Seunghyun had lived many thousands of years, seen trillions of lives - Ethereal, human, animal, otherwise - perish and leave behind oil, dust and a twilight memory lost to the evening dew and erased come the searing prescence of morning. He'd impartially watched others walk the earth beside him, been present when they were killed and stood over them as they wasted away to nothing. Some had left impacts on his heart, some had brought nothing but relife and others just happened to have reached the terminus of their existence around his being. 

Death had never been a distant concept to Seunghyun, having embraced it more than once in the grief of a lost friend or even returning one last time to see his mother off to the night sky, imvisible to him for most of his hours. She'd been often a moral compass and losing her to the navy black sky had been a hard loss, even though the irony of her ever-present directional guidance was not lost on him. His mother, the North Star, had been the one he'd followed for many millenia, the one to teach him and guide him through the changes his body made and the powers he attained. His siblings had even been there when she'd told him that the runes decorating his skin was actually White Mage Sun and Moon blessings. HIs siblings had been silently furious at the favouritism showered on him, one demanding to know what they did. She had explained the meaning of the long, flowing scriptures on his limbs as protection, the ones on his chest and back as blessings of power and strength. And then there were those few simple words across his collarbones and his neck, ones that had even his mother touching him more reverently, dusky fingertips tracing them carefully. 

"His name . . . " She breathed, electrum eyes sparking like lightning. "Sun, fire, torch . . . "

He had taken her other hand then, over the dainty appendages "What do they mean, Mother?"

"They're abilities." She met his gaze, his hair and eyes back even as he stood in the blank of day, the powers of Heaven being manufactured around him. "Life given by Sun, the cleanse of fire and the singular leadership of a contained blaze - a torch. They are gifts. Gifts even I do not have."

He blinked at her, looking up to the Sun and passing a prayer of a thought up to his grandparent. What of me? The unclean spawn? Why so much favour? What did I do to curry such affection?

"Why me?" He asked his mother, too.

She offered a smile. "I cannot know. Something in you, I suppose. Some magnificent beast left asleep in your heart they know - perhaps even created - that I cannot see."

"Why him? What has he done? He is nothing like us, even when he could be. Abandon his darkness and ascend to his proper place."

HIs mother's gaze silenced his other siblings. "You speak like a jealous god, weakly pawing at what you don't understand, settling that you do not like it and that it must be wrong. There is nothing created that hasn't a reason, nothing come to be that serves no purpose, even if it is a hard one. To speak as if you understand this world is nothing more than stupidity - bravado and listless, wasteful thought. You are no gods, only beings. You have no more wisdom than anything else, could never comprehend the universe that bore you any more than you can the being that did. You do not fully understand me - one who has hidden nothing from you, but you never seek to ask - and yet you bear him judgement."

They had backed down then, but her words hadn't made friends of them either. She took him then, brought him to a shade of the Grotto, and cupped his tanned hands with affection. "It is magic, Seunghyun. Power of light, lightning, ravaging energy in flame. I know my parents' language, otherwise I would be as dark as you, lost in their meaning and abandoned to ignorance. I cannot tell you what they will do, only that should you be entrusted with such vibrant strength, there is a future before you worth arriving at."

Thousands upon thousand of calmly restless years of wandering and watching, knowing and learning and understanding to his best the working ways of magic, life and existence. He had answers, but didn't know their questions and was in search of curiosity rather than its sating. It took until they washed up the shores of Incheon for the ascention to Nirvana to begin and even then, he'd been unaware that he had begun to fly.

He had not payed attention to the ache in his upper body when he first slid his fangs into the tender flesh of Daesung's nape, feeling clean salt dance into his senses. He did not understand, nor care to, when he'd repeated the process of marking his family - coven, whathaveyou - and tying himself to them. He had not known that his Torch then, had come to light. The small, insubstantial water creature had held a match to tinder, unaware that the blackness hid towering machinery. The Siren had no idea that his smile had burned through the shadow and the miniscule flicker building to flame, then fire, then blaze. He had no way of knowing he was warming such a mechanism to life when the person it was inside had no idea the beast inside had even stirred.

No, such revelation came at the hands of torturers. It came to him as he stared at the ashen embers of the structure that had been his home, the haven his coven had trusted him to protect, what should have been safe. It felt like darkness stirring in him, ravaging hatred and fury roiling together in a thick cocktail of molten animosity. Only the thick black of his many layers of clothing hid the burning runes, but their discomfort wa drowned in the waves of multipled agony bellowing through his mind's eye.

Taeyang's fierce howling of despair, rings of metal forced through skin and muscle and strung to the ceiling, the rings and their captured flesh bearing a full man's weight and the instant sense of tearing and ripping and serrating that didn't leave. Jiyong's claustrophobic restless terror gripped his mind as he tried to think, the weight of four walls and no air to breathe leaving him lightheaded and faint even on the boardwalks of the Yellow Sea. Seungri's dry listless furor, trapped in his own body even as his soul seethed and wretched, venomous to the point of poisonous, making his fangs ache to avenge the wrongs against his suffocating dryad.

But it was Daesung which culled the others, crippling him the most. There was chill that spread through his limbs, time seemig to speed around him and space became nearly too vast to traverse. HIs body felt like it was creaking iron - unloved and uncared for as it lay abandoned. Uncomfortable expansion became a sifling strangle, the right side of his body stiffening and losing all contact, other than a rippling ache that only got worse the more of his body left feeling numb. But worst of all, above even the encroaching frightening blue-grey nothingness, was the beating of Daesung's heart slowing hour by hour, its resonance fading out as the grey around his vision increased and his tangible relationship to fear became a subjugated acceptance of hopelessness.

For Seunghyun, being able to feel that crippling weight of agony - the simple wait for death - hurt him more than anything else. Taeyang's physical pain, Jiyong's mental torture and Seungri's decent to firewood didnt' compare to knowing that somewhere along the lines - in the time Seunghyun had wasted trying to find and understand the Hunters - Daesung had shifted from trying to find ways to delay the freezing of the cold to wondering why it was taking so long for the cold to fade, but the black in his eyes to remain.Daesung's despondancy - how he'd given up - had been unbearable and spurred him to fight out the burden of his connection to his coven and push himself as hard as it took to get them back, to have them safely in his arms again. 

When he'd entered the Tower of Saviours - the home of the Hunter clan responsible - he could taste the victory the Hunters felt, could sense the interest and curiosity warped into the minds of the human audience. 

There was dull roaring in the back of his mind, warmth settled at the base of his spine, coiled and ready like a hunting cat. 

The way the clan leader spoke had his body vibrating, but he did not let it show. They should not be allowed to see him tremble, be it in agony or fury. His calm would bely his rage, and his words would become legend so far as he could make them. He could feel his coven, not so far away now, but their misery no less poignant for the lack of distance. 

What of me? The unclean soawn? Why so much favour? What did I do to curry such affection?

He began to shed clothes, the words falling from his mouth distant, like they were spoken by someone else. The heat trailed up his spine, first an explorative tendril, then an expansion across the broad panes of his back. 

What is it you see that I cannot? What do you know that you will not share? 

The sweet crack of Daesung's beaten-down voice splintered his heart into millions of pieces, left all that there was of him scattered on the floor, the tender affection he had nursed for the young ones under his care spilling blood helplessly across the cracked stone of his heart into the waifish flesh beneath. Its echo had left he crowd breathless, their sympathy now turn two ways. Heat spread through his limbs, around his chest, shooting into his hair and manifesting in his eyes. 

Daesung - always, always their precious Daesung - called out to him, the only one to recognize the sunlit burn.

"Save me, hyung."

Fire jumped from blaze to inferno and the newest roar issued silenced the torment of his coven in his mind. 

The world trembled around him, the earth trembling and cracking as it tried to escape him. Humans scattered, always having an instinct for disaster unlike any other species. The Hunters came to arms, but they were nothing to him. No bullet would rend his flesh, no fire could sear him. But they were not so lucky.

Lightning and power and savagery consumed his existence and the white-hot incandescence that shot from him was not enough to make them understand the sheer amount of suffering they had caused, to make them repent and beg for the forgiveness they would neither deserve nor recieve. He wanted to unleash it all, the whole pillar of his ire, into the room and stand above them all, a terrible lord of violence against the backdrop of hellfire the likes of which would cow Taeyang. He wanted to make them understand the force of what they were fighting, to know who they had chosen to attack, to be consumed by the gravity of their decisions and the heat of the Hell that awaited them. 

What kind of being am I to be worthy of this? What love do I have that you feel? What purpose does this serve, giving something too precious to nothing?

As much as his temptest shrieked in righteous and heinous contempt, there were more important things than people deserving so much of his loathing. They would serve their purpose and fall to dusk, as all things, and he would still be there to see them evaporate from all caring recollection. They would burn themselves out, and he could revel in their demise then, safe, at peace. 

Taeyang was easy to heal, the fire in his hands so easily changed from ending life to replenishing it. He wiped the fear from Jiyong's mind, gifting him essence to defend and cloak himself with. Seungri, like Taeyang, had looked to biting retort and dying without passing the satisfaction of fear onto his captors. He, too, was simple to fix. Light, water, nutrients, magic. But Daesung . . . 

Oh, Daesung.

What love have you given me? What such a divine pleasure as love, such a hellish punishment as love? What have I done to deserve such a thing?

The white tank tops Daesung liked to wear crunched under his hands as he knelt before the Siren, guilt and regret filling him. At his gentle touch to his chest, Daesung flinched, face screwing up painfully and lips cracked from the forced movement. His unmoving eyes bulged out slightly, improperly. His long lashes were jutted out slightly, dainty tears locked in them like the finest of diamonds laid with the care and perfection only produced by nature. Should the bronze of Daesung's skin not have been replaced with unflinching grey, he might have taken a moment to admire it. Should he not feel the slush of Daesung's shoulder and the solid block of his neck . . . He flooded what little was liquid left of the Siren's chest cavity with light, with Fire, and grit his teeth when it barely flinched at his assault. HIs brows furrowed under grief and effort, pouring more and more of his sunlit energy into the second youngest.

Seungri crawled over, peering down at his best friend with a guarded expression. Taeyang paced over too, claws clacking softly on the linoleum. Jiyong's talons clenched around the edge of the stage, his massive head looming over them and violet eyes watching searchingly.

Seunghyun closed his eyes, forehead pressed to the Siren's and put more effort into his work, spreading his fire as far as he could. He blinked his eyes open once more when he felt the drop of liquid strike his skin. Brown eyelashes fluttered and Daesung's navy eyes peered out at him, the once-ice-crystals taking their leave and sliding down Daesung's cheeks. His blue lips were soft and pink once more, the tears in them finishing sealing. 

He coudln't help the tears that sprung to his own eyes, the sheer relief of seeing Daesung's wane smile dousing the flame keeping him level. He pulled the Siren into his arms, onto his lap, and just held him, so, so thankful that he was alive, safe, back. 

Jiyong behind them returned to his huamnoid shape and, with the other two, crowded close, offering their own restored warmth and tenderness. 

Daesung hugged him back, heart, soul and body intact and strong once more. He pressed his face into the vampire's shoulder and nuzzled him there, a heartwrenching sob tearing from him. 

For long minutes, in the heart of a distaster and with distant sirens on police cars wailing, all they did was hold on, each more thankful than the last that they were alive, together.