Chapter Text
Jungkook’s skin weighs down on his bones. He’d never been fragile, not like this. He doesn’t remember what it was like, before, barely even sure there was a before, but he doesn’t think his body was like this.
He’d loved the sun. He’d loved the beach, swimming in the ocean, salt water in his hair.
As he shivers, city-sludge-water soaking into his threadbare clothes from Seoul’s cracked concrete, he pretends the puddle is an ocean. The sun hurts now, but the restaurant exhaust is warm, and if he closes his eyes and presses down hard enough, shocks of light burst behind his eyelids, almost like being sun blind.
He can’t quite conjure up the smell of salt, can’t really remember how the sun always made his dark hair hot to the touch, but if he breathes through his mouth can just barely block out everything else enough to pretend.
His senses, all over the place now, make that so hard.
He smells everything. He smells the frying oil the restaurant is using, a canola blend, bubbling far above its smoke point. The smoke hangs rancid in the alleyway. He loved fried chicken, before, he thinks. The stench is nostalgic. Jungkook’s brain pulls at that thread. Had he been here before? Did his friends, his family come here? Maybe they did, maybe they still do, maybe they would find him and tell him everything is going to be okay .
And so he stays.
He blocks out the heartbeats pounding in his ears from the other side of the double layered concrete brick wall. Blocks out the stone pressing into his cheek, too far gone to know if he’s hot or cold or a fever or hypothermia.
It’s been so long since he ate.
Maybe he could give the fried chicken a try.
Just the thought makes Jungkook swallow down his nausea. Not that there’s anything to come up. Even the stomach acid had been gone for weeks. He misses it.
He’s so hungry.
Maybe it’s just time to give up? Even in his head, full of un-strung sensations and thoughts, giving up sounds too close to giving in and no .
He’s not a monster.
He’ll never be a monster.
Hopefully he can die before he becomes one.
Hundreds of years later, Seokjin still hates it when Yoongi goes anywhere alone. For decades, Seokjin insisted it was just for protection. He dropped that façade somewhere in their second century together, and now he just says because someone has to hold your hand on the way to work . Poor excuse, when they’re all more than competent with teleportation nowadays, but Yoongi lets it slide because he likes holding hands. Sue him.
They’re heading in early tonight. It’s been humid, with all the rain, and the second the sun rises it will be insufferable outside. In the early hours of the morning, though, the smell of last night’s rain makes the city feel clean. It’s a nice walk. Seokjin keeps trying to make Yoongi laugh; Yoongi hasn’t broken yet but as the jokes get worse Yoongi gets closer.
Yoongi likes the day shifts. He gets to the clinic right as the humans wake up, before most of the new patients from the night before are being processed. He gets to hold their hands, help when it’s needed the most, and most of all, enjoy the morning walk with Seokjin.
They take a different route every day. Today crosses through the district that’s open for humans, even now. The wind changes, and Yoongi wrinkles his nose. He likes fried chicken as much as the next guy, but old frying oil somewhere is starting to go rancid.
Yoongi pulls his sleeve over his hand to cover his nose when he smells something else.
Decay.
Not normal decay, not the decomposing leftovers in the dumpster or the dead rat behind it, but a much more familiar type.
He smells it on feral fledglings every day.
“Seokjin,” he says, stopping in front of the chicken shop, “do you smell it?”
Seokjin stops the second Yoongi does, eyes dilating and turning serious. The man telling a joke a second ago is gone.
“Yeah,” Seokjin says, looking around, “the alley?”
Yoongi nods. “I think so.”
Approaching a feral is always dangerous. There is quite literally no one in the world as well equipped and experienced to deal with this as Seokjin and Yoongi are, but even they proceed with caution.
Ferals are dangerous, and a feral this far gone, this close to being nothing but an immortal corpse…
They’re cautious. They have to be. Yoongi hasn’t smelled Ash on a fledgling this bad in years.
They enter the alley. The smell is even worse, here. There’s the oil, the dumpster, the rat behind it, and—
There.
“Oh, shit,” Yoongi says.
Against the brick wall, hidden behind piles of trash waiting for pick up, is a form, back against the wall, face pressed against the ground.
His clothes are wet, hanging off of him by ropes of surviving material. Yoongi thinks it’s a him, but it’s impossible to tell. He can’t see enough, can’t confirm; either way, Yoongi is paying much more attention to the Ash.
He’s never seen it this bad, not on someone who hasn’t already gone fully feral. That’s not what they’re dealing with, here; if the fledgling was feral, Yoongi and Seokjin would already be fighting for their lives.
This one is holding on.
Yoongi ignores the trash and kneels next to him. He tilts the boy’s head back. The Ash marbles his face with a black spiderweb, cracks his lips, but he’s breathing, barely. Yoongi feels for a heartbeat. It’s there, but heavy, slow, even for a vampire.
If Yoongi hadn’t searched for a heartbeat he would have thought the boy was dead. His eyes are open, but barely, just like he fell with them open and didn’t both to close them again. Everything about him is dull. It hurts. Yoongi brushes his cheek, takes some calm energy and presses it into the boy.
His skin is almost stone. Ash starts in small patches, reaching out from cracks in a fledgling’s skin as their body starts to reject itself. It starts to heal itself after first feeding.
This boy hasn’t eaten; he hasn’t eaten in weeks . The cracks are still there, black lines crisscrossing every visible inch of him, oozing black. His own blood, likely.
“Fuck,” Seokjin says.
Despite doing this every day, this one feels different. Seokjin moves the trash out of the way and takes his jacket off to lay over the boy. He’s so gentle, even as his favorite jacket drags through the trash. Yoongi is so glad Seokjin is with him, always is.
the boy doesn’t flinch.
His eyes are open, distant, glazed.
“Hey,” Yoongi says, placing a gentle hand over the jacket he just placed, “can you hear me?”
The boy shivers, gasps, curls in on himself, but doesn’t respond.
“Okay,” Yoongi brushes the boy’s hair out of his face. He’s so cold. “Hyung, can you bring us to the clinic?”
Seokjin nods, kneeling next to them. He’s getting his nice pants muddy.
Seokjin, calm, calmer than Yoongi is, places his hand over Yoongi’s, fingers just barely touching the boy’s head. “Deep breaths,” Seokjin says, and once, quieter, “he’ll be okay.”
No matter how many times he’s felt it, being teleported by someone else is always disorienting.
Yoongi chokes back a cough, feels Seokjin’s skin on his, shakes his head, and focuses.
The clinic is warm, harshly warm against the cold fledgling’s skin. It’s like coming inside from a snowstorm, those uncomfortable tingles as feeling returns. It must be painful.
They’re on the ground in the middle of admissions. It’s still fairly empty, this early. A young woman with light Ash on her hands, waiting at the front desk, gasps, stumbles back.
The fledgling, completely unresponsive in the alley, has gone from shivers to shakes, silence to a quiet whine, a quiet wail , if Yoongi’s being dramatic. He wants to be dramatic; this feels dramatic.
“Okay, baby, you’re okay now,” Yoongi says, gentle. He keeps brushing the boy’s hair. All of his coven mates like it when he does this, and the pet name falls out on instinct. The boy is clearly in desperate need of some affection, so Yoongi lets himself be affectionate.
He gestures to the doctor on call. Minji nods and she calls for a nurse.
“What happened? Is he sedated?” Minji asks, pulling a gurney over with the help of one of their nurses.
“No, he hasn’t gone feral,” Yoongi explains. He steps back to let the doctor do what she’s trained to do. The boy whimpers when Yoongi stops touching him and Yoongi wants nothing more than the help him.
“What?!” Minji asks, “how?”
The nurse scoops an arm under the boy, practiced, unfazed when his whimpers turn to shouts, his weak thrashes doing nothing to stop his movement.
Yoongi shakes his head. “I have no idea. We found him on the streets.”
The boy is placed on the gurney, struggling. He’s still not seeing what’s happening, but his eyes flicker around, looking but not seeing. His confused sounds of distress and pain break Yoongi’s heart.
“Restrain him,” Minji tells the nurse, and then to Yoongi, “for his own safety. And ours. Hopefully we got him in time.”
Yoongi nods. “Let me just,” he says, and places his hand on the boy’s head.
The skin is rough, crumbling under his hand, but the boy’s hair might have been soft in some other context. The boy is breathing too fast, choking on his own air.
“Breathe, darling,” Yoongi says. For the first time, the boy looks at him. Big, dull eyes search his face for something. There’s someone left inside of him, Yoongi knows it.
Pulling magic from the ground below them, the spirits around them, and the air they breathe, Yoongi presses calm into the poor boy’s skin.
His eyes flutter closed and his body goes slack.
Minji takes him away to the clinic’s small emergency bay, and Yoongi turns to the young woman. He forces a smile.
“Sorry about that, let me get someone to get you checked in.”
Seokjin sits down and pulls out his phone to wait, and Yoongi does his job.
They worked for years to create The Gangbuk Clinic for Young Vampires. It’s only a hundred years old now, young by immortal standards, but it runs well. Yoongi knows the boy is in good hands. Minji has been with them for 90 years, she knows what she’s doing.
Even as he works, Yoongi can’t stop thinking about the boy.
Seokjin normally walks him to the clinic and then heads home or to work or to class, whatever his interest is that decade, but today, Seokjin stays. He sits off in a corner of the waiting room, reading something on his phone. Seokjin isn’t normally tense like this.
Yoongi isn’t normally tense like this.
Maybe they feel something like sympathy for the boy. Maybe it’s bad memories. Either way, Yoongi’s skin itches and as he helps all the abandoned fledglings get settled and calm in their new lives, there’s someone else he wishes he could help.
Minji comes out of the emergency bay, pale. If she could sweat she would be sweating.
Yoongi gives a quick apology to the sire and new fledgling he’s welcoming before approaching Minji. Yoongi tries his best to look calm.
“How is he?” he asks.
Minji rubs her eyes. “He’s alive.” She sighs. “I’ve never seen it get this bad, at least not in a pre-feral.”
Seokjin joins them from his place in the corner. “Yoongi got this bad, before we figured it out.”
Yoongi shivers. “That was a long time ago, we didn’t know.”
Minji nods. “He’s alive, he’s here, and he’s on IV for fluids and nutrients at least, but we can’t get him to consume any blood. His magic is, forgive my language, fucked right now. He needs to eat.”
“He hasn’t fed?” Yoongi asks, trying his best to keep his voice calm for the other patients.
Minji shakes her head, exasperated. “He’s refusing. Every time he sees blood he panics; it’s even making it through your charms.”
Seokjin seems just as baffled as Yoongi feels. They share a look. “That must be some intense distress, to beat Yoongi’s magic.”
“Thank god the emergency bay is soundproof. When the donor on call presented her wrist he screamed, I’ve never seen anything like it. He’s clearly weeks old and has never fed, his fangs haven’t even come in. No energy to transform.”
Yoongi crosses his arm. “Fuck, poor kid.” Seokjin nods. “I can try again, see if he’ll feed from me? He seemed to be okay with me.”
He looks to Seokjin, who just shrugs. Vampires don’t often feed other vampires; not because of any taboo, it’s just inefficient. It’s easier to get blood from donors or blood bags than to get it filtered through another vampires body, but when a vampire is injured this badly, the magic of another being is sometimes necessary.
Minji pouts in thought. “You could give it a try. He’s so dry, the fluids will keep the Ash from getting any worse for a day or so, but I don’t know how long we can keep him if he won’t eat. He’s in and out, see if you can catch him in a lucid moment.”
“Alright, I’ll give it a try. Hyung, come with me?” he pleads, and as always, Seokjin comes.
The bed is soft. Jungkook doesn’t really understand what’s happening, but the bed is soft, and there are lights on. He’s inside. There’s antiseptic around, but it’s muted, like whoever cleaned was careful not to spread too much scent. It’s nice.
For the first time in too long, Jungkook isn’t overwhelmed.
There’s a steady, slow beeping. Is that him? It sounds like a heart monitor, but it’s too slow. He remembers his heartbeat, before. Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum . He could hear it in his ears when he got excited.
This is too slow.
Ba-
dum.
Ba-
dum.
His skin itches, but when he reaches up to scratch, his arm doesn’t respond. He flexes his fingers.
Ow .
Maybe he’s just too weak to scratch his nose. That sucks. He wrinkles it instead, tries to convince his nose to stop being itchy . It doesn’t work.
He’s so hungry. As soon as he has the thought, he bites his tongue.
No . He doesn’t want to be one of them, doesn’t want to be a monster. People shouldn’t have to die so he can live, that’s not right, it’s not .
He misses the alley, the mud, the rotten oil.He knew what he was feeling, there. Pain, fear, the slow crawl of an immortal’s almost-impossible death, fear. Fear.
He’s still afraid, here. Different fear. Out there, the fear was death.
Here, the fear is life.
He feels better. He’s breathing better. His heart is still too slow, he still apparently can’t scratch his own nose, but he’s not laying face down in a puddle anymore.
There’s a blanket on top of him.
He doesn’t remember much of getting here. The nice man (men?) in the alley, the people who wouldn’t stop touching him, a lot of blurs of fear and panic and cut through it all, an eerie calm .
Calm is weird. Weirder than the fear and the pain. Jungkook wanted to fight through, but god, it was so nice to melt into it when his body let him.
But when blood was nearby—
His body wouldn’t let him; or maybe his brain wouldn’t. His body wanted to give in. Someone had come in, smelling clean and friendly, her heartbeat fast and stable. She’d smelled so good. Jungkook’s gums had itched.
He wanted to bite .
Even the memory has Jungkook’s throat itching. Either something is wrong with the machines or he’s crying. He doesn’t think he has the capability to cry anymore. Must be the machine.
The door opens. Jungkook flinches, turns his head into the pillow.
He swallows. The door closes. Two sets of footsteps, two heartbeats, slow. Vampires. Safe. They’re safe, or at least safe from him.
“Hi,” one of them says. That’s the man from before, the man who called him baby , who made him feel warm and calm. “My name is Yoongi. You can call me hyung, okay?”
Jungkook doesn’t respond, keeps his eyes closed. Too hard.
A wooden chair scrapes against the linoleum. Two chairs. “I’m Seokjin. You saw me before, the handsome one,” he says. Jungkook can hear the smile in his voice. It’s nice. Jungkook breathes.
The men sit.
“Can you hear us?” Yoongi says.
Jungkook can hear them. He can hear too much of them. Their aching heartbeats, the scuff of their shoes on the floor, he can hear so much that it’s hard to focus on their voices. He can hear, though.
He shifts his head against the pillow. Down, up.
“Good,” Yoongi says, and if Jungkook could smile, he would. Yoongi brushes his hair back, just like he had in the alley, just like he had when they got to this place, wherever it is. Just like before, Jungkook’s mind goes calm .
He hadn’t thought there was any room in his body left for tension, but it’s all gone now. His lips are slightly parted, head limp against the hand holding him up.
This is weird.
Jungkook had never been particularly skilled in magic, but once, in some past life, he bought a cup of tea from a mudang in Itaewon. This is what it had felt like. Not wrong, but almost like alcohol. Like something was happening beyond his control, but nothing he needed to fight.
His body was constantly working beyond his control, but this one, just this one, he didn’t need to fight.
He groans, blinks his eyes open.
The man with the kind eyes and the magic hands hovers over him. Yoongi. “Hi,” he says again, “are you feeling a little bit better?”
Jungkooks opens and closes his mouth, his tongue sticking to the roof. He hums, noncommittal. Maybe better. Definitely calmer.
“Okay,” Yoongi says, “you don’t have to talk.”
Jungkook hums again, gives a little nod. The man—Yoongi—lets him have his silence.
And then, all of a sudden, he doesn’t.
“Are you hungry?”
Jungkook’s head snaps up. His gums itch. He bites down on his lip, begs himself not to whine but he’s whining anyway.
He hadn’t had the energy to scratch his nose, moments ago, but now he has the energy to pull away, scramble back in the bed. He doesn’t know what he’s running from.
Maybe himself?
Yoongi reaches for him, Yoongi with the healing hands, but Jungkook flinches back with such violence that he almost tumbles over.
“Easy there,” a second voice says, strange hands catching him before he can go tumbling. He’d forget about the other man, Seokjin , but now he doesn’t know where to run. They’re not letting him run from himself, not letting him run anywhere .
Jungkook’s brain is going to explode. On one side, unadulterated panic, and on the other, that artificial calm. He wants to reach for the calm, wants to live in the calm, but he knows if he lets go of the panic, he’ll fall.
There’s a voice in his head, whispering over and over again, you only exist to cause pain , you’re disgusting .
Jungkook keens. He’s so hungry. He’s so tired. He doesn’t want to be a monster.
Seokjin is at his back, and Yoongi kneels on the bed next to Jungkook.
Jungkook wants to run. He doesn’t know where. He thrashes, weak; Seokjin holds him, easily.
Yoongi cups his cheeks with both hands and Jungkook feels himself quiet, feels that same drug-like calm pulse through his body like a cold liquid, and his eyes fall shut.