[Fic] Moonrise (EXO)
Title: Moonrise
Pairing: Sehun/Jongin
Rating: R
Genre: AU, vampire, werewolf
Prompt: Sehun is a vampire and Jongin is a werewolf. somehow they make their relationship work
***
Jongin possessed no powers of hearing.
But he suspected that would have been dead before not hearing his best friend scream.
Tree branches whipped his face, bushes grabbing at his clothes as he ran. None of it hurt, and none of it slowed him. The scream was like an imprint in his ears, ringing over and over as he relived it. He smelled blood. If there was one power being a vampire had allowed him, it was that. If blood was in the air, he could find it. He wasn’t a shark, it was his life.
It wasn’t like a movie. He didn’t find Sehun nicely centered in some clearing.
He was lying against a tree, as though he’d been flung there, blood spreading from him.
“Sehun,” he gasped, leaving leaves scattered in his wake as he leaped forward to turn Sehun over. His shirt was soaked through at his side, the cloth warm and tacky as Jongin pulled it up.
“Oh,” he cried, nearly gagging. A chunk of flesh nearly the size of Jongin’s hand had been torn from his side, leaving open flesh and exposed organs. “Sehun. Oh god.”
There was no way a human could survive it. Maybe with the best trauma care, life flight, hospitals. They were hours away from any of those. The only thing he could do, and even that wasn’t guaranteed, was turn Sehun into a vampire. He would bleed out If Jongin picked him up and carried him.
“Sehun.”
It had been years. Sehun was his closest friend. What Jongin had, he didn’t want for Sehun. He didn’t want that. But he couldn’t just cradle Sehun’s head and watch him die.
“He won’t die,” Jongin heard from behind, and he let down Sehun’s head, turning.
The smell of blood had been over everything so much that Jongin hadn’t sensed another person.
“Who are you?”
“The person who called you here.”
“Sehun asked me here.”
Sehun had sent a letter asking to meet him, after dark. Alone.
“Because I made him write it. Do you know what is your downfall?” the man asked. “It is that you are predictable. You love this boy. You want him. You will die for him. But he will live. I gave him a gift.”
“Gift,” Jongin said, for a moment mystified before his brain began to work again. He couldn’t mean-
“Yes, I see you’ve sensed it. He’s a werewolf, or soon will be. And he will find you savaged when he wakes. Perhaps he’ll think he did it, but that’s of no concern to me.”
“How many vampires have you killed, old man?” Jongin taunted.
“Enough to know how to call you out,” the man replied. “Even if he dies in the change, he’s of no further use to me.”
“Once he turns into a werewolf, there is no cure,” Jongin said.
“That’s right. A gift to last a lifetime.”
“Why me? Why him?”
“You exist. Now die.”
His hands were covered with Sehun’s blood, and he stood.
Perhaps many vampires had been killed by this wolf. But not that day.
***
It took Sehun a week to heal. Oh, by the time Jongin had killed the werewolf, the wound in Sehun’s side had begun to mend, but there were other wounds hidden deep.
“He took me after I got off the bus,” Sehun said. “He said… He said he needed to find you. He hit me, tied me up, and drove me out to the edge of town.”
Sehun sounded slow and rough, like an old man who’d fallen and needed help getting up. Before sunrise, Jongin assembled food, anything that Sehun would need to recuperate. Sehun slept great stretches of daylight anyway, and Jongin only felt him moving sometimes. There was a conversation they needed to have, and it was one he didn’t know how to begin. Especially with Sehun still weak.
“Why am I not in a hospital?” Sehun asked.
It was awkward, meeting Sehun’s eyes and looking away. It had been almost two years since they had seen each other. Two years since Jongin had become a vampire.
“Because you’re healing fine here,” Jongin said, feeling tired.
“Why do you sleep all day? He told me he was a werewolf, and you were a vampire. He was obviously mentally disturbed. I don’t-“
“He was telling you the truth,” Jongin interrupted, before Sehun’s eyebrows could frown any harder. “He was a werewolf.”
And so are you.
“Did you hit your head?”
Jongin almost grinned at Sehun’s incredulous face. “No. But I can prove to you I’m right.”
“You said he died.”
“I killed him,” Jongin said, keeping his voice even. “To save your life. Look at this.”
It took barely a scratch with Jongin’s knife across Sehun’s arm to draw blood, and Sehun squawked in protest.
“What are you doing! Get away from me!”
“I’m proving to you he was a werewolf!” Jongin shot back. “Just look!”
“That’s my arm! Are you insane?”
“Just look,” Jongin repeated.
Sehun, still frowning and backing up on the bed, touched his arms. And his frown grew deeper as he wiped away the blood.
There was no cut on his skin.
“I don’t understand,” Sehun said. “You just cut me. I felt it.”
Jongin wanted to walk away from all of it. And he couldn’t. “He was a werewolf, and he bit you.”
“So, what are you saying? That I’m some kind of werewolf, too? And that you’re a vampire? Jongin-”
He bared his teeth as Sehun looked up at him, did what he had tried never to do for the last two years.
He’d never wanted to see Sehun looking back at him in horror.
***
“Vampires and werewolves are enemies,” Sehun mused.
Jongin shrugged, his back against the wall beside Sehun. Sehun hadn’t run out the door screaming, so it was something.
“Of a sort. It’s more of a territory thing, really. A werewolf needs places to hunt. Vampires need humans to feed from. When that overlaps, things can get nasty.”
“And the werewolf that bit me wanted to kill you? Why?”
“Vendetta against vampires, maybe. Sometimes there’s no good reason.”
Jongin had been hunted before, but he hadn’t been lured like he had that night. He watched Sehun’s fingers rub the blanket between them, an absent movement, and wanted to grab Sehun’s hand and just revel in the contact. He’d been careful not to touch, since revealing what he was to Sehun. The wary expression in Sehun’s eyes was something he didn’t want. He wanted the smiles they’d shared growing up together, and that breathless moment when they’d been fourteen and wrestling and he’d nearly planted his mouth on Sehun’s by accident. He’d wanted for real, so badly, and they’d laughed it off. He’d gone home and obsessed about it. Sehun and his new haircut, Sehun and his hands. He’d never gotten to kiss Sehun, by accident or on purpose.
“Why did you leave?” Sehun asked, as though reading his thoughts. He’d asked, in other ways, before. But Jongin had gotten adept in avoiding it.
And then he really wanted Sehun’s hand. To touch him, or reassure himself. He wasn’t sure if the contact would be what he needed or if Sehun would pull away.
“I snuck out to go to a club,” Jongin said. “I was 18. I thought I owned everything. I got jumped by a couple of guys on my way home. I- One of them was vampire. I don’t know, maybe they both were. But they turned me. I left because I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t want you to be…afraid of me.”
“This is so fucked up,” Sehun blurted. “You’re something that shouldn’t exist, and I’m something that shouldn’t exist. How is it a secret?”
“Legends are legends for a reason, I guess.”
“How do you eat? Humans?”
“Well, I can’t eat animals. Blood banks, mostly.”
“Is it good?”
“It’s food to me. You can eat anything, though. You just have to worry about the full moon.”
Sehun looked a little bit sick. “When is that?”
Since Jongin had found that out the moment he’d gotten Sehun back to his apartment, and marked it on the calendar every day since, he said without hesitation, “In three days.”
***
They trusted each other. There had to be some kind of trust between them. Before Jongin had left, they had been friends for nearly half their lives. Time apart hadn’t changed that, even if Sehun felt as though he’d been abandoned. Years apart hadn’t changed that. Sehun wasn’t a teenager any more. He had a job, was in college. He’d changed, not just physically, though there was that.
Sehun stared back at him with wary eyes sometimes. Other times they were wistful. Sehun had perfected a look of almost total stillness when they were children, but there were emotions that ran rampant that Sehun couldn’t control. He heard about Sehun’s life, a life he was currently absent from. It was something that couldn’t be helped. Sehun could get another job, but they only had once chance to make sure Sehun survived the full moon without hurting himself or others. And it was Jongin’s fault. He couldn’t just leave Sehun to deal with it himself.
“This building is really near mine,” Sehun said, staring out of the window one night.”
“It’s next door, actually,” Jongin said, as Sehun sent him a sharp look. “I wanted to be close, in case you needed something. But it just made you a target.”
“Without ever letting me know you were here? You could have come over at night! I never would have known.”
“But then you’d have asked about meeting in the day, and it would’ve just gotten more weird.”
“Jongin,” Sehun said softly.
“I kept hoping I’d find a cure, or-“
Jongin turned as Sehun stood. “I would’ve accepted you, no matter what. I searched the internet, tried to contact your family.”
Jongin laughed, sinking to his knees in front of his low table in an easy movement. “My family moved as far away from me as possible.”
“I wouldn’t have. Does that mean you hate me, because of what I am?”
Jongin turned his head, and startled to find Sehun right there. “It’s my fault.”
“It’s his fault,” Sehun growled.
Truly growled, low and rumbling like a predator in a way that shivered over his skin and had Sehun’s forehead dropping onto Jongin’s shoulder.
“I missed you,” Jongin said, and felt so lost. The first time he’d said that to Sehun, they had been eight, and Sehun had gone away on vacation for two weeks. It had been like losing a lung.
“You didn’t answer me,” Sehun told him. “Do you hate me?”
Jongin shook his head. “You’re my best friend.”
Sehun’s arms slipped around him, squeezed his ribs almost to the point of pain.
“I’m not afraid of you,” Jongin told him. “You can’t hurt me.”
“Would you have been angry at me if I’d hidden what I was from you and ran away?”
“We were closer than that,” Jongin said, and tried not to let the tears form as Sehun pressed harder against his back.
“No more running.”
No more.
***
Jongin drove them as deep into the forest as he could the night before the full moon. Even if Sehun ran for hours, they would never make it back to civilization. Jongin would run with him, as best he could. Even if Sehun savaged him, he couldn’t kill him. There were no werewolves to ask. All they could do was hope and wait it out - Jongin in his trunk and Sehun in the back seat as they waited for nightfall. And then, for moonrise.
“Will I know who you are?” Sehun asked. Worried, really. His stomach was full, Jongin had made sure of that. If the wolf wasn’t hungry to start with, perhaps their time would be easier.
“I don’t know. I think… I think control is something you kind of have to learn. At least, that’s what I’ve heard. I know when I was first turned, I was hungry constantly. I thought I was losing my mind.”
Sehun had begun to shake, rocking forward and back against the tree he was leaning against. And Jongin knew it wasn’t from the cold.
Sehun had been restless the night before, like the moon was in his blood and calling for him. Jongin had never seen a fully turned werewolf. And the last thing he wanted was for Sehun to see his fear for him.
“Jongin.”
Sehun’s voice was breathless and deep, and Jongin stepped up immediately, pressed against him chest to chest.
“I’m here. You’re okay.”
“I feel it.”
“Keep talking,” Jongin suggested, his fingers tightening in the back of Sehun’s jacket. “Maybe that will help.”
“It feels like I’m going to throw up, like I’m turning inside out.” Sehun’s breath was harsh on his shoulder. “If I- You won’t leave again? You can’t leave again.”
Not that night. Not again, like Jongin had disappeared for years. Sehun would never have to wonder. Jongin would be there, every full moon. He would- He owed it to Sehun. He needed it. He would gladly live with Sehun, learn to feed him, run with him.
But they would learn how. In Sehun, he smelled only fear. It was bitter. He wanted to stop it.
“Maybe this will be better,” Jongin said, almost shivering with Sehun. “Maybe you will do better with this than if I had turned you into a vampire. I thought about it, you know. I- I wouldn’t have let you die. You can’t hate yourself. You’ll be okay. I won’t go away.”
The words were so hard to say as Sehun keened.
He couldn’t feel the moon, but he could feel Sehun. He felt the change, as he was forced to stand back, grabbing at Sehun’s arms as Sehun reached for the ground.
“Sehun.”
One of Sehun’s hands curled into the dead leaves and the other clasped hard on Jongin’s wrist.
“Help me.”
And Jongin watched with helplessness scraping grooves in his heart as Sehun changed.
***
They ran together, the head of Sehun’s wolf nearly to his waist, strides much longer than the fastest run that Jongin could sustain. Luckily, it didn’t seem like Sehun was trying to outrun him. Blood red eyes and snarls had had Jongin jerking back at first, Sehun’s hackles raised and panic in every posture. Jongin raised his hands.
“Sehun, it’s me. I won’t hurt you.”
And with a growl, Sehun had turned and ran. The wolf was dark, as the forest was dark, and Jongin followed him only by sound and glimpses, coming to a halt to see Sehun’s head high, nose testing the air. A thin howl wavered from him, and Jongin gasped. Sehun’s head swung around, teeth bared, and he was running again.
Running, Jongin wasn’t sure to what. He crashed through bushes, leaped logs, and splashed through a stream just to keep Sehun just barely in sight.
He skidded onto his hands and knees at the sound of another howl, still Sehun. As though he were calling for other wolves.
None answered. Jongin was grateful for that. The last thing he needed was Sehun to be met by another wolf, maybe bigger, maybe stronger, and a wolf that could hurt or maybe even kill Sehun.
Jongin was running again as he heard snarls, and some kind of shriek.
“Sehun!”
He cursed how breathless he sounded, but if it got Sehun to come towards him, it didn’t matter.
But what he got, as he caught up to Sehun, was a growl, from around the fluffy brown thing he had in his mouth.
Sehun had been hunting.
He almost laughed, he was that relieved. Instead, he backed the hell up because an angry wolf, an angry wolf asserting himself owner of the rabbit he’d killed, was not something Jongin wanted to mess with.
Not a lot of flesh on a rabbit, but perhaps it’d sate Sehun’s need to hunt. Somehow, either by Sehun knowing him or that he could tell Jongin was a vampire, he had not tried to attack him.
Jongin sat, let himself relax as he kept Sehun in sight. He could eat, do his thing. But he startled, as Sehun rounded the tree and came toward him. Very delicately, the rabbit carcass was dropped beside Jongin’s body. Mostly bits of fur, and bone.
“Thanks for that,” Jongin said, poking at it gently with the business end of a leaf. “Very appetizing. Why do I feel like you’re laughing at me?”
Sehun just rumbled.
“Can I touch you? I know you’re not a lap dog. But you are in there somewhere, right? My Sehun. You gave me a dead body, so we’re going steady, right?”
That got him a snarl, and he nearly jerked back his hand.
“Sehun. I know you.”
But his concern was greater than a wolf. It was the time of day. He knew the time of sunrise, and a quick glance at this phone told him it was only an hour away. They were far further away from the car than an hour, he knew that. Even running full out, abandoning Sehun, he’d never make it back.
“Sehun. Sehun!” he said, getting the attention of the pacing wolf. “Do you have some kind of magical wolf senses, or nose to find a cave? The sun is going to come up. If I’m out here…”
He’d packed a foil blanket. In an emergency, it’d do enough to keep him alive, but it’d be a long day huddled under it. He also had blood, because he’d had no idea if he’d get hurt, or how long they’d be gone.
“I’ll burn out here, Sehun. Sehun!”
Jongin staggered onto his feet as Sehun pivoted and turned back the way they had come. All he could do was run and follow, watching as Sehun paused to whine back at him before running off again. Almost like he was making sure that Jongin was following him. Perhaps that was wishful thinking, but he was running anyway. Any normal human wold have been flat on their face. Unless they were training for a marathon, he amended. But he was hardly being able to keep a steady pace, and the air was chilled without the sun.
The large wolf was almost gray in the growing light. Sehun. Jongin figured he had maybe twenty minutes before he found himself a hollow and made himself a foil tent to keep out the sun. Sehun growled back at him, and Jongin fought the urge to growl back.
It wasn’t Sehun’s fault.
But Sehun stretched down, his forelegs extended and tail in the air, as though stretching.
In front of him, was a rocky hill leading up to a cliff face that gradually leveled off on higher ground.
“Sehun…”
There was a split in the rock, an old rock slide. But it was darker than anything he could see. If it went back far enough, he wouldn’t need the foil at all. If it was shallow, it would still help to protect him.
Sehun was still there inside. He’d heard Jongin. He’d led him there.
“Don’t go running off, though,” Jongin said. “If you turn back and I’m stuck in some rock, I can’t find you by smelling you. I’ll be wandering out of the woods a week later. You do know how to get back, right?”
Sehun’s wolf made a sound almost like a snort.
“Are you afraid still?”
Sehun cocked his head at Jongin, as though to ask why he thought so.
No, he didn’t suppose Sehun had any reason to be afraid as he was. He was a predator. At least one night a month he was.
Jongin retreated into the crevice in the rock. It was shadowed, deeper than he was tall, and he kicked rocks aside when he reached the furthest edge of it, where two rock slabs had met.
He patted the one atop him, and said, “If you just stay up there, I’ll be out of your way soon.”
He didn’t dare take out blood, for fear it would trigger Sehun’s need to hunt. But he did unfold the foil blanket, on the off chance the sun tried to find him in his little hole.
“I’m just going to sleep a while, okay?” he told Sehun, feeling drowsy as the sun rose. He could stay awake, if he needed to. But he could see Sehun’s fluffy back at the entrance, like some kind of sentinel. Sehun wasn’t leaving him. He could rest. And he slept to the howl of the wolf.
***
Jongin woke in the twilight, and found himself quite warmer than usual. The rock he was lying on was no softer than it had been, but he wasn’t alone on it. When he opened his eyes, Sehun was looking back at him. Not wolf Sehun. Human Sehun.
“You’re still here,” he said.
“I am. I couldn’t have missed you in your tinfoil spaceship.”
“Just in case we got stuck,” Jongin retorted, trying to sit up and feeling woozy.
“You brought blood?” Sehun asked.
“I did. You ran me all over.”
“You didn’t have to follow me,” Sehun told him, rummaging in Jongin’s bag.
“I told you I wasn’t going to leave you. And you were scared before you turned.” He swallowed, watching Sehun uncap the bottle Jongin had brought the blood in. “What was it like?”
“I felt stronger,” Sehun said, handing Jongin the blood. “I could see, smell more. I wanted to hunt.”
“Yeah, I saw proof of that,” Jongin joked.
“The wolf wanted you to eat it, too,” Sehun told him. “I did. I was…providing for you.”
“What, like I was part of your pack?”
“Maybe,” Sehun said, looking down at his hands.
“As long as you don’t get rabbit indigestion,” Jongin said. The blood fortified him, and Sehun was weirdly more quiet than he had been before he’d changed. Jongin didn’t know what to make of it. “Let’s try and find the car.”
But Sehun grabbed his arm. “Wait. I- I think I could become the wolf entirely, if I was alone. I’d have killed anything. Anyone.”
That made him wary. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. But every time I started running, I could hear you, smell you. Every time the wolf wanted to take over, I could just… I couldn’t forget you were behind me. I could’ve killed you, if-”
Oh. So Jongin had kept Sehun grounded. And there he thought he was just following along to make sure Sehun didn’t kill someone else.
“Wasn’t scared because it was you,” Jongin told him.
Sehun spoke, his voice solemn. “I was still myself, because you were there, because I-“
Sehun looked up at him, and even in the fading light he could see Sehun’s eyes glittering.
“You…?”
“The wolf kept thinking “he is mine” and I couldn’t go too far from you. The wolf knew. That I still love you.”
Jongin’s head snapped back, bouncing painfully off the rock. He could not say that was because they were friends. It sounded as though the wolf claimed him as more than that.
“I don’t know if a werewolf and a vampire are compatible,” Jongin said, feeling the awkwardness as he spoke. All he wanted was for Sehun not to laugh. He’d spent almost two years hiding from Sehun. Sehun could cut him down so easily. More easily than Sehun could know.
“You can protect me from the moon,” Sehun said. “I’ll protect you from the dark.”
“Oh.”
It was the clasp of a friend, the way that Sehun grabbed the back of his neck and pulled him into a hug. A hug he’d waited for.
“Are we going steady?”
Jongin gulped. “You remember that?”
“I gave you a rabbit.”
He breathed in Sehun’s scent. The scent of Sehun’s blood.
“Do you realize-“
There were things Sehun might not understand. He’d never had a relationship since being turned, and there were so many complications. His mind was racing. He could bite Sehun, and Sehun would heal faster than a human. If his blood didn’t make Jongin sick, they could protect each other, just as Sehun said.
“I’ll need time,” Sehun said, his head pressing against Jongin’s. At least Sehun knew that. And Jongin knew that, too. It wasn’t as easy as waving away years apart. What they were could bond them, had already bonded them. “I missed you so much, Jongin.”
But Sehun didn’t realize, yet, that Jongin would give him anything.
***
Sehun found another wolf, and he’d needed that, as much as Jongin had needed a vampire to tell him how to survive. Jongin would have found one for Sehun to begin with, had he known how. But Sehun was still learning the fine nuances of his nose and what it could do for him, which meant that Jongin had been permanently put on garbage duty.
And most of it wasn’t even his garbage.
“It feels like a nightmare,” Sehun said, remembering the hunt and hike back to the car. “It doesn’t feel real.”
It had been torture. Terror. Faith in Sehun, to send him off with his new mentor for a week. Apparently, a new werewolf keeping his head during his first moon wasn’t unheard of. It had been his connection to Jongin - the years of trust - that had seen him through.
Jongin woke most sunsets with Sehun against his back. Either back to back, or Sehun sprawled over him like a heater. That was how it started, simple. He had to keep his head on straight, with Sehun rubbing his hip and telling him what he’d gotten up to while Jongin was sleeping. Some of it was said sleepily, soft murmurs against the back of Jongin’s neck as Jongin’s fingers dug into the mattress edge.
They needed to get to know each other again. Even though Sehun made him laugh so effortlessly, irked him in all the same ways. It was like that time after they’d spent those two weeks apart as children. Coming back together was like remembering to take a breath.
If the breath carried with it the weight of wondering what was next. How they spanned the distance between friends and more.
The first full moon, Sehun told Jongin that he loved him. The second, Jongin carried scraps of meat, and kept Sehun from running into the woods again. They were learning, slowly.
“You trust me to drive you home in the trunk?” Sehun asked before he’d turned.
“You can’t kill me,” Jongin reminded him, patting his butt. “But don’t crash my car.”
It wasn’t like he woke up in some glass coffin in a fairy tale, waiting for Prince Charming. He smelled like grease and he really needed to vacuum the carpet. His mouth was dry as Sehun opened the trunk.
He was going to say something, and he didn’t know what, staring up at Sehun’s ruffled hair. He didn’t look too worse for the wear of a night in the woods.
“Two moons down,” Jongin teased, grabbing Sehun’s offered hand.
But Sehun didn’t say anything, didn’t thank him or even do much but pull his head past the edge. It wasn’t like Sehun could get the jump on a vampire. But that didn’t mean Jongin didn’t take a sharp breath as Sehun leaned to press his mouth solidly on Jongin’s.
For being mostly immortal, he wondered if it was possible to die from a kiss.
He was pretty sure all the conventional knowledge told them it was a terrible idea. Sehun’s mentor had given him a look like he was so much scum under Sehun’s feet. But Sehun hadn’t really been one to follow the crowd. He usually got his own way, even if he had to work for it.
And maybe, apparently, he wanted Jongin.
“Took you long enough,” he said, but his voice was too breathless to hold any bite.
Sehun was the one with the big teeth anyway.
But Sehun grinned, and all Jongin could do was kiss him, and try not to pull him down into the trunk with him.
***
Pairing: Sehun/Jongin
Rating: R
Genre: AU, vampire, werewolf
Prompt: Sehun is a vampire and Jongin is a werewolf. somehow they make their relationship work
***
Jongin possessed no powers of hearing.
But he suspected that would have been dead before not hearing his best friend scream.
Tree branches whipped his face, bushes grabbing at his clothes as he ran. None of it hurt, and none of it slowed him. The scream was like an imprint in his ears, ringing over and over as he relived it. He smelled blood. If there was one power being a vampire had allowed him, it was that. If blood was in the air, he could find it. He wasn’t a shark, it was his life.
It wasn’t like a movie. He didn’t find Sehun nicely centered in some clearing.
He was lying against a tree, as though he’d been flung there, blood spreading from him.
“Sehun,” he gasped, leaving leaves scattered in his wake as he leaped forward to turn Sehun over. His shirt was soaked through at his side, the cloth warm and tacky as Jongin pulled it up.
“Oh,” he cried, nearly gagging. A chunk of flesh nearly the size of Jongin’s hand had been torn from his side, leaving open flesh and exposed organs. “Sehun. Oh god.”
There was no way a human could survive it. Maybe with the best trauma care, life flight, hospitals. They were hours away from any of those. The only thing he could do, and even that wasn’t guaranteed, was turn Sehun into a vampire. He would bleed out If Jongin picked him up and carried him.
“Sehun.”
It had been years. Sehun was his closest friend. What Jongin had, he didn’t want for Sehun. He didn’t want that. But he couldn’t just cradle Sehun’s head and watch him die.
“He won’t die,” Jongin heard from behind, and he let down Sehun’s head, turning.
The smell of blood had been over everything so much that Jongin hadn’t sensed another person.
“Who are you?”
“The person who called you here.”
“Sehun asked me here.”
Sehun had sent a letter asking to meet him, after dark. Alone.
“Because I made him write it. Do you know what is your downfall?” the man asked. “It is that you are predictable. You love this boy. You want him. You will die for him. But he will live. I gave him a gift.”
“Gift,” Jongin said, for a moment mystified before his brain began to work again. He couldn’t mean-
“Yes, I see you’ve sensed it. He’s a werewolf, or soon will be. And he will find you savaged when he wakes. Perhaps he’ll think he did it, but that’s of no concern to me.”
“How many vampires have you killed, old man?” Jongin taunted.
“Enough to know how to call you out,” the man replied. “Even if he dies in the change, he’s of no further use to me.”
“Once he turns into a werewolf, there is no cure,” Jongin said.
“That’s right. A gift to last a lifetime.”
“Why me? Why him?”
“You exist. Now die.”
His hands were covered with Sehun’s blood, and he stood.
Perhaps many vampires had been killed by this wolf. But not that day.
***
It took Sehun a week to heal. Oh, by the time Jongin had killed the werewolf, the wound in Sehun’s side had begun to mend, but there were other wounds hidden deep.
“He took me after I got off the bus,” Sehun said. “He said… He said he needed to find you. He hit me, tied me up, and drove me out to the edge of town.”
Sehun sounded slow and rough, like an old man who’d fallen and needed help getting up. Before sunrise, Jongin assembled food, anything that Sehun would need to recuperate. Sehun slept great stretches of daylight anyway, and Jongin only felt him moving sometimes. There was a conversation they needed to have, and it was one he didn’t know how to begin. Especially with Sehun still weak.
“Why am I not in a hospital?” Sehun asked.
It was awkward, meeting Sehun’s eyes and looking away. It had been almost two years since they had seen each other. Two years since Jongin had become a vampire.
“Because you’re healing fine here,” Jongin said, feeling tired.
“Why do you sleep all day? He told me he was a werewolf, and you were a vampire. He was obviously mentally disturbed. I don’t-“
“He was telling you the truth,” Jongin interrupted, before Sehun’s eyebrows could frown any harder. “He was a werewolf.”
And so are you.
“Did you hit your head?”
Jongin almost grinned at Sehun’s incredulous face. “No. But I can prove to you I’m right.”
“You said he died.”
“I killed him,” Jongin said, keeping his voice even. “To save your life. Look at this.”
It took barely a scratch with Jongin’s knife across Sehun’s arm to draw blood, and Sehun squawked in protest.
“What are you doing! Get away from me!”
“I’m proving to you he was a werewolf!” Jongin shot back. “Just look!”
“That’s my arm! Are you insane?”
“Just look,” Jongin repeated.
Sehun, still frowning and backing up on the bed, touched his arms. And his frown grew deeper as he wiped away the blood.
There was no cut on his skin.
“I don’t understand,” Sehun said. “You just cut me. I felt it.”
Jongin wanted to walk away from all of it. And he couldn’t. “He was a werewolf, and he bit you.”
“So, what are you saying? That I’m some kind of werewolf, too? And that you’re a vampire? Jongin-”
He bared his teeth as Sehun looked up at him, did what he had tried never to do for the last two years.
He’d never wanted to see Sehun looking back at him in horror.
***
“Vampires and werewolves are enemies,” Sehun mused.
Jongin shrugged, his back against the wall beside Sehun. Sehun hadn’t run out the door screaming, so it was something.
“Of a sort. It’s more of a territory thing, really. A werewolf needs places to hunt. Vampires need humans to feed from. When that overlaps, things can get nasty.”
“And the werewolf that bit me wanted to kill you? Why?”
“Vendetta against vampires, maybe. Sometimes there’s no good reason.”
Jongin had been hunted before, but he hadn’t been lured like he had that night. He watched Sehun’s fingers rub the blanket between them, an absent movement, and wanted to grab Sehun’s hand and just revel in the contact. He’d been careful not to touch, since revealing what he was to Sehun. The wary expression in Sehun’s eyes was something he didn’t want. He wanted the smiles they’d shared growing up together, and that breathless moment when they’d been fourteen and wrestling and he’d nearly planted his mouth on Sehun’s by accident. He’d wanted for real, so badly, and they’d laughed it off. He’d gone home and obsessed about it. Sehun and his new haircut, Sehun and his hands. He’d never gotten to kiss Sehun, by accident or on purpose.
“Why did you leave?” Sehun asked, as though reading his thoughts. He’d asked, in other ways, before. But Jongin had gotten adept in avoiding it.
And then he really wanted Sehun’s hand. To touch him, or reassure himself. He wasn’t sure if the contact would be what he needed or if Sehun would pull away.
“I snuck out to go to a club,” Jongin said. “I was 18. I thought I owned everything. I got jumped by a couple of guys on my way home. I- One of them was vampire. I don’t know, maybe they both were. But they turned me. I left because I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t want you to be…afraid of me.”
“This is so fucked up,” Sehun blurted. “You’re something that shouldn’t exist, and I’m something that shouldn’t exist. How is it a secret?”
“Legends are legends for a reason, I guess.”
“How do you eat? Humans?”
“Well, I can’t eat animals. Blood banks, mostly.”
“Is it good?”
“It’s food to me. You can eat anything, though. You just have to worry about the full moon.”
Sehun looked a little bit sick. “When is that?”
Since Jongin had found that out the moment he’d gotten Sehun back to his apartment, and marked it on the calendar every day since, he said without hesitation, “In three days.”
***
They trusted each other. There had to be some kind of trust between them. Before Jongin had left, they had been friends for nearly half their lives. Time apart hadn’t changed that, even if Sehun felt as though he’d been abandoned. Years apart hadn’t changed that. Sehun wasn’t a teenager any more. He had a job, was in college. He’d changed, not just physically, though there was that.
Sehun stared back at him with wary eyes sometimes. Other times they were wistful. Sehun had perfected a look of almost total stillness when they were children, but there were emotions that ran rampant that Sehun couldn’t control. He heard about Sehun’s life, a life he was currently absent from. It was something that couldn’t be helped. Sehun could get another job, but they only had once chance to make sure Sehun survived the full moon without hurting himself or others. And it was Jongin’s fault. He couldn’t just leave Sehun to deal with it himself.
“This building is really near mine,” Sehun said, staring out of the window one night.”
“It’s next door, actually,” Jongin said, as Sehun sent him a sharp look. “I wanted to be close, in case you needed something. But it just made you a target.”
“Without ever letting me know you were here? You could have come over at night! I never would have known.”
“But then you’d have asked about meeting in the day, and it would’ve just gotten more weird.”
“Jongin,” Sehun said softly.
“I kept hoping I’d find a cure, or-“
Jongin turned as Sehun stood. “I would’ve accepted you, no matter what. I searched the internet, tried to contact your family.”
Jongin laughed, sinking to his knees in front of his low table in an easy movement. “My family moved as far away from me as possible.”
“I wouldn’t have. Does that mean you hate me, because of what I am?”
Jongin turned his head, and startled to find Sehun right there. “It’s my fault.”
“It’s his fault,” Sehun growled.
Truly growled, low and rumbling like a predator in a way that shivered over his skin and had Sehun’s forehead dropping onto Jongin’s shoulder.
“I missed you,” Jongin said, and felt so lost. The first time he’d said that to Sehun, they had been eight, and Sehun had gone away on vacation for two weeks. It had been like losing a lung.
“You didn’t answer me,” Sehun told him. “Do you hate me?”
Jongin shook his head. “You’re my best friend.”
Sehun’s arms slipped around him, squeezed his ribs almost to the point of pain.
“I’m not afraid of you,” Jongin told him. “You can’t hurt me.”
“Would you have been angry at me if I’d hidden what I was from you and ran away?”
“We were closer than that,” Jongin said, and tried not to let the tears form as Sehun pressed harder against his back.
“No more running.”
No more.
***
Jongin drove them as deep into the forest as he could the night before the full moon. Even if Sehun ran for hours, they would never make it back to civilization. Jongin would run with him, as best he could. Even if Sehun savaged him, he couldn’t kill him. There were no werewolves to ask. All they could do was hope and wait it out - Jongin in his trunk and Sehun in the back seat as they waited for nightfall. And then, for moonrise.
“Will I know who you are?” Sehun asked. Worried, really. His stomach was full, Jongin had made sure of that. If the wolf wasn’t hungry to start with, perhaps their time would be easier.
“I don’t know. I think… I think control is something you kind of have to learn. At least, that’s what I’ve heard. I know when I was first turned, I was hungry constantly. I thought I was losing my mind.”
Sehun had begun to shake, rocking forward and back against the tree he was leaning against. And Jongin knew it wasn’t from the cold.
Sehun had been restless the night before, like the moon was in his blood and calling for him. Jongin had never seen a fully turned werewolf. And the last thing he wanted was for Sehun to see his fear for him.
“Jongin.”
Sehun’s voice was breathless and deep, and Jongin stepped up immediately, pressed against him chest to chest.
“I’m here. You’re okay.”
“I feel it.”
“Keep talking,” Jongin suggested, his fingers tightening in the back of Sehun’s jacket. “Maybe that will help.”
“It feels like I’m going to throw up, like I’m turning inside out.” Sehun’s breath was harsh on his shoulder. “If I- You won’t leave again? You can’t leave again.”
Not that night. Not again, like Jongin had disappeared for years. Sehun would never have to wonder. Jongin would be there, every full moon. He would- He owed it to Sehun. He needed it. He would gladly live with Sehun, learn to feed him, run with him.
But they would learn how. In Sehun, he smelled only fear. It was bitter. He wanted to stop it.
“Maybe this will be better,” Jongin said, almost shivering with Sehun. “Maybe you will do better with this than if I had turned you into a vampire. I thought about it, you know. I- I wouldn’t have let you die. You can’t hate yourself. You’ll be okay. I won’t go away.”
The words were so hard to say as Sehun keened.
He couldn’t feel the moon, but he could feel Sehun. He felt the change, as he was forced to stand back, grabbing at Sehun’s arms as Sehun reached for the ground.
“Sehun.”
One of Sehun’s hands curled into the dead leaves and the other clasped hard on Jongin’s wrist.
“Help me.”
And Jongin watched with helplessness scraping grooves in his heart as Sehun changed.
***
They ran together, the head of Sehun’s wolf nearly to his waist, strides much longer than the fastest run that Jongin could sustain. Luckily, it didn’t seem like Sehun was trying to outrun him. Blood red eyes and snarls had had Jongin jerking back at first, Sehun’s hackles raised and panic in every posture. Jongin raised his hands.
“Sehun, it’s me. I won’t hurt you.”
And with a growl, Sehun had turned and ran. The wolf was dark, as the forest was dark, and Jongin followed him only by sound and glimpses, coming to a halt to see Sehun’s head high, nose testing the air. A thin howl wavered from him, and Jongin gasped. Sehun’s head swung around, teeth bared, and he was running again.
Running, Jongin wasn’t sure to what. He crashed through bushes, leaped logs, and splashed through a stream just to keep Sehun just barely in sight.
He skidded onto his hands and knees at the sound of another howl, still Sehun. As though he were calling for other wolves.
None answered. Jongin was grateful for that. The last thing he needed was Sehun to be met by another wolf, maybe bigger, maybe stronger, and a wolf that could hurt or maybe even kill Sehun.
Jongin was running again as he heard snarls, and some kind of shriek.
“Sehun!”
He cursed how breathless he sounded, but if it got Sehun to come towards him, it didn’t matter.
But what he got, as he caught up to Sehun, was a growl, from around the fluffy brown thing he had in his mouth.
Sehun had been hunting.
He almost laughed, he was that relieved. Instead, he backed the hell up because an angry wolf, an angry wolf asserting himself owner of the rabbit he’d killed, was not something Jongin wanted to mess with.
Not a lot of flesh on a rabbit, but perhaps it’d sate Sehun’s need to hunt. Somehow, either by Sehun knowing him or that he could tell Jongin was a vampire, he had not tried to attack him.
Jongin sat, let himself relax as he kept Sehun in sight. He could eat, do his thing. But he startled, as Sehun rounded the tree and came toward him. Very delicately, the rabbit carcass was dropped beside Jongin’s body. Mostly bits of fur, and bone.
“Thanks for that,” Jongin said, poking at it gently with the business end of a leaf. “Very appetizing. Why do I feel like you’re laughing at me?”
Sehun just rumbled.
“Can I touch you? I know you’re not a lap dog. But you are in there somewhere, right? My Sehun. You gave me a dead body, so we’re going steady, right?”
That got him a snarl, and he nearly jerked back his hand.
“Sehun. I know you.”
But his concern was greater than a wolf. It was the time of day. He knew the time of sunrise, and a quick glance at this phone told him it was only an hour away. They were far further away from the car than an hour, he knew that. Even running full out, abandoning Sehun, he’d never make it back.
“Sehun. Sehun!” he said, getting the attention of the pacing wolf. “Do you have some kind of magical wolf senses, or nose to find a cave? The sun is going to come up. If I’m out here…”
He’d packed a foil blanket. In an emergency, it’d do enough to keep him alive, but it’d be a long day huddled under it. He also had blood, because he’d had no idea if he’d get hurt, or how long they’d be gone.
“I’ll burn out here, Sehun. Sehun!”
Jongin staggered onto his feet as Sehun pivoted and turned back the way they had come. All he could do was run and follow, watching as Sehun paused to whine back at him before running off again. Almost like he was making sure that Jongin was following him. Perhaps that was wishful thinking, but he was running anyway. Any normal human wold have been flat on their face. Unless they were training for a marathon, he amended. But he was hardly being able to keep a steady pace, and the air was chilled without the sun.
The large wolf was almost gray in the growing light. Sehun. Jongin figured he had maybe twenty minutes before he found himself a hollow and made himself a foil tent to keep out the sun. Sehun growled back at him, and Jongin fought the urge to growl back.
It wasn’t Sehun’s fault.
But Sehun stretched down, his forelegs extended and tail in the air, as though stretching.
In front of him, was a rocky hill leading up to a cliff face that gradually leveled off on higher ground.
“Sehun…”
There was a split in the rock, an old rock slide. But it was darker than anything he could see. If it went back far enough, he wouldn’t need the foil at all. If it was shallow, it would still help to protect him.
Sehun was still there inside. He’d heard Jongin. He’d led him there.
“Don’t go running off, though,” Jongin said. “If you turn back and I’m stuck in some rock, I can’t find you by smelling you. I’ll be wandering out of the woods a week later. You do know how to get back, right?”
Sehun’s wolf made a sound almost like a snort.
“Are you afraid still?”
Sehun cocked his head at Jongin, as though to ask why he thought so.
No, he didn’t suppose Sehun had any reason to be afraid as he was. He was a predator. At least one night a month he was.
Jongin retreated into the crevice in the rock. It was shadowed, deeper than he was tall, and he kicked rocks aside when he reached the furthest edge of it, where two rock slabs had met.
He patted the one atop him, and said, “If you just stay up there, I’ll be out of your way soon.”
He didn’t dare take out blood, for fear it would trigger Sehun’s need to hunt. But he did unfold the foil blanket, on the off chance the sun tried to find him in his little hole.
“I’m just going to sleep a while, okay?” he told Sehun, feeling drowsy as the sun rose. He could stay awake, if he needed to. But he could see Sehun’s fluffy back at the entrance, like some kind of sentinel. Sehun wasn’t leaving him. He could rest. And he slept to the howl of the wolf.
***
Jongin woke in the twilight, and found himself quite warmer than usual. The rock he was lying on was no softer than it had been, but he wasn’t alone on it. When he opened his eyes, Sehun was looking back at him. Not wolf Sehun. Human Sehun.
“You’re still here,” he said.
“I am. I couldn’t have missed you in your tinfoil spaceship.”
“Just in case we got stuck,” Jongin retorted, trying to sit up and feeling woozy.
“You brought blood?” Sehun asked.
“I did. You ran me all over.”
“You didn’t have to follow me,” Sehun told him, rummaging in Jongin’s bag.
“I told you I wasn’t going to leave you. And you were scared before you turned.” He swallowed, watching Sehun uncap the bottle Jongin had brought the blood in. “What was it like?”
“I felt stronger,” Sehun said, handing Jongin the blood. “I could see, smell more. I wanted to hunt.”
“Yeah, I saw proof of that,” Jongin joked.
“The wolf wanted you to eat it, too,” Sehun told him. “I did. I was…providing for you.”
“What, like I was part of your pack?”
“Maybe,” Sehun said, looking down at his hands.
“As long as you don’t get rabbit indigestion,” Jongin said. The blood fortified him, and Sehun was weirdly more quiet than he had been before he’d changed. Jongin didn’t know what to make of it. “Let’s try and find the car.”
But Sehun grabbed his arm. “Wait. I- I think I could become the wolf entirely, if I was alone. I’d have killed anything. Anyone.”
That made him wary. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. But every time I started running, I could hear you, smell you. Every time the wolf wanted to take over, I could just… I couldn’t forget you were behind me. I could’ve killed you, if-”
Oh. So Jongin had kept Sehun grounded. And there he thought he was just following along to make sure Sehun didn’t kill someone else.
“Wasn’t scared because it was you,” Jongin told him.
Sehun spoke, his voice solemn. “I was still myself, because you were there, because I-“
Sehun looked up at him, and even in the fading light he could see Sehun’s eyes glittering.
“You…?”
“The wolf kept thinking “he is mine” and I couldn’t go too far from you. The wolf knew. That I still love you.”
Jongin’s head snapped back, bouncing painfully off the rock. He could not say that was because they were friends. It sounded as though the wolf claimed him as more than that.
“I don’t know if a werewolf and a vampire are compatible,” Jongin said, feeling the awkwardness as he spoke. All he wanted was for Sehun not to laugh. He’d spent almost two years hiding from Sehun. Sehun could cut him down so easily. More easily than Sehun could know.
“You can protect me from the moon,” Sehun said. “I’ll protect you from the dark.”
“Oh.”
It was the clasp of a friend, the way that Sehun grabbed the back of his neck and pulled him into a hug. A hug he’d waited for.
“Are we going steady?”
Jongin gulped. “You remember that?”
“I gave you a rabbit.”
He breathed in Sehun’s scent. The scent of Sehun’s blood.
“Do you realize-“
There were things Sehun might not understand. He’d never had a relationship since being turned, and there were so many complications. His mind was racing. He could bite Sehun, and Sehun would heal faster than a human. If his blood didn’t make Jongin sick, they could protect each other, just as Sehun said.
“I’ll need time,” Sehun said, his head pressing against Jongin’s. At least Sehun knew that. And Jongin knew that, too. It wasn’t as easy as waving away years apart. What they were could bond them, had already bonded them. “I missed you so much, Jongin.”
But Sehun didn’t realize, yet, that Jongin would give him anything.
***
Sehun found another wolf, and he’d needed that, as much as Jongin had needed a vampire to tell him how to survive. Jongin would have found one for Sehun to begin with, had he known how. But Sehun was still learning the fine nuances of his nose and what it could do for him, which meant that Jongin had been permanently put on garbage duty.
And most of it wasn’t even his garbage.
“It feels like a nightmare,” Sehun said, remembering the hunt and hike back to the car. “It doesn’t feel real.”
It had been torture. Terror. Faith in Sehun, to send him off with his new mentor for a week. Apparently, a new werewolf keeping his head during his first moon wasn’t unheard of. It had been his connection to Jongin - the years of trust - that had seen him through.
Jongin woke most sunsets with Sehun against his back. Either back to back, or Sehun sprawled over him like a heater. That was how it started, simple. He had to keep his head on straight, with Sehun rubbing his hip and telling him what he’d gotten up to while Jongin was sleeping. Some of it was said sleepily, soft murmurs against the back of Jongin’s neck as Jongin’s fingers dug into the mattress edge.
They needed to get to know each other again. Even though Sehun made him laugh so effortlessly, irked him in all the same ways. It was like that time after they’d spent those two weeks apart as children. Coming back together was like remembering to take a breath.
If the breath carried with it the weight of wondering what was next. How they spanned the distance between friends and more.
The first full moon, Sehun told Jongin that he loved him. The second, Jongin carried scraps of meat, and kept Sehun from running into the woods again. They were learning, slowly.
“You trust me to drive you home in the trunk?” Sehun asked before he’d turned.
“You can’t kill me,” Jongin reminded him, patting his butt. “But don’t crash my car.”
It wasn’t like he woke up in some glass coffin in a fairy tale, waiting for Prince Charming. He smelled like grease and he really needed to vacuum the carpet. His mouth was dry as Sehun opened the trunk.
He was going to say something, and he didn’t know what, staring up at Sehun’s ruffled hair. He didn’t look too worse for the wear of a night in the woods.
“Two moons down,” Jongin teased, grabbing Sehun’s offered hand.
But Sehun didn’t say anything, didn’t thank him or even do much but pull his head past the edge. It wasn’t like Sehun could get the jump on a vampire. But that didn’t mean Jongin didn’t take a sharp breath as Sehun leaned to press his mouth solidly on Jongin’s.
For being mostly immortal, he wondered if it was possible to die from a kiss.
He was pretty sure all the conventional knowledge told them it was a terrible idea. Sehun’s mentor had given him a look like he was so much scum under Sehun’s feet. But Sehun hadn’t really been one to follow the crowd. He usually got his own way, even if he had to work for it.
And maybe, apparently, he wanted Jongin.
“Took you long enough,” he said, but his voice was too breathless to hold any bite.
Sehun was the one with the big teeth anyway.
But Sehun grinned, and all Jongin could do was kiss him, and try not to pull him down into the trunk with him.
***