So, it goes like this.  Choi Minho moves into a haunted house on Saturday and suddenly his socks go missing.  He loses his favorite red sweater on Sunday and his lights begin to flicker every time he turns on the television.  On Monday morning, his bathroom wreaks constantly of noxious chemicals and there is nothing he can do to get rid of the smell.  Not even opening the windows helps to ease the stench.  His nostrils and eyes burn every time he passes by there, but at least he finds his socks.  On Tuesday, he walks into the kitchen and finds hot water on the floor.  It soaks through his socks.  On Wednesday, he wakes up to the shrill beeping of the fire alarm.  It rings in his ears like the screams of a thousand sirens, but when he goes to investigate, he finds that there is no fire, no smoke, no nothing.  He takes the batteries out of his smoke detecter and goes back to bed.  On Thursday, he thinks he feels someone's eyes on him, but he has no roommates.  Every time he lifts his gaze, he is both relieved and surprised to find that he is, in fact, completely alone.  On Friday, he accepts the fact that he is losing his mind. 

Maybe the rumors are true, maybe his house is haunted, but that's not enough to drive him from it.  He signed a lease!  On Saturday morning, exactly one week after having moved in, Minho trudges to the kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee.  He holds his nose as he passes the bathroom, which still smells like Satan's morning breath, and steps over the puddle of perpetually hot water in the kitchen that just won't evaporate.  The coffee maker has been moved slightly to the left of the fridge, but Minho makes no attempt to put it back.  This is the fourth time this week that his furniture has been rearranged.  He has given up on pretending that he can change this house.  Clearly, he is not alone among these four walls.  He figures it's time to meet his roommate. 

Minho has never tried to conjure a ghost before, but he thinks it can't be all that difficult.  His browser's history is full of articles on how to communicate with the dead.  For a minute, he even considers hiring a medium.  In the end, he lights a scented candle at his dining table and waits.  It's not a brilliant plan, admittedly, but he's a little strapped for cash at the moment.  Anything more complex will have to wait until his next paycheck. 

"Um, so," Minho says into the open air, "look, we gotta talk."

There is silence for a long time.  Two minutes, at least.

"I don't know if you have anything to do with whatever is happening in the bathroom, but I can't really breathe in there and I don't really like brushing my teeth at the kitchen sink, you know?  Maybe we could...discuss?"

He knows he sounds like an absolute fool, but there is no going back now.  His rancid coffee burned his mouth minutes ago, leaving his tongue little more than a paper weight between his lips, and all he really wants to do is crawl back into bed.  It's his day off and he's spending it with what could either be absolutely no one, or a dead person.  Neither option makes Minho feel particularly good about his choices in life.  He must have done something wrong along the way since spending his day off with what he hopes is a ghost doesn't even sort of strike him as being a stupid idea.  He knows it looks nuts from the outside, but here he is doing it, so obviously it isn't crazy enough. 

"Also, I was wondering if you've seen my sweater anywhere around here.  It's red and my grandma knitted it for me before she passed away.  I'd like to find it before winter settles in, you know?"

Radio silence.  This is worse than that time he tried to master ventriloquism when he was in high school.  However, it does feel eerily similar.  It's not a comforting notion.  Somehow, that thought makes him more uneasy than the possibility of sharing his rent with a ghost.  Sometime around eleven in the morning, he throws in the towel.  It's not quitting, he swears, because he never really started anything.  That's how this works, right?  He can't fail if he never tries.  With his bruised pride, Minho marches himself back to bed.  Talking to no one all morning is not particularly exhausting, but somehow Minho feels like his entire body has been hit by a truck.  Maybe it has something to do with the fact that he hasn't gotten a good night's rest in about a week.

~*~

In the summer of 1999, Lee Taemin moved into the small house that his great uncle had left him.  There were building code violations in every corner of every room, but Taemin was in no position to ask for anything fancy, considering the sad state of his bank account.  So, he packed up whatever he could fit into his best friend's truck and spent two days turning his death trap of a house into something warm and hospitable.  Well, he tried to do that, anyway.  Whether or not he was successful remains a mystery.

He lived in that house for all of two years.  He held parties there.  He slept in on the weekends there.  He made breakfast in the cramped kitchen there.  He dyed his hair in the bathroom there.  He accidentally broke the heater and barely survived one brutal winter there.  He ed his best friend there, on more than one occasion.  Needless to say, there were many memories between those walls.  It's incredible that one measly, little kitchen fire managed to erase all of that.  He'd made a grilled sandwich before going to sleep, but he'd forgotten to turn off the stove.  He hadn't noticed the dish towel when he turned off the lights.  He'd forgotten to replace the batteries in his smoke detector the week before.  It wasn't even the fire that ended it all.  The flames never even spread to any other rooms of the house.  It was just the smoke.

Lee Taemin had eaten a grilled cheese sandwich, tossed on his comfy sweat pants, and crawled into bed.  When he woke up in the morning, he was surrounded by officers and firemen.  His home was smokey and his kitchen was reduced to rubble.  No one would look at him.  Of course, eventually they all left.  A few weeks later, his parents came to the house and collected his belongings.  There were contractors who came in to repair the damage from the fire.  His friends came, too.  They talked about him, never to him, and then they said good bye.  Everyone always left, except for Taemin.

~*~

For two months, there was a man.  He came and visited the house every weekend.  Sometimes he came with the realtor, other times he visited on his own.  On the third Saturday of the third month, the man started to move in.  He brought large boxes and worn out furniture from second-hand stores.  Somehow, the sparse furnishings only managed to make the house seem emptier than when it was a shell.  No one decided to move into this house if other options were available.  Taemin saw this man and knew that he was at the end of his rope.  Moving into his house had to be the act of a desperate man.  A poor, poor, desperate man.  Taemin pitied him, more so than he usually did the living.

Curiously, the day that the handsome man moved in, Taemin felt a chill rush through him.  It made him ache inside the core of his being.  That night, he stole some soft, woolen socks that had been abandoned on the floor during the move earlier in the day.  Taemin never intended to steal the socks.  He promised himself that he would return them once the sun came up.  His fits of temperature fluctuations usually hit him in the winter around the anniversary of his death.  He didn't know why, nor did he care to examine those feelings.  Instead, like a crude bandage, he covered up the symptoms of his discomfort until he could forget them.  That seemed healthy, yeah.  Totally. 

The next day, his chills only intensified.  The cold soaked him through to the bone, leaving his thin body a shivering mess.  He could barely stand up due to the intense convulsions in his muscles.  He hated the cold, he really did.  That was when he noticed the red sweater in the closet.  It looked so soft.  When his fingers skimmed over the turtle neck, he immediately felt safe from the chill that threatened to incapacitate him.  A part of him felt apologetic because he still hadn't returned the socks yet, but he was just so damn cold.  He slipped on the sweater, but he promised that it would only be for a day or two.  He had not felt so warm in a long time, certainly not in the last twenty years. 

That evening, he wandered into the living room to join the man who was now inhabiting his once lonely home.  The man was eating a bowl of cereal on his lumpy couch and channel surfing aimlessly.  Taemin sat down on the opposite end of the couch and snuggled up with a well used pillow.  The man beside him laughed loudly and unabashedly whenever he saw something amusing on the television, which delighted Taemin to no end.  Soon enough, he found himself sharing in that contagious laughter, although he did notice that every time he laughed, the lights would flicker for a moment.  He tried to restrict himself so as not to scare his new roommate, but some things were just too funny.  Laughter felt good and it was something he did not do often, not anymore.  He damn near kicked his own when the man decided to go to bed early, thanks to the unknown cause of his electric problems.  Good job, Taemin thought to himself, you've scared off another one. 

With his borrowed socks and sweater, Taemin wasn't so afraid of the cold anymore.  This man radiated warmth in a way that Taemin craved.  He felt alive, which of course was no surprise to Taemin, but his liveliness promised a kind of security that Taemin had not felt since he himself was alive.  What he needed to be secure from, Taemin couldn't be certain.  He was beyond danger at this point, but he still felt comforted by this new presence.  He didn't want Minho to leave like any of the other tenants he had seen in the past.  People did not tend to stay with him for very long.  Taemin learned a long time ago that if he wanted company, he would need to be as out of the way as possible.  No one liked sharing their home with a clingy, dead guy. 

That Monday, Taemin sulked around the house while the man went to work.  He was always so bored during the long hours by himself.  Some time ago, he had learned how to entertain himself with only his memories, but they felt so hollow in the physical world.  Taemin went to the bathroom and perched himself on the edge of the sink.  With his eyes closed and his mind blank, he allowed himself to remember.  He'd made many memories in this bathroom, but one of the most noteworthy was the time he tried to dye his hair himself to save a little money.  He'd had his best friend over that night to help him do it, but they were both so clueless.  He remembered how his friend had struggled to bleach all of his hair evenly, how his friend panicked when the first round of bleaching left Taemin's hair blotchy, brassy, and coarse. 

"It's fine," Taemin insisted.  "We can bleach it again."

"I messed up, man.  You should just go see a professional," Jonghyun advised.

"C'mon, we're almost there.  You can do it!"

"Dude, it smells so bad in here.  Can we open a window or something?  I can barely breathe!"

"I wish," Taemin sighed, "but the ventilation in this place is absolute garbage."

Taemin remembered the burning sensation of the bleach in his nose, his eyes, his mouth.  He remembered ducking out of the bathroom with his friend and finishing up the second bleaching in the bedroom with every door and window opened as wide as possible.  He hadn't been able to get the thick stench of bleach out of his bathroom for a week.  He was surprised when his new roommate came home and made note of the noxious smell.  Taemin didn't know that other people could just walk into his memories like that, feeling the remnants of his life like it was a nuisance.  He knew it wasn't the man's fault, but a part of him felt a little bit affronted from the way the man avoided the bathroom like the plague.  Sure, it smelled horrible, but it was still a pleasant memory for Taemin.  He supposed that he couldn't fault the man for not thinking about it in the same way as himself.

He noticed that the bathroom still smelled abrasive even after he'd stopped actively trying to surround himself in his fabricated memories.  Taemin felt a twinge of guilt when he saw the man brush his teeth in the kitchen sink.  To apologize, Taemin left the heavy woolen socks out in the open for the man to find.  He wasn't quite ready to give the sweater back, though.  He liked the warmth that enveloped him.  Still, he noticed that the man was afflicted by more than the inconvenience of missing socks and stinky bathrooms.  The man didn't sleep very well at night.  Taemin wondered if his own presence was the source of the man's restlessness, but he ignored that thought the moment it was conceived.  He didn't want to go there.  The man usually got out of bed around six or so in the morning, groggy at best and absolutely destroyed at worst.  Taemin tried to show a sign of good faith, to reassure the man that he wasn't trying to make his home a living hell. 

That Tuesday morning, Taemin tried to make a piping cup of green tea for the man.  He would have preferred to make coffee, but the guy just didn't seem to own any.  The guy didn't seem to own much of anything, really.  Taemin managed to boil the water and set out the tea bag, but his hand faltered on the pot at the last second.  He hadn't meant to spill the hot water everywhere, honestly he hadn't, but by the time he even came close to cleaning up the mess, the man came stumbling out of the bedroom in an exhausted haze.  There was still a large puddle on the kitchen floor and Taemin felt too ashamed of himself to clean it up in the man's presence.  He hid himself away in the bathroom.  It seemed to be the only place where he could be alone anymore. 

The following day, Taemin was resolved to return the sweater to the man.  He'd already kept it for far longer than he intended and it was getting to be kind of rude at that point.  He sat on the floor for a moment to watch the man sleeping on the lumpy excuse for a bed.  Taemin wondered which was worse, an uncomfortable bed or a haunted house.  This was the first person who genuinely did not seem phased by either.  Perhaps he was minutely inconvenienced, but the man only ever seemed to shrug when something new went wrong.  Taemin was a little worried about this guy.  That morning, he saw something strange, though.  The man was sleeping.  Really, truly, honestly sleeping.  No, not just sleeping.  He was resting.  There was a peace on his face that made Taemin's insides twist up in fear.  He remembered the last time he'd slept that soundly.  He remembered very well, because it was the last time he had ever gone to sleep at all.  In his fear, Taemin shut his eyes and tried to block out the memories, but they hit him like a freight train all the same.

He remembered pulling the blankets over his head the night he'd died.  He remembered rolling over and rubbing his eyes, completely oblivious to the world around him.  He remembered the smoke, the heat, the unbearable moment before his waking hours delivered him to the other side of the veil.  He had only experienced the fire for a split second, at least that's what he remembered of it, but it was enough to set him off.  He didn't like to remember the fire.  Unlike when the night when he had died, Taemin was surprised to hear the smoke detector go off from the other room.  He'd done it again, the fool.  He had remembered too hard and brought his past into this man's present.  Despite the phantom fire alarm, Taemin did not expect the man to brush it off so easily.  The man merely removed the batteries from the smoke detector, which aggravated Taemin to no end, and went back to bed.  Incredible.  This man really did not seem to care.  Taemin wondered if he worked in retail.

~*~

"Also, I was wondering if you've seen my sweater anywhere around here.  It's red and my grandma knitted it for me before she passed away.  I'd like to find it before winter settles in, you know?"

The man has been trying to talk with him for over an hour.  Really, honestly trying to talk with him, not at him, not about him.  Taemin is touched, but much too fearful to say anything.  He sits opposite the man at the meager table setting and he plays nervously with the edge of the sweater that this man wants back so badly.  Taemin is afraid to give it back.  He is afraid he will be cold and empty without it.  Of course, knowing that it was a gift from the man's dearly departed grandmother doesn't make this any easier.  Taemin feels so guilty, but in the same vein, he also feels so, so selfish.  He considers finally speaking up, but the man is two steps ahead of him.  The man is ten steps ahead of him.  The man is literally ahead of him, heading to the bedroom.  Heading to bed.  The man leaves Taemin behind at the table.  Alone.  He is so alone here.  He doesn't want this man to leave him. 

He tries to be patient.  He wait for the man to finish resting before he returns the sweater.  It is folded crudely and left in a lump on the edge of the man's bed.  Taemin sits on the floor and waits for the man's eyes to open.  He probably should not be so surprised when the man opens his eyes and screams like a teenage girl at the sight of him.  After all, to this man, Taemin is just a stranger in his house. 

"Hi," Taemin squeaks.

"Who the are you," the man yells.  He shoots up out of bed and reaches for anything to use as a weapon.  Admittedly, Taemin thinks the pillow is a poor choice, but he understands that the man hasn't had much time to prepare and he was caught off guard.

"You wanted to talk to me," Taemin offers, as if this will explain the previous week's antics.

"Who..." the man mutters.  He is surprisingly calm within a matter of moments.  "What's your name?"

"Taemin.  You?"

"Minho," the man offers cautiously.  "Prove it."

"What?"

"Prove you're the ghost and not some thief who just broke in here to steal my things."

"First of all," Taemin smirks, "no one is coming here to take your things.  Dude, you own, like, half of a bagel and some thread bare towels."

The man, Minho, looks offended, but simultaneously he cannot deny that this is a fairly accurate account of his life.  He puts down the pillow and makes room on the edge of the bed for Taemin to sit with him.  It's crazy, of course it is, but Minho is so goddamn tired.  He just wants to understand what has been happening, and for once, it seems like the cause of his strife is actually willing to sit down and talk it out.  That would be a first for him.  They do talk it out, very well actually.  Hours feel like minutes and even though he should be freaked out, Minho doesn't mind this ghost man.  If anything, he kind of likes the company.

~*~

They watch horror movies on Fridays.  Taemin still wears his favorite red sweater, but Minho reaches out to touch the hem of it from time to time.  His fingertips are so warm.  Taemin wishes he could keep those hands on him a little while longer, but he doesn't say anything about it because they have created a strange sort of equilibrium here and he doesn't want to disrupt whatever peace they have.  Minho makes coffee in the mornings, but he doesn't drink it.  He knows his ghostly roommate can't either, but Taemin seems to like the smell, so he keeps doing it.  They fight each other some times, but it is never about anything serious.  They argue over who should use honorifics because, technically Taemin was around for a solid twenty years before Minho even knew how to walk, but in terms of age, Minho has two years on the ghost frozen in his youth.  It is incredibly gratifying for him when Taemin concedes and agrees to be considered the younger of the two, although he does so very grudgingly. 

Minho wakes up sometimes to the blaring of a fire alarm, despite there never being any fire, and on those nights, he invites Taemin to rest his head on a lumpy pillow in his lumpy bed.  They both know that Taemin doesn't sleep, but between the sheets, he doesn't seem to remember those things quite so often.  Minho doesn't know why, and Taemin refuses to admit that it's because Minho's bed smells like fresh linens and comfort.  He doesn't sleep on those night, but somehow he still manages to dream.  Minho offers him a kind of comfort that he cannot put into words and never tries to.  Minho doesn't ask.  He just waits until Taemin wants to talk, whether it be about the fire, the tenants, his family and friends before.  Minho offers to find them, to look them up online, and of course Taemin's only response is what is the on the line?  Sure, the internet existed in the nineties, but Taemin never really got into it.  Minho shows Taemin his cell phone and introduces him to what Taemin insists on calling the world wide web machine.  Minho calls him grandpa sometimes.  Then he bans Taemin from the internet because his laptop catches over six hundred viruses from various sites.  This is his life now, Taemin realizes, even if it is only for a little while.  He often wonders how Minho feels about a dead roommate who never leaves home or pays rent, but Minho never gives him a straight answer. 

"Are you happy," Taemin asks.

"Sure, I guess," Minho shrugs.  "I mean, my job and I subsist off of sweet potatoes and tea, but it's fine.  I'm fine.  It's all fine."

"I don't believe you for a goddamn minute."

"You don't have to believe me," Minho teases.  "I don't need your validation.  Hell, you're dead.  Who cares what you think anyway."

"Laughing out loud," Taemin says, because he has only recently discovered text messaging shorthand and he is so bad with it. "I mean it.  Are you happy here?"

"Eh, it's not so bad.  What about you?  Are you happy here?" 

Minho smirks at him, as if their banter doesn't fill Taemin with violent delight.  Beneath all of the joking, there is a small smile nestled between Minho's snark and his sarcasm, and it's just enough to make Taemin giddy.  That, of course, is something he will never admit.  So, instead, he holds the cup of coffee that he cannot drink and he nudges Minho's shoulder with a shrug that neither of them believes.  Taemin is so unbelievable, incredibly, indescribably happy.  For the first time in his life (or death), he feels something like hope.  But hope is for es and he will never tell Minho that.  Well, at least he won't tell him right now.

"Relatively."