roommate [shane/ryan]

👻 chapter eight 👻

There have been a lot of times in Shane's life where he thought that his browser history would be worrying if people other than him ever looked through it, but nothing quite topped the history he compiled after Ryan asked him to summon him during their ouija board session. All in all, Shane has always considered himself pretty clean cut. His interests have always been relatively safe and normal, with the most extreme ones being violent video games that his mom didn't quite approve of. Up until this whole ghost endeavor, he hadn't even heard of things like paganism or rituals, the very things he was so intensely researching now.

Between his hundreds of searches of 'how to bring the dead back to life' and 'how to summon a ghost,' Shane had compiled enough information to make him feel like he had created a solid foundation to build this whole ritual on. However, there was still work to be done, which is why he soon found himself sitting in the corner of the local library looking at a dusty book about witchcraft.

He glanced at the notebook resting on the arm of his chair. The list of herbs and materials he would need for this ritual was growing and growing. Bay laurels, lavender, thyme, birch bark, dried cedar needles... Shane rubbed his forehead. He felt as if he was in too deep. A week ago, he was struggling to complete a level on a new video game. Today, he's planning a ritual to manifest the spirit of a dead boy in his bedroom. Oy.

He didn't even know how he was going to acquire any of this, either. He had managed to acquire some of the more basic herbs at the grocery store, but some of the harder to find materials required a trip online and a suspicious charge to his mother's credit card. God, his poor sweet mother. Shane really didn't understand how she hadn't walked in on any of his recent antics yet.

With his pile of necromancy materials slowly growing in his closet, Shane had plenty of time to think about why exactly he's doing all of this, especially while the fucking mugwort and wormwood were being shipped to his house. The thought of meeting Ryan face to face excited him, but he watched enough movies as a kid to fear the thought of permanently ruining the timeline of their universe. His feelings about the ritual shifted nearly every single day on a spectrum from pure, unadulterated excitement to absolute, intense terror and regret. The entire situation, he felt, was turning into some giant mess of feelings that he couldn't clarify or try to understand.

However, one thing was clear: He couldn't back out now.

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a/n: tell your crush you like him by fuckin raising the dead to talk to him