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When Jongdae wakes up, not much has changed except for the persistent ache behind his eyes that wasn’t there before. The room still looks like it had when he had lost his cool and trashed the place, broken glass glittering in the low light of the evening sun.
He groans and sits up. The collar of his button-up shirt digs into his throat uncomfortably, and he hooks a finger in, pulling it away as far as he can.
“You could just undo the bowtie?” A voice says, right next to his ear.
Jongdae usually prides himself on being the antithesis of a scaredy-cat, but the sudden tickle of breath against his skin makes him startle and yelp.
He overbalances and crashes to the floor, the corner of a broken picture frame digging into his back.
Chanyeol looks down at him from atop the bed, a wide smile bunching up his cheeks, the dimple on his cheek deep enough for the shadow of sundown to catch. Every part of him is familiar, but Jongdae can’t help but feel like he’s looking at a stranger.
His edges blur when he lifts a hand to push his hair off his forehead.
“You’re bleeding,” he says, and Jongdae needs a moment to catch up with the meaning, too focused on the cadence of Chanyeol’s voice. It’s rough, even raspier than usual. Like he just finished screaming and crying, and needs a glass of water.
When the words finally start meaning something to him, Jongdae looks down at his hand, startled by the sudden sting of his palm and the feeling of sticky blood pooling against the broken glass he had crashed into.
“Fuck,” he gasps, balls his fist up to try and stop the bleeding. When he looks back up, Chanyeol is gone.
Jongdae grabs onto the edge of the bed with his uninjured hand and pulls himself up to his feet with a groan that makes him feel older than he is.
Between his clenched fingers, blood drips to the floor, staining the picture in the broken frame below. It’s splattered all over Chanyeol’s face, halfway squished into frame next to Jongdae’s, both of them beaming at the camera.
He turns away and towards the door.
Jongdae stumbles out into the hallway and feels a weird sense of vertigo at the long corridor stretching out in front of him. He knows that he needs to turn to the left to find a bathroom, but he cannot recall how he knows.
On his way, he loosens his bowtie and just drops it in front of the bathroom door. There is a first-aid kit behind the cracked surface of a mirrored cupboard, and he tries his best not to get blood all over every surface.
“You know how queasy I get seeing blood,” Chanyeol scolds, and Jongdae is only a little surprised when he looks up and Chanyeol's eyes bore into his in the mirror.
A memory flashes into Jongdae's mind: Chanyeol standing behind him at the sink in Jongdae's tiny bathroom, arms wrapped around his slight waist. It's gone as quickly as it had appeared, and Chanyeol's arm reaches past his torso, and he picks up some antiseptic wipes from the kit.
“Were you always this clumsy?” He mutters, and Jongdae swallows hard. No, Jongdae wasn't the clumsy one out of the two of them. Chanyeol even asking the question feels charged somehow, and Jongdae's flinch is only partly due to the sting of alcohol on his wound.
Chanyeol works quietly, wrapping Jongdae's hand in gauze and finishing it up with a butterfly tie. When he's done, Jongdae looks back up at his face, and for a moment, he thinks Chanyeol will lean forward to press a kiss to his head.
Instead, when Jongdae blinks, Chanyeol is gone again.
It’s disorienting, and Jongdae sways, only partly due to blood loss. He looks back into the mirror, into his own eyes, and almost doesn’t recognize himself. He turns away and hurries back into the hallway. His tie has vanished from its spot on the floor.
When he gets back to the room, it’s as if nothing had ever happened there. Gone are the traces of Jongdae’s anger and hurt, no more shards of glass and charred remnants of pictures, and no more blood pooling on the hardwood floors. Jongdae’s palm stings. He pulls on his collar to loosen it, and his top button pops off and clatters to the floor noisily, sliding underneath the perfectly made bed.
“No worries,” Chanyeol says to his right, a single finger tracing the buttonhole on Jongdae’s shirt, “I can fix it! I’ll just bring my sewing kit the next time I come around, alright?”
Jongdae tries brushing his hand off, and passes through it like water. It’s cold. It’s completely unlike Chanyeol’s hands, usually so warm and soft everywhere except for the calluses on his fingertips. His guitar leans against the wall in the corner next to Jongdae’s couch and collects dust. Jongdae can’t quite remember when he last played it, strumming along to Jongdae humming and singing around the apartment.
“I don’t need you to do all that for me,” Jongdae replies and feels as cold as the nonexistence of Chanyeol’s warmth. He belatedly realizes that this is the first time he has replied in what feels like days. When he looks up at Chanyeol, craning his head slightly, his bemused smile has finally left his face.
He scoffs. “I know. You don’t need anything from me at all,” and then promptly vanishes, doesn’t even wait for Jongdae to look away this time.
Something in Jongdae rears its ugly head, something he keeps pushing back, and he pulls at his collar again. It feels like he can’t breathe, like air is getting into his lungs but not traveling to all the important places.
He pulls too hard, and the remaining buttons on his shirt go flying. It slips down his shoulders at his angry huff, and he turns to the wardrobe opposite his bed. He’s glad to be rid of the constriction of his collar, but dreads what he knows he will find in the wardrobe.
Mixed into his clothes, sandwiched between cozy cardigans and linen pants that cinch at the waist, are shirts that hang too big on Jongdae’s frame. Sweats that would not hold up on his slight hips, and socks that have a hole at the big toe. Jongdae can’t stand holes in his socks.
He grabs whatever he can reach at random and curses when a huge gray monstrosity of a worn old shirt ends up getting pulled along with a sweatshirt much too warm for the season. Begrudgingly, he slips the shirt over his head but stills when hands grasp at Jongdae’s waist, bunching up the fabric. They pull down, and Jongdae’s head pops out of the neck hole.
“I always liked this shirt on you,” Chanyeol says, smiling, playing with the hem. Jongdae rests his hands on Chanyeol’s shoulders, and it feels like a gross charade of what is so familiar.
“I did, too. Doesn’t smell much like you anymore, though.” He says and slides his hands down towards Chanyeol’s wrists. He’s gone before Jongdae can reach his elbows.
The pictures Jongdae had shattered before in all his rage are back where they used to be, lined up in a specific way Jongdae never quite understood. It’s not chronological, that much he knows because he remembers when every single one of those pictures was taken. He never had much of an eye for interior design and was fine with whatever Chanyeol decided on.
He sweeps a hand right at the picture taken at a friend's wedding that sits right in the middle, and manages to take out all of them in one go, the entire lineup tumbling to the floor. The crash of glass is less satisfying this time around. That doesn’t stop Jongdae, only gives him pause for a second.
A little model of Namsan Tower in a snow globe is next, along with the replica of a cheesy lock, ‘J&C’ engraved in the middle with a love heart around it. It had been a joke at the time. It feels serious when Jongdae dunks it into the trash can underneath the desk.
“This making you feel better?” Chanyeol asks, indifferent to Jongdae’s carnage, rumpling the sheets of Jongdae’s comforter.
“Not at all. Shut up.” Jongdae says and reflexively, “Sorry. I don’t mean that. About shutting up.”
“I know,” Chanyeol says, and Jongdae throws a bracelet at his muddy shape, grabbed from the little box of trinkets Chanyeol loved slowly but surely filling for him.
Next, he grabs the jar of preserved moss from a hike a while back. Camping isn’t really something Jongdae is interested in, but he’d do anything. Had done anything. And he remembers it not being so bad, just the two of them and the song of a thousand birds and critters and the low gurgle of a nearby river.
“I wish you would stop doing this,” Chanyeol says, and Jongdae has never felt more satisfied lighting a matchstick on fire than he feels now, slowly watching the dried plant catch the flame and crumble down to ash. The cut on his hand burns. The moss burns. Chanyeol goes up in flames, cold like the shock of a fresh burn wound. Chanyeol burns.
But he doesn’t disappear, no matter how much Jongdae wishes he would.
“Take your time, Jongdae,” he says, dimple catching the shadow of the flame licking at his collar, “I’ll be here for a while.”
When he grabs for Jongdae’s hand, his palm is freezing cold. Jongdae yanks his hand back and throws the burning jar at the nearest wall. It explodes into a mess of ash and flames and glass, leaving dirty smudges all over the wall and floor.
“Why are you still here, at all?” Jongdae grits out, but he can’t quite manage to pull his hand away. Chanyeol does it for him once he manages to pull Jongdae down to sit on the bed, shoulder to ice-cold shoulder and knee to freezing thigh. Instead, he props his chin up on his palms and smiles that same smile at Jongdae. The one lacking sincerity, the one dripping in shadow and fire and hurt.
“You want me to be here, and that’s why I’m here. I rather wouldn’t be, honestly.” And that admission is what hurts worst. Jongdae grabs at a pillow and yanks it out of its sheets, and whacks it over to where Chanyeol had sat just a second ago. It turns into a cloud of feathers where his grip rips it open, and Jongdae feels like he’s a little figurine stuck in the snow globe he destroyed earlier. There’s nowhere to go, and fluffy white rains down around him, tickling his nose where it sticks to his face.
Chanyeol is on the couch now, watching him. He’s sitting on the right side, where he always sits, where his weight has imprinted a depression into the cushion, perfectly Chanyeol-shaped and matching the one Jongdae left on the other side of the couch.
“Maybe you need to really get it all over with? Burn the whole place down. It’s just gonna keep coming back, otherwise,” he suggests with a cute tilt of his head. His eyes are wide, sparkling in the low light, and his mouth is red as blood, plush and soft-looking.
The distance between the bed and the couch seems monumental to Jongdae at that moment.
“Maybe I do,” he says and lights another matchstick with the little box sitting on his bedside drawer.
He’s not sure if ghosts are necessarily affected by fire, but if it keeps him from seeing them everywhere he turns, it’s worth a try. When he drops the match to the floor and it goes up into a big tongue of flame that licks at Jongdae’s life confined into four walls, Chanyeol smiles at him through the red of dancing fire.
He reaches out a hand, and Jongdae can’t help but stumble up to his feet and leap through the flames to catch it. It’s warm, pressing into his bandaged palm.