Chapter Text
If you are reading this, then the tale of my life is finished.
What do I mean by finished? Well, it means that I died.
You'll probably panic at this statement at first but I don't mean that I died in the sense that's written in the dictionary. I'm not buried six feet underground, locked into a heavy coffin with a headstone marking my grave where people will leave flowers as a token of remembrance — well, certainly there is a grave, but I’m nowhere near that place. How does that famous poem go?
‘Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep.’
I'm dead, in the sense that I never outrunned death. I did die, as my heart stopped beating and I stopped breathing. I died to my family, who still wonder what went wrong, where did they lose me completely and will always wonder if there was anything they could've done to prevent my death (there wasn't).
Instead, I outlasted death.
How, you may ask. Well, the story you'll read will tell you all the sordid details of how I managed to archive this great feat. But the shortest answer that I can give you it's that there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
I was once a human like you, don't think that I haven't ever been in your shoes. I had a family, a job, and friends. I was an ordinary guy just as anyone out there, there was certainly nothing very special about my life. I expected that it would be like this till the end of my days, nothing would change much. I didn't ever even expect marriage or had any plans to share my life with someone. I was essentially married to my job, and maybe it was that specific circumstance that allowed me to become what I am today.
It was because of my job that I met him.
Notice that I never said ‘through my job’, not, it was because of it that I met the man that changed the entire course of my life. If I had not decided to take on that job, if I had not gone to that house, then I would've never met the one who crossed the oceans of time to take hold of my heart with his claws and sharp teeth and claimed me as his for eternity.
Sometimes I wonder if my whole life was planned ahead of me by fate, if everything I ever did and ever was while still human was always supposed to culminate into our encounter. He seems to agree on that, being centuries older than I am, in only my 34 years of life and death.
He, who is the corrupt angel — almost preternaturally handsome, in its louchy qualities that hit of unspoken depravity. He, who is the demon of my dreams, the most handsome of all angels. He, whose lips were wine — scarlet madness. And made me want them, want their bite and their gentle, strangled agony. I wanted him even when I knew that wasn’t wine in his mouth; that it was blood and the taste was mine.
The immortal one. The lonely one.
The shameful curse of immortality is the loneliness that follows all death. Death cannot claim beings like us, so it simply seeps into all that we are, infects any chance of warmth from gracing our cold dead skin. For which living being in sane mind could love a monster? Not even God can love the damned, so left to us is to find comfort in searching for love through all eternity.
He found it in me.
His love seeped into my veins like Paganini and morphine. One sip, one taste, one touch, one intoxicating kiss…I was never the same.
I write this from a rented room back in Korea. It's hot here, but it's raining pretty heavily outside — I can, if I wish, hear the raindrops hitting leaves outside with my skin, feel the molecules of wet earth opening and sprouting; it seems as though time stops between raindrops distinctly hitting the slate roof tiles in groups of ten or twenty. Moments like this make me insist and insist that we vampires are certainly not undead ghouls; as I sit in this chair typing this on a cheap second-hand laptop, sniffing the wet peat of long-dead, long buried people wafting from a mile away at the nearby cemetery, I feel more alive than any human creature ever felt.
Nonetheless, the sight of my angelic, lupine lover would please me no end. I haven't seen him for weeks. A week to me is a long time; I am mostly solitary and often idle, and other humans interpret my moody demeanor as aloofness. I'm sure the other people at this place think I'm just some odd guy who never sees any sunlight, one of those ice kings who wears a leather jacket to spend his night at clubs, but still spends the evenings locked in his house reading countless books.
My dearest friends are dead or far away. I miss them all, our conversations, the countless laughs. The last few years after my death that I spent with Namjoon and Jin, I feel that we became a strange little family. Going to the bookstore and record store with Namjoon and spending the nights talking about whatever book we bought or dancing to some new record we found. I remember Jin's laugh as we watched random movies and TV shows in Namjoon's big bed or how he would drag me to parties in strange places all over Paris, and I miss them so much it hurts. I hope we can meet again soon and go back doing all that and more.
In that other life, that human life, so sane and silicone in comparison with this, it feels like it was about a million years ago, or maybe it was only a few. I was then, as I am now, Park Jimin, twenty nine years old, born in Busan, heir of a construction and restoration company, lover of plain black outfits that mainly involved jeans and sweatshirts, and romantic action films, and prone to blasting music in his headphones while writing his biography in a shitty computer during a rainstorm.
So I've been thinking about everything, reviewing it in my mind; we vampires have the trait of having very sharp memories. Some of us get extremely testy, some stop caring about anything they've said or done, and some, like me I guess, just step back and quantify. Thinking about the past gives me something to do, a back-process in my mind to pass the time, the inexorable time, the excruciating waiting room of eternity that extends itself in front of me.
For all the beings in my extended immortal family, the transformation occurred at a particularly touchy time in a person's life, especially for those of us of the twenty first century — that time in one's life where living becomes an effort for the first time. I was not old enough yet to see life as a blessing, as something to be treasured and appreciated as it goes along. The very young take it in stride, take it for granted in fact, that the immortality that they feel inside is the real thing. After the age of forty or so, some people grasp at it desperately, see it as a grand cure for their failing eyesight, graying temples, and temperamental joints. All I saw before me was years and more years of degeneration, and the gradual loss of my youth, a boring life alone was all that I could envision…Because let's face it, humans are social creatures, as much as one claims they don't like people, we still need company from time to time to some degree.
I'm not unhappy. Quite the opposite. I know myself now to an extent that would have been impossible otherwise, and I like what I know. I just wish it wasn't so hard, you know… So many deaths already and how infinitely many deaths to come?
I won't distract you with pretty stories. I'll tell you with my sharp supernatural memory how I came to see through darkness. I'll tell you how I met my fallen angel of black wings, the angel of Death itself, and our bloody and violent love story.
Darkness is its own kingdom, my friend. It moves to its own laws and many creatures live in it. Me and him are such creatures, and this is our story — entwined in red rings of love, loneliness…
And death.
So much death.