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Hakka watches as the soul cries, slumped over the body, tears rolling down still cheeks.
Car accident, it seems. Nothing too crazy, just a car smashed against a tree. Too much ice, maybe. Mechanical things are scarier than you’d think. There were two passengers, both male, but only one soul left behind. He glows blue, bright, almost incandescent as his fingers ghost over pale cheeks. His body practically sparkles against the blanket of snow around them. Full of love, it seems. That’s a shame.
He can sympathise with them, but he’s not allowed to get attached.
That’s rule number one.
Sometimes they’re monstrous, snarling creatures poisoned by the weight of all their last regrets. Those lost souls are the type to fight back, the type to get noticed by those still alive enough to report them. Sometimes they’re beautiful, breathtaking and cursed and utterly accepting of their fate. They’re the type that won’t speak, that just follow wordlessly behind him as he sends their spirits on their way. He’s seen a little bit of everything over the years.
In the end, humanity is just as precious and fucked up as anything else.
He never really understood what made some spirits linger anyways, but it wasn’t really his job to find out. It was part of it sometimes, mollifying the ones who have some big final regret, but usually they’re fighters. Usually he needs to attack them first and force them out himself. Some of his clients were families, concerned children wanting to send their parents away at peace, vindictive ex-lovers, a caretaker, a teacher, someone who noticed a presence that simply wouldn’t go away. Disease, murder, arson, assault, poison, anything. It’s a mixed bag. It’s usually those closest that notice first because they’re the ones who are always looking for a trace, whether out of fear or love.
It’s bittersweet. Hakka always preferred the ones that fought him back, the ones that made him really work for it. At least he won’t feel bad about defending himself.
He offers his hand to the young man in front of him, still heaving, still clutching the body next to him, the other male motionless in the dead of the night. Spiritless. Whoever that was must have already moved on without him, whether intentional or not. Seeing how attached this spirit seems, perhaps it was not. Another cruelty.
“Come on brother, let's get you somewhere warmer.”
No matter how they react, it’s always a little like coaxing cats. He always starts with a softer touch, something to cushion the blow.
The spirit lingers though, stubborn, ghostly hands phasing through that other man’s chest once more as if trying to nurse out one more breath. The soul is undeterred, if anything it makes him work harder to try to finally reach the other, hands reaching desperately toward the body in front of him. Hakka doesn’t have the heart to tell him he never will.
“Why him?” He finally asks, voice quivering in the winter air. Souls can’t breathe though, so while Hakka makes clouds in the air, the soul beside him can only ponder, boring invisible holes into the corpse in his arms.
Always the same questions with them. If not why me, then why us, why him, why the people I cared about. Fate doesn’t have favourites. It simply doesn’t work that way, and it’s narcissistic to assume otherwise. In lieu of answering, Hakka just strokes his head once and tugs his hands away, pulling him along towards his final destination.
It’s better for the both of them to get this over with. Another soul for the ledger.
-
It was a funny idea, the fact that he died just to become a wandering ghost himself. Karma, maybe. Imagine that. Time to call an exorcist for your old exorcist. Haha.
Except they wouldn’t because no one has ever been able to see him after all this time.
He’s learned a lot of interesting things, to be fair. There are some things that you only learn from the other side.
One: There are more souls out there than he previously thought. Most of them are harmless, living semblances of independent lives. They pass through other humans without anyone noticing. Hakka could always tell when they spot someone who could see them because they skitter on sight, ducking into buildings and vanishing before they can get caught. It doesn't affect him.
Two: Nothing changes, but everything is different. The rules are weird. He can phase through walls if he wants to, so he has to float around instead of truly walking. He’s not allowed to touch people, or he is but they won’t be able to tell what he’s doing. Actually, no one has ever seen him, spirit or human alike for that matter, but he can see everyone else. Maybe it's his fate as an exorcist, as someone who always had a foot in each world. Now he gets no real place in either. Sometimes he can pick up objects if he tries hard enough. Sometimes he can’t. He doesn't feel things as strongly before, not the water from the rain nor the longing in his chest.
It’s almost like a rejection, but you have to exist first in order to truly be rejected.
Hakka doesn't have to eat, but he likes to, likes sitting in the feeling of being more alive than he truly is. It’s a matter of comfort. Cooking was always one of his few passions while he was still alive. He stayed at his old apartment for a while just going through the motions. Wake up. Cook. Wander. Go back to sleep. Repeat.
Then, when the rent stopped passing through, people started throwing away the parts of the life he left behind. He still stayed there though. There was no harm in it anyway, not when no one would notice him sticking around.
A living ghost.
-
The first tenant that moves in is nice enough. He’s fiery and sharp, a little too loud. The type that'll burn you if you get too close. He plays games till late at night. Shooters, mainly, but sometimes he’s better off doing other stuff. The heavy keyboard clacking keeps him up at night.
His voice booms over the phone whenever his family calls, laughs echoing around the room. That’s when he really comes alive. It’s the only time he truly opens up, retreating back into his shell the moment the line drops.
He must be lonely.
Hakka understands it because he’s a mirror to it; he’s just as lonely as everyone else. Maybe worse, honestly, because the man doesn’t seem to notice anything he does, not when his clothes are moving around, not when the doors open and close, not even when he waves his arms in front of his face and screams. Hakka screams until his throat goes hoarse, the only evidence that he's been doing anything at all.
He sleeps and wakes up, throat back to normal. Hard reset. One day the new tenant leaves, but nothing seems to change.
Hakka started playing games with it, seeing how much he could get away with before he got noticed. Once he turned all the toilet paper backwards so it was facing inwards. Another time he hard boiled their eggs and put them back in the fridge. None of the tenants really cared, so for better or worse he could continue his normal existence day by day in his old, long-gone home.
-
The newest tenant was a firework of a man, all bright hair and bright eyes with a bright voice to boot. He seemed kind of cute, honestly, a little spark of a human. His voice was loud, but not sharp, not cutting, not piercing. Being around him was like being inside a kiln, warming him all over from the inside out.
Hakka watched over him for a few days, just observing his patterns and letting him get settled while nestled between the walls. He really was cute, ritualistic and distractible and comfortable to be around. He’d lose himself for hours at a time on whatever caught his eye. He felt special somehow, different. This one was definitely an improvement over the last one, the "crazy jackhammer dude" as he liked to call him. Then again, it's not hard to be better than someone who liked digging into the floors at night and interrupting his sleep.
Maybe he shouldn’t have gotten so comfortable around him though. No, definitely not, because here he is at 3am, hair still dripping from his shower, and he leaves the bathroom to see the red-haired guy screaming. He’s pointing and screaming and Hakka turns around to look behind him, but there’s nothing weird there so he turns back again even more confused than before. Maybe the new guy is a weirdo after all.
“WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU?!” The man shouts, one hand poised to grab his wrist as the other vaguely covers his chest from view.
His eyes widen even further when his hands pass through Hakka’s.
Oh, right. Ghost things.
It turns out the cute little (same-height, he insists, because floating above the floor adds extra inches and that’s unfair) red-haired guy is Flayon and he's never met a ghost before, but he won’t call an exorcist for him until Hakka actively tries to ruin his life. I’ve had worse roommates, he said with a grin. It didn’t make Hakka feel any better. He likes strawberries, but prefers chocolate or vanilla milkshakes. He likes red and blue, but thinks sometimes they can be too bright. He prefers mountains over the sea, likes chicken, and wouldn't mind cooking with him so he can stop doing it alone. He likes playing old games and wants to get better at other languages. He’s guarded and careful and pours so much love into everything he does that it radiates off of him like sunlight, even when he claims he doesn’t.
He’s perfect.
“I’m mean as fuck!” Flayon shouts, more to fill space than anything.
“No you’re not,” Hakka replies, words thrown back before he can even think about them.
A mean person would have kicked him out a long time ago, forced him out rather than dealing with an unwanted ghost roommate. A mean person wouldn’t compliment others when he thinks they can’t hear, wouldn’t chase every insult thrown in jest with a similarly sweet moment of sincerity. A mean person wouldn’t open up to him and give him a chance to just be himself. Above all, a mean person wouldn’t look at him and see him and make every effort to truly see him as if trying to make up for every single person who never even tried.
“Do you still want to stay with me then?” Flayon offers softly, right foot drawing nervous figure-eights into the floorboards.
“Hell yeah, baby!” Hakka cringes a little at the eagerness overflowing from his voice, willing his throat to dial it back a little. “That would be really nice, Flay.”
Flayon doesn’t judge him though, if anything he just looks relieved as if there was ever a chance he would say no.
Cute.
-
Shit.
Phone call.
Those don’t always go well.
Flayon’s face is pinched up in anguish and he looks ready to cry but he can't yet, hands wringing together as his leg bounces faster and faster. He watches him from behind the door, observes the way Flayon presses a hand on his chest as he breathes in deep. It’s like he pushes and pulls an invisible string tied to his chest, willing his lungs to just breathe. In and out. Just breathe and get through this. He stumbles a bit after he hangs up, curling up into a ball on the couch.
He gets up and runs his hand along the kettle, leaving it there long enough to burn. Flayon stares at his hand, the lack of a mark, and places it back for a second more. He trudges over to the sink and runs the water, masking his tears as it all empties out into the drain.
Flayon, Hakka thinks, numbly, tenderly, and that is all he’s capable of thinking for a while.
Flayon. Flayon. Flayon. Flayon. Flayon.
Hakka wishes he could give him a hug, a real one, but they make things work as best as they can.
“I was going to be a doctor before I was an exorcist,” Hakka revealed, wrapping gauze tenderly around his hand. “Or well, I trained a bit to become one. Then I had to leave, but you can’t have everything. Still picked up enough along the way.”
Hakka presses a gentle kiss to the air just above his wrapped hand.
Close enough.
Days of injury checking turn into days of Hakka draped on his couch beside him, pilfering strawberries from the counter as Flayon tells him about his day. He stops hiding behind the walls. The days pass quickly with something new in them. The nights are filled with endless conversations about life, death and philosophical shit. And games, always plenty of games.
“Sadness isn’t a good look for your pretty face, Hakka. Play something with me! Beat me up! Do it, you won’t.”
Hakka wasn’t really in a playing kind of mood, but who was he to deny him? Flayon eagerly pushes a controller into his hand, but he doesn’t play as well as he normally would. His hand obviously holds him back, but he just scolds him for going easy on him whenever he tries to pull back. It’s annoying because Flayon probably means it. Going through things like normal probably would make him feel better. It’s just hard to ignore how the pain paints itself across his face the moment he thinks Hakka’s gaze has slipped away. Silly boy. As if it was that easy to look away.
He wants to wrap Flayon up in a blanket and keep him warm and safe forever.
He didn’t have friends, not even acquaintances really. Even before he died, he was just a wanderer going wherever his job required. He was a man for the people, after all. There was no room for being selfish.
But he supposes Flayon is exceptional. In many different ways.
-
“Welcome back, loser,” Hakka calls as he finally hears motion coming from the door. He rushes over and passes his hands through his hair, ending the greeting with a little tap on the forehead.
It’s far past midnight when Flayon finally returns home, offering a tired glance as he hooked his coat against the door. Tough night, it seems.
Hakka can tell that something is weighing on him, that his steps thud against the floor a little more than usual. He cuts his vegetables with a little too much force, tossing the peeler in the sink with a definitive thunk. Flayon grimaces a little as the water runs from cold to hot, patience worn a little too thin. His voice is less controlled than usual, modulating from too loud to too soft and back before the sentences can even finish.
Flayon is the strongest person he knows. The type to bear the weight of the world with enviable grace, steady and solid. But tonight he sees it flash across his face unbidden, the echoes of pain tossed aside again and again.
Obviously something is wrong, but Hakka was never the type to pry.
Flayon keeps pacing around the room as Hakka watches.
“Do you think I’m worthy of love, Hakka?” He finally asks with faux nonchalance, roving hands navigating through the fridge to pick out some marinated chicken as he pointedly avoids his eyes. “Because you bet your ass I am,” he adds, a little too quick on the draw. An afterthought. An easy way out.
Flayon beamed as he said it, but the notes fell flat, a pale imitation of the real thing.
The smile stretches across Flayon’s face in an incongruent, ugly kind of way. Which was amazing in itself really, the fact that anything he did could even come remotely close to being ugly. It was a smile of denial, probably, carefully crafted to ward off any intruders. It might have fooled him if he didn’t know him so well, if Flayon hadn’t invited him so sweetly into his heart a long time ago. He's starting to force that composed mask back on. If Hakka didn't do something now, this moment will become something that festers in his head for days on end until it's just another joke, a punchline repeated so many times regardless of the burrs of hurt still stubbornly clinging to it.
“Of course you are, angel. You deserve this world and then some,” he replies after a moment, pushing a smile onto his face to chase away his worries.
Hakka’s chest aches a little, the dull pain sinking into his ribcage. Where his real heart would be, probably, if he still had one. It’s so typical of Flayon to ask something so serious, so real, but steel himself to be treated like a joke the second it leaves his lips. He can’t help but gently poke at Flayon’s forehead again, softer this time. Silly boy. As if he’d ever laugh at him for something important.
His hand passes through him on its way home, but the gesture is the same.
-
“-and sometimes I want to tell them ‘if Hakka was here he would tell you that I'm just a little guy!’ and it's like… oh yeah, you're my ghost and no one else knows you, so they wouldn’t get it,” Flayon said happily, fists waving in the air to punctuate every beat. He was so cute as he ranted about his day. “And sometimes I feel bad, not that I don't like being here with you, but it must be kinda lonely for you.”
“I could never feel lonely with you here,” Hakka assures him.
Flayon looks at him, so so soft, the gaze in his eyes strangely distant. He takes in a breath and exhales just as quickly, chasing breath after breath as they sit in silence.
“Do you think if you met me and I was a spirit instead that things would be the same?”
It’s hard to say.
Hakka's felt connected to Flayon from the moment that they met. But rules are rules. Rule number one: don’t get attached. Would he have picked love? Would he have even known what it was? It stings, knowing he probably wouldn’t. He’s always meant it when he said that Flayon was kinder than he was.
Selfishly, he wants to believe that he would though. He wants to believe that they would find each other in every universe. Flayon should be the exception to every rule.
His silence is probably answer enough.
“It doesn’t matter if you wouldn’t, Hakka. I want you to be here with me now, ghostly body and all.”
Flayon’s words echo in his head. Hakka feels so painfully, inexplicably alive even though he knows deep down that he isn't. His phantom heart shudders, preening at those words. He knew how important it was for him, the idea of being truly wanted. It wasn’t something given so freely.
Finally looking back, Hakka thought about how sad it is that they had to meet like this. That maybe in another world they could have met somewhere else just like this, in a guild hall, in a battle, in a cafe, in the streets, in the cockpit of a plane, and he'd just be so in love, so inexplicably in love that he'd be crazy with it. He could picture it as easily as breathing.
It would be just like now, but easier.
Maybe that was his real regret, not loving enough while he was still alive.
When you grow up you realise that not everything is crazy and sometimes you just have to settle down. It’s a shame it took him literally dying to figure that out.
Hakka grieves for all the futures that can never be.
It’s just like Flayon can tell what he’s thinking though, so equally in tune with him. This is just what they do. They go back to it, to planning all these adventures they would have as if it could really happen someday because maybe they could, just not in the same way. He longs for it so deeply sometimes that it physically hurts, like a knife twisting into his skin over and over and over again.
“I’d like to build a garden in our home one day,” Flayon starts, voice light but firm as he drifts into talking about cacao trees and honey and the intimacy of eating something home-grown and theirs.
“With tomatoes too,” he throws out with a giggle, just adding things for the sake of it.
Every time they come back to this vision, they always add on a few more embellishments. A cute little space for their kitty. A warm, open kitchen. A little art nook where they can draw on a big shared canvas. A space for music, the perfect home studio. Enough space for their family and friends. A daughter. Their perfect home.
“After that, you’d take me to a wet amusement park, right Hakka?”
They both nod and laugh, knowing it could never happen but happy to share it regardless. He’s so in love that he relishes in it, the feeling of building shared futures inside his mind. A newfound comfort to chase away the demons.
Flayon already is his perfect home.