Baekhyun’s still very young. About 90 years in as a walking undead, the others who are centuries older calls him a baby. He watches his reflection mimic the action of breathing, the rise and fall of his shoulders looks comical now. He watches how the world goes dark for a split second as he tries blinking. 

“Thinking about humans again, Hyun?” Chanyeol passes by, catching sight of Baekhyun’s hesitance before the mirror. “Put on some makeup and get out there. You may be a baby to the others but we both know you’re capable enough.” 

Chanyeol, even though he doesn’t look like it, is a couple of hundred generations older than him. He’s about somewhere in his 400s while Baekhyun’s still 96 years old. Well, 18 plus 96. He’s a hundred years old plus-minus, really. But to the others like Junmyeon and especially Minseok, he’s still a teething baby vampire. 

Baekhyun tries to pry into Chanyeol’s mind but the sensation of flames swallowing him whole makes him stop. Vampires can’t pry into another vampire’s mind because they each have an element that protects them from the others. Chanyeol’s element is the prickling fire. 

He misses the heat of the Sun, he misses the bustle of life, the toxic gossip about others. He misses his friends. How old would have they been now? Some of them would have already been six feet under the ground by now. Maybe he should go and pay a visit to the lonely ones. The juniors he’s been close with. Maybe if he’s lucky at least one of them would still be alive. 

“Yeah… maybe I should go out.” 

Baekhyun puts on contact lenses and some makeup to make his complexion slightly darker. There’s no point either way. His friends would know something’s different if he’s this lively and young at the age of whatever 18 plus 96 is. 

“Be careful of the Americans,” Chanyeol calls out.

When he passes by Minseok in the common room, the eyes of the eldest follow him out the door. Baekhyun takes Minseok’s silence as permission. 

          It’s because he’s so young that he still remembers how his life had been before the full awakening. He’s always been special ever since he was born and it was that aspect of him that attracted the elders. The first breath he took in, they didn’t know. It was when he reached the starting ages of adolescence that his scent changes to something so sweet that the rest could smell him a mile away. Baekhyun has always known what he was, like it was meant to be, in his flesh and bones the temperature colder than human’s. 

Baekhyun’s rare. He was born as a vampire. He was never bitten, and it’s this aspect of him that makes him the natural leader of the clan. Sure, the older ones have to completely keep him in check, but all of his decisions goes. It’s also this very same aspect that makes him more human than the others. He allows himself to feel, to let himself get carried away. He allows all of his emotions control him. 

Chanyeol runs on anger, and it’s this emotion that brings him to stand on his feet every morning. Sehun depends on curiosity to control him, waking up every day with a new purpose to be fulfilled. Junmyeon feels sympathy the most, and he uses this as a reason to feel like he deserves living even without harboring a life. Minseok, on the other hand, gets by each day with the help of an excuse; entertainment. He finds it fun to live. Baekhyun, feels all and more. 

          He has lived a very short life, and it’s for this reason alone that he yearns for what was rather than what is. It felt like yesterday where he faced the faces of his relatives. Crowding around his mother’s coffin was him, his aunts and uncles and his grandparents. They stared at him and his clan. The elders and Sehun stood behind him and he stood before them, posing as the real head of the group for the first time ever in public. He heard his relatives’ thoughts, accusations of him turning to become a thug and leaving his mother alone. He sees the look in their eyes, feels their pulse getting quicker under their tender skin. 

He heard the gears in his relatives’ heads working. They know he’s not human. He can’t be. His mother was dead, and he should be at least 60 years old by now. How could he still be as fresh and looking as young as he was at 18? They fear him. 

“My father passed away,” he didn’t know why he lied to them. He still doesn’t. He claims himself to be dead, and that he’s his own son. “Byun Baekhyun passed away in a trip years ago and my grandmother knew about it. Don’t think he’s a bad son just because he’s not here.” 

They visibly relaxed. They still suspect him, especially his clan, but they’re buying his excuse just to bring peace into their minds.

“You look just like Baekhyun,” his aunt says, sniffling, “and I think it made us think you were him. I’m so sorry to have heard that Baekhyun has already passed away.” 

Baekhyun relishes in the noise of pulses going wild around him. He enjoys the voices penetrating his mind. Mundane thoughts humans have always harboured.

         In truth, Baekhyun’s old. Staring down at the ground, Baekhyun tries his best to cry, for anything indicative of sadness to show itself. He doesn’t. He’s old enough to grow so insensitive to such distant worries like death. He won’t die. Even when Earth crumbles, he won’t die till another century when his body would finally give in to hunger. He’ll just float aimlessly in space. 

He won’t die till someone seeks to kill him and succeeds in it. Even immortals have weaknesses. It’s the way nature made everything; weaknesses and strengths. 

Baekhyun’s old enough to the rest of the world. So old that he’ll be regarded with instant fear if the truth about him comes to light. 

His friend lay lifeless in a coffin, under the dirt, and Baekhyun stands above him with guilt. Was it wrong to wish for death now? No. He won’t even get to meet his friends anyway. He can’t go to Heaven. If there even is one. Wishing what was will never be the same as having what already is. 

He’s so old, living through wars and uprisings. Even now. Ever since the national war between the North and South, Baekhyun has to sneak into the North just to visit his friend’s grave. Of course no one would know his friends’ decayed bodies live here, and of course no one would know Baekhyun was once as young as them. The war’s over, all thanks to some agreement that Chanyeol doesn’t completely agree with, but it’s a very sensitive period of time to live through. 

Something rustles behind him. Maybe it’s the soldiers. Baekhyun has to go. 

         Baekhyun watches TV with an impassive face on before he decides to breath. He imitates one of the actors on screen, his shallow breaths morphing into an irregular panting. Someone chuckles to the side and it sounds suspiciously like Sehun. Baekhyun slowly turns to the younger one—just by a year. 

“What are you doing, Hyunnie?” Sehun flops down next to Baekhyun, slotting right up against the leader like they were meant to be. 

“Why do you ask, Hunnie?” Baekhyun feels Sehun pressing his cheeks to Baekhyun’s. 

“I smell something strange on you.” Sehun nuzzles his face into the Baekhyun’s neck, right at the juncture where his neck and shoulders meet. “A dog.” 

“Hmm.” Baekhyun knows this. He’s been catching a whiff of it too from time to time. Not because the creature’s close, but because Baekhyun never really bothered to wash it off. “I’ll wash it away later.” 

With this, Sehun nodded his head in satisfaction and stands up. Giving Baekhyun one last peck on the cheek, Sehun walks past him and away from sight. 

         Baekhyun visits his old high school once again, and he sees some of the most familiar faces hung up along the walls. They were all his friends. He was quite the popular figure back then. He naturally had eyes that pulls people in, and a voice that soothes people’s worries. His laughter brings people in, makes them think he’s approachable and kind. He was. But he hasn’t been for a long time now. 

Baekhyun sees a student walking, heading towards him. He’s not going to the toilet as he said he would. The student was skipping classes. 

“Hey,” then comes the greeting. Kids these days, too trusting of strangers. But then again, Baekhyun was like that too. 

Baekhyun’s head tilts a little to the left, giving the kid a minute smile. 

“Are you new here?” He approaches Baekhyun. “My name’s Yixing.” 

Baekhyun smells just faintly something familiar, a scent that’s been sticking onto him for the longest time now. It’s not from Yixing, but it is from someone who spends a lot of time with him. 

“I’m Baekhyun.” And I’m old. 

“Well, if anyone asks, say you didn’t see me.” The corners of Yixing’s lips tilt up to form a smile. There’s a faint dimple showing itself. Baekhyun briefly thinks what it’d feel like to feed from that dimple. “See you around.”

         He stands on the roof of a blown up building. The blood spilled here was too much, too much that Baekhyun can taste the iron on his tongue in the air. Time is money, they say, but can the Japanese pay what’s worth of the lives they stole. 

Baekhyun throws himself off the abandoned building, liking the wind in his hair and the thrill of falling. He plummets onto the ground, face up, and he lays there motionless. Baekhyun stares up at the sky as he feels his bones fix themselves. The stars are nice.

He cranes his head up just a little more, staring at the forest right behind him in an upside-down view. 

“I can smell you,” Baekhyun says out loud. 

If he wasn’t paying close attention to everything, he might have missed the faint rustle in the grass just a few meters away. Baekhyun closes his eyes, heightens his other senses. The scent wafts in the air a little too thinly to his liking. It fades away. 

         “You reek.”

Baekhyun throws Sehun a side glance before going back to reading a newspaper. From 1917, about wars and the current state of countries across the globe. 

“Hyunnie…” Sehun whines.

“I’ll wash it off later.” Baekhyun flips to another page of the newspaper. It’s old news, but it’s fitting for him.

“Is it stalking you? The last time I smelled it on you was about 12 years ago.” Sehun sniffs the air. “It’s stronger this time.” 

“14 years ago,” Baekhyun corrects Sehun. 

The little one’s younger by just a year but the difference in experience was apparent. Sehun was bitten so he’s only spent part of his life as a blood-er. For Baekhyun, on the other hand, he’s spent his whole life as one. Time isn’t something Sehun chooses to keep up with. His senses are more sensitive too, which explains why he can’t handle the smell of a wolf. 

“He was closer this time.” 

         “Hello.” 

Baekhyun’s stare shifts from the picture of his friends, the same ones he’d been facing 14 years back, and looks at Yixing. His face no longer sports acne, and his height reaches above Baekhyun; evidence of time taking its toll on him. Baekhyun can’t help but smile. Ageing, such a delicate process it is. 

“I see you’ve come back again.” That same dimple Baekhyun has thought of feeding on the last time he saw it now makes him reminisce about times where he could freely kiss someone. On the cheeks, forehead, on the lips. Baekhyun was popular after all. “What brings you here?” 

Baekhyun felt rather than heard the thought that comes with Yixing’s intrusive look. Yixing knows what he is—or at least has an idea of it—and Baekhyun doesn’t find it in him to pretend otherwise. 

“I can’t remember all of them. But this one was Jongdae. They grew up without me.” Baekhyun points up at the photos of his friends, the valedictorians and the presidents over the years. And they moved on without me, he wanted to add on. “I find myself missing them sometimes.” 

Yixing bobs his head, up and down, almost too comically. Then he sighs. Baekhyun does the same, humouring himself enough when he decides to start breathing. His hand reaches up to tap on the glass encasing keeping the certificates of honor one of his old best friends had gotten. 

He wishes to be there once again. Baekhyun knows he can’t, not when he’s cold enough to cause the glass to crack, not when he can chew on the glass and nothing would happen. 

Baekhyun hears the echoes in Yixing’s head, about him. He almost smiles but keeps his face impassive. Yixing will get it out. 

“If you ever want to make a new one, find me.” Baekhyun can’t keep a small smile in any longer. Yixing leaves then, and he’s left Baekhyun too alone.

So alone, basking in what’s left of that wolf’s scent.

         He misses his friends a little too much this year. Maybe it’s because death is something that happens a lot these days.

Wars still go on, and if they reach far enough where Baekhyun and his clan lives, he’ll have to snap their necks and their blood dry. Humans may perish, but they shall not with the knowledge that his kind exists. 

But even when soldiers are still on the lookout for the enemy’s troops, Baekhyun doesn’t care. He’s protected this gravesite from wandering souls, he won’t stop now. 

Leaving more bouquets of flowers on his friends’ gravestones, Baekhyun patrols the areas too for soldiers or others seeking to bring demolishment to this gravesite. He won’t allow that. 

Baekhyun stays for a minute or two longer. Faint slow thuds makes him perk up in curiosity. He hears a steady pulse nearing him, deafening, and he slowly turns around to meet eyes with a large beast. The beast growled, eyes shifting down to the gravestone that Baekhyun has placed a hand on. Baekhyun smiles as he takes a step back from the gravestone. 

It’s him, the wolf that’s been leaving its scent everywhere around Baekhyun. The one that drives Sehun insane. It makes Baekhyun feel safe, though, because only with its scent lingering here and there over the years does Baekhyun finally feel that a creature like this exists. A creature that lives as long as vampires, but has a heart that beats like a human. 

It reminds Baekhyun that his kind isn’t alone in this cruel world. Baekhyun tries to read the wolf’s mind even though he knows he can’t. He can read a werewolf’s mind when they’re in their human form, but not when they’re in doggy form. That’s why most of them approach Baekhyun and his friends on all fours. 

The wolf bares his fangs to Baekhyun, and he puffs out even more. Baekhyun disappears into the shadows, further into the trees. 

Sehun’s going to have a hell of a day when Baekhyun comes home.

         Bathing has never felt this much like a beating. Baekhyun swears on his life he felt a few of his bones cracking under Sehun’s care. He’s getting scrubbed and soaped up like the world would end if he wasn’t. A part of his flesh tears, and it sews itself back close. That’s when Baekhyun has had enough.

“Sehun, stop,” it almost comes out as a growl but Sehun’s immediate obedience causes Baekhyun to go soft.

“Sorry…” Sehun twitches under Baekhyun’s piercing stare. “It’s just that…”

“I know,” Baekhyun relaxes further into the bath, body going limp, “and I understand that you really can’t stand the smell. But for me, will you?” 

Sehun has no choice but to nod his head in agreement. He wordlessly reaches over to gently scrub Baekhyun’s scalp with shampoo. 

“I’m sorry,” Sehun mumbles. 

Baekhyun smiles, pulling Sehun down before pressing a quick peck on the younger’s cheek. Once out of the toilet, Baekhyun pulls on a fresh new set of clothes. He stalks into the kitchen fully intending to rant to Minseok about Sehun.

Minseok suddenly sneezes. Baekhyun stares. They don't really sneeze, not really. Unless they really will themselves to do so. 

“Sorry.” Baekhyun knows Minseok doesn’t mean it, he expresses mirth instead. “I forced that sneeze out to get rid of the smell invading my nose. Have you washed it off yet?” 

“Uh, Sehun tried to scrub it off so hard my skin actually tore.” Baekhyun grimaces. “That boy still has a long way to go.” 

“Oh, don’t be too hard on him because even I still have trouble withstanding the smell. And on that note, take that seat over there.” Minseok points to a chair in the living room. “Don’t get too close to me for the next three weeks. You’re lucky I don’t have to breathe to live.” 

“It’s not that bad,” Baekhyun deadpans. “All of you need to stop being so dramatic.” 

“It’s really bad,” Chanyeol calls out from outside the window. He’s perched up atop a tree somewhere where they can’t see. “I can smell it from here.” 

“It’s bearable,” Baekhyun insists.

“You like the smell, that’s why you don’t mind it.” Junmyeon walks in, clicking his tongue at Baekhyun’s frowned-upon behaviour. “Which reminds me to remind you that you can’t like the smell.” 

“I don’t like the smell. I just find it… interesting.” 

Junmyeon stares right into Baekhyun’s eyes for a few seconds before his own ones well up with tears. Baekhyun smirks. Junmyeon smacks the back of his head. Maybe a little too hard because Baekhyun hears his neck cracking. He just healed from Sehun’s rough treatment just minutes ago, he can’t be breaking again so soon. 

“I think your light glows slightly brighter than before,” Junmyeon comments, “It’s never actually made me cry before.” 

“Good. That’s what you get for trying to read my mind.” Baekhyun leans back on the counter next to the sink, his arms crossed over his chest. His neck faintly cracks back into place. 

Vampires are breakable, too easily breakable, but they heal fast and they can’t die that easily. A stake through the heart, limbs torn apart and separated as far as they can go, and fire burning each part of their bodies should do the trick. It takes a lot of effort to kill one of them and that’s exactly why other creatures like them of different species never really bothered to hunt them d