In the far future, the Phantom is a confused being.
It knows it had friends once, vague colors; yellow-and-red next to purple-and-black, with blue-orange hovering. A general air of happiness emits from that smeared memory.
Other memories are less sure; some are that same happiness and love mixed with a dreadful fear. Often, there are two figures in those— blue-black and orange-black. He remembers their jewel-red eyes, staring at him with a mix of love and hate.
The Phantom dislikes those fear filled memories. When they come, he retreats to the safer ones of those two figures feeding, caring for him, vague blurs ever present in his life.
The Phantom also knows he was once human— more human? It is unsure; even this form has changed. The Phantom knows that once it had human-looking parts from memory; it remembers its tongue running over flat teeth, remembers seeing human-colored flesh, remembers pupils, remembers a time when it combed a flat, clawless hand through its hair and did not brush long ears.
Truly though, it has no opinion on these changes. The only one it really aches for is those halos of light that mean blackhair-blueeyes but it cannot remember how to do it.
Sometimes, the Phantom questions whether the halos and the smears of color are just fake memories, dreams, created to justify its existence, its loneliness. Often, it shakes those thoughts from itself and continues to drift. (That is all it does, now).
It only aches and misses the smears of color.
There was a time when the smears were living and breathing— like he… once was? Is?— (almost) surely. These times were the time when the Phantom breathed, looked human, and the halos were within reach— a gateway to a beating heart. The smears of color died, though— and so did the rest of those things.
But the Phantom knows it was not immediate— because the people of memory came back, same-color but different. And so the Phantom still lived then, too— just… less.
But the smears left again, of their own choice, to a place the Phantom— couldn't? wouldn't? follow. They said come with us and the Phantom remembers the taste of the words people still need protecting.
One by one they left, and one by one the Phantom lost a little more (life-memories-Fenton-self).
Now only the Phantom remains, a shell.
Drifting. Protecting. Sort of.
Humans are adaptable (ghosts are not, they stay, stuck, drifting, one-purpose). The humans developed enough tech to deal with the ghost threat.
The Phantom is obsolete. The people don't need protecting. Sometimes, it tastes those amended words on its green tongue, thinking of the beyond where perhaps something not so lonely lies.
But what if they do, one day?
That's the awful question that keeps it.