Chapter Text
Carry my soul into the night
May the stars guide my way.
I glory in the sight
As darkness takes the day.
–– In Noctem, Nicholas Hooper
As one would suspect, it starts with a fever.
Donghyuck burns up internally from one moment to the next, and when he collapses in the middle of class, he’s carried away to the infirmary with adept efficiency.
His parents are notified, as are the authorities, but then there’s nothing else to do than to wait while Donghyuck lies motionless in one of the sickbeds and loses more and more color as the minutes pass.
Inside of him a virus spreads. One that kills and devours, one that passes through all of him and leaves nothing unchanged. The process is fast and merciless, half of it over when Donghyuck’s parents arrive at his school to sit next to his bed and hold his hand.
Donghyuck stays unconscious through the whole process, fingers twitching in his mother’s hand as the temperature inside of him rises, the virus burning him internally, leaving something new behind, something that rises from the ashes, unfamiliar and raw.
His parents watch him in an almost detached way, faces expressionless, but when the official in attendance asks them if they’re feeling well, both Donghyuck’s mother and father nod.
This is the second time this is happening in the Lee household after all, and since Donghyuck’s twin sister made it through the virus in a fortunate way, they have good reason to hope that Donghyuck will do so, too.
That’s why neither his mother nor his father are as alarmed as it usually is when a child burns up even though the body goes deathly cold. The official shrugs and leans back against the infirmary wall, eyes on Donghyuck who passes through the last stages of the virus.
It can only go two ways, everyone knows.
In the best case the fever is never caught and the child never forced to turn into one thing or another. Only one out of several hundred thousand children catches the virus after all, too few for parents to seriously fear for their offspring, but also too many to call the infection rate rare. The outcome for those that catch the virus, though, is always the same, and it brings either devastation or fortune to their families.
“Dohyeon, his sister,” Donghyuck’s mother says when the sun starts to set and the shadows in the infirmary get longer. “She’s going to be happy when he wakes up. She misses him most. She’ll be happy when he can go to where she is.”
“Lee Dohyeon,” the official says as he flips through the documents in his hands. “Turned and transferred to the jurisdiction of the Night Court. She’s the older twin?”
“Younger,” Donghyuck’s father corrects, his eyes never straying from the motionless form of his son. “She caught the virus in spring.”
“She’s been going to school among her...kind… since then,” Donghyuck’s mother says, eyes shutting as she tries to keep her composure. “She’s going to be so happy when Donghyuck joins her.”
The official leans forward to glance at the documents in his hands, eyes narrowing at the two pictures of a girl that are neatly pinned on top of the file.
Lee Dohyeon, age fifteen, one picture of her from the beginning of the school year, and next to it one picture of her only a few weeks later, after she woke up from the fever.
The worst is, the official thinks to himself, that they almost look the same.
The same eyes, the same nose, the same mouth, the same girl. Only that she isn’t. In the second picture her eyes gleam bright red where they were brown before. Her sweet smile turned into that of a predator’s, full of sharp teeth, her canines elongated into fangs, showing fully since she’s too young to control them yet. The sunkissed color of her skin turned into a sickly pale white, blue veins shining through until she will be a little older, the official knows, her skin a little thicker.
And yet, she’s one of the few fortunate that came out of the fever like this. And even if it’s still sad, even if it means another of their children turned into something else, the official hopes that the twins’ parents are right and that Lee Donghyuck will make it through the transformation just the same as his sister did.
The alternative would be… well, even worse.
Ten years into the job, ten years of witnessing and documenting the transformation in children that catch the virus, ten years of watching parents despair, of families getting torn apart, and it’s still a tragedy whenever a child burns through the fever and comes out not in the way everyone hopes for them so desperately.
Please, the official thinks as he watches the boy’s mother bend down so low that her forehead touches the hand of her son which she desperately holds in her own. Please let his eyes be red.
The sun sets and everyone in the infirmary holds their breath. Any moment now, Donghyuck will awaken. As soon as the pull of the sun dies down the night will claim him in one way or another.
The air in the room shifts softly, then the boy stirs.
The official doesn’t see him blink open his eyes, but his own flutter shut in defeat when across the room Lee Donghyuck’s mother cries out and starts suffocating on sobs.
-
Lee Dohyeon is the first of her kind they let in to see Donghyuck.
It’s only a day later and the circumstances of Lee Donghyuck’s situation look similar enough to the day of his transformation, but the truth is that everything changed.
It’s protocol for parents of transformed children to commit their custody to the state, the children taken to safe facilities where they rest and wait until their new status is registered and they’re passed from the care of one race to another.
Because that’s what happens when the fever eats them up. No matter the outcome, the children don’t make it out as humans, their biology changed so irrevocably that it makes them fall under the jurisdiction of a different species.
Donghyuck’s parents already said their goodbyes to their son on the day of his transformation. Unlike how it is with their daughter, they will never see him again.
Their last wish for Dohyeon to see her brother as the first of her kind is born from a place of such utter devastation that, no matter how unorthodox, even Dohyeon’s authorities agree to it. Everyone in the Night Court was once a human after all, and everyone understands the despair of the twins’ parents, the last rays of hope they’re clutching to keep Donghyuck with them, to prevent losing him forever.
They’re twins, and the last chance to save Donghyuck is for Dohyeon to see her brother before anyone else, to claim him if possible, if compatible, even if it means another tragedy between the twins.
Nothing would ever be the same between them of course, Dohyeon forever her brother’s owner, Donghyuck forever bound to be his sister’s feeder, but he’d stay in the family at least, be with his parents and his twin, instead of bound and chained to someone he doesn’t know.
They’re twins. Their blood used to be the same. And as gross as it sounds from a human perspective, it’s a chance, a blood-born bond that might avert the tragedy of the Lee household.
When Dohyeon enters, Donghyuck lies alone and curled up on the bed in his cell.
He looks smaller than she remembers, more fragile, too. But all humans look delicate to her since she changed, even adults like the human official who led her to Donghyuck.
Her brother stirs when she sits down on his bed, and Dohyeon’s breath gets stuck in her chest when his eyes blink open and look up at her. They used to have the exact same eyes, but where hers turned deep red as she transformed, his turned into a pale grey, adding to his overall fragility.
For a second he stares up at her in confusion and Dohyeon fears for the worst- but then he recognizes her with a gasp, and when she helps him up and pulls him into her arms, her chest feels tight at the way he curls against her and sobs out her name.
He feels like a baby, small and frail. Dohyeon closes her eyes, sends a prayer to the gods of both worlds she lived in and bends her head until her face presses gently against the curve of her brother’s neck.
Then she inhales, and as her chest fills with the warm scent of her twin’s skin, her eyes fill with the phantom of tears she no longer can cry, because Donghyuck is not the one for her.
He smells like home. He smells like memories. He smells like growing up together and thinking that nothing will ever change, he smells like the soap in the shower of their parents’ house, like the sheets of their bunkbed, like the cooking of their mother.
He smells like his transformation, too, a sweetness to his scent that tingles the gums in her mouth and makes her tongue twitch. But his blood doesn’t call to her, the warmth on his skin not feeling right, his body not fitting against her in a way that makes her feel like she found the missing piece of her new life.
Everyone of her kind needs someone of Donghyuck’s kind. But Donghyuck is not the one for her, and had she not lost her heart during the transformation, it would be breaking the moment she gently nudges him to uncurl from her so she can look at him for a last time.
“Hyuck,” she says, and her throat constricts when she realizes that this could be the last time she says his name. “Hyuckah, you’ll be fine.”
Talking is hard for Donghyuck, she knows. Where the fever burned away everything fragile inside of her to make room for more strength and power, it left her brother burned to ash and filled with nothing.
“You'll be fine,” she says again, more to herself, voice breaking when she cups her twin’s face in her hands. “You’re my brother. You’re my twin. I belong to a powerful clan now. They’ll make sure you’ll go to someone good. No one will dare to… to treat you bad with a sister belonging to a noble clan.”
Her brother stares at her with his brows furrowed, and for a second Dohyeon feels an intense echo of pain in her chest.
“Dohyeon,” Donghyuck whispers then, eyes fluttering shut and lips spreading into a smile. “Cry– cr– …cry…baby...”
“I can’t cry anymore, dummy,” she sobs, but she reaches for her twin to pull him back against herself, quiet whimpers leaving her lips as she rocks them both back and forth.
Behind them, the human official leaves the room, undoubtedly to inform the authorities about the situation. They just have a few more minutes, but only Dohyeon knows this, it’s only her who sobs at the thought that she might never see her brother again.
For a wild second she considers killing him. It would be easy, it would be merciful.
No matter what she promises him, in the end Donghyuck will belong to whoever the call of his blood reaches.
And Dohyeon might be new to this life, but she knows her kind, knows how they treat their food, the other side of the virus’s outcome: feeders just like Donghyuck, created solely for them, transformed into something less as they went through the same fire that gave birth to the ones sinking their fangs into them and sucking off their blood.
Donghyuck’s quiet whispers of “I love you”, is what makes her tighten her arms around her twin instead.
It shouldn't be possible, not for many years to come, but Dohyeon cries, face buried in the soft tuft of hair on top of Donghyuck’s head, unable to stop.
She sits with him until there is nothing left inside of her, and she doesn’t let go of her twin until they come and take her away.
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