Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Vlad is falling.

There’s an ache sunk deep into the marrow of his bones, rattling through each individual fiber of each individual muscle, but that’s nothing to this white-hot hollow screaming in the center of his chest, screaming crying begging to do something about it, an animalistic impulse to pull the pain from him like it’s something physical and fling it aside, to end it, whatever the price, whatever the consequences, just end it end it end it—

You’d think, after more than two decades toeing the line between the living and the dead, you’d think he’d be prepared for what it feels like to share his body with a ghost.

But he’s falling and he’s aching and he’s burning up from the inside and God, this pain is going to crumble him down to nothing, and yet still there’s that screaming, that horrible agonized screaming, pulling at his ribs and echoing through every corner of his mind, and—

It’s hours seconds days years decades before someone yanks them apart, and when they do, the screaming still reverberates like a struck bell in the back of his mind. The ache still pulses in his chest. There’s ice in his veins where there was fire not seconds ago, and it seems to take ages for that familiar warmth of his own phantom to cautiously tip-toe its way back, hesitantly reclaiming territory that another phantom had scorched its way through, settling into bone and joint and muscle and skin that its known for all of its existence.

“He’s your responsibility now,” Clockwork tells him, and the boy in front of him opens angry, blood-red eyes. “With the mending this timestream needs, I will not be able to help again if something goes wrong.”

Don’t mess this up, that’s what the master of time means, and Vlad tries to silence the screaming at the back of his mind long enough to listen.

Don’t mess this up.

Don’t mess this up.

Don’t mess this up.

He can do that, can’t he?

Aug 10 5:14pm
Daniel, pick up your phone.

Aug 10 5:15pm
new phone who dis

Aug 10 5:18pm
Omg dude I’m messing with you

Aug 10 5:23pm
STOP CALLING ME

Aug 10 5:24pm
How did you even get my number??

Aug 10 5:25pm
Pick up your phone. This is important.

Aug 10 5:31pm
Hi, Danny! Thanks for saving the world from a problem I caused again! I’m so grateful that no one remembers the time I lost my freaking marbles and decided to take over the world, and I’m definitely never gonna do that ever again! Also I’m going to therapy now! 👍👍👍

Aug 10 5:33pm
No?? We’re skipping that part?

Aug 10 5:34pm
This is hardly a time for jokes!

Aug 10 5:36pm
Nah I don’t think so dude

Aug 10 5:38pm
You released literally the most powerful bad guy I’ve ever fought in my ENTIRE LIFE and you almost destroyed reality as we know it

Aug 10 5:39pm
Like sure you did help fix it so I’ll give you a little credit

Aug 10 5:40pm
But I’m still gonna be milking that one for a WHILE

Aug 10 5:40pm
Wait

Aug 10 5:41pm
You’re not blowing up my phone because you released a new superpowerful ghost are you

Aug 10 5:47pm
PLASMIUS?

Aug 10 5:48pm
Well, I don’t know if I would word it quite that way.

Aug 10 5:49pm
DUDE

Aug 10 5:49pm
You shouldn’t be wording it ANY way!

Aug 10 5:50pm
Please tell me you didn’t release a new superpowerful ghost wtf

Aug 10 5:52pm
Not technically.

Aug 10 5:53pm
PLASMIUS

Aug 10 5:53pm
HOLY SHIT

Aug 10 5:54pm
Honestly, Daniel, do you kiss your mother with that mouth?

Aug 10 5:56pm
PICK UP YOUR PHONE

Vlad waits until the third ring on the second call before he picks up, because honestly, he needs to take the little joys where he can get them these days. He waits, indulging himself by imagining the boy working himself up into a frenzy, and then he sighs, flips the phone open, and brings it to his ear.

“Yes, Daniel—?”

“— ANOTHER super-powerful ghost, dude, I swear, I’m gonna overshadow whoever runs the Packers and I’m gonna sell all their best players to every other team. Try me.”

“My, my, you’re getting more creative these days, aren’t you?” Vlad drones, leaning forward with his cheek in hand, elbow on his desk. “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, my boy, but I know you’re well aware that the Packers don’t have an owner. The team is collectively owned by the city of Green Bay, so I’m afraid your threats fall a bit flat in that regard.”

“Then I’ll… I don’t know, I’ll overshadow the guy that throws the ball or whatever and make him miss. Look, did you release another super-powerful ghost that I’m gonna have to fight?”

“Take a breath, Daniel. There is no imminent threat on reality this time. Nor even on your little town.”

“But…?”

“But, I am happy to report that Clockwork was able to remove our rapidly disintegrating future counterpart from my body before we both perished, thank you ever so much for asking.”

There’s a beat of silence on the other end. “I was gonna get there. After, you know, the whole making sure you’re not ending the world again… thing,” Daniel says, sounding a bit more subdued now. “Is he…? Is he okay?”

Vlad sighs, rubbing the headache out of his forehead and then leaving his head in his hand, eyes closed.

It’s been twenty-six hours since Clockwork ripped the boy’s consciousness from his own. Vlad hasn’t quite slept since then because, frankly, he’s been far too wired to even consider trying. It turns out that Clockwork righted some of the timeline but not all of it, and most of his money’s more-or-less where it’s supposed to be and his companies are running more-or-less as smoothly as they were before that whole mess with the asteroid, and he still has a house in Amity Park but he’s not the mayor anymore and no one seems to remember that he ever was, and he’s got an entire network of connections throughout the Ghost Zone to check up on and maintain, and meanwhile, of course, there’s the somewhat-half-ghost not-quite-half-human child lurking under his roof who refuses to speak to him.

A short nap sounds awfully tempting right now. He resists anyway.

“What do you know about him, Daniel?”

Again, silence on the other end. There’s the distinct sound of wind passing by the speaker, which means he’s either mid-flight or sitting atop a rather high building. Vlad was already well aware that the boy was in his ghost form the moment he called; he could hear it in his voice.

“That’s… like, a whole conversation,” Daniel finally says. “A really, really uncomfortable conversation.”

“My boy, I spent several hours yesterday with more than one voice battling for dominance inside my head,” Vlad says. He leaves it at that, leaves out the more unpleasant details, and he’s big enough to admit that it’s less to spare the boy from hearing it and more to spare himself from having to relive it. “Believe me, I can handle uncomfortable.”

Daniel blows out a breath through his lips. “Fine.”

“Fine?”

“Yeah, fine,” the boy says. “Meet me on top of my school building.”

“I’ll be there in thirty seconds.”

“Can you stop and get food on the way?”

“Oh,” Vlad says, pushing his chair back and allowing his ghost half to take over in a wash of purple-black light. “I’m buying you dinner now, am I?”

“Yeah, cheesehead, you’re buying me dinner. I’ll text you my order.”

Click.

Here is what Vlad knows so far:

The child in his care is fifteen years old. Or at the very least, his body is fifteen years old, biologically and physically, but factually—temporally—his body has existed for all of about six months. It was built, grown, in a vat of amniotic fluid until it reached a certain point of maturity and, yes, it would have kept going beyond that, it would have developed further, it would have become more than just a thoughtless husk of flesh and bone and organs had Vlad ever gotten around to finishing his work on it.

But, well, he’d been a bit busy, you know. Taking over a small town, trying to expand his influence over the globe, being unceremoniously jettisoned out into the vast emptiness of space to perish among the stars.

You know how it is.

Right. So, here is what he knows:

The child is fifteen years old, and he’s six months old, and he’s also neither of those things. He’s twenty-four and he’s forty-two and— did he age as a ghost, actually? Did the fusing of a fourteen-year-old ghost and a forty-two-year-old ghost average out into a man who looks like he’s in his twenties, or did he just start at Daniel’s age at the time and progress from there? Vlad has no idea.

He’s digressing. Alright. What he knows. The boy is some nebulous age that might be anywhere from fourteen to mid-twenties, probably. He is made up of the spectral energy extracted from two half-ghosts and fused together into something that seems to be altogether different than either its parts, and all of that turned him into something that’s not quite ghost, not quite human, and not quite a half-ghost hybrid, either.

He caused quite a bit of trouble in another timeline that no longer exists. He is very, very, very angry—angry enough that it’s imprinted itself into Vlad’s mind and feels all but impossible to shake, hours and hours and hours later. He does not like Vlad very much, or at least he shows no inclination to spend more than five minutes in his presence. He does not like to talk.

Judging by the last twenty-six hours he’s been inhabiting his human host, actually, it seems that what he does like to do amounts to the following: Sleeping, eating several boxes of cold Pop-Tarts in one sitting, staring silently at nothing for frankly concerning stretches of time, and holing himself up in his bedroom for hours on end.

That’s it.

That’s what Vlad knows, from start to finish.

Beside him, on the roof of Casper High School with his legs dangling over the ledge and a half-eaten slice of pizza gracelessly shoved into his mouth, a very human Daniel Fenton asks, “So is he, like, stable, or…?”

“I have no reason to believe otherwise,” Vlad says, because it’s the truth, and more to the point: He has no reason to believe that Clockwork would have allowed any of this to happen if he believed otherwise. He’s sure Clockwork wouldn’t have set them on this course if the timeline showed the child’s body collapsing into a pile of ectoplasmic goop before he had a chance to live again. Pretentious and inscrutable and infuriatingly cryptic as that ghost may be, for some reason Vlad doesn’t think he possesses the capacity to be cruel.

Daniel chews and swallows, taking his time with it, and then he takes a long slurp of his extra-large soda.

“Now, I believe you said something about an uncomfortable conversation?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m getting there,” Daniel mumbles. He picks up the bag of fries that came with his order and gives it a shake so that he can, apparently, look through it for whichever fries seem the best. With his eyes on the inside of the bag, he admits, “I don’t really like thinking about it, but… ugh, okay. Okay. There’s another timeline where everybody I care about is dead.”

He says it quickly, like he’s ripping off a bandage, and then he shoves upwards of seven or eight fries in his mouth at once.

“Everyone?” Vlad asks. “Really?”

The phantom they’d been fighting had said he lost everything, but…

Daniel nods, swallows his fries, and he’s staring straight ahead when he says, “Yeah. Everyone. Mom, Dad, Jazz, Sam, Tucker. Even my English teacher. All just—” he mimes an explosion with his hands— “all at once. It’s my fault when it happens. I mean, it’s a freak accident, but… anyway.” He shakes his head, quickly, in a manner that brings to mind a dog shaking water off of itself. “Yeah. So, everybody dies, and I’ll give you three guesses where I end up when my parents are gone.”

Vlad’s still processing the first bit, still struggling to imagine a reality in which Maddie and Jack are both wiped off the face of the Earth and he himself had nothing to do with it at all, when Daniel asks that.

He blinks. “You don’t mean—?”

“Yep.”

“Me?” Vlad asks. “Why?”

“I don’t know!” Daniel says, throwing his hands up. Then he pulls his knees up to his chest and wraps his arms around them, shrugging as he does. “Because the version of you in that timeline paid off the cops? Because my parents don’t have a whole lot of other friends? Because my only aunt lives in the middle of nowhere off the grid? Because of my dad’s big dumb crush on you—?”

Vlad rolls his eyes. “Oh, really—”

“I don’t know why, dude,” Daniel admits, sounding more exhausted than any teenager has any right to sound. “I just know that everybody I care about dies, and I end up with you, and I’m in so much pain over the whole thing that I ask you to pull my ghost half out of me. Apparently the idea was that it would, like, dull my emotions or whatever—which is so dumb, especially now that we know what we know about ghosts. But it was an easy out, I guess. And you do it, I mean, you rip my ghost half out, and he’s pissed, and he rips your ghost half out and then the two of them fuse, DBZ style, gross power-up and all, and he goes totally off the rails and goes on a world-ending rampage, and… yeah, the rest is history. Or, you know, isn’t. Since Clockwork fixed it.”

He shrugs, casually, like all of that wasn’t the most insane string of words any human being or ghost has ever strung together, like Vlad has any clue on God’s green Earth what DBZ style means. Daniel drops his chin onto his knee, staring out at the clouds in the distance.

Vlad asks, “He told you all of this?”

“No, actually, uh. You did,” Daniel says. “Future you. Human you. I went looking for answers, found you in your lab, and you told me everything.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah, and then you tried to kill me.”

Vlad winces.

“Eh, don’t sweat it. I had to cut that version of you a little slack, I mean, he was living in an apocalyptic wasteland for like ten years going nuts by himself. Plus, once he figured out he couldn’t beat me in a fight without his ghost powers, he did help me get back to our timeline, so… I dunno. I’m just saying, trying to kill me to stop the end of the world isn’t the worst thing you’ve done.”

“Oh, thank you,” Vlad deadpans.

Daniel smirks, still looking ahead. “No problem, fruit loop.”

Vlad sighs, shoulders sagging. The sun’s setting to their left, a warm orange glow settling over the roof of the high school. About ten miles southeast of here, a boy with two ghosts inside of him is sleeping, and so far, none of Vlad’s security systems have alerted him to movement—or, worse—ghostly activity in his house.

He feels only marginally less lost than he did an hour ago.

It does make sense, though. Everything Daniel’s said, actually, unfortunately, makes perfect sense. It takes absolutely no stretch of the imagination to believe that Vlad would do what he did. With Maddie gone, even Jack gone, with his purpose all but evaporated into smoke in his hands and with a broken, grief-stricken teenage boy at his doorstep…

Well, it’s easier to imagine what he wouldn’t do, honestly.

It takes a concerted effort to tug his thoughts away from that particular rabbit hole.

“Is he really both of us? Evenly, both of our ghost halves?” Vlad asks finally, more thinking aloud than expecting any sort of concrete answer. “He certainly looked more like you.”

Daniel scoffs. “Uh, hello? He didn’t get the fangs from me. Or the ears. Or the blue skin—”

“Alright,” Vlad rolls his eyes. “Point taken, but he did look more like you.”

“Yeah,” Daniel concedes. “Acted like he was me, too. I dunno.” He folds his arms over his knees and turns his head, resting his cheek on his arms so he can look at Vlad directly for the first time since he started his explanation. “I guess you’ll have to ask him, huh?”

Vlad watches him for a moment, suddenly struck by— something. He’s not sure what.

It takes him a moment to pick it apart, but when he does, it’s stunningly obvious: It’s how… at ease Daniel seems. Even after recounting something as unpleasant as all that, even with his proclaimed arch-enemy sitting beside him, he’s as relaxed as Vlad thinks he’s ever seen him. And he offered all this information up without so much as a threat or a comment about Vlad’s untrustworthiness or anything. The reason, of course, is just as obvious: Daniel isn’t afraid of him, nor is he even vaguely intimidated by him. Not at all, not anymore.

And Vlad understands, all at once, why people with children of their own never shut up about how quickly they grow.

The thought comes with a pang in his chest. He smothers it, takes a breath through it, and says, “Yes, my boy, I guess I will.”

And he would have, if not for the fact that the child says absolutely nothing for two full days after waking up.

It’s unnerving.

Any questions Vlad asks are met with stony silence and a quick exit. If not for the empty boxes of Pop-Tarts littering the floor of his bedroom, Vlad would be certain the boy isn’t eating. He can say for certain that the boy is not showering, judging by the greasiness of his (white, why is it white—?) hair hanging in front of his eyes, and he spends roughly half his time sleeping, curled up on his side in a too-large bed with blankets kicked off the edge of the mattress and piled, abandoned, on the carpet.

And when he does finally speak, for the first time in days—first time ever, in this body, as far as Vlad’s aware—he asks:

“What happened to the others?”

Vlad almost falls out of his seat at the breakfast bar of his kitchen. He just manages to save his coffee in time, righting it before it would have spilled across the counter and soaked his laptop. He was in the middle of sorting through his finances, trying to work out whether he can appoint an acting CEO without risking it all falling apart in his absence, and—

All those thoughts drain out of his mind like ice melting.

The boy stands in front of the pantry, hand on the door, his back to Vlad so that he can’t see his expression. Still, he can see the tense set of his shoulders through that overlarge hoodie. He can see the grip the boy’s maintaining on the pantry door. He can feel the boy’s energy, pulsing with his emotion like a full ghost’s would—although pulsing isn’t quite the right word, is it? It’s steadier than that.

Crouching, his mind oh-so-helpfully supplies.

Vlad clears his throat. “The others?”

“The clones,” the boy says, and his voice is not Daniel’s and it’s not Phantom’s, but something else entirely. “There were others before… this one. What happened to them?”

Dread sinks into Vlad’s stomach.

“That is… not exactly a pleasant subject—”

“What happened to them?” the boy asks again, turning to regard Vlad in his peripheral, eyes burning as red as ever, and Vlad is struck again by the fact that this child is not Daniel, and he’s not Vlad, either. For inhabiting a clone of Daniel Fenton, actually, he doesn’t look like him much at all. Not unless you’re really looking for it.

Then again, that shouldn’t be all that surprising, should it? Danielle hadn’t looked entirely like him, either.

Vlad shoves that thought away.

“They were unstable,” Vlad quietly admits. “Often, their bodies couldn’t handle the transition from human to ghost form. It took a toll. Most of them… Most of them died before they were fully formed, but they didn’t feel any pain. It was…”

There’s the smallest electrical surge, hardly a blink of the kitchen lights that he may or may not be imagining. There’s a fiery heat that prickles at his lungs, his ghost sense flaring, which he is absolutely not imagining. The boy hasn’t moved. He might still be regarding Vlad in his peripheral, watching, scrutinizing, or he may just be staring into space as he processes Vlad’s answer.

“Most of them,” the boy repeats.

And Vlad very resolutely does not think of a little girl with vibrant green eyes calling him dad when he repeats, “Yes. Most of them.”

The boy nods, shuts the pantry door, and he leaves the kitchen without another word.

Vlad wakes in the middle of the night to the sound of someone vomiting across the hall.

It takes him a delayed minute or so to identify it as such. Sleep still clings to his mind, trying to tug him back under, so that all he’s aware of at first is a deeply uncomfortable squirming in his gut, an anxious uptick of his pulse, and then—belatedly—recognition. It’s strange, he thinks, that the sound of someone vomiting should make him react that way. He hasn’t heard that sound in almost twenty years.

Of course, there’s literally only one person on Earth that the sound could be coming from now, so Vlad pushes himself out of bed, toes on his slippers, and passes straight through his bedroom door and out into the hall.

He finds the boy exactly where he expects to: Kneeling on the bathroom tile with an elbow on the toilet seat, his hand tangled in his hair, shoulders heaving with his breath, the unmistakable tangy smell of sickness in the air.

As soon as Vlad steps up to the doorway, though, the boy goes entirely still.

A moment passes in silence before he rasps in a voice that’s probably meant to sound a little less pathetic than it does:

“What do you want?”

Vlad raises an eyebrow at him, and he can’t help the chiding from his voice when he says, “Oh, nothing, really. It’s just that there’s a child vomiting in my bathroom—”

“Not a—” the boy starts to say, but his stomach rebels against him, cutting him off before he doubtlessly would have insisted that he’s not a child. Which, honestly, the gall. Whether he’s truly the age of his human host now or he’s still the age that Daniel was in the future or he’s somehow both, it hardly makes a difference. Vlad’s still technically old enough to be his father either way.

The boy retches into the toilet again. Overhead, the lights flicker, and a single arc of blue-white electricity pops off the boy’s left forearm. Vlad swallows down the heartburn that comes with his ghost sense flaring up.

When the vomiting subsides, the boy lets out a sound that’s somewhere between a growl and a groan before he spits out, “Well? What are you doing here?”

“Just checking to see if you’re alright.”

“I’m fine.”

“Yes, you look it.”

“Oh, fuck you, old man,” the boy huffs. “Leave me alone.”

And it’s funny: The first bit almost gets a rise out of him, like poking a bear except the bear in question is the half-lidded temper of a very exhausted half-ghost who’s been a hair’s breadth away from snapping on a good day for the last twenty years.

The second part, though, snuffs that fire out as easily as if it were a candle.

Vlad tucks his hands into the pockets of his pajama pants, leaning sideways into the door frame. He’s fairly certain that the boy’s cloned body is a few inches taller than Daniel is, but right now, with his shoulders hunched and his legs curled up beneath him on the bathroom floor, he looks impossibly small.

“If you want me to leave you alone, then continuing to reside in my house is a strange way of going about it, don’t you think?”

“What, are you telling me to—?”

“No,” Vlad cuts him off. “No, I’m not telling you to leave. I’m pointing out that you haven’t left. You’re not a prisoner here, you know. The ghost shields haven’t been up since we arrived here, and even if they were, there’s nothing stopping you from walking out the front door and never looking back.”

“Maybe I will.”

“Maybe you will,” Vlad echoes, though they both know he’s certainly not going to do so in this state. In the ensuing silence, he finally sends out a Plasmius double. It slips through the walls and teleports away unnoticed, likely because the boy’s too distracted and unwell to pick up on his ghost sense.

Actually, come to think of it.

“When was the last time you transformed?”

The boy groans again, pressing his forehead into the heel of his hand and squeezing his eyes shut. “What does it matter?”

“It might not,” Vlad shrugs. “This little episode could have any number of causes. It could be an issue with your human host. It could be an effect of not using your powers for too long. Honestly, though, the most likely culprit is the fact that you’ve eaten nothing but processed sugar for the past two days. Like it or not, you are human again, with all the unpleasant messiness and maintenance that being human entails, and I can say with some certainty that human beings cannot survive on Pop-Tarts alone.”

The double returns, arms laden with stolen goods from the convenience store three blocks away. It sets them on the bathroom counter—a six-pack of ginger ale, a box of crackers, and a bottle of Gatorade—before sinking back into Vlad’s body where it belongs.

The boy watches that happen, eyes warily following every movement.

“Right,” Vlad says. “I’ll leave you to it, then. But when you’re feeling up to it, try to get some actual sustenance, will you? The drinks will help, too.”

He turns to leave, but—

“Do you still want to kill Jack Fenton?”

Vlad almost jumps. He doesn’t, but it’s a near thing. He fixes a startled look on the boy, who stares right back at him with eyes burning like hot coals.

“… Excuse me?”

“Do you still want to kill Jack Fenton,” the boy says, the inflection of a question lost the second time around. His voice is still entirely wrecked from the vomiting spell, but he’s making a valiant effort at injecting some strength into it.

“Why are you asking me that?”

“Because I want to know.”

“Oh? And if I said yes?” Vlad asks. “What then?”

“Then you’ll have answered my question.”

Vlad huffs a sigh, bringing a hand up to rub at his temple. “Look, Daniel—”

“Don’t call me that.”

Vlad goes still. “What?”

“I’m not him. I’m never going to be him again, so don’t—”

“Fine,” Vlad says, because he’s too tired for this. This would have been his first full night of sleep since returning if it hadn’t been interrupted. “Fine. You’re not him, so I won’t call you that. And would you mind telling me what, exactly, I am supposed to call you instead?”

That brings him up short. Vlad sees it, clear as day, when the boy gulps. He’s no longer making eye contact when he rasps, “I don’t know.”

“Well, feel free to enlighten me when you figure it out, then. In the meantime, when you’re done here, eat something, drink something, take a shower—I assume you still remember how to do that?” he asks, and he doesn’t need an answer, because the glare he receives for even asking is answer enough. “Good. Eat, drink, shower, and get some rest. I’ll see to it that you get some proper nutrition in you tomorrow.”

He very nearly leaves it at that, because he’s exhausted and frustrated and a little bit angry with the boy for getting under his skin so easily.

But he doesn’t. He can’t.

Everybody I care about dies, Daniel’s voice rings in his head, and I end up with you. He clenches his fists in his pockets, grinds his teeth for a moment, and takes a breath. Even then, it takes a deliberate effort to pry the next words out of him.

“To be clear,” he says, sanding the harsh edges from his voice now and hoping that whatever’s left is soft enough, “you are welcome to leave this house whenever you want, and I certainly won’t stop you if you do. But I would… prefer it if you didn’t.”

The boy hasn’t moved, staring ahead at the toilet seat in front of him. He hasn’t vomited for at least a few minutes either, though, so that’s probably a good indication that it’s been worked out of his system.

“Get some rest,” Vlad tells him again. “If you’re still here tomorrow, I’ll get something delivered. Something with actual protein in it.”

He leaves, then, padding back to his bedroom and collapsing face-first on top of the sheets, hoping for a quick and dreamless sleep to take him under.

Four hours later, the sun creeps its way through his blinds, and he hasn’t slept a wink.

Look.

It’s not that he doesn’t want Jack dead, alright?

It’s just that… well, maybe Jack’s death wouldn’t serve the same purpose that it would have before. Maybe his death has lost its usefulness.

Right, of course, because we always wanted to kill him for its usefulness—

But it’s not as if killing him would change anything, would it? It wouldn’t undo the accident. It wouldn’t undo the years of hospitalization, the isolation, that ceaseless awful aching loneliness. It would be but a single millisecond of primal satisfaction followed by days and weeks and months of ugliness to deal with afterward. Maddie’s grief, for one. Daniel’s grief, for another, and that alone was apparently enough to end the world if Clockwork hadn’t stepped in, so why on Earth should he tempt fate a second time?

Maybe it’s not even about that. Maybe he doesn’t want to get his hands dirty, and honestly, what’s wrong with that?

And besides, he couldn’t kill Jack even if he wanted to, could he? He’s trying to make amends. You don’t go around killing people when you’re trying to make amends.

And sure, after twenty years of nothing but that singular bloodlust guiding him, he’s all but completely unmoored without it. Sure, even the mere thought of Jack somehow makes him feel like he’s drowning. Sure, every text he receives from the insufferably sincere moron gets immediately and deliberately marked as read so that the notification doesn’t sit at the top of his screen, blinking, screaming at him, threatening to burn a hole straight through his brain—

Look, this is all beside the point.

He doesn’t want to kill Jack Fenton because he doesn’t need to, alright? Simple as that. It’s not worth it.

He doesn’t need to.

He’s fine.

In another life, if things had been different, if the accident hadn’t happened, Vlad has no idea whether he would have ended up becoming a father one day.

Oh, but we are a father, aren’t we?

She just wants nothing to do with us—

No, he doesn’t know whether he would have been a father, if things had been different. He doesn’t know what kind of father he might have been in another life. But he does know what kind of person he is, now, in this life, and if pressed, he will be forced to admit that that person is not exactly the nurturing type. Not naturally, anyway, and not without a great deal of effort. That person, quite frankly, probably shouldn’t be a father.

Still. There’s a child in his house, and that child is angry and a whole other mess of emotions that Vlad doesn’t have the energy to pick apart right now, and he’s lost and out of place and out of time and he is completely, utterly, desolately alone.

Vlad doesn’t know how to nurture. He doesn’t quite do empathy. He never really has.

But he does understand loneliness.

When it becomes clear that the child didn’t vanish in the night, Vlad places an order for enough food to satiate a small army. It’s all from an Asian fusion place down the street. Warm foods, spiced foods, the kind of foods that make it difficult not to feel something when you’re eating them. Wonton soup, miso soup, egg drop soup, steamed dumplings, fried dumplings, General Tso’s chicken, spare ribs, beef and broccoli, scallion pancakes, egg rolls, spring rolls, and finally, pizza rolls. Those last ones are, evidently, egg rolls with pizza sauce and cheese stuffed in them, which just sounds like something a teenager would make up and which Vlad couldn’t believe was a real actual item on the menu. But here they are.

Vlad doesn’t see the child come down into the kitchen.

One minute the counter is laden with an untouched buffet, and the next minute the General Tso’s and wonton soup are both missing, and all the appetizers are significantly less well-stocked than they were a minute ago.

With a sigh, Vlad teleports up to the hall, just outside the boy’s door, and he lightly raps a knuckle on it.

“Go away.”

“Yes, yes, I’ll leave you to it,” Vlad concedes. “Just take it slow, my boy.”

There it is again, the surge of the lights, the flare of his ghost sense. “I don’t need you to tell me how to eat, old man.”

“Maybe not. But you haven’t had to take care of a human body for about ten years, and I’ve had to take care of mine for more than forty. Not to brag, but I’m something of an expert in the subject,” Vlad says. “You don’t have to take my advice. Just thought I’d mention it, in case it helps prevent a repeat of last night.”

He waits for an answer, but the boy doesn’t say anything else.

The boy doesn’t say anything else, in fact, for several more days.

He avoids Vlad far more judiciously than he ever did before, never setting foot on the main floor of the house when Vlad’s home, hardly ever so much as leaving his room. Food still disappears from the kitchen on a regular basis. It’s far less food than Vlad would like to see disappearing from the kitchen, actually, but how is he supposed to say so if the boy won’t so much as look at him, much less listen to him? How is he supposed to help this boy if he won’t set foot outside his room?

In those days, Vlad counts four separate occasions during which the electricity in his house acts strangely. The lights dim, or an appliance shuts down when it’s not supposed to, and every time—every single time—it’s accompanied by a flaring of his ghost sense. He knows something’s wrong, he knows, but any attempt at asking about it yields no results whatsoever and only ends with Vlad pissed off and storming away from the boy’s (closed, always closed) bedroom door.

On the fifth day since returning, Vlad’s working his way through his third cup of coffee when his phone vibrates. The sensation comes with an automatic swoop of dread deep in his gut, and he closes his eyes, counts to five, opens them, and wakes the screen.

But shockingly, it’s not from Jack Fenton.

It’s from Daniel.

Not long ago, receiving a text completely unprompted from Daniel would have been a cause for celebration, a little dreamt of victory. Oh, he would have gloated over this and rode the high for ages. He’d have been entirely insufferable about it.

Now, though, Vlad looks at the completely innocuous text and its three little words— how’s he doing —and the dread sitting in his stomach does not budge an inch. He gulps. He sets the phone down. He picks it back up. He considers leaving the message on read like he’s done for all the texts streaming in from Jack. He considers incinerating the awful little device right here and now, ramping up the heat in his palm until the glass pops, until there’s nothing but ash and blackened metal left behind—and then hiring someone to scrub the smell of smoke out of his walls, of course. He even considers (God help him) telling Daniel the truth.

He doesn’t do any of those things.

His response is brief and to the point. So far, so good, Daniel. No pressing concerns as of yet.

Oh, so you’re a liar AND a coward—

Vlad slams the phone down on the counter with perhaps a bit more force than is strictly necessary. He doesn’t check to see if the screen’s cracked. He just gets up, leaves it there, and heads down into the basement and the ghost portal. He’ll spend a few hours blowing things up in the Ghost Zone. See if that doesn’t tire him out and finally get him a good night’s sleep.

Seven days after their return, Vlad can’t take it anymore.

It’s been four days since he’s seen the boy in one piece, since he’s interacted with him beyond a few terse words on the other side of a closed bedroom door, and he cannot shake the idea that the boy isn’t even there anymore. He can’t shake the thought of him falling apart, of his legs crumbling beneath him like a house of cards, of entire limbs dissolving into puddles of glowing green tar sizzling on the carpet. He can’t shake the thought that a pool of ectoplasm is all that’s been in that bedroom for days and that he’s been hallucinating what little responses he’s been getting ever since.

Wouldn’t be the first time, would it?

There are probably more advisable ways to go about it than stomping up to the door and banging his fist on it, but… well.

That’s what he does.

He slams the side of his fist into the wood once, twice, three times, hard enough to rattle it in the door frame. No response. He tries opening the door the old-fashioned way, turning the knob, but it’s quite predictably locked. He shakes it. He doesn’t need to, he could walk right through the door, but he does it anyway.

“You cannot hide in this bedroom for the rest of your existence, boy,” Vlad calls through the door, his voice half a growl and laced with a ghostly echo even in his human form. “I’ve been patient until now, but—”

The lights surge again.

“Oh, how cute,” he says, glaring at the door. “Is that meant to intimidate me? Do you think I’m going to slink away with my tail between my legs? If you have even an ounce of my phantom in you, then you should know damn well that’s not something I’m going to do. Open this door right now, or—”

Something explodes.

Vlad doesn’t have time to react. Something slams into his chest and knocks him back, sending him careening backward into the opposite wall and through it into the storage room he never got around to unpacking. He lands, limbs akimbo, back-first in a stack of boxes, crushing half of them on his way down.

Something’s digging into his back. All the air has very efficiently been sucked out of his lungs. His hair is all over the place like he’s just gone through a wind tunnel. In front of him, the crushed door is now a pile of splintered wood on the floor, powdered plaster hangs in the air like fog, and the wall he’s just unceremoniously demolished with his own body isn’t quite done falling apart; it drops another chunk of drywall onto the floor as Vlad watches.

And beyond that, in the space that used to be the boy’s bedroom door, stands a silhouette with red eyes trained squarely on him.

“Fine,” Vlad growls.

He’s in his own ghost form in half a blink, and he’s leapt across the distance between them in less than that.

His shoulder collides with the boy’s stomach, and he phases them both through every wall of the house until they’re out in the open, under the stars above Amity Park. He’s aware of an elbow slamming into the side of his face with bruising force before he grabs the boy by the upper arm, spins them both around, and tosses him to the ground with every ounce of strength he’s got in him.

The house sits on seventeen acres of land on the outskirts of the town.

The boy’s landing destroys three of them.

Vlad touches down on the outer edge of the crater, seething, feeling in his bones that he would be out of breath if he needed to breathe—this fight has lasted all of twenty seconds and he already knows that transforming back is going to be deeply unpleasant—and the boy does not give him an ounce of reprieve.

Electricity crackles white-blue around the boy’s ghost form, illuminating blue skin and white hair, and that electricity coalesces into a genuine, honest-to-God bolt of lightning that heads straight for him—

His shield comes up in time, but barely, and all of that energy slamming into it at once hurts.

“Finally,” the boy shouts, though it’s difficult to make out his words past the ear-popping zap of electricity and the ghostly echo of his voice. “You’re starting to get it, old man!”

“Get what?!”

There’s no answer, unless the next shot hitting his shield is meant to be one.

The boy doesn’t let up. The blasts keep on coming, faster than his shield can absorb them, the air around them thrumming with static, so when the boy gets closer—and he does get closer, Vlad can sense it even while his vision is blotted out by green white blue white blue —Vlad drops the shield and sinks intangibly into the ground.

He comes back up on the boy’s other side, and his own energy blast collides with the boy’s back. It sends him sprawling onto his stomach, but only for a moment before he shoves himself back up to his feet and whirls around and—

For a moment, Vlad thinks he’s seeing things.

He’s given just the split second impression of three different sights overlaid upon each other all at once: The boy in his ghost form, blue skin and pointed fangs and all, electricity popping and zapping in arcs all around him, his hair wafting up like white flame. The boy in his cloned human body, smaller and swallowed up by a too-large hooded sweatshirt. And beyond that, hazy, there and gone so fast it’s blink-and-you-miss-it: The ghost he used to be. Taller and broader than the boy is now, taller and broader than Vlad is now, even with his shoulders hunched and his body poised to launch forward, claws out, eyes wild and spewing red smoke—

The boy pounces at him, gripping at the collar of his hazmat suit, and he slams him back-first into the ground.

“I’m not your boy,” he growls. The illusion is gone now, but the boy’s fangs are still bared in a scowl, his very teenage face inches away. “I’m not some dumb kid. I’m not like him, I’m not good—”

“Wonderful,” says the Plasmius clone behind him, and Vlad lets himself revel in the startled look on the boy’s face just before it grabs him by the scruff of his neck and yanks him backward like an unruly kitten. “Neither am I.”

Vlad throws the strongest blast he can manage directly into the boy’s middle.

It’s blinding in its intensity, flooding everything in a deep magenta glow. The Plasmius double fully disintegrates on contact, and the boy goes flying up like a comet into the night sky. Vlad’s palms ache from it, but he’s not done—he teleports, vanishing in a puff of smoke, and reappears on the boy’s other side just in time to drive a fist down into the boy’s spine.

He forms a second crater on Vlad’s property, twice as wide as the first.

An ectoplasmic blast, shimmering green-blue, fires out of that crater the second Vlad lands. He smacks it out of the way with a shield, and it buries itself into the ground. From inside the smoking crater and all its little pops of blue-white electricity, the boy’s voice shouts:

“Do you still want to kill Jack Fenton?”

“Really! This again?!” Vlad screams back, stomping forward into the crater. Another blast comes at him, and he barely manages to deflect it this time, but he does. The child isn’t going to best him today. A Plasmius double lands behind the boy and attempts to wrangle him into a chokehold, but the boy sinks his teeth into the double’s forearm, spins around, and fires a blast at the double that’s still strong enough to vaporize it.

Vlad knocks him over with another blast while he’s got his back turned.

“You never answered me the first time!” the boy shouts in a voice that’s strained even through the ghostly echo, and he pushes himself up and fires a mess of ectoplasm and electricity in Vlad’s general direction. He misses, but it scorches through the ground and radiates the kind of heat that Vlad thinks might have been liable to kill him if he were still human. “Do you—”

“What the hell does it matter!” Vlad yells back, firing again. The boy blocks it with a shield of his own this time. “If you’re not Daniel, then what does it—?!”

“It matters!”

Another blast, another shield. Another blast, another shield. They’re going to tire themselves out without landing another hit at this rate, so Vlad sends out more doubles—ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen of them—and surrounds the boy on all sides, readying a series of ectoplasmic blasts—

A surge of white-blue energy ripples out of the boy like a sonic boom, and the doubles vanish, screaming, leaving an empty ache in Vlad’s core.

Ow.

“Do you still—!”

“NO, I DON’T,” Vlad all but screams at him, and he’s closer now, less than ten yards away, and he fires another blast that the boy doesn’t manage to dodge or deflect. He hardly notices. His vision has gone entirely red. If he needed to breathe, Vlad thinks he wouldn’t have enough air left in him to scream like this. His lungs ache. His throat aches. Everything aches. “I don’t! Is that what you want to hear?! I don’t want to kill him, I don’t even want him dead, and I’m fairly certain I never wanted it in the first place—!”

“Then what do you do?”

The boy’s struggling to push himself up, legs shaking, but he manages it. He’s hugging his ribs with one arm, and he turns blazing red eyes on Vlad.

“What do you— what do you do with that?” he asks, and it takes a delayed second or two for Vlad to recognize that nearly all of the anger has drained away from the child’s face. He looks terrified, and unsteady on his feet, and very, very small. An arc of electricity snaps from his body, curving along the ground, but he doesn’t seem to notice it. “You— you wanted him dead, you wanted to do it, so how do you…?”

Time slows to a crawl. The ectoplasm sitting in Vlad’s palms, ready to fire just a moment ago, fades away to nothing.

Oh.

Oh, he’s an idiot.

It takes a serious effort to tamp down the adrenaline, to calm the wild animal of his ghost half that wants to keep fighting, wants to tear, to maim, to keep retaliating and throwing a hissy fit, to come out on top. Instead he raises a hand, slowly, signaling that he’s not about to attack, and he says, “Listen to me. What was your purpose, before, as a ghost?”

“I didn’t have one—”

“Yes, you did,” Vlad says. “You know you did. So what was it?”

“I don’t know,” the boy spits, like it’s an idiotic thing for him to ask, like it should be obvious that there’s no answer. “You’re not fucking hearing me, I never had one, I just did whatever the hell I wanted!”

Oh, he’s so close to getting it.

“Yes, you did whatever you wanted,” Vlad says, “and what did you want?”

The boy goes still except for the shaking, eyes wide on him. “I— I wanted…”

“You wanted…?”

“I wanted to burn it all down,” the boy says, and he gulps, breaking eye contact and staring into the middle distance instead. “I wanted everyone to feel like I did. I wanted to rip everything apart.”

“Alright,” Vlad says, nodding. “I can work with that.”

He takes two steps forward and grabs the boy by his upper arm. It’s difficult teleporting another person with him—it’s already like trying to thread a needle on the best of days, let alone two threads at once, let alone as exhausted as he is—but he grits his teeth and yanks them through anyway, and when they reappear, it’s to the dazzling light of day.

They’re on the other side of the planet. Vlad has no idea what time it is here, but the sun is just beginning to creep up over a mountainous horizon, casting shimmering orange light over miles upon miles upon miles of uninterrupted snowy wilderness, pockmarked with trees.

The boy rips himself out of Vlad’s grip, stumbling, and he shouts, “What are you—?!”

“Go on,” Vlad yells back. “Burn it all down!”

“What?”

He clearly needs more egging on.

Right, because destroying half of our seventeen-acre property was fine, but this is somehow a problem.

Vlad tosses a ball of ectoplasm at him, far less vicious than anything he’s thrown at the boy yet, but enough to piss him off. And just in case, he follows it up with an actual physical push, both hands shoving at his chest so he’s sent staggering backward.

It works, if the right hook thrown at his face is any indication. But it’s messy, easy to dodge.

Vlad throws his hands out to his sides. “Oh, you’re holding back now? What are you waiting for? I’m right here, boy, and if you want to do any real damage, then you’re going to have to try a bit harder than—”

The boy screams.

At first, Vlad thinks that’s all he’s doing, but it’s a very short lived moment before he flinches away from it— this is an attack, he realizes, dazed, teleporting away on nothing but instinct, the scream itself is an attack—

He reappears directly behind the boy with a good twenty, thirty yards of distance. He still has to clamp his hands over his ears. He still has to project a shield to mitigate the worst of the onslaught, and he still feels the boy’s scream pounding against it like all those ectoblasts from their fight multiplied a thousand-fold. And he can see it, the damage wrought by the boy’s voice, on the other side of that shimmering pink shield: the very ground wobbling, snow swirling up into the air around him like something massive has exploded an he’s at the epicenter, trees creaking and then bending and then breaking, collapsing into piles of snowy timber. Electricity still crackles around the boy’s body, although that at least is finally, finally, beginning to tamp down.

And again, just for an instant, he sees the ghost that the boy used to be, a hulking shadow flickering in tandem with that pulsing electricity, fangs bared as he screams, his eyes spewing red smoke. But it’s only for an instant, and when it’s gone, Vlad can’t say for certain whether he saw it at all.

What he can say for certain is this:

The boy’s scream tapers off. He loses his hold on his ghost form, but it’s nothing like any half-ghost transformation that Vlad’s ever seen. There’s just a flash-bang of light, a fizzling out of all that white-blue electricity, and where the ghost once stood there’s now a teenage boy, collapsing to his knees in the middle of a scorched circle of snowless, wet earth.

Slowly, Vlad floats down and lands beside him.

“So, what,” the boy rasps in a voice that’s absolutely wrecked, refusing to look up at him. “You drop me in fucking Siberia every time I want to—? That’s not— That’s not gonna work forever—”

“No,” Vlad agrees. “No, this was a temporary solution. Most things that feel that satisfying are, I’m afraid.”

His human half calls to him, pulling at him, but he ignores it. If he transforms now, he’s fairly certain that he won’t be able to transform back, and one of them has to get them out of here eventually. One of them has to get them back home. He sweeps his cape out of the way and kneels down beside the boy, who still won’t look at him, and from the shaking of his shoulders, Vlad can make a few educated guesses as to why.

Carefully, mindful of startling him, Vlad lays a hand on his back. The boy doesn’t shake him off, but he does reach out, one fist latching onto the side of his suit. Not pulling him closer, not shoving him away, just… keeping him at arm’s length.

His human body is startlingly thin, and Vlad wants to kick himself for not intervening sooner.

“I don’t know how to do this,” the boy says, shaking his head, and it’s plainly obvious that he’s crying now. “I don’t know how to be human anymore, and it— it fucking hurts—”

“Yes, being human hurts, on occasion,” Vlad reminds him. “That’s part of it.”

“Clockwork’s insane, he shouldn’t have— I don’t— I shouldn’t— I shouldn’t have a second chance—”

“Well, neither should I, and yet here we are,” Vlad says, and he moves his hand to the spot between the boy’s shoulder and the side of his neck, giving him what he hopes is a reassuring squeeze. He thinks of a little girl with vibrant green eyes calling him dad, and he thinks of dozens of clones melting away into nothing, and he thinks of a whole world turned against him by his own hand in another time, and then he thinks of everything this boy supposedly did in his time—cities destroyed, livelihoods ruined, lives ended.

He may look more like Daniel, but he has far more of Plasmius in him than he likely wants to admit.

“Perhaps we don’t deserve a second chance,” Vlad says, “but it’s here whether we like it or not, isn’t it? Now we just have to figure out what to do with it.”

The boy’s crying in earnest now, curling in on himself and crumbling, and Vlad gently pulls him up so that he’s crying into Vlad’s suit rather than collapsing down into the freezing mud underneath them. It’s not exactly a hug, or at least the boy shows no inclination to make it one, leaning sideways into him and still clutching his suit in one shaking fist. But he doesn’t fight it, either. He lets Vlad wrap an arm around his shoulders, pulling him closer. He lets him bring the other hand around to the side of his head, holding him steady against his chest.

“It’s alright,” Vlad says into the boy’s hair. “It’s alright. I’m here. We’ll figure it out together.”

The next afternoon, Vlad’s sitting at the breakfast bar with his laptop open, reading a news article about the ghost attack that leveled parts of a residential property in Amity Park—apparently they’re saying the Guys in White managed to stop the ghosts in time and keep damage to a minimum, which is just a hilariously bold-faced lie—when he catches movement out of the corner of his eye.

The boy steps through the threshold into the kitchen, and Vlad can’t help the critical once-over he gives him. His hair is a mess. There are bags under his eyes more reminiscent of a raccoon’s than a teenage boy’s. He’s wearing sweatpants, a pair of mismatched socks, and an old hoodie of Vlad’s which he didn’t even know he still had and which the boy is absolutely swimming in.

At best guess, the boy has just finished sleeping for the better part of sixteen hours.

“Feeling better?”

The boy squints ahead at nothing, and he absently rubs at his chest with the heel of his palm. His voice crackles with sleep when he asks, “How do you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Make amends. Ignore what your ghost half wants.”

“Those are… two very different things,” Vlad admits. “One of them is far more difficult than the other.”

“Start with the easier one, then.”

Vlad sighs. “Well, it’s not as simple as ignoring… anything, really. Eventually, what my phantom wants and what I want inevitably align. It’s just that sometimes I fall in line with what it wants, and sometimes I have to make it fall in line with what I want,” he says, and it’s not exactly a perfect explanation, but it’s the best one he has. He adds, “It helps to have something else to strive for, something to distract from the old pull. Some… new purpose.”

“Yeah? You have a new purpose?”

“I do, in fact. I’m looking at him.”

The look he gets for that is so bored, so annoyed, so teenager-like that it almost makes him laugh. The boy rolls his eyes, trudging over to the pantry closet, and he says without turning around, “That was so unbelievably lame.”

“Oh, my word. Lame. How will I ever recover,” Vlad drones. “You’ll need some real food, by the way. The cereal, top left, that’ll do it.”

The boy grabs the box without further comment. He goes through the motions of fixing himself breakfast, if a meal this late in the afternoon counts as breakfast anyway. He pours himself a heaping bowl of cereal, shoves a spoon into it, leaves the box right there on the counter without even closing it—because of course he does—and brings the bowl and a quart of milk from the fridge over to the breakfast bar.

Vlad bites down on the urge to comment on the fact that he’s actually choosing to exist in the same space as him; it might make him leave if he does.

“As for making amends,” Vlad continues instead, “I’ll admit, I’m not entirely sure. I’m not even sure where to start.”

The boy doesn’t respond to that. He settles into his seat, not quite directly across from Vlad, but a little to the left. Vlad waits until he’s poured enough milk into the bowl that it nearly overflows before he asks, “Well? Are you feeling any better?”

“Different,” the boy answers. “Not better. Tired.”

“You expended a lot of energy yesterday. I’m not surprised. Eat,” Vlad says, nodding at the bowl. “It’ll help.”

The boy eats. He sits hunched over the bowl, leaning on his elbows, his hair hanging over his eyes. In his human form, he doesn’t necessarily have fangs, not like he does as a ghost, but Vlad can’t help but notice his canines are a bit pointier than they’re supposed to be.

“You know, it’s probably best that we start having friendly spars every now and then that don’t result in the destruction of several acres of my property and a few errant walls,” Vlad tells him. “It’s not good to smother your ghost half and try to ignore it, believe me, I know. Your human body can’t handle that strain for very long.”

Through a mouthful of mushy cereal and milk, the boy says, “Having a body sucks.”

“Oh, yes, you poor thing, having to live in a perfectly healthy, teenage body— with superpowers, I might add,” Vlad says, and he finally returns to his coffee and his laptop instead of hovering. “Just wait until you get older. And you will. Get older, that is. This body should age just as normally as any other human body would, so don’t worry, one day you too can be in your forties and entirely incapable of drinking orange juice without getting tremendously uncomfortable heartburn.”

“That’s messed up.”

“My dear boy, that’s not even the half of it,” Vlad says, side-eyeing him with a smirk. He nods at the carton of milk still sitting right by the cereal bowl. “Haven’t you noticed that milk’s non-dairy?”

The boy goes still, eyes on the milk carton, and then he shoots a disbelieving look at Vlad.

“No way.”

“I’m afraid so,” Vlad nods solemnly. “That one started in my twenties.”

The boy frowns, a pinch forming between his brows.

“What is it?”

“I don’t remember that,” the boy says. “Why don’t I remember that?”

Vlad pauses, thinking. It’s a good question, actually. He folds his arms on the counter and leans forward, once again giving the boy his full attention.

“Tell me: Do you remember much about being me? Before?”

As if he’s only realizing it now, the boy’s eyes go a bit wide, and he shakes his head.

“What about Daniel?”

“More,” the boy says, his gaze straying as he thinks. “More than I remember about being you, but even that’s… fuzzy. It always has been.”

“Hm. That makes sense,” Vlad says, and the boy shoots him a questioning look. “No, really, I think it does. Ghosts are never exactly the person they were before they became a ghost. They’re more like… duplicates. And over time, they become more and more distant from the person they came from. When you were… born, so to speak, Daniel’s ghost was less than a year old, but it’s been ten years since then. You’re ten or eleven years removed from Daniel’s human half, and thirty removed from mine. So I think it’s safe to say that you are very much not him, and not me, but someone else entirely.”

The boy listens to all of that, quietly, eyes down on his bowl of cereal.

“Speaking of which, have you figured out what you’d like to be called?”

The boy shakes his head.

“Well, like I said, just let me know when you do.”

The boy nods. He returns to his food, eating faster now that his appetite’s woken up a bit—or maybe just to give himself an excuse not to talk. Maybe both.

Eventually, though, he stops, as if something new has just occurred to him. His mouth twitches and then forms a tight line, like he’s trying not to laugh.

“What?”

“You’re lactose intolerant,” the boy says, and his eyes flick up to meet Vlad’s. “You’re a Packers fan, and you can’t eat cheese.”

“The world is a cruel and unjust place, yes.”

The boy snorts a quiet laugh before returning to his cereal, and Vlad counts it as the greatest victory he’s had in weeks.

Chapter Text

Three days after their little scuffle, there’s a note sitting on the breakfast bar when Vlad comes downstairs.

He pauses, looking vaguely up in the direction of the boy’s bedroom, and realizes with a jolt that the space between his lungs feels oddly cold. Desolately cold. Not so much as a sliver of his ghost sense, which means the boy isn’t here and likely hasn’t been all morning.

Which is fine. It’s completely fine. Obviously it’s fine. He’s allowed to leave whenever he wants, and Vlad is absolutely not already panicking when he closes the distance to the breakfast bar and rips the note off of it.

It’s a torn page from a book, one of the blank pages they put in the front and back.  The boy must have gotten it from the library. It reads, in scrawled marker:

I figured out where to start.

On the bottom of the page is a set of coordinates.

Vlad sighs, closing his eyes, waiting for the rabbit-thump of his pulse to die back down. Right. Of course he didn’t run off for good. Of course he didn’t. And of course he’s being unnecessarily dramatic about… whatever this is. The boy may be his own person, but he is half made of Vlad Plasmius, after all.

He sets the note down, transforms, and teleports on the spot.

The coordinates lead him to a large-ish town that is three full states over, a time zone away, so that the sun is just barely beginning to rise here. The faint pulse of the boy’s energy nearby then leads him, specifically, to an alleyway between two buildings, one of which is a bakery and the other of which is apparently a residence of some sort. The alleyway itself isn’t anything special. Clean, at least. Empty. It’s a bit dark, but Vlad can make out a fire escape to his right and a few dimly lit windows high up on his left.

And there, at the other end, are a faintly glimmering pair of red eyes peering through the darkness.

Vlad steps into the alleyway, hands on his hips.

“You know, usually, when one wants to set up a meeting with someone, they give both a place and a time,” Vlad says. “How long, exactly, have you been standing back there brooding, waiting for me to wake up and find your note?”

“Not too long,” the boy answers. As Vlad’s eyes adjust to the pre-dawn light, he can see the boy leaning casually back against the wall, hands in his pockets. “You always wake up at the same time. We just got here ten minutes ago.”

Vlad hesitates.

First of all, the boy was certainly gone for longer than ten minutes. Vlad’s ghost sense hadn’t just gone away but left him entirely freezing from the inside out, which meant the house had been bereft of any ghostly energy for at least an hour. Probably longer than that, if he had to venture a guess. Could have been all through the night, for all he knew.

Second—

“We?”

The boy looks down. Not quite down, actually, but down and a little to his right. Quietly, he says, “Your move, kid.”

And here’s the thing: A few days ago, he and this boy fought as viciously as if they were trying to kill each other, and when all was said and done, when Vlad transformed back in the solitude of his own bedroom, it had felt like he’d taken the brunt of a freight train directly into his sternum. The bruising still hasn’t faded, and yet that—

That is nothing compared to this. He could take another blast or three to the chest right now and it still wouldn’t feel like this.

The boy says your move, kid, and then, very suddenly, the empty space beside him is filled up by a little girl with vibrant green eyes, and those eyes are wide and fixed directly on him.

Vlad transforms. He doesn’t really have the presence of mind to determine whether he did it of his own volition or if he just loses the ability to focus on his ghost form or if, maybe, he does it because he said some truly awful things to her the last time he saw her, and he can’t bring himself to stand in front of her now wearing the same face he did then. Whatever the case, he transforms, and all the air promptly stalls in his lungs.

She looks the same, he thinks, as if he last saw her just hours ago instead of months. She isn’t hurt—not in any obvious way, anyway—and she isn’t falling apart into puddles of ectoplasm, either. She looks… healthy, actually. Someone’s been taking care of her.

Someone’s been taking care of her, all these months, when he should have been.

He finds, humiliatingly, that there’s already a lump in his throat, but he swallows it down and speaks anyway.

“Danielle—”

That’s all it takes. Remarkably, that’s all it takes.

She was always so freely affectionate, so physical with it, and now is apparently no exception. Danielle closes the distance between them at a speed she never could have managed in her human form, colliding with him half a second later, and really, he only moves as a means to steady her at first, but it’s a lost cause to hold back and he knows it. He’s returning the embrace as quickly as it’s given, both arms wound tight around her middle, his face tucked down against her shoulder and his eyes squeezed shut. His knees hit the ground a moment later, and she follows right down with him.

He owes her an apology, he knows. Several of them, really, and effusive apologies at that.

But that will come later.

For now, there’s this: A little girl— his little girl—crying in his arms and holding on tight like there’s nowhere in the world she’s ever wanted to be more than right here, with him, in spite of everything he’s done. A hand on his shoulder, a squeeze and a pat, before the boy says see you back at the house, old man, and disappears. A man who doesn’t quite know how to nurture and doesn’t quite do empathy and who probably in all honesty shouldn’t be a father, and second chances that likely should never have been given, but, well, here they are.

It’s time they figure out what to do with it.

Aug 19 3:12pm
Hey Vladdie! Checking in again

Aug 19 3:15pm
You been getting my texts, V-man?

Aug 19 3:16pm
This is Jack 🙂👍

Aug 21 9:42am
Let me know if you get this! I’ll have to check if I got the right number.

Aug 22 10:13am
We gotta hang out soon! Whenever you want, just let me know 🙂

Aug 23 1:14pm
Hm, starting to think I have the wrong number 🤔

Aug 24 1:16pm
Well, I won’t bother you anymore, stranger! I gotta figure out Vladdie’s new number.

Aug 24 1:17pm
👻✌️

Sep 14 11:17pm
Hello, Jack.