Chapter Text
Zhou Zishu stretched his arms above his head until they popped, stepping off the deck and into the overgrown garden to look at the work he had ahead of him. The ground was soft and wet with dew from last night's rain, and the fences were completely obscured by bushes, vines and weeds of varying shades of green. The small deck coming out from the sliding door was just above the ground, and aside from a few missing panels and holes, the wood was also starting to rot.
No wonder the rent was dirt cheap.
Other than the house being miles from the nearest town, with no neighbours as far as the eye could see, it had also been left empty for almost as long as Zhou Zishu had been alive. From the lack of maintenance, it had fallen into disrepair. When he expressed interest, they did the bare minimum to make it livable, eager to get it off their hands. The real estate looked remarkably relieved when Zhou Zishu didn’t ask why it was unattended.
Someone probably died there, and it freaked everyone out. Hah. Zhou Zishu wasn’t afraid of death. Death had been the blood in his veins, and the blood on his hands. It had been intimate and personal with him, like he had never let any human be. Zhou Zishu wasn’t sure he could ever leave that shadow behind, even if he had been given a lifetime to try.
It was the same old story, anyway. He would probably believe whatever outrageous rumour was spread about the house’s history; it was perfectly located for criminal activities. How funny, then, that Zhou Zishu moved in to retire from just that. Besides, he knew what a murderer’s house looked like, and it didn’t look like this. It looked like his old apartment; expensive, modern, and minimalist. It looked like his old backup apartment; cheap, so dirty that even blood stains were obscured, and in a neighbourhood where bringing someone home who never left the next morning wasn’t something to bat an eye at. It looked like his third backup apartment, and then the one after that. Slept in, but not lived in.
Zhou Zishu wanted to try living in a home before he died.
He rolled up his sleeves to his shoulder, slipped on the padded gloves half-hanging from his pocket, and started working methodically from the front back. He worked at pulling out the weeds from the garden beds he discovered under the mess until the sun was high in the sky, grabbing a can of beer from the kitchen to take a short break. The tab pushed in with a crack, and the cold beer hissed.
In the garden, the stray cat he’d only seen from a distance was sitting where he had been working. She was white, maybe average sized, and that was about all Zhou Zishu knew about it. It was a feral thing, and always snapped aggressively whenever he got too close. He had no idea why it hung around, and why it didn’t stay in town, but what the hell.
He was dying anyway. Who cares if a stray cat wanted to keep him company? If in the future, she ate his corpse, then Zhou Zishu could die glad that Tian Chuang never got the chance to pick apart his body instead.
Zhou Zishu sat at the edge of the deck, on one of the more stable sides. The sun was overbearing with no breeze to help, and sweat had started to gather around the back of his neck and under his chin. He leaned back on his palm, and pulled the bottom of his shirt up to his neck to wipe at the sweat.
There was a low, sharp whistle, not unlike that of a lecherous cat-call.
He startled up, immediately reaching for the knife he no longer kept at his side, and whipping his head around to the direction of the noise.
Nothing. No one in the yard, obviously, and no one past the fence either. Zhou Zishu, put-off, still ended up doing a sweep of the property, but even with his sharp eyes and skills, he couldn’t find a trace that anyone had been here at all. Was it just a weird bird? He sighed and returned to the garden, sipping at the beer that had gone lukewarm.
He noticed the cat was a lot closer to him than she’d ever let him come before, her tail warily waving in the air and her dirty white fur stood on end. She stared pointedly at an empty space in the garden.
Hm. Interesting. Zhou Zishu left a portion of raw chicken on a plate for her in the garden, and added cat food to the whiteboard grocery list on his fridge.
He was prepared to leave it behind him, but then things only got weirder.
Zhou Zishu groggily woke up in the middle of the night, the glowing alarm clock reading 1:03AM. Predictable. Even his pain liked to be on schedule. He let out a shuddered exhale as it gripped his body, tensing up and curling to his side. He tightly bunched the sheets up in his hand, and counted his shallow breaths, controlling his visible reaction, hiding his weakness, even in the darkness with no one to see it.
Or so he thought, until he shifted the wrong way, and his eyes shot open in pain, meeting the eyes of a silhouette in the window. Their figure was entirely black, though the faint red of his alarm clock highlighted their empty spaces, like the cut out shape of eyes and a simple curling mouth.
It wouldn’t be the first or the last time the pain made him delirious. At least it wasn’t the face of someone he’d killed this time. Zhou Zishu rolled his eyes at the reflection through gritted teeth, and flipped over to sleep on his other side. He was tired, and he wasn’t in the mood to process his trauma.
Zhou Zishu hadn’t thought much of it either, when he awoke to that feral cat in his bedroom, hissing and yowling to itself.
“What’s the point of locks if even a stray cat can get in?” He grumbled sleepily, half to the cat, and half to himself. The house was so full of holes, he wasn’t terribly surprised that it had managed. He was more surprised about which room it decided it wanted to yell in, first thing in the morning. The door creaked open just slightly with the breeze, and the crazy cat viciously leapt after it, scrambling down the hall.
When Zhou Zishu regained enough of his physical and cognitive functions to get up, he realized the air was dead still.
The cat was waiting for him in the kitchen on the bench, her nose turned up grumpily, but she had lost the look of a violent, obsessive hunter. He stepped over some of the moving boxes he hadn’t got to yet to take his medication, and start making a coffee. Zhou Zishu then put on the oven mitts, and used them to shoo her off the bench, unaffected by her scratching and biting.
“I don’t really care if you come and go, but stay off the furniture.”
There was a strange chill down the back of his neck, but he dismissed it as a sign of his body weakening. She meowed at him, loud and displeased, before trotting off to a patch of sun by the sliding doors to the garden. She padded at the ground, circling it a few times, before dropping herself into it and lying down. Zhou Zishu watched her, ignoring the beep of the microwave signaling his coffee was done.
She came with issues, but Zhou Zishu thought it’d be nice to keep her around. Didn’t he sleep with a gun under his bed and a knife in his bedside drawer too? They both just wanted to bask in the sun, but they were unadjusted to safety and trust.
Coffee in hand, he padded over to join her, sitting on the opposite end of the sun’s outline. His late adoptive father had once pointed out a grumpy cat in the park, and said it reminded him of his old friend, Baiyi, in some attempt to make Zhou Zishu laugh. He didn’t find it funny at the time, as a closed off kid who wanted to be left alone, but now, the thought made him smile. Good enough for a name, wasn’t it? He couldn’t keep calling her ‘the cat’.
He basked in the late morning sun on the wooden floors for a little longer, because for the first time since he was a child, he could. In Tian Chuang he had power, and wealth, but he didn’t have this. He didn’t have the time to lie freely in the sun, and he didn’t know how to enjoy it.
He knew Tian Chuang would find this little home of his eventually. Zhou Zishu had done the bare minimum to hide his tracks, but the organisation he built was too good, too ruthlessly efficient, to think about hiding from. Ironically, he cursed his own competence. There was nowhere in the world he could run from them, not without living everyday the same way he was trying so hard to leave behind; paranoid, overly cautious, and hidden away in his shell. But ultimately, they couldn’t do much. Blackmail was useless, Zhou Zishu built the damn place, if they wanted to drag him down he’d pull every agent and every rich benefactor they had down with him.
They would find him, threaten him, resort to begging, and he would ignore them until he died.
He was eventually interrupted by a sudden series of bangs, crashes, smashing, and various other words for the sound of destruction occurring in the kitchen. Baiyi bolted out the door, leaping across the garden and over the fence in the blink of an eye. Zhou Zishu, who had nothing to lose, got up and went straight to the source of the noise instead. There was nothing there, no animal nor human that could have caused it, but ‘it’ definitely happened.
One of the beige cupboard doors had been violently torn from its hinges and thrown across the room, almost all of his plates were smashed in a pile (though some remnants had ended up on the living room couch), and the fridge door was left open, a hole puckered through the milk carton and leaving it dripping down onto the floor. The whiteboard on the door hung unevenly, and in the centre, ‘GET OUT’ was written in something red.
The lights were still flickering, Zhou Zishu belatedly noticed. That was a lot less intimidating at midday. Ah. So that’s what it was. He was glad Baiyi had been chased out already, with the sharp shards everywhere. He grabbed a thick plastic bag, and wrapped another around it, before he started to sweep up the mess.
Zhou Zishu was being haunted.
He dumped the bags outside, and then dealt with the fridge. He grabbed his whiteboard marker, and ignored the ominous message in… ketchup? It was too thick to be blood, and Zhou Zishu knew blood better than anyone. He added milk, plates, and a new cupboard door to the list.
He clicked his tongue, looking down and realizing that he was bleeding on the marker. It must’ve happened when he was cleaning up the smashed plates. He washed it under the kitchen sink, and then started work in the garden again. He had been meaning to clear some of the fallen logs and branches so he could have the fence re-built, and he would keep whatever was salvageable for firewood.
All in all, he wasn’t all that surprised about the ghost. Maybe he could’ve put a little effort into feeling shocked or afraid, but Zhou Zishu was too old and too tired to bother with something like that. He didn’t have any particular opinion on the existence of ghosts in the past, except that if there was such a thing, Zhou Zishu would be the first to know. Why would the universe wait until the afterlife to torture him for his sins, when it could start now?
He always expected to be haunted by his actions. He just didn’t predict it would be quite so literal.
There were continuous minor disturbances throughout the day, but the ghost was evidently running out of ideas. The house was falling apart as it was, any means of destruction just tended to speed up his plans to replace it anyway. Zhou Zishu had a truly pathetic amount of belongings that he cared about, and he was too well trained for anything as simplistic as a jump scare to get a reaction out of him. He had catalogued the incidents, and none of them seemed vicious enough to suggest the ghost wanted him dead.
But if it ever changed its mind, what did it matter anyway? It simply sped up his plans. For all the people he killed in the dead of night, Zhou Zishu had no right to complain about receiving the same hospitality.
Maybe he’d buy a rubix cube the next time he went into town to see if the ghost was bored enough to complete it, or if they found it so condescending that they’d get it over with and just kill him on the spot.
Zhou Zishu tried to heat up leftover takeaway in the microwave for dinner, when it suddenly spontaneously combusted in a fit of sparks, and then proceeded to catch on fire. Frustration gnawed at him truly for the first time since the incidents started. After pushing himself too hard in the garden, he had no energy left to put up a fight.
He didn’t give the ghost the satisfaction of addressing it directly, and just went to bed early. Zhou Zishu left his bedroom door open in case Baiyi wanted to come in again, because she didn’t seem to like the ghost much either, and he liked the security of knowing where they were.
He had been living with the ghost for two weeks, and one week of interaction, when the ghost did the first thing he could really consider as violent. He barely half-awake and too exhausted to process what was happening when he instinctively latched onto someone hovering above him with his own knife and disarmed them, shoving the attacker down next to him in the bed and then turning over to fall back asleep, knife safely (if you could call cuddling a knife safe) tucked against his chest.
He didn’t get to see the ghost’s visible form lying beside him in shock, staring at the ceiling with wide, incredulous eyes, cheeks flushed a subtle pink.
Zhou Zishu couldn’t be entirely sure what he did vaguely remember wasn’t a dream, but he was still surprised to find out he survived in the morning. He blinked awake, and a groan slipped out of his throat as the aches settled in. It wasn’t pitch black anymore, but the sky was overcast by rain, and it rapped steadily against his window. He curled in on himself and dragged the covers over his shoulders, sharply inhaling.
Some days were worse than others. He’d be an easy target.
Every instinct he carefully and purposefully drilled into himself screamed at him to take the gun from under his bed, as if it would be of much use against a ghost anyway. But the quiet surrounding room reminded him of why he had come here in the first place, why he had moved into a house in the middle of nowhere, isolated from neighbours and the world. He had come here to die. If he was an easy target, that was fine. If Baiyi ate his corpse when she found it, that was fine. If no one found his body for months, if no one cared, then…
He held himself through the shaking, and when the worst of it passed, he turned over to find his medicine bottle on the bedside table, and Baiyi silently watching from the floor at the foot of the bed.
Huh. The crazy stray cat that wouldn’t let anyone pet her, and went wherever she wanted, was waiting for permission to lie on his bed, and the ghost destroying his house had brought him his medicine. Either Zhou Zishu was going crazy, or he was dying a lot sooner than he’d thought.
He shook a pill into his hand and swallowed it dry, patting the bed to motion for Baiyi to come up. She quietly hopped up onto the end, and curled up in the corner by his feet. Zhou Zishu had a rough day. He didn’t have the strength to try and make anything without the microwave, and all he managed to do was unpack a small box of his things, needing a break to sit down every 15 minutes.
The ghost didn’t bother him for that entire day.
It really only lasted that day, and Zhou Zishu knew it was back to business as usual when he awoke to the globe in his lamp shattering. He rolled off the bed just in time to dodge the flying glass, and Baiyi came dashing in to run around and howl like a madman. Zhou Zishu sighed in the heap he landed in, and dropped his head back onto the wall behind him with a thud. It was going to be a very long day.
He found part of the couch and the book he’d been reading (that he wasn’t all that interested in anyway) ripped to shreds, and Zhou Zishu wasn’t even sure if it was the ghost or the cat. Every time he passed a window in the hall, the ghost would bang loudly against it, although one time it had been Baiyi chasing a fly. It was expensive and unrewarding to live with these two violent, aggressive things. All he wanted to do was retire in peace.
Zhou Zishu tried to get a moment of respite by taking a shower. It had been too long, anyway. He sighed in content as the hot water trailed down his skin, the shower curtain decidedly closed just in case the ghost got any weird ideas. Then, he heard the gurgle of water as the toilet flushed, and the water turned ice cold (“mother fucker -”). Alright. Whatever. Zhou Zishu could deal, he had worse roommates in college. At least the ghost wasn’t having loud, kinky sex all night in the room over from his (yes, Beiyuan, he was sure that he wanted to move out, because soon enough he’d kill himself before Wu Xi’s jealous streak ever got a chance to).
He grabbed a towel to loosely wrap around his lower half, and stepped out of the cold shower with a scowl. On the way out, he stopped at the fogged up bathroom mirror, and processed the words drawn through it with a finger.
‘Exquisite shoulder blades, Zhou Xu.’
Zhou Zishu pinched his wrist, to be sure he was reading it correctly. Shoulder blades…? His what? It may have been the most effective attempt to creep him out yet, and it had nothing to do with the fake ID the ghost must have so cleverly found. Seriously, he had at least five of them lying around, was he supposed to be impressed?
An uncomfortable shiver went up his spine. It was the feeling of being in the dark, while your enemy saw everything clearly. He narrowed his eyes, and swung open the door. Zhou Zishu put his thumb and finger to his lips, sharply whistling for the cat, out of spite if nothing else.
“Baiyi!” He called out, and the cat sprinted down the hallway from wherever she had come from. All three of the weird inhabitants of this weird home had a habit of disappearing and appearing from nothing, then. She hopped up onto the sink (he really should train that out of her), and hissed at just behind where Zhou Zishu had been standing before. “Hm. You’re a useful little thing after all, huh? Good girl,” he said smugly, smirking and instinctively reaching over to pet her. She tensed, claws sharpening on the defense, and his hand paused midair.
Zhou Zishu left his hand there for a moment, far enough away that he wasn’t a threat, but it was an offer nonetheless. Baiyi slowly and cautiously approached, butting her nose into his fingers cutely, before nipping them and running away. He laughed, and left to change in his bedroom, making sure that Baiyi was on watch the whole time. He couldn’t confidently claim he remembered the face of every person he killed, but it seemed more like a ghost that just wanted him out of their house. They were haunting the house, then, not him. It wasn’t a victim back for vengeance, after all.
The ghost didn’t come near him for a while after that. Whether by choice, or forced away by the violent cat at his feet, Zhou Zishu wasn’t sure. The only strange thing it did was throw a towel at his head while he was replacing the creaky kitchen cupboards. It took him a confused second to remember that he had never dried his hair, leaving it lying wet over the skin of his shoulder. He would’ve thought it was a peace offering, if not for the ghost waving a mug around in the air and smashing it right in front of him, as if to make a point. He seriously hoped they would get tired of property damage soon, because even if the rent was dirt cheap, he wasn’t earning any more money
He had to pick Baiyi up with the oven mitts when she got too close to the shards, but despite her unhappy meowing and violent wiggles, she didn’t scratch and bite up his arm this time. That was progress. He felt a sense of achievement and pride, a different kind than the one he used to feel after a successful assignment. A better kind.
The doorbell rang later in the evening, and his good mood was ruined.
“Mr. Zhou, it’s an honour! This one is not worthy!” A squeaky voice called out, and Zhou Zishu could practically hear the bow. Seriously, was this an historical Chinese drama? Or an American mafia movie? He was just glad they didn’t call him ‘boss’. It was disheartening that they found him so quickly, he had bet on having another few months. He ignored them for the moment and walked back to his bedroom, sliding a box out from under the bed and loading the gun, just in case. “Uhm, sir, I have a message to pass on, and I-I know you’re there, so if you could please…”
With a long suffering sigh, he trudged to the door, and grumpily opened it.
As he thought. A newbie. It was either the higher up’s idea of a prank to put the new kid through his wrath, like some sort of hazing, or Helian Yi figured he’d be softer on a kid. The blood rushed out of the poor thing's face when he saw the gun.
“Don’t come in the house, don’t touch me, and we won’t have a problem,” he spoke up, keeping the gun casually in his hand at his side, and not drawn up at the boy. The agent nodded quickly.
“Helian Yi just wanted to make sure you were safe, and he wants to clear up any misunderstandings from the past. If you wanted, y-you would definitely be welcomed back, and no one would hold it against you! You’re really appreciated here!”
Zhou Zishu rolled his eyes. Helian Yi had probably told them to go tell him he fucked up, and come back or else. Baiyi was yowling again, somewhere in the garden, and he should probably go make sure nothing was set on fire or destroyed.
“He said that, word for word, did he?”
The Tian Chuang agent stumbled. He hadn’t been gone that long, how far had his strong organisation fallen since? What was with the standard for the new trainees? Even door to door salesmen were pushier than this. Well, it wasn’t Zhou Zishu’s problem anymore. He shut the door.
“Not interested.”
He spun around, and headed to the yard. A half-alive man, haunted by the dead and the living. Peaceful retirement, his ass. When he stepped out on the deck, and surveyed the garden, he immediately found two bottles of his expensive wine hanging upside down above the drains, their contents rapidly gushing out.
Fuck, those weren’t easy to get! He preferred it when the ghost was trying to kill him in the night! Zhou Zishu ran forward and tackled the air to grab the bottles back before it was too late. The invisible force blocked him instinctively with their wrist, but Zhou Zishu used the opportunity to dig his knee up into what he assumed was their stomach, twisting their wrist backwards and grabbing the bottle from above, even as the messy execution made the wine spill down his neck. He realized in the second after that the ghost appeared when he had attacked, looking more surprised than Zhou Zishu did, which was a little unfair.
Zhou Zishu cracked their wrist back a little harder, making their other hand go limp and drop the bottle, smashing it onto the ground. The ghost stumbled away from the shards instinctively, as Zhou Zishu swiped his leg around his ankle to trip him up, the simultaneous movement sending them both tumbling to the grass. Zhou Zishu spread his knees over the man’s torso, grabbing his wrist in the air and pinning him down to stabilize himself, while his other hand managed to hold the bottle upright in the air, the quarter of the wine left still splashing around inside.
He was brought back to the scene when he relaxed his weight where he straddled his hips, and there was a quiet, muffled gasp below him.
Wide, shocked eyes with blackened, dilated pupils stared up at him. Zhou Zishu could see the blur of green, dewy grass below him, but otherwise he looked almost entirely human. He was only exposed by the dusty kitchen light coming from inside the house, filtering dimly through the flush on his cheeks. Despite that, his wrist felt real in his hand, his body real and solid enough to support his weight. Zhou Zishu’s chest heaved, coming down from the adrenaline, and their heavy pants were the only sound in the thin air. They watched each other like a predator and a cornered prey all at once.
The man, Zhou Zishu painfully noted, was attractive.
And then he was gone.
The weight disappeared from under him without warning, dropping him onto the grass, with no evidence of what he had seen other than the shattered bottle behind him. Zhou Zishu waited, but the ghost didn’t make a sound for the rest of the night, or for the days following it. The silence was almost more unsettling than the destruction had been.
Tian Chuang returned faster than the ghost did, appearing at his doorstep a few mornings later in their uniforms, recognisable only to someone who knew what they were. Zhou Zishu pondered pretending to be dead, before tossing the idea out. Any Tian Chuang agent worth their salt would see through it instantly, it was only a matter of whether they were brave enough to call it out, and these ones had been knocking on the door for half an hour. Clearly not lacking in persistence or courage. Maybe the fact that they’d brought three this time made them braver.
Zhou Zishu grabbed the gun again, not because he feared for his safety, but because he was annoyed and he didn’t want the agents starting to get an ego with him.
“Zhou Zishu, Helian Yi swore that if you come back, you’ll receive a significant pay rise, and he’ll personally fund your visit to the specialist you need for your health! You were his partner, not his servant, so if there was anything in the organization you were unsatisfied with-”
“Tell him I said no, go fuck yourself.”
He slammed the door in their face, only to find a pen scratching out something on the back of the door. So, he was back. Zhou Zishu itched to tell him to get a piece of paper instead of writing on the goddamn furniture, but the blatant graffiti still wasn’t the worst looking thing in the house, so what the hell. It was the ghost that had to live with it for another… however long ghosts hang around. Zhou Zishu would only be there a few years.
‘I thought your name was Xu?’
“I never said that.”
‘Lie of omission.’ The blue pen scribbled underneath it. It paused, and then continued on another line. ‘Who were they?’
“Stop terrorizing me and maybe I’d consider telling you,” Zhou Zishu dryly answered, leaving the door and whatever the ghost said next, behind. It was the first proper communication they had, if you didn’t count wrestling over wine bottles. Most people would probably try to get answers. Zhou Zishu had enough answers in his lifetime. He was retired, and still a little pissed off about the wine, and so he decided to take a nap about it instead.
He heard a distinct scoffing sound close to the shell of his ear, and he instinctively struck out with his fist in that direction. Zhou Zishu hadn’t hit anything, but there was still a resounding silence. He thought that maybe physical contact forced the ghost to show himself, but it could have been shock, too. Maybe Zhou Zishu missed, or the ghost was quicker than he had given him credit for. He’d need to test it further, he considered, shuffling into his bedroom.
“Alright. Can you use a phone?” Zhou Zishu asked to the empty air, dropping himself on the bed and lying out, legs spread in a comfortable and undignified manner. It seemed like it would be the quickest way to communicate, if the ghost was open to trying it. He didn’t have many notebooks lying around, and he really didn’t want their conversations to be had all over the walls. Admittedly, despite all his talk about being different, something made him a little curious. He didn’t feel like sleeping anymore.
He had an old phone by his bed that he was fairly sure was charged. Probably. He hadn’t used it since he moved. Though he’d like to tell himself there was no point in using it, and that there was nothing on his phone but a way for Tian Chuang to track him (as if that ship hadn’t sailed), there was a small pinch of… avoidance to it.
It was a burner phone, but he had the same number for a while, so it wasn’t unreasonable that someone might know it. Maybe there’d be something there, like a text or a call. Maybe there’d be nothing.
He wasn’t sure which was worse.
The phone lit up, and he tilted his head comfortably to watch the phone unlock to the home screen, and then open the standard notes app. Letters rapidly appeared on the screen, although oddly enough, the phone didn’t recognise any pressure on the pop-up keyboard.
‘Better than you can, I’m sure. This is ancient.’ The ghost snarkily wrote. Zhou Zishu rolled his eyes, though carefully noted that the ghost was modern. Anyway, phones were just a tracking device for enemies and for friends alike. He didn’t have many left of the latter, and far too many of the former.
“Do you have a name?”
‘谷主. Ghost Valley Master. I generally don’t take kindly to those in my house.’
Where did that name come from? Was there more than one ghost here, was there an underworld that he led? It was pretentious as hell. Zhou Zishu didn’t have a thick enough face to go around calling him master.
“I’m not calling you that. Think of something else, or I’ll just call you a pestilence. Also, I pay rent, so grow up and learn to share.”
‘I’ve never met anyone like you.’
“If you say some cliché line about how everyone’s afraid of you and no one before has dared to talk to you, I’m going to throw up.”
‘No, I’ve never met anyone as beautiful as you are. But sure, that too.’
Zhou Zishu blinked. He then surprised himself by bursting out laughing. Beautiful? Him? Maybe back when he was at the peak of his career, with cold dead eyes that played pretend at warmth and perfect smooth skin, all a part of the visage he created for himself. Here, he was weak, tired and aching, his hair grown out a little too long and his skin just a little too pale. When was the last time he shaved? This ghost was insane. Maybe just as much as he was.
“With all due respect, I think you haven’t met very many people, Ghost Valley Master,” Zhou Zishu said, amused, the remnants of his laughter still dancing over his features.
‘I’m renowned for my taste in men. I know a beauty when I see one, but now you’re interesting, too. I might even let you stay. Can I call you A-Xu?’
“No.”
‘Okay. A-Xu. Get rid of your cat.’
“Also no. Touch her, and I’ll find out how to make you die a second time.”
‘I could be your first.’
“If you were going to kill me, you would’ve done it by now. Can you stop pretending? It’s tiring to watch.”
The phone screen decidedly turned off, and that was the end of that. The ghost didn’t like his cat as much as his cat didn’t like the ghost, he weirdly seemed to think Zhou Zishu was a beauty, and he was generally coming around to the idea of his presence in the house. He could… work with that. The door creaked open, and the sixth sense that told him there were eyes on the back of his neck, disappeared.
Zhou Zishu whistled for Baiyi, just in case. She leapt up onto his bed, dark pupils enlarged in the darkness, and she stood at attention, taunt like a bowstring. She was so… obedient, for a violent stray. Zhou Zishu wondered if she’d had an owner before, wondered what made her so ready to snap at his command. It was weird to see himself in a cat, wasn’t it? Whatever. She wasn’t staring creepily at the corner, so the ghost probably really had left.
He snatched up his phone again, and unlocked it with a swipe. His thumb hesitated over the messages app, where he had one notification.
‘Your pre-paid mobile plan expires at the end of this month, please reply ‘YES’ to automatically renew. Visit [x] to cancel or upgrade your plan, and thank you for choosing us for all your mobile data needs!’
Zhou Zishu wanted to throw it against the wall. He might have, if not for the fear that the walls were so damaged the phone would fly straight through them. Stupid fucking… Why should he renew it? Who should he be expecting a text from? The boys he trained himself, who looked up to him like family, that died for his choices? The little brother who had said ‘an eye for an eye’ before he left, seeing who Zhou Zishu really was for the first time and hating it?
Zhou Zishu wondered how he was doing. Jiuxiao would never find this number, he had never been clever and sharp like Zhou Zishu was. He had never been cruel like he was either, so there was no reason he’d even want to. Even if he did, he never left him the option. It was a small mercy. The choice was easier if it never had to be made.
‘YES.’ He replied anyway. Another text from the same number came through almost immediately after, and he almost dropped his phone.
‘Got you, Zishu! I wasn’t sure you’d reply to me normally. Wu Xi said this idea was dumb, and that I should just have you tracked down and tied you up to get you to talk to me, but look which one of us is talking to you now?’
… Zhou Zishu wasn’t even with that phone company, when he thought harder about it. Fuck. He took a second to settle his heartbeat, spiked up with anxiety after the first few words. It wouldn’t even matter if Tian Chuang had found his number, it couldn’t be worse than them knocking on his door every other day, but paranoia was a hard habit to break. He lay the phone in front of him, and sat up, staring at it like the problem it was.
‘I’m kidding. Well, not really, he actually did say that. But it’s because he cares. I do too.
Don’t ignore me. You have read receipts on, I know you’re there.’
Zhou Zishu sighed. There was no avoiding this conversation. Still, a part of him felt lighter. He had been meaning to visit them in Wu Xi’s home country sometime, but he wasn’t sure when he would be well enough to do so. It was nice to have Beiyuan there again. It was really nice.
‘How do I turn them off.’
‘It’s really you! Some things never change.
You know, when I left and we agreed that it was unsafe for you to keep one phone number, so I gave you mine, it was kind of with the expectation you would actually text me. It’s been so long, and I finally found you, and you ignored me.
I’m quite hurt.’
He grimaced. After Beiyuan left, Zhou Zishu had been the one that hadn’t continued their contact. He could hardly remember why, anymore. Something about having no time with how busy he was with work, that in retrospect, was more like self-sabotage. He was tired, so, so tired, and he didn’t know what he wanted anymore.
He cut himself off from whatever was left, whatever still made him feel human.
‘I just didn’t check. I didn’t think you’d find this number.’
‘I have my methods :)’
‘Does Wu Xi need to enrich your environment before you cause more trouble?
I’m
Sorry, Beiyuan.’
‘Good, you should be, asshole. We missed you.
What made you check?’
Zhou Zishu slid down on the bed, and he realized he was smiling. He exhaled, and there was something closer to relief there than he ever would’ve imagined.
‘The ghost haunting my new house. What made you?’
‘Funny.
Well, a little birdy told me you quit, and didn’t even tell us. Have Tian Chuang found you?’
‘Yeah. I didn’t leave the country.
It’s fine for now. They’re just like girl scouts but with guns.’
‘That’s a distinctly horrifying image, and not comforting in the slightest, thank you.’
‘You’re welcome.
:)’
‘Please don’t ever do that smile again, it’s too ooc.
Also, quick, gimme your new address.’
Zhou Zishu frowned, examining the phone in hand for a second. What could Beiyuan want his new address for? He was a whole country away, not to mention the danger of Helian Yi catching onto his scent again. He couldn’t visit on some whim.
‘... What are you up to?’
‘Zishu! So suspicious of your old friend!
Your old friend that, need I remind you, you didn’t contact for years.’
‘Ugh. How long are you going to hold that over me?’
‘Oh, as long as I possibly can. Just hand it over, Tian Chuang already found it lol, what do you have to lose?
Or do you plan on running away again?’
It was a fair question. But he was right, and Zhou Zishu was tired of running.
‘[x]’
‘Good boy :)’
‘Duck you.
Duck.
Fuck.’
‘LOL. Also I gotta go, Wu Xi was watching over my shoulder and he’s getting really handsy now! He says hello, by the way, and that he’s sorry for suggesting we should tie you up. He’s not sorry about the tracking you down part though.’
‘Ah. I remember why I stopped texting you now.’
‘Grab a bottle of wine tomorrow, we’re calling, and you’re going to tell me everything about how you left, and what you’ve been up to.’
Zhou Zishu stared at the final text for longer than was probably necessary, before putting his phone down on the other side of the bed. Baiyi had settled down in the corner, kneading the old thick sheets idly. In the silence left behind from the conversation, he could hear something of a purr.
He was glad Beiyuan was well, and he was glad Wu Xi’s devotion was unchanged. Beiyuan would surely drag him through the mud first, and then insist on finding out what finally made Zhou Zishu leave. He wasn’t sure he could tell him.
Would Beiyuan believed he had been injured? Would he believe that Jiuxiao had yelled that he didn’t know how to call him ge anymore? Zhou Zishu waited for Jiuxiao to be ready to talk. He never came, so Zhou Zishu took the choice from him. The world moved before him, and it would move forward after him.
He didn’t block Beiyuan, but he didn’t answer the phone when it rang at midday. He was in the kitchen when his ringtone sounded, and he could feel the ghost’s curious eyes on him even without having to see him. Ignoring it, he grabbed a bottle of the cheap wine, and went to stand by the open sliding door, where the sound of his phone ringing was muffled and silenced by the sound of the rain.
He leaned against the frame, and made room for the cold empty air beside him. It was a sun shower, the light of the sun reflecting on the raindrops that dropped into heavy blobs on green leaves, slowly sliding off to the ground and leaving the grass shining with dew.
Zhou Zishu blinked, and by the vibrant green plants was a man.
The rain and sun seemed to pass right through him, but the sun still caught in his eyes, and his hair was sleek and black, damp by the water. It fell down to his lower back, half put up in a loose bun with a beautiful hairpin. He looked up at water sliding off the leaves in front of him, and the reflection of the light from the greenery seemed to make his amber eyes glow. His lips parted just so in a kind of idle wonder, a pretty pale peach in colour, and it felt like a punch in the gut.
Those sharp eyes slid lazily toward him, careful, practiced and intense.
“I’ve heard that an owl laughing is bad luck. A boy heard it, once, and he tripped. The stones he fell on scratched across the stone road, and they started a fire in the grass. Can you hear the owl, A-Xu?”
Zhou Zishu frowned at the nonsense story, and had no time to formulate a reply before the ghost was strolling ( prowling- ) toward him. His feet stopped just beyond an arm’s length away, and Zhou Zishu could see the rain behind his smile, sharp as a knife.
“Did you know, I don’t know who caused my death? I think, when I find out…” The ghost paused, and laughed, manic, the whites of his eyes expanding. He stared straight at Zhou Zishu as he said, “I’ll gut them like a fish and feed them their own bloodied organs. I’ll skin them and leave nothing but bone behind, and I’ll hang them to dry in the woods.”
Zhou Zishu crossed his arms over his chest, unimpressed. As if he hadn’t seen worse. As if he wasn’t capable of worse, for half the reason.
“Alright. Tell me your name, and I’ll see if I can find anything.”
The ghost blinked. The crazed look in his eye was gone in a flash, replaced by something genuine and utterly confused. Zhou Zishu was stupidly endeared by it.
“What?”
“I said,” Zhou Zishu stepped out onto the creaky deck, knowing just where to step without looking down. The rain drenched his hair against his neck, and stuck his clothes to his skin. He found… he didn’t care. It felt good. It felt freeing.
This was probably a last ditch attempt to scare him off, so he couldn’t know how true anything he just said was. But there was very little that could scare Zhou Zishu now, least of all the ghost that brought him his pain medication and threw him a towel to dry his hair with. He smirked, and stopped when he was toe to toe with the ghost, staring down at him at a loss.
“That if you tell me your name, I can look into who’s responsible. I don’t have the resources I did once, but I have some connections. I have a small torture kit somewhere in one of the boxes I haven’t unpacked-”
“You have a what? -”
“-and you’re free to use it. Don’t get me implicated, stop breaking my stuff, and we won’t have any problems.”
The ghost stared. The rain fell. Zhou Zishu was just about to head inside, thinking he must have broken him, when he spoke, quietly.
“Wen. Wen Kexing.”
He looked so alive in front of him. His breath caught in his throat. Zhou Zishu impulsively reached up to his face, just to see if he could touch it. If Wen Kexing would let him. He could, he was allowed to. His skin was cold to the touch. Zhou Zishu ran his thumb over his cheek, feeling the drops of rain pushed aside. The strands of hair that were outside of his bun and framing his face tickled the back of his hand, and the both of them startled.
He quickly retracted it, and masked his embarrassment.
“I’ve really… never met anybody like you,” Wen Kexing said. He looked at him the same way he looked at the vibrant green bushes in the rain. Zhou Zishu really hadn’t thought that his biggest problem after leaving Tian Chuang would be a ghost. He really, really hadn’t thought that said ghost being handsome would be the worst part of it all.
“So I’m told,” Zhou Zishu said, with more feeling than he intended, and stepped away. The rain was heavy on his eyelashes, dripping down his face, his sweater was well and truly soaked through, and his jeans were starting to uncomfortably grate against his skin. He trudged back indoors, dripping water on the wooden floors. The ghost trailed him not far behind, impossibly curious, like a puppy you just couldn’t get rid of.
“Tell me your name.”
“Zhou Xu. Didn’t you already know?”
Wen Kexing raised an amused eyebrow, clasping his hands behind his back and tilting his chin. Zhou Zishu turned on his heel, and met his gaze with just as much strength.
“I think you’re lying,” he lightly commented, as if he hadn’t heard the Tian Chuang agents say Zhou Zishu’s name just earlier. Though, he supposed if Zhou Xu was a fake ID, Zhou Zishu could just as easily be another.
“And I think you’re full of shit, but I’ve learnt to compromise,” Zhou Zishu smiled and replied just as casually. Wen Kexing laughed, deep and loud. He tried to slide an arm around him, meeting his eyes with a devilish expression.
“Really, now? You still won’t tell me? Aren’t you worried I’ll get angry?”
“Mhm. Really. Nice try, but I’m not scared of you,” Zhou Zishu shrugged the arm off him, and left him behind at the door to get a towel.
Wen Kexing watched him, eyes bright and fascinated. Zhou Zishu hadn’t thought there was anything left in him worth being looked at like that.
“Alright. I like A-Xu just fine… Swift as a willow, light as catkins. It’s fitting, for a beauty such as yourself.”
“Who’s a beauty? Fuck you,” he grumbled. Wen Kexing laughed again against the sound of the rain, his ghostly figure illuminated by the sunlight streaming in from the outside.
“Indeed, I like you just fine.”
Zhou Zishu watched him smile, and then he stared at the empty space he left behind when he disappeared. Maybe the little stretch of life he had left wouldn’t be so bad. If Wen Kexing killed him, and if Baiyi ate his corpse, then in the end, it truly wouldn’t be so bad.
“… It’s Zhou Zishu. You already knew it, anyway,” he said to the empty house, before taking a large drink of wine straight from the bottle. Wen Kexing was strange, but he saw the most violent, ugly parts of himself in him. Ghost or not, he found himself mirroring the sentiment that he’d never met anyone who left an impression on him like Wen Kexing had.
For the first time since he left, Zhou Zishu wished he had more time.