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They barricade the door to the church with whatever's at hand.
It's dark outside, but not enough for Caelus to miss the cracks in the windows. This place has been abandoned for a while, it looks like, with thick layers of dust coating the pews. It certainly hasn't been well maintained.
At least, for a while, it looks like it was used for storage. Dusty crates are stacked in one of the side rooms, miraculously intact despite the visible age. They're heavy as shit but their time is limited, so Caelus shoves the hardest he can.
Dan Heng isn't much help at the moment. As much as he wants to contribute, because Caelus knows basically only death can keep this idiot off his feet, he's got a hand trying to staunch the gush of blood from his neck, the other braced against the back of the nearest pew. They don't have any bandages, so he might as well have torn strips off his shirt or his coat to make up for the loss, but they had to move too quickly. There hadn't been time.
(And, of course, the risk of infection was always there. But he'd rather Dan Heng live with an infected bite wound than not live at all.)
A sufficiently angry vampire could break down that door even through the crates like it was nothing, or smash a window, or probably even rip through one of the walls. Caelus is fully aware they're probably doomed. He's just also aware that if he gets enough of a chance to stall them, the sun might come up first.
He steps back to look at his handiwork. A human definitely wouldn't be able to open those doors. It would stall a vampire for maybe a minute at the absolute max. Sure, good enough.
"Done," he says, dusting the… well, dust, off his hands and his pants before he turns back to Dan Heng, who has been just as silent as usual. "We should be good for a bit."
Dan Heng, at this point, has stumbled around to sit down on the pew, leaning heavily on its wooden arm. His shirt is too dark to see anything, but Caelus is sure that if it was the same white as his coat, there would be a bloodstain slowly spilling down his chest.
"How are you doing?" he asks, far more quietly.
There's little light in the building, but Caelus's phone flashlight will last for a while longer. He checks the time: it's almost 4am, with sunrise in maybe another two hours. The sun is the only safety they can afford at this point. If they fall asleep, it's guaranteed death.
Dan Heng's voice is strained, and most of all tired. "I think you'd be able to guess how I'm doing."
Caelus winces. "Right. Yeah, sorry. Stupid question. Do you think this place has a bathroom to clean that?"
"This far out in the woods? Caelus, they've probably shut the water off."
"Worth a shot, though. Maybe they'll have some kind of first aid kit."
Dan Heng sighs. In the harsh light of Caelus's phone, he just looks exhausted. "Go look, then."
It's as close to a dismissal as he's going to get.
Digging comes up empty. He even rips open some of the crates; nothing medical at all. He'd be surprised if they were, stored out here in a probably-abandoned church, but that just means he has to resort to fabric.
"The bleeding is already slowing, Caelus," says Dan Heng, adrenaline audibly crashing. There's a sleepy shake to his voice that he'd usually find cute but now just finds incredibly, horribly concerning. "You're too late."
Caelus kneels down next to him, and he doesn't even need to pry the hand off his neck because there is no hand on his neck anymore. Far from the gush of the first few minutes, while they had been running for their lives and Dan Heng's racing pulse had driven the flow far faster than usual, the slow is almost alarming.
Scratch that, it's very alarming.
He tries his absolute hardest to be gentle, but when Caelus reaches out for his neck, Dan Heng still flinches back out of reach. "Sorry," he says, quiet, forcing himself to move back, and Caelus is immediately hit with a sharp wave of guilt.
There isn't any of the immediate coldness to the skin that would indicate the next stage of turning, but they both know enough to keep an eye out. They also know even better, though neither of them is willing to say it, that even the first stage is fatal.
"We're going to have to keep an eye on that," says Caelus, brushing fingers over heated skin and watching as Dan Heng represses a wince. "Tell me the moment you feel anything."
"It would be much easier to do so if you would stop touching it," he replies, almost petulant. "Although, we really do need to talk about it."
"About…"
"What to do when I end up turning." He's far too casual about this, tone still light like they're discussing the weather and not his impending death and resurrection. "You know at this point it's inevitable."
"Don't talk like that."
"I'm going to need you to take one of those stakes," he continues, as if Caelus hadn't said a word, "and send it through my heart. It's the only way."
"No."
"Yes." Dan Heng is still far, far too calm about this. "You know that there's only one way this ends if you don't."
"I'm not going to be the one to kill you, Dan Heng, we just have to make it to morning, it'll be alright—"
"I'm not going to make it to morning," he interrupts with a pained smile. "We've watched this happen before, enough times to get a good idea. Two hours is generous. I don't want to hurt you."
"You wouldn't hurt me, you'd never." Caelus thinks he might be babbling a bit, at this point. "You're the kindest, nicest person I know, you wouldn't hit a fly if it didn't attack you first, nothing's going to change that for you, not even this, right?"
The chuckle that tears itself from Dan Heng's throat is strangled, and slightly wet if he listens too closely. "If we'd found a doctor an hour ago, maybe. I need you to promise."
"It's not going to come to that point."
"And if it does anyway?"
"Then…" He doesn't want to say the words. "I will."
It hurts, a twisted crooked thing tearing at his heart from the inside out, promising to be the one to kill him. There's nobody else here, though. He can't outsource killing his boyfriend to the ghosts in the graveyard outside. Worst case scenario, the sun does the job for him, rending flesh from bone in a pyre that could be seen for miles.
Watching that would be a fate worse than pulling the trigger himself.
"Okay," he says again. "Okay. Let me just… find something, so I can have it ready. Yeah. Okay." The spike fits neatly in his palm, close to the size of his forearm from end to end, and he doesn't know how it ended up here but he wouldn't be surprised if it was for the same reason.
Caelus sits down next to Dan Heng for what might be the last time in his life, and he settles in to wait for the end.