Work Text:
Jack is tinkering in the lab when she comes to him. It's been two weeks since the incident, a week and a half since the funeral and he's down in the dark trying to pretend like everything's normal, like his hands don't shake and his eyes aren't rimmed with red, like he didn't break down crying over her work station when he saw she'd left one of her tools out and had the thought that she was never going to come back and put it away. It was still out. He couldn't bear to touch it, to cover up these lingering traces of her. It was late, and the kids were hopefully asleep, but probably not. Jazz had been staying up late, nursing tea and staring at nothing and Danny... Danny's bed had been empty every night since Maddie died. Jack hopes he's just been with Sam and Tucker, taking comfort in his friends. He dreads it's something worse. He- he needs to talk to Danny soon. He knows he does. It's just so hard, when sleepless nights bleed into sleepless days and he goes about feeling like his heart is too heavy for him to lift. He doesn't know how to help Danny when he's barely living these days himself.
"Jack." Comes her voice from behind him, quiet but achingly real. He closes his eyes and tries to breath through the pain. He's heard her call his name countless times since she stopped being able to. Seen her out of the corner of his eye, sworn she was just in another room. But no. She's gone and he could search the whole world over and never find her. She's just... disappeared. That's what death is, after all. Ceasing to exist. Still. He turns around. He'll never believe she's not there if he doesn't.
She is there.
No. She's... almost there. The thing in front of him has her face. It has her voice. It hovers, eye level when before he'd always had to look down. It has her eyes, the shape and light of them, but cast in a red as bright as the goggles of her hazmat suit. Her skin is teal. Her hair has gone a bright and neon green, it's still short but it swirls around her head like pure ectoplasm. It could be pure ectoplasm. He closes his eyes as pain lances through him like a suckerpunch, fast and vicious. He had no idea the universe could be this cruel.
"Maddie" he croaks, and grabs the table behind him as his knees give out for a moment.
"Jack," She calls again, and he's seen that look of concern on her face a million times and never has it broken his heart like it does today. "Jack- I know this is a shock." He can't help the strangled laugh that escapes him at that. It sounds like a dying goose. She bites her lip as her eyes get more worried, she floats forward a bit, her hands hovering as if to reach out and touch him. He's glad she doesn't. If she did he'd let her embrace him and damn the consequences, and he can't afford that. Not when he knows what she is.
"I-I swear," She tells him anxiously, "It's not what you think. We were- we were wrong about everything. I'm still me. I promise- I-" She pauses, swallowing, "I need you to trust me Jack," She tells him quietly, and he can't look away from the red of her eyes, "Please. I know- I know this looks bad. But I need you to be my partner. Please."
Here's the thing. Jack knows better. He really, really does. He knows this isn't his wife. He knows exactly how this story ends and it's with this ghost using him to create as much pain and destruction as it can manage. He's read so many accounts just like this one, and it doesn't matter that those are Maddie's eyes, just red, or that it's Maddie's voice, or that she sounds so sincere, and he has never, ever not trusted her. It's exactly what she would say, he thinks dully. It's what she's always asked, when she's convinced of something but he's not sure. It's what he's always asked of her when it was the other way around. Trust me. Be my partner. Before today the answer has always, invariably been yes. And now, with her face and her voice asking what she's always asked, he wants, more than anything, to say yes.
Grief is the weapon of ghosts.
It was her, cry the victims in all the accounts he's read. It was him, I'd swear. This isn't Maddie, and if he's fool enough to fall for it then this ghost with his wife's face will drag him to his death and use him against everyone he loves. His children are (not) sleeping upstairs and he is all that stands between them and this thing wearing their dead mother's face. Trust me, says the spectre in every tragedy ever put to pen, and until today he's never understood how the victim could.
It's not Maddie. He knows it's not Maddie. But here and now with her loss cold iron in his veins and a hole through his very soul, looking into a face he knows more dearly than his own, he would give almost anything to believe it was. He would follow her to his death willingly, for the barest sliver of a chance that maybe he's wrong, maybe she's different, maybe despite everything he's read and studied this will work.
The children says the last sane part of his brain. His own destruction is one thing, but he could never gamble their lives.
"Vladdie can watch the kids," He finds himself saying, his lips moving numbly. "We could- we could go to the Ghost Zone. Study where we went wrong." It is the most selfish decison he's ever made. But- if he can take her away from Amity Park, away from their kids and their friends and all those helpless people, if he could limit the destruction to just himself- the ache of their empty bed numbs all else. His children should never forgive him this, for taking both parents from them when he should stay, should be there for them, but he's... he's not strong enough. Maddie has always completed him and he doesn't know how to go on without her. Vladdie will take care of them. They'll be cared for, at the least.
"Oh Jack!" Her eyes light up and she looks so relieved, "I knew you'd help!"
"We should go immediatedly," he tells her, still feeling distant, moving almost on automatic, "You might have different needs or reactions now. It's best to study them first, rather than risk anything going wrong." He moves over to the phone as he speaks. A flash of surprise lights her eyes.
"The kids?" She asks, trailing off, "We should say goodbye." His heart siezes at the thought of her near his children, when they're grieving her so deeply, when they've never been as wary of ghosts as they should be.
"Better to have answers to give them," Jack tells her, dialling Vladdie's number, "They'll be confused and hurt otherwise. Jazzy-pants doesn't do well when she doesn't have the answers, and you know how Danny is with stress. We'll investigate a little first, so we can answer all their questions. We don't want to scare them."
"Right." Maddie's ghost subsides, quieting. He calls Vlad. Vlad doesn't pick up. It's very late. He leaves a message. He picks up a pen and scribbles a note on a post-it and sticks it to his workbench, the first place the kids will look in the morning.
Gone to Ghost Zone with your mother. Vlad will take care of everything. I love you.
It's not enough, but he doesn't know what else to say. I'm sorry? It seems too cheap, when he's doing it anyways.
"Ready?" He asks Maddie's ghost, moving toward the Specter Speeder.
"Oh- yes." She agrees, going with him. She seems disquieted, thrown off by his behavior. It's fine. They're leaving, and he'll get to see her face and hear her voice and pretend, maybe, that things are just like they used to be and they're just off on an expidition, like they always planned to one day take. And she won't be near anyone else she can hurt.
He enters the Ghost Zone with her. He doesn't expect to come back.