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Changmin paces around the room; nervous footsteps over cold floorboards.
It’s dark inside, the moonlight barely reaching the window. Yunho sits on the bed, draped in comfortable darkness as he lights up a cigarette. The flame from the lighter illuminates his face from above as he holds the cigarette between his lips. It frames his sharp features with a ghostly glow, and Changmin thinks he looks dangerously beautiful. Like death impersonated.
Yunho takes a drag and tells him to come back to bed.
Changmin wants nothing more than to burn him to ashes.
✝
There are times where Changmin shows up at Yunho's house.
He curses under his breath because seeing Yunho is the last thing he wants, but there’s a tug in the pit of his stomach that drags him back every time. A call that rattles every cell in his body and makes him crawl until he can stand up and follow the trace of blood that will surely lead him to Yunho.
It’s inevitable.
He still tries to fight it.
So when his hands finally circle around Yunho’s neck, determined to snap it, Changmin finds out that, instead, he’s kissing Yunho violently, digging his nails on his waist and fucking him senseless against the matress.
There’s no place for love on the bed, nor between the hot touch of their skin. Just the need to quench a thirst that’s no longer human; hasn’t been for a long while.
Yunho lights up a cigarette and Changmin can clearly see the tiny spots on his neck where he just drank and where blood is still dripping. It looks out of place; a disruption on Yunho’s immaculate skin.
Soon enough there won’t be any reminder that anything happened, just the mental image of something wrong burned into Changmin’s skull.
✝
Sometimes it’s Yunho the one who shows up at his doorstep.
He looks like a spectre–like a veiled photograph from another time–, pale and drenched in rain. There are traces of dirt underneath his fingernails from crawling out of the grave where Changmin buried him last and his lips are smeared with blood; his rage and thirst appeased by someone else’s life.
Despite his looks, Yunho kisses Changmin tenderly under the threshold and promises him that this time it’ll be different. That he had time to reflect and he’s ready to make amends. And Changmin believes him. Because as much as he wants to remain unmoved, if there’s something immortality hasn’t taken away from him it's hope.
Later, Yunho would say this was all a mistake. There’s nothing left to fix and he should have left Changmin to die all those years ago.
Back to zero. Back to the grave.
✝
It wasn’t always like this. Changmin remembers –or rather, thinks he remembers– when things used to be different.
Yunho had saved him and blessed him with eternal life. Back then Changmin had been nothing but grateful and had been eager to prove himself worthy. With time they’d become equals and eventually they had fallen in love with each other, promising to never leave each other's side.
But that was ages ago and there’s nothing time can’t erode.
Now the love has burned and all that’s left is a curse. A rope that drapes too tight around Changmin’s throat and prevents him from breathing. He keeps telling himself he wants to break free but the rope feels strangely grounding. In a world that’s constantly changing, Yunho is the only fixed point in Changmin’s eternal life.
The only way he could break the bond is ending Yunho’s life –put a stake through his heart or sever his head from his body and set him on fire–, but he can’t bring himself to do it.
He cannot kill Yunho. And Yunho cannot kill him either.
What he can do is pierce his fangs through Yunho’s neck once again, drain him of all his blood and listen intently how his heartbeat drops. Then, he can dig a grave to put him away, place some flowers on top of it and forget about Yunho's existence for the next decade.
Or at least, until he’s gathered enough strength to rise from the dead and hunt down Changmin to repeat the cycle.