Chapter Nine: In Your Heart

Disclaimer: I don't own Mediator or the Outsiders. If I did, I wouldn't be writing crappy fan fiction.

Suze shivered and started off. She wasn't really walking, she noticed, more like gliding. She tried jumping up and landed in a tree. This is going to take some getting used to, Suze thought.

Struggling with the branches and leaves, she made herself ghostly liquid, so she could just seep through anything. It was one advantage of being a ghost; you could go anywhere. Well, anywhere in this dimension, anyway.

She stopped herself just in time, before she fell through the Earth's surface.

She spent the first hour or so getting used to being a ghost. She haunted the drugstore and stole a Coke, catching herself just before she made the same mistake Dally did and give people the impression of a floating beverage.

She stopped by her own house, too. She caught her mother and Ryan talking, and was just about to leave them to their dull conversation when she heard her own name being brought up. She settled down to listen.

"…Oh, Ryan, don't beat yourself up about it. Suze is…well, she's just like Harry. She likes to test people," Jan sighed.

"How long can it take her, Jan?" Ryan sounded frustrated. "I promised myself I wouldn't be like my own stepfather. I don't want to be her father. I'd at least like to be friends, if nothing else."

Suze was shocked. Ryan had had a stepfather of his own? No wonder he was trying so hard. Suze resented him for that, for trying to be her father, when all the while he was just trying to get to know her. Shame washed over her, and nearly drowned her.

The topic changed and Suze left, not wanting to intrude any further. She had other work to do.

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A few minutes later, she ran into Dally. "Hey, Dally," she greeted. Dally heard her and turned to greet her.

"Hey, Su—WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO YOU?" He demanded, staring at her in horror. Suze nearly laughed and started to tell him the truth. Then she decided to have some fun.

"I got hit by a car," she teased. Dally stared and sputtered incoherently for almost a whole minute before Suze decided to spare him.

"I'm joking. Johnny possessed my body to talk to Ponyboy, and I decided to see what life as a ghost was like."

Dally's eyes narrowed and he swung at her angrily. He missed, blinded by his rage. "You—!" Dally cussed her out. "Jeez, Suze, you scared the hell outta me! Don't do that!"

"Yeah," Suze said breezily. "Whatever. I'll see you later. I've got some work to do." She faded, leaving Dally to curse till the air with blue with swearing.

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Yes, Suze had some work to do. But how she was going to go about it, she didn't know. She let herself fly with the breeze until she could rest on the clouds, surrounded by blue sky. She settled back to think.

Smothered by the rich blueness of the sky, she thought back to what Johnny had said the day she had met him and Dally, and the two of them had explained their predicament.

Most ghosts couldn't go on because they hadn't fulfilled something from their past life or something in their past life was a mystery that had to be solved. In Johnny's case, it was both.

When Johnny was five years old, his father was drunk and beating him. Nothing so unusual about that, Dally had interjected. Johnny, being only five years old, blacked out.

When he finally came to, he heard his parents talking in low voices. He didn't dare stir, in case they started beating on him again. He remembered that they were arguing, not yelling or throwing things, but just arguing in quiet and urgent voices.

"…How do you explain that, Maria? How?"

"It was a mistake, Richard. It was a mistake…he was a mistake."

"Well, what are we supposed to do with him? We could give him up for adoption."

"No!"

"What the hell do you mean by no?"

"I can't give him up, Richard. You don't know what it's like…to have a child of your own. I can't just give him up."

"You'll regret that, Maria. You will, I promise you. I swear, as long as he lives in this house, both your and his lives will be a living hell. That's your choice to make."

"He's my son, Richard. And now, he's yours too."

That had been all Johnny could remember of the conversation. What Dally and Suze had known right away, and what Johnny had refused to believe at first, was that Johnny was only Maria Cade's child. He had no genetic relation whatsoever to Richard Cade.

With that cleared up, there was still the question of why Maria had stayed with Richard all these years, why she hadn't just married Johnny's father, whoever he was.

As for what Johnny had to fulfill, well…

"I have to talk to Ponyboy one last time," Johnny had said. "I need to tell him something. Something I forgot to mention in my last letter to him. Something important."

"If it was so important, why didn't you just tell him the first time around?" Dally had demanded at this point.

"Hey, give me a break," Johnny had complained. "I was dying." Dally had shut up after that.

And why was Dally still around? That Suze didn't have to worry about. He was discontent because Johnny was discontent. He couldn't rest easy until Johnny was.

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Lifting herself up off the cloud, Suze decided she would worry about that later. Right now, she had her own personal troubles.

She didn't think she had ever actually told her dad she was a mediator. Yet, somehow, he had known. Suze remembered what he had told her once, when they were alone.

"Suze," he had said quietly. "No matter what happens, you'll always be my Suzy. If anything should ever happen, just look for me in your heart."

Suddenly, it all made sense. Suze had always thought had meant "Follow your heart" or some dumb saying. But her father had never really been one for sayings. He had meant it quite literally.

Suze faded. It was the fastest method of ghost transportation she knew of. She reappeared a few seconds later in her bedroom. She zoomed over to the closet and started rummaging around for one of the few things she had brought from their old house in Homer Glen.

It was the golden, heart shaped pendant her father had bought for her on her fourteenth birthday, the last one she had spent with him.

"Your heart" meant, quite literally, her heart necklace. Now, if only she could figure out how to use it.

Her hands moved almost automatically to clasp the necklace around her neck. It occurred to her that she had never worn this necklace before. She wondered why vaguely as she fumbled with the clasp at the back.

The chain was long enough so that the pendant hung down exactly where Suze's heart was. She waited. And waited. And waited. Nothing.

Suze sighed in disappointment. She knew she shouldn't have gotten her hopes up. She turned to drift away sadly…and gasped in astonishment.

Her room was gone. Cornfields and miles of open road stretched before her. She could smell a familiar scent of spice and mint in the air, and it brought tears to her eyes.

"Don't cry, Suzy," someone said. Suze wiped at her eyes hurriedly. "I'm not cry—" she stopped mid-sentence. Only one person had ever called her Suzy…

She whirled around, not daring to believe it until she saw it with her own eyes. "Daddy!"

Suze ran into the open arms of her grinning, transparent father. "Oh, Suzy," he exclaimed. "I was wondering when you'd figure it out!"

He broke the hug to examine her more closely. "You've grown up a lot," he said admiringly. Suze smiled through her tears.

"Don't cry, Suzy. I'm always here for you. All you have to do is wear the necklace."

Suze's smile faded at his words. "But…Dad," she said. "Didn't you go on, you know, to the afterlife?"

Harry smiled at his daughter's concern. "Suzy, this is my afterlife. When you were born, my whole life changed. I took one look at you, and I knew."

"Knew what?" Suze blurted out, frowning in confusion. "Knew you were a mediator," Harry responded.

Suze's jaw dropped. "You…knew?" she said in disbelief. Harry nodded.

"Oh, yes," he said. "Yes. There's a long line of mediators from my side of the family. Your grandmother was one, though she died before you knew her. Otherwise you would have trained under her, been her apprentice."

"But I still don't understand," Suze said in a small voice. "Why are you here?"

"I'm getting to that," Harry said shortly. "Listen, Suze. I was a small town kid, a bit of a hick. And I stayed that way, all throughout my life. Until you were born. That's when I knew my life had a purpose. And when I died before my time, well, this became my afterlife."

"But you gave me the answer," Suze reminded him. "How did you know?"

Harry just grinned. "That's for me to know and you to never find out," he said mysteriously. "Some things are better left untold."

Suze knew her father well enough not to press him. "So," Harry abruptly changed the subject. "Why are you transparent? You didn't die, did you?" he asked worriedly.

Suze laughed at his concern and reassured him that, no, she had not died. She launched into the story, starting from the very beginning, when she had moved to Tulsa until now.

When she had finished, Harry was looking at her strangely. "What?" Suze asked, not sure she wanted to know.

"Did you say, Johnny Cade? And his father was Richard Cade?" Harry asked, still giving her a strange look.

"Yes," Suze said, wondering where this was going. Harry held out his hand, and Suze took it.

"Come with me," he said. "I think I have something that can help you."

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An update after so long! I'm so proud of myself. Kindly review and tell me what you thought of it.

Also, tell me what you think of maybe adding in a bit more of Tim and Curly Shepard or the Ponyboy and Suze romance thing. There's got to be more to this story than just the mediator factor.