SLEEPSONG (BoyxBoy)✔️

Chapter 52

Chapter Fifty Two

I was unsteady.

I was very unsteady and upset, and overall in a bad mood... it was just one of those days where nothing was going right, a Bad Luck day as I liked to call them. I think that Sebastian could tell from how I spoke and talked to him what my mood was like, even though I tried to hide it.

The reason I suspected it was because, for the first time, he did the talking and told me stories about his past, of living through things I'd only ever read about in history books. He'd seen full-blown wars and poverty and had even fought in many historical battles, such as the battle of Fort Wayne and Gettysburg, D-Day, Pearl Harbor, many nameless battles from the Vietnam War, and a multitude of others from the sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen hundreds.

He had seen the births and deaths of every single World War, and he had fought for what he believed was morally right despite never once being enlisted in the army or military.

For two hours, he told me of how he'd hidden what he was, of the few people who'd known that he was a werewolf, the soldiers he'd befriended and the friends that he'd lost. And... he told me about Jasper, about their relationship, how living with him had been the only sort of stability he'd ever had.

It was near the end of his story about the time he'd gotten himself cornered by a squadron of Nazis while helping a small group of Jewish children cross the border from Germany into Austria that I spoke up.

"What was your favorite time period?" I asked and he paused mid-sentence; in-game, the two of us were beating down a bunch of goblins running around in a dark cave, and while our battles were fairly intense I was so out of it that the movements came like robotic clockwork. "Is there a time period that you miss living in? Like, the Victorian Era? Or maybe when the west was wild?"

"No," Sebastian said in a somewhat distant tone. "I much prefer the present. People glorify the past in ways that make it look desirable, but in reality, back then... those were lawless times. For hundreds of years this world was full of death, murder, hate, and grief, and it almost always went unpunished because people lacked the resources, technology, and knowledge to do much."

"Then, your scars," I said a little tentatively, "did... all of them come from rabid vampires?"

"Rabid vampires?"

"That's what I've decided to call them," I explained, frowning at the screen. "They aren't like me, they aren't... you know."

"Hn..." he acknowledged, then fell silent for a second. "Many of the scars around my neck and shoulders actually came from Jasper. Those were scars of a... viciously... intimate nature. As for the the rest... I have many, some from vampire fights, some from the wars I've fought in... but what about your scars? You always talk about them, but I've only ever seen three."

"You know about the knife scars," I reminded him, then added, "but... the other scars are from the surgeries I had as a kid. The long thin one beneath my rib cage for the work done on my lung, the burns on the nape of my neck from when I was... hurt... by my mom. I have scars on my forearms, too, from when I tried to go outside after being turned. They caught fire."

I heard nothing for the longest time, but while I waited I realized something and chuckled.

"What's funny?"

"Nothing," I honestly explained, still laughing a little. "It just hit me that we're way more similar in certain ways that I initially realized. We both have scars, we both only loved once, we both were hurt by that special person, and we both survived by doing whatever it took."