Chapter Text
It’s always a stupid idea to be walking home at 5am in the morning in the middle of January. As if that’s a sensible plan at any time of the year, Hoseok thinks to himself, wrapping his jacket tighter around his body. He wasn’t usually one to feel cold, but after two days spent with his friends from out of town, he can feel himself running low on energy reserves. That is sort of the point of their get togethers anyway.
It was always a fun event, he and his friends saw to that, otherwise they would never make it through their longer than average holiday rituals, but when Seokjin had called it a night and even offered a place to stay, Hoseok had been focused on nothing other than going back to his apartment on the outskirts of town. He had reached that point where he knew his energy would only be restored by being surrounded by his own familiar things.
Luckily, his walk home had been entirely uneventful, with only a handful of drunken revellers still on the street at this hour. The moon had set as he walked and so now it’s turned into that truly dark time of the morning, when even the street lamps have turned off and the world feels wide and lonely. He finds his pace quickening as he reaches the streets showing he is finally drawing close to home.
Passing the small hedge that marks the edge of his building's boundary, he almost wouldn’t have noticed anything out of the ordinary. The hedge itself provides an even darker shadow than the rest of the night around him. Yet, more attuned than most, Hoseok feels all the hairs on the back of his neck rise, just as he reaches for his keys at the end of the garden path. Something makes him look back over his shoulder.
That something was lying on his lawn. He bites back a groan, sincerely wishing he could dart inside his home, close all the curtains and pretend he hadn’t seen anything. But now he’s here he knows that isn’t truly an option.
Blink
It’s still there. He definitely has to actually go check it out.
Making his feet move towards the mysterious, still lump in the shadow of his garden at an ungodly hour in the morning takes more strength than he even knows he has in him. His friends would be so proud, hopefully. At the thought, Hoseok’s fingers twitch for his mobile, considering calling Seokjin for help but after a moment longer of hesitation, he flicks on the torch app.
The mystery lump lets out a strange mixture of a groan and a whine and Hoseok nearly drops his phone altogether, a not so brave squeak caught in his throat.
So it’s human, and semi-conscious on the small piece of lawn outside his block. Not too scary, nothing too bad, he can do this.
The person doesn’t make any other noise as he approaches, Hoseok tries to let himself believe that maybe it’s simply a passed out partygoer that he can send on their way. Then his light reflects on something glistening, wet, coming from somewhere on the person’s body.
A spilled drink, surely.
Hoseok tends to always be on high alert but he really prefers to think that it doesn’t have to be something nightmarish every time.
It’s only when he leans down and the unmistakable tang hits him in the back of his throat that he loses hope of this being something not terrible. Blood and, if he is able to detect it, lots of it.
“Shit, shit.” He mutters, mind going a hundred miles an hour. At that moment, whether due to the light on his phone or unlucky chance, the body - person - rolls slightly to one side and they give out a sharp, pained groan.
“Shit!” Hoseok barely manages to not shriek at top volume as he falls backwards over his own feet trying to get away. One hand on his heart, the other held in front of him like a shield, he musters the courage to approach again. The person remains as still as a...still but not dead thing and Hoseok hesitantly reaches out to turn him over, moving the light to where it can be of use.
When it catches the glimmer of blood, Hoseok’s breath lurches in his throat.
There’s too much, is his first thought. He can see now where it’s spread across the entire front of the guy’s shirt, a tear ripped in the clothing somewhere on his side.
Hoseok tries to steady his head, while also figuring out if this person is still actually bleeding, still breathing, and in this action some kind of routine takes over. The guy’s heartbeat is there, but faint and getting weaker, he’s still bleeding sluggishly from the wound and he has to be cooling down rapidly, his face already felt cold and looked deathly pale. Hoseok didn’t know how long he’d been out here but he is suddenly nervous about staying outside for too long.
It must be adrenaline that gives him the strength to lift the guy from the ground, fumble for his keys and kick the lobby door open, thanking everything he has that he lives on the first floor and that there are no working security cameras in the building. Through his own front door, he manages somehow to get the man on his bed. Only then does he turn the light on, and this time the guy - young, sandy blonde hair - barely has the energy to complain at the sudden light. Hoseok only just notices how his eyes squeeze tighter closed and his lips part in what might be a silent groan.
It all becomes a blur to Hoseok, as he lifts the shirt from the wound, taking a warm cloth to the area to clean it up and get a proper look in the light of the house. However, it feels like things halt into abrupt clarity again when he dabs oozing blood from the skin just below the man’s ribcage and before him are the telltale tear marks of several teeth, a set of vicious jaws.
A werewolf bite.
Hoseok freezes, staring down at the damning wound in front of him. He knows what his family would say, what the friends he only just parted from would say. Calling them was no longer an option.
He also hopes that maybe, just maybe with his pastime as a prolific reader, and as someone who is far too curious for his own good, he might be able to figure out what to do if he were to go against their advice. Because Hoseok couldn’t knowingly watch someone die. If he doesn’t act fast, that’s exactly what he’s going to do. At this point the blood from the wound has slowed to almost stopping and Hoseok tentatively reaches out again to find the man’s wrist.
His own breathing stutters to a halt as he struggles to detect the pulse beneath his fingers and his eyes drift over the other man’s face. Pale, pale as the moon itself, but he can only be in his mid twenties, probably about the same age as Hoseok himself. His hand left his wrist and moves to the man’s shoulder.
“Please hold on.” is all he says, before he hurries to get supplies, summoning all the energy he thought had left him. He’s going to need it.
>>><<>><<>><<<
Yoongi feels grey. He can’t think past the fog that has settled in his mind and a heavy blanket covers his whole body, smothering him down. He feels groggy and it takes far too much concentration just to try and open his eyes. It’s easier, he figures, to just stay like this, floating, instead of reaching out through the fog to grasp at consciousness. Something is wrong, it’s heavy and throbbing and overall easier to just ignore it for now.
Maybe it will go away.
The next thing Yoongi is aware of is noise. Something near him makes a loud clatter and he hears a voice muttering under their breath. It takes far too much effort, and possibly much longer than it should, but he manages to just break his eyes open. Enough to see a bearably low lit room, dim enough that it isn’t painful after being in darkness for so long.
It feels like it’s been long.
So he succeeded in opening his eyes, but even with that accomplished, it doesn’t seem right. Like there’s a few seconds processing time between his eyes looking at the room and his brain figuring out what he’s looking at. Everything feels...dull, is the best way to describe it, though it seems his brain isn’t quite coming up with words like it usually might.
What he realises he’s seeing, after a moment, is someone on the floor. Their back is turned to him as they snatch things, miscellaneous things from the ground. What, he can’t find the capacity to care. The thought swims to the surface, does he even know this person?
Suddenly, the person is pivoting on the spot, bringing their nose only inches from his own. He blinks. Yoongi concludes that no, he doesn’t know this person. And then the other person practically catapults themselves backwards across the room, letting out a shriek that is quickly muffled, not that this prevents the sounds ringing in Yoongi’s ears any less.
“Mother of- you’re awake!” The other man says, still not in a quiet tone and obviously still getting his breath back.
Yoongi groans, and although he tries to respond with ‘Apparently’, only a crackle makes it out.
“That’s okay, don’t push yourself. You were hurt, I’m trying to make sure you haven’t broken anything.” He says this in a way that’s obviously meant to be reassuring but it doesn’t help that he keeps his position, backed up against the far chest of drawers. He isn’t going to be much good trying to help him from five feet away.
Articulating his thoughts verbally is beyond him, but Yoongi imagines he manages to get them across through a quirk of his eyebrow, because the other man takes a couple of hesitant steps towards him again. While the other man dithers, Yoongi’s senses starts to extend out beyond the still hazy confines of his head. He feels his arms and legs there and he is coming to the conclusion that despite this man’s attempt to reassure him, something is really fucking wrong. His whole body aches, everything feeling leaden, like a weight holding down all his limbs. He can’t even angle his head enough to tell if it’s a psychological weight or if maybe he’s tied into a bed by a mad person.
This potential mad person is inching his way forward, or maybe Yoongi is just processing in slow motion, but he’s looking about as nervous as Yoongi imagines he himself should be feeling right now. “I didn’t think you’d wake up so soon. You’re probably in quite a bit of pain right now. You should have been out longer. I think. This is new to me.”
This person seems to talk a lot. Instead of trying to get his head around half of what he said, Yoongi concentrates on trying to lift his arm, or his head to get a look at the rest of him. With a monumental effort, his head raises no more than an inch from the pillow.
He sees the blanket is pulled to his waist, he’s apparently not wearing a shirt and there’s a large white and red lump on the side of his stomach. Red, like it was coming through the white bandage. His brain catches up and as if it was waiting until he saw it, hot pain shot up his body, lancing like a poker. A noise tears out of him as his head drops back to the pillow, no more than an animalistic snarl. Dark stars dance across his vision, though his eyes are still open.
Hands on his shoulders, pleasantly cooling, though he hasn’t noticed that his body is particularly hot.
“Shh, no don’t try and move. I don’t think you should...Oh hell’s teeth.” The stars dim and Yoongi can focus on seeing the stranger hovering over him, slightly blurry but with his head turned down to Yoongi’s stomach. He mutters something under his breath and looks back at Yoongi’s face wonderingly. Their eyes meet and the stranger’s eyes widen. And though his vision is definitely greyer than usual, he swears he sees fear in the other man’s eyes.
One of the hands is taken away from his shoulder and then that cool palm is over his eyes. In barely a moment, Yoongi sinks back into the enveloping darkness.
>>><<>><<>><<<
Hoseok knows what he should do. He had kept muttering it to himself for the past day as he cleaned and wrapped the man’s wound. They’re monsters, he reminds himself, as he finds the medical book that can tell him the right procedure for dressing a wound properly. They’re evil, he repeats, as he runs another bowl of fresh, warm water to replace the bandages.
They’re a curse against us, he taps out in a rhythm on his arm, as he sits in the chair at the end of his bedroom, listening to the mystery man’s breathing, steadier now than it had been some hours ago.
Only he isn’t exactly a mystery man any more. After he’d woken up, Hoseok panicked. He had been panicking before that, but he’d been avoiding the issue by simply doing the bare minimum to clean the man’s wounds. Then he’d woken up and all the mantras Hoseok had learned; that werewolves can’t be trusted, werewolves are evil, werewolves should be eradicated, they didn’t sound like they could be talking about this man with the soft eyes and confused pout. Because the man currently unconscious in Hoseok’s bed didn’t look dangerous. He looks so small, scared and pale.
Hoseok finished redressing the wound, as he’d been trying to do before the disruption, then he spent some time trying to draw away some of the pain in the wound. It was unlike any other wound he’d come across and so he wasn’t sure whether what he did would be of any help. It was such a strange feeling, almost as if he can sense the pain pulsing from the wound like a physical heat. He muses that this is exactly what it’s doing, venom from the original bite coursing through the man’s blood, spreading it’s infection through his whole body. It makes Hoseok shudder to just think about it.
After seeing the man’s eyes, they aren’t red, they aren’t evil, he wasn’t trying to tear Hoseok’s throat out where he stood. And while Hoseok’s experience with werewolves was limited to one, he couldn’t help but feel that maybe they weren’t quite like they were painted in the history books.
So he had found the man’s wallet and phone, which he had taken from his pockets before putting him in his bed. Curiosity finally getting the better of him he pulled the ID card from the wallet and found that this man was one Min Yoongi, only a year older than Hoseok. His phone was locked, of course, but the wallpaper was a generic landscape, and no one had called in the nearly 15 hours he had spent in Hoseok’s house.
Hoseok can’t help but feel like maybe he is this man’s only chance.
And he really isn’t sure how to feel about that.
>>><<>><<>><<<
When Yoongi woke again he has no way of telling how much time had passed. The room is still dimly lit which is certainly nice on his eyes but with the curtains drawn closed there is no light to tell him what time of day it is. He does feel considerably less woozy than he had last time. He still feels disoriented, but this time it has more to do with the fact he’s waking up in a stranger’s house, in an unfamiliar bedroom than because of a fuzzy state of his mind.
He takes his time letting his eyes rove across the strange room around him, but there isn’t the same greyness to it that had made it hard to even keep them open the last time. Like poking a toe out of the safe confines of the blanket first thing in the morning, Yoongi tries to open his awareness to the rest of his body, expecting the pain to hit him again at any moment. Now, however, it doesn’t seem to be as present, thank whatever god there might be out there for that. Without that pain in the back of his mind, it also feels like his brain can work at a more normal level.
Carefully doing a mental inventory of his own body, checking from head to foot without daring to move, he discovers a strange lightness around his torso and stomach, like it’s disconnected from the rest of him. Feeling mildly alarmed, he carefully shifts his arm, brushing his fingers against his side, then pressing with slightly more force. It gives a peculiar sensation, like poking himself through a heavy woollen jumper.
Unnerving, but compared to the searing pain he had been fighting back the last time, his jaw clenches just at the memory of it and he decides he’ll take the numbness.
His eyes drift over the room again, finding it slightly larger than he had realised as he notices an alcove in the wall.
Then he’s trying to hold back a choking cough when he suddenly registers the shape in the alcove is not shadow but a chair, with a very real person sitting in it. It takes Yoongi only a second longer to recognise it as the man who had been on the floor before, only now he lies fast asleep, breathing steadily. His head lolls to the side at what immediately looks to be an uncomfortable angle and Yoongi should feel bad for him, if he weren’t still mildly freaking out.
Under other circumstances he would feel awkward staring, but in this case the man had brought him, unconscious, into his house, so he can’t help but feel like he’s entitled to a little sneaky staring in turn. And what he sees surprises him, because the man is young, probably around his own age, and his face is soft, so calm in his sleep. He doesn’t look like a crazy person who likes to kidnap people. At least in Yoongi’s limited experience. But his recollections are feeling a little shaky at that moment, as he tries to think back on the circumstances that brought him here.
He had been out, he remembered that much, drinking, why? A celebration, of something. He had been walking along the street, it was a part of town he didn’t come to often, but he knew his way. He’d been walking alone, and then as if out of nowhere, there had been noises, whooping and hollering and suddenly people in front of him. Then something coming at him and...he didn’t remember.
He lets out a grunt of frustration, willing something to come back because the only thing that makes waking up in a stranger’s house worse, is not knowing how he got there. He didn’t get this problem, never when he was out drinking did he ever get blackout drunk and he’s sure last night was no different. At least, he thinks it was last night.
His face pulls down into a frown as he groans again, despairing with his struggle to figure out how he wound up here. Then, something draws his attention at the corner of his vision, smaller than a movement, like a shift in the air and all Yoongi’s nerves stand on end. His eyes flick sharply to the alcove and he is just in time to see the sleeping man’s eyes slowly blink open. He fixes them immediately on Yoongi.
Their eyes lock and for a moment the room is still, Yoongi has the oddest sensation of being sized up, which is strange since he’s the one lying bandaged up in a bed and hardly posing a threat. Finally, the silence drags on into uncomfortable territory and Yoongi opens his mouth.
“You’re awake.” The armchair sleeper beats him to it, a measured tone.
“So are you.” Yoongi says, and he’s surprised and pleased to find his voice sounds relatively normal, if pitched a bit lower to match the tone of the otherwise silent room. “I have some questions.” Yoongi continues and the guy, the audacity, dares to quirk up his mouth in an alarmingly adorable smile.
“I can imagine.”