Chapter 26

"This is what you do for fun?" Dan grumbled, leaning his elbows on the table as he rested his head in his hands.

Kwan lifted his gaze from the piece that he was examining. "You don't have to stay here. I have weapons to protect myself from the ghost now." Even after Kwan came back from Dash's apartment with the ghost hunting equipment that Masters sent them, Dan remained with him. The ghost was lucky that Kwan didn't get fed up enough with his presence to shoot him with one of the blasters. Masters also gave him something Dan told him was called a Thermos that was used for capturing ghosts. It looked like what its name suggested: a thermos. He felt sorely tempted to try it on Dan if the ghost continued to annoy him.

"That would be more convincing if you didn't go and break the weapons down into parts." Dan picked up one of the pieces from the blaster that Kwan dismantled as soon as the sun rose. Apparently, the man couldn't sleep, and this was his idea of enjoying the wee hours of the morning.

"I do this for a living." Kwan grabbed at the piece in Dan's hand, but the ghost turned it intangible, making the man grab at air. A frustrated growl rumbled in his chest as he glowered at Dan. "I'm a forensic scientist. Sometimes I end up taking apart guns for evidence. I analyze stuff. This is what I'm interested in. So forgive me if you're bored while I learn a little something about the weapons I'm supposed to use to defend myself against your kind."

"Someone's not a morning person." Dan tossed the piece back onto the table. "And you can put this back together?"

"I wouldn't take it apart if I didn't think I could put it back together." Kwan put down the part that he was examining and picked up another part. "What is this stuff?" He turned the part over, watching the green goo slide down the sides of the clear tubing.

"It's for fighting against a ghost. What do you think it is?" Dan grinned in amusement at Kwan's scowl. The gears were turning the man's head, but he wasn't getting the idea as he stared intently at the green goo. Dan released an exaggerated sigh, deciding to take pity on the man. "Ectoplasm! It's ectoplasm. It's an ecto energy based weapon. It charges and uses ectoplasm in its blasts."

Kwan blinked in surprise. After he set the part down, he stood and walked into the other room. When he returned, he set a microscope down on the table. He ignored the curious quirk of Dan's eyebrow as he picked the part up again. Prying off the top of the part, he took a small sampling of the ectoplasm and put it on a slide.

"What are you doing?"

Kwan paused as he lifted his gaze to Dan. "I'm examining the ectoplasm," he answered like it should be obvious. "I've never encountered ectoplasm before, so I want to examine it. If I'm boring you, feel free to leave."

"I guess this really shouldn't be a surprise." Dan returned to his bored head in hands posture. "You were all ghost techno geek in my time. But before I went evil? I never would have imagined you'd be so interested in all this junk."

"I didn't exactly go around sprouting out how smart I really was in high school." Kwan shrugged as he stared down through the microscope, adjusting it to examine the ectoplasm on the slide. The substance was strange, and he couldn't think of how best to describe it. It was nothing like what he was used to dealing with in the laboratory. "A jock that got good grades? I would have been picked on by my teammates if they knew. Well, some of them wanted to kick my ass regardless of my intelligence."

That seemed to catch Dan's attention, and he sat up with sudden interest. "Who wanted to kick your ass?"

Kwan sighed as he tore his gaze away from the microscope. "Why do you want to know?" The only answer he received was a shrug. "Just this guy that was on the football team. He pretty much hated my guts."

"You? He hated your guts?" Dan shook his head in disbelief. "I know you did some bullying, usually when forced to by the other 'popular people,' but you always seemed like a generally good guy. I couldn't imagine anyone actually hating you."

"You always talk like you know so much about me." Kwan was the one now leaning his chin on his hand. He frowned at the ghost as his eyes narrowed a fraction. It was almost like he thought he could figure the ghost out if he stared at Dan long enough. "Why would a ghost care to know anything about some average human?"

Dan snorted. "Who said anything about caring?" He reached over and flicked Kwan on the forehead. "In case you forgot, I," he pressed his hands to his chest, "lack all human emotions. It's the whole reason I turned evil."

An eyebrow lifted then Kwan shook his head. "You're so full of shit."

The comment gained a blink from a rather stunned Dan. "Excuse me!" he shouted as he rose to his feet. "What do you mean by that?"

Kwan grinned, and for once, Dan almost wondered if the man possessed a bit of an evil streak himself. "Oh, what's that? Is that anger I'm seeing?" The grin only stretched wider when Dan responded with a scowl. "You know, anger is a human emotion. If you have no human emotions, why are you getting angry? Why do you feel pleasure in tormenting people? Why do you get frustrated? In all this time you've been lurking around me like an unwanted shadow, I've seen you display a whole range of human emotions. If you really didn't have human emotions, you would float around as an empty shell. Nothing would provoke any sort of reaction from you. You'd be as dead on the inside as you are in the physical sense."

Dan glowered, an eye twitching as his mouth pulled back, baring fangs like a furious beast. "You're rather irritating for a human," he finally managed to growl, restraining himself enough from attacking the man in his anger.

Kwan merely stared him. The grin disappeared before he finished his little speech about human emotions, and now his expression was blank, devoid of any display of emotion. His eyes, which twinkled mischievously a moment ago, were dull and lifeless. "But I'm right, aren't I? You act like you have no human emotions because it allows you to act the way you want and get away without any sense of remorse. You're only pretending like all that destruction you say you caused in your timeline didn't affect you, but it did and still does."

Dan's nose wrinkled, and a growl grew in the back of his throat. His hands hurt from how tightly they were curled into fists at his side. The man was almost too perceptive, read him a little too well. "You don't know anything," he grumbled as he dropped back onto the floor. He leaned one arm on the table and turned away from the man, too angry and frustrated to even look at him.

Kwan didn't bother speaking again. He returned to examining the ectoplasm on the slide. Silence claimed the room for several moments, stretching close to an hour as Kwan fiddled with adjustments and played with the sample. Then he slowly sat up straight. He stared uncertainly at the microscope, like he hoped he was wrong in what he saw. After scrambling to his feet, he hurried into his bedroom and snatched his laptop off the dresser. When he returned, he collapsed onto the couch as he opened the laptop. Dan only gave him a passing glance at the sudden movements. Kwan continued to ignore him as he pulled up his data on the drug analyzed from the soda that the drug dealer drank before falling into a coma. The silence seemed to stretch on forever as he reviewed the data. But as he looked at it, a cold feeling wrapped around him and settled deep inside. With a sinking sensation, Kwan lifted his gaze toward Dan.

"I'm wrong."

"No, you're not," Dan said, but he wouldn't look at Kwan.

"But it can't be. I mean, it's not-"

"No but yes."

Kwan ground his teeth, glaring at the ghost for interrupting. "It doesn't make sense."

"Of course it does."

"Dan, what do you know?" Kwan pushed the laptop onto the couch as he stood. He mustered up the most menacing glare he could manage and directed it at the ghost. In the blink of an eye, Dan vanished from his seat on the other side of the table and appeared suddenly right before Kwan. He stood far too close, and his lips nearly brushed the curves of Kwan's ears when he spoke in a soft voice that almost couldn't be heard.

"You already know." Dan grinned when Kwan flinched, like he did every time the ghost spoke this closely to him. "You don't need me to explain anything though you may want to pass that information onto your friend. My time is up."

"What?" Kwan gasped at the last statement. "You loiter around this whole time," he kept his voice low too, realizing somewhere in his mind that Dan must of a reason for this conversation be between just them, "and the moment I figure something out, you're out of here? I thought you were sticking around because of some stupid order to protect me." He wasn't sure why it mattered now. Wasn't he trying to drive the ghost off only a moment ago by making him angry? Why was he feeling panicky now that Dan announced he would be leaving?

"Not really my choice. You can blame that meddlesome Clockwork." Dan shook his head. "Now it's time for you to play the bait so that my younger half can save the day."

Kwan turned his head so that he could stare more fully at Dan's face. "And it's against some rule that you can't stay and fight this battle too?"

Dan laughed at the question, a big laugh that almost sounded like a real one. "I'm not the hero here."

"You were a hero once."

A moment passed as their eyes met. Then Dan faded from his sight, his eyes disappearing last, and Kwan knew he was really gone. Dan wasn't playing around and using his invisibility to toy with him. The ghost was gone from the apartment, leaving Kwan completely alone for the first time since they met. Kwan stood there for a good long while, almost stunned that Dan actually went through with his announcement to leave.

Then he remembered he needed to tell Fenton about his findings. He still couldn't fully wrap his head around it. Nothing about it actually seemed possible in his head, but after staring at the data, he couldn't explain it any other way. Grabbing his cell phone, Kwan started typing up a message for Fenton. Maybe Fenton would understand everything better than he did, since Fenton's parents were the resident ghost hunters, other than the Guys in White.

Kwan hit the send button and sighed out in relief. That part was at least finished. An explosion ripped through the side of his apartment. The force of it threw him back, slamming him into the wall. Kwan gasped at the impact, and his phone fell from his hand. Sliding down to the floor, he winced and held his head where pain blossomed after his head banged back into the wall. When he lifted his head, Kwan swallowed at the ghost towering over him, menacing in its size.

"And now you're left all alone." The ghost grinned toothily, a venomous gleam in its red eyes. "Big mistake. But then, it was only a matter of time before they all gave up on you." The ghost's hand glowed red.