Briar Rose - Taekook

Chapter 36

Unedited shit, but im honestly too tired to change it. Im sorry for the long wait. When the weekend comes, I'll be able to update more frequently. 

5 years later

XXXVI: Jungkook

It had been five years.

Five years since I met Taehyung.

Five years since the war.

Five years since I became a vampire.

In those years, my life had been uprooted and changed completely, though, perhaps for the better.

The horrors of the war had stayed with me throughout the years, and sometimes I would wake up from nightmares crying and sweating. Every time, Taehyung had been there to hug me tight and whisper away the bad memories, staying with me until I fell asleep again. The next morning, I would find a cup of herbal tea at my bedside, along with a vial of a calm-inducing elixir. Taehyung would usually leave before I woke up, but he always left something on my bedside table. Sometimes it was a flower. Other times it was a note. Each time, it left me with a fuzzy feeling in my chest.

On a more painful topic, I had asked Taehyung to remove my existence from the mind of my parents, lest they go crazy with worry. He had accepted, and even though I saw clear reluctance on his face, he knew why I had to do it. But it was still very hard for me to watch them laugh with each other or talk about having kids without realizing that once, they had had a son. A son who was now a vampire living in another dimension.

I visited them frequently during the first year, just like Taehyung had visited me before. But when I realized that by doing so, I was only worsening the pain, my visits started to dwindle out. It didn't make the pain any less harder to bear until more than three years had passed. By then, there were so many things to do that I probably couldn't find time to visit my parents even if I still did. The only thing that I allowed myself to keep was the music box from my mother, which I had taken from our house long ago. I played it every night, and Taehyung would sometimes come to listen to it with me. He always said that the melody was beautiful.

I had also become more or less used to being a vampire as well as becoming queen of a clan. Drinking blood had become second nature to me, and I no longer thought of it as disgusting. I learned quickly that there were many responsibilities attached to becoming queen, such as attending annual meetings with the rulers of other clans. The first time I went, I was quite the topic of conversation: the king of the largest clan had finally found a queen after more than 300 years of searching.

Surprisingly, no one seemed to care much about me having human origins. It was either because they genuinely didn't mind, or courtesy of the fact that Taehyung's scim was resting on the wall next to him throughout the meeting, the blade shining as if still drenched in blood. It also didn't help that on my first year, the king of another clan tried to kiss me without my consent. Let us just say that he was unfortunate enough to meet the wrong side of Taehyung's blade. It landed him in the healing center for weeks.

Nobody tried to flirt with me after that.

But lately, Taehyung had become a bit more distant, spending more time in his office or talking to Yoongi in hushed tones. He barely ever showed up for breakfast anymore, and usually spent most of his days with the door. But whenever I asked him about it, he would only smile and say that he was fine. I was no fool; I knew that he was hiding something.

The question was, what?

XXXVI: Taehyung

It hurts.