AN: I was searching through old fanfic challenges on the forums and came across a prompt asking for an explanation as to why Maddie hates ghosts so much. I'm sure my Fading Shades readers want me to shut up about Maddie's parents, who I actually have headcanon for rather thoroughly, but for those not yet sick of that, this is the story of Maddie's father. At least, this is the part of the story Maddie would say is most significant.
Reviews, criticisms, an feedback in general are all appreciated.
Maddie hates ghosts because they took her father from her.
His purple eyes were more beautiful than the sunset when he smiled, like doe eyes, surprisingly bright and full and big, melted glaciers. He had a smile he gave only his wife and daughters, a gentle expression of love that softened his angular face, made his age seem significant. Maddie remembered being six and surprising him with a bunch of fluffy white dandelions, telling him to blow on them and make a wish. He turned the bundle over in his scarred hands, and looked at her, warmth spreading to his features. The sunlight caught the red in his orange hair, outshining the white streaks, when he turned and obediently blew on them.
But she has more memories of the way he was when it snowed.
Snow made him think of ghosts, for reasons she would not understand until later, and he withdrew into himself. His eyes became hunks of foggy amethyst, imperfect and unreachable, clouded over with things he did not name. Maddie had walked in on her father changing once when she was four. His left ribcage down to his hips were a mass of dark red, clawed scars, so deep there almost seemed to be a piece of him missing. He always wore layers, but she glimpsed other scars as he slammed the door, alarmed and ashamed. She never saw him in less than full length sleeves, pants and usually gloves, though it seemed to Maddie that her mother could coax him out of the gloves more often than not.
"Give me your hand, Vincent, not suede," her mother would say, and he'd always take off his gloves for her, revealing lean, long piano playing fingers. "Now, isn't that better?"
"Ja, Jaclyn," he'd murmur with a single nod of his head, following where his wife went despite the fact he was twenty years older than her, a foot taller and much stronger.
There were good days and bad, but snow was a promise of the worst, of him refusing to remove his gloves, running them through his hair again and again, jumping at every little noise, lapsing in and out of English and German, and fearing sleep. His nightmares often left him clawing at the ground or thrashing. Afraid of hurting his wife or scaring his children, he retreated to the basement where he could wait it out, huddled on the floor. He was too at home sleeping on floors and hard surfaces; his eyes went glassy when he did it, and he slept still as a corpse.
Maddie remembers when she was ten and she found her father just standing at the bathroom medicine cabinet, a bottle of pills in his hand, measuring out pairs of two on the sink side, tears silently running down his cheeks. When she screamed, he simply continued to stand there. That was when her mother came in, and after some arguing, he emerged from the bedroom later to hand Maddie an old journal. In it lay the answers to questions he couldn't even bear to hear spoken.
He had been a ghost hunter. So had his friends, and as one huge united group they went out and caught a ghost, a historic first, an advancement of science that paid for this house, for their lives together. Her mother had been a ghost hunter on the expedition alongside him, as just friends back then.
Almost everyone had died, slowly and painfully.
His journal contained no details as to his own survival, it simply dropped off for a month and resumed when her parents had gotten back home. The blanks she filled in with the scars, with the steady flow of coffee and bitter denunciations of God and Santa and anything mysterious. The blanks were there in the long nights he spent playing the piano, improvising long pieces with no real end; they were in the layered clothing and the commander's voice he so often used. There was idealism and faith in his journal before he led the journey to the north to look for ghosts. Now there was an extensive book collection and a coldness to him, a hesitation to touch or be touched.
Maddie remembers hugging him at her wedding. That's it. That is the only embrace she recalls, the only happy tears he ever had. But they weren't truly happy; when she and Jack were dancing, she caught a glimpse of her father's face, grief stricken and crestfallen. There was betrayal in his eyes. You're leaving me. I'm losing you, his expression said, and yet he managed to vanish into the crowd and keep from letting her have a chance to speak to him. It was the only way he could keep her day from being totally ruined. He loved her. She remembers that.
But ghosts were still out there, and at their resurgence in the eighties the government tried to get him to come out and fight them again. White haired and smoky eyed by then, he had told them to give him time. It had been snowing that night; it had been a record setting winter for where they lived. He took his pills and his wine and went out to the church he didn't believe in, to fall asleep forever in the cold in the alley behind it. He was so peaceful in death that it was hard to be angry at him. It was much easier to be angry with ghosts, with the way they had destroyed everyone and everything he used to have, and took him away from what he regained.
Ghosts had made life not worth living for her father. And Maddie hates them, because they took from her something they never truly allowed her to have: a father.