Chapter 3: Possession

Taehyung didn’t sleep after that night.

Even as the sun poured through the curtains the next morning, its golden light could not wash away the cold grip around his heart. The camera sat silently in the corner of the room, blinking its dead red eye. He didn’t need to replay the footage. He already knew what it captured. The way Jungkook had appeared—impossibly there, impossibly gone—and the way Taehyung had collapsed after, shaking, marked.

Jungkook was real.

But not alive.

He sat at the kitchen table, his hands cradling a chipped mug of tea he couldn’t bring himself to drink. The steam had long since faded, leaving only a bitter scent of dried leaves and regret. Across from him, the chair that used to be Jungkook’s stood empty. Yet somehow, it felt like someone was sitting in it—watching. The silence between them stretched, thick with memory.

There was a new sensation growing inside him. It started in his chest, a heaviness that pressed on his lungs like hands, unseen but insistent. His hands shook more often. His skin paled until the veins beneath were visible like ink beneath parchment. The scar on his neck, once faint, had begun to darken by the hour. It wasn’t healing. It was spreading. Crawling across his collarbone in delicate black lines like roots from a poisoned tree.

By the fourth day, he could no longer hide it.

His coworkers texted, asking if he was okay. He didn’t reply. He didn’t go outside. He stopped answering the door. Shadows moved differently now. Mirrors blurred when he passed them. And every night, Jungkook returned.

Each visit left Taehyung weaker, but also more entangled. Jungkook wasn’t just biting him now. He was claiming him. Touching him. Speaking to him in half-whispers, brushing fingers down his spine, lips against his ear. Things Taehyung barely remembered come morning, yet they echoed in his bones.

Things like:

“You’re mine, Taehyung. There is no afterlife without you.”

“When I died, I waited at the threshold. You never called me back. So I came.”

“Our love is stronger than death. It must be fed.”

On the fifth night, Taehyung tried to resist. He barricaded the windows with heavy furniture, spread salt around every doorframe, recited protective chants found buried in haunted forums run by insomniacs and witches. He burned sage until the apartment reeked of ash and desperation. His voice cracked from chanting. His eyes stung from smoke.

It didn’t work.

Jungkook appeared anyway.

More beautiful than ever. More monstrous.

He stepped through the salt like it was nothing, his form flickering as if pulled between two realms. His eyes were the same—those endless pits that once held love, now burning with something deeper, darker. Possession.

“You don’t understand,” he murmured, cupping Taehyung’s face with ghost-cold fingers. “You’re not being haunted. You’re being chosen.”

Taehyung sobbed, trembling. “I didn’t ask for this. I just wanted to grieve.”

Jungkook's lips, ice and memory, brushed his cheek. “But your grief summoned me. You kept me alive in your heart. You fed me with your tears.”

That night, the bond deepened.

Jungkook didn’t just bite.

He pressed his palm to Taehyung’s chest, and a mark appeared—black and veined, right over his heart. It pulsed in sync with Jungkook’s touch. Taehyung screamed, the sound swallowed by shadows.

When he woke, the mark remained.

So did Jungkook, curled beside him, breathing slow, as if sleep had found even the dead.

“Soon,” Jungkook whispered, fingers threading through Taehyung’s hair. “You won’t need to breathe without me.”

Taehyung clutched his chest.

And for a moment, he wondered if he already couldn’t.

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