Being dead was exhausting. Melody knew that all too well. Sure, you didn’t have to deal with the physical aspects of exhaustion, but mentally? You were screwed. She’d hoped that in the fifteen years she’d been roaming the school, the loneliness would cease. Maybe she’d meet other ghosts, other people. Maybe she was gonna get picked up by some psychopomp and she’d be on to the next life, whether that be an afterlife or something else. Except that never happened. She just kept on waiting and trying to help anyone she could, not that they’d ever know she was there or who she was.
Unlike the ghost stories she’d grown up watching, none of the living could see her. Feel her, maybe, but that didn’t count for much if she couldn’t feel them. Touch starvation is a real issue when your body can’t be touched. She’d hoped that the basic human desires might fade with time, but that didn’t seem to be the case. Her life was monotonous, lacking, and if it weren’t for the small bits of satisfaction she got from helping people, she would have been a classic wailing ghost, crying in the corners of the school that killed her.
Things had started looking up when Katie’s year level came into the school. There was a shimmer on the people she could interact with, that was one thing she’d learned. People that were like her, that she wanted to protect were marked with a shimmer and that year there were many people marked. Katie, Adam, James, Nick and Lachie all marked with a shimmer. All except one had realised they were what she had learnt was called LGBT. Every year she learnt more about these kids.
Nick, she’d learnt, was a quiet kid. He, Lachlan and Katie had autism, a condition she’d heard a lot about through her years studying the loud halls of the school. She was unsure if it had a connection to the LGBT stuff, but it did seem to have a connection with falling in with crowds that weren’t the best. Nick started hanging out with James and Ben because of shared interest, one which always seemed to bring out the boy’s voice.
Lachlan fell in with Internet communities that did more harm than good to sociability. He got into media far too mature for a kid his age, things that made Melody uncomfortable to look at. As much as she wanted to help him, it was a struggle.
Watching Katie was where she learnt the most. Firstly, she learnt about a lot of trans stuff through Katie; the terms being used had come up before in her time observing the campus, but Katie and Adam were the first ones she had seen wear the label proudly. Through Katie, she was able to learn more about her restrictions and abilities as a ghost. For example, by observing Katie and hearing about her hormones, Melody figured out she could do slight tweaks to people’s appearances if the subject were willing.
Through Adam, she learnt that trans guys were harder to help. Melody knew what trans girls liked. She knew how to speed up the transition process by softening Katie’s face or helping her body develop. She was sure that if she kept helping out, Katie’s body could be ideal for her, especially if she figured out how to talk to the girl. Adam, though? It was best to let him start a process before she intervened. When he tried to deepen his voice, Melody tried to thicken his larynx to make it easier. When he started working out to reduce his chest mass, she tried to reduce his chest so he wouldn’t need a binder. Each step he took needed to be started before she could help. That made helping James that much harder.
Melody figured out the full extent of her power through James. The day she’d decided to change James’ body hadn’t been particularly interesting. James had gone off on some tirade about how Katie needed to “abandon delusions of being a girl” and how she had destroyed their friendship and blah blah blah. She tried throwing paper balls at his head to disrupt his rant. She tried to make the teacher come quicker. She tried comforting Katie while she was crying in the bathroom, but none of it worked. Katie had been picking up on all the things Melody had tried to do, but she still couldn’t feel Melody’s presence.
So she decided to possess James. As a spur of the moment decision, it wasn’t going to be the best, but she figured that she could reverse it, or only mess with him a little bit, and then things got out of control. As she entered his body, she knew something was up. She didn’t try and mess with anything at first. Not even going as far as to affect his speech or movement. Instead, she was distracted by how wrong everything felt. Maybe ghosts weren’t supposed to possess other people and she’d broken some big ghost laws that she knew nothing about because no one had told her what she was doing. His body felt disgusting to her, everything about it was gross, from his deepish voice to his ugly moustache and sideburns that he loved and refused to shave. What was wrong with him? Still, she’d committed to doing something about his behaviour, and Mama didn’t raise a quitter.
She was reminded of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. A nightmare wake-up call of how Melody believed the world would go if he kept continuing to be a terrible person to the person who should have been his close friend. She wanted him to consider becoming a better person before he wound up traumatising or in the worst case killing someone, because if that didn’t work, then what would? She didn’t believe he was a terrible person. Just one that hadn’t developed in a way conducive to being a good person. Maybe a nightmare would change him for the better. Maybe if showing him the future didn’t work, she could give him nightmares about being bullied. Making him a trans guy suffering from dysphoria as his friends mocked him in a dreamscape made up of his own words and behaviour. She hoped it wouldn’t come to that, but it was a possibility.
Then she noticed his body changing. The changes were subtle at first. His hair became more shaggy. His clothes were hanging off of him. He was hungry. She’d seen plenty of teenage boys eat before, but he was eating a lot. It had to be a side effect of her possessing him. It wasn’t like she could leave, though. She had spent years trying to expand the space she could occupy around the school. Would she even be able to exist outside of it? She couldn’t take that risk now. Not when she didn’t know what was happening to him.
He soon grew tired, faster than someone his age reasonably should and headed to bed. That’s when things ramped up. She watched on in horror as, after his face and voice feminised, his reproductive system changed too. The pain he was going through reverberated through her. Every twist and break that went on inside him, all the bones going through rapid lengthening and shortening. Everything. She hadn’t felt touch or physical pain in years and now it felt like surgery was being performed on her without anaesthesia. She could also feel how thin he was getting. Any fat on his body was being broken down into energy that his body could use to change him. Could this kill him? She needed to hold on to his body. She needed to keep him alive.
Then everything stopped. Melody felt hungry. A feeling she hadn’t felt in a while. She was still in his body, but things didn’t feel as wrong as they did yesterday. Additionally, she was pretty sure she had lost consciousness, which for someone who was just a consciousness was terrifying. Was she a part of him now? Would she now be stuck after what had happened? She wouldn’t even be able to test it for the next couple of days. She wanted to panic but knew it wouldn’t solve anything. So she did what any other person would do in her situation. She tried to understand how this person worked.
The worst thing she noticed was she could see inside his thoughts. Just glimpses, words and feelings and emotions. He was overwhelmed with panic. He wanted to call his mum but knew she wouldn’t take it well. James was a guy. He liked being a guy and his new body was terrifying to him. His mum would hate him.
Everything he felt was Melody’s fault and she had to figure out how to fix it, while he resisted every change and opportunity to grow. This was going to be exhausting
Melody is fun to write
Yay another fix, for my addiction for copious amounts of drama. This story is the most concentrated I've come across.
I absolutely love it.
Due to personal circumstances and another identity crisis, I will be writing this story more. Though, it might get a lot darker. Sorry.
@DetectiveRed , more dark than it already is? Im interested.
Hope your doing well. And please don’t feel sorry for anything. It makes me a bit sad when author’s think they owe their audience longer/better/frequent chapters. This is your story and yours alone. You’re free tell it however you want, whenever you want and or drop it whenever you want. I wont ask for a justification for your decisions.
@CinnamonPie Yeah darker than it already is. If you peek behind the curtain this story is a vent piece. When I feel good, it's harder to write. When I feel like I'm struggling I write it to get my feelings out. This is the one story i don't feel guilty about not writing consistently.