ghosts that we knew (chapter 1/?)
ghosts that we knew (chapter 1/?)
shinee: jongyu
ao3 mirror (chapter formatting is a little different there)
content warning:
This entire fic revolves around a character death, albeit one that occurred in the past, so plz keep that in mind if character death in fic makes you uncomfortable. I don't intend for this to be super oppressively angsty but it is a fact that weighs heavily on the story.
When Jinki yanks open the door to his bedroom, Jonghyun is sitting cross-legged on the plaid duvet, leaning back on his wrists. He's wearing that huge black sweater that nearly swallows him whole and a dumb smile that’s likewise too big for his dumb face, and he's not saying anything, just kind of grinning and waiting for Jinki to react. Jinki's backpack suddenly feels full of cinder blocks, or maybe it's that his limbs have all gone slack. He's sweating everywhere and he wonders how fast the human heart can beat before it just gives up.
Because he’s got so many feelings about Jonghyun being here in his house again that he could compose a symphony about the exact peroxide-blonde shade of Jonghyun’s hair, but he’s also pretty sure that people who die in car accidents aren't supposed to show up a week later on their best friends’ beds.
"Boo," Jonghyun says, his mouth going round with the word. Jinki had dismissed Mrs. Kim’s quietly-spoken suggestion that he see a psychiatrist after Jonghyun’s funeral, but he’s beginning to consider that a mistake.
Because here are the facts, the ones printed in the school paper:
Jonghyun had been, with a friend, riding his bike home from the 7-11 at around 10pm when he collided with the passenger side of a sedan headed west at the intersection. The sedan was white but the make, model and license plate remain unknown, as the vehicle fled the scene of the crime and the only witness was unable to remember any identifying characteristics aside from the color and a small bumper sticker that read, in English, "Beast of Cheddar."
And then there are the other facts:
Jinki watched Jonghyun get hit by a car and can't remember anything useful aside from the nonsense phrase on a fucking bumper sticker.
And now Jonghyun is sitting on his bed with his not-shattered ankles tucked under his not-bloody knees like he belongs there and like he never left.
"You’re a hallucination or a delusion or something?" Jinki says, an unvoiced sigh lurking under each word. He drops his backpack on the floor and the whole room shakes, framed posters trembling on the walls.
"Boo, I’m a ghost,” Jonghyun says, sounding kind of exasperated. And that makes sense, he guesses. Jonghyun is too determined and annoying and alive to go out quietly.
"Are you, like, transparent now, Casper?" Jinki says. He stumbles closer to the bed, reaching weakly in front of him. "Will my hand go right through you?"
Jinki brushes one fingertip against Jonghyun's arm and it's like touching a dandelion: unusually ticklish on the pad of his finger, inhumanly soft--and he has this weird sense that if he's not careful, if he presses down too hard, Jonghyun will just disintegrate.
"Whoa," Jonghyun says, following a sound that's more of a nasally whinny than a laugh. He grins and cranes away from Jinki's hands. "Buy me dinner first?"
Jinki really can't be held responsible for the way his legs fold under him, or for the thunder of his knees thumping the floorboards. Jonghyun is in his room--in his room--and he looks the same and he even sort of smells the same--baby powder, which he always used to put on his face--and he's a ghost or something or maybe Jinki is crazy after all. Jonghyun coming back is an idea he had quarantined: dangerous to everybody's health, best to never entertain. He had even bullied his subconscious out of any stupid dreams.
So Jinki definitely cannot be held responsible for how wet his face his getting.
"Oh god, not again. Please stop, you’re gonna dehydrate yourself," Jonghyun says and looks away like he’s embarrassed for Jinki, although Jinki thinks Jonghyun is probably feeling pretty pleased with himself right now. They're playing FIFA and Jonghyun sucks just as much as a spectral entity as he did in life.
Jinki laughs wetly and wipes his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket. He stares at the dark splotch on the navy cotton and thinks: whoa. When was the last time he cried? He's going to need to disinfect his PS3 controller because he's dripping snot onto the control pad but he's crying and that's sort of incredible.
He's learned, over the course of his life, that people are afraid of you when something of yours breaks and you don't cry. As a boy, holding half of his favorite transformer in each hand, he just nodded, like, how interesting, so that was what happened when you left your toys on the driveway, and his parents had looked at him a little strangely, started asking him a lot of questions about his feelings. When his skateboard hit a crease in the sidewalk and he fell, he heard the dry snap in his ankle and lay there, in awe of how aware he suddenly was of every nerve in his body. He didn't cry when they lifted him onto the stretcher, and he didn't cry when they lifted Jonghyun onto one either. He remembers being convinced, somehow, that it was the same stretcher.
Jinki learned to fake it.
Jonghyun was the one who cried, for real. He cried every time he stubbed his toe on the one buckled floorboard in Jinki's living room. He cried when he failed his math tests, muffled, in the janitor's closet with the braided strings of a mop draping down onto his face, pissed-off and red-eared whenever Jinki found him there. He cried, in a really ugly, blissful way (nostrils flaring wide, mouth gaping open like a shark on a movie poster), when a local newspaper did a feature on his band, calling his lyrics "transcendent."
Jonghyun would cry and Jinki would sling an arm around his shoulder or shove at him with the flat of his palms and it just made sense, the mechanics of it.
But now: Jinki, cross-legged on his bedroom floor, playing video games with an actual ghost and crying because he's happy.
"Seriously, stop," Jonghyun says, squirming where he sits with his heels pressed into the seat of his jeans. "Stop looking at me like that."
"Like what?"
"All in awe, like I just single-handedly cured cancer, or something. This isn't that big of a deal."
"Oh, yeah. Your resurrection as my undead roommate is pretty status quo."
Jonghyun groans at the TV. “I could be haunting the bathroom of a hot chick with a huge rack and instead I’m playing soccer games in your bedroom.” He chucks his controller into a pile of laundry. “Which, by the way, stinks from beyond the grave.”
Jonghyun unfolds his legs and gets up from the floor, leaving two foggy marks where his feet had been pressed to the wood.
"So, how does this work? Are there ghost rules?”
"There are rules. It’s all very serious," Jonghyun says. He leans to inspect Jinki’s bookshelf, and Jinki thinks that there’s a slight difference to Jonghyun now. It’s not his voice (kermit-y) or his height (5’ 5”) or the way he fidgets. It’s not something Jinki has words for. The setting sun casts a parallelogram of light onto the wall and maybe that’s part of it: the sunlight hits Jonghyun weird. If Jinki really squints, he can almost see something like television static crawling along the surface of Jonghyun’s skin.
"Like," Jonghyun begins, running his index finger along the book spines, "I have to scare people.”
Jinki snorts. “Well, good job. I’m still kinda pissing myself.”
“Gross,” Jonghyun says, not disapprovingly. “But listen, this is like a job. If I go too long without getting spooky, I’m gone.”
“Forever? As in, laid to rest?” Jinki feels his palms getting damp again. Jonghyun just shrugs, the collar of his sweater slipping to reveal one shoulder blade. It’s smooth and tan like the rest of Jonghyun and not bruised the way Jinki remembers it.
Jinki swallows. "What are we waiting for, then? Let's scare somebody."
shinee: jongyu
ao3 mirror (chapter formatting is a little different there)
content warning:
This entire fic revolves around a character death, albeit one that occurred in the past, so plz keep that in mind if character death in fic makes you uncomfortable. I don't intend for this to be super oppressively angsty but it is a fact that weighs heavily on the story.
When Jinki yanks open the door to his bedroom, Jonghyun is sitting cross-legged on the plaid duvet, leaning back on his wrists. He's wearing that huge black sweater that nearly swallows him whole and a dumb smile that’s likewise too big for his dumb face, and he's not saying anything, just kind of grinning and waiting for Jinki to react. Jinki's backpack suddenly feels full of cinder blocks, or maybe it's that his limbs have all gone slack. He's sweating everywhere and he wonders how fast the human heart can beat before it just gives up.
Because he’s got so many feelings about Jonghyun being here in his house again that he could compose a symphony about the exact peroxide-blonde shade of Jonghyun’s hair, but he’s also pretty sure that people who die in car accidents aren't supposed to show up a week later on their best friends’ beds.
"Boo," Jonghyun says, his mouth going round with the word. Jinki had dismissed Mrs. Kim’s quietly-spoken suggestion that he see a psychiatrist after Jonghyun’s funeral, but he’s beginning to consider that a mistake.
Because here are the facts, the ones printed in the school paper:
Jonghyun had been, with a friend, riding his bike home from the 7-11 at around 10pm when he collided with the passenger side of a sedan headed west at the intersection. The sedan was white but the make, model and license plate remain unknown, as the vehicle fled the scene of the crime and the only witness was unable to remember any identifying characteristics aside from the color and a small bumper sticker that read, in English, "Beast of Cheddar."
And then there are the other facts:
Jinki watched Jonghyun get hit by a car and can't remember anything useful aside from the nonsense phrase on a fucking bumper sticker.
And now Jonghyun is sitting on his bed with his not-shattered ankles tucked under his not-bloody knees like he belongs there and like he never left.
"You’re a hallucination or a delusion or something?" Jinki says, an unvoiced sigh lurking under each word. He drops his backpack on the floor and the whole room shakes, framed posters trembling on the walls.
"Boo, I’m a ghost,” Jonghyun says, sounding kind of exasperated. And that makes sense, he guesses. Jonghyun is too determined and annoying and alive to go out quietly.
"Are you, like, transparent now, Casper?" Jinki says. He stumbles closer to the bed, reaching weakly in front of him. "Will my hand go right through you?"
Jinki brushes one fingertip against Jonghyun's arm and it's like touching a dandelion: unusually ticklish on the pad of his finger, inhumanly soft--and he has this weird sense that if he's not careful, if he presses down too hard, Jonghyun will just disintegrate.
"Whoa," Jonghyun says, following a sound that's more of a nasally whinny than a laugh. He grins and cranes away from Jinki's hands. "Buy me dinner first?"
Jinki really can't be held responsible for the way his legs fold under him, or for the thunder of his knees thumping the floorboards. Jonghyun is in his room--in his room--and he looks the same and he even sort of smells the same--baby powder, which he always used to put on his face--and he's a ghost or something or maybe Jinki is crazy after all. Jonghyun coming back is an idea he had quarantined: dangerous to everybody's health, best to never entertain. He had even bullied his subconscious out of any stupid dreams.
So Jinki definitely cannot be held responsible for how wet his face his getting.
"Oh god, not again. Please stop, you’re gonna dehydrate yourself," Jonghyun says and looks away like he’s embarrassed for Jinki, although Jinki thinks Jonghyun is probably feeling pretty pleased with himself right now. They're playing FIFA and Jonghyun sucks just as much as a spectral entity as he did in life.
Jinki laughs wetly and wipes his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket. He stares at the dark splotch on the navy cotton and thinks: whoa. When was the last time he cried? He's going to need to disinfect his PS3 controller because he's dripping snot onto the control pad but he's crying and that's sort of incredible.
He's learned, over the course of his life, that people are afraid of you when something of yours breaks and you don't cry. As a boy, holding half of his favorite transformer in each hand, he just nodded, like, how interesting, so that was what happened when you left your toys on the driveway, and his parents had looked at him a little strangely, started asking him a lot of questions about his feelings. When his skateboard hit a crease in the sidewalk and he fell, he heard the dry snap in his ankle and lay there, in awe of how aware he suddenly was of every nerve in his body. He didn't cry when they lifted him onto the stretcher, and he didn't cry when they lifted Jonghyun onto one either. He remembers being convinced, somehow, that it was the same stretcher.
Jinki learned to fake it.
Jonghyun was the one who cried, for real. He cried every time he stubbed his toe on the one buckled floorboard in Jinki's living room. He cried when he failed his math tests, muffled, in the janitor's closet with the braided strings of a mop draping down onto his face, pissed-off and red-eared whenever Jinki found him there. He cried, in a really ugly, blissful way (nostrils flaring wide, mouth gaping open like a shark on a movie poster), when a local newspaper did a feature on his band, calling his lyrics "transcendent."
Jonghyun would cry and Jinki would sling an arm around his shoulder or shove at him with the flat of his palms and it just made sense, the mechanics of it.
But now: Jinki, cross-legged on his bedroom floor, playing video games with an actual ghost and crying because he's happy.
"Seriously, stop," Jonghyun says, squirming where he sits with his heels pressed into the seat of his jeans. "Stop looking at me like that."
"Like what?"
"All in awe, like I just single-handedly cured cancer, or something. This isn't that big of a deal."
"Oh, yeah. Your resurrection as my undead roommate is pretty status quo."
Jonghyun groans at the TV. “I could be haunting the bathroom of a hot chick with a huge rack and instead I’m playing soccer games in your bedroom.” He chucks his controller into a pile of laundry. “Which, by the way, stinks from beyond the grave.”
Jonghyun unfolds his legs and gets up from the floor, leaving two foggy marks where his feet had been pressed to the wood.
"So, how does this work? Are there ghost rules?”
"There are rules. It’s all very serious," Jonghyun says. He leans to inspect Jinki’s bookshelf, and Jinki thinks that there’s a slight difference to Jonghyun now. It’s not his voice (kermit-y) or his height (5’ 5”) or the way he fidgets. It’s not something Jinki has words for. The setting sun casts a parallelogram of light onto the wall and maybe that’s part of it: the sunlight hits Jonghyun weird. If Jinki really squints, he can almost see something like television static crawling along the surface of Jonghyun’s skin.
"Like," Jonghyun begins, running his index finger along the book spines, "I have to scare people.”
Jinki snorts. “Well, good job. I’m still kinda pissing myself.”
“Gross,” Jonghyun says, not disapprovingly. “But listen, this is like a job. If I go too long without getting spooky, I’m gone.”
“Forever? As in, laid to rest?” Jinki feels his palms getting damp again. Jonghyun just shrugs, the collar of his sweater slipping to reveal one shoulder blade. It’s smooth and tan like the rest of Jonghyun and not bruised the way Jinki remembers it.
Jinki swallows. "What are we waiting for, then? Let's scare somebody."