Chapter Text
Danny stared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. Blue eyes bored into blue. He ignored the dark circles, and the cuts. He just focused on his eyes. His blue eyes. They flared into green and he shut them tightly.
He could do this. He had to do this. After what had happened, he couldn't not do this. He had to know. He had to see what the other ghost had seen.
His mind skittered back to the fight. Technus, laughing, trying to take over the computer store yet again. Danny didn't know why he didn't go after something else, like the server farm beneath Axion Labs, but he wasn't about to say anything. He had learned his lesson about giving the tech ghost ideas. The computer store fights were difficult enough, with all the wires and appliances. Laptops could be heavy when thrown with force.
Not to mention, Technus was convinced that Danny was a rival scientist out to steal his ideas. Something about the 'HAZMAT suit clearly indicates that you died conducting an ill-advised experiment!' Not wrong, exactly, but the fact that Technus always followed up with 'Using ideas stolen from your intellectual superiors!' grated on him.
(A part of him wondered, as it did with all ghosts except Vlad, Skulker, and Spectra, how Technus would react to him being a a fourteen, now fifteen, year old half-ghost. Not that he intended to find out.)
This time was different, though. In between the typical maniacal laughter and ranting, Technus seemed to be... arguing with someone?
"All I wanted was for you to fix my keyboard!"
"And so your keyboard shall be fixed, user of hip! It shall be sweet and funky fresh! And it shall be able to fire burning rays of doom!"
"I am not a hipster! And I live in a library! I don't want burning rays of anything!"
Was that Ghost Writer? It sure sounded like it. Hopefully, without his keyboard, Ghost Writer wouldn't have that awful rhyming power. Fighting him last Christmas had been beyond surreal, and he was pretty sure that Ghost Writer had almost figured out that he was half-ghost.
Danny phased out of the grip of the latest batch of animate, electricity-spitting cords, and leaped towards the voices. The only way to really end this was to take out Technus himself.
He landed just a few feet away, said something about how shocking it was to see Ghost Writer and Technus together, and then threw a bolt of ectoplasm at the older of the two ghosts. The fight quickly devolved into a three way melee, with Technus and Ghost Writer still arguing over the keyboard.
Danny's suit got torn up, as it always did, but with the other two ghosts fighting one another, the battle went quicker than it normally did. He got Technus into the thermos, and relaxed. This was a mistake.
Something that Technus had been levitating dropped from the vicinity of the ceiling and hit him in the head, knocking loose the faceplate and mask of his HAZMAT suit so that the goggles slipped awkwardly over Danny's eyes. Danny hissed, and tried to right them; Ghost Writer was still around, after all, and, keyboard or not, he was still a ghost.
He was hit. It was far from the worst hit that Danny had ever taken, mostly because Ghost Writer had aimed poorly, and had struck the edge of the HAZMAT suit's faceplate instead of Danny's actual face. The faceplate skidded across the store floor and began to sublimate into ectoplasmic mist. Danny got a shield up before Ghost Writer could smack him again, and got his mask straightened so that he could see again.
But at that point, Ghost Writer had apparently decided that he couldn't take Danny on in a straight up fight, and had taken cover somewhere in the computer store. Danny groaned.
"Come on, Ghost Writer," said Danny, "I know you only came here to get your keyboard fixed or whatever. I'm sure that you just want to go home. So if you'll come on ou-" and that's when Ghost Writer attempted to strangle Danny with his scarf.
It was a kind of stupid idea. Beyond the fact that Danny was a ghost, and didn't really need to breathe, he was wearing a rather large amount of protective gear that included a stiff collar around his neck and a gas mask. He said as much during the ensuing undignified tussle.
This did not stop Danny's mask from coming off when Ghost Writer's scarf got caught on it.
Danny said something that was probably blasphemous under his breath (his voice sounded so strange without being filtered through the gas mask) and covered his face with his hands before blinking out of the visible spectrum. Ghost Writer just froze, staring, eyes wide and more than a little horrified. Then he ran. Well. Flew.
Danny was in no mood to follow him, but he did. All the way to the natural portal that he and Technus had presumably come from.
Now Danny was here, staring at his reflection in the mirror.
The truth was that he had no idea what he looked like in ghost form.
Oh, he had glimpsed himself in mirrors while he was in ghost form, and the press certainly took pictures, but never without the HAZMAT suit. Never without the mask, with its bulky breathing apparatus and thick goggles. Rarely without the outer hood and faceplate, although those both got knocked off often enough in battle.
But under that? He had never looked. Honestly, he was scared to look. After all, he couldn't be human under there. He couldn't look at all like he really did. Like he did when he was human. Not with the way the goggle shone beneath the faceplate, two pools of light that swirled like the portal. Not with the way stark white strands of hair would sometimes peek from beneath the inner hood, showing clearly against the hoods dark fabric. Not with the way all the colors of the suit itself had inverted. Not with the way he could feel his teeth grown sharp in his mouth. Not with the way he had burned in the portal.
He was afraid that he'd find a monster under there.
It hadn't always been like that. At first it had just been that taking it off would be a chore. The suit had taken forever to put on before the accident in the first place, after all. Then with all the ghost attacks, and his parents and other hunters coming into the picture as antagonists, he'd been worried that he'd be recognized, somehow. That his family and friends would be in danger. Besides that, it had never been a pressing matter to find out. He simply hadn't worried about it. Hadn't cared.
Then he met Vlad. Vlad, with his pointed, animal teeth, his clawed hands, his sunken, pitted, blue skin, his sharply pointed ears, his hungry, flat, red eyes. Vlad was terrifying, for all of Danny's bravado during their fights.
Then he met Spectra. Spectra had picked the scabs off of all his existing fears and insecurities, and had even generated a few brand new ones.
(Then he met Dan.)
So he had never looked. Had never taken off the HAZMAT suit. But he had to look now. He had to know.
Whatever it was that he looked like had made Ghost Writer run.
Danny changed, the brilliant white rings of his transformation springing into existence around his waist and passing over him, covering him in glowing black and white fabric. The hood, faceplate, and mask were back in place. Just like every time he transformed, the suit was as good as new.
He worked on the boots and gloves first. The edges were taped to the suit's outer layer, so that the suit was air tight. His parents had been really serious about ectocontamination back then. He dropped the discarded items in the tub, so that the ectoplasm could sublimate without hurting anything. Then he peeled off the outer layer. The tape made loud, sticky, tearing sounds as he pulled it off, and he was glad that no one was home yet this afternoon, otherwise they would definitely hear him.
After that, he disconnected the air supply and secondary filter from the mask. He never really needed those, but the gas mask was really just a gas mask now. Then he went about the business of removing the second layer of the suit. The weird little foot booties and their tape came off first, then the second, thinner, pair of gloves, then he was peeling the tape off of his wrists and ankles.
He paused then, looking in the mirror. Green stared back at him from behind the goggles. Resolutely, Danny pulled back the inner hood. The hair beneath it was white, though not quite as stark as Danny had originally thought. It had silvery highlights. He ran a still-gloved hand through it, just avoiding the mask's straps, and tilted his head. It looked mostly like normal hair. Old man hair, sure... It didn't quite seem to follow the laws of gravity, and Danny knew there wasn't a draft in the bathroom, so it really shouldn't be moving like that. Still, it wasn't made of fire or anything like that, so Danny counted it as a win.
He struggled out of the remainder of the second layer and its associated accouterments, leaving only the inner, spandex garment and the mask. He examined the inner layer closely, stalling. He had rarely seen it, in the past year. White gloves up to his elbows, white boots with grippy bottoms up to his knee, white collar, white utility belt (and how did his parents think that he was going to get to the belt through the other two layers of the suit, exactly?). He amused himself playing with the little tools in the belt pouches for a little while. He had forgotten about those entirely. Some of them might be useful in the future. He noticed, too, how much sharper his hearing was without two layers of fabric between his ears and everything else.
But he had to move on eventually. He sighed, the sound made strange by both the mask and his ghostly acoustics. Now, he could either unzip the spandex inner layer, or bite the bullet and take off the mask.
His hand rose to the zipper in the collar, but...
(He could remember the portal, the brilliant flash, lightning rooting him, an icy spear, a universe exploding just beneath his heart. HoT and COld and dyiNg and pAin-)
Mask it was, then. He shut his eyes and fumbled at the straps. It seemed to take forever to undo the clips, far longer than it should have, but, finally, it slipped off.
Danny squared his shoulders and breathed in deeply (unnecessarily). This was it.
He opened his eyes.
It took him a few seconds to process what it was that his eyes were seeing, but once he did he had to laugh. This... This... was what he had been afraid of?
One of the side effects of not having to breathe as a ghost meant that he didn't need to stop laughing until he was good and done. Still, when he had finally uncurled himself from his laughter-induced ball and met his eyes in the mirror once more, the sight sent him into another fit of giggles.
It was just that he couldn't believe that he had built this whole thing up in his mind, only for it to come down to this: he looked like himself.
Well, he supposed that he would have looked like himself no matter what he had looked like, but that was the best way to describe his appearance. Human to an almost unsettling degree. Subtract the ghostly glow and the weird hair color, and Danny probably could pass as a normal human. Heck, considering 'Gregor' Danny could probably swing it even with the white hair.
Not that he looked entirely human. Under the glow, his skin had a slightly greenish tint. It was also a good deal... tanner?... than he was as a human. His ears were tapered ever so slightly, the green hue more obvious in their tips. His teeth were- he bared them- very white. Way too white, actually. As white as his hair. And his canines were pointed, but not as long as he had thought when exploring them with his tongue. Weirdly, his eyebrows and eyelashes were still black. He wasn't sure how that worked, what with the rest of his hair being white.
But it was probably the eyes that gave him the most relief. Yes, they glowed and swirled with emerald, viridian, lime, and a thousand other shades of green. They were definitely and undeniably a ghost's eyes. But, they had pupil and sclera, and clearly defined boundaries. They were Danny's eyes. Recognizable. Not the eyes of a stranger. (Or a monster.)
Danny was about to float back, examine himself from a different angle, when something that caught his eye made him lean in again. Was that a cut? A bruise? No, as often as he got those, he would still notice one on his face, especially given that it was shaped... so...
Wait.
He touched the mark. It didn't hurt. He licked his lips and grabbed the tag of the zipper, yanking it down violently. He squirmed out of the last layer of the HAZMAT suit, discarding gloves, spandex, and boots, leaving himself with only underwear, and shot a glare at the mirror.
Ancients, he was covered in scars.
Most of them he recognized, they had faint doubles on his human skin. Some of them he could even identify by date. Or, if not by date, then by fight. If not by fight, then by weapon, or ghost power.
One of them though, Danny had never seen.
It was huge, starting as a starburst mark on the palm of his left hand, winding, branching, up his arm to split at his shoulder. One branch licked up his cheek. Another lay across his chest, intersecting another, larger, starburst pattern just below his heart, and met the third branch, the one that had, apparently, gone across his back, at his right hip. The whole thing then wound down his leg, to his foot. Danny bent his leg, staring down at the sole of his foot. There was another starburst there, on the ball of his foot.
(Danny knew what this was from.)
(Danny knew now that his skin wasn't tan, it was burnt.)
Well. That was horrifying.
But, he had seen worse. Way worse. Lichtenberg figures were actually kind of pretty. This one was kind of aesthetically pleasing, too, as long as Danny didn't think too hard about the fact that it was burnt into his skin... Yeah. Okay. That's enough of that.
Danny flashed back to human, pleased by how little he changed. He glanced at his left arm, and let himself scoff when he found no scar there.
He was about to leave the bathroom, feeling lighter than he had in a long time, when he froze, remembering why he had done this in the first place. He turned slowly back to the mirror.
By ghost standards, heck, by Amity Park standards, Phantom sans HAZMAT was Not Scary. Appearance-wise, anyway. Ghost Writer was way scarier looking, what with the whole hipster-vampire thing he had going on.
So why had Ghost Writer run?