Author's Notes: Well, this one was hard to push out, and I'm not satisfied with it in length or quality, but after working on it extensively I can't seem to make it right, so here it is. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a French test to go fail. Also, if my OCs are bothering anyone, feel free to tell me. As I explained very loudly to my girlfriend last night, I cannot fix problems if I'm never told anything is wrong. And this holds true for my writing as well. I can only improve when you tell me what I need to work on. Thank you all for your patience and understanding with the lateness of this chapter. I hope it's good enough.

I could feel my mother's sorrow, see it like a flame in the night. Her aura burned darkly with guilt, shame and sadness.

Vlad was a beacon of uncertainty, and everyone else in the hospital helped obscure them, their own glows making it impossible to tell anyone apart. I was overwhelmed by the colors that blurred and glowed before me, but I wasn't scared by my sixth sense rising up again. In fact, as it grew more powerful, it became less and less overpowering. I could see more clearly than I ever had before. I drifted out of my body, walking away calmly into the bowels of the building. No one saw or heard me. I walked through them as if in a dream. I knew it was real, though. I felt something I never did in dreams: a purpose. I was on a mission and I had to get moving before that Vlad came back and saw me.

There were screams, gasps, cries, hanging in the air. The best way to explain them to a mortal is that they were like bubbles lingering invisibly in the halls, and when I touched one they would burst into sounds and smells, visions and sensations. They flared and died. No one burst lasted more than a few seconds. I made my way to the stairs, unhindered by the staff or Vlad. Up above my body slept peacefully, the first real peace it had been able to get in weeks. Shaking of the chains of the past I went deeper down still, acting on some kind of instinct I hadn't known I had. Down, something inside told me, down to the bottom.

I feel more than hear the sound of footsteps past and present as people walk by me. I breathe in the scents of the hospital. I'm in my own little world now, still the real world but removed from the realm of mortals, a place that's been calling to me for what seems like a maddeningly long time. Past and present are blurring, irrelevant. Is this really happening to me? Is this a dream? Is it a memory? Everything fades into single-minded purpose. As I descend the stairs, out of some force of habit I don't really understand when I could just go through the floors, I begin to see faces, shapes. They linger in the rooms, in the halls, litter the building like stars in the night. They see me and react, alarmed, sometimes saddened, sometimes scared, moving back from me as I approach. They are all white, transparent, and many of them have blood stains on their bodies that are the only colored thing about them.

One of them begins to follow me. She chases after me, actually, grabs me by the arms. She tries to pull me back, but she's too small and she can't stop me. So she runs at me again and shoves me. We fall to the ground, both of us, and she's in tears. I can't tell how old she is. Four? Five? She has a ring of bruises around her neck from whatever killed her, the dark purple the only color on her. She's familiar. I've seen her before, somewhere, but before I can ask her what her name is she slaps me across the face.

I woke up back in my own body, gasping quietly for air.

It felt more foreign to me than ever.

My relationship with Sam had fallen apart.

And it wasn't even Hxis' fault. Sure, I could spend time hating him, his foreign name and his trilingual skills and his love of poetry, all those things he had that I didn't. I could blame it all on him. But Sam and I were already broken up by the time he rolled around, and that was my fault, not his. He transferred in and met a girl who liked his snarky personality. She met someone who was interested in the paranormal and intelligent. They were pretty good for each other, even if I didn't want to admit it at first. I was the one who didn't fit into the equation. I used to, I used to be part of Sam and Tucker's life, and it wasn't the addition of Hxis and Tien that drew them away from me. I was the one who pushed them away. I was the one who did this to myself.

I made Tucker meet Tien. I faked sick and she went from being the odd one out in Chemistry to being abruptly partnered with him. I remember the way his smile reached his eyes when he introduced her to Sam and I, going on and on about how smart she was. She blushed red and looked at the ground, embarrassed. Her hair was mostly short, save for one longer lock she had a tendency to cling to when nervous. That was how I knew she and Tucker were a good match; she didn't have to do that when he was around. Tien was in a couple of my classes. I knew she was smart but more importantly she was kind hearted; an idealist, going off of her English papers Lancer made her read in front of the class. She saw good in everything. Tien Nguyen was a perfect match for Tucker. All I had to do was get them to spend forty minutes together and everything fell into place perfectly.

Sam and I hadn't had such a smooth and easy path. She knew something was wrong. I was in denial. When I wasn't in denial to myself I was still lying to her. That I was fine, that nothing was wrong, and she knew something was. She wanted to help me. I didn't want to be helped. I didn't want to even admit I needed help because I had some stupid idea that doing so would make me weak. Maybe on some level I didn't want to drag her down with me. As my hair got grayer and my eyes went teal, my thoughts became increasingly messed up, and I wouldn't even realize it until after I snapped out of my latest stupor. It was only days after the fact that I'd realize what I'd been thinking when I kissed Sam, or when I held her hand, and the thoughts made me scared of what I could do to her.

Let me fly you to the tunnel the trains out of Amity Park go through. We'll stand on the tracks and I'll make us ghosts as it goes by, it won't hurt, I've done it before. The rush is incredible. I want you by me as the world flies through us, us alone in our own plane of existance.

I want to put a gun to my head and fade the bullet through me so it doesn't hurt, phase it out so I feel invincible, and see your face while you watch me. Because when I'm in danger I can tell you love me; there's no pretense, no walls, just us and our emotions that bind us together like tangled string.

Since I never want to forget you, jump with me from this building. We'll be ghosts together, stay together forever. Your parents will never hurt you again. They'll never make you cry again. You'll be mine and I will be your shield.

Things like that seemed like natural thoughts, were naturally occuring thoughts, but then I examined them. And I wasn't liking what I saw. I knew that at this rate it was only a matter of time before I did something messed up. So I tried to push Sam away. We didn't break up, not really. We never sat down and discussed the end of our relationship and agree to be friends. I just stopped asking her out on dates, made excuses to duck out of ones, and spent more time laying on my bed staring up at the ceiling than I could ever admit. I was protecting her. Or I thought I was. Was it the right thing to do? She seemed to love hanging out with Hxis, and Tucker barely noticed Sam or I anymore now that he had someone who understood his technobabble. I thought I'd done the right thing.

But people with Depersonalization Disorder weren't a danger to others. Themselves, sure. Other people, though, were perfectly safe with me. I'd pushed her away for nothing. I'd lost her to my own inability to admit I was wrong, I was weak, and I needed help. If I'd just been honest she'd still be my girlfriend. Then again, would she still want me, knowing what was wrong with me? I had no way of knowing that short of talking to her, but the hospital staff wasn't about to let my friends visit me just yet.

In a way I was grateful that I had an excuse to take some time to pull myself together. How was I supposed to explain this to Sam? I needed to think. I needed to try and find a way to say any of this that made sense. Everything was a blend of ghostly and mortal senses, sixth sense visions and images I had conjured up in my dreams. Words repeated over and over in my head as I tried to wait patiently for Vlad to return to the room. It was in this quiet that I made the terrifying realization I was going off the deep end. My condition was rapidly deteriorating. Ever since I jumped...

When I jumped I had been real for a flicker in time, and I was paying for it in full. My ability to feel was damaged, and so was my desire to stay in this world. My mind had tasted the afterlife, what it would be like to really be a ghost, so now it was even haarder to stay here trapped in this form. It was harder to be mortal now that I knew what the other side truly felt like. Every second in this form was too long now. This body didn't feel like my own. I was drowning, choking on air in a world that I couldn't call my own anymore. And I'd made my own Hell worse in attempting to escape it. Was there ever going to be an escape from this? The very thought of waiting days for the drugs to arrive and weeks for them to work was a nightmare. How could I wait that long when every second here made me want to scream? I couldn't survive another minute like this. A day was an eon, an endlessly long time, too much for me to fathom taking, and I dug my nails into my skin again as I tried to calm down. Everything was getting impossible to take again but if I didn't take it I would be giving up. I didn't fight off ghosts and survive all those fights to be beaten by my own head.

I was trying to surf through TV channels to distract myself when I saw it. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the transparent blue-white figure of a human being. It wasn't quite a ghost. There was no green to it. It didn't speak. Instead, it drew closer to me, even though my ghost sense didn't go off. It made no noise. I heard no sounds coming from it. The lights flickered vaguely as it approached, ambling forward slowly. I couldn't tear my eyes away from its' head. It was crumbled, broken inward, the face removed entirely. There wasn't even any way to tell where the eyes or nose should have gone. I shut my eyes tightly as it got closer, wondering (praying, at this point, honestly) if I'd been misdiagnosed. If I was schizophrenic this thing wasn't real and couldn't touch me. It couldn't hurt me. And indeed, it walked right through me, fading out to nothing before it got to the window.

But it had always been invisible from the knees down. And it had white hair.

I shuddered, pulling the blankets tighter around myself and waiting for this rollercoaster of a life to end.

Orange and blue.

Mr. Lancer had been explaining it to the class once. I had to rush out to fight the Box Ghost, but I'd been listening until this. Black and black morality was when everyone was evil. Gray and black was semi-good and evil. Gray and grey was when nobody was good or bad or if they were they were on the line. Gray and white was good and morally ambiguous. White and black was good or bad, the end. White and whie was when everybody was varying degrees of good. It gave me a headache. It was complicated and totally unnecessary. When would it ever come in handy? There were too many terms too similar, and we all got bad scores on that test. I took notes and still got it messed up. The only thing I understood was blue and orange morality: when someone's definitons and views are so scewed they aren't any of the above, when nothing makes sense or seems bad or good, just opposite. Blue and orange meant total confusion, a loss of a sense of what anything was. I understood that. I got that. I knew what it was. It was me, post breakdown.

The stray thoughts and images I was picking up were only bad at night. It wasn't a problem at home because they were images and thoughts left over by my family. My family's life was good and the memories were like my own. The thoughts made sense. Now, even if I was in a better facility, I was in a real and true mental hospital. And the thoughts weren't mine. They were psychic and emotion static left over from everyone who'd walked the halls of this building. I glimpsed eyes, muddy clay red brown, dark inky colored, robin's egg blue, tawny. I saw faces, old, young, heart shaped, angular, soft, round. They flickered through my mind like half remembered songs and vanished. You know the way your thoughts stop making sense if you're tired? It was like that. The words didn't make sense to me anymore, and they wouldn't stop.

Tawny eyes, blonde hair. "En ymarra! Jata minut rauhaan!" Red brown eyes, heart face, gray gloves, hands on his head. "Aiuto, aiuto! Mi lasci in pace!" Dark clothes, an incredibly thin frame. A Brooklyn accent, voice just above a whisper. "I can't get the sounds she made out of my head..." Someone threw themselves against the wall, again and again, wild dark hair falling to her thighs, body shaking. "Wake up, wake up, not real, this is real, this is life." Orange matted hair, thoughts feral, untouchable, scratching, never been inside before don't want to be want to be free like before help help HELP. "He's not imaginary, he's my friend! I won't take your stupid pills, they kill him! I don't want to hurt him. He only tells me to do good things anyway. He loves me. You don't understand!"

This place was going to drive me mad at this rate. We were all orange and blue when we needed to be around people who weren't. But what else was there for me to do? I listened to my room mate's deep breathing as he slept. He was a sweet guy, the kind of nice guy girls would normally swarm over, and his arms and legs were so scarred it made me wince to look at them. There were prominent neck scars healing too, and it was disturbing to have him welcome me with a hug and then hear him cry at night later. If I could have I'd have gotten out of bed to comfort him, but my broken leg made it impossible to do anything other than listen. His black hair was long and hung in his face like an emo kid's, but I'd never met anyone so cheerful. Cillian was nearing fourteen. I didn't want to think about what made him break already. At least he wasn't dangerous. I'd seen the lock down ward on my way in. That place was something I never wanted to see again.

"Danny, you awake?" he muttered quietly. "How're you holding up?"

"I'm fine," I replied. "Just can't sleep in a new place, I guess."

"It gets easier. After the first week you'll be fine. But I worry about everybody who's new. It's not easy on you." He paused thoughtfully. "Do you know you're flickering?"

"Huh?" I said intelligently.

"You're going see through. Is that why you're here? You have whatever Casil and Ayulan have?"

I remember a saying from Lancer's lecture, then. That it was possible to hit rock bottom and keep falling. There's a light at the end of a tunnel and it's a flamethrower. It can always get worse. Those things suddenly looked optimistic by comparison.

"Tell me everything you know, Cillian. Everything."