invisible {halloweeb spoopyfest 2017]

Spoiler: the deets

CASH ATTEMPT
for halloweeb spoopyfest 2017, category: best horror [ghost]
cc: 6,619
note: this is a heavily edited version of a one-shot i posted in the WW years ago. if this isn't okay, let me know.

INVISIBLE
​

I would have loved you, baby.

The moment you pushed open the rusty metal door to my house, the moment your big green eyes widened in wonder, I knew I could love you. Honest.

All you had to do to seal the deal was say yes, baby. And you were so, so close to saying yes. I’d been staring past the mold-covered windows, forever waiting, forever hoping for someone like you to come see me. It had been far too long since the last human dared to show themselves. Why couldn’t you have said yes, then, to cease my suffering? When you tried to leave, tears frolicking down your bloody cheeks, why didn’t you just turn around and embrace me? Why didn’t you take me with you and promise to keep me safe, keep me warm?

I would have loved you, baby. I thought I’d made that clear. Did something about me bother you? Well, you rejected me and I had to cut you into pieces all the same. Did that bother you?

Apparently, you missed the memo about how you can’t walk into an abandoned building and not expect to see ghost pokémon. It’s not a difficult concept to grasp. We live because there’s nothing else to do. The world won’t accept our departure, but likewise, its inhabitants won’t accept our presence. So we thrive where living souls usually don’t dare approach. There’s nowhere else to go until someone offers to promise to take us and keep us safe and warm from the dangers lying in wait for us. Someone like you.

…Yet there very rarely is someone like you. Our solace rests with the sick scent of humans who have died here still lingering in these corridors. On the flip side, our afterlives are protected by human spirits which have no choice but to remain with us and fight the invisible fight against the living. When our home is threatened by other pokémon, we phase into the walls and peer through the cracks until the intruder scampers off.

Humans, as you know, are a different story. Surely you could understand that we sometimes are scared, too, baby. Catastrophes are not quite as alluring as your spooky campfire stories would have you believe. Does that bother you? If it helps, I would’ve never been scared of you, baby. Honest. I would’ve never hurt you if you’d just embraced me the way humans were always meant to. Death is not the end. Death does not mean stopping, and death does not mean you disappear. Does that bother you, baby? Does it?

We don’t embrace every human, mind. Some of my brethren wish to travel with trainers, as they seek the answer as to whether or not a ghost can be satisfied elsewhere besides the confined space they were chased into. We want to try to remember what it’s like to be part of teamwork and achievement. We want to be in the light once more. Does that bother you…? It shouldn’t, but I’d like to know.

I would have loved you, no matter what we did together. Honest. Now, neither of us are leaving. You no longer have a say in the matter. You lost your chance to choose when you decided I was unworthy of your time and attention. You’ll stay and keep me warm with your ice cold bones the best you can.

Your blonde hair was so pretty, baby. It was so bright, much too bright for a place like this. I pulled on it, forced you back from the door to my home, ripped it out. You held on to your head, though your hair was the least of your worries. Did that bother you? Your eyes were next. You crashed into the walls, screaming, scratching at them, lost. Oh, how wonderful it must’ve been to run into solid walls, a sure sign of the reality around you.

Here’s another truth, baby: I wish I could figure out if I’m real or not. Did being real bother you, baby? If it did, I could’ve loved you and saved you. Instead I had to make you beg and scream more. For your mother. For your father. For your sisters and brothers. I made you beg and scream for the person you’d hoped to be by this point in your life. Does it bother you, baby, to know that you could’ve been waiting for the best day of your life, all the while never considering that it may have already passed you by?

You screamed for your pokémon, too, baby. That was a real treat, I must say. They were waiting for the best day of your life with you, I’m sure. How disappointed they’d be if they left the comfort of their pokéballs and saw your mangled corpse splayed across at least a hundred others. They’d be angry, no doubt, but their moves would be powerless against me. They’d move right through my body, translucent as it is. They’d scream, too. So loud. I’d free them and allow them to take their anger out on me but it’d only make me miss your screams. I can never hear them again, and that’s such a shame, don’t you think, baby? I would’ve loved you and taught your pokémon how to fear and how to cry while they were still young. I could have taught them many things.

I could have taught them in particular how there are many ways to end a life, making such a sacred concept even more fragile than expected and desired. There could be a simple snap of the neck. A disease which persists past modern technology to determine the day that you die. A pokémon attack gone awry and fired in all the wrong directions at all the wrong people. There could be the pull of a trigger and bullets that move faster than air itself, the same air that goes through so much trouble to place people in the gun's path, only to abandon them and watch them rot.

Let it not be forgotten that blood—though you despise me for wanting it so much—is exactly what keeps both of you alive and breathing and together.

Let it not be forgotten that you are trying to live in a world that can offer you nothing but misery not meant for someone so young, a constant fight against insanity, and a skeptical view on what it means to be happy.

Let it not be forgotten that you made me this way.

Does that bother you, baby?

Baby?

Why won’t you answer me?

I would have loved you, baby. Speak to me. I am made of so much nothing, but I am not incurable just yet. I am floating on a slow, slow drift into indifference. I drowned and took one last short, terrible surge of breath in my past life and I just want to replace the memory. Please don’t let me go.

Will my aching ever amount to anything? Will anyone ever fill the gap?

…Baby?

Okay. I understand. This is a kind of silence even a ghost roaming a cemetery is afraid of, but I understand.

Humans are ephemeral. They come and go so fast and that sometimes I think that they are all the same. We come from two separate worlds, baby. But still. I would have loved you. I will love you now and forever, just in a different way.

Let it not be forgotten that you made me this way. You deprived me of so much potential.

I know it bothers you.