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The little prickly leaves on the Christmas tree tickled your nose, both from poking it and smelling strongly of sap. It makes your face scrunch and your job a lot more difficult, but you’re not one to give up, so you persevere on tip-toes and try as hard as you can to hook the Grinch ornament higher up on the tree.
Against all odds, you succeed, and as the sneering green face hangs perfectly from its intended bough you lean back to grin at it with pride. Good. If you could do that one, then you could do the rest. No help required! And the blood-sucking Grinch in the other room could remain there, lazing in bed and reading on his present – a hard-earned Kindle that had taken too much of your paycheck.
Your happiness, however, is short-lived. You’re still pleased with yourself as you lean down to grab the next ornament, but it’s too late by the time you feel something tug at you. A thread on your cardigan snagged on one of the branches, which pulled on one of the lights, which wrapped around the tree, and then followed your momentum. Forward.
The abrupt change in weight threw you off-balance and you yelped, tripping straight to the ground. The Christmas tree toppled in slow-motion, narrowly missing you – not that you knew it, you were winded from your fall and barely heard the thump before the shattering and sprinkling of fir needles against your face.
For a moment, you just lay there, dazed and trying to breathe properly. Then you blink and the world restarts and you’re staring at your ruined, horizontal Christmas tree.
Tears fill your eyes before anything else.
“____? What’s wrong? What happened are you okay?”
The odd sound of slight panic in Yoongi’s voice prompted you to sit up, sniffling as you tried to not look like a mess.
“I’m fine,” you half-croak as you try to get to your feet. The vampire is at your side in a split second, his strong hands helping you up by your arms from behind as if you’re nothing more than a doll. Like you’re breakable.
The Christmas tree is sprawled out in front of you now, and you start hiccuping anew with fresh tears.
“My tree,” you whimper, heartbroken. All your hard work. All that meticulous placement and determination and time, gone, just like that, and left with a huge mess in its wake. “M-my whole tree. I… I…”
“Shhhh.”
His hands are freezing, so when his palms of his thumbs brush across your cheeks to wipe away the tears you flinch at the cold. You see the guilt flash in his eyes, but the fact that he’s so concerned and still dutifully drying your eyelashes and running his fingers against your jawline to catch the dripping wetness is more than enough to make you ignore the temperature difference. If anything, it’s making you warmer from the inside out, and your heart thump a little funny. It’s soothing, that’s all, you remind yourself. Just a sweet gesture because your tree is lying on the floor.
More tears well up to take the place of the last ones, and Yoongi is back to shushing you soothingly.
“Shhh, shhhhh… S’alright, little lady, we can fix the tree. I’ll pick it up in a minute. Shhhhh. No tears. I– Oh no.”
His voice goes from low and lovely to a violent hitch on the last word. His hands yank away from your face so fast it almost hurts and your body tenses instinctively at the sound, and when you look up you see him covering his mouth. What catches your attention, however, are the pools of smoky vermilion that glimmer in the candlelight.
“Yoongi…?” You can barely hear your own voice as fear overtakes you. Something like cruelty and despair wars in his gaze and he’s still clutching his hands over his mouth for dear life as he parts his fingers just enough for him to hiss, “Your hand.”
There’s an immediate, pulsating sting in your left palm at the statement, and you wince. Warmth coats it, and you glance down to see newly-blossoming rivulets of crimson coming from lacerations on the soft skin. He just hadn’t noticed at first – he was too busy fretting over you.
The gravity of the situation hits you like a train and the blood drains from your face instantly.
“Oh my god,” you whisper. “I’m sorry. Yoongi, I’m sorry, I didn’t notice, I’ll go–”
“No.” His order cuts you off so intensely you freeze to the spot, obeying. “I’m okay.”
His words sink in slowly, and you can’t help but stare in anxious disbelief. Yoongi should have killed you and drank you dry approximately twenty-six seconds ago. You were a dead man walking right now, and living on preciously borrowed time. But before you can try to protest and talk any sort of sense into him, he’s lowering his hands and you can see the tendons in his neck protruding sharply from the strength of him gritting his teeth.
Yoongi breathes out through his nose and his brow furrows as he stares at you with more frightening intensity than you’ve ever seen before – the effect is instantaneous, and you’re suddenly engulfed in a wave of mortal terror and hazy, lucid pleasure not unlike being sleep-deprived-happy-delirious. Faintly, you can recall him telling you this was how preying worked; even if the human instinctively knew they were about to die, the innate vampire hypnosis was very potent and very… very good at taking the edge off. He hadn’t described what “taking the edge off” meant at the time, but now you think you understand.
“Bathroom,” he says, voice tight. “Now.”
It’s strange seeing his eyes that shade of red. Blood drips on the creaky hardwood as you walk down the hall, and when you arrive in the bathroom he’s already in there with first aid kit out of the cabinet and plucking out supplies.
Your jaw drops. “You’re not serious.”
He doesn’t reply. Replying means taking a breath and that means probably definitely your death. Instead, he gestures with his head towards the toilet for you to sit down, and you obey with some reluctance. The fact that he’s going to try and do this is ludicrous. What’s more insane is that you haven’t run out of your home to save your life, but hey, we can’t all be winners.
Lacking any self-preservation, you can only sit quietly and wait for what might possibly be the last few minutes of your existence. Your heart pounds away erratically in your chest and your entire body is shaking from adrenaline, and after what seems like an eternity, Yoongi comes to you and turns the faucet on.
“Rinse.”
The frigid water is painful and makes your skin prickle, but it washes away until there’s nothing but pink going down the drain and you can clearly see little slices from a broken ornament. You’re thankful that you don’t see any shards stuck there.
Calmly and steadily, Yoongi dresses your hand.
The blood doesn’t stop coming. You watch raptly as his thin fingers apply ointment, smearing themselves with red as he does, and the only reason it seems like blood and not just watercolors is because you can smell the copper from here.
Once he’s satisfied, he begins winding the gauze around your hand. One layer, then two layers, then three layers are bled through, but the fourth stays clean and the fifth and sixth do, too. Well, aside from the stains that come from his own messy fingers.
You want to tell him that this is crazy. You want to ask why he’s doing this – better yet, how the hell he’s doing this. You remember again that you should have been dead many, many minutes ago, and that what was happening right now was unheard of in every single way.
This time, concern grips your heart instead of fear. Your mouth is dry, but you manage to ask, “Are you okay?”
Yoongi doesn’t seem to acknowledge that you even spoke. He doesn’t bat an eye. But he finishes tying off the bandage, and examines your hand for anything he missed.
“I’m fine, thank you,” he says, sounding completely normal and unshaken in only a way something who was trying to sound completely normal and unshaken would sound. “And you?”
“Just worried about you,” you admit, right away. He still won’t look at you, but his eyes seem to be a little darker than before. None of this should be happening. How was he doing this? How was he not frenzied with bloodlust?
“Worried I’m going to kill you?” he quips, and you balk. It’s a joke, but you’re blown away that he can say it so nonchalantly.
“No! No, I just, I don’t know h-how you just… all this… Are you okay?”
He responds with his low hum of humor, and strokes his thumb over the back of your bandaged hand. He’s staring at it in a way you can’t read at all, and as the moments tick by, you feel the question building on Yoongi’s tongue before he even says it.
The air is thick and heavy with anticipation and unspoken things. It’s stifling, and something in your chest thrills, waiting for it, as Yoongi continues to stroke idly. He hasn’t killed you yet, and is holding your injured hand gently while your blood is still on his own. The contrast of scarlet on pale cream is almost pretty, in a way.
Then he stops. He stands up properly, gazing at you with so much intention you’re momentarily overwhelmed and breathless.
His eyes still shine red.
“I want you to tell me no,” Yoongi says. The words are even, but you hear the note of silent desperation that hides in them. He draws his smeared, still-glazed hands up, half-curled, and tilts his chin down towards them, his lips slightly parted and the tips of his fangs visible. Waiting. “May I?”
The question is quiet and undemanding, and it rings in your ears louder than thunder. You know what he’s asking of you full well, and his gaze is pleading.
Your hands twist in your lap and you bite your lip when you feel your heart stuck pounding in your throat. Yoongi swallows hard, but keeps his expression impassive for your sake.
He told you to tell him no. Well, not tell – only told you he wanted you to. But he asked anyway. Despite his wants, he asked.
A vampire stands before you, asking for permission to give in to temptation. Yoongi is perfectly still as he waits, and the tension in the room turns nothing but suffocating.
The fifth layer of the gauze bleeds through, and you reply.
You reply.