Glee!fic, All The Other Ghosts part 2
All The Other Ghosts part 2, superhero!AU. I know I haven't replied to Puppyverse finale comments yet, I'm so sorry =( I cannot even tell you the ball of stress my life is right now (final Greek exam tomorrow morning, doing this instead of revising; yup). This is a sort of am I waving or drowning? gesture. Halp.
Disclaimer: I accept no responsibility for canon. It isn't mine.
Rating: R? Mostly for violence. Be wary of the violence, kids, go read Cardcaptor Sakura instead <3
Warnings: 1. I HEREBY DECLARE THIS AN S4 SPOILER- AND WANK-FREE ZONE. Seriously fucking *god* I don't even want to hear it. LEAVE IT AT THE DOOR. 2. All warnings from the first part apply, do read that thoroughly first <3
Summary: Define 'help'.
The first time Blaine goes out, shades on under his hoodie and a ski mask in his back pocket, knee and elbow pads on under his baggier-than-usual black outfit, he doesn't come across any trouble at all. He wanders the city until nearly midnight and doesn't see so much as someone flipping someone else off. When the hell did New Yorkers get so nice?
Cooper's just back from a performance, and Blaine shrugs and says he was getting a drink with people, then trawls the internet for Ghost-sightings for a while. Someone's put a photograph up of the corner of what could be a cloak slipping out of sight around a wall but Blaine's inclined to agree with the commenters, it's more likely a plastic bag.
The next day he walks around with his iPhone out, trying to work out the Ghost's geography of the city. He seems to turn up all over the island, though, Tribeca to Harlem, there's no centre to the sightings. Maybe he's wise enough not to stick to a single neighbourhood. The police still have an arrest warrant out for him - it occurs to Blaine that what he's trying to get into is illegal, which actually makes it seem even more thrilling - and Blaine knows that while he's got fairly strong support on the ground from New Yorkers themselves, he probably still doesn't want to stay too long in any one place.
He's walking the edge of Central Park squinting at the map on his phone when it's snatched right out of his hands by a guy careening past on a bike. Blaine's too shocked at first to do anything but give a sort of startled yelp, knocked to the side to bang into a parked car, and the guy's speeding off quick, standing up on the pedals -
He doesn't think. It's the worst thing about himself, he knows, he just doesn't think. He snaps a shield up in front of the handlebars and the bike flips right over, the guy yells out, Blaine's phone goes sailing and bounces off the sidewalk. Blaine's breath stops before he gasps it out and runs over, oh hell he didn't mean to break the guy's neck -
He's making a long groaned noise on the ground, and a jogger's pulling her headphones out, picking up Blaine's cell. She holds it out to him, just a little scratched in the corner but miraculously unhurt. "You want me to call the cops?"
"Did you see what happened?" a man in a suit says, staring at the guy dragging himself up on his arms, cursing and touching his face. "What did he hit?"
"I - don't know." Blaine says, and his face feels scarlet, oh god he hopes they can't guess - "Just - lost control, I guess."
"Or our friendly neighbourhood Ghost stuck his foot out," the jogger says, and grins at him. And Blaine, after a startled pause, grins back.
*
So, the shields.
They're hexagonal, he doesn't know why, translucent but tinted green. He seems to be able to throw them up pretty much anywhere, to a really wide radius - he can surround himself, boxed safely into a blocky green-tinted globe, but he can also make them pop into existence at a distance, or he can fling them like discuses. He's practised with them, out in the middle of nowhere back in Ohio; they're incredibly smooth, he can skid along them like a path of ice, can even make himself a staircase to get off the ground. It's not exactly flying, but it's - it can be a pretty amazing view, even if that sometimes is distracting enough that he drops a shield and goes down with a yelp.
The thing is, to a kid from Ohio, becoming a superhero just belongs to another planet. Maybe kids who grew up in New York discover they've got some crazy power and they just know what they have to do with it, Blaine mostly wanted to just get by, he really didn't need the extra sense of isolation this gave him. Or at least until his first year of college, when reports of a new superhero in New York first appeared.
They didn't even know if he was a super, at first. For a while people genuinely believed he could be a ghost. Blaine got online, kept an eye on the sightings, became more than a little obsessed. Four years ago there was that firebombed building and that one photograph, iconic now like it had to be that way, like the world was waiting for that photograph to be taken, Blaine has it taped to the side of his computer monitor: the building still pouring flames in the background, a soot-smudged firefighter holding the oxygen cylinder and the Ghost, his body a little bowed, clasping the mask to his face. With the hood over the top half and the oxygen mask over the bottom half there's little of his face to be seen, it's just possible to make out that his eyes are closed, his mouth is open; that pale grey costume is blotched with smoke-stains, and there's still a small wisp of smoke coiling from a corner of his hanging cloak, where the material smouldered and crisped.
He kept going back in. He kept going back in to get people out until the building collapsed, and in the tributes people left for those who'd died, flowers stacked up on the sidewalk outside, people lit candles for the Ghost of New York as well. But three months later he stopped two superpowered girls from robbing a jewellery store and Blaine's sunken heart set sail again, he was alive alive alive and Commissioner Figgins put out the arrest warrant on him, as a vigilante setting a dangerous precedent. It was too late to call him a criminal, though, his 'fanghosts' loved him, New Yorkers were pleased he was back, nice to have another tourist attraction around in tough times . . .
He's a hero. He's Blaine's hero. He needed someone to point out the right path and he found him, and now he knows what he has to do, to make the admiration he gives him worth his receiving it, to make his power not a wasted gift, to help people. To help him. Because it's a big city and even ghosts must need a little help now and then.
And the news reports no sightings of the newly escaped Noah Puckerman in two days, but that's plenty of time for him to have reached the island by now . . .
*
"It needs to be adjustable," Kurt says, turning the design on his desk for Sophie to see. "I mean, we can make large medium and small ones but, people want to wear them on their waist or their hips, on top of bulky jeans or skintight skirts, you know? Use them how they want to use them. And they should be comfortable. Plus the better the fit the fewer problems with digging in if they get heavy. No-one wants saddlebag imprints on their hips from these things."
"You know they'll get heavy." She's making notes on her Blackberry. "You ever hefted a full handbag around all day?"
"Mm, not exactly. I can guess."
Sophie taps the dot at the end of the sentence and looks at him over her designer glasses. "You seriously want to market utility belts at women."
He shrugs, holds his hands out. "It's a vicious circle. Women's clothes don't have pockets. So women have to carry bags to put everything they need in, but because they always carry bags no-one bothers to add pockets to clothes. And just sticking pockets on doesn't make the same point. These are strong, they're sturdy, they're difficult to steal, it's easy as hell to pull a bag off someone's shoulder -"
"You're speaking from experience?"
He rolls his eyes to the ceiling. "I have girl friends. These make women feel competent and prepared and strong. We can make elegant little ones for eveningwear. Just a couple of pockets. Imagine how they'd look slung around a long dress -"
"Supers are a touchy subject, politically."
"Belts weren't illegal last time I checked."
"You know what these are saying. 'You too can be a superhero!'"
"What's so wrong with telling women that?"
She just keeps looking at him over her glasses, then looks down at her cell again. She breathes in slowly through her nose, lets it loose. "I'm not saying we didn't know what we were getting into when we hired you."
Kurt's portfolio of designs probably did stand out. High fashion bulletproof vests, Kevlar eveningwear, fireproof gowns. At interview he perched in his seat as poised as a stubborn sort of bird and said, Fashion is politics. What you put on your body is how you present yourself to the world and to yourself. Who doesn't want to feel safer and stronger and bolder? Everything is war paint. Every article of clothing speaks. And sometimes you need to wear something that yells 'I'm here and I'm strong'.
She narrows her eyes at him, then closes them, shrugs. "Okay. I like them. Don't get too excited, remember I'm the nice one, remember you have two more dragons to get through."
He tries not to bounce in his seat. "I look forward to hearing how begrudgingly they like them too."
She snorts the laugh, says, "Hell. You're not gonna start designing masks for daywear, right?"
"Nothing you'd have to take off to walk into a bank," he says, hands raised in surrender, eyes all wide and innocent, and she does laugh out loud that time.
The door to the junior designers' office opens and June puts her head in, her mouth sort of slack. "Sophie - on the news, have you seen the news?"
"No, June, my darling, I've been working. I'm glad things are so very quiet on the front desk, though."
"They're evacuating the area, Sophie, they want everyone out all the way up to Central Park -"
"What?"
Kurt puts his pen down, says sounding a lot more calm than the inner thrumming of his heart, "Why?"
June swallows. "That - that lizard-monster, he's back, he's out in the street tossing cars aside, they want everyone out of his way, there are police everywhere -"
Kurt scrapes his chair back, heads to the window, looks down just as three cop cars zip past, silent far below. One of the other junior designers, Chandler, comes to stand next to him to look down on the street - it's the closest he's stood to Kurt since their absolute disaster of an almost-maybe-oh-no-not-after-all-then, and he whispers under his breath, "Oh my god." Kurt swallows, arms folded around himself to keep himself small. Sophie's rubbing her eyes under her glasses.
"Evacuate to where? It's not here, can't we - oh hell, get into the basement, what do you do when Godzilla attacks? Kurt, are you okay? Sit down, you've gone pale."
"I'm always pale," he says, turning from the window, trying not to visibly lean away from Chandler. He swallows. "I - sorry. I -" Pick a lie, any lie, you need to be out of here an hour ago already. "I was - in the area last time he - I'm sorry, I just - you don't think he'll come here, right?"
He picks the 'scared kid from Ohio' card. He's twenty-three but he knows he looks younger and he knows he looks like a well-placed flick could knock him down; there are times when he needs people to pity him too much to resent their doing it so automatically.
"Oh hell." Sophie pulls her hands back through her hair, clipped up into a bun but escaping all over, fine black strands too fond of static. "Sit down. Do you want to - head down to the subway or something, they always say it's safer underground. They probably have people directing you to safe places out there anyway." She rubs her eyes again. "June, hit the fire alarm, we need to start moving people out."
"Out where?"
"Anywhere! Evacuation means out, there'll be cops down there directing us!"
Kurt slips out while their attention's busy, only Chandler starts to say something and then stops, and since there's only one guy further up the corridor with his back to him, as soon as he's out of sight of the doorway Kurt turns invisible and ghosts between floors. Somewhere under his office he left a bag and a spare costume he hoped he'd never have to use from work. He just needs somewhere safe to change in, he can follow the cop cars to the trouble, and it gnaws in his stomach, this, again, can he deal with this again - ?
No choice. Tie off and mask on in a storage closet, and yes, he knows what it means to wear clothing as if it's a weapon in his hands. In that cloak he doesn't doubt. Life is so much simpler from behind the mask . . .
*
'Puckzilla' is at a crossroads marked by a hovering helicopter, impassable now with crashed-over cars around its edges, and it's very possible that he's even bigger than he was last time. His t-shirt's torn ragged across his shoulders - lucky his hips are narrower, the pants are still holding up - his skin tinted green, scaled across his shoulders and back down to the long lashing tail behind him as he fists his clawed hands, puts back his frilled head and bellows, "C'mon out an' face me! Out in the daylight where everyone can see it, you face the Puckzilla like a man!"
"Like the man who kicked your ass last time," he mutters, standing arms folded and invisible with the cops, shielded behind two cars barricading the road. "What the hell is the point of this?"
He scans the cops and his heart gulps its beat, because there's Finn, uniform on with a gun in his hands, and the Ghost - hates being the Ghost in front of people who know him as Kurt. But then there's a reporter's van nearby, there are cameras aimed on Puckzilla and there is just no way this will be as secretive as his normal nighttime activity. He needs to keep his back to the cameras and stay invisible as much as he can, and protect Finn at all costs. He tugs his hood further over his face, walks through a car and into the empty ring surrounding Puckzilla, trying to breathe evenly.
"C'mon you spineless poltergeist, c'mon out and face me! Round two, let's go! You face me man to man, we'll settle this here an' now -"
He doesn't make himself visible yet; he just walks close enough, and raises his voice. "We already settled it, Noah, we settled it by me putting you in jail. What the hell are you doing?"
His head snaps around but he can't see the Ghost, who just folds his arms and waits. "-hell are you, sneakin' around like a coward, you don't dare face me -"
"Okay," the Ghost says evenly. "How about you stop being a giant monster lizard and I'll stop being a ghost, and then we can make this more even. Settle it over Mario Kart or something."
"C'mon an' fight me, Casper."
The Ghost just watches him. "Noah, you know how this ends. You know that being absurdly strong is no good against me. Why are you doing this, what are you going to achieve?"
Puck's sort of guessed where the Ghost is now by his voice, so as his eyes settle around him, the Ghost circles him a little, and turns intangible for good measure, just the soles of his boots on the road to hold him up. "You know where you put me, man? You know what it's like in there?"
"You robbed a bank, what did you think would happen if you got caught, that people would be disappointed in you and ask you to do better next time?"
"People laughed!" he roars, spinning to follow the Ghost's moving voice. "At me! Getting knocked down by some puny punk in a hallowe'en costume! Well y'know what, this time it's different, this time I spent all that time behind bars thinkin' how you bring down someone too gutless to stand there an' get punched -"
"Yes, clearly I am really so very cowardly when I don't just stand there and let the genetically modified monster punch me in the face."
Puckzilla's muscles flex in his shoulders, his frill falls and raises again, and he reaches into the pocket of his jeans, pulls out a book of matches. "What'd you think all those totalled cars were for?"
"What are you-"
He lights a match, and sets fire to the box. And then he tosses it - a bright arc in the sky - at a crumpled car belly-up across two lanes, resting in a little puddle of gasoline. It goes up with the softest noise, like a flumping duvet of flame. The Ghost goes stiff because he has reasons not to like fire, but Puckzilla's got another box of matches, and he's turning for another smashed car.
Puckerman has halfway thought this through, because even intangible the Ghost feels heat and needs to breathe, that fire is still dangerous to him. But he can ghost straight down and it's other people who're in danger if this whole area goes up, and Finn is behind those cop cars.
He runs at him, springs, his swiping hand ghosts the matches through Puckzilla's hand and he roars, grabbing after the Ghost's cloak as he drops into sight and drops right through the surface of the road. He leaves the matches down there, turns and kicks and hauls himself through the solid surface, coming up with a gasp - no air inside solid objects - behind Puckzilla, who's already got another car alight, boxing off two sides of the road now. The Ghost braces his weight on his hands and rolls out of the range of Puck's whipping tail, legs cartwheeling, back onto the road's surface. "You are going to kill people!"
"People who stuck me in jail, like they care about me, they put me in chains like an animal-"
"Maybe they wouldn't do that if you didn't do this when you're not chained up!"
"No-one cares about me! No-one cares about the Puckzilla!"
"You might garner more sympathy by not referring to yourself in the third person," the Ghost says, and Puckzilla roars, and punches his hand into the surface of the street. The Ghost blinks, backs away as he wrenches his hand free pulling wiring out with it, stretching and snapping it, peeling it out of the surface of the road like a varicose vein.
"What are you -?"
He punches down again, and this time the thick cable he drags out spits and bangs and crawls with electricity, and his hand shakes a little but he gives no indication of feeling it. "Here you go, spooky. The Puckasaurus Rex feels no pain. How about you come over here an' feel what it's like."
He's frozen. Puckzilla's as strong as a number of oxes and really not much brighter, but bright enough to know that strength means nothing if you can't connect with the person you're trying to punch - the ghost you're trying to punch. But there are a few things the Ghost is horribly, horribly vulnerable to, and he knows it. One is air, he still needs to breathe, and getting trapped in something solid, or inhaling too much of something like the Pink Dagger's poison gas, could still kill him. Another is fire, in too high temperatures - or too low - if he lost consciousness he'd be done for. And the third -
He got tasered, once. Rescued a woman from a mugging and wild with fear she had no intention of waiting to find out why he'd rescued her; he woke up to a couple of bystanders debating what the hell to do with him, can you call an ambulance for a superhero? with his head resting on a girl's rolled-up jacket. She was kind, helped him up while his legs barely worked and he was embarrassed as much as still hopelessly weak.
Even ghosting, electricity will hurt him. And he has no way of bringing Puckzilla down without being in close range, he needs to touch him to haunt him, nothing physical hurts him but if the Ghost can get a hand to his head then he can press all the terror in the world into him and that, that will knock him out -
If he can get past that sparking line of electricity in his hand.
He licks his lips, tries to think what to do.
And then he becomes aware of shouting to the side, glances over at the cops just as a voice he knows yells, "No you can't-!" and they open fire. He instinctively puts an arm over his face even though, ghosting, the best the bullets do is buzz through him; he hears them thump off Puckzilla's hide without even drawing blood, and then someone is yelling at 'Officer Hudson', and one of the burning cars explodes.
His ears ring. He's face down on the road, pressing himself up on his arms, intangible so a burning tyre bounces right through him and away and he sucks his breath in at the heat of it. Puckzilla's caught half of one of the seats, its stuffing burning such bright orange, lobbing it at the kneeling Ghost with a triumphant snarl.
It hits something green in the air in front of the Ghost's face and bounces back. He stares, heart throbbing in his ears, at the clear green hexagon just there in the air before it vanishes, and then he sees the figure in black making its way towards them, across the empty road. It's a kid. It has to be a kid because it's too damn short for a man and what the hell -
"Fuckin' interlopers, get back in the bleachers." Puckzilla mutters, and spins so tight his tail lashes out like a whip. The Ghost springs forward but he'd never be quick enough, he would never have got there in time, and he doesn't even need to because that tail strikes off more of those green hexagons, tessellating neatly together like a honeycomb shield at the side of the boy in black. Puckzilla staggers at the force of his own strike bouncing off the shield, hands fisting, growling now as he faces this new player. And all the Ghost can think is, What the hell is he doing?
Puckzilla's tail snaps behind him, his frill raises and flattens dangerously. "This is between me an' the spook, kid, go find somewhere less annoying to be emo."
He's got his hood up and some kind of ski mask on under it. Amateur hero, the Ghost thinks, groaning softly out loud. At least he actually has some kind of powers but oh god he is going to get himself killed, and more people if this can't be contained. But Puckzilla has his back to him now, and maybe this is all he needed . . .
The kid says, sounding cheerful if just a little shaky, "Excuse me but you are about four times his size, I'm just trying to even the odds out a little, otherwise it just looks like bullying."
"Bullying," Puckzilla snorts. "If you mean stronger guys pounding weaker guys, that's how the world works."
"I mean not picking on someone who weighs about as much as your leg. Though, uh, not picking on anyone at all would be really nice."
The Ghost walks towards Puckzilla, quite slowly. He dropped that electricity cable when the gunshots were fired, and it's laying between the two of them; he tries to give it a wide berth, fades out of sight again, watches carefully as the human lizard and the kid in black talk.
"'Nice'." Puckzilla says, sounding as impressed as he might be at gum on the sidewalk.
The kid in black shrugs. "What's wrong with being nice?"
"Nice." His voice is more of a snarl now, as the Ghost pauses a leap away from him, considering his moment. "Nice like gettin' experimented on by whackos in white coats until they do this to you? Nice like not bein' able to find a job or a place or a girl who doesn't freak out, nice like bein' treated like a monster before you ever even did anything wrong -"
He feels a low inner twinge; fighting a monster is one thing. Fighting a victim? Okay he's a victim who's intent on taking his victimhood out on other people, but - what is the Ghost for if not standing up for victims . . . ?
The kid in black doesn't know what to say either, just stands there with his mouth a little open and hands in loose fists at his sides, maybe becoming aware that even beyond the obvious he is in over his head with this. And the Ghost swallows, he doesn't have a lot of time for intricate ethical reflection, lives are at stake and another one of those cars could go at any given moment. He can find a way to talk to Puckzilla some other time; right now he just needs everyone to be safe.
He fades back into view behind Puck's shoulder, slipping his hands out from inside his cloak, preparing to jump. And the kid's eyes flick immediately to him.
Idiot.
Puckzilla turns with a roar, the Ghost instinctively leaps back instead of forwards and Puck's long tail slashes through his hastily ghosting body. The kid yelps out and runs forward and Puck - just keeps spinning, the Ghost can only yell, "No-!" but his tail's already whipped the kid in the side, smacking him sideways with a skid-stumble-thunk into the side of a car. No time: the Ghost leaps.
He lands on Puckzilla's broad back, grabs his shoulder and kicks himself right over his head as his claws grab after him; looking upside-down into his face the Ghost whispers, "I'm sorry," and ghosts a hand right through his head.
He did this to himself, once. He needed to know what it is that he does to people, what damage he might be doing. He locked his bedroom door and sat on the edge of the bed and drew his breath in, and he haunted himself. Ghosted his hand through his own head, haunted himself.
He woke up on his bedroom floor, cold.
It's fear. It's fear like a physical force, cold and crippling, fear so the heart stops and breath stops and brain stops, terror so strong the mind and body cut out, fear beyond death and pain, nothing but fear. The purity of it can't be coped with: most people black out within a couple of seconds. Some of them don't even make a sound.
Most of them do.
He's still falling as Puckerman screams, face-down to the road. He ghosts right through it, kicks and turns himself, thrusts himself back into the light; Puckerman is staggering sideways, hands clutching at his face, his chest, and then he sags to his knees - skin turning a warmer tanned shade, body becoming smaller, tail shrinking in - and collapses on his side. He looks just like a guy, then, just some guy with a mohawk instead of a frill, helpless on the floor with his eyes closed and mouth open.
The kid in black is on his knees next to the car, holding himself up by the door. The Ghost runs over, crouches next to him - "Can you stand up? Are you okay to stand up?"
"Whuh. I." He squints up at the Ghost and says, "Oh god it's really you."
He knows the cops will be coming for them, he knows Finn can't risk himself in slowing them down. "Can you walk. This is important."
"Yeah. I'm fine. Yeah." He stands up far too quickly and staggers, and the Ghost grabs his arm, stands with him.
"Hold onto me and hold your breath."
"What?"
One of the cops shouts, "Stay right where you are, hands where we can see them!"
The Ghost snaps at him, "Hold your breath." and ghosts straight down, pulling the boy with him. He starts a yelp but thankfully does catch a breath in and hold it before they're underground, cool dark silent, and the Ghost slips them lower, lets them fall that sleep-slow falling through solidity, you're never too long underground in New York without hitting a pocket of - a basement, a subway tunnel, a sewer even, something -
His searching hand finds open space underneath them and he slips his head through, emptiness, can't see a thing until he fumbles his flashlight free; disused subway platform, even better. He tugs at the boy's hand, twists himself feet down and ghosts them through. They drop so much faster, the boy manages to get his yelp out before the Ghost lets them drop just into the platform's surface, then hauls them back again onto solid ground. He holds him by the shoulders because he's shaking, clipping the flashlight one-handed back into his belt to illuminate the graffiti on the tiles and cast their shadows huge on the ceiling. "I am going to take you to a doctor. But first of all tell me what the hell you think you were doing."
The boy coughs and says, "Helping."
The rage in him is like a fist inside his chest, he can hardly breathe around it. He grabs the ski mask at the forehead and rips it off - the boy yells, "Hey-!" and the Ghost tosses it to the side, snaps at him, "You will get yourself killed, do you have any idea -"
He's about his age, older than he'd expected, and sturdier-built than he'd expected under those baggy clothes. He's blinking at him - brown eyes, wide and childlike, cute nose, frankly ridiculous eyebrows, one of them a little clotted with blood from the cut on his head where he must have met that car head-on. The Ghost repeats, slower, harder, "You will get yourself killed. I do not want to see you in a mask out there again. I'm taking you to a doctor and then I'm taking you home and you never so much as -"
"I want to help, I have this -" He waves a hand and little green hexagons flare into life in the air around his gesture and vanish again. "- can't I help?"
"By headbutting cars? How much do you think you helped?"
"I stopped that chair hitting you!"
"It wouldn't have hit me! I'm the Ghost!" He's all but screaming at him now. "This is not a game! It is not fun! If you want to be a hero then volunteer at a homeless shelter, don't put a mask on!"
"Wh- you do it! Why can't I?"
His breath snorts out of him, he doesn't have the energy for it. "Fine. Get yourself killed. Just try to do it during the daytime and not on my watch." He unclips the flashlight, takes the boy's wrist - he tries to pull it back but the Ghost just grabs it tighter. "I am taking you to a doctor, you're probably concussed. Come on. We'll hit a working station sooner or later."
"I'm fine! I don't -"
The Ghost turns them for the platform and the guy's arm suddenly goes slack under his grip; he turns as quickly as he can, catches his shoulders as he pants at the platform, saying quietly with each too-much breath, "Okay, okay, I'm okay-"
"You're concussed. Breathe. I know a doctor."
"Can't we - hospital?"
"You just put a mask on, showed off your powers and picked a fight with a supervillain. You walk into a hospital, you might as well wave a flag that says arrest me. Come on. We'll go slow. I know a doctor, it's okay."
The guy's still for a moment, breathing at the floor, head down. Then he swallows, and nods, and lifts his head slow and struggling. "Okay."
The Ghost helps him down onto the tracks. "Don't worry about any trains. Just hold onto me, I'll ghost us through."
"This is."
"Mm?"
"Not what I -"
". . . what?"
"Imagined. Not what I imagined."
What did he think superheroing involved, tickertape parades? He just holds his wrist and keeps walking down the track, and says because it's probably a good idea to keep him talking, "What did you imagine?"
"Don't know. Not this. It smells of pee down here."
The laugh comes out of him too sharp, he stifles it too late. When he glances back, the guy's grinning, and it's hard to make his own mouth lie flat. "What's your name?"
"I hadn't picked one yet."
"What? Your real name."
"Should I be telling you that? Like, secret identities and everything?"
"You are not becoming a superhero, you do not need a secret identity. And I need something to call you, you at least know what to call me."
"Um. I -" He rubs his forehead, squinting his eyes closed. "Your number one fan? Did I just say that out loud?"
The Ghost rolls his eyes, keeps walking. "I am not calling you that."
"I." Their footsteps echo off the walls, too loud here in the dark. "I really . . . I really admire you, you know that? I read about everything you do, I -"
"You don't read about everything I do."
"Everything anyone knows about. I follow all the blogs, I just - you know, when you're just some nobody from Ohio with this freakish thing you can do, and you see someone doing something as amazing as what you do? It just - it makes it feel like - like I understand what I'm for, now, you know?"
He wants to say, Where in Ohio? but unlike his new friend Concussed McRamblyson, the Ghost actually does understand how to work a secret identity. "That's what you do? Make little - shield-things?"
"Yeah. Like, I can do other things with them. I kind of think I shouldn't right now, I don't feel." He rubs one eye. "Well."
"Just keep putting one foot in front of the other."
Silence for a few steps, and just before the Ghost tries to prompt him back into speech so he can tell how far gone he is, the guy says, "I really can't believe it's you."
He just holds his wrist, keeps walking. The guy pulls at his arm, loosens his grip to take his gloved hand instead, and the Ghost would object but - but. He doesn't know. He's not right in the head and he's apparently an enormous super-groupie. It's somewhere between weird and cute, and it's not like it's going to kill him to hold the guy's hand.
It's been a while since anyone wanted to hold his hand. He tries not to think about that while his face heats under the mask.
"You smell good," the groupie says. "They never say that on the blogs."
Oh god, he could laugh again. "Don't make me leave you down here."
"Oh my god, does that like, compromise your identity? Now I've smelled you?"
"I smell like sweat and subway."
"Hey," the guy says, pulling his hand. "I could blackmail you. You have to teach me superheroing or else I'll tell the whole internet what you smell like."
"No, please, that will entirely collapse my secret identity," he says in a monotone. Then, "What do I smell like?"
The guy sniffs at his shoulder, and the Ghost tries not to jump. "Laundry and shampoo and . . . good sweat, the kind makes you hungry."
Don't say anything, just keep walking.
Groupie pulls at his hand again. "Will you teach me how to be a superhero?"
"No. There's a light ahead, be quiet, I can make us invisible but people will notice disembodied voices climbing onto a platform."
"Are we going to take the subway to this doctor?"
"You can tell them to add it to the charge sheet. Vigilanteism and skipping subway fares."
"Oh my god, you are such a supervillain."
He really wants to laugh, again, squeezes the guy's hand instead. "Shut up."
*
He hauls groupie up the fire escape to the second floor, which is not fun, then knocks on the window there. It's getting dark by now, late afternoon in autumn, and there's light behind the blinds. After a moment they peel aside, and then the girl inside grins and unlatches the security bars so he can swing them out. "Mike! We have a visitor! God, what happened? Who's he?"
"A groupie with a bashed head." He helps him climb over the window ledge into Tina's arms, where he staggers and folds, and sits there on her bedroom floor looking dazed. The bedroom door opens and Mike stares in at them, then hurries over and crouches in front of groupie, who props himself on a hand and holds the other to his forehead, and says, "Ow."
"Okay, watch my finger." Mike says, immediately holding him by the arm and holding a finger up in front of his crossing eyes. "What's your name?"
The Ghost flips open the wallet he just ghosted from the guy's back pocket. "His name's Blaine. You seriously put on a mask and then took ID out with you?"
"How did y-" Blaine swings his head to look at the Ghost and then groans, grits his teeth, turns it slowly back to Mike who says, "Okay Blaine, easy, come sit down and I'll clean that cut. What happened to him?"
"He got between me and a dinosaur." The Ghost sits on the window ledge, dropping Blaine's wallet onto the bed where Mike gets him sitting, then heads out for his medical kit. Tina stares at him, then back at the Ghost.
"That's the guy? I watched on the news, that's the guy with the shield-things?"
Blaine says plaintively, "You are a walking spoiler for my secret identity."
"You don't have a secret identity, you are not a superhero!"
"Only because you won't help," Blaine says, like the Ghost is being so unreasonable in trying to save his admittedly quite admirable ass. "I'm learning, I can get better -"
Mike's back in the room with a small briefcase, snapping it open on the bed. "Tina, can you get me some hot water?"
"I'm on it," she says, immediately out of the door. They make a great team, Tina the artist and Mike the junior doctor, and an adorable couple, and mostly the Ghost manages to feel fond rather than jealous. Honestly, mostly, he does.
Blaine winces his eyes open, says, "Is this going to hurt?"
The Ghost swings his boots a little. "I would like to nominate a further reason why you would make a terrible superhero."
"What, it stings, no-one likes it!"
"It'll only hurt a little bit," Mike promises, as Tina walks back in with a bowl of steaming water, putting it on top of the book on the bedside table. Mike wets some cotton wool and then pours some antiseptic on it. "Hold still . . ."
Blaine hardens his jaw and makes no sound as Mike cleans the cut, apparently determined to prove that he can too be a superhero. And the Ghost presses his mouth closed not to laugh and keeps his eyes on one of Tina's prints on the wall, a tangle of graffiti in shades of dark grey with the white shape of a hooded cloak just right of the middle of it, like the outline of a ghost; that white cloak stands out like an angel in an annunciation. He sees them all over the city. They look like distorted up-ended goldfish, but he appreciates the gesture.
"Are you okay?" Tina says, and touches his arm. "He didn't hurt you?"
He twitches a smile at her. "I'm fine."
Eyes screwed up and jaw held tight, Blaine says, "So how do you guys know him?"
"He saved my life once," Tina says, standing up and hooking her long black hair over her shoulders again. "I was getting a photograph - that one, actually -" Pointing at another print of a wall of graffiti, black corrugated iron covered in a cacophony of tags, with one white hooded cloak in the bottom corner of it like the artist's initials - "when some guys who were drunk or high or just crazy shoved me into the wall and . . . he walked me home, he's a gentleman like that," and she grins at him and the Ghost holds one arm to himself and drops a half-bow from his seat on the windowsill - "and Mike said if he ever needed help we'd be here for him."
"Someone's going to have to sit with him all night," Mike says, because Mike is sensitive to his secrecy and doesn't want any details about what the Ghost might have needed them for coming out in this conversation, dropping the used cotton wool in the trash can under Tina's desk. "He can sleep on our couch."
"No, no no, I have to get home, my brother - he'll go nuts if I don't come home, you have no idea, I can't -"
"This is what I mean," the Ghost says patiently, "when I tell you that you have not thought this superhero thing through."
"He'll call our mom. I can't stay out all night." He screws his eyes closed again. "God this is embarrassing, I don't think I have ever been so humiliated in my life, and I once serenaded a guy in the GAP."
"If concussion leads to you vomiting personal information to anyone who will listen, again, please rethink the superheroing." The Ghost sighs, and stands up. "I'll take him home, I'll sit with him. All night?"
"Wake him up every half hour. Call me if you're not sure about him."
Blaine says, "Wait, what's happening now?"
"Now you're giving me your address. Do you have enough in there for a cab?" He points at Blaine's wallet on the bed. "I am really too tired to run you home invisible on the subways."
"You're coming home with me?"
"Consider your secret identity well and truly blown. It's okay, I'm good at keeping secrets." He smiles, and Blaine looks up at him, looking wary and young and - okay, there is no harm in admitting that he's good looking. He has no love life to speak of, he can hardly be blamed for noticing that this guy is unfairly handsome for an idiot. "If you actually want to be a superhero then you really need to understand how much of it involves walking people home, sitting with crying drunks while their friends come to find them, sitting with people on bad trips until the ambulance comes for them, sitting with scared store assistants surrounded by busted glass until the cops come. There is a very surprising amount of sitting."
Blaine says, like he is struggling so hard to understand this, "You're going to sit with me?"
He narrows his eyes at him, not sure quite how much of a supergroupie fantasy he's walking into here. "Anything weird and I haunt you, cuff you and leave you. Understand?"
He holds his hands up, innocent and blinking and increasingly delighted, and really, really, he needs to stop making him want to laugh . . .
*
It's a nicer apartment building than the one he shares with Rachel. He stands invisible at Blaine's shoulder in the elevator, murmurs, "Fancy." and Blaine squirms an awkward shrug.
"It's my brother's. He's an actor."
He almost asks if he would know him from anything, but everything risks skating too close to who he really is. He bites his tongue, and watches the numbers creep up.
Walking down the corridor Blaine says, "Are you still there?"
"Right here." He touches Blaine's arm and feels his muscles tighten and drop again, and he pulls his hand back. "Don't talk to me until we're inside."
Blaine nods, finds a door and goes through his keys, unlocks it. It's dark inside, his brother must be out. Blaine's standing there holding the door open long after the Ghost's walked inside. "Are you still there?"
From behind his shoulder he says, "Close the damn door, Blaine."
Blaine jumps, snaps the light on, stares wildly around him for a second and then closes the door. "Okay, I can see why criminals are terrified of you."
"Yes, I'm just that scary." He fades back into view, and looks over the open-plan kitchen-lounge, pale carpets, dark wood and black panelling, the wide-windowed view of the skyline. He has to turn his head back to look at Blaine, the hood cuts out most of his peripheral vision - he's intangible as often as not in costume, so he's okay with risking the edges of his sight to keep his face more hidden - and Blaine is just watching him, mouth just a little open, with tape over the cut on his forehead and the bruise now growing all the way down to his eye, he'll have a hell of a shiner from it. He looks away, because Blaine's attention is just too much. "Do you want to sleep now?"
"I - dunno. Yeah, I'm pretty - tired."
"Which is your bedroom? Get - get changed or, just let me know when you're - ready."
He doesn't know why he's embarrassed. He's done enough things like this before, he's even had to ghost out of the arms of a rescued guy a little overwilling to show his appreciation more than once (a couple of women too, adding an extra layer of embarrassment), but something about this boy makes him so aware of himself under the suit, like he's more on view than he possibly can be. But Blaine just nods, and pulls a hand through his hair, and looks tired. "There's soda and stuff in the fridge, help yourself." he says, and drags his feet off to one of the doors at the side, turning the light on as he goes in.
For a moment, he just stands there holding his arms to himself, feeling very self-conscious. Then he walks to the closed door, taps on it and says through it, "If I make coffee do you want one?"
Blaine makes a negative noise through the door, muffled; he must have that hoodie up over his head. He tries very hard not to think about that, goes and pokes at the sleek black coffee machine for a while, finds the sugar in the fourth cupboard. They have three different kinds of breakfast cereal. Strange little intimacies, being in someone else's kitchen.
The door opens again. "You can come in," Blaine says, looking even younger in t-shirt and pyjama pants, bare feet on the floor. "Or are you gonna wait out here all night? I don't know how this . . ."
"I'll sit with you. Not to be the angel of doom or anything but you could still throw up and choke yourself, the night is young." He walks to him and Blaine looks sleepily up at his face - he tucks his chin in a little under the hood in the hope that the shadow will fall further over him - and then Blaine takes the cup off him, which he's too surprised to stop him doing. He takes a sip, then smiles.
"Sugar and cream." He hands it back. "I promise not to tell anyone how you take your coffee."
"You are such a little stalker," the Ghost mutters, following him into his bedroom. Which.
Is a bit.
Blaine stands there in the middle of the floor, then says, "It has only just occurred to me exactly how creepy this might seem to you."
There's a black and white poster over the bed of him leaping from the edge of a building, cloak blooming darkly, suit pale in the light; all around the desk, taped to the walls, are photographs and photographs clipped from magazines and newspapers, his own pixelated half-hidden face two dozen times, columns of news stories, blaring headlines, GHOST PREVENTS BANK HEIST, SAVED BY A GHOST, 68% OF NEW YORKERS SAY GHOST IS GREAT -
At any second you want, he tells himself, you can ghost right through the floor and never return to this demented nest of fanatical groupiedom ever, ever again.
He says again, as calmly as he can, "You are such a little stalker." and walks to the desk chair, rolls it over to the bed. "Get in. Please just go to sleep, it's already been a long day."
Blaine climbs into the bed, slots his legs in under the covers. "Do you have a day job? Can you manage a day job and still be up all night saving lives?"
"Secret identity," he says, and closes his eyes, drinks his coffee.
"I wouldn't tell anyone. You can trust me."
"No I can't. I met you four hours ago. I don't know the first thing about you."
"You know a lot more about me than I know about you." Blaine shrugs, swallows. "You know more about me than anyone does. I haven't told anybody about the shields. Not even - no-one."
He opens his eyes, watches him from over his cup. "Why?"
Blaine flicks his eyes away. "You know. You know. Don't you? When you first find out it's - Jesus, weren't you scared? It's like your body doesn't belong to you anymore, you don't know who you are anymore, not now you can do this . . ."
He keeps his eyes calmly on his, and takes a sip of coffee, and says nothing. Blaine licks his lips.
"I've never met anyone else who can . . . I wish you would just believe that you can trust me. Why would I want to hurt you? I'm -"
"Don't say you're my biggest fan again. Please. I've seen the pictures, I believe you. Just lay down and go to sleep."
Blaine wriggles down onto his side, but he doesn't close his eyes. "How did you find out what you could do?"
"Secret identity, Blaine."
"That's not fair."
"Such is life."
"You sound better than you do in the audios online," he murmurs, eyes drooping now. "Your voice. S'nice."
He just sighs, and drinks more coffee. Coffee, he decides, is the only really good thing in his life right now. If it wasn't for coffee he would have nothing left to live for. Well, no. His dad. And really good cheesecake. But mostly just coffee . . .
Blaine seems to be quiet, for now, so the Ghost checks his cell - he has one for each costume, set up so Finn can track their location, just in case - and lays it on his thigh to keep an eye on the time (every half hour, this is going to be a long night). His eyes trace over the room, he didn't even know half these photos existed, he googles himself as often as he dares because he needs to know what's out there, he needs to control his exposure, but -
Well, as much as anything else, between infuriating articles labelling him a dangerous criminal and the goddamn fanfiction, he really just doesn't want to know.
Taped to the side of the computer monitor is the photograph he couldn't avoid, on the front cover of every newspaper and magazine, when he was still bandaged and rasping and aching from it. That burning building, that firefighter who caught him as he staggered out maybe the sixth or seventh time, while the others carted to an ambulance the man he'd just ghosted through after himself and the firefighter didn't even ask him if he needed it, just held his shoulder and held the mask up to his face. And he sucked it down, clamped a hand greedily over the mask, clinically clean air, it made him dizzy.
Then the firefighter said, Fuck, kid, how old are you? and he said, I don't know how many more are in there. and turned around, his cloak intangible through the man's grabbing fingers, and ran back for the building.
"I read about that," Blaine's voice slurs softly from the bed, low at the edge of sleep. "Bravest thing I ever heard anyone do. They said you went back in thirteen times."
He remembers the screaming and the agony of heat and the choking solidity of the air, heat-blind, smoke-blind, fumbling for another living body through broken, burning timber. He remembers the floor collapsing under him, desperate hands slipping through his as he fell, he remembers yelling to someone that everything was okay and ghosting through metal so hot it seared him, and he remembers only the sound of the ceiling coming down. He remembers waking up in a sub-basement, cheek to cold concrete, wet from the hose-water running through, not understanding why no-one had come to help him before he realised that no-one ever does come to rescue the hero. That's what 'hero' means.
He says, because it's the darkest thought to come back to him on all the darkest nights, "There were a lot more than thirteen people in that building."
Blaine doesn't say anything. The Ghost doesn't look back to him to see if he's still awake. He swallows, and looks away from that photograph, and this is as close to a quiet night in as he's ever likely to get . . .
Part 3
Disclaimer: I accept no responsibility for canon. It isn't mine.
Rating: R? Mostly for violence. Be wary of the violence, kids, go read Cardcaptor Sakura instead <3
Warnings: 1. I HEREBY DECLARE THIS AN S4 SPOILER- AND WANK-FREE ZONE. Seriously fucking *god* I don't even want to hear it. LEAVE IT AT THE DOOR. 2. All warnings from the first part apply, do read that thoroughly first <3
Summary: Define 'help'.
The first time Blaine goes out, shades on under his hoodie and a ski mask in his back pocket, knee and elbow pads on under his baggier-than-usual black outfit, he doesn't come across any trouble at all. He wanders the city until nearly midnight and doesn't see so much as someone flipping someone else off. When the hell did New Yorkers get so nice?
Cooper's just back from a performance, and Blaine shrugs and says he was getting a drink with people, then trawls the internet for Ghost-sightings for a while. Someone's put a photograph up of the corner of what could be a cloak slipping out of sight around a wall but Blaine's inclined to agree with the commenters, it's more likely a plastic bag.
The next day he walks around with his iPhone out, trying to work out the Ghost's geography of the city. He seems to turn up all over the island, though, Tribeca to Harlem, there's no centre to the sightings. Maybe he's wise enough not to stick to a single neighbourhood. The police still have an arrest warrant out for him - it occurs to Blaine that what he's trying to get into is illegal, which actually makes it seem even more thrilling - and Blaine knows that while he's got fairly strong support on the ground from New Yorkers themselves, he probably still doesn't want to stay too long in any one place.
He's walking the edge of Central Park squinting at the map on his phone when it's snatched right out of his hands by a guy careening past on a bike. Blaine's too shocked at first to do anything but give a sort of startled yelp, knocked to the side to bang into a parked car, and the guy's speeding off quick, standing up on the pedals -
He doesn't think. It's the worst thing about himself, he knows, he just doesn't think. He snaps a shield up in front of the handlebars and the bike flips right over, the guy yells out, Blaine's phone goes sailing and bounces off the sidewalk. Blaine's breath stops before he gasps it out and runs over, oh hell he didn't mean to break the guy's neck -
He's making a long groaned noise on the ground, and a jogger's pulling her headphones out, picking up Blaine's cell. She holds it out to him, just a little scratched in the corner but miraculously unhurt. "You want me to call the cops?"
"Did you see what happened?" a man in a suit says, staring at the guy dragging himself up on his arms, cursing and touching his face. "What did he hit?"
"I - don't know." Blaine says, and his face feels scarlet, oh god he hopes they can't guess - "Just - lost control, I guess."
"Or our friendly neighbourhood Ghost stuck his foot out," the jogger says, and grins at him. And Blaine, after a startled pause, grins back.
*
So, the shields.
They're hexagonal, he doesn't know why, translucent but tinted green. He seems to be able to throw them up pretty much anywhere, to a really wide radius - he can surround himself, boxed safely into a blocky green-tinted globe, but he can also make them pop into existence at a distance, or he can fling them like discuses. He's practised with them, out in the middle of nowhere back in Ohio; they're incredibly smooth, he can skid along them like a path of ice, can even make himself a staircase to get off the ground. It's not exactly flying, but it's - it can be a pretty amazing view, even if that sometimes is distracting enough that he drops a shield and goes down with a yelp.
The thing is, to a kid from Ohio, becoming a superhero just belongs to another planet. Maybe kids who grew up in New York discover they've got some crazy power and they just know what they have to do with it, Blaine mostly wanted to just get by, he really didn't need the extra sense of isolation this gave him. Or at least until his first year of college, when reports of a new superhero in New York first appeared.
They didn't even know if he was a super, at first. For a while people genuinely believed he could be a ghost. Blaine got online, kept an eye on the sightings, became more than a little obsessed. Four years ago there was that firebombed building and that one photograph, iconic now like it had to be that way, like the world was waiting for that photograph to be taken, Blaine has it taped to the side of his computer monitor: the building still pouring flames in the background, a soot-smudged firefighter holding the oxygen cylinder and the Ghost, his body a little bowed, clasping the mask to his face. With the hood over the top half and the oxygen mask over the bottom half there's little of his face to be seen, it's just possible to make out that his eyes are closed, his mouth is open; that pale grey costume is blotched with smoke-stains, and there's still a small wisp of smoke coiling from a corner of his hanging cloak, where the material smouldered and crisped.
He kept going back in. He kept going back in to get people out until the building collapsed, and in the tributes people left for those who'd died, flowers stacked up on the sidewalk outside, people lit candles for the Ghost of New York as well. But three months later he stopped two superpowered girls from robbing a jewellery store and Blaine's sunken heart set sail again, he was alive alive alive and Commissioner Figgins put out the arrest warrant on him, as a vigilante setting a dangerous precedent. It was too late to call him a criminal, though, his 'fanghosts' loved him, New Yorkers were pleased he was back, nice to have another tourist attraction around in tough times . . .
He's a hero. He's Blaine's hero. He needed someone to point out the right path and he found him, and now he knows what he has to do, to make the admiration he gives him worth his receiving it, to make his power not a wasted gift, to help people. To help him. Because it's a big city and even ghosts must need a little help now and then.
And the news reports no sightings of the newly escaped Noah Puckerman in two days, but that's plenty of time for him to have reached the island by now . . .
*
"It needs to be adjustable," Kurt says, turning the design on his desk for Sophie to see. "I mean, we can make large medium and small ones but, people want to wear them on their waist or their hips, on top of bulky jeans or skintight skirts, you know? Use them how they want to use them. And they should be comfortable. Plus the better the fit the fewer problems with digging in if they get heavy. No-one wants saddlebag imprints on their hips from these things."
"You know they'll get heavy." She's making notes on her Blackberry. "You ever hefted a full handbag around all day?"
"Mm, not exactly. I can guess."
Sophie taps the dot at the end of the sentence and looks at him over her designer glasses. "You seriously want to market utility belts at women."
He shrugs, holds his hands out. "It's a vicious circle. Women's clothes don't have pockets. So women have to carry bags to put everything they need in, but because they always carry bags no-one bothers to add pockets to clothes. And just sticking pockets on doesn't make the same point. These are strong, they're sturdy, they're difficult to steal, it's easy as hell to pull a bag off someone's shoulder -"
"You're speaking from experience?"
He rolls his eyes to the ceiling. "I have girl friends. These make women feel competent and prepared and strong. We can make elegant little ones for eveningwear. Just a couple of pockets. Imagine how they'd look slung around a long dress -"
"Supers are a touchy subject, politically."
"Belts weren't illegal last time I checked."
"You know what these are saying. 'You too can be a superhero!'"
"What's so wrong with telling women that?"
She just keeps looking at him over her glasses, then looks down at her cell again. She breathes in slowly through her nose, lets it loose. "I'm not saying we didn't know what we were getting into when we hired you."
Kurt's portfolio of designs probably did stand out. High fashion bulletproof vests, Kevlar eveningwear, fireproof gowns. At interview he perched in his seat as poised as a stubborn sort of bird and said, Fashion is politics. What you put on your body is how you present yourself to the world and to yourself. Who doesn't want to feel safer and stronger and bolder? Everything is war paint. Every article of clothing speaks. And sometimes you need to wear something that yells 'I'm here and I'm strong'.
She narrows her eyes at him, then closes them, shrugs. "Okay. I like them. Don't get too excited, remember I'm the nice one, remember you have two more dragons to get through."
He tries not to bounce in his seat. "I look forward to hearing how begrudgingly they like them too."
She snorts the laugh, says, "Hell. You're not gonna start designing masks for daywear, right?"
"Nothing you'd have to take off to walk into a bank," he says, hands raised in surrender, eyes all wide and innocent, and she does laugh out loud that time.
The door to the junior designers' office opens and June puts her head in, her mouth sort of slack. "Sophie - on the news, have you seen the news?"
"No, June, my darling, I've been working. I'm glad things are so very quiet on the front desk, though."
"They're evacuating the area, Sophie, they want everyone out all the way up to Central Park -"
"What?"
Kurt puts his pen down, says sounding a lot more calm than the inner thrumming of his heart, "Why?"
June swallows. "That - that lizard-monster, he's back, he's out in the street tossing cars aside, they want everyone out of his way, there are police everywhere -"
Kurt scrapes his chair back, heads to the window, looks down just as three cop cars zip past, silent far below. One of the other junior designers, Chandler, comes to stand next to him to look down on the street - it's the closest he's stood to Kurt since their absolute disaster of an almost-maybe-oh-no-not-after-all-then, and he whispers under his breath, "Oh my god." Kurt swallows, arms folded around himself to keep himself small. Sophie's rubbing her eyes under her glasses.
"Evacuate to where? It's not here, can't we - oh hell, get into the basement, what do you do when Godzilla attacks? Kurt, are you okay? Sit down, you've gone pale."
"I'm always pale," he says, turning from the window, trying not to visibly lean away from Chandler. He swallows. "I - sorry. I -" Pick a lie, any lie, you need to be out of here an hour ago already. "I was - in the area last time he - I'm sorry, I just - you don't think he'll come here, right?"
He picks the 'scared kid from Ohio' card. He's twenty-three but he knows he looks younger and he knows he looks like a well-placed flick could knock him down; there are times when he needs people to pity him too much to resent their doing it so automatically.
"Oh hell." Sophie pulls her hands back through her hair, clipped up into a bun but escaping all over, fine black strands too fond of static. "Sit down. Do you want to - head down to the subway or something, they always say it's safer underground. They probably have people directing you to safe places out there anyway." She rubs her eyes again. "June, hit the fire alarm, we need to start moving people out."
"Out where?"
"Anywhere! Evacuation means out, there'll be cops down there directing us!"
Kurt slips out while their attention's busy, only Chandler starts to say something and then stops, and since there's only one guy further up the corridor with his back to him, as soon as he's out of sight of the doorway Kurt turns invisible and ghosts between floors. Somewhere under his office he left a bag and a spare costume he hoped he'd never have to use from work. He just needs somewhere safe to change in, he can follow the cop cars to the trouble, and it gnaws in his stomach, this, again, can he deal with this again - ?
No choice. Tie off and mask on in a storage closet, and yes, he knows what it means to wear clothing as if it's a weapon in his hands. In that cloak he doesn't doubt. Life is so much simpler from behind the mask . . .
*
'Puckzilla' is at a crossroads marked by a hovering helicopter, impassable now with crashed-over cars around its edges, and it's very possible that he's even bigger than he was last time. His t-shirt's torn ragged across his shoulders - lucky his hips are narrower, the pants are still holding up - his skin tinted green, scaled across his shoulders and back down to the long lashing tail behind him as he fists his clawed hands, puts back his frilled head and bellows, "C'mon out an' face me! Out in the daylight where everyone can see it, you face the Puckzilla like a man!"
"Like the man who kicked your ass last time," he mutters, standing arms folded and invisible with the cops, shielded behind two cars barricading the road. "What the hell is the point of this?"
He scans the cops and his heart gulps its beat, because there's Finn, uniform on with a gun in his hands, and the Ghost - hates being the Ghost in front of people who know him as Kurt. But then there's a reporter's van nearby, there are cameras aimed on Puckzilla and there is just no way this will be as secretive as his normal nighttime activity. He needs to keep his back to the cameras and stay invisible as much as he can, and protect Finn at all costs. He tugs his hood further over his face, walks through a car and into the empty ring surrounding Puckzilla, trying to breathe evenly.
"C'mon you spineless poltergeist, c'mon out and face me! Round two, let's go! You face me man to man, we'll settle this here an' now -"
He doesn't make himself visible yet; he just walks close enough, and raises his voice. "We already settled it, Noah, we settled it by me putting you in jail. What the hell are you doing?"
His head snaps around but he can't see the Ghost, who just folds his arms and waits. "-hell are you, sneakin' around like a coward, you don't dare face me -"
"Okay," the Ghost says evenly. "How about you stop being a giant monster lizard and I'll stop being a ghost, and then we can make this more even. Settle it over Mario Kart or something."
"C'mon an' fight me, Casper."
The Ghost just watches him. "Noah, you know how this ends. You know that being absurdly strong is no good against me. Why are you doing this, what are you going to achieve?"
Puck's sort of guessed where the Ghost is now by his voice, so as his eyes settle around him, the Ghost circles him a little, and turns intangible for good measure, just the soles of his boots on the road to hold him up. "You know where you put me, man? You know what it's like in there?"
"You robbed a bank, what did you think would happen if you got caught, that people would be disappointed in you and ask you to do better next time?"
"People laughed!" he roars, spinning to follow the Ghost's moving voice. "At me! Getting knocked down by some puny punk in a hallowe'en costume! Well y'know what, this time it's different, this time I spent all that time behind bars thinkin' how you bring down someone too gutless to stand there an' get punched -"
"Yes, clearly I am really so very cowardly when I don't just stand there and let the genetically modified monster punch me in the face."
Puckzilla's muscles flex in his shoulders, his frill falls and raises again, and he reaches into the pocket of his jeans, pulls out a book of matches. "What'd you think all those totalled cars were for?"
"What are you-"
He lights a match, and sets fire to the box. And then he tosses it - a bright arc in the sky - at a crumpled car belly-up across two lanes, resting in a little puddle of gasoline. It goes up with the softest noise, like a flumping duvet of flame. The Ghost goes stiff because he has reasons not to like fire, but Puckzilla's got another box of matches, and he's turning for another smashed car.
Puckerman has halfway thought this through, because even intangible the Ghost feels heat and needs to breathe, that fire is still dangerous to him. But he can ghost straight down and it's other people who're in danger if this whole area goes up, and Finn is behind those cop cars.
He runs at him, springs, his swiping hand ghosts the matches through Puckzilla's hand and he roars, grabbing after the Ghost's cloak as he drops into sight and drops right through the surface of the road. He leaves the matches down there, turns and kicks and hauls himself through the solid surface, coming up with a gasp - no air inside solid objects - behind Puckzilla, who's already got another car alight, boxing off two sides of the road now. The Ghost braces his weight on his hands and rolls out of the range of Puck's whipping tail, legs cartwheeling, back onto the road's surface. "You are going to kill people!"
"People who stuck me in jail, like they care about me, they put me in chains like an animal-"
"Maybe they wouldn't do that if you didn't do this when you're not chained up!"
"No-one cares about me! No-one cares about the Puckzilla!"
"You might garner more sympathy by not referring to yourself in the third person," the Ghost says, and Puckzilla roars, and punches his hand into the surface of the street. The Ghost blinks, backs away as he wrenches his hand free pulling wiring out with it, stretching and snapping it, peeling it out of the surface of the road like a varicose vein.
"What are you -?"
He punches down again, and this time the thick cable he drags out spits and bangs and crawls with electricity, and his hand shakes a little but he gives no indication of feeling it. "Here you go, spooky. The Puckasaurus Rex feels no pain. How about you come over here an' feel what it's like."
He's frozen. Puckzilla's as strong as a number of oxes and really not much brighter, but bright enough to know that strength means nothing if you can't connect with the person you're trying to punch - the ghost you're trying to punch. But there are a few things the Ghost is horribly, horribly vulnerable to, and he knows it. One is air, he still needs to breathe, and getting trapped in something solid, or inhaling too much of something like the Pink Dagger's poison gas, could still kill him. Another is fire, in too high temperatures - or too low - if he lost consciousness he'd be done for. And the third -
He got tasered, once. Rescued a woman from a mugging and wild with fear she had no intention of waiting to find out why he'd rescued her; he woke up to a couple of bystanders debating what the hell to do with him, can you call an ambulance for a superhero? with his head resting on a girl's rolled-up jacket. She was kind, helped him up while his legs barely worked and he was embarrassed as much as still hopelessly weak.
Even ghosting, electricity will hurt him. And he has no way of bringing Puckzilla down without being in close range, he needs to touch him to haunt him, nothing physical hurts him but if the Ghost can get a hand to his head then he can press all the terror in the world into him and that, that will knock him out -
If he can get past that sparking line of electricity in his hand.
He licks his lips, tries to think what to do.
And then he becomes aware of shouting to the side, glances over at the cops just as a voice he knows yells, "No you can't-!" and they open fire. He instinctively puts an arm over his face even though, ghosting, the best the bullets do is buzz through him; he hears them thump off Puckzilla's hide without even drawing blood, and then someone is yelling at 'Officer Hudson', and one of the burning cars explodes.
His ears ring. He's face down on the road, pressing himself up on his arms, intangible so a burning tyre bounces right through him and away and he sucks his breath in at the heat of it. Puckzilla's caught half of one of the seats, its stuffing burning such bright orange, lobbing it at the kneeling Ghost with a triumphant snarl.
It hits something green in the air in front of the Ghost's face and bounces back. He stares, heart throbbing in his ears, at the clear green hexagon just there in the air before it vanishes, and then he sees the figure in black making its way towards them, across the empty road. It's a kid. It has to be a kid because it's too damn short for a man and what the hell -
"Fuckin' interlopers, get back in the bleachers." Puckzilla mutters, and spins so tight his tail lashes out like a whip. The Ghost springs forward but he'd never be quick enough, he would never have got there in time, and he doesn't even need to because that tail strikes off more of those green hexagons, tessellating neatly together like a honeycomb shield at the side of the boy in black. Puckzilla staggers at the force of his own strike bouncing off the shield, hands fisting, growling now as he faces this new player. And all the Ghost can think is, What the hell is he doing?
Puckzilla's tail snaps behind him, his frill raises and flattens dangerously. "This is between me an' the spook, kid, go find somewhere less annoying to be emo."
He's got his hood up and some kind of ski mask on under it. Amateur hero, the Ghost thinks, groaning softly out loud. At least he actually has some kind of powers but oh god he is going to get himself killed, and more people if this can't be contained. But Puckzilla has his back to him now, and maybe this is all he needed . . .
The kid says, sounding cheerful if just a little shaky, "Excuse me but you are about four times his size, I'm just trying to even the odds out a little, otherwise it just looks like bullying."
"Bullying," Puckzilla snorts. "If you mean stronger guys pounding weaker guys, that's how the world works."
"I mean not picking on someone who weighs about as much as your leg. Though, uh, not picking on anyone at all would be really nice."
The Ghost walks towards Puckzilla, quite slowly. He dropped that electricity cable when the gunshots were fired, and it's laying between the two of them; he tries to give it a wide berth, fades out of sight again, watches carefully as the human lizard and the kid in black talk.
"'Nice'." Puckzilla says, sounding as impressed as he might be at gum on the sidewalk.
The kid in black shrugs. "What's wrong with being nice?"
"Nice." His voice is more of a snarl now, as the Ghost pauses a leap away from him, considering his moment. "Nice like gettin' experimented on by whackos in white coats until they do this to you? Nice like not bein' able to find a job or a place or a girl who doesn't freak out, nice like bein' treated like a monster before you ever even did anything wrong -"
He feels a low inner twinge; fighting a monster is one thing. Fighting a victim? Okay he's a victim who's intent on taking his victimhood out on other people, but - what is the Ghost for if not standing up for victims . . . ?
The kid in black doesn't know what to say either, just stands there with his mouth a little open and hands in loose fists at his sides, maybe becoming aware that even beyond the obvious he is in over his head with this. And the Ghost swallows, he doesn't have a lot of time for intricate ethical reflection, lives are at stake and another one of those cars could go at any given moment. He can find a way to talk to Puckzilla some other time; right now he just needs everyone to be safe.
He fades back into view behind Puck's shoulder, slipping his hands out from inside his cloak, preparing to jump. And the kid's eyes flick immediately to him.
Idiot.
Puckzilla turns with a roar, the Ghost instinctively leaps back instead of forwards and Puck's long tail slashes through his hastily ghosting body. The kid yelps out and runs forward and Puck - just keeps spinning, the Ghost can only yell, "No-!" but his tail's already whipped the kid in the side, smacking him sideways with a skid-stumble-thunk into the side of a car. No time: the Ghost leaps.
He lands on Puckzilla's broad back, grabs his shoulder and kicks himself right over his head as his claws grab after him; looking upside-down into his face the Ghost whispers, "I'm sorry," and ghosts a hand right through his head.
He did this to himself, once. He needed to know what it is that he does to people, what damage he might be doing. He locked his bedroom door and sat on the edge of the bed and drew his breath in, and he haunted himself. Ghosted his hand through his own head, haunted himself.
He woke up on his bedroom floor, cold.
It's fear. It's fear like a physical force, cold and crippling, fear so the heart stops and breath stops and brain stops, terror so strong the mind and body cut out, fear beyond death and pain, nothing but fear. The purity of it can't be coped with: most people black out within a couple of seconds. Some of them don't even make a sound.
Most of them do.
He's still falling as Puckerman screams, face-down to the road. He ghosts right through it, kicks and turns himself, thrusts himself back into the light; Puckerman is staggering sideways, hands clutching at his face, his chest, and then he sags to his knees - skin turning a warmer tanned shade, body becoming smaller, tail shrinking in - and collapses on his side. He looks just like a guy, then, just some guy with a mohawk instead of a frill, helpless on the floor with his eyes closed and mouth open.
The kid in black is on his knees next to the car, holding himself up by the door. The Ghost runs over, crouches next to him - "Can you stand up? Are you okay to stand up?"
"Whuh. I." He squints up at the Ghost and says, "Oh god it's really you."
He knows the cops will be coming for them, he knows Finn can't risk himself in slowing them down. "Can you walk. This is important."
"Yeah. I'm fine. Yeah." He stands up far too quickly and staggers, and the Ghost grabs his arm, stands with him.
"Hold onto me and hold your breath."
"What?"
One of the cops shouts, "Stay right where you are, hands where we can see them!"
The Ghost snaps at him, "Hold your breath." and ghosts straight down, pulling the boy with him. He starts a yelp but thankfully does catch a breath in and hold it before they're underground, cool dark silent, and the Ghost slips them lower, lets them fall that sleep-slow falling through solidity, you're never too long underground in New York without hitting a pocket of - a basement, a subway tunnel, a sewer even, something -
His searching hand finds open space underneath them and he slips his head through, emptiness, can't see a thing until he fumbles his flashlight free; disused subway platform, even better. He tugs at the boy's hand, twists himself feet down and ghosts them through. They drop so much faster, the boy manages to get his yelp out before the Ghost lets them drop just into the platform's surface, then hauls them back again onto solid ground. He holds him by the shoulders because he's shaking, clipping the flashlight one-handed back into his belt to illuminate the graffiti on the tiles and cast their shadows huge on the ceiling. "I am going to take you to a doctor. But first of all tell me what the hell you think you were doing."
The boy coughs and says, "Helping."
The rage in him is like a fist inside his chest, he can hardly breathe around it. He grabs the ski mask at the forehead and rips it off - the boy yells, "Hey-!" and the Ghost tosses it to the side, snaps at him, "You will get yourself killed, do you have any idea -"
He's about his age, older than he'd expected, and sturdier-built than he'd expected under those baggy clothes. He's blinking at him - brown eyes, wide and childlike, cute nose, frankly ridiculous eyebrows, one of them a little clotted with blood from the cut on his head where he must have met that car head-on. The Ghost repeats, slower, harder, "You will get yourself killed. I do not want to see you in a mask out there again. I'm taking you to a doctor and then I'm taking you home and you never so much as -"
"I want to help, I have this -" He waves a hand and little green hexagons flare into life in the air around his gesture and vanish again. "- can't I help?"
"By headbutting cars? How much do you think you helped?"
"I stopped that chair hitting you!"
"It wouldn't have hit me! I'm the Ghost!" He's all but screaming at him now. "This is not a game! It is not fun! If you want to be a hero then volunteer at a homeless shelter, don't put a mask on!"
"Wh- you do it! Why can't I?"
His breath snorts out of him, he doesn't have the energy for it. "Fine. Get yourself killed. Just try to do it during the daytime and not on my watch." He unclips the flashlight, takes the boy's wrist - he tries to pull it back but the Ghost just grabs it tighter. "I am taking you to a doctor, you're probably concussed. Come on. We'll hit a working station sooner or later."
"I'm fine! I don't -"
The Ghost turns them for the platform and the guy's arm suddenly goes slack under his grip; he turns as quickly as he can, catches his shoulders as he pants at the platform, saying quietly with each too-much breath, "Okay, okay, I'm okay-"
"You're concussed. Breathe. I know a doctor."
"Can't we - hospital?"
"You just put a mask on, showed off your powers and picked a fight with a supervillain. You walk into a hospital, you might as well wave a flag that says arrest me. Come on. We'll go slow. I know a doctor, it's okay."
The guy's still for a moment, breathing at the floor, head down. Then he swallows, and nods, and lifts his head slow and struggling. "Okay."
The Ghost helps him down onto the tracks. "Don't worry about any trains. Just hold onto me, I'll ghost us through."
"This is."
"Mm?"
"Not what I -"
". . . what?"
"Imagined. Not what I imagined."
What did he think superheroing involved, tickertape parades? He just holds his wrist and keeps walking down the track, and says because it's probably a good idea to keep him talking, "What did you imagine?"
"Don't know. Not this. It smells of pee down here."
The laugh comes out of him too sharp, he stifles it too late. When he glances back, the guy's grinning, and it's hard to make his own mouth lie flat. "What's your name?"
"I hadn't picked one yet."
"What? Your real name."
"Should I be telling you that? Like, secret identities and everything?"
"You are not becoming a superhero, you do not need a secret identity. And I need something to call you, you at least know what to call me."
"Um. I -" He rubs his forehead, squinting his eyes closed. "Your number one fan? Did I just say that out loud?"
The Ghost rolls his eyes, keeps walking. "I am not calling you that."
"I." Their footsteps echo off the walls, too loud here in the dark. "I really . . . I really admire you, you know that? I read about everything you do, I -"
"You don't read about everything I do."
"Everything anyone knows about. I follow all the blogs, I just - you know, when you're just some nobody from Ohio with this freakish thing you can do, and you see someone doing something as amazing as what you do? It just - it makes it feel like - like I understand what I'm for, now, you know?"
He wants to say, Where in Ohio? but unlike his new friend Concussed McRamblyson, the Ghost actually does understand how to work a secret identity. "That's what you do? Make little - shield-things?"
"Yeah. Like, I can do other things with them. I kind of think I shouldn't right now, I don't feel." He rubs one eye. "Well."
"Just keep putting one foot in front of the other."
Silence for a few steps, and just before the Ghost tries to prompt him back into speech so he can tell how far gone he is, the guy says, "I really can't believe it's you."
He just holds his wrist, keeps walking. The guy pulls at his arm, loosens his grip to take his gloved hand instead, and the Ghost would object but - but. He doesn't know. He's not right in the head and he's apparently an enormous super-groupie. It's somewhere between weird and cute, and it's not like it's going to kill him to hold the guy's hand.
It's been a while since anyone wanted to hold his hand. He tries not to think about that while his face heats under the mask.
"You smell good," the groupie says. "They never say that on the blogs."
Oh god, he could laugh again. "Don't make me leave you down here."
"Oh my god, does that like, compromise your identity? Now I've smelled you?"
"I smell like sweat and subway."
"Hey," the guy says, pulling his hand. "I could blackmail you. You have to teach me superheroing or else I'll tell the whole internet what you smell like."
"No, please, that will entirely collapse my secret identity," he says in a monotone. Then, "What do I smell like?"
The guy sniffs at his shoulder, and the Ghost tries not to jump. "Laundry and shampoo and . . . good sweat, the kind makes you hungry."
Don't say anything, just keep walking.
Groupie pulls at his hand again. "Will you teach me how to be a superhero?"
"No. There's a light ahead, be quiet, I can make us invisible but people will notice disembodied voices climbing onto a platform."
"Are we going to take the subway to this doctor?"
"You can tell them to add it to the charge sheet. Vigilanteism and skipping subway fares."
"Oh my god, you are such a supervillain."
He really wants to laugh, again, squeezes the guy's hand instead. "Shut up."
*
He hauls groupie up the fire escape to the second floor, which is not fun, then knocks on the window there. It's getting dark by now, late afternoon in autumn, and there's light behind the blinds. After a moment they peel aside, and then the girl inside grins and unlatches the security bars so he can swing them out. "Mike! We have a visitor! God, what happened? Who's he?"
"A groupie with a bashed head." He helps him climb over the window ledge into Tina's arms, where he staggers and folds, and sits there on her bedroom floor looking dazed. The bedroom door opens and Mike stares in at them, then hurries over and crouches in front of groupie, who props himself on a hand and holds the other to his forehead, and says, "Ow."
"Okay, watch my finger." Mike says, immediately holding him by the arm and holding a finger up in front of his crossing eyes. "What's your name?"
The Ghost flips open the wallet he just ghosted from the guy's back pocket. "His name's Blaine. You seriously put on a mask and then took ID out with you?"
"How did y-" Blaine swings his head to look at the Ghost and then groans, grits his teeth, turns it slowly back to Mike who says, "Okay Blaine, easy, come sit down and I'll clean that cut. What happened to him?"
"He got between me and a dinosaur." The Ghost sits on the window ledge, dropping Blaine's wallet onto the bed where Mike gets him sitting, then heads out for his medical kit. Tina stares at him, then back at the Ghost.
"That's the guy? I watched on the news, that's the guy with the shield-things?"
Blaine says plaintively, "You are a walking spoiler for my secret identity."
"You don't have a secret identity, you are not a superhero!"
"Only because you won't help," Blaine says, like the Ghost is being so unreasonable in trying to save his admittedly quite admirable ass. "I'm learning, I can get better -"
Mike's back in the room with a small briefcase, snapping it open on the bed. "Tina, can you get me some hot water?"
"I'm on it," she says, immediately out of the door. They make a great team, Tina the artist and Mike the junior doctor, and an adorable couple, and mostly the Ghost manages to feel fond rather than jealous. Honestly, mostly, he does.
Blaine winces his eyes open, says, "Is this going to hurt?"
The Ghost swings his boots a little. "I would like to nominate a further reason why you would make a terrible superhero."
"What, it stings, no-one likes it!"
"It'll only hurt a little bit," Mike promises, as Tina walks back in with a bowl of steaming water, putting it on top of the book on the bedside table. Mike wets some cotton wool and then pours some antiseptic on it. "Hold still . . ."
Blaine hardens his jaw and makes no sound as Mike cleans the cut, apparently determined to prove that he can too be a superhero. And the Ghost presses his mouth closed not to laugh and keeps his eyes on one of Tina's prints on the wall, a tangle of graffiti in shades of dark grey with the white shape of a hooded cloak just right of the middle of it, like the outline of a ghost; that white cloak stands out like an angel in an annunciation. He sees them all over the city. They look like distorted up-ended goldfish, but he appreciates the gesture.
"Are you okay?" Tina says, and touches his arm. "He didn't hurt you?"
He twitches a smile at her. "I'm fine."
Eyes screwed up and jaw held tight, Blaine says, "So how do you guys know him?"
"He saved my life once," Tina says, standing up and hooking her long black hair over her shoulders again. "I was getting a photograph - that one, actually -" Pointing at another print of a wall of graffiti, black corrugated iron covered in a cacophony of tags, with one white hooded cloak in the bottom corner of it like the artist's initials - "when some guys who were drunk or high or just crazy shoved me into the wall and . . . he walked me home, he's a gentleman like that," and she grins at him and the Ghost holds one arm to himself and drops a half-bow from his seat on the windowsill - "and Mike said if he ever needed help we'd be here for him."
"Someone's going to have to sit with him all night," Mike says, because Mike is sensitive to his secrecy and doesn't want any details about what the Ghost might have needed them for coming out in this conversation, dropping the used cotton wool in the trash can under Tina's desk. "He can sleep on our couch."
"No, no no, I have to get home, my brother - he'll go nuts if I don't come home, you have no idea, I can't -"
"This is what I mean," the Ghost says patiently, "when I tell you that you have not thought this superhero thing through."
"He'll call our mom. I can't stay out all night." He screws his eyes closed again. "God this is embarrassing, I don't think I have ever been so humiliated in my life, and I once serenaded a guy in the GAP."
"If concussion leads to you vomiting personal information to anyone who will listen, again, please rethink the superheroing." The Ghost sighs, and stands up. "I'll take him home, I'll sit with him. All night?"
"Wake him up every half hour. Call me if you're not sure about him."
Blaine says, "Wait, what's happening now?"
"Now you're giving me your address. Do you have enough in there for a cab?" He points at Blaine's wallet on the bed. "I am really too tired to run you home invisible on the subways."
"You're coming home with me?"
"Consider your secret identity well and truly blown. It's okay, I'm good at keeping secrets." He smiles, and Blaine looks up at him, looking wary and young and - okay, there is no harm in admitting that he's good looking. He has no love life to speak of, he can hardly be blamed for noticing that this guy is unfairly handsome for an idiot. "If you actually want to be a superhero then you really need to understand how much of it involves walking people home, sitting with crying drunks while their friends come to find them, sitting with people on bad trips until the ambulance comes for them, sitting with scared store assistants surrounded by busted glass until the cops come. There is a very surprising amount of sitting."
Blaine says, like he is struggling so hard to understand this, "You're going to sit with me?"
He narrows his eyes at him, not sure quite how much of a supergroupie fantasy he's walking into here. "Anything weird and I haunt you, cuff you and leave you. Understand?"
He holds his hands up, innocent and blinking and increasingly delighted, and really, really, he needs to stop making him want to laugh . . .
*
It's a nicer apartment building than the one he shares with Rachel. He stands invisible at Blaine's shoulder in the elevator, murmurs, "Fancy." and Blaine squirms an awkward shrug.
"It's my brother's. He's an actor."
He almost asks if he would know him from anything, but everything risks skating too close to who he really is. He bites his tongue, and watches the numbers creep up.
Walking down the corridor Blaine says, "Are you still there?"
"Right here." He touches Blaine's arm and feels his muscles tighten and drop again, and he pulls his hand back. "Don't talk to me until we're inside."
Blaine nods, finds a door and goes through his keys, unlocks it. It's dark inside, his brother must be out. Blaine's standing there holding the door open long after the Ghost's walked inside. "Are you still there?"
From behind his shoulder he says, "Close the damn door, Blaine."
Blaine jumps, snaps the light on, stares wildly around him for a second and then closes the door. "Okay, I can see why criminals are terrified of you."
"Yes, I'm just that scary." He fades back into view, and looks over the open-plan kitchen-lounge, pale carpets, dark wood and black panelling, the wide-windowed view of the skyline. He has to turn his head back to look at Blaine, the hood cuts out most of his peripheral vision - he's intangible as often as not in costume, so he's okay with risking the edges of his sight to keep his face more hidden - and Blaine is just watching him, mouth just a little open, with tape over the cut on his forehead and the bruise now growing all the way down to his eye, he'll have a hell of a shiner from it. He looks away, because Blaine's attention is just too much. "Do you want to sleep now?"
"I - dunno. Yeah, I'm pretty - tired."
"Which is your bedroom? Get - get changed or, just let me know when you're - ready."
He doesn't know why he's embarrassed. He's done enough things like this before, he's even had to ghost out of the arms of a rescued guy a little overwilling to show his appreciation more than once (a couple of women too, adding an extra layer of embarrassment), but something about this boy makes him so aware of himself under the suit, like he's more on view than he possibly can be. But Blaine just nods, and pulls a hand through his hair, and looks tired. "There's soda and stuff in the fridge, help yourself." he says, and drags his feet off to one of the doors at the side, turning the light on as he goes in.
For a moment, he just stands there holding his arms to himself, feeling very self-conscious. Then he walks to the closed door, taps on it and says through it, "If I make coffee do you want one?"
Blaine makes a negative noise through the door, muffled; he must have that hoodie up over his head. He tries very hard not to think about that, goes and pokes at the sleek black coffee machine for a while, finds the sugar in the fourth cupboard. They have three different kinds of breakfast cereal. Strange little intimacies, being in someone else's kitchen.
The door opens again. "You can come in," Blaine says, looking even younger in t-shirt and pyjama pants, bare feet on the floor. "Or are you gonna wait out here all night? I don't know how this . . ."
"I'll sit with you. Not to be the angel of doom or anything but you could still throw up and choke yourself, the night is young." He walks to him and Blaine looks sleepily up at his face - he tucks his chin in a little under the hood in the hope that the shadow will fall further over him - and then Blaine takes the cup off him, which he's too surprised to stop him doing. He takes a sip, then smiles.
"Sugar and cream." He hands it back. "I promise not to tell anyone how you take your coffee."
"You are such a little stalker," the Ghost mutters, following him into his bedroom. Which.
Is a bit.
Blaine stands there in the middle of the floor, then says, "It has only just occurred to me exactly how creepy this might seem to you."
There's a black and white poster over the bed of him leaping from the edge of a building, cloak blooming darkly, suit pale in the light; all around the desk, taped to the walls, are photographs and photographs clipped from magazines and newspapers, his own pixelated half-hidden face two dozen times, columns of news stories, blaring headlines, GHOST PREVENTS BANK HEIST, SAVED BY A GHOST, 68% OF NEW YORKERS SAY GHOST IS GREAT -
At any second you want, he tells himself, you can ghost right through the floor and never return to this demented nest of fanatical groupiedom ever, ever again.
He says again, as calmly as he can, "You are such a little stalker." and walks to the desk chair, rolls it over to the bed. "Get in. Please just go to sleep, it's already been a long day."
Blaine climbs into the bed, slots his legs in under the covers. "Do you have a day job? Can you manage a day job and still be up all night saving lives?"
"Secret identity," he says, and closes his eyes, drinks his coffee.
"I wouldn't tell anyone. You can trust me."
"No I can't. I met you four hours ago. I don't know the first thing about you."
"You know a lot more about me than I know about you." Blaine shrugs, swallows. "You know more about me than anyone does. I haven't told anybody about the shields. Not even - no-one."
He opens his eyes, watches him from over his cup. "Why?"
Blaine flicks his eyes away. "You know. You know. Don't you? When you first find out it's - Jesus, weren't you scared? It's like your body doesn't belong to you anymore, you don't know who you are anymore, not now you can do this . . ."
He keeps his eyes calmly on his, and takes a sip of coffee, and says nothing. Blaine licks his lips.
"I've never met anyone else who can . . . I wish you would just believe that you can trust me. Why would I want to hurt you? I'm -"
"Don't say you're my biggest fan again. Please. I've seen the pictures, I believe you. Just lay down and go to sleep."
Blaine wriggles down onto his side, but he doesn't close his eyes. "How did you find out what you could do?"
"Secret identity, Blaine."
"That's not fair."
"Such is life."
"You sound better than you do in the audios online," he murmurs, eyes drooping now. "Your voice. S'nice."
He just sighs, and drinks more coffee. Coffee, he decides, is the only really good thing in his life right now. If it wasn't for coffee he would have nothing left to live for. Well, no. His dad. And really good cheesecake. But mostly just coffee . . .
Blaine seems to be quiet, for now, so the Ghost checks his cell - he has one for each costume, set up so Finn can track their location, just in case - and lays it on his thigh to keep an eye on the time (every half hour, this is going to be a long night). His eyes trace over the room, he didn't even know half these photos existed, he googles himself as often as he dares because he needs to know what's out there, he needs to control his exposure, but -
Well, as much as anything else, between infuriating articles labelling him a dangerous criminal and the goddamn fanfiction, he really just doesn't want to know.
Taped to the side of the computer monitor is the photograph he couldn't avoid, on the front cover of every newspaper and magazine, when he was still bandaged and rasping and aching from it. That burning building, that firefighter who caught him as he staggered out maybe the sixth or seventh time, while the others carted to an ambulance the man he'd just ghosted through after himself and the firefighter didn't even ask him if he needed it, just held his shoulder and held the mask up to his face. And he sucked it down, clamped a hand greedily over the mask, clinically clean air, it made him dizzy.
Then the firefighter said, Fuck, kid, how old are you? and he said, I don't know how many more are in there. and turned around, his cloak intangible through the man's grabbing fingers, and ran back for the building.
"I read about that," Blaine's voice slurs softly from the bed, low at the edge of sleep. "Bravest thing I ever heard anyone do. They said you went back in thirteen times."
He remembers the screaming and the agony of heat and the choking solidity of the air, heat-blind, smoke-blind, fumbling for another living body through broken, burning timber. He remembers the floor collapsing under him, desperate hands slipping through his as he fell, he remembers yelling to someone that everything was okay and ghosting through metal so hot it seared him, and he remembers only the sound of the ceiling coming down. He remembers waking up in a sub-basement, cheek to cold concrete, wet from the hose-water running through, not understanding why no-one had come to help him before he realised that no-one ever does come to rescue the hero. That's what 'hero' means.
He says, because it's the darkest thought to come back to him on all the darkest nights, "There were a lot more than thirteen people in that building."
Blaine doesn't say anything. The Ghost doesn't look back to him to see if he's still awake. He swallows, and looks away from that photograph, and this is as close to a quiet night in as he's ever likely to get . . .
Part 3