Chapter Text
"You know you didn't have to spend your life savings to win me a stuffed toy," Tzuyu teased.
Elkie turned to stand in her path, gazing up at her with a coy smile. "Well, if you don't want it..."
"No!" Tzuyu hugged the dog close to her chest, narrowing her gaze at the shorter girl's triumphant smirk. "It was very kind of you."
“You could be a little more appreciative, babe,” Elkie teased. “Don’t I deserve a kiss for being such a wonderful girlfriend?”
“I don’t kiss on the first date, Chong,” Tzuyu countered.
Elkie looked positively scandalized by her response. “But this isn’t our first date!”
Tzuyu smiled down at her, radiant in the soft glow of the city lights. “It’s our first date of this year,” she declared.
Elkie’s eyes narrowed. “Antagonizing little shit,” she grumbled as she slid a hand behind Tzuyu’s head, “you’re lucky that I love you,” and pulled her down into a kiss.
Tzuyu grinned into it, humming a happy little noise against Elkie’s lips, and pulled away reluctantly when Elkie’s hands started to stray. “We should go home,” she whispered.
The other girl pouted dramatically, her cheeks flushed. “Okay, so you’ll invite me back to your place after the first date, but you won’t kiss me?”
Tzuyu laughed softly and reached for her hand, marveling at how easily their fingers laced together, fitting like an intricate puzzle created to their own design.
Meeting Elkie had been chance – yet fated, as most things in the world beyond the mortals tended to be. Tzuyu had been dragged along to one of the many witches summits, an unwilling plus one to the matriarch of her coven while Jihyo’s Second had business elsewhere.
She had been bored stiff, left to socialize with witches bordering on a millennium in contrast to her short life of twenty. Her ears had been bombarded with opinionated voices, loudly expressing their disagreement at how the witches were progressing alongside human society. Tzuyu had been wise enough to be silent. It never boded well to argue with the ‘old crones,’ as Nayeon called them.
Tzuyu wasn’t brave enough to try calling them that to their faces though.
That was when Elkie had appeared. She had swept in out of nowhere and countered dated opinions with the simple fact that witches needed to evolve with society or they would be left behind.
It wasn’t until after, when they had found their own quiet corner away from everyone else, that Elkie admitted that she had been watching Tzuyu since she arrived and that she was filled with intrigue.
It was simple really.
Elkie was an earth witch from a predominantly earth witch coven. She could create life with the touch of a fingertip, pulling flowers and saplings from nothing but dirt, finding beauty in the circle that was life itself – a circle that Tzuyu was thrown in the middle of.
Tzuyu wasn’t entirely sure what she was, only that she could communicate with the dead. She had heard the term ‘death-touched’ being thrown about by a few elders before, but she was reluctant to put a name to it.
She wasn’t a necromancer, not entirely, yet the lost souls of the departed haunted her all the same. She could see them as they had died, the flickering remains of a life that had once been, and touching a corpse allowed her to experience their last memory, but the ghosts couldn’t move furniture like they did in the horror movies she had covertly watched as a kid, explaining it as research when she had inevitably been caught.
Her ghosts were different. They existed in her peripheral, lingering yet not causing any immediate harm beyond being a nuisance and rather unsightly to look at. There was no tuning them out or any way to make them leave, but Elkie helped.
Elkie saw life and Tzuyu saw death, and when Elkie touched her, the ghosts disappeared for a moment.
“So I was thinking that we should have a lazy day tomorrow,” Elkie said, pulling Tzuyu from her thoughts. “I think I pulled a muscle in my shoulder throwing those basketballs to win you that dog.” She grinned. “It was totally worth it though. We should go to the carnival again before it leaves the city.”
Tzuyu glanced around and realized that they were back on their street again, fast approaching the apartment that had been her home for the last few months.
Usually witches lived in a den with their coven but with the new movement to blend in and merge with society, it was permitted for witches to live elsewhere so long as they remained in contact with their covens and registered their details with the Hunters Guild.
Two years since they had met and one since they had started dating, Tzuyu’s only regret was not saying yes sooner to Elkie’s offer.
“After you, beautiful lady,” Elkie held the door open and made a sweeping gesture with her free arm for Tzuyu to enter first.
Tzuyu dropped her eyes with a bashful smile, still affected by her compliments as much as she had been at the beginning, and slipped inside with Elkie in tow.
“So a lazy day?” Tzuyu said dryly. “Like it’ll be any different than our usual Sundays?”
“Hey, sometimes we go out for brunch.”
“True,” Tzuyu relented when they entered the stairwell. They were only on the second floor so there was never any point in taking the elevator. It was healthier anyway and less claustrophobic than a shuddering box attached to a wire. “Okay, a lazy day it is.”
She would humor her girlfriend if it made her smile – and it always did, which is exactly why Tzuyu entertained her antics. A whole day of binging junk food and cuddling on the couch in blankets was always appealing too.
They stepped out onto the second level, complete with the flickering light at the end of the hallway that their landlord refused to fix until it broke completely. It wasn’t the most luxurious of apartments, not by a long shot with its wilting wallpaper and creaky floorboards, but they made it work with their limited income and the small grant available to supernatural youths willing to live alongside humans.
Tzuyu shoved her hand into her bag while balancing the stuffed dog in her other arm, scouring the depths of it for their apartment key, and was about to pull it out when Elkie's fingers suddenly snaked around Tzuyu's bicep to tug her to a halt, rooting her a mere few steps from their door.
“What?” Tzuyu looked back at her with her hand still in her bag and felt a surge of concern.
Elkie looked pale, sickly pale, and she pulled firmer on Tzuyu’s arm, urging her back the way they had just come.
“Elkie,” Tzuyu resisted, her eyebrows knitting together at her girlfriend’s sudden urgency to not go home, “what’s wrong?”
Elkie kept pulling, growing increasingly more panicked the longer Tzuyu refused to comply. “There’s something in our apartment,” she whispered and Tzuyu’s heart stuttered.
She looked at their door, marked with their apartment number and a small sticker Elkie had secretly added a few weeks ago without notifying their landlord. It had warmed her heart when Tzuyu had first noticed their names and the small red heart, and a feeling of home had swept over her.
She had felt something similar when Jihyo and Nayeon had helped her decorate her door back at the coven house all those years ago, but it was different with Elkie. The coven house was permanent. She would always have a room there. With Elkie it felt like there was a whole world of opportunity for them to explore. Together and away from the multitude of rules their covens enforced.
Tzuyu searched beyond the door, reaching out into the temperamental threadwork of magic, and sure enough, there was a presence on the other side, but unlike anything she had felt before.
It was colder than the bitter chill of death that chased Tzuyu constantly and it hummed like constant static, a perpetual white noise that made her teeth itch uncomfortably. It didn’t feel human…and it didn’t feel supernatural either.
“We should go,” Elkie pleaded, still trying to get Tzuyu to move. “Yeeun’s place is close. Let’s go there. Please.”
Tzuyu tilted her head, listening to the noise, and stepped closer, confirming her own theory when the ghosts grew louder.
They were frightened of it too.
The doorknob started to twist, the lock rattling and clicking as another force made it turn, and then it stopped again, leaving them with only the thundering of their hearts and the roar of static.
Everything was still.
Then the door burst from its hinges and crashed against the apartment across from them, the noise thundering in the empty hallway.
Elkie seized her arm and yanked her towards the stairs before Tzuyu could catch a glimpse of the strange presence, urging her forward while the nauseating hiss gave chase. The stuffed dog slipped from her grasp in their manic escape, lost somewhere in the hallway, and her heart would mourn that loss later, but not then. She could feel the shadows pulling on them, trying to claw them back, and the ghosts started to wail.
"Run!" Elkie commanded as she shoved her into the stairwell. “Run and don’t you dare stop!”
And Tzuyu did exactly as she was told.
She tumbled down the stairs and shouldered through the door into the street again, but it was too quiet, too empty, so she kept going, running and running until her lungs threatened to burst.
Turn after turn, street signs flew by, panic causing her to lose herself in the city, it wasn’t until her legs gave out that she had to stop.
Tzuyu clutched at her chest, frantically searching for her own pulse, and found it weak and aching, but still going. She was alive and being urged further away by the ghosts. Her heart was still beating but someone else's had stopped.
"Elkie."
She turned, searching frantically through the mass of wandering souls for her girlfriend, praying to whatever deity existed that the older girl would appear.
"Elkie!”
But she didn't.