Thank you to the lovely Quinn_Oct for requesting this!! I hope I did your idea justice, dear friend!!! 💕💕💕

*cries legit tears cuz it's my first time writing vampires and whatnot lolol*

*it took so long cuz I was intimidated at first and cuz schoolwork crept up on me oops haha 😂*

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**[[begins the petition for Jae to live out his dreams of growing out his hair]]**
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Pairing: Jaehyung x Younghyun
Concept: angst, fantasy!au, vampires/grim reapers/etc.
Ending: Sweet, wholesome <3

**This will be broken up into 3 parts ooft**

🥰"Missing Persons 1 & 2"🍠
OneRepublic

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There is a well-known story of an end, of a fall, a loss turned anew.

The story is vaguely preceded by the appearance of an ancient being, a powerful creature of the night who feasts on blood and holds no remorse for humans. This Great being, Park Daebeom, presides over the rest of his breed as a direct descendant of the defeated Original Being. Park Daebeom rules over his breed with the assistance of a council and manages the regulations set for all those below him. The council also deals with matters of death, matters of treason within the mystical community, matters of marriage and bloodline and spirit.

And herein enters the protagonist of our story: Park Jaehyung — a vampire of noble mystic blood, one of the most ancient of his breed. He's been around since the fall of Park Daebeom's grandfather, the year of this death being the same as Jaehyung's year of birth. His mother is a cousin of Park Daebeom's, his father — a descendant of the original Deathbearer. Park Jaehyung's status is one of great prestige and purity, and, for this, Daebeom holds him in great honor.

Our story finally takes its start in the eighteenth century during the celebrations on the fifteenth day of the Lunar New Year.

It was the day of the festival of the Great Full Moon — Daeboreum. All the common-people were cracking nuts with their teeth, laughing with one another, or playing geuybulnori with their rings of fire to set right the fields for the rice crops which were soon to be planted.

Now, Park Jaehyung, having roamed the planet for ages, eons even at this point, had begun to lose his ambitions to live — he refused to take blood even from the worst of humans long ago, and so his heartbeat slowed within his chest dangerously. He was a gentle, sickly being, not fit for the solitary life led by most vampires, and this caught up to him dangerously. He had isolated himself from humanity, one day, in order to quell his desire for blood, and so he lived with a constant instinct to feed. With time, his heart had lost its beat altogether.

Jaehyung looked down over the fields which were aflame with licking lines of fire and smiling teeth belonging to celebrating mortals. He had climbed the Great mountain to its very peak in search of luck for these people he so graciously wished to protect. He knew a being like him could never keep them from harm, as he himself was a danger to these mortals, so he was stuck with only the option to wish for luck on their behalf. His toes trembled above the snow and the ice he was standing on. He was too weak to go on — his hunger drove him into bestial actions he knew could potentially harm the helpless people around him. He was too tired to hold a will to live... All he wished to do now was lose his life before anyone lost their soul and body because of him.

His pale, pale fingers wrapped over a stake set with steel engravings which he had prepared, quivered. His lip shook and an icy tear rolled down his cheek, stuck to his nearly-transparent skin from the freezing wind.

The stake swung towards his heart, but then there was a cry from behind him. Somebody grabbed onto Jaehyung's hands before he could so much as touch the tip of the weapon to his chest. The fingers covering the crying vampire's were warm, so contrastingly warm to the biting atmosphere around. The arms encircling him burned with a fire-like warmth. A smell of torches and chestnuts comfortingly tingled Jaehyung's nose. Then the aroma of fresh blood — warm beneath the fragile skin of a living body like milk boiling inside a kettle — washed over his senses. Jaehyung felt himself begin to grow crazy from desire. He shook from his tedious self-restraint, his body nearly at the point of thrashing. He was going to go mad, he was going cRA—

The vampire dropped the stake when a deep voice rumbled into his back. "Don't taint the pure snow with your precious life. Wait for death to come for you on its own."

The warm fingers moved away from his freezing ones to turn him around, and he now faced the stranger. Jaehyung's breath hitched. Sharp eyes sparked up at him, reflecting the grandiose moon's shine. Dark locks framed plump cheeks, lips quirked upwards in a bitter smile. "I—" The stranger's form was growing hazy, then sharp, then out of focus once more, over and over and o—

"Don't rush it. Hastiness brings only pain to those around you."

Jaehyung's hands were burning with the heat of the stranger's body from their position atop the man's chest. His pale cheeks burned, eyes widened from the sensation of being held, from his primal instincts.

This man smelled so good.

Jaehyung could hold back not much longer. His gut was stabbing itself from the inside, screaming for him to sink in his teeth, for him to fill himself to the brim with the blood of this Innocent. To taint the insides of his own body while sacrificing the one before him: the mortally warm one, the one holding him close and whispering comforting words to him. Jaehyung itched to ravage the man, to destroy him, to satiate all the vampyrical desires left long-neglected.

"I'll take you to my place, sound good? We'll get you warm, mm?"

Jaehyung's insides tore at him. He screeched inhumanly, and the stranger's shocked eyes peered over at him from somewhere behind split vision. In a last attempt to keep the man safe from him before his instinct fully took over, Jaehyung hissed out, "Get away; this vampire would rather die than kill..."

The man's arms only tightened around him. Jaehyung felt himself slip away remorsefully, the fear of killing the Innocent fading together with his control over himself. His mouth caved outward, exposed fangs made to carve out the throats of mortals.

The sensation of a warm mouth over his own dropped Jaehyung's screaming gut into itself. The man was kissing him. The man was willingly giving him his body.

Jaehyung's fangs sank into the stranger's bottom lip, drew blood. The man hissed, his grip on Jaehyung's shoulders tightened. Jaehyung's hands rose to encompass the man's neck, to cover it from his instincts while he hungrily lapped at the trembling man's punctured lip. The man hummed into the contact after releasing a choked sob. Jaehyung's fingers loosened slightly as some of the pulsing blood entered his system.

A few minutes later, Jaehyung finally felt himself slip into the right mind. His fingers let go of the man's neck. He made space between himself and the man and watched the mortal dizzily catch his breath, knowing that this clever Innocent had just saved himself, that he had also bonded himself to a vampire. "Your name," Jaehyung breathed out.

"Kang Younghyun," the man pushed out between heavy breaths. His lip trembled, and Jaehyung cursed his own bloodline and position. "And yours?"

Jaehyung pressed another greedy kiss to Younghyun's mouth, then licked away the trace of blood this left on his own lips. "Park Jaehyung."

Younghyun nodded. The blood from his lip dripped onto the pristine snow, and Jaehyung felt like dying all over. "H-hey..." Younghyun pulled Jaehyung close to him once more and tipped his mouth into a grimace-like grin. His heartbeat tumbled from his own chest onto Jae's still one. "I heard a human who kisses a vampire is tied to him forever. Is this true?"

Jaehyung nodded in remorse. "Right."

The grin grew wider, and Younghyun bit over his bottom lip to draw out some more blood. "Then why not go for another?"

His mouth leaned towards Jaehyung's, caught the vampire's upper lip. Jaehyung's eyes closed and his tongue responded to the alluring taste of the fresh blood cascading from Younghyun.

The vampire's once-still heart, stiffened by hunger and loneliness, let out a single dull yet miraculous beat.

A month passed, and Jaehyung found that Younghyun seemed to be moving closer to him, that he was itching for contact more often than usual. They would kiss three times a day — enough to subdue Jaehyung's hunger for him to be able to go out in public without feeling the desire to murder every mortal around — or, more often, Jaehyung would carefully suck a small portion of blood from Younghyun's neck. They had both grown closer emotionally over the span of the month, Jaehyung having opened up about his worries and his interests to Younghyun gradually from his first day living at the human's cozy home. Younghyun, in turn, had shared a good bit of information about himself. And yet... Younghyun so obviously wished to get closer to Jaehyung physically. They had never gone past a comfortably low level of skinship apart from the satiating kisses, and Younghyun seemed to want to amend this.

Younghyun's bold approaches wrought fear unto Jaehyung's mind. The vampire wasn't disgusted by the subtle touches on his wrist, his waist. He wasn't bothered a bit by the long-lasting hugs on the bed when he was reading a book or the spooning when Younghyun wanted to take a nap with him or Younghyun's fingers gently parting his hair to fix it where his bangs fell over his eyes because "Your eyes are small enough, I want to see that adorable blinking, so don't cover it!" and messing with the strands. No, on the contrary, he found every action touching, endearing even.

But the way his heartbeat was beginning to speed up whenever he was near Younghyun or even when he was only thinking about the man turned his entire body cold in dread. For if a vampire fell in love with a human...

That human would be taken to his or her death.

"A vampire's pure bloodstream cannot be tainted by a heart beating melodies of love," had always been voiced to Jaehyung by Daebeom and all the other vampires. Oh, how he detested that rule... In fact, he absolutely abhorred it. But the fact that he was against the rule didn't mean that he could break it; even more so, the punishment that came with the law drew him closer to these words and tied him to the hurtful syllables with the desire to never go out of line. Because the last thing he wanted was for the dear Younghyun to die prematurely.

So, on the day (a few more months down the line) when his heart was beating infinitely harder than usual, Jaehyung told Younghyun with stuttering voice and fluttering breath, "Maybe... M-maybe I should... T-tu—Turn you..."

Younghyun laughed, then, brushed Jaehyung's trembling hand away and took it into his gentle palm instead. Laced their fingers together. "No, no. Then whose blood will you drink? And whose will I drink?"

His eyes sent a crystalline twinkle to Jaehyung, and the vampire couldn't block out the thoughts he had been restraining for weeks any longer. "N-no," Jaehyung stammered, pulled his hand away. "I— I'm turning you right now." He reached out towards Younghyun with shaking hands and grasped the mortal's shoulders. "I— I love you," he whispered onto Younghyun's neck, his tears sliding down Younghyun's skin.

"I love you, too," murmured back Younghyun, and he lifted Jaehyung's face to connect the two of them into a tender kiss, a loving nip, a halting tug of the upper lip. Jaehyung's eyes fluttered shut and the tears left over in them slid down his cheeks in small rivulets akin to rivers of blood streaming down a mountainside. The vampire bit through his own lip. Next would come the piercing of Younghyun's lip for the transfer to take place.

Just as Jaehyung sighed out and prepared himself to transfer his blood into Younghyun's body to turn the mortal he had come to love, Younghyun fell away in a shower of sparks. Jaehyung cried out, chased after his beloved's fading fingertips, yet no matter how far he reached, all he could see were sparks, sense the singe of flying metallic embers and heartbreak. "I'll come back to you, my love, trust in me—" was the last cry he heard from Younghyun before the sparks were gone, replaced with a heap of burned clothing belonging to the mortal lying on the cold stone, and a feeling of unbearable emptiness took over Jaehyung's cavernous chest. The vampire fell to his knees with a heart-wrenching sob.

His heartbeat dulled second by second until all that was left in him was a hollow hunger and a cruel, pitiful sorrow.