LOSE MY BREATH

LMB 28

28: Heartbreak.

Jisung remembered watching a ghost movie at a friend’s place when he was fifteen. It was the type of hyped-up autumn blockbuster that would be the scary movie of the year before fading into the shadowy back of the shelves of barely watchable pop culture.

So in that movie, there had been a pretty blonde and a handsome dude who were ghost hunting. One of them got possessed or something. Jisung could not recall the details, but it had been fun.

His friend couldn’t sleep that night and had shaken Jisung up multiple times to make sure there wasn’t anything staring at them from the darkness of the corners.

In any case, that was when Jisung had learned that he had a pretty high tolerance for spooky stuff. He figured it was a mix of general fascination with ghosts and also his lack of care for his own well-being.

But he does hate jump scares though, be it from a human or something. 

So he was very excited when the night-hunt led them to an angry ghost, who was real and spooky and kind of gross with his sunken face and toothless mouth.

Minho played a song with his guqin and asked questions, meanwhile Jisung fooled around in the ghost’s emptied house like he was a fucking guest.

It turned out the ghost had gotten sick with some sort of mouth infection, and his lover had left him to get a healer. She never returned, and he died, feeling kind of shitty over all the lost teeth and also the utter betrayal.

Jisung would have wanted to investigate the whole thing further, to maybe find out if the girl had really just up and left without care for the guy or if she had somehow been stopped from returning.

Jisung was a sucker for unsolved stories.

But the ghost got really bold for a guy without teeth and maybe tried to chomp off Jisung’s entire head with his unhinged jaw, so Minho shut that down with a spiritual attack.

The night-hunt end with that as the ghost wasn't the strongest.

On their way home Minho was kind of distant, staring off into somewhere with one of his expressions that were not meant to be readable for the general audiences. Jisung, who wanted the night-hunt to be about distracting him from all the inconvenient realities of his situation, found this unacceptable.

Because the thing was, Jisung was going to have Minho for only a few months. Then he had go back to Seoul for at least a year. What was his plan there, anyway? He couldn’t really leave every other year in another world, not if he wanted a steady job and an apartment.

It would have been different if he could have simply shown up whenever he wanted, but having to spend a year wherever he went was inconvenient. However, there was another option...

Not seeing this world’s Jeongin and Felix anymore, not getting to ride a sword, not getting to taste Emperor’s Smile.

Never seeing Minho again.

“Hey, Minho.” Jisung said before he would fall into the cold, bottomless pit of that thought. “If my mouth got infected and you had to go and find me a healer, would you come back?”

Minho came back to him from the distance he had been off to and gave him a look. “Mn.”

“Would you still hang out with me if I had no teeth?” Jisung asked, kind of thrilled at the easy answer.

“Mn.”

“I would hang out with you, too.” Jisung said. “I’d get you dentures.”

“What are… dentures?”