Chapter Text
A new day has Mika waking up in a sour mood, rubbing at his eyes and yawning. Sunlight blares in from the window, incessantly hot and much too bright for the hour, and it has him wondering if getting up would be worth it. It's not often that they let him pull off a full night's rest. He has the bags under his eyes to prove it.
After sitting up on his bed in a sleepy daze, pondering for several minutes, Mika finally makes the painful decision to get up. He drifts to his bathroom to start his daily routine. Often times, Mika likes to think of himself as any other college student in the world.
He brushes his teeth. He rinses and repeats.
He looks up and sees a ghost staring back at him in the mirror, smiling toothily.
He splashes water on his face to wash the sleep away.
He closes his eyes and Sees a flash of a man with red hair and a wrinkly-cheeked smile die from cardiac arrest.
He gets dressed and takes extra care to make sure he's wearing trousers.
His definition of breakfast is three cups of coffee with no sugar and half a cream.
So to some extent, Mika is like any other college student in the world. He drinks more coffee than he does water. He spends the latest hours of the night writing reports and essays because the rest of his time has been otherwise wasted. He skips class whenever he can't find a reason not to.
The only thing that really separates him from the rest is this: Mika is a psychic.
And Mika firmly believes that that is precisely why he is worse off than any other college student in the world.
"Off to school today? What a good student," Ferid Bathory, the resident spirit — and resident fuckboy, if you'd asked Mika in one of his better moods — simpers cheerfully.
Mika, definitely not in an even marginally good enough mood to humour one such as Ferid, wordlessly flips him off. He adjusts the strap of his computer bag so that it dangles by his hip and slips his phone into his pocket. Krul had offered to give him a ride today but Mika had firmly refused, knowing that had he accepted, she would probably expect him to model for her agency again. Mika had fallen for it once and vowed never to allow a second.
"It's a relationship of give-and-take, sweetie," Krul would always say, saccharine and sweet as a child, just before coercing someone to do her bidding.
Besides that, dealing with Ferid's bullshit and hers so early in the morning would probably put him in a murderous rage for the rest of the day. While it's satisfying to stalk by other students on campus and see them cower away in fear and tiptoe around him as if traversing a minefield, it can get rather tiring when even the cashier at the local coffee shop is shaking too badly to make his order properly.
The silver-haired spirit drifts after him, trying to catch his attention by ripping off his own arm and waving it around. Mika sneers at the bloody mess it leaves behind, even though he knows that it isn't really there and can't actually stain his carpet and ruin his walls. It's the principle of the matter.
"Not hungry?" Ferid asks innocently.
"Fuck off," Mika snaps, wishing he could somehow make the man shut up for good. Ever since he'd moved in here a year ago, he hasn't had a single moment of peace. The spirit had claimed that this had been where he'd died — that he couldn't bring himself to move on, because regrets, humans being too interesting, death being boring, and other such bullshit. Mika hadn't bought any of it and still adamantly refuses to. He knows the silver-haired freak is here for a far darker reason. They all are. All the spirits.
Ferid is no different, even if he is probably about a million and one times more aggravating.
Mika grabs his keys from the rack and tosses the nearest projectile — a slipper — at Ferid's head, even though something like that is only good for shutting the spirit up for about five seconds before he reappears again.
Still, there's a certain amount of satisfaction that goes with the sight, enough to make it worthwhile.
"So feisty," Ferid comments with a casual wave of his severed hand. "Bye-bye, Mi-Mika-kun! Don't forget to bring me back a sacrificial body!"
Mika shuts the door on his face and thanks small mercies that, while Ferid had been lying about his tether to this world, he hadn't been lying about the apartment being where he'd died. Mika knows this for certain because the spirit never tries to follow him out.
He'd only just stepped out into the hallway before a familiar lancing pain builds up behind his eyes and has to brace himself on the wall as he rides out his newest vision.
He sees flashes of colour. Black. Green. So much green that it practically blinds him. Red. He looks up and sees Krul — she's saying something urgently, grabbing his hand — he shakes her off. He smells the sharp stench of fresh paint. Then he turns —
Green. That's the first thing he sees when his vision ends abruptly, the searing pain in his head disappearing so suddenly that he almost feels whiplash. Disoriented, Mika feels lost, like he'd been standing on a carpet and it had been pulled right from under him. That's when he realises that the comparison is not so far off, as he's currently lying flat on his back, staring up into someone's eyes — green, the colour of rainforests and calm — and forcibly jerks himself back to reality by discreetly pinching his thigh.
The stranger straddling his hips has his brows furrowed with concern. "Hey, are you okay? Did you crack your head open or something?" He gives Mika a hard shake. "Hey. Hey. Can you hear me? Snap out of it — "
"I'm fine," Mika says, brushing him off and sitting up with confusion. My visions have never just... ended that way before, he thinks, puzzled. Why had this one been different?
The man scrambles back out of his space, pupils blown wide and cheeks flushed oddly endearingly.
"... What happened?" Mika demands. "Why am I on the ground?"
The guy looks momentarily baffled by Mika's reaction. Then just as quickly, his bewilderment morphs into a glare of defensive anger. "Well, you were standing in the middle of the hall, blocking the way! I was just trying to move my things and you ran into me!"
"I ran into you," Mika echoes sceptically.
"... Don't sweat the details. Your head's working okay, so no harm, no foul. Just watch where you're going next time."
Mika pats the back of his head gingerly. "... I'm bleeding."
"Details," the guy insists. "Anyway, are you just gonna sit here all day? 'Cause I still have to move my desk and I can't exactly levitate it over your head."
Mika levels him an incredulous stare, then looks pointedly down at the hand still clasped around his forearm.
The guy's face reddens as he pulls away and Mika wonders if that amount of blushing is healthy. His arm tingles oddly where their skin had met.
Maybe I should've stayed in bed after all, he thinks, picking at the blood that's gotten into his fingernails. He doesn't feel too dizzy anymore so he probably doesn't have a concussion, but staying home would probably be safer...
Then he's immediately and thoroughly dismayed at the thought of spending the day locked up with Ferid mother-fucking Bathory.
God... he's caught on all sides now, isn't he?
Then again... Mika eyes the man in front of him, who's fidgeting like he's fighting to stay irritated, and thinks, maybe not.
With a frigid stare, Mika asks, "You ran into me... with a desk?"
"W-What! No! I was holding the desk when I ran into you!"
"So you did run into me." Mika feels an unexplainable urge to run around in circles screaming "A-hah! I've got you!" and battles to keep the childish thought out of his expression.
"If your head works, can't you just let it go?" he grumbles.
"I'm a med student. If my memory gets affected, I have every right to sue you," Mika says smugly. He pulls out his phone and proceeds to play his winning card in a very business-like tone. "I'm going to need your contact details."
"What the fuck?!" Mika watches the guy panic, feeling like a cat that just caught the canary. He's startled out of his glee when his head is roughly manhandled by hands digging and patting around frantically through his hair. "It's just a small bump! Like, the size of... of... something really small! You can't sue me for this!"
Mika clicks his tongue. "Assault, and now harassment," he lists on his fingers, keeping his face carefully devoid of emotion and hoping with vague desperation that the man isn't studying law. "Anything else you want to add?"
The man retracts his hands again, eyes wide. Green. Perhaps this is what Mika had been Seeing. "... You've got to be kidding me."
"Contact details, or I'll call the police right here and now," Mika threatens.
He thinks he hears, "Oh my God. This asshole..." and, "Guren's gonna kill me," muttered under the guy's breath but Mika pretends he doesn't. He lets the man take his phone and tap away, angry grumbling punctuating each press of the screen. When it's over, Mika snatches his phone back.
"'Yuuichirou', huh." Double-checking the number, he gives it a test-call, nodding when there's an answering ring from the other man's pocket. Mika hangs up and slips his phone away. "I'll be in touch, then, Yuu-chan." He stands with finality and is only half faking it when he sways and wobbles on his feet and has to hug the wall to stay standing.
Mika hears an irritated sigh, but he's too busy trying to make the world stop spinning to react properly. On second thought, I might have a concussion after all.
Just brilliant.
"Wait," Yuu mutters, grabbing him again by the arm. "Just... wait over there. Let me get my desk inside and you can come in. I've got... first-aid stuff."
Mika only manages a soft groan, holding a hand to his forehead while Yuu manoeuvres him over by the shoulders. Just how hard had he hit the ground?
Squinting through his lashes, he watches his new neighbour — go figure, the guy Mika just threatened with legal action lives right next door — roll up his sleeves and proceed to lift a weighty-looking ceramic desk with just his bare hands and walk into his apartment, the only sign of strain being his initial grunt of effort. After it's done, Yuu comes back out, dusts off his hands and shoves them into his pockets like he hadn't just lifted what had likely been an eighty-pound object and moved it about twenty meters.
He's stronger than he looks, Mika thinks wearily as he staggers after Yuu into his apartment. And when Yuu kicks the door shut behind them carelessly, Mika very nearly screams when he sees a girl, pale and gruesomely dismembered, staring at him over by the kitchen counter. He tries to calm his breathing — it's just a spirit, she can't touch you, she's just a spirit — and has to dig his nails, hard, into the skin of his palms to let the pain ground him because she's still looking at him, and, oh god, what the fuck happened to her eye — it's fucking gone —
"Hey... Do you need to sit down or something?" Yuu's voice comes, breaking him out of his staring contest with the dead girl.
He squeezes his eyes shut and backs away. His back hits something hard — it's the door; get it together already, you're making a fool of yourself! — and his eyes fly open in panic.
"I have to go," he manages out.
Yuu's staring at him, irritation forgotten and replaced by wary befuddlement. "Sit down for a second. You're going to pass out — "
"I have to go. Now," Mika whispers, fumbling for the doorknob because the girl has gotten to her feet, braided hair swinging over a burnt, skeletal shoulder. "I have to — "
"Hey."
Mika stops because Yuu has him by the arm in a firm grip and, even when Mika blinks twice, then three times to be extra sure, the ghost is nowhere to be seen.
It had vanished the moment Yuu laid a hand on him.
How is that... possible?
"Calm down and just sit for a second, would you? It's not like I'm gonna kill you or something. Jeez."
Yuu pulls away. Mika sucks in a breath. The girl is back, and she's standing close — too close. Mika swears he can almost smell her burnt flesh.
He isn't imagining things. Yuu's touch, it... Somehow...
Yuuichirou Amane. Mika wonders what kind of person could be capable of making the dead disappear. But, tearing his eyes away from the spirit, Mika knows that he does not care about that one bit.
There's only one thing that matters now: he needs those hands on him again.
"I..." He doesn't know how to get Yuu to touch him. Make it go away. Help me. He doesn't know how to say any of it without sounding completely insane.
Luckily, Yuu takes the lost look on his face for dizziness and grabs hold of him again, pulling Mika's arm over his shoulders. "You're lucky I've got a couch already, or you'd be sitting on a box," he grumbles. Mika lets himself be taken over to the living area, looking back only once at the empty spot where the dead girl had only just been standing.
He sits gingerly on the plastic-covered couch, and Yuu draws back to go and get the first-aid kit. Mika watches him leave, barely managing to restrain the urge to grab him and make him stay, all the while trying to ignore the way the girl re-appears right next to him, close enough that had she been corporeal, their arms might have brushed.
She doesn't say anything but he can feel her eyes on him. The spirits don't usually speak to him; preferring to scream or hiss like animals in his ear. Mika wonders why it had to be him — wonders what he'd done that they need to torture him so.
She reaches out and her fingers pass right through him.
Mika's breathing quickens, goosebumps rising on his flesh. Don't let her know you can see her and Stop touching me, leave me alone, plays like a mantra in his head. But like godsend, Yuu comes back carrying a large box, just as Mika feels on the very brink of losing his mind.
Yuu sets the box down by his feet and reaches out; brings a steady hand to Mika's hair, and Mika finds himself thinking, really, what a brilliant thing it would be indeed to have this man touch him forever.
Mika looks into green eyes — green, like sage and peace — and comes to a slow decision.
Yuuichirou Amane...
I'm going to make him mine. By any means necessary.