Chapter Text
She doesn't remember her name, anymore. That is the first thing that goes, as a ghost. Your name, your family, and then everything else.
Almost everything else.
She does not forget the first time her Sultan put his hand on her shoulder. She does not forget the way her sisters become silent and stiff, laughing awkwardly, tittering around her, swaying their hips and smiling coyly. Trying to become more beautiful, more tempting — to drag his eyes away from Desiree, to stop his hand from trailing down her waist. She remembers that she is the youngest. She remembers being thirteen.
She does not remember their faces, but she remembers expressions, sometimes. She can see it in her own face. In her eyebrows, the eldest's worry. The second's smile, when Desiree has enough joy for it. She has her third sister's face, almost a carbon copy, in the jawline and soft, round cheek. She knows that she has long eyelashes like her sisters — that they were coveted and praised in all four of them. They had been the town's most vied-for women. They were beautiful.
In the mirror, she will trace her mouth and nose and face, and Desiree will see glimpses of her sisters, and see their personalities on her own. She says something that her eldest sister said, long, long ago. She can trace her lips and know, intellectually, that these are the lips of her grandmother, of her mother, and know, in the mirror, their smile. Sometimes, when on the rare occasion of her laugh, the sound vibrates through her core, and she knows: this is the laugh of my eldest sister. This is something so inherent, she had never had to think about it, when she was alive.
But that is where it ends. She sees glimpses of their bodies in her own — sees how all the parts of her were made, how her body is a collection, a memoir of her family, their only shrine. It is her skin and bone that makes her — made her, before she was dead, selfish and bitter — and it is through her form she can rewrite her past, rewrite everything as closely as she could remember; remember the way she danced in the caravan's spirituous light, feet kicking up sand; remember her sister's hand, whispering follow, follow, follow —
Desiree will remember how to apply kohl, though she has no need to any longer, melded to her deathly pallor. She will remember and will not forget.
Her haunt is not what it is supposed to be, anymore. Before the boy came, before she saw the state of humanity through the little tantrum she made, it was a comfort, an inherent truth to her bone and body. At least, to the ghost of it. Before the Romany boy, it was the Sultan's palace that she desired most, had worked for through her childhood, had given up her body and family. It was the gold of her genie's bottle she wanted; the sneering evil eye of women, the god in her own world. Spirals of gold and art resurrected from her memory, of the palace the Sultan erected for her, and it was that, she wanted. Her life's work. It was for that, she smiled and laughed for the Sultan. It was for that, for that stability, for her body in the art of its walls, she had moaned and swayed her hips and recited poems.
She did not die of a broken heart because of her Sultan. Make no mistake, she could not care less about who he invited to his bed. But after giving up her flesh and body, after being torn from her family, after forcing them to stay within his borders, tearing off their wings, silencing their millennium's worth of song — to be cast away? For their sacrifice, for her own sacrifice to mean nothing?
She wished, beyond any wish, that she could do it again, and never allow him to touch her shoulder. But she has tried. Desiree cannot fulfill her own wishes.
Her haunt can.
In her own haunt, a deserted palace, void of men and sound, she strings up wooden lanterns, inverted and bright, as all things are within the Infinite Realms, but familiar, even as a ghost of what she was. They create shadows she remembers from nights of dancing with her family, flickering and inflamed in the cavernous dark within her palace's walls. The walls are the only thing still standing in the Sultan's palace. She cannot be rid of him completely — not when it was him who killed her, his wife who cast her out. In the darkness, though, she can ignore them.
Slowly, her hands meld her marble floors into sand, flecks of gold and snow embedded within, moving like a serpent's dance in the dunes. They are soft and low hills, nothing like what her caravan handled, back when they called themselves the Psittaculidaes of the Desert — colorful parrots that traverse the continent, song and light — but just enough for her core to thrum the beat of her mother's tambourine. She remembers, in a vague, desperate sense, the dances her mother combined with it.
She remembers her mother's whisper, as she was sent to the Sultan, "If you do not know where you go, never forget where you came from."
After her death, Desiree thinks her mother was wrong. At the time, she knew where she was going, and let the dances of her sisters and mothers fade from her memory, taken up by the Court of the Harem's rules, by the comfort of pillows and drapery. Now, she does not. Now, she knows neither, and will force herself to remember even if it tears her skin away.
Her feet contort to the dances not of the Sultan's harem, but of those from her family, bright and lively, like the birds they named themselves. She remembers their whistling, a tease of their namesake, and trills to emulate it, ghostly, a shadow, but not forgotten. She remembers looking up with her sisters, and dancing under the stars.
Now, she will do the same, alone. There is no need for Desiree to place the stars on her ceiling. They are already there, in the Infinite Realm's infinity, in seeing the sheer weight of billions of peoples and cultures, as she always had. With many of them, she shares nothing except death. With many more, she shares everything.
Desiree is not a young ghost, by any stretch of the word. She is from the time before Siddhartha, before the Christian wars, before all except their many gods — the gods whose afterlife she could not enter. She is not young, and she has spent more of her life in the bitterness of being separated from her family both in life and death than she has honoring them.
Until the Romany boy.
In death, it is easier to tell these things — whose ancestors have claimed them, by blood and spirit. She can tell, not only in the ghosts that follow him, but in his feet. In the way that, obliviously, he carries himself softly, ankles twisting just enough that if a bangle were to be placed on it, it would ring. She can tell because, inside of that unfamiliar, new accent — the accent of a new country, younger than many of the ghosts are — there is a shadow of her own, of the language she knew before anything else.
It helped, of course, that sometimes he spoke it.
"Lasho. Lasho! Si but'i. Me sim lašo." He said, when she had invaded months ago.
Be calm. Be calm! This is okay. I am alright.
At first, she thought he was speaking to her. It had been many years since she had spoken to a living person in the language of her people, but many years longer since it had been anything but a wish. Nearly, Desiree wanted to stop, drag the Half-boy to the portal, and stop this madness — do nothing but speak to him, to see how her language had evolved since her death. Some of the inflections were different. She didn't know if that was because of her age or his own.
But then he repeated it, again and again, eyes wide, trembling against her strength, and she realized: he wasn't saying this for her. He was saying this for himself — because he was just a boy. Because he was scared. This was a boy, a boy that had already died, but a boy. A teenager and infant ghost; a child in every sense of the word.
He is thirteen.
She was thirteen.
Desiree, for the thousandth time in her death, wished she could fulfill her own wishes. But any wish she hears, she must fulfill, and it had been up to the boy, the child and his friends, to stop those she had already granted. To stop a ghost thousands of years old, power building with every murmur of her name. Her core yearned, beyond anything else, to stop, stop, stop me —
But he did.
And in her defeat, she murmured, "Žao mange, tsinorho chiriklo."
He did not hear. But next time, she promised, next time she found him within the Infinite Realms, she would know what he knows, and she would teach what she could teach. She would remember her sisters, her family, and it would be in him that she could know where she is going. Desiree knows she is selfish, but selfishness is too much a part of her to try and fix.
She was thirteen.
He is thirteen.
—
Desiree couldn't find many that were like her, she found. Even fewer, that were like her and had memories to grasp on. Again, she is old. She has had time and experience and memories building from her thousands of years of death, and more than that, she had the awareness to make something of it.
Many ghosts cannot. The Infinite Realms, for all the half-lives experienced, for all the sentience and pain and love, did not house living things, least of all something as meager and unimportant as a living soul. Ghosts are simply imprints. Ghosts are the mirror of a living realm, singular — just one of the many versions of themselves found in infinite realities — and despite feeling alive, they are not. Ghosts could feel pain, yes. Ghosts can scream, cry, laugh, sob — there is a mental capacity similar to a living person. But they are not alive. They cannot learn.
She is aware she is Sisyphus, and her memories will, eventually, plateau.
As it is now, Desiree is painfully aware that what "growth" she sees is simply something that she always knew was there. It is the tail end of her shadow, slinking along and the only thing she cannot catch when she turns around. It is the last note on a sitar, strung high and waning, something she can only hum correctly after many mistaken attempts. It is the sunrise. She sees it in the sunset, and she knows something is not the same, but she will never see anything else. She can only rediscover what she knew during her death.
Desiree hopes it to be more, more, more.
She dreads the day she stops rediscovering. She dreads the day where she cannot learn because as soon as her memories stop, as soon as she stops moving, stops dancing — then she'll realize she's dead all over again. At least like this, in the quiet, painful memories she never thought she could reach, she can feel the warmth of the sun again. To be a voyeur of the living, even simply herself, is divine.
Her hand hits a tambourine, the same purple, green, and white of everything else in her haunt, inverted. The sound reverberates in the empty halls of her palace, walls sun-beaten in a dimension that only houses dead stars, sands swallowing her feet. The walls house the same paintings she remembered of her childhood, though many of them have been substituted with her visage, replacing whichever Pharaohs and Kings and Sultans whose stories were told. Instead, it is her body, in crushed lapis lazuli. Her hair, dark, romantic, is painted in kohl. It no longer is that color — she has become more of the stars, hair swallowing galaxies and a glistening, infinite darkness, borrowing life like many of the other ghosts did — but she remembers that that is what she looked like, and she stares. She looks nothing like the paintings, anymore. She is too otherworldly, as all things are in the Realms, but seeing herself, who she was, brings her closer to human, anyways. Her bangles, a gold long-faded and an unsettling, deathly bright, sit high on her forearms. They jingle. The tambourine rings out, and the cold, damp sand move with her feet.
She remembers her mother's beat.
It is an empty day when another memory strikes her: thick and long, something vapid that wouldn't have mattered had she lived. It is the day her sisters brought her to a barter.
The area is big and loud and far too much for her, being only five or six, but part of her loves hearing everyone just as another part of her cowers from the strange men and women yelling. Colors drape over them, poorly erected tents using sand-weakened wood and bright, and flashed of dusty rose and a faded, emerald green flutter above her, giving shade to those under it, to those in the store, but leaving everyone on the path around them in a burning, scorching sun. The wood they use is unfamiliar — it is lighter and dull, so very unlike her family's rich, worn caravans. Black streaks must have run through it at some point, certainly a charming, eye-catching wood in the desert sun, but it has now faded into a dull grey, only a few shades off from the rest of the wood. It looks like it will retire soon, too brittle to keep up. However, the maker's made careful calculations on how thick they needed the wood to be. Just enough to keep the cloth above it from collapsing, but not a centimeter more. It holds steady, if barely.
She notices this all in a glance, all in a singular flash, but it grants her more memory of her life than ever before. She does not need to be in her haunt to know that the wood of her lanterns had become that same color.
But still it continues, and she remembers looking deeper into the colors themselves. Pieces of cloth hold intricate patterns much like on her and her sister's performance skirts, though these women tend to look more blase about it, not as careful and reverent as she and her sisters had been. They looked indifferent. "Look," however, she emphasizes. Not be. The women bartering on the drapery have pinched faces, arms gesticulating wildly and pointing towards various pieces of clothing before throwing their hands up in the air, as if completely put out.
She remembers her father and mother — and her middlest sister, if she is remembering rightly — using those expressions and movements in their musicals, miming the rise and fall of music notes with their faces, telling stories without words. They would pull their faces into dramatic frowns and ghastly expressions of shock, followed by either satisfaction or a vaguely miffed, exaggerated sniff. At no point would they reach a level further than mild acceptance, only taking the cloth when it was fully, bodily communicated that taking the fabric off the seller's hands was a favor rather than a sale. The women would, then, continue to look as disinterested as they could be, even when rifling through their pouches for coin.
Except, unlike her family, these women were using words. Desiree knows so, in fact, because she remembers her sisters giggling and putting their hands over her ears, sharing looks.
"You're too young to hear their talk," one of them had said, like she was as old as grandmama and not just a year and a half.
"You're hearing it," Desiree offers petulantly, because that's a fair argument.
Then, a bigger sister would cover her ears, and Desiree felt a strange mixture of guilt and glee, knowing that now neither of them could hear whatever the woman was yelling.
The drapery really is beautiful, though. She does not know how one could barter for something like that. It reminds her of her family dancing.
No, something like that isn't bartered for.
She cries, after that memory. Not because of the memory itself, though having it cradled in her head makes her feel much like a little bird, delicate and defenseless, arms crossed around her to block out the wind. No.
She cries because, in the laughing of her sister's memory, she remembers her middlest sister looking towards her, a complaint so obviously about to leave her tongue, and she sees her mouthing a name. Her name. Desiree's name.
But an older sister has her ears covered. She cannot find it in herself to think long and hard about the rest of it, about the rest of her, that she doesn't know. She only thinks about one thing: Her name started with an A.
Desiree's name starts with an A, and she cries.
She cries, and cries.
———
She can see it, in him, as he traverses the Realms. Silently, she watches, like the birds that once followed her caravan. Like the spirits she knew to have blessed it, she follows. Her eyes are an eagle's, sharp and wise, a distant voyeur watching from above, below — such descriptors are unnecessary in the Realms. Up and down do not exist in any permanent capacity. She watches. Still, she watches.
Danny is the boy's name. He carries with him nothing but the suit he died in, a cruel hazmat suit, similar to the Russian radiation suits she remembers from spirits entering fifty years ago. It is tight on him — something she knows isn't right. The Russian suits were loose-fitting, baggy in all ways except their wrists, ankles, and neck to ensure minimum radiation against... well. She hadn't asked them, of course. No one asks ghosts why they died — how they died — but... Even more so, when you can see their skin bubbling, even in death. It is unsettling, even to her, the way their veins blackened. Which makes Danny all the more curious.
His suit is poorly made. It is made of thick rubber, uncomfortable in life though unnoticeable now, and it seems as if it was his a few years ago. He outgrew it in one fell swoop, a single growth spurt, and no one cared enough to replace his equipment with a proper-fitting thing. Desiree wonders if that is what caused his death. She, of course, will never ask, though the strikes of lightning on his skin make a grim picture.
She is a ghost of emotion, as many others are in the Infinite Realms. Despite what many think, violent death isn't the main ticket into non-specific afterlives, no. It's the desperation to stay. She had been so desperate, she remembers. She remembers thinking, Please, just let me see my sisters again. Please, let me have my life back. Please, I can't let it end like this, I can't die here, please, please please —
But it wasn't a painful death. No more painful than anything else in the wild, eaten alive or run to their death. She was animal as much as the boar and snake, as much as the tiger and peacock, and she died like one. Dehydration, stepping through the deserts after being cast off by her Sultan's jealous wife, panting like a dog just as the queen wished. She only remembers feeling a deep thirst, a desperation, and a want to sleep. She slept, and she never stopped sleeping.
Because of this, there is a disconnect. She — and many others like her, because there are, indeed, many and most other ghosts that aren't born simply of pain — can never understand what it is like to feel one's own death so intimately that they cannot help but wish for anything else. Because, if this is dying, if this is death, what could they possibly look forward to? Her heart twists, and she watches. She is always watching.
Danny only goes to a few places in the Realms, which is not unusual. He is a young ghost, not even a child, but a babe, and there are only a few places that often feel safe to such a little one in the great expanse of the Infinite Realms. The Realms are vast, swallowing galaxies and stars and making spirits of them, creating thoughts from a child's whimsy, a life from a simple storybook. The Realm must always mirror the living planes, and thus, it must grow. It is never-ending, but it is always becoming bigger, larger, more complicated, layering dimensions upon dimensions. It is easy to get lost, and for him, for someone that has somewhere to truly go back to, it is even easier. The child is wise to only go where he knows. He should not stray any further until his true death, or perhaps his earthly majority, when he decides his coronation, because it is of any ghost's natural life that they adventure through the stretch of the Beyond. It took her a thousand years to find her way back. She watches, steering ectoplasm gently sometimes. He will not be lost with her guidance, however light that guidance is.
The places he frequents are never to his own benefit, she finds. He goes to the Yetis in order to gift Fenton technology — a way to find ways to combat their poisons. It is an exchange of few words, many bags, a nod, and he is off. He allows himself a customary, living greeting: a smile, a shallow how are you, and a wave. He does not allow his core to mingle, for them to greet in any permanent, proper way. He does not allow himself a check-up, and he does not allow himself a rest in their cold. Even she hears the ways the Yetis try to hum a greeting towards him, a rumbling of ice and snow that Phantom, far more than she, should resonate with. She hears trilling echoes, and she watches as he never returns it. It is unacceptable, but he is young, and no one has taught him. The Healers know this better than any others, and she can hear, once he leaves, the way they mourn.
He goes to his castle, and he trains, letting the Observants whisper his ineptitudes in his ear, laughing them off when they say something that makes his eyes widen and core freeze. Desiree isn't laughing. If any ghost could hear what they told him, they would rage. In the comforts of her dunes, she does. But he is young, and the King believes them to be his handlers. He does not.
In some moments, she watches as he lets himself float along the ectoplasm, closing his eyes and leaving his body pliant on the waves of their oceanic air — but... never with anyone. Like this, he is a desolate tundra, soft, without any sound, like a dormant animal who fell asleep just a little too soon, and wishes not to wake up. Like this, he emulates his core well. He is the isolation that the arctic cradles, and it is in this quiet that he becomes less a blurry mirror of ghosts and more of a phantom, proper. For the amount of time he spends in the expanse of the Yeti's land, he does not seem to know how to become the icy desert his core must yearn for. It is like this that he seems more his age — a babe, but one that knows of itself as it should. For as much that he loves to speak of his death, of his title as Phantom and all the puns associated, he does not let himself linger on it. He should.
There is something incomplete in not allowing oneself to truly ruminate on their death. He has not been allowed that luxury — he had to pretend himself alive as soon as he died. Desiree cannot imagine how painful that must be.
She used to pretend, for the caravan, to be teachers and princesses and birds, and later, for the Sultan, to be a seducer and a minx and fae, but she was allowed to take her face off every night in the safety of her bedroom, in the presence of her family or girls-in-waiting. She had been allowed to take off her kohl and lip tints and bangles, and she was allowed a quiet, human feeling of just being. In these moments, she has no distinction except herself.
His performance does not stop.
He pretends to be alive to his friends, the contaminated children, and he does so well. He will go to the human's school and he will pretend like his life did not truly end a year ago. His smile is bright when his answers are correct and brighter still, when he can understand why. His friends forget the hum of power underneath his skin. She sees him hiding it like magma under black rock, like a Saharan-horned viper coiling under sand, his skin. His smile is tight, often, and she would wonder why his friends would not notice, but... They are children. They are alive. They will not understand now, and they seem too... normal, to be truthful, to understand even in death. Desiree assumes they will die in peace. Most do.
Danny, like all other souls in the vast majority of the Infinite Realms without a True Ending, did not die in peace.
When he is Phantom, he glosses over his death with a cavalier that any ghost would feel a tug at. The child will mention things being "electrifying" and how it is "hard to kill something already dead" and, certainly, ghosts make jokes about such things.
If one were her age, perhaps on the edge of moving on.
Despite Obsessions and emotional imprints, no ghost younger than a few millennium spoke on their death in any capacity — even more so, publicly — and he is... He is as young as a ghost can be. It is not just frowned upon for him to speak so loosely about his death, but it is unacceptable. It is unhealthy. This is not a way to "cope" as the humans have coined. Death is painful, brutal, and the core remembers not how humor works in the spoken context. He may please his core with his quips but he hurts it, too, in his dismissal. No one has taught him this, but no one can claim him because — well. Who can claim their King?
They all forget he is young.
She is just beginning to remember this. She remembers it more, when she watches.
"You know how it is, being dead and all. The chill doesn't really hit like it used to." He cuts in class, letting his friends snort at their homework, shivering.
She is old, she will admit. Desiree does not find it funny.
"Yeah, yeah — you're the arctic tundra, just waiting for us to keel over from the negative degrees Mr. Bulstrode keeps this classroom in."
"It's a science room. That's basically one of the requirements."
"Sucky requirement."
"Become a teacher and change it, then, freezer burn."
"Teachers can't do shit, Elon." Phantom pokes the curly-haired child with a pencil. She remembers his name being something like Thomas. Perhaps Tuck. Tucker. Yes, Tucker.
"Your death will be swift and retribution, sweet."
"Little late for that, Sam. Just a bit." It is humorous, she notes, how he says it, but there is a rumble in his core that they cannot sense, and she knows he is not completely joking. She can tell there are words on his tongue that he wants to say, and she is fairly certain they are: "And it wasn't."
"You know, your sister is right about you being like... way too comfortable with your half-death." They could not notice the warning sign, only seeing his smile, and the girl is frowning at him lightly, still somewhat humored.
"Oh my god. Let me do my fucking chemistry in peace, please."
"Never," Tucker juts automatically, and they keep doing their "chemistry homework."
She watches as they quibble and laugh, and it is light and lively and everything her king deserved, but... there are parts of him that do not fit. He is like a puzzle piece whose sides all fit poorly. He is a dog whose leg hurts enough to limp, but not enough not to use it.
Danny's mouth pulls down as he stares at his homework. It looks more complicated than anything she had ever seen in her life, and there are symbols and numbers that she does not think she will understand before she finally Moves On. She does not want to. She is a ghost, and there is nothing in her life that makes her care about something so unrelated to her experiences. She wishes she could see him in a dancer's class. That would be interesting to her.
His pencil scratches kohl into a leaf of processed paper, bright white with light blue ink lines spaced perfectly horizontal. He had skipped earlier pages that held more symbols and calculations she had no understanding of. She knows he is smart, though she does not understand why he is so upset by the red markings on the papers given back to him. In this notebook, it feels as if he understands everything, perhaps even more than the scholars did, sitting on the Sultan's shoulder. It reminds her that she does not belong in this world, anymore.
They keep talking in bursts. Sometimes, it is just to give another dry bout of humor — not always at his expense — and it tends to make them have a little more energy for their studies, it seems. Back when she was alive, either one studied or was chastised by their teachers. It is different, but it works better. Children never could have sat for such long periods, before, and though she does not like how little they move, she wonders how much more they know compared to her, at their age.
Of course, she lived a very different life, considering she was one of the Caravan's Birds, but she, too, had teachers and studies to care for.
His pencil continues to scratch, as does his companions. They work, and talk about the teachers, and gossip as any children do. She wonders what he will do when he stops aging. (When he will be left behind, and when he will leave them behind. This is inevitable.)
"What did you get for number thirty-seven?" Tucker asks, pushing his glasses up as he bends his head further into the paper, eyebrows scrunched before eyes flicker to the other children's work. "Is it a trick question?"
"I said hydrocarbons," the girl offers. She looks to be on question fifty.
"Hm." The child bends further into his paper as if the answer will offer itself up the closer his proximity is. He tilts his head before pausing, looking over at, "Danny?"
Danny sighs, his back curling away from the paper for a second, rubbing his eyes, and leaning back in. "Let me skip to it." He ruffles his notebook for a moment, and in this she sees that he is evidently not working on whatever the other two are. They work on two pieces of loose-leaf paper, easy to turn in to the teacher, as she has seen them do before. He works in his notebook — one that does not look so readily torn. There are sketches in them that she has seen before, of ectoplasmic guns and healing technology. She has seen him trade things from this notebook. "Thirty-seven?" At Tucker's nod, Danny focuses his attention back in the notebook, looking in all ways except in actuality. His eyes are glazed over, just a bit, as he looks at the paper. He is working through it now, in his head. "Yeah, hydrocarbon. It's not a trick question. I think he just threw something easy in there to throw people off or to give them a bone."
"Goddamn Bulstrode," Tucker mutters, and he scribbled the answer down before flitting to the next one.
Danny chuffs out a laugh, and he goes back to his own machinations, resolved from his distraction. She still does not know what, exactly, chemistry entails.
She also wonders why, with how complicated his notebook looks, the red letter "F" seems to upset him so much.