CoinFlipperദ്ദി(˵ •̀ ᴗ - ˵ ) ✧ @thecoinflipper - Tumblr Blog

again

For @q-gorgeous, @bibliophilea, and SapphireShield (who has no tumblr).

Can also be read here on AO3.

Trigger warning for dissec.

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For the umpteenth time, Jack and Maddie prepped the dissection.

Maddie’s hands shook slightly as she laid out her tools precisely, one by one. She wished dearly that she had some way to count how many times she had done this. Somewhere in the middle, she’d lost track.

Not that it mattered much. The real problem was that she and Jack had no way to record what they’d already done, what they’d already tried, or the results of those different trials. There was a limit to how much data a human brain could absorb and how fast. There was a reason she and Jack spent so much time developing sensors and programs to interpret what those sensors collected.

“What are we going to try this time?” asked Jack, leaning close to whisper in her ear. He, too, was going through the motions, pulling an extra pair of safety gloves over the ones attached to his jumpsuit.

Honestly, Maddie didn’t know. Sometimes, it felt like they’d tried everything. More than once, they hadn’t even bothered to start the dissection, they’d just jumped immediately to destructive measures. They had more than a few at their disposal, after all. A whole vault full of experimental weapons and everything deadly that lived in a house, from baseball bats to kitchen knives to electrical outlets. Her bare hands, once, and even she didn’t know how that worked.

(The thing on the table behind them, sectioned off in a soundproofed cubicle, was a ghost.)

(It shouldn’t have worked. It shouldn’t have been able to die. It was already dead.)

What hadn’t they tried? Where hadn’t they looked?

There had to be some sort of mechanism for what was happening to them. That thing had to be doing it somehow, because neither Jack nor Maddie had ever designed something like this, had never wanted to. What would be the point? They wanted to study ghosts, not create time loops.

But the question remained, as it always did when Maddie’s thoughts went down this rabbithole: What was the mechanism? How could they make it stop?

For at least the last several loops, Maddie’s theory had been that, somehow, they just hadn’t been destroying whatever body part mediated the ghost’s powers fast enough. That the loops - which had to be some sort of defense mechanism - triggered upon significant damage to the body,

They’d gone for the obvious, first. The glowing crystalline sphere that was the ghost’s core. The other strange, inhuman structures in its chest. The surprisingly human-like brain. The organs that ectoplasm seemed to rush to most easily. The hands, from which most active ghost powers seemed to originate. Then they’d moved to anything that seemed at all anomalous, compared to other ghosts they’d studied. There was certainly a lot. This ghost was abnormal.

But even there, they were starting to run out of places to look.

How much longer would they have to do this? Maddie missed her children. This time loop was too short to call Jazz at college or pick Danny up from school early. The only thing there was time for was the dissection.

“We could try incinerating it again,” suggested Jack. “I betcha we could rig the furnace to be at least, three, four times as hot as it’s supposed to be. Just really overclock it.”

“Maybe,” said Maddie. They’d done that before, she was sure of it. Even if they hadn’t, they’d ended one loop by removing the ectofiltrator and setting the portal to blow. If that wasn’t fast enough and thorough enough to destroy the ghost, Maddie didn’t know what was. “Just give me a moment to think.”

The lab’s ventilation system hummed, which didn’t help Maddie’s growing headache. Every time the loop reset, the headache went away, but it came back before too long.

“We’ve been working on destroying it quickly, or finding the source of the power, but… what about doing it slowly? Maybe doing it quickly is what triggers it, but if we did it slowly, with poison, or a corrosive agent, maybe we could degrade it enough that it couldn’t do it.”

“Or something ectophobic!” said Jack, excitedly. “That’s brilliant, Maddie! We could start with our formula for ecto-dejecto–”

“No, if we’re doing experimental formulas, we start from scratch,” said Maddie. “We can’t risk it getting out.” They couldn’t let these time loops lure them into a false sense of security. She doubted that they would continue if the ghost fulfilled its goal of escaping.

“Will we have enough time?” asked Jack.

It was true that the loops never lasted long. “We’ve worked with tight deadlines before. We can do it. And each time we’ll get better, faster. But we’ll start with simpler things.” She flexed her gloves.

Jack nodded. “The ectophobic coating on our gloves’ll be toxic to it, in liquid form.”

Maddie nodded slowly. That, at least, they’d tested. “We can try different ways of administering it,” she said. “Orally, intravenously…” She trailed off. The ghost had veins, but no heart, and little in the way of ‘blood’ pressure. Would something like an injection or an IV drip even work? She sighed, reminding herself that the one thing they had an excess of was time.

“You figure that out, I’ll whip up a fresh batch,” said Jack. “Banzai!”

Maddie nodded to herself. The coating mixture was stored in component form, as the mixture itself was too unstable to keep. It wouldn’t take him long, although it would probably take longer than most of the loops had lasted. Her hand hovered over her tools, the back of her neck prickling.

Perhaps, in addition to setting up their delivery method, she ought to distract the ghost. Make sure it didn’t just rest the loop on them out of boredom, or whatever spiteful thing passed as boredom for ghosts. Her hand fell to a scalpel, index finger running along the length of the blade.

Preparations first. Injections. That would be easier than devising a delivery method to force it down the ghost’s throat and into a stomach it barely had. Without getting bitten, mind. Some ghosts were venomous, and they’d gagged this one for a reason. All the horrible things it had been saying…

Injections were easier.

She walked over to the cabinet that held the syringes and started sorting through them. Had they tried giving the ghost an air embolism yet? Logically, it shouldn’t do anything, but, goodness, it was such an easy thing to test. She’d suggest it to Jack next loop. No need to make Jack do all this work for nothing if it did trigger something.

She transferred the syringes and the rest of her tools onto the table cart that she and Jack sometimes used as a mobile workstation and wheeled it over to the thick, reinforced door to the containment unit. The ghost followed her with its awful, too-bright eyes, the only part of itself it could move, other than its fingers and the tip of its ghostly tail. That had been a trick to strap down, but not one she and Jack hadn’t anticipated. Its white hair spread out around its head like a corona, and its chest was open from their initial exploration, before the time loops started. It was so long ago, now.

Maddie punched a security code on the pad next to the containment unit door and opened the it, an act loud enough that Jack looked up from his work measuring reagents. “Mads?”

“I’m just checking on something,” she called to him. “You keep going.”

“You got it, Maddie!”

Maddie sighed and shut the door behind her. She didn’t like cutting herself off from Jack, but it would only be a few minutes.

Cautiously, she approached the ghost. It was as firmly bound as it always was, but, surely, it knew about the time loops too. It may have found a way out. Certainly, it must be trying to find a way out, if it hadn’t.

But, no, everything was still in place. Exactly in place, as if she and Jack hadn’t ended the last loop by carving out one of its eyes.

She leaned over the ghost, looking into the opening in its chest. She and Jack had moved some things in there before the loops started, but at this point she had no idea which ones. Reaching in, she palpitated the sides of the hole with her gloved fingers, feeling for… What? She didn’t know. Ribs? The outlines of organs?

Nothing new stood out. Nothing she hadn’t seen and felt dozens of times before. Nothing she hadn’t destroyed dozens of times before. Nothing that would solve their problems. So much for that moment of inspiration.

She turned away, going back to the door and once again leaving the ghost alone in its containment unit. Horrible thing. Didn’t it know when it was beaten?

“Just about done over here,” called Jack. “I just need to–”

The door at the top of the stairs slammed open. Maddie gasped, spinning, squinting against a sudden light. This had never happened before. Not in any of the loops. It had always been just the two of them and the ghost.

She was treated to the sight of Danny, her son, leaping down the stairs, an expression of shock and confusion on his face. He must have practically launched himself off the top step.

Maddie didn’t have time to react, but, thankfully, for the sake of her racing heart, Danny neatly avoided hitting any of their equipment. He jogged sideways on one foot a bit, catching his balance, but the effort was rendered moot by Jack sweeping him up in an enormous hug. Maddie joined it immediately.

It had been so, so very long.

“What? I– Okay. I, uh–” Danny pressed his face into her shoulder, bunching his fingers in the fabric of her jumpsuit. “Okay. This is going to sound crazy, but I’ve been stuck in some kind of time loop, and–”

Maddie pulled back from the hug, although that was the very last thing she wanted to do. “You’ve been experiencing them as well?” she asked. “Has everyone?”

“You–?” Danny shook his head. “No, no one, but this is the first time I’ve managed to get all the way here without it ending and dumping me back in class. But this is good! I think I know about someone who can help, but they’re in the Ghost Zone. If you’re starting from here, you can probably get there in time with the Speeder, even though I–” Danny had been craning his neck, looking deeper into the lab, and now he froze. He wasn’t even breathing.

Was this some new torment the ghost was trying? “Danny?”

“What are you doing?” he breathed. He squirmed, pushing his way out of Jack’s embrace with surprising force. He lunged for the containment unit as soon as his feet hit the floor, but Jack grabbed his shoulder. “What are you doing?” he demanded again, but this time the question echoed off the steel walls of the lab.

“Don’t get too close, son,” said Jack, “that’s what’s causing all this. But don’t worry, your mom and I are close to figuring it out.”

Danny whirled to face them again, wide-eyed. “Wait, you know, and– Have you just- just been cutting into him this entire time? What is wrong with you?”

“It’s the only way to stop the loops,” said Maddie.

“Only way to– Have you tried stopping?”

What did he even mean by that? Maddie frowned, trying to understand. Naturally, Danny would have had a very different experience of the loops than they did, but why in the world would he want them to continue? Jack answered first.

“I know you kids don’t like to see stuff like this,” said Jack, “but we wouldn’t have to do this much if it wasn’t causing the loops.”

“Yeah?” Danny’s voice was high pitched and almost hysterical. “What else could he have done? Huh? What else was he supposed to do, when you’re, you’re dissecting him like some kind of lab frog?” He ripped away from Jack and, this time, they were both too surprised to stop him. He reached the door to the containment unit and pulled on the handle.

Maddie had never been so glad for their redundant security measures as she was now. Danny didn’t know the code to the door. That didn’t stop him from sucking in his lips and punching in first one code, then another. He wasn’t going to get it. He didn’t even have the right number of digits.

“You’re not going to find the code like that, Danno,” said Jack, sounding confused. Maddie was confused, too. “It’d take millions of years to guess it.”

“Then I guess it’s a good thing we’re in a time loop, then, because now that I’ve figured out how to get here, I’ll keep coming back again, and again, and again–”

“Danny,” said Maddie, shaking off her momentary paralysis. “Danny. What are you doing?”

“What do you think I’m doing? I’m ending this. You- You can’t do this to people. You can’t.”

“It isn’t a person.”

“He is.”

“It’s a ghost,” said Maddie. This was why they didn’t involve their kids in this part of their research. They were too sensitive. It wasn’t a bad thing, just an impediment to this kind of science. “It’s more like a corpse than a person.”

Danny kicked the door of the unit hard enough to shake it - Maddie would have to check that it was still bolted to the floor properly, it shouldn’t have done that - and turned to face them.

“What about me?” he asked through tightly clenched teeth. “Am I just a corpse to you, too?”

“What– Of course not. What are you talking about?”

A light flashed around Danny’s waist, and by the time Maddie had blinked it out of her eyes, there was someone else standing in his place. Something. Floating. There was something else floating in his place.

Phantom floated in her son’s place, glowing tears gathering in the corners of its eyes, breaking off to float in the air.

And then a blast of green light struck it squarely in the chest, slamming it into the wall. Maddie’s head snapped to the side to see Jack holding the still gleaming bazooka with two hands.

“I- I panicked,” said Jack. “But we can just… try again.”

Maddie could feel the tingle that presaged the time loop restarting. She nodded.

“As many times as it takes.”