Chapter Text
The alley smelled like rust and old rain.
Wemmbu opened his eyes to a strip of sky wedged between two buildings, gray-orange and bruised at the edges, the kind of color that could've been dusk or dawn — he couldn't tell which, and there was something wrong about not being able to tell. His head didn't hurt, which was strange, because everything about waking up in a dumpster-adjacent puddle should have hurt. He sat up. His hair — long, purple, catching what little light there was like it was lit from the inside, the one warm thing in a scene otherwise drained of color — slid over his shoulder in a way that felt familiar and wrong at the same time, like touching your own face in the dark and forgetting it was yours.
"Okay," he said, to no one. "Okay, cool, great start to the week, chungie behavior right off the bat."
Except he didn't know what week it was. He didn't know what day it was. He stood, dusted off knees that weren't dirty, and noticed — really noticed — the quiet. Not silence. The city was never silent. But it was quiet in a specific way, like a room right after someone stops talking about you.
He began walking.
The streets did that neon-city thing where the light didn't so much illuminate as assault, pink and blue signage stuttering over convenience stores, colors that didn't belong to anything real, didn't belong to sky or skin or sunset — just chemical, manufactured, an ATM screen looping the same electric-green ad four times before he'd even passed it. He squinted against it, disoriented, everything too bright and too false at once, and it was somewhere between the pharmacy on the 9th and the shuttered noodle place, under a sign the color of a bruise, that he saw his own face.
Stapled to a telephone pole. Laminated against the rain.
MISSING. His school photo printed above a phone number he didn't recognize as anyone's, the whole thing washed sickly blue-white under a street lamp that flickered like it was thinking about giving up. He stopped walking.
"That's—" He touched the poster. His hand went through the plastic satin like it wasn't there, and for a second he thought that was a problem with the poster.
Then he saw a second one, twenty feet down. A third, taped to a bus stop. His own face, over and over, asking the entire city if anyone had seen him, and nobody was answering, because apparently he couldn't even answer for himself. He had no memory of the last week. Not a day, not an hour. There was a day in there somewhere he was fairly sure he'd been alive for, and then there was this — an alley, a puddle, and streets absolutely wallpapered with his own missing face.
He spent the night walking anyway, because what else was there to do. He tried talking to people — a guy locking up a convenience store, a woman waiting at a crosswalk who wouldn't be waiting at a crosswalk once she crossed it — and none of them so much as flinched in his direction. He waved a hand in front of someone's face. Nothing. He shouted directly into someone's ear, and the guy just adjusted his headphones like the wind had picked up.
By the time the sky actually did the thing where it turned properly light — soft gold bleeding in at the edges, ordinary, the kind of morning color that belonged to people with somewhere to be — Wemmbu had stopped being scared and gotten annoyed instead, which was more his speed. He followed the flow of backpacks and yawns and found himself in front of a very familiar set of gates. School. Fine. Whatever. If nobody in the whole city could hear him, maybe someone here could, because surely someone he knew would clock that something was deeply wrong with their missing classmate strolling in at eight in the morning, gold light and all, like nothing had happened.
"Yo, bro, hey," he said, sliding directly into the path of the first person crossing the gate, a kid with headphones and a coffee clearly too big for 8 a.m. "You gonna tell me why there's like fifty posters of my face plastered across the entire downtown area, or are we doing the silent treatment—"
The kid walked straight through him.
Wemmbu staggered back on reflex, even though there was nothing to stagger from, just the cold-water shock of being passed through like a shower curtain. "Wow. That was rude." He said, unimpressed yet slightly annoyed.
He rounded on the next body in the crowd, already talking before he'd even lined up the sentence. "You. You, with the— whatever, doesn't matter, bro, do you know why i'm apparently a missing person? Because i've got a lot of questions and zero answers and everyone's being extremely unhelpful about—"
That was when he noticed.
Behind the girl he was mid-rant at, someone had stopped walking.
White hair, a thick streak of blue running through the center of it, and inside the blue, thinner still, a line of black. Pale, half-lidded blue eyes under lashes so white and thick they gave the permanent impression of being closed, of looking at the world through the last seconds before sleep — the only cold color in a hallway otherwise washed gold, like he'd brought his own weather with him. There was something around his neck, hidden mostly under his collar, a small dark shape on a beaded cord — and above his head, so faint Wemmbu almost mistook them for a trick of the morning light, two small wings, folded in, quiet as held breath.
And he was looking directly at Wemmbu.
Not the girl. Not through her, not past her, not vaguely toward the noise. At him. Dead center, unblinking behind those sleepy lashes, like Wemmbu was the single most solid thing in a school full of white noise.
Wemmbu stopped talking mid-sentence for possibly the first time in his life.
"...Wait," he said. Quieter now, testing it, like he might scare it off if he said it too loud. "Wait, wait, wait— can you see me?"
Something happened in the white-haired kid's face — quick, involuntary, gone almost before it arrived. Not shock exactly. More like the flinch of someone who'd just heard their own name called across a crowded room when they'd been trying very hard not to be found. His sleepy-lidded eyes flicked once, sharp, unmistakably aware — and then, deliberately, they slid past Wemmbu's shoulder, to the middle distance, to nothing, the same practiced nowhere everyone else had been looking at him with all night. Except everyone else's nowhere had been real. This one wasn't, and Wemmbu could tell.
"Bro. Bro, i saw that, don't do the thing, don't do the thing where you pretend you didn't just—"
The kid adjusted the strap of his bag, jaw tight, and walked. Not through him — around him, a small, precise, unhurried step to the side, the kind of correction a person makes so smoothly you'd almost believe it was a coincidence if you hadn't watched his eyes do it first. He didn't look back. He didn't speed up either, which somehow made it worse — no panic, no confirmation, just a boy folding his wings a fraction tighter to his skull and disappearing into the current of backpacks and morning chatter like he'd never stopped walking at all.
"Okay," Wemmbu said to the space where he'd been standing. "Okay, that's— that's fine, bro, that's a completely normal way to treat the only person who's looked at me all night, love that for me—"
He went after him anyway. Of course he did. But the hallway had already swallowed the white hair and the thing blue streak whole, folded him into a hundred other shoulders, and by the time Wemmbu shoved through the doors into the main breezeway there was no telling which back was his. He gave up the chase somewhere near the announcement board, mostly because his own face stopped him cold.
Laminated. Bordered in black. The same photo from the telephone poles, except this one had a program stapled beneath it — a time, a location, the school's gym, a somber little clip-art candle rendered in gray. Someone had tied a length of deep violet ribbon around the corner of the board, the one real color in a hallway that had, without him noticing, gone very quiet around him.
IN LOVING MEMORY. 8:15 AM. Six days.
Wemmbu read it twice. It didn't get easier the second time.
"...Huh," he said, to no one again, because apparently that was just the shape of his life now — or his afterlife, he supposed, was the more accurate word, and didn't that just sit like a stone in a chest he technically didn't have anymore. Something in his vision went red at the edges, faint, velvet-dark, the only color that felt like it still belonged to him in a hallway gone violet and gray and strange.
The bell rang. Bodies surged past him towards homeroom, none of them slowing, none of them seeing the boy standing very still in front of his own memorial notice.
Somewhere down the hall, half-swallowed by the crowd, a flash of white hair turned a corner that didn't look back — but for one second, right before it vanished, Wemmbu could've sworn the kid's shoulders were rigid in a way that had nothing to do with being late to class.
You saw me, Wemmbu thought, watching the space where he'd disappeared. I know you did. And you're gonna have to explain that eventually, bro — because i am absolutely, one hundred percent, not going anywhere.
—
The gym was full by 8:15, which told Wemmbu something he hadn't fully let himself absorb yet: that a lot of people, apparently, had liked him. Folding chairs in crooked rows, half the school crammed shoulder to shoulder under fluorescent lights someone had tried and failed to soften with a table of white candles and a blown-uo photo on an easel — the same photo from every missing-poster he'd encountered, like it was the only picture anyone had ever taken of him. Someone's mom was crying in the third row. A teacher he barely recognized kept dabbing at her eyes with a tissue like she'd personally lost something.
He drifted the aisles like smoke looking for a draft, and it was strange, unbearably strange, watching people cry over him while not one of them could feel him brush past their shoulder. Flame was there — Wemmbu spotted the dreads before anything else, framing his face, and the sight of that stupid, stubborn, familiar face sitting rigid in a folding chair with his jaw locked shut did something painful to whatever Wemmbu had instead of a chest now. Flame wasn't crying. Flame looked like he was daring the room to make him.
Parrot sat two rows back, green-yellow-brown hair dulled somehow under the gym lights, hands folded so tightly in his lap his knuckles had gone pale, the exact posture of someone doing math on a problem that refused to solve.
And spoke — white eyes fixed dead ahead, rainbow bandana traded out today for something plain and dark, like even chaos knew when to sit down — hadn't said a word to anyone since walking in, which for Spoke was its own kind of scream.
Wemmbu drank all of it in and felt something violet and heavy settle over the whole room, the same color as the ribbon on the announcement board, grief with nowhere left to go, filling every folding chair like water finding its level.
And then he found Eggchan.
Not up front — Egg wasn't up front for anything, Wemmbu was starting to understand that about him already, an instinct as automatic as breathing. He was in the back row, corner seat, the kind of position a person chooses when they've spent years mapping the fastest route out of any room. Nobody sat near him. Nobody had saved him a seat, and nobody seemed to have noticed there was an empty half-row on either side of a boy with wings folded flat against white hair, like he'd learned a long time ago exactly how much space he was allowed to take up at things like this.
Nobody was looking at Egg. That was the whole point of Egg, apparently — a boy built to go unnoticed in a room built entirely around noticing someone else.
Which meant nobody saw it when he finally stopped pretending.
His eyes found Wemmbu across the gym and didn't flinch away this time, didn't slide off into practiced nowhere. He just looked — openly, fully, none of the careful nothing from the hallway, like a held breath finally let go because there was, for once, no one around to catch him doing it. Blue eyes steady under those sleepy white lashes, fixed on the one thing in the entire gymnasium that could actually see him looking back.
Wemmbu felt it land somewhere under the red at the edges of his vision, warm and strange, the first thing all night that hadn't felt like white noise or fried or gold morning light lying to him about the day ahead. He drifted down the row, weightless, and dropped into the empty seat beside him — the one nobody else had wanted, the one that had clearly been waiting for him the whole time.
"Hey," Wemmbu said, quiet, quieter than he'd said anything since waking up in that alley. "Didn't take you for a crier, bro."
Egg didn't look away. Didn't answer, either — not yet — but something in his face, unguarded now that the whole room had its back turned, said more than the silence in the hallway ever could.
At the front, someone picked up a microphone that shrieked with feedback before settling, and the whole gym turned to face forward, present at Wemmbu's own funeral, except for two people in the back row who were still looking at each other.
—
The principal spoke first, the kind of careful, rehearsed sentences that could've been about anyone — bright, light, gone too soon, our hearts go out — words so smoothed over they barely left a mark. Wemmbu tuned it out. It didn't sound like him. It didn't sound like anything.
Then Parrot stood up, and it got harder to tune out.
He didn't use notes. He stood at the front with his hands loose at his sides, green-yellow-brown hair catching the fluorescent light wrong, and talked about the time Wemmbu had talked their entire class into a three-day prank war that ended with the vice principal finding glitter in his car for a month. The gym actually laughed — a small, startled, grateful sound, the first crack of anything other than grief since the doors opened. Parrot smiled through it, easy and warm, and Wemmbu watched his jaw tighten right after, like keeping that smile up cost him something he wasn't going to let the room see him pay.
"He never let anyone carry anything alone," Parrot said, near the end, voice dropping out of the performance and into something rawer for just a second before he visibly reeled it back in. "Even when he should've let someone carry him."
Wemmbu, sitting in a folding chair no one else could see him occupy, felt that land somewhere it had no business landing, given he technically didn't have organs left to ache.
Flame didn't speak. He sat rigid through the whole thing, arms crossed, dreads still framing his face, staring straight ahead through his blindfold like eye contact with the easel photo might do something he couldn't take back. Wemmbu knew that face. Had seen it a hundred times across a court or a field or whatever dumb competition they'd cooked up that week — Flame's I refuse to lose face, except there was nothing left here to compete for, and losing had already happened, and his jaw was doing the thing it did right before he said something he didn't mean to say out loud.
Spoke didn't speak either. He just watched the room with those white, unreadable eyes, arms folded, expression doing absolutely nothing — and Wemmbu, who knew him best of anyone in that gym, understood exactly how much work that nothing was doing to hold itself together.
By the time it ended, the gold light through the high windows had shifted, thinner now, grayer, like even the sun had lost interest in staying warm for this. People filed out in slow clumps, hugging, wiping faces, already dissolving back into the ordinary business of being alive. Wemmbu sat very still and let it happen around him, weightless, unable to be hugged or thanked or told he'd be missed by any of the people currently doing exactly that to each other in his name.
When he finally looked over, the back row was empty except for him.
Egg was gone.
He found him outside, around the side of the gym where the vending machines hummed against a wall nobody bothered to paint, half in shadow, half caught in the thin gray light of a sky that couldn't decide if it wanted to be morning or something sadder. Egg had his back against the brick, arms crossed, staring at nothing with the specific stillness of someone doing very deliberate breathing exercises.
"Hey," Wemmbu said, quieter than before. "You didn't have to run."
"I didn't run." Egg didn't open his eyes. "I left. Calmly. Like a person who has never once panicked in his life."
"Sure. Very calm. Very chill exit, ten out of ten, no notes." Wemmbu drifted closer, settling against the brick a few feet off, matching his stillness without quite meaning to. "You gonna keep pretending you can't hear me, bro? Because i watched you not-look at me for a solid twenty minutes in there and i gotta say, your not-looking has range."
A long pause. Long enough that Wemmbu almost expected the silent treatment again, the hallway all over. Then Egg finally opened his eyes, and turned his head, and looked at him — really looked, no crowd left to hide behind now, nothing between them but a gray wall and a machine that occasionally clunked out a can no one had bought.
"I've been doing this since i was six," Egg said. Flat. Tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hour. "You get good at looking through people when the alternative is everyone finding out you're insane."
"You're not insane. I'm right here."
"That's exactly the problem." A humorless huff, almost a laugh, definitely not one. "Do you know ehat happens to a kid who says he can see dead people in third grade? I do. I lived it. So i stopped saying it. I got very good at stopping."
Wemmbu was quiet for a second — a genuine first, and he'd been embarrassed about it if there'd been anyone around to clock it. "And now there's me."
"And now there's you." Egg exhaled, slow, like it cost him something to admit it out loud. "Standing in the middle of every hallway. Talking to everyone. Getting seen by no one but me. It's not exactly subtle, Wemmbu."
"Well, sorry, bro, i wasn't given a manual on how to be a considerate ghost. This is my first time doing this."
That — finally, actually — got something out of him. Not quite a laugh. But close enough to one that the corner of his mouth gave up trying to stay flat, and for a second the gray light around them didn't feel quite so heavy.
"I still don't know why i died," Wemmbu said, quieter now, dropping the bit because it didn't feel like the moment for it anymore. "Or where i was for six days. Or literally anything that happened after last Thursday. And you're the only person om the planet who can actually help me find out, so." He spread his hands, something almost sheepish under all the usual noise. "I know you've spent your whole life hiding this. And i'm about to make that a lot harder. I get it if you wanna just— go back to pretending. I can't exactly stop you."
Egg looked at him for a long moment. Blue eyes, steady, doing that math-behind-the-eyes thing again — except this time Wemmbu could see the answer arriving before he said it.
"You died six days ago and you don't remember any of it," Egg said slowly, like he was thinking it through as the words left him. "That's not normal, dude. Ghosts remember. I've seen dozens of them, and every single one remembers exactly how it happened, down to the second. That they play it over. That's usually the whole reason they're still here."
"...Okay, that's not ominous at all, bro."
"You not remembering isn't a glitch." Egg pushed off the wall, and for the first time since the hallway, he wasn't looking away. "It means someone — or something — took it away from you. Which means whatever happened to you wasn't an accident anyone wants you walking around with memory of."
The gray light held still for a second, like the whole world was waiting to see what Wemmbu would do with that.
"Well," Wemmbu said finally, and something in his voice had gone quieter, steadier, the joke mostly drained out of it. "Guess we're finding out, bro. You in?"
Egg looked at him — really looked, the way he had across the gym when he thought no one was watching, except now someone was, and it didn't seem to matter anymore.
"...Yeah," he said. "I'm in."