his nose. “Hongjoong? Are you okay?”  

“I—yeah, I’m fine,” He chokes out around his fangs trying to unsheathe themselves in his sudden inescapable hunger. “Sorry, did you say something?”

Yunho sighs gustily through his nose, sitting up so he has better angle for cupping his wonderfully huge palms against Hongjoong’s cheeks. “You can’t hide from me, Kim Hongjoong. Tell me what the problem is,” his eyes go wide and hurt in just the right way to make Hongjoong feel like a heel. “I can’t fix it if you don’t talk to me.”

“I still want to bite you,” Hongjoong guiltily admits. “I thought it would go away but it’s not going away, I’m really sorry.”

“We’ll work up to it,” Yunho assures him, hands still blazing lines of heat against his cheeks. “Just give me some time to get healed, yeah? I don’t want to faint on you. I like you a lot, jagiyah.”

“I like you too.” Hongjoong gulps around his tongue that feels weighty and thick and idiotic in his mouth. His fangs are still unsheathing by increments against his lips. “But this isn’t smart, Yunho.”

“Mingi, Yeosang, and Jongho all call me an idiot multiple times a day for dating a vampire,” Yunho says dry. “I thought you’d know by now me and ‘smart’ do not belong in the same sentence.”

Hongjoong cringes in on himself. As much as he wants to continue what they have, continue the slow paced relationship he’d otherwise be down for, the need to bite and to sink his teeth into Yunho’s flesh gets stronger by the day and there’s only so much willpower one person can possess. There’s only so much guilt he can swallow before it turns to poison in his gut.

“Yunho,” Hongjoong shakily uses a last burst of strength to wrench Yunho’s hands off and away from his face—out of his personal orbit—and shoves himself to the farthest corner of the room so he can’t be tempted. “We can’t do this anymore, I’m sorry.” A first, blistering tear slips down over his left cheek. “I like you too much I can’t—please just go and stay away from me for a while. For the rest of your life, maybe.”

“This is a joke, right?” Yunho laughs at him, still half covered in a crochet blanket. “Hongjoong—”

His teeth slice through the skin on his bottom lip with an urgency he can feel tingling down into his knees.  “Go! Just go home!” He roars.

“No,” Yunho says defiantly, though his skin is going paler by the second and Hongjoong can smell the fear bleeding out of his sweat. “I’m not leaving.”

Hongjoong watches Yunho attempt to quell his hands from shaking, watches him swallow around a lump of fright in his throat, watches the veins in his neck stand out with the ferocious beat of his blood that Hongjoong can almost hear—

“If you won’t,” Hongjoong lisps around his teeth, defeated and angry at himself and his own weakness. “Then I will, goodbye.”

The window of his apartment breaks easily when he bursts through head first along with his skin in jagged open wounds, but Hongjoong doesn’t bleed.

--------

Hongjoong finds himself nursing a blood bag in Eden’s den, propped up against so many throw pillows in a room darkened by blackout curtains while his sire taps a pen against his own kneecap in contemplation. 

“I apologize, but I do not see what the problem is here,” Eden finally admits, confusion evident in his tone of voice.

Hongjoong wilts further into the cushions. “The problem is I was being...too selfish.”

Eden hums low in his throat, a comforting grumble. “In what way?”

“I wanted—want to bite Yunho,” Hongjoong mopes. He takes a pull from the blood bag and grimaces at the too stale taste of old blood. It floods his mouth with the acrid stench of ash and sickness. “That’s not fair to him, he’s not even recovered from being attacked by a group of rogue vamps and now here I am being no better. I’m a monster, Eden.”

Eden snorts. “It’s just a bite, Hongjoong. Not some world ending affair.”

“He was injured!” Hongjoong yells, frustration getting the best of him. “He’s human!”

“So were you, once,” Eden fires back. “Why try to win this human’s affections when you know you were only going to get hurt? Or to hurt him? Vampires are a needy bunch, Hongjoong, we form stronger bonds than I think you’ve come to realize.” Eden sighs gustily through his nose. “If you weren’t planning on turning him or drinking from him, you might as well go into your coffin now to sleep for a century or two to ward off the heartbreak before it destroys you.”

“Why would that destroy me?” Hongjoong finishes the last of the tasteless blood, somehow still unsatisfied even though it’s more than he’d drank in days—months, even. He frowns at the emptied sack crumpled in his fist. “Ugh, they must be putting less blood in these things now. Capitalist scumbags.”

Eden remains silent for an endless strand of time before it breaks and he directs his gaze towards the emptied pack. “I’ll get you another.”

---------

The apartment is thankfully void of Yunho by the time he trudged his way home to flop face first on his shitty couch that still sort of smells like Yunho’s aftershave. Even his broken window has been replaced, he assumes by either San or Seonghwa at Eden’s behest, and makes a note to himself to send them a thank you basket. Or at least buy them a few pints of their favorite blood types.

The gashes on his arms take ages to heal to the point Hongjoong starts wearing sweaters to cover the worst of them so he doesn’t have to see the innards of his own limbs. There are certain things that even he can’t stomach and seeing the gross muscle and sinew slowly knit itself back together in front of his eyes is just a little too much for him to bear. The gashes close faster and faster as the days go by but still sluggish compared to what he’d been used to back in the 1900s when he was a fresh newblood. Maybe it’s a sign that he’s getting older and the healing process is starting to slow down. 

Hongjoong plays a lot of Zelda, drains the equivalent of two months worth of blood stocks in less than four days while sitting on his couch—barely moving except to give his eyes a break—and still feels ravenous. Starving. So parched he thinks his skin is going to start withering any day now. 

Yunho hasn’t tried to contact him at all.

His phone stays silent for another two days. Hongjoong spends twelve hours staring at it, waiting, before giving up with a moan and oozes his way to the floor. “I’m such an asshole,” he tells the empty apartment as if it’s going to answer him. “The worst person on the planet, of course Yunho is going to leave me in the dust.”

The apartment continues its silent treatment.

He drains another two week span of blood pints in his emotionally weak state and groans miserably from the gaping emptiness centered in his stomach.

Another day comes and goes. Hongjoong knows because he sees the shadows lengthen and move across the walls and the carpets and his save file blinking at him from the television screen gets brighter as the night creeps closer. San drops by to visit and finds him still curled on the floor like a pillbug around his phone, gently weeping at picture of Yunho he’d taken when his boyfriend wasn’t looking. Ex-boyfriend? Fuck, are they actually over? Probably. 

“What is this?” San toes at his knees. “Hyung, what are you doing on the floor?”

“Existence is pain,” Hongjoong says as if that answers everything. “And Humans are fragile creatures. We should put them all in a bubble to keep them safe.”

“Jesus, are you still moping about what happened with Yunho? Hongjoong, the Council has already dealt with the guys trying to go rogue and your boyfriend is perfectly fine now.” San crouches to rub at the still healing lines etched into his arms. The muscle had finally knit back together but his skin is still pulled open like someone had taken a knife to his arms recently instead of nearly a week ago. “Get up.”

“No, I’m going to live here on the floor from now on,” Hongjoong whimpers into his rug. He flicks his gallery to the next picture of Yunho—the one where he’s got ice cream dotted at the tip of his nose and going cross eyed at the smudge of chocolate. “I told Eden I wanted to bite Yunho and he said I need to go back to sleep.”

“Dude, Eden is cool but he’s from way back in 1602 or something. He’s so out of touch he may as well not even have hands,” San stresses. “You gotta take what he says with ten barrels of salt and a silver bullet between your teeth.”

“That is not at all comforting.” Hongjoong sniffs pathetically. “I miss my baby.”

“I’m getting Seonghwa,” San mutters and flees the apartment again. 

Hongjoong doesn’t blame him, waves him away with a listless flop of his arms before resuming his voluntary torture. Yunho smiling. Yunho trying on a yellow duck cap meant for small children and immensely pleased with himself when it fit over his forehead. 

His stomach feels so empty.

He’s not sure how much time passes after San leaves, but the shadows are deep and dark again when Seonghwa kicks his door open with his arms laden with a cooler full of new B+ blood bags, two containers of pig’s blood, and a collection of shitty romcoms Seonghwa swears he hates. 

“Rise and shine!” Seonghwa cheerfully announces from the doorway, smiling wide enough that his fangs are on display. “We’re going to eat, drink, and be merry! Or, well—drink, drink, and be merry since we don’t actually eat anything anymore. You ever miss kimchi?” Hongjoong ignores his rambling as Seonghwa sets the cooler in front of him and switches the television over to his blu-ray player. “Military drama or period drama? Your pick.”

“Neither,” Hongjoong says and hates the way his voice comes out pathetic and watery. “Leave me alone, I’m trying to mope.”

“The last time you moped we lost you to sleep for thirty years,” Seonghwa places a container of pig’s blood in front of his face. Hongjoong squints at it for half a second before the hunger gets the best of him and he drains it dry in three huge gulps. “San says you’re having boy troubles again. What's happened now? Someone try to hurt Yunho a second time?”

“They didn’t just try last time; they did, and it was my fault he was injured to begin with,” Hongjoong sighs. He finally allows himself to sit upright for the first time in days and his bones creak as they readjust. “It’s dangerous for me to be around him.”

“For fuck’s sake, you cannot believe that to be true,” Seonghwa groans above him. “His best friends are a werewolf, a hunter, and a pair of ghouls. If it wasn’t someone associated with you, then it was going to be someone else in his orbit. Stop beating yourself up over an attack you had no knowledge or control over. What’s really going on?”

“Yeah, well, whatever.” Hongjoong sulks into his knees. “Anyway, nothing happened to him. He’s just not speaking to me.”

“Why?” Seonghwa asks him curiously. “I thought you guys were doing okay.”

Hongjoong leans into Seonghwa’s legs for comfort. “We were until my instincts turned me into an asshole.”

Seonghwa makes an amused sound low in his chest. Hongjoong bites his kneecap as revenge. “Ow! You don’t have to take your weird vampire puberty out on me, you dick.”

“Shut up and put on your stupid movie,” Hongjoong says. “I don’t need you rubbing my nose in it, I feel bad enough as it is.”

Seonghwa is silent for a while as they watch two characters playfully dodge each other’s advances on screen. Hongjoong feels Seonghwa’s slender fingers run through the hair at the base of his skull in gentle pulls. “Seriously. Tell me what’s wrong, ‘Joong-ie, I can’t bear to see you like this. I feel like we’re losing you again.”

Hongjoong cracks open another blood container for strength. “I want to bite Yunho.”

The fingers in his hair stop. “Okay?” Seonghwa trails his fingers down lower to rub at his shoulders. “I don’t see why that’s such a problem, love. You’re a vampire, biting comes part and parcel with it.”

Hongjoong guiltily swallows a mouthful of blood and his own emotional devastation. He knows it sounds stupid looking from the outside in, but any time he smells Yunho’s scent spiking in fear—

“I can’t bite him, hyung,” Hongjoong admits. “When Yunho was in pain during the attack my whole body just hurt to the point everything went black.” He shivers. “I didn’t even recognize myself. How am I supposed to willingly hurt Yunho just because I can’t control my stupid fucking urges?”

Seonghwa’s hands wander over his collarbones. Seonghwa’s nails catch at the bones sticking prominently above his chest and Hongjoong is stupidly grateful for the little pricks of pain that keep him from totally losing himself in a sob session. “Joong-ie, have you ever even asked your donors what it feels like to be bitten?”

“I don’t have to! It’s teeth going into someone’s skin, that has to hurt like a sonofabitch.” Hongjoong finishes the second container of vaguely pork flavored liquid angrily. “Yunho doesn’t have a pain fetish like the donors at the club do, I can’t ask that of him.”

“Hongjoong,” Seonghwa starts laughing at him to the point his voice squeaks. “The donors don’t have a pain fetish, dumbass. We produce a pain numbing agent in our saliva. It stings for half a second and then it’s just a nice time for everyone.”

Hongjoong gapes at the screen until he barely turns around to face Seonghwa directly. “What?” 

“Wait, is that why he’s moping? I thought Hongjoong was just trying to avoid heartbreak,” San says mildly in the background, probably in from the kitchen draining the last of Seonghwa’s blood bags and texting Wooyoung. “Wild.”

“When did you get here?” Hongjoong hadn’t heard him come in. Or smelled him. Nothing. It was more than a little disturbing.

“Don’t worry about it,” San replies with a wink. “I can’t believe you think the club is a bunch of pain freaks.”

“Anyway,” Seonghwa smoothly interrupts, “Read a biology book sometime. Humans create it in smaller amounts too, but in us we have a larger dose to make the feeding process easier. Keeps them docile so we don’t have to fight the whole time.”

Hongjoong gapes. “I—seriously?”

“Yes,” Seonghwa growls at him. San starts cackling, the sound echoing from his relatively empty kitchen.

Hongjoong sees the future stretch out before him. Seeing Yunho again; kissing him without worry of hurting him; biting at his arms where the veins stand out prominent and beautiful. “So then...if I bite Yunho, he’s not going to be in pain?”

San and Seonghwa both shout, “No!”

“Oh.” Hongjoong blinks in wonder. Warmth spreading in his chest at the notion of seeing Yunho and maybe— “That means—”

“You can bite your boyfriend and have a fun happy time all around.” San says monotonously. “Go nuts you crazy kids.”

“But before that,” Seonghwa’s voice darkens. “We need to have a discussion about needy vampires and their attachment issues.”

“If this is a callout, I promise I already fully embrace my stupidity.” Hongjoong sighs with a frown. His stomach is still sort of aching even though he’s had two full containers in less than an hour. He tells himself it must still be the healing process. "God, are they just not filling these things up anymore? I'm still hungry."

On screen, the two protagonists are swearing they don’t belong together, different lives and different experiences threatening to tear them apart. Hongjoong decides he hates this movie.

“You slept through a lot of your formative years,” Seonghwa hands him the rest of his blood bag for Hongjoong to finish. “There’s a lot you don’t seem to know about vampires.”

---------

Hongjoong sits in the middle of his now empty apartment slowly adjusting to his new worldview. No one told him this was a thing. Eden had never told him this was a fucking thing that could happen if he spent too much time with one particular human. 

There’s a vase on his mantle that he bought in that brief window of time in the 70s when he awoke and pretended he wasn’t still suffering from the loss of his family. It’s green, hand blown glass in the shape of a spade with flecks of gold dipped around the base. He’d kept it as some kind of trophy for making it in the real world long enough to purchase something with his—or at least the coven’s—money. Every month he buys a few stems of floral arrangements to display inside, a useless bid to make his apartment seem less dreary—more lived in and special.

The vase is heavy enough that it makes a satisfying shattering sound when it hits the closest wall. Hongjoong breaks another, less important, vase by throwing it in the same spot. He stomps a side table he found at IKEA three years ago into splinters in a rage.

“Fuck!”

---------

He finds out like this:

Seonghwa turns off his movie with the protagonists in mid-confession. He’s enough of a hopeless romantic that Hongjoong immediately clues into the actual seriousness of the conversation and sits ramrod straight, eyes wide. 

“Hyung?”

Seonghwa steeples his fingers against his lips. “How serious are you about Yunho?”

“I—I don’t—” Hongjoong stumbles. He hasn’t really let himself think about the future when it comes to the human, his lifespan so much shorter in comparison to Hongjoong’s own that he can’t stomach the thought of losing Yunho to disease or old age. Hongjoong clicks his mouth shut.

“That’s what I thought,” Seonghwa says with a sigh. “Listen, I don’t want to say this to be cruel, but Eden may have been right when he told you to get back in your coffin and sleep for a century or two.”

“San!” Hongjoong spins around to glare daggers at his covenmate. “You snitch!”

San raises his shoulders and palms upward and outward as if to say ‘wasn’t me’, as if Hongjoong believes it for an instant.

“I overheard Eden telling you the other night,” Seonghwa breaks in before Hongjoong shoves himself into San’s space to scratch at him or something. “What do you know of bondbreak?”

“The hell is that?” Hongjoong frowns. “That sounds like a made up word.”

San goes eerily still in his periphery. Hongjoong witnesses his eyes flash dark red and shivers. Oh. “It’s really not,” San whispers from his perch on the kitchen counter. 

Seonghwa nods and reaches forward to cup Hongjoong’s tenderly. “Hongjoong, bonds form when we get too emotionally attached to one human to the point feeding from anyone—or anything, as the case may be—does nothing to sate our hunger. Bondbreak happens when that human decides to stop letting you feed from them or if they refuse to turn.” Hongjoong gulps. That sounds...familiar. “Or, in your specific case, if you’re a dumbass and don’t even want to bite your boyfriend because he might be in pain.”

“Sometime soon you’re probably going to start withering to the point of no return,” San adds. His lips tremble hard at the tail end and he hastily wipes at his eyes when a tear drops down his cheek. 

“But what happens if, say, I do feed from him but he decides he doesn’t want to turn and dies?” Hongjoong asks, morbid curiosity getting the best of him. “This is all a little...fantastical if you ask me and I’m a literal vampire.”

“We’re all vampires here,” Seonghwa rolls his eyes. “But if you allow this bond to form without trying to sleep it off—and you can before it gets to that point, that’s still an option—and you feed from him…”

“I’m locked in,” Hongjoong finishes for him. “Right?”

“Got it in one,” Seonghwa mimes shooting him with imaginary finger guns. “He dies without turning then you die with him. Bondbreak is as bad as, if not worse than, a silver stake through the heart.” Seonghwa is still stonefaced at the prospect of losing a covenmate—a brother—but wiggles his eyebrows a little saucily as he adds, “There are a few perks that come with bonding though, it’s not all doom and gloom.” 

Hongjoong lets the information sink in. It sounds ridiculous in theory: how could he, a literal vampire, get so attached to one human that his own life depends on Yunho’s own? Eden was right when he called them a needy bunch. A bubble of hysterical laughter makes its way out of his throat.

San stomps out of the apartment with a slam of the door and several pictures rattling on the walls. 

---------

Once the anger finally bled its way out of his system and he’d cleaned up all the glass shards littering his apartment floor, he sends a singular text to Yunho:

‘We need to talk.’

It makes him feel a little better that his phone lights up almost instantly with Yunho’s reply of ‘we do’ and a follow up, ‘meet me in front of my building in 10?’

Hongjoong makes it there in fifteen. His legs are sluggish and don’t seem to want to cooperate. He hopes its from stomping around his apartment for the better part of three hours than it is a sign of early onset bondbreak. 

Yunho is already sitting on a bench—their bench—staring into the middle distance like he’s not even taking in the scenery.

Hongjoong pulls the sweater he threw on to cover the worst of his jagged window gashes down over his fingers, fisting the material as a way to keep his hands from shaking. Or at least to make it less obvious.

He steps into Yunho’s line of sight with a small wave and a supremely lame, “Hi.”

“Hey,” Yunho smiles at him. Hongjoong notes the purpling bags beneath his eyes with no small amount of guilt. He still smells amazing though, like warm linen and clean skin, no fear or pain or annoyance present to spoil it. Yunho pats the empty space beside him. “Come sit. I’ve missed you.”

Hongjoong shakes his head. He’s a little worried that if he sits now then he’ll never get back up. This bench will be his final stop as he withers into near nothingness. “Yunho, I wanted to say I’m—I’m so sorry about everything that’s happened. Associating with me dragged you into a stupid mythological pissing contest and you got hurt because of it, I—”

“Stop,” Yunho stands to his full height. His hands are huge and warm and everything Hongjoong has missed dearly when they grab at his shoulders. “It wasn’t your fault, I don’t think it’s your fault and I have never once blamed you for any of it.” His face twists in on itself on a grimace. “I mean, hell, I just found out none of my friends except for Wooyoung are even human, so.”

Yunho pulls him forward to cradle his head against Yunho’s chest. Hongjoong listens to the steady beat of his heart and nearly sobs from the sound of it alone—nevermind he’s been craving the touch of Yunho’s skin or his voice or his easy acceptance of everything Hongjoong is and has ever been. Hongjoong can hear the rush of blood in his veins over the distant chirrup of crickets starting their evening songs. 

“Yunho,” Hongjoong cries into his chest where it’s safe. He lets go of his own sweater to clench tight to the pocket of Yunho’s hoodie. “Yunho, I thought you hated me.”

“I could never,” Yunho chokes out against the crown of his head. 

They stay swaying together for a while. Just enough for Hongjoong to get his eyeballs to quit doing the thing where they disobey him by watering endlessly into Yunho’s shoulder. Embarrassing. Vampires aren’t supposed to cry. “Yunho, about the biting, I—” his legs decide now would be an excellent time to go numb and Hongjoong drops to the ground as if he’s got lead weights in his pockets. “Oh!”

Yunho goes sheet white. “Hongjoong?”

“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” Hongjoong glares balefully at his stupid goddamn legs bent awkwardly beneath his body. Could they not have waited ten minutes for him to get his spiel out in the open before betraying him so completely?

“Why did you fall?” Yunho frets at him. “What’s wrong?”

“The only thing wrong with me is me,” Hongjoong says while swallowing the last remaining smidgen of his pride. “Apparently I’m a codependent asshole and I need to bite you in order to survive.”

Yunho boggles at him. “Seriously? That’s it?”

“Seriously,” Hongjoong sniffs, upset with himself the general unfairness of the situation. Dropping dramatically to the ground like this feels like he’s trying to coerce Yunho into letting him feed instead of a genuine offering. He knows Yunho is enough of a bleeding heart that he won’t just walk away. “You’re allowed to say no,” Hongjoong adds as a reminder.

“Why would I say no, Kim Hongjoong,” Yunho sighs and crouches down with his back towards him so Hongjoong can reach up and cling to his neck for a piggyback ride. “I’ve offered to let you bite me how many times now? You’re the one who keeps backing out.” Hongjoong swallows deep at the display strength when Yunho scoops him up by his thighs and starts walking them towards Yunho’s building. “And in case you haven’t noticed, I’m kind of in love with you.”

Yunho’s scent is all annoyance and affection mixed together with his own uniquely human smell. Hongjoong has to swallow three times before he manages to wheeze, “Yunho—”

“Shut up, just—” Yunho’s fingers tighten around his thighs when they get through the door and into the elevator. The smooth jazz playing over the sound system is totally at odds with the dark growl in Yunho’s voice when he says, “Shut the fuck up until we get to my place and you can bite me as much as you want.”

“Once is enough, thank you.” Hongjoong holds on tight, hides his face in the space where Yunho’s neck and shoulder meet. “I love you so much.”

“You fucking better,” Yunho mutters, though Hongjoong notes his ears are a precious shade of crimson. He presses a kiss to the side of Yunho’s jaw, the closest he can reach to his mouth without overbalancing the both of them, and goes quiet until the elevator dings to announce their arrival to Yunho’s floor.

---------

Finagling the door open takes Yunho a few tries before he can punch in the code to his door. Hongjoong apologizes since he knows trying not to drop him is made worse by the fact the only way he can hold on to Yunho is with his arms, legs still dead weights that refuse to listen to any of his attempts to move them.

“I never realized you were so strong,” Hongjoong heatedly whispers into Yunho’s neck, right against the vein to feel it throbbing against his mouth. Yunho shivers.

“I don’t go to the gym just for show.” Yunho crouches so Hongjoong can awkwardly drop himself down into the hard cushions of Yunho’s couch. “Stay here just a sec, I need to kick tweedledum and tweedledee out.”

“Okay.” Hongjoong watches Yunho speedily make his way down the hallways of bedrooms, knocking on doors and demanding everyone get out for a few hours. He more than likely just doesn’t want the scent of blood to trigger Yeosang’s need to feed or Mingi’s overprotective instincts, and Hongjoong appreciates the forethought Yunho seems to have for his roommates.

“You done avoiding each other?” Mingi asks, yawning, as he rounds the corner of the living room with a jacket thrown over his arms. Yeosang doesn’t say much when he follows not long after, but he does give Hongjoong a sort of terrifying glare accompanying a stiff nod of acknowledgement.

Yunho hustles them out of the door with his cheeks nearly crimson. “We’re fine now, go away and give us some privacy.”

Hongjoong gives them a tiny wave. “Hi guys. Bye guys.”

“Bye, have fun!” Mingi waves over Yunho’s shoulder. 

Yeosang rolls his eyes and starts bodily dragging Mingi away by the collar of his shirt. “We’ll be back by eleven, promise to finish fucking by then.”

Hongjoong chokes. “We’re not—”

“Yes, sir.” Yunho interrupts before shutting the door and turning back with a grin as if he’s proud of himself.

“Yunho,” Hongjoong says scandalized, “Dude.”

“What? You never know,” his boyfriend bounces next to him on the couch eagerly. “Things might get hot and heavy once you get your teeth in me.”

“We’re not going to fuck while I’ve got my teeth in you, jesus.” Hongjoong rubs at his still numb legs. The numbness has gotten worse to the point he’s starting to feel the tingling in the tips of his fingers. “Maybe once I know you’re okay we can but that's a hard maybe.”

Yunho takes off his hoodie, followed by the shirt he’d been wearing underneath, and Hongjoong’s mouth waters at the expanse of skin on display. Stares at the way Yunho’s nipples pebble a bit from the chill of the room. There’s so much he wants to bite without his fangs in the picture, so much that he wants to kiss and bruise and leave marks like he’s claiming his territory. 

“Whatever you say, hyung.” Yunho giggles, before pulling him into his lap—arranges Hongjoong’s thighs on either side of his hips—and holds Hongjoong’s head to his neck. “Go on.”

Here, with his nose pressed against the heady scent of blood just beneath the surface, Hongjoong loses a bit of himself. “Are you sure?” He asks, though he’s already licking a stripe against the most prominent pulse to taste Yunho’s skin. His mouth is watery, vision going hazy, and the way Yunho shivers beneath him while his scent spikes with the sharp tang of arousal isn’t helping. “Yunho, please, tell me it’s okay. Tell me you’re sure.”

“I’m sure,” Yunho sighs out. There’s a nervous shake to his voice but without the horrifying sting of fear from previous sessions. “Bite me, Hongjoong.”

His teeth sink in as quickly as he can manage and Hongjoong feels Yunho jerk beneath him at the sensation. He wants to be concerned about it, wants to back away and make sure Yunho is still alright, but his blood is already flooding his mouth and it’s—

God, Yunho’s blood is the taste of heaven. Perfect. The best thing he’s ever put in his mouth. It makes his veins come alive and his cells start to flourish again with the first needful gulp. Hongjoong laps the the well of fluid trying to escape the suction of his lips with a moan, unwilling to let even a drop of the precious liquid escape and Hongjoong barely registers Yunho groaning with him.

The next swallow brings with it the feeling back into Hongjoong’s legs and his waist where the numbness had started to creep. Yunho is clutching at his hips, panting hot and humid in Hongjoong’s ear and—oh—his dick is hard where it digs into the crack of his ass.

Yunho shoves his hands down and under the waistband of his jeans with a quiet whimper in Hongjoong’s ear. “Hyung, fuck, can I—”

“Yeah, yeah—shit—please,” Hongjoong slurs against the hot skin of Yunho’s neck as another blurt of blood rolls over his tongue. “Where’s your lube?”

“In the bedroom,” Yunho groans low and growling against his ear, hips shifting tantalizingly beneath him. “We’d have to move—” Yunho breaks off to curse as Hongjoong rubs circles over the stiff peaks of his nipples with his thumbs. 

Yunho’s blood seeps into every pore, into every vein and every single cell in his body and Hongjoong feels weightless with it. Warm for the first time in months and turned on to a degree that seems unreal. “We can move in—in one sec. Just let me—”

He sucks in another mouthful, swiping his tongue against the wound while Yunho gasps expletives and tightens his fingers over the globes of his ass. Hongjoong doesn’t even realize how close to the brink he is until the wave crashes over him and he’s crying something that might be Yunho’s name—twitching and jittering in his lap as he comes completely untouched in his pants. 

He’d be embarrassed about it if Yunho hadn’t groaned deep and guttural, “Did you just come?”

“Sorry,” Hongjoong whimpers, still jolting from the aftershocks. “Oh god, Yunho, this is so—” He slurs a wordless hum into Yunho’s neck, gets blood smeared across his cheek and his mouth. 

“Don’t be sorry,” Yunho says before crushing their mouths together heedless of the blood clinging to Hongjoong’s lips. Hongjoong feels oversensitive to the point even the scrape of Yunho’s barely there stubble along his chin and his upper lip make him shake with the urge to gasp and mewl and beg. “Fuck, that’s so hot, Hongjoong.”

“Ngh,” is all he manages to get out in reply, a needy little whimper as Yunho slides the tips of his fingers over the crack of his ass just shy of his hole. “Please—”

Yunho quiets him with another biting kiss to his mouth. It’s hot, everything is so hot it feels like Hongjoong is going to catch fire. Between one kiss and the next, Yunho’s fingers retreat from their grip on his ass—and Hongjoong is aware of himself enough to stop from crying at the loss—to hook under each of his thighs and hoists Hongjoong up to carry him down the long hallway leading to his bedroom. They get distracted only once, when Hongjoong can’t stop from pricking at the marks in Yunho’s neck for another taste and Yunho stumbles hard enough that they have to pause with his back against the wall while Yunho shook along his front.

It’s not the first time he’s been in this room. It’s not the first time he’s been in this bed sharing space with Yunho. It is the first time, however, that he’s seen his boyfriend so desperate to yank their clothes off and away, a trickle of blood sliding over his clavicle and arousal burning in his scent.

His cum has gone tacky by the time Yunho wrenches his pants and his underwear off his legs, the cold of the room making him grimace at the sensation. 

“You’re so messy,” Yunho tuts at him with his eyes pitch dark. Hongjoong has to fist his hands in the sheets when Yunho leans over to suck a mark in the space just shy of his dick, right next to the curvature where thigh meets pelvis, and shoves the end of his sweater in his mouth to stop the needy little scream threatening to spill out of his mouth. 

Yunho doesn’t let him get away with it for long, already naked himself—and when that happened Hongjoong has no idea, the concept of time and movement are as strange and foreign to him at this point as the huge leap in technology he met when he woke. Yunho tugs the ends of his sweater, “Let’s get this off of you.”

Too late, Hongjong remembers the deep gashes still so close to healing and tries to stop the sweater from leaving his arms with a muffled, “Wait!”

But it’s already off and Yunho is quiet. “Hyung, your arms—”

“I’m sorry, don’t look at them. I know they’re so gross right now,” Hongjoong clenches his eyes tight to keep from seeing them and the expression on Yunho’s face. “Give me my top back.”

“They’re not gross,” Yunho whispers above him. “Just scarred. Is this from the window?”

A delicate touch to his arm makes Hongjoong peek an eye open and—oh. Oh. There must be something to this bonding shit because his arms, once split in deep trenches, are now closed and nearly healed completely. Only the faintest trace of the wounds remain, crooked red lines that are fading slowly back into nothingness. 

“Yeah, they were from the window,” Hongjoong says dazedly before tracing the long gash still red and raw looking on Yunho’s sternum. “We kinda match.”

“We do,” Yunho grabs his hand to place a kiss against the knuckles tenderly and so at odds with the frenzy that led them here to this room and this bed, both naked as they day they were born. “Still want to do this?”

“Always,” Hongjoong reaches up to pull Yunho down on top of him, moans deep at the shock of hot skin against his spent cock. “Wanna feel you,” he breathes into Yunho’s mouth as his boyfriend shakily exhales in the miniscule space between their mouths. He cages Yunho’s hips in with his own thighs, tugs him down as best he can so he can greedily soak in the feel of Yunho’s warmth spreading over him. 

Yunho hums, fucks his hips down against him; his cockhead slick and hot where it slides in wet jerks against his own. The click of the lube bottle makes Hongjoong jolt, too busy losing himself in the heat and the smell of blood still drying on Yunho’s neck.

“Hyung.” Yunho runs his slick hand over Hongjoong’s cock until he’s hard and nearly yelling from the wet friction. “Hyung, bite me again.”

“What?” Hongjoong blinks away the tears beading at the corners of his eyes, pleasure turning his tongue thick in his mouth. “Why?”

He vaguely registers Yunho’s other hand traveling lower to run two lubed fingers over his hole, circles them like Hongjoong isn’t fucking open and ready and willing to take them as it is.

“Because it’s hot,” Yunho sucks an angry bruise into the meat of his thigh, blood rising to the surface now that he’s fed and full to the brim with it. Yunho’s fingers breach his entrance for an instant before sliding away again—a vicious tease that makes his fangs drop down, god.

“Sure, fine, whatever you want,” Hongjoong pushes his hips down to try and get Yunho’s stupid fucking fingers deeper where he needs them. “Just—get the fuck on with it, Yunho. I’m dying here!”

Yunho snickers. “Hate to break it to you, but you’re already dead.” 

“Shut up and put your dick in me,” Hongjoong whines with a kick of his feet against the mattress. “Why are you being so mean to m—shit!”

Yunho smugly pulls his mouth off of his dick with an audible pop and a trail of spit and precum dripping from his mouth. “You were saying?”

Hongjoong muzzily considers that perhaps getting involved with a human who was fool enough to live with a werewolf, a ghoul, and had a vampire for a boyfriend was always going to be a lesson in cruelty. It takes so little time for Yunho to have him a whimpering, drooling mess fisting his hands in Yunho’s sheets and his hair as Yunho bobs his head and fucks him open with his hand. 

Hongjoong sinks his teeth into Yunho’s neck again when Yunho pushes himself in until he bottoms out—until he feels the slap of Yunho’s balls against his ass. His back arches with the force of the arousal invading his senses and the searing heat of blood in his mouth. Everything he tastes is Yunho; his unnecessary gasping breaths are Yunho; the blood in his mouth and the skin beneath his fingers Yunho, Yunho, Yunho.

“Is it always like this,” Yunho whispers darkly under his breath in Hongjoong’s ear, fucking him hard and unrelenting. “Do you always end up fucking like this? Like a needy little thing who can’t control himself?”

“No,” Hongjoong sobs around a mouthful of blood, overwhelmed and on the brink again from the rush. “Only with you, Yunho, I promise. I’ve never felt like this before god—fuck—please—”

Yunho folds him until he can get Hongjoong’s knees by his ears, shoves his hips into him harder with the sound of skin and lube meeting loud in the otherwise empty apartment. “Hongjoong, tell me again—tell me—”

Hongjoong breathes hard through his nose even though he doesn’t need to, tries to stay soft and pliable in Yunho’s grip. The feeling of Yunho filling up his empty spaces makes him want to pretend for just a moment that they’re the same, that this isn’t some insane life altering decision.

Yunho stills his hips until Hongjoong asks, “Tell you what?” 

“Tell me you love me,” Yunho shoves into him again, slower this time and Hongjoong feels every blessed inch of his dick dragging against his walls. “Wanna hear it again, say it.”

“Love you,” Hongjoong says immediately and Yunho picks up the pace with sharp sound in his ear. His dick hurts with how badly he needs to come again. “Love you so much, Yunho, probably forever—I’m sorry—”

“Don’t be sorry,” Yunho pants, hips stuttering, “I love you a lot. So much, you don’t even know, hyung—fuck!” Hongjoong can feel him getting harder, his rim stretching in delicious little sizzling shocks of almost pain. “Come with me, yeah? Please—”

Yunho’s neck is too far away, but his forearm is close enough that it only takes a small shift of his head to sink his teeth into the meat of it—only gets a small rush of blood over his taste buds before he’s crying and coming untouched again, frictionless but still so good the room goes fuzzy at the edges. Yunho fucks him hard and fast before he bares his teeth and jerks himself out in the hot grasping clench of him. Hongjoong selfishly wants to keep that, too, wants to hoard every little bit of Yunho he can save within himself for a lifetime.

Yunho doesn’t pull out, just droops against his chest to press his mouth against the place where Hongjoong’s heart used to beat. Yunho’s dick still twitches gently inside of him and it’s—nice. Hongjoong feels almost alive again for the first time in several decades, never wants to lose this feeling of closeness. Yunho goes to pull away but Hongjoong loops his arms and his legs around him to keep him still, the sting of his used and abused hole clenching around the dick in his ass is the only thing keeping him anchored and awake, he can't bear the threat of emptiness so soon after being so full.

Yunho stops trying to back away but reaches up to cup his cheeks in his huge tender palms. “That wasn’t so bad,” he says, which is kind of a massive understatement.

“Not so bad,” Hongjoong agrees, blissed out from the feeling of being swollen and sated. “Are you okay?” He rubs over the barely there marks on Yunho’s neck trailing down to the set of puncture wounds in his arm. “I didn’t take too much, did I? Anything hurt?”

“Could probably use a cookie but I’m okay,” Yunho pulls Hongjoong’s hand away to kiss the whorl of each fingertip. “Totally fine. It only hurt for like a second and then it was—” he coughs, “You were there.”

“Yeah I was,” Hongjoong smiles dreamily at the grin quirking one side of Yunho’s mouth. “I’m so full, oh my god.”

“In more ways than one—ow!”

“Don’t be crass,” Hongjoong hisses before releasing the pinch of skin along Yunho’s ribs. “We were having a moment.”

“Mmm,” Yunho leans close to rub their mouths together, barely there pressure just shy of an actual kiss. “I didn’t think it would be so—like that, you know?”

Hongjoong murmurs agreement, leans up to connect their mouths for a moment. 

“Is it...is that a thing that happens? Like, usually? I can’t imagine getting turned on while drinking someone’s blood is very conducive for survival,” Yunho wonders. “For either party.”

“Only with bonded pairs according to Seonghwa,” Hongjoong cringes and hides his face beneath one of Yunho’s pillows. “Oh my god, I’m so embarrassed.”

Yunho yanks the pillow away. “Why,” he demands.

“Because…” Yunho’s dick is still sort of hard in his ass and Hongjoong shivers when Yunho barely shifts his hips again. “God, Yunho you can pull out now if you want. I can’t concentrate.”

Yunho’s eyes dilate and Hongjoong can smell the arousal building in his scent again. “Gee whiz, that’s terrible for you.”

“Yunho,” Hongjoong whines breathless and turned on. There is no way he could go another round without actually passing out. “Be serious I—ugh, fuck.”

Yunho drags his dick out tortuously slow before rolling back in short sharp thrusts. “Let’s—ugh—let’s talk about this after round two?”

“Yeah, sure, just—just keep doing that,” Hongjoong mouths at Yunho’s chest when he rolls them over so Hongjoong can at least do some of the work this time, bouncing with the shift of Yunho’s hips. “Love you, love you, love you—”

---------

Hongjoong finally gets a chance to explain the same things Seonghwa laid out for him after a shaky round three—and once Yunho’s roommates came back home and Yeosang beats against the door for them to stop. 

“This feels a little bit like a marriage proposal,” Yunho muses with his hands tracing formless shapes along the skin of Hongjoong’s back where he’s laid on top of Yunho’s chest. 

Hongjoong bites his mouth to keep the whine building in his chest from leaking out, because that’s essentially what he’s offering. Eternally bonding together so they never have to be apart—because he got too attached too quickly and now he’s going to fucking die if anything ever happens to Yunho. It’s like marriage turned up to eleven with bass boosted. 

“There is absolutely zero pressure.” Hongjoong thanks every deity in existence his sweat glands stopped working in the 20s. “None whatsoever, you are free to say no and walk away at any time.”

Yunho pulls away so they can look into each other’s eyes. Hongjoong resists the urge to close his. “But what happens to you if I do?”

“Negative zero pressure,” Hongjoong stresses to avoid answering his question. He knows Yunho; knows him to the very marrow in his bones, and knows for a fact the reality of the situation would trigger Yunho’s horrible need to put everyone ahead of himself.

“Hongjoong, you promised to be honest with me. Haven’t we been through enough?” Yunho runs his fingers through Hongjoong’s bangs with a frown. “You not answering tells me all I need to know anyway. How bad is it?”

Hongjoong blinks away an errant tear. “If you say no—if I stop feeding from you exclusively or you never turn into a vampire with me, I—”

He stops. Admitting how deep in this shit he is makes him feel too wide open and vulnerable. 

Yunho sighs. “You?”

“I stop functioning. Like when my legs went numb earlier but all over,” Hongjoong swallows even though he doesn’t need to just to buy himself some more time. “It’s called bondbreak and it’s basically a death sentence. Worse than a death sentence, even.”

Yunho swipes away the tears with his thumbs, leans in to kiss them away when more replace them. “It’s a good thing I love you so much because you’re an idiot.”

Hongjoong bristles. “Rude!”

“Seonghwa and San already came over to put the fear of god into me last week.” Yunho squeezes his cheeks until Hongjoong’s mouth puckers. “I’ve just been waiting for you to man up and tell me yourself.”

“Those snakes in the grass.” Hongjoong hisses, mouth full of sharp teeth as his fangs drop from the rush of anger. “They had no business interfering—”

“They had every business to interfere, they were worried about their friend,” Yunho stresses. “And for good reason since getting information out of you is like pulling teeth. How long were you going to wait to tell me this was going on?”

Hongjoong mutters something unintelligible and snide under his breath. Yunho nods as if it makes perfect sense. “See? Anyway, I’ve had time to think it over and I’ve already made my decision.”

“You—you have?” Hongjoong sits up, careful not to put pressure on anything tender. There’s a collection of bruises above Yunho’s navel he makes sure not to poke too hard. “What, uh, what did you decide?”

Yunho grins at him, a wide open smile that makes his teeth gleam in the low light of the room. “Give me a few years to finish school, maybe long enough to see my brother graduate.” Yunho laces their hands together when Hongjoong starts trembling above him. “I wouldn’t mind seeing him start a family first too, but I can see that happen as a vampire as well.” He places a kiss to the knuckle above Hongjoong’s left ring finger. “I want to turn, hyung, even if it means not being able to enjoy my favorite foods in exchange for a few centuries with you.”

“I—that’s it? Those are your only requirements?” Hongjoong says wonderingly.

“That’s it,” Yunho reaffirms, shifting upright so he can press their mouths together in a brief peck. “The happiest I’ve ever been has been with you, Hongjoong. Becoming a vampire with you—for you—doesn’t seem so bad."

“Yunho,” Hongjoong tears up, “Baby.”

“Shhh,” Yunho hushes him with another long, drawn out kiss. “We’ve got all the time in the world, yeah? Let’s not think about all this tonight.” He soothes his huge palms over the knobs in Hongjoong’s spine, over the heaving in his chest and fisting into the roots of his hair. “We have a lot to catch up on, I’ve missed you.”

---------

The day Yunho accepts the bite from Eden six years later, Hongjoong is a nervous wreck. Yunho had kissed him briefly, before leaving for Eden’s den, and Hongjoong spends an age pacing back and forth in front of the doorway until his sire calls him back. 

“It is done,” Eden tells him, mouth blood red and eyes gleaming still with a gash along his wrist sluggishly dripping onto his carpet. For once, Eden grins at him—a happy little upturn at the corner of his lips. “Go welcome your boy into the fold, Hongjoong.”

His sire doesn’t need to tell him twice. Hongjoong sprints passed him eagerly, ignoring the amused little hum Eden makes low in his throat, and finds Yunho laid out on a chaise lounge, bloodless and pale with his eyes closed against the dimmed lighting, and something inside of himself settles. An aimless little emptiness that had occupied his chest where his heart used to beat finally feels whole after nearly a century of trying to fill the void with sleep and scaring humans for fun.

The chaise creaks ominously beneath their combined weight when Hongjoong settles beside him—unsurprising considering it’s an antique from the 18th century Eden refuses to let go of or update. Yunho’s eyes flutter open as Hongjoong traces the still gaped open wound in his neck. “Hi, baby. How are you feeling?”

“Awful,” Yunho admits, voice coming out as a rasping slur. He reaches up to lace their fingers together. “And amazing at the same time? I can smell everything.”

“Yeah, you’ll get used to it eventually.” Hongjoong bites the inside of his cheeks to stop himself from grinning. Yunho is cold to the touch but they can rectify that later when he recovers from the first turning, Hongjoong isn’t going to make him scavenge on the street for sustenance like he was made to so long ago. “I love you.”

“I love you more,” Yunho sighs and brings their hands up to his mouth to take in a deep lungful of their scent mixed together so sweetly. “Hey, I didn’t get hard when Eden bit me, are you proud?”

Hongjoong chokes on his laughter, startled from the out of the blue admittance. “That’s good or else I would have come across the room and challenged you both.” Hongjoong leans close enough to peck Yunho’s pale mouth before backing away again. He still kind of stinks like fresh death which is not the best odor—on anyone. “I told you that was only between bonded pairs anyway.”

“You never know,” Yunho says back with a tiny smirk. Hongjoong thinks he’s the most beautiful person he’s ever seen, even when not a second later Yunho leans over the side of the chaise and empties the contents of his stomach on the floor and the edge of Hongjoong’s shoes.

From where he sits, disregarding the pile of sick at his feet and Yunho’s weak groaning, the future is bright. The future is theirs, and maybe someday Yunho could be a top contender for Hongjoong’s coveted ‘Best Scarer of the Month’ plaque.

("Why do I smell burnt sugar?" Yunho drags him down by the edge of his sleeve so he can better hiss in Hongjoong's face. "Did you go get Starbucks?"

"Uh," Hongjoong avoids eye contact. "Maybe?"

Yunho bares his teeth, new little baby fangs still forming in his gums. They're precious. "While I was literally dying?" 

"Listen, I needed the emotional support."

"You needed the emotional support of a caramel frappucchino?" 

"....Yes," Hongjoong admits while Yunho thunks his head back against the plush chaise. "I love you?"

"Whatever."

"Yunho!")