The familiar yet eerie sound of the EMF meter whirred softly in your hand as you moved around the bathroom cautiously. You moved the device around like a metal detector, holding it up and down and around slowly. The lights on the meter continued to remain neutral, much to your relief and dismay.
Please, please.please don't say that I need to come back here at night. I do not want to be wandering around an empty school in the dark. You cringed to yourself.
Drip.
The bathroom was quiet and you were alone, making your way down pushing stall doors open causing them to creak and swing on their hinges. Nothing to be seen and according to the EMF meter, nothing invisible was there either.
In the corner of your eye you saw the movement of your reflection in the mirrors above the sinks.
Drip.
You turned your attention to the mirrors fully, looking back at your other self, copying your exact movements. It reminded you of all the folklore surrounding mirrors and the belief of how someone's reflection was a projection of their soul trapped inside the mirror. That's where the common myth of breaking a mirror brought you seven years of bad luck.
Drip.
As you inhaled you watched your shoulders lift and fall as you sighed, and turned your gaze to the dripping tap at the end.
The drips echoed on the tiled walls and so did your footsteps as you walked over to the sink to turn the tap off all the way.
Seeing as there was nothing out of the ordinary in the bathroom, you turned to leave, slipping out the exit and leaving the door to clatter shut behind you.
Drip.
You saw Taehyung by the boys bathroom waiting for you on his own, the school hallways now empty of children as they returned to their classes.
"How was it on your end?" You asked, Taehyung lifting his head as you approached.
"Nothing," he said shaking his head with a frown, disappointment clear on his face. You had almost forgotten that Taehyung enjoyed this sort of thing, 'ghost hunting' in his words. It only made you wonder about him. Although the two of you had bonded (if you could call it that) over cameras and photography on the last case you had taken on with him, you realised you still knew very little about Taehyung. He was Mark's assistant at the morgue, he liked photography and he enjoyed the thrill of ghost hunting. That seemed to be all you knew about him and quite frankly it began bugging you a bit. Could you trust someone you barely knew to have your back? The last time had definitely been a step back in your minimal relationship with him because you still weren't sure if you believed his words defending his case of shutting that basement door behind you. You began reminiscence back to it through your memory.
"I thought you wanted to keep it down there in one place? You know how ghosts can be, flitting from room to room. We needed to trap it down there..."
"I don't believe you for a second!" You retorted.
With a sigh, Taehyung stepped towards one of the walls in the house, and slid his hand into one of the decaying cracks and pulled out something you recognised instantly.
A ball of rosemary wrapped in string. And again, as he pulled a second from the floorboards.
One of the few things that ghosts hated was rosemary. Minnie's dead mother really had been trapped down there with you, she wouldn't have been able to escape through the walls. In a way, that actually made it more dangerous for you.
It still didn't excuse his methods. You could have sworn he smiled at you before closing that door...
"I know a lot more than you think I do, Petal. I'm not just some naive kid coming along to get some scares out of this like you thought I was..."
Perhaps later when you weren't on the prowl for some murderous urban legend, you'd try and get to know Taehyung a little better, but right now you had two more bathrooms to check, excluding the boys restrooms that you left to Taehyung.
With a sigh you straightened your back and lifted your chin. "Onto the next two then. There's three bathrooms in total on the school grounds and we need to check them all."
It was past noon as you finished checking the second restrooms, but the sky was darkened by heavy clouds cloaking much outside in dull shadows. The gloom seemed to press against the large windows on the right side of the hall as you walked down beside Taehyung. Again the second ones had been clear, leaving you hopeful for the last boys and girls restrooms to have something loitering about in them.
"If these ones are clear too, we may have to come back at nightfall. Meaning we would have to sneak ourselves back in..." you trailed off as you started thinking off ways you would pull that off, breaking into a school at night. Yeah...Real normal thing to do that was.
"You're a bit naughty aren't you?"
You almost tripped over your own feet.
"Huh!? What do you mean by that?" You blustered looking up at him with raised brows. Also, why did he have to say it like that?
Taehyung huffed out a laugh. "You convinced me to commit fraud with you without so much of a blink of an eye and now you're talking about breaking into an elementary school at night," he answered looking down at you in the corner of his eye.
"Yeah well don't phrase it like that. Its for a good cause," you grumbled while avoiding his eye.
It had been a waste of time. All the bathrooms in the school were clear, and you had then stomped away in frustration, dragging Taehyung to the coffee house nearby with you to sit down and wait for sunset in annoyance.
Before you had left the school, you had returned to Miss Lee and asked her to leave one of the fire exits to the school open when she finished for the day, so that you and Taehyung could sneak back in after nightfall. Albeit reluctantly, she had agreed to do so.
It was the coffee house that your friend Rosé worked at, the one you had gone to after your first case with Taehyung. Although you were glad to see her and accepted her greeting of a hug, you hadn't missed the cautious glance she had sent in Taehyung's direction while she went to make you both some hot drinks.
Rosé had surveyed Taehyung cautiously, something rubbing her the wrong way about him.
You weren't sure as to why she made a look like that at him...Sure he was a bit...different, but she didn't even know him.
"You seem on edge," Taehyung commented, eyeing your bouncing knee peeking out from underneath the table. "Are you annoyed we didn't find anything?"
"I don't like waiting," you replied shortly chewing your nail and not tearing your eyes away from your phone screen. You were looking at old articles about the 'aka manto', to get any ideas on what to do next. "Something always goes wrong when I'm just sitting around."
"What do you mean by that?" The blonde asked suddenly interested in why you had turned so negative all of a sudden. Your eyes flickered up to him catching his intense gaze before focusing back on your phone screen. You weren't going to lie, that look had startled you with how penetrating it was. You contemplated on telling him, whether or not you were close enough with him to share something you usually kept to yourself. Something you were ashamed of.
Exhaling slowly, you switched of the screen and placed your phone flat onto the table, keeping your gaze on the half empty coffee mug, watching the still brown liquid as if it was the most interesting thing you had seen.
"...A while ago I had taken on a case," you began quietly, knowing full well Taehyung was listening intently. "It was a girl, a little younger than myself was being tormented by the ghost of her recently passed boyfriend, and she blamed herself for his death. His spirit had been agonising her for a while, so upon getting her call, I turned up at her place to purify the building. However that method didn't work...Because it turns out his spirit had hidden itself within the mirrors of the house, effectively avoiding any of the repellents I had put in place."
You looked up at Taehyung, his silence telling you to continue.
"I'm guessing you know the term 'black mirror'?" you continued and Taehyung nodded. You let out a dry chuckle. "Well as we were waiting around for something to happen, my client had gone to the bathroom and had taken her phone with her, and of course, a blank phone screen is a form of a mirror. Seeing him everyday beside her in those mirrors only just reminded her that she had killed him, purposely or not. Using that same guilt against her, he convinced her to join him and I think...she was on her last thread, and you know oh how convincing the ghost's of your loved ones can be."
"By join, you mean..." Taehyung started quietly never once breaking his gaze away from you.
You nodded. "Yeah. She killed herself, and I failed to save her."
There was a thick silence between the two of you and a sinking feeling in your stomach making you regret revealing all that to Taehyung, only causing you to worry of what he thought of you now. You wanted to stand up and run and get this over with and have his hawk like eyes off of you.
"How did he die?" He asked slowly.
"Car accident. She had been driving," you replied curtly.
Taehyung sat there expressionless, not even having blinked throughout your explanation.
Taehyung was struggling to look away from your face. That melancholy look on your face...was breath-taking. He felt that looking at it only for a few minutes wasn't enough.
Taehyung hadn't said anything else, so you focused back onto your coffee assuming that he was deep in thought, wrapping your cold fingers around the mug to feel some kind of warmth to put you at ease.
A flash and shutter caused you to look up in surprise. Taehyung had his DSLR pointed at you, his face hidden behind the camera. For some reason there was a pressure on your chest, one similar to the feeling of being scared. It was a rather odd time to take a picture, right after you had just revealed something so personal.
"Yah! What are you doing?"
"What does it look like?" he replied cheekily.
"You have plenty of other things to take photos of, I on the other hand will not do that camera any justice so stop," you exasperated sparing him a look of disbelief, before going to sip your drink.
"I kindly disagree," he spoke looking up at you with an unfamiliar kindness in his eyes. "You're beautiful."
Embarrassingly, you choked on the hot liquid you drank, coughing and spluttering to clear your throat.
He continuous stare was finally unnerving you enough to say something as it was starting to get a little excessive and nerve racking. In fact you had wanted to just outright say 'take a picture, it'll last longer' but of course, he already had.
"What?" You questioned, eyeing him suspiciously.
His lips twitched upwards, and he made that face like he knew something you didn't which once again had you irritated (almost like a certain ravenette you knew). "Nothing," he said before chuckling softly, leaning back in his chair.
You huffed and turned away from Taehyung trying your best to ignore him for a bit. Doing this, you noticed a bus stop across the street outside the large coffee house windows, three people supposedly waiting for a ride. There was one however that seemed to catch your attention more than the other two.
He was sat on the bench, looking down at a cellular device minding his own business. A black cap covering the top part of his face and a black mask concealing the bottom half.
In Korea it wasn't uncommon for people to wear masks as it had become a sort of fashion, however there was something about this man that made you wary. Something about him definitely didn't look right.
You held your breath as he looked up, meeting your gaze directly under shadowed eyes. A car drove past the bus stop, and there was an unsettling feeling in the pit of your stomach as the figure on the bus stop bench was no longer in sight. You sucked in a breath to calm your senses, telling yourself you had something else to worry about than some man disappearing right in front of your line of sight.
Ah, to hell with it! That was definitely something to worry about! You mentally scolded yourself.
"Did you just see that?" You asked Taehyung who had been flicking through the photos on his camera.
"See what?" Obviously not then...
It was just your mind...Playing tricks on you. God you hoped that was the case. You kind of had your hands full at the moment with the current case.
Due to it being near the end of Autumn, the sky had darkened considerably by nine pm, and you and Taehyung waited another hour in the cafe with Rosé's permission while she finished up the last tasks of her shift, before bidding her goodbye and returning to the now ominous looking school with its black windows and crawling darkness up the sides of the building.
Like she had agreed to, Miss Lee had left one of the fire exits open for you and Taehyung to slip through into the school building, being careful not to be seen while doing so.
Once again, you both switched on the frequency devices and started your search once more through the quiet, vacant and eerie looking corridors of the school. You had also remembered to bring a torch with you this time as the halls would not be illuminated with any light.
Yet again, your search came to be futile from two of the three bathrooms...
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. You stomped your foot into the ground in frustration wandering what the heck you were doing wrong. The two detectors were working fine. Your only other theory was that the spirit had moved onto somewhere else for its next unsuspecting victims.
"I don't understand!" You growled in frustration as you stomped through the black hallways toward the last bathrooms, the only light guiding you through from your torch. "This better be where it's hiding or so help me god-"
Your words were cut short by a cold hand that shot over your mouth and the arm that wrapped around your mid section pulling you around the corner in a hurry. You looked up at Taehyung with wide eyes as he advanced much too close, to the point where he moved his head closer to your as if his plan was to steal a sudden kiss. Instead, he moved to your right ear and whispered his reasoning for his actions to you lowly.
"Don't make a sound, but the janitor is just down the staircase."
Recovering from the shock, you nodded your head stiffly with the hand that still covered your mouth letting him know that you understood, and he pulled away slightly removing his palm from your lips allowing you to exhale the breath you hadn't realised you had been holding. For a moment you couldn't believe that you had thought he was going to kiss you.
Get a hold of yourself (Y/n)!
As if on cue, the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs echoed throughout the dark empty hallways.
"We'll hide in there, I have a plan."
You weren't able to utter a reply as Taehyung had already begun grabbing your wrist and dragging you behind him, pacing with light and swift feet towards the boys restroom. Upon entering he closed the door quietly behind you and led you past the urinals and stalls, before you even realised that he headed towards the forth stall.
He pulled you in behind him before you could voice your disapproval and locked the door, holding you firmly against him causing a flush to rise up your neck to your cheeks.
The sound of the entrance door banging open alerted you to the presence of another, possibly the janitor in his rightful suspicion.
You shot a look up to Taehyung to protest only to stop yourself when you saw him press his index finger against his smiling lips.
He kept one arm around your mid back, the hand that was resting on your hip tapping a single finger on the bone in a slow unsteady rhythm, which had you distracted on that instead of keeping your attention on the matter at hand- which was whoever had entered the boys bathroom. As you held your breath and glancing at anywhere but Taehyung, your eyes caught sight of something etched onto the stall door.
Silence passed through the bathroom, then you relaxed at the entrance door opened and closed once more signalling their departure.
"Let go," you whispered quickly putting your hands on his chest to push him away, the proximity of you both making your heart pound in your chest. What Taehyung said next caught you of guard.
"Your heart's beating rather fast...Is it because of me?" He was looking down at you with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, visible in the low lighting.
"Hah, like you know the rate my heart is beating. Sure," you scoffed with a roll of your eyes.
"You doubt it?" He asked with a single risen brow.
"Human ears can't pick up the sound of another's heartbeat, you're probably hearing your own pulse rush around your head, Taehyung."
"Well...mine's beating fast too," he admitted smiling softly, looking deep into your own eyes.
Pity swept over your features. "You're scared?"
"Its for a different reason, I assure you."
"Like what?" You asked, your brows pinching together in an innocent clueless-ness.
He pushed you backwards into the wall of the stall, his gaze suddenly unwavering and heavy making the inside of your chest seize up for a split second.
"Bₗᵤₑ...ₒᵣ ᵣₑd ₚₐₚₑᵣ?"
You both froze.
Taehyung's smile dropped and eyes slid over to the closed stall door, his own form growing still. Your lips were pressed tightly together as not to keep yourself from making a single sound. You kept your breathing steady and as quiet as you possibly could.
You wanted to scream at him, 'This was your plan!?' but you refused to make a sound as the air dropped to a considerably low temperature so suddenly. You shivered, a cloud of breath dispersing from your mouth from the icy air and watched it mingle with Taehyung's.
"Bₗᵤₑ...ₒᵣ ᵣₑd?"
You grabbed him by the forearm making his attention snap to you questionably.
'Don't answer it,' you mouthed to him., your fingers unconsciously squeezing around your talisman.
"Dₒ yₒᵤ wₐₙₜ Bₗᵤₑ, ₒᵣ ᵣₑd ₚₐₚₑᵣ?"
Fear rushed through your veins as the stall door suddenly unlocked itself, the latch dropping against the metal like a dead-weight. The door creaked quietly as it opened in a slow motion, revealing empty space behind it.
If you hadn't been so concerned at the current moment in time you would have registered Taehyung's grip grow tighter on your form.
There in the space outside the toilet stall, a figure began to form from nothing, its face covered by the shadow of it's red hood. In two of his white hands peaking out from dark red sleeves held a roll of red paper, and in the other a blue one.
"Bₗᵤₑ...ₒᵣ ᵣₑd?" It said again in a gravelly wisp of a sound that caused what felt like ice to run through your blood.
In a blind panic, you broke the iron bracelet around your wrist with a hard yank and threw it at the translucent figure. As it passed through its body the apparition let out an ear piercing wail and exploded into dispersing smoke.
You broke out of Taehyung's grip and jumped out of the toilet stall, your head whipping around the bathroom for any sign of the ghost lingering. Iron was a temporary solution. That thing would be back.
"I can't believe you! You put us in so much danger! What kind of moron makes a plan like that!?" You snapped at the male as you turned to him.
"I just thought that it was the best way to get it to come out," Taehyung shrugged with a teasing look on his face.
You tried so hard to keep your stern expression plastered over your face. You snorted, unable to keep the laugh in that bubbled up your chest, adrenaline dying relieving the tension and fear that your body had held onto during the whole time.
Taehyung watched you with an amused smile.
"I thought we were just going to hide from the janitor!" You said wiping a tear from your eye. Sometimes being scared was a thrill to laugh at later. You started to relax slightly as you felt the cold air grow warmer to it original temperature once more.
"I knew what I was doing, and I wouldn't have let you get hurt," he said earnestly.
like you did last time?
"Sure," you said with sarcasm dripping from your voice, all laughter gone at this point.
"You doubt me Petal?"
You sighed. "Honestly, a bit yes."
"I feel like you still haven't forgiven me for what happened last time."
Instead of continuing the conversation you got back to the matter at hand, ignoring him much to his dismay. Whilst you had hidden in the stall with Taehyung you remembered you had noticed a word had been scratched into the door.
It had been a name...
You stepped back into the stall and took a look at the marking on the back of the door. The one thing you had missed on your search during the daytime.
̷Y̷ ̷O̷ ̷O̷ ̷ ̷ ̷Y̷ ̷O̷ ̷U̷ ̷N̷ ̷G̷ ̷-̷ ̷C̷ ̷H̷ ̷U̷ ̷L̷
You ran a finger over the indented letters trailing over them until something flashed in front of your vision.
A girl with a gruesome skin flayed back, flaps of flesh dangling down her body and strewn around the floor by her crumpled figure by the toilet seat and the water in the bowl colouring a dark red.
The vision switched and this time it was a boy, head pointing up to the ceiling with a face as blue as ice, eyes frozen wide in shock and mouth left agape as if he were still trying to gulp air.
The vision before your eyes switched once more, to the boy with the blue face, this time standing on a grave, the name Yoo Young-Chul engraved onto the stone. You recognised that graveyard.
You gasped for air as you fell against the door, using it for support as your legs became jelly. There was a pounding against your skull from the start of a migraine.
"Petal!? Whats wrong?" Taehyung asked behind the door, worry in his voice. You paid it no mind however as you focused on the visions you just had and the name of the dead man's spirit dangling on the tip of your tongue.
"I-I know where the remains are," you said breathlessly coming out of the stall and passing by Taehyung as you left the bathroom.
"Remains?" He questioned, concern etched onto his handsome features.
"Of his ghost. The aka manto! His bones, I know where his grave is!" you expressed with pressing insistence.
The male looked sceptical.
"How?"
"I just do! We need to burn them if we want to get rid of this thing for good," you told him, hurrying through the long corridors and towards the fire exit.
Taehyung followed close behind as you made a B-line towards his car. The very much confused male complied however without anymore questions considering your urgency, driving the car towards the place you directed him too.
The closest graveyard to the school at was only a few blocks away.
Arriving at the graveyard quickly you grabbed the needed supplies for a salt and burn from the trunk of Taehyung's car. You were glad that you had remembered to gear up Taehyung's trunk with these things in case the situation ended up with a classic salt and burn as this was a common way to dispatch a spirit.
Much to your luck, it didn't take you long to scour the graveyard and the lights from the city illuminated it faintly enough for you to see, to find the specific gravestone, the exact place where the blue faced boy had stood in your vision. There unsurprisingly engraved on the stone was the same name that had been written on the stall door.
Yoo Young-Chul
So, you and Taehyung dug yourselves through the night, digging up the worm and critter infested soil of the grave to get to the coffin. Your smart clothing was about to get very messy.
Once your shovels finally hit the hard wood beneath, with a lot of force you broke the coffin open to reveal a dusty ancient fossil smell of old bones that lay silently within the wood, the two hollow eye sockets staring blankly up at you both.
Without waiting another second, you found yourself grabbing the salt from your bag and pouring it over the bones with the gasoline second before taking out a box of matches and lighting one. Dropping the lit match into the coffin you watched the flames lick up and devour the pile hungrily. The salt acted as a purification as the fire destroyed the remains for good, making sure the spirit would never come back and haunt some place again.
Taehyung watched the yellow of the flames reflect on the surface of your eyes with enamour, understanding that there was something about you that he just couldn't get enough of.
"He may not be the aka manto but his spirit definitely took after the urban legend," you spoke finally, relief lifting from your shoulder's. You had completed the case with Taehyung without much trouble getting in the way.
Taehyung shook the dirt that clung to the sleeves of his white shirt. Although mildly annoyed, he was merely thankful that it wasn't one of his Gucci shirts.
With the soft crackling of flames in the six foot hole, in the background you could here the faint sound of wind rustling the grass among the busy sounds of street traffic in the distance.
The stench of gasoline, earth and dust seeped into the skin of your hands and onto the cloth of your sleeves. Your clothes were splattered with mud, mostly the bottoms of your legs and the ends of your arms.
Those two children...The girl and the boy, they had shown you who the culprit was. It was like they had wanted you to avenge them...With their help, you had done so.
Despite the ache and pains in your back and shoulders you picked up the shovel to refill the hole, your work being done.
Taehyung finally looked up from the grave and up at you as you gathered the equipment to return to the Volvo.
"You never said if you forgave me or not," he said with an innocent tilt of his head, looking somewhat hopeful.
You didn't respond.
From your lack of response, a soft jingling sound met your ears as Taehyung took his car keys out of his pocket.
"Will this help your decision at all?"
You pondered to yourself for a second. Taehyung had been on his better behaviour this time, and he genuinely seemed like he wanted to make up for last time which you had to acknowledge, even with his uncomfortable staring and no sense of personal space at times...
Lugging the equipment back into the trunk of the car with his help you sighed.
"You're forgiven," you huffed, grabbing his keys and getting into the driver's seat the car without another word, Taehyung smiling to himself as he followed suit.
Extra:
As Taehyung sat quietly in the passenger seat beside you, he thought back to the instance when out of nowhere you fell against the toilet door saying you knew where the remains of the spirit were out of the blue. Taehyung had seen you do similar the first time he had met you at the morgue. He remembered when you touched the nurse's body, you had seen something. And you'd done it again tonight in the bathroom. You had seen something.
His mind trailed back to the moment he had silenced you with his hand over your mouth and couldn't help but still remember the feeling of your soft lips against his palm. He stole a glace at your face, your lips, as you drove back to the facility through the bright city lights in silence. The feeling lingered on his skin.
Would your lips feel just as smooth and soft on his own than they hand been on his hand?
Taehyung looked at his camera and at your sorrowful face from the coffee house on the small screen, replaying your story in his head and the way your voice had sounded so deliciously mournful.
He wanted more of it.
Apologies if this chapter seemed a bit messy and all over the place....But I was just getting so fed up with myself for not knowing how to write it that I just typed it out anyway I could...eh. I'll be sure to come back and edit it later.
Also, I know not much yandere stuff has happened yet but it is building up to it so please be patient with it. These past few and the oncoming chapters are probably more like fillers but I'm going to try and make them enjoyable.
Since I started this story I've wanted to do it little differently because I feel like a lot of yandere stories that I have read things happen way too soon sometimes even within the first few chapters. I'm trying hard to make this story different and I do hope you guys aren't thinking that its just dragging along and that you're still enjoying reading as much as I'm enjoying writing it (along with some frustration ahaha). If you haven't realised already this story is a bit of a slow burner, so if that's not what you like then it's not about to get better for you ^^'
I've written rough drafts in future chapters and trust me, shit will hit the pan soon. Anyways, thank you again for all the support everyone <3
UNEDITED
August. 30. 2020