The silvern weight of the full moon pressed against the windowpane, washing over Prosper as he stood motionless in the dark. For years, he had treated the moonlight like an unwelcome guest, something to turn his back on while he played the part of a mortal man - the quiet husband, the steady father, a creature who belonged to hearth and home.
Yet the ancient blood beneath his skin refused to stay buried. Slowly, his hand drifted upwards. His fingers grazed his temples before brushing against the small, jagged ridge hidden neatly beneath his hair. An antler growth. It was subtle and small enough to go unnoticed by anyone else, but to him it was an obvious reminder. He stared at his reflection in the glass. The elven blue of his eyes still remained, but there was a distinct ring of burning gold around his pupil that glared back at him.
He closed his eyes, drawing in a sharp breath.
He had tried so hard to forget what he was. But the world had a brutal way of reaching into the past and pulling old horrors back into the light. His thoughts snagged on the memory of Engel's capture and the man pulling strings - Julian Summerset.
Prosper knew every shade of malice that the world had to offer - greed, rage, cruelty, rawness, and ambition. But he knew deep down that there was something off about the doctor. He didn't quite catch on to it at first, but when he recalled the memory of watching Engel's coffin descend into the cryogenic container, Mr Summerset possessed something far more unsettling. A quiet, clinical emptiness. He didn't look at Engel as a captive or an enemy; he looked at him like an unsolved equation - a key to a door that has yet to be unlocked.
Exhaling slowly, Prosper sat on the edge of his bed, his calloused hands clasped tightly between his knees.
He opened his eyes.
Outside, a veil of clouds covered the moon, plunging the bedroom into deep shadow.
Amy had already fallen asleep hours ago, but Prosper chose to stay awake.
He always did.
"You think too much."
That is what his husband would say, his voice a low, teasing rasp against the silence of the room.
Engel had always said it with that familiar, crooked smirk, just as Prosper was trying to untangle some complex knot of thought late into the night - usually overlapping into dead hour.
Prosper would always reply with the same old answer, his tone dry, however, softened by the affection threading through it.
"Someone has to."
A faint but bittersweet smile graced the elf's lips as he sat alone on the edge of the cold mattress. The memory washed over him with blinding clarity. However, the warmth of the recollection shattered almost instantly. The phantom weight shifted, the illusion dissolving because no one was lying beside him anymore.
No breathless laughter whispered into the dark. No late-night conversations that dissolved into tangled limbs and quiet confessions. Only an empty room - the chill of bedsheets and the heavy ache of memories now remained in his wake.
The silence pressed against his skin, intolerable and hollow, until he needed to feel something real - anything to bridge the distance between now and then. Slowly, Proper raised his trembling hand. He traced his fingers upwards, sliding them over the sharp line of his jaw, and then, with a deliberate, agonizing slowness, he brushed his fingertips down the nape of his neck.
There were two old, scarred, punctured marks.
At the first stroke of his fingertips, a sharp, breathless gasp escaped his lips. The sensation unlocked a floodgate. Suddenly he wasn't just touching a scar: he was reliving the exact moment it was pierced into his pale flesh. He could feel the phantom heat of Engel's body pressed against his back, pinning him to this very bed. He recalled the laboured, intoxicating rasp of his husband's breath against his flushed skin. The deliberate hesitation before the graze of his fangs along the nape of his neck and the sharp, exquisite jolt of pain that bloomed into raw, consuming pleasure. Engel's hands had gripped his waist just like this - possessive, grounding, demanding every ounce of his attention until thought was impossible.
Prosper's eyes drifted shut, his back arched slightly into the empty air as his fingers pressed harder into the sensitive tissue of his neck. A shiver rippled down his spine, hot and electric, as vivid as if Engel were right there behind him, whispering filthy, adorning things into the night.
For a few heartbeats, the phantom touch felt entirely real. But when the elf opened his eyes and leaned back, his hand only met the empty air.
In the silent sanctuary of this bedroom, those differences faded. Whenever Engel came back to him, all of that terrifying predatory power was folded into something fiercely, achingly tender. Prosper remembered what it felt like when the hunger took over - not as a threat, but as a profound communion. Engel's crimson eyes would darken before his pupils dilated. His skin would shift into a cool, marble-like chill before the fever of the feed began. His approach was always deliberate, a low warning rumble vibrating in his chest that signalled the absolute surrender of control.
With a deep, shuddering breath, Prosper leaned into his own hand, pretending for a fraction of a second that the cool phantom pressure of Engel's lips was resting against his pulse, with a gleam of his fangs - a promise of ecstasy. He could practically taste the dizzying swirl of adrenaline and euphoria that always left him boneless against Engel's chest. He would wrap his arms around Prosper's ribs, whispering dark, immortal endearments while licking the blood clean from the fresh wound, soothing the ache with a tongue of primordial winter. His breath would ghost over the freshly punctured marks.
"Always thinking. Always worrying..." Engel would murmur against his damp skin, scented with arousal and sex.
"You belong to the night now. Belong to me."
Prosper's eyes flew open; the weighted quietude of the bedroom crashed back down with cruel clarity.
For an elf, grief was a terrible thing. It did not pass with the seasons; it settled into the bones, lasting for centuries. And unlike mortals Engel used to feed upon, Prosper had all the time to miss him - mourn him. The bed was cold and vacant. A lonely draft of a room belonging to someone who would love across the span of ages.
He dropped his hands beside him - his fingers curling into the fabric of the duvet cover, staring straight ahead into the dark as the hunger for a ghost gnawed hollowly at his chest.
In the pitch black, a single pinprick of warm light flickered into existence. A floating sphere of golden flame. It blinked open. Then another manifested beside it - then another, until there were a dozen or more.
Within seconds, the room swarmed with dozens of silent, hovering golden all-seeing eyes. They weren't mindless spirits nor summoned beasts, but fragments of his own consciousness. The gift of ancient sight derived from his abandoned heritage.
With a silent nudge of his will, the eyes dispersed. They vanished beyond the walls, passing through the floorboards, and streaked across the dark expanse of the world.
One swept the quiet city streets; another tracked communication grids; a third hunted for the subterranean scars of the facility, where Engel had been dragged.
Prosper remembered the installation from an earlier glimpse - the heavy steel doors, the sterile glass holding cells, the armed guards. But when the golden eye breached the perimeter tonight, the scene had shifted. The eye was sending him a visual - a visualization of empty holding cells.
A cold panic seized his chest for a fraction of a second before the eye ventured deeper, tracing the humming thrum of strange, suppressed energy. Deeper into the complex, the psychiatric prison gave way to a sprawling, high-tech laboratory.
The guards were gone, replaced by researchers moving in a clinical silence and focus.
Then Prosper found him.
Engel wasn't behind glass or inside a reinforced cell. He lay flat on a cold steel table beneath the harsh, blinding glare of overhead surgical lamps. Unconscious, pale, and strapped down with complex magical restraints humming with hostile energy. Banks of monitors blinked around him, surrounded by clipboards, scribbled equations, and anatomical notes.
They weren't just containing him anymore.
They were dissecting him.
The eye hovered over the table. It drifted closer, looking past the machinery until it locked onto Engel's chest. There it writhed. A dense, abyssal mass of darkness - a living black orb embedded deep within Engel's core with hairline cracks of shimmering gold.
It was something that defied nature - a supposed malignancy that should not have existed.
Jullian's instruments probed it relentlessly, trying to isolate and measure a shadow that was inextricably bound to a soul.
Prosper felt a sickening jolt in his gut. Instinct screamed what logic refused to accept.
That darkness was alive.
As if the feeling was the pressure of a foreign gaze, the black orb flickered like a glitch in the system.
An acute, invisible shockwave rippled through the ether, stretching across miles in an instant. It wasn't a voice, but a sudden, piercing jolt of recognition.
The silent yet familiar echo of family.
The elf's grip tightened until his knuckles cracked. The remaining golden eyes in his bedroom flared violently.
He thought of the oath he had sworn to himself in the quiet hours of the night - the promise that if Engel ever escaped the facility and lost control, if he ever became a threat to the world or to Amy, Prosper would be the one to put him down.
Because he was the only one strong enough.
Because he loved him - and contradictorily so.
He braced himself to be the executioner.
But looking at him now - defenceless on a surgical slab, subjected to the clinical curiosity of monsters in human form. The elf felt a highly strung coil in him snap. There was no room for cold resolve anymore. Only a suffocating, heavy wave of grief. The blue in his eyes was devoured by an ardent, molten gold. Radiating in the darkness, like two miniature twin suns. The very floorboards groaned and trembled beneath his feet.
For the first time in centuries, he finally stopped fighting his nature and allowed the dam inside him to burst, welcoming every suppressed terror, guilt, protection, and unbridled ferocity that dwells in the realm of the eldritch.
"What have they done to you?" he murmurs to himself as images of Engel's vulnerable form flash in his mind's eye. His words quake in the empty air. And then, with a flick of his mind, the floating golden eyes winked out, plunging the room back into sudden, heavy darkness.
Prosper continued to sit alone beneath the fading moonlight, pouring out from the bedroom window behind him.
The hesitation was gone. He was no longer preparing to stop Engel.
He realised that there was an element of truth to what Engel was saying all along.
They cannot co-exist with humans, not anymore - no matter how hard they try.
It was time to accept reality.
To accept the truth.