(AU: Jack and Maddie are there for Danny's accident)
"Can I take this off?" Her son groaned, "I don't really have to walk around with this, do I?"
She sighed with a gentle chuckle.
"Sure, sweetie. Just as long as you keep the jumpsuit on. Safety rules."
With a sigh of great relief, Danny ripped the patch of Jack's face off his chest.
...she really hoped it wouldn't upset Jack that much.
As much as she loved her husband's antics, she knew things like this didn't sit well with her youngest.
She had no reason not to let this slide.
Jack, meanwhile, sat at the control panel—tinkering away with the buttons and checking the settings and power attachments.
"Can I go take a look?" Danny asked.
"Sure thing, kiddo!" Jack beamed. Maddie elbowed him quickly in the side.
"What? It's all off right now, everything's fine!"
Maddie sighed with light exasperation at her husband, and made her way over to the control panel.
"Any idea what's wrong with it?" She asked. He shook his head, sadly.
"Nope. We have everything calibrated exactly according to the blueprints. We should have it working this time. It just...isn't."
...screams exploded into the air behind them.
There was barely time to react—they whipped around.
In an entire second, Jack and Maddie's lives flipped completely upside down.
The portal frame, once empty, set alight with a blinding green like fire, and the silhouette of their son inside arched backwards, one hand planted firmly onto the inner wall.
Maddie's heart leapt up her throat, her mind desperately pleading for it not to be real.
"JACK! TURN IT OFF!" she screamed.
He jammed the power button on the panel futilely.
"I CAN'T! IT'S ALREADY OFF!"
Wild, guttural, agonising, feral...
Jack, in hard desperation, finally launched forward to the cord on the floor, ripped out the plug, but the blinding assault asserted its own due time—its right, bought by hundreds of brutal volts, to start and end as it pleased.
...finally, after a painful eternity, the light faded without a sound. Maddie's scream was guttural.
The blinding shimmering faded...but the greenness did not. The portal was no longer empty—now swirling with an inhuman vortex...
The lab fell into stillness, silent save for the gentle humming of the portal.
Seconds passed, agonisingly.
In the silence, in the emptiness, a small figure stumbled out of the portal.
A glowing figure, dressed in black, with a shock of white hair.
The white fringe steered upwards, and a deep horror welled in Maddie's throat.
That hair should've been black.
She could see it—the lithe body, the now-black jumpsuit that should've been white, the young boyish features an unmistakeable mix of her and her husband's.
"...mum?" The voice hissed, less like a true reverberation from a voice box and more like a whistle on a wind.
Maddie's hands dart to her mouth in horror. Unshed tears pricked the corners of her eyes.
Green eyes—acid-green, ectoplasmic-green—flicked upwards and caught hers with a magnetic pull.
The form glowed with an unearthly aura, slumped on the laboratory floor.
Slowly, that gaze drifted down to his hands—to the sight of glowing white gloves...
...the clueless daze escalated into panic.
"...w-what...what's going on...?! What happened to me...?!"
The ghost's eyes flickered to Maddie.
"...mum...? No...please don't cry! ...please...!"
The figure stumbled to its feet. Its steps barely rang about the lab, traitorously silent as if pulled by something weightless, and it crooned out with a shaking hand.
Years of rational theory-crafting and research in the back of her head rattled on, in a voice cold and clinical.
A real, completely undeniable ghost.
"Mads—" Jack warned, his own his eyes wide in horror, but she didn't hear him. She stumbled forward.
But the part of her warning of hollow echoes of consciousness and shallow tricks faded out under the pain wrenching in her chest.
The spectre's face stiffened with recognition at the name. Got up on two feet and shakily stumbled.
In a brief, but sickening, flash...Maddie was thirteen years younger, and her infant son was toddling up on his feet for the first time. She held her arms out in eager excitement.
But then the cruel reality flashed into the present. The form that shook before her was glowing and ethereal, see-through like the smoke of a dying fire.
This was not a birth...but a death.
The spectre made it several steps, but after a short few seconds he collapsed to his knees—right as her arms opened.
...rather than her hands catching him as he stumbled, he fell right through her arms, leaving faint ectoplasmic whisps on her gloves.
(Jack followed suit—approached them hesitantly, wrapped an arm around her and huddles over the prone form that had just slipped through her fingers).
They barely had a second to speak, to mourn, to pull back with a deep breath and piece the scattered fragments of order in their head back together—
A strange halo of light burst into existence at the ghost's waist. It split into two, travelling in both directions over the glowing shape...
...the glow receded. The jumpsuit became white, the hair black, the skin pale and cold but human—
Blue eyes blinked rapidly. Her baby took deep staggering breaths, hands reaching out for her, shaking.
Time slowed down. Confusion crawled out of her stomach and up her throat, and for once, Maddie couldn't breathe.
The traitorous terror dissolved into the ambivolous presence of bemused relief.
"...Danny?" She asked quietly.
Her son squeezed his eyes shut beneath her. She grabbed for his wrist, hauled off the glove with a desperate fervour to feel the vein beneath.
...it thrummed with life underneath the skin.
A wave of confusion washed over Maddie. Her mind froze in its tracks. Her head so light she felt like she could faint.
"Am I...a ghost?" Danny finally croaked, "Am I dead?"
Slowly, befuddled, Maddie shook her head.
It should've been obvious. It should've been impossible.
And yet, in this moment, it was a question without an answer.
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