A/N: Happy holidays to all who are celebrating this time of year.


Jazz hadn't had much cause to use the Ops Centre before, but she knew the basics, the instructions couldn't be clearer, and the Auto-Jack feature meant she could put it in jet mode and not have to worry about properly flying anything.

All she really had to do was input the destination and wait.

Waiting was the hard part.

Talking to Sam and Tucker didn't help much. Tucker was still on his way to the Far Frozen by the time Sam declared that her search of Skulker's island had officially turned up nothing. Or, at least, nothing useful or particularly unexpected. There were no signs of Jack or of Vlad's nefarious plans in action. If Danny could make use of anything else that Sam had found, that was all well and good, but that was also very much a later thing, and—

Breathe, Jazz reminded herself. She wasn't making a mistake. She could help.

The Ops Centre flew faster than Air Grits typically did, in part because a large portion of their business model depended upon the fact that you jumped out over your destination. They would have to slow down above prospective destinations, maybe circle a few times if their passenger was a first-timer, but they wouldn't be stopping. She just needed to get there as quickly as she could and then find a place to land that hopefully wouldn't result in crashing in a field.

Still, with Auto-Jack dealing with all the important details like making sure they didn't crash into anything else in the air, Jazz had plenty of time to arm herself.

Specter Deflector still around her waist—check. Not getting overshadowed by Vlad when she was trying to help was going to be a major one.

A wrist ray on each wrist, the newer, sleeker model on her right. Bazooka strapped to her back. Jack-o'-Nine-Tails on her left hip, ecto-gun on her right, utility stick at the small of her back. A lipstick tucked into each sock. She loved the Fenton Peeler, but even she wasn't keen on turning that on Vlad. She still could've gone at him with the Fenton Anti-Creep Stick—that would have been satisfying—but she'd do better with some weaponry that had a better range than that. She planned to take out a couple of thermoses, too, in the hope that he'd be distracted enough to stay in ghost mode when he was too weakened to withstand their pull, but she didn't like their odds on that one.

Plasmius wasn't the Box Ghost.

Catching him in a thermos wouldn't be any more impossible than catching Danny in a thermos, but it was unlikely if he was aware of the possibility and could take steps to avoid it.

Since she'd made sure his secret about being Plasmius wasn't a secret anymore, he wouldn't even need to avoid transforming one way or the other. She sincerely doubted he'd care what Aunt Alicia thought, and if Alicia had been taking care of Danny and Danielle, she would have made it known around town that she didn't want unexpected visitors right now. They wouldn't have to worry about anyone walking in on them.

Well.

Vlad wouldn't know that, but Danny would.

Vlad would probably guess it once Danny fought without caring about his secret, though.

"Auto-Jack?" Jazz called, grateful one of her dad's latest tweaks to the Ops Centre involved the voice command. "How much longer until we reach our destination?"

She and Danny hadn't often had cause to fulfill the whiny child stereotype of going are we there yet? on every car trip ever, but that was mostly because she and Danny had been strapped into the RV and hanging on for dear life whenever Jack was behind the wheel. Encouraging him to go faster had never been necessary. She'd actually made a pact with Danny once that they wouldn't ask about when they might get there, as doing so on the previous trip had resulted in no fewer than eight tickets—all various combinations of speeding, distracted driving, and dangerous driving—and them missing the drive-in movie that had been half the point of the trip.

It had been somewhere rumoured to be a haunted drive-in the next state over. Going early and actually seeing a movie at a working drive-in had been her idea, and Danny had cheerfully backed her up. They'd worn their parents down relatively easily. And then they'd missed the movie, and with it, any food that they might have purchased. Emergency rations only tasted so good when you'd been expecting popcorn.

They'd been up all night looking for ghosts that had never shown up.

Or rather, Jack and Maddie had been up all night; Jazz had taken her little brother back to the RV and they'd camped out with their sleeping bags and tried to ignore their still-growling stomachs.

Fun times.

She'd trade so much to have that back right now, but no ghost would take that deal. By this point, having Jack back where she could hug him was a lot more dangerous than having him lost in the ether that was the Ghost Zone. He would not be amused by what had happened. Nothing focused him like threats to his family, and being taken away from them was still very much a threat to his family.

Vlad had to know where Jack was. He had to. And once she caught up to him again, Danny could hold him down while she got the truth out of him.

"We are ten minutes out of Spittoon, Arkansas!" Auto-Jack chirped. "Time to eat your last pieces of fudge and prepare for landing!"

A lifetime could happen in ten minutes.

"Please don't let me be too late," Jazz murmured as she got up and buckled in so she didn't pull her hair out in the meantime. "Please."


There was a heartbeat of nothingness as Maddie's body moved under another's control through barriers that should have kept her in place.

She felt a burst of pain from a kick to the ribs and a corresponding gasp that wasn't hers, for all that it was startled out of her lungs.

Held lightning, crackling but not hot, sparked green and tingled in the palm of her hand before she released it, though pain seared her left arm when she didn't dodge the return fire quickly enough.

That wouldn't be enough to slow her down.

It never had been.

There was a rush of satisfaction in avoiding one projectile and the next and then giving as good as she got, but she was breathing faster than she should be this early in a fight.

She was tiring.

Boasting and pretending and masks could only take her so far, even now.

One instinct had her flinching away and raising her arms to protect her face before another instinct could kick in, and she felt the swift sting and lingering pain of lodged glass slivers in her flesh as the lamp collided with her forearms and shattered, some of the smaller pieces pricking clean through the thin cotton of her plaid shirt. What hadn't already fallen dropped through her a second later—a second too late to avoid injury in the first place.

She snarled, ran, leapt, and flew, reaching to grab a mundane weapon of her own. Something hit her back before she could, knocking her forward and into the window with enough force that it seemed to rattle her teeth, and she had to phase through metal and cloth alike rather than waste precious time getting untangled. Still, she surged upwards, this time successfully closing her fingers around metal—only to find herself struggling with the unexpectedly unwieldy weight of the curtain rod in her hands as she pulled it free of its brackets.

There was the briefest second of panic, of realization that this shouldn't be this hard, that none of this should be this hard, that she wasn't recovered enough for this despite everything—followed swiftly by the grim determination that success would be had anyway because stopping before that point would mean giving up too much.

Before she could further regret her choice in weapon, she swung.

Halfway through, her eyes caught on a glint of glass in the sudden sunlight, not entirely shielded by the practiced hand which held it, and fear froze her muscles in place as she remembered two nights ago in the lab. Her swing continued but didn't have the force it should have, and it turned out that didn't matter as it didn't connect at all, passing through what had been solid flesh seconds ago.

She took a shuddering breath and forced the thoughts away, burying them as she'd buried everything else she'd gone through.

One hand grasped fabric and pulled, granting her the dubious cover of a thrown curtain, billowing and—just for a split second—blinding.

Focus.

For the semblance of a plan that it was, it was simple: a hop, a skip, a jump, a trick.

Still, a sickening shift made her stomach lurch, and she had to stop by the bed as the world tilted.

Too much, too fast.

Some mistakes weren't mistakes—some mistakes were intentional—but that one…wasn't. Not entirely.

Careful.

The needle she'd held was torn painfully from her fingers, and she had the distant thought that that was deliberate, that it could have been lifted effortlessly.

She had to keep going or this would never work. The next step—

A jumble of words. A plea. A distraction.

Even knowing it would be coming, the sting of the needle in her right arm made her flinch.

It didn't make her falter.

She was too practiced for that.

Her other hand reached for and found the correct pocket, pulling out another needle unnoticed.

She could feel the effects of the injection already. She knew what was expected—fatigue, incoherence, deterioration, and distortion—but instead there was a burst of strength, a second wind, the buzz of barely-contained energy beneath her skin.

There was also another part of her that recoiled, rejected, and tried to expel.

That part had her doubling over as a sharp pain hit, tracing the clean lines of the scalpel and trying to stitch together what wasn't torn apart in this body, and she didn't try to stop the almost instinctual reaction of gagging as her body tried every way it could to rid itself of the foreign substance.

Let them see what they expect.

It was all part of the plan, wasn't it?

Mostly.

Enough.

Enough that she could follow through on that with a cry, a whimper, a promise, a threat.

The response was the one she'd predicted: a laugh, a smirk, a scoff—

Realization flickered across horrifically familiar features as she found the strength to move, to push down on the plunger of the pilfered needle, neatly phased through a HAZMAT suit and pants (neither of which were treated against such intangibility) and into the muscle beneath. It took concentration, precision, and power.

It took enough that she couldn't fight back as effectively as she might have in other circumstances. Even though she'd expected the struggle, the anger and the attack that followed, fingernails still raked her face. She didn't need to look into the mirror above the dresser to know that four bloody lines scored her cheek.

Weariness spread through her; she was still so tired, even more so with the rush of energy fading and queasiness setting in to take its place.

She stumbled as she got to her feet and lurched for the closet, unused to limbs this long and unable to compensate with flight any longer.

I can do this.

Her fingers curled around worn leather, but it took three tries to disentangle the belt from its hook.

It took longer to drag Madeline's dead weight up and onto the bed, something that should have been child's play, and she couldn't—

She couldn't—

She couldn't keep holding on.

She didn't have to, either.


When Maddie came back to herself, Madeline lay unconscious on the bed with a needle jammed into her thigh. Danielle sat beside her, pulling Madeline's wrists behind her back so they could be bound with one of Alicia's belts. Maddie took a step to the side, stumbled as her vision swam, and settled onto the foot of the bed before she collapsed onto the floor.

Speaking of, the floor had more scorch marks than it had earlier. Same with the ceiling and walls, now that she looked. Both curtains had been on the curtain rod, too, and that curtain rod hadn't been in the middle of the floor beside the broken pieces of the lamp that had once resided on the bedside table. Not to mention, the clothes had been in the laundry hamper, and it certainly hadn't been dented like someone had tried to dropkick it across the room.

"What happened?"

Things were…fuzzy.

That wasn't only the after-effects of being overshadowed. That was a large part of it, no doubt, but no one Maddie had ever interviewed after the fact had mentioned a pounding headache or their stomach threatening to reintroduce them to their lunch. She reached one hand up to feel her head and winced as her fingers ghosted over tender and torn flesh.

She wasn't in immediate danger.

This would pass.

She'd be fine.

Besides, she wasn't so incoherent that she couldn't put some of the pieces together. A ghost could still use basic abilities when overshadowing someone, so Danielle could have gotten her away from Madeline with intangibility. The scorch marks meant ectoblasts—something Maddie hadn't realized ghosts could use in a human body—and no small number of them, unless Madeline had had an ecto-gun. If her HAZMAT suit was stolen from them and not elsewhere, it was hardly an impossibility.

"You're going to be happier if I don't answer that," Danielle said without looking up from her task.

Maddie wasn't sure that was the case.

Memories from the time people were overshadowed could come back, but sometimes they never manifested as anything more than dreams. Right now, she was left with impressions that might not even be accurate, might be nothing more than Danielle's intentions at the time, intentions she hadn't been able to—or hadn't needed to—carry out. At best, Maddie could expect a hazy recollection of the fight like she was trying to recall something that had happened in her childhood that she knew better from the stories others told than what she remembered personally.

Unless she was wrong about that.

She'd been wrong about so much else.

As it was, she wasn't sure if the aches she felt were new or if they were leftover from the fight she remembered having.

One hand rose unbidden to press against her chest, but she couldn't feel any injuries; however much it hurt, however much it felt like someone had sliced deeply into her flesh, it seemed to be nothing more than phantom pains.

"Long story short, I got her with whatever she was threatening to use on you. Looks like it's something that knocks you out. I don't think it's some fast-acting poison. That's never been Vlad's style."

Maddie swallowed and her hand rose higher to touch the scratch on her neck. Danielle was right: it could have been worse than a sedative. She knew that. Danielle had been facing far worse than a sedative, and if Madeline had really given her one dose of something that would destabilize her before Maddie had had a chance to stop her…. "May I ask how you did that? When I saw you earlier, you were in no state—"

"That was earlier," Danielle said, finally looking up. "Then she gave me a shot of Ecto-Dejecto. Two, if you count the one you got."

Maddie blinked.

They hadn't tested Ecto-Dejecto on humans. It shouldn't be harmful to anything except ectoplasmic entities—it certainly wasn't designed to be harmful to humans—but it didn't exactly do what it was designed to do.

In Maddie's case, it might—at a stretch—explain the nausea if she hadn't taken a hit to the head she couldn't remember for one reason or another. If nothing else, she could have enough traces of ecto-contaminants in her system that she could feel it acting on them.

As for Danielle….

Ecto-Dejecto, in its alpha version that did the opposite of what it should, would be an effective counter to whatever remained of the suppressants in Danielle's system from when Maddie had captured her. She and Jack had even taken to using it on their test subjects whenever they feared they might be pushed to the point of destabilization if they weren't strengthened. So why would Madeline—?

"I'm assuming she didn't know that's what it was," added Danielle, no doubt reading the look on Maddie's face. When would she have gotten so adept at reading her? Did Danny share enough of her expressions that Danielle didn't have any trouble interpreting Maddie's? Was Danielle simply particularly skilled at that? Had…had Vlad trained her, or someone like him?

Or did she have practice reading Maddie's expressions from the time she'd spent with those like Madeline? Or…or with that Maddie program Jazz had mentioned?

"I mean, if she did, she didn't know what it really does. She obviously thought it was something that was going to destabilize me. I should have been melting into goo every time I tried using my powers, and I definitely couldn't have pulled off overshadowing you for longer than two seconds. But I switched out Vlad's stock in every lab of his I'd found. It's always the first thing I do when I get back to town. Apparently, he hasn't figured that out yet. Or started buying a different brand of lab equipment."

Maddie frowned. "Exactly where did you get your hands on Ecto-Dejecto?"

"I know the formula. It wasn't hard to get. I mean, you guys have your copy, Vlad has his copy of your copy, and Danny wasn't keen on me going anywhere without me having my own copy in case the effect didn't last, so…."

"That doesn't mean you can make it!" Even if she had the knowledge and skills to do so, she'd need a lab. She'd need—

"I can't, no, but I've got friends."

Maddie opened her mouth.

"That's as much as you need to know about them."

Well.

She supposed she shouldn't be surprised.

"And this—" Danielle's voice caught. "This doesn't make us even. I don't know if you were thinking that, but if you were, it doesn't."

"I wasn't." Overshadowing someone was a terrible thing. Being completely at a ghost's mercy like that….

Maddie wasn't unaware of the irony, though.

She also wasn't unaware of the fact that Danielle hadn't, as far as Maddie could tell, taken advantage while in the position of power.

Really, compared to what Maddie had done when she'd— This hardly held a candle to that in these circumstances, Here, it had been done to help her and, from what she could tell, had lasted no longer than necessary.

That hadn't been the case when she'd had Danielle on her table.

"But thank you. You didn't have to do what you did. You should have left."

"If I'd left, you'd be the unconscious one, not her. She didn't really use her powers the first time she fought you, so she was just playing with her food. Vlad makes the same mistake." Danielle blew out a breath and sat back, curling into the pillows that were somehow still at the head of the bed. "Look, I saved you because it was the right thing to do. For both of you. You don't deserve to be replaced by someone playing at being you. And Madeline deserves to be her own person, if she can bring herself to accept that. The Ghost Writer will be able to help with that, and he'd be glad for something relatively easy to count towards the community service part of his sentence."

"Community service?"

"Ghosts might be dead, but some of them were people once. It's not like laws are a foreign concept."

Huh, maybe there really was a ghost jail.

No. Wait. That wasn't the most worrying thing Danielle had said. "What did you mean by powers?"

Danielle stared at her, green eyes wide in obvious surprise. "You still don't get it? Madeline's like us. Me and Danny and Vlad. I don't know if Vlad's technology works properly on a clone that doesn't have ghost powers. I mean, for a while, it didn't work properly anyway, but there needs to be a certain amount of ectoplasm in the target system for stuff to take the way he wants it to."

Ah.

Madeline hadn't needed an ecto-gun to fight back, had she? And not just because one of them had pulled down the curtain rod to have a makeshift weapon (a terrible one, in Maddie's opinion; even the tangling abilities of the curtain wouldn't do anything against a ghost) or started throwing anything that was small enough across the room.

She's not a carbon copy of you. She's a variation.

A variation. An improvement, at least by Madeline's standards.

Danielle was right; Maddie should have put that together herself.

Still, if Madeline had powers, how had Danielle managed to get the upper hand on her? Why hadn't Madeline seen the needle until it was too late? Invisibility? Distraction, from whatever Danielle had been saying or doing? Or had something happened with Vlad…?

No, Danielle would've said that immediately. That would've meant the others needed help. Maddie would be the one tying up her clone or sent running to do something more useful than sitting on the end of the bed with her thoughts going a mile a minute—

She had to focus.

Maddie swallowed, her throat suddenly dry. "And you're intimately familiar with this technology and how it works?"

Danielle went still, her eyes dropping back to Madeline, and Maddie didn't think she would answer.

Honestly, Maddie wasn't sure she deserved the answer, even though she was fairly certain she knew what it was.

If Danielle told her what Maddie suspected was a lie, she wouldn't push it.

"I mean." Danielle stopped before she could really start, and Maddie tried not to fidget on the other side of the bed. "You know I am."

Yes.

She did know.

Vlad had said he'd had Danielle in his lab before because she'd come to him for help, but from what Maddie could tell, the only reason she'd come to him for help was because he'd been the one who'd—who'd—

"Is that a problem?"

Danielle's tone was more guarded than it had been, and Maddie felt awful. She hadn't thought it possible to feel worse, after everything, but here she was, feeling worse. "No, no, I don't mean it that way. I— I should start again." Trouble was, she still didn't know how to start. "I know— I know you're important to Danny. And that's wonderful. And I know that despite your recent actions, what we have—"

"We don't have anything," interrupted Danielle. "I would've done the same thing if you'd been Alicia or Jazz or someone else."

"I know, I promise. I meant…. I meant the past between us. That it's still there. That it'll always be there. I can't erase what I've done. I can only try to do better. And if you ever decide you're up to giving me the chance, I'd like to help you, in whatever form that help needs to be. It's…. It's an open offer."

Danielle frowned down at Madeline instead of saying anything, and Maddie wondered if her words were too similar to what she'd said before. What exactly had she said before? She'd meant it, both times, but if it was too similar, would it sound insincere? Was Danielle debating whether or not to believe her?

"Thanks," Danielle finally said, and Maddie didn't know what that really meant.

"I just— I want you to know that being—" Maddie swallowed, not sure how best to say this. Acknowledging that Danielle was a clone like Madeline was one thing; acknowledging exactly who she was a clone of was a farther, harder step to take, as if giving it voice would shatter some illusion.

Not that Maddie knew what the illusion was of.

It certainly wasn't a comfortable silence that stretched between them, and her illusions about Vlad had already been thoroughly shattered.

"You being who you are, I mean. That makes you someone special to me, too. Not just to Danny."

"Thanks," Danielle echoed again, and this time Maddie didn't need to wonder if the tone was wooden.

"If you want a place in this family, you have it."

"Awesome."

Danielle still wasn't looking at her.

Maddie decided to leave the subject alone for now. "How can I help right now?"

Danielle pursed her lips and finally flicked her eyes up to look at Maddie again. "Get Danny. I don't want to do anything without him being on board."

Maddie was fairly certain Danielle would have been happy to deal with this without talking to Danny, especially if Alicia was right and Danielle had intended to do so all along, but she didn't push it. "All right."

She'd already made progress with Danielle.

She could be grateful for that, and any future progress, however slowly it happened.