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The first known sight of a ghoul dated back centuries ago when a traveller came across an abandoned cemetery where all the bodies had been dug out. It was done by a shapeshifting creature that fed on dead flesh and blood. The incident was passed on by word of mouth until more empty cemeteries were found and the cries of each grieving family called for a solution. Soon enough, it wasn’t only the dead who were disturbed and feasted upon.
The Yeoheung Min clan was one of the first to march into the woods with an axe in one hand and a lantern in another before returning days later with the head of what many came to know as a ghoul.
With the heroic nature of the duty and recognition from the king himself, ghoul hunting soon became a family trade where hunters would teach their sons who would then grow up to train their sons, passing on all knowledge of the ghouls.
Yoongi was no different.
The branches broke under his feet as he ran. The loud howl distanced itself further and he promptly took a sharp turn, chasing after the sound. His brother was somewhere ahead of him, hand already gripping the throw net hung on his belt. His silhouette faded by the second from the darkening sky and time was running out. Yoongi had his eyes fixed on his brother’s back, sprinting up the hill. Eventually the sky darkened to a pitch black and then came the sound of bells — that was his signal.
Yoongi barrelled forward, following the tinkerings up the hill where the net was thrown over a creature. Without hesitation, eyeing the flash of yellow, he pulled out his stake and finished the job.
The creature let out an inhuman screech as it died writhing in pain under the net before it soon dissolved into silence. Their deaths were easy to determine; the glowing yellow light behind their eyes would dissipate into darkness.
“That’s the last of it,” he heard his brother say as everything calmed, voice light as he struggled to catch his breath. “We best burn it on empty grounds or we’ll risk the fire spreading through the woods.”
Yoongi nodded promptly. The ghoul laid still under the net, and the bells tied to it had gone quiet to signal the defeat. Just as they were about to drag the body down to the cart, someone came running to them from afar with pleas for help.
“Sir Yoongi!” The man’s cries grew louder as he neared them. “Sir Yoongi!” he heaved out, falling to his knees with terror-filled eyes. “The village has been calling for you!”
“And you’ve found me.” Yoongi straightened up. “What is it that you need?”
“There was a ghoul, sir!” the man screeched. “Someone saw a ghoul in the village!”
“Where is it?”
“They saw it entering the physician’s hut!”
Yoongi grew cold.
“...Help my brother take this body back,” he commanded before taking off in a sprint.
It had always been a hazard, something Yoongi had pointed out more times than he could count, yet the physician never listened, always ready with some excuse of liking the quiet of the rural area or being able to defend himself if something were to happen.
“They must have been seeing things. Paranoia does that,” he said, all too calmly as all his possessions were rummaged through. “I have been here the entire day, unaccompanied.”
“And shall I wait for them to strike before I do something?” Yoongi rebutted, lighting up every lantern he passed to search through shelves and cupboards for any trace of blood or dirt, something that would indicate the presence of a creature that smelled of rotten flesh and never thought to clean itself. “You don’t need to be a corpse for them to prey upon you,” he said. “There have been many that ate the living. If they know you’re alone and unguarded, you’re as good as dead.”
He returned to the main room, which was alight in an orange glow, an earthy scent fuming up the walls and out the window. The careless physician sat back on his hands, curved nose scrunched at the strong smell.
“Ginseng drives them away,” Yoongi told him before he could even part his lips to complain, knowing his tells. “This is your consequence for choosing to live so far out.”
No anger from him, just the slightest twitch of his brows, a slip-up of his attempt to conceal his annoyance. “My grandparents built this hut,” he said. “Now the entire place and my breath reek of ginseng.”
“Don’t be so stubborn. This is for your own good.”
“You seem to know a fair bit about what is good for me. This putrid smell filling my hut must be a blessing according to your verdict.”
Yoongi felt the tension within him rise, and soon he was unable to suppress it any longer. His voice was hoarse when he spoke. “Is that all you care about right now? The smell?”
The physician sighed. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
That only riled Yoongi up more. “You think what I’m doing is ridiculous?”
“I think you are overreacting like a mad man and making a mess.”
“Were you worried about the mess when they killed your parents?”
He said it sooner than it took him to realize a line was crossed.
“Hoseok,” he called, guilt catching up though not fast enough, flicking off of Hoseok’s back as he stood up. “You need to understand—”
“Enough.” His voice wasn’t loud, airy, though it was firm enough to silence Yoongi. It was something worse than the expected flaming hot anger, the usual furious irrationality that would dart out in shouts from the mouth of anyone but Hoseok. He was rational, always, and grew subdued at Yoongi’s own irrational outburst. “That’s enough now,” came the dismissal before anything could leave Yoongi’s parted lips. “I’m going to bed.”
Yoongi knew better than to follow or speak up another poor attempt to mend things, not when Hoseok was at his limits in lending Yoongi all of his patience. He gave Hoseok too much of it, wasted breaths, fumbling for the right words that were found too late.
Yoongi watched him disappear behind the door and stepped out to sit at the front of the hut, staking out for ghouls and thinking of a thousand different things he could’ve said instead of what he let out in his haste. Pointless now, but it was a pesky symptom of his longing heart, sickly craving for Hoseok.
With the moon in his peripheral, he sat. Sword, stake, and ginseng on hand as he stayed alert for anything that could come and harm his person.
-
To understand the world at any capacity is to take its smallest parts and make them stand in for the whole that could not be studied. To live life was to learn through the microcosm of what one had survived, branching a new leaf after every strike.
Hoseok was four when his mother stuffed him into the chest where she kept her robes, hands unrelenting until he was buried in cotton. To his eyes that peeked out from the mess, she sang the usual lullaby of storks that return to their children up above in the canopy to put them to sleep. It was to ease him, he knew, though her lithe voice couldn’t muffle the crashing sounds outside beyond the wall, of his father’s screams; a desperate shout of Humans! We’re humans!
His mother sang him the lullaby, hoping that her parting words for him were soothing ones, though by some cruel twist of faith, all he could remember of her voice was her loud cry as he got locked in the pitch black cage of the chest.
Eternity felt something like that, he learned. He was buried alive in his mother’s scent, the darkness choking him until he grew weak and shook awake.
The same old past. The same nostalgic nightmare.
The room was lit by one frail flame of a lamp set in the corner. Next to him was a small cup of tea. Ginseng, he learned grimly at the smell that hit him, though his throat was too dry to ignore.
Yoongi was still there, stripped out of his leather armor, sitting by the open door on the ledge outside, letting the night’s chill in. Hoseok’s grandfather had built this elevated platform to survive floods and laze around on summer days. It was still sturdy, only letting out a quiet groan as he sat down next to Yoongi, who was occupied with carving out a stake from what used to be a deer antler.
“Why must it be a deer’s?” he asked when Yoongi made no move to say anything.
“Nothing else kills them,” Yoongi said without turning to look. His hands were sturdy with his pocket knife, carving out thin strips to sharpen the tip. “It must be sharp enough to pierce through the skin, but blunt enough to cause damage. Too thin and it’ll break off.”
Hoseok frowned at the thought, at the weapon Yoongi was so meticulously crafting. “I imagine it would kill humans all the same.”
A gust of wind swept by then, brushing Yoongi’s long hair from his face, laying it gently behind his shoulders. Shivering, Hoseok shifted to press up to him, resting his head on his shoulder.
“You should go back to sleep if you’re still tired,” Yoongi said, though he made no gesture to push him away.
Hoseok shook his head. “I woke up to see you.”
The blade cut into the stake effortlessly, shaving off layer after layer, then Yoongi set the knife down momentarily to reach for something in his pocket. He didn’t have to look at Hoseok’s face to know what his reaction was. “Just chew on it. Ghouls don’t like ginseng.”
“I don’t like ginseng.” Hoseok weakly batted the plant roots away. “Are you warding me off too?”
That made him chuckle, a low but light-hearted one that he missed more than he had thought. It had been a while since Yoongi frequented the hut, too busy actually hunting to show up and pretend to have an injury.
“Isn’t it lonely here?” he asked. “Don’t you want to move back in?”
Hoseok shook his head, feeling his cheek brush the fabric of Yoongi’s robe. “This is all I have left of my family, and I am already too indebted to your parents.” He gazed up at Yoongi. “And to you, too.”
He wondered if Yoongi thought he was joking, poking fun at something he had said as a child. It was Yoongi’s parents who brought him in but it was Yoongi, seven years old at the time, who promised to protect him.
It was Yoongi’s father who flipped the chest open and found him, a small child trembling in fear and holding onto the remnants of his mother. He thought Hoseok was a hostage of some kind, a human boy kidnapped by some vile creatures.
He brought Hoseok home to Yoongi’s family, bathed by Yoongi’s mother as she frowned at the story of a young boy who was taken from his parents who were now dead. Still struck by shock, Hoseok didn’t say a word of rebuttal, and in a way he knew that it was true; his parents were dead, and the man that separated him from them had their blood on his hands.
Life there started off conflicting, his heart too small to brave through the fear, and it wasn’t until he had accepted that the goodness of one’s heart still existed along with the darkness that he knew how to navigate the world. That was something his young self realized when the youngest son of the family, barely a year older than him then, showed him that a life’s devotion was something he was still capable of.
“The intent of my question was selfish.” Yoongi’s confession pulled him back from the past.
Hoseok looked at him. “What do you mean?”
Yoongi was quiet for a long while before putting the ginseng on Hoseok’s lap. “There is always this looming feeling from you, ever since we were young,” he whispered. “It makes you feel so distant, too far away for me to reach you. It’s stronger now that you live here on the opposite end of the village, but it was there far longer than that.” His exhales came out in white mist, drying his lips as they parted to speak again. “You speak as though no one has ever believed you. I don’t know what you are so afraid of, neither do I know what to say to aid you, and it will continue to pain me to no end.”
It was rare for Yoongi to be vocal about his secrets, his feelings. Hoseok had known deep down that this was a worry of his ever since they grew closer, from friends to something sweeter.
“I was foolish,” Yoongi went on to say, quieter. “The thought of losing you felt too real, all of a sudden, and I went mad.”
“I understand,” Hoseok whispered, “though I shouldn’t have treated you like a fool.”
Under the moonlight, his hand crept up Yoongi’s to still them. Without another word uttered, the pale palm of his hand opened, letting Hoseok trace his fingers over the rough patches, the streaks of scars across his skin, collected throughout the years. The touch was a quiet apology, gentle, letting their pulses meet and sync into one.
Hoseok looked up at the moon, then down to the ginseng on his lap. “Have you ever looked into their eyes while you were killing them?”
The question was unexpected, though Yoongi remained calm. “Everything happens too quickly, though I can see their eyes in the dark, bright yellow. They glow.”
“And does that not make it difficult?” Hoseok asked. “You said they resemble humans.”
Yoongi sighed at that, looking down at his lap, at the stake he had carved out, at Hoseok’s hand that was still covering his. “The night conceals most, and they are not humans,” he said frankly. “I have to do it no matter how difficult it is. One can’t avoid the family trade. It’s honorable work.”
Hoseok kept his face neutral. The safety of the people, mourning families, recognition from the king, they all felt like an easy way to relieve the mind of the nature of its body’s doing. “Sometimes I wonder if honor is a lens that changes how things look,” he whispered.
It felt easier to justify when put like that, when it was seen as something that brought safety and for the greater good, and Hoseok wouldn’t deny it; ghouls could be dangerous—as much as humans were, at times. That was just the nature of living; killing to survive, the inescapable void of embracing what they were, this microcosm of ghouls eating humans to survive and humans killing ghouls to survive, to come home and scrub the blood off one’s hands while praying that the stars had not shunned them for doing what they must, that this did not mark them as sinners but survivors.
And still, there was room for humanity in survival. The flesh did not have to be fresh or alive—had their souls gone, then what was left of them belonged to nature, a resource to those that needed it.
Life wasn’t simply sinners and saints, he knew it well; nothing in the world’s essence was innately singular. It was out of the goodness of their hearts that Yoongi’s parents took him in as much as it was the oblivion to the truth behind what they had done. Yoongi loved Hoseok for what he was never told.
Difficult to digest still, perhaps, but it was as simple as that—humans were not innately bad, and ghouls were not innately good. Yoongi was his living proof of that, with the way he would speak and how Hoseok could feel him in his heart.
It would be too much for them and the world if Yoongi ever found out about him; it would shatter his identity and crumble his heart, and Hoseok would hate to be cruel enough to do that. It was painful to even imagine.
“I would not ask you to change who you are for me, Yoongi,” he said, waiting for Yoongi to look at him. “Would you ask that of me?”
“Of course not,” Yoongi whispered with a frown, wondering what had made Hoseok so sad, and his heart was too precious to break.
He softened when Hoseok leaned in to kiss him, clenched hands loosening as his lips pressed closer, wanting. It was the gentlest reminder that Hoseok only had him in this life, that they were too entangled together to not hurt each other.
Hoseok’s chest ached, pulling away, looking at Yoongi up close. “Do my eyes glow?”
It took a moment of quiet as Yoongi looked at him, one that was long enough for a thought to flicker in the back of Hoseok’s mind that maybe he noticed, maybe he knew. Yoongi looked at him and answered,
“Beautifully.”