Chapter Text
Since he was a child, Bran had felt stalked by the supernatural. His house was haunted — he had seen the ghosts. They would look directly at him before disappearing in frightening giggles. It never stopped, but he learned how to ignore it. He would put salt around dark shadows he'd see at night, pray a little whenever he heard something weird.
He was probably ten when he told his mom about that and she put him in therapy. She didn't say it in front of him, but he knew she thought his “hallucinations” — as the doctor labelled them — was due to the fact that he didn't have a father. He didn't even remember how he figured that out, he just stopped telling his mom these things were happening until she eventually stopped asking, but his therapist was insistent — so he always ended up letting go.
He denied all of that to himself, it was much easier to believe he was insane than that he attracted ghosts. Even though he spent years of his life feeling hunted down by ghosts, he had always tried to be skeptical about his psychic abilities — and it was only when he had his hand read by a fortuneteller at a bar mitzvah that he noticed he couldn't deny it any longer.
“How odd.” the lady said, pressing her thumb over the palm of his right hand.
“What?” His voice sounded high-pitched and weird like the voice of any fifteen years old, but there was more behind it.
He had been sweating in discomfort the whole night. He barely knew anyone there, it was the bar mitzvah of the son of his mother's friend, and the boys that tried to take him into his group were trying to set him up with a girl for the past ninety minutes.
Bran would feel sorry for this information dumping, but he was absolutely gay with no doubts, no question mark. He always knew that the last thing he would do in his life — if he was ever to do it — would be kiss a girl. Girls didn't gross him out — no! Far from it! —, they were nice. He really enjoyed the company of his mom's friends when they came over for a bookclub reunion. They were the nicest people on earth, he just lacked attraction. And sometimes he would even thank God for it whenever he heard anyone talk about their relationship with a woman. They sounded complicated, while boys were not just simple, they were easy. It had always been easy for him to find a boy to make out with whenever he went to a party of someone who wasn't his friend — as he didn't have any friends, but we'll get there.
So, yeah, being set up would only frustrate the unlucky girl chosen for the job. He figured that what scared catholic boys — that went to the same school as the boy having the bar mitzvah and were his best friends, Bran was told —, more than having their sins exposed, were superstitions. Superstitions were easy to find in a bar mitzvah.
“Your life line…” the lady continued. “It's so curious.”
“Why?”
“It's barely here.” She whispered. “It's like your life barely exists to yourself. You barely do what you want. You just live to please others, isn't that right?”
That checked out.
He nodded with his head.
“Then, it gets more apparent, your heart line mixes into it, and they become the same line…” She stared at his hand for some time. “It's like yours and your lover's life become one at the end of your life.”
He felt a shiver down his spine and pulled his hand from that woman's touch.
“That's enough.” He reached for his pocket. “How much do I owe…” He noticed his wallet wasn't there anymore, he had surely lost it somewhere in his way to the tent in that party. “... you?” His mom would be so pissed.
“Forgot your wallet?” Her tone was sweet.
He grinned awkwardly.
“I think I lost it on the way here…”
“While you ran away from those boys?”
He felt his heart drop to his fucking ass.
“How did you…”
“You flinched every time a few boys called your name outside. I'm a fortuneteller, but not everything is fortune.”
He gulped.
“Not everything is what it seems.” she said in a ‘are you stupid?’ tone, sounding like she wanted to remark on it.
“How much do I owe you?” He repeated, to try and gain some control of the situation even though he was hardly able to hold eye contact.
“A smile will suffice my charge.”
He couldn't help but frown.
“But isn't there karma for when you don't get paid? I'm sure I read something like that the other day.”
“I put my price on my work. For this session, it's a smile.”
“This is not some weird trick, right? Like, you're not trying to say ‘oh, your smile is the price!’ as a wording trick to steal my teeth or something…?”
She sighed, irritated.
“Alright, kid, I'm starting to lose my patience with you.” she said in a roll of eyes and raised her hand to him. “Just give me a hand shake, that will be the price, and get fuck out of my tent.”
He just stared at her hand out for him to shake.
“I'm not gonna steal your fingers, kid, I have way better shit to do.”
He shook her hand and left the tent.
That day, he realized he couldn't just ignore the ghosts for the rest of his life. Maybe they even knew something about what that fortuneteller had said about his life line. He spent the next few years of his life hearing them, waiting for their signals, and trying to help them.
Some took the help gladly — he wrote letters to the people they left, crumpled and ripped parts of them so they would look old, and managed to give it to them.
Others just insisted on chasing him — like they were keeping him company.
“Do you not get tired of this bulshit?” He was sitting on the bed of his dorm in college. His roommate had left for a party, but Bran didn't trust the ghost alone in their room, so he pretended to have a headache and stayed over. “Don't you have anybody to talk to?” The sensation didn't answer — because he couldn't see that ghost. “Do you want to talk?”
A cold breeze made all the hair on his arms stand up and a sheet of paper of his homework fell from his bedside table.
“Is that a yes?”
It didn't shock him when a pencil was lifted in the air. The pencil seemed clumsy, like the person holding it hadn't written anything in a while. It fell onto the floor loudly once the ghost finished writing. A breeze made the sheet of paper fall onto his lap.
It was an initial.
“B and W?”
His laptop lit up all of a sudden. From across the room, a sound came from the device. It was a small thing he could barely recognize, until the volume was turned up and a song blasted from the computer and filled the room.
“I always feel like I am not alone.” A man sang on a YouTube video. It seemed like a recording of a performance.
He had to stand up and walk closer, putting the paper aside. The song was good, but there was something enchanting about it. It was like having a siren singing to him. It was probably an old transmission, but the way he sang… It was like that man was singing for him. Calling him. He had to turn it down.
That man moved around the stage like he owned it. His curly long hair bounced as he moved his head, giving rage to the melody. Watching him was magnetic.
He paused it.
“What do you want?” He asked the ghost. “Who is he?”
The sheet of paper flew from his bed. It was different this time. The second initial was underlined.
“Is B. W. him?”
A rough wind took the paper from his hands, as if the ghost didn't want him to see it anymore. The intense breeze started to press the paper against his laptop screen — the W pressing exactly on the singer's frozen face.
He took the paper from it and scrolled down the page to find the name of the artist. He had to have something to do with it.
Wilson Chiyo.
He didn't even realize when the ghost pressed play and the entire song was played. He couldn't register it. There was something in that name that absolutely terrified him.
The next day, he was in a particularly boring course of his administration college searching for that name. Wilson Chiyo. It was engraved on his brain, and that ghost made sure to breath it onto his ear for the whole night so it was easy to get even more disturbed.
Wilson Chiyo.
Wilson Chiyo.
Shi was his middle name.
Wilson Shi Chiyo.
When he searched superficially, he found the meaning of Chiyo as eternal. What looked weird was when he looked deeper into it though. Chiyo in Mandarin means bloody night. He searched a little bit more and his classmates gave him curious looks when he sighed as he found out Wilson was half-Japanese.
In the beginning, it also sounded silly to Bran to search someone's last name as if it was proof of who people were. With time, though, he learned that it was necessary if you had to deal with ghosts.
Shi.
His smile of relief dropped instantly.
Shi Chiyo together meant Eternal Death.
Once he read that name written all together — Wilson The Eternal Death —, something inside him told him to get out of the administration course — and it for sure wasn't his six pending subjects. He changed his graduation in administration to history in the last semester.
His mom didn't argue — she wasn't the one to pay for his college anyway.
“What else do you want?” he asked to his empty new dorm.
A breeze made his hair tingle his forehead.
“Shi Chiyo? Is that him whom you want to talk to?”
A violent wind knocked the air from his lungs. He fell to the floor, coughing. His bag was forcefully taken from his shoulders and dragged to the other side of the room. The bag suddenly was opened and his stuff started being thrown all over the room by the wind.
The wind kept making a mess out of the room and kept taking the air from Bran's lungs every time he catched his breath.
“Wilson Shi Chiyo!”
It calmed down completely.
“Is Wilson who you want?”
He felt a cold get closer to him.
“What do you want me to do?”
It didn't answer him. Instead, it turned on his laptop from his bag and that same song by Wilson Shi Chiyo started playing.
“‘Cause you're here, you're watching me…”
He stood up and limped towards his bag, near the window. He took the laptop to see the ghost had opened Wilson Shi Chiyo's site. He turned off the music before reading what was on the main screen. He would be in town for a concert in a few weeks.
“You want to go?”
The wind was so strong it would have thrown the laptop onto the floor if Bran wasn't holding it in a strong grip.
“You want me to go?”
The wind said nothing.