Just Another
Night
the continuation of Just Another Afternoon, part of the
Ghostbusters, Inc. AU by Setcheti
Disclaimer: Don’t own them, just borrowing. This story grew out of a request from TexasAries for the ‘missing scene’ from Just Another Afternoon where the boys brought Nathan face to face
with reality. Thanks
Dinner that night was
about as normal as it could get – or at least, as normal as it had been since
September. Vin had to laughingly remind
Chris to keep eating several times as the physicist kept mentally wandering off,
turning their latest batch of problems over in his mind. Ezra, on the other hand, was completely
fixated on his food even though he wasn’t actually eating any of it. Just a day ago that would have irritated
Chris, but now he understood and kept the others from bothering the troubled
psychologist. Hopefully after tonight
they could start getting things back to normal for Ezra as well.
As soon as everyone was
done eating – or pretending to eat – Chris ordered the table cleared and
everyone into the family room for the meeting.
Everyone who was there, that was; he’d called the hospital and left word
that Nathan was needed at the firehouse ASAP, but so far the biochemist was a
no-show. Larabee decided not to wait for
him. “Boys, something happened this
afternoon,” he said, addressing Buck, JD and Josiah. “Today Vin and I got
to see what all those readings we’ve been taking over at the disaster site
mean.” He stopped the torrent of excited
questions with an upraised hand. “And
now we also know exactly what happened to Ezra,
and hopefully that will give us a better shot at fixing it.”
Everyone’s eyes
immediately went to the psychologist, who was slouched in a corner of the couch
with his eyes fixed on the floor. Buck
frowned and looked back at Chris. “So
what’s the problem?”
“We have more than one,”
was the answer. “But they kind of all go
together. First off, I think everyone
knows that Nathan is considering leaving the business to go work at the
hospital, and for the record if he doesn’t show back up here tonight I’ll tear
up his contract with Ghostbusters, Inc. myself.”
Josiah stiffened. “Chris…”
“No.” Larabee didn’t look angry, just
decisive. “Dr. Jackson is making his own
decision. If he’s not committed to being
here, to being a part of this team, I’m not asking him to stay.”
“This all hit him really
hard,” the former priest tried to defend his absent friend. “All that time we spent at ground zero, all
the pain and tragedy we saw down there, the futility of it all…”
“There’s a perfectly
good psychologist right here that he could talk it out with,” Vin interrupted. “He
just won’t.”
Josiah dropped his
eyes. “I know Brother Ezra wants to
help,” he admitted quietly. “But he
can’t fully understand what we went through, he wasn’t there.”
Chris saw Ezra twitch slightly and that tiny, involuntary reaction decided
him; talking could wait. He walked over
to stand beside Ezra and ordered Josiah, “Take his hand.” Nobody questioned Chris Larabee when he used
that tone of voice; Josiah picked up the limp hand that had been lying beside
him on the couch, his eyebrows rising when he felt the way it was trembling. Then Chris held out his own hand to the
psychologist. “Ezra.”
Green eyes looked up at
him, filled with torment, pleading.
“Chris…”
“They need to know,
Ezra.” The command was gentle but clear. “This is the only way they’ll
understand.” After a moment’s hesitation,
Ezra reached up to put his other hand into the grasp of the one in front of
him.
Josiah’s yell shook the
windows and startled Buck and JD to their feet.
Chris’ knees buckled but Vin was there to
steady him and to yank his hand away from Ezra’s. Ezra pulled his own hand out of Josiah’s
grasp and curled in on himself even more, closing his eyes. The former preacher just stared at him in
horror, and then at Chris. “You knew…”
“We found out this
afternoon, by accident,” Vin answered him. “Think you’d have to agree, Preacher, it’s all
of us that didn’t really understand.”
Buck looked from Josiah
to Chris to Ezra and his eyes narrowed.
Circling around the couch with JD in his wake, he dropped to one knee
beside the psychologist. “Ez? Pard, does it hurt
you to do this?”
Ezra shook his head
without opening his eyes. “Makes him
tired after a bit,” Vin elaborated. “Problem is that he don’t
want to hurt us, and what he’s listenin’ to can’t
help but do that.”
“In more ways than one,”
Josiah put in heavily. “Hurts me to know
he’s been going through…that all this
time and we haven’t done anything but tell him he’ll get used to it.” He locked eyes with Chris. “I understand now, Chris, and I won’t say
another word. You do what you have to
do.”
“I’d planned on it.” Larabee nodded to Buck. “Go ahead, you won’t understand until you do.”
Buck and JD each took
one of Ezra’s hands at the same time.
Buck let loose a startled exclamation, lost his balance and fell
backwards onto his rear end, losing contact with Ezra when he did so. “How in God’s name…! JD, are you all right?”
JD was absolutely white,
but he hadn’t let go. His head whipped
around suddenly, tracking something none of the others could see – except Ezra,
who followed it lazily with his own eyes but didn’t seem concerned. “It was moving so fast, where do you think it’s going?” the younger man asked tremulously.
“It just broke away from
the mass,” was the psychologist’s unruffled answer. “You might liken it to a spacecraft breaking
free of the planet’s gravitational field, they
apparently must attain sufficient velocity to escape.”
Ezra started to slide
his hand out of JD’s, but the younger man tightened his grip. “You’ve been watching them, studying them?”
A soft snort. “I’ve had little choice – and I thought my
observations might prove some benefit if it ever became necessary for all of
you to have further interaction with the mass.”
“For all of us,” Vin corrected softly. “You’re still a Ghostbuster,
Ezra.”
“That may still be a
debatable issue…”
“I say it’s not, and
what I say goes.” Chris was doing the
correcting now. He looked around at his
team and nodded, pleased with what he saw.
“You’re a part of us, a part of our family, and that hasn’t changed. Now we just need to figure out where to go
from here…”
“They’ve heard it, they
need to see it,” Vin suggested with a smile. “Didn’t you say it was better to look at at night, Ez?”
“I wouldn’t say better,”
Ezra replied unhappily. “More visible, certainly.”
“I want to see.” JD tugged at the hand he was holding, urging
the reluctant psychologist to his feet. “The roof, right?
That would be the best place. We
should all go take a look, and then,” he shifted his grip, moving his hand to
the psychologist’s shoulder. “And then
you need to get some rest, Ez, and Buck and I will
figure out how to block that noise for you.”
The two of them left the
room, and the remaining four men looked at each other and grinned, even
Josiah. “Damned if that boy doesn’t
surprise me every time,” Buck said proudly.
“Damned if Ezra doesn’t too.”
“Maybe we need to stop
being surprised,” Chris told him, holding out a hand to help him up. “So let’s go get the last one of the night
over with and go from there.”
Nathan came home to what
looked and sounded like an empty firehouse.
At first he was afraid the others had been called out on a bust, but all
the vehicles were still in the garage.
Maybe someone had gotten hurt, gotten sick? No, he would have heard about it at wo…at the
hospital for sure. He really was
starting to think of it as work, not just pitching in anymore, and he was also
starting to think that might not be a bad thing. At least at the hospital he felt like he was
making a difference and he was surrounded by people who felt the same, people
whose priorities were in the right place.
He still didn’t think
they should have had a birthday party for JD.
Nathan didn’t blame the young mathematician or really even the other
Ghostbusters, but he still didn’t think that kind of celebration had been right
under the circumstances. And it hadn’t
been right for one of them to stay here to take care of Ezra, either, not when
everyone was needed so desperately elsewhere.
He’d been ready to suggest they leave the psychologist at Belleview when
Chris had made his speech about it being just as important to take care of
their own, and after that the biochemist hadn’t thought his idea would be too
well received so he’d kept his mouth shut.
Nathan had wondered more
than once if that had been the wrong decision.
Had Chris called him back to headquarters because something had happened
with Ezra? The man had tried to kill
himself once already, it could have happened again. He spotted the crumpled note on Nettie’s desk and picked it up,
frowning worriedly when he saw what was written there. Oh, that probably
hadn’t gone over well, another possible explanation for the summons he’d
received…
The sound of a throat
clearing startled him out of his thoughts; Chris was standing on the stairs,
not looking very happy. “Where have you
been, Dr. Jackson? I left word for you
to get back here hours ago.”
Nope, hadn’t gone over
well at all. Nathan started to explain
that they’d been busy in the lab but decided against it. “What’s going on, Chris? Is everyone okay?”
“Everyone’s fine.” Chris didn’t soften any. “Let me guess, they needed you and you
couldn’t get away.”
“Pretty much, yeah.” The biochemist dropped the note back on the
desk. “So what’s going on?”
“If you’d been here,
you’d know.” Larabee turned around and
started back up the stairs. “Come on.”
Nathan followed him
upstairs, and was surprised when they didn’t stop at either the kitchen or the
family room but kept on going up to the bunkroom, and then up the final flight
of stairs that led to the roof. The
night was clear and cold and still, and from five stories up it was remarkably
quiet. “Chris?”
“You missed the meeting
– and dinner, by the way,” the physicist told him. His turquoise eyes were colder than the chill
breeze plucking at their clothes.
“You’re going to have to make a decision tonight,
And with that he turned
and walked away, and after a moment’s hesitation Nathan went with him. The others were standing clustered around
Ezra on the far side of the roof, all looking out over the city in the
direction of the disaster site. Chris
grabbed Nathan’s arm and pulled him into the tight little semicircle to stand
beside Buck. The biochemist’s eyebrows
rose when he saw that Buck was holding Ezra’s hand. “How you holding up,?”
the engineer asked the psychologist gently, ignoring Nathan like he wasn’t even
there.
“Fine,” came the shaky answer.
Ezra’s eyes were still fixed on the darkness – no, Nathan suddenly
realized, on the empty space where the
“Pull the other one.” Buck patted the smaller man on the shoulder
with his free hand. “We’re going to fix
this for you, Ez, it’s all going to work out. I’m gonna trade off
with Vin now, okay?”
Ezra shuddered
visibly. “No…”
“Yes,” Vin told him, catching hold of the hand on his side as soon
as Buck had let go of the other.
“There’s got to be an end to this, pard; we
need to be a team again and this is the only way to make that happen.”
Nathan was getting an
idea of what the others thought they were doing, but he couldn't believe they
were taking it this far. They were up on the roof! In the middle of the night,
holding hands! He knew they wanted to
make Ezra feel more a part of the group, but the man was just going to have to
come to terms with the fact that he hadn't been a part of the tragedy that had
hit the city and couldn't possibly understand. Nathan had privately wondered more
than a few times over the past weeks if the psychologist's collapse had
actually been a nervous breakdown brought on by his inability to deal with the
incident. I should
have spoken up before, when it started, he chastised himself. The man should be in the
hospital getting some real help, not five stories up in the middle of the night
with his friends practicing amateur psychology on him. For Ezra’s sake, I’ve
got to put a stop to this. Nathan
opened his mouth to make them all face reality…
…And then Buck grabbed
his hand and shoved it into Ezra's. And
Nathan’s world exploded.
Suddenly the night
wasn’t dark any more; there was a massive, glowing cloud of spirits hovering
ominously over the downed
And then Ezra let go of
his hand. Nathan fell to his knees and clutched his head, gasping. He vaguely heard Chris say, "I think he
understands now. You okay, Vin?"
“Will be.” Tanner sounded breathless and a little
shaky. “Thought it might be easier the
second time around, guess that’s what I get for thinkin’. Ez?”
“Think we just wore him
out,” Josiah rumbled softly. “No,
brother, I don’t need any help. He
doesn’t weigh anything at all anymore.”
Nathan’s head jerked up;
Josiah was getting to his feet, cradling Ezra in his arms like a child. He saw the psychologist’s hand push futilely
at the bigger man’s chest. “I…can
walk. Don’t have to…”
“I want to,” Josiah
contradicted with a smile. “And we know
you’d try to walk, but you’d most likely fall down the stairs. Go to sleep, Ezra. Tomorrow will be a brand new day, for all of
us.”
His light blue eyes met
Nathan’s wide dark ones as he made the promise, and then he turned away and
made for the stairs with JD running ahead of him to get the door. Nathan started to follow but found his way
blocked by the remaining three men. “Not
just yet,” Chris told him. “We still
have a thing or two to discuss.”
Nathan shivered – and
not just because of the wind. “If this
is about that message from the hospital I can explain…”
“I’m sure you can,”
Larabee cut him off. “But as far as I’m
concerned them being gung-ho to hire you away from us is just the tip of the
iceberg here. Why don’t you start by
telling me just when you decided the job we do isn’t important?”
Vin and Buck
didn’t look surprised by the question, but Nathan’s mouth dropped open; he
didn’t think he’d been that obvious about what he was feeling lately. He sighed.
“It’s not that I think there’s anything wrong with Ghostbusting,
but after what happened…” He looked over
his shoulder at the empty space in the darkness. “What we’ve been doing is all well and good,
but…but well, everything that’s happened kind of made me straighten out my
priorities.”
“So you’re saying ours
aren’t straight, is that it?” Vin observed coldly. “We’re just a bunch of selfish bastards now?”
“I didn’t say that…”
“You didn’t need to –
it’s been coming through loud and clear,” Buck told him disgustedly. “You still have your nose out of joint
because we celebrated the kid’s birthday, don’t you? And because we didn’t pack Ez off to the loony bin so everyone could go help out
downtown.” He snorted at the
biochemist’s renewed amazement. “I saw
the look on your face when Chris said we’d take turns staying here with him,
didn’t you ever wonder why you never had to stick around by yourself? We were pretty sure you’d be calling the men
in white coats as soon as we were out the door.”
“Don’t try to deny it,”
Chris said with a grimace as it looked like Nathan was about to do just
that. “You aren’t exactly good at hiding
how you feel,
Nathan had to shake his
head. “I…I didn’t know. That it was like that for him, I didn’t
know.”
“None of us did,” Vin observed quietly.
“Not until today.”
“And we’re all feelin’ guilty about it,” Buck put in. “All of us have told him at least once before
today that he’d just have to get used to it.
Now we know better.”
“You have any ideas
about that, Buck?” Chris wanted to know.
“There’s got to be a way…”
“Yeah, there does.” The engineer’s pleasant, open face hardened
with determination. “And the kid and I
will find it, don’t you worry. I’ve got
an idea or two already.”
“Thought you might.” Chris’ pleased expression became grim again
when he turned his turquoise gaze back on Nathan. “Well, what about you? If the hospital is what you think you want
I’m not going to argue with you.”
“Half and hour ago it
might have been.” Nathan admitted honestly, casting another look back over his
shoulder. “Now that I know a little more
about what’s going on, though, things are looking a little different to me.”
“Yep.” Chris sighed.
“You’re a good man, Nathan, and I don’t want to lose you…but if you’re
staying there’ll be some conditions.
The biochemist nodded
slowly; it was what he’d expected. “I
know I owe Ezra an apology.”
Larabee smiled
slightly. “That would be nice of you,
but that wasn’t one of them. No, if
you’re going to stay with Ghostbusters, Inc. I’m going to have to insist that
you quit working at the hospital. No
more moonlighting at all, not even volunteer work.”
Nathan had expected that
too, so he swallowed it without comment even though it didn’t go down too
easily. “Okay.”
“And you have to get
some help, I’ll want you to see someone for at least a
month.” The look of shock that produced
was almost comical, but Chris didn’t smile this time. “Ezra tried, but he already told us that he
wasn’t able to help you so it’ll have to be someone else. I think if you ask him he’d probably be able
to suggest someone you’d be comfortable with.”
That went without
saying; professionally speaking, Ezra had a real bee in his bonnet when it came
to matching a patient with the right therapist.
But still… “What if I’m not comfortable with
the whole idea?” Nathan wanted to know.
“Now that I understand things better…”
“Thought one of the
things you understood was that what I say goes,” Chris interrupted mildly. “Take it or leave it is the only option
you’ve got.”
Nathan still didn’t like
it…but he took it. He still wasn’t sure
about everything and his conscience was still pushing him to do something
‘useful’, but the brief contact with the howling madness hovering over the city
had put cracks in his self-assurance.
Through one of those cracks he could catch a glimpse of what might have
been the hospital manipulating him, through another a flash of himself coming
across as self-righteous when he’d thought he was just being honest. Those images would need to be explored and clarified,
and much as he hated to admit it a therapist might be able to help him do that.
He followed the other
three men down off the roof but stopped at the bunkroom while they continued on
downstairs. Ezra was in bed,
asleep. Nathan walked in a little
farther. Most of the psychologist’s
clothes were folded into a neat pile on top of his nightstand and there was an
extra blanket on the bed. Even from here
Ezra looked worn out. Nathan sighed and
walked right up to the bed so he could look down at it’s
occupant. Vin
had said they’d only found out today and the biochemist had to wonder how – he knew
without having to ask that Ezra hadn’t told them. Holding hands had triggered the connection, maybe it had been an accident? That would make sense, but that would also
mean that Ezra could do more than just see and hear ghosts…
Nathan may have been a
skeptic, but he was also a Ghostbuster and had a
healthy measure of scientific curiosity in his own right when it came to things
he didn’t understand. He didn’t think
Ezra had always been able to ‘share’ his special ability because they would
have noticed it before, so did that mean that the disaster had triggered
something? Or was it just because of the
magnitude of what was going on, a kind of unconscious overflow? The biochemist bit his lip. If the contact-triggered effect was being
controlled by Ezra’s conscious mind then right now a person should be able to
touch him all they wanted to and not see or hear a thing.
The echo of those
horrible screams was a fearful shiver that ran up Nathan’s spine as he reached
underneath the blankets to take Ezra’s hand.
The room lit up…but
thankfully stayed silent. A medium-sized
ghost was hovering over the bed, it’s cause of death
obvious from its appearance, and when it realized Nathan could see it it howled silently at him and then darted off. Other spirits whizzed through the room, some
stopping, some circling, some just going straight
through like commuters on a freeway.
Something small and blue with sharp-looking teeth was cowering in one
corner of the ceiling and watching Nathan’s every move with unnerving
intensity. He shook himself and let go
of Ezra’s hand, then pressed two fingers to the man’s neck to check his pulse
and found it a bit fast. Overflow, then,
but the transmission of it to someone else was manifesting physically as though
he’d exerted himself. Which
meant that Ezra’s brain was trying to deal with the bombardment of unnatural
stimuli by telling his body it was something else and in the process causing a
cumulative chemical imbalance….
Nathan quickly tucked
the blankets in a little tighter around his friend and hurried out of the room. They needed to change Ezra’s medication
before the problem got any worse, and he was betting that once they did the
contact-transmission problem would gradually fade away. And once Buck and JD had something working to
block the noise he could back down the dosage in stages…
Chris and Vin looked up as they saw Nathan dart past the family room
making a beeline for the lab and then a moment later heard a triumphant whoop
from Buck and a cheer from JD. The two
men grinned at each other; things were getting back to normal already.
Fin