We Are Bulletproof

( 's all good.)

Jae let out a noise not unlike the roar of the wind and the storm and the thunder crashing down over their heads, wild, feral and untamed at the height of ecstasy. But then it was over, with one last spasm that took him deep inside of Gunji, emptying all of the fire and the heat into his unresisting body. Jae would have liked him to put up more of a fight... but he wasn't complaining.

At least he was coming out of this relatively unscathed, with only a bite on the shoulder.

Almost affectionately, he nuzzled at the back of Gunji's neck, with a pleased and satiated wolf-like growl. Afterglow was a brief moment of peace, when the storm inside abated while the one outside raged just as fiercely as ever. Jae closed his eyes momentarily; the warmth between their bodies lasted a brief heartbeat. Then, not particularly carefully, he pulled out and stepped away, studying Gunji's bowed back. The trickle of something dark slipping down between his legs, mingling with the rainwater that slid in rivulets against his pale skin, made Jae smile--grimly.

Without a word, he shifted again, smoothly assuming the bulky and ferocious form of a large gray wolf. The golden eyes still pierced through the darkness and blinked once against the sheeting rain. Then he turned away.

There was no art to Jae's touches, no subtlety in the way his hands roved to obvious places. He was barely human and mostly animal, turned feral by the virus that had claimed him and countless others. Nothing close to guilt or shame or sympathy was felt, either; there was no reason to feel any of those things. This was simply the natural order of things--it was the way things had to be between them.

He was pleased, however, as his ministrations evoked a response out of Gunji. Maybe the response wasn't exactly enthusiastic but it was a far cry from struggling and maintaining that they weren't doing this. Jae's lips curved into an almost smug smile as he slid into place behind Gunji, hands stroking long, long lines down his back, nails clipping the cool wetness of his skin.

Rain still lashed down on them; wind howled in their ears, drowning out the softest of contented rumbling issuing from the back of Jae's throat. His fingertips followed the slight curve of Gunji's spine to his ass. He parted him, with hardly any thought for preparation. Lube? Condoms? Not in Jae's world. The only warning he gave was the nip of sharp teeth against Gunji's shoulder--a nearly playful gesture--and the shift of Jae's hips as he aligned himself into place. Then he pushed into velvet heat, riding a slow and steady rhythm almost immediately, with hardly any time for adjustment.

Jae rolled his hips as his head dipped low; his tongue flicked out, tasting the dewy rain, the faint sweetness of Gunji's skin at the back of his neck. He growled--Mine--possessively as their bodies met pleasurably, came away and met again, though far less violently than the struggling earlier. Jae wasn't careful but his purpose wasn't to rip Gunji apart, either. Gunji was a vampire, anyway; he could heal himself afterwards off of any unsuspecting human's blood. Jae wasn't worried about hurting him; he had his own selfish desires to satisfy.

Words never meant a hell of a lot to Jae--not when he communicated mostly in growls and body language. Stop, no, don't, anything that Gunji said fell mostly on deaf ears. Jae didn't think he could have been more clear about his intentions. It was Gunji who wasn't getting it through his head that this was happening.

This was happening.

Whether he wanted it or not.

Jae fell back a pace at the shove but then he came right back, grabbing the arm that had wriggled free and using it to spin Gunji around. He pushed hard to get him back up against the wall and then sandwiched him against it, between wall and body. "No," Jae growled by his ear, pressing closer, fumbling to catch his hands again and still them--and by then it should have been fairly obvious where this encounter was going. The evidence of his arousal couldn't exactly be missed.

The struggle was amusing--like some type of perverse, rough foreplay--but it was time to get down to business.

Thing was, he didn't know when Gunji's vampire friends might return. Jae was confident in his strength and abilities but he didn't want to be interrupted. It was the prospect of having to stop half-way (that would be a crying shame) which made him hurry, both hands grasping at Gunji's hips to bring him back into position. "Just let it happen. It'll be easier on us both." His voice was coaxing... as much as a feral wolf hell bent on fucking somebody (against their will) could have a coaxing tone of voice.

If Jae had to assign a human emotion to what he felt, the closest approximation would have to be desire. He desired Tak Gunji--he was attracted to him. There was no reason for it. Emotions rarely had a rational or logical basis.

Maybe his 'courtship' style left something to be desired, but Jae wasn't bound by human conventions. He had been living in the wild for so long as a wolf that all of this was rather strange and foreign to him. The only reason he was in this form was because he couldn't communicate with Gunji otherwise. Not that the ability to speak was doing him any good...

Then again, he wasn't seeking permission. Jae operated by the rules of the wild and the way he saw it, if he wanted something, he could take it. It just so happened that he wanted--desired--Gunji.

A pleased growl rumbled in the back of his throat as he was bitten. This, he understood. Violence and blood and the struggle, those were common things, familiar things. Even when the kiss broke off he was smiling--a little. His hand followed the twist of Gunji's body, rubbing him inexpertly, a little forcefully. Jae leaned in again and this time the kiss was more like a kiss and less like an assertion of dominance. Some of the human way of doing things was returning. Once he even had a normal life, a lover, a family. Now, he had... this. The forest, the wild storm and the struggle of predator versus prey, a timeless battle.

Violently, he tore at Gunji's clothes--to rip apart his shirt, exposing him to lashing wind and rain. He tore at Gunji's pants, frustrated by the belt--useless, unnecessary human accessory--and buttons.

"You don't get a choice."

Jae freed one hand--while the other pinned Gunji's two wrists in place. He used it to grasp sharply at Gunji's jaw, turning it forcefully towards him. His eyes--almost golden in the glow of a nearby lightning streak--bore into the vampire's. "You are mine."

He didn't seem to understand that simple, basic fact. Jae was taking him. In the animal kingdom there was no such thing as 'negotiation.' It was kill or be killed, hunt or be hunted. To the victor, as they say, go the spoils and Jae considered himself the victor here. Who was stronger than him? Faster? More vicious and ferocious? No one. Otherwise they would have already taken his place.

His nails dug hard into Gunji's jaw on either side, so hard that he broke the skin. Could have broken his jaw, too, to stop him from denying the truth. Jae thought about it seriously for a few moments. Maybe he could dislocate it. His eyes narrowed. Or he could shut him up another way. It annoyed him a little, how calm Gunji was being. How... superior that made him appear, as though Jae was beneath his contempt and needed to be talked down to like a disobedient child. It stirred the animal inside of him.

"Mine," he growled again, and then leaned in for a kiss that was more of an act of war than any really affectionate gesture. There was more teeth than tongue; he tasted blood, whether his own or Gunji's was debatable. The hand that was at Gunji's jaw dropped low, shamelessly groping with intent to humiliate more so than to offer pleasure.

"And I caught you again."

There was no getting around Jae's logic by the simple fact that he refused to budge. He was immovable; he was the brick wall that Tak Gunji had run up against and brick walls yielded to no one. Despite his best efforts to pull his hands down, Jae held on tight. It made no difference to him if Tak Gunji broke something in the struggle, or if he dislocated a shoulder or two. Jae didn't need him whole--just alive. Alive long enough for him to figure out why he needed to sink his teeth and claws deep into him.

Except Tak Gunji sank his teeth in first, tearing into the unprotected flesh of Jae's shoulder with razor-sharp canines. It hurt, too. Jae wouldn't deny that it hurt but it only made him laugh in the face of the pain. "What is that supposed to achieve?" He asked, almost sounding amused. In return, he shoved Tak Gunji up harder against the wall, ignoring the way that the violent movement tore his shoulder apart even further. Pain only fed into his voracious wild side, the wolf in him rising to the challenge of subduing his prey--by any means.

Jae insinuated his body against Tak Gunji's, to ward off more attacks. At this proximity he could only snap, maybe try to headbutt. Jae's grin was purely wolfish, sadistic, pleased.

"You. Are mine." His sinister whisper hissed against Tak Gunji's ear. Jae's tongue flicked out against the shell of it; a low, possessive rumble sounded in the back of his throat as his body pressed in closer. They might have looked intimate from afar, to the passing eye. But intimacy in the traditional sense of the word wasn't exactly in Jae's plans. The virus saw to that; it wiped out everything in him that was capable of feeling anything except rage and possession.

This wasn't a game.

Jae was in dead earnest, in his attempt to subdue the vampire. His quick hands caught one wrist and jerked it up, banging it hard against the rough exterior wall. The other came at his chest, with surprising force, but that just meant that it stopped moving long enough for Jae's other hand to whip up and grab on. He was particularly careless in the way he pulled it away, letting it join the other arm up in the air--again with a punishing smack against the side of the house.

"Stop. Resisting." His words were a low growl, a bare rumble of sound welling up from the back of his throat. His eyes bore into the vampire's with a ferocious glare. Both of them had excellent night vision, so he knew that Tak Gunji knew he was serious. Nothing in his expression indicated that he was out here for a lark.

"You are mine." Jae's hands tightened around Gunji's wrists with bruising force, almost enough to snap the bones if he really wanted. "I caught you."

The words may have been simple, even childish, but they followed the rules of the wild. Jae was the predator. Gunji was his prey. Having caught him, he felt entitled to keeping him, and to catching him when he escaped. It wasn't the first time a mouse ran from a cat, only to be snatched up again--or a bat from a wolf, as it were.

Wolf, he was called, and wolf he was. He didn't count on his prey being alone, however. It didn't actually matter if he was. Jae could take on any number of them, if it meant reclaiming what he considered rightfully his. He had killed vampires before. Tearing off their heads was the same as a stake through the heart. Maybe it was better. He couldn't feast on their still-warm corpses if he staked them.

Jae smiled, though it was more of a baring of the teeth than anything else, as he took a bold step forward. Vampires were dangerous creatures but so were werewolves. That age-old debate of who was stronger, faster, the more efficient killer still held, although Jae could rest somewhat easier given that it was close to the full moon. His strength was rising. It would peak on the night of the full moon, but even now he was more than a match for Tak Gunji.

"Jae."

There, now they were on even footing. They each knew the other's name, although that was inconsequential to Jae's intentions. He already knew that he had the vampire trapped. He had come back for his prey. Maybe he hadn't tried to eat Tak Gunji in the woods but it didn't mean that just anyone could waltz in and steal him. Yes--steal him. Because now, by right of conquest, Tak Gunji belonged to him.

Swiftly, almost as fast as the lightning that forked in the sky, Jae moved. He bulled forward into Tak Gunji, grasping at his wrists to try and force them up over his head.

At last, he found him.

The one that got away, Jae tracked him down.

It took a while, though. It took a long time, many days of carefully following the trails--the scent trails. There was another scent mixed in with Tak Gunji's, and sometimes the two mixed together so that he couldn't immediately distinguish which way his prey's scent came or went. Other times, the scent grew cold and then Jae had to use his human tracking skills--asking around, skulking in the shadows and watching for likely places that vampires could be found.

It wasn't easy, but he found him.

As the storm settled in and swept inland over Hazleton, Jae rushed through the woods. There was a heady kind of rush in joining the wild savagery of Mother Nature's angry outburst. Winds whipped trees violently, causing them to shed not only leaves and twigs, but whole branches. Lightning forked in the sky; thunder rumbled in low growls, like a great angry wolf up in the sky.

Jae threw back his head and howled, long and slow and unbroken. It was a warning to others: stay away. He wouldn't be interrupted tonight and God or the Devil help anyone who tried to interfere. No answering howl greeted him. Good. The others knew not to come out on nights that he had marked as his nights to hunt. Their hierarchy still held.

He stood on a small hill looking down on the house, a ramshackle building that used to be part of a larger settlement. Most people who lived in Hazleton stayed within the town's confines; out here, there were only monsters and things that went bump in the night.

As a fork of lightning illuminated the skies, Jae caught movement. He stood stock still, watching, waiting. Tak Gunji. Jae caught his scent, a mere whiff of it before the wind whipped it away. His lips pulled back and away from his teeth in a savage and feral smile--if a wolf could smile. Then he was gone, zipping effortlessly down the little hill, changing as he went until the quiet shuffle of paws became the dry scuffle of bare feet.

"Tak Gunji." Jae's voice was still a low, raspy grate as he came upon Tak Gunji, who was prodding at something in a metal box.

For a long while, Jae studied Gunji. Why was he so compliant? They usually had more fight than this, even the fledgling vampires much younger than he was. Was there no drive in him? Earlier attempts were amusing--if futile--but now he was cooperating and Jae didn't know if he liked that or not. It seemed like a trick.

He looked down at the phone; another text came through with a low buzz. 2941... He could have entered the code, looked at the message, but there was no real point to it. All he wanted to know was if Gunji would give the code to him, and he did.

Carelessly, Jae snapped the phone in half. Then he tossed the broken halves back into the satchel and slung that into the far corner; it raised a small cloud of dust as it landed.

"I'm going out. Don't try to run unless you want to get fried."

"Not quite." He didn't explain. Gunji would find out in due course why he was spared.

Jae had extracted the ingredients, giving each a sniff and recoiling slightly (almost comically) at the scent of what looked like a desiccated toe. That was offensive to both sight and smell, to say the least. He finished looking through the bag and finally pulled out the phone when it buzzed.

He turned it on, annoyed that there was a lock code. There was a flashing icon that looked like a little envelope; he supposed it was a text message. Gunji's friends? Someone worried about him, perhaps? Or was it the person for whom he was gathering ingredients?

"Give me the code."

He did find the cell phone but ignored it in favor of looking through the rest of the bag, mostly out of sheer curiosity than anything else. Maybe the contents would lend insight into Tak Gunji's reason for being here.

Or was he nothing more than an errand boy? Jae glanced up at him with an expression that betrayed nothing. He thought about the question seriously, for some long moments.

It was a compulsion. A desire and a gut-twisting need. Jae's appetite for violence was like none other and vampires, they were self-healing. Whatever damage he did would be mended over time, allowing him to keep the same person for a long time, to satisfy his perverse urges. The answer was both simple and not so simple.

"I just wanted you," he said at last, before bending his head to look through the bag again. He wanted Tak Gunji so he took him.

Jae's answering laugh was more of a harsh bark than anything else. "You mean your precious mushrooms?"

He turned to look at the fallen bag, remembering it just then. Unhurriedly he strolled over and picked it up by the strap. Then returning to his former position, Jae opened the zipper and glanced into it.

"You came for these?" He held up a mushroom, studying it curiously. Come to think of it, most of the vampires he caught, he'd found near the area where these mushrooms grew. They clustered at the base of a certain type of tree. Jae had no use for them--he was a meat eater--but why did a vampire need a mushroom?

"Why?"

"Tak... Gunji..."

He rolled the words around on his tongue, savoring them. Tak Gunji. The vampire's name was Tak Gunji.

Jae looked him up and down, trying to make sense of his seemingly calm demeanor. Was he really calm, or was it all an act? Tak Gunji was a good actor, if that was the case--a lesser being would have been blubbering by now, asking him what he wanted. Some fought and he enjoyed those, up until the moment when he was forced to slay them or risk them running out on him.

"Aren't you going to ask why I'm keeping you here?" He smiled, not particularly mirthfully. It was more of a baring of the teeth; there was no warmth in it and it brought none to his face, either.

A smile spread slowly across Jae's lips. "I could use a little variety in my diet."

He sat down on the cold, hard ground in front of the vampire, staring him in the eyes. Now he did feel a little bit of a tug--the human body was far weaker than the wolf's--but his altered physiology wasn't prone to falling prey to the vampire's hypnosis.

"What's your name?"

Sadistically Jae reached out to touch the broken leg, giving it a meaningful squeeze in case the vampire felt the need to be difficult. Behind him it grew brighter; the trees were thin right around his cabin, exposing it to full sunlight during the day and full moonlight at night