Chapter 3

Those bright, electric green eyes blinked slowly, and the ghost pulled his forehead away from the glass to sit up straighter.

In that moment, Valerie realized that Phantom had changed. His hair had grown longer, and his face and the lines of his body were sharper, the glow of his own body revealing the gaunt edge of his cheekbones. He appeared older, oddly enough, as if he had aged right along with her.

It indicated that he'd been awake for a long, long time.

The blaster trembled in her grasp before she steeled her nerves. "Phantom." Terror and some strange form of satisfaction tore through her, to see him again. Her old enemy. The one ghost she hated above all others. "What the hell are you doing outside of a cryostasis protocol?"

The ghost tilted his head, his straggling, white hair brushing down to the edge of his jaw. His lips trembled in a shock of his own. 

"Valerie?" he called to her. The sound was dampened by virtue of the pod, but his tone carried that same deep and clear tone that had haunted both her dreams and her nightmares. He pressed a gloved hand to the glass.

His fingers were long and thin.

He didn't quite look evil in that moment.

Valerie's voice hardened. "I asked you a question. What are you doing awake? Your pod is supposed to be self-powering."

Those fingers tapped against the glass. His eyes narrowed in a strange, unsettling way, as if he were attempting to measuring her up. "Two years," he called. "And, for all I've done for you, you can't even give me a hello?"

She kept the blaster trained at the pod, moving forward to check the pod panels and generator on the far side of the room. In doing so, she stepped over curiously glowing metal cords that linked back to Phantom's cage. "Oh my god," she breathed. "This day just couldn't get any worse. He's freakin' awake."

His voice carried a torn, gaunt sound, and he tapped the glass more insistently. "What is happening above?" he demanded. "The alarms sounded, and...they all left me here. I hear the sound of fire." His breath hitched. "Did you come back for me?"

"No," she retorted. "I came back to make sure you stay right where you're at, ghost." She peered at the controls in surprise. The cryostasis switches had been manually turned off, and judging by the cobweb growing off of one of them, it looked as if they had never even been turned on.

A foreboding slipped up her spine.

She flinched at the sound of a sudden, harsh pound against the glass. Turning around, wild-eyed, she saw Phantom bang at the glass again, his face twitching unsteadily with unstable emotion.

"I want out," he demanded. "I know you did this. And I know it's really you this time." His breath caught again, which was always a strange sight to see. It gave Phantom a strange facsimile of being alive.

Valerie, upon realizing that the anti-ecto encasing could still hold strong, dared to lower her weapon. "What do you mean, this time?"

Phantom's green eyes lit up with tears. "I've thought about you every day. What I would say to you." A deep pain wavered through him. "But if you let me go now, maybe I won't say those things."

"You're not going anywhere," she deadpanned. "And neither am I. We're staying right here until the fire gets suppressed, because you're too dangerous to let escape."

Those cracked lips of his stretched into a smile without humor. The light did not reach his eyes as it used to. "Oh, come on, Valerie. You remember our truces. We were able to work together a couple times before."

"That was before you proved to be an even more powerful menace," she grumped. Some part of her had missed arguing with him. But even as her frayed nerves calmed, the pain of her hand returned. It became more difficult to ignore.

Phantom pressed both hands against the glass. "But you're injured," he said, voice desperate. "And you're missing your jet sled. You're not at all like the Valerie Gray I remember, which means you're just as scared to be left behind as I am."

"I'm not afraid of anything." Her voice hardened. "And I wasn't left behind; I chose to come down here. Thanks to me, this lab is now more fireproof, which means Amity Park will continue to be free of your miserable existence."

His face cracked with agony, and with more force than she thought possible, he slapped the glass with his palm. "But you don't understand," he pleaded with her. "You're not protecting anything. Please, listen to me."

"Oh, I'm listening alright," she retorted. She dared to stomp up to the cold pod, and with a hard gaze, she revealed her injured hand and planted it against the cold glass. Her skin sizzled against the cold, and relief tore through her. "Why the hell are you awake and not in cryostasis?"

His green eyes flickered to her injured hand, focusing on the blackened skin and seeping blood. "What do you mean?"

"You're supposed to be asleep down here," she snapped. "But the damn controls have cobwebs on them. Did you do something? You got some kind of new power the scientists didn't know about?"

Phantom was good at emotional manipulation and mimicry, but even Valerie could see that his bewildered glance in response was genuine. "Asleep?" he repeated. His face twitched with instability. "Oh, I've been anything but asleep for two years."

There it was again, that foreboding feeling, that something was very strange and wrong.

This close, she could see that he sat in an odd, tangled pile of wires that glowed. He steadied himself against the glass and pulled himself up into a stand, leaning on the glass for support.

And Valerie faltered. Her lips moved to say something, but nothing came out.

Phantom's form towered over her with his height, and the glow of his body revealed that thick, ectoplasmic-coated wires hung from his torso like vines. His jumpsuit appeared to be cut away for unnatural ports injecting the wires into him.

Valerie grew nauseated at the sight. As he stood on shaking legs, she saw many of the deep wounds that were inflicted upon him. Several were visible through the holes in his jumpsuit, had barely healed, and had overlapped into a jagged pattern of scars.

Phantom's voice rose with a snarl. "Who told you I was just asleep down here?" A few harsh gasps filled the room from his exertion of energy, and his limbs shook harder. For stability, he leaned his shoulder fully against the glass. "Didn't you know what you'd signed me over to?"

His ragged breathing and the distant drumming of the fire echoed between them.

Both figures stood rigid, waiting for the other to make a move.

"What the hell is this?" she asked, her voice softer and unsteady as she looked him over. She dared to peer at the wires connected to his body, unsettled by the visible glow of dried ectoplasmic blood.

His hand pressed against the glass where she'd rested her injured hand. In that brief moment, pain connected them. He leaned his forehead against the glass, his white hair matting. "Take a wild guess," he deadpanned.

She licked her lip as her thoughts raced. "The self-powering technology," she said. "For the pod. Is this how you power your own cell?"

Phantom's eyes bored into hers. He smiled, and a weak laugh stretched his lips. "Oh, Valerie. That's only the beginning of it." He shakily tapped one of the wires. "Y-you...you gave the CGIA so much more than a prisoner to lock up and throw away the key. You gave them an asset. That's what they call me, isn't it?"

More chills slipped down her spine. She pulled away from the pod, her eyes flickering back to the generator and the heavy cords streaming to it. Some of the cords slipped up through the walls, into other unknown rooms.

Valerie did not want to think about what it all meant. She inhaled shakily before saying, "Stop trying to guilt-trip me. Whatever they've been doing down here? You probably deserved it. Because you're a ghost, and you're evil, and you ruined my life."

Deep, blinding anger tightened his expression into a form of hatred she had never seen on Phantom before. "I ruined your life?" he repeated. His voice rose so forcefully that it strained his vocal cords. "I've lost everything!"

The glow on the wires temporarily brightened and flickered. His power seemed to concentrate briefly before he wore out and leaned his forehead against the glass once more. The hatred in him gave way to a sudden, glum depression, his expression breaking into sorrow. His voice broke. "You don't know. You don't know what they've taken from me."

Those green eyes of his dulled as emotion overwhelmed him.

She fell silent, breathing hard. Most ghosts who invaded human lands were mindless and violent creatures, bent on a destructive obsession, but Phantom had always been an exception. 

Too human. To unsettlingly alive. "You were an ectoplasmic pain in the butt," she retorted, voice shaking. "The bounty on you was big too. I can't regret that. You're down here because you deserve to be."

His thin fingers tightened into a fist over the glass, and he clenched his fist so hard that the thin fabric over his hand burst to reveal scarred knuckles. It seemed his suit was just as worn out and limited in its regeneration capabilities as he himself.

"You know what the worst thing is?" he asked her, voice shaking with rage or sorrow, she didn't know. "If I told you what they'd taken, you wouldn't even believe me, because that's just how you are. Completely and totally unaffected by other people suffering."

"Don't try to get inside my mind." She still couldn't look away from the wires that streamed from him. "You're not a person; you're just a monster with a human face."

She hated him.

She'd always hated him.

But those wires and the broken, unstable look on his face bent her hard will, and it left her feeling as if she stood on uneven ground.

Phantom gave a bitter laugh, and it sounded like a rasp with a strangle gurgle. It was clear that he was not well, and that something with the wires was dragging down his usual state of power. "I wish," he said. "I really wish it was that easy."

The fire continued to surround the Lab with its inevitable reign, slithering closer and closer with its deadly blaze.

Flames licked the doors beyond the containment walls.

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Don't forget to throw some power Stones, to keep the story going.

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