You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?
― Friedrich Nietzsche
"Don't you know it's against the law to burn stuff in alleys?" This was greeted by more laughter. The tallest of the group administered another kick to Gabe's curled-up legs. "You're gonna give this place a bad reputation!"
A rusty metal trash can with a briskly burning fire inside stood just a few yards away from Danny and behind the group. A duffel bag with spray paint spilling out of it lay nearby. Apparently they were about to do some law-breaking of their own before they'd decided hurting old people was more fun.
Danny balled his hands into fists. If he could go ghost, he'd have these creeps licking the bottom of a dumpster in two minutes flat. Gabe needed a hero. That was him, right? He reached for his core, as if by sheer willpower he could bring it back to life.
Cold flickered in his chest and died away. Nothing. Of course.
Ghost powers or not, he had to do something.
Danny slipped out of the backpack and set it down. No point in bringing ectoweapons into this. It might intimidate them—maybe—or it could blow up in his face, literally. If the ghosts in the thermos got loose… yeah, that would be bad. He took one step into the alley, then his eyes fell on the colorful aerosol cans. A stupid, reckless plan came into his head. Danny grinned. Maybe explosive was just what he needed.
The bullies were completely absorbed with baiting Gabe. Danny crept up behind them, snatching up the duffel and moving to stand next to the burning trash. He groped through the cans and found one that felt about half full. Shoving his foot under the trash can to tilt it at a harmless angle, he dropped the can into the flames.
The contents—crumpled paper, broken bits of pallet, and what smelled like lighter fluid—must have been hot, because it only took a matter of seconds. Danny counted. Six, seven, eight, nine—the aerosol spray exploded, vibrating the trash can against Danny's foot and sending up a spectacular cloud of flame. The heat singed Danny's cheeks, but he ignored it. Shrapnel rattled into the dumpster and rained against the wall over the teens' heads.
They jumped and turned with a jumble of swearing and flailing at burned bits of clothing, one of them screeching in an impressive falsetto. The teens stared goggle-eyed at Danny.
"What the hell?" Someone squeaked—falsetto guy.
"Hey," another one pointed to the duffel. "That's ours, loser!"
"Funny," Danny said, making a show of selecting another can. "I thought you guys were law-abiding citizens. Grafitti counts as vandalism last time I checked, and these cans have seen some mileage." His fingers closed around a green can—someone had scribbled a skull and crossbones on it with Sharpie. Cute.
He dangled it over the fire and gave them a lazy grin. "That first one was mostly empty. You wanna find out whether a full can throws shrapnel harder?" He swung the entire bag over the trash can, bare inches from the heat. "Or hey, why not a whole bunch of them?" They could totally jump him in the handful of seconds before it went off, but they didn't know that.
They looked at each other, furious. One of them cracked his knuckles and another was getting red in the face, but none of them made a move. "What are you, crazy?"
Danny's eyes narrowed. "I'm not the one beating up some harmless old guy in an alley."
Falsetto scoffed and pulled a lighter and pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, turning away. "We were done here anyway."
Sure you were, Danny thought, but wasn't stupid enough to say it. If they actually started a fight he'd probably lose worse than Gabe.
The boys stalked past him. One made a swipe at the bag.
"Whoops," Danny said, and dropped it into the flames. All five broke out into a run.
They vanished around the corner, their footsteps fading into the distance. Danny yanked the smoldering bag out of the can, poured the spray paint into the dumpster, then dropped the bag on the ground and stomped out the little flames still flickering on the canvas.
He dusted off his hands, still shaking from the sudden spike of adrenaline. He chuckled. He could've blown himself up. That had been really, extra stupid, but it worked. Thank you, Dad, for an extensive knowledge of combustion rates.
The confused mass of smoke around the old man calmed into a dozen vague silhouettes. White eyes stared at him. Gabe still hunched against the wall, eyes squeezed shut, arms over his head.
Danny stepped through the circle of shades, suppressing a shudder at the chill, and crouched next to the old man. "Hey," he said quietly, trying to sound as non-threatening as possible. "You okay?"
The old man raised one of his arms and peered out from under it, odd mismatched blue and brown eyes glittering out of shadows. "Spook boy," he muttered, and glanced around, as if realizing for the first time that the alley had emptied. Slowly, his arms dropped into his laps. His hands were shaking.
"Danny," he corrected, then sat back against the brick wall next to Gabe. "You're not very popular, are you? I know what that's like."
The man didn't answer, groping through his pockets with a nervous kind of urgency. The shades milled around, mingling with the smoke, flicking in and out of visibility. One stared at Danny with a blank white gaze, then drifted off through the brick wall.
Fumbling gnarled hands finally produced a pipe and lighter. Gabe lit the pipe and puffed at it. He looked at Danny. "Much obliged for the help, boy. Danny."
Danny shrugged. With the immediate threat taken care off, all the confusion and frustration slipped back into place, hanging over him like a cloud. Mom. Shannon. Home. The smoke still billowing out of the garbage can began to stink of plastic. It stung his eyes. He looked up at the blue scrap of sky visible above the tangle of brick and steel. It didn't have any answers, either.
"Leaving?" The old man pointed his pipe at Danny's backpack, still leaned up against the wall.
He shrugged again. "It'll be trouble if I stay."
"Maybe." They both watched blue-white smoke curl out of the pipe and drift through the bodies of the shades. "Those troubles just might follow you."
"They already did." He thought of the wolf-ghosts that had found him just outside of town, the fight in the warehouse that he'd just barely won. He got lucky that time—a deserted space to fight, a trap that worked. Did he really want to go back to that? Better than making Shannon their target, right?
Gabe wiped at the soot on his face; it left a streak of blood.
Danny started. "Woah, are you cut?"
The old man grunted. "Punks had hard boots."
Danny got up and peered at the side of Gabe's head. A bright slash of red welled up beneath the matted grey hair. Danny whistled; he'd seen enough cuts to know when one needed stitches. "Yeah, we're going to the clinic. Come on."
Gabe waved off his offered hand. "It's nothin, boy, leave it be."
"That's most definitely not nothing." Danny rummaged in his backpack and grabbed at the first thing that came to hand—a clean sock, stuffed into the side pocket. He pressed it against the cut. "Dr. Wagner needs to see this."
The man blinked up at him, looking suddenly timid. "Those punks were right on the burning. I could get in real trouble. I've been looking out for you," he added, as if that explained things. "Sometimes you've gotta take risks."
Danny sighed and fished around behind the dumpster until he found the lid to the trash can. He glanced inside at the still-smoldering fire. It was mostly crumpled-up sheets of paper, blackened beyond reading, their edges torn as if they'd been ripped off of telephone poles. Some kind of flyer? Weird.
He put the lid on, smothering the flames, and turned back to Gabe. "There, it's out. Let's go."
Angela stared up at the Fenton house from the street, casserole dish clutched in her arms. The door was not only unlocked, but nonexistent, a jagged hole edged with black soot and splinters. A clear plastic shower curtain had been taped over it, edges flapping in the breeze.
Not terribly unusual for this place, but after everything that Tucker had just admitted, the scene felt ominous. A palpable reminder of just how dangerous the Fentons' work could be. When she thought of the number of times her son had crossed that threshold, it made her shudder. Was this place so much of a minefield and she hadn't realized it?
Tucker had sat her and Maurice down over pancakes that weekend. He'd told them a rambling, disjointed story that came down to this: Their son hunted ghosts. The dangerous kind. He'd been sneaking out, running around after these… these monster things and trying to catch them. Fighting them. Breaking the law to track them down. Risking life and limb. He'd talked about it like an after-school hobby.
There was only one place he could have picked up such a dangerous idea, and she was standing on its doorstep. As his mother, she couldn't let that continue.
Angela squared her shoulders, walked up the blast-scarred front steps and pushed through the plastic cover. The living room was dark and empty, though free of further signs of violence. Angela headed toward the kitchen, holding up her meatloaf like a shield.
"Hello?" she ventured. "Maddie? Jack?"
Nothing but the ticking clock and the buzzing refrigerator. She tried again, louder.
"Maddie, I brought you something!"
This time she heard a muffled response from downstairs. Angela stared at the broad cement steps that led down to the lab, marked with industrial black and yellow stripes. Their workspace, a place she'd rarely visited. The home of that impressive-looking portal and all of the couple's inventions. Which, apparently, her son stole from time to time to act as a self-appointed vigilante assisting a ghost. Against other ghosts.
Angela winced. They needed to talk, mother to mother. She pushed the meatloaf onto the kitchen table and marched down the stairs.
Her eyes went straight to the portal—it was hard not to look there first, considering it was the largest and most impressive thing in the room. Its poison green glow was muffled behind thick blast doors, also striped in black and yellow. The wreck of an oversized motorcycle lay next to it, looking weirdly translucent under the harsh white fluorescents. The lab was…
Angela put a hand to her lips, shocked. The Fentons weren't orderly at the best of times, but this took it to a new level. Tables knocked over or broken. Blast scars on the walls outlined in clouds of soot. Heaps of broken machinery everywhere, spilling out of containers, strewn across the floor, piled up against the walls.
Maddie sat at the one table still standing, next to a crude-looking piece of machinery that seemed to be cobbled together from several others. A neat row of odd disc-shaped devices were welded to a thick metal frame at regular intervals. She had a similar disc on the table with the face popped off and was picking at the wiring with a pair of tweezers and needle-nose pliers.
All of the semi-accusations, questions, and demands Angela had come prepared to make flew right out of her head. "Maddie honey, what happened?"
Her friend set down the tools and swiveled her chair, smiling. A huge blue-black bruise took up her right cheek and made the smile crooked. "Hi Angela. I thought that was you."
"What happened to your lab? And your face! Where's Jack?"
Maddie's smile fell. "Upstairs sleeping. He got the worst of it. He'll be alright, but it'll take more than a few days until he's up and about again. We were at the hospital until yesterday."
Angela pulled up a second chair, dusted the rubble off, and sank into it. They'd been so preoccupied by Tucker's confession that neither of them had kept up with much this week. "I wish I'd have known, I would have visited. Was it an accident? Or…" she glanced up at the portal.
Maddie followed her gaze. "We were attacked, yes. Though not unprovoked. You could say we stuck our hands in a hornet's nest; it's' no surprise we got stung."
"This is more than a little sting, honey." She took in the blast scars on the wall, the mangled machinery. All palpable reminders of just how powerful and deadly ghosts could be. That great big blast door hadn't done anything to keep them out, either. "Those ghosts are dangerous!"
"So we've found." Maddie sighed, then picked up her tools. "So what brings you here?"
Angela pursed her lips, finding an undamaged corner of the wall to stare at. This was hard; she wasn't a confrontational person by nature, even less so with old friends. But someone had to speak to the Fentons, for their own sake as much as the kids. What Tucker had been exposed to here went beyond carelessness.
"Tucker called a family meeting this weekend," she said at last. "He said he wanted to come clean, and… he had a lot to say. "
Maddie glanced at her with an expression Angela couldn't read. "What did he tell you?"
"Do you remember that one ghost, Phantom?" Nearly everyone had an opinion on the controversial ghost 'hero;' Angela couldn't imagine the city's top ghost hunters overlooking him.
Thin lines gathered at Maddie's brow as she worked at a small screw. "Of course I do."
Angela hesitated. To be honest, she hadn't had much of an opinion either way on the ghost boy. He seemed to be helpful, and she was as grateful as everyone else when he'd stopped a rampaging ghost, but when Phantom vanished, she hadn't missed him. Life went on. Other ghost hunters picked up the slack. She'd never wondered what had become of him. Now that she knew, or at least had an inkling, she felt guilty for that.
Angela wanted to ask if ghosts could be hurt the way Tucker seemed to think they could. She didn't quite dare. "Was he really helping people?" she asked instead.
"He was," Maddie said to her tools, almost too softly for her to hear. "We never gave him enough credit."
Angela thought of the video Tucker had shown her; especially that last, haunting shot. The ghost boy's frightened eyes as the GIW closed in on him was enough to earn her pity, even without all the things he'd done. She wondered where that scene had led. What had waited for him in those labs? Tucker said that Phantom had escaped, eventually, but… just like with Danny, surviving hadn't been enough.
"Do you think he'll come back?" Angela asked.
Maddie coiled a scrap of hair-fine wire gently and set it aside. "I don't know. I hope so."
Angela sighed, picking up a discarded screw from Maddie's project and rolling it in her fingers. She pitied the ghost boy, yes, but… maybe it was better if he stayed vanished. "I'm not so sure I do."
Maddie looked up sharply at that. "Why not?"
"I worry about Tucker. He said he was… involved with Phantom in some way. He's even gone so far as hacking into government servers to try to help Phantom when he got captured. That's what this scholarship project of his really was, a front so we wouldn't suspect what he was actually up to. I had no idea he had that kind of talent— in lying or algorithms." It had been a blow to her sense of security that he'd hidden such a huge and dangerous secret from her. "In fact," she glanced at Maddie, "he said he borrowed Fenton tech in order to help this ghost fight the bad ones."
Maddie pulled another piece free, examined it, and tossed it in a plastic bin at her feet. She was taking the prospect of having been robbed of dangerous equipment by a teenager very calmly.
"Did you know about this?" Angela asked, seized by a sudden suspicion.
"I've… learned a lot about the three of them in the past few weeks, but I didn't think that... " Maddie sighed. "If I thought Tucker was in any danger, I would've told you."
Of course she would— though that was the whole point: the Fentons just didn't see danger the way most people did. "I'm sorry, Maddie, it's just…" Angela clasped her hands and stared at them. "You and Jack can be so… focused on your work, I'm afraid that the line between your family life and work has blurred. Maybe without you noticing. Tucker won't say it outright, but… I'm sure Danny was involved. You know how those three were; if one was into something, so were the other two. That means your family's problems are my family's problems—and the Mansons. That our kids did such dangerous things here at Fentonworks without either of you noticing disturbs me. Deeply."
"Our children are better at hiding things than any of us realized."
Angela frowned and put her hand flat on the table. "It's not the children I blame for this."
Maddie stopped, screwdriver in hand. "I see." She looked up at Angela with tired eyes. "It's my fault."
Angela winced at the pain in the other woman's voice. "I'm not saying that… exactly. I know you've had your own sorrows lately and I'm sorry for that. I know you and Jack would never deliberately put our children in harm's way. But Tucker told us he could—and frequently, did—just walk in here and take things— including guns. Ectoguns, but still, potentially lethal weapons."
"That's entirely possible," Maddie admitted. "We never had stringent security here. Most people wouldn't know what our technology was, let alone how to operate it."
"A teenaged boy managed to figure it out. Luckily for him nothing exploded or backfired, but can you guarantee that wasn't a possibility?"
Maddie shook her head.
"To say nothing of going out there and facing actual ghosts all on his own!" Angela stood up and paced over to the nearest shattered table, then turned back. "He put so much faith into this Phantom, heaven knows why. My child, who's had asthma since he was five and barely escaped flunking out of PE, has been throwing himself into these battles against inhuman monsters on a daily basis." She took in Maddie's bruised face and bandaged knee with a sweep of her hand. "If even you and Jack don't walk away unscathed from that kind of encounter, what about my son?"
"I— you're right, of course."
"I let Tucker come over here despite all the dangerous lab equipment because I thought you were able to set boundaries and keep our children safe. Clearly I was wrong."
Angela paced back to the table and drew herself up. She had to say it now, or her resolve would crumble.
"I don't want Tucker coming to Fentonworks again, not until I feel that you can ensure his safety. I've told him as much, and I'd appreciate if you'd help me enforce that." She nodded and took a step toward the door, determined to leave before she could soften the words, or take it back despite herself. "With Danny gone, he has no real business here anyway."
Maddie stopped, hands on her half-assembled invention, eyes fixed on some point on the far wall. "And if Danny comes back?"
That 'if' made Angela pause; it echoed Tucker's heartbroken words from just a few days ago, sorrowful and with the undertones of defeat. She suspected there was more going on than she knew, but now was not the time or the place to question. Her job as Tucker's mother and guardian came first.
"I suppose we'll cross that bridge when we come to it." Angela sighed. "We've been good friends, Maddie, but you know how much Tucker's safety means to me. Danny and Sam just as much. I respect your profession, but in my humble opinion, you should seriously reconsider how you go about your work."
That was all the sternness Angela could muster. She brushed invisible specks of dust off her skirt and turned away.
"I understand."
Angela looked back; Maddie had her eyes on her work, head bowed, fingers fiddling with the device in her hands. To an outsider she might look completely absorbed, unmoved. Angela had known Maddie long enough to see the sharp lines at the corners of her mouth, the lines of pain and worry gathering between her eyebrows. She looked so sorrowful and uncertain and alone, Angela faltered despite herself.
She went back and wrapped her friend in a hug. "I'm not angry with you, I promise. I want my Tucker to be safe, that's all."
Maddie shook her head and pulled out of the embrace, a cynical smile on her lips."That's kind of you, Angela, but you're exactly right. I've endangered our kids in more ways than you know. I regret every moment of it. I'm sorry."
"Don't be sorry, Maddie, be more careful. For your sake as much as anyone else's." Angela straightened and touched Maddie's arm. "I'll leave your meatloaf in the fridge."
After Angela disappeared up the stairs, Maddie sat back with a sigh and pushed her goggles up. She'd even managed to estrange a gentle and understanding person like Angela. If that didn't tell her this was the right decision, nothing would.
She snapped the disc cover back onto the repulsor lift she'd just fixed and rose, balancing on her good leg. She hopped over and screwed the disc in next to the other five on the upended underside of her makeshift contraption. Carefully centering her weight, she knelt, wrapped her hands under the bottom of the frame and heaved, flipping it over to rest on four stubby iron legs. The device fell with a clang. Nothing shook loose. So far, so good.
Maddie picked up a remote and clicked a button. The repulsors hummed to life and the whole thing rose in the air: a crude flatbed cart with a four-inch steel railing around the edges. It had taken all the spare repulsors they'd kept stashed away for the speeder, but this thing could do all the heavy lifting until Jack got back on his feet.
She glanced around at the chaos that her lab had become. It was beyond wrecked now, between Jack's original trashing of it months ago and the more recent chaos of their battle. Dangerous liquids seeped under piles of jagged metal and broken glass. It looked far more apocalyptic than scientific, even to someone accustomed to typical Fenton disorder.
She wondered how it looked through Angela's eyes… or Danny's. Her eyes fell on a scattering of scalpels under one of the tables and she cringed.
Tucking the remote into her belt and moving across the room on her crutches, she knelt and scooped the scalpels up, tossing them in a nearby plastic bin. She pulled out a sharpie and marked the side in all caps: INCINERATE.
One thing at a time.
Minds that Move :: tbc...
A/N:
Well, that defused an explosive situation, eh? Some people have time to burn. Hehe. I'm not totally happy with this chapter, but I felt like these character interactions were important. It's all moving forward… to what end?
Sorry this one's a bit late, guys! I had a lemonade emergency (solved by some quick thinking and kitchen-sink-style flavor repair), then Aunt Flo came by and delivered a dropkick to the guts. It's still Friday in some reality, right?
Just kidding about the fall weather, by the way. It's gone back to being hot- hot, dry, and unrelentingly sunny. And I always thought people in Hollywood wore sunglasses to look cool… turns out they're necessary if you don't wanna go blind from glare. 0_0
The final edit of SoaD is stubbornly dragging on, with a few knotty problems barring my way to a fully finished draft. I'm getting there though, with the help of my wonderful beta readers.
Speaking of which! Many thanks to MyAibou, Anneriawings, LunarMothim, Misfit-toy-haven, Pumpernickel Muffin, Attu, Chintastic, and Cordria!
And thank you, dear readers, for your reviews! Super cool to see readers old and new! I hope you enjoy this arc and its new developments!
Until next week!
-Hj