"Sleep" Yong Guk commanded as he stood by her bedside and folded his arms, waiting for her to fall asleep.

 "Staring at me won't make me fall asleep any faster" Yoon Mi muttered as she turned to face one side.

"Well, I'd you stop talking back to me you might actually fall asleep." he answered back, hearing everything with his vampiric hearing.

"Easier said than done" she sighed as she turned to another side trying to feel comfortable.

"Fine, if I tell you my story would you be able to fall asleep?" Yong Guk gave an exasperated sigh.

"Most likely I might" she peeped at him with one eye open.

"I swear you're as stubborn as Yi Jae" Yong Guk took a seat for himself. 

"Who's Yi Jae" she asked innocently as she sat up.

"My younger sister" Yong Guk answered as he clasped his hands together.

"You have a sister? Why isn't she here with you?" Yoon Mi's eyes lit up at the thought of another girl.

"That's because she's dead" Yong Guk said as he kept his gaze on his hands.

"I-I'm so s-sorry. I d-didn't mean to-"

"Its okay" He looked up and tried to give a reassuring smile. "She died a long time ago along with the rest of my family." Yong Guk paused to rub the back of his neck. It felt strange to be talking about this after having not to for so many years.

"I came from a pure blood family like you. We were fairly normal though, one appa, one omma, a younger sister and me.  My omma had defensive gifts while my appa had offensive gifts. They complimented and worked well with each other.  My younger sister..." he smiled and laughs wistfully at the memory

"She was a genius and had the gift of foresight. She was so smart that while other kids were saying monosyllabic words, she was talking our ears off with her never ending sentences. She even received her gift when she was only a few years old. One could say it was both a blessing and a curse.

While she could see happy times like us celebrating our birthdays and what gifts we got her. Sometimes she would wake up crying at night. Saying that what she saw was scary and terrifying."

 "Do you think she saw...it?" Yoon Mi asked hesitantly as Yong Guk stopped with a distant look growing in his eyes.

"Maybe…” He thought for a little bit, navigating through memories that were almost a decade ago.

“There was one night where she wouldn't stop crying" he recalled "no matter what I did, she wouldn't stop. Her little hands clung to me so tightly that night she cried herself to sleep." 

Shoulders heaving as he sighed "I had never seen her so distraught before, any envy I had for her gift disappeared that night. Because of her visions, she also had difficulty going to school. In the end my parents got her home schooled and I would sit in on her lessons so that she wouldn't feel lonely.

She asked me a lot of strange questions as we grew up. How would I feel if everyone disappeared… What would I do if she wasn't around anymore... What kind of girls I liked when I was only 12 or 13 then" He shook his head giving a dry laugh.

"I told her how would I know, I was only a kid like her." Yoon Mi listened sat still in her bed, having never seen this side of Yong Guk before. 

The depth of pain that she could see in his eyes, the little actions that he did, the shuffling, the sighing, and the way his eyebrows would scrunch together in certain sentences.  

He looked happy and pained at the same time.

"The day we were attacked, they caught her while she was playing outside and her screams got us running out to find her.

The trespassers demanded to know who was the one who could see into the future… Not knowing that they had who they wanted in their hands. I lied, saying it was me" Yong Guk covered his face with his hands.

"Thinking that they would take me hostage instead of her; I was a fool for thinking that. As soon as they surrounded me they slit and as if that wasn't enough, they pierced her heart with a silver blade. Seeing her die before our eyes drove my omma mad. With her emotions unstable, she couldn't use her gifts and appa tried his best to kill the trespassers but he was outnumbered.

I hadn't received my gift yet so I could only watch them kill my family before me one by one. Watching them kill my omma after my appa was the last straw.

Hearing her screams for me to run, to leave when they pinned her down and her last cry when they killed her. Anger consumed me.

Having to see everyone die in front of me…

If I had been braver, stronger was all I thought.” Yong Guk paused to prevent his voice from breaking, reliving all these memories to tell her brought back a lot of feelings that he had thought was gone.

Regaining his composure and the use of his voice, Yong Guk continued where he left off.

 “I began to see red and before I knew it, one by one, the trespassers burst into flames.

I felt nothing when they slowly burned into ashes before my eyes, what filled my mind was how they killed my family mercilessly. Watching them singe and burn into nothingness, only then I would be able to at ease.

The vampire council found me shortly after.” Yong Guk sighed as he recalled their dark and dreary clothes that they wore. They resembled the undertaker rather than a government body.

 “Numb from loss and from the buzz that my powers gave me. I didn't care where they took me. By the time I snapped out of it I had gone from the countryside to the city. It was there where I saw the real world.” Seeing the dirty streets, the impoverished people scrawny and half of them sickly looking vivid in his imagination having spent a considerable amount of time there. The images of the slums were hard to erase.

“The disparities between the classes were clear as night and day. When a beggar came up to us to ask for money to buy medicine for his ailing sibling, the councilman heartlessly kicked the beggar aside, making him fall into the trash cans behind him.  A frail little girl from not too far away cried out, "Oppa" running to his side trying to see if her older brother was alright.” His heart broke as he saw the little girl like his own younger sister.

“ 'Filthy halflings' was what the councilman said as he looked at them with contempt in his eyes. 'Scums like you are polluting our society' he spat.” Yong Guk imitated the his pompous manner of speaking.

“Waiting for the councilman to walk ahead, I quickly went over to the little girl and gave her a few bills I had with me. Looking at me in shock, I ran to catch up with the councilman before the girl could manage out her thanks.

With what I saw, I knew instantly that I needed to get away from the council. If I stayed with them long enough I'd end up like them and probably having seen my future, Yi Jae had hoped that I would never be like one of them. 

I remember clearly as she pleaded in tears for me to promise that I would never treat anyone else like that.” Yong Guk paused as the memory of his sister played back. It broke his heart continuously that his younger sister had to be exposed to such things as such a young age.

“Escaping one night, they chased me all around the city. Desperate to lose them, I went into the place they hated the most. 

The slums.

Losing them easily in there, I spent my days in the slum hiding from them.  

If I was of that much value to chase after, there was no denying that they would be waiting by the outskirts. I did what I needed to survive. There was this place in the slums where people fought to earn money. Having nothing to my name now, fighting was the only thing I knew how to do aside from studying. I fought daily to live and earn enough to buy a pack of blood. You have no idea how much one costs out there" he remembered the hefty price tags on different grades of blood. 

"It was expensive and diluted, unlike to what we're used to here.

One day I heard someone shout 'Oppa' and I felt something slam into my leg. Looking down, the small figure that clung to my leg looked familiar. "Thank you for your money Oppa!" looking up at me, the little girl had such a wide grin. "You're that..." I said slowly, trying to recall the little girl, I was still dazed from ending the fight a few moments ago.  "Ne! Thank you for saving us the other day!" "Aish! Min Hwa! Don't go running off like that!" Another familiar face approached us. Running to her oppa, "I found the kind oppa who gave us money for medicine!" she jumped excitedly. Looking at me, he awkwardly held his hand out for a handshake.  Shaking his hand "I can't thank you enough..." he said in a quiet tone. "You saved her life and she never lets a day go by without thanking you."

"I wish I could have done more" I told him regretfully. Shaking his head, I wished that I had I had stopped the councilman from kicking them, realizing how cowardice I was a month back.  Living down there had opened my eyes and shown me so much that I wouldn't have seen if I was still with my family.

Going back to my one room home, on my way I saw a commotion.

The guys were crowding in a circle and there was a lot of shouting and fighting. It took me shattering a wine bottle to the wall behind them to get their attention. Getting them to scatter and move back, I saw that the kid they picked on had passed out. Glad that I went back at that timing, had I been a little later they might have hit him till he died. Putting his arm around me, it took almost all of my strength to drag him to back. Even when he was younger, Zelo was a really tall kid" Yong Guk shook his head as he laughed.

“Mwoh? You found Zelo just like that?” Yoon Mi said in surprise, not expecting his introduction like that.

“Yeah, he sleep talked too. It was very interesting, I was listing out the things I needed to do and suddenly he replied me in his sleep.” Yong Guk laughed at the memory.

“That’s not interesting! That’s strange!” Yoon Mi laughed, unable to seriously believe what he said.

“If you don’t believe me I can show you when he gets back.” Yong Guk smiled genuinely this time.

“How did you find Elder Yong?” “Oh we didn’t find him. He found us” Yong Guk said simply.

“Zelo came and left my place a few times over the first one two months but awhile after that he came back every night. He practically treated my place like a hotel but I didn’t mind, I knew that like me he had no-where else to go and no other family members. Zelo started fighting in the arena to pay back the portion of his expenses.

Believe it or not, it was one night where Zelo and I bought groceries with our earnings and we opened the door to see Elder Yong seated on the dirty, old sofa that came with the room.

“Ah, you’re back. Come in, I had dinner prepared for you” Was the first line he said to us. He was a seriously strange old man” Yong Guk shook his head. “He was the first pure blooded vampire that willingly set foot into the slums and he even brought a chef to cook a big pot of food to distribute the leftovers to the neighbours around.”

“That makes him a strangely nice person” Yoon Mi tapped her chin in thought.

 “Overly strange and overly nice was my initial reaction. Who invites himself into someone else’s house and cooks for them?

After having stayed in the slums for so long, I knew that there was a catch somehow. Asking him directly if there was an ulterior motive for doing all these things, Elder Yong very straightforwardly said yes.

“I want to bring you two back with me to my house. I’ll adopt the two of you” He said. “You can come willingly or come willingly”

“That’s not even two choices!” I barked back at his options.

“That’s because you don’t have much options yourself!” Elder Yong grabbed both our arms and pulled them out for us to see ourselves. Look at your veins they’re turning purple black, it’s a warning sign that you’re going into blood shock! Before you harm yourself and your friend, you two better come with me” He said in a no nonsense manner, dragging both of us into the car parked outside.

It was strange, both of us were the top few fighters in the arena yet we were dragged into his car… When he asked me to go along with him and Dae Hyun, I even wonder if he ever needed me there. He seemed strong enough on his own.” Yong Guk looked up and stared at the ceiling, thinking about the version of the story he had told Yoon Mi.

*Him Chan was right. The way she gets sad at my story like it was her own made me unable to tell her every single detail that happened, the kind of people I faced in the slums and in the arena and the people I ended up killing during death matches…How would she feel if she knew that both Him Chan and I have bloodied hands?* He thought solemnly.

*Would she still see us the same way?*

Annyeonghaseyo!!! :D

Phew! This is one long chapter!!!

Yes, like Himchan's story, Yong Gukkie censored his story for Yoon Mi so that she wouldn't cry.

This is a few day's efforts gelled into one chapter. I hope that it's not too long for you guys...But a lot did happen to him and I tried to include as much details as I could without diverting the story flow.

After this I am planning on young jae and some jong up moments  or some getting to know each other kind of stuffs.

With Love~

Violynn. 6/6/2012