Maddie couldn't believe it. She didn't want to believe it. There were so many things she'd rather do- scream, cry, rip her hair out, throw up. Wind time back five years. Wind time back twenty-seven years. Anything to get her away from having an answer, having the answer.
The answer to it all.
Who Phantom was.
Not who he had been, but who he was, who he is. Right now, who he was now and who he'd been all this time, right under Maddie's nose, right next to her deaf ears, right in front of her eyes that were too blind, too proud to see it.
Too blind to see her own son.
The worst thing was that he hadn't told her. No, that wasn't the worst. The worst, really the worst, was that she herself had created a home where her son, her own child, could not come forward and tell her about what had happened. The worst thing was that, as Maddie looked back on all the memories her distressed mind could supply, there was no way or form even her subconscious could try to place the blame on anyone else but her and Jack.
She'd been mad at Phantom before, when the answers would not come when she wanted them to, but now that they came when she desperately wanted them not to, she could see no fault in him. How could she?
He had died. That was the worst part. No matter how horrible Maddie felt about everything else, that was the worst, truly the worst. Trust might be regained. Trauma might be healed. But death? Death was permanent.
True, an argument could be made that the mere existence of ghosts disproved the permanence of death, but that was not how Maddie saw it. No matter what her stance on ghosts was, or had been, they'd always been… dead. They might be imprints left behind of living things, they might appear to be alive to a casual observer, but they were dead. Might not always have been, but always would be.
There was no coming back from death.
Her son was dead. Always would be.
But…
Maddie clutched the empty glass in her hands tightly, as if if she did not squeeze it hard enough she herself would shatter like glass. The house around her was quiet, her daughter and husband still asleep in their beds.
She didn't think Danny was. She didn't know where he was. If she didn't check, she could lie to herself that he was sleeping soundly in his bed, safe under faded glow-in-the-dark stars, safe under his covers.
Maddie was certain he was out there, somewhere. Flying. Dead.
She tried to take a sip from her glass, but found it empty against her lips. She'd drank it all, already. She couldn't muster the energy to travel to the sink and back for more. Besides, at this point water didn't really cut it. She yearned for something stronger, but they had nothing in the house but denatured ethanol for cleaning the lab, and no matter what else Maddie might be, she wasn't suicidal.
She sat there, staring unseeing into the glass in her trembling hands, as the early morning light filtering through the blinds changed into warmer, yellower mid-morning light.
He's dead because of you, her mind seemed to scream at her. He's dead and you hunted him like a passenger pigeon.
—
Maddie sat there, blankly staring at nothing and trying not to think, until a little bump from the door startled her out of her trance and her head snapped up. The house was still quiet, little particles of dust dancing like fireflies in the narrow rays of light cast by the windows. When was the last time anyone had cleaned the house?
The bump sounded again, followed by a rattling of the doorknob. Maddie jolted up from her seat and strode silently but stiffly into the living room and entrance hall. She stood there and watched as the knob was jiggled again, but did not open. Silence and stillness for a few seconds, before a translucent hand appeared through the door. Maddie jolted and dropped to a defensive pose on instinct, hand reaching for her hip where it found no weapon. The translucent hand reached for the lock, and opened it from the inside before retracting itself back outside. The knob turned again, and this time the door opened.
Sunlight streamed into the dim room, eclipsed by the body in the doorway, and Maddie stared right into the startled eyes of her son.
"Hi, mom", Danny said, lifting his hand off the doorknob and letting it hang at his side.
"Danny", Maddie said with a wavering voice. She could only imagine how haunted her face looked after the sleepless night. "Was it- is it you?" she managed weakly. "Are you him?"
Danny's tense shoulders relaxed slowly, and he turned to close the still-open door behind him. Only after the door was closed again did he turn back to face his mother, an oddly serene look on his face. "It's me."
"And you're-"
"Yes."
Maddie searched Danny's face, eyes darting from feature to feature, searching for a lie, searching for any twinkle in her son's eyes that would mean he was only joking, but the only thing she found was more connections. The longer she searched, the clearer the completed picture became, the easier she could see Phantom superimposed over the human features. She could feel the final notes in her symphony of despair, and with the serious, almost melancholic look in Danny's eyes, the full reality was finally allowed to settle on her shoulders.
Dead.
For five years.
And she had never noticed.
"When-" she stammered. "How-" Tears welled up in her eyes, pooled on her lashes and overflowed, tracing glimmering streaks down her cheeks. The last question she didn't manage to say still seemed to ring in the air.
Why? Why him? Why him, her own son, of all people? Why, oh why did it have to be him?
Danny had a sad smile when he lifted his hand to wipe a tear off of Maddie's face, and she clutched it against her cheek like a lifeline. It was not warm, her son always had cold hands, but it was not cold like the dead. There was warmth underneath, warmth that simply did not quite extend to the thin fingertips.
"I'm sure you know this by now", Danny said softly, "but the on button was on the inside of the portal."
Maddie's breath hitched. She knew that, now. They had eventually fixed that, during extensive portal maintenance about three years ago. But hearing it from Danny? Her mind was sent racing, connections made like wires on a circuit board. That's why they'd had initial trouble starting up the portal. That's why it had suddenly started working- their explanation at the time was that it had needed to warm up, and they'd made sure to always preheat it before use. That's when Danny had… when he had…
She couldn't imagine what it was like. She'd seen it in small scale, with the cockroach, she knew the power output, but she could not even try to comprehend what it must have been like. But he had gone through it, because of them. Because of their mistake. Because they put a button in the wrong place.
"Oh, Danny", Maddie said and her voice broke. She opened her arms, not expecting Danny to come but she had to try, and to her surprise he came. Took a step forward and into his mother's open if shaking arms, and hugged her tight like no tomorrow.
Maddie couldn't help it; she cried into Danny's shoulder, and he squeezed her back with strong and steady arms. She could feel his slow and steady heartbeat against her chest.
Alive.
Dead.
Alive.
Dead.
Alive.
AN: I will be cross-posting this series to AO3 soon, now that this fic is complete. If I end up writing more for this particular series, I will post it here too, but otherwise you can find me on AO3 as the user le_chat_noir.