#4. i saw someone else write a poe/ghost person fic and was like 'oh shit theyre gonna think im copying'

[honeylikewords]

That was perfect!! I love Vampire Eddie. How about Santi or Poe moves into a haunted house and they can see ghosts?

I am so glad you enjoy Vampire Eddie! He’s a real sweetheart! For this prompt, I decided to go with Santi being able to see ghosts, and this one took FOREVER to write, for some reason, and I’m still not perfectly content with it. It is kinda hard to write a ghost-human romance, after all, but I hope this is a good opener; I feel like it’ll be a fun AU to explore once I have more of the groundwork in place!

So, without further ado, please enjoy!

Something most people don’t know about Santi is that he is, in fact, very into architecture. He always has been. In fact, before signing up for the military, he’d considered becoming an architect himself, when he was young and in love with reading books about great works of architecture. But no one who had served with him would know this about him; after all, most of Santi’s military friends didn’t especially care about things like architecture, so he never brought it up.

He let his friends dominate the conversation with blabber about which celebrity they’d rather take to bed or about what guns they liked most or about what beer was best, and was fine to just nod along, keeping his interests to himself. He knew there was a time and a place to talk about his hobbies, and that his friends, while close to him, wouldn’t really care that much, so he didn’t feel like wasting his breath. 

Still, after all he’d gone through in the service and after, he was tired of living an incomplete life. Once he got back to the States, he wanted to be more himself, so he did what he’d always dreamed of doing: he bought a beautiful old Victorian mansion, one he’d seen online as being for sale out in Connecticut. He loved the architecture of these older homes, and had always dreamed of living in one for himself; master of a home with swooping, graceful staircases, high, vaulted ceilings, and wide, lovely windows. He’d researched the house online and fallen in love with its gingerbread beauty: the laced windows, the cupolas and spanning porches, the skillful carving of the lattice. It was a dream of intricate little details that made architecture such a fascination of his, and it was elegant and beautiful, a home steeped in history. 

After placing a few calls to local realtors about the place, he set aside a portion of his money from the work he’d done and bought the house, packed up all his things, and moved to a quiet, sleepy little town in Connecticut.

The day he arrived, moving trucks parked all around the massive driveway, he stood in the foyer of his new home, hands on his hips, grinning into the massive space before him. Sure, it was a touch dusty-- he’d been told no one had lived personally in the home for many years, but that it was well-maintained and fully up to code-- but he was nothing if not a hard worker, and he’d have the place ship-shape in no time. 

As he stood in the foyer, surveying his estate, he could swear that he thought he heard... humming. A woman’s voice, humming a tune he didn’t know but felt he’d heard somewhere before. Santi looked around; there were no female movers on the team. He tried to hear the voice again, but when he listened closer, he heard nothing but the clatter and grunt of the movers. 

Shrugging the anomaly off as outside noise, possibly from a passerby on the street, Santi went out to help the movers unload the trucks and bring the goods into his home, and spend the rest of the day bringing in boxes. His help meant the work was over faster, and, soon enough, after the final boxes had been set inside and all the tips had been dispersed to the workers, Santi was alone and free to look around the house. 

The home had come fully furnished, still stocked with original furniture from its heyday in the Victorian era. Gramophones, high-backed chairs, tortoiseshell lamps, shelves of books, butterflies pinned under glass; a beautiful museum of treasures, all for him to explore. He wondered to himself about who the owners had been to leave this all behind, but he found himself more intrigued by just the exploration itself than by getting bogged down in too many details.

Santi moved from room to room, running his hands over the dark, wooden paneling, his eyes traveling from object to object. On the wall hung little samplers and embroidery hoops with delicate designs sewn in, alongside oil paintings; landscapes, portraits of firm-looking men adorned in military regalia and of stern-seeming women in tight-laced dresses, all pallid and austere. There were tables crowded with books and glass-domed clocks, cloche-covered specimens of taxidermy. There were rooms with doors that stuck in their frames, pushing open with a pop, a creak, and a flume of dust, revealing to him beds and chairs draped in white cloth. He marveled at the oddness of it all, and wondered where he would fit into it, now that it was his to have.

As Santi was about to try and pry open the door to the kitchen, he heard something. A familiar, faint sound, wafting to him from a different room. It was the humming from before, but it sounded nearer, clearer. It was unmuffled by the chaos of the movers, and Santi furrowed his brow, listening to it.

He was certain it was a woman’s voice, and felt a chill run through him at the thought that there was someone in his home without his knowledge or permission. He tried to brush off the thought; perhaps there was another one of those gramophones elsewhere in the house, and it had been bumped by a mover, and was now playing a recording of a woman’s hums. Santi attempted to comfort himself with the thought as he began to walk towards the place he heard the song issuing from, but the nearer he drew, the more certain he was that the voice was not recorded, but live, present, and close to him.

He came up to the door he heard the song coming from and pressed his ear to it, holding in his breath. Indeed, he could hear the music, the humming, coming from directly behind it. Swallowing, Santi gathered his courage, and pushed the door open.

Stepping into a room he quickly concluded was the house’s attached solarium  Santi found something he was entirely unprepared for. It was no stuffed fox, no dour portrait, no dusty old grand piano. No, it was something Santi would never have imagined he’d discover waiting for him in these walls.

It was a woman.

She was sitting on a chaise lounge, on the far side of the solarium, near the window, sewing an embroidery hoop. The woman, who seemed to be somewhere around his own age, was wearing a very odd, full-length, heavy-looking dress, her hair pushed up into a bun. When the door closed behind him, she looked up from her hoop, humming stopped, startling him.

Santi felt the instincts of a soldier pass over him, tension rising inside him, threat assessment thoughts running through his head, but he tried to calm down; she seemed harmless, right? She was just sewing, which was not all that threatening, despite the oddness of her being a stranger who was sitting in his supposedly vacant house.

The two stared at each other for a few seconds. Santi broke the silence first.

“Can I... help you?,” he offered modestly. 

She squinted at him, then set her hoop aside, looking left and right. Seeing no one else in the room, she pointed at herself, silently asking him if he was talking to her. Santi nodded and pointed at her, too.

“Yes, you, miss,” Santi clarified. “I believe you’re in my house.”

“You can see me?”

At this, Santi was puzzled. Of course he could see her; it wasn’t like she was invisible, or at all attempting to hide. She was being quite obvious, between the relaxed posture, the sewing, and the large, atypical dress, and, of course, the humming. He wondered if she was ill in some way or if he’d need to call someone; perhaps a local theatre troupe had lost a member.

In this moment of musing, she stood up from the lounge, setting aside the hoop, and wandered over to him, circling him and eyeing him curiously. He followed her gaze, turning in time with her, as if locked in a dance. As she studied him, he studied her; she was beautiful, he found. Her skin seemed to glow, trapping light in it, and her features were lovely, complemented by the color of dress she wore. As she moved, she seemed to float, and Santi found himself entranced. He was taken aback by the unexpected beauty of this unexpected intruder. When she stopped circling him, the woman met his eye firmly and frowned, breaking his reverie.

“You don’t look like a spiritualist,” she spoke.

“I... excuse me?”

“Nor do you look especially psychic,” she added, stepping further towards him, almost within the circle of what Santi considered his personal space. Naturally, he stepped backward, and she frowned further. 

He attempted to make an offer to her.

“I don’t know who you are, but if you need me to call someone for you--”

“And you’re certainly not a shade yourself,” the woman interrupted, reaching out a hand to touch him. Santi tried to recoil, but her hand brushed his shoulder--

And passed right through.

Chilled to the bone, Santi was frozen in place.

His blood froze in place. His eyes stared at her, pointed and yet blank, his mind spinning around violently to try and reconcile what he’d seen and felt with what he had known all his life to be true.

People don’t just faze through people. This he knew to be true.

He didn’t understand.

“Hm. No, you’re all in one piece,” concluded the woman, retracting her hand and crossing her arms. “And you can see me? Odd.”

“You--” 

Santi stammered, blinking rapidly. Words failed to bridge the gap between his brain and his mouth, and he merely dumbly gaped, face clenching as it tried to find the right expression. Anger? Confusion? Pain? He had no idea.

“Mm. Oh, yes.” She seemed to realize he was in shock and gave him a gentle smile, eyes sympathetic. “I see. You didn’t realize the house is haunted.”

“...Ghosts aren’t real,” he blurted out heavily.

“Afraid we are.”

Part of Santi desperately wanted to faint. He thought it’d be only appropriate-- isn’t that what people did when confronted with ghosts?-- but, sadly, he had too strong a constitution. Instead, he swallowed thickly, then wandered over the chaise lounge he’d seen her on, collapsing onto the seat and tiredly resting his face in his hands. It was the closest he could come to fainting.

He groaned miserably.

“I realize this must be stressful,” started the woman, who knelt in front of him and looked up with concern. “But there’s really nothing to be afraid of.”

After a few seconds of processing, Santi’s mind latched on to a memory, to a thread of logic, of something, anything, and forced out a response: Goddamnit, his mind hissed. Of all the houses in all the world...

“I’m not afraid,” Santi mumbled. “I’m annoyed.”

“...Pardon?”

“I am annoyed,” he repeated.

“...Why?”

“Because when I was fifteen I told my abuela that ghosts aren’t real, and it made her cry, and now I’m the jackass that made my abuela cry and I wasn’t even right about what I said!”

There was a pause.

He didn’t know why his mind had gone there. But it had. And this was all his brain had been able to remember on the topic of ghosts, so that was where he was at, emotionally. 

“I’m...sorry?”

The woman’s voice came out tinny, as if she wasn’t sure if she should be sympathetic, confused, or amused.

Santi just continued to hold his head in his hands.

This silent, oxymoronic moment stretched for a good few more seconds before Santi drew in a deep breath and sat up slightly, meeting the woman’s gaze with steely, exhausted eyes.

“Are you some sort of...” Santi trailed off, circling the air with his finger loosely to convey something he’d lost the words for. “Hallucination? Maybe a mover dropped a box on my head and I’m in a coma, dreaming this.”

“Well... that’d be hard to verify, wouldn’t it?” The woman said, standing up before sitting by his side on the chaise lounge. 

At his side, she looked down at her hands and fidgeted with her fingers, seemingly deep in thought. When she looked back over at Santi, she shrugged. 

“What would help you prove I’m real?”

Santi thought for a moment, shifting in his seat to sit up straighter. He cast a glance at the almost-not-quite-semi-transparent-if-he-squinted woman at his side, then raised his hand, pushing it, palm outward, towards her.

She understood what he wanted without him saying it, and extended her own hand. Their digits hovered near one another for a moment, and then each of them, of their own accord, moved forward the final inch, their palms meeting.

The palms did not rest on top of one another, but hers rather passed through his, fusing into one mass. Her fingers passed through his wrist, and the sight of it sent him shivering, anticipating pain, but receiving only a brush of chill. Santi stared at the unity of their hands, feeling the strange, unearthly sensation of touching her. 

His hand felt frigid, like it was submerged in ice water, yet like it was being kissed by a gentle spring breeze, both warm and cool, damp with the promise of rain, dry with the assurance of sun. Somehow, deep in the cold, he also felt a warmth; fleeting, but still there. She was not at all solid, but passing through her was like passing through a deep fog or fine mist, gaseous and permeable. Santi had never felt anything like it.

After a few heartbeats, the woman removed her hand from his, and though the cold had felt sharp, he hadn’t felt any physical pain, and he found that the loss of contact felt, somehow, painfully lonely.

Once they parted, the two sat looking at each other for a long span of seconds, each seeming to silently measure the other, to interpret what had just passed between them. He noticed that she had lovely eyes, unclouded and clear. He didn’t know how to feel about that, nor about how to feel that he definitely thought she was very, very beautiful. 

Part of his mind wondered what it would be like to kiss a ghost.

Suddenly embarrassed and uncomfortable, Santi stood up, breaking their eye contact, which made the woman at his side jump a little. As he began to walk away, she called after him.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going to make a phone call.” 

Stopping in the doorway, he turned back to look at her, a distant, tentative smile hovering on his lips. 

“I’m going to apologize to my abuela. Even if this is all a dream, I think it’d be nice to talk to her.”

As he entered the foyer and pulled out his phone, sitting on the steps, he saw the spectral woman walk into the hallway and stand a respectful distance from him. She gave him a kind smile, one that reached all the way into her eyes, and it strangely comforted him as he listened to the dial tone, waiting for his grandmother to pick up.

Santi watched the woman, a mire of emotions swirling around his tired head. She watched him back. Somehow, he did not feel particularly afraid, which surprised Santi; he always believed that meeting a ghost would be terrifying. Yet, here one was, and instead, he found her rather... sweet-seeming. 

When Santi’s grandmother picked up, excitedly greeting him in rapid Spanish, the woman took her cue and left the room, giving Santi a last wave as she faded into a darkened parlor. He watched her go, curious and confused, and then turned his attention to speaking to his grandmother, smiling to himself at the sound of her warm, familiar voice.

“Tuve el sueño más extraño, abuela,” Santi murmured, smiling distantly. 

Santi could not predict the future. He had no idea what would happen next. But, somehow, sitting on those stairs, listening to his grandmother’s happy voice asking him about his dream, he felt like he’d be alright. He’d learn to live with this ghost, or this dream, and he’d be alright. 

Maybe he’d even learn to like it.

Or love it.

Who knew?

He’d just have to wait and see.

Besides, he thought to himself, even if the box had dropped on him and he was in a coma, Santi suspected there were worse places to be than in a beautiful house with a very beautiful ghostly roommate.