"well…there is a way to satiate a vampire without them having to drink blood." "and how do you do that?" he doesn't say anything, pulling your body close to his. he slots your leg between his with a gasp and it doesn't take a genius to understand what he was trying to say. he looks at you with his hazel eyes, almost pleadingly.
૮₍˃̵֊ ˂̵ ₎ა ──── ୨ৎ content: smut MDNI , wc: 5k+
fem!reader x yunho, vampire!yunho, roommates to lovers, desperate yunho, kissing, biting, some blood mentions, oral (f. receiving) unprotected sex, begging, whiny yunho, he just likes your scent
ever since you were young you didn’t believe in vampires. being brought up in a world where they were a dwindling breed, in all your years of being alive, you have never come across one. they were almost a myth to you, an urban legend being taught to every generation just to scare them a bit.
even if you didn't believe, those stories stuck with you. you were always cautious. never staying out too late, never lingering in the shadows of the night if possible. and when it wasn’t possible, you would bring a friend along… just in case of course. typically, that being your roommate, yunho.
you’ve known each other for a few months now, a friendship born from having to share a small space that you both found through a neighborhood ad. you would both show up at the apartment at the same time, attempting to claim the spot and ultimately settle on sharing.
sometimes a dinner or two would be had when he was up for it, though he never ate. the walks in the night were typically quiet ones, only small conversations about classes or if we liked a professor.
you’ve never paid too much attention to yunho, he often keeps to himself. he's usually holed up in his room, presumably studying, but you couldn’t be sure when every night as you walked by his door it would be completely dark.
you were often curious about him, his appearance and his aura intrigues you. and as much as it also pulls you in, it also puts you off. sometimes you think about how his skin appears almost too pale and from the little touches you’ve spared, too cold. his dark hair that casting over his eyes, that sometimes appeared black… he was too beautiful to simply be a human.
but recently, something has been different about him, something you couldn’t quite place.
with a yawn, you pull yourself out of bed, throwing on a sweater and shuffling to your bedroom door to get breakfast from the kitchen. you’re startled by a tall, dark figure standing on the other side. his hand frozen in mid-air, curled into a fist, it looked like he was about to knock on the door.
“jesus-” you curse, clutching onto your chest. you look up yunho, who was looking at you sheepishly, his hands now knotted together in front of him. he looked handsome. his black hair ruffled from rest and his collar was exposed by the black shirt he wore.
“sorry, didn’t mean to scare you,” he apologizes, his voice soft. he looks down the hall and then back at you. with a sniff you take notice of the smell of food lingering in the air. "i-i wanted to tell you that i made breakfast." he finishes with a gentle smile.
you hum, happy that you didn't have to make something for yourself. you walk past yunho, brushing against him as you leave the room. you miss the way yunho stays behind, taking in a deep breath when you're halfway down the hall, saliva starting to pool in his mouth.
he has to pinch himself hard to snap out of it, his fangs almost tempted to come out. he turns his head, watching as you walk to the kitchen, a blush rising to his face as he puts a hand up to cover his mouth.
when you come home from class at dusk, you weren't surprised to find the place quiet and dark. the curtains in the living room were closed and there wasn't any sign that anyone was home. the only thing that gave away yunho's presence was how cold it was inside. he liked it that way and you were willing to comprise on him the place cold since you liked wearing sweaters.
"yunho?" you call out. you wanted to ask if he would like to partake in dinner tonight. you brought back some food to eat together. well, for you to eat as yunho would mostly watch you and talk more than consume it.
there was no response even after you waited a minute. you place the takeout on the kitchen counter and make your way to yunho's room. the light was off as usual and you couldn't hear anything when you pressed your ear to the door. maybe he wasn't home…
"yuyu," you call out the nickname that he adopted while living with you and knock on his door. it was three small taps, but they felt loud in the silent home. you hear a gasp, muffled by the door being shut, and then footsteps getting closer to the door. you take a step back and wait for him to open it, some ruckus could be heard as you rock on your heels.
when he does swing the door open he was panting heavily and he had a hood on over his head, big enough to cover the upper part of his face. his hands were shoved in the pockets of the hoodie and he doesn't look up when he speaks, "hey…"
"hi," you start, bending down a bit to get a look at his face. he dips his head lower and you give up, standing up straight. "i brought dinner back if you want to eat with me?" you hopefully invite him. you really did want to spend time with yunho, it's been a while since the last time. if felt like recently, he's been avoiding you at night more often than usual.
"uhh, not tonight. sorry i have some studying to do." he explains, taking a hand from his pocket and reaching up to rub the back of his neck. it would soon come to be a mistake as when he removed it, he also removed the hood from over his head.
you gasp when you get a look at his face. he look pale, paler than usual, his under eyes were red and his lips were chapped. he looked sickly.
"hey, are you alright?" you ask, furrowing your brows and taking a step closer to him. you reach a hand out to press a hand against his face, but yunho flinches away. he goes to escape in his room and before the door could shut behind him, you stick your foot in. you follow behind him and for the first time you enter yunho's room.
it was your ordinary room with a bed, a desk with all his study material, drawers full of clothes, socks and textbooks littered the floor, there was nothing out of the ordinary. it was even chillier in here than anywhere else in the house and you shiver as you step deeper inside. the only light was coming from a tiny lamp that resided on his desk next to his computer.
yunho goes to sit on his bed and jumps when he sees you standing in front of him. he looks up at you eyes wide and he stammers, "w-why'd you follow me?" his fingers twiddle in front of him and he worries his bottom lip as he waits for your response.
"you don't look well," you crouch down in front of him and his gaze follows you down. he swallows when you shuffle closer to him, pressing a hand against the skin of his neck. he doesn't flinch away this time when you do, to fixated on how close your wrist was to his mouth. "you don't have a fever." you mumbled to yourself.
he could feel the saliva pooling in his mouth and he bit his bottom lip harder to contain the urge to turn his head and let his fangs pierce the skin.
you rise up on your knees and get eye level with him. you lean forward and yunho leans back, he was sure if he had to bit on his bottom lip any harder, he would pierce it. your hand reaches for his forehead, pressing against the cool skin gently. your eyes search his face and you pause when you get a glimpse at his eyes.
they weren't the usual dark black, instead they were almost a hazel color, gold even. maybe it was just the lighting of the room, but you were certain that they looked different. besides, a lamp couldn't make dark eyes look almost translucent, could they?
yunho's breathing picks up as you drag your hand down to his cheek, tracing your thumb under his eye. he blinks heavily, glossy eyes looking at you expectantly. what he was expecting though, you weren't sure.
"your eyes," you whisper, leaning in closer. your lips were mere inches apart now, but you weren't focused on that. yunho's eyes quickly flit to your mouth before finding yours again, if he had any blood in his system, he was sure he would blushing right now.
"what about them?" he breaths deliriously, he was intoxicated by the smell of you being so close to him. he would typically only catch of whiff as you walk beside him or past him, he would steal sniffs often at dinner when you weren't looking and even that he couldn't handle.
with you this close to him… how was he supposed to hold himself back?
"they're… hazel. aren't they usually darker than this?" you curiously ask.
hazel? his eyes are only hazel when… yunho rapidly blinks as he jumps up, shoving you to the side and you land on your ass with a soft thud. you hardly process anything as yunho rushes out the bedroom.
"i-i'm sorry, i have to go." he says as he leaves and you hear the front door slam a few seconds after. you scoff, bewildered by what just happened. you don't think to much about it, getting up from off the floor and cocking your head in confusion as you head back to your own room.
yunho started to avoid you after that, it's going on for the second week now. he didn't come knocking on your door for breakfast, join you for dinner, or even walk you home from class. you had to substitute with some girls that you made acquaintance with that happened to live nearby.
even when he was home, he made sure to only come out when he knew you were in your room, which was often late at night. tiptoeing around the place as if you couldn't hear him or staying cooped up in his room with the door locked. you know that cause you tried one night, yunho quickly turning of the lamp in his room.
you couldn't understand what was wrong…all you did was ask about his eyes. maybe they were contacts and he was too embarrassed to admit it, but did that warrant him avoiding you completely?
you caught sight of him on campus once, it was a cloudy day and he was walking with one of his friends down the pathway that you were coming up. he looked worried, his eyebrows were raised and he was talking really fast. when he wasn't speaking he was gnawing on his bottom lip and nodding at what the other person said.
it was like he knew you were there, his head suddenly snapping towards you and his eyes widening when he finds yours. you opened your mouth to say something, but he grabs his friends arm and whirls them in another direction, speeding off. his friend caught off guard, but once he turned around and got a glance at you, he seemed to understand. he wrapped an arm around yunho and said something with a laugh.
you huffed with irritation and started grumbling as you made your way to your final class of day. it was then when you decided you would get to the bottom of this tonight, you would wait for him all night if you had to…
yunho cracked the door open, peeping his head through to make sure you were nowhere to be found. it looked empty, no lights were on and was pretty quiet. he stepped through, kicking off his shoes and with a sigh leaning against the door.
he brung a hand to his face, rubbing at his eyes as he shook his head. what was he doing? how long could he realistically keep this up, you lived together for christs sake! he stops his inner monologue when he catches a familiar scent, freezing in his spot. fuck…
he lifts his head slowly and finds you walking up to him, you didn't look too happy. yunho reached a hand behind him, fumbling to find the door handle.
"don't- don't you do it, i will chase you down…" you threaten.
you were taken slightly aback when yunho laughed, it was small, deep chuckle that make your heart flutter just a little bit. you furrow your brows, "i'm serious."
he drops his hand from the knob and sighs, pushing himself off the door and walking straight past you and towards his room. he doesn't even spare another glance your way as he keeps going.
"hey, i wasn't done talking to you!" your voice raises as you follow him and before he could enter his room, you grab his arm and spin him around. with all the strength you could muster, you push him against his door and cage him between your arms. yunho inhales sharply, his palms plastered to his door.
"why have you been avoiding me?" you ask with some anger laced in your voice. not true anger, you were just frustrated with how he's been acting lately.
"i-i haven't been avoid-"
"liar," you interject, taking a step closer. "i saw you the other day, you ran away once you saw me. what do you call that?"
yunho couldn't breathe, you were way too close. your scent was practically being forced up his nose, the saliva was starting to build and his fangs were begging to be pushed out. he had to get out of here, but he was trapped. he was strong enough to move you out of the way, but he was also weak for your scent, it was starting to cloud his mind.
"i just…" he breaths, squeezing his eyes shut and hoping he wouldn't give in to his desires. it was getting harder to more exposed he was to your scent, not only was getting hungry… he was also getting horny.
"just?" you press, getting even closer. your breasts push against his chest and you can feel the way he's breathing, fast and heavy. there's a tension building that you can't ignore.
he's once again put in the position where your lips where close to his, he only has to lean in a tad bit and they would touch. his eyes wander down to your neck, this is the first time he takes in what your wearing. he traces your collarbone, exposed in the tank top you are wearing and he licks his lips.
you snap a finger in front of his face and his head snaps to your wrist, lips parting as he stares intensely. he swallows heavily, his fangs threatening to expose themselves as he slides his teeth along the tip.
fuck, he's gonna lose it. the one thing he was hoping to avoid was finally going to happen because he was an idiot who doesn't know how to control himself. he was to do something, anything to stop himself from biting you.
he slowly turns back to look at you, his eyes drift to your mouth and he slips them shut before closing the tiny gap between the two of you. your lips are soft against his, gentle as you slowly kiss him back. he opens wider, tilting his head and allowing the kiss to get deeper.
yunho's hands wrap around your waist as he shoves his tongue into your mouth. he moans as you reciprocate, swirling your tongue with his as your arms come up to wrap around his neck. he leans down, making the angle better as he shoves tongue impossibly deeper. it's as if he's trying to eat you…
he dips his mouth to your neck, he drags his tongue up along the vein there, making you shiver. he leaves little kisses and starts to nibble at the skin. he shouldn't be this close… he's going to do something that he'll regret.
he can feel his fangs extending, far past being able to retract them. he tilts your head to the side, eyeing your neck as he growls low in his throat. he opens his mouth, baring his fangs and heading for the bite.
"fuck-" he groans, letting you go and shoving you away. it was almost a repeat of two weeks ago when he shoved you on the floor of his bedroom. he turns around and leans his head against the door, slamming a fist against. you jump, heavily breathing against the other wall, trying to collect yourself.
you can hear his ragged breathing from where you stand, his back rising and falling heavily. the veins in his hand prominent as he grips it tightly. you want to reach a hand to place on his shoulder, but you were bit afraid…
it only lasts a second. hesitantly, you take a step forward, "you okay?"
"don't." yunho sternly says. it makes you pause for a second, but you needed to know what's wrong. the reason why he shoved you so suddenly, was he feeling sick again? once your close enough, you place a hand on his shoulder. he tenses under your touch, his breathing getting even heavier, like he was hyperventilating.
slowly, you face him back in your direction. yunho's hands flies up to cover his face, they were trembling slightly and that made you worry even more.
"yuyu," you gently say, taking his hands and moving them from his face. you try not to gasp, but fail, when you take him in. just like two weeks ago, his eyes were that hazel color, rimmed with red underneath, but that wasn't all…he had little fangs that peeked through his plush lips.
he shies away, shaking your hands off of him and turning his head to the side in shame. he nervously fiddles with his fingers as you stare.
"you're…" you wanted to say what he was, but you couldn't. you were too shocked. all this time you've been living with the thing that you didn't believe in. which means all those stories your parents told you as a child, were true…
"a vampire, yes." he says it for you, barely above a whisper. you take a step back and yunho turns to look at you, sadness in his eyes. "i'm not gonna hurt you."
"how do i know that?" you question, taking another small step back. you hated to admit that you were afraid of the man that you thought you knew.
"don't you think if i wanted to, i would have already," he argues, curling into himself. it was like he was trying to prove to you that he wasn't scary, that he wasn't going to kill you like the myths say. "why do you think i've been avoiding you now?" he huffs.
"because,"
"it's because," he says as he steps towards you and you step back until you hit the wall. he crowds you, caging you in now and leaning down to whisper with a whine in your ear, "you smell so good." he takes a deep breath and moans as he does.
your skin prickles, all the way down to your toes. is this really okay, living with a vampire? i mean, you have been living with him all this time and nothing has happened, but that doesn't mean it can't. look at what just happened, was he not about to bite you?
"how can i trust you, hm? what if you try to bite me again?" you breathily say, arousal spreading through you as he brushes his nose against your neck, nibbling and licking at your ear, his fangs dragging against the skin. he places his hands on your waist, caressing the skin there as he leans back.
"i-there is a solution, but…" he starts, his eyes wide and almost puppy-like.
"what is it?"
"well…there is a way to satiate a vampire without them having to drink blood."
"and how do you do that?"
he doesn't say anything, pulling your body close to his. he slots your leg between his with a gasp and it doesn't take a genius to understand what he was trying to say. he looks at you with his hazel eyes, almost pleadingly.
"it hurts so bad," he whines, grinding against your thigh. he grips onto your shirt as his movements gets faster the more he inhales your scent.
"easy there," you grab him by the face and caress his cheek. he leans into it, whimpering at the gentle touch and his hip movements slow down against your leg. "i'll help you."
you lead him into his own room, he follows behind you closely as you lay down on his bed and beckon him forward. he happily climbs over you, straddling your waist and blinking at you waiting for instruction.
"for someone who was just ravishing me, you're being so docile." you laugh, pulling him down by his shirt and smashing your lips together. he moans into the kiss, tenderly slipping his tongue back into your mouth as his strokes your sides.
"please," he whimpers, licking all around your mouth.
"what is that you want?" you ask him.
"please, wanna taste you…" he whispers, kissing around your face. he drags your tongue along your cheek and back down to your neck. your heartbeat picks up when he leave wet kisses and bites it, likely leaving behind a hickey.
he kisses down your body, leading to in between your legs. once he's there, he looks up at you in question, his fingers gripping the waistband of you shorts. "your scent is strongest here," he moans, licking against the fabric and pressing his nose there.
you run your hand through his hair with a nod, yunho keens. he strips you out of both your shorts and panties, licking his lips at the sight of your bare cunt. he wastes no time diving down, gripping your thighs, and lapping at the wetness that was gathering there with a loud groan.
he relentlessly licks and licks, sliding his tongue up and down and occasionally fucking you with it in a way that makes you gasp every time. you start to grind against him, your hips rocking against his tongue.
"so fucking good," he moans comes out muffled before sucking on your clit. you tense up, hands latching onto his hair and tugging on it harder the longer he sucks. your thighs squeeze around him and your toes curl from the pleasure.
"yuyu," you call out his name and he hums, the vibration right against your clit. yunho feels like he could die right now - he loves every part of this. how wet you are, how heavy your scent is, how you taste… he can't get enough of you.
he loves it so much, he doesn't even realize that he was grinding against his mattress. his cock sweetly dragging between his stomach and the bed, his orgasm building up.
"yuyu, i'm gonna cum!" you yelp, you voice slightly shaky as you fist the strands of his hair. yunho's cock pulses in his pants at that, a spurt of precum shooting at at the thought of making you cum from just his tongue.
you grind against his face as you chase your orgasm, one final drag of his tongue brings you to the edge. you loudly moan with a gasp, legs trembling in his hands as you cum into his mouth. yunho instantly cums with high pitched whine when he gets a taste, hungrily licking every drop, being sure none gets left behind.
he pulls back with wet lips, licking at the remains. his fangs are visible and you were curious how he was so careful with them. his golden eyes bore into you as he watched you come down from your orgasm. he rises to his knees between your thighs, palming at his dick that was hard again.
you watch as he bites on his bottom lip while touching himself, taking notice of the large wet spot that stained the front, eyebrows creased in pleasure as he hips jerk forward.
"that wasn't enough was it?" you coo at him, making him whine with a nod. you tell him to come closer, pushing your finger against his thumb until he let it go from the grasp of his teeth.
"you're gonna hurt yourself," you complain, tracing his bottom lip. he looks at you with glazed over eyes, you're not even sure if he can understand you. he looked completely out of it. you don't know when your mind flipped, but you take in a breath before saying, "if you really need something to bite, bite me."
yunho sputters, "i-i couldn't possibly do that…it's dangerous." his eyes drop to your neck briefly. you lean forward to leave a chaste kiss on his lips.
"i trust you, only do it if you really have to, okay?" he nods in understanding. you wrap your legs around him, pulling your bodies together. "now, are you gonna fuck me or not?"
yunho groans, pulling his cock from his sweats. he was huge, way larger than you expected. the tip was pink and leaking with precum. he grabs a hold of himself, spreading the liquid down his length. he lines himself up with you, his large hands gripping your hips.
slowly, he pushes inside and you both moan at the same time. he takes his time, the wet, tight, warmth of your pussy too much for him that if he goes too fast, he might cum on the spot. he does gentle thrusts, whimpering with every push forward, he hits the right spot every time, driving you crazy.
"you feel so good," he whines into your ear as he leans down, his hips snapping forward suddenly with each word. his eyes roll back into his head as his drives into rougher, deeper. your hands grip onto the pillow below you, yunho's pillow. "f-fuck," his voice was shaky as his mouth finds your neck once again, leaving sloppy kisses everywhere.
you tilt your head and allow him more access, clenching around his cock every time he would bite down on it. every thrust knocking the breath out of you as he punches forward, desperately moaning out your name as he does. "so good," he says on repeat.
a surprised moan comes out when you feel his fangs against your neck, a low rumble in yunho's chest as they run along the warm skin. he doesn't know how much longer he can hold back, so close to your neck and feeling so good, biting you could make it feel even better…
he goes to bite on his lip, then stops himself when he remembers what you said. he hesitates for a second, only a second though as you swallow and he watches the way your throat bobs.
he launches forward, attaching his mouth to your neck. he bites as gently as he can, his sharp teeth sinking into your flesh, a loud moan comes from you at the feeling. your orgasm knocks into you full force, your cunt pulsing around yunho.
"ngh, you taste so good" he chokes out, cumming as soon as he gets a taste of your blood. it was sweet, just like the smell and he didn't want to stop sucking. the high that was running through him was to good to let up, his whole body fuzzy and light to more he drank. how long has it been since he's had human blood?
you could feel yourself getting lightheaded, it didn't feel bad paired with your orgasm. yunho shooting ropes of cum in you, his cock endlessly twitching deep inside of you. he drinks your blood feverishly, completely in bliss as he practically drains you. you can faintly hear the sounds of him sucking and slurping through your haze.
"yunho…" you whisper, reaching hand into his hair and tugging back with the little strength you had.
he jerks back, detaching himself from your neck with a moan. his eyes were back to normal, the red under them gone, leaving behind his typical pale and porcelain skin. he licked his lips that were stained red from the blood, heavily breathing.
once he's back to, he sighs with a heavy look on his face. he carefully takes his cock out of you with a hiss, grabbing a blanket to cover both him and you. he takes himself and his blanket to the edge of the bed, head down. "i'm sorry," he mumbles.
you blink, confused as you sit up (a little to fast for someone who just had their blood taken) and look at him. you slide towards him, leaning over to make eye contact with you. he had tears in his eyes.
"why are you crying?" you ask, reaching to wipe them away. he smacks your hand away as he turns and looks at the two holes he left behind, a tiny stream of blood leaking from both of them. you bring a hand to the wound and aren't surprised when you find blood on your fingers.
"is that why?" he eyes your neck and fingers with wet eyes and nods. he looked ashamed about what he had done, putting his head in his hands with a sniffle. "I'm fine." you reassure him, rubbing soothing circles against his broad back.
"you're pale, i was draining the color from your face. i bit you for too long, i almost couldn't stop myself, what if i cou-" he rants, his voice getting more worrisome with each word. the tears slide down his cheeks when he lifts his head up, eyes red.
"hey, i stopped you in time didn't i?"
"yes, but-"
"but what? i'm fine. i'm sure you weren't going to hurt me, you stopped."
"hardly," he mutters to himself, rubbing the spot with his thumb and pouting.
as you stare at the boy in front of you, with puffy eyes and equally puffy lips, you wonder why you were so scared at first. you kiss him, a small one that catches yunho of guard for a second.
"besides," you wipe a tear from his face. "i never said i didn't like it." you finish with a smile. yunho pauses, searching your face for a hint of joke.
"you liked it?"
you nod and he smashes your lips together, making out with you messily. your blood mixing with your saliva was a taste that you didn't mind too much. you feel his fangs graze your bottom lip and you pull back. his eyes were no longer dark, they were back hazel and he was staring at you yearningly.
"does that mean i can do it again?" he breaths against your lips.
ch. 1: walls
pairing: Vampire!Yunho x Reader
genre: pre-established relationship, magic, angst, smut, fighting
warnings: claustrophobia, mentions of blood, violence, shower sex, fighting, mentions of c*tting (not for the purposes of s3lf harm), drinking blood, nightmare
♡ series masterlist ♡
The walls close in.
Bit by bit they seal your fate. The only door taunting you as you tug and pull frantically.
One wall touches your shoulder, pushing you with it. You push against it, legs pushing against the floor as if you could force the whole thing back. Frenzied movements against the ground change as you turn around to claw at it. Maybe attempting to climb or maybe trying to dig through the wall. There wasn’t a plan or hope, just pure desperation. Resting against it on your shoulder giving one last push, you become aware of the tears. There’s nothing else to do as the other wall finally touches your other shoulder.
The weight of both walls restrict and move you. The pressure filling you at once then more and more. You feel sharpness shoot out of your gums and on instinct cry out before biting down hard.
“OW! FUCK”
Your eyes shoot open. Thank god it’s over. You recognize the warmth within a second before anything else comes back to you. Slowly, you feel the arms around you and the head resting against yours. You feel the neck bleeding from where your fangs are still sunk in and the wetness from your tears on the exposed skin all the way down between you.
Gently, you remove your mouth, laving over the wound carefully. It would heal quickly anyway but this was your unspoken apology. Like a dog licking their owner after misbehaving.
Only this wasn’t your fault. You breathed out qwuelling the familiar anger that wanted to bubble up. This wasn’t the time. You wanted all the comfort that came from being right there.
“Which dream?”
“The walls” you replied quietly.
“I’m sorry.” his sleep filled voice was sincere. You knew that. Yet you again couldn’t respond to it. You never could.
“I don’t wanna sleep anymore.” a sob building in your throat, he nods. He knows better than to speak right now. Swiftly, he moves to the edge of the bed with you still in his arms. He scoops you up fully as he stands to bring you to the bathroom.
As he starts the shower, you don’t dare look at the mirror. He glances over as he plays with the shower knobs, noticing your aversion to it. The face he loves completely wet with tears, slightly red from both released and held emotions, mouth and chin covered in blood-his- and eyes downcast and far away. He sighs turning back to the water.
You don’t notice he’s walking back until he’s right in front of you pulling up your shirt. He helps you shed your clothes before doing the same to his own. He guides you into the water, watching you carefully for some sign that it helps. He nearly smiles seeing your shoulders relax.
With careful hands he rubs at the drying blood with his thumb. You look up as if finally seeing him for the first time since you woke up. Your eyes stare at him with no hint of the conflict you felt moments prior.
You could see him clearly again. Your Yunho. The one you loved so deeply.
He’s simultaneously your savior and your jailor. The one that locked you in this prison disguised as a home yet saved you. He saved you from the dark depths of bloodlust and insanity though he dropped you into its grasp to begin with.
Yet when you look at him in moments like this it feels like he hung the moon. Everything is done with care for you, a smile gracing his lips most of the time as he does whatever you ask.
Though you were still a little dazed he knew the signs of what you wanted as you placed your hands gently on his neck. He searched your face a moment more for something before feeling satisfied to lean in. He gave you what you wanted when he could. He gave you pleasure every moment you wanted it and his arms for comfort when you needed.
In hot and heavy moments like these he always gave his all but now pushed himself past that to try to atone for the sin he committed against you.
His body pushed yours against the wall. Your hands slid down, holding his waist as you surrendered yourself to him. The feeling of his lips giving you more than you could ever want from a kiss. He tried to explain it before but you just cared it was him.
Passionately, he held you tightly as he fucked you against the slippery shower wall. Nails digging into his wet shoulders as he rolled and grinded his hips into you again and again. Your lips barely parted as he brought you over the edge twice.
You watch him quietly as he dries you, attentively patting every wet spot with the fluffy towel.
When he finally reaches your neck and notices your eyes on him he smiles. A hint of nervousness in it not going unnoticed. You simply smile and give him a sweet peck.
*
“One hour!”
“No.”
“Thrity minutes!”
“No.”
“Five minutes?” you were getting desperate now.
He paused what he was doing as if considering it. Though he wasn’t looking at you, it sparked a miniscule amount of hope until…“Nope.”
“UGHHHHHHH”
You begged him everyday to let you go outside. The off white walls of your apartment were honestly starting to make you sick.
It has been 6 months since the night Yunho turned you.
His words from that night haunted you constantly in the beginning. “I killed you.” Things were better now but they just sat in the back of your brain for dark or quiet moments where you were left with only your thoughts.
“It’s for you and everyone else. It’s-”
“Not safe.”you sighed finishing the familiar sentence with him. “I know”
A sad look drew down his handsome features. “You're still too unstable.”
You sat up. “How do you know? I’ve been cooped up for so long my body must be used to whatever now!”
He wanted to sigh and tell you it’s not “whatever”, considering he has explained the changes multiple times but instead, he smiled. “Maybe you're right. It’s got to be fine now.”
He stopped chopping vegetables to take a container from the cabinet. “I forgot to tell you I made these.” He pulled the lid of so you could see the small pastries.
You perked up as you grabbed one. “Thank you! Do you really mean it though?”
“We have to be sure like you said.”
You weren’t sure what changed his mind so easy this time since you were sure you made that argument before but you weren’t going to question it. Taking a huge bite of the sweet treat your brows furrowed.
Goosebumps spreading, tastebuds tingling, skin warm, fangs emerging. As you finally looked down you saw the red running down your hand. You instinctively licked your lip tasting it further.
The answer was obvious but you looked to Yunho. “What’s in this fucking thing?”
He took another bite of his. “You don’t like filling?”
He smiled, his fangs on display.
“F-F-u-ck,” your body pulsed roughly. You sunk to your knees with palms flat on the floor while your mouth watered profusely. Eyes glowing red, you looked up to where your boyfriend was knelt in front of you. He swiped his hand in the air as some of the pain and odd sensations dissipated. You knew he took away some of the pain as he had before. This time it made it slightly more bearable. Before it only dulled the pain enough to keep you from tearing at everything in your proximity.
You felt like a rapid animal as you regained a piece of your senses.
“Yeah baby, six months isn’t enough.”
*
Yunho’s mind couldn’t rest.
He watched you slept peacefully as he sat worried in the dark. You slept so soundly it was as if your life was as it was six months ago. Before he ruined your life.
That night haunts him constantly. He’s wanted to leave for so long, knowing he doesn’t deserve you. Someone who ruined your life doesn’t deserve your kindness and love. But he also knew he couldn’t abandon you to deal with the intense change he caused. It was better to stay by you rather than run like a coward.
He thinks about how the one spark of awareness saved him from ripping your jugular out. The one hint of your smell activated the smallest part of recognition to pull him back from the most monstrous vampiric instincts.
The vision of you naked bleeding out in his arms was almost too much to bear. Knowing he did it made him more lost. He acted without thought, moving not of his own volition. He watched like a passenger in his own body as he sliced at his arm and put the wound to your mouth. It dripped down your throat steadily.
His dark blood spilled from your mouth.
He waiting with bated breath before you convulsed. Eyes popping open to glow red before your throat released the worst scream he ever heard. So inhumane he feared he made a worse choice.
Through his squinted eyes as he flinched away from the sound he saw the fangs emerging in your open mouth.
Your eyes bled human red before running his darker color.
The screaming finally ceased. Your body began to sway. Yunho quickly caught your shoulders once again as you fell back.
He was breathing hard as the trauma of what just unfolded set in.
He couldn't dwell on it as he got to work preparing for when you woke up.
Currently he sighed as he pushed away the horrible memory.
He had to figure out the best course of action for what comes next.
A quick text was sent before he climbed into bed behind you. His heart swelled as he felt you move into his warmth more before relaxing.
He loved you so much that he could never forgive himself but maybe one day you could.
characters: vampire photographer!yunho ft. bartender!wooyoung and fae prince!hongjoong
description: In order to help his friend Wooyoung heal, Yunho takes a big risk to frame a bad man using his camera.
word count: 10.2k
warnings: swearing, murder, blood, death, dead bodies
author’s note: SO MANY THINGS ARE HAPPENING. 1) this is the longest fic ive ever written for this acc 2) first fic ive written in so long and it feels so good to write again 3) I wrote this for nanowrimo 4) this is yunho’s long long long belated birthday present. finally the birthday fics are all complete god fucking bless 5) I strongly strongly strongly recommend you read corpsehands first in order to understand some nuances but you can still read this as a standalone (im gonna expand the corpsehands universe and try to write smth for all ateez members). anyways hi again. buckle up. get fucked. enjoy
part 2 of The Sinisterwise Series; masterlist here
A glass of the reddest Sanguine wine longed for Yunho on the wooden bar table, and the bartender that had made it for him ached similarly.
Wooyoung’s speakeasy job allowed him to talk to all sorts of unique faces, so there was never a shortage of conversation for him to enjoy while working and pouring illegal alcohol for all supernatural beings that knew about this underground establishment. Usually, the interactions filled him with life in the same way he could give life through his hands to corpses – but the death of his Seelie fae friend Helio had grasped him by the hands and had drained him of his vitality. Every time a Seelie fae entered the bar with their insignia pinned onto their cloak, Wooyoung was thrown back into the terrible past, his hands remembering all too vividly the feeling of Helio’s shirt on his fingers when he had gripped it and the color of the blood and bruises that coated Helio when he had laid motionless on the speakeasy floor. All of this haunted him, but what Wooyoung was most preoccupied with were Helio’s last words to him – “you saved me. Wooyoung, how?”
The words had tugged and gnawed at him so much that he couldn’t find it in him to speak to customers joyfully anymore. The truth of the matter was that he hadn’t saved Helio – he had removed his healing hands and had let Death take the reins away from him. He had watched the life leave Helio’s eyes. He had seen the funeral procession in the newspapers. Speakeasy frequenters couldn’t understand where their bubbly and amiable Wooyoung had gone – Helio’s death had broken him, and Wooyoung was helpless to find the pieces to stitch himself together again.
When the noise of the bar died down and customers left, Wooyoung was able to find a break in his schedule. He walked into the bartender’s lounge in the back of the speakeasy. On the table, next to a pile of papers one gust away from being strewn across the floor, was a brand-new candlestick telephone that Wooyoung had purchased with the speakeasy’s net gain of profit they had seen recently. Wooyoung spun the dial to a phone number he knew by heart, put the phone to his ear, and prayed that the recipient would pick up.
Wooyoung bit his lip while the phone buzzed. He had to answer the phone – Wooyoung had gone on months without getting better, and the recipient was one of few people he could trust and believed could make some real closure for him. The recipient couldn’t make Helio alive again, no one could, but perhaps he could be Wooyoung’s hands of revenge in the exact places where Wooyoung’s own hands had failed so fatally. Wooyoung didn’t know what he would do if the recipient wasn’t available.
Another ring. Wooyoung was nervous. Vampires were faster than this.
But then the phone clicked and Yunho’s warm voice was in his ears – “Hello?”
Wooyoung’s eyes welled up. “Yunho,” he said, warmth flooding through his body. “It’s Wooyoung. Yunho, I need your help.”
A few days later, Yunho traversed through a dim and busy street, his black coat whipping against the autumn wind. The rain didn’t help the dimness of the street, or the fact that the wind was pushing the rain onto him, but Yunho trudged on in his leather-clad boots. He slid by warlocks gossiping about potions and avoided werewolves that were on their way home for evening dinner, searching for the alleyway that gave the entrance to Wooyoung’s speakeasy. One hand held his umbrella and the other clasped a brand-new 1922 Kodak camera with a strap around his neck for extra support. There was nothing to photograph at the moment, and certainly, the rain would make it much harder to do so, but Yunho carried it around him like an appendage for the constant purpose that there might be something worth documenting. That was something Yunho had learned in his centuries of living – there was never a shortage of photographs to be taken, and when there were photos to be taken, those were the chances Yunho could grab to make his own story.
Yunho entered the alleyway containing the speakeasy entrance and threw it open. He was greeted with a pitch-black and musty-smelling hallway that contained more doors. The dark was no issue, he could see fine in the dark, but the smell overpowered his already powerful senses and left him reeling for a few moments while his nose calmed down. He could hear the faint tinging of glasses and laughter tens of feet away, and he used that to choose the right door to the speakeasy. Once in front of the door, Yunho knocked the specific pattern Wooyoung had told him – it changed every week – and a burly fae with muscles bigger than his head greeted him at the door. Yunho opened his mouth to say hello, but the bouncer interrupted his introduction. He poked at the camera in his hands and Yunho stiffened.
“You can’t bring witchcraft like this in here,” he said gruffly. His eyes narrowed.
Yunho, who was expecting worse from this large man, relaxed. His eyes glimmered as he became more relaxed around this bouncer. “It’s a broken camera,” he said, nodding. “Look.” Yunho picked up the camera and pointed the lens right at himself. “Take a look at the display.”
“Listen, I don’t know what you’re–” the bouncer began, but Yunho smiled at him so blindingly that he sighed. He looked at the display like Yunho had asked him, folding his beefy arms across his chest as he leaned in to see.
And instead of an image of Yunho, where the lens was pointing, the camera showed just the background around him. It was like the camera could see directly through him, an unimportant view when compared to the scenery around him.
“You see?” He said, laughing. “This damn thing is so bad at picking up things that even if I did take a photo, it wouldn’t be worth anything.” He flashed a toothy smile, fangs glimmering. The bouncer looked at him for a moment more, like he was contemplating kicking him in the rear to send him far outside of the store, and then his shoulders relaxed.
“Keep it as a necklace, bloodsucker,” he huffed. “And if I see you using it, I won’t hesitate to stake you.” His words packed power in them and Yunho didn’t doubt the truth to them, especially with a man as hefty as this one saying them. But Yunho was not fearful in the slightest – he had outsmarted all sorts of people with his angles and fast fingers, and he would do it a thousand times more. A meathead bouncer was nothing.
“Thank you very much, sir, will do,” Yunho said with no intention of doing, flashing yet another charming smile at the bouncer before slipping by his large frame and larger muscles before he could change his mind.
Yunho entered the bar and was hit with a cacophony of noise from drunks, customers, and workers alike. In the corner, he could hear a pixie whining about the stock market. In another, a group of vampires huddled and muttered over a stack of cards with drinks at their sides. To his displeasure, he could also hear the sound of the devil’s tango and the creak of the bed they were using to dance on the floor above the speakeasy. He decided to discard that from his hearing.
“Yunho,” a voice called out over all of the chatter. Yunho turned to the voice, already knowing who it was – Wooyoung, one of his greatest friends, stood at the counter in his bartender uniform with a wide grin. Next to him was a glass of dark red liquid that made Yunho’s eyes light up.
“Wooyoung,” Yunho said smoothly, sliding into a bar seat right in front of him on the counter. He flashed a smile similar to the one he had shown the bouncer, but this one had genuine intentions. He clutched his camera with his left hand while grasping the red glass with his right. “I assume this is mine?”
“That it is,” Wooyoung nodded. “It’s on the house.”
Yunho swirled the red liquid – Sanguine wine – around in its glass. A concoction of wine and blood, it was an extremely popular drink for vampires and unsurprisingly disliked by everyone else. “Thank you, Wooyoung,” he said, looking at him thoughtfully before taking a sip. The taste of blood hit his tongue first with the alcohol following closely behind; he savored it. “It’s good to see you.” He paused. “You said you needed my help for something?” Another pause. “And my camera?”
Yunho could see the weight in Wooyoung’s eyes, and when they had called he had heard it in his voice. Yunho and Wooyoung ran risky lives so it wasn’t unusual to see pain, weight, or fear in each other quite often – but this seemed especially bearing. Yunho’s eyes softened. “Wooyoung, I’m here now.”
Wooyoung gave a sad smile to Yunho. “Can you help me frame a bastard?”
Yunho sat up in his chair, his eyebrows raised. His mouth curled. “Oh?”
Wooyoung didn’t share his enthusiasm, and again, Yunho deflated for him out of respect. “There was this fae at the speakeasy one day,” Wooyoung began, and Yunho adjusted himself in his seat and held his drink tight while he gave his attention to Wooyoung.
Wooyoung dove into the details about this fae he had befriended for a short period, Helio, and his untimely death with an Unseelie fae. Yunho listened, silently drinking his Sanguine while stroking his camera in thought.
“And I know Helio was just somebody and I probably shouldn’t be affected by this as much as I am,” Wooyoung said, furiously scrubbing at a wine glass that he had been cleaning repeatedly for the entire duration of their talk. “But I am and I feel helpless. I want vengeance for Helio, Yunho. Vengeance in a way that would hurt all Unseelie fae, because I doubt Helio’s murderer was just an isolated case of violence. Can you help me?”
Yunho had lived through more deaths than the number of decades he had been alive. Hearing Wooyoung’s story brought it all back – Helio was next to a nobody to Wooyoung, but he had been undoubtedly someone to so many. Yunho thrived in the suffering of those with higher social status, those that could easily evade consequences for actions that would ripple throughout poorer communities, or those with less. It was his immoral duty to destroy people like this and his loving duty to ease his friend’s pain.
“Of course,” he said, and Wooyoung’s visibly now brighter eyes made him pleased with his decision. “What is it that you want me to do, though?” He quipped, tapping the table with his long fingers. “You said you disposed of his murderer already.”
“I have an idea,” Wooyoung smiled and leaned into the table, ready for a spiel. “Mitha, the land of the fae, has been going through a lot of political turmoil,” he began.
“The Seelie and Unseelie courts can’t get along. Each side is grasping for supporters but the fae are equally divided. For every fae that believes in goodness is another that believes in bloodshed.” Wooyoung pulled out, to Yunho’s appreciation, a photo of a man and placed it on the table for Yunho. Yunho craned his head to look at the man – a male fae.
A solemn fae with tricky eyes stared back at him. The fae sat on a red velvet seat and held at his side a black cane with a skull hilt. His hair was split evenly into two colors, white and black, but he was dressed in darker colors that suited the black part of his hair more than the white. Yunho wondered, idly and ironically, which side of the fae this one was on.
“This fae is Prince Hongjoong, an influential political leader in Mitha,” Wooyoung said while Yunho continued to study the photo. Yunho kept up with newspapers and somewhere, in the back of his brain, he thought he had seen him in the news before. It made sense – a man of this kind of caliber tended to grace the papers often. Yunho wondered if his publicity was usually the good or bad kind.
“So, you want me to kill this guy?” Yunho asked, raising his eyebrows.
Wooyoung snorted. “I know you’re not a murderer, of course not. I wouldn’t ask you to do that.”
Yunho touched his camera around his neck with a soft hand. “Mm, I’m not sure about that. I’m a shooter.”
Wooyoung grinned. “You’re funny. But I don’t want you murdering this man, dear Gods, I couldn’t imagine the hell you and I would be in if he perished by our hands.” He paused. “I want a worse fate for him.” Wooyoung leaned into the counter. “I want you to take photos of him.”
Yunho’s face remained even – he could feel the bouncer from earlier burning critical eyes in the back of his head. “Now that is something I can do.”
“I know you can,” Wooyoung grinned, finally placing down the glass he had been scrubbing nonstop. “Mitha won’t be a hard journey for you, will it?”
Yunho shook his head. “Nah,” he laughed. “It’s not too hard to get in when you have a reporter pass. It allows me access into lots of places.”
“I didn’t know you were hired at a reporting firm,” Wooyoung marveled.
Yunho’s eyes luminesced as he downed the last drops of his Sanguine. “Who said the reporter pass is mine?”
Wooyoung smiled so largely that his cheeks became round. “Yunho, you’re a little bastard, you know that?”
“The police call me that too often,” Yunho mused and then offered a cheeky smile to his friend. “Well, I best be going, then?”
Wooyoung glanced at the clock on the wall: Yunho had been here for an hour and a half. “Oh Gods, sure. Thank you, Yunho,” he said, bowing his head at him. “This means the world to me and more.”
“Of course, it’s no trouble at all,” Yunho smiled. “And it was good seeing you.” He snuck the photo of Prince Hongjoong Wooyoung had shown him and slid it into his coat pocket.
“Good seeing you too.”
Yunho got up from his seat and narrowly avoided hitting a very drunk goblin while doing so. He offered a perplexed look to Wooyoung, who only shrugged.
“I'll be in contact, but you'll probably see my work before you hear from me,” Yunho grinned, stretching his arms above his head, making him appear much taller than he already was.
“I’ll be on the lookout,” Wooyoung saluted. “Now, I should probably get back to my job…”
Wooyoung glanced around and saw a customer waiting to be served by him. It was a werewolf, one that was staring at Yunho like he was a stain on a white carpet. Wooyoung opened his mouth to tell his friend, but he realized Yunho had noticed him too, and his facial expression mirrored that of the werewolf’s.
Yunho was locked in Wooyoung's vision. "Yunho, no."
“About time,” the werewolf sneered at the two of them. “I’m being held up by one of that kind?” He bared his wolfish teeth at Yunho, even though it was Wooyoung’s fault that he wasn’t served immediately.
“Yunho, just go, you have more important things to worry about,” Wooyoung nudged, knowing that fights and quarrels were all too frequent at the bar, and to his relief, Yunho lost eye contact with the werewolf, but Wooyoung wasn't blind to the minute eye roll he did.
“Are you siding with him?” The werewolf roared, and Wooyoung stared daggers at Yunho, his hands gripping the wooden bar table so hard that his knuckles were white. His eyes pleaded for him to leave.
Yunho, luckily, obliged. “See you later then, Wooyoung,” he said with a little cheer in his voice, and Wooyoung watched him dart by the bouncer and exit the speakeasy.
He then dug up his bartender personality and a smile – and thought that if dealing with a crabby and impatient werewolf was hard enough, he couldn’t imagine the hoops Yunho would have to go through to successfully photograph Hongjoong in all of the right ways, but more importantly, in all of the wrong ways. He wished him the best of luck and then went to satisfy the werewolf.
The travel to Mitha was very similar to the travel to the Underworld – easy, relaxing, and methodical. As Yunho stood at the subway station waiting for the yellow train to Mitha, he watched demons, vampires, and spirits alike board the red train – the one to the Underworld. The yellow train was set to arrive in 20 minutes, but Yunho liked arriving early to watch people. His camera hung at his neck and his hands itched to grasp it and take photos – but there was nothing special about people traveling to hell. The mundane, while a good source for fabrication and framing, had a price to document because of the time it took to develop the photograph in a dark room. Yunho wanted his photos to be of substance, and photos of substance begged to have context; context he didn’t feel like making. He sat and twiddled his thumbs and ignored the Kodak.
Besides his camera, Yunho had his photographer license, a handful of Mitha’s coin currency tucked safely into his pocket, and a black satchel at his side. In the satchel were a few bags of blood and a change of fancier clothes. This would be an easy trip – there and back without a hitch. Perhaps he would journey through hell if he had time to spare after the photoshoot.
The yellow train arrived five minutes early at the station. Yunho was one of the first to stride onto the train and he didn’t waste any time stealing a comfy seat. As more creatures boarded the yellow train to Mitha, Yunho wondered why they were also on the train. Were they seeing friends or family? Were they on their way to work, which could explain why so many people were giving looks to Yunho, an outlier in their daily routine? He ignored their glances. They saw him; they were looking at his camera.
Cameras, while not a new invention, had a layer of scrutiny from the public. It was considered dirty work to be a photographer in the same way as it was dirty to be a prostitute. In a world where magic, uncanny encounters, and accidents existed, a perfect mechanical machine such as a camera was the antithesis of it all. Despite years of practicing espionage magic, a photograph could foil a warlock’s criminal plans immediately. Fae found ways to step over their curse of always telling the truth to cause trickery, but a photograph could dismantle that. The camera was a powerful tool used to twist media despite an immortal’s and all-powerful’s best efforts to maintain their image. And Yunho was a master of his camera.
It was also dirty to be a vampire, but without the blood in sight, it would take longer for people to realize he was one. He certainly wasn’t a fae – his ears weren’t pointed, his eyes, hair, and skin were a natural color, and he could very much lie his way out of anything – but there were plenty of warlocks who also looked almost human, like him. Yunho eased into his seat as the train began to move. There weren’t too many people riding today – most on the train were fae, but there were also a fair amount of vampires, warlocks, and to Yunho’s distaste, a werewolf. He wrinkled his nose uncomfortably.
“The politics of Mitha are always in turmoil,” Wooyoung’s voice echoed in Yunho’s head as he focused his attention on how his encounter with Hongjoong would go instead of the werewolf. “Their court is divided into ten Seelie and ten Unseelie fae to pass laws, but all fae regardless of side vote for both sides. Being a bipartisan politician is crucial to claiming a seat. That means all fae running for a seat in the court will advertise themselves as neutral as possible to appease all fae, but after the election, they will lose their bipartisanship and be extremely Unseelie or Seelie-oriented. And nothing will get passed. Prince Hongjoong is running as a Seelie, but I don’t think that’s where his true affiliations lie. The Unseelie have high hopes for him to win the seat because if he does, the court will be Unseelie-majority for the first time in decades.”
Yunho had interacted with Unseelie before, though it wasn’t always obvious which side they affiliated with by looks alone, safe for if they had either symbol of affiliation on their clothes. Even mannerisms weren’t a way to define which side they were on – Yunho had met the kindest Seelie bikers and the most callous Unseelie mothers. The most accurate way to tell was in how they carried themselves – there was a certain aura of disdain that the Unseelies held and a sense of benevolence that the Seelies had in their personalities. He wasn’t scared of Hongjoong, but he would be lying if he said wasn’t even a little nervous diving into fae territory as a vampire. Hongjoong had the high ground – and Yunho hoped he could swipe at his ankles when he wasn’t looking.
Yunho wasn’t even truly sure what his interaction with Hongjoong would look like. From the few times he had traveled to Mitha, he had visited fae that lived in the city or suburbs, fae that weren’t coughing up riches like the royal fae were. But Yunho did his best work in the moment – and his determination to help out Wooyoung kept him going, even with his anxieties gnawing at his extremities.
It took an hour for the yellow train to reach the major train station of Mitha. Once off of the train, Yunho asked an older female fae for directions to the castle of the royal fae.
She had looked at him, puzzled. “Are you sure you want to go there?” She had questioned, and Yunho had nodded.
“I’m sure you know how much the royal fae love having their photos taken,” he laughed, having absolutely no idea if that was true or not. It didn’t matter, because the fae had shrugged like it was indeed plausible, and then she gave him the directions to the castle.
It took another hour of walking to reach the castle. Unlike in the Midworld where it had been pouring rain, Mitha’s sun blazed across the buildings, pedestrians, and cars in the cities. It was a popular, and incorrect, belief that all vampires burned in the sun. And while a few did, Yunho was of the majority that didn’t.
As Yunho walked to the castle, he took note of the stores he saw. There was a store that sold canes that doubled as weapons, and it made Yunho think about the cane that Prince Hongjoong had in the photo that Wooyoung had given him. Another store advertised mail services across Mitha, Midworld, and the Underworld. Another store advertised Mithaized Underworld food, and next to it was a jewelry store that catered to fae’s pointed ears and unique skin tones.
The closer Yunho got to the castle, the fewer of these stores he saw. Like nature had seen the urbanization of Mitha and had scoffed, trees replaced buildings and stores. The absence of stores made the gorgeous castle in the distance that much more captivating and obvious to the eye.
As he got closer to the castle, Yunho now saw clearly the golden brown bridge that separated the mass of land Yunho was on from the castle ground. At the front of the gate was a group of guards. Yunho gripped his bag and his camera tighter. With the reporter pass that he had stolen, he didn’t think it would be much trouble to get into the castle.
He was right. The guard closest to him had taken a look at him and asked to see what was inside his bag – and gave a puzzled expression to the blood but didn’t say anything – before Yunho had flashed the guard with his reporter pass.
The photo on the pass was of a man that looked eerily similar to Yunho, and never once had anyone doubted that it was him. Yunho couldn’t even have his photo taken as a vampire, anyway. Jongho, the man on the card, could.
The guard was no exception, and let Yunho cross the bridge. He enjoyed the stroll, watching fish he had never seen swim in the moat below and admiring the intricate details of the wood of the bridge.
And once Yunho was inside the castle – and how thrilled he was to be, how was it this easy? – he was paralyzed with awe at the architecture in front of him. His hands itched at his camera, to soak in and capture every beautiful curve or corner he saw. On one wall was a magnificent photo of the royal family. Hongjoong, without his cane, was there with his parents and siblings. On the ceiling hung a chandelier with what must have been thousands of gemstones adorning it. On another wall were rows and rows of statues of what Yunho could only presume were past rulers. How easy it could be to stay here for hours, swallowing up the sublime divinity of it all and let his camera run dry – but he had to find Hongjoong. He pleased his artistic eyes just a bit longer before asking a nearby guard for directions to the Prince.
“You want to go to the throne room?” The guard sputtered when Yunho reached him and asked.
This was now the second time someone thought he was brainsick for wanting to see the Prince. “Well, yes,” Yunho said, scratching his head before pointing to his camera. “I’m here to take photos of His Highness Prince Hongjoong. I’m in support of his political program and wish to convince the public to vote for him.”
When he got no response, Yunho fished out Jongho’s reporter pass again. “See?” He said, flashing it to the guard.
The guard waved away the reporter pass. “No, that’s not what–” he sighed. He shut his eyes, contemplating something, and then opened them. His eyes held nothing. “Allow me to lead the way.”
The guard led Yunho through a hallway that, once again, brought Yunho close to tears. Long tapestries of the royal fae family’s logo adorned the walls in a rainbow display. Yunho opened his mouth to ask the guard who exactly each royal fae was on the wall, but he stopped himself when he saw how stiff and tight the guard was. It wasn’t a tightness that alluded to discipline and years of training, but a stiffness that came with nerves. It was the little things that Yunho picked up on, like the guard’s tentative steps as if one wrong move would lock his knees and send him to the rock-hard velvet floor of the castle, or the way he kept looking behind his shoulder at Yunho every few seconds.
Yunho tried not to let that get to him. Maybe the guard was fearful about something else. Some fae found vampires, by nature, unsettling and disturbing, which wasn’t much better; but he couldn’t shake the ominous feeling growing in the pit of his stomach like a parasite in a petri dish.
At last, the throne room was in front of them: a gleaming gold door with handles half of the length of Yunho – so very long. Yunho secured his bag one last time and made sure all of his belongings were accounted for, and then looked up at the guard to find him staring right back. Something in his gaze sent ice-cold sensations down Yunho’s spine, alerting all of the nerves in his peripheral nervous system.
“What?” He blurted out before he could think through being silent.
The guard gave him a solemn expression. “Are you absolutely sure you want to go inside?” He asked.
Yunho grimaced. “I traveled a long way to get here,” he said. “Of course I do.” He held the gaze of the guard a little longer. He then continued: “what are you so afraid of that’s inside there?”
The guard’s eyes grew weary. Even though they were the color of a lightning bolt, white-blue, powerful, and supernatural, they looked weighed down by the weight of something – some kind of fae secret, no doubt. One that Yunho suspected with a drop of his stomach, he would soon bear as well.
“Prince Hongjoong…” he said, and then shook his head. “No,” the guard said, talking to himself. “I am not scared of him. I am scared that you will be scared of him because you are naive. You do not know the ways of the Unseelie and how they like to work, and how they don’t like to work.”
Yunho was reminded of the fact that fae could not lie and his blood temperature dropped a degree. “Okay,” he said, thinking of Wooyoung and how he needed his help, “but I want to go in.”
The guard sighed with a note of finality, realizing that he couldn’t change Yunho’s mind. “Fine.” Without a preamble, he threw open the large, golden doors to the throne room.
The first part of the throne room Yunho noticed was the large, dark grandfather clock that hung ceremoniously in the corner of the room, the hands of it itching to hit the hour. It was two minutes until two. The perimeter of it, besides being marked with numbers to tell the time, had an engraving in the fae’s ancient language that had died off centuries ago. Yunho had just been turned when the last native speaker died, and he did not know the language. The body of the clock stretched to the floor, and the large metal pendulum encased in glass on the inside of it swung back and forth as a hypnotist would in their profession.
The clock was so significant that the blood all over the floor was only the second aspect of the room he noticed – he smelled it before he saw it, and he was surprised he hadn’t smelled it outside of the doors. He had long since learned to control his bloodthirst, so he didn’t feel the need to lap up the mess on all fours, but he did feel discomfort in his stomach as anyone would that had morals. Blood had been shed, recently, and why?
Yunho then saw Hongjoong, and he immediately understood. Yunho thought back to the old vampire tales his vampire friends had told him centuries ago that listed certain facial features and personalities as more bloodthirsty than others. Yunho had never believed them, taking them as jokes or old vampire’s tales only, but taking in Hongjoong, a little inkling of fear grew in his stomach and made him shudder.
The fae prince was seated on a throne much too tall for himself or any fae, a throne whose top almost reached the bottom curve of the clock. The prince had a long black cloak tossed over the edge of the seat of the throne and it splayed helplessly onto the floor beside him. One leg lounged on the armrest of the chair, the other knee-bent, and semi-parallel to the floor. One hand rested on the kicked-up knee, the other held that damn cane that never seemed to leave his side in all of the photos Yunho had seen of him. The prince’s crown glimmered with gold, which matched the details on his black shirt to an unsettling degree. Yunho thought if he would only smile, he would be admired by all of the women in Mitha. But what destroyed that image for Yunho was the prince’s face – a face that when described, would match the high bloodthirst requirements. Hongjoong wasn’t even a vampire, but his sharp eyes loomed over Yunho like a predator sizing up its prey. They were darker than obsidian, and the prince’s red mouth seemed curled upward in a state of perpetual arrogance. This man had the face of bloodthirst that the vampires’ tales fulfilled.
Yunho made eye contact with the prince, and he could have sworn he saw them glimmer.
“You brought me another one, guard?” Prince Hongjoong said boldly and boomingly, and Yunho had expected his voice to be deeper. It was higher, playful, and lackadaisical, and it reminded him of Puck from A Midsummer Night's Dream, a person from fae history. The prince smiled, and it was not a smile that would make women swoon. This smile was one of a lion about to eat supper. “That’s three back-to-back.”
Absentmindedly, Yunho heard the clock in the room tick. Only one minute until the hour. Prince Hongjoong swung his leg over the gorgeous armrest so both of his feet were planted firmly on the ground. His stance was wide, and he used his knees as armrests. He leaned in, and Yunho expected him to make a comment at him – a dirty vampire or a silly peasant. But then Hongjoong’s head cocked to the left, away from Yunho, and Yunho followed his laser gaze.
There were two more people in the room with them, so quiet and insignificant when compared to the burst of personality on the throne. The first one was a fae man – a commoner, based on his average clothing – that looked like he was about to pass out from anxiety due to the Prince’s stares. The second man was in the shadows, one that Yunho only saw because of his enhanced vision. He was cloaked from head to toe with not even his face visible due to the shadows his clothing gave him. He was a blur of darkness against the bright throne room safe for the enormous and bloody axe he held. The blood on the sharp end of it still dripped, staining the precious white floor with beads of coagulated red.
Hongjoong raised an arm and gestured to the commoner, his smile almost kind. “Why don’t you walk to the center of the floor now, boy?”
Yunho watched as the man followed the Prince’s command, taking uneasy steps to the center of the floor, overtop of the blood that had been spilled from someone previously. Yunho eyed the axeman warily. He itched to help out this commoner, somehow save him from this axeman, but he didn’t know what to do.
It was at that moment that the grandfather clock struck the hour. Hongjoong’s eyes narrowed with malice, and he turned his head to focus on the clock. The man in the middle of the floor also watched it, his eyes frightened and large. The grandfather clock, as grandfather clocks did, began its merry song of announcing to everyone in the room that fifteen minutes had passed since one o’clock, and then also thirty minutes, and forty-five minutes, and then, as if releasing pent-up happiness, the clock sang that it was now two o’clock, its chimes clanging merrily in an announcement.
This is what a normal grandfather clock did, but Hongjoong was still intently focused on the clock like it would do something extraordinary. No, Yunho thought suddenly. He looked at Hongjoong more closely, he looked at how his eyes were unfocused like he was looking directly above the clock instead of right at it. His blood chilled. He’s focused on the sounds the clock is making.
The clock began its first bong that one o’clock had passed. Yunho recognized it immediately as a different sound – he wasn’t sure what about it that was different, but it wasn’t what a normal grandfather clock sounded like. He took a second to spare a look at Hongjoong – and found his eyes were glazed with malicious delirium that had not been there seconds ago. The man in the center of the room began to sob raggedly.
The Prince stood up, his cape following him, elegant, dark, and oh-so-obsequious. Hongjoong thrust his cane so that it pointed right at the sobbing man, not caring that he was crying. His eyes were filled with fire, and the smile on his face radiated with violent lunacy. A giggle lept out of his mouth.
The skull cane in Hongjoong’s hand began to shake due to the shaking in the wielder’s body. Hongjoong’s head turned rapidly at the axeman, who had now walked out of the shadows. The man began screaming. Hongjoong’s shaking became worse and his smile widened. The clock bonged again – it was two o’clock.
“Kill him.”
It happened in an instant. One moment, the axe was in the axeman’s hands, and the next it was sliced three-fourths into the man’s neck. It had flown through the air like a hawk, finding its target with ease and spraying blood all over the room’s walls and floor.
The blood flecked onto Yunho. He screamed in surprise, but not before instinctually licking a bit off of where some had landed on his cheek. It tasted wonderful, but there were too many emotions swirling in his stomach with tornado-like tendencies for him to process it truly. He wanted to cry. He wanted to lick all of the blood off of his face. He wanted to murder Hongjoong. He wanted to melt into the floor. He wanted to stake himself. Instead, his hands found the camera around his neck.
Hongjoong did not protest, though he was focused on Yunho as the vampire fumbled around with his camera. The Prince knew what he was doing, there was no way he didn’t know what a camera was. There was a pride in his eyes that glowed as Yunho’s fingers found all of the right functions on his camera despite the fear that was traveling through his body and making him shake. He cranked the film and cocked the shutter, then took the photo – Hongjoong grinning menacingly on his throne, the victim with blood pouring out of his neck on the floor, and the sprayed out blood all over the white marble floor from when the axe had first made its impact. The axeman, who had done his job, was back in the shadows. Yunho wasn’t even sure he had made it into the photo. He would have to develop the film later to see.
A thought occurred to him amidst all of the fire alarms that were screaming in his head to get the hell out – if he could publish this photo in a newspaper, there would be no need for a photo shoot to frame Prince Hongjoong for Wooyoung. Yunho could do that all on his own with this photo. A smile tried to grow on his lips, but like a plant without sunshine, it wilted. A murder had just happened. He couldn’t smile at that.
When Yunho lowered the camera from his eyes, Hongjoong was staring at him with piercing and dark eyes.
Yunho opened his mouth to ask why he was looking at him like that, but Hongjoong was royalty. He was used to speaking first.
“You shouldn’t have seen that,” Hongjoong said serenely. He looked dazed like a child would be after eating a bag of candy. “You should not have seen that…” Prince Hongjoong paused, then inclined a hand towards him. “What are you called?”
Yunho did not lose eye contact with him, and he thought about his stolen photographer’s pass. “Jongho.”
Hongjoong nodded in a way that showed Yunho the question of his name was insignificant. “Jongho,” he said, tasting his name in his mouth and nodding. “Jongho, I’m afraid you’re going to need to die.”
“I already died fifteen hundred years ago,” Yunho said casually, instead of jumping back in terror like he should have. For a moment, he lost eye contact with the prince and noticed that the guard that had escorted him into the room was gone. He had no clue when he had decided to leave. It was just him, the corpse, his murderer, and this fae with a dark and iron hand. His attention was back on the prince. “Why do you want me dead… a second time?”
The prince eased back into the comfort of his throne like a beast succumbing back into the catacombs from which it came. The cane had not left his right hand the entire time he had been in the throne room, though he now held it with a much more relaxed grip. Hongjoong smiled at him, and it wasn’t a nice smile – it was one similar to the one that had been plastered on his face when the axe had found its target only minutes ago.
“You can’t let Seelie know that I kill,” Hongjoong yawned. “And you just took a photo of the murder.”
“You could have stopped me,” Yunho pointed out. “Though, I’m not sure you actually could’ve. Watching a person die in front of my eyes isn’t exactly something I see every day, and so I had to document it as a photographer.”
“It’s only okay to kill someone if it’s dinner in your book, bloodsucker,” Hongjoong nodded, his grin wider. Yunho had a sudden desire to twist Prince Hongjoong’s head off like a lid of pickles.
“But perhaps I should have been clearer,” the Prince continued, now tapping his fingers on the skull handle of his cane while Yunho fumed. “I honestly just wanted to see you squirm. It’s a shame you’ve died already, the first death is always the worst… though you know that already,” he smiled, and then his eyes narrowed. “You might die again, is what I am saying.”
Yunho opened his mouth to ask what that exactly meant, ignoring the Prince’s other comments, but Hongjoong was ready for him. “I have no say in if you die or not if I am a righteous leader, though I can make it happen,” Hongjoong said. “The Fate Clock will decide for me since fate has brought you here anyway without my request.”
Yunho eyed the towering clock in the room again, and thought about how when that clock had struck two o’clock, Hongjoong had ordered the axeman to kill the man. A worry grew in his stomach, and he glanced down at the corpse that was emptying its bodily contents onto the floor. “How?”
Hongjoong got even comfier on his large, large throne. A lazy smile appeared on his face. “The Fate Clock is an old relic from when my ancient ancestors were young,” he said.
Wonderful, Yunho thought. Fae magic.
“It has aided my royal family throughout since the inception of its life and will continue to aid my progeny when I am long gone,” Hongjoong continued. “It can determine if someone lives or dies by how useful they will be to my family.”
“If me releasing you with that photo will do good for my people, then the clock will chime in a major key,” he paused, “do you know what that is?”
“I’m dead, not deaf,” Yunho said mundanely, though he had never thought to dabble in music in his long life.
Hongjoong took this as an acceptable answer and continued. “If the Clock chimes in a major key at the hour, I will spare your life. Though if letting you spread that photograph will only cause harm…”
There must have been a rock in Yunho’s stomach, teetering against his kidneys, unsure if it should fall or not. It chose at that moment to plummet down to his feet.
“It will chime in a minor key at the hour,” Hongjoong continued, “and you will become just like this man at my feet right now.”
Hongjoong had backed Yunho into a corner. “It’s a harsh and cruel world,” Hongjoong said with cheer, “for people that don’t have power like me. I bless the silly thought that made you desire to come and see me, vampire. More bloodshed for me.”
Yunho looked down at the corpse on the ground, and realized with a sickening punch in the gut, that he would join him soon enough. He knew, and Hongjoong knew, that at three o’clock, the Fate Clock would chime. The Clock would chime in a minor key because surely no photo of a murder would be received well – and Yunho would be gone. Wooyoung would not be avenged. Helio’s death would be in vain, and at the price of Yunho’s. For the second time, Yunho would die, and for the first time, it would be permanent.
Yunho looked Prince Hongjoong directly in the eyes. “Then the Clock will chime in a major key,” he said, plastering on a kind smile and lying right through his teeth, “because I will never show that photo to anyone. I will only bring goodness and light to your reign, political career, and life.”
Hongjoong’s eyes glimmered. “I think you’d best benefit my life bleeding out on the floor at my feet, dear.”
The stare the two of them held could have cut glass. Hongjoong, powerful even when lounging in his chair, legs spread out in a move of dominance and fingers tapping on his cane thoughtfully stared at Yunho like he was considering all of the ways he could string Yunho’s useless and dead intestines across his wall artfully, and Yunho, feet planted firm into the ground with a strong grip on his camera on his neck and unwavering gaze to the prince. He was not going to die today. He convinced himself of this.
Hongjoong considered Yunho a bit more, looking up and down his lithe and lanky frame before sighing. “Well, I suppose I should let you sit comfortably for your final hour.”
Hongjoong was kind enough to let Yunho sit in an old, wooden chair that the axeman had dragged across the floor to him. It creaked under his weight when he sat in it and was terrified that if he moved, the chair would break apart and he would somehow stake himself during the fall. Perhaps that was Hongjoong’s plan all along – to quench his thirst for bloodshed that couldn’t wait an hour. Yunho had not thought about death so much for the full hour of waiting. Could vampires die by an axe? Was an axe how he would die? Was there a stake underneath all of that dark and bloodstained clothing that the axeman wore that would drive through his heart? Perhaps the axeman would just pull off a leg from the chair Yunho was seated in, or Hongjoong would drive his wooden cane to end him in a painfully majestic murder.
But Yunho was most upset about the promise he had made to Wooyoung, a promise that he saw slipping through his fingers like sand. He had wanted to come back victorious, to ease Wooyoung’s troubled heart, and now he wasn’t sure how his friend would ever know he had died. And how would Wooyoung cope with two deaths when he did realize? He didn’t want to think about it. He couldn’t think about failing Wooyoung. He had failed enough times with others for greater stakes.
Yunho inclined his head towards the large doors that had led him in here. Perhaps if he ran fast enough, he could escape Hongjoong’s wrath. But that’s still failing Wooyoung, he thought. Because even if you managed to get out and release the photo, Hongjoong would hunt you down and kill you anyway.
Thus, the hour passed by very slowly. Yunho was too into his thoughts to realize it was five minutes until the hour when Hongjoong spoke up.
“Five minutes,” he sneered, the glee of slaughter emanating off of his body like smoke from a fire. “Five minutes until you’re dead.”
“Five minutes until you let me go, alive,” Yunho said. If he was to die – again – he was going to stand tall and strong up until the very last moment. “Five minutes until I release that photo, and it will prove to be useful for your throne.” He just hoped the Clock didn’t know what photo editing was. He was shaking out of anxiety now, and he hoped Hongjoong couldn’t see it.
If Hongjoong had anything other than sanguinary thoughts, he did not show them. Like a slinky, he sunk deeper into his throne. He shrugged, and Yunho prayed to whatever higher power that controlled the Clock that it would be merciful on his already damned, vampiric soul.
The five minutes were up in an instant like Hongjoong had turned its ancient hands closer to the hour himself. At some point during Yunho’s melancholic reverie, the axeman had removed the body of the man from the center of the floor and had done a poor job of wiping up the blood. The place where Yunho would soon stand was a circle of bloody pink.
“You know where you must be,” Hongjoong leered, inclining his head to the circle. Yunho said nothing, but he did obey the Prince and stood in the center of the throne room. He gripped his camera tightly and watched the Clock. There was less than a minute left. If Yunho’s heart actually worked, it would be running a marathon.
Hongjoong also watched the clock, his smile turning wider and wider as each second passed. He stood from the throne, threw back his cape, and lowered his cane to the ground.
Ten seconds. Yunho held his breath, though he hadn’t been breathing anyway. Five seconds. Yunho gripped his camera tighter. If this was how he was going to die, he was going to give the people that ransacked his body a hard time prying it from his hands.
The Clock struck three o’clock. Like a symphony being orchestrated by a conductor’s baton, the clock began its song of telling everyone in the room that fifteen minutes had passed since two o’clock, then thirty, then forty-five. Everyone in the room was transfixed by the tune. The end of its song was nearing – the chime was coming. Yunho shut his eyes.
The first chime sounded in a wondrous major key, and if that was not music to Yunho’s ears, he didn’t know what was. He opened his eyes, and found Hongjoong at the center of his vision, his face perplexed and his mouth slightly open. His brows furrowed in confusion. The second chime came, in a major key just like the first. Yunho released his fingers from the camera. The camera was now soaked in sweat. The third chime was more defined than the other two, reverberating across the room. The axeman, who had stepped briefly out of the shadows, sunk back to where he was before.
Once the third chime had finished ringing, there was a moment of silence between Prince Hongjoong and Yunho. Hongjoong looked down at him from his elevated position and had the expression of a disappointed father to his son, Yunho. Hongjoong sighed quietly and put down his cane. His shoulders dropped.
“That does not happen very often,” he said, breaking the silence. “I wish I could kill you,” he said flatly, and Yunho was too shocked to snort at that statement.
“But the Clock is never wrong. Therefore, I grant you immunity and life for the betterment of my people, Jongho.” He sat back down on his throne, and Yunho did not mistake the pout on his face. “I cannot wait to see what that photograph will do when you release it,” he said, the bitterness most recognizable in the word photograph.
Yunho couldn’t drop the smile that was now plastered across his face. “As do I.”
Hongjoong flicked his wrists, and the doors to the throne room opened. The photomeister left. There was no time to take a relaxing trip to hell like he had said he would do earlier – he had a photo to develop.
The photo-developing process took anywhere from ten to fifteen minutes – it depended on how complex the photograph was. Once back in Midworld, Yunho rushed to his home and his own, private darkroom. In complete darkness, Yunho mixed the developer mixture with water. The not-quite photograph of Prince Hongjoong was wrapped in a reel that was placed in a film tank. Yunho poured the mixture into the film tank and then waited. He turned the lights back on and eagerly awaited the results of the photograph.
Yunho first saw the dark area where the axeman lay hidden develop, the darkest part of the photo. Black lines appeared quietly around the rest of the square, outlining Hongjoong, his throne, the corpse, and the blood that coated the floor. Yunho narrowed his eyes, studying the developing photo, and then a smile appeared on his face. His hypothesis that the axeman would be too dark to see in the photo was right – there was no way to tell he had ever been there. The photo continued to develop, and there was no sign of him ever appearing – Hongjoong got darker, the blood increased in saturation, the floor became whiter, and Yunho’s ego developed with it. A story brewed in his head – Hongjoong, a political candidate for the good and kind Seelie, was caught murdering the innocent with his own hand. There would be no editing needed for the photograph – it already said everything Yunho wanted it to say.
The photo finished developing. Yunho washed off the harsh chemicals and treated it with a protective treatment so that it would not be damaged in the sun, his hands shaking as he did so. The photo was a photographer’s dream, a landscape photo that was worth a ten-thousand-word story that Hongjoong was unfit to hold a court seat for the Seelie fae. There was no way that the public would believe any other story, not when everyone thought photography was indecent practice and akin to witchcraft. What the public didn’t know, was that as perfect and mechanical a camera was, there was an imperfect being behind it, snapping shots with their own vision, view, and perspective. Yunho had them wrapped around his fingers, and he would make them see whatever vision he wanted them to see.
Yunho let out a laugh as he exited his darkroom and pocketed the photograph. He threw on a coat – it was getting chilly, and the walk to the train station to Mitha was far. “My gracious thanks to you, Prince Hongjoong,” Yunho muttered under his breath as he left his house, feeling fueled by his own version of bloodlust, “for allowing me to live so that I might be a tumultuous effect to your reign.”
Yunho entering the Seelie newspaper room two hours later caused quite a ruckus. One fae by a typewriter blinked multiple times upon seeing him like she had never seen a vampire before. Another shrieked, but that may have been because Yunho had kicked the door open before entering in a six-foot-one-inch fury of a long dark cloak and vampiric sensuality.
“Hi, Seelie fae,” Yunho said, and then slapped the beloved photograph of Hongjoong onto the table so they could all see. “I need a story on this. Stat.”
Within the next few days, the political climate of Mitha changed rapidly. Even those not living in Mitha felt it and saw it because it appeared all over newspapers as an enormous story. Yunho’s photo was on the front page of every Seelie newspaper and on at least one page of non-fae newspapers.
Prince Hongjoong of the First Province of Mitha Violates Seelie Social Code, the headliner read. Experts predict that he will be disqualified from the ballot to obtain a Seelie court seat, underneath. And, gorgeously, Yunho’s photo was printed on thin, glossy paper, the colors vibrant and eye-catching. Hongjoong’s murderous eyes were looking directly at the camera, a detail Yunho had failed to see when he had developed the photo. Coupled with the smirk on his face, an assumption could be made that Prince Hongjoong had orchestrated every drop of blood on the floor beneath him and was proud of doing so. This was not someone fit to make decisions for Seelie fae. This was an imposter. Underneath the photo was the credit: Jeong Yunho, 1922, and those three words made Yunho’s spirits soar.
When Yunho walked into Wooyoung’s bar with a spring in his step, the bartender hollered a cry of excitement and knocked over the drink he was in the middle of making. “Yunho!” He screamed, then as a delayed reaction, his body shook in surprise that he had accidentally spilled his drink all over the table. “Did you–”
“I did,” Yunho grinned, and he hadn’t grinned wider than this in a long time. Wooyoung looked at him adoringly, with crinkled eyes and pink in his cheeks and teeth that shone in the odd bar lighting. Yunho took a seat in front of Wooyoung, who was in the middle of cleaning up the mess he had made. “I did see it. I can’t believe it.”
“That’s a damn good photo you took,” Wooyoung marveled. “How did you do it? Well, not how, but, you know… how? What sneaky Yunho thing did you do to frame that bastard like that? Oh, he’s probably hating you right now! He wants to kill you so bad, but he can’t!” He banged his fist on the table and shouted with happiness.
Yunho thought back to Hongjoong’s words before he had left the throne room: I wish I could kill you. If only Wooyoung knew.
“There was no editing,” Yunho grinned, allowing himself a moment of hubris as Wooyoung audibly and theatrically gasped. “That was just me and the perfect lighting and the angle of my camera.” He thought about telling Wooyoung about the clock – and he decided to when he saw how Wooyoung was vibrating out of his body every time he spoke. He owed it to him to tell him everything that had happened.
So he did – everything from the events leading up to the photograph, after the photograph, and Yunho’s terrifying hour on death row. Wooyoung clung to every word like a koala on a tree branch, his eyes growing like saucers at all of the right moments.
“And I honestly have no fucking clue why the Clock let me live,” Yunho said once he was finished with his story. “Because how is this beneficial to Hongjoong in the slightest? What does the Clock see that I don’t?”
Wooyoung quirked his lips while he cleaned up the last bit of the drink he had spilled. “I think it’s because the Clock helps all of Mitha, if I understand you correctly,” Wooyoung said after a minute. “Hongjoong missed an oversight that allowed you to live – something I suppose he missed because of how far that cane is up his ass.” Wooyoung, who was perpetually smiling, smiled even more. It was such a good sight to see him so happy. Yunho hadn’t seen him this cheery in months, and the feeling gave him warmth in his chest. Despite everything he had gone through to obtain that photo, seeing Wooyoung so satisfied made it all worth it.
“Thank you, Yunho,” Wooyoung said as if he were thinking the same thing as Yunho. “If I had known it would be this hard or life-threatening, I wouldn’t have asked you to do this. But you did it, and you did it with flying colors because you’re Jeong motherfucking Yunho. It makes me feel so good that innocent Seelie lives will be saved because Prince Hongjoong now won’t have political power.” He paused. “Or, not as much power as he could have had.” Wooyoung took a deep breath and beamed. “Fae with lives like Helio can now live.”
Yunho wished he could see Prince Hongjoong’s face right now – was he seething on his throne, clawing at the walls, crying his eyes out? – but he was certain that whatever reaction he had, it wouldn’t be as satisfying as Wooyonug’s glee right in front of him.
Yunho touched Jongho’s reporter card in his pocket and let a wave of sadness wash over him. He couldn’t save everyone, but he was glad to save Wooyoung. The happiness reappeared on Yunho as it had never disappeared, and it was his natural look – a man that would move mountains just to see a friend smile after months of grief. “And I would do it again.”
vampire!yunho kisses all over your face, his arms wrapping around you as he falls backwards into your shared bed. then, a moan slips out of his lips as your ass presses against his tented jeans. that... was unexpected, but needed.
you’d both been getting increasing levels of pressure from friends and family members, and maybe... something was needed to take the increasing frustration out on. in this case, taking it out on each other sounded suitable.
time passes and next thing you know you’re undressed in front of yunho, and he’s looking at you like you’re an absolute meal - not literally - while also having unadulterated love mixed into the gaze. he’s shirtless and making his way towards you, arms pushing you back onto the bed and caging you under him.
Alright gang, more than 1 of you seemed interested in the idea of a The Mortal Instruments inspired Ateez AU, so I’m going to start working on it lol
So far, I know I want the story to be predominantly set in the Downworld as opposed to focusing on Shadowhunters.
Without further ado, let me introduce our first set of characters:
Part 1: The Vampires
Kim Hongjoong: Leader of one of the main vampire clans in Seoul. Sire to Mingi, Yunho, and Wooyoung. Feared by many due to his reputation of being one of the oldest and most powerful of the Night Children. Before the Accords were written, demanding peace between Shadowhunters and Downworlders, the Clave launched an attack on Hongjoong’s clan, as they feared his growing power. The clan dwindled from hundreds down to barely a handful, leaving Hongjoong with a strong hatred of the Nephilim.
Jeong Yunho: Widely known as Hongjoong’s right hand. Born a prince during the Joseon dynasty, Yunho fell in love with one of the King’s young soldiers - Song Mingi. During a particularly bloody battle, Mingi suffered a fatal wound. Hongjoong appeared to a devastated Yunho and offered him a deal: in exchange for Yunho’s eternal servitude, he would turn them both, saving Mingi’s life.
Song Mingi: Once a soldier of Joseon Dynasty, now a vampire and loyal follower of Kim Hongjoong. As he and Yunho were the first humans Hongjoong had ever turned, they formed a particularly strong bond. Because of his build and external demeanour, he also carries a fearsome reputation amongst other Downworlders, however, in truth, he is the softest of the three by miles.
Jung Wooyoung: as of our story beginning, he is the newest fledgling of Hongjoong’s clan, and a complete stranger to this world of magic and shadows. Wooyoung does not take well to his new reality and runs away from his Sire. But how will a newly turned vamp survive on his own?
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Note: I've made some amendments to this regarding the vampires' ages. Having looked at my source material again, I realised the first vampires were canonically created by Hecate in the 1400's, meaning I'd made them all way too old lol.
Part 2 to be released soon. I love and encourage feedback, please tell me what you think! Also if you want to follow along I’d recommend following the title tag
warnings: mentions of blood, violence, sexual situations, fighting
“Don’t panic.”
You jumped the voice. It was Yunho, your boyfriend, crouching against the wall across from you. You tried to move closer on instinct but felt restricted.
You jumped the voice. It was Yunho, your boyfriend, crouching against the wall across from you. You tried to move closer on instinct but felt restricted.
Chains?
“Don’t think too much, don’t move. In fact do anything but listen.” his voice was quiet and serious. It was a tone you’d never heard before, and frankly it scared you.
“Your body is still changing. It's going to be really hard but I'm here for you.”
A scoff came from your throat trying to hide the rising panic. “What the hell are you talking about? Can you use real words?”
He hesitated for a moment. “You're a vampire.”
You blink once. Twice.
“No seriously what the fuck is this?” you stare at him, unamused. The more the feeling returns to your limbs the more aware you are of how tightly you are restrained.
“This is going to feel like a sick joke but I promise you its real.”
“Whatever, continue your fucking joke but loosen these up.”
He opens a cooler next to him without acknowledging your complaints. He holds out a raw steak swimming in blood inside a plastic container.
Your nose is tingling, but you're unaware why.
He looks you in the eyes, holding your gaze for a few seconds but the moment he opens the bag, you're filled with feelings and sensations you don't understand. There is only one you can pinpoint.
Hunger.
Intense and overwhelming hunger.
What feels like hours is actually seconds as you go feral.
Eyes wild and scarlett. Body yanking against the chains in a way that should bruise and bloody your limbs.
Under his breath, you hear him mutter something before whatever mania you experienced halted like a breath.
You stopped as if on cue, bewildered by your own actions. Yunho just stared, almost bored looking.
“What the fuck?”
“I took away your smell. Your boody is still reacting to the blood in small ways but the smell is the strongest sense in this case. You're a vampire now, ______”
His words were without amusement or humor.
The silence stretched, your body was still tingling and even the sight of the blood so close made your mouth water in a way you found disgusting.
When you started to understand, you spoke in a low voice. “...how?”
Now his face changed. Unable to hold your gaze. He was uncharacteristically nervous and this scared you.
“That…that is my fault” he looked down at his hands.
“I…” he took a deep sigh. “I didn't know you had an open wound.”
His voice was so low but somehow you could hear it.
“Even then, i usually have more control. I-I don’t know.”
That time he seemed to be talking to himself, almost chastizing. He was regretful of something
“Yunho,” you started carefully “what happened?” the tears in your eyes made his own start to form before his eyes began to burn red just as yours had. Glowing against his guilt sorrowed face, startling you.
