Happiest of birthdays to you, Liv! C8 You deserve all the angstiness I can write and more.
Many thanks to Dash (theCinderninja) for being a fantastic Beta-reader and making sure this worked out alright. :)
Before
October 18, 2012
Sequel to After: s/7475518/1/After , which I suggest reading first, although it's not necessary.
Note: I wrote Danny's death in 'After' ambiguously enough that you could read it as him having transformed or not. I'm still not sure which one I think would actually happen, but I needed to choose one that would let me write this follow-up. Sorry if I didn't choose the one you wanted.
.
There was a soft but sharp knock on his office door and Vlad frowned at the interruption of his work. Completing the dry but very necessary intricacies of the mayoral office was a delicate process and one hard to complete even with an uninterrupted line of concentration. Adding useless secretaries who knocked on the door even after instructed not to bother him for any reason whatsoever was not helpful and not to be tolerated.
But when the young blonde said that Maddie Fenton was in the lobby and wanted to talk to him…
Well, in that case, all was forgiven.
.
Vlad almost lost his calm façade when the love of his life walked into the room. She looked as he had never seen her before. Worn. Disheveled. Her aquamarine Hazmat suit stained with blood and ectoplasm. Haggard. Her watery eyes rimmed with red and the most despairing look on her face that he could ever have imagined. In short, she looked like she had been to hell and wasn't sure if she had made it back.
He was out of his seat and at her side in a moment. Escorting Maddie to a chair, he realized with horror that the colored liquid on her jumpsuit was still recent and wet. After a sharp looking-over, however, Vlad decided that none of the blood was hers. She was safe and in one piece. He sighed in relief, but then his mind turned to what could possibly have put her in this position.
None of the options were good. Almost all of them he could avenge. But he was getting ahead of himself.
"Maddie?" he questioned gently, putting out a hesitant hand, sure she would reject the movement, but unable to hold himself back.
She brushed away a tear with the back of her hand and looked up into his face. He had never seen her look this helpless, this vulnerable.
"What is it?" he asked breathless, suddenly afraid to hear an answer.
"Oh… Vlad…" her voice broke and in that moment, so did his heart. He couldn't bear it any longer and dropped to his knees, pulling the woman into a tentative embrace. Not because he wanted it, but because she needed it. Even had young Daniel been there to see, he couldn't have found fault with the motion, not when Maddie leaned into it like she would otherwise have fallen.
But what on earth could have made the woman like this? She was always so strong. Unbreakable. That was one of the things he admired most about the woman. Nothing could faze her. What tragedy could have occurred to break her? He didn't even want to imagine how terrible it must be, but the images and hypotheses raced through his head, getting more and more frantic and each one more horrible and outlandish than the last. He wouldn't discover anything by merely guessing and the thoughts whirling around his skull were driving him mad.
"Maddie?" he asked gently, pulling her away and holding her at arms length. "What is it?"
She didn't answer.
"What's wrong?" he asked again.
She shook her head wordlessly.
"What happened?" he tried a third time, an edge creeping into his voice that he hadn't ever intended leaking out from behind his ever-present mask.
She finally looked up at him as she replied hesitantly, "I… I have to ask you something."
His eyes searched hers for a clue as to what this could be about. He didn't think that this could be about his ghostly alter ego. It might explain her current emotional state if she found out about her son, but she would have come into his room bazooka blazing instead of melting into his hold like she had.
He decided to stop trying to figure it out on his own and instead simply ask her what she meant.
"There's something I need to know…" she elaborated before he had a chance.
"About what…?" he asked warily, not liking the track this could very easily be taking.
"Ghosts," she whispered.
Vlad chuckled deep in his throat, buying time to formulate a plan. "Surely, you know more about ghosts than me, Maddie," he put her off. "After all, you and… Jack… are the ghost experts of Amity Park." As he continued, his speech picked up speed and he even added a flourish with one hand. "Which is in turn the paranormal capital of the world. I'm merely the mayor," he pointed out, with a self deprecating tone that he had rarely felt obliged to call upon. "Why do you imagine that I will know more than you about ghosts?"
"He said you did," Maddie responded, not caring about what he'd said.
"He… said I did?" Vlad was caught off guard. "Who said I did?"
"Phantom." She choked on the name.
Vlad quirked an eyebrow. What was that little badger up to now? "Indeed?" he murmured.
"He told me to ask you…" Maddie floundered for the words. "That you could explain…"
It was all he could do to keep from gaping at her. The boy wanted him to explain their status to the woman who had been threatening to dissect any abnormal or paranormal entity she got its hands on? Vlad practically stuttered, "I… I'm not sure that I…"
"Don't!" she cried out desperately. "Don't play games with me, Vlad. I need you to give me a straight answer to this. I need you to…" she broke off.
Vlad nodded softly to himself. "I understand."
He would have to explain matters to her, answer whatever questions she asked of him. Although he'd imagined such an inquisition might occur, he had never sat down to think through how he would answer the question. Perhaps it was wishful thinking, believing that somehow coming up with a line of defence would be tempting fate. Or he had realized long ago that he simply had no idea how he would approach such a situation and would have to temper his answers depending on the thousands of variables as they aligned when such an event should occur.
At any rate, he needed a moment in which to collect himself. Weighing his courses of action, he opted for delaying the inquisition until he had further information. "Of course," he told her. "There's one call I need to make and then I'll be all yours. Is that agreeable?"
That wasn't what Maddie wanted and the look on her face made that as clear as day, but as she was the one barging in on his busy life, she realized that she was in no place to make demands. He was the mayor, after all, and had duties that he needed to attend to and who was she to get in his way, no matter what kind of crisis she was enduring?
Vlad searched her face as he stood up, trying to figure out if Maddie would hold up by herself if he left her for a minute. He wasn't sure at first, but rallying under his stare, Maddie clenched her jaw and set herself firmly in the belief that she would stay strong, wouldn't shatter. Not yet. She had to figure this all out first. She needed to get an answer. But before that happened, Vlad needed to make a phone call. She would endure until then.
When he was assured of this fact, Vlad walked out of his office to an empty one and locked the door. Whipping out his cell phone, he let the first traces of annoyance show on his face as he called Danny.
It rang until he reached the voicemail.
Not surprising, but still annoying…
"Butter biscuits," he muttered, before terminating the call and then scrolling through his contacts until he found the next number. He pressed the call button and this time, someone picked up.
"Who is this?" a cautious voice on the other side answered.
"Ah, Samantha, my dear…" Vlad opened the conversation.
"Ewww," she exclaimed as soon as she recognized the suave voice. "It's Sam," she pointedly corrected. "And how did you even get this number? Never mind, I don't even want to know…"
"Well, as mayor of our beautiful city, I do have access to certain information…" he smirked, pulling his face into its more natural devious look.
"That includes my cell phone number? You're a fruitloop, Vlad."
The man exhaled through his nose. "I am not a fruitloop," he countered slowly.
Then there was some confusion and the addition of a second voice on the other end.
"…who's that… Vlad?"
"Yeah," Sam replied to the person joining her.
"Seriously?" Tucker screeched.
"Yeah," she laughed.
"How'd he get your number?" the boy spluttered.
"He's a creep," she said
"Dude, tell me about it," he agreed.
A snort from the girl.
"Dude!" Tucker yelled to the phone that Sam was still holding. "You're a fruitloop, you know that?"
Vlad gritted his teeth. "Samantha," he growled.
"It's Sam," she emphasized again.
"Samantha," he said again in a display of patience that only came from years of dealing with hordes of imbeciles. "I need you to tell me where Daniel is."
"As if I would tell you where Danny is. What kind of a person do you think I am that I would betray his whereabouts to his arch-enemy?" she spat into the phone.
Vlad rolled his eyes. Teenagers. So melodramatic.
"He's not picking up his phone…" he explained to her.
"No duh. You really think he would pick up his phone when he knew it was you who was the one calling him?"
Vlad pinched the bridge of his nose. This was taking far too long. Why did they have to be so troublesome? All he wanted to do was ask the boy a simple question. It wasn't as if he were going to shoot an ecto-blast through the telephone…
"Will you please put him on the line? I wish to speak to him."
Sam was silent for a moment. She didn't know how to respond to a Vlad asking, nearly pleading, for her to do something without a threatening glare at least to back it up and completely balance out all niceness that could possibly be associated with the motion.
"No, Vlad, I can't put him on."
The man wanted to blast something, but refrained when he realized that subordinates would wonder why there was ghostly damage when none of his alarms had gone off.
"He's not here," she expounded.
Vlad blinked. "You mean, Daniel isn't with you?"
Somehow it seemed strange to imagine the Manson girl and Foley boy even existing when Daniel wasn't around. They functioned as a unit. They were always together.
There was a pause before Sam affirmed the statement. "We haven't seen him since lunch when Skulker showed up at Casper High." He could hear her eyes narrowing. "Why, did you have anything to do with that?"
He was rather offended at that. "No, I did not. I think it would have been rather obvious had Skulker been acting under my orders and not everything he does is done under me. He is a ghost capable of acting on his own and he certainly likes to chase after his prey in his free time. Don't just assume everything is my fault because it isn't."
Sam saw his point, but wasn't about to apologize. "So what did you want to talk to Danny for?"
Vlad hesitated, but realized that Danny would probably run to Samantha first and so she would be his best messenger. "Maddie is in my office."
"What?" Sam shrieked so that the half ghost needed to pull the phone away from his ear. "You have Mrs. Fenton? You jerk! You kidnapped her and now you want me to relay the message to Danny?"
Vlad closed his eyes before responding. "You don't understand, Samantha. She's practically in tears…"
"And you think that will make Danny run there even faster? What did you do to her?"
"Calm down, you silly girl; I haven't done anything to her. Maddie came to my office already crying. She says Phantom told her that I would explain something to her and I want to know what Danny was referring to and how much she knows before I go and expose myself."
There was silence on the other end in the aftermath of Vlad's small rant.
"There," he huffed. "Are you satisfied now?"
"Yes." Her answer was short and clipped.
"Fine. Now when you see Daniel, tell him to call."
There was some half-hearted grumbling on the other end. Nothing further to be gained there.
"Ta." And he snapped the phone shut, knowing that he would have to return to Maddie without any more knowledge than he had begun with.
Disappointed, but realizing that there was nothing to be done, Vlad walked back into his office to see her in exactly the same state he had left her. Maddie didn't seem to have moved, thought, or even blinked since he went to call her son. It was as if she had frozen herself in time, willing herself to stoically ignore all of the pain, emotion, turmoil racing through her body. She wouldn't be able to take it, once she released that floodgate.
She blinked as he came in front of her and seemed to come back to reality. "Is everything alright?" Her voice was hoarse.
Vlad blinked, uncomprehending why she would be asking him that instead of the other way around.
"Your phone call?" she clarified, coughing out the catch in her voice.
"Oh, yes, my phone call." He shook his head to clear it. "It was fine. But what is all this about?"
"I…" Maddie faltered. "I'm not sure where to begin."
That would get them nowhere quickly. He tried to start the conversation by pointing her back to the one piece of information he did already know. "You said that you were talking to Phantom?"
She nodded, her eyes brimming with tears.
Vlad tilted his head to the side, unable to comprehend why she would be crying because of this. Daniel would never hurt her, and why would she care about a ghost without knowing it was her son?
He was scared to tread too far down that road, however, lest his love break down in tears, an idea that scared him, frankly.
"He told you to ask me something?" he prompted.
Another nod.
Very good. They would take this in baby steps.
"And… that I could answer the question for you?" This was all still old ground, but he needed to figure out exactly what had happened.
She nodded, then stopped, unsure of herself. "Well, I think it was you. He said to ask Vlad. He didn't really clarify if it was you when I asked him… maybe it was you and maybe it wasn't, but you're the only Vlad I know and he knows you too and you know about ghosts from college and…"
"Alright," he acknowledged so she would stop rambling in that wavering tone. "Perhaps I can answer it."
Maddie nodded, not trusting her voice. Vlad knelt and watched her anxiously, not sure of what could be causing this sort of emotional turmoil in a woman who was normally so very strong.
"Can you tell me what the question was?"
There was a long pause. Then her head jerked up to face him as she posed the question. "What's different about Phantom? Why is he not a normal ghost?"
Vlad's face darkened and he had to restrain a growl. Why would the boy trap him into answering this? What did he want him to do, expose them both?
"Why did he imagine I could tell you that?" he tested lightly.
Maddie's face fell in disappointment as it didn't look like Vlad could help while she explained, "He said you understood the science behind it and could actually explain."
"Explain what?" Vlad asked point blank.
"How it was that he was different. How he could be a ghost without… having… ever died…" Maddie covered her mouth and curled in on herself.
Vlad reached out a hand to hesitantly comfort her as she choked back a sob. "Maddie…"
She looked up, tears streaming down her face, hands desperately trying to wipe them away, willing them to dry. "I'm so sorry, Vlad. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to… I don't really know what came over me…"
It was obvious that she knew exactly what had come over her. And it was something big. But he didn't know and it was frustrating to say the least. "Maddie… what happened?"
"He…" and she couldn't continue.
Vlad rubbed her arm soothingly and whispered something to her until she stopped crying. "It's alright. Just start at the beginning."
She nodded and steeled herself. "The ghost tracker went off this morning when I was working in the lab so I grabbed my equipment and followed the signal. It was just me. And when I got there, I found Skulker fighting Phantom. He… wasn't in good shape."
"Skulker?" Vlad asked with a wry smile, imagining the metal hunter's helmet separate from his hulking form and a certain teenager poking his tiny green blobby body.
"No," Maddie contradicted. "Phantom."
Vlad sobered at once, his brows contracting as he took in this information. Sure, Skulker was very skilled, and it would only take one or two lucky hits to gain the upper hand against a boy who fought without a plan. But if he had never beaten the boy, it chafed his pride to think that his sometime underling had.
"Skulker had spectral paralysis darts," Maddie explained.
That certainly made more sense. But then, what had transpired since…?
"He was about to finish him off when I showed up."
Vlad's eyes went wide. He thought his actions had made it clear that the boy was not to be skinned and put on display in Skulker's cave. Perhaps he hadn't said so in so many words, but with all of his plans centered around the younger halfa, he was sure it was obvious to his some time employee. So what was Skulker doing, going around besting Daniel? He would have to blast some sense into the puny green blob.
But making angry faces at Maddie would get him nowhere. He suppressed his emotion as he looked at her again. "And what happened next?" he asked.
"Well, I beat him and sucked him into the thermos the ghost boy always carries."
Vlad smiled. He knew she could. She was competent… unlike that oaf of a husband she sported.
"And then I went over to check on Phantom."
"He hadn't left yet?" Vlad frowned. That was not in Phantom's modus operandii. He would always flee if Jack or Maddie got too close.
Then it dawned on him. "The darts were still in effect."
Maddie nodded. "That and… he wasn't in any condition to go anywhere."
Vlad frowned. "What do you mean, in no condition to go anywhere?"
"He was… oh god, Vlad, it was so terrible! I'd never seen anything like… I mean, sure I've always been fine around blood, in all of our medical courses, but Vlad, there was so much of it! So much of it… so much…"
"Maddie!" Vlad exclaimed, shaking her slightly, nervous at how much she seemed fixated on the amount of blood she'd seen. He knew how testy ghost fights could get; they weren't pretty. He understood why Daniel hid so many of his injuries from his parents. The things he got himself into every day were far beyond healthy blood loss. And there were some things that a mother should never have to see.
But wait… blood? She had said that she'd seen blood. Had it really been blood or was it ectoplasm that flowed? That would make a big difference in this conversation…
"Maddie, was it blood or ectoplasm? This is a ghost we're talking about here, isn't it?"
"Yes," Maddie nodded, still shaken by the scene she appeared to be replaying again and again in front of those unfocused eyes. "It was ectoplasm. It was green. But it was everywhere. And it felt like blood, smelt like it. Vlad, I never realized…"
He filled in the unspoken continuation. She never realized how similar to humans ghosts were. With the blood. They could be wounded. They could die too. They could feel the pain. She'd never seen that before.
But now she had. Just what did that mean?
"Hold on, Maddie," he ventured out on a limb to soothe her. "It's alright."
"No!" She reacted by pounding into his shoulder. "No it's not alright, Vlad! He's not alright!"
Not alright? He wasn't alright?
"What happened?"
"He died, Vlad!" she screamed at him. "Phantom died."
In that moment, Vlad's world stopped. His hands froze and he forgot to breathe as his icy blue eyes grew wide and fixated on one of the slimy streaks of green that littered Maddie's jumpsuit. He couldn't think, couldn't process anything, even as what she said pierced through his brain. He was dead. Daniel was dead.
But that simply wasn't possible.
"He's dead?" Vlad asked unbelievingly in a voice that he couldn't even recognize as his own.
Maddie gripped the cloth of his suit tightly in her hands. "He died in my arms, Vlad, even though ghosts can't die. It's impossible, but it happened. I saw it. I was there, and Vlad…" she broke off as a few sobs wracked her frame.
"He's dead?" Vlad repeated numbly.
"Yeah," she whispered into his suit jacket. "I never realized. I never realized that he was so small."
Vlad had to swallow back a large lump in his throat.
"He was so tiny," she continued, not aware of how her words affected him. "I held him in my arms and he was so fragile. I thought he was going to break with every cough. We always thought his was so brash and bold with his snarky banter and always cutting things so close when he was fighting, but we never really saw him get very hurt. And we didn't think… we never realized that he was just a kid."
Vlad didn't trust himself to speak.
"At the end… he thought," she buried her head even further. "He thought I was his mom, Vlad. This ghost was asking for my forgiveness and asking me not to leave him. And there wasn't anything I could do for him. So then he died. He died, Vlad!" she shouted again as if he hadn't heard.
"I know," he somehow managed.
"But he couldn't have died! He just couldn't have. Tell me it's impossible, Vlad. Tell me that it couldn't have happened."
She looked up at him with pleading eyes but he didn't know what comfort he could possibly give. His mouth worked a couple times before he finally spoke. "I've never heard of a ghost that died. I wouldn't have said it was possible… but if you say that you saw it…" he trailed off not quite knowing what he should say, but knowing at once from the expression on his love's face that he had said the wrong thing.
"Perhaps he didn't actually die, Maddie," he spoke with a harshly forced optimism. "Maybe he went back to the Ghost Zone or turned invisible or something."
She shook her head. "No, that's not what happened."
"Well, what did happen, then?"
He wasn't sure he wanted to know the answer. He still wanted to cling to the hope that she had been wrong. After all, it wouldn't be the first time she had been mistaken about ghostly matters. The boy just couldn't be dead.
"It was awful, Vlad. It was just like watching a human being dying. He had already lost so much blood…" she wavered, still haunted by the image. "And then he was coughing and convulsing even though he was still paralyzed from those darts. And then he couldn't see anything and I could barely hear him talking and then he… died." She began to hyperventilate again. "He stopped breathing and responding and no matter how many times I shook him, he wouldn't answer. And then the blood stopped flowing. He was dead, Vlad. He was dead."
"But what happened after that, Maddie?" he asked, consumed by the need to know what the outcome was, what possibilities there were for action now. "What happened to the body?"
"You think I would have left his body just lying there in a deserted alley?" she asked, shocked and offended that he would suggest such a thing.
"Then you have him?" Something surged inside of Vlad's chest, so sudden and warm that it physically pained him. And yet he didn't mind. "Is he in the Ghost Assault Vehicle? If so, then perhaps there is a way to jumpstart his system again, Maddie, we should go…" Vlad was already standing when Maddie pulled him back down into his chair with a shake of her head.
"That's not it. I don't have him."
"I don't understand; you said that you didn't leave the body…" The pieces of her story weren't fitting together.
"I didn't. But there wasn't any body."
"What… what do you mean?"
"I mean he… was gone. He vanished."
Vlad tried to make sense of that. "He turned invisible?"
"No." She paused for a long moment. "He didn't turn invisible. He… vanished. He disintegrated. It was like he melted away into nothing and blew away in my hands. One minute I was holding him, and the next, he slipped away from me. And I couldn't stop it, I couldn't keep him there." Her mouth trembled. "There was nothing to hold onto."
Vlad, who had gotten his hopes up at the possibility that Danny was still partially alive, or at the very least, salvageable, finally understood with this last revelation that there was nothing he could do. Daniel was dead. And gone.
And in his dying breath, Daniel had sent his mother to him for answers. His heart sank. He couldn't be the one to tell her. Then again, there really wasn't anyone else. He would have to do it here and now. Before she got home and realized that her son would never come back…
Slowly, he forced the cogs in his head to turn. How could he go about this without inflicting any more damage than he had to?
"Was that… all you saw?" he asked quietly.
"What do you mean? What else should I have seen?"
"I'm not sure; that is why I asked."
"No," Maddie shook her head. "That was everything. That was more than enough, don't you think?"
It was more than enough for the poor woman, yes, Vlad thought, and yet, not enough at the same time. Not nearly enough to prepare her for what was to come.
"Maddie, my dear…" he began, without knowing how to finish. He decided then to take a different approach. "Do you have the thermos with Skulker in it?"
"Yes," she said, turning to fumble at her belt and Vlad saw for the first time that it was strapped to her multi-purpose belt. "Here it is," she said, holding it out with one hand and wiping her eyes with the other. "Why did you want it?" She was a little puzzled at the change in subject.
"If you don't mind, I'll keep it with me. I have a ghost-proof safe here and we'll discuss what to do with him later."
"Why?" she asked.
Vlad sighed. He didn't want to tell her that he was scared of what she might do to the ghost when she realized whose existence he had snuffed out. And if he was honest with himself, part of it was the need to assure that he was the one who got to punish Skulker for this. He could already feel the fiery tingles burning out the tears pricking at his eyes. But all that would have to wait until… he got through this conversation.
"Because this conversation will be more than enough for the both of us today. The thermos can wait until tomorrow and I don't want you to have to worry about it." Saying this, he took the silver container out of her hands and quickly locked it away in the large safe at the other end of the room. Perhaps there, it would be far enough out of his consciousness that he could finish explaining things to Maddie without feeling the driving need to blast the thermos to pieces and proceed to do the same to the ghost inside.
He came back to sit beside Maddie and noticed something about her appearance for the first time. Neon green was not the only color streaking her teal jumpsuit. There was a dark rusty red there too. Blood.
He fingered it and asked concernedly, "Maddie, is this your blood?" He wondered if he had been so remiss as to miss an injury. Yes, she had bested Skulker, but had he landed a hit? Had she been bleeding this entire time?
She looked at the splotches on her shoulder with wide blinking eyes. "No," she said, eyes still fixed on the stains. "That's not mine. Skulker never even got near me."
He looked at her closely. "Then… whose is it?"
Maddie blinked again, as if unable to comprehend the question or the blood or how it had gotten there. Then she met his eyes and asked in a tremulous voice, "Could it be… his? Could it be Phantom's?"
Vlad met her gaze with a steady somber look.
"Is that even possible?" she gasped. "For a ghost to have blood?"
"You told me that there was something different about Phantom. That he wasn't just a ghost…"
"But for him to have blood?" she covered her mouth with her hand, suddenly horrified.
He nodded.
"What…? How…? Vlad… what is going on? What is… what was different about Phantom? What was he?"
"You said that he was talking to you, that he told you to come to me because I could explain."
"Yes."
"Did he… have a chance to tell you anything himself?"
"A little." Maddie searched her mind, forcing herself to relive those minutes when she held his weak and wounded form. "He was hard to hear and going in and out of… consciousness… lucidity. But he said that he wasn't really a ghost. That he hadn't actually died…" She stopped before bursting out, "But that's not possible, is it, Vlad? For him to have all of the characteristics of a ghost but to not be one? For him to be a ghost that had never died?" She looked at him and the proof that all of the assumptions in her world had been pulled out from under her feet was written plainly on her face.
"Phantom was a ghost," Vlad assured her. "But a very specific type, a rare type… one that behaves differently and responds differently than the ghosts you are used to dealing with." He took a deep breath, steadying himself to tell another living soul about this for the first time.
"He was what the other ghosts often refer to as a halfa." He looked at her. "Are you familiar with the term?"
Maddie wracked her brain and might have heard it once or twice, but she couldn't be sure and didn't even know if that was the word she recalled. She shook her head.
Vlad nodded. "It comes from the Latin word."
"Half of," Maddie murmured.
"Yes," Vlad confirmed. "It essentially means that he was, for lack of a better way to put it, a half ghost. A being with many of the powers and characteristics of a ghost, but a being who was not, strictly speaking, a ghost. You want to find an example to break the logician's law of non-contradiction, and here you go. A ghost and yet not a ghost at the same time. The reason why you never knew what to make of him was because you measured him by fully ghostly standards, when he would fit very, very few of them."
Maddie nodded. "That would explain why our tests and theories, they never were right for him."
"No, and you couldn't expect them to be. He was…" he paused. "Almost unique in all the world."
"But if he was half ghost like you said, he would have to be something else too, right?"
"Yes," Vlad said slowly. "It would."
"What's the other half?" Maddie asked, eyes wide.
"What do you think?" He countered, asking her to do this, to figure it out herself.
She put one hand to her head as she ran through the possibilities. "Well vampires or werewolves would be too farfetched but after all this, I don't…"
"No, think, Maddie. What would make the most sense?"
She looked at him without understanding.
"What category of beings are ghosts most like?" He waited, but she still wasn't fitting the pieces of the puzzle together, so he prodded further. "Where do ghosts come from?"
Maddie was stunned into silence that wanted very desperately to be broken, if he could tell anything from the way she tried again and again to say something.
"You mean…" she got out in an incredulous half scream. "You mean that he was half human?"
Vlad nodded solemnly with clenched jaw. "He had a human form, too, that you wouldn't have thought was a ghost, wouldn't be classified as one."
Maddie clasped and unclasped her hands in her lap, bunching ratted pieces of her suit between them. Her movements became more frantic until Vlad put out a hand to still hers.
"It's impossible," she whispered. "Impossible."
"Twenty years ago, ghosts were impossible, too, Maddie," he said with a small, sad smile.
"How could we have been hunting down someone who was half human without even stopping to see the signs? To ask ourselves why he was different, instead of wanting to go after him more? Jack…" she called out brokenly to the man who wasn't there, "what were we doing?"
"It's not your fault that you didn't see it," Vlad tried to tell her. After all, it was the truth. Daniel was adamant that his parents would never know. "He tried hard to keep you, and everyone else, from finding out, from realizing he was that different. You can't blame him."
Maddie looked up. "Yes, I can. If he had just said something, there's no way we would have threatened to pull him apart molecule by molecule if we had known."
"If you had known what?"
"That he was half human."
Vlad paused before replying, "That also means he was half ghost. That was more than enough reason for him to hide from ghost hunters."
"But he was human."
"He was part human," he emphasized. "Would you really have dealt with him as a full human if he was alive and well?"
Maddie was silent. Understanding what Vlad meant. If Phantom was half human, there was no way that she could justify any of the many thoroughly painful experiments she and Jack had planned for him. On the other hand, though, if he was half human and half something else, wouldn't that have stimulated her brain to come up with a different slew of tests designed to find out the differences between him and ghosts, him and humans? And if he was part ghost, didn't that still make him part ghost? How much of his psyche was obsessive and malignant, how much had been corrupted? How much could she trust him, and how much would she treat him like the freak of nature he had to be to span the world of the living and the dead?
But she had to believe that she would see the human side of him. Had to believe the best in herself. Had to believe that she would do the right thing- the humane thing.
"He was human," she repeated.
"He was human," Vlad concurred.
"How…?" Maddie asked. "How could he be part human and part ghost at the same time? It's impossible, but… just… how?" she asked again. "He said you knew, that you could explain it."
Vlad bowed his head. "Yes, I can. It's a rather complicated process to explain, but I'll try to keep it simple. Heaven knows you'll have enough to think about by the end…"
He took a few moments to compose himself.
"He was half ghost. But he started out as a full human and then… well… died halfway. I suppose that's the easiest way to put it."
"He died?"
"Well, not all the way. You need to have the perfect set-up, the exact conditions right to make it work or it backfires and completely kills the subject. It's ridiculously hard to replicate even in laboratory settings. That's why there are so… few halfas in existence."
He swallowed.
So few? There weren't enough of them to call them a few. There never had been. It was just he and Daniel to be perfectly honest. And then the multitude of failures he had cooked up and tried to make himself. But you can't start the process of creating a halfa from lab rats, clones, and synthetic life forms. You needed to start with a fully living and breathing natural human. But regardless of what his business rivals said of him, he did have moral standards of some kind. Putting another human being through the agony that had been put upon him was out of the question. And that was why he never could come up with another halfa; even with Daniel's mid-morph DNA it wouldn't have worked.
It was just the two of them.
And now he was alone.
Again.
His fists clenched as he realized the full impact of those words. To have been alone for so long, thinking you were the only freak of nature in the world, then to find someone just like you with whom you could talk, reason, fight, only to be left completely alone again…
For a moment, emotion threatened to overwhelm him. But he had to shove it aside for now, get through this conversation with Maddie. And he could fall into the stupor of fully realizing the truth that night when he was alone.
He cleared his voice of the lump in his throat. "In order for it to work, you need to open up a new rift in reality, another doorway between the worlds."
"A portal."
"Yes. And the subject has to be right in the middle of it when it activates. All of the energy surging out of the portal when the two planes of existence collides is a force of nature unrivalled by anything known to man. It could easily burn the subject to a crisp in a matter of seconds. Or all of that foreign energy suddenly invading a system could cause it to implode."
Maddie blanched.
Vlad paused in his narrative as he realized what cruel mark of fate it had been that he and Daniel were both spared all of the horrendous outcomes that could have occurred so easily.
"But, if all goes well, that energy bonds with the subject, altering their DNA to match their surroundings at that moment. Half real world qualities, half Ghost Zone. No one could completely survive a blast like that, so it's as if it half kills them, but then grants them the powers of the dead."
"They have a human form that can live in this world as well as a ghost form complete with ghostly properties and powers," He explained. "It's like having the best of both worlds, aside from the fact that they're considered unnatural freaks by everyone who knows about them on either side and are specially targeted by ghosts and ghost hunters alike. They can't win."
She looked at him, trying to process the information.
"To put it one way," he said, vaguely waving a hand around. "That's as much as I've been able to put it into vaguely scientific terms."
"He… was created…?" Maddie questioned.
"Yes."
"Someone put him through that?" She shuddered, unable to imagine such cruelty.
"Not purposefully," he was quick to point out. "I doubt that if you ever tried to make it work, it would; the process would probably completely backfire on you. No, no, it happened on its own. By accident. It was nobody's fault, Maddie. It wasn't anyone's fault that it happened to him." He tried to think of as many different ways of stressing that truth as possible. Because she couldn't blame herself for what happened to Daniel. Even though she would, he would give her no grounds on which to base such destructive self-loathing.
He could blame Jack for his own creation, but for Maddie to blame herself for what truly was an accident would be unacceptable.
She nodded, hesitantly accepting his explanation, his assurances.
"But how do you know all of this, Vlad? You seem to be an expert, but you've never told us about this, about any of this. The existence of halfas, or the process by which they're created. How do you know and why didn't you confide in us?"
She looked hurt that her college research mate wouldn't tell her, the resident expert on ghosts, about this revolutionary development that completely changed the body of facts she had been collecting and working off of for nearly her entire life.
"I didn't tell you because I didn't want you to look at that boy as a freak of nature. And quite frankly, I thought you would figure it out without me telling you."
"But how do you know, Vlad? Jack and I have been the ones researching ghosts all this time. How are you the one with this information?"
He sighed shakily. "I don't think that you would like to know the answer to that question, my dear."
"But of course, I would, Vlad. I need to know this. How do you know?" she pressed.
"You don't want to know," he reiterated. "And… I don't want you to know."
"What is it, Vlad? What is going on here? Everything's changing at once and I don't know why. How? How could this be true? How do I know it's true? How do I know that the ghost I just saw die was actually a human being? How is any of this possible and how do you know?"
"Oh, Maddie," he sighed. "You still don't understand, do you?"
Her brow furrowed, her tirade stopped mid-flow. "What don't I understand?"
"What I'm trying to tell you."
"What? What are you trying to tell me? What am I not getting?"
He put his head down for a moment before lifting it up to her, eyes glistening. "You don't understand what has to be true about all that I've told you."
"What?" she repeated. "I don't understand. Just tell me, Vlad," she reached out a hand to clutch desperately on his sleeve. "What am I still missing?"
"Think, Maddie," he nearly pleaded. "Think. Halfas are created from human beings who happen to be caught up in the creation of a portal." He spelled it out for her, link by link. "Think of where portals are. How many of them are there?"
"Well, we made the first working prototype in college."
"Yes."
"And then there's the one at Fenton Works."
"Yes."
"And then we assume, we've heard of them even if we haven't been able to verify them yet, that there are natural portals that come and go."
"Yes, but how big are they? How stable? How powerful? Powerful enough to radically alter the genome sequence of a human being?"
"No," she replied, thinking through every scrap of data she and Jack had been able to collect about the elusive phenomenon. "No, they're small, unstable, never stay anywhere long. You could probably walk by it and not see a thing. It couldn't change a person like that."
Vlad watched her, waiting for the final pieces to fall into place. "Which means that if halfas have been created, where have they been created?"
"In man-made portals…?"
Vlad nodded.
"But… we have the only portals."
He nodded again.
"Yes you do, my dear," he confirmed, holding her hand. "And there was an accident at each one, wasn't there?"
Maddie's mind began to whirl.
College. The proto-type. The incorrect calculations. Jack pressing the button anyway. The blast. Jack knocking her to the ground. Vlad still standing in front of it. Vlad. Vlad catching the full stream of ectoplasm in his face. The ecto-acne. The years in the hospital. His shutting himself off from the world. Vlad. Vlad. Vlad.
"Vlad…?" she asked, her voice barely audible.
He smiled sadly as he saw she had figured it out. He nodded and she pulled her hand out of his.
Vlad. He too was one of these things. These halfas. Half ghost, half human. He had been all this time, for all these years, and she had never known. He had never told her.
What did this mean for them now that she knew? How would this change things? How would Jack take it? How would the city react when the realized who and what their mayor was?
Vlad backed away from her slowly, painfully, as he saw the emotions cascading over her face. This changed everything. Like he knew it would. He'd had no choice, but that didn't mean that it wouldn't still hurt.
"I'm sorry, Maddie," his shining eyes pleaded for her forgiveness. "I'm so sorry we never told you…"
We. We never told you.
Who? Who was this other person, the other halfa that she hadn't known about? One created in their portal. Who had been there? It hadn't even been working, but then…
Oh god.
Danny.
Danny had gone into the portal when it actually turned on. He'd been zapped. They'd taken him to the hospital but all seemed well and they brought him home and he claimed to have no side effects. Had there been? There must have been. But she never noticed. She must have been too obsessed with finally seeing ghosts to see what was wrong with her baby.
That he was a ghost himself.
That would explain it. Would explain everything. The equipment going off around him. His skittishness and worry about everything- about being around them and their inventions. His not doing well in school. Everything. It explained everything.
Why had it taken Vlad telling her for her to figure it out?
But Vlad had said that these halfas had two forms, hadn't he? One for their human selves, one for their ghost halves. Danny must have had a different form too. He must have looked different. He would have looked like a ghost. She would have seen him, seen his other form. Had she chased her son with guns? Threatened to tear him apart molecule by molecule?
Who was he, though. Who was Danny when he was a ghost?
And then it hit her. Immediately, completely. She knew. She understood. She finally put together all of the pieces that she should have seen from the start. The similarities, too many to count. So obvious now that she knew.
He was Phantom. Danny Phantom. Her son.
The ghost who had just died. The one she had held in her arms, wishing she could give it comfort as he called her 'mom'.
She had just held her baby boy as he died. As he died.
He couldn't have died. It was her son. He couldn't be dead, he couldn't, he couldn't. Not without giving her a chance to figure this out, to tell him she would accept him no matter what he was. He couldn't be dead…
"Vlad…?" she asked, tears brimming out over her too-wide eyes. She inhaled one shaky breath to say, "he's dead" before she collapsed in on herself, unable to control her sobs.
She reached out blindly through tear-filled eyes to grab onto Vlad for support. At the invitation, he moved forward, coming next to her and wrapping his arms around her shaking frame. He, too, needed support, as the horrific truth finally caught up with him, threatening to overwhelm his cold and lonely heart.
He pulled her close, and it was a long time before either one of them spent their tears.
And so it ends. Comments would be a most wonderful thing.