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"Hey dude, stop fucking with the bookshelf and help me with this." The shout caught Church's attention, and he glared across the room at Tucker briefly, then turned back to the bookshelf, where a copy of some crude-looking romance novel was halfway through the process of dropping out onto the floor.
"I'm trying to haunt you. Let me do my job." Church responded snappily, knocking the novel all the way out and watching as it joined the pile of discarded books that had started to grow on the floor beside him. Tucker groaned in frustration.
"Come on, you can stop doing that for ten minutes." Tucker rested his chin in his hands and sighed loudly as Church responded by knocking another book onto the floor. "You're not even good at being a ghost." Church narrowed his eyes at Tucker's statement and manoeuvred himself into a standing position.
"Fuck you. I'm wasting my energy by making myself semi-corporeal just because you'd probably be too lonely to cope if I left, so you'd better be grateful for my half-assed attempts at haunting." The ghost shook his head slightly, and reached out to knock one of the photo frames off the top of the bookshelf. "Boo, motherfucker."
"You are literally the worst." Tucker spun his pen around on the tabletop in an agitated manner. "Can you just take ten minutes out of your oh-so-busy schedule of knocking my stuff over and changing the TV channel to help me with this shitty assignment." Church huffed out an agitated sigh, then made his way over to the table, allowing himself to levitate beside Tucker.
"What do you want help with." The ghost made sure to force as much of a scowl onto his face as possible, just to reinforce his displeasure. Tucker gestured at the paper in front of him.
"I've got some history work due in tomorrow on the Vietnam war and I've spent the past few lectures ignoring the professor and exchanging shitty innuendos with Kai, so I have no clue what any of these questions are talking about."
"And what do you expect me to do about it? Go down to the library and get you a textbook?" Church's response was edged with a hint of exasperation. "Because in case you hadn't realised, I’m stuck in-" Tucker cut him off.
"Look, I'm being serious, I need to do this shit." He made more distressed hand gestures towards the paper. "Can you just tell me the answers or something?"
"What makes you think I'd know any of that stuff better than you do?" Church stared down at Tucker, eyebrows raised questioningly.
"Well, don't ghosts know that sort of shit? Y'know, infinite afterlife knowledge or something?" Tucker trailed off slightly at the sight of Church's unimpressed expression.
"You do know that I've only been dead for about three years, right?" Church asked, and Tucker nodded in response to the ghost's question. "I wasn't even alive when that shit happened."
"Uh, I guess. But I thought that ghosts were super smart and all-knowing and stuff. That's what it's usually like in movies." Tucker's brow was furrowed in concentration, as if the fact that Church didn't have infinite understanding of the universe puzzled him.
"Dude, I died making fucking mac n' cheese. Do you really think I'm going to have any clue about what Guerrilla Warfare was." The ghost immediately regretted his statement the moment Tucker let out a choking sort of laugh.
"Wait seriously?" Definitely regret. So much regret. "How the fuck do you even manage that?" Church folded his arms and glared down at Tucker from where he was floating next to the table.
"I thought you wanted some help with your assignment." His voice was filled with annoyance.
"Nope, not important anymore. Seriously, how do you even manage to make mac n' cheese fatal?" Tucker was evidently hooked on learning how Church had died, pitched forwards in his seat and fixing the ghost with an intensely curious gaze, still spinning his pen absentmindedly between his fingers. Running through a list of possible ways to get him to drop the subject, The ghost sighed, and gestured over to the small kitchen built into the corner of Tucker's apartment, where a large section of the wall was scorched to a blackened mess that none of the previous tenants had stuck around long enough to fix.
"It has something to do with that." The half-hearted response earned Church a deadpan expression and sarcasm-laced response from Tucker.
"What, really ? Never would have guessed that one." He dropped the pen onto the table, and continued looking directly at Church, prompting him to continue speaking.
"Look I don't have to tell you- how people die is their own business; why do you think they don't put that shit on gravestones?" Church moved into a position that made it appear as if he was sitting on the table, folding his arms again.
"Come on, man. I've told you all sorts of embarrassing shit about me, like that weird rash I had that one time, or that time I accidentally hooked up with those twins and-" Church aimed a kick at Tucker's chest, his foot going straight through, but still causing Tucker to shiver violently and cut off his own dialogue. "I thought you agreed not to do that, you piece of shit." Church shrugged, the slightest beginnings of a smirk forming upon his face, before he shook it away again and sighed loudly.
"Look, if you agree to never talk about that thing with the twins again, I'll tell you how I died." Tucker paused for a long while, as if coming to a decision was genuinely causing him trouble.
"Fine. Come on then, Mr mac n' cheese; explain." Church was seriously considering phasing through the nearest wall and hiding in a cupboard until Tucker decided to drop the subject.
"Okay, so I was working on an assignment for my computer science course, and it was, like, two in the morning, and I thought; ‘hey, mac n' cheese seems like a good idea' , but I'd been pulling all-nighters for about three days straight by that point, so in my sleep deprived state, I put the thing in the microwave with the foil lid still on, and boom , goodbye Leonard Church jr." The ghost finished the story with lackluster jazz hands. "Tada. That's literally it."
"Wow, I was expecting something a lot more impressive." Tucker rocked back in his chair, glancing across at the burns on the wall. Church let out an exasperated noise.
"Well what the fuck were you expecting? There's only so much you can do in terms of macaroni-based fatalities"
"I don't know, you never mentioned that the macaroni was the direct cause of death, so it could have been anything really, you know, like-" Church zoned out of focus the moment Tucker started started rambling off increasingly creative- and increasingly stupid- ways in which the ghost could have died.
"Dude, are you considering making out with me or something?" Church realised far too late that his gaze had settled onto Tucker's lips, and that thoughts of 'I wonder if kissing him would make him shut up' had started to pass through his head. Calm down there, unsolicited gay thoughts, nobody invited you. The ghost snapped his line of sight back up to meet Tucker's eyes.
"What the fuck, no." Never in Church's life- well, afterlife- had he been so grateful for the fact that he could no longer blush, because that would definitely have been happening, and would definitely have done absolutely nothing to prove the credibility of his statement.
"You sure? Because it looked to me like-" The moment Tucker started talking, Church felt the overwhelming urge to submerge his foot into the student's chest again to get him to shut up.
"Fucking shit, no!" The ghost waved his hands, frustrated. "Seriously. How would that even work? I'm not even fully corporeal!"
"Yeah, I know. It's a shame really." With a shrug, Tucker picked up his pen from the table, and went back to looking down at the history assignment. Church floated blankly by the table for a moment longer before what Tucker had said fully clicked with him.
"Wait, what ?" The Ghost rounded on Tucker, moving so that he was levitating horizontally over the table, his face close to the student's. "You're kidding, right?"
"You can go back to haunting my bookshelf now; I don't need any more help." The nonchalant tone to Tucker's voice was the very definition of infuriating.
"No. Not happening. You can't just essentially admit to wanting to make out with me, then go all 'oh it didn't happen' on me." Church attempted to slam a hand down beside him, but only succeeded in falling elbow-deep into the table. Tucker lifted his head, and fixed Church with a steady gaze.
"The books won't knock themselves over, you know." The slight upturn at the corner of Tucker's mouth told Church that the student knew exactly how aggravating he was being.
"I hate you so much."