The space between
Now playing: Forever & ever more - Nothing but Thieves
Pairing: vampire!hyeongjun x fem!reader
2.7k words – vampire horror
C.W ! : +18, drug use, blood, biting, vampire feeding, dubious consent, also descriptions get a little gross. Disgustingly sexy, read at your own risk... (wink)
Forgotten. That was the word. The house in front of you looked forgotten. Peeling paint curled from its walls beneath endless layers of graffiti, its bones showing wherever rain and years of neglect had eaten through plaster and mortar to expose its bricks underneath. Crossing what remained of the doorway felt like leaving the breathable world behind. Compared to the open night, the atmosphere inside felt… weighted, in a way. Warm and heavy and saturated with human heat, humid enough to feel viscous in your lungs. Each breath seemed to carry the residue of countless others before it, moisture and human warmth passed from lungs to lungs until the air itself felt strangely used.
Inside, music hung over the crowd like a veil, pressing down on the bodies packed beneath it as the whole house vibrated under the strain. The walls trembled with it. The loose glass left in the windows trembled with it. Bodies moved in uneven waves beneath the lights, colliding shoulder to shoulder, chest to back, separating only for another body to fill the space between them; bare skin glistened with sweat, wet hair stuck to foreheads and necks, fabric darkened beneath arms, across chests and along spines. You could smell everything in there. Everything. Spilled alcohol, cigarette smoke, dust, those musty old walls… all of it mixed with the sour warmth of sweat and breath exchanged at too close a distance, perfume turning heady on overheated skin.
Time dragged its feet. Movement followed itself with a slight delay, bodies leaving impressions behind them as they crossed your vision, gestures repeating in succession like echoes arriving through water. Red swallowed nearly every other color in the room. It glazed mouths and cheekbones, caught in loose strands of hair, burned through closed eyelids; farther from the lights it deepened, spreading across walls and bodies until everything seemed submerged in it. Red everywhere. In the corners, in the spaces between moving bodies, dissolving slowly into shadow. Muted and velvety and bloody red!
Your friend faded into the crowd - you let her. One moment her shoulder was still within reach, the next there were three bodies between you, then five, then you could only catch bits of her hair somewhere farther ahead. Then not even that. You looked for her for another second or two… maybe. Then something else caught your attention and you forgot what you were looking for.
Enough heat, enough noise, enough bodies brushing past your own. You stopped resisting the pressure of the crowd and let your weight yield wherever it pressed hardest, carried forward and sideways and back again by people whose faces vanished in the shadows. Soon there was only the pulse inside your ears and the deeper pulse beneath the floor, your clothes damp against fever-warm skin, your mouth tasting faintly of smoke and somebody else's drink. You existed wherever the room placed you.
Eventually, that happened to be closer to one of the walls. It was particularly humid there... or maybe the whole house was like that, you couldn't really tell anymore. Broken glass and cigarette ends disappeared beneath people's shoes, the floor sticky enough to pull faintly at your soles whenever you moved. People kept passing through, one after another, but somehow there was this little stretch of darkness that everyone seemed to move around. There, something was leaning against the wall.
At first, it was little more than a silhouette against a wall, swallowed by darkness. Tall, thin and a little hunched over. Long hair fell past its shoulders in loose strands and disappeared somewhere into the black around it. You could see its arms, long too, its hands hanging still at its sides. Its head tilted, or was that just the angle? Nothing else. No mouth, no nose, no expression; the dark hid its face from you. You could only see its eyes, catching the light and reflecting it blood red. You stared... and stared... and stared. Maybe it was only the lights- everything was red in that room! Still, through the pleasant fog inside your head, you wondered how nobody else seemed to notice it... him? Was that even a man? People passed within inches of his body without turning their heads, slipping through the darkness beside him and disappearing immediately back into the crowd. No one looked twice. No one seemed curious about the motionless figure pressed against the ruined wall, staring out from the dark with those strange huge droopy red eyes.
Eventually, someone crossed between you and broke your stare. Moving shoulders, wet hair, hands lifted beneath the red lights. You blinked and let your eyes wander with them, following nothing in particular, but a moment later they returned to the wall. He was looking at you now. Another body passed- you lost him again. Your attention went somewhere else for a while, caught on a face, a mouth, the bright rim of a glass raised above the crowd- then back to him. Still looking. This time, you held his gaze. People kept crossing between you, making him disappear for a second or two at a time, and every time the crowd opened again, those heavy-lidded, bored-looking eyes were still there. You held them longer than you would've held a stranger's, then a little longer. You were curious. Very curious, actually.
At some point, you became aware of your pulse. It was beating faster than before, hard at your throat, then your wrists once you noticed it there too. You swallowed. Your skin felt hot. Had you been this hot before? Probably, right? The whole house was fucking hot. Still, now that your attention had turned inward, you kept finding things. Sweat had gathered along your spine and dampened the fabric between your shoulder blades. Across your chest, behind your knees, between your thighs, everything- wet. Your clothes touched you too much and so did every stranger brushing past. Suddenly there was too much of you to feel at once. Every inch of skin seemed swollen with sensation, horribly available to every accidental touch. Your body received everything greedily, magnifying each bit of contact until its responsiveness became embarrassing. Repulsive. You wanted to crawl out of your own damp, hot, tight fucking skin. Still, whenever another body interrupted your view, your eyes went searching for that dark spot against the wall.
The crowd took you again. You let it. Fighting it felt like too much work, so you gave your weight back to the restless current of shoulders and hips and raised arms and let yourself be carried wherever it wanted. Away from him first. Someone’s wet hair caught against your mouth, an elbow pressed into your ribs. Then you were moving sideways. Were you? Someone backed into you, another body pushed from the opposite direction, your feet following whatever space opened beneath them. Away, across, around. You stopped keeping track. At some point you looked up and there he was again, still against the wall, a few strands of his hair flashing red between passing bodies. Huh. The crowd pulled you away. Fine, you went with it. Bodies closed around you, warm and wet and moving, and you forgot about him for a while. Then you looked again, and there he was. Each time you lost him, the room seemed to rearrange itself beneath your feet until that same dark pocket appeared ahead of you again. Someone collided with your back hard enough to send you stumbling forward. You caught yourself. He was standing right in front of you.
The bass was loud enough to rattle your teeth, people grinding past on every side, red breaking over faces and hands and mouths. You felt him in front of you, a strange pocket of cold against the heat of your body. You looked up. Oh. He was close. Close enough that the darkness could no longer hide his face. Those huge, heavy-lidded eyes first, then the rest of him: an angular nose, sharp brows, a narrow V-shaped jaw. Rounded lips. Strangely soft lips, actually, among all those edges. Even this close, with everyone around you shining wet beneath the lights, his skin was completely dry. Weird. The red caught along his throat whenever he moved, making his skin look unnaturally smooth, like wax. Your eyes followed the clean line of his neck, then wandered lower. His collar… his chest. Still dry. You found yourself looking for something there, some dampness in the fabric, some little sign of sweat. Anything, really. There was nothing.
He was so weird! You should’ve been repelled, you should’ve wanted to back up. Instead, your mouth was filling with saliva. What the fuck? Your tongue pressed against the back of your teeth, your throat tightened and you swallowed, feeling it all the way down your chest. His eyes settled on your throat, and his pupils slowly expanded, darkness spreading through the blood until there was barely any color left.
The room compressed. Red light. A mouth opening soundlessly. Fingers tangled in wet hair. The bass striking hard enough to blur the edges of your vision. Your pulse. Smoke on your tongue. Again the red. Again his face disappearing between flashes. People collided with him and slipped back into the current, barely disturbing him. His jaw tightened. His fingers flexed once at his side, then went still again. You watched his chest for a moment. Once, twice. Three beats of the music. Was he even breathing? You couldn't tell. Whatever. Still, he just stood there.
You looked at him, brows pulling together slightly as your eyes dragged over his face. Seriously? Was he going to do something? Anything!? You had been staring at each other for what felt like half the fucking night. He could talk to you, touch you, maybe (hopefully) kiss you. Something! Instead, those lazy eyes kept staring back at you like he had all the time in the world. You wanted to roll your eyes. Then your gaze fell to his mouth and there it was again, that same stupid rush of desire. His eyes dropped to your throat instead.
Another wave of people pressed against your back and narrowed the space between you. This time, when they receded, you didn’t bother reclaiming it. Your body stayed where the crowd had placed it, finally leaning into his cold.
His hand found your hip, and his fingers spread slowly over it, settling in a way that made the touch feel strangely possessive. Fucking finally!! The bass drove another violent pulse through the floor, but suddenly all you could feel was his hand. Your pulse struck hard at your throat, then lower, then everywhere at once. Then he bent toward you.
He closed the distance painfully slowly. His face lowered toward yours, red slipping through his hair, catching briefly along his cheek before losing it again to shadow. Your breath caught, your lips parting for the next. Closer, please. Your eyelids lowered, your chin lifted slightly as the last bit of space between you thinned into warmth and breath. Your body softened toward him. His mouth passed the corner of yours.
For one suspended moment you only felt the shape of his lips on your cheek, and then the wet point of his tongue touched you. Every thought you had been holding came apart. He drew his tongue very slowly over your skin, cool at first against the fever of your face, warming as it traveled and leaving behind a thin wet path. A shiver followed. Cheekbone… jaw… that sensitive spot behind your ear. Your head tilted back, exposing more of your neck to him. More room, more skin. His tongue took it all. Sensation spread far beyond the small place his mouth touched, slipping down your throat and beneath your damp clothes, settling hot low in your body. Your eyelids lowered, the red behind them pulsing with the lights. His mouth kept moving… slowly, lazily. God, you wanted more.
His tongue reached the sharp angle of your jaw and continued downward. Each movement came with the strange inevitability of sleep. Your body softened further into him, shoulders loose, head heavy, knees beginning to give up. Thinking became harder; then unnecessary. Music ran through your bloodstream. Bass. Heat. His hand on your hip. His mouth. His mouth. Everything else in your head was going black around the edges. You let yourself sink into it. Loose and warm and wonderfully empty. His mouth moved lower along your throat... lower... until it found the beat beneath your skin.
He moved slowly over the damp heat of your skin, past the place where your heartbeat struck hardest and into the hollow at the base of your neck, where he stopped. The hand over your hip tightened a little as the crowd surged around you. His lips parted against your skin, two fine points pressing into you slowly, so carefully that your body only softened further into his. Pain arrived first, bright and exquisitely precise. Sharp enough to make you recoil, maybe, but you didn’t; you couldn’t quite remember why you would. Then his mouth closed over the wound, and the world opened.
The first pull of his mouth emptied your head, then everything got sharp. Your eyes opened. You felt every strand of wet hair stuck to the back of your neck, every thread of your clothes against your damp skin, the slow drag of his fingertips over the fabric at your hip. Smoke and alcohol, you could taste both separately on your tongue. Even the music seemed to come apart. Beneath it, shoes scraped against wood and a couple kissed messily behind you. You could hear all of it. Feel all of it. All of it! Everything at once, perfectly, horribly clear.
Seconds lost their edges. The crowd moved around you slowly now, bodies brushing against yours and seeming to stay there forever before slipping away. Another pull at your throat and something inside you opened wider. You felt yourself loosen from the shape of your own body. You were still there, somewhere, held against him, but you were also in the floor beneath your feet, in the bass running through it, in the heat of every body moving around you. Everywhere. Everywhere. The song continued somewhere far away… or maybe close? Both... maybe? You found yourself existing in the spaces between its beats, suspended there where a second could stretch and stretch and stretch to fit an entire life in it. Another pull. You felt your blood moving toward his mouth, felt some of you leaving with it, and somehow that only made you feel larger. Lighter... endless. God, you had never felt so free.
Your jaw went slack, then your shoulders... your hands. Your fingers slipped loose from wherever they had caught in his clothes, and then your knees were giving too, pleasantly, until you weren't really standing anymore. He was holding you up. His arm came around you and drew you fully against him, the hand at your hip anchoring you there while the crowd closed over what little space remained. Bodies pressed into your back and shoulders, pushing you deeper into his chest, your collapse going completely unnoticed amid all that dancing, all that pushing and grinding. Nobody noticed. Your head rested wherever he placed it, throat exposed beneath his mouth, limbs heavy and limp, every remaining fragment of will dissolving into the ease of being held there while he fed from you.
With each slow pull, something else became clear. One thing, then another, then another. Oh. You understood. Each answer opened into another. Answers to what? You didn't know. Still, you knew. Questions you had never thought to ask suddenly had answers so obvious you wanted to laugh. Of course. Of course. The whole world had been keeping its secrets right in front of you all this time, and now they were giving themselves up one by one. You understood everything for an instant and retained none of it. Every revelation vanished the moment you reached for it, already replaced by another, then another, leaving only the absolute certainty that you had finally arrived somewhere you had been moving toward your entire life. Pleasure was too small a name for it, ecstasy too. This was something else- something else completely! His cold was your heat. Your heartbeat was the rhythm beneath the floor. The bodies around you, the house, the city, everything beyond it- none of it ended where the next thing began. Neither did you. Nothing had ever been separate. Of course. How had you never understood something so simple? For the first time in your life, existence seemed perfectly clear.
Then you were standing alone.