penumbra

Chap. 28 - Shattered Grounds

The sun had already set. Another whole day of hiding in the garden had gone by. He just had to wait for another twenty years or so to finally be able to get out of that house once in a while... Hopefully it wouldn't take longer than that for the public to forget his face, but maybe it was prudent to actually wait twenty five or thirty years.

Two years had passed since he was brought into that coven, and every now and then it was still such a pain in the ass to deal with everybody. But then again, he was never much of a patient individual to begin with.

He'd fallen in love with his damn doctor then had his life saved by him when he tried to kill himself. Jongho hadn't believed the offer at first. Getting his voice back and rid of his crazed mother who'd made him a fucking dance monkey since childhood? That sounded too dreamlike. He was unbelieving and nearly delirious from blood loss at the time but simply said yes in the end. He hadn't expected to be basically locked inside a huge house for decades because he was too much of a public figure, nor had he expected to be sharing said house with such different people.

On top of it all... He hadn't known he would be losing his humanity forever. It was a bit of an issue, indeed. Every once in a while he'd be overcome by anxiety and dread from not being fully alive anymore, loathing his unnatural existence simply because he couldn't make sense of it, somehow spiraling from the thought that he wasn't really 'there' or 'him' anymore. Everything in him was frozen and dead now, his life wouldn't go anywhere from where he was stuck in time... There was no life left to go anywhere anyway.

That was for sure what made him so grumpy all the time. It's not like he didn't know.

He did wish that it wouldn't put that much of a strain on his relationship with his sire. Jongho did love Yeosang, and he was indeed also able to develop his own kind of relationship with the other two people the older was directly involved with, but in the end everything was just so... hard. It was hard to approach people, hard to understand them, to put himself in their shoes sometimes. He hadn't properly learned how to do it growing up. He could be hardened and snappy and snarky on the outside, but on the inside he just... didn't know any better. And he wished he did. Jongho wasn't stupid, he saw how hurt he could make people feel, but there was always something pulling him back when he thought about opening up to others.

He sighed, getting lost in his own overthinking again as he got into the house through the glass sliding doors that led to the living room. As soon as he lifted his gaze a bit, he noticed Yeosang walking back and forth, nervous and restless. That was certainly unusual. His sire always tended to be extremely calm and collected, very patient and level-headed. It was rare for something to actually manage to make him so on edge like that.

"Yeosang?" he called Yeosang as he approached. The older immediately looked up at him, a nervous smile appearing on his face. "What's wrong?"

His sire swiftly walked up to him. "It's nothing, my love... Don't you worry about it."

Jongho dodged a hand the blonde tried to gently reach for his shoulder, already getting a bad feeling about the situation. "There's clearly something bothering you. I never see you restless like that."

Before Yeosang could even begin to formulate an answer, Jongho heard a car parking outside. The older still tried to play it cool.

"Jongho, I really don't want you to worry about this-"

The door flung open the very next second. The poignant metallic smell of blood assaulted Jongho's nostrils.

Firstly, Wooyoung ran inside whilst holding someone clearly taller than him in his arms. The unconscious young man's feet and the tips of his fingers were reddened, he had bleached platinum blonde hair and was most definitely a human by his smell. Jongho also recognized his scent. That person had been inside the house before. His feet and the tips of his fingers looked reddened.