=o=o=

Phantom floated.

That wasn't quite accurate; he flowed through the endless green and black expanse, his tail slicing through the viscous surroundings effortlessly, like a knife through butter. He'd been incredibly young by ghost standards when he'd fallen through one of Amity Park's transient portals, and since it snapped shut behind him he'd spent his formative years entirely in the human world, the energy infused in the city by the fact of its placement in a thin area of reality probably a major contributing factor to the fact he didn't dissolve in that harsher plane.

Going to the Ghost Zone therefore felt strange to him, like going to a homeland your parents came from but which you'd never been to. While you knew a lot of things about it from people you knew who'd been there, that wasn't the same as having lived there, immersed in a particular type of experience from birth, the chance of which to have having sailed.

It was more like visiting than coming home.

Still, it was the origin of his kind. Phantom may have liked the human world more, with its sights and sounds and colours that weren't bright green or purple and blue sky and a warm coloured star and gravity that pulled at you, unless you told it not to, always in a comfortingly consistent direction, and a purpose for him, but there was something about the Ghost Zone that always pulled at the bones he didn't have, like a heartache.

There was a naturalness to being in it. It felt right, in some small way, a missing piece of a mechanism that simply suddenly clicked back into place, forgotten until he found himself there again, and he would find himself taking his time doing whatever he'd come in for, if it wasn't urgent, and maybe a few detours of things that would catch his interest, before his obligation to the city of Amity Park that was his obsession drew him back to it with the ping of a ghost attack on his radar.

He never came here without a reason, though, because he had built up quite a large rolodex of enemies over the years, and this was their turf. Right now, he was looking for something.

He wasn't sure, couldn't recall, what it was or why he was looking for it, but that didn't matter. He was looking for it, and he'd know it when he found it.

He slowed, and alighted on the start of a path made of cracked and broken purple rock, the soft tapping of his boots echoing in the space. Every sound echoed here; the ectoplasm it had to travel through warped and changed it. Phantom had never heard sound underwater, or at least paid attention to it, but if he had that's what he would have mentally compared it to.

The place was deserted. The only doors he could see could barely be made out in the distance, and he got the sense that the reason this path had formed was because the natural drift of rocks had caused them to come into contact with the black, thready roots of the dark, leafless trees that dotted the sides of it at irregular intervals with branches that reached upwards like claws, which had caught them and held them fast. The tip of one snaked around his right boot, and he absentmindedly kicked it. It retreated.

He walked forward. The path twisted and jinked in three dimensions, curling over and around, and it was never possible to see the end. After a while of walking it became impossible to see the start as well. It moved too, a soft sineous swaying back and forth under the quiet ectoplasm currents, stone grinding against stone under the tethers of the roots. Gradually he began to make out that it lead up and over some sort of hill in the distance, and he could make out the silhouettes of two figures on top. He felt they were important; knew, without knowing how he knew, that they were in some way the answer or part of the answer to what he was seeking.

He called out to them, but they didn't respond or move, and while he sped up his pace the hill only approached at the same slow rate it had already been.

He came across a presence on the path. That was the only way he could describe it; the knowledge that someone was there but nothing else about them, not their height, or age, or number of limbs. It wasn't that the details slid off the mind like oil on water; there were quite possibly no details at all to do so in the first place. He was unbothered by this.

"Excuse me," Phantom asked it, "can you tell me what I'm looking for?"

who am I? it said, plaintive, pleading.

"I don't know," Phantom said, feeling a little exasperated, like an answer to his actual question should have been given. "But do you know?"

who am I?

"I'll take that as a no," Phantom said, and made to continue walking, before something grabbed his upper arm in a vice grip. He thought of black roots, and pulled against it sharply, and did not make any headway, instead being tugged to face the thing far, far too closely.

WHO AM I!? it screeched into his face. WHO AM I!?

It wasn't a presence, Phantom realized with sick, revulsive horror. It was an absence, an utter lack, a void, a vacuum. A moving patch of nothingness, terrifying in its contrast with everything around them that was real. It hurt to look at; it was something that every part of him was similarly screaming at him should not be.

"I don't know!" he shouted, kicking at it, firing an ectoblast at it, the movements rapid and indiscriminate with the need to get away from that… thing. Nothing he did harmed it, because how could it?, and touching it made him shudder and shiver and feel like his skin was trying to crawl away from the point of contact. "Let me go!" he yelled, and managed to jar himself free from its grip.

He ran up the path as fast as he could, and didn't look back. Behind him a mournful howl wound up like an air raid siren, as if an antarctic wind were a lost, abandoned child. He clapped his hands over his ears and kept going. The hill was getting closer, and he could see the figures on top of it had grown larger, although they were still indiscernably shadowed. He felt a leap of joy in his chest.

Something closed around his ankle, and he fell, jaw cracking painfully against the stone. He struggled, looking back with the expectant dread of seeing the Not Thing, or a leg twined in roots. It was worse.

The suit the half man wore had once been entirely white; not so now. A trail of red stained the path where he pulled itself towards Phantom with only his arms. Phantom made a strangled exclamation and tried to step forward, out of the grip, and only succeeded in dragging him along with a nasty, gristled sound. The man did not react; his face simply stared in a rictus snarl into Phantom's wide eyes like it had ever since Phantom looked back.

"You…" he burbled, more blood bubbling up out of the corner of his mouth. "You, you, you you youyouyouyou…" An intake of breath, a horrible gurgling, hissing rasp. "YOUR FAULT!" the man roared, red flecked spittle dotting the words, and that was the last straw for the increasingly distressed Phantom, snapping him out of his stare. "There's nothing I could have done!" he tried to shout back, but it came out as more of a small whisper, the way people say things they want to comfort themselves with. "YOURS," the man said, "YOURS," and started using Phantom's cape to pull himself up, a deadweight.

Phantom kept struggling to reach the apex of the hill, but the man was dragging him down, somehow far heavier that he should be. "Yours," he kept repeating, over and over and over. Phantom stretched an arm out to the silhouettes, silently begging them to help, say something, do something, the choking of the clasp around his neck preventing speech.

They looked at him. They LOOKED at him.

They did nothing. They remained impassive. Their expressions couldn't be seen, but were still obvious. Shame. Anger. Disgust. A washing of their hands of him. He was dead to them. They turned away.

Shaking fingers found enough coordination to untie the cape at his throat, and "Wait!" he cried out with the momentary freedom to speak. They simply walked away and down the other side of the hill and vanished from sight. "Don't… mmph!" The man's hand clamped over his mouth from behind as his arm snaked around Phantom's neck. The weight of him pressed Phantom, immobile, into the stone, and he was helpless to do anything but watch as the roots slowly wound their ways around his wrists, ankles, waist, limbs.

"Mine," the man whispered in his ear, and cold flooded him.

He shot bolt upright, panting, disoriented, thrashing. His surroundings whirled; his ankles and wrists met resistance and he struggled furiously against it. There was a rapid beeping to his left, but he ignored it, straining to get free…

Phantom? Phantom!

…his surroundings slowly bled in to the panic overtaking his mind. White. White walls. White ceiling. White sheets on the… a bed? It was a strange bed. Not Danny's. Memory struck him, and he glanced around wildly.

"Danny!"

Relax, I'm still here, okay? It was the deliberately soothing, highly nervous voice used by people trying to deal with spooked but dangerous animals without any prior experience with them. Calm down.

"What… what…"

Despite all odds, Phantom did, in fact, start to calm down. His rapid, gasping breaths began to slow, despite being still shaky and gulping. The beeping to his left started to slow as well, and he realized he felt sticky and sore. He closed his eyes, still in a sitting position, and moved a hand to run through his hair, blinking when it met resistance and stopped. A grey cuff and a short cord tied it to one of the rails of the bed. Further observation revealed the other wrist, and both his ankles, one of which was covered by part of a cast, were similarly tied.

They had to tie you up to stop you hurting yourself, Danny chimed in helpfully. Uh, me. I think they said something about it being a bad reaction to the anaesthetic? There was a forced casualness to Danny's voice. He sounded slightly shaken as well.

"What…" Phantom tried again, and then swallowed. Some of the dry, fuzzy feeling went away. "Where…? I was just…" He probably sounded as lost and confused as he felt. He was in the Ghost Zone, and he was suddenly here? It didn't make sense. A lot of things about it weren't making sense, in hindsight, like how he'd been himself again... "That… it didn't happen?" he realized. It was some kind of illusion?

You were having a nightmare, Danny said. So yeah, it wasn't real. I tried yelling at you to wake you up but nothing happened. Phantom realized from the slight stress in his tone of voice that it likely hadn't been pleasant for him either.

"That's what a nightmare is!?" Phantom said, pure horror in his voice. He had a newfound fearful respect for Nocturne. There was a snort from Danny. Sorry, he said, sounding slightly guilty about his amusement. Does that mean that this is the first time you've had one? A note of curiosity. It sounded really bad.

Well that assuaged one of Phantom's fears, that Danny had seen all or any of it. "It was really bad, yes." He scowled at the cuff on his wrist, and started slowly working it off. It hadn't been applied with preventing conscious escape in mind. "That's it," Phantom declared. "I'm never going to sleep again."

I'm pretty sure that's impossible, Danny supplied.

A/N: And here you go, the last update before I disappear. You could even say I'm… going ghost. Kudos if you get the title reference.