At the End of Forever (oneshot)
Title: At the End of Forever
Rating: R
Form: Oneshot
Words: 4 282
Pairings: YunJae
Genre: Drama, angst, romance. Vampire!fic.
Summary: Forever is just a pretty word in romance books, and eternity means watching everyone around you die.
A/N: Thanks to my beta, tatsunotoshi, who put up with some nonsense from me. Don’t try to proof your work when tipsy folks. XD
Also, this is er, ‘inspired’ by the idea of Twilight, because although I’ve never read the books, I find the idea of them quite ridiculous.
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When he was a child, his mother used to tell him fairy tales. They’d be about heroes and dragons and princesses, and they’d all end happily ever after. None of them really said what happened in that ‘ever after’, but as a child, ‘happy’ was a good enough description for Yunho. When he was a little older, fairy tales were for babies and the stories he was more interested in were the ones that involved blood and guns and other dangerous things. It was a phase that all little boys went through, his mother said one time to a friend of hers.
Maybe it was the remnants of that fascination that brought him to Jaejoong. Even if it was though, it couldn’t have been what made him stay - because the dark dangerous stories he heard and read about were never as complicatedly mundane as his own story turned out to be.
Even from first glance, Yunho knew Jaejoong to be everything other. The opposite of him in every way, and someone he’d probably never have hung out with. But he was there, that night at the club, when Yunho had snuck in with his friends, all underage and overeager. He’d been there, sitting at the bar with his legs crossed, dark eyes scanning the crowds. Yunho never found out what he’d been looking for, but that night, Jaejoong’s eyes had met Yunho’s, and locked.
He was gorgeous. Gorgeous, dark and exotic; a study in monochrome, ebony hair and eyes stark against pale, flawless skin. There was something about him, something that Yunho couldn’t put his finger on but sucked him in, intrigued him. Something that screamed danger but sent shivers of pleasure up Yunho’s spine. He looked like a movie star, or some other, far superior, form of being. Someone that mere mortals like Yunho couldn’t begin to understand, let alone touch. Yet, it was all Yunho could do to keep from touching, and there was no possibility of keeping away all together.
And that was all it took really, to change Yunho’s whole life.
At seventeen, Jaejoong has stepped off the pages of a novel. He is drama and passion and secrets. He is breathtaking, exotic and otherworldly. Yunho can’t keep his eyes off him, can’t keep his mind away from him. Jaejoong laughs at him and the naivety he finds in the boy, when Yunho first approaches him, all fumbling pick up lines and hopeful looks.. It’s charming somehow, and Jaejoong can’t bring himself to act the way he does when older men try to tempt him. There’s never anything innocent nor naïve about those men.
“Boy, you don’t know what you’re asking for,” he tells Yunho. And while Yunho is affronted at being called ‘boy’, he’s also not able to stay away. Not that night, or any night after that.
Jaejoong makes it difficult though, reluctant at best, angry at worst. He doesn’t understand that it isn’t really a conscious choice for Yunho. Something keeps dragging him back to Jaejoong; something that he romanticised over the next few years and then laughed about in his later life. In the present though, Yunho is a man obsessed, and nothing Jaejoong says or does can dissuade him. Yunho wants more. More of Jaejoong - more knowledge about the gorgeous man, more opportunities to touch, to taste. After a while though, that little ‘something’ that screamed danger came into focus, and Yunho found another reason for not keeping away.
“I know what you are,” he tells Jaejoong one evening as they sit in a small coffee house. Jaejoong quirks an eyebrow at him over the top of the mug he is holding, warming his cold, cold hands.
“I rather thought you might,” the vampire replies quietly. “Go on then,” he says kindly after a moment, seeing the questions fairly bursting out from Yunho.
He’d answers them all that night, and Yunho goes home with a head full of heart-racing fantasies and the touch of cool, pale skin on his mind.
At eighteen, he is still enamoured with the whole idea of what Jaejoong is, and insists on Jaejoong biting him.
“Why?” Jaejoong asks him, brows furrowed.
“Because!” Yunho exclaims, unable to further articulate his desire.
Jaejoong just looks at him, with the cool blank gaze that Yunho knows he pulls out when he is puzzled or angry, or just lost in his memories. At the moment he can’t really tell if it is the first or second that called the expression forth, but he becomes anxious anyway.
“I mean…” he tries to explain himself better, justify himself, but he finds the words gone.
“You watch too many movies.” Jaejoong turns away, like he can’t bear to look at Yunho. Anxious, Yunho lurches forward, grabbing his hand.
“Wait, no… please, don’t go.” The desperation for Jaejoong far outweighs any desire to enact the sensual, mystical ideas of blood letting he’d fixated upon. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”
Jaejoong sighs, but stops, turning to the boy again.
“You’re so stupid, you know that? Drinking blood isn’t some game, you know. It’s not romantic or sexy or anything. It’s painful, messy… and dangerous.” Jaejoong’s voice is flat, his eyes piercing. Yunho struggles not to loose himself in them, and bites his lip. He wants… he doesn’t know what he wants, really, but knows he can’t do without Jaejoong anymore.
“You wouldn’t hurt me,” he tells the vampire with conviction, and Jaejoong just snorts, and laughs at him.
“You’re an idiot,” Jaejoong repeats, and leaves quickly. He doesn’t fade into the night, but he does move too fast for Yunho to catch him up.
It is weeks before he sees Jaejoong again, and by then he’s ready to give up on the idea of being bitten if Jaejoong will just talk to him again. Jaejoong takes him back with a sigh, brushing a kiss over his brow and stoking his hair. It’s the air of someone dealing with a naughty but beloved child, and it rankles at Yunho a bit. Of course, in his self importance and short term view of the world, he doesn’t realise that to Jaejoong, Yunho is nothing but a child.
And it’s because of this that Jaejoong can’t bring himself to frighten Yunho off. To tell him the facts of the life that he thinks he wants, to strip away the rosiness that Yunho’s romance-addled brain has thrown up over the world. He looks into Yunho’s face, sees his youth and innocence and the love shining out of his eyes, and Jaejoong’s words all die in his throat, the guilt of his selfishness flooding into his mouth instead.
At twenty one, Jaejoong offers to turn him. It’s the first and only time he offers it, in a quiet, round-about way. And Yunho considers it. Considers it deeply because he’s twenty one and at the prime of his life and in love. He thinks and thinks, for weeks on end. Jaejoong lets him, not pushing. If there’s one thing Jaejoong has, it’s time.
Finally, one day Yunho sits him down and gives him an answer. It’s painful and hard and he wonders if Jaejoong will hate him for it, but he says it anyway. Because even if turning would mean Jaejoong for a foreseeable eternity, Yunho can’t find it in himself to say yes. So he doesn’t.
Jaejoong just nods, kisses him, and holds him tight. They make love fiercely that night, and Yunho nearly changes his mind. It’s a stupid reason to live forever though, he tells himself. What if this isn’t forever? Hormones and lust can control a man, but for how long? Another part of himself looks down into Jaejoong’s eyes, shining with something Yunho likes to label ‘love’, and wonders what a good reason would be.
Jaejoong never offers again, though Yunho knows implicitly that should he ask, it would be done, no matter at what age or situation. He never does though.
At twenty four, he goes into business with Jaejoong. They start a club together, across the country from Yunho’s parents and all his friends. Jaejoong is still nineteen, and soon there would have been questions. It hurts Yunho a lot, because he’d always fancied himself a family-man. But a lot of things have changed since Yunho was seventeen, and somehow, without realising it, he’s already chosen his path forward.
The club is convenient. Night business meant that they could spend their time together, share the creation and work that went into the club. It is successful enough to be profitable, to support them both even if Jaejoong has well enough in various accounts across the globe to do whatever they wanted. Yunho wants to work though, and Jaejoong can’t begrudge him that.
They keep the staff on rotation, and the club patrons are constantly changing anyway. Nobody is there to notice the increasing age gap between the two owners.
At thirty five, they had to close the club, because the people in the neighbourhood still saw them on occasion, and noticed that even as Yunho matured and aged, acquiring laugh lines and the odd grey hair, Jaejoong remained young, beautiful and deathly pale.
They move to the States, where it is easier to get lost in the crowd, one of the nameless millions. Jaejoong teaches Yunho English, the foreign words wrapping his mind in knots. Jaejoong knows so many languages, the sounds rolling off his tongue like liquid and enchanting Yunho always. Sometimes he sings to Yunho in lilting Italian or soft Japanese, and Yunho would fall asleep to dream of exotic places and times past. And Jaejoong. Always Jaejoong.
In spring, Yunho’s parents call, wanting to know when he’d settle down, get married. He laughs them off uneasily, his voice fake and tinny down the telephone line as the worry in his mother’s voice eats him up alive. After, he can’t bring himself to touch Jaejoong.
“I’m twice your age,” he says in despair as Jaejoong strokes his hair and tries to calm him.
“Yunho, I’m ten times as old as you are. Even if the world can’t see it, you’re doing nothing wrong.” It is hard for him to convince Yunho though, the abnormality of it all overcoming him.
For three years it’s a constant strain on them, Yunho’s conscience weighing on him while logic made little headway. Jaejoong is patient, always patient, and sometimes that drives Yunho mad.
At forty, Yunho asks Jaejoong what eternal life is. Jaejoong rolls over in bed so that they are facing each other, locking their eyes together. His face is sad, and Yunho can see the pain in his eyes that he sometimes catches glimpses of, holding all of the weariness too many years of life has brought.
“Eternal life is watching everyone around you die.” The words are soft and matter of fact, but Yunho feels his heart skip a beat. He wraps Jaejoong in his arms and cradles him close, and wishes that somehow things were different. He opens his mouth, about to say something stupid, but Jaejoong just shakes his head against Yunho’s shoulder.
“You don’t want it, Yunho. I know you, and it is not something you want.” And so he closes his mouth, holds Jaejoong tightly, and tries to sleep. That night, he dreams of seeing Jaejoong amongst sunlit fields, and having him in his arms forever.
Weeks later, Jaejoong joins him on the couch, curling up at his side as he drinks a mug of coffee.
“People think they want to live forever because their minds don’t fathom what forever is,” Jaejoong says slowly, and Yunho blinks, needing a few moments to catch up to what Jaejoong is talking about.
“What is it?” he asks obligingly. Jaejoong sighs and leans against him, listening to the steady beats of Yunho’s heart as he likes to do.
“Think of everything you’ve ever wanted to do, every person you’ve ever wanted to be, all the things you want to achieve. After you’ve done them all, then what do you do? There is no one to show it to, no one to share it with. And you have years and years and years spread out before you still, with no end in sight. That is what forever is.”
“What about the one who… made you?” Yunho says, falling back on the terminologies of Hollywood. Jaejoong smiles wirily.
“He made me because he hated humanity. He’d lived too long, seen too many bad things to be anything but cynical. It fed something perverse in him, to give me continuing life. I was dying, you see. I had some disease, no home and nobody to care. So he found me, and turned me, and for a while shared his hate of the world with me.”
“What happened to him?” Yunho asks, utterly and morbidly entranced.
“He, as the novels would put it, met the sun.”
You can only live with the weight of hate and disgust for so long, Yunho supposed. He gathers Jaejoong closer, and tries not to think what might become of the man beside him once he tires of the world.
At forty-five, Yunho’s mother falls sick. JiHye, his dutiful little sister, calls at some obscene time in the morning when any normal person who isn’t in love with a vampire would be asleep. Yunho answers the phone wide awake however, and is on a plane the same morning.
Yunho is horrified at how frail and faded his mother is. How old she looks. Her hand is tiny in his own as he sits by her bed. Milky soft brown eyes stare back at him.
“I missed you,” she says, and a little bit of him breaks.
JiHye takes a sledgehammer to the rest of him an hour later; their hissed, angry conversation carried out two rooms away in an effort not to wake their ailing mother.
“Why the hell haven’t you been back?” she asks, and Yunho doesn’t really have a good answer, other then the crawling guilt and the disappointment he knew he’d see in his parents eyes.
“What the fuck is so good about America anyway? What, aren’t there enough seedy areas of Korea for you to set up your nightclubs in?” JiHye rails on. “What happened to my responsible brother?” Yunho is silent, unable to say anything. I have a boyfriend, he could say, but that doesn’t explain anything. I have a boyfriend who has looked 19 for the last twenty seven years of my life, and can’t come out during the day. That would explain more but she’d strangle him for being flippant and making stupid jokes at a time like this. Except it wasn’t a joke, but who would believe that?
“Just keep out of my face. At least stay with mum, okay?” his sister bites off, sick of his silence. She storms from the room, and Yunho sinks down into an old creaky armchair and burries his head in his hands.
He stays, and a week later his mother passes away in her sleep. Yunho listens to his father, crying by her bed next door. He looks out the window to the morning sunshine and wonders what the fuck he’s doing with his life.
He spends three more months in Korea, trying to figure that out. He tells himself he’s trying to organise his life, come to terms with what his parents would have wanted for him. To figure out why he hadn’t seen his mother in years. Why his sister hated him. To try and understand his options. To figure out what life, for normal people, is. Or could be. What he’s really doing though is hiding and procrastinating.
When he gets back to America, Jaejoong is there, waiting. He’s exactly the same as he was when Yunho left.
At fifty, a woman spits on Yunho in the street. Jaejoong is on his arm, and they’re going to the cinema.
Yunho’s not sure if it’s because he’s male, and Jaejoong is male, or if it’s because he’s an aging man with a beautiful, vibrant teen beside him who is most obviously not his son. It’s probably the latter though; or at least a combination of both. Yunho’s hair has greyed, and there’s no questioning the obvious age gap between him and his companion.
The old woman glares at him viciously before she walks off, and he tightens his grip on Jaejoong’s waist, fingers digging into the thin fabric of his shirt and feeling the cool skin beneath. Jaejoong looks over at him, large eyes almost unreadable as he blinks slowly. Yunho can see the faint spark of sympathy behind them though, and it makes him turn away.
The looks of disgust that they garnered in public were getting heavier and more frequent with every year that went past, and he knew that in times to come it would be all the worse. People only saw what was on the surface: only saw a depraved old letch with his young plaything.
But then, he couldn’t blame people for judging by appearances, because what was under the appearances was too outlandish for most to contemplate. They say love is love, but even for the mysterious ‘them’, there are certain lines. Yunho doesn’t know how many he’s crossed already. Age, sex… and then there is the small fact that Jaejoong is cursed to live forever.
They always made it seem far more romantic in books.
It made him not want to go out, made him want to keep Jaejoong and himself tucked away together where no one else could see or judge; as if he wasn’t isolated enough from the world already.
At sixty, Jaejoong gets them a small house in the suburbs. It’s pretty, idyllic, and it has a basement.
Jaejoong takes Yunho’s hand as they stare at their newly furnished subterranean bedroom and squeezes it. Yunho looks over at the visage of the young man, and feels a surge of love for him. It’s been years, so many years, but the love is still there. Sometimes he wonders why, because love, like everything else, is not everlasting and most people find it hard to hold onto love for a few years, let alone a lifetime. Maybe it’s destiny, or maybe it’s just ironic, that they manage to beat the odds in this, too.
“Thank you,” Jaejoong says, quietly, and looks over at Yunho with a small smile on his face.
“For what?” Yunho asks.
“For staying with me. For being here.” It doesn’t matter that Yunho is sixty, his face aging gracefully and making him look like a respectable, distinguished man. He’s still there, beside Jaejoong, and that’s all that matters to either of them anymore.
Yunho smiles at Jaejoong, and pulls him into his arms, hugging him close.
“Always,” he says. But they both know it’s a lie.
At seventy, Yunho walks slowly towards the kitchen of their little house, his hip a dull ache with every step. It takes him a while, but he can hear Jaejoong’s voice outside and knows he’ll be back soon.
Reaching the kitchen window, he leans over the sink and looks outside the window. He can see Jaejoong standing on the path, talking to the woman from next door. She’s plain next to his beauty, but the way she interacts with him is almost motherly. She’s smiling kindly, and Yunho tries to pick up what they’re actually saying.
“- good you’re doing so well at university. More young people need to be as responsible as you are,” the woman was saying. He snorted to himself quietly, and he could hear the same amusement in Jaejoong’s voice when he replied.
“Yes, I totally agree.”
“And you’re such a darling, taking such good care of your grandfather like you do,” she went on. Any humour in Yunho’s expression fell away, shock replacing it.
He doesn’t hear Jaejoong’s reply, stumbling back from the window before it can reach his ears.
Grandfather?
It made sense, of course it did. But it was such a shock, such an unwelcome word to hear. He’d never found out what Jaejoong said to others, how he explained their coexistence. To be honest, he’d never really thought about it. He didn’t get out as much as he used to, and while he waved at the neighbours and exchanged friendly greetings with them, most didn’t have time for an old man. Nor, for that matter, was he much interested in them. He’d gotten used to living isolated, with only Jaejoong as a constant in his sphere of life.
But gods, was he that old? It was a numbing acknowledgement. Years went past unremarked upon, and while Yunho logically knew he was getting older, the meaning of it didn’t really sink in so much. Jaejoong never aged, and in Yunho’s eyes, he was the only thing that mattered. Time had somehow come to a halt in Yunho’s mind.
“I’m home,” Jaejoong called out as he came in the door, pausing to remove his shoes. His voice woke Yunho from his trance, and he looked up from the floor to his lover.
He really was that old.
Suddenly, looking at Jaejoong was almost painful. He was radiant, gorgeous and young and as exotic looking as he had been all those years ago when Yunho had first laid eyes on him. Smooth, supple skin, dark, silky hair, lithe, fit body. He was the embodiment of youth and beauty, and the polar opposite of everything that Yunho was.
Yunho was old. His body was falling apart, his skin crinkled and dried with age. His eyesight was getting worse, his joints seizing up. His hair was grey and thinning. Honestly, Yunho wondered if there was anything left of that young man that had met Jaejoong in the nightclub a life time ago back in Seoul.
“Yunho?” Jaejoong’s voice was soft and somewhat concerned, seeing Yunho’s stunned expression. “Yunho, are you okay?” The vampire left the shopping bags on the floor by the cabinets and came over to where Yunho was sitting, reaching out to touch the man’s hand.
The realisation of their appearances and ages was made all the clearer as the soft young hand of Jaejoong’s slid over Yunho’s wrinkled, mottled one. Yunho stared at them for a moment, before looking up into Jaejoong’s face.
“I’m old.” The words were out of place, but Jaejoong seemed to realise what they meant, and his face crumpled into something that was half sympathy, half fear.
“You’re still Yunho,” Jaejoong replied. He sat by Yunho at the table, not letting go of his hand. “You’re still the man I love.”
It wasn’t the words that got to Yunho, but what he saw in Jaejoong’s eyes. His own eyesight might be failing, but he could still see the same affection, the same love, in Jaejoong’s eyes that had been there years ago. That too, like the rest of Jaejoong, seemed to remain the same.
That morning, when they lay down together in bed, Jaejoong rested his head on the pillow by Yunho’s and kissed his cheek. They’d stopped making love some time ago, but had never stopped holding each other as they slept.
Even as Yunho drifted off to sleep, Jaejoong watched over him. He kept watching the rise and fall of Yunho’s chest, the slight movements of his eyelids as he dreamed. He kept watching, because he was afraid that if he looked away, those movements would stop. He could feel his throat close up, feel the tightness in his chest and pressed reflexively closer to Yunho’s body.
He made no sound as he cried, nor shed any tears. His body was not held together by either water or blood, so there were no tears to be shed. But he cried anyway, because he knew that each second brought him closer to the point at which Yunho’s time would be over.
Yunho dies on a cool December evening, closing his eyes peacefully in his bed as Jaejoong leans over him, large eyes never leaving his face. He weeps silently for a time, before wiping his face uselessly and kissing Yunho’s brow softly. Yunho’s skin is papery with age, and Jaejoong thinks again about what it means to be immortal.
He’s tired, so very tired, and for a while he rests his head on Yunho’s arm and closes his eyes.
Just before dawn, he gets up to check the paperwork at the table in the corner, making sure that everything is in order. That everything is taken care of.
He can feel the sun coming, and the urge to go to ground increases inside him. He ignores it though, pushing all of his will against the instinctive needs of his body. Instead, he goes back to Yunho, looking down at his worn and aged face. All he can see however is the visage of the boy he’d met years ago now, fresh faced and intriguing. He can see the laughter and the love, and remembers with crystal clarity every day between that time and now.
It’s enough, he thinks. Enough.
And then he draws the sheet gently over Yunho’s face and leaves the room.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Yunho’s time is over, and as Jaejoong leaves the house, walking into the street and the half light, he sheds the memories of the inquisitive young man, the conflicted middle aged man, the weary old man. He lets them all ebb away from himself, letting Yunho go.
Yunho lives on, somewhere, but it cannot be in Jaejoong. If he did, Jaejoong too would crumble to dust.
Life goes on, he thinks to himself.
Forever.
Rating: R
Form: Oneshot
Words: 4 282
Pairings: YunJae
Genre: Drama, angst, romance. Vampire!fic.
Summary: Forever is just a pretty word in romance books, and eternity means watching everyone around you die.
A/N: Thanks to my beta, tatsunotoshi, who put up with some nonsense from me. Don’t try to proof your work when tipsy folks. XD
Also, this is er, ‘inspired’ by the idea of Twilight, because although I’ve never read the books, I find the idea of them quite ridiculous.
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When he was a child, his mother used to tell him fairy tales. They’d be about heroes and dragons and princesses, and they’d all end happily ever after. None of them really said what happened in that ‘ever after’, but as a child, ‘happy’ was a good enough description for Yunho. When he was a little older, fairy tales were for babies and the stories he was more interested in were the ones that involved blood and guns and other dangerous things. It was a phase that all little boys went through, his mother said one time to a friend of hers.
Maybe it was the remnants of that fascination that brought him to Jaejoong. Even if it was though, it couldn’t have been what made him stay - because the dark dangerous stories he heard and read about were never as complicatedly mundane as his own story turned out to be.
Even from first glance, Yunho knew Jaejoong to be everything other. The opposite of him in every way, and someone he’d probably never have hung out with. But he was there, that night at the club, when Yunho had snuck in with his friends, all underage and overeager. He’d been there, sitting at the bar with his legs crossed, dark eyes scanning the crowds. Yunho never found out what he’d been looking for, but that night, Jaejoong’s eyes had met Yunho’s, and locked.
He was gorgeous. Gorgeous, dark and exotic; a study in monochrome, ebony hair and eyes stark against pale, flawless skin. There was something about him, something that Yunho couldn’t put his finger on but sucked him in, intrigued him. Something that screamed danger but sent shivers of pleasure up Yunho’s spine. He looked like a movie star, or some other, far superior, form of being. Someone that mere mortals like Yunho couldn’t begin to understand, let alone touch. Yet, it was all Yunho could do to keep from touching, and there was no possibility of keeping away all together.
And that was all it took really, to change Yunho’s whole life.
At seventeen, Jaejoong has stepped off the pages of a novel. He is drama and passion and secrets. He is breathtaking, exotic and otherworldly. Yunho can’t keep his eyes off him, can’t keep his mind away from him. Jaejoong laughs at him and the naivety he finds in the boy, when Yunho first approaches him, all fumbling pick up lines and hopeful looks.. It’s charming somehow, and Jaejoong can’t bring himself to act the way he does when older men try to tempt him. There’s never anything innocent nor naïve about those men.
“Boy, you don’t know what you’re asking for,” he tells Yunho. And while Yunho is affronted at being called ‘boy’, he’s also not able to stay away. Not that night, or any night after that.
Jaejoong makes it difficult though, reluctant at best, angry at worst. He doesn’t understand that it isn’t really a conscious choice for Yunho. Something keeps dragging him back to Jaejoong; something that he romanticised over the next few years and then laughed about in his later life. In the present though, Yunho is a man obsessed, and nothing Jaejoong says or does can dissuade him. Yunho wants more. More of Jaejoong - more knowledge about the gorgeous man, more opportunities to touch, to taste. After a while though, that little ‘something’ that screamed danger came into focus, and Yunho found another reason for not keeping away.
“I know what you are,” he tells Jaejoong one evening as they sit in a small coffee house. Jaejoong quirks an eyebrow at him over the top of the mug he is holding, warming his cold, cold hands.
“I rather thought you might,” the vampire replies quietly. “Go on then,” he says kindly after a moment, seeing the questions fairly bursting out from Yunho.
He’d answers them all that night, and Yunho goes home with a head full of heart-racing fantasies and the touch of cool, pale skin on his mind.
At eighteen, he is still enamoured with the whole idea of what Jaejoong is, and insists on Jaejoong biting him.
“Why?” Jaejoong asks him, brows furrowed.
“Because!” Yunho exclaims, unable to further articulate his desire.
Jaejoong just looks at him, with the cool blank gaze that Yunho knows he pulls out when he is puzzled or angry, or just lost in his memories. At the moment he can’t really tell if it is the first or second that called the expression forth, but he becomes anxious anyway.
“I mean…” he tries to explain himself better, justify himself, but he finds the words gone.
“You watch too many movies.” Jaejoong turns away, like he can’t bear to look at Yunho. Anxious, Yunho lurches forward, grabbing his hand.
“Wait, no… please, don’t go.” The desperation for Jaejoong far outweighs any desire to enact the sensual, mystical ideas of blood letting he’d fixated upon. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”
Jaejoong sighs, but stops, turning to the boy again.
“You’re so stupid, you know that? Drinking blood isn’t some game, you know. It’s not romantic or sexy or anything. It’s painful, messy… and dangerous.” Jaejoong’s voice is flat, his eyes piercing. Yunho struggles not to loose himself in them, and bites his lip. He wants… he doesn’t know what he wants, really, but knows he can’t do without Jaejoong anymore.
“You wouldn’t hurt me,” he tells the vampire with conviction, and Jaejoong just snorts, and laughs at him.
“You’re an idiot,” Jaejoong repeats, and leaves quickly. He doesn’t fade into the night, but he does move too fast for Yunho to catch him up.
It is weeks before he sees Jaejoong again, and by then he’s ready to give up on the idea of being bitten if Jaejoong will just talk to him again. Jaejoong takes him back with a sigh, brushing a kiss over his brow and stoking his hair. It’s the air of someone dealing with a naughty but beloved child, and it rankles at Yunho a bit. Of course, in his self importance and short term view of the world, he doesn’t realise that to Jaejoong, Yunho is nothing but a child.
And it’s because of this that Jaejoong can’t bring himself to frighten Yunho off. To tell him the facts of the life that he thinks he wants, to strip away the rosiness that Yunho’s romance-addled brain has thrown up over the world. He looks into Yunho’s face, sees his youth and innocence and the love shining out of his eyes, and Jaejoong’s words all die in his throat, the guilt of his selfishness flooding into his mouth instead.
At twenty one, Jaejoong offers to turn him. It’s the first and only time he offers it, in a quiet, round-about way. And Yunho considers it. Considers it deeply because he’s twenty one and at the prime of his life and in love. He thinks and thinks, for weeks on end. Jaejoong lets him, not pushing. If there’s one thing Jaejoong has, it’s time.
Finally, one day Yunho sits him down and gives him an answer. It’s painful and hard and he wonders if Jaejoong will hate him for it, but he says it anyway. Because even if turning would mean Jaejoong for a foreseeable eternity, Yunho can’t find it in himself to say yes. So he doesn’t.
Jaejoong just nods, kisses him, and holds him tight. They make love fiercely that night, and Yunho nearly changes his mind. It’s a stupid reason to live forever though, he tells himself. What if this isn’t forever? Hormones and lust can control a man, but for how long? Another part of himself looks down into Jaejoong’s eyes, shining with something Yunho likes to label ‘love’, and wonders what a good reason would be.
Jaejoong never offers again, though Yunho knows implicitly that should he ask, it would be done, no matter at what age or situation. He never does though.
At twenty four, he goes into business with Jaejoong. They start a club together, across the country from Yunho’s parents and all his friends. Jaejoong is still nineteen, and soon there would have been questions. It hurts Yunho a lot, because he’d always fancied himself a family-man. But a lot of things have changed since Yunho was seventeen, and somehow, without realising it, he’s already chosen his path forward.
The club is convenient. Night business meant that they could spend their time together, share the creation and work that went into the club. It is successful enough to be profitable, to support them both even if Jaejoong has well enough in various accounts across the globe to do whatever they wanted. Yunho wants to work though, and Jaejoong can’t begrudge him that.
They keep the staff on rotation, and the club patrons are constantly changing anyway. Nobody is there to notice the increasing age gap between the two owners.
At thirty five, they had to close the club, because the people in the neighbourhood still saw them on occasion, and noticed that even as Yunho matured and aged, acquiring laugh lines and the odd grey hair, Jaejoong remained young, beautiful and deathly pale.
They move to the States, where it is easier to get lost in the crowd, one of the nameless millions. Jaejoong teaches Yunho English, the foreign words wrapping his mind in knots. Jaejoong knows so many languages, the sounds rolling off his tongue like liquid and enchanting Yunho always. Sometimes he sings to Yunho in lilting Italian or soft Japanese, and Yunho would fall asleep to dream of exotic places and times past. And Jaejoong. Always Jaejoong.
In spring, Yunho’s parents call, wanting to know when he’d settle down, get married. He laughs them off uneasily, his voice fake and tinny down the telephone line as the worry in his mother’s voice eats him up alive. After, he can’t bring himself to touch Jaejoong.
“I’m twice your age,” he says in despair as Jaejoong strokes his hair and tries to calm him.
“Yunho, I’m ten times as old as you are. Even if the world can’t see it, you’re doing nothing wrong.” It is hard for him to convince Yunho though, the abnormality of it all overcoming him.
For three years it’s a constant strain on them, Yunho’s conscience weighing on him while logic made little headway. Jaejoong is patient, always patient, and sometimes that drives Yunho mad.
At forty, Yunho asks Jaejoong what eternal life is. Jaejoong rolls over in bed so that they are facing each other, locking their eyes together. His face is sad, and Yunho can see the pain in his eyes that he sometimes catches glimpses of, holding all of the weariness too many years of life has brought.
“Eternal life is watching everyone around you die.” The words are soft and matter of fact, but Yunho feels his heart skip a beat. He wraps Jaejoong in his arms and cradles him close, and wishes that somehow things were different. He opens his mouth, about to say something stupid, but Jaejoong just shakes his head against Yunho’s shoulder.
“You don’t want it, Yunho. I know you, and it is not something you want.” And so he closes his mouth, holds Jaejoong tightly, and tries to sleep. That night, he dreams of seeing Jaejoong amongst sunlit fields, and having him in his arms forever.
Weeks later, Jaejoong joins him on the couch, curling up at his side as he drinks a mug of coffee.
“People think they want to live forever because their minds don’t fathom what forever is,” Jaejoong says slowly, and Yunho blinks, needing a few moments to catch up to what Jaejoong is talking about.
“What is it?” he asks obligingly. Jaejoong sighs and leans against him, listening to the steady beats of Yunho’s heart as he likes to do.
“Think of everything you’ve ever wanted to do, every person you’ve ever wanted to be, all the things you want to achieve. After you’ve done them all, then what do you do? There is no one to show it to, no one to share it with. And you have years and years and years spread out before you still, with no end in sight. That is what forever is.”
“What about the one who… made you?” Yunho says, falling back on the terminologies of Hollywood. Jaejoong smiles wirily.
“He made me because he hated humanity. He’d lived too long, seen too many bad things to be anything but cynical. It fed something perverse in him, to give me continuing life. I was dying, you see. I had some disease, no home and nobody to care. So he found me, and turned me, and for a while shared his hate of the world with me.”
“What happened to him?” Yunho asks, utterly and morbidly entranced.
“He, as the novels would put it, met the sun.”
You can only live with the weight of hate and disgust for so long, Yunho supposed. He gathers Jaejoong closer, and tries not to think what might become of the man beside him once he tires of the world.
At forty-five, Yunho’s mother falls sick. JiHye, his dutiful little sister, calls at some obscene time in the morning when any normal person who isn’t in love with a vampire would be asleep. Yunho answers the phone wide awake however, and is on a plane the same morning.
Yunho is horrified at how frail and faded his mother is. How old she looks. Her hand is tiny in his own as he sits by her bed. Milky soft brown eyes stare back at him.
“I missed you,” she says, and a little bit of him breaks.
JiHye takes a sledgehammer to the rest of him an hour later; their hissed, angry conversation carried out two rooms away in an effort not to wake their ailing mother.
“Why the hell haven’t you been back?” she asks, and Yunho doesn’t really have a good answer, other then the crawling guilt and the disappointment he knew he’d see in his parents eyes.
“What the fuck is so good about America anyway? What, aren’t there enough seedy areas of Korea for you to set up your nightclubs in?” JiHye rails on. “What happened to my responsible brother?” Yunho is silent, unable to say anything. I have a boyfriend, he could say, but that doesn’t explain anything. I have a boyfriend who has looked 19 for the last twenty seven years of my life, and can’t come out during the day. That would explain more but she’d strangle him for being flippant and making stupid jokes at a time like this. Except it wasn’t a joke, but who would believe that?
“Just keep out of my face. At least stay with mum, okay?” his sister bites off, sick of his silence. She storms from the room, and Yunho sinks down into an old creaky armchair and burries his head in his hands.
He stays, and a week later his mother passes away in her sleep. Yunho listens to his father, crying by her bed next door. He looks out the window to the morning sunshine and wonders what the fuck he’s doing with his life.
He spends three more months in Korea, trying to figure that out. He tells himself he’s trying to organise his life, come to terms with what his parents would have wanted for him. To figure out why he hadn’t seen his mother in years. Why his sister hated him. To try and understand his options. To figure out what life, for normal people, is. Or could be. What he’s really doing though is hiding and procrastinating.
When he gets back to America, Jaejoong is there, waiting. He’s exactly the same as he was when Yunho left.
At fifty, a woman spits on Yunho in the street. Jaejoong is on his arm, and they’re going to the cinema.
Yunho’s not sure if it’s because he’s male, and Jaejoong is male, or if it’s because he’s an aging man with a beautiful, vibrant teen beside him who is most obviously not his son. It’s probably the latter though; or at least a combination of both. Yunho’s hair has greyed, and there’s no questioning the obvious age gap between him and his companion.
The old woman glares at him viciously before she walks off, and he tightens his grip on Jaejoong’s waist, fingers digging into the thin fabric of his shirt and feeling the cool skin beneath. Jaejoong looks over at him, large eyes almost unreadable as he blinks slowly. Yunho can see the faint spark of sympathy behind them though, and it makes him turn away.
The looks of disgust that they garnered in public were getting heavier and more frequent with every year that went past, and he knew that in times to come it would be all the worse. People only saw what was on the surface: only saw a depraved old letch with his young plaything.
But then, he couldn’t blame people for judging by appearances, because what was under the appearances was too outlandish for most to contemplate. They say love is love, but even for the mysterious ‘them’, there are certain lines. Yunho doesn’t know how many he’s crossed already. Age, sex… and then there is the small fact that Jaejoong is cursed to live forever.
They always made it seem far more romantic in books.
It made him not want to go out, made him want to keep Jaejoong and himself tucked away together where no one else could see or judge; as if he wasn’t isolated enough from the world already.
At sixty, Jaejoong gets them a small house in the suburbs. It’s pretty, idyllic, and it has a basement.
Jaejoong takes Yunho’s hand as they stare at their newly furnished subterranean bedroom and squeezes it. Yunho looks over at the visage of the young man, and feels a surge of love for him. It’s been years, so many years, but the love is still there. Sometimes he wonders why, because love, like everything else, is not everlasting and most people find it hard to hold onto love for a few years, let alone a lifetime. Maybe it’s destiny, or maybe it’s just ironic, that they manage to beat the odds in this, too.
“Thank you,” Jaejoong says, quietly, and looks over at Yunho with a small smile on his face.
“For what?” Yunho asks.
“For staying with me. For being here.” It doesn’t matter that Yunho is sixty, his face aging gracefully and making him look like a respectable, distinguished man. He’s still there, beside Jaejoong, and that’s all that matters to either of them anymore.
Yunho smiles at Jaejoong, and pulls him into his arms, hugging him close.
“Always,” he says. But they both know it’s a lie.
At seventy, Yunho walks slowly towards the kitchen of their little house, his hip a dull ache with every step. It takes him a while, but he can hear Jaejoong’s voice outside and knows he’ll be back soon.
Reaching the kitchen window, he leans over the sink and looks outside the window. He can see Jaejoong standing on the path, talking to the woman from next door. She’s plain next to his beauty, but the way she interacts with him is almost motherly. She’s smiling kindly, and Yunho tries to pick up what they’re actually saying.
“- good you’re doing so well at university. More young people need to be as responsible as you are,” the woman was saying. He snorted to himself quietly, and he could hear the same amusement in Jaejoong’s voice when he replied.
“Yes, I totally agree.”
“And you’re such a darling, taking such good care of your grandfather like you do,” she went on. Any humour in Yunho’s expression fell away, shock replacing it.
He doesn’t hear Jaejoong’s reply, stumbling back from the window before it can reach his ears.
Grandfather?
It made sense, of course it did. But it was such a shock, such an unwelcome word to hear. He’d never found out what Jaejoong said to others, how he explained their coexistence. To be honest, he’d never really thought about it. He didn’t get out as much as he used to, and while he waved at the neighbours and exchanged friendly greetings with them, most didn’t have time for an old man. Nor, for that matter, was he much interested in them. He’d gotten used to living isolated, with only Jaejoong as a constant in his sphere of life.
But gods, was he that old? It was a numbing acknowledgement. Years went past unremarked upon, and while Yunho logically knew he was getting older, the meaning of it didn’t really sink in so much. Jaejoong never aged, and in Yunho’s eyes, he was the only thing that mattered. Time had somehow come to a halt in Yunho’s mind.
“I’m home,” Jaejoong called out as he came in the door, pausing to remove his shoes. His voice woke Yunho from his trance, and he looked up from the floor to his lover.
He really was that old.
Suddenly, looking at Jaejoong was almost painful. He was radiant, gorgeous and young and as exotic looking as he had been all those years ago when Yunho had first laid eyes on him. Smooth, supple skin, dark, silky hair, lithe, fit body. He was the embodiment of youth and beauty, and the polar opposite of everything that Yunho was.
Yunho was old. His body was falling apart, his skin crinkled and dried with age. His eyesight was getting worse, his joints seizing up. His hair was grey and thinning. Honestly, Yunho wondered if there was anything left of that young man that had met Jaejoong in the nightclub a life time ago back in Seoul.
“Yunho?” Jaejoong’s voice was soft and somewhat concerned, seeing Yunho’s stunned expression. “Yunho, are you okay?” The vampire left the shopping bags on the floor by the cabinets and came over to where Yunho was sitting, reaching out to touch the man’s hand.
The realisation of their appearances and ages was made all the clearer as the soft young hand of Jaejoong’s slid over Yunho’s wrinkled, mottled one. Yunho stared at them for a moment, before looking up into Jaejoong’s face.
“I’m old.” The words were out of place, but Jaejoong seemed to realise what they meant, and his face crumpled into something that was half sympathy, half fear.
“You’re still Yunho,” Jaejoong replied. He sat by Yunho at the table, not letting go of his hand. “You’re still the man I love.”
It wasn’t the words that got to Yunho, but what he saw in Jaejoong’s eyes. His own eyesight might be failing, but he could still see the same affection, the same love, in Jaejoong’s eyes that had been there years ago. That too, like the rest of Jaejoong, seemed to remain the same.
That morning, when they lay down together in bed, Jaejoong rested his head on the pillow by Yunho’s and kissed his cheek. They’d stopped making love some time ago, but had never stopped holding each other as they slept.
Even as Yunho drifted off to sleep, Jaejoong watched over him. He kept watching the rise and fall of Yunho’s chest, the slight movements of his eyelids as he dreamed. He kept watching, because he was afraid that if he looked away, those movements would stop. He could feel his throat close up, feel the tightness in his chest and pressed reflexively closer to Yunho’s body.
He made no sound as he cried, nor shed any tears. His body was not held together by either water or blood, so there were no tears to be shed. But he cried anyway, because he knew that each second brought him closer to the point at which Yunho’s time would be over.
Yunho dies on a cool December evening, closing his eyes peacefully in his bed as Jaejoong leans over him, large eyes never leaving his face. He weeps silently for a time, before wiping his face uselessly and kissing Yunho’s brow softly. Yunho’s skin is papery with age, and Jaejoong thinks again about what it means to be immortal.
He’s tired, so very tired, and for a while he rests his head on Yunho’s arm and closes his eyes.
Just before dawn, he gets up to check the paperwork at the table in the corner, making sure that everything is in order. That everything is taken care of.
He can feel the sun coming, and the urge to go to ground increases inside him. He ignores it though, pushing all of his will against the instinctive needs of his body. Instead, he goes back to Yunho, looking down at his worn and aged face. All he can see however is the visage of the boy he’d met years ago now, fresh faced and intriguing. He can see the laughter and the love, and remembers with crystal clarity every day between that time and now.
It’s enough, he thinks. Enough.
And then he draws the sheet gently over Yunho’s face and leaves the room.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Yunho’s time is over, and as Jaejoong leaves the house, walking into the street and the half light, he sheds the memories of the inquisitive young man, the conflicted middle aged man, the weary old man. He lets them all ebb away from himself, letting Yunho go.
Yunho lives on, somewhere, but it cannot be in Jaejoong. If he did, Jaejoong too would crumble to dust.
Life goes on, he thinks to himself.
Forever.