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vankoya · 7 years

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Fight Blood with Blood.

Genre | Witch Hunter AU.

Pairing | Jeon Jeongguk / Feminine Reader.

Words | 6,611 words.

Conspectus | Amid the white of the snow, the pitch black of the night, the small witch besmears the calm scenery as a speck of crimson. Marring Jeongguk’s every thought like the death of him.

Warnings | Blood. Vague gore. Character and animal death. Also note that the ‘reader’ is referred to as small and tiny. This is not necessarily what her figure is, it is just how Jeongguk visualises her in comparison to his own size, which is comparably much bigger than the size of real life Jeon Jeongguk.

“This is the truest of crimes, you know.”

The air is bone cold. Ice crackles and pops beneath the two wooden wheels of the cart. Breath steams in puffs of white at his lips.

But she is vibrant. Blood against the white backdrop of snow that sticks to the soil, tucks between the frostbitten bark, and drips from icicles clinging to dead branches like daggers threatening to fall. Thick scarlet flows in the cotton of her red riding hood coat. Jeongguk pales beside her frame that nestles into his hulking side, a black mass of fur trim that tickles the cut of his jaw; wraps in grimy leather boots around his calves; shimmers in the onyx metal of the shotgun resting against his thigh.

Often, it is difficult to remember who is the monster. The cardinal or the crow.

“What is?” Jeongguk hums, tries to act indifferent but he knows she sees right through that facade now. Like mist clinging to the glass of a windowpane, her warm palms had effortlessly wiped the condensation away weeks ago, and he just as easily allowed her to. It is almost as though he wanted it, for her to peer in and take a look, to see that his insides are just as black as his plumage.

The handcuffs jingle when she lifts her wrists into view, leans into him. She feels warm against his arm, tempting. “These little darlings. Enchanted with a binding spell that I knew how to perform by the age of ten. You claim to hunt my kind, yet you need us to do so in the first place.”

“Touché.”

It is true, the hunters need them, those malevolent, selfish witches with their wicked fingers and tongues, as evil to their own kind as they are to all but themselves. Anything to have the upper hand, the benefit, the promise of another hundred years to crease the skin of their knuckles with lines of the cast; the making, the destroying. Fight blood with blood, they say. But she, the little bird that Jeongguk found whistling a sweet tune between evergreen trees, chasing a sickly rabbit to have in a stew, to ground the bones for later magic, never fit into that mould. Not an inkling suggested that her voice has ever crafted an incantation that’s seared villages down to the ashes, pulled a human apart limb for limb and eaten their heart from the inside out, poisoned a lake that supplies fresh water for the three towns within a fifty mile radius.

He still does not know, after all, what she did to land here beside him on this winding, snowy road in the middle of here and there. Handcuffed, wrists raw from the biting metal, trembling around her soft voice that chirps every now and then to the man that will claim the bounty on her head. A couple ten thousand. Not the biggest that the hunter circle has known, yet the largest sum he will ever stuff into his own, dirtied pockets.

“It’s getting dark, will we make it?” Her lips pout, brow daintily pinching. A pretty little thing, she is. Probably a murderer, too. All the ones that look like sugar and cream have thick tar running through their veins, pumping out of their heart.

But Jeongguk bets she tastes as sweet as cherry pie and has thought such a thing since five weeks ago when she willingly offered her hands to the jaws of the cuffs. All the way up until this very day.

“No, we’ll have to set up camp in the woods,” Jeongguk mutters with blatant distaste, eyeing the withered horses that seem to stride slower as the sun descends at a steady pace behind the thick blanket of overcast. The present threat of the darkening evening lugs at their hooves, weighs down at the tips of his own lashes in an unwelcome lethargy that has him pulling their reigns, guiding them off the path; neither too near to the tracks where a wandering by crook can steal his loot, nor too far that they completely lose the way.

She shrinks closer to his body now, looking absolutely unsure with her wide, fawn-like eyes, nervous as the horses tiredly wind them through the stark naked trees. Her teeth cling to her swollen lower lip again, and Jeongguk wants to hold her rubescent cheekbones between his grubby fingertips and kiss her silly. A dangerous, dangerous thought.

“Is the big bad witch afraid of the wilderness?” Jeongguk hums instead, admittedly satisfied at the way she tucks her stocking-covered knees into the side of his thigh, melding ever so near, handcuffs tinkling like fairy music; a sharp reminder ringing through his hearing of who she is, why she is here.

“I just–“ And she shivers, the kind that ripples from your toes to your nose and rattles your teeth in its trek– “Hate, hate, hate the cold.”

“We’ll build a fire,” Jeongguk chuckles, knows of at least three other ways he can keep her warm though retains those thoughts, tightly sealed underneath his tongue, “or we’ll try, at least. Might be too wet.”

She grumbles under her breath while Jeongguk pulls tight on the reins, the horses snorting and huffing white mist as they come to a standstill in a small clearing of white space, surrounded by the stark silhouettes of tree trunks. Effortlessly, he swings off the cart like a swooping crow and tends to the two black beauties, unhinging the pole between them, numb fingers fiddling over the buckles and leather straps of the breast collars, traces, and bridles; soothing them under his breath all the while, palms gentle on their smooth, midnight coats. The air is colder on his lips by the time he is releasing them from the weight of the cart, carefully lowering the front onto the snow-covered ground. Though his hands slip at the last fifteen or so centimetres and it suddenly thumps down. His ears perk up at the tinkling of chains, the panicked shriek and scuffled scramble as the witch struggles to keep upright on the seat.

“You’re still up there?” Jeongguk frowns, to which she lifts up her shackled wrists and stares levelly at him, encouraging him to roll his eyes. “You could’ve jumped down.”

“I’m cold, weak, and bound,” she huffs, gaze trained on him as he strides around to her side of the cart, “so it didn’t seem like that fantastic of an idea to test out. I don’t want a face full of snow.”

“No, we most certainly don’t want the imprisoned witch to suffer,” and although the sarcasm is laced lethally through his tone, Jeongguk stretches his long arms out to her anyway. Dark, strong muscles that look like reaching shadows amongst all the white. “Come here.”

Wetly sniffing, she shuffles close until his hands can wrap around her red waist, thumbs pressing into her bottommost ribs and thinking how simply he could crush them when he lifts her up and out of the cart. Once her laced boots are touching the ground, she stumbles a little and Jeongguk balances her with a hand on her shoulder, staring at her pinched and pretty features until she looks up at him, curiosity piqued, and only then does he break away. Jeongguk crosses the open space to near the looming trees and misses her murmured “thank you” when it drifts quietly after him.

Beneath his palms, the bark of each tree is soggy and sodden with melted snow. Jeongguk lolls his head back with a tired groan, and the sky is truly dark now, some of the brighter stars managing to dimly flicker through the sheet of grey clouds.

“No luck?” She calls, and Jeongguk tilts his body just so, enough that he can see her wearily eyeing the horses that hang their heads low, nudging one another.

“Completely saturated.”

“Well, I have an idea, but I don’t think you’ll like it.”

Jeongguk stiffens at that, something terrible striking through his heart and he struggles to keep his face composed, biting down on the twisted hope that tries to leak into his voice, “What might that be?”

She lifts up her wrists as she had done so in the cart no more than a few moments ago, exhibiting that same, level stare that manages to pierce through him, even when they are metres apart. “I can make a fire if you unchain me.”

The laughter that barks out of his throat is sharp, piercing; disbelief and disappointment mixed tightly together into the harsh, grating sound. Of course, of course. How could he think it would be anything other than that? A fool, Jeongguk, a complete and utter fool. Still, he watches her, the way her features remain unchanging, deadly serious and stoic, not giving anything away. Just like that, he falters, considers.

It takes seven steps to reach her, to loom above that tiny frame like the shadows that slink and play around the clearing. Even so, she is more dangerous than he ever could be. The crow may be the predator, but the cardinal is just as cunning.

“Can I trust you?” Jeongguk narrows his eyes, scrutinising her, though she upkeeps her calm play.

“No, of course not,” she’s honest at least, unusual for a witch, “but the risk is up to you. We either freeze over and die just like that, or you can have a little faith and let me build us a fire.”

The ideas circle through his mind again, the other ways to keep warm. He wonders what her skin feels like, if it is soft and plump, hot to the touch. But it seems to be a concept that will be fruitless to tease out of her, witches never being too easy to tempt. And so, for the sake of another day to survive, he rifles around his coat pocket until he pulls out the silver key.

Her eyes do not even zone in on the metal, the means of her release, remaining to keep on Jeongguk’s face and such a matter convinces him all the more that perhaps, it will be okay.

Jeongguk takes her left wrist, bringing it up so that he can fit the key into the cuff there, jostling the binds about until the teeth snag on the latch and the shackles unhook, gape open enough for her hands to easily slip out. His gaze does not leave her own as he stuffs the handcuffs and the key back into his coat pocket, proceeding to fold his arms and raise a thick eyebrow, hoping she is convinced by the brave facade that he stretches and moulds around the thin anxiety clinging to his form.

She sighs. He startles.

“Can you please take some bark from the trees? Just a few handfuls, doesn’t matter if they’re wet,” the witch skirts around him, gingerly rubbing her raw wrists, gaze flicking across the snow that she steps through. Her boot prints are dainty compared to the stomps of his own that press deeper into the white. When she notices that Jeongguk has not moved, nor said a thing, she looks back over her shoulder. A bloodstain beautifully marring the gradient of black to white. “Please?”

“Oh,” he shakes his head, thinks about the sleek onyx of his shotgun, shakes his head again, “yeah, I’ll do that.”

They both work in silence, with Jeongguk peeling and the witch still observing the ground that she treads. He has one armful by the time that she is crouched down, eyeing a spot at the centre of the small clearing, the fingertips of her right hand intermittently clawing at the snow in between shaking the ice from her nails, hissing and cursing under her breath because of the cold. Jeongguk keeps a distance of three feet from her small, hunched form, watching her dig and dig until she reaches the frozen dirt underneath, to which she elicits a pleased sound.

“May I borrow your knife?” She speaks without looking at him, a tiny palm splayed out just beside his boot where the hilt of the blade barely juts out. He wonders if she has noticed it nestled there since the day he chained her up, if maybe she plotted using it against him like this.

“As long as you don’t gut me,” Jeongguk says lightly, but the joke is no joke, and they both know it as he reaches down and pulls it from the strap, carefully twisting the blade in his hand and offering her the hilt.

It is only then that she finally flits her gaze up to him, doe eyes watching widely with amusement, swallowing him whole.

“If I had wanted to kill you, I would’ve done so the moment you unchained me. No, even before that, I would’ve snapped these shackles myself,” and he looks so alarmed that she laughs, a song caught in the still, chilly air. “Like I said, I’ve known this spell since I was ten. Sure, magic is harder to undo than it is to create, though it’s not impossible. Besides, if I really wanted to use that knife against you, then instead of asking you, I would’ve casted an incantation that charms you into handing it over to me without you even realising. You would only notice once the hilt is sticking out of your heart.”

She takes the knife from him then and, instead of driving it into his calf like he thought she might, she starts hacking it into the snow, breaking the frost apart to reach the soil underneath.

The cardinal is an enigma. Jeongguk, scared relatively shitless, knows that one fact for certain.

“Why aren’t you trying to escape? Nor attempting to kill me?” He cannot help but ask, a mountain of questions piled high in his throat, demanding to be spoken while she continues to scrape away the snow.

Her grin is tiny, soft and wicked, like the fact that he says “attempting” is hilariously sweet, to think that he even has a chance against the likes of her. “I’m not escaping because I deserve this awful end. I’ve lived a handful many decades, and I’ve done terrible things that merit a dismal way out. My time to die has come. Maybe a little earlier than I expected, though it happens to the best of us.”

Jeongguk wants to ask more, wishes to pick apart her bones and search the marrow for the answers, more truths, to learn of the genuine honesty about herself and who she is. But whatever he wishes to say becomes lodged in his mouth when he watches her bring the blade to her palm and cut a clean slice through the flesh. Crimson that looks like liquid black beneath the moonless sky instantly bubbles to the surface and spills into the clear patch of dirt that the very same knife carved out.

“W-What are you doing?!” He panics, which the witch has found among her years is a common reaction to the sight of blood, the very essence of mortality. She finds it rather ironic how blood is considered bad because the only way it can come into visual perception is through injury; meaning harm and danger and death. Thus, it is only safe and okay when it is trickling through veins and arteries, out of sight and mind.

The witch stays quiet and calm, dropping the now tarnished blade to the snow and dipping her fingertips into the sticky, red mess accumulating in her other palm. They come away dripping, soaked in the colour of her very own coat, and Jeongguk observes with his lips parted, shoulders rigid while she draws nonsensical script into the frozen surface of the dirt she has cleared. Witch language, looking twisted and evil, like it is going to reach out and bite him if he dares to look away.

“Blood magic,” Jeongguk finally whispers, completely baffled.

Her laugh is melodic, soft, accompanied by the frost that forms on her breath as she continues to write. “Did you think all of this red was simply for show?”

The corners of his lips would quirk towards the darkened sky if he were still not so surprised. “I thought it may have just been your favourite colour. It suits you.”

“So does your smile. It makes you less intimidating.”

Jeongguk cannot tell whether she might be joking, for she is quite possibly the most frightening thing that this forest will ever see. His threatening presence is infinitesimal in comparison to her own.

The inscription is seemingly complete when she lifts her hand away from the intricate cursive, looking back up to Jeongguk with a beckon of her dirt-and-blood-caked hand, following with a point of her forefinger to the exposed soil.

“Drop those on here,” she requests of him, and albeit slightly hesitant, Jeongguk gradually closes the distance and kneels down beside her, the cold seeping through his thick pants as he arranges the bark into a misshapen pile over the nearly invisible crimson marks. She beams at him, a curve of white that sparkles between her lips and causes his heart to race before she faces the beginnings of a fire and squeezes the rest of the blood from her wounded palm atop the already damp pieces of tree.

Jeongguk watches her press the gash against the snow, wiping away the remnants of crimson, and only a moment later does he realise she is whispering rapidly beneath her breath. A spell that loops and winds through the quiet clearing, frosts white at her lips until suddenly, with a cracking sound like a snapping branch, the bark ignites in a burst of well-needed warmth. Candescent orange licks along the dead bits of tree, sizzling when the tongues of flame venture too near to their snowy confines.

“There, we won’t be dying by the hands of the cold tonight,” she says, though Jeongguk hardly notices her soft voice in the clearing with his eyes peeled on the sight of the gash on her palm slowly healing itself. A sinister sense of danger thrums heavy in his chest, fingers itching to reach for the icy metal of the shotgun and level the barrel at her heart, yet he snaps his gaze towards the kneeling witch when her lips part a second time. The smile she wears is too tender; cast with warmth by the flames.

“Pull the rear of the cart to the edge of the fire and we can use the bed as a seat instead of the snow. That way, our coats won’t get wet and we’ll stay warm.”

Jeongguk wordlessly, ludicrously, abides by the word of his prisoner. He lugs the cart away from the horses and turns it so that its bed faces the fire and the witch, albeit with a fight from the snow getting caught in the old wheels. The flames reside close to the edge of the bedding, though, with the cold wetness that has seeped into the wood of the cart’s structure, there is hardly a single chance that it would catch alight. Obviously pleased with this turn of events, of having a flickering fire and a relatively dry space to lay, the witch claps her hands rather sweetly, wincing a little and pouting over the sharp sting at the impact made with her wound.

Jeongguk carefully skirts around the cart so he can sit on the edge of the bed; a bundle of darkness huddling into itself. He inclines his chin towards her hand and says, “Isn’t it painful cutting yourself to perform magic?”

“Not anymore, though it hurt like hell when I was just a kid,” the witch inspects her palm, the puckered gash that no longer bleeds. “But back then, I only did magic that required a small amount, only pinpricks to fingertips. I can control how much blood comes out, so I could’ve made the inscription for the fire with just a slice the size of a paper cut, but it would’ve taken much longer. The bigger the wound, the faster the magic.” She presses a handful of snow to the freshly sealed cut, holding it tight between her palms, cocking her head as she looks up at Jeongguk. “Also, didn’t you know I was a blood witch?”

“Not a clue,” Jeongguk looks away as the confession slips from his lips, sheepishly rubbing a hand at the nape of his neck. Out of the corner of his eye, her expression appears genuinely baffled, staring at him with saucer-wide eyes before returning her focus to the fire.

“Isn’t all of that information already provided to you before you hunt? So you know what you’re facing?”

Jeongguk scowls at the way in which she adjusts the alight bark, her fingers dipping into the fire without a care, coming out unscathed, a black ash that dusts her knuckles being the only evidence of the contact. “No. Your papers were untouched, save for the sum of your bounty. There was not even a smudge of ink to suggest what your abilities were, what you had done to earn such a penalty. That’s why I took you on when nobody else would. There’s always a fear when it comes to chasing the unknown.”

She ceases toying with the fire and swoops to her feet with airy elegance. “But you’re not afraid?”

“Everyone’s afraid, that’s natural human instinct,” Jeongguk says with a shrug, making space for her on the edge of the cart. The witch sidles up to him much like she had before sundown, packed into the heat of his side, and Jeongguk oddly, suddenly, feels warmer all over. “But the unknown tends to be the worst of them all. If everyone is too frightened to face it, then it will come for them just as quick.”

“You have a brave heart,” she smiles, teeth like pearls, “if I was worse off, I’d eat it.”

The itch to leap for his shotgun on the front seat of the cart nags at him once more. He is unsure whether it is the fact that he knows he will not reach it in time before she retaliates, or if he truly feels no impending desire to use the weapon against her, but instead, he says, “And being executed isn’t something you consider as ‘worse off’?”

The whites of her teeth slip away, hiding behind the firm line of her soft lips. “No. In this world, it’s quite possibly one of the better ways to die. Dishonourable for a witch, of course, since we take pride in letting our own magic do the bidding.” She picks at a fingernail, swings her small, booted feet. “I’ll burn at the stake, won’t I? I hope they scatter my ashes deep in the forest. It would be nice to rule there.”

“To rule?”

“They always take the ashes far from the town they burn the witches in, don’t they?” She asks, looking up at him once more for confirmation. Jeongguk nods at the tiny bloodstain that she is. “That’s because even when we are burned, our magic still thrives, albeit in a weaker state than when we die naturally by our own magic. You see, our bodies are merely vessels for the magic, and our souls are integrated with it. Once our magic and soul is without a body, they will accommodate the particular vicinity that the body last existed. The range of this vicinity depends upon the strength of the witch and how greatly she fostered her magic throughout her lifetime. So, if they were to leave the greater portion of the witches’ ashes within the town, the magic and the souls would combine and inhabit it, and it would be safe to say that the townsfolk would be absolutely doomed with all the magical beings and monsters that would spring up there.

“Also, different terrains host different types of magical beings. Imps and old demons dwell within forests inhabited by magic, though my magic would be strong enough to birth a talking tree and a dragon to protect the forest, too,” she says as casually as one would when figuring out what they are going to purchase from the market. Jeongguk feels rather stunned into silence, wide eyes blinking at her, absorbing all of the information that she speaks like water on parchment paper. Her sweet smile returns as she says, “That is why I hope to be scattered within a forest. It would be nice to rule one, don’t you think?”

He nods dumbly, brow knitted at the centre, and then asks, “It’s true then? The stories of the forest in the far East homing an albino two-headed dragon?”

“Yes, and it is an exceptionally powerful one, at that. The witch, Aenwyn, died by her own magic there. That is perhaps why it is more favourable for the humankind to burn us down to ash and decimate a great intensity of our magic with it, since the vicinities in which a witch’s magic inhabits when she dies is much, much stronger if she dies the way that we are supposed to. Aenwyn was over five-hundred years old, and she had lived within that forest for at least three-hundred of those years. A witch can tell when her time is up, so Aenwyn grew a tree around her body and let the magic eat her up, then the magic spread through the tree’s roots, which extend to all ends of that forest.”

The little witch traces her palm where the gash was buried. The skin is no longer raw and scarred; pearly smooth like it was before she had taken to it with the blade. She looks up at Jeongguk again, hooking her chin on his shoulder and looping her crimson arm around the midnight black of his own.

A foreign heat simmers underneath his skin, burning the frostbitten skin of his nose and cheeks all the brighter, especially when she softly says, “Not even fire could burn that forest down. Nothing other than a witch that is beyond stronger than Aenwyn would be able to eradicate it, and even then, that witch would die and the land that the forest stood upon would become a cursed site for demons to rule with the extreme levels of magic living in its soil. Luckily, Aenwyn was a kind witch, so there is no need for her forest to be destroyed, even if the humankind believe otherwise because of the two-headed dragon. They can be kind too, you know.”

At that, Jeongguk cracks, a breathy chuckle escaping him and she curiously watches him all the while. He notices her small hand resting upon his wrist and, without thinking, he takes it between both of his own, running a thumb over the bony knuckles. Beside him, her expression transforms, teeth sunk into the still swollen flesh of her lower lip. Jeongguk knows this is terribly wrong, touching her like this, feeling something come alive within his chest at the thought of having the witch he is sentencing to death for his own financial benefit tucked closer against him. A small furnace of warmth.

She tilts her head slightly to the side and asks, “What’s so funny?”

“Dragons and witches being kind, that’s the complete opposite of what I’ve been taught my entire life,” Jeongguk hums, staring at her hand clasped within his own. He sighs deeply, white mist gathering at his lips and dissipating almost immediately, and then settles his eyes upon her, watching the lambency melt into her skin. “Are you cold? Would you like to lay down? There’s sheepskin in the trunk.”

“Please,” she urges, teeth beginning to chatter now that she is no longer caught up in her own ramblings of forests and curses and the ashes that she is soon to become.

The cart creaks and wheezes as Jeongguk shifts so that he can reach the trunk strapped on the opposite end. He notices with an irritated groan that the locks are frozen over, so he grabs the shotgun from where it sits on the bench and busts the ice by slamming the stock against the metal, effectively shattering them. The sheer sight of the grey sheepskin inside warms him, and he gleefully pulls out the two rugs, each of which are certainly big enough to cover at least three people. The little witch must notice this, her soft voice piping up from behind him.

“Let’s lay one on the cart and then use the other as a blanket.”

Jeongguk, looking over his shoulder at her, hopes that the flush sitting high in his cheeks will be mistaken as the biting cold. “Are you sure? You don’t want one to yourself?”

She shrugs, and the dark may be hanging low in the clearing, unassisted by the fire that backlights her frame and melds her expression into a shadow. But Jeongguk swears that she is acting coy when she says, “We’ll be warmer if we lay together, anyway.”

“Are you trying to seduce me so that I won’t see it coming when you kill me?”

The witch laughs, tinkling sweetly in the air, and she crawls up the cart so that she is sat beside him. Here, he can see her pretty smile; glimmering something absolutely wicked. Jeongguk finds that he hardly cares. Jeongguk has somewhat always wanted to know if poison tastes like sugar.

“That’s a secret!” She giggles, and then helps him lay the grey mass onto the damp wood. Her voice is light when she winks and says, “Don’t worry, I’ll make it painless.”

He should take those words as a threat; loaded like the shotgun resting atop the closed trunk. Each word a bullet that’s just waiting to be driven through his heart. Instead, he lays on his side and wraps one half of the remaining sheepskin around his bulking frame and then watches silently, wide-eyed, as the witch begins to unhook the large buttons of her blood-red coat. The red riding hood image peels slowly from her figure, inch by inch.

The cardinal sheds. Revealing that, underneath, she was a crow all along. Just like him.

Jeongguk takes in her attire. Pitch black and skintight. Thick thermals that stretch from her throat to her wrists, all the way down to her booted feet; thighs and biceps and waist banded with belts and straps inscribed by witch language. Outlining the curves and dips of her figure like a dream. The orange light of the flames dances against her right side, melting into the onyx fabric, and Jeongguk only realises she is staring at him expectantly when she clears her throat.

“A-Aren’t you going to be cold?” Jeongguk stutters, trying to tame the thoughts that skip wildly through his mind. Nonetheless, he lifts up the sheepskin with his arm, welcoming the witch inside.

“I’ll be fine, you’ll keep me warm,” she hums nonchalantly, sliding between the rugs. Jeongguk can feel his pulse in the back of his throat as those words fill the air, expand in the clearing, and envelope him whole as she melds her small body to his own. Frozen, dumbfounded, all he can do is stare at her until she huffs and yanks his still hovering arm down so that the sheepskin embraces them and, similarly, he embraces her.

“See? Warm,” she grins up from where she is tucked into his chest, and Jeongguk, a man who is supposed to be a ferocious witch hunter with blood money wedged in his pockets, cannot help but soften into a dangerous, vulnerable state and smile back at her. When she notices the curve of his cracked pink lips, she snuggles in closer, the heat of her breath lingering on his chin when she whispers, “I wasn’t lying when I said your smile suits you. It’s like daylight breaching the horizon at dawn.”

Jeongguk shudders, neither a sensation of discomfort or pleasure. His body, under her insistent gaze, just cannot help but quake. “I’d stop there, if I were you. You’re making it hard for me to resist a prisoner.”

“That’s good,” she giggles, and Jeongguk, curling both of his arms tightly around her, feels the gentle vibrations of her bird-like ribs; humming a delicate song. Her hands that are crushed between their bodies emerge, the fingertips resting gently against his throat. “You can kiss me, if you like. It’ll pass the–“

If Jeongguk were asked to describe it, he would say he was incapable of doing so. Two opposite poles colliding; a wave crashing onto the shoreline; the sky passionately meeting the distant horizon. Perhaps, a deathly dehydrated man finding water for the first time in weeks; plunging himself into the cool mass, inhaling it into his stomach and lungs until his deprivation is satiated. Kissing her feels this way, like a force smashing into chaotic harmony with another. Satisfying a yearning that’s magnitude is only completely understood in all of its fantastic intensity when Jeongguk slices the tongue of her sentence and instead, presses his own to the soft seam of her lips.

She is pleasant; unbearably so. He elicits the tiniest, almost imperceptible sounds from her, like plucking a harp. Slanting his mouth slightly to the right, and she whimpers. Tracing the plush flesh of her lips with the tip of his tongue, and she sighs. Pushing it past her teeth to meet with her own, simmering when they touch, and she gasps. The witch coils around him, locking their legs together, urging him closer with her hands snaking around to his nape, and Jeongguk untucks her long-sleeve from the belt, slips his calloused, cold hands underneath the thick black fabric and slides them from the small of her back up to her shoulder blades. Her entire figure trembles, starting from her toes and climbing northward. Jeongguk no longer strums a harp; he holds an earthquake that splits down the centre, spilling open.

Unexpectedly, she pulls away. Jeongguk opens his eyes, hazy at first, blinking until her bright face comes into view and he can see the saliva glistening on her swollen lips. She seems to be about to speak, though Jeongguk cannot help but kiss her again; brief, enough to taste the chilly air already settling in the spit. The witch smiles when he draws back and brushes their cold, reddened noses against one another.

“I don’t know your name,” she mumbles, sounding almost embarrassed. Jeongguk presses his lips to her own in a swift peck, scattering more to her cheeks where the winter draws chilly patterns on her skin.

“Jeongguk,” he murmurs at the centre of her brow, gliding his mouth down the slope of her nose, then to her lips again; a magnetic pull that he cannot resist. Jeongguk smiles there, pearly whites curving against the damp pink, and she places a kiss on his teeth. “And you?”

“___,” the witch grins, her abdomen bowing delightfully into his groin as she fits herself closer. “I like your name. Jeongguk. Je-on-gguk. It’s nice.”

“It’s nice when you say it,” he agrees, drawing his hands still underneath the fabric of her shirt to settle on her small waist, massaging there. “So is yours. ___. Pretty, like you.”

“It’s pretty when you say it,” she mimics around a mouthful of laughter. Jeongguk, deciding that poison tastes like cherries and blood, catches her lips with his own once more, taking the lower between his teeth and sucking the sweetness from it.

“Tell me what you did, ___,” he suddenly murmurs into the corner of her mouth. The touch of her fingertips leaves his neck and instead comes up to his face, searing against his cheek; burning through to the bone. “I want to know. No, I need to know why I’m sending you to your death.”

The midnight dances across her eyes, almost appearing sinister if not for the way her lips are tilted in the stretch of a small, sad smile. One that, although faint, holds the weight of a past cast in thick shadows; jagged claws hiding between the floorboards; monsters looming in the corners, waiting to strike.

“No, we witches are too selfish, I cannot tell you,” she whispers, and the words are razors that slice as they fall upon his lips. But Jeongguk still licks the wounds with care, watches as her gaze washes over with a placid calm. “But it’s bad enough to be burned at the stake. You would be strung up beside me too if they knew about this.”

But all Jeongguk can do is grin, the hard exterior cracking completely. Always for her; the monster disguised. He tucks her head underneath his chin, holding her close, so near. The warmth of her breath is a gentle constant against his throat.

Jeon Jeongguk probably deserves death for living in such sin, and he is a fool to believe that he will have anything else coming for him.

“Sometimes, I think that might not be so bad,” he whispers, eyes closing and at long last giving in to the lethargy that has wound tight through his muscles since midday. Tucked in the nook of his shoulder, her smile is one of glass.

The witch of scarlet with a pitch black past burns silently at the stake within four days of the cold, cold night at the centre of the forest, tightlipped with her eyes closed as the flames blister and lick her skin black and burn her bones into charcoal. She is so hauntingly quiet that nothing but the crackling of the fire fills the town square, sounding like breaking bones; dying magic; the carcasses of promises.

The bounty is never collected.

It takes them a while, most especially since they had such little information on the blood witch other than her potential whereabouts. But they do find him eventually when they are deep in the neighbouring forest to scatter her ashes. The hounds sniffing through the fresh layers of snow are the ones to discover the hunter first; looking an absolutely disgraceful sight, frozen over and drenched head to toe in blood, wrapped in mottled sheepskin. Not a speck of it is his own, and rather, it belongs to the two headless horses collapsed either side of his body.

It was the heart failure that got him.

If she was still here to enunciate the tale, she would confess that it was pity. That the heart attack was so easy to twist out of him, suggesting nothing more than the fact that he was not going to live any longer than a month, anyway. Make that pity and selfishness. Pity, that he fell so in love with such a witch as blood to bone evil as her. Selfishness, that she did not wish for him to watch her die in the fire, nor did she wish to escape with him to a place far away, building something together, only to bear witness to his heart crumbling like cracked ice within a matter of weeks.

As the witch was swallowed by the rich, fiery tongues of vibrant orange and red, she could not help but find comfort in their blazing warmth as they twisted about her strung up figure. She imagined they were Jeongguk’s arms wound tightly around her on their final, frosty night together. Keeping her close, even after he had drifted asleep for the final time, even when she had never planned to succumb to such unconsciousness because she was too occupied with contemplating just how she was going to do it. That was, if she could do it.

So maybe the cardinal did quite love the crow after all.

Note | LET’S GET SPOOOOOOOOOOPPYYYYYY.

I have had this in the works since the middle of last year and it feels so good to finally have it polished off! This was originally going to be a part of my ATM drabble series, but I suppose it became long enough to deserve its own little post instead. Anyway, hooray for my first post since June and hooray for witches and Halloween!

#jungkook x reader #jungkook fluff #bts scenarios #bts x reader #jungkook angst #bts angst #jeon jungkook #gukvory #/ blood #/ death #/ mcd

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