It was something that Maddie had only ever dreamed of in the past.
Danny sat beside her at the steel laboratory bench, actually helping the woman to build a ghost hunting weapon.
Only instead of using the soldering iron, the tip of her son's bare finger was lit with a miniature ectoblast. Its unnatural light was reflected in his green eyes, throwing the ice-coated burns on his face into sharp relief.
After years of pleading and threatening, the teen was finally helping her in the lab. Even better, he was obviously interested, even suggesting his own improvements and obviously enjoying himself.
He was talking as he worked, explaining in detail the different heat intensities of ectoblasts and how to achieve these extreme levels. Although it was the language of ghosts that rolled off his tongue, Maddie understood every single word, and had even contributed to the conversation in that same dialect.
Now she just listened, staring at the tiny spark of compressed energy that danced blue at the tip of her boy's finger. The miniature blast danced like a flame, but with a much more viscous appearance, and the huntress couldn't take her eyes off it. "… and blue energy, like the one I'm using now, is the most stable type of ectoenergy, but it's also the weakest. Still, it's strong enough to be used for this sort of stuff… Mum, are you listening to me?"
Blinking to regain focus, Maddie smiled at her son. "Of course I am, Sweetie. But I don't know why you're telling me all of this right now, when we have plenty of time for lessons later. There are far more important things to talk about."
Like the fact that this was her fault.
Daniel Fenton was condemned to a lonely eternity of being one of the only living creatures with ghost powers all because Maddie hadn't bothered to lock the lab.
From the way her expression fell, Danny made a pretty good guess as to what his mother was thinking.
"It's not your fault," he insisted, "and we're not getting into this again. It's a good thing that I'm a halfa, or a whole lot of people would be dead."
"But you're not happy, are you?"
Danny blew white strands out of his eyes. "I'm happier than I'd be if a lot of people I care about had died from ghost attacks… and bank robbers." The last one was accompanied by a smirk.
The lump in her throat was suffocating in its enormity. "Would you give it up if you had the chance?"
Letting the light on his finger wink out of existence, Danny shook his head. "I have before, but that was years ago. I used to want to be human, but now I think I've forgotten what that even feels like. I can't imagine having to walk down the hall to the toilet instead of teleporting, and don't even get me started on how upsetting it'd be to lose my flight or intangibility.
"Besides, my powers help me to save a lot of people. Being half ghost made me who I am, and they're now as much a part of me as my love of stars or my best friends. So, no, I won't give my powers up, and I don't want you to try to convince me to."
Taking the soldered wires that he held out, Maddie felt a burst of pride at her son's words. "I was just checking," she reassured him.
"Good," the boy huffed, repositioning in its brace the metal cylinder that would serve as a new Fenton Thermos.
Maddie placed the wires in their correct position before directing her son to solder them in place. As Danny's finger lit up again, she watched the way that little blue light danced with life; technically dead, but so full of potential and the promise of magnificent results if utilised in the correct way by someone skilled in its wielding.
"Did it take you long to learn that?"
Danny snorted, his free hand lighting up with another blue spark. This one was more of a shard than a flame, and was sharp enough to cut an extra chunk of solder free from its wire. "Let's just say that Vlad's been aching to teach me stuff from the get-go, and every now and then he'll let stuff slip when we fight because he'll be so frustrated that I'm not at the same level as he is. Our relationship improved a lot over the past year or so, and I'd teach him stuff about cryokinesis and cores in general while he gave me advice on practically every other power."
"Things seemed pretty bad upstairs."
"Mhm," Danny mumbled, chewing on his lower lip as he used tongs to carefully place the new bit of solder. "Some of the only things I won't let him near are you and Dad, so he's been pretty pissed at me since he figured out you were a halfa a few days ago."
Maddie dipped her gloved fingers into the drawer beside her, producing a screw and its corresponding screwdriver. "He's overreacting a little bit," she said, readying the case of ectobatteries. These were a new invention, and were powered by ambient ectoenergy, which was found everywhere in both the human and ghost realms. No more being left defenceless in a fight thanks to sloppy weapons maintenance!
The patent also brought in quite a nice profit for the inventors, as did several other Fenton innovations. Most of which had only been created recently, with Phantom's help.
If she thought hard enough, he had been there for much longer than the past few months of Maddie's halfa status. Always looking out for them, both in the lab and in the field, right back to that first encounter with the hospitality ghost who had decided to haunt Casper High's cafeteria.
The guilt that had been threatening to overwhelm Maddie since Danny's altercation with Vlad began to seep away. With its retreat, the light of a promising future slipped into the woman's thoughts. It kept to the edge at first, like a shy child in the playground on their first day of school. Hoping, as it stood on tiptoes and tried to not look to apprehensive, that it would be invited in and given a permanent place.
Maddie was only too happy to embrace this light.
Danny took his hands away from the Thermos that they were building, allowing his mother to screw the battery pack into its socket.
He blew on cherry-red hands that were still badly blistered, and Maddie sighed as frost crept from the tips of his fingers up his arms, disappearing beneath black hazmat that had been pushed up to his elbows.
Things were going to be better now. There were no more lies, no more secrets. All that was left was a future relationship that she couldn't wait to build. Where Danny had been distant and slipping ever further away, he now sat right next to her. Ghost powers on either end really weren't a problem when there was a badly damaged mother-son relationship to repair.
Only one thought stopped Maddie's thoughts before they could be fully realised.
The door upstairs slammed, followed by the familiar, heavy stomping of a large man in black and orange.
"Is there anything left from dinner?" Jack bellowed from the kitchen, his magnificent voice easily heard through the lab's heavy metal door.
"Yeah," Danny shouted, "there's half a plate of pasta!"
"Thanks, Phantom!"
A moment later, the fridge door dimly slammed from somewhere above them.
Where this domestic exchange, once so alien but now so normal for the halfa and his hunter, had barely penetrated Maddie's troubled mind, that abrupt sound jolted her into new levels of anxiety.
Jack had to know.
"Danny…"
"Mmm?"
"There's something you need to do as soon as you think you can."
Jack needed to know the truth, to hear it from his son's mouth. Everything hinged upon the Fenton patriarch's reception of this news.
Another thought weaselled its way into Maddie's mind, and she almost crumbled.
On top of everything else, how was she going to cope with what she had done to Vlad?