Ordinarily, the Fenton's living room would've been sent into a disarray of energetic, chaotic, but energetic energy. Namely, the energy that was the large form of Jack Fenton. The man could be everywhere, just as he was big in physique, along with a splash of orange that was his hazmat suit.
His wife, Maddie, was just as energetic. But because she wanted to maintain a more professional front, she was evenly tempered. The happy jitters that went through her couldn't be missed. She was as enthusiastic as they came. Her curvaceous figure was enhanced by a tightly fit, blue suit.
The energy that flowed through the living room dissipated when they heard the urgency in their daughter's voice. The air went flat.
With a proper look at Jazz, they realized she looked quite frazzled. And she shivered all over as though she had seen or experienced something unsettling. Jazz was pale, there was the faintest tint of a flush on her face.
Maddie stepped forward and cupped Jazz's face. "Sweetie, what happened? Where were you? Why are you all shaken over?"
"It's not me, mom," Jazz's voice shook lightly. She stepped aside to let Dan through the doorway. His tall form just not quite reached the ceiling.
Maddie's purple eyes followed his movements. She watched him take his place at the wall, the furthest away from everyone else. Dan shifted his posture and readjusted his arms.
He glanced up, red inhuman eyes met soft lavender. Dan shut his eyes and turned his head away. An invisible length formed between them, the pseudo sci-fi interior of a bygone era made it claustrophobic.
Maddie's eyes went down from his hardened expression, which she inexplicably felt a bit stung by, to his arms. Her body shifted backward in shock.
Prone in Dan's arms was the still and silent form of Kai. No one had seen or heard from him for several weeks, which they were quite used to considering his closed-off nature. And now he showed up in poor condition. Kai's name was on Maddie's tongue when she couldn't bring herself to say it out loud. Instead, she cast an inquiring glance at Jazz.
"What happened?"
"We found him like this," Jazz said, eyes cast down.
"Well, yes, I can see that," Maddie said with a hint of falter.
Dan and Jazz sent each other a discreet glance. They both noticed the hesitation, a guarded demeanor.
"It was those weird guys in the white suits. What else do you think?" Dan butted in, his expression slightly darkened.
A small frown appeared on Maddie's face, and the corners of her lips turned downwards. She and Jack had dealt with the GiW here and there over the years. They weren't the worst out there, only containing ghosts and conducting research.
"What?" Jack burst out unexpectedly. He positioned his arms into a readied fighting posture. "Did they hurt you, Jasmine? Did they sic a ghost on you? Do I need to get the Fenton Anti-Creep Stick?"
"Jack!" Maddie sharply turned on her husband.
"Dad-no! No one's going out to beat up some guy with a baseball bat!" Jazz raised her voice a bit. "We don't need that right now! Just-can you guys help Kai? Please?"
"Ah…you won't need to worry about those bozos for a while. I left them a light show, so to speak," Dan said unhelpfully. The other three gave him a strange look.
"Of course, we will." Maddie gave a small smile to placate them. "Please come down to the lab."
Before she crossed into the kitchen, Maddie stopped by the bottom of the stairs. She held the railing and called to the upper floor.
"Danny! Will you come down here, please?" Maddie stood on the step with one foot. "I may need your help with something."
There was a muffled response back. Maddie seemed to understand what it said as she nodded. Swiftly, she left the living room with the others that followed in her stead.
Past the brightly lit kitchen to a door with a set of stairs that lead deeper down. It looked darker than usual. As if it were hiding dark things that were not meant to be uncovered. Down into the dim, cold darkness of a large underground laboratory. The air was tight and unwelcoming.
Jazz shrank down into her shirt a bit, her arms around her.
Dan peered around with a hard expression. He could taste the heaviness down here. His muscles tensed up, and he held Kai closer to his chest.
Maddie walked up to a metal table and began to clear it off. Strange instruments and medical tools clattered onto a nearby countertop. A washcloth squeaked on the metallic surface. Maddie then pulled the table into the light.
She patted a hand on the surface. "Over here, lay him on the table."
Dan silently trudged up to the table. He purposely made his footsteps heavier to display a silent warning. He pinned Maddie with an eerie side look as he laid the prone form down. A heaviness settled over Maddie.
An unsettled sensation crawled up her even as Dan backed away. His eyes never left her, cast as an ominous glow from the darkness.
Dan, once again, found a spot at the wall furthest away from the others. He sighed softly and leaned against the wall. His body was tired and strained. A slow burn of energy coursed through him. Eventually, Dan allowed himself to close his eyes.
"Jazz, come here." Maddie gestured to her daughter. "I need you to help me take his coat and shirt off."
In silence, Jazz joined her mother at Kai's side. The blue ghost remained deadly still even as they readjusted his arms to make it easier to strip him. His head was turned to one side, face veiled by lighting and darkness.
When Maddie went to start removing the numerous articles of clothing, she took notice of the dark red that stained one of the gloves. She glanced to the side in suspicion.
Once the gloves and coat were gone, Jazz made a small sound and backed away. A horror-stricken expression flashed across her face. She held her arms and rubbed them in discomfort. Phantom pain stung her skin.
On the sickly pale blue arms were jagged and distorted lines of torn skin. Darkened and too visible veins stretched and slithered in all directions. A sickness that seemingly worked its way through his system.
Maddie wordlessly deduced the torn flesh to be scars. Both old and new. Raw, shiny skin indicated it wasn't fully healed. Maddie had seen worse and then some, but she had never seen a ghost that wasn't fully healed.
A flurry of footsteps startled the tense quiet. A distant voice spoke in rapid succession.
"…I might have to call tonight off, something's come up, and I don't even know what," Danny's voice resounded down the stairs, his voice the right balance of deep but still young sounding.
The footsteps came closer.
"We'll do it another time…yeah..." Danny paused. "Alright, love you too, babe."
Danny casually stopped at the bottom step and flipped his cell off. An exhale, and he looked up. He froze. Blue eyes blinked owlishly as his expression morphed into utter confusion.
"What the heck is happening here?" Danny asked exasperatedly.
His mother and sister were gathered around a table with someone on top of it. The spectral glow and blue skin told him who it was. His dad was nearby with an equally confused expression. He saw Dan's silhouette in the shadows to his far right.
"Not now, Danny," Maddie ignored the question, "you're just in time. Can you and Jazz restrain him while I remove his shirt? Jack, I need you on standby in case something happens."
Danny ran a hand through his slicked-up bangs and shrugged. He briefly rubbed his chin, which had a newly growing goatee. He rolled up the sleeves of his plaid shirt and approached the table.
The confusion grew once he saw Kai, whom he hadn't seen for a while. He was silent and stiller than a statue, he didn't look so good either. Now that it came to mind, Kai seemed smaller than usual. Unease grew in Danny's chest. The setup looked more like an autopsy for a corpse than an examination of someone who was obviously horribly wounded.
Around the other side of the table, Danny, along with Jazz, took hold of Kai's arms and held them down. Maddie's hands tremored lightly as she held the shirt. The three shared a look. Swiftly, the shirt was stripped off. Violently, Kai's body jerked, and orange-red eyes flashed open for a second. As soon as it happened, he slumped back down to the table. Silent, as if he hadn't sprung back to life at all. This time, all three backed away to process the sight.
Kai's upper body was littered with cuts, bruises, and more scars. The same dark veins stretched down the gaunt skin, snaking around the joints and curves. As if something had a death-like hold on him.
Some cuts and scars had deeper grooves than others, and a couple of bruises looked a tad too dark. The sight of it was enough to make anyone's skin prickle. Jazz turned away, her chest tight once again. She spotted Dan leaning against the wall, seemingly oblivious to all of this.
"Dan, are you seeing this?" She called out to him.
"I don't need to see it to know how bad it is," Dan grunted, eyes still shut. Despite the fact that Kai did approach him, he still trembled under his touch. It was quite obvious why. Dan was…put off by it, to be frank.
"This is out of my league," Maddie said, "I break and study things, not put them back together."
Dan shuttered one eye at the last bit of her sentence. Either she very much underestimated her ability to help, or she was trying to hide her lack of empathy for ghosts. She didn't even hide that she slipped up frequently.
"What about the Ecto-Injecto?" Jack said after an unusually long time of not saying a thing. "Inject fresh ectoplasm, and he'll be right as new!"
Danny and Maddie stared at Jack in admiration of the idea. It was quite easy to pull off.
"That's a start," Maddie nodded, she gestured at her son. "Danny, will you go get it, please?"
"Ecto-Injecto, right," Danny repeated the name to be certain he wouldn't accidentally grab the wrong device.
Said device was found on the other end of the countertop. It was the shape of a small gun with a slot on top to insert vials of ectoplasm. Easy to carry around in case of emergencies.
Danny picked up the device and went back over to the table. He handed it to Maddie, who then adjusted it. She fiddled with certain knobs and safety features. She eventually held it up to use it.
She placed the barrel on Kai's bicep, facing directly downwards. It had a tiny needle inside that needed to go in a linear direction to pierce the skin. Maddie carefully pulled the trigger, and green ectoplasm bubbled and sloshed from the vial. Kai's bicep, and by extension his body, tensed up as fresh ectoplasm pumped into his body.
Several seconds passed as everyone held their breath, unwilling to break the hypnotic lull. The light fixture seemed to brighten as Kai gave a tiny twitch. There wasn't even a sigh of relief before his body unexpectedly seized up. Muscles were rigid and stiff as Kai's claws gripped the sides of the table in an iron grip. There was a faint sound of metal creaking. His chest bounced up and down several times before it slowed down.
Kai's face went from gaunt and sickly to looking too flushed and sweaty. He made a strained expression before he laid back down, wheezes that came out now and then.
"What just…" Jazz spluttered, shaken all over again.
Maddie set the Ecto-Injecto down with a loud clunk and held her hand to Kai's forehead. She instantly pulled it away.
"He's burning up," she said.
She held a hand to him again. Then her eyebrows vanished behind her bangs. Kai's face spontaneously went from a sticky flush to cold and clammy.
"What…he just went from hot to cold!" Maddie exclaimed. She held her hands up.
A huge dark figure pushed past Maddie and Jazz. It pushed them away from the table.
"Get out of the way," Dan's voice emerged, fangs bared and eyes narrow. He leaned over Kai, the cape obstructing him from view. Dan held a hand to Kai's face, ice-cold and stiff. Something rumbled faintly within Dan's throat.
"Ghost fever," Dan said simply. He took Kai's shirt and coat and slipped them back on.
"That's a fever?" Jazz asked in disbelief.
"Our bodies will warm up, but the worst part is the cooldown." Dan slightly turned his nose up at them. He picked up Kai and began to make his way up from the lab. Dan reached the stairs before a sharp feminine voice stopped him. He bunched up his shoulders in a grimace and sighed.
"Young man, where are you going?" Maddie asked pointedly, her hands firm on her hips.
"Hospital," Dan growled softly.
"Then wait for us!" Maddie waved a hand around.
"I'll get the RV started!" Jack said excitedly and bounded up the stairs. He just avoided running into Dan.
"I am not riding in that thing you call an RV." Dan's ears flattened. "I'll fly there myself. You can meet me there."
Dan was gone before anyone could respond. The three remaining Fentons all shrugged at each other. It couldn't be explained, but something had changed, it permeated the air. They went up the stairs in disquiet.
Outside, the skies above Amity Park were painted with a faint pink-orange hue. The sun was still visible, but not for long. In a way, it visually presented how Dan felt.
His arms felt lighter. Like he no longer carried anything in them. Again, such thoughts weren't like him at all. Dan kept his gaze up and straight ahead to avoid the source of his thoughts. Which was right down below and close to his chest. Cold and unmoving, it taunted him.
A low growl vibrated through him. A lump formed in his chest, a lump of emotions. Foreign and fuzzy stuff that was making him feel something under Dan's hardened exterior. And he duly hated it.
Luckily, the city hospital wasn't too far away. He was flying faster than he remembered ever going. A monotonous train of thought played in his mind repeatedly to keep them away from Kai.
Get to the hospital and make an entrance. Hand Kai off to whoever. Take some time to himself, or leave.
The sight of a bright sign disrupted his internalized sulking. A great big white sign with a red medical cross plastered on it.
Amity Park General Hospital
A sheer white and grey building—hey, at least there was another color other than white—that somewhat stood over all the other buildings in the area. It was a welcoming sight to most but to Dan, he was eerily reminded of the way the GIW building was structured. He supposed setting a portion of the GiW facility on fire was a good idea after all.
Dan sneered in amusement at the thought. They had better suffered extensive losses. The less they had, the better. Then they'd no longer have the power or resources to take Kai again.
His eyes disobeyed his willpower, and peered down at Kai's smaller form. For a second, Kai gave the impression he was merely asleep. The ice-cold blanket that slowly made its way through his body said otherwise.
Dan looked up again and eased himself down to the ground. He landed silently on the pavement in front of the entrance to the ER. There wasn't much activity, but the lights were on. Unobstructed, Dan walked up to the doors of the ER without a care in the world. The hospital towered over him, but he refused to let it deter him. The most he felt was the heavy sensation of unease. Dan still felt the effort to quash such feelings down internally.
Why was he feeling like that? Because he sure hated it, it was like something wanted to crawl out of his chest.
Inside the ER, Dan straightened his posture and looked around. Someone was bound to see him. The room was empty and bare with the unpleasant color splashed on the walls. Dan remained where he was, distrustful but cautiously waiting.
A set of double doors at the other end of the room swung open within a few minutes. A group of three presumed hospital staff marched through. At first, they didn't see Dan standing right there. They were too occupied with themselves to take notice of an ominous presence.
Dan shut his eyes and set his jaw in frustration, his teeth ground together. A bout of annoyance, and he allowed his ghostly aura to flare.
It was subtle, however, just enough. The air shifted, and a pressing sensation weighed down. Everyone within the vicinity inexplicably felt their bodies feel heavier and slower. The lights above lightly buzzed and flickered in a manner it was a blink-and-miss-it moment. Furniture jittered, and rattling echoed faintly.
Kai tensed up in Dan's arms. Whether he was comforted by the flare or disturbed was completely unknown. The humans, on the other hand, at least one of them, clearly were.
It was evident by one looking up and faltered back in shock at the sight of him. Wordlessly, they nudged their colleague and pointed directly at him. The room was a lot less empty now that someone finally took notice.
One of them took a tentative step forward. "Who are you? Why are you here?"
"Oh, I thought it was quite obvious," Dan said snidely.
The same human took a step back. Pathetic.
"My…partner here needs help." Dan began to walk towards them. Slow, deliberate steps. "This is a hospital, is it not?"
"W-well, yes…"
"Then are you going to help him?" Dan pressed. His tall stature overshadowed the three humans. They stared at him, silent. Dan wondered if they heard him or if they were just stupid.
"Well?" Dan said impatiently, his voice sharper this time around.
"We-we can…" another of the three said weakly.
"Take him then," Dan cut the second off. He stopped in front of them and leaned in close. His eyes pinned them to the spot.
There was a collective squeak of terror, and one stumbled back fearfully. Still, the first one that spoke gestured to the third member of their group. There was a whispered conversation, something about hospital beds.
The third human skidded out of the room through the doors. They were gone for a few minutes and pushed through the doors, wheeling a bed.
Dan was directed to set Kai on the bed, with the humans keeping a short distance from him. Dan carefully set Kai on the mattress to avoid disturbing him, and took a moment to look at him. He kept his hands to his body a few moments longer before he finally stepped away.
The three gathered around the prone figure and began wheeling him out of the room. They weren't even close to the doors before Dan had a sudden bout of anger spike in his chest.
He reached out and grabbed the bed rail. He held it in an iron grip and strained his muscles to stop them. The bed jerked from the forced halt. Dan had both hands on the rail as he leaned on it, staring down at the humans.
"I know you will do your jobs, but make sure you do them right. Otherwise, I will be forced to use my hand." Dan let some ecto-energy crackle through his hands. "And none of us want that, do we?"
A collective nod affirmed his words.
"Oh, and don't let him get too cold." Dan narrowed his eyes, pupils grew into small slits. "Keep his presence hidden. I mean it."
He leaned in closer, his body almost hovering over the bed. Dan curled his lips back, and there was a squeak of fright. A dark grin appeared on his face.
Good.
"Good doctor," Dan said mockingly and withdrew.
He glided over the floor to a corner near the outer doors and leaned against the wall. Arms folded and eyes slowly closed shut to relax.
There was a simultaneous breath of relief from the group of three, considering a ghost just threatened them. Yet he hadn't done anything outright. They rolled their newest and most peculiar patient out of the ER. It was going to be quite the trip to explain to their superiors what just happened.
Dan was left alone in silence for several minutes. He meant to take it as time to ease himself before he did anything else. He was far too tense and hyper-vigilant.
His brief minutes of peace were interrupted by a flurry of activity outside. The doors crashed open courtesy of Jack Fenton. The rest of the family followed him shortly after, calm, but they had a somber air.
One look at Dan and Kai was nowhere to be found, they deduced that Dan had already gotten the job done. The silence alone confirmed that. All they could do now was wait for Kai's condition and a proper explanation about what led up to this.
Danny picked up a TV remote from one of the small table stands and turned a nearby television on. An eerie white light cast over the waiting chairs as the device flickered to life.
"Oh crud…" Danny said, his voice hitched in anxiety.
The TV showed a familiar white building with smoke billowing over it. A news report was being reported live from a helicopter, as indicated by the banners on the screen. Fire trucks and police cars surrounded the building as red and blue lights flashed across the grounds.
Only two people in the room knew what it was all about. Specifically, turquoise eyes pinned the eerie red. Explanations were definitely required now.