“Ignorance is bliss.”

“Excuse me?”

“Ignorance,” Sehun repeats, “is bliss.”

Astonished, Nana replies, “You’re telling me I’m stupid.”

“Not quite,” Sehun backtracks, thrown off by her harsh gaze. He’s never seen her with such a hard look before. He imagines this is the face she would have if someone told her that her literary works were shallow and weak. “I’m saying that you can’t generalize people. Not everyone is evanescent, as you call it.”

“Anyone alive is susceptible to death.”

“Not me,” Sehun murmurs, not quite low enough to escape her keen ears. She leans back, her arms crossed, her fascination with Greek food, gone.

“I forgot. You’re a nightmare.”

Something in the way she says it disappoints Sehun. She regards him the way he wants to be regarded, the way he should be regarded; and yet perhaps his wish has changed, for her observation of the truth no longer match his unacceptable craving for what is considered normal.

“Even nightmares have an end,” Sehun says, but it falls flat like a deflated balloon. There is no weight to his words, and by the way she looks at him, she doesn’t believe him, either. He feels the need to explain; a foreign need, but like any unusual beckoning, he listens.

“Two years ago, I tried to kill myself,” he confesses. A voice in his head shouts – No! No! – but the story has pressed against the roof of his mouth for two years, and he supposes that the time to tell the tale is here at last. “I was tired. Have you ever felt that way? Worn, and lost. The only way to escape your mistakes and faults was to leave the life that gave them to you. You had to kill the ugly part of you, but in doing so, you had to become a monster. A nightmare.”

“Sehun … “

“Let me tell you this. You’ve always been curious. I know you’re just faking empathy.”

“I’m not faking anything,” Nana forcibly responds. “I know how that feels. Out of seven-billion people in the world, I’m sure you aren’t the only one who has tried to kill himself.”

“Of course not,” Sehun nods. “But my story is the one you’re interested in. Isn’t that why you wrote me that poem?”

So you say that life is constant in its dreariness?

At least it’s constant.

“Okay,” she sighs. “I’m sorry. Go on.”

If he had a heart, it would be pounding right now. Instead, his pulse is as dead as his organs. “If you do enough of something without any real purpose, you start searching for an end. What used to give you pleasure ceases to satisfy you. You do things half-heartedly. There’s no such thing as happiness, or contentment. You’re consumed by darkness, because you believe that only the darkness will bring you light.” Sehun looks at his hands. They’re as pale as the whites of Nana’s eyes. “It doesn’t make sense, does it?”

A rhetorical question, Nana hopes. She doesn’t answer.

“I tried to commit suicide, but the ugly part of me was stronger than the monster I had yet to become. I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t something I could control. To save myself, I harmed someone else.” Sehun chokes. Whoever that man was, he had the sweetest blood Sehun had ever tasted. “I don’t know what happened to him.”

“And you?” Nana urges. “What did you do?”

“I prepared myself. Four months from now is the anniversary of when I first attempted suicide.” Sehun remembers how the sun felt that day, how it was as if twenty people were poking needles into him and peeling his flesh off as if it were cardboard. “I’ll try again, and I will succeed.”

Nana is aghast with his story. She’s never known someone to actively and consciously prepare for his own death and take two years to do it. He speaks of it like a person would about a prospective business plan, or a young girl talks about her birthday arrangements. For him, death is more than inevitable. It’s the solution.

“So those pills that you take. Is that just preparation, too?” Is it to keep him alive until the proper time?

“Yes,” Sehun admits. “Indirectly.”

“But why? Why choose death?”

Sehun thinks of the infinity that stretches before him like a plateau. It’s as endless as an Arizona highway, as flat as the horizon that seems to loop seamlessly around his vision. The most beautiful view he can imagine is seeing a nick in that perfection.

“Because I’ve run out of things to live for.”

Himchan ensnares his hands through Chaeri’s undone bun, trying to remember how they arrived at his apartment. He doesn’t know why they are here. All he can recall is drinking with her at the restaurant. As the alcohol slowly permeated through their once alert consciousness, her tongue became loose, and soon she was telling him how to play the game.

“You’re right,” she had said. “You drink until you forget which hand to tap with. The person who is most sober gets their wish granted.”

“And what’s the wish?” Himchan asked.

“Your wildest fantasy.”

And now they’re here, Chaeri pinned to the wall, a picture frame that previously hung by her head now trampled to the ground. In spite of his confusion, he continues to kiss her. He blames it on inebriation. In most cases, he wouldn’t willingly engage her in such a physical manner.

Or would he?

She seems to enjoy it. He guesses she’s wanted this for some time, since she’s been an inexorable flirt the moment he met her. That must be why she clutches the collar of his shirt with such waning vitality, as if, now that her wish is finally happening, she no longer wants a pretense of resistance.

“Himchan,” she groans. “Hey. Slow down. Just because I’m letting you kiss me doesn’t mean you can do what you want.”

“Of course not,” he replies. “I’m a gentleman to the end.” He lifts her up and carries her to his room, where he gently rests her on his bed before leaning in and pressing his entirety against hers. “I’m only doing what you tell me.”

Her eyelids flutter closed. She laughs, and Himchan feels it rattle against her rib cage. “I see why the girls flock to you.”

He quiets her with a kiss, his hand cradling her jaw, fitting perfectly. His hand brushes her collar, pulling it - he stops. He stares at her bare neck. He thinks of the dinner he ordered, how he hadn’t eaten at all. He considers her perfect skin and, thinking only of his hunger, plunges his fangs into her neck.

She swears at him. Before he can drink more, she pushes him off of her. He tumbles back like a roll of paper, crumpled and dirty. When his clouded brain registers the blood on her neck, Himchan wipes his mouth regretfully.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to – “

“If you’re going to feed on me, at least tell me!” She shouts. “No one’s bit me in years. Gosh … I forgot how much it hurts.”

“Let me get you a towel,” Himchan says and rushes toward the bathroom. He returns with a black towel and uses it to apply pressure to the wound. He cleans her up, leaving behind only the stains on her clothes and two punctures in her neck. “I’m sorry,” he apologizes again. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not a bad thing,” she sighs. “It’s part of you. If you suppress it, it will only hurt more. You just need to learn self-control, that’s all.”

Himchan feels like a scumbag. More than feeling like one, he is certain that in the span of time it took to plunge his regrets into her, he became the epitome of a putrid, vile, noxious disease. His hands are shaking. What ached to roam the galaxies of her skin had suddenly turned into murderous tools. If this is what it feels like to be a Daver, he doesn’t want any part of it.

“I can’t do this anymore,” he admits. “Chaeri, I can’t. I understand the slang, and I sort of get how this all works. But I can’t live like this. I can’t restrain myself. I don’t know how.”

“’Practice makes perfect’,” she quotes as she folds the towel. “How do you think I lived? As the years pass, you grow tired of drinking blood. With every gulp, you feel like you’re spoiling yourself with an indelible stain. You learn to deal with it.”

“I don’t want to deal with it!” Himchan massages his temples. Closing his eyes, he tries to call upon the time when living was a much simpler procedure. “I can’t live like a Daver. I want to be human.” The longing pulses in his chest, growing with each beat that drums against his heaving chest. “How … how do I do that?”

Chaeri watches him quietly. She doesn’t want to give him false hope by proposing an idea of which she’s only heard. She’s never met a Daver that accomplished what the men in the stories have. Perhaps the Binders would know for certain. The Binders always know.

“We can find out. But in the meantime, take this.” Chaeri reaches into her purse and pulls out a small, plastic container. Upon hearing the pills clack against each other, Himchan raises his head. “Take one,” she offers. Gingerly, he accepts the token of generosity. The red, oblong pill easily fits between his thumb and forefinger.

“What is it?”

“Blood tablets. You’ll need them if you want to keep your energy up without sacrificing your humanity. Once any pure or half blood starts to feed, it gets more difficult for the hunger to subside.”

“Does it have side-effects?”

Chaeri’s thin smile melts away Himchan’s speculations. “It freaking hurts.”

The Tender guesses that Sehun will never come to pick up his pills, or if he does, that it will be a long day from today. Even if the Tender is free to deliver the refill, he knows that Sehun will find an excuse to reject it. It seems that, ever since Nana’s entry into his life, Sehun has found a new addiction.

Could love be a possibility? And in addition, a healing that will hurt before it gets better?

The Tender hopes that Nana can mend the scars on Sehun’s heart. And if he is unwilling to be mended, that he is at least open to having Nana accept the wounds. What greater friendship is there than the one who embraces another, perfections and flaws?

Although he supposes he is shirking his responsibility if he prays that Nana and only Nana will heal everything. It isn’t as if it is her job. It isn’t as if she afflicted him tragically. If anything, it’s the Tender’s responsibility – not just to heal, but also to apologize.

But the past can never be changed, and Sehun will never forget that it was the Tender who blunted his first attempt at suicide. After all, it was the Tender who had pulled Sehun out of the sun and into the dark. He was the one who had saved him – the Niver who did not want to be saved.