Are You There - Chapter 48: Chapter 48

The transfer of a soul cannot be retrieved nor revoked. Somehow, Changkyun knows this as he sits beneath the cooling fan in Hyungwon's store office. Two blood packs lie empty at either side of him, his energy filled and his knowledge seeping in from nowhere specific. Hoseok and Minhyuk sit huddled beside one another deep in conversation, loud enough to be heard but speaking of nothing intriguing to hold Changkyun's attention.
The young vampire figures he is gaining new information from them, but does not dwell long on what he takes in. Souls this and incubus that; the words begin to run the same through Changkyun's mind. He does care to know a single syllable of it.
Jooheon lies asleep across Changkyun's lap, breathing slow and mind blank of most thoughts. It had taken a lot out of Hoseok to force the blonde into a deep enough slumber to keep him down, but the whole lot have not even caught a single eyelash flutter since Jooheon has gone under. None of them can handle his questions. None of them can handle having to ever explain the rest of their world to him.
"So the little one's soul has departed?" Hyungwon's voice is almost emotionless, Sunday's imminent approach drawing a callous attitude over the elder's shoulders. He wears his fear like a cloak, warding away any questions on his own state.
Hoseok nods, his legs folded almost in a meditative position. He is not quite relaxed on the floor, but he has come to terms with what he'll need to do here. "I can find where it's gone though,"
Hoseok speaks up. "Well, I guess I'll need Minhyuk's help, but I can find it."
Hyungwon's thin hand reaches up to his chin in thought; Changkyun's hand reaches down to push Jooheon's fringe back from his face; Minhyuk's hands fold complacently in his lap; Hoseok's hand reaches up as if to pluck Kihyun's soul straight from the empty air before him.
"The soul of an incubus will only find itself awoken in a newborn," Hyungwon points out dryly. He holds back a yawn, tired somehow though he has taken a full night's rest in the last week. "Why are you bothering to find him now? He won't have any answers for you, and you can't reverse it."
Hoseok glances down at Jooheon's resting form, the blonde's chest lifting and falling in a gentle rhythm. "Maybe you don't care, but Kihyun has a few ties left here that should be told about what's happened." Changkyun sits a bit straighter at that, startled by the idea of telling Jooheon or Hyunwoo anything about what has happened to Kihyun's soul. The vampire is confused on why he had not been handed over that idea straight from Hoseok's mind; he wonders if Minhyuk has anything to do with the wavering hold he has on Hoseok's thoughts.
"You don't expect people to believe you, right?" Changkyun glances down at Jooheon, his friend Hyunwoo on his mind. Sure, Hyunwoo has been grasping the news of otherworldly creatures well enough in the last few days. Kihyun had spoken to Changkyun about it in passing, and it was a nice change to see the incubus smile for proper reasons. But Hyunwoo will not handle this well in the slightest.
"Well, yeah." Hoseok almost rolls his eyes as he leans forward. "You can't expect me to actually wipe Jooheon and Kihyun's boyfriend both, right?"
Changkyun shrugs, his glances dodgy and squinted. "I don't think it would be that bad to just wipe him-"
"It didn't work for you last time," Minhyuk points out hotly. His cheeks are red when everyone spares him a glance, not expecting his tone to be so sharp. "Sorry," he murmurs weakly, his lashes low after one slow blink.
"He's right," Hyungwon puts in when nobody else makes any move to speak. Three pairs of eyes rise to meet their Master's, Hyungwon's closed in thought and easily avoided. "Changkyun, even with a fae's kiss, your little lover remembered you easily. You cannot completely delete someone."
"See? Even he gets it-"
Hyungwon lifts a hand to silence Hoseok, his eyes opened in an instant and commanding all the attention. "But I still find no purpose in locating a newborn's soul. Your dear leech will have no recollection of who he is until he's of age, if he makes it that far within this new life."
Changkyun purses his lips, struck by the idea of another brush with death this week. First it had been the pair of faes across from him. Then he himself had come close to a pile of dirt and ash. Jooheon had very literally been killed before him. But this one is permanent. This is a real death, brought down out of seemingly nothing.
Nobody even knows what has happened to Kihyun, or how he has come to meet the end. Or if he was merely being dramatic and has not passed forward at all.
"That's why we should find his soul," Hoseok pipes in, his eyes locked on Changkyun's as their thoughts pass between one another. The space between them, a rather steep ten feet, could be a mere ten centimetres with the way their souls connect so seamlessly. It makes Changkyun shuffle beneath Jooheon's weight across his legs.
"You just want answers?" Changkyun knows that is what Hoseok wants, though he is not sure how the fae intends to get them from a newborn with nine lives of men long dead now. "And you really think you can get them?"
Everyone bristles when Minhyuk's hand comes down to clasp over Hoseok's, a motion that seals whatever they are together. The telepath smiles up at his Master, aiming the full wattage towards Changkyun, and then sighs in content. "Whatever he can't do himself, I can help with. I wanna test what I can do too, so even if you two aren't on board, we're looking for Kihyun tonight."
Changkyun's hand works through Jooheon's hair again, a doting action he has not quite realized he is doing yet. He plays with the silky tendrils between his fingers, winding one particularly long chunk around his knuckle. "I wanna take Jooheon home first, but I'll meet you wherever you plan to go for this... I dunno, seance?"
Hoseok snickers, shrugging without any better word for the process. "My house it is then. It should be someplace I can stretch my own soul out of, and home is where the heart is so-"
Hyungwon stands suddenly, his desk scraping against the floor from the force of his action. The metal leg tears at the linoleum beneath it, a thin stripe coming up from the ground and quivering beside Hyungwon's booted foot.
"What?" Hoseok challenges, his frown immediate and his thoughts dark as his eyes trace over Hyungwon's expression. Though the vampire has every ability to kill Hoseok where he sits, the fae shows not a single sign of fear. Even his thoughts are clean of any trace wariness.
"Why are you three, my Claims might I add, so caught up in a creature that has only been reborn? Meanwhile, come this time in two days, I'll be killed before you all for my acts of treason-"
"You're not as important," Hoseok huffs as he stands from his place. His long sigh traces through the air, a warm current that smacks Hyungwon full in the face. The vampire's eye twitches as he stares down his nose at his oldest and newest disciple. "Of us here, none of us chose to be taken as your Claims, while all of us have had at least decent connections with Kihyun."
Changkyun rolls his eyes at that; the intent is there, and Hoseok's conviction is real, but neither of the vampires believe him for an instant. Raising his hand, Changkyun speaks from the floor. "I actually am okay being a Claim. Just means I'm alive for a little longer."
"Or dead that much sooner," Hoseok stabs at the vampire, his hands clenched into fists. "What d'you think the Counsel is gonna do to you after they kill Hyungwon, huh?"
Changkyun blinks, lost for a moment. He has not told Hoseok about his abilities. In fact, within the last few days, the memories of what had happened to Jooheon had faded as the lapse of time rewound itself. Changkyun's reality is something new now, and Hoseok has yet to tap into the old findings of his talents thus far. The vampire does not know what to say now, under heavy fire from one of his oldest friends.
"I suppose they'll gimme a chance," Changkyun mutters halfheartedly. It's all he can say at this point, just to hide his talents a little longer. He can feel that they will do nothing for Kihyun, and he does not want to be forced into a trial run of them just to feel drained for the second time today.
"They'll give you a chance to make your peace," Hoseok blurts. He is not angry with Changkyun, the vampire knows. The fae is merely angry with the situation. He is upset that someone has to die, someone else has to die. He is upset beyond relief that it may end up being someone he's come to consider a brother.
Hyungwon glances at his youngest, confused for a moment. In the slightest of whispers, so soft only another vampire could have heard him, Hyungwon speaks. "You've kept it a secret?"
Changkyun nods, an imperceptible motion to everyone aside from his Master. Lifting Jooheon from his legs as gently as possible, Changkyun stands their awkward pair up from the floor. The blonde sags into his side, comfortable against the vampire's unnaturally chilled body that warms only when Jooheon rests there. The vampire cannot fight the smile that hitches up the corners of his lips as he lifts his head towards the faes.
"I'll come around in a few hours." To Hoseok, he adds a sudden thought that does not sit right with the fae. Wait for me, in case you need the extra energy.
And without any other words, Changkyun hobbles from the shop with a sleeping blonde snaked around him like a cloak. Under the setting sun, a pair of dangerously opposing lovers stumble to an empty home waiting for no return.
[ x ]
"Is that a full moon?" Minhyuk groans at the sight even as his fingers let the drapes of Hoseok's den collide into one another. "Isn't that a horrible sign?" Hoseok glances towards the shrouded window, shrugging in silence as he arranges a few clay pots of oils. He has been arranging them for nearly thirty minutes now, and Minhyuk's impatient pacing has done nothing to help him.
"I really wish," Hoseok murmurs upon the start of Minhyuk's twelfth lap about the den, "that you'd have studied charms and incantations more closely." Minhyuk pauses near the window once more, a hand to his chest in slight embarrassment. "Or that you'd just sit down for now, because you're making me nervous."
The telepath does as he is told, taking the seat closest to the home's entrance to wait for Changkyun's arrival. The vampire texted Minhyuk only minutes ago to announce his departure from Jooheon's now empty home.
"Changkyun's here," Hoseok mutters when he has finally found the perfect placement for his oils around him. He is sat still on the floor, only his head and hands moving about as he organizes; Minhyuk is confused on how the fae could possibly know that the vampire has made it in, until the dark man lets himself in at the front door.
"Could you get outta my head?" He demands immediately, a hand at his ear as if to silence the fae's thoughts within his own mind. "I miss your silence."
Hoseok rolls his eyes but gestures for Changkyun to enter. The vampire is tentative once the front door is shut, his eyes combing over the many small pots surrounding Hoseok on the floor. It is not quite a circle, but more an arc at both his sides. He can smell a diverse round of woodsy scents, all mingling with the natural stenches of the faes before him.
"Are you playing with essential oils?" Changkyun questions as he settles onto Hoseok's long sofa. The fae glares up from the floor, at a loss for words.
They are in fact essential oils, all crafted behind the walls of his family's tea shop and meant for many different uses. One of which is the creation of portals for the fae specialized in spirit to use. "I'm not playing," Hoseok defends. "I've created an offering."
Changkyun sniffs at the air, his nose wrinkling at the overpowering scent of teakwood. "Kihyun would probably prefer vanilla, but have it your way."
"It's not for Kihyun," Minhyuk explains from his place near the door still. His eyes blink between both men, wondering how exactly to explain it. "It's for his soul, but not Kihyun anymore. Each oil is meant to entice the soul of an incubus, not a specific life he has lived."
Changkyun mulls over that for a moment, wondering what exactly he is about to witness. "So this really isn't a seance?"
Hoseok shakes his head, running his hands through his hair tiredly. "We're not calling the dead Kihyun. He's just a body at this point. We're calling the soul that left Kihyun, and whatever name that now comes with it."
Changkyun chuckles to himself, a slew of horrid names cropping up in his mind. "Do you think he's been reborn as an American?"
Hoseok shakes his head, none-too-eager to explain everything to someone still new to this life. Minhyuk beats him too it, thankfully, and does so far more gracefully than Hoseok ever could.
"Incubus souls refuse to travel far," he admits easily. "As soon as there's a spare body, it jumps. The incubus works as a parasite even when without a host; whatever unsuspecting newborn entered the world closest to Kihyun's passing will have taken the soul in without even a fight."
"Don't babies have their own souls?" Changkyun's question earns him two chuckles, his eyebrows knitting together at the pair when they don't offer an answer. "Well don't they?"
"They only know bright lights and the sound of their mother's voice," Minhyuk blurts around his hands. "Perhaps they do have souls, but they've barely made it into the open air of the world; they don't need the small soul they have now. An incubus can grown up all over again within the child, coming of age around ten and finding the lives of many before him all within his head."
Sounds terrible, Changkyun thinks to himself. He does not miss Hoseok's nod, clearly having heard the vampire's thoughts.
"Well, if class is over," Hoseok states quietly with his eyes on the floor between his legs. Changkyun straightens a bit in his seat, Minhyuk doing the same across the room. "I suppose now is as good a time as any. Let's get started."
[ x ]
"Are you sure you don't want to hold him-"
"No." The woman lies in bed, her expression stoic despite the sweat on her brow and the rampant heart monitor beside her. Her husband, scrawling his signature just now across page after page of divorce documents, should be at her bedside. She faces the window and waits for the nurse to take her son away.
She had gone through nine hours of labor to have this child, and the damn man that had put him there is not even around. She cannot believe she has brought herself into this situation. She cannot believe she let herself fall for a man that clearly had not a single ounce of love for her in return.
"We can try to feed him if you'd like-"
"I don't want him." The woman's voice is cold, and the child across the room simpers at the sound. He recognizes his own mother's voice, only taken from her a short while ago. His dark eyes, alike that of his father's, squint and crease amidst a storm of tears as he wails for his mother's touch. "Take him away," the woman adds, flinching each time the child cries out.
"You haven't worked out an adoption. You have to sign his birth certificate so we can arrange things for you instead."
Sitting upright, the woman glares with the strength of sabers behind her eyes. She holds her hand out, beckoning with her fingers for whatever she has to sign. It takes two hours to figure out what to call the child, knowing it ought to be something good if the boy is meant to walk around with it for the rest of his life. She catches only a glimpse of her son when a nurse tries ardently once more to have the woman attempt to nurse her young. The name almost spouts from the pen onto paper upon that single glance.
It just seems right, as if in another life, the man this child once was could have been called by it as well.
Scrawling across the paper messily, knowing it will only be reprinted later on. The nurse and her paired hospital caseworker part without bothering to glance at the paper. The child could be named Dong Dong and neither would care much.
The nurse finally glances at the script when she reaches her station, filing away the paper for a later time when it will be notarized. "Kihyun," she murmurs, her fingers tracing over the dried ink in thought. She quite likes the name. It seems to fit a young boy; his life is in the open, the hands of strangers now. He is vulnerable here.
"Fitting," she sighs with finality as she slides her filing cabinet drawer closed, the lock clicking home in the silent station.
for y'all that don't know, Ki-hyun means foundation-visible. to reveal one's inner-workings or roots, as infants do