+ two

"Jongdae! Brothers! Come quick!" She called from the hallway after leaving her bedroom in a rush, startled that there was someone else in the reflection of the mirror. She had also been surprised that she even had a brief conversation with the entity, and he was as normal as if he were any other person. He didn't seem to be bad, but then again she couldn't be too sure after having spent only a few moments with him.

Her voice was so full of worry and even fear, something unusual in her, that her brother ran towards her in a flash, ready to protect his sister from any type of harm. He had heard her quickly, his own room was only across the hallway from hers and he had grabbed the first object he could potentially use as a weapon in self defense. The rest of their brothers were still downstairs with their parents, exploring the many rooms of the house's main floor. Doyoung and Taehyung had been especially excited about the pool in the back yard of the house, and had gone directly out to it, rather than visiting their new bedrooms first. None of them had heard Jisoo's screams calling for help from the second floor.

"What is it, Jisoo? Are you okay?" He was out of breath and held an aluminum baseball bat securely in his hands, ready to swing at an intruder. His eyes darted from one side of the room to another in search of intruders. When she didn't say anything, he asked her again, "What's wrong?" He was expecting there to be a homeless person or someone breaking into the once abandoned house, but at that moment she didn't seem to be in any sort of danger. He seemed to relax significantly, dropping his arms to his sides.

She moved to the side and let him pass into the empty room cautiously. Jisoo grabbed onto her brother's arm and led him all the way into the room, stopping directly in front of the mirror which had been mysteriously left behind by a previous owner.

"Look into the mirror, Jongdae. Tell me what you see." She gestured towards the gold color rimmed object before them.

Her brother's dark eyes looked at his own reflection in the mirror with confusion. It was all he could see in it.

"Its a mirror." He stated the obvious. His grip on the baseball bat relaxed considerably and he let it fall to the floor with a thud. If there was no one to protect his sister from, he wouldn't be needing it until he could join a baseball team in town, most likely the one at his new high school.

Frustrated, she groaned, "Well duh, Jongdae. But...do you see anything else there? Anything at all?"

"Like what sort of thing am I supposed to be looking for?" He eyed her, confused, turning now to face her. He was starting to think that she was trying to play a prank on him. Usually he was the one playing pranks on his other siblings, but every once in a while they'd gang up and prank him back. 

"Like, I don't know, maybe a guy in a military uniform?" She insisted, her eyes darting from her brother to the mirror and then back again. Jisoo could clearly see the boy standing inside the mirror.

Kyungsoo rolled his eyes, telling her, "You're wasting your breath and your time. He's not like you, he can't see me. All he can see is his own reflection." If anything, he was surprised that she could see him at all.

She looked right at the boy in the mirror. "You be quiet."

"Jisoo, who are you talking to?" Jongdae asked, cocking an eyebrow at her suspiciously. He seriously thought his sister was out of her mind at that point.

"No one, Jong. I thought I heard you say something." She quickly replied, in an attempt to reassure him that she wasn't crazy. But she felt like she was clearly going insane if she was seeing things that weren't really there. The boy in the mirror looked as real to her as her brother who was standing next to her. "This mirror was just here when we arrived and I wanted to know what the deal with it was...just forget it." She waved him off, dismissing him now that he had proven to be of no use to her.

Jongdae sighed his heart still racing with adrenaline. He would probably need to do something to get rid of it. "I thought you were under attack by a pack of wolves or something, but you called me here to check out a mirror? Sometimes I don't understand you at all, Jisoo-yah." He never seemed to understand his younger sister. She insisted on dressing in dark clothes, dye her hair in unnatural colors and listen to music no one listened to. She was nothing like him or the kinds of girls he was used to being around at school. Jongdae was always surrounded by jocks, cheerleaders, and other populars while his sister had one friend and they hung out with the rejects. The only reason she didn't get picked on or teased by the populars was because Jongdae was one of them and they didn't want to upset him by picking on his younger sister.

He thought his sister could have really fit in with the populars if she had tried harder. Jongdae was accepted and he thought they could give her a chance if she wanted to. But Jisoo's goal in high school was to just get by without being noticed. She hated being the center of attention.

"You were planning to save me from a pack of wolves with a baseball bat?" She questioned, unimpressed. She doubted her brother could save her from a pack of wolves armed only with a baseball bat and his courage which was questionable at best.

"Shut up." He told her with a snort and turned to leave the room.

Jisoo rushed to the door to her bedroom and bolted it shut after her brother left. When she returned to the mirror, Kyungsoo asked her looking toward the door where Jongdae had been earlier, "Who was that guy? Your boyfriend?"

"Ew no!" Her face contorted in disgust. "That's my older brother."

"You two don't look alike at all." He commented.

She shrugged her shoulders, suddenly feeling more comfortable with the entity in her bedroom like he was a regular person. "We get that a lot. He looks like my dad and I look like my mum, unfortunately." All of her brothers looked nothing like her. Every single one of them was handsome in every way while Jisoo felt every bit like a potato.

She was often told she didn't look like her brothers or her parents, which was another reason why she felt like she didn't fit in with them. When she had black hair and dressed in clothes her mother picked for her, she was constantly told how much she looked like her mother. But Jisoo wasn't Ko Eun and didn't feel like herself. It wasn't until her fifteenth birthday that she started picking out her own clothes and begged her dad for permission to dye her hair blue. Her mother complained about it all the time at first, until she grudgingly accepted it months later. The way she was now, Jisoo truly felt like herself. But she found she fit in even less with her perfect family. She was the black sheep of the Kims.

Once the reality of it all sunk in, she covered her face with her hands, letting out a loud groan. "I cannot believe I am actually talking to a mirror and I am actually getting a reply by a gorgeous, but weird guy in a military uniform. Maybe its the lack of sunlight affecting my brain since I don't go out much. Or maybe I'm going fucking crazy. This cannot be real. He's just my imagination, that must be it-"

He interrupted her before she continue any further, "I'm sorry to interrupt your session of self-pity and denial, but I am real."

"No, no." She shook her head, refusing to believe his words. "There really isn't a guy living in my mirror. I'm just seeing things. Its the Bucheon withdrawal symptoms. I just miss home."

Just then, there was a knock on her door. "Jisoo-yah? Who are you talking to?"

It was her mother.

"No one, eomma." Jisoo called back, reassuring her.

"Open the door, sweetheart. I have your sleeping bag. You know the movers aren't going to bring the furniture until tomorrow." She said cheerfully from the other side of the door. They had decided to move houses on a Sunday, and the moving company they contacted wasn't open on Sundays, which meant the Kims had to take the essential things in their mini van and wait for everything else to arrive on Monday. Considering their mini van was packed with eight people, there really wasn't much they were able to take with them anyway. The majority of their belongings were in a moving truck somewhere in a Bucheon warehouse.

"Ah, wae!" Jisoo groaned, throwing her head back in annoyance.

"That's no way to speak to your mother." Kyungsoo interjected. No one he knew back in the sixties acted that way towards their mother. Not unless they wanted a good scolding. As he had heard once from a friend, they'd be picking up their teeth on the street. 

"Hush!" She eyed him with a pleading yet annoyed look, just before opening the door.

She opened it just a crack and reached out to grab her sleeping bag from her mother's hands, but her mother had other ideas. She pushed the door open further and looked around the room, as if expecting someone to be there with her daughter. "I thought I heard you talking to someone in here."

Jisoo shook her head, gesturing to the empty room. "How would I do that? I don't know anyone in this place. What you heard was just me talking to myself."

Her mothers eyes fell upon the golden mirror at the end of the room. She gasped, "Oh my gosh, that is just lovely. Do you think the previous owners left that here for us as a welcome present?"

"Eomma, what previous owners?"  Jisoo asked, annoyed. She just wanted her mother to get out of there so that she could continue interrogating the boy in the mirror. She had so many questions for him. But most of all, she wanted to know why it was that she could see him. Why her, and not her brother Jongdae, or any of her family for that matter. "Dad said no one has lived in this house since the sixties. I doubt they left their mirror as a housewarming present. Now, will you please leave? I'd like to be alone. I just want to relax."

She practically pushed her mother out the door.

"You're not very nice to your mother. I never behaved like that with my mother." He said from the mirror. He seemed to have a comment and criticism for everything she was doing. Jisoo wasn't sure if she was going to be too keen on the idea of sharing her new bedroom with a very opinionated ghost.

"Can we not talk about this right now?" She asked him, then added, "What I really want to know is if you are real like you claim to be, how did you get in that mirror?"

He opened his mouth to speak. "You haven't heard the story of what happened to my family?"

-

so i was trying to write for a story i'm writing with brandy. but i did write some good idea notes. so today was not  a total loss.

but i thought i should post something for this story, since all i have to do is go back and edit, change names, places, and add a few things. that took me about twenty minutes. so there will likely be another update tomorrow.

thank you all loads for reading. 

we're going to start going a bit into kyungsoo's back story in later chapters, like how he died and all of that because as we all can see, he died pretty young.

i hope you all enjoy!

-clary