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For ghosts, teleporting (or 'poofing' as Pete put it) was like a memory. Short distances were easy, but long ones had to be trained. Most ghosts had a handful of places they bothered to visit enough that it eased the strain. Old homes, current homes for ghosts who lived in the human world, family members, cemeteries...
It'd been a while since Scratch last visited his resting place.
He wasn't lucky enough to have some fancy grave with flowers set out or whatever. It wasn't even a particularly nice place to die really, pitch black (while he could see in the dark, it tinted the colour of everything to dull greys) and crawling with freaky looking fish. If nothing else, that meant it was a good place to go to feel sorry for himself. Recently he'd been wanting to do that a lot less...hence the exhaustion.
He leant against a rotting plank of wood and exhaled deeply, watching the oxygen bubble in front of him. His ship was always falling apart more and more every time he visited.
'Ship' was generous. Of all the boats he'd sailed on in his life, Scratch couldn't help being a little annoyed it was this one that became his coffin. Not the fancy navy ship or even any of the larger fishing boats he'd gotten to use when working for companies, no. It had to be his piddly little houseboat.
The thing looked more pathetic than he remembered. Maybe it was because half of it was buried in sand now, making it appear smaller, or maybe it was the state the creatures down here had left it in. The plank Scratch was leaning against creaked dangerously beneath his hand and small shards of bark began to break off with tiny little crunches. The thing wasn't worth preserving really, but he stopped leaning on it regardless. His usual spot on the deck had been uprooted; the fish that now lived in his old home seemed to have widened their entryways through executive use. It sucked because the railing was broken away there, letting him dangle his tail over the side. It made him feel like he had gravity again, like he was human again. Sometimes he even formed legs to try and remember what it felt like to kick them over the edge of a pier into the ocean. It never really felt the same when he was surrounded by it.
In place of his old spot, Scratch settled himself atop the wheelhouse. It would make it easier to avoid looking in the windows. Despite the fact they were dark and covered in barnacles by now, he still tried his best to keep his eyeline away from that area. He was already aware he was dead, thank you, he didn't need to see it.
A handful of fish began to circle him the longer he sat, attracted by the glow he gives off. He wouldn't mind if they were little, like in Molly's kiddie movies, but the fuckers down here were big and it was more than a little intimidating. Not like they can do anything since he's already dead, but aside from the general annoyance, teeth hurt ectoplasm same as flesh and he doesn't want the excess of prey attracting a predictor like an angler fish or something.
Scratch swatted at the things ineffectively. The water slowed his movements, making the gesture come across as sluggish. Not particularly in the mood to expend any more energy now, but seeing no choice, Scratch groaned before putting on his scary face. The rippling visuals already in place due to the water make his impact on the environment minimal, but his form was enough to get the message through. Animals were simpler than humans, so he could skimp out on the details like bloodshot eyes or bugs crawling out of his mouth. All he needed was to make himself big and form a large, sharp row of teeth and the entourage scattered instantly.
He sank back down into his spot, exhaling another breath. Or miming it at least. There wasn't any air down here for him to have breathed in since arriving, but the gesture was still a force of habit. Where, exactly, 'down here' is he never found out. There'd been a handful of times he'd tried to swim to the surface to maybe locate himself, but he was either too far down or too lazy to ever see it through. The most he'd gathered was that he was maybe in a ravine of some kind? On his most determined search, too clouded by grief to get tired for...a long time, he found some walls that, following upwards, started to taper inwards. The ocean proved too big for him to investigate more thoroughly though, and it's not like it mattered anyway. It would certainly explain why he was never found if that was the case, assuming the storm didn't blow him too far out to sea before he went down.
(And assuming anyone bothered to look for him at all).
Whatever, it wasn't important. His past life wasn't someone the living world would bother to remember, and he'd made a point to distance his afterlife from that identity as much as possible. It wasn't one worth holding onto. In a way, he found it almost poetic how untouched by other eyes this wreckage was; the sole link between his two lives. It only made this place stranger and more melancholic to visit. It was like his own personal limbo.
Molly didn't know about this place, but she'd pried enough out of him to know his resting spot wasn't final. He didn't have a grave anywhere, not even a makeshift one, to visit. The kid acted like it was the most tragic thing in the world, but in a weird, backwards way Scratch preferred this. If he was found and buried, he couldn't ever visit to mourn without seeing how little anyone gave a shit. At least here it was out of sight out of mind. Maybe not the spot he would have chosen, (and certain not the way he would have chosen) but it could be worse. It wasn't perfect but it was his. And hey he got the place to himself. Aside from the fish of course.
His only complaint would be that he'd rather not have to have his own corpse to avoid. But, he supposed, the wheelhouse was a better coffin than none. At least he went down anchored inside something so he got the dignity of none of his colleagues finding it. Nobody wanted to see that, including him.
It took a while to call that bundle of bones below him an 'it' instead of 'me', but that's what it was, in truth. It may have been him once, but the fact that he was up here and it was down there was proof that a persons humanity was something else entirely. Made looking back on the few old pictures he had kind of weird, though. It was disorienting enough seeing young, obsolete depictions of himself without an existential voice in the back of his head telling him it was only a temporary puppet of flesh. (Christ being a ghost took some getting used to.)
...Usually he came here when he wanted to feel sorry for himself. Right now, Scratch didn't know why he was here. He didn't feel particularly sorry for himself. He wasn't sad, he wasn't angry. He wasn't not having one of those bizarre lapses in judgement where he missed his life. There'd been no nightmares or storms that he wanted to make worse for himself so he could get it out of his system in one go. Today was his deathday yet he felt nothing.
This wasn't even a tradition for him. It was Molly who put the thought into his head. Scratch didn't feel like he needed to grieve his death, not anymore. Plus he spend the last what? Decade of his life? In a drunken or hungover stupor, so he was hardly paying attention to the date at the time anyway. The ghost council giving him the rare day off was the only reason he bothered to mark it on his calendar now. The day didn't matter, he'd just be sad when he was sad.
Was it just obligation that he was here? Because Molly had made him feel like he was doing something wrong by not being? That sounded a little harsh- he didn't think that was her intent. It wasn't like he hated it here (discomfort about the literally skeleton in the closet aside). In a way it was relaxing to experience the ocean in a way he never got to when he used this boat for its intended purpose. Sure it wasn't as majestic as he would have liked. It was dark and dingy with creepy looking giant fish who stared at him with their lifeless eyes. In a way though, that was fitting. Just like both his life and his death, shit was never as beautiful as expected. It was an ugly, ugly mess down here, and that felt most appropriate.
Maybe it wasn't the perfect, engraved tombstone Molly thought he deserved, or a calm, pretty place for his ashes to be scattered, but he'd made his peace with it. And in a weird way a home. Not a permanent one- he'd made a point to live his afterlife differently than before and that included a new house (even a new family, recently)- but this place? Well it was a nice vacation home to visit on occasion. A grim one, perhaps? Well yeah, but a vacation home nonetheless.
The perfect place for Scratch.