Chapter Text
There’s a muck about the air this morning. Something cold, still humid. The sun struggles to rise through a mist of fog, the ever-looming pewter of the sky. There will be a storm this afternoon. There always is this time of year. Kun knows that, the same as he knows if he doesn’t get done with this washing soon, old Mrs Yang will filet the back of his shins.
Kun’s back aches where he crouches, curved over the wash basin. Once upon a time he was a scrawny kid with perpetually skinned knees and welts on the inside of his arms, the back of his legs. Now he’s stronger, smarter, faster. Muscled where he needs to be, disciplined when he must. He wipes his brow in a brief reprieve, enjoying the burn of his morning struggles, ever eyeing the glowing haze against the horizon, knowing he needs to beat the sun.
The sheets he gets up on the drying rack well before time. They’re pristine and white. Unusually bright. One of the best sets of sheets in the house.
“Kun!” whistles a shrill shriek from around the side of the house.
“Coming!” he shouts.
All around him, the servants’ corner of the estate is bustling with activity. Some carry more bushels of clothes and linen, like him. Others this morning’s barrels of flour. A pig cries shrilly where it’s cornered against the yard, and Kun can already anticipate the smell of tonight’s dinner roast. Maybe if he’s quick, he’ll even manage to snag a scrap of the leftovers before it’s dumped into the slop bucket.
“Out of my way!” Kun hears, narrowly dodging the mistresses’ own brigade of personal servants as they scatter into the yard, barking instructions to everyone lower ranked than them.
Kun doesn’t have to bother with them though. He answers only to Mrs Yang, a pock-marked and wrinkled old woman who, rumor says, was the nursemaid to the estate’s very own master, years and years ago.
Kun shudders to wonder what got her banished to scullery work if that’s true. There’s already enough misery about the place, he doesn’t technically need to know more.
Kun has lived here all his life. At least that’s what he’s been told. Maybe he had parents, maybe he never did. Old Mrs Yang says they’re dead, but if so it didn’t happen anywhere near the Dong estate, or Kun would definitely have heard about it from someone alive, or dead. And around this place, the living talk a lot, but the dead talk more.
All his life, he’s heard their whispers in the shadows, in the dark places. In the fog and in the mist. Kun reckons he can’t be the only person who hears them. The last time he dared mentioned them though, he was seven years old and earned himself a severe beating from the yard manager who told him to shut up if he valued his existence. Even now Kun remembers the sting of the whip. Remembers also the cold comforting hands that supported him silently, weightlessly, while he cried in his bed thereafter.
Around midday the sky isn’t much brighter than when the day first broke. Kun snatches a bowl of gristle and porridge from the kitchen and, before anyone can ask him what he should be doing instead, steals off into the mist.
No one’s ever asked him this, but Kun does have a favorite spot. It’s a little hideaway to the north of the estate which is masked from view by a row of overgrown, moss eaten trees. There’s a little trickle of a stream. Some subsidiary Kun guesses runs from the nearby lake. Almost nobody comes here aside from him and the ghosts who haunt this place.
Perhaps it used to be nicer, when the estate was younger. Back when there was enough money and passion to be poured into more than survival amidst the stench of death.
He eats as he walks, kicking over a rotten log and skirting around what might have been once a well-cared-for and engraved stone bench, many decades forgotten. The words can no longer be read, faded with time and decay. He knows what they say though. Someone, might have told him once.
To J., with love and to the memories we’ll make. ~ D.S.
Memories. What memories. Only the dead keep their memories now.
Overhead is the remains of a once fine tree. In the dead of winter, its leaves are stripped and there’s hardly any shade. Some sickness only known to the arboreal community has otherwise stolen this tree’s every springtime flowering as well. Kun pushes past a low hanging branch, the bark a moist shade of gray, leaves yellow and spotted.
Kun finds the drying rock by the stream and dreams of a better day. Someplace he won’t find in this life but maybe in the next, maybe in the past.
He chooses a round pebble washed up on the bank, circles it between his fingers for a few precious moments, wondering how long he can get away with hiding. If it’s worth it. It usually is.
Before leaving he slides the pebble across the top of the water’s surface. It skips twice before dropping with a little plop.
Off somewhere to his right, another pebble skips across the stream, bounces three times before sinking and Kun doesn’t have to pretend he can’t feel the surge of smug triumph present about the place. Kun, no longer scared like when he was a young boy, smiles.
“See you later,” he says.
There’s a massive portrait that hangs behind the grand staircase in the center of the house. It’s full-bodied and stately, portraying a handsome man in his early thirties, broad shoulders and black hair, an arresting look.
It’s a portrait of the master; Kun rarely glances at it. The resemblance doesn’t have any bearing to the master of the house who is now twenty years past his prime with graying hair, a haggard look, and a perpetual, persistent aura of anger. The master as Kun knows him today is a loud, irreverent man prone to violent rants and fits of rage and no one is safe when caught before him in one of those moods. Not his wife, not his staff and servants, definitely not the creditors who brave a visit once a month, or more rarely if they’re feeling sane at all.
If ever Kun hears his voice coming down a hall, he’ll make a dash down a side hallway instead, or hide in another room, behind a tapestry, in a closet. Once, Kun’s feet took him tearing into an unused bedroom and, upon hearing the door slamming shut, with the master bellowing in anger, he slid quickly on the dusty floor under the massive four-poster bed.
That’s how Kun met Dejun, one of the few fellow servants with whom Kun is on friendly terms. Surprised and shocked, but sharing one emotion sharper than all — fear — the two huddled there for what felt like hours until the footsteps of the master retreated and they dared to come at all.
Dejun is yet another boy with no past. It’s not that unusual, Kun learns. There are lots of people who work for the Dong family who have either forgotten their origins or just plain don’t want to remember. Kun and Dejun are around the same age, unlike the others. They don’t meet one another, because such things are forbidden after all, but Kun always has a nice word for Dejun whenever they cross paths, and sometimes Dejun sneaks tasty desserts from the kitchen where he works and saves them in dirtied napkins for Kun. When no one’s looking, or late at night, Kun drags them out from his coat pockets, whichever has the least amount of holes, and savors the taste of the treats in secret.
Dejun is the nicest person Kun knows on the whole estate. Aside from the dead. If ever, when he’s chewing, Kun feels the presence of one of the many spirits, nose to nose, he imagines they too might be pretending to enjoy it.
Dejun aside, there’s only one person on the estate Kun isn’t frightened of. And that’s because he never sees her. That’s the mistress of the house. Kun knows barely anything about her. She’s a willowy figure who rarely leaves her rooms. More ghostlike than the ghosts themselves. And there aren’t any portraits of her like there are of the master.
Sometimes Kun hears her weeping. At night, during the day, it doesn’t matter when. One just knows that, at the sound of her tears, to steer clear and stay focused, for if the master gets wind, all hell will break loose. Furniture flies, and dishes shatter to the floor. Kun’s been nearly blown over by a stray spirit fleeing the scene, and he had to shelter in place behind a statue just to recover from the cries reverberating in his inner ear, part woman and part ghost, intermingled.
“He’d never hurt her, of course, he wouldn’t,” pleads one of the mistress’s servants to the visiting local doctor, a man with skin so pale Kun wonders if he won’t faint himself one day.
“Of course not. Of course not. It’s just… with her condition… and the situation…” He pauses at the sound of the servant’s hissing gasp. “Of… well, her son…”
Because that’s the clincher right there.
Dong Sicheng.
“I just want to be sure she is well enough to… deal with what must come,” the doctor concludes.
Dong Sicheng, son and heir. And the only memory Kun has is almost fifteen years old, back when Kun himself was barely able to take the stairs two at a time and he saw a child shrouded in blankets, pale face with a mop of black hair, being handed from the arms of his mother to a manservant who stowed him away into a carriage that drove off, never to return.
“It’s true, then?” asks the servant. “He’s really coming home? Oh, the poor mistress!”
The doctor shushes her quickly, and from Kun’s hiding spot in the shadows of the hallway during his ill-timed walk to the kitchens, he sees the doctor flushing and looking around, as if to verify they won’t be overheard. Too late, Kun thinks. With or without himself saying something, a rumor like this will all over the estate within hours.
“I can’t verify when,” whispers the doctor. “But soon. Definitely, soon.”
The servant covers her face with her hands, more hope reflected there than Kun’s seen on anyone his entire life. “And is he… you know? Cured?”
“Now that, unfortunately, I cannot say.”
Kun is right. About many things. By the time the clouds burst over the estate, blanketing everything in its path with harsh rains, and the sun has almost disappeared from the afternoon sky, everybody knows.
From the outdoor laborers to the maidservants, everyone is talking about it in rushed voices. He catches the kitchen hands not even whispering about it when he steals in to deliver a basket of clean linens. Dejun catches his eye, but they don’t speak. He’s also one of the few people in there smart enough not to be caught gossiping. Sure enough, the head of the kitchen marches out moments later. Kun is already long gone when the cries of pain begin.
They’re wondering what’s going to happen if the rumors are true. Which Kun happens to know are probably true.
The young master returns. An event like this will either be monumentious, or tragic, or both. How things will change, nobody knows. But everything will change, that’s for certain.
Kun busies himself for the rest of the day, only speaking to Mrs Yang and being scolded for minor offenses. She’s as close-lipped as ever. The ghost that lives on the back stairway isn’t.
When Kun goes to bed he’s added another’s memory to the confusing image of young master Sicheng, the poster child of joy and delight and mischief, running down the halls with a puppy in his arms and a cacophony of mayhem behind. For the rest of the night, Kun dreams of that beaming toddler, that beautiful boy, turning uncomfortably in his bedsheets when it morphs into his own memory of the sobbing child shunted out the manor and away from their lives forever.
Sicheng comes home, of course, in the middle of the night.
Kun hasn’t been sleeping well. Sometimes the ghosts will leave him alone, but more often in the night, they enjoy being awake in the darkness. And they keep Kun awake too. So he hears through his open window when the carriage wheels sound down the gravel road.
It’s him , whispers the ghost. Kun wishes he knew his name. He’s the friendliest of the lot. Has saved him from many a scuffle throughout Kun’s long miserable life.
Him?
Sicheng .
The son and heir returned.
Kun walks to the window, pushes the shutters away. He lives in the attic like many of the servants, but no one likes this room. It’s small, cramped, always muggy, and well-haunted. That part at least, Kun doesn’t mind.
The path below is shrouded in the night fog. But there, coming toward the house, is a carriage light. Its low flame flickers through the mist. A single horse labors closer, its driver covered in a heavy wool jacket, his face hidden.
Kun doesn’t hold his breath in anticipation. As far as he knows, this is just the start of another chapter in the life of the estate. Life isn’t going to get better. It might even get worse. But he waits nevertheless until the carriage stops. Only two servants from the household are there to greet him. A man steps lightly out of the carriage and Kun spends a short moment being confused at his appearance. Then, the man turns around, holds out his arm, and another figure emerges instead.
Tall, lean face, hair black as midnight. Heavily covered in coats and blankets. He moves like death itself. Slow, laborious. His weight is supported by the man who has accompanied him. Ages it takes for them to reach the steps of the house, and they disappear from view.
Kun goes back to sleep. This time he doesn’t dream.
For all that Kun expected change, it doesn’t happen immediately. A whole day goes by. Everyone on the estate is aware that something is different. A few have guessed the younger master is home. There is silence from the mistress’s wing of the house.
The master left the morning after his son’s return. Kun doesn’t even bother doing the math, though many around him have speculated something is off. The long-known fact of how the master has never tolerated hearing even the slightest word about his son. There are now even more rumors about his illness. Or is it an injury? What could have been so severe that he was sent away as a child and is only now returning as a man?
Kun doesn’t join in their speculations. He has other avenues of information.
Days go by. Then a week. Two weeks.
The tension in the house is palpable. The servants of the mistress are tight-lipped but shaken, testy, easily pressed. They argue over the meals sent to feed the young master. They scold the laundry. Even Kun’s Mrs Yang is grumbling more of late and snapping at her underlings, Kun included.
It’s late in the evening one day when Kun turns a corner and runs right into another figure. He barely recognizes him.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry! I’m sorry!” Kun cries, immediately throwing his head down to bow over and again, and again one more time before he drops to his knees to pick up the pile of linens he’s dropped. Some of them will have to be refolded.
The other man kneels down too. Kun is beyond shocked.
“You don’t… have...to…”
But the man doesn't reply. Instead, he picks up a few of the sheets, rumples them up in a manner that’s entirely unhelpful, but nice overall in that he hands them over to Kun.
“Thank you… you didn’t have to help. My fault, it’s all my fault, Mr…?”
“It’s Doyoung. No ‘mister’ please. And of course, I know I didn’t have to. However, you did run into me and thus this mess.”
“I’m….”
“Please, just stop,” says Doyoung with a sigh. Kun can tell the man is already far away in his thoughts, far from Kun and this ridiculous minor accident.
Kun swallows his last apology, stands quickly, and moves to the side. Doyoung whisks past and out Kun’s sight without another word.
So that… is the young master’s personal servant?
Kun doesn’t see him again for several days. He’s heard, of course, from the servant’s gossip that this Doyoung person is tight-lipped and severe, never conversing longer with another servant longer than is absolutely required. Most have heard fewer words than even Kun, and Doyoung apparently visits the kitchen at least once a day.
The cook’s assistant is practically in tears after one of Doyoung’s latest departures.
Kun, just stealing indoors after a whole morning slugging away at the laundry, makes eyes at Dejun who sneaks over eventually to whisper, “Something about the young master’s meals. He doesn’t like them.”
“Doesn’t like what?”
“The food. All of it. Doesn’t matter how it’s made. It’s like he-”
The doors open suddenly. They disperse before the head cook can find them gossiping and Kun flees down the back hallway. He hears the woman scolding the cook’s assistant once more, even though it sounds like the poor man has tried everything already, to no avail.
Kun doesn’t sleep that night. The ghost occupying the foot of his bed wants to talk all night. Kun can’t understand most of his ramblings. It’s like that sometimes. He feels some of their impressions, their memories, occasionally a word or two, sometimes a whole sentence. But something tonight has his ghostly friend more on edge than usual.
He stares out the window instead. It’s near to the full moon, whose light shines down upon Kun’s room, but there’s an eerie silence outside. Contrast that to the mumblings of the ghost and it has the hairs on Kun’s arms standing up in protest.
Something itches from within, a compelling desire to… inexplicably… leave his room… perhaps do a walk around through the night’s darkened halls…
Before he can do something stupid though like that follow that up, Kun slams his head down on the pillow and throws another pillow over his ears. Sleep, that’s what he should do. That would be wiser… definitely wiser.
The next day, however, Kun gives up his wise nature. He’s standing in the hallway watching a frozen-in-place Dejun hovering outside the young master’s corridor, meal tray in his arms.
“Dejun?”
The other servant jumps, dishes and cups wobbling precariously for a moment before he recovers.
“Uh- Oh, Kun. Hi.”
Kun already knows what’s happening. Dejun drew the unlucky straw, has become the unluckiest soul of the day.
In his peripheral, Kun can see the hallway ghost with worried eyes. His fright, even Dejun’s fright is real.
“I’ll take it.”
“What?” Dejun turns around, startled. The dishes wobble again, but Kun cooly steals the tray from him.
“I said, I’ll take it. Wait here for me and I’ll bring back the tray.”
Dejun’s shocked but profuse thanks follow Kun all the way down the hall.
It’s silent in this wing of the house, too silent. Kun knows where he’s going though. Before it was occupied, Kun had a few duties sorting the linens and clearing out the cupboards in a variety of rooms, including the one he knows the young master has to be occupying now.
He stops before a door at the end of the hall, knocking softly.
It opens a few moments later than should be necessary. Doyoung’s impassive face greets him.
“What is it? Breakfast?”
Kun copies Doyoung’s face as best he can. No emotion, no expression. “Breakfast for the young master, Mister Doyoung.”
“Oh?”
Doyoung looks over it briefly, scowls. “And what about my breakfast?”
As for that, it’s a hiccup Kun did not foresee. “I uh… all I know is…”
“Yes, yes, I know. Very well, come in. Your kitchen wants to see me starve and the young master poisoned, it’s the same every morning. Hurry up.”
“Thank you, Mister Doyoung.”
“And don’t call me mister .”
“Sir,” asks Kun stoically, “how should I address you then?”
“You don’t have to address me at all.”
Kun’s first impression of the young master isn’t anything he imagined. For a figure so larger than life in the minds of the household, both living and dead, Dong Sicheng, only son and heir, reclines in an armchair in the sitting room, blankets wrapped his ankles, legs, and lap, two soft and fluffy slippers at his feet. He makes the chair seem too small, too short. Aside from that, his face, now that Kun can finally see it, is regal, bored, almost unto death. His hair is black as midnight, uncombed, and the bangs a little too long.
He throws a glance at Kun and his pupils are dark, a bold stare that lasts too long before he slowly looks away, out through the open window. The room is freezing.
“Y-young Master,” says Kun deferentially, head slightly bowed.
Doyoung is the one who answers. “You can put it on the table there.”
Kun sets it down flawlessly. He’s not sure what he expected to happen in here, but he bows one last time before turning to leave. Does this perhaps give him some fodder to share with the others? How he finally saw the young master. It’s not like Kun has anyone to talk to, other than Dejun who was obviously too terrified to even enter. Maybe to one of the ghosts? He can feel the one from the hallway has followed him halfway here. Kun runs into the spirit peering through the doorway. He can only feel its presence but he nods anyway as if imploring the ghost to leave with him.
That’s when the young master speaks.
“You don’t work in the kitchen, do you?”
The voice is deep and low, still with an air of indifference. Kun feels its gravity regardless.
He turns. “No, sir, I don’t.”
“What’s your name, then?”
“Kun, sir. I work in the laundry.”
“And the man whose job you have evidently borrowed this morning?”
Kun thinks of Dejun waiting petrified outside but he doesn’t think he can lie and get away with it.
“Dejun, sir.”
“Hmm.”
The young master looks away, frowning over the breakfast dishes with disdain. He doesn’t move at all or make like he’s about to eat.
“Do you know how to cook at all, Kun?”
“No, sir.”
“And I suppose you’ve lived here most of your life so you wouldn’t even know what good food is supposed to taste like?”
There’s really no good response to that so Kun just nods. The meal presented to the young master is loads fancier than what the servants are given to eat
“A pity.”
Kun waits, unsure if he’s been dismissed or if Sicheng is properly done with his interrogation. The ghost also is now wrapped around him, almost like a sign of protection.
All of a sudden, Sicheng laughs. His head falls back, and it’s not a loud sound nor does it last long but for several seconds, the young master looks amused, even pleasant. As if years have been drawn off his face. For the first time, Kun gets a glimpse of who this young man might have become if things were different. Or perhaps he still is.
Sicheng says, with a glance over Kun’s shoulder, “I’m not going to eat him, Taeil. No need for such posturing.”
Kun gulps even as he feels the spirit around him tense.
“Who… who is Taeil?” he dares to ask.
Sicheng suddenly looks him straight in the eye. His smile falls away but his face is still halfway pleasant.
“You don’t know his name? Your friend there. His name is Taeil. He’s a little sneak, always creeping up here to spy on me. You make interesting acquaintances… uh, what was your name again?”
“Kun, sir.”
“Kun. That’s right. I’m Sicheng.”
“I… know, sir.”
That brings back another smile. Sicheng sighs and cuddles further into the back of his too-small armchair, eyes drifting once more outside to the window.
“Do you know Jeno too? I miss him.”
“J-Jeno?”
“The ghost who lives by the stream. Under the dead tree. Likes to skip pebbles. Always jolly.”
To say Kun is shocked is no understatement. He thought he was the only one who knew the ghosts of this place, and he never even knew their names. Sicheng, for all that he hasn’t lived here in years, seems to know them intimately.
“So his name is Jeno,” says Kun more to himself. When he glances again at Sicheng, he finds the man looking right back at him. “I, see him every few days, I guess, sir.”
“He’s still there, then?”
“Yes.”
“Hmm. I really do miss him. He was so nice to me when I was little… especially after… well… just after . You don’t need to keep standing there, Kun. I understand you probably have lots to do today than humor me. But please, do take Taeil with you. And tell Jeno I said hello. I’ll have to visit him soon. Good day to you.”
“Good day to you too... sir.”