[Time started: Jan 3, 2015, 5.17pm; –]
This is the second time I'm writing this I am sobbing. The Box Ghost is hard to write for.
Technically I shouldn't be writing this since school has already started for me but the workload hasn't really set in yet so I think this should be fine /squints/
Disclaimer: I do not own the characters from "Danny Phantom". All rights reserved to their respective owners.
Please rate and review!
Title: watch the sun sink down low
Summary: He was a small man in a big world, but then what else is new. –– The Box Ghost.
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He was known as Barry in his previous life.
Barry Baxter, and it was almost as painfully ordinary as a name could be, but that was just what he was. (Painfully ordinary, that is.) He was born into an average family with two working parents and a little brother, and grew up in a fairly average and normal life. His parents always made enough that they were able to get what they needed, but never enough that they would be able to afford any luxuries.
When he grew up he got himself a job at a seaside warehouse stacking boxes together and loading them at the docks, and it seems that was how his life was going to go till the end of his days.
Despite that, Barry loved his job. It wasn't any big-shot gig, but Barry worked hard and liked what he was doing. The hours were long, but Barry worked hard, and after a good day's work when he was allowed to sit at the port with a good ham sandwich and a flask of tea and watch the sun set in the horizon, he thinks that life couldn't get any better than this.
He takes another bite out of his sandwich, and grins.
"Beware!" He yells suddenly to a group of seagulls flocking nearby as he raises his arms dramatically and mimes lunging at their direction, and the seagulls all flew up in a flurry of white feathers and frightened squawks as he watches.
He swings his legs over the grainy sea-salty of the port, and grins wide with all his teeth.
–
The next day he shows up to work bright and early in the morning, and he walks through the doors with a big grin on his face.
Well. He was exactly on time, actually, but punctual was punctual, and definitely a lot better than being late.
He walks up to one of his other co-workers in the warehouse, a tall, blond, beefy man wearing a shredded singlet and with stubble round his jaw, and unceremoniously slaps him on the back.
"Good morning! How may I, Barry Baxter, be of assistance?" He asks loudly, dramatically, puffing up his chest and sucking in his slightly thick stomach. His voice was dopey, grating in a boy-man way, and he stretches his vowels in all the wrong places so that he sounds loud, overdrawn and overbearing. He was all funny goofy in-your-face obnoxious.
And his fellow warehouse worker barely even reacts. This was just how Barry was; all annoying and loud and the butt of everyone's jokes in not-always a kind way, but he was so sincere in his dramatics that nobody would ever tell him to stuff it. So they let him be an annoyance in his superior-inferior complexes without breathing as so much of a word, and they take care of him quietly the way one might do to a very stupid, very annoying pet.
Barry's co-worker barely grunts a greeting before he jerks a thumb towards a large stack of cardboard boxes in a corner. "These need moving to the loading dock onto the ship before the day ends today. Hop to it."
Barry salutes. "Aye aye!" He says. He toddles towards the boxes, before carefully gripping one at the bottom with his gloved hands and lifting it up. It wasn't too light – but it wasn't too heavy either. An average weight to carry, and Barry think he'll do just fine.
So he huffs and he puffs along for the rest of the day, and carries boxes to and fro from the warehouse down to the loading dock where the goods ship awaits. Turns out that he doesn't really do just fine, and after the other workers were done with their loads they had to come over to help him with his own. But with their help Barry finishes before the day ends, and as the goods ship sails away from the loading dock Barry wipes sweat off his brow, and feels proud of himself.
"Another great job by the great, Barry Baxter!" He yells triumphantly into the sky, hands clenched into fists and up in the air as he stands at the edge of the dock with his face to the setting sun, dark hair sweat-sticky on his forehead and messy under his blue knit hat.
As the orange-gold sunlight beams past his face he casts a silhouette on the ground, and he is neither heroic nor inspiring. Against the sunlight he is a small shadow of a man in his black worker boots and overalls and short and stout stature, and he does not inspire. But he grins stupid wide in his pride and is so caught up in his own small achievement in such a huge huge world that he looks big, almost for a moment.
But then the moment is gone and he is old Barry Baxter again, the goofy annoying situationally-oblivious man that all the workers know, and as he totters up to them and slings an arm over their shoulders and breathes all into their personal space, they all go off for dinner.
It was just routine.
–
He is heading home after his dinner, and it is already late. The stars hung themselves low in the sky, and he whistles out-of-tune from between his teeth. Hands in his overall pockets, a look of smugness on his face, he is congratulating himself on a job well done today.
Just before he rounds the corner to the warehouse where he plans on bidding his co-workers goodbye, he hears his own name, amongst the crackling of the small campfire that some of his fellow workers builds every night as they stay up late talking under the stars. Barry stops, and freezes.
"Why would my own co-workers be talking about me, Barry Baxter?" he whispers to himself, frowning, uncomprehending, and he presses himself flat to the wall as he strains to hear the conversation floating around the corner to reach his ears.
"All I'm saying is," –and Barry recognises the voice, it was the one who had tsk-ed behind him today when he stopped for a second to catch his breath –"don't you think that Barry sometimes is, you know, annoying?"
An uncomfortable silence echoes around the warm crackle of campfire, and Barry is frozen.
Silent murmurs uncomfortably echoes around the campfire, and Barry hears rustling as people nod, or shake, or nod their heads. Nobody spoke for a long time, and when someone did, it was the uncertain, hesitant, slightly guilty voice of a person who felt like what he was going to say was going to be betrayal.
"Well, sometimes."
Barry hears this, and silently walks away.
–
For the next few days, he is quiet and withdrawn, and he does not pour as much of himself into his work anymore. He still shows up on time, but the warehouse almost echoes from the absence of his sound. Almost.
The other workers all wonder what is going on, but nobody says a word.
–
The fifth day after Barry's quiet withdrawal he sits down alone at the edge of the port again, but this time he hears someone walk up beside him and sit down. He does not glance the intruder's way; rather he concentrates on staring into the sea green spangles of the water down below.
"Hey," the voice to the left of him speaks up, and it is low, rough-smooth with a slight drawl, "the other guys and I have noticed that you've been feeling kinda… low, lately. Did something happen?"
"Oh nothing," Barry mutters, kicking his legs forward as they dangled over the water, "just the discovering of the fact that everybody here hates me, Barry Baxter, that's all."
"Hate you?" The voice beside him asks, surprised, and Barry steals a glance to his left; it was his co-worker with the stubble round his chin and the blond hair that reached his shoulders, and Barry thinks he might've been there at the campfire that night, too. He turns away.
"Yeah," he mutters, hands clamping on the wooden port as he leans forward to stare into the water, "five days ago, at night, around the campfire? Someone said that I, Barry Baxter, was annoying, and then everybody agreed." In the setting light he slumps forward in his misery, all poor posture and poor stature and even poorer expression, and his blue knit hat gets pulled down low over his brows as he stares miserably into the water. His co-worker beside him is silent, and he says nothing as he stares at the sun sinking orange-gold low over at the horizon.
When the sky was dark in its light and the air around them was still, Barry heard a sigh, and his co-worker finally spoke up.
"Look," he says slowly, awkwardly, "I know you heard what you heard that night but, well, we don't hate you."
Barry glances up at him, confused. "But all of you said–"
"I know what you heard," he repeats, rubbing the back of his neck with one of his hands, "but despite what we said, we don't hate you."
"…You called me annoying," Barry pointed out.
His co-worker shrugs. "Well, is there anybody who ever isn't?" He leans backwards on his arms, stares up at the sky, and exhales.
He has tanned, weathered lines etched onto his face; he's been here the longest, Barry remembers, the longest out of all of them and much more experienced compared to Barry's two years of working in the warehouse.
Barry suddenly feels very, very small.
They both of them don't speak again for a while, and Barry twiddles with his thumbs; his co-workers stares up at the sky and tipped his head back. After a while, he sighs.
"Look, we said that you were annoying sometimes, but we like you. You're sincere in your work, and you work probably harder than anybody else. We respect that." He glances over at Barry once, before he tilts his head back up to the sky.
"You're a good person, Barry. We don't hate you."
Barry stares with his mouth hanging open, before he feels his lips stretch into a small smile.
"Really?" He asks, hesitatingly, timidly.
The man next to him simply glances at him once again, before he heaves himself up. He puts a hand on Barry's head, and says, "Continue working hard, kid. You're still a rookie, compared to some of us here, but you've got it going for you," before walks back up the pier, towards the warehouse. He does not glance back.
Barry tilts his head back down to stare at the now dark-black spangles of the water in the night, and grins.
–
"Are you sure, Barry?" His fellow warehouse workers asked, a frown creasing their features as they hovered near the doors, a look of uncertainty flitting across their hard-worn features. "Are you sure you don't want one of us to stay with you?"
Barry looks up from where he had been stacking up boxes, and puffs up his chest. "Do not worry about me! I will be all right! It is just a little bit of extra work, and I will be done! You go on ahead!" His voice is as loud and as dramatic as ever; the same pauses in all the wrong places, and he's finally back to his old self, again.
The other workers exchanged glances before they finally nodded. "Alright then, we're going now. Be careful, Barry," they called out gruffly before they closed the doors.
Barry stays grinning at the door until they finally slammed it shut, and he rolls his shoulders and prepares to go to work. He's putting in overtime today, to make up for the five days where he didn't really do his work properly. There was a bit of extra boxes left to organize and tidy – Barry thinks he'd better hop to it. He's only got a few hours to spare, and he needs to catch the last bus home before it's too late.
So he starts lifting the boxes up and stacking them into neat columns, and as time went on he finds that he is huffing and puffing and the boxes are getting heavier, but still he continues working without so much as a rest. He wasn't as strong as the other workers, but that's okay, because he could work up the muscle over time.
He has the rest of life to do it; he has time.
He finishes his work just before the clock strikes ten, and he is sweaty and tired, but he is pleased. He takes off his gloves and wipes his hands on his overalls; he pulls his blue knit hat on.
Tugging his gloves back on, he whistles as he makes his way out of the door, and plans on coming in early the next day as well, to put in some extra hours. He was still far behind the other workers, so he'll have to put in the extra effort to make sure he doesn't fall behind.
Then maybe some years from now he would be tall and beefy, with enough muscles to carry four boxes at once, and maybe even a scar or two somewhere from an accident. Maybe an injured eye? He knew someone who injured his eye from a warehouse incident before.
So when he turns around and finds the stacks of boxes that he didn't organize steadily enough falling in his direction, his first instinct wasn't to do anything but to dumbly stand there. He knows the boxes are heavy; he'd carried them just now, and so many falling in his direction was probably going to kill him.
He couldn't really believe it. His mind flashes back to his plans for tomorrow, for the next two years of his life, for the next twenty – he'd thought he could go on working in the warehouse forever.
The first box hits him headfirst.
He just wanted to do his job.
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The Box Ghost is incredibly difficult to write a decently serious story for. He was created as a gag character – it was hard to think up a serious death storyline for him.
Also wow, I see why The Box Ghost and The Lunch Lady are put together as a couple. They're quite similar.
I'm not all that pleased with this, but I think it suits, so there? Also The Box Ghost looks like a Barry to me and you cannot convince me otherwise. Also how do I type out his speech, on paper I just can't seem to make it obnoxious enough.
Someone tell me if throwing in made-up characters in this story or assigning the ghosts their names if they have none is weird, though – just give me your honest opinion, because I'm not too sure on doing that myself.
Please rate and review!
[Time ended: Jan 4, 2015, 2.53pm; –]