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Spectra made it ten miles out from Amity Park city limits before the arthritis stabbed up her hand. She cursed as her fingers jolted and curled into themselves, jabbing uselessly against the car radio knobs like cloth bags full of thumbtacks.
Damn it. She’d let herself lose focus on her form. An idiot mistake, after having the form this long; Bertrand would’ve rolled his eyes for sure. You may be obsessed with youth, but do you really need to act like it’s your first day in the afterlife, dear?
Bastard.
At least she still had enough grip to ease on the brakes and nudge the steering wheel, pulling off to the side of the road and to a puttering stop. The convertible coughed up a plume of diesel smoke, an inky wisp of ozone and antifreeze and a dozen other chemical smells she hadn’t sensed in the humanside since the 50s, and she breathed deep, grounding herself in it.
Outside the double-arches of her headlights, the woods buzzed with crickets and rustling leaves. An owl called. A frog groaned. Steady noises, enough to call quiet but not so quiet it made her ears ring.
The moon shone overhead, fat and yellow and ringed with clouds. It was brighter out here than in Amity, framed with pine tree branches and stars instead of concrete and the searing neon of that oversized FentonWorks sign. Almost scenic, if there was anything out here worth calling a scene.
A breath in. Out. She didn’t need to breathe anymore--didn’t need to do any of those little calm-down psychology tricks she’d memorized through college--but her body still reacted like it did, lungs filling up and blood rushing to each limb. And after a few reluctant heartbeats, the arthritic tingling faded a little.
Still, she’d need a replacement sooner rather than later at this rate. She always seemed to--her ghostly aura ate through human things like a fungi, creeping rot through all the soft tissues and burrowing holes in the bones.
Breathe in.
Maybe she should’ve taken that halfa Plasmius’s offer, after all. Her entire skin recoiled at the thought of spending more than a minute pretending to be interested in that simpering man-child’s rants, but she had to admit (one narcissist to another) having a basement full of teenage clone bodies was... tempting. A body like that--with a few cosmetic change-ups, obviously--would buy her a decade on the humanside, at least.
Hell, he’d even reached out to her first, his ectoplasmic core radiating with genuine revulsion and sympathy the moment he mentioned the, “Erm, Jack incident with your last vessel.” How he’d known about that mucus-ridden nightmare--now drifting somewhere in the frozen deeps of the Zone forever--she wasn’t sure. Or why he cared . But he’d offered a replacement as if its very existence offended him on a personal level, and it’d been almost worth the humiliation of owing him a favor to say yes.
Almost.
Breathe out.
But she wasn’t that desperate. Not yet, anyway. Not while she still had other contacts in the Zone to try.
The convertible’s engine ticked, cooling metal hissing against the cold night air. A breeze picked up, scattering goosebumps across her body’s pink skin, and she took a moment to savor it even in the arthritic parts of herself.
You didn’t get breezes like that in the Ghost Zone. Ectoplasm didn’t shiver and flush red when it got cold. Spirit bodies didn’t get anything out of breathing steady, or sleeping eight hours, or eating healthy.
All the little good health tricks she’d based her career around only worked if you had health to lose.
She only worked out here, only felt like herself out here, playing at being human even while her ectoplasm rattled against her insides so hard it drained the life out of any vessel she could put together.
Oh, well. Jumping from aging vessel to aging vessel at least still beat drifting around the Zone until she forgot herself. Until her starving, rattling, irritated core turned and ate itself, leaving her as mindless as any of the other shadow husks and blobs drifting in the deeps.
Desiree had understood exactly what she meant, better than any other ghost around--after all, she’d built her own core around desires and pleasures and everything carnal, hadn’t she? She couldn’t fault a girl for wanting to enjoy a breath of fresh air and a cute new look.
Sure, granting the wishes of other spirits didn’t give Desiree any ‘power’--none of the strength of will to hold onto the memories and sense of purpose that kept them from collapsing under the weight of the long afterlife. Feeding your purpose off of other ghosts was like eating ice and trying not to starve.
But she’d died of old age and a broken heart, too. The first wish she’d granted had been her own, bringing her unlovable, shriveled body back to when it’d been enough to sway a sultan’s heart.
So she’d granted Spectra’s wish for a vessel without even adding a sadistic kick to the end of it, for once. All she’d asked in return was some gossip over cardamom coffee.
(And Spectra’s phone number, “in case you need another one. This one should be fine, inshallah, but... just in case.”)
(Spectra had raised an eyebrow and said, “You have your own phone now?”)
(And Desiree shrugged, nodding towards a gilded rotary phone nearly as old as Spectra, sitting on a nearby cushion. “You’re hardly the first person to come calling. I get tired of letters sometimes... however loving they may be.” She nodded further, this time towards a sandstone wall covered from top to bottom in notes speckled with hearts and XO’s and perfume samples.)
Spectra still had Desiree’s number in a crumpled kerchief in her pocket, next to the cigarettes. Her fingers hesitated over it... and moved on, grabbing out a smoke instead.
She wouldn’t call in that request so soon. She could live with some mild arthritis for a while longer yet. Drive this vessel into the ground a bit further yet.
Still, it took her three tries to flick her lighter with stiff, tingling fingers, and she cursed under her breath before catching it and drawing a deep breath in.
She didn’t need to rely on Desiree and her stupid hoard of love notes, anyway. Or Plasmius and his incel creep monologues. Or Bertrand and his sniveling servitude, or anyone , damn it.
At the end of the day, she had only herself. Her corrosive, angry, rotting self.
Damnit.
Her hands shook again. The lighter dropped from them before she could shove it back in a pocket, and she hissed out a frustrated scream through her teeth.
Fucking hell, she was on edge today. She sat down hard on the convertable’s hood, burying her head in her hands and breathing in and out until the rush of corrosive anger faded from her chest and forehead.
It wasn’t any of them, she decided. Not Desiree or Plasmius or Betrand. They were all annoying in their own ways, but in the way ghosts always annoyed each other just to feel something.
The real problem right now was Jazz-fucking-Fenton.
Oh, yeah. Smart, young, cheery, oh so very nice and helpful Jazz Fenton.
She really should’ve killed that girl when she’d had the chance, back during the secretary gig at Casper. Maybe if she hadn’t wasted half her time getting mood-drunk off that halfa kid’s potent misery, she’d be thriving out here and Fenton would be giving cheer speeches in the Zone, instead.
But she hadn’t.
She didn’t.
And then Jazz Fenton had the audacity to forgive her for it.
Spectra breathed in cigarette smoke, dragging half the stick down in one long, slow inhale.
How had Fenton even found her office? Humans couldn’t exactly float through the Zone like wisps. Fenton had plowed through the depths in her parents’ clunky old Speeder like a slack-jawed tourist instead, and she’d less parked outside Spectra’s lair than crash-landed on the rocks just outside of it, exhaust pipe coughing out smoke and the sour-apple sizzle of two dozen anti-ecto weapons.
Spectra remembered it well. It was one of the few days she’d actually been in office, and the sound of clattering steel plates and scraping rocks had made her spill her perfectly good hot cappuccino on Bertrand.
The sound of babbling, laughing children after it didn’t help, either. (Could ghosts get migraines outside of a vessel? She wasn’t sure, but she felt one coming on, anyway.) She shushed Bertrand, blocking out his howls of burning pain to focus on the outside.
“Alright, here we are! Next on the list: Penelope Spectra. Also known as Shadow Misery,” Jazz’s know-it-all pep queen voice rang out.
A scruffier, younger voice answered her. “ No one calls her that but you, Jazz. Why does she even need a nickname?”
“It’s a code name, actually. And it’s an important record-keeping tool for all of Team Phantom’s files--especially since now I have to update everything with all we learned from the Ancients!”
“Y’know, when I mentioned wanting to heal the rift between worlds, I kinda thought at the time that it meant fighting evils, not updating files.” A pause. “And school counselors. Eugh. This place looks like a dentist’s office.”
“A spiritual dentist’s office!” Jazz’s voice lowered into something gentler. “You... don’t have to come in if you don’t want to, Danny. I know this place holds a lot of bad memories for you.”
“Heh. What place in the Zone doesn’t, at this point?”
“I mean it. It’s very brave of you to want to fix your enemies, but you don’t have to do everything at once. You’re not alone, Danny.”
“Yeah. ‘Team Phantom’, right? Public enemies number one through four?” A pause. “Five? I think I forgot Dani-with-an-I in that--”
“Who’s Dani-with-an-I?”
“...You know what? I’m just gonna, um, unpack that one later. I gotta go... check the Speeder’s filters. Or something.”
A soft laugh. “Whatever you say, little brother. Take as much time as you need for emotional recovery.”
“Ugh, gross.”
“I love you, too.”
“You have the Peeler still, right?”
“Yes.”
“And the lipstick, in case that doesn’t work?”
“Danny.”
“And the Specter Deflector, and--”
“ Danny. I’ll be fine. I promise. Though it’s sweet to know you worry.”
“ Gross. Get out of here.”
Spectra, now leaning against the window and massaging her temples, hissed to herself under her breath. “For fuck’s sake, will one of you at least make up your mind?”
Bertrand, meanwhile, was drifting a foot or so off the floor, peering through the window with a raised eyebrow. “Language, dear, there’s children around.” He paused. “In fact, Penny, dear... isn’t that the same girl we tried to kill a couple months ago?”
“Oh, stop acting like it was such a big deal.” Spectra waved a hand. “ We’re dead, and you don’t see either of us bothered that much by it.”
“I’ll admit it does lack a certain pleasurable something, though.”
Spectra snorted. “Certain pleasurable men, perhaps.”
“Oh, don’t act as if you’re better than me in that regard. I’m not acting as your beard just because I like facial hair, dear.”
The door rattled. Spectra shoved Bertrand aside, primping up her hair and putting on a plastic smile before striding over. She even pretended to look surprised to see Jazz beaming up at her on the other side, as if her and her brother hadn’t been arguing loud enough for half the Zone to hear.
“Miss Fenton! How are you, darling? It’s been ages.”
To her disgust, Fenton matched her energy, reaching out to grasp and shake Spectra’s hand with both of hers, like a baby’s rattle.
“Ms. Spectra! Glad you’re here. I’ve been so eager to talk to you about your powers--Danny’s mentioned a lot about them, and while obviously they’re not ideal right now, being mostly tools for narcissistic supervillainy, that doesn’t change the fact that I believe you’re one of the most knowledgeable spectral beings on ghost psychology. And if you’re willing to cooperate with us, you could be an amazing resource on repairing the rift and sense of purpose for all spirits within the Zone--” She cut off, there, drawing in a hearty breath. “Oh, sorry! I’m rambling. Let me start over. How have you been?”
Spectra blinked back at her, trying to process any of that incoherent, unfocused paragraph into something that made sense. ‘Repairing the rift’? ‘Sense of purpose’? Phantom had mentioned as much on the way there, more or less, but hearing it the second time around still didn’t give any sort of clarity.
But still, Spectra wasn’t about to let a babbling teen girl see her confusion. She shoved it down under a sickly-sweet grin, all teeth, and squeezed Jazz’s hand in her own, hard enough to hurt.
“Oh? Seems like you’ve been ever-so busy. I’m delighted to hear it. I’ve been doing swell, really working on myself lately. Mostly on getting feeling back into my limbs after your little brother ruined my afterlife’s work for the third time and then jammed me in a Thermos for seven hours.” Another hard squeeze. Jazz flinched. Spectra smirked wider. “But that’s all water under the bridge, of course.”
Jazz jerked her hand away from Spectra’s the second Spectra let go, shaking it out, and Spectra drew a deep breath of flickering insecurity and guilt. Not the finest suffering she’d ever felt--Jazz seemed a bit too focused to be truly miserable--but she’d take it.
Meanwhile, Jazz muttered, half to herself. “That wasn’t my brother, that was Danny Phantom--”
Beside Spectra, Bertrand chuffed out a laugh, and Spectra smirked along with.
“Oh, come off it, like we all hadn’t figured that secret identity out already. Literally every one of his--what’s the word?--rogue’s gallery connected those dots months ago. It’s honestly kind of fascinating that you’re still trying to hide it.” She let her smile widen a half-inch. “After all, the only people in town too dense to know better are your parents.”
Another flinch. Spectra pounced on it. “Or is that the reason...? That deep down, you’re nervous they’ll find a way to burst in and ruin your Team Phantom Zone restoration project with their biases?”
Ah, there was a decent burst of conflicted emotion. Spectra savored it, how it buzzed through the air like static and danced new life across her vessel’s pallid skin.
Just as soon, though, Jazz shoved it down inside herself, pulling out her notebook like a shield against her insecurity. “I didn’t come here to talk about our parents, Shadow Misery. I came here to talk about you.”
“Boo.” Spectra pouted. “I don’t do reverse-psychology, dear.”
“You will once I tell you about this.” She drew a deep breath, and then: “We found out the truth about ghosts.”
Spectra froze. Something in that phrasing made her core lurch cold. Like Jazz knew more about being a ghost than Spectra did, despite it living in Spectra’s chest for as long as she could remember being a ghost. “That doesn’t make sense. There’s no ‘truth’ to ghosts. They just are.”
“But there is. There’s a reason you exist. Listen: the human world and the Ghost Zone used to be connected. You, Danny Phantom, even the Box Ghost--all ghosts are based on spirit and emotion created in the human world. And the earthly tethers in our world rely on your spirit to have life and emotion at all.” She beamed, way too radiantly to match sharing news that upended Spectra’s entire existence. “Do you get it, Spectra? We need each other. All your feeding off misery and strife to give yourself power--that was you connecting to your earthly tethers, and us connecting to you. Ghosts don’t want to fight humans--ghosts want to be whole with humans, like how it used to be before the divide.”
Drifting somewhere around her shoulder height, Bertrand blinked up at Spectra, and she grimaced away from that mixed expression he was giving her. Confusion, sure, but a sort of gullible curiosity underneath that that made the air around him taste like rotting fruit and sparkling optimism.
“We could be whole?” he asked.
“You’re ridiculous,” Spectra deadpanned back. “If you expect me to believe you after one practiced speech--”
“I expect you to believe that it’s okay.” Urgh. Jazz’s voice softened, becoming far too sickly sweet and caring. Like she and Spectra were old friends instead of enemies. “You don’t have to live in fear of being hunted by humans anymore--or even half-humans, like Danny. You don’t have to feed solely off our misery to preserve yourself. We need you. And if you work with us, we can start bridging our two worlds together, one ghost at a time.”
Spectra’s core lurched again. The same humming, aching, ravenously hungry sort of feeling she was used to dealing with as a shadow, itching at the edges of her vessel and gnawing relentlessly at the borrowed vitality within it. Like a broken mess of pieces, aching to be whole.
It infuriated her--the idea that Jazz, this simpering, smug, know-it-all teenager, who hadn’t had a wrinkle in her life and whose only career was in high school extracurriculars, might be onto something.
Jazz held out a hand, then; a bridge between worlds. It looked so small, and peachy, and against the purple-green ambient sheen of the Zone, it was undoubtedly, utterly human.
Spectra didn’t say anything, so Jazz pushed on, filling the long silence. “I know what counseling was probably like back when you were alive, Ms. Spectra. What humans were like. I don’t blame you for not trusting us and enjoying our misery. But the world has changed. You can be accepted for who you are. I promise.”
And something in Spectra snapped at that. She scowled, slapping Jazz’s hand away.
“You don’t know anything about what the world was like when I was alive.” The words came out low and steady, hissed through her sharp teeth. “You’re sixteen . All you’ve ever known is your accepting, changed, wholesome world. Yet you’re still convinced you can go back and fix everyone in two entirely separate worlds.” A barked laugh. “You expect me to work with you and teach you, but I already know you won’t stand up for us when we need it. You can’t even stand up to your own parents .”
A violent spark of hurt lanced through the air, turning it bitter and smooth as a black coffee. Jazz took a step back, her eyes wide.
“You--you don’t know that about me! I stand up to them all the time. I’ve been working hard every day at calling out their biases with psychology and logic--”
“And the dissection table that they keep in their basement ? Or how about the giant portal that turned your precious baby brother into a fish fry? How far along on your psychology and logic track are you towards them getting rid of those?” A laugh. “Or have you told yourself they don’t have to, as long as they compromise a little by pretending to humor you with the right terminology and a thumbs up once in a while?”
Another twinge of hurt. Tears budded in Jazz’s eyes. “We’re--we’re still working on it. We’ve made a lot of progress.”
“You won’t make progress pleading empathy at someone who doesn’t see you as worthy of their attention in the first place. Not with your parents, and especially not with ghost hunters.” Her core ached. “And not with me.”
That broke her; Jazz burst into violent sobs, her face scrunching up red and trembling. She turned on her heel, hunching into herself to hide the sight of it, but the sound of miserable wailing--and the feel of it, cool and fresh and crisp to breathe in--trailed behind her all the way out Spectra’s door, and even bled through the windows to the outside.
Spectra stood there, breathing it in until her hands stopped shaking and her core settled from wild rattling to a steady hum.
This, Spectra was familiar with. The sweet taste of fresh human misery, the warm youth in her bones, the satisfaction of having torn down the ego of an idiot teenager so hard they’d never let themselves be so stupidly vulnerable again.
She’d almost forgotten she wasn’t alone in here; until Bertrand spoke up, startling her out of her emotion-fed stupor.
“Well, that was a waste,” he drawled.
Spectra’s forehead pounded, veins she didn’t technically have throbbing in a migraine she wasn’t supposed to be able to feel. “Shut up. She needed to hear it from someone.”
“I mean, that was a waste of a perfectly good source of misery.” He floated along near her eye-level, pudgy arms crossed and gray mustache twitching in disapproval. “She’s clearly already nervous and insecure about this mission. Even if you don’t care about Ancient legends, we could’ve at least strung her along for a while and fed off that.”
Spectra’s migraine worsened, and she gritted her teeth. Bertrand didn’t get it, either. It wasn’t just about the misery, about following along the nearest human source of it like a feeder fish getting scraps. It was about the audacity of her bursting in promising a bunch of dreams. It was about the way Spectra’s core lurched at the mention of the two worlds. It was about purpose.
“Penny? Are you even listening to me?” Bertrand waved a hand in front of her face, and she slapped it away.
“Ugh! I can’t do this right now. I need some air. Real air, not this...” she gestured vaguely at the greenish, purplish, ambient soup around them, “spiritual shit.”
“Penny--”
But before Bertrand could argue, she was flying through the wall and out into the void, to the nearest portal to the humanside.
#
Spectra had burnt her way through three cigarettes already, just sitting on her car’s hood and thinking to herself.
She smoked them like a diver huffing oxygen through their snorkel, giving them barely time to light before they were drained to the filter.
None of them really understood. Who gave a shit if the two worlds were separate? She didn’t have anything of her human life left for her. If she became whole with the humanside, it meant she’d become whole with the decomposed body of an old lady high school counselor, stuck in the cheapest cemetery the senior living center could shove her into.
(And that was assuming she’d even be allowed to ‘be whole’ at all, and wouldn’t just lose her form and disappear as soon as the hunger keeping her spirit here resolved itself.)
Whole with a corpse, or hungry in the Zone. Either way, she’d be rotting inside for it.
Another cigarette. She’d stolen this pack yesterday from some gas station she could barely remember, taken intangibly off the back shelf, and already it was looking like she’d need to steal another. Maybe two. One of a hundred tiny ways she leeched off the world of the living, stealing their emotions and sensations and trinkets to keep herself persisting out here.
Ghosts didn’t do change, after all. That was what made them ghosts. Humans did living things like feel and grow and die. All ghosts did was linger and haunt. No matter how idyllic and accepting Team Phantom’s rift-healing future vision of the world was, the ghosts of the past couldn’t come along for the ride without dragging it down.
She’d made her peace with that decades ago, since the moment she’d died alone in a tacky senior center and woken up floating in the shadows over her body, irritable and hungry. A negative force, breathed out of dying human lungs like a whiff of charcoal-black smoke.
If the world had changed so Goddamn much, that meant it didn’t need spirits like her. It meant spirits like her didn’t exist , ideally--that there weren’t any more queer women psych majors shuffled into dead-end high school staff jobs, forced to swallow down all their resentment, until they died alone and wrinkled and unloved and all that bitterness spilled out of their lungs in one dark whisp.
Why would she bother tagging along to help create a world that didn’t need spirits like her? Why would she help Fenton with a project that went against everything she was?
Why would she change what she’d been doing for decades, if that meant risking losing her entire grasp on her sense of self? She was bitterness and hunger and resentment all the way down; that was her purpose.
...Wasn’t she?
Her core lurched again.
Her vessel’s arthritic fingers itched.
Desiree, at least, would understand--she was the only other woman in the Zone who’d died of old age and a broken heart, too. She knew good and well how emotions lingered and made up everything of what they were.
...And yet the walls of her lair were still covered in love letters from callers, so many that she’d had to install a phone line.
And yet she’d offered to help Spectra for free, even though granting ghostly wishes didn’t do anything for her power and sense of purpose.
And yet she’d been calling herself djinn instead of letting everyone call her genie , wearing new clothes that looked like silk and smelled like saffron perfume, getting Technus to teach her how to upgrade her phone line. Becoming, over the last decade and a half, more of who she wanted to be and less of what she’d been lusted into.
Because the world had changed since they’d last talked, sometime around 2007 or so. And they’d already started changing with it--even the ghosts that were made of old age and broken hearts and unfulfilled desires.
Even Spectra.
...Shit. She dropped her last filter, letting it roll across the forest dirt, and dug in her pockets for her flip phone, pulling up the most recent number.
She dialed.
“Hey, Desiree. It’s me. I--no, no, the vessel’s doing fine. Surprisingly. But listen. We need to talk. I learned something today. Something about the Ancients? Yes, mm... over coffee? Sounds perfect. See you soon.”
And despite herself, despite her bitterness and spite and hunger for misery, for the first time since she could remember, her core lurched with something like hope.
#