Hum
An odd sound drifted from his bedroom.
Skulker shut the main door behind him as quietly as he could. A gun slid out of a compartment in his left forearm, and his audio receptors began filtering out all other noises—the clicking of gears in his suit, the soft thrum of his lair—loud without the rattling of cages in his basement. He let his mind narrow, seeking to pinpoint a singular focus onto that…
His optics shuttered in confusion. It was a voice, low and breathy, as though it had come from the parched throat of a human being. But it wasn't someone speaking at all.
It was humming, and it carried a slow, lilting tune.
A tune, he realized, he had not heard in half a decade.
Entranced, he took a step forward, but the wooden flooring creaked beneath his boot.
The humming stopped. The noises he had filtered away crept into his senses, but he ignored them in favor of the three strides he took to cross his living room—towards the closed door of his bedroom. If he had breath, it would be held, and he twisted the doorknob to shove his way through the entrance.
The exotic lamp duct-taped to the ceiling cast the room in warm, patchy glow, but he didn't need light to see the blue, flaming hair spilling shadows across the floor.
"Ember," said Skulker.
The woman reclined on the center of his futon, gloved arms thrown around his pillows and legs stretched out on the ratty sheep hide he used as a makeshift blanket. Her silver boots were tossed at the foot of the bed, and the purple electric guitar—dirtier and scratched up, to his distant horror—lay against the nook of her waist. But where Skulker remembered her as a young, thin figure, here she was—
He didn't want to say it. She would've smacked him across the back of his metallic helmet if he'd so much as alluded to her weight back in the day.
"You know, staring ain't any better." Ember sat up, glancing at him. Emphasized by her thick, black eyeliner, her eyes held a muted glow, and Skulker discovered he could no longer read her expression. "You gonna welcome me with that gun of yours, baby pop?"
"What—" He glanced at the weapon on his arm, still charged and ready to fire. "No!" he said, hastily putting it away. "No. I…" He looked at her again, optics scanning over her frame. She didn't look hurt or in pain, or in any need of aid.
Relief hit him unexpectedly. "Where have you been?" he demanded. "What happened to you?"
She sniffed, jerking her face away, and seemed to discover interest in his bare walls. "I don't wanna talk about it."
"But you sound—"
"I said," she warned, her voice raspy, "don't push it."
He fell silent. It hurt to hear her. They were both self-obsessed when they'd dated, but she had always loved her music and taken great care to maintain her appearance as an attractive, undying diva.
Phantom. It came to him, and he wondered why he felt surprised. Phantom got to her. Hurt her vocal cords. That son of a—
Skulker forced himself to calm down. No way was he letting his first meeting with Ember after so long be of him blowing his top. He went over to the bed, sitting on its edge and willing her to meet his gaze. She didn't.
"You used to have all sorts of dead animals hung up here," she commented. "Finally threw them out?"
"No." Skulker's optic twitched. "Phantom—" Ember stiffened, but he barreled on "—burned my lair down. I had to reform it from scratch."
She harrumphed. "No wonder it took me so long to find you."
"Why did you come here?" he asked.
Turning to him, she fell back into the pillows stacked against the bed frame, and laid an arm across her bare, protruding midriff. Her other hand rose, fingers curling, half-hiding a wry smile that crept across her face. If she was trying for coy, the look didn't work. "I can't say hello to my boyfriend?"
He crossed his arms. "Am I?"
"You've dumped me?"
"How long has it been? Five years? Babe, I didn't even know if you'd faded."
"Pssh." Ember waved an arm dismissively. "Still with that habit of using human time?"
"Don't change the subject."
"Fine!" She growled, her fiery hair swelling into a blaze. Its flames crackled, whipped the wall behind her, and a part of Skulker prayed the paint wouldn't peel. "You wanna know what happened? That dipstick found us and stomped us under his foot. This? My voice?" She jabbed a finger at her throat. "He dug his fingers into my throat and clawed it right out!"
She was heaving, even though she didn't need to breathe. The gray scars marring the soft blue skin of her throat bobbed.
Skulker missed his old bedroom. This lair, molded out of what little ectoplasm he could spare, was too small for the two of them. "I guessed as much," he said with a sigh, then paused. "Us?"
"Johnny and Kitty, and Shadow. The lot of us," she muttered bitterly, fingers curling around the neck of her guitar like it was a comforting weight. "We thought we could take him. So stupid."
In all this time he had spent hiding, he hardly thought about the couple. It was the norm, now, to go months without seeing another ghost. Most had faded. Unraveled into threads of ectoplasm by Phantom's terrible wail.
If Ember hadn't returned… she would have become just like them. Another soul lost to the pariah's crusade against the Ghost Zone. Another statistic to the Observants.
Another tally added to Skulker's regrets in his afterlife.
"What a fool." She hissed these words. It took him a moment to realize she was referring to herself. "Can't even sing no more."
Skulker had felt relief when he had seen her here, whole and as unharmed as she could be. Now, a thread of unease began mingling with it. He shuffled closer to her, reached out a hand. When she didn't jerk away, he pulled her wrist into his grip. He did not press in and shake her hard, despite his instinct to do so.
"So what," he said instead, "you're just gonna sit here?"
Her face twisted into rage. "What?"
He nodded to her guitar; its neck cradled in her grip. "You haven't fixed that. You're not the Ember I know."
"It's been five years!"
"Who's following human time now?"
Ember snarled, shooting forward, her fingers finding the seam between his helmet and his suit. One twist and it would come off, but Skulker stayed his ground. "How dare you!" she snapped. "I've been doing nothing but trying to heal! If Phantom hadn't—"
"You think that punk hasn't left any of us alone? Look at the rest of us! Look around you, he's hurt all of us, but not everyone runs away and then comes back just to throw a pity fest!"
He was wound up so tight, joints in his neck were creaking from the tension. Calm, he told himself, calm.
"I thought you'd understand." Ember let go, collapsing back onto the bed. "I thought you'd get it. This" —she gestured to the room around her, small and barren, a shadow of the glory it once held— "living like this. I've got nothing left."
"You can sing," he said abruptly. When Ember cast him an incredulous look, he corrected himself. "Maybe not as well as you had. I don't know if we'd ever go back to who we were. But I heard you just now. I recognized you and your song. And your guitar—" He picked it up, avoiding the scruffy parts, and plucked one of the strings. It vibrated, humming what he knew was one of the letters. He'd never learned music, but he didn't need to be a musician to tell that it hadn't been well taken care of. "This is fixable, isn't it?"
Ember pursed her lips. "It'll be easier with replacement parts. From the human world."
"Then we'll go," he said firmly. "We'll get the parts."
She huffed a laugh. "You really think we can move past this, don't ya?"
He shrugged. "What else can we do?"
She heaved a long sigh, strumming an absent chord in her guitar. It gave a twang, off-tune, and she winced, slapping a palm against the strings and halting their vibrations. "Okay," she said, swinging her legs off the bed and standing up. "Let's go."
"Now?"
"Yes," she said, gripping his elbow and hauling him to his feet. "If we're gonna make sure this ain't gonna be what the rest of our afterlives are like, we're going now."
There was still a slump to her back, a shadow in her eyes. This renewed energy about her, it was a pretense, Skulker discovered, as he watched her pull on her boots and stalk into his living room, an imperceptible stagger in her gait. She remarked on the shoddiness of his interior décor, a now-familiar rasp in her words.
She was putting on a show. For who amongst them, he didn't know.
Neither did he know how whether to leave it be or confront her, but her return—even this act—had to mean something. It was hope, and helplessly, he held onto it, and followed her out of the door.
Written: 29 Jan 2020
Edited: 3 May 2020
Written for a prompt in Fluffcember19 Day 3 (humming), a writing challenge first uploaded on Tumblr by paper-shield-and-wooden-sword.