Chapter Text
紛紛擾擾千百年以後
一切又從頭
WANTED:
Roommate needed. Gothic mansion on the outskirts of Seoul. One-and-a-half storeys with extensive grounds. Sits in a breezy South to face a sunny North. No preference for male or female, although third genders and third eyes are not welcome. None below twenty nor above eight hundred and eighty-eight need apply. Must know how to be clean. A steady heart is preferred. Please expect occasional atmospheric disturbances. Willing to take rent payment upfront or in installments. Interested? Call +82-010-xxx-xxxx.
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Lunar Calendar: xx day of the Ninth Month
Year of the Earth Pig (Ji Hai).
Month of Jia Xu. Day of Bing Shen.
Today is a day that clashes with Tigers, and with an Evil South. It is auspicious for residence relocation, as well as engagement and marriage ceremonies. However, today will not be ideal for funerals, nor for bed instalments. Take care of possible inclement weather, and umbrellas are advised.
Auspicious timing:
2300-0059, 0100-0259, 0700-0859, 0900-1059, 1300-1459, 1900-2059.
--
Yunho straightens his left cuff, brushing off a tiny piece of lint from his suit sleeve. The ironed creases are straightening out from wear, fading into the black.
Between this, and the faint water smudges dotting the crown of his fedora, he’ll have to drop by the dry cleaners’ again tonight.
He pauses, and remembers what day it is, and brightens.
Yunho's moving today. He’s finally saved up enough for a house of his own, even though it’s a rental, and he'll have a landlord. But it's finally his own place, after a century of rooftop rooms.
The dry cleaners will have to wait till tomorrow night.
It’s a rainy autumn day. Seoul’s still busy regardless, a seething, chattering mass of humanity, who hurry along about their daily lives. People brush by him, walking briskly in the other direction, undeterred by the steady drizzle. Overhead, the sky is a low poignant grey.
In the distance, a siren wails.
Yunho’s very good at his job. It’s something he knows, and is told to him on a regular basis.
He works hard, and for long hours. Some of the others grumble how their boss isn’t too good with staff welfare and benefits, and how they don’t get days off these days. Except Sundays, but Sunday’s kind of like a free-for-all without boundaries, and they’re still on standby anyway for large cases.
“What do we need days off for?” Yunho points out, reasonably enough, he thinks. “We’re dead.”
His senior three classes before him snorts. “Only you, Yunho. Don’t you miss the days when we’d at least get ten days of annual leave off after the Spring Equinox? We’re dead, not robots.”
“We still have three days off for Spring Equinox, sunbae-nim,” Yunho straightens the edges to his umbrella.
It’s black as well, to go with his outfit, and sturdy. He hasn’t unfurled it yet, because he saw his senior at the bus stop, and wanted to say hi.
He gets an eye-roll in return. “The people in this stupid little peninsula barely celebrate that anyway! It’s not the same as having proper leave when I’m still bothered by the same amount of cases. More than usual in some years even, when you have idiots who think it’s elegant poetry to get themselves offed during the old festival of Qing Ming. And how many times do I have to tell you to call me Heechul, Yunho?”
“Never enough times, sunbae-nim,” Yunho offers, polite as you please, to Heechul’s laughter.
The rain is coming down hard now, practically in sheets. A mortal human won’t be able to see well through it.
Another siren joins the first. Yunho unfurls his umbrella.
Heechul trills another laugh, and flutters a languid white hand. “Ah well. No rest for the wicked. I have to get going. I assume the sirens are yours?”
“Yes.” Yunho puts his hat on, and lowers the brim. Touches the little bird brooch he wears, out of habit. “You? The smoke I saw from the luxury flats two intersections down earlier?”
“Bingo,” Heechul smiles, but now there’s no mirth to the crooked curve. He puts his own fedora on. “Family. The father was retrenched. Didn’t take it well.”
Yunho glances at the thick stack of embossed name cards in his hands. The traditional Mandarin characters are stark and red in bold slashing strokes. “An entire bus-full of high schoolers. One bus driver. No one is at fault. The roads are too slippery in this weather.”
“Ah, well,” Heechul brings up his umbrella. It’s the same red as the ink for the characters on their cards. They bow to each other from the waist. Behind them, a bus approaches. “Somewhere, a goblin must be throwing a tantrum. That’s the only explanation, since our boss still doesn’t quite like the Genesis flood narrative.”
Yunho snorts. “If that’s true, it’s a callous goblin indeed.” The doors to the bus open. Confused teenagers are stumbling out. Someone is screaming.
Heechul waves him off. “Everyone knows goblins don’t have feelings. There’s always some nasty thing or other that’s gotten their hearts too shrivelled for that. Go on. Get. I know you’re busy.”
Yunho tips the edge of his fedora at Heechul in farewell. He walks to the schoolboy nearest to him. He’s shivering and crying, arms around two whimpering female classmates. “Lee Minhyeong?”
--
It’s the last of them. She’s sitting in front of him, shoulders shaking but not from the cold. Her hair’s still dripping wet, because the bus had skidded on its side, and all the windows shattered.
Yunho had offered her a blanket earlier, but she declined very politely, and asked in a trembling whisper if he could turn the heat up.
He does. She’s got both hands on the pine-and-oak table now, clasped together. “I-I-I-I’m. Still cold.”
He pauses. Doesn’t lie to her. Puts the kettle on. “The dead cannot feel the heat.”
“That’s g-g-good, in s-s-summer,” she tries to joke, then bursts into tears.
Yunho waits for her to calm herself. The water needs to boil, anyway. When she weeps so hard that she’s almost bent double, he gets up quietly, and goes to pick a teacup for her.
He’s gotten glimpses of her over the years, when he collects souls in her neighbourhood. A large part of Seoul is under Yunho’s care, and he tries to look in on them every now and then, when he can. It's not just the dead that he cares about.
He does like the children in his district. They laugh freely. It’s a joy to watch. Quite a few of them are on the bus today.
Before, she always seems like a cheerful girl. He selects a pretty sky blue teacup for her, the sides carved with curling white daisies. By the time he comes back to the table, she’s subsided into hiccuping sniffles.
The kettle is whistling.
Her eyes follow him as he takes it off of the burner, and measures out tea leaves for the strainer. “I didn’t think the afterlife would be so… advanced.”
Yunho follows her gaze to the gas burner, and snorts. “Well. One must ha, advance with the times, or be left behind.”
“What if I want to be left behind,” she blurts, and ducks her head. Yunho places the strainer into the teapot. He pours boiling hot water into the pitcher, for the water to cool slightly.
He waits.
“What if I don’t drink the tea,” she whispers, after a while. “What if I don’t leave.”
“Being offered the tea is a luxury,” Yunho says. The water’s cooled enough, with only slight tendrils of steam rising now. He pours it into the teapot, and covers the lid. “It makes you forget, Yeri. Forgetting is a luxury.”
“It’s your job, right?” She ignores him to ask. “To catch us, if we stay?”
“To help you,” Yunho corrects. He places a finger on the purple clay of the teapot’s body. Still too hot. “Not to catch. To guide. Spirits…. Change, when they stay.”
Yeri shivers again. “Do they become like the ghosts you see in horror films?”
He smiles at her, and doesn’t answer. The tea is ready. He places the teacup in front of her, and pours.
She curves both hands around the wide brim, and jerks in surprise. “Oh. This is warm! I can feel it.”
He smiles at her again.
It has the opposite effect on her. Her lips tremble, and a lone tear falls. “I’m really dead, aren’t I? My mum… She’s going to be so sad. I hope she’s going to be okay. At least she’ll have my sisters. At least she won’t be alone.”
He folds his hands and bows his head. Yeri doesn’t cry again, though. She sniffs, and stares down at the steaming tea for a few beats. Then she brings the teacup up. Drinks.
When she puts the teacup down again, it’s empty. There’s still a small droplet clinging to the edge.
Yunho doesn’t move. “If you look to your left, there should be a door.” He advises, voice soft.
She turns, “oh! There it is.”
The girl rises to step forward, but pauses. Turns back to dip into a ninety-degree bow at him. “Thank you, ahjussi,” she says, before straightening. She meets his eyes dead on. “I used to see you around our neighbourhood when I was a child. A few of us did. You looked lonely.”
Yunho startles slightly. She takes a deep breath and bows again. “You’re very kind. I really appreciated it.”
He blinks, and stands. Like this, he towers over her. He bows down as well, a slighter inclination than what she’s performed to him out of respect. “Go forth in peace,” he says formally.
She bows to him one more time, and puts her hand on the doorknob. She turns it.
Yunho stands there for a while, still and in silence, before shaking himself to pick up the teacup. Then he walks to the back of his tea parlour, and hangs a left, to store the used teacup with so many others in his lacquered wooden shelves.
--
Changmin is over two thousand years old and he is not in a good mood.
“What the fuck were you thinking?” He rages at the boy, shaking a piece of paper, a flyer, sadly crumpled in his fist. “Really. It’s a question I need answered. What the fuck! Were you thinking!”
“Uncle…” The boy shies, but he’s got a fat bottom lip and his expression is maybe one that he wore when he was five, and begging Changmin to sneak him boiled sweets. Changmin wants to smack it off of him. He settles for crumpling the flyer and flinging it at the boy instead.
It bounces off of his forehead. The boy claps a hand dramatically over it, eyes shiny and wide. “Ouch! Uncle!”
“It’s fucking paper, you spoilt nitwit,” Changmin snarls, the full force of his displeasure maybe underscored by the rumble of thunder over head. A second later he feels his hair and shirt start to dampen. Casting a vicious eye upward, he growls at the hovering storm cloud, “fuck off outside. I’m not in the mood.”
Chastened, the cloud withdraws. It starts pouring outside the window.
There is a shadow sneaking in Changmin’s peripheral vision. He whirls around. “Minseok!”
The boy - Minseok- pauses in exaggerated tiptoe, halfway up the steps to his foyer. Changmin’s foyer. A foyer that will now be tainted by the grubby footsteps of a mortal commoner stranger. “Yesssss, Uncle?”
“Cancel it!” Changmin throws a little zing of electricity at the boy’s ass, as punishment. He yelps and straightens into what would have been a properly deferential bow, except that he’s got a hand with fingers crossed over each other that he thinks Changmin doesn’t see, and his shoulders are up midway in a defensive shrug. “Cancel this fucking- whatever- lease!”
“I can’t,” Minseok spreads his hands out. “It’s a contract! We signed it. With our lawyers and witnesses, and our family register stamps, and everything.”
Changmin feels like his head will explode into fire. He raises a hand to check. His head is indeed on fire.
He takes a deep, very long breath, and reins himself in, just barely. Sends another zing of electricity into Minseok’s ass for his idiocy. “I order you to cancel it! Your family swore to serve me as long as the Kim line lays unbroken. You owe me your life, imbecile!”
“You were willing to let me starve to death,” Minseok sniffs petulantly, a hand rubbing at his posterior. “I asked you for help, and you refuse to take my side to fight the forces of evil! I asked you! You told me I should be thinking of business and entrepreneurship and make my own money instead! So I did.”
Changmin pulls at his hair. In the olden days, he’s beheaded men for less. “You- the forces of evil? He’s your grandfather! ”
Minseok sulks. “He’s an overly-controlling dickhead.”
“You’re twenty-nine!” Changmin waves a hand, and the wall-light explode in a chorus of agreement. Sighing, he waves his hand again, and they reknit themselves in reluctance. “He just wants you to get a proper fucking job! And you did go mad and buy the neighbouring mansion with fucking money that’s not fucking yours yet!”
Minseok’s fat lower lip gets fatter. “You’re always on his side.”
Changmin thinks he’s lost the plot. Changmin knows he’s lost the plot. He rakes a hand through his rumpled hair and tries for reason. “That’s not the point. The point is that you agreed to let strangers into my home. My! Home. Not yours. And now you are telling me you were paid for it. And you can’t cancel it!”
Minseok examines the manicure on his fingers. “One stranger, although he’s not really a stranger. I think maybe we can see him as a nice neighbourhood brother? He has got impeccable taste in suits. I think you’ll approve. When we met for contract signing, he was in classic Dior. Not a single crease anywhere!”
There’s a throbbing above his left eye. Changmin thinks he’s got a headache. He erupts again, and there’s blue fire at his fingertips and Changmin tosses it at the wall sconces since they had re-knitted themselves for him. They glow brighter in mute approval. “You took money for it! And you signed a contract! Why are you so stupid!”
“Hey,” Minseok says, hurt. “The money is not the point. But it’s probably this man’s precious savings, Uncle. And we made a promise to him. To cancel it now will render him homeless! You always taught me I should keep promises, remember?”
Changmin clutches at his head. His brain is imploding. “Homeless- Keep promises-”
The doorbell rings.
They look at each other. Minseok brightens. “I think this must be Nice Neighbourhood Brother in a Suit, now! Let me get the door.”
He scrambles for it, Changmin in hot pursuit. They reach the door just as Changmin’s got a long arm around Minseok’s waist, roaring, and Minseok’s got a hand on the door handle, what a disobedient child, “my door, my house, don’t you fucking dare-”
It swings open.
In the rain is a stranger.
He’s got a hat and a black suit. His lips are red and his nose is sharp and his suit is dry. His eyes are hidden by that low black fedora he’s got on. One hand rises, pale, and brushes the tip of a finger against the brim. It lowers. He’s just white skin and red lips.
Changmin and Minseok pause in their tussle.
The edge of the black fedora rises.
The stranger gazes at them. He’s got eyes with a feline upward tilt to them. They’re thickly lashed. Twin bold black brows frame them, slashing into the arch of his nose bridge. A sharply clean jawline completes the look. It’s an acute slant above two inches of neck that slopes down to again be hidden by a crisp collar decorated by a black tie.
Changmin blinks.
The red lips part. “Hello. Kim Minseok?”
Behind him, white starts to fall. It’s the first snow of the year.
--