31_days; August 28
Title: Eating Sweet Peas
Day/Theme: August 28; "It's the breathing, it's the breathing in and out and in and..."
Fandom: Original
Characters/Pairing: Ethan, Mirélha, mentioned others
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2,627
Note: What the fuck, I have enough people living inside my head, I don’t need a million more. WAY2GO self. :| I also really didn't write this for 31_days... it just sorta came out and ended up almost-fitting the theme of the day. Hahaha.
Ethan has always believed in ghosts.
Or, to be more accurate, he has always been able to see them. He remembered being three-years-old and watching an old, semi-transparent man with no visible feet sit down comfortably on a bench and take off his fedora to look up at the sun, just as if he were alive. Pointing out the spirits was no use; all it ever earned him was a concerned look from his parents and mockery from his peers. By the time he was six, he stopped mentioning them completely.
But that didn’t mean they went away; in truth, it seemed as if his awareness grew more with time. Walking home on abandoned sidewalk in the fifth grade was actually a journey through ghosts crossing the street and sitting in trees, standing by sign posts and drifting about. It never bothered him though, and if he was being honest, he quite enjoyed being able to see others that no one else could, one giant secret only he knew.
This continued until he was twelve-years-old.
By then, he no longer wanted to see anything.
○
Ethan was not quite sure as to why he took on this dare.
Inside a decaying wooden house under a dusty, insect corpse-filled desk was Ethan, crouching into a tiny little ball to escape the dripping rain; half of the roof had collapsed in the living room, and the leaks have already soaked him to the bone. A spider spun a web on the other side of the desk, and he watched it climb down with disinterest as he wondered why he was here.
There was school, and then friends, and somewhere in the middle talk of the old haunted house at the edge of town. Local legends and tales evolved into a full out ghost story about a girl who still walked the halls of the creaking mansion.
He, at age seventeen, had no interest in ghosts at all.
“They say she’ll cut your heart out!”
“Or drag your soul down to the underworld!”
“Well then, why don’t we ask our local ghost expert,” Kyle said with a smirk, arms crossed over his chest, and honestly, it was probably supposed to look intimidating or even threatening but he thought it just looked really kind of gay. “Ethan, what do you think of the ghost story?”
The flat look he had since the beginning of the conversation didn’t change at all when he replied. “I don’t believe it.”
On a desk swinging her legs behind him, Jessica booed. “Oh come on! What is that? How can the boy who shouted ‘There’s a ghost right there behind you, I swear!’ be denying the fact that there’s a ghost?”
“That was years ago!”
“Doesn’t change the fact you did.”
She leaned over, resting her head on top of folded arms. On his head. “Are you saying you’ve already looked inside the house yourself and there wasn’t a ghost?”
Standing up, he watched Jessica nearly topple over before sighing, “I just don’t think there’s a ghost, alright?”
Kyle’s smirk grew three times bigger; Ethan vaguely felt like punching something, preferably his face. “Why don’t you prove it then?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”
“It’s supposed to be stormy tonight, the perfect chance to meet this ghost according to the story-”
“I thought you were supposed to see scary things on Halloween?”
“Shut up, Danny.”
“I propose that you spend the night there, alone, and then come back and tell us if the ghost girl is really there or not!”
He blinked at him. “And you can’t do this yourself why?”
Kyle waved his hand, brushing the comment off, and again he thought Gay. “Of course I can’t do it! I can’t see them after all, remember?”
Danny nodded his head in agreement, adding, “We’ll have to rely on you, Mister I-see-ghosts-no-really.”
His features dropped down into a dreading sort of look, like he would rather eat bugs than waste his time like this. “What,” he said, giving all three of them a rather pointed look, “is in it for me then?”
Jessica looked up thoughtfully, lightly tapping her chin as her eyes wandered around. “Umm. I dunno, we can all give you some money?”
Kyle’s face paled just a bit. “N-Now wait a minute, whoever said that-”
“Yeah, sure,” Danny interjected, leaving Kyle’s attempt at dissuading the proposition left behind in the dust, “if you can stay there the entire night without chickening out, we’ll each give you… twenty dollars! How does that sound?”
Well, he did like money. Especially when he didn’t have to do anything to get it. Besides, he had wanted to buy some new sneakers…
“Hold on now, I don’t think-”
“Deal.”
His possibly-gay friend’s mouth dropped open, and he started flailing as he shouted, “I never said I would agree to this and I’ll have you know I won’t so-”
Danny patted his back not-so-sympathetically. “It’s too late man; you’ll have to pay up when the time comes.”
Kyle groaned, his attempt at looking threatening withering into a defeated droop. After a few moment of what was probably self-pity, he stood up straight and pointed one accusing finger at Ethan. “Fine, we’ll have it your way! I’ll just have to make sure you end up leaving that damn house!”
Jessica looked at him quizzically. “And how do you suppose we do that?”
His mouth twitched up into a smile, and Ethan thought that if his life was a cartoon, this would be the time when menacing flames would rise up suddenly behind his friend as he cackled. “Muhuhuhuu, let’s just say I have my ways…”
“He’s probably going to have someone stalk you,” Danny whispered to Ethan, also starting to imagine bright red flames behind his other friend.
Nodding, Jessica just looked at Kyle blankly and said, “Yeah, probably.”
It was going to be a very long night.
○
Ah, right. That’s why I’m here.
He checked his watch; three am and no sign of a ghost. Those sneakers better’ve been in stock or he was going to throttle something.
The leaks continued to drip down in seven second intervals, and the space under the desk was beginning to feel damp; it was already too, too small, and the addition of moisture seeping into his back as he breathed in musky, humid air was not at all what he could call pleasant. In fact, the entire situation was highly unpleasant, and he started to debate whether $60 shoes were really worth the trouble.
Thunking his head against the wood-and as a result, probably a spider as well-he closed his eyes in hopes of getting some sleep. Stalker or not, he doubted that Kyle actually sent someone inside the house as well just to see if he was sleeping or not.
“Are you alright?”
Ethan jumped, slammed his head against the desk, and swore under his breath all under the span of five seconds. He looked up and saw a girl with ivory skin and ebony curls that lightly framed her face-a classic sort of beauty-but her clothes must have been outdated for a century.
And he could have sworn that she appeared from thin air.
She peered down, the pearl necklaces around her neck chiming together from the sudden movement. “I said, are you alright?”
“Holy shit,” he panted, still out of breath, “where the hell did you come from?”
“You see, there’s this thing called having a home. Ever heard of it?”
His brow furrowed; he had looked around the entire house, room to room to room in search of a ghost, but he definitely didn’t see anyone living in them. The bedrooms looked like they hadn’t been touched in over twenty years, and the rest weren’t any better.
“Really? I looked around and didn’t see anyone here, not even signs of someone living he-wait a minute, why are you here anyways? This house hasn’t been occupied for years.”
The girl had the grace to look the tiniest bit sheepish, even as she attempted to stretch her lips into a smile. “W-Well… just because I said I live here doesn’t mean it’s, y’know, legal.”
He blinked at her, incredulity colouring his voice. “You mean you’re a squatter?”
She bristled, looked ready to start shouting seeing as how her mouth was open as wide as a watermelon, but she seemed to deflate instead and muttered weakly, “You don’t have to put it like that…”
The laugh in his voice was hard to hide. “Are you even old enough to be doing this? What are you, eleven?”
Her responding expression was not so much as coy as it was oh-well-wouldn’t-you-like-to-know-too-bad-I-won’t-tell-you. “I’ll just say older than you think.”
Ethan stroked his chin in fake contemplation. “I’m going to say… fifteen. Am I right or am I right?”
Sticking out her tongue just a bit, the girl simply said, “Close enough.”
After looking back down at him, she shifted her weight from one leg to another and inquired, “So, what’s your excuse?”
“My what?”
“Why are you here?”
“Oh,” he said, finally getting out of his spider and dust filled desk bed. Stretching his back-that knot near his shoulder was going to be a bitch later-he simply said, “A dare.”
Raising one black, black eyebrow, she repeated him, “A dare?”
“Yeah. I’m supposed to see if there’s a ghost here or not. Stupid, right?”
One of her hands began playing with the necklaces, rubbing the beads between her fingers back and forth. “And why is that? Stupid, I mean.”
He shrugged. “I’ve looked here before, and there was no ghost. I can see them normally, like everyday people, so I would’ve known.”
Ethan has no problem telling people he sees-and he wishes it was saw-ghosts. It was a part of him, like how he had permanently messy hair or the fact his sense of direction was more likely to end lives than save them-just another detail.
“Oh, really,” the girl said, now looking interested, “did you know what kind of ghost you’re looking for? Specifics, like do you know what they’re supposed to look like?”
Now this he wasn’t expecting. “Wait, you believe me?”
“Of course,” she replied, and she said it so easily, like it’s weird to not believe. She blinked, catching her mistake, and said, “I mean… I believe you since I can see them, too. Ghosts.”
“I…” he started, stopped, because what could he say? Should he be glad that he’s actually met someone that doesn’t greet this fact with stares of disbelief? That they accept it instead?
Because if he should, he doesn’t feel any better, not one bit. In fact, he feels kind of worse.
The girl continued, either not catching his single vowel of a sentence or simply ignoring it. “I have never seen another ghost here, just so you know. Still, it doesn’t hurt to pass along information; what ghost are you supposed to be looking for? Female, male, adult, child,” she paused, and something resembling a smile appeared on her face, “perhaps even an animal?”
“Very funny,” he said flatly, “and I’m not exactly sure. All my friends said was ‘a girl,’ so I’m going to assume that the ghost is not an adult.”
The almost-smile turned sympathetic and a hint of… something else. He wanted to call it bitter but wasn’t quite sure if that was right. “If you’re looking for the ghost of a child, I’d have to call you quite unlucky. The ghosts of children are always the worst.”
He put a hand to his forehead, thinking of a certain terrible incident five years ago-cries that peeled the paper from the walls and dead-dead eyes that simply could not belong to any normal three-year-old child-but still chose to ask, “And why would you say that?”
“Well think about it,” she prodded, leaning against the wall of the house, and it struck him as odd that there was no creaking of aged wood or discomfort with the dampness, “if you died a child, you’d have to see everyone you know grow up without you. While that goes for anyone else who dies, a child would see their seven-year-old best friend turn to eight, and then nine, and soon enough, they become the adult they always wanted to be but never got the chance to, all while stuck in their little boy or little girl body. In essence, they are given the chance to see everything they have ever wanted, but not the chance to actually have it for themselves; it’s torture. That’s why they’re so wrathful.”
When said like that, it does make sense. At the very least, he knew that if he died without fulfilling his own personal dream, and then saw someone else do it, he’d be pretty pissed off. As in really.
“Now that you mention it, I’ve noticed over the years that it’s more likely for the ghost of a kid to be drifting around than an adult or elderly person.”
“Right, exactly. I mean, most elderly people are probably pretty satisfied with their life, so there’s not much to be angry about. Adults, they usually only stick around to haunt people if they feel like they got really cheated or ripped off in life, like growing up with a terrible childhood that lead into a really, really terrible adulthood. That doesn’t happen too often though, and so you’re left with the children who never got anything and hate everything else because of it.”
“Wow,” he breathed out, voice quiet in amazement, “I’ve never met anyone like you. How do you know so much?”
“Oh, well,” she said, shifting and playing with the hem of her skirt just a bit, “I’ve been around, that’s all.”
“Ethan.”
She blinked at him, eyes wide and confused. “I beg your pardon?”
He sighed, rubbing the back of his head; he never was too good with talking to people, let alone introducing himself. “My name. It’s Ethan.”
Her hands flew up to her mouth, and her reply became a bit muffled. “Oh my goodness, I can’t believe I didn’t realize that! How rude of me, oh jeez.”
“Err… it’s fine.”
“Well then,” and her expression turned light and cheery; daffodils, but not sunflowers, “my name is Mirélha. You can just call me Mirél.”
He became so concentrated on just doing this whole introduction thing right that he didn’t notice Mirél’s already pale complexion turn even whiter than chalk as he raised his hand to shake her own. “It’s nice to me-”
Blinking, he suddenly withdrew his hand; Mirél let out the breath she wasn’t really holding.
“You said you’ve never seen ‘another’ ghost here,” he said, voice hard and clear, like glass but not so brittle, “does that mean there is a ghost?”
Mirél sucked in a breath-or at least, that’s what it looked like; Ethan didn’t actually hear anything-and the smile on her face faded. She looked sad, so sad, and he just couldn’t imagine why anyone in the world should be so sad.
“I told you, right? Children are the worst,” and as she said this he watched her form change from fifteen, to four, to eleven, and then back to fifteen. She did not go any higher than fifteen-years-old.
He had a sinking feeling that he knew why.
She looked up, semi-transparent and feet missing; he couldn’t hear her pearl necklaces clacking together as she raised her own hand to meet his. It passed through his body like neutrinos-millions of particles passing through every pore every second; you just can’t feel it.
“They always come back to haunt you.”
Day/Theme: August 28; "It's the breathing, it's the breathing in and out and in and..."
Fandom: Original
Characters/Pairing: Ethan, Mirélha, mentioned others
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2,627
Note: What the fuck, I have enough people living inside my head, I don’t need a million more. WAY2GO self. :| I also really didn't write this for 31_days... it just sorta came out and ended up almost-fitting the theme of the day. Hahaha.
Ethan has always believed in ghosts.
Or, to be more accurate, he has always been able to see them. He remembered being three-years-old and watching an old, semi-transparent man with no visible feet sit down comfortably on a bench and take off his fedora to look up at the sun, just as if he were alive. Pointing out the spirits was no use; all it ever earned him was a concerned look from his parents and mockery from his peers. By the time he was six, he stopped mentioning them completely.
But that didn’t mean they went away; in truth, it seemed as if his awareness grew more with time. Walking home on abandoned sidewalk in the fifth grade was actually a journey through ghosts crossing the street and sitting in trees, standing by sign posts and drifting about. It never bothered him though, and if he was being honest, he quite enjoyed being able to see others that no one else could, one giant secret only he knew.
This continued until he was twelve-years-old.
By then, he no longer wanted to see anything.
○
Ethan was not quite sure as to why he took on this dare.
Inside a decaying wooden house under a dusty, insect corpse-filled desk was Ethan, crouching into a tiny little ball to escape the dripping rain; half of the roof had collapsed in the living room, and the leaks have already soaked him to the bone. A spider spun a web on the other side of the desk, and he watched it climb down with disinterest as he wondered why he was here.
There was school, and then friends, and somewhere in the middle talk of the old haunted house at the edge of town. Local legends and tales evolved into a full out ghost story about a girl who still walked the halls of the creaking mansion.
He, at age seventeen, had no interest in ghosts at all.
“They say she’ll cut your heart out!”
“Or drag your soul down to the underworld!”
“Well then, why don’t we ask our local ghost expert,” Kyle said with a smirk, arms crossed over his chest, and honestly, it was probably supposed to look intimidating or even threatening but he thought it just looked really kind of gay. “Ethan, what do you think of the ghost story?”
The flat look he had since the beginning of the conversation didn’t change at all when he replied. “I don’t believe it.”
On a desk swinging her legs behind him, Jessica booed. “Oh come on! What is that? How can the boy who shouted ‘There’s a ghost right there behind you, I swear!’ be denying the fact that there’s a ghost?”
“That was years ago!”
“Doesn’t change the fact you did.”
She leaned over, resting her head on top of folded arms. On his head. “Are you saying you’ve already looked inside the house yourself and there wasn’t a ghost?”
Standing up, he watched Jessica nearly topple over before sighing, “I just don’t think there’s a ghost, alright?”
Kyle’s smirk grew three times bigger; Ethan vaguely felt like punching something, preferably his face. “Why don’t you prove it then?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”
“It’s supposed to be stormy tonight, the perfect chance to meet this ghost according to the story-”
“I thought you were supposed to see scary things on Halloween?”
“Shut up, Danny.”
“I propose that you spend the night there, alone, and then come back and tell us if the ghost girl is really there or not!”
He blinked at him. “And you can’t do this yourself why?”
Kyle waved his hand, brushing the comment off, and again he thought Gay. “Of course I can’t do it! I can’t see them after all, remember?”
Danny nodded his head in agreement, adding, “We’ll have to rely on you, Mister I-see-ghosts-no-really.”
His features dropped down into a dreading sort of look, like he would rather eat bugs than waste his time like this. “What,” he said, giving all three of them a rather pointed look, “is in it for me then?”
Jessica looked up thoughtfully, lightly tapping her chin as her eyes wandered around. “Umm. I dunno, we can all give you some money?”
Kyle’s face paled just a bit. “N-Now wait a minute, whoever said that-”
“Yeah, sure,” Danny interjected, leaving Kyle’s attempt at dissuading the proposition left behind in the dust, “if you can stay there the entire night without chickening out, we’ll each give you… twenty dollars! How does that sound?”
Well, he did like money. Especially when he didn’t have to do anything to get it. Besides, he had wanted to buy some new sneakers…
“Hold on now, I don’t think-”
“Deal.”
His possibly-gay friend’s mouth dropped open, and he started flailing as he shouted, “I never said I would agree to this and I’ll have you know I won’t so-”
Danny patted his back not-so-sympathetically. “It’s too late man; you’ll have to pay up when the time comes.”
Kyle groaned, his attempt at looking threatening withering into a defeated droop. After a few moment of what was probably self-pity, he stood up straight and pointed one accusing finger at Ethan. “Fine, we’ll have it your way! I’ll just have to make sure you end up leaving that damn house!”
Jessica looked at him quizzically. “And how do you suppose we do that?”
His mouth twitched up into a smile, and Ethan thought that if his life was a cartoon, this would be the time when menacing flames would rise up suddenly behind his friend as he cackled. “Muhuhuhuu, let’s just say I have my ways…”
“He’s probably going to have someone stalk you,” Danny whispered to Ethan, also starting to imagine bright red flames behind his other friend.
Nodding, Jessica just looked at Kyle blankly and said, “Yeah, probably.”
It was going to be a very long night.
○
Ah, right. That’s why I’m here.
He checked his watch; three am and no sign of a ghost. Those sneakers better’ve been in stock or he was going to throttle something.
The leaks continued to drip down in seven second intervals, and the space under the desk was beginning to feel damp; it was already too, too small, and the addition of moisture seeping into his back as he breathed in musky, humid air was not at all what he could call pleasant. In fact, the entire situation was highly unpleasant, and he started to debate whether $60 shoes were really worth the trouble.
Thunking his head against the wood-and as a result, probably a spider as well-he closed his eyes in hopes of getting some sleep. Stalker or not, he doubted that Kyle actually sent someone inside the house as well just to see if he was sleeping or not.
“Are you alright?”
Ethan jumped, slammed his head against the desk, and swore under his breath all under the span of five seconds. He looked up and saw a girl with ivory skin and ebony curls that lightly framed her face-a classic sort of beauty-but her clothes must have been outdated for a century.
And he could have sworn that she appeared from thin air.
She peered down, the pearl necklaces around her neck chiming together from the sudden movement. “I said, are you alright?”
“Holy shit,” he panted, still out of breath, “where the hell did you come from?”
“You see, there’s this thing called having a home. Ever heard of it?”
His brow furrowed; he had looked around the entire house, room to room to room in search of a ghost, but he definitely didn’t see anyone living in them. The bedrooms looked like they hadn’t been touched in over twenty years, and the rest weren’t any better.
“Really? I looked around and didn’t see anyone here, not even signs of someone living he-wait a minute, why are you here anyways? This house hasn’t been occupied for years.”
The girl had the grace to look the tiniest bit sheepish, even as she attempted to stretch her lips into a smile. “W-Well… just because I said I live here doesn’t mean it’s, y’know, legal.”
He blinked at her, incredulity colouring his voice. “You mean you’re a squatter?”
She bristled, looked ready to start shouting seeing as how her mouth was open as wide as a watermelon, but she seemed to deflate instead and muttered weakly, “You don’t have to put it like that…”
The laugh in his voice was hard to hide. “Are you even old enough to be doing this? What are you, eleven?”
Her responding expression was not so much as coy as it was oh-well-wouldn’t-you-like-to-know-too-bad-I-won’t-tell-you. “I’ll just say older than you think.”
Ethan stroked his chin in fake contemplation. “I’m going to say… fifteen. Am I right or am I right?”
Sticking out her tongue just a bit, the girl simply said, “Close enough.”
After looking back down at him, she shifted her weight from one leg to another and inquired, “So, what’s your excuse?”
“My what?”
“Why are you here?”
“Oh,” he said, finally getting out of his spider and dust filled desk bed. Stretching his back-that knot near his shoulder was going to be a bitch later-he simply said, “A dare.”
Raising one black, black eyebrow, she repeated him, “A dare?”
“Yeah. I’m supposed to see if there’s a ghost here or not. Stupid, right?”
One of her hands began playing with the necklaces, rubbing the beads between her fingers back and forth. “And why is that? Stupid, I mean.”
He shrugged. “I’ve looked here before, and there was no ghost. I can see them normally, like everyday people, so I would’ve known.”
Ethan has no problem telling people he sees-and he wishes it was saw-ghosts. It was a part of him, like how he had permanently messy hair or the fact his sense of direction was more likely to end lives than save them-just another detail.
“Oh, really,” the girl said, now looking interested, “did you know what kind of ghost you’re looking for? Specifics, like do you know what they’re supposed to look like?”
Now this he wasn’t expecting. “Wait, you believe me?”
“Of course,” she replied, and she said it so easily, like it’s weird to not believe. She blinked, catching her mistake, and said, “I mean… I believe you since I can see them, too. Ghosts.”
“I…” he started, stopped, because what could he say? Should he be glad that he’s actually met someone that doesn’t greet this fact with stares of disbelief? That they accept it instead?
Because if he should, he doesn’t feel any better, not one bit. In fact, he feels kind of worse.
The girl continued, either not catching his single vowel of a sentence or simply ignoring it. “I have never seen another ghost here, just so you know. Still, it doesn’t hurt to pass along information; what ghost are you supposed to be looking for? Female, male, adult, child,” she paused, and something resembling a smile appeared on her face, “perhaps even an animal?”
“Very funny,” he said flatly, “and I’m not exactly sure. All my friends said was ‘a girl,’ so I’m going to assume that the ghost is not an adult.”
The almost-smile turned sympathetic and a hint of… something else. He wanted to call it bitter but wasn’t quite sure if that was right. “If you’re looking for the ghost of a child, I’d have to call you quite unlucky. The ghosts of children are always the worst.”
He put a hand to his forehead, thinking of a certain terrible incident five years ago-cries that peeled the paper from the walls and dead-dead eyes that simply could not belong to any normal three-year-old child-but still chose to ask, “And why would you say that?”
“Well think about it,” she prodded, leaning against the wall of the house, and it struck him as odd that there was no creaking of aged wood or discomfort with the dampness, “if you died a child, you’d have to see everyone you know grow up without you. While that goes for anyone else who dies, a child would see their seven-year-old best friend turn to eight, and then nine, and soon enough, they become the adult they always wanted to be but never got the chance to, all while stuck in their little boy or little girl body. In essence, they are given the chance to see everything they have ever wanted, but not the chance to actually have it for themselves; it’s torture. That’s why they’re so wrathful.”
When said like that, it does make sense. At the very least, he knew that if he died without fulfilling his own personal dream, and then saw someone else do it, he’d be pretty pissed off. As in really.
“Now that you mention it, I’ve noticed over the years that it’s more likely for the ghost of a kid to be drifting around than an adult or elderly person.”
“Right, exactly. I mean, most elderly people are probably pretty satisfied with their life, so there’s not much to be angry about. Adults, they usually only stick around to haunt people if they feel like they got really cheated or ripped off in life, like growing up with a terrible childhood that lead into a really, really terrible adulthood. That doesn’t happen too often though, and so you’re left with the children who never got anything and hate everything else because of it.”
“Wow,” he breathed out, voice quiet in amazement, “I’ve never met anyone like you. How do you know so much?”
“Oh, well,” she said, shifting and playing with the hem of her skirt just a bit, “I’ve been around, that’s all.”
“Ethan.”
She blinked at him, eyes wide and confused. “I beg your pardon?”
He sighed, rubbing the back of his head; he never was too good with talking to people, let alone introducing himself. “My name. It’s Ethan.”
Her hands flew up to her mouth, and her reply became a bit muffled. “Oh my goodness, I can’t believe I didn’t realize that! How rude of me, oh jeez.”
“Err… it’s fine.”
“Well then,” and her expression turned light and cheery; daffodils, but not sunflowers, “my name is Mirélha. You can just call me Mirél.”
He became so concentrated on just doing this whole introduction thing right that he didn’t notice Mirél’s already pale complexion turn even whiter than chalk as he raised his hand to shake her own. “It’s nice to me-”
Blinking, he suddenly withdrew his hand; Mirél let out the breath she wasn’t really holding.
“You said you’ve never seen ‘another’ ghost here,” he said, voice hard and clear, like glass but not so brittle, “does that mean there is a ghost?”
Mirél sucked in a breath-or at least, that’s what it looked like; Ethan didn’t actually hear anything-and the smile on her face faded. She looked sad, so sad, and he just couldn’t imagine why anyone in the world should be so sad.
“I told you, right? Children are the worst,” and as she said this he watched her form change from fifteen, to four, to eleven, and then back to fifteen. She did not go any higher than fifteen-years-old.
He had a sinking feeling that he knew why.
She looked up, semi-transparent and feet missing; he couldn’t hear her pearl necklaces clacking together as she raised her own hand to meet his. It passed through his body like neutrinos-millions of particles passing through every pore every second; you just can’t feel it.
“They always come back to haunt you.”