For the ghostlights drabbles: “Say my name” with a favor being called in?
Duke had saved Phantom years ago, back when he was just out of high school and working to take down a branch of the government that was kidnapping and experimenting on people, targeting magic users and metas. Phantom had been working on his own to take them down, and they met in the middle, trashing a lab and freeing as many people as they could.
They had managed to shoot his back, knocking him down and making him bleed a glowing green. Phantom couldn’t move, protecting two kids with his body, and Duke couldn’t reach them in time before they were taken away by another swarm of agents.
He was able to go after them in time, free Phantom and the kids, and evacuated the victims before Phantom rained hell down on the facility.
At the end, standing in the background as they watched paramedics treat the victims and take them towards the nearest hospitals, Phantom had turned towards him and thanked him.
Or rather, he thanked the Signal and offered him a bracelet with a rounded orb of ice, glowing faintly in the dark. If you ever need me, he had said, Hold this, and call me name.
Phantom vanished once the last of the victims were transported to a safer location, and Duke hadn’t seen him since.
He’s kept up with news about Phantom as best he can, but from what he could tell, Phantom is based primarily in Amity Park, Illinois, and the town is fiercely protective of their hero. News rarely leaks out of there, and with them running on their own servers and independent internet, it was nearly impossible to get in from the outside.
Phantom remained a curious and distant figure in Duke’s life. He holds onto the bracelet still, guarding it carefully and sometimes running his fingers over the ice that never melts.
But he doesn’t call in that favor. He’s never to.
At least, not until now.
Sucking in a breath, Duke prepares himself and holds the orb of ice in the palm of his hand. He’s in civies, unable to hide his identity for this, and closes his eyes. “Phantom,” he says.
For a moment, nothing happens. Duke blinks his eyes open and frowns, mind already forming new plans to contact Phantom. Then the ice goes bitingly cold, almost painful, and the temperature in the room drops dramatically. The ice lifts up from his hand, floating in the air, then cracks open.
White-blue light spills out of it, growing brighter as it seems to swallow up the room entirely. Duke hurries to back up, an arm thrown up to protect his eyes. His breath mists out before him and he shivers as the sound of ice cracking fills the room.
And then, just as suddenly as it started, the light disappears and the cold fades away like a bad dream.
Slowly, Duke lowers his arm and looks up at Phantom, floating in the middle of his living room with a crown made of ice, engulfed in blue fire, hovers above his head. He looks older, more regal, holding his head high.
He regards Duke carefully for a minute, then tilts his head and says, “Signal?”
“Yeah, it’s me. Man, I’m so glad you came.”
“You… need help with something? You’re calling in your favor now, right?”
Duke nods. He understands Phantom’s confusion; being in the hero business means that favors like these tend to be used only during the most hopeless of times, when the world is close to ending, when the chances of getting out of a situation alive is close to impossible. It’s exactly the kind of thing Duke was expecting to call Phantom in for.
Not the kid sleeping on his couch.
“You’re a ghost, yeah?”
Phantom blinks at him. “Ghost king, now. Why?”
“Well…” Duke rubs the back of his neck, nervously. “I didn’t really know who else to call, and I can’t do this on my own since I’m not a ghost. But this kid got attached to me and won’t leave, so now I’m taking care of her and I have no idea what I’m doing.”
“I don’t know why you think I have any experience with kids but—”
“She’s a ghost.”
Phantom stops short. “Ah. I see.” He floats down until his feet touch the floor, and then he’s standing like any other person. “Where…?”
Duke looks past Phantom’s shoulder, and Phantom turns to follow his gaze. Chelsea, the ghost girl, looks to be around nine years old and is fast asleep on the couch, curled up under Duke’s softest blanket.
“Signal,” Phantom says quietly, “What, exactly, is the favor you need from me?”
“You can say no,” Duke starts. “I get that this is a lot. But I need help raising her. And since you’re a ghost, I figured you could help me learn about the ghostly side of things. You don’t have to raise her with me or anything! Just… I would appreciate any help you’re willing to give me.”
Phantom doesn’t say no. He doesn’t say anything. He just stares down at Chelsea, an unreadable expression on his face.
On the couch. Chelsea shifts in her sleep, brows furrowing as she makes a choked noise in the back of her throat.
Moving on autopilot after so many nights of this routine, Duke kneels next to the couch, fishing one of her hands from beneath the blanket. He gives it a few reassuring squeezes, keeping it a slow rhythm to pull her gently from her nightmare. She settles down in just a minute, brow smoothing out as she continues to sleep.
The silence grows and Duke is all too aware that his heart is the only one beating.
He doesn’t hear Phantom move. Doesn’t realize he’s right next to him until he sees Phantom’s hand reach out towards Chelsea. When Duke looks, Phantom is sitting on the floor next to Duke, looking at Chelsea with something soft and devastated in his eyes. His hand hovers about her head for a long moment, then slowly lowers to rest on her head.
The touch looks gently, barely putting any pressure on her head, but it’s enough to make Chelsea’s eyes snap open, suddenly wide awake. She stares at Phantom with wide eyes, then sits up and looks between him and Duke.
“Who are you?” she asks in a small voice that makes Duke want to stand against the world to keep her safe.
Phantom smiles. It’s casual and charming and makes him look like anyone else, as if he’s not a powerful king from a realm unreachable to humans. “Hi there,” he says, “I’m Danny. I’m a ghost like you. Signal called me and asked me to meet you.”
The Ghost King is good with kids. Who would have thought?
Chelsea looks at him for confirmation and only relaxes when he nods. “I’m Chelsea. What do you mean ghost? I’m not dead.”
Both he and Phantom tense, carefully keeping their expressions neutral. She hasn’t told him much at all, just that her parents were gone and forgot her and she got hurt, so she wanted to stay with ‘Mr. Signal’ because he’s a hero and heroes keep people safe and he was the only one who was Black like her. Duke hadn’t had the heart to say no, and began searching for her family, only to find that her parents had fled the state, and likely the country, after killing their only child through neglect and a dangerous environment.
It was then that he realized that her powers were not because she was a meta, but because she was ghost.
It still hurts to realize how young she is, how much of her life had been stolen from her in an instant. Duke hadn’t been brave enough to broach the topic with her, instead choosing to let her grow comfortable in his presence, get them both settled into a routine now that he was her primary guardian.
“I know it sounds scary,” Phantom says, “And you may not want to believe me, but it’s true. I’m sorry that you died so young, but that just means you get to hang out with me and other ghosts from now on!”
Chelsea crosses her arms over her chest and glares at him. “I am not dead,” she says.
“Cici, I’m sorry to say this, but you are,” Duke cuts in. “That’s why I called… Danny. You have new powers as a ghost, and he can help you get used to them.”
“I’m not dead!” she says again.
“Kid,” Phantom begins, but Chelsea shakes her head hard and hops off the couch.
“I’m not lying! Watch, I’ll prove it to you!” She closes her eyes and scrunches up her nose, concentrating. Her hands curl into tight fists by her sides, and the glow around her grows dim. Two faint, stuttering rings of light appear around her waist. They flicker and wobble in the air, as if weak and uncertain of their own existence, then split apart, one moving up towards her head while the other falls to her feet.
Beside him, Phantom sucks in a sharp breath, but Duke can’t turn to see what’s wrong when he’s trying to take in the sight of Chelsea suddenly full of vibrant color, looking more solid that he’s ever seen her, very much alive.
“See?” she says proudly, lifting her arms and doing a spin to show off her right she was. “I told you I’m not dead!”
“No, you’re not,” Phantom agrees, sounding shell-shocked. When Duke is finally able to look away from Chelsea to check on him, he looks awed. There’s the smallest smile on his face, just the slightest upturn of his lips, but it makes him look softer.
Duke turns his attention back to Chelsea before he can be caught staring. “Cici, can you come here for a second?”
She goes before he’s finished speaking, crossing the space between them in a single jump, then grins up at him. Her hair is a bit of a mess, the two buns he managed to get her hair into falling askew. He makes a note to visit the old aunties in the Narrows later to ask them to teach him how to do hair. For now, he holds out a hand and Chelsea drops an arm into it.
It seems to good to be true, having her be alive, but her pulse is steady and strong when he presses his thumb against the inside of her wrist.
“Well,” he says, leaning back and letting go of her arm. “You certainly proved us wrong.”
Chelsea doesn’t have much time to look smug before PHantom quietly says, “You’re like me.”
“What?”
“You’re like me,” he tells Chelsea. “A halfa.”
She tilts her head to one side. “What’s that?”
“Someone who is half human and half ghost. Both dead and alive.”
Duke blinks, taking in the words, then turns to face Phantom so quickly he’s worried he might give himself whiplash. Halfa, he said. Like me, he said.
And sure enough, two rings of light, bright and strong, appear around Phantom’s waist before splitting in half, moving over his entire body.
Gone is the Ghost King, all powerful and adorned in dark clothing with a crown of ice above his head. In his place is a guy who looks to be Duke’s age, eyes a deep blue and his black hair messy, feet set solidly on the floor. He looks completely normal, completely human, and no longer an impossibility.
“You still up for learning how to use all your new powers?” Phantom asks.
Chelsea grins. “Yeah!” And then, with a quick flick of her eyes going from Phantom to Duke that he almost misses, very innocently asks, “Are you going to stay with us then?”
“I… don’t know?” Phantom looks to Duke for an answer.
Already, Duke can see this going two ways. The correct way forward, the normal one, has Phantom popping in every so often, taking Chelsea out for a few hours to work on training her and her powers. It’s easy and routine and they can keep their boundaries uncrossed and be professional.
The other path is what Duke wants most that he shouldn’t impose onto the literal Ghost King. He could have Phantom living with them while he’s on Earth and out of Amity Park, having a place at the table, a section in the closet for his own clothes, a quietly domestic night together while Chelsea sleeps where they can get to know each other more, get to know each other outside of news reports and texts on a screen.
“You can stay with us if you want,” Duke offers, casually, “It might keep my apartment safe from her powers acting up on their own again.”
“Are you sure? I could always just fly in on the weekends or something.”
“I’d appreciate having you around. So you can help Cici.”
“If you don’t mind,” Phantom says, looking away. Like this, fully alive with a beating heart, it’s easy to see the blush steal away across his cheeks.
“I don’t.”
“I don’t either!” Chelsea pops in, looking far too gleeful by their awkward conversation.
Duke can’t help but laugh, feeling lighter than he had in ages. The relief of knowing that Chelsea is alive, for the most part at least, eases the guilt of thinking he had been too late to save her, that there was no chance she could have made it out and had a future, makes him feel weak. All the exhaustion of the past few weeks hits him all at once and he wants nothing more than to collapse in bed and sleep for twelve hours.
“Alright, squirt,” he says, reaching out to pat her head. “It’s late. We can talk more in the morning, so go to bed. In your actual bed this time, not on the couch.”
Chelsea stands up taller, ready to argue, but Duke gives her a Look™ and she quickly shuts her mouth, nods, and drags her feet back to her room (the former guestroom he can never give any of the other Waynes ever again, once they find out about her).
Sighing, Duke collapses onto the couch once he hears the door shut behind her. Phantom joins him after a few seconds, sitting tentatively on the edge of the couch. The cushion moves beneath his weight, another reminder of how solid and alive he is right not.
Duke wants to touch him, to reach out and feel for himself his pulse, the warmth of his body, his chest lifting with each breath.
He doesn’t move. He stays where he is, hands carefully still, and tries to think past the dizzying thoughts of she’s still alive, I’m not too late, he’s still here, he’s alive.
“Rough week?” Phantom asks, voice purposefully light.
“Something like that.”
“You should get some sleep too.”
“I don’t think I can. Not after everything. My mind’s too loud right now.”
Phantom shifts closer to him, hesitant in a way that Duke has never seen before in him, and asks, “Want me to stay with you until you mind quiets down some?”
“Yeah. I’d like that. Thanks, Phantom.”
“You know, if I’m going to be around so often as Chelsea’s halfa mentor, then you might as well call me Danny.”
Truth be told, Duke didn’t think that was his real name. He’s glad to know it’s not.
“Then call me Duke.”
“...Are you sure? You could still hide your identity from me.”
“Nah, I trust you. A name for a name, yeah?”
Danny smiles. “Duke,” he says, testing out the name, and it’s never sounded better than when it falls from Danny’s mouth.
“Danny,” Duke returns. He belatedly realizes that they’ve leaned towards each other, drawn together like gravity, stuck in each other’s orbit. It feels natural. It feels like this is where they’re meant to be.
Maybe he should be more cautious. They’ve only meant once before, after all. But he’s read all he could on Phantom and has seen how Amity Park loves him. He’s stressed and exhausted and trying to figure out how to look after a half-ghost child that’s already been dealt a bad hand in life. He should be keeping Phantom at a distance, watching over him carefully to ensure he isn’t a threat to Chelsea.
But Duke saw how he acted with Chelsea, so gentle and understanding and kind. That’s all he needed to see.
He may not know much about Danny, but he knows this: he is trustworthy.
Enough to entrust his identity to him.
Enough to entrust Chelsea to him.
It’s more than a favor; it’s a promise to walk this road together.
There’s no one he’d rather do this with.
“Thanks,” he says again, “For all of this. I know it’s a lot.”
Danny shrugs. “I don’t mind. Really. It’s nice to know there’s another halfa out there, no matter how she came to be one. Makes things feel less lonely.”
“Will you tell me more about halfas?”
“Later. Once you get some proper rest. We’ve got time, haven’t we?”
“We do,” Duke agrees, affection settling warm in his chest. “We’ve got plenty of time.”
Learning how to control her new powers won’t be easy for Chelsea. Learning how to take care of her won’t be easy. Learning how to do things together, as Duke and Danny rather than the Signal and Phantom, won’t be easy. But Duke knows with a certainty he feels in his bones that they’re going to be fine.
So long as they’ve got each other, they’ll be fine.
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do you have any particular thoughts regarding marcille being a half-elf? its interesting to me considering the fact that she seems self-conscious about being a half-elf, but denies it when its brought up
i remember marcille looking visibly uncomfortable over laios simply asking her how old she is, which i think the only reason she might feel nervous about this is because it might reveal her as a half-elf to him.
she's never corrected anybody whose called her an elf either.
never mind the circumstances of the reveal, in which thistle goes on about how half-elves are inferior and accusing her of wanting to become full blooded elf, she seemed particularly upset like he struck a nerve-
i wish the half-elf thing was built upon more. also, underrated marcille line:
okay so i revisited this sequence just to make sure I could back myself up and it's just... man. there's a lot going on.
the first reaction we get from Marcille is this huge panel that takes up half of the page
she is viscerally affected. flushing to the tips of her ears with the intensity of it. and we see it again, a few pages later
so it might seem like she's embarrassed about it and lying to herself, but... I really think it's just that Thistle is accidentally hitting sore spots. If you really look at what he says to get these reactions
"you'll live out your entire life [...] and die that way too"
"a hundred years from now, nobody will be there"
Hear me out. I think, if he stuck to harping on about her inferiority without bringing up how terrifyingly long-lived she is, she wouldn't have been as bothered. But right now, Thistle is accidentally hitting all the marks on Marcille's deepest fears-- and this is after the Winged Lion promised her that her dreams could come true in an extremely vulnerable moment, so it also hits her slightly guilty conscience as well.
I do truly believe that Marcille isn't bothered about being a half-elf the way that people assume she'd be bothered by it. To her, the biggest problem with being a half-elf is that it's isolating.
On one hand, it's not hard to imagine why she'd distance herself from elves in the west. A lot of them can clock her as a half-elf on sight, unlike other races, and therefore she's always branded with this weird stigma of being Othered -- I would even say that she considers herself lucky for being born outside of elven culture instead of having to grow up in it. I mean, just... look at the way elves talk about her.
Skipping past the uncomfortable implication of what 'not tolerating the existence' of half-elves would actually entail, this is incredibly fucking annoying. You can see why she wouldn't want to be around elves much. You see a lot of Marcille reacting badly here, but honestly, almost all of it can be attributed to her freaking out that her bluff completely failed. She's honestly more paying attention to Izutsumi's footsteps and trying to coordinate an opportunity to escape.
And in the end, you see her built-up frustration at being asked if she wants to be a full-blooded elf like 2-3 times in a row.
Yeah, yeah, "the lady doth protest too much," and all. But we know Marcille. We know that she's a lot more embarrassed and horrendously unconvincing when she's being prodded about something she's actually self-conscious about.
Moving onto the flipside of things, it might seem weird that she "pretends" to be a full elf around other races, but it's not really that strange if you think about it. Again, people are weird about her being infertile or whatever, and a lots of them don't even know much about what sets half-elves apart from everyone else. I mean, look at how uncomfortable Laios is just asking her about it
and look at how exasperated and resigned she looks
And like... she's right. Where would that come up in normal conversation? Why would she go out of her way to tell them? She's functionally a normal elf to other races anyway -- got the ears, the abnormally long "childhood", and the huge mana capacity. Unless it's directly relevant or important for people to know, I don't think it's all that strange or indicative of insecurity that she prefers not to bother with it.
(This combined with her sense of being an "outsider" to elf culture also explains why she thinks elf superiority is embarrassing. She sees the way elves treat short-lived races from the "outsider" perspective nonetheless, and thinks it's obnoxious; especially more so because she usually has to play the elf around short-lived races and deal with the reputation of arrogance that elves have built up.)
The sad thing is, this all means that... she doesn't actually fit in anywhere. She doesn't like going out West much because of how elves treat her. But she's also an outsider in the continents she was born in, treated like this exotic long-lived alien choosing to live among short-lived races for some reason. She is always an outsider, the Other, no matter where she goes. Add in the fact that she'll live longer than literally anyone she knows, and it's honestly kind of heartbreaking.
And I think that's the crux of it. Marcille really doesn't act like she's at all self-conscious about being a half-elf because of any feelings of inferiority or being half-made or whatever. She considers herself a perfectly legitimate being and might even, in some ways, consider herself superior to normal elves because she's not blind with elf supremacy or whatever. (And whatever "elven biases" she displays, all of them are born more out of the fact that she's kind of bad at conceptualizing how other races age and mature compared to herself, not that she actually considers herself better or more mature simply for being an elf.)
I think that whatever self-consciousness Marcille has about being a half-elf is, instead, related to terror and loneliness. The reminder that it ensures she'll never truly belong anywhere for the rest of her very long life. The reminder that, in truth, even she's not actually sure how old she is by other races' standards (hence the discomfort when asked how old she is). She doesn't want to not be a half elf, or be a full elf or full tall-man-- in her ideal world, she's still a half-elf. She just gets to live out her life at the same pace with the people she loves and doesn't have to say goodbye again and again and again until she dies.
and one last very important panel, right after Mithrun tells her that all her desires would be devoured
In her ideal world, she's still a half-elf and reality magically starts marching at her pace. But failing that, the second best thing is that she's still a half-elf-- but one who is able to accept reality and let go of her fear.
(But the rest of the story pans out the way it does because, to Marcille, taking reality apart and reshaping it was less scary than simply and fully reconciling with it.)
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