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Chapter Text

Rawling's Effect
Part one

Journal of Egon Spengler

November 12

I believe I have finally come up with the answer.

It appears that the algorithm Raymond came up with

before his--

It appears the previous algorithm was insufficient

to affect the requisite perturbation in the

dimensional shift. Using the Croxsie-Manheim

variable, I believe I have succeeded in creating

a stable temporal shift. Unfortunately, there is

little time to test this theory, given both

Pendrake’s Inviolability Principle and the

narrow window of temporal flux that my

recalibrations have created. At any other time,

it would be unlikely that I would attempt such

an endeavor without proper and extensive field

tests, but the farther we move from the event

itself, the less likely is my margin of success.

Three weeks may well already be too long.

Egon Spengler looked deeply into the shifting mists, willing them to crystallize into a too-familiar scene. Beside him, Janine Melnitz stood silent, her worry and grief a living thing in the air between them.

It had been nearly three weeks since the funerals. Peter’s had been a small affair--a few friends from his days at Columbia, plus Egon and Janine. His father was still missing in action, though Janine had spent five hours the day after their deaths just leaving messages for the old conman at every number she could find in Peter’s address book. Ray’s was far larger than they had thought it would be, with his Aunt Lois producing old friends and new friends and near and distant cousins seemingly out of a hat. Winston’s, of course, had been family. His brothers and sister, mother and father, and again, Egon and Janine.

It had all been exactly as they would have wanted it, had any of them wanted to die before fifty. And it had been closer to hell than Egon had ever wanted to get. For Janine, trying to hold him together, it had undoubtedly been worse.

“Are you sure this is going to work, Egon?” she asked quietly, watching as he turned the knob another micron, staring into the depths of the dimensional gate as if it held the secrets of the universe. For them, it did. But those secrets didn’t necessarily want to be told.

Egon inhaled a shuddering breath. “No,” he confessed blatantly, the remainder of his breath falling out of him in a desperate sigh. “But we don’t have any choice. There’s only enough power to create a fifteen-minute window. Field tests would take up far too much of that time.”

“But Egon, are you sure they’d want you to--“

“Just--be ready.” His violent interruption gave her pause and he turned quickly to grasp her hand in apology. Her grief was as bright as his own, and no less painful. “I’m sorry, Janine,” he whispered, the phrase giving voice to so much more than remorse over a few sharp words. “If this doesn’t work, we’ll need to rethink my hypothesis. If it does...” He smiled hopelessly. “You won’t know to worry.”

She pulled him closer, giving him a light peck on the cheek. “Bring ‘em back, Egon,” she pled in a murmur. “I’ll be waiting.”

If I can bring them back, Janine, he thought, steeling himself as the lab he stood in was finally mirrored in the gate, you won’t have to wait.

With one last look at the only remaining constant in his life, Egon Spengler stepped forward into the energy field. A world of shining pain enveloped him and he felt himself falling--

--to land hard on the laboratory floor.

The lab. The same room he had just left. With a gasp for a sudden pain in his side, he lurched up, heading for the calendar beside his computer and picking it up to hold it in a trembling hand.

October 21. Twenty-three days ago.

The day the world ended.

“Ray?” Peter’s voice made him flinch, and Egon dropped the calendar and turned toward the door, dread and anticipation crowding his heart. “Are you up here? I thought--“

“Peter?” Egon’s voice was something less than a whisper as his friend walked into the lab, looking around in confusion. He was... so real it sent a jolt of pain through the physicist’s heart. The last time he’d seen his friend, laid out in a tasteful coffin... He’d worried that he would always remember him that way; bruises eased from view with not-so-subtle make-up, hair styled in a way Peter never would have put up with in life, stubborn curl tamed to hide the fracture.

To see him now, whole and undamaged, was somehow worse than that memory. If he couldn’t change this...

Egon steeled himself, knowing that Peter would be as likely to draw his thrower on him as to believe that he’d finally made Ray’s hypothetical dreams of time travel possible.

“Peter?”

He knew this time he’d spoken loud enough to be heard, but Peter looked right through him, scratching his head.

“Huh. Could have sworn I heard something.”

“Peter?” Egon moved forward, his hand stopping inches short of Peter’s arm. Something had gone wrong, obviously--but what? He could affect things here. He’d touched the calendar, picked it up...?

Alive, healthy, and completely oblivious to his presence, Peter turned away from Egon’s frozen form, heading for the stairs. “Hey Ray! Where are you, Tex? Winston’s got a bust for us!”

Egon followed him as he headed back down the stairs. The physicist’s feet touched the steps, his hand gripped the railing... If Peter stopped, he’d probably knock the smaller man down the flight running into him. But the time phase that the dimensional gate allowed him to create, the phase that let him see and hear and touch this reality three weeks in the past, left him shifted just enough to remain invisible--and tragically silent. His head pounded viciously--probably from the time shift--and he couldn’t quite come up with a way to communicate with the man before him.

Could he write a note, perhaps? If he could touch the world around him, he could touch Peter. Force him to look at the note. Get him to abort the bust...

The phone rang suddenly, setting off more pounding in Egon’s skull, and Peter headed into the kitchen. Egon glanced at the clock as he followed, painfully remembering exactly who was waiting on the other end of the line.

“Ghostbusters! You got a spook, we’ll bust the mook.” Where on earth had he come up with that? Egon had wondered the first time.

“Hey, Egon!” Peter’s face lit up, and Egon felt a twinge in his chest. “Just trying something new--what, that’s a crime?”

Given the miniscule list of things you haven’t experienced, along with their probable nature, I believe it might be, Peter. Egon’s thoughts provided his reply. He remembered that phone conversation so clearly. At least he thought he did.

“Under the weather, huh?” Peter asked, making Egon wish he could hear himself on the other end. He remembered waking up in the early hours of the morning that day, his body still on New York time. He didn’t recall having felt ill.

“Well I’m sure Ruth’ll be able to make you feel better.” The comment was accompanied by a lecherous grin that was exactly what Egon remembered hearing when Peter had asked after Ruth Myers’s health in their original conversation. Then, he’d been pleasantly irritated by his friend’s contention that the physics conference was simply a chance to “hook up” with his old flame.

“Breakfast, huh?” Peter’s grin expanded, and Egon tried to work past the throbbing in his head to figure out what had already changed. There were theories that a person couldn’t double back on the timeline of his own life... Something about the pressure of two identical beings occupying the same temporal state...

If only his head would stop throbbing so he could try to remember!

“Well you two have fun, then,” Peter griped good-naturedly. “We’ll just slave away, keeping New York safe until you get back.”

“Pete! Come on, man, get a move on!” Winston’s voice was clear and vibrant now, while three weeks ago, Egon hadn’t even heard it over the line. At least that moment in time hadn’t changed.

“Feel better, okay, Spengs?” Peter said into the receiver, a smile on his face for the upcoming job. “We got ghosts to bust.”

Take care, Peter. The remembered farewell had Egon’s eyes burning, and he hoped this new reality evoked the same response from his original self. I’ll see you all next week.

“See ya, Egon. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

I doubt that will be a problem, Peter, he’d replied the first time--except that Peter had never thought Egon would be planning his funeral in less than a week’s time. Have a good bust.

Peter hadn’t even bothered to respond.

“Venkman, you coming, or what?” Winston was getting impatient, and Egon followed his best friend as the younger man led the way down to the garage.

“Rush, rush, rush!” Peter’s gripe held no irritation. “We got a call from the famous Dr. Spengler,” he explained as he headed toward Ecto. Egon’s chest contracted at the sight of Ray and Winston beside the old hearse; Ray bouncing on his toes in excitement while Winston simply looked at his watch and glared at Peter’s approaching form.

“He got there okay?” Ray’s childlike enthusiasm had always been a source of comfort to the physicist, but now, it only reminded him of what he’d lost. “How’s Dr. Myers?” He opened the door behind the driver’s seat and snapped his fingers in irritation. “Darn! I forgot the destabilizer. Egon was rerouting the power matrix in it before he left last night. We might need it.”

Peter grinned at his friend’s boundless energy, sliding into the shotgun position while Ray ran for the stairs. In his haste, he left the back door open, providentially giving Egon a chance to slide across the seat to the other side. Somehow, he felt they’d notice a door opening by itself, and the revelations brought on by the altered phone conversation hadn’t given him a chance to come up with a way to stop them from going. Maybe, if he went along, he could prevent the accident from happening this time.

Of course, if he’d simply stayed in New York the first time, it might never have happened at all.

“The ghost is gonna split by the time we get there,” Winston groused.

“What’s the matter, Zed?” Peter asked, leaning out the window to smile at him. “You and Hallie have a fight?”

“Mind your own business, Venkman,” Winston retorted, though Egon could see from the look on his face that Peter had guessed correctly. “I didn’t see you heading out with Trish last night.”

Peter shrugged. “Had to give Spengs some last minute instructions--you know him and the ladies.”

“They throw themselves at him, Pete,” Winston remarked, twisting a well-worn knife.

“Yeah, but he never could catch.”

If, by some miracle, this insane scheme actually works, I’ll remember to pay you back for that, Egon promised silently, as Ray hurried back down the stairs and slid first the destabilizer, and then himself, into the vehicle.

The trip to the bust gave Egon little information he hadn’t had when he began this trip. That day, Janine had had a dentist’s appointment mid-morning, and hadn’t come in by the time they took the call. But Winston had left her a message with the address and a vague mention of a possible class six. The note added that they had taken the destabilizer just in case--the device sat heavily in the back of Ecto, just behind Egon’s seat.

As he listened to his friends banter back and forth, a pain growing in him for the knowledge that all of this was lost to him now, Egon remembered clearly the slightly panicked report he’d been given by the only eyewitness to the blast. A policeman, on the force for twenty years, Rob Gilbert hadn’t been prepared for the sight of such an entity.

“It was huge and blue!” he’d said, his left hand rubbing across the cast on his right arm as he sat numb in his hospital bed. “Just... electric blue. It had horns, and fangs, and I don’t know what else.”

“Can you tell me what happened, just before...” At the time, he hadn’t been able to say the words. Over time, speaking them had become easier, though the phrase they died still stuck in his throat. The accident was somehow easier to stomach.

“They were chasing it around the building site, and Venkman and Zeddemore finally got it caught with their beam-things.” His eyes became round, his breathing shallow. “That monster just screamed. Like something out of hell. Stantz lifted his rifle and... bam.”

Bam. Hardly enough information for Egon to piece it together. The resulting explosion was small--the proton packs’ shielding had miraculously held--but it had been enough to dislodge a fair amount of rubble from the building being demolished. That rubble had ended both Peter and Winston’s lives... Ray had been dead before it had the chance to try for him... And Gilbert had sustained a head injury that rendered the rest of the scene a mystery.

Which was why Egon was here now. He had spent three weeks in hell, obsessed with one goal: to go back and save them. Now, finally, he was here. Not in the manner he’d hoped for, but... He could touch them--affect them. He could, if fate favored them all, save them.

“Okay, boys, what do we got?”

Peter’s manner, always brash and confident, seemed to put the construction manager instantly at ease.

“There’s something in there!” the manager announced, an affront in his voice that blamed anyone and everyone for the fact. “It’s gonna eat my crew if you guys don’t stop it!”

“That’s what we’re here for,” Peter assured him. Egon went ahead of his friends into the site, his stomach clenching in anticipation. If he could only figure out what the demon was. If he could just figure out how to stop it...

“Wow, these readings are weird!”

Ray’s excitement led the three teammates to the edge of the site, slightly behind the spot where Egon stood getting an idea of the terrain. The residuals Egon himself had picked up upon his emergency return to New York had indeed been strange. A class six, but with heavy overtones that hinted at a greater strength.

“Peter,” Ray said quietly, moving forward. “I think it’s a class seven.”

Peter’s lips tightened into an unforgiving line. “Trust a demon to show up when we gave Spengs the week off.” There was no recrimination in the tone, but Egon hardly needed it. He knew he should have been here. Things might never have gone so wrong if he hadn’t decided to take the time off.

“It may not be a demon, though,” Ray countered, puzzling over the readout on the meter before him. Egon headed toward him, hoping for a look at the levels. “It’s strange--it’s almost like I’m getting class four and class--"

“Drop!”

Winston barked out the command, and Peter and Ray immediately flattened as the ghost skimmed over them. It was pretty much as Gilbert had described after the fact--electric blue with fangs and horns. Claws on five arms finished off the ensemble, and it shrieked in anger at the near miss.

Peter and Ray came up shooting, their streams missing the specter by mere inches.

“Damn, he’s fast!” Winston exclaimed angrily, his own stream shooting wide.

“And powerful,” Ray added. “Go to full streams, guys! It might be a composite ghost. I’m reading a negative valance mixed in. We might have to use the destabilizer after all!”

“We can keep it busy, Tex,” Peter bellowed over the ghost’s screams. “Go for it!”

Ray ran back to the hearse, and Egon tried to keep an eye on Peter and Winston as the ghost led them on a merry chase through the construction site. Twice, he barely flattened himself in time to miss being clocked by the specter, which seemed to be diving and swooping in all directions rather than being out for the Ghostbusters in particular, though he could have sworn it looked him in the eye on one particularly close pass. The trace of ectoplasm that splattered him after that dive confirmed his hypothesis that ghosts, who lived slightly outside of time, could affect him as easily as he could manipulate objects around him, unseen though he was.

“Zed! On your left!” Peter’s call, slightly frantic now that the ghost increased its activity, was followed by a hard burst of protons that barely cleared Winston’s arm before latching onto the entity. “All right! Got it!”

“You nearly got me, homeboy!” Winston called out in good-natured disgust, rolling down and to the side to provide Peter’s stream more room. “Watch it next time!”

“Hey, I missed you!” There was a thread of enjoyment in Peter’s voice--an enjoyment that accompanied him on every bust and that he always denied later. “Feel free to join in any time, Zed. This gooper ain’t getting any prettier!”

“Hold him for a second, guys!” Ray called, huffing heavily as he approached, destabilizer slung over his shoulder. “Egon did some work on the power matrix for this--it’ll just take a minute...”

Ray hefted the modified thrower before him, taking a bead on the ghost that Winston and Peter held in their streams for the moment. He pressed the trigger, stiffening at the subtle whine the machine gave off.

“Guys, something’s happening! The destab--“

Egon was already rushing to Ray’s side, and the mounting whine of power as the machine cycled toward overload made him shake. His fault. This whole thing must have been his fault! If he hadn’t been trying to realign the power matrix... He tried to reach for the destabilizer, tried to bat it out of Ray’s hands.

“Ray, watch it!” Winston’s voice was sharp. “I’m getting an--“ Whatever he might have said was drown out by an unearthly howl, though Egon was too focused on Ray to note what the others had done to make the ghost scream so.

Ray backed away from the ghost, and therefore Egon, in surprise as a stream of energy launched toward him. The beam from the destabilizer shot past Egon with a jolt, meeting the demon fire behind him, and Egon felt the explosion dimly as he grabbed at the recall bracelet on his wrist, knowing that he could do nothing to prevent it this time. But he’d come back. He’d come back and he’d fix it--

Light surrounded him, wrapping him in pain and anguish before crushing his thoughts.

* * * * * *

Chapter Text

It was a long few moments before he swam up from the pain, the anguish still a heavy weight in his chest as tremors wracked him.

“My fault,” he whispered, horrified. “Janine, it was my fault! The destabilizer... I must have miswired in my haste to finish the modifications...” Only silence met his confession, and he dragged his throbbing head up to look around the room.

Janine was gone.

Panic gripped him and he glanced at the calendar on his way out the door, ignoring the shudders that still ran through him, leaving pain like glass shards in their wake. November 12. Right day. The right day, but--

“Janine!”

“Come on, Egon. Time’s wasting.” Her quiet, tired call stopped him on the stairs, and he heard the exhaustion in her voice. She hadn’t been waiting for him--she didn’t even know to wait...

Something was different. Something had changed. Pounding down the remaining steps, he paused again at the bottom, watching her. Janine stood impatiently by the VW that she’d drawn up in Ecto’s normal spot. Of course. Because Ecto was no longer here. The guys had taken it on the bust, and falling debris had damaged it beyond repair.

“Visiting hours only last so long, Egon,” she remarked, her normally caustic tone overlaid by heavy grief.

“Visiting hours?” What had happened? Had his bumbling interference actually changed things? Were they...? “The guys?”

Sympathy flooded her eyes and she walked toward him gently, reminding him of a woman approaching a cornered animal. He looked away, denying, and his gaze settled on her desk. The flowers and cards piled there haphazardly were testament enough to his failure.

“Oh, Egon...” Janine sniffled mightily, taking his hand as she would a child’s. “Come on, Egon. Winston’s waiting.”

* * *

It was more difficult than he could say to keep silent on the trip to NYU Medical, as the midmorning sun crept through the streets. Questions hovered in the air, but Janine was simply too tired to notice--or too grief-stricken to respond. Winston’s waiting, she had said. Only Winston.

The theory that had driven him since their deaths--the theory that guided him as he redesigned the dimensional gate, creating a narrow window of time for him to affect their rescue--gave him at least one answer. When he rushed toward Ray, he changed something. A slight movement on Ray’s part, perhaps. Enough to save Winston and change Janine’s perception of the intervening time.

And yet, even this would never be enough. He had had one small chance to save them--a window only fifteen minutes wide to affect the time transfer. And he had failed. Worse, he knew now how it had happened, heard the off-tempo whine of the destabilizer before it blew... His fault. His inattention...

He barely noticed their destination: the neurology ward.

“Dr. Spengler.”

The quiet voice had him turning suddenly, and he came face to face with a man of a height with him. He had bushy red eyebrows and a gentle smile, and his nametag proclaimed him to be Dr. Jenefsky. He obviously knew Egon in this reality. This reality that still had two men missing.

“How is he today?” Janine’s question held a desperate hope that died at the sympathy in Jenefsky’s eyes.

“The same, I’m afraid,” the doctor said, leading the way to a nearby room. “We haven’t been able to do very much for him. Head wounds like his are always tricky and his brain waves indicate...”

His words faded into the background as Egon’s shaking hand pushed open the door, revealing a scene that, a month ago, would have been the stuff of nightmares, but now was only proof that indeed something had changed and still, nothing was right.

Winston lay silent, his head bandaged neatly, his limbs slack. A monitor kept time with his heart and a machine hissed in time to his breaths, hooked to the tube that assaulted his mouth.

Egon shook with a painful tremor that had little to do with his physical aches and everything to do with the guilt that ran through him. Peter and Ray were still dead, and Winston... God, how could he live with this? How could he go on, knowing they had paid the price for his incompetence? “How...?”

Jenefsky answered a question Egon hadn’t asked with that anguished whisper. But it was a question that, perhaps, this reality’s Egon had asked before. “We still can’t say how long, Dr. Spengler, you know that. Comas...” He shrugged, a movement that Egon caught only subliminally. “He’s hanging in there.”

Thanks to the machines, Egon thought coldly, glaring at the ventilator that breathed for his friend. He stepped forward, collapsing into the chair beside the bed and taking Winston’s hand in his. The fingers were cool, lifeless.

“I’m sorry, Winston,” Egon whispered, unheard by the man and woman who stood behind him, murmuring quietly. “If I had just...” If I had stayed. If I had paid more attention.

Tears slipped from his eyelids as they closed. It had been nearly a week since he cried for them. A week since he had finally given up trying to sleep in the empty bunkroom, giving himself over to exhausted slumbers on the couch in the lab, when he was simply too tired to continue. The couch Peter had used so often.

Peter, who spent more time napping in the lab, listening to Egon and Ray “putter” than he did in his own bed, it seemed. Peter, who had trusted Egon to come up with every last minute save, every miracle gizmo. Gizmos that were always built by Ray, who was never without a good idea himself. Who never hesitated to enter into the fray. Who would never have made the kind of mistake Egon had. Ray would have gone over the machine more carefully. He would never have been so distracted by his upcoming trip. He’d never have put his friends in danger.

And now Winston, sole survivor, lay silent in condemnation of Egon’s failure, the hissing machine at his side his only hold on life.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered again, clutching his friend’s hand, despairing. He didn’t expect absolution--would never have accepted it even if Winston were awake.

He had been in such a hurry to leave! Why? Why did he go to San Francisco at all? The seminar hadn’t been important--merely a good break. A chance to get away, by himself. Bitter laughter welled up, unbidden. He was certainly by himself now, wasn’t he?

“Egon?” Janine’s warm hands on his shoulders brought him back to the present, and he looked up into her eyes to find his grief mirrored. Not by himself, then. But so alone. “It wasn’t your fault, you know that, right?” Words she had said many times in the last three weeks, no doubt, judging by the tired, worn quality to them. “If you hadn’t gone to San Francisco, you’d--“ She broke off, unwilling to complete the sentence.

But he knew what she meant. He would have died, as well.

But of course, he wouldn’t have, he told himself, anger welling up. If he had simply taken the time to recheck the modifications...

He stood suddenly, determination giving him a furious strength. “I’ll go back,” he ground out angrily, his voice barely a whisper as he remembered his last fragmented thought in that previous reality. “I can go back to when I left...”

“Egon?”

Janine followed him out of the room, almost running to keep up with him as he blundered past the dumbfounded doctor.

He just had to recalibrate the gate. Time it so that he could fix the destabilizer before they left on the bust. As long as he didn’t run into himself. That would be the trick. He’d left to go downstairs with Peter almost immediately. Fifteen minutes...

“Egon, stop!”

Her tortured cry stilled both thought and body, and he waited for clicking heels to approach.

“Egon, what’s wrong? What did you mean ‘you could go back’?”

He turned to her, gripping her shoulders and staring intently into her face. “Janine, I need your help.” Her eyes grew soft and he shook his head. “There is a way to stop this.”

Her face tightened, as did the muscles beneath his hands. “Egon--“

“Janine, just believe me--please,” he begged quietly, punching the button for the elevator with more force than necessary. “I’ll explain everything to you on the way back home.”

She sighed, and he sensed that she was at least willing to feed his delusion, if such she thought it was. They entered the elevator, heading for the garage, and he shook quietly through another tremor as she watched him.

“Egon, believe me,” Janine whispered gently as they exited the elevator. “I know how hard this has been on you--it’s been hard on me, too--but you can’t--“

“This is my fault, Janine,” he countered, a coldness in his tone that was meant to hurt only himself. “I have to fix it.”

“But how?” she asked, anger replacing the quiet grief as they reached her car. “Egon, it’s done... They’re gone.” She closed her eyes against her own words. “It’s not like you can go back in time and fix it.” But her desperate wish that that could be so caused tears to escape her closed lids.

He turned her around, embracing her gently, though his mind still raced with possibilities. She shook in his arms, and he ran a light hand up her back, giving the same comfort he remembered receiving a thousand times in the days after their deaths.

“God, Egon... I still can’t believe they’re gone.”

He sighed, standing away from her and holding out a hand for her keys. The story was a bit more unbelievable than their normal, and he didn’t want her driving when she heard it.

* * **

“But if you went back once already...” Janine mused dazedly, pulling herself out of the car as Egon parked in the firehouse. She had taken his story in in silence, puzzling it out as he spoke. Believing the unbelievable was the Ghostbusters’ stock in trade, after all. Time travel was just another in a long list. “How can you go back again? Won’t you... I don’t know--meet yourself?”

That would be bad, Egon admitted silently. It would probably take out half the city, if not destroy the timeline altogether. He shook his head, leading the way up to the lab. The research that had taken him three weeks to amass was all in his head now--and in the notebook that dug into his back pocket. It shouldn’t take more than a day to reconfigure the dimensional gate. He’d have to send Janine out for some parts, if his previous self hadn’t already gotten started--

“Egon?!”

He stopped at the second floor landing, realizing that she’d been talking to him the entire way up. He turned to her, contrite. “I’m sorry, Janine. What were you saying?”

She huffed in irritation. “I said, what if you can’t fix it? You said last time... You said they all died, but Winston’s alive now.” The shadows in her eyes admitted that it was only barely true. “What if you changed things too much the first time for things to work now?”

Her instinctive grasp of the paradoxes didn’t surprise him in the least. She was as intelligent as any of them, if as reticent as Peter to admit it.

He had been thinking about that very paradox. “Winston lived this time because my interaction with Ray must have thrown him farther from Winston when the destabilizer... exploded. If I can go back and fix the destabilizer before the bust, I believe my previous actions during it should make no difference.”

“You believe,” she grated. “But you don’t know! Egon, you’ve only got a fifteen-minute window! What if you don’t time it right?” Her head dropped in anguish as she whispered, “what if I lose you, too?”

There was a wealth of pain in her tone, and it gave Egon pause. This Janine had lost Peter and Ray already--would probably lose Winston as well. Was it fair to her, to have her lose them all? He’d had that thought in the original timeline, and the answer now was the same.

“But if I can fix it...” His eyes closed. “Janine, this is my fault. Everything that’s happened--everything you’ve been through... If I can...”

She smiled bravely as he trailed off, tears brimming in the grin. “I know. You have to try. I just don’t think I can...”

He hugged her to him. “It will work, Janine,” he vowed, a current of steel in his words. “We’ll make it work.” She nodded against him, and he pulled back, smiling gently. Another shudder ran through him, and he frowned at the muted pain.

“Egon, what is it?” Her hand on his arm was curiously distant, and an ache built slowly in his head, muting her words. “You’ve been shaking all day. Is something wrong?” She grinned darkly in self-reproach. “Beyond the obvious.”

Of course, he thought dimly, the time shift. He had felt a residual weakness when he first came back through the gate, but he hadn’t noticed anything more than the occasional tremors since. And it would explain his original self’s illness when he went back before. There were theories--untested, of course--that said a man couldn’t exist more than once in any time. No matter how far from himself he got geographically, cellular damage was still being done. To introduce himself again...

No. He would risk his own dissolution in a second, if it would only bring them back. He shook his head carefully, steeling himself against the numbness. “I’m tired, Janine,” he whispered reassuringly. “It’s... been a very long three weeks.”

The understatement had her chuckling for a moment before she sobered. “We should eat. Get some sleep.” When he tried to voice his denial, she put a finger to his lips. “This is time travel, right?” she asked. “One more day on this side isn’t going to make a difference to them. But it will to you.”

Pendrake’s Inviolability Principle said differently. If he waited too long on this end, it was entirely possible he could never get back to the proper window in time to repair the destabilizer. Pain like a dagger sliced through him, greying his vision around the edges for a moment. Perhaps she was right. Perhaps he simply needed to rest, to recuperate. He couldn’t go back in the shape he was in now--he needed as much energy as possible to withstand the effects of the time shift. If he arrived at the other end too incapacitated to function quickly...

“You’re right, as usual, Janine,” he admitted with a smile.

“Course I am.” The sure, cocky tones gained her a chuckle from him, as shaky as her own had been, and she shoved him toward the spiral staircase. “Go up and take a shower. Relax for a few minutes. I’ll go order us some food.”

He went at her bidding, smiling gently. What would he have done without her, these past three weeks? She had helped him through the horrors he’d had to endure; helped him make Peter’s funeral arrangements, called Winston’s parents, sat up with him and Ray’s Aunt Lois... Had this Janine ever found Peter’s father? Peter had been laid to rest without Charlie in attendance, and that fact had weighed on Egon since the day they buried his best friend.

But it won’t happen this time, Peter, he vowed, gasping a little as the numbness in his arms gave way to a sudden jolt of pain that passed as quickly as it came. This time, you’ll be griping about him forgetting your birthday.

As he stepped under the showerhead, feeling pounding heat wash away the residual aches, Egon could only pray he was speaking the truth.

* * *

“This is entirely unacceptable.”

Egon dropped the screwdriver onto his lab table with too much force, denting the shining surface slightly.

“They can’t get that circuit here from California any faster, Egon,” Janine offered calmly.

He nodded, nervous energy pushing him to his feet to pace. The headache was back again, battering at his self-control. “I know. I understand the delay, but...” But he simply could not wait any longer to get them back. Yesterday had been spent cataloging the components needed, and resting as Janine insisted. Now, when he was so close to completion, to be denied another day...

Janine’s light snort caused him to whirl back toward her, her soft voice pulling at him. “Dr. V. could have browbeat them into it.”

His retort was instinctive. “Peter would have chartered a jet and had them fly it out in the night.”

The irritated tones caused Janine’s face to fall, and she slumped sadly into the lab chair at her side. She’d spent the day beside him, helping when she could, offering silent support when she couldn’t. But the look in her eyes now was the one he’d seen too much of since they died. This Janine had had a different experience of the past three weeks, but she was no less devastated than the first reality’s secretary had been.

“What was it like, Egon?” she asked, tones brittle and worn. “The first time?”

He sighed, taking a seat again. “Difficult.”

She laughed, tears in her eyes. “Peter always said you had a penchant for understatement.”

He hid yet another painful tremor from her, reaching out to take her hand. “One thing made it almost bearable, Janine,” he whispered, waiting until her eyes met his. “You. Having you here was...” He closed his eyes, griping her hand with painful intensity. “Everything else was gone. You were all I had left.”

She squeezed back before she let him go, fighting to move them into something less maudlin. Her machinations were more transparent than Peter’s, Egon mused sadly, but no less effective. “I still don’t understand why you’re here--I mean, why is my memory different from yours? Shouldn’t we... Shouldn’t we both remember the same things?”

“In going back, I changed something,” he explained, feeling himself slipping into what Peter had always called his “lecture mode.” For once, he almost balked at the shift, then allowed himself to be drawn in. For Janine, who had seen him through the worst, he could do that much. “I came back from it, so I am privy to the original timeline. You stayed, so...”

“But where’s my Egon?” she suddenly wondered. “He didn’t... He couldn’t function, like you are,” she admitted tiredly. “He said he was sick that morning--like he almost felt it when they died... He just floated, like a ghost.” She shivered at her own description.

Egon could imagine that all too clearly. If not for the dream he’d had, that first day on the plane back from San Francisco, he’d never have had this idea at all. He wondered idly why that had changed in this reality. Had the fact that Winston survived given him some hope, at least? Had the other him decided to take what he could, salvage a shade of his former life? And he didn’t remember feeling ill the day they died, though it was obvious from Peter’s phone conversation that he had--at least in the altered reality.

“I am your Egon,” he explained quietly. “Once the timeline shifted, I became a part of this reality. There aren’t two of me because there don’t have to be.”

“Oh.” It was too reminiscent of Winston--that tone that said “I don’t understand, but I’m willing to trust you.” He was always willing to trust, and the fact that Egon had so betrayed that, through his own selfish desires...

“We should get some dinner,” Janine suggested, taking his hand when he would have balked at the suggestion. “You need to eat--you’re still not feeling well, I can tell.”

Could she blame him? He wouldn’t feel right until he had changed this reality for good. Not until Peter was pulling him and Ray out of the lab, cajoling them into a night on the town with Winston. But another shudder, harder to mask, ran through him, and he nodded his agreement.

As they headed downstairs, his mind ran over their conversation, and he realized something. Like a ghost... “Where is Slimer?” He’d been home for nearly thirty-six hours, and he hadn’t seen the little ghost once.

Janine stopped, sighing deeply. “He... left last week.” Egon just stood in amazement. He couldn’t imagine Slimer abandoning them--abandoning him. “You--Egon--came back from visiting Winston one day, and Slimer asked--again--when Ray and Dr. V. were coming home.” She sniffled, starting down the stairs again. “Every time he asked, you just seemed to... to die a little more. You yelled at him and...” She shrugged, heading into the kitchen. “I think he’s afraid to come back.”

His Slimer had done the same, moaning after the guys, asking when they were coming back. But Egon had had an answer then--he’d been so sure he’d succeed. The answer was “soon,” and the ghost seemed to take it at face value, sad though he was. Egon sighed. To be so without hope... At least he had had a purpose, something to make the frigid quiet of the firehouse recede, something to fill him in the darkness, if only a little bit.

Janine had turned to him as he mused, and she drew gentle arms around him. “We’ll do this, Egon,” she whispered, echoing his promise made late yesterday morning. “We’ll get them back.”

He held off another shudder of pain until she’d let him go, feeling it race through him, leaving broken glass in its wake, leaving his mind slightly muddled. He wondered exactly how much it would take for the time travel to destroy him. Would going back again do too much damage?

Did he care?

We will get them back, he repeated her words silently. Or I will die trying.

“So,” Ruth said, a smile on her face as they sat in the crowded hotel restaraunt, full of an augmented lunchtime crowd. “You guys are famous now. Who would’ve thought, huh?”

Egon smiled his acceptance of her disbelief. When they had dated, he was nothing more than an eccentric grad student, his theories about spooks and specters baffling, if not downright amusing, to his colleagues. Gozer had changed that--in a big way.

“Peter’s still a lady-killer, I hear,” she continued, munching cheerfully on her salad as they waited on the main course. “And I suppose Ray’s still doing his Tigger imitation?”

“He has yet to reach a plateau in that regard, I’m afraid,” he admitted. Indeed, Ray’s exuberance seemed only to grow as the years went by. It was a heartening development, an energy that kept them all going. “Winston manages to keep them both fairly well in hand.”

“With no small help from you, I’m sure.”

“Dr. Spengler?”

One of the runners for the convention came up, slightly out of breath. “I didn’t think I’d find you--lunchtime and all.”

Egon looked up at the young man, a sliver of fear working its way into his stomach at the boy’s serious demeanor. “How can I help you?”

“You’ve got a call waiting for you at the desk--they said it’s an emergency.”

Egon’s eyes opened slowly as he drifted out of the dream, glad for the interruption. He didn’t need to live over the horrible sound of Janine’s crying, or the news she gave him from the other side of the continent.

The darkness around him was not enough to disguise the lab’s features, and he lay, staring blankly at the table across from him for a long moment before rising to sit on the edge of the couch. Janine had been unsurprised when he refused to enter the bunkroom again tonight. He assumed this reality’s Egon had been equally as reticent to enter the room that was more empty than the rest.

Standing, he waited through another spasm of pain, lighter than the previous ones. Perhaps he was finally recovering. Though he guessed his progress would mean very little once he walked back through the dimensional gate. As dulled as his faculties seemed to him here in the dead of night, how much worse would they become once he had subjected himself to the time shift again?

He heard a whimper drifting down the hallway and froze, his heart stopping briefly before he realized that the voice was light and high. Janine. Not the guys. Janine.

He stood for a long moment in the doorway of the bunkroom, watching. She had refused to go home, and hadn’t even been able to make herself go down to the guestroom below. Curled in a tight ball on his bed, she whimpered again, Ray’s name falling sadly from her lips. As he approached, Peter and Winston’s names followed, and he sat on the edge of the bed, shaking her gently.

“Janine?”

She curled tighter, tears leaking from closed eyes.

“Janine, please wake up.”

She jerked once and opened her eyes, looking up at him in sorrow. “Oh, Egon...”

He gathered her to him, holding her carefully as she cried. His Janine had stayed at the firehouse for nearly two weeks after they died, afraid to leave him and just as scared to be alone herself. He wondered if her Egon had been able to comfort her as much as she deserved.

He winced at the thought. How could any comfort be enough? How could he help her when it was his fault in the first place? Did he even deserve to try?

“I’m sorry, Janine,” he whispered, a soft hand running through her hair. “I’m so sorry I did--“

“You didn’t do anything, Egon,” she cried angrily, pulling away from him to look him in the eyes. “This isn’t your fault.”

“Of course it is,” he replied calmly, hiding the shakes that his guilt caused him. He had been ruthless in his narration, telling her everything. Including why they had died. “If I had simply paid closer attention--“

“Stop!” She pulled away entirely, rising to her feet. “I don’t want to hear this!”

“Because it was my fault?” he ventured, feeling knives digging in as she turned on him.

“Why?” she asked, desperate. “Why didn’t the damn thing work?” Anger welled up, and he could see her try to hold it back. “Damn it, Egon! I took care of you--I kept watch over you, and...”

“And all the while, it was my fault they died.” His admission of guilt was almost silent. “I don’t blame you for being angry--I wouldn’t blame you if you chose to leave--“

“Oh the hell I will!” She pulled him to his feet. “You broke it, and you are damn well going to fix it, Egon! You bring them back, you hear me!” She clutched his arms in fury, tears pouring from her eyes. “You bring them back!”

He nodded, forcing back the tears her anger had brought him. She’d feel sorry for him then, and she had so little cause for that. “If I have to die trying, I will,” he vowed, his voice stronger than it had been in weeks. “I promise you.”

The promise cut her strings, and she fell back to sit on the bed, crying as deeply as she had the day he returned home from San Francisco. But her grief was too old now, the force of it had held her for too long, and she dropped back to sleep, sobbing in his arms.

Once he was sure she slept as soundly as she was able, he rose, turning to leave--and came face to face with Peter’s bed.

A heavy four-poster, with a sturdy mattress that was so well-suited to his sleeping habits... Peter could sleep anywhere, at any time, but never was he so hard to awaken as when he slept here. Like a wraith, Egon drifted over to it, sitting carefully on the edge. Dried, caked slime covered the pillowcase, a testament to how much Slimer had missed him. Egon smiled. Slimer and Peter had had such a contentious relationship, but he had always known that Peter liked the little ghost.

But not the way Ray had.

Slimer was the sort of pet that people like Ray needed. New, different, always exciting and never normal, Slimer was yet another joy in a life full of them--at least for Ray. Winston tolerated the little “spud,” but, Egon suspected, more for Ray’s sake than anything else. Winston had loved having another little brother to watch out for, especially one as frenetic and loyal as the young occultist.

No, not young, really. Not anymore. They were all getting on in age now--Winston would be 50 in a few years, Egon only months behind him. Peter had lived in dread of the day he rolled past that half-century mark...

And Egon had lain in wait for it.

He felt the tears and knew he’d be unable to hide them now. And there was no one to hide themfrom, at any rate. Gone... God, how could they all be gone like this? How could he have killed them?

It was a very long time before he left the room, and longer still before the tears stopped flowing. He spent an hour rereading his journal, making notes where he felt they were needed, his mind full of images of them and the uneven whine of the destabilizer that had caused their deaths.

* * *

Journal of Egon Spengler
November 14

I cannot help but feel time slipping away from me.

The day before yesterday was spent cataloging the components I have here on hand to recalibrate the dimensional gate, and it became apparent early on that I had done nothing in the previous reality to attempt this recalibration.

According to Janine, the previous reality’s Egon was of little use for anything, spending as much time as possible sitting at Winston’s bedside, and most of his remaining time simply sitting. I have come to the conclusion that Winston’s survival derailed any thoughts that I might have had of changing this reality.

She has no knowledge of the dream I clearly remember having that first night after their deaths--the dream which led me to unearth Raymond’s complex conjectures on time travel--and I wonder if the change in circumstances caused me to be too preoccupied to focus on the real possibility of bringing them all back safely. Regardless, the lack of supplies has caused yet another delay in my preparations, and I can only hope that the parts I lack will arrive this morning. The sooner I can get back to them, the better, as Pendrake's Principle is a bare theory and can give me no hard timeline. I have no idea when it will be too late to try again.

The tremors I experienced upon my return have eased off over the course of the night, and I feel nearly whole--physically, at least--for the first time since I attempted their rescue. I found Raymond’s notes on the subject earlier in this notebook of his, and if Rawling’s Hypothesis is correct, the weakness and fragmenting I experienced in my temporal shift should intensify, as there will now be three identical physical entities on October 21. Any pain I incur upon myself is of miniscule concern, but I hope that I will be whole enough to repair the destabilizer in time to stop the accident from happening.

Had I simply repaired it properly in the first place, this would never have happened at all.

* * *

Bacon woke him with its aroma, and Egon sat up quickly, his pen dropping to the floor beside the metal table. He’d fallen asleep over his journal, and he was momentarily confused by that, and by the thought that Winston must be cooking today.

No. No Winston. No Winston, no Peter, no Ray...

“Egon?”

Janine’s timid call turned his head toward the doorway. She stood silent, watching him, her clothes rumpled and her eyes full of guilt.

“I... made breakfast,” she offered, moving further into the room as he rose to greet her. She had obviously slept badly for the remainder of the night, and arisen early. “Egon...”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Janine.”

“No,” she insisted. “I am. I should never have...” She trailed off uncertainly, anger still a glowing ember far back in her eyes.

He reached out, almost afraid to place hands on her shoulders, until she stepped closer, leaning into the grasp with trust. “Peter was always the first one to say that we should speak our feelings,” he reminded her gently.

She looked up at him, stricken. “But it isn’t helping! Egon, you’re trying, I know you are, and it doesn’t hurt you any less than it does me, but--“

“Janine, please,” he murmured gently. “Just bear with me a little while longer. If this doesn’t work, you can decide... from there. If it does--“

She grinned tentatively. “You’ll be glad I forgot.”

He smiled in return, accepting the truce. “Undoubtedly.” He engulfed her in a desperate embrace for a long moment, shuddering with another slight spasm of pain that she thankfully took for emotion. The time shift effect was still with him, then, he realized, his mind going cold and disconnected. He wondered fleetingly if this time it might kill him, and cast away the thought as irrelevant.

“We should eat,” she decided, pulling away from him finally. “That part should be here in a couple of hours, and we can get on with this.”

The part actually came during breakfast, causing Egon to wonder if Janine indeed had Peter’s gift for browbeating after all. Another hour more, and he had the machine reconfigured, set to drop him only minutes after his previous trip.

“Are you sure you won’t run into yourself?” Janine asked worriedly, as he twisted the knob another degree, staring at the lab in the past.

“I left rather quickly,” he assured her. “It shouldn’t be--“

“Egon, look!”

He followed her gaze back to the dimensional gate and froze, watching himself land hard on the floor, watching Peter enter, watching himself leave...

“I have to go now, Janine. There’s very little time.” How long had the call taken? How long did he have until Ray headed upstairs for the destabilizer...?

“Be careful,” she whispered, pulling him in for a peck on the cheek, just as she had the first time.

“I...” Words caught in his throat as he looked at her. Janine--this Janine--wouldn’t know anything had happened if he succeeded. Given his first trip, she might not know even if he didn’t. But just in case. “I’ll be back,” he said, breathing deeply and steeling himself for the pain of transfer.

“I’d better not know about it when you do,” she retorted, soft and acid at once. “Be careful,” she repeated.

He nodded, stepping into the field once more--

* * * * * *

Chapter Text

--and gasping in pain as he landed.

Agony and numbness raced through him, so intense that it took him long moments just to fight past them to breathe. As the sensations died down, he sighed heavily, pulling himself to his feet with the greatest effort. A glance at the calendar and clock told him he had made it. Right place, right time.

He lunged for the destabilizer, ripping it open and checking the wiring carefully. Nothing! He sat back on his heels, listening for footfalls on the stairs, knowing Ray would be coming for the unit any moment now...

How could there be nothing wrong? He’d heard it pushing toward overload--he’d seen the explosion! Another pain ripped him apart, and he sat shaking, trying to think as his mind fragmented further.

“Egon?”

He looked up in shock at the query, the motion sending shards of pain through his skull. Could they see him this time? Could they--?

“Egon hurt?”

The voice resolved into a familiar one that caused him to slump in relief. Slimer. The little ghost floated a few feet from him, looking at him in concern. Originally, he’d thought that Slimer, whose concept of time had never been proven to be linear, might see him, but his mind couldn’t grasp the concept now. He merely saw the ghost as a chance to get his information out. If he could explain to him--

“Egon hurt!” Slimer confirmed to himself, turning to go. “Gotta tell the guys!”

He grabbed the ghost before it got to the door, turning it to face him.

“No, Slimer! Wait.” He gritted his teeth, more glass and fire ripping through him.

Slimer’s face scrunched up in confusion. “Egon hurt. Guys’ll help!”

Egon heard Ray’s step on the stairs, knew he had little time. “Slimer, you have to tell Ray not to use the destabilizer. Tell him--“

His rough handling of the little ghost was apparently too much, and Slimer raced away, leaving a blob of ectoplasm on Egon’s hand, to wrap himself around Ray’s neck, gibbering in fright.

“Slimer?” the occultist cried in confusion. “What’s wrong?”

But Slimer was too scared to reply, and gave a little yelp as Egon called out to him again, disappearing down the stairs in a green blur. Egon’s chin dropped to his chest as he sighed, trying to gain control through the constant tremors.

Ray entered the lab and frowned at the destabilizer, still lying open from Egon’s efforts. The physicist held his breath. Figure it out, Ray, Egon pled silently. Take a good look at it.

“I thought Egon finished working on this thing before he left,” Ray mused quietly. “I could have sworn...”

“Hey, Ray, what’d you do to the spud?” Winston’s voice came clearly up the stairwell as he headed toward the lab and Egon watched in agony. His mind raced, his body rooted to the spot, too tired to put forth effort when thinking took so much more. Why had the explosion happened, then? If not the destabilizer...? And if Slimer didn’t return, how could he ever explain to them what had happened?

“I don’t know, Winston,” Ray offered as his teammate entered the room. He was still looking at the destabilizer. “He flew out of here like he had a demon on his tail...”

“Well he’s downstairs now, hiding in Pete’s jumpsuit,” Winston told him. “Keeps babbling about somebody grabbing him.”

Ray looked up in confusion. “Winston, didn’t Egon finish the remodifications on the destabilizer before he left?”

Winston shrugged. “I think so, why?”

I did, Egon told himself sharply, the memory of screwing the casing back on and testing it coming clear through the haze. He had done it--it wasn’t the destabilizer at all, then. But if not that, then what?

“It’s open,” Ray said, an arm out to draw attention. “I could have sworn--“ He broke off sharply and reached out for a meter that lay abandoned on the table. Turning it on, he swept the room, and Egon jumped as it beeped loudly in his direction. Ray looked up through him and refined the meter’s settings, while Egon simply looked on, confused by his new knowledge and this unpredictable turn of events.

He hadn’t thought he’d register--hadn’t figured a time-shifted human could come through as psychokinetic energy... Would Ray be able to tell it was him? If Ray tried--

Winston drew his thrower. “Where is it, Ray?”

No! Surely his phased reading would be close to his normal one! They shouldn’t be able to read him at all, but surely--

“Right there!” Ray shot a hand out, pointing at Egon. “It’s a negative valance, but not strong. Probably a class four.”

“With a negative valance?” Winston asked sharply. “I thought that was only demons and up?”

A negative valance? Egon’s mind rode out another spasm of pain and the confusion it brought, as he tried to grasp the concept. A class four negative valance like the one Ray found at the building site?

“It is, but--“

“Well, you can study the readings later, buddy,” Winston gritted, taking aim at Egon’s chest. “If this thing is trying to mess with the goods, we’d better blast now and ask questions later.”

Egon barely had time to understand what was happening before Winston fired. He leaped to the side, feeling the stream brush past him as he slammed a hand down on the dimensional bracelet and felt the painful light drag him away--

--to dump him on the floor with an all-too-familiar thump.

He shivered continuously now, wave after wave after wave of pain slamming him down. With a gasp, he managed to gain his knees, crawling mindlessly toward the couch nearby.

A class four... negative valance... nothing... nothing wrong...

Thoughts tried to break the surface, but the pain refused them, crushing them into dust as he slid onto the cushions and curled himself up, presenting a smaller target. But the pain didn’t care, still pummeling him with equal force.

A sob escaped him as he remembered his failure, and he sank beneath the waves...

* * *

“Egon?”

Janine’s voice seemed to come from too far away, and he simply didn’t have the strength to answer. Every inch hurt, and every thought burned him.

“Egon, wake up.”

Wake up? The somehow strange request lent him the power to lift his eyelids, and he found himself on the lab couch, curled into a ball. He straightened his limbs with difficulty and looked up into her face.

“Egon, the hospital called,” she murmured quietly, a timid hand reaching out to run through his hair. Not sensual, but as if she were waking a small child. The tiny smile on her face gave him pause. “They think Peter’s finally waking up.”

At those words, he lurched into a seated position, gasping at the pain it caused. Memories trickled back, and he wondered if, somehow, he had finally managed the impossible. If Ray hadn’t taken the time to rebuild the destabilizer... But no. That hadn’t been the answer after all. Had it?

“Peter?” he asked breathlessly, gripping her hand tight. “What about Ray? And Winston?”

He fell back as she sighed, the pain and confusion in her face telling the story. Close. So close, but he wasn’t home yet. *They* weren’t home. Janine’s breath caught in a sob, and he raised a weary head to look at her, seeing the tears she was fighting.

“Egon, please,” she whispered desperately, fear taking center stage. “Please...”

They were still gone. Holding out a shaking hand to her, he only dimly felt the pressure of her grip in response. His nerves were failing, cut to ribbons by the time shifts he’d endured. But he would endure more, he decided stoutly, rising to embrace her though she all but held him vertical.

“I’m sorry, Janine,” he whispered, wondering how much he would have to explain to this woman. Wondering, with vague panic, how much he could manage to speak. “I was... dreaming.” It explained his query, and she leaned into him in relief. “I’m sorry.” How much had her Egon done? Had he simply collapsed, like the second one? Perhaps, given her tears, he had gone insane, as he so desperately wanted to do now. At least then, he wouldn’t have to remember.

But he did. He remembered the perfect, undamaged destabilizer, remembered their deaths, remembered Ray’s comments about a class four with a negative valance. His mind felt the effects of the time shift as acutely as the rest of him, and he tried desperately to connect the information. It had to make sense. Somehow, there had to be an answer...

Peter would know. Peter had survived this time, even if the others hadn’t.

“Come on,” he murmured, dropping a kiss on her hair, surprising both of them. Of course, he thought, it should come as no surprise. He loved her, as he loved all of them... Or at least as much, if differently. “We need to go see Peter.”

He drove, though his limbs shook badly at intervals. Janine was watching him carefully, but he couldn’t do to her what he had done to the others. He’d keep his silence. It wasn’t fair to hurt her, to allow her false hope. He was beginning to realize that he might never accomplish his miracle. He would find out what Peter knew, and hope it could provide him some clue.

He would go back. Again. As many times as it took.

Though he knew he wasn’t thinking clearly, the decision was already made, and he would stick to it. He’d made a promise--if not to this Janine, then to another. He would get them back if it killed him. All of them. He didn’t matter anymore, by himself.

“Egon? Are you all right? You’re not feeling sick again, are you?”

He smiled gently, forcing his arms to remain still as another tremor rocked him, setting off pain harsh enough to take his breath. He remembered another Janine, telling him he’d been ill the morning they died. Time shifts. As damaging to the real man as to his future selves.

“I’m all right, Janine,” he answered, pure will lending his voice strength. “I just need to see Peter.”

It seemed this hell had taught him to “go with the flow,” if nothing else. He could tell from Janine’s eyes and the grief in her face that Peter had never been awake since the explosion, and that made it easier for him. She seemed to accept his silence for the rest of the trip, and had no trouble leading the way once they arrived at NYU.

He was unsurprised to end up in the neurology ward again. Falling debris from the explosion had been the cause of Peter and Winston’s deaths the first time around. It was logical to assume a head injury, and it certainly explained Peter’s prolonged coma.

“Dr. Spengler.”

Egon turned unsteadily, keenly feeling the unreality of his position. This man had never met him--not this Egon--but the physicist had no trouble recognizing the bushy eyebrows. “Hello, Dr. Jenefsky.”

“I’d like to speak with you both before you go in to see Peter,” the doctor said quietly, leading them, unresisting, to a closed waiting room across the hall. Once there, the man looked Egon over carefully. “I thought I told you to get some sleep, Dr. Spengler? I won’t have you falling ill here.”

Egon offered a plastic smile, unable to do more. “It was... difficult.”

Jenefsky’s face fell. “Of course. I know,” he sympathized. Others had taken the same tone with Egon in the last three weeks. Police, medical examiners, morticians... “I know how tough this has been on you both, but I can offer you a little bit of good news, anyway.”

Janine nodded, desperate for something. “How is Peter?”

“He’s almost there,” Jenefsky allowed, sitting back and eying them both. “I don’t want you to expect to go in there and have him talking in an hour, okay? He’s likely to be extremely disoriented for some time to come.” He pegged Egon with a penetrating stare. “We’re not sure yet exactly how much permanent damage there is, Dr. Spengler, but chances are he’s going to have a very hard road ahead of him.”

Egon nodded, though he knew in his heart that Peter wouldn’t have a hard road at all. This Peter wouldn’t even exist in another day. As soon as he got the information...

“Can we see him?” He kept his voice quiet, calm. Every ounce of control he had went into that simple sentence, his mind consumed with disjointed facts and figures and temporal equations. If he could just get Peter to explain what he saw--if Peter could only give him the missing piece of this horrible puzzle...

Jenefsky stood, still watching him, and Egon had to hold on to another spasm. He couldn’t give himself away. He’d be gone in a day--maybe less. He would fly to California himself for the parts if he had to...

“Come with me. I’ll let you both stay for a couple of hours, but I want you to go home and sleep after that, Dr. Spengler,” he grated. “I can--and will--refuse to let you see him if you come in again looking like you’ve been run over.”

Egon allowed himself a self-deprecating smile. “I am sure that seeing Peter will do wonders for my ability to sleep, Doctor.”

My Peter. The one who’ll live. Whole and undamaged, with Winston and Ray at his side.

Walking into Peter’s room, he had a terrible moment of deja vu. Flanked by a heart monitor, IVs in both arms, Peter was different only because he lacked a ventilator, and Egon mused vaguely that the oxygen cannula under his nose looked much less uncomfortable than Winston’s tube had. But they shared the grayness about them, and the still, still quality.

He took a seat, feeling his screaming muscles relax a fraction against the now almost-constant pain.

“Hello, Peter,” he whispered, taking his friend’s hand. The fingers twitched weakly, though in response to his greeting or the simple action of being moved, Egon couldn’t say. He stood back from himself, watching the unreality of it. Somehow, he couldn’t quite feel the full devastation he knew this scene should engender in him. He was, in part, already three weeks back in time, saving his best friend from this fate.

“Janine is here as well, Peter,” he continued, feeling her hands with startling clarity as they settled on his shoulders. She was real, if nothing else was. “We need you to wake up.”

The fingers moved again.

“Peter?”

Again.

“Peter, please wake up. It’s very important--“

A groan cut him off, and he held his breath. But it wasn’t repeated, and Peter lay slightly restless for the rest of their visit.

“I meant what I said, Dr. Spengler,” Jenefsky told him severely, as they made their way to the elevator two hours later. “I’m well aware of that episode you had a few weeks ago. And the fact that you haven’t had another seizure doesn’t mean you won’t. If I don’t see a marked improvement in you, you won’t be allowed to see him.”

“I’ll make sure he rests, Doctor,” Janine assured him, shooting Egon a tired, hopeless look.

Seizure? He wondered exactly what had happened that morning, in this reality, but of course, he couldn’t ask... He would rest. He would rest, and eat, and keep them all happy until Peter awoke and told him what he needed to know.

And then, he would go back. If it killed him, at least they would survive.

* * *

“Are you sure you’ll be okay?” Janine asked that evening, looking at him in concern over their half-eaten Chinese meal. “I can stay...”

“You’ve spent enough time here,” Egon replied, seeing in her eyes that this Janine had stayed as close to him as all the others. “You should get some sleep.”

“I don’t know if I can, thinking you’re going to be here all alone.” The thought would have hurt him at another time, but now, it was simply a chance to get to work without her watching over him. Somehow, he sensed she had had a harder time of it than the others.

“I’ve been difficult, haven’t I?” he asked gently, reaching out to take her hand carefully in his. “I’m sorry.”

She bit back a sob, but the tears came instead. “Egon, I know this has been so impossible for you, but you can’t... You can’t clam up like this!” She shook their entwined fingers sharply. “Ray and Winston would kick your ass, and Peter--“ she broke off, unable to say more.

The peace his determination brought him was enough to conjure up a smile. “I know, Janine. It’s just... If I could get them back--”

“Don’t, Egon.” The sharp retort was not what he expected, and he straightened in surprise. “Don’t start talking about that again. When it didn’t work, you nearly...” She dissolved into tears again. “Oh, God, Egon, please... You can’t go back and save them and if you keep trying, you’ll drive yourself insane!”

“I tried it before?” The question was cold and out of his mouth before he could stop it, and he damned himself for the agonized look in her eyes.

“Egon...” She broke off in shock and stood abruptly, heading for the phone. “I’m calling Jimmy,” she stated coldly. “You’re going to talk to him whether you like it or not!”

James Palfrey was a friend of Peter’s from college. He had helped them all when Peter was suffering the aftermath of being trapped in an alternate dimension, and he had told Egon at Peter’s funeral to call, if he needed to talk to someone. Egon rose and held out a hand to stop Janine’s movement.

“Don’t, please.”

She pulled away angrily, fists balling at her sides as she turned on him. “Damn it, Egon, you have to talk to someone!” She caught a sob before it escaped her. “I think that seizure in California broke something--or maybe getting bounced from that dimensional gate fried your brain. I’ve... I’ve tried to hold you together myself, but--“

He embraced her tightly as her words broke off. “You have, Janine,” he whispered tenderly. “You have kept me together. Without you here, I truly would have gone insane.” And it was true. If he hadn’t had her there, he never would have survived. Just the fact that he had to keep her together had helped him to control himself. “I’m sorry.” He shivered through more pain, trying to think up an explanation that made sense. Little did, it seemed, and he filed that away for future reference. If his mind started going now, he would never get them back. “I’m tired, and Peter...”

“He’ll come back, Egon,” she vowed, squeezing him tight. “He has to. No one else can beat any sense into you.”

He smiled against her head. Yes, Peter would come back. The pain came again, though his body was too tired to do more than twitch. He would come back, and he would be whole.

* * *

Journal of Egon Spengler
November 14

Janine has finally fallen asleep, and I have had a chance to look over the work my previous self did on the dimensional gate. Apparently, the stress of Peter’s continued comatose state had distracted this Egon from Raymond’s notes, as the entire configuration is faulty.

That said, it looks as if I have all the parts necessary to affect repairs. If I can simply keep up a facade of playing along with both Janine and the doctors, I should be able to recalibrate the settings in just under eight hours. Then, it will simply fall to Peter to give me the information I require.

My quick perusal of the destabilizer on my last trip back yielded no faults in its circuitry, and I am at a loss to explain the accident--as I have been from the beginning. There must be a piece to this puzzle that I am missing. Something that might give me a clue as to how to prevent this from happening.

The Rawling’s Effect is still with me, intensified by my previous trip. And it is apparent that the effect changed the past here, as Janine and Dr. Jenefsky both alluded to some sort of attack I suffered that morning out in California--something worse than the simple illness that Peter mentioned during my first trip back. It is obvious to me now that the effect centers on nerve conduction--perhaps breaking down the communication between neurons. I must keep as clear as I can now. Any confusion on my part would certainly spell the end of this endeavor. And given these new revelations, I’m concerned that the trip might actually cause permanent damage to my original self...

Peter seems at least slightly responsive, and for that, I can be glad. If he can simply relate what happened as he remembers it, perhaps I will be able to fill in the missing pieces. I can only pray that he will awaken soon, as I do not know how much time is left to me before the window closes on this event.

It must be this trip--I am certain that I couldn’t survive another, as the Rawling’s Effect will likely kill me, or my former self. And if I die, they die with me. I can at least take heart in the fact that Peter will survive, though how intact, I cannot say. And Janine... She is, perhaps, my one real regret. If I do not succeed, I hope she will not remember all I’ve put her through--and all I am likely to put her through soon.

It took more than an hour to put down everything he wanted to get clear in his mind, and he sat through two attacks as he wrote. Rising stiffly and tucking the notebook into his back pocket, he turned to the dimensional gate, looking at it critically again.

As wrong-headed as his theory was, this Egon had gotten all the right parts, at least. It took less time than he had feared to reconfigure it properly, and he paused frequently, listening for the telltale sound of Janine’s feet on the stairs. She remained sleeping, however, and he sat back as the dawn rose, knowing that, once Peter gave him the information he needed, he would be ready to go.

As he stood, a familiar wave of agony rolled over him, dropping him to his knees as his insides seemed to fill with fire. Gasping, he stayed still, waiting for it to dissipate. If there were only a way to stop the degradation...

But his life was theories now, untried, untested. He couldn’t hope to figure out a way to buffer against the damage in the time he had before the next trip. And he found, to his surprise, that he didn’t care. Somewhere between their deaths and writing down his tortured attempts to save them, he had lost all worry for himself. If he died, they wouldn’t. If he destroyed himself, it was only so that they could live.

He knew his mind was fragmenting, could feel the pain each thought brought, but he still could not work up to worrying about himself. He realized, as he collapsed onto the couch, that his brain had probably already suffered permanent damage. It was likely that he wouldn’t survive another trip back--at least not intact. But the faces of his friends crowded the darkness as he fell asleep, and he knew, for them, he would risk even this.

* * **

A meter flashed before him, swinging in lazy arcs as he watched. It was Ray’s--the one they’d recovered from the blast site. Hanging before him, it was relatively undamaged. It must have been thrown clear of the center of the explosion this time, though Ray himself wasn’t...

Wow, these readings are weird! Ray’s voice, bright with the thrill of the hunt. The construction site was muted around Egon, held off by the meter-pendulum.

Peter, I think it’s a class seven.

No... a class six, Ray. His mind answered his friend, though the words couldn’t find their way out. A class six. Read the meter.

It’s strange--it’s almost like I’m getting class four and class--

That’s me... ignore it, Ray. I’m here. I’ll help...

I’m reading a negative valance mixed in. We might have to use the destabilizer after all!

You can’t. His mind was calm, not a hint of the fear he should be feeling. If the temporal field is creating a reading, it might interfere. There’ll be feedback...

An explosion, muted in its power--

--But there was power enough to jolt him out of sleep.

Egon sat up, breathing hard as he felt the ever-present pain rise up to engulf him. He tried to fight his mind clear of it, at least, trying to recapture the dream. The valance... Something about--

Oh God! That was it! That was why the destabilizer had exploded the second time. He’d been a fool!

Rising carefully from the couch, he reached for the meter he’d seen sitting on the table. It might have been the one Ray had used when he and Winston had discovered Egon’s time-shifted self in the lab, or the one Egon had used to scan the site... He ran back in its memory, pulling up the readings.

His, then. It had the class six, the overlay of seven... and a reading he hadn’t gotten the first time around. A strong class four--human remains--but with a negative valance.

“That could do it,” he whispered to himself, running the analysis again as he reached for his notebook to write down the information. “A temporal shift, combined with the destabilizer’s modifications...” He’d caused the explosion after all. The second explosion.

But he still had no idea about the first.

“Egon?”

He turned quickly enough to dizzy himself, and he shot a hand out to grip the table edge fiercely. Janine stood before him, rumpled and tired, and watched him carefully while he steadied himself.

“Good morning, Janine,” he offered after a moment.

She waited a moment more, as if assessing his health, before she smiled softly. “Lunch is ready. Dr. Jenefsky called. Peter’s more restless today.”

“Lunch?” he asked in confusion. The clock read one-thirty, and he looked back at her with a trace of betrayal. “You should have woken me.”

She grinned at his irritation--as if she’d been waiting weeks to hear it--and led the way downstairs. “You needed the rest. I don’t think Jenefsky was joking about not letting you in.”

No, he thought, he probably wasn’t. Lunch was a silent affair of soup and sandwiches, and then Janine bundled him into her car, driving toward the hospital without a word. Just the silence was enough to worry him.

“Janine--“

“Egon, I’m all right,” she said quickly. “I just wish...” At the stoplight, she turned to him, smiling gently. “I’m worried about you.”

“I’ll be all right, as well, Janine,” he promised. “As soon as Peter is.”

And Winston and Ray as well.

“Peter? Can you hear me?”

The form in the hospital bed was no longer still, and hadn’t been for the nearly five hours Egon had sat watching him. Peter’s head rolled lightly at intervals, as if he dreamed, and his hand, when Egon gripped it, gripped back with something approaching conscious effort.

“Peter, it’s Egon,” the physicist tried again. “You must wake up.”

What had never worked during any morning of their acquaintance worked now, and Peter’s eyes opened, though they focused nowhere.

“Peter, can you hear me?” Egon asked again, his eyes flashing his excitement to Janine, who headed for the nurse’s station at a run.

“Not supposed to be here...” Peter whispered, his voice cracked and dry. “Firehouse... not...”

Egon squeezed his hand, gratified when Peter squeezed back.

“Spengs...”

“Yes, Peter, I’m here.”

“On vacation... but Slimer said...”

Egon leaned forward. “Peter?” He wasn’t sure his friend could hear him, but he had to try. “Peter, do you remember what happened?”

“Toasted the ghost... But it was back... Not... not supposed to...” His head thrashed suddenly, though his eyes never moved, focused on something only he could see. “Ray!” His voice dropped, his mumblings becoming more incoherent. “...blue--not blue... hiding... didn’t see...”

The door slid open quietly and Egon turned to see Dr. Jenefsky enter. When he turned back, Peter had fallen back to sleep. Not blue... Egon watched the doctor examine his friend as he pondered those last words. Hiding, he’d said. The ghost was hiding? He’d spent days researching, trying to match the ghost to anything in their copious database. But no blue ghosts like it, with those strange mixed readings, had come to light. If it was hiding its true nature...

“He’s doing all right,” Jenefsky offered. “Considering.” He sighed, looking Egon up and down. “You still look like hell, Dr. Spengler,” he said finally. “Did you sleep?”

“He did,” Janine affirmed from the doorway, a fond smile for her favorite physicist. “Not that it did him any good.”

“I can see that.” Jenefsky sighed again. “Listen, I know he was talking, but don’t get your hopes up. Was he making any sense?”

Egon shook his head, still preoccupied with the puzzle at hand. Did he mean the ghost was hiding, or...? “Some. He appears to remember the explosion, at any rate.”

The doctor nodded. “We’ll give him time to wake more fully before we assess. I have to say that his EEGs haven’t looked quite right, though they’ve been stabilizing over the past few days to something a little less dire.” Egon nodded again. The man wasn’t being callous, he sensed. Simply giving them an honest evaluation. “You said a while back that you thought he might have gotten some kind of... What did you call it--psi backlash? Maybe he’s finally coming out of it.”

Egon perked up at that. Had his former self found something? He relaxed with an effort, fighting another round of dizziness and pain. “I’d... like to take another look at his brainwave output, if I could.”

Jenefsky nodded and reached over, tearing off a sheet from the EEG machine and handing it to him. Certain alpha and beta functions were still suppressed, he noted as he ran the long roll of paper through his fingers, but were slowly creeping toward normal. Egon felt his heart leap as he realized that this might be the last piece he’d need to solve his puzzle and get them back. Something was edging around the sides of his mind. If he could just grab hold of it...

“May I keep this? And perhaps get copies of some of the earlier readings?”

The doctor shook his head. “But I’ll make you a copy.” He ushered them out of the room. “And then I want you to go back home and get some more sleep, okay?” When Egon would have argued, the man held up a hand. “I’m still holding that threat over your head, Spengler. If you don’t take care of yourself, you can’t take care of him.”

Egon nodded reluctantly, though he knew he had the key to his next trip back. If he could only keep it together long enough to figure out what it meant...

They left with a stack of xeroxes that chronicled Peter’s return from hell. As Egon and Janine reached the car, another spasm ripped through him, stronger than before, and he fought to remain standing.

“Egon! Are you okay?”

He nodded with effort, willing away the gray smoke that clouded his eyes. “A headache, Janine,” he whispered, feeling the pain of his lie as he gritted his teeth. The spasms were getting worse again. He wouldn’t have much more time left...

“I think you should see a doctor, again, Egon,” she countered, trying to lead him back to the hospital. “You’ve been sick for at least the past couple of days.” There was a fear in her voice like that he’d heard from another Janine. “I hope you’re not having some sort of relapse.”

He pulled out of her grasp as the pain left him--for the moment. He had no illusions that it was gone for good. “I’ll be fine. I promise.” He turned entreating eyes on her, watched her lip tremble with indecision. “Please. I promise you I will rest when we get home. But I would like to research these brain waves.” He gripped her hand. “It could be the key to finding out what happened.” He kept to himself that it would be his key to saving them.

She vacillated for a long moment before sighing in defeat. “You’re going to eat and sleep, Egon,” she threatened heavily as he took the passenger seat. She was at the end of her rope, trying desperately to stop what she must see as his final slide into insanity.

Perhaps it was, he mused, holding his muscles taut as a tremor stole his sight again for the time it took her to get the car back onto the streets. Perhaps he was insane now, all of this merely his demented way of coping with a tragic and unbelievable reality. But the notebook that sat in his back pocket told him differently, and he promised himself he would not be here when the sun rose.

Or perhaps he would--but only with the guys by his side.

* * *

Journal of Egon Spengler
November 15

I have been a fool.

If I had simply looked at the readings from the blast site a bit more closely the first time, I would have found the answer much sooner. I didn’t even truly correlate the information until I ran Peter’s brainwave activity through Ray’s computer matching program.

There were two entities there that day--not a class six with heavy overlays, but a class six and a seven. Peter said it was hiding. If I assume he was speaking of the class seven, then I believe I can make a guess at what happened.

The first time... The first time they must have been close to capturing the class six--that was what the injured officer must have seen, though his own head injury did not allow him to remember the rest. If the demon appeared as Ray was preparing to trap the six, it’s possible that it could have attacked them at their most vulnerable.

Unfortunately, this complicates my next trip considerably. But if I can retrieve a pack once I get there... If Slimer could see me--and the six at the construction site certainly seemed to be able to--then I should be able to distract the seven long enough for them to capture the six, leaving them free to finish off this second entity. If not...

I have no time for if nots. I will go back, and stop this demon. There is absolutely no other option left to me.

Janine was sleeping, curled on his bed, her slumber marred by what were no doubt horrifying reminders of the hell they had been through. Egon sat on Peter’s bed, as he had in a previous reality, watching her tear-stained face.

He had found it. The theory was sound--or as sound as his increasingly fragmented mind could make it. He sat back against Peter’s headboard, trying to make sense of the memories he held from too many lives, the notebook in his hands a chronicle of his continued failure.

The second entity must have fired at Ray an instant before the destabilizer blew. Egon vaguely remembered the blue light coming at them. And the machine he’d built was undamaged. If Ray’s matching program was correct, the seven was a completely noncorporeal entity. If Egon could simply stop it from attacking them, give them the precious seconds they needed to trap the six...

He could do this. He could finally change things for the better, instead of simply causing more damage.

Egon tried to hold on to the knowledge that there was nothing he could have done to prevent the original explosion. It hadn’t been his work at fault--simply a case of the wrong place at the wrong time. But his mind was too muddled for that. He had spent too much of his energy--energy that was rapidly waning--trying to put this all right. One thought crowded all others out of his mind. This was his last chance.

And he would save them.

He rose on shaking legs and knelt beside Janine’s sleeping form, resisting the urge to reach out to her once more. But his resistance was so low now... With a sigh, he put out a hand carefully, touching her hair with the same simple concern she had shown when he arrived here.

“I won’t be back this time, Janine,” he whispered, watching her sleep on, oblivious. “I’m sorry.”

And with a final sigh he made his way to the dimensional gate. He locked the bracelet around his wrist, sliding the notebook into the back pocket of his trousers, and turned the knob slowly until the lab reflected back at him in the mirror of energy.

One minute, and he arrived the first time, freezing at Peter’s call, shaking slightly as he followed the younger man out. Two minutes... Three. He was there again, hunting through the destabilizer, scaring off Slimer, watching Ray arrive. Winston came after. The proton stream--and he disappeared, leaving them confused at his ready departure. They stood for long moments. Eight minutes... Nine... He felt himself shaking as another tremor took him, felt himself grow panicked as they stayed too long. Fourteen minutes. And they were gone, heading for the stairs, puzzled by the events they’d witnessed.

It was time. The notebook digging into his back, he took a deep breath. Fifteen minutes. No time left--and all the time in the world...

He stepped through the gate--

--And lost the precious hold he’d had on reality.

* * * * * *

Chapter Text

He didn’t know how long it took him to come to his senses, but he did so with a jolt, gasping aloud at the pain that shot through every cell. His mind wailed now, continuous, its one thought that of getting to the guys.

Gaining his feet took most of his energy, and he stumbled to the bunkroom on sheer willpower. The firepole. Faster, easier. If he fell down the stairs, he’d never save them. He hit the ground floor in a heap, crying out soundlessly as he felt himself fragment further.

“Guys?”

Janine. She told him, three weeks and four realities ago, that she must have arrived but minutes after they left. Still time then. The explosion had been more than an hour in coming. She walked to her desk, picking up the note Winston had left, oblivious to the battered wraith that stumbled across the floor.

No time for subtlety. He burst through the door, leaving her agog at the apparent ghost-motion, and headed for the street.

They were in Brooklyn. He could get there. Traffic would slow them down, but the subways ran faster. Down into the tunnels--no need for a fare. He slid into the car, thankful to find it half-empty. Avoided other riders. Avoided any thoughts except those that led him to them.

Half an hour.

The trip had been endless, but it left him more than thirty minutes to run the ten blocks to the site. His legs barely held him, but he didn’t notice. He didn’t feel it as he fell the first time, nor the second.

The third time, he ceased to feel anything at all.

Pain came before thought, and thought was muddled, crushed by its older sibling. The guys. The construction site. He lurched to his feet on the sidewalk, amazed to find himself unmolested--after all, one cannot avoid tripping over what one cannot see. But the sidewalks were nearly bare. A new community forcing out an old, no one around in the transition.

He ran, falling again and again and completely unaware of the blood that now flowed from hands and knees, the tears in his light slacks and red stains on his shirt. The site... Oh God, the old hearse! Ecto was here--they were here already!

He was here.

A new conversation--different from the one he’d heard the first time, but understandable in light of what Peter had mumbled in his incoherent state--was going on in the building site, punctuated by furious howls and proton streams. The construction crew was nowhere in evidence. They’d probably fled at the first inhuman howl.

“I don’t know how it got here!” Ray cried, his confusion palpable. “But it’s the same ghost that Winston tried to capture at Central!”

Him. It was him. He heard Winston shout out a warning, held his breath until he heard Peter call in response: “Whatever it is, we’d better nab it this time. I hate to think what two of them could do with all the ammunition around here.”

“Winston! Try to work your way over here!” Ray had a plan, Egon could hear it in his voice as he stumbled toward them. Too much construction. He couldn’t see them yet...

“We’ll try to trap this one while Peter keeps the other one busy!”

“Oh, I like that idea!” came Peter’s angry reply. “Can you even trap it without the destabilizer?”

Half a block more, and Egon saw himself, the first time-traveler, standing to the side, panic wreathing his features as he reached that erroneous conclusion again.

“Raymond, don’t!” Soundless, but Egon could read his own lips, could remember saying the words.

NO! No, he had to stop himself! Barely strong enough to crawl, he somehow found the strength to run, heading for his former self as it let out another voiceless yell. “The destabilizer!”

Egon suddenly took in Ray, wearing only his regular thrower, and shot another glance at his previous self. When the time stream changed, his previous incarnation couldn’t change with it. As far as it was concerned, everything was happening as it had done the first time. It would have been fascinating if Egon hadn’t had other things on his mind.

“Guys?” Ray’s voice, soft, confused. “I don’t get it. I’ve got another reading! The ghost--“

Egon saw his former self stumble toward Ray, and rushed in himself before it could get there, wondering if the negative valance could cause problems even without the destabilizer present.

“Ray, watch it!” Peter’s cry was cut off as the seven showed itself suddenly--sliding around behind Ray. Its skin glowed an angry red, and gigantic claws elongated into tentacles that reached out for them all. One pointed at Ray, and Egon saw the blue light forming.

Leaving the original time-shifted Egon to his preset temporal dash, the wreck that had once been Egon Spengler sprinted for Ray, bowling him off his feet. Ray let out a shout and rolled over, coming up firing as the lightning bounced harmlessly off to the side.

“Ray, you okay?” Peter called over the new, colder shrieks of the demon. The six still threatened, and Egon could see Winston struggling to capture it in his beam. “What the hell is going on?”

“Pete!” Winston’s shout was vicious. He’d clearly had enough of magically appearing ghosts for one day. “Let’s get this one in the box before we lose them both!” He chanced a look at Ray, who was heading back the way he’d come, braving the seven with all the courage he had always shown. “How are we gonna trap all these damn things without that destabilizer?” He cursed roundly. “Maybe that’s what the ghost was trying to do at the firehouse--stop us from bringing it when it knew we’d need it most.”

Egon lay where he’d fallen, his body finally giving in, unable to do more than watch as Ray tried to come up with a plan, lifting his meter just as the previous Egon, his own loop completed, flashed out and headed back to his own time.

“My meter shows we don’t need it--at least for the seven!” Ray cried happily. “It’s not corporeal!”

“Great! Wanna give us a hand, then?” Peter called back. He turned his own meter briefly in Ray’s direction, his other hand tightening on the thrower he held trained on the seven’s growing form. “Get out of there, Ray! That ghost from Central? It’s--“

His call was cut off sharply, and Egon turned his head, every movement an agony all its own, and cried out to see Peter flung back into the rubble, unmoving.

“No!”

“Pete!” Winston’s sharp bark was tinged with worry and a panic Egon rarely heard from his calm, resourceful partner. “Damnit, Ray, you’d better come up with something fast! No way two of us can--“

Another broken call, this time cut short by a tremendous crash as a wall somewhere beyond Egon’s narrowing field of vision collapsed. Winston didn’t even cry out--there was simply not time.

And Ray... All alone with two far-too-powerful ghosts...

No! It was happening again. Egon curled up, pitiful, ignoring the shout of concern that Ray let out, ignoring the whining of a single proton stream and the flash of traplight and the screams of the six and the seven and his friend...

He’d failed again... He’d always fail. He couldn’t save them. He couldn’t even save himself. The pain welled up--mixed portions of grief and decay--and he grabbed for his bracelet on instinct. He didn’t care anymore. The transfer would kill him--he hoped.

Nothing left. Nothing left to do but remove himself from this timeline. His original would live with the knowledge of their deaths--unless this last transfer killed that Egon, as the previous ones had damaged him. He almost hoped that would be the case. He didn’t think he could live with the consequences of his failure in any time line. His hand reached the bracelet, numb fingers fumbling for the button that would kill him.

As the light took him, he heard Ray’s panicked cry, and screamed himself--

--and landed in darkness.

* * *

One of these days, this job was going to drive him nuts. Leave him babbling in a padded cell, a straightjacket his only friend for the rest of his life.

Of course, if that wall had come down just five feet in another direction, Winston thought wryly, a nuthouse would be the least of his problems.

Not that he didn’t have a bunch of them right now.

He hadn’t bothered to tell the hospital staff to call Janine, knowing that he’d be in and out of treatment in the minimum time. He’d been the lucky one--though he felt a little like Peter, hoping the deep cuts on his face didn’t leave any scars. But still, a few stitches, a couple of band-aids, and one hell of a lot of painkillers and he was fine. It gave him time--gave Janine time, too. He could find out how Pete and Ray were doing and get a few things straight in his own head before he worried her with the news. And before she worried Egon.

Now, information obtained, and more weary than he could say, Winston headed for the nearest payphone, a few quarters jingling in his pocket. He just had to hope the damn coins hadn’t been too slimed by that six. Ma Bell didn’t take kindly to that.

“Ghostbusters,” Janine answered, sounding strangely distracted. “You got a ghost, we’ll make it toast.”

“Hey, Janine. Winston.”

She must have heard the exhaustion in his voice, but her own tone was harried and sharp. “Winston! I was trying to call you on the car phone! What’s wrong? The guys?”

He was too tired to notice much past the worry. “Booked into the lovely NYU med center for the night, but they’ll be okay.” A sigh caught up to him suddenly. “Pete’s got a broken collarbone--left, thank God--and Ray’s sporting one hell of a headache. That bust got a little out of hand--and seriously weird.” He looked up at the clock on the wall and groaned. It was nearly six. The damn ER had taken a whole lot longer than he thought they would. “Look, I don’t think Egon needs to come back early or anything, but could you give him a call? Let him know what’s going on?”

She was silent for a long moment, and Winston felt the adrenalin rising in his system again--as if he hadn’t had enough of it today already.

“Winston, Ruth Myers just called about an hour ago.” There was that vague tinge of jealousy in her voice that he always heard when she talked of Egon’s former girlfriend, but it was far outweighed by stress. “She and Egon had made plans before he left last night to meet for breakfast this morning. He never showed, but the hotel said he checked in late last night. She just figured he’d had something come up, but when he didn’t show up for that panel he was on this afternoon, she wanted to call and make sure he hadn’t been called back here on an emergency.”

Winston gripped the phone a little tighter, more awake now. “Somebody check his room?”

“Of course,” she replied, as if he’d suggested she’d dropped the ball. “His suitcase is there, but he’s not.”

One more weird, goddamn thing to go wrong today. If he checked in... Egon didn’t oversleep--ever. But they’d checked the room. He wasn’t even there... Winston remembered his thought earlier in the day: that maybe that strange reading--what Peter had called the ‘negative four’--had been trying to keep them off-balance.

Was swiping Egon just another way?

He sighed, the motion turning far too easily into a yawn. “Look, why don’t you get down here--and bring that new laptop of Ray’s. I think it’s upstairs in the lab.” He tried to rise to the occasion, but he was so damned tired! “We got some seriously strange readings at that bust this morning. Maybe they got something to do with whatever happened to him.” As an afterthought, his paranoia kicked in. “And lock the grid.”

“You think someone’s after the containment unit?” she asked, her voice sharper than usual. “But why would they take Egon all the way out in California?” He could almost hear her nod over the phone, pulling herself together. “I’ll lock it up and be there as soon as I can.”

Winston hung up and slumped wearily into the nearest chair.

Now what the hell was he supposed to do?

* * *

“Ray?”

Ow. Noise. Loud. Ow.

“Come on, buddy, wake up for me, okay?”

Winston. Loud.

Ray moaned faintly, and winced at that, too. But the sounds were bringing memories with them, and he suddenly remembered Peter, propped against a stack of girders, trying to hold it together long enough to bring the seven down. He was hurt, his arm almost hanging there, useless--he’d been unconscious for a while, hadn’t he? Not moving? But how had they gotten the ghosts, then?

“Winston?” Ray finally managed, another moan for the pain in his skull.

“Yeah, Ray, it’s me. You’re gonna be okay, man. Just relax a minute.” There was a shadow in that voice. Couldn’t be for him if he was going to be okay, right?

“Peter?”

“He’s on his way. Little problem with his arm.” Now he heard a smile. A shadow smile. Ray wanted to open his eyes and see the face that went with the voice, but that was asking too much right now. His head ached and he felt like every muscle in his body was sprained. All he really wanted to do was sleep. But there was that darn shadow...

He pried his eyelids open by force of will, cringing at the bright light of what must have been a hospital. Winston’s face was smiling, but his eyes were as dark as his voice.

“What’s wrong?” Ray asked, fighting to make the world make sense. Concussion. Nothing else ever hurt quite this much.

Winston put a hand on his shoulder, and Ray tensed, feeling assorted bumps and bruises protest in response. The hand was his only answer, but he wasn’t going to stand for that, was he?

“Winston, tell me,” he demanded, not liking how much effort it took to speak. “Is Peter really okay? Is he--“

“He’s fine, Ray. Promise.” Those darkened eyes dropped a moment before meeting his head-on. “Egon’s gone missing--out in California.”

Ray sat up in a rush, forgetting the other essential part of having a concussion. He could almost feel himself turning green, and Winston had a basin of some kind ready when he lost his breakfast. The heaves went on for a while, but he managed to get himself under control and looked up, gratitude and confusion warring in his face.

“What do you mean?” he asked finally, shaking. How could Egon be gone? “He was supposed to meet Ruth--“

Winston shook his head, setting the basin aside with absent distaste now that Ray had finished with it. “He didn’t. Dr. Myers had them check his hotel room, but they only found his suitcase.”

“Well maybe he went somewhere!” Ray exclaimed in desperate hope, wincing at his own volume. “Just because he didn’t show up for breakfast...” He petered out. Of course Egon wouldn’t break a breakfast date. Not without calling first. And definitely not with Ruth. He wanted to figure this out--knew he had to... If only his brain would work!

“I don’t know, Ray, but given that negative four this morning, maybe we better check out all the possibilities.” He helped Ray lie back down, making sure he didn’t need to be sick again. As he resumed speaking, Ray struggled to keep track of his words. “Janine’s bringing over the laptop. You’ve been teaching me that program you wrote for matching PKE signatures and ghosts, and I figure I could run the meter readings through that and--“

“Winston!”

Janine’s yell pierced clearly through the cacophony of the ER, and Ray looked up carefully to see her striding toward them as a trauma team rolled a gurney past at top speed. The body on that gurney looked a lot like--

“Egon!” Winston’s cry was almost outraged. “Janine, what the hell--?”

She was out of breath, and Ray suspected she might be on the edge of tears, too. “I went upstairs, like you said. I haven’t been up there all day--there wasn’t any reason to! You guys weren’t here, and Egon was in California, and--“ She took a deeper breath, trying to drive the hysteria out of her tone. “He was... He was just there, in the lab!” She leaned into Winston’s offered hug, though Ray could see that Winston was far more focused on the gurney that had banged through into the main trauma section. “Oh, Winston, he was all beat up! His hands and knees were bloody and his clothes are a mess!”

“Is he okay?” The adrenalin made Ray’s head pound more fiercely now, and he watched her through squinted eyes, trying to make sure she wasn’t trying to snow him. Though he wasn’t sure he’d be able to tell, what with his brain this scrambled.

Janine walked up to his gurney and gave his hand a squeeze. “I don’t know, Ray. They didn’t say anything to me, but I heard them calling out his vitals, and they didn’t sound very good.” And what a sad comment, Ray thought, that they spent so much time around paramedics that they could all tell what bad vitals were. “His blood pressure and temperature are way up, and they said something about his... heart rhythms...”

Ray’s vision grayed a little, and he wished his mind hadn’t grayed with it. What was going on? Egon was safe in San Francisco! He was supposed to be, anyway...

Winston must have seen the distress in his face, because Ray felt a calming hand on his shoulder again, pushing him comfortingly into the bunk beneath him. “Easy, Ray. We’ll figure it out.”

But Ray didn’t want to relax. He needed to know what was going on with Egon. Gosh, his head hurt so much! As his vision cleared, Ray watched a small, pretty nurse walk up, an orderly nearly as tall as Egon by her side. Egon...

“We’re taking Dr. Stantz up to his room now, Mr. Zeddemore. Your other friend should be done pretty soon--they want to make sure about the x-rays before they send him up.”

Ray shook his head weakly, ignoring the dizziness. “No, Winston--“

That comforting pressure again. “Go on up, Ray,” Winston said softly, as close to a gentle demand as he ever got. “I’m going to see if I can find out what’s going on, okay?”

Only the steel in his voice let Ray heed him--that, and the crushing pain in his skull that was causing his vision to fuzz again. Winston would take care of it. He’d find out what happened to Egon, and everything would be okay.

Wouldn’t it?

* * **

Peter had a mild concussion himself, though he was able to sit--if carefully. And thankfully, he was on just enough pain medication to take the news without losing it completely.

“So what the hell happened?” he grated anxiously, pegging Winston with an angry glare. Ray lay in the bed beside his, red hair in disarray as his more severe concussion and the painkillers made sure he’d sleep through the discussion. Winston had said Ray’d be okay. Just a concussion, and Peter had had plenty of those. But that damn six had hit him so hard...

Winston sighed, running a hand over his face and wincing as he encountered the square of gauze that covered his left cheek. “I don’t know. Janine’s downstairs, trying to find something out. They took him right into trauma, though, and you know how long that can take.”

Peter knew. Intimately. He tried to relax, his breath catching as he inhaled too deeply and pulled at his broken bone. How the hell had Egon gotten here in the first place? “The negative four, you think?” he ventured tiredly.

Winston nodded. “Seems a safe bet. It was trying to stop us every way it could. Maybe it figured we’d find him before we left for the bust. Maybe we wouldn’t make it at all.”

Peter shook his head, ignoring the accompanying stab of dizziness. “No. He wasn’t there--you and Ray were upstairs with that thing right before we left. If it was keeping an eye on us, it would have seen you leave.”

“So why’d it trash the destabilizer, then?” Winston wanted to know. He blew out a breath in frustration. “Hell, we didn’t even need it--unless it would have been to bust the four itself. And when that thing hit Ray, it actually knocked him out of the seven’s line of fire.”

Peter closed his eyes as he remembered that moment, watching the blue hellfire skim above Ray’s head. Could’ve ended it all right there. “Almost like it was trying to save his life,” Peter mused, a hiss of pain greeting an unwary shifting of his torso.

“Listen, man,” Winston said quietly, taking in his friend’s discomfort. “We’re not going to figure this out until we find out about Egon--and until Ray wakes up.” His eyes softened. “Just try to take it easy for a few, okay?”

Peter snorted. “Yeah. That’s gonna happen.”

Before either man could say more, Janine walked in slowly, her face a mask. Following her was a tall man with hair redder than hers, and eyebrows like caterpillars. Peter tensed at the sight of them.

“Egon?” he asked, his voice little more than breath.

The man stepped forward. “I’m Dr. Jenefsky.” He offered Winston his hand. “I’m the neurologist who was called in on Dr. Spengler’s case.”

Winston looked at Janine in confusion, and was met by desolate eyes. “Neurologist?”

The doctor straightened, as if bracing himself. Winston noticed vaguely that he was just Egon’s height. “Most of Dr. Spengler’s injuries aren’t severe--mostly bruising and lacerations to his hands and knees. But he started seizing shortly after he was brought in,” he explained in no-nonsense tones. “A brain scan revealed a significant lesion in the precentral gyrus, and two secondary lesions in the occipital and temporal lobes. There’s evidence that these are recent--"

“Wait a minute,” Peter broke in, his head throbbing painfully. “You’re saying he has brain damage?” Janine gasped at that, but one look at her told Peter she’d already known. “How bad?”

Jenefsky hedged. “We can’t really say yet, Dr. Venkman,” he explained evenly. “As I was about to say, it appears that the lesions are relatively recent. I’m not exactly clear on what happened to Dr. Spengler--"

“Neither are we,” Winston grated, shock giving his tone a rougher feel than usual.

Peter’s mind froze. He knew a fair deal about the brain, and he knew that any damage to the areas the neurologist was talking about could spell all kinds of problems. Paralysis, blindness... He repeated his question. “How bad is it?”

Jenefsky seemed angered by the repeated interruptions. “As I said, we can’t say until he’s regained consciousness how much permanent damage there’ll be. But it looks as though there may be some functional loss. Mostly in motor function, though there will probably be a bit of cognitive damage as well.”

Peter couldn’t breathe. He absolutely couldn’t breathe. He reached across himself and pulled the covers off, sliding to the edge of the bed. He wasn’t dizzy. He wasn’t dizzy-- “I want to see him.”

The neurologist stepped forward. “You need to calm down, Dr. Venkman.”

Peter just glared. “No, I really don’t think I do.”

Jenefsky shook his head just as Winston put a quelling hand on Peter’s arm. “He’s sedated right now, and you are injured. I’ll let you see him when you’ve both had a chance to recover a bit.” The doctor’s voice was reasonable, but the implacable tone grated on Peter’s very last nerve. “We won’t be able to assess the damage until he’s conscious and you should get what rest you can, now.”

Like hell. Peter pushed Winston away, grabbing for him immediately when he listed to one side as he stood. Winston supported him--at least physically.

“He’s right, Pete. You stay here.” He balanced Peter against the side of the bed and walked over to the pile of personal effects on Ray’s bedside table, picking up the meter that Ray had been carrying on the bust. “I’m going to go see him, and I’m going to take a reading while I’m at it. I’ll bet you he’s got that damn four’s fingerprints all over him.”

Peter wanted to argue. Violently. But the painkillers and the pain itself conspired against him, and he knew he’d never make it to Egon’s bedside without help--help Winston seemed entirely unwilling to give. With a sigh and an angry glare at his teammate, Peter let himself be put back to bed. If need be, he could always stumble out and find a wheelchair later. Just as soon as his stomach stopped doing flip-flops.

Janine seemed to be trying to decide whether she should accompany Winston or stay with Peter, who knew he looked fully as distraught as he felt. He smiled lamely at her. “Go tell Egon to get a move on, okay, Melnitz?” he asked, Watching relief grow in her eyes. “The sooner he wakes up, the sooner we can figure all this out.”

Winston put a warm hand on his forearm. “You gonna be okay?”

“No,” Peter replied glumly, his mind already conjuring up a million problems for Egon. His voice grew hard, though he tried to soften it. “Just go see Egon, okay?”

Winston gave his arm a squeeze, and the trio departed.

As Peter lay back in frustration, listening to Ray’s exhausted breathing in the next bed, he wondered again just what the hell had happened. How did a four get to be so damned powerful?

And how were they going to live with the result?

* * *

Winston’s steps ended a foot short of the door into Egon’s room. He could see a slice of his friend’s blanketed legs through the small window, and he sucked in a deep breath, willing himself to proceed. But it was Janine’s tentative hand on his arm that finally gave him the courage to enter, and, with Jenefsky at their back, the two walked up to Egon’s bedside, staring down at the lax face in silence.

God, he was so still!

“We’ll be retaking the scans at regular intervals,” Jenefsky offered in a whisper, the sound of it mixing into the buzzing in Winston’s ears to produce something irritating and incomprehensible. “We’ll need to determine if the lesions are growing or static. We’re monitoring him constantly for any more seizure activity...”

Winston knew the moment that the neurologist realized they weren’t listening to him. With a muttered farewell, the doctor left, and Winston heard Janine sigh into the quiet.

“I wish we knew what happened,” she murmured, her small hand reaching out to hold Egon’s bandaged one. The physicist’s face was unmarked, but Winston thought the bandages on his hands seemed awfully thick. It’d be a while before Egon could handle a thrower comfortably. With a shock, Jenefsky’s comment about motor function shot through his brain, and he realized that Egon’s hands would be the least of their worries.

More to give himself something to do than out of conscious thought, Winston raised Ray’s meter, running it over Egon as the antennae fluttered and the lights flashed. After fifteen years, he couldn’t quite make the equipment sit up and dance the way Ray and Egon could, but he’d earned his parapsychology degree through hands on experience, and he knew what to look for. He ran a quick comparison against the class four they’d seen--or rather, not seen--at the firehouse and again at the bust.

“Damn,” he whispered, glaring at the meter’s screen as the two waves matched roughly. “What the hell was that thing?” He ran another program, muttering angrily. “There’s no reason the damn thing’s residuals should still be this strong.”

Janine looked up. “The four?”

He nodded, sighing. “I wish Ray was awake. I can run that new program he’s written--he's had time to teach me that much--but he and Egon are the brains of the outfit.”

Janine sobbed softly at that, and he reached out and wrapped an arm around her shoulders.

“He’ll make it, Janine,” he assured her, far from assured himself.

He wasn’t surprised when she didn’t answer, and he knew his words could easily be nothing more than a comforting lie. Egon was breathing on his own, his heart was beating... That was something. Not much, but better than dead. Just thinking the word gave him a shiver and he leaned forward, reaching out to touch his friend’s arm, squeezing it gently.

“We’ll figure this out, Egon,” he murmured, wishing he could be sure the man in question was in there to hear him. “I promise you, man. We’ll figure it out.”

* * *

In the wee hours of the morning, Peter was ready to scream, and felt he’d almost recovered enough strength to do it. Winston had returned hours ago from seeing Egon, and the visit had obviously shaken him. The four’s fingerprints were there, just like they’d thought--much stronger than they should be, given the time he’d been in the hospital. Janine had finally been convinced to go home for a few hours of sleep, and Peter and Winston spent the night trying to get the laptop to give them answers, all the while darting looks over at Ray to see if he was ready to help them yet.

Winston’s fingers flew over the keyboard, his face set, as Peter rubbed his temples angrily. The nurse had brought in something for his stubborn headache a couple of hours ago, and it had lasted only long enough to lull him into a false sense of security. Now the throbbing was back with a vengeance, and he’d have begged for some morphine--or a handy gun--if he didn’t need to keep his mind clear.

“Relax for a minute, Pete,” Winston muttered, sagging back himself as the scenario he’d just written ran through the computer’s mind. He looked at the clock, rubbing a hand across his face, only to encounter that damn bandage again. He grimaced. “It’s nearly two, man. Maybe you should think about trying to get some sleep.”

Peter chuckled bitterly at that. “Come on--like I’m going to sleep right now?”

Winston shrugged. “A guy can try, right?” He sighed heavily, looking over at Ray’s snoring form. “He seemed a little more with it when they woke him up just now.”

His companion nodded. “He’ll be okay.” If he sounded more vehement than he needed to, Winston wouldn’t notice, right? “He’ll probably puke on us the first chance he gets--"

“Already been there, buddy,” Winston offered, striving for a light tone. The laptop beeped, and he called up the results with a frown.

“How the hell’d you learn all this, anyway?” Peter wanted to know, watching his friend punch at the keys with every evidence of knowing what he was doing.

Winston grinned meanly. “You gotta be smart to work these things, Pete,” he told him in a serious tone. “I’d explain it, but you probably wouldn’t understand.”

“Bite me.”

That gained him a chuckle, which was more than he’d been able to get out of Winston before. The guy was hanging on by a thread, and Peter wished he could make him feel better. But the situation wasn’t going to improve any time soon, and Peter just didn’t have the strength to lie to him right now.

“Damn. That didn’t work.” Winston leaned back over the computer with a growl and attacked the keyboard again, searching for answers they just weren’t coming up with. He was great with the computer, and Peter tried to use his usually uncanny instinct about the ghosts they busted, and still they came up empty. It was at times like this that he realized how much they depended on Ray and Egon’s leaps of logic to make the connections they needed on the really tough cases. But Ray was out of it for the moment and Egon might be out of it permanently--

Shutting the door on that unpleasant thought, he looked up at the clock. “His second scan should be done by now,” he offered quietly.

Winston glanced at the clock again as well, and nodded. Peter saw the other man watching him carefully, but he didn’t have the energy to pretend he wasn’t about to blow apart from the waiting. As tightly as he was wound himself, Winston should understand. “They’ll come and tell us if anything changed, Pete,” Winston promised him.

“And maybe this time you guys’ll let me see him?” Peter knew he sounded more bitter than he should—especially because he knew that Winston had been right. Just the look on Winston’s face when he came back made Peter realize that he’d never have kept it together, seeing Egon like that. But he couldn’t help feeling a little betrayed that his friend would deny him that chance. Especially if the worst happened and Egon--

A knock on the doorjamb stopped the thought before it could truly form, and Peter looked up in thanks--and froze solid at the serious look in Dr. Jenefsky’s eyes.

“Can I come in?” the doctor asked, strangely diffident. When they waved him over, he paused to look at Ray’s sleeping form. “How is your friend doing?” he asked, chilling Peter with the stall. “Has he been talking at all?”

“Beyond ‘leave me alone’ and ‘ow,’ you mean? Not much,” Winston replied evenly, though Peter could see he was itching to lose it. “He’s with it enough to gripe when they wake him, but that’s about it.” He finally gave in to the impulse to rise and confronted the neurologist. “How’s it look?”

Jenefsky ducked his head. “I can’t explain this...” he began tentatively.

Peter jumped on the silence. “What happened now?” he demanded. “What’s wrong?”

Again, the doctor hesitated, and a thousand possibilities ran through Peter’s mind. The lesions had grown. Egon had had another, more serious, seizure. Egon had... “What is it?” he finally hissed.

“We ran the scan twice,” Jenefsky stated, disbelieving. “We thought maybe, the first time, that it was some sort of misread--maybe a glitch in the program.” As if he’d suddenly recognized Peter’s impulse to reach out and grab his throat, the doctor straightened defensively. “The lesions are shrinking,” he blurted out, anger mixing in his tone.

Peter just stared, trying to reconcile the statement with the doctor’s demeanor. “Shrinking?” he asked carefully.

“He’s getting better?” Winston’s whisper sounded like it shaded toward belief in miracle.

Jenefsky shook his head in frustration. “You don’t understand,” he grated, a pleading, irritated look in his eyes. “In the last eight hours, the lesion in his PCG has lost 4 millimeters in length and what surrounds it is healthy brain tissue! Lesions stop growing--they develop scar tissue around them, they close over. They don’t heal--not in a forty-six-year-old man!”

Peter held his breath for a long moment. “You couldn’t have misread the first scan?” he ventured, not daring to hope just yet. “Just thought it was bigger than it was?”

The doctor ran a hand through his thick mop of hair. “We went over everything twice,” he insisted. “I can’t begin to explain this--it defies every law of medicine I know!”

“Maybe it’s related to the four.”

Winston’s whisper had both men turning on him, and he looked up defensively. “Come on, the damn thing was more powerful than any four has a right to be, wasn’t it?” he demanded, looking pleadingly at Peter. “And remember, the meter said his residuals are still a lot higher than they should be.”

“But why rip him apart just to cure him, Zed?” Peter asked tiredly. “Seems like more trouble than it’s worth. And why bring him all the way back to New York?”

Questions on top of questions. But Winston felt a certainty in his bones. “Pete, you said it yourself. At the bust, it was almost like the four was trying to save Ray’s life. Why not Egon’s?”

His friend mulled that over for a long minute before he groaned, rubbing his temples. “This ghost is giving me a headache.”

Jenefsky snorted, and Winston held his breath as Peter tensed. “That could very well be your concussion, Dr. Venkman,” the doctor offered evenly. Wrong move, Winston moaned to himself, ready to step in as Peter bristled.

“Why don’t you just--"

“Pete, shut it,” Winston barked, before his friend could completely destroy their relationship with the neurologist. “Remember, he’s the guy who’s gonna let you see Egon later today.” He pegged the doctor with a telling glare. “Right?”

Jenefsky seemed about to return the attack, but caught himself at the last moment. “I’ll send someone over after ten,” he allowed finally, raising his hand in warning. “If you get some sleep between now and then.”

Peter grinned--which should have sent the doctor running for cover. “Like a baby,” he promised disingenuously.

Winston felt the need to get the discussion back on track. “So Pete, if we figure this ghost is influencing Egon right now, what do you think we should do?” He sagged at Peter’s blank look. “Come on, you’ve gotta have some idea, right?” He himself was out of his league, and he knew it.

Peter nodded sharply, and Winston wondered suddenly just exactly when the stress was going to tear the younger man apart. “Yeah, I do. I have an idea that we really need Ray on this one,” he said, shooting a glance at their sleeping comrade.

Winston hated waking the kid, but he had to agree. The computer wasn’t doing what they needed it to do, and he had no idea at this point whether he’d recognize the signs if it was. Ray was the expert, damnit. What made Winston think he could take care of things himself--or even with Peter’s help? With a sigh for his own inadequacy, he nodded, and walked over to shake Ray lightly, trying not to jar him too much.

“Ray?” he asked quietly.

“This is a ghost thing, then?” Jenefsky asked in the background. Winston thought there was a desperation in his tone, as if he hoped there would be some supernatural answer--something that didn’t destroy his science entirely. “The ghost is healing him?”

Peter’s voice was rough. “We thought it was the ghost that did this to him in the first place.”

Winston shook his friend’s shoulder again. “Ray, come on, man. Wake up.” He got about the same result the nurse had an hour ago, but he persisted, feeling like he was only waking Ray up so he could tell him the world had ended while he slept. Unless, of course, he was right about that damn four...

“This simply isn’t possible.” Jenefsky sounded pissed, and Winston sighed to himself as Peter jumped on him again.

“Look, I’d think, as a doctor, you’d be glad one of your patients was getting better,” he railed, pain making him lash out. “Sorry Egon’s messing up your perfect little world.”

“Pete, give it a rest,” Winston commanded, still bent over the sleeping redhead.

Finally, Ray moaned lightly once, muttering testily.

“I know you’ve got a headache, buddy, but we need your help, okay?” Peter called softly, abandoning his beef with the neurologist.

That did it. Ray’s eyes squinted open, focusing on Winston’s somber face. He tried to sit up, subsiding willingly when Winston held him down with a hand on his chest. “What’s wrong?” he asked muzzily. “Is it Egon?”

Peter gave a sigh of relief, and Winston felt a measure of his own worry recede slightly. He’d known Ray was supposed to be okay, but the way things were going he wasn’t taking anything on faith.

“Yeah,” Winston agreed, keeping things simple in deference to what had to be a monster headache. “He’s better, Ray, but we’re still a little clueless.” He thought hard for a minute. “That four’s been putting its fingers in, and we need to know more about it. If I read out some info from the computer, you think you can keep it together long enough to help us figure this out?”

Jenefsky shuffled his feet nervously, obviously uncomfortable with the technical turn the discussion had taken. “I need to get back to my patients, Mr. Zeddemore,” he said, clearly choosing not to engage Peter again in his current mood. “Please let me know if you figure out what’s going on here.”

“You’ll be the first to know,” Winston assured him. Hell, the doctor looked as if he’d be glad if he never saw the Ghostbusters again.

Meanwhile, Ray was obviously trying to pull himself together, blinking owlishly at the dim light of the room. As he started explaining the readings they’d gotten, Winston heard Peter sit back, obviously nursing his aching chest and arm.

He was glad to hear his friend’s snores start up not long after, as he and Ray went over the program once again.

* * *

As good as his word, Jenefsky had a nurse show up the next morning. Another doctor had just been examining both injured men, and she’d decided that, while Peter was more than recovered enough to go home, Ray was stuck for another day. Promising to come back and discharge Peter in the early afternoon, she’d left just moments before the young blonde nurse came in to take Peter to Egon’s room.

“I want to go, too,” Ray murmured, though Peter could see that part of his friend was screaming at the thought. Peter knew exactly how that part felt, actually. He wasn’t sure he was going to be able to stand this, but he didn’t have much choice. Egon wasn’t sedated now, and according to the update they’d gotten that morning there was no reason why he wouldn’t wake up today.

And if the worst happened, and he was paralyzed, or blind, or deaf, or worse... Peter couldn’t stand the idea of him waking up alone.

Winston shot down Ray’s request with a look. “Come on, buddy. You can barely sit up on a bed that ain’t moving. You honestly think you’re ready for a wheelchair?”

Ray conceded the point a little too easily, and Peter knew his hunch had been right.

“Morning.”

Janine’s quiet greeting had them all turning toward the door. Peter rolled his wheelchair forward and studied her. She hadn’t slept--or at least not well.

“Hey, Melnitz,” he offered gently. It wasn’t the time for their usual banter--as much as either of them might hope it could be. “Been in to see him yet?”

She shook her head, and Peter realized that she was as reluctant to visit Egon as the rest of them were. Winston saw it, too--nothing seemed to be escaping him in his current hyper-aware state--and stood up, grabbing Ray’s meter.

“Can you stay with Ray for a while, Janine?” Winston asked, his voice a quiet murmur. “I want to get some more readings.” He looked at Ray for a moment. “Do you want anything else, numbers-wise?”

Ray shook his head carefully. “No, just the two programs we talked about.” His head was obviously still hurting, and Peter knew they’d both been up since the dead of night. “When you take Peter home, can you bring me a few books? I recognize some of those anomalous readings, but I just...” He sighed in frustration. “I just can’t remember where I saw them.”

Winston reached over to lay a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Give yourself a little time, Ray,” he assured him, smiling at the wan grin he got for his troubles. “Make me a list. Once I take Pete home, I’ll come back with them. But you gotta rest, man, okay? The sooner you’re up and running, the quicker we can figure this out.”

Receiving a faint shrug in response, he waved the nurse off and pushed Peter’s wheelchair himself. Peter looked back as they left the room, his heart aching at the desolate looks on his friends’ faces.

* * *

“Egon?”

Egon floated, lying on his back in the darkness. He felt awake--he felt alert. But that voice wasn’t one he’d find in the real world. Peter’s tenor sounded rough. Did ghosts feel pain?

“I don’t think he’s going to just open his eyes for us, Pete.” There was a heavy sigh, and the sound of a solid body dropping into a chair. Winston. Ghosts weren’t solid--not that solid, at any rate. As clear as Egon felt, he knew this had to be just another dream.

“You okay, Zed?” So much caring in that phantom voice. And Egon had heard the anger and frustration in Winston’s tone. But he sounded unhurt--at least physically. Egon hadn’t had a dream like this in a week. A dream where he’d returned from California to find them all nursing minor hurts--Peter milking it for all it was worth while Winston and Ray thought of ways to cut him down to size. This dream-Winston was rockier than most, but perhaps it was just another evolution in Egon’s increasingly vivid fantasy life.

“Yeah, just tired,” Winston allowed. Egon wondered if he’d see them again if he opened his eyes. Somehow, that was always worse. Just hearing them hurt, but to see them, as if they still lived...

“You can get a little sleep, you know?” Peter told Winston gently. “You don’t have to go around carrying the world on your shoulders.” Egon shivered. Janine had said the same thing to him, a week after their deaths. “Ray’s up. Between the three of us, we’ll figure this out.”

Peter thought Winston was losing it. Egon could tell. Their most stable member, Winston didn’t let the job get to him--even when things went bad--very often, but when he did, Peter was always there to help him through it.

“I’ll sleep when we find out what the hell happened.” Implacable. Stubborn.

“You sound like me, now.” Egon could have laughed.

“God help me, then.”

They sounded tired, and desperate, and sad. Egon rolled over, trying to hold on to the dream. Hoping for more of the voices he knew he’d never hear again in the waking world.

“I wish he’d wake up,” Peter whispered, and Egon felt the pain of the request. “It’s so weird to see him just lying there.” There was a long pause. “Do you think he can feel me?” Feel you what, Peter?

Winston sighed. “I don’t know, Pete. Jenefsky said there’d be motor damage.”

Motor damage? Of course--Rawling's Effect. It centered on the nervous system, didn’t it? Still, he could turn over, couldn’t he? He must not be as affected as he thought.

“What if he’s paralyzed?” Peter’s voice was low and tortured, and Egon wondered at the realism in his dream. He almost wanted to sit up and explain that, since he had just rolled over, he would be fine. There was nothing to worry about.

But there was no one real to say that to.

“We’ll deal with it, Pete,” Winston answered, strain showing in his voice. Egon wanted to comfort him. He wanted them to be real so badly... With an internal sigh for the torture he was leaving himself open to, he let his eyes open--

And stared at a ceiling he didn’t recognize. That confused him enough that he barely heard the cries of surprise from his friends. Shouldn’t he be seeing a wall? Had he rolled back over onto his back and not noticed?

“Egon?”

Unwilling, he felt his eyes track down slowly to take in Peter’s face. Worn and scraped, he looked as if he could use a week in bed. And there was a strange fuzziness to him. Not just like things got when Egon wasn’t wearing his glasses. It was as if there were a hole in his vision.

“Egon, can you hear me?”

Of course I can hear you, Peter. He didn’t hear the words, but he was sure he meant to say them. He closed his eyes again, mustered his strength, and sat up--

And opened his eyes to find himself still lying on his back.

“Egon, come on, man. Are you in there?” Winston’s voice broke hard on the last word and Egon tried to raise his head to look over at him. He couldn’t move. He could feel his head turn if he closed his eyes, but his body wasn’t mimicking his thoughts. “Egon?”

It was really rather fascinating. He’d have been happy to spend some time trying to catalog the strange sensations he seemed to be feeling, but the pain in the ghosts’ voices made him concentrate on them, abandoning his musings.

I’m all right. Again, his mouth didn’t move. The words didn’t form. Peter’s face paled as Egon tried to look reassurance at him. Why would a ghost’s face pale like that? Shouldn’t it be pale as death anyway?

“Winston, I think he can hear us,” Peter’s spectre finally croaked. “I just don’t think he can...” He trailed off, and Egon watched his eyes close for a long moment before they fixed on Egon’s face again. “Egon, if you can hear me, give a blink, okay?”

Egon blinked. Why not answer a ghost, after all? If he was going to lose his mind, at least his friends were here. But they both groaned--Winston nearly sobbed... Egon concentrated fiercely, and his eyes tracked across the bed to fix on Winston’s face. Ghosts could cry. That he knew from previous evidence.

“Egon, you’re in the hospital,” Peter was saying now, his voice that reassuring one he used when he was barely holding together himself. “Winston’s going to go get the doctor, and they’re going to check on you.” He lost his hold on his self-control as Egon heard a door close and the sound of footfalls. “Egon, can you move at all?!”

Apparently not. He could blink though, but that just made Peter groan again. The ghost leaned in, trying to keep eye contact. But the dream was slipping away now. Egon struggled to hold on to it, but he felt his eyes close, and his descent back into the darkness was accompanied by Peter’s increasingly frantic calls of his name.

* * * * * *

Chapter Text

Ray and Janine sat in silence for far too long after Winston haltingly filled them in on his and Peter’s disasterous visit. What seemed a century later, Ray finally spoke.

“We... should call his mom.”

Peter nodded fatalistically. He looked like he was numb down to his toes, and Ray didn’t feel any better himself. Even his headache had faded in response to this brutal confirmation of their fears.

“I called. Virginia said she’s in Vancouver, visiting one of Egon’s cousins,” he stumbled over their friend’s name. “She gave me the number there. I didn’t... I couldn’t tell her.” And the failure--even to pass on Egon’s fate to his family’s housekeeper--told in his voice. “I’ll call Mrs. S. when we get home.”

Winston nodded at that, and Ray could see him take on yet another level of responsibility. Somehow, Ray knew that Peter would have to fight to make that call. “Ray, did you get that list together for me?” he asked softly. “Once I get Pete into bed, I’ll come right back.”

Ray’s fingers felt far too clumsy as he passed over the small sheet of paper. He wished he knew what to do. He wished he knew what to say to make it better.

But it wouldn’t get better, would it? Egon... If it was permanent...

“What did Jenefsky say?” Janine asked, her voice barely carrying farther than Ray’s bedside. “What did the latest scan show?”

Winston sighed. “The lesions are still shrinking. Not as fast as before, but the one that they worried might affect his vision is almost gone now.”

Ray nodded, a breath of hope in his tone. “Maybe, once the other ones heal--"

“If they heal completely,” Peter qualified ruthlessly. He wasn’t going to expect a miracle, and Ray wondered at the part of himself that dared to. “They aren’t healing like they were, Ray. And the four’s signature is getting fainter.”

Ray closed his eyes as an explanation came to him. “It’s using all its strength to make it better,” he theorized. “Maybe it doesn’t have enough to...”

Janine took a deep breath beside him. “I’m going to go sit with Egon,” she announced, her voice firmer now, almost angry. “You guys can give up on him if you want to, but he needs somebody there who’s pulling for him.”

Peter reached out to stop her, but she brushed past him, and Ray saw the impulse to follow her and explain die in Peter’s green eyes. He sighed instead. “I think I’m going to stay here--"

“You’re not,” Winston cut in, implacable. “Pete, you’re not up to pulling guard duty, okay?” The look he turned on his friend was pleading, and Ray had a sudden desire to send Winston home and make him stay there. Two days of trying to hold them all together was more than enough for anyone, and the wear was showing. But there wasn’t really anything to do, was there? Things were never going to get better... The only thing Ray could do was show Winston that he could take care of himself--and Egon and Janine, if need be. They’d all need to take care of Peter. One person just couldn’t do that on his own.

“I think he’s right, Peter,” Ray surprised them both by saying. “You should go home and... and talk to Mrs. Spengler and Winston can bring me back those books while you get some rest.”

“I can get some rest here, Ray,” Peter stated, a shadow of his usual stubbornness shining through his shock.

But Ray shook his head, his own stubborn streak coming to the fore. “Peter, you can’t sleep here and you know it. Even if you don’t sleep, you can at least...” He shrugged eloquently. “You can at least take a break.”

He was going to argue. Ray could see it in his eyes. Whenever one of them was hurt, it was almost as if an unspoken rule required that the rest of them stay--sit at the bedside, pine for their fallen comrade. But not this time. Ray could see the strain wearing on both of his friends and he knew Peter would be better for even an hour on his own. It would give him a chance to fall apart, just the way he wouldn’t when he thought they all needed him to be strong. Winston would be better for something to do, but Peter would fight it, trying not to dwell on what had happened, but unable to work past it.

“Peter, please,” Ray finally asked softly. “Just a little while. It’ll do you good.”

Peter ran a hand through disheveled hair and sighed, looking up at him with anger in his eyes. “It won’t do Egon any good,” he growled.

“No, but me getting those books and bringing ‘em back will,” Winston stated. Ray almost cheered the quiet power that Winston always seemed to have. If anyone could manhandle Peter, it was Winston. “Just a drive to the firehouse, Pete, that’s all I’m asking. If you want to come back after that...” He shrugged.

Outnumbered, outstubborned, Peter had to give in. His glower told Ray they’d be paying for this little bit of manipulation for weeks to come, but he’d take it, if it would just give Peter a chance to get some perspective.

“Say hi to Mrs. Spengler for me,” Ray said quietly, as his friends gathered up their things. It was a cruel reminder, but it had the effect of at least squaring Peter’s shoulders, and he turned back to Ray with a small measure of acceptance in his eyes.

“Don’t go making passes at the nurses, Ray,” he joked lamely. “After all, I’ve got to have some chance of getting a few phone numbers when I get back.”

Ray smiled, but the grin dropped from his face the moment his friends left the room. He let a portion of his mind mull over the readings they’d been getting on the meter in the past two days, while the bulk of his thoughts rested on Egon.

He was paralyzed. Worse, they couldn’t even really be sure he was in there. Peter had whispered that he could see Egon looking out at him, but that might have been wishful thinking. Ray wanted so desperately to believe that Egon would come back to them, that somehow the negative four they’d been tracking would be able to cure him completely... He wanted it so desperately, but he knew the science of it--even if that science ran counter to medical knowledge.

He toyed with his meter, looking at the readings Winston had gotten during his latest visit. There was something very familiar about the sine wave on that negative valance. It was almost like he’d seen the wave in a drawing before--not in real life...

What were they going to do? If the four was fading as fast as it seemed to be, it would never have enough power to fix the damage completely. Already, it was starting to slow down, and Egon was still paralyzed, still helpless. Ray squared his shoulders. Egon was alive. That had to be enough. If he was paralyzed forever--no. No, there was no point in thinking like that. Nothing mattered except the fact that Egon was alive.

He was still sunk in his thoughts two hours later, when Dr. Jenefsky knocked quietly on the doorframe.

“Hi,” Ray offered quietly.

“You’re feeling better, I see,” Jenefsky replied. There was a suppressed excitement in him that made Ray sit up and take notice. “I just came from another scan of your wonder Ghostbuster.”

“And?”

Jenefsky almost laughed. “And he’s pissing me off.” At Ray’s look of confusion, the tall man moved farther into the room. “The lesions in his occipital and temporal lobes have completely healed. There’s another five percent reduction in the main lesion.” He shrugged in frustration. “I have no idea how any of this is happening, but--counter to everything I know about the human brain--your friend is getting better.”

Ray chanced a smile. “Can I see him?”

The doctor looked him over, and Ray wondered suddenly just how bad he looked. He could feel the bruise that ran from his left eye down to his jaw, but he hadn’t been up and hadn’t worried about his looks much. Peter was the vain one, he reminded himself with an internal grin. He straightened up unconsciously, trying to look as healthy as he could, though his stomach still felt like he’d eaten too many cookies.

After a long moment, Jenefsky smiled. “I’ll get you a wheelchair. Your friend Ms. Melnitz is in with Dr. Spengler now--she seems like she’d be able to keep an eye on you.”

Ray grinned broadly at the amused tone. Janine could be counted on to watch him like a hawk, he agreed silently. Out loud, he only said “Thank you.”

* * *

Peter sat at the kitchen table, staring into space as he heard Winston rummaging through Ray’s books in the library. God, he was tired. But every time his eyes closed, he saw Egon, gazing out at him from a frozen face, and he snapped them open. It had been hard enough to see the first time. No use in repeating the torture.

“Pete? You gonna order something, or risk whatever’s in the fridge?” Winston’s voice sounded too strained, and Peter felt his focus change slightly. Winston was running on fumes. Though he hadn’t been hurt too badly in the bust, he also hadn’t slept since it happened, and the stress of trying to take care of everybody was going to crack him, sooner or later. Sighing, Peter rose and opened the fridge, grimacing at the slim pickings.

“How about Yao Shan’s?” he offered, trying to sound at least self-sufficient, if not hale and hearty. “You want the Emperor’s Chicken, or the orange beef?”

A muffled curse preceded the loud crash of books by a second, and Winston obviously took a moment to compose himself before replying. “Beef is good. I could go for a whole damn steak right now.”

“A steak takes longer than twenty minutes to deliver,” Peter reminded him, knowing they’d be hard pressed to let themselves stay even that long. But they had to eat. Winston had to eat. If Peter could have convinced him to hang the world on a hook for a few hours and get some rest, he’d’ve done it. Sometimes it had to suck being the stable one, he thought wryly, reaching for the phone and dialing awkwardly. He’d be glad when his shoulder finally healed. They were going to be in a world of hurt, thrower-wise, for a while. Thank God the fall was the slow season.

The food ordered, Peter sat heavily, staring at the phone. He had to call Egon’s mom. He wasn’t sure exactly what he was going to tell her, but he had to let her know what was going on. With a painful knot in his throat, he dialed the number Virginia had given him.

“You have reached the home of Donald and Cynthia Ever--"

“Nobody home?” Winston asked from the doorway, making Peter jump as he hung up the phone.

He nodded, slumping back into the chair and looking in awe at the stack of books Winston placed on the table with a thud.

“Ray’s going to be able to read all those?” Peter asked doubtfully. “I thought his eyes hadn’t stopped crossing yet.”

Winston snorted at that. “Hell, Pete, some of these aren’t even in languages I can identify. Good thing he’s a genius, at least.”

Peter nodded, deadpan. “Way smarter than us.”

That got him a laugh, but Winston’s mock-cheerful demeanor dropped as he took a seat, staring off into space in exhaustion.

“Wanna catch a shower or something?” Peter asked after a moment. “I’ll come get you when the food comes.”

Winston shook his head, then shook the rest of himself. “Nah. I better get downstairs and check the messages. I don’t think Janine took the time to change the outgoing before she...” He sighed. “Anyway, I’ll need to do that--and we better make sure the containment safeguards are still in effect, right?”

Peter nodded, rising to his feet, though he felt a distressing tendency to list to one side. “I can handle that.”

Winston waved him off, pulling himself up with grim determination. “I got it, Pete. Just wait for the food--maybe catch a few minutes zone time.”

“You could use a day of it,” Peter shot back gently. He intercepted his friend as Winston tried to head for the stairs, placing his sound hand on his partner’s shoulder. “Come on, Zed. Ease up. I’m not a complete invalid.” He tried for the joke and smiled. “Physically speaking, I mean.”

Winston just stilled in response. “Pete,” he whispered suddenly. “What if Egon doesn’t get better?”

Peter tried not to be surprised by the raw fear in that question. It took a lot for Winston to lose his cool—so much so, in fact, that Peter hadn’t realized just how close to the edge Winston was right now. He steered his friend back to the table and made him sit, taking the seat beside him and looking into his eyes.

“If he doesn’t, we’ll deal with it,” Peter promised stoutly. “You said it yourself, Zed. We can do this.” He reached out, digging hard fingers into Winston’s rigid forearm. “But it has to be us, okay? I know we count on you to be the one who’s got it together, but this is a hell of a lot bigger than any of us planned on.” He shook that forearm, feeling the muscles soften slightly. “You don’t have to take care of all of us, you know? I do have some experience in that department.”

Winston snorted, and if there were tears in his eyes, Peter pretended not to notice. “Yeah, and look at the state you guys were in when I showed up.” It was coarse and soft and painful, but at least it was a small sign that Winston was trying to let go.

Peter smiled comfortingly. “You should take your own advice, you know? I got a nap this morning, but I know you and Ray were going over those numbers the whole time I was out.”

Winston shook his head. “Battle fatigue,” he answered coldly. At the lack of comprehension in Peter’s eyes, he smiled grimly. “Gets to where you’re so ready for something to happen that you couldn’t sleep if you tried.” And from the look in his eyes, this was hardly the first time he’d suffered from it.

Peter nodded. “Okay, fine. But I’m going to knock you unconscious pretty soon--just so you know.”

He was gratified by the laugh that gained him. “You and what army?” Winston just looked at him for a long moment, before one of his hands came up and covered the one Peter had on his arm. He squeezed it in thanks and let it drop, rising again to his feet. “Okay. You go check on the containment, and I’ll deal with the messages.”

As they both headed for the stairs, he turned back. “But listen for the door. I’m not paying for dinner again.”

* * *

“...still not sure what happened. Gosh, I hope I can find something in those books.”

Ray. Egon listened to the floating words, trying to use them to draw himself forward, out of the darkness. Ray was here. No pain. Ray. If the other guys showed up, he’d know he was in heaven. Except that he’d learned in Sunday school that God didn’t accept people who killed them--

“You will.” Janine’s voice pushed him back into the shadows. Janine was very much alive, so it must be another dream. He’d had them every time he slept, that first week after they died. Everyone safe and sound... All just dreams. “Come on, Ray. It’ll be okay. The doctors say he’s getting better--they don’t know how, but he is.”

“I wish we knew how the ghost did it!” Ray’s voice was rocky, grating. As if he was hurting. The words had a tendency to blur in Egon’s mind, and he let the sound of them wash over him. “It’s getting weaker, according to the readings. It’s like it’s pouring itself into making him better. I just can’t understand why. I mean, what did it do to him in the first place? And why did he end up at the firehouse?”

Because it used to be home. Because I didn’t have anywhere else to go.

“I don’t know, Ray--don’t try to get up again, please.” Janine could be such a mother hen. Egon used to enjoy it. “I don’t need you tossing your cookies all over me.”

“I just wish he’d wake up.” The longing in Ray’s voice was enough. For him, Egon could do anything--almost anything. He couldn’t save him, but...

But he could open his eyes.

“Egon?”

The world was white and fuzzy, broken by a flash of red, but the hole in his vision that he remembered from his previous dream was gone now--he just needed his glasses. A muted sensation reached him, and he translated it as Janine’s hand on his wrist. It felt so like it always seemed to now, thanks to Rawling’s Effect, that he could still take comfort from the phantom touch. Maybe this was real? Janine felt real, anyway...

“Egon, can you hear me?” Ray asked tensely, his voice sounding closer than it had been, and infinitely more pained. Apparently ghosts could feel pain. Peter and Winston had seemed to before.

He found himself too tired to nod, and feared he was too tired to speak, as well. But again, for Ray...

“Ray?” His voice was wisp-thin, but distorted, as if he had rocks in his mouth. He heard a gasp, and his heart sank. Janine was sure to think he was insane now. Calling to Ray as if he were really there. As if he could hear him. Best to try to cover again. If this really was reality--or some disturbing mix of dream and wakefulness, she might forgive him the slip. “My... glasses?”

They were settled on his face, though they seemed a little off, as if they were only hooked over one ear. He let the thought drop away, and looked up again. And something in his throat caught.

He’d dreamed their ghosts before, though none of them had actually come back to haunt him in his failure until Peter and Winston... And yet Ray stood to one side of him, in an off-white gown that looked much more like hospital-issue than heavenly garb. His face was scraped in too many places, bruised in too many more, and his skin had a peculiar greenish-gray tint to it. His eyes and smile blazed forth, but there were shadows there, dark and terrified, and Egon wished Ray were real, so he could try to soothe them away.

Janine stood at his other shoulder, as real as she’d ever been. She’d been crying again--not too recently, but near enough that he could see the red rims behind her glasses. She was scared, too, and he’d seen that quiet grief in her eyes for too long not to recognize its source. She’d been talking before. To Ray? Comforting herself with his ghost?

Something told him he was wrong, and he struggled past the last of the darkness, focusing on the now with tremendous difficulty. Janine was trading worried looks with the ghost. She could see the spectre clearly, Egon was sure... And Ray had still been standing when Egon left the bust...

“Ray?” he ventured, a hint of desperation in his tone. “You’re really here?”

A tear shook loose from his friend’s eye as he reached forward, gripping Egon’s other wrist, the one Janine hadn’t captured. This touch he could feel clearly, and the feeling of that callused hand, warm, alive, convinced him as his eyes hadn’t.

“You’re really here.”

Egon’s quiet, garbled pronouncement left them both speechless, but he was too busy trying to see around them, behind them. His head and neck didn’t want to cooperate, but he had to know. If Ray were here...

Peter, flung out in the dust, unmoving. The sounds of Winston’s cry cut off by falling rubble...

He sagged painfully, closing his eyes to the inevitable truth. One out of three. Always. Perhaps there was a reason, a variation on the algorithm that he hadn’t accounted for. He looked up at them again, seeing those shadows, that quiet grief. Wondering if, this time, Ray would help him; if they could do the impossible together. God knew, he hadn’t been able to do anything on his own.

“Egon, you’re in New York,” Ray declared patiently. “Do you know how you got here?”

How he...? It took a moment, and another long look at Ray’s battered face, for the answer to come. Of course. The recall hadn’t taken him back to his point of origin. The temporal loop he’d created had finally collapsed--Pendrake’s Principle had taken over. He didn’t understand the reason for it, but he must have been returned to the beginning of the loop this time, the... bubble... must have burst, bringing him back to October...?

“What day is it?” His voice was so weak--as weak as the rest of him. His body seemed stuck in slow motion, mired in sand that cased his left side in a muffling cocoon. And his mind was even more muddled now than when he’d left for that final trip back. Was it permanent, he wondered? Looking up at Ray, the latest last survivor, did it matter? At least, since he himself was still alive, there appeared to be only one of him here.

“It’s Thursday,” Ray offered, frowning when Egon’s eyebrow lifted. “The 23rd.”

“Of October?”

He watched the two of them stare at each other in confusion, before Janine gave his wrist a final half-felt squeeze, that desperate worry for his sanity creeping back into her eyes. “Egon, I’m going to let the nurses know you’re awake, all right?”

He waited until she was gone, smiling fondly after her for a moment, before looking up at Ray and repeating his question.

“Yes, Egon,” Ray replied, still that gentle tone to his voice. “It’s still October. You’ve only been unconscious for a couple of days. You were in San Francisco--do you remember? You were going to meet Dr. Myers for breakfast?”

Strangely, he did remember. He remembered the first time, when he’d actually met her and they’d gone to lunch as well and Janine had called him with the news, and he remembered Janine telling him of his collapse in the hotel room after his second trip back... And then he remembered nothing.

And he remembered everything. Including his failure.

“It’s okay, Egon,” Ray soothed, taking his confusion at the multiple memories as evidence of none. “It might come back to you.” His grip tightened, and Egon felt a vague throbbing in his hand. “Gosh, I really hope it does, because we’re all going crazy trying to figure out what happened. Winston thinks--“

Ray broke off in shock as Egon tried to sit up abruptly, his movements jerky and uncoordinated. The best he could manage was a clumsy flopping, as his hand fell back to the bed, thudding against the bedrail with a twinge that Egon barely felt. He looked down at his hands in surprise, and found them both well bandaged. The left--the one that had hit the rail--was shaking slightly, and he knew he should be disturbed by the fact that he didn’t feel the movement. He shook off his confusion as Ray’s soft voice intruded. “Egon?”

“Winston?” Egon asked sharply, remembering the cry he’d heard cut off by the falling wall. “He’s alive?” When Ray nodded in consternation, Egon carefully held his breath for a moment, closing his eyes before asking softly, “And Peter?”

Ray gasped a little in dismay, disengaging his hand from Egon’s, only to place both of them on his friend’s shaking shoulders. “Egon, listen to me, okay? Please?” The fear in his voice made Egon’s eyes pop open, focusing on those truthful brown orbs. “Peter and Winston--and me--we’re all fine. Okay? Peter was released this morning, and the two of them went back to the firehouse to try to get some sleep. They’ll be back in a couple of hours--but they’re fine.” His gaze became penetrating, and Egon tried to look away, but couldn’t get his muscles to obey him. “Why did you think we weren’t?”

He couldn’t tell him. It wasn’t that Ray wouldn’t believe him--far from it. Ray would be thrilled to know that his time travel theories were at least workable. But Egon couldn’t burden them with this truth. He couldn’t let them know what had happened--or what hadn’t happened. It was much more than he himself wanted to know, and he had lived through it.

He knew it was irrational, but that part of his mind that remembered every second of the horror that had been the last few weeks held his mouth still.

“I... don’t know, Raymond,” he finally offered, trying to fake a look of confusion, and finding it wasn’t all that difficult. How had they all survived, when he’d never been able to stop the bust? He’d seen Peter fall--heard Winston’s cry cut off... “When I awoke, I was certain that...” He tried to will away the image of this friend, laid out in his coffin. “But you were here...” His look of shocked joy was not faked in the least. “You were here, but they weren’t.”

Hands on his shoulders--hands he’d never thought to feel again--squeezed lightly and pushed him down onto the bed. He could feel himself slipping again, knowing that the time shift had taken far more out of him than he’d replenished with his two-day slumber, but he kept his eyes open for just a moment more, watching Ray accept the lie and usher him back to sleep.

And he suddenly wondered, as the darkness--so different from his darkness of the last three weeks--crashed over him, why he bothered to lie at all.

* * *

Peter rolled over and looked at the clock, his mind taking more than a minute to make the digital numbers resemble anything identifiable. 8:30. At night. He sat up quickly, cursing at the pain that ripped through his shoulder and chest and looking around for the sling he’d abandoned while he slept. Sliding his arm into it and sighing at the immediate, if marginal, relief it afforded, he looked across the room at the only other tenanted bed. Winston was asleep. Still. Thank God.

After their hastily-eaten dinner, Peter had taken another good, long look at his friend as Winston sat staring into space, a pain in his eyes so deep that Peter almost couldn’t face it. He came to a decision.

“Winston, you’re taking a nap.” Winston immediately roused himself to argue, but Peter cut him off. “Doctor’s orders, Zed. I’m serious.” His gaze softened as Winston pursed his lips in anger. “I’m not going to let you run yourself into the ground, Winston. Got it? Two hours is all I’m asking.”

Winston shook his head. “If Egon--"

“If something happens, Ray will call us,” Peter assured him, rising to place a gentle hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Come on. You haven’t slept in two days, and battle fatigue or no, you need the downtime.” He squeezed the tight muscles firmly. “We need you on this, Zed.”

Guilt sufficed where logic failed, and Winston blew out a despairing breath before rising, reaching out for the half-empty Chinese containers on the table. Peter slapped his hand and waved him off with a smile. “You’re not the responsible one right now, remember?” He waited for Winston to smile slightly before moving. “Catch a shower while you’re at it, Zed,” he called as Winston made for the spiral staircase. “You’re starting to get funky.”

So he’d gotten Zed to sleep, and he’d even managed to succumb himself after an hour or so, but it had been more than three hours since they’d left the hospital, and Peter figured that was more than enough time to be away. Ray had probably let them sleep because there was nothing new on the Egon front. If anything at all had happened, Peter knew they would have been awakened by the blare of the private line.

Sliding silently out of bed, he crept to the bathroom and did his business. He felt better. Grimy and wrung out, but better--except for the searing dagger in his shoulder, and the other one in the vicinity of his heart... Well, at least he was fed, anyway. With a sigh he went to wash his hands, cursing at his shoulder just for a break in routine, and stared at himself in the mirror for a very long time. The bruises on his face were just starting to turn yellow and purple--colors that did not go with his complexion at all. At least he wouldn’t have any scars. He wasn’t so sure about Winston.

He should definitely wake his partner up so they could get back to the hospital. Taking the nap had been self-indulgent, but it had also been necessary--at least for Zed. Peter hoped he’d wake up in a better frame of mind. They weren’t going to be able to get any answers if they weren’t all a little more on the ball.

But his feet carried him past the bunkroom door, all the way to the lab. The floor was strewn with wrappers and little bits of medical plastic. From Egon. He shuddered, desperately turning away from the sight, when his eyes fell on a crumpled, half-torn notebook that looked like it had been kicked off to the side during the paramedics’ work.

He bent to pick it up, his body protesting the movement. Turning it over, he saw that it looked a lot like one of Ray’s research journals. The kid had a million of them, all lining one wall of the basement lab. What was one of them doing up here? Idly, he opened it, flipping past pages of Ray’s haphazard scrawl, accompanied by drawings that looked vaguely like some rudimentary sketches of the dimensional gateway. He’d about decided to drop the thing on the table and head in to wake up Winston when he came upon a page in Egon’s perfect, tiny handwriting.

October 23

Having gone over Ray’s theory thoroughly, I believe there may be a way to recalibrate the dimensional gateway. The hypothesis is relatively sound, though I believe he mistook the Frelin Horizon for a wholly etheric construct, instead of the marginally structural crossrip that many of the leading scholars believe it to be...

Peter shrugged. Didn’t make any sense to him. And it had to be over a year old—so what was it doing up here all of a sudden? And Egon didn’t usually take over Ray’s notebooks when he started working on one of the engineer’s experiments. He had his own anal way of note-taking. Peter flipped farther on, something about the slant of Egon’s letters and the tightness of the script nudging at his subconscious.

October 27

There is no celebration today, beyond the realization that I may have found one of the main flaws in Raymond’s theory...

No celebration? On Peter’s birthday? He remembered last year clearly: Egon hadn’t worked in the lab at all that day. They’d busted a couple of ghosts and then gone out and seen... Air Force One? Yeah. That was it. They’d been meaning to see it for weeks, but it had just never worked out. Even Janine had come along... There is no celebration today...

Sounded pretty damned depressed.

Peter browsed back through the previous entries, and one made him freeze.

October 25

Peter’s funeral took place today. We haven’t been able to find his father--which I suppose shouldn’t surprise me. He’s rarely been here when Peter needed him. There is little reason he should actually show up now.

What?

October 26

Winston’s mother is a true Godsend. Without her and his sister Clare to help in the planning, I fear this last funeral might have been too much for both Janine and myself. After yesterday, I thought I had finally begun to come to terms with their losses, but Winston’s memorial has made things all the more difficult. His father, never a supporter of our work, would not even speak to me, but his mother tried to make certain I knew she didn’t blame me.

Peter sat down hard on one of the lab stools, trying to understand what he was reading. Was this some sort of cosmic joke? He flipped to the first page of the notebook, scanning Ray’s scrawl carefully, deciphering as he went. When the technical terminology parsed itself for him, he could have sworn his heart stopped.

Time travel. Jesus Christ.

“Winston!” He strode to the bunkroom, shaking Winston’s shoulder more roughly than his own body would have liked. But the discomfort from his broken collarbone paled in light of that damn notebook. “Zed, come on. Wake up!”

Winston bolted upright, immediately clear and wakeful. He took in Peter’s agitation and launched himself from the bed, throwing on clothes. “What happened? Is Egon--?”

“I don’t know what Egon is, Winston--except maybe completely insane.”

The enigmatic comment caused Winston’s movements to slow, and he looked at his friend steadily. “What happened?” he repeated, more slowly. “Did Ray call?”

Peter could see the worry on his friend’s face, but he couldn’t seem to work past the strange anger growing in his gut. “No, he didn’t.” He rose, heading for the pile of clothes in the corner by his bed, trying to dig out something clean one-handed, while the hand in the sling held the notebook. “But I think I’ve got the key to everything that’s been happening--including that damn bust.”

Winston looked a little better when he and Peter burst into Ray’s hospital room half an hour later. Janine had tried to call them at the firehouse and had gotten the answering machine with its new “closed for business” message. She’d been about to try the mobile in Ecto when the two missing Ghostbusters had appeared. While Winston looked at least marginally rested, Peter seemed to vibrate with an untold anxiety.

Janine recounted their visit to Egon’s bedside, and Ray watched both of his friends try to cope with the news. Somehow, he thought it must have been easier to see Egon paralyzed completely. It was beyond painful to remember how he’d tried to communicate with the use of only half his body, and a seemingly scrambled mind. At least Winston and Peter hadn’t had to watch that panic in his eyes, hear the garbled pleas for word on his absent friends.

Why he had thought them gone was still a mystery, and he hadn’t woken again when the doctor came in to check on him--and to throw Ray and Janine out. Jenefsky managed his patients with an iron fist, and he’d been clear on the fact that no one would be allowed to see Egon again before visiting hours the next morning. When Janine told Winston and Peter as much, Ray expected Peter to react with his usual disregard for the rules and regulations of every hospital at which any of them had ever been a guest. He was surprised then when Peter simply nodded and turned to him, bristling with pent-up energy.

“Ray, do you remember when you and Egon were building the dimensional gate?”

Ray paused at the seeming non sequitir. “Sure. We spent weeks trying to figure out the physics of it.” Peter nodded again, and Ray just stared at him for a moment before he found himself catching a battered, dirty notebook thrown awkwardly toward him.

“Remember your little pet project at the time?” Peter grated.

Still not quite tracking, Ray opened the notebook. His temporal studies...?

Oh wow!

“Time travel,” he whispered, the implications hitting him like a brick to the head. “That’s what that sine wave was--temporal flux!” He flipped through the pages to find his own graph detailing a theoretical wave nearly identical to the one the negative four was giving off.

“Turn to the back,” Peter demanded in a strange, clipped tone.

Peter was angry. Angry? Ray shook his head at the puzzling conclusion, and did as he was told, trying to make sense of it. What did the four’s temporal signature have to do with this? And why was it pissing Peter... “Oh gosh,” he murmured, reading one of Egon’s entries quickly, the precise, pained words chilling him. “Oh wow.”

“Somebody gonna explain this to me?” Janine asked shrilly.

“I wouldn’t mind being filled in myself,” Winston replied. Ray looked up from the notebook, catching the irritation he’d missed before. “I’ve been patient, Pete. Spill it.”

Peter didn’t seem inclined to, so Ray did it for him. “It looks like Egon must have used the dimensional gate to go back in time.” He read on, his mind reeling as the clues in Egon’s journal painted a grim picture. He went back and started to skim the first few entries.

But Winston was still irritated, and still confused. “What the hell are you talking about? Why would he go back in time? And to when?”

“To now,” Ray replied, looking up. “Or, I mean, to Tuesday. He’s... he’s a future Egon.” He read through a few more entries quickly. “We um... we all...”

“Bit the big one on that bust.” Peter’s cold statement dropped like a stone in the silence, and Janine and Winston just gaped at him.

Ray nodded. “He started working on the theory pretty much right away.” He could feel the excitement build in his stomach. “He must have figured the whole thing out and found out how to go back and change things.” No one seemed to understand, and he looked up at them all. “Don’t you get it? That four--that was Egon! That’s why he’s so sick now.”

Peter’s eyes swung up from their gaze at the floor to peg him hard. He obviously hadn’t figured that particular bit out yet. “What do you mean? Why--"

“There’s a theory--well, I guess it’s more than a theory now, huh? But it’s called Rawling’s Hypothesis. It states that time travel in a person’s own lifetime should be impossible because one person can’t be in two places at once.” He leaned forward, caught up in the science, his headache momentarily forgotten. “It says that the simultaneity would cause cellular degeneration in both copies, and that, once they both returned to their original timelines, the damage would eventually reverse itself.” He frowned as his mind presented a flaw in his thinking. “But then, why’d Egon end up back here? And why did the notebook?”

“I found it in the lab,” Peter said quietly. “It looks like it’s been through the wringer the way Spengs has.”

“Okay,” Ray reasoned, “so he carried it with him when he went back.” Ray shook his head. “No, that doesn’t work. This timeline’s Egon should still be in San Francisco. And the future Egon should have returned there--I mean, you know, to his own time. There’s no reason for the future Egon to be here now...” He studied his own entries in the notebook slowly, looking for an answer.

“But Egon’s not...” Winston thought hard for a minute, trying to grasp the unlikely concepts. “Egon’s not Egon--is that what you’re saying?”

Ray shook his head. “No, not really. I mean, that’s not really what I’m saying. I think... I think something must have gone wrong with the dimensional gate, maybe.” He flipped to the middle of Egon’s entries, lighting upon a graph that showed a neat downward curve. “Oh, of course,” he whispered, his aching brain trying to connect the dots. “Pendrake.”

“Who?” Peter sounded like he was getting a headache.

“Nicholas Pendrake. He theorized that there was a kind of... event horizon, I guess you’d call it--a point in the future at which past events could no longer be influenced--you know, so you couldn’t go back and stop the Kennedy assassination because we’re too far away from it?” He’d meant to continue, but the look on Peter’s face stopped him--as did his own thoughts. “But that doesn’t make sense. If Egon came back too close to that horizon... He’d kill both himself and his former self.” They all looked at him in shock. “No, I mean...” He took a deep breath. “Okay, think of it like a bubble, okay? Egon was on one side--" He flipped through to the end of the notebook, only noting the date. “Three weeks in the future. The bust was on the other side. He slid along the top of the bubble to get here, because he was at the very edge of it--if he’d been able to come back earlier, he’d’ve just ended up going back to the future when he was done. Because he wasn’t close enough to the event, when he tried to change it the bubble burst and he ended up at the beginning--the day before yesterday.”

“But he did change it,” Janine stated. “I mean, you’re all here, right?”

Ray nodded. “Right.” He was silent for a moment. “I still don’t understand how he could do that, though. I mean, theory dictates that he should have been two people at once, and he’d eventually succumb to Rawling’s completely. There’s no reason why he should be the only one here--or why he should be getting better.” Unless Pendrake was wrong, and the time travel negated any intervening reality? In which case... He almost bounced. “Oh gosh, guys! Do you know what this means? It means he really will get better--totally better!”

Peter didn’t believe it--or didn’t want to believe it. “Yeah right, Ray. That’s why he was lurching around like Lon Chaney when you guys went in to see him.”

“That’s better than being completely paralyzed,” Ray reminded him, grimacing in sympathy at the pain his comment caused. He leaned forward, capturing Peter’s hand. “Peter, I’m sure I’m right. Rawling believed that the degeneration would have to correct itself. The temporal flux will eventually wear off and the subject has to return to a neutral state.”

“Yeah, and there’s another theory that says your life is a big old ball of string, Ray,” Peter countered angrily. “Theories are theories because nobody’s had the guts to try them yet.”

“Except Egon, apparently,” Winston murmured. Ray could hear a small current of hope there, and he took it as a good sign.

“Let me rephrase,” Peter ground out. “Nobody’s been dumb enough to try them.”

Winston reached out, laying a hand on Peter’s sound shoulder. “Come on, man,” he tried, his confusion at Peter’s anger evident. “This is good news, right?”

Ray could see Peter fight to relax, could see him pasting on a grin that he didn’t seem to feel. “It’s the best news, Winston,” Peter replied finally. “If Ray’s right.”

Janine entered the discussion for the first time, and it was clear she’d been following Ray’s logic better than Peter had. “So the residuals from the time travel are fading as he gets better, right?” she asked quietly. “It’s not a ghost using its power to cure him, it’s just his body returning to a neutral state. But the... the temporal signature... is fading faster than he’s recovering, Ray. What if he doesn’t come all the way back?”

Ray almost answered before he saw Janine’s jaw tighten defensively as Peter favored her with a shocked stare.

“I do know how to read, Venkman,” she ground out in a dark version of their usual wordplay, though Ray could hear a thread of his own excitement in her voice. “Just because I don’t spend my time reading Vogue...”

Peter smiled then, and meant it. “I’m going to keep a closer eye on you, Melnitz. I think you don’t have enough to do at that desk of yours.”

“I’d say she does plenty, Pete,” Winston countered, a light tone in his voice. “Sure seems to understand this better than you do.”

“Who doesn’t?” Janine whispered, saving herself from the wrath of Venkman by turning quickly back to Ray. “So, what about it?”

“I think it’s just accelerating,” Ray offered, a confidence in his voice that he didn’t quite feel. “He’s improved so much in just the last twelve hours...” He felt something release in his chest and tried to stop the tears from coming. “He’s coming back.”

There was a deep silence in the room for a moment, as his statement soaked in. Then, in a cold, worn voice, Peter whispered, “I’m going to kick his ass when he does.”

”Peter--"

Winston’s retort was silenced immediately. “No way, Winston,” Peter barked. “He had to know what a stupid stunt that was! He could have been killed--he damn near was!”

”He doesn’t even remember it.”

Peter turned on Ray, seething. “What do you mean?”

”When Janine left to get the nurse,” he began, feeling his way carefully. “He was surprised to see me--and he asked about you guys like he thought you were dead. But he didn’t seem to know why he thought that.” Ray pondered it for a moment, running the theories through in his mind. “Maybe it’s because the bubble burst. It wiped out everything that came before it.”

Peter just stared at him. “But he thought we were dead.”

“It was instinct, Peter,” Ray explained gently. “He didn’t remember why you might be, just that he thought you were.”

Winston sighed. “Looks like you’re going to have to explain it to him before you let him have it, Pete.”

Peter ground his teeth for a long moment, before heading for the door. “Think I’ll go do that now.”

“Jenefsky won’t let you in, Dr. V., remember?” Janine reminded him, stopping him in his tracks. She stood tall as Peter turned on her. “He kicked us out. You can’t see him till morning.”

Ray saw Peter’s jaw clench hard enough to crack teeth. “I’ll just go have a talk with the good doctor,” he muttered angrily, finally responding in a way that Ray expected for him. He strode from the room before anyone could try to stop him again.

”I’d watch out if I were Dr. Jenefsky,” Winston muttered glumly.

Ray nodded, feeling his previous anticipation drain away in the wake of Peter’s anger. “I just hope he doesn’t get himself kicked out of the hospital.”

* * *

Chapter Text

Peter stood on the third floor deck and tried to breathe. He should have hit that damn neurologist. If nothing else, it would have made him feel better. But he’d held his peace at the expense of his sanity and agreed that he wouldn’t try to see Egon before ten a.m.--not a hard promise to make when the alternative was being banned from the ICU indefinitely. The guy was a natural born hardass, and he didn’t seem to understand the situation.

Which was the real problem, wasn’t it? Nobody likes to be told that there are things beyond their knowledge. Especially if that person is tops in his field. Jenefsky was as angry as Peter was, in his own way. Angry because he just couldn’t understand.

And that made two of them, Peter thought wryly, looking out into the night and letting the cold wind bite through his jacket on its way down the corridor of 5th Avenue. What the hell were you thinking, Egon?

It wasn’t that Peter wasn’t happy to be alive. He’d counted himself damn lucky to have gotten away from that bust with a simple broken bone--and that had been before he’d found Egon’s notebook. Now he knew how much worse it could have been, so yeah, he was thanking his lucky stars that he had a friend willing to risk everything to bring him back.

But did he have to risk everything?

“Hey, Pete? You still welcome, or are they banning you for life?”

Peter turned around, leaning against the short wall that ran the length of the deck. Winston stood in the doorway, jacket in hand.

“Hey, Zed,” he replied, trying to stuff his confused thoughts down where they wouldn’t bug anyone else. “They kick you out of Ray’s room, too?”

Winston smiled. “Pretty much. Janine’s already gone home for the night.” He came forward, propping himself up next to Peter. “You okay?”

If he said no, he’d have to explain--and he hadn’t been able to explain it to himself yet, so... “I’ll be better when I get to see H.G. Wells,” he finally allowed.

“One hell of a stunt, huh?”

Peter sighed. He wasn’t going to get out of this, was he? “I’ve seen Egon do some pretty stupid things, Zed, but this?” He snorted. “Drilling holes in his head sounds like a great idea just now.”

“Drilling holes...?” Winston trailed off. “Remind me never to ask you what that’s all about, huh?” He turned around, looking at the sky. “Would you have done it?”

“I wouldn’t have known how to do it, Winston.”

Winston shook his head. “If you knew... would you have done it?”

Was that...? No, that wasn’t the problem. “It’s not about what I might have done, Winston.” Shit. Now he was thinking about it, he couldn’t stop. “You remember when his dad died? Remember how broken up he was?” Winston nodded. “But he got over it. Hell, Ray got over losing his parents.” His voice dropped as he turned from the hospital to the darker view. “I got over Mom...”

“Death’s hard, Pete. We all know that. I miss my Granmama every single day--and I won’t even talk about the friends I lost in Nam... But you’re right. People get over it.” He looked Peter full in the eye, and Peter tried not to shy away. “But don’t tell me you’d’ve gotten over losing all of us at once, Pete. That full of shit, you ain’t.”

“Thanks a lot, Zed.” But Peter understood the sentiment. He knew himself well enough to know that he would have survived--he would never have been whole again, but he’d have been alive...

“He nearly killed himself, Winston,” he whispered softly. “I’d like to think I could have descended from Heaven and kicked his ass for pulling a stunt like that just for us.”

“Heaven?” Winston asked lightly. “I’m thinking you’d be looking for the ‘up’ escalator.” He sobered once he got the smile he was looking for. “And he wasn’t doing it for us, Pete, anymore than you pull those crazy-ass stunts of yours for us. He did it for himself.”

”Well, I have heard that suicide is the most selfish action a man can take.”

Winston smacked him lightly in the arm. “He did it because he’s not that full of shit either. Pete, he had the right. Like I said, you’ve done it yourself--risked everything. Your life, your soul...” He nudged Peter. “You gonna say he’s not allowed to do the same thing?”

Peter grinned reluctantly, straightening up and pushing off from the wall. “You’re a pain in the butt, Zed, you know that?” But his eyes were grateful. “Fine. He had the right to try.” He headed back into the hospital.

Winston nodded in satisfaction, walking with him in silence for a long moment.

“You’re still gonna kick his ass, though, aren’t ya?”

Peter smiled grimly as he opened the door. “That goes without saying.”

* * *

Somehow, Winston had convinced himself that Pete would be better for a good night’s sleep--but then, he always was a sucker.

“Where the hell are they!?”

Winston sighed as he heard Peter slam down the phone, muttering a string of curse words. Obviously, Egon’s cousin had had something planned for her aunt’s trip, and Peter had gotten the answering machine one too many times.

“Pete, give it a rest, okay?” he asked, walking into the kitchen and taking stock of his friend’s condition. Peter hadn’t slept last night, though he had given his sheets a good workout, tossing and turning and generally driving Winston up a wall. Winston had been only too ready to sleep till Sunday, but he found himself waking up every hour or so to Peter’s thrashing across the room. He knew he himself looked pretty rough, but he was ready to do a spread in GQ compared to his partner.

“You bother to make breakfast, or did you just figure to destroy the phone?” Winston asked, a cautious amount of acid in his tone. Peter didn’t do more than glare, but the slimed cereal bowl on the table said it all. “Did you get to eat any of that before Slimer got to it?”

Peter shrugged. “I wasn’t hungry.”

“Right.” Winston dragged out the skillet and set about making some eggs. “You know, I’m not sure it’s the best idea to call her right now, anyway. You know how Egon is about not wanting to worry her.”

”Oh no. Wouldn’t want to worry her,” Peter muttered angrily.

“Pete, he’ll be okay.”

Peter froze at that. “I know,” he finally allowed. “I know that.”

”And he’d be pissed that you called her.”

”Serves him right.”

Winston turned on him. “Damn it, Pete, come on! Thought we had this discussion already.” He put down the frying pan and crossed his arms, pegging Peter with an exasperated glare. “Yes, he did a stupid thing--like that’s never happened before. And not just to him,” he added, nodding to Peter significantly. “He doesn’t even remember what happened--and even if he did, it’s not like you could go forward in time and stop him from doing it.” He sighed. “Give it up for now, Pete. Chew him out later.”

”If I can.”

Winston hung his head. “You’re not going to let that go, are you? Read my lips, Pete. He’ll be okay.”

“Says Ray,” Peter shot back, desperate to hold on to his anger.

“And when has that kid ever been wrong? I mean about something like this?”

Peter gave in to that grudgingly, and Winston grinned. Ray might make some wild speculations, but he never would have said anything if he wasn’t sure. Not when things were this serious. It had to give them all a little hope, right?

But Peter was still silent through breakfast, and the drive to the hospital, and the trip up the elevator. He was angry because he could control it--that much Winston had learned from living with a psychologist all these years. But it didn’t make things any better, and it wasn’t going to help when Egon woke up and wondered what the hell was going on.

Pete had every right to be pissed at Egon for taking that kind of risk--Winston was damn angry himself. It wasn’t something he should ever have done. But the fact was, he had, and there was nothing they could do about it now, except be thankful they had a friend who cared so damn much.

”Pete,” he murmured carefully, stopping his friend as they neared Ray’s room. “Do me a favor, okay? Be a psychologist for a minute before you talk to Egon.” Peter’s eyes widened, but he was listening. “Forget he’s your friend for just a second, and think about what it’d be like to have done all that and not remember any of it.”

Peter sighed, and Winston watched half the tension leave his body. “I don’t plan to rip his head off the second I see him, Zed,” he retorted weakly.

Winston patted him on his sound shoulder and smiled. “Just making sure.” He pushed open the door to Ray’s room. “They can still ban you from the place, you know?”

”They better not try...”

Peter’s voice trailed off, and both of them froze as they took stock of the room, now housing two patients.

“Look who they moved out of ICU, Peter!” Ray announced, bouncing on his bed and casting out a flourishing hand to point out Egon, sleeping deeply in the bed beside the window.

Peter walked forward slowly, almost as if he was afraid it was all some trick. Winston was less wary and strode over to Ray, sharing a relieved smile.

“When’d they move him?” Winston asked, watching Peter stalk the other bed.

“About an hour ago.” Ray bounced again. “He looks better, doesn’t he?”

Winston had to agree. Egon had more color than he had the last time he’d seen him, and he seemed less still. But he was still sleeping. “He been awake at all?” he whispered, damning himself when Peter turned sharply to await the answer, lingering worry in his gaze.

Ray blushed and dipped his head. “Not yet—but he’s only been here for a little while. And now we can all be together while we wait,” he added, hoping to appease Peter.

Peter turned back to Egon and smiled tightly. “I don’t think we’ll have to wait very long,” he whispered, raising his voice abruptly. “Hey, Spengs. Front and center.”

Winston walked forward in shock when Egon’s eyes opened almost immediately, focusing vaguely on Peter’s face. His voice was confused, but there was no desperate plea in it, and it didn’t have the garbled quality Janine had described yesterday. “Peter?”

Peter nodded gently as Egon’s eyes tracked up to take in Winston as well. “Yeah, Spengs, we’re here,” he replied, surprising Winston with the utter lack of anger in his tone. “How are you feeling?”

Egon shook his head, and it didn’t seem like it was all that difficult for him. Winston shot a glance at Ray, who was easing out of his bed and heading over, and the excitement in the younger man’s face said this ease was a new development.

”Sore,” Egon ventured carefully, feeling his way. He lifted his left hand and seemed to marvel at it for a moment, scrutinizing the bandages as well as he could without his glasses.

Peter produced the corrective lenses from the bedside table, settling them gently on the bridge of Egon’s nose. “Better?”

”Much,” Egon replied. “Thank you.” He looked around at them all, and Winston could see him taking stock. Counting heads. “Janine?”

”She’ll be here soon, Egon,” Ray piped up. “Gosh, it’s good to see you awake.”

”I... was awake before.” He almost turned it into a question, and Ray nodded.

”You were, but... well, I think you were a little confused.”

Egon nodded, giving himself a very long moment before speaking again. “What happened?”

Winston was watching carefully, or he would never have seen Peter stiffen. It was subtle, but something was going on.

”We’ll talk about that a little later, Spengs, okay?” Peter’s voice was just a shade hard, and this time, everybody caught it. Ray frowned, but kept silent, and Egon stiffened a little himself, as if taken aback by Peter’s sudden anger.

“Until then,” a deep voice came from the doorway breaking the tense silence, “how about I take a look at you while your friend gets checked out of here?” A small black man with a round, friendly face stepped toward them, a couple of underlings in tow. “Mr. Stantz, you’ve been cleared to go. The receptionist will draw up your paperwork, if you’d all like to go see her.”

And get the hell out of my hospital room, Winston finished for him, a grim smile on his face. He ushered his two friends out while the doctor started asking Egon the standard questions.

The moment the door closed, Winston turned Peter around to face him. “What the hell was that about? I thought we agreed--"

”He remembers everything, Zed,” Peter ground out. “You could see it in his eyes--the way he was looking us over to make sure we were all right.”

”You do look pretty banged up, Peter,” Ray ventured, without a hope of stopping the blow up. “And with all the bandages on Winston’s face...”

”Not even you’re that naive, Ray,” was the cold response. “He knows.”

”Hey, watch it, Venkman,” Winston snapped, causing Peter to stare at him mutely. “If he knows, then why isn’t he saying?”

”I don’t know,” Peter replied, his tone a little gentler. “All I know is that he’s lying when he says he doesn’t know.”

Ray had frozen, and for a moment, Winston thought it was just Peter’s dig getting to him, but suddenly the younger man sighed, and both of them turned on him.

”What, Ray?” Peter asked dangerously.

”The notebook,” Ray began. “Saving us? It was... It was really complicated.”

”How complicated?”

Winston herded them both into a nearby waiting room, and sat them down, leaning against the wall beside him as Ray told them all about his bedtime reading. Peter listened silently, his expression going from furious to incredulous to just plain irritated.

”He thought it was his fault?” he asked finally, exasperated.

Ray blushed slightly. “Well, actually, the second time, it kind of was his fault. You see, the temporal shift must have disrupted the destablizer’s--"

”Ray,” Winston put in gently. “Science, we don’t need right now.”

Ray nodded. “Okay. Anyway--"

”Do you have the notebook?” Peter interrupted.

”It’s in the room, on the tray by my bed.” He sighed. "I bet that's why he lied. He thinks he screwed up."

"He did screw up, Ray. Just not the way he thinks he did." Peter sat a long moment in silence before he stood, a strange light in his eyes. “I’m going to go see how the doc’s coming with those tests.”

Winston put out a staying hand. “Pete...”

That smile would have scared Jack the Ripper. “Don’t worry, Zed. I won’t get thrown out. And I won’t get Egon any more hospital time, either,” he added quickly. “We’re just going to have a little talk.”

Ray opened his mouth to stop him, but Winston withdrew his hand and let him go. “He’s got to work this out, Ray,” he said quietly. “And I think it’ll probably do Egon some good in the long run.”

Unless Pete killed him before it did any good at all.

* * *

He was toast, to use one of Peter’s favorite phrases.

Egon lay there through the tests; he answered all the questions, allowed them to shine that damn light in his eyes and test his limb strength, and all the while, he was thinking about what Peter would do if he knew what really happened.

And of course, he was going to find out. Once Peter got it into his head that you were lying to him, he’d move heaven and earth to uncover the truth.

True to form, Peter walked in just as the doctor and his attending interns were finishing up, lounging in the doorway like a cat.

”How’s he doing, doc?” Peter asked, an edge to his voice that would have been undetectable to anyone who didn’t know him.

The doctor smiled reassuringly, oblivious to the sudden tension. “Contrary to all known science, he appears to be doing very well.”

Certainly well enough to be raked over the coals, Egon thought glumly.

”What can you do?” Peter replied blithely. “Spengler’s just a miracle of science, isn’t he?” He straightened up and walked forward. “Winston and Ray are filling out paperwork, so I thought I’d come in and keep my buddy company.”

The doctor smiled again and led his entourage away.

Leaving Egon alone with a very pissed off psychologist.

”So, Spengs?” Peter asked, wandering around the room, stopping by the bed Ray had recently tenanted. “How was your week in San Fran? Meet any hot new scientists?”

Play it dumb, or confess? Egon debated with himself for a moment.

”Seems like you were gone an awfully long time,” Peter continued, his back to Egon. “Wow, it just seems like weeks, doesn’t it?”

Egon felt his mouth go dry. “Peter, I--"

His protest was stopped dead as a battered, beaten notebook landed in his lap.

"Any idea why I’m pissed, Spengler?” Peter asked quietly, turning to face him fully.

Egon sighed, fingering the notebook and idly wondering just how much of it Peter had read. I guess truth is the only choice I have. “I did the only thing I could think of, Peter. The only thing that had any chance of saving you.”

“Those two aren’t the same thing, Spengs.”

Egon paused. “I don’t understand.”

Peter groaned and dropped into the chair beside the bed, his right elbow on his knee. Egon suddenly noticed the sling on his left arm, but thought it a bad time to mention it. The look on Peter’s face was a mixture of concern and anger, and Egon didn’t quite know how to respond to it.

“Egon, I don’t get it,” Peter began finally. He looked up, meeting his friend’s eyes. “I’m sorry, okay? I know it must have been tough, knowing we died--“

”Tough?” Egon parroted coldly. “Peter, you have no idea.”

”No, I don’t. I have no idea what it would be like to lose all three of you--"

Egon cut in ruthlessly. ”If I had just been here--!” 

And Peter replied in kind, hanging his head in irritation. “I swear to God, Spengs, if you tell me you’re to blame for this because you went to that damn conference, I’m going to give you an even better reason to be in the hospital.” He swung his head up so he could meet Egon’s eyes. “Shut up and listen, and then we can discuss this like rational, logical adults, okay? One: Even if everything had happened like it happened the first time, you weren’t to blame. There are two goopers in containment who’ll explain how they had so much fun trying to destroy the Ghostbusters, if you want to talk to them--I’m sure Ray can arrange it. Two: Nobody would have blamed you if you’d mourned and wailed and then went on with your life. Three--and write this one down, Spengs, ‘cause it’s a toughy--first law of living: When you’re dead, you’re dead.”

“Peter! I can’t believe you’re going to sit there--“

“Been doing a lot of sitting here, buddy--for three whole days, to be precise.” He stood, pacing across the floor beyond the bottom of the bed. “At first we weren’t sure what the hell was going on--your little trips without a time machine left some pretty big footprints. Hell, we only found the damn notebook yesterday!” He visibly attempted to calm himself, and when he spoke again, it was at a manageable volume. “You said I had no idea. Try this: You have any idea what it’s like to look into the eyes of your best friend right about the time you realize he’s completely paralyzed? Any idea what it’s like to know he’s in there, but he can barely blink?” He was silent for a long moment, and Egon chose not to answer. “No?” Peter asked. He stared at Egon again for a time, before the wind went out of his sails and he sighed. “I don’t know what it’s like to lose everybody, Egon, but I sure as hell know what it’s like to think we lost you.”

Egon took a deep breath. “Peter, I had to try.”

His friend rounded on him, his voice rising again. “Three times!? What the hell were you trying to do? Kill yourself?”

That hit closer to home than Egon would have liked, given his thoughts when he hit the recall button for the last time. He sighed. “I simply did not feel I could give up on you guys.”

“So you gave up on yourself instead, huh?” Peter barked. “Would have been fine to just disappear, right? Or better--let Janine find you on the lab floor.” Egon shivered at that, gaping at his friend as Peter continued ruthlessly. “Oh wait! You did that, didn’t you? Would have been a hell of a lot worse if Winston hadn’t been around to pick up your pieces, though, wouldn’t it? He told me she was a wreck when she got to the hospital with you.”

Egon tried desperately to breathe, his mind freezing on a picture of Janine standing in the firehouse kitchen: ”What if I lose you, too?”

Peter drove angrily forward, pacing to the far end of the room. ”And what about your mom, huh? I’ve been trying to call her for a couple of days now--lucky for you I couldn’t. Who would have had to call her? Janine again? Did you figure they’d both just move on if you were an unexplained casualty of your homebrew time machine? Just like you were moving on?”

“I couldn’t.” Egon’s bare whisper stopped Peter cold, and their eyes met across the room. Pushed beyond endurance, Egon couldn’t stop the quaver in his voice. “Peter, there was nothing left. No future, no chance--“

“You were still breathing!” Peter cried in exasperation.

“And it wasn’t enough.” Egon dropped his gaze to his hands, staring at the ends of his fingers where they stuck out of the bandages. “Peter, the entire trip back from California, all I could picture was what you three went through--My God, I didn’t even know what had happened, and I saw it all in nightmarish detail!” He met Peter’s eyes again, knowing that the pain he felt was as visible as his friend’s. “I am sorry that you’ve had to go through what you have in the last few days--but don’t think I wouldn’t do it again in a heartbeat.”

Peter froze, then sat down hard, contemplating the floor for a long moment. “Fine, Egon. Whatever. Just remember that you almost did the same thing to us, okay?” He looked up, the anger waning in the face of the worry he’d used it to hide. “Damnit, Egon... We didn’t even know if you were coming back, you know? Even when Winston and I saw you that first time, we hoped you were in there, but we didn’t know for sure. And to find out that you did it to yourself--for us...?”

“I didn’t, Peter,” Egon replied simply, wrung out. “I did it for me.”

Peter’s laughter took Egon totally by surprise and he watched his friend shake with comic release.

“Why is that so funny?” he finally asked, when Peter’s chuckles began to shade toward hysteria.

“Winston told me the same damn thing,” Peter offered after a long moment, wiping the tears from his eyes. “I’m surrounded by geniuses, huh?”

“Winston is a very wise man, Peter,” Egon murmured, the thread of a grin in his tone. “You should listen to him.”

“Yeah,” his friend agreed, and there was acceptance in his voice. “Of course, I think he’s going to give you an earful when he gets the chance. He was holding down the fort for all of us for a while there.” He looked Egon in the eyes. “I’m sure you know how hard that is.”

Egon nodded solemnly. “So you forgive me?” he ventured carefully.

“For the last few days? Not a chance.” But Peter rose and stood beside the bed. “For why they happened...? Just be glad I haven’t burned that notebook, okay. Try anything that stupid again, and I’ll do a little time travel myself. Go back to your childhood and give you the tanning of your life before you meet your first test tube.”

“Corporal punishment is not an altogether successful technique of child-raising, Peter,” Egon replied, feeling a sense of peace settle between them for the first time.

“No, it’s not,” Peter agreed. A sneaky smile broke free from him. “And whupping your ass as an adult is so much more satisfying.” They shared a chuckle before Peter abruptly sobered. “I’m serious though, Egon. Don’t pull this shit again. Much as I love Ray and Winston, none of us is worth it.”

Egon shook his head, gripping Peter’s hand and not minding the pain a bit. “All of you are worth it, Peter. We’re worth it.”

* * * * * * *
The End