As people — people of the earth — walk to their inevitable deaths, it was after the rookie party, when the shock and guilt and alcohol weighing on Daehyun morphed into one disgusting ugly boulder he could not carry. Jiae could sympathise, because she was the only one among them who could bear the weight of all the bull that are ever-present in her life.

She’d gone to visit Daehyun, one lonely night not two weeks after the video has gone viral. She remembers walking in the darkness of Daehyun’s chilly apartment and ending up in the bathroom, (aiming for the bedroom, dammit), but not caring about her aim after seeing Daehyun leaning against the bathtub. If he wasn’t breathing so hard, Jiae would’ve thought he was asleep. She gives a soft cough, and Daehyun’s eyes snap open and realises who exactly is standing before him.

His eyes were sunk deep into his skull, normally honey-brown eyes now dark as coal in the shadows. He was wearing only a pair of pyjamas bottoms, and Jiae could count each of his… hickeys that he’d probably gotten from more than one or two girls. It made her nauseous just to look at him.

“Hi,” she says, her voice cracking as if it hadn’t been used in ages.

Daehyun just stared at her. Jiae can see the ghosts of guilt in his eyes and wants to take it away. She doesn’t want him to feel this way — Jiae doesn’t wish the burdens of ty feelings on anybody.

“I-” Jiae has to swallow before she continues. She feels exhausted all of a sudden. “I want to say- I know how you feel. And- I- I know you don’t think I do, and- and I know. I know I can’t really know how you feel. But it’s not–”

She has to pause while Daehyun dashes back to the toilet, and Jiae doesn’t follow him in until the noises of sick cease.

When she does, she takes a seat on the edge of the bathtub and traces the cold edge with her fingers. “I do know how you feel, though.”

Daehyun grips the toilet seat so hard his knuckles go white. “You. Cannot possibly. Know how I feel.”

Jiae doesn’t say anything for a long, long while. When she does, her voice sounds bitter, even to her own ears. “Yeah. I tried to kill myself. Can’t possibly know anything about death.”

Daehyun leans back and sits on his heels. “Why are you here, Jiae?”

“You aren’t alone,” she says. “I- I forgive you, even if you can’t forgive yourself.”

There’s a pause, and then- “Please don’t blame yourself. I swear it’s not your fault. Don’t feel guilty.”

The ghostly girl can see the emotions battling across Daehyun’s face. Guilt and loneliness and despair and shock and disgust- they’re all there, fighting furiously for dominance. He opens his mouth as if to scream, but nothing comes out.

“S’not that easy,” He says finally.

Jiae gives a soft laugh that lacks warmth and says, “I know. Believe me, I know.”

 

x

 

See, the thing is, Jiae isn’t very good at running. Of course, it’s never really been her fault – she hasn’t eaten anything in days. Planet Earth isn’t a nice place in the best of circumstances, and for a teenager it’s one of the worst.

She won’t make it long here, and she knows it. So when she hears a thrumming, feels it resonate through her being, she follows it to Sunset Playground. It’s the middle of the day when she finally reaches it, but the doors swing open at her outstretched hand, and she lets them swallow her up.

Naturally, nobody ever notices a thing.

Her eyes are big with awe, fascination without even a hint of the dull pounding of fear. She should be afraid, she thinks dimly and distantly. She should be, but she’s not. The shadows and murky rivers and the severe, exact lines of the buildings fill her with comfort, not terror. Even though she can hear the echoes of the shrieks of the things unseen and unsounded, it doesn’t feel like being on the outskirts of homelessness. Oddly enough, it feels like coming home.

“Because you are,” a deep voice rumbles off in the distance. Jiae looks up into the old, terrible – but still human – face of a man with a thick, unadorned crown on his head. “Welcome, child.” His face is just as stern as the tree bark, his voice steely and deep like its core, and Jiae suddenly feels about the size of a mouse on the floor, gazing up at him with wide eyes.

“Who are you?” she squeaks out, her voice shaking a little.

The man his head to the side, regarding Jiae like she’s a particularly intriguing piece of pond scum. “You don’t know?” he asks, and a corner of his lip twitches up. “No, you don’t. You really don’t know, do you?”

All of the sudden, Jiae’s being pulled to her feet, and lead along the edge of a wall made from pillars of black walls and she stumbles along, tripping over the hems of her too-long skinny jeans and dirty, frayed laces of her ratty old sneakers.

“Come along, child,” The man says, ignoring Jiae’s half-hearted protest of it’s Jiae. “I have so much to teach you about your gifts.”

It’s mid-December when she emerges out of Sunset Playground, exactly the same as she started, except her hair is longer and there are a few more shadows under her eyes.

It takes her all of five minutes to find a McDonald’s. Apparently, everybody really likes McDonald’s. Go figure. It probably has something to do with all the calories and fat — which seems to be like crack. Personally, Jiae thinks it’s too greasy and kind of really gross.

She makes her way to a suspicious-looking alleyway that lead to a bigger park. The location doesn’t matter, the man had told her, but she always felt more comfortable alone anyways. She finds a relatively fresh soil and digs it up with her bare hands. Dirt gets under her ragged fingernails and stains the white a brown-grey-black colour, but she doesn’t really care. She places the slightly squishy burger, still wrapped, in the ground and covers it with the dirt once again.

Biting her lip, she does her best to clear her mind. “Jung Daehyun,” she says, voice wobbly. She clenches her eyes shut and pictures him in her head, does her best to recall every detail. Her body starts to tremble, almost violently, and she does her best to brace her legs so they stay standing. The faintest drops of sweat start to bead on her forehead, even as chilly as it is.

“Jung Daehyun,” she calls, louder this time with a voice twice as shaky. Pressure builds up in her head until it pops in her ears, and she cracks her eyes open.

Daehyun is standing there, looking like he was the night she left, but washed out in a sort of way, all pale except for his eyes, which were as brown as ever. She feels like collapsing to the ground in exhaustion. “D-Daehyun,” she cries, voice hoarse. As she gets nearer to him, he flickers out briefly before coming back, and does so a few more time. She reaches a spot right in front of him and puts her hands on her knees, panting for breath. “Daehyun,” she says again, quieter but just as desperate.

There is no reply. She looks up, and he isn’t even looking at her — just at a fixed point over her shoulder. He doesn’t say a word. Then he flickers once again, twice, and then he disappears. She’s left staring at the spot where he used to be.

No. This isn’t fair, she thinks despairingly, before pulling out a carton of nuggets from the McDonald’s bag. She digs another hole, and buries the food just the same as she did before.

“Daehyun,” she says, body thrumming with strained, thin-spread energy. “Jung Daehyun.” The stars gleam in the sky, bushes rustle with small animals, and crickets chirp in the cold night, but nothing happens.

She spends the rest of the night burying various pieces of food, calling his name until her knees give out on her and she collapses in exhaustion.

Nobody appears.

The next morning, she wakes up to the cold of snowflakes landing then melting on her neck at sunrise. It’s the beginning of a light snowfall, but it promises to become heavier, so she just grabs the empty bag and tosses it into a basket on the way out, before making her way into the city.

Even though the sun is just beginning to rise, it’s nearly ten in the morning, and people are out and about. The streets are busy and shops are open and she considers going through her pocket for some money, but decides against it.

It’s a weird feeling, being empty. Up until now, she had a goal. Find Daehyun. Talk to Daehyun. Hug Daehyun. Talk to Daehyun some more.

Daehyun, Daehyun, Daehyun. Everything hinged on Daehyun.

Now she’s found him, but he doesn’t want to talk to her. He doesn’t even want to look at her.

She stands against a brick building and stares across the street. The rising light is bright and bold, a stark contrast to the black blocks of shadows where all the skyscrapers are. And she thinks about what she’s going to do next. Because she doesn’t want to do anything right now. She just wants to curl up on a couch or in a bed and sleep, pretend these last few years were nothing more than a horrific nightmare, but she can’t even do that.

Everything she wants is so far out of her reach they might as well be in another dimension.

She wants… she doesn’t even know what she wants, anymore. Because she’s got nothing now. Not a life, not a family. Not even a brother — it doesn’t count when Youngjae seems to hate her guts.

Like she said. Nothing.

She tries summoning him again, of course. How could she not? It’s Daehyun, and she’s… she’s lonely. But each time she does, he doesn’t speak – lately, he’s taken to looking at her with his big brown eyes, staring at her solemnly, but that’s about it — and he flickers out within minutes of his summoning.

So she’s moved on to summoning other wandering souls. Because she’s lonely, okay? And the lost folks are the only ones who seem to tolerate her. And even that’s probably because she’s the only child who tries to talk to them.

She’s not bitter about this. Really, she’s not.

But she feels so old right now, older than most teenagers, and when she looks in the mirror, she doesn’t think she can even see the kid she used to be a year ago.

Sometimes she wonders if Daehyun would talk to her if she was the same beautiful kid, that same annoying little girl he always took care of before everything went to hell. But she’s not. So. She keeps on summoning and she keeps on walking. She knows all of the best places to sleep in a city, which is kind of weird had it not been out of necessity.

She keeps summoning Daehyun, though. Every night, she buries a little bag of French fries and a small cup of strawberry milkshake, and she tries to talk to him, but he never answers her.

And then Kim Himchan shows up and gets her to summon Daehyun. And for the first time since she summoned him in December, he talks. And she can’t help but still hate Himchan a little more for that, for Daehyun only speaking to come to his defence, not before.

The next night, she summons him once more. This time, he doesn’t say a word, like normal. She screams at him and she begs and she pleads but he doesn’t open his mouth, and why did he talk for Himchan and not for me?

She doesn’t summon him for nearly six weeks after that. Some nights she finds herself unconsciously buying an extra bag of fries when she’s at McDonald’s, or starting to order a strawberry milkshake. Still other days she’ll find herself burying the food and realise what she’s doing right before she finishes covering it with dirt.

Those nights, she tosses and turns, or walks around until she’s so tired she’s on the verge of forgetting her own name. It . But she can’t bring herself to think about how he left her on her own.

Finally, in the early fall, she finally snaps, and she summons him. She doesn’t even bother to go buy a whole bag of French fries or get a cup of strawberry milkshake — she just tosses half of his sandwich in the ground and calls out, “Jung Daehyun!” Her body still trembles a little with the effort, but it’s been getting easier and easier.

She has so many thing she wants to say to him. She has so many accusations she wants to hurl, and she wants to scream and rage and demand answers from him, but when he shows up — after six weeks of not seeing him — all she can do is just stand there and stare.

Then everything hits her like a wrecking ball to the gut. Her face starts to crumple, slowly at first and then she just completely loses it. She starts to cry like the little girl she really is — and she is, she is, she’s only a child and why is this happening to her it’s not fair.

She’s not sure how long she stays like that, curled up with her knees tucked to her chest and her face buried into her aviator jacket, the one thing she hasn’t gotten rid of. A cold chill that she barely notices drifts over her scalp, and she looks up to see Youngjae sitting next to her, running a hand through her hair.

“Y-Youngjae? How did you–”

Daehyun isn’t anywhere in sight. It’s Youngjae, he’s here–

She’s aware of a dull cold through the shirt sleeve on the other side and a stripe of the chilliness across her back, and realises that his arms are around her. He’s barely touching her, but she knows they’d probably go to hell or something if he really did touch her or let his body sweep through her skin.

No matter how much she wants it, they can’t.

“Oh, Jiae,” he says, an airy, soft whisper that seems like they could be part of the wind’s breeze. “I’m so sorry. I am so, so sorry.” He rests his head against hers and whispers other things into her hair, things she can’t really hear but knows he’s the one saying them.

She sniffles a bit, a rough sound, and rubs at her eyes with her jacket sleeve. “You waited this long to look for me?” she says, voice throaty like sandpaper. She glares at him a bit accusingly, but it’s really not that intimidating through swollen, bloodshot eyes and an equally red nose. She snuffles again, and his hand drifts to her face, running a hand through her hair in a gesture of pushing her bangs out of the way.

And it’s all forgotten. Jung Daehyun is gone just like that.

“You waited this long to cry?” Youngjae asks her, gently, and she bites her lip and squeezes her eyes against more b tears. He curls his pale, spindly body around her just as bony ones, and they sit together for the rest of the night. His body is jutting into her strangely and with an incredible familiarity, and fitting together too well and a lot more than they should. “Love you, lil’ sister.”

In the morning, when Jiae wakes up, he fades away, but this time, life doesn’t really hurt so much anymore.

 

---

 

a/n: sorry…