Chapter Text
There's nothing worse than waiting and not knowing what'll happen to you. Your own imagination can be crueler than any captor.
“Please,” the man in front of her begged, fear plaguing his wide gaze. It wasn’t as if he was cornered, far from it - the both of them were standing out in a rather large alleyway, large enough for him to easily run past her - but it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume he was paralyzed by his fear, too petrified to move. “P-Please, just leave me alone...!”
Perhaps on any other day, she would feel obliged to do so - after all, she didn’t consider herself an unreasonable person. People like him surely had families to go home to. But the sight of his neck, unmarred and ready for the taking, was too inviting... and she was just so
so
so
hungry.
Blood always tasted best when it came from an unsuspecting victim. Granted, it probably wasn’t the best idea to single her target out when she already had crimson smeared across her lips, trickling down to her jaw, but there wasn’t much she could do to stop herself. In a way, though, blood tainted by fear had its own charm to it, oddly enough.
Everyone is afraid of something. We fear things because we value them. We fear losing people because we love them. We fear dying because we value being alive. Don't wish you didn't fear anything. All that would mean is that you didn't feel anything.
There was something beautiful to be found from watching the life drain from a person’s eyes, she thought. It was perhaps why she found the sentiment, that ‘eyes are windows to the soul’ to be so true. And even if they weren’t, there was still at least a kernel of truth to the statement. According to her, life could not be measured by actions, or general appearance, or lifestyle. No, the best indicator of life was through someone’s eyes (not to mention, her own crimson hued irises were plenty indicative of her noticeable lack of life, she would reckon) - and nothing was more satisfying than watching it wither away with every passing moment, every draw of blood leeching away his lifeforce, to make up for the glaring lack of her own.
“You’re alone, now,” She mused out loud after pulling away, letting his lifeless body drop to the cement. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”
Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym.
She knelt down to his stiffening corpse, opening her mouth to make another smart remark, only to pause, picking up the sound of a struggle further down the alleyway. She let out a sigh, begrudgingly getting back onto her feet and approaching the noise, leaving behind her most recent victim.
“Come on, baby, let me take you home!” A male voice crooned, grating on her ears. “You’ll be safe with me.”
Fear isn't so difficult to understand. After all, weren't we all frightened as children? Nothing has changed since Little Red Riding Hood faced the big bad wolf. What frightens us today is exactly the same sort of thing that frightened us yesterday. It's just a different wolf. This fright complex is rooted in every individual.
The voice was unfamiliar to her, but the scene was not. A tall, fairly well-built man cornering a tiny woman - really, such a pretty little thing - with the putrid smell of alcohol on both of their breaths. Truly, she would never understand humans’ fascination with the intoxicating beverage...she found it rather revolting.
And yet, despite the association of the drink with celebrations, she could smell the discomfort on the woman. She could detect the fear emanating from her, much like she did from her victim’s last fleeting moments, and it put a horrid taste in her mouth. That woman probably did not know up from down, and it became clear to her that the man knew this all too well. Although she didn’t specifically know what he was planning, there wasn’t a doubt in her mind that it was with malicious intent.
There are many who don't wish to sleep for fear of nightmares. Sadly, there are many who don't wish to wake for the same fear. When we speak, we are afraid our words will not be heard, nor welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid - so it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive.
It was over quickly, she mused to herself. A little too quickly, if she was being honest - for she realized for the first time in an eternity that she was not just driven by her hunger to sink her teeth into the conniving stranger - no, she was also driven by anger. An anger, she realized, she had not felt before. Perhaps she was too eager to leech his life away from him, but... she supposed actions had to speak louder than words.
Indeed, she was far from full, by the time that she let his lifeless body fall to the ground, but there was something so inherently wrong that twisted in her gut when she entertained the idea of feeding from the woman as well. She feared ruining the effortless beauty that was this porcelain doll of a human. Truly, she was a complete mess, but that did nothing to distract from her God-given features; fair, unblemished skin that looked so fragile it might break, if she were to hold her the wrong way. Wavy, thick locks of dark hair, and deep brown irises that seemed to hold a billion galaxies captive.
“I can’t leave you like this,” She frowned, biting her lip. Swiping her tongue over the ensanguined surface, she savored the last traces of her previous meals. Knitting her brow together, she made a split second decision and lifted the stranger into her arms. “Let’s get you out of here, hm?”
All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.
“Uhh....can you please repeat that? Like, all of it?”
Bora groaned out loud, laying her head on the lunch table. “I just told you, Yoohyeon! And, no, asking me multiple times is not going to make me miraculously remember more information!”
“No offense, unnie, but it is rather...unbelievable,” Yubin chimed in between bites of her sandwich, giving the older student a pointed look. “Are you sure you aren’t misremembering things because you were drunk?”
“I don’t know what to tell you... I was practically blackout drunk,” Bora grumbled, before giving Yoohyeon a withering look. “Which, might I remind you, would have never even happened in the first place if you hadn’t ditched me!” Yoohyeon visibly deflated at the remark, prompting Bora to continue. “Anyways. I told you all I could remember. Some guy was trying to take me home, and this hot lady showed up and knocked him out. I don’t remember anything else.”
“Hmm...” Yubin frowned, knitting her eyebrows together in uncertainty. “Any distinguishing features you remember? Anything at all that stood out about her?”
A complete stranger has the capacity to alter the life of another irrevocably. This domino effect has the capacity to change the course of an entire world. That is what life is; a chain reaction of individuals colliding with others and influencing their lives without realizing it. A decision that seems miniscule to you, may be monumental to the fate of the world.
“Well...” The shorter student trailed off, unable to help her slight pout. “It was kinda dark, but...she had bright red hair,” she finally acquiesced. “Oh! She had something red smeared all over her mouth, too... did she smudge her lipstick or something?” Bora mumbled out loud to herself, missing the exchanged look between Yubin and Yoohyeon.
“As riveting as this conversation has been, Yubs and I gotta go to class,” Yoohyeon declared, abruptly standing from her seat and slinging her backpack over one shoulder. “We’ll see you at the apartment, okay? Good luck with your knight in smudged lipstick!”
Bora waved the duo goodbye, softly sighing to herself. “As if I’m ever gonna see her again,” she scoffed gently under her breath, shaking her head. “I wish I could just fall in love normally like those two... but instead, I’m here crushing on a total stranger I’ve only met once.” She afforded one last glance at her food, before disposing of the half eaten plate of tteokbokki with a huff.
“No point in staying here, I suppose,” the small woman reasoned out loud, grabbing her bag and heading for the exit of the student center. “The least I could do is get in some more practice before class, right...?”
Perhaps love is a minor madness. And as with madness, it's unendurable alone. The one person who can relieve us is of course the sole person we cannot go to: the one we love. So instead we seek out allies, even among strangers and wives, fellow patients who, if they can't touch the edge of our particular sorrow, have felt something that cuts nearly as deep.
“I’m home!” Bora called out into the apartment, as if opening the door didn’t do a good enough job of announcing her presence to the other two occupants of the living space. “Did you miss me?”
(Well, four, if you count Pie and Ddoddo. Yoohyeon would crucify Bora if she didn’t involve them in her housing census.)
“Not in the slightest,” Yubin deadpanned from the living room in a flat voice. Bora resisted the urge to smack the younger woman, instead choosing to drop herself onto the sofa with a heavy sigh. She craned her head, noticing Yoohyeon’s little pomeranian struggling to hop onto the furniture. Deciding to oblige the puppy, she sat up and lifted Pie into her arms. From the corner of her eyes, she spotted Yubin typing away on her laptop.
“Rough day?” The younger student snorted out loud, briefly taking her eyes off the computer screen.
Across generations, wariness of new individuals, groups, and ideas was built into the circuits of the human brain's alarm response because those who had this wariness were more likely to survive to reproduce. It was just safer to assume danger- and expect the worst- than to count on the kindness of strangers.
“Something like that,” Bora muttered, gently scratching behind the puppy’s ears. “We had a transfer student join the class today... it doesn’t make sense, I guess. She’s fine as a dancer, but... why in the middle of the semester?”
Yubin hummed, before a knowing smile curled on her countenance. A rare sight, considering Yoohyeon was the more expressive of the couple. “She, huh?”
“Excuse you, I don’t fall in love with every girl I meet,” Bora grumbled, glancing away when Yubin gave her a pointed look. “I’m not that much of a useless lesbian! But, fine, she’s attractive. So what?”
Yubin didn’t respond verbally, opting to raise her eyebrows in an expression of doubt. Bora rolled her eyes, returning her attention to Pie, who whined when she momentarily stopped giving the puppy affection. She gave a few more scratches to the pomeranian’s head, before letting her wander away, as dogs often tended to do. “Okay. Maybe I have a crush on her. But I’m pretty sure half of our dance class does,” she acquiesced reluctantly. “I don’t know what her name is yet... but maybe I can invite her over to lunch so I won’t be third-wheeling you lovebirds. If you’re okay with that, I guess?”
“I don’t mind,” Yubin answered simply with a shrug, going back to working on her laptop moments later. “That all depends on Yoohyeon’s ability to not scare her off, though, I suppose.”
It doesn't matter if you never see someone again, I told myself. There are millions of people in the world, and most of them never see each other in the first place. You hoped to know her forever, but there's no such thing as forever, really. Everything is much shorter than that.
Bora hummed noncommittally, taking her attention from the other woman, and let her gaze wander about the room. For three working college students, Bora wouldn’t be the first to admit their apartment wasn’t too shabby. It wasn’t high-end, by any means, but far from the worst option for them. It had a nice and homey feel, something that all of them could appreciate. She wouldn’t lie - it broke her heart to think about her future after graduation two years from now, when Yubin and Yoohyeon would no longer be constant in her daily life, so Bora elected to cherish every moment with the duo to the best of her abilities until then.
“I’ll invite her for lunch, then,” Bora stated out loud, begrudgingly getting to her feet. “Considering the kitchen is still standing, I’ll assume neither of you have eaten...so I’ll fix some dinner before I head out for work.”
“That would be good,” Yubin replied, continuing to type away on her computer. Bora shook her head as she opened the fridge, rifling through its contents for ingredients. “Thanks, unnie.”
Bora smiled, despite herself.
You must remember, family is often born of blood, but it doesn't depend on blood. Nor is it exclusive of friendship. Family members can be your best friends, you know. And best friends, whether or not they are related to you, can be your family.
“So,” she began, leaning back in her bar chair. “She asked me out to lunch.”
“Please tell me you’re joking, Minji,” Siyeon groaned, resting her face in her hands. “This is the last thing we need for the coven. You wouldn’t be in this mess if you had just killed her in the first place,” the black haired woman grumbled, sighing and taking a long sip from her beer. “What’s so special about her, anyway? She’s just a normal human.”
“She doesn’t even know what I am,” the redhead scoffed in response, shaking her head. “I doubt she even remembers what happened, she was drunk out of her mind. Would anyone even believe her if she went on harping about a vampire saving her?”
Use your blood to paint. Keep painting until you faint. Keep painting until you die. Tell them that you weren't hungry, tell them you followed the pomegranates seeds because they tasted like blood, like love.
Siyeon didn’t say anything in response for a while, choosing to silently nurse her drink. After several moments passed between them, she decided to finally speak up again. “What did you say?”
“I said yes,” Minji answered with a shrug, spinning around in her chair like a bored child. “She’s pretty and probably means well, so I don’t see why not.” She took a sip of her water, curling her lip slightly at the smell of Siyeon’s beer. “I don’t think she even recognizes me.”
“I hope you’re right,” the younger vampire muttered with a grim experience. “You know what you’ll have to do if it goes south, unnie.”
“Yes,” Minji sighed, shaking her head. “I know...”
“I know, Siyeon-ah.”
Home is people. Not a place. If you go back there after the people are gone, then all you can see is what is not there anymore.
Bora, Minji learned, was nothing short of peculiar.
Nothing bad, certainly not - despite the human’s apparent noisiness and bombastic laughter, the redhead found her company extremely enjoyable, and the caring personality underneath those flawless features made her infinitely likeable.
(Either that, or Minji’s loneliness and utter lack of human interactions for Gods knew how long was becoming glaringly obvious, but she’d rather not think about that.)
She could not deny, however, that there was an odd charm to Bora. Something about the human was an enigma in every which way. No matter how she picked apart the shorter woman, there were undeniably codes that Minji just couldn’t crack. It left her pondering why, indeed, she had saved Bora in the first place, that night, many weeks ago.
Was it curiosity? Or was it something beyond the surface level, something her unbeating heart knew, and her mind did not?
Nobody has ever taken a photograph of something they want to forget. We can build a wall of happy Kodak moments around ourselves, a wall of our Christmases, birthdays, baby showers and weddings, but we can never forget that celluloid film is see-through, that behind it, all the misery of real life waits for our wall to collapse someday.
Their lunch...outing went surprisingly well. Bora’s other friends had suspiciously “dipped” within ten minutes of Minji showing up, not that the redhead really cared. That allowed her to get to know Bora better...and find out just how much Bora remembered from their incidental meeting at the beginning of the month.
She, at one point or another, considered telling Bora the truth about what really happened - that she was the redhead that had taken her home, that she was more than who she said she was... but she decided against it in the end.
(What possessed her to even think about spilling such information to Bora in a public environment perhaps was an even bigger enigma to her, but she didn’t care to acknowledge why the thought even crossed her mind.)
She felt some semblance of sorrow when it came time for them to part ways, something the vampire was stunned by. Even weirder yet, the thought of seeing Bora again in dance class put an odd feeling of warmth blossoming in her chest. Her heart did not beat, but Minji thought, if anyone could somehow make it beat again, it would be Bora.
She definitely did not want to think about why those thoughts made her dizzy in the head, specifically because she knew the reason for them...
Minji didn’t want to acknowledge what she already knew to be true.
“What’s that human saying?” Minji mused to herself. “Ignorance is bliss?”
Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?
Bora wasn’t exactly sure why, but she somehow had a knack for getting herself into decidedly bad situations.
Am I a bad luck magnet? She pondered to herself dryly.
“Now that your dyke friends aren’t here,” the tallest boy of the three cornering her in the hallway sneered out loud, leaning forward, “how about that date, baby?” He shared a glance with the other two students on either side of him. Bora felt her skin crawl, feeling the trio’s gaze on her, and it didn’t take a genius to guess they were undressing her with their eyes.
“I don’t even know your name,” Bora responded in a clipped tone, hoping to end the conversation right there and make a successful escape, which was quickly foiled by the other boys covering either of her possible exits. “Please leave me alone.”
She hoped someone would notice the uncomfortable situation and step in, but every bystander either walked by and avoided looking in her direction, or watched the event like a spectator with a disdained gaze. Her heart dropped in response, shrinking against the wall as the ringleader stepped closer.
Being terrified but going ahead and doing what must be done—that's courage. The one who feels no fear is a fool, and the one who lets fear rule him is a coward. Cowards make the best torturers. Cowards understand fear and they can use it.
“Excuse me, but I don’t appreciate you flirting with my girlfriend,” a voice asserted out of nowhere, causing Bora to jolt up in surprise. She caught a flash of familiar red hair, hope flourishing in her chest. “It would be wonderful if you could leave her alone... You’re making her very uncomfortable.”
“Nice try,” the tallest of the three scoffed, though Bora could see his brave act was quickly faltering. “There’s no way you two are girlfriends. You’re too pretty to be dykes!”
Minji let her petrifying glare wash over the three boys, before she effortlessly shoved past them and towards Bora. Without skipping a beat, the redhead took hold of Bora’s jaw, bringing her in for a bruising kiss. The younger of the two only hesitated for a moment out of sheer surprise, before matching the redhead’s intensity, loving the way Minji’s lips felt against hers.
(Out of the corner of her eye, Bora could see the disgust and shock blossom across the boy’s face, surely thinking that should be him instead, and it sent an immense wave of satisfaction washing over her.)
“I won’t... I won’t forget this!” He sputtered, flustered by the display and ultimately turning tail to scurry away. His lackeys were quick to follow, but Minji paid no attention to him, taking a deep breath after pulling away from their lengthy kiss. The redhead’s lips were slightly swollen from the contact, but in Bora’s opinion, that only made her even more effortlessly beautiful.
Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.
“I apologize for doing that without your permission,” Minji apologized with an earnest expression, sheepishly scratching the back of her own neck. “You looked really uncomfortable there, and no one was doing anything, so...”
“I, ah... I actually liked it,” Bora cut her off hurriedly, face flushed pink in slight embarrassment. “T-the kiss, I mean! I...liked it a lot, actually...that’s not...weird, is it..?” She fiddled with her hands, averting her gaze in fear of what she might see on Minji’s face - the last thing she wanted was the redhead to think of her differently.
Minji simply smiled, shaking her head. “I didn’t expect to kiss you before taking you on a proper date, but it’s not weird... I promise,” she responded in an attempt to placate the obviously nervous student before her. “That is, if you want to go on a date... if we’re supposed to be girlfriends,” she added on with a little touch of cheekiness to her tone.
“Wait, what?” Bora blinked, floored by Minji’s rather...bold statement. “You would really...with me...? Why?”
“Well, why not?” The redhead shrugged. “Is it so hard to believe that I want to get to know you? Doesn’t hurt that you’re cute and attractive, but that’s not the only reason I would date you.”
“I-I just... You could do way better than me,” Bora stuttered, face turning redder and redder by the moment. “You’re so beautiful, and skilled, and talented, and smart, and I’m just....me.”
Minji frowned, ultimately catching Bora off-guard. “You’re plenty that and more, Bora. I could spend hours telling you why... but I think we should do it over dinner instead. How does that sound?”
“I...” Bora hesitated, knitting her eyebrows together, before her expression relaxed into a gentle smile.
There is never a time or place for true love. It happens accidentally, in a heartbeat, in a single flashing, throbbing moment.
“I would love that, Minji.”