Beating Heart
Title: Beating Heart
Pairing(s): QMi, side!HanChul
Genre(s): Romance, sci-fi, dead!AU
Length: 3720 words
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Zhou Mi is a gravedigger who is suddenly brought to the Underworld.
Inspiration(s): Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride
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I.
Zhou Mi had a crappy job and he knew it, but hey, it was what got him a meal at the end of the day and that was all that mattered.
Digging graves was not so much a job as it was a mere convenience. Honestly, Zhou Mi really didn’t think that he would ever do anything else, being as unambitious as he was. For all he cared, he would be digging graves for the rest of his life-heck, he’d probably dig his own grave when the time came for that, both figuratively and literally. It’s not as if he could have done anything else.
Despite the views of the general consensus, grave-digging was a lot more than just laborious muscle work with a shovel and a tombstone. There was the emotional impact in the middle of every job where Zhou Mi would all of a sudden realize that a person who died was going to be resting in the very hole that he was digging. He would start to wonder what he or she would have been like in real life, and whether or not they would have been friends. Occasionally it was difficult for him to find the heartlessness in him to cover the casket with dirt. Sometimes when he walked down the street, he looked at peoples’ faces and wondered if, one day, he would be digging the graves for any of them. In many ways, he felt like the Grim Reaper, and the thought thoroughly sickened him.
That was what happened with the death of a man named Cho Kyuhyun, who died at the age of nineteen from a rare case of cancer. Zhou Mi had looked at the tombstone, read the description, and immediately his heart sank at how young the deceased boy was. Only nineteen, and already gone from the world. Zhou Mi had snuck a look at a picture of him and noticed that, in spite of his medical condition, Kyuhyun was still a beautiful young boy with dark soulful eyes and a soft smile. It had been difficult to dig his grave. Zhou Mi had tried to elongate the process for as long as he could-as if it would hold off the reality of the nineteen-year-old’s death for just a little longer.
Zhou Mi had watched by the sidelines as the funeral ceremony progressed, a heaviness in his heart. Empathy, for him, was not something that he could hold back easily. Though he had witnessed many funerals, he had never gotten used to the deep melancholy aura they all had. The air was filled with tears and hiccups, and it reeked of sadness-so much that it had the potential of making Zhou Mi shed a few tears of sympathy regardless of his orders to remain completely expressionless and neutral. By the time it was time to bury the casket, the gravedigger nearly didn’t have the heart to pick up the shovel and finalize the death of the young but charismatic man he never met. Before the last of it was completely covered, Zhou Mi allowed himself one tear out of human compassion before dumping another shovelful of dirt on top of the black coffin until disappeared behind a mound of wet soil, never to resurface again.
At least, that’s what he thought.
Zhou Mi had never believed in ghosts, nor had he ever believed that people with unfinished business could return with a vengeance. He believed that there was no life after death and that once you died, you’re dead, finished, gone, never to return. Done.
Which was why, a week after the funeral as he walked back to his home that was really nothing more than a shack, he was sure he shed off at least ten years of his life when a pale bony figure dressed in a dirtied white tuxedo appeared with a gust of wind right in front of him. So Zhou Mi did what any other sane human being would have done, which was scream and run frantically in the other direction with his mile-long legs and flailing arms.
Of course, any other sane human being would not have chosen the route that led straight into the forest where utter darkness handicapped you to the point where blindly clawing through the creepy-crawlies suddenly seemed just as tiring as mountain-climbing without a rope.
Zhou Mi saw it coming when it all faded to darkness.
II.
“Is he going to be alright?”
“Is he alive?”
“Of course he’s not alive, he’s here, for Christ’s sake!”
Zhou Mi woke up to a swarm of stretto-styled voices. Voices that came from people in frightening Halloween skeleton suits. They were expensive, too, by the looks of it. Gasping, the gravedigger pushed himself upwards and inspected his surroundings-a whole room filled with people in expensive skeleton suits! “Where am I?” he asked frantically, head spinning.
“Oh, you’re awake!” a skeletal man with what Zhou Mi discerned to be a Northern Chinese accent exclaimed, and the gravedigger was almost certain that the knife stuck between his ribs was not the fake plastic ones sold in dollar stores. “You must have fainted as you made your way towards the light.”
“Ah, so you’re the one that little Kyuhyun here has been telling us all about! My, my, he has great taste, doesn’t he?” a less skeletal figure with fiery red hair winked (or in his case, blinked: he was missing an eye, which would have been okay if he had at least worn an eye patch or something).
“Kyuhyun?” Zhou Mi’s head cleared at the mention of a familiar name.
“Yes?” a small voice from behind him answered.
Zhou Mi spun around and came face to face with a skinny tuxedo-clad young boy who looked like his makeup artist had applied too much eyeliner and too much whitening powder. “You! I know you!”
“I’m glad,” Kyuhyun replied softly, rolling his eyes amusedly.
“Were you the one who died last week?”
“Mm hm.”
“And why are they all wearing skeleton suits?”
“Huh?”
The redhead cackled. “Looks like someone’s in denial about their life orientation.”
Zhou Mi frowned, breathing heavily. “Excuse me?”
“Give it up, tough guy, everyone dies in the end.”
“I’m not dead!”
“Uh huh, sure you’re not.”
“He isn’t,” Kyuhyun interjected before Zhou Mi could holler back in indignation that no, he was not dead, he had a pulse and a spinal cord and fully-functional pair of kidneys and and and-!.
The Chinese skeleton frowned. “Why is he here, then?”
“I brought him here.”
“Only the dead are allowed down here. That’s the first rule of the town.”
Kyuhyun looked down, but his eyes flashed boldness. “I know, but-”
“What is going on here?” Zhou Mi bellowed hysterically to the small group, long arms flailing around in an attempt to get his point across. “Who are you? What are you? Where am I? And why am I here?”
“Oh, where are our manners?” the red-haired corpse laughed, already becoming quite fond the tall pointy-nosed man with (apparently) a great sense of fashion. “Let us introduce ourselves first before we harass the poor thing. I’m Heechul, and this here is Han Geng, the mayor of this sector of town. And you know Kyuhyun, I presume.”
“You’re in the Underworld,” Han Geng explained calmly. “And you’ll be leaving soon,” he noted with a pointed look directed towards the sheepish-looking one who seemingly brought him there.
“Soon?” Zhou Mi’s eyes flew wide open and he looked at Han Geng as if he were fat and wearing a red coat (double buttoned and fitted, thank you very much). “As in, right now?”
“Afraid not,” the mayor replied sullenly. “As you probably know, it’s not too often that somebody leaves the Underworld. It has never happened in this sector of town, at least.”
Zhou Mi’s blood ran cold. “So there’s a chance that I’ll have to stay down here forever?”
“Yes, but it’s not very likely. You have a pulse and a beating heart, after all. I’ll get back to you on that once I find out what to do. In the meantime, why doesn’t Kyuhyun show you around?” Han Geng smiled kindly. “Get a head start as to where you’ll eventually end up.”
And so, before long, Zhou Mi was ushered (Heechul) and dragged (Kyuhyun) away. The Underworld, Zhou Mi discovered, was not that much different from the Living. Sure, there were gruesome fellas with swords through their chests and walking skeletons with their intestines hanging out, but all in all the basics of his life back home were still there. Homes, streetlamps, mail offices, cellphones and the like.
Kyuhyun had suggested doing something fun together, and that was how Zhou Mi found that shopping in the Underworld was quite, for lack of a better word, interesting. After all, he had never dreamed that one day he would be sifting through a rack filled with eyes (for those that have fallen out) or nearly getting scratched by a skeleton alley cat.
So basically, if you exclude the fact that he was walking with dead people and shopping with dead people while wandering on dead peoples’ land, then everything was perfectly normal.
Sixty or so shops and at least fourteen shopping bags later (hey, the Underworld had some pretty cool stuff), the duo headed back to Kyuhyun’s home, where Zhou Mi was to spend the night.
“I’m sorry I don’t have a bed,” the living corpse apologized as he directed his guest towards the couch. “The dead don’t really sleep per se.”
“It’s alright,” Zhou Mi yawned back, dead tired-no pun intended. He placed his shopping bags near the door and ordered them from smallest to largest before flopping onto the couch and melting into its soft fabric. “Wow, this is comfortable.”
“It’s made of spider skin.”
Zhou Mi jumped up and fervently brushed off the imaginary insects, which made the other burst into laughter. He was struck by how melodious Kyuhyun’s laughter was-one would think that everything in the Underworld would be all about sadness and pain and sorrow. “Not funny,” he grumbled as he made himself comfortable again, shuddering at the mental image of eight hairy legs.
“Yes, it is,” the boy replied, still chuckling. “Hey, this may sound insurmountably ridiculous, but how do you like it here?” Kyuhyun asked tentatively once his laughter died down.
“It’s actually not too bad,” Zhou Mi replied cheerily, “considering the fact that I’m literally seeing dead people everywhere.”
“You get used to it.”
“What’s it like?” the one with the beating heart inquired, curiosity plain on his face. “Being dead?”
Kyuhyun shrugged. “Very much like being alive, except you don’t feel anything. Sort of like having anesthesia administered into your whole body.”
“Sounds scary.”
“It is.” There was a sorrowful look in Kyuhyun’s eyes, a look that definitely did not become him in Zhou Mi’s opinion. “Good night, then.”
“Kyuhyun,” Zhou Mi called out before the boy was out of earshot. “Why did you bring me down here?”
The boy stared at him with his glassy eyes but said nothing.
“You never knew me in real life, did you? So what am I here for? Did I do something wrong?”
“No! No, you didn’t do anything!” the lifeless boy responded quickly before sighing and shaking his head, exasperated. “It’s just hard to explain. Let me think about that one, okay?”
“Okay,” Zhou Mi conceded, eyes furrowing at the despair the sickeningly pale boy in front of him evoked. “See you in the morning.”
III.
Though it was clear that Kyuhyun was intrinsically quiet, Zhou Mi learned soon enough that quiet did not necessarily mean docile. The boy was wild in the most feral sense of the word, and it was not because he was dead or had messy hair or looked like he had crawled straight out of a grave (which he did, but that was beside the point)-he was rash, snarky, disrespectful, and an all-around unruly person.
Kyuhyun literally oozed out a homogenous mixture of anger, sorrow, and relief. There was feeling in his dark eyes, deliberateness in his actions, intensity in his words. He was a massive nuclear bomb of emotion, ready to explode into an immense mushroom cloud of passion.
Zhou Mi found him poisonously intoxicating.
A week into his stay in the Underworld (Han Geng refused to tell him anything about his imminent return to the Living World until some concrete information came his way), he finally worked up the courage to ask about his life prior to death. He asked about his parents, about the things he did, about how dying felt like-the typical questions that any other person would have asked a dead person.
But of course, Kyuhyun was not the typical kind of dead person. “My parents were the overprotective kind, and I loved and hated them for that. Because of them, I spent my whole life in a damn hospital. But as a result of that, I lived as long as I did. The doctors told them that I was supposed to die by the time I turned twelve. I got an extra seven years, and though I didn’t do much during that time, I’m still grateful.” Kyuhyun sighed. “I didn’t do a lot of things while I was living. I only remember sitting in the hospital bed and playing with my Nintendo DS. I’ve never talked to anybody save for the medical staff and my family. I’ve never seen anything besides the hospital walls. I’ve never fallen in love. Hell, I don't even remember one time that I’ve ever touched the ground.”
“Oh,” Zhou Mi averted his eyes, almost ashamed that he had brought the topic up. “I’m sorry.”
“That I died?”
The taller nodded.
“Don’t be. Everybody dies. Granted, probably not everybody dies as early as I did, but dying’s not that bad. You probably don’t realize it, but you already know what dying feels like,” he said, a grimace on his grey face. “You’re dying right now.”
Zhou Mi gave him his best confused expression, and Kyuhyun rolled his eyes tactlessly.
“Every living creature starts to die the moment they come to life,” Kyuhyun explained grimly. “It’s a slow process, some slower than others, but it’s ongoing. You’ve been dying before you knew what dying was.”
The man with a strong pulse let out a breath of sudden awareness. “That’s really depressing.”
“Just be glad that you’ve been born with inherent anesthesia. You won’t feel death until you’re old and frail.” Kyuhyun’s eyes turned dark. “I’ve felt death ever since I was five, since the day I first came to realize that as every day that passed, I was going to fade away and go out like a candle.”
Zhou Mi looked down. “I’m sorry.”
“I already told you, don’t be sorry that I died.”
“I’m not sorry that you’re dead,” he amended gently. “I’m sorry that I’m alive.”
For a moment, Kyuhyun seemed to freeze. His shoulders slumped and he faced his confidante with the most murderous expression on his decaying face that Zhou Mi had to take a few recoiling steps backwards. “Don’t be sorry for that. Don’t you ever be sorry for that.”
“But I am,” Zhou Mi lifted his chin defiantly, voice wavering. “I’m a perfectly adept person, Kyuhyun, and instead of doing something with my life I do something as lowly as dig graves. If you had my health while you were alive, you would have been something great. You would have done something with your life. While I’m pretty much nothing.”
Kyuhyun’s eyes flashed horrifyingly, and within seconds his hand-nothing more than white peeling skin stretched tautly over nimble bones-was around Zhou Mi’s neck. “Say that again,” he hissed through clenched teeth, “And I won’t hesitate to stop that precious beating heart of yours.”
Zhou Mi winced as Kyuhyun let go, and lightly ran his fingers over the purple splotches on the side of his neck. He watched as the boy stalked away with trembling shoulders, and started to wonder if the dead could still shed tears.
IV.
“The portal back to the Living World will be open on the next full moon,” Han Geng told him.
“Three days,” Zhou Mi breathed out.
“Make good use of the time you have here,” the mayor drawled, casting him a meaningful look before turning around to rejoin Heechul in some of their weekly couple shopping.
“Han Geng,” Zhou Mi suddenly called out.
The skeleton turned his head around.
“How did you meet Heechul? Were you together when you were alive?”
Han Geng smiled, teeth grey and rotting but still brilliant. “I met Heechul here. I never found love while I was living.”
“Oh. Do you wish you did?”
The mayor looked towards his love who was presently arguing heatedly with the cashier who refused to haggle the price of bone-whitener any lower than what was marked. “Never.”
V.
“Han Geng told me that I’ll be leaving in three days,” Zhou Mi broke the pregnant silence over a cup of black coffee.
If Kyuhyun was upset about Zhou Mi leaving, he certainly did not show it. The corpse had only eyed the bruises on his friend’s neck and nodded passively.
Zhou Mi took another sip and winced at the bitterness. “Kyuhyun, are you happy?”
The dead boy did a half-laugh-half-scoff. “I’m dead. I can’t feel anything.”
“Are you at peace, at least?”
Kyuhyun stared down into his drink and frowned. “I thought I would be.”
“What?”
“When I was alive, my sister would visit me at the hospital and read me stories about true love that could never be parted until death. She told me that love felt like your heart was going to burst and that you could hardly breathe because you were just so happy. Like you were going to stop breathing altogether if you were to get any happier. I brought you down here because I thought that I could, that I could-”
“Could what?” Zhou Mi asked softly, breath hitching.
“I thought that I could fall in love with you and finally feel what those people in the stories felt like.” Kyuhyun confessed. “But I can’t. I can’t feel my heart bursting. I can’t feel like I’m about to stop breathing-because I already have. I feel absolutely nothing.”
Zhou Mi pursed his lips and took a few slow breaths. “So you didn’t?”
“Didn’t what?”
“Fall in love with me?”
Kyuhyun looked away. “I don’t know.”
Zhou Mi nodded and accepted his answer in silence.
“You’re not nothing, Zhou Mi, and you deserve to live as much as anybody.”
“Thank you,” the other replied after a moment’s quiet, genuinely touched. He half-smiled. “Is there a reason why you chose me of all people? Or was it a spur-of-a-moment pick?”
“It was supposed to be spur-of-a-moment,” Kyuhyun admitted, pretending not to notice how Zhou Mi’s face fell. “You cried at my funeral.”
“Did I?” Zhou Mi quirked an eyebrow, though he remembered very clearly that moment of emotional openness.
“When you were burying me. They were tears of compassion, and they were pure.” Kyuhyun smiled softly, and Zhou Mi started at just how weak the boy looked. “I think I fell half in love with you the moment they fell onto my coffin.”
Zhou Mi smiled despite himself. “That’s a start.”
Kyuhyun chugged down the remainder of his coffee, inwardly cursing at the fact that he could no longer taste. “If I ask you to stay here with me, will you?” It was much too direct of a question, but it had to be asked.
Fortunately, Zhou Mi had already seen this question coming, which lessened the surprise factor tremendously. The breathing man took a moment to turn the question over several times in his head before answering in the affirmative. “I also think that I’ve fallen half in love with you.”
VI.
Because it was against the Dead rules (Han Geng) and because it would be a waste of a life not lived (Kyuhyun), Zhou Mi eventually went back to the Living World and lived another seventy years, still unambitious and still a gravedigger. Of course, Zhou Mi found that funerals were no longer the depressing events where people passed away and disappeared and were never to be seen again. He knew where they would end up, and every time he buried the coffins, he smiled and wished them luck in their new life.
Zhou Mi died of old age in his sleep, which was sort of anticlimactic, really. He had hoped to die dramatically, like in those sappy American movies where the hero lies on his back and pushes his last words out of his vocal cords before going all still and motionless. Zhou Mi’s last words were “How much do I owe you?” to the pizza delivery man, though he would never admit it to himself.
When he found himself in a surrounding filled with people dressed in expensive skeleton costumes, he grinned so hard that it could have hurt if his nerve endings still worked. He spotted a familiar-looking body of bones with a knife jammed between the ribs and ran towards him, arms flailing as he attacked the mostly putrefied and slightly rickety Han Geng in a bone-crushing hug.
“You seem way too happy to be here,” the mayor of two hundred years and counting wheezed as he picked up the broken pieces of his ribs and put himself back together.
“Looking for Kyuhyun?” Heechul asked, laughter on his face. Both of his eyeballs were missing now, but it was a lot less frightening than it had been the first time Zhou Mi saw him. “He’s still living in the same house. You remember where?”
Zhou Mi had already bolted off, grinning as he zoomed down the streets without the pain of arthritis in his legs. He knocked on the door and heard something crash from inside. The door opened with a creak and a slightly more decomposed Kyuhyun came into sight.
“Surprise,” Zhou Mi beamed, taking in those soulful eyes that he had fallen half in love with.
For a split second, Kyuhyun could have sworn that his heart had started beating again.
Pairing(s): QMi, side!HanChul
Genre(s): Romance, sci-fi, dead!AU
Length: 3720 words
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Zhou Mi is a gravedigger who is suddenly brought to the Underworld.
Inspiration(s): Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride
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I.
Zhou Mi had a crappy job and he knew it, but hey, it was what got him a meal at the end of the day and that was all that mattered.
Digging graves was not so much a job as it was a mere convenience. Honestly, Zhou Mi really didn’t think that he would ever do anything else, being as unambitious as he was. For all he cared, he would be digging graves for the rest of his life-heck, he’d probably dig his own grave when the time came for that, both figuratively and literally. It’s not as if he could have done anything else.
Despite the views of the general consensus, grave-digging was a lot more than just laborious muscle work with a shovel and a tombstone. There was the emotional impact in the middle of every job where Zhou Mi would all of a sudden realize that a person who died was going to be resting in the very hole that he was digging. He would start to wonder what he or she would have been like in real life, and whether or not they would have been friends. Occasionally it was difficult for him to find the heartlessness in him to cover the casket with dirt. Sometimes when he walked down the street, he looked at peoples’ faces and wondered if, one day, he would be digging the graves for any of them. In many ways, he felt like the Grim Reaper, and the thought thoroughly sickened him.
That was what happened with the death of a man named Cho Kyuhyun, who died at the age of nineteen from a rare case of cancer. Zhou Mi had looked at the tombstone, read the description, and immediately his heart sank at how young the deceased boy was. Only nineteen, and already gone from the world. Zhou Mi had snuck a look at a picture of him and noticed that, in spite of his medical condition, Kyuhyun was still a beautiful young boy with dark soulful eyes and a soft smile. It had been difficult to dig his grave. Zhou Mi had tried to elongate the process for as long as he could-as if it would hold off the reality of the nineteen-year-old’s death for just a little longer.
Zhou Mi had watched by the sidelines as the funeral ceremony progressed, a heaviness in his heart. Empathy, for him, was not something that he could hold back easily. Though he had witnessed many funerals, he had never gotten used to the deep melancholy aura they all had. The air was filled with tears and hiccups, and it reeked of sadness-so much that it had the potential of making Zhou Mi shed a few tears of sympathy regardless of his orders to remain completely expressionless and neutral. By the time it was time to bury the casket, the gravedigger nearly didn’t have the heart to pick up the shovel and finalize the death of the young but charismatic man he never met. Before the last of it was completely covered, Zhou Mi allowed himself one tear out of human compassion before dumping another shovelful of dirt on top of the black coffin until disappeared behind a mound of wet soil, never to resurface again.
At least, that’s what he thought.
Zhou Mi had never believed in ghosts, nor had he ever believed that people with unfinished business could return with a vengeance. He believed that there was no life after death and that once you died, you’re dead, finished, gone, never to return. Done.
Which was why, a week after the funeral as he walked back to his home that was really nothing more than a shack, he was sure he shed off at least ten years of his life when a pale bony figure dressed in a dirtied white tuxedo appeared with a gust of wind right in front of him. So Zhou Mi did what any other sane human being would have done, which was scream and run frantically in the other direction with his mile-long legs and flailing arms.
Of course, any other sane human being would not have chosen the route that led straight into the forest where utter darkness handicapped you to the point where blindly clawing through the creepy-crawlies suddenly seemed just as tiring as mountain-climbing without a rope.
Zhou Mi saw it coming when it all faded to darkness.
II.
“Is he going to be alright?”
“Is he alive?”
“Of course he’s not alive, he’s here, for Christ’s sake!”
Zhou Mi woke up to a swarm of stretto-styled voices. Voices that came from people in frightening Halloween skeleton suits. They were expensive, too, by the looks of it. Gasping, the gravedigger pushed himself upwards and inspected his surroundings-a whole room filled with people in expensive skeleton suits! “Where am I?” he asked frantically, head spinning.
“Oh, you’re awake!” a skeletal man with what Zhou Mi discerned to be a Northern Chinese accent exclaimed, and the gravedigger was almost certain that the knife stuck between his ribs was not the fake plastic ones sold in dollar stores. “You must have fainted as you made your way towards the light.”
“Ah, so you’re the one that little Kyuhyun here has been telling us all about! My, my, he has great taste, doesn’t he?” a less skeletal figure with fiery red hair winked (or in his case, blinked: he was missing an eye, which would have been okay if he had at least worn an eye patch or something).
“Kyuhyun?” Zhou Mi’s head cleared at the mention of a familiar name.
“Yes?” a small voice from behind him answered.
Zhou Mi spun around and came face to face with a skinny tuxedo-clad young boy who looked like his makeup artist had applied too much eyeliner and too much whitening powder. “You! I know you!”
“I’m glad,” Kyuhyun replied softly, rolling his eyes amusedly.
“Were you the one who died last week?”
“Mm hm.”
“And why are they all wearing skeleton suits?”
“Huh?”
The redhead cackled. “Looks like someone’s in denial about their life orientation.”
Zhou Mi frowned, breathing heavily. “Excuse me?”
“Give it up, tough guy, everyone dies in the end.”
“I’m not dead!”
“Uh huh, sure you’re not.”
“He isn’t,” Kyuhyun interjected before Zhou Mi could holler back in indignation that no, he was not dead, he had a pulse and a spinal cord and fully-functional pair of kidneys and and and-!.
The Chinese skeleton frowned. “Why is he here, then?”
“I brought him here.”
“Only the dead are allowed down here. That’s the first rule of the town.”
Kyuhyun looked down, but his eyes flashed boldness. “I know, but-”
“What is going on here?” Zhou Mi bellowed hysterically to the small group, long arms flailing around in an attempt to get his point across. “Who are you? What are you? Where am I? And why am I here?”
“Oh, where are our manners?” the red-haired corpse laughed, already becoming quite fond the tall pointy-nosed man with (apparently) a great sense of fashion. “Let us introduce ourselves first before we harass the poor thing. I’m Heechul, and this here is Han Geng, the mayor of this sector of town. And you know Kyuhyun, I presume.”
“You’re in the Underworld,” Han Geng explained calmly. “And you’ll be leaving soon,” he noted with a pointed look directed towards the sheepish-looking one who seemingly brought him there.
“Soon?” Zhou Mi’s eyes flew wide open and he looked at Han Geng as if he were fat and wearing a red coat (double buttoned and fitted, thank you very much). “As in, right now?”
“Afraid not,” the mayor replied sullenly. “As you probably know, it’s not too often that somebody leaves the Underworld. It has never happened in this sector of town, at least.”
Zhou Mi’s blood ran cold. “So there’s a chance that I’ll have to stay down here forever?”
“Yes, but it’s not very likely. You have a pulse and a beating heart, after all. I’ll get back to you on that once I find out what to do. In the meantime, why doesn’t Kyuhyun show you around?” Han Geng smiled kindly. “Get a head start as to where you’ll eventually end up.”
And so, before long, Zhou Mi was ushered (Heechul) and dragged (Kyuhyun) away. The Underworld, Zhou Mi discovered, was not that much different from the Living. Sure, there were gruesome fellas with swords through their chests and walking skeletons with their intestines hanging out, but all in all the basics of his life back home were still there. Homes, streetlamps, mail offices, cellphones and the like.
Kyuhyun had suggested doing something fun together, and that was how Zhou Mi found that shopping in the Underworld was quite, for lack of a better word, interesting. After all, he had never dreamed that one day he would be sifting through a rack filled with eyes (for those that have fallen out) or nearly getting scratched by a skeleton alley cat.
So basically, if you exclude the fact that he was walking with dead people and shopping with dead people while wandering on dead peoples’ land, then everything was perfectly normal.
Sixty or so shops and at least fourteen shopping bags later (hey, the Underworld had some pretty cool stuff), the duo headed back to Kyuhyun’s home, where Zhou Mi was to spend the night.
“I’m sorry I don’t have a bed,” the living corpse apologized as he directed his guest towards the couch. “The dead don’t really sleep per se.”
“It’s alright,” Zhou Mi yawned back, dead tired-no pun intended. He placed his shopping bags near the door and ordered them from smallest to largest before flopping onto the couch and melting into its soft fabric. “Wow, this is comfortable.”
“It’s made of spider skin.”
Zhou Mi jumped up and fervently brushed off the imaginary insects, which made the other burst into laughter. He was struck by how melodious Kyuhyun’s laughter was-one would think that everything in the Underworld would be all about sadness and pain and sorrow. “Not funny,” he grumbled as he made himself comfortable again, shuddering at the mental image of eight hairy legs.
“Yes, it is,” the boy replied, still chuckling. “Hey, this may sound insurmountably ridiculous, but how do you like it here?” Kyuhyun asked tentatively once his laughter died down.
“It’s actually not too bad,” Zhou Mi replied cheerily, “considering the fact that I’m literally seeing dead people everywhere.”
“You get used to it.”
“What’s it like?” the one with the beating heart inquired, curiosity plain on his face. “Being dead?”
Kyuhyun shrugged. “Very much like being alive, except you don’t feel anything. Sort of like having anesthesia administered into your whole body.”
“Sounds scary.”
“It is.” There was a sorrowful look in Kyuhyun’s eyes, a look that definitely did not become him in Zhou Mi’s opinion. “Good night, then.”
“Kyuhyun,” Zhou Mi called out before the boy was out of earshot. “Why did you bring me down here?”
The boy stared at him with his glassy eyes but said nothing.
“You never knew me in real life, did you? So what am I here for? Did I do something wrong?”
“No! No, you didn’t do anything!” the lifeless boy responded quickly before sighing and shaking his head, exasperated. “It’s just hard to explain. Let me think about that one, okay?”
“Okay,” Zhou Mi conceded, eyes furrowing at the despair the sickeningly pale boy in front of him evoked. “See you in the morning.”
III.
Though it was clear that Kyuhyun was intrinsically quiet, Zhou Mi learned soon enough that quiet did not necessarily mean docile. The boy was wild in the most feral sense of the word, and it was not because he was dead or had messy hair or looked like he had crawled straight out of a grave (which he did, but that was beside the point)-he was rash, snarky, disrespectful, and an all-around unruly person.
Kyuhyun literally oozed out a homogenous mixture of anger, sorrow, and relief. There was feeling in his dark eyes, deliberateness in his actions, intensity in his words. He was a massive nuclear bomb of emotion, ready to explode into an immense mushroom cloud of passion.
Zhou Mi found him poisonously intoxicating.
A week into his stay in the Underworld (Han Geng refused to tell him anything about his imminent return to the Living World until some concrete information came his way), he finally worked up the courage to ask about his life prior to death. He asked about his parents, about the things he did, about how dying felt like-the typical questions that any other person would have asked a dead person.
But of course, Kyuhyun was not the typical kind of dead person. “My parents were the overprotective kind, and I loved and hated them for that. Because of them, I spent my whole life in a damn hospital. But as a result of that, I lived as long as I did. The doctors told them that I was supposed to die by the time I turned twelve. I got an extra seven years, and though I didn’t do much during that time, I’m still grateful.” Kyuhyun sighed. “I didn’t do a lot of things while I was living. I only remember sitting in the hospital bed and playing with my Nintendo DS. I’ve never talked to anybody save for the medical staff and my family. I’ve never seen anything besides the hospital walls. I’ve never fallen in love. Hell, I don't even remember one time that I’ve ever touched the ground.”
“Oh,” Zhou Mi averted his eyes, almost ashamed that he had brought the topic up. “I’m sorry.”
“That I died?”
The taller nodded.
“Don’t be. Everybody dies. Granted, probably not everybody dies as early as I did, but dying’s not that bad. You probably don’t realize it, but you already know what dying feels like,” he said, a grimace on his grey face. “You’re dying right now.”
Zhou Mi gave him his best confused expression, and Kyuhyun rolled his eyes tactlessly.
“Every living creature starts to die the moment they come to life,” Kyuhyun explained grimly. “It’s a slow process, some slower than others, but it’s ongoing. You’ve been dying before you knew what dying was.”
The man with a strong pulse let out a breath of sudden awareness. “That’s really depressing.”
“Just be glad that you’ve been born with inherent anesthesia. You won’t feel death until you’re old and frail.” Kyuhyun’s eyes turned dark. “I’ve felt death ever since I was five, since the day I first came to realize that as every day that passed, I was going to fade away and go out like a candle.”
Zhou Mi looked down. “I’m sorry.”
“I already told you, don’t be sorry that I died.”
“I’m not sorry that you’re dead,” he amended gently. “I’m sorry that I’m alive.”
For a moment, Kyuhyun seemed to freeze. His shoulders slumped and he faced his confidante with the most murderous expression on his decaying face that Zhou Mi had to take a few recoiling steps backwards. “Don’t be sorry for that. Don’t you ever be sorry for that.”
“But I am,” Zhou Mi lifted his chin defiantly, voice wavering. “I’m a perfectly adept person, Kyuhyun, and instead of doing something with my life I do something as lowly as dig graves. If you had my health while you were alive, you would have been something great. You would have done something with your life. While I’m pretty much nothing.”
Kyuhyun’s eyes flashed horrifyingly, and within seconds his hand-nothing more than white peeling skin stretched tautly over nimble bones-was around Zhou Mi’s neck. “Say that again,” he hissed through clenched teeth, “And I won’t hesitate to stop that precious beating heart of yours.”
Zhou Mi winced as Kyuhyun let go, and lightly ran his fingers over the purple splotches on the side of his neck. He watched as the boy stalked away with trembling shoulders, and started to wonder if the dead could still shed tears.
IV.
“The portal back to the Living World will be open on the next full moon,” Han Geng told him.
“Three days,” Zhou Mi breathed out.
“Make good use of the time you have here,” the mayor drawled, casting him a meaningful look before turning around to rejoin Heechul in some of their weekly couple shopping.
“Han Geng,” Zhou Mi suddenly called out.
The skeleton turned his head around.
“How did you meet Heechul? Were you together when you were alive?”
Han Geng smiled, teeth grey and rotting but still brilliant. “I met Heechul here. I never found love while I was living.”
“Oh. Do you wish you did?”
The mayor looked towards his love who was presently arguing heatedly with the cashier who refused to haggle the price of bone-whitener any lower than what was marked. “Never.”
V.
“Han Geng told me that I’ll be leaving in three days,” Zhou Mi broke the pregnant silence over a cup of black coffee.
If Kyuhyun was upset about Zhou Mi leaving, he certainly did not show it. The corpse had only eyed the bruises on his friend’s neck and nodded passively.
Zhou Mi took another sip and winced at the bitterness. “Kyuhyun, are you happy?”
The dead boy did a half-laugh-half-scoff. “I’m dead. I can’t feel anything.”
“Are you at peace, at least?”
Kyuhyun stared down into his drink and frowned. “I thought I would be.”
“What?”
“When I was alive, my sister would visit me at the hospital and read me stories about true love that could never be parted until death. She told me that love felt like your heart was going to burst and that you could hardly breathe because you were just so happy. Like you were going to stop breathing altogether if you were to get any happier. I brought you down here because I thought that I could, that I could-”
“Could what?” Zhou Mi asked softly, breath hitching.
“I thought that I could fall in love with you and finally feel what those people in the stories felt like.” Kyuhyun confessed. “But I can’t. I can’t feel my heart bursting. I can’t feel like I’m about to stop breathing-because I already have. I feel absolutely nothing.”
Zhou Mi pursed his lips and took a few slow breaths. “So you didn’t?”
“Didn’t what?”
“Fall in love with me?”
Kyuhyun looked away. “I don’t know.”
Zhou Mi nodded and accepted his answer in silence.
“You’re not nothing, Zhou Mi, and you deserve to live as much as anybody.”
“Thank you,” the other replied after a moment’s quiet, genuinely touched. He half-smiled. “Is there a reason why you chose me of all people? Or was it a spur-of-a-moment pick?”
“It was supposed to be spur-of-a-moment,” Kyuhyun admitted, pretending not to notice how Zhou Mi’s face fell. “You cried at my funeral.”
“Did I?” Zhou Mi quirked an eyebrow, though he remembered very clearly that moment of emotional openness.
“When you were burying me. They were tears of compassion, and they were pure.” Kyuhyun smiled softly, and Zhou Mi started at just how weak the boy looked. “I think I fell half in love with you the moment they fell onto my coffin.”
Zhou Mi smiled despite himself. “That’s a start.”
Kyuhyun chugged down the remainder of his coffee, inwardly cursing at the fact that he could no longer taste. “If I ask you to stay here with me, will you?” It was much too direct of a question, but it had to be asked.
Fortunately, Zhou Mi had already seen this question coming, which lessened the surprise factor tremendously. The breathing man took a moment to turn the question over several times in his head before answering in the affirmative. “I also think that I’ve fallen half in love with you.”
VI.
Because it was against the Dead rules (Han Geng) and because it would be a waste of a life not lived (Kyuhyun), Zhou Mi eventually went back to the Living World and lived another seventy years, still unambitious and still a gravedigger. Of course, Zhou Mi found that funerals were no longer the depressing events where people passed away and disappeared and were never to be seen again. He knew where they would end up, and every time he buried the coffins, he smiled and wished them luck in their new life.
Zhou Mi died of old age in his sleep, which was sort of anticlimactic, really. He had hoped to die dramatically, like in those sappy American movies where the hero lies on his back and pushes his last words out of his vocal cords before going all still and motionless. Zhou Mi’s last words were “How much do I owe you?” to the pizza delivery man, though he would never admit it to himself.
When he found himself in a surrounding filled with people dressed in expensive skeleton costumes, he grinned so hard that it could have hurt if his nerve endings still worked. He spotted a familiar-looking body of bones with a knife jammed between the ribs and ran towards him, arms flailing as he attacked the mostly putrefied and slightly rickety Han Geng in a bone-crushing hug.
“You seem way too happy to be here,” the mayor of two hundred years and counting wheezed as he picked up the broken pieces of his ribs and put himself back together.
“Looking for Kyuhyun?” Heechul asked, laughter on his face. Both of his eyeballs were missing now, but it was a lot less frightening than it had been the first time Zhou Mi saw him. “He’s still living in the same house. You remember where?”
Zhou Mi had already bolted off, grinning as he zoomed down the streets without the pain of arthritis in his legs. He knocked on the door and heard something crash from inside. The door opened with a creak and a slightly more decomposed Kyuhyun came into sight.
“Surprise,” Zhou Mi beamed, taking in those soulful eyes that he had fallen half in love with.
For a split second, Kyuhyun could have sworn that his heart had started beating again.