Your Vanilla Scent (Junhao)

Myungho

It wasn't until Myungho got home and started drawing, sitting cross-legged on the floor of his living room, his pencil sketching an all-too-familiar female face, that the bad thoughts and feelings surfaced again.

He considered Jeonghan's anger toward Myungho's maker, his clear irritation with Myungho for his inability to renounce her.

Myungho couldn't help feeling like it was just a bit unfair though. Myungho and Jeonghan were different in that way; they always had been. They may have been raised in the same toxic den, taught the same lessons: obey your maker, humans are cattle, no vampire makes it alone in the outside world. But Jeonghan had been brave—he'd always been so brave—and he'd escaped anyway.

True, Jeonghan's maker had definitely been the kind of vampire to run from; Hendrick had been much crueler, more physically violent, and more aggressive than Vee. And he'd wanted certain things from Jeonghan Vee had never wanted from Myungho. Vee had wanted a...servant, Myungho supposed it came down to. And not of the sexual kind. Someone to keep things neat and tidy and put on a good face for visitors. Someone to keep her company—reading quietly or playing the piano concertos she'd taught him—during the long, cold nights. Someone to never talk back and never contradict her and never look dirty or unkempt or wild. And as long as he'd done all those things perfectly, she'd been...kind. She hadn't yelled or hit. Sometimes she'd even hugged him, or praised him when he'd done a particularly good job. Those were the very best moments,

And if he hadn't done all those things absolutely perfectly, then Myungho had been simply...left alone.

Which wasn't so bad, right? Not compared to what Jeonghan had been through, that was for sure.

Locked in a room by himself for hours or days, nothing to look at or play with or read. It could have been worse. Myungho had learned to pass the time in his head. He sometimes still did, even without meaning to. He sometimes lost hours that way.

It didn't happen when he was around people though.

Myungho's pencil paused. His throat felt thick, like it was hard to swallow. He wished he weren't alone now. He wished...

He wanted to call Jun, to ask the human to distract him with his good smell and his nice hands. But calling someone in the middle of the night, just because he was lonely...that was for boyfriends, wasn't it? Jun wasn't Myungho's boyfriend.

Myungho was never going to get to have a boyfriend, was he?

Myungho stabbed his pencil back into his paper, running back over the familiar lines, an angry, roiling heat filling his gut. He shouldn't mind being alone. He should be able to be brave. He should be able to raise his voice at the dinner table without feeling like he needed to be punished.

Myungho tried it, tried tasting the words out loud. "Fucking Veronique." He tried again, putting as much spite and malice as he could into the words. "Fucking Veronique."

It wasn't enough.

He scribbled over his drawing, crossing out the eyes with heavy, repeated strokes. He turned the whole page into a mass of gray-black sludge, then crumpled it into a little ball and threw it at the wall. Fucking Veronique.

He started on a new paper, a new face. A long, straight nose. Pretty eyes with so many different colors, none of which Myungho could capture with just a pencil, but the kindness in them he could. The way that stern brow turned soft just for Myungho. The little crinkles at the corners of those eyes when they were smiling at him, telling him he was good and perfect and gorgeous.

Myungho let the motions of his pencil soothe him.

He was growing. He was changing. He was.

He could be more than what his maker had made of him.