⤷ ❛ ❅ the elementium hall

@☾ wonwoo j｡ A decade ago, Mingyu would've pounced on the very obvious bait. He would have made Wonwoo bleed - slowly slaughtering him until he had stripped him of everything that had been him for so long, peeling back layer after layer of remnant humanity, until all that was left was the bloody rawness of nothing but feral will of survival. A decade ago, Mingyu wouldn't have swallowed around the need to bite, rip, maim, wouldn't have gritted his teeth to will the aching in his gums to subside. It felt like he was swallowing around shards of ice, his powers flooding his system - and yet the surge of cold was nothing but a shadow of the violence that had always remained barely simmering beneath the surface. One hand on the holster, all the time.

But now, years later, he should know better. Did he, though? Not really. He wasn't the bigger person, not really.

"Fledglings like you just like getting on their elders nerves", he grunted while letting go of his student's hand and placing his hand on the table in front of him instead, leaning in as his voice dropped down to nothing more than a growl. "You're all just begging to be bled dry, sometimes. You don't even know what I /could/ demand from you and you're so quick to dismiss it all. Young vampires like you never tasted the brutality od our kind and still you think you're on top of the world, on top of everything. Be careful, Wonwoo. I never claimed to be above all the dark things our kind gets up to. Let sleeping dogs lie, if you know what's good for you. And not... get the // out of my classroom."

@☪ mingyu k｡ A pindrop of silence follows in the atmosphere that could have been cut if it was not already absolutely frozen with the seeping of the elder's power. Perhaps he should have - perhaps professer Kim was expecting something like fear to kindle somewhere in Wonwoo's flatlining soul, but the papers dropped without inciting hardly a flutter of raven lashes. Maybe a wiser creature would have learned to turn tail and run for their own sake- but he had never promised that he had any ounce of the wisdom of life, after all. A monster that does not fear death doesn't learn the depth of its consequences and perhaps never will.

Instead the pale headed beast just smiles, a feral grin in the face of the larger, scarier threat, strawberry gaze brimming with suicidal interest at the possibility of having woken up something he should not have. Because this /was/ infinitely more intriguing than the put-together shell that the other man has surely been wearing each and every day of his classes, the dull lie that had very nearly been believable to Wonwoo until this moment- it feels like a vampire, and Wonwoo feels like he can't stop pitching forward into the abyss that is now staring back.

If he had been alive he thinks his heart might have been pounding, from fear, from excitement, or from the sheer hunger that was beginning to insistently at the edges of his mind. As it was Wonwoo swallowed thickly, the saliva building for all the wrong reasons as fingers closed around the ones trapping his wrist in an attempt to free himself, digging blunt fingernails against thick digits."Oh, professor. We've been here before, haven't we? I miss my gutter but neither of us have the final say and... As with all demands you will make, of me, I'm sure-- I must refuse."

@☾ wonwoo j｡ Now, Mingyu would've liked to claim that he had left the violent ways of his family behind decades ago. And that statement in itself betrayed just how dangerous it was to play a wolf in sheep's clothing, his rage never as far out of reach as he would've liked it to be. Perhaps it was partially Anzhelika's fault, did their energy not bounce off of each other on a daily basis and, well, that was a problem for tomorrow Mingyu. Today Mingyu had a different problem and that was not Wonwoo, despite the fact that it probably should've been. No, it was the slow crackling of ice racing through him, part his anger and part his ability, as his fingers curled around the student's wrist, the pages shoved at him freezing solid in an instant, whatever little moisture that had been left inside the paper turning solid and crystalline.

"By any means, feel free to stop pretending and drop out", he gave back slowly, his voice barely above a snarl - and yes, he would've liked to be better than this. Better than his father and his violence, better than his mother with her acid words and daggered eyes. "The cage has no doors but the ones you give it. Be my guest, Wonwoo, drop out and go back to whatever gutter you might have crawled out of. And this, by the way, is my classroom and you're the one who should learn when to tuck tail and leave. You might have given up on your potential, but then don't waste the school's air and leave. If you're comfortable being undead meat, go ahead. Fail my class, but you're the one who'll have to face the music, not me."

@☪ mingyu k｡ The one thing he perhaps had to amend about Professor Kim that he disliked was the professor always talked as if whatever archaic speech he was spewing out at any given moment actually mattered. Another relic of the past lost in some dimensionless dream that he amounted to something, perhaps, or that any of this house play meant more than a funny gamble built upon a few years of their progeny’s lives- or worst of all, somebody self important enough to imagine there was something he could teach to Wonwoo. He disliked that breed of people in particular, and professor Kim was beginning to tick the boxes.

Figures.

“—And why, prof, do you imagine that this… any of it, matters to me?” The Cheshire grin stretching across soft lips is colder than he intends it to be, the annoyance of being woken and building hinder starting to nip at the vampire’s already exceeding short patience. “Where else should I be but here? I should be interested to hear your suggestions.” Stretching the garnet gaze from the papers littered on the desk to return the older creatures stare with a brazen challenge of his own. “Even though you seem to be anxious to retain me for another year, my dear professor.”

It was a dangerous line he was toeing- Wonwoo would never call himself a fool in matters of might, and yet, despite knowing that professor- that Kim Mingyu would not find it a hassle to rip him apart like one of his own rag dolls, he was finding it difficult to rein in his tongue. Perhaps it was the hunger speaking after all as ivory fangs flashed with each word, tasting the roiling anger across his tongue. “You are the cage and I the inhabitant… but I would not mind seeing if these rules of yours can hold me, professor.” Cool hands collected the scattered papers, pressing them back against the older vampire. “— Don’t you have somewhere to be? Or are you so free you’d rather waste time here with me?”

@☾ wonwoo j｡ There weren't many things that irked him. Mingyu was too old to be nothing more than a slave to his own emotions, a being with endless time and patience and while he knew he was harsh and unforgiving when it came to his teachings, he also knew that he was nothing, if not fair. Again, there weren't many things that could get a raise out of him, but perhaps that was the very reason he could feel a muscle feather at the edge of his jaw, his teeth grinding and his eyes darkening as he stared down at his student, who dared to challenge him. Fledglings these days were nothing, if not impertinent.

"You think I haven't noticed how you're dozing off in each of my lectures?", he asked slowly, pulling out another set of papers from him bag to toss them down on the desk, another red mark at the top corner. And another and another. "You're failing my class, Wonwoo. And no, that does not depend more on me, than it does on you. You should clean up your act, if you really don't want to do an honor lap. You wouldn't want me to talk to the dean and get your Feeder privileges revoked for a week, no? You should learn where your place is, in all of this. Where is the point of coming to the institute and not even trying?"

@☪ mingyu k｡ Professor Kim’s class was his first choice when it came to naps for many reasons. It was always air conditioned to barely above freezing, curtesy of the class element, always quiet and orderly, and finally, there was always somebody else catching the professor’s ire before he ever has a chance to discover Wonwoo. He liked to think he managed the feat well- slipping in with the crowd, and out the door promptly at the bell. Not that he ever imagined he was slipping past unnoticed, but just as long as he never stayed long enough to attract trouble.

But one could never quite walk the riverbanks without getting his feet wet, he supposed. It wasn’t on purpose, or at least Wonwoo could have sworn that he had set up a subtle alarm with a purchased charm, but maybe he had been too tired to notice, or maybe the witch who’d passed him the goods had really just scammed him after all. It wasn’t the supposed silent electricity stream that he was expecting but the exasperated growl, rough voice cold in the accusations that pierced through his sleepy haze.

Garnet orbs blinked to blurry alertness, flipping up to the angry, dark fuzzy cloud hanging across the desk. “I don’t,” he began slowly, folding up into a smaller, slouched circle. “But no, professor, I think… you and I both don’t plan on repeating this year. But this—“ moving to match a slender digit beside the red, bolder numbers with pointed, methodical mischief. “—— depends on you more than I, no…? Prof.”

@☾ wonwoo j｡ Truth be told, Mingyu regretted. Not a specific thing, really, but sadly most choices he had made that had gotten him here, nursing a splitting headache and aching eyes. Which was oddly paradoxical, considering that vampires were designed to be apex predators by default. Well, aside from all of the superstitious believes of sunlight, garlic and crosses, of course. Besides the point, really. But in the names of all the gone gods and the current ones, his head was killing him and it was all due to the fact that, of all things, he had decided to become a teacher. And teaching was the most annoying thing in the ing world. Granted, most of his students knew that he wasn't messing around when it came to his classes, nor did he grade unfairly. And yet.

As the classroom cleared, Mingyu collected his papers from the desk at the front of the room, packing his bag, before he made his way across the room, only to slam the stack of papers he was holding down next to the head of a snoozing student, clearing his throat rather loudly.

"Do you really think your grades are good enough to sleep through an entire class?", he asked loudly, uncaring of the fact that he had just rather rudely woken someone up, rapping one long finger down next to a glaring, red grade in the upper right corner of the sheet on the very top of his stack. "Because I really don't think so. Do you want to end up failing and repeating the course? Because that's how you end up failing and repeating the course."