Being dead… is new.

The Phantom isn't sure just how it is new, it contemplates as it stares at two children who scream and scrabble at a smoking portal. Blank in their terror, they ignore him.

His eyes flicker towards a mirror on the other side of the room, and it only shows the two of them.

The phantom ignores them— who is he to interrupt? Dead men tell no tales. He gets the distinct feeling that everything is wrong, and a piece of that puzzle is the pair's odd familiarity— but hey, he just died, he's really not feeling up to much of anything.

Green eyes stare in the mirror, but that's all he is— two green wisps, apparently ignored in the panic of two teens.

He supposes he should feel weirder having, presumably, died. No, he innately knows he died.

But mostly he just feels… confusion. Displacement.

And cold, not unpleasantly so, just a buried, almost peaceful chill.

In between blinks— perhaps he is tired, so tired, dead tired (he laughs to himself), the two teens flicker away, basement restored, before he can even think about questioning them. Why are you so familiar? Why am I here? It pokes sharply at his heart.

For the phantom knows he is dead, but he never considered that means alive once, too tired and dead-brained (hah) to question implication.

The ghost of Danny Fenton closes its wispy eyes, not strong enough to maintain form, let alone to pervade that shock scrabble at memories that may lead him to living again.

xXx

Three days pass. The ghost, in moments of waking, had decided Phantom. There is something so familiar about that name, the way it rolls off his (hypothetical) tongue.

In between blinks, he sees the Family in the basement, that place of awakening.

They speak of someone missing, lost. They gesture to the green, swirling abyss, upset as they work on something that looks like a rocket. Rocket. Stars pervade his mind as he lazily blinks, and he falls back asleep to dreams of space before he can even think again of questioning the Family, of asking can I help?

He knows what it is to be lost, but he is too tired and unfocussed.

xXx

The one with the firey, long hair notices him first. He has taken to floating about the abode. Nothing physical keeps him here, but there is some tug in his heart that makes him want to stay.

He likes the red haired one. She reads a lot. Talks about bad coping to the Parents, though he's not sure what those words mean (he's unsure also why he gets the feeling of vague annoyance, oddly familiar, and the stinging in his chest becomes so painful when he thinks like that, like a scorpion's deadly barbed stinger).

One day, one higher energy day, a week after the awakening, Phantom lazily swishes after her, into her room. Sometimes he blinks and he hears the swishes of pages and a drip of water, and he has enough energy now to be curious.

The doors, the walls, the floor— they're all nothing. Or maybe, rather, he's nothing, he observes as he notes the girl crying on her psych book.

He frowns, distantly. She'll ruin the pages like that. Maybe there's something more he should be concerned about, but he is so young and lost, and so tired.

He runs a finger along a page, rolling away a tear, in an effort to dry it. The pages flutter in a wind, and the girl startles, glancing at the closed window.

For just a moment, Phantom sees not two piercing green wisps, but something blue and glinting, and a fragment of a foggy body in his place. He glances down— there is no second person here.

He's distracted by the fact the girl is crying again, harder, scrubbing her eyes.

Distressed, he thumbs at her face, and a cool, wintery wind blows over her hair.

He's too tired to do much more, and his chill becomes like a blanket to him.

xXx

It's small, but maybe Phantom can help the family. His waking moments get more frequent and longer, and he starts to fidget with objects; the daughter cries, and he rustles her hair. The mother sleeps on her research of the great swirling door, and he drapes a foggy arm over her. The father squints into darkness at his foggy form as he goes down for a midnight snack— then blinks and rubs his eyes. He flickers the computers off when they should be sleeping, touches at their shoulders in comfort, because he wants to help them and he wants to be with them so bad. The flailing stinger pierces again and again.

"We'll find him," the Parents insists, and the Phantom tries to support them as best he can. The Daughter has given up, but he tries to help her, too.

Bluntly, the Phantom notes perhaps he is not exactly selfless— one of the few concrete truths he knows of himself (the other being an enjoyment of word play; he's twisted dead and ghost every which way). There is some innate desire within him to be with them; seen, known, interacted with.

At the moment, he's not more than a blustering wind and a foggy reflection.

He sinks to the floor, ghostly sigh escaping his ever invisible lungs. He's wondered if ghosts are supposed to breathe as he does, but it's not like anyone's around to ask. His crackled voice is never heard by the Family, responded to by nothing but icy silence.

He brushes a hand against the cold lab table from his floating position. His hands feel solid to him, but again, do not reach the Family.

The Phantom takes a look around at the toxic green beakers and sleek white tech. He is slipping away again, not that he wants to— but not that he has a choice.

In what feel like his last moments for the day (week? Month? Time is undefinable) he grasps at a beaker, curious.

Green oozes onto the floor as it blows over. Frantically, the Phantom tries to correct his mistake— but touching it… touching it feels good. A jolt of electricity and energy. The tiredness… is gone.

Something flickers beneath him, and the Phantom jumps into the air. White feet follow black legs. Him.

The mirror that showed green wisps and two teens now show a white haired boy, with two green eyes. Something seems… underneath that reflection, though. Approaching the mirror, Phantom tilts his head, and the picture glints into something blue eyes and black haired for a fraction of a second, as though it is iridescent.

And then he blinks out altogether again.

xXx

Phantom's first appearance is in the night. The girl has put away her book she was crying over while reading in the kitchen, and the Parents are upstairs; they eat, softly, quiet. It's like walking in snow. The cold is not tranquil, the flakes not soft, they are just sharp things that land quietly in flesh.

The Phantom decides to break it with an icy crunch.

From the shadows, from the floors, he claws at that energy.

The Family stare in shock at the white haired, green eyed form that flickers in the shadows.

Their ears ring as his form, like static snowflakes, glints into something familiar, as they sit frozen.

xXx

He sleeps again, after that stunt— but the Phantom wakes, hopeful. The Family is searching for the lost person— perhaps they will also be sympathetic to his cause. Maybe they don't even need to find the lost one, Phantom considers; this feels so much like home, maybe… maybe. No, no, you can both get help, he scolds in gentle reminder to himself, reminding those thoughts are the scoprion's poison. It's not malevolent— it just, in some way, he just knows he'll slot in like a missing puzzle piece. He doesn't know how he knows, and thoughts like that make the urge of please see me, the love, the need, grow so strong.

His voice reaches them in a static scream; he gives that approach up quickly when the Parents shoot into the nothing. He doesn't want to scare, he wants to be helped, and to help. He's finally a little less braindead (his chuckle is tinny static) and can contemplate a little more emotionally complicated situations— in other words, he can tell continuing to screech is perhaps not the best idea, and perhaps more subtlety that is available to him with his increased thoughts is required.

The TV channels, the word magnets, the radio. Static and the message lost lost lost please help lost lost forgot forgot see me see see see seeseeseeseesee me.

The Phantom feels his message is going well until the Family destroys those things in a green fire.

I need your help, though, he grimaces. Perhaps they just aren't getting it. The dead cannot speak, are not supposed to; he knows this when he writes messages, something grating in his mind that keeps him from communicating all but his basic thoughts and wants.

Determined still, he starts flickering into existence again, clawing out of shadows. Lights flicker at his arrival.

It's hard to do much like that, though; his brain dies (more?) and it's all his concentration of see me see me.

The Family shoots at him, and more sleek machinery invades the household— defenses.

It doesn't hurt him.

But… if he gets frustrated, slams at the fixtures a little harder than needed, rakes the words into place to try to say something, who can blame him? The Phantom, for some reason he cannot explain, feels the Family is his family. The Phantom wants to be seen. The universe tries to keep the dead in line, restrain the dead from disrupting that natural order of their old life and their afterlife. It's a lot of factors, the Phantom dismisses, very much like a sassy teenager, and slams a door a little harder to get someone to notice.

The real problem is that they notice, then react in all the wrong ways. But the Phantom cannot swallow that, that his efforts are squandered, because then where would he be?

xXx

By the time the Fentons are valiant enough to get Vlad to get the "gang" back together, the creature is a constant. The ghost scrapes its filthy claws over the lights, resides in mirrors, screams over anything electronic— and their tech puts no stop to it. It's like it has a foot in each world, caught between the ghost zone's intangibility that would let it not be hurt but make it challenging to interact and the human realm's solidity that would allow it to be wounded.

It is too powerful.

xXx

The Phantom can feel that the irritated old man is powerful. Something about his eyes glints red, in that same iridescent way that something inside Phantom's green eyes glint blue like a glacier, if you just tilt your head and squint just right.

The Parents, who the Phantom has grown wary of— and yet he's still here— why? It feels so much like home. He wants it to be home, because it's always felt his place. Maybe that missing person doesn't need to be found— maybe he can—no, no, remember!— the Parents, they are ranting about ghosts loudly. The man is impassive, and the Phantom plays with tilting his head just right to get the man's skin to flood blue.

"I think it's Danny," Daughter says softly. That name stings him, but Phantom doesn't think Daughter means to hurt him. She, Phantom still likes. She looks at him when he shows, looks at him like someone is concerned, even if she cries harder than ever nowadays (maybe Phantom is just awake to see it more, but he notes the constant redness of eyes and face is new, so maybe not). She doesn't destroy his messages, just stares. Not helpful in the least, he notes sarcastically, plucking at the invisible yet black (—how can it be both? How can he be two things that are so opposite and parallel?) jumpsuit of his (how can it exist when he never can exist, so many hows).

"That isn't Danny," the Parents cement, and Phantom frowns. The name stings again, the scorpion sitting perched upon a rib and taking personal offence to that person. Who is Danny?

xXx

Watching the old man is tiring and boring. Phantom doesn't have enough energy to reach him, to say help me (because the old man has the glint and that has to mean something) so he decides to change that.

When he sleeps, he dreams of so many glinting things. Flickering figures of the Family and the Teens that visit sometimes. But they are just ghosts of memories.

xXx

It is in the night when he wakes up, green eyes staring at the silver pool moon, pleased as he ever is staring at those stars.

A breath passes his lips, and his nonexistent form shudders. Someone—!

"You must change back," the ghost he saw in glints of the old man says. Belatedly, he introduces— "I am Plasmius, and I am… like you."

"You see me," Phantom murmurs, breath foggy. No, that isn't right. The ghost is squinting in general directions, as though Phantom is a glimmer in his eye. Phantom is a glimmer in his own eye in the mirror, so he understands.

"You are... foggy," the blue ghost amends, confirming Phantom's thoughts. "Something about you is wrong."

"Thanks," Phantom says sarcastically (a new ability, a new joke that he loves), "tell me something I don't know."

"What happened to you?" the ghost asks.

"I woke up," Phantom says bluntly. "I'm here now. They won't help me."

"Their son— they ignored their son?"

"They have a Son?" Phantom's eyes flutter— "is he the lost one?"

xXx

The ghost went back to flickering inside the old man, because the Mother charged in.

"Oh," she sighed, "it's just you."

"Yes," he says, and he glimmers and shows fangs and horns, "just me."

Phantom does not like the way he is looking at the Mother, but he's not that good at judging subtleties in people still, so he lets that feeling pass.

xXx

The next… Phantom isn't sure if it's the day, he fell asleep, but his naps are less and less, so he feels safe in calling it the next day… the next day, the ghost flickers out of the old man to float with him again.

"How do you do that?" Phantom wonders. Is it the key to not being seen, to guise oneself as one of them, as not dead?

"You should be able to do it, too," the ghost mutters, "I see it in you."

"The blue eyes and the black hair," Phantom breathes. Like a bird feather that shows green at an angle, so too does his other, and this ghost is the same.

"But you are unstable," Plasmius informs in a frown. "You never settled into one world, so you are stuck unable to traverse between them."

Phantom blinks, confused, and Plasmius heaves a sigh of thin patience.

"You flicker a lot more than I do," he informs bluntly, in a tone that suggests perhaps Phantom is an idiot. "And," he tacks on, more contemplatively, "you seem to not remember anything, as though you've separated yourself from that essential connection."

"Connection," Phantom echoes, and he yearns for that connection. His entire soul keens for it, to fill that hole.

"Yes Danny," Plasmius grunts, and that scorpion strikes again, "a connection."

"I'm Phantom," he defends, tapping at his ribs like he can knock the stinging creature off, away from his vulnerable chest.

"You're both," Plasmius says.

"Danny is the other?" Phantom asks.

"The blue eyes and the black hair? Yes. He is your glint, and he is the lost one, and he is just you."

"Oh," Phantom breathes, and the scorpion is writhing and striking his heart and itself and his ribs and— and—

He passes out, green eyes going out like a light.

—But the flickers, the flickers finger around him, crawling over his form like electricity for a moment, and his form is a patchwork of two, and his mind is a flood of memory.

xXx

"I defeated the ghost, last night, and he gave me your son," Plasmius' old-man voice rings.

And Phantom is Danny and Danny is Phantom— and as usual he sleeps. Memories came in dreams, an eruption after so long of being dammed, brought forth at simple acceptance. Despite the dreaming, or rather because of it, he is achingly tired, with zero energy.

This time, his family (the Family, the same) surrounds him in warmth, in that thread of connection, and inside, in more normal and soft dreams, he feels something become filled.

The scorpion crawls away into the soft, soft snow.

xXx

Prompt from Ectopal: "Jack and Maddie, at the end of their rope, beg Vlad to come to Amity to help stop the ghost that's haunting their family. Vlad realizes that it isn't a ghost that's terrorizing them, but their son, who recently became a half ghost and is having just about the worst time in the world dealing with it. Bonus points if in his human form Danny is extremely unsettling. "

(yes the title is from lemon demon's lifetime achievement award)

this... i spent. way longer setting it up so sorry about minimal vlad but. uhh im really proud of this. i went. i went a little nuts, admittedly, with imagery. i hope its not incomprehensible?