Status: Closed
This round has closed. It remains open for fills, comments and remixes, but prompts are no longer accepted.
About
"Someone will remember us, I say, even in another time."
"How inconvenient to be made of desire."
"It's me, hi, I'm the problem its me."
Calling all readers, lovers of poetry and music, screen and stage. Quote collecters and lyric hoarders, unleash your archive. For this round, every prompt must contain a quote - you can combine them, add commentary, link to articles, do whatever. Steal from a literary classic, or copy WeVerse drama.
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(now i'm) haunted
Major Tags: N/A
Additional Tags: alternate universe!
Do Not Wants: canon compliant/canon divergent
Prompt:
- Haunted Houses, an essay by Laura Maw
[FILL] close enough for comfort
Major Tags: N/A
Additional Tags: photographer!wonwoo, ghost hunter (of sorts)!hoshi, interviewer!chan, this all makes better sense in my head ok
Permission to remix: Yes
Word Count: 1.1k
***
[a/n heavily (heavily) referenced the quote source in this one lol]
***
This is what Chan imagines: the photographer, Jeon Wonwoo, dipping his head under the black hood of his camera to look through the lens; and his partner, Kwon Soonyoung, gently pulling aside the owner of the house being photographed to distract them with questions and put them at ease about the two near-strangers inside their home. Wonwoo’s lens is focused on an open doorway, beyond which lies an old bedroom. The room looks lived in: cushions of varying sizes and patterns lie at the head of the oakwood bed; a rocking-chair, upon which rests a knitted throw, is to its left, hidden partly in the darkness behind the doorframe; a cardboard box filled with odds and ends—yarn, needles, spools of thread—peeks out from underneath it. A potted plant, a large dreamcatcher, and a painting in shades of brown and blue hang above the headboard. The painting depicts two figures, one in light and the other in shadow, but their faces, despite gazing out towards the viewer, are obscured by a swathe of paint; no matter how hard one looks, their features can’t be discerned.
Chan looks up from the photograph in question to his laptop screen. Wonwoo’s seated in front of a blank wall in his studio, arms folded across the table before him, looking exactly the same as he did two years ago when he and Chan last met. He even has on the same glasses. “I didn’t expect him to be of any help at all,” Wonwoo’s saying about Soonyoung wryly, his voice breaking up on occasion due to the poor connection, “but I was surprised to find myself proven wrong.”
The perfect moment to interject—they’re only a few minutes into their conversation, and this is around the time he usually mentions it—Chan asks if he can start recording. To his surprise, Wonwoo says no, telling him that he would rather talk first and be interviewed another time. Chan pauses for a moment but says he doesn’t mind; secretly, he begins agonizing over what they say to one another, imagining each word disintegrating as they speak. “Was it difficult, making the decision to move countries for the sake of your work?” Chan asks, trying to keep his worry out of his voice. He pulls his notebook and pen closer, ready to jot down anything Wonwoo says that he might want to return to when they’re actually recording.
Noise from Wonwoo’s end of the call has him looking to his right in the middle of a sentence. “I brought lunch!” someone says, and must be brandishing shopping bags because Chan hears the rustling through the laptop. A moment later, Soonyoung’s face shows up in the camera frame. “Oh, was the interview today?” he asks. “Dino-yah! Have you eaten?”
“Do you still insist on calling me that?” Chan replies, and the conversation quickly devolves from there. However much of a comfort it is to catch up with old friends, even if only over an online call conducted well before sunrise in order to match time zones, there’s a reason he avoids interviewing people he knows if he can help it: it’s impossible to stay professional. Between bites of kimchi fried rice—apparently, the food in several of Koreatown’s restaurants reminds them of home—the three of them jump from topic to topic, discussing Wonwoo’s temporary move to the States and his subsequent rise in success, the publication of monographs, Soonyoung’s visit and its extension, his memories of learning to dance in the academy Chan’s parents still run in Iksan, Wonwoo’s first impression of Chan as a freshman, what Joshua’s doing right now, what Jihoon’s doing right now, what Mingyu’s doing right now. Through it all, Chan keeps his eyes to the screen but his pen to paper; he scribbles pieces of their conversation in his notebook to return to later, a frantic attempt at preserving, and they become a strange list: ghost stories, Shirley Jackson, stereo cards. His biggest fear is one he’s painfully familiar with due to mishaps in previous interviews, when noticing the tape recorder’s static numbers or replaying a jumbled phone recording: the acute dread of losing good sentences. He knows his internet is as stable as ever; his anxiety stems from the American end, with whole phrases getting lost not only in the connection but also in the delay, when they accidentally speak over each other.
At one point, Wonwoo talks about the inspiration behind Haunted Houses. “I didn’t notice it myself,” he says. “When Soonyoung first accompanied me on one of my shoots in New York—this was for one of the group catalogs I featured in, No Place Like Home—he talked to the owner of the house we were working on and found out the house had a ghost. Then for Parameters, I photographed the houses of thirteen people with agoraphobia, and they all mentioned having ghosts in their houses.” The way he says it—ghosts in their houses—passes no judgment. Apparently this is also the time Soonyoung decides to extend his stay, and the two start their hunt for haunted houses. One takes the pictures, the other records the stories of the people who live there, and a pattern emerges: to the owners, the ghosts are a presence not unwanted but comforting. A woman named Denise talks of how when her family first moved in, doors would be locked and the television turned off at night if anyone forgot to do the same before going to sleep; she once woke up early to find someone sitting at the foot of her bed, wearing a flannel shirt, their face blurred to her vision to the point she couldn’t make out any of their features—just like the painting above the headboard. She told nobody of the incident until a friend of hers, a psychic, casually mentioned having a dream in which a figure wearing a flannel shirt was sitting on Denise’s bed. Another person in another house, a child named Mia, tells Soonyoung of the ghost that plays with her toy car every evening, driving it up as far as the roof.
Chan can’t help but wonder if Soonyoung’s told Wonwoo about the first house he lived in, if that’s where his lack of judgment stems from. Perhaps Soonyoung’s natural inclination towards belief over skepticism has rubbed off on his best friend; Wonwoo had always seemed much more cynical when in university.
Before long, their hour together is at an end, and the trio say their goodbyes, with Wonwoo promising to make time later on during the week for a recorded session. Chan exits out of the meeting and looks down at his notebook to find his writing has skewed across the lines, the words becoming smaller and harder to read, often even overlapping with other words to create a convoluted mess.
He sighs. This will be hell to type up.
Re: [FILL] close enough for comfort
NEXT. omg i love the way this flows - even if it's fast-paced the references to their shared history, their past, chan talking about stuff he knows about them is SO ME coded. seriously! & also the entire fact that this is chan pov (CHAN INTERVIEWER IM CRYING)
would love to read more of ur stuff pls drop ur twt/ao3!!!
Re: [FILL] close enough for comfort
Re: [FILL] close enough for comfort