Chapter Text
Wooyoung can't handle it tonight, the infernal rustling sound of Mingi's leg as it restlessly bounces up and down, up and down. The sound burrows into the grey folds of his mind and Wooyoung imagines it a pointed tool for a self-administered lobotomy.
'Can't handle it’ is perhaps rich framing. He is patently choosing to handle it, and making no move to get up from his perch, treating the high windowsill behind the check-in desk like a glamorous chaise lounge.
Wooyoung’s allowed to frame richly, from his entirely biased point of view. It’s not like he can get a second opinion. He focuses hard, leans his forehead against the dingy glass. It’s not as cold as he wants it to be against his skin, but it never is.
It’s liminal hours at the Golden Hour Motel, the eerie time between two and five that tends to drag in a way that Wooyoung has always felt held by. He’s always felt most at home on the grounds here, but this is his favorite time of day, the yellowed bulbs inside the office clashing with the inky dark shot through with flickering neon outside the windows. He drifts, reaching a hand out through the window and wiggling his fingers.
He hasn’t really moved in a while, not that it matters. His muscles don’t get tight, his legs don’t get antsy. It’s not one of the more prevalent downsides of his current physical state, but it’s the one he’s taking the most issue with right now. He glares bitterly at Mingi’s knee.
The bell on the front door dings its off-key announcement of the arrival of a guest, and the end of Wooyoung's leg-bouncing-related suffering for the time being. He pulls his hand back through the glass, turning his head to see his favorite category of late night motel visitor: a hot guy that’s about to fluster Mingi.
Mingi gets to his feet, tossing a gruff wave in the direction of the door. He hasn’t looked up yet, Wooyoung knows, because he’d be standing up straighter than he is now; the new guy is a few inches taller than Mingi, with dusty pink hair, under-eye bags, and an easy smile around the stick of a pink lollipop in his mouth.
He’s a bright flash in the dull soft beige of the room, some streaks of his hair more vibrant, dayglo fuchsia in stark contrast with the bland decor, the stock images in taupe frames and the grey seats with mysterious stains despite their rare use.
But it’s not just his haphazardly colored hair; there’s something about his lanky form that glints in the corner of Wooyoung’s eye, like a flash of heat lightning, a shimmer hovering over burning asphalt.
The newcomer saunters up to the desk, although maybe ‘saunter’ isn’t quite the right word for it, Wooyoung thinks. The man walks liquidly, gracefully. His rumpled oversized button-up shirt is askew, showing the milky skin of his collarbone dotted by bite marks and hickeys. Wooyoung’s eyes are fixated, glued.
“A room for two for the night, please,” the stranger sing-songs. Mingi finally looks up from the desk, and to Wooyoung’s amusement he stands up straighter to even out their eyeline. The stranger quirks an eyebrow, just barely, as he holds Mingi’s gaze, gesturing a long arm to a burly shadow under the dim lights outside the motel lobby. Wooyoung watches Mingi’s head move to trail the line of his arm, watches him stop pointedly at the stranger’s long fingers and pale, veined hands.
“Don’t need to know your personal business,” Mingi mutters roughly, looking down. His ears are red, but he starts fussing with the ancient desktop. “Name?”
Wooyoung watches a grin spread across the stranger’s face. “I thought you didn’t need to know my personal business.” He props his elbow on the counter, rests his chin on his hand, and sighs loudly. “Jeong Yunho, though, I suppose, if you must know where to find me again.”
Oh, he supposes, Wooyoung thinks.
Yunho’s much too tall to be bent as low down as the crappy desk is, and his hip is popped so that his perky, bony ass sticks out. He’s not subtle, and Wooyoung grins. He’s got good style.
Yunho drums his fingers on the desk, on his cheek with the other hand, builds up a tune of it while the desktop continues to chug along, whirring loudly in the background of his makeshift beat.
And then the stranger Jeong Yunho does something very curious. He turns directly to Wooyoung, looking him in the eye.
“Slow night?” Yunho asks in what could, maybe, be his direction. Impossible. Wooyoung blinks, lips all but glued shut.
He hears distantly as Mingi chuckles, says gruffly, “Yeah, it’s pretty late I guess. Wait, what do you mean, you suppose?”
“Yeah, he supposes,” Wooyoung murmurs, out loud this time, testing the waters. He hasn’t broken Yunho’s stare, a deer held in place by the oncoming headlight. There’s recognition there, and he battles down the reckless, stray hope.
“Can’t a babygirl suppose sometimes?” Yunho’s wry smile reaches his eyes in a way that is nearly blinding to Wooyoung, brown irises sparking.
“It’s not like I’m trying to find y—this is coming off wrong. I just work here,” Mingi sputters, starting to fumble his words before taking a second to breathe and speaking levelly. “I have to put a name down, that’s actually pretty much it, man,” he says.
“Hmmm, man,” Yunho takes his lollipop out of his mouth and says the second word snarkily, flatly, as ill-fitting in his mouth as it sounded the first time.
This slithery, pink-haired stranger turns his gaze back to Mingi, and what do you mean his gaze shifted when he couldn’t be looking at Wooyoung in the first place. He can’t see him, point blank. Wooyoung won’t fall for this hope again, won’t kid himself this time. He’s just looking out Wooyoung’s window into the pulsing neon the same way Wooyoung had been; that’s all, simple answer.
“I-” Mingi starts, stutters to a stop, bewildered amusement in his tone that Wooyoung’s not heard for a long time. Wooyoung is glad he can only see the side profile of the half-smile on his old friend’s face, only catches a lateral beam of it, and he swallows the sting.
“You’re free to suppose as you wish, of course. Congratulations on your whimsy, Mr. Jeong.” Mingi takes the cash that Yunho is sliding toward him on the counter with two fingers, and fumbles with the finicky door key machine. His hands are clumsy, maybe due to the partially drained bottle of whiskey and glass tumbler under the desk, or maybe Wooyoung was right and he’s flustered by the man sitting close to him, lips wrapped soundly around shining pink candy.
Mingi hands him two room keys in a paper envelope, and his hand twitches as their fingers brush fleetingly.
Oh, how Wooyoung has always loved being right.
He giggles and a real, albeit a little crazed, smile splits his face as he watches the nape of Mingi’s neck and ears turn impossibly redder. He forgets himself for a second, feels the phantom tingle of a blush heating his cheeks.
And then, undeniably, chillingly, Yunho turns his wide open and smiling face back up to the ghost in the window perch, and he winks right at Wooyoung.
Wooyoung decides to stop focusing on his corporeality, and dissolves forehead-first through the window, tumbling end over end, vanishing and becoming a part of the neon red veins lighting the motel parking lot.
𓉸♱𓉸
The day that Wooyoung died started out fine, as far as days you’re going to die go.
Obviously he didn’t know at the time that it was the last time he’d start a day living and breathing in ye olde traditional flesh and blood sense, but he’s had a whole year since then, to think about the way that day went, and he’s really pretty sure he had a good last morning.
The motel was a family operation, boasting years of warmly hosting folks traveling through the mountains, or equally as often, folks snowed into them. Wooyoung had been happily taking the motel night shifts since the Song family caved and officially hired him when he turned eighteen. Before that, he’d just been a welcome straggler, their son’s friend who sat on the counter after most school days, chattering at guests and distracting their son and finding excuses not to go home.
Wooyoung had never been a particularly routine-based person, naturally tending towards spontaneity, grating against rigid schedules. But the hour overlap between his and Mingi’s shifts at 8 each morning was his sunrise. They hung out outside work too, all the time really, but that hour was the North Star of his day, the point from which the rest of his day unfurled and took shape.
Sometimes, on especially slow nights, such as the night before Wooyoung died, he would exercise his free will (read: boredom) to craft tableaus on the front desk for Mingi to walk in on. On this occasion: an army of one hundred mini toothpastes, cap-down and sitting sentry, Wooyoung behind them waiting in the shitty spinning chair, hair sticky and slicked back by shower gel, the rabbit fur throw blanket from one of the comfy lobby chairs bundled in his lap to look like a fancy pet.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” Wooyoung had said, ripoff Godfather accent in a poor state despite the night of practice, when Mingi finally stepped through the door a few minutes late.
“Sorry,” Mingi’s voice was still gruff from sleep as he peeled his arms ungracefully out of the bulky jacket hanging off his frame, “I oversle—” His eyes landed on the toothpaste battalion.
Oh, how Wooyoung could’ve lived forever in the moments watching Mingi process one of his pranks, the split seconds before the laugh split his face in two.
He wasn’t paying enough attention that day, too pleased with himself for the sound of Mingi cackling in front of him, reducing him to his own giggles behind the desk. They had put the toothpastes back into the extra stock closet together, and Mingi tried to shove Wooyoung out the door to go home, wash the absurd amount of shower gel out of his hair, but Wooyoung had never sacrificed a minute of that hour, and he didn’t start that day.
Wooyoung knows and thinks as little as possible about the fact that there’s no amount of attention in the world that he could’ve paid Mingi that would feel like enough, not when he’s sat invisible sentry every day since, unable to reach out and touch Mingi’s cheek like he always should have when he had the chance.
He stayed at the motel longer than he needed to after walking back out into the cold, sitting on the hood of his shitty 2005 Honda and smoking a cigarette that he didn’t really want, down to the filter. He hadn’t been wearing a jacket, bracing himself against the early winter wind and sneaking glances between the slats of the blinds to watch Mingi’s regular morning pacing and reorganizing. He remembers that well, enjoying the chill and taking the chance to watch Mingi unobserved, before getting in the driver’s seat and driving away from the home he preferred to shower in.
He’d be back later, of course, and then forever, but Wooyoung doesn’t actually remember leaving the motel for the last time. He doesn’t remember looking in the rearview longingly, as he’s sure he did. He doesn’t remember feeling any more dread than the usual, and he doesn’t even remember what song he put on through the crackling aux cord. He can only remember the familiar blur of the winding, pig-to-slaughter drive back down the mountain to his family’s trailer.
𓉸♱𓉸
Leaning against walls is easier than leaning against windows, Wooyoung has found throughout his year of academic research. Sometimes, academic research can be a ghost falling through surfaces and screaming himself hoarse. Because he can still feel his throat ache somehow, of course.
Wooyoung wouldn’t trade away any sign of change though, truthfully. He loves to feel, even if just for moments.
His favorite wall to engage in corporeality against is the thinly plastered cinder block one on the side of the building you can’t see from the road, facing the shroud of trees that continue to trail up the mountain. During the day, he likes the sun filtering through the trees to create shifting patterns on the surface that he can and does watch for hours. At night, he likes the memory of danger that hovers there.
Wooyoung had always taken his work breaks out there, liked watching the sun on the wall before too, felt at home in the full and waiting dark. The light above the side door only ever worked half the time, and now that it’s just Mingi, he doesn’t bother to fix it at all anymore. No one to chainsmoke against the wall, waiting for a customer, not waiting for anything at all, back when Wooyoung didn’t know what it was to have a favorite wall against which to be corporeal.
He’s practicing mindfulness, which is to say that he is taking turns broodily leaning against his wall and pacing back and forth at a high rate of speed. This has been helping thus far, but he still feels largely more insane than he’s managed to muster in months, no small feat for a dead man haunting his place of employ.
That pink-haired little shit had seen him. He had looked at him and spoken to him and he had seen him. What the fuck. What the fuck?
No he didn’t, his logical brain says. But there’s only one way way to be sure, isn't there?
𓉸♱𓉸
Wooyoung shoves his head through the wall of five rooms before he finds the one containing Yunho, as well as the hulking mass of man that the little possibly-ghost-seeing menace is riding.
He doesn’t open his eyes when the ghost unceremoniously noses through the wall, and Wooyoung finds himself justifying it to the hopeful voice in his head. He’s on the wall to the side of them, not above the headboard or anything, to be fair. Plus, Yunho’s eyes are closed. No proof of sight in either direction, so he should probably keep lurking. He watches as Yunho guides the meaty hands of the man below him up his torso, fingers running along flushed, lean skin. Yunho writhes, moaning softly as he works himself down onto the man’s cock dutifully, rhythmically.
Wooyoung remembers, distantly, the burning feeling of his hands running along skin, skimming over the muscle underneath, trying to leech the warmth up into the pads of his fingers to make the touch last longer. The thick fingers on smooth skin turn into Mingi’s, on his own waist, grasping and desperate, and Wooyoung is lost in the phantom touch. Mingi’s waist, squirming under his own hands as though he can make Wooyoung’s hands get bigger, touch more of him at once, Mingi’s breath hot and urgent against his ear.
“I’m not supposed to be the one getting haunted, you bitch,” Wooyoung mutters poisonously. He shakes his head to thoroughly exorcise himself of the memory, lets out a frustrated huff, before he realizes his mistake.
“And I’m usually the one saying that,” A low, buttery voice, and a cheshire grin spreading across Yunho’s face as Wooyoung snaps his eyes back up. Yunho’s eyes are open now, alert and bright despite the blissed-out expression that he’s been doing a good job putting on.
The man beneath him grunts, confused. “I didn’t say anything, baby,” he forces out, only half-paying attention as he watches himself pumping in and out of Yunho, who giggles and grinds down harder to effectively shut his companion up.
Wooyoung is unable to move—caught in the tractor beam that is Yunho’s attention, which is undividedly on him. There’s no other way to interpret the data he’s been given, and Wooyoung has been the leading (only) academic expert in his field for ages now. This twink can see him.
A year, part of him thinks quietly, shyly. It’s been almost a year since anyone looked at you. He shakes his head vigorously again, but this thought is not so easily as exorcised, too tender, too new, and Yunho is still looking him in the eyes when he stops.
“Fuck,” he says, and he knows that later on, when he’s not wildly caught off-guard, he’ll be annoyed about not landing a snarky line or saying something clever, but he’s so busy being seen that he forgets all pretense.
Yunho laughs again, loudly, a little more sympathetically this time and a little darker. Or maybe Wooyoung just knows more certainly now that he can see dead people; he can see the edges, now, of the affable mask the older man is wearing over the haunting.
Maybe it’s the second manic laugh, but the man Yunho is riding has lost interest, not that Wooyoung was really noticing him anyways. “You seem a little distracted tonight,” he says to Yunho, not unkindly, lifting him off of his cock with a wary look on his face.
The rosy-haired man’s smile in return is grim under the surface, and the long-suffering sigh he lets out says that this isn’t the first time this has happened. “One of those nights tonight, sorry.” He tucks himself under the dingy comforter on the bed, and the man just nods noncommittally, pulling his pants up from his ankles.
Wooyoung feels awkward, like he’s seeing something he’s not supposed to be. He’s done this a thousand times by now, phased through the walls into other peoples’ rooms and hovered among them invisibly, chattering back to oblivious ears in the hollows of their conversations, to feel a semblance of company, but he feels somehow even more on the outside now.
When he was alive, he’d skated through the shadows and popped up where he wasn’t wanted just the same, making homes for himself anywhere; he was the trailer park’s resident pest, the motel desk’s decorative ornament, the whole town’s sad little jester. But here, in the home he likes the best, the one that is home now, he feels all of a sudden disorientingly out of place, bones rattling against their chains.
The sound of the door shutting slams Wooyoung back into the horrifying, impossible moment, and he still doesn’t move an inch. This earns him a bright giggle that makes him feel lightheaded.
“I can still see you, even if you don’t move. You’re dead, not a chameleon,” Yunho’s tone is comforting, the casual cadence of someone having a good-natured conversation with an acquaintance.
I can still see you. The words echo, echo, echo.
Wooyoung narrows his eyes, sees the other man register the movement, and decides to accept that he’s the one on his back foot in this exchange. He feigns impartiality, putting distance between himself and the new fact. It’s, again, not something he’s very practiced in, and he does not think about how much more comfortable he feels being dead than being seen.
One leg first, then the other, he presses the rest of himself into the room. He’s unsure how to stand, hasn’t been aware of his posture in so long, and what did he ever do with his hands before? Where did he put them, did he just let them hang at his sides lamely like this?
Yunho breaks the silence first, freeing Wooyoung from thinking about his accursed physical form.
“I suppose,” the pink-haired menace says pointedly, “you probably have some questions, unless this is just a regular Friday for you.” He shoots Wooyoung an impish smile and it goes straight to his stomach, a flash of heat.
“It’s Saturday,” Wooyoung corrects. He knows this correction is petulant, that it’s only been Saturday for a few hours technically. Yunho’s grin deepens still, gets a little crooked as he looks more searchingly at Wooyoung’s face. The feeling of him noticing details, cataloging the unchanging curve of his jaw, the sharp Adam’s apple beneath it, makes Wooyoung want to die again.
Not to be dramatic.
It’s just that he can’t remember what color his hair is for a second—he hasn’t bothered even trying to look at himself in a while. It’s still bleached colorless, he knows, once he has a second to actually think about it. The roots had just barely started growing in on the day he was killed, in the way that he likes.
Silver linings, Wooyoung would mutter to a crowd of imagined ‘boo’s, if he were still invisible. Notably though, he seems not to be. He needs to stop stalling. He just doesn’t seem to be able to find anything clever to say, anything worthy of this moment that he’s never dared imagine.
“What the hell?” is what Wooyoung finally comes up with, immediately regretting his choice of words.
“Not there, try again,” Yunho retorts humorlessly.
Wooyoung’s left eye twitches. Deserved, probably. For correcting him on the day. He stays silent, conceding ground because honestly, he still can't think of what to say. It’s a disarming feeling, embarrassingly close to on par with being seen, Wooyoung not knowing what to say. He never struggled with it in life, a habitual and practiced yapper, and in death he’s been preaching to an invisible choir for a year, and yet, now that he has a real audience, the words he’s been saving up feel inexplicably dammed.
“Speechless,” Wooyoung whispers. “I’m experiencing Speechless.” Here, his studio audience hushes.
Yunho’s lips part and he huffs a genuine, surprised laugh, maybe a real one, leaning his head back against the headboard. He’s still naked, Wooyoung notes, the long lean lines of his body tangled in the beige sheets invitingly. And yes, Yunho is unbelievably hot like this, sex-flushed and low-lidded and so amused, so smug, but—
“I miss the feeling of rubbing my legs together in the sheets,” Wooyoung blurts before he can stop the leak. It’s more vulnerable an admission than he would’ve liked, all of this is too vulnerable than he’d like. He didn’t like being invisible either.
Yunho holds his eyes, says simply, “Good thing to miss.”
Wooyoung nods. He looks hard at the milky skin of Yunho’s calves against the sheets, gathering data. He can hear the gentle hiss of flesh against cloth when the other man moves, the sheets not melting through his limbs but instead twisting up around them, the way they do with the skin of the living.
“So you’re not dead then,” Wooyoung concludes aloud, and he sounds surer than he would’ve given himself credit for.
“A wise one.” The other man’s gaze skitters away now, studying his cuticles, the shimmery clear polish on his nails. Wooyoung cocks his head the tiniest bit at the home-familiar sound of avoidance, feeling himself gain footing, and he files it away.
“One who understands how to interpret research,” he corrects thinly.
Yunho’s demeanor shifts again—back to playful, odd—and he raises an eyebrow, far too amused for Wooyoung’s taste. “Research?”
“I’m pretty much the leading academic in my field,” Wooyoung says, attempting a boastful affect. He chases it with a smile that he wills to reach his eyes, and does not need any social research to know that it doesn’t work in the slightest.
“Had that one in the bag for a while?” Yunho says, and Wooyoung feels abruptly like his skin has been stripped away from his bones (notably impossible, he rationalizes feebly).
He has been saving that one, can imagine exactly how practiced it must sound to Yunho. Wooyoung’s mind takes him back, flipping dizzyingly through every dumb joke he’d saved to say to Mingi in the morning during their shift change. He is locked in a montage of Mingi’s broad grin, regardless of the quality of the pun or snarky remark, and he aches with it.
What he says, in the end, is “yep.”
Yunho nods. “It’s a good one.”
Wooyoung waits for him to continue, but he doesn’t. He’s looking back down at his long fingers as though the cuticle work he’s doing is a matter of life and death. The cracks in this impossible stranger’s gravitas are showing, but it doesn’t make Wooyoung feel any more comfortable, any less a powerless fool.
“Thanks,” he says curtly after a too-long silence, and he turns toward the wall to leave before he hears another long-suffering sigh. He hates how instantly it stops him in his tracks, how quickly his instincts have adapted to reacting again, but he stops all the same, chin to the side.
The lanky, not-dead man in his periphery stretches, arms like white wings. “Sorry,” Yunho says. The harsh, joking edge of his voice has dulled to a blunt head. “You guys don’t usually talk back like this.”
Wooyoung blinks. That humorless chuckle, again.
“You guys?” His voice shakes as he speaks, betraying the way he trips over his own legs trying to say it, desperately needing to confirm that this stranger said there are others, that it’s not just him.
He turns around, and Yunho’s gravitas has all but disappeared, but maybe it was just a trick of the light in the first place. The dry grin on his face is sad, an obvious mask, and Wooyoung wonders if he maybe just didn’t see it before because he wasn’t paying enough attention.
“I see dead people,” Yunho says. It’s a sorry attempt at a joke, but fuck it, Wooyoung truly laughs. He doubles over at the waist, bent in half and twisting back towards the room as he cackles, and he barely even registers that this is the first time he’s heard the sound of his real laugh in perhaps even longer than a year.
Yunho’s soft giggling joins his, a harmony he wishes he could brand into his eardrums. Laughing together, laughing with someone else. Oh, what a sound.
“Okay, Haley Joel Osment,” Wooyoung says around the end of a bout of laughter, and he holds tight to the smile that spreads on Yunho’s face as he catches his breath.
“Yunho,” Yunho corrects quietly.
“I know,” Wooyoung says back, before realizing he’s being prompted. “I’m Wooyoung,” he adds, his face heating. Yunho studies him, and he feels stuck again by it, a butterfly pinned gently to a board as the other man gathers data of his own, Wooyoung guesses.
“I’ve never seen it actually. The Sixth Sense, I mean.” Yunho says, clarifying after a second of consideration, eyes flicking back down to his hands in his lap. “My parents never let me watch horror, and then it seemed a little on the nose, after.”
After, Wooyoung snags on the word. He wonders for the second time if Yunho can hear his thoughts, too, because the other man’s gaze snaps back up. He does looks caught, but no, the look on his face is recognizable; he hadn’t meant to say so much. Wooyoung’s thoughts are safe. This is important data.
“Neither have I— remotes are tough.” Wooyoung extends the admission as an olive branch, and watches the other man’s body release a little bit of the tension he’s been cloaking himself in. “Buttons are too small, I think.” He’s not even sure if this is true, he hasn’t really tried.
“You haven’t been dead that long, though,” Yunho muses, half asking and half observing.
Wooyoung’s lip quirks of its own accord. “Didn’t have a TV at home, so I mostly snuck movies here, and Mingi hates scary stuff.” He can’t stop being honest, hearing the words tumbling out and doing nothing about it. He’s addicted to seeing someone’s face change at his words, watching Yunho process the name, the new information.
“Does he know he’s being haunted?” He’s just asking this time, and the question lands like a blow. Wooyoung winces, Mingi looking right through him a thousand times in his minds eye.
He’s not about to start shutting up now, though. “No. Too depressed or drunk, or both, I don’t know,” he mutters, honesty souring in his mouth. He deems it unnecessary to add that his former best friend doesn’t believe in ghosts, but he still thinks it, of course.
Yunho looks at him long enough that Wooyoung almost convinces himself it’s his turn to say something again, before clearing his throat.
“I saw you’re hiring. Maybe I’ll stick around for a bit,” Yunho says. He punctuates it by leaning over and turning off the dim lamp on the dingy bedside table, plunging them into darkness.
Wooyoung takes the chance to use a little bit of his research. He silently, quickly hovers across the room, is thankful the other man can’t see the smile on his face when he speaks.
“Still here, just dark now,” he whispers, inches away from Yunho’s ear, and to his credit, he nearly doesn’t flinch. Not quite, though. Wooyoung smirks, emboldened in the gloom.
“Goodnight,” he says, on the other side of the bed now, and this time he hears that addictive soft chuckle.
𓉸♱𓉸
He tamps it down the best he can, but when Wooyoung dissolves through the wall into incorporeality there’s hope thundering through his chest, down the road, taking off into the mist.