Chapter Text
“Just a little further,” Grian directs, as Skizz and Impulse carry the heavy glass coffee table into the living room. Gem and Scar are in the kitchen with Cleo, while Grian, Skizz, and Impulse finish loading the furniture into the living room. It looked fairly empty until now, with the coffee table acting as a lovely centerpiece for the room. Impulse and Skizz lower it down until it rests on the floor, where its feet sink into the plush living room rug. “That was way easier than I thought,” Grian comments with a grin.
Impulse and Skizz look at each other and then groan.
“We’re all good, boys!” Scar calls as he wheels himself back into the living room, Cleo and Gem following. “Got all the paperwork squared away, and Cleo sent us a check in the mail days ago.”
“Fantastic,” Grian smiles, “It's been a pleasure working with you, Cleo.”
“Oh, absolutely,” Skizz agrees, “You've got great taste in furniture and even better taste in… uh, hey, Dippledop, what are we again?”
Impulse snickers. “I think we'd be movers,” he answers, “at least for this moment.”
“Whatever we are,” Gem interrupts, “Cleo’s gotta get ready for work, so let's pack it up!”
“Thank you all again for your help,” Cleo chimes in, leaning against the doorframe between the kitchen and the living room, “You've been an absolute treat to have over as well. I've been looking for someone to pawn those muffins off to.”
“Of course, of course!” Scar nods, and the five of them begin their edit. Cleo follows them to the door, through her newly-furnished living room. “Have a lovely afternoon, Cleo! Remember to call GIGGS if you need an extra hand! We've got ten!”
“Will do!” she calls after them, and then closes the front door.
“You know,” Gem starts once the door is closed, as they load their equipment – a few dollies of varying sizes and wheel number, a ramp, a tool kit, and some other miscellaneous items – into the truck, “You don't need to advertise to Cleo. They've already bought our services. And we did a good job, so they'll probably ask us for help again if they need it.”
“You can never have too much advertising, Gemstone,” Skizz butts in, appliance dolly in hand. He passes it to Grian, who is standing inside the truck. Gem sighs, but doesn't argue with Skizz, and Scar seems proud of this fact.
Loading the moving truck is the part where Grian probably plays the most active role. His short stature means that, unlike Impulse or Skizz, he's not at risk of hitting his head. Gem has argued for her own use in loading the truck this way before, but, truth be told, she's infinitely more useful for the heavy lifting, carrying whatever Impulse and Skizz choose not to. Scar is more of a business kind of guy, but he does have quite a bit of upper-body strength, so he'll usually steady the largest objects as they're lifted into the truck. That all means that no one else can do what Grian does, which, truth be told, is a rare occurrence; he rarely feels really, truly good at the things he does. When they're loading the truck, Grian can't help but feel like a load-bearing part of a well oiled machine. It's the part of the process he enjoys the most.
“Last thing,” Gem says as she passes Grian a storage bin, labeled “Misc” over tan masking tape. The truck looks a lot emptier than it was a few hours ago, when it was filled to the brim with furniture. It gives Grian a feeling of accomplishment, and, when he sees his team gazing into the truck, he assumes they feel the same.
Grian hops out of the truck, slamming it shut as he makes his descent. Gem lifts up the ramp attached to the back of the truck and pushes it back into place, then closes the latch for both the ramp and the truck itself. The loud, harsh clanks of metal always feel rewarding, to put a lid on something that they've been working on all day. Skizz once described it as “orgasmic”, and Grian has spent his life since then wondering what exactly he meant by that. (He tried asking for elaboration, but Skizz was kind of drunk at the time and Impulse made himself busy to uninvolve himself from the conversation, so he never really got an answer.)
Once they all realize it's done, they celebrate, just for a brief moment, cheering and high-fiving behind the moving truck. Then, just as quickly as the celebration starts, it ends with the five of them dispersing. Grian, Impulse, and Skizz ride in the moving truck, with Impulse driving and Skizz in the middle; Scar and Gem take the van, with Scar in the passenger’s seat. They wave their goodbyes and honk their horns a couple times before they begin the long drive back to their office.
As Impulse pulls the truck out of the driveway, Grian plays with the radio until he settles on a song he likes. He's never been able to sit in a car for any longer then five minutes without some form of sound.
“You know,” Skizz says, “Your music taste shouldn't surprise me, but it always does.”
“What? Do you have a problem with Chappell Roan?” Grian quips, “This is high quality music. Any respectable person could see that instantly.”
“You can see music?” Impulse snickers, which gets a chortle out of Skizz. Grian just slides down in his seat and crosses his arms, grumbling to himself.
Impulse and Skizz talk amongst themselves for the rest of the ride, while Grian sits in the middle and waits for the ride to be over. It's not like he's shocked to find himself as the third wheel again; Impulse and Skizz have known each other for longer than the sky's been blue. When they speak, they almost have their own language, full of words and phrases Grian doesn't even attempt to understand. He's honestly never minded being a third wheel with them. They've never made him feel excluded, and he appreciates that. Even if sometimes he'd like to be excluded from their conversations.
Instead of participating in their conversation, though they do make an effort to include him, Grian makes a mental list of things he needs to do once they return to the office. Truth be told, he's never been a fan of work, but most of it – calling the utility companies, filling out paperwork, printing business cards – has a deadline, and he knows Gem will wring his neck if he misses those deadlines. It's more than that, though. Grian knows that. He loves GIGGS, and he'd do anything to keep the office and the company afloat. Even if that means… work. Eugh.
Grian only notices that the truck has pulled into the parking lot of the office when Skizz bumps the side of Grian's head with his shoulder while he's getting out. “Ouch,” Grian scoffs, not because it hurts, more for the principle of the matter.
“Sorry, G,” Skizz calls, already halfway to the door, “Just happy to be home.” Grian huffs and follows Skizz into their office building. Well, they all call it their office, but it’s just a used car dealership that they retrofitted to be their headquarters.
Skizz is right, in a way; although none of them sleep here or anything, it does sometimes feel like a second home. Before GIGGS, Grian was always staunchly anti-work. He'd never pick up more than he had to, coworkers be damned. No one would get more out of him than they paid for, and that was that. He still finds himself falling into that category, of course – getting scammed isn't really on his to-do list. But the difference with GIGGS is that there is no boss, aside from him and his friends, and it's something he chose to do, on his own. It's something he wants to succeed, and something he's willing to work for.
As Grian is walking to the front door, he gets an odd feeling. He gets the feeling that something is wrong inside that building, very wrong, like someone is waiting for them inside. He's not sure why he does it, but before he can think about it, he blurts out, “Wait!” as Impulse grabs the door handle. Before his brain is even able to catch up with his body, his hand is over Impulse’s in an attempt to stop him.
“Hey, hey, what's the problem, G-man?” Impulse asks, his gentle tone almost completely counteracting the sudden spike of stress he feels. Impulse takes Grian’s hand in his, the stability of Impulse’s hand giving him something to focus on.
“Nothing,” Grian responds, after he takes a deep breath. “The door just… jams if you try to open it without unlocking it, and we haven't unlocked it yet. Gem has the key.”
“Yep, got it right here!” Gem calls, rushing over. Grian didn't even see the van pull in, but he supposes that he wouldn't have, with his back to their small parking lot after he got out of the truck.
Impulse raises an eyebrow, but doesn't question Grian any further, which he's thankful for. He's not sure he'd be able to explain what actually happened, which would sound something like “I had a weird feeling about the office building we come to every single day and I panicked”. Gem has described Grian as “a little out there sometimes” before, but he thought that might be too out there.
“What's going on over here?” Scar asks, rolling up to Skizz, who found himself behind Impulse and Grian after all the commotion.
“G’s freakin’ out over the door,” Skizz answers, crossing his arms and smirking. Scar chuckles along with him.
Gem nudges Impulse and Grian out of the way and unlocks the door, and that uneasy feeling is back. Most people would assume that they were being paranoid in a situation like this. The door was locked, after all, and there was only one other key to this building that one person had, so any entry into this building would leave an obvious mark. But Grian isn't most people. Ask anyone who knows him, and they'll tell you that his intuition is scarily good, and he's not one to squander a talent like that.
Gem is the first one to enter the building, but she stops after her first step, so suddenly that Impulse almost runs into her. “Huh,” she says, looking down at the floor.
“What's up, Gemstone?” Skizz calls, unable to see past Impulse and Grian. Mostly Impulse.
“It’s a letter,” she calls back, “I don't know why someone wouldn't just use the mailbox. We have a mailbox. It's a very obvious mailbox.”
“I knew it!” Grian shouts, already feeling exonerated.
The five of them file into the building, with Skizz entering last to push Scar’s wheelchair past the threshold of the doorframe. They've made every other part of the building accessible, but they couldn't figure out that part, and after a point, Scar told them to stop trying, since all he needed was the smallest push to get himself over it. They crowd around the counter while Gem hunts for a letter opener in the messy drawers of their reception desk.
Once she finds the letter opener, she slices the envelope open, and pulls out what looks to be an ever so slightly crumpled piece of notebook paper. “Dear GIGGS,” she reads aloud, “I am writing to you out of desperation. There is something in my home that has been tormenting me for months. I believe I’m being haunted, but I've tried everything, and no one ever believes me. You are my last hope. I will pay you very well if you can figure out what is torturing me in my own home and remove it.”
“Well, how much?” Scar interrupts, which Gem ignores.
“You will find me at 6 Tanglewood Drive,” Gem continues, “I will pay you $100 per hour per person to remove the spirit from my house.”
The rest of the crew whistles and gasps at that number. “That's five hundred an hour,” Impulse remarks, “I don't even know how they can afford that much money, per hour. That's double our usual rates!”
“Yeah, and it's just some nutjob who thinks their house is full of ghosts! That's basically free money!” Skizz adds on, leaning over Gem to read the letter for himself.
“I dunno, fellas,” Grian interrupts. Instead of the celebratory mood everyone else seems to be in, the sinking feeling in Grian’s stomach has only grown. “I hate to be the voice of reason, but… if they're right, we're gonna be dealing with some real, actual ghoulies.”
“Yeah,” Gem agrees, her face falling as she scans the letter. “And if they're wrong, we're… basically scamming someone out of a lot of money.”
The group gets quiet for a moment. They've all worked very hard to build an honest business; their rates are very upfront, they do exactly as they say they'll do, and they work hard to maintain a good reputation in their small town. Scamming someone out of thousands of dollars because they need a few ghost hunters really doesn't sit right. When Grian glances at his crew members, he can see the wheels turning in their heads and knows that they're all putting together some version of that. Gem lays the letter flat on the table so they can all see it, and they all quietly contemplate it for a moment, occasionally turning it towards themselves to read its shaky cursive lettering.
“Let's sleep on it,” Impulse suggests, “It could be a really good opportunity, but it could also be a scam, either on our end or on theirs.”
Grian isn't so easily convinced. He eyes the letter on the counter, feeling both drawn to it and repulsed by its mere existence. There's not much more than Gem described, only a little bit of contact information at the bottom. So much about it doesn't make sense. For one, Tanglewood Drive doesn't have any kind of dark history, as far as Grian knows. There aren't even any potholes on Tanglewood Drive, it's as normal as quiet, suburban roads get. And GIGGS has a good reputation in their community, sure, but they're certainly not ghost hunters. They've declined pest removal jobs for the same reason, that being they'd be entirely out of their depth.
So why does it seem like they're all considering it?
“Well, I don't know about the rest of you, but personally, I've got a Lego set to finish and a phone to wait by,” Scar interrupts, rolling himself behind the front desk, next to the stool the rest of them use when it's their time to man the phones.
“Who agreed to let him display the spaceship Legos again?” Skizz chuckles.
“It's not just a spaceship, it's a TIE Bomber, and Gem said the colors on the box were pretty,” Scar argues, still rummaging through the drawers until he finds the half-finished Lego set, as well as the box with the loose pieces and the manual.
“Yeah, you're not gonna argue with Gem, are you, buddy?” Impulse asks, although it sounds less like a question and more like a challenge.
Grian picks up the letter while the rest of the group is talking amongst themselves. Something doesn't feel right about it, and if anyone's going to find out, it's going to be him. “I'm gonna hang out in the back office for a while,” he announces while he stretches his arms up, hearing a couple pops in his lower back. “I've got some work to do.”
“Work?” Impulse gasps, “Who are you and what have you done with Grian?”
Grian rolls his eyes. “Very funny,” he chuckles as he walks past the front desk, towards the slightly ajar office door. The group doesn't seem to feel his absence much, going back to discussing Scar’s Lego figurine, which he's grateful for; Impulse was right. Grian doing work when he could be spending time with the group is incredibly unlike him.
He doesn't bother to close the door behind him, instead sitting down at one of the two desks in their office. One might wonder why they don't have four desks, a question which is resolved by simply acknowledging who GIGGS is composed of. Usually, this would be a problem; one person can't do an entire company’s work on his own. But in this rare instance, Grian is thankful for his peers’ lack of a work ethic.
He lays the letter out on the desk next to him as he boots up the company computer. His first plan of action: find any information at all about 6 Tanglewood Drive. The more he thinks about it as the computer starts, the more he realizes how suspicious it is for an area like that to have no history at all. Maybe he's just looking for shapes in clouds, though. There could be nothing wrong with that house. He reminds himself that he's only doing this research to squash his paranoia and decline the offer.
First, he searches for the street address on its own. As he expected, not a lot surfaces in this search. A few house listings, a lot of broken links that take him to the homepage of realtor websites, nothing particularly special. He notices, though, that the house was purchased ten years ago, for an incredibly cheap price, since that's when the most recent link listing the house for sale is dated. Maybe it's inflation, though. Or maybe they just got a good deal. He keeps looking.
Before he types anything else into the search bar, he checks the news tab. It's practically empty, except for one article calling it the “Wilson House”. He opens that article, but the article is vague about why they're referring to this regular suburban home as the Wilson House. Who is Wilson? Or, maybe: who was Wilson?
“Wilson?” Gem asks.
Grian had no idea he was speaking out loud when Gem interrupted. “You know, you could at least knock,” he snaps.
“This is my office,” Gem retorts, “The desk you're sitting at is literally my old desk.”
“It's not your desk anymore.”
“Okay, well I guess you don't want this cup of tea I made you.”
“Nonono wait I'm sorry!” Grian shouts as Gem turns around to leave.
“That's what I thought,” she smiles as she sits at the desk across from him, passing him the large, warm mug of earl gray tea. Immediately he takes a drink, even if it's too hot. “So… who's Wilson?”
“Wilson?” Grian raises an eyebrow, the bottom half of his face covered by the mug. He looks back at the computer screen, and then sets the mug down. “Yes! Wilson. I'm doing some… research. About the letter.”
“Oh, because if someone died there and became a ghost, there'd be a story about it! That's smart,” Gem remarks, standing back up and walking around the desk to lean over Grian’s shoulder. “What’ve you found so far?”
“Not much,” he admits, “except for the fact that some people call it the Wilson House.”
“The Wilson House?”
“Yeah,” Grian nods, taking his glasses off to clear them of the steam from the tea, “Weird, right?”
“The name sounds familiar,” Gem remarks, “But I'm not sure why. Maybe I'll remember tonight and text you about it at some ungodly hour.”
“Please do,” Grian snickers.
Gem walks back around the desk to sit in the opposing chair and boots up the other office computer. Grian’s not sure what she's doing, but she seems to have a specific task in mind other than bothering him with tea and questions, so he leaves her to it.
He tries looking up “Wilson House”, with and without the street address, with the year the house was sold, with the year before the house was sold, the town name, anything he can think of, and he's unable to find a single article about what he wants to know, which makes him infinitely more suspicious. He expected maybe a rumor, a forum post, a tweet, anything to suggest that people know what the Wilson House is, but there's not a single mention of it outside of an incredibly local news source.
Grian knows that, if he continues his search, it might drive him crazy, so he decides to bookmark the original article and get to work on paying for the utilities.
…
Grian manages to spend the rest of his day not thinking about 6 Tanglewood Drive. He pays the utilities, orders the business cards, and even prints out and files the right paperwork, all before 6:00 when they usually close. Gem spent quite a bit of time in the office, but eventually she finished whatever she was doing (Grian suspects she was playing Papa’s Scooperia, but can't prove it) and went back into the front room, so he ended up alone for the last hour in which he was working. As he's shutting down the office computer, he hears the door creak open. He doesn't need to look over to know it's Scar, waiting for them to go home together.
“Hey, G-man,” Scar says, “You almost ready to go? I think Mumbo’s making chicken piccata, and I could really go for some chicken piccata right about now.”
Grian sighs. After the day he had, he's desperate to have a nice night in, and he knows Scar must be as well. He knows he should clean off his desk entirely before he leaves, but he also knows that he can do it in the morning, and he'd really like to sit on his couch and watch a movie with his roommates at this moment, thank you. So he grabs his leather messenger bag, smooths over his red sweater, and pockets the letter on his desk before he flicks off the lights in the office on his way out. “Let’s get out of here,” Grian smiles, closing the office door behind him.
“Oh, thank goodness! I thought I'd have to drag you out of there,” Scar sighs, rolling through the reception area over to the door. While Grian is checking himself to make sure he has everything, Scar sets the alarm for the night. The code is written on a sticky note by the alarm, “797719” scrawled in blue ballpoint pen, because Grian got tired of reminding Scar, and Scar got tired of asking.
When Grian is sure he hasn't forgotten anything, he joins Scar by the door, and they leave the office, side by side. Grian steps in front of Scar on the ramp, and then, once they're all the way down, Grian walks by Scar’s side once more. “Do you think we should do it?” Grian asks as they head to the car.
“Do what? Oh, the Ghostbusters job?” Scar replied, eyes lighting up. “It sounds so cool! We could get walkie-talkies and flashlights–”
“i just meant–”
“--and that paradoxibobible thing, I forget what it's called–”
“Scar.”
“--but it lets you hear ghost noises, oh! And we could get some–”
“Scar!” Grian shouts, cutting him off. They're standing by the passenger-side door of the car, Grian preparing himself to help Scar into the car. “I just meant, like, ethically . If we take on the job, we're basically admitting ghosts are real.” Grian opens the passenger-side door while Scar puts one armrest up on his wheelchair. “I don't know if I believe in ghosties and ghoulies, if I'm honest.”
“We're a business,” Scar laments as he lines himself up with the seat and puts his brakes on. “If this person wants us to check for ghosts, and they're paying us double,” he explains through grunts of physical effort, pulling himself into the passenger seat, “then why shouldn't we? It's an easy job, Grian, you never pass up easy work.”
Grian pulls the wheelchair away from the door once Scar is out of it. He opens the back door of the car and removes the cushion of the wheelchair, before folding up the wheelchair itself and placing it in the back seat. “There is a fine line,” he says as he closes the back door, “between an easy job, and a scam. I like easy money, but I'm not in the business of scamming any innocents.”
Scar doesn’t seem to find this answer particularly satisfying, but he doesn’t say anything about it, so Grian lets it go. He walks around the back of the car as Scar situates himself in the passenger’s seat, for a moment surrounded by only the sounds of everyone rushing to get home. Grian wonders if the person who left the note is in all of that traffic, hoping to get home just like everyone else. They must have some high-paying job, considering how much they’re willing to pay GIGGS for a single ghost-hunting mission. Or maybe it’s too good to be true. Grian opens the driver-side door and climbs in, trying to put the thought behind him. “You said something about chicken piccata?”