[turboheaven] catchall for the ghost potentially known as dan

[jiaohua]

squints suspiciously at you. you're tutorialing aren't you. AREN'T YOU.





ok well i guess not

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[jiaohua]

[waner, unlike hawke, does not go through the five stages of why is he hot.



it does distract her from tantruming about her terrible luck with men, though.]

...how long ago was that? Before you ended up here, I mean.

[foreverphantom]

[ sighs ] A little over a month before I died and ended up here.

[jiaohua]

[sh enods to herself. a month... that's such a short amount of time to have so much power and then to have it ripped away.]

...I will say it again, then: it is no small wonder that you were so distraught to not be able to use your powers when we first arrived.

[foreverphantom]

[ waner is the only bitch in this house he respects

he barks out a laugh ]

At least here, I can use some of them again. But, yes. I haven't been that weak and human in over a decade.

[jiaohua]

[do not respect her]

Stop saying human like it's that bad. I'm human.

[and she's starting to feel a little insulted.]

...but I can see how it would be very frustrating, for someone used to being something more.

[foreverphantom]

You didn't have any choice but being human. I had the choice to be a ghost instead. So I did.

There was nothing left for me in being human anyway.

cw suicide mention i guess...?

[jiaohua]

[she makes a face because uh that sounds like he chose to kill himself to become a ghost......?]

You had the choice...?

cw suicide mention

[foreverphantom]

[ yeah i was going to add it myself for this tag anyway lol ]

I was half-ghost, before. I could go back and forth between human and ghost as I wanted. I could've just never transformed back into a human and that would've worked too, I guess.

But the human side was dragging me down. It became unbearable. So I ripped it out and killed it.

[jiaohua]

...dragging you down how?

[she's so confused. trying to understand, but confused.]

[foreverphantom]

[ this, he will not answer, looking obstinate and closed off.

thankfully, the memories talk for him. ]

[jiaohua]

[that explains so much.



she does flinch, when he's murdering danny. because it's not the same as what happened between her and neverah, but it's similar enough - the overkill, really. the unrelenting assault, piece by piece, when really just a few decisive blows would have ended it. but that would have been too quick for brimstone, and it was too quick for neverah in the throes of the affliction.

but although waner flinches, she doesn't look away, either.

("waner, run!" her mother had advised, at the first sign of the danger her father posed being directed at her. she had internalized that. running is what she's always done in the face of danger, whether physically or not - she'd run from neverah. she'd tried to distance herself from other dangerous situations with words. but never once had it worked.

her mother's advice won't help here. so although this memory of brimstone's frightens her, she doesn't run.)

instead, she chokes out -]

...he tried to throw you away.

[how lonely that must have been.

(and how like the people she knows, discarding others as soon as they serve no further use to them.)]

[foreverphantom]

[ of all the responses he anticipated to that memory, this was not one of them. nor did he expect her to sound so...invested. ]

...he did.

But in the end, I was the one who got rid of him.

[jiaohua]

...so you did to him what he was planning to do to you.

[it is perhaps an uncharitable explanation for it. she remembers the ... well, frankly nicer version of him, helping her down from the cage when she first woke up here. that version of him likely would not have torn him apart in the same way.

(this isn't what i wanted, danny had cried out. and maybe it wasn't, but what had he expected to happen?)]

That man who suggested it - he must have known, even if he hadn't...

[foreverphantom]

Vlad.

[ shakes his head ] No, he didn't. He genuinely thought he was helping--or at least, making it more bearable. He didn't really know which would be the functional one, though, the ghost or the human. I'm not sure he cared to tell the difference.

Not that it mattered, in the end. [ (linkin park voice) ]

[jiaohua]

...even if he thought he was helping...

[something about it really doesn't sit right with her. waner is a person who has done awful things with the full knowledge of what she was getting into; framing people and setting up situations in which they'll die is not something she's shied away from. but human experimentation is just sort of...]

Well. What happened seems unfair. I do not know if that is quite the right word, but - they played with fire, and they got burned. You shouldn't have had to be the one to suffer because of what they did.

[foreverphantom]

It's fine. I made them suffer more.

[jiaohua]

...did making them suffer satisfy you, in the end?

[because it didnot seem like it from the memory. or from how he's acted here.]

[foreverphantom]

[ maybe once upon a time, he'd insist that it did. but at this point... ]

...no. But making sure they couldn't be satisfied either...that's as close as I could get.

[jiaohua]

What would you do next, then? If you did go back at the end of all this.

[foreverphantom]

What else is there? Take whatever scraps are thrown to me and try to "become a better person." I don't exactly have much choice.

[jiaohua]

[she makes a face, because that's about where she's at with her own return too.]

...that's really what you'll do after going back?

[foreverphantom]

[ barks a mean laugh ]

Either I'm trapped here trying to be "better," or I'm trapped there trying to be "better." At least there, I get to have all my powers back.

[jiaohua]

Who defines "better," once you've gone back?

[foreverphantom]

[ huffs ] Probably Danny and Clockwork. That's the one who kept me trapped in the thermos.

[jiaohua]

Can't they just mind their own business and let you be? Nobody likes being told what to do.