Chapter 21: A paradox to blame
The director was sitting in Vlad's room when he finally looked up.
The young man hadn't slept since perhaps the doctor and June had found him – unmoving, silent, unresponsive – with his lungs hanging out of his rib cage. He hadn't moved on his own, hadn't done anything for them to make it easier to do to try anything at all whatever they could, hadn't tried to push them off either.
He'd been vaguely aware of June pushing him down on the bed, as carefully as possible, while the doctor had cradled his flickering lungs back into the gaping nothingness where his sternum should have been, looked mystified all along – and yet, focused, willing to play along so that something could be done.
He didn't think he'd looked at either of the two directly during all that time.
if he did if he tried if he dared
who knew what he'd see should their eyes meet?
A long time after he had no idea how long perhaps one hour perhaps three it had all started glowing shimmering pink and hidden outside of materiality, Vlad had felt something shift within his ribcage, as if everything was back to normal his lungs were finally back where they belonged, solid and functioning inside his chest. He'd been able to feel himself breathing once again unnaturally aware of the organs inside his upper torso of their presence of their absence of the fact that they were, his heartbeat had come back, and before long the skin and muscles across his ribcage had reappeared.
There had been several medical tools hovering in his sight, touching his skin lightly – and some that weren't usual, devices he'd never seen before – but Vlad hadn't been in any state to actually think about it. He supposed they'd examined him, checked that everything was back to normal as if any of this was normal.
Hours had passed.
He hadn't counted.
Now Bianco was sitting by the far wall, going through a wad of paper with a frown on his aged face, and Vlad was exhausted, incapable of not reacting to this fact, incapable of doing anything more than ask:
"...Director Bianco?"
The older man blinked and looked up at Vlad.
"Oh, Mister Masters, you are..."
He trailed off. Vlad guessed "awake" wasn't the right word and Bianco knew it.
"Aware" might be a better choice.
"Ah, well. Good. We were getting worried that you'd remain unresponsive. Drink some, will you?"
The older man gestured to the nightstand – and the glass of water on it.
Vlad wasn't sure it'd help anything, but did as he was told. His movements were slow, tired, and getting the glass took longer than he'd expected.
Drinking helped, and it did not. When he looked back at the director, nothing had changed.
Bianco nodded to himself, fingers tapping against his notepad and the ten-or-so sheets of paper stuck on it.
"Mister Masters, you've had a rather extreme reaction to the blood blossoms infusion tonight, I'm sure you noticed."
a gaping wound of nothing pounding collapsing expanding collapsing he couldn't feel his own heartbeat "clear!" perhaps "banzai!" it would all go away
The director turned a page on his notepad, frowned at it for a moment, then put the notepad under his arm and only looked at Vlad.
"I wish to apologize about that. We certainly didn't expect this treatment to end so poorly. It is obvious that we'll be discontinuing it right away. It has, however, brought another theory to our attention."
Vlad didn't say anything, did nothing more than listen. His mind was tired, his body throbbed duly.
He hadn't slept.
Bianco waited for a moment for a reaction, but eventually realized that he wouldn't be getting one.
The director sighed – it was obvious that he cared, that he was trying, that he wanted Vlad to get better. They weren't quite friends, probably, but maybe he'd grown attached. Maybe he was doing that job because he wanted to help the victims of ghost-related incidents.
June and him did want to help, he didn't doubt that.
Vlad just wasn't certain that there was anything they could do. Even if a flash of green "banzai!" hurts his body was still there, breathing on a good day, it seemed obvious, now, that he was too dead killed by his best friend to be saved.
Jack's fault
"I'm not sure how much you are hearing right now, Mister Masters, so Nurse Porter will tell you everything once again later, after you've slept some. You must be... Well. Still, here are our observations so far: lowered metabolism, bouts of fever and ectoplasmic infection, several cases of cardiac arrest, fortunately those have stopped, unnatural necrosis on your hands, spontaneous bleeding and vomiting... You seem to manifest something equivalent to known ghosts powers at times, such as intangibility, but you have no control and it usually happens during a fit of some kind. Your intense rejection of blood blossoms has led us to think..."
Vlad's heart didn't pick up, he noticed absently. This could be the moment everything went wrong, the moment they started to suspect what he'd been convinced of for a while now.
Vladislav child why are you still here?
"...there might be a ghost hidden inside you. One of their ability is called overshadowing, very close to what the public thinks of as possession. They can... enter a person and use their body for their own needs. Of course, you haven't been mind-controlled so far, which is unusual, but it's possible that when your experimental portal exploded, a ghost was unwillingly flung into you. If our theory is correct, it should be injured or unconscious, which would explain why you remain aware of yourself and why the bouts of ghost powers are so erratic. Or why the ectoplasmic infection within you isn't drying out even after so many months."
Vlad saw the hesitation on Bianco's face, then, and wondered – there had to be something the director didn't want to say, something the older man considered even worse.
At the point he'd reached, Vlad didn't think there was much that would make it worse.
"...Mister Masters... It's... possible that you wouldn't have survived the initial infection without the ghost's healing factor. The ectoplasm itself was causing all the death-like symptoms, the heart attacks, the necrosis, and the ghost's energy kept you alive even when your body should have shut down, it bought you enough time to heal from the worst of it. Now, though, it keeps producing more ectoplasm which prevents you from actually recovering. And we don't know how to disentangle the ghost from your body, not without risking you collapsing under the pressure. It probably needs to leave from its own accord, but for that it needs to be awake, and if that happens..."
Bianco looked like he knew exactly what happened to people who had a ghost inside them, and Vlad had no reason not to believe him. One of them had experience with actually meeting ghosts, and it wasn't him.
Before, he'd thought meeting a ghost might be a way to learn more about the afterlife, about the value of life and death. He hadn't believed it would necessarily be easy, or that no ghost could be aggressive – but he hadn't thought that they were inherently dangerous despite the writings of all of Jack's ancestors.
Now bedridden haunted by ectoplasm and death without a future and only nightmares of the past, Vlad couldn't help but wonder if, perhaps, he hadn't been asking the right question.
Maybe ghosts were evil, or maybe they weren't, maybe some were and some were not – but maybe the common factor between them all was that their simple presence wrecked the lives of the living, intentionally or not. Maybe them being here at all left burn marks, scars you couldn't truly recover from.
Maybe they were death and had no place where life dwelled.
maybe he shouldn't be there at all dead and alive and nothing natural an abomination worse than the simple wrongs of the dead haunting the living
The thing was, he understood the director's reasoning. It made more sense to believe that a ghost was haunting his bones, twisting and turning within him, and that it was the cause of the eyes the teeth the ears the skin the hands the blood the abnormality everything, it was logical enough, given the facts.
But Vlad was the one inside his own corpse body, and he could tell.
He doubted there was anything inside him that wasn't himself, no ghost sleeping behind his heart, no easy explanation, no potential solution or end to all this. There was him, only him, here.
No one else.
Because he was the one who was dead, he was the one haunting his own corpse, he was the one slowly becoming a ghost as he hurt and writhed under the change – and it was just that his body refused to understand that it wasn't alive anymore.
That green hurts what please he'd died that day.
It made no sense, to think that his body could still live while Vlad himself was dead and shackled to it – so why would Bianco think of it, when he had a more likely explanation?
The director shook his head one last time and stood up.
"I truly hope we'll find another way, Mister Masters. For now, though... I'll leave you to rest."
Vlad didn't say anything what was the point what would it change? as the older man threw him a last look before closing the room's door behind him.
Alone again always, he rolled on his side and stared at the wall.