In Conclusion

or alternatively: Yep, It's the Epilogue

On the second day after Kwan's arrest, Amity Park's city-level quarantine was lifted. Tucker, Sam, Danny, and Tucker's parents were in the small crowd at the border when the hazmat guys took down the orange barriers.

Tucker hung back and witnessed Sam's reunion with her parents from a distance. Her mom sped up and pulled her into a tight hug, folding over a bit to account for their height difference. Sam's body language was uncomfortable, but she hugged back, if loosely. Then Pamela stood to the side and dabbed her eyes with a tissue while Mr. Manson said something to Sam in a low voice, something that made her eyes widen. He hugged her, and she reciprocated with a fierce grip, trembling.

After a while she rejoined the Foleys, dry-eyed, and led the whole group of them away from the borderline, pushing through the crowd and into the open street behind it. Tucker's parents and the Mansons exchanged slightly stilted pleasantries as Tucker went in for his own hug with Sam and Danny stood to the side, smiling. (His parents were absent. Tucker knew they'd called, at least.)

After a moment's hesitation, Sam also quickly hugged Danny. "Hey, I'm gonna head home and enjoy my mom's first reaction to the front window. Call me!" And without further ado, she headed off toward her parents' car, Doc Martens clomping on the pavement.

"I guess I'll head out, too." Danny sidled casually in the direction of the nearest building, presumably planning to go invisible and fly home as soon as he turned the corner. Tucker absolutely intended to wheedle, beg, and/or blackmail Danny into taking him flying sometime soon, despite the slightly worrying reaction he'd had to being turned intangible the night before last. (Wow, that had been less than 48 hours before?) "See you at school?"

"Yeah!" Tucker smiled.

Halfheartedly. It faded. He felt…weird.

For the second time in a row, that night (although this time without any snoring piles on his floor), Tucker went to sleep at 10 pm and slept for a full ten hours, with the lights on. (The next day, he would find a new night light in his room, already plugged in and assembled.) He FaceTimed Sam and then Danny in the morning over breakfast, since his dad had taken time off work and could drive him to school. He fidgeted in class, his eyes drawn in English to an empty desk. Two empty desks; Paulina wasn't at school. Star wasn't wearing makeup, and had deep bags under her eyes. Dash was quiet.

The school as a whole was quieter, really. The janitor's closet, Danny reported over lunch, was roped off, door plastered with police tape, but no explanation had been given to the student body at large.

Sometimes, when he was at school and his parents were out of sight, Tucker caught himself feeling nervous. When he was home with his parents, he worried about his friends. It diminished, though. Slowly.

~(*0*)~

The trial was held two weeks later.

The minimum sentence for homicide under Illinois law was 20 years. Since Kwan was older than 16, he was automatically tried as an adult. His role in the murders of Schulker and Technus couldn't be proven, so Kwan ended up with a 25-year sentence for the murder of Amber McClain and the aggravated assault and attempted murder of Tristan Harris. He wouldn't be leaving prison until his early forties. Tucker wasn't sure how he felt about that. He decided not to think about it, for a while.

None of the three of them had to testify. They had managed to get past and out of the school without the police seeing them, and all the school's security cameras had been mysteriously on the fritz since an hour or so before they showed up, when Kwan began drawing the circle that so conveniently resembled the one Amber McClain's body had been found in alongside a fair amount of not-successfully-washed-away blood, filled with no-longer-unidentified DNA.

It didn't necessarily feel good. It wasn't nice. But remembering the look in Amber McClain's living eyes, watching Tristan wince as he stood up off the couch…it felt more right, at least. Some dislocated bone had been wrenched back into place; the ache remained.

It hurt, Tucker realized. It hurt to know that justice felt like this. It ached like a growing pain.

~(*0*)~

"Your dad really hasn't asked about the window?"

They were at lunch, two days after the trial. "Oh, yeah," Sam said in a disinterested tone. "Well, I told him I'd tell him the whole story next time we go ice skating. He said he can wait." She waved a negligent hand. "Of course, I'll edit out all of Danny's various issues."

"Hey!"

"And then he said he's gonna help me, uhh, translate for my mom." She shrugged, looked kind of uncomfortable. "Uh. Yeah. We'll see."

She clearly hadn't started out intending to share that much. Like the absolute best friend ever he truly was, Tucker jumped in to change the subject.

"So what are y'all's plans over the long weekend?" Parent-teacher conferences delayed from early November meant that they would have a much-needed mini vacation.

"Not much," Sam conceded lazily. "Hang out with you guys, hopefully. Play Doomed?"

"I'm not doing anything either," Danny shared. "Or, I guess my sister—oh, hey, wait, you guys can meet Jazz!" He abruptly brightened. "She's my sister, she's kind of awful. In college, right now. But she knows about the ghost stuff, and she's coming home this week, and like, she can probably explain stuff way better than I can."

"Wait, someone else knows about the ghost stuff?!"

Danny went shifty around the eyes. "Heh. Yeah, actually, I was…kinda trying not to mention it in case you got, like, interrogated by the government or something and she lost her plausible deniability." Sam raised an eyebrow. Danny went slightly green, which Tucker took a minute to realize was probably his way of looking embarrassed. "But hey, I guess I have faith you can withstand moderate amounts of torture now. You guys should be flattered."

"...Just moderate?" Tucker scoffed. "Please, have you heard Sam's driving playlist? Two years of carpooling! Her taste has not improved!"

Sam elbowed him pointily. Danny snickered. Any tension dissipated into the blue sky.

"I think this weekend I'm gonna ask my aunt to teach me some more stuff, actually. Like, psychic stuff," Tucker admitted after a pause.

It wasn't that Tucker particularly wanted to get involved in more ghostly situations. But if it was going to happen regardless, he might as well be prepared. That said, after the baptism of fire of the last two months or so, he honestly felt pretty good about his chances against the sorts of things his aunt had described facing in the past, just putting ghosts to rest through small favors rather than having to track down and punish someone for paranormal misdeeds. Plus, in the end, Amber and the lunch lady had just wanted help, and to help in turn. And Tucker did like making people happy.

"Oh, that's cool! I'm actually gonna take a break from the occult, I think," Sam offered with a smile, surprising Tucker. He'd thought she'd want all of the details of his aunt's stories. "Present company excluded, of course."

Danny groaned. "Wish I could do that."

Tucker opened his mouth to reply, and then the bell rang to signal the beginning of second period. Ugh, French. At least Danny had to suffer with him.

As he walked down the halls with his friend, from the corner of his eye, Tucker spotted a small grey fox, sitting primly beneath the water fountain. The legs of students passed busily in front of it, revealing and obscuring it in turn like rush hour traffic. It looked at him with limpid black eyes, bowed its head once, and trotted off in the opposite direction.

Tucker glanced at Danny. His friend was staring with intent at the opposite wall, a glint of green in his eye. In the distant cafeteria, something chuckled lowly.

Yes, maybe it ached. But only some of the time. Given the circumstances, in that moment, Tucker found he was remarkably happy.

NOTES:

October 15th is Winter's Night, the Norse new year. Kwan didn't have to wait for Halloween. Hehe.

BONUS:

Officer Darren Walker sighed as he stood up from his desk and went to collect the new box of evidence for filing. There was a lot of it floating around, even now, after the trial was done. This Ainara case was a mess. He remembered, not too long ago, the case of the kid's mother, which it had been definitively proven Kwan Ainara was not responsible for. Walker wasn't in the habit of sympathizing with murderers, but victims, and kids...well. It just sucked.

Particularly given how only a month ago, his own nephew had been lost to a hit-and-run accident, still unsolved. Walker had just barely been cleared for desk duty again a week ago, having spent the last three weeks with his grieving sister. It was...it was hard. He pushed the thought out of his mind, for the twentieth time today, as he took the box from his coworker with a wan smile and a few meaningless niceties.

Took the box to his desk, opened it to double-check that everything was organized right before locking it away for good. Paused.

There was a piece of paper at the bottom of the box, one he was almost certain should have been put in a different box since it had been crucial evidence for the trial. A printout from some obscure website, complete with sketchy pop-up ads with the images reduced to black and white. A website for kids messing around with superstitious nonsense, nonsense that had motivated a misguided teenager to murder.

Walker's grandfather would have had a few things to say about how nonsensical those superstitions were. Walker's grandfather had taught him a thing or two.

Walker stared down at the paper for a long moment, not really seeing it. It rested innocently at the bottom of the evidence box, thick cardboard walls painting it half in shadow.

He began to read.