Chapter Text
The first thing y/n realized after waking up was that she was dead. She was in her garage, yes. But she was dead. There's no other possibility. She’d been trapped in a room for a while, though she’s not exactly sure how long but it was long enough. There’s no way that she’s back in the time that she died though unless her aunt and uncle had done a lot of redecorating in the past hour or two. She has to be dead.
It was at that moment that she heard the door behind her begin to open and a familiar face appeared, a face she never thought she would see again.
“y/n?”
When she had first re-appeared, y/n got to meet her new baby cousin who was only a couple months old at the time. She quickly learned that she had died about 5 years ago in 1999. That was quite a shock and took her a couple of days to fully process that.
After recovering from learning about her death and about the fact that her aunt could seemingly see her despite her current ghost status, the first task on y/n’s to-do list was to find some new clothes to wear.
She had previously lived with her aunt in her old apartment for years before Rose got married and moved into a house with her new husband, bringing y/n with her. In order to give the newlyweds as much space and privacy as possible, as well as give herself as much space as possible, y/n moved into the garage that her and Rose set up as a studio. There was a bathroom and a pull out couch, what more could a teenage girl need? Not to mention, no one can tell you to pipe down when you’re practicing guitar at 3 in the morning as long as you’re not shredding on max volume.
Y/n had loved living there, she was the happiest she had probably ever been during the short period of time that she had lived there before her untimely death. But now she is back! Her aunt had saved a majority of her things, not that she had much more than a suitcase and a guitar, and had slipped them up into the loft for safe keeping.
The loft was kinda a mess of boxes and old music equipment, but y/n eventually found some of her clothes and was able to finally change into something new. Curiously, she also found a bunch of guys clothes that didn’t appear to be that much older than her own, but she had bigger things to focus on. But I mean they were just sitting here, and that tank top looked pretty comfy. No one was going to miss it. Y/n contemplated a little more before slipping on the shirt. Who was gonna know anyways.
As time passed, y/n learned a lot about being a ghost. Not long after reappearing she discovered that he could “summon” her guitar, for lack of a better term. It was the best revelation. Her aunt got her some new headphones to plug into the amp in the garage so that she could play without raising any suspicion. Little did y/n know, those headphones would make what would become her life bearable.
Not long after receiving the headphones, Rose and her realized that her little cousin, Julie, could see her when she started laughing and clapping at something silly she had done. This was fun for a little bit, but then something changed in Rose. She was elated that her niece was still with her, but if Julie grew up talking to ghosts, who knows how damaging that could be to her especially when she starts school and becomes the freaky delusional kid. Rose knew she had to protect her but didn’t know how. Ultimately she decided that y/n needed to relocate up to the loft and stay there no matter what, especially when Julie was home. Even if the garage was empty, she can’t risk it.
It was devastating for y/n. Her aunt didn’t want her cousin to know about her? But this was still her aunt’s home and where else would she go? She owed so much to her aunt, there’s no way she could just up and leave. So instead she pushed around the boxes in the loft until she had a little space just big enough for a sleeping bag and some breathing space, not that she really needed it, and poofed her amp and guitar up there. If she was going to be stuck up here for the next who knows how long, there was no way she wasn’t going to at least bring her guitar with her. Besides, she bought that amp with her own money before she died and she’d be damned if she let someone else play on it, or worse- let it just sit and rust, while she rotted up in the loft.
That’s how things went, it became the new normal. When y/n wasn’t watching the waves at the beach or wandering around the city, she stayed up in the loft playing guitar. Before her death, playing had always been when y/n had felt the most alive, like she was right where she was made to be, and death hadn’t changed that fact.
It was a number of years later that Julie, now a teenager, climbed up to the loft and pulled out an old cd. Normally when Julie started to venture up to the loft y/n would poof away to the beach or into the town, but then Rose had died. Y/n knew that Julie was going to want to go through some of her mom’s things but she just felt something deep inside of her that told her to stay. She watched from the shadows as Julie went back down and put in the old Sunset Curve CD that Rose had given y/n years ago and began to play it.
If anyone told her that one day she would meet the guys who were behind her favorite CD, y/n would have told them that they were crazy. They died the night that Rose got that CD, much to y/n’s dismay once she fell in love with the album.
And yet here they were.
Sunset Curve was standing in her garage.