Chapter Text
Moving into a new apartment all alone, in a new city he doesn’t know that well, has been a taxing process on its own for Renjun.
He finally graduated from his master's degree in art history two weeks ago, after years of flooding textbooks with his own blood, sweat and tears, and celebrated by signing a lease on a quaint one-bedroom apartment close to the museums and cultural district of the city he hopes to find work in, rather than continuing to live in the town near campus a whole two hours away from his new home. He’s optimistic about his possible future.
However, in his joy about finally living alone without awkward acquaintances in his space for the first time in his adult life, Renjun forgot that roommates, even annoying ones, can be useful when it comes to moving and first settling into a new place. Instead, it was poor Jeno alone who helped him to carry the boxes full of his belongings and all his suitcases of clothes and accessories up to the sparse apartment, the only one of their friends who was able to clear their busy schedule for a whole afternoon.
The two of them managed fine in the end, even if the amount of furniture Renjun owns still isn't up to par with what he would like. His bed at least has a frame and is not just a mattress on the floor, because he refuses to ever come close to the stereotype of a single man in his twenties living alone, he has some self respect.
So, Renjun has been sleeping on a proper bed at night. But these first couple of weeks full of so many changes in his life are still affecting him, and it seems he never feels quite rested enough. He spends his days in a whirlwind of applying to nearby museums for a big boy job that will hopefully lead him to be an exhibition curator in a few years, scouring second hand stores for discounted furniture, and familiarising himself with his new neighbourhood.
On Monday, he finds out there is a nice coffee shop around the corner right across the road from a dog park, which means when he gets too dejected from sending his cv to any open position he finds in a mind-numbingly repetitive pattern he can at least look up and gaze longingly at adorable dogs running around and having fun, unburdened by vile human issues such as needing to look for a job.
On Tuesday, while carrying back bags of groceries after exiting the metro, Renjun sees a guy sitting on one of the benches on the sidewalk outside of his building. He takes note of it because the guy is cute and seems to stare at Renjun with interest as he trudges by, his neck and head turning so his gaze can continue to follow him as Renjun gets to the entrance door.
On Wednesday, Renjun meets one of his neighbours, an elegant woman looking to be around her sixties who lives in the apartment across from him and one door down. She has shiny white hair cut short just below her ears and styled in a swoopy side bang that reminds him of Miranda Pristley in The Devil Wears Prada, and she wears thick-rimmed round tortoiseshell glasses and a beautiful green pantsuit with geometric patterns on the fabric. She lives with her wife, she says, and follows her nod of approval at learning that Renjun is looking for a position at an art museum by letting him know she owns a fancy art gallery nearby. Her name is Kim Chaeyeon, and she tells Renjun he can drop the honorifics and call her Noona if he likes. At least for now, Renjun still calls her Chaeyeon-ssi and bows when they say farewell.
On Thursday, Renjun sees the cute guy outside his building again, sitting on the same bench, in the sun. He doesn’t look at his phone or seem to carry anything else to distract himself with, like a book or headphones. He wears jeans and a flannel shirt and his floppy black hair doesn’t look sweaty, so Renjun rules out that he’s taking a break from a jog. Either he’s a psychopath who can just deal with his own thoughts on their own, or he’s simply extremely chill and likes to enjoy the sounds of the city and of the few birds living on the thin-trunked trees lining the edge of the sidewalk. His eyes still follow Renjun every time he glances back to check, and Renjun feels his neck prickle with a hint of heat at the attention.
On Friday, Renjun visits a local weekly flea market to scour for some furniture more durable and original than something he could get from Ikea, and hopefully not too expensive. After circling the stalls for a couple of hours he’s about to give up, but then he catches a glimpse of a beautiful wooden dining table. It seats six people, has bowed legs with decorative lines carved down their length and clawed feet, and the warm colour of the wood pattern is simply gorgeous. The old lady selling it seems thrilled at his enthusiasm and at the prospect of the table possibly going to someone who’ll love it as much as she does, and the price she quotes Renjun for is a steal. She even tells her nephew standing beside her to put the table in the van they used to carry the furniture to the market and to drive it over to Renjun’s apartment. Mark is nice and funny, and by some miracle of geometry and a series of risky maneuvers he and Renjun manage to carry the table up two flights of stairs and through his front door. By the end they’re sweaty and tired, and Mark says his goodbyes after drinking a cold bottle of green tea offered by Renjun and after sharing phone numbers in a way that feels like a tentative promise of Renjun’s first new friend in this area of the city.
On Saturday, Renjun sleeps in for a couple of hours, muscles still aching slightly from the previous day’s exertion. When he finally gets out of bed, however, a look at his former dining table, now moved into his bedroom to act as a desk, is enough to remind him that the effort has been well worth it and to put him in a good mood. He waddles to the living room in his slippers and with a spring in his steps, immediately casting enamoured eyes to the right as soon as he’s past the bedroom door. He sees his new table, looking beautiful and almost resplendent in the late morning orange sunlight coming in from the windows, and the guy from the bench outside his building sitting at the head of it.
Renjun screams.
The guy has the gall to startle at that, as if he’s the one scared by being caught breaking into people’s homes, the fucking weirdo.
Renjun looks around wildly, feeling the urge to grab something like a baseball bat or a knife. But he's never wielded a baseball bat, let alone owned one, and to grab a knife he would need to get to the kitchen, which means walking by the possibly dangerous home intruder. Shit.
“Who the fuck are you?! What are you doing in my house?!” Renjun demands.
The guy stutters, eyes wide. “I'm— I'm Jisung, I think.”
“You think?!”
“I'm pretty sure!” he’s quick to shout, like that amends it in any way. He's probably a stalker, spending so much time outside of Renjun's condo to spy on him before breaking into his apartment, and to boot he doesn't seem to be fully there mentally.
“What do you want from me?” Renjun asks. The prickly buzz of nerves is running through his veins and he feels terrified.
“Nothing! Well, not nothing, I saw you and I just felt—”
The guy starts to get up from his chair, palms raised placatingly in front of his chest. Renjun panics again at the movement and lets out an undignified shriek. His right hand shoots out towards the thin hallway table between the doorway he’s in and the entrance, and his fingers close around the first object they find. He throws it reflexively at the intruder.
Renjun has a moment during the object's flight when his eyes focus on it and he recognises it as his set of house keys—ironic to throw at someone who broke in—before they pass right through the guy's chest like he’s not even there, then slide off the edge of the table behind him with a clatter and a scrape of metal against wood.
Renjun blinks. Jisung-he-thinks is frozen mid-standing up, knees still slightly bent.
What.
“What,” Renjun echoes his thoughts out loud, gaze flitting from the home intruder's chest to the set of keys sprawled on the ground.
Maybe Renjun has been so tired the past week that he's hallucinating a whole human inside his apartment. He can't really decide if suddenly seeing things is better or worse than someone stalking him for a week and breaking into his apartment.
Better, he settles on, if it's just caused by needing to catch up on sleep some more and not by him losing his mind.
Or maybe he is still asleep and this is just an anxiety-inducing dream he's having. People in movies usually pinch themselves to realise if they are sleeping, but he never understood it. He's always been able to feel sensations in the middle of dreams too, so that likely wouldn't clear anything up.
He tries it anyway, pinching the side of his right thigh through his pajama pants. It hurts like a bitch, and leaves him with no smaller amount of plausible deniability than before.
Renjun sighs gravely. Okay. Questions.
“So. You’re Jisung?”
Jisung startles like he didn’t expect to be spoken to again, then finally straightens up properly and hurries to nod. “I, uh— Yeah.” He seems extremely jittery for a home intruder, and Renjun leans again in favour of him not actually being one. It would be kind of embarrassing to have his apartment broken into by a guy that feels like he’d be scared by his own shadow.
“What are you doing in my house?” Renjun continues, “How did you get in here?”
Jisung smoothes a strand of his hair against his temple uselessly, looking sheeping. “Well… I’m dead. I’m a ghost? I don’t remember much of my life, really, but I’ve always felt drawn to this street since I… came to again, I guess? When I saw you moving in I felt that same pull towards you too, and I didn’t really get it. But then you walked by and looked at me like you could actually see me, and I just needed to know.”
Renjun blinks.
Blinks again.
Then he hangs his head downward while closing his eyes, pinches the bridge of his nose and lets out a dramatic groan. Sure. Fucking ghosts now?
Renjun has never considered himself inherently a believer, but he’s not fully a skeptic either. More like a cautious ponderer over the plausibility of supernatural events, while also feeling like not everything can be explained by science. He picks up his head and sweeps his gaze over Jisung’s body, head to toe, then lets it linger over the set of keys still on the ground. The keys which he saw pass right through the guy’s chest. His feet look like they aren’t truly touching the ground, like his body has no real weight.
Renjun is not religious, has no set of beliefs when it comes to the existence of a heaven or a hell, or an afterlife other place. However, ever since his first grandparent died when he was a child he has always felt like after people die a trace of them remains lingering around the places and things they’ve loved. Looks like he’s getting his confirmation on that one.
Renjun finally walks further into the room and drags a chair back from the table, leaving one seat between him and Jisung at the head of the table, and slumps down against the back of the chair. “Okay. You’re a ghost. Sure. And only I can see you?” He really wishes he had some tea to drink right now, but he’s sat down already and has no energy left from the earlier spike of adrenaline to get up again this soon and start fumbling about with a teapot.
Jisung sits down again and angles his body towards him, prim and stiff and with his knees closed together. “That I’ve noticed so far, yes.”
Renjun trails his assessing eyes down over Jisung’s body, from his floppy black hair falling over his eyes, to his red flannel shirt, to his black jeans, and finally to his black chunky converse shoes, the kind with the thick ridged brown sole, as his feet are propped up on the front stretcher of the chair. Or, are they propped up on it? How come he isn’t passing through the chair like it happened with the keys?
Renjun bends heavily to one side, whole body tilting as he looks underneath the table. More than sitting, Jisung seems to be hovering above his seat just a centimetre or two, barely noticeable if Renjun wasn’t paying direct attention to it. Huh. Interesting.
“Uhm, what is it?” Jisung wonders.
Renjun straightens up again and shakes his head minutely, waving the question off with one hand. “Nothing, don’t worry.”
Jisung accepts it with an unsure nod, then flicks his head to one side to get his fringe out of his eyes. Renjun’s mouth corner ticks up with the hint of a smile. It is kind of amusing, that the one time Renjun meets a ghost, he looks like a stereotypical textbook emo kid, the kind of person you would expect to be into the supernatural. He might have actually been a legit one, probably. Jisung clearly seems to have been interested in the otherworldly during his previous life, if he remembers hearing about the cardinal rule of ghosts lingering around earth because of unfinished business.
Maybe already being into the supernatural or the spooky in life is a facilitator to being turned into a ghost after death. Wouldn’t that be something, if a large portion of the spirits that clearly currently haunt the world were just a bunch of alternative people who have left behind most of their memories? Maybe the impression in pop culture that a disproportionate amount of ghosts come from the Victorian era is really due to a lot of goths who were really into historical fashion and carried over their amazing fashion sense even in death.
Renjun wants to ask Jisung if he likes My Chemical Romance to corroborate at least part of his theory, but again, the amnesia puts a spanner in the works. And figuring out how, why and when Jisung died is probably a more pressing matter.
“How long has this so far been?” Renjun gets back on track.
Jisung shrugs awkwardly. “A few months? Maybe a year? Time flows strangely when I’m not really focusing on following life happening around me, and for a while at the start I was already panicking about suddenly being dead that I didn’t even know I could focus on living-time. I definitely saw at least two or three changes of season, though.”
“And you want my help? With finding out what is keeping you stuck here?”
“Well, in these months I figured that being a ghost must mean I have some unfinished business in life, right? So if I can figure out what that is and fix it, I guess I’ll be able to move on and just disappear for good, or move on to whatever is next. It’s been kind of… lonely, being like this.” Jisung sheepishly curls his shoulders inwards at the end, like it’s a fault of his to admit it.
“What,” Renjun jokes, “Other dead people aren’t that fun for conversation?”
Jisung scrunches his nose and lips to one side as he hums. It kinda makes him look like a mouse. “Not really, no. I mean, I don’t actually know any. Sometimes I’ve seen some floating along the sidewalk or inside buildings and I tried to call out to them, but they always disappear before I can catch up to them. It’s like they don’t hear me, or maybe they just thought I was a human. Maybe they’re like, permanent ghosts and that’s where I’ll end up being later on, but for now I’m still in the earlier middle ground phase because of the unfinished business, so we’re like on different planes of existence?”
Renjun hums as well and nods, pensive. “Could be,” he concedes.
All of that, unfinished ghostly business and multiple planes of existence overlapping, makes sense according to what Renjun can recall reading over the years from here and there on the internet. Despite not exactly being a believer, he has amassed over the years a decent amount of hours getting acquainted with the general basics of human knowledge or theories regarding ghosts.
He just always thought that casually researching supernatural creatures in his free time would be like learning about space or aliens or folklore legends around the world or how the scientific name for what would happen to a human if they got sucked into a black hole is spaghettification—just another interesting way to keep his curious mind occupied and filled with fun facts that he would never need to employ practically in his life.
But here Renjun is, sitting in his new apartment and conversing with a real, actual ghost boy. If aliens could be so kind as to wait until this current matter is resolved before showing up in his bathroom, it would be much appreciated.
Renjun gets up from the table with a heavy exhale, picks up the keys from the ground and goes to brew himself some of that damn tea.
After the kettle has whistled and Renjun has dropped the tea leaves into the boiling water, he pauses after opening one of the cabinets. He turns his head back towards Jisung and asks, “Is it more rude if I offer you a cup you can't drink or if I drink it in front of you?”
Jisung snorts. “I have no idea, but I'd like some tea anyway. Warm things help.” Then his eyes get this far away look in them, his whole expression closing off a fraction. “I feel like I'm cold all the time…” he murmurs under his breath.
Renjun's stomach feels made of lead all of a sudden. Between the whirlwind of discovering ghosts are real and how animated their conversation has been, it's easy to forget that Jisung is dead. A soul only sticking around on borrowed time, relegated to an aimless state of loneliness and no memories of its own past life. From his appearance, Jisung can’t be that far from Renjun’s own age. Renjun feels like he’s just at the beginning of setting up his own life, while the thread the Fates have spun for Jisung has already been mercilessly cut off instead.
Renjun clears his throat and hurries to pour Jisung a mug of tea and slides it on top of the table in front of him, before awkwardly reclaiming his own seat from earlier.
Jisung looks up and nods at him in thanks, his expression only clearing partially. He then wraps his hands around the sides of the streaming mug and slides it closer to himself a handful of centimetres.
Renjun is both surprised and eager to bring the conversation back to a lighter tone. “How come you can touch that, but not the keys or the chair?” he asks.
“Mmh? Oh.” Jisung shakes his head minutely as if to get his thoughts back in order. “I can touch things if I want, but I have to really focus on my hands to make them feel solid first, and it usually only lasts for a few seconds. So for big objects or prolonged positions it’s just easier to…” he waves a general hand towards his lower body, “hover really close. Makes it feel like I'm still somewhat normal.”
“How did you figure out you could do that?” Renjun wonders.
Another fake-nonchalant shrug. “I had nothing but time for months to test what I became and what I could and couldn’t still do. You know, I think it's why in all those movies about poltergeists they throw things around that violently. If you only have a few moments and can't really dose your strength, chucking objects across the room seems the most practical way to make sure it gets noticed by people who can't see you.”
Renjun raises his eyebrows. “So you don't remember your life but you know what usually happens in popular culture ghosts lore?”
Jisung sinks a bit into his shoulders, sheepish. “Yeah, pretty much. I remembered a name, Jisung, and figured it was either me or someone really important to me. But it was the only one I had along with just a general feeling of how human life works, so I started thinking about myself as Jisung anyway. I think the knowledge about ghosts remained as some sort of videogame tutorial, when I died. Like, ‘welcome to the gulag, this is what you'll need to do’, you know?”
Renjun does not, in fact, know. He blinks twice.
“The gulag?”
“Don’t really know what it means either, it’s just in here.” Another shrug, followed by Jisung tapping a finger against his temple twice.
“Right,” Renjun decides to graciously move on.
He swallows a sip of his tea, feeling it warm him from the inside as it travels down his esophagus, and thinks of the dead guy in front of him who instead is always cold and who can't recall his own life.
“Alright, Jisung. Let's figure out who you are.”