A/N: I am late. I know. I am incredibly unorganised on top of being kind of terrified of posting these things so I managed to forget that RoChu week actually started yesterday... sorry.

Okay, so this story is seven chapters, each with the title of the prompt for the RoChu week day they're (supposed to be) posted on. Some of the links with the titles are a little bit (very) dubious, for example this first one here, but there's nothing I can do about that right now. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So yeah. Here we go.


1. sino-soviet

For as long as he can remember, Ivan Braginsky has seen ghosts.

First it was the old, battered war veteran that lived in Ivan's attic - a cold, stoic man whom Ivan only ever knew as General Winter, sulking icily in the furthest corner of the house he could find. Ivan used to try to warm him up, talk to him, but General Winter was never very responsive.

Not many ghosts are, really, but Ivan is fairly certain General Winter was quite high up on the list of least talkative ones. He was an enigma - Ivan never even learned the ghost's real name, or if he was related to the Braginskys, or anything at all - because the ghost chasers got in there eventually and after that there was no more General Winter.

He had heard of the ghost chasers in passing before, an organisation that removed the overstaying spirits from this world before they could become a problem, but that was his first real interaction with them. Ivan can't say he was sad, either, when the ghost chasers exorcised General Winter out of the physical world, because ghosts do not belong on this plane of being and he is more than aware of that. Over the years Ivan sees more than one ghost exorcism in his life and none of the ones he witnesses truly upset him.

He knows it's what needs to happen, so he doesn't complain.

The exorcism of General Winter did, however, leave Ivan somewhat lacking a familiar ghost to talk to. His house was in a rural area, far from anywhere ghosts generally liked to be, and until Ivan's older sister went to university he had no choice but to forget about ghosts entirely.

When Katyusha went to university Ivan's entire family packed up and moved to Moscow to be nearer to her, and the moment Ivan set foot in the city he suddenly saw more ghosts in one day than he'd ever seen in his life. They converged around nursing homes and hospitals, seemingly comforted by the lingering scent of death-

-which is why Ivan found it so strange, meeting a ghost wandering the grounds of Katyusha's university.

He had been taken to an open evening at the place and had wandered away from his parents out of boredom, looking for something interesting, and in a small courtyard surrounded by frosty little trees he had discovered the ghost of a boy - probably the youngest ghost that fourteen-year-old Ivan had ever seen. It had taken a few seconds for the ghost to figure out that Ivan was aware of him, but after that it did not take long for Ivan to learn that he was the ghost of a student at the university who died on its grounds in the 1960s, beaten to death by his classmates because of his appearance.

The ghost had said he didn't know whether it was because he resembled a girl or because he was a Chinese student in Russia - Ivan hadn't been sure which one was worse.

He had sat outside in that cold, dark little quiet courtyard, seemingly talking to nothing, for what felt like hours yet only seconds at the same time, until people came looking for him after noticing that he was missing. The ghost had watched him go, silently staring, and as the rest of the evening went on Ivan had been unable to stop thinking about him.

He became particularly aware of the plaque in the hall, a small, nondescript sign recognising the loss of a student and a friend, Yao Wang.

When he got home he spent much of the following night researching the case - it turned out in the 1960s there was a legal case about what punishment to give the group of college students convicted. It turned out Yao Wang's family in China were angry because the boys who killed their son and brother were given a punishment that was "not severe enough".

After that, he didn't see the ghost of Yao Wang again for years.

He finished school, joined the ghost chaser ranks, exorcised a few old ghosts outstaying their welcome or causing trouble, started university and suddenly there was Yao Wang again. The ghost chaser guild hadn't caught him yet, Yao said, he was just too good for them, and although the ghost chasers were about exorcism Ivan let Yao stay with him.

Fast-forward through a year of university, a year of all-nighters spent trying to tune out the sound of Yao complaining about another story from his lifetime as he drifts around the room, and suddenly Ivan Braginsky is the ghost chaser that's desperately in love with a ghost.