(( Soojung isn’t the type to question the universe but when one begins to live one’s life as a ghost, parts of one’s belief is bound to change. She thinks that time and space are odd concepts once you’re dead. She can blink once and come to find her surroundings completely changed in the nanoseconds it takes for her to shut her eyes and open them. She could be in Taemin’s room one second and then be out in the stark white hallway once again, all by her lonesome. Sometimes she finds herself floating by Jinri, following her through her rounds until she reaches Taemin, while other times she’s by the pretty doctor’s side—the one who tried to save her—to watch her work and try to move on from her guilt.

The doctor is still as lovely as ever but she’s a lot more demure now, Soojung thinks. Keeping to herself and avoiding Taemin’s doctor all the more. It makes her wonder what happened to them before the crash and what her death and Taemin’s accident had done to their relationship. She wonders why she finds herself following these strangers, looking into their lives and caring for them as though they meant something to her when she was alive.

She’s dead, this is a fact she’s accepted. So why them? And more importantly, why is she still here?

“You’ll hurt your head, thinking like that.” A voice says and she almost jumps out of her skin if she had any left. She is usually very much alone when she in the hallway, but today as it turns out is not the same as yesterday.

Soojung turns and finds herself faced with a blond-haired boy with narrowed, mischievous eyes. He looks to be around her age but she wasn’t too sure what to make of him. After all she is dead, haunting a boy’s hospital room. A ghost. What the hell is he?

“I’m a ghost too, duh.” He answers, reading her thoughts and she really does jump back in surprise.

“I’ve never seen you before.” She replies, brow crinkling at him. A smirk lights up his face and Soojung finds herself bristling at the half-amused, half-exasperated look he gives her. It was a look that Taemin would give her sometimes, when he talked about the mechanics of a so-and-so engine and she would ask an inane question he’d already answered minutes before. It was a look that made her feel very small, very stupid and she was neither of those. She wasn’t even human anymore.

The blond starts walking, passing by her before speaking close to her ear, “You haven’t seen me because you hadn’t needed to until now.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” She asks, whirling at him. “What do you I hadn’t needed to see you until now?”

“Exactly what it means, Soojung.” He counters, looking back at her. The white of the room made his blond hair look even brighter, practically platinum in the light. It hurt her eyes to look at him, but she couldn’t look away either. “You haven’t wondered why you were here until now. So here I am.”

“What are you? Some kind of spirit guide?”

“You could say that.” He shrugs, grinning at her. Offering up his hand, he motions for her to follow him further into the white. Soojung doesn’t particularly want to but her feet moves anyway. She’s by his side in flash before she’s able to speak again.

“Where are you taking me?”

“To where you should be.” He tells her, grabbing her hand and dragging her down the hallway. The room begins to change around her, filling up shapes that were not there before into actual objects. She recognizes them as they slowly fill in color and when she blinks again, she knows that she is already days into the future since her last visit in the living world.

She takes in the look and smell of Taemin’s dorm. Everything is familiar and new here. The desk is still riddled with screws and bolts and parts of machines she’s given up long ago to understand. Shoes lines up the wall near where the TV sits on top of a dresser Taemin and Jongin had taken apart and made into some sort of bookshelf/cabinet. Bottles of waters litter the floor next to a chair where a jacket had been slung over haphazardly. And finally Taemin is where she expects him to be, sleeping soundly on his bed in the very early hours of morning—completely healed and bruise-free.

Everything is in order, and yet at the same time changed.

Soojung turns to the blond again but finds him missing so she looks back down at Taemin. It’s in that moment she knows the ‘why’ to her questions.

She wishes she didn’t have to. But she knows now what to do. ))

**

Taemin refuses to acknowledge her and that’s OK. Soojung expects as much from a person who only believes in what he can measure. Taemin is a logical being, undeterred by things done in affection. It’s one of the things she found attractive about him. She liked that he was certain about everything he did. He didn’t believe in hesitation, in guessing, or in luck. He believed in himself and what he knows. He knew who he was and what he wants in life, and by being with him Soojung knew who she was and what she wanted in life.

Granted she is neither here nor there. And every day she greets Taemin with a smile, she feels herself falling farther and farther away from where she ought to be.

With a smile, Soojung tells him—“You’re going to have to fess up sooner or later. You can’t keep ignoring the fact that you can see me, Taemin. I’m not leaving anytime soon.”—but all he does is turn back at her and bury his head in his books.

She knows that he knows what he has to do but he doesn’t believe.

“Taemin, you have to.” She whispers to him in his sleep. “Sooner or later, you have to believe.”

(( Her guide tells her to call him ‘Sehun’ and the name rings a bell in the back of her mind.

It doesn’t matter though because Soojung decides he is as strange as he look. Like a mushroom that pops up out of nowhere and when she least expects him. He starts coming around more often when she’s out following Taemin around. Taemin doesn’t see him like she does but it isn’t like he acknowledges her presence either so she can’t be sure if he actually does or doesn’t.

But it doesn’t matter, really, it doesn’t. Because it’s nice to have someone around… even if it’s just a weird spirit guide hanging around.

“Your boyfriend’s a tough nut to crack.”

“Well, he’s been through trauma. You can’t expect things to just be okay in a snap.”

Sehun shrugs, pointing his thumb at Taemin’s back. “He seems to think he’s okay.”

“Yeah…” Soojung agrees, tired all of a sudden and worried. “And yet I’m still here.”

“You can’t leave if someone still wants you here.” ))

The pain is more obvious in Jongin.

Soojung worries as she watches them hanging out at a bar late one night, her brow crinkling at the amount of alcohol Jongin keeps ingesting. He throws each shot back in one gulp, eyes screwed shut with every burn the liquid takes down his throat before opening them and be lifeless still. He is worse off than he was at the hospital when he was visiting, all rough and cutting whenever Jinri’s name comes up in his and Taemin’s conversations.

Taemin is trying, despite his own unease—his eyes darting from where she is standing beside him and then at Jongin slumped over on his stool. She can tell he doesn’t want to be rude, because that isn’t who he is, but his patience is also already paper-thin.

Jongin’s question catches her offguard—“Don’t you miss her at all?”—and she sees Taemin begin to shutter. Taemin turns away, flushed and responds just as cuttingly as Jongin had spoken to him, “What the are you talking about?”

Soojung knows a fight is about to begin when thankfully Jinri appears by her side. The anger quickly dissipates at her arrival and for that Soojung could not be anymore grateful for her presence. Taemin makes a quick quip of how stubborn Jongin is being by calling her ‘Sulli’ and when Jinri jokes and laughs in response, Soojung laughs too.

It’s quick but the way Jongin’s eyes flit to Jinri (at her) and how his shoulders tense makes her wonder if he heard her too. So she stops laughing to step closer, aware of Taemin’s eyes catching her movement from the periphery and lays a hand at Jongin’s back. He doesn’t ease and that hurts because he doesn’t deserve to be in so much pain…

Taemin looks away as her spirit hovers over Jongin. She thinks he’s acknowledging her now because he can’t handle his best friend right now as he orders another shot of whiskey and gulps it down. Not when both them are still so angry at each other. At themselves.

She wishes it were easier.

(It could be, though.)

(( Soojung hates Taemin the most when he’s being belligerent. Pointedly ignoring her when he should be listening.

He and Jinri are beginning to crumble because he refuses to believe. The good of who he is with Jinri chipping away with every denial he convinces himself. He’s hurting himself and Jinri and Soojung all at once and yet he does nothing still.

He’s so ing stubborn I could scream! She thinks, wanting to throw something at him as he lies to Jinri about being fine when he is clearly not.

“Tell her about me. Tell anyone.” Soojung pleads with him but he keeps silent.

“Jinri,” he says but the next part is for her, “Stop it.” ))

It’s awful once the dam breaks.

Soojung’s heart breaks for Jinri as she rushes out of the hospital room in sobs, leaving Taemin behind to fight back his own tears. She steps towards him after his doctor leaves hours later, just as his shoulders begins to shake and reaching for him as the tears began to flow in rivulets to his dismay.

He doesn’t freeze when she touches him, curling behind him on the white hospital bed as he cries. He is too tired to deny her any longer.

So he holds on, gripping the (nonexistent) hand on his chest as the sorrow overwhelms him. Soojung lets him cry as hard he needs, feeling his heart as it beats beneath her palm. She lets him cry for himself, for Jongin, for Jinri and for her—and it’s good because this is what he ought to do. He needs to grieve. He needs to accept that everything in all of their lives has changed.

“That wasn’t what I meant when I said you should tell her.” She tells him later, her cheek pressing against his chest.

“Then what?” he says aloud, the notion clear.

She reaches up to brush his hair off his forehead and watches him close his eyes for one quiet moment. “She had no part of this. We’re to blame.”

Taemin understands, he does because she knows him despite himself. She knows him inside out and he knows her too. He wishes he didn’t and it is exactly this that makes her strong enough to spell it out for him as her own tears come, “… and even though you say otherwise, you haven’t accepted the fact that I died. That you loved me the same way I did in your own way but was never able to tell me. Because you didn’t believe in love then, at least until she came along. You fell for her because she made you believe in things I could never make you consider when I was alive.”

Soojung presses a kiss against his chest and chokes out. “You have to let me go, Taemin.”

“I never wanted you dead.” He tells her and she knows it’s as close to I love you as she can get from him now.

Her body feels lighter now as she raises her head, looking down at his glassy eyes. The room slowly fading out of color, like sketch being slowly erased, as she watches him for a long, long moment.

“I know.” She nods finally, cupping his cheek to press a kiss on his lips. It is the softest of kisses she will ever have with him but it’s OK. She’s dead, she accepts it. And now he does too. “Tell her about me. Tell anyone.”

Don’t forget. “I love you, Taemin”

He closes his eyes and breathes. I love you too, Soojung. “Okay.”

**

(( When she comes back to, she is in the empty room of light and sees Sehun leaning against nothing. He smirks at her as she moves to stand, holding out a hand,

“Ready to go?”

Soojung shakes her head. “Could I have… one last stop?”

The blond raises an eyebrow at her, “Okay… to where?”

“Jongin.”

“He wasn’t the one holding you there.”

She knows that but, “He ing loved me, did you know?” ))

**

Their steps are better in sync of each other now that she’s dead than when she was alive and Soojung thinks that it’s a pity.

She wonders if she had known Jongin better, would any of this have happened? Would she be walking down this path with him, her footsteps not making a mark on the cobblestones? Would she be alive and well? Happy? Thinking of what if’s is useless but she can’t help herself from imagining them while she is by his side.

She daydreams of play-fights and ice cream dates. Of cheesy love-notes passed in between her course classes and visits in between each of their part-time jobs. She daydreams about how he’d call her ‘Krystal’ because it’s his name for her and how she’d let him with a mocking glare because she secretly does loves it. She daydreams of burrowing into him and sighing, knowing that he ing loved her beyond death and—

Jongin stops at her grave stone, sliding down against the granite.

“Taemin loved you, you know. He did. He’s an idiot but he did.” She smiles at him when he chuckles. A tear escapes his eyes as he leans his head against the stone. He sniffs, quickly adding, “I wish I told you, Krys. Before. The rejection would have suited me fine if it meant that at least you knew.”

Soojung sits beside him, resting her head on his shoulder—much like she had done in the hospital practically eons ago. Her surroundings begins to fade out of color again as they breathe in sync. In and out, shades fading from color to grey to white…

“I love you, Soojung.” Jongin speaks to the sky and she knows he’s going to be alright.

A breeze brushes past them as she replies,

“I love you too, Jongin.”

(( Soojung is walking along the light with Sehun when she hears her name being called.

She stops for only a second to close her eyes, only to open them in time to see red posies being set on her grave as a pretty young nurse sits down on the grass. Her hair is longer now but still in the same chestnut color she likes, her grin wider than she’s ever seen it before.

“Hiya, Soojung.” Jinri says, leaning back against the stone, “The boys left me to play video games all day. Mind if I hang out?”

Soojung laughs, the wind agreeing with her. “Sure… why not?” ))

finis