Work Text:
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Ryan pats Shane’s chest and grins.
And, oh, it’s not a fear smile that spreads across Ryan’s face—no, because the part of the night where Ryan scares himself silly, alone in the dark, has yet to take place—this grin is the real thing, Ryan’s genuine delight all wrapped up neatly with a glimmering, twisted thread made up of Ryan’s brash affection.
“Only way out is through, big boy.”
Shane feels his jaw drop as Ryan—Ryan, mind, the man whose hip flexors are so tight he complains loudly about the strain to his body every time he sits on the floor—that Ryan—rolls his shoulders and crouches low, shifting his weight from side-to-side and grunting aloud like he’s at a basketball tourney. His deranged warm-up complete, he then ducks his head and crab-walks into the ridiculously small room. He tucks his knees up to his chest and pats the floor of the empty space next to him.
“Coming?”
“I—uh.”
It’s barely a room. It’d be more accurate to call it a closet. It’s like if a room was forgotten about and then hastily sketched in just before the library opened its doors. The ceiling, what Shane can see of it, tilts down low and foreboding.
“Are you sure about this?” Shane hedges. He ducks his head below the door lintel and peers inside.
The air is so close that Shane feels Ryan’s impatient huff of breath flutter across his clothes like a disappointed specter.
“We’re the best ghost hunters in the biz,” Ryan deadpans. “So, yeah, c’mere. The ghosts beckon. And we must do our due diligence to investigate.”
And what Shane wants to say is that, if the ghosts had nothing to say while Ryan stood there, earlier, between the library stacks, Shane keeping Ryan’s face centered within the tiny, grainy viewfinder of his camera while feeling his heart slowly break into small pieces inside his chest on Ryan’s behalf while Ryan pleads—pleads—with the ethereal presence to show herself, sure his sincere words can somehow help her find her rest, then the ghosts will definitely have nothing to say still, even if the two of them cram themselves into this tiny closet masquerading as a room.
But Ryan is looking up at him, then reaching out to grab at one bony knee, and rather than letting this all turn into one long unintended bit, Shane sighs and crouches down, down, until he can pretzel his body up so the two of them can fit. The barest shadows on the wall show where shelves used to hang, so tightly huddled together that they must have held the stiff cardstock of an old-fashioned card catalog. Or maybe this was where aperture cards or even microfilm reels were stored; some fount of knowledge in a format so outdated that it had long since been rendered into the incorporeal via digital format and the shelves, no longer needed for their physical job, had similarly evaporated into the air.
The roof angles low here, so low it’s impossible to stand, so Shane settles on the floor, hearing the planking creak beneath him, and waits for what Ryan has in store.
Ryan fumbles around in his knapsack, grins wider than Shane’s seen him grin all night, and produces—
—the headphones.
Shane drops the headphones over his own head and enjoys the way their heavy padding deadens the sounds of the outside world to nothing. Ryan handles the receiver in his lap, plugging in wire connections and setting up the gadget. All too soon, his eyes flicker up to meet Shane’s, and he grins once more.
And flicks the switch which floods Shane’s ears with the finest (and loudest) radio interference waves the Estes Method can offer. Shane probably groans out loud, not that he can hear himself at all, judging by how Ryan’s eyes crinkle at the edges in a muted display of laughter.
“Turn around,” are the last words Shane sees Ryan’s mouth shape, accompanied by a gesture with his hand, his fingers tracing a circle in a small arc before his chest. The end result is that Shane lines up his back with Ryan’s, tries to cross his legs so his knees don’t bang into the wall, and closes his eyes. And listens.
Usually, when enough time has passed, the harsh static of the radio skipping through stations blurs into a soothing cacophony of noise. Sometimes it’s reminiscent of the low hum of chatter in a coffee shop. Of rustling pages and the soft graphite scratch emanating from the neat rows of library carrels. Or the sounds of wind fluttering its bony fingers through the autumn-dry leaves of the oak trees which line themselves up in a row outside the library on this dark night.
It’s an unusual setup, to breathe in and fill his lungs with air, and, because the room is so small—just a cupboard, really, a forgotten room in a library so old even its storage nooks have fallen out of use, good only for storing two men and a whole pile of their ghost-huntin’ equipment, at the moment—it’s odd to feel the movement through his body when Ryan draws breath, too. There’s an occasional low rumble of Ryan’s voice asking questions, too. Though he can feel the movement of Ryan’s syllables vibrate against his spine, the headphones ensure he hears nothing but the disembodied voices skipping their way over the airwaves via the radio.
“Now!” Shane repeats.
kshhh kshhh ksssshhhh, the radio babbles.
“Must!”
Did Shane say other words? He must have. Ryan’s back, exuding warmth even through all the layers of shirts and jacket and blood and bone Shane wears, wrapping up his soul in layers to protect—to protect—
“Touch—you—no, me!”
Ryan’s body shakes; a laugh, maybe. A quick reply. What must be words register only as low rumbles against Shane’s spine.
Ryan shifts. Shane’s body eases into Ryan’s.
“Kiss!”
Ryan shifts his weight, side-to-side. It brings Shane back to consciousness that he even has a body, abruptly awakening from floating on waves made of cotton-batting-soft radio fuzz.
“You!”
“Yes!”
A return to floating. Dreaming. Shane likes these sessions; likes how the headphones blot out the world. Likes how he can close his eyes and drift. He can allow himself to forget the pressure of performing for the camera, because all he has to do is repeat what he hears, and all he has is what he is—“Kiss!”—a featureless wisp of being. A simulacrum of nothingness. A floating wreck of a person subsumed in a gently tilting ocean. A sliding bag of neuroses, rocking on the swells of a wine-dark ocean. A traveling show of noise and volume, jaunty and loud and—and—and feeling himself cradled in Ryan’s thick arms and the huff of Ryan's breath on his scruff of his skin and the touch of Ryan’s lips on his, gentle and slow.
Shane’s eyes snap open in shock, and the wavering light from Ryan’s flashlight lends an underwater haze to the room. The beam dances across Ryan’s sharp cheekbones and hides Ryan’s eyes in deep shadows and somehow Ryan is caressing his cheek while the headphones blare a decrepit kssh sssshshhhh still the same as before.
Probably a noise escapes Shane’s mouth—but it’s something he feels rather than hears. His heart pounds in his chest. Heat pools low in his body. He lets the radio receiver slip from his grasp so he can help himself to great handfuls of Ryan, fisting the fabric of Ryan’s shirt against the small of Ryan's back. A gasp of breath breaks between them, and Shane thinks it might’ve been Ryan but it could’ve been either of them, the way Shane’s unsure, now, if he’s breathing with Ryan’s lungs or his own.
Intrigued, Shane opens his lips, encouraging, hoping, and Ryan meets him there with an exploring tip of his tongue and a tighter grasp around his shoulders—and he knew, somewhere inside, that Ryan had to be strong, but feeling the fact of it around him is something else entirely—and Shane realizes he’s reclining like a swooning maiden and Ryan is bearing him up in his arms while they are kissing like the world is ending outside their door.
And maybe it is—Shane wouldn’t know. Or care.
“More,” the voice in his headphones croaks, before wafting back into the nothingness of snow and static.
“More,” Shane repeats, and the only way he knows he must have said the word out loud is the vibration of his own vocal chords and the way Ryan smiles against his skin.
The padded headphones make Shane feel like his head is full of fluff, the outside world cordoned off by headphone wires. He floats in a formless place while the rhythmic hiss pulled from the airwaves pounds in his ears.
Then Ryan’s hands ground him, fingers kneading into his back. Then Shane wriggles his way into Ryan’s lap, and Ryan’s hands are making their way up into the bristle of his sideburns. The heat of Ryan’s body registers like fingers of electricity spiking and arcing.
A kiss, then another and another, heated like tongues of flame from a quiet candle. Ryan’s scruff is sharp over Shane’s skin and Ryan’s groan into Shane’s mouth is a low vibration of longing.
And then. A startle. A shake. Ryan’s intake of breath is sharp, his eyes wide in the close darkness of the room.
“No,” Shane says, or maybe the woman in the headphones says it first. “Come back,” the keening voice cries.
Ryan’s lips are moving, panicked, quick, and Shane’s spirits are sinking low into the floorboards.
“I never—” the radio squawks, louder than the steady rumble of Ryan’s words and ruminations, his ever-present anxiety finally catching up to him and locking him in its greedy embrace as Shane sits up, cold from the memory of the warmth of Ryan’s arms around him.
“—got—to live,” she protests with her reedy voice in Shane’s ears.
The radio goes dead.
The lack of the familiar hiss of the feedback feels like loss. The cold creeps in from the walls and Shane feels it in his bones. Feels it in a shiver that radiates from the places on his body where Ryan’s hands had held him and now just the cold tendrils of a late autumn midnight rush in.
Shane looks down from Ryan’s wild eyes to see the spirit radio in Ryan’s hands. Ryan has disconnected it, and its tangle of wires resemble a squashed bug in his hands. Bereft of life.
Shane wonders, idly, for a fleeting half-second of madness, whether his heart would beat again and his body would stop being so cold if he snatched up the mess of plastic and metal and wires and jammed it into his own chest, underneath his ribcage, where his heartbeat has frozen in place.
Ryan’s hand comes towards Shane’s face, and Shane closes his eyes so he can bear it, but instead of feeling the warmth of Ryan’s touch, all that registers is a breeze across Shane’s hair as Ryan tugs the headphones off Shane’s head.
The world snaps back into place, into a focus so sharp that Shane grits his teeth against it, in order to bear its sandpaper rasp against his soul.
“I’m sorry—I’m sorry!” Ryan is saying, over and over. “I should have—I don’t—you said to do that, and so I did, and I can’t—”
“Ry.”
“I should have known—”
“Ry.”
Shane places a hand on Ryan’s knee. It’s not a far distance, still crammed into the small room as they are, their knees bumping together as they face each other.
Ryan gasps, then his mouth snaps shut with a click of teeth.
Shane hastily fills the silence. “It’s fine. I said to, and you did. You did what I asked.”
Ryan’s eyes are bigger than dinner plates. Normally, Ryan’s fear is a good time in a haunted library like this one. Something for Shane to poke and prod and tease, until Ryan is laughed out of his fear of the unknown.
This time, Ryan’s afraid of. Afraid of.
He looks Shane up and down, half-hidden in the shadows and just says, shortly, “I did.”
Shane reaches out to touch Ryan. To graze his fingers along Ryan’s knuckles, cold as they are in the sudden chill of the room.
“I liked it.”
“Oh.” Ryan looks at Shane’s hand, right where it is, over jeans and skin and sinew and bone.
He looks up again, and then he breathes out, as if everything has suddenly been explained to him, inside his head. Blinks hard. Swallows like there’s a lump in his throat.
“Oh.” The edges of Ryan’s voice are hard and sharp. When he speaks again, he’s making a visible effort to soften his effect, but his voice is low and cuts into Shane at a low angle, like a sharp knife against his ribs.
“It’s you, isn’t it?”
Shane can feel the ground shift underneath him. Underneath the two of them. “Ryan. It’s me. Shane.”
Ryan shakes his head. Vehement. Sure.
“It’s you,” he breathes again, somehow speaking in Shane’s direction but not. Not to Shane at all. “The girl who died in the stacks, over there.” Ryan gestures with his chin, in a bro-ish gesture that doesn’t hide the hurt in his eyes. “All those years ago.”
No. “Yes.”
Cold fingers clutch at Shane’s insides. Why did I say that?
Ryan’s intake of a deep breath resonates against the walls of the room.
“You can rest, you know. Don’t have to hang around the place where you died. You don’t have to take up residence inside my friend here.”
“Ryan.”
But Ryan’s far away, talking at a rapid pace. Not to Shane, but through him, to the entity he thinks is controlling Shane’s thoughts and moving Shane’s body.
Ryan looks down into his lap. Pulls his hand away from Shane’s. In response, a panicked flutter beats against Shane’s ribs from the inside.
“You can go now,” Ryan’s saying, his lip curled into a performance of bravado, but his eyes are wide and scared—scared of Shane, when all these hours and all these years they’ve been tramping in haunted places, Shane is where Ryan looks to when he wants to be unafraid.
Somewhere inside Shane’s guts, the cold flutter happens again.
“Don’t haunt this place anymore.” Ryan chucks the whole pile of deadened electronics into his little rucksack while simultaneously scrabbling for the doorknob above his head.
“Ry. Ryan, it’s me.”
Ryan won’t meet Shane’s eyes.
His fingers gain purchase on the brass doorknob and he throws his shoulder, hard, against the old wood. The door bursts open in a rush of fresh air.
Ryan is still talking, but not talking to Shane—no, calling out to the spirit of some unfortunate woman who was stabbed, right where she was standing between the bookshelves laden heavily with canvas-bound books with marbled pages. It happened long ago; decades and decades have passed since she collapsed in the aisle and her attacker slipped away, never to be found.
Ryan’s back is broad and his fingers shake where he clutches onto a metal shelf to anchor himself, as if he’s afraid of falling as he turns his head this way and that to scan the shadows for movement.
Shane unfolds himself from the tiny closet-room and launches into the stacks, his sneakers quiet on the ancient olive-green carpet.
“You have to move on,” Ryan calls out.
Shane reaches out and just barely touches the elbow of Ryan’s jacket, canvas fabric and cotton underneath and flesh and bone and a panicked heart going a mile a minute when he half-turns and the glow of the flashlight lights up his features.
It’s Ryan who looks haunted, Shane thinks to himself. Not me.
Shane would share the thought out loud, so he and Ryan can laugh at it together, here between the stacks where the air smells of paper and dust and where hauntings don’t walk the aisles because all that’s here is pages heavy with printer’s ink and shelves heavy with bound books and Shane, weighted down with the memory of Ryan’s lips on his.
“You have to move on,” Ryan says again.
“Don’t. Ryan—” Shane tries.
Ryan’s gaze pins Shane into place.
“And let my friend go.”
The flutter beneath Shane’s ribcage stills. Goes sullen and still. Shane’s body is cold. He yearns to feel once again the warmth of Ryan’s hands through the fabric of Shane’s coat and shirt and skin and sinew and bone.
Ryan advances a step. Shane backs up a step more, until he feels the narrow steel lines of the bookshelves pressing into his back. Ryan steps up close, so close Shane can see the dark rings and furrows that wind along the irises of Ryan’s eyes. Behind those eyes, Shane can see that Ryan’s scared. He’d joke about it, try to jostle Ryan until the fear is laughed out of him, but when Shane tries to speak, instead his tongue cleaves to the roof of his mouth.
Ryan levels a determined gaze. When he opens his mouth to speak, his voice is gravel.
“Let. My friend. Go.”
Someone whispers, sadly: “I never got to live.”
And then, inside Shane’s head, someone turns out all the lights.
The knuckle of his first finger makes two raps on Ryan’s hotel door.
“Yeah?” A bleary voice responds.
Shane’s body is warm now. The chill that scraped at his bones back at the library is long gone now. Another episode of Ghost Files is wrapped and in the can, followed by another fast food feast enjoyed with Ryan and the crew at four o’clock in the morning, when the sky was so dark it didn’t seem believable that the sun would ever come up again.
But the sun will rise, in another short hour, changing the sky from gray to gold, and they’ll see it outside this old hotel through its expansive windows made up of lots of little squares of glass and wood.
And Shane himself might be evidence, judging by the way Ryan’s chewing his lip and tapping away at his laptop, likely rolling footage back and forth and back and forth, looking for a certainty Ryan believes the camera will give him, sure as the sun will rise and Ryan will house a stack of pancakes for breakfast when they go together later to the diner down the street.
Shane has his own evidence to present. And it has nothing whatsoever to do with ghosts.
“Hey.”
Ryan blinks, stretches his arms above his head with a tired groan, and rubs his face. “Hey.”
“You feeling okay?”
Shane swallows. “Never better.” He perches at the side of the bed, next to where Ryan stretches his legs out, dressed in soft sweatpants and ending in socked feet. Ryan lays his laptop aside.
“Ghost possession will do a number on you,” Ryan says. His expression is grave. He looks Shane up and down. Gets up from the opposite side of the bed and paws around inside the minifridge. Hands Shane a bottled water.
“I’m not—I wasn’t ghost-possessed,” Shane protests, before he twirls the cap off the bottle and takes a swallow.
Ryan levels a look at him. Narrows his eyes. “Really.”
The bottle crinkles under Shane’s fingers. He sets it aside. “I know what I said, Ryan.”
Ryan’s eyes are guarded. “What the ghost who possessed you said. But go on.”
Shane leans in. Steadies himself with a hand on the mattress, so close that he can feel the heat that radiates from Ryan’s body.
“I said, touch me, Ryan. Will you?”
He gives a tight little nod. His eyes may be full of doubt, but his curious hands are already reaching out. Tentative fingers run over Shane’s hip, then up over his chest, playing over the soft fabric of his shirt.
Shane forgets to breathe for a moment. And then remembers how to again. His huff of air swirls the dust motes in the room.
“Do you believe this is me? Not a ghost, Ryan.”
Under Ryan’s hand, there is the cloth of Shane’s shirt and then Shane’s skin and bone and then his heart, beating triple-time.
Ryan sets his jaw. Stubborn. “Ghosts leave behind an energy. A yearning for what they couldn’t have in life.”
But he doesn’t take his hand back, away from Shane’s chest. Shane covers Ryan’s hand with his own. Feels his body warm with desire.
“A ghost gets to be horny for you—that you’ll believe—but I’m not granted the privilege?”
This close, Shane can see the doubt in Ryan’s eyes. Ryan’s laugh is harsh. “It’s not a privilege, dude.”
“You’re wrong. In more ways than one.”
A spark of defiance lights behind Ryan’s eyes. Outside, through the window’s many glass panes, the sky lightens to a pearly shade of gray.
“But you felt so cold,” Ryan whispers.
Shane cracks a smile. “It was likely just the wind,” he teases.
Ryan half-gasps an outraged laugh. “You’re incorrigible.”
Shane ups the ante. “I also said, hold me,”
Ryan squeezes his eyes shut, then opens them again. As if he expects Shane to shimmer out of existence and just—evaporate from the physical realm to the ethereal. Maybe just end up composed of invisible zeros and ones, like the digitized ether where all those library files from the emptied storage room reside now.
As if Shane isn’t solid, all the way through. Made of blood and bone and sinew and parted lips and gasping breath.
Shane leans in.
Ryan grinds his jaw so hard it’s a wonder his teeth aren’t all broken in his mouth. Shane waits, steady, feeling the warmth of his body and the rhythmic thump of his own heart. Waits until Ryan reaches over and reels Shane in with his strong arms.
This close, Shane can see the lines and star-like patterns in Ryan’s irises. Can feel him take a breath, and then another, fighting within himself over what he believes.
Shane wraps his arms around Ryan. Every place his body touches Ryan’s he offers as another piece of evidence for Ryan’s cache.
“Don’t pass out on me this time, big guy,” Ryan murmurs.
Shane laughs. “Wouldn’t think of it.”
Chest-to-chest, Shane can feel Ryan’s heartbeat underneath his skin. Because Ryan, too, is made of sinew and bone and deep-seated desire, hidden underneath all that fear.
“Do you believe it’s me in here? And not a ghost trying to get at you?”
Ryan looks at him. Still wary. Still hesitant.
Shane makes a disappointed noise in his throat. Answers his own question. “Of course. There’s no way to prove it, is there?”
It’s not a question that needs an answer.
Their bodies are flush together. Shane draws his fingers along Ryan’s cheek, where his stubble scratches and drags at his fingertips. Ryan closes his eyes and leans into Shane’s touch and sighs.
After a long moment, Ryan leans back. Refocuses his attention on Shane’s face.
“There might be a way. To prove it,” Ryan rejoins mildly.
“Oh?”
“Scientifically, even.”
Ryan squares his shoulders.
“Kiss me. Again,” Ryan says, ducking his head to hide his sudden flash of affection behind his pessimist's glare.
An encouraging tug around Shane’s back, and a small groan from Ryan’s parted lips, and Shane mashes his lips into Ryan’s. It’s a messy, unsophisticated affair, tongue and teeth and lips. Ryan’s hands slide down to press their bodies together.
Shane presents his case, his evidence, in the only way he knows how. In the mutual shedding of shirts and jeans and socks. In the lick of heat between his legs and the answering moan from Ryan’s lips. In the way their bodies interlock together.
In the doubt behind Ryan’s eyes disintegrating. The way his new certainty shows itself in the firm way that he grasps Shane's cock.
“All me, baby—only me,” Shane murmurs reassuringly.
Ryan laughs and it lights up his eyes. That and the sunrise, golden through and through.
Ryan leans down, and, “Ryan, kiss me,” he presses his lips to Shane’s. Shane throws a leg over Ryan’s so Ryan can feel that the both of them are only made of skin and sinew and blood and bone.
There are no ghosts when Ryan closes his eyes and comes with a cry and Shane’s name in his mouth. There are no cool breezes when Shane rocks into Ryan and murmurs warm praise against Ryan’s skin while Ryan pulls an orgasm from Shane.
Their legs tangle together and Shane pants into Ryan’s mouth as they both come down. Through the window, the sky shimmers in sunrise shades of pale gold.
Ryan stretches his arms over his head and lets out a satisfied groan. Soon, too soon, that diner stack of pancakes will beckon.
Ryan cuts his eyes over to Shane. “The Estes Method is—it’s pretty reliable,” he insists. “You know what you heard. And who made you a conduit in that library.”
Shane’s body ran cold, then. The blood like ice in his veins. “Kiss me,” the voice had demanded from the radio-static waves of Shane’s headphones.
Shane’s body is warm, now. And waves of heat thrill through him as he leans in to collect languorous kisses from Ryan’s lips.
“I think she’s gone, Ryan.”
What Shane means is: never was here. Ghosts don’t walk between library shelves at night.
Ryan's grin is as wide as the day is long. “I know,” he says.
What Ryan means is. Well.
“I think she’s at rest now. Thanks to us.”
Ryan cackles with glee when Shane groans out loud and pelts Ryan with a pillow.
“I’m not even gonna ask how you think we sent a ghost on to the higher plane.”
Ryan arches an eyebrow. Sighs with a note of satisfaction. His bare chest is enticing and makes Shane’s mouth water.
“Why, we sent her on to the light with our wild, ghost-huntin’ sex. One look at us, doing the horizontal mambo between the sheets, and she said, ‘Blech. You know what? I’ve had enough of hanging around Earth. Time to move on, and see what’s next in store for me. It's gotta be better than this.’”
Shane laughs.
“That’s one way to encourage ghosts to walk toward the light, I guess.”
After the stack of glorious diner pancakes but before the midmorning flight back to LAX, Ryan walks back into the library stacks, with Shane, as always, trailing behind.
Ryan curls up on the carpeted floor, and looks up at Shane, who stands guard. His eyes are hopeful as he plops the headphones over his head and switches on the spirit radio.
Ryan closes his eyes and listens. The static sounds like the breeze rustling through the autumn-dry leaves of the trees. Unchanging. Serene.
Somewhere in the library, archivists continue their work. Scanning and converting. Film pictures become computerized jpegs. Paper disappears into digital zeros and ones. Metal boxes full of paper and carbons disappear, leaving behind only the shadows of where they once were and empty shelves as testament to their lost physical forms.
Ryan wonders if he can hear it in the static—the sound of all these physical files, as they lose form and become ethereal. Trading one form for another. Becoming one with the air and the wind and the crackling breeze through autumnal trees.
He wonders if there is a sound when a ghost leaves the earth and heads out for—for—well, whatever’s out there. He wonders if he heard that sound, when he knelt next to Shane’s unconscious body and pled with anyone who could hear for Shane to be all right—Please, please be okay—and Shane looked at him with unseeing eyes and tried to form words, but all that came out of him was an unearthly keening sigh.
Ryan had held Shane’s cold hand in his own, and told the ghost in Shane’s body that it was okay for her to move on. That there was a place for her, far from the cramped rooms and low ceilings of the library stacks.
The spirit radio hisses in unchanging static. Ryan clicks the switch to Off, and silence fills his head.
The library is quiet.
At the threshold to the library, Ryan stops by the old wooden doors with shining brass handles. Looks out at the stand of trees that rustle as the fall breeze whispers its secrets.
Ryan slips his hand into Shane’s.