The Price of a Heart's Desire

WARNING: This story contains imagery and allusions to chronic illness, hospitalization, death, murder, and body horror. Take care of yourself first; do not read if there is a chance you will be triggered by such themes. Listen to yourself.

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Drake bit his lip. His form flickered, somewhere, somehow, unsure of itself.

The shadows were only getting worse. 

This dark, oily substance at the corner of his eye.

Sometimes he spotted women.

Dark haired and bony. Old and white colonial dresses. Some in simple silk lingeries. 

He’d… honestly expected some sort of reaction. In an eternally teenaged body. Though he supposed dead meant dead.

Other times there were men, sometimes children with two big irises finding all shades in the multitudes.

But one was a constant.

Sometimes biting on a cherry– where did he get that?-- other times lounging or hanging about like a long limbed cat or lemur. Other times he was fully upside down. Like a possum.

Always smiling that eerie smile of his. 

Ticking off his words so playfully.

The Wishing Ghost.

Today he was having fun tormenting Seth’s little puppy; Shadow. 

Now and again Seth would wake from the racket scolding his brother to not be a creep and leave his things alone. Before laying back into a doze.

He pinched his nose.

How he would have liked to shout out it wasn’t him!

“Isn’t it though?” 

The crimson eyed boy hummed, body leaned close to Drake’s chest in turn.

At a recoil, Drake shielded the IV tube running eternally down and to ether. Sometimes he did feel the stand that should be there. Saline or medication for his kidneys, maybe morphine.

The ghost pouted and whined. “Do you really have to think so ill of me? Hurts a ghost’s feelings you know and just when I’m trying to do my job and give you a bit of company for the good friends we are.”

“You tried to push several classmates down the stairs,” Drake retorted, “and almost clubbed Bianca over the head. Three times.”

“Okay those pinheads had it coming and Miss. I-can-see-future-dead-people,” he cracked about Bianca, “waaas just for fun I admit.”

“Then we really have nothing to talk about,” Drake said, settling his transparent butt on the top of the doorframe. 

“I suppose we do.”

The Wishing Ghost’s smile was unpleasant.

His body coiled around his, a bit like a length of noose rope. 

“How about you humor me,” that smile revealed fangs, “and I give you a bit of information about my death.”

Finger to his lips, the Wishing Ghost looked just as coyly arrogant as ever. A trickster to his core with destructive, disturbing tendencies.

Even so, Drake shook the offered hand.

One session for a vital piece of who this boy had been. If he even was a boy.

Didn’t seem like the worst trade off.

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“I do not want Seth to ‘GET IT!’ Why would any brother want that!

Why would Drake want that?

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“You know he could be pulling your IV tube right?” Maria inquired.

“I’m not sure, just, call it a feeling,” Drake said.

“But we know that if he’s not a compulsive liar, he still has fun stringing us alo– oh.”

Her expression dropped.

Drake peeked at the screen, watching as it nearly blacked out from his presence.

“Get– Get it back!” she cried out, alarmed. “I cannot afford another repair!”

“Ugh. Ow.”

Drake had ended up overshooting, tangling the cord still in his cold, blue tinged body.

With a slight wobble he was back on his feet.

Swallowing a surge of nausea, he explained to his best friend, “I know he can be a pain… okay, an asshole. He doesn’t think well of us as humans and sees us specifically as a joke.”

Drake looked down. “But the dead. He has to get them to trust him somehow.”

“Yeah. I do suppose that’s the way to go about buying you off.”

“He didn’t– buy me off. Really. He just wanted me to humor him. I have no doubt he has a plan but no way did I give him much. Not unless he can read minds.”

“Dunno what there would–” she stilled.

“Plus, I figure he was intrigued by me more than he wanted to admit. Even before I was dead.”

Maria crouched over the keys. Typing away. Urgent and almost angry.

“Hao Gieum. From Daegu. Killed by his twin in a classroom holdup at knife point. The incident was dug up again a few years later, when the school would be sued for gross negligence on part of its staff,” she read, voice hollow. Turning to face Drake directly, “By then though, both were dead. And no one knows yet WHY the other boy snapped.”

“Just two little brothers.”

“It hurt. So, so, so much.”

Hao, while still manic, had looked torn recollecting that. 

Probably saying it out loud.

Then he’d glided off, hissed one last ‘sssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhh’ in Drake’s face and then disappeared. Giggling.

“Are you sure you’re not just letting yourself get led?”

“I probably–”

A jolt suddenly had him reeling.

This…

This feeling in his chest.

Seth.

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The Vietnamese boy was quite smug.

You’re welcome,” he had sung.

Drake had almost tumbled before remembering there would be nothing to tumble into.

Resting himself and allowing himself to simply exist and siphon the energies of this haunt he called home was meant to ground a ghost.

It made him wonder again how Hao– he should really refer to him as Gieum actually, that was the respectful or at least less familiar, proper way to go about it– had gotten from Korea to here in the first place.

Besides more intimate snapshots of his family life and bits of what had to be some wild party or movie now splashed across his consciousness, the Wishing Ghost hadn’t interrupted much.

Shooting up Drake immediately demanded of him, “what did you do?”

His answer came soon enough when Seth trudged through the hall looking deeply troubled.

With Gieum at his side, both boys peeked through the wall.

With a click of his tongue Seth directed Shadow to walk the meager paces to his feet, before scooping up the cute bundle of a puppy to pet him. 

It was then that he recounted what happened.

The Captain position.

Drake hadn’t attended the practice. Partly so the Wishing Ghost may be deterred and dare Drake have hoped, even help out some on that big, burning question.

Why had he stayed on?

No matter what Maria said, how cautious and methodical she wanted to be about this, Drake knew himself. This was much more about the people in his life he cared about.

After all, he’d never wanted to leave. He’d just realized within some moment as he laid in his bed still breathing and alive, he didn’t get a choice. From the moment he’d been born.

When he died, he would die and while not always pleasant he’d lived his life well enough.

No dreams had been left behind he wasn’t promised there, no one he couldn’t meet again, and he had always wanted to meet that one Uncle. Get the story on that falling out between him and his own Dad. Though, that was probably just the Mediator and ‘Voice to the Dead’ titles talking– the dead particularly liked the latter.

But for now…

He’d have to try not to send himself to some bad place for violating the no deaths beyond this point rule on Hao Gieum. 

Remind himself, he’d died at thirteen and Drake was already lightyears more mature and reasonable at basic sixteen. And he suspected, clean of all the apathy and/or sadism that made him possible to begin with.

“This,” Drake pointed to Seth as he absently stroked his dog, “is. Never. What. I. Wanted. Not outside or inside! Never anywhere! I would never ask or want you to grant a wish like this. So why do you?”

“Drake, let’s stop okay,” Hao said quite seriously. “I’ve been at this game a long time, longer than you, longer than even your favorite adorable old man has been alive, and, do you think your age group often, if ever tells the truth?”

He laughed. “If they did, why they’d be constant disappointments. Parents’ll waggle their fingers off ‘disciplining’ them,” he said with quotations that didn’t believe the word, “and then it’ll just be all the more wishes for me to grant. Hmmm, that’s not bad actually!”

“Oh yeah and just what am I supposed to be lying about? I don’t hate Seth in any way Hao Gieum,” Drake said. The power of his full name was startling. 

The usually chipper and unnerving presence hardened and grew cold. An appropriately yet juxtaposing darkness entered a gaze already made of drawn blood.

“Did I give you that information so you could bully me?” he asked, “no I don’t believe I did.”

Drake expected Hao to lunge, to charge, maybe a bite, a kick, punch, even to taste the smothering daze of hospital drugs. Something. Any act of aggression for what he now realized with icy terror had been a slight. Except none came.

Instead, Gieum looked like he couldn’t be happier.

“Since you like to mimic me so much,” he began, “and be so mean about it…”

Skin began to reshape and remold around his skull, “let me show you how it’s really done. Little brother.”

The voice had shifted and distorted now no longer that of an extreme teen with undead command.

And then, it was his face. His face smiling right back at him with tired eyes, sick with sedatives, pain meds, and dialysis. 

Drake could remember the name for every drug in his IVs (many) now.

He also remembered surgery prep, the next day, no… no next day.

The weak, rotting piece inside him had finally failed. Does it dissolve? Whatever it did, it took what made him human out. 

The pain certainly felt like only one word. Death.

The mouth spoke, sneering at him about bullying and being mean. His own face pouted, and then he realized.

The dimple.

Drake had a dimple on the right side of his mouth when he smiled. 

Seth had none.

Then again, did that really matter. 

It was ugly, the sickness that ravaged through his or Seth’s body.

Eyes whited out.

Red staining into simple blue jeans that were still Gieum’s. 

Blond hair that grew and grew matted.

And before Drake could truly process any of that, the room spun.

In one retch he vomited an impossible amount of his stomach.

Again and again.

Two, three, no fourth time.

He coughed and sputtered but all that was left was water and burning acid.

Terrible stabs of agony shot through his stomach, his body wracked with terrible fever. A permanent ringing in his ears.

In and out to near insanity.

“Don’t bully me again Drake,” Hao Gieum whispered in a low, ample hiss. “I’ve done this too long, with too many evil adults.”