- dawn -

Minseok often had recurring nightmares. Ghosts in faceless bodies and humans turning him into a circus attraction. Running through endless rows of shelves with files that stretched into a red horizon. Being choked by his mother. Having to explain his story over and over again to adults making notes. He saw these things so often that, when he finally woke up, he always immediately knew that they were just dreams and that he was safe now. But still, that knowledge never slowed down his heart. It never made him not wake up drenched in sweat and terrified to close his eyes again.
That morning, too, he stared at the ceiling that was stained grey in what must have been the early morning hours. The shadow of his curtains painted a familiar pattern and he felt sleep creeping up to him again. He didn't remember much of his dream. He had been hit and his mother had cried out his name and ghosts had touched his bones.
When he felt calm enough, he rolled on his side and planned to close his eyes again. But then he felt a sharp pain on the right side of his face and saw the shadow of a figure in the corner of his eye and nearly fell when he quickly tried to sit up. He was not alone. He was supposed to be alone but he was not.
And then, when his bare feet touched the wood panels of his floor, it all came back to him. Making plans with Kim Jongin from the Eastern branch because Luhan had dragged him into it. Rushing into what he had hoped to become an easy case, only to be punched in the face because he had underestimated the ghost and its control of the body. Blacking out and that short lucid moment when Park Chanyeol had pressed something cold to his face. As if to confirm a suspicion, he looked beside the bed and found what had been a frozen package with dumplings at some point. They must have dropped when he had moved in his sleep.
All that left only one explanation on who the mountain of a person sitting at his kitchen table would be.
Now that he concentrated on it, he heard the soft sound of even breathing and sighed. This was not what he had wanted to happen. All he had wanted was to show that they were not actually compatible. Because he had not trusted the Office, he had tried to do everything himself but the truth was that he couldn't. He couldn't help. He only made things worse. And rather than to correct his prior mistake, he had shown only more weakness. There were debts he never wanted to make because he did not know how to repay them.
Unsure what else to do, he stood up on slightly wobbly legs, gathered his blanket and put it over Park Chanyeol's shoulders. It made a rustling sound and Park Chanyeol let out a quiet noise and then everything was still.
As he looked down on Park Chanyeol's sleeping figure he wondered if Byun Baekhyun lingered outside. He tried to ignore it but he unwillingly remembered what it had felt like to be possessed. The numbness and the sensation of skin against his skin that he couldn't control.
Without meaning to, he idly touched Park Chanyeol's shoulder and part of him was glad that he only felt the cool fabric of the blanket.
He hated those nights when he woke up from a nightmare and couldn't go back to sleep.

Time seemed to crawl.
He took a shower and then spent what felt like an eternity staring at the bruise around his eye. It was angrily purple and blue but looked worse than it felt. He rarely got hurt and couldn't remember actually ever having a black eye, so it was an odd sensation. When he finally gave up on poking it and returned to the living room, he expected the sun to have risen but the room was still dyed in blue twilight. The mountain at the kitchen table had  not moved.
So he put on a sweater and stared outside the window and at the millions of ghosts floating in the early morning sky. It made a shiver run down his spine. He could see them but as long as he was inside, they could not see him. It was so easy to feel a false sense of security when in hiding.
Park Chanyoel muttered something, which startled Minseok enough that he swivelled around and glanced at him warily until he was sure that he was still asleep. He couldn't decide what he dreaded more: Spending hours waiting in deafening silence or the moment when he had the be thankful and apologetic and all-knowing at the same time.
He sat down on the edge of his bed with his phone, scrolled through messages he had ignored before, browsed through the emails from various work-related mailing lists that rarely contained anything interesting and then walked past Park Chanyeol to the kitchen to prepare rice.

It was past seven. The rice was cooked, the bathroom sink cleaned, the tiny potted plant in the kitchen window watered and the drawer with socks arranged as neatly as never before, when Park Chanyeol finally moved. He groaned, the blanket slid off his shoulder and he rubbed his neck with half-closed eyes. When he stretched his back and turned to the side, he clearly was surprised to see Minseok standing at the window because his eyes widened. He immediately looked awake.
"Are you okay?" Park Chanyeol asked with the hoarse voice of someone who had not slept well and Minseok felt a pinch. It wasn't the first time someone asked him that question. It wasn't even the first time Park Chanyeol did. Somehow they always ended up in these situations. But it was strange for the question to be the first thing he heard in the morning. Normally he first had to waltz through walls of ghosts before he heard a single familiar human voice.
"Does it hurt a lot?" Park Chanyeol while pointing at his own eye and Minseok realized that he hadn't replied yet.
"I'm okay," he said and probably sounded defiant. Park Chanyeol's expression told him as much.
"That's good," Park Chanyeol said with a small sigh. "I kept thinking that I maybe should have brought you to the hospital and not home, but then I wasn't sure what I would have told them. The guy,what was his name again?, he said it's probably exhausting to do what you do and that you'll be fine if you rest a while, but he didn't sound all that sure, so..." He trailed off and awkwardly rubbed his face. "So, anyway, I'm glad you're okay." He flashed a smile at him that was so obviously filled with relief that Minseok was taken back a little. Relief meant that he had been worried. Something about that realization struck him. Worry was rarely directed at him because he normally didn't give anyone a reason to. They were never that close. He was never that weak.
When he didn't say anything, Park Chanyeol suddenly looked around and then checked his pockets while he asked, "What time is it?" Before Minseok could reply, he already pulled out his phone and squinted at the screen. "What did Junmyeon-sshi say when I was supposed to be in? I should probably brush my teeth and change clothes before I go." He was about to stand up and stepped on the blanket he had dropped.
Minseok realized that he was probably about to go home and it didn't feel right to be at the receiving end of kindness without a chance to give back, so he quickly asked, "Are you hungry?"
Park Chanyeol, who was in the middle of picking up the blanket, looked at him cautiously.
"I cooked rice," Minseok added and immediately felt stupid.

- face search -

"What are you doing here so early?" was the first thing Tao said as he entered the office around eight. He took off his coat in an exaggerated way that caused a sheet of paper to fly off Jongin's desk, and then his computer. "It's Sunday, you know" he added jokingly as he pulled a folder out of his bag.
"Hm," Jongin replied because it was too early for casual banter. He had barely slept because the same scenes had kept repeating themselves in his mind the moment he had closed his eyes. Part of him probably simply needed to occupy itself with something else or he would keep thinking about the fact that Kim Minseok had killed a ghost in front of his eyes. The mere thought was absurd and terrifying at the same time. So when he had tried to think of something else, he had remembered the bits of the ghost's mind he had seen before it had died. The more he thought about it, the more sure he came that they were crucial somehow.
There were only two things he knew for certain:
a) the ghost had not been normal or else he would have been able to deal with it himself.
b) the ghost had been in contact with a summoner. Jongin had seen a face he had immediately connected to the Office although he could neither remember where he had seen it nor how he even knew.
"You're in early to look through party pictures?" Tao asked in exasperation as he leaned over his shoulder and looked at his screen. Jongin was in the middle of scrolling through rows and rows of pictures of drunk summoners from all around the country. He had figured that the big summer party in August was his best bet to find out who the missing summoner  was. The guy had looked Asian and in his eight years at the Office, Jongin had rarely been in contact with anyone from abroad.
"Oh man, look at her. She just doesn't know when to stop," Tao laughed when Jongin scrolled past a few pictures of their colleague Sohee heavily flirting with a guy with a patchy beard. "So embarrassing," Tao muttered as he pulled over his chair and leaned his elbows on Jongin's desk as he sat down. He didn't seem to mind the lack of any form of reply.
"Wow, go back for a second," Tao said and when Jongin didn't react quickly enough, he swatted off his hand and took charge of the mouse himself. "Look at that guy. So lame," Tao said as he scrolled up to a guy in a leather jacket and with retro sunglasses. It took Jongin a second but then he recognized Wu Yifan. They had never talked before because Jongin was younger than him, but Wu Yifan was generally known to be an okay summoner and a popular mentor. Of course Tao would know him better because they were both Chinese and the Chinese all knew each other.  
"You know, it's so unfair," Tao said as he scrolled down and reached a picture of Wu Yifan pretending not to laugh while Luhan gave an animated speech. "They told me that I have to work with Koreans only because I'm from China, and yet those two work for the same office. I don't know what they think where those two come from."
Jongin nodded rather than to say that it probably had to do with the fact that Wu Yifan and Luhan both spoke better Korean than him.
There were more pictures of Luhan, this time with Kim Minseok. Luhan talked and Kim Minseok stared into his glass.
"I wish someone had told me how awful that shirt looked on me," Tao noted as he reached pictures of himself. "Look at that. I look like a penguin." He shook his head theatrically and Jongin sighed as he threw a glance at Tao in a black and white shirt. And then, as he scanned the rest of the picture, he finally saw the face he had been looking for.
"Who's that?" he asked and pointed at the guy Tao had thrown an arm around.
"Huh?" Tao asked because he had probably not expected Jongin to say anything at all. "Oh, that's Yixing."

- monster -

Sometimes Minseok lost control of himself.
"You're a monster," his mother had said one day when her thumbs had dug deep into his throat and when his vision had become spotty. His fingers had been clawed into the fabric of her dress and he had felt the beating of the wrong heart. It was the first time he had been able to distinguish between human and ghost.
"You pretend to be a child but you're a monster," she had shrieked and there had been an echo when the ghost's voice and the human's voice hadn't aligned any longer. He often dreamed of the moment. He never forgot the feeling. The coldness filling his chest and the darkness washing over him. Everything became so clear in those moments. All the emotions he usually tried to suppress turned into a single overwhelming sensation, as if all the colours around him were mixed until they were a solid shade of nothingness.
That was why he destroyed ghosts. He knew it could be avoided. It was easier to make them leave than to break them apart. And yet he constantly found himself feeling the fleeting shapes of ghosts brushing against him and couldn't control what he did to them.
Sometimes his world became black.
Sometimes the monster broke out and swallowed everything around him.

He wasn't sure how it had happened.
They had sat at his kitchen table, he on the chair and Park Chanyeol on the stool. They had eaten rice and kimchi and salty scrambled egg. Park Chanyeol had eaten out of Minseok's only bowl, Minseok had eaten off his only plate and they had drunk water out of tea cups. It had been perfectly absurd and he couldn't even remember what they had talked about. Probably work.
Then, Park Chanyeol had insisted on helping him wash the dishes and had talked about how he had hit his head as he had shoved Minseok in the back of a taxi the previous night.
"I keep thinking that there's probably nothing taxi drivers wouldn't have seen in their life," he had laughed. "For all he knew, I tried to kill you. I wasn't even sure about your address. I just told him to drive to the hospital and then made him stop when I recognized the building. Although I keep thinking that he probably could have helped me get you out rather than to scowl at me in the back mirror. I would have tipped him if he had." He had pulled a grimace that Minseok had only seen as a tiny warped image in the water tap.
"How did you get me inside?" Minseok had asked without looking up. The real question he had meant to ask why Park Chanyeol had helped him in the first place, but then he had figured that he probably had not had much of a choice.
"Uh, that was..." Park Chanyeol had begun hesitantly as he had dried off the wet plate Minseok had put next to the sink. "I might or might not have slapped you in the face."
Minseok had then looked at him.
"Which I admit was not the smartest thing to do," Park Chanyeol had continued with an awkward expression. "But I mean, it did wake you up enough to hit me in the chest. Which hurt. And in my defense, it wasn't like I slapped you hard."
Minseok must gave given him a strange expression because he had stretched out his hand and lightly patted the side of Minseok's face that was not bruised. "Kind of like this," he had said and had blinked at his hand as if it was only then that he had understood what he was doing.
His fingers had brushed against Minseok's cheek when he had muttered, "And then I might or might not have tried to undress you but you kicked me, so I gave up on that. I'm not sure if you remember all that but I was not trying to do anything strange. I just thought it would be uncomfortable. But then I just looked for something cold instead because your eye looked really bad and I..." He had trailed off when their eyes had locked. "And I..."
Minseok had felt it then. The darkness that crept up to him. The monster that hid under his skin.

It felt different from the times he lost control around a ghost. He felt no urge to destroy, no necessity to make the coldness he felt when he touched them to disappear. It was the complete opposite from all those times. He wanted more. He wanted the warmth in his chest to spread until it burned down everything else.
That was what touching Park Chanyeol did to him. The hot breath on his neck and the body that pressed him against the sink. The lips on his lips and the skin under the rough sweater that contained nothing but life. He couldn't remember the last time he had touched a human like that. Not to free them of something stuck in them but just to feel them. Just to feel anything.
"You're alive," he said in awe when he placed his hand on Park Chanyeol's bare stomach.
Park Chanyeol looked down at him curiously and then wrapped his own fingers around Minseok's. "I'm alive," he nodded and leaned down to kiss him again.
The feeling was like hunger. Like a haze that washed over him and made him desperate.
But even as he pulled Park Chanyeol's sweater over his head and tasted the salty skin of of his collarbone and ran his hands across his back, there was a certain familiarity.
His actions almost felt mechanical as he pulled himself closed and dragged him behind himself across the room.
He was on top of Park Chanyeol on the bed and fiddled with his belt when a light blinded him and he looked to the side.
The mirror.
The mirror of the closet showed his own reflection illuminated by the morning sun and he halted. He wasn't sure why it startled him so much. It was his own face. The face he saw every day but something about it felt horribly wrong. It reminded him of the day when Byun Baekhyun had been inside him and he had caught a glimpse of his face in the window of a bar. His face, but in the wrong setting.
He had fallen into a trap.
"What's wrong?" Park Chanyeol asked in a tiny voice and lifted himself up as far as he could with Minseok still on top of him.
Minseok looked down on him and blinked.
"Everything," he said and felt calmness wash over him. The monster retreated. "Everything about this is wrong."
Park Chanyeol obviously looked hurt, so he quickly got off of him and turned around to face the rest of the room. For a split second he could pretend to be alone and closed his eyes.
"I'm in the wrong here," he said to the room. "New recruits often get attached to the person who trains them. When you're around a ghost for too long, you easily become desperate. I'm supposed to know that. I shouldn't have let it come to this."
Behind him he head the soft squeaking of the mattress as Park Chanyeol lifted himself up. "Minseok-sshi, I'm not..." he began quietly.
"You're confused," Minseok said firmly as he turned back to him. "This is what your friend did to you. I can't save you. Not like this."