Like Pulling Teeth

by faedemon

Summary:

“For a long time I waited to see you,” Vlad says. “I was sure you’d visit.” He looks up again. Jack and Maddie both gaze at him openly, rapt. It’s too much to bear, and his eyes skate away.

“But you didn’t come.”

The white of the hospital subsumes him. He is there again—he is limp and weak in his patient’s gown, with a nurse bent over him, her face terrified, and he is lifting his arm to find it glowing.

“And eventually, I realized you never would.” He smiles bitterly to himself. “I tried to leave you both behind, but I kept circling back to you. Over and over again, you two occupied my thoughts. For twenty years you have been the last I think of at night and the first in the morning.”

Twenty years after his half-death at the Fentons' hands, Vlad hosts a college reunion with the vague hope of exorcising all the rage and misery Jack and Maddie left him with. Except, to his surprise, he finds that in their time away from him they have made the same mistake again—they, too, are half-ghosts, and Vlad must reckon with that discovery.

(Fics in this series are standalone.)

Notes:

I wrote this fic for Invisobang 2022, and worked with the lovely, wonderful artists Fern (friendzoned61 on tumblr) and Blob (blobghostdoart on tumblr). Their artworks are embedded in this fic, but you can also find each of their pieces linked in the end notes!

Also, a Spotify playlist is available for this work: Like Pulling Teeth. You will find a brief explanation of what each of the songs was chosen for in the epilogue's end notes!

Chapter 1: Like Pulling Teeth

Despite the years, and despite the suffering that characterized them, it is surprisingly easy to write the invitations. First, he writes the inconsequential ones: impersonal, identical missives to old college acquaintances. Only once these are penned, and sent off by mail, does Vlad turn to the one he saved for last—the only one that actually matters; the reason he thought to host a reunion at all.

It is still easy to put pen to paper for this last invitation. Perhaps it isn’t real to him yet, or perhaps time has made him eager—either way it does not matter so long as he sends it, so long as they come. He makes this one impersonal too. It is simpler this way, and more strategic. He will not give them any hints to work with. They will not know his mind, or what the years have made of him. They will receive only his invitation—and because he knows them, he knows they will heed it.

He knows everything about them. Vlad would like to say he has had, these past twenty years, some modicum of self-control, but he is not that man. In the early days of his hospitalization, when he waited impatiently for them to visit so he might give them all the vitriol he could, he hoarded all information on them that he could find. He hungered for it—in the absence of them, he built their silhouettes, traced the shape of their lives without him. And he never stopped. It became clear that they were not coming, but Vlad was not satiated. He needed more. Closure, perhaps, or just some confrontation; he needed a place to put his rage, to exorcise it. And he only wanted one place: the laps of those who killed him.

Oh, the hospitals—multiple, yes; his case was very special—offered him therapists. Mandated sessions with them, in fact, and Vlad can only imagine what it was to see him from the outside in those days. But it never took. What was initially a coping mechanism became a vice, and to this day he indulges it, peering in on them from afar.

Yes, they will accept his invitation. He knows they will. He knows them inside and out.

 

Vlad hosts the reunion over a weekend, from Friday to Sunday, all the guest rooms in his mansion tidied and ready for those who plan to stay over. He expects the largest crowd on Saturday, and for most to only attend one of the three days, though out-of-state guests will likely stay the night. He expects Jack and Maddie Fenton will drag their family out Thursday night and make every attempt to remain until Monday morning.

It is only a slight surprise that, come the weekend, the Fentons manage to hold off until the earliest time on the invitation. Vlad assumes it is one of their children he must applaud, for Maddie and Jack have always been equally eager. No matter either way. They are here now, emerging from the years as though nothing has touched them, meeting his eyes unblinking as they walk up the steps.

“Jack,” he greets them. “And Maddie! You’ve never looked lovelier, my dear.” He spares a glance at the children. Jasmine—so like Maddie in appearance, but with unfamiliar eyes. Daniel—an even combination of his parents. Both as he had been informed. “Please, come in.”

He ushers them inside. Finally having seen them, Vlad pushes back the howling thing in his chest that reaches for them, and he disregards and the itch in his palms, having touched their shoulders. Vlad toys with the idea for a brief instant of shutting the door on Jack, slow as he is to enter, but thinks better of it. There are other guests just nearby. It would be a gauche display if someone were to walk in and see him acting impolite, and anyway there will be other chances. No—in fact, there will be no need for other chances at pettiness. He is not throwing a college reunion to stoop to shutting doors in faces. There are much larger ways he plans to express his ire.

“I’m so glad you two—ah, you four, I should say—could make it. Part of the reason I’m hosting the reunion in the first place is so we might reconnect,” he says, smiling. And perhaps something shows on his face, because for a moment Maddie looks at him strangely, almost with a grimace. “I do hope you’ll be staying the night?”

“You betcha, Vladdy! Maddie and I made sure our whole weekend was free.”

“Wonderful,” Vlad responds. And just like that, he is leading them deeper inside. They are welcomed into the belly of his home, and the four of them disperse within it, mingling or exploring or, in the children’s case, acting the wallflower. It is only easy for Vlad to unclench his hands and allow them to stray because this mansion has four walls: even without him there as their shepherd, they are contained.

He allows the Fentons time to mingle without him hovering. They, despite Jack’s enthusiasm, are clearly on eggshells—it is not that they have overlooked the years, but that they do not know yet if they should mention them. Vlad’s invitation did its work. Offer up none of yourself, and you manufacture the upper hand.

There will be Saturday and Sunday to approach them. For now, Vlad works the room. He puts on a show of his hospitality, engaging his guests just near enough to the Fentons that they hear him, and every so often glance his way. Their brief attention stokes him. He takes care not to look when they do, but he cannot help himself from watching.

In the moments that there are no eyes on him, Vlad clenches his grip on his wine and refrains from screaming.

 

The night offers a unique opportunity to Vlad, one which he is hesitant to take.

Unable to sleep, unable to cow his pulsing core with the knowledge that they are here, he gave in some. Vlad haunts the Fentons’ room, watching them rest. Finally, to observe them in person! He catalogues the moments they turn over or reach for each other, memorizes the occasional furrow of their brows. It is the sort of information he would never have learned remotely. He drinks it in, howling internally, digging his nails into his arms.

At around two, Jack gets up to use the toilet. Vlad tails him, and unbidden he wonders if this may be his best option: to ream them out in the dead of night, to demand answers, to—perhaps!—cause an accident. It is so tempting. But Vlad knows, too, that it would be dissatisfying for it all to culminate while the estate is asleep. For it to go unwitnessed.

He has wanted this for twenty years. He has fantasized about it in hospital beds, in meetings, at night and in the morning over breakfast. Time has made him fester, and Vlad did not mind it. He encouraged it, even. He has relished in the rage: how dare they? How dare his best friends, unwitting Frankensteins, create this abomination? Vlad has come to appreciate his ghosthood, but he will never forgive those years in the hospital, where he watched his body metamorphose into something unrecognizable. And once he realized what it was—ghostliness—it was a horrifying recognition. Vlad has had to learn on his own what he’d become. He has had to comb through archives in the Infinite Realms, listen to hours of inane oral history, beg for scraps of information, experiment on himself—all to find that half-ghosts are things of unpleasant legend only, and any who may have existed to spark that legend are long faded. He is alone. But he had been alone, and loneliness is an old suffering, incomparable to what Vlad had only just then begun to understand: the complete terror of a knowing death.

There is no coping with that realization. There is only motion, and Vlad has been smoothly moving since he was discharged, his other half finally wrestled under enough control that it no longer made his human body sick. At first, spitefully, he decided he would move on from the Fentons, as they had done to him. He amassed his assets and influence partially to be better than them, and partially just to prove to himself he could still have influence, that the living world had not shaken him, that he still held weight in it. But—still, he had that old vice.

No matter his determination to forget them, every few days Vlad would look in on the Fenton patents. He would check their children’s behavioral records. He would make note of new haircuts and traffic violations, of conference presentations and progress reports. He couldn’t stop himself. It was compulsion. It was damaging. It was inevitable that Vlad would end up here, he understands now; all his rage has been building to it. Vengeance becomes him. Retribution dogs his steps.

Jack stumbles sleepily toward the lavatory. Vlad hovers behind him, invisible, watching his back, tracing his steps. He should not do anything now, he knows, but the temptation tugs at that bottomless pit within him, the one that daily screams the Fentons’ names. And Vlad cannot stop himself from reaching ever so slowly forward—

—into nothing.

For Jack Fenton has just intangibly passed through the floor.

For a moment Vlad only stares, halted in midair. And then something tilts in his chest, and he feels abominably angry. How on earth—Vlad has not had control issues in thirteen years! Besides that, how could he have made the floor intangible without even touching it? That’s impossible. Intangibility spreads through contact. All ghosts know that; the knowledge is inherent. This is impossible. So why is Jack Fenton now a floor down from where he started?

Vlad descends after him. Jack is blinking, disoriented, standing there in the center of the hallway. He looks around. He looks down at his hands. He—grimaces? And shakes his arms out, and says, not surprised but exhaustedly resigned, “Not again.”

Not again.

The words scatter through Vlad with all the grace of sprinting boars. Not again, Jack said, which means he knows exactly what just happened—means it was expected—means it was not Vlad who caused the intangibility, but Jack himself—meaning—

Vlad, without deciding to, backs away. Still invisible, he watches Jack with an expression one might reserve for a predator, and waits.

This level has no guest rooms on it. Vlad’s staff hadn’t bothered to light any lamps. Jack is squinting into the darkness. Then, so simply, he conjures a mass of ectoplasm above his palm, lighting the black hall gently in green—as if the action can be gentle, as if Vlad isn’t now this close to falling over, the world listing, the green invading him, feeling poisonous now as it would have been, had he never met the man before him, had one mistake never been made.

One mistake. Hah. Clearly—clearly Jack and Maddie Fenton made it twice.

“Where…?” Jack wonders to himself, looking down one length of the hall, and then the other, in which he looks through Vlad, and Vlad spooks himself gazing into the man’s eyes. That look—seeing through him—is one that has, purely imagined, haunted Vlad since the accident. No—since he finally realized Jack and Maddie weren’t coming back. Seeing it now, real, senseless, twists him. Vlad is thrust back to that time intangibly: suddenly he is so young, and so filled with devastation he can’t think through it.

Jack starts moving. He recognizes the floor, and begins to head for the stairs going back up. They are behind Vlad. He moves aside so that Jack Fenton doesn’t walk through him.

 

The night passes. In the morning on Saturday, reunion guests slowly trickle out of their rooms as the sun climbs, the early risers mingling quietly. No one new will be arriving until ten at the earliest, so Vlad elects not to make an appearance until later, allowing the curious to snoop with a careful eye kept on where they’re snooping.

He did not sleep. He was barely able to think, either, too absorbed with controlling his breathing, with keeping himself from slicing the mansion entirely in two. For all that he has prepared for the confrontation, Vlad had never fathomed this possibility.

No matter. No matter—he cannot let their idiocy stray his course. His course has always been to make the Fentons see, and if Jack is a ghost now too, then all the better for his devastation. He will know exactly what he put Vlad through. Fine. Fine.

Vlad’s insides thrash with things nameless. Steadfastly, he ignores them.

It is around nine forty-five when Vlad lets himself be seen up and about, greeting the early risers and sharing knowing exchanges with them about the virtues of the morning. He mingles thoughtlessly, letting the pleasantries and simple banter distract him. At ten, as he had predicted, many of his in-state attendees begin arriving for the day, greeting him enthusiastically and reminiscing at length about their days at UW-Madison. They tastefully do not mention the ridicule that Vlad, Jack, and Maddie often endured for their unique passions. Instead, his guests remark on Vlad’s incredible financial success, and marvel at his home, and express that they, too, are Packers fans, what do you know? It's all very trivial, and Vlad has come to appreciate that triviality—meaningless social niceties have a cleansing effect, so stark an emotional contrast as they are to all else.

The Fenton children emerge first from their respective rooms, near ten-thirty. They’re both understandably nervous, though Jasmine puts on a surprisingly brave face for a sixteen-year-old, so Vlad assumes his most reassuring expression and leads them to the parlor, lightly prodding them about their schooling. Jasmine is interested in psychology, but he knew that already. Daniel, Vlad knows less about, so it’s a pleasant surprise to learn the boy is no less driven, with great plans to be an astronaut. Unlikely, but one can dream. On the whole they are unremarkable. They are both only children, with none of the eccentricity of their parents—though Vlad can see their influence still.

He sets them free after only a few minutes of engagement, noting their eagerness to slink off. No matter that Jasmine thinks herself mature, no child wants to talk at length with an adult, he knows. It is about fifteen minutes later that Vlad’s actual targets of interest appear.

Maddie appears well-rested. Jack wears none of the previous night on his face, and when he meets Vlad’s eyes and smiles so easily, it’s clear he has no clue that he was witnessed. Now that Vlad knows what to look for, he does see some stress in the lines of Jack’s face, but only faintly. Jack is evidently not completely new to this. Vlad ignores again what erupts in his chest.

“Jack, Maddie, good morning,” he greets, welcoming them into the parlor. “I trust you slept well?”

“Yes, the bed was very comfortable,” Maddie says, smiling.

“Definitely,” Jack agrees. He looks past Vlad, to the breakfast buffet he’d had catered. “I’m starving—catch up with ya in a sec, Vlad, I’ve got to dive into this food first.” Convenient. Vlad lets him go, an idea forming.

When the man is out of earshot, Vlad knits his eyebrows, and leans in to Maddie’s space. “Maddie—you wouldn’t have happened to bring any of your equipment, would you?”

“Of course! We came in our Ghost Assault Vehicle. We call her the GAV for short.” Then she pauses. “Oh—how’d you know we were still inventing?”

Letting his expression smooth for a moment, Vlad smiles at her. “I looked in every once and a while. You two made quite the splash at that conference last June.”

“It was a big success! But yes, we brought plenty of our work with us. Why do you ask?”

He puts on concern again. “Well, I didn’t want to excite Jack in case it’s a fluke, but—oh, you should know, I have been doing some work in ectobiology over the years; never could shake the passion. And last night, some of my own equipment was picking up ectoplasmic readings.” He taps a finger to his chin. “Normally this part of Wisconsin is a dead zone, so I was worried perhaps one of the guests has a tag-along—but since you brought your things, I’m sure I’m just picking up that.”

The surprised smile Maddie had shown when he mentioned his ectobiology work dims quickly. She frowns, as Vlad had expected her to, although along with it there’s a fleeting something in her eyes he doesn’t quite catch. “None of our equipment can give off active signatures, actually, and all of our samples are kept in the lab at home… where were you picking up readings?” There’s a note of anxiety behind her intrigue. Curious.

“Well, my equipment is in the basement and covers the estate, and as far as I can tell the signature originated near the guest rooms. I was actually up and about last night—couldn’t sleep, you know—and it was around two o’clock when I got the alert. Coincidentally, I had just seen Jack down the hall heading for the bathroom. I thought about stopping him and asking his opinion, but… you know how he gets.” He meets her eyes again with an exasperated smile, and is surprised to find Maddie’s own expression tight. He hadn’t expected her to catch on to his implication so quickly—perhaps she already had her own suspicions?—and he wonders with great interest what she will do now, handed the potential of her husband’s monstrosity.

“That is odd,” Maddie replies quickly, her expression smoothing. Then it contorts into one of constructed realization, and Vlad listens with an incredulity he does not show on his face as she says: “Oh! Actually, you know what? I think I do have a few ectoplasm samples in my luggage. We were just toting them around the other day; I entirely forgot to unpack them. That must be it.” She shakes her head with a smile. “I’m so sorry to worry you.”

She is covering for him. Vlad does not let his disbelief show on his face. “That’s a relief. Sorry to hold you up for nothing, dear. Go enjoy breakfast.”

“Thanks, Vlad,” Maddie responds, clearly relieved, and moves off. He watches her go, face falling to neutrality, so baffled at her choice—does she love Jack that much, in truth? Or had he misinterpreted her expression? Perhaps she didn’t catch what he was actually implying. But then, why else would she lie? Vlad does have equipment set up to notify him of any stray ectosignatures which cross into his territory, and if the Fentons brought live samples with them, he would know about it. Jack didn’t alert Vlad’s sensors because he—stupidly—made an exception for what he discovered to be the halfa frequency, rather than his own specific signature. It was a joke with himself. Idiotic.

Maddie begins piling food onto a plate, brightly greeting a very tired-looking Harriet Chin, awake only for etiquette’s sake. She’s clearly using the chatter to distract her, and the stress of her and Vlad’s interaction now shows more clearly on her face, no longer standing directly before him. She’s holding up admirably, though, talking easily to Harriet, reaching for the breakfast ham, the tongs falling through her hand to clatter to the buffet table—

Vlad stares.

Maddie starts, slightly, then apologizes to Harriet for the noise, making a quip about how don’t we all drop things sometimes? As if we haven’t been using our hands our entire lives! And Harriet politely laughs, having been barely paying attention, not having seen what really happened. No one else stands at the buffet line. Maddie’s shoulders relax.

Vlad stops staring—what would his guests think if he looked too long?—and instead turns on his heel and leaves the room, along with it any thought of his hastily constructed plan to out Jack as a halfa to Maddie, to use that against him. He leaves any thought of a plan—or, indeed, any thoughts at all—behind, and covertly descends the stairs to his basement lab: the only room in the mansion off-limits to guests, and the only place his anger won’t escape from audibly.

As Jack had slipped through the floor, the tongs had slipped through Maddie’s hand.

The Fentons’ idiocy had created not one monster, not two, but three.

 

Vlad would have stayed in the basement the entire day if he could have, but of course he has a reunion to host, and guests to impress, and social etiquette to maintain. Normally he does not mind the polite baggage that comes with being so high-profile an individual—he chose this, after all—but today Vlad abhors it. He wishes he could rip through his mansion: tear the rooms apart, shatter plates, carve a hole through each floor to the roof. He craves that destruction. There is devastation inside of him, begging to pour out.

Vlad, that morning, did not do any of that. After forty minutes of tight breathing in his lab, he had reemerged and retreated into his mind. He let his body play the dutiful host, dipping in and out of conversations, redirecting his staff as needed, starting a few games of pool and cards. He winked and showed some attendees his aged wines and top-shelf liquor. He drifted through his rooms. He ghosted by his guests. He did not speak to the Fentons.

That was a mistake, to be sure. He had claimed to host the reunion specifically to be close to them again; he cannot afford to ignore them. He has plans. Well—had. Had plans.

All his plans are in ruin now.

That night, after the Fentons retired and Vlad bid good evening to his night-owl guests, he reentered his lab. Here, now, he stands unblinking before his monitoring equipment, adjusted to no longer ignore the half-ghost signature. Here he stands: staring endlessly at the two damning dots on the reader, nearly overlapping. In bed together. He stands. He stares at them. For a stretched and terrible moment, he does not blink.

Suddenly, near-hysterically, Vlad scans the rest of his mansion, then widens the range and scans the entire acreage of his property. He has the radar set to ignore those ghosts he has on staff. Thus, the screen displays to him, relentlessly, only three dots: himself and the Fentons. The Fenton adults, rather—somehow, miraculously, the children have been spared their negligence.

With difficulty, Vlad averts his eyes from the machine. He is leaning on it, both hands braced against its paneling, most of his body weight held up by it, this fragile, damning thing. Vlad clenches his fingers on the edges. He refrains from breaking the equipment. This is expensive, something he personally designed. He refrains from breaking the equipment. He refrains from breaking the equipment. He refrains from—

Vlad presses the button to shut off his entire monitoring grid. A significant amount of the electrical hum in his lab dies. Most of the blinking lights shut off. He slides to the floor beneath the screens. He kneels there. He covers his face. He refrains from screaming.

At the other end of the lab, Vlad’s portal to the Realms casts the room in green. Normally he enjoys admiring it; he managed to get it working long before the Fentons perfected theirs. That superiority is often a comfort. He doesn’t know what to feel now, bathed in the light of its ectoplasm. He feels twenty-one again, so near to graduation, bending forward to peer at the frame of the proto-portal, not expecting it at that moment to turn on—

He refrains from screaming.

He refrains from doing anything except hunching forward and breathing out.

Vlad knows what his obsession is. Rather—he knows what it feels like. He knows what it begs of him. He wants Jack dead and he wants Jack to apologize and he wants Maddie dead and he wants Maddie to apologize and he wants them to see what they’ve done—what they hurt—what they murdered—he wants them to apologize. He wants to tear the apology from Jack’s throat. He wants Maddie to make it on her knees, her head bent.

Vlad digs his nails into his skin. He doesn’t know what he wants from them. He just wants it to stop. He wants the thought of the Fentons to cease hurting.

Halfas. Like him. What is he supposed to do with that? What—what is this supposed to mean? He can’t think. He can’t understand. He can’t. He can’t.

He refrains from screaming.

 

On Sunday, Vlad makes every effort to spend time with the Fentons, both the adults and the children. He coaxes from them the things surveillance and public records can’t tell him: hopes, stories, jokes, woes. Jasmine warms up to him quickly, which puts Daniel more at ease, Vlad can tell, though outwardly the boy tries to appear disinterested. The sibling dynamic, he presumes. Vlad wouldn’t know personally.

It is difficult to look at Jack and Maddie. Whenever he does, Vlad wants violently to either slice them open or fall to his knees at their feet. He compromises by avoiding eye contact as much as he can; he gives them a tour of the estate, invites them to a game of pool, puts on old recordings of UW-Madison home games and competitions and some amateur videos he’s amassed from their time in college. It isn’t perfect, but it suffices. Vlad does not kill anyone or cause a scandal. The Fentons let their guard down. They reciprocate his feeble attempts at reconnection, Maddie stops giving him that strange look, and their children don’t groan and roll their eyes quite so hard when Jack refers to him as “Uncle Vlad.” Vlad does not choke on the moniker. He does not choke on anything. Vlad’s silver tongue gleams, apparently untarnished, while he polishes it frantically in every second no one looks.

Sunday stretches like a cat in its eternity, but eventually it passes. The reunion comes to a close. Vlad stands in his foyer for over an hour saying good-bye to his guests, who gush to him about his professionality, about his home, his wealth, about the raucous success this reunion was—surely he’ll host another?—and he smiles and chats and waves and always behind him looms the Fenton family-shaped shadow, sticking around until the last, waiting for a personal farewell.

The guests are gone. Vlad is left alone with his now-dead killers. And their children.

As a staff member shuts the front doors, Vlad turns, his eyes carefully bright, smiling. “Did you enjoy yourselves?” He allows a bit of anxiety into his voice, some humility to the lines of his face.

“Of course!” Jack replies, walking up to clap Vlad on the shoulder. “It’s been nice to see you, Vlad, really.” He is smiling. His hand is warm.

Maddie also approaches. “Yes, we’ve had a great time.” She meets his eyes, a tentative affection in them. “You know, I was worried this might be a bit of a disaster, since—well. Anyway, it’s wonderful to get to know you again.”

That—that nearly breaks Vlad’s composure, her skirting acknowledgement of the years. Despite himself, Vlad is relieved. If she had apologized just then, so casually, he doesn’t think he could have coped with it.

He mimics her tact. “Quite.” He shoots the children, clearly impatient, a pointed look, and then smiles at Maddie and Jack. “Well—you’ve all been here plenty long. I wouldn’t want to take up too much more of your time. You should get going.” It is a completely obtuse way to ask someone to leave, and Vlad will reprimand himself for it later, but right now he does not care. It is not as if either of them are socially sensitive enough to note it. He just needs them out.

“Right! We’ll head out, then.” Jack’s hand, this entire time resting there so simply, finally slips from Vlad’s shoulder. He does his best not to shudder. “Okay, kids, grab your things!” Jack turns away, not having noticed anything amiss.

The pre-departure scramble moves most of the attention off Vlad, and he takes all he can from this moment of rest, breathing, breathing. The children breeze by him on their way out the door, Daniel sparing him a wave and Jasmine a polite good-bye and thanks for his hospitality. He shakes her hand dutifully. He breathes. Soon they will be gone. Soon he can fold.

“We’ll see you again soon, right Vlad?” Jack asks in the doorway, a bag slung over his shoulder, his eyes bright.

“I’d like nothing more,” Vlad replies in kind, clenching his fists behind his back.

Jack smiles. “Don’t be a stranger!”

“You have my word.” He waves Jack forward. “Go on—before the children get any ideas about how to drive a vehicle.”

Jack leaves. Maddie steps forward to take his place.

“You should write sometime,” she says to him. “You have our address. Send a card or two, you know Jack will swoon over them.” She says so with a light air, a fondness that she expects Vlad to share in. He recognizes the tone. He recognizes all of this—at Vlad’s invitation, Jack and Maddie are tentatively testing the waters of their college days, dipping their toes back in to that old rapport, seeing if it’s warm enough to submerge themselves in. Vlad is playing his part too well. This is not how this weekend was supposed to end.

Vlad is supposed to be free. He is supposed to be done with this—this fixation—he is supposed to be exorcised of them; he is meant, finally, to rest. To put down the vice. To be so subsumed by catharsis all the rage is overwritten.

He refrains from screaming.

“I was afraid it wouldn’t be welcome,” Vlad says instead, tilting his head slightly, evading Maddie’s eyes.

“Why not?”

He looks back at her. “You never wrote, either. Even when you knew exactly where I was.”

He cannot resist it. He must allow himself at least some confrontation, if just this. If just to catch a glimpse of the guilt she must feel—that Vlad needs her to feel. On the threshold, he can allow himself this. He won’t let it spiral away from him. He will maintain his self-discipline.

The twist in her face and the look in her eyes is a balm.

“Vlad—”

Outside, the GAV’s engine revs. Distantly, Jack shouts, “Hurry up, honey! The kids want to stop for food!”

Maddie breaks their eye contact, glancing outside and then back at him. She opens her mouth—

“Oh, off you go, now,” Vlad says lightly, removing the accusation from his face. He pushes it all away. He has no plan. He cannot break now. “I’ll be sure to write, since you’ll have me.”

Maddie smiles at him. She does not call him on the subject-change. She makes no attempt to apologize anyway.

“See you, Vlad. Thanks for inviting us.”

Then she is on her way out the door. She shuts it behind her. The Fenton family vehicle’s engine roars and quiets as they drive away. They are gone. They are gone. They are gone.

Vlad does not bother any longer to refrain from screaming.

 

In the spring of that year, Vlad’s delegates send him word of a potentially lucrative acquisition: Axion Labs, a technological development company with research and production centers dotted nationally across the map. Acquiring the company is desirable in and of itself; Axion’s products are high-tech, marketable to the general public and to specialists alike—not to mention Vlad’s personal interest in what new technology can do for him. But striking this kind of deal is, generally, below his interest; Vlad prefers to allow his trusted subordinates to cross the Ts and dot the Is for him, so that he might devote most time toward his personal work. What draws his attention to the Axion Labs acquisition is this: that its first-established location, and effective headquarters, resides in Amity Park.

In the months since the reunion, Vlad has swung wildly between refusing to think about the Fentons and obsessively monitoring them. Even in the former periods, his mind has been consumed by them; they occupy his thoughts relentlessly. Everything he does is tainted by their influence. Vlad has had twenty years to learn to cope with the reality of them, and still he is struggling. Every day he wakes to an internal inferno. His core aches with longing. He thinks he really might kill them or himself one of these days.

That Maddie, in his doorway, had so simply acknowledged that she knows she and Jack did him wrong, makes Vlad feel like the world is spinning. That, even then, she didn’t so much as apologize, makes him want to gouge out his eyes.

Vlad knows them. Despite the years, despite his anger, he knows the Fentons, and of course Maddie would not apologize to him in that moment. She is so prideful. She lives so much in her own head.

Vlad sweeps his arm out. He is in his kitchen. He knocks a glass off the counter and watches it shatter.

He is not thinking about what the reunion revealed to him.

He is not thinking about what they’ve turned themselves into.

 

VLAD Co. enters negotiations with Axion Labs that same week. Vlad volunteers himself to attend the most important meetings in-person, traveling out of Wisconsin as needed. Most of these meetings occur at an offshoot location, with delegates who are suitably intimidated by Vlad’s presence. This both frustrates and relieves him—he both wants and desperately does not want to set foot in Amity Park. He wants to run to them. He wants to see the looks on their faces. He never wants to see them again.

Business meetings are always tedious, but Vlad appreciates the finesse and attention required, if he is to make the most of his time. There is a cutting sort of feel to the professional world, something almost cleansing in its acidity. Vlad enjoys that feeling. He prefers it, these days, to personal interaction—not that he engages in much, but, regardless, professional distance and professional viciousness are easier to sink into. Any mask is more bearable than truth.

Business is tedious, but it is easy. The upcoming tour of Axion Labs’ Amity Park facility, hosted specifically for Vlad as their new superior, promises to be exactly the opposite. Oh, of course the tour itself will be nothing—a formality more than anything; something to acquaint Vlad distantly with the sort of work being done, so that Axion isn’t only a name on his bank statements. It is Amity Park itself that vexes him. It is what is contained within. It is the proximity—Vlad is not certain he can resist, so close to them—not certain, even, exactly what he is resisting.

He could have avoided this. He didn’t need to acquire Axion Labs.

He didn’t need to host the reunion.

He didn’t need to do anything at all.

 

Who is he attempting to kid?

“Thank you for your hospitality, Mr. Gray, truly. It’s quite the shift, I’m sure, adjusting to new policies and guidelines. You have been very gracious,” Vlad is saying, allowing the praise to fall out of his mouth, adjusting his cufflinks and smoothing his front.

“The pleasure is all mine, Mr. Masters, sir.”

“Of course.” Vlad looks up and meets Damon’s eyes, a sharp smile on his lips. “This location is in good hands. I’ll expect to be hearing great things.”

“You will,” Damon Gray assures him. Yes, yes. Blah-blah. Get it over with.

Farewells, even between individuals only professionally acquainted, take entirely too long. Today in particular, Vlad is itching to be away, intensely aware of how much time the tour has taken from his day. He has nothing else scheduled. No meetings, not even a business meal. Still—still.

Finally freed from duty, Vlad’s chauffer drives him back from Axion to the hotel he’s staying in, the nicest available in neighboring Elmerton. He chose deliberately not to stay within Amity Park proper. It would have felt… too much, too quickly. Stepping into the mouth of a beast before he’d propped open its jaw.

Vlad is left at the valet. From there, he very calmly enters the building, and passes through the lobby, and waits at the elevator, and ascends to the third floor, and walks down the hall to his room, and swipes his key card, and enters, and turns on the lights, and shuts the door behind him. Aware of how thin hotel walls are, Vlad very calmly crosses the room, and eases himself face-first onto the hotel bed, and puts a pillow over his head, and does not scream. He does not scream.

Perhaps he should have allowed his therapists, those years ago, to instill in him some kind of coping mechanism. He has no idea how to do this. He has no plan. He is here for lack of self-control. He is here—for what? A true confrontation? Closure? To reexamine, to convince himself he was seeing things at the reunion, that they are human, that they are not like him? He is breathing through his obsessive agony, at such a loss, determined halfway to violence, the other half complete, utter uncertainty. Since the reunion he has been gasping for breath. Vlad is not screaming.

He is not screaming.

 

Fentonworks is hideous.

Against his better judgement, Vlad had emerged from his pillow and requested his chauffer drop him off a block from the Fentons’, so that he might walk up the rest of the way, and use that time either to convince himself to flee or brace himself and continue. As such, he is treated to a fresh, in-person view of Fentonworks as he turns the corner, and seeing it, Vlad very nearly stops dead in the middle of the sidewalk.

“What on Earth…?” The building is a townhouse, brick and sturdy, with room in the alley at its left to park vehicles. Its front stoop is well-tread, the sidewalk before it unweeded but without cracks, and atop the roof rests a truly gargantuan, ovular, metal… structure. Not to mention the enormous, neon-lit sign attached to the building’s front, which would not look out of place on Broadway. It’s a nightmare. It’s an eyesore. It is so completely Jack and Maddie Fenton that Vlad is thrust halfway back to college, firmly shutting down their plans to deck out their clubroom in décor so hideous anyone would have thought a bomb had gone off.

Honestly. Vlad knew from his monitoring that Fentonworks was something of a landmark in Amity, but he had not seen any pictures. He did not imagine this.

The absurdity of it is almost enough to make Vlad want to barge in without knocking and demand what the hell they’re thinking, raising children in a home practically designed to draw bullying. And then—oh. Here he is on the front steps.

It is impolite to linger too long in a doorway. Without consciously deciding to, through muscle memory alone, Vlad raises his arm and knocks.

The building emits a low electrical hum. This, and the brick, make it difficult to hear anything from inside, but Vlad thinks he can hear a distant “Coming!” and hurried footsteps, and suddenly his heart is in his throat and his nails are nearly piercing his palms—what is he doing here?—how can he escape—?

The door opens. Standing within, mouth open and poised to speak, is Daniel, who jumps slightly and stops in surprise when he registers who is at the door. Expecting someone else, then. Good to know the boy has friends he’s willing to invite to this circus tent.

“Unc—uh, Vlad! Hi.”

“Hello, Daniel. A pleasure to see you.” He ignores the near-slip and smiles as non-threateningly as he is emotionally capable of. Daniel doesn’t seem particularly afraid, so Vlad takes it he looks normal enough.

“Right, you too. I guess you’re here to see my parents? I didn’t know we were having you over…”

“Ah—yes, my apologies; I didn’t call ahead. I’m in town on business; I just wanted to drop by.”

“Oh. Okay, well, you can come in.” Daniel opens the door all the way for him and steps back. His eyes on Vlad, the man allows himself only a millisecond of hesitation before etiquette has him stepping so unceremoniously through the door.

Vlad’s eyes dart all over, drinking in the scenery. The ground floor of Fentonworks appears unremarkable: to the right is the family room, which extends into an open-concept kitchen and dining room. Directly ahead of him is a short hallway to the back door, along it a few more doors, which he assumes are either closets or bathrooms—and one, of course, must be access to the basement. He can feel the portal’s resonance even from here. To the left are stairs leading to the second floor, and along that wall Vlad sees family photos and school pictures hung up, as well as one old, framed thing that has Jack and Maddie and himself—he looks away. Despite its exterior, Fentonworks does not appear to be an active business. It’s just a home, so simply lived in.

“Mom and Dad should be in the basement. You can—” Daniel stops, then looks him over. “Actually, wait here. I’ll get them. People aren’t supposed to go downstairs without protection on.”

Daniel’s off like a shot, which means, thankfully, that he doesn’t see Vlad twitch, or his eyes bug slightly as he watches the child open a closet, fish out a hazmat suit, and hastily put it on before disappearing downstairs. How many times, in college, did he see Maddie and Jack so brazenly ignore PPE requirements? He wonders—was it Vlad’s accident that made them change, or their own?

His palm is bleeding. Vlad unclenches his fists and breathes as the wounds close up.

All too quickly there is the sound of feet on the stairs again. Up comes Daniel, who clumsily starts to peel off his hazmat, and right behind him, so simply, so damningly, appear Maddie and Jack.

“V-Man!” Jack exclaims, pulling his goggles from his eyes and beaming. “You should have told us you were coming by!” Behind him, Maddie removes her own goggles, looking at Vlad bemusedly.

“This is a surprise,” she says. Her voice sounds like it wants to be warm but isn’t quite sure yet, and Vlad starts at how much, for an instant, he wants to coax her into that warmth. Memories of college assault him. He is so angry—but, god, he is so lonely too—

“Sorry to drop in like this,” he says, looking between them, echoing what he’d already told Daniel. “I’m in Amity Park on business and thought it would only be impolite to leave without saying hello.”

“Too right.” Jack grins. “You should stay for dinner.”

A flare of alarm goes through him. No—no, he did not prepare for that—he can’t—

“Yes,” Maddie agrees. “That’s a wonderful idea. It’s around that time, and Jack and I need a break anyway. You can tell us about the business that brought you here.”

“Well, I—” Vlad doesn’t know what he’s going to say. He’s cut off by a glaring noise that reverberates through the entire house, which, despite himself, makes Vlad start.

Daniel, down the hall and busy putting away his hazmat, practically throws the suit back into the closet. “I’ve got it!” he calls, already half-jogging toward the front door, and Vlad processes that the air siren was their doorbell half a second before the door is opening again and two extra teenagers are making noise. Daniel greets his friends excitedly, Vlad’s presence all but forgotten, though the friends in question shoot him curious looks as Daniel leads them up the stairs.

Maddie waves them down as they pass by. “Oh, Sam, Tucker—we’re about to make dinner, would you like to sit down with us?”

Two distinct shadows pass over the children’s faces. The boy, Tucker, wears a face that is rapidly descending toward nausea. The girl, Sam, nudges him, then calls back down: “We were actually thinking of going to the Nasty Burger to eat, if that’s okay?” Nasty Burger?

“Oh, sure, as long as Danny is back before curfew. Danny—ask your sister if she wants to go, too.”

Daniel groans, but mutters that he will, and then the children disappear up the landing. Distantly, Vlad can hear a begrudging knock and call—the boy asking Jasmine, as promised.

“Come here,” Maddie says, and suddenly Vlad is being led into the kitchen, following after his hosts for politeness. “Let’s see… what do we have?” She motions for Vlad to sit at the dining room table, turning away thoughtlessly to open the refrigerator and search inside. Jack pulls out a chair of his own and sits down next to Vlad, opening a conversation, one entirely too bright for the moment, for all the suddenness of this.

Vlad knows the Fentons, but for all that he knows them, he cannot comprehend them. Why did they leave him alone all those years ago? Why did they let him rebuild their rapport at the reunion? Why now do they invite him into their home so casually, like nothing, like the years haven’t passed, like they still know him? He cannot do this. What is he here for, after all? What has he ever wanted from them that matters? An apology? Vengeance? To kill them as they killed him? He is too late! They have done that for him! They have enacted their own sick penance, far away from him, without satisfaction, without catharsis. They are already dead. What more can he ask of them? What more can be fixed or changed or murdered?

“Vlad?”

“Hm?” A momentary lapse in expression. Curses.

“You alright?”

“Of course. Although I must say, it is strange sitting down with you, after so long. I’m getting déjà vu.” He chuckles.

Jack smiles, a bitter curl to it. “I get what you mean. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” He raps his knuckles on the table. “Ah, but let’s not bring that up now. You didn’t drop by for all that.”

Didn’t he, though? Didn’t he? Is that not the only thing he has wanted for twenty long, anguished years?

Vlad says nothing, just returns Jack’s half-smile and averts his eyes. “So, Jack—should I be worried, staying for dinner? Is it too much to hope that either of your cooking has gotten any better since we dormed together?” He pushes forward a chipper tone. He rights the conversation. He wonders, in the back of his mind, with the parts of himself that are not on autopilot, what the hell he is doing, allowing this to go on. In the back of his mind, he holds at bay the bubbling, roaring thing, the obsession, that which wishes violence beyond all measure.

Constantly, unendingly, Vlad is holding himself back from teetering off of a precipice without return. What is he resisting for? Why shouldn’t he tip forward—why shouldn’t he tear them both to pieces? At least like this he knows he can ensure they will never come back. The core and heart nestle close enough to be torn out together in one motion.

Jack laughs, the skin around his eyes crinkling with amusement. “I don’t know if I’m the one you want to ask, when we’ve been fixing each other meals this entire time. We’re probably immune to it by now.”

“Perhaps I should be joining the children for fast food, then,” Vlad says, posing as if to stand and flee the kitchen, and Jack smiles. And Vlad—he just—he can’t take it. Humanity and ghosthood were never meant to coincide. He cannot reconcile this: his old college fondness rearing its head, the twenty years’ hurt hanging on his shoulders, the monster they made him, begging him to do something drastic.

Vlad is running on loop. He has been chasing the same questions and aches around and around within himself for twenty years, and after the reunion, that loop has only grown tighter. He had intended to break it, that weekend. He intended to finally, finally put to rest his compounded misery. Whether that meant murder or just an apology, Vlad didn’t know, didn’t even care—he is long beyond personally connecting with other people—and yet! And yet again Jack and Maddie Fenton, in their clumsiness, chased him into himself! All his plans—so tenuously laid, he sees now—upended. And he cannot right himself. He is moving on instinct alone. He is here. Now what?

Knowing what to look for now, it is so simple to take note of their ectosignatures: the barest hum in his perception, not a sound but a sensation that rings through the very edge of his core, the slightest greeting, so familiar to his own frequency he had not noticed it; had mistaken it, in fact, for himself.

Three aberrations of man walk into a kitchen. Now what?

 

When Vlad leaves Fentonworks that evening, he does so in carefully controlled motions, with his conscious mind in the backseat. Within him is a pulsing mass, a burning thing, kept at bay only by his distance. He cannot be completely here. He is not capable of that.

Vlad is stepping toward the car waiting for him on the street. From the doorway, Jack calls down to him: “You’ll be in Amity for Axion plenty, right? Swing by again soon! We can really sit down to talk.”

He contorts his face into constructed hope. “I’d like that. Until then.” He raises a hand to wave. Jack, so free with his joy, grins and returns the gesture. Vlad gets into the back of the car. The door to Fentonworks shuts. Vlad does not release himself yet.

“To the hotel,” he instructs the driver. The car leans forward into motion. Good. They are moving; it is only minutes until Vlad no longer has to be poised; it is only seconds until Fentonworks is no longer visible.

For a few minutes, the ride is silent and uneventful, and he begins to calm, preparing to go over the day in his head, reorder things until they make sense—and then there is light.

Out the left windows, brightening the darkening eve, Vlad’s gaze is arrested by the unmistakable flashes of ecto-energy that characterize a ghost fight. Simultaneously, the minor radar watch on his wrist begins beeping loudly, the car just now close enough for the ghosts to be within range. Vlad knows Amity Park is an ectoplasmic hot spot. He knows that Maddie and Jack, with their portal, have only allowed ghosts an even easier time slipping between worlds. He knows that this fight could be anyone—but, still, he nearly presses himself to the window’s glass to look.

Above the buildings, hovering, like a sun against the blue evening, is a ghost in orange hazmat. Her blue hair floats around the giddy smile that stretches her face, that Vlad can see even in profile. She watches with rapt attention the conflict in front of her: a weak ectopus against another ghost, this one in blue hazmat, his hair orange, his wobbly ectoblasts sending scatterings of light across the buildings.

They are unmistakable. They are dead.

In the rearview mirror, Vlad can see his driver’s face, tense, committed to the road and ignoring what, to them, must seem like some ghastly lightshow. The car moves on. The fight is left behind. Vlad, still deep within himself, is frozen against the glass, eyes burned with their radiance, staring at the echoed space they left.

 

Vlad stays in Elmerton longer than planned.

He has no rational reason for it. Of course, he has very little rational reason for anything he does, these days, given his preoccupation with Jack and Maddie Fenton. He still does not know how to approach the situation. He does not even know what he wants from the situation, nor does he think he ever did. All Vlad wanted in the first place was for it to stop, and what “it” is, he can’t define—only that it has been intensifying ever since the accident. Daily, he begs to crawl out of his own skin.

He hates them. He misses them. Crouching at the edge of Amity Park’s thin veil, he teeters toward and away from them, wanting, wanting.

Suffice to say, Axion Labs finds itself lousy with Vlad Masters as the weeks pass. He sticks his nose into everything they’ll let him, and cannibalizes an office to do his own work in when they won’t. It is compromise—Axion is Amity Park, but it is not the Fentons. With this, Vlad can appease the thing inside him that’s begging, and in the meantime can reorient: he can determine what he is here for, what he is seeking. He will not cow to the longing rage within him; he will not kneel unprepared at the Fentons’ feet. Instinct would make a fool of him.

For a few days, it even works.

A late afternoon those days later, Vlad is in ghost form sitting contemplatively on a rooftop when he sees them again. In an instant all thought is dashed from him, and again he is teetering—again he is this close to rushing forward, to putting his hands at their throats.

He manages to remain seated. A few blocks away, Jack and Maddie’s ghosts dart after the wisp of a dog, attempting—it seems—to capture it, and only causing more ruckus than it would have on its own. Vlad winces, watching them. With every motion they betray their youth—with every wobbly ectoblast and clumsy flight, they remind Vlad of being new, being clueless and weak and filled with the ghostly rush of the fight. Ghosts are competitive by nature; youth is made of smacking and being smacked down.

Vlad averts his gaze, but their afterimages haunt him. He can’t rid his mind of the sight: both Maddie and Jack flying as though they still bow to gravity. Neither of them yet understand weightlessness, he can see. They pretend that they are human still, that their bodies are filled with bones and breath and blood. Gravity does not notice them—still, they expect it to tug them to fall.

 

For months, the precipice has tempted Vlad. For years. Now, indulging himself in Amity Park, the objects of his obsession so nearby, it was only ever a matter of time until he fell. Every second was borrowed—every moment without losing balance a miracle.

Vlad arrives again, this time invited, to Fentonworks, feeling as though he already has one foot over the edge. Jack had promised next time they were together they would “really talk,” and here Vlad is again on their doorstep. Here he is, raising his hand to knock. Vlad had not flinched from Jack’s implication then—why would he? This is what he wanted! This is what for twenty years he has desperately sought!—but he hesitates, just slightly, his knuckles a centimeter from the wood. He feels like an intruder even as he knocks.

“Vlad!” It is Jack who opens the door for him, beaming. For him, joy is thoughtless. “Come in—it’s just us tonight. Jazz took Danny and his friends out to a movie.”

“Thank you for having me.” He puts on a smile. He steps through the door, and slows somewhat in surprise. “What smells so good?”

Jack grins, sheepish. “Takeout, actually. Maddie figured that, for tonight, the least we could do is offer you edible food.” He turns to lead Vlad inside. “It’s Chinese. You still like chicken lo mein, right?”

“Forever a guilty pleasure.” Vlad follows Jack toward the kitchen. “I’m surprised you remembered.”

“You too? Mads almost didn’t believe me.”

Vlad shoots him a look. “With the amount of things you misremembered in college, including both of our birthdays, I don’t blame her.”

Jack snorts. “Harsh. But I get it.” In the kitchen, the table is already set. Maddie isn’t here—upstairs, perhaps? “I usually remember stuff like this, though. Everything that doesn’t actually matter.”

The words scrape, and Vlad can only hum his acknowledgement. Jack uses the lull to retrieve three wine glasses from a cabinet, setting them each on the table. He looks to Vlad. “Any preference? We have red or white, though I can’t make any promises about quality.”

“Red.” Vlad feels brief relief when Jack’s eyes move off him to retrieve the bottle. “I assure you, I have no expectations. You can only exceed.”

Jack pours generously, and leaves the bottle on the table once he finishes the last glass. “Maddie’ll be down any second. She just got back with the food a few minutes ahead of you, so she’s still freshening up.” He drums his fingers on the table. “Anything else I can get for you before we eat? Water?”

“No, thank you. I’m alright.”

Thankfully, it’s only a moment or two of silence before there are footsteps on the stairs, and Vlad steps into the sitting room again to greet Maddie as she comes down.

“Vlad! Sorry, I meant to be ready when you got here.”

“It’s no trouble,” Vlad says. “Thank you for inviting me.”

“Please,” she dismisses his thanks with a wave of her hand. “This has been a long time coming.”

She looks lovely. Casual, but thoughtfully dressed. Jack, too; they’ve both put effort into this. Vlad is here in slightly-more-formal-than business casual, and he almost feels overdressed. Not that he ever dresses down, but it’s hard to forget these people have seen him in pajamas. He digs his nails into his palms and focuses on the present. Nothing will be real until someone says it.

For a while, they do talk about nothings. Jack and Maddie elaborate together on some of the tech they’re working on—capture-focused rather than strict weaponry, Vlad notes and files away—and Vlad asks apt questions. They beg details of Axion’s development processes, and he plays coy, not at liberty to say. He shares details about the years, and coaxes some from them in turn. Jack admits Jasmine is his favorite child, to which Maddie faux-gasps and smacks him, but admits much the same about Daniel. Vlad asks about the children. Eager to share, Maddie retrieves a photo album to take him on a tour of. Jack points out a picture of Jasmine, age eight, swamped in one of his enormous shirts. Vlad asks for the story behind a photo of Daniel and what must be his friend Tucker, both about five, crying in a waiting room. Tucker needed a normal check-up, apparently, and was so terrified that Daniel begged to go with him for support. When Tucker burst into tears, Daniel started crying along with him.

“Danny’s always been a sweet boy like that,” Maddie says with a smile. “He’s very empathetic. A little oblivious, sometimes, when it comes to what people want, but if there’s ever a person who needs help or feels sad, he’s there.” She shares a knowing glance with Jack. “If only that stretched to his love life.”

“Love life? He’s only fourteen,” Vlad says, not judgmentally.

“He and his friend Sam have it bad for each other,” Jack explains. “But we don’t think either of them have realized it yet.”

“Here’s hoping they figure it out.”

“Cheers to that!” Jack says, lifting his glass. Maddie follows suit and, bemused, Vlad raises his own. The three of them meet in the middle with a short clink.

“You know, I think Jazz might be worse than Danny?” Jack says to Maddie.

“Really?”

“Yeah. You remember that Spike kid she used to try to do, like, amateur therapy for? Pretty sure the only reason he went along with it is that he was whipped.”

“Oh, god, that makes so much sense.” Maddie laughs, bringing a hand to her mouth. “That poor boy.”

“She tried to do amateur therapy for someone?” Vlad asks, unable to keep the incredulity out of his voice.

“Yes!” Jack says loudly, slapping the table, and Maddie cackles harder. “She’d do it to us, too!”

“Christ—one time she physically dragged us out of the lab to force us to all sit down and play cards together. We didn’t do enough family bonding, apparently.” Maddie shakes her head, a fond smile on her face. “She had a point—we’d been doing a lot of work on the portal at the time—but, god, the way she went about it? It felt like an intervention.”

“She tries to act like an adult, but sometimes she’s so childish. It’s cute.” Jack pokes the remains of his dinner around on his plate. “Nice to see the reminder that she still has growing to do, you know?”

Maddie nods profusely. “You know, Vlad, most of the time it feels like we’re barely out of college. And then I look at Jazz and realize she only has a year to go before we’re working on her applications.” She runs a pensive finger around the rim of her glass.

Vlad closes his mouth. He is so relieved she isn’t looking at him, and more so when Jack speaks up.

“I wonder if we should encourage her to apply to UW-Madison,” he says. “The psych program there is good, isn’t it?”

“The out-of-state tuition, though,” Maddie reminds him.

“God, I know,” Jack groans. “Let’s put down Vlad’s address for her, cheat the system.”

“I’m decently sure they have systems in place to prevent just that sort of lie,” Vlad says carefully.

“Oh, but we have basis for it,” Jack says seriously.

“Jack—” Maddie tries to interrupt.

“You’re down as both the kids’ godfather, so they’d probably let that slide, right?”

Maddie shoots Vlad a tense glance before saying, “I think it has to do with where she went to school in the years leading up to her application. Besides, that doesn’t have any actual legal basis.”

“Darn.”

“I’m their what?”

Both Maddie and Jack quickly turn to look at him. That question had come out sharper than he’d intended—but he’s just glad it hadn’t been a bark. He’d barely restrained that. He’d barely been restraining himself this entire night.

They’re silent a beat too long.

“I didn’t know you two had converted,” Vlad says, stiffly.

“Oh, we—well, we haven’t,” Maddie says, stumbling over the words.

“No, no. Just, my family’s always been big on tradition, you remember? We never intended to go through with baptism or anything,” Jack fills in.

“It was to appease Jack’s family, mostly, but we both thought it was a nice idea to… you know, have someone in mind to take care of Danny and Jazz,” Maddie explains quickly, “if something happened.”

Vlad stares. In his lap, his hands clench and unclench.

Jack, uncomfortable with the silence, barrels on. “Maddie’s sister has never been good with kids. And my family—well, it’s tense at the best of times. Not the kind of people I want Jazz and Dann-o growing up with, right?”

“Of course.” Vlad manages, expression tight. “I would never turn them away. But, pray tell, when were either of you planning on telling me this?”

Their godfather? When Jasmine was born, Vlad was still hospitalized. He could barely walk without falling through the floors, was only able to sleep atop his bed once he’d exhausted himself—there was no recovery in sight. And all that time he never heard from them. Neither Jack nor Maddie arrived at his door, nor did they call; all he ever received was an impersonal “Happy Graduation!” card, six months after the accident. Hah! As if he had graduated in any way that truly mattered. The diploma bestowed on him by UW-Madison was a thing of pity. He was out for his entire final semester with what he later learned was a bad case of death.

They left him there. Vlad had been certain he wasn’t even a thought in their minds.

What is he supposed to do with this? With the knowledge that they had thought of him—enough to entrust some hypothetical future version of him with their children?

Vlad barely sucks back a bitter laugh, instead sipping his wine and averting his gaze from theirs. He can practically feel the glance that they exchange. After a moment, it’s Jack who speaks.

“Listen, Vlad… we know we did you wrong,” he starts. “We both regret never coming to visit. It… there’s no excuse, I know. We were stupid. But we’ve wanted to apologize to you, properly.”

“Yes—for all of it. For hurting you in the first place, and for abandoning you afterwards,” Maddie says. They both sound so sad. “We’ve missed you ever since.”

Vlad looks back up. He stares at them, his face blank. They’re so painfully earnest. They lay it out so simply. I’m sorry, they say, with honesty, and what is Vlad supposed to do with that? What is he supposed to do with any of this? The same questions turn over and over within him. He feels half nausea and half rage, no personhood left. This is what he wanted, isn’t it? At least partially? He wanted them to apologize. Why does this feel so much worse?

He can’t help it. He laughs. It is a terrible sound.

“Really?” he says eventually, voice flat. “You’re sorry.” Both of them flinch at his tone.

“Yes, we are—” Maddie says, intensely.

“We feel awful—” Jack overlaps with her.

“You don’t even know what you’re sorry for.” He bites the words out. He can’t keep the rage out of them. The room begins to fill with it: his twenty-years suffering. He can’t stop it. He doesn’t want to. He watches the hairs raise on their arms and doesn’t bother to make his face into anything it isn’t.

“Vlad…” Maddie murmurs.

He clenches one hand on the edge of the table. His nails dig into it enough to leave shallow gouges, and the noise draws both Maddie and Jack’s gazes, their apprehension briefly giving way to confusion.

“You never showed up,” Vlad goes on. Their attention is on him again. It’s intoxicating and awful, both sets of eyes. He has them undivided. “You don’t know what the proto-portal did to me. You don’t know how long, how much I suffered.” His voice is icy. He isn’t shouting, yet, but he will. He can feel it rising in his throat. “Do you know how long I was hospitalized?”

Neither of them speak, but he can wait. He stares them down until Maddie, small, says: “No.”

“Six years.”

Jack raises a hand to his mouth. Maddie is tearing up. It’s almost funny—for all that Vlad has wanted them to know, to see him, he had not thought about this until this moment. He hadn’t registered—and oh, it is registering now—that they wouldn’t have even known this. That, for all they knew, he had recovered in time for his birthday that summer.

“Vlad, I—” Jack starts to say, but he has no words to follow it.

Suddenly, Vlad feels intense jealousy. It had taken those six years for his body to accept ghosthood, for Plasmius to stop poisoning his human organs. Jack and Maddie are newborns—Jack and Maddie should be bedridden, and yet here they are, hale and whole, delightedly chasing down dead things in their spare time. It is due to some difference in the portals, in their deaths, Vlad is sure, but that doesn’t stop the violent envy that rises in him, that erupts from his throat in a half-sob. He bends forward over the table, pushes a hand through his hair, thoughtless of the neat ponytail he’d tucked it into. Across from him sit his killers, who have perfected half-death. He is sick with it.

“You don’t know!” He cries out, sitting back up, glaring at them. Yes, there’s the shouting. “You—hah, have missed me, idly regretted leaving me back then, but you don’t even know what it meant! You don’t know what you turned me into!”

He stands, his chair scraping out behind him. Across from him, still sitting, Jack and Maddie stare with horror. He reaches for his wine and downs the rest in one gulp. The room lists—or he does?—not at all with the drink, but rather with his own devastation. His obsession makes his limbs buzz. He wants halfway to hurt them, but not yet; he has not driven the nail far enough in. They still don’t know. They still don’t see.

He stares at them, his eyes wide. Jack almost looks scared. Good. Good!

“Did you never wonder?” he growls. “After you killed yourselves, did you not think back and wonder how you murdered me in the same way?”

Maddie does start crying now. Both of them wear the same awful looks, this time of realization. Good. Good. Why isn’t it satisfying enough? Why is there still a hole in him?

Vlad doesn’t know when he properly died. All he knows on that front is that, upon his first true transformation, he wore his hospital gown, the colors inverted. His hair, a premature gray when human, hung so limply black. He created Plasmius’ usual attire later—no ghost would be intimidated by a man in a gown—but those clothes take energy to manifest. When he is tired, he returns to that pitiful state. It is this part of himself he wants to show them. Staring them down, seeing them understand, but not believe, he reaches for that black spark—

From the foyer, they hear the front door open.

“We’re home!” Jasmine calls. She and Daniel make light conversation as they enter. Vlad hears keys put down on a table, hears footsteps on stairs. No one makes for the kitchen, thankfully. Vlad stares at Maddie and Jack.

They stare back.

The rage retreats. It does not subside; he is not sated. But they are not alone anymore. The children are as of yet free from Jack and Maddie’s idiocy, and he will not do this to them. He will not give them this burden to bear, not when they have so far evaded it. Not when he would give anything, anything, to have never grown interested in ectobiology at all.

Carefully, Vlad repackages himself. He swallows the rage. He controls his voice. He blanks his face. He reaches down, puts his fork and knife on his plate, and then picks it and his wine glass up and brings them to the sink. Jack and Maddie’s gazes follow him as he goes.

He breathes. He breathes.

Vlad turns around, and says, “Thank you for dinner.” And he walks out of the kitchen, and out of their home.

Neither of them try to stop him. Neither of them follow.

Inside him, something old begins to crack.

 

Green streaks the rooftops, and Vlad is still in Amity Park.

The large, ferret-like ghost he had just been engaged with darts away, through one of the many slivers in Amity that lead to the Realms. There are microfractures all over the city; someone flexible enough, or desperate enough, could slip through any one of them. Behind Vlad, an exhausted worker sweeps up the shattered glass of their storefront, the “BURNER RECORDS” decal in now-unrecognizable pieces.

Two days have passed since the dinner. Vlad had checked out of his hotel room in Elmerton altogether that night, packed his bags, sent his driver away with them and the instruction to ship them home. He had every intention of returning to Wisconsin, damn the Fentons, had scheduled his flight and all. And yet, as if in stasis, here he has remained.

Now that he has returned to them, of course, of course, he has found he cannot leave. All those twenty years were only a wide orbit. By his own hand, at the reunion, he had tilted out of alignment, and since then his orbit has been tightening. Since that weekend, he has been arcing toward their suns.

Earth’s sun crests the horizon. Amity Park is lit up gold, and the slivers sharply shine, their half-there green glittering with the light, the Realms leaking through, peering in. This place is haunted. It is an otherwise unremarkable midwest American city, and Vlad tastes its air, its ectoplasm. Every corner is bright. It is the belly of a great beast, and Vlad has walked willingly inside. It cradles the worst things that ever happened to him. It killed the worst things that ever happened to him, and brought them back to life.

The city, behemoth, eventually gives way to the setting sun and welcomes in the dark. Amity Park is lit up green, the slivers betraying themselves, and most humans won’t notice the glow but will still blink and wait for something missing when they leave Amity and the dark elsewhere is only dark. Within the city limits, the night is green electric, and within, Vlad lets his mouth hang just slightly open to taste it, allowing the distraction to take him.

Then, nearby, two giddy figures shoot up from between buildings like arrows. Vlad’s breath catches.

Jack and Maddie’s ghosts crest the rooftops, and come to a stuttered halt in their ascent. In Maddie’s hands, Vlad spies some device—not a weapon, but a flat, rectangular thing with a screen and antennae—that the two of them are focusing on. Jack hovers over Maddie’s shoulder, pointing and murmuring as her face contorts with familiar frustration. Vlad knows that look; something that should be working isn’t. As Maddie and Jack work the problem, they drift slightly in the air, and Vlad almost wants to avert his gaze. Only young ghosts drift like that. Witnessing them, Vlad feels as if he is a babysitter, and the toddlers he watches over have walked for the first time, their mother off at work.

Maddie’s face clears. She twists a knob on the edge of the screen, adjusts the antennae, and—oh. It is a radar. They are looking at him.

For a moment, Maddie smiles, an eager-for-a-fight sort of look common on young ghosts. She reaches for an ectogun at her hip. Jack starts forward beside her—and then both of them, at the same moment, stop. Both their faces fall. They look at him, just look, and Vlad knows what they have realized—or, knows what they now suspect. At this distance, there is still opportunity for denial. With his blue skin, and red eyes, and unfamiliar clothing, there is still wide enough a margin of error.

The ghostly part of Vlad’s psyche nudges an idea forth.

Vlad steps forward. The Fentons float back some, wary. He raises a hand, and, before they can blink, fires off a pink ectoblast that scatters at their feet. They jerk back. They stare for a half-moment at the scorch on the roof, then back at him. They don’t move.

He fires another. Maddie floats forward, her hand twitching at her hip. Vlad floats back, hands alive with energy. Without words, he beckons: come get me.

It is difficult to say whether they lurch forward first, or he flies away. Either way, with the Fentons at his heels, Vlad feels an insane urge to laugh. He streaks forward over roofs. They give chase. He drops through the air, a stone falling into an alley; they overshoot it, and he waits a beat as they course-correct, allows them to keep him in their sights. They give chase. He runs, flies, and clumsily behind him they follow. He turns intangible and cuts through a closed shop. Maddie goes over and Jack goes around, and he hovers on the other side, darts away again when Jack sees him. He uses the same trick again: intangibility takes him into an abandoned duplex, and this time they follow him inside, slipping through the walls with unease on their faces. From one living room he leads them upstairs. From a bedroom he crosses to the other side. From there, he takes them up; they burst out into the night sky, and Vlad streaks away again. They give chase. They are young; they overshoot every sharp turn he takes, swing wide when he doubles back, shudder when he has them walk through walls. But they follow. And something in his core clenches. No—something in his core releases. They are the ones chasing him. He is the one leading.

Maddie finds the guts to shoot at him first. He takes the change in stride, glancing over his shoulder, seeing in her face not violence but a question, and he answers it for her: he turns over to face them, still moving away, and fires back a response that just misses her ear. She makes a face that’s something like a grin and grimace both. In all the times he’s watched her before now, she has stopped moving in order to take aim. Now, following him, she stows her ectogun and reaches her arms forward and finds a way to fire in motion.

Her ectoblasts fly wide and wobbly. Jack’s join them, similarly juvenile. Vlad ducks and evades and flies forward, and they give chase. They follow. The night around them is alive and this is partial catharsis. What was scattered and senseless at the reunion is being reordered. They collide and arc away and collide again; at each meeting, another piece slides into place.

Vlad darts into the shadow of an alley. He slips into invisibility and waits for them to careen after him.

They slide to a halt, hazmat touching down on the damp concrete. Maddie’s radar, hanging on her other hip, beeps insistently—he is here. But where? They each cast one wary glance around. Then Vlad allows his invisibility to drop, and he rushes forward.

It is trivial to slam Jack against the wall and knock Maddie into the corner of the alley and the chain-link fence at the back of it. With his arm bent against Jack’s collar and one hand burning pink, pointed at Maddie, the three of them freeze.

Beneath his forearm, Jack breathes quick and shallow, and again Vlad wants to laugh. They are newborns yet. They’re still breathing.

A beat.

“Look at yourselves,” Vlad says. “Sloppy.”

They both flinch at the sound of his voice. He’s looking at Jack when he says it, and sees his eyes soften with guilt.

“So it is you?” Maddie asks quietly. When Vlad glances at her, her gaze is darting all over him.

After a moment, he lowers both arms, stepping away from Jack so that he can see them both at once. There they are again, with that kicked-puppy look. Neither of them show guilt like he wants them to.

He thinks of just saying “Yes.” He thinks of flying away and not responding at all. Instead, he returns to that impulse of two nights ago, to that old desire to make them see.

Changing one’s form can be as unsettling or as subtle as is necessary. Ghosts’ bodies are malleable in that regard—ectoplasm is flexible, willing. Vlad’s body will move as dramatically as he makes it, and he makes it: before them, he wills his cloak to swish forward, obscuring him in its arc—and as it falls, he lets himself settle, retreat back into his death-garb. It is the easiest body to wear, even including his human one. It is also the most humiliating. And, to the two people before him, the most horrifying.

His black hair is limp, perpetually greasy-looking. His hospital gown, darkly inverted, hangs off his skinny form, swamping him. He is barefoot. His face is marred with ecto-acne—hah! What a juvenile name for the open sores, the lesions perpetually infected, which made his face look like a raw steak, which kept him from looking at himself in the mirror. They’re green on the inside now. Radioactive steak, he supposes. Vlad knows what he looks like: pathetic, sickly, mutilated. With his blue skin, like some freak experiment shut away too long.

This is what they did to him. This is what he has always wanted them to see.

“Oh, Vladdy,” Jack gasps. The moniker causes a nauseating flip in Vlad’s stomach.

Maddie catches on quickly. “How… how long did it take?” To die, she leaves unsaid.

Vlad meets her eyes coldly. “Six years. Weren’t you listening?”

The night yawns. Amity Park slowly settles, uncaring of the confrontation happening in this thin alleyway. It accommodates far more ghosts passing through than these three, after all.

“I’m so sorry,” Jack says. “We should have…” He trails off. Yes—they should have lots of things.

“But you didn’t,” Vlad replies flatly, and they have the decency to look chastised.

He changes shape again. He banishes his deathmarks. He returns himself to steel. Another moment passes where they only watch each other.

“You really gave us the runaround there, Vlad.” Jack says quietly.

Vlad scoffs. “With you two bumbling about like a pair of ducklings, it wasn’t hard.”

Before they can say anything else, he backs up. The enormity of this night, and the one past, is gathering in his throat. They know now. They know, and their guilt is filling the air, thick enough to strangle, and he can’t endure it.

“Vlad—” Maddie calls, but he is already going.

He moves away. He turns invisible. He darts off, and behind him, he hears the cricket-chirp of night and Maddie’s radar, growing quieter.

 

Crack.

 

In the morning, after Vlad had spent the night staring hopelessly out into the dark, the first thing he does is go to the train station just outside Amity Park.

Trains begin running far earlier in the morning than any chauffer would pick up their phone, and Vlad needs that—he needs to be away, gone, needs, in the absence of a private car, a train compartment to himself that he can unravel in, something even the most expensive first-class plane ticket wouldn’t permit. In the station, Vlad beelines for the ticket booths, and he allows himself this tunnel vision. He cannot afford to focus on anything else. He must preserve this motion; he must leave before his traitorous body can stall his feet, before his mind and core can start screaming out again for the Fentons.

He is halfway across the marble floor when a voice calls his name, and a hand catches his arm.

The world stills as Vlad turns his head to find Maddie there. She is out of her hazmat, in plain clothes, her gaze resolute. She appears to carry no Fenton tech. Her hair is mussed, her eyes tired. Had she, like him, not slept?

He can’t speak.

“Please wait.” Her voice cracks slightly.

He says nothing. Around them, station workers and the few early travelers make a quiet racket as they begin the day. Maddie’s hand clenches slightly on his bicep.

“That was you last night,” she says. It is not a question, but she waits for his confirmation anyway.

“Yes.”

Her mouth twitches and she blinks quickly, as if holding her face back from crumpling. “You’re… like us.”

Fury slices through him. “I think you’ll find that you are like me.”

“Yes—yes. You’re right.”

Silence, again.

“Maddie, why are you here?”

She looks between his eyes. “We couldn’t just let you go like that, without…” She trails off. “Jack is out by the highway entrance now. We hoped one of us would catch you.”

There’s a pause. Vlad opens his mouth, but then in a rush Maddie keeps going. “We still haven’t talked, really talked, without anyone interrupting us, or one of us leaving. You haven’t explained… we want you to explain everything that happened. The things we don’t know. We want to listen.” Her hand clenches on his arm again. “Please come back to Fentonworks with me. Don’t leave like this, when we haven’t fixed anything.”

He shakes his head slowly. “What could you possibly say that would fix it?” He looks away from her, and then back. “I have tried—” He breaks off. Looks away again. If only he still felt like killing them. “What could you say?”

Maddie sighs. “I don’t know, Vlad. Just—let us try.” She keeps holding on to him, like he’ll disappear if she loosens her grip. He might. “Please.”

The burning thing in Vlad’s chest howls with it: that nameless desire for it to stop. Killed at the Fentons’ hands, Vlad, like any vengeful ghost, has been unable to shake them. He dogs their steps, watches them. He haunts their lives like they haunt his mind. He is obsessed with them. He is obsessed with what they once were to him, what they have done to him, what curdled in their wake. They hurt him. He is aching and he wants it to stop. He wants them to stop it. He wants them to fix their mistake.

He misses them. God, he misses them.

But he has tried to leave behind these feelings. He spent years of his life trying and failing to move on from the Fentons, to allow the past to remain the past. Always, he returned to observing them. Always, he has been teetering on the edge of that precipice: that which would bring him crashing horribly back into them. He is stuck. He is a record skipping, and the lyric that has replayed so many millions of times he is sick with it, is: You left me. And they have already apologized. And they have seen him in his death-clothes. And the only thing he feels is worse.

Maddie grips him tighter. He’s been silent for too long.

“You don’t have to forgive us,” she says quietly, eyes looking between his. “But please, at least explain what actually happened to you, so we know what we’re apologizing for.”

Her hand burns where it touches him, even through two layers of sleeves. For a moment longer, he is silent, just looking at her. He takes in the person she has become without him. He thinks, again, of leaving—and nearly shudders with the ragged reluctance that wells up in him at the idea.

“Fine,” he acquiesces, and Maddie slumps with relief.

 

Crack.

 

Against all odds, Vlad survives the tense car ride Maddie offers him as they return to Fentonworks.

She calls Jack on the way, and Vlad pretends not to hear the naked relief in Jack’s voice when Maddie explains she’d caught Vlad before he left. Vlad says nothing throughout, and Maddie doesn’t try to coax conversation from him. Perhaps she knows it would only end tersely. Perhaps she is feeling just as out of step. Either way, they are driving toward an unavoidable conversation.

Jack, insane driver that he is, beats them to the house. He is waiting on the doorstep for their arrival, and upon seeing Vlad step smoothly from Maddie’s passenger seat, he slumps just the same as she had in the station. Jack wears the same exhaustion on his face that she does. All three of them have had a sleepless night, it seems.

“Vlad…” Jack starts, but does not finish. Vlad looks between his eyes and thinks unwittingly of the man who had been his college roommate.

For a moment, the three of them simply stand there before Fentonworks, and let it all loom over them.

“Let’s get inside,” Maddie says eventually. Jack opens the door for them, and Vlad, with lead in his stomach and something at the back of his throat threatening to crawl out, follows them in.

All the lights are off. Fentonworks’ electric hum is as quiet as it might get. The house might be sleeping, were it not for the dawn light sneaking in through the windows—rather, it is only just waking up. A glance around betrays no sleepy teenagers. It’s eight o’clock already; they must be off at school.

Maddie and Jack fall into what appears to be an absentminded routine as Vlad shuts the door behind him. They each drop their respective keys near the door, in a dish that also houses what looks to be backup keys, a miniature flashlight, and a few stray mints. Maddie helps Jack out of the jacket he’d been wearing—no hazmat on him either—and hangs it up. Jack stretches. It’s a thoughtlessly intimate display, even as desperately aware of Vlad’s presence as they are. As Jack meets his eyes, a thousand returning-home moments fly through Vlad’s head. So many classes shared and returned to the dorm from. So many meals, and club meetings. Jack liked to flop down on his dorm bed, then, groaning as if exhausted, no matter the kind of day he’d had. Vlad’s eyes flick without his permission to the couch, imagining a Jack-shaped divot.

Perhaps taking his wandering gaze as a suggestion, Maddie murmurs a “Come on,” and leads them over to the sitting area. Jack takes a seat first, on the couch, and Vlad watches as Maddie moves automatically to sit beside him—and then looks at Vlad and pauses, before instead taking the armchair, leaving half the couch open for him. The Fenton unit breaks apart, and they are again three individuals. Vlad confronts a two-headed hydra no longer. Perhaps that’s even what she meant.

Vlad sits. His insides turn over on themselves. He leaves room for Jesus and more between himself and Jack, and the three of them become the vertices of a triangle. It still feels like an intervention.

There is silence.

Maddie exhales, eyebrows knitting together. “Hold on,” she mutters, and stands to disappear into the kitchen for a moment. Vlad and Jack are silent in her absence. When she returns, she carries with her an unopened bottle of wine and three glasses, held precariously together by their rims.

Vlad raises his eyebrows. “Five o’clock somewhere?”

“Something like that,” Maddie agrees. She pours three glasses and hands them off. Vlad pretends incredulity, but takes the glass she offers him. On some level, he doesn’t want to do this at all. And certainly not so early in the morning, without sleep—but at least, now, he doesn’t have to do it sober.

He takes a generous sip. The gentle burn fills his chest as it goes down. It’s a comforting weight, and Vlad allows himself a moment to close his eyes and feel it. Then he takes another, sets the glass on the coffee table in front of him, and braces himself.

Jack opens his mouth. A panicked thing slices through Vlad, brace useless, and he cuts Jack off.

“Tell me yours and I’ll tell you mine.” The offer escapes him, the only thing he can think to throw out in so short a moment. Anything to push it a little further off; he is not ready.

Maddie and Jack exchange a glance. Peculiarly, Vlad sees Maddie’s lip quirk up for half a second, sees some mirth in their eyes, and he—yes, he still knows them enough to determine this. The look they share is recognition. This offer of his has been made years ago, in inconsequent context, and yet with the same gravity—about family, getting to know each other, about childhood stories passed between them. Never has Vlad given himself up without something of equal value attained in return. They remember him. He sucks in a breath.

“Yeah, that’s only fair,” Jack says. He offers Vlad a quick, sort-of smile before turning to Maddie. She nods him on.

“It happened the day we were going to test the portal for the first time,” he starts. “Well—the hundred-and-first, really, but it was the first time we were convinced it would work. We were doing preparations, making sure everything was where it should be.

“Maddie was inside the portal frame. She was poking around behind the paneling where a few important connections were—power to the portal itself, the line for our bio-lock, the tripwire alarm that would catch any ghosts passing through, other stuff. Just checking on them, making sure the connections were stable, that no rats had gotten in. She called me over…”

Maddie fills in the gap. “It looked like something actually had gotten to the wires. One of them, the power to the portal, was frayed, maybe bitten.”

“I went in to look at it with her. I—at this point, all the power was supposed to be shut down, right, there weren’t supposed to be any currents—I reached in to touch the wire, to get a closer look at it. I must have pinched it just right.” Jack stops, gaze far away.

“I think we both must have tried to make sure the power was off,” Maddie says. She has her hands curled around her wine glass, leaning on her knees, looking small on the edge of the armchair. “One of us flipped it off and the other one came and flipped it on again. Neither of us were paying enough attention. We were just so excited that it all seemed to be coming together.” She frowns, eyebrows knit. “The only reason the portal hadn’t turned on in the first place was because the wire was frayed enough it wasn’t connecting. We assumed it was our fail-safes—of course, we both thought the other had implemented them, because we were…” She trails off. Vlad’s mind fills in the blank: arrogant, ignorant, sightless, hasty.

Jack reaches across the gap between the couch and the recliner to rub Maddie’s knee for a brief moment. He inhales, and then says: “The portal opened on top of us.”

For a moment, Vlad’s mind blanks.

His own accident—that cancer he has been beholden to for so long—was devastating. He was caught in the blast radius of an explosion.

The Fentons were the epicenter of an explosion.

Hah—no wonder they became with immediacy! It was that or obliteration. Had the Fentons been anyone else, or stood any further or closer together, they would be charred remains drifting in the Realms: a feast for the proto-ghosts to nibble on, whalefalls that sink into eternity and slowly disintegrate for lack of a floor to rest on. It was inevitable that Vlad made a ghost—ectoplasm is vicious, and adaptable, and he was infected by it—but it is luck, unimaginable luck, that the Fentons, both the Fentons, are sitting before him, capable of regret.

They take his blank look for rejection, and hurry to explain themselves further.

“We didn’t know what happened to us.” Maddie takes the lead. “Jack touched the wire, and for a moment it was all just light. And pain. And when we both could think again, we opened our eyes and we were there, beyond the portal. It was… we could hardly comprehend it.” At this, a touch of fervor comes into both of them, one that Vlad knows well.

“It was beautiful,” Jack murmurs, too quietly for a human to hear. But then, no one in the room is human.

“We were overwhelmed. We backpedaled through the portal again, and ended up back in the lab. That’s when we looked at each other, and realized what we’d become.” Maddie rubs her throat and takes a sip from her glass. “Sort of. We hadn’t seen any actual ghosts at that point, and for a while we tried to rationalize it as—as radiation, or something.”

“I got the picture first, when these two humanoid spooks came through on a motorcycle. They looked like us. And by that point we’d both started falling through the floors.” Jack huffs out a laugh without mirth. “It took Maddie longer to accept.” She nods and does not elaborate.

Vlad turns their words over in his mind. He drains the rest of his glass, and allows Jack to pour them each another.

“I’m surprised,” he says, because he cannot say anything else, because he is reeling, because automatic dinner party humor is all he can make spill out, “that you two didn’t get lost in the Realms. I’m sure Walker would have loved to slap cuffs on your wrists.”

Maddie and Jack both look to him sharply, suddenly intrigued. The heavy thing in the air recedes for a moment, as they both lean forward as the room becomes their shared club, and over top of them are superimposed the curious, young, wonderful things Vlad met twenty years ago.

“You’ve been there?” Maddie asks.

“How far in have you gone? I mean—what have you learned about the ecosystem, the physics—”

Vlad cuts them off. “You mean you haven’t explored yet?”

“It’s an entire dimension full of hostile entities, Vladdy, what do you mean we haven’t explored yet, of course we haven’t—!”

“I mean, it’s incredibly dangerous—”

“Alright.” Vlad stops them, both hands raised and fingers splayed, bracing his wine glass in one hand with his pointer and thumb. He feels incredulous. “So you two know absolutely nothing about the culture of which you are now part. Wonderful.” He shakes his head slightly, an aborted motion, and downs a mouthful of wine, letting the sensation of it soften his disbelief.

“Ghosts are unified enough to form culture?” Maddie asks.

Vlad just stares at them.

They are—they are children. They are still too human to lean into ghosthood, to know it, to walk among it like he can. They are now ghost enough to dart through the city like predators. They, like him, walk the line between death and life, but keep plunging down toward either side, unable to keep their balance. They don’t know anything, and he doesn’t—Vlad cannot be this. He has wanted an edge over them, has wanted power, has wanted to stand and look down, but now they are—! They are stupid! They are young, and ignorant, and need someone to show them the way or to at least give their backs a good shove, and Vlad is still so wrecked, and he cannot look away—

Their excitement fades tangibly as the situation returns to them. Jack clears his throat. “I guess this isn’t really the time for that, huh?”

Jack and Maddie look between each other. Vlad feels their anticipation; there is no more left with which to put it off. Against his better judgement, he raises his glass and drains it again, too quickly after the last, he’s sure, though how much he’s had won’t make him nearly loose-lipped enough for all there is to say.

“So,” he says, the words fighting him. “My turn, I expect.”

They both hesitate. It’s Jack who pushes through and prompts him: “What happened to you, Vlad?”

He takes a deep breath.

Vlad never meant to explain himself. Always, he has expected that they would see him, and know, and that would be all that was needed—that that would be catharsis enough, and he would then kill them or otherwise leave them behind. Vlad has been close-lipped all this time. He is sure now, for a moment, he will not be capable of it. He is sure he will open his mouth and nothing will come out at all, and then—

“I died,” he says. He shudders. The drink in him does nothing but make his neck feel loose, his chest warm, and he leans into those physical sensations, feels them as deeply as he can. “I died for years, as if in slow motion. It was like cancer. That was what the doctors pretended it was.”

It spills out of him. The way it ached, the way he moaned, the hushed whispers the nurses shared over his bed, the harsh white of the hospital room, the yawning loneliness of it, how cool the tile was on his bare feet when he could still walk across it, the whispery sensation of falling through it when he couldn’t, the way it hurt, the way it hurt, the way it hurt, the way it hurt, the way it hurt, the way it hurt, the way it—

“I don’t know when it killed me.” Vlad slumps forward, allows his head to drop, loose, bending, sinking into the memories, the hate. “Only that it took six years to die and build enough strength again to go on living.”

He lifts his head just enough to gaze at them fleetingly. “For a long time I waited to see you.” Across from him, he hears the slightest of gasps. “I was sure you’d visit. I was sure you’d only gotten caught up in something. All three of us were prone to fixation, I knew. I waited. I waited for you.” He looks up again. Jack and Maddie both gaze at him openly, rapt. It’s too much to bear, and his eyes skate away.

“But you didn’t come.”

The white of the hospital subsumes him. He is there again—he is limp and weak in his patient’s gown, with a nurse bent over him, her face terrified, and he is lifting his arm to find it glowing.

“And eventually, I realized you never would.” He smiles bitterly to himself. “I tried to leave you both behind, but I kept circling back to you. Over and over again, you two occupied my thoughts. For twenty years you have been the last I think of at night and the first in the morning.”

They’ve both finished their own glasses by now. Nothing to do but drink while they listen, Vlad supposes. All the better—while he lets the words spill out, he can let his shoulders steadily loosen. It makes confession easy. For a fleeting moment, Vlad imagines getting down on his knees.

“I meant it when I said I hosted the reunion for you,” Vlad says quietly. “But I did not want to rekindle our friendship.”

There is heady silence.

“I wanted—this. I wanted you to know. I wanted you to apologize, I wanted to kill you—” Vlad’s ponytail is, by now, already loose. He gives up on it. He pulls the tie from his hair and threads his fingers through it, resting his forehead on his palm, his elbow on his knee. His hair falls limp around his face. He lets it hide him. “I wanted you to see what you did to me, that you killed me. I wanted to return the favor.”

He cannot see them, bent forward like this. He does not know if they move to speak, but he barrels on regardless.

“Imagine my surprise when the reunion came, and you both were already dead!” He barks a laugh, sitting up again. “Fate had taken that from me. I could not kill either of you in a way that mattered. I could not even turn you against each other, when you had both suffered the same fate. My fate. The world had enacted vengeance in my stead, and I found out long after.” He drags a hand down his face. In the other, his wine tips dangerously. “I cannot even blame you the same way anymore. Your negligence cost me my humanity, but it cost your own, too. We’re the same, now.” Vlad spits the last sentence like a curse. “We’re the same.”

Again, silence. It dogs them, the awkwardness. Twenty years of it, and breaking it now is slow, a great ship’s prow breaking ice. All three of them are out of practice with sincerity, Vlad most of all—but here he is, baring himself and all the hurt, allowing them to see. They are looking at him, still. They are seeing.

“I wanted to visit you,” Jack tells him. “I wanted to every damn day.”

“Why didn’t you?” Vlad doesn’t bother to keep the—betrayal? desperation?—out of his voice.

“At first I was afraid you’d blame me,” Jack says. “Then… then it had just been too long, and it was easier not to, since then I wouldn’t have to explain how long it took.”

Vlad stares at him openly. Twenty-years devastation.

“I would have forgiven you.” The words spill from his mouth before Vlad can stop them. He feels his face burn, but they’re out now, and he can only build upon them. “For anything.”

Jack grimaces. “Would you have, though? I mean—look at us.” He gestures to the room at large.

“Not always,” Vlad says. “But for longer than you’d think. I waited a long time, Jack.”

He had. He had waited years in that bed for them to come visit him, for Jack Fenton to poke his head in the room and guiltily grin, to apologize half-heartedly for his absence, for his overzealousness. Vlad waited for it with bated breath. He was eager to forgive—he was lonely, and the ectoplasm was wending its way to the core of him, and the quickest thing it could attach itself to, the obvious thing, was them. Vlad was obsessed. He would have forgiven Jack and Maddie for murder—he had already. Preemptively, he had swept his own death under the rug. Had they come waltzing back into his life that first year, or second, or even the third, he would have bared his throat for them to, again, slit.

Vlad slides his gaze to Maddie. She clutches her wine glass between her palms.

“And you?” he asks.

“I just didn’t want to admit that we made a mistake,” Maddie says quietly, but firmly. She has been practicing these words. “We were the pioneers of our science. We had to get it right. We were already a laughingstock—we couldn’t fail, or else we’d never have even a hope of being taken seriously.” She lets her head hang. Her red hair falls around her face, though some strands stay tucked behind her ear. “You… it was easier to pretend you didn’t happen.”

Vlad feels pinned. The words stick him like needles. He is a butterfly’s carcass, wings spread open; for her, he is in a glass case, on display.

“I was young. I was naïve. And I had never had a close friend before you or Jack, and I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t realize what I was giving up.” Her voice catches in her throat. “I was cruel.”

Jack and Maddie were twenty when the accident happened, Vlad twenty-one. He was so close to graduating. He wanted them there with him; he promised when the next year came around, he’d be cheering loudest as they walked their own stage. Vlad had never had a best friend before Jack and Maddie. He’d had acquaintances and casual friends, even a lover or two his first year of college, but never had he been close to a person like he was to them. They fit spaces he didn’t know were empty. He loved them. He knew what it was to be loved—wholly, selflessly—for the first time in his life, with them. And then he knew what it was to be lonely.

Yes, she was cruel. They both were.

Vlad watches as Jack reaches out, in lieu of speaking again, to pour them each another drink. Vlad doesn’t blame him—anything is preferable to this. Having to contort feelings into speech is a violence. Once the glasses are full again, Vlad reaches for his immediately. He hates this in-between stage; his body is loose, but his thoughts are still stable enough to hurt.

The three of them, in some mockery of camaraderie, raise their glasses together to meet in the middle with a hopeless clink. After a short silence, Jack speaks.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “That I killed you when I turned that damn portal on, and that I left you alone afterwards.”

At Jack’s cue, Maddie sits up, back straight, and meets Vlad’s eyes. “You were always more important than any respect we might have gotten. I’m sorry I didn’t see that back then.” She pauses. Then, earnestly, she says: “I’m sorry for leaving you.”

For a long moment, there is nothing. Vlad looks at each of them, looks in their eyes, over their bodies. He traces the sensation of them that sings in his core, their signatures that touch against his, that remind him lowly, endlessly, they are here. They entwine with him. He gazes into their eyes, touches at this manifestation of their afterlives, and he—he feels their earnestness—their guilt—how they miss him—

All within him comes crashing forward.

All the hurt, all the rage and misery and loneliness and love—all of it rushes forward, subsumes him, and it is all he can do to sob, for finally he understands. This is what he wanted. Not the apology itself, not their knowledge, but the certainty, the immutable truth that they regret. That they comprehend how they hurt him. That they care enough to even hope for his forgiveness, that they are sorry and that the regret is not the end, that they are sorry and they still want him. Vlad has wanted all of it. He has wanted them. He has been alone, and all this time begging for the only people he’s ever been brave enough to entrust himself to.

No man can survive forever on rage. Anger is grief is love with no place to go, and for twenty years he has been aching, been begging for it all to stop. Stop, they are telling him. You can stop now.

The cracked thing inside of him shatters.

He will never forgive them. But forgiveness is not what matters—he loves them, and he has always, always wanted to move on.

When Jack moves down the couch to tug him into an embrace, Vlad presses desperately into it. And when Maddie comes to his other side and encloses him, he comes shudderingly, finally undone.

 

They keep drinking after that. They were tipsy already, and none among them willing yet to part. Vlad lets the scene get away from him. He allows himself this looseness, because he’s compromised already. He allows the conversation to drift. He allows them to remain sitting on either side of him, allows them to reminisce and participates in the reminiscing. It’s easy. He remembers this feeling, and they are all already so far in the past.

All this to say—when the children return from school in the early afternoon, they pause in the threshold to take in the scene before them with matching baffled looks. Jack calls a louder-than-usual welcome home, which Maddie echoes, and Vlad manages to wave. Jasmine returns the greeting, sharp eyes already darting between the three of them and the drinks on the table. Daniel, bewildered, waves back before disappearing up the stairs. Jasmine follows him.

On Vlad’s right, Maddie cracks up. Jack, on his left, joins her in laughter. Between them, Vlad feels the vibration of their joy, feels their warmth pressed to his sides, and the part of him that has missed them desperately both aches and eases at once.

Later, in the evening, when the drink has receded to a fading buzz and Jack has left Vlad and Maddie in the living room to make dinner for the children, Vlad bends forward with his elbows on his knees, clutching a glass of water in both hands.

Maddie sits beside him, leaning back against the cushions. The living room is quiet. In the kitchen, they listen to Jack bustle about, whistling. Vlad can smell pasta boiling.

“Have you really been through the portal?” Maddie asks quietly, after a while.

“Plenty of times.” Vlad places his water on the coffee table, cleaned of their earlier mess, and sits up. “It was hard to stay away once I had access to a portal, at least at first. You can feel it calling.”

In his periphery, he sees her glance at the basement door. “Yes.”

“Why haven’t you gone in?”

Maddie’s brows knit together. “I guess we just don’t know what to expect on the other side. We still don’t even understand what we are, really.” Staring at the ceiling, she laces her fingers together over her stomach, worrying the gloves as she tugs at them. “And the pull… it’s scary.”

Vlad hums. He’s never thought of it as frightening, but he supposes he can see how it might be. In the beginning, for him, it was a vague, barely-there thing in the pit of himself. There was no open portal near enough to be pulled to, only the brief, violent memory of the accident. Like that, it was just longing. He mistook it for his obsession on a good day and for insanity on a bad one. When Vlad got his own portal working for the first time, the sensation nearly bowled him over with its intensity—suddenly there, and real, and fierce. In that moment, it was relief more than anything.

“I can’t say the Realms aren’t dangerous,” he says. “But you feel it calling you for a reason.”

Maddie hums in acknowledgement. There’s silence for a moment, and then: “Vlad, what are we?”

He turns to face her. “What do you mean?”

“I mean—are we zombies, or something?” Maddie huffs out an incredulous laugh. “We shouldn’t be possible. There are certainly no humans who can manipulate ectoplasm like we can, and what we’ve seen of the ghosts so far… they’re almost fluid. They’re not like us.” She lurches forward to bend over her knees, presses her palms into her eyes. “I don’t understand.”

Vlad just looks at her for a moment. It returns to him, that sensation of age. From their clumsiness, it is clear that Jack and Maddie can only have died within the year. A month or two before the reunion, at most. Again, he realizes their youth, the breadth of what they do not know. Briefly, vindictively, he considers withholding the knowledge. But he is too tired for that. The air is still too raw.

“The ghosts call us halfas. Half-human, half-ghost, at least in the mythology—there were more like us, once, though as far as I can tell any such individuals are long gone.” Vlad sighs. “Biologically, or ectobiologically, we are living humans that died long enough for our consciousnesses to begin to form a ghost, and when we came back to life, the ectoplasmic structures that had begun to form continued to do so, integrating with our living bodies.”

He watches as Maddie searches his face. Then she drops her head again, and as her hair obscures her, she lets out a long breath.

“Fuck,” she says to the floor.

“Indeed.”

She has more questions, Vlad is sure, but it’s then that Jack calls up to the children that dinner is ready. Fast footsteps pound first on the stairs, then more sedate ones follow—Daniel and Jasmine respectively, Vlad presumes, and is proven right when the two children appear.

“What is it?” Daniel asks loudly, walking past the living room and into the kitchen. Within, Jack answers his question indistinctly.

Jasmine stops to greet Vlad before continuing on. “Are you staying for dinner?”

“Yes,” Maddie says, before Vlad can respond either way, which irks him. He was going to say yes; the least they can do after accosting him this morning and drinking with him into the afternoon is feed him, even if that food is questionably edible.

“You’ll have to put up with me a tad longer, I’m afraid,” he says, smiling gently. Jasmine, instinctively, smiles back.

“We’re happy to have you,” she says. “God knows Mom and Dad need friends. Even Danny has a better social life!”

A petulant voice calls from the kitchen. “Hey, I heard that!”

“You were meant to!”

Jasmine continues on into the kitchen. Vlad watches her go, then turns back to Maddie, to find her looking at him with a sad expression.

“Is something the matter?” he asks.

Maddie breathes out, the expression falling away into something tired. “No, nothing. Come on, Vlad. Let’s eat.”

Later, after the children scamper off again and the dishes have been set aside, sitting in the dim kitchen, Jack tentatively offers Vlad the guest room. All three of them are exhausted, after all—they were up all last night.

It is tempting. But, mostly sober now, Vlad pulls back. He cannot give them all of himself yet.

He declines.

 

That night, all is quiet.

The sky is black and still. The occasional vehicle seems to crawl noiselessly in the streets. The only ghosts that dart between alleys do so unobtrusively; they are mere specks in Vlad’s peripheral vision. The city relaxes into silence as its residents sleep, and the Zone hums from beyond, green slices of it shining in the dark.

The clawing, howling thing that has lived in Vlad’s chest for twenty years makes no appearance.

High in the air, Vlad curls in on himself, a pinprick akin to a star dressed in white as he is, and he searches. He reaches for the agony, as he has always done, and does not find it. Vlad is left vacuous in its wake; it has stopped; he knows not how to endure this stillness.

His obsession has always been them, their absence, their ignorance, and now he is here and they let him in and they have listened, they have seen, they have apologized twice over, and—and!—there is nothing left to cling to! The longing dissipates. He is left only with the remembrance; here he is with the aftershocks, muscle memory-reaching for what has propelled him all this time. It is useless now. It crumbles and falls through his fingers as dust.

The hate has absconded, the intensity burned away. He was always in conflict. His obsession was reactionary; it was betrayal, vengeance, held at the point of tension between how he missed them and how they were not there to forgive.

Before the Fentons he has folded. All his violence reveals itself as self-defense and comes apart. Vlad is left hollow with potential. Again, as with those years ago, all he can think of is them.

The city is still. A visiting star burns and drifts above it.

 

Again, Vlad does not leave Amity Park.

He books a room in a hotel within the city limits this time, and has new clothes and toiletries sent to him, though he does not summon his driver back. He finds he prefers the idea, at this juncture, of haunting the city as Plasmius. Officially, Vlad Masters has returned to Wisconsin. In his stead, Vlad Plasmius lingers, because he is weak, and they are here.

Amity Park citizens are, it appears, by now used to encountering ghosts. They aren’t comfortable around them by any means—people tend to move along when they appear, and the occasional clash between ghosts vacates an area near-instantly—but it means that Vlad is subject, at most, to wary glances, which amuses him. The portal has not been open long enough for the more destructive ghosts to crawl out. These humans don’t know, yet, what ghosts can truly do. Of course, he does not wish to see Amity Park leveled—but Vlad does miss making people turn white as a sheet when they catch sight of him.

He is perched atop the roof of an apartment building when an orange figure alights beside him. Maddie.

He turns to her and, since there is no urgency to the moment, observes her ghost form in detail where he had not allowed himself to before. Maddie’s glow is healthy, intense in that way of new ghosts. She wears her usual hazmat, colors inverted, the hood down and her blue hair drifting as though in water. The hazmat’s white accents suit her, he thinks distantly—every part of her is bright.

“Hi, Vlad,” she greets him.

“Maddie,” he returns. For a moment, she looks him over the way he had done to her. He imagines what she must be seeing: the blue hue of his skin. The black hair he keeps braided back. The cloak, the red that consumes his sclerae—what does she think of it?

“You haven’t left yet,” she observes.

“No.” He turns to gaze out over the city. “I assumed you two would have more questions for me, seeing as I have quite a few years of experience in this.”

Maddie cringes, but does not deny it. “Of course we do. But after you left the other night—well, we were worried that would be it.”

Vlad huffs. “One could only dream.”

“Why haven’t you left?” she asks.

He doesn’t answer for a moment. He doesn’t have the words for it. He can’t leave; they are here.

“Why did I invite you to my home after twenty years?” Vlad wonders bitterly. At that, he can feel her gaze on him—but before she can speak again, he says: “I take it you didn’t come out here just to find me, then.”

“No. Jack and I were just heading out to do some research.” Despite the heaviness in the air, her voice betrays her excitement. “We’ve been testing our weapons, and now that we’re a little more confident we’re going to test our capture devices.”

“Oh?”

“How else will we get to study ghosts up close?” she says with a grin.

“You could talk to one,” Vlad proposes, not seriously, but at that Maddie’s face falls some. There is a pause.

“We didn’t think ghosts were complex enough for that,” she says softly. “Before.”

Vlad glances at her. “Well. You know now.”

Her face is pensive, even in profile. She seems about to say something, but it is at that moment that Jack calls out a greeting behind them. They both turn to meet him, and for a moment, waiting for Jack to catch up, Vlad is again in college. The sense memory is strong enough to catch his breath, and he shushes the feeling quickly.

“Hey, Vlad.” Jack smiles tentatively. He is Maddie’s perfect mirror—broad where she is thin, blue where she is orange and orange where she is blue. The white accents of their hazmat suit him less, but he always was more fetching in black. Both of them couldn’t win the death lottery, Vlad supposes. Still, anything is better than a hospital gown.

“Hello, Jack.”

There’s an awkward beat of silence.

“Do you want to come with us?” Maddie asks.

Vlad blinks. “In your research?” He restrains a grimace, thinking of their terrible aim, and the likelihood of getting caught by one of their questionably-functional devices. “No, thank you.”

Maddie wilts slightly.

“But,” he says, and this is a concession, “I’ll answer your questions. I have no intention of leaving you both to flounder.” He says the last part pointedly. They both wince, but Maddie recovers quickly.

“Alright,” she says, accepting his offer. “Now?”

“No—go test your inventions.” Vlad shoos them with one hand. “I’ll come by Fentonworks sometime this week.”

“Door’s always open,” Jack promises. And then they leave.

He watches as they fly off. For a moment, thinking of their clumsiness, something urges him to follow.

 

For the fourth time, Vlad is on the Fentonworks doorstep. For the second, he is here unexpected.

The townhouse is as hideous as it was the first time he saw it. Still, Vlad cannot deny there is a certain… not charm, certainly, but a rightness to the gaudy façade; of course a house inhabited by Maddie and Jack would look like this. It could never have been different.

He rings the doorbell. He waits.

It is Jasmine who lets him in this time, and she assesses him with a quick, shrewd—as close to shrewd as a girl of sixteen can achieve, at least— look. Vlad makes himself appropriately genial and harmless.

“Good afternoon, Jasmine,” he says.

“Good afternoon,” she echoes. “Mom and Dad are down in the lab. They said you’re allowed to just go straight down, but I would recommend putting on one of the hazmat suits before you do.” Ah, that would explain the look. His attire is not quite the pinnacle of lab-safe.

“I’m sure I’ll be quite fine,” he says, stepping inside. “I trust Maddie and Jack will uphold every safety standard while I’m here.” He allows some sarcasm to creep into his voice, which makes Jasmine grin.

“Oh, yeah. You know my parents!” She shakes her head slightly. “It’s Jazz, by the way, nobody calls me Jasmine except Aunt Alicia.”

“Jazz, then. Thank you for your hospitality. Do give my corpse a proper farewell when I am inevitably irradiated downstairs.”

She laughs. “I’ll be sure to, Mr. Masters.”

Jasmine retreats upstairs as Vlad heads for the basement door, and in her absence, he decides against stooping to put on any hazmat. He doesn’t think he could quite pull off either Jack or Maddie’s silhouettes.

Opening the door to the basement, Vlad is met immediately and intensely with chrome. The walls, ceiling, and the stairs themselves are all metal, and he can just see the beginnings of stainless steel counters and shelving in the room below. As he descends the stairs, the tug of their portal grows all the more intense, and Vlad is surprised to find that beneath the fluorescent lighting, the room is tinged in green—their portal is open. How have they managed to resist its pull?

Vlad steps into the room proper, and takes in the shelving, the equipment, the unidentifiable but vaguely ominous inventions, and the portal itself: yawning, beckoning. It’s the aesthetic ideal of any mad scientist, and Vlad is entirely unsurprised to find Maddie and Jack bent together over a central table, masks up and goggles on as they fiddle with some sparking mechanical gadget, looking for all the world like the mad scientists in question.

“An impressive laboratory,” Vlad observes. Both Maddie and Jack start, and turn to face him.

Jack’s face breaks into a grin, seeing him. “You like it? We designed it ourselves.”

“Really?” Vlad says mildly. “I’d never have guessed.”

Ignoring his sarcasm, Maddie cuts in, reaching up to pull her hood and goggles off. She sets aside what they’d been working on. “Let’s go back upstairs. We can sit down in—”

“Actually, it might be best to talk down here,” Vlad says. “We’ll have more privacy. And I can demonstrate, if need be.”

They share a glance. Jack shrugs, so Maddie turns back to Vlad and says, “Alright.”

There are only two chairs in the lab, so Vlad finds himself leaning against one of the lab tables while Maddie and Jack sit across from him, appearing for a moment like bright young pupils, Vlad their learned professor.

Their questions are trivial, it feels, and Vlad has to bite back his own incredulity, reminding himself of how much more time he has had to find the answers. They ask him about the Ghost Zone, about its make and its visage and its denizens. It is too vast and varied to explain in entirety, so he simplifies it: picks out the things that are important, omits the rest with promise to expand later. They ask about halfas, and Vlad divulges with only a beat of hesitation the facts that took him years of searching to learn: the myths, the history, the—no, not the loneliness. They do not need that from him. He shares what he has learned from experience, shows them his transformation, smiles fleetingly when they gasp with appropriate awe. He explains cores. He explains how ghosts form. It is… easy. They ask and he answers. They are eager for the answers; they are scientists, always hungry, always searching. And he finds, curiously, that he jumps at the chance to explain it all—when it is not himself he is explaining, he is eager to tell.

“What can we do? What are we capable of?” Maddie asks, leaning forward.

“Flight,” Vlad says. “Invisibility, intangibility. Manipulation of ectoplasm—to shape it, to use as projectiles or tools. Some ghosts can specialize their ectoplasm, have it take on the properties of things such as ice, or sound, or story. You will grow in skill and in the breadth of your ability as you mature.”

“What causes specialization?” Jack presses.

“It depends on multiple factors. Cause of death, environment, and obsession are the most common influences. Specialization can be inherent or later developed, but most ghosts never specialize at all.”

“What do you mean by obsession?”

Vlad stills, just briefly. Jack and Maddie both notice. They draw back slightly. There is a pause, and then: “All sapient ghosts develop an obsession. It is what drives them in their continued existence; fulfilling an obsession is, for ghosts, our most important want and need. It is subconscious, and can comprise a goal, or a concept, or objects, or a person.” He does not hesitate on the last item. He does not.

Maddie and Jack look at him intensely. He sees the moment that each of them suspect, and then comprehend. There is, for a moment, silence again.

Jack is the one to break it. “What’s yours?” The question is soft.

Within him is still that quiet space, waiting to be occupied. Its walls are scored with the clawed violence of the years; the howling, begging thing that had consumed him left its mark. But it is no longer there. Instead, little tendrils are reaching out, sweeping through his mind, looking for something to latch onto.

All he thinks of is them, still.

“What do you think yours is?” Vlad returns, in lieu of answering.

That seems to stump Jack. Maddie, too, furrows her brows. It is almost cute to watch them both think, to worry their lips on a problem. This is not a question Vlad has the answer to, but, then, all students need a thesis to present.

“I don’t know,” Maddie admits, frowning. Jack shakes his head in agreement.

“You’ll learn. Once you encounter a situation in which you can’t fulfill it, I’m certain it will become clear.” At that, Jack and Maddie both make the same concerned face. Vlad politely restrains a smile. Oh, just wait, he thinks, not as vindictively as he once would have.

Vlad pushes up his sleeve to glance at his watch. It’s not for show; he has not been able to automate all his work, and there are some meetings he truly must attend, albeit over phone call at present. He chose to come to Fentonworks today, with his meeting looming, to give himself a definite end-point.

“Do you have any last questions before I go?” he asks. Maddie and Jack look at each other, but neither seem to come up with anything. “Then I should leave. I have—”

“Wait,” Maddie says. Her interjection seems to startle not only Vlad, but Jack, too.

“Yes?”

“Would you teach us how to… be ghosts?”

Vlad stops. He looks down at her, and her expression is so earnest, and lost.

They are young, and ignorant, and need someone to show them the way or to at least give their backs a good shove. The tendrils seize the thought. In Vlad’s hollow chest, potential bubbles up and becomes.

God. He has missed them so much. Here Maddie is, offering him an excuse to stay.

“Good idea, Mads,” Jack says, grinning. He winks at Vlad. “You can tell us all the ways we’re screwing up.”

Vlad lets out a breath.

All is not fixed. All hurt has not ceased. Twenty years is so long a time, and an obsession so violent a thing; he is still reeling. He still aches, low and persistent, and it no longer overwhelms him but it does pulse. Still—still, he missed them, and now he has the freedom to choose; now he is here with them, and they, abashed, do not wait with bated breath for forgiveness but offer him a place with them all the same.

Maddie and Jack gaze at him, waiting.

“I’m never getting out of this city,” he says with a sigh.

Maddie beams, and suddenly Jack has Vlad wrapped up in the kind of bear hug he had forgotten he missed, and Vlad pushes at Jack’s arms and grumbles into his shoulder, but really, really he is warm.

Notes:

I hope you enjoyed the main body of this piece! If you hit "Next Chapter," you'll find a ~2k epilogue waiting for you, and my proper end notes will be there. Thank you very, very much for reading this far!

Thank you so, so much to the skilled artists I worked with during this event—it is a joy to see things come to life, and I was delighted and awed every time you showed me your progress. Their artworks are available to reblog, in chronological order by where they appear in the piece, here and here!