Jadeite had once called Kunzite a ghost, all pale and white and lurking in the shadows. He laughed over the top of his drink, leaning back into his chair casually, saying things that many other men would have been too scared to even whisper and that even he would have thought twice about had he been completely sober. “Sometimes I look at you, and I think I’m staring death in the face,” he admitted, chuckling to himself. “You certainly do put the fear of God in people. And you don’t try very hard at it. The dead don’t have to try either.”

But he had called him a ghost only once because Kunzite wasn’t a ghost. He wasn’t anything like a ghost really, and when Jadeite thought about it, he had no idea why he’d come up with the comparison in the first place. Kunzite was too solid for that. Too substantial. Too many other men had called Kunzite things like “rock,” “stone,” “a giant boulder knocking at my door,” “a wall with an occasional facial expression.” To call him a ghost was terribly inappropriate. Kunzite was very much alive and not something that could be looked through easily.

Besides, Kunzite didn’t haunt anyone.

Kunzite met a ghost once, wandering through the palace gardens. He’d never expected to meet a ghost swathed in gold and sparkling as if it had been dipped in starlight. And he’d certainly never expected to see one so lovely and so lively yet so clearly a specter.

Perhaps he should have attacked, but he’d found himself frozen, transfixed, even shaken at the sight of her. He could do nothing but watch from the shadows, secreting himself in the cool darkness, hiding himself from her scorching light. Hair like solid sunlight and eyes like burning metal, others might have called her an angel or a goddess. But Kunzite knew her for what she was. A phantom cast out from some demonic heaven to torture the eyes of men who would never, never be able to have her. After all, he couldn’t touch a ghost.

The moment had been a brief one, and he never saw her again.

And yet she remained. He saw her shadow in the corridors, saw her in a stain of breath upon a mirror, saw her in the hungry eyes of other men Kunzite had never respected until then. He dreamt of her at night where otherwise he would have thought of nothing at all. He pictured her dancing around him in the fog and the light, taunting him and unsettling him like no living thing could have done. There were promises in her eyes, ones she couldn’t keep, for promises had to have a solid foundation and there was nothing solid about her. Sometimes he thought that she regretted that, while other times he thought he could see her laughter written upon her transparent features. He was never certain what it was she felt or if she felt at all.

She was haunting him. She was hovering over him like a plague, smothering him. Sometimes he woke up unable to breathe, feeling like delicate hands had tried to wind themselves around his neck. Once, he thought he saw bruises, but he told himself it was the trick of the light. It didn’t change the wine dark circles pooling beneath his eyes or his distracted nature or his turmoil that he could not ignore though he tried.

It was madness, this stalking. She was vapor. She was air. She was nothing. He should have been able to wave her away like so much smoke, yet there she was, always just a few steps behind him. He did not shake her in war, he did not shake her in peace, he did not shake her in loyalty, he did not shake her in betrayal. No matter what he did, she would not stop haunting him.

And she haunted him right up until the moment that he killed her.