“Fatherless, fatherless!” the mean bully taunted him. It was the seventh time that week. In TV shows, they often showed the bully being someone fat and pudgy, who was rich, spoiled and pretty much royalty compared to the main protagonist that they bullied. However, Sunggyu begged to differ. His reality told him that clichés were just clichés, and that seeing was believing.

The bully had a rather twiggy finger that was pointed at him. Sunggyu was sure that if the other boy jabbed him in the chest, he would surely die from how pointy and sharp the other boy was. The boy before him was nothing short of skin and bones—he was suffering from some form of malnutrition, for the boy was much smaller than Sunggyu was.

Sunggyu was also sure, based on the scuffed shoes that the bully wore, and the rather big hand-me-downs that he wore, that the bully’s socioeconomic situation was not better than his by much, if not worse. Those, of course, were all observations of a boy who was shy of six-years-old.

Sunggyu opted to look bored, although the words did pierce him. He used to give reactions, but he read in a book that if you pretended to be unaffected, then bullies would leave you alone. Sunggyu hoped that was true because he was itching to tell the boy to leave him alone. Sometimes, much to his mortification, he would cry too because the other boy really was too much.

What teachers used to teach them in kindergarten about sticks and stones breaking bones and words never hurting was wrong. Words hurt the most and they left no evidence. These bullies at his school were smart, he’d give them that. He’d never been hit because it was easy to have evidence for that.

So, Sunggyu just dealt with the taunts as is, pretending it didn’t affect him. He didn’t want to tell his mother—there was no point in worrying her and there was also no evidence.

“Are you done?” Sunggyu coolly asked, ignoring the pounding pain in his chest, figuratively. He didn’t want to say anything back to hurt the other boy. His mother told him that words were powerful and that they hurt more than fists. At least she had sense compared to his teachers.

The bully crossed his arms across his chest, his elbows jutting out, looking painfully sharp. “You’re no fun. Is this what happens when you’re fatherless?”

Sunggyu shrugged, pretending to be nonchalant and ignoring the stinging of tears in his eyes. “I guess.”

The bully promptly left him alone after that, grumbling that he was no fun. He never bothered him again, either, after not getting a reaction for at least seven times.

What was different, however, was that in the weeks following until he moved away once more, no one in his class batted an eyelash in his direction unless there was groupwork in class that required them to talk to him. In the end, it hurt all the same.

The bully’s name, Sunggyu mused, was something he no longer remembered. However, it was of no consequence. He often met a boy or girl who was much too similar like that faded figure in his memories at each school he transferred to, who wanted to make his life living hell.

People were cruel. Nothing has really changed, if Sunggyu had to be honest.

It was after the fifth school that Sunggyu vowed that people were cruel and he wanted no part in being part of their cruel games.

--

Sunggyu Kim grew up with a relatively normal childhood, with the bullying and all, although it was mainly since he didn't have a father figure in his life which made society and his classmates shun him. But even then, he found that his mother's continuous, loving presence in his life made up for it and thus, he didn't find that his life lacked much.

That is, until the memories began to haunt him.

He remembered the first time he saw a part of his past, it was of when his lover was hanged.

"What's wrong Sunggyu?" his mother's kind voice asked him when he had woken up with a start for the first time ever. Her eyes shined with concern in the darkness of the room. He never had nightmares and he often slept like a baby. That was, of course, before he was burdened with memories of his previous life.

When they were just above the poverty line, she couldn't afford an apartment with more than one room, so they slept together on the same, rickety bed. They moved very often too, because the apartment buildings she often rented were those which were on the verge of demolition and rented out for very low prices.

That was how she was privy to the fact that he often had nightmares since the night they first began to haunt him. It wasn't until he was ten that they moved out of the small apartments to a bigger one he lived in when he turned ten. Then they moved again... and he met him.

Young Sunggyu, at the age of nine, when the first ever memory appeared of his previous life, had just shuddered in fright. The image was still fresh in his mind. He saw the limp body hanging from the hangman's noose, swaying gently with the breeze. He didn't know how to explain it to his mother and why he felt so horrible. He didn't know who it was at the time, hanging and swaying with the breeze, but it made him angry. And it made him feel hollow inside, like he was experiencing a loss so great that not even the most pained reaction he could muster would compare to how he really felt.

At nine years old, those feelings were foreign to him. He'd only experienced love from his mother and nothing but happiness with rare moments of sadness caused by his bullies, even though they had so little.

"Nothing," he remembered saying in response to his mother that one time. And that was the same response he gave her every other time he woke up from his nightmares. It continued until they moved out of the small apartment-hopping that they did and got separate rooms in the bigger apartment they could afford. She stopped being there right beside him when he had his nightmares.

He continued getting nightmares... or memories, now that he knew.

But she didn't really know the extent of his nightmares and memories because he learned to be more subtle and quiet whenever he woke up with a start. However, something told Sunggyu that she was at least partially aware that he still had nightmares. She sometimes checked on him in the middle of the night when she woke up to get a glass of water.

At first, his memories came back in the form of dreams that seemed too vivid to be a figment of his imagination yet too distant to be considered real. He had thought he had a vivid imagination that ran too wild. When he was a child, he often pretended to be a fire-wielding user whenever his mother wasn't too tired from work to play with him. Fire with its destructive tendencies yet its ability to keep people warm made him entranced--it was able to be so destructive yet so healing at the same time.

He supposed that now that he looked back on it, perhaps he had always known that he wasn't simply human. He was now aware of it; when he had first existed since many, many centuries ago he was a vampire.

He'd known since he was a child that he wasn't quite the same as others, unconsciously. He was far too mature for his age and he didn’t like doing the senseless things that others liked to do (not that he was really invited to play with them, anyway) such as tag.

So as these vivid, dream-like memories began to surface and reoccur repeatedly, Sunggyu went straight to the library to read. As a child of a single mother, he didn't like bothering and worrying his mother with unnecessary concerns of his own, since she had many other things to worry about. He grew up fast, learning to defend himself and his mother f