Maddie had a hard time sleeping after Jack had passed. Their bed felt empty with him gone. She had gotten used to the warmth his hulking frame gave off in their almost two decades of marriage. Hell, she had even gotten used to his monstrous snores that somehow always managed to slip through the special noise-cancelling earplugs she had made. A ghost of a smile touched her face as she thought of how she always used to joke with him about how he snored loud enough to wake the dead. He had always replied that it was good for business.
In her sleeplessness, she had gone down to the kitchen to make a warm cup of tea—she wasn't avoiding their vacant room, not at all.
Maddie had poured the tea into her favorite metal tumbler and sat down at the table and just watched the steam with a far-off gaze. She was zoned out, trying to forget the pain of losing her spouse and the worry over losing her children in a very different but all too real way. Danny had started slipping away long before Jack's death, and before either of them realized. The heart attack had just driven the wedge further between them. And with Jasmine going off to college soon, she feared losing touch with both her children. Parenting seemed so much harder with him gone, everything really. He might have been a bit too loud and not necessarily the sharpest tool in the shed, but his energy and enthusiasm could be matched by none. His exuberance in everything—hunting, inventing, parenting—was amazing, and a comforting presence that she dearly missed, even if he could be over the top. She was always the realist—bordering on cynicism—so she relied on him for positivity in the home.
A noise from downstairs jarred her out of her thoughts. (She really hadn't been doing a good job of relaxing anyway.)
That's odd. Maddie thought. That sounded as if it came from the lab, but there shouldn't be anybody down there this time of night.
Slight concern creased her brow as she got up, tumbler in hand, and headed towards the lab. She hesitated at the top of the stairs. She could hardly bring herself to go down there since Jack died, they had spent so much time down there over the years that everything down there seemed a grim reminder of her loss. Maddie took a deep breath and steeled herself, she was Amity's foremost ghost hunter, she couldn't be scared of going into her own basement.
She tightened her grip on the tumbler and began the descent. As she neared the door and heard voices, she slowed her step so as to not be heard. Maddie creeped down the last bit of stairs and peered around the corner before walking silently into the room. It took her a moment to locate the beings causing the disturbance.
It was hard to see in the dim lighting cast by the portal, but she quickly began to make out two glowing figures. The first was the all too familiar "hero" (as if a ghost could be anything other than a malicious ectoplasmic entity) wrapped in a classic Fenton anti-ghost weapon. Her eyes naturally followed the wires to the one brandishing the weapon, the second glowing figure.
Once her eyes alighted on the figure, her jaw started to drop as her violet eyes opened as wide as possible. Her hands went slack, the tumbler falling to the concrete floor with a resounding clang that caused both figures to focus on her.
"Jack?" she said, so quietly she wasn't even sure if she had said it aloud or not.
"Maddie!" The orange jumpsuit clad figure yelled excitedly, "I caught the ghost kid!"
It looked like him, sounded like him, acted like him. Maddie oh so wanted it to be him, but how? How could this man possibly be her husband whom she had buried in the ground not too long ago.
Danny Phantom watched in horror as Maddie Fenton stared at her husband and her mind went through the same hoops that his had not moments before. He watched as her eyes dilated and her skin paled; he could see her chest start to rise and fall more rapidly to match her racing heartbeat. He needed to do something now.
Maddie knew she was going into shock. Knew she needed to calm herself down, but she just… couldn't.
"Mads?" Jack asked, his smile deflated some.
Maddie's eyes focused on him again as she tried to ground herself.
"Jack?" she said again.
"I caught him Mads!" he explained, brandishing the handle of his Jack o' Nine Tails.
Phantom took their momentary distraction as an opportunity. He managed to wriggle his body out of the grasp of the weapon and flew over to grab Jack.
This seemed to snap Maddie's mind back to her surroundings and she yelled, "Get your hands off my husband you ectoplasmic malcontent!"
She started to rush forward but Phantom was too fast. He hauled Jack's large frame through the air and into the portal before Maddie could do any more than graze his boot. She stopped short of the portal—she didn't know if it was safe for humans after all. Instead of staring at the swirling emerald gate that swallowed her husband and local ghostly menace, she instead gawked at her hand that had brushed against her husband's boot.
"He was real," she murmured, before she finally allowed the tears to spill from her eyes.
Sorry, I meant to put this out yesterday, but I didn't like how I ended the chapter so I wrote the last little bit. I realized that this story has taken place mostly in people's heads and I will try to get away from that next chapter, but the prompt does promise introspection so there's no getting out of that completely in this story.
It'll be a few days before the next chapter is out (before the end of this week at the latest). Thank you to everyone who has read, reviewed, and followed/favorited! It really does mean a lot to me.