Work Text:
What makes it frustrating is that it’s no one’s fault.
Jisung sits down, takes a deep breath, straightens his spine that will undoubtedly bend like a shrimp in five minutes time as soon as the repetitive task takes over his brain, grabs the automatic pipette, and begins.
An eerie silence falls on the lab, broken only by the soft hum of fridges and distant machinery. Jisung only remembers it would probably be a good idea to plug in his earphones to try and counter that unsettling quietude when his hands are already disinfected – no nitrile gloves, not so close to the Bunsen burner – and he’s way too tired to get up to get them.
The sun has set a long time ago. No one else is here anymore.
Only the lights above his team’s workbenches are on; the rest of them, belonging to a dozen other research groups, receive only a combination of the leftovers of Jisung’s overhead light, the moon that enters through the wide windows, and the small colourful screens and shiny buttons on all sorts of equipment resting heavily on the workbenches. They glimmer in the dark like fireflies, slumbering in standby, but Jisung tries to focus on the samples he still needs to plate. The transparent boxes, half full of dense bronze-coloured medium, seem to stare back at him like they’re the eyes of some unknown creature sprawled on the table in front of him.
“Very funny,” he mutters to no one but himself. “Super funny, in fact.”
He could be home by now. On a normal day, he would be. The train ride would be over and done with, and even the walk home from the station would be a memory.
He sighs. Two weeks. Two weeks of this god-forsaken protocol and he’s free from this bullshit. The results will shine like little diamonds on his thesis, and he will never again think about how his stomach is growling because it’s dinner time, his snacks have been gradually eaten over the day, and the last thing he wants to do is waste time going to the cafeteria, delaying his escape from this lab even further.
Two weeks. He’ll live.
He forces himself to focus and, who would’ve thought, work starts getting done. Little by little, small drops, dripping with more or less bacteria, fall on the plates and form neat circles on the translucent medium. They’ll grow overnight, harmless bacteria replicating in the comforting heat of the incubator.
Comforting if you’re bacteria, I guess. I wouldn’t like to be there.
Jisung pushes his glasses up with his shoulder. They keep sliding down.
It would be funny if humans worked like that. You put a bunch of them in a place that’s so comfortable that they just go ‘holy shit, this is awesome, let’s make a bunch of babies’.
He finishes a plate and slides it closer to the flame for it to dry. In a way that’s kinda what happy recently married couples do. He pouts, deep in thought. Or did. I probably won’t.
It would require getting married and stuff.
“Burning the midnight oil, huh?”
Jisung nearly falls off his chair. He drops the pipette, and it only narrowly avoids colliding with one of the finished plates before it slips to the floor, plastic tip breaking on impact.
“AH!”
He turns around, heart trying to gnaw its way out of his chest. There’s a person standing there, right next to him.
Jisung forces himself to breathe and blink, two things that are only automatic until moments like these arrive. The stranger raises his eyebrows. He looks worried, yet somewhat amused, if that almost non-existent smile curling the corner of his lips is anything to go by.
“F-Fuck!” Jisung murmurs. He places one hand on his chest, as if he could personally slow down its pace by pressing down. “I… Yeah, I guess so. Jesus.”
The young man chuckles. “Sorry,” he says. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”
Jisung dismisses the stranger’s apology with a wave of his hand. Shit, his fingers are shaking. How is he going to plate anything now? “It’s-it’s fine, really!” he exclaims, trying to sound like he didn’t almost die just now. “I just… there isn’t usually anyone here at this hour.”
He fully expects the newcomer to nod and politely leave, but to Jisung’s surprise, he sits down on a nearby stool. “Why are you here?” he asks.
“It’s just this awful protocol, you see,” Jisung bends down to grab the neglected pipette, searching for damage before he sprays it with ethanol and replaces the tip. “Takes me hours. And I can’t even start earlier or rush stuff here and there to save time because there are long waiting steps where my hands are tied.”
It’s not like him to vent to a complete stranger. Jisung silently apologises to the young man and blames it all on his exhaustion and pent-up frustration. Then, he gets back to work. The drops come out a little more irregular than before, but at this point he couldn’t care less.
“I don’t envy you,” he hears. From the corner of his eye, Jisung notices the stranger is sitting turned away from the workbench, elbows supporting his relaxed torso. It’s fine. He’s far enough from Jisung’s precious little samples.
“It’s just these two weeks,” he comments, “then I’ll never have to do it again. I’ll live. Somehow.”
For a moment, there’s only the hum of the fridge and the rainbow lights of the digital fireflies. Right when Jisung’s overwhelmed brain is about to forget the man is still there, he speaks again.
“You’re very fast,” he lightly says. “You’re barely looking at what you’re doing.”
Is this a compliment? I’ll take anything at this point.
“It’s just practice,” he says. “You should have seen me a year ago.”
“Clumsy?”
“Probably the clumsiest person alive.”
“I would never be able to tell.”
Alright, that was definitely a compliment. Jisung pauses and raises his head from the Petri dishes to the stranger. For the first time, he takes a good look at him, not one clouded by his sudden fright or by the task he has been handling.
He should be around Jisung’s age, face youthful and bright, but probably slightly shorter. He’s still sitting down, it’s hard to tell. What isn’t hard to tell, is how his dark feline eyes shine under the bright ceiling lights, how his black hair frames his doll face, how his pink lips seem to be stuck in a tiny smile. Jisung’s mouth suddenly goes a bit dry. It’s probably a good idea to look away.
“What are you doing here, though?” he asks, but not before he clears his throat. “It’s just as late for you.”
“Is it?” A low hum. Jisung fights against the temptation to turn and look. “I think I just lost track of time, honestly.”
Jisung nods. Six, seven, eight… nine more plates and he’s done. Freedom is just around the corner. “It’s easy to get distracted when you’re working hard.”
“Tell me what you’re working hard on, then.”
Surprise replaces temptation and easily wins the battle against the bacteria and the thick brown medium. Jisung turns to the boy, blinking once or twice. Jisung is clearly stuck here working overtime, but this person seems to be just… wasting his time chatting with a stranger when he could be going home? What sense does that make? Does he have to wait for a specific train or bus and prefers to do so here instead of the station? It’s either that or he’s a masochist. And yet, for someone who's almost certainly just whiling the time away, he’s very good at pretending to be genuinely interested.
Jisung mentally shrugs and discovers that it’s not entirely impossible to talk about his thesis’ while he works on it. He explains the bacteria, its characteristics and hosts, the trials and experiments he’s been doing, the trials and experiments he will still do, the trials and experiments he very much wanted to do but has now completely given up on due to time constraints. By the time he’s done, there’s only three plates left to handle.
“Interesting…” the young man muses. He had been interrupting here and there to ask a few questions, but Jisung didn’t mind. Maybe he’s still in the honeymoon phase of the project, but discussing it still excites him. “I didn’t know it was possible to do that.”
It’s really not that innovative, Jisung thinks, but he supposes everything sounds new and original to someone from the outside looking in. “What’s your topic?”
The guy’s smile is open and wide. “Something different.”
“Oh, come on,” Jisung laughs. “At least tell me your research group.”
The stranger tilts his head, but manages to look more like a mischievous cat than a confused puppy. He leans slightly forward as he speaks. “Why would I?”
“You know mine!” Jisung points at the team's logo, originally designed by Renjun and drawn by him too on a colourful piece of paper taped to a nearby shelf. Jisung loves it to death. “It’s only fair.”
“I never told you I was interested in ‘fair’.” His nonchalant shrug piques Jisung’s curiosity. A less tired version of him who hasn’t spent all day burning his own brain-cells down to the last reserves would probably stop there and let the stranger take this win. That is not, however, the version of himself that’s currently alive and breathing in front of this stupidly cute guy.
“Your name, then?”
The boy glances at the shelf right above Jisung’s head. “Even there you’re at a disadvantage,” he says. When Jisung follows his gaze, he meets the sight of a note that’s been hanging there for a few weeks now: the words ‘Jisung’s personal burrow’, written in stylised letters and decorated with tiny doodles. Renjun’s work too, of course. Jisung loves it beyond death, but right now it only symbolises the second battle lost in a row. He’s still staring at the note and trying to come up with another weapon when he hears light, pleasant laughter coming from his left.
Ah. Small crinkles form around the stranger’s eyes when he laughs. That certainly doesn’t spell disaster or anything. Not for Jisung’s butter heart.
“Fine,” the young man says. “Because you care about what’s fair that much, I’ll even tell you my surname, to even things out. I’m Chenle. Zhong Chenle.”
Chenle. Matches his face.
“Nice to meet you, Zhong Chenle,” Jisung greets, and he only realises he’s smiling when Chenle stands up from his chair.
“I’ll leave you to your plates then.”
Jisung’s heart jumps a little.
“It’s alright, you’re not…” His elbow bumps against the edge of one of the plates, and he turns away to fix it before it falls to the floor and ruins his hard work. When he turns around, he’s once again the only person in the lab.
Chenle is already gone.
“...distracting me,” he completes, a murmur that falls only on his own ears.
He gets home, takes off his coat and his shoes, and realises he’s been replaying their conversation in his head since Chenle turned around.
⊱ ─── ⌬〰°⌜⏣⌟°〰⌬ ─── ⊰
“Algae.”
“Nope.”
“Then, frogs? I think there’s still a group that works with frogs.”
“Wrong.”
“Flies? Drosophila. It has to be Drosophila.”
“Another wrong guess and you get a penalty.”
Jisung huffs, but there’s no edge to it.
It’s late again, he’s tired again, Chenle’s presence makes it a bit more bearable again.
“What’s the penalty?” he asks.
Chenle purses his lips. “Hmmm…” Then, surprisingly, a lopsided smile. “I’ll haunt your dreams forever?”
Jisung rolls his eyes and tries not to smile. “Then, can I get a reward if I get it right this time?”
“What’s the reward?” Chenle asks, his intense gaze making it very obvious that the repetition hadn’t been an accident but rather purposeful teasing.
There are several things Jisung could ask for. His number, for instance. Dinner somewhere trendy, a drink or two. He spent the entire day wondering if he’d ever seen Chenle again, given that he’s been here in the lab for over two months without ever laying eyes on him anywhere in the facilities, and now here he is, silently showing up after sunset like he’s a vampire that spends the sunlight hours hiding in some cupboard.
Jisung decides to start small. Even this is a monumental step for him, one he certainly wouldn’t be taking if he had managed to remove Chenle’s smile off his mind for the past twenty-four hours, so all that’s left is praying he sounds casual enough.
“We have lunch tomorrow.”
He realises he fucked up as soon as Chenle’s smirk grows, and he leans down like a cat smelling something delicious.
“Oh,” he slowly says, drawing out the sound like he’s tasting every edge of the word on his tongue. “Nice to know my company counts as a reward to you.”
Jisung’s teeth sink into his inner lip.
“I…! That’s not what–” he stutters. “No, I just… huh, I never see you around. I’m just starting to think I’m having some weird hallucinations.” He almost injects an awkward artificial laugh at the end but luckily manages to stop himself before he makes everything worse.
“You think I’m not real?” Chenle replies without missing a beat. “Maybe those bacteria you work with are starting to eat your brain.”
Jisung’s cheeks are burning by now. “Yeah, not exactly that kind of bacteria.” He swallows. It’s a good thing he’s not wearing gloves; they’d be all clammy and humid by now. “Do we have a deal or what?”
“Bring it on.”
“Zebrafish.”
Chenle laughs loudly. For the first time in Jisung’s life, he likes people who laugh loudly.
“I hope someone else can join you for lunch tomorrow,” Chenle says.
“Shit.”
⊱ ─── ⌬〰°⌜⏣⌟°〰⌬ ─── ⊰
It does happen; he’s not that much of a loner. Renjun and Gaeul invite him to join them, but for the first time in a good while, he refuses. By a monstrous stroke of luck, the person he’s been searching for and that never eats lunch alone, is in fact eating lunch alone. Jisung approaches him and lets his body fall on the chair in front of Donghyeok, heavily like a sack of potatoes.
“Hey, Hyeok,” he says. “How busy are you?”
Donghyeok raises his big brown eyes from his phone to him. His other hand hangs onto the second half of a sandwich.
“Well, I have a meeting starting in…” A quick glance at the screen, “five minutes, that will devour the rest of my afternoon like a hungry beast, but for you I’m never busy,” he finishes off with that awful smile he loves to do, even though he usually saves it for Renjun.
Jisung does his best to ignore it as he pulls out his lunchbox. “It’s fine, it’s not urgent,” he says, “Just a favour I’d like to ask when you have a free minute.”
“You have four minutes and thirty-nine seconds to tell me about it. Just a ballpark figure here.”
Jisung hesitates. For a second, he just holds the pink plastic lid in his hands, hovering over the table, certain that everything will sound worse outside of his own head. “I’d just like you to… find someone?”
Donghyeok dramatically gasps. “You stalker!” he tsks. “I raised you better than this.”
“That’s not it!” Jisung protests. “I guess, it’s just… a game we're playing?”
“What…?”
It’s not a long story, Jisung quickly flies through it. Donghyeok attentively listens as he munches on his sandwich.
“But he refuses to tell me which group he’s in, and I’m really curious!” Jisung adds. “So, I assumed you could maybe help? If it’s not too much trouble? He said his name is Zhong Chenle.”
After all, who could possibly find someone as easily as a close friend who works in the administrative department?
For what Jisung guesses can only be an entire hour, Donghyeok simply chews and stares at the sky. It’s a nice spring day, more than warm enough for outdoor sitting.
“I’m guessing he’s hot,” he says at last. Jisung blinks.
“What?”
Donghyeok shrugs. “Why would you care so much otherwise?”
“You–!” Jisung picks up his jaw from the ground and screws it back in place. “Maybe I want to make friends! Have you heard of that?”
“You never want to make friends!” Donghyeok counters. “You already have me and Renjun and Gaeul; what do you want other friends for? What you need is to get laid.”
Jisung hesitates for a second too long. Not off limits, if he’s down. By the grace of everything that’s sacred, Donghyeok lets his grin do all the commenting and says nothing.
“Just… Will you do it?” Jisung asks, hating how pleading his voice comes out. “It doesn’t have to be today. When you have a little break.”
Donghyeok shoves the last piece of bread in his mouth, crumbles the paper bag into a compact ball he throws at Jisung’s lap and stands up. “That would be never,” he says. “And definitely not now. Gotta go, they can and will start without me if I’m late.”
Jisung decides this is probably a good time to weaponise his puppy eyes, but something tells him it wasn’t actually necessary, because Donghyeok smiles as he walks away, back turned to the direction he’s heading.
“I’ll drill some holes in my schedule for you, baby!” he shouts, finger-guns and all. Some people stare, but Jisung smiles.
“Thanks…!” he says, but Donghyeok is already disappearing through the doors of his building.
Jisung sits there, holding the paper ball, watching his food go cold. Two questions take turns in taking up space inside his mind.
Number one: why does he care so much about all this?
Number two: is it too late to crawl back to Renjun and Gaeul’s company so that he doesn’t have to eat alone?
⊱ ─── ⌬〰°⌜⏣⌟°〰⌬ ─── ⊰
“Do you like Oasis?”
Jisung’s heart does a somersault. “They’re my favourites, yes!”
“Pearl Jam?”
“I like them too! Do you like Linkin Park?”
“Who the hell are Linkin Park?”
“Have you been living under a literal rock?”
Chenle sticks his tongue out. “Sorry I’m not a music nerd like you.”
“This is not music nerd territory. This is… common sense. My mum knows them.”
“Well, she’s your mum.”
“That’s–! Whatever. Surely you know Coldplay.”
“Who…?”
⊱ ─── ⌬〰°⌜⏣⌟°〰⌬ ─── ⊰
Chenle doesn’t always show up. It’s all a bit too silent and dull on those days. Jisung doesn't let himself think too much about it.
⊱ ─── ⌬〰°⌜⏣⌟°〰⌬ ─── ⊰
Until he can’t ignore it any further. After a while it’s plain to see that it’s getting worse.
Jisung has been thinking about Chenle way too often. He makes coffee in the morning and wonders whether Chenle will be there tonight. He grabs a donut and wonders if Chenle likes donuts. He attends a conference and wishes he were falling asleep on Chenle’s lap instead of falling asleep on this uncomfortable wooden chair. His phone buzzes and he prays Chenle has gotten his number from some unknown mutual friend that is just now making themself known.
It won’t take long for the two weeks to end, but he finds himself secretly wishing they’d last forever.
⊱ ─── ⌬〰°⌜⏣⌟°〰⌬ ─── ⊰
Donghyeok picks what’s possibly the worst occasion to visit their lab: everyone’s there. Renjun on his laptop, punching data into spreadsheets, Gaeul staring down her microscope – even Jisung’s supervisor is there, discussing something with the lab technician. Donghyeok has the grace to sit close to Jisung as he prepares some reagents he’ll need, but not to turn around and come back later when there’s no audience. Jisung decides he should consider himself lucky that Donghyeok is keeping his voice down, at the very least.
“I’m afraid I must announce I will no longer be the best man at your wedding,” is what he starts with.
Jisung blinks and stops gently shaking the bleaker he’s holding. “My what now?”
“Your mysterious stranger is full of shit.”
His heart speeds up. This can only mean that Donghyeok found something out, that there’s news, that there’s information. Bad information, it seems, but information, nonetheless. He puts down the bleaker before he spills something over.
“What do you mean?”
“There’s no one with that name working here,” Donghyeok explains. “Or studying here. Or doing lab work here for some class they technically take somewhere else.”
Jisung raises his eyebrows. Could it be that… Chenle lied? Why would he?
“Are… you sure?” he tentatively asks. “Maybe you typed in the wrong spelling? Maybe I misheard and it’s not Zhong but rather Zhang, that’s a surname too–”
From the other side of the workbench, Gaeul raises her eyes from the microscope and discreetly casts them a fleeting glance. Donghyeok just stares at him.
“Jisung.”
“Me.”
“Don’t you think I tried that?”
Very well. This either makes no sense or is a bad, bad sign. Jisung truly doesn’t know which option he prefers. He stares down at the blue-ish contents of the bleaker, head so full he doesn’t even notice Gaeul is currently silently trying to pull Renjun’s attention towards the unfolding scene. The conversation between the supervisor and the technician ends and they go their separate ways. A lie or an inconsistency.
“But that’s… strange,” is all he comes up with.
“The fact there’s apparently someone with no reason to be in these facilities talking to you when no one else is here?” Donghyeok says, matter-of-factly. He stretches his long legs under the workbench. “Yeah, I agree.”
“No, like!” Jisung huffs. “Why would he give me such a specific fake name? If I were pretending to belong somewhere, I’d say my name is, I don’t know, John Smith. There’s always one. Not something extremely unique.”
Donghyeok raises an eyebrow. “Maybe you should ask him, then,” he suggests. “Right before you report him to the security guard.”
Unfortunately, Jisung has always believed in the simple concept of the benefit of the doubt, and he’s not ready to throw that conviction away now.
“I don’t know if he’ll answer.”
⊱ ─── ⌬〰°⌜⏣⌟°〰⌬ ─── ⊰
“Donghyeok says you don’t exist.”
Chenle’s eyebrows disappear under his hair as he raises them. Is that genuine surprise in his eyes? Where’s the teasing smile? He responds to everything like it’s a lighthearted chirp, why is that changing? “That’s news to me too.”
Unless Donghyeok is right. Unless there really is something that doesn’t add up. Jisung hangs onto the few cells in his body that contain even the slightest percentage of optimism and turns his eyes to his Petri dishes to avoid looking into Chenle’s beautiful eyes. That would make everything more difficult than it needs to be.
“He says there’s no one at this institute with your name,” he continues.
Chenle lets out a giggle, but it comes a second too late, an inch too forced. Jisung’s heart tightens a tiny little bit. There’s always a caveat, a downside. Maybe he’s just unlucky.
“You’re cheating,” Chenle says, voice almost back to his usual cheerfulness. “Requesting other people’s help to know more about me isn’t exactly fair.”
“I wasn’t getting very far otherwise.” He subconsciously tightens his hold on the pipette. “So?”
“So?”
At this point he’s just keeping the plastic tip uselessly suspended over the plate. He discards it, puts the gizmo down, and digs up the courage he needs to face Chenle. He either loves the jumper he’s wearing, or owns a collection of identical items, because Jisung doesn’t think he’s seen him wear anything else.
“Why are you here if you don’t work here?” he asks. Too quickly, that’s for sure, but he needs to get it over with before he regrets it. “It’s either that or you’re lying about your name.”
It’s not that he wanted to corner Chenle… Alright, maybe he wanted to corner Chenle a bit. But in actuality, what he truly wants is an answer. A simple, genuine answer, so they can go back to how things were just half a week ago. God knows Jisung desperately wants to return to that stage, it was paradise both on its own and especially when compared to this doubt that blooms inside his chest.
Whether or not he meant to drag Chenle to a dead-end, it seems to have worked. He sighs.
“It’s not that.”
“What do you mean?”
Chenle smirks, but there’s not much humour in it. “Now you think I’m here to rob equipment or harm you somehow,” he says. “That’s not it at all.”
“Then what is it?” Jisung insists. Fuck, he hates this. He hates insisting, prying, snooping around, demanding answers, ripping them from people’s tongues. But there’s not much choice here.
“I wasn’t lying about my name,” Chenle admits after a while. He is, like always, sitting next to Jisung, further than where Donghyeok sat the other day. He’s not looking down, his voice is not trembling. At least this part must be true – at least, Jisung takes the risk of trusting this portion of his words.
He nods, but he’s not done. His heart is beating way too fast for what’s probably considered healthy. “Alright,” he says. “Then how did you get in? Did you climb the fence? Because you can only enter through the gate with your personal card or if you tell the security guard someone invited you, but then he’d check and–”
Chenle raises his hands, but doesn’t come any closer. He always stays like this, at arm’s length. “Jisung, calm down.”
“Yeah, I don’t think I can.”
Chenle sighs and runs his hands through his dark hair. It bounces, fluffy and somewhat frizzy with the spring humidity, and there’s another universe out there where Jisung just wants to touch it, instead of wanting to go home right this instant.
“I just… I need to be here for a bit,” Chenle starts. His smile has completely vanished. “Can you trust me? Please. I promise you I’m not doing anything wrong.” Maybe he’s forcing the smile, maybe it’s a genuinely sad one. Jisung’s not sure he can tell those two options apart. “I get it, alright? It’s a bit hard to trust someone who’s clearly hiding stuff from you, but I… I have my reasons. You don’t have to do anything, we’ll just hang out as usual. Just don’t report me.”
At some point during Chenle’s short speech, Jisung’s eyes ended up drifting to an arbitrary point on the wall in front of him, and there they remain. He tries to flip through the pages of his mental dictionary but it’s like someone has erased all the words, replacing them with a big blank nothing.
“If you think you can’t do it,” Chenle carefully continues, “you can–”
Jisung closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. “No, it’s fine.”
“Jisung, I mean it, I wasn’t trying to guilt-trip you into–”
“No, no, I mean it too,” he says. Heart of butter, that’s what his mum used to say. Renjun caught wind of it one time and immediately added it to his dictionary. “It’s alright. You aren’t doing anything wrong, not that I know of.”
Chenle’s shoulders relax, relief washing over his entire frame. “Thank you, you’re the best,” he says. “Seriously, thank you. I don’t know what I would’ve done without you.”
Jisung can only hum a choked-out sound in response. Don’t say those things. They’re dangerous.
⊱ ─── ⌬〰°⌜⏣⌟°〰⌬ ─── ⊰
Things end up going back to what they used to be. Chenle is too charming and cool, and Jisung could easily be spread over warm toast. He tethers an inch closer to insanity every time Chenle comes around and listens to him. That’s the thing, he listens. He asks questions when it’s opportune, and talks Jisung’s ears off when it’s his turn, but otherwise he pays attention to Jisung’s words. When Jisung needs to devote his attention to a harder part of the protocol and goes silent in concentration, Chenle doesn’t pull out his phone, he simply does his share of the talking or walks around examining the contents of the lab shelves. He furrows his brows as he reads the labels on the bottles and boxes, and Jisung finds it hard to concentrate with the beautiful sight of his side profile right next to him.
⊱ ─── ⌬〰°⌜⏣⌟°〰⌬ ─── ⊰
“Who sits here?”
“Renjun. He’s a PhD student, and basically my co-supervisor. Taught me everything I know.”
“And here?”
“That’s usually Gaeul’s spot, but she likes to hop around. She’s an undergrad, she’s just doing a project for some class she’s taking at her university.”
“And this is your burrow. Why burrow?”
“Back when I didn’t know anyone well, I’d just sit there all day in that little corner, hoping to go by unnoticed. Didn’t really work.”
“That’s cute.”
Jisung violently blushes. He hopes Chenle hasn’t noticed.
“And over here?”
“It’s, huh, it’s technically – ahem – the PI’s seat, but it’s just for when we all meet or something. He has his own office.”
“One day you’ll have your own.”
“You think so?”
“Of course. Why not?”
Why not. There are many ‘why not’s swirling around Jisung’s mind, and several of them include inviting Chenle to hang out this weekend.
His courage fails him every time.
⊱ ─── ⌬〰°⌜⏣⌟°〰⌬ ─── ⊰
“Where the hell are you? I went to your burrow like three times thinking I had landed on your coffee breaks the first two, but you’re still not here.”
There is, in fact, a large cup of coffee right next to Jisung, even though it has long gone lukewarm. Jisung got distracted with work, that’s the main reason, but the other is that the mug in question was a terrible choice that he only noticed far too late. There’s a cat drawing on it and it painfully reminds him of Chenle.
“I’m home,” he says. “Remote work. I had no lab work today.”
Donghyeok snorts. “Lucky bastard. Well, let me tell you: not only I won’t be your best-man, but I’ll also probably not attend the wedding either. As a form of protest.”
Jisung rubs his forehead. There’s already a headache brewing in his skull from the graph he’s been trying to code for the past hour, so he truly didn’t need another one. He should probably tell Donghyeok he’s busy and tell him to call later, but alas. “What in the world are you talking about?”
“As a matter of fact, you should break up.”
“Donghyeok!”
“Your guy! He fucking sucks.”
Jisung almost doesn’t want to ask, but how will he rest otherwise? After all, he got himself into this mess, he could have easily accepted Chenle cryptic silence as an amusing quirk and moved on. A ‘what you don’t know can’t hurt you’ kind of situation, the kind of stuff no one in their right mind actually believes. “Why? Did you figure something out?”
“I did, yes.” Jisung closes his eyes and braces himself. “I wasn’t going to snoop around any further, but I kept thinking about it. It looked important to you. So instead of just searching for current researchers, which is what I’d logically been doing, I went and looked at past researchers.”
“And?”
“Have you heard of that fire that destroyed the building you work at?”
Jisung furrows his brow. “What?” he murmurs. “I… think so? But wasn’t that in the 90’s?”
“Yeah.” Donghyeok’s voice softens. “It was awful, honestly. Five people unfortunately died. Guess the name of the youngest one.”
Jisung’s heart drops. Donghyeok keeps talking, but he barely even registers it.
It can’t be.
It really can’t be.
How can this be?
There must have been… some mistake. A coincidence. Similar names, or similar enough.
Something. Something that’s not the only answer he finds himself able to think about. There has to be another explanation.
He slots his phone between his shoulder and his jaw, opens his browser and starts typing, fingers sliding over his keyboard almost automatically like his muscles have turned on autopilot mode, now that they’ve realised the only thing in his brain is panicked static. Donghyeok is still talking.
“Isn’t this really scummy?” he says, outraged. “Not only is he lying, but he’s also pretending to be someone who died thirty years ago! In the 90’s! You weren’t even alive in the 90’s! Why would he say that?”
The results of the search pop up. Jisung clicks the first link. It’s an archived news article, and it seems to include photos.
“Y-yeah,” he manages to mutter.
The pictures take a few seconds to load. They’re in age order. Donghyeok said he was the youngest, didn’t he?
There’s not even any surprise when Jisung gets to the last image. Deep down, he already knew.
It’s a good photo. Chenle’s smile looks just as pretty as it does in real life.
Jisung slams the laptop shut and rubs his hand on his face. Fuck, it’s shaking. All of him is shaking like a leaf.
Donghyeok’s voice sounds like it’s reaching him from the depths of a deep abyss. “Are you alright?”
A deep breath, taken as far away from the phone as his stretched-out arm allows him, in hopes Donghyeok doesn’t hear it. It’s fine. He’ll handle it. The person he’s been talking to and slowly developing a crush on has been dead for thirty years. It’s alright. Common occurrence, really.
“Yeah.” The word comes out conspicuously strange, but Jisung can’t deal with another second of this. “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Uh, listen I’m a bit busy right now, so we’ll talk later, alright?”
“Are you sure–”
Jisung’s fingertip is already hovering over the red button. “See you, Hyeok.”
He hangs up without another word. Then, he places the phone down and stares at the photo on his screen. He’s half expecting Donghyeok to call back, worried for good reason, but he doesn’t. He must have understood Jisung needs some time, even if he doesn’t exactly understand why.
The abandoned coffee grows cold ice-cold, but Jisung still doesn’t touch it. He reads the article over and over again, studies the grainy picture like he’s observing it under one of the microscopes on his workbench. It was plants, after all. Chenle used to work with plants. Arabidopsis.
Used to. Before the fire took him.
⊱ ─── ⌬〰°⌜⏣⌟°〰⌬ ─── ⊰
“Ah. So you found out.”
The two weeks are over. There’s no reason for Jisung to be here so late, the protocol is over and done with, but he finds himself staying after everyone else has left once again. Tonight, he sits in front of a squeaky-clean workbench, void of bacteria, Petri dishes, pipettes or burners. By the time Chenle walks in and finds him there, he has barely moved in over an hour, but his sudden voice startles him. Jisung shudders, subconsciously rolling the chair away from Chenle before he can even realise what he’s doing.
Chenle notices. He sighs, but there’s no annoyance in his voice when he speaks.
“Jisung, I won’t hurt you,” he calmly says. “Didn’t I have plenty of chances to do that already?”
He comes closer, but remains standing instead of sitting down on the nearest chair. It’s still a few metres away from Jisung’s spot, too far for a conversation like this, and it’s not like Chenle can grab it and pull it closer. Jisung placed the chair there on purpose, and his theory was proven right, it seems.
“I guess,” he murmurs.
For the first time this evening, he looks directly into Chenle’s eyes. It’s cruel how real he looks. How solid, how tangible. There’s no layer of unreality, no transparency, no shimmer under the strong lights raining down from the ceiling. If Jisung didn’t know any better – like he used to – he’d say Chenle is really, physically there. How could anyone ever guess?
“You could have told me,” he blurts out.
Chenle patiently tilts his head. “Would you have believed me?”
“Probably.”
“Superstitious, huh?”
“A bit.” He shrugs, but it’s too casual to ever make sense, too careless to match his stiff posture, his bitten lips, his jittery eyes. “So, it really is true,” he continues. “You really are… a ghost.”
Chenle steps closer, and Jisung just wants to feel something that doesn’t originate from the inside of his aching heart. The scent of cologne, human warmth, the weight of a close presence shifting the molecules on his skin to make itself known. There’s nothing, of course. How hadn’t he noticed Chenle’s footsteps never made any noise?
Chenle reaches out his hand like he plans to place it over Jisung’s, frozen like a statue on the table. Instead of his nerve endings picking up the texture of Chenle’s palm, there’s not even a drop in temperature. Chenle’s hand just phases through his own like a hologram, and Jisung’s eyes sting with tears.
“I guess that’s the right word, yeah,” he softly says, and he takes his hand back.
Jisung sucks in a breath and steels himself. After Donghyeok’s call, he spent the rest of the day thinking about this, hours spent turning over endless questions and ideas, that were simply followed by countless hours of sleepless deliberations. He barely even tried to work today, he knew it’d be useless. He came to the lab hours later than usual so it would be less obvious he’s behaving like a zombie, and even then, he’s not entirely sure he didn’t see Renjun and Gaeul exchanging puzzled looks. To summarise: he’s ready for this. Still in shock, of course, but duty calls. This is not about himself.
“How can I help?”
Chenle blinks, surprised. “Huh?”
“You’re… stuck here, right?” Jisung starts. “Isn’t that why you’re here? Because something kept you from… crossing over to the other side?”
“I’m not just stuck here,” Chenle corrects. “I’m stuck in my life, I assume. Sometimes I’m here, sometimes I’m home. I show up at my parents’ house once in a while. The train, the coffee shop I used to go to, my favourite grocery store, the basketball court.” A heavy pause. For the first time since they met, Chenle looks sad. “I just wander.”
Jisung heart aches. He’s never been the touchy type, so it strikes him as a cruel joke that the first person he wants to initiate a hug with is precisely the one that’s off limits.
“Are there other ghosts?” he asks instead.
“I’ve barely seen any.”
“Really?” Jisung frowns. “In thirty years? That must be lonely.”
Chenle hesitates for far too long, but he’s smiling again by the time he finds his words again. Jisung wants to believe he can no longer trust anything his own two eyes see, but it’s hard to ignore the longing that shines in his eyes.
“It hasn’t really been thirty years to me, you know?” Chenle says, sitting back down. There’s this softness in his voice, a certain vulnerability that hadn’t been there before. “I’m not always here, at least not consciously. I come and go. I don’t really get it either.”
“And you haven’t managed to get anyone to help you?”
Chenle remains sitting, but leans back, relaxedly placing his elbows on the workbench. He’s so close. In any other circumstance, Jisung would be able to feel Chenle’s thigh touching his knee.
“Wanna know a secret?” Chenle asks.
“Of course.”
“I had never met anyone who could see me yet.”
Jisung’s jaw drops. “What?!”
“Really.” He nods enthusiastically. “I wasn’t expecting you to hear me when I talked to you that first time, I was just as surprised as you were. I was making a joke to myself.”
“But… that makes no sense.” Jisung scratches the back of his head, playing their conversations in his brain like he’s rewinding old VHS tapes. “You made me promise I wouldn’t tell anyone you were here!”
“Fine,” Chenle says with a smirk, “next time, I’ll let you go through the embarrassment of claiming there’s a mysterious stranger invading the lab, only for them to come here and see an empty room.”
Heat creeps up Jisung’s cheeks. “Oh. Okay, thank you.” He bites his lip before he continues, fighting against the urge to play with the hem of Chenle’s jumper. His fingers would only find air, if he were to try. Is that why Chenle always sat a few metres away from him? To prevent accidental touches that could give his secret away? “But still, I had never seen a ghost before. Why can I see you?”
“I don’t think there are many of us, you know. That’s a good thing, I suppose. Not many people get stuck here.”
Jisung searches through every corner of his brain for possible answers. “Do you know why you got stuck? Did you leave your research unfinished?”
“Technically, but I don’t think that’s it.” He laughs. “I don’t think I cared that much.”
“Then… Let me think–”
When Chenle smiles like this, he almost looks fond. He almost gives Jisung’s heart something to hopelessly look for.
“Jisung, it’s alright,” he gently says. “You don’t have to help me.”
“But I want to,” Jisung insists. Then, he remembers how Chenle pretended he had ignored the comment on the loneliness of the afterlife. “Were you alone? When you… you know–”
“You can say it. When I died.” He stresses the last word, like someone teaching a foreign language to a beginner. “Not saying won’t undo it. Wish it would.”
There it is again. Jisung says nothing this time. He leaves the space between them open for something only Chenle could ever provide.
And he does. He understands.
“I was, yes,” he softly says. It barely lasts, he’s hiding behind a smile-shaped mask in no time, but it’s something. Jisung was there and he saw it. “But I don’t think that’s it, really. I’m not that needy.”
Give him time. Thirty years is a long time, but if he spent them alone, that’s not really helping at all.
Jisung nods with a smile. “Alright,” he says. Fuck, he needs to tuck his hands under his thigh, pressed between his body and the cushion of his chair, to keep them from trying to caress Chenle’s knuckles. “Then, we’ll figure it out. In the meantime, we can chat if you want.”
Chenle’s cat eyes are so beautiful. They capture the boring light of the ceiling lamps and turn it into constellations. “Yes, that would be nice.”
“There’s another option,” Jisung suddenly remembers.
“What do you mean?”
“You can’t interact with other living beings, just me. And I can’t see other ghosts, just you.”
Surprise parts Chenle’s lips, suspending him in a moment of awed disbelief. The first drafts of a smile are born and his eyes shine with what could be hope, but then he clenches his jaw before his chin has time to tremble with poorly contained emotion.
“You mean that I was meant to stay here until you could set me free?” He huffs. “Kinda cocky of you.”
I wish I could hug you. I wish I could kiss you. I wish I could keep you.
Jisung shrugs, but he matches Chenle’s smile. “Yeah, you’re right,” he says. “That’s probably not it at all.”
⊱ ─── ⌬〰°⌜⏣⌟°〰⌬ ─── ⊰
It was it.
Jisung knows it was it because Chenle doesn’t come back ever again.
Every once in a while, he once again stays in the lab after everyone has left, even when there’s absolutely nothing to do. The first few times were hard. It hurt. He kept raising his head from whatever menial task he used to keep himself busy, thinking he’d heard Chenle’s voice, almost believing he’d caught a glimpse of his green jumper from the corner of his eye. Invariably, there was nothing. It took him a handful of lonely nights from him to accept the truth.
Now, he goes expecting nothing and receiving nothing in return. It’s alright. If he closes his eyes and stays very quiet, he can almost hear what’s left of Chenle’s laughter, suspended between these walls forever, as long as there’s someone who remembers, someone who was here, someone who helped.
It’s not exactly enough to soothe his heart, but he likes to think there’s a version of himself that’s falling asleep with Chenle in his arms.
The real one. Flesh and bone.