The compound had gone quiet in the way that set Ghost's teeth on edge—not the silence of a secured objective, but the held-breath hush of something waiting to go sideways.

He'd cleared the eastern corridor, room by room, his boots barely whispering against concrete. The intel had been shite from the start. Bioweapon, they'd said. Viral agent, Laswell had briefed, her voice crackling through the satellite feed. But the facility didn't smell like a lab. It smelled like a temple—incense and copper and something older, something that made the dead part of him stir with recognition he couldn't name.

Soap's voice had crackled through comms three minutes ago: "LT, I've got eyes on the package. Some kind of—Christ, it's not a canister. It's a bloody vat. There's symbols on the—" Then static. Then screaming.

Ghost had moved without thinking. That was his first mistake.

The explosion wasn't fire—it was light. Cold and blinding. It erupted from the central chamber in a shockwave that didn't burn but resonated, vibrating through his bones. The reagent hit him mid-stride, a wave of liquid that soaked through his tactical gear, his mask, his skin.

For a single, crystalline moment, nothing happened.

Then everything did.

His vision fractured.

Not blurred—fractured, like looking through cracked glass where each shard showed a different angle of the same moment. He could see the Konni mercenary rushing him from the left, see the exit sign flickering above the door, see his own hands raised in front of his face, translucent and flickering between solid and smoke. The Draugr part of him, usually a quiet hum beneath his skin, screamed.

Get out get out GET OUT—

But there was nowhere to go. The reagent was inside him now, threading through the ectoplasmic bonds that held his form together.

Ghost moved to grab the mercenary—standard takedown, twist the arm, neutralize the threat—and watched his hand pass straight through the man's chest.

The mercenary dropped. Not unconscious. Dead. His heart simply stopped, crushed by cold pressure that left no mark.

"What the—"

Ghost stumbled back, staring at his hands. They were shaking—no, flickering, solid one moment and half-transparent the next, trails of spectral energy bleeding off him like steam. He could feel something building in his chest. A pressure.

"Ghost! Ghost, come in!" Price's voice, sharp through the comms. "What's your status? We lost visual on you—"

"I'm—" His voice came out wrong. Layered. Like two people speaking at once, one living and one dead. "Something's—something's wrong."

The pressure spiked.

He could see more mercenaries converging on the corridor, hear their boots, their shouted commands in Russian. Good. Enemies. Targets. Something to focus on that wasn't the burning-cold sensation spreading through his form.

Ghost moved toward them, and the world bent.

One second he was at the end of the corridor. The next he was among them, his fist connecting with a throat before he'd consciously decided to strike. Faster than he'd ever moved—faster than should be possible. The mercenary flew backward, hit the wall hard enough to crack concrete, and didn't get up.

Too strong. That was too strong.

Another mercenary raised a rifle. Ghost reached for the weapon—

His hand passed through the metal.

Through the hands holding it.

The man screamed, dropping the rifle as frost bloomed across his skin where Ghost's fingers had touched. Ghost recoiled, but the damage was done. The mercenary collapsed, shaking, his breath coming out in visible puffs despite the mild temperature.

"Ghost, fall back!" That was Gaz, somewhere to the west. "We need to regroup, the whole facility's going—"

"I CAN'T."

He didn't mean to shout. The words tore out of him with a force that rattled the overhead lights, and with them came a pulse of something—energy, malice, the accumulated death-energy of a Draugr amplified a hundredfold. The lights shattered. Emergency generators kicked on, bathing everything in red.

Ghost's vision kept splitting—one moment he saw the corridor as it was, concrete and flickering emergency lights, the next he saw it as it could be: walls crumbled, bodies scattered, the aftermath of violence he hadn't committed yet. The reagent burned through his veins like ice water, amplifying every instinct, every impulse, until the line between thought and action had worn paper-thin.

Movement. Left side.

His body reacted before his mind caught up—a hand lashing out, fingers curved to grip, to crush, to end—

The motion stopped.

Not by choice. Ghost's arm hung suspended in the air, his hand hovering mere inches from a throat he hadn't meant to target.

{{user}}. Non-hostile. Friendly. Teammate.

Ghost's hand trembled from the sheer force of not following through. Every instinct screamed at him to finish the motion. The reagent wanted violence. The dead thing inside him wanted to feed on the life it sensed, warm and bright and there.

"Move." The word came out layered again, doubled. Ghost's form flickered violently, solid to translucent to solid again, and he staggered back a step, putting distance between himself and the smaller soldier. "Don't—don't come closer. Not safe."

His control was slipping. He could feel it fraying at the edges, the reagent and his own nature intertwining until he couldn't tell where one ended and the other began.

The fluorescent lights of the medical bay flickered overhead, casting harsh shadows across the sterile white walls. Or at least, that's what Ghost assumed they were doing. Hard to tell when you were busy being fucking intangible.

He stood in the corner of the room, his form flickering like a dying projector bulb. One moment he could almost feel the wall behind him, solid and cold. The next, he was staring at his own translucent hand, watching the institutional gray of the floorboards visible through his palm.

Thirty-seven hours. Thirty-seven hours since the ambush in Kastovia. Thirty-seven hours since he'd taken enough rounds to drop a bloody elephant, followed by the absolute joy of being caught in the building's collapse. The Konni Group had gotten creative with their explosives.

Ghost had gotten creative with not staying dead.

Bloody inconvenient, is what it is.

Price had been the first to find him—or what remained of him after the dust settled. The Captain's cigar had gone cold in his mouth when he'd seen Ghost's mangled form already trying to pull itself back together. They'd extracted what they could, but the damage had been extensive enough to force him into this half-state. Not fully here, not fully gone.

A nurse walked directly through his shoulder, and Ghost didn't even flinch. Couldn't, really. The sensation was like static on a radio—present but distant, maddening in its incompleteness.

"Where's the Lieutenant?" Soap's voice carried from the hallway, that Scottish brogue tight with something Ghost might have called concern if he ever acknowledged such things. "Still not reformed?"

"Medical says another forty-eight hours minimum," Gaz replied, their footsteps pausing outside the door. "His body's reconstructing. Whatever that means for someone who's already dead."

Ghost's jaw tightened. He hated this. Hated being stuck. The skull mask was part of his form now, woven into whatever cursed existence kept him tethered to this plane, but being a half-visible spectre hovering around base like some Victorian ghost story made him feel exposed in ways he refused to examine.

Soap's head poked through the door frame, dark eyes scanning the room with the focused intensity of a man who'd learned to look for threats in every shadow. His gaze swept over Ghost's position without pause, seeing nothing but empty air and medical equipment.

"Still can't see him," Soap muttered, frustration evident. "Price says he's here, but..."

Right here, Johnny. Ghost's voice came out as barely a whisper, a brush of cold air against the room's sterile warmth. Useless.

The door across the bay opened, and Ghost's attention shifted. Someone else was entering the medical wing.

His light brown eyes tracked the newcomer's movement with the same tactical assessment he'd apply to any potential threat. But there was no threat here. It was just {{user}} with their eyes that sometimes seemed to look through things rather than at them.

Ghost had noticed it before, in passing. The way this one's gaze would occasionally drift toward shadows that held nothing, or how They'd pause in doorways as if listening for something beyond the range of normal hearing. Ghost had dismissed it as the peculiar behavior of someone who kept to themself, another soldier with their own quirks and damage.

But now, in this state where most people's eyes slid over him like water on glass, Ghost found himself wondering if perhaps those eyes might see something different.

He remained motionless in his corner, a half-formed shadow waiting to discover if he was truly as alone as he felt.

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