#chanvember 2021 | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

yeoldontknow · 3 years ago

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Hero: 15 (M)

AN: welcome to chanvember 2021! if youve been looking forward to this chapter for ages, me too <3 i really hope you enjoy this one, especially as this is the last chapter before the storm begins. from here out...we are moving. this is an essential character development chapter which is why it took so long to get right. however, from now on...uh...please read the warnings carefully Pairing: Chanyeol x Reader (oc; female) Genre: vampire au; horror; thriller; suspense; angst; romance Rating (this chapter): R Warnings: non-explicit sex (not the way you think); graphic depictions of violence; graphic depictions of blood; graphic depictions of death; depictions and discussions of trauma; guns; body horror; dark language; dark themes; manipulation; toxic relationships; themes of control - please take these chapter warnings seriously and do not read, under any circumstances, if under the age of 18. Word Count: 8.7k

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CHANYEOL

The second time he fucked you, the clammy grip of his unsteady palms at your hips and your own purposeful fingers at his shoulders, you grimaced at the familiarity. Regarding the down turned corner of your lips, he called you pretty.

Even then, you couldn’t remember his name, whelmed instead by the stench of teenage aftershave and watered down beer. You wore the disdain of young adulthood in your bones, laying in his college bed because it was something to do, a violent interruption and metamorphosis to the perception of your being. He’d had you before, months ago, in the same twin bed. It was messy, uncoordinated - uncomfortable, but only because he lacked the confidence to hold you with vigor.

He’d had you before, months ago, and so he felt entitled to you again, perhaps for always. He wanted you with such horrible intensity, peering at you longingly over uncapped beer bottles and weakened glasses of whiskey; similarly, you wanted him, though not as passionately. Rather, you wanted the way he worshiped you, the way he whispered praises into the crevice of your clavicle. Twenty-one and already you were looking to be exalted, looking to move through him like a blade, demanding he wear you as a badge of honor.

Ultimately, the sameness of him was a disappointment, finding yourself uninspired by his penetrating expression of excitement. He held you closely, carelessly, thoughts running through his head with painful sameness: you, again, perhaps once more even after; a routine of habit rather than the thrill of unmaking. He was comforted by you, and you despised the emptiness. Thin-lipped, you kissed the moonlit expanse of his shoulder on a whim of self-discovery, learning quickly the difference between what you wanted and what you craved.

Entrenched in your own sublime self-assurance, you flipped him onto his back, determined to give yourself what he could not. Thighs bound tightly to the side of his hips, you pushed him deep into the bed, a game of entrapment, imprisonment. Wide-eyed, he looked at you in awe and in fear, and found little difference in the experience of either.

You crouched over him, hungry enough to eat the heart out of misery, and moved over his skin already prepared to leave in the morning. The yeast of the beer seeped through his pores, mingled just enough with his sweat to make your tongue burn. Had you any semblance of humility, then, you would have stopped kissing him altogether, the sourness of his existence sinking deep into your stomach. But he watched you, lips parted and mouth wet, and you felt the seat of your power rise up the nodes of your spine - this glory your first fetish.

Beneath your skin, blood rushed to places long abandoned and long ignored, core aroused by your own vitality more than anything else. Having never been anyone’s first choice, you decided to validate yourself through the eyes of the meek and mild boy beneath you. You gave yourself an orgasm like an earthquake, ripped it from the depths of your existence in the effort of growing monstrous. Like the very concept of virginity, you tore your innocence from yourself, smiled in the horrid glow of the moon becoming flesh and blood and alive for the first time in your life.

In those final moments above him, his pupils dilated with thoughts of love and adoration; he could love you, would love you, though it was more this impression of you and nothing at all to do with your inherent repugnance. With your hands at his throat, you felt his breath tremble beneath your palms and you laughed not unlike a wolf’s howl. Fingertips vibrating with the rhythm of his pulse, you grinned, confident, more than ever before, that romance is little more than terror.

Chanyeol opens his eyes and stares blankly at the endless expanse of his ceiling.

In another life, he’d sit upright, fist curled in his hair and limbs bent inward in protection. Long ago, memories like this would distress him; when he was young and he was new, the life contained with every cell of blood haunted him like a ravaging ghost. People tend to live with such conviction, the vibration of it within his bones would leave him rattled, profoundly unsettled. Now, he’s grown uncomfortably used to the tether human experience seems to have on him, the pull towards emotions and the ashen resonance they leave behind, irritated in his late existence simply because there are so few days in which he can escape it.

Rolling his tongue over his teeth, he tastes you in his mouth, against his cheeks, salivating in anticipation. You slither down the back of his dry throat, wetting everything you touch. The saccharine sweetness of your iron has not left him, not since you brought him back to life - a cascade into the hollow cavern of his belly, caging him in permanent thirst.

You, the first human taste he’s had in decades, warm and rich and full. Days on, and still you have refused to fade, demanding permanence inside his mouth even after Yixing ensured your scar bore no trace. It often takes months for the flavor of heart enriched blood to dissipate, but as he grits his teeth and blinks at the way the room seems to breathe, he bitterly grows acutely aware that you will be something stubborn, unyielding, disdainfully persistent.

If he’s lucky, you will eventually diminish into an aftertaste that comes only during the hungry hours - when the moon eats the stars from the sky, when the weeping of humanity morphs into thin lipped silence, accepting the value of their wounds. If he’s lucky, he will only taste you then, not unlike tendrils of smoke or the memory of a woeful, unkept promise.

Even when he was human, he never had such luck. You, he thinks, will burn inside him like the magnetic core of the sun, ensuring he will taste each letter of your name until the sky turns black with ash. Gripping the edge of his bed, he clings to the rough cotton of his sheets, feeling his tether to you tighten, called to the terrible mess of your body, your flesh so full and lush inside him.

He wonders what horror of his youth will play out in your dreams. Will you see the way he could dissolve amongst the nightmarish intensity of his longing, learning quickly that to desire was to vanish entirely inside it? Will you see his first kiss, his last kiss, the way it rendered him a monster, all his senses involved in the biblical knowing that he was changing? All his rapacious needs, driving him through heartsick famine and corpse addled war, as though there was any difference. Will you feel him?

Will you know him?

Sleep will not come for him now, rarely does twice in a night, and so he swings his legs over the side of his bed and presses his elbows into his thighs, pensive.

It has already started.

Your curiosity of the boy he used to be a confirmation there will be no more escaping you, or you of him. Dreaming of the girl you used to be means you, too, are dreaming of the boy who died, and he steels his resolve for your impending questioning.

Jaw clenched, he moves his arm from his leg and reaches beneath his pillow, tips of his fingers stroking idly at the barrel of his Sig Sauer in comfort. The solid metal of the gun, and its deceptively feminine curved grip is perverse and unforgiving - much like you, to his great dismay. Unmarked crevices within his bones ache with your sadness, a claustrophobic yearning to be witnessed as you are, completely, clouding his senses. He winds his hand over the barrel, clutching, waiting, seething. The chill of it against his palm grounds him in the moment, an act of separation between the metal of your spirit and the metal of his power.

Still, he laughs to himself. How like you to live with vengeance, terrified of being forgotten or abandoned, even in memory.

Your overwhelming fear of being discarded weighs heavily in his mouth, and he sucks the inside of his cheek between his teeth, feeling heavy with compassion. With a grunt, Chanyeol pushes himself to a stand, the chill of the air beyond his sheets nipping at his nakedness. Mindlessly, he pulls on discarded clothes, choosing instead to relieve himself of you as best he can beneath the stars.

The stench of his spilled blood still permeates on the roof, the blackened circles etched into the concrete. He sits beside the splatter of the drops, running his fingers over each, stroking with as much tenderness as he would give a painting. Darkness descends around him, not unlike velvet, encasing him in a dark tomb above the city. Closing his eyes, he relishes the sensuality of the silence, liberated.

When he was young he hated nights like this, murder black and encroaching on his fragile perceptions of security. The night was a warning, a threat, or perhaps it was a vision of what he would become, his mortal nature rejecting the bleak void that would eventually overtake his spirit. Foolish, he thinks, knowing now that even creation starts in the dark. Nothing is truly born in the light, even if that is where it is seen. Everything in existence is merely a shadow.

Dragging his nail over a large drop of blood, sparks fly freely into the night, their brief existence quickly extinguished. They sting against his skin, and he opens his eyes to watch the reddened tips of his fingers begin to glow. Slowly, he repeats the motion, the veins in his wrist burning like ignited vines, changing from red, to yellow, to white, smoking all the while. Taking the fumes into his lungs, his eyes roll back into his head, smelling burnt evergreen and cedar, the sweet before it all turns sour, his scorched flesh filling the air.

Again, he runs his finger over his blood, haunted by the ominous symbol of his earlier transgression, a ball of flame starting to fill his palm. Holding his hand out before him, he looks into the fire, right into its heart, unafraid of all it contains.

The first thing he sees, the first thing he always sees, is the first bullet he ever placed in the center of an unsuspecting forehead. He hears his laugh, his surprised, appalled laughter that burst forth from his chest, horrified and disgusted by how easily a body crumbles when there is nothing left to hold it. It was not the first time he had killed a man but it was, perhaps, the first time he sensed detachment, sensing it was easy. The spray of gray matter and blood dripped down his cheek, a tender tickle that fell into his mouth, retribution and deliverance for his gallantry.

He sees the halflings, their wretched and decaying bodies all wrought together in a cage. The slime of symbiosis overtakes them even as they do their best to feast on everything, every living atom until they have made a black hole out of life itself. They always lead to Jinsoo, and now Taeyong’s razed corpse, an ancient child realizing it hurts to scream while burning; his cursed ignorance and the way he has damned his men to yet another war.

You appear, a new addition. Your valiant will to survive matches only the skill of your corruption, the swiftest, most cataclysmic end to an alliance he has ever seen. You burned his life down, and yet he is still asking you to stay, seeking you again over and over, confronted perpetually by the way you are both the knife and the wound.

His name follows after you, every stroke gentle and written in red ink, like juice, like plum wine, on a perfumed note. He recognizes the writing, he always does, shaped by a hand and a heart that once loved him. The things he did for her were ugly, utterly mad, full of regret the moment he started his voracious wanting. Those obscene feelings rise in him, putrid, aroused by the chasm ripped inside his vacant chest, and he frowns, embittered.

All this, a mirror lying in the palm of his hand, and still there is something missing.

The fire is blood red, mutating into a fading sunset like it always does when he pays it any attention. Regarding it mutely, he supposes he is not unlike a pomegranate seed, an upturned sneer at the corner of his lip as he considers perdition and the way hell ate the heart out of him for righteous power. A creature of malice, he shakes off the feeling, reverting back to the teeth that devours the fruit, flush with vengeance.

Blinking once, the scene changes to Jinsoo - his mutilated body, his death.

What he sees is not knowledge. It is not memory. Letting his vindictive fantasies consume the flame, borderline erotic details causing his jaw to clench, his fixated gaze is piercing. Jinsoo would die slowly, body burning and mind living, existence interrupted; Chanyeol would be a tender butcher, looking him in the eye as the gaping hole in his chest singed into gangrenous black. It’s a red event, violence incarnate, and he smiles precisely the way Cain would at the sight of Judas; foul creatures united in the pestilence of their existence, an epithet and a bloodletting all at the same moment.

The creaking metal of cheap hinges interrupts the vision, distorting every image and shaving the clarity down and down, bringing it to the brink of transparency, until the flame is extinguished altogether.

Chanyeol glances over his shoulder, arching his brow as he regards you coolly, studying your curves and shapes as though they are constructed by moonlight. The shadow you cast is long, enormously tall, twinged with a hint of crimson from a distant billboard sign; your darkness is not black but the very last degree of vermilion, all your secrets full of blood.

Arms crossed over your chest, you let the door slam closed, hard enough to dent. Unwavering, you hold his stare, eyeing him conspicuously, almost patiently, elongating your posture in an effort to emphasize yourself. Chanyeol smirks, acknowledging the shifting energy as you turn the roof into a theatre of your power. You are always so aware you are a revolution, a riot caged in the chambers of your heart and equally as unforgiving as passion.

Kyungsoo said you were kind. Sat beside him in a metal truck, you humanized yourself for a moment, welcoming a stranger and masking your capability for utter destruction behind charisma. Over and over, you cast him side long glances, watched him drive and watched him send you miles off course, planning and plotting, and, always, smiling.

You have never appeared kindhearted, least of all in his presence, wicked and discerning from the very moment he looked you in the eye. Yet, he appreciates the brutality of your honesty. Even now, as your seething displeasure emanates from your very aura, his mouth twists dangerously around a smile.

He used to stand like that, when he was human and small and unimportant. He used to be just like you.

Perhaps he still is.

Pressing his hands into the concrete, palm meeting the bruising of his blood, he rises to a stand, holding your stare. Matching your posture, he too stretches to his full height, rolling his shoulders back as he peers at you down his nose. It's unfair of him, he knows, but fairness is no longer in his nature, and that, he presumes, is the last thing you expect from him.

Lifting one eyebrow in reprimand, you sigh through your nose, gnawing the inside of your cheek before you turn on your heels, prepared to leave.

‘You don’t have to go, Hero.’ His voice carries through the veil of night, surprised and rattled by the sound equally as much as you. He had not meant to call for you, but he gave you this roof as a peace offering and he has no intentions of rescinding his word. ‘You are more than welcome to join me, if you like.’

A long moment passes in which you deliver a view of your back, stoic and statuesque, his eyes drawn to the regal slope of your shoulders. Your skin is smooth at the crook of your neck. He hates that he knows this, that he remembers the feeling even though it is not his to remember.

Eventually, you look back at him, a glower and a turn that starts with your curiosity and ends with your contempt. Your thin lipped answer is a comfort, and he swallows an empty laugh, amused that you are still attempting to be horrified by him.

Chanyeol takes his time watching you, the way you refuse to make yourself soft for him, jaw set like iron. If he's honest, he senses you are more disturbed by the notion of continuing the banality of your daily life beyond the hangar, and the very notion of it disgusts you.

Wordlessly, you make your approach, unblinking. With each step, you seem to mutate, the shadows along your cheeks painting a myriad of expressions against your features. By the time you reach him, you are perverse, looking out over the city as though it is an oblique, deformed kingdom you have claimed for yourself. It's the same look you gave him from the bed of the trunk, a narrow-eyed vicious look of melancholia and rage.

A smile still threatens the corner of his lips, even as he joins you in regarding the world that creeps beyond his harrowed existence.

‘I’ve been dreaming about you,' you announce, matter-of-factly. Emotion stripped from your voice, you provide this information with clinical emptiness, understanding, completely, the meaning of transfusion. ‘It’s more vivid, now.’

He nods, a non-committal response he's certain could be read as solemn. ‘That much is to be expected. I've been dreaming of you, too.'

Scoffing you shake your head, and Chanyeol glances at you briefly, studying the roll of your eyes and persistent refusal to face him.

‘You’ve already told me you hear every memory and life in the blood you drink.’ The disdain in your voice is thick, penetrative, and he feels it wander all over his skin. Sneering, he turns away silently, grimly aware you will have more to say. 'I didn't think it would affect me, and that feels...'

Drifting off, you grow unable to finish your sentence, dissecting its intended meaning in solitude. Cocking a single brow, Chanyeol maintains his vacant stare, bewildered by the way you cling to your innocent sensibilities, as though you have not been an active participant in your becoming from the moment of your arrival.

'I already told you,' he explains lowly, 'your blood, my blood - there no longer is any difference.' The air shifts, your immediate rebuttal bubbling to the surface, igniting the atmosphere with static. Pursing his lips, he continues. 'It's already happened, anyway,' he drawls. 'The moment you walked into Yixing's mind, it was happening. If you really think about it, Hero, I'm certain you could recall it was happening long before you got here. You likely wrote it off as an inconsequential phenomenon; dreams you thought you fabricated, lives you lived only to wake up tired and feeling as though you never slept. The sooner you accept it, the sooner you can manage it.'

From the corner of his eye, he sees your grip on your arm tighten, nails digging into the flesh as you stomach his explanation.

Sighing, he closes his eyes, stricken by the way he is always compelled to appease you. 'You can do it now, you know. It's not necessary for you to be asleep.' Waving his hand outward, he gestures to the city. 'Look at the world, really look, and tell me what you see.'

Now, you look at him, a searing heat against his profile. The flames of it linger, forcing him to burn in the turmoil of your hesitancy. Perhaps you mean to scorch him, the ire in your eyes churning to a magnitude he doubts you could easily stomach, but he finds comfort in your discontent, soothed, at least partly, by your wrath. This, at least, he understands intimately.

Dejected by his lack of response, you click your tongue as you turn away, finally obedient. Terse in your petulant silence, Chanyeol watches as your eyes glaze over, shimmering against the city lights. Several moments pass while you let it in, weight shifting from foot to foot and breath growing shallow.

Lips falling open, your silent exhale of awe is timed perfectly with the movement of your eyes over absolutely everything, the act of seeing a crisis of contact. Arms loosening, your hands drop to your sides, limp and compelled. He'd apologize for making you look, but you'd have seen it eventually; you are greedy, indiscriminate in your desire to bend the world to your will. One day you'd have realized it was bent and broken before you could command it to be so.

Mouth snapping shut, you shake your head vigorously, eyes squeezed closed as you take a step back. Your axis has shifted, gravity taking you places you did not ask to be, and as you correct your posture, Chanyeol decides to see as you have seen, observing the world as one would a phantom limb.

Even at such great heights, the distant lights of the city still burn his retinas, arching gracefully along the shore line. All that remains around the hangar is a wasteland, neon signs beckoning apparitions of an abandoned town to a cheap paradise. Girls, girls, girls, and no music to accompany the ecstasy.

Far away, the slanted yellow and green of street lights and building lights finds his irises, humanity taking its revenge against him like an incineration. Loss and grief gather in his joints, the whole of history haunting his veins.

The sprawling earth, sordid in all its baneful permutations, is a labyrinth of lost souls, each building a cadaver, the remnants of a feast; his name is torched in the pavement, the limestone; money spent and blood taken; life carved in the same places where it was taken, the taciturn peace little more than a void of last words, failed promises, threats, each scream a ceaseless echo.

Chanyeol sees them all, every body, every limb, every bone; he pulled at them with his teeth, saved some and lost others. On the streets below, people walk in surrender of the evening calm and Chanyeol wonders if they can feel it - the veins of the city, the life that drips slowly through concrete cracks.

You see them too, though your horror is far more palpable. What calm is there to be found when the whole world is merely bleeding at your feet?

Chanyeol hums in acknowledgement. ‘The city is made of our flesh.’

He doesn’t mean for it to sound chastising, but there’s an urgency to the way he needs you to understand he sculpted this city with his tongue, quietly; he did it all in the shadows while the world continues to surrender to the light.

A hiss of revulsion escapes between your teeth, your pointed effort to not look at him relatively amusing. Instead, you peer directly into the glow of a luxury apartment building, doing your best to remaining unscathed. Dubiously, you observe each window with resentment, determining each home is an unburied coffin.

‘Your flesh, sure, but it’s our blood you’ve painted it with.’

Unable to help himself, he laughs. It starts mysteriously in his chest until he cannot help himself, overcome with constant surprise. How you always fight him. How you always completely understand him.

‘You describe it like a heart,’ he says finally, intrigued by your observation. ‘Perhaps it is,’ he shrugs. ‘The heart is a savage thing. Always dripping, always demanding, always pushing itself to its limit. The world is like that.’

Chanyeol looks down at his hands, at the red of his fingertips and the blur into pale white at his knuckles. Leaning forward, he rests his hands on the ledge and grips it, hard enough for his nails to drag, sending sparks drifting into the night.

‘My heart, I fear, is little more than a ditch of blood.’

Now, precisely during a moment in which he will not look at you, you look into him with an enough intensity to pass through his ribs. He hates you for it, but this hate is fleeting, a glimmer of rage that dies swiftly, whelmed by the gratitude of being witnessed.

‘It’s full of life and death, every life of every person or creature I have ever allowed myself to love.’

Furrowing his brow, he stops himself from rearing back at the sound of his voice, at the very shape and texture of the word love. Mind reeling, he searches the empty expanse of darkness, looking sidelong to the where the sea rolls mercilessly against the shore. It's awkward and violent in his mouth, though it is always this way against anyone's tongue, affection never absent of savagery.

Suddenly, he feels young, foolish, childish; he sounds hopeful, pink with the pleasure of having a companion at his side. You are pulling his mortality from repressed corners of his spirit and unable to stop himself, he continues, uncertain if it is out of fear or admiration.

‘Every life gathers in my blood, collecting like a cursed pool.' In an instant, faces flash behind his eyes - some screaming, some weeping - every name he cannot forget. Blinking, he silences them, dissolving them to ether. 'Yet, they all come back to life - over and over again. Do you realize, Hero,’ he says, turning to face you, watching the malice of your pointed stare shift slowly to altruism, wrought with minute understanding, ‘how much happens in the heart? Within a lifetime? An hour? A moment? In taking a life, you take the blood and you always, inadvertently, take the heart.’

It sounds like a plea, and maybe he means it to be.

‘I am damned by the intensity of it. To be perpetually heart-full and grieving the notion that in taking life, in taking the heart, the vulnerability of humanity will continue to choke me.’

Chanyeol straightens once more to his full height, your neck craning back to take him in as the lonely billboard sign changes from red to blue, putting shadows beneath your eyes. You appear to him as a hungry ghost, face long with an unspoken sorrow that swiftly contorts into reticence, soul drifting away and down a river to the sea. Digging his hands into his pockets, he fondles a wad of money with his thumbs, imagining two coins placed delicately over your eyes.

‘After all this time,' he concludes, 'I have come to learn the only truly shared human experience is that no one ever wants to feel naked.’

‘Don’t they, though?’

You step out of the light, allowing yourself to get close to him and returning to your true nature. He's seen so many parts of you in one evening he wonders how much left of you there is to seek, aware even as he muses over this passing thought, that you contain infinitely more inside yourself.

‘Haven't you ever felt seen?' you press. 'By a second glance, the knowledge of someone looking back for you? Or the moment someone says "we need to talk," "I have something to tell you," haven't you ever felt utterly shaken? No one is ever so walled off they can’t…’

Your brave words evaporate, fleeting in fear of what you truly want to say.

‘Be unmade?’ he finishes on your behalf.

You nod, emphatic. ‘Yes.’

Chanyeol smirks. ‘That kind of cruelty looks good on you, Hero.’

'It's not cruelty,' you argue, crossing your arms again as you look back out over the shore. 'It's what it means to be human.'

Chanyeol opens his mouth to speak, but closes it immediately, choosing instead to let you ruminate over your weak rationale. The purse of your lips tells him everything, the confidence in your belief slowly crumbling. To be cruel is to be human, he learned this long ago, and he sees the inscrutable way it lurks in the back of your mind. Cruelty is recognizing precisely that someone is human, and having to learn to stomach all the inevitable disappointments.

Cruelty is love, the same way love is horror and the way horror is bloodshed. Humanity is volatile, kindness reduced to an active choice while cruelty remains its natural proclivity.

Steel eyed, you regard the city lights with conviction, blithely ignoring the way these two sensibilities are synonyms. At your very first meeting, you declared war against him, weaponized your silence as though he would not understand what it means to ache in solitude. You performed the dichotomy beautifully, blossomed inside the rapture of it, yet still persist in believing you were forced into the temperament rather than born in it.

‘Did you ever truly fear me?’ he asks suddenly, expression quizzical and penetrative. Hugging yourself, you shiver under his scrutiny, and he suppresses a laugh. ‘I wonder this often. You committed yourself to fighting me, and most vehemently to winning, I wonder occasionally if you ever gave yourself the opportunity to feel fear.’

‘Of you?’ Taken aback by the question, you eye him conspicuously. ‘No. I’m not usually afraid of men.’ You grow quiet, retreating inward as your expression becomes vacant, likely recalling Kyungsoo and Junmyeon - the exceptions to your rule. ‘I was afraid of what would happen to me,' you surmise finally. 'I am afraid of what will be done to me.’

Even this is not what you truly want to say, what you truly feel. Pride entrenches the very edges of your voice, slinking up the back of your throat. Perhaps you did feel fear, perhaps you would not truly be honest with him. But what you truly want to say, what you truly mean, is that you found yourself in a hall with demons and learned to bring them to their knees; you wandered into the depths of hell, and there you found your courage.

‘From the moment I met you, I felt...' Such an ugly word inside his mouth, and yet he means it, adamantly. 'I felt deeply that you are afraid of yourself, of what you are truly capable of.’

The quickening of your pulse is a flutter of wings, a moth inside a jar, wild and untamed as he speaks. Blood rushes through your veins, waves upon crimson waves louder than the rolling sea, and he relishes the sensation of being correct. Mouth growing wet with the memory of your taste, he swallows thickly, a glutton.

Voice dropping low, gravel gathers in the nodes of his lungs, coal he did not intend collecting in the intonation. Narrowing his eyes, he asks the question that has smoldered behind his teeth too long. ‘Who would you be, Hero, if you no longer feared who you could become?’

The knot in your brow deepens, your spirit growing into a fire determined to mock the sun. Whirling to face him, your heartbeat thunders, monstrously loud and piercing his synapses, a thin blade of fury intent on shaving him down, on peeling him back layer by layer.

‘You're afraid of me, too’ you spit, venom landing a physical blow even though you do your best to remain grievously calm. ‘You think I haven't noticed? You’re not asking me to become me, you’re asking me to become Other. You're asking me to do it for you - like it's a requirement for my survival.'

Incredulous, your embittered laugh eats its way through the darkness. Extending a finger toward him you move to press it into the center of his chest, hands growing into weapons. Catching yourself, you ball your hand into a fist, gesturing around the roof instead.

'I see the way you all look at me,' you continue, wanting all your anger and pain to be held. 'I hear the way you all talk about me. So why would I want that? I don’t want to be something you fear, I want to be something you respect.’

'Those very often can be the same thing,' he counters.

Hearing the retaliatory nature of his rebuttal, you bristle, lips parting in preparation to cut him down. Making an effort to soften, he raises a hand and cuts you off.

‘And you are wrong, you know.' His slippery oscillation between monster and gentleman unsettles him, the trick of your connection ultimately unnerving. Focusing instead on the stench of low tide, the fish and the rot that permeates the air, he breathes deep. 'I’m not interested in having you be yourself or a reader, placing weight on one over the other. I think I'd simply like you to make up your mind. At the very least, I'd like you to realize those things are not mutually exclusive.’

He chews the words the way he would chew bullets, the cock of your hip in the wake of his explanation evidence of your exasperation.

‘Then tell me what it is, really.'

Oh, the way you face him. Immediately the valiance you muster grows wings, the life inside you struggling to burst forth, blossoming in its fury. You stand beneath the billboard light, every bit its opposition. In an instant, you turn the roof into a cosmic arena.

'Tell me exactly what this power is.' Appealing to his better nature, you step even closer. Now he can smell you. Now, he can feel you. 'You said I'm not exactly human so tell me what it can do - and don't dodge the question or spit some vague bullshit I'm supposed to understand.’ Eyes wide and wild, you search his face almost fervent in your distress. ‘I know I can influence and I know I can choose, and...I know we…’

Cannot resist one another, he wants to say; Will be each other’s lethal mirror, he wants to say. He remains silent, watchful.

‘Jinsoo craves it,' you state flatly, avoiding any implication of your bond. 'I felt the way he coveted me. I uncovered that feeling like a memory and I want to understand why. Completely.’

Chanyeol offers you his hand, palm facing upward, the softest action he's made in years. Your chest heaves as you regard his outstretched hand, fingers twitching at your side.

‘Would you like me to show you, instead?’

Hardly a moment passes before your hand drops into his, wholly unafraid of his body. Lacing his fingers through yours, he holds it tightly, hard enough he can trace the lines of your heart and life etched into your skin. The pulse in your mount of venus undulates violently, flush full of adrenaline and heightened by the strength of his grip.

Touching you exhumes the mortal life that has sunk deep inside his bones, reduced to ether after centuries of decay. Touching you, like it always is, is utterly immense, profound. The triumph of life's first breath tears through his lungs, a dagger in each cell as the memory starts to awaken.

The truth, in the end, was that the threat had always been there. It waited, patient and wordless, until there lived the falsehood of complete bliss, until there was absolute joy. This, in the end, made it unbearable, made it so much worse - because it was intimate.

Eun-Hee yearned for her marriage bed with the same conviction a king awaits his death, twenty years old and already hungry to be a wife. In her lush garden, she gathered flowers and bound them tightly with ribbons, fashioning elaborate bouquets and making promises to the bumblebees. Her rehearsed speeches became more extravagant over the years until she was old enough to understand that love is a fleeting experience and commitment is an enduring choice, things she accepted with a heart full of unoffered affection. Only when her vows had been crafted into short expressions full of words that carried the most impact did she begin to grow impatient.

Jongdae mocked her at every opportunity, giggling impishly at the blush that would flood her cheeks. Embarrassed by her older brother's perpetual teasing, she would chase him, and Chanyeol, and occasionally Baekhyun, who ran sluggishly and with indelicate steps, struggling amongst his humor, the dirt on her knees childishly browning her soft skin. She would yell in frustration, and they would laugh with their full chests. Yet, in those days, death had already found them, a penumbra that thrived where the light was most brilliant. Every little action gave way to little consequences, consequences which eventually brought them to their end.

It was Spring when Myun-Suk sold her azaleas at the market. Their fingers touched, brief and glorious, the universe centering itself around this initial contact for a moment and for always. She leaned into the caress, open hearted and heartsick, feeling herself immediately, painfully, connected. From that day forward he inspired a laugh that Jongdae could not, a laugh that existed only for him. Eun-Hee never said she loved him, but on the days she would walk to the market on her own, unchaperoned, just to watch him work, she knew. He carried the sunlight behind his eyes, she said, and she liked watching the stars that lived inside him, the start of a long and arduous surrender.

Kyungsoo chose to remain observant, to endure that magnificent anxiety and envy. Kyungsoo saw it first even though it was not his place, a guilt he would stomach for the rest of his eternity. Deciding early on there was no knife to cut himself from her, to sever his love for her, he became one with her like a shadow. And so, he saw it first.

He saw it first.

The first war room was painted with the blood of the lives sacrificed to build it.

Walking down the long corridor to the main banquet room, Myun-Suk relished extending his hand and dragging his fingers over the carved wood. Letting his nails scratch into the plump bellies of each cherub, he counted every angel, every life massacred to make such a sacred place, each one a memoriam of a life devoured. The acrid scent of death always lingered, never fading, his nose stinging with each breath. Namdae was always by his side, his own hand gliding along the walls, a dimple chiseled into his cheek as he smirked.

This journey was a parade, every time. It had been four hundred years since he last felt his heart, but he was certain it would quake heroically against his sternum if he could, a celebration of his honor as he made his way to each banquet. He had been chosen, gifted both the day and the night, and decided this was reason enough he was closer to a god than a monster, even though both are great and terrible things.

The Reader always sat at the head of the table, his Mistress, his bride. In the dim candlelight, she appeared to glow, completely aflame as the fire attempted to eat her bones. Sitting beside her, he would fondle the veil that covered her face, the ceremonial five pointed crown atop her head signifying her righteousness. She did not press into him the way Eun-Hee would, childishly and often carelessly. Instead, she would sit, still as a statue, immobile in her corset of pleated gold.

The blood that perpetually dripped from her eyes pooled in the center of her lap, the sweet perfume completely intoxicating. With all the tenderness he could manage, which is to say with all his incorrigible bloodlust, he would dip his fingers into the puddle. Right above her mound, he would press the digits, sanctifying himself in her tears at the altar of her thighs. And, slick-fingered, would suck them clean before the members of his coven.

Possessed, not by herself but, by the voices and minds of all her unholy ancestors, the readers who came before and would come after, she would speak. Peering out the windows of her eyes, they provided missions and commands, answers to yet unasked questions, knowing and knowing, while she would tremble, haunted by a malarial agitation within her bones.

‘Your mission progresses.'

Such a small statement of approval, yet inside it lived a thousand voices. The very nature was saturated in evil, all the way down to the language, a command and a hum of approval, a hunger and a thirst all at once. Myun-Suk preened beneath the wickedness of her praises, a vulture clinging tightly to the dominion of his wife.

The very moment she saw Jongdae she determined he would be legion. It was always Jongdae, the one who would win her the war.

One look at him, and she saw the lightning toiling in his irises and smoking in his mouth, tempering every word he spoke - its very volume volatile and tremendous. She craved him something beastly, a deep thunder rolling through the hall every time she spoke his name, creeping along the shadows as a display of his remarkable power. There had never been one like him before, and so she demanded his soul, coveted her impending soldier with matriarchal malice. But lightning could never truly be bottled, elusive in nature and feral in definition.

No, Jongdae would never be hers, not unless she took the cloud first.

And so Myun-Suk had one job, one very simple, very terrible job: kill the cloud. Kill everything that gives the lightning its sky.

Make it hurt so deeply he would think it is the end of the world.

The taking of Eun-Hee would prove to be simple, as would the burning of everything Jongdae had learned to call home, family, hope. Still, Myun-Suk inwardly cringed every time Eun-Hee stroked his cheeks in the hopes of stealing kisses, teeth feeling not unlike blades as he kept them away from her soft flesh until it was time, until the moment was ripe.

‘Why bother?’ he asked, once more dipping his fingertips into the blood in her lap, feasting. ‘All it festers is grief.’

‘Have men gone to war for anything else?’ Peering ominously through her veil, she bled freely as her stained hand twined around his slick fingers, painting one another vermilion. ‘Isn’t every war because of grief? Grief like fear, grief like love? Men never sit with the feeling of loss, they fight it. He will fight, and he will lose.’

Eun-Hee died miserably, painfully, and completely alone save for Myun-Suk who pressed his hand so deeply inside her chest he clawed at her heart until it bled.

Kyungsoo saw it first, unintentionally; he simply wanted to see her, to speak with her, and so he approached the house with jubilant, tender steps.

Kyungsoo saw her body fall to the earth as Myun-Suk sunk his teeth into her still beating heart. It trembled in his palm as he feasted, eyes blackened with passion. Kyungsoo wept, silent and stone faced, all the rage in the universe coiling around his lungs. He regarded the formidable maw and immediately understood why Chanyeol had left them, having experienced a pain so abhorrent he chose to never speak again.

Jongdae found her as their home burned, an inferno that stung his skin even from a distance. Myun-Suk stood with his red mouth, a sneer fixed in the corner of his lips as Jongdae screamed, cradling her against his chest as her vacant expression studied the unfamiliar stars, gazing into the bleak night. There was still so much life inside her, so much of it left behind, but he did not care, did not notice the way he became drenched in the forgotten entrails. It stuck to his hair, his skin, his clothes warm and wet, soaked like a shipwreck.

She emptied herself all over him as he became a void, the blurred vision of Myun-Suk looming over him in the grass. Jongdae called for him, brother, brother, anguished and confused, knowing precisely how she died while hardly understanding it at all. Even then, the Reader saw it; saw the beast superimposed on Jongdae, he and Myun-Suk, one and the same, monsters in the same second.

'We will have you,' Myun-Suk affirmed, licking his lips with a crimson tongue. 'You must earn the right to call me brother.'

Jongdae choked on his refusals, lungs full of ash and fury. He shivered, repulsed, hardly paying any mind to the storm that rolled in over the horizon, called in by his will alone. Ready to fight, and ready to die, he was prepared to join his sister, wanted to tear the world apart until there was nowhere left to live. He'd found the no man's land between life and death; having lost all purpose, he stubbornly continued to persist.

The Reader joined them, standing barefoot in a mud that churned with blood and rain. Jongdae's throat had been ripped raw from screaming, and Myun-Suk braced to silence him with a bite to the center of his throat, but she held him back, her desire larger than anything that could fill it.

'To take him now would give us nothing,' she reasoned, ferried away on a laugh. 'He would bleed out like a riot. I have no power over him tonight. Not yet.'

All along she had seen it, the taking of Eun-Hee the beginning of an end, a cog in a wheel. One body was not enough, one cloud does not make the sky.

'It is not we who will turn him.' She pulled Myun-Suk away, slipped his hand beneath her veil and kissed his palms with the sharp edges of her teeth. 'We must let the fire king devour this spark.'

Even after they departed, Jongdae held her. He needed it, looking her in the eye before he closed the lids with two dripping fingers. He held her long enough he got used to the smell, cried hard enough there were no more tears atop his cheeks, only rain. Screamed loud enough, hard enough, that even atop the hill, cloistered in the monastery with his mouth pressed to a pipe that funneled his breath into flame, Chanyeol could hear the echo of his sorrow.

It was a slow victory, their absence lingering in the ash as everything that remained of Jongdae was taken by hatred.

Chanyeol abruptly releases your hand, elongating his fingers to their full length as his pulse throbs beneath his skin. Arms falling to his sides, he sways slightly, capsizing.

Jongdae's howl of grief is permanent, resonating across the water, making a cathedral of the shipping docks. It careens around the distant city, falling back on his ears in a storming quake. Mouth full of static, he sucks on his tongue, electricity shocking the air the same way it did the night Jongdae finally died, fighting and fighting and, eventually, overcome. The rage still lives, and Chanyeol feels himself suffocate, the tightness in his chest unbearable.

For a long while you do not move, tears leaving behind streaks of moisture across your cheeks. You weep quietly, mortified in your knowing. He could weep for it, too, all his buried humanity the price he paid for existence.

‘And that was when you…’ you mumble, almost perfectly frozen.

‘Yes.’

He doesn't say anything else, certain you've already seen it. His death, his sudden surrender; the unceremonious change of language, brow furrowed as he cried and pleaded with Myun-Suk. Brother. Traitor. Sire. Gasping for breath atop shattered glass, and the magnolia blossoms drifting above him; the leaves, so green, so red, so red; a sunset and an autumn frost of desolation. The acceptance, the relief of never having to survive all the screaming; the heartbreak, the sleep that would not come.

'It's mortal possession, too,' is your strained realization. Now, you understand the truth behind the vision, the pull of Eun-Hee to a man who never loved her - a man she would have never chosen over Kyungsoo, the boy she wanted first.

'Yes,' he says again, the heaving expanse of the earth resting at your feet.

Looking away, he steels himself and stares blankly into a far away apartment building, feeling more akin to a begrudging Lazarus. The earth took him back so benevolently, so appallingly swift and without envy, it took him too long to learn to resent its remembrance. Light from the neon sign slants over his skin, your heavy breathing a wind that rustles the leaves atop his grave and he grimaces, shoving his hands back in his pockets.

Two bullets rest beneath the money. He strokes them, letting the metal cool his skin.

‘You always smell like smoke and blood, like a burning body.’

Startled by your peculiar announcement, his answering laugh awkward inside his mouth. Always so unpredictable, you remain unknown to him; you act, you do, and he finds he is pulled towards you, a lure, a harpoon. With you, everything is possible, and he must learn to account for the endless surprise.

'I didn't realize it until Taeyong...' Uncomfortable, you shift your feet. 'I recognize it now.'

Tilting his head to the side, he studies you, confident his penetrative stare is an inquisition. You hold yourself tightly, but you do not back away, jaw growing tense as you play a game of patience.

‘Does it offend you that I kill?' he questions. 'That I have killed, and will again?’

You shrug, holding his gaze. ‘Does my opinion matter?’

‘Hardly.’

Now, its is you who laughs. Do you recognize the sinister way it starts low, almost silent, until it rises forth, volcanic in its intensity? He supposes you don't, but regardless he remains enthralled in the act of your becoming.

‘No,’ is your consequent admission. The knot in your brow deepens, and you peer off into the distance, searching for a forgotten dream of the future. ‘Sometimes I think you do the things I’ve always wanted to, or thought about doing.’

‘Could you accept,' he begins slowly, stepping close until you can feel him, and he can feel you, radiating together as twin suns, 'that instinct is the same as your desire? That to bite is also to touch?’

The impact of his words etches minute fissures along your stoic expression, your fingers pressing circles into the flesh of your arms. In the cold mirror of your eyes, he sees himself reflected; you, shining beneath the moon and the neon, reflect in his, the icy tendrils of shared understanding burrowing in the canals of his arteries. Silence encroaches you both, and you prepare to speak, jutting your chin forward as though you are readying to confess a crime but you decide against it.

Grateful for your prudence and at once disturbed by the unyielding influence you have over his will, over his severity, he clears his throat, changing the subject.

‘I hope you realize the gravity of your acceptance of this task.’

You catch his meaning quickly, shoulders dropping, relaxed. ‘I’ll need training.’

‘Yixing and Kyungsoo have offered their services.’

Kyungsoo's name puts steel in your spine, though the rigid aftermath does not remain. Blinking several times to clear your vision, your distracted countenance keeps you in conflict, remembering the man who trapped you and the man who loved like eroding mountains.

‘Believe me,' he drawls, fighting back a smirk at your affliction, 'they are the best.’

Impulsively, you step forward, close enough he could touch you, could hold you. Pointedly, your hand moves down your arm where it scratches against the fabric of your long sleeve. His own arm aches at the sight, muscle growing stiff as if you had touched him yourself.

‘And your blood promise?’

Inquisitive, your murderous intent is softened, the question inching towards wonder.

Terse, Chanyeol frowns. 'What of it?'

'Am I bound to you?' you press.

Chanyeol shakes his head, bracing for the weight of what he knows he must say, what he must admit. He wishes he could stop here, to leave it unsaid, but you would never allow it. In all his centuries of existence, it appears you would be his fatal flaw.

‘No,' he manages, gritting his teeth before letting himself fall. 'But I am bound to you.’

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