TRANSLUCENT

miss me? • 02

───── 💌! ❝ feel you on my neck when I'm calling a taxi, climbing over me while I climb in the backseat ❞

[ TEMPORARY FIX — One Direction ]

"So you're telling me..." The boy drawled out in pure disbelief, "You were cooking, and it was so disastrous that you accidentally ended up performing a summoning ritual instead?"

His reaction fueled my humiliation, but I would rather die than accept that. I felt like I was trapped in a petrifying fever dream—one that I couldn't break out of no matter how many times I pinched my arm. Some part of me still believed that my mind wasn't fully conscious. That everything in front of me was an elaborately loomed tapestry of lies. That would be giving my imagination too much credit, for it usually encircled daydreams, not horrors I couldn't comprehend.

"I have so many questions," I mumbled, trying to regulate my panicked system. I hated fear and how vulnerable it made me look. How easily it amused the catalyst.

"Well, so do I. What do you mean you couldn't cook a bowl of chicken soup? Even I can do that."

"You're one dickhead of a... a thing. You said you'd be nice if I kept quiet and heard you out."

"I said I wouldn't kill you. I have no idea how you concluded me being 'nice' from that statement." He clicked his tongue. "And don't call me a dickhead. Or a thing."

"Then what are you?"

I could feel a drop of my blood collapse against the floor, my fist drenched in crimson.

His violet hues flickered up to meet mine, holding our gazes together for a moment. It was bone-chilling, hypnotizing, like a famed witch's spell. His eyes—they were dull, yet full of colour, fettering me to my spot with invisible chains. In that flash, I knew. This was no fabricated realm of fantasy. I could not create that jolt in my veins myself. He was real. Present. Just not whole.

"All I know about myself is that I'm dead."

Those words, his voice, everything reeked of false nonchalance. I, for one, could not bring myself to put up an artificially composed visage no matter how hard I tried. I wouldn't say this thought never crossed my mind, but it was still hard to come to terms with, for some reason. A ghost. Not a poetic metaphor for Tatsuo's soul, but an actual ghost.

He probably had a corpse somewhere. His chest was an empty void, with no beating heart and expanding lungs in sight. He could not feel it tightening, could not beg for air like I could.

"...Dead?"

His hand hovered above my head for a few seconds, sliding through my skin like a winter zephyr. The action alone caused me to flinch.