Unfinished business:
"The term wasn't spectrally exclusive. Vlad only realised this ten years after having his own spectral half violently torn from his body"
Wrote this for Ectober and initially published it on Tumblr, you can find a link to my blog through my profile page.
Just-in-case trigger warning for some brief suicide references (but no actual suicide)
He wasn't sure why he didn't die that day, first by the violent ripping apart of his halves, second by the hands of the monstrous combination his and Daniel's ghost halves made. Vlad had always wanted to see what kind of effect he could have on the world if he had both his and Daniel's power at his disposal, but he always imagined being on the stage for this show, the front row seat was not a position he was planning to be in.
He wondered for years why he wasn't killed right then and there, Daniel had been... blasted to... to pieces with hardly a hesitation, yet this creature had taken a single smug glance towards Vlad before shooting through the ceiling and taking off. Where Vlad didn't know. Vlad didn't care.
As the world was destroyed around him Vlad's castle was left alone, always being the man with a backup plan he had plenty of canned goods stocked to keep him alive for a good number of years, Vlad's dwindling appetite allowed it to last longer.
He wasn't sure why he even bothered to eat at all, why he didn't just let himself waste away, there was nothing left for him on this earth, no Maddie, no Daniel, no power, there was hardly even a world after He had gotten to it. Perhaps Vlad was just being stubborn, perhaps this was his way of rebelling, against what Vlad wasn't sure. There didn't seem to be anything worth rebelling against.
Perhaps it was the sheer hopelessness of the situation at hand that kept his rebellious flame going, because if there was anything in this world Vlad hated most it was giving up, a trait he believed he and Daniel had shared. He knew that if it was Daniel sitting here in the dark he would not have backed down, he would not have given up.
He would have kept looking for a way to fix everything, no matter how hopeless it seemed.
And Vlad was not about to be upstage by the memory of his rival.
...But under all of this reasoning, there was also the fact that Vlad just didn't want to admit that he was scared of death. Terrified of something he thought he knew all about but really had been given nothing but a sample of... and He knew it. Maybe that's why He'd left Vlad alive, left him with nothing. Nothing but a ruined castle and a raging battle within his own mind.
Vlad didn't know what to call Him. It seemed important for a while, finding a name for the beast. Maybe because Vlad had nothing better to do, maybe because he was still struggling to come to terms with just who He was and was trying to distract himself from analysing the ghost more thoroughly, in the end the name didn't matter, it was how He came to being that Vlad's mind wanted to dwell on.
A deadly combination of their ghost halves yes, that much was obvious, but after some thinking, months and months of endless thinking while simultaneously trying to block it from his own inquisitive mind, Vlad came to a conclusion. Initially he put it down to his own aggressive side winning out over the boy's protective nature - the story he wanted to be the truth - but this story relied on the boy Daniel had once been, not the emotional mess he had become in the weeks after the explosion.
That boy was a very different boy, it didn't make sense that Vlad's ghost half would cause a killing spree, there was nothing to gain from it, it took unnecessary effort and though Vlad knew that he could be cruel (oh so cruel) he was never bloodthirsty.
Daniel, on the other hand, he wasn't so sure. The boy he kept in his house in those last few weeks was unrecognisable to the boy Vlad knew, there was something going on in his head, something dark and strange that Vlad couldn't identify at first, but he'd dealt with enough of the scum of the ghost zone to recognise a certain darkness when he saw it.
Vlad didn't know why he called it something so cliché as a 'darkness', but he couldn't find a better word for the aura Daniel radiated from his very core, that bone chilling cold that followed him everywhere. There was something very wrong with this child and Vlad, at the time, was too concerned with his own grief over a woman who never loved him that he wouldn't spare more than a thought to the odd behaviours of this powerful time bomb he kept in the walls of his home.
It was hard for Vlad to come to terms with the fact that his own neglect had been his eventual downfall, for he knew had he acted on the signs that he'd caught early on there would have been something he could do about it, but he'd left Daniel to stew in his own grief, to fester up all the negative emotions that were building within him, feeding the raging monster that must have been growing inside. Vlad should have known better than to let this happen, for weren't ghosts emotionally fuelled beings? Their very essence comprised of the feelings and the grief and the raw emotions of humans in the moments before their death?
The deeper Daniel sunk into his depressive state and the more he would dwell on those negative feelings, the more restless his ghost half would grow.
It explained the random outbursts, the tantrums, the times Daniel lashed out at anything and everything around him, destroying his things, destroying his room, even hurting himself in the midst of it all. It explained why Vlad would walk in to find this broken child on the floor - so different from the one Vlad could hear screaming from across the castle - with his hands clenching the shredded remains of carpet, begging Vlad to remove the ghost inside him.
That ghost had become something Daniel wanted no part of, and Vlad - such a fool he was - misinterpreted the boy's meaning entirely. He assumed Daniel was suffering a mental breakdown, that he was using his ghost half as a scape goat and had deluded himself into thinking that removing it would make everything better.
Oh how wrong Vlad was.
Daniel had told him that Phantom was a monster, that he had to be destroyed before he could fulfill the terrible threats that he'd whisper into Daniel's mind night after night, Vlad didn't realise that these words he took as deranged babbling were the most sane words to come from the boy's mouth in a long time. Daniel hadn't been suffering mood swings and tantrums, he was being possessed by his own spirit and was suffering through a constant battle of wills to keep it from hurting anyone, only allowing it to break free and tire itself out when he was alone before reigning it in again.
It was only after removing the ghost and breaking his promise of destroying it the moment it was free that Vlad realised his error, and even then he would not accept what had happened until almost ten years of trying to bury the truth of his own mistake within the depths of his memory.
Ten years was a long time to remain bitter when life no longer gave him no company other than himself to be bitter towards, and again he wondered what kept him going all this time.
Only after finally coming to terms that it was his fault - all his fault - did Vlad's resolve start to crumble, death was looking less and less terrifying as the days wound on, his food supply was almost spent and he knew that soon his death would be out of his hands. He'd stayed alive for ten years just for this? For the knowledge that in the end he truly was his own undoing?
If there was a God he must have hated him.
He'd sat in that crumbling chair in the rusted out hull of his old lab, waiting for death to take him. He'd thought hunger would be Death's scythe at his throat, but as his long unused portal sparked with activity he cringed in fear of the only ghost who had any reason to hunt him down.
Not wanting to die an old, frail, pathetic pile of rags, he turned to stare down his would be killer, stretching his old arrogant façade over the face of a man who had lost all hope, he didn't want anyone to see him like this. Least of all the monster he himself created.
But the only ghost to come through his portal... was one from his past.
Standing before him was the reason he'd remained alive all these years, it was this moment that Vlad wondered if things such as fate and destiny truly existed for if they did he had certainly reached his. This was his moment, his chance to change things, his chance to finally make it right.
He could never make it up to the Daniel he'd helped to destroy, but if he could save this one then, well, perhaps his old soul could finally rest in peace.