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Jiseok meets Jooyeon last. Everyone else is in and out of the house and always around, always close. They talk about Jooyeon but Jiseok doesn’t actually see him for almost a week.
It’s anticlimactic. Jiseok is only just beginning to earn a little trust, a little time unsupervised. He slept without a babysitter for the first time, disturbed by nightmares and unsettled but more hours asleep than he’s had so far, and he wakes up long after sunset. Hungry, as he always is, the first thing he does is head to the kitchen.
When he walks in he pauses at the sight of an unfamiliar man seated at their table. Definitely a vampire, sucking on a bag of blood like it’s a capri sun.
Jiseok has only been here for six days but he feels defensive instantly. There’s a stranger in his house. He can’t help but bare his fangs.
The man sees him and has the opposite reaction: he grins wide with bloodstained teeth, and says, “you’re Jiseok, right? I’m Jooyeon!”
Jiseok relaxes minimally to know that this isn’t an intruder. Still, he’s on full-alert confronted with someone he doesn’t know when he’s hungry and thirsty and only wearing boxers.
He shuffles to the fridge and peers inside, counting how many bags are lined up on the shelves. Twelve human currently, and close to thirty animal. Gunil has been coming home every day with a handful, all too aware of Jiseok’s need.
He tries to have some restraint: Jiseok takes one bag, pig blood, and sits himself opposite Jooyeon at the table to drink it. His teeth slice into the plastic with ease and it flows into him too fast, too smooth. Even cold and unnatural he can’t get enough. Jiseok thinks, every time, of how much better it was when it was fresh and hot and stolen, and then has to fight the urge to spit it all back up.
“Nice to meet you,” Jooyeon says, undeterred by Jiseok’s silence.
The bag is empty too soon. Jiseok drops the bag to the table and digs his fingernails into his palm, resists the urge to open the fridge again and down every single drop they have, and says, “you, too,” in the most level voice he can manage.
Jooyeon frowns down at the empty bag.
“Want another?” he offers easily, standing up. He’s taller than Jiseok, skinny and lanky, and his hair reaches his shoulders. He’s handsome in a classic way, sharp cheekbones and a strong nose, and when he smiles at Jiseok his lips are heart-shaped.
“No, thank you,” Jiseok denies.
He wants it. He can’t smell it when it’s sealed up so clinically but he can imagine it. It would be unsatisfying, it wouldn’t sate his growling hunger, and he wants it anyway.
Jooyeon frowns again.
“Aren’t you only a week old?” he asks. “You must be starving.”
If Jiseok digs his fingernails in any harder he’ll scrape bone.
He shakes his head and stands abruptly, shoving the chair back with a screech, and stalks out of the kitchen leaving Jooyeon alone with the fridge hanging open behind him.
Jiseok wants to curl himself up into a ball and hide. He wants to stay under the sheets of this borrowed bed and never resurface. He does not want to drink or eat. He only wants to drink and eat.
He wonders how long it would take to starve himself. Would he die or would he just remain, still and empty, like a husk? Would his skin dry out, would his flesh rot?
Jiseok doesn’t get his answers because Seungmin seeks him out after only a few hours.
There’s no beating around the bush with him.
“You have to eat,” Seungmin says, resting a hand on Jiseok’s shoulders through the duvet.
Like a sulking toddler, Jiseok shakes his head.
Gunil had tried to explain this all to him. He was nineteen when he was bitten, but now he’s like a newborn. Survival instinct only, no ability to regulate himself. His body is still changing, becoming something he never asked for. He won’t always be this hungry.
As far as Jiseok knows, Jooyeon is the closest to him in vampire-age. A few months since he had an accident, since Gunil took pity on him and “saved” him; Jiseok doesn’t know that he would have wanted to be saved if this is the outcome.
“You’ll feel worse if you don’t,” Seungmin says quietly, still patting Jiseok on the shoulder. It’s the most human touch he’s felt since the night this all began and Jiseok relaxes into it unconsciously.
“You know we don’t… We don’t kill anyone for that blood, Jiseokie,” Seungmin continues.
Yes, Jiseok does know that. No, it doesn’t make him feel any better about it.
“Can we make a deal?” Seungmin tries finally, when nothing else gets a peep out of Jiseok. “Drink one pint a day. At least. I know you don’t like it-”
Understatement.
“-But you’ll end up out of control on less.”
He hates that these are his choices.
The blood, cold and viscous, is deeply unappealing, but the thought of ending up in the state he was before is terrifying.
“Okay,” Jiseok croaks, throat dry. “Fine.”
Seungmin leaves him in peace once he agrees, and Jiseok stays in bed curled up just like that for twenty hours straight.
It’s not what he wants to do, but for the second day in a row the sun sets and Jiseok enters the kitchen. For the second day in a row, Jooyeon is there, too.
“Hi,” he says with a wave.
He isn’t drinking anything this time, and Jiseok instantly wonders if Seungmin told him not to. He feels babied and he hates it.
Not Jooyeon’s fault, though. Jiseok keeps a wary two metres between them, scooting along the wall, and says, “hey,” back.
Jooyeon eyes the distance, says, “I don’t bite,” and then doubles over laughing at his own joke.
The fridge is in here, the blood is in here. Jiseok wants some, wants too much, wants none of it. He can’t laugh with Jooyeon, he can’t tear his gaze away from the refrigerator, his muscles are tight and tense.
“Do you want to watch anime with me?” Jooyeon asks then, pulling Jiseok out of his daze.
“Um. Sure.”
Jooyeon leads him into the main room, where Jiseok tends to avoid because it’s where everyone congregates and the loud noises and incessant talking make his newly-sensitive ears ring. It’s blessedly empty right now, though. There’s one large couch, L-shaped, and two armchairs that look old and squishy.
Jiseok perches on the edge of a couch cushion while Jooyeon flops into the corner, sprawled out over three.
“We can start from the beginning,” he offers, and he turns on the TV and presses play without waiting for Jiseok to agree.
It’s weirdly a relief. Everyone else is kind of treading on eggshells around him, asking what he wants and if he can and won’t he just try. Jiseok doesn’t want to make any choices. Jiseok doesn’t want to think about what he wants. Jiseok wants to slide back until he’s resting properly on the couch, which is surprisingly comfortable, and distract himself with something he’s never even heard of before.
They watch two episodes without interruption. There are noises upstairs, footsteps and floorboards creaking, people talking which has been driving Jiseok insane because he can’t quite tune it out yet, but he manages to focus on the anime and the subtitles rather than what Jungsu is saying to Gunil.
Jooyeon pauses halfway through the third episode and gets up without explaining himself. Jiseok hears the telltale sound of the fridge opening then closing, tearing of plastic, pouring noises and then a microwave whirring.
When he comes back in he’s clutching two mugs, and he passes one to Jiseok before dropping back onto the couch. Not in the corner this time but one cushion over, closer to Jiseok. He hits play and takes a drink, doesn’t say a word, and Jiseok stomach twists at the smell of blood. Hot, artificially but still so much more bearable than fridge-cold, and in a mug he doesn’t have to look at it nearly as much.
It’s still thick and wrong going down, but Jiseok drains it.
He clutches the mug in both hands afterwards, staring blankly at the TV screen and trying to squash the guilt and the sickness he feels.
The fourth episode starts playing automatically. As the opening song starts, Jooyeon says, “you’re cold, right?”
It doesn’t make sense to Jiseok because, based on everything Gunil and Jungsu have told him and everything he was taught in school, vampires don’t feel cold. Their skin doesn’t react to external temperature. Only once they’ve fed enough for their dried up veins to flow with blood once more can they approach even a semblance of human warmth.
But he is cold. He nods.
Jooyeon digs around behind the couch for a moment, and emerges with a thick, slightly dusty blanket. Knitted and a little moth-eaten, beige and wonky. He throws it at Jiseok, and Jiseok wants to push it away but he’s cold, impossibly so, and he can’t help that he twists his fingers into the wool and tugs it over himself more. He tucks his feet into it, cocooned, and it’s comforting even if it doesn’t do much.
“I was always cold,” Jooyeon says, conversational. “For weeks. I think Gunil-hyung has forgotten what it’s like to be new.”
“How old is he?” Jiseok asks, curiosity beating his desire to not get involved in this whole… Thing. This coven, they call it.
“I dunno,” Jooyeon shrugs. “A couple of decades? Jungsu-hyung is almost ten, I think.”
Jiseok is nineteen, and he is one week old.
“How old were you?” Jiseok asks next, hoping Jooyeon gets what he means.
The anime keeps playing but Jiseok is only looking at Jooyeon now, his side profile that lights up with the colours on the screen.
“Eighteen,” Jooyeon tells him, not an ounce of sadness in his tone.
Jiseok feels sad for him, anyway. Sad for him, sad for himself. Jooyeon is kind, open and friendly, and his life is reduced to sitting in an old house with a bunch of strangers and sleeping through every minute of sunlight.
He has to give himself a minute, to blink back tears and to hold onto the wool blanket like a lifeline, to muster up the strength to ask the question he hasn’t asked anyone yet.
“How do you live like this?”
Jiseok knows how he sounds, hoarse and broken. He fiddles with a hole in the stitches.
Jooyeon’s forehead scrunches up in thought, and then he shrugs and says very simply, “it’s just the way it is now.”
Bloodlust makes it hard for Jiseok to think so clearly.
“It feels so bad,” he murmurs. Half of him hopes Jooyeon won’t hear him, and the other half knows he will. “The… The hunger.”
“Did it feel bad before?”
“What?” Jiseok is surprised. “Eating? Before I got- Before this?”
Jooyeon nods, and turns to face Jiseok on the couch. They’re close enough that Jooyeon’s knees almost, almost knock against Jiseok’s leg, and Jiseok has no idea when that happened.
“No,” Jiseok answers even though he thinks the question is silly. “Of course not.”
“Well, then,” Jooyeon gestures around them with his hands. “It’s the same thing. You have to eat to live.”
It’s not the same thing. It is so not the same thing.
“I didn’t used to eat people!” Jiseok shocks himself with the volume of his outburst. It’s the loudest he’s ever been in this house. He can tell that everyone upstairs heard him, too, and if he could blush he would.
Jooyeon doesn’t look shocked, though. He looks unbothered, he speaks so matter-of-factly that it almost pisses Jiseok off more, and he leans in closer to Jiseok when he speaks even though Jiseok thinks maybe Jooyeon should be afraid of him.
“We don’t eat people,” he says. He even smiles, like he thinks Jiseok is being funny. “You don’t have to eat people.”
Does he know? Did Gunil tell them the way he found Jiseok, smeared in too much blood to only be his own? Do they allow Jiseok into their home despite what he did, knowing what he did? Is home an illusion, is this a prison to keep him from doing it again? Jiseok doesn’t care if it is; he’d lock himself up for it just as fast.
Jiseok turns back to the TV, unable to meet Jooyeon’s eye anymore.
“It’s all donated,” Jooyeon continues anyway. Quieter, though, like maybe he’s trying not to spook Jiseok. “They give it to us.”
He might keep talking if Jiseok doesn’t reply, so he grits out a reluctant, “I know.”
Jooyeon looks back at the TV, too, halfway through an episode neither of them have caught any of. He snags the remote and rewinds it.
Off the hook for now, Jiseok tries to relax into the blanket again. The mug in his hands has grown cold and he thinks he snapped the handle off when he shouted. He has no idea what any of the characters in this show are called.
“You shouldn’t feel guilty for surviving,” Jooyeon says a minute later. His voice is sure and set, like nothing Jiseok could say would convince him otherwise.