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“None of this even makes sense!” Tony Stark exclaimed as he paced back and forth across the large and expensively furnished living room. “First off, our whole consciousness is basically the biological equivalent of ones and zeroes - neurons and synapses and such. Once the electrical activity in the brain ceases, poof! It’s like wiping a hard drive. Everything that person was is gone.”
“But we know that’s not true,” Sam replied gently; it wasn’t the first time they’d been called in by someone who didn’t want to believe in ghosts. “There are times when the essence of a person lives on in the form of a spirit.”
“Usually because they have unfinished business,” Bucky chipped in.
“And that’s bullshit, too!” Tony exclaimed, gesturing emphatically. “If that were true, we’d be up to our eyeballs in ectoplasm, because everybody dies before they’re ready, don’t they?” He turned his red-rimmed eyes to them; a young man grieving the loss of both parents at once. Sam couldn’t argue the fact; no one really knew how or why some people became ghosts and others didn’t.
“If anyone should be haunting this house, I’d have expected Howard.” Tony huffed out a sharp laugh as he resumed his pacing. “I can just see it, him down in his workshop swearing up a storm because he can’t touch anything. Can’t finish his precious projects.”
“If it were him,” Tony went on giving them a sharp grin, “this would be easy. I’d just ask you to fire up that proton pack of yours,” He gestured at the equipment Bucky had brought in, “then zap him, trap him and take him away.”
“But it’s not him, is it?” These were the tough jobs, Sam reflected, where the client had an emotional connection to the spirit in question.
Tony stopped pacing and wrapped his arms around himself. “No. I think it’s my mom. It doesn’t look like her - it hardly looks like anything, to be honest - but it … feels like her, if that makes sense?
Sam nodded. “It does.”
“And…” Tony paused, biting at his lip. “it’s like she’s trying to tell me something?”
Sam reached into his bag for the Ouija board. “Then let’s see what she has to say.”