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At thirty, Seokjin feels too old, really, to be doing this. Not that he considers thirty to be old, just too old for this: cruising for a rebound hook up in this sardine can of a club that he had to pay the price of two drinks just to get in and another to have an excuse to linger by by the bar. Seokjin has no nostalgic memories attached to this place, not like Hoseok and Jimin—who attended university twenty minutes from Jongno-gu.
After coming out to his parents in rather dramatic and most importantly public fashion, Seokjin was pulled out of Seoul National and hastily enrolled into a more low key—but no less prestigious—university in Perth to lick his wounds, and to give his parents time to smooth over their family’s ruffled feathers. A gay son! Unimaginable! How was Seokjin supposed to have grandkids for his halmeoni to stuff with food or for his halabeoji to tell cautionary tales in his nicotine choked voice?
Their only consolation was that Seokjin was the second son.
Anyway, Perth. The place where his parents probably didn’t expect him to stay after graduation.
No matter how far you run, clubs tend to look the same. Swathes of painfully underaged-looking baby faces who’ve never seen a queen with her dick taped to her asshole, interspersed with disgruntled regulars looking to unwind after twelve hours of verbal abuse from their bosses. Then there are what Seokjin calls the tourists, those who may or may not be queer but liked to stare, as if their existence was the main act at a circus yet acted offended if anyone dared to hit on them. Lastly, there’s Seokjin and his sad ilk, who’d somehow been conned into thinking that this is a good and healthy way to get over the implosion of his three-year relationship.
A specter drifts through the crowd, someone with a likeness to Yunho uncanny enough to make Seokjin choke on a rum-coated ice cube. It wedges firmly in the wrong tube until he coughs it and what seems like bits of his lungs back up, eyes all the while firmly glued to the man.
Yunho thought that his gay was a different type than the virus that the rest of them had, wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like this. He liked to pretend he was above it all. As if being gay was just another one of those unsavory personal choices, akin to a bad nicotine habit or going too hard on the bottle. Never mind the fact that he fucked someone who was very much a man—that would be Seokjin, your resident broken heart—enthusiastically and on a regular basis. It’s not Yunho—that’s for damn sure.
Seokjin has the utmost and sincerest respect for people such as Yunho who decided that their sexuality was nobody else’s business. The closet was a better place to be than in a bathroom stall with three boys from the basketball team pushing your head into an unflushed toilet, or on the six o’clock evening news complete with a mugshot and ticker tape detailing your fall from grace in excruciatingly thorough detail, or in an early grave. There were those, here and elsewhere, who can’t afford the luxury it is to be out of said closet.
Seokjin can understand the decisions of those who choose that life while also making a vow to himself to stay as far away as humanly possible. Yet, like an utter fool, he gambled with his heart as though he had five more to spare in the trunk of his Mercedes, and fell for one. And, in a turn of events that a blind deaf fortune-teller could have guessed, the question of how publicly Yunho and Seokjin were permitted to love each other eventually became the bullet that tore them to shreds. Seokjin wanted to move in. Yunho had once asked, in total sincerity, if Seokjin would consider playing the role of mistress—were male mistresses a thing?—while Yunho married some Yonsei girl that his mother had picked out for him. Don’t worry, jagi, it’d just be for show.
Seokjin contemplates this while watching not-Yunho slip between swathes of gyrating young adult bodies. The more he takes the man in, the less he actually looks like Seokjin’s ex. He’s taller than Yunho, though only by a couple of centimeters, and hasn’t mastered that confident swagger that Yunho used to strut down the street with. If Seokjin has to guess, he’d say that it isn’t not-Yunho’s first time at Electron, but he’s not exactly a veteran either—still finding his footing amongst the roiling dance floor.
Not-Yunho’s hair is long, sleek with what’s either sweat, grease, or hair-product, and pulled into a bushy half ponytail. Or rabbit tail, if Seokjin is being true to size. At first Seokjin thinks that the man has on a dark long-sleeve shirt, then realizes with the help of the shifting club lights that his skin is obscured almost entirely by an intricate series of tattoos bridging the gap from his shoulder to his wrist. Idly, Seokjin thinks that his smile is lovely. And he’s not the type to call many things lovely.
Seokjin is granted a better look at said smile as not-Yunho comes closer— wait fuck, he’s getting closer. Is he coming over here? Seokjin whips back around to face the bar in a move that is neither graceful nor subtle, sucking down the rest of his rum and coke as though the answer to all his life’s problems lies at the bottom of the glass. A body settles into the empty seat next to Seokjin, who keeps his eyes glued to the shelves of liquor bottles affixed to the wall behind the bar. If Seokjin doesn’t look then not-Yunho isn’t there. Like Schrödinger’s fucking cat. All he has to do is not open the lid.
A minute passes. Seokjin’s hungry; he should have eaten more before coming out. Two minutes pass. Seokjin had turned so quickly that he didn’t get a good look at who it was who sat next to him; is it even the Yunho doppelgänger? Just when he thinks he might be in the clear, the person to his left says, “You were staring awfully hard just now.”
Migraine-inducing EDM bellows out of Electron’s surround speakers, but the man’s voice does some— freaky and frankly almost preternatural—shit, traveling through the air straight into Seokjin’s ear like the room is empty other than the two of them. For a brief heart-stopping moment he wonders if the bartender slipped something in his drink because the man’s voice … echoes. It jumps and reverberates the way Seokjin imagines an opera singer’s would in an empty theater hall.
Seokjin’s gaze flickers to the right. “Sorry. You look like my ex.” Why are those the first words out of your mouth, idiot. Who hears that and goes ‘god that’s hot, take me now?’
“Ouch,” not-Yunho laughs. “Does that hurt my chances?”
“Chances of what?”
“With you. Tonight.”
Seokjin huffs a wry laugh through his nose and finally turns to give not-Yunho his full attention. Not-Yunho’s body is opened up towards him, with his right elbow on the bar and his curled fist mashing into his cheek. Jesus, his shirt is tight. Seokjin has a front row seat to the way his robust pectoral muscles taper into his abs, which then taper into a tiny waist made tinier by the belt cinched around it. Not-Yunho shoes seem better suited to the VIP section—gift-wrapped in purple velvet rope—than down here with the plebs, where the danger of getting spilled or vomited on is much higher. If they’re the same shoes Seokjin remembers seeing in the Hèrmes display window, they also cost a good three months of rent for the average Seoulite.
“Is this your first time picking up someone at a club?” asks Seokjin.
Not-Yunho’s cool veneer cracks, the panic on his face brief but noticeable. “ … No?”
“Are you asking me or telling me?” Seokjin should really stop. He should tell not-Yunho that he’s not interested, that he’s supposed to be playing sober companion for Hoseok and Jimin—both of whom Seokjin knows will be one shot from blacking out by the end of the night. He should tell the man that yes, looking like Seokjin’s ex does in fact disqualify him from getting into Seokjin’s pants, if only for his own sake, so that he can protect the little bit of face he has left.
Then not-Yunho smiles again, this time less come hither and closer to what Seokjin imagines is his natural expression.
Seokjin sighs gustily, then tosses back the rest of the melting ice. After pulverizing the bite-sized pieces between his molars, he says, “Luckily for you it looks like I’m making bad decisions tonight.” He grabs not Yunho by the wrist to pull him across the ocean of people spread out on the dance floor, to a suspiciously propped-open supply closet that Seokjin spotted on their way in.
“Am I a bad decision?” Not-Yunho asks, and Seokjin can tell that he’s grinning that dopey, bunny-toothed grin.
Seokjin doesn’t answer in favor of texting Hoseok and Jimin so that they don’t freak out if they can’t find him. He locks the door behind them. The closet is spacious enough that he and not-Yunho can actually put a couple of centimeters between them, and turn around without knocking anything over. A naked bulb dangling from a wire overhead is their only source of light, and the whole places smells faintly of cleaning products. It’s not the worst place Seokjin has gone down on someone. Better this than that atrocity of a bathroom.
Not-Yunho stares at the empty bucket and mop propped up in one corner. “This might be more comfortable in a bed. My place isn’t far ….”
“Why bother?” replies Seokjin. “This will be over fast enough.”
Just as Seokjin leans in for a kiss, not-Yunho stops him. “Wait.”
Seokjin raises an eyebrow. “Second thoughts?”
“My name is Jungkook,” not-Yunho—or rather, Jungkook, says. “I figured if your dick is going in my mouth you should at least know whose name to scream.”
Seokjin can’t help the rough snort that bursts from him. “God that was corny; if you weren’t cute I might consider leaving. But if you must know, my name is Seokjin.”
Jungkook takes that as permission, pushing Seokjin back into the door frame by a firm grasp on his hips and pressing their lips together. Seokjin’s shirt is loose enough that the movement causes it to rise above the waistline of his pants, freeing up more territory for Jungkook’s fingers to explore. He lets out a hiss against Jungkook’s lips as his fingers make contact with Seokjin’s bare skin.
“Your fingers are freezing,” he mumbles. Nevertheless, he lets the touches continue, and loops one arm around Jungkook’s shoulder to feel the firm length of his body against Seokjin’s own.
“Sorry,” says Jungkook. “I get cold easily.” Then returns to his task, coaxing Seokjin’s lips apart to deepen their kiss.
Seokjin feels his eyebrows furrow when he tastes something coppery on his tongue. His eyes flutter open and he pulls back from Jungkook to touch his own lips. Had he bitten them? Why the hell are Jungkook’s canines so sharp? Then, like someone flicked off the lights in his head, Seokjin slams abruptly into darkness.
I was definitely drugged, Seokjin thinks when he comes to. And whoever drugged him was nice enough to lay him out on the couch; he can feel the stuffed cushions under his back and a throw pillow propping up his head and neck. Seokjin tries vainly to remember the symptoms of special K, or even what the hell happened, but he can’t think past the churning hollowness in his stomach.
I’m so hungry. Why am I so hungry? Seokjin expects the headache, the cottonmouth and the overall achiness permeating his limbs, but all of those feelings play second fiddle to the hunger. Seokjin has been hungry before. He had to fast before his appendectomy, and even that discomfort wasn’t so bad as long as he had distractions to keep him from thinking about his empty stomach.
The pain twisting inside of him ran deeper than simple hunger, Seokjin was starving. Was so sure that if he didn’t eat something right then and there, his stomach would consume him in revenge. He forgets, momentarily, that he was drugged and kidnapped in favor of locating a refrigerator, because surely this place must have one right? If his kidnapper was nice enough to spread a fucking blanket over him so he wouldn’t get cold, they must have food somewhere.
Seokjin stubs his toe while stumbling towards the kitchen because the room—a living room, in a normal and not at all dungeon-y looking apartment—is dipped in shadows. The lights are off and the windows are shuttered by floor to ceiling blackout curtains. Light sears Seokjin’s eyes when he yanks open the refrigerator door, so much so that he barely sees what he grabs until the door is shut again.
A packet of smoked barbecue beef jerky.
Seokjin hastily lifts the plastic to his teeth to rip it open only to jerk back when his hand brushes against something with needle-like sharpness. He feels at his lips, his mouth, his teeth, until his fingers find the offender: Seokjin’s canines—they’re at least two centimeters long and taper to a razor sharp point. They feel like daggers when Seokjin tentatively pokes at one with his finger tips.
Okay, so some of the drugs are still in his system and he’s hallucinating, or he’s still unconscious and having a wild ass dream.
“Oh good, you’re not dead!” A voice says.
Seokjin startles badly, dropping the jerky and whirling around to face his kidnapper. It’s Jungkook, the Yunho look alike from the club. Fragments of his memory resurface, triggered by Jungkook’s face. They were making out in a supply closet when—when.
“You!” Seokjin lunges forward to—he doesn’t know—knock the guy out or something so that he can make his escape when Jungkook yanks back one of the heavy curtains, allowing a beam of yellow morning light to cut across the room.
Where there should be a faint warmth all Seokjin feels is a searing burn like someone doused his hand in gasoline and dropped a lighter on it. The pain is a shock, and he yanks his hand back with a livid hiss. His skin blisters. What the hell? He tries again, tentatively stretching his hands towards the sunlight and this time the pain is enough to bring tears to his eyes. That sliver of open curtain may as well have been an impenetrable fortress, effectively corralling Seokjin to one side of the living room.
Jungkook, from the safety of his side, holds up both thumbs in his direction. “Congratulations, you’re a vampire!”
“So just to recap,” says Seokjin, from his seat on the floor. He’s reclaimed the jerky, hoping to stave the hunger. “You expect me to believe that you’re a vampire.” Jungkook nods. “That you turned me into a vampire when I accidentally drank some of your blood.” Another nod. “That I can’t leave this apartment until the sun goes down unless I want to die a horribly painful death.” A third nod. “And that none of this is an indication of mental instability on your part.”
Jungkook, also seated, rubs a sheepish hand at the back of his head. “It’s a lot to take in, I know. Hyung is better at explaining than I am. But yeah that’s pretty much the gist of it.”
Seokjin’s breathing takes on a noisy hitched quality, so he covers his nose and mouth with his shaking hands, not that that does anything to ward off the impending wave of anxiety crashing down on him. He’s dreaming. He has to be. He’s on a bad trip from something that someone slipped him and having the most realistic lucid dream of his life, and he needs to wake up right fucking now.
“So now I’m some immortal creature of the fucking night that has to drink blood to survive?” asks Seokjin, voice strangled. A pretty rational question considering how irrational he’s feeling right about now. He keeps running his tongue obsessively over his sharpened canines, hoping that they’ll smooth out somehow. If Seokjin is being pranked, the perpetrator is one dedicated asshole.
“Well, according to Yoongi hyung, we’re not actually immortal, just live very long lives. Everything dies.”
Seokjin squints at Jungkook. “How old are you then?”
“Five-hundred and seventeen,” Jungkook answers candidly.
Seokjin feels his eyes bulge. “ Five-hundred and seventeen—are you serious?” So vampires really stopped aging the year they are turned? Physically, Jungkook doesn’t appear older than thirty.
For a few weighted moments, Jungkook’s face remains frozen in a picture of stoicism, then one side of his mouth ticks up to reveal a single bone-white canine. “Nah, I’m just messing with you man. I was turned like six months ago; I’m twenty-five.”
Seokjin throws the jerky with as much force as he can muster, and is satisfied by the dry smack it makes when it hits Jungkook’s forehead. “That is not funny, asshole.”
Still chuckling, Jungkook unsheathes a string of dried meat and tears into it. “You’re right. I really am sorry. I don’t have perfect control over my form, being six months old in vamp years and all. I must have cut myself when we were making out and you swallowed my blood that way. But it’s not all bad! There’s … super strength! And we can turn into animals, though I haven’t quite figured out that trick either ….”
Seokjin stares.
“There’s also … hot kinky vampire sex?” Jungkook tries.
“Hot … kinky … vampire sex ….” Seokjin repeats. “So I’m a blood sucking leech for the rest of eternity, because apparently I’m immortal now, but at least there’s the hot kinky vampire sex. Well, thank goodness.”
“Technically—”
“I know!” Seokjin snaps. “Technically not immortal. Can it be reversed?” The cramping in his stomach worsens, overshadowing the absurdity of Seokjin’s new reality, and even his crushing sense of powerlessness.
“If there is, Yoongi—my sire—will know it. I called him when you passed out so he should be here in a few hours.”
Seokjin can’t be sure since the curtains obscures the window’s view but judging by the angle at which light streams into the room, it can’t be more than eleven or twelve o’clock, in other words—hours until sunset. “I thought you said sunlight kills vampires.”
“New ones, but you can build up a tolerance over time. See.” When Jungkook thrusts his hand into the beam of light Seokjin jerks abortively as if to stop him, then waits for the pain to hit the other man, remembering his own. But Jungkook doesn’t cry out and his skin doesn’t burst into flames. His cute nose scrunches up like he’s experiencing something uncomfortable, but nowhere close to the apocalyptic pain that Seokjin felt. His skin doesn’t blister but it does eventually flush pink, then a deeper red, and he has to pull away.
And thirty seconds after Jungkook withdraws his hand, his skin returns to its natural color. “Another perk, we heal quick.”
To Seokjin, the trade-off doesn’t seem equal. He never asked for the strength to juggle cars or healing abilities that would mystify doctors and make for-profit healthcare workers cream their unethical pants, all he wanted when he went to Electron was to not think about his ex for more than five minutes. Maybe this was divine retribution by the universe for thinking with his dick one too many times. And the best part is that even while he’s experiencing a once in a lifetime supernatural crisis, Yunho keeps shoving his way to the front of Seokjin’s thoughts.
“Can I have my phone? I need to let my friends know I’m not dead. How did no one see you carrying an unconscious body down the sidewalk?”
Jungkook unearths Seokjin’s phone from between two couch cushions and tosses it to him. “Sorry, I didn’t want you calling the cops before I had a chance to explain.”
There are a few missed calls from both Jimin and Hoseok, as well as some texts. Seokjin isn’t necessarily happy that they’re worried, but feels a particular sort of gratification at being the recipient of their concern. Sometimes it felt like Yunho wouldn’t have even cared if Seokjin had been out all night. He’d just greet Seokjin with a oh hey when he finally dragged himself back home.
“Pass me the jerky,” says Seokjin. The hunger pains twisting his stomach have become increasingly present.
“Human food can only fight off the hunger for so long,” replies Jungkook while tossing him the jerky as well. “Eventually you’ll need to feed.”
Seokjin gives him a flat look. “I am not stabbing my little fang straws into some unsuspecting human and drinking blood from their very alive veins.”
“We’ve evolved a fair bit past the times of Dracula,” says Jungkook with an eye roll. “There are bags in the fridge. They taste a little funny because of the anti-coagulant but it’s better than slowly starving to death.”
The mere thought of the blood inside Seokjin’s mouth—thick and viscous and salty with iron, the sluggish way it would slide down his throat and the coppery tang left behind—made him woozy. Seokjin’s head shakes furiously. “No way, no way in hell. Either your buddy finds a way to make me human again or … or…”
Yes, Seokjin is deathly afraid of blood. He can’t stand the sight of it or the smell of it, even thinking about copious amounts of blood for too long is enough to give Seokjin goosebumps, but would he die rather than consume it?
“Hey, hey,” Jungkook soothes. “Yoongi hyung will figure something out. You’re going to be fine. Say it.”
Haltingly, Seokjin repeats, “I’m going to be fine.” And feels just the slightest bit better. Or, if not better, less like the world is ending.
“If I close the curtain will you try to jump me again?” Jungkook asks. “We could watch TV or play a video game. Or you know, just not be sitting on the floor.”
Seokjin finishes the last of the jerky—his seventh piece—and says, “Fine. Truce. Your friend won’t help me if I kill you.” With a quick jerk, darkness overtakes the room again.
They settle, tentatively, on either side of the couch, before Jungkook hops up with a noise and scrambles to his room to get something. That something turns out to be a pair of sunglasses, because even the dim artificial light of the television is enough to hurt Seokjin’s eyes. So that’s how they spend the afternoon, Seokjin in a pair of reflective aviators and Jungkook cradling a bowl of shrimp chips in his lap, watching historical dramas from the nineties.
Jungkook mutters lines along with the actors under his breath until Seokjin joins in, saying the responding line. It turns into a game: they flip to a random drama channel and whoever can name the drama first wins. Jungkook’s impersonations and satoori become more and more ridiculous until Seokjin cracks, squeaking with laughter. And for some reason one he starts he can’t stop until he’s clutching at his aching sides and leaning over the armrest. This time, Jungkook’s smile is triumphant.
Finally, they settle on Tazza.
“So, your ex, huh,” says Jungkook. He would be the type to never be able to keep quiet or sit still during a film.
“What about him?”
“How’d you two end it?”
Yunho and Seokjin’s final argument was ugly. The kind of ugly that makes you wonder how you could've ever fallen for a person capable of such vitriol in the first place. Seokjin hadn’t recognized the person yelling obscenities in his face, demeaning him, calling him a fag. “It was my fault,” says Seokjin.
Jungkook snorts. “I doubt that.”
“You don’t even know me. And you certainly don’t know Yunho.”
“Did you cheat on him?”
“Brazen aren’t you? No, I didn’t go behind his back.”
“Was it long distance?”
“If only.”
“Did you fall out of love?”
That question gives Seokjin pause. “In hindsight, I don’t know if we were ever in love to begin with—is that pathetic? No, no, none of those things. It was me. I … expected too much of him. I wanted him to be a person that no longer existed. Maybe never existed. I wanted him to be courageous and daring, and I wanted him to fight for me. But that wasn’t who Yunho was, so we ended it.” Seokjin coughs to clear the tears choking his throat like a noose. Is he going to cry? How embarrassing. Jungkook’s gaze heats the side of his face.
“You’re wrong, you know,” he says finally.
“Am I?”
“I know a thing or two about you. I know that your capacity for compartmentalization and crisis management is phenomenal, considering how chill you are right now. I know you cherish your possessions and take care of them—those sneakers, they came out when I was in middle school. So you’ve had them for at least ten years and they still look like new.
“I know you drink rum and cokes, and that you kiss like you have all the time in the world. I know you have a mean right arm. And apparently you really like smoked barbecue beef jerky.” Jungkook nods to the empty plastic bag that Seokjin has crumpled between his fingers.
“So knowing at least that much, I find it hard to believe that you were completely at fault.”
Jungkook is kind enough not to point out the wetness on Seokjin’s cheeks, and simply turns back to the television.
“Thank you,” Seokjin whispers. He wonders if Jungkook knew what he needed to hear, or if he’s just a wellspring of comfort and consideration all of the time. Must be exhausting.
Jungkook’s sire is named Min Yoongi and his companion is Kim Namjoon. Min Yoongi is covered from nearly head to toe, with only his face and hands exposed, and he has a folded black umbrella by his side. His cheeks are flushed pink with a light sunburn, adding to his general air of disgruntlement, but otherwise he appears unharmed by the sun’s rays. It is evening, not yet completely dark but not as light as midday; still, Seokjin is impressed by the feat. That ray of hope that tells him that even if he isn’t changed back, a normal semi-life is possible.
Min Yoongi accepts one brief hug from Jungkook with a pat on the back, then examines Seokjin with unnervingly dark eyes. Then says to Jungkook, “Got any food? That trip took a lot out of me.”
Kim Namjoon chuckles. “If you left your studio every once in a while maybe you’d be more used to the sun. Look at Jungkookie, he’s already much better than you were at six months turned.”
“Take a long walk off a short cliff.”
But Kim Namjoon does not appear particularly cowed by the threat.
“Uh, can you maybe eat later, hyung?” Jungkook glances at Seokjin. “Seokjin is kind of…”
“Kind of what?”
“Terrified of blood,” Seokjin finishes.
A pregnant silence. “Wow. Nice job, Jungkook, you managed to spawn the first hemophobic vampire.”
Jungkook whines, covering his face with both hands. “I’m sorry. These stupid fangs do what they want.”
“Only when you’re horny,” says Namjoon.
“Fangs become more difficult to control with any form of excitement,” Yoongi corrects.
“Yeah,” retorts the taller man. “Like being horny.”
“As amusing as this back and forth is…” starts Seokjin. He’s eager to know what his options are.
“Right, Namjoon?”
Jungkook ushers them all to his dining table.
“So according to my research, there’s no way to make you human again.” The words are ice water thrown on Seokjin’s head. Upon seeing his crestfallen expression, Namjoon is, to his credit, apologetic. “I’m sorry. But there may be a way to turn you from a vampire into something else. That way at least you wouldn’t have to drink blood.
“The laws of the supernatural are surprisingly fixed for being steeped in so much myth. They dictate that no one person can exist simultaneously as two supernatural creatures. So, if I were to turn you into a werewolf let’s say, you would no longer be a vampire.”
Seokjin can’t help his skepticism. “Werewolves are also real?” Namjoon’s pupils flash from brown to a white gold, and for the span of a breath his face shifts into something more monstrous. “Okay, werewolves are real. Why do I have to be a werewolf, though? Can’t I be something cute and nonviolent like a fairy?”
Yoongi scoffs. “Fairies aren’t real.”
“Until twelve hours ago, neither were vampires or werewolves!” Seokjin snaps. “So excuse me if the learning curve is a little steep here.”
“You’re right,” says Namjoon, physically human again. “We don’t mean to take for granted the things that are new to you. Yoongi is just prickly. But that really is your best bet. You can take some time to decide, but if you refuse to drink you’ll … you’ll starve to death pretty quickly.”
Seokjin gnaws on his bottom lip. This is his life now, he’s either one monster freak or another. But Namjoon, Jungkook, and even Min Yoongi seem like well adjusted, relatively normal people. Maybe it won’t be as bad as Seokjin imagines. Maybe he can still live the life he planned for. Breaking up with Yunho already threw some wrenches into his master ten year plan, what’s a few more twists and turns?
“Is it dangerous—changing from one species to another?”
“Think of it like surgery. There’s always a chance something may go wrong, but with good surgeons, the odds are in your favor.”
“Fine. I’ll do it,” Seokjin decides. “And if I die I’m coming back to haunt all of your asses.”
“Ghosts aren’t real either,” sighs Yoongi.
“How would you know?”
“He’s got you there,” says Namjoon. “But great! Always nice to add to our numbers. There’s some paperwork to fill out, and we’ll schedule a time and place to do everything. Give me your cell so I can call you.”
Seokjin dutifully hands Namjoon his cellphone so that he can put his number in and text himself. To Yoongi, he says, “So you’re Jungkook’s sire. How old are you?”
“Four-hundred and seventy-three,” says the vampire.
“Yeah, Jungkook already tried that one on me. How old are you, really?”
“I was born in the fourth year of Queen Regent Munjeong, what you would refer to as the year 1549.”
Seokjin feels his eye twitch, then looks to Namjoon and Jungkook to see if Yoongi is bullshitting him. According to their faces, he is not. “Does that mean I have to call you ‘hyung?’”
That garners the first indication of something like humanity in Yoongi’s body language, nose scrunched in distaste. “Please don’t. I was turned when I was twenty-nine. You may, for the sake of ease, treat me as such. Less questions, that way.” Makes sense.
Without consulting his companion, Min Yoongi decides that he is finished with this conversation, and with their interaction in general. He rises and makes for the door, slips his boots back on, and does not say goodbye. Namjoon—seemingly used to the feline behavior— trails after and promises to call Seokjin soon.
He and Jungkook are alone again.
Seokjin thought he’d be leaping at the chance to leave once he finally could, yet something keeps him rooted in place.
Finally, he says to Jungkook, “Aren’t werewolves and vampires mortal enemies?” In spite of the last twenty-four hours, he doesn’t want to hate Jungkook. He thinks he rather likes the man.
“Nah, that’s mostly a myth. I mean, look at Yoongi hyung and Namjoon hyung.”
“So what you’re saying is that if I’m a werewolf and you’re a vampire, there’s a strong chance we can still work it out?”
“You mean you’d want to …?”
Dating the guy Seokjin tried to pick up at the club, who then subsequently turned him into a vampire wasn’t initially in the cards. But at this point Seokjin has to accept that maybe his ten year plan has gone firmly out the window. And facing an uncertain future, Jungkook is about the only thing that Seokjin is sure that he wants. “I’m game to try if you are.”
Jungkook’s final smile unfurls like gaenari in early spring, blooming shyly into being to claim its rightful place amongst the maehwa trees and cement, nourished by the arid sidewalk soil.
“Deal.”