caitlyn k. ⠀╋━ㅤghost!cait x new tenant!femr ;; a modern au
ㅤ݁ᛪ༙ㅤnew place, the rent's cheap, close downtown, and you've got a ghost neighbor. what would possibly go wrong?
ㅤ݁ᛪ༙ㅤmodern au , ghost!cait , conservative caitlyn if you squint (old ass prejudice) , caitlyn might be old but she died young so let's not mention the questionable age gap , fem!reader , terrible landlord and amazing neighbors , SFW
prologue ::ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤarcane m. list | gen. m. list
The new tenant in Caitlyn’s house—yes, it’s still hers, thank you very much—was strange, if not the most amusing so far.
Trace back to a few eighty or so years, you’ll find her name in the land title: Countess Kiramman. One thing Caitlyn didn’t account for was dying. Okay, maybe she did expect that much, but what she didn’t least expect was the fact that her entire fucking life was a lie.
Paradise? Heaven? Yeah, a load of bullshit. She’s been in the same hell since 1933.
She’s had all kinds of tenants—good ones, weird ones, kinky ones, religious ones, and definitely illegal ones. She’s also seen all kinds of renovations that were minor up until 1995 when the owner decided that a Victorian house didn’t fit the suburban vibes, so they took the entire house, yes, the entire freaking house, and built a cute picket fence around it, along with a two-story house with blue trimmings and a wrap-around porch. Oh, isn’t that cute?
Except the grandmother of the woman died while walking down the stairs, and everyone’s been blaming it on Caitlyn, the lot ghost, ever since!
Bunch of assholes, really.
Then they started calling priests, shamans, spiritual gurus, monks, and whatever fucking entity sweet Sophia with the tarot cards and pretty crystals worshipped.
Caitlyn wished she could evaporate from embarrassment whenever these people started mouthing absolute nonsense. Since she realized that ghosts were real, and that she was a ghost, and that there was no infinite heaven or hell, she stopped believing in those Tri-body thingamajig that her parents oh-so drilled into her after catching her kiss their new maid.
Okay, so what if a Countess dabbles in a little sapphic magic? Even Susan from church says “Jesus is inside me” with a straight face.
Moving to several decades later, that picket fence didn’t stand a chance against capitalism and shitty urban planning, and the large front yard was transformed into a concrete jungle with the two-story suddenly multiplying itself.
It’s a busy day for Caitlyn; she’s walking through walls, checking in on the couple on 12B, and seeing if they got over the husband’s hemorrhoid excuse when it’s obvious that he’s been shagging the Thursday mail boy in a motel three blocks down. Then, she overhears these three ladies gossiping by the flight of stairs that there’s a new tenant for 6C.
“Heard it’s a lady, a young one!” Lestrange says, pocketing some of her husband’s earnings into her pocket to shop God knows what in Chinatown again. Their laogonma collection has been steadily rising, and so will Mr. Kim’s UTI if he doesn’t stop his wife from adding laogonma to every side dish.
“Can’t blame her, really,” the shortest of the three snorted and shook her head while chewing on some sunflower seeds. Merredith’s her name, and she’s got a nasty collection of dildos for a 40-year-old widow. “This place? Cheaper than the ones closer downtown. It’s quiet here too.”
“Yeah, if you can ignore the ghosts at night.” Petunia huffed, elbowing the stout lady beside her, who rolled her eyes. “My son was throwing out the trash last night, and guess what we saw? A man in white! Just standing there by the hedges! Gives me the shivers thinking about it.”
“He’s just using his phone too much,” Merredith snorted and waved a seed at Petunia. “You too, you old hag, I can hear your Facebook reels two flights down!”
“Hah! Look who’s talking,” Petunia grabbed the seed and tossed it out the window.
Caitlyn didn’t stick around long enough to hear the rest of their bickering. New tenant? Seems interesting enough, but not really that interesting. There’s always a new room vacant every now and then. People can feel Caitlyn—and she’s not trying to scare anyone, geez, with the current economy? Caitlyn’s lot is basically a paradise for the working class. Cheap, a little haunted (there’s only one ghost, Caitlyn doesn’t know what Petunia’s spouting about), and it’s situated awkwardly between the landfill and the very old MRT that’s still working miraculously with sheer will and thirty-year-old graffiti.
Case in point, living people can feel ghosts, especially those overly sensitive ones, people call it third-eyes or whatever jargon there was for spiritual gimmicks. Caitlyn’s never met another ghost wandering about; she can’t get too far from the lot she died in. Just several meters down the parking lot, far enough to reach the curb, but that’s about it. Some strange power pulls her back, keeping her from leaving the place. It’s like they want to make a point that Caitlyn hasn’t understood for eighty years and counting.
Maybe this was God’s Truman Show, or just the entire collective metaphysical playing a fun game on the dead.
Caitlyn wants to rest, okay? She’s been here for almost a century; it’s about damn time she finally closes her eyes and leaves the living plane. Any more than this and she’ll act out the fears of these tenants about their malevolent ghost. Caitlyn should start choosing who to scare first. Scaredy cat Theodore, or Mr. Otto, who keeps crop-dusting everyone down the stairs on Monday mornings.
Everyone seemed to buzz with excitement, or maybe that’s just Caitlyn. She’s been searching for people who can see her ever since the last tenant, some kid named Maddie looked at her dead in the eye and screamed.
Irish, that girl was. Full.
Caitlyn could barely understand her; it’s worse than her cousin’s cockney accent, really. And that’s saying something because Cassandra was an honest-to-God elitist who never allowed Caitlyn to mingle with the commonfolk, but this was the twenty-first century. Unless you had the last name Rothschild, you were common folk as far as this new century was concerned.
“What is it you're doing here?” Maddie gasped, clutching her blow dryer as she flailed it around. If Caitlyn were any less ghost, she’d have sported a bruise as large as Mr. Kim’s ass mole. “Who are you at all!”
Caitlyn sighed, rubbing the bridge of her nose. This one could see her. That’s wonderful! Awfully amazing, in fact! Someone, after eighty bloody years, could see Caitlyn Kiramman, the ghost.
And it was an Irish kid. Her mother would have had a fit if she were here. An Irish with rights? Totally abhorrent.
The thing is, whenever Caitlyn tried to speak, Maddie's dramatic screeching kept overlapping, so they never really talked. Instead of a proper two-way conversation, the living girl would just hysterically whip out whatever item lay closest to her dominant hand and wave it at a ghost.
Right. Because Caitlyn was a ghost, and ghosts can’t talk, apparently.
Caitlyn doesn’t visit Maddie that often after that incident. She’d also like to not burst her eardrums, thank you very much. Maddie was ridiculously dramatic about it, too. Went to file a complaint to the landlord, some pudgy forty-year-old something who’s having an affair with a student from the community college downtown. Crazy stuff, throwing happened when the missus found out. Caitlyn thought she was going to get blasted in flames on the spot when the missus started threatening to burn down the entire building.
The ghost-seeing abilities didn’t last long because Maddie ended up moving elsewhere. Some lousy excuse of wanting to be closer downtown and that she actually found a cheaper place. Now, if Maddie only said the first part, even Caitlyn would have bitten, but then she tattled in that nasally accent that she found a cheaper place and Caitlyn mouthed bullshit behind the landlord.
Maddie spat her tea, glaring at the landlord’s majestic baldness where Caitlyn was three seconds ago before disappearing behind Maddie’s eyelids. Gone. Poof.
She must have been drinking too much caffeine.
“Nolen?” The man raised an eyebrow, leaning forward so quickly Maddie was sure the chair was going to topple with the seal. “You hear me, young lady? I said you still have t’pay for this month’s rent if you wanna move.”
“Yeah, that's grand,” Maddie flashed him an uneasy smile.
Whatever it takes just to stop seeing that pretty ghost, she guessed.
The landlord chuckled, leaning back with his entire weight the chair cried. He gave Maddie a toothy grin, shrugging with his neck. “Normally, I wouldn’t just… Y’know, give up the place but er… Someone’s been eyein’ on the cheap lease for months! Couldn’t pass it up, yeah? Anyway, you can drop by the office this Tuesday to leave your keys, sweetie pie lost the last spare.”
Come Tuesday, Caitlyn wanted to bid farewell to the only one who could see her for eighty long years and decided to make herself known to Maddie while she was conveniently trying to dry her bob—it looked terrible, Caitlyn has been trying to tell Maddie but the Irish was a little too into the ginger lion look to really listen to someone who used to dominate the social circles with her clean, elegant coiffure. Maddie’s loss, anyway.
She popped just right behind Maddie, peering over the lady’s shoulder to check what she was doing with the blow dryer. Maddie was still conveniently blowing her hair dry, dragging her fingers through the short locks while humming something by Adele. Typical.
Then, Maddie turned around too quickly than Caitlyn anticipated and was face-to-face with the fucking ghost. A scream so guttural tore throughout the bathroom that Caitlyn’s corporeal form shimmered until it disappeared entirely.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” Maddie shrieked, dropping the dryer with a clatter. “I’m losing my life here! I’m gone, that’s it, I am absolutely gone!”
“Not a hope. Not a chance in hell am I staying another minute.” Maddie was spewing curses as she hastily packed her bags, fingers trembling, and not from the current shock when she pulled out the blow dryer too close to the outlet and stuffed that inside her suitcase.
The poor lady ran down the hall and to the stairs where she disappeared, never to be seen again. With the keys to 6C.
chapter 1 ...
So excited to see how this goes
