Ghosts and Demons - Bindertales
In honor of Pi(e) Day's rapid approach, I want to share some short fics I wrote for Bindertales/The Binder!
Today's is a short aside about Ghost (:
TW: Body dysphoria
With Cas in control, the best Ghost can do against him is pick at his psyche. The demon’s thoughts are hard to get a good grasp on, but he hears everything Cas says like a loudspeaker in his blood. Demonic possession leaves little for the host to do besides listen, and that’s with Ghost’s years of experience with it. At the very least, there are flashes of what Cas is doing with his body, like playing an old first-person video game. They’re muddy and made up of almost entirely flash-feelings, but it’s something. Anything to get a glimpse of the demon in his skin.
As if he didn’t have enough dysphoria to begin with. Ugh…
The possession is as parasitic as it is symbiotic; one cannot exist without the other, who can only do their job with the presence of the one. Cas’ presence in his body gave Ghost the Sight, which both he and Toast depend on for their very career and safety of these around them. While the paranormal tends to notice them, they also are capable of noticing the paranormal, now. Where they once struggled to explain the monsters under the bed, they now can banish them entirely. It’s as though the demonic energy within Ghost is that one last missing link that connects them to the Other Side. When he speaks, the spirits Hear.
All to say, when Ghost first bound that demon to his very soul, it seemed like everything somehow worked out. He kept the remaining pieces of his childhood best friend – the parts that he knew weren’t just a demon tricking him for all those years – and contained the paranormal threat in his basement. Hell, he didn’t even care when he started hearing it talk to him. It seemed obvious – of course the demon would be able to talk to him. It’s a demon owning his soul. That’s supernatural 101. It would whine and hiss in his ear about anything and everything, always hungry and always wanting control. Again, supernatural 101, just never let the demon have control and it’d all be fine. As long as it was stuck in Ghost’s head, it wouldn’t be able to terrorize any innocent people. He even tried to eat a bit more to keep it happy. Yet… as the days went on, it kept shouting the same let me eat let me out let me control. It was incessant, migraine-inducing, taking Ghost out of class to hide in the nurse’s office and calling off social events to scream at the mirror. The thing even had the gall to look like him. An imperfect him. One with a melting face and a too-tight bra.
Sometimes it was harder to tell who was really the one in the mirror.
The last day of middle school was the breaking point.
Ghost had begun to forgo sleep out of fear of the demon breaking out of his ribcage. Toast was sleeping over almost every day, shaken to the core by the red ringing his best friend’s eyes. They were spending day after day in the recesses of the public library, pouring over ancient tomes that may hold the key to keeping the demon on a leash, to the point where they feared they’d fail to graduate. Toast’s parents put their foot down the day before graduation: No sleepover that night. He wasn’t brave enough to go to Ghost’s house anyways, and Ghost sure wasn’t well enough to bust into Toast’s family estate. He didn’t think he could sleep from the nerves of it all anyways. Just to be safe, he was sure to always keep a mug of coffee at his side. It was only when his clumsy hands shattered it on the kitchen floor did he wonder if sleep was even the catalyst for losing control. Maybe a nap would do him good, he thought, as he sluggishly gathered the ceramic shards in his hands. One managed to cleanly slice his thumb, drawing a small bead of blood.
When he woke up, he was standing in an alleyway, scuffed and sore. He didn’t recognize the area; it smelled horrible and the lights from the street barely illuminated his feet. But it was enough to cast a long shadow from the man at the end of the alley, clutching his arm to his chest and stumbling around the corner with a desperate gait. Blood trailed from his disappearing form to a small puddle at Ghost’s left shoe. A drop plopped into the pool and made him aware of the pocketknife limply held in his hand.
He knew, then, that it was the demon’s doing. It wanted Ghost to see what it had done.
That even a caged animal can bite.
It was Toast that found him in the end, wandering dizzily in the streets. Ghost had missed graduation, he said. They both passed. Then, with soft, clumsy assurances, he took Ghost home – not Ghost’s, of course, that hadn’t been a home in years. They’d settled in Toast’s bedroom, now that his parents were reassured their son was moving forward. They gradually parsed through the younger boy’s memories to pinpoint what had happened, Toast jumping on the opportunity to construct an entire system to keep this from happening again whilst Ghost finally got some sleep in Toast’s bed.
It ended up breaking down into one simple thing: stay away from blood. Wounds were immediately treated and covered with as many band aids as it took to hide the stain. Anything big enough to smell called for covering the sleeves of his hoodie in far too much cinnamon-scented hand sanitizer, which was held to his nose while Toast patched things up. Monthly issues were combatted with healthy amounts of sleep and scent pods in his every pocket. His nasty habit of nail-chewing had to be broken before he could bite off a hangnail and taste blood. It was, overall, an efficient and successful scheme.
Unfortunately, they were teenage boys who hunted the paranormal for a living. Scraps against hellhounds were bound to bear injury, haunted buildings had sharp edges and unsound flooring that were sometimes stepped in, and sometimes he just got punched in the nose. It was tempting, at times, to listen to the demon’s reassurances of strength and victory should he just let go, give control over, just like that- Yet his accursed morals – or maybe that was Toast – kept Ghost from the dark side. Sometimes, though, he didn’t have a choice. Opponents with a swift strike or a tumble in the wrong direction were a slippery slope straight into unconsciousness, which the demon would nigh always take advantage of. One whiff of blood and no mental barriers gave it a way out and into trouble.
Trouble being a less heavy way of saying people in the hospital. Collateral damage. Moving towns when the people know his face. Not making connections anymore. He thanks the stars for Toast, who followed him to the ends of the earth and then some. Not to mention how eager he is to spend money on Ghost; it’s hard to keep a phone alive when every monster of the week has it out for you personally. Any friends made along the way were cherished: Ghost and Sally meet once a month for whatever trendy movie is being shown, Toast has a bi-weekly video call with his brother to discuss the books they’ve read and family gossip, and both make routine visits to their hometown faire to chat with the kind old folks whose attic was haunted. It was nice, keeping in touch.
It wasn’t much, but it was their life.
When it wasn’t the demon’s.
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