Prompt 01: "That would be intimidating, if well, you were intimidating." (WC: 1161)
A/N: Alternate title - In which Lee Brown manages to turn a funny encounter with the Box Ghost into a deep moment
If you've known someone's fear, you know them
~ Victoria Aveyard, Red Queen
Lee Brown blinked twice as the specter in front of her and absently noted that the amount of boxes floating in the air spoke to pretty good telekinesis.
The Box Ghost was used to ghosts not taking him seriously. Humans, however, at least screamed the first time they saw him. Whether out of surprise or the fact that they had just become aware that ghosts were a thing. This girl, however, was not reacting at all.
"I saw you." Lee told him.
The Box Ghost blinked and Lee wondered how Ghosts could be transparent and blink without their eyelids being transparent.
"But I was invisible!" He blubbered.
"I can see ghosts even if they're trying to hide."
The Box Ghost doesn't know how to begin to process that, so he reverted back as if the girl hadn't spoken at all. "I AM THE BOX GHOST! BEWARE!"
It was Lee's turn to blink, "Yeah... that would be intimidating, if well, you were intimidating."
The Box Ghost deflated like a pin-pricked balloon. Nobody was ever intimidated by him and his boxes, and it was really eating at his ego. His once massively inflated ego was now about what would be considered normal, for someone who wasn't as pathetic as he was.
Lee, sensing that this ghost was more talk then action decided not to start swinging her iron cross that was dangling from her belt.
"Why boxes?" She asked.
The Box Ghost stared at her. Ghosts (and that one Ghost Boy) laughed at his boxes all the time. Nobody asked why he used them. The question wasn't even a veiled slight.
"Boxes are scary."
To Lee, and everyone else on the planet (and the Ghost Zone) boxes weren't scary. But to the Box Ghost they were.
"Why do you find boxes scary?" Lee asked, as if she were discussing the different reasons people found the dark scary or snakes, or the hundred other normal fears.
"Well, warehouses are eerie and warehouses filled with boxes. So boxes are scary."
It would have been easy to get caught up in the 'correlation does not prove causation' side of things, but Lee fixated on the word choice instead, "Eerie isn't scary, though," she pointed out.
The Box Ghost scratched his head, a weird motion for a ghost to make since ghosts couldn't feel itchy. "Things that kill you are scary, right?" He asked in a more subdued and serious tone.
Lee nodded her head and then put it together. That statement plus boxes, plus warehouses equalled...
"You were crushed to death by boxes, weren't you?"
The Box Ghost frowned and for a second Lee was worried she was going to have to pull out her iron cross after all (which would have been a shame since she was starting to feel emotional for this ghost). Then he calmed down and just nodded.
"I'm sorry." Lee told him, even though it didn't accomplish anything.
"My coworkers were trying to play a prank on our manager." He told her, "It went wrong and I..."
"Got crushed." Lee finished for him when it was clear the ghost wasn't going to.
"Yeah." The Box Ghost sounded like he hadn't ever thought about his death. Lee knew that it wasn't rare for ghosts not to remember dying or the things leading up to their death. It often took a few pointed questions to for them to remember. Sometimes it took more than that.
Lee observed the ghost carefully. Some ghosts didn't keep any sense of self after death. They were impossible to hold a conversation with and were more forces of nature (for good or ill) then anything. They were raw emotions embodied in supernatural force or stuck reliving a moment. But this ghost, the Box Ghost, had maintained his personality, and since he wasn't hostile, Lee could ask, "Why try so hard to scare people?"
Usually it was obvious, Lee could admit. But the Box Ghost seemed nice enough and was so weak willed that Lee only had to be polite, talkative, and unaffected to get him to give up trying to crush her to death. Lee had the feeling the Box Ghost wouldn't have even killed her if he could.
"I wasn't ever scary when I was alive. They didn't even let me in on the prank because they said I would muck it up. I did anyway."
The boxes he had been threatening her with floated to the ground, and at some point Lee had sat down on one of the heavier boxes to listen.
"So I thought... now that I'm dead and a ghost... I ought to scare someone."
Ghosts got fixated, usually with events or objects that surrounded their death. Crushed to death in a prank gone wrong totally fit with the Box Ghost's persona.
"Why surround yourself with reminders of how you died?" Lee asked. She knew that he hadn't realized until just now how the boxes fit in with his death, but she was trying to lead him to a conclusion that fit her own goals.
"At first I was scared of them, and I was trying to scare people." The Box Ghost explained, "But now... I like boxes and the things inside them."
He liked them because of they had a piece of humanity. That was sort of touching. Lee was used to ghostly explanations being more gruesome or macabre at best, and that answer gave Lee just enough information about how the Box Ghost thought for her next move.
"You know, some of the boxes could have killed me." She pointed out.
The Box Ghost hovered anxiously, frowning.
"I know this place, it's filled with boxes. Nobody goes there but teens when they sneak drinks illegally." The Box Ghost looked confused, but Lee didn't have time to explain that the drinking age had moved since he died, "You can live there if you like."
The Box Ghost grinned, "Filled with boxes?"
Lee nodded, "But if I show you this place, you have to promise not use those boxes to try to scare anyone. You don't want to accidently kill someone, do you?"
The Box Ghost shook his head.
"Besides, those boxes have things in them that could break if you fling them around."
The Box Ghost nodded.
"Can I take these boxes with me?"
"No, those boxes are filled with school supplies. The students need them."
The Box Ghost pouted (of all things) but agreed.
Lee had him wait there until school ended, then she showed him the warehouse. She didn't hear anything about the Box Ghost from anyone in town again, though she made it a priority to visit the Box Ghost once a week if she could. Humans went crazy from isolation, Lee had a theory that the concept still held even if the human was in incorporeal form. It explained why ghosts were always such nutters.
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