Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The argument is about the fan.

Specifically: whether the lamp-sized fan in the corner of the room counts as Donghyun's or as communal property, given that he brought it from home, but it's been running continuously for the past three days in a room that’s nominally shared by all three of them, and Woonhak is hot.

"It's my fan," Donghyun says. He's sitting cross-legged on the floor with a book open in his lap, wide-eyed, brows furrowed. He has this habit of being immovable. Unfortunately, this is one of the categories of argument he sees as worth engaging with. It's maddening. "I brought it."

"Dude, that's not—that isn't the point."

"What's the point, then?”

Woonhak gestures at the fan, which is currently angled directly at Donghyun's side of the room. "The point is that it's in a shared space and it should be pointed at the shared—it should benefit everyone."

"Sounds like a you problem," Jaehyun remarks helpfully, from where he's lying on his stomach on his own mat, scrolling through something on his phone. He has his chin propped on one hand.

"You're also hot, you were complaining about it half an hour ago."

"I mean, yeah." He grins at his phone. "But I'm coping. Copium."

"I can see the sweat on the neckline of your shirt!"

"I'm a sweaty guy, Woonhak-ah. I've made peace with it."

Donghyun looks back down at his book and turns a page. Outside, Gwangju in July is doing what Gwangju in July apparently does, which is bake—or steam, or broil—you alive. It had been Donghyun's idea to come here, mostly because it wasn't Seoul and wasn't Busan and he'd seemed wholly charmed by the idea of showing them around. Showing Woonhak around, technically, since Jaehyun had no reason to be here except that Woonhak had mentioned the trip and Jaehyun had practically invited himself along and said okay, I'll come with an easy, uncomplicated commitment. He had nowhere better to be for the summer, and despite his usual fretting, somehow found that totally fine. 

The course is Woonhak's—a summer term gen-ed about something something sociology of memory, which originally sounded interesting in the course catalogue and has since revealed itself to be mostly vague, frustratingly open-ended assignments with prompts like document how memory exists within a physical space (8-10 images, accompanying written reflection, due end of term). Great, fantastic. Three weeks in Gwangju, and then back to Seoul. Woonhak had three weeks and no idea.

Jaehyun is taking nothing. He's here for shits and giggles. Woonhak tries not to find this annoying on principle.

Their accommodations are functional. One room, barely large enough for two beds, which means there’s one actual bed and one predicament. Donghyun and Woonhak had ended up sharing the bed due to logistics, mostly. Jaehyun immediately claimed the floor mat before either of them could argue.

"I'll take it," he'd said, already dragging it into position. "You two need the space." 

Just the nonchalant, responsible eldest of the group making a noble sacrifice. Definitely not admitting his love for being useful. Woonhak had tried to object and Jaehyun had waved him off, end of discussion.

"I will move the fan," Donghyun says finally, holding up a finger, "fifteen degrees."

"Hyung." A whine.

"Take it or leave it."

"Okay…" Woonhak sits back on the bed, dignity more or less intact. "Fine. Fifteen degrees."

Donghyun reaches over without looking and adjusts the fan by what is probably twelve degrees, maximum. Woonhak decides not to escalate—at least the room now feels marginally less like the inside of someone's mouth.

There are a lot of things Donghyun does in ways that go beyond normal interest, or at least encroach upon superstitious grandmother behavior. He keeps a small lucky charm on his bag. He'd rearranged the furniture in this room within forty minutes of arriving, moving the big bed ninety degrees for reasons that had to do with airflow or something. He'd explained it seriously and seemed very pleased with the result. The room did feel better after, though Woonhak would like to not admit this.

"I need to find somewhere to document," Woonhak says, mostly to the ceiling. "For the assignment."

"Mm."

"A place of memory that’s significant to the community. Some… layered meaning, historic context." He's mostly quoting the assignment sheet. "Accessible to photograph."

"Museum," Jaehyun suggests.

"Everyone does museums, though, don’t they?"

"A park?"

"Probably everyone does those too."

Jaehyun rolls over onto his back, staring up at the ceiling alongside Woonhak in spirit if not in position. "Monument?"

"I'll think about it." He won't think about monuments. "I'll just walk around tomorrow and see what I find."

That’s how Woonhak generally approaches problems he doesn't have a solution to yet—declare an intention and defer the actual thinking. It works, mostly. It's worked so far. Donghyun turns another page. The fan hums. Jaehyun scoots over to the big bed and starts showing Woonhak something funny on his phone, and for a while that's all he bothers to think about.

── .✦

He finds the cemetery by accident.

He'd been walking for almost an hour at that point, phone in hand, convinced he was being productive just by moving around. There was a wall with faded lettering, a corner store with a sun-warped awning, the shadow a bridge made over the water of a small river — none of it really being what the assignment's actually asking for. Something with more weight to it. He'd taken a wrong turn somewhere and then another and had ended up here, at the entrance to a municipal cemetery, which is probably the most obvious interpretation of the prompt and which he'd mentally dismissed immediately when the assignment was given.

He almost turns around to hightail it back, but he's already hot and slightly lost. The cemetery has trees, which have shade, and the shade is the most compelling thing he's encountered in this city in four days.

It's quiet, as cemeteries are—well, the birds are chirping lightly in the trees and there's distant traffic beyond the walls. Woonhak walks in slowly, phone lowering. The light is filtered through the canopy above, coming down in dappled shapes, settling across the variously aged headstones and grass and gravel paths. Okay, maybe this could work. He can feel himself starting to look at things as potential images—the shadows, the texture of old stone, the green of grass that's been consistently watered, maybe the person standing a few rows ahead can be in the background—

Woonhak's eyes try to glance over and then refuse to fix onto the shape. Like trying to focus on something in his peripheral vision; the harder he looks, the less resolved it gets. His gaze slides even when he tries to correct it. He squeezes his eyes shut, shakes his head, tries again. Same thing—there, but not fully there. He manages to gather that this person is male, facing partly away, black hair, standing between two rows of graves, and underneath that, a more insistent feeling of something is wrong with this.

Half of it's the clothes. He can't figure out the clothes. There's a shirt, the shape of one, short-sleeved—but when he tries to look at it, the surface won't stabilize. Something’s printed there, letters, a logo maybe, and it's Oasis for a second, the typeface clear enough that Woonhak almost acknowledges it consciously. And then it's something else, Nirvana, maybe, and then something he doesn't recognize, and then something again. A strange crawling goes down the middle of his spine—his eyes are telling him one thing and his sense of how-things-work is telling him that's not possible. Both insisting very firmly, and neither backing down.

The rest of the figure is like this too. Slightly blurred at the edges, almost see-through, not too dissimilar to when there's an accidental dash of motion caught in against a still background in a photo. Almost like a quality of light.

Woonhak stands there with his phone in his sweaty-ass hand and brain running very quickly through a number of possibilities. Trick of the light. Heat. He's probably dehydrated.

Still, the trees aren't doing that thing, and the headstones are also not doing that thing, it’s just this random dude. Even though Woonhak is running out of alternative explanations, his feet carry him forward, in either blind bravery or a complete failure of self-preservation instinct.

The figure turns before Woonhak reaches him.

Brown eyes—lighter than expected, catching the filtered cemetery light—land on Woonhak with an expression more annoyed than haunted. The face resolves in Woonhak’s vision better than the rest of him does, with a high nose, statuesque lips pressed into a bit of a frown, jet-black hair lying flat across his forehead. Handsome. The thought arrives before Woonhak himself has anything to do with it. He looks twenty, maybe, twenty-one. The shirt is still doing the thing, Oasis logo surfacing and submerging.

"You can see me," the figure says.

"Yeah." Woonhak's voice comes out at a normal volume. Minor personal victory.

The figure stares at him. The annoyance in his face shifts into something more complicated, too fast for Woonhak to follow, and then it's smoothed back into the frown. "Hm."

"Hm," Woonhak replies in wide-eyed agreement. Is it not insane?

He’s realizing that he’s standing maybe two meters from something that isn’t producing a shadow. The sun is at an angle that should—there should be a shadow. Woonhak's own shadow stretches out behind him on the grass, perfectly normal. But he kind of needs to deal with one thing at a time, and the shadow thing is decidedly not the first elephant in the room to address.

The first thing comes out of his mouth before he's made a conscious decision to say it:

"Are you… a ghost?"

A pause. The figure looks at Woonhak with an expression that tritely suggests this is the stupidest question he's heard recently, balanced against the obvious point that it's also the correct one.

"Yes," he says.

"Okay." Woonhak's stomach does something complicated, but he won’t allow himself to throw up in a moment like this. "Uh, so—"

"Twenty-eight years," the ghost says, almost to himself, and then seems to catch it and stop. He refocuses on Woonhak. "You're the first person who's spoken to me in twenty-eight years."

Woonhak does the math before he can stop himself: that's 1998, roughly—eight years before Woonhak was born. He turns his head because he needs to stop doing that math and do a different thing instead, and inadvertently, his eyes find the headstone.

It’s a standard municipal stone. Upright grey granite, the surface worn just enough that the edges of the carved letters have softened with time. There’s a faint darkening near the base where water must collect when it rains, and a small, cloudy, sienna-colored photograph inset near the top—sun-faded, the face barely visible. Someone has left a plastic-wrapped bundle of flowers to one side, the colors bleached and edges of the leaves withered.

Han Dongmin. August 10, 1977 – July 7, 1998.

Twenty-one years old, then nothing, and then twenty-eight years of the cemetery and the trees and no one to talk to, and Woonhak is nineteen and standing here in 2026, and his phone’s gone impossibly sweatier in his hand.

In contrast, his mouth has gone dry.

"Han Dongmin," he says, not totally meaning to say it aloud.

"Yup. That's me." Dongmin—Woonhak’s decided he’s going to use that—is watching him with the sheer novelty of being looked at and seen. "...And you are?"

"Kim Woonhak. I'm here for—I go to school in Seoul, I'm here for the summer. An assignment." He gestures vaguely at the phone, the cemetery. "I got lost."

"You came to Gwangju and got lost in a cemetery?"

"I got lost near a cemetery and then—look, the shade looked good."

Dongmin looks at him. "The shade."

"It's super hot," Woonhak snaps back, with some dignity.

Something happens at the corner of Dongmin's mouth that seems like the beginning of a smile with a taste of contempt. He shifts his weight, and Woonhak catches it—Dongmin is slightly more there than he was thirty seconds ago, or maybe Woonhak's eyes are just adjusting as if this place is just a regular dimly lit room, being able to find shapes in the dark that were there the whole time. The shirt still cycles, but slower. Woonhak can hold his gaze now without it slipping.

"Your shirt," he says, “the pattern keeps changing."

Dongmin glances down at it with a mild expression. “Clothes aren't part of the body," he says. "They don't stay with you. I have to actually think about them or they'd—"A pause. "I'd be naked, basically."

"Oh."

"All the time, so." He makes a short, succinct gesture to emphasize the idea of nakedness.

"So you're actively maintaining—"

"I'm used to it. Had to figure it out the hard way."

"Right." Ghosts are real, and they have to manually maintain their clothing, and this guy Han Dongmin died in 1998 at twenty-one years old and is standing in front of Woonhak in a shirt that can't decide if it's Oasis or something else, and this is a thing that is happening. "Can I ask you something else?"

"You're going to, regardless."

…Fair. "Are there other ghosts? Can you see them?"

Dongmin considers this with genuine thought. "If they haven't passed on, then yes."

"Can you talk to them?"

"Sometimes." He says it in a tone that doesn't invite follow-up, and Woonhak, for once in his life, registers this and doesn’t follow up.

"Can you leave? The cemetery, I mean. Or are you—" He gestures again, vaguely. Stuck, he doesn't say.

It’s just a small closing, but Dongmin's expression shifts, and he says, "Next question," which seems to be an answer in itself.

Woonhak takes a deep breath. His list of questions is getting longer much faster than he's asking them. That’s going to be a problem, and there are some he already knows not to ask—the obvious ones, the how and the why and the what-was-it-like—even he can tell those go somewhere he's not supposed to wander yet. "Is there anything from… before," he starts, and stops. "That you miss."

It's not a well-formed or detailed question, but Dongmin seems to understand it anyway.

"Music," he says, after a moment. "I had a record player, I collected vinyls." He sounds like he’s stopped letting himself think about it too often, turning over the words carefully. "I miss being able to actually listen to it, with volume. Presence." He looks at the shirt, briefly, the Oasis logo rising to the surface as if it's been waiting. "This is what I have now."

"That sucks," Woonhak says. He can’t help himself.

"It does."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't." Dongmin says it without meanness or finishing whatever comes after it, making a short, decisive huff that closes the door on the subject without slamming it.

Woonhak nods. He looks down at his phone, the camera app still open. His assignment sits somewhere in the back of his mind looking mildly reproachful and neglected, and remembering it makes him feel absurdly guilty about it. "My assignment is to document, like, memory, in a physical space." He holds up the phone. It communicates nothing useful, really. "This is a physical space."

"...With dead people in it."

"I thought it was pretty relevant to the theme."

Dongmin's mouth is doing the thing again, the not-quite-smile. "And how's that going for you now?"

"I haven't taken a single photo yet."

"Mm." He sounds almost entertained. "Likely because you've been standing here talking to a ghost instead."

"I'm going to figure out the photos," Woonhak says, with more confidence than he has. "That's not—I'll figure that out."

Light brown eyes assess him thoroughly. Then: "I like you."

Woonhak blinks. "What?"

"You're easy to talk to." Dongmin remarks. There’s a preconceived, cut-and-dry edge to it, informing Woonhak of the outcome he’s already decided. "Come back if you want. It gets real boring here."

"Um…" Woonhak glances at the headstone, then back at Dongmin. "Yeah, okay."

"Or don't," Dongmin adds, with complete equanimity. "But you probably will."

Woonhak says goodbye without really responding to that. It's smug. And also correct. He'd rather not hand him both things at once.

He takes twelve photos on the way out. None of them are good, really. He takes them quickly, without looking at what he's framing, because his hands need something to do.

The walk back is forty minutes—he's more lost than he'd thought—and for most of it his brain is very loud. Mostly noise with minimal thinking. It keeps circling the same points without getting to any useful conclusion, skipping ahead, doubling back, jumping tracks. He tries to line everything up in a way that makes sense and abandons the effort after a couple more minutes.

Who would even believe this?

He huffs out a sad excuse for a laugh. A ghost. Right, sure. That’s a normal and sane thing to think you see on a random afternoon.

He glances over his shoulder once, and again a minute later, as if Dongmin had followed him out past the gate and into the street. That’s stupid, since ghosts don’t—well, he doesn’t actually know what ghosts do. That’s a problem.

Trick of the light, he thinks again, but he still doesn’t buy the line.

He’d looked at the headstone. He’d read the name on it and Dongmin had confirmed it, that’s me, with a flat, settled ease. He’s simply had a long time to get comfortable with something terrible, and Woonhak had just nodded dumbly. He’d talked to a dead man for twenty minutes in a cemetery and at no point had he given anything that even resembled a socially adept response, and now he’s walking back through the afternoon heat with twelve really mid photos and deep-seated doubt in his sanity.

By the time he gets back to the room, he's decided not to say anything. Not yet. But also—maybe not ever, when he thinks about it.

Jaehyun looks up from the bed. "You were gone for a while."

"Got lost," Woonhak replies, which is true.

"Find anything good?”

"Maybe." Also true. "I'll look at the photos later."

He flops down on his bed and stares at the ceiling, the fan running, Donghyun doing something quiet on his side of the room. Once more, he tries to explain it to himself in terms that make sense. The explanation doesn't hold its shape, and then he stops. He can’t overthink it when he’s only had one experience with a ghost, so he’s forced to let it be what it is.

Outside, the Gwangju summer is still exactly as hot as it was this morning. Three weeks left. Maybe he should start counting the days.

── .✦

He goes back the next day.

He doesn't really consciously decide to. He wakes up, lies there for a while listening to Jaehyun grumbling in his sleep and the fan running, and then he gets up, gets dressed, and walks to the cemetery. It's the same walk as yesterday. He vaguely remembers the streets that lead there now.

Dongmin is in roughly the same spot.

"You're back," he says, unsurprised. He'd said you probably will. He was right, and the smugness of that is already present in his voice even though he hasn't said anything explicitly smug yet.

"I said I'd come back."

"Mm." He looks at Woonhak's hands. "No camera."

"I have my phone." He holds it up. "I took some photos yesterday, but I have a plan."

"What's the plan, then?"

"It’s in progress," Woonhak says. He sits down on the grass a few feet away from Dongmin's headstone, back against a black pine tree. If he's going to be here, he's going to be comfortable. Somewhat funny that he's decided he's going to stay. He opens his camera app and points it upwards at the light coming through the canopy. 

Dongmin watches. "That's your plan?"

"Part of it."

"Mm." He sounds unimpressed, but he sits down too, close enough that Woonhak can see the Oasis logo stabilizing on his shirt. It says something that Dongmin has decided to stay, as well. Woonhak presses the shutter anyway and doesn't comment on it.

It's the second visit that starts to feel less like an interview and more like two people existing in the same place, a strange concept since one of them technically isn't.

On the third visit, Woonhak brings a Bluetooth speaker.

Dongmin stares at it. Woonhak has learned that he has a specific way of looking at things he doesn't recognize—not baffled so much as curiously observational—and he turns this expression on the speaker while Woonhak explains what it does. Then his face morphs into something interested that he very quickly neutralizes with a vague scowl.

"It just plays music," Woonhak says. "Wireless."

"I know what wireless means."

"It can’t bite you, man, why are you looking at it like that?"

"I'm looking at it," Dongmin says, with slight offense, "because it's just so small."

"They're all small now. I don’t think I’ve seen a big wireless speaker in forever." Woonhak sets it on the grass and connects it to his phone. "What do you wanna hear?"

What follows is one of the stranger hours of Woonhak's life, which definitely says something, given the last three days. Dongmin has specific, total, confident, not-particularly-open-to-revision opinions about music. Oasis, yes, always, non-negotiable. Other than that, The Beatles. The Carpenters. Seo Taiji and Boys, which Woonhak does know, vaguely, for the massive hip-hop influence specifically. Nirvana, yes. The Ramones. Something called Suede that Woonhak has to look up. 

Dongmin watches him do it with the expression of a teacher watching a student fail a very basic quiz. "They're British," he says while Woonhak scrolls. "From London. I always wanted to go."

"To England?"

"Yeah, someday." He says it simply, then stops, and they both hear the unspoken idea behind the words. Woonhak looks down at his phone. He finds the Suede album.

"Blur?" Woonhak then tries half-heartedly, mostly because it’d been on a playlist he had made once.

Dongmin physically recoils. "No."

"They're not bad—"

"They're the fancy, posh, polished middle-class Southerners. They’re nothing like the real deal." Dongmin spits it out with such resolve that Woonhak removes Blur from the playlist immediately with an uncontrolled giggle and doesn't mention them again.

He plays Woonhak something, narrating it with an evidently tamped-down intensity. Woonhak lends an ear, and during the second song he stops viewing it as researching this ghost guy’s music taste and starts just listening to it for the sake of listening to music. The sunlight filters down through the cemetery trees. Dongmin sits against his own headstone with his arms resting on his knees, eyes closed, and there's something in his face that Woonhak looks at and then looks away from, carefully.

Woonhak's own playlist gets exactly one chance. Dongmin listens to about forty seconds of a rap song—it’s Drake, everyone likes Drake (right?), well-produced, Woonhak actually loves it—and opens his eyes.

"What is… this?"

Woonhak’s lower lip juts out a little. "...Music?"

"He’s barely singing. It’s just a weird beat with noise over it."

"That's all music."

Dongmin closes his eyes again. His face looks a little green. "Ugh… play the other one. The Oasis."

Woonhak sighs and plays the Oasis, mostly without resentment.

He learns things about Dongmin in pieces. He doesn’t have to question him directly, it’s just things that slip every so often when he’s talking about something. Dongmin grew up here in Gwangju. Had siblings—a younger brother and sister, he mentions once in passing, and then moves on. Was not, apparently, a peaceful or easy child. This comes up when Dongmin watches Woonhak accidentally walk into a low-hanging branch and snorts.

"You're so clumsy," he quips. He sounds delighted.

"I didn't see it!"

"You weren't looking."

"You could have warned me, I was looking at my phone—"

"I used to throw rocks at the neighbor's fence," Dongmin says, apparently as a non sequitur, but Woonhak’s starting to understand that Dongmin's non sequiturs are actually responses to something he's observed, they just take a turn he hasn't announced. "When I was a kid. Just because. My mother had to come apologize twice in one month." He says it with unmistakable satisfaction. "I also broke a window once, on purpose."

"On purpose?"

"Different house—the kid had it coming."

Woonhak looks at him. "You must have been a brat."

"I was very spirited. There's a difference. You would've been scared of me," he insists, and it’s probably true. "How old are you?"

"Nineteen."

"Funny. When I was alive, I didn't believe in ghosts. Total skeptic. Would have laughed in your face."

"And now?"

"And now I am one, so." He tilts his head, matter-of-fact. "I’d think that updates the position a little."

Woonhak laughs, and Dongmin's mouth does the thing at the corner again. It looks nice. Cute, even. But his brows then flinch, almost furrowing. 

"I was going to turn twenty-two," he says. He doesn't add anything else to it, and Woonhak doesn’t push. He thinks about it anyway, while looking at the headstone. Dongmin is talking again now—something about the Carpenters, Karen Carpenter specifically, the voice, it's about the voice. Woonhak listens to him and thinks Dongmin. Not ghost. Not dead guy. Not the situation. This is just Dongmin, sitting against his own headstone in a Gwangju cemetery in July, having opinions about Karen Carpenter. Just a person.

It’s either the most natural thing in the world, or a sign that Woonhak has quietly gone a little bonkers. He genuinely can’t tell.

── .✦

The next day, he tells Donghyun.

He'd been working up to it for a few days, running it through his head while running his fingers through his hair, testing different angles of approach, trying to figure out how to say I've been visiting a ghost and I think I’ve become his friend in a way that doesn't make him seem like he’s gone extraordinarily bonkers. By that Thursday, he's also skipped a whole afternoon of exploring Gwangju with Jaehyun and Donghyun to go to the cemetery instead, and he'd told them he had assignment work to do, and that wasn't entirely a lie, but it wasn't entirely true either.

He breaks it to Donghyun at the kitchen table, with Jaehyun conspicuously absent (gone to get food, an errand Woonhak had perhaps begged for Jaehyun to do with guilt-inducing levels of calculation), over two bottles of ice-cold sodas Donghyun had grabbed from the fridge because he seemed to sense something coming by the way Woonhak had brought up wanting to talk to him.

He tells him everything—the cemetery, the headstone, the shirt, the weird misty quality of Dongmin’s body at first, the speaker, the music. Donghyun listens with his hands around his bottle that’s sweating with condensation, watching Woonhak with quiet attentiveness. Sometimes this demure quality makes people mistake him for an introvert. When Woonhak finishes, Donghyun says:

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"I’d like to meet him," he replies.

── .✦

Doghyun walks into the cemetery and immediately slows down. He doesn't say anything, instead looking around carefully, expression slightly concentrated, brows tightened.

"Something's off, I think," he says.

"Yeah," Woonhak says, standing next to him. Dongmin is behind them, approximately a meter back, and Woonhak knows because he can practically feel Dongmin looking at the back of his head with an undoubtedly mischievous expression he's choosing not to see.

"It’s not bad, though," Donghyun notes, head on a swivel. "There’s some kind of presence."

Woonhak sees Dongmin step closer and reach out, eyes glinting with interest. His hand passes through the air for a split second before it lands against Donghyun's forearm.

The hairs on Donghyun's arm lift all at once. His shoulders tense, just slightly startled, and he looks down at his forearm with a steady, curious expression. "He touched you," Woonhak confirms for him.

"It was cold." Donghyun's turns his arm over, examining. "Cold and wet. Like a fish."

"That’s interesting."

"Fish are often cold and wet," Donghyun adds, helpfully.

Woonhak turns around to see Dongmin standing there, looking pleased with himself. "He said it’s cold and wet," Woonhak tells him.

"I heard him," Dongmin says.

"He seems pleased," Woonhak tells Donghyun.

Donghyun considers the empty space Woonhak is talking towards and then addresses it directly, with a pleasant "Nice to meet you." Then he turns back to Woonhak, apparently satisfied.

Dongmin, to Woonhak's left: "I like him."

Woonhak, to Dongmin's right: "He says he likes you."

Donghyun smiles at the middle distance. "Cool. I like him too."

They sit together for an hour. Woonhak functions as a relay; Dongmin says something, Woonhak relays it, Donghyun responds. It's slightly exhausting, mildly absurd, and Dongmin seems to find the whole arrangement more entertaining than Woonhak does. He keeps saying things Woonhak has to decide whether to edit—mostly slightly needling observations about Woonhak himself. Woonhak keeps delivering them with less tact than he'd like because he's also having to hold the conversation on Donghyun's end simultaneously.

"He says you're good at listening," Woonhak tells Donghyun.

“Most people aren’t," Donghyun says. “I just try my best.”

On the walk back, he's comfortably quiet for a while. The evening has cooled slightly, which in Gwangju’s July means it's merely warm rather than actively hostile, cicadas whirring in the trees.

"So," Woonhak says.

"So," Donghyun agrees.

"Why me." He says it without preface, since Donghyun likely already knows what the question is. It's been the question since the first day. "Why can only I see him? He's been there for twenty-eight years. Why do I show up and all of a sudden—"

"I don't know," Donghyun says. It isn’t exactly comforting, but at least he didn’t choose to be dishonest and pull some answer out of his ass, either, so it’s fine. He watches the street ahead of them. "Maybe you're the only one who can see him because you're the only one meant to. Maybe you need to help him with something."

It's probably the right thing to say. Woonhak turns it over and the pieces fit—the logic holds, Donghyun isn't wrong, it's the most coherent explanation either of them has managed at this time. But meant to implies a direction and an endpoint to this thing, reason that has a resolution built into it, and Woonhak stands in the street at dusk turning the word help over in his head and feeling it rub him the wrong way entirely. Help with what. Help him leave? Help him pass on, or whatever the correct language is for the thing that hasn't happened yet in twenty-eight years, for whatever reason.

He doesn't say any of this. With the thought simmering in his head, he just nods and walks.

By the time they get back to the building, Jaehyun is in the stairwell, waiting with food and a suspicious expression.

"You guys were gone for forever," he says. "And you both look weird. What happened?"

Woonhak looks at Donghyun. Donghyun looks at Woonhak.

"We were just walking around," Woonhak says. "It's a nice evening."

Jaehyun stares at them with a slight frown for another three seconds, and then holds out the bag of food, which he has already opened and started eating from. "Okay," he says. He definitely doesn’t believe it, and now he looks faintly put-upon about it, since he’s been excluded from something on principle. Looks like he’s choosing to let it go for now. "Fine. I got us food." 

He looks between them once more and gives one last testy, disgruntled huff. "Just odd and strange behavior…"

He turns and heads up the stairs, shoulders a little stiffer than necessary. Woonhak follows, and behind him Donghyun follows, and the conversation doesn't happen tonight—but Jaehyun’s sulking is visible even from the back. 

The next day, they're in the room in the late afternoon, the fan going, food wrappers from lunch still on the table. Donghyun is finishing up his book. Woonhak had lost rock paper scissors and was tasked with cleaning the mess up, but he insisted on getting in at least fifteen minutes of a food coma beforehand. He’d been on his phone and then his thoughts drifted into what Dongmin had said a little while ago. Something about the Carpenters again, a specific song, the way he'd described what it felt like to listen to it when he was alive. It was probably the most openly vulnerable Dongmin has been about anything, and which he'd talked about in a dismissive manner as if that would make him seem less sensitive—and Woonhak has been sitting here quietly staring out the window, which is apparently noticeable.

"Okay," Jaehyun says.

Woonhak comes out of his head and back down to Earth. "What?"

"You've been staring at nothing for, like, ten minutes." Jaehyun sits on the bed with his legs crossed, expression is patient. "And yesterday you left at noon and didn't come back until almost five, and the day before—"

"I've been working on the assignment—"

"At a cemetery," Jaehyun cuts him off.

Woonhak's mouth closes. Fine.

"Donghyunnie told me you've been going to a cemetery." He looks at Donghyun briefly, not accusatory. Donghyun doesn't look up from his book. "I mean, sure, it's a photo project, but you also went yesterday and you didn't say anything about taking pictures—I saw you leave—and you were gone for four hours." He pauses. "And you two keep doing the thing where you have a whole conversation in like eight words and I'm just standing there. What's going on?"

The room is quiet for a moment except for the fan. Woonhak looks at Donghyun. 

Donghyun looks up and says, "We should tell him."

"I know," Woonhak says. Unfortunately, knowing isn’t the same thing as wanting to—especially when the explanation is going to include the word ghost, and Jaehyun, who once refused to watch a horror movie trailer without muting it, is sitting right there.

Regardless, he tells Jaehyun everything. He uses roughly the same structure he'd used with Donghyun, and watches Jaehyun's face move through several distinct phases. First is polite, patient listening, nodding, as he waits for the part that makes sense of the preceding parts. Then as it becomes clear there’s no such part coming, there’s a gradual widening of his eyes. By the time Woonhak gets to the part where Dongmin is very obviously not alive, Jaehyun is sitting very still.

Then, around the part where Woonhak describes Dongmin touching Donghyun: "Wait, he touched him?"

"He did," Donghyun confirms.

"Feels cold and wet, allegedly," Woonhak adds.

"I don't—" Jaehyun looks between them, visibly rattled. "You're both being really calm about this."

"You get used to it." Woonhak shrugs. Maybe not the right thing to say, because Jaehyun's next expression shift suggests he finds you get used to it significantly more alarming than anything that came before it.

"Woonhak-ah," he whines.

"Yeah."

"There's a ghost."

"Yes."

"The ghost is who you've been visiting. Repeatedly. At a cemetery." He points at Donghyun. "That touched him."

"Correct."

Jaehyun is quiet for a moment. He's looking at his hands, now, which he does when he's processing something pretty large. He's also gone a little pale, which Woonhak feels mildly guilty about. "Is he scary?"

Woonhak gives Dongmin’s scariness level some thought. The flat voice. The smug expression when he'd predicted Woonhak would come back. His weirdly intense opinions. "No," he says. "He's actually kind of annoying, and on purpose, too."

Jaehyun looks up. "Annoying?"

"Yeah."

A pause. "Okay," Jaehyun says, with a lack of conviction. "Can I come, too?"

── .✦

Dongmin, when Woonhak had told him a second friend would be visiting, said: "The scaredy-cat?" Woonhak had mentioned Jaehyun at some point, and Dongmin had apparently filed it in his head without overtly extracting any further information.

"Yes," Woonhak had said.

Dongmin had looked noticeably pleased, with a quick, sharp grin that reached his eyes and that he didn’t bother to hide. "Good," he’d said. This turns out to mean something specific, which Woonhak understands approximately thirty seconds after they walk through the cemetery gate.

Jaehyun enters slowly, with his hands shoved into the pockets of his jorts and his shoulders drawn up near his ears as he looks around. He's shorter than Woonhak, as the majority of people are, but he’s trying to carry himself as if he could compensate for his fearfulness with just determination. His whole body is rigid with the effort of seeming casual.

"It's fine," Woonhak tells him.

"I'm fine," Jaehyun says, definitely not fine.

"He probably won't—"

Jaehyun makes a sharp, startled noise that cuts him off mid-sentence. His whole body jerks, shoulders jumping, and he grabs Woonhak’s arm with the full grip of both small hands, immediately trying to angle himself slightly behind him.

"What—what was that?" he whimpers, already looking over his shoulder.

Woonhak turns. Dongmin is standing just to Jaehyun’s side, looking intensely pleased with himself. His hand still hovers where it had just made contact, evidently considering a second attempt.

"Hyung, he barely touched you," Woonhak says, sighing.

"I barely need to," Dongmin retorts.

Jaehyun, still gripping Woonhak's arm: "Did he say something? What did he say?"

"He says hi."

"He absolutely did not say hi."

"He says hi," Woonhak says again, more firmly.

With a nervous giggle, Jaehyun looks at the space to Woonhak's left, which is where Woonhak keeps addressing, and says, "Hi… I can't believe I'm doing this."

They sit together for an hour. It turns out that Dongmin finds Jaehyun fascinating like how a cat finds a piece of string fascinating. He plays with him persistently and without the smallest shred of remorse—a pebble that shifts slightly; a cold spot that Jaehyun walks directly into and then out of very quickly, saying nope nope nope under his breath to no one. Woonhak has to run the relay again, and Donghyun, who had opted to sit calmly on the grass and examine a beetle he'd found, provides zero assistance. Awesome. Each time Dongmin does something, Woonhak looks at him with an expression that tries to communicate please stop, and Dongmin looks back with an expression that says hell no, this is the most entertainment I've had in twenty-eight years.

"He likes you, dude," Woonhak tells Jaehyun, during a brief lull.

Jaehyun is sitting on the grass with his knees drawn up, his back to a small stone wall. "That's what this is?"

"He messed with Donghyun-hyung a lot less."

Jaehyun shoots a pointed look towards Donghyun. "That doesn't make me feel better."

"Donghyun-hyung didn't react," Woonhak says. "You're more fun, to him."

Jaehyun makes a face. Then, to the general area: "You really are a pain in the ass."

Dongmin, to Woonhak's side: "I know."

"He says he knows," Woonhak says.

Donghyun makes a distracted noise of soft protest as he shifts his arm a few inches to the left, without looking up.

"Hang on," he murmurs, still focused on the beetle. It has a ridiculously large and long nose—horn? Whatever it is, looks like a little freak. "He's climbing. So cute…"

In a brief moment of silence, Donghyun's shoulders hike up ever so slightly.

"Oh," he says, mild, "no, that's not the beetle."

Dongmin has crouched down beside him, clearly curious, and is dragging his fingers lightly through the air just above Donghyun's wrist—close enough that the skin reacts, goosebumps lifting in a slow ripple.

Donghyun exhales through his nose, the closest he gets to whining. "That’s cold. Stop distracting me."

Dongmin does not stop. Donghyun moves his arm again and swats around in the air with his other hand, evidently trying to stay patient and still for the beetle’s sake but now feeling faintly aggrieved. "I’m trying to look at him."

Jaehyun stares at this entire exchange and then puts his face in his hands. When he comes back up, his expression has settled into a reluctant middle ground. “What's Dongmin like, other than being annoying?"

Woonhak thinks about it. "He's interesting. He has a lot of opinions, mostly about music."

"That kinda sounds like you."

"Really? I don’t think we’re anything alike." 

Jaehyun squints at the empty space where he thinks Dongmin might be. He’s missing the mark by a few feet. “What does he look like, then?”

Woonhak hesitates. It’s not a helpful start to whatever he’s trying to say, so he tries to just say whatever’s on his mind. “He’s pretty good-looking.”

Jaehyun blinks. “That doesn’t help, man. I asked what he looks like.”

“I’m getting there!”

“You started, and then stopped at good-looking.”

“He has—” Woonhak gestures vaguely around his own face to assist in the description. “Good features, tall nose, black hair, brown eyes, nice lips. Looks kinda…” He trails off again. Describing Dongmin out loud feels kind of vulnerable. Does he want to gatekeep Dongmin’s appearance?

“Kind of what?” Jaehyun presses.

“Like he’s about to throw rocks at your window,” which is technically not wrong.

“Great. I feel comforted to know that.”

"Mm," says Donghyun, with slight disagreement, still looking at the beetle.

Jaehyun makes eye contact with Woonhak across the grass. A leaf falls off a branch above and lands squarely on the top of his head, in the complete absence of wind. He makes that involuntary, startled yelp again and jumps and flails around a little, grabbing blindly to his right and catching Donghyun's arm.

Donghyun steadies automatically. His free hand adjusts around Jaehyun’s wrist without thinking, firming just enough to anchor him, thumb brushing once in what could almost be reassurance before he stills again. The back of his neck flushes faintly reddish, ears following a second later, but his expression doesn’t change. "Careful," he mutters. "You’ll scare him."

On the walk back home after everyone bids their farewells, Jaehyun is quiet for a while. His hands are in his pockets again and he watches the pavement.

"Is he lonely?” he asks, eventually.

It's a very Jaehyun-esque question, and gets straight to the thing Woonhak had been talking and thinking around for two weeks, not trying to consciously address it. Is Dongmin lonely? For God’s sake. Twenty-eight years of seeing the same things every day in a cemetery, and the first person to talk to him in all that time had walked in because he wanted shade in a city he isn’t supposed to be in for more than a summer. Woonhak realizes he hadn’t let himself think this directly.

"Probably," he says.

Jaehyun nods. He doesn’t say anything else about it, but he checks on Woonhak twice before they go to sleep that night. Once when they’re in the stairwell, and another one later.

Woonhak is already in bed by the second time, staring at the ceiling—pressed to the side open to the rest of the room, because Donghyun is fast asleep beside him with one arm up behind his head like usual, the other thrown across his chest. The room is dim, the fan clicking softly again as it turns.

From the mat a few feet away, Jaehyun’s hand reaches for Woonhak’s shoulder, makes contact, and lingers for just a second longer than necessary. It then withdraws after Woonhak doesn’t move. There’s a rustle of fabric as he lies back down.

── .✦

Woonhak hadn’t expected Dongmin to talk as much as he does now. 

He'd built a picture in his head that he figured was pretty accurate, and it was accurate in some parts, but it missed something essential about the ratios between ghost/cemetery/1998/prickly/opinions. Of course Dongmin, who’s been existing in silence for twenty-eight years, has things to say. He only now gets to deliver the arguments he’s been holding onto since his death. He talks about Gwangju a lot, since it shaped him before he was old enough to notice it. Sometimes he talks about much smaller things; the way the clouds were moving today, a bird he’d been watching, someone who came into the cemetery that was intriguing enough to bring up. He only talks about his family in small interjections so quick Woonhak almost misses them. He still hasn’t even mentioned how he died, but Woonhak doesn’t ask in the first place, anyways. So.

What changes is that Woonhak stops feeling the urge to fill space. Even though he’s always been a bit of a talker, something about Dongmin makes him quieter. More comfortable with the quiet, because the quiet with Dongmin in it doesn’t feel empty.

Also, Dongmin is always there when he arrives. He doesn’t have to be in the same spot or standing at attention. Sometimes Woonhak will come through the gate and find Dongmin already watching him from somewhere in the rows, and Dongmin will look away with feigned disinterest the moment Woonhak's eyes land on him. Woonhak has mostly stopped pointing this out.

They sit closer to each other now than they did in the first week. It happened incrementally, visit by visit. Woonhak usually sits with his back against the black pine near Dongmin’s headstone, legs stretched out in the grass, and Dongmin sits beside him at a distance that started at two feet and is currently closer to one.

"You know," Dongmin says one afternoon, in the middle of a silence they'd been sharing comfortably for about ten minutes, while staring at the grass, "I wish I could touch. Things, people—I miss the texture of things."

"You touched Donghyun," Woonhak says. "And Jaehyun. Multiple times."

"That's different."

"How?"

Dongmin takes a moment, looking up into the canopy before replying. "That's cold, as they’ve said, and it scares people, but it’s all I have to offer." He makes a small, vague gesture, trying to grasp the concept. "On my end, it feels like putting your hand through a dense fog. There’s a little resistance, but nothing defined, and I can kind of push through it."

He looks at his own hand, turning it slightly. "I think I remember what it used to feel like," he says, after a second, with no self-pity in his tone, “with the real pressure. And the warmth. The memories are a little fuzzy, but I just know that it was different."

"Oh," Woonhak says.

"I could show you," Dongmin says.

"Um," Woonhak says. "How?"

Dongmin reaches over. It’s a careful motion, and he places his hand over Woonhak’s where it’s resting on the grass. The precision is obvious, the control he’s exerting to land there and stay, and what Woonhak feels is cold, yes. The same cold that made Donghyun describe it like a fish, seeping and spreading up into his wrist. But there’s still a bit of pressure to it. Neither of them moves. The cold continues creeping up Woonhak’s forearm, but strangely, his whole chest feels warm. And tingly.

The light coming through the canopy shines down in dappled spots, some landing on their joined hands, making Dongmin’s shimmer and blur. After a moment, Dongmin lifts his.

“Ha, you made a face,” Dongmin says, delighted.

“I didn’t.”

“You did. What was that?”

“It was nothing.”

“It wasn’t nothing. You looked like you were—”

“I wasn’t anything—”

“You were,” Dongmin says, and he’s evidently not going to drop it, “you do that when you’re trying not to react.”

“I don’t.”

“You do. It’s very obvious.”

Woonhak looks down at his hand. By all means, it looks normal. It doesn’t feel normal. There’s still a trace of cold lingering in his wrist and knuckles, fading slowly, and Dongmin is still watching him like he intends to get some sort of satisfaction or reward out of this whether Woonhak cooperates or not.

“Stop looking at me like that,” Woonhak whines.

“Like what?”

“Like you’re going to keep talking until I say something.”

“Don’t care.” Dongmin doesn’t even hesitate, already continuing seamlessly into something else. “It felt different, didn’t it? From before.”

Out of spite, Woonhak doesn’t answer.

“That’s because I was actually trying,” Dongmin proclaims. “Before, with your friends, it’s barely anything. This takes more effort. It’s easier if I’m not actively trying to meet a boundary.”

Clearly, he wants to talk about this, so Woonhak lets him. Dongmin goes on and on about the difference between brushing past something and holding contact, how it’s inconsistent, and how sometimes he misses entirely—and Woonhak is half-following, half-not, the earlier feeling still whirling around in his head.

Eventually the conversation thins out on its own, and Woonhak pushes himself up from the grass, brushing his hands off.

“I’m going,” he says.

Dongmin glances at him, almost deciding whether to follow that thread, then doesn’t. “Okay. See you.”

Woonhak nods once and heads toward the gate, and he can feel Dongmin watching him for a few seconds before the distance takes care of it.

── .✦

That evening, back in his room, Woonhak finds himself on his phone, looking things up. Half the time he leaves the cemetery with a list—mental or otherwise. It’s usually of albums Dongmin mentioned, a song he'd referenced through the lyrics or singing the melody rather than just telling him the damn title, which had taken Woonhak twenty minutes of searching and three wrong answers before he'd gotten it right. Dongmin references things as if he’s certain the other person already knows them, which Woonhak never does, born in 2006 into a musical landscape that would be mostly unrecognizable to someone stuck in 1998.

Tonight it's Oasis. Knowing Oasis the way you know a famous painting and knowing Oasis the way Dongmin knows Oasis are apparently completely different categories of knowledge, and Woonhak has been unintentionally migrating toward the second, as of recent. He's got (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? playing through his earbuds, lying on his bed, and he's reading through lyrics on a site because Dongmin had said something today before the touching incident about a specific line in a specific song—he’d said, I’m a dreamer. All I do is daydream, and I have all the time in the world to do it—and Woonhak wanted to find the line. 

He finds it. He reads it. Wake up the dawn and ask her why/A dreamer dreams she never dies. He reads it again.

He puts the phone face-down on his chest and stares at the ceiling and the song keeps going.

It was a good album before Dongmin, presumably, in the years it existed that Woonhak wasn't paying attention to it. But within the past few weeks, Woonhak has learned which track Dongmin goes still for—Don’t Look Back in Anger, where Dongmin stops talking mid-sentence every time it starts, and his expression turns so quiet and unguarded that he'd probably deny, deny, deny everything if asked about it. Woonhak keeps pressing play on that one. He tells himself it's because it's just a good song, but he's not totally sure that's all of the reasoning behind it.

The thing he's been circling lately: he'd been concretely sad last Wednesday. It took him an embarrassing amount of time to trace it back to the fact that it’d been pouring rain. He hadn't gone to the cemetery because none of them brought an umbrella to Gwangju and it was coming down too hard to go buy one, even at a convenience store, and he'd just not seen Dongmin. That was the whole reason. He'd sat in the room with Donghyun watching something menial on his laptop and Jaehyun eating snacks beside him. He was very present, very fine and also mentally somewhere else entirely. Probably means something, no?

He's thinking about Dongmin's face when the Oasis song came on. The problem is that every time he tries not to think about Dongmin, his brain immediately supplies another detail anyways. Something about his face, the shape of his mouth when he's trying not to smile, the way he says Woonhak's name when teasing him, the chill of his hand over Woonhak's in the grass—

He lies there with his earbuds in and his face hot for absolutely no reason. His legs keep shifting restlessly under the blanket because he has too much nervous energy trapped in his body and nowhere to put it and every position feels uncomfortable or too static. At one point he takes a deep breath and presses the heels of his hands against his eyes in annoyance because his stomach won’t calm down. It's not even like Dongmin did anything especially crazy today. He touched his hand. They've done that before. Technically. Once or twice.

But today, it was so intentional, and almost flirty, but he’d rather jump off the roof of the cemetery’s maintenance building than further consider the concept of him thinking that a ghost is flirting with him. He groans quietly into his pillow and kicks one foot against the mattress. Just some deeply embarrassed loser. If Jaehyun saw him right now he'd never recover from the humiliation, he can already imagine the look on his face—ooooh, Woonhakie likes somebody.

Absolutely not. Except, okay, maybe a little. Enough that his chest keeps doing weird warm swooping things every time he remembers Dongmin standing at the cemetery gate waiting for him, which, again, sounds off the delusion alarm.

Donghyun is sat beside him on the bed doing a slow, methodical shoulder stretch. He switches arms, a quiet sigh. “You’re doing the thing again,” he says, peering over at him with ingenuousness.

“I’m not doing anything,” Woonhak replies, taking an earbud out.

“The ceiling thing.” Donghyun tilts his head back to stretch his neck. “You’ve been staring at it for a while.”

“I’m thinking.”

“‘Bout what?”

Woonhak considers this. “Music.”

Donghyun hums in acknowledgement and lets his arm drop, settling more comfortably against the mattress. Woonhak puts the earbud back in. The track has already moved on, but he rewinds back to Don’t Look Back in Anger and replays it for maybe the sixth time tonight, letting it fill the space in his mind instead of his thoughts. He could follow the line of thinking further if he wanted to, but he can feel where it would go and how quickly it would pick up speed. He knows himself well enough. And he’d like to sleep at some point tonight—so he just listens. He’ll leave in three weeks, he reminds himself, then he goes back to Seoul. The thought feels weirdly like heartburn. Nauseating.

His chest is warm and a little tingly in the same way it was in the cemetery. He falls asleep with the earbuds still in. In the morning, the phone battery is dead.