“Downward Spiral”

... where running from destiny might just bring you right into its arms

Prompt: anything fantasy! witches, wizards, vampires, fairies, mermaids (whatever you want)

This is my entry for Infinite Secret Santa 2014 which had been dropped, sadly enough. I still admire the effort put into it, so do go and read the stories that are there.

Woohyun/Sunggyu

± 3600 words

Dedicated to: ??? didn't find out ALL OF YOU

‘God.’

I have never been a religious person.

‘God, help me.’

Why was I turning to the Supreme Being at that moment?

“Help me, someone!”

In all sincerity, it had never been about the religion.

“Anyone!”

I just wanted someone to come.

“Please!”

Why did I bother calling for help though? No one was around.

“Help me!”

All things considered, why would they have been? At that time of night… On the edge of the town… There of all places.

I might as well have been in the middle of nowhere. The result would have been the same.

No one to hear my pleas for help… Not a single person.

I was alone, running as fast as my body allowed.

My feet making little stones fly away from the path in my haste.

My arms swinging by my sides wildly, the hands tightened into fists hard enough to make my fingernails dig little half-moons into my palms.

My breath coming out in harsh, wheezing gasps, the lungs not quite able to keep up with the demand of air I had of them.

My heart beating loudly, nearly bursting from my chest in its effort to supply my body with enough oxygen.

One almost wouldn’t guess I was running for my life, huh?

After all I was only running madly through the dark… that considering the intensity of that darkness I may as well have been blind being just a side thought of it… what would I be looking at even?

I did not dare turn back.

Because then I’d have seen him… or maybe I should say it? What would you call the personification of your worst nightmare?

‘I for one am sticking to calling the being behind me it, whether said it would like that or not.’

The sounds of that unspecified it behind me were getting closer by the seconds.

‘How did I get into this mess? Why me? I did not ask to have a part of it!’

I almost would have been able to hear the breath of the one behind me by that point of time… If they had any breath to speak of, that was.

‘Okay, so maybe being in this one of them all had been my fault by a portion. A fraction of a portion. A very tiny one…’

I stumbled on a rock that I did not even bother to look back at. I knew what it was that I tripped on the edge of.

‘The possibility of never ever taking a part in the Truth or Dare ever again had never sounded so good before… Who was this dare from even, Sungjong? I bet this one was from Sungjong. He always makes up the freaking scariest of dares… But why a graveyard, Sungjong? Why?’

My thoughts were flying through my head as quickly as my feet were trying to run, however neither was fast enough.

The pace of my thoughts was not quick enough to make me think up a way out of the muddle I got myself into.

The pace of my steps was not quick enough to take me away from the one who was chasing me.

‘Hunting would be a more appropriate a choice of word. And guess who the lucky prey is?’ A thought ran through my head in a span of a second as I stumbled on yet another tombstone.

I wanted to continue running. I truly did.

However the tiny segment of time it had taken me to gather myself had been more than enough for the being behind me to catch up, to leap at me from behind… It had been more than enough to seal my fate.

Like a wax on an envelope.

Like a lid on a coffin.

Like a stone block on a tomb.

- - - - -

I could feel the warmth of it in my mouth.

Blood.

I haven’t had any since forever.

‘Why?’

I could feel how it energised me wholly.

My hearing suddenly became sharper… My eyes could see in more detail… My sense of smell could differentiate between even more scents than it had seconds before…

No supplements could ever replace that aspect of drinking blood. Nothing could ever replace the blood in itself.

It was simply impossible.

‘Ah, true.’

There was also nothing else that could make me so guilty by indulging in it.

Because wasn’t it this part of our existence that made us so hated? Wasn’t it this that had cost me pretty much everything?

‘Isn’t it this that is ridding the world of yet another - more likely than not - innocent life?’

That thought made me tear myself away from the one my claws desperately clung onto just the second before.

Something I only rarely, if ever, managed.

Usually I could only let go of my prey when they were drained dry… when the body was already cooling in my arms at times even.

‘But maybe this time…?’ I looked at the person that was all but limp in my arms, only the strength of my hold keeping them upright.

‘Him… Keeping him upright.’ I corrected myself mentally, and completely uselessly, when I realised that my forearms were pressing against the hard plains of a male’s chest.

It was also at that moment that I realised that the heart under that set of muscles was trying and failing to continue working, its rhythm that irregular.

‘Was it too late?’ I wondered sadly as I slowly lowered the man on the ground, only at that moment turning him around…

It was then that I saw his face for the first time, tightened in an expression of mixed fear and pain…

“So young…” I whispered, my right hand reaching out to the man’s face unconsciously.

The full-body jerk the male gave when my fingers touched his cheek I definitely did not expect from someone I had thought to be all but dead.

Neither did I expect his eyes to snap open to look at me.

The accusation in them burned.

‘Maybe I could do something for him still?’ I wondered as the hand that shot back to my side reached into the direction of the man again, this time to the junction of his neck and shoulder.

The junction in which an open wound, the courtesy of my teeth, still produced fresh blood… I tried not to let my eyes linger on it for too long a while.

‘If I remember correctly, losing about half a litre of blood is bearable for the organism of a human… I drank at the very least twice that amount, and very likely even more than that… How can you help someone that lost so much blood?’ I asked myself, searching in my mind for information I haven’t searched for in ages.

Human biology, aside from the knowledge of where which veins and arteries go through, I had long since lost use for.

Not that I was very happy about having to use that information, mind you.

‘How much blood can a human lose without it being fatal?’

It was useless to think about it, really.

Especially as it was pretty obvious that whatever that unknown amount was, the man that lay in front of me had lost more than that.

There was nothing I could have done that could have saved his life.

Which, in all sincerity, is why I hadn’t tried to do that in the end.

I did not save his life.

I saved his soul.

- - - - -

Fire.

Liquid fire, running through my veins with the speed of a hurricane, destroying everything it encounters in its wake.

It hurt so much… Pain. Pain. Pain.

I wanted it to stop… Not to feel it, or anything else for that matter, any longer.

I cried.

I screamed.

I begged for it to end, for the fire not to burn, to leave me be… or to already finish the destruction it has started.

However it refused to.

It seemed to go on forever.

And then it stopped… For no apparent reason… Unexpectedly… In between one blink of an eye and the other… All of sudden the fire that had been consuming my whole being, burning it from the inside, just was not there anymore.

‘Why?’

My mind did not catch up at first. It was still caught in the throes of pain the fire caused… The possibility of the pain stopping had seemed too good to be true.

It had been literally unbelievable.

Excuse me for being a little overwhelmed.

In all sincerity I couldn’t have been anything but, given that the last thing prior to having lost my consciousness was an all-consuming fear and pain and “suddenly” –who knew how much time passed already – I was lying in what one could easily describe as a fluffy bed…

‘What sort of weird reality did I wake up to?’ I asked myself, looking around the room I found myself in. ‘And the most important question of them all: Where am I?’

Before I had any time to elaborate that thought a soft sound broke me out of my reverie, making my head turn to its source. Because that was a sound I easily recognised.

It was a sound that could mean either the answers to my questions, or more danger – which I also would like to be aware of.

It was the sound of the door being opened.

“Do you find your room to be to your liking?” a suave, male voice asked, the owner of it just having stepped through the door.

‘What?’ I stared at the man, dumbfounded. Did he not know what I went through the last time I was awake? How did I come to be here then?

“I see many questions in your eyes… Are there any which you would like me to answer?”

“How about: ‘Who the heck are you?’” I burst out, not liking the way the man spoke to me one bit. It was as if he knew the answers to his own questions… but if that was true, why was did he bother asking?

That put aside, I woke up in a weird place. Of course I had questions. Never mind the fact that I woke up in a weird place atop having had a near-brush with death!

“I’m the owner of this house, if you have to know. My name is Kim Sunggyu. But no one had called me my name in ages. You can call me just Sunggyu if you want.”

“I don’t want to call you anything! I want to how the heck I came to be here in the first place!” I shouted, getting up from the bed… and suddenly I stood in front of him.

‘How did I get across the room so quickly?’

“Calm yourself,” he continued in that smooth voice of his, as if nothing weird happened, “I can answer all your questions, if you are patient, that is.”

This Sunggyu guy was really starting to get on my nerves. And was he blind along with being annoying? I just freaking moved across the whole ing room!

“I can see that my words don’t calm you much.”

‘, Sherlock.’

“The first thing you should know is that I am well aware of the reason you’re in my house at this moment.”

That piqued my interest. A bit. He was still pretty annoying.

“As a matter of a fact I am the reason you are here.” he said, his lips quirking up in what probably should have passed as a smile.

It did not.

Not to me.

In my eyes the words he said were twisting his mouth into a grimace.

‘How could he be? He wasn’t there, was he? How would he… know?’

- - - - -

I could see the confusion in the man’s eyes.

He caught my words, but he couldn’t process their meaning. It did not make any sense to him.

For a moment.

I could see the stages of realisation, as they moved across his expressive face.

The moment he tried to think up reasons of why I would be aware.

The way his eyes shifted from me to the bed he had been on mere minute or so before. Analysing why it did not get any reaction from me… Why? It wasn’t something he considered normal. Natural… And up until that point of his life it was not.

‘He’ll have to get used to it though. This is how it is going to be from now on.’

Even in my thoughts I did not miss the final stage of his understanding.

How his eyes widened more than just a fraction.

How his whole posture leaned backwards, his fight or flight instincts kicking in, likely.

If that wouldn’t have been enough a clue to his realisation, his words, which followed, would have been… As it was, it was just a confirmation.

“It was you…” he whispered. His voice so soft a human wouldn’t have heard. He did not know that though, nor did I feel the need to point it out to him. “You were on that graveyard.”

‘And the award for the quickest analysis of the data given goes to…’

“You were the one… That… that thing that had been chasing me.”

“No need to be rude. I very much am not a thing, if you would…”

“Shut the up! I will call you what I want. What the are you? And what the freaking did you turn me into?”

‘A fact to save for later: When angered, spouts profanities.’

“A vampire, what else?” I said matter-of-factly, flooring him effectively. “For someone who made the connection between now and then so quickly I would have expected something more.”

He did not say anything to that. He was making a good impression of fish, though.

“To sum it up. You were attacked at night. You were bitten. I took your blood… if that alone did not cue you in, the speed you moved with could have helped.”

“So… the fire?” he started feebly, not moving an inch.

‘Fire? Ah…’

“That pain was the part of the transformation, yes. I only remembered it was a part of the transformation when you started experiencing it. It’s been a long time since I went through it.”

He stared at me, assessing, judging. What his mind came up with, I did not know.

At least not until he voiced his thoughts out loud on his own.

“Why turn me though?” he asked, his voice breaking at the last word.

The grimace he made was more than enough of a confirmation of him not being satisfied with how that sentence came out.

I could also see that his body was shaking off the lethargy of the transformation. He was soon going to realise that there were more urgent matters in his mind than getting answers for his questions.

Matters that would most importantly include hunger… blood-lust, some call it even.

“Why not just kill me? Wouldn’t that be easier? I am of no use to you.”

‘Was there ever time that I thought that? Maybe there was.’

“Easy? Maybe. In the technical sense of it, that is. However if there is one thing I would like you to remember about me, than please let it be the fact that I have never enjoyed this life.”

“And so you decided that you want someone else suffering through it also?” he all but spat at me, his voice bitter. He did not understand.

“Incorrect.”

I don’t know why I had kept on ribbing him so much. Maybe I had hoped that he would understand sooner. Maybe I had wanted to see him snap…

Maybe I just wanted to feel the sharp sting of his fangs pierced into my skin all the sooner.

By that point of time it had been inevitable anyway.

And if I was a little starved for contact – any kind of contact – after the years of avoiding everyone… that was no one’s business but mine… and his.

“You have to understand that attacking you was not a conscious choice on my part. You just happened to be in a wrong time on a wrong place.” I started, watching how his chest was beginning to expand and contract more rapidly. He was approaching the edge, even if he did not realise it.

I did.

And yet I kept on talking. And so I kept on talking.

“However I hadn’t fed on anyone in months and you happened to cross my path. I wasn’t able to stop myself and by the time I gathered my wits enough to stop you had already lost too much blood. I could hear that your heart was giving up…”

Why did I come closer to him at that point?

Was I trying to listen for his pulse?

It was there, like it is with every vampire for we do have blood of our own, but it was slow. So. Very. Slow…

“I knew with certainty that it will inevitably give out… and so I decided to turn you. You might yet find that living the eternity in two people is much better than by oneself.”

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

‘Soon.’

“Because whatever the legends say, vampires don’t need to live off human blood… if they have another vampire who is willing to share his or hers with them, that is.”

Confusion.

Interest.

His expressions were so easy to read. He wore his heart on his sleeve, as to say.

“You feel the need for blood, don’t you?”

A/N: Okay, so… opinion? I quite like how this turned out (despite the fact that I got stuck few paragraphs before the end at a point). That aside it’s not even fair just how many ideas I had gotten for this prompt! (Also managed to go a bit overboard with the length also)…How... unexpected, ha-ha  (ovo)/

Either way if anyone would like to see more fantasy/supernatural variants this prompt offered do tell me, I'm up for it!!

See? The camerman knows something is going on! (SG: I like your... jugular. ♥)

Until then:
See ya~ ( "-.-)/