Chapter Text
Growing up in a haunted house isn’t the kind of thing you put on your resume. That’s because it’s not the kind of thing you expect to use later in life. And that’s totally irrelevant when you move to a weirdass town called Amity.
So, yeah, Wes had some experience with ghosts.
He grew up at the bottom of a hill and the edge of a forest, right outside city limits and just off the highway, within walking distance of a creek that should have branched off but never did. He grew up plenty far away from any graveyard or cemetery, but no one was surprised when a place like that was used as a dumping ground.
In some ways, it felt like the edge of the world. To the Weston family, it was home.
And yeah, sometimes they would hear footsteps where there shouldn’t be, and moonlight could play tricks, and fog could make its way inside, and dust never settled in the right places. Sometimes they’d think a light was on until they opened the door, or shapes would move behind them in the mirror in an empty room, or they’d see someone walk into the forest from the corner of their eyes when no one was there.
Sometimes, every last one of them was sure the house was built on at least one grave, but it didn’t really matter. They were there, and the ghosts were there, and they were all content to ignore each other when it suited them.
That experience helped them with the ghost attacks, if not much. The hold of mind-influencing powers was loosened, so they found themselves to be some of the last ones influenced by Spectra or Ember. No ghosts had attempted to overshadow any of them — sensing the claim left by sentiment, the traces of mourning without grief — and a few non-aggressive shades even seemed to seek them out.
Phantom wasn’t a shade so much as a poltergeist or a “full-fledged ghost,” whatever that meant, and “non-aggressive” wasn’t entirely accurate, but he sought them out, too.
Wes wasn’t too sure if it was a choice.
Well, anyway, it took maybe a week after the first big ghost sighting for Wes to connect the weird kid no one else looked at with the viciously protective ghost who looked exactly like him. It was like two sides of a coin — a human with blurry edges who vanished from Wes’s periphery and a ghost with a more solid appearance than any of the others. A kid whose voice always seemed distant and a being whose voice had physical weight. Black hair, white hair, and both of them wore the exact same thing every damn time Wes saw them.
It took him three more weeks to figure out who this ghost was really haunting.
Not that he cared, of course — it was just… odd. They weren’t mourning him, but they seemed unsettled. They couldn’t see him, but they kept looking. He’s right there, he wanted to say, but something held him back. A tether of some sort, tangled through his soul and wrapped around his throat. It ached.
He went up to the flesh-and-blood ghost during lunch one day, rather than sitting with the rest of the basketball team like he usually did. They wouldn’t notice; he was new and talked too much, but never about the things they wanted to hear, and he hadn’t really built any rapport. The ghost was sitting in his usual corner, staring at two people who never looked back. The closer Wes got to him, the more everyone else’s gaze slid over him. The ghost didn’t pay him any mind, apparently thinking himself invisible to everyone.
Well, he was almost right.
“Should I just call you Phantom,” Wes said, voice plenty loud and never loud enough to carry, “or do you have an actual name?”
The ghost yelped, fell backwards through the cafeteria table, and slipped through some sort of invisible rift. Wes furrowed his brow. That wasn’t standard invisibility. What–
“You can see me?” a voice whispered behind him, and he whirled around. The ghost was back, still looking human, but his gaze had locked onto Wes like an apex predator. It made his skin crawl. “But you’re– not a ghost.”
Wes crossed his arms, almost defensive. “Yeah, no, but you’re clearly not a normal ghost, so how do you know? Maybe I can just disguise myself like you.”
The ghost made noise, something small and wounded and definitely not human. “It’s not a disguise. I’m human when I’m like this. I have– I have a heartbeat. I’m alive. Are you... like me?”
Wes shook his head, mystified. “You feel like a ghost,” he said.
The not-ghost didn’t move, but the air shifted. Sharpened.
“I mean– when you’re like this. You feel like the ghosts I’ve seen before. But when you’re Phantom, you feel like the other ghosts here.”
The not-ghost hesitated. “You’ve seen… other ghosts?”
Wes winced. “I mean– traditional ghosts. Chills, mist. Emotions from the outside. Before we moved here, my family lived in this house that had ghosts, but not like the ones in Amity. It’s hard to explain.”
The not-ghost nodded slowly. “And I… feel like that.”
It wasn’t really a question. Wes nodded, shrugged one shoulder. “Not as Phantom,” he added.
“Not as Phantom,” the not-ghost, not-Phantom echoed. “I didn’t–” he cut himself off with a flinch, hissing through his teeth, and a cloud of mist drifted from his mouth. “Oh, come on.” He looked up, slightly to the side, and a ghost — the Amity kind — swooped into the cafeteria with an angry shriek right where he was looking. “I have to go,” he told Wes, voice thick, and then he was running.
He leapt, transforming into Phantom midair, right there in the cafeteria. About a dozen people clearly watched him appear, but everyone else was running.
No one looked at Wes. Even the attacking ghost didn’t pay much attention to that corner he was in, and none of the panicked people fleeing fled through there. He followed the evacuation with a slight jog — and about three paces away from the table where the not-ghost Phantom had sat, people could see him again.
He made a mental note of that as he broke into a sprint.
–
“You know places where you spend a lot of time get weird, right?” Wes said the next day, yet again foregoing lunch with the team. “And I still don’t know your name.”
“No one does,” the not-ghost answered. “Uh– it’s Danny.”
“Wes.”
“I know.”
Wes blinked, frowned.
“I mean– people don’t really transfer to Casper. There are only a few freshmen who didn’t go to middle school with the rest of us– or, uh, everyone else, but you’re the only new sophomore. One new senior, I think, but isn’t that your brother? It’s not– I didn’t, like, look you up or anything, I just sort of hear everyone talking all the time, so–”
“Yeah, no. I get it. Stop talking.”
Danny stopped talking.
“You know places you spend a lot of time at get weird,” Wes repeated. “Right?”
“Oh. Uh. Yeah — I didn’t at first, but it sort of– yeah. I didn’t even realize humans could approach me. I mean– not that I’m not human! I just, y’know, maybe not… completely.”
Danny seemed pretty upset about that. Wes figured he would be, too. The ghosts he grew up with hadn’t seemed so lonely, but his family had definitely known about them, so maybe that was it. That music ghost, Ember, was pretty obsessed with people knowing about her. Being forgotten probably sucked.
Wes hadn’t really been thinking about that, before. He’d just been curious.
“Why them?”
Danny jumped. “I– what?”
Wes pointed across the cafeteria. “Samantha Manson. Tucker Foley. It’s like you’re obsessed with them, and they keep trying to look at you. What’s up with it?”
Danny grimaced. “I… they used to know me. The– the thing that made me… like this… somehow, it made everyone forget.”
Forget. That seemed like a too-simple word for this… unsettledness that permeated those two. “Everyone?” he said, rather than ask about that.
Danny grimaced and didn’t look away from his friends — his ghosts. “Everyone.”
Wes… wasn’t really sure what to do with that.
“You might.”
He blinked. “Huh?”
“You might,” Danny repeated. “Might… get weird, if you spend time around me. Or you might forget. They– I tried to get them to remember, at first.” He looked away, a sense of shame resting in the curl of his shoulders. A sense of guilt dragging them down. “It… didn’t go well. For them.”
Wes wasn’t sure what to do with that, either. He poked at his lunch — the same menu, apparently, as forty years ago. The same menu that would never change because of a single spirit’s influence. Stagnant. Distorted. Things weren’t meant to hold still like that, resisting time, always looking back.
That’s what Danny was, Wes realized. Still. Tethered. Trapped. His ghost was him, now — the human part was just the thing he couldn’t let go.
Wes couldn’t be that with him. Not really, and he really shouldn’t, anyway. But he’d always been good at acknowledging ghosts, and it still didn’t scare him. He hadn’t known them in life, so they couldn’t drag him into death. Simple.
“I won’t spend too much time around you, then,” he said. “That way I don’t get weird, and there’s no reason for me to forget, and you can, y’know… do something other than haunting.”
Danny’s demeanor was all desperation under a fragile pretense of curiosity. “You’d do that? Risk that?”
Wes gave a casual, wry grin. “No one really transfers to Casper,” he reminded him. “Not like I have a bunch of friends.”
–
Growing up in a haunted house isn’t the kind of thing you put on your resume. That does not, Wes realized, mean it isn’t useful for some things.