Filled with new determination, Chanyeol spent Tuesday morning updating his color-coded charts both for the house renovation, and for the ghost hunting. Coloring Zitao’s line with green felt way better than he really thought it had a right to, but then again, why shouldn’t he be proud of it? He’d literally released a tormented soul to… well. Whatever came after.

Zitao asking him if he was a ghost hunter made Chanyeol wonder if there actually were ghost hunters. Ghosts were real, and he obviously wasn’t the first person to run into them, so were there others? A support community online, maybe? He’d have to look. It had been a long time since he’d been a member of an online community, it might be nice to have something like that again. Not right now, though; he hadn’t planned to lose three full days of work and so he had a lot to catch up on.

While eating, he found a website that sold historically accurate replicas of antique hardware, and some coordinating pieces that had no reason to exist historically, like cast-iron light switch plates and outlet covers. He ordered a few items, washed his dishes, and settled in for the day to work.

He was over in the west wing today. The staircase was still collapsed and filled with debris, and even though he’d cleaned and wrapped his scraped arms the night before, the memory of his infected cuts made him decide not to try to clean out or repair that staircase while he had open wounds on his arms. Instead, he decided to begin really working on the first-floor rooms of the wing.

Now that he knew for sure that the wing had been sealed off back in the late 1940’s, he was extra careful to look before he stepped and not to touch anything too much. Unlike main body of the house, the west wing was a time capsule; anything in there could be priceless. Before doing anything else, he documented the entire floor carefully, taking extensive photos and video. Once that was done, he started the very tedious job of cleaning out debris and dusting.

Originally, Chanyeol had thought that he would restore the wing to the style of the early 19th century to match the rest of the house, but the more he found, the more he thought he might try to keep the wing preserved as it was. The decor and furnishings were a fascinating blend of older Joseon styles and that odd Western influence that was all through the house, but there was also a strong Japanese influence in this wing that seemed to not be present in the rest of the house. In the 1940’s, Korea had been just coming out from under Japanese rule - Chanyeol wondered if a later owner had purged the Japanese influence from the rest of the house after this wing had been sealed off.

Absorbed in his work and his internal musings over how each new piece might have come to be in the house, the morning and a good chunk of the afternoon flew by. Chanyeol made his way through the wing, from the center out towards the far end of the house, and reached the massive, two-story library at the end of it around midafternoon.

Three sides of the library, on two floors, were set with huge windows, alternating with the bookcases. Since the wing faced southwest, the afternoon sunlight was absolutely streaming in, illuminating the motes of dust in the air and glinting off of the gilded lettering on the spines of the old, leather-bound books. It was a downright magical sight.

“Damn,” Chanyeol said softly. “I’m so in love with this house.”

A balcony with a lovely, carved-wood railing ringed the entire second floor, accessed by a spiral staircase in the corner that matched the ones going up to both of the towers. This one was in considerably better shape than the others, and didn’t sway at all as Chanyeol climbed it.

“I could spend a lifetime just going through these books,” Chanyeol muttered. The shelves were stacked with newer books than the tower library, and probably at least ten times as many of them. He ran his fingers over the spines as he walked the length of the balcony, skipping lightly over the knick-knacks and curios that dotted the shelves at strategic intervals.

The bookcases were very tall, but even further above them was a decorative shelf that held still more knick-knacks, expensive objects d’art and the like. In the far corner, something was sticking off of the shelf at an odd angle. Chanyeol stared at it, trying to figure out what it might be. A leather folio, maybe? What was it doing up there?

His stepladder was down on the first floor and all the way back in the billiards room, and he wasn’t real sure he’d be able to get it up that narrow spiral staircase anyway. There was nothing else nearby to step on, and the folio was just barely out of reach, even if he jumped. Without thinking, Chanyeol put his foot on the second shelf of the bookcase, braced himself, and pushed up.

He put his hand on the folio just as the shelf gave out from underneath him. Yelping, Chanyeol grabbed for the bookcase as he fell, and then gasped as he felt the entire thing pull away from the wall.

Chanyeol went down, pulling the bookcase down on top of him. Books bombarded him like very heavy rain, followed immediately by the bookcase itself, solid and crushing. Chanyeol manage to get his arms up to protect his face, and cried out in pain as the weight of the bookcase landed right on his scraped up forearms.

A few more thuds and at least one clang, then the room finally fell silent. Winded, Chanyeol lay there for a moment, his arms straining to keep the heavy bookcase off his lungs before adrenaline kicked in. Chanyeol heaved, shoving upwards with all his strength, and got the bookcase to lift enough that he could scoot out from under it. It crashed to the floor where he had been, splintering in several places from the impact.

“,” Chanyeol breathed, and collapsed to the floor to catch his breath. That had been close.

After a moment, he rolled up to sitting, wincing as he went, and took stock of his body. Nothing broken, as far as he could tell, but he was going to be one massive bruise in the morning, and he was bleeding in a few places, including across the cheek.

Sighing, Chanyeol clambered to his feet. “I am the biggest moron,” he grumbled, and went to go get his first aid kit for like the sixth time since he’d moved in.

This time, he heard the voice before he saw the ghost. Male, unfamiliar, yelling. His eyes widening, Chanyeol hobbled faster, redirecting towards the voice.

To his surprise, he ended up in his own suite. There was a young man in the sitting room, backing away from the door as Chanyeol entered it. He appeared to be staring at Chanyeol in fear, but of course when Chanyeol moved to the side, the man’s gazed stayed right where it was.

“No,” the man was saying. “You won’t get me, you won’t. I only have to make it one more night.” He took another step back, and another, until he was pressed against the door leading out onto the patio. Chanyeol watched in fascination as the man’s hand found a doorknob that was no longer there, hiding the fact that he was turning it with his body, which was not hidden at all since his body was translucent.

Something roared, making Chanyeol jump and look around frantically, but he didn’t see anything. The man pushed through the door - which didn’t move, of course - and bolted outside. Quickly, Chanyeol opened the real-life, modern sliding door that was in the same place and followed him.

He realized which scene this was the moment he passed through the door, because out there, just past the patio, the ceramic-tile pool was filled with ghostly water and translucent fish, shimmering in the late afternoon sunlight. “Oh, ,” Chanyeol whispered, and stopped at the edge of the patio, not willing to get any closer.

The man actually made it entirely past the pool, sprinting for the woods behind the house, but he went down before he got much further than that. Not as if he had tripped - as if something had taken him down. He screamed and scrabbled against the grass as he was dragged backwards too swiftly to be natural, his pants ripped and blood flowing from deep lacerations on his legs.

Chanyeol covered his mouth in horror, stepping back. He couldn’t see what was making those wounds, but he had a pretty good guess.

The ghost was sobbing. “No, no,” he cried, “I’m so close, let me go, let me go, no!”

He was dragged unceremoniously into the pool, which immediately began to freeze, frost creeping in from the edges and crawling up the sides of his body until he was completely consumed, his horrified expression frozen. The yard went silent but for the occasional distant chirp of birds, afternoon sunlight glinting off of the ice.

Behind him, Chanyeol heard the grandfather clock faintly chiming three PM.

Chanyeol spent the evening nursing his wounds and thinking about what he’d seen. The frozen ghost had been wearing a modern enough outfit that Chanyeol couldn’t place his time frame, other than probably post-Joseon. His accent hadn’t been particularly old-timey, either, but nor did it sound modern and slang-filled, and it was definitely native Korean.

More interesting still were his actual words. Only one more night? One more night until what? He had spoken to whatever was chasing him with familiar language, but not in a friendly way, more as if he was being impertinent or insulting. How much had he known about the house, before it got the better of him?

It was the first indication Chanyeol had that maybe someone else, before him, had actively tried to figure out what was going on in the house. But the man hadn’t been successful - he’d ended up a victim, a ghost, just like all the others.

That was an unsettling thought. The idea that he was in danger, real, personal, bodily danger had crossed his mind before, but tonight it felt closer than ever. The house was quiet tonight, no groaning in the walls or flickering lights or footsteps or screaming, but the darkness pressed in around him like a weight.

Chanyeol almost texted Amber, but the thought of how she would react to finding out about this latest accident stayed his hand. He also - shamefully - nearly texted Minho, wishing desperately just to hear his former lover’s voice, to listen to him talk about his day. But that wasn’t an option, so he fought the creeping unease back with his bright, modern LED lamps and his calming white noise, and told himself it wasn’t a worse feeling than anything he’d faced before.

The next day, right after his morning coffee, he made his way back to the west wing library, intending to clean up his mess from the day before. This time, he took his stepladder with him, and determinedly maneuvered it up the narrow spiral staircase, moving slowly due to the fact that his body was one big pounding ache.

Carefully, he stacked up the old books, trying to guess from the way they had fallen which ones had been shelved together and attempting to keep them in that order. When he went to lift the fallen bookcase back into place, Chanyeol found, to his surprise, that he could barely move it at all. He tried for a good few minutes, but it was just too heavy to lift by himself, at least while injured and sore. Eventually, he huffed and gave up, flopping to the ground next to the stack of books and the splintered bookcase. How had he not broken any bones yesterday when that thing fell on him?

A translucent, socked foot stepped into Chanyeol’s line of sight, and he jumped in startlement and yelped. Wide-eyed, he looked up, as a new ghost, someone he had never seen before, walked through the pile of books and the downed bookcase as if it wasn’t there.

Because it wasn’t. It was standing back up exactly where it had been yesterday, the broken shelf back in place and the books all neatly arranged, and Chanyeol had to blink at it for a long moment, wondering if he had finally lost his mind for real. But no - his bookcase was still on the ground. The one against the wall was slightly translucent. A ghost bookcase.

Chanyeol scrambled to his feet. The ghost was nearly his height, dressed in elaborate hanbok but with his long hair loose around his shoulders, and carrying something in his hands. He looked around, as if to check if he was alone.

There was no sound, but the ghost startled as if he had heard one, and turned towards the door. “I will be there shortly!” he called out to no one.

He stepped up to the ghost bookcase and put one socked foot on the second shelf, and Chanyeol gasped. It was exactly the same motion Chanyeol had made the night before, right down to the way he gripped the finial on the corner of the bookcase in order to haul himself upward.

Chanyeol held his breath, fully expecting the young man to go right through the shelf, just as he had. But instead, the ghost only pulled himself up, and reached a very long arm upwards to place the object in his hand on the high shelf that was above the bookcases. The ghostly object settled right into the exact same space as the folio that was already on the corner of the shelf, hanging just a little bit over the edge.

Then the shelf broke.

The young man yelled, and Chanyeol leapt forward instinctively, but of course there was nothing he could do. The bookcase crashed down, crushing the young man underneath it.

Chanyeol turned away from the scene before the image could burn too deeply into his brain. The ghost had been higher up, hadn’t been able to get his arms up in front of him in time, and the top edge of the bookcase had come down right across his throat. He’d been killed instantly, his neck broken.

Very faintly, Chanyeol heard the grandfather clock chiming, and checked his watch. Quarter to nine in the morning. This was the last ghost on his list, then, the one he had heard the chime for but hadn’t seen.

He’d personally witnessed the deaths of ten different ghosts, now. As long as he didn’t think about it too hard, he could almost convince himself he was getting used to it.

Chanyeol looked up. The last thing this ghost had done was hide that folio. Why? What was up there? Carefully avoiding looking at the body - his nightmares were bad enough, thanks - Chanyeol went to go get his stepladder.

He was careful as he climbed, wary of anything else breaking or falling, but nothing happened and he was able to get the folio down from the high shelf. Judging by the dust, it did seem possible that it hadn’t been disturbed in at least a hundred years.

He left the stepladder - and the dead ghost - where it was, and took the folio back to his sitting room to peruse. Housework could wait.

Chanyeol ended up spending the entire day going through the folio and cataloguing what he learned from it.

The folio contained, in essence, a journal, but in the form of letters, specifically love letters, written by the young heir of a noble family to a servant that he was clearly enamoured with. The noble’s name was Oh Sehun, and Chanyeol quickly figured out two things - one, that Oh Sehun was the ghost he had seen in the library, and two, that he had never actually given these letters to or in any way confessed his feelings for the servant, likely because the servant was a man, named Do Kyungsoo.

The letters were dated for the late winter and spring of 1890, making them almost 130 years old. The Hangul was a bit flowery and old-fashioned, but readable, and Sehun’s tone wavered from conversational recounting of his mundane days, to overwrought and anguished professions of the love he was hiding, and everything in between.

There was a lot to sift through, but sift through it Chanyeol did, because it was interesting, and also because there were hints scattered throughout the letters that Sehun was experiencing hauntings himself. He mentioned odd occurrences several times, including one time that a sip of water had turned to blood in his mouth, only to turn back to water before his eyes after he spat it out. He mentioned a certain portrait over and over again, telling his silent audience about the chills he got up his spine when he looked at it and the way its eyes seemed to follow him as he crossed the room.

One letter was devoted to recounting an unsettling occurrence that matched Chanyeol’s first experience with the jumper ghost to the letter. Sehun had been woken by a scream and a crash, run down to the conservatory, and witnessed absolute carnage before the whole scene just… disappeared.

The more Chanyeol read, the more fascinated he became. Sehun’s voice came through very clearly in his letters, so clearly that Chanyeol could almost imagine him speaking the words. His aching, unrequited love, his struggle to figure himself out, and the way he talked about feeling isolated even amongst a crowd were all familiar to Chanyeol, and he couldn’t help but feel like he was getting to know Sehun, in some small way.

As time and the letters wore on, Sehun had started to see the tower ghost as well, though Sehun called him “the portrait man” instead, as he was apparently the same man as was depicted in the portrait Sehun found so terrifying. Chanyeol read about Sehun taking the portrait down and burning it, hoping to make the visions of a man long-dead stop, but it didn’t work. He mentioned being awoken by horrible, high-pitched screaming, he mentioned seeing bloody footprints crossing the front galleries, and he mentioned dreaming of being chased by a tiger.

Then, Chanyeol came to an entry marked Saturday, May 10, 1890, whereupon in shaking hand and with tear marks blurring the ink in places, Sehun wrote a letter to Kyungsoo that began with You are dead, and my heart has died along with you.

The letter was an outpouring, a young man raging on paper in a way he would not have been able to express out loud, and it wasn’t the most coherent. But, about halfway through the second page, Chanyeol realized exactly what he was reading, exactly who Kyungsoo was.

Kyungsoo was the servant in the kitchen, the one who had tripped and fallen upon the knife.

“They knew each other,” Chanyeol said out loud, startled by this revelation. “They lived in the house at the same time, they probably were both being haunted and didn’t realize it.” How much differently would it have played out, if Sehun had confided in Kyungsoo the things he was seeing? Or would it have made any difference at all? “They were the same age,” he remembered. Sehun had made mention of that fact earlier, in the letter recounting his own 25th birthday. “Maybe they were the only young men of that age in the house.”

Opening his chart, Chanyeol added a column for age at death, and filled in what he knew. Jongin and Zitao had also both been 25, and Yixing, Lu Han and Jongdae had been 26.

Chanyeol was also 26. Was that why he could see the ghosts, and no one else could?

Did it mean the house really was actively hunting him, after all?

He kept reading. The tone of Sehun’s letters changed, then, as he was writing not to a man who was alive but unreachable, but to a man who had passed. Almost as if the knowledge that Kyungsoo would never know how he felt had set him free, Sehun’s thoughts were poured out onto the page with impunity, and they brought Chanyeol himself to tears more than once.

Then, Sehun wrote that he had seen Kyungsoo’s ghost.

Chanyeol had to stop, look up, stare out the window for a moment while he let that sink in. Sehun had been in the kitchens at the wrong time, and he had witnessed Kyungsoo replaying his death. He’d watched the man he secretly loved die, right in front of him, and couldn’t stop it.

. Chanyeol could hardly think of anything worse.

He kept reading, but there wasn’t actually much more. The last letter was dated May 27, 1890, and said little of interest other than to note that Sehun would be going away for a week beginning the next morning, and he would have to hide the letters as he could not risk taking them with him. Chanyeol looked at a calendar, and sure enough, the next day, May 28, had been a Wednesday.

“What the is in this house,” Chanyeol muttered aloud. “What kind of evil lives here?”

The hardware Chanyeol had ordered arrived at his local hardware store that night, so the next morning Chanyeol went down to the town and picked up his order. He also grabbed a few more things he needed for the house, including half a dozen fire extinguishers, as the knowledge of how Jongdae had died had brought to his attention just exactly how flammable the old house was, even without ghostly intervention.

The main bulk of the cleanup was done now, so Chanyeol wanted to start working on the actual restoration part, beginning with the front doors. As if the house had read his mind - could it do that? Chanyeol hoped not - when he got home, the rusted and partially rotted front doors were smeared with blood. A lot of blood. Handprints, splatters, and scrawled lettering that spelled out HELP ME in English letters.

Standing on the front stairs, Chanyeol glared at it for a moment, waiting for the illusion to fade. When it didn’t, he swept his finger through the edge of the lettering. Yep, it was blood. Real blood, still wet.

“You’re not scary,” Chanyeol told the house sternly, “and you’re not funny.”

He went inside and grabbed his toolbox and a bucket of soapy water. When he came back outside, the blood was still there, but so, to Chanyeol’s surprise, was the tower ghost, leaning against the wall of the house in an ornately embroidered Chinese changshan and staring out towards the driveway.

“Good morning,” Chanyeol said automatically.

The tower ghost’s eyes flicked up towards his. In the bright morning sunlight, he seemed more translucent than usual, his eyes little more than black pits in his face. His lips twitched, a shadow of a smile, but he didn’t answer Chanyeol. He only went back to looking out over the front yard.

Well, alright then. Chanyeol decided to leave him be and got to work, taking the front doors off their hinges and carrying them out to lay them on the grass. The blood looked stark in direct sunlight, viscous and gross, and Chanyeol wasted no time scrubbing it off, along with probably decades of dirt and mold.

He glanced up a few times, just to check that the ghost was still there, but after a while he kind of forgot about him and got absorbed in his work. The doors looked bad on the surface, but they were solid, carved hardwood, and underneath the dirt and the rot they were still in relatively good shape.

By the time he’d gotten them both clean on both sides, the soapy water in his bucket was an awful brownish red. “What is this place’s obsession with blood, anyway?” Chanyeol muttered to himself.

“Blood is life,” the tower ghost murmured.

Chanyeol looked up. The ghost had moved, sitting now on the stairs just in front of Chanyeol, and was watching him with disguised curiosity. His robes were ornate, formal, but his posture was relaxed, even sprawling. He was a very long man.

“Blood is life, huh?” Chanyeol put the bucket aside and started working on taking off the old, rusted hardware. “But whose blood is it? It has to be coming from somewhere.” He glanced up. “Yours?”

The tower ghost spread his hands eloquently. “I have none to give, anymore.”

Snorting, Chanyeol nodded. “Guess that’s true. Nothing in here has blood to give, anymore.” Then, he blinked. “Except… me?”

The ghost didn’t answer.

“I injured myself on the boards when I broke into the conservatory,” Chanyeol thought aloud. “Amber cut me with the knife that same night. I fell through the stairs and ripped up my leg, I scraped my arms saving Zitao.”

“You are bleeding still,” the ghost said quietly.

Chanyeol automatically put his hand to his cheek, where he’d gotten cut when the bookcase fell on him. Sure enough, a bit of red came away on his fingers. He glanced up at the ghost. “It’s my blood?”

No answer, save for a significant raise of the eyebrows.

“My blood,” Chanyeol muttered. “Freaky.”

As he worked, Chanyeol considered that. He stripped the finish from the doors, and wondered if his multitude of injuries was really just his usual clumsiness, or if there was something more to it. He began to cut away the rotted parts of the wood, and he thought about how each time he bled, the visions in the house became stronger, and he saw more scenes, more completely.

A chill shivered down his side, and Chanyeol looked up as the tower ghost sank gracefully to the grass beside him. “What are you doing?” the ghost asked.

It was so rare that the ghost showed any kind of interest in Chanyeol’s activities that it took him a moment to respond. “I’m restoring the doors,” Chanyeol said. “Once all the rot is cut out, I’ll use a wood filler to repair the holes, and then refinish the doors and put on new hardware.” He pointed at his supplies.

Black eyes regarded him curiously. “People come to change the manor sometimes,” the ghost said. “They knock parts down, or close them off, or add on something new. But no one has fixed what is damaged.”

Chanyeol got the feeling he wasn’t talking just about the doors. “I think anything can be fixed,” he said firmly. “If you have the right tools.”

Slowly, the tower ghost smiled. A real smile, that showed gums and crinkled up his eyes, and for the first time, he looked young. Chanyeol, suddenly and strongly, wanted to give him a hug.

He couldn’t, but he reached anyway, holding out his hand palm-up. His smile fading, the ghost reached out his own, matching up their fingertips. His palm was less square than Chanyeol’s, his fingers longer, but they were well-matched hands, and Chanyeol found himself wishing they could entwine their fingers.

Chanyeol went back to working. It should have been creepy, or at least awkward, to be working with a ghost looking over your shoulder, but he found that it was… kind of nice. He kept glancing to the side to check, and the ghost seemed actually interested in what he was doing, so Chanyeol started to talk. Just casually, just recounting a stupid story of a funny thing that had happened while he was working on another door at another job, but the ghost watched him, and listened, and even, after a while, began to ask questions.

They passed an hour like that, with Chanyeol doing ninety percent of the talking and the ghost asking a soft, terse question every once in a while, and it almost felt like having real company visit. Chanyeol even stopped noticing the chill of the ghost’s nearness after a while.

Eventually, the ghost looked up at the sky. “It will rain tomorrow,” he said softly.

Chanyeol cocked his head. “It isn’t supposed to rain tomorrow.”

Two chilly, translucent fingers dipped into the center of Chanyeol’s palm, and traced up the still-healing scrapes on his forearms. Chanyeol’s shudder was full-body. “It will,” the ghost repeated. “It always does.” He smiled wryly, and faded away, leaving behind nothing but a dissipating fog.

Clenching his fingers against the lingering cold, Chanyeol bit his lip. “I guess I better make sure to get this done today, then,” he told the empty air. “Just in case you’re right.”

Repairing the doors took the rest of the day, as Chanyeol had to wait hours for the wood filler to dry before he could sand it down and carve it to match the original shape of the door. Normally, he would work with music, but his mind was so filled with questions and theories about the house that today he didn’t need the distraction.

It was getting late, though, and Chanyeol was getting hungry, so he hung the doors back in place with their new, not-rusted hinges, making note to come back to re-stain and seal them the next time he got a clear, warm day. As he was screwing the new hinges into place, the heavy door slipped a little, and the cast iron hinge bit into his fingertip.

“Ow.” Chanyeol immediately and instinctively put his finger in his mouth, pressing his tongue to the cut. The taste of his own blood made him scowl. “Aren’t you sick of drinking my blood yet, you vampire house?” he asked peevishly, covering the flood of fearful adrenaline with a wall of snark. “I need it more than you do.”

Determined not to give in to what was essentially bullying by an inanimate object, and wanting to get his doors functional again before nightfall in any case, Chanyeol went back to hanging the doors. A bit of blood from his finger smeared over the door as he did so, and this time, Chanyeol distinctly felt a ripple in the wood under his hand.

He stopped, wide-eyed. Just how literal was the phrase blood is life in this situation? Was his blood literally fueling the haunting?

Chanyeol looked at his own still-healing arms, and something clicked into place that he couldn’t believe he hadn’t realized before. Zitao’s scene had become real, right on top of him, the moment he had hit the concrete floor.

The moment he’d shed blood.

“That’s it,” he breathed aloud. He hadn’t been able to touch Jongin until the time of his death had passed, and he hadn’t been able to touch any of the other ghosts at all. He couldn’t pull Yixing from the water, he couldn’t stop Lu Han from running out the door or Kyungsoo from tripping or Sehun from falling, because he couldn’t touch them. But Zitao, he could. Because he’d bled on the floor of the garage.

If he bled into the bathwater, would Yixing become real? Could Chanyeol save him that way? It would mean feeding more blood to the house, which was probably a terrible idea, but if there was a chance of stopping Yixing from drowning…

There was only one way to find out. It was Thursday, exactly one week after the first time he’d seen Yixing, so tonight was a good bet to try again. Maybe, if he was fast, he could save Lu Han tonight as well.

Chanyeol finished re-hanging the door and went to make dinner, his mind spinning with plans. He wouldn’t have a lot of time, especially not if the two scenes played out back-to-back the way they did last week, so he’d have to be prepared.

By 9:30, he had everything set up and was waiting in Yixing’s bathroom, sitting on the closed toilet and jiggling his knee with nerves. Towels were spread around the bathtub, ready to catch any splashes and wrap Yixing as soon as he was out, and there was a precision craft knife with a small but sharp blade sitting on the sink. Considering how unpredictable the house could be, Chanyeol hadn’t wanted to give it any kind of real weapon.

He’d also brought in a clock, and set it on a shelf in easy view. If the pattern held, they would not be safe from the house’s influence until the moment the grandfather clock struck, which for Yixing was ten PM. Lu Han was quarter-past ten, so Chanyeol would not have enough time to soothe Yixing if he wanted to save Lu Han as well. As soon as Yixing was safe, he would have to bolt down the stairs to catch Lu Han before he ran out the front doors.

Unfortunately, he could do nothing until Yixing appeared. This meant that Chanyeol could only watch the seconds tick by, excruciatingly slowly, his heart rate climbing with each minute that drew closer.

At 9:46, just like last week, the bathroom door opened by itself, and Chanyeol sat up straight. “Yixing?” he called. “Zhang Yixing?”

No response, not yet. After a few long, breathless seconds, the door closed again, and locked.

“Okay,” Chanyeol exhaled. “Here we go.”

The bathtub began to fill. It was so freaking strange to know exactly how this scene would play out, like a movie he’d seen before, like the most accurate deja-vu. Chanyeol caught a rustle of movement that wasn’t there, and he stood, his eyes darting around the bathroom.

He saw a shirt dropping to the floor first, before the hand that dropped it. The shirt disappeared, but the hand didn’t, and Yixing shimmered into view, no more than a shadow at first.

“Zhang Yixing,” Chanyeol said.

Yixing paused with his hands on his beltline, his brow furrowing. He didn’t look up. Chanyeol stepped in front of him, attempting to get his attention, but Yixing shrugged and continued undressing.

Chanyeol tried again, calling his name repeatedly. It was clear he was having some effect - Yixing would pause, or look around, or frown as if he heard something, but obviously the effect wasn’t really strong enough.

Yixing stepped forward to get into the tub, and the ghostly water bubbling around his calves made Chanyeol abruptly realize that Yixing likely just couldn’t hear him over the sound of the water. He took a deep breath and bellowed out Yixing’s name.

Freezing in place, wide-eyed, Yixing stopped and looked around. “Who is there?” he asked, softly accented. His eyes scanned the room, looking right through Chanyeol. Chanyeol stepped forward and put his hand right into Yixing’s shoulder, gritting his teeth against the cold, and immediately Yixing’s eyes locked onto his face, and he jumped, startled. “What? Who - “

He didn’t finish the thought. A wave of water wrapped around his knees, and he went down, dragged under the surface.

“!” Chanyeol reached, but of course it was no good, he couldn’t grip what wasn’t really there. “, okay, okay,” and he grabbed the craft knife and sliced into the tip of his pinky finger before he could think about it too hard.

It was a small cut, in a pre-planned place, because he wasn’t about to sacrifice more blood to the house than he absolutely had to. Tossing the knife into the sink to keep it out of his way, Chanyeol plunged his bleeding hand into the bathwater.

Immediately, cold and clammy turned to hot and wet. Steam filled his vision and bathwater splashed across his face and chest. Acting fast, Chanyeol grabbed Yixing under the armpits and hauled with all his strength.

The water was definitely holding Yixing down, and his bare skin was slippery enough that Chanyeol had trouble keeping his grip. His hands slid, and he fell back onto his , losing Yixing entirely. Swearing, he scrambled back up to his knees and tried again.

This time, by bracing one foot against the wall, Chanyeol was able to get enough leverage to lift Yixing’s upper torso completely out of the water. Yixing gasped and spluttered, pulling in a few precious breaths before he was pulled back out of Chanyeol’s hands and under the surface.

“Oh no you don’t,” Chanyeol snarled. “You can’t have him, not this time.” He grabbed a bath towel off of the floor and plunged it into the water, looping it around Yixing’s back. Wrapping the ends tightly around his hands, Chanyeol yanked.

Yixing came up out of the water, arms flailing. One of his hands locked around the soaked towel and the other found the side of the tub. He pushed, and Chanyeol pulled, and with a very large splash, Yixing came all the way out of the tub and tumbled over the side, landing right on top of Chanyeol and immediately coughing up a gout of bathwater right into his face.

Spluttering, Chanyeol rolled Yixing off of him and sat up, furiously wiping the water from his face. He had only a bare second to do so when the showerhead - which shouldn’t even be functional - suddenly turned towards them and started spraying boiling hot water all over the room.

Yixing screamed and tried to cover himself, instinctively grabbing for the towels around him. Chanyeol lurched to his feet, gritting his teeth against the onslaught, and yanked the ancient shower curtain closed to block the spray.

“Get out of here!” he yelled, spreading his arms to their full wingspan as the curtain tried to pull itself open again. Wide-eyed, Yixing scrambled to his feet with a towel in each hand, and made for the door.

“It won’t open!” Yixing called back, sounding terrified.

Chanyeol glanced at the clock. 9:57. “We only have to make it for three more minutes,” he gasped.

The shower curtain ripped out of his hands, and Chanyeol only barely managed to turn his face away in time to keep it from getting scalded. A towel landed on his head, covering him, and Chanyeol yelled and grabbed at it, but realized just in time that Yixing had thrown it over him to protect him, and it wasn’t another attack by the house.

Keeping the towel over his head meant that he was moving blind, but it was better than getting burned, so Chanyeol left it there and d along the side of the bathtub until he could go in under the spray and find the tap. He twisted, but it was no use; the bombarding water didn’t let up.

An overheated hand wrapped around Chanyeol’s wrist and pulled him away; Chanyeol found himself being tugged down to the floor in the corner. He turned his face towards Yixing’s soaked hair as Yixing buried his own in Chanyeol’s chest, and they huddled under the towel as the boiling water soaked through it. Chanyeol could feel that his right ear had gotten burned, at minimum. His arms looked pretty bad too, and Yixing’s bared skin was mottled red.

It was a very long three minutes, but eventually, the water shut off, all by itself. Chanyeol peeked out from under their makeshift shelter and glanced around, just to make sure the bathroom didn’t have any more surprises.

The clock chimed ten, and the bathroom door unlocked with an audible click.

“Thank ,” Chanyeol breathed. He pulled back enough to look at Yixing, who was more than a little bit shell-shocked. “Get out of here and dry off, I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

He grabbed the knife from the sink and bolted for the foyer. Making sure to hold the knife out to his side and with the blade pointed away from him, he jogged down the stairs as quickly as he could safely manage, and stood facing down the east gallery, waiting for Lu Han to come running towards him.

The hall was silent. Chanyeol waited, heart pounding and chest heaving, but Lu Han did not appear. No screaming, no running, no crash.

“What are you doing?”

Chanyeol looked up, and saw that Yixing was standing at the top of the stairs, holding a dry towel around his waist and watching him curiously.

“What time is it?” Chanyeol asked. He had taken his watch off earlier in anticipation of getting wet, and his phone was upstairs in the bedroom for the same reason.

Yixing looked around, and ducked into one of the other bedrooms to find a clock. “It’s ten-seventeen,” he said.

The clock hadn’t chimed. There was no way he hadn’t gotten down here in time, so that meant Lu Han just hadn’t appeared at all. “Weird,” Chanyeol muttered. He capped his craft knife and pocketed it. “Hey. How are you feeling?”

“Half-drowned and confused,” Yixing said honestly. He gestured at the general surroundings. “Where am I? This is my grandfather’s house, but it doesn’t look…” He trailed off. “It’s wrong.”

Sighing, Chanyeol beckoned him back down the stairs. Yixing came towards him, not seeming to care too much that he was mostly , alone with a complete stranger. Given the evening he’d just had, Chanyeol didn’t care much either.

“I’m sorry that you have to find this out this way,” he began, and then told him the whole story.

Ten minutes later, Yixing was sitting on Chanyeol’s new couch, dressed in Chanyeol’s old clothes, and staring at his own knees.

“...I’m sorry,” Chanyeol offered again, as he finished putting ointment on his burns.

Yixing nodded, silently accepting his condolences. “How long do I have?” he murmured. “You said the others, they disappeared after a bit.”

“I don’t know,” Chanyeol said truthfully. “The first stuck around for about an hour, but the second one, only half an hour.” He glanced at his watch, back on his wrist now that he’d changed. “It’s already been longer than that.”

“I see.” Turning himself on the couch, Yixing pulled his feet up and wrapped his arms around his knees. “Everything looks so different,” he murmured. “It’s been eighty-five years, that’s so long. Are there flying cars now?”

Smiling, Chanyeol started telling him about the future, his future. No flying cars, but cell phones, internet, satellite radio, the International Space Station. Yixing seemed fascinated, but after a while he also seemed tired, faded. Not literally faded, not the way Jongin and Zitao had gone translucent right before they moved on, just the exhausted kind. Chanyeol, who had been going to bed relatively early for the past few weeks, was starting to feel pretty faded himself.

“It’s nearing midnight,” he said finally. “You’re still…”

Yixing smiled at him, though it was wry. “Still here?”

“Yeah.” Chanyeol cocked his head. “You seem exhausted. Should we just go to bed?”

Biting his lip, Yixing considered it. “If I have only a few more minutes to exist,” he said, “it seems a waste to sleep through them. But then again, if I pass on in my sleep, that’s better than the first time, right?” He glanced up. “Can I stay with you?”

“Of course,” Chanyeol said, without a second’s hesitation. The thought of Yixing trying to fall asleep alone, in the house that killed him, when death could come for him again at any moment? No, absolutely not. “Bathroom’s through there.” He’d said it without thinking, then blinked. “If, uh. If you even need that kind of thing anymore.”

Yixing shrugged. “Only one way to find out, right?” He got up and went through the doorway.

It turned out that yes, Yixing’s body could use the facilities. Chanyeol thought that was pretty significant - didn’t that mean that Yixing was really real, physically as well as spiritually? That Chanyeol had somehow yanked him forward in time, or made his body real when he’d saved his spirit, or something?

A question for another time, if it mattered at all. They curled up in bed. It should have been odd to sleep with someone again, should have been awkward, but Chanyeol found it to be more comforting than anything else. It had been a rough few weeks.

Hesitantly, Yixing reached out. “Do you mind if…?”

Chanyeol pulled him close, as much for his own sake as Yixing’s. Yixing’s head nestled perfectly against his shoulder, his arm wrapped around Chanyeol’s ribs, and he sighed, relaxing. Chanyeol turned his face in towards Yixing’s damp hair and did the same.

“Thank you,” Yixing whispered. “It’s only that - I don’t know if -”

“I understand,” Chanyeol said, even though he really didn’t. “It’s okay. I’m here.”

They talked for a bit more in the dark, but eventually, both of them drifted off, and Chanyeol slept soundly for the first time in weeks.

Cold hands shook Chanyeol awake.

“Chanyeol,” Yixing said, “Chanyeol, come on.”

Groggily, Chanyeol blinked his eyes open, and squinted blearily at Yixing. The light coming through the uncurtained windows was lightening, just bright enough that Chanyeol could see Yixing’s form was fading in the ghostlike way now.

“.” He yanked himself upright. “What time is it? What -”

Yixing tried to soothe him, but his hands couldn’t quite connect with Chanyeol’s skin anymore. “It’s time for me to go,” he said. “I remember everything now, and I can see the light. But I wanted to say goodbye.”

. “Thank you for waking me,” Chanyeol said sincerely. “It would have to wake up and just find you gone.”

Smiling, Yixing nodded. “And thank you, for saving me,” he said softly. “But I remember now. Listen, this is important.” Chanyeol blinked. “You are not the first person to save me,” Yixing said. “A man a few decades ago, I don’t know how long it was. He saved me, too.” Yixing’s expression was pained. “But he didn’t make it, and when the house got him, all of us that he had saved were pulled right back here again. Chanyeol - if you’re going to save us, you have to save all of us, or -”

He suddenly took a step back, as if pulled, and looked over his shoulder. “Alright,” he said. “I’m coming.” Flashing Chanyeol one last smile and a small wave, he turned, and immediately disappeared.

Rubbing his eyes, Chanyeol stared at the empty space that he’d left behind for quite a while, until the room was streaked with the first rays of sunlight.

Those first lovely golden rays of sunlight didn’t last long, and by the time Chanyeol was sitting down with his coffee, rain was pouring down and thunder crackled through the air.

“You were right,” Chanyeol murmured to the house at large. “Guess I’m going to spend today hunting down leaks.”

The roof was in relatively poor shape, and finding, photographing, and putting buckets under leaks kept him quite busy. As the day wore on, though, Chanyeol found himself having to pause because his heartbeat would suddenly spike, or he’d start having trouble breathing, or his hands would begin to shake. There was no rhyme or reason to it, no external trigger that he could see, and the thought that the house itself was having such a strong effect on him with no other provocation was more than a little bit disturbing.

Midafternoon, he was actually up a ladder in the suites above the garages when an unprompted wave of complete terror washed over him. Immediately dropping his hammer, Chanyeol gasped for air, his pulse racing as his chest constricted. The ladder wobbled, and Chanyeol grabbed it with one hand and steadied himself against the wall with the other, his vision blurring.

Warm, thick liquid dripped over his fingers. Jerking his hand back, Chanyeol looked, and saw blood seeping down the walls, dripping from the leaky roof overhead to splatter on his arms. It was the house, he realized, it wasn’t real, no matter how real it felt. Swallowing down the nausea climbing up his throat, Chanyeol got himself down the ladder as carefully as he could manage with shaking limbs.

“Is this a scene?” Chanyeol asked out loud, speaking directly to the house. “Is there another ghost?” It felt like a dumb question - this didn’t feel the same as a trapped ghost’s death scene at all. For one thing, those didn’t usually come with forced panic attacks. It had been a while since Chanyeol had had a panic attack, but he knew what they felt like. This one, though, felt wrong, it felt… foreign. Like he was feeling someone else’s panic, not his own.

Forcing himself to take deep, even breaths through his nose, Chanyeol went for the door. It was dripping in blood, but Chanyeol grit his teeth and turned the knob anyway, and thankfully, the door opened.

A wave of chill hit him, like walking out of the house in the dead of winter. Chanyeol shuddered and immediately folded his arms across his chest to conserve heat, his breath puffing visibly in front of him. The walls here were also dripping with blood, all down the hall as far as Chanyeol could see, enough of it that he could smell copper even through the cold.

One of the doors down the hall banged open, startling Chanyeol and sending his heartbeat racing again. It was the second-floor study, the one with the bookcase that hid the stairs up to the east tower. Something told him that he didn’t want to look in that room, but he knew that feeling was probably the house’s doing, too, so he forced himself forward.

A flash of translucence caught his eye before he even reached the doorway, and as he peered around the frame, it solidified into the lanky form of the tower ghost, stumbling into the heavy antique desk as if he had been thrown. He was wearing Western-style trousers and a torn, half-ed shirt, and his hair was loose around his face, wild. Most strikingly, his throat was clean and whole, no wound marring the smooth skin.

The ghost whipped around, but his eyes slid right past Chanyeol, tracking something else as it entered the room, something Chanyeol couldn’t see. His fear was so palpable, Chanyeol pressed his hand to his own heart in a vain attempt to stop it from pounding.

“Don’t touch me,” the tower ghost snarled.

Immediately, his head snapped to the side, and a long cut opened up on his cheek, blood welling up. Something had hit him. “Stop it!” Chanyeol yelled, but neither the ghost nor whatever was attacking him paid him any mind. Without knowing the ghost’s name, Chanyeol wasn’t sure he would even be able to snap him out of it - all he could do was watch.

The tower ghost straightened, and his mouth opened, but he got out no more than a gasp and a widening of eyes before his arms were jerked back behind him. He rose onto his toes, struggling, and from his movements Chanyeol could tell he was being held, pinned in place.

A crack rang through the air, and another rip opened in his shirt, revealing a new, bloody laceration down the right side of his chest. Was he being whipped? By whom? Was this a new torture the house was inflicting upon him, or…

Was it a memory of something that had really happened during his life?

Yanking his body against the grip of his captor, the ghost managed to glare even through the tears of pain in his eyes, and snapped out something in Chinese that sounded vulgar. He waited, still glaring, as if for a response Chanyeol couldn’t hear, and then he spat on the floor, a little ways in front of himself. “You are sick,” he snapped. “How dare you call yourself Father.”

Another crack, and a whip-mark opened across his skin right next to the first. The ghost jerked, and so did the entire room; shelved rattled and a few of the books on them toppled over. Wide eyed, Chanyeol attempted to take a step back, to get himself further away from the doorway, but his feet moved forward instead, actively disobeying him.

“No,” Chanyeol gasped, even as he stepped through the door. It swung shut behind him. “.”

Once the door latched, Chanyeol’s legs came under his own control again, and he stepped back, pressing his back to the door. The chilly temperatures were starting to warm, the dim, greyish light from the storm outside giving way to golden-orange, and Chanyeol smelled smoke. He glanced over at the fireplace - the lit fireplace.

The ghost’s eyes were wide. “No, I won’t,” he said. A pause. The ghost was solid enough that Chanyeol could see the color draining from his face, despite still being able to make out the windowpanes through his head. “I will not. I would rather die!”

The shelves rattled ominously, and Chanyeol startled as the by-now disgustingly familiar feeling of old blood dripped down his hands. He jerked away from the door, instinctively rubbing his palms against his jeans. The walls were all dripping, puddles were forming on the old rugs, even the rain pounding on the windows was turning to blood. The smell was nearly unbearable, and Chanyeol fought not to gag.

Something glowing hot lifted from the fireplace, like a tiny sun floating through the air. It solidified, stretching out, and horror filled Chanyeol’s mind when he realized what it was.

A cast iron poker, the tip red-hot from the fire.

“No,” Chanyeol said, and the ghost said it along with him, perfect unison. “Stop,” Chanyeol said, as the ghost struggled against his captors. The entire room was shivering, glass rattling in the windowpanes and books shuddering along the shelves. One book suddenly went flying, shooting off of the shelf and right through the scene to slam into the wall just a meter to the left of Chanyeol’s head.

The poker came closer, threatening. The ghost’s eyes were flicking back and forth between the glowing tip and whatever was holding it, shrinking away as best he could while trapped. He set his jaw and looked up. “Never,” he said, spitting the word in his torturer’s face.

The poker came down, pressing into the side of the ghost’s ribcage.

The ghost screamed and struggled, but he couldn’t get away. Books started flying, one at a time at first, then faster and faster, rebounding off the walls. The smell of burning flesh filled the air, and Chanyeol gagged, pulling back to try and get away from the onslaught. His hand reached for the doorknob, uncaring that it was slippery with blood.

“Let me out,” he gasped, rattling the door. He was on the hinge side; it wasn’t likely he’d be able to kick it in, especially not with as woozy as he felt. “, please, let me out of here!”

“Sorry,” Chanyeol heard, and in shock he looked up. The tower ghost was looking right at him, face twisted in pain and covered in blood and tears, his skin still searing as his blackened shirt fizzled away. “I’m sorry,” he said again, gasping. “Go. Run.”

The door came open under Chanyeol’s hand.

Chanyeol stumbled into the hall. The blood on the walls was frozen over, reddish ice crackling against faded wallpaper.

He didn’t stop to think about it. He ran.

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