Chapter Text
The house was quite nice. Spacious, conveniently located, and if the style was outdated, it was elegant enough that only a little remodeling would be necessary. Really, the guy who’d sold it to him for a pittance was an absolute fool. The guy’d claimed he “couldn’t find a buyer,” but all that really meant was he was a poor salesman, so-called “ghost problem” or no. One look and Sakyo could tell he’d easily be able to quintuple his investment with only a little work, if he didn’t decide to have the whole place demolished and turned into something that would really turn a profit.
Somehow, though, he didn’t really want to do that. The house was perfectly sound structurally, and more than that, it just felt like someplace worth saving. Maybe that was silly and sentimental of him, but the house had clearly been loved at one point, and more than one family worth of children had grown up there. He’d at least see what he could do with the place first. It’d be an interesting little personal project to do in his spare time.
He couldn’t really deny that there was also an odd feeling to the house, though. Of course, he didn’t actually believe the nonsense he’d been told about ghosts, but every once in a while, while sorting through the old furniture to see what to leave and what to sell, he’d catch a grayish shape in his peripheral vision, or feel the hair on the back of his neck stand up for no reason. He chalked it up as his mind playing tricks on him. It was especially easy for it to do that since most of the light fixtures didn’t have bulbs in them, leaving the rooms dimly and unevenly lit. With light coming from odd angles, he kept seeing his shadow in places he wasn’t expecting. It was definitely his shadow.
But… there was one thing that he didn’t really have an explanation for. In one of the former bedrooms, he’d found a woman’s hair ornament tucked at the back of a shelf. It was a pretty little thing, and it seemed like it would be a shame to throw it away or put it in a box of junk to be sold off. He set it aside, thinking vaguely that he might give it to his mother.
Shortly thereafter, he found the same hair ornament in a cabinet in the kitchen. He thought briefly that maybe there were two, but when he went to look, the original one was gone. He stared at it. He definitely hadn’t moved it there.
After the fourth time he found the hair ornament tucked somewhere he knew he hadn’t put it, he decided he needed to figure out what was going on once and for all. He’d start by staying in the house overnight, just to make sure there really wasn’t anything supernatural afoot.
He set the hair ornament next to his phone on the cardboard box he’d repurposed as a nightstand before going to sleep, and when he woke in the middle of the night, feeling oddly disoriented, it was gone. He glared at the empty space there. It wasn’t like he hadn’t been expecting that, but it was still rather unwelcome, especially considering this time it’d vanished from right next to him while he was sleeping.
Deciding to get up and get some water, he grabbed his empty water bottle off the box and headed out to the hallway. He turned the corner into the kitchen and dropped the water bottle he’d been holding on the floor because standing barely a foot in front of him was an incandescent white human form, the indistinct shape of a kimono draped in a floor-length train of silvery hair, wide golden eyes holding his. The edges of the figure blurred and shifted, the details difficult to perceive, as if he were looking into the sun. A dark slit of a mouth opened in the pale face but did not move to match the words as a distant, sibilant voice spoke, implacable, “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Oh, fuck,” was the thing that came out of his own mouth, for some reason.
The figure blinked.
“So you’re real,” he said, numbly, letting his instinctive fighting stance loosen a bit when the spirit made no move to advance. “Holy fuck, you scared the absolute shit out of me.”He let out a deep breath to steady himself, hand automatically going to adjust his glasses but finding thin air. “So this is your house, huh?”
The figure stared at him in bemused silence for a second before… flickering. It dimmed, leaving a strangely clear afterimage of a human in a white kimono with waist-length white hair, a somber image but not at all the frankly pants-wettingly terrifying specter he had just been looking at. Then he blinked, and both the vision and afterimage were replaced with a thin, oddly ageless man about his height, wearing a dark shirt and khakis and with a long, silver ponytail draped over his shoulder. His face was delicate and sad, and when he spoke, his lips moved, and his voice sounded completely normal, albeit quiet.
“Yes.” He said softly. “This is my house.”