Archive of Our Own

Thomas had gotten scarily good at reading decaying interiors.

A house abandoned for a few months still reeked of the people who had left it: coffee grounds set like concrete at the bottom of a mug, a calendar perpetually stuck on a day nobody would ever cross off. It was nothing like six years, which was his metric, give or take: six years of no one at all, inherited by silverfish and the earthy smell of soil stains. Despite everything, there were still photographs of nobody in particular hanging crookedly on the walls. The ghost of a life that belonged to a couple who grew old together, to a loner who would spend his last days wondering where it all went wrong, to a happy family of four. He preferred the years all the same; they made it easier to pretend he wasn't bothered by any of his guilty subconscious workings.

He had become better at telling the difference over the last year, moving from one dead town to the next with only an oversized royal-blue backpack to his name. Paradise City, read on a map he borrowed from the station. They had a boarded-up movie theater and a diner that miraculously served coffee at all hours near where he had decided to stay. At the corner of it stood a wrought-iron gate bearing the word ROGHOST in rusted letters. Fancy, he thought as he whistled and pushed it open.

If you were to ask what he was doing, he would tell you that he was a student. Gap year for independent research. Research into what? Regional folklore, historic architecture, "the socioeconomics of rural depopulation" — memorably, once. It had earned him an impressed nod from a bartender and a free basket of fries.

The truth was so small it was acknowledged only when no one else was around to see it. The fact was that, when Thomas turned nine, his father had brought home a book with the Von Kruger brothers’ names on the cover — two brothers stranded in the Wild West with nothing but each other and a dream, leaving their name on the most influential bank in town. Little Thomas had read it fourteen times before he was twelve. He had, God help him, read it four more times since leaving home, on nights when the place he’d broken into didn’t have working lights, tracing the words by streetlamp through a grimy window. He believed there was a fortune somewhere out there waiting for him, too. He even pictured it – slicked-back hair and a fancy suit, some undiscovered thing that would make all of this worth it. He would not need to look back, for he’d have it all in the palm of his hand.

His father flatly called it a fantasy. His mother didn't say anything at all, which was her own way of showing her disappointment. And when Thomas, at twenty-two, renounced law school in favor of pursuing his dream, it was not a battle he won by any means.

The Roghost place was the nicest he’d found in months. You could tell from its good bones: the leaded glass in the front door, a fireplace mantel carved with a level of care not everyone could afford these days. Six years, Thomas guessed, running a hand along the porch rail as it came away gray with dust. Seven, maybe.

He let himself in through a window with a broken latch around the back, setting his bag down in what appeared to be a sitting room. The relief after the long journey wasn't long-lasting as the temperature in the room dropped fifteen degrees, and a voice that did not belong to him spoke directly into his left ear —

"Get. Out."

Thomas, as a matter of fact, did not comply.

He probably should have screamed, run, and slept on a bench somewhere instead. But in the moment, the only thing he felt was bone-deep irritation. He had walked eleven miles that day. His left shoe had a hole opening at the toe. He was not going to be chased out of the first house in three towns with an intact roof by what was, statistically, just a draft of his own tired imagination.

A door slammed somewhere upstairs, then the lone working lightbulb in the front hall — which he was fairly sure had not been screwed into its socket, since there was no visible power source — flared to blinding brightness and then died with a pop.

The next three nights went much the same, with escalating and increasingly personal variations. On the first, every book Thomas had brought with him ended up stacked in a precarious tower balanced directly over where his head would be if he lay down, which he regarded, with some admiration, as a threat with real intent behind it. On the second night, the room filled with the sound of something being dragged across the floor above for five hours straight, at the end of which the ever-so-stubborn student moved his sleeping bag to a different space.

On the third night, the door locked itself from the outside. He shook his head and let out a dry laugh. "You do know I have a book on lock mechanisms," he called out, working the ancient deadbolt loose with a bent hairpin he'd been saving for this exact contingency. "Scouts. I was a very committed Scout."

There was a long pause before the voice spoke to him.

"So, let me get this straight. You have that on you, but not a flashlight?"

His hand nearly dropped the hairpin. The voice sounded younger than he'd expected, that's for sure. Such an angry and strong presence carried a certain, lazy cadence as if it belonged to someone around his own age. He could swear he had heard it before, on one of his few classmates. It came from everywhere and nowhere, almost as if he were in a stairwell. Except there wasn't a stairwell, because Thomas was all alone in a locked room with his heart going very fast in his ears.

"It broke. Battery corrosion, it's a whole thing," Thomas confessed once he found the ability to do so. "I was planning on getting a new one this morning."

"That's — okay, I was actually expecting anything but that. Usually, this is around the part where everyone starts freaking out. You're kinda not good at this."

"Really? I'll take that as a compliment."

"It wasn't one."

Thomas managed to free the deadbolt and pushed the door open into a hallway that, as far as his eyes could see in the dark, was completely desolate.

"I'm Thomas," he introduced himself to whatever was clearly, at this point, going to be his roommate, whether either of them wanted it that way.

"Cool," said the voice. "Get out of my house."

Thomas could only smirk. "No," his voice had an uncanny cheerfulness to it, almost as if this whole thing was a challenge he wasn't going to back out of. He went ahead to find his sleeping bag.

It took a week for the haunting to stop, if you could even call it that. Thomas made sure to mark every single one of them the way a prisoner marks a wall, except his tally, chalked inside a closet door, was less about counting time until his freedom and more of a ridiculous scoreboard — who was stuck with whom? Me. You're stuck with me.

"You've stopped trying." his arms were crossed as he stood in the middle of the kitchen. It was where the voice tended to linger the most; he still couldn't understand why. "Something tells me you're out of ideas."

"I'm choosing the best time to strike. Also, I kinda haven't talked to anyone in a buncha years. It's a whole new logistical problem for me."

Thomas couldn't help but chuckle. The sound resonated around the walls for a fraction of a second too long. Oh no, had he scared his new friend away?

"I'm not leaving. I've got nowhere else lined up, and this is the first place in a while that's decently comforting to stay in. Respectfully, none of this will be my breaking point. Bigger things have tried."

"…Bigger things like what?"

Oops. Thomas hadn't meant to say that much. He busied himself with the fireplace, which he'd gotten working with a scavenged bundle of newspaper and a truly unreasonable amount of patience. He didn't offer an answer.

His ghostly comrade didn't press, either.

They didn't shake on it, exactly, because one of them no longer had a physical body, but they settled on a truce over the following week. Thomas would learn the name of his new friend by accident, mid-argument over whether he was allowed to burn a water-damaged copy of the Farmer's Almanac for kindling.

"It's actually a historical document," Thomas's grin almost reached his eyes.

"It's a moldy pamphlet."

"It's history, F—"

"Mike," the voice snapped amidst the absurdity of it. "My name's Mike."

"Okay. I'm—"

"Thomas, yeah. Hi Thomas, I'm Dad. You've said it enough times to the air like a lunatic."

"You could've answered sooner."

"Nah, I wasn't gonna ruin the fun of watching you narrate your own life to no one."

I was narrating it to you, Thomas wanted to say, but decided against it. In its place, he asked how Mike had ended up like this. The story was relatively simple: he and some dumb friends had come out to the house on a dare after having heard something about the family that used to own it. Something went terribly wrong, and he'd died here – a freak accident, or whatever they called it. Now he was stuck, tethered to the property by supernatural ghost logic.

"That's it?" Thomas asked, tilting his head.

"Essentially, yeah." Mike waved his hand dismissively. "And you? Did your parents kick you out?"

"I'm doing a school project on rural architecture." It was this week's answer, delivered with such straight-faced confidence that Mike had nearly believed him, if not for the cackling that followed. "Dude, that's the most boring lie you could've come up with."

"It's true! I'm here because I didn't want to bother paying for a room in a hotel." His gaze drifted to the fireplace flames. "I'll be out of your hair after I wrap up my research here."

The ghost only hummed in response.

Surprisingly, after that conversation, Thomas had begun his mornings waking to commentary on the weather or a complaint about how the morning light hit the water stains on the ceiling. "It's like the house is a show-off, very dramatic, I hate it here. Don't tell the house I said that."

Thomas, in all his Thomas fashion, had brought up the Von Krugers to his wonderful acquaintance when he had gone strangely distant and withdrawn. For some reason, Thomas couldn't stand the silence anymore, and he knew his concerns would be brushed off regardless.

"Do you want me to read to you?" Thomas asked, reaching for his bag.

"Do I – what, is this a nursing home? Does the white hair make me look that old? Wanna check my blood pressure too?"

"You don't have any blood. And I'm being genuine, Mike. You can say no if you're not up for it."

A beat.

"…What's it about?"

"The Von Krugers, Timothy and Jan," Thomas's face had already lit up as he turned the page in a way that almost made him resemble that same child all those years ago receiving a gift for the first time. "They're twin brothers who arrive in the Wild West and manage to strike it rich by founding a bank in–"

"This has to be the most boring book ever published."

"It is not!"

"Two guys build a bank. That's the whole plot?"

"There's a train robbery in chapter six," Thomas defended himself with immense dignity. "Jan gets shot. He doesn't die, but Timothy has to figure things out on his own for a while. Turns out that he's actually better at the interpersonal side of banking than anyone gave him credit for, and there's also this whole thing where the town doesn't trust him because he's–"

"Holy shit, you're such a geek. Keep going."

And so he did. Thomas made sure to do voices, too — a gravelly rasp for the villainous railroad baron, an earnest stammer for young Jan — and Mike made fun of every single one. Even so, when Thomas's voice went hoarse around midnight, he begged for one more chapter.

"I wanna see if the bank thing works out." The carefully engineered indifference didn't fool Thomas in the slightest.

"It does. I'm quite certain that was the first thing I told you before I started reading."

"I could still be surprised."

"You most likely won't."

"Dude, just read."

It became a fixture before either of them noticed. Mike constantly interrupted his reading, mostly to complain about the prose. Once, he made Thomas re-read an entire page because he'd missed the good line after getting distracted by a passing car's headlight through a crack in the wall. Not once, not a single time, however, did he leave the room.

"You really love these idiots," Mike snickered when Thomas had gotten so worked up defending Jan's business decisions that he'd started gesturing with the book itself.

"They're not idiots, they're aspirational."

"Yeah? The fictional bankers?"

"Everyone needs something to aspire to."

"You aspire to be a fictional 1880's banker?"

"I aspire," Thomas began with a sort of wounded formality, "to build something valuable. It doesn't have to be a bank."

"…Well, whatever it is, you'll do great someday."

"Thank you, I think."

"Yeah, yeah. Uh, you can – you can continue."

Huh. Thomas would have to write in his journal that ghosts got flustered, too.

"Okay, but be honest," Thomas began one otherwise unremarkable evening as he poked at the fire. "Do you think Abigail's mother is the secretary? They both have blonde hair and all. I've always thought she was underwritten, but there's some tension between her and Jan in chapter nine."

"Who is— is this about…?" The ghostly silhouette of what called itself Mike drifted away from the window, flipping lazily through the air before coming to a stop upside down in front of Thomas. "I have exactly zero opinions on that guy's fictional love life. What I do want to know is why you care so much." He tilted his head. "You got a type, Thomas? You got a thing for hot blonde secretaries? Be honest. I won't judge you. Much"

"I don't have a type." The boy shook his head, the grin never subsiding from the corners of his eyes. "Didn't have time for it. I skipped my homecoming dance because I had better things to occupy myself with." Or because no one ever bothered to invite him. Or because there wasn't a dance to begin with. He made that up on the spot because he was bored and wanted to make Mike feel bad for not humoring him. "What about you, party boy? I'm assuming you didn't have that problem."

"Duh. It's not like I was a monk about it. There was really only one person that ever, y'know. Mattered, though." A beat. "Grayleigh."

Thomas sat up a little straighter. He was sure he had heard the name before, during Mike's recount of his idiotic, tragic death. It had passed so quickly he didn't bother looking too deep into it then. "Was she your girlfriend?"

"No! God, no, nothing like — we were just close. She used to call me out on my own nonsense in a way nobody else bothered to, and I just… I liked that about her. I liked so many things about her." The ghost sighed, absently scratching at his neck. It must've been a reflex of an old need to do something with his hands in moments like these, because he obviously didn't feel anything anymore. Like, literally. Mike was dead. He was an apparition, even if it was sometimes hard to remember. His hand phased right through the spot, but neither of them said anything about it. "I never told her 'cause I figured there'd be time to get around to it eventually. Y'know, maybe after graduation, so if things went wrong I'd never see her again." He let out a short, humorless laugh. "There wasn't, obviously."

"I could find her." The words had stumbled out of his mouth before he'd fully thought them through—a very, very bad habit of his. "I'm going back into town tomorrow anyway. I could ask around, find out where she ended up. Tell her, uh — just enough, so she's not still out there wondering what happened to you."

The air in the room went still and sharp in a way it had never before.

"No."

"Mike, I just meant — "

"I know what you meant." Mike's voice had lost every trace of that easy, deflecting warmth from a moment before. "And the answer's no. Don't go looking for her. Don't say my name to her, don't say anything about this, don't give her one single reason to come within a hundred miles of here. I mean it, Thomas. Leave it alone."

"Okay." It was spoken so quietly that the answer almost came out shaky. "Okay. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to—"

"You don't have to apologize. You didn't do anything wrong." Mike exhaled, or did whatever the version of exhaling was for someone with no lungs. "You were just being nice. You're annoyingly good at that. Whatever she thinks happened to me, it's better than whatever you could say to her. Trust me on that one."

Thomas wanted, badly, to ask what that meant. He filed the wanting away instead; he knew he had pushed too much for the night. And in this house, they always kept at least one door locked.

It was Mike who decided to break the silence a few minutes later, his voice working visibly hard to sound casual again. "Hey. You said you never went to a dance?"

"Yes."

"There might be an iPod somewhere upstairs. Second door on the left, end of the hall. Old junk the old owner must've left behind. It's definitely dead, but there might be a cord in one of the drawers, if you're willing to dig. I've been dying to try it out, but I don't exactly have fingers anymore."

"Whose room is it?"

"Does it matter? I dunno, I didn't really look into it that much. Or maybe I did, but I don't remember. Go. Or don't. I don't care."

The room, when he found it, had a narrow bed still made, a faded poster curling off the wall for a band he didn't recognize, and a dust-furred trophy on the windowsill with a little gold football bolted to the top, the engraved plate too grimed over to read. Thomas picked it up and looked it over before shifting his attention to the drawer in the nighstand. There were, in fact, several iPods inside. Enough to overwhelm him a little. He picked one at random from the bunch, silently hoping it was the correct one.

It took him twenty minutes and holding a scavenged charger at an odd angle to coax even a flicker of life out of it. When the little screen finally lit with a singular bar of battery, Thomas felt an entirely disproportionate rush of triumph.

"It's alive!" he announced, jogging back down to the sitting room, holding it up like a trophy of his own. "…Barely. We might get one song out of it before it dies again, so choose wisely."

"Depends on what's on there."

It was things Thomas didn't recognize, for the most part. A decade-old party playlist heavy on songs built for basements and red cups, an environment he didn't even dream of being part of. But near the bottom, sitting sorely apart from the rest, was a single track with no artist. Mike went very still when Thomas's thumb hovered over it.

"That one. Play that one."

It came out tinny and warped around through the single blown speaker. It had an unhurried three-quarter time unmistakably meant for slow dancing.

"I don't have anyone to dance with," Thomas said.

"You've got me."

"I can't touch you, Mike."

"Never stopped anybody from dancing with a ghost before. Surely you've read a book or two about that?"

So Thomas stood, in the middle of the room, and held his arms out in the shape of holding someone — one hand raised, the other resting where a waist should be — and it felt so ridiculous until the spirit filled the space in front of him. A near-invisible hand wrapped around his own, or at least attempted to. It felt cold. It didn't feel like anything at all.

"You're leading with the wrong foot," Mike sneered.

"You should be grateful I'm not stepping on your feet."

"You are. You so are. Ouch, dude. Other foot."

Thomas laughed, correcting nothing in his sway that was more of a slow turn than a waltz. His limbs had started to ache from being held upright without actually having a living, breathing partner to rest on. The iPod's battery gave out two-thirds of the way through the song, cutting off mid-note into silence. Neither of them stopped dancing anyway — Thomas hummed the last third himself, horribly off-key.

"You're terrible at this." Mike's glassy eyes were half-lidded, staring right into Thomas's own vivid ones.

"I know."

"I really like you being here."

"…I wish we could do more." The confession came stupidly small. Thomas allowed himself to imagine it, sometimes — his back against the grass, Mike's body stretched out beside his, pointing up at a sky full of stars Thomas wasn't even looking at, because he'd rather have been looking at his hand. A movie date in which they both get kicked out of the cinema for being too loud. All the cheesy, corny couple stuff that was never going to be in the cards. Certainly not with a corpse.

Something in the dim shape of him, almost as if it could read his mind, offered a bitter smile in return.

It had been an easy enough arrangement, at first. Thomas had somewhere to sleep, and Mike, in exchange, had somebody to talk to. That was the whole of it, or it was supposed to be. But Thomas knew that the longer this went on, the deeper he was falling for him.

And that terrified him.

"I…" Mike stepped back, and Thomas reached after him anyway, chasing a touch that had never once been there to catch. "You know, there's always one way."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, it's ridiculous, but—"

"Mike, is there a way to change this?" Thomas didn't let him finish. "You know it kills me not knowing what would happen—" Suddenly, Mike closed the distance he had put up between them in the first place. Unlike any moment before, the air in the room went tight enough to feel against his skin.

"You… you could summon me. Like, with a spellbook and candles and everything." His gaze held a dare, even if the smile beneath didn't quite reach his eyes.

"I have no idea how that sort of magic works." It didn't even occur to him that the part he'd objected to wasn't this is insane but I haven't been trained for it, the insane part had stopped being an issue anyway. He'd already built his whole life out of somebody else's pipe dream. This would only be a stranger chapter of it. It was tempting. He still didn't want to pick a fight with whatever force of nature it was that answered to the great beyond.

"I thought you wanted to be with me." Mike tilted his head. The sadness that crossed what passed for his face was good enough to fool almost anyone. It certainly fooled Thomas, whose hands were already clasping around something that, as always, wasn't there to be held.

"Of course I do—!"

Mike vanished mid-reach. Thomas's eyes went wide as he scrambled around the empty room for a shape that reappeared close enough for him to nearly walk straight through where a chest should have been.

"I'm just messing with ya."

The news came on a Tuesday in the form of a woman with sun-kissed skin and a flaxen braid that fell nearly to the small of her back. A golden tiara rested in her hair, set with a cyan stone that caught the afternoon sun and nearly blinded him. An ebony leather jacket hung open over a faded vermilion tank top, dark gloves disappearing beneath its sleeves. She was radiant. The water jug in his hands slipped from his grasp and struck the ground with a dull crack, spilling a sheet of water across the gravel that spread around his shoes before sinking into the thirsty earth. He barely noticed. By the time he remembered that staring was rude, his jaw had already gone slack enough that closing it again felt like too conscious a choice.

"So you're the one staying in the old place," The confidence in her voice made it rather clear she was confirming a fact she already knew rather than asking a question.

Thomas straightened, silently doing the math on how fast he could get over the fence if things went south. "I'm just passing through."

"Sure you are." The smile she offered was offensively warm; it belonged more to a teacher, or to charity workers. Thomas might've been naive, but he was not stupid. His fingers curled against the fabric of his jeans until his knuckles paled. "You know, I can take you to a place you can stay in. Not many rules, no questions asked." Her eyes wandered over him with an honesty that felt neither invasive nor pitying. "You look like you haven't had a decent bed in a while."

"I'm fine where I am."

"I didn't say you weren't." She lowered herself into a crouch without the slightest concern for the puddle spreading beneath her boots. Bringing herself to his eye level didn't make him feel any less cornered than when she was towering over him. In fact, Thomas had the uncomfortable impression that she had only made it harder to look away. "I'm not here to drag you anywhere you don't want to go. I just wanted to let you know that the house is scheduled for demolition in three weeks, and it's probably not the smartest idea to let the wrecking crew see you here."

For a heartbeat, Thomas forgot how to breathe.

"...Demolition?"

"Yeah. The property's been sold. County crew starts clearing the lot on the fourteenth. I don't really know much beyond that." The sympathy on her face looked painfully genuine. "You've got somewhere else lined up?"

"I—" The answer was an automatic reflex at this point, always delivered with a straight face. Somewhere between forming the first syllable and letting it leave his lips, he heard it as though someone else had said it first. It was all wrong. Did he always sound this mechanical? He was too busy feeling his stomach lurch as if he'd eaten something bad to worry about it.

Zora's face made it obvious she wasn't buying a word of it, and yet, she seemed content to let the lie die quietly between them.

"Thank you," he managed after a long moment, each word caught on a throat too tight. "Really. But I can't. Not yet. I've got — there's something I have to sort out first. I'm not trying to be difficult."

"I didn't think you were." She rose to her feet, brushing damp grit from her knees. "We are over on Fourth, whenever you change your mind. No pressure, of course, but — don't be so stubborn over this." Her gaze lingered only a second on the house behind them; it was enough to send a cold knot winding its way down the back of Thomas's neck. "Whatever you've got worked out for yourself in there, it isn't worth staying for."

She turned and walked away without waiting for an answer.

Thomas stood rooted to the spot until the sound of her footsteps disappeared into the afternoon. Only then did the panic catch up with his state of shock.

He spun on his heel and bolted for the front door, stumbling over the uneven path in his haste. The porch steps shook beneath his weight as he took them two at a time, fumbling for the handle with hands that had begun to tremble in earnest. Every rational part of him knew the house would still be there when he crossed the threshold.

He needed to see it anyway.

"Yeah," Mike said. "I know. I've known for a while. There's been surveyors out front for a month. You just don't usually walk that side of the property."

"You knew, and you didn't—" Thomas heard the pitch of his own voice climbing and caught himself halfway through. He shut his mouth hard enough that his teeth clicked together and forced himself to draw in a slow breath through his nose. Panic had never solved anything; it had a remarkable talent for making every problem look twice its size while shrinking every possible solution. Less than a month, the thought settled somewhere behind his ribs with the weight of a stone dropped into still water. It felt like an anvil slowly descending onto him — the beginning of the end.

"Okay, okay... so we have three weeks."

Mike frowned. "Three weeks for what?"

"To figure it out."

"Figure what out, Thomas?" There wasn't a trace of cynicism in the question. If anything, Mike sounded resigned, as though he had rehearsed this conversation with himself enough times that he had accepted the dull certainty of an ending years before Thomas had even known there was one. "If the house is destroyed, I probably go down with it." His gaze wandered toward the ceiling where sunlight spilled through half-rotten boards and settled over dust that would never quite find the floor. "I've got zero clue about the specifics, but I've had plenty of time to come to terms with—"

"Stop it!" It had to be some sick joke. Thomas hated how sharp the words came. He hated even more that Mike stopped talking all the same. "I'm not going to let that happen." His hands had curled into fists, fingernails pressing deep crescents into his palms. "I've spent my entire life listening to people tell me I'm too idealistic, too stubborn, too— too dense to know when something can't be fixed, and I've never once let that stop me. I refuse to believe that the answer is to sit here and hope the universe sorts the rest out for us." He only stopped because his lungs demanded air. The words had come tumbling over one another so quickly that they hardly felt like thoughts anymore.

"So give me time," he mumbled, meeting Mike's eyes with a desperation he hadn't managed to hide. "Give me time to think before you start planning your own..."

Even in front of a corpse, he couldn't bring himself to finish that sentence.

He went to the library the next morning.

It occupied an old brick building with a hand-painted sign whose letters were beginning to peel beneath years of rain and summer heat. Inside, the place smelled of damp carpet and whatever miracle was keeping the heating system alive.

It was horribly understaffed. The books that had escaped their shelves were sprawled open across reading desks or lay abandoned in the middle of aisles, as though someone had been struck by a brilliant thought halfway through reshelving and wandered off.

A stack of flyers sat beside the front desk.

We're sorry about the mess.
If you happen to find books where they don't belong, we'd really appreciate it if you could put them back in the correct section. Don't forget to check your own books out before leaving. Thank you!
P.S. Please watch your step. The floor is beginning to give out in the more trafficked areas.

It had been signed —Saps :) in loopy handwriting. The smiley face at the end had one eye bigger than the other.

Geez. This place was held together by goodwill and wishful thinking.

He found the occult book by complete accident. A handful of books had slipped from an overstuffed shelf while he was putting another pile back where it belonged. As he crouched to gather the fallen volumes, one cover caught his eye.

A Magical Grimoire of Sigils and Rituals for Summoning and Mastering Spirits.

It certainly seemed promising. He settled cross-legged on the floor without another thought, thumbing through brittle pages crowded with circles, sigils, and elaborate diagrams. Most of it might as well have been another language he didn't understand. A heading caught his attention.

'On the experiment of seeking lost love.'

Thomas let out a dry laugh. There wasn't another word that fit nearly as well.

If thou wishest to perform the Experiment of Seeking Lost Love, observe in what manner the Experiment is to be carried out. Then shalt thou repeat over it the following Oration...

The ritual itself was divided neatly into three parts: the staging, the oration, and the summoning. The staging required a hand-drawn circle and an object that had belonged to the deceased. There was an old can of white paint somewhere in the garage. It would do. There was a small collection of things Mike had left scattered through the house, too. Against all reason, this seemed like something he could actually do.

By the time he looked back up, the light spilling through the windows had begun to soften into evening. It was getting late— he had to tell Mike about this.

He tucked the grimoire beneath his arm and headed for the stairs, already rehearsing how he would explain that, yes, he had found a solution, and yes, it involved summoning the dead.

He had almost reached the front doors when a voice split the silence.

"Hold up!"

The shout belonged to a man somewhere in his forties whose reading glasses had been pushed so permanently into his greying hair that they appeared to have become part of him. He was so white he reminded Thomas of A4 paper.

"You can't just leave the library without checking out!"

Right. There was one small problem with that, though. Thomas didn't have a library card.

He turned and bolted through the front doors. Snow had begun to fall while he'd been inside. The flakes caught in his hair as he ran, boots slipping on the thin layer already settling over the pavement.

He needed to get home.

A quiet dread threaded through Thomas as he arranged the room. The can of paint scraped across the floorboards as he knelt to finish the last curve of the circle. Candles borrowed from kitchen drawers stood unevenly around the edges, some taller than others where the wax had melted away. The spellbook lay open on the floor beside him, its pages held flat beneath an old wrench from the garage that happened to be heavy enough for the job.

Every few minutes, his eyes drifted back to the instructions, as the same impossible question resurfaced from the depths of his mind: Is this actually going to work?

There was no satisfying answer he could come up with. No professor he could ask during office hours, no librarian who could point him toward the appropriate reference shelf, no sensible adult who wouldn't conclude that he had suffered some catastrophic break from reality. The only people who believed in rituals like these were either charlatans or patients, and Thomas had no intention of becoming either.

Mike, for once, seemed content to let the silence exist. It didn't hide his displeasure one bit as he followed Thomas's movements with crossed arms and a judgmental stare.

"Mike, you're going to need to work with me, okay?"

He wasn't going to get away with the lie for much longer.

A missing poster. Newspaper archives. Digging through countless social media profiles. Everything he'd learned had come from places anyone could have looked, provided they knew where to start. That counted for something, didn't it? It wasn't as though he'd pried open locked drawers or stolen secrets from one massive corporation that offered a hefty money reward if you could find the son of its CEO.

And yet, there was an undeniable difference between discovering the truth and choosing not to tell someone they had been lying to you.

Mike had bullshitted his way through a story that didn't survive its own weight. Thomas knew, and he'd nodded along anyway. Somewhere along the line, pretending had become easier than confronting. Mike got to keep whatever reasons had driven him into the lie, and Thomas got to play the harmless college kid who wandered into an abandoned house with zero ulterior motives whatsoever.

As comfortable as it was, sacrifices had to be made. It was a lesson Thomas had learned long before stepping foot into the city.

He showed Mike the family photo that had been hidden behind his back.

A little boy stood in the foreground with a soccer ball tucked beneath one arm, no older than ten, grinning with a confidence unhindered by the gap in his front-row teeth. Beside him stood a taller man in a tailored suit, one hand resting lightly on the boy's shoulder. His expression stopped just short of becoming a smile. A polished wristwatch caught the camera's flash. The resemblance was impossible to miss— a carbon copy with the same nose, the same eyes. There wasn't as much ambition on the kid as there was on the father. One of them looked far more overjoyed to be there than the other.

"Is this your dad?"

Mike glanced at it only once; long enough for Thomas to notice how something behind his expression tightened and failed to keep his lips in a straight line. It was only a matter of time before he gave in. Thomas trusted as much.

Mike tittered once beneath his breath. "Funny coincidence, but no. I told you before, this isn't my house, dude."

…Or not. Fine. Two can play this game.

"What do you want from me?" Mike asked.

Nothing.

"You trying some kind of interrogation technique?"

Thomas glared daggers at him. Mike only clicked his tongue.

"It sucks, by the way."

Mike's shoulders lost some of their practiced ease. His eyes drifted back to the photograph despite himself, lingering there a second longer than before.

He scoffed before he drawled out an exasperated sigh. "Where did you find this picture, Thomas?"

"Does it matter?" Thomas tilted his head, his free hand fiddling with the bandana wrapped around his neck.

Of all the answers he'd been expecting, that one seemed to exhaust him the most. "You've really been snooping around, eh?"

"It's hard not to. The property is quite large."

By that point, Thomas wasn't the only one who had begun putting pieces together.

He barely had time to register his words before the spirit crossed the distance between the room and him. Mike stopped inches from his face, close enough that Thomas could make out every hard line of the expression twisting across it. One translucent hand thrust toward his chest, an accusing finger passing harmlessly through him. Thomas flinched anyway, stumbling backward so abruptly that the picture frame slipped from his grasp.

It struck the floor face-first. The crack that had once occupied a single corner splintered outward in jagged veins until it covered the entire pane.

"Why did you really come here, dumbass?" Mike snarled. "Looking for something to steal? You think there's something valuable buried in this god-awful place? Some antique you could auction on eBay and make a fortune from?" He barked a humorless cackle. "Bad news, man. You're fresh out of luck."

Thomas opened his mouth to retort. Mike didn't let him.

"Answer me, fucker!"

"My—"

"Don't."

"My intentions—"

"I don't care about your intentions!"

Thomas felt his back meet the wall. The cold seeped through his shirt immediately; he had never felt more grateful for the sensation.

"Your father was looking for you."

He watched the change arrive on Mike's face almost imperceptibly. His anger didn't quite disappear, but it gave way to something that almost resembled confusion. Thomas found himself looking away first.

"I found a missing person's poster online," he confessed after a long moment. "There was a cash reward for any information. I started digging because..." He stopped himself. Curiosity sounded embarrassingly small now. "Well, it was an absurd amount of money."

Mike almost choked. It wasn't a pleasant sound. It escaped him in one short breath of pure disbelief.

"So that's it." He shook his head slowly. "You figured you'd bring me back, march over to my old man, and collect your paycheck?"

"No," Thomas answered so abruptly it even surprised him. "I called him the same day you started haunting me."

Mike's eyes narrowed. Thomas absent-mindedly rubbed the back of his neck, suddenly finding the warped floorboards infinitely more compelling.

"He didn't pick up. I kept trying anyway." He swallowed. "For almost two weeks, I believe." Every evening he'd be met with the same pre-recorded voicemail, and still— he silently, wholeheartedly prayed. It wasn't just the sentiment of someone actually picking up and taking the time to listen to him— rather, it would've served as proof that this whole escapade wasn't all for nothing. He was so convinced that when he got his chance to unveil the mystery that was Mike Roghost's disappearance, everything would become simpler.

"I told him everything, and he told me not to call his number again."

Mike's expression seemed to fold inward on itself. Whatever fury had carried him across the room moments earlier drained away so gradually that Thomas almost found himself missing it. An exhausted sigh escaped him. He drifted backward to the opposite end, his not-legs dissolving into the familiar haze before they reached the floor. One hand disappeared into his hair, combing through it again and again with restless fingers that never quite seemed to find what they were looking for.

"...You fell for his cover-up. He knew what happened to me."

Thomas raised an eyebrow, suddenly looking up with interest.

"I was in a fraternity before all this. Alpha Alpha Alpha." He snorted softly through his nose. "Stupid name. My father hated it. Well, not really. Hating it would've required him to care enough to have an opinion. Mostly, he just expected me to inherit the company someday." He smiled without looking up. "But I wasn't as careful as he was. Wasn't as disciplined. I liked people too much. I liked wasting time. I liked messing around." He chuckled once, sheepishly. "God forbid."

Despite the many questions brimming in his mind, Thomas didn't interrupt him.

"I organized a hazing ritual that year in an old barn in the middle of nowhere— kinda gave me the creeps, but it looked sick as fuck. I thought it'd make for a good story afterward." He drew his knees tighter against his chest until there scarcely seemed enough of him left to occupy the corner he'd retreated into. "I couldn't tell you how it started. Somebody might've knocked over a lantern. Maybe it was the fireworks. I don't know, but there was fire everywhere. People were pushing each other and— it was so loud. I kept yelling for everyone to keep moving, but nobody could hear anybody." A tiny sob shook his frame as he burrowed his face in his palms. "Little Pete never made it out, man. I-I was— I looked after him, y'know? And when he… when he needed me the most, I…" there were no lacrimal glands for tears to come streaming down a face that was more of a mirage. It didn't make him look any less pitiful. Thomas suspected this was the first time Mike broke down in front of someone else since he had ended up like this. "I couldn't live with myself knowing I caused that. I don't— I really don't remember how, but I— uh, I killed myself. My father was the first one who found me, and he reported me missing instead. 'Cause, like, can you imagine the headlines? CEO's son kills himself after fraternity hazing leaves student dead. Terrible for business."

Thomas didn't know what to say to him. He could say sorry, but for what? For a past neither of them could change? For keeping Mike company? For making the house feel even a little less dismal? Sure, he was only in it for the bag, but he had done some good along the way. Mike had carried this alone for years, and Thomas couldn't decide whether he pitied him, resented him, or simply wished he had never been forced to hear it. All he knew was that he wanted a life with him, and he had found a way to make it happen.

So, he retrieved the photograph and made his way back to the circle. The candles were burning lower now. The shorter ones had begun to collapse inward, their wax pooling around blackened wicks that wouldn't survive much longer.

Time, for once, had remembered it was moving.

Thomas set the photograph carefully inside the circle before reaching for the grimoire. He skimmed the page one final time, lips moving silently over the archaic language until the unfamiliar rhythm no longer felt quite so foreign.

"You don't actually think..." Mike began, watching him with an expression Thomas couldn't decipher.

"I know you're… already dead, Mike. But bear with me for a second. What if I… lost you forever?"

Mike's face suddenly showed a calm determination.

"Do your thing, school boy."

The room seemed to shrink as Thomas struck the final match. Its sulfurous smell lingered only a moment before another candle joined the rest, the tiny flames surrounding him in an uneven ring of gold. Shadows climbed the walls, stretching long across the ceiling until every corner of the house appeared deeper than it had a minute before.

He cleared his throat and began to read.

The words were awkward in his mouth at first, their consonants catching against one another in ways no language he knew ever had. Luckily for him, he had taken some Latin lessons. It wasn't much of a struggle. His eyes lit up with expectation as he finished the first paragraph.

Nothing happened.

Thomas read the next paragraph louder.

The candle flames trembled, though whether from the wind slipping through the broken windows or something else he couldn't tell. He reached the end of the oration and looked expectantly toward the center of the circle, and again, nothing happened.

He looked back down at the book, flipping frantically through the preceding pages as though he might find a line he'd somehow skipped, a step he had managed to overlook— "There has to be something else," he muttered, already rereading the instructions. "I followed— I followed it exactly. Mike, do you feel different at all?"

Mike lowered his gaze to his hands. He flexed his fingers experimentally before pressing one palm against the other. Just as they always had, they drifted through each other without resistance, one translucent outline dissolving into the next before separating again.

"…It didn't work."

Thomas shut the book hard enough that dust jumped off the cover. What moved through him in that moment didn't have a clean name. Despair didn't even begin to cover it — after everything they'd just handed each other, after every door they'd finally opened, the house was still going to come down, and Mike was still going to be here when it did, and there was nothing — absolutely nothing — Thomas could do about any of it.

No. He'd rather die than let anything happen to him.

"You know," Thomas parroted back to a puzzled Mike. "There's always one way."

"Wha—?" His brows furrowed, mouth opening and closing a few times in bewilderment. "Thomas, what are you talking about?"

"I could stay here. I could stay with you until the house comes down."

Mike only did so much as blink. "No."

"That way, we'll both know what'll happen to you."

Mike was on his feet before Thomas had finished speaking. The movement made one of the candle flames flutter violently as he passed through it, the flame bending around an invisible body.

"No!"

"Mike, this was the only way to get you out of here!" Thomas shot back, rising just as quickly. The grimoire slipped from his lap and landed open beside the circle, its pages fanning across the floor.

"Are you crazy!? I'm not going to let you kill yourself for me!" Mike dragged both hands through his hair in one frustrated motion before pacing. It was a strange thing to watch. His feet made no sound against the wood, yet the habit remained so deeply ingrained that Thomas could almost hear the same squeak it did when he was the one walking.

"But you can pass on, and I'll never get to see you again?"

The spirit stopped dead in his tracks.

"You don't even know that would happen."

"Then, you'll stay the way you are, and I'll finally be able to be with you."

Mike scoffed as he shook his head. "No, Thomas! Look at me! I can't even— I can't even open a window, I can't leave this stupid house! Don't give up your whole life for me, please." I can't bear to see someone die again because of me.

"Mike. I'm a homeless squatter. What do I have to give up?" It hurt, more than he expected, to say it that plainly — to take years of looking and hoping and boil it down to four flat words — but if he was being honest with himself, that was the whole of what he actually was: a failure of an adult who was never going to make it big anywhere, in any town, doing any of this.

It's a futile gesture, but he places his hand on top of Mike's anyway. Of course, like it always happens, it phases right through.

"You're my whole life, Mike."

"…You're stubborn. You wouldn't even leave this place after I locked you in a room."

"This was the only place I could stay. By now, I'm… probably just as tied to it as you are, Mike." This was home. Mike was his home. "And somewhere in there, I fell in love with its ghost."

Mike laughed, dangerously close to a sob. He rubbed at his face out of habit, wiping a tear that wasn't really there, and shook his head with the weary fondness of knowing he had entirely run out of ways to argue.

"And I…" He looked almost embarrassed by the confession. "Fell in love with that loser boy."

Mike drew a slow breath, his shoulders rising and falling with an instinct his body no longer needed to obey. "I know I can't stop you once you've made up your mind, but is— is this what you really want?"

"Of course it is. I'm scared. Terrified, if you want the truth. But I'm more terrified of losing you than I am of any of the rest of it. I want to be with you, Mike. Whatever that ends up meaning."

Mike looked at him a long moment, and offered him a smile that didn't try very hard to hide how sad it was.

"The house goes down in three weeks," Thomas said. "Can you wait with me until then?"

"Thomas," Something in the way he said the name made the question feel smaller than it was, easier than it was — like it had never really been a question at all. "I've been waiting for years."