Disclaimer: I don't own DP.

BGM: "Never-Ending Story" by Within Temptation.

Current

Observations:

I awoke. There was light and something else that I cannot describe in any human tongue. The green pushed me away, out of my birthplace into a place with metal and glass and fragments of green reduced nearly to nothing, and two soft warm things that spoke, and I remembered how to answer. They were bright, so bright it hurt, and I needed that brightness so much I reached anywhere I could to get it, and I reached inside myself and found it. So the warm soft things – people – were like me?

There were more, but some of these were different. They tasted like metal and lightning strikes, and there was a sort of half-twist in them that made them hard to reach. Thankfully, there were only two of these. Jack and Maddie Fenton – my parents. They're human – but I'm not? That was a little confusing, at first. Tucker didn't help, with that shifting half-twist that wouldn't settle and that stupid chemical taste like the stuff my parents used to preserve live specimens. At least I could reach those annoying little animals. Humans eat meat, and I'm at least sort of one. It wasn't weird.

There was another place I went, Casper High. It's a school, not the school, not that anyone could tell. Amity Park is all one school district. There were so many people, so much energy that they didn't even notice losing. I never had to go hungry again. …Of course, I figured out pretty quickly that I needed human food, too. Apparently, high school cafeteria food is universally gross and barely edible.

Analysis:

That was when I remembered the first two – Sam and Tucker's – arguments. I still don't get it. Humans are made to eat plants and animals, so why not? I could tell it mattered to them, though, and they matter to me, because they don't run from me, not ever. Okay, sometimes, but I know they don't mean it. It's just how we're friends.

They have no idea how much that matters. I hope they never do. I need them, like I need air and water, like I need the sky and stars. I need Sam to make me get up and do things and live life to the fullest, and Tucker to make me slow down and just enjoy life's little pleasures. I need them to care, so I can remember to care.

Sam, Tucker, my parents, my sister – they're easy to remember. They're always there, and I want them there, even if I don't say so. Unfortunately, Dash and Mr. Lancer are always there too. Funny enough, I don't mind them as much as I remember. Dash can't really hurt me anymore. He's just so, so small, and I know that if I wanted to I could break him, so I don't need to. Mr. Lancer doesn't like me, but he doesn't pick on me for the heck of it. He cares about schoolwork, and that I don't do as well as I could, but I don't care about schoolwork, just the routine of it. We disagree. I might resent the obstacle he presents, but that's all. They exist in ways I can't ignore, so I remember them.

Ah, Paulina. Now there's a mess. On the one hand, I have human reproductive impulses. On the other, Sam has a point. She's not particularly horrible, and she doesn't go out of her way to be cruel (because of her arrogance), but she's just… Shallow. Small, the way Dash is. She just doesn't matter, except when my more human side decides to spazz out over the hot girl standing right there, and I'm mentally banging my head against a wall. Of all the girls to fixate on, her? She barely has enough substance to her to fill a teaspoon. She tears others down to make herself feel better. Any new-formed weakling knows how to do that.

Valerie. …Honestly, she's more my fault. I'm beginning to suspect I'm a masochist, or at least self-destructive. She hates me. Really, "kill-him-a-lot" hates me. That's the problem. When she was just another popular girl, she was just kind of there as far as I was concerned. She existed, but didn't matter either way. Then she started trying to destroy me, sharp-as-a-knife destruction, fire and venom and poison and all-consuming rage – it was beautiful. She really saw me. …Yep, I'm an idiot. I-di-ot.

And here we come to Sam. Honestly? I don't know what to think about her. There's power in her, too, but it's not the same. Sam is... She's a hedge of thorns, a scarlet rosebud with inch-long thorns, a many-colored flower that could destroy me with a touch. She just – she feels everything, so strongly and immediately her emotions seem more real than reality sometimes. She's hot and bright and surging energy and grasping thoughts and I want her so badly it hurts. …I'm not gentle. I'm a freaking ghost. I barely understand the concept, on a good day. As strong as she seems from a distance, up close she's only human. I'd hurt her, I know I'd hurt her, so I can't have her. End of story.

That's where Jazz comes in. Sweet, naïve, child prodigy Jazz. Everyone likes her, and that's just how she likes it, because the more people she has around her, the more she can pick their brains apart and see how they tick. Jazz wouldn't pull the wings off a fly to see it suffer, but she would do it to see if its behaviors changed, however slight the chance. She pokes and prods at my sore spots, shows me where Fenton and Phantom don't fit and where they do, asks me questions that make me think instead of just letting everyone else define me. …She goes and makes me hot cocoa in the middle of the night when both of me are panicking and pacing through the walls because I can't tell who "Danny" is anymore, and I'm terrified. She's the only one I can show fear to, because she already knows my fears, whether I show them or not.

And this? This scares me more than anything. I'm philosophizing, going on and on about the "self", when all I'm supposed to care about is who needs to hurt and who needs help and who I can safely ignore. I'm becoming more and more like Fenton. And Fenton is becoming more like me. Don't get me wrong, sneaking into the girls' locker room was all him. Overshadowing Tucker for the heck of it, tricking Vlad by taunting him with what he wants most, sneaking into Dash's home to see what we could hurt him with – yes, those are all things I would do, but I wasn't in charge at the time. I wasn't even a spectator the second time, thanks to that freaking Plasmius Maximus. If I ever get the chance, I'm blowing the thing to pieces and wiping the blueprints. Both me's. It hurts being alone, when I'm never supposed to.

That much, I know. Fenton's body was fried in that explosion. Without my power regenerating the damage and holding on to our memories, he'd be a vegetable by now. I'm basically parasitizing Fenton, hitchhiking in his body and mind, tacked on to his soul so tightly I can't even tell whose it is anymore. Without him, I would only be Phantom – a nameless ghost. With him, I fear as strongly as I care, and this much will never change: If my loved ones are hurt, I will do anything I can to make up for it. If that hurt has a cause and that cause has a name, they will suffer in equal measure. If I owe a debt, I pay it back. If someone wrongs me, I wrong them back.

Oh, he never said it, but he felt it. Every time the bimbo brushed him off, every time the jocks threw him around like a sack of potatoes, every time his teachers ruled in favor of the kids whose parents were on the board and not the town freaks, it hurt. They never mattered to me, though, so it hurt less and less each time. Every time his parents humiliated him, every time his sister dismissed him, every time his best friends forced him to choose, it hurt. But they matter, and if they were perfect, they wouldn't be the people we love anymore, so I can let go. Not always, but most times. For the other times? Two words: Care Bears.

It's funny, it really is. Somewhere along the line, when our parents decided they wanted to vivisect me and the townspeople started running away screaming, Sam and Tucker and Jazz all assumed something about us, and neither of us bothered to correct them. See, they all think our obsession – our, not mine, not anymore – is protection. Ha! It's not. Yes, I'm protective of my loved ones, and I don't want random bystanders to get hurt just because they had the bad luck to get caught up in my battles. It's what I do, but it's not what I am. What am I, then?

Conclusions:

Retribution. Not revenge; I don't need to rub it in people's faces when I get even, as long as I'm satisfied we're even. It can be fun, but it's not necessary. I just – it's wrong, when someone does something and nothing happens to even things out. It doesn't hurt, exactly, and it doesn't scare me. It just feels wrong, like the thought of the sun going out in eight minutes with no warning, or when Dad accidentally warped the house somewhere else with us in it and nothing seemed to be quite right, and all the angles went too far and all the curves were too straight and all the rooms were too small. That's how it is.

I'm weird, for a ghost. Fenton is very weird, for a human. …We're the same person. At least, most of the way, most of the time, except on moonless nights when there's no light, no living things to distract me. At least, nothing I can't sense without trying. Times like this, I can stop being alert all the time and Fenton can stop being paranoid and we can just think and feel, and more and more we think and feel the same things. Now we're drifting apart again, which almost always means-

"BEWARE!"

Oh. You've got to be kidding me. How does that dope even keep getting back out of the Ghost Zone? Well, whatever, time to do what we do best. I tense, Fenton laughs, and we smirk as that sense of rightness settles into place for the thousandth time.

"Hello, misplaced aggression."

A/N: AR, not AU. If it's left open to interpretation whether or not Phantom is an alternate personality, just a set of impulses or even a replacement for the old Danny Fenton, that's because A) That was the point, and B) I don't know myself. ^^ *heh*

In some ways, this is a counterpoint to Antifreeze. Sort of.