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Changmin thought dying would feel a whole lot different than it really did. He remembered the way that Kyuhyun had told him his life flashed before his eyes when he almost died, how his vision slowly turned black and he had time to pray that he would still live.
The reality was much bitterer, like black coffee on his tongue the moment after he’d woken up. Changmin closed his eyes on a hospital bed at 10:37 at night and never opened them again. He had no final thoughts or words, he just was there and then the next gone, tracing the paper thin line between life and death.
Changmin had also thought maybe there would’ve been a heaven—somewhere to rest after all the chaos his life held, a rest from the fans that screamed in his ear and stalked him to the ends of the earth, or perhaps even just darkness.
Changmin didn’t believe in ghosts until he became one.
The novelty of it wore off after five minutes as Changmin sat on his bedside and watched his mother cry over his body, the nurses holding her off. She sobbed and screamed until her throat went hoarse and her body collapsed, his father barely able to hold her up when she did. It was messy and horrid, and Changmin had to watch his own death—his own body be wheeled away from the emergency room with his eyes shut. He tried to touch his hand in a futile effort to somehow connect his spirit to his body, but he slipped through it like water. Changmin couldn’t touch a thing. The walls were made of paper, and everything around him but the floor fell away from his touch, his sense completely lost.
There was no guide to tell him what to do, only himself and the empty halls of the hospital. He was alone in the afterlife.
Of everyone, seeing Yunho’s reaction to the news was the most heartbreaking. Changmin knew how much Yunho relied on him, and could only imagine a moment of the pain that Yunho had to go through now that he thought Changmin couldn’t see him anymore.
Yunho didn’t cry. He held Changmin’s lifeless hand and Changmin let his fingers ghost between, pretending even for a moment that he could feel, could get across that he was… well, not okay, but here.
“What am I going to do, Changmin?” Yunho said, voice so low Changmin barely heard it. He didn’t break, but his hand shook. “What am I supposed to do now you’re gone. You were my… I lo—“ he cut off and lowered his head.
‘But I’m here!’ Changmin wanted to scream. ‘I’m here, turn around and look at me!’
Yunho didn’t hear a god damned thing.
Changmin followed him all the way home, barefoot. Not that it mattered, this bits of glass melted right through him anyway. It was disconcerting, and Changmin had never felt so alone and out of place in his life. Not a single other ghost roamed the streets, and Changmin shivered from fear.
The first he saw of Yunho as he entered their… now just Yunho’s house, was Yunho hunched over the dining table.
Yunho slapped his face once, hard. “Wake up,” he barked. “Stop.”
It didn’t stop. The clock hanging on the wall kept ticking away, and the world kept turning, and Changmin wasn’t fine at all.
Yunho burst. He threw the plates on the kitchen—two for when Changmin was going to get home—on the wall and screamed, shouting nonsense and obscenities. He swiped at the table and the bric-a-brac tumbled to the floor. Yunho’s anger softened in an instance when he caught sight of a note written by Changmin just before he had left.
Going to Kyuhyun’s… sorry about before. The words ‘I love you’ were scribbled out at the bottom.
Yunho choked and called Hojoon.
“I should’ve… I should’ve been the one to pick him up, Hojoon. I fucked up and we shouldn’t have fought in the first place because it was my fault, and over the dumbest jealousy. I said the most horrible things to him what—how am I supposed to forgive myself for that? I should’ve been there for him and it’s all my fucking fault and now he’s dead. He’s dead because of me. I never even got to say sorry.”
Changmin tried to put his hand on Yunho’s shoulder but it slipped right through. He didn’t know ghosts could cry until that moment, but he tears dried before they even touched the floor.
Yunho hung up the phone and held it to his chest, crossing the room to kneel before a picture of him and Changmin they had taken on their honeymoon in Hawaii. They were both smiling, keen but relaxed in the warm weather. It hurt Changmin too see Yunho like this, and the tears wouldn’t stop falling.
He tucked it under his arm and wandered, looking more the ghost than Changmin, to their bed. Yunho sat on Changmin’s side and pulled up the covers, burying his nose into the pillow. That was the moment he broke and the tears came in heaving sobs, so violent they shook his whole body with each pull and gasp. He settled after countless minutes and looked at the photo he’d placed on the bed next to him.
“Remember when I said I didn’t love you?” Yunho said. He held out his hand to the picture and placed a thumb on Changmin’s face. He sniffed then smiled, mangled and wrong.
“Well I lied. But baby, you’re too dead to hear that.”