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Changkyun sat atop the peak of Ulsanbawi, a difficult climb that took him well beyond the safety of the park’s fenced hiking path, but which offered him a feeling of serenity that he never could’ve experienced within a string of metal posts. The rush of adrenaline that came with the knowledge that he could overbalance at any minute, that he could tip into the sea of clouds beneath him to be swallowed into the heavens for a few brief seconds before making a painful acquaintance with the earth below, allowed him a feeling of exhilaration that he welcomed far beyond the general feeling of safety. Knowing that he probably wouldn’t die upon impact didn’t make the experience any less enthralling. In fact, it tempted him even more, a subtle whisper in his ear that asked how much damage, exactly, his semi-immortal body could actually endure.
A weight suddenly slammed into him from the side, knocking him to the ground in a heap and settling on top of him, pinning him in place. His heart jumped for a second, only a second out of the fear that comes with the sense of falling, his brain panicking in that instant as he thought he really was going to topple over the edge. It was a feeling he didn’t enjoy.
“Ya, Jooheon,” he griped, slapping his sire hard on the elbow. “Idiot. You could’ve killed us.”
Jooheon chuckled as he sat up and tugged his protege with him, careful not to lean forward too far. As an extra show of precaution, he swung his legs around either side of Changkyun’s and pulled the younger boy back against his solid chest, arms idly settling around his middle to hold him in place.
“Like I would really let you fall,” Jooheon smirked against Changkyun’s ear before giving it a hard little nip, “and show some respect. I’m your elder and your sire. You should talk to me with the same respect you show the others.”
Changkyun just shrugged and continued to let his gaze wander over the moonlit clouds, his eyes seeing them as clearly as if it were full daylight. It was nice, feeling like he was on top of the world, that even as a demon he could look down upon Heaven. He found that it was even nicer with his sire’s warmth seeping into his back, and even though he hadn’t welcomed the confinement of the hiking trail’s bars, he found he rather enjoyed the security of Jooheon’s arms around his waist.
Funny how his mind could flip from wanting to fall to wanting to stay safe as quickly as that, something as simple as his sire’s presence drawing him so firmly back from the edge of his destructive thoughts. Jooheon had probably sensed that he was riding a little too close to it and this joking manner was his way of resetting Changkyun’s mind without getting sappy on him or lecturing him with long, pointless speeches. None of those approaches had worked on him when he was alive, they certainly wouldn’t work on him while he was still essentially a vampire-in-training, his mind still prone to slipping into its pure animalistic form if he gave it an inch to do so.
He thought back to the clan fight at the park, his memory of the events nothing more than a hazy blur after the blood had started flying. He had hoped that by eight months of being a vampire he would’ve had a better handle on the demon side of him, but apparently that wasn’t the case. It had reacted the moment he’d seen Hyungwon rip another vampire’s throat out, lusting for the same feel of torn flesh between his teeth and warm blood dripping from his tongue. In that moment, there was no decision to be made between fight or flight. He had wanted nothing but death.
Shownu had told him afterwards that part of Changkyun’s violent impulses were just a negative reaction to Young-chul’s influence, that his mind had partially closed itself off to keep him safe from any further invasion. The other part, though, was all purely due to his young age and inexperience. Controlling the demon side was supposed to get easier after a year, and easier still each year that he aged until he reached the vampiric age of twenty. Changkyun didn’t quite understand why that was the magic age vampires had decided upon to dictate full maturity, but he supposed that was just the average length of time it took before a vampire could pull off siring another without losing complete control of his or her faculties. Any younger and they had an alarmingly high failure rate when it came to eating their intended proteges outright.
Twenty years seemed like an impossibly long amount of time for Changkyun. He had just gotten through living that long in his morose human existence, so it felt a bit like he was having to start all over again in his bizarre version of an afterlife. He had chased death to get away from all the uncertainties and the pain that his twenty years of life had caused him, but now he had twenty more of being afraid he might lose himself to his demons all over again.
“Clouds are boring,” Jooheon suddenly mumbled against his shoulder, interrupting his flow of melancholy thoughts. He let go of Changkyun with one arm so he could brace it behind him and lean back on it, turning himself into a recliner of sorts that shifted the younger’s view higher towards the sky. “Tell me about the constellations.”
Now that Changkyun was looking, the stars really were shining bright that night, nothing to block them since the clouds were sleeping peacefully somewhere beneath his feet. Taking a moment to get his bearings, he pointed at one star and drew a pattern across the sky, connecting the dots for Jooheon to see.
“Those stars there? Those make up the tail feathers of the Phoenix, and it’s back is up there, and if you look up that way–”
Jooheon shook his head, his hand tightening against Changkyun’s side for a moment. “No, no, not Phoenix. I already know that one. Tell me the Greek stories.”
Changkyun let himself smile for a moment, reminded for the millionth time why being a vampire actually wasn’t so bad, why twenty years of fighting darkness might not be as bad a second time around. Jooheon and the others, they not only accepted his odd wealth of knowledge that had come from moving around so much as he was growing up, but actually seemed to enjoy it, encouraging him to share his mashed up customs and stories and languages as much as he was comfortable with doing. They didn’t push him away because he was different. They accepted all of him without even a hint of the disdain he’d felt from everyone he’d ever tried to get close to before. It was…
Nice, he settled on, not really having a better word to describe how it made him feel inside. Frankly, he was still a bit surprised with himself by how quickly he had latched onto the six vampires, how generally submissive and cuddly he could be with them. It was just another one of those behaviors that seemed to be outside of his control, a need to be close with them in a way he had never been with people when he was human. Distance was the thing he craved the most as a person, a desire to keep away from anyone who could potentially hurt him.
“Your strongest desires and deepest emotions sit right on the surface when you become a vampire,” Shownu had taught him when Changkyun had been in the middle of throwing a tantrum over how he hardly recognized himself anymore, “especially the ones you didn’t even know you had.”
It made a bit more sense to him now, the reasons behind his newfound clinginess. He was like Minhyuk in that way, he supposed, just another lonely soul who so desperately wanted to belong somewhere. The only difference between the two of them was that Changkyun had openly turned his back on that want when he’d been alive, letting it eat him up on the inside until it literally killed him, while Minhyuk had sought it out over the course of his entire existence and just hadn’t found it yet by the time Death cut his thread.
Changkyun thought maybe he got the better end of the deal between the two them, like receiving a surprise birthday gift in the form of puzzle piece that he never knew had been missing. With the exception of the little moments that snuck up on him, the ones in which he was still a little drawn towards the mystery and the permanence of death, Changkyun was generally a happier person now than he had ever been in human life. He had shied away from people and relationships and thus had worn his sadness on his sleeve for all the world to see, just another punk kid crying out for help that he already knew would be ignored, embracing that sadness and making it a part of himself. There was nothing for his vampiric nature to heighten in that regard, so instead it latched onto his hidden needy side.
Sadness was the part that Minhyuk had ignored for so long though, that he had pushed down into himself so deeply that it rarely ever had a chance to breathe. That was the side of him that came out now in violent bursts, dragging him down so far into its inky depths that it took all six of them working in tandem to bring him back out into the light again. Minhyuk, when he was genuinely upset over something, was actually self-destructive, unlike Changkyun who suffered from the occasional dark thought nowadays but rarely ever acted on them.
The others had their fair share of issues too, the damaged pieces of their psyches that age could never seem to disperse. Kihyun had a naturally wicked side that he hated to love, lamenting the days when he naively thought he was nothing more than a sweet, innocent, and pure soul trying to fight the injustices of the world. Where Changkyun had grown more loving, Kihyun had grown more disdainful, a part of him relishing in the type of revenge he could take now that he never imagine himself taking when living under human law. It was liberating to him, as liberating as drugs and alcohol had once been to Changkyun, and part of Kihyun would forever hate himself for feeling that way. A bigger part accepted it because the thought of living out an eternity with that self-hatred seemed worse than just embracing the person he had become.
As far as Hyungwon went, Changkyun didn’t think there was really anything hidden about him, nothing for his vampiric side to pull out from some locked box inside his soul. It was difficult to tell because his mentor rarely ever talked about his past life, but Changkyun knew he had been a soldier during the Korean War, a rather cunning one according to Wonho, and he certainly hadn’t lost his edge as a vampire. Being turned simply gave him more weapons to work with and a greater chance for surviving in battle, enhancing on talents he had already been gifted with in his mortal life. Hyungwon could be frightening, but in a way that had become predictable to everyone, so they didn’t feel like they had to watch out for him. He could also be soft and even philosophical at times, a different side of his personality that seemed to come out as naturally as breathing, not yanked out of him like the mood swings the others seemed to suffer from. Changkyun thought that maybe, even with as dark and violent as he could sometimes be, Hyungwon was probably the most balanced out of all of them.
Wonho liked to pretend to be the most balanced, but sometimes his empathetic nature proved to be too much for him to bare. On occasion he would go into “meltdown mode” as Jooheon had called it, something Changkyun had never personally seen, but he’d certainly heard the heart-wrenching sobs through Shownu’s door one evening at the end of what had been an otherwise perfectly normal week. Everyone had been happy, there had been no altercations with other clans, feeding had gone well the night prior; and yet there was their second eldest, carrying on in broken words behind a locked door about how he was failing all of them. Changkyun had nearly pushed his way inside to help comfort him when Jooheon had stopped him with a quiet hand on his shoulder. He took Changkyun back to his room where he explained that Wonho was like a vault of guilt, that he took everything into himself in hopes of locking it away from the rest of them, but sometimes the vault overflowed and poured out of him like a tidal wave crashing against a crumbling surface. Only Shownu was allowed to see it though, because if Wonho knew how much his episodes upset the youngers, his guilt would only intensify. The best way to get him back on his feet again after one of his meltdowns was to simply pretend they didn’t know it had happened, to be happy in front of him, to deny themselves their own dark moods until he was stable enough to handle negative emotions again. The estate was never as openly chipper as it could become post a Wonho breakdown.
When it came to Shownu, Changkyun didn’t think the Grand Sire really had much of his original humanity left. Whatever natural changes in his personality that the vampiric shift had brought on were smothered by the violent tutelage of his sire. He hadn’t been allowed to feel an abundance of sadness or joy or loneliness or guilt; he was made to feel what his sire wanted him to feel. If she wanted him to lust, he lusted, but only for her. If she wanted him to fight, he sunk his teeth into his opponent with all of the thoughtlessness of an attack dog being ordered to kill. If she wanted him to express pain, he would whimper at her feet. If she wanted him to brighten her day, he would smile for her and offer to bring her the sun if that’s what she asked of him. Changkyun knew all this because Shownu had made it a point to tell him, to inform every new member of his coven about how not to live, how not to treat their proteges and their brothers so that they could remain a strong family unit. Covens like the one he’d come from, ones that were based on power plays and greed, they always fell apart, leaving the remaining vampires scattered and lost until they either perished or, like Shownu had done, managed to form new families of their own. It was Wonho who had saved him, brought him back from the edge of insanity and made him almost human again, but Shownu would never fully recover the memories of the person he used to be. All he remembered was the demon he had been for decades, the vile creature his sire had turned him into, the one that, on some nights when the mood was just dark enough, would still raise its ugly head. Changkyun had been taught very early on that if Shownu up and disappeared for days on end, no one was to go looking for him. No one. If they did, they may not make it back alive.
Then there was Jooheon. Changkyun adored Jooheon, not just because he was the boy’s sire, but because it was easy to feel like an equal in his presence. That was the reason Changkyun didn’t often use honorifics or even respectful language towards him, because he never really felt like he had to. They were sire and protege, yes, but also brothers and best friends, oftentimes bedmates when one of them was having a bad day. Jooheon had been the person to save Changkyun from himself, to teach him love and acceptance, to brighten his mood whenever he was feeling down, to hold him steady whenever his mind was slipping away into dark crevices. Jooheon stepped aside when it came to mentoring Changkyun in the ways of fighting and feeding, allowing Hyungwon to tutor their youngest in the ways of answering to the demon’s call, because Jooheon was there to remind Changkyun how to be human. He was the healing salve for all wounds, both physical and mental, the support beam, pillar, and pedestal that held Changkyun afloat. It was also for that reason, though, that Jooheon had to separate himself from the coven when he was dealing with his own dark moods. Like Wonho, he didn’t want anyone else to see him falling apart, didn’t want them to see that he had his own cracks in his walls, that he was weak and vulnerable when they needed him to be their unbreakable rock.
Changkyun wished he wouldn’t be like that sometimes. Maybe seeing Jooheon at his worst would’ve been difficult for him when he was still nothing more than a confused fledgling, but Changkyun felt he was old enough now to handle being the caretaker for his sire every once in awhile. It made him feel bad that Jooheon went to seek his needed solace elsewhere, either alone or possibly in the arms of someone outside their coven. The others didn’t seem to mind at all, always open to each other’s coping mechanisms so long as they weren’t harmful to themselves or others, but something about seeing Jooheon slip away to find peace without them made Changkyun feel a little sad; and a little jealous, if he were being honest with himself. Why he couldn’t trust his protege with his darkest feelings when Changkyun trusted him with everything ate at him in a way that made him feel the familiar sting of being cast aside that had been so prevalent in his human life.
“Changkyunie? You okay?” Jooheon asked.
Changkyun shook his head, realizing he had been mentally drifting through his storytelling and had stopped speaking somewhere along the line.
“Fine,” he mumbled, doing his best to ignore the tight ball of betrayal that had settled in his stomach.
Jooheon sat up straight so he could properly hug his protege. “Hey, you can tell me if–”
“–I said I’m fine.”
His tone said completely otherwise and Changkyun knew it, but he was slipping back into one of his emotional states that so often spiraled out of his control. He had woken up that evening feeling a bit unstable to begin with, which was why he had wandered out alone where he wouldn’t be near anybody. It didn’t take much to throw a young vampire into an exaggerated fit over the tiniest mishap when their mood was off. Just Jooheon’s presence was enough to have put his mind completely at ease one moment, only to send him into a rage the next.
Wanting to put some distance between himself and his sire before he completely lost all control, Changkyun shoved his way out of Jooheon’s hold and hastened back towards the marked path. He could hear his elder scrambling to his feet behind him, but made no moves to wait for him. He needed to get away before he did anything stupid.
“Changkyun. Stop.”
Jooheon used his vampiric speed to catch up, closing the short distance between them in the blink of an eye so that he could halt his protege’s progress with a hand latching onto his arm. It was a bad move even for a vampire as strong as Jooheon, his balance not quite stable on the thin outcropping of rock that they stood upon. When Changkyun wheeled around on him, fueled by a fiery temper he knew was completely unfounded, it only took the slightest shove to send Jooheon stumbling back over the mountain’s edge.
According to some myths, vampires had the ability to fly. They also were said to have the grace and balance of a predatory feline. Jooheon, like most vampires, had certainly adapted a more surefooted gait since he had turned, but he was no Hyungwon who had practically been half cat even in his human form. Vampirism only enhanced upon the traits and abilities that were already prevalent in a person, meaning it didn’t often make the impossible possible for them. Flight, for all vampires, was completely out of the question.
Changkyun was moving before his brain even really registered what had happened, his anger quickly shoved aside out of the stronger need to protect his sire. He snapped back into real time as his chest hit hard against the cold rock, pain flaring through his arms and shoulders as he caught Jooheon, halting his fall and bearing the entirety of his weight.
Jooheon panted heavily, in complete shock as his feet scrambled to find purchase on the smooth stone in front of him. His free hand swung up and clasped Changkyun’s wrists, his grip so tight it threatened to snap bone.
“Don’t drop me,” he pleaded, eyes filled with fear. Unlike Changkyun not even an hour earlier, Jooheon was not the slightest bit curious to see what would happen to him if he fell from such a distance. Playing games with Death was not on his list of occasional pastimes, but at that moment it really wasn’t up to him. His fate was now entirely in his protege’s hands.
Changkyun wasn’t thinking about the trust that entailed at the moment, though. The only thing that was running through his head was a mantra of, ‘Don’t let go! Don’t leave me!’
Gritting his teeth to the point where he felt slightly-extended fangs cutting into his lip, Changkyun hooked his ankle around a smaller stone behind him and pulled. His whole body felt stretched as he fought against gravity, his muscles on fire as every one of them worked in tandem to haul up his sire’s weight. It felt like eternity wrapped in seconds before Changkyun could get him up high enough for both of them to shift their grips on each other, Changkyun reaching down to grab Jooheon’s waistband while the elder clutched onto his protege’s jacket behind his shoulder. He used the thick fabric to pull himself up far enough where he could reach one of the rocks with his other hand, then with Changkyun’s assistance, dragged himself up the rest of the way.
“Oh my god,” he huffed as he rolled over onto his back, eyes shut in an attempt to calm his racing heart.
Changkyun practically scrambled to crawl on top of him, his fingers twisting tightly into his sire’s shirt to ensure he was still there and not going anywhere anytime soon.
“I’m sorry,” he babbled, his voice pitchy as he struggled to control his own fear. “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry, hyung. I didn’t mean to. Please, I’m so sorry.”
“Hey, hey,” Jooheon soothed, his arms shaky as they came up to wrap around Changkyun’s back. “It’s okay. I’m fine, not even hurt. Nothing to worry about. I shouldn’t have grabbed you. That was my fault.”
Changkyun shook his head and buried his face in Jooheon’s shoulder, trying his best to keep himself from crying. If he started he felt like he would never stop.
“No. I was mad,” he confessed. “I was mad at you, but I didn’t want to hurt you. I would never hurt you. Please don’t hate me. Please, hyung.”
“Okay,” Jooheon grunted as he pushed himself to a sitting position, opening himself up so that his protege could pretty much curl into a ball on his lap. “Hey, listen to me. I’m not going to hate you for being mad at me. Or for accidentally pushing me off a cliff. This stuff happens. I wasn’t much better with Shownu when I was in my teen moody phase. It’s the sire’s job to deal with it, so try to calm down, okay? We’re okay.”
He pulled back and held out his fist, shaking it front of Changkyun’s face until the younger boy hesitantly bumped it. That simple act of familiar camaraderie calmed him a bit, opening up his airway so he could breathe again. God, he hated this, hated his mood swings. If lithium actually worked on vampires he’d be taking enough of it right now to probably overdose all over again. It would’ve been worth it if it helped keep his head on straight.
Jooheon rubbed his hand up and down Changkyun’s arm, creating some friction that the younger could focus on, keeping him in the now. “You didn’t have to tell me stories if you didn’t want to, you know,” he said in a quiet, steady tone, careful not to set the maknae off again. “Is that what made you mad? Did you think I was making you do something you didn’t want to?”
Changkyun huffed out a bitter laugh. “No. I was upset that you don’t trust me, but now I get why. I almost killed you.”
The gentle rubbing ceased, Jooheon’s hand clenching onto Changkyun’s arm to lift him off his chest. The look on his sire’s face was one of shock and confusion as he tried to read answers in his protege’s eyes, in the swirl of emotions creating thunderclouds in his mind. Changkyun knew he wouldn’t find any answers in either place though. He doubted even Wonho, complete with his extrasensory empathic abilities, would’ve been able to make sense of the mess that was Changkyun’s head.
“You leave,” he clarified before Jooheon could ask. “When you get upset you leave and you don’t tell anyone where you’re going or what you’re doing. You don’t tell me where you’re going, and I can’t track you if I wanted to like the others can. I don’t...I don’t like not knowing where you are, and I don’t like that you won’t tell me. I don’t like that I’m not...good enough. I’m never…”
He bit his lip and clamped his eyes shut, too many memories of his past life creeping up on him. This was probably why it took so long for vampires to adjust to their new situation, because they were still too close to their human existence to be able to think like anything else. It was easy remembering he could gain and lose friends in an eight month span of time, easy to think he had to act or look a certain way to gain acceptance that would never truly be real, easy to believe that he was just waiting to be tossed aside like yesterday’s trash. What was hard was trying to forget all of that, to accept the idea that he was going to live an eternity, and that people could possibly want to be around him for that long. There were just too many quirks and oddities about him that they were all still getting used to, and he still couldn’t quite fathom why they were even trying – not only trying, but literally fighting to make sure all his quirks and oddities stayed theirs and not somebody else’s.
But that couldn’t last forever for real. It couldn’t. It never did.
“Hey, Changkyunie,” Jooheon called, tapping him on the shoulder. “How long have Wonho and Shownu been together?”
Changkyun thought for a moment, the question throwing him off guard enough to actually consider the answer, his mind latching onto the simplicity and the certainty that numbers always seemed to provide.
“Ninety years?” he answered, giving the rough estimate from what he had learned of their histories.
Jooheon nodded. “That’s almost like a century, and other vampires call us a young coven. Some of the bigger clans in Europe have kin who’ve been together for over four hundred years. With ties as strong as theirs, they’re not that easy to break, and our ties are just as strong even though we haven’t been around as long. I bet we’re going to beat the record of longest lasting clan one day, and you’re going to be a part of that, okay? We’re not going anywhere, so stop worrying about that. I can hear you thinking it.”
Changkyun ignored the invasion into his thoughts as a fond chuckle found its way to his lips. He lightly shoved his sire in the chest as he snorted out, “Everything’s a competition with you, isn’t it?”
Jooheon shrugged. “It’s in my nature, and that’s why I don’t tell anybody where I’m going or what I’m doing. It has nothing to do with trust, Changkyun. I just get, I don’t know, overly competitive. I need the fight sometimes. I have a way of working it out, but I don’t want you or the others involved in it. I don’t want to ever compete against you, not for real. I don’t want to hurt anyone I care about.”
“So you’re a little like Shownu then,” Changkyun nodded, then furled his brow. “I can’t see you ever being as violent as Shownu.”
“I don’t think any of us have actually seen Shownu at his most violent,” the older boy speculated, “which is kind of the point. We do what we have to for the good of the clan, and if that means leaving for a little while, that’s what we do.”
“Even if it hurts some of us?”
A heavy sigh tumbled from Jooheon’s mouth as he squashed his protege into a hug once more. “Lesser of two evils,” he mumbled into Changkyun’s hair. “Would it help if I reached out to you while I was gone? Just to let you know you I was okay?”
Changkyun thought about the offer for a moment before nodding his head, figuring that was the best he was going to get. It would be better than what Wonho got whenever Shownu was away, which was essentially days of worrying until their Grand Sire returned. Changkyun made a mental note to be extra attentive and to try to be less of emotional basketcase during those times in the future. Now that he could relate, he wanted to try to make life a little easier on their second in command.
Just thinking about him made Changkyun crave Wonho’s mothering attention in that needy way that so often struck him as of late. He was too tired to fight it at the moment though, too tired of constantly trying to fight all of it. As he had already speculated before, there were worse outbursts he could suffer from than simply needing attention.
“Can we go home now?” he asked, his mental exhaustion evident in his tone.
Jooheon didn’t answer, simply adjusted his hold on the youngest and scooped him up in his arms. Changkyun actually squeaked in surprise, but put up only a mild fight so as not to overbalance his sire again in his struggles.
“Stop it,” Jooheon scolded, an amused smile on his face. “Let me baby my baby. We can go watch cartoons with Minhyuk and Wonho, and let Kihyun stuff us with cookies and milk. Sound good?”
Changkyun opened his mouth to argue, but snapped it shut again. It did sound good. It sounded great, and if that sounded stupid, he honestly didn’t care. For the first time in his life he felt like he belonged somewhere, and maybe it wasn’t perfect, but he was going to try to cling to it for all he was worth. If that happened to be forever, then maybe living forever with roller coaster mood swings wouldn’t be so bad after all.
~Kkeut~