Phantom kicked open the front door and dropped a rather green-faced Jack on the carpet. "You are so lucky that we're only a few minutes from the Fenton Portal," the teen grumbled as he leaned against the wall. He rubbed against his chest with a grimace, using the other hand to dab at a split lip.
Maddie got to her feet stiffly, leaving her book on the couch and lurching towards the two boys. "Phantom, are you hurt badly?" she demanded, observing the black eye and swollen jaw with a frown. Dark green bruises were already spreading beneath skin as pale as moonlight, mottling patches of the teen's face where he had been hit the hardest.
"Yeah, yeah, don't worry," the halfa insisted, ducking away from her before she could touch him. "He only punched me a couple of times before I managed to hand him the ring and note, and he didn't use ectoguns or anything. You and Jack talk – I'm gunna go get some ectoplasm and lie down for a bit."
He limped off, obviously hurt more than he was letting on, and Maddie felt the increasingly familiar guilt sour her thoughts. She had sent him into a potentially dangerous situation, without even considering what might go wrong. The teen had obviously had reservations about going, but she had pushed, and he had paid for it.
Once again, this strange young halfa was hurt because of her.
Strong arms snaked around the woman's waist, lifting Maddie off the floor and holding her tightly. "Mads," Jack sobbed, burying his face in her hair. "I thought you were… I-I…"
"Shhh," the huntress soothed. She returned the hug, rubbing circles into her wonderful husband's spine. "It's alright, I'm here, it's going to be okay…"
Maddie's fears began to melt away. Jack was here now, and so long as she had him on her side, she could conquer the world. This whole halfa business, with its strange secrets and unpredictable powers, could be worked through. She'd be okay. And once Maddie was alright, they could work together to figure out a way to help Phantom.
In between sobs, Jack plastered her face with kisses.
After what Maddie deemed an appropriate amount of time, she extricated herself from Jack's arms. "You're squashing me," she announced in a deliberately light-hearted voice. A door slammed, and the woman winced. "You hurt him, didn't you?"
Jack stared at her. "Of course I did! The spook just appeared next to me in the kitchen and started babbling about a note or something. If there's one thing I know not to trust more than anything else, it's a ghost acting different from normal!"
"Well, Phantom's not normal," Maddie murmured absently as she glanced down the hallway. The door to Phantom's room was shut, and some textbooks had fallen across the floorboards from where they had been stacked neatly next to the doorframe.
"I guess I did hit him a little hard," the man sighed. "A couple of punches and a kick to the shin and he was on the floor, almost out for the count. That's when I realised that he had your ring. The note said you needed to explain something before you came home?"
Maddie sighed, refocusing her attention on her best friend. Everything that she had planned on saying was suddenly gone, and the woman watched in fascination as Jack carefully slid the ring back onto her finger. His hair and clothing were unkempt, face lined with worry and exhaustion.
She decided to start with something simple. "Let's sit down." That was good – nice and normal, with nothing to indicate that she was ready to scream or cry or possibly even bolt out of the room in order to avoid the changes that this conversation would irrevocably catalyse.
Jack's fingers slipped into the gaps between hers, and Maddie squeezed his hand as they sat on the couch. It was a nice couch, made of soft leather and dark grey in colour. It was almost as soft as the bed that Maddie had been sleeping in, and she found herself trailing the fingers of her free hand lazily over the cool surface.
"You're freezing," Jack commented, clasping his other hand over their intertwined ones in an attempt to warm her unnaturally cold digits. Maddie tensed. She couldn't acknowledge that, because then one thing would lead to another, and she'd blurt out the whole story without any coherence. A small part of her mind screamed for her to get a grip, and Maddie took a deep breath.
She had to start from the beginning, or everything would become a jumbled mess. Pulling her hand free, the woman undid the buttons on the front of her pyjama top. Jack's smile faltered at the unexpected movement, his confusion giving way to an entirely different expression as the fabric fell away.
The bolt of green, the veins of ectoplasm, the inflammation – all of it had faded significantly, but this was somehow even more gruesome than the wound's original appearance. Before, she could fool herself into thinking that there was still time, that the icy cold thing that had saved her life could be pulled out or dissipated once she had healed sufficiently.
Now the green was an integral part of her flesh, and one glance for someone as familiar with ectoplasm as Jack Fenton was more than enough to know this.
"Mads," he breathed, face slack with horror, "what happened?"
She took a shuddering breath, and told him.
Jack didn't interrupt her narrative, simply sitting there and growing paler with every new piece of information. Everything she spoke about, from thieves shooting her through the heart, to halfas being real, to ectoplasm tainting her body, to Phantom being their mistake in the first place, exacted a visible toll on the man. It took a surprisingly short few minutes for her to explain exactly what was going on, and by the time Maddie had finished, her poor husband was grey-faced and trembling as though he had seen… well, something horrific that he didn't study and hunt on a daily basis.
She stopped talking, and he didn't start. Maddie knew the man well enough to know that this quiet moment would be necessary – the little inconsistencies throughout their dealings with Phantom, all of the things that had often kept the Fentons awake for several nights in a row while research continued to hit dead ends, were explained in one brutal hit. To top it all off, everything he had been comfortable with at home was suddenly thrown into question with the revelation that his own wife had been turned into one of these hybrids. When presented with information of this magnitude, Jack Fenton was the kind of man that had to stop and think for a minute in order for it all to make sense.
They sat in silence for a long time, fingers intertwined and breaths in perfect synchronisation.
Once his trembling had died down somewhat, Jack swallowed thickly. "Can you show me?" he breathed into the tense atmosphere.
How badly Maddie wished that she could refuse. So long as she didn't actually exhibit spectral abilities, her halfa status was still just theory. As soon as she showed him, there was no more denying it, no more pretending that things weren't set in stone.
Holding up her hand, Maddie imagined that it was the only corporeal thing in the universe, and plunged it into the lovely leather couch.
