two ghosts — parson x angel.

Throughout the years, Angel De Costa had learnt how to be a ghost.

And it wasn’t hard, not when your heart had stopped once and was reawoken all wrong. Angel was dead, then he wasn’t, and what that means is there are parts of him plump with blood, so fiercely vivacious, and then there are parts of him rotten and blackened, as dead as the earth of a graveyard. These parts fight together for dominance, making him human one day, a ghost the next, but these days he feels as though he’s caught in a limbo between the two.

He is weary, and he can’t tell anyone about it.

No one would understand. Mackenzie is there, sure, but the golden man hadn’t died in his arena before he was baptized and crowned. Angel had. His blood spilled out amongst the illusionary sea and mingled with the salt took. No one can understand what that feeling is like … no one except Lex, who hasn’t talked to him in what feels close to decades, and the man he would meet today.

He left the forest a few days ago, but he’ll confess: he hasn’t had the bravado to walk up to the victor village. Instead, Angel has been foraging for himself near the woods, always hooded so as not to be seen, and lurking. Haunting.

But that needs to end, and so there he is, staring at the doorbell, his knuckles bone-white around the strap of his backpack.

Ring it. He doesn’t.
Ring it. He doesn’t.

Instead he spies an open window, and decides for that instead. With an agility that hasn’t aged yet, Angel clambers in, a dark shadow in the bright, wintry day.

That’s when he spots the baby toy, hears footsteps, is greeted by …

“Parson.”