A/N: This story came to me very randomly, and the prompt was literally that Casper and Pet Sematary both take place in Maine. From there... Well, this happened.

The Resurrectionist

"Kat's sick."

These words leave Casper's mouth with worry hanging heavy between them. Kat had told him not to bother her father, that whatever this was she would get over it, but he can't help himself. Not when she's huddled under her blankets and curled in on herself, whimpering like a wounded animal. Not when, once upon a time and long ago, he, too, had thought nothing of a sickness and that it would pass.

He remembers: I got sick. Dad got sad.

He doesn't know what's wrong with Kat, but it's better to be safe than sorry. So he tells James, and James worries over her like the good father he is.

What starts as something akin to a bad case of the flu quickly progresses into something much worse. She complains of a soreness throughout her body, has trouble keeping food down or processing it properly. Within the course of just a few hours, she's severely dehydrated and unable to quell the tremor racking her body.

James likes to think they were able to get a doctor to her in time, and he's probably right. However, treatment doesn't always work for everyone, and not every situation gets better after it gets worse.

This goes on for three long days, and almost as suddenly as it all started, it stops. She had been weak, and her breathing shallow, and so James doesn't notice right away. It's when Casper barges into the room, alerted to something beyond James' senses, looking panicked and dropping the temperature, that James becomes aware that something's wrong. Stretch follows Casper in and drags him back out quickly, and James is only vaguely aware of the other ghost shouting, "damn it, I told ya not to go in there!"

And while the ghosts bicker just beyond the closed door, James is forced to accept his daughter's passing. He holds her cool hand and brushes the hair out of her face before kissing her forehead. The illness took its toll on her, and her pretty face had so quickly become gaunt and withered, and the longer he looks at her, the more he finds himself disassociating from this reality.

He remembers what it was like to die, to become something more than this corporeal being, and there's a flicker of hope in his broken heart. He squeezes her hand and cries into her chest, "come on, Kat. Come back." It's a selfish thing to wish such incompleteness on his own daughter, but he needs her. And so he begs and prays and bargains, because she was young, and taken too soon, and there has to be something she wanted to live for, to finish.

The ghosts give him some time before they let themselves into the room, without Casper. He had still been new when J.T. died, and too caught up in trying to understand his own death to notice the passing immediately. Things have changed since. Being dead and seeing death are very different things, and while Casper is perpetually young and naive, they don't feel seeing the fresh corpse of his best friend is in his best interest.

"Hey, Doc," Stretch starts, speaking much softer than he's used to. James doesn't pull away from Kat, seems to nuzzle into her at the sound of his voice. "Doc - she ain't comin' back."

"You don't know that," James says quietly, whimpering as he pulls away from Kat with great reluctance. His eyes are red and swollen, face flushed with grief. Stretch isn't a creature of compassion, but even he has to look away from the doctor for a moment.

"You been there," Stinkie interjects slowly, carefully. He keeps his eyes on James, has a hard time looking at Kat's sickly body. "You know how it works."

"She woulda been back by now," Fatso says.

They're trying to be gentler than they're used to being, and James can appreciate that, but he's desperate and he's stubborn and he shakes his head while running his hands over his flushed face. "Maybe - I mean, so many things factor into death and the afterlife," he starts to babble, "and it's different for everyone. So - so maybe, it's just going to take her a little while. Maybe she's lost somewhere. Maybe – "

The trio exchange careful glances, and Stretch sighs when he looks back at James. "Doc, c'mon. You know that ain't how it goes."

James lets out a heavy breath that's not quite a sigh as he looks back down at Kat, letting Stretch's words sink in. He swallows hard and shakes his head again. "But why…?"

"You're a good guy, Doc," Stinkie says and shrugs his shoulders. "You love 'em too good while they're here. They ain't got a reason to come back."

This is supposed to be comforting, and maybe at some point down the road it will be, but for now this isn't what James needs to hear. As selfish and childish as it is, he just wants his daughter back.

This is such a delicate situation, and the Trio lack the grace required to properly manage it, but they try. Fatso and Stinkie stay with James and Kat while Stretch confronts Casper. The youngest specter takes his time coming to terms with this. It takes him hours to sort through his confusion and grief, but when all is said and done, he crosses over. All he had ever wanted out of his afterlife had been a friend, and Kat had been the best he could have asked for. It surprises no one that he follows her.

The process that follows Kat's death feels much longer than it actually is. The minutes and hours and days all bleed into one another, and it's almost as though a whole lifetime passes between the moment her body's taken away and the moment she's lowered into the ground. In this time, James has very little sleep and too much time to think.

He's desperate to find a way to make contact. The conventional methods - automatic writing and seances and the like - herald no results. And some part of him, the same broken and lonely part that searched so long for Amelia, drives him onward to find Kat.

He wouldn't be able to tell you exactly when or how he comes across word of the Micmac burial ground that lies beyond a small pet cemetery in Ludlow, but what he finds leaves an impression on his fragile mind. The lore says that anything buried in the stoney soil there will come back from the dead. He can find no recorded cases of success or failure, only myth and legend and rumors. Within the clutter of information, the word wendigo comes up more often than it likely should. If he was thinking clearly, he would have noticed this. He would have known better.

But he isn't thinking clearly, and his mind begins to creep down dark and unsavory paths.

By the time the Trio know and understand what James plans to do, it's too late. He's already driving to the cemetery with a flashlight and sheets and rope and a shovel in the trunk of his car.

"You ain't serious," Stretch says, materializing in the passenger's seat beside James. Against his better judgment, he had agreed with Stinkie and Fatso when they suggested he be the one to try and talk some sense into James.

"You and the Doc, you got somethin' we don't," Stinkie had explained. Reasoned. Excused himself of any responsibility.

In retrospect, he supposes that not only is that true, but maybe this is for the best. Stinkie doesn't have the metaphorical balls to handle this mess, and Fatso lacks the decency.

James' hands on the steering wheel shake, his knuckles turn white. He glances sidelong at the ghost, and he can see uncharacteristic concern gracing the sharp edges of Stretch's features. Those unusual, purple eyes are trained too intently on him, and James has to look away, back to the road.

"James," Stretch persists, and he's never used the doctor's name before. It makes James jerk and squeeze the wheel tighter. The leather there creaks.

"I have to try," he finally says. Despair and defeat are so obvious in his quiet, cracked voice.

"She's gone," Stretch blurts out, and James flinches again. Stretch doesn't care; the time for being kind and gentle is over. "She's as dead as they come and she ain't gonna come back."

"Don't say that!" James snaps. He slaps a palm against the steering wheel before holding on to it tightly again. Quieter now, "you don't know that."

"Hate to break it to ya, Doc, but yeah, I do," Stretch retorts, and he can see James' composure starting to break. Maybe starting this argument while he's driving isn't Stretch's best idea. But, then again, maybe it is. If he drives himself off the road, maybe he'll put himself out of this misery.

James is quiet for a long moment. "I have to try."

Stretch sighs. "Ya really shouldn't."

Another pause.

"I have to."

There's something that disturbs even Stretch to watch James digging up the fresh grave of his daughter. It's not so much the act itself, but the frantic and clumsy desperation behind every stroke of the shovel. It takes him an hour or two to reach the coffin and uncover it, but Stretch stops him before he pries it open.

"I wouldn't do that if I was you," he warns, hovering just a few inches in front of James. "She been in there for a couple days, Doc. She ain't exactly gonna smell like roses, y'know?"

James doesn't reply with actual words, instead only waving him off before pushing his way through him. Stretch sighs, watching the doctor struggle to open the coffin. When he gets the lid open, he recoils from the smell of embalming fluid and death. He barely manages to pull himself up out of the grave before relieving his stomach of its contents.

"Hate to say I told ya so, but I told ya so," Stretch remarks.

James composes himself, slides back into the grave with the flashlight, and pulls the coffin open the rest of the way. His hands tremble as he flicks on the light, shining it down into the pit, into the coffin. And there's Kat, pale and still pretty in her death dress. He stares, and thinks she looks at peace - which is more than what could be said while she had been within the clutches of cholera.

Stretch stares at her, too, and thinks her make-up's starting to run.

"Help me get her out," James says, looking away from Kat and to Stretch. He turns the flashlight toward the ghost, but the beam goes right through him. The light makes the ghost's strange eyes glow, blends and blurs his entire outline into the night. The sight is eerie and beautiful, but not enough to distract the doctor the way it might have years ago.

Stretch groans and fixes James with a long, hard stare. "You're really gonna go through with this, ain'tcha?" But Stretch knows he doesn't really need to ask this question again.

And James doesn't need to answer.

And so the two of them work Kat up and out of her grave. Stretch holds the flashlight while James takes care to swaddle her in the sheets he brought. She's limp and stiff all at once somehow, and he tries not to think about it as he tucks her into the bundle.

Why don't we roll you in aluminum foil, and you can go as a leftover?

The memory comes unbidden and it makes him laugh to himself wistfully, hollowly. That had been his suggestion for a Halloween costume when she had been younger, and now this is all he has.

Cold, rotting leftovers.

The three hour drive to Ludlow starts in silence.

Having Kat in the car with them makes James uneasy, something Stretch supposes he can understand. It's been a long time since he's been alive, but he thinks he can remember when death and all of its reminders made him uncomfortable. He figures having his dead daughter propped up against the backseat must be quite the ordeal for James.

He doesn't feel sorry for him, though, because James is the only one putting himself through this. Stretch is only here with him on this morbid roadtrip to try his hand at playing the part of his conscience.

For the record, he's not doing a very good job.

Thump.

And just like that, the silence is broken.

His thought process is disturbed by the sound of Kat's head bumping against the window beside her. He twists around from his place in the shotgun seat, and for a long moment just watches her corpse jitter and jump as they drive over uneven and worn roadway.

"Her head!" James gasps.

"Relax, Doc, it's still there," Stretch grins, turning his attention back to James. The man beside him looks panicked, anxious, but the ghost doesn't regret his words.

"No!" James hisses, distressed and alternating between looking at the road, checking the rearview mirror and glaring at Stretch. "Sit her up!"

"Why? It ain't like it's botherin' her," Stretch says with a shrug.

But James imagines her head bump-bump-bumping against the glass until something gives. He imagines her resurrected, head skewed, skull broken in and cracked open.

"Stretch!"

The ghost groans but obliges the doctor's plea. He gets himself into the backseat with Kat, and pulls her up into a sit using the rope securing the sheets. The corpse tilts toward him, unsteady in the moving vehicle, and for a moment he holds her in place. He stares into her sheet-covered face, and thinks about how he had never been able to get this close to her for this long while she had been alive. To say the two of them hadn't been able to get along very well was an understatement.

He pushes her back into her previous position and takes it upon himself to hold her steady. He doesn't own this rotting bag of bones a damn thing, and so he tells himself he's doing this for James. His nerves are already shot and he has too much to think about, he doesn't need to worry over his daughter toppling over and smacking her head against the windows.

"Is she - ?"

"She's fine," Stretch sighs, "I got her."

The silence creeps in again and settles heavily over them for the rest of the way. As they draw further away from Friendship, closer to Ludlow, Stretch can feel it. He can feel something ancient, something great and terrible.

And it's waiting.

If James had thought digging Kat up and driving three hours with her in the car was going to be the most tortuous part of this macabre venture, he realizes now that he had been wrong. He heaves her dead weight and the shovel out of the car, and finds the path that leads to the pet cemetery. Or, as the sign proclaims in childish scrawl: the Pet Sematary. He takes only sparse moments to note the spiral pattern of the graves, and some of the names of the animals buried there.

Spot.

Biffer.

Smucky.

Winston "Church" Churchill.

"Doc, c'mon, enough's enough," Stretch says as he floats along side James. "That place over there," he looks ahead, toward a deadfall, "it ain't gonna bring Kat back."

"I have to try," James says, and Stretch comes to terms with the fact that this is going to be James' only argument. He's stupid with grief and won't listen to reason.

And that thing somewhere out there is counting on that.

James had struggled to walk to the pet cemetery with Kat hauled over his shoulder, but as he begins to climb the deadfall, Stretch notices her weight seems to become insignificant to him. He doesn't know where he's going, doesn't know where to step to avoid falling, but he somehow manages to walk on without fault. He never looks down, never looks back.

As they get over the deadfall and carry on through the woods toward the Indian burial ground, James doesn't seem to notice the way the bare branches click like bones. Or the hollowed cries of loons far off in the distance. Or the glow of St. Elmo's fire flitting about the treeline. He's completely ignorant of his surroundings, focused solely on the pull of the soured ground ahead of him.

For the first time in his afterlife, Stretch is scared.

By the time they reach the burial ground, James is sweating and winded. He lays Kat down gently, then tosses the shovel down beside her. He takes a moment to catch his breath, staring at the patch of land ahead of him. The ground is harder and stonier than he had imagined it to be, and he thinks he won't be able to break through it. He worries that this was all for naught, that he'll have brought Kat out here for nothing and he won't be able bring her back to her own grave and she'll have to rot out here. And he'll rot with her, because he can't leave his little girl alone.

But he picks up the shovel, anyway, and strikes the ground. The spaded metal chips at the earth, and Stretch can feel that thing again, overwhelming and terrifying. Before James can strike again, he grabs the handle of the shovel and jerks hard, but not hard enough to take it out of the doctor's hands.

"Don't do it," he warns. "If you put her in there, it ain't gonna be her that comes back."

That Great and Terrible thing clicks and howls in the distance.

James looks at Stretch, and then over to Kat, bundled up and so still on the ground. He swallows hard, and some part of him knows Stretch is right. But something, a little nagging voice he can't place, inside urges him on, convinces him that they won't know if they don't try.

And he has to try.

He jerks the shovel out of Stretch's hands, and pretends not to notice the concern clearly visible on the specter's face.

Stretch is not a sympathetic soul, he reminds himself. And that strange little voice whispers to him, he's lying and he doesn't want you to be happy and Kat's so close can't you feel it James she's waiting for you Kat's waiting for you James -

He starts to chip away at the soil again, and Stretch watches him, helpless. He's tried his best and he doesn't know what else to do to help this man. He's come so far with him, it feels wrong to even think of leaving, and so he stays. He stays and he watches James dig a shallow grave for his daughter in old, cursed dirt. And the thing in the woods, in the ground, in James' head, laughs a loon's cry and lights the woods on electric fire.

The sun is rising by the time James has finished burying Kat. He drops the shovel and collapses in a heap beside the new grave, clothes dusty and dirty, glasses skewed. His eyes are red from lack of sleep and wet from tears he doesn't remember shedding. He leans back against a large, rocky marker and stares at the sky as he comes to terms with what he's done, what he's trying to do, and what he's waiting for.

"I hope you're fuckin' happy," Stretch sneers from across the burial ground, outside of its circles. "Whatever comes back here, it comes from another place. A place Kat ain't in."

"No one made you come," James says, looking away from the brightening sky and toward the ghost. "I didn't ask for your help."

"And we didn't ask for yours," Stretch snaps back, glaring in a way that his eyes turn red. "But you tried, anyway, even though we're all about as hopeless as they come."

"What's your point, Stretch?"

"Tit for tat, Doc," Stretch goes on with a roll of his eyes. "I figured the least I could do for you and her was try and keep ya away from this place and doin' somethin' you'd regret."

"You don't know that I'll regret this," James insists, convinced by now that this was for the best.

"Yeah, I do!" Stretch bellows. "I've been tellin' ya and tellin' ya that this place don't bring people back like they were before!"

"Stretch - "

"Don't Stretch me!" He points to Kat's shallow grave. "That thing that crawls outta that hole ain't gonna be Kat."

"We'll see," James says and sighs. His head droops forward as exhaustion finally gets the better of him, and his eyes close.

Stretch doesn't bother trying to keep the argument going, letting sleep take James. It's the very least he can do for him now, because God - or whatever Higher Power is out there - knows he's going to need it.

The sun is setting when James is woken up by the sound of the shovel scraping across the ground. He must have slumped over while he slept, because when he opens his eyes, he finds himself lying flat on his back. And Kat's standing over him, holding on to the shovel. She's covered in the sour dirt he buried her in, spitting mortician's cotton from her dry mouth, and smiling afterward.

The shock is too much, and James can't bring himself to do more than lean up on one elbow. His breath is hard to come by as he stares up at Kat through tear blurred vision. He knew it would work and that she would come back and that Stretch had been wrong all along. He had worried over nothing, that silly, paranoid ghost.

"Kat," he whimpers, and he reaches out with one shaking hand to grope for the skirt of her dress. She's standing just out of his reach. "I missed you. I missed you so much."

Her head tilts, as does her smile. She lifts the shovel as she speaks, and her voice is full of dirt. "I missed you, too, Daddy."

The shovel comes down.