Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Look it says here guys, if you kill the head vampire, all half vampires will return to normal. 

• Sam Emerson to the Frog Brothers, on the occasion of his brother’s falling into the hands of the Santa Carla Tribe in 1987.

“He’s downstairs.”

“I know.” Jaehyun turned over in bed, blocking out the sight of Doyoung in his doorway. “Go away, I’m tired.” But Doyoung didn’t go away. Of course he didn’t. He was a busybody like everybody else in this damned cave. Hotel. Whatever. “Get out, Doyoung.”

“Why won’t you go talk to him?” 

“Because it’s not that simple. I can’t just go talk to him.” Imagine that. Imagine being able to walk downstairs and just have a conversation. 

“Why not?” There was a muted thump, Doyoung allowing the uneven floor and inertia to canter his lean frame into the doorframe. “Taeyong is talking to him right now.” 

The blankets covering Jaehyun shot to the ceiling and he swung around on the mattress. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Taeyong is down there talking to him but it should be you.”

“He doesn’t want to talk to me-”

“You turned him. You’re the only person who can say if he can stay. Taeyong can talk to him but he can’t let him-”

“Taeyong knows that he doesn’t have to do anything,” Jaehyun said. “And neither do I. Jungwoo was here when we took over the hotel in 1988.” Jaehyun lay back on his back and shut his eyes.

The place was only half as disgusting as it had been the last time he was here. Jungwoo wasn't impressed with the clean-up so much as he was impressed that the cave was still standing. At this point, the sunken Santa Carla Hotel was holding up the cliffs as much as anything else, and there was water in here now, pouring periodically through a sunken shaft that at least kept the place fresher. That, and Taeyong had been holding a sweeping brush when Jungwoo dropped through the entryway. He assumed that Taeyong was responsible for the general liveableness of the place. He’d been away on one of his escapades the last time Jungwoo was here. Jaehyun’s tribe and Taeyong’s tribe were technically separate, but Taeyong was a natural leader where Jaehyun preferred to brood in the shadows. Back then, without Taeyong, order had disintegrated. Things looked to be more organised now, though. A stack of plastic bins in the corner holding what looked like linens and other soft furnishings was a welcome addition. Jungwoo shuddered when he remembered the mouldy blanket he was given to sleep under last time. 

Yuta wasn’t around but there were signs of him everywhere; bits of motorcycle piled up near the alcove he’d claimed when they moved in here in 1988. There was a familiar beat-up guitar on a stand, still going strong. The alcove was messy in a way that made Jungwoo almost nostalgic when he looked up at it. There was a new dog pottering around, a snow-white German Shepherd like Thorn had been. She padded over to Jungwoo when he’d come in before dawn, recognising him for what he was, if not who he was. Jungwoo petted her ears when she came up to him again. 

“Bubu, go sit down,” Taeyong ushered the dog towards her bed in the corner. “Yuta went down the coast for a few days,” he told Jungwoo, seeing the direction of his gaze. He shifted on his feet, clearly waiting for something. Jungwoo wouldn’t make him wait any longer. 

“And is he here?” Jungwoo didn’t need to ask, of course. He knew where he was. He could feel Jaehyun; even thousands of miles away he couldn’t get away from him. Here, in the Hotel, he could almost see the thread that connected them. But it still felt more polite to ask. Launching himself up onto the balcony and straight into the general manager’s office wasn’t exactly good manners. And imposing himself on others wasn’t something Jungwoo had ever been guilty of. No, that was his maker. 

“Do you want me to find you a room? Doie knows where the free ones are but he’s just up with-”

“I’ll take my old room,” Jungwoo said, looking around. “How many of you are here?” 

Taeyong looked wrong-footed. “Um… four of us right now.” He was used to being in charge, Jungwoo supposed. But he was outnumbered here. Jungwoo was Jaehyun’s tribe, and only Jaehyun could exert his authority on Jungwoo. Of course, Jaehyun had been Taeyong’s first. He wondered what that had been like, that severing. Had Taeyong felt it, when Jaehyun untethered himself? When he cut himself loose and wrapped his own ties around Jungwoo? How free he must have felt in that moment. 

“Which one was your old room?” Taeyong asked. He sounded worried, like this vampire he had no control over might throw his weight around. Well, he had nothing to worry about. 

“I doubt anybody’s in it,” Jungwoo said. He gestured to the spouts in the cave walls, the base of which was awash right now with one of the periodic swells of the ocean outside. He stepped up to the edge of the water and launched himself up, up, into one of the little recesses where the vampires who’d been here before them had made their nest. Their debris and detritus had been swept out by Jungwoo in the late-80s, and he was right. Nobody else had ever claimed this space as their own. A shaft of light lanced through a hole in the rock, and Jungwoo carefully sidestepped it. That was new, and he would need to patch it once it got dark. 

“Jungwoo?” Taeyong called up from below. 

“It’s free,” Jungwoo said into the hollow, his voice echoing off the walls. There was a fetid blanket on the ground that might have been that mouldy one he had last time, and he folded it, tucking it under his arm, and then he dropped back down to the main floor. Taeyong clutched his brush. His eyes were huge. Maybe a little hungry. Jungwoo asked, “Is there anything to eat here?” 

Taeyong chewed the inside of his lip. Jungwoo had some work to do if he was going to put him at ease. Taeyong had no power to compel Jungwoo, but he did have teeth. Jungwoo didn’t want him to think that he would have to use them. 

“Relax,” Jungwoo said. “I won’t raid your stash too much. I just need something to get me through to nightfall.” 

He looked worried still. “The cooler is full. Take what you like.” Taeyong hesitated and then added, “We’re keeping a low profile here,” like Jungwoo was likely to take off as soon as the sun went down and pluck a screaming teenager from the back of a Camaro on the cliffs. Jungwoo flashed him a grin and walked over to crouch by the industrial-sized cool box that was hooked up to the generator. There were jars inside that didn’t smell like the Grade A stuff he’d been used to drinking from the vein. Definitely not human, either. Taeyong’s tribe still kept to his habits then. 

“He’s right upstairs,” Taeyong said behind him.

“I know.”

“Do you want me to talk to him first?” Taeyong sounded tentative but also a little impatient. 

“Isn’t the other guy already doing that? Your new one?” Jungwoo took two jars out of the cooler and walked one over to Taeyong, offering it. 

Taeyong waved him off, “I have work to do,” he said. 

Jungwoo shrugged and opened his jar, tipping his head back and taking the contents in big easy gulps. It was slower than he was used to, but eventually he felt his senses quicken, his hearing and taste and sense of smell heighten, and his muscles tense with the need to exert themselves. It would go off if he didn’t channel it into something, though, and he knew he had a few minutes before he either took off into the sky and burned up like a taper, or passed out. The jar he’d drank would be enough to knock him out for a whole night and day, probably. 

“I’ll take Yuta’s bed until I can fix something up for myself.” His steps were only a little bit uneven as he stumbled over to the alcove, loosening the curtain around the bedframe and climbing in once he was screened off. The bed was soft with cushions and blankets and every conceivable luxury. Yuta really hadn’t changed. Jungwoo pulled off his boots first, then his jacket, and then his shirt. Taeyong stood holding a full jar of blood in one hand and his broom in the other on the other side of the gauze, indistinct. 

“Welcome home,” he said.

With a scoff, Jungwoo dropped backwards onto Yuta’s bed, the edges of his vision starting to tunnel. 

“Home,” he whispered to himself as he drifted off. The knot inside him loosened to slack as he allowed his consciousness to drift. That anxious unsettled feeling of having left something behind, that nagging he felt every morning when he lay down to go to sleep, hadn’t intruded on his thoughts at all. He almost missed it, the distance he usually put between himself and his maker that made his tether taut. “What a joke,” he said, and dropped into the weary rest of the long dead.  

“Only a creep watches somebody sleep.” 

Jaehyun looked up from his contemplation of Jungwoo’s still form. Yuta’s eyes were half open and he curled himself more closely around Jungwoo from behind, with a little smile that couldn’t be anything but a taunt.

“He’s not asleep,” Jaehyun said. “He’s dead. When did you come in?” 

Yuta yawned and shut his eyes, burrowing his nose into the back of Jungwoo’s neck. “Dawn”

That was cutting it fine. It could have only been barely dark when he arrived. “You’re cutting it fine. I told you it’s dangerous” 

“So kill me,” Yuta said. “Wait. I think it’s too late for that.” His hoarse chuckle caused Jungwoo to stir, and Jaehyun watched as Jungwoo’s lips curled into an answering smirk. 

“You can’t kill us again,” Jungwoo whispered into Yuta’s pillow, and Yuta shook Jungwoo when he laughed into the back of his neck. His arms were wrapped around Jungwoo’s narrow waist, and Jungwoo leaned back into the hold. He looked over his shoulder with hooded eyes and said, “I missed you.” Yuta sighed, eyes shut, and settled again. 

Jaehyun felt rooted to the spot. The palms of his hands were itchy. He didn’t sweat and he felt like he was sweating now. He waited for Jungwoo to look at him but Jungwoo didn’t. He just shut his eyes again and pretended to be asleep. 

“Your hair is nice,” Jaehyun said finally. It was nice. It was white, almost purple in the dim LEDs Yuta suspended above his bed. Jaehyun wanted to reach out and smooth it down but Jungwoo would probably bite him if he got that close. Jungwoo looked good, too. Healthy in a way he had no right to be, really. His skin had never quite settled into the pallor of the undead, and still gleamed like poured honey, offset beautifully by the lights. 

“Let me sleep,” Jungwoo muttered. That was his cue to go, but Jaehyun didn’t move. He thought it had been maybe thirty years or so since they were all together; his tribe, the vampires he’d made, and him. If they were normal, he’d be in that bed too, carding Jungwoo’s hair, Yuta’s arm around his waist. They’d been his thralls once, his ghouls to guard his body as he slept, his tribe that he built for himself with the two men he’d loved most in the world. The two men he thought loved him. He stood and watched Jungwoo and Yuta for another ten minutes or so. Then he stepped away, pulled on his boots and his jacket, and launched himself out of the cave. It was nearly six o’clock, full dark finally. The comic book store was probably busy, but Donghyuck would make time for him. Jaehyun needed to get to him before Mark or some other insane do-gooder got wind that there was a new vampire in town. 

There was moonlight lancing through to the base of the cave when Jungwoo finally woke fully. Behind him, the solid dead weight of Yuta kept the worst of the damp from his bones. He couldn’t feel cold anymore, hadn’t done so in two hundred years, but the damp was different. So was loneliness. He was used to that in spades. He really had missed Yuta, and he turned in his arms to tell him so. But Yuta was still out, still comatose with blood, and probably would be for a while. So Jungwoo kissed him on the brow and got up, pulling on his t-shirt before he set out to find wherever Jaehyun had wandered off to when he got bored of being a creep. 

He didn’t find Jaehyun. He found Taeyong, tangled up in the guy he was with the last time Jungwoo saw him, years ago now in Korea. Doyoung; Jungwoo remembered his name. The two of them were flushed and sated-looking, naked and close-bound and more than blood-drunk it seemed like. Jungwoo pulled the curtain shut. Doyoung had barely been turned when he’d seen them last. He had been so shy of Taeyong as to be actively hostile. Ten was still with Taeyong then. He looked around but Ten wasn’t here. 

Jungwoo wondered what else had changed in the intervening years. 

Not Jaehyun, that was for sure. 

A pile of surfboards cluttered the entryway, or what passed for the entryway. There was sign of Jaehyun everywhere in the cave, but he definitely wasn’t here. The blowhole that led up to the unstable edge of Hudson’s Bluff was looking more precarious now than it did twenty-five years ago. Lairs weren’t always easy to come by, not secure and remote places like this one, but there had to be somewhere else they could set up camp. The Hotel was one more bad tremor away from slipping into the sea. 

Jungwoo took one of Yuta’s leather jackets from the rack next to his bed and decided that he was rested enough. He launched himself out of the cave and into the night sky. 

To the south, Santa Carla boardwalk glittered, tacky and iridescent. Jaehyun was there, he could feel it. He angled his body and swooped low over the water, and reached the stairs under the boardwalk without being seen. 

“I can’t give you a discount.”

“I’m your best friend.”

“Come back when you have some money then, best friend.” 

Jaehyun dropped his comic book. “Can you two shut up?”

Donghyuck levelled him with the kind of look he usually reserved for Mark. Which was to say his expression didn’t change. “This isn’t a library. You need to start bringing money too.” Jaehyun rolled his eyes and went back to his Superman 2#180 and Mark went back to trying to wheedle free shit out of Donghyuck. Jaehyun wished he’d leave. 

He liked Mark normally. Jaehyun suspected that if Mark knew what he was he might be considerably less nice, but he really wasn’t bad for a vampire hunter. Beneath all of that blind zealotry to a cause he didn’t understand was a good heart and a sunny disposition. In any other circumstances, Jaehyun would want to call him a friend. But not tonight. Tonight, Mark really did need him to leave so Jaehyun could talk to Donghyuck alone. Luckily it was some Saint’s feast day, and Mark made a fuss about having to get to church in time to set up his guitar. He swung his case from his shoulder and stowed the comic book he still hadn’t paid for in the front pocket. Then he looked up and down the length of the store, and levered himself up on the counter, planting a wet kiss on Donghyuck’s cheek, before he hurried out. 

When he was gone, Jaehyun put down his comic book. 

“There’s a name for people like that,” he said. 

“Is it Mark Lee?” Donghyuck, blushing slightly, frowned. “That’s two words I suppose.” 

“In my day we might have called him a gallant? Or a rake?” 

“Yeah well in my day we call him a fucking cock tease.” 

Gathering a stack of new stock, Donghyuck moved out from behind the counter. It was still early and the boardwalk wasn’t busy yet. The comic book store was empty, and Jaehyun followed Donghyuck from shelf to shelf. 

Jaehyun sighed. “You swear too much.” When Donghyuck only laughed, he said, “Did he say anything interesting tonight?” 

“Mark Lee says a lot of interesting things,’ he said. “He’s still pretty set on going up to Hudson’s Bluff.” Donghyuck shook his head. “I really shouldn’t have left him alone with my uncle at that stupid wedding. He’s obsessed with those bikes they found up there in, like, the 1900s.” 

Jaehyun moved a Spider-man 2099 behind the Spider-man 1602 Donghyuck had just put on the shelf. “It was 1987,” he said.

“I said that,” Donghyuck moved down the line and Jaehyun was obliged to follow. Before he could ask any more, though, a voice interrupted them. A familiar voice, soft and lilting; and playful, so he knew that Jungwoo couldn’t be talking to him. 

“The 1900s is a decade. It’s when that hotel up on Hudson’s Bluff disappeared into the caves. 1906.” Jungwoo pushed off the doorjamb and sauntered over, dropping an elbow onto Jaehyun’s shoulder and leaning in, their first physical contact in 25 years. If Jaehyun could shiver he would have right then. Jungwoo went on, “The 1980s is the decade that they found the bikes. The century is the 20th century.” 

Donghyuck had stopped what he was doing and was regarding Jungwoo with the kind of interest he only reserved for Mark Lee. “And which of the ‘hundreds’ were you born in?” Donghyuck asked, eyes sharp, his wink salacious when he was one tenth of Jungwoo’s age. He really didn’t miss a thing. Jaehyun was almost proud of him. 

If Jungwoo was concerned that this man knew what he was, he didn’t sound it when he said, “Jaehyun and I are the same age, give or take a half-century.” Out of the corner of his eye Jaehyun could feel Jungwoo’s gaze come to rest on him. He was afraid to meet it. “Well, maybe our hyung’s a year older in real time.” 

Donghyuck chuckled. “Hyung.” He beamed at them both. “Can I call you that too, Jaehyun? My mom would be so proud.” 

“You can call me whatever you want,” Jaehyun mumbled. 

Jungwoo didn’t look at him when he said, “Are you turning this one?” He looked Donghyuck up and down. “Are you joining our little family?” 

At that word, Jaehyun couldn’t help the cough that startled out of him. He’d heard Jungwoo use it before, many times, and never once without bitterness. This time, he sounded almost fond. Jaehyun supposed that Jungwoo did like Yuta. And since they’d joined their tribe with Taeyong’s he’d never been anything but kind to him, and to Ten. He wondered how Jungwoo would get on with Doyoung, if Jungwoo had already picked up on Doyoung’s complete lack of ability to withstand a pair of doe eyes. 

Donghyuck set out the last of his new stock and walked back to the counter. Jaehyun turned to follow him and Jungwoo’s arm dropped from his shoulder. He still couldn’t look at him. He did see Donghyuck’s hand disappear under the counter, though. He had a stake down there, Jaehyun knew, and a water pistol full of holy water that would be nothing to Jaehyun but would burn Jungwoo’s pretty skin for a few hours. He stepped in front of Jungwoo and shook his head at Donghyuck. 

“Is this one new?” Donghyuck sounded serious. He was a vampire hunter before he could drive, and his friendship with Jaehyun notwithstanding, he was a vampire hunter still. 

Jungwoo scoffed. “The last time I was here was before you were even born.” 

“Keep Mark away from the cliffs,” Jaehyun said. Donghyuck’s jaw tightened but he finally nodded. 

“Get out of here,” Donghyuck said. “You’re scaring away all of the customers.” 

Jungwoo gave him a smile that was all teeth and said, “The customers, or the staff?” 

Jaehyun didn’t wait to hear what expletive-laden response Donghyuck gave. He walked out of the comic book store, and after a moment he felt Jungwoo follow. 

The boardwalk had changed since the last time Jungwoo walked it. The big carousel that used to delight the young and fascinate the drug-addled was gone, and in its place was a burger restaurant that looked too expensive to go inside. All of Santa Carla was upscale now. The yuppies and the affluent had probably started to trickle in once all of the murders stopped. 

Even Jaehyun had adopted a new look, more muted and upmarket like the city around them. At some point in the last thirty years, he’d ditched his biker jacket and dreadlocks. But some of his surfer bum aesthetic remained. He was still wearing cargo pants, albeit back to the dull khaki green he’d worn through the war and well after. At least the stonewash was gone. Jungwoo wondered vaguely if he still had his skateboard.

They walked side by side to the end of the pier and stopped. 

“What are you doing here?” 

Jungwoo shrugged. “Can’t I come home to visit every once in a while?”

“Home,” Jaehyun shook his head. “Since when was this home?” 

He could feel the nasty smile take hold and let it. “Ah, since when is home just a place, hyung?” 

Jaehyun finally looked at him. He was meant to. They were his own words repackaged and sent back to him, words he hadn’t forgotten though they all tended to forget most of the details of their long years. Jungwoo still remembered those days with clarity, though; those days when the smell of a restaurant kitchen would have made Jungwoo hungry instead of the smell of the Pekinese passing by on a lead. 

Jaehyun said it when Jungwoo told him he couldn’t be with him. When he told him that he had to leave Hanyang, that he had to go home.

You’re my home, Jaehyun said. And then he handed him the bottle. He was Jaehyun’s after that first sip of blood. 

“Are you here to kill me?” Jaehyun said it so casually. He said it like attempts on his afterlife were a minor annoyance. 

“Will you stop me if I try?”

“Yuta might,” Jaehyun chewed the inside of his lip. “If you kill me, you’ll both die. You know that.” He sounded so tired. Jungwoo hated that he wondered about the last time Jaehyun ate. He was wont to run himself ragged in days past. 

“I’ll talk to him,” Jungwoo said. “He knows he can turn somebody if he want to cut your connection. But if you let me do it, we can all find some peace.” The sea was loud but Jaehyun’s sigh was audible over it. 

Leaning back against the railing and looking towards the pier, Jungwoo watched the families and the young couples, a far cry from the motorcycle tribes and coke-fuelled student athletes that had dominated the place the last time he was here. He watched a street dancer performing for a group of tourists. 

He asked, “When did Ten leave?” 

Jaehyun wasn’t very good with keeping track of time, so when he said, “Jungwoo knew he could be talking about anything between six weeks ago and ten years. 

“What kind of while?”

“Maybe three months?” Jaehyun sighed again. He’d done a lot of that tonight. He didn’t have a complex emotional life, but Jungwoo could imagine that he might miss Ten. He missed Yuta all the time, and probably still would even if their connection was severed. Ten had been Taeyong’s only companion before Jaehyun; the last of the old tribe to make it as far as Santa Clara in the late 1980s. And now he too was gone, displaced by the appearance of this interloper Taeyong couldn’t keep his eyes off of. Jungwoo had seen it and he’d only been back a few hours. It wasn’t a little concerning. The last time Jungwoo had seen that kind of hunger in somebody’s eyes, Jaehyun had condemned him to this life. How had Doyoung come to join Taeyong’s tribe? Was it choice or necessity or request? He hadn’t been with Taeyong when Jaehyun ran into him in Seoul not ten years ago. New additions were always suspicious, for one reason or another. 

“The new guy,” Jungwoo said. “Has he turned yet? Has he drank from the vein?” He didn’t look new-made. In the few minutes Jungwoo had spent in his company, he hadn’t seen any of the feverish intensity of a half-vampire. But then, he didn’t know how long he’d been with Taeyong. Still, Doyoung had a kind of bank-teller look about him that didn’t suggest he’d sank elongated canines into a living human’s neck. 

“He’s one of us now,” Jaehyun said, sidestepping the unpleasant truth of what Doyoung had to do to make that transition complete. Jungwoo considered himself corrected. He was here to stay, then, for as long as Taeyong wanted to stay alive. 

“Is he good for Taeyong?” 

“Yes,” Jaehyun nodded. “He’s nosy. And he has telekinesis.” That was a surprise, and Jungwoo momentarily forgot to be furious with Jaehyun as he blinked at him. Not everybody had powers. The last vampire Jungwoo had met who had manifested anything had been that pretty nightmare who’d lived at the hotel before they did. David had hallucikinesis; not much use for anything but a party trick, or terrorizing new initiates. 

“Telekinesis?”

“Yeah,” Jaehyun said. “He’ll show you if you ask him. Have you met him?”

“Briefly,” Jungwoo said. “Where did he find him?”

“In Seoul,” Jaehyun said, glancing sidelong at Jungwoo. “Did you meet him there?”

“No,” Jungwoo said, answering his next question: had Taeyong told Jaehyun they’d met that time? He would have, of course. Jungwoo wondered how Jaehyun had taken that news. Jaehyun didn’t know where he was of course, though their bond was stretched taut and painful at the time. The bond was hard to live with when they were far apart but pain is like cold water after all; at some point, the body gets used to it. 

On the boardwalk, some skateboarders were getting told off by a cop. Jungwoo watched them. Jaehyun glanced over his shoulder watching them too, and once they’d stopped throwing offensive gestures at the retreating cop’s back, they walked off towards the comic book store. 

Jungwoo said, “Don’t turn that kid in the comic book store. He hasn’t lived long enough.” 

Jaehyun shook his head, turning back out to sea. “He asked me to. He wants it.”

The resignation in his tone as much as the sentiment behind it was what finally spiked Jungwoo’s temper. Jaehyun was always soft. He had never been a leader.

“Let Taeyong do it, then. And let me die.” 

“No,” Jaehyun said. He turned to Jungwoo, turned the complete force of his inscrutable gaze and all of the power behind it on him. He wouldn’t use it, but he could, if he wanted to. He’d made Jungwoo. He could force him to back down. “If you want to cut yourself off from me, then you can turn him yourself.”

As if Jungwoo ever would. As if he could do that to somebody after what was done to him. 

“Please,” Jungwoo said. He knew he sounded desperate. “Let me go. Let’s end this. Together?” 

“I’m sorry, I can’t,” Jaehyun said. For the first time, though, Jungwoo thought he sounded like he meant it. Jaehyun looked back out to sea. “I still love you,” he said. 

Jungwoo didn’t want to hear any more. He launched himself off the boardwalk, and let his feet skim the dark water before he took off back to the caves. 

Yuta was still in bed when Jungwoo got back. He still felt a little flushed, a little feverish, a little overstimulated by the life essence of the seabird he’d snagged on the wing as he came in to land this morning, but he was awake now and itchy to do something. Jungwoo stormed into his alcove, muttering to himself in a way that could only mean that he’d finally talked to Jaehyun. Yuta didn’t have to ask what they’d talked about. No matter that it concerned him too, Jungwoo had only one thing he wanted from Jaehyun and it was the only reason he would be swearing at the coat rack as he replaced Yuta’s jacket. 

“It looked good on you,” Yuta said. Jungwoo glanced over his shoulder at him and didn’t respond. He did strip himself back down to his underwear, though, and climbed through the curtains and onto Yuta’s bed. Yuta hadn’t been able to believe his eyes when he’d come home, feeling the old familiar link between him and Jaehyun pull taut the day before and finding Jungwoo in his bed when he followed its thread back up the coast. It was enough to assuage his existential anxiety, to curb the worry that he might have to unmoor himself as soon as Jaehyun conceded to Jungwoo’s demands, and he’d almost cried when the skin of his chest had met Jungwoo’s bare back. It was right, it felt right, and it felt right again when Jungwoo settled himself now in Yuta’s arms, head on his chest, and sighed. Yuta waited for Jungwoo to speak if that’s what he wanted.

“Why are you still here?” 

“In Santa Carla?” Yuta slipped his fingers into Jungwoo’s hair, teasing his scalp. “Waiting for you.” He chuckled at Jungwoo’s tut of impatience. “Because it hurts to get too far from him,” Yuta said. “I worry about him here on his own.” 

He felt rather than heard Jungwoo’s scoff, a little exhale of unnecessary breath against Yuta’s cold skin. He shivered with the pleasure of it and wrapped his arm around Jungwoo’s waist, drawing him closer. There was something about being close with a member of your own tribe, something Yuta didn’t often get to feel. Jaehyun was there, of course. His sire, Jungwoo’s sire, was two floors up in his miserable little General Manager’s office. But Yuta still hadn’t quite forgiven him for Jungwoo leaving; being close with Jaehyun now felt like betraying Jungwoo. Taeyong had slaked his thirst a little bit for a while. Sharing his bed had been fun in an abstract way. But it wasn’t the same as sharing himself with one of his own. Taeyong wasn’t likely to invite Yuta into his bed anytime soon now, anyway. He was all wrapped up in his new initiate, and there was no getting between them. Ten had found that out the hard way. Yuta wondered where he was; if being far from Taeyong was hurting him the way it hurt Yuta to be too far from Jaehyun. He had no idea how Jungwoo could stand it for years at a time.

For a while, they lay and said nothing. The moon was setting, what small light it spilled into the entryway dimmed when Jungwoo propped himself up on his elbow and looked down at Yuta under the twinkling fairy lights. His hair was short again and he looked so beautiful. Yuta reached up and brushed back his bangs.

“Why don’t you come with me when I leave?” Jungwoo asked him.

He knew why. Yuta didn’t know why he was asking. “Why can’t you stay?” 

There was an answer to that and Jungwoo wouldn’t give it. He didn’t have to, though. Yuta couldn’t leave Jaehyun and Jungwoo couldn’t be around him. So here they were, missing each other constantly these last 25 years. 

The first kiss was tentative, like Jungwoo wanted to test it out in case he forgot how Yuta liked to be kissed. It was sweet and soft and Yuta had to bite down on Jungwoo’s lower lip to give him a hint. He felt Jungwoo’s smile in the kiss, and the dimples on his cheek when Yuta touched his face, and slipped his other hand into his hair again. Jungwoo slid across his body until he was straddling him. He’d fed a day ago, and his cock was hard under the cotton of his briefs, pressing insistently against Yuta’s, against his naked hip and, as Jungwoo shifted on him, between his legs. Jungwoo licked into his mouth and Yuta moaned, uncaring that the whole cave would be able to see what they were doing because the gauze around his bedframe wasn’t worth shit. He didn’t care. He had to lie awake on days he didn’t feed and listen to the way Taeyong let himself be claimed by the new guy. Taeyong and Doyoung could stand to listen to him for once. 

Jungwoo’s movements were becoming more deliberate, his hips pressing tight to Yuta’s, and it was a mystery to Yuta why he was still wearing his underwear when they should be bare, skin-to-skin like they were supposed to be, pressed against each other and around each other and into each other in an expression of completion. Not completeness. No, they needed Jaehyun for that, and Jaehyun hadn’t joined them in bed since before the Wall came down. The memory of that last time, here in this very bedstead, was enough to drag another moan out of Yuta. The way it had felt to be so utterly full, of Jungwoo behind him and Jaehyun in his mouth, and his own hardness cradled lovingly in somebody’s hands and Yuta couldn’t even tell whose, Jaehyun and Jungwoo kissing over his shoulder, and then kissing his shoulder, his neck, one each on both sides; it had been perfect. 

“Let’s call Jaehyun,” he gasped out as Jungwoo bit into the side of his neck, drawing ichor to the surface. Yuta had his hands in Jungwoo’s underwear, pushing them down his legs to feel the length of him better. Jungwoo stilled and then kissed the bite, nuzzling into Yuta’s neck.

“He’s already here,” Jungwoo said, his nose swiping at Yuta’s neck, directing his gaze to the other side of the gauze curtain. Jaehyun was there, far enough back that his expression wasn’t distinct, but close enough to know what was going on. Yuta watched him for a moment, watched the way he didn’t make a move though his body must be thrumming with the need to join them. 

“Should we invite him in?” Yuta whispered, knowing Jaehyun would be able to hear. 

“We don’t need him,” Jungwoo said, but Yuta could hear it, the hunger in his voice. He knew how much better it could be when they were all together, all three; Jaehyun’s creations and him, their cruel creator. Yuta tugged on Jungwoo’s hair, bringing his mouth to his again and letting himself taste him properly, giving in to the comfort of it and the way his body hummed, responding to every twitch of Jungwoo’s hips against his own. They had all night, and all day if they wanted it, and Jungwoo’s languid, dry thrusts were enough to say that he wanted to take his time. They had time, is what he was saying, and Yuta was so relieved he wrapped his arms around Jungwoo’s body, stilling him so he could hold him to him for just a second. Just a minute, in these gifted hours he was being promised; allowed. 

It was through that stillness that a shrill cry tore through the cave, and Jungwoo was on his knees immediately, looking out towards where Jaehyun had been standing, a momentary flash of concern on his face that told Yuta all he needed to know about how Jungwoo still felt about him. But Jaehyun was fine. He was still there, but he was looking in the opposite direction, to the little recess in the cave wall that used to be the reception desk. To-

“Taeyong,” Yuta scrambled out from under Jungwoo and hurtled through the gauze curtains. The damp floor of the cave didn’t even register on his bare feet as he followed Jaehyun to Taeyong’s bed. Doyoung was there, kneeling beside Taeyong, half dressed like he’d been getting ready to go out, to leave Taeyong in bed, wrapped up in his sheets. 

“I don’t know what’s wrong,” Doyoung said, panicked-sounding and terrified. “He was asleep. He wasn’t even awake, and then he just started screaming.” 

Taeyong was holding his chest, hand over his heard and the other clamped over his forehead, like a migraine and a heart attack all at once. Yuta had never seen him in pain before. Not once, nearly 150 years since they met in the port of Kobe. Taeyong was hit by a trolley car in San Francisco in the 20s, and he didn’t even look like he noticed. He was whimpering now, though. His hand dropped from his face, and he looked around wildly, his eyes falling on Jaehyun. There was accusation there, something like resentment and sadness. Deep, bone-crushing sadness. 

“Ten?” Jaehyun asked him. Taeyong managed to nod. Yuta’s attention snapped to Jaehyun. What about Ten?

“What about him?” Doyoung asked, either Taeyong or Jaehyun, whichever would answer him first. He’d taken one of Taeyong’s hands and was cradling it in his lap. Taeyong clung to him, fierce and possessive. 

Behind them all, Jungwoo spoke up. “He’s severed their bond,” he said. “Ten’s turned somebody else.” 

Chapter Text

You don't have to beat me, Michael. You just have to try and keep up.

• David to Michael Emerson while attempting to recruit him to the Santa Carla Tribe in 1987. 

“What’s with you tonight?” 

Jaehyun looked up to find Johnny looming over him, holding beers. The ping of the pinball machine behind him and the steady rumble and crash of the place seeped back into his consciousness. He’d been daydreaming again; nightdreaming? Whatever. 

“Huh?”

“It’s your turn,” Johnny said. “I went to the bar like ten minutes ago, have you just been sitting here staring into space?” Johnny peered at him as he set the beer on the low table. In the booth opposite, Jisung reached for one and Johnny swatted his hand away without looking. 

“He’s over twenty one,” Jaehyun pointed out.

“I have yet to see evidence of that.” Johnny gestured to the score board which did indeed have Jaehyun’s name lit up in red. Nobody else seemed to have noticed. Mark had abandoned the game, was playing pinball with the kid he picked up at community college. He didn’t speak any English as far as Jaehyun could tell, and Mark had zero Chinese, so what language they were communicating in was beyond him. He stood up and stretched.

It was nothing to lift the ball, to line up the shot and set his feet right, to step-step-step to the line, until his right foot curled around his left calf, and he set the ball down to coast down the lane, to curve at the eighty-percent, and plough into the space between the one and two pins, taking down the whole formation. He heard Johnny’s low whistle and wished he weren’t so impressed. Johnny had thirty years to grow up and learn to throw a ball at a bunch of pins; Jaehyun had been doing this for as long as it had been a game, or just about. 

Jisung was drinking his beer by the time Jaehyun got back to the booth. Johnny shook his head at the scoreboard, but he went to take his shot anyway. 

“We should enter the tournaments,” he said to Jaehyun when he got back. “We could clean up.” 

“Sorry,” Jaehyun said, “I work during the day.” A complete lie, of course, but the tournaments at the bowling alley ran from noon to three on Saturdays, and if Jaehyun tried to enter one, he would be embers by the time he even cleared the mouth of the cave. Not to mention, Jungwoo and Yuta would burn too. He hoped Jungwoo never met Johnny. This would probably appeal to him. 

“Have you seen the new guy around the pier?” 

“This is a beach down, Jae, we get a lot of new guys. Is he a surfer?” 

Jungwoo could probably surf if he tried. But that wasn’t what Jaehyun was asking about. 

“I doubt it,” he said. 

“Jisung, take your turn,” Johnny said, sitting down next to Jaehyun. “Are you looking for a new friend? Potential friend? More than a friend?” Johnny always asked Jaehyun about men like this, like Jaehyun was a thirteen year old girl. Like Johnny had never met a man who liked men before. Given that he spent all day every day teaching bleach-blonde himbos how to surf, Jaehyun highly doubted that. 

“Old friend,” Jaehyun said. “He just got back into town.” 

“Are you talking about Jungwoo?” Jisung picked up Jaehyun’s beer again and downed almost half of it in one giant gulp.

“Do you know him?” Jaehyun wasn’t sure why he was asking. He wanted to talk about Jungwoo and there was nobody to talk to about him back at the cave. Jungwoo was there for one thing, and Yuta wouldn’t talk to Jaehyun about Jungwoo. Since Ten had defected, Taeyong barely spoke to anybody who wasn’t Doyoung. It had been four days now and Jaehyun was going quietly mad with the proximity. 

“I met him at Hyuck’s place,” Jisung said. He pointed to Johnny’s untouched beer. “Can I have this?”

“Knock yourself out,” Jaehyun said. 

“There’s also the German guy,” Jisung said around another mouthful of liquid. 

“Who’s that?” Johnny asked. It was Mark who answered him.

“Hyuck said this really, um, interesting guy came in a few nights ago. With silver hair. He’d never seen him before, but he was with that dancer? You know, who busks down at the prom? Like, with him, maybe? I don’t know.”

“I know that guy,” Johnny said. “The dancer, I mean.”

Jaehyun had no doubt about that. Johnny was exactly the kind of tall-and-pretty Ten liked to thrall back in the day. He would take these pets home to Taeyong and parade them around before it was a case of kill them, turn them, or set them free. Taeyong always set them free, their memories hazy with only a vague sense of having had a good time and some short term scars to prove it. It wouldn’t surprise Jaehyun to learn that Ten had approached Johnny, but he wouldn’t have even bothered once he found out Johnny wasn’t into men. 

Jisung mused, “But he always dances on his own.” 

The German guy was news to Jaehyun. The only new face in the hotel was Doyoung, and he’d been a vampire longer than most of these guys had been out of high school. And he wasn’t German. Jaehyun didn’t ask any questions, though. 

He took his next turn and came back to find Jisung had absconded with Mark and the Chinese kid.

“They have classes in the morning,” Johnny said. “Jisung was bringing nothing to the table anyway.” Jaehyun shrugged and took a second turn. They bowled until the alley boss rang the final bell, and didn’t talk much again until they were leaving. 

“Who is he? The new guy. Your old friend who you asked about.” 

“Old boyfriend,” Jaehyun clarified. “He’s a good guy, though. I just wondered if you’d met him.” 

Johnny nodded and loaded his ball into the back of his pickup. “There’s a swell coming in tomorrow.”

“What time?” 

“Should be rolling in around four-thirty,” Johnny said. “I’ll wait for dawn, but I know you like the half-light. Just be careful.” Johnny had long ago given up on trying to convince Jaehyun to surf with him. Jaehyun had never tried to convince Johnny to surf at night. 

“I’m always careful,” he said. That was very untrue, but it would take more than a tumble into the sharp rocks by the bluffs to kill a head vampire. And he could fly, a skill Johnny couldn’t exactly boast for all that he was probably a better surfer than Jaehyun was regardless of his decades of experience.

Jaehyun watched Johnny drive away and regretted that he couldn’t go with him, that theirs wasn’t the type of friendship where Johnny could drive him home in his pick up or they could rent a shack down by the beach together, or even go surfing in the daylight and enter bowling tournaments on weekends. What theirs was, was a friendship born of being the only two people on the beach when it was still half-dark every morning. They’d run into each other enough times these last three years to have quickly progressed to beers and bowling and roaming Santa Carla after dark. Jaehyun had forgotten what it was like to just have a friend to hang out with. His tribe and Taeyong’s were everything to him, but tribes were so… intense. Everybody was fucking or very pointedly not fucking each other, and doing something normal could be upset very quickly by a passer-by accidentally skinning their knee. Yuta and Taeyong were well past the point of craving humans, but Doyoung was still new and Ten was a liability at the best of times. Judging by the speed of his flight and the healthy glow to his skin that couldn’t have come from sunlight, Jaehyun guessed that Jungwoo was back on the O+ too. 

The pier was busy when Jaehyun landed at the base, just outside of the lights of the expensive new ferris wheel a half hour later. He took a cigarette from the box he kept in his pocket and lit it so it looked like he had some reason to be lurking down on the fire escape below the boardwalk. It wasn’t a good reason, but he looked like a beach bum, he might as well act like one. 

“You can’t be down there,” one of the maintenance workers said as Jaehyun climbed over the little chain that separated the stairs from the boardwalk. Jaehyun threw him a wink and kept on walking. It was busy, but he didn’t really notice any of that. Jungwoo was here, and Yuta. They were in Donghyuck’s store, and Jaehyun was tired of resisting the pull of them both together. 

He found them trying to shoplift. 

“Please don’t do that,” Jaehyun took the comic book from Yuta’s back pocket and reshelved it. “This isn’t the 1980s, he can see you through a camera.” 

“But what about our reflections?” Yuta stuck his tongue out at Jaehyun. “We’re invisible on camera.”

“That’s a myth,” came Donghyuck’s bored-sounding voice from behind the display. “Jaehyun spends a lot of time looking at himself in the mirror behind the counter, so I know it’s not true.” 

Yuta grinned and stepped around the display to talk to Donghyuck, leaving Jaehyun with an unobscured view of what the fuck Jungwoo had done to his hair.

“It’s bleach,” Jungwoo said, patting down the strands. It wasn’t just bleach. There was something pink in there too. His hair looked like cotton candy. Jaehyun wanted to put it in his mouth.

“We should get back,” he said, before he started to get hungry. “Yuta?”

“Why should we?” Jungwoo challenged him. “We just got here.” 

Jaehyun ignored his tone and followed Yuta around to the counter where he was leaning in far too close to Donghyuck. Jaehyun glanced around the store quickly before he leaned in too. 

“Did Ten come in a few nights ago?” 

Yuta flinched back at the mention of Ten’s name. They weren’t allowed to say it out loud back at the hotel. Donghyuck noticed because Donghyuck was sharp but he didn’t ask. 

“Yeah, he came by. He bought some gum.” 

“On his own?”

“No, he had somebody with him.” Donghyuck looked over Jaehyun’s shoulder. “New guy. Another new guy.” 

Jaehyun wanted him to go on, but Donghyuck looked cagey now. He didn’t like being kept in the dark, and Jaehyun hadn’t told him about Taeyong at all, let alone the existence of a whole separate tribe to his own. Whoever he thought Ten belonged to, he didn’t ask before. Ten belonged to himself now, at any rate. 

“Thanks,” Jaehyun said. He set the comic book Yuta had been trying to steal on the counter. “How much for this?”

“Eight dollars,” Donghyuck said without looking at it. He looked from Yuta to Jungwoo and back to Jaehyun. “Nobody wants things to go back to the way they were,” he said. 

“I know,” Jaehyun said, pushing the comic book into Yuta’s chest and handing over a ten dollar bill he didn’t expect to get change for. 

Donghyuck watched them leave, and Jaehyun felt uneasy about that. He was a good ally, eyes and ears in the town and a useful source of information on Mark and his inherited mission to rid Santa Carla of the undead. But Donghyuck also wanted turning at some point, and a bunch of new vampires in town might spook him. He’d grown up here, after all. Santa Carla’s vampire problem was more than local lore, and too many of them around here would draw attention. Too many of them around here already were.

Yuta led them over to two motorbikes piled against the pier. 

“When did you take these out?” Jaehyun hadn’t seen the bikes operational in nearly thirty years. They lived in the hotel and Yuta sometimes tinkered with them, but they looked shiny, oiled, freshly… whatever kinds of words somebody used when they knew anything about motorcycles which Jaehyun didn’t. He looked around. “This is a bit conspicuous, isn’t it?” 

Yuta dragged one bike out and sat astride it. “No more conspicuous than David was,” he said.

“David was so conspicuous, his whole tribe was destroyed,” Jaehyun pointed out. “And it wasn’t even his tribe.” 

“Stop being such a boyscout,” Jungwoo climbed onto the back of the bike behind Yuta, looping his arms around his waist. Jaehyun, left with the other bike, dragged it out and took the keys Yuta offered him. Jaehyun’s back felt cold in a way that had nothing to do with the weather because he didn’t get cold. He wanted Jungwoo to sit behind him, to put his arms around his waist. Or, he wanted to be on that other bike too. 

“I don’t want to race,” Jaehyun said, firing up the bike.

“You don’t have to beat us,” Yuta said.

Jungwoo added, “Just try to keep up.” 

They took off down the promenade at a very conspicuous speed. Jaehyun waited to see if a cop car would peal out from a side street, but nobody followed. He’d flown over town earlier and knew that all of Santa Carla’s small police force was right at that moment tied up in maintaining a cordon around the old seal reserve. He knew from flying low enough, and from overhearing the police radio that Johnny kept in his car, that a body had been found at the reserve earlier this evening, and it was drained of all of its blood. 

Taeyong was sweeping the cave when Jaehyun arrived. There was no sign of the others, but he found the other motorbike behind the disused weather station on the bluffs. Even Doyoung was missing.

“Where is everybody?” 

He’d startled him. Taeyong jumped like he wasn’t a virtually-indestructable head vampire. 

“What?”

Jaehyun reached out and gently removed the broom from Taeyong’s grip. “Where’s Doyoung?” 

A head vampire was vulnerable in that they were the only vampires in a tribe who could die and for it to be a permanent affair. And when they died, their whole tribe went with them. Jaehyun looked around for the dog who protected Taeyong during the day but she wasn’t there either. 

“He took Bubu out for a walk,” Taeyong said. “It’s bright tonight.” Jaehyun gave him a look but Taeyong waved him off. “I’m fine,” he said. “Jungwoo and Yuta are around here… somewhere.” Jaehyun didn’t point out that Jungwoo and Yuta weren’t in his tribe and that they had no responsibility to protect him. They would, of course. Anybody would protect Taeyong. Jaehyun had known him a little before he was turned, before he turned Jaehyun, and Taeyong had always inspired a protective instinct in anybody he met. It was those eyes. They should have been unsettling but instead they just made everybody want to keep them from tearing up. 

There was a moan from somewhere upstairs. Jaehyun glanced up to his room, the office he’d claimed for himself. He bit the inside of his lip, drawing ichor. 

“See?” Taeyong said. “Jungwoo and Yuta are here.”

Jaehyun didn’t point out that having sex in Jaehyun’s room wasn’t the same as being in the room in case Ten turned up. 

“Call Doyoung back,” Jaehyun told him. “I’ll get the others. We need to talk about Ten.”

“He already turned up,” Taeyong said. He sounded lost. 

“When?” If Jaehyun had any normal blood in his body he might have felt it run cold.

“Just after you left,” Taeyong took his broom back and continued to sweep the clean floor. “I think he was waiting for you to leave. Doyoung was here, don’t worry.” 

Like he’d heard his name, Doyoung dropped down the shaft from the surface, Bubu following behind on her own carefully beaten trail. He went straight to Taeyong, hands touching in a way that looked almost unconscious. Jaehyun averted his eyes.

“Ten came by?”

“Yeah, he was here,” Doyoung said. “Did he come back?” He sounded shook. Jaehyun cursed himself for going out at all, knowing there was risk of a rogue in the area. 

“No, he didn’t. He won’t.” 

Jaehyun had to ask. “Is he- did he want to join us? Here?” 

The way that Taeyong shook his head told Jaehyun that there was never a question of that. “No. He’s holed up at the old Emerson farm.” That was a surprise. Jaehyun must have made an expression because even Doyoung noticed. 

“What’s that?” 

Taeyong didn’t answer him. He curled his arm around Doyoung and turned into him. Bubu padded over, pushing her nose into Taeyong’s other side.

Jaehyun said, “The Emersons wiped out the last tribe in Santa Carla.” 

“He knows it’s empty,” Taeyong said. “He’s not making some kind of statement.” He didn’t sound convinced and Jaehyun wasn’t convinced at all. Ten was pretty angry when he left. Ten had been temperamental as a human; as a vampire he could be wild. But he wouldn’t hurt Taeyong. He loved Taeyong. He always had, no matter what he’d done. In any case, Taeyong was well protected now. Jaehyun should go find his own tribe. He turned to go, then turned back. 

“Did he bring the new one with him?”

“No,” Taeyong looked lost, turning into Doyoung already. “He was alone.” 

Jaehyun wondered how much he should tell Taeyong. He knew very little. 

“The guys down at the bowling alley said they saw Ten with a guy with silver hair. That must be him. And there’s been a draining down at the seal reserve. We should be ready… to go.” 

Taeyong nodded and Doyoung nodded a half second later. Jaehyun left them to each other, to their reduced tribe of two, and the Hound of Hell that could look after them while they slept. Dawn was still hours off but Jaehyun didn’t want to go out again. The cooler was full. He retrieved a blood bag from the cooler because he hadn’t eaten in a few days. If they were facing a showdown with Ten and whoever this new guy was, he would need his strength. 

He vaulted up to the mezzanine floor. and knocked on the door. He shouldn’t have to. This was his room, his general manager’s office that he’d commandeered for himself in 1988. But what was his belonged to his tribe, so he waited until nobody told him to fuck off and he let himself in. 

“You’re too late,” Yuta said, voice muffled into Jaehyun’s pillow. He was naked from the waist down, lying on his stomach. There was an empty blood bag on the floor next to him. He would be unconscious soon. Jaehyun walked over and pulled his blanket over Yuta’s bare legs. “No, don’t,” he muttered, and pushed himself up onto his elbows. “I’m going to my bed.” 

Jungwoo, fully clothed still, was splayed out on his back next to him, one hand reaching out to play with Yuta’s hair. 

“You’re such a lightweight,” Jungwoo giggled.

“Says you,” Yuta leaned over and kissed Jungwoo’s neck, nipping at the skin with his canines so a tiny drop of dark ichor rolled down Jungwoo’s throat. Then he got up. He cast around until he found his underwear. 

He paused next to Jaehyun as he stumbled through the door and said, “Goodnight, Master.” He pecked Jaehyun on the cheek with more mockery than affection, and then he was gone. 

“I’d offer to change the sheets if I didn’t know you like them like this,” Jungwoo stretched and made no effort to move. Jaehyun eyed the stained mattress on Yuta’s side and pulled the blanket over the stain. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do so he set his blood pack on the floor. He thought about going back down to get one for Jungwoo. Had he fed recently? Jaehyun hadn’t entirely discounted the idea that the body at the seal reserve was Jungwoo’s kill. But he couldn’t ask him. To ask him would be to invite another quarter-century of sullen silence. 

It was strange having anybody at all in his room. Yuta never normally came up here, summoning Jaehyun to his bed on the very rare occasions when he wanted to close their loop, when he wanted Jaehyun to get inside of him and hold him and show him what it meant to be part of a tribe. But those occasions were very rare, and there wasn’t really anybody else. There hadn’t been a half-vampire in the hotel since the 1990s, and Jaehyun was very aware of the fact that the last time his bed had been occupied by anybody other than himself, it had been Jungwoo. 

“Are you staying?” Jaehyun kicked off his shoes and shrugged out of his jacket. Jungwoo watched him with distaste as he slung his jacket across the table over which he heaped all of his clothes. “What?”

“You can get a wardrobe,” Jungwoo said. He still didn’t move. “Nobody is going to think you’re any less of a badass for having somewhere to hang your clothes.” 

Jaehyun had no idea what his clothing situation had to do with either being a badass or anybody else. He peeled his socks off and threw them in the corner with the rest of the things he took on his bimonthly laundry visits because he wasn’t a complete animal. He approached the mattress and picked up his blood bag. 

Jungwoo eyed him from where he was lying. His t-shirt had ridden up, showing off more skin than Jaehyun needed to see. He stretched again, even more of his stomach exposed for Jaehyun’s benefit. He was doing this for Jaehyun’s benefit, there was no doubt about that. Jaehyun sat down on the mattress with his back to the wall. 

The room was dark, Yuta’s fairy lights and the lanterns Taeyong kept downstairs in what had once been the lobby barely penetrating the small internal windows of the general manager’s office with their light. Jaehyun didn’t need light to see by, though. He glanced at Jungwoo and saw the reflective glint there, the eyeshine that marked them out. It was one of the things that set them apart, apart from the obvious. Their preternatural good looks was another. Vampires tended to gravitate towards people like them, lonely beautiful creatures in need of a cold touch, but simply being a vampire gave one an edge too. 

Into the silence, he dared to ask a question. “Why are you…” he trailed off as Jungwoo rose to his knees and then climbed into Jaehyun’s lap, caging him against the mattress and the wall, “...here?”

“You know why I’m here,” Jungwoo said. Jaehyun knew from his tone, the coldness and despair, that Jungwoo wasn’t talking about why he was here - now - on the mattress in the general manager’s office. He wasn’t about to give Jaehyun an answer that might make up for the last quarter century of loneliness. 

Raising the blood bag to his lips, Jaehyun bit into the seal at the top. It was something to do with his hands that wasn’t putting them on Jungwoo. It was something to do with his mouth that wasn’t tracing Jungwoo’s perfect neck with his lips. 

“Why do you want to die?” Jaehyun asked. He was trying to sound casual and he was failing. He sipped at the bag, at the cold and congealed blood inside that couldn’t compare to what had been drained from the body at the seal reserve. 

“I’ve lived long enough,” Jungwoo watched him intently and when he met Jaehyun’s eyes he ground his hips down into Jaehyun’s. Whatever he’d been doing with Yuta hadn’t been enough, then. Jaehyun knew that if he breathed, he would have let out a shaky breath right then. “Don’t you think we’ve lived for long enough, Master?” 

“Don’t call me that,” Jaehyun said. He did shudder this time because the word made him all too aware of what he was to Jungwoo. Power had never come easily to Jaehyun.

“It’s what you are to me,” Jungwoo ground down on him again, leaning in so that the weight of his erection pressed into Jaehyun’s. Jaehyun tried to be nonchalant. He tried to keep sipping at his bag. That wasn’t exactly easy when Jungwoo’s lips were hovering so close to his. Jaehyun parted his lips, tipping his chin up. 

It was a low trick, but Jungwoo was a vampire and there were some things a vampire couldn’t resist. Jaehyun hadn’t been kissed in a long time. His lips were wet with blood now.  

“I was everything to you once,” Jaehyun whispered. 

“Once,” Jungwoo agreed, shifting closer, the friction between them causing the button on Jaehyun’s jeans to catch against Jungwoo’s zipper. 

“I could be that again,” Jaehyun said. He slipped one hand down to Jungwoo’s thigh, gripping him right under the femoral artery, on a hidden scar the shape of Jaehyun’s mouth that would never heal because Jungwoo had stopped healing two centuries ago. Jungwoo’s tongue clicked in his mouth. “If you let me.” 

Jungwoo leaned in and licked a stripe across Jaehyun’s open mouth, taking what was on offer and nothing more. It wasn’t a kiss because Jungwoo had to know it was what Jaehyun wanted. But it was something. Jaehyun brought the blood bag to his lips and drained it in one go, watching Jungwoo’s pupils dilate with the high from just a taste. Jaehyun could feel the effects almost instantly, the mild dizziness and the blurring of the edges of his consciousness. It was dark in the room and he felt it closing in. 

Yuta was out, and soon he would be too. It was four hours to dawn and until then, Ten could come back and take his revenge. He might not stop at his old tribe. He might move on to Jaehyun’s, and they didn’t have a Hellhound to protect them. 

“Can you stay awake until dawn?” Jaehyun whispered, slurring his words. 

“Is that an order?”

“It’s a favour,” Jaehyun said. “For Yuta, even if you won’t do it for me.” 

He felt himself slip down the wall and the pillow rise to meet him. Jungwoo stayed straddling him, his expression stony, unreadable. As Jaehyun slid into his blood-drunk stupor, Jungwoo climbed off of him and resettled himself on the other side of the mattress. 

Jaehyun heard him say, “Get some sleep, hyung.” And then he was out for the count.

Chapter Text

"Don't ever invite a vampire into your house, you silly boy. It renders you powerless." 

• Max to Sam Emerson, on the subject of the tribe's admission to his home in 1987.

He was too hot. Temperature wasn’t something that had bothered Jungwoo in two centuries so it was a discomforting experience to ease into full consciousness with the memory of that sensation of having too many clothes on, too many blankets, too little air. Especially when he didn’t need air at all. Blinking into the gloom of the twilight filtering through the lightwell outside, he found that he wasn’t hot at all. He was feverish, but it wasn’t heat. 

At some point during the day, Jungwoo had drifted into a doze. He was bored, had been reading one of Jaehyun’s shitty paperbacks for hours, and at some point the threat of the Hotel being raided receded from his mind and he’d shut his eyes. He woke up now in Jaehyun’s bed, his chest pressed against Jaehyun’s back and his arms looped around him. It was probably some weird tribe thing, some magnetism he couldn’t deny, because he didn’t remember that he fell asleep anywhere near Jaehyun. He didn’t recall rolling into him or wrapping arms around his waist, or nuzzling into the back of his neck which was what he was doing when he snapped into waking. 

He was feverish, and his cock was stiff in his jeans, his skin on fire with proximity to Jaehyun who had made his blood run hot when blood was what flowed through his veins. His own blood, at least. Whatever it was now, Jaehyun still made it hot. Boil sometimes, yes, or just rush to places that were inconvenient when he was pressed up against him but still determined to act on his vow to hate him for eternity. 

If he could breathe, he would have gasped in shock. If he could breathe, he could have breathed Jaehyun in. He couldn’t decide which he would rather have gotten away with, and he didn’t get to decide because Jaehyun turned around in his arms and looked at him across the gap of centimetres. 

“You’re still here,” he said. His voice was gravelly with sleep, eyes heavy and pupils still dilated with sated hunger. 

“Where else would I be?” Jungwoo answered. 

“Somewhere else. Wherever you went. Downstairs with Yuta.” Jaehyun, whose hands had been clasped over his stomach in sleep like a corpse in a morgue, pulled Jungwoo into him, pulling him closer. Jungwoo wondered if he was even fully awake. He’d only been asleep for ten hours or so. The feeding should still be making him stupid. Maybe that was why he was running his hands under Jungwoo’s vest, dry, blood-warmed palms making Jungwoo shiver even though he was too hot. That excused Jaehyun’s behaviour. It didn’t explain Jungwoo’s but who would even know? He closed the space between them and touched his lips to Jaehyun’s throat. 

Jaehyun groaned, the sound vibrating through his skin, into Jungwoo’s mouth and making him want. He didn’t let himself want, to feel the snap of the bond between them when they were apart or the way it was like swimming in warm water here when they were together. But he couldn’t help himself when they were this close. Jaehyun was drunk on blood but Jungwoo was drunk on Jaehyun. He let himself be rolled onto his back, and held up his arms, so Jaehyun could push his vest up and off. 

“You too,” he said, tugging at the shirt that Jaehyun hadn’t bothered taking off before getting into bed. His shoes were still on, too. Jaehyun was a mess, but Jungwoo wanted to feel him all over anyway. The bond kept him from leaving Jaehyun but it wouldn’t exist if he weren’t so wildly, uncontrollably attracted to who Jaehyun was in the first place. Tribes could exist without the bonds, but with them it was so much better. They were closer. There was nothing in this afterlife better than sex with another vampire, especially a member of your tribe, except (for Jungwoo) sex with the vampire who made him; with Jaehyun. 

Jungwoo hadn’t had Jaehyun in thirty years. He couldn’t forget a single detail but he took his time anyway to run his fingers down his chest, his abdomen, the swell of muscle below his belly button and the trail of fine hair that ran down to his cock. Jungwoo traced his hand down until he was holding him, gripping him, tugging him towards his own body, before he could think better of it. If he thought for a second about what he was doing, he would think better of it. But he let the fever take over, and let Jaehyun take him, slow and deep and better than he’d had since the last time he’d had this. 

Jaehyun didn’t kiss him. It was probably the only indication of lucidity, that he was on the tail end of the stupor and the lust that the blood could take responsibility for. He mouthed at Jungwoo’s neck as he fucked him, at the places he’d left marks when Jungwoo still had blood to be drawn to the surface by a pair of perfect, plush lips that could handle him better than anybody ever had. Jaehyun had mutilated him with love bites so many times before he’d sunk his teeth into the artery on his leg, before he’d fed Jungwoo his blood and watched him feed on another. Jaehyun’s hand crept around his backside now, slipping down to where Jungwoo’s hole was stretched around his cock, and lower to the imprint of his own teeth in Jungwoo’s immortal skin, the scar that had long turned silver, the scar that had joined them in more permanent ways than they were joined now. This had never been enough for Jaehyun. At some point in his existence, it hadn’t been enough for Jungwoo either. 

That really shouldn’t have been what set Jungwoo off. He really shouldn’t have found the gesture as tender as he did, as tender as he always had. He slipped his hand down to his own cock, and was coming in seconds. Jaehyun followed quickly, and then collapsed, not on Jungwoo like he might have once, but onto his side, then his back. Jungwoo felt cold suddenly, the heat of before dissipating. The worst thing was that he knew why Jaehyun wasn’t holding him. He knew that Jaehyun had pulled out and put distance between them because Jungwoo was liable to push him away at any moment. Jungwoo lay panting and streaked in his own release and cold when he shouldn’t feel the cold at all. He was still lying there when Yuta walked in, fully clothed.

“Rise and shine,” he said, taking in the scene and passing no comment. The comments would come later, probably. Jungwoo wouldn’t hear them. Yuta saved his snarkiness for Jaehyun. 

“You should knock,” Jaehyun said, making no move to cover himself as he caught breath he didn’t need to catch because he didn’t need to breathe. It was habit, a carry-on from his human life, that he should be out of breath after sex. Jungwoo wished he could, just once, find out how long it really took for Jaehyun to catch his breath. It tortured him to think of how beautiful Jaehyun must have been as a human, to be so gorgeous still with no sunshine to make him golden and no beating heart to make him blush. 

“I waited until you were finished.”

Jungwoo swung his legs off the bed and cast about for his clothes. It was futile to think of Jaehyun alive. Jaehyun wouldn’t die. He wouldn’t let himself die. He wouldn’t do what he needed to do to see an end to all of this in the course of a single human lifetime, even if he could spend it with Jungwoo. He got up and strode naked past Yuta, to the door.

“Sun’s all the way gone?” he asked.

“Yeah, it’s gone,’ Yuta said. Jungwoo gave him a peck on the cheek and then launched himself up and out the entryway and into the still twilight, the pink sky that had only just seen the last of the day. He wondered if he should go out and get himself someone to eat. Or maybe not. He didn’t know this place any more. He didn’t know what qualified as an unsavoury element of this city that the city would be better off without, and he’d never been one to murder innocents. He’d managed to kick his warm blood habit a half-dozen times over the years; he could do it again. He breathed deep even though he didn’t need to. He’d grown out of the habit of breathing. He didn’t waste time looking around, hurling himself off of Hudson’s Bluffs and into the surf far below, to wash himself clean of the one habit he couldn’t shake. 

“Did you drink enough this morning?” Yuta asked him. Jaehyun looked like he wasn’t entirely sure he was awake or still dreaming. He blinked up at Yuta, repeated his words back at him, and then nodded. 

“Yeah,” he said. “Thanks for asking?”

“I’m not asking because I care about your wellbeing,” Yuta nudged his foot with his toe. “Did you fuck yourself tired again or do you need a quick hit? I can get you some but no more than a sip or you’ll be useless.”

“I’m fine,” Jaehyun scrubbed at his face with his hands. “Why are you here? You scared him away.”

“I didn’t scare him. Jungwoo got what he came for.” Was that true? Yuta had been surprised to find them together, but not that surprised. Jungwoo had lasted longer than he expected him to. The fact that Jaehyun wasn’t already chasing after him was progress for Jaehyun too, he supposed. 

“Do you think he still hates me?” Jaehyun asked the ceiling. 

“I don’t care.” He did, a lot, but they had bigger things to worry about. “Clean yourself up. We have to go to the Emerson house.” 

Jaehyun pulled himself up into a seated position. The sheets next to him were still indented with the impression of Jungwoo and Jaehyun reaching out to smooth them over. Yuta rolled his eyes.

“You can have the What-Are-We talk with him when you get back. And turn your fucking phone on.” Yuta pulled out the piece of paper that had been crumpled around a rock and dropped through the entryway at sunset. Up here, closed in on all sides, Jaehyun had probably not even heard Bubu’s frantic barking. He’d probably been too balls-deep in Jungwoo to notice that a human had breached their carefully assembled obstacle course of terrifying warnings and had dropped a note onto the floor of the hotel from above. The last time humans had been in the hotel, a vampire had been stabbed in his sleep. Yuta flung the balled-up note at Jaehyun so it hit him on the forehead. “I read it already.”

Jaehyun scowled at him and rubbed at his forehead. “Ow. What is this?” He uncrumpled the note and read it. “It’s from Hyuck.”

“Yeah,” Yuta said. “We have a serious fucking problem. Right?” 

“Right…” Jaehyun read the short note. Yuta hoped he was reading it a few times and that this wasn’t a horrifying indication of how long it took Jaehyun to read three lines of text: Turn your phone on, dipshit. Mark’s went out to the Emersons last night with the German and your friend from the prom and he hasn’t come back all day. If your friend killed my boyfriend I’m going to stake your whole fucking family.

“Ten…” Jaehyun rubbed the bridge of his nose. Then he finally got out of bed. He picked up a t-shirt from the floor and wiped himself down with it, and then seemed to seriously consider putting it on. Yuta took it from him and flung it across the room. Jaehyun bent and picked up another one, tugging it on. “Yeah, we should go to the Emerson place. He won’t kill him. Ten’s not crazy.”

“What about the new one?” Yuta asked. “Ten killed him. Or as good as. And who’s to say he’s not crazy?” There had been a murder already, after all. Okay it was the serial creep who flashed people on the boardwalk and hung out in the arcade menacing the girls who worked the cash desk, but a murder was a murder. Ten wasn’t crazy, but a new vampire could be trigger-happy. With a sigh, Jaehyun dipped his toes into his sneakers and then picked up his leather jacket.

“Let’s go,” he said. “We’ll take the bikes. Might as well walk the walk. Santa Carla vampires and all that.”

Yuta waited for him to say something else but when he didn’t, he asked, “What about Jungwoo?” 

“Jungwoo can come along if he likes,” Jaehyun said. “He won’t struggle to find us.”

“And Taeyong? I didn’t show him the note.” 

That might have been a mistake but Taeyong wasn’t his tribe leader. He’d had seen it come in, of course. His dog had been the alarm clock that woke them all up. Doyoung had been the first to pick up the rock, but Yuta had taken it, had said he’d take it to Jaehyun who it was addressed to in a hasty scrawl, after all. Taeyong didn’t need to know that Yuta had stopped and unwrapped the note from the rock and read it, halfway up the stairs. 

Jaehyun looked tired, like he’d not just had a full day's sleep. 

He said, “Let’s keep this between us for now. If we bring Taeyong with us, it might make things worse.”  

The house was in rough shape. Jaehyun had been back there a few times since it was abandoned, since the older of the Emerson boys sold the place to pay for his mother’s new condo. Jaehyun had liked Michael. Michael, who knew who he was and what he was and didn’t - couldn’t - hold it against him. He was long gone now, and his brother with him, and the farm had been sold to a land trust who let it rot. A car blocked the driveway when Jaehyun and Yuta rode up on the bikes. The black 1969 Chevrolet El Camino had been there for a long time, as long as Jaehyun had been in Santa Carla. Yuta whistled low as they walked around the car and up to the house.

“Can we take this?”

“For what?” Jaehyun asked. “You can fly. And you’ve already resurrected the bikes.” 

“The car would go great with the aesthetic, though.” 

“You’ll have to fight Yangyang for it,” came a voice from above. Jaehyun’s head snapped up and he saw Ten crouched on the wrap-around balcony. His eyes gleamed in the dark, catlike, reflecting the light of the city far below them. “He’s taken a shine to it. Can I help you?” 

“Ten, come down. We need to talk.” 

His teeth shone white as he smiled. “I thought you said that you could-” with three running steps, Jaehyun jumped and cleared the balcony railing, landing in a crouch, “-fly. You’re so dramatic.” Yuta landed softly behind them. 

“Where is he?” 

Ten was off the railing and walking towards the house before Jaehyun even saw him move. He always had been the most agile. Ten had taken to being a vampire like it was his true nature. He let himself in the window of one of the upstairs bedrooms and Jaehyun made to follow him, slamming into an invisible barrier. 

“What the fuck?” Yuta pressed his hand against the barrier but it didn’t move. Ten, grinning still, hopped through the window, back out to the balcony, then back in again. 

“No vampires allowed,” he said, phasing and flashing his fangs so fast Jaehyun would have missed it if he weren’t also a vampire. From downstairs, Jaehyun heard the strum of an acoustic guitar and a deep voice he recognised. 

“How did you get him to agree to this?” Jaehyun asked. Yuta was already gone, off the balcony and probably peering in the windows downstairs. Ten didn’t answer him, his eyes darting over Jaehyun’s shoulder. A split second later, Jaehyun heard Jungwoo land with a thump behind him. He held his features still, meeting Ten’s eyes again when he looked back at him.

“Your stray came back.” 

“Hi Ten,” Jungwoo sounded almost friendly, and the smile Ten afforded him was warm. He stepped out of the window and past Jaehyun and pulled Jungwoo into a long hug. 

“You smell like seaweed,” Ten said. “And you look like you’ve been eating farm-fresh co-eds for breakfast. Are you back on the vein?” Jaehyun wasn’t surprised at the edge of concern in Ten’s voice. He’d always liked Jungwoo, had been on his side during the fight way back when. Jaehyun had never taken it personally; Ten just wanted everybody to be happy. He had always just wanted everybody to be happy. Himself, most of all.

“Why aren’t you back at the hotel?” Jungwoo asked, untangling himself as much as he could when Ten hadn’t let go of his waist, when he was still being peered up at with that uncanny way Ten had of looking. 

“Taeyong has lost his mind, of course,” Ten said with dramatic enunciation. “The librarian he’s adopted gives me indigestion.”

It surprised Jaehyun to hear Jungwoo say, “Doyoung seems nice.” Then, it always surprised Jaehyun to hear the way Jungwoo spoke to others who weren’t him. Downstairs, filtering through the open window, Mark started to beatbox along with his guitar. Then another voice joined in, an accented rap that kept time with Mark’s strumming.

“Let him go home,” Jaehyun said to Ten. He was guessing, but it was a fairly good guess when he said, “You haven’t hurt him yet. He won’t remember anything.” 

Ten shook his head. “Little Mark is having some trouble at home, Jaehyun. He needed a new place to live really fast, and busking for Jesus doesn’t exactly pay the bills.”

Well, Donghyuck hadn’t said that in his note. 

“Is your new vampire downstairs?” Jungwoo asked. “Can I meet him?” 

Ten shook his head slowly. “I don’t know if dogs should be around sheep.” 

Well, that nonsense statement made no sense. Jaehyun walked to the balcony edge. He could go down there, but Mark knew him. His cover would be blown as soon as Ten fed Mark some of his blood. 

He called down to Yuta, “He’s alive?”

“He’s alive,” Yuta said. The guitar cut off and Jaehyun watched Yuta wave at the window. Mark was never going to invite him in. 

“What’s happened?” Jungwoo asked Ten. He didn’t ask Jaehyun, of course. He could make love to him but he wouldn’t actually speak to Jaehyun, would he? 

“One of Jaehyun’s pet humans is living in the house,” Ten said. 

“I thought you were living in the house.”

“I am,” Ten said. “We are. Mark invited me inside last night. He said I was letting all of the heat out. And once I was in, Yangyang wasn’t blocked.” Ten cackled. Jaehyun needed an invite for the whole tribe. Yuta could get in if Mark invited him but only Yuta would be able to come and go. And Mark was never going to invite Yuta inside when he looked like a beautiful monster, standing in the garden not blinking or breathing and waving like a person who had learned waving from a mannequin. 

“Yuta, stop waving,” Jaehyun called down. There was a scuffling behind him and he swung around. 

There was another vampire on the balcony. 

He was dressed like the vampires of Santa Carla past, sleeveless shirt and safety pins and a pair of ripped skinny black jeans. A black hood and a bandana covered most of his face. Bleach blonde hair spilled out from the front of the hood and a pair of eyes watched him intently. 

Jaehyun was struck, even though he couldn’t see most of his face, by the beauty of the newcomer. He radiated it. Newborn vampires, even half-vampires, had a glow about them that made them irresistible. It was probably something chemical, some lure for prey they needed to seal their fate. But Jaehyun had the impression that this man was unnaturally beautiful even without the immortality now running through his veins. Ten had always liked them beautiful, his thralls and his kills, when killing was something he did. Before he let himself be reigned by Taeyong. Was he back on it now? He didn’t seem like it. 

This newcomer was a different story.

“Hi.”

“Yangyang, go back inside. Mark will probably follow you up here.” 

The new vampire, Yangyang, lowered his bandana. Jaehyun was right. He was breathtaking. Beatific. Biblically beautiful. The kind of face that masters made paintings of and didn’t come close to capturing. 

“I’m Jungwoo,” it was impossible to stop him, to throw himself between them, but Jaehyun tried. He reached Jungwoo just as he was shaking hands with Yangyang. Yangyang smiled up at him. He had very straight teeth. 

“Yangyang,” he said. “Are you joining us?” He looked to Ten, who had retreated to the window, to run interference with Mark probably if he needed to. 

“No, my love,” Ten said, managing to sound bored and indulgent at the same time. “They’re leaving.” 

Yangyang looked between Jaehyun and Jungwoo, stricken. “But you just arrived. I’ve never met any of Ten’s friends. Except Mark.” 

“They’re not really my friends, lovely. We used to live together. I fucked Jungwoo more times than years you’ve been alive, and Jaehyun… well, he’s my one that got away.” Ten winked at Jaehyun. Jaehyun chewed on the inside of his lip and wondered how it was possible to have a headache for the first time in two hundred and fifty years. 

“Are you going to hurt him?” Jaehyun asked Ten, determined to eliminate the biggest threat first. They’d worn out their welcome before they even arrived, so there was no point in pushing it. Ten was still smiling but he could turn quickly and he always had played dirty. “Mark,” he clarified.

“Why would we hurt him?” Ten said, wrapping his arms around Yangyang from behind. “He’s our guardian. He keeps us safe while we sleep.” 

“Get a dog,” Jaehyun said.

Ten winked at Jungwoo. “Like yours?” 

“Ten, if you eat that man, if you turn him, people will notice,” Jaehyun said, and Yangyang cackled in a way that was uncannily close to Ten’s signature laugh. “He’s not some predator like the body you left at the old seal reserve. He’s a nice kid with a family and friends and a whole congregation of people who’ll notice he’s gone.” 

Ten kept his eyes on Jaehyun as he leaned in to kiss Yangyang’s neck. Yangyang shut his eyes and hummed. Jaehyun didn’t look away like Ten wanted him to. 

Running his nose up the column of Yangyang’s neck, Ten said, “Do you think nobody misses this one?” He nodded to Jungwoo. “Did he go without a trace too?”

Jaehyun didn’t look at Jungwoo. He didn’t even look at Yangyang. He kept his eyes on Ten and just said, “Please.” 

A clattering noise behind him announced Yuta’s return. 

“We should go,” Yuta said. “That Mark kid saw me and he looks spooked as fuck.” He sounded exhilarated, like scaring the wits out of somebody was hilarious. “He was trying to get the front door open just now.” 

Jaehyun hadn’t dropped his eyes from Ten’s. 

He said, “Mark’s a hunter. He knows every hunter in town, too. If you hurt him, they’ll burn this place to the ground just to make sure you’re gone.” 

“I can just come home then,” Ten whispered. “Can’t I?”

Ten could never come home. Jaehyun knew that better than anybody. He could come back to the hotel. He could even go back to Taeyong, climb right back into his bed and curl up where he used to on his right hand side. But it wouldn’t be home. Home for him was the vampire next to him, now. Home for Jaehyun was Jungwoo, and Yuta. And what was happening at the Emerson place was putting them all in danger.

“Let’s go,” Jaehyun said. Yuta didn’t argue, and neither did Jungwoo for once. They dropped off the balcony, and Yangyang went into the house. Jaehyun could see him over Ten’s shoulder, pulling off his shirt. Mark would have some time on his own, Jaehyun guessed. He would pass on the message to Donghyuck. If Mark still had his phone, maybe Donghyuck would have better luck getting him out of the house. He would come back if he was already in thrall, but it was the best they could do. 

Jaehyun backed up to the edge of the balcony. 

“We have a good thing going here,” he reminded Ten. “Don’t fuck that up because you’re pissed off with Taeyong.” 

“Who’s pissed?” Ten had stopped smiling now. “Go home, Jaehyun. I won’t touch your pet human.” 

Ten shut the window behind him but not the curtains. Jaehyun saw him climb onto the bed inside, and Yangyang wrap his arms around him, before he jumped off the balcony. 

Jungwoo was on his bike. Jaehyun hesitated behind Yuta’s bike before Jungwoo leaned forward, leaving space behind him. Jaehyun didn’t question it. It had only been a couple of hours since Jungwoo had been wrapped around him trembling with his release. He climbed on behind Jungwoo and pulled out his phone. He shot a quick text to Donghyuck who had left ten messages in the last half hour alone. Jaehyun told him to call Mark, to try to entice him out tonight, to get him out of the Emerson place while Ten and Yangyang were busy with each other, and try to keep him out if he could. He told Donghyuck to shut the store and come get Mark now, as fast as his 1999 Corolla could drive. 

Then he fired off a message to Johnny. 

“Where are we going?” Yuta asked, idling the bike.

“The bowling alley,” Jaehyun said, his heart sinking a little. “I think it’s time we had a frank discussion with the hunters.” 

Chapter Text

One thing about living in Santa Carla I never could stomach: all the damn vampires.

• Michael Emerson's grandfather on the subject of the undead in his locale. 

The rumble and clash and clatter of resin on wood spilled out of the open doors of the Santa Carla Pin Palace. Jaehyun stopped just outside of the spill of light and Jungwoo walked into him. 

“Ow.”

“That didn’t hurt,” Yuta jibed, digging his knuckles into Jungwoo’s shoulder. Jaehyun looked down at the threshold, and knew he was probably not coming back here again after tonight.

“What’s wrong with him?” Jungwoo asked.

“He’s mourning the end of his bromance,” Yuta said. “His boyfriend works here.”

Jungwoo didn’t sound entirely detached when he said, “Boyfriend?” That was something at least.

“He doesn’t work here,” Jaehyun said. “And he’s not my boyfriend.” 

Yuta tutted. “Did he turn you down? Harsh. But I get it. He can do way better.”

Jungwoo giggled along with Yuta but it sounded a little forced. It was hard to enjoy. Jaehyun knew he should move but the longer he stood there, the longer his friendship with Johnny could go on. This one uncomplicated thing in his life was about to come to an end and Yuta wasn’t even wrong. He was mourning it.

Eventually, Yuta pushed him through the doors and then they were inside. Jaehyun spotted Johnny immediately and raised his arm in greeting, the way he normally would. Johnny didn’t return the gesture, the first sign that everything had changed. He led the way across the bowling alley to where Johnny was leaning against the bar talking to Harker, the owner. Harker dropped a silver key on the bar and walked away, giving Jaehyun a once-over that he was more upset about than he really should be. He was a vampire. He’d lived on this earth for two and a half centuries. And he still couldn’t abide the idea of somebody disliking him so. 

Johnny led the way to the back room without saying a word. As they crossed the bowling alley again they were joined by Renjun first, and then Jisung. Jisung at least gave Jaehyun a small smile, like he didn’t know how to act any differently despite what he knew now. 

The back room where Harker kept the machine for waxing the floor and the cleaning fluids was actually the disused arcade room that Jaehyun remembered from when they first came to Santa Carla. Jungwoo clearly remembered too, because he yelped in excitement when he saw the Starfox cabinet, and started hunting around behind it for a plug. Yuta joined in, watched by Renjun with an air of mild contempt. That could just be his resting face, though. Jaehyun had definitely seen him look at Mark and Donghyuck with the same expression. 

Jaehyun shut the door behind him and turned to find Johnny pointing an expensive-looking hunting crossbow at his heart. He didn’t bother to point out that the bolt was metal and would only give him indigestion. He put his hands up because that might have an outside chance of putting Johnny at ease.

“You lied to me.”

“I didn’t lie to you,” Jaehyun sighed. “You never actually asked me if I was a vampire.”

Yuta cut in with a very unwelcome, “Wasn’t the night surfing a bit of a give away?”

“I asked you who you were,” Johnny ignored him, eyes narrowed and fixed on Jaehyun. He sounded… hurt. 

“If it makes you feel any better, I wish things had been different.”

“You wouldn’t have lied?”

“I wouldn’t have needed to. That’s what I wish.” 

Behind the arcade machines, Jaehyun heard Jungwoo’s sotto voce, “I see what you mean by his boyfriend. Jesus Christ.” 

“Can you say that?” Jisung asked Jungwoo, sounding more curious than frightened. “It’s not like holy water is it?”

“Everybody shut up,” Johnny said. He jabbed the crossbow at Jaehyun again. “What’s going on? What happened to Mark?”

At that moment, Donghyuck burst into the room. Mark Lee was behind him, holding his phone. He looked up at them but only briefly before he went back to his phone. He looked drunk. He didn’t look hungry. He looked unsteady on his feet but at least he was on his feet and not floating above the carpet tile.

“What did they do to him?” Donghyuck demanded. “I picked him up like you said, and he was all dizzy and weird, and that Ten guy was standing on the balcony just staring at us.” 

Knocking his shoulder into Jaehyun’s as he stepped forward, Yuta muttered, “Nice going, asshole. You could have got them both killed.” He approached Mark and put his hands on his shoulders, making Johnny gasp and Renjun hiss in a breath between his teeth. Donghyuck, who was holding Mark’s hand tightly in his own, peered curiously at Yuta. He really was fearless. 

“What are you doing?”

“Checking for signs of slippage…” Yuta peered into Mark’s face, and Mark smiled warmly at him, gaze unsteady. 

“You’re pretty,” Mark said, or slurred. 

“I think he’s just out of it,” Yuta said, turning back to face the room. “Even a small dose should have knocked him out more than this though.” 

Jisung sounded both defensive and proud when he said, “Mark’s really good at drinking. I’ve never seen him pass out.” 

Yuta flashed him an indulgent smile that was all canines and if Jisung could have whined his alarm he would have. 

“What was he doing up there?” Donghyuck asked. “What do they want with him?” He shot Jaehyun a threatening look. “Mark would make the world's shittiest vampire. He would die immediately. He can’t even bring himself to kill the mouse who ate the lining on his guitar case.” As he spoke, he stroked Mark’s hair and Mark purred like an actual cat. 

Mark stood up then. “I should go back. Ten said I shouldn’t be gone for too long.” 

“Or what?” Donghyuck asked, not standing up and holding Mark’s hand in a vicelike grip. “What if you don’t go back?”

“He has to go back,” Jungwoo said, his voice uncharacteristically gentle. “He won’t feel like he has a choice right now.” Jaehyun was trying to work out how Ten even got Mark to drink his blood. He could have tricked him, or mixed it in with something else. Ten said he hadn’t touched Mark, but he wouldn’t have to touch him to thrall him. Mark wasn’t a half vampire, not yet, but he had some vampire blood in his system. If he ingested any more blood he could be tipped over the edge, knocked out of his mind like Yuta had said. 

“What do you want?” Johnny said suddenly, breaking the contemplative silence. He was still focused on Jaehyun. “Why did you call me?” He jabbed with the crossbow. “You blew your cover. Why?”

“He blew his cover the first time he went surfing at night, dude.” Donghyuck rolled his eyes at Johnny and Yuta snorted.

“You don’t seem particularly surprised by all of this.”

“I knew about it,” Donghyuck said, not sounding even a little bit ashamed of hiding this secret from his friends. “So there.” 

This seemed to shock Johnny into silence for a moment. 

Then Jisung said to Donghyuck, “But you’re a hunter.”

“Technically I’m hunter-adjacent,” Donghyuck said in that annoying sing-song way he had of being pedantic. “Mark’s a hunter. I’m just with Mark.” He looked to Jaehyun. “Can we reverse this? Whatever’s happening to him?”

“I know one way to kill a vampire,” Johnny said darkly. The crossbow was still pointed at Jaehyun’s heart. Once again, Jaehyun didn’t point out that he was incorrect. 

“That’s not going to help him,” Jaehyun said, tired now. He didn’t get near enough sleep. “He’s not thralled yet. He’ll probably sweat it out if you don’t let him take another hit, but that’s going to be the hard part.”

“But there’s a cure,” Donghyuck said, his tone far less threatening. “If Ten turns him?” 

That wasn’t at stake yet, but fine. 

“Yes, there is a… process,” Jaehyun said. He didn’t dare look away from the carpet tile in front of him. He couldn’t. If he saw the look on Jungwoo’s face, he wouldn’t be able to keep talking. Or they would get into an argument. Or both.

Johnny asked, “What kind of process? The Frogs told me it was as simple as staking the head vampire. So who’s the head vampire?” 

WIth a wince, Jaehyun shook his head. “That’s not the only way to do it.” He looked up and met Johnny’s eyes. “Even Head Vampires have to get made.” 

“So we need to stake the Head Head vampire?” Jisung looked confused. He looked like he was doing complicated math. Jaehyun sympathised. 

“A vampire can revert back to the age they were when they were turned. All they have to do is feed from the vampire who made them. If a Head Vampire feeds, then all of the thrall vampires will revert. See?”

“That sounds like magic,” Johnny said, skeptical eyes running from Jungwoo to Yuta and back to Jaehyun. 

“I don’t know how it works,” Jaehyun said. “I just know that it does.” He’d seen it. It hadn’t always just been him and Taeyong. 

But Johnny wasn’t convinced. Jaehyun knew the look. He remembered the same one on Jungwoo’s face a hundred and fifty years ago when he explained the process to him. Jungwoo had said it was too simple. Jungwoo had no idea how difficult it could be. Again, not everybody’s maker had been Lee Taeyong. And besides…

“It’s not just the blood drinking,” Yuta chimed in. Jisung and Johnny both winced. 

“What else?” Johnny asked.

“The vampire who wants to change back has to flush themselves out. We have this- it’s not blood, it’s-”

“Ichor,” said Renjun, making everybody jump. Jaehyun had been convinced he didn’t speak or even understand English. He definitely didn’t talk back to Mark on Saturday nights when he was being monologued at. He didn’t say anything else now, though. He just stared at Yuta.

“Ichor,” Yuta repeated. “Yeah, that. It runs through our veins, and if we want to be human again, it all needs to come out.”

Johnny frowned. “Like an, uh, like an enema?” 

Against the back wall, Jungwoo barked a laugh.

“Not exactly,” Jaehyun said. “It’s more like a draining. It’s dangerous. We could die for real. And if-” he stopped himself before he said ‘I’, “-if the Head Vampire dies, his tribe does too. We can’t do it alone.” Jaehyun held his wrist out, going for broke with the explanation because if Ten did get his teeth into Jaehyun’s neck in a fight then Johnny needed to know this. “The ichor should run clear. Like hair dye or something. I don’t know how to explain it.” He lifted his wrist to his teeth because nothing in this room would do the trick, and jabbed at his skin with an elongated fang. Muddy ichor welled to the surface lazily. Jaehyun held it out.

Johnny looked disgusted. Jaehyun didn’t blame him. He didn’t like it either.

“It’s brown, dude.”

“It’s old blood,” Jaehyun told him. “Of course it’s brown.” 

“That’s sick,” Jisung said, hand over his face and eyes fixed on Jaehyun’s wrist. Jaehyun thought he was grinning and he wondered what the kids meant by ‘sick’ these days.

“The tribe shouldn’t let it get to that, though.” Jaehyun pulled his sleeve down over his wrist again. “Most tribes will fight like hell for their Head Vampire. Ten’s… this Yangyang guy who Ten has turned will stop him from feeding on Ten’s maker. Or he’ll try. Probably. Usually.” Not in his case. If Jaehyun started sucking on Taeyong’s neck. Yuta and Jungwoo would probably gather round to watch. Taeyong’s own thrall probably wouldn’t be too happy about it, though. Doyoung didn’t like anybody even touching Taeyong. It really was no wonder Ten left. 

Johnny looked around the room. “So the tribe is like, all of you too? Like drones?”

With a scoff, Jungwoo stood up behind the still-silent Starfox cabinet. “Watch it. We’re not drones.” 

Before Johnny could say something offensive, Jaehyun stepped in. “Tribes have a bond,” he said, not looking at either of his own as he said it. “It’s not enthrallment. In most cases it’s more like a kind of strong attachment.”

“Like love?” Renjun asked. Yuta broke his shit laughing and Jaehyun glared at him. Jungwoo was back behind the cabinet again. 

Johnny ignored the laughter and said, “I just need to know if we need to worry about you. Are you going to try to stop us?” 

Yuta sniffed. “We’re not Ten’s tribe,” he said. He didn’t say anything else, though. He didn’t give Jaehyun away. That felt like something. That felt almost tribe-like. 

“You have a long way to go first,” Jaehyun said. “It might not even be an issue.” He looked around the room. “Can you lock Mark up somewhere? He’s going to start getting desperate soon. It won’t be pretty. Think heroin on steroids.”

On the other side of Mark, Jisung frowned, repeating the phrase. Jaehyun really hoped he didn’t get hurt in all of this. Jisung was too sweet for this world. Donghyuck stood up and pulled Mark to him. 

“I’ve got this,” he said. “Markly built himself a nice little soundproof booth in the basement of the comic book store. For recording. I can lock him in there.” 

Yuta stood up too. “I’ll come with you.” The glare that Donghyuck shot him was half-threatening and half-jealous, but he nodded. They started towards the door. 

“Wait?!” Johnny sounded hysterical. “Hyuck, you’re not going anywhere with a fucking vampire.”

Donghyuck rolled his eyes. “And you’re not the boss of me, Kahuna. I hang out with these guys all the time,” not the truth, but fine, “and you couldn’t even work out that your best friend never went outside in daylight.” This was fair. Jaehyun felt a small pang of sadness at the words ‘best friend.’ 

Before they reached the door, though, it slammed open.

Taeyong was backlit by the bowling alley, Doyoung behind him. Taeyong never came into town and Doyoung avoided anything that didn’t involve Taeyong, so they weren’t exactly known. They looked like vampires: Taeyong, in his leather pants and sheer shirt, and Doyoung behind him in the world’s most conspicuous black duster. Even Johnny looked awed. 

“Hi Yongie,” Yuta said with a grin. Taeyong spared him a small smile and then looked around the room, at Donghyuck and Mark who was grinning drunkenly, at Jungwoo who had abandoned his attempts to rewire a plug from the 1980s, to Renjun who glared back. To Jisung who gave him a small wave and Johnny who raised the crossbow again, and finally, to Jaehyun. 

He said, “There’s been a murder.” Taeyong rolled his r’s. It was distinctive and in the right circumstances it was cute. In this circumstance, it sounded like he was tasting the blood of whoever had bought it this time. “Some surf gang up the coast. They told the police that a man walked into their camp and walked out with their leader.” 

Ten. This was his MO. 

But…

“How did you hear about it?” Jaehyun asked. He was careful about what he brought home to Taeyong. He was careful about upsetting him. He was careful about- about Taeyong. His maker. His first tribe. That protective instinct never really went away. 

“I told him,” Doyoung said. Jaehyun sympathised with Ten for a moment. This guy had no idea how to be a vampire.

Taeyong looked around the room again. “So are you going to invite me to your secret meeting or not?”

Chapter Text

It’s not our fault. They pulled a mind-scramble on us! They opened their eyes and talked!

• Edgar Frog on the reasonable dangers of vampires.

Jungwoo would be lying to himself if he said he didn’t enjoy watching Taeyong give Jaehyun a dressing down. It was fair enough, too. No matter that Jaehyun was protecting Taeyong, no matter that he didn’t want to drag all of them out into the open, Taeyong wasn’t a child. He wasn’t some elder to be coddled in his cave, either. Jungwoo had said as much to Yuta, but Yuta had just shrugged. He was protective of Taeyong too. 

Well, Jungwoo trusted Taeyong. He trusted the new guy, too, who had the kind of feral guard-dog expression when he stood next to Taeyong that Jungwoo had once worn. And he was telekinetic. Doyoung was more powerful than any of them really, and he would stand between Taeyong and the pitchforks of Santa Carla if it came to that. It wouldn’t, but he would. 

But it wouldn’t.

It shouldn’t.

Jungwoo dropped into a crouch as he landed on the roof of the house. He could hear them, inside. Still going at it. He sat down to wait. The telltale noises were obvious, the practiced sighs of the new guy who probably didn’t realise that he didn’t need to breathe yet, and an ancient bed-frame, creaking rhythmically. Ten had a set of lungs on him too, but he was oddly quiet tonight. Jungwoo recalled Ten’s early days in the tribe, and the way he would commentate sex like everybody else needed to know, the way he would praise Taeyong because he knew Taeyong liked that, and gasp like he was having the best sex of his afterlife. Sex with Taeyong, too, which was never anything to write home about in Jungwoo’s experience. Sex with Jaehyun, now… 

Living this long meant that Jungwoo forgot a lot of things. He never forgot what it was to be with Jaehyun. It wasn’t that Jaehyun was particularly energetic. It wasn’t even the bond between them, because that bond was a tangible thing that Jungwoo could choose to look right at and ignore when he wanted to. There was something about Jaehyun and the way he took up Jungwoo’s whole world when he took him. And he gave as good as he got. Jaehyun treated sex with him like a holy act, and it was addictive. So addictive. Jungwoo was craving it again, which was why he’d fled the bowling alley as soon as it looked like everybody was going back to the hotel to strategise. As soon as it looked like he would be alone with Jaehyun again soon, maybe even Yuta too later when he got tired of babysitting, he took off. 

Beneath him, he could hear Ten calling his name. With a sigh, he got up and walked to the edge of the roof, dropping lightly down onto the balcony. Ten was at the window again, stark naked. Behind him, the new guy was stretching. There were fresh bite marks on his neck, but they would fade now that he had accelerated healing. 

“What were you lurking up there for?” Ten asked. “You should have said if you wanted to join in.” 

Jungwoo flashed his teeth. “Maybe. Maybe I’m not getting what I need from my own tribe.” A lie that Ten saw right through. 

“I can’t invite you in anyway,” Ten said.

“I know.” Jungwoo did know. Ten couldn’t invite him in even if he wanted, which Jungwoo highly doubted that he did. Mark was locked up somewhere downtown, with Yuta standing guard. Jungwoo gestured beyond Ten. “Can I talk to him?” 

Another assessing look from Ten, and then a shrug. “I’m not his keeper.” Another lie. But he did step back, as Yangyang approached the window, pulling on a pair of jeans. 

He really was beautiful. Ten had always gone for the most captivating of thralls, surrounding himself with gorgeous humans to feed from, but never really touch; not like this. Ten had been faithful to Taeyong. Ten had bought into their philosophy that a thrall was there to serve and feed, but never to fuck. Of course, for Taeyong, all that had changed when he met Doyoung. Had it changed when Ten met Yangyang? Was he just too difficult to resist? With his silver hair wisping around his face in the light evening breeze, and the amused turn of his mouth, his too-red lips, his too-white teeth, Jungwoo could imagine that Ten could lose himself entirely. Jungwoo didn’t think so, though. Taeyong had become entirely consumed by Doyoung from the first, madly in love and madly in lust and had driven Ten away by the force of it. Ten didn’t even look back at Yangyang as he walked out of the room. 

“Get a shirt on,” Jungwoo said. “I’ll show you around the bay.” 

Yangyang stared at him, unblinking, still smiling. “Why? I don’t know you.”

Jungwoo nodded over his shoulder. “I’m the only one here who isn’t working out how to kill you right now,” he said. 

“Ten doesn’t want to kill me,” Yangyang said, sounding like he didn’t really believe it. Ten had, after all, killed him once already this week. 

“I’m the closest thing you have to an ally,” Jungwoo insisted. “So put on a shirt, and let’s go.” He stepped back towards the edge of the balcony. Yangyang watched him for a few more seconds, before he reached back and plucked a thin white shirt from the bed. He stepped out onto the balcony barefoot, and Jungwoo thought that he had never seen anybody take so beautifully to being a vampire. He’d seen Yuta turned. He’d seen them when he was thralled and human and still burning with life, and the beautiful monster he’d allowed himself to become. But Yangyang looked like he had never been quite human. Yangyang looked like Jungwoo had felt, all those years ago, when he’d begged Jaehyun to turn him.

The flight to the railway bridge was short. Jungwoo took the lead, not daring to look behind him too often lest he seem needy, urgent. Lest Yangyang think that he was being checked on. Jungwoo needed Yangyang to trust him, and fast. So he kept his gaze ahead and when the bridge came into sight he banked and dropped down lightly on the edge of the tracks. 

“Scenic,” Yangyang said, touching down next to him. “I thought you were going to take me to the boardwalk or something.” 

Jungwoo glanced across at Yangyang as he sat down. “I thought you’d already been there,” he said. Far in the distance, the horn of a freight train broke through the night. This bridge wasn’t used anymore but Yangyang probably didn’t know that. He sat down next to Jungwoo, almost touching but not quite. He looked just a little bit nervous, a little bit of human fear left in him still even if nothing else was.

“Ten took me down there, yeah.”

“I know.” Jungwoo looked out at the horizon, at the ships winking on and off in the night, lining up for their approach to Oakland, Los Angeles, Long Beach. He pointed to the lights. “This is one of the easiest ways to travel,” he said. “If you want to leave the continental US.” 

“Flying’s quicker,” Yangyang said. Jungwoo knew he didn’t mean what they could do, catching currents and zephyrs and riding the winds around town. That kind of thing wasn’t really possible long-distance. 

“Your ID won’t work forever,” Jungwoo told him. He’d been on planes, of course. Back when he didn’t need some form of identification to fly them. “You should get used to travelling without it.” 

Jungwoo had been across every ocean on the planet. He’d been to every continent, every major landmass. He went but he always came back to Jaehyun, wherever he was; his anchor.

“What’s the point?” Yangyang pulled at a thread in the ripped knees of his skinny jeans. “We can just stay here, right? Ten said nobody in this town has ever asked questions.” 

“Santa Carla makes for a pretty boring eternity,” he said. He didn’t point out that Ten had lit out of this place enough times in the last thirty years too. “Do you think you want to stay with him?” Jungwoo asked. “With Ten, I mean.”

Yangyang’s hands were restless. He was always worrying at something, playing with something. This time he rubbed at his chest, at his unbeating heart. 

“Why would I leave him?” Yangyang asked, like that was a stupid question. He kept rubbing at his heart. Jungwoo wondered if he were even conscious of it, of how he seemed to be trying to feel for its beat. 

Jungwoo decided to be honest. He could talk to Yuta, to Taeyong if he really wanted to, but he had a chance here to set things out with somebody who had no connection to Jaehyun. He took a deep breath that he didn’t need, but then he’d never lost the habit of sucking air into his lungs. He liked to think that it was what kept him from developing the pallid complexion of the others.

“We haven’t been introduced formally,” he said.

“No…?” Yangyang sounded like the youth that he was. His voice still held that edge of knowing mocking. Jungwoo was hundreds of years his senior, but Yangyang probably looked at him and saw a man only a couple of years older than himself. 

“No,” Jungwoo said. He held out his hand. “I’m Jungwoo Kim.” 

Yangyang laughed and the sound wasn’t unpleasant but it wasn’t friendly either. “Hi, Jungwoo Kim. I’m Yangyang Liu.” 

“How long have you been a vampire, Yangyang Liu?” 

Yangyang hummed like the answer required calculation. “A few days?” 

Nodding, Jungwoo did his own maths. “I’ve been a vampire for two hundred and one years.” Next to him, he felt Yangyang tense. “When I was twenty seven years old, I took an apprenticeship in a city I’d never been to. I met a man on the street one night and he told me to leave before I got hurt. I met the same man on the same street every night for a half-year, until he finally let me know his name. By then, I was past my apprenticeship. I didn’t want to work as an artisan, though. I was good at it, but all I wanted to do from that first night was sit on the street where I met the man and wait for him. Everything was boring that wasn’t looking at him. Do you recognise what I’m talking about?” 

“Ten,” Yangyang said with a soft sigh. “You met Ten?” 

“I met Jaehyun,” Jungwoo said. 

“It sounds like when I met Ten,” Yangyang said with a shrug. That was probably right. Jungwoo remembered the nightmares even when most things about his old life had faded from memory. Memory didn’t become more elastic just because he couldn’t die. But he’d dreamt about Jaehyun for nights in a row when he was still alive: Jaehyun on the street or Jaehyun outside of his window, Jaehyun in the corner of the small room he rented, or in his bed, watching him sleep. He couldn’t shake Jaehyun from his thoughts until one night he found Jaehyun before Jaehyun found him. 

“I caught him feeding on a peddler. The guy was a criminal, he used to overcharge for his produce and use the profits to gamble instead of sharing it with the farmers who sold him their wares. Jaehyun had been feeding from him for weeks. His profits had gone down, even I’d noticed that he wasn’t charging as much. But I thought Jaehyun was kissing him untl I saw the blood. I ran off. I was so…” what? Angry? Jealous, certainly. “Anyway, he caught up with me and he told me to leave the city again. I told him I couldn’t.” Jungwoo took another unnecessary breath. 

“So he turned you?” Yangyang guessed.

“So he thralled me,” Jungwoo said. “Because I begged him to. Because I told him that I didn’t want him to drink from anybody else when he could drink from me.” Jungwoo shook his head. “I had no idea what I was doing. But he did. He was careful with me. He gave me things to say to make him stop when I felt like he was taking too much but it was…” Jungwoo couldn’t articulate it, the feeling he still couldn’t shake. He didn’t have to articulate it, though. Yangyang was nodding.

“It’s like sex.” Yangyang said it in the present tense because for him it had probably only been last week. Jungwoo hadn’t been fed on properly in centuries. He knew how it felt, though. And he knew how thralls reacted when he put his lips to their throat, his teeth in their neck, the flutter of their pulse, their trembling breaths, and the way they went slack when he was on the edge of taking too much. Jungwoo always stopped there, on that edge. His hunting grounds were clubs and raves, festivals and giant outdoor concerts where people were already fucked up. Where he could drink his fill and look into a person’s eyes and convince them in that moment of euphoria that they’re fine, that they’ll heal, that they don’t need to call the police. 

“How long were you thralled to Ten?” Jungwoo asked Yangyang.

A shrug. “Maybe two months?” 

Two months? 

“And who were you before?” Jungwoo had to know. Two months wasn’t long enough to commit to an immortal life. Not to really think about it. He felt a flash of anger towards Ten. “Ten turned you after two months?” 

“Ten didn’t want to,” Yangyang giggled. “But he was leaving and I didn’t want him to go, so I asked him to take me with him…” he trailed off, playing with the frayed sleeve of his sweater. “I was done with college. I’m done with my parents and all that bullshit. I just want to be wherever he is.” He sounded like a religious fanatic. And Jungwoo could relate. He’d begged Jaehyun to turn him, too. 

He turned to Yangyang and tried to steady his voice. He wasn’t trying to be cruel when he said, “Ten doesn't love you. He’s pissed off with his maker for loving somebody else.”

Yangyang scoffed. “Who is this idiot, anyway? Who would choose somebody else over my Ten.” He was so fervent. He was so sold on the idea. Jungwoo couldn’t help but wonder if Yangyang had thought past the next week, the next month, into the long years ahead. He stood up, because there was no point in trying to convince a fanatic. Yangyang stayed where he was. There was a scent on the breeze and Jungwoo forced himself not to follow it, up to the struts on the top of the bridge. He looked down at Yangyang instead.

He said, “If you change your mind about any of this, come and see me. You’re only in this for a few days. There is a way out.” 

Yangyang stood up too. “Why would I want a way out?” He flashed his white teeth, and Jungwoo thought again that this man had taken to vampirism like he’d been born to it. Yangyang scrunched his nose. “I think I need to find better blood, though. Ten said we couldn’t kill just anybody and that guy at the seal reserve had lots of nasty shit in his blood. Knocked me out for hours.”

“Blood’s supposed to knock you out,” Jungwoo said, a little impatiently. He was done talking to this guy. Yangyang would come around eventually. Maybe when the college semester started and he started missing his friends, or his parents. Maybe then he would look for a way out. Jungwoo had come to him tonight with the foolish idea that he might find an ally in Yangyang, that he might find some humanity still that would help him convince the others that their tribes had run their course. That they could live out their human lives now, because there was no place for vampires in today’s world. 

He took off without saying goodbye.

Ten’s joints creaked when he rose from his crouch on top of the bridge. It was an odd sensation, to feel one's bones react to an age he hadn’t been for longer than any human lifetime. Yangyang hadn’t spotted him, hadn’t scented him, hadn’t even noticed the slack on their bond. He was too new to know what any of it meant, but he would feel it now when Ten took off and put distance between them. He probably didn’t know how to follow it yet, though, unless Ten wanted him to follow. So he didn’t worry too much as he launched himself in the opposite direction to the cliffs, the opposite direction to Jungwoo. Jungwoo had noticed him. He was sure of it. But he didn’t care. He’d not been hiding from Jungwoo. 

The lights on the boardwalk were starting to wink out as Ten dropped down into the bay. He found Jaehyun on the beach, sitting on the sand and looking out at the waves. There wasn’t a surfboard in sight tonight, and his pet hunter was nowhere to be seen. Did Jaehyun know that the hot surf instructor was a hunter? Ten had never bothered to tell him, but Jaehyun never was as dumb as he liked people to think. He certainly knew Ten was coming. He even moved over on the sand to make room for him even though there were miles of beach stretching off in either direction.

“This is peaceful,” Ten said, settling onto the sand and wrapping his arms around his knees.

“Usually,” Jaehyun agreed. 

They sat in silence for a little while. Dawn was some way off yet but it would come. 

“Have you had anything to eat recently?” Ten asked Jaehyun. 

“Yesterday,” Jaehyun said, allaying Ten’s worries for now. Jaehyun, like he understood subtext, nudged Ten. “Why? Checking to see if I’m on a diet?” 

“It wouldn’t be the first time you tried to end yourself,” Ten said. “And Jungwoo’s back, so I just assumed…” He had all but expected it. The last time Jungwoo had been a regular fixture, Jaehyun had starved himself to the point of almost dessicating before he let himself feed. It was the only time Ten had ever seen Yuta angry, when he’d come back to the hotel to find Jaehyun drinking from a jar of Ten’s special O-negative. 

He had never asked. Jaehyun was very private about these things. And as far as Ten knew, Jaehyun had never properly explained himself to his tribe, had never told them why he changed his mind about ending their collective immortal lifespans. 

But he and Jaehyun were equals now, or thereabouts. They were both of them head vampires.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Shoot,” Jaehyun said. He was hunched over, burying his own bare feet in sand that was whipped off by the wind in little flurries before it could settle.

“Why didn’t you just wait it out, last time? Back then? You were almost free. Taeyong had been crying for days, but he was ready to give you a vein. You were probably hours out from being able to turn yourself back and give Jungwoo everything he wanted.” Yuta too, though Yuta seemed unbothered either way. Still, it was the closest Ten had ever seen anybody come to ending their immortality. It was a level of commitment, of devotion, of love and community and tribe that Ten, for all that he loved Taeyong, had never felt. 

Jaehyun didn’t answer him right away. He kept piling sand on his toes. Just when it seemed like he’d forgotten the question, when Ten was about to give up and go back to the farm, Jaehyun spoke.

He said, “I found a wrecked Pontiac Fiero on the side of the road, near the hotel.” Jaehyun’s voice sounded distant, like it was coming through all the way from 1988. “It was on fire. It hit one of those big electricity pylon things that used to be on the side of the road up there before that big storm. Remember that?” The car crash, the pylons, or the storm? Ten couldn’t remember any of them.

“Anyway,” Jaehyun went on, “I saw it. I had to get out of the hotel that night. I was sick of waiting and of Taeyong watching me to make sure I didn’t just straight up shrivel. So I went out and flew all the way up into the mountains. And when I was coming back down, I saw the wreck. There were two people there. There was a kid who looked like he’d been thrown clear. Preppy type, blonde hair. And he was just sitting on the side of the row, not a scratch on him, crying. And about ten feet away was the body of this other guy who clearly hadn’t gotten out of the car before the fire.” 

What was this story? Ten tried not to picture it. For all that he was a creature who preyed on the life essence of others, he couldn’t stand the thought of gore. He couldn’t shake the image of the burned body of another kid next to a brand new racecar in the wet heat of a July night all those years ago. Tribes didn’t quite share telepathic links but they could feel strong emotions from each other. He wondered in that moment if the link between him and Jaehyun had ever been entirely severed. 

“What did you do?” Ten asked.

Jaehyun said, “I went back to the hotel. Jungwoo was outside, waiting for me, probably expecting me to drop out of the sky with weakness, but anyway I told him to go down to the city and find a cop. I told him to get somebody up onto the bluffs as soon as they could. He went, and I went inside and I found your cooler and I stole your blood. The end.” 

Not the end. 

“But why?” Ten had to know because it bothered him. He had to know because it had broken something in him to watch Jaehyun starve himself for Jungwoo, for Yuta. For their humanity that he was willing to give up an untold lifespan to restore. Deep down, Ten had always known that Taeyong would never drain himself for Ten. He’d already been planning to leave then, even if it took him nearly forty years to do it. 

“All I could see when I saw Jungwoo that night was a burned corpse beside a mangled car,” Jaehyun said, his voice steady but quieter again. “That bike that Yuta loved wrapped around an electricity pylon,” he went on. Then he finally looked at Ten and Ten was astonished to see what looked like tears in Jaehyun’s eyes when he said, “Me, sitting beside their human bodies and not a scratch on me.” 

There was a thin sliver of light on the far horizon by the time Jaehyun got to his feet and kicked off the sand, and dragged Ten up next to him. Ten felt dazed. He felt hungover, or like he could almost remember what that meant. He felt like he couldn’t go back to the Emerson place, to where a beautiful new vampire was waiting with his whole immortal life stretched out ahead of him and the only person who could make it right was him. 

He said to Jaehyun, “It didn’t occur to me that you love Jungwoo too much to set him free. I thought that was the exact opposite of what you were supposed to do with love.” He added, “I heard Jungwoo talking to Yangyang tonight. He wants it to be over. You know that, right?” 

“I know. I’m selfish,” Jaehyun said. 

He was. Ten was selfish too, though. He had no lofty reasons for turning Yangyang the way he did. 

“Can I ask you one more thing? Taeyong loves Doyoung, doesn’t he? More than just the way a tribe loves each other.” 

Jaehyun nodded. “I think so.” 

Ten didn’t have to ask Jaehyun if thought Taeyong had ever loved him. Taeyong would dry himself out for Doyoung, Ten knew. Taeyong would ruin Doyoung’s eternity just to keep him safe, too, and he and Jaehyun had that in common. It was a catastrophic kind of love. It was the kind of love Ten had never felt for anybody in his immortal expanse of lifetime. 

“We should go home,” Ten said, reaching out and taking Jaehyun’s wrist.

Jaehyun looked down at Ten’s hand. He looked guilty. He was betraying an emotion, which was how Ten knew there was something wrong. He found that he wasn’t even surprised, though, when Jaehyun told him that the hunters had gone to the Emerson place. That if he looked up into the hills right now he might see the glow of the fire they’d set to smoke Ten out.

Ten hoped Yangyang wouldn’t retaliate. He could feel him now, not back at the burned farm yet; still on the bridge. Ten tried to call on their bond. Yangyang would feel it like thirst, the need to follow, the need to join Ten. He had been a thrall only days ago, and he would be feeling the residue of that too. He would be okay. 

He would get to Ten before sun-up.

“I meant Hudson’s Bluff anyway,” Ten said. “Back to Taeyong.” He pulled Jaehyun close, and then into a hug. He whispered in his ear, as the light of the morning started to bleed into the night around them, “It’s time we sat down and talked about what it means to be free.”