Desperate Acts

Desperate Acts

Vlad Masters sat on the Fenton's couch, his head cradled in his hands as he fought off the blooming headache behind his eyes.  For once it had nothing to do with the big orange-clad oaf who paced the room in uncharacteristic worry.  He tried to ignore the pain, ignore the raw blisters that marred his face, ignore everything but the ranting going on around him.  Already it was getting hard to focus on things.

Only he knew how bad it would get.

Although if they didn't find a cure this time he wouldn't be the only one.  He might just be the only one who survived.

“You of all people should have known how dangerous this is,” Jack said as he paced.  “You've had this before!”

“It's never been contagious before,” Vlad snarled.  “Not that you'll believe me.  You didn't believe this was serious the first time, why would you now?”

“That's a low blow, Masters,” Jack growled, stopping in his tracks.

Vlad hauled himself to his feet, ignoring the woozy feeling that had the world growing dark around the edges.  “Isn't it?” he purred, stalking up to Jack.  “You never took the time to realize what was happening then, no, you were too wrapped up in your own life while I spent years in the hospital with this.  This!”

“It was an accident!”

“And their exposure was accidental, too.”  Vlad gestured toward the second floor where Daniel's little friends were hiding out in his room.  “This has never been contagious before.  There was no reason to expect it to be this time.  If I'd known do you think I'd have risked exposing anyone?  Think, Jack.  Would I do such a thing?”

Of course we knew.  Of course we did.

Vlad tamped down the thought, the first nonphysical sign of what was to come.

“No, you wouldn't,” Jack admitted.  “You're not pointlessly mean like that, Vladdie.  I'm sorry, I wasn't thinking.  Of course you wouldn't go out of your way to hurt people.  You're not evil like that.”

“But why come to us?” Maddie asked from the landing above.  She came down the staircase to join the two men in the living room.  “I have Danny's friends set up in his bedroom for now.  They've both got it bad.  They're breaking out with ecto-acne, they're both unnaturally tired, and I had to give Tucker 600mg of ibuprofen for his headache.  I don't know if that'll help or what to expect.  Danny won't leave their sides and I have no idea if he's safe there or not.  I say we need to get all three of you to a hospital.”

All color drained out of Vlad's face.  “Don't you dare...”

“Vlad, we don't have any idea how to deal with this,” Maddie said.

“And you think a hospital will?” he demanded.

“At least they're equipped!”

“Oh, yes, because being equipped makes up for the fact that they have no buttercreamed clue!”

“And what do you expect us to do?”

“You're scientists, you're paran-normal researchers...”  Vlad took a breath as the darkness around his vision shot inward and pulled at him.  “You can... can...”  He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.  When he opened them again the world was red around the edges.  Jack and Maddie pulled away from him before coming closer in something akin to fascination.  “You at least recognize that ecto-acne isn't always... fatal...  If you t-take the children to a hospital they'll treat it as radiation poisoning a-and they'll die.  I a-almost died when the f-first hospital made the same mistake t-twenty... yearsss...”  He trailed off as the red in his vision faded, taking everything with it.  He felt the world fall...

Jack caught Vlad as he passed out and carried him back to the couch, laying him down and wrapping him in a blanket.

“We really should call someone who knows about this,” Maddie said.  “We can't deal with this.”

“Why not, Mads?” Jack asked.  “We're the only ghost hunters in town.  We do research all the time.”

“Yes, but we don't have the facilities--”

“We can convert the lab!  C'mon, it'll work.  And you're a doctor.  We can cure this ourselves!”

“Jack, you know I'm not that kind of doctor.”

“Now all we need to do is get the lab clean then we can section about half of it off as a clean room for working and for the patients, we can do all the research we need ourselves, this'll work great!”

Maddie sighed and accepted it.  They were going to try and cure ecto-acne, it seemed.  She glared at the man passed out on their sofa.  She swore the moment he tried to turn her into his personal candy striper she was going to make him hurt.

*****

Getting the lab converted began with Danny cleaning the lab, a task that curiously took much less time when he was alone than when he was being watched.  Plastic sheeting was brought in to separate the three afflicted into clean areas as well as other supplies: scrubs, needles, IVs, medications, even some surgical equipment.  At Vlad's direction an amount of plexiglass was ordered, enough to seal them away from the world in case they needed it.  After some negotiation and not a small amount of threats to call an ambulance it was decided that VladCo would be picking up the tab.  In return VladCo and FentonWorks would joint publish any findings that resulted from their efforts.

Vlad was forced to borrow a pair of pajamas as he adamantly refused to be put into surgical scrubs.  Jack's clothes had no chance of fitting so Maddie sucked up her distaste and offered Vlad a pair of her own.  She refused to acknowledge how he leered at her after that or how he spent the first day surreptitiously smelling the fabric.

They had more important things to worry about.  Research, for one.  They had no idea where to begin.

*****

Jack slammed his fist onto the desk, making the keyboard rattle.  He groaned and let his head fall in his hands.

“You should take a break,” Maddie said, offering a comforting rub to his shoulder and a mug of fresh coffee.

“Ugh, I can't find anything on ecto-acne!” Jack growled, gesturing wildly at the offending computer and its useless internet.

Maddie took a look at the screen.  She saw tabs opened on Hoover Dam, on the Yurlov Crower chicken, on unsolved problems of thermodynamics, and on ghost sightings in the Ukraine.  “That's because you're on Wikipedia, dear,” she said.  “Here, you go have a cookie and I'll see what I can find, okay?”

Jack got up and sullenly headed to the kitchen.  Maddie sat down at the computer, closed Jack's tabs, and got to work mining the archives of the internet for something that might help cure Vlad and Danny's little friends of their horribly disfiguring condition.  A couple of clicks and some lucky searches found her something interesting.  Something that might prove useful.  She settled down to read it.

Jack found her there a few hours later reading a several hundred page file.  “How you doing, Mads?” he asked, offering her a cookie.

Maddie rubbed her eyes and sat back to stretch.  She looked at the clock, amazed by the hours that had gone by.  “I may have found something,” she said.  She tabbed over to her first finding, a two line note on OccultNet saying ecto-acne was a form of radiodermatitis caused by exposure to ectoplasm.  From there it was a cascade of followed links to what she was reading now, some heavily blacked-out internal memo leaked out of the Guys in White.  She scrolled back up and pointed out the title.

“'Severe Ectoplasmic Contamination: Assessment and Management.'  Well it certainly sounds official,” Jack said.

“That's because it is,” Maddie said, leaning back in her chair, hands clasped behind her head.  “Somebody either hacked it or used the Freedom of Information Act to get it from the Guys in White.  I'm thinking the latter given all the black ink over the best bits.  It's... rather interesting, actually.”

“So it's all about getting rid of contamination, right?” Jack asked, hopeful.

Maddie shrugged.  “I haven't gotten that far,” she admitted.  “Mostly it's about this one case study they got ahold of.  Poor guy.  He came in with ecto-acne  and headaches and got worse real fast.  The hospital he was staying at treated it as radiation poisoning until he went into a coma or something.  Had to be a coma because they say he woke up.”

“Ecto-acne and headaches?” Jack asked.  “That's how Vlad's ecto-acne started.”  This might be useful.  If they could find out how the GIW cured that one case study...

“Lemme find the description,” she mused, skimming the document until she found it.  “Ah, here we are.  'The subject designated Patient 613 was a 24 year old male of Russian descent.  Patient 613 was exposed through an attempt to open an unauthorized artificial portal to the ghost dimension.  Exposure was restricted to the... head and neck...'”  She trailed off as she just then realized what she was saying.  She looked at Jack and watched the color drain from his face.  They both looked past the plastic sheeting to the semi-conscious form of their old college friend as he lay on the makeshift bed.

“Go on,” Jack said.

Maddie swallowed, her mouth suddenly going very dry.  She continued in a quiet voice.  “'Immediate symptoms were acute facial dermatitis, glowing eyes, and the stripping of artificial dyes from the hair.  Debilitating headaches and fatigue began within thirty-six hours of exposure.  At this point radiation exposure was suspected and the subject treated accordingly with potassium iodide and palliative care.  Mild leukopenia developed 16 days after exposure, growing to moderate intensity at 27 days and severe at 31 days.  Fever and impairment of cognitive function began at 25 days after exposure.  Broad spectrum empirical therapy was initiated at this time.  Patient 613 was declared dead 35 days after exposure, cause unknown.  

“'Patient 613 awoke 27 hours later during autopsy.'”

“During autopsy?” Jack whispered.

“'It was at this point the subject was transferred to a secure facility for more thorough treatment and... study,'” Maddie continued, voice wavering.  “'The subject's leukopenia decreased in severity without intervention and the subject's immune system made a full recovery.  Dermatitis and fatigue persisted for several months and it is suspected that the subject will experience recall reactions in the future.

“'This document details the subject's initial recovery and subsequent testing' oh god, Jack.”  She wasn't able to read any more.  Suddenly this wasn't just a scientific paper.  It wasn't a random document about a nameless, faceless test subject who'd volunteered.  This was...

Jack pushed past the plastic sheeting, not even bothering with his containment suit.  He stood over Vlad's restlessly shifting form, not wanting to look.  If it was really there...

He felt ill as he pulled the sheets down and unbuttoned the borrowed pajamas.  He froze at the sight.

“During autopsy,” Jack whispered.  There was no denying it.  There, right there.  White against pale skin, so pale that he'd missed it before.  Scars.  The distinctive y-cut scars of an autopsy.  

*****

Maddie felt ill as she sat at the kitchen table. Jack sat across from her, loudly buzzing in his seat. A plate sat between them, a plate that once held a triple batch of cookies. Now only a few were left, sitting alone and forlorn among the crumbs.

“How could we have missed this?” she asked. “How?”

“It wasn't our fault, Mads,” Jack said.

“But he was in so much pain! Jack, he was studied! From what I could figure out he wasn't even treated like a human being!”

“We didn't know,” Jack snapped. “We were busy, we had our own problems. We had no way of knowing! Even if we had known what could we have done? The Guys in White don't exactly leave obvious trails to follow. Honestly, I think they're the ones who told Mom and Dad that Vlad was dead. How could we have found him against that even if we knew? We couldn't have known, even if we tried.”

Maddie stared at the plate and its crumbs. She watched as Jack grabbed another cookie. “We didn't even try,” she whispered.

Jack munched silently.

“We have to try now,” she said. “We owe him that.”

*****

Jack came down to the lab. It was the middle of the night and their patients were sleeping. Tucker held his PDA like a teddy bear and sucked his thumb. Sam was sprawled over the bed, sheets halfway kicked off, snoring loudly. Vlad had his head hidden under a pillow, likely to block out the noise and the light.

It was the middle of the night and Maddie still hadn't come to bed. He was exhausted, surely she must be as well. But that didn't explain why she was still up, still down here in the lab, her goggles down as she attempted to read a ream's worth of pages that sat scattered around her. Jack picked up one of the pages.

“When did we get black-faxed?” he asked. The page was so covered in black ink from redactions that it might as well have simply been a sheet of black paper.

“We're out of toner again,” Maddie said.

“Again?! Maddie, I just bought three cartridges!”

Maddie gestured to the pages and pages around her. “I printed out the whole document,” she said. “I was trying to see if I could use spectral analysis to read under the redacted lines.” She scowled at it all. “Nothing. I can't make heads or tails of it. There's just too much that's been blacked-out.”

“Anything useful at all?” Jack asked.

Maddie shifted past some useless black pages to a stack that she'd marked with post-it notes. “From what I could gather the Guys in White never spent time looking for a cure,” she said. “They never stumbled on one, either. In fact, if I'm reading this right, they worked to try and keep Vlad sick for as long as possible.”

“What?”

She held up a stack marked with bright pink post-its. “They were very interested in the effects of the ecto-acne on Vlad's psyche,” she said. “When they first got ahold of him they thought he was possessed. But it didn't act like possession. It wasn't multiple personalities, either. They either never figured out what was going on or the answer's hidden under all these redactions.” She sighed and scowled at the black-inked carnage around her. “I don't know which would be worse, that the answer isn't here or that is it but we just can't find it.”

“So there's nothing useful here,” Jack realized.

“Not in terms of a cure, no.”

Jack nodded. He pulled on Maddie's arm, dragging her away from her pages. “We'll figure it out, Mads,” he said. “It's early yet, they aren't that sick. Right now the best thing we can do for them is to get some sleep. Then in the morning we can find a cure ourselves.”

Maddie nodded and let herself be dragged off up the stairs. At the top of the stairwell she looked back down at the lab and its occupants.

They needed to find a cure. Badly.

*****

Stomping on the lab steps drew curious eyes to the pair storming their way down into the laboratory.  An angry cloud of pink silk and plaid sweater vest drew a groan out of Sam as she hid her face in the pillow.  She did not want her parents here.

“There she is!” Pamela shouted.  “What have you done to my daughter you-youyou...”  She glared at Maddie Fenton, trying and failing to find something civilized that still accurately detailed how she felt.

“Mr. and Mrs. Manson, I'm so glad to see you,” Maddie said through gritted teeth.

“Glad, nothing, Mrs. Fenton,” Jeremy said.  “I demand you release our daughter from this-this experiment you have going on here!”

“I'm afraid that's a very bad idea.”

“Release her this instant or-or we'll have you arrested for kidnapping!”  Pamela stomped her foot against the floor as she gave her ultimatum.

“Now see here!” Sam shouted, throwing herself into a sitting position.  She fought off the woozy feeling that tried to drag her right back down.  “Mom, Dad, this isn't something you can control!  This isn't an experiment!  We need to be cured of this and the Fentons know what they're doing!”

Unfortunately neither Jeremy nor Pamela heard their daughter's words.  They didn't hear anything.  Instead they saw the weeping sores marring their daughter's face.  They saw how difficult it was for her to sit up.  They saw her slow gasping for breath between each sentence as though the effort of speaking exhausted her.

“We have to get you to a hospital,” Pamela whispered.

“That would be a bad idea.”  Jack Fenton glared at Vlad for speaking; he'd hoped to stay hidden at Vlad's bedside so he wouldn't have to talk to Sam's parents.

The Mansons glared at this... person who dared interrupt them.  Obviously some degenerate friend of the Fentons what with that long wild gray hair sticking every which way and those shadowed red-ringed eyes, his pale skin pocked and marred with pulsing red sores.  He looked as exhausted as their daughter.  “What, and leaving her here is a better one?” Jeremy demanded.

“Why not?” Vlad asked.  “If you take her to a hospital she'll die.”

“You don't know that,” Pamela snapped.

“On the contrary, you're looking at one of the few who can know,” Vlad purred.  “A hospital is just going to treat this like radiation sickness.  You know how they treat radiation poisoning, don't you?  They stick you in a room and hope.  No treatment, no cures, just... keep you comfortable so you don't die screaming in pain.  But you die.”

“And how would you know?” Jeremy asked.

Vlad smiled at them.  “The last time a hospital dealt with a case like this their patient ended up in autopsy,” Vlad said, a careless purr tainting his voice as he gestured with a broad dramatic flair.  “This patient was still alive when they sliced into him.  Of course it wasn't the hospital's fault.  No hospital ranked one of the best in the country would dare make a mistake like that.  But go ahead.  Amity General is nowhere near as equipped now as Wisconsin University was twenty years ago.  Maybe when your daughter is dissected alive without anesthesia, trapped in her own mind unable to scream, maybe this time the hospital will be found at fault.”

Pamela and Jeremy both looked and felt ill.

“Then again she might survive,” Vlad continued.  “She'll only have to carry the physical scars for the rest of her life.  Or you could leave her in the care of possibly the only woman in the country who knows what this is and has any chance at all of curing it.”

Jack glared at Vlad again.  “What about me?” he asked.

Vlad laid back down and curled up in the sheets.  Throwing power into his voice like that made him tired.  “You never finished your PhD,” he said, his eyes drifting closed.  He didn't actually care what happened with the children so long as at least one of them stayed here.  He needed them to keep Daniel in line.  

Daniel would not fail so long as his friend's lives were on the line.

*****

Jack hid in the living room while Maddie paced the kitchen, phone pressed to her ear. Danny came downstairs to see the orange quarantine tape pasted over the windows. He put his backpack down. “Huh,” he said.

“Oh, hey, Danny,” Jack said.

“Um... what's with the tape?” Danny asked, pointing at the windows.

“After your little friend's parents came by we figured it was a good idea,” Jack said. “Jazzy-pants is over at a friend's house so she can keep going to school while the house is under quarantine. I guess since you're still here that means you're staying here with us.”

“But... why?” Danny asked, still pointing.

Jack sighed. “Your mother thinks it's contagious,” he said. “I don't blame her. How else were your friends affected, after all?”

“Yes, how else,” Danny said, glaring in the direction of the lab. He knew Plasmius had planned this.

“So I guess that means your mother needs to call the school and tell them you're gonna be staying here for the duration. I'm sure your teachers won't mind. Ecto-acne is nothing to sneeze at, no siree. We Fentons aren't making that mistake again.”

Danny grabbed his book bag and trudged back upstairs. No school today then. Nothing at all to distract him from the plight of his friends downstairs or the thoroughly evil deeds of the man beside them. And his parents had no idea how to cure the ecto-acne.

If only there were some way to fix this...

If only the accident hadn't happened in the first place...

Hey... Wait a minute...

Danny dropped his backpack on the bed, transformed, and zoomed down to the lab. He sped through the ghost zone, looking for the one being in all the realms who could cure his friends by making sure the accident never happened in the first place.

*****

They were sitting up today, that was an improvement. Tucker and Sam were able to sit up and take some soup while Vlad refused the bowl.

“C'mon, Vladdy, you need to eat something,” Jack pleaded from within his big white containment suit. “You gotta keep up your strength!”

Vlad looked at the bowl of 'random flavor from a can' and turned his nose at it.

Jack sat on the edge of Vlad's bed. “Please, Vlad? For me?” Jack picked up the spoon and started making flying motions with it. “I'll feed you if you wanna. The Specter Speeder's zooming toward the storage bay?”

Vlad growled as he heard the snickers around him.

Jack tried again, flying a spoonful of soup near Vlad's bared teeth, not noticing that most of the spoon's contents slopped out long before the spoon reached anywhere near a useful position.

Vlad's arm shot out, knocking the spoon away. “Get that blasted swill away from us!” he snapped.

Jack jumped, dumping half the bowl over his containment suit. “'Us'?” he asked. “What us? Vlad, there's only you and me here.”

Vlad's eyes faded red for the faintest of instances before he growled, stalking toward Jack on all fours.

“Umm... Vladdy?”

Vlad pounced, landing on Jack's chest. His hands wrapped around the neck of Jack's suit, gripping tight. An alarm beeped in Jack's ear, warning him that the pressure seal was breaking. Red-blue eyes glared into his as Vlad's hot breath fogged the glass faceplate.

“Laissez-nous tranquilles,” Vlad said, the syllables falling off his tongue like he was a native speaker. “Pourquoi faites-vous cela? Qu'avons-nous fait de vous pour meriter cela?”

“What?” Jack asked.

Vlad shoved Jack away, taking little satisfaction as Jack fell to the floor and had to scramble away on hands and knees. “Nous voulons juste rentre a la maison,” he said, sounding mournful. “S'il tu plait laissez-nous partir.”

Jack made it out of the containment area back into the lab. A long glare from Maddie sent him directly to the safety shower.

Vlad huffed at them all before curling up in bed, pulling the blankets around him like a nest as he snuggled in on himself like an animal.

“I didn't know Vlad spoke French,” Maddie said.

“He doesn't,” Jack said from the corner.

She looked thoughtful for a moment before flipping through her stack of post-it marked pages. “Ah hah!” she crowed. “I knew there was something about that in here! Jack, this paper says Vlad was able to speak fluent French despite no exposure or training. It was apparently intermittent though. They say it was the influence of...” She trailed off before swearing loudly and slapping the pages down on the floor. “It's redacted! It's bloody redacted!”

Jack stripped off his containment suit and left it in the water. He came up behind Maddie and wrapped his arms around her. “Shh, we'll work around it,” he promised. “We'll figure it out on our own.” He sighed, disappointment rising. “I just wish either of us knew French.”

“I do,” Sam said.

“Sam?” Maddie asked.

“I mean, I'm taking it in school,” she admitted. “That's gotta count for something, right?”

“Do you know what he said, honey?” Maddie asked.

Sam shrugged. “Sort of. He, well... He kept referring to himself as 'us'. 'Let us go. What did we ever do to you? Why are you doing this?'” She trailed off before looking up at Maddie, her eyes sad and very scared. “'We just want to go home.'”

“Oh.” There was nothing else Maddie could say to that. Not just because of the language or the look on Sam's face. But the words...

Vlad came to them for help. He knew where he was. He knew what they were doing to him, that they were trying to cure him. If he'd already forgotten...

Maddie looked at the curled form hiding under the sheets. If he'd forgotten already then they had much less time than they thought.

*****

Jack flipped through pages of data, the kitchen light the only source of illumination in the dark of night behind the biohazard tape. They were running low on chocolate chips. Jack mindlessly ate one of the few remaining chocolate chip cookies and wondered idly when they'd be able to get more. That would require breaching the containment perimeter and Maddie would kill him if he put the whole town at risk for a few pounds of chocolate.

So while Maddie worked downstairs Jack stayed here in the kitchen going over her notes. Ugh, he hated this part of science. He was never any good with turning random numbers into science, that was all Vlad and Maddie. But Maddie was busy and Vlad was...

Well...

Jack sighed again and picked up a new page, blinking hard until the random lines coalesced into words and numbers. He needed sleep. He needed something but they were running low on coffee and Maddie hadn't let him into the medicine cabinet for the little pills yet.

His mind wandered. Jack had calculated that a ghost portal mishap could never give a person massive contamination resulting in a large scale mutation of the body. He was willing to stand by those calculations. But...

Jack pulled out a sheet of paper covered in black-lined redactions. A good half of the symptoms and most of the conclusion was missing but from what was here...

...perhaps a portal mishap could causes smaller-scale alterations. Ecto-acne for instance. That was a given as they had three cases of it downstairs. So why not more? Why not symptoms that might mimic a more normal possession?

Jack bolted up and ran downstairs. “Maddie, I got it!” he shouted.

Sam turned over and kept snoring. Tucker pulled his thumb from his mouth as the shouting drew him to consciousness. Vlad had been sedated and didn't even notice. Maddie stood bolt upright, her face a perfect picture of delighted surprise. “You got it?” she asked. “You really found the cure?!”

Jack paused at the base of the stairs. Cure? What cure? Wait, no... “No, not the cure,” he admitted. “I figured out why Vlad's gone crazy!”

Maddie visibly deflated. She put on a brave face and wrapped her arms around her husband. It wasn't a cure but he claimed to have something... Maybe it was something good. “You know why Vlad's crazy?” she asked.

Jack nodded happily. “It's a lesser ectoplasmic contamination,” he said proudly. “Like a possession but not really since there's no ghost present. So it'll mimic a possession but exorcism or treatment or nothin' won't do anything about it! It's why the Guys in White couldn't fix Vlad!”

Maddie perked up. That was an interesting idea. And if her reading of the paper was correct then the Guys in White had never thought of it. Being able to one-up the Guys in White left her with a warm and fuzzy feeling inside.

“So his crazy is just a symptom of the ecto-acne,” Jack continued. “We don't have to worry about it since there's no ghost in there fueling it! And that means once we cure him he'll--”

“No...”

Jack and Maddie turned to look at this new voice. Tucker was trying to push himself up in bed. “I don't want to go crazy,” he said, pleading quietly. “Don't let it happen to me, Mrs. Fenton. I don't wanna go crazy...” He fell back into the bed, too weak to try again.

“Don't worry, Sweetie,” Maddie assured from the other side of the glass. “I promise, we won't let anything bad happen to you.”

“Yeah!” Jack crowed. “And if you do go crazy, well, I'm sure whatever cure we find can bring you right back!”

Maddie glared at Jack as Tucker curled up, shaking with fear.

*****

Sam was the first one to spike a fever.  She put on a brave face as the Fentons used their business connections to get antibiotics shipped in.  She knew they were afraid for her.  She was afraid, too, but not for her life.  She knew Danny would come through, even if no one had seen nor heard from him in almost two weeks.

No, it wasn't death she feared.  It was becoming like Vlad.

*****

The padded floor was uncomfortable, insulting, unsanitary, and all too familiar.  At least the straightjacket was missing although they did not remember ever being without it.  Instead there were sheets that they could pull out of the floor and fluff around themselves as they curled up in a nest.  They knew they should feel lucky that they had even this, patients aren't allowed beds or nests, no, a patient is supposed to sleep on the floor in his straightjacket if he keeps insisting there's more than one inside poor Vladimir's head and if he can't then he'll be sedated until he falls asleep or stops moving.  They shuddered and curled up in the nest, pulling it tight around themselves.  Maybe if they curled up enough they'd implode and the orderlies would never find them, could never touch them again with filthy hands, leering faces, hard fists, shining needles...

The door to the padded cell opened.  Except there was something wrong.  The walls didn't look like they were made of padding, cracking foam, stinking stained canvas, stains of blood and fear and rents from when the orderlies forgot to keep them restrained and they went to work with claws and burning red eyes and screaming screaming screaming...

One of the orderlies came in.  When did orderlies wear space suits?  What was going on?  Where were they?  This wasn't the facility but it had to be, they were sick and they were never outside when they were sick and they never were released from the facility so how could they be anywhere else?

“Vlad, I need to take your temperature,” the man said.  Familiar.  His voice was so familiar.  It inspired such anger, it must be one of those orderlies, it was always the big ones, the big ones always like to hurt and take and torment.  They pulled away from the orderly's white-gloved touch.  

“Vlad, please, I just need to make sure you're not running a fever.”  The orderly came close with something shining in one hand.  Of course he was going to say he just wanted Vlad's temperature or something innocent then he would inject them with something again.  Always with the injections, always painful or sleepy or burning hot or quiet without the other voice or all of it, everything at once.

“Get away from us!” they shrieked, leaping from the nest and pressing into the corner.  They looked around, looking for something, anything to defend themselves with.  They weren't in the straightjacket, their hands were free, ooohhhh that orderly was going to regret ever touching them...

“Vlad, I don't want to hurt you!”  The orderly lunged for them, trying to trap them in the corner with his huge bulk, big and white and pain, so much promised pain.

Something broke in Vlad's head, two minds becoming two distinct voices.  Eyes flared red as one drew their legs up to shove that huge white-dressed man away from them.  The other collected the scattered shards of their will and dragged their body into a standing position.  Their legs were shaky, so shaky, so tired, in so much danger.  “Je ne vous laissera pas lui faire de mal,” one said while the other growled.  Then one lost control and their eyes turned blue again, the other was barely able to catch their body as exhaustion and illness rampaged.

Vlad's eyes rolled back as the world spun and went black.

Jack Fenton stood in the glass-walled clean room, his white containment suit filled with the echoed sounds of his own ragged breathing.  “What was that?” he asked.  “What did he say?”

Maddie flipped through Tucker's PDA for a translation program then let it work on the recorded words.  “He said 'I won't let you hurt him anymore.'”

“But hurt who?” Jack wondered aloud.

“I don't know.”

Jack pushed away the guilt, the confusion, and did what he needed to do.  He rearranged Vlad's bed, laid him back in it, and checked for fever.  No fever, not yet.  He looked down at the pale, weak, pitiful form of his sick friend and made a decision.  Jack gently lifted Vlad up and placed him to one edge of the bed then laid down next to him.  Jack would be damned if his best friend had to suffer through this alone.

*****

One woke up first, unsure why their eyes are closed.  One called out into the fiery blackness of their mind, trying to drag the other out of sleep, out of silence, so much silence.  One slowly started trying to do something with their body, twitching their fingers and shaking their head.  It was so hard, so tiring, so hot...

One fell back into the soft blackness of sleep as the other woke up.  Their eyes opened to the feel of a heavy arm over their chest, the sounds of a voice at their ear.  The other didn't recognize the words, not quite, not given how run together they were.  Didn't the voice know that English wasn't a first language?  “Quel est-il?” the other mumbled.  What is it?

One was dragged back to consciousness by the other, the other wincing as they were hit by the sensation of burning from the inside out.  “Jack?”

“Vladdie!” Jack shouted.  

Vlad looked around through red-hazed vision, pointedly ignoring the way the world seemed to be boiling.  “Pourquoi tu es...”  One shook their head as the other reached up to grab it to keep it from moving. They tried asking again.  “Why are you in bed with us?” Vlad asked.

Jack wrapped his arms around his friend, his heart wrenching.  Even in this moment of lucidity Vlad still seemed to be crazy, still thought there were two of them in there.  He felt Vlad sigh and sort of resign himself to being held, something that Jack was imminently grateful for as a whole new realization was made.

Vlad was burning up.

“You're running a bad fever, Vlad,” Jack said.

“Et alors?”  Vlad sighed in frustration before trying again.  “I chto?”  One's eyes glowed red as the other growled.  That wasn't English either, that was Russian.  They tried again.  “AND?!” they nearly shouted, forcing the English out.

Jack watched this all as he held Vlad close.  It broke his heart that his friend's brain was so addled that he was having trouble distinguishing between languages.  If only they could find a cure.  Not just before this horrid ecto-acne killed Vlad or Danny's little friends but before it damaged their minds.  “I'm sorry,” he whispered.  “I'm so so sorry, Vlad.  I wish we could cure this.  I wish you didn't have to be like this.  I wish I could make it all better but I can't, I don't know how.  I don't know how...”

Jack's words flowed past one then the other.  Within the recesses of Vlad's mind two sets of eyes, one blue and one red, regarded the man's words with contempt.  Two voices, one deep and purring, the other small and nasal, taunted the man who held them.

“Vous l'avez fait pour nous.”

You did this to us.

“Vous méritez de souffrir.”

You deserve to suffer.

“Regardez ce que vous avez fait pour nous, Jack.”

Look at what you've done to us, Jack.

“Je vous hais pour toute ma vie.”

I will hate you for the rest of my life.

Yet all that Jack heard was one voice whispering one line over and over.  “Vous l'avez fait pour nous.”

You did this to us.

*****

The alarms started shrieking 20 days into the quarantine. Jack scrambled into the containment room, frantic and near panic. He knew what that sound meant.

One of their patients was going into distress. Jack made a beeline for Vlad as Sam and Tucker weakly tried to lift themselves off their pillows to watch. Jack tore the sheet off of Vlad and ripped open his surgical scrubs with his hands alone. Maddie came in with the portable defibrillator and started preparing the paddles.

“Do it,” Jack pleaded as the alarm turned into a single ominous tone.

Maddie pressed the charged paddles to Vlad's chest and squeezed. Vlad arched into the current then laid back, quiet. The heart monitor beeped and fluttered for a few moments before going dull and shrieking again. “Again, Maddie!”

Maddie grumbled and turned up the power on the machine. She charged the paddles and pressed them again. Vlad's eyes glowed red as the current coursed through him and wisps of pale rose-colored energy arched between his fingertips. But his heart didn't start again.

“Please, Vlad, wake up!” Jack pleaded. “Live!”

Maddie glanced at her son's little friends and wondered which of them would be next. That was enough to cause her to turn the machine up to its highest setting, high enough to burn flesh, and shove Jack out of the way. She pressed the paddles to Vlad's chest and squeezed the trigger.

The machine squealed in agony as its capacitor was drained and then more as the body it was pressed to seemed to feed off of it, actively pulling enough electricity to blow the circuits. Smoke trailed from the machine as Maddie threw the paddles at the floor.

“No!” Jack cried. “Live, Vlad, live!” He started pounding on Vlad's chest, attempting to restart Vlad's heart through brute force.

And then Danny walked in.

*****

Diet soda.

The whole time it had been diet soda.

Jack didn't remember ever pouring diet soda into the ectofiltrator but he must have. He was the one responsible for filling it. He was the engineer, it was his job to make sure the machine was kept in good working order up to and during the experiment.

It... really was his fault. Years of indignant refusal, years of the great black mark against his record, of never being able to get back into a graduate program so he could at least have a chance to catch up to Maddie... It was all deserved.

And the whole time Jack had refused to accept it. He'd insisted it wasn't his fault. He'd insisted that he was innocent, that the cause of the explosion could never really be traced, that it was a fluke of the design, any excuse he could cling to. Yet in the end, they were right. They were always right. He did this to his friend.

Jack sat in the isolation room, now open to the rest of the lab. The quarantine was lifted and the plexiglass taken down but Vlad still slept fitfully in the hospital bed. Occasionally he'd talk in his sleep, two personalities arguing with each other. It was still heartbreaking but as the hours went on it seemed to get easier. Almost as if Vlad was working to integrate the multiple personalities on his own.

Jack watched as Vlad thrashed as if from a horrible dream, suddenly shouting something in French. Vlad sat up with a start, eyes glowing red before he fell back onto the bed in a faint. His skin was flushed and sweating, expelling the toxin as Maddie called it.

The kids had recovered very quickly, all ready to go home and work on three weeks worth of missed homework within a couple of hours. But here it was two days later and Vlad was still recovering.

“I'm sorry,” Jack whispered. “I really did do this, didn't I?”

Vlad gave no answer as he laid sprawled on the bed.

“Please get better,” Jack said. “No more other yous, k?”

“Il est a moi, Jack,” Vlad mumbled. “Il est a moi.” He's mine, Jack. He's mine.

Jack patted Vlad's arm. “You'll get better, Vladdy. I know you will.”

“Je nes veux pas. Je sais mieux que cela.” No, I won't. I know better than that.

Jack squeezed his friend's hand and went upstairs. There was nothing he could do but wait.

*****

The incinerator flared as the last of the flammable material was shoveled in for disposal.  Despite knowing they had the cure for Vlad's particular strain of ecto-acne Maddie still insisted there was no reason to tempt fate.  Despite the thousands of dollars worth of materials currently melting in the roaring inferno Jack had to agree.  No one should be forced to go through what Vlad experienced.  And yet...

Who knows how many times it had happened?  The information they got out of the GIW documents only covered two years.  The pages didn't mention when or if Vlad, or rather “Patient 613” stopped having recall reactions in their care.  Heck, there was no word on how long they held him, when or even if they released him!  Jack shuddered.  Vlad went through so much as a result of the accident, so much he'd never allowed himself to notice.  And to think, all that time he'd been pissed that Vlad's accident had cost him his candidacy when Vlad was off somewhere being tortured for the sake of science.

Jack closed the incinerator door, locking it.  He sighed, long and loud, feeling guilty about all those years of feeling bitter, of entry-level jobs measuring and testing and cleaning rat cages, of working and scraping and saving just so Maddie could finish her PhD so at least one of them could benefit from their work.  It was hard, sure, but he also had the love of a beautiful woman, they had two wonderful children, and after so many long years of work they finally had their dream, their FentonWorks.  Vlad...

Vlad was experimented on, that much was known now.  He was poked and prodded and imprisoned and even tortured because of what had happened to him and there was nothing he could do about it.  Cursed to fall ill with this horrid recurring ecto-acne until a cure could be found.  Affected by the portal accident in horrifying ways, none of them good.  And yet...

And yet a year ago Vlad had contacted them, asked to renew their friendship.  Invited them to his home.  Sure ghosts ruined it all but the fact remained Vlad forgave him for what had happened.  There was no other reason Jack could think of for why Vlad would dare re-initiate contact when it would have been easier to just forget the past and suffer through his future.  

Jack had to admit, Vlad was a much bigger man than he was.  It took a singular strength of character to forgive someone for something so life-altering as this.  Jack didn't think, no, he knew he would not have had such inner strength.

There was only one thing he could do then.  Jack resolved then and there that Vlad would never have to suffer alone through anything again.  Jack would be the best friend he could be, maybe invite Vlad into the family.  He was the kid's godfather after all, it was time for him to really get to know Jazz and Danny.  They'd like having Uncle Vlad around more, Jack just knew it.

With a lighter heart and a stronger resolve Jack headed upstairs and let the incinerator burn away the last of the bitterness from their lives.  From now on things would be better.