Chapter 27: In the human frame
Night had fallen once again as usual as ever because even time followed the rules and Vlad stood in the bathroom with the door closed.
It was the middle of the night and Vlad wasn't sleeping.
Looking at himself, finally.
The mirror showed him a man of indistinguishable age – young, he was young, he was twenty-four years old only and he knew that, but the man in the mirror had grey hair and no obvious tell – but overall normal appearance. Tired, sick, of course – but normal. Other people got tired and sick too.
The man in the mirror looked normal enough.
Except, of course, when he opened his mouth – even just a little bit, just enough for his teeth to show.
There was that damned fang in place of a human canine. Vlad had finally stabilized – however you wanted to look at it, at least his body itself wasn't flickering between two states of existence anymore, even if his... powers... were far from being in his control – but that accursed, monstrous tooth had remained, lone reminder of the long list of monstrosities he'd been displaying during the preceding months.
The doctor had been baffled by that, had posited that maybe accommodating a ghost for so long had literally changed his body – something they'd already discussed, before, but now that everything else the red eyes the pointed ears the dead hands and of course of course the fangs had gone, now that he was supposedly ghost-free not in truth of course not there was no ghost except himself and he knew that even if they didn't and only mildly contaminated with bonded ectoplasm as absurd and unnatural as it was, it was all the weirder that a single fang remained.
Sometimes Vlad wanted to pry it off and throw the tooth away, even if it meant going around with a hole in his mouth for the rest of his life.
Vlad stared at the man in the mirror – normal, human lying.
He couldn't hear anything in the neighboring rooms, no one walking down the corridor. It was the middle of the night, and of course a nurse or two had to be awake and on duty, but they weren't going to come in for no reason.
It was the middle of the night, and if Vlad wanted to try this it was now – and not "or never", he could still do it tomorrow or the day after tomorrow and thus as long as he remained stuck in this clinic with a severe case of death, but waiting wouldn't change anything for the better.
He'd done it once before June a pale and sick light blue spreading over his skin and he knew it had been him – not some other ghost brought to light from its hiding place – so it stood to reason that he should be able to do it again.
Without endangering "Nurse Porter was injured the other night" anyone this time.
Vlad didn't know, for sure, how to do it, and maybe leaning on the feelings from last time fear hurt panic terror wasn't a good idea.
It was...
It was him. A facet of him, at the very least – perhaps his true self, now an undead abomination clutching to life and refusing to let go no matter the cost to those still alive, hidden under the human guise – and he ought to be able to call it forth.
The doctor thought he couldn't learn to control those powers, but the doctor didn't understand the truth – she thought Vlad was still human.
He needed control, if only to prevent someone from getting hurt like June had been because of him.
If he didn't try to learn and it happened again, it would be his fault.
it already was
Vlad stared at the man in the mirror – who looked like him, and yet not, who still looked more like him than that version of himself he wanted to draw out – and went in search of the source of his ghostly powers. Basically, he needed to find the death lurking under his skin.
here? is that it? this crackling under his lungs this small wave of cold creeping along his entrails?
no
not only
It was like trying to find a tumor hidden away. A spark of death in a living or at least seemingly alive body – and then, then...
If Vlad wanted to transform completely, then death had to be everywhere. The cold had to take over, for the blue to creep out and show the pale glow of death on his skin, sickly and feeble but omnipresent in its subjects. He needed to force the tumor out, to sprinkle it everywhere else...
And maybe he shouldn't compare the transformation process with metastatic cancer death pain fear agony ineluctable, this was all bad enough without Vlad being deliberately depressing.
no need to try really
agony was there and here and everywhere already
A flow of black light – weak, uneven – flickered over his body, like a translucent mist of otherness, and blue smudges started appearing on his skin. Eating away at the right side of his jaw, at his collarbone under the hospital gown, at his left ankle – he could feel all the spots getting colder, less real in their presence – in the small of his back. Above his heart.
Vlad's breath hitched and the blue faltered, its progression halted for a moment – but he gritted his teeth the fang breached his upper lip but the skin there was already dead blue with darker threads moving underneath like maggots crawling underneath no blood came out and endured the tightness over his ribcage as the mist and the blue spread there too, cold and unnatural and something was wrong with his torso but he couldn't see it under the fabric still he knew the agent had said June had seen and told there was something wrong and tight and. He was doing this. It wouldn't get easier if he pushed it back to tomorrow – to the day after and the day after that.
The blue cold dead spread to his entire body and the mist dissipated – it didn't even go in a last flash of black light, too volatile to shine brightly.
Vlad's sight shifted in one eye – red and pink and shadows of old blood stains on the mirror with the corpse fangs and eyes and ears and skin watching him from the other side – he felt small changes in his body a bit pointier a bit more gaunt a bit and the other eye shifted too.
With both eyes completely red, Vlad realized he could see colors – other than red and pink – again, even if the layer of ghostliness remained present, as if his brain picked up on two images at the same time.
Turning completely, out of his own free will – it was like letting out a breath kept too long.
Vlad did his best to stay calm, not to flinch away from the ghost in the mirror.
He needed to watch, to observe, to understand.
This was the same as an experiment, after all. Vlad, so far, didn't know anything about what he had become except that it wasn't supposed to be and thus he could only fear it. If he learned anything from tonight...
Well. He might not be happy with this turn of events, it wouldn't suddenly feel like a good thing, but at least, at least he might manage to overcome this challenge. Things were as they were and wishing they weren't wouldn't make them any less true.
"humanoid blue skin solid red eyes pointed ears and fangs"
The agent in white's words were what June sorry so sorry he didn't mean to had seen that time, what people would see and remember if he lost control and was overtaken by his own powers again.
It wasn't all there was to see.
Vlad first noticed something else, after all – he'd known about all those things, but no one had commented on this: in this form, his hair wasn't grey at all. No, it was black – still, and at the same time, darker than it used to be. More importantly, perhaps, it was swept back messily, as if still caught in an unnatural explosion a flash of green and purple and burning acidic lethal cold, almost frozen in time. It would move if he touched it, but would hover back at the back of his head the moment he let go.
He looked...
pathetic
Vlad took a better look at his cold skin instead.
It wasn't only a very light, almost paper-thin blue with an eery glow – there were small darker streaks sluggishly moving around green "banzai!" pain hurts, and if they'd kept still a moment he'd have thought they were veins showing under the skin but no they wriggled crawled squirmed like maggots on a corpse. If he paid them too much attention they started hurting too, just a little sting but all over his body, everywhere he could feel them moving.
Like energy and pain pumping under the surface.
All four of his canines were fangs, poking at the opposing lips when he closed his mouth – but not so big that they'd be entirely visible even then. That was for the better, considering how sharp they were.
Turning his head a bit revealed ears entirely pointed – inhumanly so, unlike when this appearance had been trickling into his human body, before.
Something truly unsettling, perhaps, was the absence of shadows. The lighting in the bathroom didn't seem to break through his natural as natural as this all could be glow, and in the same way there was no space left for secondary shadows: all the planes of his face, every little hollow in his body were evenly lit.
Nothing on the floor either, no discernible primary shadow.
Vlad, in all respects, didn't belong in the material world right now. Light and darkness did not reach him. His very appearance proved it, uncanny and jarring.
The most difficult part of himself to look at, ironically, were his eyes. It wasn't the first time that shining red looked back at him from within the mirror – but he hadn't grown used to it for all that. The agent had been wrong to call it a solid color – there was a distinction between the sclerae scarlet, the iris crimson and the pupil garnet.
It wasn't an easy one to spot, though, the shades of red bleeding into each other and the more pronounced glow dulling the edges. Vlad himself could barely tell the limit between each part.
It was, in the end, all glowing red.
Vlad couldn't help but look away.
He didn't need the mirror to look at the rest of his body.
His hands were back to darkened fingers in this form, with greying palms and backs, but the flesh itself – while cold – wasn't eaten away or hard and dead well. His nails were dark red, almost black, and slightly too long, too hard. Almost like claws.
It stopped at his wrists, where the skin became once again a cold blue with those weird unsettling wriggling lines of darker blue.
Vlad wondered fleetingly if it was the same for his toes – he didn't have a problem with the necrosis there, though, and it was the only reason he could imagine for the darker appearance so close to the necrosis itself even if smoothed over of his hands.
A simple look, and no, his legs and feet were alright – blue and cold and sickly glowing but as normal as he could expect with a body like this one.
His clothes, however, had reverted back to what he'd been wearing when "banzai!" green pain...
...Or not quite. The lab coat looked dark and fraying at the edges a bit like the mist of black light when he'd turned and the Packers t-shirt he'd been wearing was nowhere to be seen.
Vlad grabbed nervously at the lapel of the coat and then to get a better look at the fraying, but it revealed the truth what he'd already known but never seen himself the blue cold and abnormally translucent skin underneath.
He almost lost his grip on his transformation could feel it slipping away but he had to look he had to know he had to when he finally saw.
"a black coat and you could see the ribcage through translucent skin"
The upper half of his chest was almost see-through, the blue color more of a tint than anything else. Bones seemed encased in a blue jelly his flesh transparent and inert, the organs underneath moving and pulsing at a worrying pace but he was dead if not buried what was there to worry about apart from pain and eternal torment.
His lungs remained inside his body for once expanded sluggishly under the jelly-like flesh, liver, kidney, stomach – no heart, because the heart was hidden away, between the slow-paced lungs and behind his stermun and it was better that way. Vlad knew his biology, he'd always had an easier time at it than Maddie and Jack Jack's grasp of biology was just good enough that he could remember the basics but not the implications.
what had he thought would happen when the proto-portal Jack's fault had thrown up ectoplasmic energy all over Vlad's face hurts had he believed he'd just walk away and move on with his life had he thought at all did Jack ever think about his so-called friend nowadays did Vlad matter at all
why was he alone and forced to deal with this
alone
It was ironic, actually.
Vlad knew human biology still, but it wasn't his anymore, and it wouldn't help.
nothing did
Vlad felt like throwing up – but there was nothing, not this time, no food and no blood, only acidic instead of sour like charged ectoplasm bile – at the sight of what looked like a life-sized 3D model of a male subject's chest area and his organs – corrupted, just like the rest of him. Lower down, towards the intestines, the blue skin regained its opacity, and he wondered if his back was the same or if his spine was exposed for all to see.
He didn't know why he had to see that "clear!" shock again "clear!" shock again "clear!", why his body would remind him of it all of course he knew he'd figured it out the other day when he'd fallen through the floor when the agent had said when the doctor but because he knew how didn't mean he had to understand why, what he had done to deserve this.
he'd trusted Jack Fenton
to care
to be careful
and now
Vlad staggered back, his breath short and aching – his body human once again or at least pretending to be with a single wave of black mist.
So I got my wires crossed: I was convinced a certain plot point with a new tag was for this chapter, but it's in fact for chapter 30...
Anyway, it's not like Vlad is having a good time here.