#h one

A loud knock on your door disrupted the silence of your apartment which was draped in darkness only broken by the blue light of the screen of your laptop. You snapped out of your stupor and squinted at the clock on the wall. Groaning you dragged a hand through your hair. You had been staring at the blank page of your document for over an hour now but didn’t type anything besides your name and the course you were supposed to write the paper for which was due to the end of the week.

It’s not that you didn’t like the class or didn’t know what you should write about but you just couldn’t focus. You mind was wandering the second you weren’t distracted by your friends or the lectures you had to attend. Being worried about your boyfriend not contacting you for a little over a week may sound stupid but when he had left, he hadn’t said where he was going, just that he needed to attend to some family business with his extended family. You were always antsy when he mentioned his family, especially his extended family. For other people that meant meeting a creepy uncle or a noisy aunt asking you when you would finally get married or your cousin boasting about how many sales he had this week alone. But for Hyungwon it meant that he had to face his creator and his brothers and sisters. And judging by the urgency of the meeting, it seemed like one of his so called siblings - not by birth but by rebirth as he liked to call it -  might have either gone rouge or a newborn wasn’t able to control themselves.

Neither of the options seemed good and Hyungwon had often told you stories about his brothers and himself getting hurt whilst trying to hunt the other vampires down for the safety of their family and their race. He had told you that the government and the police knew very well that creatures like him existed but did everything to keep it hidden, so the general public wouldn’t panic but if a clan would decide to go rouge and reveal themselves there would be nothing to stop it. The way they were hunted down by special police forces was brutal enough, you didn’t dare to imagine how it would escalate if everyone knew of their existence.

Another harsh knock on your door ripped you from your thoughts. Shouting an affirmative noise, you got up from where you were seated on your work desk and padded over to the wooden door of your apartment.

When you opened the door, your heart dropped and stopped beating for a second. In the dark hallway before you was standing your boyfriend. His white hair was dishevelled, clothes torn and dried blood clung to his pale hands. He smiled weakly at you, showing his canine teeth but the smile wasn’t reaching his bright red eyes and he leaned heavily against the doorframe. Without saying anything, you grabbed his slender waist and threw one of his thin arms around your shoulder so you could support him on your way into your apartment. When you sat him down on your couch, he almost melted into the pillows, his head dangling over the back of the couch, eyes losing their focus.

Climbing into his lap, you grabbed his ice-cold face between your palms, forcing him to look at you. “What do you need, Won?” You asked, voice trembling with fear. You had never seen him in a state like this. His eyes would turn more and more red the more thirsty he got but it also made him more aggressive and eerie, not weak like this. He had fed just before he left, you knew that. So he shouldn’t be this starved. “Blood,” he said weakly, voice not more than a breath, sounding hoarse as if he had been screaming. Nodding you got up to go to your fridge to see if there were blood bags left, but his hands weakly wrapped around your arm. “That won’t do,” he breathed out, his head falling back again, his hand losing the grip he had on you.

Cursing you rolled the long sleeve of your sweater up, holding your wrist up for him to bite you. Ever since you had been together he had refused to feed from your neck. It was supposed to hurt way less than doing it from the wrist area but he didn’t like that you weren’t able to stop him like that, not confident in his ability to stop himself even though he was far from being a newborn who was new to feeding from a living being he didn’t want to kill. But even though he had his lips parted and his canines were shining in the low light of your computer screen, he didn’t bite you. Brushing the hair from his forehead, you gently pressed your wrist against his lips. “Drink, Won,” you urged him on, bracing yourself for the pain which was about to come, screwing your eyes shut. But it never came. Instead Hyungwon went limb in your hands, every tension leaving his body. “Won?” “Hyungwon?” “Chae Hyungwon?!” You called him, your voice climbing higher in pitch and getting louder with each call of his name.

Cursing you jumped off of him and the couch and raced to the kitchen to find a knife. Ripping open random drawers as well as crashing several kitchen utensils, you finally grabbed a large, sharp knife and dashed back into the living room. With trembling hands you brought the knife to the skin on your wrist. A whimper left your lips when you pulled the knife over your flesh, breaking the skin. The sound of the bloody knife falling to the ground echoed load in the room when you broad your wrist to Hyungwon’s lips again, the dark red fluid streaming past his lips, staining them and his face. Praying to whichever god might be listening, you stroked his hair when he still wasn’t moving, tears collecting on the corners of your eyes not only because of the pain in your wrist. Willing them back, you screwed your eyes shut and tried to stop your bleeding arm from trembling so you wouldn’t make even more of a mess.

When a sudden pain shot through your whole body, your eyes snapped back open and were met with the almost glowing blood red eyes of Hyungwon whose fangs had pierced through your skin to get even more of your blood flowing. Whimpering, tears of relief began flowing down your face when you saw how with every drop of blood leaving your body, Hyungwon’s strength seemed to come back to him. But while his strength came back to him, your head began to feel light. The exhaustion that came with letting a vampire feed from you washing over you faster than it had ever before which was no surprise when you considered the big wound on your wrist and the way his Adam’s apple was bobbing with every gulp of blood he swallowed.

“Hyungwon, stop. It’s enough,” you told your boyfriend through gritted teeth. But he didn’t seem to even hear the words or recognize your words; simply trailing his tongue over the cut to make more blood flowing into his mouth. For the first time you were thankful that Hyungwon would always refuse to feed from your neck, at least giving you some kind of chance to get him off of you even though he possessed unnatural strength. Gently caressing Hyungwon’s cheek with your free hand, you threaded your fingers through his hair before grabbing a handful of the shorter hair at his nape to yank at the strands.

This seemed to make him snap out of it: His glowing eyes snapped open and his lips left your wrist to curl back to expose his bloody teeth in an animalistic snarl. Shrieking in fear you yanked your injured hand from his grip, making you fall from the couch, blood droplets falling on the cushions and the carpet. But you didn’t have time to even acknowledge any of that, your vision turning black when your head connected to the couch table with an unpleasant sound.

~

When you regained your senses, your body felt unusually heavy like there were weights pulling your limps down into the soft material of the bed and keeping your eyes shut. You could make out faint noises, soft whispering, muffled through the door of your bedroom. Slowly and with much effort you managed to open your eyes. The heavy curtains of your room had been pulled close, so it was impossible to judge how long you had been unconscious. A soft whimper left your lips when you tried to lift yourself up to look at the time, a splitting pain shooting through your head.

Not even a second later, the door to your bedroom opened and Hyungwon poked his head through, smiling when he saw you were awake. Before you would express how worried you had been about him, he beat you to it. “I was so worried, you wouldn’t wake up. You have been out for almost twelve hours,” taking your bandaged hand from under the covers, he sat down on the edge of the bed. “I thought I took too much. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have come to you like this. I wasn’t in my right mind, if you hadn’t pulled me off, I didn’t know what would have happened. Please forgive me.” He sighed, toying with the bandages on your wrist, avoiding to look you right in the eye.

Smiling weakly, you intertwined your fingers with his. “What happened, Won? I thought you were dead for a second,” you asked him. “I am dead, sweetheart,” he answered bitterly. “You just went limb and wouldn’t even drink at first, Won. I’ve never seen you like this and it scared me.” He finally met your gaze, his own eyes dark and wide in confusion. “THAT scared you? Not how I couldn’t stop feeding off of you?” “Well, I got you off, didn’t I?” You asked shyly, hiding yourself beneath the fluffy blanket so Hyungwon wouldn’t see the blush creeping up your cheeks.

Shaking his head in disbelief, he pressed a soft kiss to the top of your head before he laid down next to you, placing his head on your chest so he could listen to your heartbeat.

“It’s not going to happen again, I promise”, he whispered softly.