In the morning, Jack wakes up to find Maddie already up and showered, a new jumpsuit tied at her waist and the bedroom reeking of Icy Hot. His nose burns. He looks at the clock. It's not even seven.
"What are you doing up?" He asks quietly. She still jumps.
"Oh. Sorry. Did I wake you?"
He shakes his head and gets out of bed with only a minimal amount of aches and pains worth griping about. Nobody said ghost hunting would be easy. Maddie watches him pull a clean jumpsuit out of the closet, socks underthings from their shared dresser. "I couldn't sleep," she says.
"Me neither," he admits. He didn't fall asleep properly until the dawn had begun to stain the sky gray.. "Is he...?"
"I don't know," she says. "I haven't heard him moving around."
He tuts. "Poor thing. I wouldn't be surprised if he slept all day. He looked like he hadn't had a decent night's sleep in..." He trails off weakly. He doesn't want to finish that sentence. Maddie winces all the same.
"I know. And all those—those scars. Did you see his hands?" A breath shudders out of her. "What did that monster do to him?"
There's no answer to that. Not yet. Danny said he'd tell them everything though. He said they deserved to know. Last night, only a scant few hours ago. Jack hadn't been able to look away from the pale slash across Danny's mouth. It had wrinkled when he spoke, turned white when he feigned a smile. "I don't know," he says.
"Danny—he didn't say how he got away." Maddie slips her arms into her suit, busies her hands with the zipper. "Do you remember what Sam said? About the first time Freakshow took him?"
"Yes," he says, but Maddie goes on as if he hadn't spoken at all.
"She said she was able to get through to him. Talk to him so he heard her. Shake him out of that control enough to break that staff Freakshow had."
"I know," Jack says, and though it's agony to admit he says it anyway. He has to. "Danny didn't say what creepy thingamabob Freakshow used this time around."
Maddie winces.
"Must've been something a heckuva lot stronger if it took him three years to break free."
"Almost three years," she corrects. She turns to look up at him. Her eyes are bruised with exhaustion, her hair a damp and tangled mess. "Months, Jack. He's been free from that bastard for months. He said he should've been hospitalized. What could he have—"
"Hush. Stop, hssh." He drops his clothes on their bed so he can gather her up in his arms. He hugs her until she stops trembling, strokes her hair for long minutes after that. "He'll tell us. He said he would. We've gotta be strong for him now, Mads. He's home, sure, but he needs us to be strong for him. Whatever happened, whatever was done to him, he's still—"
"—still Danny. I know." She sniffs, swallows. "I just—he wouldn't look at us, Jack. Not once. And he moved liked—like—like a dog, Jack. Like he expected us to—to beat him for leaving—"
"I know," he says.
Danny hadn't shed a single tear last night; only shook and flinched and said, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, over and over and over. Jack has never wanted to hurt another man in his life before now, but more than anything he wants to see Freakshow bleed for what he'd done to his boy. "Come on," he says with forced cheer. "Get your face on. I'll be out of the shower in two shakes and then we can see about making that skinny son of ours a proper breakfast, huh?"
Maddie's smile is wobbly, but it's a start.
Twenty minutes later Jack walks nervously behind her down the hall, feeling like a stranger in his own house. He lets her knock on Danny's door—a door he's opened like clockwork once a week to dust and vacuum and mop up tears he couldn't bring himself to shed anywhere else. He'd staunchly ignored it otherwise, for his family's sanity as much as his own. It still hurt to walk past every single day since Danny vanished.
"In the kitchen!" Danny calls out.
They both jump, but Maddie's the one to stutter quick laughter. Nervous syllables that strain and trip over one another until he squeezes her shoulder to make her stop.
They both jump, but Maddie's the one to stutter quick laughter. Nervous syllables that strain and trip over one another until he squeezes her shoulder to make her stop.
.They walk downstairs. He can hear the old coffee pot percolating away, smell the rich smell of a fresh brew burbling as it would any other perfectly normal day. The combination of such a habitual, ritual smell-sound eases the tension that wants to gather in his jaw. He can almost muster a smile as they enter the kitchen.
Danny's sitting at the table, in his old-usual chair nearest the refrigerator. There's an empty glass wet with condensation near his right hand, a banana peel squashed inside. In the center of the table is a strange necklace; a thick gold chain ending in a fat crimson gem. Danny's got those cheap reflective sunglasses on again, the same as last night, and his shoulders are hunched so high they ought to be stapled to his pierced ears. He looks like any sudden movement will send him bolting for then nearest exit and all Jack wants to do is hold his boy tight and tell him he's sorry he couldn't protect him from the monsters like he always promised he would.
"Morning," Danny says neutrally. "I made coffee, but I couldn't remember how you guys take it."
Maddie responds while he struggles to find a way to answer without his voice breaking. "Thank you." She squeezes his arm meaningfully, goes to the cupboard where their vast collection of mugs in and pulls two down. She glances over at Danny, uncertain, then pulls a third mug down too.
"Did you sleep well?" He asks helplessly. Danny smiles, but the faint gleam of his teeth doesn't carry anything positive to it at all.
"Well enough, sure. I forgot how soft my old mattress was though."
He's so careful with his phrasing. Jack can't help but assume the worst. Where has Danny been forced to sleep in these years since he was taken? Couches? Floors? The streets? God. He folds his hands together and puts on the broadest smile he can muster. "So! Danny! That's a nice bit of jewelry y'got there. Where'd you get it?"
"Freakshow."
Oh. Oh. Fuck.
Danny picks the necklace up, loops the chain through his fingers so the gem dangles freely. Despite a deep crack in its largest facet the gem shines with an eerie, unnatural brightness. It casts a perfect red square of light across the dining table's pitted surface, more like a sheet of tissue paper than simple light. "He used this to control the other ghosts," he says, holding it out to Jack with a thin, inscrutable smile. "Here. Put it on."
Jack balks. "Oh, Danny, no. No, I couldn't—"
"It's okay. You won't do anything to me, but it'll help me if you guys have a little..." Danny hums, searching for the right word. "...Perspective, I guess, with what it's like. Go on, Dad. Put it on."
Jack hesitates, his hand outstretched. He looks to Maddie, his compass for even the meanest of difficult decisions, but she's as inscrutable as Danny in this. She stands rigidly near the coffee pot, her painted mouth a thin, unhappy line. He'll find no guidance from her for this.
Sheer curiosity is what makes him take the necklace and slip it over his head. The gem hardly has a chance to bounce off his chest before the power of it bleeds into him. He gasps. For one awful moment, for one brilliant eternity, his visions grays and then warms over crimson. His mind empties of all rational thought, drains of all inherent self. He is—
He's only—
He'd expected—
It's not—
It's nothing like—
He couldn't have expected this.
It's electricity humming under his skin, an awareness stretching far beyond his primitive flesh, far beyond his limited human senses. He can feel the Fenton Portal boiling in its steel and rive frame down in the basement. He can feel It—aware, eager, hungry. He can feel experiments bubbling, ectoplasm thrashing in plexiglass containers. Sentient, if not intelligent. Alive in a way that defies a pulse. Electricity and light and power. He can feel the same ravenous hunger fizzling inside Danny's skinny frame, bubbling and boiling and hissing, a shaken soda bottle one cap twist away from foaming over. It's too much. It's too much.
Jack blinks, falling into himself again. He becomes himself again; human and heavy and weak. Danny's smiling at him. It's all teeth, chipped and yellowed, sharper than they are in any of the old pictures.
"Feels good, doesn't it?"
"I—" Jack swallows. He tries to remember how to breathe. Largely fails. He yanks the necklace off, practically throwing it to the table. His heart pounds. His hands shake. His voice doesn't sound anything like it ought to when he croaks, "My god. Danny, I—what—what was that?"
"Jack?" Maddie asks warily.
It.
He.
He doesn't know what to say.
He doesn't have the words to describe what happened or how it felt. He only knows that he's scared. He's terrified of what Danny brought home with him.
"I know," Danny murmurs. Calm. He's utterly, wholly calm. Jack latches onto the dry rasp of his son's voice as if it were the only lifeline afforded to him. For all he knows, it is. "I put it on once, not too long after we were all freed. Just to see how it worked. What it felt like. I was curious. I wanted to know what it felt like to be on the other side of the puppet strings."
Jack swallows. Licks his lips. "I—"
Danny ignores him. "I accidentally made one of my friends walk into a wall. I didn't mean to. Honestly, I didn't. It was just a background thought in my head. I'd gotten so sick of being stuck in bed and just wanted some fresh air, and that was enough to make her veer right into a wall." He chuckles. "Freakshow never took the damn thing off. Probably explains why he was so manic all the time."
"Danny, that—" Jack shakes his head feebly. "That was awful. He used that thing? All the time?"
"On about, mm, forty ghosts. Total, not all at once. I think the most he ever had at one time was—twenty-three? Not including me, of course."
"You said it wouldn't work on you," Maddie says as she joins them at the table. She sets a mug down for each of them before sitting down. Danny only glances at his but Jack grasps his like a lifeline with both hands. "Do you have any idea why that is?"
Danny's smile is thin and humorless. "That's not what I said. I said Dad wouldn't do anything. The necklace absolutely works on me."
Jack stares at him aghast. "What? But I could have—I might've hurt you, o-or—"
"Nah. You wouldn't've done anything I couldn't shrug off." He sniffs, then takes a slow gulp of coffee before continuing. "It's all about intent. You don't mean it to stick, it won't work."
Maddie looks at Jack wordlessly. Something in his expression must convey how shaken he is. She reaches over to squeeze his arm. It's practically Pavlovian how much her touch relaxes him. "If he didn't use this..." Her mouth purses with brief distaste, "this device on you, then what did he use?"
"Yeah, he had something special for me, all right." He slips a few fingers under his collar and pulls a fine gold chain out and over his head. A glass vial dangles from it; about three inches long and stopped with a cork. Something glitters inside, casting four red slashes of light across the table. "He used these."
Jack doesn't move, reluctant to even risk brushing his fingers against whatever-it-is and feeling that same overwhelming rush again. Maddie takes the vial from Danny's outstretched hand. Whatever's inside plinks against the glass as she turns it over with a frown. "What am I looking at here?"
"Needles," Danny says, and Jack goes cold straight through. "Don't take 'em out. They'll go straight through your gloves, trust me."
Maddie nearly drops the vial, looking stricken. There aren't a lot of conclusions one can make about mind control and needles. "Uh," Jack manages. "How... how did he...?"
"See how they're different sizes? Two long, two short? The long ones have caps too, but I dunno why. He slipped the long ones into his wrists—" They both wince but Danny continues as if he didn't notice. "—but I dunno if the placement of those matters. I didn't even know about them until after I was free. The little guys went into me the night I was taken."
Maddie holds the vial out between pinched fingers so Jack can see. The "little guys" are about the same length as sewing needles and wickedly sharp. He doesn't want to ask. He doesn't want to know the answer. But he needs to—he has to—for Danny's sake.
Maddie beats him to the punch. Her voice is forcefully detached when she asks, "Where were these inserted?"
Danny doesn't answer. He takes a deep breath, knots his fingers together and pulls them apart again. He touches his sunglasses, his mouth, then drags a hand through his hair as he laughs weakly. "Shit. I'm sorry. This is—it's harder than I thought it'd be."
"Sweetheart, it's okay. You don't have to—"
"It's funny," he interrupts. "And by 'funny,' I guess I mean it's pretty dumb. But it's been driving me nuts ever since she gave them to me."
"What has?" Jack asks at the same time Maddie asks, "Gave you what?"
"She told me they're blue, and they probably are?" He jerks one shoulder in a small, self-conscious shrug. "But she also said she picked 'em out because she thought it was a good color for me, and coming from a dead lady with a giant tarantula tattooed right on her—"
"Danny," Maddie says quietly.
He shudders, pressing the heels of his scarred hands to his temples like he wants to simply squeeze whatever he's trying to say out of his head and be done with it. "Gah. I'm sorry. I should've just told you guys last night when you were already all cried out." He yanks his sunglasses off. "Did she get the color right?"
A beat of silence falls between them. Jack blinks, confused, blinks again when Maddie's hands jump to her mouth. Her voice breaks. "Oh. Oh, Sweetie..."
"What?" Jack asks. What's wrong? Danny looks—not fine, no. He looks like the monster that stole him away in the night treated him like trash, like something nasty stuck to the bottom of his shoe. The word abuse has been running itself ragged in the back of his mind since he first got a good look at Danny's poor hands. But right now Danny just looks tired, shiny white eyeliner smeared around his eyes. He doesn't know what's upset Maddie so.
"I'm still getting used to—well. To this," Danny stammers. "It's, uh, it's the big reason why I took so long coming home. I—while I was still controlled I could—I was fine. With the needles in me, I mean. I was. I could see fine when he wanted me to. My eyes were this creepy red so I always had to wear sunglasses around humans, but that was it. It was getting them out of me that did this." He waves at his face, sitting stiffly, sitting like he wants to bolt out of the room and pretend he hasn't told them—told them what? Jack leans forward, trying to make sense of it, and finally sees what's staring him in the face.
Danny's eyes are the wrong color. Too dark. Ocean blue rather than the sky blue he'd inherited from his old man. He thinks for a moment—prays for a moment—that they're only contacts. But even though Danny's looking at Maddie, he isn't looking at her.
"Oh," Jacks says numbly. "Oh."
Danny stretches out his hand, pawing around the table, groping blindly. It hurts to watch, but Jack can only sit there and watch. He sits like the big stupid lump he is with his hands gripping his coffee mug so tightly it should by all rights shatter. Maddie sits frozen beside him, twitching her hand a little to let the vial go when Danny tugs on the chain. He slips it over his head again, hiding the vial under his shirt like a dirty secret. "Lydia—she was the one who kidnapped me, but she's the one who freed me too—she said this was the only sure way to get them out without breaking them. She didn't want to risk leaving any splinters behind. Freakshow trusted her, y'know? He never treated her like the rest of us. Never controlled her—or, well. Mostly didn't. But she could do whatever she wanted, come and go as she pleased. But she couldn't exactly burn his needles out without him knowing, obviously, so she had to do it the hard way—"
He's rambling. Talking for the sake of filling the silence because Jack and Maddie are just sitting there mute with horror. God, he's filling the silence because he can't see their faces, he can't gauge their reactions because he can't see—
"Danny," Jack croaks, but Danny jerks back, teeth clicking together.
"I'm okay," he says too quickly. "I'm—I'm adapting. And it's not like I'm tripping over ever little thing and busting my face open. Turns out being half-ghost really does have some benefits. Who knew?" He laughs. Too loudly, too forced. Jack's stomach clenches. He wants to beg Danny to stop. Stop talking, stop pretending, to just stop. "And believe me, I'd rather be blind the rest of my life than belong to Freakshow another day."
Belong. What a simple, commonplace word. Yet hearing it now, in this context, said by his son, makes him want to throw his mug at the wall in disgust. He wants to break every dish in the cupboards. He wants to squeeze that man's throat bruised and speechless and make sure he sees justice done for the—for the hell he put Danny through. He wants to hold Danny tightly and tell him there's no such things as monsters.
"Where is he."
Danny frowns. "Huh?"
"That—that man," he seethes through clenched teeth. It's taking all his self-control not to bellow. He's—he has never been so angry in his life. "That creep who—who did this to you. He—I'll make him—he's got to pay for this. Nobody can get away with treating my son like—"
"Dad."
Danny's voice is a whip crack, loud enough to leave Jack's ears ringing. Coffee spills across the table from Maddie's mug but she doesn't seem to notice. She just looks at Danny, her face wet with tears. Danny's hands are slapped flat to the table, his eyes—prosthetic, fake, blind, he's blind—glaring holes at nothing. "You can't," he says, voice tight.
"I—of course I can! Something's gotta be done about him. We can't just let him get away with—with kidnapping and enslaving a child, not to mention whatever else he did to you!"
"You can't," Danny repeats doggedly. "Because he's dead."
In short words, clinically spoken, as if he were reading about it in some dusty old history book, like it wasn't his own life—Danny tells them. Things were bad, and then they got worse. Lydia didn't like what Freakshow was doing. They fought about it and Lydia left. ("What did he do?" Maddie asks in a quavering voice, and Danny opens and shuts his mouth, then moves on without answering.) When Lydia came back she held Danny down and burned his eyes out of his face, and only then was he freed.
"I remembered," Danny says . He's sitting again, sliding his empty glass of water with the banana peel inside back and forth as he speaks. Left hand to right, right hand to left, grinding loudly across the table. Jack wants to knock it off the table. He wants to hold Danny's hands. He sits there and drinks his room temperature coffee instead. "Everything he'd made me forget finally came back to me. I was me again. I'd—I'd managed to remember a few things before that, here and there. My name. You guys and Jazz. Sam and Tucker. But it was all..."
Left hand to right. Right hand to left.
"It wasn't mine. It was like—like catching a few minutes of a TV show you've heard about but don't really know. That's all I had until Lydia freed me. Everything came back, and having that—having me—and not just a jumble of words and colors made everything else so much realer too." Left hand to right. Right hand to left. The little smile on his face is fond, nearly reverent. "Everything felt more. I can remember laying on the floor of the train car and being so aware of the wood under me and the smell of the hay and a cool breeze coming in through the open door. How much my face fucking hurt and how tired and weak I felt. I could feel my heart again, pounding in my chest and ears. It was like waking up from a dream. I remembered I was still alive. I remembered. And after that... Freakshow died after that."
"How—" escapes Maddie, and immediately looks like she regrets it. But if she hadn't Jack would've. They're both scientists and parents. They have to know everything, never mind how much it hurts to hear. Jack pries one hand off his mug to hold hers, squeezing it gently.
"I..." Left hand to right. Right hand to left. "I flew out of the train car. Chased him down. He was laughing about something, schmoozing it up with some other humans, so it was easy. I was going to—I wanted to—" Left hand to right, right hand to left. His face smooths. He sets his anger aside like so much silverware in a drawer. "I was going to tear him apart. I wish I had. But I didn't, because—because Lydia got there first. She pushed me down and—I dunno what she did. All I heard was a crunch before I passed out."
Danny keeps sliding the glass back and forth, but that seems to be all he's willing to share of—of that. Jack swallows the morbid questions stuck in his throat and asks, "Passed out?"
"Yeah. I was totally drained. That was the first time I went human since the night they took me. Good thing the others didn't bail on me as soon as—as soon as Lydia broke the necklace, otherwise I probably woulda died for real." He laughs.
Laughs.
Maddie sits hunched over the table, folded in on herself like a cloth napkin. "He—he never knew, did he?"
"Nope." Danny finally sets the glass aside, twitching when it pings against his empty mug. "He just thought I was good at mimicking humans."
This time, Jack doesn't lag behind. He knows exactly what Maddie's trying to ask, why the fear in face has drawn such deep lines. He looks at his boy, with his too-sharp cheekbones and the blueberry veins painted down his neck. His nose, broken so badly its healed crooked and hooked. Danny's teeth seem too big for his gaunt face, chipped and stained. His fingers are a gnarled mess, calluses and scar tissue and old breaks never set right. He's so thin. He's so young.
"Tell me they took you to a hospital," Jack begs.
"Nope. I should've, sure, but that wasn't really an option. But the others were there for me, took care of me 'til I could get around on my own again. I think they did pretty good, don't you?"
"But—" Maddie begins, but stops when Danny bares his teeth in a flash of irritation.
"What was I supposed to do? Drag myself to the nearest ER with eyes dribbling out of my face? Was I supposed to tell the nice doctors what had happened to me and not expect to get locked up? Was I supposed to tell the cops or social services or whoever that I'm a milk carton kid that'd been forced to join the circus, but oh yeah! I'm also part of a troupe of feral ghosts that've been terrorizing suckers out of their money for years! And oh, hey doc, don't worry about those crazy readings your equipment's giving you. It's not broken, I'm just a freak!"
He's getting louder, nearly shouting now as he slaps his hand to the table and barks out hard laughter. "Ha ha! And let's not forget I've spent the last three years committing all kinds of crimes across two, maybe three continents. Robbing suckers is just scratching the surface of what he made me do, and if you think that bastard was the first human I—"
Danny clamps his mouth shut, stepping away from the table so quickly his chair screeches against the tile floor. He breathes out, and out, and out. "I didn't have a choice," he says, and his face immediately twists. He rakes his hands through his hair. "I'm—I need some air."
Jack stretches out his hand—stupid thing to do, it's not like he can see it. "Danny, wait—"
But Danny bolts, not for the doorway but straight up. He kicks off the floor and vanishes through the ceiling in a hard buzz of light. Jack doesn't move for the doorway; he lunges. He can catch Danny before he reaches the roof if he's quick—
"Don't."
He whirls to look at Maddie. "But—!"
She stands quietly, gathering the mugs and Danny's glass. "We can't—we shouldn't push him. We don't know what he's been through."
"He's told us enough that I know we need to be there for him now! He needs to know we can help—"
"We can't." She goes to the sink, busies her hands with dish soap and a sponge as she waits for the water to warm. "He's terrified, Jack. Can't you see that? He's so afraid that we'll—I don't know. That we'll hate him if he tells us too much. I don't want to think about what he's been through. I know anything I might imagine won't come close to the truth. I want to hold him and tell him everything's going to be okay, but it won't be. It can't be. We weren't there for him when he needed us, and—god, Jack. He didn't even seem sorry that this Lydia ghost killed that man—"
"And why should he?!" Jack demands hotly. But the ferocity thrumming through him drains away. He slumps in the doorframe, his face crumpling. "Why should he? Our boy. Our Danny."
Maddie abandons the sink to slip into his arms, resting her forehead to his chest. He holds her tightly and shakes.
"Our boy," he says. "Our Danny."
"I know."
"He's blind, Mads."
"I know."
"He's so... I barely recognize him. It's him—I know it's him, but it's like..."
Words have never been his strong suit, but Maddie understands. Of course she does. She knows him better than he knows himself. Their boy. Their son. Their little hero, saving the day and sleeping through class, and they never really knew what a gift he was until it was too late to tell him so.
"It's like he died," she whispers.
"Yeah." Jack sniffs thickly. "It's like Danny really did die, and now his ghost is trying to come home."
They'd talk about this, many times before. Long hours in an empty house, curled up together on the floor of Danny's bedroom. Cradling old photographs, a shirt that still held a faint smell of him, a library book he never had a chance to return. They're scientists, trailblazers in their field. They had to talk about this. How each day without answers meant percentages ticking up and down in all the wrong directions. There's a hole punched through reality in their basement that leaks phantasms no matter their efforts to better secure it. They knew. They'd talked about this.
Imagining it never got any easier.
"But he isn't dead," Maddie says. "That's not what happened. It's him. Danny's home and alive. He's scared and he's been hurt—" She swallows. "He's been hurt so much. But we can't overwhelm him. We have to wait until he's ready to be here with us again. Until he's ready to accept our help. Until then we—we just have to remind him he's safe now."
What did he do to deserve a woman so wonderful? He presses a kiss to her temple. "You're right. Always are, but don't let that go to your head."
She laughs weakly, pulling away. "Weren't you saying something about breakfast earlier?"
