The trap was set as soon as the sun did.
 

Joohyun leaned into a thick tree trunk and stared up at the dense clouds peppered across the deep purple expanse. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath to steady her nerves. The scattered sounds of her best friends feeding nearby reminded her she wasn't alone in this. A slight breeze rustled her raven locks and it sent a surge of adrenaline through her.
 

Oh yes, it was all coming back.
 

The vampiress stood poised in the shadows of the trees, letting nature do the rest.

…
 

Seungwan was growing more restless by the second. She tried to go to sleep, by god she tried. Even counting non-existent sheep on the ceiling to ‘force’ sleep onto her. But of course, without Joohyun there beside her blowing sleepily on her ears or whispering lullabies from behind, it was as good as impossible.
 

Suddenly, the duck down duvet seemed to make her even colder.
 

She tossed and turned, but it was no use.
 

She needed Joohyun.
 

With an exasperated grunt, the girl swung herself out of bed and marched toward the drawer she’d seen Joohyun fold her clothes neatly into. After a few minutes of haphazard rummaging, she found her favourite blue jumper and sweatpants to match. She cringed when she turned to face the messy mountain of clothes she’d built up on the floor.
 

No time for that now, though, she was on a mission of utmost importance.
 

Mummy will recognise me straight away, she thought gleefully, getting herself dressed and feeling like the cleverest girl in all the world.
 

Socked feet padded downstairs and headed straight for the doors.
 

*click*
 

Despite the huffing and puffing and putting her whole back into it, that horrible sound whenever she twisted the doorknob reminded her there was no way she was leaving.
 

Joohyun’s word held true. No one was coming in or out those doors.
 

Unfortunately for the vampiress, Seungwan was sometimes a tad too smart for her own good.
 

Sure, no one was getting through the doors… but what if they didn’t need to?
 

She zipped over to the huge French windows, hoping her thinking out of the box would not let her down. Her heart skipped a beat as she reached a small hand to push the handle down.
 

Success!
 

Well… mostly, success.
 

The door only opened a peep, rudely stopped by the row of heavy potted plants lined neatly up against the outside. It’d be a tight squeeze, but that didn’t phase Seungwan. Her sensitive nose was already picking up Joohyun’s scent and it put both her mind and body on autopilot. Without too much effort, she managed to squirm through the crack, the freshly trimmed lawn grass cushioning her landing.
 

The girl dusted herself off and immediately set out, letting her eager nose do the guiding.
 

…
 

Soon enough, Seungwan found herself in a very familiar patch of land. She cocked a thoughtful brow, trying to clear the vagueness in her mind. Everything seemed so eerily recognisable, yet she wasn’t able to fathom why; the night breeze, the way the trees were imminently shaped.
 

The way they towered overhead, curving down at the top in an almost caging manner.
 

Even the darkness possessed a familiar ambiguity.
 

The deathly stillness just amplified how cold and alone she felt right now.
 

Hm, but where had she seen this before?
 

Seungwan scrunched her face and shook her head free of the distraction. She had to focus; her sharp canine instincts were telling her Joohyun was very close now.
 

Where cou-
 

*Thwack!*
 

The poor girl jumped out of her skin when the deafening sound pierced her delicate ears, causing her to whine, stumbling around and instantly pawing at them in attempt to get rid of the awful ringing it left behind. Apparently, she wasn’t the only one startled by the noise. Her attention snapped up to the flock of crows scattering off into multiple directions from their perches on thin branches.
 

Then she heard it.
 

A small whimper, coming from somewhere behind her.
 

Seungwan whipped around and squinted into the distance. Edging closer and closer to the continuously shifting black shape, the frenzied cries thundering in her brain. She was only a few feet away when eyes widened; why everything about the current situation felt so strange finally dawned on her.
 

The thick, roped net.
 

More specifically, the undeniable scent of the person, or vampiress, it belonged to.
 

Mummy!
 

But the string of panicked whimpers and struggles abruptly skewed that lovely little epiphany into a question.
 

Why was there a poor young deer caught under it?
 

This is where Joohyun had found her, after all.
 

Seungwan, bless but god save her, began down the devastatingly innocent thought path of mirroring Joohyun’s actions the night she was adopted. Getting on her hands and knees with a muted thud, she ever so slowly crept up to hooves kicking helplessly in the air. The slightest crunch of a twig, regardless of whether she’d caused it, made her flinch and snap up. She swallowed thickly as she paused every few inches, pupils darting warily across her field of vision.
 

Joohyun’s scent was overpowering but she was committed to the task at hand.
 

It’s okay, she silently reassured the creature, not brave enough to even whisper, but still hoping she’d get her message across, Wannie’s gonna free you like mummy did to me.
 

But poor Seungwan’s courage was snapped into pure terror not milliseconds after.
 

She now felt as horrified as she had felt heroic.
 

Because right before she felt the coarseness of the net on the tips of her fingers, an enormous gush of wind blew over her from the opposite direction, sending her tumbling backwards into the soft grass.
 

Mummy?!
 

Seungwan was frantic with dilemma and the jumble of competing thoughts now running amok in her mind. Joohyun was almost unrecognisable; crouched over the screeching baby deer with her face buried in its neck. The shocked girl had originally thought the vampiress had meant to free the animal, but the thought crushed itself and disintegrated faster than she could take her next breath when she saw the slowly growing puddle of crimson seeping from under them both.
 

Why was Joohyun hurting it?
 

Why are her eyes such a flaming, icy red?
 

What are those things in ?!
 

That’s mummy… but it’s not…
 

Wait, that’s where she remembered those eyes. She knew those eyes. It’d been brief. Fleeting. But she’d seen them on the first day Joohyun found her under that net. The deathly stare she could somehow see right through. Yes, she’d been more than shaken that night. Initially, though. That was more because she’d never seen anything or anyone like Joohyun before… and because Joohyun didn’t hurt her.
 

But would this have potentially been her? What made it different? Why was she deserving of suffering a fate any different to this young fawn?
 

Pieces of a hellish nightmare were coming together behind her eyes and there wasn’t a thing she could do to stop looking.
 

Petrified at what she was witnessing and what she’d just pieced together, she scurried backwards in the dirt until her back hit a solid tree trunk, forcing a yelp from her lungs which she tried to muffle by clamping both hands tightly over her gaping mouth.
 

Bae Joohyun was so preoccupied with her first drink after such a dreadful drought that she didn’t even pause to inhale until the shrivelled carcass remained. The black cloud in her mind prevented her from focusing on or noticing anything else; just feed. Which is probably the reason she didn’t realise anything was amiss until the fearful whimpers carried on long after she’d drunk to completion.
 

Confusion contorting her features, Joohyun glanced down at the carcass, wondering how a dead deer could still make those sounds. It took a good two minutes before the cloud of black dimmed just enough for the vampiress to discern the direction of the sound.
 

It was right next to her.
 

Thinking it was another potential feed, Joohyun craned her neck sideways to face it with a menacing stare. She purposely made a show of running her blood-stained tongue over glinting fangs, savouring the remnants of her last meal dripping off them and staining the soil.
 

She must've looked like the devil herself.
 

But as soon as she beheld the trembling figure curled up against the bark, her fangs retracted faster than they’d ever done before. She shook her head and blinked furiously, forcefully rewiring her famished mind out of its state of unadulterated bloodlust.
 

“S-Seung-wan?!” she half yelled, perplexed as to what she was seeing.
 

Surely this was a figment of her frayed imagination. There was no way Seungwan had gotten out of the house. She’d double locked the doors! It didn’t make any sense!
 

This was bad, very bad.
 

And then the even worse realisation that her innocent puppy had just witnessed her slaughter and consume another small animal without a smidge of remorse hit her like a ton of bricks.
 

The vampiress didn’t even know how to react. She got up, ignoring her stained clothes and face, probably, inching towards the horror-stricken girl.
 

“W-wan-ah…” the vampiress stuttered, holding a hand out to gently touch Seungwan’s cheek when she got close enough.
 

Her cold blood ran icier when the girl flinched away from her touch, kicking her legs out in front of her and uselessly pressing her back further into the tree. A frightened tail was wedged between quivering knees, as if she wanted no part of her accessible to Joohyun, as if she wanted to get as far away from her as possible.
 

She may not have had a heart, but it sure felt like she did in this moment with the way Seungwan’s entire being was absolutely shattering her.
 

Joohyun froze, hand still extended, barely breathing for fear of jolting her poor Seungwan worse than she’d already been.
 

The next thing she heard broke her.
 

“… m-mummy wuh-wanted to… to do that to W-Wah-Wannie… too…?”
 

Seungwan was peering up at her with red, tear-filled eyes, sniffling uncontrollably as she waited for the answer she desperately didn’t want to hear. Usually lively, chocolate ears were now flattened in fear against her head.
 

There wasn’t anything on earth she could respond with that would even begin the pitiful attempt at Band-Aiding this appalling gash of a wound her actions tonight had caused.
 

She tried to will anything, anything, out of her impossibly dry mouth.
 

But she couldn’t.
 

was sealed shut and her brain couldn’t string together any semblance of a coherent thought.
 

All she wanted was to take Seungwan in her arms and tell her whatever it took to rebuild the trust she had single-handedly set ablaze right in front of those dreadfully innocent brown eyes. She wanted to feel her puppy melt into her embrace like she always did. But that wasn’t going to happen.
 

It was devastating, being just inches away from the girl she wanted nothing more than to just comfort and hold, but every second she hesitated, another wall was built in between them. Every delay caused Seungwan to fall further and further away from her, until she was left clawing at the mere memory of a friend.
 

Joohyun hung her head as heavy sobs crippled her. Scalding waterfalls cascaded down her pale cheeks, falling in remorseful drops at her knees as she begged her puppy for any shred of forgiveness or understanding she could possibly find in her broken heart.
 

She begged her for a second chance.
 

But there was no one there to listen.
 

Joohyun blinked heavy tears out of cloudy eyes to realise her only company was the lonely whistle of the gentle breeze.
 

Seungwan was gone.
 

She'd slipped away before she could even notice.
 

You ing monster.
 

She barely registered the concerned voices calling out to her from three separate directions.
 

“Unnie? Unnie!”
 

“Joohyun unnie, where are you?”
 

“Are you okay? We heard a voice…”
 

She just shook her head, abandoning the hunt and leaving early.
 

Joohyun cried all the way home.
 

The double locks felt like it took a millennium to unlock. She didn’t even want to think about how this could’ve happened. But her answer was there as soon as she stepped in. The thin material of the curtain was fluttering silently against the French window that stood ajar behind it.
 

It was taunting her, beckoning her, highlighting her carelessness.
 

In a fit of uncharacteristic grief, she stormed over and roughly slammed it shut again, not caring at how the glass shook threateningly, a few cracks spidering across the planes. Grabbing the flimsy white curtain, she ripped it right up the middle, destroying any reminder of the shattering series of events that had just taken place.
 

She didn’t go upstairs. She couldn’t bear to.
 

Joohyun fell onto the sofa, unbothered at the dirt and blood now staining the expensive material. It was probably unsalvageable now, but to hell with it, so were her feelings. Why destroying her own things made her feel like she wasn’t the only one in pain she didn’t know.
 

She knew only that she would readily burn it all for a chance to turn back time.
 

She was a fool, undeserving of any of it.
 

Joohyun wept bitterly. Then she bawled. She ungracefully rode the wave of utter disbelief and shock, wanting to drown the entire time.
 

She cried her swollen eyes out until she couldn’t anymore.
 

Until she had nothing left.
 

Until her breathing eventually evened and her wrist fell limp against the sofa.

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oh no... here we go.