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When Johnny was a kid, he was scared of most everything. Not just the dark, the monster in his closet, or puppets, thanks to that movie his big sister let him watch that turned gory. Nobody he knew had dreams like he did. Eyeballs hiding in spoonfuls of kimchi, spiders crawling out of the mouths of cats, warm rain that turned to blood.
At first his mom said that moving around so much probably unsettled him, and that was okay, he’d adjust to a new country quicker than he knew. When the dreams didn’t stop after that first year, she said he just had an active imagination, that he was artistic, they’d find a class at his new school to explore his creativity. When he was fourteen and still talking about flooded graveyards and caves full of bones she said maybe he should watch a little less television. Maybe they should consider therapy.
So he kept them to himself, after that.
On his eighteenth birthday he accidentally rips the bathroom door off its hinges, and his hearing is so sharp he worries he’s getting an ear infection. He chalks both up to too many hours at swim practice until Taeil turns up five days later and tells Johnny he’s a vampire slayer.
The Slayer, turns out. One and only.
🦇
Taeil’s alright. He’s the only Watcher Johnny’s ever had, so there’s no comparison, but still. He’s young, so he doesn’t talk to Johnny like a kid, and he takes Johnny’s dreams seriously. Treats them like omens, which sometimes they are. He gives Johnny books of lore to read, gives him a place to train, and he doesn’t bring up those first months, years ago, when Johnny didn’t want a damn thing to do with fighting monsters and wasn’t shy about saying so.
Taeil’s alright, but Taeyong is kind of a prick.
He came with Taeil, like his books and scrying crystals and trunk of medieval looking weapons. All in dusty black, with a fresh scar running from the corner of his eye down his cheek and a motorcycle Johnny wasn’t allowed to touch.
Where Taeil would say good try when Johnny was exhausted from training, frustrated with how he couldn’t translate all his newfound strength into dexterity, Taeyong would jab him hard in the sternum with the end of his staff until Johnny picked up his own again. Do better, he’d say.
🦇
“You’re lucky,” Taeyong says as they pick through a graveyard with only the moon to guide them. If Johnny suggests a flashlight, Taeyong will say that’s a great way to get killed, genius, ruin your night vision. “Cremation wasn’t always this popular. There’s not half as many fresh vamps as there used to be.”
“How would you know?” Johnny scoffs. He’s tired, his eyes gritty and hot, he was up all last night studying for an exam and instead of letting him crash Taeyong dragged him here. “What, were you out dusting vamps when you were ten?” He’s still not sure exactly how old Taeyong is, but his best guess hovers somewhere around thirty.
“My family was,” Taeyong says after a long silence, and in the dark Johnny can’t see his eyes.
🦇
In the space of five years, Johnny slays a master vampire, puts a ghost to rest, stops a vengeful witch from turning every cheating boyfriend in the city into a reptile, falls in love, gets dumped, makes friends at a demon bar, drives a horde of zombies that used to be Joseon warriors into the ocean, tanks out of university, and once, memorably, saves Taeyong’s life.
Other things, too, but that stands out.
If he stays busy with patrol and practicing with his crossbow, he can almost distract himself from thinking about slayers. How there’s only ever one at a time, Taeil told him. Those are the mechanics of it. One slayer dies, another one is called.
Taeyong doesn’t get the memo, because he never shuts up about it.
Keep your guard up or you’ll get yourself killed, he says. Always keep a stake on you or you’ll get yourself killed. Walk softer or it'll be the last thing you do.
Johnny kind of hates him for it, until he doesn’t.
Thing is, Taeyong might be stern and intense and impossible to please, but he’s not full of it. He might have a sweet face, when it isn't scowling, but his knuckles are all swollen round as marbles with how many years he’s been fighting, he’s got fang marks gouged deep into his arms, his neck, the scars layered over each other. Not like Johnny, who heals in days. No scars, not after all this time.
“You knew another slayer before you came to work with Taeil, didn’t you,” Johnny dares to ask once. Taeyong’s icing his bruised shoulder, leaning up against the kitchen sink, and he was in a friendly enough mood to invite Johnny back to his place for a beer after patrol.
Taeyong stares out the window so long Johnny’s finished his beer, and he’s wondering if he ought to just leave.
“I knew three.” Taeyong’s voice is hoarse, and back when they first met that was intimidating. Now he just sounds exhausted.
Johnny has a friend, a vampire who drinks pig’s blood out of his favorite mug and is never shy with gossip. Yuta says slayers don’t live so long, or that’s what he’s heard. He says they don’t tend to see the other side of thirty. They draw trouble like honey, like fresh blood. Johnny can see it. Every year he survives, every big bad he kills, word spreads. Vampires come looking for him now by name. They all want to be the one who bagged a slayer.
“You’re a good kid, Johnny,” Taeyong says suddenly, with a face like he’s being torn down the middle. It’s so unlike him that Johnny forgets to say he hasn’t been a kid in a long time.
🦇
When a person becomes a vampire, the person part goes away. The soul is gone, carved out, and a demon wears their face. Yuta's the only vampire Johnny ever met to have his soul sewn back in, and even then he says the demon is never really gone. He always feels it, like breath on his neck.
Johnny's dusted so many vamps he lost count years ago, but he still wonders, when he sees one in his funeral suit, or wearing her wedding ring, what kind of people they were. He wonders about the empty space they left in the world when they died, and who they could have been.
Sometimes the ashtray in Taeyong's kitchen window is full of fresh butts, even though he doesn't smoke. Sometimes when Johnny stops by the bed is unmade, an unfamiliar jacket thrown over a chair. Maybe Taeyong has hunter friends, and maybe they get to hear the stories he never tells Johnny about the slayers before him. About his mother. Maybe Taeyong unclenches his jaw and asks them to stay the night, and maybe they get to see Taeyong in the morning, when Johnny's always thought he looks softer, with the sun in his hair instead of cold moonlight.
He wonders even more about who Taeyong would be today, with all his family alive around him and no fear of monsters. Taeyong who cleans Johnny's wounds though they'll heal by morning. Once, after breaking up an underground demon fighting ring, when Johnny was so stiff and sore he couldn't even lift his arms above his head, Taeyong poured him a bath and washed his hair and never said a word about it.
Johnny thinks how some people are born cowards, like him, but the world doesn't let them stay that way. He thinks how other people are born gentle, or kind, and even when they hammer their pain into armor they can't quite hide it.
Kind eyes, he thinks, as he waves vamp ash from his face and watches Taeyong drop to his knees and call out to the little girl still huddled inside the tomb.
🦇
“Be quicker or you’ll get yourself killed,” Taeyong snaps, yanking Johnny back up to his feet in the graveyard dirt, and the heat of his palm lingers.
In his dreams Taeyong kisses him. He holds him by the face and says please don’t die.
🦇
“Do you need some water? You’re flushed,” Taeyong says, surprised, like he hasn’t spent the past hour adjusting Johnny’s stance and murmuring good, perfect, just like that near his ear when he follows instruction.
“Are you glad I’m still alive?’ Johnny hears himself ask, and for the life of him he can’t think why. He knows better. They’re friends, now. He likes how Taeyong doesn’t go easy on him, likes his hard callused hands and the rasp of his voice. Taeyong knows him better than anyone, better than Taeil even, better than his family. He makes six years feel like a lifetime.
Maybe that’s the trick of it, Johnny thinks. Cramming all that living in before your time runs out.
“I’m proud to know you,” Taeyong answers, thick like he’s holding blood in his mouth, and oh. That’s so much worse.
🦇
Taeyong is bleeding from his hairline and they both reek of smoke from the fire but he lets Johnny kiss him anyway. His thumb strokes under Johnny’s ear and he kisses him back until it begins to rain and soot runs in their eyes.
He lets Johnny undress him, too, and put his mouth all over his scars.
“You saved the world.” Taeyong has a palm over Johnny’s heart in the shower, there’s water running over his lips.
“We did.” The tiles are cold at his back and Taeyong is so warm against him, his hands on Johnny’s hips like an anchor. Like he won’t ever let go.
If Johnny added up every book he’s ever seen on slayers and their history, the stack would be taller than Taeil. Even Yuta knows stories of famous slayers, and how they died. Hundreds and hundreds of slayers, their names kept in tidy rows by the watchers council. Slayers are expendable and priceless all at once.
No book is ever going to record Taeyong’s name. There won’t be a tally of how many friends he buried, or how many lives he saved. How he never let Johnny patrol alone. How if you made him laugh he’d double over and wheeze with it, how he had such strong hands but they’re so careful with Johnny now.
In the big picture, the neverending war between good and evil, there’s no time for miracles like Taeyong. His hard mouth gone sweet when he swallows around Johnny’s cock. The way he gasps when he eases into Johnny and strokes his thigh to soothe him, resting their brows together until Johnny says it’s good, says please.
My body’s not mine, Johnny says, or maybe he only thinks it, all tangled up in thoughts of destiny, but I want it to be yours.
“I’m your weapon,” Taeyong promises, thrusts up harder and then tumbles Johnny onto his belly, fits himself between his thighs and sinks into him again like they were made for this. Like he built Johnny up by hand, every bone and sinew. He covers him in his heat and presses a hard kiss between his shoulders. “Keep me close.”