There are many nights he finds himself ravaged by night phantasms. They’re in the form of a woman with long hair, ghostly eyes and bloodcurdling lips. Usually, she hums a melody to him. Those strange, empty notes carry with them no joyousness. A nursery song sung in minor, for a funeral rather than for a child’s ears.
Yet there’s inexplicable comfort when he hears it. The nights Noah spends with her are the nights he cherishes, no matter how much it breaks him when he feels himself being hard-pressed against the wall, his throat caught in a strangle, the left of his pectoral sliced and bleeding out.
“Stop it,” he tries to call out. “What are you doing?”
She doesn’t hear him, as always, and then gradually, his oxygen cuts off. He’s so weak he doesn’t care to struggle – and this is his retribution, he supposes, so he allows it. It always ends the same way – he slumps onto the ground, feels pain but not really physical, and then his vision blurs.
Black out.
He wakes up, abnormally calm. Unfamiliar ceiling, unfamiliar walls, copper-tinted candles. He raises a hand to block his eyes and then sighs softly. He waits for the buzzing in his ears to calm down before lifting his head and propping himself up with his elbows.
He stares emotionlessly at the person hovering over him.
“…”
Noah, half-undressed on the bed, sees Colonel Yang fully trying to undress him. Yang Rong has one hand placed on the lower of his navel and the other on his black trousers, tugging the waistband closer to his nether. No matter from which angle, the posture they’re in holds no good implication.
The two of them are frozen in position. In such a close distance, Noah feels the heat radiating from the colonel’s body, smells the faint sandalwood shampoo from his hair, the contrasting agave from his soap and some naturally masculine balm – alpha-like but not unpleasant enough for him to recoil. He is lost in a daze.
“Little kitten, how about you wake up five minutes later?”
Yang Rong recovers first. The man playfully slides his calluses over the lean of his abdomen. His eyes are smiling.
“Don’t throw a fuss,” the man continues without waiting. “Your Rong-ge was helping you wash your body. If not for me, you’d be covered in sweat. How about you thank me for my hard work instead?”
Noah is suddenly so drained. He was fine before but now there’s a tingle on the back of his throat. He’s parched. It’s been too long since he’d fed on anything and his animalistic body, so inconvenient, is straining for sustenance. Colonel Yang, right in front of him, is a prime target.
The desire itches more and more until his head begins to throb. He’d miscalculated so gravely because he feels his carnal side threatening to shift – and he can’t, not in such an unfamiliar environment.
Yang Rong, unaware, slaps him lightly on the hip. He leans forward and lowers his voice into a teasing whisper. “What’s wrong? Are you shy?”
Noah finally opens his mouth. “…Get lost.”
“Are you normally so—”
Noah lifts his leg to kick him off. The colonel intuitively grabs his calf and stops the blow. Surprise is rampant on the colonel’s face. Yang Rong tries to speak again but Noah, unrelenting, twists his own body, throws himself forward and shoves the man down on the bed. The scuffle is chaotic – entangled limbs, frenzied eyes, light and raspy breaths.
The bedsheets pool to the side, wrinkled and worn, as the two one-up each other – Noah using more and more strength and Yang Rong retaliating by stopping him.
“Noah,” the man begins again before Noah resolutely slams their foreheads together, eliciting a pained grunt from them both. Yang Rong hisses and then, finally fed up, grabs him and pushes him down, locking him firmly onto the mattress.
He tries to shift away but the colonel forcefully binds his wrists overhead and locks his movements with his knees. He struggles under the hold but Yang Rong doesn’t allow him a chance to break free, tightening his grip even more. Unknown pain sears from his forearm and Noah flinches, only now feeling the brunt of his injuries opening up.
“Noah.”
The colonel’s voice saps him of all his strength, the commanding edge behind it prying straight inside his mind, forcing him to yield. Again, Noah is submitting to those nauseating pheromones – he hates it so terribly he’d rather die, but his body would not listen. Yang Rong senses his discomfort and softens his grip so as to not hurt him. It’s still strong enough to bind, however.
“Shh… relax,” Yang Rong murmurs. “Look at me, hmm?”
He doesn’t. Instead, he turns his head away to the side, squeezes his eyes shut and takes deep, shuddering breaths. His heart doesn’t calm. It’s so easy to lose control – one more trigger and he won’t know if he’ll cause another bloodbath.
“…Don’t come near,” he says.
“You were so clingy before,” Yang Rong leans closer and says close to his ears, “Putting your head on my shoulder, holding onto me in your sleep, rubbing your body against me… I still haven’t received compensation yet and now you’re attacking me. Taking advantage of me like this would be a dine-and-dash, wouldn’t it?”
Noah furrows his brows and turns to refute.
It was on purpose – Noah realizes too late – that the colonel egged him on. He’s startled when the colonel suddenly cups his chin, preventing him turning back. Yang Rong meets his gaze.
“Oh?” The man muses, “You are shy because of your eyes?”
“…” Noah uses his now-freed left hand to push him away but to no avail. The colonel’s body is unnecessarily built and sturdy as a rock, and after a while longer, Noah gives up and settles for covering his eyes with the back of his hand.
Yang Rong sounds pleased by the lack of resistance now. However, he still insists on hovering closer, tilting Noah’s face so he can catch a better glimpse. The younger man squeezes his eyes shut again, not yielding to the silent command.
“Not letting me see?” the colonel whispers, their proximity so close he can feel the warm breaths ghosting on his face. It’s a blatant violation of space and Noah is shrinking back when Yang Rong, too obviously enjoying his position of dominance, takes ahold of his pale hand and guides it away.
Radiant golden on his left and wintry blue on the right, vertical slits in lieu of round pupils – Noah’s eyes have always been peculiar, animalistic, and not mesmerizing like how Yang Rong is studying them out to be. He’s a little insecure when the man stares so intensely. The colonel had always known him to be different but it’s the first Noah’s been so laid out for him to see.
“How much longer will you stare?” he grunts out coarsely, still feeling the craving and heat in his system.
“Very cute.” Yang Rong’s lips curve. “Do you have other traits?”
“No.”
“I wonder how scientifically possible it would be for you to have a tail. How about paws? Perhaps whiskers?” Yang Rong murmurs, “Show me?”
A wave of vertigo crashes into him and Noah is lost somewhere between hunger and daze. Noah looks up with half-lidded eyes, his face abnormally flushed and tinted caramel orange from candlelight. Exertion weighs down on him and he licks his dry lips. “Colonel Yang, I need to…”
Yang Rong follows the movements of his tongue. “What do you need?”
Noah feels the stinging pain on his gums – his teeth, his canines especially, are forming sharper and sharper. He scrapes his tongue over the molars in an attempt to repress, but he only gets nicked in return. The colonel is still watching him with a look of interest – leisurely, as if Noah isn’t struggling under him – and it’s exactly this superciliousness that Noah harbors such ill regards toward him.
He winces.
“Do you think you can turn completely?” Yang Rong asks him matter-of-factly as if the request were that simple. “I would be very pleased to see.”
He’s looking at him with those self-assured, forest green eyes, telling him to show him something more interesting – and Noah’s only an interesting specie to look at, isn’t he?
“I can’t,” he whispers slowly. “I don’t know how.”
At that, Yang Rong raises an eyebrow. “You can’t control it?”
“I’m not usually… like this.” Noah has half a mind to glare at him now – wouldn’t it be easier to kill him and get it over with? Yang Rong is quite dispensable after all. He squirms again, but of course, the man doesn’t let him go. Beads of sweat dot across his forehead. He grits his teeth and spits out, “Colonel. Yang. If you continue pressing me down, I will eat you alive, you bastard, I can’t—”
“Such colorful words,” Yang Rong laughs lowly. “But I think I’m more prone to eating you alive right now?”
He belatedly realizes that it’s true the both of them are enemies. There’s no way Colonel Yang would let him deter this topic for long – the topic of his origin, that is, and Noah is pressed to surrender. There’s vulnerability in being straddled onto the mattress, his body locked, his torso bare and sheened with sweat. The firm grip on his carpals is making him more and more delirious. His carnal itch is begging for sustenance and it’s physically torturous. Noah lets out a defeated whine.
“…Yang Rong,” he murmurs softly, “it hurts…”
The colonel looks at him with an indescribable gaze. He is staring so fixatedly at his lips, rosy and saliva-slicked, parted to reveal an emerging white fang. A small trail of blood makes way down the vermillion. Five seconds later, Yang Rong speaks, finally, the jut of his Adam’s apple moving per syllable. “…Where does it hurt?”
Yang Rong releases the hold on his wrist and circles a thumb over the lower of his lip. The sensation of warmth baits him and his sensory is in overdrive. Noah thinks numbly that this is going to escalate, that it’s the pheromones drawing him in, that he really shouldn’t be so craved for this. He doesn’t register when Yang Rong smears saliva across his lips, dragging his thumb to the opening. Noah is so dazed he voluntarily parts his mouth to receive it.
“Here?” Yang Rong whispers, a little too close than appropriate. He slides in an index finger, testing, teasing, before pressing gently on the roof his mouth, forcing Noah to open more. There’s a flash of something dangerous in those dark-green eyes, ironically more carnal and more ravenous than his own. Darkened pupils, dilated to the extreme, a titillating red glint in the center. He continues, licking his lips. “Little kitten, you may not be aware but right now, you look—"
Noah grabs his hand and violently surges forward, pulling the other man flush against his body.
His bared fangs scrape the side of Yang Rong’s fingers, letting out light dribbles of blood – and to the latter’s surprise, Noah licks it up cleanly, hungrily, and lowers his head to nibble further down the palm, the wrist…
It’s before his teeth pierces a protruding green vein that Noah stiffens up, widens his eyes and practically flings the colonel away from him.
“—Fuck,” he gasps, rubbing his lips raw, scraping away the blood he’d just lapped up. He’s so frazzled it’s almost comical when he starts spewing out a string of curses, the aftermath of what he’d done colliding him at full force. It’s not difficult to make out the panic in his expression. “Fuck. Fuck, Yang Rong, you—”
The colonel, pushed to the end of the bed, is still looking at him with an inquiring yet indescribable expression – and why he’s out of it, Noah is uncertain. Interestingly enough, right after he had pushed the man away, Noah quickly goes and straddles him against the edge frame.
“Quickly, give me your knife,” he says in a single breath, reaching behind the colonel’s waist and grabbing a metallic dagger from the belt sheath. Noah seems to be too comfortable with pilfering, not even caring to ask why he has the weapon with him in the first place. “Give me your hand. I’m going to cut—”
Yang Rong stops him by seizing his forearm. To Noah’s utter frenzy, the colonel is oddly calm and… smirking. He’s enjoying every bit of this, watching Noah squirm under his gaze, taking control because he can. Yang Rong has a sadistic and unrestrained personality.
He says teasingly, “I’ve figured it out. You’re not a cat, but a vampire.”
“…” Noah doesn’t care to indulge. “I might have infected you.”
Yang Rong lifts his right hand and studies the marks with interest. Two light pricks on the side of his index finger and red blood on his calluses, glossed with saliva. His lips curve. “It would be interesting if you did infect me.”
“You are… mentally cracked,” he settles. Noah sounds hesitant, a little scared even, that he’d get killed on the spot. A mysterious hybrid, a confirmed anomaly who bit a colonel and drank a small drip of his blood. He turns away, the fluster apparent on his face. “What will you do right now?”
The previous incident had temporarily shocked him out of his muddled state. The tingles in his throat remind him how crazed he is. He’s speaking face-to-face with the person he’d bitten – the consequences of all this frighten him.
Yang Rong radiates body heat from an inch away. Noah is so aware that the man can easily stab him right now – it’s why he brought the knife, isn’t it? Just in case.
“That’s right,” the colonel says mysteriously. “What should I do with you?”
“…I don’t want to go to the Nexus,” he whispers.
“Hm.”
“I also will not let you kill me.”
Yang Rong hums again. “I see.”
“You…” Noah rephrases his question carefully, weighing each syllable before turning to meet gazes with the colonel. The dimness of the room makes the atmosphere more pronounced, engulfing it with heavy fog. Suffocating, nerve-wracking. He clears his throat. “For my freedom, what can I offer you?”
