Work Text:
When Hyuna finally comes out, Luka has been lounging on the rug at the base of her couch for nearing on half an hour, waiting.
“Luka?” Hyuna squints at him. She’s got her fingers running through her hair, pushing it away from her face, still sleep-tangled, and it looks like she fell asleep in yesterday’s clothes, with their wrinkles. She hasn’t even put her leg on yet. Behind her, there are dim outlines of messy blankets and something red. When she drops the hand from her hair, her nails glint long, and sharp. “Ugh. What time is it?”
“Just barely after seven at night,” Luka provides easily.
For a vampire, she is almost an early riser.
“What the hell are you doing here, then?” But her eyes slide from him like he isn’t something that doesn’t belong here. Hyuna migrates from the entrance of her bedroom to kitchen, leaving the door ajar.
It’s delightful, really. She is so easy. Because Hyuna will not force him to give a real answer. Even though she could. Even though most people can’t. Luka presses the pads of his fingers into the softness of the rug beneath him, and hides a smile.
“Because I want to be here,” he answers, because he doesn’t have to give a real answer.
“What, you came here right after work?”
“I had today off,” Luka says vaguely.
She’s making coffee. “Uhhuh.”
“I’m here for breakfast.”
Hyuna pauses. She does tilt her head to look at him, this time. The sun has long-since set, and all the apartment’s windows are blackout-shuttered, seeping the space into a deep, quiet darkness. Hyuna keeps a small, golden night-light on at all hours, and the warm glow of it catches bright on the black of her lashes. Her sharp, sharp eyes. Their dilated pupils. Luka’s hairs very nearly stand on end.
Her tongue flicks red over her lips. “Hell no,” is what she says. “I don’t wanna clean blood off my floor. And I’m not in the mood.”
“You think so bad of me!” Luka slides to his feet, stepping lightly across the room. Brushes his head against her shoulder before leaning himself against her counter. “I want to take you out.”
Hyuna raises a brow. She’s intrigued. “Take me out?”
In Luka’s coat-pocket, his phone buzzes. Earlier, Sua had texted him what are you doing followed by don’t tell me you’re with the vampire and then today of all days? Luka had sent a heart emoji. Ivan replied: good luck. Luka closed the app and unlocked Hyuna’s door with the spare key Hyuna never asked him to return, and hasn’t looked back since. It buzzes again, and then again.
He ignores it. “You don’t start work until nine today, yes?”
“Yeah.”
“I have a nice place in mind,” Luka leans his jaw against his knuckles. “Empty this time of week, private booths, lovely view of a garden. They have those bitter greens that you people eat sometimes, and that ginger dressing you like, and nice coffee.”
Even apex predators can find plants helpful to digest in certain contexts, after all. Most people don’t know this about vampires, but Luka has known the minute details of their diets for so long as he remembers.
“Yeah?” She’s got that slant to her brow that means she’s unconvinced.
“It’s a special day for me today,” Luka sighs, making himself soft and hopeful and hard to deny. “Just this once, Hyuna?”
Hyuna hesitates. Her hand comes to brush against the faded bruise that’s bloomed up the vein of his neck, and the motion displaces the earrings she let him keep from her closet; the metal brushes against his skin. “What kind of special day?”
One more push and she will be over the edge.
He smiles charmingly. “My anniversary.”
“Like a birthday?” Her brows knit with a frown. He shakes his head. Hyuna pokes her tongue against her left canine, the way she does when she’s thinking, and looks dark and delicate as obsidian. “Then for what?
Luka recognizes the agreement for what it is, the fact that she has decided to give in, to go with him. He leans into her touch, and avoids the question.
-
He first met her along the waterway.
The slow, flat waters of the canal reflected a dozen hundred city lights. He saw the outline of her shadow behind his before it happened—the firm hand on his forearm, the sharp nail that nicked his wrist, the teeth on his jugular, the warm breath that hit his skin. The stone-cold nostalgia that kicked him through the stomach, made him dizzy head to toe, threw his glassy heart against his ribs.
His notebooks hit the ground. The spine of his textbook made a hard thunk. His favorite pen snapped under her boot and bled black on the concrete.
Blurry, he thought,
I still need those notes, and, I can’t afford losing academic progress now, because even this many years later, he is still making up for all the time he lost. He studied late at the library that night. He decided to walk home, instead of taking a taxi, because he was feeling well, relatively speaking, and his doctor said even slow walking is better than no exercise at all. He should have known better than to put aside how dangerous it is to walk at night for people like him. Even though it had been years. Even though he had been safe, whatever that meant, for that long.
Figures, he thought.
“Relax,” she had said behind him, into his neck, hot breath against his ear. Her voice, dragged low and languid, carried that distinctive, vampire-lisp. “It’ll be over quick.”
He made some small sound. Maybe a whimper, maybe a whine.
She had twisted him around, pushed him up against a lamp-post. He saw over her shoulder when she dragged her teeth against his neck to find the vein. He saw long hair in the moonlight, the way it twisted between his fingers where they twitched against her shoulder blades. He saw her outline in the dark: vampire, vampire, vampire.
Fight or flight or freeze.
Luka might have had one of those instincts, in that nebulous past he doesn’t remember and which means nothing to him. He has a different instinct now.
Compliance comes like second nature.
That night, upon the innate realization that he could not escape, that there was no way out of it, that there was really nothing to do or be done about any of it at all—
Luka melted like sugar, and bared his neck.
-
“Oh!” Luka brings a hand to his mouth, pulls off his glove with teeth. Beside him, Hyuna tilts her head to look at him weird.
They’ve just got off the bus. It’ll only be a few more minutes until they arrive at the destination that Luka has set. Amazing, really, that Hyuna has not even asked for the name of the place that they are going. It makes something rustle in his chest. Her, beside him, with her sleeves rolled up half to her elbows and the button of her collar undone. The white curl of her breath in the streetlights. With her brown skin, she doesn’t go pink in the frost, steady and warm no matter the context.
Hyuna asks, “Oh?”
He finishes taking off the glove, and runs his teeth over the second knuckle of his ring finger, where blood has congealed into something that isn’t yet a scab, but could be by tomorrow. He catches Hyuna’s eye, digs his teeth under the clot, and rips open the wound. It wells, again, with blood.
Her pupils dilate. Their black expands to swallow the pearly gray of her irises. “Tempting.”
“For you,” Luka says.
She takes his hand. He stops walking.
“You okay?” Her tongue burns warm on his cold skin, when she licks the space between his fingers, drags it not only over, but into the cut. She isn’t looking at the blood, though; she’s looking at him. “When’s this from?”
“Paper cut,” he says. “I was looking through paperwork this morning. I was clumsy.”
“Jeez,” she says. “It looks like it was made barely five minutes ago. You always bleed so much.”
Luka’s blood doesn’t clot the way it should. It does clot, but badly. Not the way it’s supposed to. He used to be told it was one of his chief virtues. It gives him a unique texture. Luka grins at her, “I could bleed for you all the time.”
Hyuna rolls her eyes and pulls away. “I like variety in my diet.”
Her saliva glistens on his skin. It is immediately colder without her. There are three levels of charm, he knows; first is the charm in the air, second is the charm in the venom of the bite, and third is the charm in the blood. She did not even bite him, but Luka feels enchanted regardless. For a moment, he is too distracted studying the way her saliva mixes with his newly welling blood, that he misses her movement. It’s startling, like a pebble thrown into still-water, when Hyuna takes his wrist again, this time to hold him steady while she rips open a band-aid with her teeth and wraps the cut snugly. She started carrying the latex-free kinds after she met him.
“I can have variety.” It’s hard to talk, when all he really wants to do is become soft and quiet and soak in the presence of her. But Luka learned a long time ago that if he wants to keep what he has or gain what he wants, he has to become more than he is. The next words come with more personality, “I have everything you know. I’m so considerate. I’m taking you out for breakfast and everything.”
“You’re the one who asked me out.” She sounds indulgent.
He says, “I let you drink from me all the time. Aren’t I considerate?”
That gets a scoff. Hyuna starts walking again, so he does, too.
Her prosthetic impacts her mobility. Hyuna walks with oscillation. Like every step is off a ledge. She is better at running than walking, although she never runs with him, because Luka cannot run.
“A risk, that’s what you are,” Hyuna hums. “I shouldn’t even talk to you.”
Luke does not say: You like to take risks.
It’s true that she’s a risk taker. It’s true, too, that she’s right; it’s risky to talk to him. The whole thing between them is a risk, reckless beyond measure—for him to submit himself for feeding, and for her to take the offer. For all of it to be done with clear minds.
There is nothing to stop Luka from reporting her. There’s nothing to stop her from doing worse. He knows all her dirty secrets. She’s the kind of vampire that feeds often on one-off flings, occasionally on friends, and mostly on unwitting strangers. Her attacking him that night was not an outlier. He knows this; she knows he knows this. Hyuna could look at his body on the platter of which he’s offered it to her, and take his mind instead.
Luka says, sugary, “You could always enthrall me.”
“Don’t even joke about that.” Hyuna makes a face. Her voice is flat. She’s serious.
How would her blood taste? It’s been ten years and two months and two weeks since Luka last tasted the blood of a vampire. He didn’t used to count. It just tasted like blood. But maybe hers would be different. He lilts forward in his step, twists on his heel so he half-faces her. “There are easier ways to shut me up.”
Like enthralling him.
But she just smirks. “Oh, I know.”
Heat flushes up his neck and onto his cheeks. Hyuna twists him around by the shoulder, so he’s actually looking where he’s walking. They’re coming on the bend of the street where it starts getting lined with ginkgo trees that’ll bloom come spring. The roadside is still lined in gold where their leaves have amassed in great, fallen piles. Luka has photos on his phone of Hyuna climbed up in their autumn foliage, winking at the camera. When they turn the corner, he sucks in a quiet breath and reaches for her arm and makes physical advance on her.
He tugs down her lower lip at the corner, lightly touches the tender flesh of its inner side, where the pink hue becomes an angry, irritated red. Her canines keep nicking the flesh, and then catching again on the subsequent swelling.
“I’d drink from you well,” Luka says, looking at the place on her that isn’t bleeding now but could be reopened easily, just like his paper cut, “even if you’re not even half as sweet as me.”
Hyuna grasps his wrist firmly. Removes his touch, and licks her lip, and then her teeth. “It’s like you want me to enthrall you.”
She sounds exasperated.
Well.
His thin wrist in her long fingers. Her gaze on him. Luka looks back, and, for a moment, forgets he needs to say anything at all. He doesn’t want to be sincere. He doesn’t want to say something he doesn’t mean, either. He wishes she would just dig deeper. There is an art to pressing, and pressing, and pressing, until something breaks.
Eventually,
“Oh not at all,” Luka answers airily, light like it doesn’t mean anything. But every word is truthful. “Never.”
-
After their first meeting, Luka had woken up a decade in the past.
In that thin sliver of time, he wasn’t a person anymore. He was laying limp on something soft, with a sharp, pulsating, familiar ache in his neck. His head felt stuffed full of cotton. He could barely think. There was no sense of self, in that moment, only a body, and the knowledge that it had been used. He knew the unique ache of a vampire bite like the back of his hand, the way the venom makes the muscles weak. He knew the dizzying sensation of his body attempting to burn it out of the blood in his brain, like a fever but worse, like his insides cracking out of his skull and spilling in a viscous mess.
Nothing had changed. He was right back where he always was.
It must have been a fever dream, he felt, or thought, or wondered: it must have been a daydream, his life until that moment, the memories of being saved, the knowledge of being safe, the thought that that had ended—a fantasy.
The beep of something medical.
Luka snapped back into himself. He was twenty eight, not eighteen. He opened his eyes to a hospital room. There was a nurse beside him. He struggled to sit up. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m disoriented. Where am I?”
“XXX Hospital,” the nurse said. He tried to understand her words. “You’ve been unconscious for around an hour.”
“Oh,” he said.
“We called the number on your medical bracelet.” They called his case worker. His case worker is still his emergency contact.
He felt briefly, inordinately glad that he never accepted Ivan’s offer to make him his emergency contact instead.
“Okay,” he said.
The nurse told him it was almost two in the morning and explained what happened to him. He had been a victim of a vampire attack. There was no need. He understood that the moment he woke up, and remembered what happened the moment he remembered himself. The figure by the waterway, her long hair, the vampire-lisp, the teeth at his neck, the clatter of his notebooks...
All his notebooks were stacked neatly beside the hospital bed. They were organized beside his textbooks.
His mouth was dry. “Who brought my stuff here?”
“Oh,” said the nurse. “That would be whoever brought you here. It was this long-haired woman—she said she found you by the waterway.”
Surely not.
He had asked the staff for a description. A description could not be provided.
Vampiric charm, Luka thought, distantly—the temporary, harmless sort. The charm that clings to vampires passively, through pheromones or something like them. A weaker version than even the kind which should have had Luka under its influence; the venom in the bite should have disoriented his memory much more than it did. It would have, if not for the tolerance he’d built over the years.
It didn’t matter. He gathered himself in the hospital bed. He called his caseworker; no, don’t have to come to the hospital; yes, his deepest thanks for relaying his medical needs; no, a counseling session was not necessary. He went through the half dozen emergency tests and treatments for a vampire bite. By the time he left the hospital, it was four in the morning; he took a taxi home. It didn’t matter.
He went to work the following morning on two hours of sleep and three cups of white tea. He found his boss at the coffee machine and asked, promptly, “Is it against the code of ethics to use government resources and records for personal interest?”
“Luka,” said his boss.
“Hypothetically,” Luka specified. “Would it be against our code of ethics to use private government resources and records to track someone down?”
Across the room, Ivan made something like a choking sound and coughed into his arm. He leaned against the wall. When Luka glanced over, Sua was covering her mouth behind her sleeve and Ivan’s ears were pink. This almost certainly meant that Ivan had, in fact, done the very thing Luka asking about.
His boss said, “Yes, Luka.”
Luka paused. He checked, “Even if there’s no malintent?”
“Yes, Luka.”
He paused again. He tried, “Is it only against the code of ethics, or is it also against the code of conduct?”
There’s a key difference between those two, after all. The code of ethics is a guideline for behavior, but the code of conduct is a hard-rule. Luka didn’t break eye contact. His boss put down the cup of coffee and looked as though verging on a headache. The kind of expression someone makes before burying their head in their hands. “Yes, Luka.”
Immediately, Luka regretted asking. If he didn’t ask, he could have had plausible deniability.
“Okay,” Luka said.
He moved to leave. His boss said, “And Luka?”
“Yes?”
“Thank you for asking.”
Luka didn’t reply to that, although it did make him feel a bit better. It didn’t change the fact that he lost plausible deniability because he was attached to getting permission. A migraine was beginning to build behind his skull, had been building since the hospital, and he knew that in a few hours, he’d be heaving stomach acid and seeing aura, and going home on sick leave. He returned to the table where the Ivan and Sua had already started filing paperwork. Ivan was eating Luka’s lemon drops. Luka snatched them back and settled into his chair, sulky.
Sua mimiced, “Even if there’s no malintent?”
“Do not talk to me,” Luka said.
“Aww,” Ivan said. “Don’t sulk about it. There are always other ways to track people down!”
Sua hid her mouth behind her sleeve, again. “It’s really okay,” she said, although she turned to look at Ivan, instead of Luka, which meant she was only talking to him to make fun of Ivan. “It’s good not to use your government job to use government resources to track someone down for personal interests.”
“That was one time.” Ivan crossed his arms. Then he looked at Luka. “Besides, Luka’s just weird about rules. Luka would’ve done it too, if it wasn’t against the rules.”
-
Hyuna never asks, is the thing.
“I swear to god your job does not pay enough to cover this,” she mutters.
They’re at the restaurant, now. It’s an expensive place. Luka got them not only a private booth, but a private room; the floor is warm, and littered with soft cushions and mats, and the table is low, and the lights are quiet. The back shows a window into the winter-garden, and the dark night outside. Hyuna’s bitter-greens salad came without a single wilted leaf.
She isn’t wrong. What paid for this is the exorbitant damages he was granted after his case was processed. Part from the traffickers, and part from the government itself, charged with criminal neglect and corruption in allowing him to fall through the cracks. He’s set for life, really. It’s enough to live comfortably for a very long time. Somewhere, there exists a stack of paper that assigns a monetary value to all the parts of himself that were taken or denied or ruined: this much for his health, that much for his education.
Hyuna didn’t ask a question, though. Luka gives a not-answer to her not-question, “It’s a nice job.”
“Sure,” she says with dry amusement. “I’d say you’re just a spoiled rich brat if I didn’t know your parents are—dead, or something.” She motions vaguely.
She never asked why his parents are out of the picture, either.
“Pfft.” Luka leans forward, across the table, into her space, tilts his head up to look at her. He licks his tongue between his teeth. “Brat?”
“Absolutely,” Hyuna answers, but indulges him anyway.
She lifts herself up onto her knees and braces her body with one hand on the table to lean across and kiss him comfortably. Her mouth is hot, and she snakes her hand around the back of his head, into his hair, and pulls him closer. Her canine nicks his lip. Blood seeps into the kiss. It slips down his jaw. A droplet hits his collar bone. His lip pulses hot with pain and fizzes with anesthetic-buzz.
When Hyuna breaks the kiss, Luka sighs.
“You taste even sweeter than usual,” she hums, licking up the line of blood that had slipped down his jaw.
He bats his lashes. “Am I the sweetest you’ve ever had?”
“Mm,” Hyuna says. “Maybe.”
“And am I the most tempting, too?”
“Don’t even try,” Hyuna says. “Finish your meal first.”
That isn’t a no. He’s plated with desert. Sweet rice in coconut milk with fruit slices, almond-milk ice cream and syrup-soaked pastry. He likes the idea of a life that is sweet, and soft, and mild. Even the slightest spice gives him a headache at best and migraine at worst. He presses, “I don’t mind.”
“I’ll feel bad if I eat now,” Hyuna says. It is almost like an admission that he is tempting to her. He’ll get her to say it eventually. It’s like a game they play. “I won’t make you eat while bleeding out. No matter how nice you taste.”
Luka settles back down to his own cushion. He smiles. “The genetic disorders make me taste better, apparently.”
“Apparently?”
He shrugs. “It’s what I’ve been told.”
Hyuna doesn’t ask.
She doesn’t say, been told by who or, how would someone know? She doesn’t ask.
It’s obvious.
Hyuna doesn’t take thralls the way many vampires do, Luka has learned, over his months with her; she doesn’t care whether her prey is willing or unwilling, only that they are free. He’s discomfiting, then, for her—his habitual, half-forgotten willingness.
“Hmm.” Hyuna adjusts her hair, tucks strands of it behind her left ear, and the movement shows the dark brown-on-brown beauty mark on her cheekbone. Behind her lashes, Hyuna’s silvery eyes are sharper than a blade. “It’s not just that, though.”
“Hm?”
“It’s true your blood has an innately different taste and texture,” Hyuna says. “But you taste better than you did when I first fed on you.”
Of course he does.
He’s not new to this, after all. He’s known the minute details of vampire diets for so long as he remembers, and for Hyuna, he has adjusted his own diet accordingly. He tastes better. He is better. His blood is tailored to providing the right nutritional balance, enough for her to barely have to feed outside of him. Hyuna has noticed, even if she has not explicitly called him on it. Amusing, really, how easily habits like these return. He barely even remembers walking through these steps, and they still come so easy. It’s been a decade, and he is still practically made for this. No involvement with vampires for a decade, not even in the slightest way, and here he is.
It feels just the same as it always did, and it feels entirely, thrillingly new. He gets nostalgic, sometimes. Was it always this thrilling?
Hyuna has never taken a single thrall, not even the short-term, temporary type. This does not mean she’s unable to recognize one.
But Hyuna never asks.
Maybe it would be against her principals to pry. Maybe she doesn’t want to hear the confirmation. Maybe it’s her way of respecting him. Maybe she just doesn’t want to know. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
“That’s good,” Luka says, dragging the sound between his teeth. “I wouldn’t want to get boring.”
“Pfft.”
“Really!”
Blood slips down his jaw, again, from his still bleeding lip. It feels cold on his skin. He always feels cold, even as the cut sears a hot, venomous sting. Hyuna reaches across the table, and wipes him with her finger. Licks the blood from the pad of her thumb.
“Well whatever it is—” Hyuna leans back on her palm, and yawns; it shifts the line of her trachea through her throat, and flashes her sharp, sharp teeth, “—it makes you like dessert.”
She grins.
Luka feels something strange. It’s like a fever. He doesn’t look away, though, even when Hyuna looks right back at him, and laughs at whatever she sees. He can see his blood on her teeth.
A secret:
Luka likes to press to see how much he can make Hyuna take of him. There’s an art to it, after all, to pressing, and pressing, and pressing, until something breaks. How far is against her conscience? and how far against her conscience could she go? Hyuna has principals. She doesn’t care if her prey is willing or unwilling, so long as they’re free. He’s discomfiting for her. Even she can recognize a thrall.
How much of himself, he has thought, again, and again, and again, can he make her take?
The answer is: everything except the parts that have been taken before.
-
The parts that have been taken before:
His personhood. His agency. His autonomy. His dignity. His caseworker called him “the worst case of thrall trafficking I’ve seen in twenty years.” The press called his situation “a national embarrassment upon every single agency involved.” The hospital called him “a miracle.” He never called himself much of anything at all. He thought they were being sensationalist, back then. He somewhat still does. The photos made it look worse than it was; he bruises easily and bleeds easier, after all. They used to include those in the articles, with his face blocked out for privacy: NINETEEN YEAR OLD THRALL FOUND CATATONIC AFTER[…] which soon became SEVENTEEN YEARS AS A THRALL: XXX-THRALL IDENTIFIED AS CHILD THAT WENT MISSING AT TWO YEARS OLD […] FAMILY REMAINS UNFOUND. None of them included his name. He’s glad for that.
Hyuna caught his attention because she didn’t enthrall him. He had never met a vampire content to taste him only once.
Luka tracked her down the old fashioned way; he remembered the length of her hair and tone of her skin and fabric of her jacket. He went through public records. He made lists of every job within the city, and which ones had hours appropriate for a vampire, and where they were, and every route of public transit, and the cross-sections with vampire-friendly housing, so on, so forth. He gave himself at least half a dozen migraines.
He found her at a bar some thirty minutes away from the waterway.
Her pupils had dilated when she caught scent of him, and he had watched the shift of her throat when she swallowed, and almost smirked. She hadn’t even looked at him.
“Water,” he’d asked for, when he settled into a chair at the bartop.
It took twenty minutes for him to finally draw her out to him. In that time, he ordered tea, and played the old piano by the performance stage, and sank into a dark, secluded corner of the bar. He folded himself into his arms, and closed his eyes, and pulled down his collar, and let his illness show. He let himself be a perfect picture of a wounded, sickly thing. He got more blood draws barely a few hours prior and took off the pressure-pad they put to close the vein. Black-blue bruises bloomed from his elbow up his arm and down nearly to his wrist. The bite on his neck had barely closed up. He made sure he smelled like blood before he came.
“Hey. ‘You alright?” She had come to his table with the third cup of tea he ordered. Her sleeves were rolled up above her elbows, and her hair pulled back and bound loosely. She was the picture-perfect image of a bartender. “We can call someone if you need help..?”
“No no no,” he said. “No need. I’m alright.”
She frowned. “You’re sure?”
“I just got into a mess the other week,” he had laughed, putting on a mask of sheepishness, smiling like he didn’t know who she was. “Walked home alone when I shouldn’t have. Unfortunately, I ended up missing doses of my medication. It’s a bit of a headache. But I’ll be OK.”
She had grimaced.
Caught you, Luka thought.
His eyes flicked from her, with sunglasses hung over the collar of her button-up, and the slight indent of her lip where her fang must have been pressing it inward, to the other staff of the bar. He tried to decipher whether it was a vampire den. There are certain tell-tale signs. He couldn’t find them. It didn’t make much a difference to him.
The rest of the night, Hyuna had paid him special attention. Luka exploited it entirely.
Hyuna would find out, eventually, that the entire meeting was manufactured to bait her out and lure her close. But she would not find that out until months into knowing him.
Luka became close to her the same way he could always expect to get close to anyone: through being sweet, and convenient.
He learned what she liked. He learned all about her. She has a brother she barely mentions and never names; Luka heard them on the phone, once, the laughing complaint that she was over-protective. He got her coffee when she forgot, and got her number, too. He sent her pretty pictures and jokes she’d find funny. He observed how her hunting practices adjusted after meeting him, because she didn’t want to accidentally trigger medical complications in what was supposed to be a casual victim; it was less because she cared about the harm caused, and more because the harm was not intentional. He let her lick his paper cuts. He let her nick him with her teeth. When he walked in on her with blood on her face and her teeth and her nails, he said, I already knew. He let her bite him. He offered himself to be bitten. He’s never met a vampire that isn’t tempted to taste him twice. Thrice. More. Hyuna is no exception. He drew her to the library and let her feed off him between the bookshelves.
Hyuna took him in the street and the car and against the door to her apartment. Hyuna took him in the stairwell and a dark back-room of the art museum and the outdoor garden of a cafe. Hyuna took him when she was hungry and when she was peckish.
Luka was convenient. Luka had always been convenient.
He didn’t mind it.
Another secret:
He does remember the time before he was a thrall. He has three memories: something soft, something sweet, and sunlight through a window of a house he might have been born in. It splayed over the floor in patches. In this memory, he rolls over and grasps at the air, watching the gold on his fingertips, trying to hold the sun in his palm. He felt something and it was not a bad feeling. He remembers nothing more.
He used to miss the memory so much it felt like he would die. He remembers that, too.
In those first months of knowing Hyuna, Luka remembered more than he wanted to. He waded his nostalgia like a swamp. It felt like breathing tar. He looked at the sky and the stars. He looked at the sun for longer than he should, on old habit. He used to catch whatever glimpse he could of the sun, as a thrall. Afterward, he stared at the sun for near-minutes at a time until his head felt it’d split itself open. The doctors said his eyes were already half ruined from years in the dark. The paperwork, the caseworkers, tutors, life coaches, caregivers, medications, doctors, hospitals, witness protection programs, counseling he didn’t want. A dozen faceless faces telling him everything that was wrong with him. Court visits, agencies, an apartment just for him. Ivan, Sua. Their dark eyes on him. Ivan talked to him first; Luka didn’t speak a word to him for six months. The doctors thought it was because of the cognitive impairment; that was probably true, too, but in Luka’s memories, he just didn’t want to talk. Ivan told Sua he looked like a doll.
Those hazy days.
The taste of blood in his mouth. The way it churned in his stomach for seventeen years. His body turned itself inside out in its absence.
Ivan and Sua were watching him again. Ivan’s careful, observatory gaze and Sua’s sharp, held tongue—Luka pretended not to notice their eyes on his neck, even as bruises mottled further, and further. He kept the iron-hot thing between him and Hyuna quiet, and clandestine.
“How long will you bother me,” Hyuna had said, once, still irritated over the fact that he had played her for so long.
Luka had smiled. “As long as you’ll have me.”
“You know,” Hyuna had muttered, flicking ashes from her cigarette, “most people don’t cling to vampires and bet on their good graces. It’s usually the other way around.”
-
Hyuna has certain preferences.
She doesn’t go to blood shelters because those are ‘for people who need it.’ Blood shelters run on donations, and donations are always in short supply. Even though virtually all blood drives have a vampiric consumption donation option, open to near everyone, unlike those for medical use, it’s still charity. Luka’s own caseworker took him off every possible blood solicitation list. Hyuna isn’t wrong; after all, she can easily find someone to feed on, willing or not; she does not ‘need it.’ But..
He also knows her preferences. Hyuna likes a warm, living, breathing body beneath her. Hyuna—
“Hyuna,” Luka gasps, air punching out of him with the way his back hits the cold grass.
—Hyuna likes it when her prey struggles.
She grins down at him.
Her hand on his chest, pressing. He claws at the grass, and then her arms, her back, her neck, the sleeve of her denim jacket, the collar of her button-up blouse. She is all blacks and rusted reds above him—black denim jeans, black denim jacket, dark length hair like a curtain. His toes curl in his shoes. They’re on a secluded bank, a few streets down from the restaurant. The couple-minute walk might so well have been across a live wire, walking with a vampire poised for a meal. She tripped his ankle the moment they turned the bend of the road; he saw the pounce in her step before he saw the flash of her teeth.
Hyuna bends down and drags her teeth across his Adam’s apple. “Yeah?”
“You,” he manages, “are so uncourteous.”
That makes her laugh into his neck. “Me?”
“I’m covered in bruises,” he says. “People will gossip, you know.”
“People,” she hums.
“Strangers,” he says. Then, “My coworkers.”
“I’m sure.” She sounds entirely unconcerned.
“You’ll have to come in and defend yourself,” he says. “All, ‘Hello, I’m his lover. I know this looks bad, but I can explain.’ I’ll look like a horror. And they’ll all give you death glares because they love me.”
Hyuna drawls, “Intimidating.”
He hums, “But I love you more, so I’d back you up. I’d say—”
his words catch between her teeth.
She has his throat between her teeth. Her canines dig into either side of his trachea, tugging it out of place. The cartilage pulls with a displacing shift. None of her teeth break blood. Not yet and not there, where it would kill him. His pulse beats a steady, steady, steady thrum.
He was going to say something. What was he going to say?
It’s so hard to focus like this.
“You’d say?” Hyuna’s words vibrate against his own voice box.
The body straddling him.
Beneath him, the ground is all soft, freezing grass. It could seep through the cotton of his clothing, through his skin and his flesh and into his bones; he is almost as cold. Against him, the muscle of her right leg lays across his abdomen, and the metal of her left knocks against his ribs. His head throbs. He could burn into ash.
“...You’re so—” his voice grinds like glass inside his skull, “mean.”
Her thumb presses its nail into the tender wound in the side of his neck. They haven’t healed from the last time she fed off him like this. “You’d say I’m mean?”
Hyuna likes it when her prey struggles.
Luka—
“Hyuna,” he calls.
His spine aches. His head throbs.
Most of his bruises aren’t from blunt force. Most of them are just from internal bleeding. Once the vein is cut open, even just a little, it weeps all over the place. It seeps his bad blood all around inside of him, until it rots beneath his skin. It blooms across him in blacks and blues and purples before festering into yellows and greens. Hyuna presses one hand against his skin, these days, after she bites him; with the other hand, and her teeth, she unravels fabric to tie around the bite. She ripped up an old sheet into long strips to tie around each wound. Because pressurizing the site helps keep the blood from continuing to spill out of the vein.
Hyuna is gentle with him, in truth. When she tripped him at the ankle and straddled him against the bank, she slipped her hand behind his head to take the fall.
Rough-and-tumble playfulness.
“I’m listening,” she says with her throat between her teeth.
He feels the vibration of his own voice where it’s captured against his skin by her mouth. He reaches his hand up against the back of her head. “You’re uncourteous.”
“Mhmm.”
“This is bad manners,” he says.
“Oh?”
Months back, Luka had double-point scars at every major artery.
They were the unmistakable kind. Everywhere a major vein was accessible, and all over his neck and his arms, wrists, hands, thighs, feet—there lay twin canine-scars. Back then, Hyuna had yet to taste every major vein in his body. She hadn’t seen the whole of him. And every time she uncovered a new part of him, someone else had been there first. Hyuna never said anything about it. Instead, she would hover her mouth over the scars for honey-thick moments that stretched out into eternity, looking, and looking, and looking. Luka would look back, watching, and waiting. The drag of her teeth over the tender tissue, the catlike lick of her tongue, time stretching out like molten sugar, slowly, sweetly hardening, before the moment would snap in two between her teeth.
The anticipation of the bite.
“Hasn’t anyone told you?” Luka looks at the dark, starless sky. Against him, she is firm and heavy, like a weighted blanket, or a branding iron. He curls his fingers in her silky hair and pulls, hard. “It’s not nice to play with your food.”
Hyuna trails her teeth from his throat to the side of his neck.
It goes like this:
He tries to draw his leg up to kick her off of him, but it’s useless; she is so much stronger than his weak body. He knew that already. He has a script to follow. He counts heartbeats. The hand cushioning the back of his head from the ground becomes firmer in its grip, and twists his head leftward, to better bare the neck. He makes a low sound, and struggles, and she holds him down. Grass tickles his cheek. The ground makes itself a bed. Something aches. He gets dirt in his mouth. Her mouth finds the right spot.
One heartbeat. Two, three—
Pain breaches the side of his neck, and blossoms up its blood. Her canines sink into the half-healed wounds. When he tries to twist away from her, the movement only brings them deeper. Four, five—
The venom hits.
Luka blanks.
“Bad manners?”
Her tone is thick with blood like syrup. Like this, the vampire-lisp caused by the canine teeth makes itself heard in full.
He can’t think.
He can’t think, can’t move. The hand he has in Hyuna’s hair goes limp. All of him narrows down in two dimensions. He tries to remember why he was moving at all before, when he didn’t want to. He tries to remember why he was talking, when he didn’t feel like it. He wants to lay there and let things happen to him. He tries to remember how to recreate himself, when so many other people have always been the ones stitching him back together, for better or worse. But there is something he should do.
There is something…
“...Hyuna,” is what he manages.
There is—
Hyuna is sitting up now. She’s bent over him. She touches below his eye. “Hi Luka.”
Ah.
He remembers now.
Hyuna likes it when her prey struggles. This is not a matter of sadism. Hyuna just likes it when people are alive. So Luka tries to be alive.
He flexes his fingers. He draws a harsh, ragged breath.
When he moves to cover the bite, she dives right back in. His jaw touches against the top of her temple. He clenches his jaw. Her mouth is hot on him. The area feels sticky, and slippery; something wet seeps into the hair at the base of his nape. He moves, and the movement smears blood.
Her canines sink back in.
Another dose of venom.
The flesh begins to hum and buzz like a live wire, numbing over in the same way ice burns. The sensation tingles down to his fingertips. He flushes hot-and-cold with something feverish. He digs his heel into the ground, so she feels the tension of his body below her. His mind feels so far away like this, fog and molasses, silt and sand and sugar. A headache presses against the back of his eyes. The focus it takes not to lose himself to the sensation in these moments is enough to give him a migraine, sometimes. He tries to think. He tries to think. He curls his fingers. He remembers to move. He follows the vague urge to grind against her. Feverish. Something addictive. He thinks: play-living.
It is all he can do not to float away.
Like pulling himself through a sieve. He is pulling his thoughts through a sieve. His mind is made of molten glass. It is one of the most arduous tasks imaginable.
“Hey Luka,” Hyuna says, beside his ear.
Like moving through wet concrete. He barely hears his own answer. “What?”
“You said today was a special day for you, yeah?”
Did he? It takes longer than it should to parse her meaning. Luka searches for the memory. The day stretches itself out like an unfinished painting in his mind, all shapes and no detail. He remembers, “I said that.”
“Then...” she’s trailing a nail across his collar bones. “In honor of the occasion, I wanna ask you to do something.”
“Okay.”
“Great,” Hyuna says. “Luka, quit it.”
She’s bent over him, again. He can see her face. It doesn’t tell him much of anything. But her mouth isn’t smiling, and her eyes are on him.
He stares blankly.
Something wet hits his face. It’s his own blood slipping from her chin.
The headache behind his eyes threatens to burgeon into something worse.
“I don’t know what you’re asking.”
“I am telling you,” she says, and there it is, that way she scalds on the edge of her intensity over anything that means anything to her, but he still doesn’t know what she’s talking about, “to quit it. You’re fighting me.”
He thinks, you like it when people fight you.
He says nothing. He remembers to press his lips thin.
“Quit doing what you think I’ll like,” Hyuna snaps.
Hyuna likes it when her prey struggles. Luka—
“What I think you’ll like?” He tilts his head. He smiles placidly.
—complies.
The first time they met was the last time he surrendered to her completely. He went limp and boneless. He let himself leave his body to become his mind, and leave his mind to become his body. He just existed. He cut his strings. He laid in the sensation. It wasn’t pleasant, but that owed mostly to the circumstance. He likes it when things are soft, and quiet, and easy.
It was natural to him; Hyuna must know that, if she is bringing this up.
“I didn’t realize at first,” she says. “I thought you liked playing back even if it’s hard for you. You play people like fools, you know. But I’m not stupid. There’s this moment at the end of when I’m feeding on you, where you go all glassy and barely hear a word I say and look by every measure like a freshly killed corpse, and it’s more sincere than most of anything else about you. If you want to relax and do nothing, then just do that.”
“Hnng,” Luka says.
He thinks. A pulse behind his temple. He thinks,
Caught me, with a smile, the kind of thing that is said with a subtle little smile, except he isn’t smiling. There’s an image in his mind that is more like the reconstruction of a sensation, where he is smiling. He doesn’t know what to do. He is used to being convenient. The venom messes with his head. The situation messes with his head. His finger twitches. At some point the hand he had on the back of Hyuna’s neck fell to the ground. He thinks something bitter. Or maybe he thinks, thank god.
“Luka,” Hyuna says. “Quit it.”
Overwhelmed, Luka—
-
By the time Luka realized, it was too late.
Sua had already twisted the key to the lock of the door. He heard its click, and caught glimpse of the brassy glint. When he swerved to look, he found Ivan’s hand already on his scarf. Ivan’s fingers touched briefly against his skin as they hooked around his scarf, and pulled it off. The fabric slipped from his neck.
Luka covered the side of his neck with his palm. This was useless not only because it might so well be admitting guilt, but because by the time he slapped a hand to his neck, Ivan had already grabbed his sleeve and ridden it up above his elbow.
“Luka,” Ivan said.
There, in the white light of the filing room, stark against his skin, was a double-point bite into the junction of his elbow, right at the major artery.
It was pink and red, and fresh.
Ivan held his arm up by the wrist. He twisted the limb to show Sua, still by the door.
What a farce, Luka thought, something cold seeping through him. They were at work. Ivan drew him out from the citizen service desk out at the front, where Luka sometimes tends because ‘people love you,’ to the back, past the work areas, into the far back, where the records that they’re legally required to keep physical copies of are kept. He dug his heel into the back of his shoe and felt the hard flatness of the concrete through the thin carpet. Cold air kissed against his then exposed skin.
Sua rested her head against the only exit. It made a small thunk. She looked at Luka’s arm, then his hand-covered neck, and said, “Oh my goddddd.”
Ivan gave him a sardonic smile. “Wow.”
That cold feeling froze into a burn.
“Hands off,” Luka said icily.
Ivan broke contact easily. He raised both his hands in peace, but one of them was still holding Luka’s scarf. Luka’s own hand fell from his neck.
It was useless. He started wearing longer sleeves and gloves and chiffon scarves to cover the bites, but that was clearly no longer necessary. Nothing he could do then could hide the long plumes of bruises that vined across his skin, nor the fresh bites that bled them into existence.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Ivan said.
Luka replied, sweetly, “Do I look like a thrall right now?”
His face felt more frigid than ice.
Ivan just laughed. It crinkled his eyes and showed his teeth. “Maybe. Do you?”
“You of all people should know how to tell that, shouldn’t you?”
It was a low blow but Luka really didn’t care. If Ivan didn’t want Luka to use the fact that he’s also an ex-thrall against him, then he never should have let Luka know. Unfortunately, Ivan didn’t flinch or falter. It just made him laugh again. He was twisting Luka’s scarf around his fingers. “You look like a bloodbag.”
He could have defended Hyuna. He didn’t.
I look like a bloodbag because I had breakfast at her apartment, he thought of trying to explain. He imagined how that conversation would go. Her grin flashed in his mind, the length of her lashes and firm lines of her face. The way her tongue curls over her canine and the dip of her voice: if you want, sure. The intimacy of it crawled uncomfortably over his tongue. He would not attempt to explain any of it.
Luka felt abruptly lightheaded. He leaned against the metal of a filing cabinet. It pressed uncomfortably against his shoulder blade. He thought of sinking to the floor. “Stop laughing. It’s annoying.”
Like an ice-pick through his skull. Ivan stifled his laughter. “Sorry sorry.”
“I can’t believe you,” Sua said from the door.
That made Ivan twist to look at her. “Oh hey,” he said. “I can believe it. Pay up.”
Sua made a tsk sound. The key danged from a ring around her pinky. She dug around her pocket and threw a handful of cash at him. Ivan caught it all, except the last coin, which smacked him in the face. It didn’t stop him from looking smug.
Luka stared. “You were betting on me.”
“It has now come to my attention that I perhaps mischaracterized your dedication for safety and comfort,” Sua said delicately. Then, “I didn’t think you’d actually be that stupid.”
Cheerily, Ivan said, “I did.”
Ivan understood the addictive ecstasy of a vampire’s venom. Sua might have or might not have. Luka managed to extract details of Ivan’s history, but Sua remains elusive. He knows little more about her than the fact she and Ivan knew each other before either of them met Luka, and the fact of her seventeen sisters. It used to be sixteen sisters and one brother, but the last one transitioned. When Luka drifted into the role of a government clerk, Ivan followed for reasons he wouldn’t tell, and Sua followed Ivan.
“I don’t remember inviting you to comment on my personal life,” Luka said.
“It’s kind of like our lives too,” Ivan lazily defended. “Considering your medical episodes have you taking so much time off all the time.”
“This conversation is useless,” Luka said.
Sua said, “Are going to explain it to your doctors?”
“You’d think daily migraines would discourage someone from flirting around with being a bloodbag,” Ivan sighed.
Luka said, “Enthrallment is a completely different level of neurologically altering than the doses of venom from a bite.”
Something wet trickled down his collarbones. He realized, abruptly, that the wound on his neck had reopened. His wounds don’t close well on their own.
That, at least, is innate to him. He has a poor heart, and poor blood, and poor wound healing. The rest of it—the weekly hospital visits, the dozen doctors, migraines so incapacitating he cannot so much as lift his head, seventeen years of cumulative brain damage and subsequent developmental abnormalities and neurological debilitations, schedule of medications, permanent fatigue—it’s impossible to know how much would be present if not for what happened to him.
Sua said, “Luka.”
“What?”
“I really,” Ivan said, smiling, “hope you know what you are doing.”
-
“It’s not an assumption that I’m doing what you’ll like,” Luka tells Hyuna simply. “I know you will.”
He is laying boneless on the bank below her. He is limp like a doll, a marionette with its strings cut. He feels like a corpse that has just been killed—the moment the heart goes out, and the body hits the ground. There is no point in keeping up an act that has already been called. Maybe there would be with someone else, but Hyuna is looking at him like a basin of clear water, or something that has wronged her.
Her face is dark in the night. Her voice is rough. “No you don’t.”
“I know what you like,” Luka says flatly. It makes him sound bored.
“Luka.”
He thinks of tilting his head. He doesn’t. “Hyuna.”
There is such a quiet intensity to the way she looks at him.
“I,” Hyuna says, jabbing a finger to his chest, “like you.”
Earnest.
It’s so shockingly earnest. It can’t be called anything but earnest. The warmth of her body straddling his, the press of her finger over his heart. The tense lines of her face in the dark, like anger but not really. It is so sincerely earnest.
What is he supposed to do with that?
No one has ever been earnest with him before. He studies her, and does not find what he had been looking for. He wants her rough with him. He wants—something. He doesn’t know what he wants. But that wasn’t what he was looking for. Or maybe it just wasn’t what he was expecting. He wants her. He wants himself. He was looking to prove a point, right? Something tilts behind his temple. The world swims sideways in vertigo. It is so much nicer to exist in a body that does not try to move. Is this what he was looking for?
From the start, Luka has been looking to see how much he can make her take of him.
How can he make her angry?
He doesn’t smile, because he does not have to smile to prove this point. “Hyuna,” he trills airily. “Do you know why today is so special?”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“I didn’t,” he agrees. “Maybe you can guess.”
“I don’t want to,” Hyuna says.
That’s okay. “Today is the anniversary of my retrieval from thrall trafficking.”
Hyuna draws a sharp breath above him.
It’s the first time he’s said it explicitly to her. He’s been saving the words for a moment wherein he can use them. Like a vial of poison to keep quietly between his ribs, beneath his tongue. Everything can be used.
He asks, “Can you guess how long I was trafficked as a thrall?”
“I don’t want to,” Hyuna says, again.
That’s okay, too. “Seventeen years.”
“Oh.”
“It started when I was around two,” he continues irreverently. He is callous because he knows this means something to her. “They found me half dead, apparently. I don’t remember being retrieved. I do remember the years before that, to varying degrees. They think my family must have sold me into a trafficking ring, but it couldn’t be confirmed. I retain a lot of habits from back then. You might be one of them. Isn’t it lovely I choose to see you today? I knew you’d hate it. When I woke up in the hospital the night I met you, I thought I was back where I started.”
Hyuna is coiled taught like rubber-band.
“...”
He presses, “Isn’t that funny?”
“No.”
“Your loss,” he says idly. It is so much easier to talk now, even through the venom, when he does not have to think so hard to find the words for someone he isn’t. “My blood is unique, apparently. I’ve never met a vampire that isn’t tempted by it. But it could always be better. You were right.”
“I never said that.”
“My blood isn’t the same as when you first tasted it,” he clarifies. “Do you know why?”
There is no way she doesn’t know why.
Hyuna does not say because you know how to make it taste different or, because someone taught you how to tailor yourself for someone else’s palate, or even, because you like to play me for a fool. Instead, she lets out this long, tremoring exhale. Her fingers dig into his ribs. He doesn’t know the expression on her face.
But when she speaks her voice is plain, “You don’t have to say it.”
He is not sure why that makes him stop.
Luka’s gaze slides away.
Past the curtain of her hair, the city makes a town of dark shapes and distant lights. Golden street lamps fall in halos seven steps away. Somewhere in the distance there is a rustle of leaves, and murmur of disparate traffic. It is very quiet.
His neck pulses. He is weak down through his fingertips. It is more familiar than the world. Natural, comfortable. He knows very well why Hyuna would not want him.
“You don’t like prey like me,” he says. He sounds sardonic. “You like yours wild.”
“I like you.”
“You like me,” Luka agrees, because Hyuna has said it again. And because Hyuna wears her heart in a place he can reach it. “And you’re discomfited by me.”
“...”
“I make you uncomfortable. I knew that. I noticed that. I pressed you anyway. I wanted—” I still want, I am still looking “—to see how much you’d take of me.”
Hyuna’s touch sends electric shock through his nerves where they hold into the soft curves of his body. The cotton of his clothing wraps him like spider silk. The sticky kind, made to capture and kill.
Hyuna says, “Only what you offered.”
“Do I not offer things you don’t want?” He lifts a hand to touch her hair. Wrap it around his finger. Gold from the streetlights shines through and hues it warm between his fingers. “Isn’t it horrible? Tonight is case and point.”
Like digging his teeth into the tender flesh of her inner lip: I can make you violate your principals. I can make you do worse than you have done before.
Hyuna is the kind of person that gets angry at that kind of thing.
“Luka.”
“...”
It’s the kind of sensation like laying limp in the maw of something that could swallow him alive. He could fall asleep like that. He feels the tension in her body, her hands, legs, diaphragm as she takes those deep, level breaths above him. His own hair tickles his neck. He looks past her hair to the sky, but cannot find anything but murky clouds.
“Luka,” she says again. “Look at me.”
He looks at her.
Past her lashes, the narrow casings of her eyes hold the whole moon in two. And there, center to the dusty full moons of her irises, silver like an old coin, her pupils are blacker than anything he has ever seen. His own reflection looks back out of their abyss. She is looking at him head on.
He expects to see anger on her face. But Hyuna just looks sad.
She looks—
sad.
Upset, maybe. Her jaw is tensed. Her lips are braced and tugged downward and trembling in this half-snarl half-frown like she doesn’t know what to do with them. There’s anger somewhere in there. Maybe there’s grief, too. Something else he cannot name.
What’s he to do with that?
Her hand, clenched white knuckled in the fabric over his heart, lets go. It reaches up to touch the bite she made on his neck, still slowly, steadily seeping blood. Some of it has dried sticky on his skin. Most of it has gone cold, and wet, and miserable. He can feel it even through the steadily freezing numbness that tingles through the skin. Hyuna’s gaze slides from his face to the blood. A muscle in his arm twitches. Another in his eyelid, and thigh. His tongue is heavy and clumsy.
Her thumb puts pressure on the opening. “We can stop right now if you want. Just say the word.”
And Luka speaks without thinking.
“Would you care?”
He actually feels the flinch of her fingers.
Hyuna’s gaze snaps back to his face. Hyuna grimaces, hard.
That’s not what he wants her to look like.
An icy feeling slides through his veins, through his stomach and his heart. That’s not what he wants her to look like, he thinks, again. Feels himself catch on the thought, again and again. He didn’t know what to do when she looked sad. He didn’t hate it, though. But he hates this. He wasn’t looking to make her draw away, he was looking to see if he could provoke her into digging further into him. Because he could. Because he can. Because there is a morbid curiosity within him to see if he can really, truly belong to himself foremost forever, or if his new favorite fascination can be made to take it all away.
He didn’t mean to say that. That was a line he hadn’t crossed.
“Forget I said that.”
“What the fuck,” Hyuna says. “No.”
And then she makes to move away. Her hand leaves his neck and his ribs and her body shifts sideways to swing herself up on her flesh leg. She’s moving to move away. She—
he catches her wrist.
“Hyuna.” He strains to sit up, to put weight on his arm and brace himself against the ground, but can’t. He tries to think more clearly, past the venom and headache and body that doesn’t work, because he has to. It makes his vision swim, all at once, and his head knock around inside itself like it is cracking itself open; he tries to look at her face, but can’t find her eyes. “I didn’t mean that.”
Hyuna gives him a look. “Then what the hell did you mean?”
Ivan, Sua. Himself. All the people that have known him. Hyuna likes prey that struggles, because it means they’re alive, and she likes it when people are alive. Hyuna likes it when people are alive, and to live, she thinks a person has to be free. Hyuna likes—
you.
He knew that already. He wouldn’t be here if she didn’t like him.
“Hyuna I could ruin you,” Luka says. It’s the only way he knows how to explain this to her. “I know more than enough to ruin you. I could ruin you yesterday. I could ruin you today. I could ruin you tomorrow. You never let me know even so much as your brother’s name, because you know I could ruin him, too.”
A thick tension strings through her. “And?”
“If I thought you’d ruin me I would have ruined you first.” It is easier than saying: I wouldn’t be here if I thought you wouldn’t care if I said stop.
“...”
Hyuna doesn’t respond immediately. The strain of attempting to hold himself up starts to mount, pressure behind his eyes, ringing in his ears. The back of his neck and tendons that connect up behind his ear are pulled taught to hold the weight of his head, and the bone of his shoulder presses awkwardly in its joint, and his hand is beginning to feel like it’ll fall off with the weight of gravity attempting to pull it down. At some point, he stopped holding Hyuna’s wrist to keep her from leaving, and instead grasping to it as a support for the weight of his own arm in the air.
He lets it fall back down to the ground with a thud. He lets the rest of him fall limp, too. His head lolls to the side.
He calls, “Hyuna.”
How much of himself, he has thought, again and again, can he make her take of him. The answer, again and again, has been: everything except the parts that have been taken before. Hyuna has taken everything he’s offered. Hyuna has taken so much of him. His blood, his time, himself on a silver platter. But never, not even once—
“Okay,” Hyuna says under her breath, as if to herself, and then dives right back into him.
Her teeth latch into the bite. Her hands slip under him, one palm on the back of his neck bracing his shoulder blades with her forearm, and the other finding its way to the small of his back. She lifts him up, like that, heaves him off the ground and onto her. She shifts under him, so he’s in her lap, legs coming round to rest limply around her hips. The metal of her prosthetic leg presses lightly beside the base of his spine. All his weight is collapsed in on her. The position makes his head rest into her shoulder, against her neck, and it brings her mouth right into the dip of his neck. Blood seeps into the collar of his shirt.
—not even once has Hyuna taken his agency.
“I can’t believe you,” Hyuna mutters into his skin. “I’m going to be late for work at this rate. My shift starts in like ten minutes.”
It makes him want to smile. “Skip it for me.”
“I can’t believe you.”
“It’s my special day,” he says.
“Mmm,” Hyuna answers, which means agreement. “Now stop talking.”
Luka quiets.
The sensation of the venom, which had faded into a background hum, undulates with the entrance of a new dosage. Its intensity rolls in and up, tiding over him. He slumps into her as if he could melt into her body. Hyuna, Hyuna, Hyuna. He plays the last few minutes over in his mind. He almost smiles, but finds that the muscles of his face do not want to work. He thinks about her in the restaurant, and her in the apartment, and her over him in the grass of the bank with the streetlamp through her hair and catching on her lashes: the tension in her jaw when he looked at her. She was angry, he thinks. She was sad and upset, and she was angry. On…
his behalf, probably. Not at him, but for him.
Hazy minutes. Hazy moments. He loses himself to the nothingness of it all.
He stares out without looking at anything. He feels dolllike. Flushed. Hot—needy. Something he rarely ever is. He feels existant. When he moves, it is to be closer to her. To grind against her abdomen, to press his forehead into a bone beneath her skin. He wonders, in this place between somewhere and nowhere, if it is possible to nestle into the body of another person.
He might have said her name again.
When he comes back into some awareness, the weight of his head is held in the palm of her hand, and his shoulders supported by his arm. He’s been shifted sideways across her. What had been the beginnings of a migraine have pleasantly washed away into the cotton of a headache, and he is still bleeding.
She notices his attention and smiles. “Hi Luka.” It’s something she likes to say to him.
Hyuna is all browns above him. The brown of her hair, the brown of her skin, the brown where his blood rusts on her. Night brings all of her several shades darker, but she’s still all browns. It’s the color that homes are made of, he thinks. The hue of everything warm; fresh baked bread and autumn leaves where they pile on streets, coffee in the morning and hot chocolate in the winter, dried tea leaves and hand woven baskets. He catches glimpse of the golden brass of the rings he gave her on her fingers when they reach to touch his face, his hair, brush the earrings she let him keep from her closet. He feels it flutter against his skin.
He didn’t know that being taken by anyone or anything could ever be this gentle.
Later, they’ll make way to her apartment, or his. Maybe they’ll wander the city. He’ll fall asleep eventually, and so will she, long after him. Hyuna retreats at dawn; he has always wanted to see her in the sunlight. He never will.
Hi Hyuna, he tries to say back, but only manages to form the shapes with his mouth. It makes the firm lines of her face crinkle up and soften.
He will never see her in the sun. But here she is half-gold in the glow of a distant streetlight, and he has seen her gold in the lamps of her apartment, and gold through the light of a window of a home in the dark. It is all the same gold.