From then on, Chanyeol would pay visits to Kyungsoo on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; which would be the days whereby Kyungsoo would be left home alone.

Kyungsoo would study by himself in the morning before taking a break in the afternoon, and then continuing to study for a few more hours until his parents and younger sister returned in the evening.

Chanyeol would appear in the morning and leave just then in the evening. Chanyeol would never let Kyungsoo follow him back in the evening, to make sure that his hideout in the attic would remain hidden and unknown.

Chanyeol hung around Kyungsoo during this studying time, whether it be in the mansion’s library or in Kyungsoo’s room.

Chanyeol observed Kyungsoo going about his day and Kyungsoo was more than happy enough to let Chanyeol learn and watch.

Despite supposedly being the more mysterious being, Chanyeol did have a lot of questions for Kyungsoo himself.

Kyungsoo was sitting behind his desk in his room with a workbook, writing away with a pen. The lights in his room were during the day because the curtains were shut.

For Chanyeol’s convenience, Kyungsoo had drawn the curtains at the window shut so the sunlight wouldn’t come through.

Kyungsoo was slightly surprised to know that vampires didn’t vaporize or immediately combusted into ashes when exposed to sunlight, unlike as they were portrayed in folklore. Kyungsoo did also learn that vampires were weakened by sunlight and that prolonged exposure to it could actually kill them.

Kyungsoo was still more than welcome to accommodate the needs of his new friend.

“Why don’t you go to school?” Chanyeol asked one morning, during the first few times since Chanyeol begun paying visits to Kyungsoo. Chanyeol was sitting on the window sill with one leg raised onto the sill.

“I’m taking a year off from school before I go back to complete my final year in high school,” Kyungsoo answered, looking up from his book, “That’s why I study the subjects by myself at home so I won’t be too far left behind when I start school again next year.”

“Hmm…” Chanyeol hummed, “-but don’t your siblings go to school as normal? Why don’t you?”

“Oh, that,” Kyungsoo pondered, setting his pen down on the desk and looking up towards Chanyeol at the windowsill, “You see, my family and I aren’t originally from around here. When we moved here, my parents decided that I should take a year off to give me time to adjust to the move before I start school again.”

“Is it because you’re sick, unlike your siblings?” Chanyeol bluntly asked.

“I guess so,” Kyungsoo shrugged.

“I do not know how things work for humans but don’t you visit some doctor or medicine man or some healer if you’re sick so they can help you get better?” Chanyeol pondered, “Then why do you just stay home all day?”

Kyungsoo laughed, cupping his mouth with a palm, “-we just see a doctor now, Chanyeol. No more medicine man or healers.”

“Oh, I see,” Chanyeol nodded, “I guess the job market is a tough competition now.”

“What about you, Chanyeol? Did you go to some sort of school before too? You’ve lived a long time; surely you must have learned something or acquired some skill, have you?” Kyungsoo asked eagerly.

Chanyeol shook his head, explaining, “Even if I did, I would have forgotten everything that I had learned by now. We vampires have bad memories.”

“Why is that?” Kyungsoo asked.

“I’m not sure,” Chanyeol pondered, staring blankly into space, “-it’s just probably the way we are, or that we live too long and move around too much. It gets hard when you’ve lived through too many years and at too many places, where nothing is the same and there’s nothing that gives you a sense of stability and normalcy.”

“So, will you forget about me years from now?” Kyungsoo questioned Chanyeol.

“From the looks of it, maybe,” Chanyeol answered, lifting a hand up to his face, staring at the never-aging state his body was permanently frozen with.

Despite the rather morbid but truthful answer, Kyungsoo was given with, he still smiled, “I guess we’ll have to make whatever time we have to count, shall we?”

On another day, Kyungsoo decided to study and spend the day in the drawing room. Chanyeol tagged along also, as their routine had been for over a week or so.

While Kyungsoo was studying on a couch through online classes on his laptop, Chanyeol squatted on the floor, intrigued at the rectangular box on the wall with moving pictures and sounds.

Kyungsoo had explained to Chanyeol what televisions, computers, tablets, and phones were. Although, Chanyeol still had not gotten used to the technology yet and was very easily impressed by how much content there were available on these “boxes”.

While Kyungsoo studied, he had put on an older popular vampire film for Chanyeol to watch.

In the film that Chanyeol was watching, the vampire owned a large castle and even had a title of nobility. The said film vampire had a deformed figure, lusted after a human’s blood, was promiscuous and could also shapeshift into bats.

It was from there that Chanyeol understood how the misconceptions of vampires came about and spread as a false belief among the humans.

Chanyeol snorted, still squatting on the floor in front of the television when the movie ended and the credits began rolling, “That’s such an inaccurate depiction and portrayal of vampires. First of all, we aren’t rich. It’s almost impossible for vampires to legally own property, lest to say a huge amount of it to warrant a title of nobility. We look the same as humans. We only drink blood to sustain life and not for pleasure. We’re loyal to a partner if we have one and we certainly don’t turn into bats at will. The only thing they got right was the part where humans are afraid of us and often try to kill us. Even in a work of fiction, it seems that the vampire couldn’t have a happy ending either. I’ll give it to that.”

Kyungsoo chuckled hearing Chanyeol’s rant. “Yeah, you really don’t look like or seem like the vampires in the movies.”

Chanyeol whipped his head back to look at Kyungsoo behind him sitting on the couch, “If they still portray vampires as such scary and dangerous beings, then why aren’t you afraid of me?”

“Well, you don’t seem like other vampires- not that I’ve known or met vampires before,” Kyungsoo explained, “-you just seem different to me. It’s just a feeling that I have.”

“Whatever floats your boat,” Chanyeol accepted.

Kyungsoo closed the lid on his laptop with an audible click sound, before scooting up further down the couch and closer to Chanyeol squatting on the floor.

“Sooo..,” Kyungsoo dragged on the syllable, his tone of voice clearly hinting that he was curious but also hesitant to ask a question.

“What is it?” Chanyeol acknowledged.

Kyungsoo moved from the couch to the floor, joining Chanyeol there. Kyungsoo began asking, “I always wanted to know this but do you have fangs? Like the ones in the vampire movies? How do you drink blood?”  Kyungsoo then began backpedaling, “I’m sorry if I’m intruding too much with that question. You don’t have to answer me at all if you don’t’ want to.”

“I’m good,” Chanyeol assured, before pulling up the corner of his lip to expose his teeth.

“Woah! So vampires have the same teeth structure like humans but it’s just that your canine teeth are sharper and more pronounced,” Kyungsoo noted, very interested and surprised to see Chanyeol’s canine teeth, “-that’s so cool!”

“Sure…cool, I guess,” Chanyeol responded, still a bit unsure at how to use the word “cool” in a sentence structure to make himself more relatable to Kyungsoo.

Kyungsoo too tried pulling back his lips to touch his own canine teeth, somehow trying to make a comparison between his and Chanyeol’s.

Seeing this, Chanyeol offered, “Do you want to touch it? Be careful though, it’s sharp.”

Kyungsoo didn’t need a further second to think and jumped on the offer.

While Chanyeol held and pulled his lips open, looking rather comical at it; Kyungsoo tapped and poked on Chanyeol’s fangs with a finger.

Kyungsoo heeded Chanyeol’s warning and made sure he didn’t touch the sharp tip of the fang.

It was certainly a sight to see a vampire squatting on the floor, holding his lips apart so a teenager could pique his curiosity regarding a vampire’s teeth.

But Chanyeol was more than happy to do so for his newly found human friend. It was nothing big or revolutionary but Chanyeol hoped that this even in the smallest bit would help bridge the gap between vampires and humans.

Once Kyungsoo was done admiring and gawking in the fascination that was Chanyeol’s teeth, Kyungsoo pulled away, sitting down on the carpeted floor with Chanyeol.

“You have sharp fangs so you can drink blood, am I right?” Kyungsoo questioned, being very curious.

Chanyeol too sat back down on the carpeted floor, instead of squatting as he had been earlier along. Chanyeol pulled his legs up to his chest, wrapping his arms around them before he answered, “Yes, that’s what it’s for.”

Based on past experiences, Chanyeol was already beginning to dread the follow-up questions that would come after this, especially when it was asked to him by a human none the least.

“So what kind of blood do you drink?” Kyungsoo continued to ask.

“We can only drink human’s blood,” Chanyeol answered, bluntly. There was no point in sugarcoating it, Chanyeol believed.

“How much do you need to drink? How often do you do it too?” Kyungsoo asked away, unbothered at the response that Chanyeol was giving him.

“A few teaspoons of blood can keep us full for a month at most. A full glass of blood can last a year and an entire adult human’s blood can last vampires up to a decade. If we go into hibernation while we’re full, we can sleep for almost two hundred years without having to drink blood,” Chanyeol explained, actually remembering that amount out of everything else he failed to remember.

Then again, that was probably ingrained into a vampire’s head to know in order to survive.

“So…” Kyungsoo dragged on his sentence, rocking back and forth on the floor, “-aren’t you hungry for some blood now?”

“Not really, I’ve been hibernating for over a hundred years so I didn’t have to. But now that I’m awake, I do feel myself getting hungrier by the day.” Chanyeol revealed, pondering the thought that he’d have to feed soon.