Chapter Text
Being the Phantom is a 24/7 endeavour.
As soon as he wakes up, he is the Phantom. Kit Walker is the disguise he uses when he has to walk among average citizens incognito. Most people believe it’s the other way around: when he needs to, he masks his 'true' identity and becomes the Phantom. Kit Walker is a person that his father created, whom he expanded upon while studying in New York. Once the legacy of the Phantom was passed on to him, however, only the smallest traces of Kit Walker existed.
To be a functioning hero, you couldn’t only think and act as one part-time. This was something he tried to teach Sala the few times she and Diana had returned to the island. Every attempt was met with a disinterested shrug and Sala claiming that she never tried to be a hero. Diana would usually follow it up with a blanket assumption that, like lawyers, all pirates tended to fall in the grey area of morality.
He didn't have any fancy gadgets or superpowers or special mutations; all he had were skills honed through years of hard work and dedication. It did help that his training had started young, and that his family had four centuries of experience to fall back on.
His training went beyond the use of modern technology. A lot of the skills he required were mental. Physical agility meant nothing without the support of a well-honed mental capacity. Visualisation was vital: you couldn't move faster than a cheetah if you imagined yourself as a snail.
But these were the Phantom’s skills, not Kit’s. Sometimes he wondered whether if he thought too much like Kit, his abilities as the Phantom would fade. Other times he wondered if there was any difference between how the Phantom and Kit thought. Could they rightly be said to be the same person, even though one only existed in short spans of times and was rarely acknowledged?