Whatever happens, it happens excruciating.
It is instantaneous. It doesn't feel so. It is lightning in all its shuddering glory, coursing through a form too small to contain it. It is a perfect split-down-the-middle change, an awakening, a gasp ripped from the throat after it has long forgotten breath. It is a lonely Phantom, a wanderer caught in between oblivion and existence, and it tears right in two.
For the first time since his death Phantom finds himself opening his eyes and seeing. His hands touch metal and his nerves cry, the texture of it lancing through his body like pain. He has blood and it pumps, roaring in his ears and he can hear. His mouth is dry. He can taste. He can touch.
Phantom opens his eyes and he sees not the body that he had grown to know as it floated in a lifeless haze, a green nothing. He opens his eyes and sees pink, fresh skin shot through with dancing electric scars. Hands as they emerge from the tattered remains of what once had been his hazmat suit, now torn and burnt. He is on his hands and knees on cold metal, and his body is trembling, and Phantom has never known gravity in its entirety the way he does in this moment, come back under its command from the weightless grip of death.
There is a voice speaking. It drags on Phantom's ears like nails on a chalkboard, high and excited and utterly confused. He looks up, and sees a man—a living, breathing man—standing a few feet from him, dressed in a white lab coat, his hair a staticky mess that sticks up and out unflatteringly. He is tall, looming over Phantom with the lights to his back, his face in shadow.
Phantom remembers fear. It is so sudden and lurching that it makes his heart—his heart?—stutter, and adrenaline is what gives him energy enough to shove himself backward, landing on his butt and scooting as far away from the man as possible. Whatever he's rambling, it stutters to a halt, and, to Phantom's surprise, he steps a little ways back as well.
"Um, hello?" the man says, and Phantom's mind chews through the words slow, hearing them first and comprehending them a few seconds later. The man, the scientist, seems to be waiting for some kind of response. Phantom does not respond.
After a few seconds, the man takes a tentative step forward. Phantom does not scoot further away, but he does pull his head back a bit. This does not deter him, and he steps forward more. Phantom tenses, ready to continue moving backward, but it turns out there's no need. The man stops short before entering the metal cavern Phantom has found himself in, casting an uneasy glance at its frame.
"My name is Nicolai. Are you—can you understand me?"
Phantom can understand him. Slowly but surely, his mind is waking up; this time he hardly needs a few seconds to process what the scientist—Nicolai—had said.
Phantom opens his mouth, but does not move to speak yet. He stretches his face and his lips, swipes his tongue across his teeth, swallows a glob of saliva he hadn't noticed building. Then he enunciates as best he can, "Yes."
Nicolai seems excited at this, and shakes his hands in a burst of glee. "Oh my god. Oh, what the hell!" He turns away, pacing a few steps before turning on his heel and coming right back, a grin squirming on his face. "Come out of there please, it's dangerous in the portal," he says, crouching down to be at eye level with Phantom. When he does, the light illuminates his face a little more, and all at once he's more like a puppy than a beast.
Nicolai's face is lit up more than just literally. Behind his cracked glasses, his eyes gleam, and his giddy grin shows more than a few crooked teeth. He's younger than Phantom had thought he was, maybe only ten years his senior.
Phantom decides that Nicolai is a person he can trust.
Nicolai reaches out a hand as Phantom crawls out of the… portal, he'd called it. His limbs still feel heavy and hard to move, so it's slow going, but Nicolai doesn't say anything other than the occasional encouragement, waiting there at the mouth of the tunnel, hand reached out. When Phantom reaches him, he tentatively takes it. Nicolai is stronger than Phantom had thought, based on his thin figure, and Phantom makes a little yelp of surprise as he's gently pulled to his feet.
"Are you okay?" Nicolai asks, looking him over. Phantom hadn't realized it, but the portal must have been deep enough to cast a shadow over him as well, because Nicolai seems to look at him with new eyes. "That was a nasty shock." He's still gripping one of Phantom's hands, and he traces one finger along the new scars there.
"I don't know," Phantom says after a moment, forming the words as best he can. His legs tremble, and he leans more heavily on Nicolai, unable to keep supporting himself on his own. Nicolai curls one arm around his shoulders to steady him.
"Okay, let's get you upstairs. Can I carry you?" Nicolai asks, and Phantom nods after a moment of hesitation.
He picks him up gently, and Phantom finds himself cradled against Nicolai's chest. They turn, and Phantom gets his first good look at the room.
It's a laboratory. Phantom doesn't realize why he recognizes it at first, but the knowledge trickles back to him, from some place he hadn't realized he'd lost it to: the Fentonworks spirits have a lab, too. Phantom spent a lot of time there. He can't quite remember why.
Up the stairs that hide in the corner of the laboratory, the building opens into a more traditional living space. The walls and floors are no longer metal, and there is no lab equipment to be seen, just chairs and tables and carpet and other normal, everyday artefacts.
Most ghosts' lairs don't really look like a human home, though, so Phantom drinks in the sight like it's novelty. To him, it is.
Nicolai sets him down gently onto a couch. A coffee table rests in front of it, and off to the side is a small TV, though it looks sleeker than any TV Phantom remembers. There's a potted plant in the corner that looks very much like it needs water. As Nicolai pulls his arms away, Phantom grips onto them subconsciously, unsure why it suddenly feels so cold to be left alone. Nicolai gives him a strange look, though, so he lets go of the sleeves, pulling his arms back close to his chest.
"Your suit is all ripped. Let me get you some clothes," Nicolai murmurs, mostly to himself, and Phantom watches as he moves to the stairs, going up them two at a time.
With Nicolai further away, Phantom notices how quiet the first floor is. Down in Nicolai's lab, there had been an almost tangible hum. Machinery, he supposes. Up here, the only thing he can here is Nicolai puttering about upstairs, and a steady dripping. Looking to his right, he can see into the kitchen. The sink tap isn't all the way turned off and, mesmerized, Phantom watches it drip.
"Here," Nicolai says, in front of him again. He holds out a folded shirt and a pair of jeans. "They'll probably be a little big, but it's better than that." He gestures lamely at Phantom's suit. Looking at it more closely, he notices that the arms had been burned away almost to the elbow, and jagged tears go down his torso from his shoulders. Most curiously of all, the colors are all wrong. Where black should be, there's white, and vice versa. His hands are pink, but his skin used to be green.
He catches sight of his warped reflection in the TV's black screen. His hair used to be white, he realizes. All of the colors are wrong.
Rather than take the clothes, Phantom raises two fingers to his neck, and presses into the side of it.
Tha-thump.
He's been breathing, he realizes. He can see, he can hear, he can taste, he can touch. His heart beats faster in his chest.
"I'm alive?" he says, and it comes out both a whisper and a question. At that, Nicolai's face does a weird dance between dismayed and excited.
"Are you saying you weren't before?" he asks, a biting kind of hope in his tone.
"I was a ghost," Phantom says. He was alive once, he thinks, but he's been a ghost much longer. He knows it more readily—the weightlessness, the swirl of energy in your chest. The haunting emptiness of the Zone that howls louder the further you get from the islands and doors. The feeling of power all your own, sparking at your fingertips.
He still feels it, he realizes. Deep in the pit of the chest is that swirl, coiled in on itself, waiting. Phantom brushes against it, and it latches onto him, and erupts.
His heart stops as it washes over him, leaving his chest comfortably silent, the quiet pulse of his core replacing it. His senses muffle in the way he's used to, ectoplasm recreating the sensations as best it can. The light and the texture of the couch no longer feels like it attacks him. Looking down at himself, the colors are right, and his suit is whole. Tugging one glove off, he sees no Lichtenberg scars.
"I am a ghost," Phantom says, and the words come faster with less input to process. He meets Nicolai's eyes, and the man looks down at him with his mouth fallen open, his hands stilled in their fidgeting, the clothes forgotten, clutched in his grip.
"Oh," Nicolai says softly, something seeming to slot into place. "Heh," he laughs briefly, breathlessly, the smile that tugs at his lips gone in a second, replaced by something more stricken. "Fuck," he says. Phantom tilts his head, confused. Nicolai only shakes his. "Oh, fuck."
After night falls—and Phantom watches in fascination through the windows as the light fades, for the Zone is never as pitch-black as this, the green whorls in the Zone's atmosphere always giving off that eerie glow—Nicolai sits Phantom down at the table in his kitchen and gives him a mug of something sweet and warm. Hot chocolate, maybe?
Phantom has changed again by now, the spark in his chest receding and his heart beating once again. The energy in him is not so limitless on Earth as it always seemed in the Zone, and now he finds himself with his fingers pressed against his neck almost constantly, marveling at the steady thump of his heart, the noise filling him up. Tha-thump. Tha-thump.
With the day gone, too, the world seems a tad less intense. At his request, Nicolai turns off the kitchen lights, leaving them illuminated only by the light that filters in from the lamp in the sitting room.
"I was trying to build a portal into the spirit's dimension," Nicolai explains to him when Phantom regains the presence of mind enough to ask. "I don't know how, but you must have gotten caught up in it as it opened on your end. I turned it off as soon as I heard you screaming."
"What am I now?" Phantom asks, gazing down at his arm. Nicolai had gotten him into the clothes after Phantom changed the second time, and now his skinny limb is dwarfed by the sleeve of the big polo Nicolai had leant him. Seeing the rest of his body as he had peeled his suit away had been strange. It's been so long since his skin wasn't green. Now he is pink, and white lightning darts across him, from his neck down his arms and his torso, tapering off at the tops of his thighs. Around his shoulders, his skin is dark with burns. Nicolai had bandaged him tenderly, hand leaping back every time Phantom had winced. It didn't bother him, when Nicolai hurt him. Pain is new again, too, and he almost enjoys it.
"I don't know," Nicolai says, wincing, as if anticipating anger. "I'd have to look at your DNA to figure out exactly what's going on, and I'm not a biologist. I'm an—an inventor, I don't know how to help you—" He cuts himself off, clutching one bicep with his other hand, his fingernails digging into the sleeve of his labcoat. After he calms some, he goes on. "As best I can tell, you're somewhere in between. You're… both. A ghost and a human."
"Oh," Phantom says. The information settles in him more softly than he expected it to. It lodges in his mind as fact, and the steady beat of his heart seems to mingle with the distant pulse of his core, in tandem. They're both part of him now. "Okay."
Neither of them break the silence for a moment after that, and in the dark, Phantom listens to the drip of the sink. Steady, like a heartbeat. Seemingly becoming aware of it, Nicolai stands suddenly, moving to turn it off. When the noise ceases, a terrible silence seems to pervade the room, and Phantom opens his mouth to try and fill it automatically.
He'd been talkative in life, he remembers suddenly, the memory rising from the same place his memory of the Fentonworks spirits had disappeared to.
"My name is Phantom," he says, realizing that Nicolai never asked, and he'd never offered. Nicolai meets his eyes, and smiles, tentatively.
"Just Phantom?" Another memory arises from those depths.
"I was called Danny a long time ago, I think," he murmurs, and Nicolai walks back from the sink to sit down again.
"Nice to meet you, Danny. I'm Nicolai Technus." He holds a hand out across the table.
Danny Phantom takes it.