it took much, much convincing, from every direction he turned to, for him to decide to stay in school. he’d fallen into a sinking depression over it for weeks, certain his unwanted immortality had jeopardized his medical career, at least for the next half century or so. he could barely patch up a human’s paper cut without wanting to eat them first, how could he be expected to get through his shadowings of doctors and surgeons, a residency, a fellowship, surrounded by injured, bleeding, beating-heart humans? humans who were so fragile it was a miracle any of them survived to be sixty, seventy, eighty, let alone a hundred. humans who were rolled into emergency rooms every day leaking life force and fighting death. he’d taken a bite of his friend, a bitter-blooded witch, for less, for scraping his knee like a careless child on a playground.
finish your degree at least, seoyun had insisted, a worried classmate, an unlikely friend and ally found in a hunter trained to kill lost vampires like kyuhwan. at least when kyuhwan had agreed to try, that painful look in kijung’s eyes seemed to fade, just a little. it was in kyuhwan’s nature to feel guilty for it, for upsetting his best friend, for worrying him with his own grief, even if it was that same best friend who had singlehandedly brought him this grief in the first place.
and so, though kyuhwan still saw no point in it, he worked, still, toward his undergraduate degree, packing his bag with more thermoses of blood every day, holding his breath through crowded lectures, focusing on monotonous professorial speeches instead of the living, breathing hearts pulsing all around him.
libraries are harder, because libraries are otherwise so quiet. there is only the scribbling of pencils and the turning of pages to interrupt the symphony of blood pumps filling the aisles. he’s gotten better at distinguishing them from each other: the slow and steady pulse of a focused, relaxed studier versus the fluttering, erratic heartbeat of a student running on caffeine and sheer willpower alone versus the even, percussive heartrate of an adolescent fast asleep on the pages of a textbook they were meant to be reading. but he’s gotten no better at drowning them out, keen, supernatural ears locking on and geolocating each and every one like a radar ingrained into his instinctive psyche. so he relies on music, slipping paganini or vivaldi or bach into his ears and hoping the very human beats around him fade into the background.
he can hear, and smell, one of those beats growing closer to him as he peruses an aisle for yet another book of medical abstracts, this one osteology-centric. he holds his breath and keeps his gaze trained forward, fingers hovering over the spines of the books before landing on the title he’s looking for, and grazing the hand of another, reaching for the same book.
“ah-” he starts to bow his head apologetically automatically, “i’m sorry-”
he turns to let his peer take the book first, pausing when he lays eyes on her face. she is petite, and terribly pretty, hair dyed golden in a way that makes her stand out from the muted tones of the library’s aisle, which she must be in because she’s intelligent and ambitious like the rest of the pre-med students around here, and he immediately knows she is far too immaculate to speak with the likes of him.
“i- i’m sorry,” he apologizes again, this time for blemishing her presence with his own, gesturing to the book on the shelf and stepping back from it to give her a respectful amount of space, “please.”
