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A figure floated through the Ghost Zone, slow pace and vacant expression leaning one towards the conclusion that it did not have any particular destination in mind. Occasionally it would flinch as if thinking of something unpleasant, sometimes going as far as to thread its fingers through its hair and let out a sigh. Whenever it floated close to other spectral beings they darted away, often in obvious fright. Perhaps it was the vaguely medieval clothing that made him seem an older sort of spirit not to be trifled with. Perhaps it was the pitch dark hair that mimicked the horns of the devil that warned them away. More likely than all, it was the aura that radiated power, strength, and something a bit darker that triggered their instincts of self-preservation. If the ghost in question noticed such behavior he took no heed of it, instead continuing to float lost in his thoughts, or, rather, his memories.
Vladimir Master's hadn't always considered himself a strong man. Throughout his schooling he had never seemed to quite fit in with his fellow students. It had something to do with him being a quarter less tall, three-fourths less wide, and twice as clever as his peers. Being shoved into lockers, dunked into toilets, and generally made a fool of was a regular part of his daily routine as an adolescent, and it hardly made him think of himself as "strong". This never really changed, even as he hit a growth spurt before college and found his place amongst others also aiming for medical school and, of course, his best friend Jack Fenton and crush (the only one that had never laughed in his face) Madeline Conner, Vlad always considered himself- even if only subconsciously at times- to be the weakest of those around him. Whenever he heard a tale of bravery and daring- from rescuing a hiker stuck on a ledge to flourishing without limbs and fighting through awful diseases, one of the most prominent thoughts on his mind was always "I could never do that". The funny thing, though, about being human is that you never really know what you're capable of until you're pushed into a situation in which nothing less is acceptable.
The first few days after his accident are hazy, to say the least. He remembers the direct aftermath. Standing right in front of the machine (for someone so smart that was an awfully stupid move, Masters- he berated himself constantly), Maddie telling Jack that his calculations were incorrect (a simple misplaced 2 had ruined his life), the bright green light (eerie and almost alive), the pain beyond any he had ever known or even thought possible (surely this was death, he thought, I really hope this is death), the looks of horror on his friends' faces (Jack, you did this to me, Jack, how can you look at me like that when you've caused this? Maddie, please stop looking at me like that, I never want to see disgust on your face); all that was clearly carved into his memories. It was after those moments that things started to lose their focus.
He woke up a few times, though he would only be able to interpret what had been happening much later. The first time he had woken up had been in the ambulance, the second time had been in the hospital as doctors rushed around to fix whatever was causing him to feel like his face was on fire. Unfortunately the fire, that despite all assurances Vlad still wasn't completely convinced hadn't been real, spread from his face to his chest causing his heart to first go into overdrive and then to flatline. He later learned that he had been dead for a little under an hour. All he had known for sure was that the next time he woke up his head was under a little green slip and that the old doctor in the room had acted pretty freaked out when he sat up and asked for a thicker blanket to dispel the cold feeling radiating out of his chest. He lost consciousness again immediately after. The next time he woke up was the last one in which he didn't black out afterward, he had been in tremendous pain and spent hours crying and begging medical personnel to make it stop. This went on for a few months, with Vlad in too much pain to do much more than whimper and be upset that they never seemed to bother to turn up the heat. He suffered all the humilities of being bedridden in a hospital and unable to care for himself.
However, after a while, though the pain did not by any definition "dull", he was able to get a handle on it, and he was at least able to recall the year for the worried doctors and nurses; 1983, he would grumble as one of them took his temperature. Soon after that, he was in a state to see visitors, or at least to be awake when they came in to see him. His legal guardians had died recently, and so Fenton was the first person to see him. The man was a blubbering mess of tears and apologies, though he did take a moment to make sure Vlad knew how rad his hair looked. Vlad didn't say a word. He had nothing to say to Fenton anymore. However, it was the first time that the idea of looking in a mirror even occurred to Vlad, and he immediately shuffled out of bed to do so. In all fairness, Fenton did try to warn him.
The next few weeks; after he had metaphorically kicked Fenton out of his hospital room with screaming, crying, and a near mental breakdown (but not a single intelligible word); were spent in self-imposed isolation. No visitors- not that he had any besides Jack and Maddie-, no therapy, no leaving bed. A whole other month passed before he re-allowed visitors, but only Jack- never Maddie, he couldn't allow her to see him, not like this. It was another one of his mistakes. Even then, he never spoke a word to Jack. Jack pleaded and begged, but Vlad couldn't bring himself to look at Jack and see his best friend, all he saw was the person who had caused him this undying agony. Why did he have to suffer for Fenton's mistakes?
The doctors didn't know what to do with him. It was obvious he was unwell if the weakness, fatigue, and puking had anything to say about it, but it was a disease that no one had ever come across before. Just by watching the symptoms most doctors would swear up and down that he had cancer, though they would also admit that he was exhibiting more of the symptoms of chemotherapy than the disease itself. His only hope soon became those who had, at least in part, caused the problem. Jack and Maddie were the only true scientists in the field of the paranormal and therefore the only ones who could cure ecto-poisoning (or so they had called it). They worked on it, and Jack visited regularly to inform Vlad of their- often dismal- progress, even if he never got a response from Vlad. However, they had their own lives to live and as the years passed Vlad knew he was drifting farther and farther into the edges of their minds, proven by the gradual thinning of Jack's visits until one visit became the last.
Vlad spent four months in the hospital under strict supervision. He spent the next nine months stuffed into some back corner of the hospital where no one would be too bothered by him and his incurable disease that everyone could tell more and more with every check up was killing him from the inside out. He spent the next two weeks discharged and free to go. He had little money and no home, but luckily the school took him back. He was still dying, but it was less painful now. He was still covered in "ecto-acne' (another name for the disease that was eating him alive) and had to face ridicule, staring, and disgust most of the time, but at least he was free of that stuffy old-hospital. For a moment he thought maybe he could still get the remainder of his life back on track. That is until he had a sudden attack and the pain flared up, the coldness plummeted to hypothermic levels, and he died for twelve minutes right there in the middle of biology.
Vlad spent the next three years in a hospice and the twelve after that in and out of hospitals for weeks and months at a time. Three weeks into this new period of hospitalization his leg disappeared. Five weeks in various body parts were following. Four months had passed when he woke up to find himself on the floor below his, and five when he woke to find himself scraping his forehead against the ceiling. Eight months had gone by before he stopped completely fearing and denying what was happening with his body, and the entire first year came and went before he gained any minuscule amount of control over it. The second year had passed by before he had enough mastery to stop accidents and use the powers to his advantage. At the end of the third year various instances of his skin turning blue and his eyes going red culminated in a complete transformation into a ghost and the subsequent vanishing of his ecto-acne. Something else happened at the end of the third year- his health insurance became too high for him to afford. He was forced to check himself out of the hospice or become penniless. (1)
Unfortunately, health does not often bow to finances, and just because his physical deformity had vanished did not mean that the poisoning by strange otherworldly radiation had been healed. He experienced dizziness, confusion, sickness, and even the occasional heart attack; he had ridden in an ambulance more times than anyone who wasn't a paramedic ever should, and more times than he could dream of affording.
The first time he did it he only wanted to be able to pay his hospital bills. A quick intangible hop into a bank vault and an invisible pop back out, and he was able to afford three meals a day. Then things started to snowball and his thought processes took on a tone he never could have imagined they would have. Didn't he deserve this money? It was hardly his fault he never got to finish college, hardly his fault he was too sickly to take a job that could pay his bills, hardly his fault he was never able to develop any other talents but these. Not to mention, weren't these talents enough? He was just doing what everyone else was, that is, developing and using his abilities to try to get ahead in the world. Still, he never could imagine himself being a bad person, and never took more than he needed to live a normal life with an average home and three meals a day. That shattered when he received The Invitation. The invitation to Maddie and Jack's wedding four years after the accident, and one year after they had abandoned him. Well, now he knew why. Jack was too busy with Maddie- his Maddie! - to worry about the life he had ruined. The invitation spontaneously combusted and turned to ash in his grip.
He had never been able to feel the same comradeship with Jack after the accident, "Jack, these calculations aren't right" wouldn't stop bouncing around his head long enough for that, but as the invitation burnt in his hand, so did the sparks of dislike ignite into a raging inferno and it was with that that Vlad's thoughts shifted farther and farther into dangerous territory.
It took a few years, but Vladimir Masters became a name known around the globe. He had steadily and stealthily used his powers and natural born intelligence to climb and claw his way to the top, where no one would ever look down on him, manhandle him, or take advantage of him ever again. He was at the top of his own self-built empire, and though he still often had to visit hospitals and sometimes was in too much pain to move, at least he had made something of himself, and all at the relatively tender age of thirty.
Still, none of this made him happy. There was an itching need in the very deepest part of him, strengthened whenever he was in his ghost form, which longed for something else. The most frightening part of it all was that he knew exactly what "something else" was: the death of Jack Fenton and the conquest of having Maddie Connor (always Connor, never Fenton) as his own. These thoughts made him lose sleep at night, for he may have broken past many of his previous moral boundaries in the last few years but he was never, and could never allow himself to be, a murderer. As for the obsession with Maddie, he understood it even less. This was a woman he had known for about a year and hadn't seen eye to eye in more than ten times that period. He obviously now had a certain motivation to continue the research that led to his misfortune, and the means to do so, and came across many different theories that he was often able to debunk or prove. Therefore it didn't take too long for him to realize that Maddie and Jack were his obsessions, though in two very different ways.
Regarding Jack, Vlad could grasp the logic of his ghost mind, but this need for Maddie was incomprehensible. Why did his soul latch onto the idea of having her at the moment of his first death? Why did he still feel as if he needed her in his life? Maybe it was because she was the only woman who he could ever consider as loving him for him and not for his money, the only woman who had ever befriended him when he was nothing, the only woman he had loved when he was still capable of such an innocent and human emotion. Either way, his feelings involving Jack or Maddie were things that should never be allowed to see the light of day, and so he locked them away inside of him.
Whenever he had down time and images of Jack's corpse floated across his mind, he immediately found something to do. Whenever Maddie danced through his dreams, he took sleeping pills and sometimes tried dating along with meaningless flings. It all worked to an extent, if not as perfectly as he would have liked, and he was able to bury his desires for about twenty years after the accident. There were times when he was weak, of course. Around the twenty year point, he almost volunteered to host his twentieth college reunion. After all, he couldn't always find something to do quick enough to keep a plot from forming and the idea of killing Jack and taking Maddie at the reunion in a plan he couldn't stop thinking about tortured him for weeks. Still, he held out and the date of the reunion, which he didn't even attend, came and went. He had even found something else to occupy his time: a mysterious rumor in the Ghost Zone about a strange ghost boy- no older than fourteen or so- that had supposedly taken residence in the city of Amity Park and used his ghostly abilities to protect people and fight off his fellow ghosts.
A ghost fighting was nothing special, a ghost fighting to protect anything other than its haunt, lair, and itself was something to look at. Vlad didn't believe it. Despite all the reports from various sources, he convinced himself that this ghost boy- Phantom, was it? - must be protecting the actual physical town as his haunt rather than the people that inhabited it. It was quite an ambitious haunting area for a ghost that, by the estimates of Vlad's various ghostly informants, couldn't be more than a few months into death, if that far. It wasn't uncommon, though, for young ghosts to bite off more than they could chew, and Vlad assumed that soon an even relatively powerful ghost would take offense at Phantom's delusions of grandeur and knock him down a healthy peg. It was quite the surprise when that never happened. Even as the ghosts around Amity became stronger and stronger, Phantom matched them blow for blow. Intriguing.
Still, as Vlad- as Plasmius, the name he had designated to his long suffered for ghost half- traversed the Ghost Zone, young Phantom was the farthest thing from his mind. It was one of his worse days and all he could think about was how his life might have been different had those blasted calculations been right. Would Maddie Masters be at his side now? Surely he wouldn't be as wealthy, but maybe he would actually be happy? As much as Vlad knew it did no good to dwell on these types of depressing thoughts, today he just couldn't get them out of his mind. Well, since he couldn't banish the thoughts, Vlad decided to take the opportunity to think through them. Today he seemed to be more focused on attaining Maddie than killing her… husband. That more likely than not stemmed from the date: December 24, Christmas Eve. Alright, so he was lonely, he was strong enough to admit it. Tomorrow he would attend the Christmas party that the more civilized ghosts always held, and surrounded by well wishes and good cheer these feelings would disappear for a while. However, today while every acquaintance he had was off celebrating with those they wouldn't get to see on Christmas Day, Vlad had been alone in his sprawling and completely empty mansion. It was no wonder that the thoughts of having a companion wouldn't stop pin-balling around his head. In fact, at the moment he felt as if it wouldn't even have to be Maddie. No, as the seemingly endless days of hospitalization coursed through his thoughts, he found himself wishing for the impossible. He wished for someone who could at least try to understand… someone like him.
Vlad scoffed at his own childish fancies. Another halfa, the idea itself was absurd, ridiculous even. The chances of the accident that created him happening again where a billion to one, especially considering all the infinitesimal circumstances that had to perfectly align as well as the fact that the only people in the world capable of creating even half of those circumstances were himself and the… Fentons.
He sighed when he realized his thoughts had led him back to exactly what he had been trying to avoid. He should have known better, when he was in this state of mind all his thoughts ended up back on the couple. He wondered what they were doing now. Neither of them had any family left besides Madeline's sister, so it could just be a quiet affair at home, just the two of them. No, wait. Vlad ground his teeth together as he remembered the only two things he attempted to forget more than Jack and Maddie themselves… their offspring. Vlad had received invitations to both baby showers, the first too close to the wedding for him to even consider reading the invitation, much less attending the celebrations, the second roughly two years later. It was a girl and a boy, respectively, if he recalled correctly. Doing some quick math, Vlad calculated that the girl must now be about seventeen and the boy fifteen. The girl's name he had not a clue of, for it hadn't been decided by the time they sent out the invitation. The boy… the boy's had been written down, though he couldn't seem to recall it at the moment… Darryl? Damian? It was something with a "Da". Dan—
It was at that moment that a speeding blur rammed into Plasmius and therefore rudely interrupted his train of thought. He and the blur were roughly thrown away from each other by the force of the impact, and the other figure lost its grip on something it was carrying, causing various small items to float out into the zone around them.
"Aw, sorry, man. It was an accident," Vlad regained his equilibrium to find a young teenaged ghost he had never seen before rubbing his head, presumably the spot where the spirit had bulldozed into Plasmius.
Vlad was about to angrily respond, maybe make sure the inhabitants of the Ghost Zone hadn't forgotten his spot on their hierarchy, when a Christmas ornament drifted across his field of vision. What caught his eye wasn't what it was, as many ghosts exalted the holiday, but rather its very apparent origins. Vlad plucked it from the air and assumed that the ghost boy must have known he was the halfa from his complete lack of reaction to Vlad's ability to touch it. For someone with that information, the teenager didn't seem as frightened as Vlad would have liked.
"A Christmas ornament… from the human world?" Vlad questioned, raising an eyebrow in surprise. It was odd for sure, it's not exactly like the teen would be able to hang something from the human world in his lair, and there was a big enough risk of instigating Walker's wrath that, more often than not, coming in with anything from that side of the universe simply was not worth the trouble.
The teenage ghost, who Vlad took the moment to examine, growled in visible irritation. He was certainly a boy, and on the uphill side of puberty if Vlad had to guess. He was somewhere around the range of 5'3/5'4 (2) with a thin wiry frame. His hair was a shocking white, his eyes a radiant green that blended in with the Zone around him, and his skin surprisingly tanned for a ghost. He also seemed to be wearing some sort of strange elastic jumpsuit- death by nuclear radiation? Now, where had he heard a description like that before?
Vlad's observation was cut short by the green ectoplasmic blast that shattered the object in his hand. Ectoplasmic energy rays, not too powerful then- at least, not compared to him (3). Though, just because the boy wasn't a threat didn't mean he wasn't impertinent. Shooting a beam so close to him like that, for someone who must know who he was, was quite the risk. He was a cocky child, no? With that thought, Vlad finally remembered where he had heard of this ghost boy.
"Stupid Christmas, Santa, no Santa, Santa, no Santa, I can't take it,"
The child now seemed to be mumbling to himself, fists still glowing as if ready to expel another blast at any moment.
"Not to interrupt your psychotic ramblings, Phantom, but is there a reason you've brought human contraband into the Ghost Zone?" The boy immediately gave Vlad his attention.
"How do you know my name?"
"Ha, how could I not? Phantom, the ghost boy who uses his powers for good, you were the only thing the ghosts could talk, or complain, about for quite a while. Surprisingly powerful too, if the rumors are to be believed," Vlad took a casual spin around the ghost boy while he spoke, "Odd, you don't look like much."
"Hey!"
Ah, classic teenage ego as well, oh to be young again, Vlad thought to himself with a bitter edge. Then again, the boy in front of him would never be anything but young. Maybe that was an even worse fate than to lose the later part of youth altogether.
"Who are you, and what's it to you anyway? Unless you're going to go running to Walker about it, you shouldn't care what I bring into the Zone. Not that it matters, that old warden isn't the boss of me; in fact, I'd like to see him try to mess with me today. I need something to let out my frustrations on," the boy snapped, shooting another beam at a drifting branch of mistletoe.
"Well, isn't someone confident in their abilities? I, my boy, am Plasmius. Now, can you back up that brimming confidence?" Vlad smirked; this was the perfect solution to his problems. Not only did he get his mind off his current obsessive thoughts, but he also finally got to gage the strength of the much talked about Phantom. On the other hand, the boy must not have caught his easy grip on the human object since it seemed Phantom actually didn't know who he was. How peculiar.
"You bet, old man," the teenager smirked right back, looking just as excited about the prospect of a good fight as Vlad was.
"I assure you, boy, I'm as not as much of a pushover as our dear friend Walker," Vlad warned just a bit playfully.
"Good, I wouldn't want this to be over too soon," Phantom quipped back.
Phantom flew forward, brashly going for the first punch. Unfortunately, he was stopped by something neither of them expected at that moment.
It was an elf.
A wide-eyed and jittery ghostly elf appeared in front of Phantom and the teenaged specter had to reel back rather suddenly to avoid hitting it, the small creature didn't stop to realize its mistake though because in the next instant it had vanished again only to show up a few feet away. Both Plasmius and Phantom stopped to stare. Plasmius had had sixteen years to accustom himself to the lawlessness of the Ghost Zone and yet this was certainly something he could never have predicted.
"Are you seeing what I'm seeing?" Phantom asked reluctantly. Vlad just nodded. However, they were saved from further inquiry by the appearance of someone they both knew very well.
"Get back here! I cannot stuff you for my walls tomorrow, so it must be done today if I want to have you up for the Christmas party!" The large mechanical ghost the voice belonged to zoomed right passed Phantom and Vlad in the direction of the small creature, which made a frightened squeak and flew off. Skulker didn't follow. Rather he became rather rigged and slowly turned around, apparently having just registered Vlad and Phantom.
The ghosts all just stared at each other for a moment, Skulker looking more panicked than Vlad thought the situation warranted. Then, of all things, the hunting ghost started to blabber just like he did whenever he failed Vlad and was afraid of the consequences.
"You two found each other! That's good, I mean, it's not like we didn't want you to find each other. No, I mean, no way all the ghosts were trying to keep you two secret from each other in fear of both your powers growing as a result, that would be ridiculous! Why would we do that?! I mean, you just never asked, Plasmius, so I didn't think you would want to know. I mean, yes, I know the ghost child is the only other being like you, but it's hard to tell what you want, how was I supposed to guess that you would want to know that Phantom was a halfa?! No, keeping apart the only two half ghosts in known existence would be a stupid plan and we would never do it!"
Skulker's speech was a long and fast one that took Vlad a good moment to decipher, but when he did the ever turning gears of his mind came to a sudden halt. Did Skulker just say...
"T-the only two…"
"… half ghosts."
Phantom stuttered out the first three words and Plasmius breathed out the last ones.
They both turned away from Skulker to look at each other. Vlad suddenly noticed a few things that hadn't caught his eye the first time he observed Phantom. A rather solid structure, edges that were slightly more definite than you normally saw on a ghost, eyes that held a spark of life...
The two ghosts stared at each other, subconsciously losing altitude until their feet caught purchase on a small floating island no bigger than a large boulder.
"Well, you two seem like you're busy right now… I'll just be on my way…" Skulker rushed off and Vlad didn't even have the presence of mind to think about severely punishing him for this later.
By unspoken agreement energy rings simultaneously formed around the waists of both beings, parting to reveal the unseen humanity underneath. Standing in front of Vlad was now a living teenager in baggy jeans and a loose t-shirt. My god, it was true.
The boy seemed just as taken aback as Vlad was.
"Woah," he exclaimed, and after a moment of silence continued, "I- I'm Danny."
"Vlad," he extended his hand and the boy, Danny, took it. Not in twenty-two years had anyone's hand not felt warm in Vlad's, but of course Danny's wouldn't, they were the same temperature.
The realizations would come later: realizing that this boy's dark hair and soft jaw line were rather familiar, remembering his confidence that only two very specific people would be capable of creating a half ghost, hearing the last name "Fenton" out loud for the first time in two decades. The anger, the mistrust, the feelings of betrayal and longing, the revelation of how Vlad used his power versus how Daniel used his powers, the undeniable conclusion that the two of them were two very different people, all of that would come later. For now, they were content with the fact that they were more alike than either of them had ever hoped was possible.
Vlad was drawn out of his split second musings on temperature by the fact that his hand had abruptly emptied. It was with empathy that no one else on the planet could feel that he watched the boy blush and rigorously start to shake his now intangible arm as one might shake a pen that wouldn't write.
"Ha, any chance you know how to make it stop doing that?" Danny asked sheepishly.
"I might know a few tricks," Vlad replied. The resulting laugh caused Vlad's lips to quirk up in a genuine smile for the first time in many years.
"Huh, maybe there is something to this whole Christmas thing," Danny mused out loud. Considering the circumstances, Vlad couldn't help but agree.
"Yes, perhaps there is."