Author's note: I feel like I should attach warnings to this but then I don't really know what warnings exactly. I guess I'll just say this features Creepy Maddie who has an unhealthy obsession with both her son and his ghost form. ^^
I borrowed one line from luxorar's fic "Disturbing." It's a haunting Maddie drabble that I recommend (currently, it can only be read on AO3).
And much gratitude to MonsterousThings for drawing such a lovely cover for me! Go check out more of her art on Tumblr.
Magnetized
In the middle of the night, she woke up feeling out of time.
Maddie lay on her back with eyes open but not actually looking at anything.
At least, not at anything in this room.
The movie in her mind was too captivating to let her sleep. She paused it, rewound it, hit the replay button over and over and over again.
Beside her, her husband was breathing deeply in the heaviest sleep.
And down the hall, her son was also sleeping.
Maddie climbed out of her bed and quietly slipped out of the bedroom. With careful, slow steps, she moved down the dark hall, her eyes adjusted just enough to make out the frame of her son's closed door. She stood outside it for some time, imagined what position he was sleeping in on just the other side.
Or was he out moonlighting as a hero for the town?
How long had it been since she discovered his secret? How long had she known that he was the ghost she had once pursued and hunted with the intention of cutting him open and studying every inch of him? A couple years at least, long enough that she couldn't remember exactly when she caught him returning from a night of ghost-fighting and changing from his spectral form to his human form right before her eyes.
And yet, even though she knew that her desired ghost was also her son…
She still ached to know all of his ghostly secrets that he was continuing to keep from her.
She placed her hand on his door knob and slowly turned it, softly pushed the door open. The smallest amount of light streamed through the cracks in the blinds, falling onto corners and surfaces that could not be discerned. Furniture she knew she had bought and placed herself, and yet she could not make out their shapes or arrangement in this dismal lighting.
But she only cared to see one thing.
A break of light illuminated the form of a boy under the covers on his bed, a boy who was still a couple months shy of legally being a man but certainly looked like one anyway.
He was on his side and turned away from her. Maddie stepped lightly to the other side of his bed so that she could see his face. She stood above him and watched him sleep, his breaths even and deep.
Her Danny.
Was he dreaming? He had nightmares so frequently. She always knew when he had just woken from one because she would hear him stumbling out of his room to the bathroom to splash water on his face and neck and into his hair. She would always run out and comfort him. Sometimes he'd accept her motherly tenderness. And other times he'd shrug her off and lock himself in his room.
He was hopefully having a good dream. Or perhaps he wasn't dreaming at all. Either way, he seemed tranquil, his thick dark bangs breaking in parts over his closed eyes, his mouth open just slightly.
If only the light were stronger so she could admire him more fully.
She sat on the bed and raised a hand toward his face. She pushed the hair off his forehead, caressed his brow.
He moaned, shifted, opened his eyes. He sat up but did not say a word, only stared at her questioningly. She locked her gaze with his in the darkness. He remained motionless and only breathed, waiting for her to do or say something. She could hear his pulse in her ears, his tense heartbeats throbbing in her own chest, pumping blood through her at a doubled pace her body could hardly regulate as her senses swelled and pulled him in.
Fluttering and flitting, her troubled heart rippled a warning to her seduced soul.
She leaned forward and placed her hand over his. She whispered near his ear.
"Come with me."
Soundlessly, he allowed her to grip his hand and lead him out of his room, down the stairs. Of course he did. She had told him to, and he would never refuse an order from his mother. He walked at her pace, slowly and evenly, just a couple steps behind her. She didn't dare let go of his hand, fearing she'd lose him if she did.
Down to their basement, to the lab where Maddie conducted all of her research and experimentations. Still holding onto his hand, she looked back at him.
He was taller than her now. Stronger. Larger. He could leave any time he wanted to. He could overtake her, fell her with little effort, reduce her to nothing.
And yet she knew he never would. Even with all his power, he was still beneath her, under her authority, her subordinate. Her child.
She held his hand tighter and controlled her shivering, afraid to make any sudden or grand movements, anything that might startle him into awareness of this situation and panic him to escape.
She tried to make sense of his expression, tried to read what was passing through his mind. He didn't look as frightened as she would have expected him to be. He looked mystified but also so sad, as if he knew this moment was inevitable, as if he had been waiting for it and was only confused why it hadn't happened sooner than this.
She gave him a reassuring smile. He did not smile back.
"Transform for me," she commanded.
He hesitated. But then he obeyed. Of course. With his hand still in hers, he closed his eyes and tilted his head back slightly. He changed, became what she wanted more than anything, became who she fantasized about more than anyone.
His hand iced over and sent a freezing jolt through her own. She marveled at the white glove she now held, gazed at the iridescent spectral energy surrounding it, followed its spiraling patterns up his wrist and arm and shoulder to his face and his eyes, eyes too bright to stare into for long.
The throb in her chest traveled south, coiled and knotted lower, deeper. Heat rose to her neck and face, stealing her breath with pounding desire.
And as his glowing eyes returned her stare, her need for him only heightened.
"Wait here."
She watched him as she released his hand. When she was sure he would follow this parental order as well, she backed away toward a cabinet and rummaged through it, all the while glancing to make sure he was still there. She turned her back to him so he wouldn't see what she was doing, calculating and measuring and drawing a certain amount of liquid and flicking away air bubbles.
She imagined the following morning in just a few hours at the breakfast table.
"Where's Danny?" her husband would ask.
She'd shrug and smile.
"Accidents happen!"
She held the syringe behind her and walked back to him. His expression was unchanged, that same desolate daze. He knitted his brow just a little at her arm concealed behind her back.
Whatever was going to happen was out of his control. After so many years of ghost fighting, he had developed coping strategies to keep his stress and fear and anxiety as low as possible. One was that if he had no control over something happening to him, then he didn't need to fight it. It was easier to just accept it.
She knew this all too well about him. So for his sake, she wouldn't give him a choice.
She wrapped her free arm around him, pressed her chin against his shoulder. He stood still in her embrace, stiffening and trembling but otherwise unmoving. She placed her other arm around him, moved her hand up his back. Aimed right at his neck, a hypodermic needle poised to break and invade.
Still holding him close, her head still resting on his shoulder, she trailed the fingers of her other hand to his front, his chest, danced them up to the zipper of his jumpsuit, the very suit she herself had sewn so long ago just for him. She tugged the zipper down a fair way, peeled the fabric away from his skin, grazed his collarbone.
He was staring straight ahead. Waiting. Lulled into familial submission.
The skin of his neck bared, the needle entered cleanly and easily. She watched his face, watched his eyes widen and blink and then cloud and close halfway. She held him up and led him, forced him to walk. He stumbled and swayed, his weight increasing as he leaned on her. He'd be completely gone soon.
With her guidance, he collapsed on an observation table, departed for the time being. Head lolled, limbs sprawled, eyes lidded, lips parted. Maddie positioned him, supine, centered. She pulled his arms above his head and cuffed them to the table. She stretched out his legs, spread them and belted them down. Shackled only at these points. Not his middle. She wanted to see the arc in his spine when he screamed.
One more injection, a solidifying solution of her own design, one that would bar his ghostly molecules from changing, one that would stop him from regaining his father's coloring, one that would prevent him from being anything other than a powerless ghost.
Not her son. Not now.
Still asleep, consciousness hiding from her in darkened corners. Maddie sighed and admired him, kneeling beside the table and languorously taking him in with a tilt of her head. His suit zipper was still situated below his collar, exposing wisps of fine hair almost transparent, a peek of alluring masculinity. She stood and leaned over him, ran a hand up his toned abdomen up to his zipper. She gripped it between her fingers, hesitated with temptation to reveal even more of him. But she at last tugged it up to his neck, concealing him. For now.
She moved her attention upwards, the matured definition of his jawline, the charming jut of his brow. Her fingers roamed his face, brushed him over with tender strokes. She could bring him back now if she wanted to, use an ammonia inhalant to trigger him back into awareness.
But there was something so calming about this. Such tranquility in his expression now. It was the least she could do for him, allow him this time to rest, allow him to wake on his own.
She swept a hand across his forehead, pushed aside his polar bangs so she could look at him fully one final time. She then stood, rummaged through a drawer, returned to do one final kindness for him.
Bending over, she bestowed a lingering kiss on his brow before covering him with a thick blindfold, securing it tightly behind his head, pressing it to his face so that no light could get to his eyes at all when they opened. She had to keep them covered. Those eyes of his were far too familiar, reminded her of someone she simply had to keep away. She feared she would back out, that she wouldn't be able to go through with this if she recognized him. And she wanted this. She needed this release after being frustrated for so long.
A graze of his lips with one fingertip, lips still full of summery color for the time being. She affixed a gag in his mouth, slipped the cloth between his lips that she knew would eventually drain and pale. Not a full gag. She didn't want to muffle his cries. She just didn't want to hear any articulated speech, didn't want to hear him beg and plead for his mother to stop, please, stop, let him go.
But ultimately, this was more for him than herself. Blind and silenced, he'd have no choice, no escape, no way to make her reconsider. He'd have an easier time tolerating it this way. He'd have no alternative, could only lie back and accept whatever happened to him.
He stirred, shifted, moaned. Maddie held her breath and watched as he moved his head side to side and attempted to move his arms, observed his distress as he struggled against his restraints. She placed a comforting hand on him, soundlessly soothed him with a firm press against his shuddering chest. He tried to get words past the gag in his mouth but could only achieve dampened utterances laced with hysteria.
Maddie stroked the side of his face before proceeding to check his spectral vitals. Temperature, pulse, ectoplasmic pressure, cardiac output. His readings suggested extreme panic and fear. Could they possibly get any higher?
She placed her hands on him again, held him to stop his convulsions, shushed him with tender descants. He gradually quieted and stilled beneath her with only the smallest of tremors remaining.
She brushed her fingers through his hair, rewarding his obedient behavior with gentle petting. She'd start easy, help him adjust and accept that she was doing this and that he had to endure it. She picked up a small hammer and lightly pressed its cold metal to his face. He turned away from it.
She began with light taps, small blows of pressure to determine his most sensitive areas. Up his legs, down his arms, over his torso. He remained quiet, his chest rising and falling steadily but quickly. She increased her speed, strengthened her hits. He grimaced and recoiled but of course had nowhere to go. He winced with the softer taps, cried out with the harder ones.
She wondered how his body was reacting under the material of his suit. Were vessels breaking? Was anything discolored? Would this cause bruises?
Later. She'd check that later. Not just yet. She'd let him keep his dignity a little longer.
She brought out a set of electrodes, turned them over in her hands before applying them to specific points on his head. He twisted away from her touch. No matter. It was only too easy to force him back into position.
She studied the other necessary sensors and conductors. They needed to be attached to bare skin. She took a pair of scissors to his left suit leg, cut just below the knee, slid the booted fabric out of the restraint which then had to be retightened. Trailing a finger up the line of his calf all the way to his neck, she slowly pulled down his zipper and stopped right at his abdomen. She spread the halves of his suit, brandishing his quivering chest. Moving up farther still, she cut away the glove of his left arm. His fingers twitched and curled.
She attached the sensors to his skin, the top of his foot, several points on his chest, one point on his arm.
His hand clenched as his arm rubbed against his restraint. Maddie slipped her own hand into his, held it and owned it. He squeezed her palm, his soundless plea.
She attempted to move away, but his grip was strong and unrelenting. She caressed the side of his face with her other hand and wrenched herself free. She didn't even bother hiding her amusement at his darling antics. Not like he could see it anyway.
After a few calculations, she sent a small shock through him, just a test before the real study began. A tightening tension traveled through him and clinched his muscles. His head tilted back involuntarily, veins pulsing with voltage. But Maddie's attention was drawn to his back, to the beautiful arc of his spine. Spellbound, she memorized its curve with ravenous eyes.
She ceased the shock and watched him fall back onto the table, panting and heaving and moaning. Maddie jotted some notes, made more calculations. She wondered how much more he could handle, how far beyond the human threshold she could force him.
She amped up the current, forced his electrons into a hurried race. His back arched even higher off the table, his spine so bent it looked set to break. The restraints ground into his wrists and ankles, visibly razing and abrading the bare appendages. His head was angled back as far as it could go, tears soaking through his blindfold and pooling around him on the table's surface.
But even more beautiful than the camber of his body were his screams. Tortured and mangled and marvelous, the destructive strums of his ghostly wail choked and suppressed by the gag in his mouth. Hypnotized, she stared at his cracking lips and bubbling drool seeping through the cloth and mixing with his tears. She was tempted to tear the gag away so the raw resonance of his suffering could echo and rebound in the acoustics of the room.
She admired his expression of agony a moment longer before terminating the shock. He collapsed back onto the table, his chest heaving with rapid expansions, his body pitching with convulsions, his tears drowning the cloth over his eyes. His whimpers were suffocated, inaudible through his gag, but she knew he was begging for this to end already.
She would end this soon enough. But not now. He would just have to wait.
She watched the movements of his chest, his shallow breaths clawing. Entranced by the glowing skin and wintry tufts exposed between the zippered halves of his suit, she could feel the frantic beating of his heart underneath it all in her own oscillating arteries. She placed a warm palm against his chilled flesh and grazed up to his collar, his neck, his tendons twitching and pulsing as her fingertips pressed against them.
His lungs seemed to be working so hard.
But how much oxygen did he really need? Was it really so essential for ghostly cell function? Perhaps breathing was just a habit he had unnecessarily retained from his human existence.
Her nails dug into him, surrounded his larynx and trachea with crushing compression. His whimpers silenced immediately with no breath to move his vocal folds. His jugular and carotid vessels strained and throbbed desperately against her fingers. She checked the time, watched the seconds tick by. He seemed to metabolize oxygen superbly in this form, staying more or less still in her strangling grasp for a remarkable amount of time.
But then his head began to move side to side, trying to break away from her unyielding hold. She dug in deeper, tighter, studied his struggling movements as they became more violent and urgent. She held him down, pressed him into the table. He began to fade, slow, surrender. The pulses in his neck sputtered and skipped with abandoned purpose.
She released him, pulled her hand back to her breast as she watched him gasp and cough and choke and sob. He didn't even try to speak this time. No more attempts to beg through his gag. Given up and given in.
His vitals were spiking and plunging in dizzied sequences. She recorded them all, envisioned other spiraling patterns she could orchestrate. What control could she have over the racing of his pulse? The lower threshold of his ectoplasmic pressure? The disturbance in his electrolyte balance? Could he freeze? Could he burn? Could he distend? Could he bruise?
She brushed her fingers against his face, the moisture trickling behind his blindfold clinging to her knuckles.
He could certainly cry. So beautifully.
She tugged at his zipper and lowered it to the end of its track at his abdomen. She pushed aside the material of his suit, removed the sensors and pads that tore at his chest hair, drawing a pained yelp from his fevered lips. She pulled away the other sensors on his arm and leg before unlatching the electrodes from his head.
She paused, blinked, took in the sight. She set aside the electrodes and delicately touched the edges of the scorch marks on his head. Charred jade surrounding blistered centers. Branding stamps denoting him as her property.
All of him belonged to her. Every lock of hair, every stretch of skin, every nerve ending, every ligament holding him together.
And he couldn't hide from her any longer. He had been hiding for so long, too long, and the time had come at last to uncover his secrets.
She picked up her heavy-duty scissors again and separated the blades, forged steel sliding past each other with a distressing frequency that sent a noticeable chill through him. Slow and deliberate, she cut through his suit, split the exquisite fabric of her own design, taking great care to not nick or mar his skin. Not yet.
She pulled the material away from him in sectioned pieces, retightening his restraints as necessary. An ectoplasmic blush began in his chest and rushed quickly to his neck splotched from strangulation, to his face he instinctively tried to cover with raised elbows that strained to break from their shackled hold.
Fully exposed, laid out for her viewing pleasure and investigation. His bare skin radiated an ethereal glow so bright that she didn't even need an operating light. Adrenaline prickled his flesh, tiny contracted muscles surrounded the hair stubbling his arms and legs, shimmery follicles standing at full attention.
She inspected every inch of him, the damage she had inflicted. Sporadic patterns of malachite decorated him. Broken capillaries, developing contusions. Shallow breaches and furious discolorations surrounded his wrists and ankles beneath his restraints.
He was still now. No twitches, no struggles, no sobs. He only breathed, surely wishing each breath could somehow be his last.
But she wasn't finished with him yet.
She reached out to his dithering chest and trailed her fingertips over his glacial skin, chilling and tingling against her biological warmth. She tangled with the vapor of his ghostly being, a vapor that was strangely corporeal, possessing a definite shape.
And so cold.
She placed a warming light over him and switched on its highest setting. She observed the steadily rising reading of his temperature. She watched the number increase for a moment before turning her attention back to him. She didn't want to miss his reaction.
The contortion of his face was obscured by his blindfold and gag, but the meaning of his writhing was not lost. The harmonic strains of his moans vibrated deep in his throat, a siren luring her to murky depths. She stroked his skin, once so cold but now so warm. He rocked side to side, trying so desperately to escape the heat boiling and scorching him inside, expanding and opening him fully to this arson. Maddie placed a hand to his forehead, checking for a fever. He stiffened and whimpered at her motherly touch.
Her hands moved back to his chest, which began to hyperventilate with arduous breaths scraping his lungs and airway. She pushed two fingers into his neck against the throbbing of his carotid artery. His pulse quickened, fell out of rhythm, weakened. His movements slowed and depressed until his clenched fists relaxed and fell back against the table. His head tilted away from her.
Maddie grazed his open palm, the side of his face.
No response. Passed out.
She ran her fingers over him again, up his bare chest to his neck. Warm but dry. A human would be drenched with sweat under this intense light. A human would be drenched with sweat just from the torture alone.
She pushed the light away to allow his temperature to decline. She let him be unconscious for some time while his body recovered and cooled down. A final reprieve. Just for him. Just for now.
When his temperature was at last low enough, she placed an ammonia inhalant under his nose, immediately reviving him with heaving breath. He lifted his head briefly before falling back. Quivering and weeping. No, not just another of his nightmares. Not this time.
Maddie studied him in silence for several moments.
"What are you?" she asked him.
He could only sob in reply.
She caressed his face, the tear-stained skin between his blindfold and gag. She tugged at the translucent strands of his arctic hair, traced the masculine angle of his jaw. He recoiled from her touch, turned his head away from her. Maddie forcibly pulled him back to remind him of his powerlessness, her hand clenched tightly on his chin.
She lowered herself to his level, brushed his ear with her lips. She spoke to him softly, tenderly, whispered the taunts she could never say to his other self, the unsanctioned secrets she had been keeping from him, the lust for him she'd been harboring in the lecherous corners of her scientific mind.
He stilled, numbed by her confessions. She rose and stared at his barely moving chest. What more was he hiding from her? X-rays could never be enough. She had to reach his core, had to discover his center.
She held his hand again, gently, sweetly. His own hand was limp for a moment with unease, but then he returned her soft grip. She smiled at his response, the tension transferring within their contact.
She studied the back of his hand, a pretty vein faintly glowing. So easy to fondle and target and puncture.
He felt it. His fingers and arm twitched as she set up the intravenous line. She could visibly see his panic rising in the tremors coursing through him, affirmed by the distressed outputs of his vital readings. She wistfully watched him tremble. She would miss this, the beauty of his reactions, the ambience of his fear, the stirring of his misery.
She pushed a dose of suxamethonium chloride into his vein. He broke down, ceased all movement. She left him blinded but removed his gag, admired the alluring shape of his blanched lips from which no words or sound would ever come again.
Awake and aware but paralyzed.
She quickly intubated him, forced a length of tubing down his tracheal passage. His disabled ghostly lungs still required oxygen, and it was imperative that he remain alive.
Such masterful work. She commended herself for a job well done.
He was hers.
She murmured her possession of him in his ear. He had always belonged to her. That was never not the case. He owed this to her after all she had done for him, rearing him, bringing him into existence.
He heard her. Every word. But he could not even shudder in response.
She selected her tool carefully. She held it to the light, inspected it, sanitized it. She looked down at him, at his covered face. She briefly considered lifting his blindfold so he could see what she was doing, all that was happening to him.
But his eyes would be too similar to someone she knew and loved so much.
And because she loved him, she had to continue keeping him blinded. It would be far too cruel to let him see this torment he had no power to stop.
The first incision was intoxicating. The first breach of his skin with her lancet was gorgeous, leaving behind a trail of such precious peridots. She ran the blade along his anterior wall carefully, strategically, slowly. Glittering streams of ectoplasm overflowed and spilled onto the table. She set the lancet aside and lifted the resulting flaps of his scissored chest laterally.
Monitor beeps of warning made her pause. She observed the extreme spikes in his vitals indicating that he was still conscious. She looked back at his face. Deceptively tranquil and still.
A deeper dive, she bent over him and tore through his fibrous tissue and pectoral muscles and subclavius muscles and—
The layers concealing his center fell away in maddening procession. She kept the essential parts intact, the parts that would continue to keep him alive and awake. She teased and groped the remnants from his human existence now imbued with spectral properties. Cephalic vein, thoracoacromial artery. After so many hours and weeks of intense study of human anatomy, her wonder as to what she might find when she had him at the end of her scalpel was at last appeased.
And he did not disappoint.
Her head lifted and lightened with euphoria. A pocket of helium inflated her chest, pulling her high with giddy drunkenness while her lower body grew heavy with engorged indulgence, rooting her in this moment, rooting her here with him.
Deeper still, she broke him apart, popped and cracked him into fragments. Bone cutters and a costotome, she hacked and sawed through him, into him, assaulted him over and over, trespassed his caverns until she reached his core.
Monitors signaled their frenzied warnings in neurotic tones and bleats. The time between them shortened, disappeared, droning into high-pitched cacophonous monotony.
Hers. Only hers. She latched onto this elusive haunt at last, claimed it with clawing nails. The space around her muted into shrill ringing in her ears.
He covered her, drenched her. She was his new core.
Disturbed with hysteric elation, her blood pressure struggled to keep her upright. She leaned against the table for support and stared at his face still blindfolded and intubated.
His silence in her moment of triumph was disappointing.
She pulled out his intravenous drip, freed his airway. He remained quiet. Her fingers hovered over his blindfold. She drew in a breath and at last removed the cloth.
She waited.
Unmoving, he stared up at the ceiling with eyes no longer hidden. She moved so that her face was right over his. She studied his expression.
He looked so perplexed.
She pressed his eyelids down, blinding his vision once again. It was over. She was finished with him. He could go back to sleep.
Sleep.
Sleeping.
He was sleeping.
Her son was sleeping.
On the other side of this door.
Maddie staggered back a step and blinked in the darkness of the hallway. How long had she been standing here?
Outside his door. He was on the other side, on his bed.
Maddie swallowed and looked down at herself, examined her fingernails. No stains, no residue, no evidence.
No consequences for mere dreaming.
The movie in her mind. For her only. She could rewind it and play it over and over as many times as she wanted.
And he would never know.
She stepped back, stepped away, walked down the hall to her bedroom where her husband was sleeping. She climbed onto her side of the bed and pulled the covers up and over.
She hit PLAY.
The arrival of morning brought her into the kitchen. She leaned over the stove, steam and oil from crisping bacon and frying eggs bubbling and sputtering off the pan.
Behind her, her husband sat alone.
"Where's Danny?" he finally asked.
She flipped over an egg.
He appeared in the doorway. Showered and dressed and ready for school. Safe and whole.
She smiled at him. He returned the smile. Blissfully ignorant.
Her favorite movie star.