Vlad promised companionship. It was unspoken, but evident the moment he stepped into the hospital ward housing me, after I refused to respond to Aunt Alicia, refused to see Mr. and Mrs. Foley or—or the Mansons, who did not visit at all. It would have made little difference whether they did. I couldn't have looked them in the eyes.
Vlad promised care. In his cavernous mansion, his chef drifted into the dining hall, to the table where Vlad and I sat, opposite each other in a facsimile of a family dinner, and set down our meals: sirloin steak, its crust charred to perfection, drizzled with chimichurri. I bit into the red meat, and froze when the hot spice exploded across my tongue.
I vomited onto my plate.
"Give it time, little badger." The man buried me into his arms. I wondered, secretly, if he resented the scent of my bile in his no-doubt expensive suit. "It'll be alright."
"Don't lie to me," I said. It came out as a croak.
His hold around me tightened. "I'm not."
His hug was real enough for me to almost believe him, his cologne strong enough to almost chase away the scent of charred flesh and hot sauce, but he was not enough to squeeze out the pain.
After that, Vlad promised relief. The Ghost Gauntlets clicked as he pulled them over his hands—they were louder than the unsettling hum of the lab. I concentrated on them, warped my mind around their sound, letting the chill from the metal table against my back fall away.
I trusted it, this invention. I trusted him. My powers, which I could no longer bear to use, would remain only with my ghost. My despair and guilt, filling my every bone, poisoning my every thought—they would remain with my human.
"For the ghost, that's biologically incapable of emotion, the pain will end. For the human, who'll be free from the burden of power, the pain will lessen with time," Vlad had said.
He extended the needles from the Gauntlets' fingertips and pricked them against my bare chest, off-center, towards my left breast where my heart and core lay, and without further ado, sunk them in. Contrary to what I imagined, blood did not bead from my skin where the metal met my flesh. It was a juxtaposition, yet that was what Vlad and I were, so I watched with open eyes as the needles dipped, further, into me.
Then, the fingers began to curve.
I felt it—the moment they hooked onto my core. My wrists strained in its bonds and a shout tore from my throat because it hurt, oh God it hurt as they began to pull, up and away from my body. My spine arched with it, unable to stop myself from trying to will it—my ghost? my soul?—back into me even as my mind told myself Vlad did not back out of plans once he walked down their paths.
My heart burned. Something integral was leaving me, as if my intestines were unraveling, losing in a tug-of-war against a giant's hand, being pulled foot by foot out of my torso. A yawning emptiness was growing in my chest, in my being, like a fruit being scooped of its flesh, until what remained was its flaccid peel. What sort of pain was this? Emotional, physical, imagined? I couldn't tell.
It would end. I gripped onto that thought.
"Daniel?" came Vlad's voice, breaking through the haze of pain.
I hadn't realized I'd closed my eyes. I opened them with difficulty, and Vlad's face swam into focus, staring into my own. His hands, and the Gauntlets, hung limp at his sides.
"Why did you stop?" My demand echoed in the lab. "Finish it. Finish the—"
"It's done," Vlad said.
That couldn't be true. The memories— the explosion— they still buzzed beneath the surface of my mind, screaming to be released the moment I let down my guard, straining against the defences around my heart.
It came to me, suddenly, that I was no longer laying on the dissection table. I was floating above it, and when I looked down, there my body was: restrained on the table and eyes squeezed shut, sniffling, crying ugly tears that dripped off my cheeks.
I raised my hands, upturning my palms. They were gloved, outlined in an aura, but the more I stared the more they appeared muted, as if they belonged to someone else, and I felt I was drifting, rising, soaring far away.
Nothing lay in my chest. No beat, no warmth, no chill. My mind grasped at the memory of a thumping heart I felt in my ghost form, or a thrumming core I felt in human form.
I could not remember. It was then I knew myself to be dead.
"Danny?" Distantly, I registered Vlad pulling off his Gauntlets, setting them on the table. Who was he speaking to? I turned to him. He was unwrapping the velcro that held my body down.
Strick! went a restraint. The sound pierced my ears. It made my vision swim.
Strick! went another.
"Vlad?" asked a hoarse voice.
It sounded soft, ruined.
Pathetic.
This thought was new, a tentative brush against my mind, but I became certain it was right. Had I sounded like that when I had been a hero?
"I'm here," Vlad said hurriedly, and I hovered at the side, watching him pull the shuddering human into his arms. "It's over, you're okay. You're alright."
He turned to me, one arm outstretched.
"Dan—" he began, but he wet his lips, eyes flickering to the boy in his embrace, and back to me.
The word died on his tongue.
"Phantom," he said.
It was a dagger to my chest. Something—not a heart, I no longer had one, no longer was alive—clenched, and it was as if a dam broke and the flood burst through, its waves rushing, rolling, drowning my mind with thoughts I'd kept at bay the second I understood I was dead. Wasn't this what I wanted? To die? But now I was dead, with no way to return to living, no way to take it back, undo that day, undo today, and yet—
I still hurt.
This boy, this body, hiding his face in Vlad's shoulder, was pathetically sniffling. What had he lost to deserve to cry? His name? His identity? His life?
"Phantom," Vlad snapped. "Calm down."
I jerked. I had shouted my words out loud, but the loss was too much to bear. So what if I had? What right did Vlad have to reprimand me? The ember of anger crackled in my chest, burning away all else, so I latched onto it and snarled. "Don't call me that. That's not my name!"
My body had turned around, and was looking at me now. His blue eyes watered, wet tracks smeared across skin. I had seen those eyes—my eyes, my eyes—countless times in the mirror, but here and now, they blinked when mine did not, shed tears where I did not.
Not mine. They could never be mine again.
"That's not my name," I repeated, vision beginning to swim. My mouth could not stop moving, even though I wanted it to stop. I wanted this to end. This nightmare, this hurt clawing out of my throat, it was supposed to fucking end! "That's not my name, that's not my—"
"Danny!" Vlad's face, stark under the fluorescent light of the lab, looked desperate. He let go of the human, who hunched into himself on the table, and reached a hand out towards me. "Calm down, alright? Let go of your hair."
His palm grasped my forearm. The contact burned—too real, too firm—and I ripped it away, but my other hand, it could not let go of the hair bunched in my grasp. It was white, I saw, as my fingers twisted the coarse strands before my eyes. White and shimmery.
I willed it to be black, but no, it remained white, like an old man's. I let out a giggle.
My scalp felt as if it were going to burst open.
"You promised," I tried to say, but it turned into a sob. I slapped my hand over my mouth to try and muffle it, because I heard Danny Fenton's whimper in my voice. Echoed, distorted, pathetic. My fingers on my hair tightened. I wanted to scream.
"Danny." Vlad's voice was strained. "That's enough."
"No no no." I shook my head, diving under the swipe of Vlad's arm, towards the table where my body sat, staring at me, next to the Gauntlets that had torn me from it. I picked one up, grasped its heavy weight. I thought the metal would be cold, and I ripped off my glove to press a hand against its unyielding hardness.
Nothing. I could not transmit heat. I did not have human skin.
"You promised me," I said.
"What did I promise you?" Vlad asked quietly.
That it won't hurt, I wanted to say, but the words died in my throat. I turned to him, opened my mouth, but what tumbled out instead was: "Do you know what it feels like?"
"What what feels—"
"To be dead." I pressed my free hand against my chest, where my heart no longer lay. "I want to go back."
Vlad's expression softened, and he spread his hands. Placating. "I can't do that, my boy."
"It's not fair." This man, this man—I needed him to understand. "It hurts. I can't take it, Vlad, please."
"Daniel." Vlad shut his eyes, squeezing the bridge of his nose with his forefinger and thumb, as if my request, my begging—I hated it, hated stooping so low—was a source of his irritation. "We made it clear beforehand. All our research, remember? It said—it's irreversible. It's impossible. We cannot bring back the dead."
I stared at him, and willed myself to cry, but my eyes were dry, and Vlad was not done talking.
"You're upset. I understand, but you have to know, we poured through our notes and what did we find? What was it that made me agree to this procedure?"
I didn't respond, a buzzing growing in my head.
Impossible, it whispered. Irreversible.
Vlad continued, slower, this time, "Ghosts don't feel. What you are feeling, right now, is your memory of it."
Had we said that? I tried to remember, our hours spent reading published journals, carrying out experiments, but the knowledge slipped away, out of reach. The Gauntlet felt so heavy in my hands. "We were wrong."
"No, son," he replied, shoulders slumping. "We're not." Then he reached an arm out again. "Give the Gauntlet here."
I shied away. "You're not listening to me." Watching him sigh and run a hand through his hair, it sunk into me: He was half-ghost, half-alive. I had been one, and now I was not. A quiet hiccup behind me reminded me, suddenly, that out of everyone here, I was the only one who knew what it was like to die.
Vlad had given up, and was shaking his head as if I were an unreasonable child, heading back towards the table, where my body was sitting. All this while, all the human—Danny, my traitorous mind supplied, because it was getting easier, by the minute, to associate him with my name—had done was sniffle, which I had tried to ignore. Now I was forced to look at him to keep Vlad in my sights, but he caught my eye.
"I'm sorry," Danny murmured.
I did not respond. "You don't understand me," I insisted to Vlad.
He brought out a blanket where we had prepared on a chair next to the table, and was wrapping it around Danny's shoulders. His back to me and his head bowed, he refused to reply.
How could he? How could I make him understand?
My hands moved before my mind thought. Danny—his eyes on me—yelped, but I wrenched the Gauntlet over my right hand, extended its claws, and sunk them between Vlad's shoulder blades.
Vlad screamed.
Had I sounded like that? He continued to shout, hands scrabbling at his back but unable to reach the points of entry. His wordless wailing sunk into me, twisting into a dark ball of hurt within my chest.
"Stop it!" Danny scrambled off the table, but his knees, weak from the operation, gave way and knocked against the tiled floor. The blanket pooled at his feet. Pathetic, I thought. "Stop it! Phantom! Danny!"
I couldn't stop. I felt as if I were no longer in control. My arm pulled, and Vlad staggered backwards, choking, unable to form words. When my claws met resistance, they had found its target and my arm poured strength into its action—strength no longer restricted by the limits of a human body.
It pulled.
The moment I felt the split, it was as if a cork screw had loosened from a bottle's neck, and with a tug, I was gaping at the full ghost ensnared on the Gauntlet, thrashing like a fish hooked by its gills. Its human crumpled onto his elbows and back, but I wasn't interested in the breathing bodies on the floor.
I slackened my fingers, and let Vlad go.
He twisted around, gasping, lurid eyes boring into mine. Only the two of us were hovering in the stale air of the lab. I looked into his eyes, which were vermillion and wide, and searched for comfort within them. "Do you understand now?"
Vlad's face twisted.
"Daniel!" He roared, and I started badly. His fists began glowing, outlined in harsh pink, but I registered them only faintly, because I could not stop staring into his face, his expression, the horror and the anger within them.
This was not what I wanted.
Hands found the collar of my jumpsuit, and I did not choke as they wrenched me towards Vlad's snarl, bringing me close. I wanted to shut my eyes; I did not want to see his fangs, did not want to feel his hot breaths against my face, but I was frozen.
"What have you done?" he shouted. "You stupid, stupid boy!"
"I wanted—" I licked my lips. A horrible, terrifying implication was sinking into my chest, into my mind, and I shook my head. Shook it again, left and right, unable to stop. "I want—"
"What part of irreversible did you not understand?" He shook me roughly, and I swung, back and forth, held up in his grip with dangling limbs. The glove on my right hand weighed me down, sending me off-balance, off-kilter like how the world spun. My gaze swung about the lab: from the dissection table I had been on, to the Gauntlet's metal winking under the fluorescent light, to the two humans who had gotten up from the floor. Danny, watching us with his mouth gaping wide, truly looking like a petrified corpse. Vlad's human, one arm before the boy, sharp eyes taking us in with gritted teeth.
Protective.
I admired it. Desired it, and the hurt slammed back into my chest as Vlad spat another vitriol in my face. Why wasn't he doing what his human was doing for Danny? He understood now, didn't he?
I looked back at Vlad. Examined his expression, as if seeing it with fresh eyes. He looked so angry then, so mad, face all twisted up. For the first time I noticed how thick his eyebrows were, how they folded into each other. Like a badly stitched-together puppet doll, or a villain of a Saturday morning cartoon.
I laughed. It echoed in the lab. My life, all fifteen years of it— it was a Saturday morning cartoon.
"You think this is funny?" he shrieked.
His voice! It was so high when he was angry! I laughed harder, and heaved, feeling like I couldn't breathe, but no! No, the dead did not feel. I was reliving a forgotten memory of choking when I had been alive. That was right. That had to be right. He and I had done our research.
"I'm right," I tried to tell him, in between my cackling. "I'm—"
He punched me across the face.
"You're out of your mind," he said. I looked up from where I was sprawled across the floor, taking in the fury on his face. It looked familiar, this intensity, this promise of violence and retribution. When had I last seen it?
Ah, when I'd wrecked his cloning technology, maybe.
"You've killed me," Vlad said.
That wasn't true. I shook my head. "I just wanted you to understand."
A part of me, a small little corner in my head, was screaming, but I couldn't seem to reach it. I didn't want to let it in.
A crash made my head whip to its source, and I saw, as if I were someone else watching this drama unfold, the recognizable circle of light pointed at me from the figures on the floor. It was instinct; I threw up an arm, and blasted the thermos away. A shout of "Vlad!" punctuated the air, and I slammed a knee into Vlad's gut, throwing him off.
We fought, and this dance, it was familiar. A pattern we fell back into as easily as remembering to breathe, two halfas—and now, ghosts—exchanging blows. It'd been the inevitable conclusion of the truces we've had in the past; how naive I was, to think this time would be any different, but this time, it hurt more, because out of the corner of my eyes I caught our two bodies huddled next to the dissection table. Danny, knelt over the prone body of Vlad, was shaking and crying, as if he hadn't already done enough of that over the past five months in this mansion.
I blasted Vlad into the wall, and he slid down it, groaning. We were bleeding, sluggish ectoplasmic rivulets snaking down my arms and his torso.
I didn't understand why Vlad was acting this way. He'd sworn it'd be alright, he'd given his word that this would work.
But it wasn't alright. There was something irreversible about death, he'd said so, and I felt it, and how could I change it? Time could not be rewound, and I'd stepped past a line, but I felt as if there were a force propelling me past it. I could not have stopped things from turning out this way, although every fibre of my being wished I could.
I had no one, not since the— the explosion. Not since I decided to cheat on the test. Maybe if I'd never gotten caught, maybe if I'd let myself fail and ruined my future, it could have turned out different. But I did get caught, and I did let myself care about my future, so I'd been fucked from the start.
Even now, I did not have Vlad—both forms of him, one who had chosen to protect Danny, the real, alive, desirable Danny, the other who had exploded into violence the second things went wrong.
But I had to try.
"Do you want to see my memories?" I stumbled over to where he lay, until I was nearly on top of him, and pressed shaking hands against his forehead. "Will we stop fighting then?"
"Daniel," he croaked. His hand rose, fingers snapping around my wrist. The grip was strong; it should have crumpled my bones. "Don't—"
I willed myself intangible, and sunk into him.
Feedback welcome! :D Also crossposted to AO3 under Kiestan.