- the impossibility of wonders -

At some point in his life Yixing had stopped being amazed easily. As a child he had looked at circus artists and rainbows and the uncle in his neighbourhood who had made the world's thinnest noodles by shaking dough a thousand times, and he had been completely blown away. Every lightning bolt ripping apart a yellow sky during the rainy season, every loaf of bread that started wet and flat and turned big and fluffy, every magic trick done by his father, everything that his mother did to her hair that made her look like a completely different person, everything had been a wonder to him.
Ghosts had amazed him, too, at first. But with his amazement had come fear, incredible fear, and once the fear had passed, nothing but indifference had remained. The fear had swept every other feeling away.
There were times when it made him feel hollow and oddly incomplete. He looked at rainbows and magicians and tried to remember the feeling but couldn't. Like ghosts that had forgotten who they once had been, his memories were nothing but shadows in his mind.
He probably would have worried about losing his humanity. The living and the dead were nothing but unvarying entities. The haunting and the haunted, the possessed and the possessing, in the end they were almost always the same. Most ghosts faded into oblivion, some clung to revenge, others simply wanted to live again. In the end they all tended to have similar motivations and it often grew tedious.
But then, sometimes, Yixing still encountered strange things that made him feel awe. A mother who had died when their daughter was young and who disappeared on her wedding day. A cat possessing the new cat of its owner. A ghost who had managed to multiply so that he could play mahjong against himself. A husband possessing a man who looked similar to him and who remarried and then divorced his former wife to find closure.
Minseok who killed a ghost.

Killing ghosts had never been an option, at least not according to what Junmyeon had taught Yixing. Mostly they talked to them, convinced them, healed them, made them go to nirvana out of their own free will. "We're here to help them," Junmyeon had explained in a way that had made it obvious that he really did feel compassion for them. "They all used to be living, breathing people but then they lost their way. I don't think we can really blame them."
Of course not every ghost was willing, no matter how patient they were with them. Some clung so much to the idea that they had found a way to cheat death that they refused to leave the hosts they possessed. But even then, they, the summoners, didn't kill them. They drove them out because nothing else even seemed possible. Ghosts were by definition dead. They were manifestations of souls and there was only one place they were supposed to be able to disappear to. Whatever nirvana really was, Yixing simply knew that it was where they went because he always felt the same overwhelming warmth when they finally let go.
But then there had been the soldier that Junmyeon had been unable to deal with by himself. The soldier had drifted from one low-life to the next, always hurting others, sometimes killing them, and when he had reached Seoul in the body of a Chinese sailor, he had already completely lost himself. There had been nothing left but the wish to destroy and when Yixing had stood in front of the man with Junmyeon and Minseok he had genuinely been afraid. Ghosts couldn't harm him. He had told himself that over and over again. Ghosts couldn't harm him, they couldn't harm him. But somehow he had been sure that the soldier probably could.
Afterwards he couldn't fully recall exactly what had happened. There had been screaming and Junmyeon had been thrown backwards by brute force and there had been blood and coldness that had seeped into Yixing's bones in icy waves. And then Minseok had been at the soldiers chest with growls like an animal and had ripped pieces out of it that had looked like spider webs in the morning dew. When it had happened, Yixing had not comprehended what he had seen but he had felt pure horror. Minseok had pushed the soldier away from him after a while and had tumbled backwards as if drunk. Something had changed, as if suddenly all the noises of the world had been turned off. Minseok had dropped to his knees, panting, and Yixing had heard his own ragged breathing but apart from that there had been nothing. No warmth of nirvana. But also no feeling of hatred and loneliness and rage that filled the air.
It had taken Yixing a while to understand because he had been faced with what was supposed to be an impossibility. Ghosts couldn't be killed. They could push them and sway them and lure them away but they could not even touch them. To touch ghosts was not supposed to be a possibility because the mere thought was implausible.
And yet, somehow, Minseok had ripped a ghost apart, and for the first time in years Yixing had felt that there still were wonders left in the world. Wonders as terrifying as the haunted tales in his childhood that had made him hide under his blanket at night.

Minseok was a mystery none of them could solve, but although Yixing couldn't deny that he was scared of him at times, he appreciated him for exactly that. Minseok's mere existence made him realize that there still were endless possibilities left in the world. Minseok wasn't like him or Junmyeon or Jongdae, but he wasn't like the voices either. He was neither all-knowing and ethereal, nor was he good at acting like a regular human. Minseok had the power to break conventions but Yixing also understood why he was never asked to teach anything to anyone. No one could do what Minseok did, so how could he have taught them?
So when Jongdae suddenly told him one day that Minseok was supposed to approach a potential recruit who had a companion, Yixing naturally was intrigued. There mere fact that Minseok was supposed to deal with him, probably meant that the new recruit, too, had the power to bend the rules.
The problem was that, although Minseok was a skilled summoner, he was awful whenever it was about ordinary human interaction.

"Hyung," Jongdae yelled excitedly when he and Yixing entered the office after coming back from their respective neighborhood rounds and found Minseok with his head on his desk. "Minseok-hyung," Jongdae specified when there was no reaction and Minseok lifted his head a little to look at him expressionlessly.
"You met the new one today, right?" Jongdae asked and Minseok let out a sigh as he fully sat up and rubbed his face. Yixing meanwhile looked at Junmyeon who watched them from his desk with a resigned expression.
When Minseok didn't reply and started to stare at the ceiling instead, Jongdae burst out into laughter. "Something tells me that it didn't go as planned," he noted.
"Just leave him, Jongdae," Junmyeon said in his usual fatherly tone. It was strange to hear it applied to Minseok because Minseok rarely failed.
"What happened?" Jongdae asked and clearly chose to ignore Junmyeon as he threw his bag on his desk and rolled over his chair to sit next to Minseok. "Did you threaten to kick the companion all the way into nirvana if the new one was not going to listen?"
Minseok pulled a grimace in response and Junmyeon gasped, "Jongdae!"
"Why?" Jongdae asked defiantly and folded his arms in front of his chest as he squinted at Junmyeon. "We all know that he could probably do that. I tagged along for one of his summonings and he barely tried to do all the stuff you told us. Talk to the ghost and be friendly or whatever. He was immediately down to business." He clapped his hand in effect and said in a bad mimickry of Minseok's voice, "Leave now or I'll make you leave, man."
Next to him Minseok winced and Yixing unwillingly chuckled because in the end that probably was more or less what had happened. Minseok, being Minseok, must have been so eager to explain all the facts and dangers of having a companion that he had forgotten to be empathetic about it. The companion, being a ghost, would have felt threatened and would have acted up and Minseok, being Minseok, would have done that trick that could force ghosts to shut up for a little while, like a radio with the volume turned down. Obviously the recruit, being the one who was emotionally attached to his companion, would then have told Minseok to scamper off.
"So it didn't go well after all?" Yixing asked and Minseok gave him an unusually defeated look.
"It didn't," he nodded and folded his hands on the desk. "At all."
"Damn," Jongdae said and sounded genuinely disappointed. After all, Jongdae was probably  the one who had been the most excited at the prospect of Minseok training anyone. Jongdae had only been with them for a year now, so he had not hit the point yet where he felt that he had fully reached his potential. Minseok meant untapped knowledge to him and a new recruit, someone who would naturally be below Jongdae in rank, was a chance to learn some of the things only Minseok could do.
"Do you want me to speak to him?" Junmyeon asked with a concerned frown. "Maybe I can-."
"No," Minseok interrupted him bruskly and then let out a frustrated noise while he ruffled his hair. "No, I mean," Minseok began and then trailed off. Yixing could not remember to ever see him so obviously troubled. "I'm supposed to do this myself. I already made the first contact, so if someone else appears in front of him now..."
"We'd probably look like a sect," Jongdae nodded and spun his chair to face the window in thought. "What to do then? It's not like we can change your personality."
"Jongdae!" Junmyeon sighed and shook his head.
"What?" Jongdae asked and it took him a second but then it dawned to him. "Well, I mean, let's be honest here, I like Minseok-hyung but it took two months until I even dared to ask him a question."
In return Minseok let his forehead hit his desk once more with a loud bang while making a strangled noise.
"Oh, , don't do that," Jongdae quickly muttered under his breath and awkwardly lifted his hand as if he considered patting Minseok's back in consolation. The whole situation was strange because Minseok normally wasn't distressed like this. "Hyung, look, I'm just saying, or rather, I'm not saying that you're a bad person or anything, but I think we can all agree that you're not very approachable." He managed to pat Minseok's shoulder once and then quickly backed off.
For a moment none of them said a word. Junmyeon threw Yixing a worried glance, Jongdae looked over to them helplessly and Minseok remained flat on the desk.
Then, after a long pause, Minseok's muffled voice asked, "What am I supposed to do now?" He lifted his head again but still stared straight down. "How do I make someone...?"
He didn't finish the question, so Jongdae helpfully added, "Like you?"
"Listen to me," Minseok said instead.
Jongdae frowned at him as if he tried hard to think of an answer. It was not a question someone like Jongdae ever asked. He didn't have to wonder how to make people listen because they already did.
"Listen to them first," Junmyeon suggested and immediately sounded like the teacher he usually was. It was in that tone that he had taught Yixing everything he knew. "Most people are desperate to have someone listen to them. So listen to them first. And then they will probably listen to you."
At first Minseok didn't seem to react but then he turned around with a puzzled expression, as if Junmyeon had explained the meaning of life to him but he simply couldn't grasp the concept
"And if that doesn't work you can still kick the ghost into nirvana," Jongdae said thougtlessly and burst out laughing when Minseok looked at him as though the joke caused him physical pain.

"Weird though, isn't it?" Jongdae asked and looked at Yixing in the restroom mirror while he attempted to flatten the hair on one side of his head.
"Hm?" Yixing only asked in return as he washed off the soap that eerily reminded him of the antiseptic smell of hospitals. He wished the cleaning personnel would simply buy normal soap with a normal, more pleasant smell.
"To see that Minseok-hyung is human like us," Jongdae explained and Yixing smiled. But then he felt the smile die down on his face and noticed that Jongdae only meant it half-jokingly, too. It certainly was weird in a way.
"Because, you see," Jongdae continued in an usually earnest tone. "I don't think Minseok-hyung would care if that recruit was just a regular guy. He would probably hand him over to Junmyeon-hyung after all. Which makes me wonder if there maybe is something they're not telling us."
"Like what?" Yixing asked but knew what Jongdae meant. Unlike him he had already suspected before that the recruit probably wasn't quite like them and probably more like Minseok. But still, that did not fully explain why Minseok would have been so emotional about it. Not being used to failure couldn't be the sole reason.
"No idea," Jongdae shrugged. "I mean, it's probably just my imagination anyway but, I don't know, it makes me a little uneasy."

- invisible sound -

Baekhyun could hear things that he knew Chanyeol couldn't. Things that he knew he himself had not heard as a child. He would have heard the TV in the living room and the gurgling of pipes and Yura loudly talking in her room and the rain lightly pattering against the window. He probably would have thought of it as a quiet evening, just like Chanyeol who lay on his back and stared at the small piece of paper he held in his stretched out hand in front of him.
But Baekhyun heard more. He heard Chanyeol's mother whispering to his father. He heard how Yura tapped her finger against the back of her phone. He heard the couple arguing two doors away and the cat hiding under Chanyeol's father's car and the man who ran through the rain to reach his house and the thousands of half-forgotten ghosts that swarmed the air like tiny insects in summer. Rainy days meant ghost soup and he tried to think of it as funny, but the sound only made him restless. Because he heard too much. He could hear that Chanyeol's pulse was a little bit higher than normal. It had been that way all day. In the shop and in the bus and as he stepped in a puddle because he had been too much in thought and during dinner and now that he stared at the crumpled paper he had stuffed into his pocket hours ago, pretending not to care but obviously caring. He had fiddled with it for hours. For hours the sound of paper had come from his pocket and it drove Baekhyun mad.
So he said, "You're not serious thinking about calling that guy." It wasn't a question because he didn't want it to be one.
Chanyeol looked over to him and let his hand drop down to his chest, careful not to crumple the paper even further. "Why not?" he asked in a deliberately indifferent voice but the beating of his heart betrayed him.
"Well," Baekhyun said and put his hand on Chanyeol's desk as if it could anker him. Lately he often found himself floating when he didn't pay attention but he carefully made sure to appear like a regular guy. He was just a regular guy who sat at his friend's desk and had a regular conversation. "First of all, he's an exorcist," Baekhyun said and put up the index finger of his free hand.
"Right," Chanyeol nodded but didn't seem convinced.
"Second of all," Baekhyun said and added his middle finger. "He's an exorcist."
This time Chanyeol put on a grimace and shook his head as he rolled on his side to face the wall.
"And my third point is," Baekhyun continued while he put up his thumb. "Did I already mention that he is a ing exorcist?"
Chanyeol rolled back to now look at Baekhyun with an exasperated face. "I feel like you're running out of arguments."
"Also," Baekhyun said and waved the four fingers of his left hand at Chanyeol. "He was rude."
Chanyeol seemed to consider that for a second and then grinned, "He certainly was." He rolled back in his back and fumbled with the edge of the paper. It sounded like sirens to Baekhyun.
"It's just," Chanyeol said and sounded distant. "I mean, what are our options anyway? You said that they want to keep an eye on me either way, whoever they even are. And they probably won't get discouraged just because we scared off the first guy. If I was them, I'd just send someone bigger and scarier who grabs me by the collar and tells me to stop ing up." He playfully mimicked being strangled and shot Baekhyun a grin. But then his expression immediately became dark again. It wasn't hard to figure out what went on inside his head. He thought about the woman who was in hospital because of the man with cancer.
"I just think that maybe," Chanyeol then continued. "Maybe, if we have to talk to one of them anyway, we should just talk to that first guy. He looked harmless enough. I think it would just get worse if we try to stall time."
Baekhyun didn't say anything because he disagreed but did not want to show it. He did not know much about the Office or their exorcists although he had spoken to hundreds of ghosts over the years. Somehow they had always remained elusive, like a half-remembered dream. What he did know was how much the exorcist had scared him and he wasn't sure whether they had an option that was even worse.
The exorcist had not looked terrifying but to Baekhyun he had been nothing but. He had appeared out of nowhere and the more Baekhyun thought about it, the more he felt as though he had sensed his presence before, like a gap in reality out of which he had crawled like a cloud of sheer nothingness . The exorcist had gone from being nobody to blaring like a scream in the middle of the night. With a flick of his hand Baekhyun had become unable to speak and he knew that, if he had tried to fight back, he could have completely lost himself.
Baekhyun did not want to imagine anyone worse than that because the exorcist already was a nightmare come to life.
"I don't know," Baekhyun then just said lamely because he felt foolish. "I just think that he knows ."
Chanyeol let out a toneless laugh. "Maybe," he said. "But if we talk to him, he maybe sees that we're okay." He didn't look at Baekhyun while he uttered those words.
"We are okay," Baekhyun agreed. It wasn't a question but he still hoped for another confirmation.
Instead, Chanyeol flicked the edge of the piece of paper and then held it in front of his eyes once more. And the room was again filled with sounds Baekhyun didn't want to pay attention to. Ghosts whispering in the dark and Yura rubbing her neck and the cat under the car meowing when a woman with an umbrella walked by and the wind howling and the rain splashing and the world moving and Chanyeol finger's brushing against the fabric of his jeans when he couldn't decide whether to take out his phone or not.
And Baekhyun wanted it to stop because he heard things, he heard everything and he needed to hear them to remind himself that he would have to pull himself together. He couldn't allow himself to float away and become part of the ghost soup outside.