Work Text:
Maddie smiled as she opened the small album on her lap. The book's yellow cover was laminated with plastic foil and covered in small stickers of starships and hearts. The edge, a white plastic rod curling in on itself, carefully bound the scrapbook pages together all these years. She dragged her finger over the photo album’s wire-bound spine.
She and Jack had just finished another set of trial tests. The new variation of replicated ectoplasm had a stronger composition to help focus weaponry blasts into a more precise beam. Days of nonstop experimentation meant that the house was turned upside down with scrap paper and blueprints. With the boys out of the house for the day—Jack insisted that the lake was perfect for fishing that time of year—Maddie thought to clean over the house and remove all the green stains from their clothes. Some unfolded laundry was still scattered around the untidy floors, and she still had a lot of work to do.
She was dusting the living room’s media chest when she realized how rarely she checked inside those old storage drawers—and it was there that she found the golden photo album. It hadn’t been there for long, she thought, but she still blew over it to remove some accumulated dust.
Scrapbooking was a hobby Jazz picked up from Jack at an early age. Her husband's hands were bulky and coarse—calloused by rough metalwork and solder burns—but they were still gentle. She remembers when Jack would spare the time to help little Jasmine with her collages, though it was evident that he had more fun than she did.
The book had already dimmed with age. Its papers were thinning, and the colorful stamps were already losing their glue, slipping off the sides.
Maddie took a break from cleaning and scooched backward in the light gray sofa's cushions. She delicately flipped through its pages, grinning ear to ear. It was so nice to take a few moments in the silence and be captured inside photos of birthdays and family vacations. Those days, as golden as the book itself, were printed onto the pages, surrounded by doodles and decorative masking tape. It felt like she was sitting in the audience of her mind.
There was a photo of Danny lying down in bed with Jack. He was sound asleep—relaxed, smiling, comforted. Jack caressed his head as Danny huddled next to him, wrapped in blue blankets like a tiny baby burrito. He’d always go to bed wearing a NASA hoodie, too oversized to wear out in public without looking like a poncho. He had some nightmare that day, waking up crying about some monster that attacked him. The other three rushed upstairs to comfort him, and as Danny fell back asleep, Jazz couldn’t help but take a photo of his cuteness. She loved that tiny digital camera—she used to always carry it in her pocket.
Danny's hoodie now rested unfolded next to Maddie, over a tumbled pile of lonely socks. Who knows where some of the stains on Danny's clothes came from, but that kid had always had a curious mind—Danny was always out exploring with his friends. She always cleaned out the stains as best as she could, especially on his favorite collection of identical shirts.
She remembered when Danny got that hoodie: The Elmerton Museum of Natural Science. They went to visit when they were younger, as Jazz had suggested. Danny must have been 9—maybe 10—years old when he begged them to stop in their tracks, pulling at Maddie’s hands before they left. He pointed frantically to the hoodie on the window display, his excitement visible in his eyes. The stars painted on the museum’s ceiling reflected off his pupils and he beamed with cheerfulness. After a lot of insisting, they finally got it for him, even if they only had much larger sizes. It would fit a bit better nowadays.
Pictures are supposed to mark a moment in time. She looked back at the photos, but they were just stills of a moment she could no longer experience.
Since Jazz had left for university, their home lives had been very different. The adjustment period was rough, as Danny distanced himself even more from Jack and her. Yet, with time, they went back to relying on one another. She knew Danny was a teenager—she understood that he deserved his personal space to shape his independence—but he was still her baby in her eyes. She missed them, even if she knew they could never return to how things used to be. They had gotten distracted with inventions, losing sight of what mattered—she and her husband had made enough mistakes.
(That thought disturbed her, but she couldn’t put a finger on why.)
It didn’t matter, though. Now, they were growing closer than ever! Danny had really opened up to them, telling them about his school life, his favorite video games, his crushes… He even showed curiosity for their ghost-hunting work!
She flipped the page of the black scrapbook to find a cut-out of another Polaroid, glued to a piece of paper covered in red glitter. Danny smiled at a half-eaten cookie on his plate, resting on the kitchen table. There was a small bandage on Danny’s hand.
Oh, Maddie remembers that day! They were much, much younger—Maddie still had her hair cut short and Jazz was just starting middle school. Maddie remembers how she kept mumbling about “studying harder now” and “taking things seriously,” wanting to go read some higher-level book instead of playing in the park. Danny insisted on staying late to look at the stars once the sunset dissipated into a blue night. He was running around the trees when, in all that darkness, he didn’t notice a small hole and tripped. He tumbled downhill, calling out for his mom when he rolled to a stop. He scraped the back of his hand, leaving a slight bleeding cut. Maddie held his hand and placed a very small bandage on it.
“See, sweetie? Now you’re safe!” She kissed the wound like a knight would kiss a princess’ hand, promising him the magic bandage would make him feel better.
This was, of course, long before she and Jack started truly working harder on their research. This was before any government investments, when they actually had free time between licensing their patents and conducting long-term experiments. After they started staying down at the lab for days on end, she lost many precious moments with her kids. Looking up, she wouldn’t see the starry nights that Danny so much adored. She’d just see the metal-coated ceilings of her basement.
She reminisced about those days, when Danny would ask them endless whys, trying to understand how the universe was made and where life came from, all over the diner table. He wandered about the stars and shined just as bright as one, and Maddie did all she could to light that spark.
Gosh, Maddie could not be more proud of her kids. She cherished them so much. Jazz went off to Yale—still often calling them to talk about exams and all the new friends she was making—and Danny was studying hard to be an astronaut! They were growing up so fast… Now, she was finally getting to know who they really were, after so long—after too long.
She shuddered with a sudden chill. No, she still had time.
(Until what?)
The light peaked through the windows and brightened the room, with sunbeams bouncing off the scrapbook’s photographs. The orange streaks of the setting sun danced over the shiny living room floor in pristine condition. She remembers—(did she?)—cleaning the room the previous morning.
Yes, of course, that's why the room looked so tidy. She had already cleaned it!
She closed the hand-made photo album, looking over its black cover again. There was something smudged on a rectangular white sticker, but she just knew it was meant to say “The Fenton Family Album,” despite Jazz’s childhood handwriting.
She left the dark—(wasn’t it golden?)—book on the sofa before making her way to the window.
The curtains slid in their tracks. As she closed them, she squinted her eyes at the blinding light from the outside and couldn’t properly see her blurry reflection on the glass. She didn’t have to see it to know that she looked much older than in those photographs.
Maddie turned to the analog clock on the wall. It was mounted up right under the staircase, next to framed photos of Danny and Jazz on their first vacation to Arizona. They were really young, so they most likely didn’t remember it, but little Danno had been so excited to see the Grand Canyon.
The clock’s (unmoving) hands were pointing directly down—it was getting late in the afternoon, so Jack and Danny would probably be coming home soon. The house was empty that evening, if not for Maddie smiling to herself at her fond memories.
Shattered glass.
There was a loud noise from downstairs.
The lab was supposed to be soundproof—and yet, she could perfectly hear the sudden rumble of things falling on the floor and breaking apart.
Ecto-proof iron shutters quickly fell over the windows and doors, bolting all exits closed, and the living room flashed in neon red lights. Her ears rang from the volume of a rhythmic deep buzzer, an alarm she most quickly recognized, as a voice mechanically announced, “ALERT! ALERT!” Maddie’s fight-or-flight response immediately jumped into action as she ran to grab the nearest ecto-weapon she could find. FentonWorks’ walls would usually turn around to reveal a gallery of anti-ghost pistols and guns for her family’s safety, and in that state of urgency, Maddie darted to the closest electric panel and instinctively pressed the bottom right button.
As the trapdoors tilted downward and fell open, all she could see were rows and rows of empty hooks, the outline of the weapons that were supposed to be there marked on the walls in a darker color. There was nothing.
She was empty-handed and alone and there was nothing she could do against whatever was destroying her lab. Sweat dripped down her cheek as she turned to the kitchen entrance where, at the end of the hall, a set of large double doors were pushed wide open, a beam of energy exploding from behind them. She felt biting cold winds press against her face, but nothing else seemed to come through the basement door. Ghosts didn’t need to use doors—they could just phase through the floor or hide their presence with invisibility—so the emptiness gave her no comfort. There was no sign of life and no sign of death. Vibrant green leaked through the open doors, swirling up the kitchen walls.
Maddie clenched her fists. She was a fighter, and no spook would come into her house and leave unscathed. No ghost would break through her portal and destroy her research, her life’s work, without payback. She could still hear those monsters breaking everything apart, the robotic sounds of her most recent inventions fading away with low, distorted glitches. She pulled up the hood of her cyan suit and adjusted her tinted goggles.
She was often the one who cooked for the family, so when she rushed to the closest kitchen cabinet, she mechanically reached for the top drawer where the utensils were kept. Her grip tightened around the handle of the sharpest steak knife she could find. She knew it wouldn’t do much, but she hoped that the little ecto-contamination in some of their food would be enough to leave a trace on the knife. Hopefully, it could at least do some minimal damage to any ghost she encountered.
Her eyes caught her reflection on the knife, nearly unrecognizable by the faded stains on the used blade.
She readied herself and headed downstairs.
Her boots clicked against the metal staircase, the sound of her steps echoing in the tight walkspace. The steel walls reverberated the sound in a sharp, nearly robotic distortion. The alarms from upstairs still played in her mind and buzzed in her ears, though they started to fade as she headed further down the stairwell. It was a cacophony of sounds from all directions, an all-encompassing commotion that sucked the air from her lungs. She flinched at every sharp sound that came from the bottom of this infinite descent, the images of beakers of ectoplasm falling off the tables and splintering on the floor vivid in her mind.
It was a pure discordance of screeching and snapping and creaking that weighed on her heart—that was her life’s work being destroyed. Irreplaceable research was being smashed to pieces. Whatever specter was doing this had no idea how much that lab meant to her, and it’s not like it would care. It wasn’t biologically able to care, and it would never recognize the actual consequences of the damage. It was chaos for the sake of chaos and anger for the sake of anger.
No matter how much she urged herself to step forward, to speed up, to focus and to breathe, she wasn’t able to. Her mind buzzed with alerts telling her to run as far away as she could go, never going back to the lab, never facing the monstrosities that certainly waited for her. Her consciousness was split. Her professionalism fought off her desire to never face whatever horror, literal or not, stood down there, smiling, excited to see her reaction to all of the things she had lost.
She continued to descend discreetly, nearly in slow motion. It felt like she had been there for hours, creeping down towards something horrific that waited to engulf her in its chaos. The stairs only had space for one person—admittedly, one Jack-sized person—at a time, but every movement compressed the stair shaft’s walls against her, the handrail brushing against her sides with every step downward. Her throat tightened with a sense of claustrophobic dread—an unforeseeable but inevitable disaster at the bottom of the stairs. It wanted her to accept the disaster.
She didn’t know how much time had passed by the time she reached the basement. An ectoplasmic light shone through the door frame, the toxic gleam tainting the last steps of the stairwell. With a deep breath and a fighting stance, she poked her head into the lab.
It was a lot cleaner than she was expecting.
There was nothing there—no ghost, no evidence of broken glass, no strewn-about boxes of damaged equipment. The lights were off, and the perfectly clean walls and floors were only sparkling with the green glow that came from the portal.
Its metal doors were stretched open like a mouth, a wide grin. It whirled in hypnotic circles, wailing and shrieking as it came to life and thus took all life away. The jade pool stood vertically on the wall as if to rub in Maddie’s face how reality-defying it was, never following any law of physics or rule she could conceive. They researched, they compiled evidence, they ran through case files over and over, but her investigations never led anywhere. The more she tried to understand what she and Jack had done, the more her mind broke into pieces, and all her preconceived notions were debunked. They could never control it or what came through it, and it almost seemed conscious with how much it teased her to walk inside. The wormhole in the basement, a portal that she built with her own hands, towered over her—a god mocking its creator.
A chill ran down her spine. A breath.
Something was standing behind her.
A drop fell on her. A tear, perhaps? She thought it was a tear. Maybe it was blood. Maybe it was ectoplasm. It slid down her arm, making her hairs stand up. She couldn’t see what was leaning over her shoulder, but she knew that it was crying.
There was a loud clang as the knife slipped from her hand and fell to the floor.
The world suddenly went dark.
—— + ` . * > [┊] < * . ´ + ——
She didn’t pass out, not exactly—it was more like there was a blip of nothingness in the world, a movie cutting from one scene to another. By the time she came to her senses once more, her fingers twitched with a tingling sensation, her body unmoving for an unknown amount of time. Her eyes rested on the lab’s ceiling, an uncomfortable pain at the back of her neck nudging her to look forward.
As she tried to move, however, her whole body flinched at the cold feeling on her wrists and ankles. The cuffs protruded from the metal table and locked around her joints, the chilling sensation washing over her arms like a prison of ice. She was trapped—nailed onto the familiar iron bed that set her fate in motion. She was but a lab experiment stuck on a putrid display, like a frog’s corpse inside a high school chemistry closet.
Maddie shook and rattled against the thick iron restraints, but she was only able to move her torso to the sides. Bending her knees just pulled on her back muscles. It was instinct, panic fogging up her vision as she tried desperately to escape.
She knew that table. She measured the blueprints for that table, carefully calculating the exact width needed to stop any subject from escaping. She knew that she had to calm down, take deep breaths, analyze the situation. She couldn’t escape with raw strength, and although she didn’t remember designing an escape switch, she had to find some way to break loose.
Her hood was down, and her goggles rested at the top of her head—she had clear eyes to look around. Maddie turned her head to the sides—she was still able to do that—and only found old, deactivated machinery. Computer monitors were turned off, and all of her work-in-progress weapons were shoved into cardboard boxes on the floor. The lights and alarms were all off.
The ghost knew how to turn off the alarms.
This was a powerful being—one that knew its way around the lab and could at least minimally plan ahead. Did it want something specific? What was it looking for? Ghosts were not known for being strategists, not at all. They were mindless and relied on sheer power in any situation. They were simply manifestations of human consciousness onto ectoplasm, the remnants of human emotions shoved into a substance that broke any understanding of what was natural. They were fueled entirely by emotion, not reason.
More importantly, the ghost had not appeared yet. Ghosts were well-known for yelling out their titles and Obsessions before going for an attack, almost as if their existence depended on human perception. Maddie heavily theorized that this ghostly need for attention was an inherent part of their continued permanence in her reality, explaining why Amity’s ghosts remained in a tangible and visible state during most of their attacks. Lower-level ghosts relied on fear, never physically interacting with the world, while higher-level ghosts focused on their physical capabilities. This ghost—(Maddie assumed it was a ghost)—evidently interacted with the world. It somehow knocked her out and trapped her on the table. It turned off the system. It reorganized the lab. It turned on the portal.
But it didn’t attack. Not yet. It waited patiently for the right moment. It thrived on building up tension and fear—perhaps that is what it consumed. It must be watching, leaving her there only to feed on its twisted Obsession.
(No.)
… No.
She was wrong.
She didn’t know why she thought her theories were wrong, but some part of her just knew. It held back, invisibly, motionless, in silence, because it wanted her to think. It wanted her to reflect. Reflect on what? What sort of conclusion had to suddenly dawn on her so she could—?
As if on cue, it flew out of the portal.
Its left hand was the first thing to appear between the currents of the twisting green void. It kept its arms loose in front of its body, curling into itself so that its head would be the last thing to ever-so-slowly emerge through the portal. When it looked up, the face that met her was unfamiliar. Although she saw it almost every day, something was different about its features. She still couldn’t see in much detail since it was too far away, but something was wrong. Those bright green eyes shone with an uncomfortable vibrancy—sharp, cutting, intense. They were fully dead, without the strange spark of life they used to have.
It was just… floating there. Completely still.
The ghost always held itself with charm and sarcastic confidence. It would smile, no matter what, revealing its fangs at crowds of ignorant kids who fell for its manipulations. It thought itself a hero, though Maddie knew the truth behind that persona.
She never thought she'd actually see the mask fall.
Phantom stared at her, its face numb and its lips slightly parted in an empty expression. There was nothing there. It gave her no sign of any reaction—no anger, no vengeance, no blame. The longer she stared at it, lifting her neck at a painful angle to see its distant, dark silhouette between her shoes, the more terrified she became.
The fear and horror that pulled at her heartstrings were much more real than any supernatural experience.
It was guilt.
(Why was she feeling so guilty?)
Phantom drifted in mid-air, always looking down at her. Its legs hung loose beneath it as it slowly floated to one of the cabinets, never breaking eye contact. It said nothing. As it came closer, she could see it in more detail—its white hair floating against gravity like a mermaid underwater, its skin tinted with olive, its pointed ears twitching up and down. It didn’t blink.
Maddie breathed heavily, her head following its movements as it opened the cabinet’s middle drawer. She could only move her chest, trying to keep herself calm and rational as she lay helplessly under its unwavering gaze.
It looked younger. Phantom had changed a lot in the past few years, but the creature that looked at her, unfeeling and unusual, had the same youthful features as when it first appeared in Amity Park.
That was another odd thing about Phantom: its ability to shift its appearance in a consistent and linear manner, almost as if it were to simulate aging. Maddie considered that it craved a “normal human life,” making up for the missed opportunities from back when it was alive. This would explain how long the ghost spent around Casper High—perhaps it had studied there before.
For months, in the quiet moments of the night, when she stared at the mirror while brushing her hair, she wondered who Phantom had been before it had died. It was a person, somewhen, somehow, and it was evident that it had died as a young teenager. Maddie felt bad for whoever experienced such terrible loss and was forced to see that reckless blob of ectoplasm mercilessly copy the remains of their child’s soul. Maddie had to remind herself over and over that it wasn’t a person anymore. It was an “it," not a “he."
It was wearing its original suit, without the later additions of the classic “heroic” logo and extra pockets. The model was simple, clean, and straight to the point—the same design she used to sketch on leaflets and receipts back when she first graduated from U-Madison. What could be better than a fully functional hazmat suit perfectly adjusted to any size?
She knew that suit. The colors were different, sure, but she recognized her own handiwork.
This wasn’t her first time noticing the similarities. She didn’t understand how that ghost got its dirty hands on a suit so similar to one of her own. It wouldn’t be the first thing Phantom had stolen from the lab. Its threads were purposefully hard to cut through for extra protection from contamination.
(When had she noticed this?)
The lights above started blinking, perfectly timed with the pulse of her own beating heart pumping in her ears. The flickering lightbulbs clicked on and off, bathing the room in darkness for a few seconds where glowing green would become much more pronounced. The open ghost portal, churning with ectoplasm in the background, only laughed at her.
Phantom opened the drawer, and a black folder suddenly floated upward, coated in a flickering bright green layer. She couldn’t read what it said, but Maddie subconsciously knew that her name was printed on the cover.
She had maybe a dozen folders in the same format, with the same purpose, kept in the same place, all neatly organized with a system that she designed. Those folders often went unused because she never had enough test subjects. She knew what those folders meant.
It was only then that she started bashing against the cuffs that imprisoned her.
She tried, at least. She noticed that she couldn’t move.
At all.
This was beyond just the restraints that tied her to the table—her head lay directly upward, her trembling limbs suddenly frozen in place by a force that pressed against her chest. Her bent fingers were completely unresponsive, and her muscles were tense and stretched out. Her face was stuck in shock, her trembling jaw left wide open. It felt like sleep paralysis, but much more surreal, much more despairing, much more evident that she was utterly helpless.
It was like rigor mortis, she realized.
Almost in spite of herself, she cried. Tears unconsciously trickled down the side of her cheek as Phantom, now more unnatural and wrong than it had ever been, put the file back in the open drawer and picked up something from the table. It slowly floated above her, like a thundering cloud casting a shadow over her, and reached its gloved hand over her body. It pointed up with its right hand, a shiny metal tool held between its index finger and thumb.
Her teary eyes caught her reflection on the scalpel, easily recognizable by the faded stains on the used blade.
The flickering lights reflected off the edge as it reached down with the tool, staring directly into her soul. Its hand circled over her heart, lining out two horizontal lines over her collar bones and straight down the middle, directly over her heart. She braced for impact, only to find that she couldn’t squint her eyes—she couldn’t break eye contact.
Her voice couldn’t escape her throat.
She couldn’t escape.
With a calm and neutral expression, Phantom dragged the sharp tip of the scalpel across her chest. She could feel the cold air seep into her clothes, the metal blade cutting smoothly through her suit—but, somehow, the hazmat suit was still left intact. There was not a scratch or dent on her.
Instead, Phantom’s suit very slowly opened in the middle, the sleeves falling over its shoulders.
The flaps of the suit revealed the ghost’s bare skin—or what looked like skin—lined with dark zigzags reminiscent of lightning that met where its heart was supposed to be. She had seen those lines before: Lichtenburg scars. She had studied them in one of her second-year university courses as a unique case—they’d fade after a day or two when a patient suffered extreme electrocution, the scars proving their survival as the electricity left the body.
(It was not until recently that she had seen one up close, one that refused to fade away—for it was permanently marked on a moving corpse.)
Whatever Phantom did to her, it would show up on him—but she would feel it.
When Phantom lowered its hand again, Maddie weeped.
Her whole body flinched in pain as the scalpel drew a straight line down her chest, first only touching the surface and then pushing deeper into her skin. God, it hurt so much.
Above her, small droplets of blood started forming over a thin line that divided Phantom’s torso in two, the incision opening up layers of its skin as the blood started gushing down Maddie’s chest. She could see the thin layers of muscle flipping inside out, and the bright green of its muscle tissue—coated in ectoplasm—twitched and spasmed from the pain. Any cuts Phantom made on her showed up on its body, she realized.
Despite its aching injuries, its face was still unfeeling, for it was a ghost. It wasn’t supposed to feel. It couldn’t feel. It cut her open and it felt nothing.
(Why did it hurt so fucking much?)
Phantom continued with the procedure, miming its actions over Maddie’s body. It pulled the chest cavity apart, digging its fingers deep into the open wound. She could see the dents in Phantom’s skin as she wailed in agony, her organs squirming against the odd sensation of being touched by gloved hands. Her insides burned, and she silently begged Phantom to stop in its tracks, her hands pushing against her restraints before he could continue.
Her eyes widened as its entire hand phased through her chest and grabbed hold of one of her ribs.
Maddie howled as Phantom’s bones quickly and indelicately broke in its chest. Its rib cage was torn apart, one by one, every rib cracking and splintering in the middle with absurd strength. The skeletal box that kept its organs together snapped away, leaving an enormous open cavity that leaked a burning, acidic green substance over Maddie’s face. She could feel the ectoplasm cutting into her neck and cheeks; the chemical burns were mild in comparison to the brutal torture her chest tried to endure. Her vision blinked to black at the biggest spikes of pain, choked sobs sliding down her face as the heroic ghost pulled further down at her skin to get a better view of her insides.
When she still had enough consciousness to see, between the gut-wrenching yelling and weeping and hopeless screams, she still saw her chest intact and untouched. Her suit was now splattered in green, sloshes of the substance at the mercy of gravity as they fell from Phantom’s gaping wound straight onto her. It hurt so much. All those gruesome incisions digging into her skin left her screaming at the sudden feeling of her own organs jumping out of her body, leaving a hole of flesh that quickly filled up with blood. The ghost floated right above her, now using its right hand to hold back whatever it could from falling out. Its insides tumbled out of its thorax—its liver, limp and wet from layers of slime, quickly dropped out from between its intestines and splashed on Maddie’s abdomen. The organ squished against her, slowly sliding down her side and flopping onto the floor along with pieces of meat and flesh that were tied around it.
Her vision suddenly flashed in a blinding white, not from the flickering LED lamps above nor the excruciating pain. It split in two and slid in opposite directions.
(She recognized those rings of light. She had seen them before, in the same context, from a different angle.)
When she tried to blink, a sudden cough splattered a mucous liquid over her face.
A red liquid.
Her son, Danny Fenton, hovered above her with his intestines falling out of his chest.
Maddie couldn’t stop crying, the tears pooling beside her head in an amalgamation of blood and ectoplasm. Pieces of her son’s insides were falling over her in blotches, and all she could do was shout and shout apologies until her vocal cords ripped inside her throat.
“Mom?” He choked out as he spat more blood on her chest.
She was so sorry. She was so fucking sorry. He was in so much pain. She hurt him. God, it was all her fault. Everything hurt so bad and she couldn’t think and she couldn’t breathe. She didn’t know it was him. She ruined everything. It was all her fault. It was all her fault that he was suffering. It was all her fault that he was dead. He could feel pain. She hurt him.
He was Phantom. He was a ghost. He was dead. Her inventions killed him. It was all her fault.
An inverted mirror reflected all the pain she inflicted back on her. He cut into her and pulled her inside out, and she deserved it.
Maddie screamed.
—— + ` . * > [┊] < * . ´ + ——
It ached to open her eyes. She could tell they were already red and puffy; the pressure of her arm against her eyelids was the only thing to soothe the irritation. Her mouth was dry, and the wasted breath stuck at the back of her throat was only released with an involuntary yawn. The first thing she noticed was the pain in her back, her stiff muscles pulling against her bones with an invisible pressure—she always tensed her shoulders when she was stressed. She rolled them back instinctively to relieve the extra tension.
Her mind was still fuzzy when she woke up, rubbing her hand—still gloved and somewhat sticky, apparently—on her face as she lifted her head.
(It was all her fault.)
Wait…
Why had she been crying? In her sleep? Maddie knitted her eyebrows. A visceral sensation of wrongness washed over her as she came to her senses. She must have had a nightmare, but the details were still disconnected in her mind, puzzle pieces refusing to show their images. She squinted as she tried to pick at the memories of the dream, like old photographs developing under a red light.
That’s right! A red light. There had been some sort of red light at first. Then she was in the lab, with the portal turned on. Phantom was there, and—
Good god.
Maddie suddenly felt like throwing up. She almost did, a sour taste like a rotten apple rolling over her tongue as the nightmare became more vivid in her mind. It was so clear; the image of her insides being pulled replayed like a broken VHS tape. It flickered and it was grainy and she knew it wasn’t true because it couldn’t be true, but it danced in her mind, almost toying with her.
That must have been just a nightmare—a terrible, horrific, gory, disgusting nightmare. In dreams, it’s impossible to count or tell time, elements of the environment keep changing, and reflections are always blurry. In her dream, nothing had been right. Nothing had been true. Her reflection was always stained, distorted, and she couldn’t recognize herself.
Could she recognize herself now?
She didn’t think she was still dreaming, but her line of work involved a lot of paranormal encounters. There wasn’t a ghost with dream-related powers, she didn’t think—or perhaps they simply hadn’t had the chance to meet, and good riddance for that—but she had to check. She could still be stuck in a dream inside a dream, an endless loop.
Maddie looked around her desk, trying to find something that could point to her being awake.
She was sitting on a rolling chair, her elbows slouched against one of the lab's metal tables. They curved up at the end as they connected to the wall, with a back panel where tools and weapons would usually be displayed—though they now lay mostly empty above Maddie, except one screwdriver here and there.
Piles of books surrounded her. There were lists of calculations scribbled in her notebooks, suddenly trailing away in slouched handwriting—she fell asleep while writing again. She rarely collapsed from exhaustion in the lab that way. If anyone got too invested in research to get proper rest, it was Jack, whose sense of time was always a little skewed. There was always a small blanket on a nearby shelf, just in case.
The open notebook in front of her had a small pen holding its pages in place. She had been trying to find some equilibrium—levels of ecto-contamination or something similar?—but she hadn’t succeeded. She crossed her work out again and again, never finding whatever she had been looking for. She barely remembers writing those equations. She must have been really out of it, probably from exhaustion. Probably.
She breathed a sigh of relief as her eyes met a clear reflection of herself in a small metal tray that lay to the side. It was one of those boxes that kept thin surgical tools for precise incisions.
Flashes of the nightmare made her sick again.
Still, it had been nothing more than an awful, awful nightmare. She was awake. None of her experiences in that hellscape had been true. She was safe, and so was her family. Everything would be fine. She was alright! She was safe. She kept telling herself that, over and over, not to trigger any lingering fears or anxieties from the nightmare.
She smiled to herself, only to see a bright color in the reflection.
The metal tray showed her a normal face, the same face she had seen throughout her entire life. This was her true self, she knew.
But as she turned her head, the left side of her face was covered in dark streaks. A wet handprint—her handprint, from when she first rubbed her eyes—left a thick, unnatural puddle on her cheek.
The colors swirled together in a grotesque, blotchy mixture, vibrant where it was green and dull where it was red.
Her gloves, from the tip of her fingers to the middle of her palm, were dipped in the same already-faded kaleidoscopic coating.
Ectoplasm. Blood.
What happened?
She swiveled on the spinning chair quickly enough to nearly tilt the back of her seat and almost make her fall. The lab was, as she most dreaded in the dream, a complete mess—glass vials were shattered on the floor, weapons were dismantled for parts, boxes were strewn on the floor over bent metal plates and broken machines.
The portal was closed, stiff, silent, almost as if it were disappointed.
Their life’s work was ruined.
But it had always been wrong, hadn’t it?
The years of research she and Jack had done were based entirely on preconceptions. Supernatural theories were originally based on nothing but rumors, and the limited paranormal experiences they managed to document were tainted by biases. All of their evidence referred to angry ghosts that attacked Amity Park—because good ghosts would have no reason to visit the living.
And claiming a ghost was angry already breaks the most basic predetermined notion that ghosts have no emotions.
Most ghosts were dead people. They were living, and then they died. She had to accept that.
Wrath was still an emotion.
And so was grief.
Oh, yes. Grief. That’s what happened.
Jack had been grieving when he crushed the ecto-bazooka on the floor, pulling its pieces and its wiring in anger. His hands were calloused, bulky, course. His eyes were gentle, though, and they were empty.
Maddie remembered when he jumped from quiet contemplation, silently trying to piece things together in his mind and process everything, to his decision to take down everything ghost-hunting-related in the house. He said he’d be up at the Emergency Operations Center to deactivate the Ghost Shield for adjustments before leaving Maddie to her research. If anyone could understand what was going on, it was her, he thought.
But she didn’t understand. She had been distant, her mind drifting somewhere else and trying everything it could to simply not think The details were still hazy because she knew that if she tried to rationalize anything, she would get no results.
She didn’t want to remember. She didn’t want to theorize. There was no reasonable explanation for why her son was sound asleep on the dissection table.
Maddie stood, the quick movement creaking the joins of the rolling chair. The color drained from her face, and before she could involuntarily slap her hand over her mouth in shock, a sudden putrid smell reminded her of the blood on her glove.
(What had she done?)
Danny’s arms and legs were locked in place by the ecto-containment cuffs on the table, and the skin around it was rashed as if he kept rubbing against the metal, trying to escape. He scraped the back of his hand, leaving a slight bleeding cut. He was shirtless—his body was covered in small, near-invisible scars that Maddie had never noticed. They were small and just as fair as Danny’s natural skin color, but they should have at least noticed the Lichtenberg figure. They should have at least noticed that.
They should’ve noticed when it first appeared. They should’ve noticed when it happened. Why were they so blind? Why had they been so ignorant?
The Y-shaped stitches across Danny’s chest looked like Maddie’s work.
Phantom was weak after another ghost fight when they managed to capture it—to capture him. It didn’t take long for his jokester personality to be replaced with an indescribable fear, an existential dread that Maddie had never seen on Phantom’s face—or the face of any ghost, in truth. He wrangled out of his binds when trying to escape, and… oh god. He begged them to stop in their tracks, pulling at Maddie’s hands. The blinking lights of the lab’s machine reflected off his terrified wide eyes.
(“Mom, please!” He screamed. “You don’t have to do this!”)
She didn’t care. She didn’t understand why he called her mom. She had hypothesized that it must be a tactic of manipulation to mess with her emotions.
She didn’t think about the implications of what this could mean—if Phantom’s life was troubled, where his parents punished him like Maddie was about to, or if Maddie looked physically similar to one of Phantom’s parents, both cases pointed to Phantom having a lot more memory of his life than he led on.
Maddie didn’t want to think about how she was actually his mom. Of course he had memories of life, because he still lived it.
How long had he pretended to be alive? How many times did he come late to family dinner because she had tried to kill him? When the operation began, and Phantom screamed that she would never do this to a human, why didn’t she stop and listen?
How long had Danny pretended to be alive?
(She almost Ended him. She wanted to.)
She and her husband had made enough mistakes. They were trying to be good parents, they really were, but they never succeeded. They didn’t think they were awful people, but they were.
That had always been her argument to justify Phantom’s actions—monsters don’t think they’re monsters. She didn’t recognize that it was completely the other way around.
She wanted to understand. She needed to.
Maddie picked up a roll of adhesive plaster on the table and walked up to Danny, throwing her disgusting gloves on the floor and making a sloppy sound. The key to the table’s cuffs was at the edge of the table, near… a variety of used tools. Tools that were used. Tools that she used. The bone saw was particularly covered in ectoplasm. The green substance shined on the tools, and she stared daggers at them, trying hard to pull herself together and not throw up at all the memories that rushed through her head.
The key fit perfectly in the tiny lock. The small clicks seemed much louder as they echoed in the silent laboratory as Maddie opened the cuffs one by one.
She couldn’t fix things, but she had to try.
Maddie held his hand and wrapped the thick bandage around it. She covered all of the open cuts to stop any infection—could ghosts even get infections? Was Danny even really a ghost? What was he?—and taped the plaster together at his palm.
“See, sweetie?” Maddie whispered with a weak smile, tears falling down her cheeks. “Now you’re safe!" She kissed the wound like a knight would kiss a princess’ hand, promising him the magic bandage would make him feel better.
"I'm so sorry."
Maddie sobbed.