Rules for Being Human
Most ghosts were once human. The rules of humanity can still be applied.
7: Mirror
Others are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself.
She was beautiful. She'd loved it.
She had been kind and compassionate and respectful. She'd enjoyed it.
She'd been insulted. She'd hated it.
She'd been deceived by the man she trusted most. She despised it.
Desiree, over the years as a genie-like ghost, had discovered that she was alright with granting wishes for those who had only good intentions, and these wishes she would grant in the exact way the wisher desired. Beautiful girls' wishes she might twist, but never into anything bad – just enough to show that there was, in fact, more to oneself than beauty.
Those who cheated and lied and were insulting and untrustworthy – she took their wishes and twisted them into things so much uglier than intended and she didn't care. Why should she?
She despised men for what they'd done to her…and for what she hadn't been able to do for herself.
He hates his younger self. Seeing his younger self again, being put back in his shoes – it makes him remember what he hated about it.
What he hated about himself.
The part of Dan that is still the heroic Phantom rationalizes that this is normal; he was technically that once, and he still retrained some of those traits. The side that was Plasmius countered with the fact that he's technically a new being now, and the flaws (and perks) of Vladimir Masters and Daniel Fenton were gone, nonexistent, unimportant.
He still hates it.
Being in the Thermos gives him plenty of time to think. (Really, plenty of time; he doubts Clockwork is stupid enough to let him out too soon – or at all. Maybe in a hundred years when his family and younger self are dead and dust he'll get a chance to stretch his legs.) As he sits there, glaring at the cramped walls (when did he develop claustrophobia?), one thing keeps running through his mind.
I hate what I was, and I hate what I become – what I am.
And it was true. He was still flawed, still had a bit of a damn heroic complex (letting Valerie live was the extent of it, really, but still), was still a pompous jerk with a dash of witty banter.
Looking into that mirror at his old face hadn't helped at all.