Warnings: Disturbing supernatural imagery; eye trauma.

The Ghost in You

Chapter 14:

"Haunting You in Parachute Pants"

Kuwabara's landlady answered the door on the third knock and was absolutely delighted to see him.

It wasn't the first time he'd met his landlady—or, more accurately, the mother in law of the current landlord. She had been the landlady before her daughter's son took over; now she was retired and enjoying herself immensely, she was quick to assure him. She lived on the ground floor, near the information office, and as soon as she saw Kuwabara on her doorstep she took him by the arm and bustled him inside for a cup of tea—not that her warmth towards him was surprising. She liked Kuwabara. He'd helped her carry her groceries home a few days after he moved in and had never had a noise complaint. Plus, he was always polite (Shizuru had beaten it into him), so when he asked if she'd be willing to speak with him about the history of the apartment complex, she was all too happy to oblige. As soon as the tea was served, she sat down and started to chatter, reciting the history of her acquisition of the building with gusto.

As she talked, Kuwabara sipped his tea and politely listened. Raptly listened, actually. Normally he'd be bored to tears listening to someone talk about building codes and deed restrictions and weathering the stock market collapse of the early 90s or whatever, most of it went over his head, but now he hung on his landlady's every word. The dry subject matter kept him from thinking about the moment he'd wrenched back his shower curtain to find Roza standing there in his tiny bathroom, big brown eyes all shiny like a deer's or something as she stared at him, and then when they got done screaming in surprise she'd smiled real big and it made her eyes sparkle and then she made that comment about his abs, oh shit oh shit oh shit oh fuck—

Kuwabara picked up his mug of tea and chugged—more to hide the red in his cheeks than out of thirst, though. Don't think about what happened, Kuwabara told himself with every scalding mouthful. Don't think about the pretty ghost girl almost seeing you naked. And she was pretty, even if she was as dead as a doorknob. Even with that faint blue tint beneath her bronze skin, Roza (with her shiny hair and clear skin and bid, watery eyes and painted pout) was the kind of girl who made head turns.

Which meant she was the kind of pretty Kuwabara wouldn't have looked twice at in the real world.

Pretty or not, Roza wasn't the kind of girl Kuwabara paid attention to. She was the kind of girl who'd ignored him all through middle and high school, after all, and getting over his aversion to preps (or whatever) would probably take some time. She liked makeup and clothes and she wore a lot of glitter, AKA she wasn't his type at all, but…

Pretty.

Roza was pretty, and she had almost seen him naked, and he had marched straight down to the landlady's office after the incident because if Roza kept looking at him with those big brown eyes of hers for even a second longer, Kuwabara was pretty sure his head would explode.

Oblivious to Kuwabara's mortified inner monologue, the landlady (whose name was Furuya-san, Kuwabara reminded himself) sighed and put a hand to her cheek. "Oh, dear. Just listen to me reminisce. I don't suppose you came here to hear and old lady ramble about the past. Did you have something specific in mind you wanted to hear about?"

"Uh, yeah!" He put his empty cup on the kotatsu, conscious of how much larger he was than the cushion underneath him. "Y'see, it's random and stuff, but did a young lady by the name of Roza ever live here?"

"Roza?" Furuya-san repeated. "That's an unusual name. I'd remember it if I heard it, I should think. Why do you ask?"

"Well, you see, I lived nearby back when I was a kid, and I had a friend named Roza who lived in the area, too." This was a lie, and while Kuwabara would normally feel bad about lying to nice old ladies, this was a special case and he needed to make an exception to help a certain other nice dead lady who had almost seen him naked oh shit oh shit oh fuck—don't think about that! Kuwabara coughed into his fist and added, "But I don't remember which building she lived in, and… I was just curious, is all." He shrugged and tried to smile. "Feeling a little nostalgic now that I'm back home."

"I see. Nostalgia is such a funny thing." Furuya's face softened with contrition. "But I'm sorry, dear. I don't remember anyone by that name living here."

"I see. Must have been another apartment complex, then." He tried to cover how awkward he felt, and how the hopeful bubble in his chest had burst, by making a joke. "They all look so much taller now that I'm grown up."

Furuya poured him another cup of tea, her smile kindly. "And into what a tall young man, at that!"

Kuwabara ducked his head and flushed; Furuya laughed, called him a sweet boy, and excused herself to the kitchen for a plate of snacks. Kuwabara tried to protest, but it was no use: Furuya was a grandmother's age and had the instinct to feed all nearby individuals younger than herself that is characteristic to grandmas everywhere. Kuwabara sat politely to wait while she bustled around in the kitchen—but soon Roza's big, limpid eyes entered his head again, and he distracted himself by studying the spider plants hanging by the window, the books on the many shelves against the walls, the crane pattern on the wallpaper he could see through a crack in the bedroom door, heck, even the pattern of the grain on the wooden kotatsu's flat top was preferable to reliving that morning's embarrassment—

Kuwabara had to stifle a relieved sigh when Furuya-san returned. Steam from a plate of hot cookies fogged her glasses and made her short, permed hair frizz a little, but her wrinkled face appeared undeterred as she set the plate before him. Only after he ate three cookies did she finally move away with a satisfied smile, heading to one of the bookshelves near the record player sitting on its wooden stand.

"Now, I have some photo albums with pictures through the years, if you'd like to take a look. I always thought of the residents as extended family and took photos for the memories." She traced her finger over the spines of a few thick tomes bound in green cloth. "Let's see… what year might this have been?"

"The—the 80s." It was a broad guess based on Roza's clothing choices, but it was his only one.

The landlady nodded. "The 80s, eh? Late or early?"

"Uh…" He took a shot in the dark around a mouthful of cookie. "Late?"

"Oh?" The landlady frowned over her shoulder at him. "You might have the wrong building, dear. Depending on how late, it's unlikely your friend lived in this building."

"Really? Why's that?"

"We shut down the building for a year or so after an earthquake to make extensive foundation repairs. That must have been oh… 1989? 1990?"

Kuwabara's heart stuttered. "And did anyone die in that earthquake?"

The question was a mistake, of course, and Kuwabara clapped a hand over his mouth as soon as he blurted his query aloud—but it was too late. Furuya-san wheeled on him, mouth wide open in prim shock.

"Did anyone—?" Her mouth shut with a click of teeth; one finger rose to wag at him, incensed. "That is an inappropriate question, young man!"

"I'm sorry!" he said before she even finished scolding. He apologized again and again, bowing over the kotatsu from his seat as his face turned crimson. "I'm sorry, I don't know why I just—"

Furuya-san wouldn't have it. "No one has ever died in this building, nor during the foundation renovations, and I am appalled that you'd ask such a frightful thing!"

"I'm sorry, ma'am, I'm sorry—I'm a medical student and we're all a little. Um. Morbid?" He bowed so low his nose brushed his cookie plate. "I am very sorry!"

Kuwabara held his penitent pose for many seconds, but Furuya-san said nothing. Eventually he chanced a look at her, face lifting in increments away from his dish. Furuya stared at him in silence. When their eyes met, she shook her head and sighed.

"It's all right." A look of grandma-ish longsuffering stole across her face, like one of her descendants had done something silly at a shrine on New Year's, but she couldn't stay mad forever. "You're polite, at least. That's something."

He apologized again, until she told him it was fine and offered him more cookies. But it was too awkward to stay for long, and he left soon after without looking through her albums.

There wasn't much point to wasting time on them, anyway, Kuwabara thought. No one named Roza had ever lived here. He'd have to go a bit further afield if he wanted to figure her out.

The flick, flick, flick of the slides echoed in the still room as he skimmed through ancient microfiche. He'd long since tied his handkerchief over his face to ward off the dust coating the library's dark basement, but it did little good. His eyes still watered and his nose still itched, and every so often he had to take a break to sneeze. His eyes ached, too, from staring into the small viewfinder of the microfiche reader, as did his back and his shoulders—but for all the effort he'd put in that day, perusing dozens of newspaper headlines throughout the 1980s, he had nothing to show for his efforts but the dire need for a hot bath and a none-too-gentle neck massage.

The landlady had been right, of course. He could find no evidence that anyone had ever died in her building. No articles about it, nothing on police records, no obituaries or death certificates… not that he had the time to look at all of them or a good idea of where, precisely, to even start looking. But the librarian had been helpful in that regard, at least.

"Here." She'd directed him to a certain collection of microfiche in a back corner of the basement after showing him how to operate the machinery. "Obituaries, organized by ZIP code. There's a law school not far from here and they asked us to compile this for case study work." She rolled her eyes. "But it's true crime junkies like you who use it most, I think. They always try to hunt down the violent ones."

Kuwabara just smiled and tried not to look nervous. Let her assume whatever she wanted about him. So long as he got what he was after, she could make all the assumptions she'd like.

Not that Kuwabara was actually getting what he was after, down there in that dusty basement. Her obituaries told him nothing whatsoever about anyone named Roza, and when he started skimming through other sets of microfiche that didn't involve dead people, the only thing he found about the apartment complex he lived in were a few break-ins throughout the years, and an article or two about the complex shutting down after the earthquake. A second article talked about the reluctant relocation of residents, and a third reported the complex's reopening.

No deaths in the building.

But at least he knew that whenever Roza lived in his apartment, it was before 1989… not that that really narrowed it down.

"So my landlady was telling the truth." His muttered observation echoed against the nearby shelves, globes, and other junk stacked high in the basement, odd reverberations making the hair on his neck rise. But then he frowned, and he said, "But hold on. That doesn't make a lick of sense. If Roza didn't really die in that apartment, why is she stuck there haunting it?"

It was certainly a good question, and one he didn't have a single clue how to answer—which was inconvenient, and it wouldn't get any less so by sitting down there in the dark and the dust. He whipped his kerchief off his face and blew his nose before putting on his coat and heading back upstairs. The librarian waved at him from behind the circulation desk as he passed, and with a smile she swiped off her reading glasses.

"Good timing; we're about to close." She jerked her head toward the stairs he'd come up from. "Find what you need?"

He shook his head. "But I'll come back and look again sometime."

"All right. We'll be here!"

She was a nice lady, that librarian, but Kuwabara wasn't sure if he'd actually end up coming back. His campus library had better options for his major, and he was not convinced more time with that old-ass microfiche would give him the answers he wanted.

But if not with the microfiche, then where?

Midway through the library lobby, he paused, echoes of his footsteps slowly fading in the cavernous marble foyer. He eyed the payphone vestibule in the corner, with its folding glass door and wooden slats, and thought about it. Counted the change in his pockets. Took a deep breath and walked over, shutting himself inside the coffin-sized space as he fed coins into the slot on the phone. His shoulders touched both sides of the glass enclosure, but he told himself he'd make this quick.

He'd make it quick not for his mild claustrophobia, but because if he didn't, and she came home while he was still on the phone with—

"Hello?"

His throat tightened; his voice came out higher than he intended when he said, "Hey, sis. It's me."

"Oh." Breath rattled in the earpiece (Shizuru taking a drag on her cigarette, if he had to guess). "So I finally get a call back, huh?"

"You—? Oh, right." He rubbed the back of his neck, cheeks heating as he remembered the events of the morning. "The phone was ringing when I left earlier, wasn't it."

Shizuru paused a second. Then: "You OK?"

"Y-yeah, totally fine, haha!" Shizuru had a nose like a bloodhound for his embarrassment and he needed to change the subject, fast, or else she'd pry out the truth and he'd never live it down. "So, uh, what were you calling about?"

Another rattling breath. "Just to bug you about moving back home, is all," she said, casually.

"… really."

"Uh-huh."

"… are you sure?"

Shizuru paused again—and then she sighed. He could imagine her throwing up her hands, eyes rolling as she groused, "Eikichi wouldn't stop meowing. Damn cat misses you, bro. Figured you might know a trick to shut her up."

"Wait, that's all you wanted?" He stared at the phone in his hand for a second, brow raised. "Why'd you call so many times over that?"

"Wouldn't have to call if you still lived here," Shizuru retorted. "You think better of moving out yet? Huh?"

This was, in short, the exact freakin' reason Kuwabara had never called Shizuru for advice about Roza before then. Shizuru had been against him leaving home, not shy at all about her disapproval—disapproval expressed through incessant mockery and by calling his decision rash. (Which it had been, admittedly, but that wasn't the point!) Kuwabara pinched the bridge his nose between two fingers and sighed.

"No, I haven't thought better of it," he grumbled. "And anyway, that's not why I'm calling." A deep breath followed as he summoned up his courage. "Can you think of any reason a ghost would haunt a place where it didn't actually die?"

For a minute, Shizuru didn't say anything at all. She didn't even take a drag on her cigarette; Kuwabara really had stumped her, or at least it seemed that way to him. He waited in tense silence as the connection buzzed in his ear—and outside, through the high front windows of the library's airy lobby, rain began to fall. The hush of water on pavement filtered even into the phone booth, echoing inside the glass coffin like the breath of some whispering spirit.

"This is not the kind of conversation I was expecting to have with you, baby bro," Shizuru eventually muttered. "Color me surprised. But why do you ask?"

He'd thought of a story ahead of time. Kuwabara wasn't the best liar, so a script felt necessary. "Oh, well, there's this ghost of a hanged man at my school," he said, aiming for nonchalance. "I looked it up but no one died there, so I just wondered…"

Shizuru finally took a drag. "Maybe he died there before that spot was a school."

"Nah, that's not it. He's wearing stuff from the 80s."

"I don't know what's creepier: the fact that he's a ghost, or the possibility of him haunting you while wearing parachute pants."

At her dry remark, Kuwabara couldn't help but laugh. Roza wouldn't be caught dead wearing parachute pants—probably. Right? Actually, he wasn't sure. He had no idea if parachute pants were fashionable or not (though he suspected they weren't). He'd have to get Roza's opinion about parachute pants later, when he got home.

"Anyway. So what do you think?" Kuwabara said. "About him haunting a spot he didn't die?"

Something rustled. Shizuru shrugging, if he had to guess. "Maybe he lived there."

"It's the college, not the dorm."

"Maybe he moved there, then. After death. Ghosts don't always stick to the same spots."

"No, I don't think that's it. He's stuck. Can't even leave the—can't even leave the classroom."

He'd almost said 'apartment,' but at the last second he caught himself. But when Shizuru did not immediately reply, he wondered if she could sense that he wasn't being completely honest with her—or would she even care? Shizuru could usually tell when he was lying (when anyone was lying; she was sharp like that) but sometimes she let minor deceptions slide. She could sense his good intentions just as well as his lies, but what if she—?

Shizuru surprised him, though, when she did not call him out. Instead she asked, "Do you remember the woodcut of a boat Mom used to have?"

He stared at the phone in his hand for a second or two before replying. "… no?"

"I was nine when she brought it home. You must've been… what, three?"

"Sounds right."

Shizuru paused again. Then, words slow and measured, she said: "Mom brought it home from a business trip to Yokohama, about a year before she got sick. Hung it in the hallway just outside the bathroom."

She stopped talking. Kuwabara waited. There came a clink, maybe an ashtray clattering against the kitchen counter, and the sound of a lighter ticking in her hand.

"Only had it about a month," Shizuru muttered. "Dad was away on business, and you know Mom never felt the things he does, or the things that we so. So she didn't know what was happening until I found out and told her."

Another click or two, and then Shizuru sighed. The ash tray clinked again. Kuwabara leaned back against the inside of the phone booth, shoulders wedged tight between two panes of glass—but he didn't mind the pinch. It wasn't often Shizuru talked about their mother, and Kuwabara barely remembered her.

"The woodcut wasn't an antique," Shizuru went on. "It was the kind of thing that's handmade, but made in a tourist trap—the thing they sell to tourists who can't tell the different between antique and a knockoff. The woodcut depicted this…wave. This massive, crashing wave with white foam and a whirlpool inside it, with blue ink layered into the carved lines. The wave covered the whole damn woodcut, top to bottom. And in the middle of it like a bathtub toy, just bobbing there on the water—"

Something clicked inside his head—a flash like a bulb coming on, only a shape instead of light. "A fishing boat," Kuwabara said. "A fishing boat with a red sail."

"So you do remember." Satisfaction softened her voice a little. "I figured you might. You were scared spitless of that thing, after all."

"I was?"

"You hated to look at it. Wouldn't go near it. And you were so little, you didn't know how to tell us what you were sensing." Her voice roughened again. "But one night I got up to get a drink of water, and there you were. Just sitting in the hallway, staring at it, eyes all glazed over. Sleepwalking."

"Yeah." He shifted uneasily against the glass. "I used to do that a lot, didn't I?"

"You did." A pause, small but distinct. "And that night, you didn't walk alone."

The breath caught in Kuwabara's throat. The air in the phone booth seemed to thin, and drawing breath (when Kuwabara remembered to breathe) left his chest feeling emptier than before.

"His clothes looked old," Shizuru said. "A straw hat and sandals, a short robe with a belt—and there was fishing line all tangled in his hair. But it wasn't the hook embedded in his eye that scared me. It was the water." Shizuru spoke with a steady rhythm, each new thought a chant drumming in time with Kuwabara's thudding heart. "It dripped off his fingers and pooled on the carpet. It pattered onto your hair and down your cheeks. You were shivering. You were soaked. And when he turned to look at me with that hook gleaming in the moonlight, face blue and bloated, eye running liquid down his face—"

An image of that face in the moonlight, that eye leaking fluid around a hook, flashed through Kuwabara's head as clearly as a memory—and Kuwabara couldn't say for sure if it was or wasn't one. He could only weakly croak a single word.

That word was, "Stop."

Shizuru obeyed. "Sorry." She wasted no more time on apology than that, forging onward in brusque tones. "We got rid of the woodcut when the sun rose. Burned it in the alley behind the house after I told Mom what I'd seen. She believed in that stuff, even if she couldn't see it herself. Dad had taught her a lot."

Shizuru's lighter clacked again. It must've caught fire this time, because soon she drew in a puff of cigarette. Kuwabara could nearly smell it, that far-off cigarette. He felt the smoke of her words and her chosen vice winding around him even at this distance, as ensnaring as the tale she spun.

"Mom prayed over the woodcut as it burned," Shizuru told him. "Sparks flew off into the night, and the smoke smelled like salt. And then it was gone—burned away to ash." A smile colored her voice, somehow. "You were happy, after that. And I never saw the fisherman again."

He couldn't help but think of the ghost of the drowned boy on the subway. He had been perpetually damp in death, just like that dead fisherman. "Do you think that ghost…?" Kuwabara ventured.

"Yeah." Shizuru knew what he was asking. "He drowned long before that woodcut was ever made. He drowned, and he affixed himself to the woodcut. Why, I can't say. But he did." He heard her shrug again. "Maybe he died out on the open sea when a big wave hit him. Can't affix yourself to the entire ocean. Maybe he clung to a ship when one passed near, and then when that sank, maybe he clung to something else. A long game of jumping from one thing that reminded him of death to the next, until he found that woodcut and scared you half to death." A pensive silence followed before she added, "Maybe this hanged man of yours did the same. He followed someone, or an object, and it led him to where he is now."

Kuwabara blurted, "What do you think happened to him?"

"What do you mean?"

"Oh. Um. The fisherman. When you burned the woodcut." He shifted against the glass, uncomfortable in his thoughts of the little drowned boy. "Where did the fisherman go, do ya think?"

"Beats me." Her voice held firm. "All we knew was that the woodcut couldn't stay."

They lapsed into silence. Kuwabara couldn't say for sure what Shizuru spent her silence thinking about. Maybe she thought of the dead fisherman. Maybe she thought of their mom. Maybe she thought of that night in the alley, burning the woodcut to save her baby bro. Maybe she thought of none of those things. Kuwabara, though, thought about what Genkai had told him when he went to her about Roza. Specifically he thought about what she said about exorcism, and what it meant for ghosts.

"Exorcism is forced banishment," she'd told him. "It makes a ghost leave wherever it's decided to stay, and whether they go to the next world or just next door is anyone's guess."

Maybe the fisherman was still out there, somewhere. Wandering around with a hook in its eye, tormenting little kids who got too close to crappy tourist-trap woodcuts of ships tossed like bath toys on the waves.

Kuwabara shivered. "OK," he said, both to Shizuru and to himself. "OK. Thanks, sis."

"Did I even help?"

"I'm… not sure." This was his honest opinion on the matter, and Shizuru did not question it. "But thank you just the same."

Shizuru did not protest when he said goodbye. She merely wished him luck before he headed off into the rain, muttering that he should come home and visit his damn cat the next time he got a chance. And although Kuwabara said he wanted to (because this, too, was the truth), he had no intention of making good on that desire. Not while she was there, just down the hall, in the room beside the place where the woodcut had once hung.

But that was one truth Kuwabara would not tell his sister, because he suspected she already knew.

NOTES:

Loved exploring Kuwabara's early experiences with ghosts, not to mention Shizuru's snark. Also, longest chapter yet. Sweet!

Next chapter will be out on Jan. 12. Chapter lengths will even out for a while, so we're now officially on biweekly updates.

Next time on The Ghost in You: Kuwabara explains himself. Roza comes clean, and Kuwabara provides comfort.

Thanks for reading, y'all! Really appreciate those who took the time to review this past chapter. You're the absolute BEST and you made my day: manic pixie mary sue, Laina Inverse, o-dragon, read a rainbow, Blaze1662001, ralynsevenfoldd, LadyGhoul1, ForeverinWonderland, Shaelindra, Deamachi, Convoluted Compassion and GrimmaulDee!