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There are a lot of reasons why, when you walk out into your kitchen at five in the morning to the sight of Xyx sitting on your counter, you go completely weak in the knees. No matter what he would say about it later, it isn’t just the sight of him that shocks you; not even model-good looks could inspire this sort of feeling. You don’t even think him breaking into your apartment could spook you like this.
The thing is, months of server friendship or not, there is no way for Xyx to be here: in your apartment, in your country, inexplicably and completely at home on your counter. It isn’t just the personal information filter, or the distance; it isn’t possible.
The thing is, Xyx died last week.
It was a skydiving accident, of all things — some malfunction of the parachute, very tragic. Extremely statistically uncommon, said the article you’d read about it after the fact — the one where you’d finally discovered Xyx’s real name.
It doesn’t even occur to you to call him that, though, when you cry out and sink to the floor.
Reaching a hand out to you, he laughs off-kilter, “A little dramatic, aren’t you, doll?” Instinctively, you take it.
You try to take it.
Later on, you’ll discover that Xyx isn’t completely intangible; he can touch objects with no trouble at all, and even if he doesn’t have to stay solidly on the floor, it doesn’t take effort to do so. Touching you, though, is not so easy. Every second of it is intentional, held solidly in his mind; he can hardly concentrate on anything else when he touches you. Otherwise, contact isn’t possible.
Neither of you know that at the moment. Your hand passes right through his, a shiver shaking up your arm and through your whole body. You only barely manage to catch your whimper between your chattering teeth.
“You’re a ghost,” you say blankly. It makes sense, really, in the way that anything could make sense in this situation. Now that you’re looking closer, the tips of his fingers aren’t quite opaque, and all his edges are shaky, blurred out.
Xyx hums. Still staring at his outstretched hand, you have no clues as to how he’s feeling. “Seems that way.”
Your tongue feels like clay in your mouth. “This isn’t possible.”
“A week ago, I would have agreed with you.”
This is a lot to take in. You need something to throw yourself at, pronto; your laptop, sitting innocently on the couch in the corner of your eye, is an easy target. Xyx watches you stumble to the it, wordless, but when you flick the lid open, he speaks. “What are you doing?”
“I should — I have to tell them,” you say, quiet and flat with the shock. This isn’t — sure, you and Xyx had video-chatted before, but you hadn’t known him as long as the others. Nothing’s been the same since the news of his death; hardly anyone has been talking at all. Even when the announcement came that Blooming Panic’s final chapter would never come, there’d been hardly any response: just a horrible, yawning silence, open and damning and heart-crushing.
“You can’t,” Xyx says, striding toward you. He’s taller than you expected, you note dazedly; it’s a silly thing to think, now. “You know you can’t. What would you even say? You’re haunted? They’d tell you to call the nearest hospital — not for me, for you.”
“But Toasty, at least — ”
His hand reaches for your laptop, nudging the lid closed. “Not him,” he says, stern and soft. “Especially not him.”
Finally, you turn your head up. He looks almost exactly how he did on your last video call, all tumbled hair and severe features, piercings gleaming from under his lips. He’s lovely; he’s impossible. He shouldn’t be here.
But he is, and somehow, you’re both going to have to try to find a way to deal with that. “Okay,” you whisper, clutching your laptop tight to your chest. “Okay.”
And so begins your domestic life with Xyx’s ghost. It’s more peaceful than you’d expected — monotonous, really. You don’t like to leave him alone for too long, and he can’t leave the apartment. It becomes obvious pretty immediately that he’s going stir crazy in here, and you can’t blame him — you get sick of it too, and it’s your apartment. You’re not even anchored here.
There are a few other oddities, though.
As you discover when you next try to open your poor laptop, Xyx fries absolutely every piece of electronics he touches — except for, inexplicably, your old CD player. Never one to miss a chance to poke fun, even now, Xyx sets himself up as the great keeper of all of your music, incorporeal hands flipping through the clacking plastic cases to pick apart your tastes. “This collection is a travesty,” he says with a cluck of the tongue, chin leaned on an elbow that’s disappearing incorporeal through your floorboards. “Someone needs to be reeducated.”
Dutifully, you take his suggestions, rattled off rapid-fire in your ear or scrawled neatly into lists, and burn new CDs for him. Xyx claims that it’s only for his own entertainment, to spare his own delicate ears from the horrors of your music, brow cocked and mouth twisted in a teasing sort of smile. Privately, you think he must want something to do.
Still, you don’t voice this thought. The two of you bicker over it for hours some days, emphatically switching between this track or not, raised voices snickering into laughs that leave you boneless on the floor. It’s fun; you have just as much fun intermittently encouraging and challenging his ego as you had before. It could almost be normal, even.
Except that every night, you dream of falling: wind whipping into your face, gut somewhere far beyond you, in an liminal space so separate from the world that even when you scream, there’s no sound. Sometimes, you’re someone else in those dreams, still falling with the same sort of desperate inevitability; sometimes, they think of someone: a mental image of a loved one always too blurry to fully make out, but who you swear looks like you. But you always wake up before you hit the ground, and then the dream is over. You’re left lying there, heart in your throat and gasping, clutching at the sheets for proof that there is something beneath you at all.
Sometimes, when you open your eyes, Xyx is there staring at you, irises glowing an uncanny neon in the dark. But then morning comes, and you don’t talk about it, and neither does he.
He doesn’t talk about dying, either: about the accident, or what came after, or how he feels about it. If you didn’t know him so well now, you might be tricked into thinking he doesn’t think about it at all. But you’ve caught him at the window before, sunlight streaming straight through him and into the room beyond, something heavy in his lightless eyes — and you don’t press. You don’t need to, and he doesn’t want it, anyway.
There isn’t much else to do. You offer to leave the television on under the strict condition that he does not touch it, but he makes a dismissive comment about ‘the electronic nanny’, and you don’t bring it up again. Instead, he rifles through your bookshelf at alarming speed, tearing through everything you have: murder mysteries and poetry, entire series of sci-fi and high fantasy, morbid nonfictions and bodice rippers. Any blank notebooks you leave out, too, disappear along with stray pens; you find them tucked away in odd corners, full of scrawling script you would never think to read.
You take to swinging by the bookstore on your commute home every now and then, carefully picking through and selecting whatever you think he’d like best: history, politics, novels about magic as wide as your fist. You never linger in the religious and supernatural section, and you never linger on why. At the pawn shop across the street, you keep your eye open for any cheap, relatively disposable radios; he’d mentioned missing it once, and you’re convinced there must be other electronics he can interact with without destroying. So far, you haven’t found any.
And every day, you come home to music.
Today, something low and slow is cresting from the speakers of your beat-up CD player; the moment you’re through the door, Xyx is wordlessly pulling you in. One hand cups his freezing neck, the other held in his, each individual finger interlaced and locked like a lifeline. This close, you can see his freckles, his eyelashes — blonde at the tips with the sun that will never touch them again. Not really; not like that.
You wish it could. You wish the two of you could walk out the door right now, take a spontaneous trip, make some bad decisions. You wish you could take him dancing somewhere other than your kitchen where he’d almost scared the life out of you, the two of you twisting in sync in any club or event or parking lot you wanted.
You wish he was still alive.
“Never thought I’d be a kept man,” Xyx sighs, and there’s real bitterness there, scarcely disguised. But when you squeeze his hand, he squeezes back, and when your aching feet start to move, he moves with you. The music arcs high and low while Xyx leads you through the motions, his lips to your temple. When he dips you, fingers digging painfully tight into your waist, his mouth is so close to yours that for a moment, you swear he’s going to kiss you.
He doesn’t, though. Instead, he spins you round and round until the last song ends and then some, feet not quite touching the ground, light not quite hitting his eyes. Sometimes, when you listen close enough, you think he can hear him humming, so low and anchorless it could be nothing but your imagination. Looming above you, he doesn’t fully stop even when you tuck your face into his chest, closing your eyes tight and pretending you can feel a heartbeat.
He’d had so much before this: friends, a career, a life. Now he only has handwritten lists, a 20-year-old CD player, and you.
You would be tempted to say the lack of independence is killing him, if he weren’t already dead.
You fall in your dream again that night. In Xyx's skin, your name on his lips, you fall all the way down.