“But what if I change into something worse?” Daniil bowed his head, gaze dropping to the Crowstone’s back. “What if I become something unrecognizable? I already feel it sometimes. Like the real Bachelor Dankovsky died a long time ago, and I’m just the thing that stepped out of his grave and kept walking.”
or
There are consequences to meddling with time. Bachelor Daniil Dankovsky finds himself trapped in a special kind of hell, searching endlessly for the solution to an impossible task while memories of his past slowly slip away. A single frail human cannot be expected to overcome such a terrible foe, regardless of what special power he may have stumbled into by "happenstance". He will have to unite with others if any piece of himself is to survive past the twelfth day.
Pathologic 3: Quarantine singlehandedly gave me the ability to write again so here we go! New fic! \o/
Also big thank you to @dairisrls for beta reading and helping to keep me writing. 💜 If you haven't read Bread and Twyre yet then I highly recommend it!
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Accumulated Days: 60. Day 1, In which the Bachelor must find a way to protect himself, and in so doing abandon another to his fate.
Daniil woke with a ragged gasp and kicked the sheets off of himself. Chill air hit sweat-soaked skin like a hammer blow as he lay there, his chest heaving with every panic-laden breath, but the sudden discomfort did nothing to dislodge the memory lingering in the front of his mind. He could still feel the agony of flames consuming his body, wringing the moisture from his skin, twisting muscles underneath with heat, consuming every part of him. His stomach rolled and threatened to pump bile up his throat as he struggled to push the memory away.
Bandits had snuffed him out three times thus far. The first two times it was with knives, and the third... with fire. And that was by far the worst way to die that he’d found so far. Nothing could compare to the sheer level of agony that came from burning alive.
His breaths came slower now, and the clammy stickiness of dried sweat outpaced all other sensations. Exhaustion crept in as panic receded, as sure and relentless as the tide.
He couldn’t keep going like this, couldn’t keep dying at the hands of madmen with too much greed and too little sense. They’d catch him without amalgam eventually. And if that happened, he’d lose what meager progress he’d made in defeating the outbreak, and the town would be that much closer to its permanent demise. He had to find a replacement for his revolver, that had to take priority over all else.
So excited to finally be able to post this! It's my first time taking part in a big DP fandom event! 💜 I had an absolute blast working with @braisedhoney for @ecto-implosion 2023, and it even spawned an entire AU as well!
Go look at the art that inspired this fic! It's so good!!
You can also read this on Ao3 if you'd prefer.
Summary
The first meeting between Jazz and Dan following the timestream’s restoration doesn’t go as planned. Dan reflects on old memories and new vulnerabilities as he digs through the rubble.
Warnings
Brief gore, blood, explosion aftermath, grief, body horror, trauma flashback
The Fic
It was cold. Water dripped from the cavity’s ceiling, ran down the back of his neck and left chilling trails in its wake. He still wasn’t used to being able to feel such sensations to this degree. To being... Attached to a human body again.
The low rumble of debris continuing to settle shuddered through the cavity they’d found themselves in. A distinctly fungal smell hung in the air, of long-undisturbed earth recently awoken by the struggle of briefer creatures. It coated the inside of his mouth, now partially open to bear fangs as he stared down at the ghost who had given him so much trouble. An enemy who had at last realized the price of picking a fight with him.
Phantom, Dark Danny, the last remaining echo of a miserable future now unmade... He still wasn’t sure what to call himself. The old man had taken to calling him Dan. The name was brief, immediate, and wasted no unnecessary time. It was good enough, though he’d never let Vlad know that.
There was a choice to be made. He and his enemy weren’t the only ones down here. He could finish this wretch off for good, make sure he never dared to bother him again, or track down the other who had fallen in the collapse. With the clone body already deteriorating, already straining under his full form he could only choose one.
Humiliation had its claws in him. He’d nearly lost the fight, he was supposed to be stronger than this. The thought of putting the feeling to rest permanently was a tempting one...
“Get lost,” Dan snarled, his red eyes wide and focused and threatening even greater violence should his enemy turn down this opportunity. His breath streamed out before him like dragon smoke, its heat stolen by the chill of the hungry earth. That, too, was something he still wasn’t used to.
Vortex briefly considered his options. He was on his last leg and in the process of collapsing into an amorphous state, but the battlelust of their previous conflicts still rang through his being with an intensity that was hard to ignore. For a moment he appeared to be gathering for another strike, his body crackling with anticipation, only to suddenly surge up through the ceiling and out of the collapse.
Dan straightened and watched the point on the ceiling where Vortex had disappeared. When seconds stretched by and no ambush came he let out a long sigh and took a step back, broad shoulders drooping. He was still getting used to the power adjustments. To the new bodies. The new... Everything. And it cost him in this fight.
He scowled and turned to the span of collapse behind him.
Now to find her.
Dan knew where she’d been when they fell; Vortex had knocked her away before Dan broke through the power restraints and stepped between them. All he had to do was keep digging until he found her. Slower than using intangibility, but any ghost power would only accelerate his host’s deterioration at this point.
He pulled the first slab of concrete aside.
It had been an embarrassing fight. Frustration burned white-hot as Dan reviewed his performance and found it sorely lacking, and it wasn’t just this time. He’d utterly destroyed Vortex back in the other timeline, yet in this one he’d been clashing with the ghost for weeks as the two sought to prove who was stronger. Ridiculous. He should’ve been able to blast Vortex into nothingness long before this.
Dan grit his teeth and shifted more debris, freezing when the mass above him groaned ominously. The jumble held, dust shafting down around him as it quieted. He kept going.
This was Vlad’s fault. Always going on about how Dan had to be more careful with the new ‘power restrictions’, how the way he treated his host bodies was ‘wasteful’. If he could just get the power adjustments right this wouldn’t be a problem. Vlad just wasn’t trying hard enough.
A carelessly-shifted chunk of concrete fell back on his forearm. He growled and hurled it into the cavity behind him, ectoplasm dripping onto the dirt and debris at his feet. Dan paused to look down at the wound. The concrete must’ve had exposed rebar poking out of it to make a gash this deep and jagged.
Not good. If his body was this vulnerable already—
Dan cut the thought short and continued on.
Memories rose with the shifting dust, of the time before the explosion. Of the aftermath of the worst fights when he had to limp his way home...
—when he had only a vast empty house to return to, the silence broken by nothing save for the sound of his own movements and the creaking of a structure settling after dark.
Dan shook his head. Not the dual memories again...
It never used to be this much of an issue, back in the other timeline. But then he’d stamped out all true adversity years ago back there. Less struggle, less opportunity for such memories to slip in. A simpler way of being that wasn’t constantly flinging existential questions at his face and expecting answers he couldn’t provide.
The next span was too unstable to shift. Dan searched for a place he might be able to crawl through—difficult with his large frame—and found only a small hole. He would have to briefly use intangibility to get through this.
Did she even make it—
It’s fine, he told himself. It would be her own fault for getting involved where she shouldn’t have. She wasn’t even his Jazz...
A chill settled over him as he shifted to a different phase to the physical matter around him. Dan dove through the wall and found that it was as thin as he’d hoped it would be. He released his power and staggered a few steps as he touched down.
The clone body held. For now.
Why did she have to step in? He didn’t need her help.
But then, that was what she’d always done, wasn’t it? When his parents weren’t there for him, Jazz was.
His Jazz. The one who’d been gone for over a decade now...
—collapsed in front of their graves. A loss so complete it was a wonder he hadn’t died on the spot.
Dan clutched at his head and willed the memory back down into the abyss of subconscious. He didn’t need this right now. It didn’t make sense anyway. She wasn’t the same Jazz.
The twisting in his gut exposed the lie for what it was. Emotions he’d stifled and strangled long ago were even now resurrecting themselves as he searched beneath the cold earth.
Like a grave, the thought crept in, with coarse concrete slabs for tombstones. A grave he’d sent countless other humans to without a second thought…
It’s fine. He’d been willing to throw her away again for the sake of power. He didn’t care.
A lie, and an ill-constructed one at that. Willing to throw her away yet still so grief-stricken over losing her to begin with. Was he capable of making sense? Was it his nature to be contradictory?
He forced down another grieving memory before it could properly materialize. This had to be because of the stupid clone body dragging him back down into those pesky human emotions. Its glitchy biological programming was throwing his trauma at him again after he’d already dealt with it years ago.
If he could just keep it together—!
It was silent beneath the earth, save for his own efforts. He hadn’t once heard a cry for help from the person he was looking for.
Dread crept in and sank its teeth into the back of his neck.
She had that armor on. It could withstand a collapse like this, right? Fenton gadgets were ridiculously robust, and the Peeler’s armor was meant for high defense. She was fine.
Right?
Dan continued on and pulled another piece of concrete aside, then he sensed it.
There was something warm up ahead. The realization gave him a burst of speed.
It’s fine. She wasn’t in danger anyway. The Peeler’s armor kept her safe. He didn’t need to worry like this!
At last he broke into the cavity she’d landed in. A few dozen feet and he’d be able to put these wretched emotions to rest.
Dan forged ahead, and trod on a loose slab of concrete that shifted the ceiling above.
Debris thundered down on him and threatened to bury the cavity entirely. He brought his arms up to catch the worst of it, and the slabs fell between himself and Jazz
No, no! He was strong, the ultimate foe! It would be fine! He would make it so!
Dan gave a wordless roar as he shoved the topmost slabs off of him.
He was running out of time. Again. If he could just go faster!
Memories washed over him. He’d realized something was wrong just before the explosion, turned to fly toward the Nasty Burger, to do something, anything, to protect them. The memory played back at an agonizing pace, as if he were moving through tar as he struggled to get there in time. It was already too late.
He lost his grip on a slab. It fell back on him and cut his right thigh open.
It’s fine. He would make it this time, push to the absolute limits of this wretched artificial body if he had to. He was stronger now. She wouldn’t be stolen from him again!
Dan remembered just in time that mindless thrashing was the last thing he wanted to do in this situation. He forced those stupid worthless emotions back down and steadied his hands as he pushed debris off of himself.
It’s fine.
At last it came down to the final concrete slab. Dan hefted it with both arms and tossed it aside.
It’s—
He froze. She lay with her back against a slab of concrete, eyes closed behind the cracked visor despite the tumult that had just taken place before her. There was blood on the armor.
Hers—?!
A swarm of unbidden memories rose around him, of running toward the smoldering remains of the explosion—
—the bodies—
—charred but still—
—blood—
—pieces—
—unrecognizable—
A sudden, agonizing shudder shook the memories loose. The clone body was starting to give. Blood-tinged ectoplasm dripped from his hands.
Dan struggled to catch his breath and made himself look at her again.
The same. Ectoplasm shifting into blood. She’d been standing behind him when Vortex landed a severe blow earlier.
The release in tension was almost enough to drive him to his knees.
It wasn’t hers.
Dan walked to her, forcing himself to take slow deliberate steps. He stopped at her feet and leaned down.
There was a light mist clouding the inside of the armor’s visor.
She was breathing.
Jazz stirred. “Who’s there?” she asked, her voice quiet and strained. She was in pain.
“It’s me,” Dan said. Before, it would’ve been enough. His voice alone was the only introduction he’d needed in the other timeline. Now he struggled for something more to pin on to the end of the phrase. Nothing felt right.
Jazz opened her eyes and squinted up at him. She smiled. “I knew you’d come back.”
“Know-it-all,” Dan grumbled before he could stop himself. Now to muster the strength to phase them out of here—
His body gave. His form started to run, to lose its shape. Every cell screamed in agony as flesh lost its grip on bone. Dan fell to his knees. The halo appeared at his waist, returning him to the clone’s form.
He’d been forced to wear Danny’s face to survive, but he refused to wear the same clothes. The battle had been hard enough that the black leather jacket, jeans, and t-shirt would have to be replaced, even without the blood and ectoplasm leaking onto them. His boots might be salvageable if he didn’t get too much ectoplasm on them. If he was able to make it out of this, anyway. The chances of that were growing increasingly slim. He looked up to find Jazz watching him with a mix of shock and horror on her face.
“You’re—”
“The clone bodies don’t do so well when I go full form,” Dan said, looking away. He dragged himself over to her, his body screaming with pain every inch of the way, and let himself rest on the slab.
“I can’t get to my phone,” Jazz said, sounding guilty. “The armor won’t come off, it’s dented in the back.”
What does she have to be sorry for? It was his fault Vortex showed up… Some first meeting this turned out to be...
“I’ll call the old man,” Dan said, silently chiding himself for not thinking of that earlier. And for not letting Jazz call Danny in when Vortex first showed up. He hadn’t wanted his other self to get involved…
Dan took the cell phone from an inner pocket of his jacket, his hand shaky enough to risk dropping it at any moment. He willed what steadiness he could into the limb and hit the only number he had on speed dial, then switched it to the speaker setting. In his defense he wasn’t used to having a phone again just yet. He simply hadn’t remembered during all the commotion.
“Old man?” Jazz asked as they waited.
Vlad picked up on the second ring. “So you finally decided to check in,” he said, tone clipped and impatient. “And where have you been? You disappeared hours ago—”
“Amity Park,” Dan said, cutting off the rest of Vlad’s rant. They didn’t have time for this.
“What are you doing in Amity Park!?”
“Melting under a collapsed building. Jazz is here too.”
The audio became muffled by a hand to the receiver, but Dan was very sure he could make out Vlad shouting an actual swear word into the empty lab in Wisconsin. It cleared again, and Vlad was all business when he spoke next: “I need you to turn on your phone’s tracker. Is Jasmine hurt? How badly?”
Dan looked at her.
“I don’t think anything’s broken,” Jazz said. She winced when she took a deeper breath. “But the Fenton Peeler’s damaged and pressing on my back. It hurts too much to move.”
“Alright. I’ll have to go through the Ghost Zone to get there in time,” Vlad said. There was the distant sound of equipment being moved in the background as he made ready. “If I have to blow my cover because of you—”
“Just get your ass in gear, old man,” Dan growled. Vlad would figure it out. Somehow he always did. “Lecture me after this is over.”
“Stop calling me that! I’m not even fifty yet!” Vlad snapped, then he hung up without saying goodbye.
“Are you sure he’ll be here—” Jazz began before the silence could properly close in.
“He will, I just had to make him get off the phone and focus. He hasn’t let me melt yet.” Dan brought up his other hand, squinting in the near darkness as he turned the phone’s tracker on.
“And the melting happens… Often?”
“Yeah, because he still can’t get the bodies right,” Dan grumbled. If Vlad could at least make an adult clone then maybe they’d get somewhere. He hated being stuck in a frail teen body again. “If I don’t hold back they break.”
Jazz inhaled as if to say something about that, then let the breath go instead.
Silence descended on them, filled only by the hiss of falling dust and the grumble of settling earth.
It was cold. Dan could feel it even through his jacket. Even through the pain of his body’s deterioration. In all his years of fighting he’d never run afoul of a pain like this, of having his body slowly picked apart molecule by molecule, torn by gravity as much as by the bindings within his cells coming undone. Even the Fenton Peeler’s effects couldn’t match it. Perhaps the cold was somehow sharpened by his dying nervous system, or by the breakdown in circulation. It wasn’t a subject he was familiar with. All he knew was that he was in pain, and that the cold sapped even more comfort from his predicament.
He didn’t want to think about what would happen if Vlad didn’t make it here in time. The pain would stop, but so would he.
Forever.
Jazz shifted, armor scraping against the slab at their backs, and put her near hand on his arm. She tugged at his sleeve, inviting him closer.
Dan hesitated. He still didn’t understand her attachment to him. Why she kept giving him chances he didn’t deserve. He wasn’t her Danny anymore...
Still, it was cold. Perhaps being closer would offer a little warmth. A little comfort while he waited to find out if this would be the day he met his end.
He pulled himself to her and laid himself across the arm she’d beckoned him over with. Jazz draped her forearm over him, holding him in a half-hug as they lay there. There was no warmth. The armor kept them separate and pressed into his upper back in uncomfortable ways, but he didn’t care. This was enough.
His eyes started to drift shut, his vision blurring slightly. He was running out of power. Jazz was in too much pain to move, even talking was difficult for her. They were in a sorry state.
He shouldn’t have come here on a whim without even warning her beforehand. Not when Vortex had it out for him, anyway. But he couldn’t stop thinking about what she said during that climactic battle, how she insisted that he was still part of her family even as he threatened to tear it apart in front of her eyes. Even after he’d leveled half the city.
It was something he still didn’t understand, even though he wanted to.
A pained shudder jolted through his body, bringing him back to the present.
There would be no asking why she still treated him like family for now. He had to conserve energy and hope that help would arrive in time.
Dan closed his eyes and waited.
Jazz wasn’t sure how much time had passed. In a place without sunlight or moonlight and without access to her phone she could only guess. Pain stretched everything longer than it should have been, but at least being able to hold one of her brothers brought some comfort.
She wanted to talk to him. Ask what his life was like now, if he was happy. How he arrived at where he was in the other timeline. But present circumstances made that impossible; just breathing hurt thanks to the way the armor crumpled into her upper back, and Dan was clearly so low on energy that any conversation was out of the question. It was horrifying, watching him slowly melt into ectoplasm. She could only hope that Vlad got here before it was too late.
Her eyes were closed when she suddenly became aware of another person’s presence in the cavity.
“Well, you’re in a sorry state now, aren’t you?”
Jazz looked up to find Vlad Plasmius, arms folded over his chest and one foot tapping in the dust as he glared down at Dan like a disapproving parent. The cut on his right eyebrow had become a scar, but he was looking much better than he had when she’d last seen him. There was a large metal coffin at his side, for what purpose she could only guess.
“About time you got here, old man,” Dan growled, though there was little venom left in his words.
“You’d think that a ghost with your level of experience would be capable of managing a vessel better,” Vlad grumbled as he pressed a button on the coffin’s lid. It opened with a hiss and the whir of multiple servos on its hinges, revealing a dimly-lit chamber within.
“If you’d just make the vessels better—!”
“I am not bothering Daniel because of your carelessness!” Vlad snapped. He met no resistance as he scooped Dan up and carried him over to the coffin. “Now I suggest you sit tight and think about what you’ve done, young man.”
“I’m twenty-four!” Dan howled as he glared up at Vlad.
“Then act like it!” Vlad snapped back. Despite his ire he placed Dan in the coffin with care and pressed the button to close it rather than slamming it shut himself. The two glared at each other until the lid closed, then Vlad sighed and let his head fall back. “I don’t know why he can’t just adapt to the restrictions. It’s not like they exist for no reason.” He leaned over the coffin and tapped away at a combination of buttons. A soft hum came from within, and the color of the lights on its exterior changed from red to green.
“Sorry for the wait, Jasmine,” Vlad said as he turned to her, his tone more sincere than she’d ever heard from him before. “He needed to be put into stabilization immediately.” He knelt before her and tried to get a better look. “Are you able to sit up? You mentioned the damage was on your back.”
Jazz turned herself onto her side, then pushed herself up and clutched at his arm for balance with her free hand. The crumpled armor dug a bit deeper into her ribs and shoulder blade, but she wanted out and if Vlad could get the job done then she’d take a little more pain. “Back here,” Jazz said, gesturing over her left shoulder.
Vlad shifted position, allowing Jazz to use one of his knees as a prop so she wouldn’t have to expend energy sitting upright. He leaned around and took a few moments to examine the damage. “I’ll have to cut the piece away, I don’t want to risk prying you out.”
“Okay.” Jazz tried to be patient, keep her breathing slow, but the pain was becoming unbearable.
There was a gentle heat at her back, not directly over the crumpled armor but in a rough oval around it. Knowing the solution was in the works eased the pain a little.
Jazz looked at the coffin again while Vlad meticulously worked his way through the armor. A stabilization chamber... Vlad certainly had a flare for drama to build it in the shape he did.
But he’d made it in time. Dan would live to see another day. That was what she figured at least, given that things weren’t so serious as to keep the two from arguing the way they did.
“Got it.” At last Vlad lifted the damaged section of armor away.
The relief was immediate. Jazz took her first deep breath since falling into the collapse. “Thank you,” she said, a tad breathless from sheer relief.
“You’ll need to get that looked at just to be sure,” Vlad said as she deactivated the Fenton Peeler’s armor. “Should I drop you off at the hospital?” He offered her a hand and carefully pulled her to her feet.
“It might look suspicious if I just showed up at the hospital all of a sudden,” Jazz replied after taking a moment to consider the option. “I’ll get mom and dad to take me.”
“Very well, I’ll drop you off on my way out.” Vlad took the coffin by one of its handles and hefted it with ease. He slung it over one shoulder and turned to her, offering a hand again.
Jazz let him scoop her up with one arm, and soon they were out in the open air again. Vortex was nowhere to be seen once they were above the roofline of Amity Park, he was probably either skulking somewhere or had been captured by Danny already. Hopefully the latter. He was a frustrating ghost to deal with even on a good day.
“So Dan’s gonna be okay, right?” Jazz asked, just to be sure. The Ops Center came into view over the rooftops; soon she would be home.
“Despite doing his best to make sure he wouldn’t be, yes,” Vlad replied.
“I heard that, old man!” said Dan’s muffled voice from within the stabilization chamber. It rattled briefly, as if he were banging on it from the inside.
Vlad’s frown deepened but he didn’t reply.
“Thanks for the save, Vlad,” Jazz said, still a little surprised that Vlad had done anything worth thanking him for. “Are things going...” she paused to glance at the coffin, “Okay back home...?”
“Mmm...” Vlad’s mouth drew into a thin line as he thought about it. “We’re making progress... I think. It’s still better than being alone, at least.”
Not the most encouraging reply, but not the worst either.
“I think Dan’s been picking so many fights lately because he’s trying to avoid thinking about things,” Vlad added, having given a bit more thought to the question. He went invisible as they neared Fenton Works and dove toward the alley next to it.
“Well he’s free to talk to me any time,” Jazz said as they landed and Vlad carefully let her down. “Just as long as we make sure there aren’t any hostile ghosts after him.”
“That part is up to him,” Vlad said, with a glance at the coffin as they returned to full visibility. It was strangely silent. “I certainly won’t stop him from coming to see you, just as long as there isn’t a repeat of what happened today.”
They both paused with the expectation that Dan might have something to add.
“Sorry our first meeting turned out this way,” Dan said quietly. “It won’t be the same next time.”
“I’ll hold you to that,” Jazz said with a knowing smile. “And to make sure I know when you’re coming to visit...” She took a small notebook and pen from her pocket and wrote down her phone number, then tore the page off and passed it to Vlad. “Just give me a call and we can set things up properly.”
Vlad knocked on the coffin with one knuckle. “You have her number now. And what do you say?”
“Stop acting like you’re my dad!” Dan snarled, and the coffin rattled again. There was a pause, and a sigh echoed within its confines. “Thanks, Jazz. We’ll talk again soon.”
“Looking forward to it.”
“We’d best be on our way, we have a long flight ahead of us,” Vlad said.
“Wait, why aren’t we going through the Ghost Zone?”
“Because the Fentons were just going down into their lab when I arrived and I’m not risking a fight with them or Daniel for a shortcut,” Vlad replied. “Besides, you have your little visits to plan. A few hours in the dark and quiet is the perfect opportunity to do so.”
“Ugh, you’re the worst! Coward!”
Vlad turned invisible and took off, the dust of the alley dancing in the wind he stirred up.
Jazz chuckled, and immediately regretted it as her bruised ribs shifted. She hurried to the sidewalk and up the front steps of Fenton Works. The relationship between Dan and Vlad wasn’t exactly friendly from what she’d seen, but it was progress for both of them. Vlad showed up despite Dan needling him, and Dan trusted him enough to know that Vlad would be there to help despite the insults.
They would probably be arguing the whole way home, now that she thought about it.
The confines of the stabilization chamber were comfortable enough. Dimly lit, perfect temperature, far more spacious than the Fenton thermos ever was. Vlad had even worked out a sort of localized gravity that kept Dan from being jostled as the chamber was moved. Something about using certain properties of ectoplasm in a similar way to the Ghost Zone; Dan had tuned out just after the first thirty seconds of Vlad’s explanation, so that was as much as he knew. It offered a good place to slow down and think, not that he was doing so because Vlad had suggested it.
Jazz still saw him as family. Part of him had wondered if, now that things had calmed, she might have changed her mind. Or if her words hadn’t been genuine to begin with. But what she said to him during the battle hadn’t been some desperate bid to get him to back down. She meant it.
Dan smiled. He was looking forward to seeing her again, once he was back on his feet.
In the meantime, though...
“Hey, old man,” Dan began, his smile becoming a smirk. “Are we there yet?”
“We have been flying for five. Minutes!” Vlad snapped back. “And I know you’re only asking that to annoy me!”
Dan chuckled. If Vlad didn’t regret taking the long way yet, Dan would make sure he did before they got home.
A little scene illustration from the first chapter of my Paradigm Shift AU. Vlad's realizing he might not make it out of this one.
Too weak to fly or phase, nowhere left to go. Vlad would have to try getting back out of the dream while whoever this was shot at him. He put his back to the wall, closed his eyes, and concentrated on leaving, just as he’d done so many times before when overshadowing someone. This was similar enough, it should be easy.
Nothing happened. Vlad broke out into a cold sweat and tried again as he heard the pair of boots round the corner. All it did was make him feel more tired.
Vlad opened his eyes to see who it was that followed him, and found that he was faced by none other than Jack Fenton. It seemed the dream had a liking for dramatic flair, or was actively trying to spite him. The cold, unavoidable question of whether he could truly die or not in Danny’s dream blitzed across Vlad’s mind as he stared at this new opponent.
Jack Fenton, built like a bear and carrying a charged ectoblaster in his right hand as he walked closer, his bulk seeming to block the entire alley and any means of escape. Strangely the big man had no expression on his face as he came to a stop. It didn’t change even when his right arm lifted and brought the blaster level with the center of Vlad’s chest. This wasn’t even Jack as Danny saw him, it was some security protocol placed in the dream by Nocturne to keep outsiders from meddling, dressed in the image of Danny’s father.
With little strength left in his legs and Jack’s finger on the trigger Vlad took the one course left that would get him out of taking a lethal shot. He allowed his legs to buckle and tipped himself to the left as he fell in the same moment that Jack pulled the trigger. The shot grazed Vlad’s upper arm, creating a painful burn where it touched his skin. He was just barely able to keep himself from clamping his left hand over the burn on instinct, settling on gripping the length of arm just below it instead.
Vlad pushed himself to his knees and had just gotten one foot under himself when the blaster was leveled at his head. Jack had come up while Vlad was on the ground, and was now within point blank range. Even if this thing shared the man’s poor aim there was no way the shot would miss.
@schnuffel-danny approached me with a delightful premise for a Vlad/Jack fic and here's the result! 💜 Had an absolute blast writing this!
Also on Ao3!
Summary
Vlad at last receives a love letter from Jack that was written long ago and realizes he might have to change a few things...
The Fic
Vlad was trying, he really was. Maddie had told him that if he wanted to get on her good side he would have to get along with Jack. She’d already wrung several apologies out of him for his past interactions with her, which he’d gladly given once she was direct about it; clearly his past approach wasn’t working anyway, it wasn’t worth sinking any further effort into regardless and she’d provided a potential path forward for him. Hanging around with Jack was worth a try, since nothing else had worked. And he was trying.
But toxic associations and bad memories meant that getting close to Jack was like trying to cozy up to a cactus.
Jack was on board the moment Vlad asked if he wanted to spend some quality time together, even to the point of canceling all other plans for such days just to make sure they had no need to rush. He doted on Vlad like a lovesick teenager, overflowing with compliments and enthusiasm for anything Vlad was presently interested in. The whole thing turned Vlad’s stomach. He hadn’t liked it from the merciful distance he’d maintained before and he liked it even less up close.
It felt... Fake, coming from Jack. Twenty years of radio silence and suddenly Vlad was one of the most important people in Jack’s life now that he was worth something. ‘Fairweather friend’ would be the appropriate, least-vulgar term. Vlad wasn’t born yesterday. He knew how these things went.
A distant part of Vlad wondered if this was how Maddie saw him and made a mental note to stamp out any similar behavior when he noticed it. He was supposed to be better than Jack, after all. More refined, less of a clown.
Supposed to be. These days he got the sneaking suspicion that he was more like Jack than he wanted to admit, and it bothered him to no end. He would have to take a day to make sure those suspicions were only that, and to make changes if they proved true. Take stock, ask ‘is this something Jack would do?’ and then act accordingly.
Today’s hangout was thankfully out of the public eye, down in the FentonWorks lab. Unfortunately that didn’t stop Danny and his friends from wandering through, and even now Jack was gushing about Vlad to the three of them. Vlad was only half-listening as he tried to fight the embarrassed blush that was settling over his face and ears.
The second-hand embarrassment was almost too much to bear at times. Why couldn’t Jack just be normal about this? Did he really think Vlad was stupid enough to fall for such tricks? That assumption alone was an insult to Vlad’s intelligence. He had to be after something, there was no possible explanation other than that.
“Yeah, that’s great, dad,” Danny said quickly, before Jack had a chance to launch off into another Vlad-related tangent; he’d undoubtedly intended to keep an eye on the two, only to be roped into Jack’s nonsense the moment he’d been spotted. “Are you guys gonna finish up soon or what?”
Jack chuckled. “We can’t stop now, we’re on a roll! We’ve almost got this new invention all figured out, right Vladdie?” He pulled Vlad into an abrupt side-hug.
Vlad barely kept a lid on the sudden flare of anger at being touched without permission. “Yes, indeed we have,” he said, after a pause that stretched just a little too long.
Danny gave him a suspicion-filled squint but didn’t interrupt.
“That’s right! Once the Buster-Vack is operational we’ll be cleaning out the ghost infestation in this town in no time at all!” Jack said proudly.
“Dad, don’t you already have a ghost-fighting vacuum?” Danny asked. “You know, the Fenton Weasel?”
“Now Danny, it’s not like they’ll do the same thing. The Fenton Weasel sucks up ghosts, but the Buster-Vack will drain the energy right out of them and store it for use somewhere else! Much more useful!”
“Yeah, I’m sure Vlad’s gonna find a real great use for it, huh?” Danny shot a pointed look at Vlad.
“Well it could be used to charge devices that require ecto-energy to run, certainly,” Vlad said, not rising to the bait. “But that does require that we get it working first.”
“Right you are, V-man!” Jack said, giving Vlad a back-slap that would’ve sent a weaker man to the floor. “Let’s get back to it!”
~~~
In the end they made little progress on the Buster-Vack. They’d gotten hung up on the present problem of how to peel the energy off whatever ghost it was aimed at without just taking the whole ghost—there was a certain dimensionality that had to be tuned just so—and had decided to sleep on it once Maddie came down and asked them if they wanted dinner. Vlad had excused himself, unable to stomach much more of Jack’s presence, and gone home for the night.
Vlad only realized how exhausted he was after he got through his front door. He sighed, and considered whether he wanted to bother with dinner or not. An early bedtime was looking quite attractive, and eating would mean he’d have to stay up longer to avoid indigestion.
He started toward the kitchen regardless; whether he was going to have dinner or not didn’t matter when there were cats to feed. They appeared like a pair of pale shadows as he neared the kitchen, giving him burbling happy meows of greeting and inevitably getting under his feet in that special way cats did. He picked up each in turn and gave them a little kiss on the head; Maddie only half-tolerated it and immediately tried to clean the top of her head when he put her down while Marty simply purred.
His mind inevitably wandered back to the situation with Jack as he prepared their food.
He was trying. It should’ve been getting easier. He’d been doing this for weeks and he was still just as exhausted now as when he’d first started hanging out with Jack again.
Why was it still so hard to just be around him?
Because he hurt you, abandoned you, and then never even did the bare minimum of apologizing for it, his inner voice replied. Some days he wondered if Maddie’s esteem was even worth this. He’d suffered for years because of Jack, and the man just pretended nothing had even happened between them! Was he supposed to forgive and forget? Brains didn’t work that way! Humans didn’t work that way! Why was he having to do so much when Jack hadn’t even said such a simple phrase as ‘I’m sorry’?
In the end Vlad decided to go to bed without dinner. He’d only end up wandering in endless angry thought-spirals if he stayed up, and that was simply a waste of time. Better to reset, avoid Jack tomorrow, and try to recuperate.
~~~
This time Vlad waited a few days before approaching Jack again. He gave Vlad that puppy dog smile of his when he found him at the front door and immediately took him down to the lab where the Buster-Vack was still waiting. They would be able to pick up right where they left off.
“Why did you even call it that?” Vlad asked after a half-hour of batting calculations back and forth. No matter how much time he’d dedicated to puzzling over the name he hadn’t been able to figure it out. “Shouldn’t it be called, oh, the Fenton Specter Buster or something like that?”
“Well it made sense to put both our names on it,” Jack said with a grin.
Vlad gave him a blank stare. “Huh? But it doesn’t have our names on it—”
“Sure it does! The Vack part! V-A-C-K.”
“Oh, so just half of my name and most of your name?” Vlad asked, a little more snippily than he’d meant to. Only half an hour in and he was already feeling tired.
“Well I had to keep it sounding like ‘vac’, and there’s no ‘l’ or ‘d’ in vacuum,” Jack said matter-of-factly.
There’s no ‘k’ in vacuum either! Vlad thought, but he stopped just short of saying it aloud. He forced himself to drop the matter and returned to his set of calculations.
A few minutes passed in blissful silence before Jack spoke up again. “I missed working with ya, V-man. I’ve been having a blast with you lately,” Jack said with a warm smile.
Vlad’s patience was already paper-thin. That apparent lie or supreme bout of forgetfulness was enough to tear it in half. “Missed me?” Vlad muttered, partially to himself. “I don’t believe you.”
Jack stopped his math scribbles and looked up at Vlad, the smile dropping from his face. “What?”
Vlad didn’t meet his eye right away. He was at a crossroads: make something up and convince Jack that he’d misheard, or tell him the truth. Jack would be more than happy to take the lie, Vlad knew that very well, but the truthful option… Well, that might get him thrown out, but at least it might put a stop to this exhausting dance they’d been doing for weeks. If Jack really wanted Vlad to believe in him then he could prove it.
“I don’t believe you,” Vlad said, louder and more clearly this time, though he still didn’t look up at Jack.
Jack stared at him, absolutely dumbfounded. “But why not?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Jack,” Vlad said sarcastically, making a show of pushing his chair back and getting to his feet. “Maybe it’s the fact that you left me to die and then never bothered to reach out to me in the entire twenty years we’ve been apart.”
“But the letters—”
“What letters?” Vlad snapped. “I never got a single one from you or anyone else.”
“They never got to you?” Jack surged to his feet and moved to take Vlad’s hand.
Vlad stepped back and out of reach. “Oh, what? Did they conveniently get lost in the mail? So you can claim you sent them without giving any proof?”
“They all came back,” Jack replied. “I still have them.”
That was enough of a surprise to derail the rising anger that had taken hold of him. He’d been expecting a convenient lack of proof on Jack’s part. “Show me,” Vlad said.
The house had a subtle spin to it as Jack led him through it. To think Jack had been trying to reach out after all... No, he wouldn’t believe it before he saw proof. He would not be tricked by Jack’s fake friendship again.
Jack led Vlad upstairs, to a hall closet near the master bedroom. He reached into the very back, behind the extra blankets and sheets, and dragged a decently-sized cardboard box out of the depths. “I had to hide them,” Jack admitted sheepishly as he set the box on the floor between them. “Maddie already threw away the ones she sent, I kinda worried she’d do the same to mine.”
Vlad said nothing and knelt beside the box. A light chill from anticipation settled into his fingertips as he looked down at it.
The box had been closed by folding the flaps under each other, suggesting that Jack hadn’t intended to store it for long periods of time. Jack pulled them open and revealed that it was full almost to the top with old letters.
Vlad slowly selected one at random and checked the postmark: November 15th, 1983. Two years after the accident. He’d been stuck in that government medical facility for four years after it happened...
His head was swimming a bit now. He turned the letter over and started to open it.
In his peripherals he noticed Jack stiffen slightly and reach into the box to take one of the letters. Vlad continued as if he hadn’t noticed. Idiot, he really must’ve considered Vlad to be an oblivious fool if he thought he wouldn’t spot him.
Jack did his best to discreetly slip the letter under a set of folded sheets. It would be easy enough for Vlad to retrieve later as long as Jack didn’t get a chance to move it. All he had to do was wait a little bit and take it once Jack wasn’t paying attention.
Vlad slid the present letter out of its envelope—this one had been written inside of a blank card decorated with a picture of a forest in autumn on the front—and read through it. The letter was brief, unmistakably penned in Jack’s blocky and direct handwriting, and split between news from Jack’s personal life and pleas that Vlad come back to them if he could.
So here it was, the box full of proof that Jack had not forgotten him. At least at first.
Without a word Vlad slid the card back into its envelope and folded the seal flap under its bottom counterpart. “I’m surprised,” he said, finally.
“You can take them home if you want. They were meant for you,” Jack said, shifting a little awkwardly on his knees. Whether his unease was from the delicate emotional matters at hand or because of the letter he’d just hidden Vlad couldn’t say. “I don’t really understand what happened. We thought you were sending them back...”
“Whoever handled the mail at the facility must’ve returned them before they got to me,” Vlad said, his voice sounding distant in his own ears. Yes, that did make sense. Why would they bother letting him get correspondence from the outside? It would be easier to simply send them back. They were both lucky that said person had decided to return them at all rather than disposing of them.
Vlad put the letter back, a pall of exhaustion settling over him. “I don’t feel well,” he said. “I think I’m going to head home for today.”
“Do you want to take them?” Jack offered again.
“Yes, I’ll take them,” Vlad replied slowly. Along with the one you tried to hide, he added silently.
Jack folded the flaps of the box under each other again to hold the top shut and passed it to Vlad, then led the way back down the hall.
Vlad followed, sending an invisible duplicate back to the closet as he did so. The letter was there under the sheets, and addressed to him when he checked the front. Now why had Jack wanted to hide this one? He would have to find that out once he got home.
~~~
The box of letters sat on Vlad’s desk with the previously-concealed letter on the tabletop before him. Vlad picked it up and turned it over in his hands. It seemed normal enough as far as letters went, and a quick comparison to the dates on the topmost letters revealed that it had been the final one Jack sent. August 10th, 1984 said the postmark. Jack had sent it a few months after he and Maddie were married.
Vlad took his little sword letter opener and cut the seal flap. The letter within was written on stationary paper this time, its edges decorated with pale blue clouds. It was... Worn, somehow. Like it had been folded and unfolded and smoothed out multiple times before finally being sealed within its envelope. Something had smudged the blocky handwriting of this one too; perhaps Jack had gotten a bit sloppy with food or drink while writing it. That would be just like him.
Vlad,
I really miss you. It’s just not the same without you here. It hurts every time I think about you being gone, I can’t find the right words for it. Please come home. We’ll help you out with any medical bills you have, no matter how long it takes.
From this point on, the writing became noticeably more sloppy, requiring many white-out corrections to stay coherent and more portions that had simply been scribbled out and left behind, looking like partially-smashed insects on the page. Words compressed on the right side of the paper where Jack ran out of room and tried to fit too long a word on too short a line. The stains from water droplets were also more numerous here.
My life’s just not complete with you gone. I miss your laugh and your lips smile and how we used to talk and how close we used to be. I miss holding you in my arms hugging you. I hope you’re doing okay. I hope you’ll be cured soon. I’m sorry I hurt you. I was stupid. I should’ve listened to Maddie. I should’ve made sure you were safe before turning it on.
The next paragraph had been blotched out entirely with a felt-tip pen. Vlad glared at it and turned the letter over; Jack used a lot of pressure when he wrote by hand, and the paper was thin enough that Vlad might be able to read the impression of the letters on the other side. The reading was slower, for obvious reasons, but the hidden paragraph was plain as day:
I’d marry you too if I could. I don’t know if Maddie would be okay with that. I know the government wouldn’t let us. I wish you could be part of my family that way.
Vlad stopped reading. It was suddenly hard to breathe. He carefully placed the letter on his desk and stood, swaying a little as his head spun from the confession.
Jack... Wanted to marry him? How long had he felt that way? They’d been close back in college, sure—far closer than even best friends tended to be—but he never suspected that Jack would want...
He was coming unmoored. It was a strange, empty feeling. Like something had hollowed out his skull and chest cavity, making him weightless.
Vlad picked up the letter again, his fingers cold and clumsy and clammy, and read the final part.
I love you, and I miss you every day. I hope you’re doing okay. Please write back.
Love, Jack
Again Vlad set the letter aside. He braced both hands against the desktop and took a deep breath. Then another. The cold weightless feeling refused to go away, and thoughts came and went at a meandering pace.
Jack... Loved him... In the same way he loved Maddie.
Did he still—
Vlad stopped the thought before it could go further. No… He had to think about this. Jack had tried to hide the letter from him earlier, and the confession had been crossed out before the letter was sent. A momentary miscalculation on Jack’s part, quickly hidden once common sense got the chance to set in.
Another part of him asked: But why send it like this? Jack could’ve rewritten the letter with this one as the rough draft, avoiding any possibility of the crossed-out sections being read.
Laziness was the simplest answer. Yes, that would be it. Jack wanted to make the gesture but was too lazy to properly go about the execution. He didn’t really mean it...
Vlad glanced over the box of letters again.
But he had indeed been writing to Vlad. He hadn’t forgotten, as Vlad had been so sure he did over the past two decades.
The letter even had an apology, something he’d wanted so desperately from Jack all along...
Vlad wished he could believe it. But he’d been hurt too badly to trust Jack again. At least, not without additional proof...
The cold, hollow feeling still hadn’t gone away.
He picked up the letter and carefully returned it to its envelope. Vlad needed time. Perhaps this was still too little too late to change things, but regardless... He had been wrong about Jack, at least in part. That was a revelation that needed proper time to sink in.
~~~
Danny looked over the mess of sheets and blankets and then back up at his dad again. Jack still hadn’t noticed him, being too busy turning the closet inside out as he looked for something.
“Uh, dad?” Danny said.
Jack yelped and jumped up so suddenly that he immediately tripped on a half-folded blanket and sat down hard on the floor. “Danny! Don’t sneak up on me like that!” he said once he caught his breath.
“What are you doing?”
“Oh well I uh...” By the pause Danny knew his dad was about to give him a lie, and a hasty one at that. “I hid some snacks in here yesterday and was trying to find them but wouldn’t you know it, they’ve gone missing!” Jack declared, only managing half of his usual confidence. “Guess someone else found them.”
So the location was probably accurate, but the thing he was looking for wasn’t. And Vlad had been visiting just yesterday too... “Well good luck finding who did it,” Danny said; it wasn’t worth trying to get a straight answer out of his dad when he was so determined to lie like this, but Danny already had a good idea of who might be the cause of this situation. He started back down the hall, only to pause after a few steps. “Oh yeah, dad?” Danny said as he turned back to him.
“Yeah?”
“Don’t forget to clean that up,” Danny said, pointing at the mess of sheets and blankets strewn in front of the closet. He then dashed down the stairs before Jack had the chance to ask him to help.
Danny found cover a little ways down the street from FentonWorks and transformed. Time to see what Vlad was playing at.
~~~
The mansion was quiet when Danny arrived. He phased through the nearest wall, then drifted through the library and into Vlad’s office.
Vlad was at his desk, eyes closed as he rested his chin on his interlaced fingers. He looked tired, melancholic; the usual smirk he wore whenever he dealt with Danny was nowhere to be found, and the shadows under his eyes were darker than usual. After a few moments passed opened his eyes and looked up at Danny. “What do you want, Daniel?” he asked, his tone sharp but lacking energy.
“Did you steal something from my dad yesterday?” Danny asked, arms crossed over his chest as he looked down at Vlad. He couldn’t help the curiosity over Vlad’s current state, however much the man annoyed him, but he kept that question in reserve for the time being.
“I did not,” Vlad replied simply.
Danny noticed the worn and marked-out letter that was even now open before Vlad and drifted a little closer to look at it.
Vlad put a hand over it and pulled it closer to himself. “Don’t you know it’s rude to read someone else’s mail?” he snapped.
“What, did you get bad news from home?” Danny asked. “Did papa Dracula write to say he’s disappointed in you?”
“Both of my parents died years ago,” Vlad replied, his voice completely flat.
The reply knocked Danny completely off-balance. “Oh uh. Sorry for your loss,” he said weakly.
“Now if you have nothing else to pester me about...” Vlad said. “I ask that you leave.”
~~~
Vlad tried to return to business as usual. Work on his own inventions, research various artifacts of the Ghost Zone, take care of human-world business dealings...
At every step the letter and the questions it raised haunted him. Not the hauntings he’d grown so used to, as a result of dealing with real ghosts for twenty years, but the ones found in rumor and urban legend. The ones you read about in tales by the old horror masters. Quiet and subtle most of the time, only to loom out of the shadows to claw at him when he least expected it.
A text from Jack interrupted Vlad’s routine stock market research, asking how he was doing. Vlad gave a quick ‘I’m fine’ in return and set his phone aside. He’d only just gotten Jack out of his mind, and there he was barging right in again. Typical.
Vlad sat back in his chair, chin resting in one hand, and stared at the far wall for a time. He hadn’t gone through the other letters yet. Their mere existence was enough of a statement for now, and he didn’t have the stamina for another shock like the final one had given him.
Twenty long years of hate were not so easily dissipated, but the existence of the letters gave a certain hollowness to it all. It was the abandonment that had cut deepest back then. The fact that Jack didn’t even have the decency to try to fix the damage he’d done, that he’d just tossed Vlad aside like a broken toy once he’d become too much of a burden.
So Vlad had thought. And how could he think otherwise? It was a perfectly reasonable conclusion to come to from where he’d been sitting.
But that conclusion had been wrong in the end. Part of it, at least. There was nothing to stop Jack from trying to reach out once Vlad escaped that wretched facility and started making a name for himself. He hadn’t even tried, and Vlad knew Jack couldn’t be so under a rock that he would’ve missed some of the strides Vlad was making back then.
So why? Had he written all those letters, just to forget Vlad in the end anyway? That might be worse than what Vlad had assumed for all these years.
He had to know, even as he dreaded the answer. From the beginning he’d thought himself justified in his enmity toward Jack, in his schemes and attempts at revenge, all because of the harm Jack had done to him. But the letters... The love confession... Threatened to change that, threatened to cast Vlad’s past actions in a new, uglier light. The thought brewed a dull feeling of nausea deep in his stomach. Things would have to change if the letter was true.
Perhaps if he’d confronted Jack years ago they could’ve settled things between them, perhaps even mended their friendship and again intertwined their lives as they had before. If Jack really was genuine about his words. If he really did mean what he wrote in that letter. Vlad could’ve had a happier life up until now.
They’d wasted so much time...
Vlad shook his head. No. He refused to get his hopes up. With his luck Jack had sent that final letter and then written Vlad out of his life, and had only re-entered it later because of Vlad’s status. He would not be fooled again.
He shoved such musings out of mind and returned to his work.
~~~
The book he was looking for was not in his library. Or the lab. Or his office. Vlad checked everywhere it could be yet again and came up short. He scowled at the span of bookshelf where it should’ve been and wracked his brain for where it might be. It was a book he hadn’t needed since before his move, a text on Ghost Zone fabrics, which meant he might’ve forgotten to unpack it after all this time.
Vlad hurried to the hall closet nearest to his bedroom, where he’d tucked a few of the unpacked boxes away to be dealt with later—quite a lot later, in this case. He moved the blankets and sheets aside and pulled three of them out.
The first contained a mix of books and clothing—he’d been in a hurry while packing due to the whole lack of roof thing, so item types had ended up jumbled together. Vlad took out the topmost books and found that they covered only mundane subjects—disappointing—then removed the clothes to see if he’d packed any more books underneath them.
His fingers brushed denim, worn and familiar, before he saw the garment it belonged to. Vlad flinched as if he’d been stung and withdrew his arm. Just his luck, to think it would be here of all places at this particular moment... After taking a few seconds to gather himself he lifted the other clothes out, revealing an oversized denim jacket at the bottom of the box.
It had originally belonged to Jack. He’d bought it just before going to college, but shortly after they got their dorm room together, well... It unofficially belonged to Vlad, given how often he wore it. He could still remember the night Jack first placed it on his shoulders to ward off the chill; Jack could make heat like a furnace and claimed he didn’t need it as much as Vlad did, and his warmth had lingered on it for some time after he’d passed it on.
They’d been far closer than mere friends back then. Their nights together were never cold, even in deep winter—
He cut the memory off before it could go further. No point thinking about that right now...
Vlad took the jacket in both hands and lifted it out of the box. It was heavy and cold and smelled faintly of the sandalwood cologne he’d been wearing when he last handled it; over the years and various washings it had lost its original owner’s scent, and Vlad had never bothered trying to recreate it. He shifted his hands and slowly let it fall open. The blue fabric was marred by a few burn marks here and there; the first set was from when he’d tossed it into the hearth in a fit of anger, only to claw it back out again when he realized what he’d done; the second was from the fact that it was one of the items to survive when his ghost portal exploded.
He’d felt a strange sense of kinship with it when he found it among his belongings all those years ago, after finally reclaiming what had been in his dorm room once he was out of the facility. Jack had carelessly left it behind, same as he’d done to Vlad.
But now Vlad wondered if Jack had specifically left it behind for him instead...
~~~
Sleep was elusive that night. Vlad stared up at the ceiling, his eyes wide and his face slack and otherwise expressionless. The jacket lay spread out on the comforter next to him. Occasionally he reached over and took it in one hand, rubbing the fabric between his fingers or simply holding on to it for a time.
At a glance he looked the same as he always did, but now everything unseen was shifting underneath him. A current of emotion and subconscious thought that dragged him farther and farther away from the familiar shore.
A deep, aching sense of longing settled in his chest. He took a deep breath in an attempt to ease it and closed his eyes, for what little good it would do.
Even if Jack still held those feelings after all this time, there was no way they could be what they once were to each other. Jack was happily married to the woman they both loved, any secret relationship would only serve to drive her away from both of them. He would lose Maddie, and he would lose Jack too. He would be alone again.
His own feelings hadn’t completely gone away in the twenty years since then. He’d been terrified when he first noticed them rising out of the depths once more in the wake of reading the letter. If Jack still shared those feelings now then it would only become all the more painful as he stifled them.
Vlad’s grip on the jacket tightened. He liked neither option when it came to the answer Jack could give: he was only now realizing just how miserable he’d been before while he still hated Jack, but the thought of having to settle for never being able to be with him despite mutual romantic feelings didn’t make him happy either. Maddie... Disliked Vlad, after all. There was no way she would ever be okay with a romantic relationship between him and her husband. Things were looking bleaker and bleaker no matter what the outcome was.
Vlad pulled the jacket over and spread it across himself like a blanket, then rolled onto his side and tried to will himself to sleep.
~~~
A few days later Vlad was working on calculations for a new invention when Maddiecat stood in front of his monitor and stared at him.
He briefly tried to look around her—a futile effort, given how much visual space she took up thanks to her long fluffy coat—then moved his chair back to make room.
She examined his lap for a few moments, then stepped down and flopped onto her side with a loud purr.
Vlad smiled and scratched under her chin, instinctively shifting his legs so she wasn’t in danger of rolling off. His thoughts drifted back to her namesake. Doing so did not bring the usual burst of happiness the way it tended to most of the time.
Had his continuing love for her been determined by Jack’s betrayal back then? Why did it feel so incorporeal now? Did it all go back to that?
It almost made him wish he’d never taken that letter. The others were enough to suggest he’d been wrong—at least in part—but that final one... He had yet to regain his balance after finding what it contained.
An indescribable feeling had settled over him ever since. The sensation of something that cannot be undone, of entropy’s relentless march to the future. Even if Jack brushed off the letter there would be a new status quo to replace the old one. There was no perfect reset after this.
Things were changing, and it terrified him. The grudge that had defined him for twenty long years was feeling more tenuous by the day, and he had no idea what would be left in its place if it dissipated completely.
~~~
Vlad proposed another visit with Jack a little over a week after reading the letter. As usual Jack jumped at the chance and cleared his schedule for the day, already making plans to resume work on their joint invention.
The usual hate Vlad felt whenever he was around Jack had that hollowness to it now. Perhaps if Jack brushed off the letter there would be substance to it again. But Vlad would have to ask Jack about it in order to find out.
They went down to the lab and set about calculations for the Buster-Vack. Vlad did his best to focus, but his attention was split between the math and the question of the letter. How to bring it up? He couldn’t just come out and ask about it, could he? But perhaps that would be the best way... Subtlety was not Jack’s forte, after all.
Vlad’s first attempt at bringing it up was abruptly cut short by Danny intruding to ask Jack about some item he’d misplaced. He dropped it once Danny was gone, having remembered that the boy was a possible eavesdropper for any conversation he tried to have with Jack. That added threat of possible embarrassment kept Vlad silent a while longer.
The day passed without an answer. Vlad was lagging behind on his calculations thanks to the divide in his attention, something that he explained by saying he was feeling a little under the weather. Jack didn’t mind; to him the only thing that mattered was that Vlad was here at all.
Vlad returned the next day. Jack worked on the main canister of their invention while Vlad turned his attention to finishing his calculations. For a time the lab was filled only with the hum of lab equipment, the clank of metal and tools, and the scratch of a pen.
“Jack?” Vlad said, at last breaking the silence between them.
“Yeah?” Jack looked up with a big smile on his face.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you something,” Vlad began. Anxiety threatened to choke him even as he spoke the words. Why did this have to be so hard? What was he so afraid of?
Jack waited patiently, the sheer force of his attention seeming to settle on Vlad like a lead weight.
“Erm, do you think we should celebrate once we’re done with this? It’s the first invention we’ve built from start to finish in twenty years,” Vlad said, even as he mentally kicked himself for chickening out on the real question.
“That’s a great idea!” Jack said with the utmost gusto. “We’ll have a special dinner and drinks, just the two of us!”
“Yes, that sounds wonderful,” Vlad said weakly. He returned to his calculations again, only to find that it was impossible to focus due to sheer frustration.
Vlad wanted to physically kick himself for that fumble. Maybe he actually would! Duplication was an option, once he got home he could use it to give himself a good kick in the rear for being such a coward. He was one of the richest men on the planet, making progress on bringing the Ghost Zone to heel in a similar manner, he’d fought many powerful ghosts without flinching, and yet here he was balking at a question. A question! A mere string of words with an upward inflection on the end! What was he so afraid of?
The answer to that question proved somewhat murky when Vlad looked for it. There was the fear of change of course, but that wasn’t the only thing that made him hesitate. There was the other side to Jack’s possible reply, the one where he told Vlad that the letter didn’t mean anything. For years he’d thought that Jack didn’t really care about him, but to actually hear it from Jack rather than assume...
It would... Break his heart all over again to actually hear it. The mere thought made him sick to his stomach.
But he still had to know, one way or the other. He couldn’t just sit in limbo agonizing over what the answer might be. He had to ask the question.
~~~
Another day went by. Vlad at last finished his batch of calculations and passed them off to Jack to be incorporated into the rest of their work and went home for the day. He did not, in fact, use duplication to give himself a kick when he got home. It was still tempting, but he had more important matters to attend to. There were cats to feed, dinner to make, and as much sleep as possible to catch once those were taken care of. He would need his wits about him when they tested the prototype tomorrow. Perhaps it would also be easier to ask the question if he got enough sleep tonight.
~~~
Vlad found no opportunity to ask his question as they put the final touches on their prototype. All their focus went into assembly and tuning the internal chamber. Vlad’s calculations were key for getting the energy drain to work properly, and he was confident that he’d done them to perfection despite all the distractions.
Jack placed a collection of faintly-glowing beakers on the testing table. “If this baby can suck the ecto-contamination off of these we’ll be ready to move to the next phase of prototyping. And the final version will be great for cleaning up the lab on top of dusting ghosts!”
“It will be quite the useful device if so,” Vlad said as he took up a position next to Jack. He was a tad dispirited despite their progress, but it was good to see their joint invention make such a milestone.
Jack took up the Buster-Vack’s wand—the device already looked very much like a canister vacuum—and hit the switch.
The device was quiet, giving off a low pulsating hum as Jack brought the wand over to the contaminated beakers. As expected the glow on the beakers was drawn into the end of the wand and soon enough they looked like perfectly mundane pieces of lab equipment again—
Vlad became aware of a horrible weight in the room, as if the air had suddenly become thick as water. He snapped his head around to look at the canister and noticed the odd shadow that seemed to be gathering around it. The rhythmic hum took on a more discordant pattern as something went wrong inside the prototype.
His calculations—
They were both standing far too close. Fear and instinct stamped out rational thought, his inner dialogue going silent as he grabbed Jack by the jumpsuit and leaped away—
The Buster-Vack imploded with a dull thud and an abrupt screech of warping metal. A shockwave flowed out, the leading edge glowing with ectoplasmic energy as it forced the ghostly power out of everything it passed over.
They landed on the floor some distance away. Jack was at a safe range. Vlad was still far too close. The shockwave broke over him like boiling water, the sheer pain of it tearing his voice away. It flowed through him and dragged every speck of ghostly energy from his body as it left—and tore most of the mundane energy from his cells as well.
Vlad collapsed as his consciousness surrendered to the cold darkness.
~~~
Jack sat up once the lab had gone quiet. It was pitch-black, save for the lingering glow left on the walls. Even the Fenton Portal had gone dark. “Phew! Never thought that would happen. Great reflexes there, V-man!”
His words were met by silence. No reply from Vlad, and even the lab equipment had gone dead quiet thanks to the shockwave shoving all the energy out of it.
“Vlad?” Worry crept in, sharp and cold.
The silence was broken not by a reply but by a flurry of footsteps coming from upstairs.
“Vlad!” Jack felt around in the darkness at his side where Vlad should be. A sudden wave of panic rushed over him, and it felt as if his heart was trying to force its way into his throat. What happened—
“Dad!” Danny’s voice rang out from the stairwell just as the beam of a flashlight hit the floor at its foot.
Jack found Vlad as Danny entered the lab. Vlad lay on his side with his eyes closed, arms limp with one draped over his waist. He didn’t respond as Jack shook his shoulder, and Jack could feel an unnatural chill even through multiple layers of fabric.
“Dad, what happened?” Danny ran over to them, rounding a table as he did so. “What was—” he spotted Vlad and stopped to stare for a few moments. “Is he—?”
Jack lowered his head to Vlad’s level and listened. For a few heart-pounding moments he heard nothing, and then—shallow, with long pauses between as if Vlad barely had the energy to pull air into his lungs, but it was there. Vlad was alive.
For now.
“He’s breathing,” Jack said. Now that Danny had the flashlight on Vlad’s face he could see that all the color had gone from it, leaving Vlad’s skin nearly gray. Jack picked him up and held him close, trying to share a little warmth; Vlad had always had issues with being too cold, but he’d never seen it this bad before. “Where’s Maddie?” he asked as he looked up at Danny. He needed someone who could think more clearly than he could right now. At least Vlad had been conscious after the proto-portal accident, but this time—this time he looked like he was on the verge of death.
“Mom’s out shopping,” Danny replied.
“What do we do? Should I take him to the hospital?” Jack brought a hand to his head as he aloud to himself. Could a hospital even treat this? He knew that the hospitals back then hadn’t been able to cure Vlad’s ecto-acne—he and Maddie wouldn’t have had to do that recently if they had—so their knowing that to do for this—
“We need to get to Vlad’s lab,” Danny said, disrupting Jack’s train of thought.
“What?” Jack looked up at him.
“I bet Vlad has something to help with this in his lab. He’s always doing ecto-tech experiments, and a hospital wouldn’t be able to treat this anyway.”
“You know what’s wrong?”
“Um.” Danny paused, the question taking him off-guard. He glanced around the room as he thought of his answer. “Well it looks like whatever happened shoved all the ecto-energy out of everything in here. So that must be what’s affecting Vlad.”
“But I was just fine at the same range.”
“Maybe having ecto-acne left him permanently ecto-contaminated?” Danny asked with a shrug. “Even after it’s been cured it could still leave permanent changes, right?”
“That’s possible...” Jack admitted. Truthfully they still didn’t know as much about ecto-acne as they would’ve liked, such as permanent effects after the cure. Long-lasting ecto-contamination could be one of them... “If his body adapted to having constant levels of ecto-energy then having it suddenly removed could make him sick...” he reasoned to himself as he stared down at Vlad. With his mind made up, Jack took Vlad in his arms and stood. “You know how to get to his lab?” he asked, raising an eyebrow as he looked to Danny.
“He showed it to me once,” Danny replied. “I think he was trying to show off.”
“Let’s go.”
~~~
They took the Specter Speeder over to Vlad’s mansion to save on time. Vlad’s house keys were in his breast pocket, and soon enough they were inside looking for the lab. Danny led the way, meeting only two missed attempts to find the entrance before locating the correct one.
Jack watched the wall slide back as Danny released the lamp that had served as its lever. Vlad definitely had style, it was just one of many things about him that Jack admired, and they had similar tastes in this respect—the entrance to Jack’s own lab wasn’t a secret, but there were certainly a few special functions of the Fenton residence that he’d hidden around.
Danny led the way down into the lab. Jack had never seen it before, despite his newly-rekindled friendship with Vlad. He hadn’t pressed him on it, figuring that Vlad would give him a tour when he felt ready. If only the circumstances for finally being able to see it weren’t so dire...
The lab was dimly-lit by the faintly-glowing lights of slumbering equipment and other devices. The two of them looked around for a light switch, only for the lights to come on mere moments after they’d begun their search. Lights on the equipment pulsed in a wave toward the other end of the lab, leading them toward something that they couldn’t see yet.
They continued on around a corner where they found a large tank with various panels and devices forming its framework. The pulsing lights ended here. This had to be the healing device that Danny figured Vlad would have. A panel lit up next to the tank and its screen declared that the entire array was indeed a recovery chamber meant to speed up healing and re-energize the patient. Instructions on how to prepare Vlad for it followed as a nearby cabinet opened with a whir of servos to reveal something similar to a wetsuit.
“Hey Danny, could you step out for now? I can take care of this,” Jack said with a glance back at Danny.
“Okay,” Danny said after a brief pause. He stepped back around the corner, but the sound of his footsteps stopped there.
It was reassuring to know that his son wanted to stay and support him, but Jack was confident that he could take care of this himself. He laid Vlad out on a nearby exam table as instructed. A scanner popped out of the side and ran its bar of light over Vlad. The readings on the chamber changed with an accompaniment of foreboding beeps, showing that Vlad was at critically low metabolic energy levels and giving the estimate that he would likely die within the hour if left to his fate.
Jack worked swiftly, changing Vlad into the chamber suit and gently pulling out his ponytail so it wouldn’t interfere with the breathing mask. Once ready the chamber’s information panel directed him to a set of spiral stairs that would allow him access to the top of the main tank. Jack ascended with Vlad in his arms and found the top hatch already open. He attached the necessary tubes to the breathing mask, then lowered Vlad into the tank, his movements slow and deliberate. Jack stepped back as the hatch closed with a heavy metallic clank.
He returned to the front of the tank and checked the main screen: it estimated three days to get Vlad back to full consciousness. They’d made it just in time.
Jack’s shoulders went slack, and he breathed a long sigh of relief.
“Everything okay, dad?” Danny called from around the corner.
“Yep! Everything’s gonna be a-okay!” Jack declared, straightening a little as the weight of worry eased off his shoulders.
Danny peeked around the corner, then joined Jack near the healing tank. “So how did this happen, anyway?” he asked as he looked up at Jack.
“Something went wrong with the Buster-Vack. Won’t be sure what until I can look at what’s left, but Vlad pulled me to safety just before it went off.”
“Vlad saved you?” Danny asked with plain disbelief.
“He dragged me away just in time,” Jack said, watching Danny closely as he did. Just what had Danny thinking Vlad would let him die like that?
“Huh.” Danny turned his attention to the tank instead and said nothing more on the matter. “Says it’ll take three days. We can head home for now.”
“I’m not leaving,” Jack said.
“Dad, you don’t have to stick around. He’s gonna be fine.”
“But something could happen before he’s ready to wake up. I’m not gonna leave him alone.” Jack crossed his arms over his chest but didn’t look Danny in the eye as he spoke. The unspoken ‘this time’ hung in the air like a piece of cobweb, slight and drifting but unmistakably there.
Danny let out a grumbling sigh. “Fine,” he mumbled.
Any further discussion was cut off when a nearby screen flashed and displayed a message asking that the two feed Vlad’s cats for him.
Danny stared at the screen. “Wait, he has cats?!”
~~~
The first thing that he became aware of was the pain. A bone-deep ache accompanied by the sensation of having had every one of his muscles wrung out like a damp rag. Next and more pleasant was the temperature: a comfortable warmth that uniformly embraced every part of his body. Then the muffled quality of incoming sound… He was submerged given what he could hear.
The Revitalization Chamber?
He briefly clutched for any recent memories that might reveal why he was here. The Buster-Vack, something going wrong with it… Ah, the shockwave from its implosion shoved nearly all the energy from his body when it hit him. That was why he’d felt so cold as he passed out.
But who had gotten him into the tank, then?
Vlad slowly opened his eyes and looked out through the clear glass at the front of the tank.
Jack was seated at its base, sleeping with his head and near shoulder resting against the glass. It was a surprise to find him here and it... Did kindle some warmth in Vlad’s heart. Just how long had he waited?
Vlad’s gaze lifted to take in the room at large. Only then did he notice the mess of food wrappers and discarded pizza boxes that had been left on various lab tables and on the floor. The resulting spike of aggravation immediately stamped out any fond feelings. Vlad scowled behind the breathing mask. Jack had been waiting around long enough to make a pig sty of Vlad’s lab, that was for sure!
The chamber reacted to his movements and began to drain the healing medium away.
Jack stirred and opened his eyes at the noise. He spotted Vlad and broke out into a happy grin as he stepped back from the tank.
Vlad took the mask off as the front of the tank unlocked and swung up and away. “Jack Fenton, just what do you think you’ve been doing to my la—” the rest was cut off by an awkward yelp as Vlad’s knees buckled under his own weight.
Jack caught him easily—sparing him the indignity of a faceplant—and swept him into an equally-undignified hug. “Vladdie! You’re okay! I was so worried when you passed out!”
Any reply Vlad tried to give was smothered by his face being shoved into Jack’s chest. He tried to yell at him anyway and only managed a lot of incoherent, muffled grumbling as he weakly swatted Jack’s arm in a wordless demand that he let go.
It took a few swats for Jack to realize what Vlad wanted. “Whoops! Sorry, Vlad. I was just so happy that you woke up!”
Vlad gasped as Jack loosened his hold on him, then let out a long groan. “How many days has it been?”
“Three.”
The bottom fell out of Vlad’s stomach. “My cats!” He had automatic systems in place to ensure their needs were met if something happened to him in the short term, but that didn’t stop him from worrying that something might’ve gone wrong.
“Don’t worry, Vladdie. We took good care of them,” Jack said. “We even followed the feeding schedule that popped up.”
Vlad let out a long sigh of relief as the worry receded. “That’s good. I don’t know what I’d do if something happened to them.”
“Aww, I’m glad you have cats, Vlad,” Jack said, giving Vlad a warm smile. “They’re so sweet, too!”
“Yes, yes, it’s very nice,” Vlad grumbled, though he couldn’t deny the warmth that bloomed in his chest when Jack looked at him like that. “Thank you for looking after things. You can go home now.”
“I can’t leave you like this, Vlad,” Jack said, his smile replaced by a look of earnest concern.
“What do you mean you can’t leave me? I’m awake now, you don’t have to worry!”
“Vlad. You can’t even walk right now.”
“Yes I can!” Vlad snapped indignantly. “You just haven’t put me back on the floor yet!”
Jack lowered Vlad to the floor as asked and let go; Vlad’s legs held for only a few seconds before threatening to give way again. He scooped Vlad up once more.
Vlad let out a grumbling sigh and let his head rest against Jack’s chest. “Fiiine, you can stay until I get my feet under me again. Just don’t make more of a mess while you’re here.”
“You can count on me, Vladdie!”
“Yes, good. Now could you take me up to my bathroom? The healing medium tends to get sticky as it dries and I don’t want it on me when that happens.”
“On it, V-man!” Jack carried Vlad bridal style—Vlad refused to examine how this made him feel right now, despite the blush that was already settling on his face and ears—and hurried back up to ground level.
After some directions from Vlad—and a few wrong turns from Jack due to his sheer enthusiasm to help—they made it to the master bedroom and its attached bathroom. Despite Jack’s insistence Vlad got him to at least let him shower on his own; Vlad was able to walk a little bit by then as long as he had something to lean against, and he still had his shower chair from the particularly bad ecto-acne flare-ups that would keep him off the floor while he cleaned himself up.
Vlad sat under the stream of hot water for a while and let his mind wander. How many times had he cursed Jack’s name while sitting on a shower chair like this? For all the years of medical agony he’d had to endure, the most terrifying flare-ups where his body lost functions and he wondered if this was finally the end, all from Jack’s five seconds of carelessness. And he’d endured every second of it alone. It would’ve been so much easier had Jack at least been there for him.
A knock at the bathroom door cut off any further ruminations.
“Everything okay in there, Vlad?” Jack asked, his voice just loud enough to reach Vlad over the sound of the water.
“I’m fine,” Vlad replied.
“Alrighty then!” There was the sound of the door closing again as Jack withdrew.
Vlad lingered a little longer under the shower’s stream, then finished up and dressed in the underwear and pajamas he’d picked out before coming in. His legs were a little more steady this time as he walked out of the bathroom and over to his bed—a relief, he wasn’t sure how much more of Jack carrying him he could take—and once there he slipped under the covers and was almost ready to fall asleep immediately upon resting his head on the pillow.
Jack followed and stood next to the bed, looming over him like the comforting bulk of a familiar mountain. He did always tend to hover when Vlad was sick back in college...
“Jack?”
“Yeah?”
“Go clean up the mess you made down in my lab before you forget,” Vlad said. No way in hell was he letting Jack get away with leaving that for him to tidy up, no matter how nice it was for him to be so attentive right now.
“Oh yeah, I’ll get on that,” Jack said with just a smidge of sheepishness, apparently aware himself that he was quite likely to forget to do that without the necessary reminders.
Vlad drifted off as soon as Jack left, soon joined by his two cats who curled up on his bed beside him.
~~~
There was something hovering over his bed. Vlad lashed out instinctively without even opening his eyes and was rewarded with a solid punch to whatever it was, accompanied by an awkward yelp from the intruder.
“Hey! I wasn’t even doing anything to you!” Danny cried indignantly, his voice now coming from a few feet away.
“Invading my personal space counts as doing something to me,” Vlad replied as he opened his eyes. He turned his head and spotted Danny standing with his night stand between them. “And for all I knew you were planning to do something more. Why are you in my bedroom?”
“Unlike you I don’t pick on people who are helpless,” Danny snapped, crossing his arms over his chest and trying to stand up straight after the blow he’d taken to his stomach. “I’m here cause I wanna know what you’re playing at.”
Vlad let out an annoyed groan and ran his hands down his face. “Playing at? I’m trying to recover from a near death experience at the moment! There are no games to be played in this case.”
“Why’d you save my dad?”
It was a question Vlad hadn’t gotten the chance to ask himself, in all that was going on; he’d only been conscious for a grand total of less than an hour today. “I don’t know,” Vlad replied after a few moments’ thought. “I just moved without thinking.”
Danny was watching him carefully when Vlad glanced at him again.
“What now?” Vlad asked. He was still exhausted despite the sleep, and he didn’t care to be pestered with difficult questions at the moment.
“You’ve been kind of different lately,” Danny mused, his eyes narrowing. “What happened?”
“Will you go away if I tell you?”
“Fine.”
“Very well...” Vlad paused, choosing his words as carefully as he could in his exhausted state. “I recently acquired some information that forced me to reevaluate my previous judgments of your father’s character.”
“Wow. All those words just to admit that you were wrong about my dad,” Danny said with a knowing smirk.
Vlad’s last nerve snapped at the disrespect. He threw caution to the wind. “Well it’s not every day that a love letter written years ago finally reaches me,” Vlad said, making a show of examining the backs of his fingernails. “So raw and heartfelt, too. Jack certainly meant it when he wrote it.”
Danny stared at Vlad with a mix of shock and horror on his face that Vlad found every bit as amusing as he’d expected it to be. “You’re lying!” he said, pointing an accusatory finger at him.
“I can show it to you if you need proof.”
“Ew! I’m not reading that!” Danny leaped into the air and gave Vlad a glare. “Don’t— Don’t think this is over just cause you’re not trying to kill my dad anymore! I’m watching you!”
Vlad burst out laughing; watching the boy try to act intimidating now was just too funny. “Watch all you like. Maybe you’ll see some of that proof for yourself.”
“Ugh!” With that final declaration of disgust Danny went intangible and flew up through the ceiling, leaving Vlad alone at last.
The mirth remained as Vlad drifted off to sleep again. He would find a way to deal with the repercussions later; it had been worth it just to see the look on Danny’s face.
~~~
Jack was seated next to the bed when Vlad woke up next.
“My lab had better be spotless when I see it again,” Vlad said as he looked over at Jack.
“Don’t you worry, V-man. It’s as tidy as when I found it,” Jack said, giving him a thumbs-up.
“We’ll see about that,” Vlad grumbled. At least the lab would be cleaner than he’d seen it earlier. It was better than nothing. He stared at Jack for a few moments as he made up his mind; the lingering exhaustion had caused his previous hesitation to evaporate, and he’d already told Danny about the letter...
“Actually, there’s been something I’ve been meaning to ask you, Jack.” Vlad sat up and draped his hands across his lap.
“Er, what’s up?” Jack asked, looking a little worried.
Vlad stared down at his hands for a few moments, then he looked up at Jack as he spoke, “That letter you sent to me, the final one. Did you mean what you said in it?”
“Can you give me a few specifics...?”
“Oh, it was in a sloppy state, lots of corrections, an entire paragraph blotted out that said you wished you could marry me...”
“So it did end up with you...” Jack said slowly. “How did that happen?”
“Some ghost played a prank on you, perhaps?” Vlad suggested. It was somewhat true, in a way. “And your answer? Did you really mean it?”
Jack had no immediate reply for him and stared at the far wall for a while. At last he sighed and scratched the back of his neck, unable to look Vlad in the eye. “Don’t tell Maddie.”
“Don’t tell her? Why? It’s not like you still—” Vlad stopped short as he made the connection. “You don’t still feel that way, do you?!”
“Yeah. I never stopped feeling that way, really,” Jack said, shifting awkwardly on the chair.
“Then why did you never try to reach out to me? You could’ve done so at any point after I got out of the hospital.”
“I thought you didn’t want me in your life anymore,” Jack replied, looking a little hurt. “The letters came back, and you didn’t find me after you got out. So I figured I messed up so badly that you were just done with being my friend, and I didn’t want to bother you after that.”
Vlad stared at Jack as a new wave of emotions crashed down on him: relief, shock, regret, longing... The tension he’d been unconsciously holding onto left his body all at once. His head swam, the room slowly starting to turn around him. It was all—just a little too much to handle at the moment—
He was only out for a few seconds at most, but he woke up with Jack holding him in his arms again.
“Vlad? You alright? What happened?”
It was all still sinking in. He had his answer now. He’d been proven wrong about Jack, and now he had to figure out how to handle that. How to navigate a world where he’d have to smother his own lingering feelings for the man even while knowing that Jack felt the same. He had no idea how Maddie would react when she found out...
“Still a little woozy from healing up,” Vlad replied weakly. “I’ll be better in a moment.”
Everything was different now. Still, he couldn’t help but feel a little hopeful, with the warmth of Jack’s arms around him. His pessimism had been disproven before, perhaps it would be again...
Been having too many thoughts about this ship and wanted to share this cause it made me smile while writing it and one specific part also made me giggle quite a bit. Still technically WIP cause I'm writing a part before this, but it looks nice enough to post I think. Also plays with some ideas about the ex-Self-Annihilator Sampo theory.
5.3k words, the title is a placeholder for now.
~~~
It was always a joy to travel the cosmos, but he should’ve been paying more attention to what was going on back home. Shouldn’t have wandered so far. Then he would’ve gotten the panicked messages in time. Would’ve been able to do something about it before things got to this point.
But now, it was far too late.
The bitter wind of the Snow Plains dug long vicious claws into Sampo’s back as he watched his adversary. They’d been playing cat and mouse for a little over an hour now, and any attempts at negotiation had failed. He could still escape if he felt like it, the canyon walls were no obstacle for him, but there was someone here that he couldn’t leave behind.
Gepard had not been himself for over a week. It started with bursts of impulsive behavior, then a series of measures toward ‘the protection of Belobog’ that became ever more draconian. Any attempts the authorities made at containing him had failed, but thankfully the moment Sampo set foot in Belobog again Gepard had made it his mission to catch him. Sampo had led him out into the Snow Plains to avoid collateral damage if something went wrong.
Now Gepard pulled himself upright with his shield as if tugged by invisible strings and lifted his head to glare at Sampo. There was a hunger in his eyes, like a desperate beast eying the single prey item on offer for miles around. And the hope that after this catch that hunger would be sated. But there was no salvation down that road.
Sampo had only needed a single glimpse of the sickly teal flames that flickered around Gepard’s body to know what had gone wrong. He’d had his suspicions upon hearing what happened, and sent a few messages to the Trailblazer in the hopes that they might bring someone from the Loufu to handle this. But they were far out of reach at the moment, and any help from the Loufu would take too long to arrive by conventional means.
Gepard shambled a little closer, his shield leaving a long, deep line in the snow. Sampo tensed, blades at the ready, and watched for tells of the coming attack. But instead Gepard stopped and pulled himself upright again, a wicked smile spreading across his face as he did so. “You smell interesting,” the thing wearing Gepard’s body said, the distinctive double voice of heliobus possession echoing through their voice. So Sampo had managed to catch its interest beyond the typical goal acquisition for its host. “How fortunate, I’ll have you next.”
Sampo jumped away as the wave of ice surged toward his feet. He landed on the snow just beyond it, his gaze fixed on the heliobus. A nauseous lump settled in the pit of his stomach as he straightened again—the heliobus would consume its current host entirely once it was ready to take a new one. They didn’t have much time left, and the only option available was one that Sampo might not walk away from.
The heliobus blinked with confusion; Sampo had seen beyond the illusion that concealed the ice. They recovered quickly, probably assuming it was a fluke, and prepared another trap for him.
But Sampo was willing to take the risk; he’d done this before and survived, and Belobog still needed Gepard. Sampo took a deep breath to steady himself, and stepped into the Shadow.
~~~
The heliobus scrambled to keep their host on his feet as the landscape tore away like an old curtain, blinding white snow snapping to abyssal starscape. Their host staggered without the shield to help stabilize him and fell to his knees. The ground was strange, a vast dark lake that stretched endlessly in all directions save for one.
A black hole waited ahead, ready to pull their energy into its endless hungry abyss. Heliobi bragged about being deathless, but a black hole could very well be the only thing able to prove them wrong. And they did not want to find out the truth themselves.
They dragged their host to his feet and turned away from the black hole, searching for any means of escape, and found themselves face to face with a pale figure. The heliobus jumped back, instinctively flinging an illusion at this new enemy, but the darkness devoured it as soon as it left their body and begged for more.
The pale figure gave them a condescending smile, and they realized that this was the human they had intended to possess next, bleached of all color save for a few streaks of red in his hair and his eyes.
Ignoring his attempts at negotiation had been a mistake.
“You know what word I’m thinking about right now?” the man—Sampo, the host’s memories offered—said as he kept pace with the heliobus’s backpedaling. His tone was one of idle conversation, as if they were enjoying a few drinks at a tavern rather than treading on the edge of the abyss. “Entropy. It’s an interesting concept, and it means different things depending on the type of person you ask.”
“Wait, stay back!” The heliobus brought an arm up to ward him off, for what little good it would do.
“The arrow of time, disorder, irreversibility... But I think the most fitting one right now is the flow of heat. The way it bleeds out until the temperature is equalized.”
“Please!” the heliobus begged, allowing Gepard’s voice to take over entirely. “Please don’t kill me!”
Sampo’s gaze sharpened, not that of a predator seeking prey but of a vengeful man preparing to take justice into his own hands. A far more terrifying prospect by far. “Heat’s just another word for energy, right? And that’s what you’re made of.” He lifted one of his blades, its edge glowing with a dull red light. “I wonder how long it’ll take for you to bleed away into nothing.”
The heliobus didn’t see him move, but they felt the blade. It slid into the infinitely narrow separation between them and their host, cold and hungry and sharp.
With a deft flick of his blade Sampo peeled the heliobus away from Gepard’s body, freeing him of its influence at last. The next movement was far more vicious, a slash that hewed the baleful fire in two and sealed its fate.
~~~
Gepard swam back to consciousness, finally free from the sea of teal fire that sought to drown him. He’d come to rest on his knees, and even that much was a miracle in his condition—every part of his body ached as if he’d been on his feet and fighting for several days straight.
A few foggy memories drifted back to him, of how he’d been driven to continue without sleep, the belief that he didn’t need it. He lifted a hand to his face and tried to get his bearings. It was so dark, completely unlike anything he’d experienced in Belobog, and this terrible hollow cold that clawed at body and mind...
How had he ended up here?
Someone sighed with relief just ahead of him. “Good, it worked.”
Gepard tried to raise his head to look at whoever was speaking, but only managed a small twitch. The exhaustion weighed too heavily on him.
“It’s going to be okay. I’ll lead you back,” the voice said. It was familiar, but Gepard’s memories were so scattered that he couldn’t place it. “Here, take my hand. Just keep walking and we’ll be out of here in no time.”
A stark white hand moved into his view, palm up and ready to take his hand. Again the familiarity hung just beyond his reach. Gepard gave up trying to remember. He missed the first time he reached for the hand, and its owner assisted on the second attempt, catching his hand in a firm grip and pulling him to his feet.
For a moment Gepard’s knees threatened to buckle from pain alone as they took his weight. He clutched at his guide’s arm with his other hand, breathing heavily as he sought balance. At last his knees held, and he released his guide’s arm.
Gepard’s guide pulled him along, and Gepard mustered every ounce of strength to follow. Something dragged at him, beyond the sheer exhaustion. It threatened to make every step his last, but still Gepard persisted, still he found just enough will to keep moving forward, one step at a time.
“Everything’s going to be okay, I promise. Just keep walking.”
Again Gepard tried to recall the voice’s owner, but as soon as he neared the answer it slipped away like water draining through his fingers. Numb surprise was the only constant at finding this man as his helper.
“You’re doing great, just a little farther and we’ll be back.”
Gepard stumbled and lost his footing, but his guide caught him and held him fast before he could fall far.
“I know it’s hard, but we can’t stop. We’re getting so close.”
After a few breaths to steady himself, Gepard dragged his feet into position and stood. “I’m ready,” he managed.
The guide took his hand again, and they continued on. “We’re almost there—”
There was sudden, blinding light that made the hollow ache behind his eyes blossom into a full-blown headache, accompanied by the crunch of snow under his boots. The sudden spike in pain was enough to force him to his knees. Gepard pulled his hand free and brought both to his face with a groaning whimper, trying to shut out as much of the agonizing light as possible. Tears trickled through his fingers, freezing within moments of touching the frigid air of the Snow Plains.
His guide stumbled somewhere just ahead, followed by the squeaking crunch of both knees coming down in the snow. He gave a horrified gasp and tried to get back to his feet, only to flounder and fall back to the snow a moment later.
Gepard took one hand away from his face and reached blindly ahead, hoping to lend what assistance he could to the man who’d rescued him. His hand found a sleeve, then a distinctive piece of metal as he moved up to the shoulder...
“Sampo?” Gepard hesitantly lowered his other hand, squinting against pain and the snow’s reflected light. The shape of the person in front of him was right, but the color... Sampo was as ghastly white from skin to clothing, save for a few stark streaks of red in his hair like blood strewn across fresh snow. A tattered memory drifted back to him, fragile and clinging like a piece of cobweb: the black abyss, the white figure, and the infinitely sharp blade peeling away the thing that had been puppeting him for days. “What happened to you?” Gepard slid his hand to one of the chains that ran over Sampo’s shoulder and pulled him closer. “Sampo? Hey, answer me.”
For a few terrifying moments Sampo didn’t move. Then the muscles around his eyes twitched and he pried them open, even such a small movement taking monumental effort. Even his eyes had been drained of color, save for a few threads of scarlet in his irises. He opened his mouth to speak, but only a silent cloud of mist made it past his lips.
“Come on, say something!” Gepard put both hands on Sampo and gave him a brief shake, as if trying to wake him up. A few more memories returned, of his terror upon realizing he no longer had control of his body, of having to watch that thing use him to terrorize others. Sampo put a stop to it, and now... “Tell me how I can help you!” A surge of adrenaline gave Gepard the energy to force himself to his feet. He tried to drag Sampo up with him, carry him somewhere safer where they could figure out what to do without the cold pressing in on them, but Sampo was like a dead weight in his arms and there was nowhere he could think of to go.
Again Sampo tried to speak, to no avail. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, drawing every scrap of focus together, and forced the words out: “I’m drifting off... Ground me. Make me laugh, or surprise me. Just hurry.”
“Wh—” A fresh wave of panic descended on Gepard as Sampo closed his eyes and fell silent again. Had Sampo asked that he fight some manner of beast to fix things, Gepard would’ve done it in a heartbeat, exhaustion be damned. But surprise someone like Sampo? Make someone laugh on purpose? That would be a tall order even with all of Gepard’s mental faculties in order.
He focused his attention on Sampo again and realized that he could see his own shadow through him. The man was literally fading away right in front of him.
There was nothing but to give it his all. It was the least Gepard could do after what Sampo had gone through to save him; he’d never forgive himself if Sampo died now.
Gepard kept a hold on Sampo as he knelt down in front of him, his battered and weary brain struggling to come up with anything that would meet the criteria. Ideas continued to skitter out of his reach, until finally he pounced on one and pinned it down. It was something that would surprise anyone, especially with the sort of relationship he and Sampo shared. They were running out of time, he had to try it.
“Alright Sampo,” Gepard said as he took Sampo’s face in both hands to keep him steady. He only had one shot with this idea. Best not to miss. “Hey! Pay attention!”
Sampo forced his eyes open, their lids drooping and threatening to close at any moment.
Gepard took a deep breath to steel his resolve and pulled Sampo in for the kiss. He screwed his eyes shut just before their lips met, his face already burning against the cold. Time seemed to stretch around that small point of contact as a sudden flood of sensations hit Gepard all at once. A brief flutter in his chest like the wings of a bird startled into flight, followed by a bubbling warmth that blossomed in its wake and spread to the very tips of his chilled limbs. There was the subtle spicy scent of Sampo’s cologne as Gepard drew his next breath through his nose, and the unfortunate rasp of lips chapped by the cold.
Sampo gave a shocked inhale through his nose upon receiving the kiss, suddenly going rigid under Gepard’s hands.
Gepard held the kiss for only a few moments, then he let Sampo go. It was brief but... Better than he’d ever expected it to be. And hopefully it was enough.
He opened his eyes and sat back on his heels, his face still burning as he tried to avoid thinking about the lingering warmth from the kiss. In truth he’d been expecting a wave of revulsion upon kissing any wanted criminal, but instead...
Best not to think about it for now.
Sampo wobbled upon being released, then pitched back and landed hard on his rear, eyes wide and cheeks flushed as he stared at Gepard in plain shock. Color flooded back into him, as if the skilled hand of a painter were bringing him back to life. Blue flowed from the roots of his hair, leaving only the tips white as they always were, and vivid reds led the charge in restoring his clothes. In the space of a few moments he looked just as he was supposed to. “Wh— What was that?!” Sampo said in numb disbelief.
“I’m sorry! It was the first thing I could think of!” Gepard replied, his voice cracking slightly from embarrassment.
After a few breaths to get his bearings Sampo pushed himself up onto his knees and brought a hand to his mouth. “So... Did you mean it, or—”
“No I didn’t mean it!” Gepard snapped, despite not being sure himself.
Sampo looked down at himself and let out a relieved sigh upon seeing that his normal color and opacity were back. “Well it worked either way.” His chuckle ended with an embarrassed sigh. “Guess I owe you a favor now.”
“Let’s just call it even,” Gepard said, waving the idea off. “I still can’t remember much, but I know that thing was planning to kill me sooner or later.”
“It was letting you watch what it was doing?” Sampo said, his scowl showing a bit of canine. “That asshole...”
A sudden shiver cut off Gepard’s agreement. He checked the sky and noted that the day was almost over. They would need to find shelter for the night, or find a way to get back to Belobog before night fell. “Where are we?” Gepard wondered aloud; they were on the Snow Plains, sure, but the befuddlement of exhaustion and whatever that thing had done to him made identifying local landmarks impossible.
Sampo gave their surroundings a brief glance. “I have a hideaway nearby. I think we can make it if we head out now.” He braced himself with one hand and got to his feet, then raised his arms above his head in a long stretch.
Gepard made the attempt, but the adrenaline and its temporary strength had left him, and his legs buckled as soon as they took his weight. He cast about for his weapon in the hopes that he could use it to prop himself up, only to find it missing; there were no footprints leading to their location either, they’d somehow moved without leaving any trace. Gepard let out a long, grumbling sigh. “They’re gonna think I’m dead when they find my weapon by itself. Serval’s gonna have a heart attack!”
“Just text her then.”
“That thing threw my phone away,” Gepard growled. It was probably somewhere on the Snow Plains, still buzzing away with incoming messages.
“Then I’ll do this,” Sampo quipped as he took out his phone. His hand wobbled as he took the picture. He let out an annoyed sigh but kept it regardless. “It’s blurry and you look half dead, but at least it proves you’re alive.”
“Serval doesn’t have you blocked, right?”
Sampo froze. “Uh.” A few more taps and Sampo’s frown deepened. “Yeah, I’m blocked.” He very deliberately avoided Gepard’s glare and continued on, “I’ll just text Miss Natasha and she’ll pass the word along.”
Gepard decided to leave it for now and took a few deep breaths, then slowly got to his feet. “Where’s the hideaway you mentioned?”
Sampo pocketed his phone, then glanced around again. “Just along those cliffs over there. There shouldn’t be many fragmentum monsters around here, too.”
“Don’t jinx us,” Gepard grumbled. He could barely stand against a stiff breeze at this point; fending off monsters was out of the question.
“We better hurry, then.” Sampo took Gepard’s near arm and draped it over his shoulders.
“You don’t have to carry me,” Gepard said as they started off. “You look like you’re about to fall over.”
“I still look better than you,” Sampo replied. “And I didn’t risk my existence just to let you freeze to death out here.”
Gepard lowered his head and focused on putting one foot in front of the other for a while. “Sorry for all this,” he mumbled.
“Don’t apologize. Heliobus possession is impossible to break out of on your own,” Sampo said. “And that one wasn’t interested in making a deal to let you go. Believe me, I tried negotiating while it was chasing me earlier. There wasn’t anything you could do.”
That was worse, somehow. He’d experienced it firsthand as he struggled in vain to take back control, as the heliobus acted in direct contradiction to what he wanted just to spite him, but there was always that hope that he’d be willful enough to break through eventually. But to find out that it was simply impossible...
Gepard’s breath caught in his throat as his airways started to narrow. He would’ve died, and that thing would’ve moved on to its next victim without a second thought. And he knew exactly who would’ve been next. Serval, followed by the rest of his family. And there was nothing he could’ve done to stop it. Resisting was as futile as fighting a blizzard.
Gepard brought a hand to his head and tried to catch his breath, the chill of every inhale painfully sharp in his throat.
“Hey, calm down,” Sampo said, keeping up their relentless march as he brought a steadying hand to Gepard’s chest. “It’s over, that thing won’t hurt anyone ever again. Don’t think about it until we’re inside. Just focus on walking right now.”
Tears started again, as much from the pain and exhaustion as from fear. Every breath was agony—tension traced every rib and muscle with small, vicious needles, and the headache pounded relentlessly behind his eyes. Gepard focused on his feet, clumsily but deliberately putting one foot in front of the other, on and on, while the terror lurked in the background like a vulture waiting for its next meal to stop moving.
Sampo helped him through it all without complaint, no matter how Gepard slowed or stumbled. Gepard had called their score even earlier, but in truth... He might not be able to repay this debt.
The ping of Sampo’s phone receiving a message startled them both. “I bet that’s Natasha. See? Things are looking up,” Sampo said jovially as he paused to take his phone from his pocket. He opened up his messages, tilting his phone so Gepard could see the good news.
Natasha
Who is this? How did you get my number?
Sampo
Please tell Serval her brother is safe
Sampo’s hand had started to shake as he typed out his reply. He didn’t say a word as he put his phone away, his eyes focused on the snow just ahead of them.
It didn’t make sense. Natasha and Sampo were known associates, and surely Sampo hadn’t done anything to provoke her into saying such a thing out of spite. “Sampo...?” Gepard looked up at him, noting how pale Sampo’s face had gone and the tension that drew his lips into a thin line. “What’s going on?”
“Let’s keep moving,” Sampo replied, his voice flat and lifeless. “I’ll tell you later.”
They reached the cliff and continued along in its shadow. It blocked the growing wind, allowing them to pick up the pace.
Gepard tried not to think as he took one step after another. His body made its complaints known with nothing else to distract him. Chapped lips, long-neglected by the heliobus, had started to crack and bleed. Every inch of him ached, most of all his legs thanks to the fact they had to keep moving—his knees would probably be swollen for days at this rate. The headache was alive and well, its pain pulsing with every heartbeat like a small spiteful blacksmith hammering away at a new project. His stomach added its complaints to the pile, hunger pangs having long since progressed from annoyance to agony. And on top of it all was the sharp, fearful tension that clutched at his chest and throat. He should’ve stopped moving some time ago, yet he pressed on regardless. Sampo’s support was the only reason he’d gotten this far.
At last, after what felt like an eternity, Sampo stopped. “We made it,” he said as Gepard looked up at the span of cliff face in front of them. There was nothing special about it as far as Gepard could see, until Sampo reached up and tugged at a fist-sized rock that protruded from it. A hidden mechanism clicked and a door-sized chunk of the cliff swung back to reveal a rough-hewn tunnel.
Sampo dragged Gepard inside and shut the door behind them.
Gepard gasped at the sudden darkness and stumbled in Sampo’s grip.
“It’s okay,” Sampo said calmly. There was the rasp of his glove running over stone, and then a dim orange light illuminated the tunnel. “See? We’re safe.” He maneuvered Gepard to a bench that had been carved out of the tunnel’s rock and lowered him onto it, then sat down himself and slouched against the stone at their backs.
Gepard stared numbly at the far wall. The mist of their breath was far less obvious now, though he had no doubt that his own lips were as blue as Sampo’s at this point. It would likely be warmer once they were farther inside. They were indeed safe.
Sampo braced one hand against the wall at his back and forced himself to his feet. “Can you stand?” He offered Gepard a hand up, which Gepard sorely needed; his legs threatened to buckle again as soon as he put weight on them.
A wooden door waited for them at the end of the tunnel, with a set of carved stone steps leading up to it. The hinges gave little noise as Sampo opened it, while the floorboards beyond creaked as they stepped inside. Gepard lifted his head and looked around as the lights—a few shades brighter than those in the tunnel—came on. The room was lined with wood on all sides and likely had some manner of insulation separating it from the rock that held it. A memory drifted back to him, of Lynx sharing some factoid about cave camping: you had to be careful about heat on cold rock, since that could cause it to break away and collapse. Any insulation here would have twofold benefit. The furnishings within the room were simple but well-kept: a table with three chairs, a bed, various cupboards and chests, a few crates stacked in a corner, an ice chest, and a geomarrow stove. There was a door across the way that Gepard guessed would lead to some sort of bathroom. Not fancy by any means, but a sight for sore eyes after what they’d been through.
There was no trace of mist when they breathed now. Sampo guided Gepard to a nearby chair and pulled one over for himself, dropping into it and letting his head hang over the back. They remained there for a while, trying to regain their strength.
“Okay,” Sampo said at last as he hauled his head back up. “I’ll warm something up, and then we can sleep like the dead.” He stood without waiting for any reply from Gepard and opened a set of cupboards near the stove, where he retrieved a couple bottles from within. He passed one to Gepard and took a long drink from the one he kept.
Gepard needed all his focus to get the cap off the bottle. He took a sip and found it full of clean water, its cool caress an absolute mercy on his chapped upper lip and dry throat. The smell of sizzling Belobog sausage greeted him when he came up for air, and his stomach very pointedly reminded him that it had been too long since his last meal. Gepard’s grip on the bottle tightened as he held back a complaint—all he had to do was wait and the food would be ready, no need to embarrass himself by whining.
The wait was agonizing, though Gepard knew it couldn’t have been longer than ten minutes. Time just didn’t register correctly at the moment. Probably thanks to the exhaustion.
At last Sampo set their plates on the table, with two Belobog sausages on each. He sat down, his chair facing Gepard and the table on his right, and stabbed one of his sausages with a fork without a word.
Gepard followed suit, too tired to bother cutting the sausages first and instead tearring off chunks with his teeth as Sampo was. The skin of the sausage was crisped to perfection, and the interior just short of being able to burn his mouth. He started salivating the moment the salty, savory flavor touched his tongue. It was the most delicious thing he’d ever tasted. Gepard needed all his will to chew each bite thoroughly, if only to keep himself from choking on it. He was determined to ask for more as he made his way through the first, but after finishing the second he felt satisfied for the time being.
Sampo let out a long sigh as he pushed his plate aside. “I’m ready to hibernate. What about you?”
“Same,” Gepard replied. Sampo had promised to explain when they got to the hideaway but now the two of them could barely keep their eyes open. It would have to wait until tomorrow.
Gepard started the laborious task of taking off his armor. He lost track of what Sampo was doing while he worked, and Sampo surprised him by shoving a set of dark green pajamas in his face just as he set the last of his chest armor aside.
“Here, borrow these for tonight. The bathroom’s through that door, you can clean up in there,” Sampo said as he jerked a thumb at the door beyond the table. He was already wearing a set of red pajamas himself.
“Thank you.” Gepard briefly wondered if Sampo was trying to subtly tell him he stank, then decided it didn’t matter—he probably did stink. He wasn’t soiled by any means but the heliobus had driven him hard enough to make him sweat multiple times under his armor. Even a simple cleanup with a washcloth would do wonders for him.
Gepard slowly worked his way through the rest of his armor, stopping a layer short of his underclothes, then he took the borrowed pajamas into the bathroom.
~~~
Sampo was seated on the bed when Gepard stepped out of the bathroom, and all lights had been turned off save for a small dim one that was only bright enough to allow navigation of the room without turning the others on. Gepard was weary still, but feeling better for having been allowed the simple act of cleaning himself up. Sleep would be easy to find tonight, regardless of the horrors he’d been forced to endure in the past week. He was simply too tired to dwell on them.
“Ready?” Sampo asked, smiling for the first time since they’d arrived in the hideaway. It was a relief to see that smile’s return, regardless of how annoying it may have been in the past.
“Yeah,” Gepard replied. The blush was back, but he would sleep easier if he was able to feel another person next to him. Especially after that person had saved him before. There was no reason to make a big deal of it.
Sampo stood and let Gepard take the side nearest the wall, as if he’d anticipated how insecure Gepard might be feeling at the moment.
Gepard was grateful either way. He settled in and slid his feet under the folded blankets. There was just enough room for the two of them, as long as they lay close enough together. Gepard grabbed Sampo and held him close as soon as he pulled the covers over them, any remaining embarrassment forgotten in the haze of exhaustion. To his relief Sampo didn’t pull away, and he even allowed Gepard to tuck his head under his chin, one cheek resting against the soft fabric that covered his collarbone.
Silence reigned for a time. Gepard was just about to drift off, but he had one worry to ask about first.
“Hey, Sampo.”
“Hmm?”
“I’m... Not going to wake up and find that you disappeared, right?”
“You wouldn’t remember me if that did happen,” Sampo replied after a brief pause. “But this arrangement should make sure it doesn’t.”
The final knot of worry unwound, and Gepard let himself melt into Sampo’s arms. “Okay.” He closed his eyes. “Thank you,” he mumbled as he drifted off.
A snippet from the next chapter of The Arrow of Time cause I'm happy to finally be making decent progress on writing it again. This chapter has been frustrating, but I'm pretty pleased with how this part turned out. Got 4.4k words down so far.
...
Rubin scoffed. “Innocent… He killed three people this morning. What’s one more? What does a father matter to someone who would do that?”
“Ah yes, how terrible! How dare he defend himself against the fools who attacked him as soon as he stepped off the train that just arrived,” Daniil said, the bitter mockery clear in his tone. “Surely Isidor would’ve preferred that he just lay down and die at their hands! Is that what you’re going to tell me, since you knew the man so well?”
Rubin drew a sharp breath through his nose, jaw muscles shifting under his cheeks as he ground his teeth. “We’re done here,” he said, and he slammed the door in Daniil’s face.
Daniil stared at it for a few moments, the sound of his still-pounding heart suddenly overloud in his ears. The headache reasserted itself in full the moment he was no longer focused on the argument, each beat of his heart like a hammer blow to the inside of his skull, and the world itself seemed to become heavier. Then the reality of what he’d just done sank in.
He was supposed to build rapport with Rubin rather than making an enemy of him, but Daniil had forgotten that goal before he even came face to face with the man. Opposing Rubin’s idiotic assertions and defending Artemy had become the only things Daniil cared about during the argument. He’d failed the moment he let his emotions get the better of him.
And now he had a new mess to clean up. Rubin wasn’t going to listen, and Daniil couldn’t trust that anything he’d said would keep Artemy safe if the two met today. Daniil let out a long sigh, turned away from the door, and took a few steps along the landing.
Jumping back to the start of the day would be the safest bet, but his amalgam levels would be critically low if he had to try again after that. The next jump would be his last until he could get more.
Daniil lifted a hand to his head, squinting against the pain of his headache as he considered what other options were open to him. The two Soul-and-a-Halves would be along eventually, but there was no guarantee that Rubin would be willing to help them at all, and Daniil had no idea how long Rubin would linger if he didn’t send the man away. He could try to head Artemy off before he got to the apartment, meet him downstairs and try to convince him to leave Rubin be for today, but Artemy had never believed what he said about Rubin in the past. Best to assume that he wouldn’t be able to convince Artemy this time either. All he could hope for in that scenario was to follow Artemy up to Rubin’s apartment, and hope Rubin would be too cowardly to try anything with someone else present to intervene—
The door opened behind him. Rubin paused for a moment, then stepped out onto the landing behind Daniil. “I thought about what you said.” There was no open hostility in Rubin’s voice, and Daniil dared to hope that he still might be able to salvage this timeline.
“And what did you decide?” Daniil turned his head to the side and lowered his hand to indicate that he was listening, but didn’t look at Rubin—he didn’t trust his expression at this point, especially if Rubin could still be swayed.
Rubin’s arm came around, and Daniil saw it too late to duck out of the way. He caught Daniil by the neck and dragged him back toward the apartment.
Daniil kicked and squirmed in Rubin’s hold, his bag falling from his hand during the struggle, both hands clutching and clawing at Rubin’s arm, but even the fresh burst of adrenaline wasn’t enough to get himself free. Rubin’s grip around his neck wasn’t crushing his windpipe—yet, but it was only a matter of time as far as Daniil knew.
“You defend him like you know him,” Rubin snarled as they crossed the threshold, his breath hot in Daniil’s ear. “Confess. You’re working with him, aren’t you? What plot did you two cook up?”
“I haven’t met him yet,” Daniil rasped, both hands on Rubin’s arm in a fruitless attempt to pry it away.
“Not with the way you talk about him.” Rubin leaned back, lifting Daniil’s feet off the floor, and kept moving them deeper into the first room of his apartment. “Maybe the two of you set this whole thing up, and you’re here trying to cover your tracks. You could’ve been plotting it ever since the first letter arrived.”
“Artemy would never do such a thing!” Daniil spat. Rage and mortal terror fought for control as he pulled at Rubin’s arm, fighting gravity and the weight of his own body to keep his throat from being crushed. “You’re the one willing to murder someone out of jealousy! Not him!” Daniil’s leg knocked over a nearby chair as he kicked wildly, trying to knock Rubin off balance, and was rewarded with additional pressure to his throat.
Rubin paused to glance at the door. Daniil’s feet briefly touched the floor again as Rubin turned, crossed the distance in a few strides, and slammed it shut. “You wouldn’t say that if you didn’t know him,” Rubin said, and he reaffirmed his hold before Daniil had a chance to get away. “You must’ve met at the university. I wonder what he’ll do when he sees that I have you.”
The scenario played itself out before Daniil’s eyes, overlaying the room before him like a transparent veil and flashing by in the space of a few moments. Himself, tied to a chair in the darkness of Rubin’s tiny exam room, amalgam ticking ever downward as exhaustion and apathy claimed him. The door opening at last to reveal Rubin, followed immediately by Artemy.
“You—you kidnapped someone?” Artemy asked, eyes wide and face pale. It was the most fear Daniil had ever seen on his face, not yet for his own safety but for the sanity of the man he’d called a friend.
“Your accomplice,” Rubin said as he turned to Artemy.
“What?” Artemy turned to him in open confusion. “I’ve never met this man, Rubin. What’s going on here?”
“Don’t try to deny it. I’ve already caught on to your little scheme!” On the final word Rubin lunged at Artemy, drawing a scalpel he’d hidden up his left sleeve.
Artemy, injured and yet unwilling to kill his friend, lost the brief struggle and slumped against the wall. He slid down to the floor and lay still, a pool of blood growing beneath him.
Rubin drew a few deep breaths as he stared down at Artemy’s body, then turned to Daniil with the bloody scalpel still in his hand. “Your turn…”
The conclusion hit Daniil as the scenario faded. He’d be out of amalgam by that point, and that meant Rubin would be snuffing out all progress he’d made up to now, would send him back to zero.
Would erase those precious memories of that night in the Stillwater, as if it never happened.
“NO!” Daniil roared as a fresh wave of anger and adrenaline hit him. He curled in on himself, every muscle in his trunk burning as he lifted his legs clear of the floor and kicked off the closed door with all his might.
Rubin stumbled back, caught off-guard by the sudden shift in weight. He blundered right into the chair Daniil had kicked over earlier, his legs catching on it, and he released Daniil at last as he threw out both hands to catch himself.
Daniil staggered as his feet hit the floor, catching himself on left hand and knee and and drawing his revolver with his free hand. He pushed off as soon as he had his balance and took a few steps forward as the chair clattered behind him. Rubin was already after him again, hellbent on taking his life, on taking Artemy’s life. If Rubin won now, it would all be over.
“Rubin!” Daniil snarled as he whirled, pulling the hammer back as he moved and raising his arm to take aim. He found Rubin already up and surging forward, crossing the distance in mere moments with a scalpel in his hand, but it didn’t matter anymore.
Daniil pulled the trigger, firing a single round into Rubin’s chest at point-blank range.
Rubin collapsed mid-step, arms dropping to his sides and scalpel slipping from lax fingers, his head lolling forward as he came to rest in a crumpled heap at Daniil’s feet.
Daniil stared down at Rubin as he caught his breath, every inhale a gasp and every exhale seeming to crush his lungs, his body still buzzing from lingering adrenaline and his muscles burning from exertion. Bloody triumph buoyed him up despite the exhaustion. He’d won. Rubin tried to kill him and now he was dead.
Served Rubin right, the bastard. This was exactly what he deserved, what every traitor like him deserved.
The ghost of a laugh shuddered through him, and he realized he was smiling. Horror rose in his chest, seeming to fill his lungs like water, and the pain of his headache slammed down on him again as if in punishment. Daniil staggered back a few steps as the reality of the situation sank in. He’d killed Artemy’s friend, the man who was supposed to help create the vaccine. He’d failed.
And he couldn’t deny the thrill he’d felt when he pulled the trigger.
He lowered his gaze to his right hand and found it and the revolver covered with Rubin’s blood. The wave of nausea that followed almost forced him to his knees.
This wasn’t who he was supposed to be.
Daniil turned and took two faltering steps toward Rubin’s bedroom. The vaccine would never be made now, he’d doomed the town because he couldn’t keep his emotions in check. And somehow more gut-wrenching than that was knowing that Artemy would never forgive Daniil for killing his friend. This timeline was no longer salvageable.
He stopped abruptly and whirled back toward the front door; he'd dropped his bag out on the landing, he still needed to retrieve it. Daniil carefully avoided looking at Rubin’s body as he jogged to the door and wrenched it open.
There was his bag, laying on its side where he’d dropped it farther out on the landing. Daniil dashed over to it and scooped it up, noticing too late the sound of a pair of running feet coming up the stairs.
The two Soul-and-a-Halves stopped dead when they reached the landing and spotted Daniil. Their eyes darted to the gun in his hand and the blood covering both and then up to Daniil’s face, their eyes wide with fear. Without waiting for an explanation the two whirled and thundered back down the stairs.
Don’t—don’t look at me like that. He was going to kill me. He was going to kill everyone. I had to. But the words never made it to Daniil’s mouth. He stared blankly ahead as he turned and half-staggered, half-jogged back into the apartment. I had to. I had to.
The sight of Rubin’s body brought on a fresh wave of nausea. Daniil stumbled, nearly lost his balance, and hurried through the front room and into the bedroom, where the clock waited for him.
They looked at him as if they’d seen a monster.
Daniil swayed as he stopped before the clock and stared past its face. He brought his right hand up, still clutching the revolver, the side of his closed fist streaking blood across the glass. His mind found the necessary pathway almost without his bidding, the single incomplete shard of amalgam rearing up before him. Daniil focused on his destination, a mere two hours in the past.
I enjoyed pulling the trigger.
His legs buckled at the unwanted thought. Daniil fell back as the world warped around him and the timeline unraveled.
