- the son who got left behind  -

Luhan had only just turned twelve when his father had died while inspecting a construction site. He had been impaled by a metal rod that had entered through his neck. It had been impossibe to save him but he had not died instantly. Instead, he had bled to death in excruciating pain. Luhan knew that because his father's co-workers had told him and his mother every single detail. It had taken him years to understand that they had not done it to hurt them but because the experience had scarred them, too.
In response, his mother had never really stopped crying for thirteen months and had slowly lost her mind.
Then, about a month after her husband's death anniversary, she had stabbed Luhan and then herself. Like her husband, she had bled to death.
Luhan, too, could have died then. He could have stayed in his mother's arms and felt his and her blood soaking his skin. But instead he had crawled out of their apartment and cried and cried until the kind elderly woman next door had found him and brought him to a hospital.
As a child he had wanted to live but as an adult he sometimes wasn't so sure anymore.
Sometimes he found himself staring at the scar on his chest and wondered.
Had it really been worth it?
He had been so close to death that he had seen the whole world of souls in his last moments before passing out. He had seen them all, all the ghosts, young and forgotten and ancient and strong. He had felt nirvana tingling on his skin.
But then he had woken up in the hospital and the delirious ghost of his mother had screamed at him to die.
Had it been worth it?
He didn't know.

"They allowed me to train someone," Minseok said while he awkwardly twisted his fork to pick up his spaghetti, and Luhan choked on the red wine he had taken a sip of. Minseok always had the worst timing.
"What?" he gasped when he finally caught his breath. Rather than to respond, Minseok just continued to twist his fork and then bend down low over his plate to stuff his noodles in his mouth. He was terrible with Western food and Western table manners and Luhan probably shouldn't have brought him to an Italian restaurant of all places. It had only occurred to him when Minseok had stared at the fork for a few moments too long. There was a story with a fork somewhere hidden in the past.
But really, the whole evening had started strange and he had not thought straight. As children they had been best friends, but lately they only met during work-relared events. In fact, sometimes his friendship with Minseok was almost as much of a half-forgotten story as his life before they had shipped him off to Korea as a child. Rather than to worry about Minseok, the boy he had screamed at the world with, he worried about the news Minseok, senior member of the Northern branch of the Office, would bring.
"What do you mean, they allowed it?" he asked with furrowed brows when Minseok refused to volunteer further information. "Did you ask them to?"
This time Minseok threw him a bashful glance and he nearly dropped his own fork in disbelief. Minseok was supposed to understand these things better than anyone.
There were summoners who could train new recruits, summoners that were deemed stable enough because of their age and the circumstances in the moment when something had broken in them. Wu Yifan could train others because he had been nineteen when two of his acquaintances had been shot to death while he had survived after a bullet had grazed his shoulder. There always was guilt involved but it changed the more emotionally involved the person was.
Luhan would never be chosen as a mentor because he had been a child when the person he had loved the most in the world had tried to end his life. The consquences of that could never be erased of forgotten because they were what made him who he now was. And for Minseok it was no different. That was ultimately why they had never been asked to train others. They simply were too broken. Broken far beyond repair but functional enough to still be able to play the same old melody.
"But why?" he asked and noticed how accusatory he sounded. Minseok bit his lips and stared at the fork in his hand like a scolded child. This was not what their friendship was supposed to be like. Them against the rest of the world. That was what they had believed as children.
Luhan wanted to say something to loosen up the situation, when Minseok finally said in a hushed voice, "I did it to end another case study. They were doing it again, just to see how far they could go with it."
He didn't specify it, but Luhan knew what he meant. It happened sometimes. They watched a rogue ghost and made a summoner write down their findings to complete the archives. It was cruel but necessary and Luhan would not have minded discussing these issues with anyone but Minseok. He himself had watched a child possessing her little sister before and had only been allowed to step in, when the mother had finally understood the situation. But Minseok wasn't rational about these things and Luhan knew he couldn't argue. Minseok's files, too, were locked away somwhere to set a precedent. He probably would have seen ghosts whether they had intervened earlier or not, but what remained was that fact that he had been one of the case studies he hated so much.
"So how is it going?" Luhan asked because he wasn't sure what else to say. There was a suspicion budding at the back of his mind, but he knew that Minseok probably wouldn't have come to meet him unless he had something he wanted to get off his chest.
"I'm not sure," Minseok said vaguely and accidentally cause the fork to make a screeching noise as he dragged it over his plate. He flinched at the noise and Luhan sighed. He remembered now. The story with the fork Minseok had told him before. When he had disobeyed his mother's words and used a fork despite being told not to, she had stabbed his leg with it. There still was a scar above his knee. Back when they had been younger, Luhan had sometimes stared at it and wondered if that was what made them different from everyone else. They both had scars of love.
Minseok finally set his fork down on the table with a clunk and the conversation halted. Luhan wondered when their conversations had become so difficult. They had been fifteen when they had met and back then Minseok had not been awfully communicative either, but at least they had found common ground. But lately it was all about work. Work, work, work. As if they resented each other for knowing each other's secrets in an organisation in which secrecy was the key to survival.
"Do you hate your mother?" Minseok suddenly asked into the silence and again, Luhan choked, this time on his breath.
"What?" he asked with wide eyes.
"I sometimes think about it," Minseok shrugged casually but his expression was solemn. "Would I still hate her if things had been a little different?"

- the missing answer -

Ten years earlier a question had appeared in Chanyeol's life but before he had been able to find an answer to it, everything had spun out of control. The question had killed Baekhyun. The question had broken him. And at some point he had started to run from it.
But it lingered.
It always lingered.
"I heard from Saebyul's aunt that she's going back to America soon," his mother said while she chopped onions. "Have you talked to her lately?"
He thought about it. Thought about the time when they had last met and when he had tried to cling to an old feeling. The feeling of her skin was still recent but it was not at all how he had remembered it. There was nothing left but a faint memory of the boy who had liked her so much, he had thought about her all day.
"They like the idea of you liking her. And you like the idea of them being happy about you liking her. That's all it ing is," Baekhyun had once said while their legs had dangled out of the window of their classroom. "You don't really care that she's gone. You care because you don't have a girlfriend to show around anymore. It's all just a game of pretend to you."
Baekhyun had been angry then and Chanyeol had not understood why.
Somehow that memory was a lot clearer than all the memories of Kim Saebyul.
"Was it fun?" Baekhyun had asked when Chanyeol had held his head under a rusty water tap in a park early in the morning. He had felt sick and his nose was still filled with the smell of cats and laundry detergent that had filled the apartment of the woman he had spent the night with. He had only recently turned twenty and she had obviously been much older. And yet, when she had flirted with him in the hole of a bar his last few remaining high school friends had dragged him to, he had gone with her.
His friends had cheered because she had been hot.
"I mean, did that satisfy your needs and everything?" Baekhyun had asked angrily and coldness had washed over Chanyeol as if he had fallen into the ocean during winter. "Truth to be told, it was like watching one of those animal documentaries which totally gross you out but at the same time it's hard to look away, if you know what I mean? Lions mating in the savanna. That kind of ."
"Just shut up," Chanyeol had muttered.
It was all he ever managed to say.
With twenty-two he had dated a girl who had worked in the coffee shop across the road from his shop. They had spent a few lunch breaks in the small park behind the bank. He had liked the way they looked holding hands in the windows of the department store on their way there. When he had slept with her in a musky hotel, she had squealed like a pig and Baekhyun's laughter had filled the room.
"Shut up," he had muttered as he had rushed back to the shop after he had broken up with her a day after she had asked him to meet her parents. Baekhyun had not even said anything. He had only looked at him as though he knew something Chanyeol didn't.
"Shut up," Chanyeol had said when he had been twenty-three and had barely been able to walk straight. He had made out with a girl who had eventually thrown up over his shoes and he had felt disgusted with himself. Baekhyun had merely been a vague shape then.
"Just shut up, okay?" Chanyeol said whenever his head was about to burst because he had drunk too much the previous night.
He wasn't sure when he had picked up the habit but drinking made it easier sometimes. Drinking allowed him to flirt and to make out and to feel at least a little normal. Drinking was the only way to censor Baekhyun who constantly judged him for every step he took.
They never talked about it, not really. None of them ever put into words why Baekhyun had died.
Because to acknowledge why Baekhyun was there, always brought back the question.
The damn question that had started the whole misery.

"What is he to you?" Baekhyun had asked when Chanyeol had left Kim Minseok's apartment and had leaned against the wall of the elevator.
It wasn't the original question but it was close.
"I don't know," Chanyeol had said.
He had not wanted to think about it. Too many thoughts could ruin it. Too many thoughts always ruined everything.

But then the answer left his mouth before his brain could really follow.
He was drunk, so drunk that all the lights around him became a mayhem of color while the world was turning around him. Why they had drunk so much he couldn't remember. There had been important lessons at some earlier point during the day but all he remembered were fragments. The stained windows of an old café and white cups and Kim Minseok glancing at an old clock behind the counter. Their hands had brushed when they had both attempted to pick up the bill and Minseok had looked at him curiously. His sweater was dark grey and as monochromatic as the rest of his apartment and that knowledge had stirred something in Chanyeol. Grey curtains and grey sheets in a room where no one could see them.
They had entered a crowded restaurant that smelled of liquor and grease and cigarette smoke and he had protested at first but then Minseok had poured him a drink and he had felt relieved because he had known that Baekhyun was going to watch. The more crowded the place had become, the more they had huddled together until their shoulder had constantly brushed.
Minseok's frowns had turned into smiles. Shy smiles. Nervous smiles. Broad smiles. Drunk smiles.
On their way out, a group of men in suits had only just entered and pushed them closer together.
"Sorry," Chanyeol had said while he had tried not to squish Minseok between himself and the doorframe. Minseok had looked up to him and then tugged at his collar to force him to bend forward a little further.
"Can you still hear the ghosts?" he had whispered into his ear and his warm breath had tingled on Chanyeol's skin.
They had been close, oh, so close. Closer than Chanyeol had ever seemed to anyone. Despite all the smells of the restaurant, he smelled the faint scent of Minseok. The scent that had filled his home. The scent that had made it seem as though life could be simple and clean and warm if he only wanted it to be.
"I can only hear you," Chanyeol had muttered like an idiot and Minseok had grinned at him while he had pulled him outside where the coldness of the night had met them.
It didn't feel like anything he ever felt before.
He had kissed before. He had been with women before. He had done everything he thought was expected of him and had never realized that all he had ever done was to widen the void inside him.
None of his experiences seemed real in comparison to the way it felt when Minseok pulled him close and when their lips touched. His heart had never beaten so violently that he could hear his flood rushing in his ears.
He didn't care where he was. All that mattered was the way warm skin felt against his.
And then the answer broke out of him.
", I think..." he muttered into the crook of Minseok's neck. "I think I really like you."
And it ruined everything.
"Damn it," Minseok gasped in a strangled voice and Chanyeol backed off when he noticed Minseok's breath speeding up rapidly. Minseok quickly freed himself and awkwardly lifted his hand to his chest as if in pain. It all happened so suddenly that Chanyeol wasn't sure what to do. Minseok faintly whimpered and pulled at his shirt as if it suffocated him. He pulled and pulled and quietly swore as he crouched down and finally burried his face in his hands.
"Minseok-sshi...?" Chanyeol asked. His voice came out as a pathetic croak.
"I'm sorry," Minseok said in a strange tone. "I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have done this. I should never have done this."
And Chanyeol felt a strange sense of déjà-vue.

- the son who tries -

"I never really hated her," Luhan said slowly because he wasn't sure what kind of answer Minseok hoped to hear. "It wouldn't be fair to hate someone for something they couldn't control."
"She tried to kill you," Minseok noted and ran his finger along the edge of the table. He acted oblivious but whatever he tried to get at, Luhan could literally see the gears turning in his head.
"She did," Luhan nodded. They had this discussion before because, despite everything, this was the point that set them apart. Luhan had come to terms with what his mother had done. Minseok still blamed his. "Because she didn't have the will to live and she didn't want to leave me behind. I can't hate her when she only wanted to do what was best for me. Even if it was twisted."
"I still don't understand it," Minseok said apathetically and stared at his hand as he balled it into a fist on the table.
Luhan sighed. He wasn't sure what to say. They were alive so obviously they couldn't understand it. The living were not supposed to understand what it truly was like for those who had passed away. Even if they could see glimpses of the world beyond, they were still alive, still breathing, still able to touch and feel. Not to be able to understand was a privilege in its own right. But this wasn't the first time they had this discussion and he knew that Minseok didn't care much for his arguments.
"I got possessed a few days ago," Minseok said in the same indifferent tone and Luhan blinked at him because he didn't immediately comprehend what he meant.
"What?" he asked while Minseok clearly avoided to look at him.
"I think I made a mistake. I got possessed and still don't understand it but..." he began and then trailed off.
Luhan eyes widened but he was unable to say anything. Minseok was different. Minseok had always been different but sometimes he forgot about it. After all, they both worked for the same organisation, had the same tasks, had spent most of their teenage years together.
But something about Minseok would always be more aloof.
"I never knew how much they could still feel," Minseok said and furrowed his brows. "I thought they were just hollow memories. I thought that they were the remains of old ideas and old wishes and that they could not have actual feelings of their own. And suddenly I..." He scoffed and rubbed his temples as if in pain. "Suddenly I wonder if I maybe shouldn't have ended her."