prologue — i. amberghast

[Haneul Park]

20 June 1974
outside indigo’s office | ♪

Amberghast Indigo was expecting Park Haneul at fourteen thirty. This, Father had confirmed two days prior, at the start of the week. The plan had originally been to go together, the three of them, as a show of respect. We won’t be able to make it, Father had said that morning, while readying for his own day at the Ministry, you’ll have to meet him alone.

While he’d said it, his hands had tugged needlessly at his tie.

Haneul had thought this unusual.

Father didn’t fuss. Mother had been tying his ties—twice around, looped once through, then down firmly—for years. Over his shoulder, in the bathroom mirror, Father had met their gaze only once.

It was a test, then.

At precisely fourteen twenty, Haneul materialized in front of the keeper of Amberghast Indigo’s door. They were alone. They carried a slim yellow folder. They wore a black tweed blazer, a black turtleneck, matching black slacks, and around their neck dangled the visitor’s badge, to be visible at all times. They said no, thank you to the proffered cup of tea. They sat in the narrow armless chair beside the keeper’s desk, legs pressed together from knees to heels, spine a single degree away from ramrod straight, fingers laced atop the folder. They counted every time the keeper had looked up from her paperwork to glance at them—six.

At fourteen twenty-nine, without waiting for the keeper—whose belated he’s ready for you trailed after them uselessly—they stood from the chair and knocked.

And then, at fourteen forty-five, they would get up and exit his office, introductions having been made. They would go back to the house by the sea, and they would peel off their skin and slide back under their covers, not materializing for another week.

But first—

Fourteen thirty.

They twisted the door handle.

[Indigo Amberghast]

After too long in his head, waves lapping to overflow, his theories grew teeth, cannibalising each other one by one, meat gnashed clean from bone. His dark eyes poured over the glossy sprawl of monochrome decorating the surface of his desk, grey matter sprawling to meet it, stride for stride, step for step, rain into water; an easing one way, a lightness the other, so obvious the difference between bruise and blood and bone in the butchery that he could just as clearly see what she was now as what she was then.

Staring back at him.

A smear of life, made with death.

The door cracked open, and a stupid head poured itself in.

“Your two-thirty i—”

“Fuck off, Dolores.”

The crack shut. The cold, sneaking sliver of light slithered away.

He sharpened himself again, shaped into a lens—

Footsteps, too far in the distance, running, chasing, fleeing, crunch, crunch, crunch, too many, ripping through snow; inside, the space crackled, source unseen, magic lingering, odious through the air; a whimper, a shudder, a tragic or otherwise involuntary convulsing, writing surrender with pooling blood, sprayed black against the floor; her mouth, painted blue, imprinted with a cruel twist, tasting the escape of her vitality, pleading — because they all did, in the end — not to send her back into the void so lonely, so without meaning. So cold.

Pleading with him, with that final moment, to lie and say it was real; to say that she had existed, after all.

The crack again, and his eyes snapped toward it in an instant, and there they were, a line of someone else’s ink scratched into his page. A memory he forgot to have.

“Close the door,” he said, not specifying which side of it they ought to be on, the darkness revealing only his shape, his stillness, and the clear, unsurprised whites of his withering gaze.

[Haneul Park]

In all the tests they had been given—by Mother, by Father, by life itself—none of them had been designed with teeth. They gnawed, white-gummed and bloodless, leaving dull imprints that faded rapidly from their consciousness. Tedious it was to pretend that they didn’t long for the deep incision of canines, for the pair of molars that ground unforgivingly to dust. They wanted more from these tests, a challenge for once, but they had never gotten that.

It made them complacent.

When they opened the door to darkness, they did not stop and think.

“Close the door.”

Thoughtless still, they stepped forward in the obvious move, the step that brought them closer to their immediate desire—an end to this introduction. The door closed behind them soundlessly, and they ceased to exist.

They had wanted teeth, sharpened, white-hot, merciful in their release. Only now, as they locked onto the only discernible glow in the room, a pair of cruel eyes, did they realize the truth: teeth were a distraction.

Haneul felt themself stutter in breath and movement, fumbling to press the yellow folder to their chest like a paper-thin shield. They flattened both palms over it, grappling for something, a tether, proof that they hadn’t completely dematerialized from this plane and into hell.

Then their heart thudded back into existence.

“What the fuck,” cut across the space in Korean, unthinkingly.

That helped tether them, too.

“Sir—” Again in Korean—no, English. “Sir, I cannot see any—”

A panicked hand slapped blindly for a Muggle light.

[Indigo Amberghast]

His movement was soundless, swift, untethered and swirling as one with the darkness, his presence no more than shadow, than smoke. Their presence, across from him, was small, slight, like a whisper that had forgotten how it was supposed to sound; like a ghost, forgetting who it was supposed to be.

A luxury for only the stupid, and the dead.

The thudding of his visitor’s heart was the first voice to break the silence of the room, eventually volunteering (at first unintelligibly) into the darkness from another world, another continent, what was so obvious that even the unseeing eye could plainly see.

His silent footsteps came to a stop just in front of them, a snap-hiss of his lighter filling the small space with a curl of flame. He dipped it with a pure-white cigarette, the glow lingering on his pale skin, his golden mane, his tallness, the broadness of his frame, the sudden intensity of it overshadowed by the intensity of his dark eyes, smouldering like wildfire, threatening to burn themselves black.

He waved his hand, a graceful flourish cut whisper-smooth through the air, and the candles wilting either side of the door began to wisp and crackle at the intrusion of his magic’s irresistible flame.

His voice found her in the dying light, shining like winter under sun.

“And who are you so anointed you can sneak your ink onto my page?”

[Haneul Park]

Panic rendered them blind to time. There was nothing, and then there was everything: the hiss of a lighter, a small flame haloing a man’s features, a cigarette, a moving hand—

Haneul flinched.

But they weren’t the target.

It took their eyesight a moment to adjust to the light. When it did, it brought along with it a horrible, all-consuming brush of warmth to their face.

The man was tall. And tall and tall. And golden-haired. And looked as if he was two inhales away from snuffing them out where they stood—with the cigarette. Worst of all, he was young. He wasn’t at all what Haneul was expecting. They had been expecting a grandfather, softly rounded by the steady weight of obligation, weathered by time’s cruelty, yet still patient. The ideal mentor.

As their neck craned at a ridiculous angle to meet his gaze, they realized they hadn’t just been given a difficult test—they had been given a test they were expected to fail.

Their eyes darted back down and they quickly bowed.

“My father asked to meet with you. He works in International. I am his daughter, Haneul Park.”

They hadn’t lingered in a bow. They hovered just before completely upright. Their posture was unsure, but their hands were steady as they jutted the folder out in offering.

“I will be your student at Hogwarts in September.”

[Indigo Amberghast]

“I will be your student at Hogwarts in September.”

The darkness did not creep around Haneul Park but moved right through them, unhindered.

His dark eyes followed, a probing stillness, pulled by the same strings.

“Lucky you.”

Haneul’s father, in International, just like her mother, wherever the hell she was when not casting an overbearing shadow upon her daughter’s life, were a couple of spooks running from just about anyone willing to chase them. He didn’t know what they’d done, if even what they’d done still mattered beyond the shameful taint of its own overbearing shadow.

But he knew you could not taint a ghost.

It took much, much more to trouble them. More than most were capable of.

He plucked the folder and flipped it open, casting his shadow on their page.

“Your father doesn’t like you very much—”

Always the truth for his students, whether they could stomach it or not.

“—does he?”

[Haneul Park]

He spoke of luck, and they didn’t know what that had to do with anything. Their presence in September under the same roof was an inevitability. Unless—ah. This man, he was saying he didn’t have a reputation that instilled a sense of levity in that inevitability.

He was making a joke at their expense.

Too late, they caught the undertow of humor, the moment cut short by him taking the folder. It was everything they could do to keep their hands still—first at their sides, then interlaced behind their back—and not reach up to press cool fingertips to overwarm cheeks.

“My father loves me.” They kept their voice factual, detached. “But he has high expectations for me, if that is what you mean.”

Their attention wandered over a broad shoulder to what they could glimpse of the room beyond.

“Do you prefer darkness? I did not mean to make a fuss. I can adjust.”

[Indigo Amberghast]

The ugliness sprawled in monochrome on his desk was nothing compared to the ugliness in that little folder; ugly and unfeeling and so blinding to them that they insisted it was love that made fathers produce dossiers on their children; it was love that cast them out, helpless, clueless, burdened with a forced invitation into an uninivting world.

“My father loves me.”

“Oh, of course he does. He’s so wonderful at showing it.”

His lips teased a laugh, silenced in his exhale, the pristine whiteness of a menthol cloud draining all the colour from the room.

He had heard some hilarious and innovative definitions of love over his years — even without listening — but this one had always been a favourite, plucked right out of the inky depths of an untouched heart: love: noun; an intense feeling of obedience and wilful ignorance.

Haneul’s eyes shifted, scaling his shoulders to find only shadows swimming there in the deep.

“Rest assured, Haneul Park, it will be my tolerance that’s tested, not yours.”

His eyes never left the ghostly aether.

“Now tell me something that isn’t in the I-love-my-daughter-manifesto; I don’t care if you sit.”

Love: noun; an intense feeling of relief, smouldering at his lips.

“Make it good. Make it like you want someone to give a shit.”

[Haneul Park]

They could do nothing, say nothing correctly. They offered an explanation for their presence, and he turned that down. They offered darkness, and he turned that down. When he turned the angle of conversation on them, offering a place to rest—and for him, a higher vantage point from which to sneer—it would have been their third strike, had they no wits about them.

To sit was to acknowledge a weakness, but that was secondary to the request he paired it with.

“Sorry—to give a shit?”

It wasn’t a phrase they had ever heard, yet it wasn’t the reason their mind went blank. Anything there was to know about them was in the folder he held. All that they were, and all that they would be, was meant to be summarized in a hand-written, one-page report—that was the point. Their interests were irrelevant. Their name, even, was hardly a month old, the third in a list of interchangeable identities.

The folder had been meticulously planned, and now, all of their effort—theirs, their father’s, their mother’s—to craft a child a step above the rest was proving futile against this mercurial man’s waning interest.

Dread coiled in their lungs, breath weightless. Knees tightened.

“I-I am a good student and I—”

The words tumbled from their lips, lifeless in their nascence, meaningless from the moment they were formed, because that, too, was in the folder, over and over. He wanted something else. There was nothing else.

Fingers went white-knuckled behind their back.

“Sir,” they tried, a bit more forcefully than his title allowed, “everything there is to know is in there.”

They released one hand to point a single, tapered finger at the folder he held, then slithered it back into place behind their back.

“Anything else can be changed. It does not matter.”

[Indigo Amberghast]

His eyes narrowed at the apology — even if it was for lack of understanding and not their presence there, or their father’s mere existence — but he did not correct it, or tell them what a waste it was, and just as he did not define to give a shit, he did not define sunk cost fallacy, or child neglect, or gaping chasm.

He didn’t correct the Sir, either. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t — generally — tell children to fuck off. He didn’t — as a rule — give anyone the satisfaction of hearing how much he hated it, all of it; that he was not their Sir.

What did they see in him that so resembled the lashing whips of their masters?

He saw only the shadow.

And he could see everything they saw — everything. — but he could not see the narrow lens through which they saw it.

He could not wake from this sleepless night.

“It does not matter,” Haneul said, and his dark eyes seemed to stir, lifted from the void.

“None of it does. Certainly not this—”

He tossed papa-love’s folder of poems into the fire, brilliant blue flames roaring out of the hearth at the sudden intrusion.

Ashes.

“Don’t ever forget that.”

[Haneul Park]

Blue flames, not red.

Haneul watched the folder turn to ash.

(—the folder, the folder, the folder, the folder, the folder, the folder, the folder—)

They did not matter, he said. They felt the first semblance of life flicker at this, even as their cowardly fingers sought, found, and curled around the handle at their back. Before they pulled and released them both from the maws of this horrific encounter, that flicker forced their gaze upwards and upwards on one final plea.

“No.”

Eyes to eyes.

“I will not forget this.”

fin.