F A U L T L I N E S

          “i hope your night’s going a bit better than mine — just a heads up: the sink in the bathroom sprays water out and not down if you turn it up too high.” cedric clicks his tongue disapprovingly as he takes his seat across from his date. they had only talked briefly before this, and he hoped he had made a better first impression over text messages than he was doing now. the wet spot on the front of his shirt really was a sight for sore eyes, and even after dabbing away some of the water with a napkin, it’d be a while before the water could dry. 

           M O O N    C Y C L E S

     Being unaware that he is being kept alive by a werewolf heart and that it is the heart of a female, Jaesung often ends up worse for wear when unknowingly battling things outside of his control. Roughly every month, or when the moon is full, he has ‘phases’ lasting from three days to seven days of heightened arousal. It includes, but is not limited to, severe insomnia ( unable to sleep for a minimum of forty-eight hours, up to a record of one hundred and twenty hours, beyond which is he is too terrified not to intervene ), lack of fatigability ( his body does not tire at all and he feels rested and fresh consistently ), a relatively high degree of irritability since he has so much energy that he doesn’t know what to do with and hyperphagia where he’ll just constantly eat if there’s food in front of him.

     While he could be using the ‘phases’ to their full potential, he ends up fighting these changes, spending hours tossing and turning in bed and eventually self-medicating to stay asleep ( again, not because he’s tired, but because of how out of routine it is, how unnatural it is, to not be tired and sleep after a whole day, two days, three days– it terrifies him ). He is not comfortable seeing a doctor for these problems since he’s spent a lot of time in a lab and an ICU bed and he doesn’t want that kind of intervention again. But he does regularly go into shady walk-in clinics and getting stronger and stronger sleeping prescriptions, even reaching a point where he’ll self-inject tranquilizer doses, just so he can force himself to sleep until everything is better again, only for the cycle to start all over from square one.

     Jaesung is very pre-occupied with getting rid of these symptoms, almost obsessively, since his military upbringing placed a very strong focus on doing things like clockwork, getting the right amount of rest, eating the right things on the right time– that he spends a lot of this excess energy subduing himself, trying to be ‘normal’. He could potentially have other effects he doesn’t know about yet, such as heightened senses, increased sexual drive and an ability to actually shift, but that’s really hard to discover when you are absolutely in denial that anything is wrong and keep drugging yourself to sleep.