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When the third incantation of the night summons a horde of skeletal cats to his chosen alleyway instead of the one soul he’s been contracted to find, Nice decides to call it quits.
”Guess that Luo kid’s alive somewhere after all,” he muses, running a knuckle along the bumpy spine of the cat currently nuzzling into his calf. Purring is off the table, given the lack of vocal chords, but he’s pretty sure the full-body rattling is meant to convey the same level of satisfaction.
“Or you could’ve fucked up the spell. That’s always an option.”
Nice rolls his eyes. “Three times?”
“Maybe you fucked it up in the exact same way three times.”
“Alright, that’s enough from the peanut gallery. Only one of us here is a trained sorcerer, and it certainly isn’t you, pencil-pusher.”
“Joke’s on you,” Lin Ling replies with a shit-eating grin, “I mostly used a tablet. I can’t even remember the last time I held an actual wooden pencil.”
With a final pat to the cat’s head, Nice stands, dusting off the seat of his pants. He breaks the magic circle he’s sketched out in chalk on the pavement with the toe of his boot, then snuffs out the remaining candles with a snap of his fingers. The cats, no longer bound by the confines of his spell, scatter. They’ll make their way back to whatever grave or trash heap they crawled out of, returning to their inanimate state within the hour.
That business dealt with, Nice looks to his companion, who’s floating curiously above one of the sigils Nice drew, face scrunched up in concentration. Behind Lin Ling, at the mouth of the alley, one of the skeletal cats walks carelessly into the street — it gets run over almost immediately, but when the car’s gone, the bones merely collect themselves again into the shape of a cat and continue on their way.
Lin Ling, noticing Nice’s inattention, clicks his tongue. “C’mon,” he says, in what he would vehemently deny is a whine, “we’ve talked about this. I don’t like you looking through me. It feels…”
Nice drags his gaze from Lin Ling’s transparent torso back to his face. Hardly chastised, but not wanting to listen to Lin Ling’s diatribe on undead etiquette for the nth time, he says, “Like you’re not even there, I know. I’m sorry, alright? I’m a little distracted at the moment.”
Judging by the pout Lin Ling gives him in response, the apology is just barely satisfactory.
“At least you listen sometimes,” Lin Ling mutters, crossing his arms over his chest.
“I listen always,” Nice corrects. He slips his gloves from his pocket and methodically pulls them on, testing the give of the leather with a flex of his fingers. “I listen, and I filter through the bratty remarks about my taste in fashion—“
“You dress like a Victorian vampire in China in the middle of summer, my complaints are totally valid—“
“—so I can retain anything of actual value,” Nice finishes with a decisive clap of his hands. “It’s late, let’s just go home for the night. I’ll get in touch with Cyan tomorrow and let her know this is as far as I can go with helping her.”
Nice’s sorcery covers a broad range of elements and skills, but his real talent lies in necromancy. The locator spells he has in his grimoire wouldn’t cut it, given that Cyan hasn’t seen this kid in years and has nothing of his she’d want to risk losing as a spell component.
He doesn’t think she’ll mind, though. The worst case scenario for Nice is her best case scenario — if Nice couldn’t call him, he’s not dead yet, and she has a chance to bring him home safe and sound.
Given what she mentioned about his heritage — a subspecies of demon, known for bringing misfortune to anyone around them — Nice expected him to have already been killed and stripped for parts.
“You’re going to eat, right?” Lin Ling squints at him. Nice smiles blithely in response, averting his eyes. “Nice.”
“And ruin my delicate figure?”
“You haven’t eaten in…” Lin Ling trails off, unsure. Whether or not it’s a kindness at this point, Nice feigns ignorance, packing away his things while Lin Ling sorts himself out. “It’s been a while,” he says at last, with none of his usual bluster but still managing to prick at Nice’s conscience regardless. “You promised, man.”
Ghosts tend to forget things.
It’s one of the first things he learned as a necromancer, one of the most important things. The longer they’ve been dead, the more they forget. It starts with little things, recent things — a conversation, their last meal. How and when they died. The deeper-set memories, the ones that are considered integral to who they are as a person, they last the longest. Their first love, their childhood home, the embrace of a loved one.
But they fade all the same, given enough time.
When all that’s left is pure emotion, anger or sadness or fear, that’s when they become a wraith. Something to be exorcised, disposed of.
Wraiths are dangerous, after all. They have no direction or will of their own, driven by pure, unbridled instinct, and they’re drawn to mortals with strong spiritual sense — whether or not they’re aware of that sense. Those with experience and know-how can protect themselves; those without… well, they account for at least a few dozen disappearances or unexplained deaths every year.
It’s early days yet for Lin Ling. As near as Nice can figure, he’s only been dead for a year or two. He doesn’t remember the manner of his death, but the wounds on his head and back that sometimes flicker into view suggest it wasn’t very… neat.
Mostly, though, he forgets random tidbits of their conversations, or the color of the birds nesting on Nice’s balcony. Frustrating, but ultimately easily overlooked.
And yet he latches onto certain things like a damn dog with a bone, Nice muses, slinging his bag over his shoulder as he straightens up. I shouldn’t have let it get to a point that he’s worried about me.
What he really shouldn’t have done was have one of his ridiculous fainting spells in front of Lin Ling. Lin Ling can’t interact with anything on the physical plane, and not being able to get Nice help spooked him.
“I’ll make something when we get in,” Nice says, because placating Lin Ling now is preferable to being kept up half the night by Lin Ling’s inevitable nagging.
“Congee,” Lin Ling says, adamant.
Nice sighs. “Sure. Congee. I’ll even add chicken if there’s any left from the other night.”
Lin Ling stares at him for a moment, probably weighing the sincerity of his words, then nods and swoops down to float alongside Nice, brushing his hand against Nice’s glove. A shock of cold spreads over his skin beneath the leather, raising gooseflesh in its wake. He feels Lin Ling, though; the faintest bit of pressure, a touch of resistance when he instinctively presses into it. Enough to know it’s Lin Ling beside him.
He’d enchanted the gloves recently — he rarely takes them off to begin with, so it seemed the most reasonable method. Ostensibly because it’s useful in his line of work to be able to physically sense the incorporeal in addition to his magical talents. Really, though, it’s…
(Nice likes it when Lin Ling smiles. The sunny warmth of it fills him up like a hot coffee poured into a mug. Lin Ling’s quick to smile, too, but any reminder of how little he can do for Nice in his current form tends to put a furrow between his brows, dampening his enthusiasm for the world at large.
The gloves don’t fix everything. They hardly fix anything, if Nice is being honest with himself. But Lin Ling’s been smiling more — frowning less — since the enchantment took hold. It’s enough.)
…really, it’s just because he’s selfish at heart. More selfish than he thinks Lin Ling knows.
_____
Nice lets himself into his apartment, waving his hand as he steps over the threshold to turn on the lights and reapply his wards. He shrugs out of his jacket, toes off his shoes, and drops his bag on the entryway table along with his keys. Lin Ling darts ahead, disappearing into the spare room. He’s humming loudly enough Nice has no trouble hearing him even as he moves to the kitchen to make good on his promise to feed himself something other than coffee and spite.
Despite his frequent and colorful protests, Nice actually enjoys cooking. He likes how methodical it is. This plus this plus heat and time equals a delicious meal. The longer and more complex the recipe, the more appealing he finds it.
Eating, though… eating is another thing entirely.
He tries not to dwell on that as he lays out ingredients on the counter alongside the rice cooker Lin Ling forced him to buy.
He wishes Lin Lind had insisted on something else. Something more time-consuming, tedious. He could let his body move on autopilot for a while longer, cast his higher brain functioning out the window and drift through the empty, weightless void and—
“Nice, a little help, please?”
Nice looks down.
Standing next to him, arms raised and straining to reach the countertop far above him, is a small plush doll. It would be a simple enchantment for someone of Nice’s level to animate it, breathing life into floppy, cotton-stuffed limbs, but this isn’t his doing for once. He did have the doll custom made — brown hair, brown button eyes, dressed in a simple white t-shirt and jeans, all to have it resemble his favorite stray as much as possible.
Lin Ling may not be able to interact with him in his usual form, but possessing a doll made to look just like him evens the playing field a bit.
Nice takes a moment to marvel at Lin Ling’s determination — he’s two seconds away from trying to scale the drawer handles with his nubby little fingerless hands — before he crouches down and grabs Lin Ling under his arms.
“We could’ve gotten you something with better locomotion,” Nice points out, settling the doll onto his shoulder and carefully turning back to his food prep. “A mannequin, maybe.”
“Too uncanny valley,” Lin Ling replies. He can’t hold onto Nice with his nonexistent fingers, so he half wraps his stubby arms around Nice’s head. Distracting, but he’s gotten used to Lin Ling’s quirks over the last few months. “If I saw myself in the mirror I’d probably shit myself. Ectoplasm everywhere.”
The congee is somehow less appetizing now. “I thought you wanted me to eat, A-Ling.”
He feels the gentle squeeze of Lin Ling’s arms. “Sorry, sorry, I didn’t think that through. But I’m serious, something bigger like that would’ve been too much. I like this doll. It’s soft, and warm — I mean, it’s probably warm, I can’t really feel it — and you can hug me without it being weird. You wanna hug a mannequin?”
Nice doesn’t say that he would gladly hold Lin Ling in whatever vessel suited him best. He doesn’t say that he treasures the time spent in this apartment only because Lin Ling is here, because in here Lin Ling has substance, here he doesn’t have to rely on a flimsy enchantment to reach out and feel Lin Ling reaching back.
He says none of it because— well. He’s not sure he physically can, for one. It seems like the kind of thing that would make him break out in hives the moment it touched his tongue. And beyond that, he’s not entirely sure it would be well-received, whatever jokes Lin Ling makes about how much more huggable he is as the doll.
What he says instead is, “You just like being ferried around the apartment, don’t you?”
Lin Ling groans and jabs at Nice’s shoulder with his dangling leg. “Jerk. Idiot. Asshole. See if I scare off all the nightmare creatures from under your bed while you sleep tonight.”
“The nightmare creatures and I have a deal,” Nice reminds him, adding the last of his ingredients to the rice cooker and setting the time. “And besides that, just because you don’t sleep doesn’t make you prime body guard material. You’re about as intimidating as one of those dogs women carry around in their purses. In or out of the doll.”
“I’m gonna tape knives to my dumb, plushie arms.”
“Mmhm. The nightmare creatures will tremble at the sight of you for sure.”
“What about you? Huh?” Lin Ling waggles a decidedly knifeless arm in front of Nice’s face. “I could do some real damage before you stopped me.”
Nice could drag Lin Ling’s soul out of that doll in a heartbeat if he felt the need to, which Lin Ling knows. He had to do it the first time Lin Ling possessed it and panicked when he couldn’t get himself back out.
“As long as you avoid the face,” Nice says blithely, “you know it’s how I attract customers.”
Lin Ling snorts. “If you weren’t any good at what you do, your pretty face wouldn’t matter.”
Pretty face. Sometimes Nice wonders if Lin Ling can even recognize how much they look alike. If Lin Ling means anything with remarks like that.
He rinses his hands off, dries them with the towel slung over the top drawer handle, then turns his attention to the stack of mail he left unsorted on the counter when he stepped out this morning.
“Speaking of jobs…” Lin Ling leans forward as much as he dares as Nice picks up a handful of letters. “Are you still getting requests from that creepy guy? Uh, Shang… something?”
“Unfortunately, he’s a persistent client.” Junk, junk, bills — Nice pauses when he comes across an envelope with a gold seal. Stamped with a stylized tree, branches extending every which way, blotting out the background entirely. He flips it around, but of course there’s no name or return address; this wasn’t sent through the usual channels. Speak of the fucking devil. “He wants me to find his son’s spirit.”
“But you tried already,” Lin Ling points out. “I mean, that’s… how you met me, right?”
Another failed summoning. Nice… tends to obsess over his failures. It’s a terrible habit he’s never quite been able to break. When something goes awry, he dissects every step, reworks it a dozen times, until he gets the result he wants — typically at the cost of his health and personal relationships.
This particular summoning, though, he knows without a doubt that he did everything right. If Shang Chao exists as a wandering spirit, he would’ve heeded Nice’s call and come to heel within an hour of the ritual taking place.
Instead, just before his phone’s timer went off, he got Lin Ling.
Shang De told him Shang Chao was dead. That he’d seen the body, that there was no chance his son was alive somewhere, evading him. So that left precious few explanations as to why Shang Chao failed to answer Nice’s summoning.
Either Shang Chao’s moved on successfully to the afterlife… or he’s already become a wraith.
According to Shang De, his son passed away more than five years ago. It’s certainly not unheard of for spirits with lingering attachments and regrets to succumb that fast.
The summoning should have failed outright, though, if that were the case. At most, it would’ve gone the way of his ritual tonight — drawing in the more malleable spirits of dead cats or dogs or rats, giving them just enough energy to reassemble into an approximation of their physical selves. It shouldn’t have lured in spirits with no relation to Shang Chao at all.
And yet…
It should bother him more, all the unknowns surrounding Lin Ling, the threads connecting him to Shang Chao, Shang De, to Nice, stretching out into the impenetrable dark— but then he thinks of the very first thing that Lin Ling said to him, when he realized that Nice could see him, that Nice knew Lin Ling was still here:
“Y’know how they tell you don’t go towards the light? I definitely failed that dice roll. But the light was, uh, you? I think? You were just — radiant. The brightest thing in the whole world, like a beacon or, uh, a star? Yeah, a star. My North Star, even. And I just… followed it here. To you. Sopleasedon’texorcisemeorwhatever—”
Lin Ling may not have been summoned in Shang Chao’s place after all. Maybe he simply followed the trail of Nice’s magic back to its source. Like calling to like — death to death.
Or maybe Nice is just an idiot jerk asshole and deluding himself.
Either way, it’s not something he has the energy to contemplate further tonight.
With a sharp flick of his fingers, the envelope held between his thumb and forefinger ignites. He brushes the ashes aside, gathering them in a small pile to deal with later, ignoring the button-eyed stare Lin Ling drills into the side of his head. He doesn’t like mess — least of all in his own home — but Lin Ling’s soft warmth is enough of a distraction that he doesn't feel compelled to clean up everything this instant.
“Nice?”
A soft hand pokes into Nice’s cheek. He answers with a questioning hum as he stacks the remaining mail near the edge of the table.
When Lin Ling fails to continue, though, he leans his weight against the table and plucks Lin Ling from his shoulder, holding him in his cupped hands so that he sits at Nice’s eye-level.
Lin Ling rubs his stubby hands together, fidgeting. Clearly uncertain now that he’s gotten Nice’s full attention. Nice waits him out — he has the timer set on the rice cooker, and nothing else more pressing to focus on aside from the possessed plushie in his hands.
“Do you… I mean, I know I do a lot to help you out, like making sure you eat actual meals and doing, like, PR for you with other ghosts—”
“My reputation was not nearly as bad as you seem to think it was before you came along.”
“Ghosts love gossip, Nice, they’ve got nothing better to do, and they talked about you a lot.”
Nice decides to tuck that away for later. He’s never been anything but cordial and pleasant with the ghosts he’s summoned; he can’t think of what they’d be gossiping about when he’s not around. Unless it’s like the aunties who live two floors down — they nag him constantly. When are you getting married? A handsome face like that, you could get away with murder! My husband wasn’t half as pretty as you and I put up with his foghorn snoring for thirty years!
…on second thought, maybe he won’t revisit this topic. The living aunties are more than enough, he doesn’t need another set of dead ones on top of that.
“That’s beside the point,” Lin Ling says, stamping his foot. “I’m just… kind of curious. You don’t think I’m…”
Nice adjusts his perch on the table, crossing one ankle over the other. Getting comfortable. He doesn’t mind waiting for Lin Ling to get his thoughts in order; with how forgetful ghosts can be, he’s gotten used to giving them ample time to respond. It does him no good to alienate them by rushing them when he’s usually after information. Nice has his fun now and again riling Lin Ling up, but he’s never seriously trying to hurt Lin Ling in the process.
“I’m not a burden, am I?”
Ah, Nice thinks, a frisson of fear zipping down his spine. I should’ve seen this coming. Fucking Shang De.
“Okay, don’t look at me like that, this is a reasonable concern. I drain a lot of magic from you just by being around, you’ve told me that before. I mean, I made you tell me, but whatever, it’s still true. I can’t help that, it’s just a natural thing, and I can think and talk and just — be when you’re around, so I know I’m definitely getting something out of it. And I know you didn’t mean to pick me up, I latched onto you like a lost puppy, and I ruined your chances of finding that Shang whatever’s kid, and—”
Nice pokes Lin Ling sharply in the stomach, frowning as Lin Ling yelps and scrabbles back a few centimeters, butting up against Nice’s curled fingers.
“What?” he squeaks out, turning an accusing glare on Nice. Nice knows that particular expression well enough even to read it in the near-featureless face of the doll Lin Ling wears.
“I sometimes think that bobble head of yours is filled with rocks instead of stuffing.”
“What?”
“You’re the equivalent of a pinhole in a barrel of water,” Nice tells him honestly. His magical reserves are one of his defining features as a mage — it’s why his spells to summon the dead are as effective as they are, and why he can afford to redo rituals so many times. There are days where he’s spent more of his mana than necessary fine-turning a spell, and Lin Ling’s presence does weigh a little heavier on his chest, but a cat nap’s enough to set things right. “And if it was a concern for me, I would’ve warded myself against you the day I decided to keep you around.”
It’s as close as he can get to admitting he wants Lin Ling around. That even if Lin Ling was capable of siphoning magic from him to the point of exhaustion, or worse, Nice wouldn’t have the heart to cast him away.
He sees in Lin Ling one of his most guarded what ifs — the scales tipping into oblivion, the decision to cut himself free from the incessant, pricking thoughts, the hopeless, hollow-eyed expectations of the desperate dead who swarm to him on listless nights. To turn the knife he uses to keep the outside world at bay on himself, instead.
Lin Ling is a young ghost. Perhaps only a year or two old. He and Nice could have passed one another on the street in recent memory without either of them being aware of it.
A year or two ago, and it might’ve been Nice who took that final step over the final threshold, not Lin Ling.
Only a fool believes in fate; another lesson from Nice’s early years as mage. But occasionally he thinks that some things are too much to possibly be coincidences.
Where that leaves him, he has no idea. On quiet, still days like this, he doesn’t much care what the answer is. Not so long as he has Lin Ling by his side and a steady pile of work to whittle away at.
“You’re no curse,” Nice says, flicking a pensive glance at Lin Ling, who’s yet to look away from him even once. “So don’t even think of asking me for an exorcism. That would be a waste of my magic.”
Nice quickly, smoothly turns to set Lin Ling down on the table. His internal timer says the food is almost done, anyway, so he busies himself with getting out a plate and cutlery, cleaning up what little mess there is on the spotless counter.
All the while he feels the brand of Lin Ling’s stare on him, tight, blistering heat concentrated on the back of his neck. The plate trembles as he places it next to the rice cooker, and Nice can only pray it escapes Lin Ling’s notice.
With everything done and plated, silence spreads over the kitchen like a stuffy blanket. Nice breathes in, counts to four as he taps his fingers against his thumb, holds it for seven, exhales for eight. Breathe in, hold, breathe out. Rinse, repeat. Until—
“You gonna eat that?” Lin Ling questions, jabbing his plushie arm in the direction of Nice’s cooling meal. “‘Cause you definitely promised, Mr. Bird Bones, and if you renege on that I’m gonna smother you in your sleep.”
The tension doesn’t fall away in an instant, but Nice is able to consciously loosen his shoulders, bringing them down from where they’d bunched up near his ears. He exhales again, and it doesn’t quite feel like an elephant’s sitting on his chest while he does it.
“Kinky,” Nice replies, a touch too breathy, but it still gets Lin Ling to make that tea-kettle noise of outrage that he finds so hilarious, so it’s enough.
“Eat your damn food, Nice. God, all I do for you and you’ve got the audacity to call me a brat?”
Nice rolls his eyes and lowers himself into the seat at the table. Elbows at his sides, well-mannered as always — and leaving plenty of room for Lin Ling to plop down beside his plate.
“I’ve just remembered that my deal with the nightmare creatures was only good through April. I’ll eat this, and the slice of cake you insisted I buy the other day” — Lin Ling perks up; Nice never offers to eat more than what’s strictly necessary for a meal — “if you’d be so kind as to keep watch for me tonight. Deal?”
He holds out his hand, and Lin Ling eagerly grabs onto two of his fingers with both stubby hands.
“Deal!”
Tucking a smile into the corner of his mouth, Nice takes a bite of his congee. It barely tastes of anything on his tongue, and it sticks to his teeth like glue, and it feels like swallowing sand trying to get it down. But he takes another bite, and another, and another — curling his fingers around Lin Ling’s hands, listening to the inane chatter of ghost gossip and cute animal sightings Lin Ling provides as background noise.
He manages the plate and the cake besides, as much as it felt like a never-ending Sisyphean task. He lets himself clean up afterwards, washing, drying, putting everything away just so. Lin Ling says nothing, though Nice knows he must be itching to suggest that Nice leave everything for the morning, it’s late, he’s been up and out for most of the day, rest is more important. But he only rides along on Nice’s shoulder and hums whatever colorful, off-key song he has stuck in his head at the moment.
By the time Nice gets into bed he at least doesn’t smell of disinfectant anymore, courtesy of the shower he refuses to skip. He is, however, so dead-tired even the walk from his bathroom door to his mattress feels like it takes an hour. He slides under the covers, flops down onto his pillows, and turns his head to find Lin Ling — still possessing the plushie — staring at him.
“What,” Nice says, too exhausted to bother with proper inflection.
“Nothing.” Lin Ling shuffles around until he’s wedged himself into the space between Nice’s pillows. “Just gonna wait for you to fall asleep before I hop out. Might do a quick walk— er, float? Around the apartment, like, y’know, a perimeter check. Or something. I’m on guard duty tonight, so I gotta give it my all!”
“Mmhm. Thank you very much for your hard work.” Nice musters a half-assed smirk, which Lin Ling remains oblivious even as he turns to pat gently at Nice’s face. Soft fabric brushes over his nose, his forehead, the bruise-like smudges beneath his eyes. “What are you—”
“Go to sleep, idiot. No point in hiring a guard dog if you’re just gonna stay up anyway.”
“A compelling point,” Nice admits, yawning into the soft give of his pillow. “Fine, fine, I’ll sleep. Say hello to nightmare creatures, I’ll renew my deal with them tomorrow…. Probably…”
Lin Ling huffs and smacks at Nice’s face again, this time less gently. “Talking isn’t sleeping, O Great and Terrible Prince of the Dead.”
“I hate you.”
“Right back at ya, Nice.”
“...A-Ling?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
Eyes drooping, Nice can’t see more than a fuzzy outline of Lin Ling, and even if he could, the doll doesn’t offer much in the way of varied expressions. He feels the light touch of cotton against his eyelids, though, there and gone in a blink. Warmth seeps down into the marrow of him, and he smiles, loose and languid and pleased.
“G’night, Nice. Sweet dreams.”
“Good night, A-Ling.”