Chapter Text
Maddie sat in the lab, her goggles pulled down as she worked on fixing the Fenton Bazooka. The weapon had been a bit erratic lately since they started experimenting with a more concentrated form of ectoplasm for their power cells. She suspected it might be getting overloaded, the power too much for its outdated systems to regulate successfully, but that was easily corrected.
“Mom?” Maddie jumped, almost dropping her tools as she glanced over her shoulder and pulled up her goggles. She still didn’t know how Danny managed to be so silent when he came down the lab stairs, which echoed even beneath her and Jazz’s feet. His hands gripped two mugs of hot chocolate as he smiled at her. “You know it’s pretty late, right?”
“I do. I also know it’s a school night, so why aren’t you in bed yet?” she asked as she took one of the mugs. It wasn’t her favorite - she much preferred coffee - but drinking that much caffeine so late would definitely turn this project into an all-nighter she didn’t feel up to at the moment, and she wasn’t about to make Danny feel bad about doing something nice for her.
“I can’t sleep,” he said with a shrug as he sat down across from her.
“Are you worried about something?” Danny’s finger traced the rim of the cup slowly as he gave a non-committal hum in response. “You know you can talk to me about anything, right?”
“I know, but it’s not–do you ever just get a bad feeling?” he asked slowly, staring off to the side as she put her goggles back on and continued to work on the Bazooka. “Like there’s something wrong or something bad is about to happen but you don’t know what it is?”
“I think everyone does. There are actually some really fascinating studies about it, too, such as cases where a plane crashes and there are higher numbers of cancellations and passengers missing the flight,” she said as she picked up her soldering iron to connect the wires for the new circuit she installed. “Not all of them hold up to scrutiny, but it does suggest that at least some people might have some heightened awareness pertaining to personal risks. Your father and I have our theories about it and how it might work, but it’s not really our specific area of research even though most would argue that it falls under paranormal studies.” Maddie took a sip of her cocoa as she looked up at Danny. “But most of the time a bad feeling is just that, hon, and you really should try to get some sleep.”
He was silent for a moment as he stared at the portal. The doors were sealed shut, the swirling green ectoplasm hidden away behind it, yet for a brief second, she swore she saw a hint of it impossibly reflecting in Danny’s normally blue eyes. “It feels like the day before I had my accident,” he said as he looked back over at her, and the green light she thought she saw was gone. It was probably a trick of the light or her own exhausted mind hallucinating. “And I’ve felt something like this a few times since then, of things just not being right, I guess, and something bad has usually happened afterward.”
“Are you telling me you think you’re psychic?” she teased gently, and he shook his head.
“No, it’s not–I know–” he stopped as he looked over her shoulder for a moment, frowning, but when she turned to look there was nothing there but an empty staircase. “It’s stupid.”
“It’s not.” Maddie reached out a hand and gently placed it on his arm. Despite being in a heavy sweater, Danny’s arm still felt cold to her, unnaturally so. It was a side effect from his accident, but it always worried her. “I wouldn’t be here now if I didn’t listen when my gut said something was wrong. If you want, you can stay down here with me for a bit while I finish this, and with any luck by the time I’m done, the feeling will have passed and we can both get some sleep.”
“Thanks. What are you working on, anyway?”
“There’s an issue with the bazooka right now. The circuits in it have been overloading, likely because of the new power source your father and I installed. We thought it could handle the load from it, but clearly, we miscalculated somewhere,” she said as she connected the two wires together. Danny drank his hot chocolate, watching her while she worked for a bit. She found herself paying more attention to him than she probably should while doing something so delicate, but it was hard to ignore all the signs that something was wrong with him and had been for a long time, especially when he was sitting right in front of her.
They knew Danny was struggling - how could they not? The dark circles under his eyes suggested more than one or two nights with no sleep, but even when they took away access to his computer and electronics so he couldn’t play video games until three in the morning with his friends, things didn’t improve. His teachers mentioned that on his best days he was usually late to class, and on his worst, he didn’t make it at all. They tried to have Jazz bring him to school rather than letting him walk, but somehow between her car and his first period class, he still vanished. Sometimes Maddie would notice a bruise or two, which Danny shrugged off as his being a bit awkward and careless sometimes. A part of her almost believed it since he’d been banned from handling the lab equipment in school after breaking over a dozen beakers during his freshman year chem classes, but she suspected he might be getting bullied, too. His teachers insisted they saw no signs, but it was hard to believe that such regular bruises could come from being clumsy alone.
His grades were poor enough that Mr. Lancer mentioned Danny might need to repeat a year. She hadn’t broken the news to her son, knowing it would crush him to not move on to his junior year with his friends, but no doubt Danny had a hunch. No amount of punishments or support seemed to help him. Part of the issue seemed to be his confidence - Danny never believed he was as smart as his sister, though Maddie and Jack knew otherwise - but the rest of it? Not doing his assignments, missing classes, staying out late? They had no explanation for it. Maddie searched his room once, looking for potential signs of drug use or literally anything that might explain what was wrong with him, but she found nothing.
“Mom?”
“Hmm?” she glanced up at him.
“There’s something I need to–” he began, when suddenly her hand slipped and an explosion rang out. She saw Danny’s eyes go wide as he lunged across the table at her rather than away, even as she herself was flown back from the force. Pain blossomed in her chest as she felt her organs rupture, her bones breaking, and–
–and then she was standing next to herself, the pain gone as the scene remained frozen in front of her. She glanced down at her hands, oddly translucent, and swallowed as terror blossomed within her. “Am I . . . ?”
“Dead?” finished someone, and turning around she saw a ghost hovering by the staircase, red eyes gleaming at her from beneath a dark purple hood. His hand gripped a staff with a clock on it, and there was, impossibly, another clock in his chest behind a glass panel. He wore large gloves covered in watches, and with his free hand he picked up his stopwatch for a moment, flicking it open before letting it fall back to his side. “Probably not. That potential exists, but it’s rather unlikely. A fraction of a percentage at best.”
“But the explosion, it–” she stopped, looking back at the scene unfolding in front of her, aware for the first time that it was moving but ever so slowly. She knew what happened, that she must have accidentally caused the new power source to explode when she looked up at Danny, and then her heart ached as she saw him in mid-flight, leaping over the table. “Danny?” There was no way he would live, not when he was so close, and if she could cry, she knew she would, but no tears came to her in her incorporeal state.
“We’re not here to discuss him,” said the ghost, and her heart sank, as good a confirmation as any that her son wouldn’t survive this, that for the second time in his life one of their inventions would be the cause of so much pain. They should have abandoned their work after the portal started or at least moved the lab off site so the house would be safer for their kids, but they hadn’t. Jack and Maddie thought Danny would be more careful. They thought they all would be more careful. “He’s not important right now.”
Suddenly the ghost’s form shifted, turning into an elderly, hunched man with a long white beard, and Maddie flinched but stood her ground. “There’s nothing more important to me than my family.”
“Oh? I suppose we’ll see,” he said, his odd grin sending chills down her spine.
“What?” Maddie stared at him. “Who are you? Are you supposed to be Death?” She never believed in Death before, or at least, not as a sentient being. Death was natural, an ordinary part of existence for all things and all people. Anthropomorphizing it was common, with various depictions and iterations over the years including the infamous Grim Reaper, yet giving it form was simply a way for people to find comfort in their end, the hope that the loneliest moment of their existence would be met with someone that would calmly and quietly guide them to whatever particular afterlife they believed in.
Or so Maddie thought. “Technically, I am Clockwork, the Master of Time, but any ghosts or spirit can be called upon to act as a guide in the moment of death. Or near-death, as the case may be here. The one who would usually accompany you right now is a bit preoccupied at the moment.” He smiled like it was an inside joke of sorts even as his form shifted yet again, this time to that of a young child. “But as his guardian, I have the right to stand here with you in his stead.”
“Whose guardian? Who should be here?” she asked. “And why–why is this happening at all if I’m not actually dead?”
“Because your heart will stop beating for a moment. Your organs have ruptured and failed, and your bones have been broken. The blood that flows through you will cease its movement, if only for a few seconds, and you will be functionally dead,” said Clockwork. “Walking the path now, despite this not being the end of your life, presents an opportunity for growth and for change, for understanding as your life flashes before your very eyes. The general hope is that you’ll take this experience and return with a different perspective on things.”
He frowned, suddenly, rolling his eyes in exasperation. “Of course. A moment, if you will.” Clockwork vanished, leaving her alone, and carefully she walked through the lab, her body intangible as she went to Danny. Even if she survived this, the damage that Clockwork described, that she’d felt in that moment before her spirit or ghost was whisked here outside of herself? There would be no true recovery from it. At best, she’d be comatose, forever dreaming in a hospital bed as the world moved on without her. At worst, she’d be stuck with crippling injuries for the rest of her life that no doubt included significant brain damage, rendering her into a mere fraction of who she was. If those were the options, she would much, much prefer to simply be dead and to move on to what, if anything, lay beyond.
“I’m sorry, Danny,” she whispered. No doubt if he survived this, he would end up no better than her, but the likelihood of him living through the explosion seemed impossibly small. That the ghost wouldn’t answer her directly about Danny’s condition only reinforced her belief that he wouldn’t make it out of this alive even as she did.
Clockwork returned his form that of an adult, and he scowled at her. “What are you doing?”
“If my son–if he’s going to die–could I guide him? Do whatever it is you’re going to do for me?” she asked.
“You are neither a ghost nor a spirit in truth at this point,” said Clockwork, his tone softer. “Too connected to your own body, still, to act in such a role. And even if it were possible, I don’t believe Danny would want that.”
“How dare you act as if you know what my son would want?!” she snapped, jabbing a finger hard in his chest. “What could you possibly know about him compared to me?! I’m his mother! I love my son, and if anyone has a right to be there with him, then it’s me!”
The ghost didn’t flinch. “I am the Ghost of Time. I can see every moment, every second of all that has passed. I can see all of the other branches that never were, the twists and turns in the timestream and every possible timeline. This is not about whether you love him or not. If anything, your love for him is precisely the issue. He knows you care deeply about him. He knows that you love him, and he loves you, too. If he didn’t believe that, he wouldn’t be here with you now. He would not have thrown himself into danger to try to save you. Your son would not want you at his side because he fears that he is undeserving of the love you have given him and that seeing his life, the moments that have made him, would only help you come to that conclusion.”
“There’s nothing my son could do that would make me stop loving him,” said Maddie, but it hurt her that Danny didn’t realize it, that he believed that there was something about him that could make her hate him.
Clockwork rubbed at his temples, finger pressed against the scar over one of his eyes. “So I’ve told him many times, but the boy’s rather stubborn.”
“You know my son?”
“Did I say that?” he said as she crossed her arms, staring at him, and he sighed as he shifted into his elderly form. “Fine. Yes, I know your son. He’s had more than a few near-death experiences, and I have acted as his guide during those moments.”
Her eyes drifted to the sealed portal on the wall. “The portal accident?”
“Amongst others.” He waved his hand as Maddie’s stomach clenched. What others? How many near-death experiences could her son have possibly had? “But we are not here to talk about your son. We are here for you, and we have a schedule to keep. So come with me.”
In any other circumstance, Maddie would not have let him lead her anywhere, but so far at least the ghost hadn’t attacked her, and clearly, he knew something about Danny. Maddie didn’t need to relive her life or whatever this was to understand who she was as a person. She knew herself better than anyone, and there was a very, very real chance that this was nothing more than a mere hallucination conjured up by her brain as she died. But if it meant a chance to figure out what happened to Danny, she would take it even if it felt like too little, too late.
Swallowing, she took his offered hand as he tapped the ground with his staff, sending a ripple through the lab, and Maddie blinked as she found herself back in her childhood home in Spittoon, Arkansas. Her Dad was standing at the stove working on making some sauce for lasagna, and a small Christmas tree remained tucked in the corner. A gentle fire burned in the fireplace, and despite her incorporeality, Maddie swore she could smell the smoke, that she could feel the warmth from it spreading through her once more.
Seeing her father made her chest ache. She missed her parents terribly. Her father passed away six months ago from pancreatic cancer, and her mother was in hospice at the moment, suffering from severe dementia. Maddie tried once to visit her, but the way her mother stared at her, as if she were a stranger . . . she couldn’t bear to do it again, leaving her care mostly to Alicia. She rationalized it by saying that Alicia was closer, that she could send money and support and it would be fine, that it would be easier and better for everyone if her mother remained the person from her memories and not the ghostly, fragmented woman she was now, but Maddie knew she was being selfish.
“I remember this,” she said softly to Clockwork as she spotted herself sitting in a big armchair, a notebook in her lap. She was four, almost five then. “Mom and Alicia went shopping. I didn’t want to talk about it in front of them since I knew Mom would lie to me and Alicia would get upset.”
Her younger self jumped out of the chair, running right through her and over to her Dad as she tugged on his sleeve. Maddie shivered as she passed through her, but her younger self appeared not to notice. “What, Mads?” he said. “Do you want to help?”
“No. I need to talk to you,” she insisted.
“Oh?”
“Santa’s not real,” she said immediately with a sly smile. “Neither is the tooth fairy or the Easter bunny. It’s just you and Mom.” She remembered this moment, how proud she felt. The problem was laid out before her, and she knew if she could see her notebook, it would be filled with all the proof she accumulated, the logical inconsistencies she stumbled across.
“Santa isn’t real?” Her Dad turned to her and squatted down, getting eye level with her. “Why would you think so?”
“Because everything about it doesn’t make sense. No one can live forever, Dad, and no one can get to every house around the world in a single night. It’s a mathematical impossibility,” she said, the big words tripping over her tongue in excitement as she thrust the notebook at him. “See?”
Her Dad took it from her, his eyes scanning over it. “It’s magic, love, not science. Though your math is impressive.”
Present Maddie snorted. She was a brilliant child, but she doubted there was much merit to her childhood self’s calculations, even if the conclusion remained accurate. “There’s no magic, Dad. I’m almost five. Don’t lie to me.”
“Of course there’s magic. That’s not a lie, Mads,” he said. “What would you call love?”
“Brain chemicals. I read about it,” she insisted. She had, hadn’t she? In some science book that largely went over her head, the overall specifics too complicated, too complex for her young mind to truly grasp, but that didn’t matter. The ideas were what stuck.
“How sad,” mused Clockwork, his form that of a child again as he watched.
“Sad?” repeated Maddie. What could possibly be sad about it? But Clockwork didn’t answer.
“I suppose you’re too smart for me,” teased her father as he patted her on the head. “You’re right. Santa, the Easter Bunny? None of it’s real, not in the way you think. But there is magic in the stories. They give people little pushes, make them be better, feel better, when the world is very hard and might push us to do otherwise. They make them believe that things are possible. Stories have power, a kind of magic, even if you can’t always recognize it.”
Her past self scrunched up her nose, scowling. “That’s stupid.”
“Maybe so, but . . . please don’t tell Alicia, at least,” he sighed. She recognized the look on her father’s face, one that she had worn herself all so many times since her own kids were born. The one that said she hadn’t expressed what she needed to, hadn’t gotten her point across clearly, and didn’t think she could because they were being too stubborn. But while there was a little truth to what her father said, her younger self wasn’t wrong. There was no magic, not really. It was a lie. A comforting one for a child, and a frustrating one her own husband bought into despite being an otherwise incredibly rational person. “Let her believe in Santa and magic a little longer, at least.”
Maddie huffed, crossing her arms. “Fine, Dad. But she’s older than me. She should know better.”
“Maybe she does,” he suggested. “But you let her tell you that. Although I think now that you know Santa isn’t real, I don’t have to bring you presents on Christmas anymore.”
“Hey, that’s not fair!” she shouted as her father laughed, and then she looked up and saw Clockwork holding out his hand.
“Come along,” he insisted, and Maddie reached out, taking his hand once more as the world swirled around them. She blinked as it coalesced and took shape. They were outside of her childhood home this time. It was clearly late summer, the sun sitting high in the sky, and she could feel the heat or at least the memory of it on her skin. Her older sister was there, her overalls stained as she carried a bucket over to a much younger Maddie. She looked to be about seven or eight now. It seemed like quite a jump forward.
“Why now?”
“Why any memory?” said Clockwork, waving a hand. “You’re the one picking the moments. I’m merely here as an escort.”
Was she? Somehow she doubted it. There was no reason to trust the ghost was being honest with her, after all.
“Now what?” asked Alicia. Her sister looked frustrated, but she always helped her with her experiments when she was younger, and as Maddie looked over she recognized which one it was.
“I want to see if they do it on purpose,” said Maddie.
“Do what?”
“I left a glass of soda in my room. The ants went in it and built a bridge made out of their own bodies,” said past Maddie. “I read about it, too, where ants will kill themselves and sometimes form a thing called ant mills.”
“Ant mills?”
“It’s a death spiral,” said Maddie with a shrug. “They follow pheromone trails, and sometimes they can lead back into themselves and the ants will keep spiraling around and around until they die. I wanted to see if I could get them to do that on purpose. That’s why I need the bucket.”
“You’re just going to kill them?”
“They’re ants. There’s hundreds of them, and it’s not like it’ll hurt the colony,” she insisted, and her younger self rolled her eyes at Alicia’s horrified expression. “They’re not people, Alicia.”
“But it’s–you already know that this happens. Why do you have to do it?” argued Alicia.
“Because science is full of studies where you do the same thing again just to make sure the first experiment was right and not a fluke or whatever,” said Maddie with a shrug. “You don’t have to help if you don’t want to, but if you can’t even kill ants, I don’t know how you’re going to go hunting with Dad next fall.”
“That’s different! We hunt for food, for–”
“--food that we can get at the store? Come on, Alicia,” she huffed. “Your reason isn’t any better than mine. You’re just curious, too.”
“It is, though! This–this is sick. It’s some kind of sick experiment and it’s cruel, Maddie!” she snapped, but her past self simply returned to prepping the experiment, ignoring her sister as Alicia stormed off.
“Are we ants to you?” asked Clockwork suddenly as they watched her younger self together. There was no judgment, no condemnation - merely curiosity.
“Ghosts?” He nodded. “Ghosts clearly have more awareness and intelligence than ants, but they still act primarily on impulses, on inclinations that are tied to their obsessions, even if they lead to self-harm in the process. Desiree is the best example of that. She’ll grant wishes that actively cause herself harm because she is, ultimately, subject to the specific impulses that don’t allow her to act in the interest of self-preservation. So in that respect, I suppose you are little more than ants.”
“How fortunate for you. It would no doubt cause you much grief to believe otherwise, given the experiments you’ve performed,” mused Clockwork.
“Are you suggesting I’m deluding myself?” said Maddie. She silently wished that whoever else was supposed to be with her now was here instead of this odd, cruel ghost, and wondered what could have been so important to keep them away. Though, she supposed, there was always a chance they would be even less kind than Clockwork had been so far.
“Am I?” His form shifted as he smirked at her. “Let’s move on.”
They traveled through a few more moments from her childhood. Her first kiss, under the stars, when she was eleven years old, with a boy she never liked or loved, but Maddie by that point wondered so much about what being kissed was like that she let him kiss her anyway. She found it a bit unappealing and wet, the kiss sloppy and gross. She decided she would never let herself be kissed again, and adult Maddie laughed at her younger self. Perhaps in another world she kept to that particular pledge, but she certainly hadn’t in this one.
She saw herself firing a gun for the first time at twelve, practicing her target shooting for hours. She went hunting only once with her Dad and Alicia, finding the overall experience a bit dull as they spent hours sitting in the woods in a cramped deer stand, and the brief thrill that came with a successful shot wasn’t enough for her to want to go through with it again. But learning how to use a weapon properly still mattered to her, and she spent hours at the range, improving her marksmanship until she won several state competitions.
She started taking martial arts lessons. They went to the moment when she finally earned her ninth-degree black belt at eighteen, and even her grumpy companion appeared impressed. That moment swirled into the next when she received her acceptance letter to the University of Wisconsin. She didn’t know what she wanted to study, but she was thrilled at the idea of leaving behind the small town of Spitoon, of finally getting to be on her own, unlike Alicia who stayed and moved into a small cabin a few miles up the road from their parents.
All of these little moments, she realized, contributed to her being a scientist. A ghost hunter. And when the scene changed again, when the memory that came up was of her with Jack Fenton and Vlad Masters at an old, abandoned house, Maddie smiled despite herself.
“Ghosts aren’t real,” she said, full of the same certainty her younger self had when she declared Santa wasn’t real. She knew what was coming, what would happen here. The moment that changed her future so profoundly that it would be impossible for her to ever forget. “And even if they were, nobody takes paranormal science seriously, Jack.”
“But with so few studying it, there are plenty of opportunities for us to make a name for ourselves if you’re wrong,” offered Vlad, smiling at her, and Maddie blinked as she saw the faint touch of red in his cheeks, the blush her past self missed. Did he have feelings for her even back then? They’d only known each other for a couple of months, and it made her a little queasy as she remembered Vlad’s uncomfortable confession to her last year. She thought his feelings then were recent, not that he’d been carrying a torch for her since their college years.
“My ancestor was interested in the paranormal. It runs in my family,” said Jack with a grin. “I’m not gonna let the skeptics stop me.”
“And some of our ancestors believed that the Earth was the center of the universe,” she said pointedly, which made Vlad snort. “That’s an appeal to tradition, Jack. A logical fallacy.”
“Which is why we’re here, Mads. To prove if it’s real or not,” he argued. “And if the most haunted house in Wisconsin isn’t enough to convince all three of us, then I’ll stick with just being a regular engineer.”
“I’ll set up the EMF meters,” she offered. “You and Vlad should take the infrared camera and set it up in the daughter’s bedroom upstairs.” They only had a single infrared camera, the cost of more too prohibitive from her perspective for an experiment with a high likelihood of failure, especially as she and the others didn’t have a lot of extra money right now.
“On it, Mads,” said Jack as he hurried upstairs with Vlad, and she saw the latter cast a forlorn look in her direction before he disappeared out of sight.
“I’m surprised you agreed, given your skepticism,” said Clockwork, watching her past self position the EMF meters throughout the house.
“I had a crush on Jack,” she admitted. “I didn’t realize it back then, but if not for that I think I would’ve skipped it. Because he was interested in it, though, I wanted to learn more about it, too, and doing an experiment felt fairly harmless.”
“How very illogical of you,” he chuckled. “Yet you think love isn’t magic, or that ghosts are the only ones that work against their own self-preservation instincts given the right motivation.”
She opened her mouth to argue for a moment before snapping it shut. He had a point, albeit a small one. “It’s not the same,” she insisted eventually. “I wouldn’t deliberately harm myself.”
“What about doing so to save another?” asked Clockwork as they followed past Maddie up the stairs. “As your son tried to save you? Would you do so even if it brought harm upon yourself?”
“But that’s your proof that ghosts and humans aren’t of a similar level of sentience or complexity,” said Maddie. “Self-sacrifice isn’t something ghosts are capable of. They make foolish decisions with respect to their own well-being on the basis of selfish, irrational impulses. They would not make decisions for the good of ghosts in general, or another ghost in particular unless their obsession was specifically rooted in such a thing as it is with Phantom and his own obsession with protection. They simply lack the complexity to be capable of it.”
“Well, if you’re so certain,” he said, giving her yet another irritating smirk as they entered the room with Jack and Vlad and her past self.
“Mads, look!” exclaimed Jack, waving her over to the camera, and she saw herself shiver as she walked over. The temperature in the room grew cold, their breath fogging in front of them despite the warm fall day outside, and on the camera, a cold outline appeared of a figure directly across from them. Both her current and past self saw nothing, but she knew it was a ghost.
The ones that they found on Earth prior to the opening of the portal were typically very weak, barely Level One or Level Two specters at best. With no continuous source of ectoplasm to draw on from the Ghost Zone, they were forced to survive on the emotional energy from humans alone, which proved too weak a source of continuous energy for most ghosts to continue to exist in the long term. The ghost in this house was an exception, powerful because of the number of teenagers and even adults that dared each other to spend time here, their fear providing a source of constant energy.
“It can’t be,” she heard her past self whisper as the ghost flew towards them, and then the ghost stopped, possessing her for a moment. Past Maddie grasped at her chest, collapsing to her knees as tears poured from her eyes and she whispered something over and over again while Jack and Vlad shook her shoulders, trying to get her to snap out of it.
“How can I see this?” she asked. “Aren’t these my memories? I never–I didn’t remember this part. The overshadowing. I remember it happening, remembered how I felt after, but this?”
“I am the Ghost of Time,” said Clockwork once again as Jack and Vlad forced her to her feet and quickly rushed her out of the house, the overshadowing ending abruptly once she crossed the threshold. “We are in the past. The moments we’ve chosen have been selected by you, but we’re here in truth. You cannot interfere with the moments, cannot change anything given your current state, so there’s little risk to be had in actually taking you here.”
“So I could walk off at any point? See something else outside of my own experiences?”
“You have already seen things your past self missed, have you not?” he asked, his eyes flicking briefly over to Vlad, and she nodded. “But I would not advise running away from where your subconscious has taken us. I cannot guarantee your safe return if you do. Your presence is insubstantial enough that I might be unable to locate you and return you to the present moment and you would become lost, possibly for eternity, in the past until you faded.”
Something clicked for her then. “That less than one percent chance of death you mentioned?”
“Indeed.” The scene shifted again, and she was in a lab with Jack, working on the proto-portal.
“Maddie, there’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you for a long time,” said Vlad, reaching out to her, and she waved her hand.
“One second, Vlad. Jack, did you remember to fill the filtrator with ecto-purifier?” her past self asked as she reviewed their calculations.
“On it, baby!” he said, and her past self turned away even as Maddie watched in horror as Jack poured a can of diet cola in instead, realizing now one of the handful of reasons the proto-portal failed so spectacularly, the reason behind Vlad’s case of serious ecto-acne. They assumed some type of contaminant made it in and caused the experiment to fail, but seeing her husband’s error made her wince painfully.
“I’m telling you, Jack, it won’t work,” said Vlad as he leaned over in front of the portal to inspect it, her past self too distracted to talk about whatever Vlad wanted to say mere moments ago.
“Bogus, V-Man, it totally will. This proto-portal is guaranteed to bust open the wall into the ghost dimension,” he insisted.
“Jack, these calculations aren’t right–”
“Bonzai!” he cried enthusiastically as he activated it, and both present and past Maddie covered their mouths in horror as they watched Vlad scream, caught in the blast, his body doubling over in pain. The scene around her swirled, changing to the hospital a month later. She was alone. Vlad refused to see Jack but agreed to let her come visit him once. She knew he blamed Jack for his accident, despite not knowing about the soda, either, but it wasn’t entirely Jack’s fault. Vlad had also carelessly walked too close to the proto-portal while they were prepping for activation. It wasn’t as simple as Vlad made it out to be, and despite Jack trying to apologize repeatedly to him, Vlad didn’t want to hear it.
“Vlad, I’m so sorry about what happened,” she said softly, squeezing his hand.
“It’s not your fault. You tried to tell that bumbling oaf–”
“--please don’t insult him. I know Jack can be careless sometimes, but he never meant to hurt you,” she insisted.
“Hardly an insult if it’s the truth,” grumbled Vlad. “If you keep working with him, at some point I won’t be the only one that ends up in a hospital bed, Maddie. He’s a careless fool. He’ll only hurt you.”
“Vlad, I didn’t come here to talk about this. I wanted–I wanted to let you know that he proposed to me,” she said, holding up her hand to show him the ring. “I didn’t want you to hear it from someone else, and I–you’re one of my closest friends, Vlad. I understand if you can’t forgive Jack enough to come to the wedding, but–”
“--get out,” he interrupted her, his tone icy.
“Vlad, I–”
“GET OUT!” he roared, and her past self fled, running through the hospital door. Maddie stopped, wondering if she should follow, but then she found herself staring at Vlad as the man’s eyes glowed a brilliant, impossible red.
“Let’s go,” insisted Clockwork, putting a hand on her shoulder.
“But Vlad–”
“--is none of your concern,” he said as the world around them swirled, and Maddie’s mind raced, trying to make sense of it. Was he possessed back then? Overshadowed? Was it a side effect of the contamination from the proto portal? But it couldn’t be that. Danny had a similar accident with the new portal in their basement, and his eyes never glowed with such an unnatural light. She shivered, not sure what it meant, not sure she wanted to know. It wasn’t something she was meant to see, but if she did remember, then maybe she could try to find a way to look into it. They were on friendly terms with Vlad again, despite her rejecting him after he declared his feelings for her. He might tell her the truth, assuming he knew what it meant.
The next memory, at least, was a happy one. There was no part of Maddie that felt sad about reliving her wedding day, and this time there was no rush as the ghost let them linger throughout the evening. The weather was perfect, the sun shining brightly overhead as she and Jack held hands, reciting their vows in front of their families and friends. Her parents and Alicia sat in the front, Alicia with her now ex-husband, and she saw her tough older sister cry a little even as she tried to hide it.
Clockwork said nothing as she lived through the night again, as she watched herself dance with her father and Jack and her friends, smash the cake in her new husband’s face, and as her sister gave an awkward, stuttering, yet incredibly heartfelt speech. She thought back then that it would be the happiest day of her life.
And then Jazz and Danny were born.