Thanks to jeanette9a, pearl84, ChopSuzi, MsFrizzle and Cussee for the reviews!

Warnings: Violence


Daniel came out of his room while his parents were trying to offer Vlad an unhelpful series of distant memories that he didn't recall. The main information he took from them was that he'd been there a very long time, probably since before Daniel had been born. It was hard to have a clear grasp of the passage of time when the only measurements you'd allow yourself were 'before' and 'now.'

"Hi." Daniel looked a bit shaky, despite remaining in the ghost form. "I mean, good morning."

"Danny!" His mother's attention was immediately drawn away from Vlad, and she reached out as if to steady him. "Maybe you should go back to bed, sweetie. One of us can stay with you..."

Vlad wondered idly if he was now 'one of us.'

Danny shook his head, but gave her a faint smile. "I'm okay. I don't feel like sleeping anymore right now."

"You hungry?" Jack asked, with a restrained version of the forceful cheer he'd shown Vlad. "Think you can keep some breakfast down?"

"Sure." Danny still seemed subdued, as if part of himself was muted. He glanced up and down the hallway with a caution Vlad approved of before starting toward the stairs.

Daniel's parents arranged breakfast, while Vlad and Daniel sat at the table and watched. He wasn't sure what Daniel was watching for; Vlad was keeping an eye out for suspicious, possibly glowing, foodstuffs. Fortunately, Maddie seemed to be taking the lead in preparing breakfast. They both got warm tea and oatmeal with cinnamon and sugar. Jack had asked Vlad what he wanted to eat, then after a brief and awkward staring contest, apparently decided Vlad just wanted what Danny was getting. It wasn't terrible, although the cinnamon taste was a bit sharp.

His sister came down while they were eating, and gave Daniel a worried, fond look and Vlad a suspicious one. He wondered what he'd done to deserve that. She helped herself to a colorful bowl of cereal before sitting with them at the table.

"Morning, Jazz." Daniel's greeting was still a bit restrained, but she smiled warmly back at him.

"How did you sleep?" She asked it casually, as if it weren't a rather serious question. Vlad couldn't tell whether that was cluelessness or deliberate, feigned lightness of tone.

"Okay." Daniel gave her the same awkward near-smile he'd offered his mother. She looked dubious for a moment, but the look was replaced by another carefully encouraging smile.

"What were you planning on doing today?"

The simple question clearly flummoxed him. Daniel stared at her for a moment, then looked down at his bowl again. "I don't know." After another second's pause, he added, "Maybe call Sam and Tuck. Let them know I'm not dead. Mostly not dead." He smiled unpleasantly for a moment.

"We might not want to get into contact with anyone about this just yet." Maddie spoke up, saving Vlad the trouble. She gave Daniel a rather sad, serious look. "If they are trying to keep track of you, or of places you'd go, this is the first place they'd look. They might not know who your friends are, though. We don't want to give them more ideas of where to look for you." She didn't go on to point out that Daniel's friends might make good hostages if the government's agents couldn't reclaim the half-ghosts with force, but Vlad doubted she hadn't thought of it.

"Oh." Daniel didn't argue. He didn't seem to react at all.

"But that doesn't mean we can't let them know you're okay!" Jasmine cut in, almost too emphatically. She leaned slightly over the table toward Daniel, as if she were moments away from trying to literally pick him up to lift his mood. "If we call them, that'd be easy to trace, but I could give them a message in person. Even if there's somebody... even if they know you're here and they're paying attention, they can't follow every person I talk to at school just in case, right?"

Daniel's expression eased a bit from its painful blankness at that. "Okay. Maybe I can write them a letter or something, too." He stared ahead absently, not quite frowning, as if a bit dazed. "Y'know, I thought as soon as I got back, that'd be the first thing I'd want to do. But I didn't even think about it until this morning."

"You had enough to think about." Maddie sounded faintly consoling, although there was an almost indiscernible change in her tone as she asked, "Danny... did your friends know about this? About the ghost part of you?"

"Yeah. I asked them to keep it a secret. I was worried..." He shook his head, as if rejecting whatever he'd been about to say. "That people would be freaked out by it."

"Danny, I wish you'd told us. We're experts on ghosts, after all. We could have helped you." She smiled at him as she said it, perhaps trying to ease the impact of her words.

They seemed to hit hard anyway, from the way Daniel flinched. "Yeah, it was pretty stupid of me."

"Hey, it's not that stupid." His father clapped a hand on his shoulder, and Daniel looked up at him. "I mean, when you think about the stupid stuff I've done, it's pretty hard to explain how much common sense you have! Must have got that from your mom."

"I guess so." It didn't strike Vlad as particularly comforting, but Daniel's smile up at him was somehow less distant than his earlier efforts. Maybe it was just familiar, or maybe the lack of delicacy was easier to deal with. "I think I'm going to go back to my room and try... writing that letter. "

"All right." Maddie smiled at him. "We'll come in and check on you a little, okay?"

"Sure. Okay." Daniel stood up. Vlad did as well, and wondered why everyone in the room but Daniel gave him an odd look. "Thanks for breakfast."

When they got back to Daniel's room, he sat down at his desk, ghostly tail curled up underneath him. Vlad wondered if it looked odd to his family, who hadn't had time to grow used to the sight of the boy without legs.

"You know, if you keep just quietly following me everywhere, they're going to think there's something really wrong with you," Daniel said, not too heatedly.

"I suppose there is. Does it make you uncomfortable?"

"No. Not really. There's some stuff really wrong with me, too." He sighed, and looked down at his desk. "I don't know what to write. What I should tell them."

"Keep it simple," Vlad advised. "That you're alive, but unable to resume your life still. They wouldn't understand more. It would only disturb them."

"Guess so." He kept giving his desk that glum look. "It'd be easier if I could just talk to them."

"Your mother was right. Contacting them would be dangerous, for you and for them."

He didn't respond at first, as if he hadn't heard. "It's too weird that you know my parents. That's just too much of a coincidence to believe."

"It isn't a coincidence at all," Vlad explained patiently. "You said you got your powers in a lab accident, isn't that right?"

"Yeah." Daniel raised his head a bit.

"I believe I did as well. The details are still a bit unclear, but... If your father has made a habit of experimenting with ectoplasm over the years, isn't it plausible that his experiments might have affected two different people close to him?"

"Huh." Daniel looked a bit surprised. "It's not like my dad works alone, though. He and Mom work together on everything. And neither of them were in the room when I got my powers. I mean, I was in their lab, but I pretty much did it to myself."

"Nonetheless, you are a teenager," Vlad pointed out. "You shouldn't have been allowed anywhere near such dangerous things in the first place."

Daniel frowned sourly. "I'm fourteen, not five."

"And when you were five, was he careful to keep his experiments away from you, from his family?" Vlad pressed.

Instead of answering, Daniel responded with an irritated question of his own. "Why are you so down on my dad all of a sudden? Even if I thought the accident was his fault—and I don't—it'd be my mom's fault too."

"Because he's responsible." It seemed so self-evident that he shouldn't need to explain more.

"What?" Daniel stared at him with obvious confusion, before shaking his head sharply. "Fine. Whatever. I'm not arguing with you about this anymore."

"My thoughts exactly." It was better to drop the subject for now, he decided. Daniel's need to defend his father was understandable. Given some time to think about it, he might see things more clearly. "Perhaps you should start writing that letter."


They came at night. Neither Vlad nor Daniel were asleep, although Daniel had been trying. The first hint of the attack was the sound of an alarm, and of glass shattering. Daniel seemed to come alert nearly as quickly as Vlad, although neither had time to do anything but stand before the door opened to reveal Maddie.

"Danny, you and Vlad go upstairs with Jazz. Your dad and I will take care of them down here." Her expression was tense, and she was still wearing her peculiar blue jumpsuit, pulling its hood into place over her head as she spoke.

Daniel looked as if he was thinking about arguing, so Vlad took him firmly by the hand and lead him out of the room before he had the chance to speak. Maddie gave him a look that was hard to decipher through the hood, but he fancied that it was gratitude.

Out in the hallway, Jasmine was wearing a set of lavender pajamas, her serious expression a junior version of her mother's. "This way."

They hurried down the hall to a set of stairs that seemed as if they should lead to the roof, but instead led to a peculiar metal trap door. Jasmine turned a thick metal latch on the door, then pushed it open, and stepped up into an equally strange metal room. Daniel followed her, and Vlad came up last, glancing back once. He could hear shouting downstairs, but couldn't make out the words. When Jasmine screwed the door shut again behind them, all sound from the house was muted, even the alarm. She seemed to almost collapse against one of the metal walls after that, her legs tucked up in front of her and her head lowered. He hadn't gotten the impression that it had required that much strength to close the door...

They were in the metal structure that he'd noticed atop the building. Now, the purpose of that structure was more obvious, banks of computer consoles and odd monitors giving it the feel of some sort of control center. It also reminded him uncomfortably of another room that had become quite familiar.

"This isn't... this is wrong." Daniel was pacing back and forth in his anxiety. "We can't just hide up here while..."

"Danny, you going back down there will give them exactly what they want." Jasmine didn't quite snap the words out, but her tone quieted Daniel down. "They're ghost hunters, right? That means both of you are the last people who should try to chase them off. At least they probably won't be expecting Mom and Dad to give them a fight."

Perhaps he'd underestimated her before. At least she was trying to talk sense to her younger brother. "Is there something useful we could do from here?"

She seemed a little surprised at the question, but shook her head. "I think most of what's up here is supposed to defend against things outside the house. I don't really know how most of it works."

"Why did your parents build this?" He looked around at the room again, no more comfortable with it.

She pulled her knees up closer to her chest and buried her head against them before answering in a mumble, "Because they're crazy."

Time passed in painful silence. He imagined Jasmine and Daniel were preoccupied with images of the fight below, worry for their parents' safety. He was occupied with an increasingly urgent feeling of being trapped, that he wouldn't be able to leave the room again even though he'd come in willingly. He was perfectly aware that it was irrational, just a memory of something that was behind him, but...

Daniel stood up again, giving the door a strange look. "We won't know if they're okay until either they come let us out, or..."

The look seemed to be warning of some incipient plan to leave this room's dubious safety. Vlad put in, "They'll only be in greater danger if you leave, you know. They'd become distracted with the effort to protect you."

"But they're just normal people!" Jasmine gave him an odd look for that outburst, but Daniel went on, "We're the ones that the government's after, and we've got these powers! We can't just wait to see if they'll be okay, we should—"

"You're not going down there." Vlad stood up, and was aware that he was taking advantage of the excuse to leave the room, but Daniel going down alone wasn't an option either way. "I'll go see."

"Neither of you should go!" Jasmine looked back and forth between them, as if trying to decide who was the least rational. "What if they catch you again?"

It was a low blow that he suspected was intentional, knocking back Daniel's fantasies of heroics with a visceral fear. The boy looked stunned for a moment, perhaps with the thought of recapture, or perhaps with the realization that fear would be enough to stop him.

Vlad took advantage of that pause, rather than let Jasmine's warning freeze him as well. "I'll be right back, then."

"Wait a minute!" Jasmine's argument was cut off as Vlad didn't bother with the stairs or door this time, simply phasing down through the floor. It was only when he'd completely left the room that a strange ache in his chest faded.

The house was dark, but not so dark he couldn't see. The alarm had ended and the sounds downstairs gone mostly mute, although he heard one loud crunching impact that seemed more ominous for its lack of context. As he was deciding whether or not to go downstairs, a white-clad figure appeared at the top of the staircase.

The darkness would only emphasize his unnatural glow, so Vlad faded to invisibility, and watched the man with an odd detachment. He was holding a weapon with a familiar shape, like a gun with an oversized barrel, and glanced up and down the hallway once before stepping up into it. Vlad had been playing with various ideas of what to do about him when the man's attention was suddenly focused directly at him, despite his invisibility.

"They're up here!" He aimed and fired, a flash of light in the dark hall.

Surprised the man missed at such a close range, Vlad rushed forward. His speed seemed unnatural to him, enhanced, and he gripped both the man's hands, forcing the gun hand up before the man could fire again. It was only when Vlad released the invisibility, seeing no reason to maintain it, that he realized the man's first shot hadn't missed after all. There was a wound on his chest bleeding green, although it seemed to be closing already. It didn't particularly hurt.

The man was struggling, but he couldn't pull his hands free of Vlad's grasp. He couldn't even pull Vlad's arms down from where Vlad held them. Distantly amused at the disparity in their strength, Vlad tried squeezing down on the hand that was still holding the weapon.

He could feel small bones snapping, and there was a momentary startled pause before the man began screaming. His knees seemed to collapse, and he was suspended only by Vlad's grip on him. As Vlad let go, the man fell to the ground, his gloved right hand misshapen. Red stained the white of his coat's sleeve. Curious, he braced a foot against the man's chest, pulling the man's left hand up from where it had been clutching at the right. He kept pulling. The man's screams went higher, and he thrashed for a moment, before going completely limp. His arm made a strange wet sucking noise as it was pulled loose of his shoulder, and soon the spilled blood made the white suit seem black. Vlad dropped the arm, which fell next to the man, only connected to the body by the coat's sleeve now. He leaned down to give the head one sharp twist, snapping the neck. It had ended rather quickly, and he felt a bit disappointed by that.

As he turned his attention away from the now-dead agent, a familiar tingle at the back of his consciousness meant Daniel had come down as well. Turning to look, he was alarmed to see that Daniel's eyes and mouth were both rather wide, as if he were in a state of shock.

"You... didn't..." Daniel seemed to struggle to get the words out, but once they came, they were nearly a shout. "You didn't need to do that!"

Utterly bewildered by his reaction, Vlad pointed out sensibly, "He'd have done worse to you, if he'd had the chance. In fact, they did do worse to us."

"Yeah, but, but..." He was still staring, his gaze switching from the body on the floor to Vlad and back again, as if not sure which horrified him more. "You just tore his arm off! Why would you do that?!"

"It was a test." Vlad looked down at the body, then glanced over to the staircase. "I don't hear anything downstairs. Shall we look?"

"Why are you so relaxed? What's wrong with you?!" Daniel wasn't calming down. If anything, he seemed to be getting more upset, gesturing at the body. "You can't just, you can't do things like that!"

Answering that he obviously could seemed a bit too casual. "Fine. I'll take care of it more quickly next time." There was no question in his mind that there would be a next time. They'd hardly give up after one raid. "If you're not coming with me, you should go back upstairs with your sister."

He seemed to need another moment to calm himself down enough to answer, closing his eyes and taking deep breaths. Since he'd seen plenty of things just as horrible or worse during their captivity, Vlad couldn't quite understand why he was so upset by this. Perhaps it was the danger of recapture, or the threat to his family. "I'm coming with you! You're..." Daniel's voice was finally starting to come down a bit from its high, panicked tone. "You look like you're hurt, too."

"A bit. It isn't really painful." He looked down at himself again, and touched the injured spot gingerly. "I believe it's already healing." Could the repeated cycle of injury and recovery have improved his own durability, or was the ghost form simply that resilient? Surely those weapons were designed especially for hurting ghosts.

A set of rapid footsteps on the stairs caught both their attention, but instead of another agent, Daniel's mother turned the corner into the upstairs hallway. For a moment, she was tense, as if bracing herself for a fight, but then she took in the scene and relaxed faintly. In one hand, she carried a rather large gun that resembled the weapons wielded by the government's men. "Danny, what are you doing down here? You need to go back upstairs!"

"Are any of them left?" Vlad asked.

"No." Even with her face half-concealed, he could see her jaw tighten for a moment. "But Danny needs to go upstairs for a little while longer."

"I'm not going anywhere." Daniel's shocked expression was replaced by childish determination. "I want to know what happened. Is Dad okay?"

"Yes, he's okay." Her attention seemed to drift momentarily to the body on the floor, but unlike Daniel, she didn't panic at the sight of it. "Honey, just wait upstairs with Jazz. Please."

Daniel seemed to wrestle between choices, before finally capitulating. "Fine. I'll go. They're really all gone?"

"Yes." She relaxed visibly, as he agreed to leave. "We'll come get you when we're sure it's absolutely safe, okay?"

There was lingering doubt on his face, but he floated back a few feet, and finally straight up through the ceiling. Maddie slumped against the wall for a moment, her free hand rubbing her face as if trying to ward off a headache, then she looked up and at Vlad again. "Did you bring him down here with you?" It was no casual question, something fierce underneath it.

"Of course not." He tried not to take offense. "I was hoping, if one of us went down, he would resist his own urge to come help." Among other reasons.

"All right." The anger faded from her voice, and she stared at the body on the floor for another moment. "We have to clean up before we can let the kids down here again. There's more of them downstairs." She sounded tired, or perhaps a bit numb. "Come on. You help."

The living room was a mess, broken glass from a now-shattered picture window reflecting little hints of light across the carpet. There was a large chair overturned, and a few scorch marks on the walls where shots had missed. On the floor, there were three more bodies, all dressed in white (and red) and all still. At the other end of the room, Jack Fenton was sitting on his couch, leaning slightly forward, hands folded between his knees, looking over the room with a strange, distant expression.

"Oh. Hi, Vladdie." He didn't look particularly surprised to see they'd been joined by Vlad, and looked down at the bodies on the floor again, his voice almost contemplative. "Y'know, you spend your whole life thinking about how you can save people from ghosts. And then it turns out you gotta save ghosts from people. Life's real weird, sometimes."

Maddie walked over to him, putting a hand on his shoulder, and he smiled faintly up at her.

"We have to get rid of them. We can't call the police over this, and we shouldn't let the kids see. We'll..." Maddie looked around the room and sighed. "Let's take them downstairs. We can send them through the portal."

"Guess that's where dead folks go, anyway." Jack stood up. "Vlad, you okay?"

"What? Ah. Yes." He'd already forgotten about the minor wound he'd been dealt.

"Okay. Good." Jack lacked either the fierceness of his wife, or the fear of his son, looking down at the bodies. Vlad couldn't quite determine what his empty expression meant. "Let's get started."

It didn't take long to move the bodies themselves. Neither of them asked Vlad about why the body upstairs was in two parts, although the downstairs bodies were a bit neater, mostly shot through the head or chest. One had a heavy bruise on the side of his face, but there was no hint as to where he'd gotten it.

His first sighting of the ghost portal was a new shock of memory, although Maddie and Jack were both too wrapped up in what they were doing to really notice. A swirling green. A flash of green light, pain, and then... Yes. This was how it happened. He simply dropped the body he was carrying at the bottom of the basement staircase and then went up again, never coming closer to the portal. Still wrapped up in his own thoughts, he took Jack's former place on the couch.

It hadn't been a household lab. It was at school. He was a college student. They were building something... he was excited and nervous. Maddie had been there, too, helping with the experiment. He didn't really think it would work. Jack turned it on too quickly, was never careful enough. He shouldn't have been standing in front of it so closely, it—it felt like an explosion, but the portal was still there at the end of it. And he was sick, it had infected him. The memory faded away almost immediately after the accident and the first sensation of weakness and pain. Remembering that part too keenly might be worse than not remembering at all. It was more than a simple feeling of familiarity, or a few flashes of recollection, it was a concrete memory. He felt reassured by the certainty of it.

When Maddie and Jack came upstairs again, he looked at them with different eyes. They were transformed from their youth; nonetheless, it was them. He was sure he'd been fond of Maddie, but how that had translated into the intense sense of importance behind recognizing her features was less clear. Jack looked older now, or maybe that was the gravity of the situation pulling him from his usual foolishness.

Maddie stood in the middle of the living room, and said calmly, "The carpet's ruined." Then, she made a strange noise, like air was leaking out of her. Jack quickly wrapped his arms around her, and she leaned against him and cried. Standing to the side, Vlad watched with the emotional distance of a scientist observing another species.