So, a day late on this one, and I'm combining it with death. This one's a bit graphic and what not, so be warned.
The metallic smell of the lab mingled with the electric scent of ectoplasm. The Ghost Portal's dim green light illuminated the dank room and cast eerie shadows on the lab equipment.
The ghost boy, Danny Phantom, swayed where he stood, a look of shock and confusion twisting his face before he fell, his eyes loosely shut.
Maddie rushed forward, throwing her ectogun to the floor. She grabbed the boy by his shoulders, dragging him to a lab table and hoisting him up with surprising difficulty.
He was a ghost. Ghosts usually only weighed about 20 pounds, all together. But Phantom easily weighed five times that.
She worked his backpack off and flung it aside, not even bothering to think why he had a backpack with him.
She zipped open his jumpsuit, exposing his slightly burned skin. The burns were worse the closer you got to his left arm.
She slipped his gloves off and gasped. His entire left hand was blackened and crisp. No pink flesh or oozing green ectoplasm, just skin. It had a chalky texture, like it could easily be broken, but it was stiff and cracked from Phantom's movement.
She pulled up his sleeve, her stomach twisting at the sight of the black burns stretching up his arm and fading into a tan, tree-like scars ran around his arm and stretched onto his back.
Maddie stood back and frowned, furrowing her brow and biting her finger. She turned away, walking over to the other side of the lab and grabbing a syringe.
She plunged it into Phantom's chest, avoiding bones and reaching under his sternum, just to his left, exactly where his core would be.
She took a sample, confusion marring her face when red blood was sucked into the syringe along with bright green ectoplasm.
She put the sample in the "Fenton-5021"- an invention Jack hadn't quite gotten around to naming yet. It was supposed to test a ghost's ectoplasm and find out all of the components and ghost's abilities and limits.
She turned back to Phantom, lying dead as a door nail on her lab table. His face still frozen in confusion, and his dull green eyes wide.
Maddie sighed and turned away.
It was so odd seeing Phantom so still. He'd always been moving when she'd seen him. Not stopping for even a second. He even mimicked breathing.
But now he was still. So very, very still. It was unsettling.
And he was so young. His face hadn't quite lost it's childhood chub, his eyes still big and youthful, despite having a haunted look in them when he was still "alive".
Maddie would guess he was maybe 13, 14. Not older than 16.
He was so young when he died.
Maddie couldn't stop herself from wondering how long it'd been since he had died. Was his family dead? Were they still alive, watching the ghost of their son risk his afterlife to fight other ghosts?
Maddie's eyes slid over to the backpack Phantom had been carrying with him. It was a simple, purple backpack, nothing particularly special about it, just a backpack that a child would bring with them to school.
She unzipped it and looked inside. Her stomach twisted at what she saw.
Daisies and a card.
The flowers were bent and scuffed up a little, but what's to expect with being in a backpack. Maddie lifted the daisies to her nose, they had always been her favorite flower, save for blood blossoms, of course. She smiled as she breathed in the gentle smell of the daisies and set the bouquet down. She looked at the card. It was blue and had a picute of a heart on the front, with fancy gold lettering that spelled out "Happy Mother's Day!"