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The night he and Donghyuck met is fluent to Mark like an echo of his prayer. Because, even then, Mark would pray out loud, subliminal faith bringing him to his knees before magnificent Romanesque altars. He was a pilgrim though the age of cathedrals was beyond that century, a pilgrim as he left the stone arches and embraced the reek of death following him with each step. Perhaps he himself was death, Mark concluded, once he passed a pile of bodies, thrown over wooden carts like manure. Their sanguine breaths merely brushed Mark’s cheek as they let him through.
The memory, to Mark, remained transparent. Rain. December of 1720, months after the plague outbreak and sermons held in privacy of confessing chapels. Mark didn’t tend to visit them regularly, not after Jaemin cursed him to eternal life through death, but he still enjoyed the prickle of ivory benches under his fingers or the religious thoughts branded into once triumphal imperial columns. The stale air of the cathedral stuck to his clothes even while he passed the square and stepped into the poorest district, the Black Death accomplishing nothing in dismantling the rich from the poor. While the hospitals on the other side of the town remained reserved to those of the upper class, here houses bore the weight of abandonment.
Therefore, Mark couldn’t feign astonishment when he spotted a creature with violet-tinted skin and lips of a nearly same shade just down the narrow street. The grey walls trapped them inside of their solitude; brick over brick, cemented with foul odor and mucus coming from the houses.
Mark paused in his steps. His eyes trailed over the man who barely had any strength to stand on his two legs. Trembling knees threatened to give out on him, but the man held himself on the pile of crates – or coffins, Mark would have guessed if he wasn’t aware of how this district couldn’t afford them – and tried to lift his head to meet Mark’s dead stare.
His voice was muffled by the rain. “I finally found you.”
He tried to take a step, but quickly gave up on the idea, rather keeping his weight against the wooden crates. Baring his neck for Mark, he called him forward.
“It took you some time,” Mark said, unmoving, “you’ve been following me from the square.”
One breathless chuckle, cut by a whimper.
“It hurts to laugh.” The man covered his chest with one hand, grinning all yellowish teeth and sunken cheeks. He was so poor and tattered, Mark had to look away. “I wrote about death so many times, expressed my desire for it and now I wish to escape it.”
He was a poet, of course he was. Mark should have realized it sooner. All poets resided in the poor districts, their verses barely paying for the mattress they slept on. If they ever did, those frail night souls.
Rather than turning away from the scene, Mark remained deeply enthralled by it. No more than a few steps separated him from the stranger who seemed to know all about Mark. Crossing the distance, Mark leaned his body over the man’s and carefully inspected his yellowish corneas, like the moon over a polluted city.
Chestnut hair, now nearly black from the rain, moles hiding underneath the chalk stains on his face, Adam’s apple nearly the size of a small fig – Mark imagined him to be enticingly beautiful below this mask of plague.
“Your teeth,” the man gasped, grinning behind his palm.
Immediately, Mark flinched back, cursing through pressed lips. But even then, his fangs threatened to pierce the soft flesh of his bottom lip and soak his chin with blood of the duke he fed on his way to the cathedral.
“Let me see.”
“No.”
“Take my life, that is why you’re here,” he enticed, this poet with nothing but the thin thread, wrapped around Atropos’ fingers, keeping his soul bound to his body. “You could have easily taken the other turn, but you came here on purpose, just to see me.”
Mark’s hand, the one in the pocket on his coat, twitched. There was nothing more he desired at this moment but to wrap it around the poet’s throat until his nails had sunken into the soft flesh around his vertebrae. The poet lifted his chin, raindrops colliding with his skin, trembling lips seeking their voice.
“Don’t let—“ he hesitated, glancing around. Morning was hours away. “Don’t let me die like them. Deformed. My face unrecognizable to anyone.”
“I don’t take pity in return,” Mark said. He helped the sick man up, holding him firmly by his elbow. His bones there felt like Mark could break them in a blink.
“In return?”
“I can’t kill you without being given something in return. Your blood won’t work. You’re sick. It doesn’t attract me.” Mark looked down, moving some of the dark strands from the poet’s face. The yellow glow in them was nearly gone, replaced with an eerie fog coming down over their souls.
Easily, Mark recognized it. He stared into the face of death.
Or it was merely his own face staring back at him, reflecting in the dying man’s eyes. He never knew.
“I can offer you my immortal life instead.” The boy sought support against Mark’s forearm. “My soul is already doomed, so why not let the world know it?”
Mark’s jaw tightened. “You don’t know what you’re offering,” he gritted through his teeth, fangs piercing his bottom lip.
“I will write endless sonnets in your honor. We can plaster them all across the known world, watch as it admires and fears the unknown. My life is yours now.”
The rain finally tapered off.
"At least, before I take it, tell me your name."
Centuries later, New York, 1974 if Mark wanted to be precise, Donghyuck lazily plastered over their couch in flared jeans and a mustard yellow turtleneck tucked into them, blending in perfectly with the yellow patterns on the couch, admits he scarcely remembered what happened after he passed out that evening. Between the flaring pain, like his skin got exposed to licking flames, and his back hitting the wet brick wall remained a gap he so often wanted to fill, wanted to metamorphose into verses, adore it with rhythm and scan it like he would do to Ovid.
Guided by adoration, he settles in Mark’s lap and allows his undying lover to guide him back to that night, to express his concern for the lightness of Donghyuck’s body as he picked him up and took them to the first empty room he could find in the maze of secluded houses.
From the moment they met, Mark, being the admirer of art he always claimed came with someone of his vocation, branded the prettiest spot on Donghyuck’s wane body. The sheets ended up on the floor quickly and Donghyuck convulsed in Mark’s hold so badly he nearly clawed off the skin from the vampire’s neck with his necrotic fingertips. They didn’t have much time. It was nearly morning and Mark was supposed to let Donghyuck feed in the first few hours after life revisited was breathed into his lungs.
It was fascinating to watch the black tissue on Donghyuck’s fingers fade into translucent, his skin keeping the same unnaturally violet tinge as Mark took the last drop of his bitter blood. The fabric he ripped from the bedding muffled Donghyuck’s screams while Mark held him close to his chest, allowing the blood to soak his shirt and coat, wishing he could whisper words of comfort in Donghyuck’s hair. The pain will always be there, he wanted to say. But it won’t matter. You won’t be alone in it.
“And I truly wasn’t,” Donghyuck says, kissing the underside of Mark’s chin where his head is safely tucked. A giggle escapes his lips, very theatrical as always knowing Donghyuck wasn’t ticklish anymore, when Mark traces the crescent scar on his shoulder.
“Do you truly have time to hear this story? You remember everything that happened afterwards.”
Donghyuck turns in Mark’s hold, giving him a strict stare. “I gifted all my time to you, remember?”
“And to your column. You have a deadline, Donghyuck. How do you plan to pay the rent, hmm?”
“Shut up, Mark.”
“Well those words sound familiar.”
Donghyuck withered on the bed. After the outbreak, Mark was used to walking in on murderous scenes the Black Death left on her trace, something just as similar playing before his eyes. Only this time he was the responsible culprit, a Flemish painter who stored nothing but crimson and grey tempera on his palette, creating faces deprived of joy.
“You’re thinking too loud.”
Mark looked up from his palms.
“I am not unhappy. I just feel too much. Hear. See.” Donghyuck sighed, lifting his hands and watching his fingers contract around floating dust particles. The room was cut out from any light source, Mark made sure of that, but Donghyuck could see everything clearly even then. “Perhaps, for a poet, that isn’t too bad.”
“Perhaps,” Mark agreed. He wanted to stand up, to wipe off any remaining blood from Donghyuck’s lips. “Are you not overwhelmed?”
“I’m just thirsty.” The messy head, brown locks, curled from the rain, spilled over the bare mattress like ink, turned towards Mark. “Can you distract me?”
“I still can’t believe you rejected me on that night.”
“We’d just met, Donghyuck,” Mark reminds his persistent boyfriend. Then, with memory tickling his senses unconsciously, his hand reaches the hem of Donghyuck’s turtleneck, twirling the loose strands there. “But I redeemed myself the night after, didn’t I?”
Donghyuck panted into the pillow, gripping it to the point of ripping, silencing his whines in the cloud of dove-white feathers. The bed dipped under his and Mark’s combined weight, senses suffocating each time Mark pressed on his lower back trying to bring Donghyuck’s hips down and fuck him in an angle where he could feel his cock rub against Donghyuck’s insides. Mark pulled out for a moment just to see the head of his cock red like the open cuts on the back of Donghyuck’s thighs, wet from being held together for too long.
It was these days Mark enjoyed the most, days spent in just to end with food Mark maimed before their door for Donghyuck to feast on. Donghyuck hadn’t fully embraced his newfound nature, selfishly gripping on his remaining human habits to sweat in the sweet crooks of his joints or blush before Mark’s crimson irises.
“Are you doing this on purpose?” Mark had asked after he shuddered just from having Donghyuck’s warm body next to his. Donghyuck’s legs quivered with willows in wind knocking against their window, kept together with Mark’s knees squashing his together.
“Doing what?” Dozens of open mouthed kisses, the last one biting down and draining Donghyuck’s veins that showed on his feet and arms like a stream of icy water coursing through his limbs.
The newborn closed his eyes and slowly opened them, his stare a masterful replica of his creator’s.
“Refusing to feed. Risking our identities so you’d only—“
“—have your undivided attention?” Donghyuck hid a toothy smile against his shoulder. “Yes.”
Mark’s cock easily slid between Donghyuck’s soft thighs. Perhaps too sticky, but warm nevertheless. He barely flinched when Donghyuck snuck a hand down and Mark was quick to grasp it by the wrist, holding the daring hand captive against the ruined bed sheets.
“Focus.” Mark looked at Donghyuck sharply, digging his nails in Donghyuck’s palm. “Keep your legs closed for me.”
It took all of Mark’s sanity not to grab Donghyuck by his jaw and rut against his pliant thighs when the little demon rolled his eyes, reminding Mark of spoiled princes he’d met on courts throughout his immortal life, the same ones he’d manage to fuck into submissive fear with nothing but his serpent irises. Yet Donghyuck, the same plague poet who was nearly on his knees before Mark, offering his soul just so he could keep his vanity, dared to expose his dewy fangs and bloody gums. He’d open his legs too if Mark didn’t have him pinned down with his entire weight.
Between them, their breaths collided in a puff of white smoke. It was so cold, yet Donghyuck still shivered and sweat as Mark snapped his hips down, some of his precum sticking to Donghyuck’s skin, other dripping down his leg, staining the sheets.
Donghyuck’s neck tasted like salt. Mark couldn’t remember the last time he kissed a vampire and had his tongue prickle, teeth go numb and own body long for life.
A guttural moan made Mark lift his head from Donghyuck’s throat, gliding his fangs down the artery, relishing in the fight the newborn was putting against the heavy body prostrated over his.
“You’re so indecent.” Donghyuck threw his head back, breathing out. “Do you want to suffocate me and let them find me like this, Mark, with you still dripping out of me?”
“Would you like that?” Mark rambled, fastening his pace, rattling the bed in an uneven rhythm. “To be treated like some whore? We just met and you let me fuck you—”
“As if you’re any better.” Mark was surprised how the vampire beneath his body still had it in him not to slur his words, especially when Mark was so close to painting his thighs pearly white. Only his body showed his sensitivity, betraying him with its flushed chest and wet lips.
“You saw me once,” Donghyuck grinned, battling the grip on his arms and lacing his fingers through Mark’s unruly hair, “and desired me so badly you couldn’t even kill me.”
Donghyuck let out a little gasp. Between his legs, Mark was warm and soft. His hole clenched and Mark looked away in shame, panting against Donghyuck’s mouth, cutting his tongue purposely on the newborn’s canines so their lips tinted like sweet grapes.
Perched on his elbows, Mark lifted his body and Donghyuck immediately spread his legs, bending his neck so he’d stare at the milky excess trickling down his thighs. An idea sparked in his mind like ember.
“Mark,” he demanded, ruby eyes not leaving the marks on his body, nearly as precious as the one on his neck. “Drink from my thighs.”
Lightheaded, Mark ran a hand down his face, blinking at Donghyuck through his fingers. “What?”
“You heard me. Drink from me, drain me to the last drop until my throat is sore from thirst. And when you bring me someone to feed from, do it all over again until my life, just like that, is yours.”
Donghyuck’s grin was bright, a once mustard yellow turtleneck and the couch with tacky geometrical patches soaked in the blood coming from his wrist. Mark licked the gaping wound, humming at Donghyuck’s words.
“Over and over again.”