Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

In the end, tracking him down wasn’t a problem.

And honestly, Sam wasn’t really surprised. Sure, these days the federal government had a team of scientists dedicated to understanding spectral phenomena, and sure, their funding comically dwarfed the Fentons’, let alone anything Sam or Tucker or Valerie or Dani could dredge up from their savings on the best of days. But the real expertise still lay squarely with Danny’s parents. Even a team of federally funded Ivy League assholes couldn’t quite match up to the nearly three decades of experience that was under the Fentons’ belt. The Specter Deflector, the Ecto-Converter, the Fenton Thermos, the Boo-merang, even the Ecto-Stoppo-Power-Erfier—it always seemed to Sam that the sillier the name was, the better the device worked.

The thing was, though: They all worked.

When all was said and done, actually, it took longer for Sam, Tucker, Dani, and Valerie to all agree that they wanted to track him down in the first place than it did to actually track him down. Tucker had worked some of his magic with the boomerang, hooked up the tracking system to his phone, and bam, the signal lit up a twenty minutes’ bus ride outside of Amity Park.

So that was how, one year and a few months after Vlad Masters tried to take over the world and literally almost killed her boyfriend, Sam ended up standing face-to-face with him in a back alley off Maitland Avenue.

Or, well. Almost face-to-face.

“Seriously?” Tucker asked, eyeing up the shimmering magenta forcefield standing between them and what looked like a random homeless dude standing at the back of the alley.

It was him, though. There was no doubt about it, even without the super obvious display of ghost powers, and even with the haziness of the forcefield that made it tough to pick up details. His beard was way scruffier and his hair had lost that douche-y ponytail, and he was wearing a pair of worn jeans and a hoodie instead of the whole suit-and-tie thing, but Sam recognized him instantly. She knew they all did.

Sam said, “Look, Plasmius, we’re not here to, like, threaten you or anything.”

“Oh,” Plasmius said, the first word she’d heard him speak in over a year, hands in his pockets and his voice dripping sarcasm, and if there’d been any doubt in Sam’s mind up until that point that they’d found the right guy, it vanished then. His voice was admittedly different somehow, quieter and a little raspier, but it was totally one-hundred-percent him. “Well, what a relief.”

“She’s serious, dude,” Tucker said. “We’re not.”

“And I’m sure you’ll forgive the precaution all the same,” Plasmius said. Yeah, there was something else about his voice that was… off, Sam thought. Something that wasn’t syncing up with her memory of this guy, something his voice used to have before that it was now lacking, but the word for what that something was uselessly flitted around the outskirts of her brain without sticking. “After all,” he said, “these are difficult times for people like us, aren’t they?”

He directed a very pointed look at Dani then, and Valerie sidestepped to plant herself a little more firmly between them.

“So he’s still exactly as much of a dick as he’s always been,” Val muttered, shooting a look at Tucker and then at Sam. “What did I tell you?”

“Ah, Miss Gray, it is just so lovely to see you again, too— One more step, Mr. Foley, and I’m afraid I may lose what little restraint I’ve been inclined to use thus far.”

Tucker went a little pale, backing up a step.

“You know, I don’t know why,” Sam said, crossing her arms and glaring across the forcefield at him, “but I was kind of hoping we could’ve had a civil conversation here.”

“Oh, were you?”

“I was, yeah.”

“And was that before or after you all hunted me down and cornered me in a back alley, hm?” Plasmius asked. “Was that before or after all four of you armed yourselves with anti-ghost weapons and… Are those Spector Deflectors you three are wearing as well, or am I mistaken?” He pulled one hand from his pocket to point at Sam, Tucker, and Valerie before stuffing both hands in his pockets again. “You can imagine that civility is not quite at the top of my list of priorities at the moment.”

Valerie said, “We had to take some precautions, too.”

“Clearly.”

Sam pinched the bridge of her nose. “Okay, again, we’re not here to threaten you.”

“No?”

“No! We’re here because—” and here Sam hesitated for the briefest of seconds, but she thought for the millionth time of Danny, wherever he was, whatever he was going through at this very moment, and she plowed determinedly on— “because we need your help.”

Plasmius, oddly, did not seem surprised by that. In fact, he huffed a laugh and rolled his eyes.

Valerie asked, “Sorry, is that funny?”

“A bit, yes,” he answered, though from the sound of his voice, it really wasn’t. “But please, do go on.”

Sam opened her mouth and found that the words wouldn’t pass the sudden hard lump in her throat; this tended to happen, quickly and with no warning whatsoever, whenever she thought of Danny in these last few days.

Valerie beat her to it anyway. “Danny’s gone.”

“I’m aware,” Plasmius said.

“Yeah, it’s all over the news,” Tucker said. “So you know he got arrested on some bullshit ‘public endangerment’ charge? And that he’s all the way over in D.C. right now?”

“In a well fortified Homeland Security facility, yes,” Plasmius answered. “While no doubt serving unwillingly as the new Department of Spectral Security’s test subject for all manner of gruesome experiments. And if you’ll allow me to hazard a guess as to where you’re going with this: The four of you intend to somehow free him from said facility, do you?”

The resounding silence from all of them was, apparently, answer enough.

“Of course you do,” he continued. “And by some miracle, you’ve set your cocksure teenage naivety aside, and you’ve realized that breaking into one of the most secure facilities in the country is not something the four of you will be able to accomplish on your own.”

“I mean, we—”

“And so you’ve come to me,” Plasmius went on without acknowledging Tucker’s interruption. “Understandable. But tell me: Why on Earth would I ever agree to help you with this? Why would I, the most wanted man on the planet, even begin to entertain the idea of waltzing into—”

“Oh, my God,” Dani groaned, the first words she’d spoken since they got here. “We don’t want your help breaking into the place, we just need you to drive us there.”

For a second, he said absolutely nothing to that.

He just stared at Dani, looking like it took a few seconds for her meaning to actually register. It seemed, finally, that they’d said something he wasn’t expecting, something that—judging by the look on his face—actually managed to blindside him.

“I— I’m sorry, what?”

“You heard her,” Sam said, shrugging one shoulder. “None of us can drive yet. And Danny’s parents and his sister are all being watched, like, all the time, so none of them can help us. And none of our parents are gonna be cool with driving us across the country just so we can—”

“Let me see if I’m understanding this,” Plasmius cut her off. “You are all more than aware of what I am. You’re all more than aware that I have enough power in me to decimate a city block , and you want me for my driver’s license?”

“‘Want’ is a strong word,” Valerie muttered.

“More or less, yeah,” Sam said. “Seriously. I mean, if you wanna help us actually get Danny out of there, that’s awesome, but right now we’re really just trying to figure out how to get there.”

Plasmius asked, “Why not use the Specter Speeder?”

“Right, yeah,” Valerie rolled her eyes. “‘Cause a six-ton chrome flying machine is exactly what we need to get to D.C. without them knowing we’re coming.”

Plasmius said nothing to that.

“Look,” Tucker said. “We need to get to D.C. to save our friend, okay? Literally every adult in our lives either doesn’t care that Danny’s locked up in that… that place, or they do care and they’re already being watched around the clock. But lucky for us, you have a whole lot riding on whether we get Danny out of there or not—”

“Oh, do I?”

“Uh, yeah?” Tucker said, raising an eyebrow at him. “Because the longer those guys have Danny, the more they’re gonna learn about half ghosts, dude. And I don’t know about you, but if I was the most wanted guy on the whole planet, I probably wouldn’t want the feds learning any more about that than they already know. They’re already catching up to Danny’s parents with all the fancy new gear they’re pumping out every month. They already got a tracking grid over the whole U.S. that pings every time there’s ghost activity—”

“Yes, I am well aware of that, thank you.”

“Yeah,” Tucker said. “And with Danny in that place now, I give ‘em a couple weeks before they figure out how to track every half ghost in existence and send a bunch of their goons to hunt you down wherever you’re at. A couple weeks tops.”

“You won’t be able to hide anymore,” Sam said. “If we don’t get Danny out of there, it’s only a matter of time before they get you, too.”

And, well… that much was true, at least.

On the other side of the unwavering glowing barrier, Plasmius was silent, watching all four of them, his eyes narrowed. Sam crossed her arms tight over her chest and dug her fingertips into her bicep, trying to quell the rapidfire hammering of her pulse. She knew, logically, that Plasmius couldn’t read minds. She knew he couldn’t possibly know what their plan really was.

It was still very, very nerve-wracking to think that he might.

Finally, Plasmius took a hand out of his pocket and scrubbed it over his face. He shook his head, muttering something under his breath that Sam didn’t catch.

Then he said, “I will… take it into consideration.”

Sam blinked.

“Wait, seriously?” Tucker asked. “What do you mean you’ll—?”

Before he could even finish the sentence, the glowing forcefield vanished into nothing but a wisp of pinkish fog.

And Plasmius vanished with it.

“I’m just saying,” Val said, leaning against the car with her arms crossed. “I could hotwire a car if we needed it.”

“We don’t need it,” Sam reminded her, paused, and added: “Yet. We definitely don’t need it right now.” She slung her bag into the very back of the trunk, tucking it neatly beside the box of emergency car tools — spare tire kit, jumper cables, extra oil, wiper fluid, flashlight and headlamp, the whole nine yards. “If we steal a car, we’re gonna get pulled over and caught before we even reach the city limits. This one is technically mine, so.”

“It’s technically going to be yours,” Tucker corrected her as he set his own bag down in the trunk. “Once you have a license.”

“And right now it’s registered under my grandma’s name. This is our safest bet. Even if she notices the car’s gone, she won’t rat us out.”

“What happens if one of your parents notices it’s gone?” Valerie asked.

“They won’t,” Sam said. “They never come here.”

It was true. This storage unit garage was super stuffy and smelled of dust and mildew because of how little any of the Mansons ever graced it with their presence. The car itself wasn’t much better; it hadn’t been touched since six months ago, when she took it for a practice drive with her grandma in the passenger seat, and it definitely smelled like it. By now they’d gotten the garage door and all four of the car doors hanging wide open, letting it air out as they arranged all their bags.

Valerie was quiet for a second before she said, “So assuming he doesn’t show—”

“I think he’s gonna show,” Tucker said.

“But assuming he doesn’t,” Val went on. “What’s the plan? How do we get Danny out of there if we don’t have anything better to offer up?”

“I still feel like the bigger problem is gonna be getting there,” Sam said. “I can drive, but we’re gonna get pulled over every couple hours if it’s just a car full of teenagers. And Dani can only overshadow so many cops.”

“I could do it,” Dani mumbled from where she was already sitting in the backseat.

Sam opened her mouth, then shut it. It was so not worth arguing, and she knew it. They all knew Dani’s powers had never been exactly as stable as Danny’s, and none of them—not Sam, not Tucker, not Valerie, and not Danny either if he were here—were gonna be willing to risk her falling apart into a puddle of ectoplasmic goop if she overextended herself again.

Of course Sam knew Dani had plenty of reason to insist that she could get them from here to D.C. without needing help from Plasmius. Dani had been the only one whose vote against this plan remained a vote against this plan all the way to the end. Even when they’d come to the inevitable conclusion that the only way to get Danny out of the government’s hands was by offering up a better option, even when she’d been totally on board for the idea of sucking Plasmius up into the Fenton Thermos and organizing some kind of trade—and, in fact, had offered to be the one to do it herself—she’d still been adamant against him being in the car for the whole drive across the country.

Just suck him up into the thermos now and get it over with, she’d kept arguing, but the fact was then as it was now: If Danny could bust out of the thermos given a day or so, Plasmius could probably figure out how to do it in half that time.

Still. It wasn’t like Sam could really blame her for not wanting him around.

“It’s thirteen hours if we drive straight there without stopping,” Tucker spoke up from the backseat beside Dani, laptop already out and open. “Did everyone disable the location service on their phones like I said?”

“Yes, Tucker,” all three of them said in unison.

“Exactly the way I said to do it?”

Again, all three of them answered, “Yes, Tucker.”

“Cool,” he said without acknowledging any of their annoyed tones. “So no one should be able to track us through our phones, but that means no GPS. And I know we planned for this, but I give it til about lunch time tomorrow before at least one of us is reported missing, which means there’s gonna be cops all over the place looking for us, which means we’re probably gonna want to vary up our route anyway.”

Sam sighed. “So you’re saying…”

“It’s gonna be a lot longer than thirteen hours, yeah. Our best bet is maybe three days. Two if we push it.”

“Four would be more prudent.”

“Jesus Christ, dude,” Sam yelled, heart hammering painfully against her ribs, and she whirled around to see none other than Vlad Masters standing in the doorway to the storage unit garage. “Oh, my God. Could you be any creepier?”

“I’m sure I could be, if I put my mind to it,” Plasmius answered mildly. He looked more-or-less exactly the same as he had the day before, but with the absence of an impenetrable glowing magenta barrier, Sam could see now that his hoodie was an old worn forest green and that it had a little Packers logo on it. Because of course it did.

“You’re ten minutes early,” Valerie said.

Behind her, Tucker leaned out the open car door and asked, “This mean you’re in?”

Plasmius shot a look at Tucker, then at Sam and Valerie still standing by the open trunk, and he heaved a sigh.

“Let’s play it by ear, shall we?” he asked, and Tucker took that with nothing more than a shrug before he settled back into the car and kept working on his laptop. He pulled his door shut, and Dani slammed hers shut a second later. Plasmius approached the car, pulling the Fenton Boomerang from his hoodie pocket, along with the little Post-It that Sam had attached to it with the time and the date and the name of the storage unit on it.

“Thanks for that, by the way,” he said as he handed the boomerang back to Sam. “I’ll have a bruise on the back of my head for the next week.”

Valerie asked, “So, what do you mean, play it by ear?”

“I mean, I’m willing to accompany the lot of you to Washington, for some reason I cannot even begin to fathom,” Plasmius answered, shaking his head. “But whether I will then assist in recovering Daniel from that facility remains to be seen.”

Sam was struck, once again, with the terrifying thought that Plasmius could actually read minds, that he somehow could tell exactly what their plan was, that he was only agreeing to this at all—even tentatively—so that he could turn on them before they would inevitably turn on him. But she shoved that anxiety way way down. Buried it, stomped it down, and schooled her face into something neutral.

“No bag?” she asked, tossing the boomerang into the trunk.

“I’ve learned to travel light,” Plasmius answered without looking at her, his eyes on the car instead. “Suppose this is what I’ll be driving, then?”

“Yeah,” Sam said as she slammed the trunk shut.

Plasmius only nodded and started making his way around to the driver’s side, but before he even made it past the rear bumper, Valerie stepped into his path with her arms crossed over her chest. And Sam had no idea how she managed to look that intimidating when standing face-to-face with a guy who stood nearly a foot taller than her and probably outweighed her by fifty pounds, but somehow she pulled it off.

Plasmius asked, “Something I can help you with, Miss Gray?”

“Yeah,” Valerie said. “You remember all that fancy ghost hunting equipment you gave me?”

“I vaguely recall, yes.”

“Good. I still have it. All of it. And I’m warning you right now,” she said, taking one step closer so she could lower her voice, “if I have any reason to think you’re gonna pull some supervillain shit, any reason at all to think you’re gonna hurt any of us, especially Dani— if you even look at her the wrong way, I will unload so much anti-ghost artillery on you that it’ll make the U.S. government jealous. You got that?”

For a second, Plasmius didn’t say anything. Sam didn’t say anything either, looking from Valerie to him and back again. She was acutely aware of Tucker and Dani sitting in the backseat not ten feet away, but whether they had overheard any of what Valerie just said, she didn’t know.

Finally, Plasmius nodded exactly once. “Understood.”

Valerie looked him up and down. Then she nodded, turned away, and opened up the back door on the driver’s side, shimmying in beside Dani.

Sam dug into her pocket and tossed Plasmius the keys before rounding the car toward the passenger side. She settled in comfortably with her extra backpack hugged to her chest, and she twisted around to look at Valerie, Dani, and Tucker all crowded into the backseat together. Val offered her a half-smile and a thumbs up, though from the look on her face she was every bit as nervous about this as Sam was. Tucker didn’t even look up from his laptop.

Dani, on the other hand, kept her glare unwavering on Plasmius as he opened up the driver’s side door, as he adjusted the seat, as he got in and buckled his seatbelt and adjusted the mirrors. Like she believed that if she looked away from him for even a second it would give him an opening to, as Valerie put it, “pull some supervillain shit.”

Sam still couldn’t find it in herself to blame her. Even if, technically, they were the ones that were planning what would count as… maybe not exactly supervillain material, but it was definitely a jerk move.

It’s for Danny, she reminded herself. It’s for Danny.

“You know where you’re going?” Tucker asked as Plasmius backed the car out of the garage and began pulling them out toward the gate that would lead them out of the storage unit complex and onto the road.

Plasmius put it in drive and said, “East.”

And as the garage door automatically rolled shut behind them, Sam clutched her backpack tight and thought, Hold on, Danny. We’re coming. We’re on our way. We’re getting you out of there.

Chapter Text

Grandiose, Sam thought.

That was it. That was the word she’d been thinking of before. That was what Plasmius used to sound like, the quality of his voice that had been there a year ago and was gone now. He always used to talk like he believed everyone was hanging on his every single word, like nothing mattered more than what he had to say. He used to talk, honestly, like a supervillain. Like he’d been pulled straight out of a comic book, a guy who’d been specifically engineered not only to be Danny’s worst enemy but also to be as much of a jerk about it as possible.

Now that was just… gone. That was why he sounded so different.

Granted, he wasn’t talking at all now. But still. Even that was a stark turn of pace from literally everything she remembered about this guy.

They’d been driving for about two hours when the sun finally dipped down beyond the trees and the endless stretches of cornfields, and it was another hour after that before the headlights turned I-64 into nothing but the strip of asphalt directly in front of them, nothing but flickering bits of white dotted line disappearing under the front bumper. The radio was on but quiet, some sports station that Plasmius had turned on and then promptly stopped paying any attention to.

Sam glanced into the backseat. Valerie was asleep with her head tucked down against the windowsill of the door, and Dani had finally fallen asleep, too, leaning on Val’s shoulder.

Tucker was still wide awake, his face washed in the blue light from his laptop.

Had he slept? Like, at all? They had all stayed up for most of last night, planning this trip and how they were gonna pull off this rescue mission. If they were gonna pull off this rescue mission. She was pretty sure she’d fallen asleep before him, and then when she’d woken up, he had already been awake for who knows how long, sitting against her headboard with his laptop, tap tap tapping away at the keys.

They were all a little strung out, Sam thought. He would get some sleep when his body didn’t give him a choice anymore.

Sam turned forward again and propped her foot up on the dash.

“I would advise against that,” Plasmius said, the first words he’d spoken in well over an hour. He shot a look at her, and then a more pointed look at her boot.

Sam frowned. “Why?”

“Because there’s an airbag there,” Plasmius said. “If we crash, you’ll likely be impaled by your own legs.”

She raised an eyebrow at him. “So don’t crash.”

“Funny enough, I hadn’t intended to,” Plasmius said, but he left it at that, and Sam kept her foot up on the dash anyway.

They fell back into what would probably have been an awkward silence, had they not already been sitting in silence for so long with nothing to listen to but the low tone of some middle-of-nowhere Indiana sportscaster through the car speakers and the sound of Tucker’s typing.

She broke it anyway.

“How long have you been back on Earth?”

Plasmius let out a dramatic sigh. “Honestly, we’ve made it—” he glanced at the clock— “nearly one hundred and seventy minutes without making small talk. Must we start now?”

“It’s not small talk,” she said, careful to keep her voice low so she wouldn’t wake Dani or Val. “It’s me wondering how long the guy that almost killed my boyfriend has just been… hanging around Amity Park without us knowing.”

He quietly scoffed. “I didn’t almost kill him.”

“Yeah, whatever, agree to disagree,” Sam said. “So? How long?”

Plasmius kept his eyes on the road, and for some reason his grip tightened on the steering wheel. He shook his head and muttered, “A while.”

“What’s a while?”

“Nearly a year.”

And Sam got really, really close to forgetting to keep her voice down. She pulled her foot away from the dash and sat up straighter, eyes wide. “What do you mean a year? This whole time you’ve been—? I mean, what, were you only in space for… a month? Two months?”

“Roughly fifty-seven minutes, actually.”

He glanced in her direction, saw the way her jaw was hanging open, and rolled his eyes and returned to watching the road.

“A portal opened up,” he said by way of explanation. “They’re no more common in space than they are on Earth, but they’re far easier to spot, given…” he trailed off, waving a hand vaguely in front of him, “… the lack of anything else in the way. I waited until one was close enough that I could teleport into it, and…”

He shrugged.

“And what?”

“I teleported into it,” Plasmius answered. “I thought that was obvious.”

“And then what,” Tucker said, and Sam almost jumped. She hadn’t even realized he was paying attention.

“And then nothing,” Plasmius said. He looked at her, then at the rearview before he looked back at the road. “Honestly. I spent some time in the Ghost Zone. Realized I was every bit as unwelcome there as I am here. Fled the Ghost Zone. Learned how to remain hidden amongst humans. I don’t see why it’s this big revelation.”

“You don’t—?” Sam started to ask, then shook her head. “Sorry, I’m just trying to wrap my head around the fact that the guy who almost killed us multiple times, the guy that we thought was dead, has been around this whole time and was, like, within a half hour of Amity Park. It’s kind of a lot to process.”

“Again, I didn’t actually try to kill anyone.”

Tucker said, “You didn’t exactly try not to, dude.”

Plasmius silently drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, jaw tight, eyes on the road, and it occurred to her—not for the first time, but certainly the first time in well over a year—that Plasmius was a lot like every other adult she knew. Most adults, like her parents and Danny’s mom and Tucker’s parents and nearly every teacher she’d ever had, seemed to have this uncanny ability to take whatever they were thinking, whatever they were feeling, and box it up and lock it down somewhere she couldn’t see it at all, much less figure out what it meant. There were exceptions to this rule, some adults that were open books, like her grandma or Danny’s dad or, on one occasion or two, Mr. Lancer.

But Plasmius was unequivocally not one of those exceptions.

Finally, after about a minute of nothing but the radio and the rolling of the tires, Plasmius said, “I know.” He fell into a stiff silence again, turned on the blinker, and passed around a slow moving car in the left lane. The other car’s headlights had faded to pinpricks in the rear windshield before he added, “I suppose, in light of… everything, it does make some sense that my presence would be… something of a concern.”

“You think?” Sam asked.

“In all fairness, though, I did keep to myself,” Plasmius reminded them. “The four of you sought me out, not the other way around. I was lying low, and I intend to continue to do so.”

“You,” Tucker said, laying the sarcasm on heavy. “Lying low.”

“Well, yes,” Plasmius said, looking up at the rearview. “How else do you imagine I have avoided the very situation Daniel’s found himself in, hm? Until yesterday, no one had been aware of my continued existence. Even he never caught wind of me, unless I’m mistaken.”

“Yeah, no, we’d have known if he did,” Tucker said.

Sam sighed, sitting back in the seat and propping her foot up on the dash again. “I mean, if Danny knew you were still around… God, if Mr. and Mrs. Fenton—”

“I’m sure,” Plasmius cut her off, even though she hadn’t actually said what would have happened if Mr. and Mrs. Fenton had known he was still around. She didn’t miss the fact that he tightened his grip on the steering wheel again, either, or that this time it was to the point that she could genuinely call it white-knuckling. “And how are they faring now that their only son is an unwilling test subject of the United States government, hm?”

Sam frowned, twisting in her seat to exchange a look with Tucker. He made a face that plainly said don’t look at me and returned to typing away on his laptop.

She turned back around and answered, “How do you think?”

Plasmius said nothing to that.

Sam blew a raspberry through her lips and sagged back into the seat, watching the asphalt get sucked up under the car like a conveyor belt. Or like a ghost getting sucked up into the thermos, she thought. There were no streetlights on this highway, nothing to see by except for their own headlights and the headlights of the occasionally passing car. A sign up ahead read LOUISVILLE 81 MILES. A sign not too long after that advertised something called the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial, whatever that was. Where Linoln grew up, maybe? She made a mental note to ask Lancer about it whenever all this was over.

“They’re doing okay,” she finally decided to answer, since she’d never technically answered, and hey, maybe Plasmius had actually wanted to know. “I mean, as okay as they can be. They’re both going a little nuts not knowing if Danny’s okay, but… I don’t know. They’re managing, I guess.”

We all are, she thought but didn’t say.

“So it’s a good thing we’re getting him back,” Tucker said.

Sam nodded, because it was true. They were. They were going to get him back. It was a definite. She couldn’t allow herself to think of it as anything other than a definite right now, so a nod was the only answer she could give.

“And um, before all this,” she added, clearing her throat to dislodge the little lump that was growing there, again, at the thought of Danny and where he was right now, “before the arrest, they were… good. Kind of. They were helping Danny with his ghost fighting. They were… I don’t know, happy, mostly. In case that’s what you were actually asking.”

“It wasn’t,” Plasmius said before the last word was even out of her mouth.

“Well, whatever,” she shrugged, looking out the window. “Now you know anyway.”

The silence that descended on them then was decidedly more awkward, but Sam didn’t really care. She remembered the few weeks after the asteroid. She remembered how hard Mrs. Fenton had thrown herself into helping Danny, mostly out of the obvious motherly concern but also, maybe, because she’d needed the distraction. She remembered how bizarrely quiet Mr. Fenton had been in those days, too. Like, all the time. None of them had ever realized that they would miss how obnoxiously overbearing he’d been before, not until all of that was gone.

Some of that had just been starting to come back, actually, now that she thought of it. Right before Danny’d gotten taken, anyway.

Plasmius flicked on the blinker, startling her out of her reverie.

“Uh. Where are you going?” Tucker asked, eyeing the exit up ahead. It said it was toward a town called Dale, which Sam had never heard of.

“South, I believe,” Plasmius answered. “As I recall, you wanted to ‘vary up our route’ as much as possible.”

“Oh,” Tucker said. “Right. Yeah, crap, uh—”

There was the rapidfire tap tap tap tap of Tucker’s typing, and then:

“Okay, so that’s, uh… 231? Route 231, cool, take that for like…” he trailed off, and there was another tap tap tap tap, “… twenty-five miles, and then turn left and we’ll be going East again. And we’ll be in Kentucky at that point, so that should help throw off anyone that tries figuring out where we went. Like… a little bit, at least. Good call.”

Plasmius said absolutely nothing to that, taking the car through the ramp and off the highway.

Plasmius didn’t say anything at all for the rest of the drive, actually.

They rolled through Kentucky at a steady eighty miles an hour, down highways that were nothing but long stretches of unlit two- and sometimes three-lane road with a guardrail to their right and a grassy median to their left. Sam rested her head against the window, dozed off, woke up to watch yet another stretch of unchanging hills roll by, dozed off again, woke up to catch a quick flash of a deer by the side of the road, dozed off again.

She dreamt of Danny exactly once.

She jerked awake with no memory of the actual dream at all. There was just this permeating, soul-crushing ache in the center of her chest and the strangest feeling of warmth tingling along her skin. Like she had just pulled away from a hug, like someone else’s— like Danny’s body heat was still clinging to her.

“You okay?” Valerie asked, and Sam realized why she’d jerked awake in the first place.

They were no longer moving. The car was sitting idle in the darkened corner of a parking lot, and Valerie had just opened up the passenger side door and was now leaning over Sam with an arm resting on the car’s roof. Behind her, somewhere, Sam could just barely make out the whisper of far-off traffic. Closer, she could hear crickets chirping and what might have been frogs croaking.

“Uh,” Sam said, swiping at her eyes. “Yeah. What’s—? Where are we?”

“Still in Kentucky, about an hour out from Virginia.”

She held out a hand to help Sam out of her seat, and Sam took it, grateful for the opportunity to stretch her legs after who knows how long sitting in the car.

They were in the parking lot of a motel, she saw now. Their car was one of only five in the whole place, and the only one with its interior lights still on—a glow of amber yellow against a backdrop of barely moonlit gray that made Sam feel a bit more conspicuous than she was altogether comfortable with.

But it was quiet, aside from the crickets and the frogs and the unseen traffic. It was so quiet that it had to be safe. Relatively, anyway.

Around the back of the car, Tucker and Dani were busy grabbing their bags out of the open trunk. Tucker had already pulled his laptop out again, propped open on the roof of the car like it was a desk, and he was hooking his duffel bag around his shoulder even while his other hand was busy staring down at his phone.

“Stopping for the night?” Sam asked.

“Stopping for the night,” Val said with a nod. “Apparently Plasmius needs to sleep sometimes, too.”

Sam tilts her head. “Well, contrary to popular belief, he is half human.”

“As it turns out, yeah,” Val answers with a huff of a laugh. “C’mon.”

She gestured for Sam to follow her, and she did, the two of them falling into step, crossing the wide expanse of black asphalt toward the motel under the pale light of a half-moon. Up ahead there was a door with white cracked paint and a neon sign in the window that read FRONT DESK.

The door opened with the chiming of a bell, and they found themselves in a cramped little office with an L-shaped desk that took up nearly the entire space. There was a TV mounted into the top corner of the low ceiling, playing the news. There was an exhausted looking, dead eyed woman sitting behind the desk. And there was Plasmius, already in the midst of taking a set of key cards from her.

As he turned away from the woman, Sam frowned, and she got this close to asking exactly how he’d managed to rent a motel room—didn’t he need an ID for that, didn’t he need money for that, did he somehow have money after so long cut off from the billions he had before the asteroid—but then she took another look at the woman behind the desk.

Exhausted, dead eyed, and distinctly red eyed.

“Oh,” she said.

Val asked, “Aren’t you worried that’s gonna ping on the tracking grid?”

Plasmius shook his head. “Something like that won’t fully register.”

Sam opened her mouth to ask him how exactly he was so sure of that, how exactly he knew that the DSS wasn’t about to come busting the motel office’s door down because of one careless use of his powers—but just then, the TV above the desk switched from the weather to a report coming out of Washington, D.C.

The bar at the bottom read PROTESTS CONTINUE OVER PHANTOM’S ARREST.

Behind a fresh faced reporter and her microphone, dozens upon dozens of people were standing on the street, bundled up against the late-night October cold, holding up signs that said NO DETAINMENT WITHOUT TRIAL and SAVIOR OF EARTH ≠ CRIMINAL and, more succinctly, FREE PHANTOM. 

The crawl along the bottom of the screen read ALL EYES ON COURT DECISION TO BE ANNOUNCED DAY AFTER TOMORROW.

The reporter was saying… something, Sam was sure, but she found she couldn’t hear a word of it. Not when all she could see was the line of counter-protestors on the other side of the veritable sea of people and all their pro-Phantom signs, a line of counter-protestors with signs that said the exact opposite, signs demanding that her boyfriend be kept in state custody and away from his family, away from his friends, away from her.

Val reached out and squeezed her upper arm, snapping her back to attention.

Plasmius had been watching the news report, too, but now he looked back down at the key cards in his hand. Behind him, the woman gasped the way people always do when a ghost suddenly leaves them. She blinked, eyes fading from that searing red to a soft brown, and then her brow furrowed, like she couldn’t quite figure out where she was or how she’d gotten there.

“Thank you, Miss,” Plasmius said over his shoulder, offering her a wave, and then he ferried Sam and Val out the door and into the cool Kentucky night air.

The door shut behind them with a clack like a screen door. Dani and Tucker were on their way from the car, which was now shut and the interior lights of which were just turning off, vanishing the car into the night along with the other five. Plasmius pulled one of the key cards out of its little envelope and handed it to Val, presumably just because she was the one standing closest to him.

“Room 16,” he said, not making eye contact with any of them. “I will be in 17.”

“You got us our own room?” Val asked, raising an eyebrow at him.

“Well, I’m certainly not sharing one,” Plasmius said, and he shuddered like the thought alone was horrifying. Which maybe it was, but the shudder itself felt off. Forced. Theatrical. Before Sam could question it—which she honestly wasn’t sure she would have bothered to do anyway—he turned away and started walking off in the direction of the rooms. “Seven o’clock.”

“Huh?” Tucker called after him.

“Seven o’clock,” he repeated without turning around. “That’s when we leave.”

And then he turned, opened up the door to Room 17, and disappeared inside without another word.

Valerie couldn’t sleep.

Course she’d slept already, so that was part of the problem. She hadn’t meant to fall asleep—obviously she hadn’t meant to, not in a tin can going eighty miles an hour with three of her four best friends and Vlad Masters of all people behind the wheel—but after a totally sleepless night at Sam’s the night before… well, in retrospect, it had been kind of inevitable. Like she’d blinked and suddenly they weren’t in Amity Park anymore, suddenly Dani was sleeping fitfully on her shoulder, and suddenly they were somewhere in eastern Kentucky.

They’d gotten to the motel at one in the morning, and the plan had been, as it was now, to stay there for a good six hours and rest up in preparation for the rest of the drive.

Valerie had been trying and failing to fall asleep for three of them.

A little after four in the morning, she got up out of the bed she was sharing with Dani, and she glanced across the room, where Tucker—the only other one of them who was still awake—looked up and met her eyes from the blue-white glow of his laptop screen. Beside him, Sam slept, her back to everyone else.

He frowned and whispered, “What’s up?”

Val shrugged, slipping into her sneakers. “Vending machine. You want anything?”

Tucker opened his mouth with a look on his face that Val somehow knew meant he was about to refuse, but then he seemed to second-guess the impulse. “Yeah,” he whispered. “Cheese puffs, if they got ‘em.”

“Gross,” Valerie muttered.

Tucker stuck his tongue out at her before returning to whatever he was doing on his laptop. It was a dumb, childish thing to do, but it was also oddly heartening, the half-second-long return to his usual demeanor. He’d been so bogged down the last few days, so not Tucker, that even something that small was refreshing to see.

Val stuck her tongue out, too, blowing a raspberry at him before she slipped out the door.

This little Kentucky town wasn’t so different, weather-wise, from Amity Park. Which meant at this time of night in the middle of October, it was freezing, enough that Valerie felt like she’d walked right into the Ghost Zone the second she stepped outside. She shivered, wrapping her jacket more tightly around her torso, and headed off toward the vending machines with her hands tucked under her armpits and her head ducked down like she was a turtle retreating into its shell.

She didn’t make it all that far before she saw it.

Their car, or Sam’s car anyway, was sitting out at the edge of the parking lot right where they left it. But the silhouette was off; through the darkness Valerie could just make out the shape of a person sitting on the ground, leaning back against the driver’s side tire.

She didn’t even consider leaving it alone. She turned, right away, and marched purposefully toward it. The cold got progressively worse the further she walked from the safety of the L-shaped motel building, little gusts of wind piercing through her jacket and whipping her hair all around her face, but whatever. It wasn’t anything she couldn’t handle.

And it wasn’t all that surprising to find out who it was, sitting back against the car.

The thing was, though, Valerie wasn’t sure what to call him these days. She’d spent so long calling him Mr. Masters that she’d always assumed he’d keep that label in her head, but after everything that happened, he had sort of lost the right to that nice respectful addition of Mister. Still, just his last name felt weird, and Plasmius felt even weirder, so Valerie generally defaulted to calling him nothing at all.

“What are you doing out here?” she asked.

He’d been sitting with one leg bent up and his arm draped over his knee, his head tipped back against the car and his eyes on the sky with a thousand-yard-stare kind of look on his face, but at the sound of someone speaking to him he seemed to snap out of it.

Sort of. He blinked, looked up at her, and hesitated before offering only a shrug.

Valerie asked, “You know we’re basically here so you can sleep, right?”

“And I did,” he said, tipping his head back again. “For a few hours.”

“Right.”

He rolled his head against the car until he was facing her, and he gave her a pointed once over. “And what are you doing out here, Miss Gray? Couldn’t sleep either, I take it.”

“I can sleep in the car just fine,” she countered.

“Evidently.”

It wasn’t so much the word itself, but the way he said it that set her off.

It was that old haughtiness that returned to his voice, even as he sat on the ground in a ratty hoodie and a pair of jeans, that old haughtiness that said he still thought he was somehow above her, like he knew so much more than she did and she was just a silly little teenager for even beginning to think otherwise.

An old, familiar anger bubbled up her throat then, like a pot had been turned to a simmer in her stomach for months—one year and three months, actually—and now it was finally boiling over.

“God, are you just… physically incapable of being a decent human being, or what?” she asked, distantly grateful that she’d gotten the opportunity to say this to him now, alone, rather than in front of Sam or Tucker or—God forbid—in front of Dani. “Is it just ingrained in your DNA to be as much of a jerk as possible all the time? You know, even before the asteroid you just kept doing crappier and crappier things, over and over and over again, and every time I thought, nah, he’s alright, he’s just kinda out of touch ‘cause he’s old and he’s rich and he’s white, but then you kept proving me wrong! Every time! You had me thinking you actually cared about me.” She unwound her arms from around her chest, jabbing herself in the sternum. “And that was a big lie, too, ‘cause the whole time you were just using me to hurt my friends. I mean, who does that? And then you messed up so bad that you lost everything and you’re still sitting here like you don’t regret any of it. Like none of what you did matters.”

Valerie, luckily, had never been the type to cry when she got angry, but she could feel herself getting dangerously close now. She took a deep and steadying breath, crossing her arms again, and she shook her head.

“Whatever,” she huffed. “Freeze to death, I guess.”

But as she turned away, ready to march off back to the motel and the vending machine and the relative safe warmth of her motel bed, he spoke up:

“I do.”

She paused, shooting a look at him over her shoulder. “What?”

“I do… regret it,” he admitted. He wasn’t looking at her, but he did glance up at her for a second before looking back down at his hands. “Not ‘any’ of it, but all of it.”

Valerie was not any less angry. Not quite. But she stopped anyway, turning around to fully face him again, arms crossed tight over her chest.

And she waited.

“You’re right,” he said. “That was… old habits, I guess.”

He lapsed into silence for a moment, and Valerie said nothing to break it. In the far distance, someone’s tires screeched on the highway.

“Fifteen months,” he carefully continued, “is a long time to be left alone with nothing but one’s thoughts for company. A long time to contemplate one’s mistakes. There is a very long list of things I regret. Terrible things I’ve done. Unforgivable things. Honestly, I think that’s half the reason I agreed to this… ridiculous plan in the first place. Driving across the country, rescuing Daniel from that place.”

Valerie couldn’t help asking, “Why?”

“Well, I might as well do something… good,” he answered, then shook his head, staring off into space. “But that’s not exactly the point.”

“Then what is?”

“As I said, there is a long list of things I regret, and quite high on that list is… how I treated you.”

He paused, gulped, and gritted his teeth for a second like whatever he was about to say was not gonna be something that came easy, and when he spoke again, he confirmed it by saying two words she never imagined she’d hear from him. Not now, not ever.

“I’m sorry.”

Valerie let out an impressed whistle. “Wow. Did saying that give you a stroke?”

“Shockingly, no,” he answered, and he looked over at her for the first time since he’d gone off on this spiel. And for the first time since Valerie had met him, he didn’t look like a guy who was wearing a practiced facial expression, like a guy who was going through the motions and trying to sound sincere as nothing more than a means to an end.

He just looked defeated, Valerie thought. Defeated, and tired. All the way down to his bones.

She drummed her fingers on her bicep, noticing how the anger had begun to dissipate, in a way. As if, once she had released it and let it come tumbling out of her mouth and into the open air around them, it had galvanized something in her, and then—job finished—it had simply faded to the background.

“I am sorry. Honestly. I don’t imagine it means anything, but,” he shrugged.  “I am.”

“It does mean something, actually,” Valerie said, and she was surprised to find that she meant it. “Mostly ‘cause you’re such a dickhead I never thought you’d apologize at all, but.”

She mirrored him with a shrug of her own, and to her surprise, he laughed at that. Or he smiled, anyway, which for him might as well have been the same thing as falling over in hysterics. He shook his head, looking away.

“I deserved that, I suppose.”

“No kidding,” Valerie said.

She paused—and of course it was right around then that she remembered, like a cold shock, what they were all planning on doing when they reached D.C., what they were planning on doing, specifically, to Vlad. Here he was, technically extending an olive branch, and what was crueler, Valerie thought? That she shouldn’t take it at all, or that she should take it, only to turn around and grind it down into the dirt in a few days’ time?

She took a breath and said to him, “I’m not… gonna just forget everything. But you can consider that apology accepted.”

He nodded.

“And for the record,” Valerie added, not even sure why she was doing it, “I’m not the person you should really be apologizing to. There’s someone else who should be way up higher on that list than me.”

A moment of silence passed, and Vlad said quietly, “I never said she wasn’t.”

“Yeah, well, I think you should probably tell her that,” Valerie said. “And soon.”

“I don’t imagine she’ll take it quite as gracefully as you’ve done, Miss Gray.”

“Yeah, but that’s not really the point, is it?”

“No,” he agreed. “No, it’s not.”

The quiet of the night fell heavily over them again, even the crickets and the croaking frogs apparently having gone to bed by now. Valerie blew out a breath to watch it turn to a plume of fog in front of her face. Vlad returned to staring at the wisps of clouds coasting over the sky, and she followed his gaze for a second. Somewhere in the distance the star-dotted black was already shifting to a deep purple with the oncoming sunrise.

Finally she turned away, making her way across the asphalt back to the motel and toward the vending machine, and the whole way she couldn’t stop thinking about it. About the apology, about second chances and whether they were deserved or not, about whether it mattered if they were deserved or not.

She’d taken the olive branch, unsure whether it was the crueler option or the kinder one. But did Vlad Masters even deserve the kinder option? After all the cruelty he dished out back then, didn’t he deserve some cruelty in return now? And if he did, was Valerie even capable of dishing out cruelty in the first place?

The motel had three vending machines, one for snacks and one for drinks and another for hot drinks, so Valerie punched in the code for Tucker’s cheese puffs in the one and then the code for a hot chocolate for herself on the other. Maybe that would get her brain to shut up for a bit. Maybe that would finally allow her to sleep for an hour or two before they had to pack it up and go.

But then, as she made her way back to the room with the cheese puffs in her pocket and the hot chocolate warming up her hand, she pulled out her phone and switched it off airplane mode to check the weather.

Her phone immediately lit up.

Seventeen missed texts. Twelve missed calls from her dad. Two missed calls from Tucker’s parents. One from Sam’s.

“Oh,” she said, feeling her heart drop down into her gut. “Shit.”

Chapter Text

“We got a problem.”

Tucker, being the only one who was actually awake other than her, startled as Valerie came into the room. He froze and asked, “What kind of problem?”

“Have you checked your phone?”

“It’s on airplane mode.”

Valerie walked up to his and Sam’s bed, already scrolling through the texts she’d been sent over the course of the last three hours but which were all bombarding her phone at once now. From her dad, from Sam’s mom, from Tucker’s mom, from both of Danny’s parents, from Jazz, from Dani’s mom. All were asking where she was. Some, especially the later ones from her dad, were demanding to know where she was. Some were asking if she knew where Dani, Sam, and Tucker were.

“‘S goin’ on?” Sam murmured, rolling over in the bed and propping herself up.

On Valerie’s and Dani’s bed, Dani was doing the same.

“They know we’re gone,” Valerie said, tossing her phone to Tucker.

“What?” Dani asked.

Tucker caught the phone and started scrolling, too, looking more and more distressed the further he read. “Oh, crap,” he said. “Crap, how’d they find out already?”

“I don’t know!” Valerie said, louder than she meant to. She set her drink down on the motel room’s little dining table and began pacing, if only to give her feet something to do, if only to make herself stop thinking so much about how worried sick her dad must be right now. They’d known on some level that this would happen eventually, but not so soon, not now. “We all told our parents we were staying at Sam’s, right?”

Tucker and Dani both nodded, and Sam added, “Yeah, and I told them I was staying at Tucker’s. It’s what, four in the morning? Why would they have checked on us so soon?”

“Which one of them checked on us so soon?” Tucker asked, tossing the phone back to Valerie.

“Uh,” Dani said from where she was sitting up in bed, staring at her own phone. “Guys, I— I think I might know.”

Uh-oh. The quiet distress in Dani’s voice was enough to get Valerie to stop pacing, and she came back to their shared bed and sat down beside her. Dani didn’t move or try to shrug her off, so Val stayed, leaning into her and reading the text over her shoulder.

It was from Dani’s mom, or one of them, anyway. A little over a year ago, just after the asteroid, Dani had been taken in by Elizabeth and Jennifer Hughes, a fifty-something couple who’d been together for thirty years and had been trying to adopt for the past ten. Dani had latched onto them immediately—she loved them, and honestly, Valerie kind of did, too. Liz was the kind of woman who tended to encourage teenage rebellion rather than try to squash it, offering little nudges and winks and stories of her own teenage years instead of the scolding that Valerie was so used to hearing elsewhere. Jen, on the other hand, was quiet and reserved but still always greeted Dani’s friends at the door like they were her own kids.

The text was from Jen.

“‘Hey, sweetheart,’” Valerie read aloud from the text timestamped at 12:02AM. “‘If you’re up, can you give me a call? Nothing serious, just wanted to check in.’”

Sam groaned and dropped her head into her hands. “Well, that answers that, I guess.”

Later, much later, it would become clear what exactly had happened. How Jen Hughes and her wife had both been wracked with nervousness ever since the Phantom boy had been arrested, because while their own daughter’s… unique history and abilities were not public knowledge, they had no way of knowing when that might change. How Jen had woken up from a nightmare a few minutes before midnight, woken with a terrible feeling of dread in her heart that she couldn’t quite shake, and she’d then sent a text to her daughter in the hopes that she’d still be awake at her sleepover and text back. How when she received no answer from Dani, she’d almost decided to leave it alone, and then thought, oh, what the hell, and sent a quick text to Sam’s mom. Hi, sorry to bother you, but if you’re awake, would you mind checking on Danielle for me?

Later, that would all come to light. Later, they would know that Jen’s text had alerted Mrs. Manson, who’d then alerted Mr. Manson and then the Foleys, who’d alerted Valerie’s dad and both of Danny’s parents.

Right now, though—

“Oh, that’s bad,” Tucker said, and all eyes turned to him. He was searching on his laptop and somehow managing to look even more distressed than he had when he was reading Valerie’s texts. “That’s really, really, really bad.”

Sam asked, “What’s really, really, really bad?”

Tucker groaned, “Plasmius is gonna kill us.”

Speak of the devil, apparently, and he shall appear. It was right at that moment that Vlad stepped into the doorway that Valerie had left open, probably drawn by the sound of all four of them not-so-subtly panicking. He looked around at all of them, at Tucker who’d been frantically typing something into his laptop until he froze at the sight of Plasmius, at Sam trying to read whatever it was Tucker was typing in the first place, at Valerie with her arm around Dani’s shoulders.

“And why, exactly,” he asked, eyes narrowed and his hands in his pockets, “is Plasmius going to kill you?”

Tucker gulped. He looked like he wanted to be just about anywhere in the world other than here, on the spot with Vlad Masters staring him down, and Valerie couldn’t blame him one bit.

“So… you, uh… You know how you’re the most… wanted guy on the planet, and everything?”

“Am I,” Plasmius said.

“Uh-huh. Yeah,” Tucker said, his voice small. “And, uh, you know how it didn’t really matter, ‘cause you were kind of presumed dead about a month after the asteroid, so no one was… really looking for you?”

“Yes,” Vlad said, in a clearly impatient tone that said, get to the point.

“Right. Uh. Well. About that. It’s not, like… in the news or anything yet, since it’s so early, but…”

Tucker wrinkled his nose as he typed one last line of code into his laptop and then, with the air of a guy who’d just snipped the last wire while trying to disarm a bomb, he jabbed the Enter key. Then he spun the laptop around and showed the screen to all of them, including Vlad.

On the screen was a grainy black-and-white photo that looked like it’d been taken from one of those cameras that sit on top of red lights, waiting to give people tickets. The photo was a front view of Sam’s car, with the license plate clearly visible. Also clearly visible was Sam curled up and dozing off in the passenger seat with her head on the window, along with an unfortunately very recognizable Vlad Masters behind the wheel.

“They— they might not know that’s him,” Valerie said. “He doesn’t look exactly the same.”

But Tucker shook his head. “I only managed to get this because they’re keeping it in their files for the Missing Persons cases they’re putting together for all of us. They know it’s Sam’s car from the storage unit,” he said, and then he directed an apologetic look up at Vlad. “And they mention you by name in the file. They know.”

It seemed, for a moment, that all four of them were warily watching Vlad like he was a wild animal that might snap at any second.

Instead he let out a heavy sigh, pulling his hands from his pockets to scrub them over his face. He did that a lot, Val noticed.

“I knew this would happen,” he muttered, shaking his head.

“You did?” Tucker asked.

Vlad didn’t even acknowledge the question. “When and where was that taken?”

“Uh.” Tucker blinked, then glanced down at the screen. “About eight hours ago? Before we crossed into Kentucky.”

Vlad nodded, then said, “Alright. When I leave, close and lock this door behind me, and—”

“What?” Dani spoke up. “What do you mean when you—?”

Tucker, at the same time, asked, “What are you—?”

“When I leave,” Vlad raised his voice over all of them, since Valerie and Sam had started speaking up, too, “you will close and lock this door behind me. You will not contact anyone outside this room until I return. You will not open the door for anyone, at all, unless that person is me. It would also be prudent to pack your bags and be ready to leave at a moment’s notice.” He turned, looking directly at Dani for the first time since they’d begun this drive so many hours ago, and Valerie could feel Dani’s shoulders tense under her arm. “The only reason you should leave this room while I’m gone is if, and only if, you see that a law enforcement officer—” he pointed at the window— “has discovered the car in that parking lot. If that is the case, you’ll have to overshadow them and direct them elsewhere. Can you do that?”

Honestly, Valerie wasn’t even all that surprised when Dani didn’t try to argue. It seemed that Vlad’s tone—the firm, direct, I’m the adult here so listen up kind of tone that Val hadn’t even known this guy was capable of—was not lost on Dani, either.

She nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I can.”

“Good,” Vlad said with a nod of his own. “I should be gone no more than an hour.”

As he turned away and headed for the door, Sam asked, “Okay, but where are you going?”

Although he was out of sight by now, Valerie could see the flash of whitish-purple as though someone had flicked on a blacklight out in the darkened motel parking lot, and when he spoke, Vlad’s voice carried back into the room with that eerie echo-y quality that Danny and Dani’s voices always got when they were in their ghost form.

“I am going,” he said, “to take care of it.”

No more than an hour became an hour and a half, and that became two hours, and then that dragged on into three.

By the time the sun came up, Sam was starting to think Plasmius wasn’t ever coming back. They’d heard nothing from him at all, and although they’d peeked through the blinds every few minutes with an almost obsessive regularity, they hadn’t seen any sign of the cops or anyone else coming looking for them. Hardly anyone came and went through the motel parking lot, and those few that did barely spared Sam’s car more than a passing glance.

The harder part wasn’t the waiting, though.

The harder part, as Sam was utterly shocked to discover, was for all of them to resist the urge to call their parents. Just to ease their worries. Just to check in.

There was one text from her mom that was particularly difficult to ignore, just in the sheer directness of it, the desperation packed into a few short words. We love you so much, Sammy, please let us know you’re alright.

Sam had shut her phone entirely off after reading that one. As far as she knew, Valerie and Dani were in the same boat, and Tucker hadn’t even taken his phone off airplane mode at all so that he wouldn’t even have to read whatever equally heartbreaking messages he was getting from his own parents. Not yet.

After all, he could keep connected to the internet just fine on his laptop for now—and he did.

At five in the morning, a solid forty-five minutes after Plasmius left, Tucker announced that the news had broken. It broke first on Amity Park’s local paper, then by five-thirty it reached regional news sites, and then by six the story was on the front page of the New York Times, but every headline was exactly the same: VLAD PLASMIUS SIGHTED IN ILLINOIS, D.S.S. AND LOCAL AUTHORITIES ON THE HUNT.

The traffic cam photo was front and center of every single article.

It was around the fifth time that Sam was mentally combing through a preliminary plan of what they would do if Plasmius never came back—that is, around quarter after seven—that there was finally, finally, a knock on the door.

Valerie was the first on her feet. She stood, one hand on the phaser pistol she kept on her pretty much around the clock, her eyes hard on the door like she expected the cops to come busting through it with a battering ram any second.

“It’s me,” Plasmius said. “Open up.”

Valerie deflated with relief, undoing the deadbolt and swinging the door open.

Plasmius didn’t even bother stepping into the room. He took one look at the four of them, saw that their things were more-or-less packed away into their various duffle bags and backpacks, and nodded in the direction of the parking lot.

“Let’s go.”

“What— That’s it?” Tucker asked. “We’re just going?”

“We’re just going.”

“But going where?”

“I had assumed you all still intended on driving to Washington,” Plasmius said, and he was already walking away, so that Sam and Tucker and Valerie and Dani all had to scoop up their bags and rush after him into the early morning sunlight. “Unless I’m mistaken?”

“Well, yeah,” Sam said, squinting and holding one hand over her eyes like a visor, “but what about—? Oh.”

Because there, parked right next to her car, was another car with the engine still running and the trunk already popped. This one wasn’t necessarily any older than Sam’s car was, but it was definitely more well-worn, judging by the fading green-brown paint job and the spider-crack in its back windshield. A Pontiac something, Sam was pretty sure, but a Pontiac what she didn’t know.

“Did you… steal a car?” Valerie asked, echoing all their thoughts.

“No, I bought it,” Plasmius answered, then nodded toward Sam’s car. “Miss Manson, I’m afraid this one is no longer usable thanks to that traffic camera photo. We’ll have to dispose of it before we leave.”

“I— uh, what?” Sam asked. “How?”

“Apologies, I meant I’ll be disposing of it,” Plasmius corrected himself, walking around to the rear bumper of the car. “Everyone has removed anything they might need from this car, I take it?”

“Uh,” Tucker said with a shrug. “Yeah?”

Valerie nodded, and Dani and Sam followed suit.

“Wonderful,” Plasmius said, grabbing onto the bumper with both hands. The entire thing suddenly faded into that peculiar half-invisible look that things took on when they became intangible, and with barely a grunt of effort, Plasmius dipped the car down until it was nearly entirely underground. He released his hold on it, stepping back to admire his work: a totally empty parking spot except for a barely visible line of shiny metal bumper breaking through the asphalt.

“Damn, dude,” Tucker muttered, staring down at what used to be Sam’s car with wide eyes.

But Plasmius was already moving on, circling the Pontiac until he was standing by the driver’s side door, and he popped the door open. Inside, the radio was playing yet another boring sports station under the rumbling of the engine.

Sam shook her head. The car wasn’t a big deal, not really, since her parents could easily afford another one, but—

“How did you buy a car?” she asked. “Aren’t they gonna be able to, like— I don’t know, trace that to you with that, or something?”

“Considering I paid for it in cash, no,” Plasmius said, resting an arm on the car’s roof. “I purchased this… lovely automobile from an elderly woman in a small town not far from Cincinnati, and she was eager enough to be rid of it that she never questioned why I happened to be paying for it with three thousand dollars in nothing but twenty dollar bills. And before you ask,” Plasmius added, rolling his eyes, because Tucker had just opened his mouth to say something, “those three thousand dollars came from several cash registers in select non-ghost-proofed stores across the Ohio river valley. Satisfied?”

Dani was the first to shrug off the explanation, muttering an annoyed, “Whatever,” under her breath as she tossed her backpack into the open trunk. Valerie followed shortly after.

“So, that’s what you were doing this whole time?” Sam asked, eyeing up the trunk and finally settling her own bag beside Dani’s.

“Most of that time was spent driving the car back here, actually,” Plasmius admitted, drumming his fingers on the car’s roof. “Cincinnati is a longer drive from this part of Kentucky than you might expect.”

Sam looked up from the trunk, shooting him a look. “So you… what? Flew all over Ohio, stole a bunch of money, found an old lady who happened to be selling a car and was willing to take cash for it, bought it, and then drove all the way back here for three hours? That about sum it up?”

“Essentially, yes. That area of Ohio has likely pinged on the DSS’s radar by now, so I required a non-ghost-powered method of getting back here. Hence the long drive.”

“That’s a whole lot of effort for one car.”

Plasmius maintained an almost defiant eye contact with her for about three seconds before he sighed, in that heavy world-weary way that said ugh, fine, I guess I’ll explain if you insist, and he leaned an elbow on the roof of the car to massage his temple.

“Believe it or not,” he said, eyes closed, “I do have a bit of a vested interest in seeing this thing through to its end. And I have an even more vested interest in not being interrupted by the authorities between here and there.” He opened his eyes then and dropped his forearm down on the car’s roof. “So? Shall we move on?”

They did move on, and it would be another several hours before they realized what else Plasmius had done in the time that he was gone.

“How many times do we have to go over this, huh?” Tucker asked through a mouthful of burger. “It’s the same. Damn. Movie.”

“It’s so not,” Sam said, rolling her eyes and pushing her salad around in its little plastic container. Restaurants at truck stops, she was learning, did not have a whole lot of vegetarian options that weren’t a plastic bucket of wilted lettuce and a bag of nuts. But whatever, she was working with it.

“It so is—!”

“Oh, my God,” Sam groaned. “First of all, A New Hope didn’t have a StormTrooper turning on Darth Vader and joining the good guys, did it?”

“No, but—”

“Exactly! That’s, like, a whole different story that’s never been—”

“And it’s a good one, I’ll give you that, but Finn’s still like, the only thing that movie had going for it, Sam, and you know it,” Tucker said, then gestured around at everyone else. “One of you guys has to back me up on this, come on.”

“You know we didn’t see the movie,” Dani reminded him. “Star Wars is dumb.”

“That,” Tucker said, pointing at her, “technically counts as agreeing with me, I think.”

Sam flicked a rolled up napkin at his face.

Valerie hummed around her milkshake straw, then said, “I dunno, that pilot dude’s pretty cute though. I’m gonna go ahead and take Sam’s side.”

“What?” Tucker shouted over Sam’s triumphant laugh. “No, you know what? That doesn’t count. You didn’t even see it.” He turned toward Plasmius, who was busy sitting with his cheek in his hand and looking like he was ready to doze off right here at the table, and he asked, “Tie-breaker? Come on, you’ve seen it, right? Heck, you probably saw the original in theaters or something.”

Plasmius seemed to wake up a bit at that, staring ahead and blinking like he was trying to process what he was just asked. Then he turned toward Tucker and said, incredulously, “How old do you think I am?”

“Is… that a trick question?”

Plasmius pinched the bridge of his nose, then sat back, taking another sip of his coffee. “No, I did not see it in theaters. I was… I don’t know, two or three years old when it was released.”

“But you did see it. Like, eventually.”

“I did.”

“What about the new one? Did you see that, too?”

Plasmius nodded—which was a little surprising to Sam, actually, considering he’d have been in the middle of his peak super-villain jerkness when that movie came out, and the last thing she could imagine him doing back then was something as normal as going to the movies.

“And?”

For a while Plasmius said nothing, just tipped his coffee cup back and drained the rest of it, then rolled the bottom of his empty coffee cup around on the table with a thoughtful look on his face like he was seriously thinking it over— or dragging out the silence purposely to make them wait. 

Finally, he stood up from his seat and took his empty coffee cup with him, presumably to get a refill.

“I liked it,” he said as he left.

Sam sputtered a surprised laugh as Tucker groaned, loudly, and dropped his head on the table. “Nope,” he said, his voice echoing oddly against the plastic-topped vinyl or whatever truck stop tables were made out of. “Doesn’t count. Super-villains don’t get a vote.”

“Oh, so it counts when Dani takes your side—”

“Guys,” Valerie said, suddenly shushing them. “Guys, look.”

And, all arguments about Star Wars immediately forgotten, they all snapped to attention in the way that only a bunch of teenagers on the run from the law could.

Val pointed across the truck stop, toward the lobby where a few TVs were mounted up on the wall playing a variety of news stations. It was impossible to make out whatever was being said on any of them—and in fact they were probably all muted, judging by the quick little crawls of black subtitles on the bottom of each screen—but on the leftmost TV, there was no doubt what they were reporting on.

“Does that say what I think it says?” Tucker asked.

On the screen was the same traffic cam photo that had been in all of those news reports, this time alongside an older picture of Plasmius from the days before the asteroid. And if Sam needed proof that he was still recognizable even with the scruffier beard and the change of clothes, well, there it was.

But that wasn’t the issue.

The issue was the pictures underneath, of Sam and Tucker and Valerie. The issue was the headline: VLAD PLASMIUS RETURNS, KIDNAPS THREE AMITY PARK TEENAGERS, STILL AT LARGE.

“Yeah,” Sam answered. “Yeah, Tuck, that says what you think it says.”

“Ah,” Plasmius said, walking up to the table and following their collective gazes toward the TVs. He took a sip of his newly refilled coffee and said, “Yes, I was wondering when they would get around to reporting on that.”

“You—?” Valerie sputtered. “You what?”

Sam asked, “Plasmius, what did you do?”

“Kidnapped all of you, apparently,” Plasmius said with a shrug, then tilted his head and corrected: “Well, the three of you, at any rate.”

Tucker threw his hands up. “Why?!”

“Because I thought it would be wiser to leave Danielle’s name out of the headlines,” he said, gesturing at her with his coffee, “considering the DSS is not yet aware of her existence. Best to keep it that way, isn’t it?”

“Why,” Sam said, glaring at him because he knew what Tucker meant, “did you make everyone think you kidnapped us?”

“And how?” Valerie asked.

“Might it be better if we discussed this elsewhere?” Plasmius asked in a way that made it clear he wasn’t asking at all, and Sam had to admit he was right. No one was paying any attention to them yet, but it was only a matter of time the longer they spent sitting here and arguing with their faces plastered on a screen less than twenty yards away.

They all grabbed up their food and hurried out of the place, and Sam dunked the remainder of her subpar salad in the trash can on their way out. Tucker was still juggling another burger and a large fry and soda, trying to eat as he walked.

“So?” Dani asked when they reached the car, hands on her hips.

“If you must know, they think I kidnapped you three because I told them I did,” Plasmius said, opening up the driver’s side door and getting in. “Through a messenger, anyway.”

As all four of them piled into the car with him, Valerie asked, “Told who?”

Plasmius twisted in his seat, looking at all of them like they’d lost their minds for even asking. “Well, your parents. Obviously.”

“WHAT?” Sam shouted, and she wasn’t the only one.

“You can’t—!”

“Why would you—?!”

“Oh, my God—”

“Relax,” Plasmius rolled his eyes. “Honestly, you should be thanking me. The fact is that not one of you appreciated the gravity of the situation you were in until I did this.”

“What are you—?”

“What do you imagine would happen,” he went on, speaking over Sam’s objection, “if the authorities were to catch up to us between here and Washington, hm? Do you think your age would protect you from being charged with aiding and abetting a fugitive? The DSS knows how close you all are with Daniel, and these people are not the Guys in White. They are not idiots. They will look for any excuse, any at all to arrest every single one of you just to keep you out of the way, and if you thought that rescuing Daniel was going to be difficult from outside their headquarters in Washington, how do you imagine you’ll fare trying it from a juvenile detention center in Amity Park?”

Sam was still fuming, even if he was technically right, because she couldn’t stop imagining how terrified her parents and her grandma must be right now. “Who was the messenger, Plasmius?”

“What?”

“You said you told our parents you kidnapped us through a messenger,” Sam said. “Don’t play dumb. Who was the messenger?”

Plasmius drummed his fingers on the steering wheel for a second, then admitted, “Skulker was the only ghost left who still owed me a favor—”

“YOU SENT—?” Sam started shouting, then caught herself and double checked that the windows were all rolled up and the doors firmly shut. “You sent an eight foot tall ghost—”

Plasmius scoffed, “He’s not eight feet—”

“— with guns for arms to tell our parents that you kidnapped us?”

“I was not exactly flush with options!” Plasmius shouted right back, then took a breath and lowered his voice. “Look. Now, if worse comes to worse, if the authorities catch up to us, no one will believe that any of you were acting of your own volition. You’ll be safe.”

“What about me?” Dani spoke up.

Plasmius went still for a moment. He glanced up at the rearview mirror, then back down at the steering wheel, hesitating like he was trying to figure out what he would say before he would say it. A new thing, for him.

“Honestly,” he said, clearly treading carefully, “if the police or the DSS get a hold of you, we’ll have far worse problems than the possibility of a juvenile detention center. It’s safest if no one knows you’re missing at all.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes. And I imagine your… adoptive parents must have felt the same, because you were never reported missing in the first place.”

Sam had never, not once in her entire life, ever seen Plasmius look as awkward as he did right now. Like he would have given anything to suddenly not be a part of this conversation anymore.

Dani asked, “But they must think you kidnapped me, too, right? They know who…”

Her voice cut off, but the end of the sentence was clear. They know who you are.

Plasmius hesitated and then said, carefully, “If… I were them, I would think that you had run off in an attempt to hunt me down and save your friends. It’s the most logical assumption. So, no, I don’t imagine they think I’ve kidnapped you as well.”

“Wow,” Valerie said. “You really thought this one through, huh?”

“Uh, guys?”

They all turned to look at Tucker, who was staring with his mouth open at his laptop screen.

“You’re gonna wanna see this, too,” he said, and he squeezed himself between the driver and passenger seat, balancing his laptop as well as he could in front of the gearshift. On the screen was the same national news station that had been playing in the truck stop lobby reporting on all of them and their alleged kidnapping, and—

Sam blinked, eyes widening at the screen. “Is that—? Is that Mr. Lancer?”

“Yep.”

Valerie asked, “Does that say he’s in… Pittsburgh?”

“Sure does,” Tucker said, and he turned the volume all the way up and pressed play, settling back in his seat.

“… school where Samantha Manson, Tucker Foley, and Valerie Gray all attended before their disappearance yesterday,” the news anchor was saying, and behind him, Mr. Lancer was standing there in a parka outside what looked like some kind of fast food place. “Can you tell us if you had any reason to believe that Vlad Plasmius had returned before today?”

“Any reason to—?” Mr. Lancer looked at him like he was crazy. “Gulliver’s Travels, we thought the Wisconsin Ghost was dead! Or however dead a ghost can be, anyway. Of course none of us thought he was back.”

“So you’re all as blindsided as anyone by this news.”

Mr. Lancer nodded, blowing out a breath like he was still trying to reorient himself to it. “I’d say so, yeah.”

“And can you tell us what you’re all doing out here in Pittsburgh today?”

The camera panned over, and there, sitting at a set of picnic tables behind him outside the fast food joint, was—

“Oh, my God,” Valerie said. “What are they all doing there?”

It was a huge group of kids from their grade, at least two dozen, maybe more. Sam could see Dash and Kwan and Paulina just at first glance, but there were a bunch more than that. At least their entire English class, for sure.

And what they were doing in Pittsburgh with Mr. Lancer of all people, Sam had no idea.

“We’re about two-thirds of the way to Washington, D.C.,” Mr. Lancer answered the anchor, and Sam felt like someone had just effectively knocked all the air from her lungs. “After Mr. Fenton’s arrest by the Department of Spectral Security and all the hubbub around that, the kids wanted to go protest. And I did, too. So we sent out some permission slips and the school district lent us a bus for the trip, and… here we are. We’re trying to make it there before the trial starts tomorrow morning.”

“And where does a school get the funding for an impromptu trip like this?”

“It’s funded by the students and the students’ parents, actually,” Mr. Lancer told him. “Members of the community. You know, everyone on this planet owes Danny Phantom their lives from that whole asteroid mess, but most of the people in Amity Park owe it to him several times over. He’s a hometown hero. And he’s a really good kid.”

“Is this live?” Sam asked.

“Nah,” Tucker said, “it’s from like… forty-five minutes ago, I think?”

“Mr. Fenton is one of our own,” Mr. Lancer went on, looking heartfelt in a way he only rarely ever did. “He always has been. If we don’t go and stand up for him, who will?”

Chapter Text

Valerie had never been happier to still have an old friend’s number saved on her phone. She dialed, set it to speaker, and waited, but the waiting ended up not being necessary; it didn’t even get halfway through the first ring.

“Valerie?” Paulina’s voice came through the receiver. “Valerie, is that really you?”

“Yeah,” Val answered, smiling. “Yeah, girl, it’s me.”

“Oh, my gosh, Valerie! Are you okay? Are you—?”

There was a commotion of other voices behind hers all of a sudden, and Valerie recognized it immediately for what it was: everyone else trying to butt in. Paulina shouted at someone to back up, then cursed out someone in very colorful Spanish, and Valerie could imagine them all packed onto a school bus like sardines, jostling to get on the phone with their apparently kidnapped classmate.

“I’m still not certain this is a good idea,” Vlad muttered under his breath, but he kept his eyes on the road and didn’t complain any further than that.

It was just past noon, and they were somewhere in the middle of Virginia by now. They had gone southeast from the motel in Kentucky until they were in North Carolina, where they’d stopped for lunch at the truck stop and then banked north toward D.C., in a move that Tucker hoped would throw the feds and the local police off their trail, if they were on their trail to begin with.

This, hopefully, would do the same.

“I— If you— Miss Sanchez, please, if you would just—” Mr. Lancer was saying now, shouting over everyone else, and Paulina must have given in and handed him the phone, because his voice was the next one to speak. “Miss Gray?”

“Hi, Mr. Lancer,” Valerie said. “Sam and Tucker are here, too.”

Sam and Tucker said, in unison, “Hi, Mr. Lancer.”

“Oh, thank God—”

“Mr. Lancer,” Sam said. “Are you guys really going to D.C. to protest for Danny?”

“What? Of course we are. Look, are you kids alright? Are you safe? This stuff they’re saying about you on the news…”

“We’re safe,” Valerie told him. “Trust me, we’re good.”

“But they’re saying the Wisconsin Ghost is back? They’re saying he’s kidnapped you, all three of you.”

“Well…” Tucker said, hiking up his voice into almost a squeak.

Sam reached back from the front seat and smacked Tucker in the top of the head, ignored Vlad’s muttered other way around if you ask me, and then she said into the phone, “Mr. Lancer, you remember how you said if a student tells you something in confidence, you would never say a word about it to anyone else? No matter what?”

There was a brief pause, and then Mr. Lancer said, cautiously, “… Yes?”

“Good, because we need your help— we need all of your help, actually, and for it to work, everyone on that bus has to keep this to themselves, okay? You have to promise,” Sam said. “If you can’t give me a rock solid guarantee that what I tell you won’t get off that bus, I can’t tell you anything.”

“What about your parents, Miss Manson?”

“Nope. Not even them.”

“And not Mr. Foley’s parents or Miss Gray’s father, either, I presume?”

“No one who’s not on that bus.”

She heard him sigh. “Well, Miss Manson, I’m going to need a pretty good reason. Your parents all think you’re in terrible danger, you know that?”

“It’s for Danny,” Valerie spoke up. “We’re gonna save him. We’re gonna get him out of there.”

There was another pause, longer than the first. There was still the low cacophony of voices going on in the background, and Valerie swore she could hear Dash yelling something like what the hell’s going on, Lance, before Mr. Lancer loudly shushed all of them.

Then he said, his voice lower:

“What do you need me to do?”

At seventeen minutes past one in the afternoon, Eastern standard time, the hotline set up to receive information about the whereabouts of Vlad Plasmius and the three children he’d kidnapped finally received its first anonymous tip.

The caller identified himself only as a schoolteacher, and he said that he was positive he had seen Vlad Plasmius in South Dakota, just outside of Sioux Falls.

(“And you’re certain this was Vlad Plasmius?”)

(“Oh, yeah, that was him alright. Green skin, red eyes, the whole deal.”)

South Dakota State Troopers and Sioux Falls PD, however, turned up nothing. It looked like Plasmius had outrun them, or outflown them, or perhaps teleported somewhere else. They knew he could do that, teleporting, though his limits in terms of distance were entirely unknown as of yet. The DSS sergeant assigned to the case pushed a pin into Sioux Falls on the map, ordered the officers in his command to watch for spectral activity pinging in the area, and resumed his research.

At forty minutes past two, another call came in.

Someone in the suburbs of Denver had spotted three teenagers matching the descriptions of Samantha Manson, Tucker Foley, and Valerie Gray. But again, local authorities turned up nothing. Another pin was pushed into the suburbs outside of Denver, officers were given another hotspot to watch, and the search kept going.

Three hours later, at half past five, another call: This time a young woman calling from Pueblo, Colorado. She was nearly in hysterics, claiming to have been scared to death by a ghost with green skin and red eyes and fangs, and she was so distraught that she kept slipping back into Spanish and, eventually, hung up before even giving her name.

But again, nothing. Local authorities caught no sign of Plasmius or of the three teenagers. The apparent route was concerning, too. Was Plasmius planning on leaving the country? Fleeing to Mexico? What kind of jurisdiction would they have, if that were the case? Growing increasingly worried with each call that came in, the sergeant sent his own officers this time, and by the time the next call came in—Sante Fe, New Mexico—the DSS had personnel fanned out all over the American Southwest.

Plasmius would not outrun them, not this time.

They were close. The sergeant could feel it.

They were not close.

Not yet, anyway. At the very same moment that the DSS received a call from a schoolteacher in Sioux Falls, Vlad Plasmius and the four teenagers in his company were all one thousand miles away in the parking lot of a Virginia rest stop.

Tucker and Valerie and Dani were all inside, getting snacks and using the bathroom. Plasmius was leaning against the side of the car, taking the chance to stretch his legs but not much else.

And Sam was just wrapping up a phone call with a cabin rental company.

“Two bedrooms and a pull out couch is perfect, thank you,” Sam said, opening up the trunk and digging through her backpack. She definitely still had some vegetarian snacks in here that she could eat before resorting to truck stop food again. “Put the reservation under Paulina Sanchez. Yeah, we’ll be there in about an hour. You guys take cash? Great. See you then.”

Luckily the woman on the other end hung up, because Sam still had the phone held between her ear and her shoulder, so she couldn’t hit the button herself.

“Come on,” she muttered, still rifling through her stuff.

Her bag was so disorganized. Why’d she bring so many ghost weapons, anyway? All she really needed was the thermos.

“I know there’s—”

She froze, having just accidentally bumped into the squeaky toy that was sitting at the bottom of her bag, and the squeak was loud enough that she just knew, she knew it couldn’t have gone unnoticed.

Sam sighed, resigning herself to her fate, and she pulled the toy out of her bag and turned around.

Sure enough, he was already behind her.

“Hey, bud,” she said to the tiny, glowing green dog sitting on the asphalt by her feet. She always liked to say she was more of a cat person, and she was, but there was something particularly heart-melting about Cujo’s big puppy eyes and the way his itty-bitty tail thumped on the ground as he looked up at her like she was the greatest thing he’d ever seen.

She crouched down and let him try to get his little puppy body up as high as he could, with his front paws on her knees so he could lick her face.

“Sorry Danny’s not here,” she told him, scratching him behind the ears, and he nuzzled the side of her face.

“Is there—?” Plasmius’ voice came from the side of the car until he rounded the trunk, and he blinked down at her and Cujo before finishing his sentence, “… a ghost.”

“Sure is.”

“Why is there a dead dog here?”

“Hey now, he may be a ghost, but he is a very lively pup,” Sam said, then gave him another pet and made kissy noises at him. “Isn’t that right, Cujo?”

“But why is he here?”

Sam gave the squeaky toy a demonstrative squeak, then let Cujo take it. “I keep an extra toy in my bag. He follows Danny around a lot, and he gets really upset if there isn’t a squeaky toy around—like, takes down buildings kind of upset—so it just got easier to keep a stash.”

Cujo, squeaky toy now securely in his mouth, trotted over to Plasmius and started sniffing his shoes.

“What is he doing?” Plasmius asked, then blanched and stepped back as Cujo dropped his toy and tried to give Plasmius the same treatment he’d given Sam, sloppy puppy kisses and all.

“Aw, he likes you,” Sam said.

“Why?”

“Beats me. He does tend to like half ghosts, though, so that might be it.”

“CUJO!” Tucker’s voice suddenly sounded off from across the parking lot, and when Sam looked up, he was already crouching down in anticipation before Cujo perked up and launched himself across the lot and into Tucker’s arms.

Tucker laughed, carrying him back to the car.

“Where’d you come from, bud?”

“Came looking for his squeaky toy,” Sam said.

“Aw, I bet you probably miss Danny, too, huh?” Tucker asked, letting Cujo push his nose over and over again into the side of his face like he was trying to push himself into Tucker’s beret. “Yeah, you do. You gonna come with us to D.C., huh? Are ya? Ooh, yes you are—”

“He is not,” Plasmius said.

Tucker shook his head. “Sorry, man, but you’re about to be outvoted five to one. Even Val loves this little guy now.”

“Five to one?”

“Well, yeah, counting Cujo.”

Plasmius pinched the bridge of his nose. “Of course the dead dog gets a vote.”

“Chill, dude,” Sam said. “He never stays in one place for too long anyway. He’ll pop back into the Ghost Zone in no time.”

“Oh, will he? And until then?”

Sam shrugged. “Until then he’ll sit on my lap, I guess.”

Plasmius stared off into the distance like he was hoping there might be someone around here he could appeal to, or commiserate with, but of course there wasn’t. He muttered something under his breath and shook his head, and then he turned away, getting back into the driver’s seat without bothering to argue it any further.

A few hours later, around the same time that the DSS was receiving a call from a woman in Pueblo Colorado, Danielle Hughes was sitting on the porch of a rental cabin near Shenandoah National Park in Virginia.

This cabin was… a good move, she had to admit. It had been a rough couple of days for all of them, a rough week ever since Danny had gotten taken, and they all deserved—and needed—to spend their last night before D.C. at least trying to relax and get some genuine rest.

It didn’t hurt that it was a textbook beautiful day, either. Or it had been, at least. The sort of nice crisp day that fall is famous for, the kind of day that begs for things like apple picking and whatever other kind of cutesy things people do in the fall. Especially in a place like this, surrounded on all sides by trees that were fading from green to orange to a bright, bright, bright yellow.

Now it was just past sunset and the temperature was dipping down into the thirties as the forest sank out of its vibrant yellows and into navy blues and grays, but Dani didn’t mind the cold so much. She’d always run a little hotter than most people. Something about her ghost core generating heat faster than a normal human’s metabolism, blah, blah, blah, even though Danny’s ghost core did just the opposite, and no one ever really had a good explanation for why they differed so much in that respect.

But whatever. It was useful, for times like right now, when all Dani wanted to do was curl up on the porch’s rocking chair and feel the cold night air stinging her face.

Cujo clearly didn’t mind the cold, either. Surprisingly, he still hadn’t gone back to the Ghost Zone. Instead he had sat perfectly calm and quiet in Sam’s lap for the whole drive up here, and now he was curled up next to Dani’s chair, napping with his squeaky toy held protectively under one paw.

All told, she managed to sit out here with him for about half an hour before she was interrupted.

The screen door opened and closed behind her, and Cujo perked up, tail thumping on the porch floorboards. Dani turned, too, only to see the very last person that she wanted to see—ever, not just in this cabin—walk outside.

Dani went stiff from head to toe, watching him.

He didn’t say anything. He wasn’t any better dressed for the cold than she was, standing there in his stupid Packers hoodie and his stupid jeans, holding a little disposable coffee cup in his stupid hands, and he was looking down at that cup instead of at her.

Finally, after what seemed like a couple seconds of internal debate, he stepped across the porch and handed it to her.

She raised an eyebrow at him, then cautiously reached up and took it.

“What’s this?”

“Hot chocolate,” he answered, turning around and leaning back against the porch railing so that he was almost facing her, except a little too far to the right. “Mr. Foley made it.”

He crossed his arms and didn’t seem to be able to make eye contact, like he was dying to be anywhere else right now and he was only staying there, rooted to that spot, by sheer force of will. Cujo watched him for a second and then, once it became clear that nothing exciting was happening, lowered his head back down onto his paws.

Dani popped the lid off the cup, frowning down at the swirl of cocoa powder chunks and marshmallows.

“It’s not as if I’ve poisoned it,” he said. “Miss Gray is rather fond of you, and I’m rather fond of not being skewered by my own ghost hunting equipment, thank you. And I wouldn’t— It’s…” he huffed, obviously frustrated, and reached up to massage the bridge of his nose for a second. “It’s a peace offering.”

She scowled up at him.

A peace offering?

Without even really thinking about it, she pressed the lid back on the cup and then hurled it over the porch railing. She’d been aiming for a tree, hoping for the satisfying pop it’d make when it hit, but instead it sailed into the ground somewhere she couldn’t see and barely made a sound.

“I don’t want a peace offering from you,” she said.

He didn’t rise to the bait. His eyes didn’t flash red. He didn’t snarl or snap at her. He just crossed his arms again and nodded, slowly, looking exactly the same as he’d looked since they tracked him down in that alley two days ago—just tired, tired, tired. Those dark bags under his eyes had gotten more pronounced in the last year, sure, but it wasn’t just that. It was more in the way he carried himself, the slump of his shoulders, the slowness of his movements.

“I owe you an apology.”

Dani glared hard enough that she could feel the ectoplasm tinting her eyes green. She didn’t want a peace offering, and she didn’t want an apology, not from him. She didn’t want to hear that he was sorry. What did it matter if he was sorry? What did it matter at all? It wouldn’t change anything.

She didn’t care if he was sorry.

She didn’t.

“Several apologies, actually,” he said, quietly, almost as if he was talking to himself instead of to her. “I won’t… stay out here, bothering you for very long. You don’t even have to— You don’t have to hear me out at all, if you don’t want to. If you ask me to leave, I’ll leave.”

Dani said nothing whatsoever, just kept on glaring at him, and he huffed a laugh that wasn’t really a laugh.

“Not letting me off the hook, then,” he said. “Alright.”

After another moment of silence he took a slow breath, like he was bracing himself, and he hesitantly slid his back down the railing until he was sitting down on the porch. Cujo took it as an invitation, getting up and stretching and then loping a few steps over to plop back down against this new half-human pillow, where he promptly went right back to sleep.

Danielle kept on glaring.

“I—” his voice caught for a second, and he cleared his throat. “I don’t…”

Yet again, he lapsed into silence, and then he shook his head and plowed on:

“I’m sorry,” he said, then shrugged, raising both hands and letting them fall into his lap. “That’s all, really. I had… I mean, I’ve thought about what I would say, here, now, if I ever got the opportunity, so many times over the course of the last year. I’ve gone over this… ridiculous speech in my head—” he pointed at his temple, swirling his finger in a circle— “over and over again, hundreds, probably thousands of different ways.”

Every time he stopped talking, and it was often, in the quiet Dani could hear the others talking somewhere in the house, their voices intermingling but not distinct enough to make out any words. Somewhere out in the forest, crickets were starting to chirp.

It was easier to focus on that than to look down at him and actually, like, process what he was saying.

“But it doesn’t matter, does it?” he finally added, and in her peripheral she saw him looking up at her. “All of it… falls apart now that I’m actually sitting here. Because none of it matters. It doesn’t matter what I was thinking at the time, or… what I’d been thinking for the past twenty years, or how I got my own powers, or— or my own relationship with my father, and God, believe me, that’s… not something we ever need to get into.”

He ducked his head down and pressed his forehead into the heel of his hand for a second, squeezing his eyes shut. He cleared his throat again, then dropped his hands back into his lap.

“None of it matters. It doesn’t change anything. You were… You—”

Dani watched as he seemed to lose whatever it was he was about to say, or lose the nerve to say it, with his eyes fixed on some vacant point on the other side of the porch.

He sighed.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, and Dani hated hearing it.

She hated it. She hated all of it. She hated him. She hated everything he’d ever done and everything he’d ever said and everything he’d ever stood for. But mostly, more than anything, she hated hated hated the fact that all she wanted to do, right then, was get up off the rocking chair and sink down onto the porch with him and wrap her arms around his waist and hide her face in that stupid stupid stupid Packers hoodie.

She wanted to reach inside herself and claw out whatever dumb little kid impulse was making her feel that way.

She hated it.

“We’re less than a three hour’s drive from Washington now,” he went on, because he couldn’t see all the anger and the hatred bubbling like hot lava in Dani’s stomach. He wasn’t even looking at her. “Daniel’s trial in the morning— well, we all know how that’s going to go. But after that… We’ll be in Washington by noon tomorrow, and we don’t know what will happen. I don’t know what will happen. So I just… wanted to make sure I’d said that first. If nothing else, you deserved to hear it.”

Dani stared down at him for a long, long while.

Then she got up, pushed the rocking chair back so it screeched against the floorboards of the porch, and walked purposefully back into the cabin without a word.

When the morning came, Tucker was too nervous to eat.

He had finally managed to knock out for a solid eight or nine hours last night in that cabin, so that was something at least. Then they’d packed up and left at six, winding their way through Appalachian mountain roads on their way to D.C.—the kind of scenic roads where tourists parked on the shoulder every few miles to take pictures, and therefore the very last kind of roads anyone would expect them to be driving on if they were trying to lie low—until they’d reached a diner in northern Virginia.

And now they were close.

Really close.

Like, really, really, nerve-wrackingly close.

This diner was right off the highway about a half hour from D.C., thirty minutes away from Danny. Tucker sat squeezed into a booth seat between Dani and Sam. On the other side of the table, Valerie was folding up a napkin into some kind of origami shape, and Plasmius was blowing on a cup of coffee. By now, somewhere in the Ghost Zone, Cujo was happily chewing on his squeaky toy without a care in the world.

Tucker opened up the news app on his phone for the hundred-millionth time in the last twenty minutes. Still nothing. The trial itself wasn’t gonna be televised, not like the actual court proceedings or anything, but there was a hell of a lot of news coverage surrounding the building already, and had been, for a while now.

He flicked through a couple different news sites. It was weird, too, having to do this without his glasses. He’d ditched them—and the beret—in favor of the barely ever used contact lenses he kept in his backpack. It helped him look a little less recognizable, at least, even if they itched like crazy. Sam had done the same thing, washed off all her super dark make-up and pulled her hair back so she looked like a whole different person. And Valerie, in a stunning feat that seemed to defy all known laws of physics, had somehow managed to twist and compact all of her hair down enough that it fit into a beanie.

A peppy looking waitress came around and took their orders, and Tucker waved her along when she got to him.

“Tuck,” Sam said, nudging him. “You gotta eat something.”

“She’s right,” Plasmius agreed, turning his coffee mug around on the table. Why did they always serve coffee before anything else, anyway? It made no sense. “This will likely be your last chance to eat before we get to where we’re going.”

The waitress smiled and asked, “Oh, you guys on a big trip?”

All five of them went totally silent in a way that absolutely could not have been any more conspicuous, and then Valerie came to the rescue. “Yeah, we are! We’re heading up to Baltimore for the Bears Ravens game. Our uncle here—” and she punched Plasmius in the upper arm hard enough to make him wince— “is a huge Bears fan.”

Plasmius rubbed his arm and shot a glare at Valerie that definitely had a smidgen of ghost-red in it. He wasn’t wearing the Packers hoodie anymore, had swapped it out for a plain old nondescript henley and a baseball cap in his own effort to avoid being recognized, so the lie was an easy one to roll with.

“Yes,” Plasmius said through gritted teeth. “Of course. That’s me. A… Bears fan.”

“Anyway!” Tucker said, slapping the menu down on the table. “I’ll, uh… I’ll have a meat lover’s omelette. Thanks.”

The waitress, luckily, didn’t seem to find them any more odd than most of her other clientele must have been on a regular basis. She wrote his order down, read off everyone else’s orders one more time, and took all their menus before disappearing around the bend toward the kitchens.

Plasmius huffed, “I have never been more offended in all my life.”

“Oh, chill out,” Valerie rolled her eyes.

Dani looked at Tucker and asked, “Anything?”

“Not really,” Tucker said, switching between a couple different news sites again. There was one that kept a live feed going outside the courtroom, so that was usually the one he defaulted to.

“Any sign of Lancer yet?” Sam asked.

Tucker shook his head. There were a few reporters from different networks that were interviewing protestors, but he could never watch those videos for very long. Every time without fail the reporter would decide to interview someone who was protesting the exact opposite, someone who really believed that Danny should stay locked up for no other reason than because of what he was, and every time, Tucker got sick to his stomach and had to close the app.

He sighed, switched back to the one with the live feed, and—

“Oh, sh—” he stammered, fumbling with his phone and hurrying to put it somewhere all five of them could see. Dani pushed the napkin dispenser at him, and he grabbed it and used it to prop up the phone near the edge of the table. “He’s there. That’s him, that’s gotta be him.”

The feed was muted, since the last thing Tucker needed was for someone to notice what they were watching and put two and two together, but the subtitles and the well-placed camera angle made it plenty clear what was going on. The crowd of protestors and counter-protestors and reporters were moving out of the street and onto the front steps of the courthouse as a van pulled up to the curb.

A black, windowless van with the DSS logo emblazoned across its side and with a faint greenish glow to it.

“Ghost-proofed,” Plasmius muttered, watching the screen as intently as any of them.

A pair of DSS agents—and they were definitely agents, Tucker could tell, because these guys were a little subtler than the Guys in White had been, but that wasn’t saying much—stepped out of the van and rounded it toward the back, and they unlocked the double doors.

That’s how Tucker saw his best friend for the first time in the week since he’d been arrested. He saw him on a tiny phone screen on an even tinier news app window, thirty minutes away from him in some rinky-dink town in northern Virginia. Danny was wearing some kind of DSS uniform and a pair of clearly ghost-proofed cuffs, and he looked…

He looked terrible.

And the thing was, until right around now, Tucker had been operating on a sort of base level of anxiety and fear that became a backdrop to everything else he did. That’s what was pushing him to research and research and research, to dig up every last shred of information he could get on the DSS and how they operated and what their headquarters was like, to plan and plan and plan until he passed out with his face on the keyboard. Because he had no idea what Danny was going through, and maybe it was exactly as terrible as he could imagine or maybe it wasn’t, but either way, he needed to get to Danny to know for sure.

Now, though, the thing that was stalling in his lungs and quickening his pulse wasn’t anxiety. It wasn’t fear.

Tucker was pissed.

Danny looked worse than he’d ever seen him, and that was saying something after years of juggling school with the superhero thing, after years of protecting the town with everything he had, after nearly getting himself killed so many times before anyone other than Sam and Tucker even knew it was him doing it. He looked like he hadn’t eaten in days and hadn’t slept in twice that long. He looked like the DSS agent’s hand on his arm was the only thing keeping him upright as they guided him up the steps and into the courthouse.

The agents made it a point to get him into the courthouse and out of the reporter’s way as quickly as possible, so they were all left watching some lady talking to the camera about the hotly debated trial and when they’d have more information on the outcome, and…

Tucker pulled his phone off the table and closed the news app.

“I gotta…” Sam said, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the bathroom, and she got up and hurried away from the table before any of them could say anything. Which they probably wouldn’t have, anyway.

Tucker let out a breath and dropped his head into his hands, and Valerie voiced exactly what he was thinking when she said, “Shit.”

“Those assholes,” Dani muttered.

“I think,” Plasmius spoke up, and when Tucker lifted his head just a bit, he saw Plasmius sitting back with his arms crossed and— was that a hint of red in his eyes again? Tucker wasn’t sure. It might have been a trick of the light, because half a second later, it was gone. Plasmius drummed his fingers on his arm for a second and then, looking up at Tucker, he said quietly, “I think it’s high time we discussed what we’re going to do when we reach Washington.”

“What we’re…?”

“We need to discuss the plan,” Plasmius said. “All of us. We need to… make sure we’re all on the same page. For Daniel’s sake.”

Before Tucker could even really process that, before he could come to the inevitable conclusion that they didn’t have a plan—not one he could tell Plasmius about, anyway, no alternative plan aside from turning on him, even if at this point the thought of doing that was enough to turn his stomach all over again—Sam came back to the table.

“Yeah, that’s gonna have to wait,” she said, sitting right back down where she’d been before she left.

“That was… fast,” Tucker said, frowning at her. “You okay?”

“No. Don’t look now,” Sam said, “but there’s a guy over at the breakfast bar. He—Tucker, I said don’t look now, oh, my God. Act natural.”

“What’s the problem?” Plasmius asked.

Sam was wringing her hands together on the table. “He followed me when I got up,” she said, quietly enough that no one else in the diner would be able to hear. “I think he was trying to catch me alone, so I stuck around that old lady with the bad eighties haircut and then I just… U-turned and came back here. I think— guys, I think he recognized me. I think he knows.”

Silence fell over all of them for a second.

“Maybe… maybe he didn’t,” Valerie said, looking hopeful. “What if he’s, you know, just a regular kind of creep?”

Oh, yeah, Tucker thought, ‘cause that was so much better. He leaned back in the booth seat and slung an arm over Sam’s shoulders like it was something he did all the time—and it was, sort of, but this time he did it specifically like Danny did sometimes or, even more specifically, like the jocks at school always did with their girlfriends. Show-offy, a little weirdly possessive.

Sam noticed the difference, if the raised-eyebrow look she shot up at him was any clue.

Tucker shrugged. “If he’s a regular kind of creep, then it looks like I’m your boyfriend for the next ten minutes.”

She gave him a grateful smile and weaved her arm around his waist, and she said to everyone else, “Look, guys, I don’t know. Maybe he is just a creep, but I’m really not getting that vibe.”

“Yeah,” Valerie said, glancing in the direction of the breakfast bar. “I’m not either.”

“Why do you say that?” Tucker asked.

Without warning, Plasmius’ eyes flashed red, and Tucker heard someone gasp. When he chanced a look over his shoulder, he saw the guy—a guy in his twenties, maybe, wearing a leather jacket—go stiff in the shoulders like people always did when a ghost overshadowed them. The guy pulled out his phone and woke the screen with the fingerprint lock, then gasped again and dropped his phone on the counter.

“Because he’s made two outgoing calls to the DSS hotline in the last ten minutes,” Plasmius said, grinding his teeth like he wanted to curse but was trying, and failing a little bit, to stay calm. “We need to go. Right now.”

Chapter Text

“Not all at once, not so fast, not so fast,” Plasmius hissed at them. “We cannot afford to make a scene.”

Sam sat back down, her heart racing, feeling like every ounce of her blood had turned to ice. At the other end of the diner, the waitress chose then to come around the corner from the kitchens, balancing a tray of plates high above her head to squeeze around the patrons sat at the breakfast bar— where, just now, the guy who’d been following Sam was glancing in their direction again.

Plasmius offered an apologetic smile to the waitress as he stood, slowly, calmly.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, “but unfortunately we have to run. Family emergency, you understand.”

“Oh,” the waitress said, taken aback for a second. “Oh, no problem, that’s totally fine. I can grab you guys some boxes—”

“No time for that, either, I’m afraid,” Plasmius said, ushering Valerie up and out of the booth with him. Then he reached into his back pocket and pulled out a folded stack of bills, counting out two hundreds, and he pushed it into her free hand before she could even begin to consider refusing. “This should cover it, I think? Keep the change.”

“Oh. I mean, this is— Are you—?”

“Very certain, yes,” Plasmius said, and on the other side of the table, Sam and Tucker and Dani started filing out of the seat.

Plasmius threw on his jacket and headed for the front of the diner, staying deliberately in front of the four of them, leading them quickly and quietly toward the exit. Sam kept the guy at the breakfast bar in her peripheral; he was watching them go with a look of growing concern on his face, and he picked up his phone and woke the screen— but at that moment, there was a hiss and a crackle from his phone, and then a loud pop, and he yelped and dropped his phone on the counter like it’d burned him.

There was a thin tendril of smoke coming up from the phone, and when Sam looked back toward Plasmius, his eyes were fading from deep red back to blue.

“Let’s go,” Plasmius said.

But then they reached the door, and—

He stepped back, throwing an arm out to stop the rest of them, and Sam instantly saw why.

Outside, plainly visible through the floor-to-ceiling windows spanning nearly the whole width of the front of the diner, there were four DSS vans parked in the lot. There was an armored car, too, and three local police cruisers with their lights flashing. DSS agents were already stepping out of the vans and the armored car, and every single one of them was decked out in ghost-proofed armor, armed to the teeth.

Tucker said, “Oh, crap.”

They were too late.

Sam looked up at Plasmius. He was staring ahead, one arm still extended to keep her and Val and Tucker and Dani behind him, and he looked, for a moment, as terrified as she’d ever seen him. Then he took a breath as if to steady himself, and he said, “Back door. Through the kitchen. Now.”

That was fine, Sam thought. That was fine. Their car was parked toward the back of the diner anyway. This would be fine.

In any case, they did not need to be told twice.

Plasmius went ahead of them again. He easily cleared a path back to the kitchens, pushing aside chairs and waving people out of his way, and then—because Sam guessed it really didn’t matter at this point if anyone recognized him or realized who and what he was—throwing a glowing magenta forcefield out to stop the guy at the breakfast bar from getting up and trying to get in their way.

Their waitress screamed and dropped the whole tray of plates on the floor, but Plasmius clearly wasn’t concerned with her.

“Stay there,” he shouted at the guy at the breakfast bar, pointing, his eyes searing red, and Sam almost felt bad for him. The poor guy looked about ready to crap his pants as he sat back down in his seat.

Other patrons in the diner were starting to get out of their seats to either try and run away or, in the case of a few brave idiots, to try and stop them from running away. Plasmius took care of the latter with another forcefield that radiated out from him like a sonic boom, knocking everyone except for Sam and Val and Tucker and Dani off their feet.

There was a section of the counter that lifted up to allow waitstaff to pass back and forth from the kitchens to the dining room, and Plasmius lifted that up now and let it swing over and slam back down on the counter, waving the four of them along to go on through ahead of him. Tucker went first, then Sam and Valerie, and…

Oh, no.

“Dani?” Sam said, her heart sinking.

Because Dani was just standing there. She wasn’t moving, standing right in the center of the dining room floor. When had she stopped following them? Why had she stopped following them? She was looking toward the entrance where the first of the DSS agents were now fifteen, ten, five yards away from coming inside.

“Dani, come on,” Valerie said. “Let’s go.”

She turned back toward them with a look on her face that was caught between sadness and steely determination, and Plasmius, apparently, caught on to what she was thinking right away.

“No,” he said. “Absolutely not.”

She backed even further away from them, too quickly for Plasmius to get a hold of her— because he tried, stepping forward with an arm outstretched and then faltering to a stop, because he could tell where she was headed and he was apparently not dumb enough to keep following.

“If they get all of us now,” Dani said, backing away another step toward the front door, “then it’s all over. Go.”

It was too late to argue. At the very same instant that the door opened with an anticlimactic ting of the bell and the first of many DSS agents stepped into the diner, there was a flash of that terribly familiar and near-blinding white light—

And Dani transformed. 

Shimmering ectoplasm coalesced at her fists and curled in wisps of green up her forearms as she turned away from them and toward the door. The agent stopped, staring open-mouthed and confused; they’d come expecting a forty-something-year-old half ghost, and they’d found him, but this teenage girl was a curveball he clearly hadn’t been ready for.

He got over the shock quickly.

But, as it turned out, not quickly enough.

Just as he hefted up his bazooka-sized antighost rifle and got ready to fire, Dani beat him to it. Two huge blasts of searing green ectoplasm shot from her palms and barreled straight into the agent’s chest, and he went flying backward out the door with a shout and with such force that it actually shattered the glass of the door— along with about ten feet of the windows on either side.

But Dani didn’t stop there. Her arms were already glowing again.

There was a flash of whitish purple like a blacklight, and suddenly Plasmius was in his ghost form, too, as more and more agents started rushing at the building. Sam hardly had time to register that Plasmius’ ghost form looked different than she remembered—that the weird horned-looking hairdo was gone and the cape had more than a few tears in it and wait was something up with his face—before there was a hum and a crackle in the air, and every single light bulb in the diner exploded, leaving them all in semi-darkness except for what little light managed to shine in from outside.

Dani shot a second and a third and a fourth DSS agent out of the building, but they were starting to come in through the shattered windows now, too. Tucker was yelling at Dani but wasn’t nearly loud enough to be heard over all the gunfire and ectoplasm and the screams of the diner patrons. Valerie was trying to back Dani up with a few shots fired from her own phaser pistol, and Plasmius—glowing now, not just from his hands but from head to toe, with sparks of white-pink electricity popping and arcing all around him—fired an ectoplasmic blast that completely obliterated a section of wall, continued out through the parking lot, and flipped one of the DSS vans over so that it hit the ground with a pop and then screeched several yards across the asphalt.

“GO!” Dani screamed, and a greenish forcefield pushed Valerie and Sam and Tucker back a step.

Sam cursed, because there wasn’t enough time, because they were outnumbered, because she absolutely hated that she knew Dani was right.

If the DSS got a hold of all of them right now, it was over, and Danny was screwed.

Tucker and Valerie must have been on the same page, although they didn’t seem any less upset about it than Sam was. The two of them were starting to head through the kitchens, Valerie hanging back just long enough to fire another shot that sent one more DSS agent sprawling to the floor, but no longer than that.

Plasmius, though, wasn’t moving from where he was.

Sam waved Valerie on, hoping the message of keep going I’ll catch up was clear enough because she didn’t actually have time to say it, and she turned back and grabbed Plasmius by the wrist and tugged at him. But she might as well have been tugging on a statue for all the good it did.

“Plasmius, let’s go!”

He fired another beam of ectoplasm from the arm she wasn’t holding, totally ignoring her, even when she shouted it a second and a third time.

Then he pulled his arm from his grip and fired again, and again, and again, taking out agents left and right. The walls of the diner were almost more shattered-open window and crumbling brick than actual wall at this point, and the whole place reeked of sulphur and was almost stiflingly hot.

Then, in the obliterated doorway of the diner where Dani was standing now, too far away for Sam or Plasmius to have a hope of getting to her, Sam watched as she took down one, two, three more agents with short range blasts of ectoplasm— until another one of them got too close, close enough that she had to fight the old-fashioned way.

The instant her fist made contact with the agent’s stomach, she shouted and tensed up like she’d been electrocuted.

Because she had been electrocuted.

The agents were wearing Specter Deflectors.

She lost hold of her ghost form after only a couple seconds. The agent she’d been trying to fight easily overpowered her after that, pulling her hands behind her back—and zapping her with the Specter Deflector even more—so that he could lock a pair of antighost cuffs onto her wrists, but before he could quite manage it, another glowing red blast tore through the air from Plasmius’ hand and sent the guy flying across the parking lot.

It didn’t matter. There were plenty of agents here now, plenty to replace every single one that he knocked down and then some.

And several of them were running right around Dani now, coming for them.

“Plasmius, come on!” Sam shouted, grabbing him and tugging again, and he finally seemed to register that she was saying anything to him at all. He was still staring ahead at Dani—and he did look different, Sam realized, in a distant part of her brain that wasn’t preoccupied with getting the heck out of here right now, because his ghost form was a little paler and a little thinner and, most notably, had a scar running along one side of his face from temple to jawline.

Sam tugged him one more time, and he finally, finally, finally gave in.

He spat a curse and whirled around, grabbing a hold of her with a vice-tight grip on her upper arm. There was a tug somewhere in the middle of her gut, and then the whole room spun out of control as her body got shoved through a pinhole and spat out on the other side.

Plasmius released her as soon as they were outside, after having teleported there apparently, standing right where they’d parked their car only half an hour ago—which was good, because her legs had been reduced to jelly at that point, and she wasn’t sure she’d have been able to run if her life depended on it.

Tucker and Valerie were outside already, having just gotten out through the diner’s back entrance, and they sprinted to catch up just as Plasmius phased into the car without even bothering with the driver’s side door. The three of them—three now, because Dani was gone, because Dani had given herself up, because Dani had just willingly let herself get taken by the DSS on the slim off-chance that it would help the rest of them to get away—all threw open their respective doors and piled in.

In a flash, Plasmius returned to his human form, and the tires squealed as he peeled out of the parking lot.

“They so saw us,” Tucker said, as shaken and out of breath as any of them. “There’s no way they didn’t see us get in the car—”

“It doesn’t matter if they did,” Plasmius said, eyes on the road.

Sam twisted around in her seat and watched as, sure enough, two of the police cruisers immediately peeled out of the diner’s parking lot and gave chase, lights flashing and sirens wailing.

And then, like the pinkish sonic boom that Plasmius used to knock back everyone in the diner, there was another flash of light and a distant muffled kaboom. Both police cars hit empty air like a steel wall, their front ends crumpling, and then were pushed backward and spun out until they skidded to a stop, idling and useless by the side of the road.

Plasmius didn’t even look back. He took the car up the ramp back onto the highway, and the engine groaned as he forced the old Pontiac up to fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty.

“Okay,” Tucker huffed, sounding like he was on the verge of hyperventilating at this point. “Okay, so… All we gotta do is get far enough that they don’t catch up. That’s all.”

“Oh, is that all?” Valerie snapped, and she didn’t sound like she was hyperventilating like Tucker did— she sounded like she was on the verge of tears, which was so wildly out of expectation that Sam turned in her seat again to see her.

She was shaking her head, and when Tucker reached out toward her, she jerked away.

“We just—” she broke off, swiping at her eyes and shaking her head again. “Guys, we just left her there.”

Something in Sam’s chest deflated like a popped balloon and shriveled up, and she turned forward again and slumped into her seat. Valerie was right, obviously. They did just leave her there, but what other choice had there been? Even if they’d been willing to forget about going after Danny at all, even if they’d just surrendered right away and given themselves up, the DSS agents would have taken Dani anyway. They wouldn’t have let another half-ghost slip through their fingers, not if they could help it.

Beside her, Plasmius thumped the steering wheel, and she looked up to find him glaring straight ahead with one hand on the wheel and the other in his hair, his elbow on the driver’s side door.

For a moment, they all just sat there, processing, while the highway flew past them at eighty miles an hour.

Then Tucker’s phone let off a little ting, and Sam looked at him through the side view mirror as he pulled it out and checked it.

“Well,” he said, “Danny’s trial just got done.”

Sam didn’t even have to ask how it went. It was clear enough from the way Tucker said it, from the hollowed out defeat in his voice. And of course they’d already been fully expecting that the DSS would win the case, they wouldn’t have put together this whole insane plan to get him out of there if they didn’t think the DSS was gonna win the case, but still, coming right off the heels of losing Dani…

Sam gulped down the lump in her throat. “What are we supposed to do now?”

And it was then, of course—because the day just couldn’t stop throwing more and more crap at them on top of everything else that had already happened—that they heard the sirens from behind them. Sam twisted around in her seat again, and Valerie and Tucker did the same, watching through the rear windshield as the flashing red and blue lights came up around the bend.

“Uh,” Tucker said. “Plasmius? We got company.”

“Yes, I see that,” Plasmius answered, and the engine hummed in a crescendo as he gunned it around a slow-moving car, and then another.

Valerie said, “We’re not gonna outrun them in a Pontiac.”

“I guess there’s not really any chance they’re regular cops, huh?” Tucker asked. “Like, maybe it’s just a coincidence and they’re pulling us over for speeding?”

Sam was clutching her seat in a death grip as Plasmius weaved around another car, and she said, “Yeah, I really don’t think that’s a possibility, Tuck.”

“We are going pretty fast—”

“No kidding—!”

“Put your seatbelts on,” Plasmius cut them off.

“Plasmius, you think you could overshadow them?” Tucker asked. “I mean—”

Sam shook her head. “Tuck, they’re wearing Specter Deflectors.”

“And even if they’re regular cops,” Valerie said, “what’s he gonna do when they ask for his license? ‘Oh, officer, don’t worry, I’m not the guy that tried to take over the world last year. That’s the other Vlad Masters?’”

“Put your seatbelts on,” Plasmius repeated, and when Sam glanced over, she saw the speedometer tick up past ninety, inching toward a hundred. “And in any case, it doesn’t matter, seeing as I wouldn’t have a license to give them anyway.”

Sam stared at him in shock. “Are you for real?”

“You WHAT?” Tucker screamed.

“You don’t have a license?” Valerie shouted right along with him.

“Of course I don’t. Now, put your—”

Valerie shouted, “Oh, my God! We only brought you on this rescue mission in the first place because you said you knew how to drive—!”

“Alright, firstly,” Plasmius shouted back, lifting a hand off the steering wheel to raise a finger at all of them, “I never outright said anything of the sort, you all simply assumed that I could legally drive, which by the way is a terrible assumption to make, given that I cannot legally do anything as the most wanted man on the planet—”

“That doesn’t—!”

“And secondly, it’s not as if I’ve forgotten how!” Plasmius cut Sam off, gesturing with his free hand at the entire car as if to say, look, it’s moving, isn’t it?

Then he slammed the heel of his palm down on the horn, and when the SUV in front of them didn’t move out of the way in time, their whole car shimmered out of tangibility and dove straight through it to the other side.

“Honestly, use your heads. Why would I have renewed my license when I could just fly wherever I needed to go? And then there were the chauffeurs, and—”

Valerie asked, “You—?”

“You haven’t driven a car in twenty YEARS?” Tucker screamed.

“Oh, for God’s sake, it’s not something you forget how to do,” Plasmius groaned, then shot a worried glance at the rearview mirror. The cops, or the DSS or whoever they were, they were gaining on them. And fast. “Just shut up and put your seatbelts on.”

Valerie yelled, “You’re telling me you haven’t driven a car since before I was born—?”

Tucker asked, “How do you even still know how to drive after that long—?”

“Just shut up and—”

Sam said, “Plasmius, Val was right, there’s no way we’re outrunning them in this thing—”

“Tells us he knows how to—”

“Twenty years, seriously—”

“There’s just no—”

“WOULD YOU ALL JUST SHUT UP AND PUT YOUR—”

Plasmius was cut off again, but this time it was not by anyone else yelling over him. This time it was for no apparent reason, not until Sam looked over and saw the look on his face. The anger had inexplicably dissipated, and now he was staring out the windshield like he wasn’t seeing anything on the other side, like something incredible—or something totally insane—had just occurred to him.

“Maybe,” he said, much quieter. “Maybe don’t put your seatbelts on. Mr. Foley?”

Tucker asked, “Huh?”

Plasmius was alternating between watching the windshield and the rearview, and he was clutching the steering wheel tight in both hands now. The way ahead of them on the highway was blessedly empty, but it wouldn’t last. Not for much longer. He took a shaky breath and asked, with clearly forced calm, “I take it that some of the extensive time you’ve spent on that computer of yours has been dedicated to researching the Department of Spectral Security, yes?”

“Uh. Yeah?”

“Including the grid they use to track ghost activity?”

“Yeah.”

“Plasmius?” Sam asked, because he was seriously freaking her out, which was a feat considering they were about thirty seconds from either crashing their car at a hundred miles an hour or getting arrested and dooming her boyfriend and one of her best friends to a lifetime in some cold government lab. “What are you getting at?”

“Does the signal strength vary?” Plasmius asked Tucker. “Are there certain areas they’re more likely to spot ghost activity? Or is it uniform across the country?”

“Uh, the first one? It’s kind of, like…” Tucker said, squeezing his eyes shut as he tried to concentrate. “It’s strongest around the major cities, especially New York and D.C.? And around Amity Park and for, like, a good fifty mile radius around Green Bay, because—” he waved vaguely at Plasmius— “and everywhere else it’s kind of just the base level detection, you know, the minimum they’d need to pick something up. But— I mean, it’s across the whole continental U.S., man, it doesn’t taper off until it hits the borders and the coastlines.”

Something in that spiel had caught Plasmius’ attention. His eyes widened, staring through the windshield, and he took another nervous breath.

“What time is it?”

“Uh,” Valerie answered. “Nine in the morning.”

“Eastern time?”

“Yeah.”

Then Plasmius did something very unexpected and downright scary: he laughed. It was unmistakably manic and tinged with desperation around the edges. “Oh, I’m going to regret this immensely.”

“Plasmius?” Sam asked.

“Or it’ll kill me, but it… probably won’t.”

Valerie shouted, “What will kill you?!”

“Grab onto me,” Plasmius said, and the speedometer finally eked it's way past 110. “And hold your breath.”

“Nuh-uh,” Tucker said, echoing Sam’s thoughts. “Not happening.”

“Not ‘til you tell us what you’re talking about,” Valerie demanded. “What do you mean it’ll—?”

“Listen to me,” Plasmius said, firmly and loudly, without looking away from the road. As if to emphasize his point he transformed again, flooding the interior of the car with that blacklight-purple flash, and his voice took on that familiar ghostly eeriness when he continued, “If we let those agents get to us, and they will, then Danielle sacrificed herself for nothing. This is not ideal, and believe me I do not like it any more than any of you do, but this is the best and only chance she has. If you want her or Daniel to see the light of day again, you will stop arguing, you will grab onto me, you will hold your breath, and most importantly you will not let go. Do you understand?”

Silence dominated for a moment, silence and the wailing of the sirens that were less than a few car lengths behind their rear bumper, and then Valerie muttered, “Fine.”

She reached around the left side of the driver’s seat and grabbed Plasmius by the shoulder, gripping tight to the fabric of his suit. Tucker did the same, with one hand on Plasmius’ right shoulder and the other on his upper arm.

Sam… was so not going to like this.

She knew she wasn’t.

It’s for Danny, she reminded herself. It’s for Danny, and for Dani.

With both hands she grabbed Plasmius by the wrist, and there was no delay. Instantly, and for the second time in less than ten minutes, she felt a tug in her gut as her surroundings spun in a whirl and her whole body got shoved through a pinhole and spat out on the other side.

Thirty yards back, the DSS agents and police officers all watched, confused and concerned and tipping further into the latter with each second, as the car with Vlad Plasmius and those three teenagers in it began to slow down—slowing and slowing and slowing and then gradually drifting out of its lane and then, horrifyingly, careening right off the highway and smacking head-on into the guardrail with the deafening POP and crunch of distorting metal.

Chapter Text

Valerie forgot to hold her breath.

Which was fine, actually, because the teleportation managed to suck all the air out of her lungs and then some anyway, and she didn’t think trying to hold it in would’ve helped too much. 

One second they were all crammed together in a little Pontiac going who-knows-how-many miles an hour, and the next it was like Valerie took a baseball bat full-force to the center of her chest. Her ears popped. It was abruptly colder, the wind whipping at her from what felt like every direction all at once, and then she smacked into something hard and freezing— only to realize, after a delayed and dazed couple of seconds, that had actually happened was that she’d just been thrown across the surface of some extremely cold water like a stone skipping on a lake.

And then gravity took hold and she plunged right in, too quickly to catch her breath, so she ended up sucking in a mouthful of salty seawater while icy cold needles stabbed through her clothes along every inch of her skin.

She coughed up a metric ton of bubbles and then kicked and flailed until she finally broke the surface again.

“Sam!”

A wave of foamy water tumbled over her head, taking her under again, and she kicked herself back up.

“TUCKER! SAM!”

It was hard to get more than a word out at a time when she was trying to stay above the water, fighting the waves and hacking up a lung all at once, but it turned out she didn’t need to.

“Val?” Sam’s voice shot through the dull roar of the water. “Valerie!”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m—” Valerie said, coughing halfway through, still fighting to keep from getting pulled under. “I’m here.”

She could see Sam now, a tiny white blur against the wide expanse of blue-gray all around them, and she swiped at her eyes to try and clear them— only to be bowled over by a wave again.

“God damn it,” she coughed, knowing that somewhere, hundreds and probably thousands of miles away, her dad was wondering why he’d just gotten the sudden urge out of nowhere to scold her for cursing for the millionth time in the last couple days. Her next kick was just as much an attempt at relieving her anger as it was to stay afloat. “God, where’s—?”

“Tucker?!” Sam screamed, already way ahead of her. “TUCKER!”

“Guys!” Tucker called out. “Guys, quick—!”

Valerie saw what he was talking about almost immediately: Along with her first glimpse of the shoreline—a bare strip of white sand that seemed to stretch on forever, with a city somewhere far off to the left and nothing but more beach to the right, and absolutely no one in sight except for one lonely fisherman in the distance—she spotted Tucker, steadily if barely keeping his head above water, and not too far from him…

Oh, no.

Oh, no, no, no.

She sucked in a lungful of air and dove under, kicking herself toward them as fast as she could.

“Come on,” she half-coughed half-shouted at Tucker when she came back up, and she looped both arms around Vlad’s middle, trying to tug him up above water and failing. He was heavy. “Guys, we gotta—”

She didn’t have to finish the sentence, which was good, ‘cause she couldn’t speak and lift at the same time, not like this. And it did take all three of them together, in the end. Valerie got one of Vlad’s arms over her shoulders and focused on kicking and kicking and kicking toward the shore, but she got pulled under by the waves so many times that she never would have managed it without Tucker and Sam picking up the slack.

By the time Val’s feet could touch the bottom, her lungs felt like they’d been shredded up from the inside, and the adrenaline was quickly losing its battle against the cold seeping into her bones. The three of them, standing now rather than swimming, dragged Vlad further up the shore by his arms until they couldn’t anymore— which wasn’t all that far, actually. The water was still lapping up at his legs, but whatever. Good enough.

Val fell onto her butt in the wet sand, heaving and still trying to cough the last bits of salt water out of her lungs, watching as Sam shook Vlad by the front of his jacket and tried to wake him up.

Tucker asked, “Sam, is he—?”

“I— I don’t know, I can’t— Plasmius— Vlad, come on—”

“Is— Is he breathing?” ’

“I don’t know,” Sam repeated, and she was shaking from head to toe. “I don’t— I don’t think so—?”

Tucker ditched his sopping wet backpack and scrambled up until he was kneeling on Vlad’s other side, and he leaned down with his ear hovering right over Vlad’s face. “Oh, c–crap,” he said, sitting back up, his teeth chattering. “He’s not, what do we—? What do we do?”

“How should I know?!”

“I don’t know CPR!”

“And you think I do?!”

“Well, I d–don’t know! Maybe w–we can just w–w–wing it?”

“You wanna wing CPR?!”

“Sam, I don’t know! I’m fr–freaking out here, okay?!”

And it was then that Valerie heard, for the first time on this nearly empty beach, a sound other than their own panicking and the crashing of waves.

There was someone approaching them.

Valerie got to her feet as quick as she could and whirled around, pulling out one of the only weapons she still had on her and clutching it tight in one hand, just in case. The anti-ghost pistol was obviously meant for ghosts, but Val had shot enough tin cans—and now, DSS agents—with it to know that ghosts weren’t the only thing it’d work against.

Plus, there was always the suit and the hoverboard built into her shoes. If she didn’t want this guy to get to Vlad, he wouldn’t. Plain and simple.

Whoever he was, he was the only other person on the beach, which Valerie figured made sense given how freezing it was out here. He was the lone fisherman she’d spotted earlier, and she could only imagine what he’d seen—three teenagers and a grown man appearing out of thin air and crashing headlong into the water—and what he was thinking now.

If he called the DSS, Valerie wasn’t sure what she’d do. Scream, maybe. Shoot him, definitely.

Look, at this point, it had been a day, alright? She could be forgiven a murderous thought or two.

As he jogged closer, Val could make out more details. He was an older white guy, like her grandpa’s age, seventy-something at least, and maybe her dad’s height. Five-ten, five-eleven. Not the kind of dude that registers as too much of a threat. He stopped short a good ten or so yards away, eyeing the pistol in her hand for only a second before he looked down at Sam and Tucker and Vlad behind her.

His eyes widened, and he murmured something that was… not in English.

Bozhe moi.

Oh, God. Did Vlad teleport them out of the country?

But then the guy looked up at Valerie and said, in accented English, “He is not breathing?”

Val shook her head.

He asked, “Pulse?”

“Uh,” Tucker spoke up from behind her. “I think? Yeah, I— I think so? It’s hard to—”

“I can help,” the guy said, putting a hand on his chest. “Please. I can help him.”

Valerie hesitated. On the one hand, even if this guy was a well meaning good samaritan, if he recognized Vlad—and he totally recognized him, judging by the stunned shock on his face when he’d looked down and seen Vlad lying there—that could be a whole lot of trouble. It could bring the DSS down on them all over again. They’d just lost Dani, and maybe that was why Valerie couldn’t stamp down on this instinct to protect Vlad now, maybe it was because he was their last remaining half-ghost, their last remaining superpowered ally against those dickwads at the DSS. Maybe it was just because she was sick of losing people.

On the other hand, though, it didn’t really matter.

The choice wasn’t a choice at all.

She stepped out of the way and let the old guy pass, and Sam and Tucker scrambled to get out of the way, too. He didn’t waste any time after that. With military-like efficiency, he dropped to his knees and checked Vlad’s breathing and moved his head to a different angle and then, quickly, folded his hands together and started pressing down on Vlad’s chest.

Later, in retrospect, Valerie would realize it hadn’t actually taken all that long. But in the moment it might as well have been hours, standing there in the freezing cold in her sticky salt-stiff clothes, her fingers turning to ice around the phaser pistol, with Sam and Tucker both watching as intently as she was, counting the rhythmic compressions in her head one two three four one two three four.

She’d made it through six repetitions of four when Vlad finally turned his head and coughed up a splash of seawater, and for a second the relief was so strong she thought she might fall down onto her butt in the sand again.

Vlad didn’t do much after that. He coughed again, then scrunched up his face, squinting up at the guy who’d just effectively saved his life, and he seemed to just… deflate there, closing his eyes again, chest heaving.

“Oh,” he murmured. “It… worked.”

And he was out cold after that, but at least he was breathing this time.

The old guy sat back on his heels and scrubbed a hand over his face, staring down at Vlad with that half-stunned half-dazed look on his face again. Yeah, Valerie thought, he had to have recognized him. There was no other explanation for that look.

Sure enough, he confirmed it right then and there.

“Okay,” he said, looking up at the three of them for only a second before his eyes were back on Vlad again. “I will be honest with you kids. I know… I know who he is—” he waved at Vlad’s general entire being— “and I know who you are. On the news. Now that he is… breathing, stable, I could call police. They will be here in no time.”

He looked up at them, each in turn, and he asked:

“Should I do that?”

“No,” Sam answered first, and for the first time Val noticed that she was near tears.

The man asked, “No?”

“No,” Tucker agreed, hugging himself against the cold. “He’s not— He didn’t kidnap us or whatever else the news is s–s–saying about him. He’s helping us.”

“Please don’t call the police,” Valerie said. “Please.”

The man looked around at all of them, and then he heaved a sigh. “Alright,” he said, in an accent that Valerie belatedly recognized as Russian, or at least something from around Eastern Europe. “Alright. Help me get him up. My car is not far.”

The old man’s car was, in fact, not a car. It was a big white pick-up truck. By the time the four of them collectively dragged Vlad up the beach and to the place where he’d parked and then lifted Vlad up into the truck bed—an endeavor that took over half an hour by itself—they’d learned that the man’s name was Alexander Sigorov.

But that was it.

He was nice, and he was a godsend for the sheer fact that he was willing to take these three teenagers at their word and not call the cops, but he wasn’t exactly talkative.

They piled into the truck cab in silence except for the chattering of their teeth. It had a backseat, but that was currently taken up by a bunch of boxes and junk, so they squeezed into the front with Valerie smushed into the middle seat and Sam sitting on Tucker’s lap, and Tucker asked, “So, uh… where are we exactly? Are we still in the U.S.?”

“You are in New Jersey,” Alexander answered.

Oh. Okay. Well, that was a relief, at least.

Alexander had already started the engine earlier, before they’d begun trying to heft Vlad up into the truck bed, so when he turned the heat on now it kicked in right away with a gust of warmth that felt amazing. Valerie and Tucker and Sam all huddled together even closer to sort of bask in it, and Val pulled her hands out of her pockets and pressed her numb fingers right up to the vent.

“My home is not far,” Alexander told them as he pulled onto the street. “Five minutes.”

He took them slowly and carefully through a town that might have been more lively in the summer, but which now had this overwhelming feeling of being cold and gray and empty, especially with the overcast clouds and the silence of the car. They passed a fire station and a surf shop and a seafood shack, a hotel and a real estate office and a place that advertised bait and tackle, but only a grand total of three people walking around, all of which were at least sixty years old and two of which were walking dogs.

As he turned a corner off the main road, Alexander said, “I do not have guest room, but he can rest in bedroom. You three can take shower, and I will throw your clothes in wash.” He scratched at his more-salt-than-pepper beard and said, “I can find some clothes you can wear in meantime. But you will have to roll up the pants to fit.”

“Thanks,” Tucker said, even as Valerie itched to reach for her phaser pistol again.

What was with this guy, she wondered? Why was he helping them at all?

More importantly, how long was this gonna last?

They pulled into the driveway of a small one-story home with yellow paint and white shutters, and Alexander turned off the car.

When they got out and walked around to the back of the truck, it became clear that Vlad was awake again, if barely. Alexander opened up the tailgate, and Vlad was already making a clumsy and fumbling attempt at sitting up. He looked up and made eye contact with Alexander, and there was a tense moment in which Valerie wasn’t sure whether Vlad was about to try and explain himself now, transform and attack this guy, or just pass right back out again.

Alexander, for his part, just tucked his hands into his pockets and calmly asked Vlad… something in Russian. Valerie had no idea what, or why in the world he seemed to fully expect that Vlad would understand him.

But he did, if the dryly annoyed look Vlad sent back was any indication.

Alexander shook his head. “Vysokomernyy mal’chik,” he muttered, and then he held out his hands to help Vlad out of the car.

“I didn’t… have a choice,” Vlad admitted, and somehow despite the low raspiness of his voice, he managed to say it in a defensive tone that felt like it needed to end with for your information, even while he clung to the old man’s arms like a lifeline.

Alexander asked him something else, again in Russian.

“Long…” Vlad answered, “… long story.”

Given that he was at least conscious this time, the process of getting him out of the truck went faster than getting him into it, but not by much. Alexander bore the brunt of his weight, but there was only so much a man his age could do. As soon as Vlad’s feet hit the ground his knees buckled, his face going as pale as a sheet, and Tucker had to swoop in to get under his other arm and help Alexander keep him up.

Vlad looked up at the tiny yellow house as if it was far more intimidating than it was, and he shakily asked Alexander, “Tak eto to mesto, a?”

Alexander nodded, and together, he and Tucker got him up the front steps and into the house without any more trouble.

Sam and Valerie followed quickly behind.

“Okay,” Valerie said to Sam when they stepped through the front door into the living room. “Why do I get the feeling this guy knows Vlad? Like, knows him knows him?”

Sam was watching Alexander and Tucker turn the corner down the hall, and she was watching them with that intense look she sometimes got when she was deep in thought somewhere else. She quietly answered, “I don’t know.”

“Because I do know him,” Alexander called back from the hall, and Valerie and Sam both jumped. Noise carried in this little house better than she thought, apparently.

Valerie crossed her arms and asked, “Yeah? You do?”

“I would hope so,” Alexander’s voice carried back to them. “I’m his father.”

Chapter Text

- Interlude -

It is the spring of 1991, and you are seventeen years old.

You’re set to graduate at the top of your class if you keep your grades up for one more year, and you’ve already started applying to colleges across the continent. Two in California, four in the Northeast, one in Vancouver.

As much as you love where you grew up, Wisconsin isn’t on your list. You want to get away, even if it’s only for four years. You want to experience life on your own, without your overbearing mother and your irritable, impatient father breathing down your neck every second of every day.

In the spring of 1991, you have no idea what your future holds.

And that’s not scary. It’s exciting.

It is the fall of 1991, and your mother’s just gotten her diagnosis.

The world, it seems, grinds to a halt.

Except it doesn’t. It should, but it doesn’t. You still have your classes and your homework and your standardized tests and your essays and your college applications, and none of that can really be put on hold, so you complete almost all of it, every day, from the waiting room at the hospital in Green Bay or from the side of your mother’s various hospital beds over the next several months. Your grades sink a bit, naturally, enough that you’re no longer in line to be the top of your class—but not enough to jeopardize your standing with the universities you’ve applied to. It’s alright.

Your father spends almost all his time at your mother’s side, too.

Surprising, maybe, but also maybe not, the more you think about it. The two of them have been separated since you were twelve, having long since learned that they got along far better as friends than as a married couple, even if they continued to live under the same roof. Your mother hasn’t gone by Victoria Sigorov in years, and all her hospital paperwork is made out under her maiden name.

But the thing is, something about the diagnosis seems to have melted some of your father’s cold hard edges. You don’t know whether he’s here as your mother’s closest friend, or as her husband, or even just as the father of her child, but whatever the reason, he’s here every single day, and he hardly ever leaves your mother’s bedside.

She seems to appreciate that, so you don’t say a word about it.

As 1991 draws to a close, you toss one more college application out there, this time to the University of Wisconsin Madison. If your mother is still in the hospital when you go off to college, you know you won’t want to be more than a couple hours away.

It is the late winter of 1992, and your mother doesn’t make it.

The funeral for Victoria Masters is a small one. She didn’t have any living relatives, so the list of guests amounts to her friends from work, your father, and you. You don’t have a great many friends from high school, and of those you do have, you’ve distanced yourself from them with almost scientific precision over the last several months. A few of them still show up to offer moral support anyway.

You do not hear any of their condolences. You’re eighteen years old, and you’re trying to acclimate yourself to a world that no longer has your mother in it.

It is not an easy adjustment.

It is the spring of 1992, and you get into an explosive argument with your father.

The two of you have argued so many times over the years it’s hardly worth mentioning. If anyone asked your father why he butts heads with his son so much, you know he’d say something about the two of you being far too alike, far too stubborn, far too self-assured for your own good. If anyone asked you, on the other hand, you’d know the answer. Your father is a gigantic, stuck up, good-old-fashioned prick, and he does not like it when you point that out to him.

So, no, getting into an argument with him is not uncommon.

The nature of this argument, though, is.

This time it starts because you learn that your father plans to move across the country, and he wants you to join him by picking one of the four colleges you’ve already applied to in the Northeast. This time your mother is not here to smooth things over, to step in and quiet you both down and tell you that you’re both idiots and you can finish this conversation later after you’ve cooled off. This time it escalates to a screaming match that seems to have no end. This time it involves jabs that are too far below the belt.

You don’t understand it. You don’t understand why he wants to move away, why he wants you to move away.

It was different when your mother was still around, when she could still be expected to be around when you came back in four years. But now? Now, this place is all you have left of her. She raised you here. She took you to your first football game here. She grew up here. She fell in love with your father, for whatever reason you cannot fathom, here, and now he wants to leave?

You storm out of the house.

You don’t even remember the last thing you said to him, and honestly, you don’t care.

The very next morning, you gather your things and take a bus to Madison. You do not say goodbye. You enroll at the University of Wisconsin, and until the semester begins in the fall, you’ll couch surf to avoid having to ever go back home.

In a few weeks’ time, you’ll get a letter from your father with his new address listed in it. A coastal town in New Jersey, of all places.

You tuck the letter away and never look at it again.

It is the fall of 1992, and you’re sitting on a campus bench when a football wallops you in the back of the head.

Then quite possibly the largest person you’ve ever spoken to in your life—like, bigger than a linebacker huge—is standing in front of you, apologizing profusely, talking so quickly and so loudly and with such heartfelt regret in his voice that you can hardly get a word in edgewise. And by the time he stops for breath, you find that your initial urge to snap at him has already faded away.

Name’s Jack, he says. Sorry. Again.

Vlad, you tell him. Then you open your mouth and nearly shake the cobwebs off your old name, but then you remember the name you’ve enrolled under, and you add: Vlad Masters. And it’s fine. Don’t worry about it.

Jack holds up the football in invitation, and he asks: You wanna join in? Gotta give you a chance for some payback at least, right?

It is the spring of 1994, and you’re almost two years deep into an extracurricular research project that you never, not in a million years, thought you’d get into. But it means a lot to Jack, and to Maddie, and these days the three of you are about as inseparable as three people can possibly be, so here you are.

The contraption isn’t all that impressive, really.

Not until you happen to lean a little too close to it at just the wrong moment.

It is the early summer of 1994, and you’ve been in the hospital for three months.

In the first three weeks, you were unconscious and were visited five times by Maddie and Jack, but you’ll never know that. All you do know is that you received upwards of seventeen or eighteen phone calls from Jack in the beginning of your hospitalization, and then none, when it became clear you were never going to answer. Maddie never called at all, though it will be another six years before you realize that it was because the two of them were together, always together, always calling together from Jack’s phone.

It’s probably for the best that you don’t find that out just yet.

You’ve considered, once or twice, calling your father. You’ve never made any attempt at contacting him, and vice versa, and for years you’ve been telling yourself that if he wanted to talk to you, he would have done it already. And in any case, when you’re physically able to move again, you can’t quite convince yourself to move to the phone and make the call.

Maybe tomorrow.

Or the next day.

It is the late summer of 1994, and the nurse tells you there are two people here to see you. Jack and Maddie.

You tell the nurse not to let them through.

You’re not even sure why.

It is the fall of 1994, and you’ve been in the hospital for seven months. For the first time in weeks, the nurse comes up again to tell you that you have visitors. And again, it’s Jack and Maddie.

This time, when you turn them away, you know exactly why.

There’s been a caustic anger burning in your gut for months, eating away at you from the inside, a voice at the back of your mind that keeps prodding and prodding and prodding at every insecurity you have, every doubt, every unkind thought you’ve ever had about every person who’s ever cared about you.

This is their fault, that voice tells you.

You don’t need them.

You don’t need anyone.

It is the spring of 1995, and you’ve been in the hospital for a year.

It is the summer of 1995, and you’re oscillating between a deep visceral fury that lasts for days on end and a complete and utter apathy that sits like a darkened haze over all your thoughts for weeks.

You do not know how to break free of either one.

You’re not even sure you remember who you are without either one.

It is the fall of 1995, and you transform for the first time.

You refuse to believe it’s real. You chalk it up to the medication, to hallucinations, and you ignore the white-hot fire that’s still growing deep inside your chest.

It is the spring of 1996, and the fire inside gets too hot. Literally. Your ribcage is a kiln. You’re burning up a terrible fever that the doctors swear, privately, is not something you’ll be able to bounce back from. Not this time.

You call on that strange feeling again until your reflection is green-skinned and red-eyed, and you fall through a portal into a place that’s huge and open and terrifying and cold, and without pausing for thought, you unleash every ounce of fire that’s been building up inside you for the last days, weeks, months, years. It comes out as a mile-wide wave of pinkish red, the color of a bad burn, and that’s exactly what the palms of your hands look like when you come to, hours later, alone in the great wide expanse of what you will one day come to recognize as the Ghost Zone.

It is the fall of 1997, and somewhere, hundreds of miles away from the new home you’ve made in Wisconsin, your father sees you on the news for the first time.

A promising new face in the financial sector. An up-and-coming giant in the field. This young man has already made a killing through the purchase and sale of corporate stocks. People are saying he can talk his way into any deal he needs, negotiate just about anything down to an inconceivably low price, almost like his opponents have lost their minds.

Almost, maybe, like they’ve been possessed.

It is the fall of 1999, and you check on your father for the first time since you left. It will also be the last time you check on him, at least in person.

He doesn’t see you. No one does. You find him on a beach in New Jersey, sitting on a camping chair with a fishing line cast out into the waves, and you stand there and watch him for as long as you can bear to.

You do not stay for long.

It is the beginning of the new millennium, the spring of 2000, and you learn that your old college friends have just had their first child together. They’ve happily moved on with their lives without you. What’s more, they’ve been continuing their research on spectral phenomena all these years and yet they still have absolutely no idea what you are, what they made you into.

Good, that old voice says. Let’s keep it that way.

It is the spring of 2015, and maybe, if you hadn’t long since embraced that sinister voice at the back of your mind and let it consume everything you do, if you hadn’t fallen willingly into that pit of visceral fury and total apathy without ever even considering the idea of trying to fight it off, then maybe, maybe it would occur to you that trying to construct an entire person with nothing but an undergraduate molecular genetics course under your belt wasn’t necessarily the smartest move.

But in the spring of 2015, you don’t really care.

You need this.

You deserve this.

It is the summer of 2016, and you’re on the news again.

The secret is out. The world knows exactly who you are. The world knows exactly what you are. You’ve finally gone and taken every last shred of a chance you had at happiness and let the whole thing implode in on itself.

Your life is a star that’s collapsing into a black hole, and all you can do is let yourself get sucked up and crushed by it.

It is the fall of 2016, and you have been on the run for four months.

You assume that the Ghost Zone will be marginally safer for you than Earth would be. After all, ghosts rarely concern themselves with the affairs of humans, whether they’re really fully human or not, and so they shouldn’t concern themselves with you.

You assume wrong.

Your actions four months ago endangered not just the human world but the entirety of the Ghost Zone as well, and while ghosts may not concern themselves with the affairs of humans, they certainly do know how to hold a grudge.

It is a small mercy, you suppose, that injuries sustained as a ghost do not leave scars on your human form. Not that it really matters.

It is the fall of 2017, and you have been on the run for over a year.

And the thing is, it was only after you were encased in this genuine unending loneliness, in this knowledge that there was truly no one left in your corner anymore and that you had no one to blame for it but yourself, it was only then that you started to realize…

You were never alone before. Not really, not the way you always made yourself think you were.

But now you certainly are. And God, has there ever been a revelation made by anyone on this Earth that was made so exquisitely, perfectly, hilariously too late?

You are, now, today, more alone than you’ve ever been in your life. These days, you can’t even rely on the kindness of strangers for fear of being recognized. Your mother’s been dead for well over two decades and you haven’t spoken to your father in nearly as long. The only friends you’ve ever really had want nothing more to do with you and would likely turn you into the authorities in a heartbeat if they saw you, and frankly, you wouldn’t even blame them for it.

Your daughter—

Your daughter has just been taken by the very agency that wants so desperately to get its hands on you.

You’re driving down the highway in a car that you bought with stolen cash with your foot flooring the gas pedal and a squadron of police cruisers and DSS vehicles right behind you. You can’t help but feel that now, now that you’ve finally committed yourself to doing something good, now that you’ve accepted your role in all this and have had every intention of following through no matter what the personal cost (and you’ve known all along exactly what it would cost), now…

Now everything’s gone and fallen apart anyway. Danielle’s gone. And the others, three of the only four people you’ve even spoken to in the last year, are fifteen years old and terrified even though, in their unending teenage naivety, they don’t quite grasp how serious this situation is.

If you’re caught now, it’s over.

If you’re caught now, Daniel will never see the light of day again. It doesn’t matter his age, or his innocence. Any chance you had of freeing him will be gone.

If you’re caught now, your daughter will meet the exact same fate, and her sacrifice will have been for nothing.

You are very, very out of options.

So you do something a little bit reckless, and a little bit stupid, and a little bit uncharacteristically hopeful, on the slim chance that it might buy you and these three children a little bit more time.

And, honestly.

What else have you got to lose?

Chapter Text

Forty-five minutes after being teleported across two hundred miles and being dumped unceremoniously into the ocean, Sam was hyperventilating in a stranger’s bathroom.

No.

No, she wasn’t.

She was having a minor panic attack, okay? Minor. She was fine. She was tougher than this. She could handle it. She could get a hold of herself.

So what if she was hundreds of miles away from home in a total stranger’s house—in Plasmius’ father’s house, apparently, after he’d just teleported them there in a last ditch effort to be able to save Danny and Dani? So what if she was missing her parents for the first time since she was, like, four years old? So what if she hadn’t seen her boyfriend in over a week and had no way of getting to him or making sure he was okay? So what if she knew now, thanks to some news footage of his trial, that he wasn’t okay? So what if one of her best friends was now in exactly the same situation? So what if she’d just been in the middle of a DSS firefight and seen her friend electrocuted and then been in a high speed car chase and then thrown into the ocean with about a half-second of warning? So what if now, after everything, after all the effort they’d expended to get to this point, she was suddenly second-guessing the whole plan from the very beginning?

So what if she was at risk of taking their only chance at getting Danny back and just… wiping it out?

So what?

Sam gripped the edges of the sink and forced herself to count out her breathing. The cold of the porcelain under her hands helped.

In for seven, hold for four, out for eleven.

In for seven, hold for four, out for eleven.

In for seven, hold for four, out for eleven.

She lost track of how many breaths she counted through like that, but eventually, slowly, she started to feel a little less like she was going to shake apart at the seams. There was still that horrible pressure behind her eyes and that lump in her throat, but she was still standing, she was still alive, and Danny was still alive and Dani was still alive and even Plasmius was still alive— despite the fact that, for a few minutes on that beach, Sam had been absolutely one hundred percent sure that he wasn’t going to be.

Luckily she’d been the last one to get a shower, so no one else was waiting on her. She pulled on the t-shirt Alexander had left for her, along with the socks and a pair of sweatpants that, true to his word, had to be rolled up several times at the ankles before they would fit. The clothes were warm, clearly having just been pulled out of the dryer, and that gesture alone was enough to make Sam start to tear up again.

God, what was wrong with her right now?

Whatever. It didn’t matter. She had to get this over with.

There was no putting it off anymore.

She stepped out of the bathroom and into the hall. Somewhere to her left was the bedroom that Alexander and Tucker had worked together to help Plasmius get to, and presumably he was still in there, sleeping off whatever that wild use of his powers had done to him.

Sam turned right, into the living room where Tucker and Valerie were huddled together on the couch, talking lowly to each other. They both looked up as soon as she walked in, and Tucker noticed right away that something was up.

“Woah,” he said, slowly standing. “Hey, you okay?”

She crossed her arms tight over her chest and walked further into the living room, and she shook her head.

“I, uh— I can’t do it.”

To her absolute mortification, her voice cracked at the end of her statement, to the point that it actually came out sounding more like a question. She’d thought that just coming out and saying it, ripping it off like a band-aid, might make it easier.

And maybe it did make it easier, but it definitely didn’t make it easy.

“I keep— I keep thinking about it? And I— I can’t do it, guys.”

Somewhere in the middle of that last sentence, the dam broke, and she had to scrub at her cheeks to stop the tears from falling, but she pressed on anyway.

“Just— please don’t hate me for it,” she managed to squeak out, “but I can’t hand Plasmius over to those jerks at the DSS. I just— I can’t do it.”

And Tucker must have been exactly as stunned by the concept of Sam crying as Sam was, because he closed the distance between them and pulled her into a hug before he even bothered answering any of what she’d just said.

Behind him, as Sam clung to him and shook and hid her face in his shoulder, she heard Valerie say, “Honestly, I’ve been thinking that since like… two days ago.”

“Yeah,” Tucker said, and his voice was a little choked up. He was a sympathy crier, always had been, ever since they were in second grade. Sam didn’t want him to let go; she hadn’t realized exactly how badly she’d needed a hug until right this second, like hanging onto him was taking some of her broken pieces and slotting them neatly back into place, one by one. “Yeah, I don’t think I could’ve done it either.”

“Seriously?” Sam sniffed.

Tucker shrugged, pulling away just enough to wipe his eyes. The glasses were back on, which was also nice; Sam wasn’t used to seeing him without them. “Yeah, I dunno. Would have been a jerk move.”

“You’re just figuring that out?” Val asked, snorting a laugh.

“Hey now, I got there eventually,” Tucker said. Then to Sam, he said, “And come on, what do you mean ‘don’t hate me.’ Are you nuts?”

Sam shoved him, trying not to smile. “Shut up.”

“Oh, don’t hate me,” Tucker repeated, rolling his eyes.

“Shut up, Tucker. Oh, my God.”

“So,” Valerie said, looking fondly up at both of them from where she was still sitting on the couch. “We’re not handing him over the DSS. Glad we got that settled. But that was our whole plan, so what the heck are we supposed to do now?”

“Now, it seems we need to put together a new plan.”

All three of them froze.

Oh, crap.

Oh, crap, crap, crap.

Sam turned, slowly, to find that Plasmius was standing right there in the entrance to the hall.

“Uh,” Sam said. “How much of that did you hear?”

Plasmius shrugged. He still looked awful, way paler than usual with dark smudges under his eyes. He was leaning sideways with a shoulder on the wall like he needed its support to stay upright, and there was a thin waffle blanket wrapped around his shoulders like a shawl.

“Long enough,” he finally answered.

Sam’s heart sank.

Tucker spoke up with a little nervous laugh, “Okay, so. I think the, uh, the important thing to take away from this is… that we weren’t gonna turn you over to the DSS, you know? I mean, we were, but like… not… doing that, is what we landed on. Right? In the end that was what we went with, so I think that kinda overrides, like, the… I’ll shut up now.”

“Good idea,” Valerie muttered.

“Look,” Sam sighed, “it was a dumb idea from the beginning, okay?”

Plasmius shrugged again. “Not really.”

“We’re—” Sam started to apologize, then doubled back. “Wait, what?”

“It wasn’t a dumb idea,” he repeated. “Poorly executed? Yes, but circumstances were not exactly in your favor at… any point, really. And honestly, I was fully on board until about—” he weaved a hand out from under the blanket to check his watch, and there was definitely a tremor in his hand when he did so, but he didn’t acknowledge it— “my watch broke at 9:37, so I’m going to go ahead and say roughly 9AM.”

“Huh?” Tucker asked.

“You’re acting surprisingly… unsurprised by this,” Sam said.

Valerie added, “And what do you mean you were ‘on board’?”

Plasmius heaved a sigh, rubbing at his eyes with the same hand before retreating fully under the blanket again, wrapping it more firmly around himself. “This may come as something of a shock to all of you,” he said, “but fifteen-year-olds are not very adept at lying. Especially not to me. If you’ll recall, I made a living surrounded by Wall Street executives and politicians for twenty years, and they were leagues ahead of all of you. No offense.”

“What are you saying?” Valerie asked. “You knew?”

“I’m saying I’ve known. Since we left Amity Park.”

“WHAT?” Sam shouted.

“Why didn’t you say something?” Tucker yelled right along with her.

Valerie added, “Are you joking?”

At the sound of all three of them shouting, Alexander spoke up from the kitchen: “What are we all screaming for?”

He didn’t wait for an answer and instead stepped out into the living room, holding a steaming mug in one hand and raising an eyebrow at Sam and Val and Tucker. Then he shot a look at Plasmius, looking him over from head to toe and back up again like was appraising him.

And oddly, Plasmius sort of… froze, warily watching this guy—his father, like he wasn’t sure what to expect from him.

“Already up, ah?” Alexander finally said, handing the mug to him. “Here. Drink. You’ll feel better.”

Plasmius took the mug, slowly, like it might explode if he wasn’t careful. He kept looking from Alexander to the mug and back again, and then finally he seemed to recover his usual jerkishness. A little. The effect was kind of lost when he still looked ready to pass out again, but the effort was there.

“Will I, now?” he asked. “I was unaware you were suddenly an expert on half-ghost biology.”

Alexander maintained stone cold eye contact with him for ten very long, very tense seconds, and then he turned toward the rest of them and he asked, “You are certain I should not call police? Offer is still standing.”

“Uh,” Sam said. “Not yet. Thanks.”

“He makes jokes now,” Plasmius muttered into his mug. “That’s new.”

Alexander said something else to him in Russian, something that sounded a whole lot to Sam like shut up and drink it or maybe stop being an ass by the tone, and then he gestured for everybody else to follow him into the kitchen.

“Come. You should still be sleeping, but you need to sit. And all of you need something warm to eat.”

Tucker, naturally, perked up immediately at the promise of food and was the first one to hurry after him into the kitchen. Valerie was next, and Sam paused in the doorway to say to Plasmius, “You sure this nice old man is really your dad? He’s a lot less… prickly than I would’ve expected.”

“Believe me,” he said. “He has mellowed out quite a bit in his old age.”

From the kitchen, Alexander said something in Russian again.

“I’m forty-three!” Plasmius snapped back. “That is not old. If I’m old then what does that make you?”

“Older,” Alexander answered easily, and Sam stepped into a kitchen that was exactly as cozy and clean as the rest of the house was. It was small enough to be almost entirely taken up by the circular table in the middle, but they could easily all fit if they were willing to sit close together— which, honestly, after the day they’d had, was not a problem. Sam knew she’d be way more comfortable bumping elbows with Tucker and Valerie right now than sitting at a nice spacious dining table like the one she had at home.

“Oh, right, Sam,” Tucker said, pointing at the counter, “your phone’s in the third bowl. I’d give it another hour before you try it, though.”

On the counter, there were three huge bowls of uncooked rice, in the first of which she could see the top of Tucker’s laptop peeking through the surface. “Huh,” she said. “Is that actually gonna work?”

“Here’s hoping,” Tucker said with a shrug.

Alexander was pulling a stack of mugs and a stack of bowls from a high cabinet, and he passed them off to Tucker. “Give these out to the girls, will you? Spoons are in, ah—” he snapped his fingers, pointing— “left drawer.”

“Yessir,” Tucker said. “Got it.”

Sam settled into a seat beside Valerie, and Plasmius approached the chair on Valerie’s other side. With one hand he shakily placed the mug down first, and then slowly lowered himself down into the seat with a deliberate sort of cautiousness that rang an oddly familiar bell in Sam’s head.

It took her a second to realize it was because of Danny. That was how he always acted in the aftermath of using any crazy, new, too-powerful-for-his-own-good superpower. Like he was a little too dizzy to function properly, like any sudden movement might make him black out.

“Was that the first time you teleported that far?” she asked.

“Mm,” Plasmius hummed the affirmative, pulling the mug closer and hunching his shoulders around it. “First time teleporting other people, too— er, well, aside from getting you out of the restaurant about… ten minutes prior.”

Sam blinked. “Wha—? That was the first time you teleported someone else with you? How did you know it was gonna work?”

“I didn’t,” he said, and then he saw the horrified looks he was getting from Sam and Valerie and, across the table with two bowls still in his hands, from Tucker, too. “Relax. I knew you three would be fine.”

“That doesn’t make it better!” Valerie shouted.

“I mean, it makes it a little better,” Tucker said with a shrug.

Plasmius rolled his eyes. “The physics were sound. It was only a question of how much strain my ghost core could handle,” he said, and he lifted one hand and held it out, watching with dismay as it shook like a leaf. “Which, as it turned out… was not all that much.”

“But you didn’t die,” Tucker said, and Plasmius lifted his mug and gestured in Tucker’s direction as if to say, good point.

“Grab pot for me, will you?” Alexander asked Tucker, pointing at the big pot of something that was sitting on the stove and letting off wafts of steam into the fan above. “Potato soup. Neighbor cooks too much, always brings me leftovers. Wait, wait, wait, I will get potholder. Don’t want to burn table.”

Tucker went still, holding the pot by its handles high above the table in waiting, until Alexander slipped a potholder underneath so he could put it down.

“Nice boy,” Alexander said, then turned and gently patted Plasmius’ shoulder on his way back to the stove. “Not sure what he is doing with you, solnyshko.”

Plasmius turned an interesting shade of pink for a second, then cleared his throat and said, “What, you didn’t hear earlier? They’re planning on handing me off to a secretive government agency to be gruesomely and inhumanely experimented on for the rest of my days.”

“Oh,” Alexander said, all casual, like oh, is that all?

Tucker dug a ladle into the pot to serve himself some soup, handing it off to Sam after, and she plopped a generous helping into her own bowl, silently thanking whatever deity had finally decided to cut her a break by having Alexander just happen to offer them something vegetarian.

She shot Plasmius a look and said, “Okay, again, we weren’t actually gonna turn you over.”

Valerie asked, “Did you really know that was the plan the whole time?”

“I did,” Plasmius said. “Honestly, why else would you have sought me out for this rescue mission in the first place? To drive you? Ridiculous.” He paused, watching as Alexander set a kettle and a box of tea bags down on the table before taking the seat beside him. Then he added, “I also… may have eavesdropped on all of you at the storage unit before I revealed myself.”

“There it is,” Valerie said.

Plasmius shrugged. “There was the slim chance that you were telling the truth and your actual plan was as mind-bogglingly idiotic as asking me to drive you to Washington, so I had to make sure.”

Sam asked, “And you still came with us?”

“Why didn’t you say something, man?” Tucker asked. “I mean, what, you just came along anyway and hoped we were gonna change our minds?”

Plasmius was… conspicuously quiet for a moment, and Valerie was the first to catch on.

“You were just gonna let us,” she said, staring open-mouthed at him. “You were gonna let us hand you over to those ass—” she cut herself off, glancing at Alexander, and then corrected, “— jerks?”

Sam asked, “Seriously?”

Tucker added through a mouthful of soup, “What the hell, dude?”

“As I said, it wasn’t a terrible plan,” Plasmius reminded them.

Tucker argued, “My left buttcheek it wasn’t—”

“It wasn’t,” Plasmius quietly but firmly interrupted him. “The Department of Spectral Security wants a human-ghost hybrid to run their experiments on. Daniel comes with a litany of complications and legal issues because of his age, and his reputation, and the sheer number of people who want him released. I, on the other hand, come with none of those complications. They would have been fools to refuse a deal like that.”

“That’s what you meant,” Valerie said, and Plasmius raised an eyebrow at her. “At the motel back in Kentucky. You told me you agreed to this whole plan because you figured you should do something good after… you know, after everything else. That’s what you meant.”

“Something good,” Sam repeated. “What, like getting yourself experimented on for the rest of your life?”

“Are you kidding?” Tucker asked.

“Like getting Daniel released,” Plasmius corrected, as if that made a difference.

“Danny Phantom, yes?” Alexander asked, and all four of them blinked at him. He shrugged. “I watch news, I know who he is. And what—” he looked at Plasmius— “you think giving yourself up to save this… ghost-human boy, that is something good for you to do? After all that mess with the asteroid?”

“Wha— maybe,” Plasmius stammered, looking around at all of them. “And excuse me, but why am I being attacked for an idea that you all came up with in the first place?” He shook his head and leaned an elbow on the table, pressing a thumb into his temple. “Look, it’s not as if it matters now, anyway. It may have been a feasible option before, but it ceased to be one after this morning.”

“What do you mean, after this morning?” Tucker asked.

Sam sighed, realizing exactly where he was going with this, and she answered, “Because they got Dani, too.”

Plasmius nodded.

“Who?” Alexander asked. “Another Danny?”

“Another human-ghost hybrid,” Plasmius quietly corrected, and he was looking down at his mug again. “Dani, with an i. Short for Danielle.”

The room fell into a silence that was painfully awkward, a silence which neither Sam nor Tucker nor Valerie were willing to explain any further on who Dani was, and Alexander kept looking at Plasmius like he was waiting for him to continue, and Plasmius, for his part, somehow managed to look exponentially more exhausted and miserable than he already did.

Eventually, he said, “It’s complicated, but she’s… sort of my daughter.”

“Your daughter,” Alexander repeated.

Plasmius nodded without looking up. “Sort of.”

“I did not know I had a granddaughter.”

“She’s—” Plasmius started to say, then huffed through his nose and said, “As I said, it’s complicated. Very complicated. She’s been… officially adopted by another set of parents. Good parents. She doesn’t want anything to do with me, and… honestly, it’s not without reason.”

“So?” Alexander asked, firm but calm, and Plasmius looked up at him with an unreadable look on his face. “So maybe she wants nothing to do with you. What, you think this means you stop being her father? You think this means you have no responsibility to her?”

Something in that spiel looked like it hit Plasmius hard, hit him somewhere he hadn’t been expecting, and he stared dumbfounded at Alexander for a few moments before looking back down at his tea.

“No, but—”

“But nothing,” Alexander said, far gentler now, his eyes only on Plasmius. “You do not stop being parent. Ever. She is your daughter. And this… Department of Spectral Security, they have her, too?”

Plasmius hesitated, then nodded.

“You have plan to release her as well?”

“Not…” Plasmius sighed in defeat. “Not really, no.” He reached up with one hand to rub exhaustedly at his eyes, and he explained, “They would have been happy to take me in exchange for Daniel, because it would have been wonderful for their public image. They’d have gone from the hottest topic of controversy to undisputed heroes overnight. But unfortunately, it’s far less likely that they’ll give up two hybrids in exchange for me. It’s possible, and might still be an option, but—”

“It’s not an option,” Valerie cut him off.

“Miss Gray, I’m touched,” he said in a tone that did not make him sound all that touched, “but I’m simply stating the—”

“No, shut up, I mean it’s literally not an option,” Valerie told him, and remarkably, he actually did shut up. “I don’t think it would have worked from the beginning.”

Sam asked, “Why not?”

“Because… the thing is, you’re right,” Valerie admitted, looking at Plasmius. “They would’ve taken the deal, and maybe they would’ve given Danny back to us with no strings attached and everything would’ve been fine, and maybe they’d even give both of them back to us now, but I don’t think it would make any difference. Not in the long run. Because I don’t think that’s where it would stop, you know? I just— I keep thinking about Dani,” she said, and she shuddered, closing her eyes for a second. “Guys, they electrocuted her. Right in front of us. Right in front of— in front of tons of people in that diner. Even after she wasn’t in her ghost form anymore. Even after she just looked like a regular fourteen-year-old girl.”

“Yeah,” Tucker said. “We saw.”

“So if they were totally cool with doing that to a fourteen-year-old girl in front of all those people, in front of civilians, I mean— what do you think they’re doing behind closed doors, you know?”

It wasn’t a new revelation by any means, but being reminded of it sent an ache through the center of Sam’s chest all the same. Again she thought of the video feed of Danny showing up for his trial, how tired he’d looked, how beaten down, how sad, how not Danny. What was happening to him? What had been happening to him for the last week? What was going to happen to Dani, now, if they didn’t get to her soon?

And crap, how much worse would it have been for Plasmius if they’d actually handed him over?

The ache wasn’t just a sad one or a fearful one, though. It was shot through with anger, a bone deep anger that made her want to screw the planning and screw the strategies and just storm into that place guns blazing.

“You’re right,” Sam finally said, following right along with Valerie. “They don’t even see you guys as human. Even if we were willing to just hand you over to them—” she looked up at Plasmius— “which we’re not, it wouldn’t stop them.”

Valerie nodded. “They’d just make some other excuse to arrest Danny again later.”

Tucker groaned and dropped his head into his hands, scrubbing them up and down his face for a second. “So then what are we supposed to do? I mean, how are we supposed to get them out of there and keep them out of there?”

“I don’t think we can. Unless we, like, actually get rid of the whole DSS,” Valerie said, “I don’t see how they’re ever gonna be safe.”

“Get rid of the DSS?” Tucker echoed. “What, like, take down the whole department?”

Valerie shrugged. “Or the building, at least. That’d be a good start.”

“The building?” Plasmius asked.

Tucker asked, “How the heck are we gonna do that?”

“Well, I don’t know, Tucker, but maybe—”

Sam was staring down at her half-empty bowl, staring through it, thinking about Danny and their original plan to save him and this whole botched trip and…

“— dunno if you noticed, Val, but we couldn’t even get within half an hour of D.C. last time before everything went to—”

“I’m just saying, we gotta try something or—”

And the idea came to her like a flash bomb.

“Maybe,” Sam spoke up, and Tucker and Valerie stopped their bickering to look at her. Plasmius and Alexander were both looking at her, too, clearly waiting for whatever it was she was about to say. “Okay, so, hear me out. But maybe we don’t totally ditch the original plan.”

“Huh?” Tucker asked.

“I have an idea,” Sam said, and for the first time in a week she felt an inkling of real hope. Just an inkling, but it was something. “I have… uh, part of a plan? But it’s just a start, and I’m… I’m definitely gonna need some help figuring out the rest.”

All four of them stared at her for a long, tense moment.

Then Alexander blew a raspberry through his lips and stood, tapping the table on this way up. “I will make coffee.”

Altogether, the planning took over ten hours.

It was well past dark by the time they finally called it, when Alexander disappeared into a back room and fished out every pillow and blanket he owned, handing them off to Sam and Tucker and Valerie so they could set up what amounted to a makeshift bed on his living room floor.

This guy was almost shockingly helpful, actually. He’d offered advice where he could, sat back and listened when he couldn’t, and he was even letting them take his pick-up truck down to D.C. tomorrow, too. Sam had no idea what the deal was between Plasmius and his dad—she hadn’t even known, until today, that he still had one—but either they’d been more or less in touch since Plasmius’ big screw-up with the asteroid, or they’d fallen back into an old harmony with each other quickly enough that it barely made a difference. A somewhat disjointed harmony, maybe, but still.

In any case, when Sam and Valerie and Tucker all collapsed onto the pile of blankets on the floor together at around nine, Plasmius was still in the kitchen with his dad, talking quietly enough that none of them would’ve been able to hear it even if it had all been in English. And it would be another several hours—at least midnight, maybe later—before Sam would be woken up, briefly, by the sound of Plasmius stepping across the living room and falling onto the couch to sleep for the night.

But that would be later. Right now it was just past nine, and Tucker was hugging a pillow and snoring away after the hours he’d spent going cross-eyed staring at screens, and Sam was already having some trouble keeping her own eyes open.

She turned over toward Valerie, who was staring up at the ceiling with her hands behind her head.

“It’s gonna work,” Sam said.

Valerie nodded. “Here’s hoping.”

“It is,” Sam insisted, because it was. It had to.

Valerie turned just a bit, offering her a half-smile that felt at least somewhat genuine. Hopeful, maybe. “Yeah, you know what?” she said. “I think it just might.”

Chapter Text

It is a beautiful sunny morning in D.C., just after nine, when Sam dials the number on her phone.

It rings three times before someone picks up.

“Sergeant Jones, DSS.”

“Hi, Sergeant Jones, DSS,” Sam says, smiling sweetly and leaning against the streetlight pole behind her. “This is Sam Manson. I’d like to speak to your boss.”

There’s a hush on the other end of the line, and Sam cuts in before he can object.

“And I mean your actual boss,” she adds, doing her best to channel the energy of her mom at every retail establishment she has ever been to in her life. “In fact, just to be safe, how about you connect me to your boss’s boss? I want to speak with whomever’s in charge. I don’t want to start talking to Sergeant-Deputy-Lieutenant whoever and then have them tell me that what I want is above their pay grade.”

Another hush, and then Sergeant Jones says, “Miss Manson, as I understand it, you’ve either been abducted by the fugitive Vlad Plasmius, or you’re aiding and abetting him. You can understand it’s a bit of a mystery to me why you would be calling my office now, demanding to speak with my superiors.”

“Yeah, that is a mystery, isn’t it?” Sam asks. “Did you finish tracking the call yet? That should answer, like, at least one of your questions.”

“Miss Manson, if you could just tell us what this is about—”

“You need more time to track the call, that’s fine,” Sam says. “Look, I want to talk to your superiors because I have something they want, but I’m not handing it over until I get what I want in return.”

“And what you want is…?”

“What do you think?”

There’s a sigh on the other end of the line. “Look, Miss Manson, I don’t know what you’re offering here, but you have to know that releasing—”

“— that releasing Danny is above your pay grade, I know, that’s why I want to talk to your superiors, Sergeant Jones.”

“And what, exactly, makes you think that they’ll be any more amenable to this request, Miss Manson? They’re not going to just release the half-ghost criminal Danny Phantom because a teenage girl says she wants them to.”

“Not even in exchange for the half-ghost criminal Vlad Plasmius?”

The line goes deadly quiet.

Sam smiles wider, tipping her head back against the streetlight pole. “Did you track the call yet?”

A pause, and then Sergeant Jones asks, “Are you on Massachusetts Avenue, Miss Manson?”

“Right outside Union Station, yep, about half a mile from your office. But you knew that, right?” Sam asks, and then waves up at the closest security camera she can see, confident that they’re watching her now through every single one. Then, for good measure, she pulls the Fenton Thermos out from inside her jacket and gives it a demonstrative wiggle. He’s here, she thinks. Come and get him. “So? You gonna send someone to come pick me up, or is the teenage girl gonna have to order her own Uber? I gotta be honest, I don’t know how long it’ll take him to break out of this thing—”

“We’ll come to you. Stay where you are.”

Click.

It was one in the afternoon, and they were all gathered around Alexander Sigorov’s kitchen table for the second straight hour, hammering out the plan.

Vlad sat back with his arms crossed. “I know I’m the last person to preach about child safety given… all… of my personal history,” he winced, “but I would like to go on record and say I’m not a fan of sending you alone into the DSS headquarters.”

Sam scoffed. “Why?”

“Because you’re, what, ninety pounds? If that? And fifteen years old? And famously the significant other of the person this agency is desperately trying to keep in their custody?”

“So?”

“So, at the very least you shouldn’t be wandering in there alone without some form of backup.”

“I agree,” Alexander said.

“I won’t be alone,” Sam reminded them, and she plunked the Fenton Thermos down on the table, dropped her chin on top of it, and flashed a smile at them. “Remember?”

“Without backup that is not trapped inside a soup container,” Vlad said, leveling her with a mild glare.

Tucker was in the middle of typing something on his laptop—which had just been newly resurrected from its seawater-induced death—but he paused long enough to admit, “He’s got a point. But, like, I don’t really see any better option.”

“We just gotta make sure we time it right,” Sam said.

Valerie, from where she was reading over Tucker’s shoulder, hummed in agreement and added, “We gotta make sure we time everything right.”

“A better option would be giving you some kind of backup,” Vlad insisted.

Sam still had her chin resting on the thermos as she thought, and then she said, “Well. We do have more than one thermos.”

“I want Danny and Danielle,” Sam repeats for what must be the hundred-thousandth time in the five minutes she’s been sitting in this stuffy office. “Literally what are you not getting about that?”

Chief Deputy Commissioner whatever—she can’t be bothered at this point to remember his actual rank and name, so by now Sam’s settled with calling him Handlebar Mustache in her head—is clearly not moved.

“Miss Manson,” he says. “This is not a movie. This department is not a pawn shop. You have a dangerous fugitive in that thermos—” he nods in the general direction of where the thermos is tucked securely inside her jacket— “and keeping him from us now is considered obstruction of justice. You understand that?”

“So charge me with obstruction of justice, I don’t care!” she shouts, throwing her hands up. “You’re not getting this thermos from me until you tell me you’ll release Danny and Danielle. It’s not happening.”

“That is not how this works,” he says.

“Are you—?” Sam starts to say, and her voice catches in her throat. “We were kidnapped, okay? By a guy that tried to kill all of us on several occasions, a guy that can— can possess people and blow stuff up with his mind, a guy that you people were supposed to be in charge of catching, and you didn’t! So we had to trick him and suck him up into this thermos all by ourselves—”

“Yes, and where are Tucker Foley and Valerie Gray?” Sergeant Jones interrupts from where he’s been standing behind Handlebar Mustache, arms crossed. “You still haven’t said.”

“I told you,” Sam says, glaring even as her eyes are clouding up with tears. “They’re hiding somewhere safe until I tell them Plasmius is locked up. They’re terrified of him. I am, too.”

Sergeant Jones asks, “So why not give him to us now?”

“Because you still have our friends locked up here, and we caught Plasmius after everything we’ve been through in the last week, and you owe us—!”

“Miss Manson,” Handlebar Mustache speaks up again. “Listen. I’m not saying that releasing the two hybrids is entirely out of the question.”

Sam sniffs, scrubbing at her eyes. “You’re not?”

“I’m not. But there is a legal process here,” he tells her. “What you’re suggesting is that you hand us a thermos with Vlad Plasmius in it, and we release those two right away. That’s not how we do things. Both of those hybrids have serious charges against them. There would be a mountain of paperwork to process, at the very least.”

“So what are you saying?”

“If you hand Vlad Plasmius over to us now, I can tell you that we will get him to a secure cell, and you’ll never have to worry about him again. You and your friends will be safe. After that, given your efforts to… let’s call it your efforts to assist our department, I can tell you that I will personally fasttrack Phantom’s appeal for release.”

“Really?” she asks, acutely aware that he’s probably only humoring her because he can afford to, because she’s crying and humoring her is easier and less messy than just outright arresting her. For now. “You’ll do that?”

“I can’t make any promises about what’ll come of it, but yes. I will.”

“And what about Danielle?”

“The female hybrid’s chances of release will sit at a ‘maybe’ until further notice.”

Sam’s voice cracks when she asks, “Can I see them?”

Sergeant Jones and Handlebar Mustache look at each other, and then Handlebar Mustache says, carefully, “I can put in a request, but it’ll take a few days to process.”

She sniffs again, but says nothing, closing her eyes with a defeated sigh.

“So?” Handlebar Mustache asks. “Do we have an agreement, Miss Manson?”

Sergeant Jones comes around to take the thermos from her, and after a few seconds of hesitation she pulls it out of her jacket, holding it out to him— and then she jerks it back before he can grab it.

“Be really, really, really careful, okay?”

“I assure you, we will be.”

“No, I mean it. You see this?”

She points at the little meter built into the side of the thermos.

“This is a feature Mr. and Mrs. Fenton built into their new line of thermoses, right? It’s a meter that tells you how powerful the ghost inside is,” she says. It helps that this part requires no deception whatsoever. She’s telling nothing but the truth right now. “Look at that. You see how it’s almost all the way filled up? He’s powerful as crap, and he’s pissed off. Just— don’t open it until you get it inside a ghost-proofed cell. Like, the strongest one you have. Please.”

Then she hands it over to him, gingerly, like it’s made of glass.

“Jones, you can take that down to Cell 01,” Handlebar Mustache says, standing and walking around his desk. “Miss Manson, if you’ll come with me, I’ll escort you to our lounge where you can wait for your parents to arrive.”

“Did you call them yet?” Sam asks as he leads them out of their office. As expected, Sergeant Jones turns left, and Handlebar Mustache leads her to the right.

“We’re just about to. I’m sure they’ll be very relieved to hear you’re safe.”

“Could you— um,” Sam says, sniffling one more time and rubbing her eyes. “I don’t want to be crying when I talk to them. Could you just… give me a few minutes, maybe? To sort of calm down?”

Handlebar Mustache sighs. “Five minutes.”

They’re now coming down through the hall that leads toward the East Wing of the building, Sam knows, thanks to the blueprints Tucker dredged up and which they spent hours poring over yesterday.

And up ahead on the left, exactly as expected, are the bathrooms.

“Um, do you mind if I—?” Sam asks, pointing, and he nods. “Thanks.”

She hurries ahead and ducks into the men’s bathroom, quickly enough that she can get away with ignoring his half-whisper-half-shout of wait wait that’s the men’s—! And she lets the door swing shut behind her. On the other side, she can hear Handlebar Mustache sighing again, evidently resigning himself to guarding the door so no strange men end up wandering in on the teenage girl using their bathroom.

Perfect. That should give her at least a minute or two.

First, she pulls out her phone and sends a quick text to Tucker: a single toilet emoji. Then she sets her backpack down on the sink and starts rifling through it. They searched her, of course, as soon as she came into the building, but nothing in there—as far as they could tell—was anything she could’ve used as a weapon, so they let her hang on to it. Pack of tissues, a mini-flashlight, a dirty t-shirt, snacks, a bunch of odds and ends, and of course, a spare Fenton Thermos that is… technically empty.

At least, it’s empty according to the meter on the side, which only shows ghost levels.

She opens that now, and—

“Oh, my God,” Plasmius complains immediately, stumbling and just barely landing on his feet.

“Shh! Keep it down,” Sam whispers. “He’s right outside.”

“Do you have any idea,” he whispers back, “how uncomfortable it is to go back to human form while inside that thing?”

“Hey, this part was your idea, remember? I was totally fine coming in alone,” Sam says, pulling out the pack of tissues to wipe the tears from her face and blow her nose. “So? You heard all that, right? Where’s that rank on the scale from fifteen-year-olds to Wall Street executives?”

Plasmius finishes rolling his shoulders and winces, trying to rub out a kink in his neck. “The waterworks were a bit much.”

“Excuse me,” she says, quickly locating the air vent by the floor and sitting cross legged in front of it, and she pulls the pin from her hair. “Started off super overconfident, slowly got more and more frustrated the more they didn’t listen to me, and then started crying when it just got to be too much for my poor delicate little-kid sensibilities. It’s textbook, come on.”

“Eh.”

“Um, did it work? Or did it work? Because I’m pretty sure—”

“It worked,” he admits.

“Thank you, thank you,” Sam says with a little mock bow of her head, and then gets to work, using the hair pin as a flathead screwdriver to twist all the little screws out of the air vent one at a time.

Behind her, Plasmius stands with his arms crossed, scanning his eyes over the faintly glowing ghost-proofed walls, keeping an eye on the door, and waiting.

“So if they’re smart, they’re gonna take the thermos down to their most secure cell, which is in the West Wing of the building,” Tucker said, sitting upside-down on Alexander’s couch, twirling a pen as he spoke and sometimes swishing it through the air like a band conductor.

By now Sam and Valerie were both lying on the floor, and Sam had her legs propped up on the couch beside Tucker. Vlad was sitting cross-legged on the armchair with his elbows on his knees and his hands in his hair, and Alexander was somewhere in the kitchen.

Sam was starting to feel like she might fall asleep in this position, which was nuts. It was only three in the afternoon.

“But we gotta figure out a way to, like…” Tucker said, stabbing his pen at nothing, “… direct him, you know?”

“What? I thought I was doing that,” Sam said. “The ventilation shaft in the East Wing? Remember?”

“Yeah, but that just means he’s gonna go from the west end of the building to the east, and only once,” Tucker said, balancing the pen under his upside-down chin. “Is that gonna be enough?”

“What do you want him to do? Zig-zag all over the place?”

“I mean… Yeah, kinda. Seems like a waste otherwise. He’s like, our personal demolition man.”

Valerie said to Sam, “If we wanted to do that, first we’d have to make the one you put in the vent be a decoy, right? Like a recording or something instead of the real thing? That’s easy enough, but then… I dunno, if we got enough people on all sides of the building we could pull it off, maybe. Like, lure him all kinds of different places.”

“There’s only four of us, Val,” Sam reminded her.

“Yeah,” Tucker said, “and Plasmius can’t do his freaky clone thing without setting off every ghost alarm in the country.”

Val sighed. “Well, without more people I dunno how we’re gonna do it.”

“What about your teacher?”

Sam, Tucker, and Valerie all turned to look at Plasmius. The pen slipped off Tucker’s chin and bounced on the floor, and he asked, “Huh?”

“Your teacher,” Plasmius said. “There were, what, two dozen students from your school with him? Three dozen? That would be more than enough.”

“Did ya have any trouble finding him?”

Valerie taps the communicator in her suit’s helmet and answers, “Nah, he wasn’t wearing a hat or anything so I just looked around until I saw a shiny bald head in the crowd.” Tucker snorts a laugh on the other end of the line. “The harder part was convincing him I was serious.”

“Huh. Really?”

“Yep. I handed him the bag, he looked inside, and then he said, quote, ‘This seems like a strange time to be pranking your teacher, Miss Gray.’”

“I mean, I guess it does seem kinda weird.”

“You don’t say,” Valerie sighs.

“He came around, though?”

“Yeah, he did. How’s it coming along on your end?”

“Sam’s in the bathroom so we’re just about good to go. Gimme… fifteen seconds,” Tucker says. “You ready?”

“You know it,” Valerie answers as she kicks the hoverboard up into the air and hops on. She’s still mostly hidden from view in an alleyway, unless someone happens to walk by or one of the residents of these two buildings happens to look out their window, but civilians aren’t really a big concern right now.

“You remember where you’re going?”

“We only went over it about a hundred times,” Valerie reminds him, because it’s true. Tucker had planned this part more thoroughly than everything else combined, and Valerie swears that when she closes her eyes she can still see the map he’d drawn out, burned into the inside of her eyelids. She lists it off anyway, just to give Tucker some extra peace of mind. “Generator’s on the roof, main electrical supply is on the ground behind the building, loop around East and hit every transformer along the block, then head one block North, two blocks West, one block South, and one block back East, and I’ll end up right behind the crowd of protestors where I can retract the suit and blend in with everybody else.”

“And you’ll—”

“— put a remote charged incendiary round on the generator and the main electrical supply, and hit the transformers with the heat-seeking rounds from the hoverboard, yeah,” she finishes for him. “I got this, Tuck.”

“Okay. Here goes nothing, right? I got the outer security cameras and all the traffic cams on their street. Freezing the feed in five… four…”

Valerie bends her knees and sinks into a riding stance.

“… three… two…”

She slides her heel back, kicking the engines on, and the hoverboard gives off a smooth, familiar whirr.

“… one.”

Sam places her phone down in the ventilation shaft, already open to the recording she needs, and she waits. After she hits play, there will be five seconds of silence before it starts, giving her just about enough time to push her phone and send it skidding down along the vent shaft so it’s at least a few rooms down from where she and Plasmius are standing.

The wait is not long. Sam counts her breaths, nice and slow, in and out, and she only gets through about five before she hears the distant pow of an explosion somewhere outside. She was waiting for it, but it still makes her jump.

Then there’s another explosion, and another, and another, and finally a deep zhoom as the lights in the bathroom flicker off. The faint glow of the ghost shielding is gone, too, so that technically Sam’s phone is the only source of light that they’ve got left.

And she’s about to chuck it down a ventilation shaft. Oh, well.

“Nice work, Miss Gray,”  Plasmius murmurs from behind her.

“Okay,” Sam says. “Here goes everything.”

She hits play, shoves her phone with everything she’s got, and backs away from the vent like it’s about to explode.

Because really, that’s not too far off from what’s about to happen.

In the basement level of the DSS headquarters, Sergeant Jones heads down a long hall of mostly empty chrome and plexiglass containment cells. He passes the only two occupied cells, Cell 02 and Cell 03, both well-fortified and heavily ghost-proofed even though each of their occupants is wearing a pair of DSS-issue suppressant cuffs around the clock to prevent the use of their ghost powers at all. The extra layer of security doesn’t hurt, and Sergeant Jones vaguely wonders when they’re gonna have someone throw a pair of those cuffs on their newest detainee, and who’s gonna have the pleasure of doing it.

Honestly, he just hopes it won’t be him.

He keeps walking toward the very end of the hall, toward Cell 01, their most well-fortified and most heavily ghost-proofed cell— a cell which had been set aside for this exact purpose many months ago. The DSS always knew they’d get a hold of Vlad Plasmius eventually. Somehow. Granted, they had never expected a teenage girl to capture him and hand him over to them in a bid to save her little ghost-hybrid boyfriend, but such is the nature of these things, he supposes. There will always be unexpected twists, but all roads lead to Rome.

Luckily, the DSS has been working on a line of copycat thermoses in the same vein as those manufactured by the Fentons, so these cells are equipped with a ghost deposit mechanism that’s perfectly compatible with the Fenton Thermos he’s holding now. Simply insert the thermos cap-side-forward into the mechanism in the wall, twist, and the ghost is securely ejected into the cell in a few seconds. No wrestling him into a pair of cuffs—that part will come later—and no risks, no backup needed.

Sergeant Jones inserts the thermos now, twists, and…

And what comes out is definitely not Vlad Plasmius.

“The hell?” he murmurs.

He’s looking down at the brand new occupant of Cell 01, which is not Vlad Plasmius or any fully grown man or even a person, but— why? Did the girl mean to trick them? It’s a possibility, maybe, but what would be the point of that? How far did she expect to get, when she knew they’d discover the deception just a few minutes after she handed the thermos over?

And why a dog?

Sergeant Jones crouches down in front of the cell, forearms over his knees. The dog is definitely a ghost dog, maybe even a ghost puppy, and it honestly doesn’t look like much of a threat, as far as ghosts go.

“You’re actually kinda cute,” Sergeant Jones tells him, and the ghost puppy seems to understand him, or at least the sentiment behind it. Its tongue lolls out of his mouth, and it thumps its tail happily on the cell floor.

No, Sergeant Jones thinks, this couldn’t have been an intentional deception. The girl must have gotten confused. He’ll have to let his boss know, and then they’ll have to figure out whether the girl’s actually got Plasmius somewhere or if she accidentally caught this harmless little ghost puppy instead and somehow thought she’d managed to capture the most wanted criminal on the planet.

Before he can even pull out his radio, though—

There’s a zhoom as all the lights on this level go out.

Sergeant Jones freezes. A power outage? Shouldn’t the generators have kicked in by now?

Even the ghost shielding is down, which shouldn’t be a problem thanks to the cuffs on their two prisoners, but it’s not exactly ideal, either. The only light at all now is what’s coming off the puppy, a harsh green glow that washes everything down here in shades of green and black like a scene from a bad horror movie, and he clicks on his flashlight to try and lessen some of the eeriness that brings on.

The puppy doesn’t seem to realize that anything’s amiss. It flops over onto its back, tongue still hanging out the side of its mouth.

Sergeant Jones grabs his radio to ask someone what’s going on, but— yet again, something stops him.

What the hell is that?

What is he hearing?

Is that coming from inside the walls? From the ventilation shaft, maybe?

He turns, frowning at the vent down by the floor, and he points his flashlight at it. What is that? There’s no way that sound is what he thinks it is. At first he thinks it must be a mouse, but it’s too loud, too rhythmic, too continuous to be a mouse. What it actually sounds like, bizarrely, is another dog somewhere in the facility chomping down on a squeaky toy.

And Sergeant Jones feels his heart plummet down into his stomach at the next sound:

A deep, guttural growl coming from the no longer ghost-proofed cell right beside him.

As soon as Sam steps back from the vent—that is, about two seconds after the power goes out—the bathroom door swings open and smacks into the opposite wall. Handlebar Mustache, apparently having immediately suspected that something was amiss and then correctly surmised that it was because of her, steps inside with one hand already on the butt of the pistol in his holster.

Plasmius is just half a second too slow.

The agent’s got his anti-ghost pistol out in the instant before there’s a blinding flash of blacklight purple in the darkened room, and he’s got the glowing green barrel leveled at Plasmius, now fully powered up in his ghost form with both hands up.

“Don’t move,” Handlebar Mustache says, and then he addresses Sam without looking away from Plasmius. “Miss Manson, I’ll ask you to calmly step away from the fugitive Vlad Plasmius and get behind me.”

“Okay, hang on,” Sam says even though she has no idea what she’s gonna say next.

Behind her, the squeak-SQUEAK squeak-SQUEAK squeak-SQUEAK sounds from her phone in the ventilation shaft. And then, distantly, she can hear a faint growl resonating through the vents, too.

Crap.

Down by the agent’s feet, there’s a shimmer of magenta like a puddle of ectoplasm on the floor, and a second copy of Plasmius rises silently up out of it.

Handlebar Mustache doesn’t see it.

“Miss Manson. Step away from—”

A blast fires out of the Plasmius copy’s palm and hits the agent’s weapon from beneath, sending it flying out of his hands. The agent backpedals with a startled yelp, and he doesn’t manage to get his bearings before Plasmius, the real one, fires a massive ectoplasmic blast that sends him right back out the door.

And, by the sound of it, through a neighboring wall, too.

“Oh, but you would have been just fine on your own,” Plasmius’ voice echoes in the fading light of the blast.

“Shut up,” Sam says without any heat, rolling her eyes, and then: “Let’s go. No telling how much time we have before—”

Before Cujo brings the whole place down on top of us, is what she means to say, but she doesn’t get the chance.

Because the thing is, the plan had been this: Have the DSS agents drop Cujo into their most secure cell, cut the power so the building’s ghost shielding powers down, and lure Cujo through the building on a nice convenient path of destruction from the East Wing to the West Wing. They wouldn’t have to worry about Danny or Dani getting hurt, since these days Cujo would never hurt either of them even at his biggest and scariest and most squeaky-toy-crazed; the real concern was when he’d start compromising the structure of the building itself, so all they really had to do was get to Danny and Dani before Mr. Lancer and the rest of their classmates started squeaking their big bag of squeaky toys outside.

Except it seems, apparently, they really underestimated Cujo’s destructive capabilities on just the first pass.

Sam has enough time to register that the floor’s shaking like an earthquake before she hears a series of muffled booms, and then—

“WATCH OUT!”

— there’s a hand gripping her upper arm and yanking her through a pinhole again, and this time it’s over the backdrop of a deafening roar that can only be several tons of concrete and brick crumbling down into the ground.

“Oh, yes, you would have done WONDERFULLY on your own,” Plasmius shouts over the ringing in her ears when they land.

“God, I get it,” Sam groans, trying to get her bearings. It’s a little easier this time, now that she’s more-or-less used to the sensation of no longer occupying the same space she was only half a second ago. She can’t see anything at all beyond the faint pinkish glow coming off of Plasmius, though; they must be underground somewhere. “Where’d you bring us?”

“West Wing, basement level,” Plasmius says, and he lifts a hand in front of him, palm facing out like he’s about to fire again. Instead, the ectoplasm swirls in his hand like a candle flame, casting a flickering magenta glow over what Sam now realizes is a hallway lined with cells.

“We’re close,” she says.

“Should be,” Plasmius agrees. “Luckily the mutt seems to have only demolished the opposite side of the building.”

“So far.”

“So far,” Plasmius echoes. “Best get moving, then.”

There’s a distant rumble that must be Cujo, and the sound of a whole lot of panicked voices and the chaotic mess of footsteps and shouts not too far away. It’s so hard to see, though, the whole basement enveloped in this oppressive dark from the shorted out electricity, and Sam latches a hand onto Plasmius’ jumpsuit at the back of his shoulder.

He shoots a look back at her.

“Shut up,” she says again, rolling her eyes. “I chucked my phone down a vent, and then somebody teleported me away from the flashlight in my backpack.”

Plasmius shrugs. “Fair enough.”

And then, in the distance, one voice rises above all the rest. Only barely, and only because it’s a voice that Sam would know anywhere, a voice that Sam knows all the way down to her core:

“… Hello? Dani, is that you?”

“Oh, my God,” Sam breathes, and she and Plasmius both immediately start running.

They only run into one obstacle, and it’s one that’s easily dealt with. A group of four DSS agents come sprinting around a corner, anti-ghost guns at the ready, and there’s a crackle in the air and a muffled kaboom exactly like the one from back at that diner in Virginia, and all four of them go flying and smack into the opposite wall hard enough to either totally knock them out or at least daze the hell out of them, and then Sam and Plasmius turn the corner, and—

And he’s right there.

Danny’s right there.

He’s standing in the doorway of what must have once been a ghost proofed cell, but with the killed power it’s just an empty doorway without a trace of a green glow to be seen at all. He’s leaning heavily against the doorframe, and he looks exactly as exhausted as he looked on that news segment, with a pair of ghost power suppressant cuffs on his wrists— unlinked cuffs this time, which is good, because he’s got one arm wrapped around his stomach like he’s in pain or a little sick or both.

And there’s also, of course, one DSS agent standing right beside him with an anti-ghost pistol leveled at his head.

“S— Stay back,” the agent tells them.

But Sam’s not even looking at him. She watches as Danny looks up, eyes landing first on her and then on Plasmius and then on her again. Like he can’t believe what he’s seeing. Which, you know. Fair.

A Plasmius double shows up right behind the DSS agent and tries to get him into a headlock, but—and he’s an idiot, Sam thinks, why the hell did he go for direct contact, what is he thinking —the agent is of course wearing a Specter Deflector. The real Plasmius lets out a startled, choked off shout, stumbling like he’s been electrocuted, because that’s exactly what’s happened.

Sam panics for a moment, but apparently, Danny’s way ahead of her.

He glances down at the Specter Deflector, then at the cuffs on his own wrists, and then he seems to go through about a half second of internal debate before he just pulls back a fist and decks the crap out of the DSS agent with a right hook to the face.

The agent crumples to the ground.

The Plasmius double vanishes into thin air.

“Oh, my God, Danny!”  

“No, no, don’t worry,” Plasmius huffs behind her. “I’m alright, too. Really, just a bit of light electrocution.”

Sam barely hears him. She’s already sprinting after Danny without another second of hesitation, all but actually bowling him over and throwing her arms around his neck. He’s here, he’s real, and he returns the hug right away, his arms winding tight around her waist.

“Sam?” he asks, and his voice is so small, so confused and almost disbelieving. “How…? You’re here?”

“Yeah,” Sam croaks, realizing a bit too late that she’s crying. “Yeah, I’m here. I— we all came to get you, Tucker and Val are right outside—”

Danny hasn’t let go of her, his face tucked down against her neck, and he might be crying a little bit too when he asks, “Is that…? Am I going crazy, or is Plasmius here, too?”

“Yeah, no, you’re not going crazy. That’s— uh, that’s a long story,” Sam admits. Behind her, she’s only dimly aware of Plasmius hurrying right past her, apparently having recovered from his light electrocution since he’s now ducking into the neighboring cells and calling out for Danielle, and Sam pulls back from the hug so she can get both hands on either side of Danny’s face.

Holy shit, he’s actually here. She doesn’t know when she’s gonna get over that fact alone.

Apparently, he’s sort of in the same boat.

“I… I didn’t think I was ever gonna see you again,” Danny says, and Sam’s heart cracks a little bit.

“Well, that was pretty stupid,” she tells him, sweeping a thumb over his cheek. “Danny, we beat the literal king of ghosts once. You think we can’t fight our way through a couple of dumb government agents?”

Danny laughs, and Sam can’t help it. She surges forward and kisses him, her hands steady on either side of his head and her fingers reaching back into the hair at the back of his neck, and Danny returns the kiss as easily as he’s done almost every single day for the last year. His arms tighten around her waist, his own hands gripping the fabric of her shirt in two tight fistfuls, and they’re a pair of wonky puzzle pieces that fit together as perfectly as they ever have.

When they pull back, they stay there for a second with their foreheads together, and Sam says, “Come on. Let’s get you guys out of here.”

Dani does not know how long she’s been here.

It’s been tough to keep track of the hours as they’ve ticked on by, partly because she obviously doesn’t have her phone on her anymore, but mostly because these new-and-improved versions of the Jerks in White have been keeping her sedated. Her thoughts have been puddy more often than not.

Because the thing is, she didn’t exactly… cooperate, at the beginning there, quite as well as Danny did. Or maybe she did. Maybe he fought back exactly as much as she did when he was first arrested, maybe he got sedated a bunch too at the beginning, maybe he didn’t start cooperating until it got clearer and clearer that he was never getting out of here, maybe that’s exactly the kind of thing Dani’s headed for—

She doesn’t like to think about that.

Right now, she’s a little bit on the more lucid side. A little.

Or at least she thought she was, until she could have sworn she heard the sound of an explosion in the distance. Several explosions, actually, and then a shyoom before it suddenly got very dark, and then a lot of yelling, and growling, and then—and this was the weirdest part of the whole thing—she actually thought she saw Cujo. As in the big version of Cujo, the way he looks when he’s really upset and he can’t find his squeaky toy anywhere. She was just sitting right here on the floor, same spot she’s been sitting for hours with her back against the wall and her knees hugged to her chest, and she saw him galloping right past the apparently open doorway of her cell. He even stopped in the middle of… whatever he was doing, for a second there, lumbering his way into her cell and giving her a curious little sniff and a bump with his nose before heading back out.

And then, a few minutes later, she’s really sure she’s hallucinating.

In the dark, it’s easy to see as he comes into view, all the glowing pinkish ghostly energy around him and with a bright ball of ectoplasm swirling in one hand. He almost jogs right past her cell until he spots her, skidding to a stop and staring at her with very wide, solid red eyes.

“Danielle?”

He steps further into the cell, peering around at it, eyes scanning over the walls before they settle right back down on her.

And the thing is, at first, Dani can’t… find her voice, exactly. And even if she could, she has no idea what she would say. She watches him, watches as he hesitates and then approaches her and then very slowly, very carefully, lowers himself down onto one knee in front of her.

She hasn’t seen him a whole lot like this. Not in his ghost form. Not since before.

He looks different than he did then, she thinks. But then again that’s not really a surprise, is it? His human half looks so different these days, doesn’t it? So it’s only expected that his ghost half would, too.

“Are you alright?” she hears him ask. “Are you hurt?”

Finally, Dani finds her voice, but it’s hoarse when she asks, “You’re really here, aren’t you?”

He frowns, then nods.

Yeah, that’s what she thought. She’s not hallucinating, he’s really here, and that means…

Dani feels a lump in her throat. It’s not that she regrets what she did, it’s not that she regrets giving herself up and ending up here at all, not even a little bit, not when it was Danny’s life on the line, but still. She’s allowed a moment of weakness or two, she thinks, when she’s looking at who-knows-how-long being trapped in this place. She swallows it down and asks, “Did…? Did it work? Did they get Danny out?”

For a second, he looks confused.

But then it seems to dawn on him what she means, and the expression that comes over his face is… unfamiliar, when it’s coming from him. Softer.

“We’re working on it,” he says, which makes no sense at all.

“Huh?”

“Danielle, did you imagine that those three would trade me for Daniel and simply leave you here?”

He waits for a second, during which he apparently takes her lack of an answer as a confirmation that she did, in fact, think they were going to do just that—because she did, that’s what they were going to do from the very beginning, that was the plan. And she thinks she might have said that last bit out loud, because the next thing he says to her is:

“My dear, the plan changed the very moment the DSS got their hands on you. It had to.”

The lump in her throat is bigger now, harder to ignore, and her voice cracks when she says, “Oh.”

He asks again, “Are you hurt?”

“I, uh…” she says, embarrassingly croaky with it, and then she shakes her head. “No? Not really. I’m just… I’m just tired.”

He looks stricken for a second, glancing over his shoulder before looking back at her. The light in his hand extinguishes, but it’s still easy enough to see from the glow of his ghost form alone.

“Alright,” he says. “I may have to carry you. If… if that’s—”

Dani’s nodding before she even makes the decision to. When he reaches out for her, she lets him scoop her up, no complaints, no arguing that she can do it herself, because right now she doesn’t really feel like she can. There’s an arm under her legs and another wrapped around her shoulders, and she clutches the front of his suit in one hand and squeezes her eyes shut as he stands, trying to fight off a wave of dizziness along with that stupid, stupid, stupid impulse again—

Oh, screw it.

She gives in, reaches up, and wraps her arms around his neck.

He goes all tense for a second, but it’s only a second before he’s holding her closer, tightening his grip, the crackling electric heat of his ghost form enveloping her in a way that’s way too familiar even after nearly two years away from him.

If Dani starts crying, it’s okay, because he doesn’t mention it. If she’s been crying, it’s okay, because he doesn’t mention that either.

“I’m going to get you out of here,” he says, and there’s something of the old him in that sentence, she thinks, in his voice. Something deadly but weirdly reassuring in its deadliness, because something like that isn’t so scary when it’s on your side. “I’m going to get you out of here if it’s the last thing I do.”

“Uh,” comes Sam’s voice from somewhere outside, sounding nervous. “Guys?”

“Val!”

You know, with about thirty percent of a building exploding like ten feet away and the giant ghost dog hulking his way through the walls and all, you’d think that the crowd of protestors would have freaking dispersed or something by now, but no. Because Tucker Foley cannot catch a break today. (Or yesterday. Or the day before that. Or the day before that.)

It takes forever pushing through everybody, but eventually, he shoves his way through yet another line of protestors—and which kind of protestors they are he doesn’t even check to see, because at this point it doesn’t matter—to finally, finally find Val standing across the street from the D.S.S. headquarters, a little ways away from the crowd by the same alleyway she was hiding in with her suit twenty minutes ago.

“Val!” Tucker yells again, accidentally making her jump.

“Jesus, what, Tuck?”

“We— we got a problem.”

“What?”

He skids to a stop when he reaches her, his hands on his knees as he tries to catch his breath, and Val grabs him by the shoulder of his jacket to haul him upright.

“Tucker,” she says, with a totally fake calm. “What do you mean, we got a problem?”

He breathlessly nods in the direction of the building. “Listen.”

She does, frowning. There’s cars honking, the shouting confused voices of everybody all around the building, and some of the agents yelling from far away, some inside and some outside, and the distant crackle of another compromised wall coming down.

It’s obvious when it dawns on her.

“Shit,” she says, letting go of his jacket. “Where’s Cujo?”

“I don’t know!”

“Damn it. What, did he go back into the Ghost Zone or something?”

“I don’t know! Maybe! Or he got one of the squeaky toys off of somebody, and he went all tiny and cute again,” Tucker shrugs, finally breathing normal enough but with his heart still pounding away like a jackhammer. “Or both, I dunno. But Val, that place is swarming with DSS agents, and Cujo did a whole lot of damage to that one wing of the building, but only to that one wing of the building—”

“And that’s not gonna cut it,” Val follows.

“Yeah, no, it’s really not.”

Val’s looking ahead at the building, over a sea of other people all looking in the same direction, all of them waiting for something else to go demolishing some more walls of the building, but it’s not gonna come. Not if Cujo’s gone. Not if Sam and Plasmius are dealing with DSS agents on top of trying to save Dani and Danny.

“Alright,” Val says, and she kicks her left heel against her right boot, opening up the hoverboard with a mechanical shink and nearly knocking Tucker off his feet. Luckily no one notices, since they’re all too preoccupied with watching the building. “Hop on.”

“I— what?”

“Hop on,” she repeats, gesturing impatiently at the board. “If Cujo won’t bring the rest of the place down, then I’m gonna do it.”

Tucker gulps. “And, uh… you need me on the hoverboard because…?”

“Because we gotta get those guys out first, and we don’t know what kinda shape they’re gonna be in, and I can’t carry everybody at once, and because I said so,” Val hisses. “Get on the board, Tuck!”

“Have I ever told you how terrifying it is being your friend,” Tucker mumbles, carefully stepping up onto the board one wobbly foot at a time.

“Couple times, yeah.”

“Okay,” he says, looping his arms around her waist. “Cool. Yeah. As long as that’s— AH!”

Well. Tucker doesn’t have to go for an absolutely terrifying joyride on Val’s hoverboard at least, because it’s right then that there’s that sort of dull pop that comes with the air displacing from Plasmius’ teleportation, and the tangy burning smell of ectoplasm that Tucker is now unfortunately perfectly familiar with, and—

Sam’s the first one he sees, since she appears literally right next to him, stumbling as she lands on the concrete. And right next to her, leaning heavily on her with an arm around her shoulders, is—

“Oh, my God!”

Tucker’s scrambling off the board and hugging both of them before he even manages to get a word out, before any of them manage to get a word out, all but knocking the two of them over as he does it. They end up in a sort of semi-organized dogpile on the ground, and Tucker might have banged his knee on the way down here, but Sam’s hugging him back and laughing, and Danny’s hugging him back, too, and he’s worse for wear but he’s okay.

Oh, man. Tucker never thought he’d be so happy to be nearly bowled over by his best friend’s archenemy teleporting into his personal space with absolutely no warning at all and with three other people in tow, but holy crap is he.

Wait.

Speaking of which, where’s—?

“Vlad?” Valerie’s asking. “Hey— HEY!”

Tucker, Sam, and Danny all look up to see Valerie, no longer with her hoverboard, kneeling on one knee and supporting a barely conscious Dani in her arms.

“Dani! Val, is she okay?”

“I— I think so,” Val tells him, and she seems to be right, or right-ish, since Dani offers a weak nod and a thumbs up. “But— guys, he took my hoverboard.”

“He what now?” Sam asks.

“Vlad! He dropped Dani on me, and he took my board, and then he just— he disappeared,” Val says.

“What the heck’s he need a hoverboard for?” Tucker asks. “The dude can fly!”

Danny’s the first one to figure it out, because of course he is.

“Oh, no,” he says, looking in the direction of the D.S.S. headquarters, through all the legs of the crowd of people. “Uh. Val? How much firepower do you think is in that hoverboard?”

Valerie’s face falls, and she honest-to-God gulps. “A lot.”

Tucker thinks he might already know—and dread—exactly where they’re going with this. He asks, “Enough to take down the rest of the building?”

Because the fact is, there is a whole lot of firepower in that hoverboard. Too much. Probably a whole lot more firepower than Plasmius has got in him right now, after that stunt he pulled teleporting everybody across three states yesterday, and plenty to take a building down— if, say, one half-ghost were to take it into the building and set it all off at once. Val knows it, because she knows that board inside and out. Danny knows it, because he’s been on the receiving end of those weapons about a million and a half times. Tucker knows it, because he’s seen it, and Val’s even let him tinker with some of the controls here and there.

And Plasmius knows it, because he designed the thing.

The muffled boom from within the building comes first, almost so quiet that it doesn’t feel like it should be able to cause the destruction it’s about to cause, but Tucker realizes half a second later that it’s because the sound’s coming from a couple floors below ground half a block away.

Then there’s a rumble like thunder, and it crescendos into something closer to an earthquake.

The rest of the place comes down with the perfect cascade of a planned demolition. Walls collapse inward, spewing concrete dust into the air. A few stray missiles plow through the crumbling ceiling before they burst like popped fireworks, but the rest all do their job from well inside and out of view. It takes seconds. It takes less than seconds.

And when the dust clears, the DSS headquarters is nothing but a pile of bricks.

Chapter Text

Three Days After The Collapse Of The DSS

Danny’s in the living room when there’s a knock at the front door, and he’s not even remotely surprised when his mom and his dad both come rushing out of the kitchen and get to the door almost before he can even hop off the couch. They’ve been a tiny bit overprotective the last couple days, and in fact, the only reason Jazz isn’t here, all three of them crowding Danny right out of the doorway, is because Jazz went back to school today.

It’s not like he blames them. It’s actually a little bit nice.

Anyway, without Jazz around, Danny’s able to squeeze between his parents as the door opens…

… and it’s to see none other than the DSS president standing on their front stoop.

Danny almost jumps. This is— This guy is the president of the whole operation.

Is he here to re-arrest him? There was no official release, after all, just the explosion of the building, and then his parents and Jazz were in D.C. with the Specter Speeder in under two hours, ready to scoop all of them up and take them home without waiting for a single word from whatever was left of the DSS.

The thing is, though: The president’s here alone. No back-up, no officers, no nothing.

Danny never really interacted with this guy while he was stuck there, but he caught a glimpse of him every now and then, and he’s seen pictures. This is the head honcho, and he’s standing outside on their dusty ectoplasm-stained welcome mat in a three piece suit, alone, looking… well, looking a little more nervous than a guy like him should probably look.

Maybe it’s the fact that he’s been confronted, all at once, by Danny’s visibly heavily armed and pissed off mom, and his very tall and imposing and equally heavily armed and equally pissed off dad, instead of the one superpowered teenager he was expecting.

After a hesitant glance at both of them, the president takes a breath and gets his bearings back a little bit.

“Mr. and Mrs. Fenton—”

“You have a lot of nerve,” Danny’s mom says, one hand tight on Danny’s shoulder, “showing up here, after—”

“After your son’s terribly injudicious imprisonment by the DSS, yes,” the president says, nodding, and Danny’s mom pauses.

His dad asks, “Huh?”

“That’s why I’m here,” the president tells them, with a significant look at Danny. “I thought you should hear it personally from me: The Department of Spectral Security is dropping all charges. As of today, Daniel Fenton, you are no longer an enemy of the state.”

Danny blinks, eyes wide. “Seriously?”

“Well,” the president shrugs one shoulder. “Technically the Department of Homeland Security is dropping all charges, since the DSS has more or less been completely dissolved and their resources allocated elsewhere.”

He pauses, and when no one jumps in, he sighs and continues:

“You see, after the events of three days ago, it became rather obvious that the DSS was not capable of mitigating ghostly threats. Everyone saw the news. The DSS couldn’t do a thing to keep Vlad Plasmius from infiltrating their walls, and if it weren’t for the building collapsing on top of him, I fear he would have been able to go on and do far worse than he did.”

“So… what,” Danny says, “you’re saying you guys think the building collapse killed him?”

Again, the president shrugs. “That’s the official record. In any case, it remains clear that the only true defense our country has against threats the likes of him are… well, you. All three of you.”

Danny’s mom drops her hand from his shoulder. “You expect us to believe that? That you’re just dropping all those charges? Just like that?”

The president looks at her, an indefinable emotion flickering across his face that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and the look doesn’t change when he glances over at Danny’s dad, too.

“You don’t have to believe it,” he finally says. “The official notice will arrive in writing any day now, and I’ll be making a public announcement later this evening along with the Secretary of State. Like I said, I only… wanted all of you to hear it from me first.” Then he looks specifically at Danny. “And Mr. Fenton, allow me to personally apologize, on behalf of all those involved, for everything you went through.”

Danny frowns. “Uh. Thanks?”

The president nods at him and then at each of his parents, and then he turns to head off the stoop. “All of you have a good day, now, and stay safe.”

Danny’s mom is the first one to shut the door, and she says, “That was… odd.”

“But hey, it’s good news!” his dad shouts, clapping Danny on the back hard enough to send him stumbling forward a step. “You’re a free man, Danny boy!”

“I suppose it is good news, at least,” his mom says, scratching the back of her head. She hesitates for a second, and then asks, “Jack, did he—? Why do I feel like we’ve met him before?”

His dad shrugs. “Beats me!”

And that’s when Danny realizes, probably a few minutes later than he should have, why it felt like a cold draft was coming into the living room the entire time the door was open.

Wow, I’m an idiot.

“Probably one of those old ghost hunting conventions,” his mom says, shaking her head before smiling at Danny. “Well, how about a celebration? We could go out somewhere for dinner if you want, wherever you like.”

“You guys pick somewhere, I’m good with whatever,” Danny tells them, and he points upstairs. “I’m gonna go get ready.”

He transforms before either of them have a chance to answer, launching himself without another word up through the ceiling and into his bedroom. Then, without stopping, he banks left and goes out through his bedroom wall and outside, right out into the wind, flying halfway down the block before touching down in the middle of the street.

Man, it feels nice to be able to just do that again.

“Hey!” he calls out after the DSS president, who’s still walking casually away from the Fenton’s house with his hands in his pockets.

The president pauses, turning to look at Danny over his shoulder, and then turning around to fully face him. “Yes, Mr. Fenton?”

His suspicion would be easy enough to test. Just try and overshadow the guy himself, see if somebody else is already in there. Instead, Danny walks up to him, hands on his hips, eyes narrowed, and he asks, “You know I can sense ghosts, right?”

“Yes, I believe it’s one of the more well-known of your abilities,” the president says, glancing around them at the surrounding street. “I’d say I should be worried that you’re insinuating there’s an evil ghost nearby right now, but if there is one out here looking for trouble, I’m sure you could take care of it in short order.”

“You know I could,” Danny says, fighting the urge to laugh.

“Of course I do. Well, I’m afraid I must be going,” he says, and he makes to turn away, but stops halfway through. “Did you know, Mr. Fenton,” he says, “that the vote to drop all the charges against you was entirely unanimous? Not one ‘nay’ vote. A room full of government officials who’d been more than happy to have you locked away just last week, and not one of them so much as hesitated.”

“Weird,” Danny deadpans.

“Weird, indeed,” the president agrees with a nod, and a bit of a conspiratorial smirk on his face. There’s definitely a faint glimmer of red in his eyes when he adds, “One could even say it was as if they’d all been possessed.”

Danny snorts a laugh, shaking his head, and the president finally turns to leave, going right back the way he came.

“Stay safe, Daniel,” he says without turning around. “And do your best to keep out of trouble this time, hm?”

“Yeah,” Danny calls after him. “Yeah, you, too, cheesehead.”

Three Days After The Collapse Of The DSS

… Plus About Six Hours

“So.”

Her voice doesn’t startle him. He’d sensed her coming from a few blocks away, well before she began the ascent up to the roof, his ghost sense blooming familiarly like a hybrid of plain old ordinary heartburn and actual fire crawling up his esophagus the closer she got to the building.

She doesn’t startle him, but she certainly does surprise him.

Now, he turns to find her gently touching down on the roof behind him. She’s got her arms crossed, but from the look on her face, she’s not particularly angry.

That’s surprising, too.

Vlad prompts, “So?”

“So, that was kind of a jerk move.”

“Well, yes, but in my defense,” he says, “none of you actually believed I was dead.”

“Eh. I mean, Tucker bought it for like, a few seconds,” Danielle says, shrugging one shoulder. “And a bunch of the news crews sure bought it.”

“That was the idea.”

“Uh-huh,” Danielle says, squinting. “And… just to double check, you’re definitely not dead.”

A fair question, he supposes, and so he releases his hold on his ghost form. The heat at his core dissipates and leaves him a little on the side of too cold, but not quite unpleasantly so. The sun’s gone down by now, and it’s nothing more than a perfectly human chill up here after dark. Automatically he taps his tongue to his no longer sharpened canines; it’s a strange and awkward sensation, all the ripples of his ghost form leaving him, even after over two decades.

“Still only halfway there, I assure you.”

He very nearly tacks on a my dear at the end there, but at least he manages to rein that in this time. Once was pushing the boundaries, he thinks, and forgivable under the stressful circumstances. Twice is best avoided.

Danielle drums her fingers on her arm, hesitating, watching him, and after a time the prolonged silence becomes a touch too awkward for Vlad to want to keep up the eye contact on top of it. So he turns away, returning to where he was sitting with his legs over the ledge of the City Hall roof, and he waits.

After a moment, he hears the telltale flash of her own transformation, and she steps up and sits down beside him.

“So that… was you, right?”

“I’m afraid I have no idea what you could possibly be referring to,” he answers, knowing exactly what she’s referring to. The public announcement will likely be broadcast across the country for the next several hours. No more DSS, no more legal action against Danny Phantom.

“It was you,” Danielle says. “I knew it.”

“Mm. What gave it away?”

She thinks for a moment, then says, “Too convenient.”

Vlad nods. That’s fair enough. While the general public might be willing to accept the official announcement without so much as a murmur of doubt, their own little group has been a bit too close to all the fighting to accept that anything would ever be so easy.

“I think overshadowing the Secretary of State is considered a felony, y’know,” Danielle says.

“My word,” Vlad says. “Me? Committing a felony? Can you imagine?”

The answering laugh he gets for that is quiet, reserved, but he’s glad for it all the same.

After a moment Vlad asks, “Are the others alright?”

She shrugs, looking down at her hands in her lap. “Yeah. Sam’s a little annoyed at you for pretending to die again, and Val’s super pissed that you blew up her hoverboard, but really everyone’s just happy Danny’s back. And, um… Danny’s okay, I think. Mostly. He acts okay.”

Vlad nods. He saw as much this morning, though it wasn’t a particularly long chat.

“But, like, he’s hanging out with us a lot,” she goes on. “And he’s coming back to school next week, and now that he’s not, like, wanted or anything anymore, he can go back to ghost hunting and superhero-ing, so… yeah. I don’t know. He’ll be okay.”

“I have no doubt,” Vlad says, and he chances a glance down at her. “And you?”

It’s not that he expects an honest answer; it’s only that he has to ask. He fully expects that she’ll lie, or brush it off, or find some way to talk around it without really addressing anything that’s happened to her. It’s what he would do, in her place.

She’s not him, though.

“I’ll be okay, too, but…” she quietly says, still looking down at her hands. “It was really, really scary.”

Well. That’s certainly true. Her initial capture had even frightened him, he had frankly been startled by just how much it had frightened him, so he can only imagine how much the whole ordeal had frightened her.

“They were so mean,” she says. “And I thought— I mean, the whole plan was to get Danny out of there. None of us ever really talked about what we’d do if I ended up there, we just sort of hoped I wouldn’t, so once I did, I thought I was gonna be in that cell for… you know. Forever.”

Vlad is suddenly, inexplicably, and viscerally reminded of two years ago when she’d only just come into being, when she’d awaken like clockwork in the middle of the night from some nightmare or another and pass right through the walls of the castle to arrive unannounced in his bedroom. They’d sit for hours on the edge of his bed—almost exactly like they are now—until he could finally manage to convince her it was only a nightmare, to go on back to her own room.

It had been at least a weekly occurrence back then. Almost daily.

Out of anyone on Earth, she sought him out for comfort. He certainly hadn’t appreciated that like he should have. Although, granted, that’s true for just about everything in those days.

Now, for lack of any better ideas, Vlad gently places a hand on her upper back. A silent I’m here, without, hopefully, being too presumptuous about how much comfort she’s willing to take, or how much of it is allowed to come from him.

But yet again, she surprises him.

She twists at the waist, turning toward him so she can wrap her arms around his middle in a sideways hug, her cheek pressed to his chest and her eyes tightly shut. And Vlad’s first instinct, as always, is to go perfectly still all the way down to the air stalling in his lungs, rigid from head to toe with his hand now hovering an inch over her back.

“Thanks,” Danielle says. “For coming for me.”

It takes a moment, but he eventually comes to his senses. He carefully drops his arm over her shoulders and then, even more carefully, gives her a gentle squeeze.

“Of course,” he tells her, murmuring it into her hair. “Any time.”

They stay like that for a moment, until Danielle sniffs and scrubs at her face with one hand, gently extricating herself from the hug. She clears her throat and returns to looking out over the city, and she asks, “So, uh… what now?”

“Now, I suppose you go back to living your life without worrying about the DSS,” Vlad tells her. “All official record of your existence perished along with the building. I made sure of it.”

She looks at him sidelong, one eyebrow up. “Thanks, but I wasn’t talking about me.”

Oh.

Vlad hesitates, thinking his answer over. Er, no, that’s a lie. He’s stalling, not much more than that, because to tell the truth, he hadn’t given much thought to what comes next for him at all.

“I suppose,” he says, treading carefully, “I’ll go back to the same thing I was doing before.”

“What, just… hiding? Surviving? All by yourself?” Danielle asks, her nose wrinkling in distaste. “Where are you even gonna go?”

“I’m not going to vanish off the face of the Earth, I assure you,” Vlad tells her. He pauses, then adds, “Not this time, anyway. I don’t know, I may…” He sighs. “I may stay with my father for a bit.”

“Your what?!”

She turns, pulling her legs up to sit cross-legged facing him.

“Seriously? What do you mean, your father?” she asks, her eyes wide. “You actually have a dad? You’ve had a dad this whole time and you never told me? I have a grandpa?”

“Funny enough, he had roughly the same reaction upon learning about you,” Vlad admits. “But, yes, you do have a grandfather. I’m sorry I never mentioned it before. It never felt all that relevant, given that he and I hadn’t spoken in about… twenty-five years or so.”

She doesn’t ask why not, which is reasonable. She of all people can understand why someone might be unwilling to speak to their father for such a long time.

What she does ask is:

“Can I meet him?”

Vlad blinks. “I— do you want to?”

She shrugs, shifting back around so she can kick her legs over the side of the ledge again. “Yeah, I mean, why wouldn’t I want to? He’s my grandpa. And he can’t be that bad, if you’re talking to him again.”

“He was… honestly not that bad to begin with,” Vlad admits, and it’s his turn to wrinkle his nose in distaste, though it’s primarily aimed at himself. “It’s— well, no, it’s not a long story at all really. This may come as quite a shock to you, but I was likely part of the problem. I’m willing to admit I may have even been… thirty percent of the problem.”

“Wow,” she says. “Only thirty?”

He squints. “Thirty-five?”

Danielle laughs, shaking her head, and she pulls her legs up to hug her knees, resting her chin on her folded arms and looking out over the city. “You know, I was kind of worried you were just gonna go back to being, like, a… homeless hobo hermit.”

“Nice alliteration.”

“Thanks,” she says. “But seriously. I’m glad you’re at least not gonna be all by yourself anymore.”

I am, too, he doesn’t say, but he imagines he doesn’t need to.

“What about Mr. and Mrs. Fenton?” she asks, turning her head and resting her cheek on her arms so she can look at him.

And that question— hurts, comes with a sort of pang through the center of his chest. Not nearly as bad an ache as the one he felt this morning, standing right in front of both of them for the first time in over a year, but something rather close. The same feeling, perhaps dulled down half a step.

He asks, “What about them?”

“I don’t know. You’re talking to your dad again,” Danielle says. “Are you gonna talk to them again, too?”

Vlad gulps down that feeling and says, “I don’t know. That… That one isn’t up to me.”

“Really? But they think you’re dead.”

“From a building collapse? Please, my dear, you’re forgetting that what sort of damage a ghost can and cannot handle is their exact area of expertise,” Vlad tells her. He takes a slow breath and blows it out all at once. “No, they know I’m alive. And believe me, if Jack and Maddie Fenton ever get it in their heads that they want to find me, I’m certain there isn’t a force on Earth or in the Ghost Zone that could stop them.”

Danielle snorts. “Yeah, good point.”

“In the meantime,” Vlad says, “I’ll simply… leave them be.”

“Yeah?”

He nods. One half-mended relationship at a time is probably best, he thinks, especially for someone like him, someone who’s just somehow made himself even more of a public enemy than he was before, who’s barely spoken to anyone in over a year, who was more or less alone for the better part of twenty.

But more importantly—

“I think,” he says, “that for most of my life, I thought that leaving a person alone, giving them space, was tantamount to abandonment. Now I’m not so sure. Now, I think that perhaps, sometimes, in certain circumstances… it can be an act of love, too.”

It’s something he’s been turning over in his head since he crash landed in the ocean off the coast of New Jersey.

An explosive argument, an unanswered letter, twenty years of silence, and yet, somehow, still a safe place to land after all that. He thinks of the lonely hospital room that was his home for years, a hospital room that he made lonely with rejected phone call after rejected phone call until the calls eventually tapered off into nothing. And then the reunion, as ridiculous a plot as that was… Well, he’d hardly gotten the invitation into the mail before Jack was ringing his phone off the hook all over again.

“You miss them, huh?”

He does. Both of them, actually, which absolutely boggles the mind, but he does. They’re the only two real friends he’s ever had.

“I hurt them,” he tells her. “I’m still trying to work out how to fix that, but I think perhaps keeping my distance is a fair start.”

“You could try apologizing,” Danielle says, as blunt as ever. “And then you could bust them out of a government lab, too, I guess, and blow the whole place up. I don’t know. Worked for me.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Did it?”

“Eh,” she shrugs one shoulder, then mimics his voice and says, “It’s a fair start.”

The open mockery somehow causes a surge of affection in him, and he has to tamp down the instinct to reach out and ruffle her hair. “I’m glad to hear it,” he says, keeping his hands in his lap. “In the future, though, try not to purposely get yourself arrested and thrown into another lab, will you? I’m perfectly happy to continue making amends the old-fashioned way, without all the government agents and blowing buildings up.”

She thinks it over for a moment, then says, “Alright. Deal.”

“Deal,” he echoes. “Thank you.”

Danielle mumbles an mm-hmm in lieu of a you’re welcome, and she leans over, resting her head against his upper arm and staying there. The two of them fall into a comfortable quiet, up on the roof of City Hall where no fully human being can reach, looking out over the hazy lights and the greenish ectoplasmic glow of Amity Park stretched out all around and below them.

It’s a fair start.