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Maddie had always considered the possibility of ectoplasmic mutations occurring in humans, in fact she and Jack had put an awful lot of thought into the idea before ever even toying with the notion of bringing up children in the same house as their laboratory.
They knew that the safety gear they worked with in college was less than appropriate considering the volatile and mysterious substances they were working with, but at the time they had been so young and foolish and determined, they didn't care about consequences or safety protocol, as long as they got answers, as long as they could prove that their work MEANT something.
It was the proto-portal incident that changed everything.
It was then that they realised they had royally hecked up, and though Maddie always felt awful about what happened and regretted it every day of her life, she was at least comforted by one thing.
Ectoplasmic radiation wasn't deadly.
Sure it could make you violently ill and cause a break out in the most horrific acne the world had ever seen but it wouldn't KILL you, or even permanently maim you! Though Vlad had been completely cut off from them due to being kept in quarantine, they at the very least were able to keep updated on his recovery by a sympathetic nurse. Vlad may have been furious and temporarily violently ill but he had pulled through seemingly unharmed and unscarred.
This was a breakthrough.
The limits Maddie and Jack could go with their experiments now knowing what ectoplasm was and wasn't capable of doing to a human body. They of course upped their safety protocols and lab-wear to prevent another Vlad incident but now they knew they were relatively safe from any mutations or illnesses, at least in the short term. Long term effects were still questionable but if Vlad could walk off a shot of concentrated ecto-radiation to the face then what harm could years of mild exposure do?
Maddie still admitted to herself, years later, that this was a naive assumption.
There were a few things she had never considered, those being the effect of ectoplasm on a human who had yet to finish growing, and the effect of ectoplasm on a child she had yet to birth.
When Maddie had Jazz it was her first pregnancy, and it took its toll on her body. She was a strong woman but not particularly large and it was a rough first experience as Jazz had been a particularly hefty baby. She had not done an awful lot of lab-work during those last few months, as heavy as she was she could barely leave the couch.
Jazz had been born after a particularly long labour but without complications, a healthy baby girl, showing no signs of illness or anything else to cause alarm. She was beautiful, she was perfect.
Danny... was not.
Maddie could immediately tell that there was a difference with her second pregnancy, she had not, in fact, known she was pregnant for a great while, unlike Jazz who was planned and expected. She wasn't a fan of the term 'accident', so she and Jack liked to call Danny their 'Little Surprise'.
Maddie did not grow nearly as large as quickly, and the toll the pregnancy took on her was much less this time around, so her work in the lab continued well into the later stages of her pregnancy. Still the small size of her Little Surprise did not bother her, she had been told by everyone that pregnancies wouldn't always be the same, it was quite expected to be a different experience for a different child.
But there was a problem. She went into labour too early.
There had been some kind of issue, she wasn't sure what, the doctors weren't sure either, 'things like this just happen sometimes' her sister told her. It should have bothered her, she should have insisted on more tests, asked more questions.
But she didn't.
She was just grateful that in the end her Little Surprise, despite being so small and premature, had been born alive and well, and she left it at that.
It was years later that she mentioned it again, that she asked Jack if they had done the right thing in raising their children in the same house in which they worked. He had told her that nothing had gone wrong so far, they can't have messed up too badly.
She should have been reassured, but she wasn't.
Jack, god bless him, was a beautiful loving man, but he was not very observant, he had a talent for missing the obvious let alone the subtle. And it was the subtle that bothered her.
Something was off about her child.
Jazz had grown up normal, she was extremely intelligent and dedicated to anything she put her mind to, and she had kept a considerate distance from their work, having rarely gone down to the basement for anything more than to ask them about something when they were working, and even then it'd be rare that she left the staircase.
Danny, on the other hand, went down there quite often. As a child he was naturally curious, always wanted to know 'why?' and 'how?' and 'what are you doing?' Jack, of course, was enthused. He would bundle Danny up in hazmat suits ten times too big for him and take him on a tour of their most recent experiment.
Maddie should have stopped him, but her little boy looked so cute swimming in that huge suit! She giggled and cooed when she should have picked the rascal up and taken him back upstairs. She should have told him that the lab was a dangerous place and not to play there instead of encouraging his presence.
Where Jazz had grown into a healthy young woman, Danny had remained rail thin regardless of how much he ate, and he would sleep more often than what should have been normal for a child. As a baby, Maddie had simply commented on how well behaved he was at nap time. As a teenager she simply explained it away as regular teenage laziness.
Though Jazz had never been quite as much of a layabout as Danny had been. She never ate as much and she had never been so pale and thin.
Maddie was, in later years, willing to admit that Danny may have had a health problem that she should probably keep her eye on, but it was later still that she finally accepted what she feared to admit.
There was something extremely WRONG with her child.
It started with small changes, nervousness, suspicious behaviour, avoiding them in public. Things she wrote off as him being a teenager, embarrassed by them and their career, the secrecy perhaps a result of dirty magazines or something of the like hidden in his room? She didn't want to think too hard about such things and so ignored them.
God she was an awful mother.
Even Jack, as unobservant as he was, picked up on it before she did.
'Mads I think Danny might be a ghost.' this was not the first time he'd made this assumption about their children, it was his explanation for any abnormal behaviour.
'Sweetie remember the last time we thought Jazz was a ghost? If the scanners don't pick up anything we have nothing to worry about.'
'They've picked up on Danny before. That time we thought it was Jazz and got her hair caught in the Fenton Weasel, it might have been pointing to Danny!'
'Jack that scanner wasn't even finished, it was playing up. Leave Danny alone, being a teenager is hard enough without us throwing accusations around.'
She wished she had listened to him. She had been right about the scanner, she was sure she was... Danny wasn't a ghost, at least, not a ghost pretending to be their child. He was... he was still their child.
He was just, wrong.
There was the time she had caught him reading when he should have been sleeping. Reading, in the middle of the night, with the lights off. At times she would see him sitting still, abnormally still, like someone had somehow placed a lifelike Danny wax figure at the kitchen table, until he broke his gaze from whatever had been on the wall that had caught his interest so intensely and began eating his cereal like nothing happened.
He wasn't getting thinner at least, in fact he was actually starting to bulk up for once in his life, but he was definitely getting paler. At times he looked almost white, no not white, there was colour, a cold tint to his skin, blue or maybe green. It would disappear if she looked twice, like the mist she sometimes swore she could see coming from his mouth.
There was another thing Maddie took a long time to put her finger on, there was a point where Danny silently walking into a room and scaring the hell out of her went from endearingly annoying to downright spooky. He would still laugh and tease her when it happened like nothing unusual was going on, nothing had changed, but it had. He had changed. There was no presence, no sound, no warmth, nothing to indicate that he was standing right next to her even when she knew he was. She could see him with her eyes but could not feel him on some other level she didn't quite understand.
And there was a glow. It was in his eyes, nothing obvious, not like a glow-stick or a flashlight, they were just so... luminescent. In an understated kind of way that just made his eyes appear so bright. He had always had such bright blue eyes but this was something almost ethereal in nature. She knew she wasn't the only one who had noticed this. Everyone stared at his eyes. Everyone. And it wasn't in an 'oh my gosh your eyes are so pretty!' kind of way. She could see it in their faces. Friends, relatives, strangers. They would look at her son's face and for a moment almost frown before covering it up with a friendly smile. They would try to hide it, but she'd see.
Nobody complemented his eyes any more. It almost felt like some sort of taboo to even mention them.
Maddie considered talking to him about what was going on, he had to be aware of it... he had to be, but he had shown no signs of concern or curiosity about his... situation. Maddie would have to be the one to bring it up, she had to be the one who sat down with him and straight up asked the question.
What question though?
Danny are you aware that you're strange? Danny is there something wrong with you? Danny have you noticed that something abnormal has been happening to you?
How the heck was a mother supposed to approach this situation sensitively?
In the end she settled for subtlety.
Maddie sat down beside her son on the lounge and turned the tv off, he whined at her. He was in the middle of a show, he seemed so normal in that moment... Until she said the words.
'We need to talk about how you've changed.'
There, subtle, non-judgemental, a calm and safe approach. He locked eyes with her and suddenly her heart began to beat double time in her ears, she could feel sweat start to bead along her hairline, her breath caught in her throat.
His eyes were locked onto hers with an intensity she thought a human could never possess, perhaps she was correct. The... thing sitting next to her could not possibly be human. He had done nothing. NOTHING to indicate that he meant her harm, there had been no tightening of muscles or fists, no glare or scowl.
He merely had to look at her, and her body immediately wanted out of this room and house and neighbourhood and planet. It wanted AWAY from this, this... whatever it was beside her.
Maddie took a deep shuddering breath, she had faced down enormous beings with teeth and claws and hulking muscles on a body twice her size, but never before in her life had she felt so terrified, so small and out of her depth, and there had been NOTHING TO TRIGGER IT. He had done nothing, he had done NOTHING to make her feel this way and still she did, what was happening? What had her son, her child her Little Surprise, what had... what had she turned him into?
All that work in the lab during her pregnancy, all that exposure at such a young age in an ill-fitting safety suit. It had done things to him, of course it had, what else could have happened? He wasn't a ghost, not even ghosts struck the sort of abject terror in her heart as her own child did at this moment.
He was something else.
Something her mind recognised wasn't human but couldn't recognise as anything else. He wasn't a ghost, and he wasn't human. He was something somewhere in between, that had to be it. He had to be somewhere in between...
Maddie drew her tight lips into a forced smile.
'Your grades, you've, uh, you've gotten better grades this semester, I don't know what you're doing different but,' breathe, she reminded herself, breathe, 'But, but I think you should keep it up.'
A brief pat on the arm later and she was off the lounge and at the door faster than she knew she could move. Then a voice froze her in the doorway.
'Mom,' he said quietly. She turned, hesitantly, the way she would as a child in a dark room fearing the scary monster she knew might be there just over her shoulder.
Her lanky beanpole of a son had draped himself over the back of the couch, lazy smile spread across his face, warming his icy eyes. Danny was looking at her now, the boy she knew and raised and loved. The fear drained from her quickly, how could she ever be terrified of him? What on earth had struck her in that moment?
'Thanks,' he said, 'For not... talking about what you came here to talk about.' He looked away from her, eyes downcast but... still warm. 'You're not ready.'
There was something wrong with her son, Maddie knew this... but despite it all he was still her son. And whatever she had done to him, he was coping, he was at peace with it, it seemed, and she knew he would never hurt her. Danny would never hurt anyone.
But that didn't mean he wasn't capable of it, and she feared the day anyone would give him a reason to hurt. Maddie hoped with everything she had that if it were to happen, she would never be there to truly see what she had done to her child.