Chapter Text
It's always the same dream after a hunt goes bad.
Always the same night.
Wooyoung is ten years old, coming home from a baseball practice that ran late. San's parents had dropped him off, Mr. Choi's hand on his arm gently shaking him awake, causing him to lift his head from his best friend's shoulder and blink groggily in the warm, orange glow of the streetlights. In the dream he remembers the way the car smelled, like grass and leather and a little bit of sweat. He remembers the way San's hair tickled his cheek as he slid out of the car, the way their fingers intertwined as San yawned out, I love you three-thousand.
He remembers the taste of his mother's kalguksu as she fixed him a bowl of leftovers, the dish salty and rich with the tang of seafood. He remembers the sound of the crickets outside his open window as he fell asleep, the warm breeze of late summer tickling his cheeks, whispering the promise of another busy day of fun and absolutely no school.
He doesn't mind remembering those things. The early part of the dream is sweet, slow and soft, like waking up late on a vacation day when you had nothing planned, and knowing you have as much time to snuggle in bed as you want.
The gentle way it eases him into a false sense of security is a unique form of torture, and even if he's lucid enough to be aware of the fact that he's dreaming, he can't stop it.
Just like he couldn't stop it that night.
Wooyoung is ten again, and he's fallen asleep with his headphones on, listening to his iPod after bedtime like he's not supposed to. The sudden lack of sound is what wakes him up, and it takes him a moment to realize the battery in the little pink device (it was the only one they had at the store when it was time for his ninth birthday, and he's covered it in stickers to try to smother the offending color) has died.
As he crosses the room to his desk, searching for the charger, he realizes that the complete and utter silence that awoke him isn't just from his music having stopped. The entire house is still, quiet, the only noise in the room being his breathing.
He's immediately unsettled.
The Jungs are not a quiet family. Not by far, not even when they sleep. His father snores, his mother tosses and turns on the squeaky mattress, his older brother stays up late playing video games or talking on his brand new cell phone with his girlfriend. The silence is unwelcome, off-putting in a way he can't quite put a finger on. Ten-year old Wooyoung forgoes plugging his iPod in favor of padding to his bedroom door, and as his hand reaches for the knob, twenty-five year old Wooyoung screams and screams and screams for it to stop.
The dream never stops. His younger self always opens the door. He always sees the dark, liquid smears on the wood hallway outside his room, and he furrows his brow in a question (I'm ten years old how am I supposed to know it what that much blood looks like). He always smells the thick scent of copper hanging heavy in the air like a closed fist, and pulls his shirt up over his nose, his expression shifting to worried confusion (I'M TEN YEARS OLD HOW THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO KNOW WHAT THAT MUCH BLOOD SMELLS LIKE). He always tiptoes around the dark trail and makes his way to his parent's room, finding it empty, then Dongyoung's room, discovering it the same (just go back to bed stop stop I don't want to see this). He always slinks to the stairs, steps soft as only one so practiced in late night snack-sneaking could be, and makes his way down them (please stop don't make me look don't make him LOOK).
His socks squish on the carpeted stairs, the liquid from the hallway seeping into the fabric, and he fights the urge to let out a nervous whimper at the sensation. There's something deep in his mind, something dark, a primal, raw fear he's never felt before, that makes him go completely silent. That makes him slip into the foyer as quiet as a church mouse, hand over his mouth, willing himself not to even breathe too loudly. The fear keeps him from calling out for his parents, no matter how much he wants to, keeps him safe and keeps him alive as he rounds the corner and peeks into the living room.
The scene in the living room is always, always reconstructed in painstakingly stark detail, down to the last speck of dust on the curtains. Wooyoung remembers it all. The way the moonlight illuminated the room from the smashed-in window, little shards of glass strewn around the rug like snowflakes. The bodies of his parents lying tossed across the furniture like discarded toys – His mother's upper half on the couch, her lower half on the floor, her legs bent at unnatural angles, her head half-rent from her shoulders from the force that had been used to tear her throat out; his father, facedown on the coffee table, arms dangling loosely off the sides onto the floor, the entire lower half of his jaw missing. The way the room was coated in swaths of red so bright it looked technicolor, painting nearly every surface in the room he'd grown up in, from floor to ceiling.
Ten-year old Wooyoung bites his lip so hard it bleeds. He's crying, tiny shoulders shaking, mind struggling to make sense of what he sees, trying to rationalize the broken, shredded bodies of his parents, when a hand emerges from the shadows behind him and grabs his wrist. Wooyoung nearly screams, only silenced by the hand of his older brother clamping down on his own that still covers his mouth, and he can feel hot, sticky blood smearing across his skin and soaking into the sleeve of his pajama top.
Dongyoung's neck is torn open, the entire right side of his throat and shoulder looking like a fresh hunk of raw meat. His arms are stained to the elbow with red, his eyes unfocused, his gait unsteady. Wooyoung, even then, has no idea how he's still standing. He sways on his feet, tears making clean tracks through the blood on his cheeks as he whispers the last word Wooyoung will ever hear his brother speak –
"Run."
Wooyoung is a good boy. A sweet, fastidious, obedient child, dutiful to his parents and his brother and only acted out when the situation calls for a bit of playful pushback. His mother always comments on how easy he is to raise compared to Dongyoung, who she jokes gave her premature gray hair. He is a good boy, who does as he's told and listens to his elders.
Because Wooyoung is a good boy, he runs – He has to fumble with the front door and slips on the wet wood of the entryway, but he does as he's told and he runs, tearing out of the house, tears streaming down his face, lungs burning with the early stages of hyperventilation.
But because Wooyoung also loves his family, he stops in the front yard, and he turns around.
Even outside of a dream, Wooyoung can't really answer why he did it. What did he even want to happen? His parents were dead. His brother was... In terrible shape. He knew there was nothing he could do – Maybe he's just hoping to see his brother running out after him, hoping he'd heroically stumble over the threshold, having defeated the monster? Dongyoung always scares away the monsters under Wooyoung's bed.
The darkness of the gaping maw of his front door stares back at him, empty and unfeeling as a black hole. No crickets chirp, no windchimes tinkle, no dogs bark. There's just blackness, and silence, and –
A pair of bright, glowing, green eyes, staring out of the gloom directly at him.
Wooyoung startles, slipping on the dew-covered grass, falling down hard onto the lawn with a whimper. The moon shifts, and a single shaft of cold white light illuminates the thing that ripped apart his home's smile.
A smile with thick, sharp, fangs still dripping red with his family's blood.
It always ends there.
He always wakes up screaming.
─── ⋆⋅ 𓋹 ⋅⋆ ───
"You good?" Jongho, Wooyoung's roommate (and friend, though he doubted Jongho would ever plead guilty to the charge) asked lightly as Wooyoung shambled into the kitchen like a zombie, visibly flinching from the warm rays of sunset spilling in through the French doors leading to the balcony.
"Why the fuck is the sun still up?" Wooyoung swiped the can of Red Bull held out to him like he was a nervous horse that Jongho was trying to tempt into not kicking his skull in with a particularly tasty carrot.
"So you're not good." Jongho's lips pursed as he watched Wooyoung hold the can to his forehead rather than drink it.
His expression deepened into a proper frown as Wooyoung made a beeline for the coffee machine, voice thick with exhaustion as he spoke.
"There's blood all over the –"
"The bathtub. I know. I cleaned it up. Showered at Eric's, just to be safe." Jongho offered him a thin smile that didn't quite reach his eyes.
Wooyoung scrambled to place exactly who Eric was as he poured himself some coffee and splashed half the Red Bull into the mug along with it.
Jongho's friend, clearly. Somebody he was close enough to to shower at their house. He'd mentioned Eric before, right?
Boyfriend? No, he didn't think Jongho had dated in a while. Probably because of him. Hard to explain to a potential romantic interest your roommate keeps the hours of the undead and often comes home full of holes and broken bones.
Work friend? Maybe. Jongho's job as a trauma nurse put him in contact with a lot of people of all walks of life, people he talked about often that Wooyoung had declined nearly all invitations to meet. Small talk was anathema to him and he was a dogshit liar. He lied to San enough on the phone about how his nonexistent bartending job was going while his childhood best friend toiled dutifully away getting his classics Masters in the States, and he wasn't ever in the mood to lie to a bunch of Jongho's friends too.
His cheeks flushed scarlet at the thought of Jongho coming home after an exhausting shift in the ER, scrubbing Wooyoung's blood out of their bathtub, and the backs of his eyes suddenly burned.
"I'm so sorry. I was going to clean it up, I left –"
"A note. I saw. But I also saw how hard you crashed once you fell into bed, and I just took care of it. It's okay. I've seen way worse."
Wooyoung blinked away hot tears of shame that threatened to spill over against his will, and he turned half away from Jongho, arm curling around his sore torso.
He was unwilling to let him see how frayed he was. Usually, he was better at keeping himself together. But the shit hunt and the nightmare kept scratching at the edges of the open wound of his mind, and he just couldn't piece himself into a functioning human being, even if he tried.
"I'm sorry."
"Hyung, seriously, it's okay. It's not like I expected rooming with a vampire hunter would be all sunshine and rainbows." Jongho was clearly trying for levity and the raw, ragged threads of Wooyoung's heart appreciated it more than he could possibly put into words.
Wooyoung hadn't exactly intended on telling Jongho his dirty little secret when they started to room together. But there were only so many different ways you could explain away having a crossbow modified to shoot wooden bolts hanging on the wall of your bedroom and the numerous claw and bite scars on your body before a smart man put the pieces together.
"I know, but –"
"I'm tired of having this conversation every time you stagger back in half-dead from your valiant quest to fight the forces of darkness. Just let me have a look at you and then you can keep drinking your battery acid, alright?"
His tone left no room for discussion. It never did.
Wooyoung reluctantly set down his mug of liquid heart attack and limped to the coffee table, settling down gingerly on the towel Jongho had already laid out on the surface for him. It was ragged and bleach-stained from many a soak to rid it of too much blood. Jongho's medical bag was neatly arranged on the couch cushion next to him, the little bear plush staring at him from a zipper pull with eyes full of keychain judgement.
Jongho sighed when he finally took a moment to take in what Wooyoung was actually wearing – A blood-soaked t-shirt that was probably dark gray at some point, but was now just a shredded mass barely hanging onto his body, exposing the strap of his sports bra that was, literally, hanging on by a thread. Even his underwear was bloodstained, because after scrubbing the worst of the gore from his bare skin he hadn't had any energy whatsoever to actually take off his clothes before he collapsed into bed.
Jongho, ever practical, chose to simply cut his shirt and bra off and discard the scraps in a garbage bag Wooyoung hadn't even noticed him grab.
He didn't protest as Wooyoung dropped his forehead to his shoulder, nor when he pressed his face into the warm, pine-smelling skin of his neck. Wooyoung couldn't remember the last time he'd let himself be so close to anyone outside of Jongho tending to his post-hunt injuries. Couldn't remember the last time he'd felt a hand in his own, someone's arms go around him, someone's shoulder companionably knock into his.
His chest tightened. His breath caught. His stupid fucking traitor eyes burned again.
It was too much and not enough at the same time. The closeness. The gentle, tender way Jongho's hands checked him over. The kindness Jongho afforded him despite how Wooyoung unquestionably only made his life more difficult.
"You smell like a Christmas tree," Wooyoung wheezed through clenched teeth as Jongho poked and prodded at his ribs, searching for breaks (maybe a bit harder than absolutely necessary but Wooyoung did bleed all over his tub).
"Eric's body wash is very manly. Real masculine men want to smell like a forest."
Jongho briefly pillowed his cheek against Wooyoung's hair and let his hands still. His strong fingers rested against his narrow hips, thumbs rubbing soothing circles along his hipbones almost protectively.
Like he could protect Wooyoung from himself.
"How bad is it, doc?" Wooyoung muffled into Jongho's sweater, knifing the moment of gentle, casual intimacy in the gut before it consumed him from the inside out.
Too much. It was too much.
It wasn't enough.
Jongho sighed, and gave him one more, this time definitely harder than necessary, jab in the ribs. Wooyoung hissed, swatting weakly at his wrist, appreciating the tonal shift of raw closeness to familiar bickering as much as he hated it.
Jongho always gave him space when he needed it, and didn't try to get past his nine-hundred foot tall walls topped with razor wire. Wooyoung didn't know if he'd survive someone pushing and actually trying to see inside him, anymore.
"You'll live. But not for much longer if you keep up the pace like this. Your shoulder looks like you dislocated it. Did you shove it back into place yourself?"
"Yep."
"Of course. And your neck might need stitches. Again. I gotta take a closer look. And your ribs – Did a bloodsucker go at you with a damn baseball bat?"
There were rustling noises, probably Jongho digging around in his medical bag for whatever the hell he needed to put Wooyoung back together this time.
"Took a tumble. Down a flight of stairs or two. The fucker got a lucky drop on me, I was – Distracted."
Jongho was saying something, probably commenting on how it was his medical recommendation Wooyoung avoid falling down any more stairs. But Wooyoung was miles away, hours away, sucked back into the memory of the hunt.
⋆⋅ 𓆙 ⋅⋆
It started, as most hunts did, with a body in an alley.
The girl – what was left of her – was found in a dumpster behind a Hongdae nightclub, throat torn to ribbons, fingernails broken off from fighting her attacker, completely and utterly exsanguinated.
He had written a program years back, a tricksy little snake of a thing that lived in the Seoul PD's databases and tipped him off to any crimes involving extreme blood loss, animal attacks, unexplained disappearances, or nighttime disturbances. Most of the time, it didn't flag anything but junk, but sometimes?
Sometimes the intel was good, and the hunt would begin.
Wooyoung spent three weeks tracking the damn thing through the underbelly of Seoul.
A week of meticulously combing police reports, hacking into CCTV cameras, greasing the palms of overnight custodial staff on if they'd seen anything weird. A week of mapping out a rough estimate of its hunting grounds and he saw the damn thing stalking a college student heading home from a convenience store and gave chase, but lost it when it headed for the sewers. He was lucky that this one seemed like it ran solo, no coterie of bigger bloodsuckers protecting it, no annoying brainwashed half-turned human pawns that could be sicced on him in the middle of the day.
He finally pinpointed its lair thanks to some clever triangulation and a particularly gruesome missing persons case – The thing was getting desperate, now fully aware Wooyoung was hot on its tail. So he'd picked a night when the weather was good and the moon was clear, loaded his backpack with his vampire-killing kit, made sure he had more than enough crossbow bolts, and the final hunt began.
He found it easily enough – No false walls or booby traps placed around its lair to alert it to possible intruders. No signs of habitation from anyone but the star of the show, either, which made Wooyoung scribble the mental note that he was likely dealing with one of the Clanless. Or maybe the thing's sire had just up and abandoned it. He couldn't imagine vampires feeling anything but a sick sense of ownership and control, even over their own kind.
The thing was squatting in Mapo, in the sub-level of an abandoned parking garage covered in bones and trash and viscera and stinking like a desecrated corpse. He loaded his crossbow, made his steps silent, and stalked the thing through the darkness.
It was... Surprisingly easy.
The creature must have not been in its right mind, or it was half-starved, or just too stupid to realize that Wooyoung was backing it into a corner, herding it towards a stairwell that led to a sealed-up maintenance shaft.
No way out.
Wooyoung, however, was not stupid, and he'd scouted the place out during the day, hoping to find where it slept when the sun was out and torch it without a fight. While he hadn't gotten so lucky, he'd been able to formulate a few plans of attack after he got the hang of the place's layout, and the stairwell was Plan C.
He was prey turned predator, upending the food chain on his own.
A game of cat and mouse ensued through the garage, and Wooyoung's claws were out. He'd shot it and made contact a couple times, though it'd been moving too fast for him to catch it in the heart at a distance. Once through the leg, the arm, the side, all with his hand-carved wooden bolts, and was following the trail of sticky blood that looked black in the gloom when a hand closed around his shoulder.
He spun around, crossbow up, knife drawn, hand already arcing down to stab the thing in the jugular (decapitation or fire may be the only ways he'd learned to kill them but they could still bleed, and paralyzing them with a stake to the heart was always a good place to start) when he froze in place, grip slackening as his knife fell to the cold floor.
The sound of metal on concrete was as loud as a gunshot in the quiet tomb of the parking garage, and Wooyoung's entire body went rigid as his gaze focused on what exactly had touched him.
Dongyoung stood before him, throat shredded, arms covered in blood, eyes hazy and stance wobbly.
"Run." His (deaddeaddeaddead) older brother whispered.
Wooyoung closed his eyes, gritting his teeth hard enough to grind the porcelain to dust, grip tightening on his crossbow.
"Not real. Not real. Not real. You're not real."
The mantra usually helped.
It wasn't the first time a vampire had turned his own mind against him. They all possessed different sorts of freakish, inhuman abilities, ranging from the strength of ten bloodsuckers in one to hypnotic compulsion to superspeed to allegedly necromancy – Though thankfully he had yet to encounter any vampire necromancers and wasn't eager to test the veracity of the claims made by hunters online who swore they existed.
It was, however, the first time a vampire had violated his mind so deeply that they found Dongyoung, and wrenched him out of a nightmare and into the present.
"Not. Real. You're not fucking real. This isn't real."
"I'm real." A voice from the darkness slithered through the shadows to him like an unwelcome tongue in his ear, and then the creature was on him, before he could even get a proper look at it.
The thing's fangs had barely broken the skin of his neck when Wooyoung, acting on pure adrenaline-fueled instinct, hurled himself and the monster with all his might down the stairs he'd successfully cornered it up against.
The beast bit down harder, claws tearing Wooyoung's clothes to ribbons as it scrabbled for purchase, reflexes thrown off by the sudden loss of equilibrium. Locked together in a morbid embrace, they careened down the concrete and metal stairs, the vampire testing its supernatural strength against the limits of Wooyoung's wiry, lean, entirely human body.
He stabbed it the whole way down with another knife he'd pulled out of his boot, wrist screaming from the effort of being bent backwards. He thrashed in the creature's arms to try and loosen its hold, bucking and flailing like a wild animal, the agonizing pain in his throat and body fading away for the sake of survival.
By the time they ran out of stairwell to tumble down, Wooyoung had just managed to drive his knife into the thing's throat. His newly-dislocated shoulder had given him some more wiggle room to do so, and its fangs receded from his neck just enough for him to whip around and shoot a bolt from his crossbow into its heart from point-blank range.
After that? After that, it was just a matter of burning the corpse, patching himself up enough so he could get back on his motorcycle and make it home, and trying not to think about the smell of burning hair and dead flesh and hot, coppery blood sizzling against the concrete –
⋆⋅ 𓆙 ⋅⋆
"Hey. Hey. Hyung. Wooyoung!" Jongho's voice and snapping fingers threw him back to the present, a bucket of cold water dropped over his head to force him out of the memory of the hunt.
"Whuh?" Wooyoung managed oh so eloquently, distantly noting that Jongho had successfully bandaged his ribs, wrist, and shoulder while he was disassociated – he swore he could feel it watching him as he poured more gasoline on the fire, empty black eyes staring out from orange flames –
"I said, you do need stitches for your neck, and you should really, really go to the hospital. I'm working a double tonight so you could come with me. I'd get you all checked in, get it taken care of as discreetly as –"
Wooyoung shook his head so hard he gasped at the sudden corona of pain that bloomed in his neck from the gesture. He clasped his hand over the ragged wounds tightly, as if he could manifest the flesh ripped off his body back with sheer will.
"No. No, Jongho, I've told you. No hospitals. I don't need people asking questions. This creature of the night bullshit goes up further than you could even realize, they've got eyes and ears everywhere, especially hospitals. If one of them found out who I was –"
Jongho scowled, slamming his bag down on the bloody towel Wooyoung was perched on hard enough to make him jump.
"You can't keep living like this! Waking up when the sun goes down, slinking around abandoned warehouses and creepy clubs and risking your life to hunt down these things – You can't do this forever! One of these days one of them is going to get the better of you, you're going to run across one that isn't as sloppy, isn't as crazy, isn't as weak –"
"And I'll take the damn thing out with me if I'm lucky! One less vampire in the world!" Wooyoung's voice rose, cracking on the last word from the dry soreness of his throat.
"And I'm just supposed to sit here and let you watch you kill yourself? Hyung, do you think this is what your family would have wanted? Seeing you do this shit to yourself? You need to move on. You've done enough. Please, Wooyoung, you need to rest."
Rest.
You need to rest.
He was so tired.
Everything hurt.
The fight went out of him like he was a balloon stuck with a pin.
He felt a thousand years old and he was exhausted and everything hurt and he was so, so, so fucking tired of living like he was – Running and hiding and planning and making stakes out of lumber from the hardware store and seeing the water in the shower turn red and wondering if this time will be the last time he'd be able to piece himself back together –
"I can't," Wooyoung whispered, shame flaring hot and bright in his chest like a gun misfiring as he felt tears slide down his cheeks. "I can't. If I stop, it's like –"
Wooyoung closed his eyes, squeezed them shut tight like that could keep the tears back. A shaky, tortured sob slipped out of his throat as Jongho took his hands and linked their fingers together, holding him tight, his touch a tether to the surface of the earth.
"If I stop it's like they died for nothing."
He was brittle. He was hollow. He was a house long abandoned, the family inside gone and the furniture and picture frames looted by squatters, no sound but the wind in what used to be a home but may never be again.
He shook, his body curling in on itself, feeling closer to breaking than he had felt in years all over one stupid fucking vampire that fucked with him using its fucked-up magic powers and ripped the worst memory of his life out of the darkest corner of his mind.
Jongho sucked in a sharp breath, but said nothing.
Maybe he knew there were no words he could possibly string together that could fix him.
So instead, Jongho just put his arms around him, his body steady and strong and warm and the soft pulse of his heartbeat undeniably human.
Wooyoung fell against his chest, his breath coming fast and uneven, heart pounding like a flagging war drum, and he let himself come apart at the seams