A Boy and His Ghost
A/N: Hello everyone! No worries, I'm still working on The Devil and His Playmate, but I had this idea nagging at me for a little while. And you guys know me, I had to write it. Lol. Another human AU.
I just want to thank you all from the bottom of my heart for all the love and support my Baffy fics have received. I am so glad you guys enjoy reading them as much as I enjoy writing them. :D
Hope you all are safe out there!
I appreciate you guys so much!
Also, I know this story has a slightly less cheerful tone than the rest of my other Baffy stories and it may feel a little bit like Coraline (which I enjoyed), but I promise it will get better the more the chapters progress. :) Promise I won't take too long with my updates. ;)
Daffy watches as the moving van drives away, feeling a pang of sorrow as the weight of the situation finally hits him; they've moved, and there's no going back now…
His mother calls him in to take a look around the new house, and he does, having realized that he's been standing outside in the yard lost in his thoughts for the past few minutes.
He daydreams a lot and it's a habit he's been trying to break lately, except he doesn't have any luck. He never has any luck.
He walks up to the house's front porch and hesitates before going inside. There's a crude scratch on the entrance wall, and it reads a single name: James. Daffy shrugs, figuring that it must have been the name of one of the people who last lived there. A breeze sweeps past him, causing goosebumps to break across his skin and he zips his sweater up.
He frowns and looks behind him, staring up at the sky as he turns around. It's a cloudy day, one that promises rain. No one in the neighborhood is outside, probably not wanting to be caught when the rain finally falls.
When he turns back around the house seems to stare back at him, with its old-world style, large exterior, it looks more like a small castle than a house. And frankly, Daffy isn't particularly eager to go inside…at all.
But the clouds above rumble and so Daffy finds himself walking past the porch, into the house and shutting the door behind him.
His parents' muffled voices lead him to the living room where they seem to be preoccupied hanging up a painting and trying to decide the best place for it to go.
Daffy watches them for a while, offering to help, but his mother kindly asks him to unpack the boxes in his room instead.
It takes him a while to find the blasted place as the house is just far too big and too confusing. It's only when he's about to give up when he hears the sound of a door squeaking open and when he looks to his right, there's a room with his books and the boxes with his name on them.
Slowly, he enters the room, he refuses to call it his as it is nothing like his room back at his old home. There's no familiarity, no comfort, there isn't the warm smell of fresh laundry or the gentle chirping of birds outside, there's just a musky smell and dead silence.
The only perks are that he has a bigger bed and a reading nook with huge bay windows. But they are only small comforts.
He walks over to the dusty window but on his way his foot kicks one of the boxes and a book falls out. He bends over to pick it up, scans the title but finds that it lacks anything interesting, writing it off as probably one of his father's that must have gotten misplaced and resumes going to the window.
He wipes off some of the dust with his hand and looks out; it's starting to rain, but it's more of a slight drizzle. The cushions of the nook are quite comfy, so he sits there awhile before soon dozing off.
Bugs looks down at the sleeping boy, feeling a rush of emotion flood him. He had never seen someone so beautiful in all his existence, not even when he was human.
At first, he was reluctant to be the "guardian ghost", as they were called in his realm, of Daffy, refusing to do it again after James and his family packed up and left.
It wasn't fun and frankly, he didn't think that he was cut out for a job like this; he was way too sarcastic and snarky for a job where his main duty was to guard and protect some punk kid. But looking down at this Daffy guy, with his crooked glasses, raven-dark hair and coffee brown eyes, and with skin paler than his, he could actually imagine giving it a shot.
Not that he had much of a choice, he still had to do eighty more years before he was free to cross over to the other side.
Apparently, the self-absorbed dick-heads of the other side didn't find driving his motorcycle over the Grand Canyon to be a "virtuous death" and in order to join them up there, he had to fulfill a century of his "dead life" trying to make up for it and to impress them.
Well, whatever, his time was running out anyways, and this kid seemed pretty harmless, eighteen, like the age Bugs was when he killed hims- passed away. How bad could it be?
Daffy awakens to darkness. It's night, but thanks to the clouds, the stars' lights aren't quite visible. So everything is black and there's no light to lead his way out.
Still, that doesn't stop him from attempting to get to the door and look for his parents.
He trips and stumbles but eventually he finds a light switch. His room is still messy thanks to the boxes, but he'll just take care of it later.
He finds his parents downstairs in the kitchen.
"Oh honey! How is packing? Do you like your new room?" His mother asks while stirring a pot of spaghetti sauce.
His father, who is chopping up lettuce for a salad, shoots him a worried glance.
Daffy tries for a smile. "Yeah, I love it."
"Good! I know this move is tough on you honey, but please try to get comfortable. Hopefully your father's new book will sell just as well as the first one." She gives her husband a loving stare. "He owes us that much for having us uproot our lives."
"Hey!" His dad frowns, but even he knows his mother is joking around. Only Daffy wishes she wasn't. Because no matter what, he is still mad at them for not even considering him in all this. But that's a topic for another day…
Now he's just hungry.
He attempts to take a seat at the dinner table, but his father stops him before he can get any further to the dining room, by tugging on his shirt. "You okay, buddy?"
Daffy nods, but he doesn't have the energy to smile again so he just walks away while his father looks on in concern.
A week passes, Daffy is in school. And like everything else, it is nothing like his old school. No one finds his nerdiness endearing, but everyone, including his teachers, find it cool to pick on him.
His old friends, the pitifully small few that he managed to have at his old school, all promise to visit, but no one calls, and, seeing that he doesn't want to be a bother, he doesn't call them.
He shuts himself off from everyone. His parents keep trying to get him to talk, but he never does. He just retires to his room and lies on his bed, staring up at the ceiling, wishing he were somewhere else.
It's a particularly rough day where someone manages to spill cranberry juice all over his head and he gets another B on his test that he comes home ready to just sleep and forget about the whole world.
But as soon as he walks past his worried mother, ascends the creaky stairs, and opens the door of his room, he feels it; the biting cold.
He looks around, wondering if he left a window open but finding them all closed.
Click!
The door slams shut behind him, causing Daffy to jump.
When he turns around he feels the chill again, causing himself to rub his arms against the assault of goosebumps rising.
Terror grips his spine, and he knows he's not alone. Which even to him is a foolish notion, as it isn't possible for anyone to be in the room with him, surely they would have made a noise? Right? Or he would have seen them enter?
The light bulb above his head flickers and he sees a dark figure standing in front of him, but just like that, it's gone. Daffy wants to scream, but he is frozen with fear.
"Shh," The person says, appearing again as the light flickers back on and off for a second, placing a finger to their lips.
When the light finally stops sparking and the whole room is illuminated again, Daffy sees that the figure is gone.
He breathes a sigh of relief. Maybe it was all in his head? Sleep would really do him good about now.
Except when he turns to flip the switch and darken the room again, a laugh resounds from the direction of the nook. Wildly, he turns to look and his eyes brush across a guy, who couldn't be much older than Daffy himself. The guy is pale, almost ethereally so, and he's wearing all black. Save for his silver hair which is cropped low and his cerulean eyes, maybe the most intense blue eyes Daffy has ever seen, staring back at Daffy with barely masked amusement and curiosity. He's beautiful, inhumanly beautiful.
"W-who are you?" Daffy asks, reaching for the lamp near to him as protection.
The person doesn't say anything but raises an eyebrow at Daffy's weapon of choice.
"I mean it!" Daffy warns, brandishing the lamp as if it can do serious damage, but even to his own ears, the threat sounds feeble.
The guy throws his hands up in surrender. "Hey, I mean no harm, Cinderella."
Daffy frowns. Cinderella? "What are you doing in my house?"
The guy shrugs. "I think the real question is what are you doing in my house, interrupting my haunting?"
"H-haunting?"
At Daffy's confused expression, the guy laughs again. "Okay, well not haunting per se, but you sort of summoned me."
Daffy feels even more confused.
"Summon?" He asks, because really, what is going on here?
"Yeah, with all your negative energy and shit. It was really bumming me out so I came to check up on you. But it's okay Cinderella, it's not like you should thank me or anything." He mutters.
Daffy frowns. "You broke into my house and I should thank you? And why do you keep calling me Cinderella?"
The guy, probably fed up with Daffy's lack of understanding, rises to his feet and whoah is he tall! He narrows those breathtaking blue eyes at Daffy and whispers so close to Daffy's face that the other teen can feel the cool rush of his breath across his cheeks. "I am your guardian okay. You summoned me when you were feeling particularly down in the dumps, it's my job to protect you. So I'm like your…" The guy cringes. "Fairy Godmother."
Then dawn breaks in Daffy's head. Fairly Godmother? Cinderella? "Shit! This is real." Then, "Are you even human?"
The guy smirks. "Nope, I'm as dead as dead can be. I'm just a ghost."
"Like Casper?" Daffy inquires, trying to wrap his head around it.
"Uhh hell no." The ghost teen utters.
"So then what's your name?"
"Really, I just tell you I'm a ghost and you're cool with it?"
"Do I have any reason to not be?" It was now Daffy's turn to raise an eyebrow.
The "ghost" flashes him a pearly white smile. "Nope."
"So, your name?"
"Bugs."
"What kind of name is that?" Daffy giggles.
"What kind of name is Daffy?"
"It's a better name than Bugs." Daffy grins as Bugs walks away to fiddle with the books on Daffy's shelf.
"Sure it is." He says, picking a book off the shelf and flipping it open. Daffy walks over to him and as he gets closer, he sees that it is the one that he forgot to return to his father.
"So your dad's a writer huh?"
Daffy nods and is about to ask him how he knows this when Bugs taps his temple. "I know everything about you."
"That's not creepy at all." The black-haired teen mumbles.
Bugs doesn't acknowledge the comment. Instead he turns his attention to Daffy who tries not to squirm under the intensity of his stare. "Well gorgeous, you summoned me, what do you want me to do? Juggle? Tell jokes?"
Daffy shrugs. "What's the point? You're eventually going to have to leave anyways."
Bugs frowns. "That's the thing, I leave but I'm never far behind."
That's when it occurs to Daffy, if Bugs' entire existence meant having to watch him, then it probably wasn't that exciting of an existence. "I'm sorry I guess I'm not that interesting of a human, huh?"
"You're more interesting than you think."
"What?"
"What?" Bugs, looks bashful for a second, until it's gone in a blink of an eye.
"For a ghost who refuses to be called Casper, you're quite friendly."
"I will smite you. Don't tempt me."
Daffy laughs.
And Bugs, after hearing the effortless sound coming from Daffy, like music. He says, "I think this is going to be the start of a beautiful..." He trails off, trying to find the right word.
"Friendship." Daffy finishes for him. And for some reason it's both enough and not enough at the same time.
They both look at each other. "Friendship." Bug repeats the word, but finds it to be less effective. He almost wants to corner Daffy and ask him what would happen if he were to ask for more between them, but he shakes that idea out of his head. No need to scare the kid, or himself.
"It would have to be enough." He doesn't realize that he's said it aloud until Daffy raises his head. "Huh?" He asks.
"Nothing!" Bugs chirps, trying his best to cover his blunder. And as Daffy flickers his attention between his books and Bugs, Bugs feels the hole where his heart should belong, ache with something new, something like longing. Boy, is he screwed.
A/N: What are we going to do with these dorks? :D If you enjoyed this story then I would love to know. Please be safe out there and see you next chapters!