Lancer watches the local ghost boy get some much-needed medical attention and ponders.
Chapter 4: The View from the Sidelines
William watches Dr. Alejo fuss over Danny Phantom. A ghost. The ghost. She orders him out of the body drawer. That can't be what it's called, can it? It's so... blunt. William feels disrespectful just thinking the phrase, but the doctor would know.
"How did you even get in there? You could barely sit up when I left," the doctor says. She has stepped back, giving Phantom plenty of room, but he has yet to move out of his hiding place.
"Funny thing about that." One of Phantom's hands grabs the frame of the drawer. The other is pressed tightly against his opposite shoulder. He shimmies forward or tries to, only managing a couple of inches before he grimaces and stops. "I think I wrecked my stitches."
Phantom offers Dr. Alejo a sheepish smile but receives a frown in return. It's an impressive frown, in William's opinion. Disapproving but not needlessly angry. It took him some time to master such an expression when he first started teaching. Before he did, he either came off as too stern or too forgiving. Dr. Alejo must have some kind of teaching experience. Perhaps that's part of her job here at the hospital. As William understands it, doctors still require a lot of hands-on training before they can treat people without supervision.
The silence is broken by a dripping sound. At first, William looks to one of the many sinks in the room for a leaky faucet. It takes him a few seconds to realize none of them—and there are many—are the source, and he gives Phantom a closer look. Stitches, Phantom had mentioned. The awkward pose makes more sense now that William spots the green seeping from under his hand, the one clamped over his shoulder
Another drop of ectoplasm falls to the floor. William tracks it, and his eyes widen when he sees the sizeable stain on the floor underneath the drawer, with something crumpled in the middle of it.
"You phased out of your stitches!" Dr. Alejo screeches.
"It was an accident!" Phantom protests. "It takes a lot of concentration to turn stuff intangible when it's not a part of me. I didn't know it was you coming back! I had to make sacrifices! It wasn't easy getting in here."
"Get out."
Phantom flinches, hurt flashing across his face.
"I don't know how quickly you'll burn through the lidocaine, and I only grabbed one dose of it. So unless you want me stitching you back up without anesthetic, get out and get back on that table." Dr. Alejo points to the table in question.
Phantom's expression takes a moment to smooth out. It occurs to William that the ghost thought Dr. Alejo was kicking him out, rather than ordering him onto the autopsy table.
"Isn't that a little insensitive?" William asks, eyeing the table. It isn't until both Dr. Alejo and Phantom turn to him that he realizes it's the first thing he has said since arriving.
"Thank you," Phantom says. "That's what I've been saying. Who brings a ghost to a morgue?"
"You haven't said anything like that."
"Oh. Well, I've been thinking it. It's a bit rude, in my opinion."
"Concussed people don't get to have opinions, now get back on that table so I can finish treating you."
Still, Phantom doesn't move.
"Do you, perhaps, need some help?" William offers.
Phantom's cheeks flush as he nods. Moving him ends up being an awkward affair. Dr. Alejo presses a gauze pad to Phantom's shoulder while Phantom wraps his good arm around William's neck. William backs away from the drawer, slowly dragging Phantom out. Every jostle is met with a wince. At first, William pauses whenever Phantom makes a muffled sound of pain, but he quickly realizes that getting this over with faster would be better for all of them. He ends up carrying Phantom bridal style to the table.
"If you ever tell anyone about this, I'll fill your car with blob ghosts," Phantom threatens. With Phantom back on the table, William returns to hovering at the edge of the room, still unsure of his role in all this.
Dr. Alejo quickly redoes Phantom's stitches. The lidocaine must have worn off because he winces every time the needle goes in. Once that's done, and his shoulder is clean and bandaged, Dr. Alejo moves on to the mottling of bruises on his chest and stomach. Green like ectoplasm, like the stained cloths piled in the garbage, like the cut above his eye that oozes slowly. The bruise covers most of his torso. It reminds William of an abstract painting. He can't help but stare.
"I knew I should have checked this first," Dr. Alejo says. She presses down on Phantom's abdomen, making him wince. "Do ghosts have internal organs?"
"We've got internal something. Sorry that I've never cut myself open to see if I've got intestines in here," Phantom quips.
A ghost on a morgue table, being looked over by a doctor, making jokes. This is by far the strangest thing that's ever happened in William's life. And he still doesn't understand why he is here.
"You need a guardian?" William asks.
Dr. Alejo doesn't look up from her work, but Phantom sets his gaze on William.
"The good doctor won't let me go home alone. Thinks I'm going to bleed out or, I don't know, stumble and hit my head or something. I don't think my concussion is that bad."
"Are you still seeing double?" Dr. Alejo takes her hands away from Phantom's abdomen and reaches for a tube on the table behind her. She opens the cap and squeezes some of the gel onto her hands, applying it generously to the bruise.
Phantom hisses in pain while she works. "There's like, one and a half of you. One and a quarter. It's like a shadow you."
"Your speech isn't slurred, and your memory doesn't seem impaired, which is good, but you've also been lying prone since it happened." Dr. Alejo glances at the body drawer. "Mostly. You could have balance and coordination issues that we haven't tested for yet."
"I got into the drawer just fine."
"Frankly, I don't trust the assessment of someone who would willingly phase out of their stitches. And some symptoms don't appear right away. If the double vision stays, you could need vision therapy or prescription lenses. I'd suggest going to an optometrist."
"Oh, sure. I'll fly right over there once we're done here."
Dr. Alejo applies the gel to several other bruises elsewhere on Phantom's body. Around the gauze pad covering his shoulder and upper arm, on his legs, his cheek. She cleans and bandages a few of his smaller cuts and doesn't step back until every last injury has been tended to in some manner.
"Okay. I'm going to get the portable ultrasound and see if I can get my hands on some antibiotics," Dr. Alejo says. "Mr. Lancer."
William perks up at finally being addressed after several long minutes of silence.
"I want you to help Phantom sit up and test his coordination. I'll double-check when I get back, but it'll make things go faster if you can help out. If there's nothing wrong, then I might not need to test him myself. Okay?"
William nods, already moving to help Phantom sit up while the doctor heads for the door. He has to loop an arm around Phantom's shoulders and push him up. The boy—because William can't think of him as anything else right now—grimaces all the while, holding back pained groans. A few slip out despite his best effort. By the time they get Phantom upright, he is panting and hugging himself tightly.
"Do you always get this injured?" William asks.
Phantom fiddles with the zipper on his hazmat suit, which is still pulled down. This close, William can see a variety of scars beneath the bruises. He didn't know ghosts could get scars. The biggest covers his uninjured shoulder. It looks like a lightning bolt—if lightning bolts were feathery. Pale branches stretch over paler skin, branching across the side of his throat. It's easily the size of William's hand. Leaning forward, he examines Phantom's back and finds that the scar continues there, blossoming out across his spine, all the way to his opposite hip. Unlike the other scars, which seem no different from a human's in the way they have healed, this one has traces of sickly green coursing through it, nearly the same colour as his bruises.
"Death scar," Phantom says.
William jumps back and flushes, embarrassed to be caught staring. He should know better than that.
"It's alright" Phantom's shoulder twitches. A shrug, William supposes, as much as he can shrug with his injured. "You probably haven't been this close to a ghost without it trying to kill you before."
Not an untrue statement, but William can think of a few times where he ended up in close quarters with a friendly ghost. "Not quite. If I recall, there was that time the school was trapped in an alternate dimension. You were with us for that. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, that was a strange day."
"Stranger than this?"
It says a lot that William has to pause and think about that. A school getting transported to another dimension isn't as strange as a whole city ending up in the Ghost Zone, which has happened three times by William's count. On the scale of interdimensional travel, it falls on the less interesting side. Visiting a ghost in the hospital, however, is a novel experience.
"No. I suppose, in its own way, this is the strangest thing that's ever happened to me."
Phantom gets out a few good chuckles before he doubles over, arms wrapped around his stomach. "Please don't make me laugh. Whoever said laughter is the best medicine has never had internal bleeding."
William's hand hovers over Phantom's back. He nearly pulls away, until Phantom lets out another grown. In slow circles, he starts to rub Phantom's back. The skin is cold beneath his fingers, and he can feel the raised edges of the lightning scar. William does his best to ignore it. Phantom leans into the contact until he is slumped against William and would have fallen over if not for his arm. It surprises William enough that his hand stops in its steady motions. He resumes when Phantom makes a protesting noise.
They stay like that for a while. It reminds William of the many times he's had to comfort students in the past, for any number of reasons. Sometimes it was a bad grade, trouble with their peers, trouble at home. Ever since their last guidance counsellor fiasco, Casper High has had some trouble getting a replacement, which means William often ends up filling the gap. He doesn't mind it. He loves his students. To him, children are the most important thing in the world. They're the future.
He doesn't think about it often, but sitting here now, William finds himself confronted with the fact that Phantom is a child, a dead one. Who had been his teacher? His parents? Did he have siblings? No one in Amity Park knows how long Phantom has been dead, but William has always assumed it was recent. The boy is too similar to some of his students to be from another decade.
It isn't fair, is it? That this boy had to die so soon, has to sacrifice himself for the city, has to experience pain every day. He deserves to find some kind of peace.
"I've never seen a teacher cry before." Phantom stares at him with wide eyes.
Sure enough, when William reaches up to touch his cheeks, he feels tears. He wipes them away on his sleeve.
"What are you crying for? I'm the dead one."
"My boy, that's why I'm crying."
"Oh. Thanks, I guess. You're a good teacher, you know that?"
"I'm sorry?"
Phantom blushes and looks down at the floor. "I hang around the school sometimes and watch things. My high school teachers aren't– weren't always great, at least not most of them. But you're a good teacher. I wish... I wish I could have had a teacher like you before I died. Your students are lucky to have you."
William feels his tears coming back. It's a fight to keep them down, but he manages to blink them away in the end. "Thank you, Phantom."
"Danny." Phantom lays his head on William's shoulder and closes his eyes. "You can call me Danny."
