Archive of Our Own ^beta

The last thing Jeongguk remembers is shattering, blinding pain.

The first thing he remembers is a demon saying, “It’s ok, little Jeon. You’re dead.”

There’s a hum to it, when Taehyung moves through to the other side. Something he feels in his body but can only describe as a sound. Like a pot of something thick just coming to boil, the crack of burning logs, distorted bass in blown-out speakers. It’s always there, even when he’s adjusted to the feeling and let it fade into the background, even when he’s paying more attention to the blurry shapes of the dead.

It’s been this way since he was little. Sort of like sleepwalking, except it feels like he’s wide awake, pointed toes as he slides down off his bed, energy thrumming through him as he navigates his small bedroom in the purple darkness. The first time he’d looked back and seen his own body still stretched out on the bed, he must have been too young to really process it, and the strangeness of it hardly registers now. Today his head is crooked to one side on the pillow, his chest still making the sheets rise and fall. He looks alive, which must be a good thing. Taehyung turns away, edges around his bedroom door and out to the rest of the apartment.

The kitchen is dark purple like his room, but wisps of white drift through the air and gleam against the slick surfaces. When he was little, the rest of the apartment itself was always his destination, and those nights he could get up and leave his body behind were just about the thrill of creeping around after bedtime. The first goal was usually the pantry. He would climb the shelves to get to whatever was up high and off limits—hard candy, or Pepero, or the big box of Koala’s March—and it was easy, because he’s always been more agile this way, like gravity was turned down just for him. He’d usually find his dad still awake, motionless with the tv light flickering on his glasses, and Taehyung would peek over the back of the couch to watch shows he wasn’t allowed to see. He had to make sure he didn’t make too much noise opening his snack, and that he didn’t chew with his mouth open, but otherwise he was safe, even if his dad reached straight through him.

But these days he wants to explore more. He tiptoes behind his dad—a mute statue on the couch—and slips down the stairs, light-footed, to the locked door at the bottom of the landing. There’s something loud happening in the crime procedural his dad is watching—tinny screams from the tv—and Taehyung takes a deep breath and steps straight through the heavy door. He makes his way through the back room of the bookstore, past the lumpy couch and the dusty piles of hardbacks that his dad was supposed to sort through. Once he’s in the main store he zigzags easily around claustrophobic shelves, brushes against old index cards that label idiosyncratic genre categories with black permanent marker turned purple—self-help, occult, vegan, sci fi, numerology. Upstairs has always felt too quiet to Taehyung, sparse even though it’s small, but the bookstore always feels peopled. There are repeat customers during the day, Jimin coming over at odd hours to do his homework, and, on nights when Taehyung can see them, vague white shapes that might be people too, or at least what’s left of them. Tonight there’s a moan from the occult section, like the sobbing of wind around an old house, but when Taehyung peers over, all he can see is a thin fog emanating from one of the new arrivals.

There are always more things to see outside—grey shapes that drag themselves along the back streets between the buildings and sink slowly into the asphalt, a black cat that Taehyung would think was ordinary if he hadn’t seen it jump through a brick wall, long distorted wisps that drift along the shop windows. Like if a person were pulled thin, almost to the point of no recognition, washed out and abandoned. They’re mostly harmless. Sometimes one of them will fixate on him, follow him around with huge dripping eyes and say please, please give it to me, give it to me, give it to me, giveittome. And some of them are screamers, hovering innocently until Taehyung gets close, and then out of nowhere they inflate: massive red eyes, cavernous mouth, unearthly wail. The first time he’d encountered a screamer was back in middle school—Taehyung had screamed back, frantic, and sprinted all the way home, tore through the apartment to find his bed in a way that he still feels guilty about, because his dad had seemed jumpy for the whole next week and hadn’t ever told him why. But now he knows that the screamers just want a reaction, and he tries not to give it to them. He can usually sense them coming now, just startles a little bit and then says hello. Sometimes they try over and over, stalk him until he goes home early, but usually they drift away, a little forlorn, and Taehyung wishes he could help.

Some of the dead, even if they’re truly harmless, still leave Taehyung with a twisting feeling in his stomach, have him searching online the next day for recent accidents or old injustices, and Jimin will put his chin on Taehyung’s shoulder at the school library and say, “Another one, huh?” Maybe it’s wrong of him, but there are parts of the city he never goes to anymore—the old industrial center, city hall, the highway. Never go near the highway. But there are other places where the dead are curious and quaint—the old theater, for instance, where Taehyung can make his voice echo on the painted ceiling while he practices songs for choir. A few sections of seats always fill up with grey figures who applaud when he finishes a song, and Taehyung hops around to say hi, balances lightly on the tops of seatbacks. They nod placidly and tell him confusing circular stories in reedy voices.

He figures he’ll go there tonight, but then he realizes that most of the shapes that have some kind of form are heading in one direction, and he follows a bedraggled moaning figure, curious, until he finds an event at the art museum. It’s like two different parties going on at once, except half of the attendees don’t know it—nicely dressed people congregate in the sculpture garden and across the lawn, and the dead circle them hungrily. Taehyung wanders into the art gallery and gets distracted by a hallway of small, detailed black and white illustrations, slides through the bodies of living visitors to look at each one.

It had been just the other day when Jimin had asked, conspiratorial during study hall—what happens if you can’t get back to your body before morning? What if the sun rises? They’d both speculated about it together in low voices until their teacher had looked up from her desk and said if they didn’t stop talking and start working, she’d separate them, but it had seemed like a far-fetched worry to Taehyung. He was smarter than that, experienced, knew the maze of streets and alleys by his dad’s bookstore like the back of his hand and could always get home in time. So it’s a frustrating coincidence that tonight is the first night in a long time that Taehyung feels really lost. He’s back out in the garden now, watching a spectral figure ineffectually lick someone’s plate of grapes over and over, and he realizes that the dead are here to stay, but he isn’t entirely sure how to get back home.

It’s his hubris that gets him in the end, because he should just ask someone—there’s a dignified-looking fuzzy figure drifting through the party with a cane and a long bumpy scarf, and maybe they would know. Or those figures crouched bat-like on the roof—they can see the lay of the town, and probably they won’t try to bite him—that only happened one time. But Taehyung really shouldn’t need help; all he needs to do is find a landmark that he knows, and he’ll be fine. If he leaves now, it’s a head start anyway. So he vaults easily over a line of expensive cars in the curved front driveway and plunges into the quiet streets.

Hours later, Taehyung wanders around a complex of ivy-lined apartment buildings and feels sick. He has no idea how to get home. He needs to figure out what to do, but instead he just keeps walking and thinking about what will happen if he doesn’t come back. If his body will stay catatonic or if he’ll just die in the morning; if his dad will get even quieter, if he’ll stop trying altogether. Taehyung rubs his eyes with the heel of his hand and tries not to be so scared, walks faster to avoid a bloated grey shape hovering by a streetlight even though he should’ve stopped and asked them if they knew where in the city they are.

When Taehyung first sees him, he’s sitting on a monument, kicking the heels of his sneakers against the base of a big stone statue outside of the library. He looks so distinctly alive that Taehyung feels it like a jolt when he sees his leg swing straight through the rock. He looks young, early teens maybe, just a skinny kid with a red sweater and a bowl cut. Taehyung slows to a stop and wonders if maybe it’s someone like him—maybe he’s a wanderer too. He makes his way tentatively across the street, ignoring the car that drives through him.

“Hey,” he says when he gets to the curb.

The kid seems surprised, grips the stone tighter as he looks up. “Hello?”

Taehyung cocks his head. The kid’s eyes are big, but they’re big in a nice way, not like they’re going to expand to impossible proportions and haunt Taehyung’s dreams. “Are you alive?”

The boy chews his lip, shoulders sagging. “No. Not anymore.”

“Oh.”

For a minute they just look at each other, Taehyung on the ground and the kid perched up high.

“Are you?”

Taehyung nods, and this figure is so strangely lifelike that Taehyung is expecting a string of questions, the way Jimin would react if he told him something strange. But he just glances down, sinks a few inches into the stone until his hands are hidden in it, and Taehyung can feel it then, the despair he’s used to encountering here. “I’m lost,” Taehyung tries. “I can’t get home. Do you know the city?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t know anything.” He sinks a little lower, his wrists and the tops of his thighs disappearing. “It’s all too weird. No one really talks to you.”

“Yeah,” Taehyung concedes, because he knows that feeling.

“If you’re really alive…”

“What?”

The kid hops down from the statue, lifelike again. He’s slightly shorter than Taehyung, now that they’re on the same level, but he looks like he’s only a year or so younger than Taehyung—fifteen, maybe. “There’s a way you can get back to the other side. If you’re really alive. I tried over and over, but they wouldn’t let me.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.” He nods, looks a little proud. “The Styx.”

Taehyung’s eyes widen. “The Styx? You found it?”

The boy smiles, and he’s utterly endearing, round cheeks and big front teeth poking out just a little. “Yeah! Everyone finds it once, but I found it again. It always starts somewhere different.” He tips his head back importantly. “It’ll cost you, though.”

Taehyung steps cautiously toward him. “Really? What?”

The kid laughs a little, like he’s calling his own bluff. “I don’t know. I’m not allowed to cross back over. It would be cool to find out, though.”

“Yeah. Ok. Can you show me?”

“Sure.”

The boy looks around and then starts decisively down the foggy grey sidewalk; Taehyung catches up until they’re walking side by side. He feels hopeful for some reason, like he knows he can trust this kid. He asks him his name, and he’s kind of scared that it’ll snap him out of the current moment, make him spin slowly in circles and mumble endlessly about his past life like some ghosts do when you ask them something like that, but instead he looks at Taehyung curiously.

“You remember yours?”

“Yeah. I’m Taehyung.”

“Wow. Cool. I guess…” It’s quiet for a bit as they walk. “I’m Jeongguk,” he says finally.

Taehyung nods, a little embarrassed at his direct, bright gaze. It feels like meeting someone at school, not like communicating with the lost. “Hi, Jeongguk.”

“Hey.”

Taehyung bites his lip, and they keep walking.

It turns out that Jeongguk’s looking for a body of water—almost any will do, apparently—and Taehyung wonders if this is a wild goose chase, if he’s never going to make it back to his body again because this ghost is charming enough to lead him pointlessly around town until the sun rises.

“I don’t know what my dad’ll do,” Taehyung says. “If I don’t come back.”

“Your dad?” Jeongguk asks, and then Taehyung feels a kind of vast, formless guilt.

“Never mind.”

They’re passing by a small park, a square of grass and a decorative fountain inside a cluster of tall, impersonal-looking office buildings, and Jeongguk pauses to look more closely. Taehyung follows his gaze; everything seems utterly ordinary, except that the water in the fountain isn’t stopping. It flows over the wide basin, spilling onto the ground, and at first Taehyung thinks that all the extra water is just soaking into the earth, but when they get closer Jeongguk squats down to examine a thin, silvery rivulet sluicing across the grass.

“See? I’m good at this,” Jeongguk says. “I told you.”

“Where’s it going?”

They follow it out of the park and across the sidewalk, along a line of rentable bikes and through a low brick wall. The physics are impossible, but the water feels wet and real, when Taehyung touches it. The stream swells, bit by bit, and when it tumbles down a set of concrete stairs near the docks, Taehyung can hear the sound. He takes the stairs with Jeongguk, the edges of his sneakers getting wet, and the sound approaches a roar. Not from the big river—it’s lapping gently at the edge of Taehyung’s vision—but from the stream they’ve been following. It broadens again here, rushes over the wide concrete slabs near the warehouses. Coming out into the open, though, Taehyung can see that the sky is definitely lightening, the horizon tinged with rosy pink.

“My dad moved,” Jeongguk says from behind. Taehyung turns around, surprised. “He packed everything up. I can’t find him anymore.” He’s looking out at the docks, and the edges of his red sweater seem blurrier here, like the faint natural light is already erasing him. Taehyung wants to hurry, to run down the river, but for a moment he can’t.

“Jeongguk.” He doesn’t respond, doesn’t seem to hear him at all, and Taehyung’s seen this before—the moment before a spirit fades away. “Jeongguk.” Taehyung reaches out to take his hand.

A few things happen at once: Jeongguk makes a sound, like a gasp—not a noise of surprise, but more like the noise you make when you’ve been kicking your way desperately up through the water, and all of a sudden you finally surface—and Taehyung feels a jolt through him, a physical thing from Jeongguk’s skin, like touching a battery to your tongue.

“Whoah!” Jeongguk says, looking right at him, and all his edges are sharp.

“Whoah,” Taehyung says.

Jeongguk looks at their hands, where they’re clasped between them. “You’re alive,” he says.

“Yeah,” Taehyung says vaguely. He feels stuck in place for some reason, energy buzzing through him.

Jeongguk seems alert now, glancing at the horizon. “We’ve gotta run,” he says decisively. “It’s time.” His skin is less translucent now, his cheeks faintly pink from the sunrise. “Taehyung, right?” He says it like he’s just learning Taehyung’s name. Taehyung nods, and Jeongguk squeezes his hand—another little series of sparks. “Come on, Taehyung. Let’s go.”

Jeongguk tugs at him, and they take off hand in hand, running between the two rivers.

The faster they run the darker it gets, and right when Taehyung thinks they surely must be at the edge of the docks, they stumble onto rougher terrain—the vast, pebbly shore of a river. Taehyung twists his head to look around—it’s everywhere, like they’ve stepped into another world—darkness behind, and the massive river, perpendicular to them now, stretching as far as he can see, low, choppy waves glowing a bioluminescent green. Jeongguk squeezes his hand, and Taehyung startles, because there’s suddenly a canoe directly in front of them in the water—dark wood with a sharply pointed prow and a flickering metal torch attached to one side. A black figure stands just as the canoe nudges into the gravelly shore. He throws back his hood and grins. Taehyung steps back involuntarily, and Jeongguk holds on tighter.

“What’s this?” the man asks pleasantly. He doesn’t look at all like the spirits Taehyung is used to seeing. Like Jeongguk, he seems more defined somehow, vibrant. His hair is so long it disappears into the folds of his cloak, part of it gathered into a topknot with an intricate metal clasp, and his face is inhumanly beautiful, plump red lips pulled back over perfect teeth. Taehyung can’t shake the feeling that he looks like he wants to eat them for lunch. His eyes flick over to Jeongguk, and he tuts. “You know this isn’t the right river for you, little Jeon.”

“I know,” Jeongguk says defensively. “My friend’s alive, though.”

“Is he?” He examines Taehyung with interest while the dark river laps against the boat. There’s no sign of an oar inside.

“You have to take him back,” Jeongguk says firmly.

The ferryman raises his dark eyebrows, and he had seemed young before, but now he seems ageless. “I know what my job is.” Then he tilts his head at Taehyung. “Well. Get in.” Before Taehyung can really grasp what’s happening, Jeongguk is pulling him to the edge of the shore, helping him into the boat—the ferryman extends a white hand, and Taehyung takes it unthinkingly when the boat rocks under his feet—there’s another shock, directly against his palm, this one more like the burn of fire than the spark of electricity. Taehyung yanks himself back, folds himself up to sit awkwardly on the boat floor. “Well then,” the ferryman says, and he sounds utterly pleased. “A high cost for most, but easy for you.”

“What?” Taehyung gets out. The boat is already moving, grinding its way back from the shore, and Taehyung looks frantically over at Jeongguk. “Guk—“

“I hope you get home,” Jeongguk says, and he seems forlorn again, a kid alone on the riverbank.

“Guk—” Taehyung tries again, his throat tight.

It’s like Jeongguk is looking at nothing. “I forgot about that,” he says.

“What?”

The boat turns as they near the center of the river, and Taehyung scrambles around to keep sight of him, but the darkness is already creeping in. It thickens until all Taehyung can see of the shore is a bit of red from Jeongguk's sweater. The slats at the bottom of the boat press painfully into his knees, and he reorients, thumps down gracelessly on his butt. He doesn’t even know if he’ll ever see him again.

“There’s a seat, you know,” the ferryman says pleasantly. Taehyung realizes that the glowing green he’d noticed earlier is actually under the surface. He blinks and realizes—it’s hands, countless hands waving, grasping, and the boat is cutting right through them. “I’ll admit I’m curious,” the ferryman purrs. “How does a little living thing like you get so, so far from home?” Taehyung closes his eyes.

The moment their teacher steps out of the room, Jimin swivels in his chair and says, “You know downtown is a grid, right?”

“No it’s not,” Taehyung says defensively. The rest of the class bursts to life around him. “There’s all kinds of wiggly streets.”

“I mean—” Jimin tugs Taehyung’s notebook toward him and starts drawing in blue pen at the top of Taehyung’s math notes. “It’s old and all, so it’s not perfect. But all the street names that’re numbers—”

Taehyung squints at the squiggly checkerboard Jimin’s making. “What’s that supposed to be?”

“They all count down,” Jimin says, indicating each street with a blue dot. “So if you follow the numbers down, you get to Main.” Jimin helpfully writes ‘MAIN’ in all caps at the center of his map, then draws a tiny, surprisingly recognizable Taehyung next to it.

“How do you know that?”

Jimin rolls his eyes. “Everyone knows that.”

It feels strange to talk about it now, telling the story in little snatches under florescent lights. He knows it wasn’t, but trying to explain it in their bright, boring classroom makes Taehyung feel like maybe it was all a strange dream, or maybe he was silly to feel so scared, so sad for the kid—it’s hard to recall now exactly what made the ghost special. He wonders if this is what Jimin feels like all the time, when Taehyung is trying to tell him about something exciting or interesting that happened on one of his nocturnal adventures. Maybe it’s a miracle that Jimin believes him at all.

When Taehyung was little, his stories of walking around at night had been a thing his friends just accepted, the way you believe your friends when they say their dad works for KARI and is going to fly to space tomorrow; or your house will burn down if you leave your cell phone plugged in for too long; or one time their dog ate a smaller dog, the whole entire thing, and they saw it all out at the park but their parents were looking the other way. And then as they grew up it started to get stranger, that Taehyung was still saying that on some nights he could walk around on the other side, that he could leave his body and come back again. The turning point was a sleepover where Taehyung knew when he was falling asleep that it was one of those days, that he could prove it, and he left his body in his friend’s bed and tiptoed over to the desk to write everyone notes with a floating pen. And his friends all believed it then, freaked out yelling about how crazy it was until a parent came up to tell them they had to quiet down and go to bed. But when Taehyung went back to school that Monday, something major had shifted. Suddenly the idea was going around that Taehyung was a freak, that he’d always been weird—eyes on him in the hallway; friends saying I can’t, my parents said I wasn’t allowed to hang out with you anymore. And that was the way things were from then on. Jimin was the only one who’d really stuck with him. He’d seen it happen, he said, still had the piece of paper with “hi, Jiminie!” written in Taehyung’s own handwriting, and everyone at this school sucked anyway—he wanted to go to art school instead.

“Well, I was way far out,” Taehyung explains. “We ended up at the docks.”

“You’ve lived here your whole life, Tae. How do you not know about the street numbers?” The class falls silent, and Taehyung glances compulsively over to see the classroom door opening again. “Wait,” Jimin hisses. “Who’s ‘we’?”

“No one. Ghost kid,” Taehyung mutters.

“Who?”

Taehyung pokes urgently at Jimin’s shoulder until he turns back around.

Taehyung looks for him. Every night he can, when he wakes up to a distorted hum, his body feeling vibrant and featherlight, he roams the city with a purpose. He tries to find a route back to that library, pauses at every statue, follows snatches of red even though he doesn’t know if the kid will appear in the same clothes again. For the first time in a long time he wonders what it’s like for all the spirits who are stuck here, if they start out angry and confused or if they deteriorate over time, because what do you do, if your whole existence is bodiless, unchanging and strange. There was a dark-skinned old man who used to always appear on a bench outside of the grocery store, and he would always fervently tell Taehyung that they could escape from here, if they just let go of everything they were holding onto, truly let it all go. And then when the bus came he would stand up and walk through it, wave at Taehyung as if it were taking him away, and then disappear slowly when the bus left him standing on the street. Taehyung hasn’t seen him in a long time now. But he wonders if maybe he was right, if he’d moved on, and if Jeongguk being gone is a good thing.

He asks the ghosts at the old theater what they think, and the woman with her hair in a bun nods kindly through the whole question, but then she just knits and knits, and the figure next to her tells Taehyung for the thousandth time about going strawberry picking in the early morning.

“I don’t want to know, young man,” the knitting woman interrupts serenely. “I don’t want to know what it’s like. This is what I know.”

“They don’t know! That’s the problem!” the other figure exclaims. Taehyung looks at them expectantly, but it turns out that what Taehyung doesn’t know is how wonderful it is to go strawberry picking in the early morning.

Other figures just tell him about the witch—another story he’s heard over and over.

“Do you have any idea what he’s done?” a wisp of a man asks Taehyung. “The demons he’s had at his beck and call?” They’re in the cozy lobby of a hotel, a cluster of armchairs in front of a big stone mantle, and the man sits absentmindedly in the heart of the fireplace. “They say that in life, one of those demons found his heart and burned it to ash, and that was the only thing that killed him.”

“I have heard of the witch, yeah, but I’m asking if there’s somewhere else you go if you’re not stuck here,” Taehyung tries. “What’s beyond this?”

“They say he’s been quiet lately, but believe me, that witch still cuts sharp as a knife,” the man says, flames flickering up his stomach. “He’ll do anything to live again.”

A black cat meows plaintively by a bookcase when Taehyung walks back through the lobby. He crouches and reaches out to let it sniff him, and the cat winds briefly around his hand before it startles and scurries through the wall.

It’s a strange mix of mundane and horrible, when Taehyung finally sees Jeongguk again. Taehyung is on a quiet side street lined with small, neon-lit restaurants, and he turns the corner to see a red and black blur in the middle of the street, a few feet off the ground. It takes a moment to connect in his brain, that what he’s seeing is a body rapidly twisting, thrown around by nothing. Spirits will do this sometimes, go through the motions of their death for no reason at all, and Taehyung’s about to turn around when he recognizes the red sweater. He hesitates, heartbeat quickening, and then Jeongguk plunges abruptly down into the middle of the street.

Taehyung runs over and drops to his knees, sees the end of a red knit sleeve disappearing into the asphalt. He grabs a fistful of sweater, yanks upward—a whole arm pops up, a hand, and when Taehyung grasps it, it’s that sensation of electric shock again, stronger than before. He loosens his grip in surprise, but then the hand grasps him tightly—Taehyung braces himself as best he can on the ground and pulls. A van approaches from behind and drives peacefully over them both, and the engine nearly drowns out the sound of Jeongguk taking a ragged, desperate breath.

“Hey.” All of a sudden Jeongguk feels lighter, and Taehyung drag-carries him over to the side of the road. He sits him down under the neon lights and takes both of his wrists in his hands. “Jeongguk. Hey.”

Jeongguk’s gaze wavers and then locks onto Taehyung’s. He’s smudged with black marks and cuts, and one of the sleeves of his sweater is slashed open. “I forgot people used to call me that. I forgot—”

“Hey. It’s me. Do you remember me?” Taehyung rubs Jeongguk’s cold wrists with his thumbs and feels a sensation like pins and needles all over his own skin.

“Guk,” Jeongguk says for some reason. “People used to—”

“Guk,” Taehyung cuts in. “It’s me. Are you ok?”

Jeongguk seems to recognize him then. “Taehyung.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re alive. Did you get home?”

Taehyung smiles a little, keeps rubbing his wrists. “Yeah, Guk. I did. You basically—you kind of saved me.”

“But…” The cut on Jeongguk’s cheek is spreading. “Why’re you still here?”

“It’s ok. I can go back and forth.”

“What?”

“I can travel back and forth. I can come here and go home.”

“Taehyung.” His eyes are big and earnest.

“What?”

“You shouldn’t come back. Everything here’s nothing. I can’t talk to anyone—I can’t—” It’s like Jeongguk’s looking through him now. “I used to go to school. I complained all the time, but I liked it. I used to run really fast. I was the fastest. And my mom—” Jeongguk goes silent.

“Did she move away too?” Taehyung asks, and he knows instantly that he shouldn’t have—Jeongguk moves to rub his face with a dirty sleeve, his expression crumpling, and Taehyung lets his hand fall.

“She—I don’t want to go—I’m not ready—I don’t want to—I don’t—” It’s a long, disconnected wail, a continuing litany, and Taehyung sits back, wishes suddenly that he could leave. He’s heard this kind of crying before. It usually doesn’t end.

“Guk,” he tries warily after a bit. “Will you listen to me?” Jeongguk just sobs and smears blood across his cheek. He isn’t babbling anymore, though, and Taehyung casts about for some way to pull him back. “Can you tell me about running? Why’d you like running so much, Guk?” Taehyung squeezes his forearm. “Will you tell me?”

“I was…” Jeongguk begins tremulously, like he’s really trying. He lowers his arm, and Taehyung grabs his other wrist again, feels a milder shock. “Why’d I like running?”

“Yeah, Guk. Tell me.”

“I was just…good at it, I guess. It was fun. It was kind of like…everything was one thing, my body and what I wanted. And when the track was wet, it would turn a different color. And we all got jackets, and I really liked my—” Jeongguk’s torn sweater turns abruptly into a red windbreaker, clean and new with a white zipper down the front, and his eyes widen in horror as he glances down. “See?! I shouldn’t be able to—this isn’t right.”

“It’s ok!” Taehyung says quickly. “It’s ok. I like it. I like your jacket.”

“You like it?” Jeongguk seems caught off-guard. He twists his shoulder a little, as if he’s trying to get a better look at it, and the neon light catches on the plastic-y fabric.

“Yeah. It’s, uh—I wish I had a jacket like that.”

“Oh. Thanks.” Jeongguk’s face is clean now too, the cuts and bruises magically healed. “I like it too. It has my name on the back.” He lets out a little laugh, like he realizes it was an odd thing to say, and all at once Taehyung feels like he’s talking to a person again, someone he could’ve met at school. He lets his hands slide off of Jeongguk’s wrists, a little self-conscious.

“Have you tried running here?” Taehyung asks. “It’s way better.”

“What do you mean?”

“I kinda hate running, normally. But over here it’s like I can run forever.”

Jeongguk’s brow furrows. “What if you get lost again?”

“Oh.” Taehyung plants his hands on the sidewalk behind him, leans back confidently. “Actually, I’m great at getting around now. It turns out the street numbers mean something.”

Jeongguk twists around like he’s looking for a road sign, and the neon slides across a scar on his cheek—completely healed now. “What do you mean?”

Taehyung grins. “Come on. I’ll show you.”

Taehyung takes him everywhere, all the places he likes to go, and even though there are spirits he likes to talk to at each one, it still feels like he’s getting to show someone for the first time. He shows him all the right places to stand to make your voice echo in the old theater, the art museum, the tall shelves of yarn in the back room at the knitting store with their endless color gradations, the busy back kitchen at the noodle place that’s open all night. Jeongguk hadn’t been very interested in the Edward Gorey exhibit, but he’s fascinated by the line of fry cooks, the bubbling vat of seafood stock, and they stay there peering through the bodies of busy employees for what feels like hours.

They pick the places they’ll always be able to meet, and Jeongguk’s always there at one of them, on nights when Taehyung steps through. Sometimes he’s himself right away, and sometimes Taehyung has to hold his hand for a while, but it’s never as bad as that first night, and they go everywhere they want. Jeongguk, it turns out, has more energy than him, at least on his good days, and he gets Taehyung to try all sorts of things he never would. They jump between buildings, figure out a whole route above the city that they can race each other on, hang off of the high boxes in the theater and take dramatic leaps until they catch the chandelier.

Taehyung gets more and more tongue-tied trying to tell Jimin about things the next day, because it’s hard to explain what makes it all so fun. At one point, Jimin looks up from the drawing he’s been sketching out in blue ink and says, “I wish I had a cool nighttime friend.”

“He’s not—you’re my best friend,” Taehyung backtracks hastily.

“I know, Tae. You’re allowed to have more than one best friend, though.”

Taehyung gets to work again switching out the foods in their dosirak boxes that they always trade. “I don’t want more than one best friend,” he says, because it’s true. Jimin is probably Taehyung’s favorite person ever.

Jimin smiles faintly, nudges up his round glasses. “I’m just saying.”

Another 10th grader bumps roughly into their lunch table as he passes by, jostling both of them, and the dumpling Taehyung was moving falls onto the floor. “Freaks,” he mutters, just loud enough. Taehyung lets his chopsticks hang, watches their classmate weave away through the lunchroom.

“Really original,” Jimin mutters, leaning across the table to retrieve his pen. “He really nailed us with that one.”

“So if I just haunt a few people—” Taehyung starts, “—scare them just a little bit—”

“Tae, we’ve talked about this,” Jimin says, but he’s grinning now.

“What’s wrong with using my powers for good?!”

Taehyung and Jeongguk are usually pretty good at keeping track of things, making sure Taehyung has enough time to get home, but one night they lose track of time trying to walk across telephone wires, and they decide to find the Styx again instead of walking Taehyung all the way home. This time they happen upon a giant fish tank in a restaurant window, the bottom full of dark red lobsters with rubber-banded claws, and Taehyung notices the way a rivulet of water trickles impossibly over the edge of the closed tank and out through the brick wall. He knows what to expect now, when the ferryman smiles and reaches out his hand, but it still hurts—a flash of fire on Taehyung’s palm.

“So,” the man says pleasantly when they’re alone on the green-lit water, Taehyung sitting awkwardly on the raised wood planks that span the middle of the canoe.

“So,” Taehyung repeats.

The ferryman settles coolly on the edge of the boat, which doesn’t shift at all despite his apparent weight. His cloak flutters on the canoe floor, but the silky black hair draped over his shoulders stays perfectly unruffled. “What brings you to the land of abandoned hope?”

Taehyung shrugs, feels simultaneously like he’s facing something very, very dangerous, and also like he’s trapped having an awkward conversation with one of his dad’s work friends. A skeletal hand emerges from the water and scratches desperately at the boat, and the ferryman glances down in annoyance, taps the wood once, and they start moving faster. “How do you do that?” Taehyung asks involuntarily.

“Hmm?”

“How do you make the boat move?”

“How do you make your arm move?” the ferryman counters.

Taehyung rolls his eyes. “Lame,” he mutters, and then wonders instantly if he’s about to be violently and eternally punished.

The ferryman’s mouth curves—his lips are a little like Jimin’s, but impossibly red. “You see, normally it’s just a lot of crying and screaming,” he says. “It’s nice to talk to a tourist.” He regards Taehyung as if he’s a fascinating specimen. “You can call me Jin, if you’d like. Now tell me—are there types of despair you love most?”

“What do you take from me?” Taehyung asks abruptly.

“Hmm?”

“What’s the cost for crossing the river?”

“Your life,” Jin says pleasantly.

Taehyung’s eyes widen. “My life?”

“Just part of it. A bit of life.” The ferryman glances up into the darkness. “An allowable bit,” he says emphatically, as if he’s talking to someone else. Then he fixes Taehyung again with a dark gaze. “It’s a steep price for most, but you’re different.”

“How?”

“Don’t you know? You feed off necrotic energy.” His mouth twists. “Is that the right word? Spiritual energy sounds nicer. Would you prefer I say that? You suck the spiritual energy from the dead.”

“I suck dead energy?” Taehyung looks at the palms of his own hands, flummoxed.

“More or less.”

“Do I—am I hurting people? Am I taking their…spirit?”

Jin looks like he’s thinking, and then he draws a shape in the air, a small figure-eight that bursts into flame, and the torch on the other side of the boat dims. “I imagine it’s a feedback loop, getting and giving energy. Quite convenient. Now. On the other side—” Jin waves his hand, and the little fire goes out; the torch flickers back to life. “I would avoid the dying, if you’d prefer not to kill them.” Taehyung blinks, trying to think it through. He’s never—surely he’s never— “Now, isn’t this nice? No one tearing their hair out, no one screaming at me to take them back to their family. You should really come here more often.”

“I don’t…think I’ve killed anyone,” Taehyung says quietly, sorting mentally through the few times he’s visited the hospital—all brief.

“That’s the spirit,” Jin purrs. He leans forward, his voice dropping conspiratorially. “I should tell you; life is at a bit of a premium over here. So you might want to watch your back.”

“I should what?” Taehyung locks eyes with him in surprise, and the ferryman looks distinctly pleased.

“I just mean you’re lucky, spirit eater, that it’s my hands you’ve fallen into. Some demons might take advantage, siphon all the life out of you as fast as possible and fly off to build a kingdom out of it. But I’m of course—” He glances up at the inky sky. “—entirely reformed.” He looks at Taehyung like he’s expecting lavish thanks for this. “I never even considered it, really. Don’t at all have a specific plan for where I would go and how many fortresses I would build. It’s really very good of me.”

“How long does it take to cross this river?” Taehyung asks. “It feels like it’s taking a really long time.”

Jin’s fond expression drops. “Is there anyone else you can send across next time? An older friend, perhaps?”

“I don’t think that’s how it works,” Taehyung says.

“Not too old, mind you. Tall is nice. Preferably someone who’s read the collected works of John Dee—I’ve been desperate to discuss them. If you’re really looking to gratify me, maybe someone a bit clumsy, face like an angel, enjoys my sense of humor—”

“Can you make the boat go any faster?”

“It’s a sign,” Jimin says a year later. “It has to be.” They’re at the main register of the bookstore, Taehyung flipping through his math book in between ringing up the occasional customer. Jimin is presumably doing his homework too, but he’s actually on his phone, switching fervently between his favorite astrology websites.

“It’s a sign that the winter dance is on the same day as the winter solstice?” Taehyung asks skeptically.

“No, all of it. The planets. The predictions,” Jimin insists, tapping importantly his phone screen. “Seriously, you walk with the dead like every other week, but the zodiac is a bridge too far?” They’re both perched on stools behind the counter, and when the bell on the front door chimes, they both welcome the customer automatically without looking up.

“It just seems really far-fetched, is all,” Taehyung says. “That has to break some kind of rule, you know?”

“You go to ghost world all the time. So what’s to stop him from coming to our world? What about—” Jimin puts his phone down on the counter, like he has to contemplate his own great idea. “When people are haunted by ghosts, how do you think that works? They cross over and bug people, right?”

“I don’t know how it works.”

“Are there any new books?” a woman calls from the front of the store.

“I’m sorry ma’am—what?”

“Are there any new books?”

Taehyung slides off his stool and makes his way around the counter to have the same conversation he has at least once a week, which amounts to: yes, we get new arrivals all the time, no, they are not new as in newly printed books. “Alright. Thanks,” the woman says brusquely as she steps back outside.

“It just seems really far-fetched,” Taehyung says as he slides back onto his stool. “There’s all kinds of stuff he wishes he could do, but he can’t. I don’t want to get his hopes up for nothing.”

“Or, ok, or—” Jimin sets his phone down. “Maybe it’s our one chance where all the stars align, and ghost boy could actually have a normal, cool, human night, and also I could actually meet this kid—”

“He came to your birthday party,” Taehyung protests.

“Yeah, levitating the miyeok guk is not the same as meeting someone.”

“And asking someone to a dance is a whole thing, Jiminie. It’s weird, even if you do the whole ‘I’m just asking as a friend’ thing. I don’t want to make things weird.” Taehyung definitely does not think of Jeongguk that way. There was that time they’d found a late-night movie theater and walked through the walls to pick a film, sat near the back and held hands through the whole movie, but that was just because Jeongguk had seemed a little translucent and Taehyung wanted to make sure he was ok. And also Taehyung had kind of wanted to hold hands. Friendship.

“So tell him you’re asking because of the zodiac.”

Taehyung cracks a smile. “Oh that’s not weird.”

“Look. I am not ignoring my date all night to hang out with you,” Jimin says with a tone that makes Taehyung think that maybe that’s what all of this is really about. “So I just think you should ask someone.”

“You want me to violate the laws of life and death so you can enjoy your date with Art Class Joaquin,” Taehyung accuses.

Jimin snorts, tries to elbow Taehyung where he’s ticklish, and Taehyung twists away. “I mean, honestly—”

“What?”

“I’d also love to kinda—” He wrinkles his nose a little. “—keep an eye on the whole thing. Make sure Jeongguk isn’t…you know. Dangerous.”

Taehyung slumps onto the counter, annoyed. “You know he isn’t dangerous.”

“Your definition of ‘dangerous’ is very different from the average person’s.”

“You know he’s fine. You’re being overprotective again.”

“Remember before you met Art Class Joaquin? When you said that anyone who secretly draws a portrait of someone else is probably a murderer?”

“I stand by that sentiment,” Taehyung declares.

“Oh also.” Jimin grabs his phone again. “You still haven’t told me his sign. I don’t even know if you’re compatible.”

“I mean. It seems pretty insensitive to ask a dead person when their birthday is.”

“Just find out somehow. Roundabout.”

Taehyung rolls his eyes because he knows Jimin isn’t looking. “Will do.”

“Or we can just go through them all again, and you can tell me which one sounds the most like him.”

“Can we talk about Art Class Joaquin again?” Taehyung asks, flipping back to the beginning of the chapter he’s supposed to be studying. “Or—I dunno—homework?”

Jimin furrows his brow at the phone screen. “I’m still feeling Virgo for some reason. Really listen this time when I read it, ok?”

Taehyung lays his head on his textbook in defeat.

Taehyung will never admit it, but scaling buildings like this isn’t easy for him anymore. It’s windy up here, and Taehyung’s sweatshirt billows around, and he’s always worried that something will have changed, or there’ll be some connection he can’t make—maybe a flagpole will go missing, or his shoes won’t wedge into the gap in the stucco, or maybe he’ll just lose corporeality and slip. Taehyung’s always been able to control whether he touches something or slides through it, but up here clinging to the side of a massive shopping center while twilight advances, it seems distinctly possible that he might lose his physicality and fall for so long that he gets to underground lava or something. He pulls himself up over the rough edge of a metal and glass façade, arms aching, while living visitors chat happily below. Just a few hundred more feet of climbing to go.

Jeongguk’s the one who figured out the route, of course. He’s always bouncing around between buildings now like it’s easy. Tonight, when Taehyung gets to the top, he perches on some sort of box unit on the massive flat roof to wait, and as soon as the last traces of sunlight disappear Jeongguk practically vaults up over the edge of the roof. He lands grinning with his knees bent and one hand on the concrete to steady himself.

Taehyung grins despite himself. “Hey. Nice.”

“Hey! This one’s fun, right?”

Taehyung makes a face. “Sorta.”

Jeongguk straightens up and dusts himself off, his chest rising and falling like maybe he’s been running around for a while now. “I didn’t think you’d get here so fast.”

“I fell asleep doing homework, so I got a head start.”

Jeongguk comes over and budges Taehyung over on the unit so he can wedge in next to him. His clothes are manifesting today as oversized and comfy-looking—grey shirt and black pants—and he has to shake his hair out of his face now. “You can see the river, right? So we’ll definitely be able to see them from here.”

“We’re in the sky, Jeongguk. We’ll be able to see fireworks in Seoul from here.”

Jeongguk snorts. “This is nothing compared to the real skyscrapers. You seriously should try with me sometime. It’s so cool.”

“I’m on top of the world’s biggest mall,” Taehyung protests. “Doesn’t that count for anything?”

Jeongguk leans back on his hands, tips his head back a little. “This kind of thing makes me want bulgogi so bad. A whole big spread with the grill, you know?”

“Yeah?”

Jeongguk closes his eyes and groans with longing, like he’s imagining the meat, and it makes Taehyung laugh instead of feeling guilty.

“We should go back to that one place and lay on the tables again.”

“Have you ever done, like, a whole day at the beach, and then bulgogi afterward?”

Taehyung tries to remember. His dad isn’t really a beach vacation person. Or any kind of vacation person. “I don’t think so.”

“That’s another thing for the list, ok? You gotta do it.”

Taehyung nudges Jeongguk with his elbow. “How come half of this list is just food items?”

“Because food is the best. If eternity were just this, plus food, I swear I’d be good.”

“Maybe it is,” Taehyung says, and then wishes he hadn’t.

Jeongguk sits up, puts his hands in his lap. “Maybe,” he says—enough of a smile to make his dimples come out, but not a real one.

“Guk,” Taehyung says impulsively.

“What?”

“Do you believe in the zodiac?”

There’s a gunshot sound, so loud they both jump, and a firework arcs up and explodes in the sky.

“Geez!”

“Whoah!”

“Holy heck.”

Taehyung giggles compulsively into his hand while a whole colorful series of fireworks bursts in front of them. “We totally knew that was going to happen. We’re so lame.”

Jeongguk gives him a crooked grin, blue and red light reflecting on his face.

That night is the fireworks show and then an outdoor concert they find at a nearby amphitheater. The music is very dad rock-y, but they both bounce around anyway through the crowd—Taehyung goofs off onstage for a whole song while Jeongguk looks on from the side, as if it would be rude of him to go up there too and haunt a live band, and then at the end Taehyung jumps off the stage like he’s crowd-surfing. Jeongguk melts through the crowd to haul him up off the ground and tell him he’s crazy.

“Wait.” Taehyung puts a hand flat on Jeongguk’s chest. “I think I know this song. I swear I actually know it.”

“I don’t!” Jeongguk half-shouts back, but he dances around energetically with Taehyung anyway.

The one song that Taehyung knows is really the peak excitement for the night—after that they both get tired and wander off to lay around in the grass while the dads rock on.

“How’s it going with hat lady?” Taehyung asks.

“Huh?”

“That lady with the hat.”

“Oh.” Jeongguk pushes himself up onto his elbows. “She’s gone now. I think she went through.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

Taehyung turns his head in the grass to look at Jeongguk from below. “Dang. Good job.”

Jeongguk’s grin goes soft. “Thanks.” He’s been spending a lot of time lately talking to other spirits, long hours that must be really frustrating. Taehyung always feels like he’s going insane when specters talk themselves in endless, disjointed circles, but Jeongguk has a knack for waiting it out. He’ll go back over and over again to spirits Taehyung would avoid, coax them into lucidity, because he’s convinced that some people are trapped here just because they’re too sad or confused to understand what it would mean to move beyond. Neither of them really know what ‘beyond’ even is, but Jeongguk thinks that everyone should have a choice.

“You’re like some kind of…cool angel,” Taehyung says, a little too sincerely. “Helping people out.”

Jeongguk collapses next to him again. “Angels are an actual thing. I’m definitely not one.”

“Wait—really? What’re angels like?”

“Unimaginative, mostly,” another voice says, and Taehyung sits up in time to see a dark shape shutter back and forth a few times between cat and human before settling on the latter. “You’d think being all-powerful would make them exciting, but that’s usually reserved for the moral grey area kind of people.” The specter settles nearby in the grass, his movements small—an odd mix of blasé and careful, like he cares too much but also not at all. He always appears in a plain white hanbok, his blonde hair in a high bun.

“Hey Yoongi,” Jeongguk says without sitting up.

“You’re right about the hat woman. I saw her leave.”

“Really?”

They talk back and forth until Taehyung interrupts to ask, not for the first time: “How come you can turn into a cat? No one else can turn into a cat.”

Yoongi regards him, dead-eyed, and says, “We inhabit a world of magic and mystery, Taehyung.”

“So you’re just not gonna tell me then,” Taehyung grumps.

“Anything is possible beyond the grave,” Yoongi adds, and if he were anyone else Taehyung would think he was teasing.

“No it isn’t,” Jeongguk says, laying on his back now. “I can’t spider-man jump nearly high enough.”

“How high is high enough?” Yoongi asks, and Jeongguk just points straight up. Yoongi shakes his head a little, as though he’s regarding someone very young. Yoongi’s another one of those spirits who feels different to Taehyung, like he’s just a normal person or something, even if one from a bygone era. Taehyung still doesn’t understand how he can be this way, how he hasn’t lost his mind, because Jeongguk says Yoongi’s been dead for a long time.

“Do you think—” Taehyung starts, then stops himself, and Yoongi fixes his eyes on him. “It’s nothing,” he adds hastily. Yoongi just stares at him, unblinking, until Taehyung feels oddly compelled to continue. “Do you think…hypothetically, if I was in the same physical space as a spirit on the night of the winter solstice, when the veil was thinnest and all...” Taehyung senses Jeongguk sitting up beside him. “And I kinda tried to grab the spirit and pull him through…could that maybe work? Just for a few hours?”

Yoongi grins out of nowhere, his canines showing. “You didn’t hear it from me. But yeah. It could definitely work.”

A few weeks later, Taehyung is standing on a roof again—much lower this time, and much colder. Winter had come on all at once—there’d been a few days of high wind, and then a thick snow over the whole city, and the next morning Taehyung’s dad had to scrape off the car windshield with a credit card. It’s kind of nice up here on top of the school gym, the sound of stray cars crunching through the snow in the parking lot and thick white flakes pattering down to cover the flat roof, but Taehyung’s spent nearly all day just feeling nervous, butterflies swarming in his stomach while Jimin’s mom insisted on posing them for photo after photo and saying under her breath that Taehyung’s dad should be here. Taehyung doesn’t need photos of this—he’s in an old brown suit from the back of his dad’s closet, and his hair’s just doing…whatever it is that it does, and he doesn't have any cool jewelry or anything. He could put on bad clothes any day and take a photo of it. But what he can’t do any day is try to pull his dead friend into this corporeal plane. He hops around in his big coat, shivering, claps his gloves together and checks the time on his phone again. He knows, with a kind of haunted conviction, that Jeongguk’s already nearby, but he’s going to wait until the time they agreed on. He’s going to do everything Yoongi said.

It feels like the minute hand on Taehyung’s watch icon is ticking directly in his gut, when the time gets close. He suddenly feels like: this is a terrible idea. It definitely won’t work at all. And also, if it works, maybe there will be some horrible punishment for violating the laws of God himself. Is there a God? Taehyung should maybe have worked out whether or not there’s a God before he agreed to do this. The minute hand hits, standing straight up, and Taehyung swallows, shoves his phone hastily back in his pocket and yanks off his right glove, drops it on the roof in his haste. He flexes his cold fingers and holds his hand straight out in the air. This won’t work. It definitely won’t work. There’s a spark of electricity on his palm, and that’s when he knows. He curls his hand around nothing and pulls.

The first thing that hits him is a breathless laugh, utterly familiar, and then Jeongguk himself, all of him, tumbling into Taehyung’s space.

“Whoah!”

“Whoah!” Taehyung echoes, his stomach exploding again in butterflies, and then he laughs when Jeongguk trips again. He grips Taehyung’s forearms heavily and tries to find his footing—right here in front of him, nearly opaque.

“It’s—it’s cold.”

“It’s really cold today!” Taehyung says, way too loud, and he has no idea why he’s the one freaking out right now.

Jeongguk twists around, like he’s trying to see everything, and then looks at Taehyung again, still holding his forearms. “Whoah,” he says, and maybe he’s freaking out a little too. “We just—”

“Yeah.”

“Holy heck.”

“Do you think we have to touch the whole time?” Taehyung asks.

“I dunno. Hold on.” Jeongguk lets go of him and raises his arms slowly in the air, eyes big, and it would be comical if Taehyung weren’t wondering too if he was going to disappear. “It seems like…I’m ok?”

“Do you feel ok?”

“Yeah. Heavy.”

“Right? You’re a million pounds now.”

“I work out.”

“I mean—”

“Sorry. Dumb joke.” Jeongguk laughs at himself in bewilderment, claps his hands over his mouth when his breath comes out in a visible while puff.

“This is so—”

“I forgot about that!”

“Guk.”

“What?”

“Guk.”

Jeongguk laughs, jostles Taehyung so energetically he almost loses his balance. “This is crazy, right?”

“It’s crazy. And what’re you—what’s all this?”

“Huh?”

Taehyung is slowly gaining the mental space to realize that Jeongguk looks good. Like, good. He tugs on the sleeve of his black suit jacket, brow furrowed. “This fits you,” he accuses.

“Oh! Yeah. You know the knitting lady in the theater, who can manifest specific stuff?”

“You got help?”

“Yeah. For my hair too.”

Taehyung tilts his head and realizes that Jeongguk’s hair is actually kind of styled, parted off center and combed back from his forehead. The strangest thing, though, is that the snow is actually settling in it, fat snowflakes in his hair and on his shoulders. Taehyung nudges one of his earrings and watches it glint.

“Uh.” Jeongguk smiles for some reason, and his lips are dark pink. “Yoongi gave me some kind of charm I’m supposed to keep in my pocket—I still can’t tell if he was making fun of me.”

Taehyung blinks, brushes the snowflakes off of Jeongguk’s shoulder like that’s what he’d intended to do all along. “How long do you think we have?”

“No idea. The veil’s thinnest at midnight, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So at least ‘till then.”

“I don’t look as cool as you,” Taehyung admits for some reason. “I found, like, an old suit in the closet. And you’re supposed to take it to the dry cleaners, but I didn’t want to bug my dad, so I just…washed it. It’s probably horrible. I mean—” Taehyung bounces his shoulders. “This coat is great. So I’ll always have that. Maybe I’ll just leave the coat on.”

“Taehyung.”

“What?”

Jeongguk looks a little sheepish. “It really doesn’t matter what suit you’re wearing.”

Taehyung feels silly. “Right. Yeah. I guess the whole Jeongguk in the land of the living thing trumps that.”

“That’s not what I meant."

“Dang. I just realized—do you think you can eat?”

Jeongguk groans. “Don’t remind me. Yoongi said I probably wouldn’t be able to taste anything.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. Torture.”

“We should try it anyway. And you have to come meet Jiminie—he’ll lose it.”

“Do you think—what kind of food is there?” Jeongguk asks like he can’t help it.

Taehyung feels like his nerves are evening out into just…a good feeling. He feels good. “Mandu, I think? I’ll show you.”

They find the service door, and then Jeongguk notices Taehyung’s missing glove and jogs back for it, and his feet make footprints in the snow. It doesn’t seem like he’s going to disappear, but Taehyung holds his hand all the way down the stairs just in case.

They sneak into the main gym by a side door, and the bass when they nudge their way inside is similar enough to that distorted, buzzy feeling Taehyung gets when he crosses over that it feels almost normal that Jeongguk is here. Jeongguk is the one who seems off, looking around at everything with big eyes, and he keeps walking straight into people and recoiling in surprise.

“Sorry!” Taehyung calls to someone Jeongguk just body-checked.

“Oh! Whoops!” Jeongguk says, far too late, and Taehyung squeezes his hand. It’s dark and loud in the cavernous gym, decorative lights strung up on the walls and winding around the lunchroom tables, an overzealous fog machine in the corner that most everyone seems to be avoiding. Taehyung goes on his tiptoes to try to find Jimin in the seething crowd of students, everyone dancing and yelling over the music and messing nervously with jacket sleeves and gelled hair and tight skirts. A group of girls runs by, and Jeongguk completely fails to get out of their way, gets knocked into Taehyung’s shoulder.

“You good?” Taehyung asks in his ear, steadying him.

“Yeah.” Jeongguk cranes his neck to watch the girls chase another girl crying out of the gym. “I’m just...”

Taehyung feels a little overwhelmed too, imagining this through his eyes. He doesn’t know the exact timing of everything, but he’s pretty sure Jeongguk wasn’t in high school for long. “We can go outside, if—”

“Walking around people is hard,” Jeongguk gripes, brow furrowed, and Taehyung laughs. “And I want to look at more stuff, but I can’t—”

“Hey.” Taehyung tugs on his arm. “There’s the food.”

Jeongguk zeroes in on the long table, a line of plastic trays and a group of beleaguered-looking teachers by the water dispensers. “Wow.”

Taehyung grins. “You gotta remember you’re a human being right now. That other human beings can see.”

Jeongguk gives him an innocent look, his mouth already full. “What?”

When Jimin finds them a few minutes later, Taehyung is in the middle of trying to shrug out of his giant coat, and Jeongguk’s cheeks are bulging while he explains that the food kind of just tastes like heavy air.

“Wait. Are you—is this—”

“I’m not even kidding, Jiminie,” Taehyung says, suddenly feeling deeply excited and intense about this as he wiggles out of a sleeve. “Your dumb plan worked.”

Jimin’s eyes go huge, and Jeongguk looks like he’s hastily trying to swallow three dumplings at once. “Oh my god,” Jimin says. “Oh my god.”

“Your literal zodiac plan.”

“You’re really—you’re not like some actor that Taehyung hired out of desperation?”

Taehyung shoots him a look of betrayal. “Wow. Absolutely no faith.”

“Sorry, this is just—”

“Don’t be weird, Jimin—you’re gonna overwhelm him,” Taehyung says right before Jeongguk barrels in to give Jimin a bone-crushing hug.

“Oh my god, hey.”

“Hey. Maybe I’m—sorry—it’s just Taehyung talks about you a lot—”

“Don’t be sorry!” They talk over each other rapidly, and Taehyung feels stupidly delighted, stands there with his jacket half off and just kind of soaks it in. Jimin’s date comes by, and Jimin grabs him by the lapel and introduces him rather forcefully. “This is Jeongguk.”

“Hey, uh.” The date flicks his dark curly hair out of his eyes, gives Jeongguk a little wave. “Hey, dude.”

“It’s Jeongguk,” Jimin repeats with a profound importance.

“That’s, uh. That’s cool. Nice to meet you, dude.” Art Class Joaquin is in their grade, but Jimin’s the only one who has an elective with him, so Taehyung’s still sorting out whether or not he’s a murderer.

“I thought he was shorter than you,” Jimin says, looking between Jeongguk and Taehyung.

“Oh.” Taehyung frowns a little. “He used to be.”

“I was?”

“Should we—” Art Class Joaquin starts.

“Yeah, yeah, let’s go.”

Taehyung finds an empty chair to stuff his jacket onto instead of bothering with the coat check, and Jeongguk picks up his gloves off the floor again and wedges them into one of the pockets. They push their way through the crowd to form a tight little circle, and they’re kind of awkwardly sway-talking when a Shinee song comes on and Jeongguk gets excited in that way that makes it seem like he has a deep well of pent-up energy.

“Hey! Hey! ‘Lucifer.’”

“Huh?”

“I used to know so much of this dance.” Jeongguk strikes an easy pose and bounce-drags one arm up and down, his wrist bent.

“I have no idea what you’re doing,” Taehyung says, trying not to grin.

“It’s such a good dance. Seriously?”

“The only dance I know is ‘Umpah Umpah.’ Or, the hand part, at least.”

“This song is so old,” Jimin says, eyes serious.

“I guess?” Jeongguk says, running through the move again like he’s trying to remember it. “It’s third gen, right?”

Jimin nods. “Is it, like, something you remember?”

All at once, Jeongguk looks like he’s about to laugh. “Jimin—"

“Sorry, sorry,” Jimin backtracks, “I didn’t mean to—”

“Jimin, I was like, a kid when this came out. I just like the song, is all.” Jimin looks a little horrified at his mistake, and then Jeongguk says, “Do you think I died a hundred years ago?” and then Jimin gets a little giggly.

“I don’t know!”

“I remember the ancient days of third gen—before the war—”

“I used to write—” Jimin lets out a laugh. “I wrote letters—while I played my gigapet—”

“I drove down to the river and played Girls’ Generation on my VCR—"

Taehyung doesn’t really get what’s funny, but they’re both cracking up now, and Taehyung asks Art Class Joaquin something almost at random to distract him from the increasingly nonsensical scenario they’re constructing about Jeongguk as an ancient ambassador of recent history. Eventually they’re all dancing around, Taehyung too keyed up to feel awkward about it, and Jimin and Jeongguk keep getting in these kind of oddly competitive little dance offs that tend to result in one or both of them knocking violently into someone—Jeongguk because he isn’t used to this, Jimin because he’s Jimin.

Later, Taehyung finds Art Class Joaquin looking a little forlorn by the drink table; he knocks back the rest of his lemonade while Taehyung fills a styrofoam cup with water.

“Jimin’s probably looking for you,” Taehyung says helpfully, but unfortunately precisely when Jimin’s bent over double laughing at some intense dance move Jeongguk is doing.

“Uh huh,” Joaquin says fatalistically.

Taehyung takes a slow drink, thinks that the guy looks pretty put out, for a potential murderer. Probably a murderer would’ve, you know, struck, by this point. “Look. Jimin’s been excited about this for, like, a month. About going with you, I mean.” Joaquin looks at Taehyung like he isn’t sure what he means. “He’s not even wearing his glasses,” Taehyung adds, “which means he’s excited enough to be half-blind. He almost tripped on the big apartment stairs, and I had to save him. He could’ve died.”

Joaquin has kind of nicely thick eyebrows, and they draw in while he processes Jimin’s potential death “Ok?”

“So you should, like—” Taehyung gestures vaguely with his water cup. “—ask him to dance or something. He’ll be excited.” Taehyung decides he’s put quite enough effort into this, drinks his water again.

“You think?”

Taehyung hums affirmatively into his cup.

“Yeah. Ok,” Joaquin says, looking a little more hopeful. “Thanks.” Taehyung gives him a cheesy thumbs up.

“Move, weirdo,” a guy from Taehyung’s science class says while he budges him aside to get to the water. Joaquin catches Taehyung’s eye, flicks the guy off behind his back, and Taehyung decides that maybe he’s alright.

They all four take the metro to get fast food afterward. Jeongguk waits in line with them and reads his way through the whole menu, and then ends up just kind of wandering around looking at things while the rest of them order, as if he’s forgotten that purchasing things with money is a necessary practice. He eats a surprising amount off Taehyung’s tray despite looking disappointed after every bite, and he and Taehyung catalog the best songs at the dance, huddle over Taehyung’s phone to look them up. Jimin scoots unnecessarily close to his date in the booth, but he also keeps hyping up Taehyung’s funny stories before he tells them, and Taehyung sucks down his strawberry shake under the garish lights, table scattered with ketchup packets and too many napkins, and thinks that it all feels actually real, mundane enough to hold onto. He and Jimin doggedly steer the conversation away every time Joaquin tries to ask where Jeongguk goes to school, or how old he is, or if he has any brothers—just an older sister, Jeongguk says—and Taehyung can feel Jeongguk’s leg jiggle nervously in the booth next to him, but even that feels good, the actual weight of it, and he has this habit Taehyung’s never noticed before of covering his own ears when he laughs too loud.

Taehyung always goes to Jimin’s after these things, sometimes to do an in-depth recap of the whole night, and sometimes to just lay around and watch Jimin draw. Tonight, through some miracle, they’re able to convince Jimin’s mom that Jeongguk is a classmate of theirs that she’s seen before, and she lets him stay over too.

Taehyung’s room is basically separated from his dad’s bedroom by a wall with all the soundproofing properties of cardboard, but Jimin has a room and a decent-sized bathroom all to himself on the second floor, and his parents’ apartment is far enough out that you can actually hear crickets over the hum of highway traffic. Taehyung scoots back into the corner of Jimin’s small bed in borrowed pajamas, and he feels amped up and sleepy at the same time while Jimin shows Jeongguk through one of his sketchbooks. They’re all thinking that Jeongguk probably won’t disappear until sunrise, and Jimin leaves him another pair of pajamas when he goes to shower. Jeongguk picks them up off the bed and squeezes his eyes shut, just stands there for a moment and then opens his eyes again.

“Oh,” he says, and then laughs a little.

“Huh?”

“I think I have to actually change. Weird.”

Taehyung blinks sleepily at him.

“Turn around or something.”

“Oh. Yeah.” Taehyung rolls onto his belly and shoves his face into the comforter. “Tell me when,” he mutters thickly. “Or I’ll just fall asleep.”

“Ok,” Jeongguk says after a bit. “You’re good.”

Taehyung rolls back over to see Jeongguk in blue plaid; he picks up his black pants off the floor and fishes a thin, curly strip of paper out of the pocket. As soon as he pulls it all the way out, the whole suit disappears. Taehyung sits up and feels much more awake.

“Whoah.”

“I guess Yoongi wasn’t making fun of you.”

“I guess not.” Jeongguk carefully tucks the paper into the breast pocket of his pajama shirt.

They end up talking aimlessly while Jimin showers, Jeongguk sitting gingerly on the edge of the bed at first and then, by degrees, sprawling back next to Taehyung on the mountain of pillows.

“We gotta plan out something way cooler next year,” Taehyung says with conviction. “Go snowboarding or something.”

“Snowboarding at night?”

“Yeah. It’s a whole thing. I went with my grandparents one time.”

“Ok. Yeah. Cool.”

“Hot chocolate and stuff. Big fluffy snow.”

“I’ve never really been. We always did summer vacation.”

Maybe it’s just because he’s sleepy, but Taehyung has this feeling like he can’t quite keep track of what they’re talking about, or like maybe there’s something else they’re actually talking about, and all the words they’re saying are nothing, really, just seafoam drifting around.

“Your suit didn’t look bad,” Jeongguk’s saying, and Taehyung thinks that Jimin’s right, that Jeongguk’s taller now, the same kid with big eyes but older, a whole entire person instead of a shadow saying the same things over and over, and for some reason realizing that makes Taehyung ache a little bit. Maybe just because Jeongguk’s never been snowboarding.

“It’s no big deal,” Taehyung says. “It’s not like I really tried.” He yawns, feels a pleasant shock when his foot brushes Jeongguk’s shin. “I never really try for this stuff. Don’t see the point.”

“I’m just saying, when you have a—” Jeongguk worries at his lower lip. “—a real date sometime. You should know. It doesn’t really matter what you wear. But the suit didn’t look bad.”

Taehyung nudges him again, purposefully, because he wants to feel the shock, and in a brief moment of clarity he knows what he wants Jeongguk to be saying. “You don’t think it matters?”

Jeongguk bumps his chin up in a little nod, and Taehyung spreads his fingers on the bed next to Jeongguk’s side and moves in slowly until they’re close, until he can see him in a way he never really has before—his eyelashes distinct, the scar on his cheek a bit blurry because he’s so close, actually present.

“Yeah,” Jeongguk whispers, and Taehyung eases forward and kisses him.

It’s just a soft shock between them, and then Taehyung shifts back again to look at him, because he has no idea what he’s doing. “Guk?”

Jeongguk is right there for another moment, wide-eyed with his chest rising and falling in surprise, and then he disappears.

Jimin’s in the middle of saying something when he comes back into his bedroom, but he stops short when he sees his blue plaid pajamas laid out wrinkly on the bed. “Geez. Already?”

Taehyung nods, pillow hugged to his chest, and tries to give Jimin a ‘hey, it’s cool; I’m only crying a little bit and definitely not because I just did something super embarrassing and don’t know what I’m feeling’ kind of a thumbs up. Jimin makes a face that’s distinctly Jimin. He throws the blue pajamas on top of his messy dresser, settles on the bed and then just talks to Taehyung, low-voiced, about nothing in particular, trivial things that it’s easy for Taehyung to answer him about, until they both fall asleep with the lights on.

They work their way fuzzily through some soup and kimbap the next morning while Jimin’s mom plies them with jaunty small talk about why Jeongguk had to leave early and whether they all had fun. Taehyung can tell that they both have that itchy, irascible feeling, like the weekend is already almost over and they both want to be alone to do their own thing, but Taehyung convinces Jimin to go out to the art supply store with him so they can talk. The metro is busy, but compared to telling Jimin long, impossible tales in the short breaks between their classes, this story is pretty easy to convey.

“Do you think…I totally freaked him out, right?”

“Ok ok, hold on. I feel like there’s some context here. I mean, what kind of stuff has he done before?” Jimin’s been a lot more invested in the conversation ever since he realized that Taehyung was trying to tell him something secret and interesting.

“What kind of stuff?”

“I mean, do you think he had a boyfriend before he died?”

A woman sitting across from them on the train gives them an odd look.

“I have no idea,” Taehyung says. “Probably not? He was like 15.”

“Any other…dead guys?”

“Gross.”

Jimin raises his eyebrows. “You kissed one.”

“Oh geez,” Taehyung realizes, covering his mouth with a gloved hand. “Jimin…I’m…I’m a necrophiliac.”

Jimin looks a little too entertained by this. “That’s if it’s a dead body. You’re just into dead spirits.”

Taehyung looks at him, horrified. “There’s probably a word for that too.”

“Spirit-o-philiac,” Jimin suggests.

“Yeah. I’m a spirit sucker and a spirit-o-philiac.” Taehyung grimaces at himself. “What is wrong with me?”

“Our teenage years are for exploration.”

“No wonder he was freaked out by me. I’m freaked out by me.”

They’re both bundled up for the cold, but Jimin grabs Taehyung’s hand, gives him a kind of friendly pressure through their gloves. “You know it’s not like that.”

“Ok, but like—it’s creepy regardless, right? I lured him in with the promise of a corporeal night—I told him it was a friend date! It was a friend date. And then I attacked him.” Taehyung realizes bleakly that he’s a monster. He accidentally makes eye contact with the woman across from them, and she looks rapidly away, as if she’s come to the same conclusion.

“Look,” Jimin says. “Can I be honest? Like, setting aside the freaking out, which I do understand is an important part of the process—can I just say something?”

“I guess.”

Jimin squeezes through their gloves. “I think it’s pretty clear, whether or not he knows it, that this wasn’t a friend date for him either.”

“You don’t know that!”

“It’s just what I think.”

“Jimin.”

“What?”

Taehyung slumps dramatically in the plastic seat. “I made things weird.”

“I think maybe things were already a little weird.”

Taehyung slumps down further.

Jimin gets serious and absorbed at the art supply store, drifting around looking at everything and eventually hovering longingly by the expensive alcohol marker set like he always does. He gets a text from Joaquin, and they dissect it and decide on an answer over by the table where you can try out a million different pens. When they leave Jimin has a small bundle of purchases and an annoyingly sunny outlook on everything.

“Just talk to him about it! He’s been one of your best friends for like a year. You’ll work it out.”

“You’re just saying that because you and Joaquin are getting married tomorrow,” Taehyung grumbles, squished against a metal pole.

“I notice he’s not ‘Art Class Joaquin’ anymore,” Jimin says archly.

“Well, he’s not just in art class anymore. He’s your husband now.”

Jimin gets a little glowy, like this is a good thing. “Can I make just one joke about this? Just one teensy joke?” He leans closer and holds a gloved index finger in front of his face.

“Sure.”

“Do you think…do you think anyone’s ever been ghosted this literally before?”

Taehyung glares at him.

For the next week, Taehyung goes to bed nervous. He keeps thinking it might be one of those nights, even when he can tell as evening comes on that it won’t be, and he both does and doesn’t want to cross over, because as many times as he’s rehashed everything in his head, he doesn’t actually have a solid plan for what to say. He wonders if Jeongguk won’t trust him anymore, if he’d never thought of Taehyung that way at all and now Taehyung’s screwed up their whole friendship. He lays flat on his bed, listens to the faint sound of the tv from the other room and imagines walking around the city and not being able find Jeongguk at all. He pulls a pillow over his head and tries to just stop thinking.

There’s a steady, icy rain, the next time Taehyung wakes up and steps out of his own body. Maybe it’s just because he’s nervous, more generally alert than normal to things that might go wrong, but for the first time in a long time it makes his stomach twist a little to see himself sprawled out on his own bed, sheets wrapped around his ankles like he’d been tossing and turning. He disentangles the covers and pulls them up over his own chest before he eases open his bedroom door.

“Hyunah?” Taehyung’s dad calls softly, and Taehyung hurries down the stairs.

The rain slices down and turns the remnants of snow into dirty slush. It’s strange to see it cut through his own body and emerge on the other side, when the wind slants it, strange to pad barefoot through the dark city while wide-mouthed shades drift through brick walls. Maybe this isn’t Taehyung’s world, or shouldn’t be. Maybe if he spent more time talking to people at school, and had more normal stories to tell, he could be happy and normal, and no one would switch seats when he picked a desk too close to them in study hall. A car swerves and sends a sheet of icy water onto the sidewalk, and for some reason it soaks half of Taehyung’s sweatpants and t-shirt, and the other half of him stays bone dry.

He’s heading to the library, since Jeongguk’s been spending more and more time there, now that he can more reliably handle the books, but on the way he sees a familiar silhouette sitting on the edge of a tall hotel. Taehyung follows an alleyway to the back of the building and slips his way up the rickety fire escape, squinting even though the rain isn’t actually getting in his eyes. Jeongguk looks over in interest, when Taehyung picks his way across the flat roof.

“Hey,” Jeongguk says warmly. “I figured I could see you from here.” He’s perched on a low wall around the edge of the roof with his feet dangling, heels thumping against the building façade. Taehyung gingerly climbs up next to him. It shouldn’t be scary, because if he slips over the edge he’ll land just fine, but he’s scared anyway. “Whoah,” Jeongguk says, eyebrows pulling in. “How’d you get all wet?”

“A car. It was weird.”

Jeongguk watches him for a moment and then says, “You wanna go downstairs?” Taehyung nods, and Jeongguk takes his hand. “Fast way or slow way?”

“Fast way,” Taehyung decides. Jeongguk nods and closes his eyes, and Taehyung follows suit. For a moment he just breathes there, feels the way the sparks travel through his palm and up his arm. Then Jeongguk squeezes his hand to say he’s ready, and Taehyung imagines becoming just a bit more slippery, insubstantial to the stucco digging into the backs of his thighs, and then the stucco is no longer digging into the backs of his thighs, and they both drop, buoyant. Taehyung opens his eyes to watch as they slide their way through floor after floor, identical curtains and window and ceiling, curtains-window-ceiling, curtainswindowceiling, until they fall through the high lobby ceiling and Taehyung thinks: light enough, featherlight. They drift down to land on the marble floor.

“We’re getting good at that,” Jeongguk says, pleased, and Taehyung feels warmer.

Normally there are more ghosts that take up residence in the expansive lobby, but tonight it’s just a group of hulking shapes in the cigar lounge, plus the living front desk attendant. The two of them mess around with the billiard tables for a while, and then they end up sitting on the thick carpet by the tall stone fireplace. Taehyung talks nervously about nothing at all for a while before he finally forces himself to bring it up—that he’d acted weird the other night, and he’s sorry. Jeongguk gets stuck on the subject of how he’d acted weird, and Taehyung realizes that he means the whole night, that he’s worried he was lame to hang out with because he isn’t old enough, didn’t get half of the references anyone made.

“Everyone was really cool, or, well, especially Jimin, and I was just confused about everything,” Jeongguk’s insisting.

“You were good!” Taehyung insists. “It was good!”

“It was just so much stuff at once, and I couldn’t really think—”

“You were fine, seriously!”

“I really liked going. It was really cool. It was—I didn’t think I’d ever do something like that. I mean, I know it’s not really a big deal, in the normal world.”

“You were super fun,” Taehyung assures him again.

“I feel like I was just really lame.”

“Jimin thought you were cool—he told me like a million times. And Jimin has really strong opinions, ok—he doesn’t fake his opinions. At least not for me.”

Jeongguk looks pleased. “Alright. Yeah. Cool.”

“Jimin does not show normal people his sketchbook,” Taehyung adds. “That’s a ‘Jimin really likes you’ thing.”

“Ok. Ok, yeah. His drawings were so impressive.”

Taehyung wrinkles his nose fondly. “Yeah. He’s obsessed.” There’s a pause. “Can I say something?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry about the end. When—right before you disappeared. I really should’ve asked, or…I’m really sorry if I made things weird.” Taehyung wonders briefly if Jeongguk is going to somehow disappear again, because he looks a little mortified there. “Guk,” he prods gently.

“Sorry.” Jeongguk blows his cheeks out for a moment. “Um. I just feel…really dumb about leaving like that.”

“It’s ok. I shouldn’t’ve—”

“I just—” Jeongguk rubs the back of his neck nervously. “I didn’t know what to do.”

“I’m really sorry, Guk,” Taehyung says miserably.

“The thing is just…I don’t know how to do any of this stuff. I, uh…I basically went through puberty and then died.”

Taehyung lets out a nervous laugh, covers his mouth. “Sorry. That’s not funny.”

“It’s not,” Jeongguk says. “Is it? It’s a little funny.”

“It’s not funny,” Taehyung decides.

Jeongguk glances down at the carpet, his jaw tightening for a moment. “Sometimes I feel like I would know what to do. That I could be…the kind of guy you might like. Or something. And then I realize…that’s crazy. That’s not going to happen.” His expression softens. “So anyway. Sorry for being lame, basically.”

“Guk.” All at once Taehyung has that feeling again, like when he could hear the crickets outside of Jimin’s house and it seemed like he was moving on instinct, like everything made sense.

“What?”

“Do you want to kiss again?”

Jeongguk only looks dumbfounded for a moment before he says, “Yeah. I do.”

“Ok,” Taehyung says.

“Ok,” Jeongguk says. They look at each other. “Um. Should I—" Taehyung reaches deliberately over to press his thumb over Jeongguk’s mouth. He feels the plump give of his lips, a sharp spark. “Uh.”

“Sorry. Just taking the edge off.”

Jeongguk breaks into a smile then, like maybe this is funny, or like maybe just really likes Taehyung. “Makes sense,” he mutters against Taehyung’s thumb.

“Ok. Ok.” Taehyung scoots closer, drags his thumb to the side of Jeongguk’s mouth and moves cautiously in to kiss him.

There’s a gentle buzz of electricity against his mouth just like before, but now he has the time to feel the shape of Jeongguk’s mouth, soft lips and sharp cupid's bow. Jeongguk goes completely still, and then he exhales slowly against Taehyung's cheek. Taehyung can feel all of it, can sense the way Jeongguk starts to press in closer and then hesitates, gets the faint scent of shampoo and sweat, and maybe this shouldn't feel so real, but it does. Taehyung breaks the kiss so they can both scoot closer over the carpet again.

Taehyung can count on one hand the number of people he’s kissed—mostly in an experimental way. So far he’s always lost interest after a few minutes because he’s at a choir retreat and there’s something cool happening over in the other room, or because it just feels like nothing, a weird mouth bumpy thing, or that one time because it was too much all at once, backstage at a dress rehearsal when one of the tenors had said ‘hey, you want to see something cool in the props room?’ But despite all the awkward things about kissing—primarily among them: how long is a kiss supposed to last? Is just smooshing your lips together and waiting supposed to feel good?—this is the first time that Taehyung really, really wants to keep trying.

“Um. Is it ok if I—” Jeongguk’s kind of hovering his hand over Taehyung’s bent leg.

“Are you asking if you can touch my knee?”

“Yeah,” Jeongguk says earnestly.

“Yes. You can touch my knee.”

“Ok.”

Taehyung starts to laugh at him, and then he actually jumps when Jeongguk does touch his knee, because he’s super ticklish, so that’s embarrassing.

And that’s the way things are that night—tentative and dumb and good. After a while they end up talking again, the fire crackling in the little silences, and it turns out, astonishingly, that they both like each other a lot, specifically in a ‘wanting to kiss’ kind of way, and they don’t like anyone else that way, and probably they should try kissing again.

Over the next few weeks, Taehyung discovers that when you really want to kiss someone, and you have essentially a magical free space in which to do exactly that, you can do a lot of kissing. Through some sort of karmic gift, the veil thins early that next week, and Taehyung blushes when he finds Jeongguk in the graphic novel section of the library. He sits down next to him in one of those little reading nooks, one knee crooked so he can face him, and Jeongguk already has this lopsided grin when he puts down his book and says hi, and then the rest of the night is mostly focused on the important developments of: kissing a little deeper, and moving closer, and whether faster or slower is better, and the all-important development of tongue.

By the end of the night Taehyung is profoundly exhausted, and he thinks then that just sitting here with his legs draped over Jeongguk’s lap, both of them talking aimlessly about the shonen manga they’re reading, is far superior to anything else, and maybe kissing is overrated. But then the next day when Taehyung’s daydreaming in math class he realizes what a fool he was—kissing is the best, the only great thing, and waiting possibly two weeks to do it again is waiting forever. He talks to Jimin so much about it at lunch that Jimin actually reaches his limit of boy talk, which Taehyung didn’t even know existed, and he literally pulls his social sciences book out of his backpack while Taehyung’s in the middle of a sentence and insists that they study for a while.

The third night is really, really good, even though Taehyung’s coming down with some kind of cold, and usually that wouldn’t affect him on the other side, but somehow he still feels heavy and slow. He starts home a little early, partly because he doesn’t feel great, and partly because the prospect of facing the ferryman right after he’s had his tongue down Jeongguk’s throat seems truly horrible. He would just know somehow; Taehyung’s sure of it. One of the screamers latches onto to him on the way home, and even though Taehyung knows they can't hurt him he walks faster than normal, tries not to betray surprise when the specter bursts through walls, face distended and pathetic as it wails. "Give it to me—I know you have it—give it to me give it to me." A siren sounds when Taehyung gets to his street, and it seems to disperse the ghost for some reason. Taehyung exhales in relief and walks straight through a smudgy purple figure on the sidewalk.

“Sorry—hello?” Taehyung says as he turns around, because he doesn’t recognize the spirit for a moment, and then it coalesces into the shape of Yoongi tucking a book into a pocket in his hanbok. “Yoongi?” Taehyung realizes with a dull shock that his form is far more wasted than usual tonight—deep purple hollows beneath his eyes, pale lips—even his blonde hair seems lighter, like he’s fading.

Yoongi looks up, leaden, and the book in his pocket is emitting a slow fog, the way some of the books in the occult section of the bookstore do. “You should be more careful, Taehyung,” he says.

“Are you ok?”

Yoongi gives him an unblinking stare. “You should avoid me if you can.”

“What? Wait—why?”

“You didn’t hear it from me,” Yoongi says, sliding around him and into the street.

“Yoongi,” Taehyung says, but when he turns around Yoongi’s already blurring into the inky purple darkness.

Taehyung realizes the next day that he definitely has a cold, and then, in the next few days after that, that it's getting worse. He usually isn’t the type to ask to stay home from school, because there’s really nothing to do at the apartment besides watch tv and help his dad out at the bookstore, but there’s a morning when he keeps telling himself he’ll get out of bed, really thinks he’s doing it, and then keeps waking up to realize that he hasn’t, and eventually his dad takes his temperature and says that he should go back to sleep. Taehyung spends that day on the couch in a ratty t-shirt, dozing his way through a Sailor Moon marathon.

He almost sleeps through it, when the veil thins again, but when he rolls his way blearily out of his body, he feels a little better, so he decides to stay being a spirit for a while. He doesn’t get far before Jeongguk finds him, and they end up just going back to the bookstore because Jeongguk’s never seen it and Taehyung’s already feeling tired again.

“It’s really cool that you guys own this,” Jeongguk says when Taehyung is showing him all the odd things his dad has put up in hidden corners over the years—old newspaper clippings, a page of Pokémon cards that he’d saved from Taehyung’s old binder before he’d given it away, a photo that Jimin’s mom had given them years ago of Taehyung and Jimin in matching hanboks. He hasn’t put up anything new in a long time.

Taehyung shrugs. “There’s a lot of old books in the world.”

“Do you think you want to run it when you’re older?”

“Not really,” Taehyung admits, and that’s the first time he’s said that aloud. Maybe it’s just because he’s really not feeling good. A few minutes later he sneezes on the glass display case for rare books, and there’s no snot at all, which is a really weird experience.

“It sucks that you’re still sick like this,” Jeongguk says, while Taehyung coughs up nothing at all. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“Yeah,” Taehyung says, his throat gravely. “Sucks.”

He realizes that Jeongguk’s eye is caught by a group of old photos pinned on the wall behind the register—Taehyung’s parents on a beach somewhere, his dad’s hair much darker; a washed-out wedding picture; Taehyung’s mom in front of a red car, grinning with a group of friends, her hand on her belly—and Taehyung’s stomach twists. He pulls Jeongguk over to the occult section. The books here are especially active tonight, emitting a white smoke that trails down to carpet the floor, and walking through the foggy lane reminds Taehyung of how strange Yoongi had acted the other day. He asks Jeongguk about it when they’re in the back room on the couch.

“He’s been like this for a while. I just didn’t realize,” Jeongguk says. Taehyung had been shivering a little before, but now he’s switched back to feeling hot, and he takes off his sweater and lays back on it. Possibly it’s not very suave, or maybe too forward or something, for him to be sprawling out the couch with his knees hooked over Jeongguk’s legs, but his head hurts and he’s really past caring. “It’s definitely getting worse, though, and he keeps acting like he might not be around for long. But I know he’s not crossing over—he always says he won’t.”

Taehyung tries to wrap his head around this and then gives up. “Sucks,” he contributes.

Jeongguk looks down at him for a moment, a white wisp of fog drifting by his dark hair, and says, “Do you care if I—”

“Nah. There’s space.” Taehyung pushes his sweater onto the floor and wiggles toward the edge of the couch so Jeongguk can stretch out next to him. They both act extremely casual about it, but Taehyung’s heart beats loudly, like something’s about to happen. Jeongguk rests a hand tentatively on Taehyung’s side, and the electricity feels weaker than normal, but then Taehyung’s able to focus more on just the feeling of his hand there, his thumb moving just the slightest bit—he can tell that Jeongguk is breathing a little faster than normal. Or seeming to breathe. Taehyung’s never quite worked out whether spirits really need to do these things, or if they just do them out of habit.

“What kind of store would you own? If you owned a store?” Taehyung asks. Jeongguk has a lot of different ideas, all very impractical, and they talk about them quietly. Then Taehyung remembers Jeongguk’s favorite kind of soup, when they’re talking about owning a restaurant, and Jeongguk pushes up on his elbow to kiss him for it, and then they abandon the small business conversation entirely in favor of kissing, slow and drawn-out. Taehyung slips his tongue into Jeongguk’s mouth and hears Jeongguk make a small satisfied noise, and partly the whole putting your tongue in someone else’s mouth thing is the weirdest thing he’s ever done, and also partly it makes him feel like he’s going to go crazy, or like he really needs something to happen, but he doesn’t know what. He goes back and forth on whether it’s nice or annoying that Jeongguk tends to plant a hand on him somewhere and not move it at all, like he’s afraid that it’s rude to touch him or something, and currently Taehyung thinks that maybe it’s annoying.

“Guk.”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

Jeongguk kisses him on the cheek and moves back to give him some space. “Your head still hurt?” Actually, Taehyung is a monster, and Jeongguk is just really freaking nice.

“Yeah. Or. I was just thinking, kinda.”

“Thinking about what?”

Taehyung blows out his cheeks, which he’s pretty sure is a habit he picked up from Jeongguk. Jimin does it sometimes too, and it’s actually kind of cool to think about, Jeongguk affecting the living world in all these little ways. “I was kinda wondering, just about, like…if you ever get turned on.” It comes out way more embarrassing than he intended—Taehyung covers the lower half of his face on the pretense of rubbing his nose.

Jeongguk takes a minute to answer, and then he says, “I mean. That’s why I’m…why there’s some space.” He looks pointedly at the inches of couch between them.

Taehyung also looks at the space. “I don’t get it.”

“Tae.”

“What?”

Jeongguk closes his eyes briefly in frustration. “I’m saying if I were closer, it would get pretty obvious.”

“Oh.” Taehyung blushes, rolls onto his back. “Ok.”

“Is there…a reason you’re asking?”

“I just kinda wanted to know.”

“Ok.”

“For like, the future.”

“Yeah. Ok.”

Taehyung rolls onto his shoulder again to look at him. “I don’t want to do anything yet. For a while.”

Jeongguk looks a little relieved, mostly fond. “That’s ok.”

“But could you, like, actually touch my chest?” He winces at himself. “Or not. If you don’t want to.”

“I want to,” Jeongguk says immediately.

For a while they just kiss again, but it’s different now, laced with anticipation, and then Jeongguk slides his hand slowly up Taehyung’s shirt. He travels up Taehyung's side to his ribs, grips him there and then moves a little higher, and he does it like he means it, like he wants to feel Taehyung's skin, and through some miracle Taehyung doesn’t get ticklish. His own hands wander as if of their own accord down to where Jeongguk’s shirt is riding up, and Jeongguk hums fervently when Taehyung asks if it’s ok. It’s a singularly blissful experience, even with his head fuzzy and his throat sore, to explore the whole expanse of Jeongguk’s back, and to kiss him with an extra intensity when Jeongguk lingers with his thumb just next to Taehyung’s nipple, like he isn’t sure what to do.

“This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” Jeongguk says when Taehyung elects to drag his whole palm across Jeongguk’s pec, and Taehyung laughs so loud he worries that someone will hear.

Eventually Taehyung’s headache gets worse, and Jeongguk says he should just take a nap, right here—he’ll wake him up in time. Taehyung is too tired to work out the logistics of sleeping as a ghost body and a real body at the same time, so he just edges closer to Jeongguk, lets him wrap an arm around his back. It’s probably silly, that they still have their shirts half on, but also it’s kind of nice.

“Definitely a spirit-o-philiac,” Taehyung murmurs nonsensically.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Definitely.”

Taehyung drifts asleep, the sparks between their skin pinging and fading away.

Taehyung is too hot, too cold, aching all over, and being asleep feels like being awake, or maybe the other way around. He sleeps and sleeps but it’s like there’s an empty well in him that will never fill up, and sitting up pretending like he’s interested in eating soup is taxing, but laying there afterward with the tv blaring confusingly is taxing too. None of the shows make sense anymore, and when his dad talks Taehyung isn’t always sure what he’s saying. The couch seems like it’s rocking sometimes when he’s laying on it, bobbing gently back and forth, and he imagines being on a big river, floating away.

Jimin shouldn’t be up so late, because his mom is convinced he’ll get sick again if he isn’t careful, but he hunches over his sketchpad in the bed and tries to figure out why the posture in this drawing is driving him crazy. He can’t tell what’s wrong with it, and he wishes he were working on his tablet so he could undo a few lines. Or just scrap the whole thing. He’d started this one at lunch with Taehyung, he remembers—that’s why it’s on paper. He suddenly doesn’t feel like drawing anymore. He tosses his pencil onto the middle of the bed, and then one of his dresser drawers thuds closed entirely of its own accord.

Jimin sits up stick straight. He paws blindly at his nightstand until he finds his glasses, slides them on and stares at his messy dresser with his heart beating very fast. For a moment, absolutely nothing happens. Then a second drawer slides open.

“Ok. ok. This is fine,” Jimin says. More drawers open and close in succession. “This is fine.” Another drawer, another little thud. “I swear, if you’re some actual spooky thing—I swear if you’re not Jeongguk—” He doesn’t really have a follow-up to this threat. “I’m friends with a ghost, ok—I’m a ghost friend. Please don’t spook me.” Something lumpy rises up out of the bottom dresser drawer, and Jimin winces in fear before he realizes that it’s just his blue plaid pajamas. “Jeongguk? Please be Jeongguk. Please be Jeongguk.” Jimin isn’t cut out for this hardcore spooky life—he’s not strong enough to watch his pajamas float. He closes his eyes, and when he opens them again he startles at the sight of his mechanical pencil standing straight over his sketchpad. It writes out: Sorry Jimin. It’s me.

“Geez! You spooked me! What part of confirm your identity do you not understand?!”

Sorry. It’s Jeongguk.

“Yeah, next time maybe lead with that. I literally have drawing supplies on me at all times—it’s not that difficult.”

Is Taehyung ok?

Jimin sort of deflates there on the bed. He scoots back into his pillow mountain to lay down on his shoulder. “Not really. He’s been sick forever—like, way too long. I had the same thing and I’m already over it.” He watches his pencil hover uncertainly for a moment. “Have you seen him?”

No.

“There was this thing today.” He tries to figure out how to explain it. “My mom kept saying, I guess, that Mr. Kim should’ve taken him to hospital by now, and we were there today after school and she was telling him that. I went up—I just saw Tae for a few minutes, but when his dad mentioned taking him to the hospital, he was like…he really freaked out.” Jimin hastily blinks back tears. “He didn’t want to go at all.” The pencil starts on a letter, stops. “I know he’s partly just really feverish, and obviously he should go to the hospital, if he’s this bad, because the doctor just said he had strep, I think, but he should be over that by now. But he kept saying that I’m the only one who believes him, that I had to believe him that he couldn’t go. And then we just…left. I didn’t even help.” Jimin blows out a long breath. “Anyway. I don’t know if I’m worrying for nothing, or what. I hate that he’s this sick.” He stretches out his legs on the bed. “Sorry if I’m talking too much.”

The pencil finally writes again. It’s ok.

It feels good just to tell someone. Jimin has friends outside of school, and also he sort of has a boyfriend now, but he hadn’t realized how much he’d relied on talking with Taehyung to just…feel like himself. Or maybe there’s a certain part of him that only Taehyung understands, and a certain part of Taehyung that only Jimin understands, and without each other they’re just missing something. Maybe Jeongguk feels that way too.

“I guess it’s weird he’s not visiting you.”

Yeah. I have to go, Jimin.

Jimin frowns. A talker Jeongguk is not. “Ok?”

I’m sorry for everything.

“Ok. Have fun in ghost world, I guess.” Then he frowns again. “Wait. Sorry for what?” There’s no answer of any kind.

The last thing Jeongguk remembers is an angel saying, “Your mother is there, Jeongguk. Your sister,” and then a demon saying, “Do you know what it means to forget?”

The first thing Jeongguk remembers is a boy saying, “Are you alive?”

Jeongguk stands in front of the demon now. “I swear I’m not trying to sneak over and stay,” he says. “I just need to get to him this one time. He’s really sick, and I can’t touch him from this side, and I need to—I think there’s a way I can help.”

“I can’t ferry the dead back over,” Jin says, not for the first time. He’s standing in the boat, facing Jeongguk on the shore, and his cloak is rippling in a wind that doesn’t seem to touch anything else.

“I’m not going to stay, though. I just need to get to him, and then I’ll come back.”

“That’s not my job. You know that.”

“It’s really bad—Jimin says they’re going to take him to the hospital tomorrow. I can’t just sit here.”

Jin’s expression changes for a moment, a flicker of concern instead of just weary patience, but he just says, "I can't ferry the dead back over."

“Please," Jeongguk lets out, even though he knows that won't work, knows that begging is all the demon hears, most days. "Please, I swear I'll come right back."

Jin looks distant, like he's not really listening, and then he says, “He shouldn't go.”

“He shouldn't what?”

"He shouldn't go to hospital. He'll regret it.”

Jeongguk knows an adult relenting when he sees one. “I can tell him that, if you just let me cross—I can help.”

“So tell him. Haunt him. Surely you have a way to communicate by now.”

“It’s not—” Jeongguk feels desperate, his gut a complex knot of guilt and need. He needs Jin to let him cross. But he doesn’t want Jin to ask how he’s going to help. “That’s not enough. He’s sick—no one’s going to listen to him. I have to get across so I can actually do something.”

“The dead can’t affect the living world. Your time there is done.”

“I know—I’m not trying to—”

“Except that you already have. You’ve changed the whole course of his life.” Jin looks intrigued for a moment, and Jeongguk pauses, thrown off. “So what does that make you, little Jeon?”

“I don’t know.”

“I still can’t take you across,” Jin repeats.

“I don’t get what’s stopping you,” Jeongguk bursts out, hearing his own voice go childish. His sweater is too tight.

The torch next to Jin flames higher for a moment. “More than you realize.” Then he glances up, a shade amused. “And one angel in particular who watches me a bit more often than necessary. I might even say excessively.” He gives Jeongguk a look, then, like what he’s about to say matters, and Jeongguk can see it again, that he's relenting. “You’re free to go where you will here, but I can’t ferry you back. This is my post, and I can’t abandon it.”

Jeongguk shifts on his feet, tries to work out what Jin’s telling him. He pushes anxiously at the piece of paper in his pocket. “Can I ferry me back?”

Jin smiles beautifully. “No.”

The water laps at the pebbly shore. “Can I…can I swim?”

Jin’s eyes flash red, almost in a warm way, and he says, “No matter what happens, I can’t leave my post.”

Jeongguk grins in relief, starts to toe off his shoes. “Got it.”

“As everyone knows, I take my responsibility to maintain the cosmic borders between life and death very seriously,” His voice is light again. “It’s just one of those things about me. Some may say I care too much for my own good. But I’m no hero. It’s a small sacrifice, really, to devote myself entirely to the service of the dead, and never at all daydream about pillaging Florence again.”

Jeongguk sets his shoes and socks aside on the pebbles, and then they disappear. He walks forward carefully, smooth rocks pressing into his feet. He grasps briefly at the side of the boat so he won’t slip.

“You know what the Styx is, right?” Jin asks, and for the first time he sounds worried. Jeongguk nods as he edges a foot into the river. “It’s regret.”

“I know.”

The water is chilly. Jeongguk closes his eyes, and when he opens them again he’s wearing a t-shirt and striped red swim trunks, just like he’d worn on one sticky summer day, hurrying barefoot down the hotel steps with his sister laughing at him because he just wanted to get to the beach, didn’t want to wait for anyone. He probably had more swim trunks than these, different colors, but he doesn’t remember them. He takes another few steps, feels Jin’s eyes on him. The water is nothing like the Haeundae surf. It’s leaden and cold, and by the time he’s in up to his knees, there are already hands bobbing toward him under the surface.

“Remember that everything you see in the river is something that’s already gone,” Jin says behind him.

Jeongguk glances back over his shoulder. “Ok.” He startles a little as the hands start to grasp at him. Some of them feel hard and skeletal, but others are like seaweed, or like a body that’s already bloated and rotten to the core, about to burst apart.

“Don’t stop swimming,” Jin adds.

Jeongguk nods. “Ok.” He wades in deeper.

Almost as soon as he gets in over his shoulders, a hand bobs in to grasp at his throat. Jeongguk gasps and yanks it off, but then another one comes, and then another—a whole line of them tightening on his arm. He starts to panic, and then there’s a bubbling heat under the water—the hands all let go and scatter away under the surface, even the ones attached peacefully to his ankles. He calms down slowly, waits for them to come back, but they don’t. He swivels around in the water to thank Jin, but he already can’t see the shore anymore, can’t even spot the ferry torch. There’s nothing else to do except to check on the paper in his pocket one last time, push off from the rocky ground and start swimming.

Swimming through the placid water is the easy part. The dead hands avoid him, and Jeongguk likes a challenge like this, likes pushing and pushing until he makes it through. The hard part is when the memories start. It’s a vivid train of them, full and bright, and it’s a sweet kind of agony because he hasn’t seen his own life so clearly in such a long time. There are all kinds of details that he’s forgotten, the things that made everything real. He’s always been able to remember eating out on the boardwalk with his family, sticking his fingers through the holes in the metal outdoor table and his sister telling him that they’d get stuck that way, and they’d have to cut his fingers off so he could get free. But he’d forgotten the prickly sunburn on the back of his neck, the greasy fried crab in a paper basket, his mom laughing and saying, “Don’t tell him that! Don’t cry, honey—you’re fine! See? Your fingers are fine.” He’d remembered his friends from school and track, and the cousins he’d liked best, but he’d forgotten their voices, their little habits, the jokes they found funny.

He kicks a little slower and tries to take it all in, even though he knows it’s only torture, knows he won’t ever get anything back, will never have anything like it again—finally getting his dad to play video games with him, and then worrying that he’d get in trouble when he died on a hard level and cursed at the screen; eating so much spicy chicken at his friend’s birthday party that his stomach hurt, and he couldn’t play soccer afterwards; taking really long showers after track practice and then raiding the fridge before even combing his hair out. It’s all already gone, he reminds himself. It’s gone.

At some point, he feels like his whole body is going numb from overexertion, and he’s worried that he’s going to stop swimming and not even know it. Maybe the faint view of the rocky shore ahead is a mirage, maybe there’s no reaching it. Maybe getting swallowed whole by the Styx isn’t such a terrible fate, if he gets to relive everything this way. He knows where the hands come from—he’d seen a passenger lurch out of the boat and throw themselves in, when he’d first crossed over.

But then another kind of regret occurs to him: the regret of never getting to Taehyung, of not being able to help him, and suddenly it’s like the river latches onto that regret and makes it more and more powerful. Your friend is sick, the river says, he’s sick, and you’ll never get there; you’ll sink here and never get there. Jeongguk kicks harder. And maybe this is the one thing he has, the sliver of difference between Jeongguk and every other dead person who’s tried to cross this way. Jeongguk has regrets that aren’t about his old life, regrets that give him the energy to push harder, to keep going. He isn’t going to let Taehyung and Jimin down.

When he first kicks a rocky outcropping, he doesn’t actually believe it, thinks he must be touching some kind of skeleton, and he’s actually brushing the ground with his stomach before he realizes that he doesn’t have to swim anymore. He scrabbles up on all fours and dry heaves in the shallows. He made it.

Jeongguk washes up in the middle of an empty office building. He presses his hand on the carpet to test it, feels that he can push through but also that he doesn’t have to. There’s something glaringly different, and it takes him a moment to realize that there’s a sound like endless static that’s been buzzing, nearly constantly, for years, and it’s gone now, just like it was on the solstice night. He stands up and checks his pocket compulsively—the paper’s still there—and he can’t seem to manifest different clothes, so he just walks through the office walls this way and goes dripping down the street.

It’s so clear here among the living, no phantoms curling around the streetlights, and the snowy sidewalk hurts his bare feet. People keep looking at him, so he tries to take side streets and walk through buildings when he can. He knows the only way he was able to swim all the way across the river is because he’s just a shade of a person, an imitation of who he once was, but he still feels exhausted, his legs throbbing the way they used to when he came down from a runner’s high. He still has a long way to go tonight.

The used bookstore looks sparse without the wispy fog that Jeongguk had seen here before. It’s almost entirely dark on the stairs, and then he walks through a heavy door into an apartment he’s never seen before. He pauses and tries to see what he can in the low, flickering light. Across the room, obscured by a dining room table, a brown-haired man is sitting on the couch with the television light reflecting off of his glasses. The sound of whatever show he’s watching is low. Jeongguk steps cautiously, cautiously through the dining room table, because he may be able to phase through things, but he’s not invisible right now. A little trail of water slides down the back of his leg, and he realizes that it’s getting on the carpet. He cranes his neck to look back at his own dark footprints and bumps into a chair—it makes a brief scraping sound. The man watching tv looks up, suddenly alert, and Jeongguk freezes.

“Hyunah?” the man who must be Taehyung’s father asks softly. He’s looking in Jeongguk’s direction, but not quite at him, and Jeongguk edges around the chair as stealthily as he can, leaves a wet hand mark on the wood. “Hyunah, I can hear you. I miss you. I miss you so much.” It’s Taehyung’s mom’s name, Jeongguk remembers then. Taehyung doesn’t talk about her much, because she’d died when he was born. Jeongguk steps carefully toward what looks like a closed bedroom door, and the floor creaks. “Don’t leave,” Taehyung’s dad says urgently. “I’d trade anything.”

For some reason Jeongguk feels it more strongly then, the need to get Taehyung out, away from this claustrophobic apartment. He almost, almost opens his mouth to say something—Taehyung’s still here; how come she’s the only thing you want when he’s still here—but he resists the urge and walks deliberately through the wall and into a very small bedroom. Taehyung is curled up tight, sheets all tangled around his legs, and Jeongguk feels a shiver of worry and relief all in one. He climbs into the bed with him, still scattering water somehow, and Taehyung’s skin is hot, too hot; there’s sweat on his forehead, and when he blinks his eyes open his gaze is glassy and vague.

“Guk?”

“Yeah. It’s me.” Jeongguk sits back against the headboard and gathers Taehyung into his lap as best he can. Touching him feels like a dull buzzing instead of an electric spark.

“Guk,” Taehyung murmurs into his neck.

When Jeongguk feels like Taehyung is secure against him, he fishes out the strip of paper that Yoongi had given him. It unwinds from his pocket, magically still dry. “We’re going to cross over, ok?” Jeongguk whispers. “There’s someone who can figure out what’s wrong—why you’re sick.” Taehyung nods, and the buzz against Jeongguk’s skin is so, so feeble. “I think it’s my fault,” he confesses shakily.

He takes one end of the paper between his teeth, pulls it taut with his hand, and tears it in half. They both disappear entirely from the living world.

Jeongguk’s heard about the witch. It’s one of the first rumors you hear, when you linger in purgatory: look out for the witch. He’s done evil things in life, hundreds of years of crime all piled on one soul, and now he wants to live forever. But the rumors had always come with the conviction that the witch’s knowledge was vast, and that in the afterlife he’d kept adding to it. He’s made a real library somehow, a bat-like shadow told Jeongguk once as it hung from the edge of a building—a library here, where nothing like that should be possible; a trove of books about the arcane arts.

It was tempting sometimes to imagine finding the ancient witch, seeing what he was like and asking him questions about the way things were here—if it was ever possible to live again, if crossing the Lethe was really what they said it was—but Jeongguk never thought he’d actually meet him. But he’d talked to Yoongi right after he’d visited Jimin, and later Yoongi had come back and said: we can figure out why he’s sick. We can help. Yoongi was still frighteningly hollow-eyed, but Jeongguk knew the honesty in his tone, knew that Yoongi cared about him.

“The problem is that it isn’t just a physical illness. That’s only what brought it on. It’s treatable, but they won’t be able to do it on his side.”

“What do you mean?” Jeongguk asked. “How do you know?”

Yoongi had said that he knew someone who he was sure could help, someone with the knowledge of millennia, and when Jeongguk had asked who, Yoongi had said: “Do you know why I can turn into a cat?”

“No.”

“Because I’m the witch’s familiar.”

And the thing is that Yoongi was right about Jeongguk being able to step through the veil on the winter solstice, gave him a piece of paper that made it possible. And he’d taught Jeongguk how to better control his own form, how to hold onto things when he wanted and slide through them when he didn’t. Jeongguk trusts him. So, on a cold night with static buzzing in his ears, Jeongguk crouches on the sidewalk and adjusts Taehyung in his arms until he’s secure, heart hurting when Taehyung sleepily wraps his arms around his neck. He hoists him up and carries him down the twisting alleys where Yoongi had told him to go, down to the witch’s house.

It’s impossible to tell how big the house is. There are multiple alleyways here that converge, and the house juts at impossible angles between them, and there’s ivy everywhere, crawling up the brick walls and over the eaves. Most of the plants are densely covered in purple leaves, but long, naked tendrils hang down over the doors and windows. One of them brushes against Jeongguk’s head as he knocks on the door. Yoongi opens it soon after, relief flickering across his face.

“You made it across. How?”

“I swam.”

Yoongi actually looks surprised. “You swam?”

“He’s really sick, Yoongi.” Jeongguk’s voice cracks.

“It’s ok—we’ll figure it out. Bring him in.”

Jeongguk takes a moment to hoist Taehyung up again once he’s through the door, his arms burning, and Yoongi leads him through a claustrophobic maze of bookshelves that reminds Jeongguk of the used bookstore. There are plants here too, though. Most of them seem to originate in their own small glass jar, but they wind around far from their roots, impossibly long, lay heavily on the shelves and curl around the spines of books like they’re claiming them. Past a wall of what looks like ornamental daggers, the house opens up into a large circular room. There are more bookshelves in here too, but there’s also a tall case of glass bottles, a desk covered in piles of paper, what looks like a fairly normal small kitchen except that a large monstera plant is growing out of the sink.

“You can set him down,” Yoongi says, tugging a low couch away from the wall and toward the middle of the room. Jeongguk sits on the edge and eases Taehyung down, finds a throw pillow for him, and Taehyung stretches out and settles.

“You good, Tae?”

“M’tired,” Taehyung mutters, his eyebrows tight. “Head hurts.”

“You can sleep. Just sleep, ok?”

“How come you’re wet?”

“Is that them?” a voice calls.

“Yeah. They’re here,” Yoongi answers.

Jeongguk looks up to see a dark purple shape step out of the hallway and resolve into a long-limbed, youthful-looking man. He crosses over to where the broad-leaved plant is climbing out of the sink, his hanbok rustling quietly, and sets down a mug, produces another one from a cabinet and fills it with water. He taps the side of the mug, and the water steams. “You have a preference, sweetheart?”

“Whatever you made for yourself,” Yoongi says shortly.

The man closes his hand into a fist, and when he opens it again a teabag dangles from his fingers. He steeps it and fixes Jeongguk with the most disarming smile he’s ever seen. “It’s nice to finally meet you, Jeongguk. Black tea? Coffee? I’m afraid we don’t like herbal, so we usually don’t have any.”

“Um. To drink?”

“If you make it strong enough, you can almost taste it.”

Jeongguk considers this. “No thank you.”

The man seems nonplussed, carries both mugs to the desk and sets them down to pick through a small pile of books. Yoongi drifts closer to him and seems to help him find the book he’s looking for, and the man nudges the steaming mug across the table in Yoongi’s direction. “I hear it was a physical sickness first?” he asks, glancing up as though he’s making sure Jeongguk’s following. “Something with his body?” He picks up a thin book and flips through it while Yoongi drinks his tea.

“Yeah,” Jeongguk says, feeling slightly relieved. “His head and throat hurt first, I think.”

The man looks dissatisfied with the book he’s reading, sets it down and crosses to examine a large, curved bookshelf set against the wall. His hair reminds Jeongguk of Jin’s, silken black and tied up in a high ponytail that reaches down his back. “Was it only in the living world, or did he feel it here too?”

“Both.”

“I see.”

“Are you the witch?” Jeongguk asks.

The man looks over his shoulder and gives Jeongguk another Cheshire Cat smile. “I am. I also go by Hobi.”

Jeongguk wonders if calling someone a witch is rude. “Oh. Sorry.”

“It’s quite alright.” Hobi taps a book spine with a purple fingernail, and the book slides off the shelf and into his hands. “Here we go. Now Jeonggukie.” He goes back to the desk and lays the book flat on it. “I can call you Jeonggukie, right?”

“Uh. Sure.”

The witch flips a few pages. “You usually feel stronger after you and your friend touch, right?”

“Me and Taehyung?”

“Yes.”

Jeongguk hadn’t quite thought of it that way, but he knows that it’s true. “I guess I do, yeah.”

Hobi hums in interest. “How long have you been dead?”

“I don’t know. A few years.”

“It’s mutual, Hobi,” Yoongi says over the edge of his mug. Jeongguk doesn’t know if he’s imagining it, but Yoongi seems a little less faded after drinking the tea, a tiny bit stronger. “It’s not just a life siphon.”

“I know, sweetheart. You’re rarely wrong about these things.” Hobi says it distractedly, still flipping through the book, and Yoongi looks quietly pleased. “Would you say, Jeonggukie, that you and your friend might have touched more than normal lately?”

Jeongguk’s cheeks go hot. “Yeah. Um. A bit more than normal.” It occurs to him that he probably shouldn’t lie about this. “A lot more than normal,” he amends.

“So if he was already weak,” Yoongi muses, and the witch shuts the book abruptly.

“Exactly. Easy to see, really.” Hobi looks a little disappointed, like he would’ve preferred a more complex problem. “When his energy changed, Jeonggukie became a parasite.”

“I did what?”

“You drained his life,” Hobi says sweetly, and Jeongguk’s eyes widen. “Accidentally, I’m sure.”

“It was my fault,” Jeongguk says faintly. Every time he’d touched Taehyung, every time he’d kissed him—he was hurting him. He looks down at his hands, hot with shame.

“Now, the physical illness will be child’s play,” Hobi continues lightly. “Yoongi, you know that book on the Black Plague? The one you found the other day?”

Yoongi sets down his tea and steps toward the hallway, but then he hesitates for some reason. “Hobi—” he starts.

“Get me that book, sweetheart. Now.” The witch’s tone is commanding, and Yoongi immediately leaves the room. Jeongguk blinks in surprise. “Take your time, of course,” Hobi lilts after him. His eyes are purple for a moment and then resolve back to brown. And Jeongguk knows something is off—the expression Yoongi had made as he left, the way he’d scuffed his feet like he didn’t want to go—but Jeongguk is also exhausted, and he’s really trying to be brave, and he just wants Taehyung to get better. “Like I was saying, I can do bodily illness easily. It’s the spiritual weakness that’ll be interesting. There’s a reason draining life from someone is a crime.”

Guilt washes over Jeongguk again. The undertow of the Styx. Regret. “Can you fix it?” he asks.

“Of course I can. The only question is—” Hobi rests his hands on the desk and leans forward, like he’s about to ask Jeongguk something very important. “What are you willing to give up to save him?”

“Everything,” Jeongguk says.

Taehyung feels good. He doesn’t know where he is—there are murmuring voices, a buzzing in his ears, but he’d woken up feeling like things were getting clear again, starting to make sense. He realizes that his head isn’t hurting anymore, and his limbs don’t ache, like maybe he isn’t sick at all. It’s nice. Someone’s taking his wrists, one and then the other, and wrapping something around them that feels like a hospital bracelet, and that’s not good—not good—he starts to pull against it, and then something taps his forehead, and things go dark.

When he wakes up again, it’s to the feeling of a knife in his wrist. He jolts up, vision blurry, and tries to twist his arm away from the sensation, but it’s still there—blinding pain—and his own voice is loud in his ears. He’s wrong—it’s not just one knife—it’s daggers all over his skin. He blinks rapidly against involuntary tears, squints at his right wrist and expects to see something gruesome, but it’s just a thin piece of paper curled around him, words twisting over it in black ink.

“Don’t move,” a voice hisses unkindly, and Taehyung twists again with pain, lets out a compulsive sob. “I said don’t—"

There’s a dark red flash somewhere in Taehyung’s periphery. “Paper magic. Pathetic,” a voice says, and then there’s another flash directly on Taehyung’s wrist. A small fire consumes the paper, and Taehyung gasps, but then the pain is gone. He collapses back, pulls his right wrist in protectively, but for some reason he can’t move his left arm. There are banging noises, red and purple flashes, the sounds of a fight.

“Yoongi, come here.”

“I don’t want it,” Yoongi says harshly.

“Yoongi, come here now.”

Taehyung hears Yoongi let out a rattling gasp, the same sound Jeongguk had made when Taehyung first touched him.

“I see you’re generous with the leftovers now.”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I know exactly what I’m talking about. The same crime over and over for thousands of years—don’t you get bored of yourself?”

“As if you haven’t indulged? He has your scorch marks all over him.”

“Tu quoque. Creative.”

There’s a clinking sound, like metal, and one of the voices laughs, brash. “You’re at the end of your leash, Seokjinnie.” The room flashes hot, then bright purple. “Remember when you were my little guard dog? Does the river tell you every time? Over and over?”

“I remember burning your heart out.”

The fighting continues, and Taehyung rolls over to the edge of the soft thing he’s on and vomits on the floor.

The next thing he’s aware of is Yoongi’s voice, demanding: “Let me help. Order it. Order me to help.”

“I don’t want you to get hurt, sweetheart.”

“Order it, Hobi.”

There’s the roar of fire, blistering heat, and Taehyung gasps for air.

“Fine, fine! Help me!”

Taehyung thinks he’s never going to be able to breathe again, and then all of a sudden the room is cool and quiet, just the sounds of heavy breathing. The pain starts to ebb, and Taehyung sits halfway up, narrows his eyes to see an unfamiliar house in tatters around him, ash in the air and charred books strewn everywhere. Yoongi is standing next to a blackened bookshelf with his hand around a man’s throat.

“Damn it, sweetheart,” the man says.

“I’m helping you,” Yoongi says. “You know I am.”

For a moment, the man’s expression softens. “I know. You always are.”

“He’s still yours, witch—your only heart. But you just can’t stop.” The voice is unmistakably the ferryman’s—Taehyung looks blurrily over to see him crunching toward the bookcase over shattered glass, his hair wild and robe torn. His cheek is bleeding, but his lips are redder. There’s a clanking sound as he walks, but Taehyung can’t figure out from where.

The man that Jin had called the witch snarls. “A hundred years of good behavior lost, just like that.” He tuts with Yoongi’s hand still on his throat. “You think dear Joonie will be happy with this?”

Jin flicks his wrist, and fire flashes on the bookshelf just next to the witch’s head—a few charred books topple to the ground, and the witch hisses in anger. Jin’s arm is yanked back and held taut as if by some invisible force.

“I’ll stop by the Gates of Dis to wave at you in the lowest circle of hell.”

Jin grinds his foot against a piece of glass, his arm still held by something Taehyung can’t see. “I’m not going to burn your heart out again. But you should remember that I want to. You should remember that it’s your fault if you lose him again.”

The witch curls his lip. “You really think I did this for me?”

Jin doesn’t answer, and it’s the first time Taehyung’s ever seen him look surprised.

“The angel’s coming, Hobi,” Yoongi says.

“I know, sweetheart,” the witch—Hobi—answers.

There’s silence for a moment, and Taehyung watches through a haze of pain as a new figure appears next to Yoongi with a gentle ebb of light. He looks like some kind of royalty—ornate blue gwanbok and a kind of youthful, serene handsomeness. His brown hair is a little wavy, seems light on his shoulders unlike Jin or the witch’s heavy dark hair.

“Namjoon, your ferryman is out of line,” Hobi says, honeylike. “Look at what he’s done.”

The royal figure holds up a hand like he’s still taking everything in. His expression changes when he sees the ferryman, and Jin steps back, almost self-conscious, so that his arm can fall to his side with another clink of invisible metal.

“Hold still,” the angel says seriously. He makes a motion with his hand, and for a moment Taehyung sees the chains—thick and heavy, crossed across Jin’s body and reaching beyond Taehyung’s line of sight—the one holding Jin’s wrist shivers violently and snaps, and the sound travels and travels, an endless dull ring. Taehyung blinks, and he can’t see them anymore.

“The archangel won’t thank you for that,” Jin says quietly, rubbing his wrist.

Namjoon looks distracted, leans down to pick up one of the books that’s splayed out messily on the floor. Part of the book cracks off and hits the floor with a puff of ash. “The library,” he says, almost sadly.

“About that,” Hobi bites out sweetly from behind him, still pinned to the bookshelf by Yoongi. “Your pet demon here abandoned his post to settle a grudge match. A bit of a lapse, don’t you think?” There’s the smell of smoke, and Namjoon ignores the witch, looks at the ferryman like he’s trying to calm him.

“Seokjin. I know.” He holds Jin’s gaze, intent. “Take care of that group on the shore. I’ll be back when the crossing is done.”

Jin looks surprised, and then his lips pull back like maybe he loves Namjoon, or maybe he wants to eat him alive. “Yes, daddy,” he says before he disappears.

Namjoon coughs, looks a little embarrassed.

“The favoritism here is getting worse and worse,” Hobi says, his voice souring. “How long have you two been fu—" Namjoon flicks his wrist, and Hobi’s mouth clamps shut; his eyes flash purple with fury.

“Help the kids first,” Yoongi says urgently, his hand still on Hobi’s throat. “Please,” he adds, a little unwilling. Namjoon raises his eyebrows. “Just give me some time. If he doesn’t have the voice to give me an order, I can hold him here—he won’t—”

“Alright, Yoongi,” Namjoon says gently.

“I know it looks bad, but he wouldn’t go too far. He knows I care about Jeongguk.”

It’s like the name pulls Taehyung out of a trance, reminds him of something—Jeongguk gathering him in his arms, all wet, Taehyung’s whole bed wet. He pushes up on his elbow, registers the humming feeling of being with the dead and a sharp, residual stinging in his right wrist. When he twists around to see Jeongguk slumped back on the couch behind him it’s with a deep, deadened pain, like he can’t actually take it in. Jeongguk’s forearm is attached to Taehyung’s left wrist with a strip of paper that curls around them in a figure eight, just like the one Jin had burned away. But this one doesn’t hurt, not even a little bit.

“Guk,” Taehyung chokes out. “Guk.” Jeongguk is wearing a frayed red sweater that Taehyung hasn’t seen in a long time, the sleeves too short for him now. The scar on his cheek is a fresh wound.

A spark flashes near Taehyung’s left wrist, and the paper binding them burns away in a yellow light. Jeongguk stirs, and Namjoon appears next to him, reaches out gently to put a palm on his forehead. He waits there for a moment, body inclined toward Jeongguk like he’s listening.

“You have to help him—you have to—"

“He’s ok, Taehyung. He’s fine,” Namjoon says. He touches Jeongguk’s cheek with two fingers, and the wound closes. “He’ll be awake soon.”

“You're sure? Is he hurting?”

“No. You took the brunt of it.” Namjoon smiles faintly. “He kept you alive.” He kneels on the ground next to Taehyung then, shakes his sleeve away from his hand and hovers it over Taehyung’s throbbing wrist. “May I?”

“Oh. Uh. Ok,” Taehyung says, maybe just because he’s a little overwhelmed by this man’s god-prince vibe. Namjoon closes his hand around Taehyung’s wrist. Taehyung hisses on instinct, but the pain lessens instantly—not like it’s been magically healed, but like Taehyung can bear it now.

“Is that better?”

“I threw up there,” Taehyung replies fuzzily. “You’re in my throw-up.”

Namjoon looks taken aback, scoots back to look at his knees. “Ah. I see.” He drags two fingers through the air, and the vomit disappears, but there’s still a dark blue stain on his gwanbok. “Well.”

“Can I have some water?”

Namjoon raises his eyebrows. “Some water?”

“For the throw-up taste,” Taehyung says. “You know, when you throw up, and there’s that taste?”

“I'm afraid I don’t.”

“Can you get me some water?” Taehyung repeats with the unthinking conviction that when you’re sick, adults should bring you things.

Namjoon looks a little sheepish, or maybe just human, faint dimples showing as he gets up. “Alright.” Taehyung pushes against the couch to sit up properly, realizes that Yoongi’s been murmuring to the witch, indistinct but heavy with emotion. It’s still like a physical pain to see Jeongguk there, even if he’s not bleeding anymore. Taehyung takes his hand on instinct, and the spark of his skin is instant, strong. That’s what convinces him, more than anything else.

“You’re sure Guk’s ok?” Taehyung asks when Namjoon brings him a chipped mug. “I don’t even know—” He takes a long drink and swishes the water in his mouth, realizes right then that it tastes too sour to swallow. He makes a desperate little sound of warning right before he has to spit it out on the ground. “Sorry," he croaks. "Tastes bad.”

“That’s alright,” Namjoon says, but he’s starting to look a little flummoxed. He gestures for the water to disappear, and it leaves behind another stain on his ornate gwanbok.

“I don’t even know what’s going on,” Taehyung says. He takes another gulp of water, and this time it tastes ok. “I had a fever—I was in my room—"

The angel kneels by the couch again, looks at Taehyung levelly. “Jeongguk brought you here because he wanted to help you. I think he could explain better than I could, when he wakes up.”

Taehyung squeezes Jeongguk’s hand, feels another spark bite his palm. “When’s he gonna wake up?"

“Soon. I need to clear something up, and then I think the three of us should stop by the Styx. Jeongguk has a decision to make. Do you mind?”

“What decision?” Taehyung asks.

“I can explain it better at the river. May I?” Namjoon sounds less like he’s asking now, more like he’s telling him what needs to happen. Taehyung nods because, again, it kind of seems like heaven’s great heir or whatever has things under control.

“He’s been doing well for two hundred years, Namjoon,” Yoongi says, and Namjoon looks back at him over his shoulder. “I’m the one who thought he could handle the temptation. I was wrong.” Taehyung realizes then that Yoongi looks healthy again, or maybe healthier than he’s ever seen him look before, purple hollows in his face gone and all his edges distinct, hair all different shades of blonde instead of one pale streak.

“You don’t need to take responsibility for that,” Namjoon says.

“It’s not like before—he wasn’t going to kill anyone. He just wants me to live.”

“I know.”

“We’re not welcome across the Lethe. And I know—I know there has to be an end to everything,” Yoongi says, and his voice breaks a little, but he’s still looking at the witch. “But it’s hard to accept when you know there’s nothing else for us both. Nothing. I don’t want him to become nothing.”

Hobi’s eyes flash a softer purple, like he’s telling Yoongi it’s ok.

“Yoongi,” Namjoon says, and when Yoongi finally looks over, there’s a smile in the corner of Namjoon’s mouth. “I’m not going to kill him. All I did was reverse your contract. He still has the knowledge, but you have control now. He’s your familiar—you’re the one holding him in check.”

Yoongi’s eyes widen in surprise, and he lowers his hand slowly from Hobi’s neck.

“—ucking,” the witch exhales, and Yoongi looks deeply relieved. Hobi throws his long hair back over his shoulder and rubs his own neck, wincing. “Nonverbal commands already, sweetheart? Impressive.”

Yoongi actually barks out a laugh. “The mouth on you. You’d be utterly fucked if it weren’t for me.”

“I know.” The witch grabs Yoongi roughly by the back of the neck and kisses him. “You think it’ll even things out if I serve you for a few thousand years?”

“Maybe,” Yoongi says softly.

“I’ll be very good.”

Namjoon clears his throat.

“You would’ve hated this before,” Yoongi says, and it’s like Hobi’s grin is throbbing purple. “You hate giving up control.”

“I imagine that’s why you’re the one who should have it. Anyway, it gets boring being the dom for a millennia.”

“Fuck, Hobi.”

Hobi laughs, and it’s a strangely bright sound in the ruined house. “What?”

“I need—right now.”

“Yeah. Now.”

“Well then,” Namjoon says awkwardly. “I’ll just give you some time to work things out.”

Jeongguk’s thumb moves against Taehyung’s hand; he shifts next to him like he’s waking up, and then everything around them changes.

The river is calm tonight, lapping gently at the boat, and all the thousands upon thousands of dead hands reach toward the surface like they’re asking plaintively, like they just want to gently pull you under. There really shouldn’t be enough room on the boat for all four of them, but it’s somehow just large enough to let Taehyung sit next to Jeongguk on the wood plank. Taehyung looks down at the familiar sight of his bare feet on the boat floor while they talk, and it’s relieving to learn what happened, why he isn’t sick anymore, but he can’t shake the feeling that whatever Namjoon is going to ask Jeongguk to decide is going to be final, and he’s going to make it sound all nice and pleasant and inevitable, like the circle of life or whatever, and then Jeongguk is going to leave forever.

They’d both been a little frantic when they’d arrived at the pebbly shore, both of them wanting to make sure the other one was ok, and when Taehyung had surged in to hug Jeongguk with his whole body, Jeongguk had pushed him back and said, “Stop, stop—don’t touch me. I made you sick.”

“No you didn’t,” Taehyung insisted. “I had strep throat.”

Jin’s the one who explained it, perched on the side of the boat—how it had been the combination of Taehyung’s physical illness and what he would guess was a sudden, unusual amount of skin-to-skin energy transfer. Jeongguk goes silent, looks deeply mortified. Taehyung feels a bit that way too, but seeing Jeongguk upset makes him stubborn, and eventually he interrupts to say: “I guess it’s pretty embarrassing that Guk almost kissed me to death.” Jeongguk lets out a small laugh while he looks down at his lap, and Namjoon clears his throat. “Did Yoongi get my energy?” Taehyung adds, and Jin visibly bristles.

“Yes. I think there was a burst—I’m not sure how to describe it,” Namjoon says. “Once you were healthy again, reconnecting the energy chain that you and Jeongguk have—it would’ve given off sparks. Hobi likely anticipated that.”

“Hobi would’ve sucked Taehyung dry no matter the circumstances,” Jin bites out. “They were both in danger every second they were under that roof.”

“Yoongi tried to warn me,” Taehyung remembers.

“I’m sorry,” Jeongguk lets out, and Taehyung realizes that he’s curling in over his own lap, face crumpling. “I should’ve realized—”

“It’s ok, Guk. Guk—”

Jeongguk pushes feebly at him. “You shouldn’t touch me.”

“I feel fine now, Guk. I’m good.”

Taehyung stubbornly keeps hugging him while they talk him through it. Namjoon’s theory is that it’s about moderation, or everything in the universe is about moderation—Taehyung doesn’t really follow it—and Jin says that they should just cool it when Taehyung’s sick. It’s simultaneously deeply comforting and also feels like talking to your friend’s parents about safe sex or something.

“I just thought…maybe the witch could do things no one else could,” Jeongguk is saying.

“You should’ve asked me, little Jeon,” the ferryman says. “I would’ve told you what he wanted.” His hair looks pristine again, and there are just the faintest marks from where he’d been bleeding. He and Namjoon both look oddly at ease on their opposite edges of the boat, even though there’s no way sitting there is comfortable, and Taehyung wants to ask the angel-prince: how come you have all this magic but you can’t get a better boat? Why can’t the ferry to the afterlife be a yacht?

“I guess. It’s just…I know there’s rules. For life and death. And I’m pretty sure you can’t break them.”

“Rude,” Jin says, and Jeongguk looks a little taken aback.

“You have to pretend he’s badass,” Taehyung advises Jeongguk. “It makes him feel better.”

“No one respects a demon anymore, hmm?” Jin snaps, eyes flashing fire.

“It might help to think of it as just what’s possible. Instead of as rules,” Namjoon says soothingly. The metal torch next to him is glowing yellow tonight instead of red. “We can’t give you what was lost, as much as we might want to. We can’t create new life without sacrificing something.”

“I know,” Jeongguk says, trying to pull his too-short sweater sleeve down over his wrist.

“Jeongguk,” Namjoon says, and there’s something in his tone that makes Taehyung tense up. “The stronger you get, the more you must know that things can’t stay like this. You need to decide if you’re ready to cross the Lethe.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“What’s the Lethe?” Taehyung asks defensively.

“The other river. Death takes away everything, and we can’t change that, but the Lethe erases your pain, gives you a fresh start.”

“Don’t mince words, Joon,” the demon says sharply.

Namjoon looks across the boat at him. “How would you describe it?” he asks, as if he really wants to know.

“You can’t erase pain without erasing the memories that cause pain.”

“Those two are often intertwined, yes.”

“So the Styx is regret, holding onto that pain, and the Lethe is forgetting. You can recognize people once you cross, but there’s no memory that binds you together.”

“Only if those memories are painful. You keep everything you’ve learned—the things you hold true.”

“Sounds exciting,” Jin says caustically, and Taehyung decides that maybe he likes Jin.

“It’s a chance to start over without being defined by your mistakes,” Namjoon says. “On equal ground—without illness, wealth disparity, hunger, without the kinds of hatreds that people hold onto without even knowing.” Jeongguk is watching him while he talks, trusting, and Taehyung thinks that they’re here already—the circle of life speech. “There are always some spirits who choose to stay here, or some who take longer because they’re angry or confused, but most spirits cross the Lethe in the end.” The worst thing is that Taehyung gets it. Jeongguk has no family here, no goals to achieve, no afterschool choir practice or Chuseok dinner or pet dog. He lives in a wasteland, an in-between world of desperate ghosts, and maybe the only reason he’s been able to stay himself at all is because it’s only been a few years, but eventually this will break him, grind him down, and he’ll have missed his chance for something better. “No one is ever compelled to cross,” Namjoon says. “But I do want you to understand, Jeongguk, that this existence can never be life. But going beyond it can be.”

“I get it,” Jeongguk says, and Taehyung tries to be very quiet, to not rustle around or draw attention to himself or say ‘screw this. Screw you and your stupid wisdom.’ Jin makes a sound of disapproval, as if he’s on the same wavelength, and Namjoon turns to him expectantly.

“Yes?”

“I said nothing.”

“You were going to say I’m being uncreative again,” Namjoon suggests.

“Imagine—” Jin breaks out, his tone acidic. “Imagine the time I’ve spent with screaming, babbling humans, hearing the same lamentations over and over until I think I might fly off and raise a vampire army for old time’s sake, and then imagine thinking, ‘you know, I wouldn’t mind another boatload,’ because at least what they have to say is more interesting than you.”

Namjoon regards him seriously, like he’s more intrigued than offended. “What other choice is there? If we tried to give him his life back in the physical world, it would be a façade. A trick. You know that.”

“So don’t. That’s not what he’s asking for.”

“No?”

“Just give him safe passage between worlds. A body to inhabit when he’s there. The mirror of what the spirit eater has.”

Namjoon actually taps his mouth with his finger while he thinks. “Not exactly a mirror. More like mutual feedback. Symbiosis.”

“Growth without stealing.”

“Isn’t all growth stealing?”

“Maybe.” Jin draws an infinity symbol in the air, and the flames that follow his finger are a mix of red and gold this time. “Maybe some growth is allowable stealing.” Namjoon stares at the infinity sign for a moment, and then he nods.

“Do you understand your choices, little Jeon?” the demon asks.

“I think so,” Jeongguk says, and Taehyung’s hold on him tightens compulsively.

“You have to understand, Jeongguk, if you choose this, your mother, your sister—” Namjoon starts.

“I’m not going to forget them,” Jeongguk says. For a moment the scar on his cheek turns bloody again, and then the river around them dissolves.

When the world fades back in, it’s neon-soaked. And also cold—Taehyung shivers in a big puffy jacket, and he doesn’t even own a jacket like this, so this must not be real, even though it’s nighttime on a street he recognizes—line of small restaurants with bright colored tube lighting winding around the windows—and Jeongguk is standing there in a coat that Taehyung doesn’t recognize, looking at Taehyung like he doesn’t want to stop standing here, doesn’t want to stop looking at Taehyung like that.

“Is this—” Taehyung tries, his throat constricting, and Jeongguk puts a cold hand on his cheek, because neither of them are wearing gloves. “Is this some kind of supernatural goodbye thing?”

“No.”

Taehyung sniffs, rubs his nose. “I get it, if you need to—” He does big air quotes, because he’s tired of all the euphemisms but he doesn’t know how else to say it. “—'move on’ or whatever. I get it if you want a real life.”

Jeongguk’s tugging him closer now, a smile at the corner of his mouth, and he’s really stupidly handsome, is the thing, so much different from how he looked when Taehyung first saw him, but still himself somehow. It’s starting to snow, and a few flakes are clinging to his bangs. “Taehyung.”

“What?”

Jeongguk nudges him softly with his nose. “Ask me if I’m alive.”

Taehyung’s too sad to say why should I ask you that, and where the heck are we, and why aren’t you saying goodbye. “Are you alive?” he asks.

“Yes,” Jeongguk whispers and kisses him. Jeongguk’s mouth is warm and familiar, sparks every time he moves, and Taehyung makes kind of a pathetic little noise, takes his face and kisses him back. Jeongguk bundles him closer, arms around his puffy jacket, and it occurs to Taehyung how solid Jeongguk feels right now, right before the end. Taehyung accidentally clacks their teeth together, laughs a little, and then he has to pull back to cry.

“Taehyung—"

“I don’t want you to go,” Taehyung chokes out. “I get it, I really do, but I just don’t want it.” He steps back to rub his face with the back of his hand.

“I already chose, Tae. This is my choice.”

“I know if—if Jiminie died, or my grandparents, and they crossed over into fancy heaven, I’d want to go see them too, so I get if you want to go see your mom, and your sister—I bet your sister’s really freaking cool—I bet she drives above the speed limit and has a really good manga collection—”

“Tae.” Jeongguk looks a little sad, a little happy, and very sure. “Where do you think we are?”

“What?” Taehyung quavers, and then he looks around, vision still blurry, like maybe there’ll be a billboard that explains it or something.

“I’m here. Physically. In your world.”

“You’re what?” Taehyung steps back in shock and runs straight into someone.

“Oh! Sorry!” the woman says, laughing a little as she skirts Taehyung on the sidewalk. “My bad!”

“What?” Taehyung asks her as she gives a cheery little wave and walks away. It connects slowly in his mind that her shoes are making footprints in the snow, and so are his, and so are Jeongguk’s.

“I have safe passage, Taehyung. Like Jin said. It’s not like I get a normal life or anything, but I’m really here, and I can come back whenever.”

“There’s snow on you,” Taehyung says.

Jeongguk laughs a little and says, “Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I’m here,” and then he starts crying too.

Taehyung just kind of watches, the knowledge slowly unfolding in him that Jeongguk isn’t leaving, and then he gets distracted and tries to wipe at Jeongguk’s face with his sleeve. “You’ve got—come here. You’ve got snot.”

“Ew. Don’t use your jacket.”

“You’re a real boy, Guk. You’re a snotty boy.”

“I’m a what?”

“I don’t know. Guk, I really—"

Jeongguk secures him close again, and there’s a good deal more kissing in the middle of the night on the sidewalk. At some point Taehyung realizes that they’re actually kissing in public, and that’s weird, and then it’s like he has a million thoughts and questions, and he can’t stop his mind from running through them, and Jeongguk keeps having to tell him that they have time, that he isn’t about to leave, and he can come back tomorrow, and the day after that. Taehyung gets happy about that, and then caught up examining his coat, spinning around trying to see the whole thing. He’s wearing his own pajamas underneath, but he doesn’t recognize his shoes. He notices the faint scent of smoke, pulls the jacket up over his nose and breathes in a strong campfire smell.

“Do you think it’s from Jin?” he asks, and while Jeongguk is examining his own jacket he finds a wallet in one of the velcroed front pockets. They both huddle together near a restaurant window to look at the contents—a sizeable chunk of bills that look mostly real but slightly charred, a vial of what definitely seems like creepy old blood, an ID with Jeongguk’s information on it but with a home address that seems to shift slightly every time Taehyung reads it.

“I can finally tell Jimin your zodiac sign,” Taehyung murmurs while Jeongguk pulls out a small note that shifts between Hanja and Hangul. Don’t ask for more, little Jeon. It’s not good to be in debt to a demon. “I’ve decided I like Jin,” Taehyung declares aloud.

“Does Jimin live near here?” Jeongguk asks. “Can we go wake him up?”

“Definitely not.”

“Whoah. I just realized—”

“What?”

“Do you think I can eat?”

They end up at one of the hole-in-the-wall restaurants that’s still open, Taehyung sitting cross-legged in the booth laughing at Jeongguk while he inhales a bowl of noodles, and then another one, and then all the food and salt seems to hit Jeongguk at once, and he’s so tired that he sways on his feet when he’s at the front waiting to pay.

The past few hours have included Taehyung getting magically cured and magically drained of life, and Jeongguk being granted a way to live again by an angel and a demon, but the actual greatest miracle of the night might be the two of them, exhausted and clumsy and a lot heavier than they’re used to, sneaking into Taehyung’s apartment without waking up his dad. Jeongguk sleepily follows Taehyung into his tiny bathroom as if on autopilot, and Taehyung finds him an extra toothbrush in the medicine cabinet—Jeongguk blinks at it like it’s a remarkable object. The bedsheets are somehow still damp, so they spread out their new coats over each other to stay warm, and Jeongguk curls around Taehyung from behind and falls instantly asleep. Taehyung thinks he might be more tired than he’s ever been in his entire life, but for a little while he just lays there and feels the sparks chase themselves up his spine every time Jeongguk moves.

Toward morning, he hears the telltale sounds of his dad shuffling around the apartment, and he taps Jeongguk with a sleepy urgency and tells him he has to go. Jeongguk groans in complaint before he disappears, but his jacket is still there crumpled against Taehyung’s shoulder, and it smells faintly of campfire and kalguksu, and Taehyung knows that Jeongguk will be back.

The last thing Jeongguk remembers is Taehyung saying, “Are you alive?”

The first thing Jeongguk remembers is telling him yes.

A year later, Taehyung roams the hallway of a junior college and glances at the classroom numbers by each door. He pauses at one, peers briefly through the thin rectangular cutout in the door, and steps back with a small, secret smile. He waits against the wall while the voice of a lecturer rises and falls, until a restrained chatter starts up, and the door thuds open and closed. A few other doors open down the hall, but most of the other classrooms in this hallway are empty—it’s early evening.

Jeongguk is usually the last one out, staying behind to ask the professor a few questions, earnestly polite, and Taehyung texts Jimin while scattered voices echo down the lonely hallway. Jeongguk looks around when he finally comes out, red backpack slung over one shoulder, but he still seems surprised to see Taehyung there against the wall.

“Hey!”

Jeongguk grins immediately. “Hey.”

“You done being a model citizen yet?”

Jeongguk gives him a little shrug. “There’s a lot to catch up on.” He looks pretty happy about it.

Taehyung tugs on his backpack strap until he comes closer. “This thing tonight is gonna be cool, I think. Jimin said the art’s kind of like Gorey.” Taehyung considers it. “Or maybe he just said that to trick me into wanting to go.”

“He can be pretty sneaky.”

“He really can.”

The professor closes the classroom door, gives them a small wave, and they very politely wait to start making out until she’s a few classrooms away.

A few minutes later, Jimin’s voice bounces brightly through the empty hall. “Hey! You guys wanna cool it with the necrophilia so we can get there on time?”

“No!” Jeongguk calls, and Taehyung laughs at him, gives him a small kiss on the corner of his mouth, and then a real kiss for good measure.

“I thought maybe we could grab some food first, but I guess if we don’t have enough time…” Jimin starts meaningfully, and Jeongguk perks up instantly, squeezes Taehyung’s sides, and then he’s halfway down the hall in what surely must be record time.

"Seriously, Guk?" Taehyung protests.

“Wait—Jimin. Hey." Jeongguk bounces after Jimin, earnest. "What kind of food were you gonna get? Can we hurry?"

Jimin's voice is amused. "I don't know—you guys really took your time there."

"Can we still make it? Jimin, what kind?"

Taehyung rolls his eyes and jogs affectionately after them.