#and even though jazz isn’t a ghost she is definitely over the age of five

[little-pondhead]

I pity the souls who actually tries to read this madness. I’m sorry in advance.

[zigtheeortega]

incomparable

pairing | logan x mc

word count | 7.4k

warnings | there’s a lot of angst in this one, and it’s definitely an emotional hurt/comfort fic! if you don’t like the idea of logan trying to move on, then this one isn’t for you!

tags | @raleighcarrera, @pixeljazzy, @senatorraines, @dionneserrano, @blainehayes, @rodappreciationweek

author’s note | a while ago, my sweet friend and fellow mod @/pixeljazzy suggested a fic plot that’s angsty and absolutely demonic, aka logan tries to move on, so i decided to write it! i’d been working on this before the mods decided to create the time capsule challenge, so i’m very content that this fits into the theme well !!! and to clarify, this is an au where my mc raquel writes down her experience with the mpc and ends up publishing it and unintentionally becomes a best selling author! also yes rodaw brought me out of my choices writing break and i’m not mad at it at all

•─────────────────•

She wasn’t Raquel.

That much was obvious – she was taller. Her shoulders were broader. Her hair was short, bluntly cut at her collarbones, and dark brown.

She was tattoo free. The skin of her arm was bare – a clean slate. Untouched.

She seemed more innocent, too. Not in the way that Raquel was when they first met.

This woman was grown with a full time job and a comfy apartment in the heart of the city, but… there was something missing.

She probably had no clue that there was a seedy underbelly to her home. Didn’t have the misfortune of crossing paths with someone like him when he was at his worst.

She was privileged enough to go about her life while a whole microcosm of crime happened right under her nose. And she didn’t want to know. Didn’t need to know.

Logan wasn’t exactly jazzed to shatter another woman’s innocence the way he did with Raquel.

This girl seemed… safe. Level headed, secure, and millions of miles away from the life he’d abandoned.

It kind of happened by accident. Meeting her, that is.

It wasn’t a carefully crafted “accident” like with Raquel. She actually just… caught his eye.

He’d gotten an honest job as a mechanic on the outskirts of L.A., working mostly with the struggling working class that had long been banished to the dingiest corners, despite being the most important cogs in the city’s machine.

The autoshop was family owned, and had been for generations – the owner, Nicandro, had accepted Logan as his own, and Logan had practically become a part of the Alvarez family.

He hadn’t anticipated finding his own home in the same city that’d chewed him up and spat him out time and time again.

A couple months into working there, he was finally settling into his routine. Nine-to-five job on weekdays, community college classes on weekends, and the occasional Saturday mass when he was invited by the Alvarezes.

He was functioning. He had a routine. And then this girl came in and disrupted it all.

The Honda Civic girl.

When the average looking car pulled up outside, he didn’t give it a second glance.

He went back to work, arms deep in the engine, grimy and stained from repairing Miss Anita’s ancient artifact she insisted on saving even though it was less than a thousand miles away from crumbling cartoon-style till only the wheels were left.

(But she was family to the Alvarezes, so Nicandro insisted on repairing the car for free nearly every week when she needed something new tweaked.)

He heard her voice from across the room and still didn’t look up from his hands.

“Hi, this is embarrassing, but my engine light thingy came on and I have no clue what it means,” she said with a nervous laugh. “I’m on my way out of town for a couple of days, so I thought I’d stop and get it checked out before you closed for the night.”

“Aye, Lo, can you help her out real quick? We’ve gotta truck coming in with parts soon and I gotta keep watch,” Nicandro called across the garage, shooting Logan a toothy grin as soon as he looked up.

“Sure,” Logan smiled politely, scrubbing his forearm over his brow, the sweat managing to hold a couple strands of his hair captive against his skin.

He was assuming it’d be a typical oil change, but the second she came into view, the ghost of the last time he left L.A. gripped his heart and squeezed until adrenaline shot through every vein in his body.

Her t-shirt, tucked neatly into her denim shorts, read “Langston”.

It wasn’t the sweatshirt, but it was the same design, same color.

He knew staying in L.A. was a gamble, but he was willing to risk it. Staying away from Raquel was priority for her safety, but… he couldn’t bury the inkling of hope that pushed its way to the surface when he walked into a coffee shop or a bookstore – places he knew she’d love.

Once he saw the shirt and her big brown eyes, he was done for.

She wasn’t Raquel, but something about her lived in this stranger.

Before he could stop himself, he was comparing her to his first love – a disaster waiting to happen.

Their first date was anything but – she insisted on bringing him a vanilla milkshake from his favorite burger place to his work.

“How’d you know I was working?” He asked earnestly, mirroring her soft smile.

“I didn’t. Nicandro told me vanilla milkshakes were your favorite and I didn’t want to ruin the surprise so…” she shrugged, her cheeks flushed. “I’ve, uh, brought milkshakes up here every day this weekend.”

He laughed – a real genuine surprised laugh – and took a sip from the styrofoam cup. “You didn’t let them go to waste, did you?”

“Nah, Nicandro’s been really happy with me.”

“Yum,” he hummed. “I’m happy with you, too.”

She grinned in delight, taking a sip from hers. “I’m glad my hard work paid off.”

She stayed there for his whole lunch break, and they chatted, casual conversation with no substance, and he actually enjoyed himself.

The last time he remembered having casual conversations about nothing with a girl his age, he was curled underneath the sheets with Raquel, tracing the outlines of her sleeve of tattoos. He could’ve listened to her talk for hours.

This girl… she was pretty tolerable – she listened to him (hung on every word, even) and cared about what he had to say, even though it was a laid back, low stakes conversation.

“My name’s Renée, you know. I realized I haven’t told you,” she smiled, resting her cheek on her hand. She was facing him, and they were seated on the same side of the old wooden table out back behind the garage.

“Renée,” he repeated, shaking the styrofoam cup to gather the last bit of milkshake at the bottom before tipping it back to lap it up. “I’m Logan.”

“Logan,” she nodded. “It suits you.”

“S’not my real name,” he shrugged.

He didn’t know why he was telling her that. If he told her too much, it’d end the same.

She tipped her own cup back, tapping the bottom to get little stray ice chunks out. “Fine by me. I still think it suits you.”

She was way too trustworthy of a man she didn’t know, but… wasn’t that what attracted him to Raquel in the first place?

Without a shred of judgement in her eyes, Raquel took everything Logan said as the truth, despite how many times he’d fucked up. Betrayed her.

Renée didn’t look at him like he was a criminal and… well… he wasn’t one anymore. He was still in the criminal mindset, though, since he’d been ostracized for so damn long.

The next couple weeks were uncomfortable – not because Renée made him uncomfortable in the slightest. If anything, she was doing the opposite, and that was the problem.

He’d had to reopen himself to caring about another woman, and to say it was a difficult task was an understatement. The gates were stubborn, rusted shut, so much so that he had to force them apart, ignoring the grating screech of metal and the inevitable pain that came with being vulnerable again.

They went on a few dinner dates. She brought him lunch at work. She invited him to her apartment. They went to a food truck festival together.

Renée disrupted his routine, and it was a breath of fresh air.

He’d gotten so comfortable with his quaint life and his work family that he hadn’t pushed himself to do much more than that.

But the first time she held his hand, he froze.

She casually grabbed his hand to lead him through a crowd and his body reacted like he’d been electrocuted. It wasn’t wrong, but it felt wrong.

“Are you good?”

“I’m fine,” he reassured her, wiping his clammy palm against his jeans before letting her grab his hand again.

It wasn’t wrong, but it was wrong.

He should’ve ended it that moment, but he didn’t. He’d convinced himself that if he could push through the initial weirdness of it all, he’d be happy. Eventually.

So he went through the motions with her, trying his hardest to push his comparisons of her to Raquel to the back of his mind, but every so often it’d bubble to the surface.

It’d manifest in the most random ways.

She liked Coke icees, not cherry.

Oh we watched that rom-com together, and she hated it because it was too corny.

She likes that TV show as background noise because she thinks it’s dumb, and I do, too.

It was unhealthy to think of Raquel that much – to compare Renée to her that much – but he couldn’t help it.

The last time he was happy, safe, loved, was with Raquel. He hadn’t chased that feeling for a long time (because he wasn’t sure he could find it again), but with Renée he was getting closer to what he used to have.

Maybe it was selfish, but he wanted that warmth – that comfort – again.

She wasn’t Raquel, but she’d have to do.

A month into their casual dating, Renée kissed him. Well, she tried.

She’d insisted on driving him to a boujee rooftop bar near her place and was thoroughly buzzed off a couple of cosmopolitans less than an hour into them being there.

The party was in full swing around them, the corny ass cover band on their fourth “tribute” to Billy Joel.

He was out of his element to say the least. 

Just as he was about to lean over to tell her he needed to use the bathroom, she’d wrapped her arms around his neck and smashed her mouth against his, planting sloppy, sugary, open mouthed kisses on his parted lips, frozen in shock.

“Logan,” she breathed, squeezing him tighter, not even registering how tense he was.

“Renée… hey, hey,” he said, gently but firmly pulling her away from him. “I think you’ve had a bit too much to drink.”

Her big brown eyes welled up with tears and his chest twinged with guilt, the distant memory of the first time he’d betrayed Raquel floating around the back of his brain.

“I’m sorry I – I don’t know what came over me –” she turned away from him, dabbing her eyes with the crook of her finger.

“It’s okay. No need to apologize,” he reassured her, rubbing his palm in small circles on her back. “We’re good.”

“I wanted our first kiss to be special and I royally screwed that up,” she sighed, swivelling back till she was facing him again.

“Can’t do worse than me.”

She chewed her lip, trying to hold back a smile. “Oh yeah?” 

“I was a girl’s first kiss… five minutes after we’d outrun the cops.”

Her laugh was a surprised one, her bright smile replacing her disappointed expression almost immediately.

“That’s surprising. I never pegged you as a law breaking type,” she blinked, the alcohol clearly making her a bit more ballsy than she normally was.

It was his turn to laugh – he doubled over, nearly knocking over her half empty glass in the process.

“I used to be quite a troublemaker.”

Despite her not-so-subtle hints over the next few weeks, he couldn’t bring himself to kiss her.

She probably thought he was the prudiest of the prudes, the local catholic church’s golden boy,  the working man’s poster child of abstinence till marriage.

He just couldn’t bring himself to do it. Yet.

He was wearing himself down more and more each day – he was on the track to kiss her in… a couple months to a year. Probably.

Two months in, she invited him to a swanky event her job was hosting.

She was one of many accountants working in the financial department for a large publishing company. She had a really cool gig, and she knew it. She never bragged, but she was proud of her accomplishments. 

So why was she dating a mechanic who was making a third of her income? He had no idea.

Either way, he tried to enjoy himself. The car that picked them up was luxurious, and that and the food and booze reflected just how much money their company had made that year.

The venue was huge and packed to the brim with hundreds of people, the standing tables a couple feet apart all throughout the ballroom.

“Damn, they weren’t playing around with this, huh?” He mused, taking a sip from his mug, filled to the brim with locally brewed beer.

“Yep, they’re serious about giving a warm welcome to new authors,” Renée said over the rim of her drink, gesturing vaguely to the room around them.

“Yeah, so is that what they’re doing?”

“Mhmm. Every year we hold a big party to celebrate our deals for that year. It’s really just to pat ourselves on the back and give our new authors a sense of comfort here, you know?”

“Can I get a booklist or something? I might wanna check out some of these books afterwards. I feel guilty as hell eating duck, drinking their expensive ass alcohol, and rolling back home without, ya know, doing anything,” he shrugged, the fabric of his hand me down suit straining with effort at the motion.

“One of the authors insisted on not being included in any of the party promos so… she kinda ruined it for everybody. But she’s our number one best seller for this year, so…” she rolled her eyes, tipping back the last of her cosmo.

“And don’t worry about it. We budgeted for this and we’re good,” Renée nodded, giving Logan’s hand a squeeze over the table.

“So what’s the itinerary for the night?” Logan asked, rolling his mug around by its base, the beer swirling around the edges, just barely kissing the rim, but not quite overflowing.

It was stupid to relate to a fucking mug of beer, but he did.

Anytime he pushed himself to his limit with Renée, he retreated, never breaking past that threshold, that barrier he set in place for himself long before he’d ever met her.

“The President is gonna give some speech – he’s that guy right there –” she said, scooting around the table till her arm was pressed against the sleeve of his jacket, “Then the Vice President – that woman – is gonna introduce the guests of honor, and they’ll give introductions. Then a brief presentation from my boss about how much money we raked in this year, then… yep. We can leave.”

“Sounds painless enough.”

She laughed, leaning her head against his shoulder. “Thanks for coming with me, Lo. I really appreciate it.”

Before he could register what was happening, she’d tipped his chin towards her, pressing a tender, gracious kiss on his lips.

She pulled back, a soft smile tugging at her lips.

He mirrored her smile, but inside he was screaming.

He felt nothing. The kiss elicited absolutely nothing from him.

She kissed him and it felt like he was kissing a friend. Completely platonic.

He’d sunk months into getting comfortable with her just for it to blow up in his face. The second he’d let his guard down so things could progress naturally, it backfired.

He’d taken Raquel for granted. Being with her was so effortless that he didn’t have to think about it, and he let that slip away without trying to get her back.

He thought he was doing the right thing by her, but it was hurting him more than he’d ever anticipated.

It wasn’t that he considered her another notch in the bedpost. It was the opposite – the bedpost didn’t exist anymore.

There was only her. No one else. No matter how many times he tried to remedy his broken heart, it’d just bring him right back to her: the only woman that ever had the privilege of making herself a home there.

“I, uh, need to go to the restroom. Excuse me,” he said, jabbing his thumbs toward the double doors, heading outside before she had a chance to respond.

He pushed his way out of the room, his heart in time with the slap of his shoes against the flooring.

As soon as he was out of the doors, he kept walking, striding past the laggards mingling in the hallway, past the bathrooms, past the security, till he felt the dirty L.A. air coat his lungs.

God, if he could only catch his breath maybe he could go back in there and salvage the night. Maybe even make himself look less like a skittish idiot.

Despite the fact that his brain was wired to unintentionally treat her like a friend, he didn’t want to hurt this girl. 

He didn’t smoke often – just a taste of nicotine when he was drunk or the occasional cigarette when he was stressed.

There was a crumpled pack in his glove box that’d been there for months.

Why didn’t he just drive? He was fucking stranded. He couldn’t run. Couldn’t put distance between him and this situation that he’d willingly put himself in.

None of this was Renée’s fault. There wasn’t a single aspect of the situation that was her fault.

She was a girl who wanted to date a boy because of reciprocated interest.

He felt like the biggest loser in the world. Here she was, a beautiful girl with a lust for life and ambitions that dwarfed anything he’d ever imagined for himself.

And all she wanted to do was love him.

And he wouldn’t let her. Couldn’t let her.

His back slid against the brick wall until he was squatting, arms braced against his knees while he tried to gulp down fresh air as fast as the wind whipped at him.

He’d managed to find the one corner of the building that was completely unoccupied. For once, he was thankful for his gut instinct to lurk in the shadows.

He’d barely gotten a minute of solitude before the door closest to him flew open, a blur of tulle streaking across his peripheral.

The person’s breaths were labored, panicked, as they ran the opposite direction until they were at the edge of the pavement.

They bent down, just like he had, and clasped both hands over their mouth, letting out a small muffled scream.

When she was finished with that, she tilted her chin upwards, her skin illuminated by the light from the parking lot that spilled onto their side of the building.

If he thought breathing was difficult before, it got a whole lot worse when she noticed he was there.

She jumped, yelping like a wounded animal before stumbling back, catching herself with her hands. “Oh my god, I didn’t know anyone was here – I’m sorry –”

Pushing herself back up to stand, she brushed her palms off and shook the tulle skirt clean. “I’m just a little stressed. Sorry again for the outburst.”

That can’t be her. There’s no way, he thought, his mouth drying out when he got a clear view of her face.

“Raquel?” He asked, timidly, voice cracking on the first syllable.

She froze, searching the shadows, her hands white knuckling her skirt.

He didn’t speak, and neither did she. He couldn’t tell how long they’d been quiet when he pushed himself to his full height and took a step towards her.

“No, no, no, there’s no way,” she whispered, stumbling backwards, catching herself on the brick wall.

“It’s – uh, it’s me –” he said, laying his palm flat against his chest. “It’s Logan.”

His voice trembled, the effort of speaking (despite nearly being rendered speechless) was more than he could handle – it was as if he had to manually pick up his words like stones and drop them, and they were heavy, and he was weak.

She slapped a hand over her mouth, eyes wide. She didn’t respond.

“I… uh, what are you doing here?” He asked finally, forcing the question past his lips.

If he didn’t say something he’d be drinking her in all night. It’d been a couple years, but she looked exactly the same.

Yeah, her hair was mid-length, the ombre traded for a black tone, and she’d gotten a few more tattoos that he could see, but she was the same old Raquel.

Same old Raquel, but professionally styled. He wasn’t self conscious of his hand-me-down suit until he noticed how polished she looked.

“I could ask you the same thing,” she breathed, a strained tone followed by a struggled breath.

His heart dropped to his stomach. He’d completely forgotten about Renée.

He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened and closed it again, like a fucking fish out of water. There was no way to beat around it.

“I’m a plus one.”

Her perfectly gelled brows furrowed, and his gut clenched at the motion.

He was scared as hell, but damn did she look exactly like she did when she was hunched over a textbook, scrawling notes as quick as her brain summarized the words on the page.

“You didn’t… deliberately come here to see me?” She asked, searching his face for something (the truth, probably).

He ran a hand through his unruly hair, an inch or so shorter than she’d last seen it.

Why’d he have to run into her after he’d gotten a trim? He’d imagined this moment going so many different ways, and every scenario he’d pictured them looking like they did the moment they parted – if he had it his way, every detail would be exactly the same as the day he disappeared into the night, from his head down to his shoes.

“I, uh… No, I didn’t,” he stammered, taking another step her way, and that time she didn’t move back.

Shaking her head, she watched him, expression incredulous. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Just because I didn’t come here for you doesn’t mean I’m not happy to see you,” he said, reaching out towards her.

He thought she’d flinch away, but she stayed planted in place, her eyelids fluttering shut when he stroked the pad of his thumb against her jaw, revelling in how soft her skin was. Just like he remembered.

“So beautiful,” he murmured. “The most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.”

She turned her head just enough till she could kiss his palm, leaving a streak of lipgloss on his calloused skin. “This doesn’t feel real.”

“It is, baby,” he reassured her, before testing her even further by tugging her into a hug. “This isn’t a dream, but it sure feels like one.”

She ran her hands across his back, like she was refamiliarizing herself with his frame, before squeezing him tight, her arms shaking with effort. “You smell exactly the same.”

He laughed, burying his nose into her crown, pressing a kiss there. “You do, too. Like lavender’n’heaven.”

Raquel was in front of him, just as warm and pretty as she was the last time he’d seen her. She even felt the same in his arms, molding to his shape like no time had passed.

Adrenaline surged in his veins, and he took advantage of his momentary courage by tipping her chin upward to get a good look at her.

God, she was so fucking pretty.

Nothing else mattered to him anymore. His mechanic job, his car, his friendships, his home in L.A. –

He’d made a home in those dark brown eyes, and he was willing to drop everything and follow her to the ends of the earth if that meant he’d be back in the one home he’d ever known.

She blinked away a few tears, her bottom lip trembling, dimpling her chin.

He cupped her face between his palms, cradling her face as gently as he would with something breakable, soaking in the moment for as long as he could.

He could’ve held her like that and re-committed every inch of her face to memory, but she broke first, closing the gap by pressing her lips against his and Christ did she taste sweet.

Their mouths, arms, bodies, slotted together perfectly, not an inch of space between them.

Just as he parted his lips for her, she stiffened, retreating from him immediately.

“You taste like cherry. I hate cherry.”

Her tongue darted out to lick her bottom lip. “You hate cherry.”

He went rigid, the details from a few minutes before flooding back to him. Renée was wearing cherry gloss.

“Oh my god… you’re here with someone?” She asked, but she said it with such conviction, because she knew it was true, and she was begging for it not to be.

His mouth popped open and shut again. “I’m sorry –” “You don’t have to apologize. You’ve moved on and that’s okay. I’m happy for you.” Her voice was trembling with each word – the stones were heavy, and she was struggling, and he could tell.

“No, Raquel, it’s not like that. I promise –”

“Please don’t make me any promises, Lo. I don’t know if my heart can take it,” she said, palms up in surrender.

And she said his nickname. It sounded wrong coming from anyone but her.

“I’m serious, baby, I didn’t think I’d see you again, especially at a schmooze fest like this.”

She blinked, once, twice, processing what he’d said. “So… not only did you insult me by showing up with another woman, but you’re insulting this event that I’ve worked so hard to attend, and you’re insulting me.”

“Raquel… I never meant it that way, I… I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

He dug the heel of his palms into his eyes, groaning in frustration. “I stayed in L.A. in case I ever saw you again, but I didn’t think it’d be this soon, and I dreamed up lots of scenarios but none of them went like this. I fucked it up majorly and I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t fucking know.”

She didn’t say anything for a while, her arms folded across her chest while she mulled over his words. “I never tried moving on.”

It hit him like a gut punch, grabbing his organs and twisting till pain shot throughout his body. “You didn’t?” Was all he could manage.

“No, I couldn’t. There’s no way I could when I’m still in love with you.”

She screwed her eyes shut, a sob leaving her before she could contain it.

“Raquel, please believe me –” Logan pleaded, stepping towards her. “If I woulda known you were gonna be here, trust me, I’d be dressed better and you’d be my date and I’d be showing you off to the world –”

Her watch buzzed, startling the both of them. “I… have to go. We can talk after, if you want.”

“Yes, please. That’s all I want,” he laced his fingers with hers, gently tugging her hand towards his lips to press a soft kiss on her knuckles. “I’ll find you after. I promise.”

Giving him one last once over, drinking him in, like she was second guessing if he was real, she stepped back through the doors.

He took a few deep breaths to compose himself before heading in – explaining his outburst to Renée hadn’t crossed his mind till he walked back inside.

He made his way back to the table, running over how he was going to apologize, but nothing stuck. He couldn’t think of anything but Raquel.

Renée was sipping on her second drink of the night, and his beer looked like it’d been dipped into as well.

“Are you okay?” She asked immediately. “I’m sorry about kissing you like that I just – I just thought you were comfortable enough. I screwed up again, Lo, and I’m so sorry.”

“Renée…” He couldn’t get over how unnatural “Lo” sounded coming from her. “The way I’ve been acting has nothing to do with you, okay? You’ve done nothing wrong.”

“Kinda sounds like you’re breaking up with me,” she laughed once, rolling her eyes. They widened as soon as it dawned on her. “Wait… are you?”

“Can we talk outside? I really want you to hear me out –” “Logan, if you’re gonna dump me, at least respect me enough to not do it in the parking lot,” she sighed, chugging the rest of her drink.

“Yeah, you’re right,” he agreed, sliding his half empty mug of beer her way. “I do respect you, though. A lot. You’re an amazing person.”

Sighing, she tipped back the beer, gulping until he could see her eyes through the transparent bottom of the glass. “I’ve definitely heard this spiel before.”

“I’m gonna tell you this story, and you’re probably not gonna believe it, but it’s true, and it was my life – it is my life,” he started, leaning against the table so she could hear his low tone.

“Years ago, I met the woman of my dreams, and she was innocent and way too fucking good for me. I was breaking the law daily by doing jobs with crews of criminals like me, living off the grid, making money in ways I’m not too proud of.

“She was a part of one of my last jobs before I left L.A. to lay low and I, uh, I fell in love with her. I’m still in love with her. I don’t know what my life would look like if I wasn’t in love with her, you know?”

Her face screwed up in disgust, and she all but slammed the mug down, whispering furiously. “Are you mocking me? Did you seriously just regurgitate the plot of Ride or Die to me? That’s the story you’re going with? One that isn’t even your own?”

“Huh, what? What are you –”

The speakers crackled and a mic squeaked as who Logan assumed to be President tapped the surface of it, cutting off his response.

“Hello everyone, I hope you’re all having a wonderful night so far. As most of you may know, my name is Arnie Harris, and I’m the President of Harris Publishing. When my grandfather founded Harris Publishing back in 1901, he only did so because he wanted to be able to publish a few of his wife’s poems as a gift. Publishers refused to register it under her name, so he made his own company so my grandma could achieve her dream of being a published author, and throughout the years, we’ve been committed to giving voices to women and minorities alike.

“This year’s been one of our best yet, and I’m so thankful to our new authors for seeing something in us and our mission statement. A big thank you to everyone here tonight – Editing, Marketing, Finance, all the staff and employees, hell, the caterers here tonight, valets, everyone. Tonight wouldn’t be possible without you.”

He droned on for a bit longer before the Vice President took the stage, and she began introducing the newest authors that they’d signed that year.

They’d copped quite a few best sellers, which was impressive. Each author took the stage briefly to thank Harris Publishing and give a brief summary of their goals for the next few years.

Renée was ignoring him at that point, refusing to even look his way. He’d be more upset about that if he wasn’t scanning every inch of the room for Raquel, trying desperately to spot the rose colored tulle and midnight hair in the crowd.

“– and the last author of the night, the number one young adult New York Times’ Best Seller for five months and counting, Raquel Olvera with Ride or Die!”

His head snapped towards the stage, his eyes wide. “What the fuck –”

“Renée, she… who…”

“She’s our top seller. The one I said didn’t wanna be in the promos?” She answered flatly, still staring straight ahead.

“Renée, that’s – that’s her, that’s the girl I’m in love with –”

“Oh, please –” She stopped when she saw how genuinely caught off guard he was. “Oh my god, you’re not lying.”

“No, that’s her – I didn’t think – I ran into her outside and she said we’d talk later, but I – I didn’t think she was coming back inside for this –”

“You’re who she wrote about,” Renée whispered, her eyes as wide as Logan’s were, words beginning to slur just a bit. “Holy shit, I just thought the names were a coincidence, but no, you’re him.”

“What… huh?”

“Oh, Logan…” Her eyes filled with tears. “Ride or Die is about you, your old crew, and how she fell in love with you.”

His heart sank. “About me?”

She nodded. “She changed most of the names but kept some, including yours. The ending… you really had to leave L.A. to flee the cops?”

He nodded. “The feds were on our tails.”

“My god… she’s so in love with you. You have to go to her,” Renée shook her head, her hair swaying around her. “No hard feelings at all. You can’t let her go – I’m serious.” 

She’d taken the stage, and had begun thanking people while Logan and Renée whispered furiously at each other. By the time they looked up, she was beginning her speech.

“I never really set out to become a writer. Even though I’m a published author, I don’t really feel like one. Every time I step back to assess the response I’ve gotten to ‘Ride or Die’, I’m rendered speechless without fail. I just wanted an outlet to get my story out, and surprisingly – thankfully – the lovely staff of Harris Publishing decided to take a chance on me. I never thought this level of success was possible, and I’m so grateful for everyone here.”

She held for applause, smiling as though she was grateful for each clap.

“But beneath the positivity and praise I’ve received, I’m still healing. I’m still hurting. Most people know that ‘Ride or Die’ is somewhat of a true story. And yes, I know there’ve been discussions on whether this is a fake autobiography and that I wrote this for attention. Honestly, for the first year after they left, I wished that it was fake, because I was in a lot of pain. Emotionally, I was in shambles.

“I’ve loved telling my story as a form of therapy, but I wouldn’t wish this pain on anyone. The love of my life vanished into the night and I couldn’t do a single thing about it. No closure, no healing, no moving on.

“Stagnancy’s been the norm for me for so long that I forgot what life was like when I was smiling every day. I’m still getting used to happiness being an everyday feeling for me.”

Raquel shook her head, taking a deep breath and dabbing at the corner of her eyes. The audience took this cue to clap again, encouraging her to continue.

Logan watched the monitor on the wall, which zoomed into her face, catching her dazzling brown eyes. He was in awe. She was tough as nails with a heart of gold and he still didn’t deserve her.

“I thought that a life without love was bleak, and that I was doomed to suffer because I didn’t know if I’d ever see Logan again.”

She took another deep breath, squaring her shoulders.

“I’ve realized that I’m surrounded by more love than I know what to do with. By those who love my story, who resonate with my story, and who want or already have a Logan of their own. I get to experience love every day through that affirmation, and I took it for granted till… well, tonight, honestly.

“The end of the story wasn’t really the end of the story for me. I thought that ‘Ride or Die’ was the first and final book, and I’ve been terrified for a while that by the time the hype for this book died down, so would my hope, and I’d have to move on… but like I’ve said, the closure I’ve craved is in everyone that carries my story with them. You’re all healing me by making me feel seen and heard and loved.

“This might be a lot for a speech at a fancy event at the publishing company that signed me, but through all of you who’ve made this possible, I feel like the version of me from years ago when I hopped in a sports car with a stranger who later turned out to be the love of my life.

“The adrenaline, the lust for life, feeling alive – I owe it all to you. Thank you.”

The cheers were raucous by the time she stepped off stage.

Logan’s throat was tight – she still loved him no matter how much it hurt.

Jesus fucking Christ, he would never deserve her.

Renée was sniffling next to him, hand over her mouth. “Logan, you seriously need to go to her. You can’t let her get away again.”

He pulled her in for a quick hug, leaning down to kiss her cheek. “Thank you, sweetheart. You really do deserve so much better than me.”

She grinned and patted his cheek lightly. “You’ve never been more right.”

He turned, darting towards the doors, shoving past anyone and everyone to get outside.

When he made it out of the doors, he ran smack into Raquel.

Thankfully, the only people outside of the room were the security guards, who’s attention was focused on the front door.

Raquel pulled him down the hallway and stopped at the last door on the left, a sign with her name on it taped to the outside of the door.

She fumbled with the keycard, her hands trembling.

“Shit –” she cursed, the card tumbling from her hands and onto the tile floor.

He snatched it off the ground and scanned it in one swoop. Within seconds, she’d shoved the door open and slammed it behind them.

His heart was racing. The last time she’d been this hasty was their final kiss, and he couldn’t fathom going through that again.

She stood in front of him, his back to the door, her gaze trained on his chest.

From his height he can see that her face is contorted, but she buries her face in her hands before he can get a good look.

“She looks just like me.” Her voice was a mere whisper, like she couldn’t manage anything more than that.

His heart sank to his feet. “Raquel –” “You say you didn’t know I was going to be here, but then why’d you date someone that works at the same company my book’s being published at?”

“I know it’s hard to believe, but I didn’t come here with the intention of hurting you,” he started, gently resting a palm on her shoulder. “Especially knowing how hard it’s been for you, I –”

He broke his sentence off, cursing himself. “Shit, I didn’t know you were having just as hard a time as me. I figured you’d go to college and meet someone better than me. I don’t know.”

“You can’t just say you expected me to move on because you clearly haven’t. What, is her name Rachel or something?” She pulled back, putting a step of space between them. 

He shook his head. “Renée.”

“It even starts with the same letter,” she shook her head, biting her lip. “You thought I’d move on so you started dating the first person that reminded you of me?”

“I – I’m –” He stuttered, dumbfounded that she’d gotten it in one try, as much as he didn’t want to admit it out loud.

“I want you to understand why I’m upset, Lo. You came back to L.A. because you thought there was a possibility that you’d see me again, but you ‘figured I’d move on’. You’re seeing a girl that looks like she could be related to me, yet you’re avoiding discussing that. “I’m mad because while I’ve been trying to heal, you’ve been making yourself suffer, and that’s not fair to Renée. You had no idea if you were gonna see me again so you tried to get the next best thing. You have to see why that’s fucked up, Lo.”

“Even if I was dating Renée because she reminded me of you, none of that matters now.”

“You can’t just dump Renée because you took one look at the girl you dated for a month years ago and decided you wanted her instead –”

“Stop. Don’t try to downplay your role in my life, Raquel. You’re not ‘just the girl I dated’, alright? I loved you then and I love you now.” 

“You can’t love me and string her along at the same time, Logan,” she furiously whispered, her voice nearing hysterics.

He blinked, shaking his head. “Did… you think I was coming here to show you that I’d moved on? And wanted to rub it in your face?”

She chewed the inside of her lip, her dark brown eyes downcast. “Maybe.”

“Renée ended things first. Just now, actually. The minute she realized that I’m the Logan from your book, she told me I needed to go to you,” he reassured her, reaching out to tip her chin up with a crooked finger, forcing her to meet his eye.

“Raquel, I had no fucking clue you’d written about us and the old crew. All these years, I’ve always known how much I love you but… goddamn, I didn’t know you loved me the way I loved you.”

Her eyes glistened, her surprised laugh coming out as a soft sob.

“So… you really do love me? It wasn’t just circumstance?” She asked, leaning into his palm when he slid his hand up to cup her cheek.

“It doesn’t matter how we felt back then, baby. None of that matters now because we fell for each other while we were apart,” he smiled softly, leaning in to press a soft kiss on her lips.

“God, I love you,” she whispered against his lips, deepening the kiss.

“Say it again,” he murmured. “I need to hear it again.”

“I love you,” she repeated, louder, more confident this time. “I’ll say it as many times as you want, as long as you say it back.”

“I love you,” he said, no hesitation, tangling his fingers through her hair and pulling her in again.

The only time they came up for air was to whisper sweet affirmations against each other’s skin before delving back into silently relearning what they could about each other.

Logan had never been the best with words, and he was at peace with that. He knew that when it mattered, he’d show it. And in the dim lighting of Raquel’s green room, he showed her over and over just how much she meant to him.

Kiss by kiss, they adhered themselves to each other, undoubtedly deciding they’d never let each other go again.

She wasn’t Raquel. That much was obvious. She’d grown into much more than the timid girl he’d met on her 18th birthday, and even more than the headstrong driver he’d left behind. 

And he loved her this way and that way – any way he could get her. His love for every version of her was boundless, incomparable to anything he’d ever felt before.

[five-rivers]

Orb/Reanimation

Another part of Doorways!  Link to series here.

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“What’s his name again?” asked Danny, picking at the hem of his shirt.  Today had been… stressful, for a number of reasons.  Partially the long drive and the disastrous breakfast stop, but also the fact that they were driving to meet a guy who was possibly:

a)       Vlad Masters version 2.

b)      A horrible hole in reality that would try to kill him.

c)       Possessed, like the Keens.

d)      Using ghost stuff without knowing it was ghost stuff.

e)      Messing around with ghost stuff while knowing it was ghost stuff, but without any of the skill to keep it from messing him up in turn.  

f)        Crazy in some wonderful, unforeseen way.

Or, finally,

g)       Mom and Dad’s one and only normal friend.  

Danny really wasn’t holding for the last one, if he was being honest.  After all, unlike Marianne, this guy had been part of the Paranormal Research Club.  

Okay, maybe there were other, positive, options.  It was completely possible for someone to be weird or crazy and not be evil or even particularly threatening.  Most ghosts were like that, in fact.  

Still.

“Frank Stone,” said Dad, cheerfully.

“If he turns out to be a Dr. Frankenstein type, I quit,” groaned Jazz.  “Just so you know.”

“You won’t quit,” said Danny, with complete confidence.  

“He is a doctor,” said Mom.  “He was studying biology when we met him, for his undergraduate degree.”

“I quit; I’m telling you.”

“If you were really quitting,” reasoned Danny, “you’d just open the door and jump out.”  He was pleased that Jazz was taking her turn as the resident overdramatic teenager.  She carried that burden only rarely, but it did seem like long trips in the GAV really brought it out.

Maybe they made her remember the whole Youngblood thing.  Who knew? Not Danny.  

“I’m not going to jump out of a moving vehicle. That’s more of a ‘you’ thing.”

“I can’t really dispute that,” said Danny, remembering all the times he had, in fact, jumped out of a moving vehicle. “In my defense, I can fly.”

“Why you can fly completely negates that as a defense.”

Danny held up a finger.  “Okay, so, first off, reality is not a moving vehicle.”

“Anything can be a moving vehicle, depending on your reference frame.”

“I agree on the moving part, but I dispute the vehicle part.  Vehicle comes from the Latin vehiculum, which is ‘a means of conveyance.’ Reality is not a means of conveyance. Ergo, it cannot be a vehicle.”

“Not so fast, brother dear.  Words change meaning over time.”

“Yeah, but that’s still what vehicle means,” said Danny.  “Unless you’re doing the medicine definition, anyway.  I think.”

“Reality is a metaphorical vehicle.”

“Well, if it’s metaphorical, it doesn’t matter whether or not it’s moving.  Does it?”

“I’m… not sure.”

“I think this is the place!” exclaimed Dad, pulling into a parking lot.  “Golding City University Medical Research Lab.”

“He doesn’t live here,” said Danny, slowly, “does he?”  They weren’t ambushing this guy at work, were they?  Even if he did turn out to be just as bad as all of Mom and Dad’s other friends, that was kind of mean.  

(Except, the Keens had been acceptable, once they were no longer possessed, and even the ghost possessing them hadn’t been too terrible.)

“He’s in the building behind the lab,” said Mom. “They let the teachers live on-campus, here.  He’s expecting us, anyway.”

Right.  Because they had called ahead, giving warning to their potential enemy.  Curse you, common courtesy and sundry social conventions.

Jazz was glaring at the small name sign on the building, which was just barely visible through the rain.  “Golding City University,” she said, eyes narrowed.  

“Uh, is something wrong?”

“Frankenstein,” she said.  

“Um,” said Danny.  He looked more closely at the name.  “Golding City.  Ingolstadt.” Oh, no.  Now he was glaring at the name, too.  Because Jazz was right, and it would be his luck.  Their parents’ luck.  Whatever.  

“Do you feel anything?” asked Dad.  

“No,” said Danny.

“Well,” said Mom.  “We’ll have to run a bit, try to stay out of the rain.  It’s too bad there isn’t a closer parking lot…”

“I could also just make us all intangible,” said Danny.  

“What?”

“I could make us all intangible.  I do it all the time to miss the rain when no one is looking too closely.”

“Huh,” said Mom.  

“It isn’t as if my powers disappear when I’m not fighting ghosts,” said Danny.  “I get to use them for other things.”

“I know, I know, it just seems… petty.”

“Petty is one of the best words to describe ghosts with,” said Danny.  

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Frank Stone did not look like a Frankenstein. Not the monster, and not the ‘doctor.’

(Because Victor Frankenstein had not, in fact, become a doctor, had he?)

He was actually pretty average looking.  The same age as Mom and Dad, of course. Brown hair.  Glasses.  Skinny, but not that skinny.  Could Dr. Stone rob a grave?  Probably. But carrying the loot away without some mechanical advantage was probably out.  Unless it was old loot.  Dried out. Maybe just bones.  

Corpses were heavy.  

(No, Danny was not going to elaborate.)

Dr. Stone appeared to be somewhat confused about why Danny and Jazz were there.  Evidently, Mom and Dad had managed to give the man the impression that they wanted to fund his research with the fortune they had inherited from Vlad.

Which, incidentally, had been inherited by Danny, who couldn’t really do much with it until he was twenty-five.  Not that he was particularly keen on funding… Whatever it was that Dr. Stone was researching.  

Maybe that would be different if he could tell what Dr. Stone was talking about.  Danny wasn’t stupid, far from it, and had a good background in any number of esoteric subjects, but, well.  It was hard to rival an adult lifetime of learning and research.  Especially when he didn’t have any context.  

Mom and Dad’s briefing on Dr. Stone had generally focused on what he had been interested in as a member of the Paranormal Research Club, not his true field of study.

“Oh,” said Mom, suddenly, “this is about your organ transplant project, isn’t it?  You really need to provide more context.  When you just jump right in like that, even we’ll get lost!”

Okay.  Danny felt better.  

“Well, yes,” said Dr. Stone.  “I have been working on this off and on since college, you know how it is.  I know you kept up with that portal business!”  He flashed a nervous smile and set his coffee mug down on his coffee table.  It made a soft chinking sound against the glass.  “But the university gave me a grant, Vladco’s been donating some supplies—From their chemical division, mostly—and I’ve been having a lot of success!  I can’t wait to show you.  We’ve actually got a few specimens in near-stasis right now, all from mice.  We’re going to be implanting one tomorrow.  See how it functions.”

“Have you implanted any before?” asked Mom, leaning forward.  

“A few, but, well.  I can’t say they were resounding successes.  The most recent subject only lasted a few days… Although, that is better than the first! We’ve been adjusting some of our ratios.”

“Say, Frank,” said Dad.  “What chemicals are you using for this, anyway?  I know you’re using them in conjunction with low temperatures, but keeping crystals from forming in the flesh—”

“Yes, yes, that’s always been the problem with cryogenics,” agreed Dr. Stone.  Then they dove back into jargon and technical language.  

Danny glanced sideways at Jazz, uneasy.  Chemicals.  From Vladco. Yeah.  Not suspicious at all.  

He leaned over.  “Ten dollars says that he’s using ectoplasm to reanimate dead bodies.”

“I’m not taking that bet.  Do you feel anything weird from him?”  Jazz whispered back.  

“Weird, yes, but…”  Danny bit his lip.  “I’m not sensing any… doors.  Or ghosts.”

“Okay,” said Jazz.  “So, when we do find his mad science lab full of dead body parts, what do we do?”

“Well…  Nothing? As long as they’re legal dead body parts, I guess.  You know, from organ donors, or people who donated their bodies to science.  I mean…”  He shrugged.  “You’ve read Frankenstein, too.  And met Ellie.”

“Hm.  True,” said Jazz.  “I have to check my biases.  I’m still quitting, though.  As soon as we find his Frankenstein stuff.  Just so you know.”

“No, you aren’t.”

Jazz just sighed.  

.

Danny walks silently through the halls of the research facility.  True, Dr. Stone was planning on giving his family a tour of his workspace first thing tomorrow and had implied that other researchers would be doing the same, but Danny believed in being prepared.  

Well.  Sometimes. He was allowed to be inconsistent and contradictory.  Like any teen, he was still learning how to exist.  

Maybe he should stop comparing himself to ‘any teen,’ though.  It was beginning to feel dishonest, even in his own head.  Even though, technically, it was true.  

Anyway.  

This place was kind of creepy.  At least, he presumed a normal person would find it creepy. Too bad he didn’t know any normal people.  Sam would think it was cool.  Tucker would be freaking out because it was a medical research lab.  Ancients, Danny was as bad as his parents.  

It did have a number of features that one would typically only find on the set of a horror movie, however, so he felt fairly confident in his assessment of its creepiness.  Also, he had encountered at least five different crimes against nature and sanity (it took one to know one), and he hadn’t even gotten to Dr. Stone’s lab yet.  

He was impressed.  He hadn’t expected such a high concentration outside of Amity Park or Vlad’s hideouts.  

At the thought of Vlad, Danny drooped. Yeah.  He still wasn’t over the stupid fruitloop.  Still hated the fact that he had died.  

Back to the crimes against nature.  Ectoplasm was definitely a component, if a small one. Hard to get things to glow that precise, reality bending shade of green otherwise.  Also, well.  Danny can sense ectoplasm.

And…  Now he was in a room of jars full of diluted ectoplasm and… He sniffed. Formaldehyde?  He frowned and decided the number, size, and arrangement of jars was suspicious.  He walked around the table.  Yep. That was in the outline of a human body. Yep.  

Honestly, this wasn’t any more alarming than the living mice impaled with various glowing needles, or the disturbingly brown heart beating in a fish tank a few rooms back.  It was, also, significantly less alarming than the prosthetic face (mainly because, dang, that thing looked realistic), the (fresh) skeleton someone had been injecting ectoplasm into (yikes), and the weird flesh… blob… thing that someone had just left out in their workspace.  

Still.  This was another point for the ‘someone is building a Frankenstein’s monster in this building’ theory, and Danny had kind of been hoping that he was wrong.  

He walked out of the room, on alert for random murderous corpse monsters (or sad corpse monsters that needed a shoulder to cry on, a restraining order against their creators, and a loving home).  Or mad scientists.  Because, at this point, he was fairly certain that everyone who worked here was crazy, and not necessarily in the fun way Mom and Dad were.

He was glad they had decided to sleep in the GAV and ignore Dr. Stone’s invitation to stay in his apartment.  

Dr. Stone’s office was just next door.  His lab, just beyond that.  Danny approached cautiously, his ghost half on high alert, and his deeper self stirring uneasily.  

He laid a hand flat against the door, and that stirring became wakefulness.

Crimes against nature.  Hubris.  Pride.

Superbia.  It had to be.

A hole.  A wound.

Well.  This was fast.  Even with the Keens’ list of Paranormal Research Club members they had encountered while possessed, Danny hadn’t expected to find another thing like Gula so quickly.  

He hadn’t wanted to.  Despite his outward pessimism, he had hoped that there weren’t any more.  

After several frozen moments where Danny braced himself for an attack, he realized one wasn’t forthcoming.  The tear beyond the door had not noticed him, was not trying to consume him.  

So, he had a choice.  He could either try to deal with this alone, right now, or he could sneak away and tell his family what he had found.  Both choices had pros and cons.  

Before even a second had passed, Danny was easing away from the door.  He hadn’t quite promised to share if he felt anything strange, if he had detected anything bad, but…  It was a near thing, and he didn’t want to be dishonest with his family after they had been so accepting of all his… Stuff.  

Yeah.  Call it stuff.  Nice and generic.  Covers everything.  

Plus, his encounter with Gula had confirmed that he needed backup.  

He refrained from calling on his powers on the way out.  He didn’t want to draw attention.  The limits of the doors to the place which should not be mentioned were largely unknown to him.

Luckily, the doors weren’t alarmed, and he got back to the GAV without a problem.  He poked Jazz awake first.  

“Hey,” he said, “we’ve got a problem.”

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“This portal is just… Sitting there,” said Mom.

“Yep.”

“In Frank’s office.”

“Well, I think it might actually be in the lab, but yes.  It’s kind of freaking me out.”

“Is Frank sleeping in his lab?” asked Dad, stroking the stubble on his chin.  

“No, I checked that before I went in,” said Danny. “He’s in his apartment.”

“You just… broke into his apartment?” asked Mom.

Danny shrugged.  “I didn’t break anything,” he said.  “But, I mean, what else was I supposed to do?”

For a moment, it looked like Mom was about to argue or scold him, but she shook her head.  “Alright, then someone else is in his office.”

“Maybe.  I’m not sure if these portals need a person attached or not.  Using person in the very loosest of senses, because…”  He made a gesture he hoped would be interpreted as a soul being forcibly removed from a body without killing the body.  

“You don’t think it’s in the, um,” Jazz also made a vague gesture.  

“You mean the hypothetical Frankenstein’s monster he’s made?  Yeah. I think that’s likely.  Also, judging from the sheer amount of, um, weird stuff in the other labs, I’d say it’s influencing everyone and everything around it, too.”

“Is that a thing it can do?” asked Mom.  

“I mean, I can do that,” said Danny.  He paused.  “’I’ in this case being the portal.  Yeah.  That’s why Amity Park is so…  Amity Park.”

Mom breathed out, slowly.  “Sweetie, trust me on this, Amity Park was strange long before we made the portal.

“Well, yes?” said Danny, not seeing what that had to do with it.  “So?”

“So, that strangeness couldn’t be caused by the portal.”

“Mom.  I’m—It’s a hole in reality.  Do you think it’s going to obey the laws of cause and effect?  You went to Amity Park because it was already a ‘thin spot,’ right?  I was already there.”

Mom looked vaguely ill.  

“Okay,” said Jazz.  “Let’s table that discussion for right now.  What are we going to do about this?  Break in?  Wait for our ‘tour’ tomorrow?”

“I don’t like the idea of waiting for Dr. Stone to give us a tour,” said Danny.  “I don’t want to give them time to prepare for us.”

“He doesn’t know what we’re here for, though,” said Dad.  “Does he?”

“I don’t know,” said Danny.  “I can’t read minds.”

“Yet,” added Jazz.

“Do you think he even knows about the…”  It was Mom’s turn to enter the gesturing game.

“Let’s just call it a hell portal for the sake of communication,” said Danny, despite the fact that the term did not do the actuality justice.  “Or Superbia for this particular one.  I think this must be Superbia, anyway.”  He didn’t want to imagine the possibility of even more of these things out there.  

“I’m not sure how he couldn’t notice that something strange was going on,” said Dad.  “Even if he was using ectoplasm and other supernatural elements in his research, we gave him a good grounding in what to expect from ectoplasm in college.”

“Yeah,” said Jazz.  “But not everyone is like you and Mom.  Your college days were over two decades ago.”

Something moving in the dark and rain beyond the GAV windows, catching Danny’s eye.  He pushed past his family to get a better look, blinking to adjust his eyes.  

“Heck,” he said.  “We have a mob.”

“What?” exclaimed Dad, rushing to the console to turn on the GAV’s exterior floodlights.  

They illuminated Dr. Stone and a crowd of college and graduate students quite nicely.  Their eyes reflected a dim red.  The GAV was, as far as Danny could see, surrounded.

Very briefly, the thought of gunning the GAV and crashing through the crowd crossed his mind.  It was just as quickly dismissed.  

He didn’t know what the line between influenced and mind controlled was, or how easily Superbia could cross it.  It was even possible that the ‘hell portal’ could vault over both of those and land directly in possession.  

“Ghost shield?” suggested Danny.  

“Will it do anything?” asked Mom.  

“Won’t hurt,” said Danny with a shrug.  

Mom flipped the switch.  

“What are we going to do?” asked Jazz, softly. “Wait them out?”

“Realistically,” said Danny, “we don’t have enough food and water to do that.  With this many people, they could take turns watching us.”

“Call the police?” suggested Maddie.  The other three turned to look at her.  “They are still human, aren’t they?”

“Yeah,” said Danny, frowning.  “But I don’t know how much, um, agency they have right now.  If we were in Amity, I’d say sure, our police understand, mostly, but…  Also, bringing extra hostages into this might not be a good idea.”

“If it’s the campus police that would get called, they might be affected, too,” said Jazz.  

“They have campus police?  How do you know?”

“This college sent me a brochure once.”

“Right.  Um.  I could always just fly us out of here,” said Danny.

“Assuming they don’t have ranged attacks,” said Mom, dubiously.

“Hm.  Yeah.  I think I could lift the GAV, and then we could just leave the shield on.”

“Assuming the shield does anything.”

Danny shrugged.  “I can always just try to fight them outright.  I’d prefer not to do that, though.”

Mom inhaled as if she were about to say something but was cut off by a loud noise from outside.

“Jack~  Maddie~ I know you’re in there.”  That was Dr. Stone’s voice, warped by a megaphone speaker.  “Why don’t you come out and see what I’ve done?  I dare say I’ve exceeded even our wildest dreams from college.”  A long pause.  “I even made a portal…  Weren’t you trying to get one of those?  Isn’t that what got good old Vlad hospitalized?”  There was laughter.  Too much laughter.  

The mob was laughing, too.

Superbia.  Pride.

Danny knew what he wanted to do.  He wanted to walk out and deal with the threat that was grating on his every sense.  But…  He knew that prideful actions were contraindicated under the present circumstances.  

Influence.  Right. How much could Danny be influenced?

How much could his family be influenced?

He looked up at his parents, seeking guidance. They seemed uncertain, too.  

“I didn’t destroy any lives- I made new life. New life!  Powered by an interdimensional portal, oh, yes…  Can you imagine the application?  Can you imagine a new world?”

“Okay, he didn’t seem like this in the apartment,” muttered Jazz.  “We have human nonlethal weapons, right?”

“Still have to worry about running people over,” said Danny.  He looked back at the lab building.  “We could try to cut this off at the source.  They aren’t protecting the building.  They’re using it as part of their perimeter.”

Eyes turned to the dimly lit building.  

“We can cover you,” offered Dad.  

“I don’t like this any better than you flying off with us,” said Mom.  “But…  It offers a more permanent solution.”

Danny should have gone after it when he was in the building the first time.  Well.  Time only rewound for one ghost, and that ghost wasn’t him.  

Unless he counted…  Never mind.  The point was, despite all his other wonderful and troubling features, Danny couldn’t go back and change a decision he’d already made.  Agonizing over it was a waste of time and brain power.  

Dad got behind the wheel.  Jazz crawled up into the well-disguised turret.  Maddie manned the other weapons.  

Danny stood at the door, ready to run, ready to transform as soon as he was through the shield.  

Family bonding activities.  So much fun.  

.

The mob attacked before he got the door open. He still made it to the building.

.

Danny didn’t bother with doors or windows or halls. He remembered what floor Dr. Stone’s office was on, and, now that he was sensitized to it, he could feel Superbia. He went through the walls, straight as an arrow.

(He wondered, briefly, if he was being as bigoted as he’d often felt his parents to be.  If he was ascribing more evil to the portals to the Red Country than was warranted. If he was simply holding up a dark mirror and seeing what he feared from himself.)

(But no.  He did not command like that.  He did not force his people to assemble armies in the night or attack people.  He kept them safe.  He had rules.)

The lab was awash in sick red not-light that burned in Danny’s mind.  It was barely physically perceptible, more present in senses that couldn’t translate to human terms than anything to do with Danny’s eyes, ghostly or not.  

In the center of the lab, on an operation table, was a stitched-together corpse.  Perhaps, under other circumstances, it would have been a very pretty corpse.  A young woman with long dark hair and broad shoulders.  

Its chest had been torn open.  Half-in half-out of the cavity was a red orb, the source of the not-light, like some sick imitation of a ghost core.  

(It reminded Danny of Freakshow’s staff, and he realized that he never did find out where that horrid thing had come from.)

They had been trying to make something like Danny.

He felt like he had eaten those blood blossom pancakes.  

Danny gritted his teeth and let his light, white-green and clear, fill his hands.  Ectoplasm fought against the miasma in the air, an oddly purifying presence. It wasn’t enough to chase away the wrongness.  This wasn’t his space.  

The fight against Gula was different.  Both he and it had been within nominally living bodies.  They had been next to the heart of Danny’s territory, his home ground.  Danny had been tricked and trapped, taken off guard, unable to use the tricks he had grown used to while fighting ghosts and Vlad.

(He could feel Superbia in his mind, pride urging him forward towards error.  Pride in his abilities, in his mind, in his family.)

Danny drifted sideways, watching.  Listening.  Other things in the building were stirring.  Sparks of wrongness growing and twisting, warping into fountains and springs.  This whole building was full of it.  Rotten to the bones.  It pressed against his teeth.  

Careful.  

He had to be careful.  

The orb shone.  

(Too much like Freakshow’s staff.)

(Influence, Danny remembered.  Just how close was it to mind control?)

Doing this as a human was impossible.  Trying to fight that as a ghost was unwise.

The always-open always-closed door that both contained and laid within Danny’s soul shifted.  So did the corpse on the table, its constituent parts sliding over each other gruesomely.  Death had lost its hold, lost its meaning.  The ghost that was Danny twisted, and he was too human, too alive.

Special little thing.  You think you can defeat us.

He could.  He could open himself and wash all this away in an instant.  He could burn with electric fire and the cold of deep space.  He could reach out.  The orb would be as dust under his hand.  

He didn’t move.  

In thinking you become…

Un-light burned up from the grooves in the tile floor. It didn’t reach the soles of his boots, didn’t reach his soul.  He gritted his teeth.  

US.  

YOUR VICTORY IS OURS.

“Wow, you picked the wrong person to use that strategy on,” said Danny, out loud.  Internally, he pulled on the delicate and frayed strands of reality that persisted even here. “I have so much imposter syndrome and anxiety that it isn’t even funny.  I know I can’t beat you.  Not here.”

But then, he didn’t have to.  

He found the right string and pulled.  He found the key and opened the door.  Death was in the room again.  Danny could move again.  Not so much the pile of flesh in front of him.  It was hard, it hurt, to keep hold of something like this, but half of Danny was this, was dead, even if he had far too many halves to ever be whole.  

Ice coated the floor, the tiles cracking under the sudden temperature change.  He dropped to the floor and was human.  

An impossible thing.  

And behind the human—

Well.  Danny didn’t have to defeat Superbia.  It wasn’t like Gula, didn’t have that strength, that experience.  He just had to make it so the things that would, could.  

(Danny had rules.  Some of them were to protect himself.)

He walked over to the orb.  Ultimately, it was just a representation, not Superbia itself. Still.  He put his foot down on it and slowly transferred his weight to it until it cracked.  Until it splintered.  Until it shattered.  Until he ground its dust under his heel.  

Then, the building collapsed.  Danny didn’t move, didn’t have to move.  He was a ghost again, floating in the air, exactly where he had been, all the floors having passed harmlessly through him.  

Outside, the faculty and student body of the college were sprawled in piles on the ground.  The GAV was, somehow, halfway up a tree.  A shockingly sturdy tree.  Several statues were in pieces.  

The sun was coming up.  

Danny put a hand to his chest and assessed himself. Yes.  Still here.  Still himself.  The Ghost Zone still sang in his bones, in his core.  He was still anchored in Amity Park.  Everything in order.  

This place, though… This place would be tainted for years, a thin spot forever.  He could feel it, now.  Why couldn’t he feel it before, when they drove in?

He shuddered.  Then he flew down to the GAV and knocked on the window.  Mom rolled it down.  

“Want me to fly us away to somewhere secluded before the cops get called and we get asked a bunch of awkward questions?” he asked.

Mom closed her eyes.  “Please do,” she said.

[archaeopter-ace]

1-3, 13, 16? (ps I will get back to ur message soon)

1. How long ago did you start reading fanfiction? Writing fanfiction?

I technically read my first fanfic when I was in middle school, I think – on Mugglenet, and then a little bit on Neopets, but I didn’t know it was called fanfiction and I didn’t pursue it further. I discovered fanfiction.net and had my fanfiction awakening in college, in 2008 (and then I lurked for like, a year, before making an account). I started putting effort into writing fanfiction in 2014, when The Flash fandom was just getting off the ground.

2. How do you spend your time when it comes to fanfiction? Are you primarily a fic reader, writer, or a perfect 50/50 split of both?

I skew very heavily towards being a fanfic reader. On average I read maybe 100k a week? Reading fanfic is probably how I spend most of my leisure time, if I ever measured it out

3. Are there any fics that inspired you to write what you do?

I would definitely have to cite Vathara’s works as an influence. I saw how she kept a very close POV and adjusted not only dialogue but also prose to reflect that character’s background, and how a person’s professional experience can be imprinted into situations and how they make sense of things. Also, one of the first authors I encountered who Showed Their Work when it comes to citing sources and incorporating research into fic.

13. Do you outline your fics? How much of a headache would someone get if they just looked at an outline of yours without reading the fic?

If it’s going to be multi-chaptered, I’ll make an outline as a way of getting my thoughts in order. Nothing so sophisticated as ‘rising action’, ��climax’, etc., mapping the story structure, though some writing resources I’ve seen make some very compelling points for trying it that way. I structure my outlines a lot like I structure my essays, with a ‘thesis’ of a chapter arc and then topic sentence ‘scenes’ supporting that thesis.

What I find is that sometimes I’ll make a note that’s like ‘expand/flesh out this section,’ but then be unable to think of how that scene could be extended – and then I realize that the reason that I can’t think of a way to expand it is because I actually don’t have much to say about it. Maybe it isn’t as interesting as I thought it ought to be, or maybe it really is just transition to get from A to B. So then I demote it from a Scene to a transitional paragraph, maybe a time skip. So in this way I find outlines most useful for figuring out what to cut out ;D

In my current as-yet-unnamed WIP (the working title is Apoptosis, but I expect that will be too confusingly similar to Autoeponym to actually use, since both are unfamiliar polysyllabic words beginning with A), my most ambitious plot to date, I’m trying something new. This time I’ve got color-coded index cards and a huge board to pin them to. I’ve also got a whole bunch of post-it note sized squares of paper, where I wrote ‘things to include/keep track of’ waaaay back when I first conceived this fic last year. So now I’m sorting those out onto the index cards: orange is a story arc (I’ve got five of those), Lavender is a scene, Green is a plot point, Yellow is continuity note, and pink is a scene that could go one of two ways without changing the rest of the story.

So the difference between a plot point and scene: a plot point is like, the bits of conflict that make up the story, whereas scenes are the How. A plot point I have is ‘Claire finds out about NotEnrique,’ and this is resolved over multiple scenes.

Continuity notes are where I keep track of the passing of time. So like, ‘Jim’s Vespa is completed.’ I probably won’t write a scene with him completing his Vespa, but I find it useful to know whether it would be available to use at any given time.

I have yet to finish my outline with this method and move on to drafting, so it remains to be seen how useful it will be. Already it’s helped a lot with resolving certain plot points that I wasn’t sure what to do with.

16. Do you research for your fics? If so, how deep of a rabbit hole have you gone down by accident when researching?

Hooo boy, do I ever go down rabbit holes. My search history, I can’t even. Probably one of the worst offenders was when I was writing a Merlin x Flash crossover oneshot, and needed to research ‘interesting yet overlooked history things from the past 900 years,’ with an emphasis on jazz history and scientific invention. Oh, or the time I was writing a ghost story au (also for The Flash) and learned all sorts of interesting things about: Christina queen of Sweden, what kinds of records are public domain and how to access them – special focus on inquests and service records (and then trying to figure out whether the fictional files in question would have been lost in the 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center), how to do a walk-around of a B-25 bomber (WWII training videos are public domain!), how to operate a reel-to-reel player, and more!

Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever not fallen down a research rabbit-hole, even when I am deliberately challenging myself to writing without looking things up. We live in such an information age, I am constantly surprised by the specificity of information available. Like that time I found the wikipedia pages for when which syndicated shows were airing on TVLand or Nick at Nite, to determine what old show could conceivably be on tv in 2005 at 11:00 at night - and then I had to go and find episodes of the potential candidates to see which one would suit the characters.

Research is how I roll *pushes up sunglasses*

Fanfic Writer Ask Game

[huahsu]

YEAR OF THE GHOST DOG

[TL;DR version for the New Yorker -- I loved many great short songs and became obsessed with (1) a very old, much longer one (2) and YouTube comments this year.]  [links to previous year’s lists at the bottom]

A while back, I found myself in an extended funk. The reasons are uninteresting and honestly a bit dumb, a mix of everyday bummers and more existential stuff, all of which manifested in a kind of 360º sluggishness. I couldn’t really figure my way out of it but I believed that I would eventually stop feeling this way.

One night, I saw that someone online was selling a copy of the Emulations “These Are the Things,” a magnificent soul ballad 7″ out of Oakland. I wasn’t exactly homesick for the Bay Area, but something about the song’s roots, as well as its overwhelming feeling of optimistic yearning, resonated with (through?) me. There’s a moment when the singer’s falsetto peaks, and the piano starts cascading, and things feel like they’re going to work out after all. The copy for sale wasn’t in great shape, and it cost $100, an extravagant amount of money to spend on a piece of music. But I convinced myself that I’d feel better at some point, weeks, months, or years later, and I’d listen to my Emulations single, and recall that weird summer/fall.

As often happened with independently produced records of the sixties and seventies, “These Are the Things” was pressed on styrene, rather than vinyl. Styrene is a kind of plastic that’s lighter, cheaper and much more fragile than vinyl, and you can tell the difference by a kind of hollow plink when you put it on a turntable. Styrene also means that it has a limited life, and that each time the needle drags across its grooves, the record degrades a little bit. Over time, styrene records that get played a lot no longer sound as crisp or clear (or so it seems). I listened to it once it arrived, feeling a bit of regret at this wild expenditure, but also imagining my future self’s gratitude. I imagined entering into communion with everyone who had played this copy before me. I decided to only listen to the song once a year, if that--after all, each time I listened to the record, the song was changing, slightly.

A few months later, I felt normal (whatever that means) again, and the record became a marker of...I’m not sure what--maybe a kind of blind, stubborn optimism. Someone years later uploaded the song onto YouTube, which means I can listen to it whenever I want. This fall, I was trying and failing to spend less time on the Internet. But I decided that, instead of going on Twitter and Facebook, I would just read comments fans left on YouTube. I became obsessed with reading all the intimate histories people shared with one another--the chance encounters, the teenage dates and breakups, the seventies shop owners who recalled the days when stocking the right hit single could cover an entire month’s rent. I was listening to the Emulations when I noticed this comment, from Deric Jackson, who was apparently one of the group’s members: “I sung this song when I was 19yrs old. It was a pleasure to record and send this messageout into the airways. I have been with the women that God had given me to marry when I was 22yrs old. I did not understand at that time I was singing about my own life and the women who I had not met, but how wonderful it is to be with my wife fo 35yrs and life is still a breath of fresh air and wonderful. I would like to say to all real men love your wife, never worship her only one to worship is God alone.“ I’m pretty agnostic about most things relating to providence. But I felt as though I had been living in these words: “I did not understand at that time...” Jackson’s song was a prophecy, maybe even a conjuring, of his own path, and I wonder what he hears when he listens to it now. Sometimes you don’t know what’s coming next. But there’s always another song, and it doesn’t always sound the same as the last time.

(LATE 2017 BUT I REALLY DOUBT ANYONE NOTICED AKA THE FRENCH “MO BAMBA”) Junior Bvndo, “T’as ça #3 (Kylian Mbappe)”

I WILL LISTEN TO ANYTHING THAT USES DISTORTION Sheck Wes, “Wanted” OR OLD SCHOOL STABS Santi feat. Shane Eagle and Amaarae, “Rapid Fire” EVEN MORE THAN THAT, I LIKE THINGS THAT SOUND MESSY AND SLOPPY BUT ARE ACTUALLY PERFECT Caleb Giles featuring Cleo Reed, “Name” WOULDN’T HAVE BEEN AS GOOD AS IF IT HAD BEEN PERFECT, THE WARPED AND SMUDGED BEAUTY IS WHAT MAKES IT BEAUTIFUL Tirzah, Devotion Niagara, Apologia SAME, BUT SLIGHTLY OFF-STEP Blood Orange, “Charcoal Baby” THE BEST GENRE OF MUSIC REMAINS “SADE” Sade, “Flower of the Universe” and “The Big Unknown” Amber Mark, “Love is Stronger Than Pride” Bon Iver and Moses Sumney, “By Your Side” Kelela, “Like a Tattoo” 808s AND HEARTBREAK AND NEAR-OCTOGENERIANS Swamp Dogg, “She’s All Mind All Mind” I WASN’T AS ENAMORED WITH A LOT OF “NEW JAZZ” BUT DID LIKE Sam Wilkes, Wilkes Sam Gendel and Sam Wilkes, Music for Saxofone & Bass Guitar …WHICH REMINDED ME A BIT OF THIS FACEMELTING REISSUE (RIYL: ALICE COLTRANE, DON CHERRY, ETC ETC) John Tchicai, With Strings SPEAKING OF TERRIFIC JAZZ-ADJACENT STUFF Dos Santos, “Manos Anjenas” THE ORIGINAL “BIG MOOD” Okonkolo, Cantos THE YEAR I REALLY REKINDLED MY LOVE OF THE CELLO Clarice Jensen, For This From That Will Be Filled Oliver Coates, “A Church” …WHICH I DEFINITELY PREFER TO VIOLIN--ESP PIZZICATO--THOUGH THIS WAS QUITE GOOD Sudan Archives, “Nont for Sale” HARPS ALWAYS SOUND GOOD Leya, The Fool Meg Baird and Mary Lattimore, Ghost Forests ALWAYS HAVE TIME FOR WOODBLOCKS AND VIBES Kate NV, для FOR AS WELL AS MIAMI BASS SIGNIFIERS (KICKSTARTER FOR CITY GIRLS TO RAP OVER DJ BATTLECAT IN 2019) City Girls, “Act Up” AND BANJO DRONE...WHY NOT Nathan Bowles, Plainly Mistaken ALBUMS THAT I LIKED IN 2018, AND THAT I SENSE I WILL LIKE EVEN MORE BY THIS TIME NEXT YEAR Ben LaMarr Gay, Downtown Castles Can Never Block the Sun Neneh Cherry, Broken Politics AN ALBUM THAT I WISH WAS TEN ALBUMS Tierra Whack, Whack World AN ALBUM I WISH WAS JUST A LITTLE BIT LONGER Pusha-T, Daytona OF THE MANY REASONS I MOURN THE DEATH OF “THE ALBUM,” ONE IS THAT I ALWAYS LIKE TO HEAR WHAT PEOPLE DO WITH THAT LAST SONG YG, “Bomptown Finest” OR HOW ALBUMS, FULL OF SIGNS, ANGLES, FLEETING MOMENTS, CIRCULATE AND RE-CIRCULATE Angelique Kidjo, Remain in Light AND HOW THEY ARE LIKE WHAT NOVELS REPRESENTED IN THE AGE OF POETRY—OPPORTUNITIES TO LIVE INSIDE COMPLEXITY, SPACE, A DEMOS U.S. Girls, In a Poem Unlimited ONE OF THE BEST ALBUMS OF THE YEAR WAS A SOUNDTRACK... Kendrick Lamar et al, Black Panther AND TEASER FOR  Jay Rock, Redemption AND ANOTHER WAS JUST SOME RAP SONGS Earl Sweatshirt, Some Rap Songs WHICH ISN’T TO SAY ARTISTS DON’T STILL VALUE AND HAVE FUN WITH THE FORMAT Vince Staples, FM A TWENTY-FIVE TRACK ADVENTURE INTO VIBES Pink Siifu, ensley AND SOMETIMES TWENTY MINUTES OR SO IS ENOUGH boygenius, boygenius ONE MORE ALBUM THING – FIRST SONGS HAVE ALWAYS FELT LIKE THESIS STATEMENTS, AND STREAMING HAS ONLY APPLIED MORE PRESSURE TO THE SOOTHING, BEWITCHING, PERFECT WELCOME Mac Miller, “Come Back to Earth” MAC MILLER AND THUNDERCAT LOOK SO HAPPY HERE whole thing, but esp six minutes in, and even more so about nine minutes in THE BEST VIBES Show Dem Camp feat. Boj and Ajebutter 22, “Damiloun” Koffee, “Toast” HAPPY-GO-LUCKY B/W DEVIL-MAY-CARE Shoreline Mafia, “Nun Major” I LIKE NEF AND EPs PERFECTLY SUIT HIM Nef the Pharaoh and 03 Greedo, Porter 2 Grape 

RAPPING AS FAST AS YOU CAN OVER FREESTYLE/HI-NRG WILL NEVER SOUND BAD TO ME… SOB X RBE, “Paid in Full” SOB X RBE, “Carpoolin’” …ALTHOUGH THEY ALSO SOUND SICK OVER FAKE GHOST DOG BEATS, TOO, THIS WAS ONE OF MY SONGS OF THE YEAR SOB X RBE, “Paramedic!” SAME WITH MEDHANE Medhane, “The Garden” TRIPPIE REDD PUTS OUT A LOT OF MUSIC FILLED WITH TRANSCENDENT MOMENTS, BUT RARELY MAKES TRANSCENDENT SONGS, AND IT PAINS ME A BIT THAT MY FAVORITE SONG OF HIS THIS YEAR WAS Diplo featuring Trippie Redd, “Wish” TRIPPY-ASS DOO-WOP Cuco, “Sunnyside” A STRONG HARMONY IS A VISION OF WHAT LIFE COULD BE Ben Pirani, “How Do I Talk to My Brother?” WHERE WERE U IN 94 Young Echo, Young Echo SWEAR I'VE NEVER HEARD MUSIC THIS “GREY” ManOnMars, ManOnMars IF YOU ARE GOING TO MAKE A FAKE D’ANGELO SONG, IT SHOULD BE THIS GOOD Patrick Paige III, “Voodoo” LIKED THIS, BUT IT’S ALSO POSSIBLE TO BE A BIT TOO FAITHFUL TO THE PAST Teyana Taylor, “Hold On” NOT QUITE FAYE WONG DOING THE CRANBERRIES (RIP DOLORES O’RIORDAN) BUT STILL MEMORABLE Katherine Ho, “Yellow” LIKE THE BEST PARTS OF FEELS-ERA ANIMAL COLLECTIVE, BUT TAIWANESE Prairie WWWW

NEVER THOUGHT TO VISIT THE LOUVRE UNTIL The Carters, “Apeshit” video BROWN EXCELLENCE Humeysha, Departures "BROWN BEATS” FOREVER RIP Cameron Paul

MY FAVORITE DISCOVERY OF THE YEAR Pharoah Sanders playing “Kazuko” in a tunnel near the Marin Headlands LIKE NONE OF ITS INFLUENCES (FOOTWORK, AMBIENT), LIKE NOTHING ELSE OUT THERE, REALLY Foodman, Aru Otoko No Densetsu DARESAY SKI MASK WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN BOOED OUT OF THE CIPHER Ski Mask the Slump God, Beware the Book of Eli THE MOST FAMOUS PERSON I’VE SEEN ON THE BIG SCREEN AT THE PAST THREE YEARS’ NETS GAMES IS Young M.A., “PettyWap” DEMOS FROM A GROUP I HAVE ALWAYS ADORED, BEFORE THEY FOUND THE SOUND THAT I ADORE The Nonce, 1990 EXTREMELY GOOD AND LARGELY OVERLOOKED REISSUE Suzanne Menzel, Goodbyes and Beginnings FOUR TET IS GOING THROUGH HIS LIVE ARCHIVES, AND IT’S A TREAT TO STUDY HIS ARC/EVOLUTION  Live at Hultsfred Festival, 18th June 2004 Live at LPR New York, 17th February 2010 Live in Tokyo, 1st December 2013 Live at Funkhaus Berlin, 10th May 2018 STRANGE TO LIVE IN A MOMENT WHERE BEING WEIRD SEEMS A BIT DERIVATIVE. STILL, THIS IS BLISSFUL SahBabii, “Anime World” HAPPY FACE Smino, “Klink” SAD FACE Drake, “In My Feelings” (especially this version) “JIM FROM THE OFFICE” FACE Pusha-T, “The Story of Adidon” STOLE YOUR FACE Sophie, “Faceshopping” FACE/OFF YG and Mozzy, “Too Brazy” Sammy Bananas feat Antony and Cleopatra, “Slow Down” Kode 9 and Burial, Fabriclive 100 GASSED FACE E-40 and B-Legit, “Whooped" ABSOLUTELY FACEMELTING Todd Barton and Ursula K. Le Guin, Music and Poetry of the Kesh VACATION AWAY MESSAGE SiR, “D’Evils” Bad Bunny x PJ Sin Suela x Nejo, “Cual Es Tu Plan” BEST OPENING DISCLAIMER TO A VIDEO 808INK, “Come Down” “TAGS: LATIN CHORAL CUMBIA GOTH LOS ANGELES” San Cha, “Cosmic Ways”

BEST USE OF “OOCHIE WALLY,” STILL ONE OF MY FAVORITE BEATS EVER Stefflon Don, “Oochie Wally freestyle” BEST USE OF “SUPERTHUG” Rico Nasty, “Countin’ Up” EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS--THE HEADBANG MINIMALISM, THE LAS VEGAS WALGREENS--BUT ESPECIALLY THE LINE ABOUT WELLS FARGO Rico Nasty, “Trust Issues” “ORGASM ADDICT” (RIP PETE SHELLEY) Victor Oladipo, “One Day” “I JUST TOOK A FLIGHT TO FRANCE TO COP CARDIGANS” Black Thought and Styles P, “Making a Murderer” “AT THE EMIRATES I MILLY ROCK” Manzo and Malachi Amour, “Lingard” DOPE TUNE, AND UNEXPECTED KELLYANNE CONWAY REFERENCE JPEGMAFIA, “1539 N. Calvert” YEAH YEAH YEAH (RIP MARK E SMITH) Travis Scott and Drake, “Sicko Mode” R-E-S-P-E-C-T (RIP ARETHA FRANKLIN) Rosalia, El Mal Querer REEL DEAL, “DRIPPIN’ DOPE (SAXAPELLA)” (1989) Gunna, “Top Off” WAMP WAMP (WHAT IT DO) B/W WAIT (THE WHISPER SONG) Vallee feat. Jeremih, “Womp Womp” SAD REGGAETON IS NOT BAD Bad Bunny, “Solo De Mi” SOUNDS GOOD TO ME, 2002-PRESENT Temani, “Power” Westerman, “Confirmation” REAL LIES, POET LAUREATS OF “YOUNG PEOPLE THINKING ABOUT BEING OLD” Tom Demac and Real Lies, “White Flowers” A SONG DESIGNED TO SOUND LIKE IT CAME OUT THIRTY YEARS AGO, WHICH ALSO FEELS LIKE IT CAME OUT A MILLION YEARS AGO (IT WAS JUST JANUARY) Bruno Mars feat. Cardi B, “Finesse (remix)” TAY-K WAS JUST A YEAR AGO Comethazine, “Highriser” FAVORITE 2 BRIDGES MUSIC ARTS “MIGHT AS WELL” RANDOM PURCHASE OF THE YEAR  Kizaki Ondo Preservation Society and Clark Naito, 木崎音頭 Kizaki Ondo FEELS LIKE IT CAME OUT TEN YEARS AGO (IT WAS JUST JAN/FEB) BUT I NEVER GREW TIRED OF IT Rich the Kid, “Plug Walk” ODDLY REASSURING THAT PEOPLE STILL JANGLE Massage, “Oh Boy” Earth Dad, “Walter” ...AND DISCOVER WORLDS FROM WITHIN THEIR BEDROOMS Soccer Mommy, Clean ...AND EXPLORE THE CONTOURS OF GROWLING AND NAGGING Sada Baby and Drego, “Bloxk Party” ...AND CAN USE THE PAST TO MAKE SOMETHING SO VISIONARY AND FORWARD-THINKING Virginia Wing, Ecstatic Arrow Mitski, Be A Cowboy ...AND LOOKING FOR FOURTH WORLDS Arp, Zebra ...AND MAKE IMPOSSIBLE RHYTHMS Heavee, WFM ...AND THAT ARTISTS I HAD NEVER HEARD OF, WORKING IN IDIOMS I HAD NEVER HEARD OF, MIGHT STILL BLOW MY MIND Odunsi (the Engine), rare. JUNGLE LIVES X-Altera, “Blowing Up the Workshop” mix TOP THREE TIMES I SAW STANDING ON THE CORNER THIS YEAR 3 - The Merciful Allah Black Hole Theatre 2 - The Time it All Ended with Fireworks on Grand St. 1 - An Empty Storefront During a Blizzard

{HONORABLE MENTIONS -The Time They Brought a Monolith -THEME DE YE-YO [Respect to the Gods]} SONG OF THE SPRING, SUMMER, WINTER, YEAR,  STILL UNDEFEATED ### A CHURCH AND JOHN LENNON’S “IMAGINE” :: 2017 SIKH DEVOTIONAL MUSIC :: 2016 SPOOKY BLACK :: 2015

[five-rivers]

Exile

Prompt by @halfaqueen. My goodness, this took forever to write. I have no idea how it got so long.

.

.

.

Danny hadn't realized that exile was still a thing, but when he and Jazz had gotten expelled, and their parents had been banned or barred from basically all public places, and all of them had gotten restraining orders of one sort or another, and dozens of lawsuits had been filed against Fentonworks... Well... Officially, it wasn't exile, but that was what Amity Park was clearly aiming for with this harassment campaign.

He watched his city, his haunt, disappear over the horizon from the back window of the GAV. It was all he could do not to cry out aloud. Leaving like this felt like tearing part of himself away.

"Don't worry, Danno!" said Jack, leaning over the back seat. He wasn't driving, as he had lost his license early on in the city's war against them. "Just give it a few weeks! They'll be begging for us to come back, what with all the ghost that'll attack!"

This did not make Danny feel better.

"Jack," said Maddie, drawing out her husband's name. As clear as day, her tone said, Don't get their hopes up.

"You betcha! Because nobody can catch a ghost better than the Fentons, that's for sure!"

Jack Fenton hadn't ever been good at reading things as abstract as tones.

"They think they can stop the ghosts by closing the portal? Please! If it was as easy as that, we'd have closed it ages ago!"

Danny cringed, and sunk lower in his seat. No. None of that made Danny feel better.

Amity Park had hired other ghost hunters, blatantly replacing the Fentons, but Danny didn't know how good they were. He didn't know how good he should hope they were, either. On one hand, he wanted them to be bad, so that Amity Park would drop the restraining orders and he could go home. On the other, he wanted them to be good, so that Amity Park would be safe, so that everyone would be safe and no one would be hurt. But, then, if they were good, and everything was fine, that meant that Amity Park didn't need him any more, that he wasn't helpful, and, even though it was selfish, part of him wanted to be needed.

But, worse, what if they were good enough to defeat the more common ghosts, but then someone powerful come through, someone big, and they couldn't handle it? What if the new hunters worked for the GIW and would send the ghosts they caught off to be experimented on?

Danny had warned away as many ghosts as he could about what was happening before they left, but it didn't seem to be enough. And what if that warning got to someone who would see it as an invitation? As an opportunity to strike, now that he, Phantom, was gone.

He'd been so worried, stressed, and paranoid that he'd made himself sick. He was probably going to make himself sick again before the day was out.

"Where are we going, anyway?" he mumbled.

"Didn't we tell you?" asked Maddie. Danny shrugged. "We're visiting some relatives of Jack's. They have an interest in the supernatural, and they offered to let us stay with them while we look for a more permanent solution."

"Yep!" said Jack. "My favorite cousin, Cory! She's not quite a ghost hunter, but she has that Fenton blood for sure!"

"Cordelia Nightingale," said Maddie. "I don't think that her branch of the family has been Fentons since the sixteen-hundreds."

Danny swallowed. He was not a fan of the name 'Nightingale,' all things considered. It reminded him too much of pain and Sam pushed up against a wooden stake.

He decided this, on top of everything else, was a bad omen. He bet that 'cousin Cordelia' was going to turn out to be a ghost or, somehow, something worse. Like a witch. Or she had something like Freakshows staff. Or she grew blood blossoms for fun. Or she was part of a cult.

Ugh, why did that sound like something that might happen? What was his life?

Half gone, that's what.

Jazz patted him on the knee. "Maybe it'll be nice?" she said, hopefully.

"Maybe," said Danny.

He didn't have high hopes.

.

Sam probably would have liked the house. Danny didn't. The Gothic architecture only accentuated his fears. He frowned up at the spikes on the railing and the darkly painted boards. No. He didn't like this house at all.

He wanted to go home.

But, at his mother's prodding, he bent and picked up his suitcase. Most of his things were still at home and, if this lasted longer than a week, would then be put into a storage locker along with the rest of the family's belongings, to await a time when they once again had a house of their own to live in.

Jack bounced up the steps and pressed the doorbell with his thumb. Almost at once, a thin woman with graying brown hair opened the door. She wore a black turtleneck and a dark, straight skirt that ended at her ankles. Somehow, she made the outfit look practically Victorian.

"Cory!" exclaimed Jack, giving her a trademark Jack Fenton hug.

Both Jazz and Danny cringed slightly. That felt a bit too familiar for someone who he hadn't seen for literally their entire lives. Danny just hoped this wouldn't be Vlad all over again.

But, to his surprise, Cordelia gave Jack a thin smile and hugged him back. She extracted herself and stepped away from the door, into the house.

"Please," she said, "come in. You must all be tired. Amity Park is hours away."

One by one, the Fentons passed through the door, Danny bringing up the suspicious and paranoid rear.

"You must be Jasmine and Daniel," said Cordelia, closing the door. It wasn't quite dark inside the house, but it did feel rather dim. It smelled sweet, but dusty. Like flowers. Old, dry flowers.

"Jazz and Danny, please, Ms. Nightingale," said Jazz.

"Call me Cordelia. We're family, after all."

Was that ominous, or was Danny just paranoid? Well, it wasn't paranoia if people really were out to get you, right?

His breath went cold in his mouth, and something moved out of the corner of his eye. He whirled, trying to trace it.

He couldn't see anything. His ghost sense hadn't gone off.

"Danny?" said Maddie. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah, I just thought I saw something."

"Probably my cat," said Cordelia, calmly. "She's a shy little thing, but curious. Don't be surprised if you don't see her again."

"Right," said Danny, doubtful, but not wanting to press the point.

"Now, I've cleaned out rooms for you upstairs," she gestured, and began to lead the way.

Danny started to follow, but another shadow moved at the edge of his sight, this one distinctly humanoid. He turned again, trying to find what cast it. There was nothing. He hurried to catch up with the others.

"Do you live here all alone?" he asked as they climbed the stairs.

"Oh, no," said Cordelia. "This place is much too large for one person. I let out rooms to some nice young ladies who work in town. None of them are here right now, of course, but I'll introduce all of you at dinner."

Well, there went that theory. He glanced back down the stairs. There was definitely a chill in this house.

"You didn't have to give us this much space," said Maddie, snapping Danny's attention back to the conversation. "We should pay you."

"Nonsense. You're family, and those rooms weren't being used anyway. Here, this one has a king mattress, so you two will want this one, even if it is a bit tight, and Daniel, Jasmine, you two take the ones on either side."

Danny and Jazz shared a look. It was a lot easier for Jazz to cover for Danny, or for Danny to sneak into her room for help, when they were next to each other. But there was nothing to be done. They shrugged.

It didn't matter who took which room. Jazz went left. Danny went right.

The room was a lot like the rest of the house. Old-fashioned and dark. It was also meticulously clean and decorated like something out of an old movie. It looked like a set piece. It really did.

Then again, Cordelia did say she had just cleaned the rooms. It wasn't anything to get nervous about, even if it did make Danny feel like he was the main character in a horror film.

He put down his suitcase.

"The bathroom is just down at the end of the hall. The schedule is posted next to it, make sure you write down when you want to shower, so you don't disrupt anyone," said Cordelia, still talking to Jack and Maddie in the hall. "The kitchen is downstairs and in the back. If you take the last of something from the refrigerator, write it down on the shopping list. Otherwise, go ahead and make yourselves at home. Freshen up, take a nap. Dinner is at six."

"Do you want any help with that?" asked Maddie. "You're cooking for an awful lot of people."

"No, no, I'm more than used to it."

"Alright. Did you catch all that, kids?"

"Yes," said Jazz.

"Yeah," said Danny. He wanted to look for whatever was giving him this chill. He didn't like the idea of something supernatural sneaking up on him or his family while he slept.

.

He couldn't find it, and it was driving him crazy.

There was something in this house, even if Danny couldn't see it as anything but a shadow in his peripheral vision. Jazz couldn't see it at all, but she believed him after that whole thing with Youngblood.

Even if they couldn't find the thing, however, they found lots of other... things. Creepy things. Dead-eyed porcelain dolls. Dusty portraits. Bundles of dried herbs. Weird sculpture things. Light fixtures that should have been updated before Danny was born. A stuffed cat. A closet full of brooms.

"You know what I haven't seen?" asked Danny, as it turned five o'clock.

"No," said Jazz. "What? Ghosts?"

"A litter box," said Danny.

"That doesn't really mean anything," said Jazz. "It could be in one of the bedrooms, or there's a cat door and the cat goes outside."

"Maybe," said Danny. "Let's check out the yard."

This far from the nearest town, the yard was big and cut into a forest that loomed darkly over them even in the bright sunlight. The yard itself was full of flowering plants, but...

"I think these are all poisonous," he said. "At least, a lot of them are."

"Isn't that normal for decorative plants?" asked Jazz. "They weren't bred to eat."

"Yeah, I guess," said Danny, frowning. "But would you necessarily want a cat out here with all this?"

"Cats are carnivores. They wouldn't eat the plants. Can you see the neighbors?"

"No. Too many trees."

"How far away are we, I wonder?"

"It can't be that far," said Danny. "Not if her boarders commute to town."

"That's true. We're not in the wilderness." Jazz scanned up and down the height of the trees. "Not really."

"Maybe a little bit," said Danny. He could imagine some of those trees being hundreds of years old. The ground might not have been untrod by human feet, but... "Does everything here just sort of feel... off? Or is that just me?"

"I don't know," said Jazz.

Gravel crunched in the driveway, audible even from the other side of the house. Jazz and Danny walked to the corner of the house so that they could see around the corner and watch what was happening.

A small white car was pulling into the driveway. It stopped next to the GAV. As they watched, three young women stepped out. One of them had long, dark hair and wore a red sweater and skirt, reminiscent of Cordelia's. The second had pale blond, almost white, hair and wore a deep brown shirt and skirt. The third had red hair, and wore white. All of them had wicked looking boots and matching leather purses.

"Okay," whispered Jazz, pulling Danny back around the corner. "I... Maybe they just like to match?"

"I hate this so much," said Danny. "I want to go home."

"Maybe whatever is going on here is friendly?"

"We are literally never that lucky," said Danny. "I hope it's just a ghost. I can deal with ghosts. It's probably a ghost."

"Really?"

"No. Let's go in. We're going to have to meet them eventually."

.

"This is Sofia," said Cordelia, indicating the dark haired woman. "This is Alison." She put her hand on the blonde's shoulder. "And this is Morgan." She nodded at the redhead. "Girls, these are my cousins, Jack, Maddie, Jazz, and Danny."

Three sets of eyes moved sequentially from Jack, to Maddie, to Jazz, to Danny. They stayed on Danny.

"It's nice to meet you," said Sofia, still looking at Danny.

He tried to hide his discomfort. Could they tell he was half-ghost? He hoped not. That was his trump card if everything turned out as badly as he feared and he had to get his family out in a hurry.

What he wouldn't give for a piece of concrete evidence right now. Without it, his parents would never listen to him. They hadn't with Vlad.

They were still looking at him. Jazz slipped in front of him.

"So!" she said, brightly. "Dinner?"

Danny pushed back in front of Jazz. "Yeah! It's six, right?"

"Well, it sounds like the kids have inherited that good old Fenton appetite! Huh, Cory?" added Jack

"Yes, yes, come along. Girls, why don't you go ahead and get the table started. No, Maddie, the girls know how I like it, I'll show you later. You just sit down and relax." Cordelia disappeared into the kitchen.

The three younger women moved smoothly around the room, pulling plates and silverware- real silver silverware- from a china cabinet. They set the long table in the middle of the room with rigorous formality. There were more kinds of forks at each place setting than Danny had seen even when having dinner at Sam's. They topped it off with two candelabras.

Cordelia emerged with a casserole dish. Whatever was in it was thick, roughly cylindrical, and covered with a thick red sauce.

"Wow! Is that a roast?" asked Jack.

"Yes," said Cordelia. "I always make this when new guests arrive. The girls have all had it."

The 'girls' nodded as one, and retreated to the opposite side of the table. They almost moved in sync with one another.

Cordelia put the roast on the table, and went back to get side dishes. This gave the three women more time to stare at Danny.

On occasion, Danny did want attention, acknowledgement, what have you, but this scrutiny would have been a bit much even when he was at the height of his 'look at me' phase. He kept a tight hold on his core to keep himself from flickering invisible.

Cordelia came back with two serving dishes full of green... things. Possibly vegetables, but Danny didn't recognize them. She then started to, with excruciating slowness, carve the roast.

The slow exposure of the meat under all that sauce was enough to make Danny vaguely ill. It was too... wet. Too vibrant and too gray all at once. He swallowed against the smell.

"Wow!" said Jack, as Cordelia dropped a slab of meat on his plate. "This looks great, Cory! What kind of meat is it?" He was already sawing away at the flesh. It was all Danny could do to keep himself from slapping it away from him.

"Beef," said Cordelia, smiling at him as she carved. "Locally grown and harvested. It's an old family recipe, from before our branches split and we were all Nightingales."

"You mean Fentons!" said Jack around a mouthful of meat.

Cordelia's smile turned brittle. "However you would like to put it, Jack." She went around the table, serving herself last.

Danny made no move to pick up his utensils. The women on the other side of the table ate while watching him, barely looking at their food. Jazz was the only one who seemed to notice, and when Danny caught her eye and shook his head, she put down the bite of meat she had picked up, turning her focus to the vegetables.

"So," Jazz said, "what do you three do?"

Sofia's eyes flicked briefly to Jazz. "Graphic design," she said.

"That must be interesting."

"It's a job."

Danny didn't eat that night.

.

"I have some granola bars," said Jazz, grabbing his arm before he entered his guest room. Not that he intended to sleep there. Or anywhere.

"You keep them," he said. "I'm fine. You didn't eat much, either."

"You didn't eat anything," said Jazz.

"I'll be okay." Danny flared his eyes. "I've got an extra reserve, remember?"

"If you say so," said Jazz. She was frowning. "Danny... Let's share a room tonight."

"What?"

"I don't like how those three were looking at you," she said. "I can't believe Mom and Dad didn't notice..."

"They don't notice anything," said Danny. He pulled Jazz into the dubious safety of his room. He didn't want to have this conversation out in the hallway. "Wait," he said, eyes flicking over the room. "Where's my suitcase?"

Jazz shrugged. "Kind of reminds me," she said, not quite whispering. "I was thinking about barricading the door."

Danny hissed through his teeth. "I put my thermos up here when we went to eat. It's gone, too."

"If this were a horror movie, this would be when we yelled at the screen for the characters to leave."

"Think we can convince Mom and Dad?"

"Maybe together?"

Danny shrugged. "Let's give it a try."

They left the bedroom, and knocked on their parents' door. There was no answer.

Jazz frowned. "Maybe they have their earplugs in already," she said. "Can you, you know." She made a gesture where her arms crossed each other.

"Let's see," he said, going back to the bedroom. He waited until Jazz shut the door to turn invisible and phase through the wall.

Passing through the wall felt... odd. Like walking through layers of cobwebs. He shook his head as if to clear it and surveyed the room. Jack and Maddie were already in bed. He made a face and stepped back into the other room, becoming visible and tangible for Jazz.

"They're asleep," he said, shaking his head.

"First thing tomorrow morning, then," Jazz said, wringing her hands. "Maybe- Do you think we should sleep in the GAV? Put up the ghost shield?"

"I'm not even sure that this is a ghost," said Danny. He walked around the bed, part of him still looking for his missing suitcase. "But you have a point, I just..." He glanced at the wall his room shared with his parents'. If he and Jazz slept in the GAV, Jazz would be very safe, but their parents would be vulnerable. If he stayed here, and Jazz slept in the GAV, she'd be safer than sleeping alone in the house, and his parents would be safer, but if something happened to her, he wouldn't be able to react to it, he wouldn't be able to protect her. "I don't know."

"Let's at least go down and look. Maybe you left your suitcase in there, after all?"

"I don't think so," said Danny.

"We can get the weapons locker."

Danny blinked. "I almost forgot about that. Yeah. Let's go."

They were halfway down the stairs when Jazz grabbed his shoulder. "What?" whispered Danny.

"I can't hear anything."

"Huh?"

"This house is old. These stairs creaked when we were walking on it before. Why isn't it now?"

Danny bit his lip. "Let's keep going." He put his hand on Jazz's and made them both invisible.

"I can't see my feet," said Jazz.

"Just be careful," said Danny, continuing down the stairs. "I'm going to phase us through the front door, okay?"

"Fine."

It was still twilight when they stepped outside, the first stars just beginning to show. It wasn't hard for them to navigate, slipping around the white car, but when they did, and finally got a good look at the GAV, they froze.

Jazz said something very un-Jazz-like. Danny let his invisibility fade.

"What happened?" asked Jazz, in shock.

"It looks like someone beat it with a crowbar," said Danny, almost reverently, touching the crumpled metal. "A really big, really fast crowbar."

"Danny, this glass is supposed to be bulletproof."

"And ghost-proof," agreed Danny. "Let's go barricade your room. Think it can get through a dresser?"

.

The thing about being under high levels of stress for long periods of time was that it was tiring. Exhausting, even. So, even though Danny didn't intend to sleep, he did.

He woke up unable to move, something heavy weighing down his chest. His eyes fluttered open. Something huge and dark, the shadow he'd only glimpsed before, loomed over him, pressed down on him. He could see Jazz's bright hair hanging off of the bed above him. He tried to call out, to warn her, to get her to run, but he couldn't speak.

He couldn't breathe-

.

When his eyes opened again, light was weakly streaming through the thick glass of the windows, making the dust in the room sparkle gold. He sat straight up, breathing hard. He was still in Jazz's room, the dresser pulled across the doorway. Why do that and then leave him here? It didn't make sense.

"What's wrong?" asked Jazz, voice deep and crackled with sleep. She yawned.

Danny told her.

"That sounds like sleep paralysis."

"Like what now?"

"Sleep paralysis," said Jazz. She yawned again. "Some people get it. They wake up, but they're still asleep and they can't move. And also they hallucinate."

"That sounds fake."

"You sound fake."

"You know what? That's fair. That's actually fair. This whole situation sounds fake, so why not add sleep paralysis to the whole thing? It's better than an actual literal demon." He took a deep breath. "What do we do now?"

Jazz licked her lips and ran a hand through her hair.

"We tell them that the GAV has been trashed, that those women were staring at you like they wanted to eat you all dinner, and that your clothes were stolen. And then I'll spell it out for them, if I have to."

"What, that this place is probably haunted or possessed and Dad's cousin is a witch?"

"No," said Jazz, making a face. "That'll probably only make them want to stay even more. That those three are probably pedophiles who stole your clothing and wrecked the GAV so we couldn't leave, and that neither of us felt safe sleeping alone. Sorry. Then we'll make them call a cab."

"No, no, that's fine. That's a better explanation than I could come up with. Let's do that. I would honestly rather stay at Vlad's than here."

"Yeah," Jazz dragged her hand through her hair again, and grimaced. "Let me get dressed, first. Do you see my brush over there?"

"No," said Danny.

Jazz looked around the room. "Actually... Where is my suitcase?"

"It was-" Danny stopped. "It was in that corner when we came in, wasn't it?"

"Yeah," said Jazz. "Okay, forget getting dressed. We're talking to Mom and Dad now." She swung out of bed and made her way to the door.

Danny phased through her, so he would reach the dresser first and easily pushed it out of the way. He stuck his head out the door, looking both ways for Cordelia and the borders.

The door to the room next to Jazz's, their parent's room, was open.

"Shoot," said Danny. He walked over. "They're not here."

"Downstairs? Maybe they went to get breakfast." Jazz emerged from the room crossing her arms over her chest.

"Maybe," said Danny. He had a bad feeling about this.

Cautiously, they made their way down the stairs and peered into the kitchen. No one was there.

"Hello, children," said Cordelia, directly behind them.

They jumped, both trying to get away and spin at the same time. Jazz clipped her elbow on the doorway and almost fell. Danny caught her and pulled her back up.

"If you are looking for your parents, you just missed them."

"What do you mean?" asked Jazz, a little more sharply than she usually would.

"I mean, they just left," said Cordelia mildly. "They took that vehicle of yours to town to go shopping. Something about not eating me out of my house. It was very kind of them."

"But the GAV was wrecked..." said Jazz, even as Danny gave a tug on her arm.

"Was it?" asked Cordelia, smiling. "It seemed fine when they left. You should get dressed, though, Jasmine, and, Daniel, are those the clothes you were wearing yesterday?"

"Our clothes are gone," said Jazz.

"You left them in your car? Well, no wonder you're looking for your parents. I think I might have some old clothes that will fit you. Come along, now." She turned.

Possibilities tumbled through Danny's head. A large part of him wanted to just grab Jazz and fly away to find their parents in town, but he estimated that there was a pretty good chance that they weren't in town, but trapped here somewhere. Jazz had apparently made that same calculation, because she was giving him the 'don't you dare use your powers' head shake.

Fine. Okay. Play along it was, then.

Cordelia lead them into a dusty ground floor room full of chests. She opened one, knocking free a number of cobwebs. "These are a little old fashioned, I'm afraid, Daniel, but it has been a while since a boy your age lived here." She handed him a small, neat stack of clothing. "And these are for you, Jasmine. I wore them when I was about your age. I grew a few inches, after that."

"Right," said Jazz, already backing away. "We'll just go... change... then. Right Danny?"

"Yeah," said Danny.

Jazz didn't speak to him until they were back upstairs. "What now?"

"Now," said Danny, "I go ghost and see if Mom and Dad are trapped in a dungeon under the house or something. If not, I take you and get the heck out of here. If they are, I rescue them, we get the heck out of here. We'll steal Cordelia's car or something."

"Not much of a plan."

"Don't kid yourself. We never have a plan. Do you want to get dressed, first, or...?"

"Pass."

"I'll have to bring you with me. I don't want to leave you alone up here while I'm searching," warned Danny.

"I know. I don't want to be alone here, either."

Danny took a breath and-

Did not go ghost. He doubled over, gasping for breath, transformation rings flickering to nothing around him as the shadows pressed inward, suffocating him. The huge fingers around his chest- The almost-human silhouette-

"Danny?" asked Jazz, alarmed, shaking his shoulder. "What's wrong? What's happening?"

"Not," wheezed Danny, "sleep paralysis."

The shadows crept up over his eyes and everything went dark.

.

When he woke up, he was wearing different clothes. Very different clothes. They were all white and loose. He wasn't sure if he should call them robes, but they had that kind of feeling. His shoes were gone. He was in his guest room, on the bed. Jazz was nowhere to be seen.

Danny should have taken his family and run as soon as he saw that not-ghost shadow. He swallowed, shaking, and clenched his fists. It was still here, watching him. He could feel it, even if he couldn't see it.

Okay. First step, get out of here.

He swung his feet off the bed. As soon as they touched the floor, something twined around his ankle and rapidly climbed up his leg. He gasped and yanked himself back, trying to free his knee from the shadow twisted around it. It held fast, firmly squeezing his thigh.

Danny growled. This wasn't the first shadow he had fought. He gathered ectoplasm in his hand and poured energy into it until it burned brighter than magnesium. The shadow retreated, and Danny scrambled to stand on the middle of the bed, ectoblast still in his fist.

"Now, now, no need for any of that."

Cordelia stood in the doorway, not the least bit surprised to see Danny wielding supernatural powers.

"Where's my family?" demanded Danny.

"Safe," said Cordelia, neutrally, "and they will continue to remain so."

Danny shifted, and the bed springs squealed. "What do you want?" he asked.

"My heritage. Come along. I will explain as we go." She turned in the doorway and looked over her shoulder. "Our shadow will not trouble you, should you follow now."

Danny clenched his jaw at the threat but gingerly climbed down from the bed and followed Cordelia across the frigid floor.

"Our last common ancestor was Elizabeth Nightingale," said Cordelia. "She was married to James Fenton. They had two children, John Fenton-Nightingale and Mary Fenton-Nightingale." She paused. "Elizabeth was knowledgeable in what would have been called witchcraft, and she was very, very good at it."

They climbed down the stairs to the first floor. All of the lights were off.

"But, as these things happen, she died. A mistake with a summoning." Cordelia turned into a long hallway Danny had missed in his earlier explorations of the house. "John and Mary were divided on how to handle her legacy. John," the name was said with anger, "decided that Elizabeth's craft, her knowledge, was evil, and decided to destroy it. He burned generations of Nightingale knowledge in a single night. When Mary tried to stop him, to salvage her mother's legacy, he tried to burn her, too. He denounced her as a witch."

"I'm sorry about that," said Danny. "I really am." After all, he knew exactly what that felt like. "But I don't see what that has to do with us. That was hundreds of years ago. A bit late for revenge, don't you think?" A sufficiently disturbed ghost wouldn't, but Cordelia was, as far as Danny could tell, human.

"This isn't about revenge," said Cordelia. "Besides, it has everything to do with you. Of the two of us, you are the one who met the man, Phantom."

"What are you talking about?"

"There's no need for you to play coy with me, young man," said Cordelia. "Why else do you think I put so much time and effort into getting you here? The magics to turn your town against your parents weren't child's play, after all." She bent and seized the corner of a rug, pulling it up and back to reveal a trap door. "Neither was calling the shadow to keep you bound." She lifted the ring handle on the trap door, pulling it open. "After you."

Danny stared down the dark hole below. There was a metal ladder, but he couldn't tell where it ended. A very faint light from somewhere to the right reflected off of some of the rungs.

"Is this where you reveal you're a cannibal?" asked Danny, unimpressed. "Is that what horror movie this is?"

Cordelia rolled her eyes. "Hardly. Although you and Jasmine refusing to eat with us last night made everything harder than it had to be."

That definitely wasn't Danny's stomach growling at the reminder that he hadn't eaten since lunchtime yesterday. "Drugged, was it?"

They stared at each other over the trap door.

"If you refuse to cooperate, we can always use Jack. Or Jasmine."

Danny's lips twitched as he held back a snarl. "Fine," he snapped, angrily climbing down, into the hole.

It turned out that the ladder wasn't terribly long after all. It descended into a basement of normal height.

That was, however, the only normal thing about the space. Far from simply being unfinished, the floor of the basement seemed to be stone. So were what little he could see of the walls. It was like the basement had been carved from one huge piece of bedrock, but that couldn't be possible. Danny didn't know, well, anything about geology, but he was pretty sure houses usually weren't built on stuff like this.

To the right, there was a small table with a single burning candle on it and two chairs, one on each side. Beyond that, Danny could make out a circle on the ground marked with chalk.

The cold feeling that had been plaguing Danny since yesterday was a hundred times stronger in this room. His core was alert, but the relief that his ghost sense usually brought just never came.

The strain was beginning to ache.

"Sit down," said Cordelia, indicating the chair closest to the chalk circle.

Danny complied, tense, and Cordelia moved the candle to one side, taking out a book and setting it on the table. The book was old and singed, the edges of the leather cover and several of the pages burnt and curled. Cordelia stroked it, reverently.

"This is all that Mary managed to salvage from the flames," she said. "Just this one book, out of so many. All that knowledge lost. Elizabeth was the last one to have it."

Danny heard movement in the dark corners of the room and turned his head to Sofia, Alison, and Morgan emerging, all of them in robes similar to his own, but in their own colors. They came close, and grabbed the back and arms of his chair.

"You asked me what I wanted. I want Elizabeth Nightingale."

A surprised laugh, almost a scoff, forced its way between Danny's lips. "Well, I'm sorry, but I don't exactly have her in my back pocket. Do these pants even have pockets?"

"You might not have her," said Cordelia, annoyance creeping into her otherwise level tone, "but you can get her. Bring her back from beyond."

"Uh, not sure what's in your book, but, contrary to popular belief, not all dead people know each other. She might not even be a ghost. She might have moved on."

"She hasn't," said Cordelia, almost smiling. "Not with the summoning she was doing. We are going to send you to her, and you are going to bring her back." She tilted her head to one side. "We could do this with any blood relative. The original plan was to use Jack, but your condition makes you so much more open to this kind of thing. Your chances of success are much higher."

Danny crossed his arms. "And if I don't succeed, you'll make Dad and Jazz try."

"That's right."

"Why don't you do it?" asked Danny. "You're a blood relative, aren't you?"

"Sadly, the ritual requires four people."

"Yeah, that's the only reason, huh?" said Danny, because he liked to antagonize people he couldn't strike back against in other ways, and also because he was an idiot.

"As I said, we can always use one of the others if you do not cooperate."

"And you'll let us all go if I do?"

"If you bring back Elizabeth, yes."

"Fine," said Danny. "What do I need to do?"

"Very little," said Cordelia. "Give me your hand. Your right hand."

Reluctantly, Danny held out his hand. Cordelia took it and wrapped a thin, white cord around it.

"That will lead you to her."

"I thought you were sending me to her," said Danny.

"You won't be in exactly the same spot," said Cordelia.

Then she whipped a knife out from under the table and sliced deeply into Danny's hand. He pushed back, away, holding his bleeding hand close to his chest. The only reason the chair didn't tip back was because the other three witches were holding on to it.

"Go stand in the circle," ordered Cordelia.

In a fit of pique, Danny phased backwards through the three women holding the chair, not bothering to wait for them to move away to let him go. The shadow pushed uncomfortably against his shoulders, but did not otherwise protest.

The circle was simple, no runes or symbols, just a single line of white chalk on the dark stone. Danny stared at it for a long moment, before stepping over it and standing at the center, his elbow dripping blood as it ran down his arm from his hand.

"Alright, girls, you know what we need to do," said Cordelia.

.

Danny stood in a field of washed-out red grass. Overhead, the sky billowed with rolling, boiling gray clouds. They seemed too close. The air smelled of smoke. The horizon was blurred and warped, as if Danny were looking at it through thick, wavy glass, or as if in a dream.

This wasn't the Ghost Zone.

He took a deep breath, the smoke washing through him. Okay. He was here. Now he needed to find Elizabeth Nightingale.

He looked down at his hand. The white cord had been turned red with his blood, and it had grown longer, reaching back over his shoulder.

"Eat your hear out, Ariadne," muttered Danny. He looked over his shoulder.

A forest was on fire.

The tall, straight, slender trees burned from their tops, like candles. Their trunks were bare, entirely free of leaves, needles, or branches. Danny should have felt the heat, even at this distance. He didn't.

The bloody cord led between the trees.

"Right," muttered Danny, "because nothing can be easy."

Resigned, he started walking towards the trees and discovered that the 'grass' on the ground actually consisted of thin-walled ceramic-like tubes. Fragile ceramic tubes. The ones he stepped on shattered and cut into his bare feet. He hissed, resisting the urge to hop around and get even more shards stuck into him. The bottoms of his feet felt wet and hot. He tried to phase the shards out and couldn't.

"Is this hell?" asked Danny, aloud. "This has to be hell. Ancients."

He couldn't feel the shadow near him anymore, but that didn't mean it wasn't there. Despite the 'grass,' he hesitated to try and go ghost to fly over it. He didn't want to pass out onto the tubes and break them even more. He didn't want those shards in his face or hands.

The squelching of his blood as he shifted his weight decided it for him. He couldn't walk over all of this.

He sent one last look around him for the shadow and summoned his rings. He was relieved when they flowed smoothly over him, transforming him into a ghost, into Phantom.

His normal hazmat suit did not appear, however. Instead, the white robes he had been dressed in turned black. Danny frowned at this. He was not a fan. He wanted his hazmat back.

Whatever. There were more important things to focus on. For example, both his blood and the cord had turned a lurid, ectoplasmic green. Much easier to see against the red-hued backdrop of this world.

He lifted up off the ground and flew on, occasionally pausing to pull shards out of his feet. His accelerated healing made the wounds scab over quickly. The cut on his hand, however, continued to bleed freely. This was beginning to concern him. He didn't have an infinite supply of blood. Or ectoplasm. Whatever.

As he approached the burning forest, he expected to start feeling heat, but even when he was right at the treeline, hovering midway up the impossibly tall, thin tree trunks, he couldn't feel anything. It wasn't hot. It wasn't cold. The smoke didn't smell any stronger.

Even so, he knew fire didn't have to be hot to burn. Fire was a chemical reaction, and Danny had no intention of being one of the reactants.

That was, if this place obeyed anything like normal physical laws. Since the trees hadn't actually burned down at all, the fire staying at the same height, he had to conclude that they didn't.

Still. He was going to stay away from the fire. Briefly, he considered flying over the forest, but the cord angled ever so slightly down, and he didn't know how the cord would fare trailing through the fire. Nothing the witches had said made him think it was indestructible.

He flew under the fires. It was bright underneath the trees, in a sort of inverse of a real forest. Bright, dry, and somehow brittle. Danny flew cautiously. This might nor be the Ghost Zone, but he didn't trust it not to have carnivorous landscape features, and even Earthly forests had their dangers. Lions and tigers and bears.

Oh my.

The angle on the cord began to point down more sharply. Danny was getting closer. The forest was also becoming stranger. The tree trunks bled, and glowing eight-legged flies licked at the ichor. Flowers of sickly fire bloomed from the ground in intricate geometric patterns.

Then, amid the burning brightness, Danny saw a house. A big house. A castle, even, its sides built into the burning trees, its pennants alight with flame, smaller fires moving, no, patrolling the battlements.

Danny quickly went invisible. He had a horrible suspicion that Elizabeth would be in the dungeons of that castle. The cord was going to make him hilariously easy to see, not to mention that he was still dripping blood. This was going to suck so much.

But as Danny approached, the fire creatures did not appear to have noticed the cord at all. Some of them even passed through it without slowing down.

Okay. So, as shocking as it was, Danny had actually caught a break.

Slowly, relying on the fire creatures to open the doors, Danny made his way through the castle and down. Down. Down.

The walls down here glowed, as if with heat, but it was a dull, old, tired glow. A rosy cherry color that burned Danny's eyes and made his head pound. Doors in the walls were made of wood that burned from the inside, veins of embers streaking their surface. The bars set in them glowed white-orange.

The green cord snaked across the floor and wove in between the bars of one of these doors.

Danny stopped. He was quite sure Elizabeth was behind that door. But...

Was freeing her the right thing to do? He had gotten the impression that she was dangerous. At least as dangerous as those witches. Even to save his family, should he set someone like that loose on the world?

But Danny had made this decision and all decisions like it the moment he died in the portal. That was the essence of an Obsession.

Besides. Elizabeth was family, too.

He held out his hands, letting frost form on his fingers and palms and pressed them against the door. Once again, he wondered why he couldn't feel any heat. He should. His ice should at least be registering the pressure, the power drain, of something trying to melt it. It didn't.

Ice spread over the door, extinguishing the light and making the metal creak. Feathery tendrils wound up the bars and encased the hinges. The wood began to fall into ash, as if the fire had been the only thing holding it together, and the bars clattered to the ground.

The inside of the cell was incandescent white. The only dark spot was a huddled, burnt black figure in the corner. The cord let straight to it.

Danny, very emphatically, did not want to go into that room. He hovered at the threshold.

"Elizabeth Nightingale?" he called, softly. If the falling bars hadn't alerted the fire creatures to his presence, he wasn't going to ruin that luck by speaking too loud. "Elizabeth?"

The figure abruptly lurched sideways and fell. Danny flinched. Bit by bit, the figure clawed their way towards the door, dragging itself onward.

Danny could hardly bring himself to watch. Part of him wanted to help. Part of him wanted to run far, far away and never come back.

But, at last, the ruined and horrible body made it to the threshold. It reached up with a claw-like hand and grasped Danny's ankle. He cringed at the feeling of the flaking burnt flesh, but didn't try to shake off the hand. He bent slightly, unsure if he should try to help the figure up.

"You," rasped the figure, ash falling from its jaw, "not from here."

"Um," said Danny. "No. I'm not."

The figure began to pull itself up. As it did so, it sort of began to piece itself back together. Danny had seen similar things before, with ghosts returning to their base form, healing, after an unusually devastating attack. Usually, though, it was slower and usually-

Danny abruptly pulled away. Usually ghosts who were doing that were draining his energy to do it. He glared.

"One of mine?" asked the figure, that was now decidedly feminine. It finally drew itself to its knees. Her knees. "One of my," she coughed, "grandchildren?"

"I'm a descendant of yours, I guess," said Danny, cautiously. He wasn't quite pressed up against the far wall, but he was close.

"You came for me," she said. Her voice was still too rough and dry for Danny to detect any emotion in it.

"I was sent," said Danny, flatly. "If I pick you up, are you going to start draining me again?"

She didn't respond for a long time. "No," she said, finally.

"Great," said Danny. "Let's go."

Elizabeth wasn't hard to carry. She wasn't much larger than Jazz, and he flew her around all the time. The problem was, he couldn't seem to extend his invisibility to her. Any power he sent to cover her was simply absorbed.

"Okay," he said, finally. "We'll just have to be fast, then." Mentally, he began to map out the path he would have to take, and how many doors he would have to blow down. It made for a discouraging picture.

"They can't harm you," croaked Elizabeth.

"What?"

"Pure soul. They can't harm you." She reached up to trace his chin and cheek with her still-charred fingers. "You don't feel the heat. You can't. You can't be harmed."

"Uh. Yeah. I don't think that's how it works. I stepped on some sharp stuff when I first got here, and, let me tell you, it hurt."

"The fires can't burn you. Sending you was clever." Elizabeth seemed to have exhausted herself at that; her hand fell back into her lap.

Right. Well. Whatever. The fires hadn't burnt him yet, but he had stayed well away from them. He was going to continue to do so.

He took a deep breath and flew out of the dungeons as quickly as he could. As expected, the fire creatures spotted him quickly, and they began to shout and shriek in a language Danny couldn't even begin to understand.

They also threw fireballs. And fire spears. And fire chains. Just, a lot of things made out of fire.

It was a good thing Danny had ice powers. Otherwise he would have had a hard time combating all this. A few fireballs passed far too close to his head for comfort. His ice also seemed to be unusually effective on doors.

Finally, Danny was able to get above ground, and, no longer constrained to follow the cord around his wrist, he escaped through a window. He spiraled up, almost high enough to hit the underside of the flames licking at the trees, and then dove away.

"So," he said, "what now?"

"You don't know?" Elizabeth looked a lot better now. Almost human.

"I wasn't given a whole lot of information when they coerced me into doing this. They just said to follow the cord to you, and I did that." Speaking of which, what had happened to the cord? It had just vanished, without Danny even noticing. "I was half-expecting to just get zapped back the moment I found you."

"Coerced?"

"They said they'd make my dad or my sister do this, if I didn't, and they can't fly."

"They're alive."

"Yeah."

There was something like a frown on Elizabeth's face. "They shouldn't have done that."

"Yeah. You don't have to tell me that." More shrieks were approaching from the direction of the castle. "They did this with one of your books. Please tell me you know how to get out of here."

Elizabeth licked her lips. Her tongue was pink. "We go out where you came in," she said.

Danny looked at the trees around him. He only knew where the castle was because of the noises coming from that direction. Otherwise, everything looked the same in every direction. He was pretty sure that even if he went back to the castle, he wouldn't be able to tell which direction he had approached it from, and after that...

They were screwed.

"Follow the blood," said Elizabeth.

It was better than nothing, Danny supposed. His green blood did stand out against the red, but he's been high in the air when he shed it. Following that trail was going to suck, and it still required going back to the castle and avoiding all the fire creatures.

Some of this must have shown on his face, because Elizabeth said, "Not like that, boy, look." She pointed to the small puddle of ectoplasm that had dripped from his hand while they had been talking.

Flowers and vines were growing from it. Ghostly green and blue flowers and vines. As he watched, the vines grew longer, the flowers opened wider.

"Oh," Danny said. "I guess that makes things easier."

.

Easier was, of course, a relative term. Was following the trail left by ghostly plants growing out of Danny's blood easier than stumbling blindly around the burning forest? Yes. Was it easy? No. No it was not. Especially not with the fire creatures hunting them through the trees and how far apart the blood spatters could be.

Still. Danny was able to follow the trail for an hour before the fire creatures caught up to him.

When they did, they seemed almost, confused. They didn't attack. It was like they were waiting for something.

Danny would have run, but he was worried that he'd lose the trail if he tried to do that, and he didn't think he'd be able to find it again. He and the fire creatures stared each other down. Every few seconds, one of them would make a noise and another would answer.

Rapidly, Danny was becoming surrounded. He would have to make his move soon. He really didn't want to lose the trail, but he didn't think he could win this fight.

Too many enemies. Too much fire. Maybe if he flew straight up, he-

The fire creatures attacked. Danny ducked, wove, and conjured shields of ice and ectoenergy, but there was a limit to what he could do against this many attackers, especially while carrying Elizabeth.

He saw a ball of fire coming that he couldn't dodge and instinctively twisted to spare Elizabeth.

It splashed against him harmlessly.

Everything stopped. The fire creatures froze, even their flames going still, as though they were videos that had been paused. One began to wail, and then they all fled, disappearing into the brightness of the forest.

"A pure soul," said Elizabeth again. She patted his shoulder. Her skin was a burnt red, now. Her eyes were as blue as his were when he was human. Her frown was deeper, more obvious. "It was clever to send you... but they shouldn't have."

"Sure," said Danny, a little surprised. He scanned the trees, trying to see if any of the fire creatures were waiting in ambush. Seeing none, he continued.

.

They reached the field of tubes, and Danny followed his blood trail back to where he had lacerated his feet.

"Now what," he said.

"Land," said Elizabeth.

Danny grimaced, remembering what had happened to his feet the last time he had tried to walk here. He landed carefully on what looked like the thickest part of the vine growing from his blood-

-and was abruptly back in the chalk circle in Cordelia's basement.

The shadow pounced on him. Unprepared, Danny dropped Elizabeth and fell. Pain sparkled along his limbs as the shadow pulled at his ghost form. It was too much. The lack of sleep, the hunger, the stress, the energy he had spent finding Elizabeth and bringing her back, the blood loss and pain from the wound in his hand, his inability to protect his family, and now this attack. He curled up, trying to protect his head and hand, and abandoned his ghost form.

"Stop this at once!"

"Grandmother, I-"

"Call off this shadow."

A beat. "Very well." The shadow stopped its assault, and Danny stumbled up and out of the circle, scuffing the lines beyond all recognition. Cordelia and Elizabeth were the only women standing. The boarders were all kneeling, faces hidden.

"Grandmother, many times great grandmother, I greet you. I am Cordelia, the last descendant of your daughter, Mary, and I have labored long to bring you back to this world, so that your works will not be lost."

Elizabeth, Danny noted, was standing very straight, her skin sunburn-pink in all but a few places, her arms crossed over the burnt rags of what might have once been a shirt. She did not look pleased.

"So my works won't be lost," repeated Elizabeth.

"Your son betrayed you," said Cordelia. "He burned all your books, all your magics. This is all that survived." Cordelia held up the singed book.

Elizabeth pressed her eyelids together briefly. "And so, you forced your cousin, a child, into that place after me, rather than coming on your own?"

"There was no choice-"

"There is always a choice," said Elizabeth, cutting her off with a sharp gesture. "Better that book should have burned as well, and I was imprisoned forever. You were lucky in my captors. Others would have delighted in taking a pure soul as an ornament for their court, even if they couldn't have harmed him."

"You can't mean that-"

"I do. Is it true you have imprisoned the other members of this boy's family?"

"He would never have agreed, otherwise. Please, this is all we have left of our heritage. We need you. This was all necessary. I beg of you, teach us."

Danny began to back away, to the ladder. Maybe if he got out fast enough, he could trap them in the basement and look for Jazz and his parents.

"Do you know how I wound up there? In that place?" asked Elizabeth. "I went too far, and I ignored the rules. What's your name?"

"Cordelia."

"Cordelia. Cordelia Nightingale-Fenton?"

"Just Nightingale."

"I begin to see," said Elizabeth.

Danny was almost to the ladder. Maybe he could tap into his ghost powers a little bit and float up, quietly.

"If you had come to get me yourself, if you had even asked him-" Elizabeth gestured to where Danny had been. Both women did a double-take, and then their eyes traced up to where Danny currently was.

"What are you doing?" hissed Cordelia. This was the first time Danny had seen her visibly angry.

"Stop," said Elizabeth, grabbing Cordelia's shoulder. "What is your name, boy?"

"It's Daniel Fenton," said Cordelia, when Danny didn't answer.

Elizabeth considered Danny for a moment. "Go to your family, Daniel. Whatever curses or enchantments Cordelia cast on them should be lifted. Including that hate curse." She ran her fingers down Cordelia's arm. "Why on earth did you cast that?" Her eyes flicked back up. "Expect to receive my correspondence, Daniel Fenton."

.

Danny found Jazz and his parents in the attic. Their luggage was there, too, and Danny and Jazz's missing clothing. Maddie's cell phone was going off. Danny ignored it. He started shaking them. Slowly, they came awake.

"Danny?" said Jazz. She scrubbed at her eyes. "Ugh, what's that sound?"

"Mom's phone is going off."

"What?" said Maddie, groggily. "My phone?" She fumbled at her pocket. "Yes, what is it? Yes, this is Doctor Fenton. What? Well," this last word was a bit snide. "It's about time. We'll be there before the end of the day." She snapped the phone closed. "Jack, sweetheart, wake up, we're going back home. All the charges against us have been dropped, and they want us to look into a ghost attack. Apparently, Phantom didn't show up. As we knew he wouldn't."

"Huh? Ghost? Where?"

"In Amity Park, Jack."

"In Amity Park! Alright!" said Jack, jumping to his feet, and grabbing most of the luggage. "I knew they wouldn't last two days without us! Let's go, kids!"

He ran down the stairs. Maddie took a moment to look around, pursing her lips. "How did we get up here?" she asked. She shook her head, dismissing the question. "Do either of you kids know where Cordelia is?"

"She went out," said Danny. "To town. She won't be back 'til later."

"We'll have to leave a note, then. You two should get dressed before we go, or you'll have to try and do it in the GAV bathroom."

"So what really happened?" asked Jazz, after Maddie went down the stairs.

"Long story," said Danny, throwing on a pair of jeans, "and we really do need to leave. Fast." He took his luggage and rushed down the stairs.

.

Danny watched Cordelia's house shrink in the rear-view mirror of the GAV, right up until it shimmered out of existence like a mirage. He clenched his teeth. He had seen worse.

He turned in his seat and put his hands in his pockets, intending to brood over what had happened, but his hand encountered a stiff piece of paper that had definitely, absolutely, not been there before. Well. Elizabeth had said to expect her correspondence.

He pulled a crisp white envelope out of his pocket. On the front, in spidery cursive, was his name. He turned it over. On the back flap was written the name Elizabeth NF.

She was family. Distantly. He put his thumb under the back flap, and began to open the letter.