Chapter Text
Baekjin has been a lot of things in his long, miserable existence. A monster, for a very long time. A leader. A liar, mostly by necessity and a survivor, by habit. What he has never been, not once in two hundred years, is careless. Carelessness is what gets vampires staked in their sleep and humans drained in alleys. And yet here he is, at four in the morning, standing in his own bedroom doorway, staring at Seongje asleep in his bed, and the word that keeps circling in his head is exactly that. Careless.
Seongje sleeps like a person who has never been afraid of anything. One arm flung above his head, the other loose across the mattress where Baekjin usually lies. His mouth is slightly open, his hair a mess against the pillow. There’s a faint bruise yellowing along his jaw from the Mapo ambush three weeks ago. The cut on his neck has healed completely. Baekjin’s saliva closed it that same night in the car, and his human hasn’t let him forget it since. He wears it like a badge, like a damn souvenir.
He could stand here for an hour watching Seongje breathe and still not be able to explain what’s wrong with him. And something is wrong with him, he knows that much. Has known it for weeks, probably longer. It started the first time he bit Seongje, that explosive recognition, instinct slamming into place, a bond snapping live between them in the middle of his apartment. He’d called it biology then. He’d kept calling it that. It meant nothing more than that, it didn’t have to.
The stories said the bond made feeding feel like coming home. They never said anything about how he’d start feeling unsettled when Seongje left a room. They never said he’d stand in the dark watching the human breathe and feel something painfully close to grateful.
Baekjin rubs a hand down his face. He should not be thinking about this now. He should be thinking about the folder currently sitting on his desk in the other room, the one Jaewoo brought him two hours ago, the one that is very much the reason he can’t sleep.
The men who ambushed Seongje in Mapo weren’t the ones they were expecting. They weren’t some rival trying to make a move on Union territory. They were hired, paid through four separate ghost accounts. It took his people over a month to untangle this mess. What they found at the center was a name he hadn’t heard in almost forty years.
Dohwan. He was another vampire, older than Baekjin. They had fought once, briefly, in the seventies, over something so minor now that Baekjin can’t even remember what it was. Territory, probably. Something stupid. Baekjin had won and let him live, because at the time letting people live had still felt like a kindness worth extending. He hasn’t thought of the man in decades.
And now he has resurfaced, apparently, and is paying humans to grab Baekjin’s people off the street.
That’s the part that chills him. Because the men in the parking lot hadn’t said take him. They’d said tell Baekjin we have one of his pets. They wanted leverage. Which means Dohwan knows. Knows Baekjin has something to lose now, something that wasn’t there before. Knows it specifically enough to point his men at the right target.
Baekjin has been so careful. He doesn’t bring Seongje to Union meetings outside the office. He doesn’t touch him where cameras can see. Three weeks, and he’s been operating as if this were still just a quiet thing between two people in a private apartment. But someone has been watching anyway, someone has been watching long enough to know exactly where to hit.
In the bed, Seongje makes a soft sound in his sleep and rolls toward the empty side of the mattress. His hand moves across the sheets, searching, and when it doesn’t find what it’s looking for, his eyebrows furrow. Baekjin feels it through the bond before it even fully registers on Seongje’s face. A flicker of discontent, even asleep, the bastard knows he’s not there. Something in Baekjin’s chest pulls tight enough to hurt.
It’s biology, he tells himself again, but the word feels weaker every time he uses it. Biology does not explain why the folder on his desk made him sit down on the floor of his office for twenty minutes without moving. It definitely does not explain the dizzy kind of violence he felt when he read the line one of his pets in a transcript for the second time, the wanting to dismantle a man he hadn’t even properly identified yet, bone by bone, because he had said those words about Seongje.
He crosses the room quietly and sits on the edge of the mattress. Seongje doesn’t wake, but his hand finds Baekjin’s thigh instantly, fingers curling into the fabric of his slacks like he’s been waiting for the contact even unconscious.
He thinks, with the awful clarity that comes in the middle of the night, that he loves him.
Not biologically, he just does. Somewhere along the line, between the first bite in his kitchen and Seongje climbing into his lap in the backseat of that car, and his damn smugginess, Baekjin had started loving him in the ordinary human way. On top of the bond, separate from it. So much worse than it.
He closes his eyes. This is exactly what he swore he wouldn’t do again. After Humin, after the slow ruin of watching someone he loved come to hate what he was, Baekjin had decided, very clearly, that he was done. The kind of man who can love another person is soft in a way he couldn’t afford to be anymore. He had rebuilt his life around that. Built the Union around it. Built himself around it.
And then fate, or blood, or whatever joke the universe was running, had dropped Seongje into his lap. Literal lap, in the end. The human had been orbiting him for years in the Union before any of this, and Baekjin had never let himself look too closely, because looking closely at humans is how you end up mourning them. But the bond had forced his hand.
He could lose this. He could lose him.
The fear is what tells him the truth. This is something else, something older than his turning, something human he thought he’d buried two centuries ago under better coping mechanisms. This is the part of him that screamed Humin’s name and dragged a dying boy home because he couldn’t imagine the world without him. This is that again, but somehow worse.
Seongje shifts on the pillow. “You’re thinking really loud,” he mumbles, eyes still closed.
Baekjin almost laughs. “Go back to sleep,” he says quietly.
“You left the bed.”
“I was in my office.”
“Mmh you’re so boring.” Seongje finally cracks one eye open, squinting up at him. His hair is flattened on one side. His lips are swollen from earlier. He looks, honestly, like a disaster. “Come back.”
Baekjin doesn’t move. “We need to talk.”
That wakes him up a little more. Seongje props himself up on one elbow, the sheet pooling around his hips. He’s naked underneath. Baekjin tries very hard not to let that register right now.
“That is a terrible sentence to hear at four in the morning from your vampire boyfriend.”
“I’m not your boyfriend.”
“You’re right,” Seongje says, eyes sharpening, already playing, already defensive, “you’re my vampire employer, how could I forget.”
“Seongje.”
Something in his tone must finally get through, because Seongje stops. He sits up fully, rubbing a hand through his hair, any sleepiness draining out of him. “Okay,” he says, quieter. “What.”
Baekjin passes him the folder.
Seongje takes it and opens it in his lap. He reads. He’s good at reading fast, Baekjin has noticed that about him. For someone who’s good at playing lazy, he misses almost nothing. Baekjin watches his face carefully. He watches Seongje’s eyes catch on the name. He watches the muscle flicker in his jaw when he gets to the transcript.
“Dohwan,” Seongje says flatly. “Okay. Vampire?”
“Yes.”
“Someone you know.”
“Someone I fought, once. A long time ago, let him live.”
“Classic mistake,” Seongje mutters, already flipping to the next page. He reads the transcript. His expression doesn’t change, but Baekjin feels it through the bond, a flash of something hot. “ One of his pets. Cute.”
“Seongje.”
“What?”
“I need you to take this seriously.”
Seongje looks up at him then, focused and efficient. Baekjin has forgotten, sometimes, that he hasn’t been careless about who he kept close. Seongje is his for a reason. A little disaster in human form, but his own kind of deadly.
“I am taking it seriously,” Seongje says evenly. “I’m just not panicking, because that would be a waste of our time.”
Baekjin exhales through his nose. “He knows about you.”
“Yeah, I got that.”
“He knows specifically enough to use you.”
“I got that too.”
“Seongje-”
“Baekjin.” Seongje closes the folder and sets it down on the bed between them. “I’m not going to start traveling with ten bodyguards and a panic button. What do you want me to say.”
“I want you to say you’ll be careful.”
“I’m always careful.”
“You are painfully not careful. You matter too much to not be careful.”
He hears it the moment he says it. So does Seongje, of course. The human’s mouth opens, closes, opens again. “You can’t just say things like that.”
“I know.”
Seongje stares at him. Baekjin can feel him through the bond, the way his pulse has jumped, the way something warm and panicked is spreading in his chest. For once, the human doesn’t immediately follow with a joke or tease.
“Three weeks ago,” Seongje says slowly, “you told me this wasn’t a relationship.”
“I did.”
“So what is this.”
“I don’t know.”
“Baekjin-”
“I don’t know, Seongje.” He rubs the heel of his palm into his eye. “I have not had to know in a very long time. I’m sorry.”
That makes Seongje go very still. “Did you just apologize?"
“Don’t make it a thing.”
“I’m making it a thing, you apologized-”
“Seongje.”
Seongje stops. Because Baekjin has moved, finally, and his hand is now on Seongje’s jaw, the pad of his thumb pressed lightly against the faint yellow bruise that’s still there. Seongje’s breath stops too. The bond rings between them.
“I thought you were going to die in that parking lot,” Baekjin says quietly. “Before I got there. For a full second, I thought I was about to watch you die. Do you understand what that did to me.”
Seongje’s eyes are huge. “What-”
“I have lost people before,” Baekjin goes on, because if he stops now he will never say it. “I have lost people I thought I would not survive losing. And I survived it. I kept going. I built a life around the expectation that I would keep losing people, that that was what the centuries were going to be. I made my peace with it.”
“Baekjin.”
“And then I felt you bleeding in a parking lot through our bond and every single thing I made peace with stopped mattering.”
Seongje makes a small, stunned sound.
“So,” Baekjin finishes, eyes on his thumb where it rests against the bruise, “I don’t know what this is. But it is not only biology. I am telling you that because you deserve to know. And because if anything happens to you-” He has to take a breath he does not need. “I will not be a person you recognize, after. I want you to understand that.”
For a long moment, Seongje doesn’t speak. The bond is humming hard enough that Baekjin can feel every one of his heartbeats. Then Seongje’s hand comes up and curls around Baekjin’s wrist, holding his hand in place against his face.
“You absolute bastard,” he says, and his voice is wrecked. “You absolute bastard, do you have to say all this at 4 in the morning?”
Seongje laughs once, a little hysterically. He pulls Baekjin’s hand off his face only to press his mouth against his knuckles, kissing them roughly, messy, the way he does everything. Baekjin feels it in his stupid dead heart.
“I’m going to need a cigarette after this conversation,” Seongje mumbles against his knuckles.
“No smoking in the bedroom.”
“Oh fuck that. Says the man who keeps blood in the kitchen.”
“That’s different.”
“Sure.” He kisses Baekjin’s palm this time, then the inside of his wrist, right over where the vein would be if Baekjin still had use for veins the way humans do. “Fine. I promise to be careful. I promise I won’t take stupid solo jobs.”
“You’re lying.”
“Yes.”
“Seongje-”
“I’ll try, ” Seongje amends, and his smile is crooked but real. “I will really, really try. For you. Okay?”
Baekjin exhales. “Okay.”
“And for the record,” Seongje adds, softer, “you are an idiot.”
“Excuse me?”
“For thinking any of this was biology. I have been in love with you since before your fangs were even in the equation, you frustrating, two hundred year old emotional disaster. Do you know how long I’ve been pretending I don’t stare at you in meetings? Four years, Baekjin. I used to go home and smoke half a pack and touch myself just because you’d stood too close to me. I used to lie awake thinking about whether you’d let me die for you.”
Baekjin stares at him.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Seongje says, scowling, cheeks pink. “I’m trying to have a moment.”
“You’re telling me you have been-”
“Pining, yes. Fucking disgusting. For years.”
“You never-”
“You never really gave me anything back. You were also, apparently, hiding fangs, which in retrospect makes a lot of my feelings make more sense.” Seongje waves a hand, aggravated, and the sheet slips further down his hips. “The point is, don’t tell me this was biology. I was already halfway gone before I made you bite me. Your dumb bond just caught up with me.”
Baekjin doesn’t know what to do with this information. He doesn’t know what to do with any of the information he has received in the last ten minutes, up to and including his own. So he leans in and kisses him.
Seongje makes a surprised, pleased sound against his mouth, hands coming up to grab the front of Baekjin’s shirt, and the bond cracks wide open between them, so warm. Baekjin kisses him slowly, the way he doesn’t usually let himself. It isn’t about hunger but about the weight of what has just been said out loud. Seongje kisses him back like he’s trying his best to answer it.
“I don’t know how to do relationships,” Baekjin admits against his mouth.
“You’re doing it fine.”
“I’m very out of practice.”
“Baekjinnie.” Seongje pulls back just enough to look at him, and his eyes are wet, which is horrifying for both of them. He’s smiling anyway. “Listen. You’re doing fine.”
Baekjin kisses him again to avoid having to respond to that. He tastes faintly of sleep and underneath that of himself, his blood pulsing under his skin where it lives for Baekjin and only for Baekjin. The bond sings again at the thought.
He presses Seongje back into the pillows. Seongje goes easily, reaching up to drag him down with him, one hand sliding into his hair and the other skimming up under his shirt, blunt-nailed and stupidly hot.
“Off,” Seongje mumbles against his jaw, tugging at the fabric. “Come on, off, I want to feel you.”
Baekjin sits up briefly, pulls the shirt over his head and lets it fall somewhere beside the bed. When he lowers himself again, Seongje’s hands are already everywhere, running from his shoulders to the cool skin of his chest where no heartbeat answers. Seongje always tries to touch him a lot when they are intimate. Tonight Baekjin lets him, and doesn’t pull away, and watches the way that single permission loosens something in his human’s face.
“Don’t make it weird,” Seongje warns him, catching the look.
“I’m not making it anything.”
Seongje groans and yanks him down by the neck. “Bite me or something, god, stop being sweet, I can’t handle it.”
Baekjin smiles against his jaw, an expression he’s grateful Seongje can’t see. He kisses his way down the line of his throat, lingering over the fading bruise, the small shadow where the cut in Mapo had been, every place someone else touched him without permission. He licks at each one, slow, claiming them back. Seongje shivers under him, arching.
“Tell me again,” Baekjin says against his collarbone, voice low.
“Tell you what.”
“Four years.”
“Oh, fuck off-”
“Seongje.”
Seongje’s hand fists in his hair. “Yes. Four years. Longer, probably. Happy?”
“Very.”
“I hate you.”
“No, you don’t.”
“No,” Seongje agrees, breath hitching as Baekjin’s mouth moves lower, “I really don’t.”
Baekjin drags his lips down Seongje’s chest, pausing to take one of his nipples into his mouth, tongue working slowly while his thumb circles the other. Seongje swears under his breath, hips shifting restlessly under the sheet. The bond keeps looping his pleasure back into Baekjin, who has never quite gotten used to how loud it is, the way Seongje’s body broadcasts to him without any filter at all.
He slides the sheet off him completely, baring him completely. Seongje is already hard, flushed, one leg bending to accommodate Baekjin between his thighs.
“Baekjin,” Seongje breathes, and this time there’s no teasing in it, just want.
Baekjin lowers his mouth to the soft skin of Seongje’s stomach, kissing along the line of hair that disappears below his navel. He takes his time. Seongje makes a high, frustrated sound, fingers tightening in his hair.
“You’re doing this on purpose.”
“Yes.”
“I will kill you-”
“Mm.” Baekjin drags his tongue down the crease of his hip. “Let me.”
Seongje stops fighting. He falls back into the pillows with a shaky exhale, hand sliding from Baekjin’s hair to the sheet, fisting it there instead.
Baekjin takes him into his mouth slowly, and for a moment he just stays there, feeling Seongje’s pulse thudding heavy and fast everywhere. The bond is so bright it’s almost blinding. Seongje makes a wrecked sound above him, head tipping back, and Baekjin begins to move, pulling every small noise out of him he can. He rests one hand flat on Seongje’s stomach, grounding him there. The other finds Seongje’s, tangles their fingers together against the mattress.
Seongje notices. Baekjin feels the realization hit him through the bond, “Baekjin-” his voice cracks. “What are you- don’t do that-”
Baekjin hums around him in answer, and Seongje whines, high and embarrassed, his grip tightening convulsively around Baekjin’s fingers. Good. Baekjin goes back to work.
He keeps at it until Seongje is shaking, until his hips are twitching helplessly against the restraint of Baekjin’s hand on his stomach and his sentences stop making sense. Then he pulls off, because he wants more than this.
“Up,” he says hoarsely, tugging at Seongje’s hip.
Seongje blinks at him, dazed. “What-”
“On your back. Just like this.”
“Already am on my back, you fucker-”
“Higher.” Baekjin grabs one of the pillows and maneuvers it under Seongje’s hips, propping him up. He reaches for the bedside drawer without looking, finds the lube, coats his fingers. Seongje watches him the whole time, lips parted.
“You’re very quiet,” Seongje says.
“I’m concentrating.”
“That’s worse.”
Baekjin huffs something close to a laugh and presses one slick finger against him, working him open slowly. Seongje gasps, then sighs and arches into it, and Baekjin watches his face the whole time, cataloging every reaction. He adds a second finger when Seongje is ready, then a third, stretching him with a patience he does not generally have for anything. The bond loops pleasure between them in a dizzy circle. Baekjin can feel Seongje’s body opening for him almost more clearly than Seongje can himself.
“Baekjin,” Seongje breathes, “Baekjin, come on-”
“Tell me.”
“What?”
“Tell me what you want.”
Seongje laughs, breathless. “You’re going to make me say it?”
“Yes.”
“I want you to fuck me.”
“You can do better than that.”
“Baekjinnie-”
“Go on.”
Seongje groans and throws an arm over his eyes. “I want you inside me and I want you to bite me while you do it and I want you to stop looking at me like you’re in love with me because it’s making me crazy. There, now do something!”
Baekjin leans down and kisses him hard. He strips the rest of the way out of his clothes, slicks himself and lines up. Seongje’s legs come up to wrap around his hips, heels pressing at the backs of his thighs. Baekjin pushes in slowly, inch by inch, watching Seongje’s face. Seongje’s mouth falls open around a broken sound, his head tipping back, hand grabbing blindly for Baekjin’s shoulder.
“Fuck- okay- okay, keep going, please-”
Baekjin keeps going until he’s seated all the way in. He stays there for a beat, forehead pressed to Seongje’s temple, breathing him in. The bond is so loud in his ears he can’t hear anything else. Seongje’s whole body is trembling under him, pliant and hot.
“You feel-” Seongje starts, then stops. “Fuck, you feel so good.”
Baekjin rolls his hips, almost in a experimental way. Seongje moans loudly, hands scrambling at his back. Baekjin does it again, a little harder, watching the way Seongje’s eyes flutter shut.
“Look at me,” Baekjin says.
Seongje drags his eyes open. They’re glassy and wide. Baekjin has been looked at with fear, with obedience, with hate. He cannot remember the last time he has been looked at like this.
He starts moving in earnest. Slow at first, deep pushes that drag sounds out of Seongje he’s never heard before, and then faster when Seongje begs for it with a hand fisting in his hair and a broken please. Seongje’s fingers drag down his back, nails sinking into his skin, and Baekjin loves the sting of it, the proof of being here and more alive than ever.
“Look at me,” Baekjin says again, when Seongje’s eyes try to close. “Don’t look away.”
“Can’t-” Seongje gasps, “can’t, it’s too-”
“Try.”
Seongje opens his eyes again. Tears have gathered at the corners, from pleasure or something worse, Baekjin can’t tell. He leans down and kisses them away, one at a time, which makes Seongje let out a sound so undone Baekjin almost loses his rhythm.
“I love you,” Seongje whispers, and it’s wrecked and stupid and reckless and incredibly honest. Baekjin feels so weak for this human, it's terrifying.
“I know,” he says roughly. “I know. I-”
“Say it back.”
“Seongje-”
“Say it back you coward, or I swear-”
“I love you.”
The bond sings so loud Baekjin nearly passes out. Seongje makes a wet, shocked sound and drags him down into a kiss. Baekjin kisses him back and keeps moving, slower now. His mouth finds Seongje’s throat, that same place, and he mouths at it without biting, waiting.
“Do it,” Seongje breathes against his temple. “Baekjin- please, do it-”
Baekjin sinks his fangs in.
Seongje comes almost immediately, a full-body shudder, a broken cry muffled against Baekjin’s shoulder, spilling between them untouched. The taste of him hits Baekjin all at once, and with it the full weight of the bond, pouring out of Seongje like a confession, four years of holding back finally let loose.
Baekjin drinks, shaking with it, and it only takes three more thrusts before he follows, burying himself deep and groaning around the bite. He lies on top of Seongje for a long moment afterward, fangs carefully retracted, tongue brushing over the bite to close it. Seongje is still trembling, breathing hard, his arms loose around Baekjin’s shoulders.
“Okay,” Seongje says weakly, “okay, yeah, that was-”
“Mm.”
“I might actually need that cigarette now.”
Baekjin presses a kiss to the healing mark at his neck, then to his jaw, then to the corner of his mouth. Seongje turns his head to catch it properly. The bond has gone quiet between them, in the way it does after, settled and warm.
Baekjin carefully pulls out and rolls onto his back. Seongje immediately migrates onto him, throwing a leg over his, pressing his face into the side of Baekjin’s neck.
“Don’t think this means I’m not still mad at you for doing this while I was barely awake,” Seongje mumbles.
“Noted.”
“I’m also still going to be reckless on jobs sometimes.”
“ Noted. ”
“But less.”
Baekjin runs his hand slowly up and down Seongje’s back. “Thank you.”
Seongje yawns, already sliding back toward sleep now that the adrenaline is draining out of him. “Love you,” he mumbles, finally allowed to say it out loud.
“I know,” Baekjin says.
He waits until Seongje’s breathing evens out. Then he stares at the ceiling for a long time, one hand tracing absent shapes on his human’s warm back, and thinks about the folder on his desk. About all the ways a man like Dohwan could try to take this from him.
I will not be a person you recognize, after, he had said.
He’d meant it. He means it even more now.
Baekjin wakes up with Seongje draped across half of his chest and the folder from last night still on his mind.
He lies very still for a minute, partly because moving would wake Seongje and partly because he needs to finish the thought he started at four in the morning. Dohwan. It isn't a coincidence. Someone told Dohwan, specifically, that Na Baekjin had something worth taking now. There are a limited number of people who would know. That's the problem, but it's also the beginning of a plan.
He runs through them in his head. The inner circle of the Union, maybe eight people, only three of whom have had eyes on Seongje consistently enough to read the change between them. None of the three have a reason, as far as he knows, to go to Dohwan. So it isn't direct betrayal. More likely it's observation, someone who noticed something and mentioned it to the wrong person at the wrong bar.
That means his first move is information. Which means Minho.
Minho runs a bar in Itaewon that Baekjin has been quietly funding for twelve years for exactly this kind of occasion. Half his clientele is Union, half is adjacent and a respectable percentage of the adjacent half is vampire. Minho doesn't ask questions, keeps his hands clean and has a great memory. If someone had been talking about Baekjin in the last three weeks in a room Dohwan could reach, Minho will have heard of it.
On his chest, Seongje makes a small, grumpy sound and burrows closer. "You're planning so loud I can feel it through the bond."
"That's not how the bond works."
"It is for us. Stop."
Baekjin closes his eyes. The bond is in fact very quiet at the moment, but he lets him have it.
"We're going to see Minho tonight," he says.
Seongje's eyes cracks open against Baekjin's collarbone. "Both of us?"
"Both of us."
Seongje considers this. "You're bringing me because you want me where you can see me."
"Yes."
"Fine." Seongje closes his eyes again. "But we're getting dinner first. You owe me after last night."
"I owe you?"
"You traumatized me emotionally, then physically. You owe me a proper meal."
"I'll have something delivered."
"Baekjinnie." Seongje finally lifts his head, chin on Baekjin's sternum, hair in his eyes. "I'm not going to let one folder stop me from leaving the fucking house."
Baekjin exhales. "Fine."
"Thank you."
"You're still bringing backup."
"I'm bringing you. "
Baekjin gives up. He watches Seongje roll off him and stretch, joints popping loud enough to make him wince, and thinks, with the kind of certainty he has started accepting about himself, that he would burn a district down for this man without asking permission first. It's not a useful thought. He files it away.
By the time they leave the apartment, the sun is already setting. Seongje has picked a place in Samcheong-dong, a small restaurant he's been wanting to try, which Baekjin agreed to on the grounds that the street is narrow and easy to watch. He made Seongje put on a jacket that is reinforced and made his mate promise, again, not to wander. He told Youngmin to stay within a block with the car.
Seongje has taken all of this with the patience of a man who is plotting something. Baekjin has noted it and filed that away too, for a later conversation. They are walking from the car to the restaurant, Seongje half a step ahead, already lighting a cigarette, when Baekjin feels it.
A scent he hasn't had to process in twenty years coming at him from up the sloped street, and underneath it, a second scent he can’t place. Two vampires, but one of them is-
"What's wrong?" Seongje has stopped a pace ahead. He's turned halfway around, cigarette paused in midair, reading Baekjin's face in that uncanny way he has. The bond flickers between them with a question.
Baekjin doesn't answer. He can't. Because two people have just turned the corner, coming down toward them, and one of them is Humin.
He looks the same. Of course he does, the same way Baekjin does too. Twenty years o He's dressed more cheerfully than Baekjin remembers, brighter colors. His hand is linked with the hand of the man beside him.
Baekjin has never seen him before, but he knows that man beside him is Humins bloodmate. He knows it is because the bond between them is visible even from here, the way they move in the same rhythm without trying, the way Humin's shoulder tilts slightly toward him at every step. But what he knows, most of all, the thing that locks his throat shut before Humin has even seen him, is that there is no pulse coming off him. No warmth. He's a vampire. What?
Humin looks up and sees him. For one long moment, nothing happens. Humin's expression doesn't break, but his eyes do, briefly. Recognition, then surprise. The man next to him follows his gaze, notices the shift in him, looks ahead, and his face does something more complicated. He knows who Baekjin is. He has clearly been told.
Baekjin becomes aware that Seongje has stepped closer to his side. The bond between them is pulled tight and alert. Seongje hasn't said anything and he is very rarely quiet.
"Baekjin," Humin says, stopping a careful distance away. His voice is the same, too. "It's been a while."
"Humin." It is the first time he has said the name out loud in a long time.
"This is Hyuntak," Humin says, inclining his head toward the man beside him. "Tak, this is Baekjin."
"I figured," Hyuntak says. His voice is warm and careful. He offers a small nod. "Hello."
Baekjin does not answer that. He does not trust what would come out. Instead he says, clipped, "He's turned."
Humin's jaw tenses just slightly. "Yes."
“Did you-” Humin nods as a response before Baekjin can even finish his question.
"When?"
"Fifteen years ago."
"Fifteen years."
"Baekjin."
"Fifteen years ago you turned him," Baekjin repeats, carefully, "You. Turned him."
"Yes."
"Because-"
"Baekjin, don't." Humin's voice is still calm, but something in it is pleading. "Please. We were just walking to dinner. Let's not do this here."
"You turned him," Baekjin says again, because his mind will not move past it.
Beside him, Seongje has gone very still. Baekjin can feel him through the bond, the dozen questions forming. Hyuntak shifts closer to Humin in a very protective gesture.
"It was my choice," he says. "Fully. I want you to know that."
"I'm sure it was."
"Baekjin," Humin warns, quieter.
"I'm sure he chose beautifully," Baekjin goes on, he can hear his own voice getting thinner and doesn't stop it. "I'm sure there was a very meaningful conversation. I'm sure you laid out every reason and every consequence and he agreed to everything-" He cuts himself off. "Fifteen years."
"Yes."
"You were not going to do this." Baekjin says it flat, almost conversationally, as if they are discussing a business arrangement that has gone bad. "You told me, specifically, you would never do this. You told me I had ruined you by doing this. Those were the words you used."
"I remember what I said."
"And now you are holding hands with a man you turned."
"Baekjin-"
"I let you go," Baekjin says. His voice is shaking, which he despises. "I let you walk out of that apartment, Humin. I let you tell me you could still love me but not live like me, and I let you go, because I believed you. I believed that was who you were. Twenty years. You understand that I have spent twenty years believing that about myself. About us. About what I did to you."
Humin has gone very still. So has Hyuntak.
"So I would like to understand," Baekjin continues, "what exactly changed. Because I'm struggling."
"Baekjin, I-" Humin closes his eyes for a second. When he opens them, they are very tired. "It wasn't the same. The circumstances were not the same."
"You were dying, " Baekjin says, and his voice cracks, actually cracks, which horrifies him. "You were on the ground in a pool of your own blood and I kept you. And then for a hundred years you punished me for it. You did not speak to me for twenty years, Humin, and in that twenty years you did the exact same thing."
"It’s not the same and you know it, Baekjin!"
"No," Baekjin agrees, "I guess it isn't."
There is a long moment of nothing. Seongje has not moved or spoken, but his hand has drifted up and is resting, very lightly, against the small of Baekjin's back. Baekjin hadn't noticed.
Humin sees it. His eyes flick over Seongje, then back to Baekjin, with a new layer of understanding settling in.
"You have someone," Humin says, quieter now.
"Yes."
"Is he your-"
"Yes."
Humin exhales. Something in him softens in a way that only makes it worse, "I'm glad."
"Don't."
"I am. I'm genuinely glad."
"I said don't."
"Baekjin," Humin says, and he sounds so tired, "I'm not going to fight you in the street. I'm sorry we crossed paths like this. I wish I could have told you-"
"What, send a fucking postcard?"
"I thought about it."
"I'm sure you did."
Hyuntak, who has been watching this with patient alertness, finally speaks again. "We're going to keep walking," he says gently. "I think this is something for a different night, if you want it. I don't expect you to want it."
Baekjin looks at him for the first time properly. Hyuntak holds his gaze. There isn't apology in his eyes exactly, but he’s not mean, and there is no fear or pity. It is the most unbearable expression on a man that Baekjin deeply wants to hate.
"Another night," Hyuntak says again. "If you want."
"I don't."
"Okay."
Humin reaches out, very briefly, like he is going to touch Baekjin's arm, and then thinks better of it and lets his hand drop. "Take care of yourself," Humin says. "And him."
He gives Seongje the smallest nod, respectful, and then they are walking again, past Baekjin and Seongje, down toward the main road. Baekjin does not turn to watch them go. He is still not breathing, which is of course not technically a problem for him, but it is a thing he notices.
"Baekjin," Seongje says quietly.
Baekjin turns without answering and walks back toward the car.
"Baekjin-"
"We're going home."
"What about dinner-"
"We're going home, Seongje."
He doesn't look back to see if Seongje is following. He knows he is. He gets into the car and tells Youngmin where to go, stares out the window the entire way back and does not say a single word.