Dying her hair was not a statement, Krystal decided. It wasn’t a symbolic way of breaking things off with the old Krystal Jung, because she was fairly sure nothing big would change during the two months between the start and end of summer vacation, and it wasn’t because she wanted to be one of those persons who did crazy things, just for the sake of attention. She just decided brown was boring, that’s all. It wasn’t like people would call her out on it - not while she was in the same class as Victoria Song who, she was pretty sure, was a metamorphmagus anyways. Blonde hair seemed satisfactory neutral in contrast to turning your mouth into a duck beak.

Another thing was that Krystal was introverted. If somebody thought something of her, the chance was she wouldn’t hear it, because she didn’t know enough people for that. Of course there was Amber, her older (but not necessarily wiser) housemate, but Amber came to school last year with her hair ablaze, so all she did was giving Krystal a thumbs up on the train when she saw her.

It was September, it was raining outside, and she was on her way to her potions class when someone she didn’t know commented on her hair. “Your hair looks nice. Did you color it over the summer?” Krystal looked up from her feet and expected to find a person standing in front of her, only to be met with nothing. Frowning, she continued down the stairs. “You know, as much as I love blonde hair I’ve never tried it myself. I’m more of a dark colors kind of person, you see. And maybe blonde would look stupid to this uniform; what do you think?”

Krystal screamed and dropped her books when a girl floated out in front of her. Going to Hogwarts and being a witch was easy enough to cope with, but even now, at the beginning of her 6^th year, Krystal still had to get used to the ghost-flying-through-the-walls-to-talk-to-you-thing. So far she had managed pretty well, she even talked to The Grey Lady a few times, but at least that particular ghost didn’t just dart out in front of her at unforeseen times.

Said ghost girl seemed just as surprised over Krystal’s screaming as she herself did, because she stopped - floated - to look down at her, eyes wide open before she settled for a much less intimidating smile. “Oh, sorry about that. Donghae says I’m to brash for some students’ liking sometimes, but I swear I’m not doing it on purpose. You need a hand with those?” Before Krystal could form an answer her books came floating back into her arms, courtesy of the ghost with a flick of her wrist. “There we go, all better. I’m Sulli, by the way. Sorry for scaring you” ghost girl (Sulli, apparently) said, feet still a few inches off the ground. “I’m Krystal. And it’s okay, I’m pretty easy to scare sometimes” Krystal replied, tugging her books safely under her arm before continuing down the stairs. Sulli floated next to her.

“So, this whole scaring people by accident, does that happen a lot to you?” Krystal asked, and Sulli laughed. “I guess so. I’m not exactly proper ghost material - but then again, who is? Donghae usually goes off on a tangent on how we’re all equals and all of that, but it’s tiring to listen to him for all eternity, so usually we just shut him out.” Krystal just nodded; she had no idea who this Donghae-person was, neither did she know who ‘we’ were, but Sulli apparently didn’t mind. “Where are we going?” Sulli suddenly asked, as if she hadn’t noticed the fact that they had moved past the Great Hall and walked down another flight of stairs before reaching the crypts of the school. “Potions” Krystal answered shortly, turning right by a statue of Salazar Slytherin, indicating that she had nearly reached her destination.

“Sounds fun - I miss blowing things up by accident. Well, toodles Krystal, I gotta go. But it was nice talking to ya!” Before Krystal could reply, Sulli was gone.

“What’s up with you? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost” Amber commented once the younger girl sat down in her usual seat. Krystal looked over at the door, as if she half expected Sulli to come flying through the classroom and break something as she knew some ghosts had a habit of doing, but was pulled out of her little reverie when the teacher arrived and the class begun, and shrugged. “I just did”

--

Ghosts at Hogwarts were nothing new - as far as Krystal knew they had been present since the very last stone of the fundament itself had been lain. Where they came from she didn’t know, neither where they resided, and they only showed themselves when they felt like being seen by others - some not at all. Myrtle, for example. The first time Krystal had encountered her in the bathroom she got soaked, and thereafter vowed never to use that toilet ever again.
Then there was The Grey Lady, daughter of Ravenclaw’s founder, and a pretty mysterious conversationalist. Usually she floated around with a book in her hand, too busy to reply to any inquiry, but other times she came if called for, and would gladly entertain Krystal and her friends with stories of the early Hogwarts times.

Of course, for every nice and somewhat mentally stable ghost there would be an equally unstable and unfriendly one. Peeves, even though he technically speaking was a poltergeist, for one. A terrible nuisance who thought it funny to scare the 1^st Year-students and annoy the Hell out of the 5^th Years. And The Bloody Baron, of course, whose very presence made everyone who wasn’t a Slytherin duck their heads. Krystal wasn’t too fond of that man.

But Sulli, she was different. She had spoken with such cheeriness for a ghost - not because ghosts couldn’t be happy, nowhere did it say that a spirit had to be unhappy and devastated over the way things worked out - but it had still taken Krystal aback when she casually approached her as if they’d been friends for life. And she noticed the hair. She was dead, and she noticed the hair.

“Hey Am, have you ever heard about a ghost called Sulli around here?” she asked the older girl. Said girl looked genuinely confused for a moment before shaking her head. “There’s a ghost called Sulli around here?” Krystal nodded. “Apparently. She told me my hair looked nice the other day”. Amber closed her book and laughed, applauding her younger housemate for befriending a ghost over a hair-dye job, when she last year explicitly had said that being alone suited some people better than others, and I am one of those people. As a form of retaliation, Krystal threw a ball of paper at her before exiting the room. Amber still thought it funny.

She wouldn’t exactly call herself and Sulli friends - they had met one time, a very brief meeting, and in no ways were they any form of close to one another, and yet it felt nice to have someone notice her that wasn’t either Amber, Jessica or Luna. Ghost or not ghost.

“Morning sunshine!” Krystal yelped and held on tighter to her books when Sulli - for the second time - suddenly appeared in front of her, all smiley and bubbly and seemingly not aware that the group of Hufflepuff girls that had walked a few meters behind Krystal down the stairs had now stopped their chatter to look at her. “How do you do that?” Krystal asked, and Sulli tilted her head. “Do what? What did I do?”

“How do you always know when I’m halfway down the stairs, carrying books?” Sulli grinned and shrugged, floating backwards through a knight’s armor when Krystal turned right down a hallway on the second floor. “Ghost intuition” she then said, and the blonde raised a brow. “I’m pretty sure that’s not even a thing”

“I’m dead, does it look like I’m very much concerned with stuff like that?” She had a point, Krystal had to give her that. “So, hey, what are you doing after lunch today?” Sulli asked after a pause. Krystal shrugged, because Wednesdays were always her off-days where she would go somewhere - sometimes the lake, sometimes the library, sometimes just the common room - to relax while most of the other Ravenclaws had a double class or something. “Nothing, I guess.”

“Great!” Sulli beamed, “because I wanted to ask if you wanted to hang out. Most of the ghosts around here are old and grey, and you’re pretty much my only friend, so please? I’m literally bored to death” Krystal weighed the option of spending time alone with a book versus spending time befriending the youngest ghost she’d ever seen, and nodded. One Wednesday without solitary alone time wouldn’t hurt anyone. “Cool, I’ll see you later! Now I gotta float, Donghae’s calling. Bye!”

How Sulli would know where she went off to after lunch apparently wasn’t a problem, and after staring at the spot Sulli had floated above for a few seconds, she sighed and continued her walk to class.

--

Donghae, apparently, was also a ghost. Krystal really could have figured that one out pretty fast, unless Sulli had more mortal friends of course, but still found it odd when she met him. He seemed nice, though, a very calm and easy-going character as opposed to Sulli’s loud and boisterous behavior.

“You’re Soojung? Sulli’s been talking about you” he says and Krystal didn’t really know wether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, so she settled with a nod in Donghae’s general direction before another ghost floated through the room, carrying a long chain in his hand. “Her? But she’s alive” the boy said, as if her breathing and the blood running in her veins were an insult to his very existence. Donghae rolled his eyes. “Of course she is, , she’s a student. I think she’s your age, so be nice”

“I have to be nice because she and I are the same age?”

“No, you have to be nice because I tell you to, so shut your yap and get going”. Krystal watched the boy roll his eyes and disappear through the floor (did being a ghost mean that floating through doors were out of the picture?), earning head shakes from both Sulli and Donghae. “That’s Kai” Sulli said. “He’s just throwing his usual hissy-fits, don’t mind him”

Sulli, Donghae and apparently also this Kai-guy resided in the eastern wing of the fourth floor, far away from classrooms in use. There were no tables or chairs in the room, but the many objects covered in sheets that had been white once served as the room’s furniture. The blackboard that took up all of the space on the wall closest to the door was filled with drawings of animals, sentences and the classic ‘HELP ME’-sign, used to scare the younger students who liked to snoop around (“Junhong did that twenty years ago. Nobody’s wiped it away” ). Other than Sulli, Donghae and Kai, Krystal was given the names of at least half a dozen other ghosts – she couldn’t remember all of them, and she still had a hard time processing dead teenagers dropping in through the ceiling at any given moment.

--

The following week Krystal spent a lot of time on the 4^th floor with Sulli, featuring whoever ghost-teen (or young adult) happened to be in when she arrived. She was initially shocked when she learned that many of them were three years older than her at best, and she found herself wondering how and when they died quite often.

Surprisingly, most of the ghosts didn’t mind sharing their stories with Krystal – actually some of them lit up by the thought of somebody showing any form of interest in their very being. Krystal would probably feel the same way if she was dead. Others, like Kai, just mumbled something about living people always snooping around, can’t a dead guy catch a break around here and floated away.

Sulli had been a Hogwarts ghost since sometime in the 19^th century. She didn’t really remember anything before her death, she claimed - it was as if she had started a new life as a reaction to her old one ending. She had, quite simply, one might add, caught the pneumonia and died after a week of hospitalization. Krystal wondered why none of the nurses, or Madam Pomfrey for that matter, had just used magic to heal her, but maybe something as trivial as a muggle disease was deemed too silly to cure with magic. And so Choi Sulli passed on from one life to the next, waking up on the 4^th floor a decade later but still stuck in her 16-year-old body. She usually hung about the hospital wing whenever she wasn’t in the ghost common room, because it felt homey to a certain extent. “I don’t know, I died there. I can point out the bed I was in. It just seemed nicer for me to hang around there than going to the basement like all the other ghosts” Sulli explained, and Krystal smiled to herself. The thought of Sulli being a scary ghost like the Baron or a poltergeist like Peeves seemed so odd, because Sulli was so nice. Krystal had an idea that even if she could, the other girl wouldn’t hurt a fly.

--

There was a heavy storm outside when Krystal was ushered out of her bed at God-knows-what in the morning to assemble in the Great Hall. Most of her fellow students were half-asleep even as they stood, but some - especially the seniors - had taken the time to get fully dressed and looked out over the mass of students with dark eyes. The magical ceiling outside showed no stars; only grey clouds and the occasional rumble of thunder.

“There’s a war going on” the faculty said. “A war where there will be no winner or loser; one that begins in your minds but ends out in the open. We ask you to tread carefully from now on. The Prefects and Head of Houses will lead an evacuation of all students as of tomorrow morning. This may be your last time seeing Hogwarts as it is now.” Krystal felt how the mass of people around her started to murmur and whisper in panic, and saw how Luna grabbed Jinki’s hand and squeezed it as a beam of lightning lit up the room for a brief second before returning to normal. And without sparing it a second thought, she turned around and bolted out of the Great Hall, speeding up when Amber tried to call for her.

“What the Hell are you doing up here? Shouldn’t you be, like, somewhere else?” Kai’s voice greeted her when she reached the 4^th floor, resting against the staircase railing after having ran up the stairs in fear of them moving too slow. But the older boy’s voice was different, more strained than usual where he just seemed low-key annoyed to learn of her presence with the other ghosts. He looked around the empty hall as if he half expected someone - or something - to come in through the wall and blow something to pieces. “Alright, fine, whatever, c’mon. But if you lose a limp it’s not my fault” he said, shooing Krystal in through the door to the regular classroom, slamming the door shot and locking it in a swift move of his hand.

“What’s going on outside?” she asked him, and Kai shrugged. “Well, uh, it’s cloudy and right now it’s raining a ton-“

“Kai.” The ghost stopped and looked down at her, moving to sit on top of a covered bookshelf. “You know that’s not what I mean”. Kai nodded reluctantly, looking up at the ceiling while listening to the thunder whose volume seemed higher here than in the Great Hall. “They say he’s back. You-Know-Who.”

Krystal was about to say something - to tell Kai that he couldn’t be serious, that You-Know-Who was gone, that they were going to be fine - when the whole castle felt like it shattered. Dust fell from the chandelier and the covered furniture, and both Kai and Krystal turned to look at the door. It remained locked, and Krystal let out a breath of relief that was soon replaced by surprise when one of the ghosts she didn’t remember the name of came running through the blackboard, Sulli and Donghae in tow.

“Everybody okay in here?” Donghae asked, and because Kai couldn’t exactly get hurt she figured that the question was meant for her. She nodded, and Sulli smiled at her, albeit worryingly. “Why aren’t you in the Great Hall with the other students?” she inquired. “I wanted to know what’s going on here. They’re not telling us anything, just expecting us to hide.” The boy that had led the way into the room tsk’ed and peeked through the wooden door, reappearing with a grim look on his face. “Not because I want to be the bearer of bad news or anything right, but if blondie over here is gonna live the night I say we move it. Now”. Sulli nodded, and grabbed Krystal’s hand before speeding away. It wasn’t until she was out on the other side of the door that Krystal noticed she had just moved through solid wall.

“How-“ The ghost boy cut her off. “Move it or lose it, we’re under attack” he said, and Sulli - still holding her hand - ran with her down the hall and through some other doors, the others trailing close behind them. “Where are we going?” Krystal asked, just as Sulli stopped in her tracks and checked the hall for any people. Somewhere below them, Krystal heard the sound of stone crumbling and people fighting, and she praised her luck that she had managed not to be found by anyone, good or bad. In a short moment she thought of Amber and Luna and her housemates, how they were probably downstairs running or fighting. It wouldn’t surprise her if the two older girls had chosen the latter; they could be pretty hot headed and stubborn when needed be.

“In here!” Sulli dragged her into a small room, probably half the size of a regular classroom, and floated to the window at the far end while Donghae and the other boy moved most of the room’s furniture in front of the door. “Safety precautions” the boy said, “we’re probably going to be here for a while.”

With the sounds of war reduced to background noise thanks to a safety spell, Krystal found out that the other ghost boy’s name was Vernon. He was young; younger than both her and Sulli, and looked to the barricaded door at every reverberating clash from around the school as if he feared that the massive amount of heavy oak furniture would fall apart and spread like breadcrumbs if anyone found them. Donghae didn’t say a word to any of them, and Sulli tried to make their stay as comfortable as possible until the room was shrouded in darkness and she ran out of things to say. When the four of them had been silent for an unknown amount of time and the worst sounds from the school grounds had stopped it was nearly dawn. Sharing a look with Sulli, the two girls moved through the wall next to the blocked door and down the stairs looking for survivors.

“Krystal! Move!” She turned at the sound of a familiar voice and felt how the ground seemed to disappear from underneath her feet, landing in the grubble of what had once been the grand staircase.

--

“Do you think she’s okay?”

“Look at the bright side; she didn’t fall from the Astronomy Tower”

“Vernon!”

Krystal awoke to the sound of Vernon wincing audibly and Donghae telling him off for being inconsiderate. She was back in the classroom on the 4^th floor - it had, quite surprisingly, survived the night - with Sulli hovering over her, brown ponytail nearly falling down into Krystal’s eyes. “How’s it going down there?” the brunette asked cheerily, as if her entire home (or well, most of it) hadn’t just been destroyed very few hours prior. Krystal shrugged. “I guess I’m okay. And you?” Sulli beamed. “I can’t die, remember? I feel great!” The blonde girl smiled.

“You wanna go to the Tower and take a look at the damages?” Sulli asked, and Krystal stood up from her position on the floor. “I guess so. Wednesdays are usually my off-day” she joked, and her friend laughed.

The trip to the top floor of the castle didn’t take nearly as long as it used to with them cutting the route short by going directly up instead of using the remains of the stairs. Krystal would have thought the floating business would have been much harder, but surprisingly enough the ability came rather naturally, even though flying head first into a piece of armor wasn’t exactly pleasant. Sulli just laughed at her.

“Don’t worry about that, you’ll have plenty of time to learn!” Krystal rolled her eyes. “Ghost lessons? Are you kidding me?” The older smiled and disappeared through yet another wall before giving her answer.

“Oh my God, you need to stop doing that when I’m trying to talk to you”

what the frick frack happened here

OKAY HAHAHAH HAPPY BIRTHDAY BRO ILY TELL ME WHAT U THINK WAS IT GOOD WAS IT WAS IT GHEY TELL ME TELLME T-T-T-T-T-TELL ME 

@ every jungli shipper i'm sorry for this