So, a new tag: implied self-harm.
Chapter 30: Cut my lip
Days – and most importantly, nights – passed. Vlad spent hours in the bathroom while most in the clinic were sleeping, training his weird belonging to the dead powers. If he could get them under control, if he could not have accidental outbursts... It would be better for him, in general, not to constantly lose his grip on everything; for others, too, if he wasn't hurting them June without meaning to; for his safety, perhaps, and certainly his future, if he could not display signs of ghostly powers in front of strangers.
It might even, maybe, get him in a better state. Vlad didn't have a certitude on how much of his failing health was because of his developing powers – parts of it had definitely been on the ectoplasm bonding with his... cells? DNA? with something, poisoning his body and literally killing him until it had become more than foreign material within his flesh – but it was entirely possible that his recurring bouts of fever were a symptom of excess ectoplasmic energy, or that the blood vomiting was because some power or other was doing things it shouldn't do in his guts, leaving holes and blood and ectoplasm where those shouldn't be.
No, Vlad didn't know if this would work – but it might, and it was one of the very few things he could actually do to try and better his condition.
To get out of this clinic, one day, perhaps.
So he'd stand in the small bathroom and try and try and try again.
He'd soon found out that he should really be careful with partial intangibility, not abusing that power yet, because if he didn't manage to turn back, or if something went wrong...
Vlad didn't want to fail to explain to the doctors how his heart had gotten stuck in the wrong place a second time – he had been shifting his torso in and out of the material plane after having gotten good results with his arms and legs, and he hadn't realized, hadn't noticed...
They were starting to fear that, despite the doctor's conclusion about bonding ectoplasm – surprisingly accurate if very toned down – the ghost him but they didn't know that and he couldn't let them know was indeed coming back for occasional rides, that it had left his body but not relinquished its claim. That it was using him.
If Vlad wasn't careful, if he gave them more reasons to believe so...
Even if they didn't find out the truth, even if they only acted out of concern for a patient, even if they just tried to protect him from a threat that didn't exist from a threat that they could not corral from his own death...
Things would get worse for him. Harder. They'd monitor his room for ghostly activity – the outer walls of the clinic were warded, he'd learned that trying to see the outside once, and it made sense, you didn't want a clinic for victims of ghost attacks to be accessible to ghosts – and then Vlad would be unable to train, unable to get better. They'd watch him closely, and they might notice everything he could yet keep under wraps.
They might understand, and he didn't know what they'd do then.
Bianco cared, Vlad knew that much, but if he found out that Vlad was dead... Maybe his caring wouldn't be enough. Maybe his caring would be the problem, too. Maybe they'd try to cure him – not a ghost possessing his body, not an entity to expulse, but Vlad himself, something that couldn't be taken back.
death
there was no curing that
Maybe Bianco wouldn't be a problem, but the director wasn't the only one here. There were the doctors. The nurses. The agents. The rest of the organization. Should Bianco come to know, it would be because everyone else did already.
they'd know he had been the one to injure June
every single patient in the clinic was here because they'd been hurt by ghosts
he'd be
he
What would Ziad think? The older nurse had gotten him a table, he'd brought him his clothes, had discussed different subjects with Vlad Masters, the patient. Would he feel the same towards the ghost underneath the skin of a dead man?
would June?
she wasn't here anymore but would she? she'd been hurt because of him once he was the reason she'd been a patient here too the reason she couldn't do her job anymore
No, Vlad couldn't get caught.
If anything, it was better that they thought him ecto-bonded and occasionally a victim of the ectoplasm in his body, even if it meant they weren't going to let him leave yet.
For things not to get worse... For that he needed to get a better grasp on his powers, and that meant taking the risk of using and training them – but with caution. He couldn't become a weirder case than he already was, his physical state couldn't turn suspicious and not just baffling.
Vlad found out he could – voluntarily – turn only some parts of his body into its ghostly form, just like he could force intangibility without transforming.
If he focused on his eyes – both of them, properly – he could shift into that weird, double-layered vision that allowed him to see not only the world as it was for humans, but also what he assumed to be ambient ectoplasm as well as blood, pulsing or already cleaned up – at least half the bathroom and bedroom were covered in washed-off dark pink stains, blood he'd thrown up or otherwise lost over the last year, and Vlad could only morbidly wonder how long such stains remained to his red eyes, if the entire world, outside where he wasn't allowed, was drenched in blood long gone, if he could see the aftermath of a battle hundreds of years late, just by looking at the ground.
If the world, in truth through red eyes and dead sight, was trapped in echoes of pain and suffering and death too.
After he'd let the eyes fade back into blue, he still had to train and transform, to be able to do it in less than a minute, less than thirty seconds, less...
One day it would be barely an afterthought, a decision, yes, but no more focused than you'd need to snap your fingers. One day turning – and turning back – wouldn't be a risk, it would happen before anyone could notice.
Vlad had to believe that.
Hours and hours and hours well into the night.
Yesterday he'd accidentally let out several electrical discharges, and when he'd panicked at the static and tried to reign it in, he'd started siphoning energy off instead, causing the lights to flicker. He'd barely stopped the reaction from frying out the room – the building, if he'd let it happen too long – and then he'd felt overcharged with power and couldn't even keep his feet on the ground, hovering in the dark and praying it would end before someone came in the morning.
This could happen again in broad daylight, with someone there to witness, if he didn't manage to...
He had to keep training.
The biggest problem – recurring, always the same even if not in the same way – was that there were, more often than not, leftovers from his attempts at transformation. He'd turn back human, and a fang would still be there – or an eye that stubbornly remained red, a patch of blue skin on his neck, an ear too pointed, dark red fingers or claw-like nails, or, worse than everything else, the skin on his chest to thin and see-through. No matter how hard he'd try to turn whatever leftover there was, it just wouldn't work, not unless he turned back into a ghost and then became human once more – except something else would fail to turn back instead.
Vlad didn't only need to train for ease in turning, or for speed, but also for control.
Right now he stood in the bathroom like most nights not sleeping he didn't have the time for that, with his hands on the sink, leaning and staring at the mirror, watching himself turn from man to ghost, from ghost to man, and again and again. Trying to understand what was wrong with his transformation besides the obvious the death lurking and clinging to him the translucent torso he couldn't bring himself to look at the darker blue smudges wringling under the skin the inhuman eyes. When he became a ghost, no human traits remained after all wasn't it his true state? a revenant hiding in its own corpse so why didn't it work the same the other way around?
Was he not focused enough?
...Was he, perhaps, not aware enough of what it meant to be in his human body? Maybe he messed up because it was something that should have felt normal, instinctual, but that hadn't been so for too long now. Because he'd been hyperaware of the ectoplasm encroaching on his humanity, and it both made turning into a ghost easy – because he'd never stopped thinking about it, cataloging the changes and their abnormality and fearing the truth behind those – and turning back human a problem – because he only had a vague idea of what to aim for.
what if there would always be something
something to hide
something dangerous should it be discovered a mark of the aberration he'd become something to track him with to identify the monster masquerading as a man
a reminder that
that
that he'd died
Vlad tried once more, but the man in the mirror had red eyes despite his most desperate efforts.
a reminder that he'd been killed and shouldn't be here
"Jack those calculations aren't right"
"banzai!"
The mirror cracked without warning, a long split from the top of the rectangular piece of reflective glass – and a piece, about the size of a needle, narrow and sharp, fell down in a shudder of power Vlad hadn't realized he'd let out.
The mirror shard called him back to reality, falling right through his forearm, stopping about halfway in, pearls of blood – with only flecks of pink laced in – bubbling up slowly.
Vlad tensed, almost cried out – but moving violently was a bad idea, it hurt hurts pain please but it would be worse if the mirror shard moved inside his arm. He'd lived died through worse in the last twenty-two months.
He couldn't refrain a hiss, though.
It was...
It was alright. He could deal with this. It was just a small injury and at least this one would be easily explained when Ziad would come in the morning – less than two hours from now – and see the mirror. Vlad had... needed to go to the toilet and then gone to wash his hands and he'd been half-asleep and had tripped and broken the mirror. He hadn't called for anyone because...
He still needed to think about that.
For now, the shard – besides, maybe he could just go to the door and call for someone on duty as soon as he'd dealt with this. He'd see.
Vlad almost went and tried to take the mirror piece with his bare hands – then he realized.
Carefully, there. Intangibility would help.
The shard fell right into the sink with an anticlimatic "clink", leaving a small trail of blood as it rolled to the bottom of the sink bowl.
Vlad breathed again, letting his arm phase back into materiality. Time to deal with the wound itself, and after that...
He blinked.
The puncture wound was still there, but the skin around it flickered cold blue for a moment, the blood shining with more ectoplasm – even if his eyes hadn't still been red, Vlad wouldn't have been able to miss it.
A wave of cold spread around the wound, and... It closed back upon itself. Healed. In a matter of seconds, the blood clotted, the two edges stitched themselves back together, the cut became a scar...
And less than a minute later, even the scar had vanished.
The man in the mirror – with his red eyes and the rest of him seemingly human but the eyes were enough were too much couldn't stay – had no wound either. His forearm was a bit stained, four or five drops of blood at most, and nothing else underneath.
Vlad blinked – but no, nothing changed.
The mirror shard, his forearm, his red eyes, the healed wound, the drops of blood.
The wound had healed, turning vaguely ghostly for a second, and then... Then it had turned back human on its own, no hints of what had happened.
Vlad... needed to test that again.
If he could heal from injuries with his powers, if it always healed back right and human...
He should try again, just in case. To make sure. On his arm again – the other one, maybe – or his leg, somewhere that wasn't too dangerous, somewhere big enough that he could observe the results, before he made assumptions and shrugged off something much worse because he'd assumed he'd walk it off alright.
he was used to pain anyway
If it worked...
Vlad stared at the shard some more, still half-covered in red and pink blood. He couldn't keep the red eyes while in his human body. He couldn't.
sometimes you didn't have a choice
For now it's implied self-harm. I don't think I'll ever write a chapter where the self-harm is explicitly described (maybe chapters where harm is described, though) but if it comes to that I'll change the tag.
Now Vlad isn't going to try and hurt himself because he thinks he deserves it, or to feel the pain, or because he can't stop himself, that's not the point - but it will be deliberate, because he'll think it's the only way to prevent something worse (being exposed, etc) from happening.
This story is, after all, about a normal person getting slowly used to inhumane things, to the point where they lose common sense and a great deal of empathy.