UPDATE What's up, it's the proposal guy. You said you wanted to know how this turned out, so I figured I'd tell you. First some context though, because I'm mean and I wanna keep you in suspense longer.
1- I don't wanna doxx us so I'm not telling you where we live, but suffice to say, neither of us are American, and gay marriage has been legal here for less than five years. For both of us, this is the first relationship we've had where marriage was even an OPTION, and I think that's where we've been getting some of that whole 'this has to be a REAL proposal with EVERYTHING' idea.
2- I gotta figure out how to explain this properly. So, I'm pretty used to being the GUY guy in relationships? I was always the one who did the nice gestures, not the one they got done for. Before I met my dream guy, I didn't really notice or care that it was such a thing, I just assumed that's how shit worked. Also, I promised I wouldn't talk a lot about his stuff here, but his last boyfriend before me SUCKED. Anyway point here is, it turns out we both REALLY like feeling swept off our feet sometimes, and a big part of finding each other has been getting to feel special for once? That's a stupid sappy way of putting it the point here is I think all that's what morphed into "I need to be the one getting proposed to, also it has to be completely perfect", and then our Petty & Extra genes got involved.
So I'm sitting in bed thinking about all that up there, and watching all the comments coming in basically being like "Dude, you are BLOWING this" on repeat, and telling me to compromise, and I look up and see him flossing in the bathroom and making all these doofy faces at the mirror, and it's like a switch just flips in my brain, and I'm like "Oh, I'd rather he gets to have his perfect proposal than we both have an okay one". I'm gonna do it.
Morning rolls around, and while I'm 'out for my jog like normal' I hit up a pawn shop for a temp ring (the ring pop thing is cute but NOT HIM). I found one I was at least confident wouldn't get ruined the first time he got his hands greasy (he fixes old machines as a hobby it's hot as hell), got back home, and hid the box in the toe of my nasty ass workout shoes in the bedroom closet, since I figured he'd check there last.
He was still asleep, because he stays up late no matter what and then is SHOCKED he's tired the next day, so I called and booked a table at our usual anniversary spot. (Side note about the 'he picks bad restaurants' thing. This isn't an 'I like Greek, you like Chinese' situation, dude's just BAD at finding places. He either assumes pricey is tasty and I get to eat some overrated gourmet bullshit, or he'll try and find something hip and underground and risk giving us food poisoning again, and he REFUSES to give up and pick somewhere we've been before when it's his turn to plan date night. I'm obsessed with him <3.) Date was set, I'd propose on the 21st.
Some of you might have noticed this, but fun fact! It's currently the 16th.
Last night I'm doing dishes and he's been sent to our room for mug collection duty, and he's taking FOREVER, so I go check just in case he found the ring, because the man's a gift tracking BLOODHOUND. Turns out he hasn't, he's found my Angry Box.
I assume other people have an Angry Box? Basically, we had this huge messy fight right when we first moved in together, and I never wanna let it get that bad again, so I have this shoebox where I keep a bunch of our stuff I can look at if we're fighting and hopefully cool off. There's one of those photo booth roll things, letters we wrote when he moved back with his parents for COVID, the wine cork from our first date, shit like that. Anyway, he's just sitting on the floor staring at it, and I explain about the Angry Box, and then he! Proposes!!! Kind of.
He definitely didn't have anything prepared, because by 'propose' I mean 'ugly cried & rambled at me for several minutes before I figured out it WAS a proposal', but once I got on the same page it was amazing. I said yes, and he had to admit he didn't have a ring for me because he was CONVINCED he'd win and I'd do it, so I grabbed mine because, yeah, he was right. He was like "this is the ugliest ring I've ever seen" and I was like yeah well the plan is to replace it later and he went "No. You can pry this off my cold dead fingers. After I'm buried with it." So I guess it's not a temporary ring anymore.
I'm just gonna go ahead and skip to this morning. I pointed out we still have the reservation, and he said I should propose there anyway because "We can get a free dessert. They have those creme brulee shot glasses you like. And for love, or something" and I said ok deal, but that means you gotta get me a ring to keep it fair, and his eyes LIT UP. When I swung by his work for lunch he was still on the phone with a jeweler and he had a whole page of notes on three other ones. Pray for me.
OH PS: I was RIGHT that he'd been the one behind the cat biting me, but it wasn't about the proposal stuff, it's because I paid my baby sister three dollars to shout 'fuck you' every single time he enters a room she's in for (if you ask me, he should be madder at my sister for charging so little), and he did it by giving her a bunch of treats for biting his hands too, so now neither of us can pet our baby girl without oven mitts on. HOLY SHIT I love this man.
Oh my goddddddd I love everything about this <333 I awwww'd out loud on a voice call, like, six times while reading. You two are friggin perfect for each other and so obviously smitten with each other and I wish y'all all the happiness in the world
PS Are y'all planning to have a big wedding? If so oh boy I can't WAIT to get that one in the inbox
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Sham Sacrifice
(Hi it's time for my favorite headcanon)
...
Vlad Masters sat firm and proper on the Fenton Family couch, legs crossed, teacup pinched in his fingertips, fighting subtly against the sinkhole that came with the mistake of taking Jack’s usual spot on the couch. He appeared with all the same charm and delightfulness of an ant swarm rearranging your picnic.
Danny stood at the doorway, just-still-in-the-kitchen, just not inviting himself to join the adults in the living room where Jack boomed and rambled and Vlad sat so stiff and polite and nice that his tea in his hands was going cold.
“Oh, Danny you’ll love this story—Danny, you should join us—Danny this was, what, summer of ’84? When was that heatwave, Vladdy? The one where you—”
“There’s no need to bore Daniel with the mad ravings of two old kooks, Jack. Kids would rather be off at the mall or—some store, surely. No need to stick around Daniel on my behalf. I assure you I won’t be offended if you leave.”
“No worries, V-man. I’m good right here. I love hearing Dad’s stories." Danny met Vlad's challenge, speaking with more poisonous courtesy than Vlad had proffered first. "In fact I think he should tell a few more, if he’s got more in mind.”
“In fact I do have more in mind—” Jack answered.
Neither Danny nor Vlad were listening to Jack. They held eye-contact, Danny with a stern unblinkingness of a sheepdog on duty. A lot was said without words. A lot was understood when Vlad decided to visit through the front door. Vlad only used the front door when he wanted something.
And it was never good when Vlad wanted something.
“—the core reactor project, yeah? That summer? That was in the lab with no A/C. Top floor. We were sweating like pigs, all of us. And I dared you to eat the really moldy pizza from our fridge the night before and you ralphed right into—”
“—Surely you remember this more fondly than I do. Daniel, really, you can go.”
Not a chance.
“Actually,” Danny answered, brightening some as his opportunity struck. “I am interested in this. For science class I need to write a report on the invention of an important piece of technology. I was gonna ask Mom and Dad about the Ghost Portal. And now that you’re here, I can get the whole history.”
Jack made a giddy little noise. He leaned forward, words primed, but Vlad was quicker to the draw.
“Sorry to say, your faith in me is unfounded. I wasn’t the portal guy back in college—that was always your mother and father’s passion project. I was their skeptic.”
“Bet that’s got you feeling pretty foolish right now, doesn’t it V-man?” Jack chided, a quick jab to Vlad’s ribs that nearly unseated the teacup from his suspended saucer. “Considering the fully-functioning portal right beneath our toes.”
“I hardly feel foolish, Jack. Your calculation for the portal in college was never going to work.”
“What do you mean? Of course it did.” Jack thumped the ground with his foot. “It’s running the old girl right now.”
At this, Vlad’s eyes narrowed. For the first time he’d been shaken off whatever skeezy machinations had brought him in. His pride was being challenged, and by Jack no less.
“Absolutely not. With that calculation? Absolutely not.”
“Well forget the tea biscuits Vlad, because you’re going to be eating your words in a second. Mads, hold my spot,” Jack said, as if anyone was planning to take his spot. He bounced from the couch, scooted from the living room, and vanished into the dark maw of the lab stairs, leaving only the waning beat of his footsteps behind.
His absence filled only a swallowing few seconds. The footsteps returned, bounding upward, creaking with his heavy cadence, and Jack bounced back into the room in much the manner he left. A pad of yellow lined paper was clutched in his hand. When he dropped it on the coffee table, it revealed row after row of tight scribble, churning math, carrying down the page and occupying two entire pages more that Jack flipped through.
“Same baby I came up with in college. It just needed heavier dampening and higher voltage than what we made back then. The portal downstairs has that in spades. Well, in like two-thirds of a spade.” Jack tapped something on the last line. “The projection was still only hitting 70% of the threshold we calculated to reach dimension penetration. But it’s an art, not just a science. We fired it up anyway, and it took!”
Vlad grabbed the paper pad, agitated. His eyes ran over it. Then again. Until he settled on one line, a firmness overcoming his face. He tossed the pad back onto the coffee table, and Vlad leaned back into the couch, arms crossed.
“The lambda, Jack.”
“The lambda?”
“Check it again.”
Jack did, lips pursed, pad of paper nearly swallowed in his big meaty hand.
“What about--?”
“It squares. The units don’t balance otherwise. It originates from an integration step of λ*∂λ/∂t. It squares.”
Jack’s brow remained furrowed, firm, until delight cracked into his eyes, and he let out a laugh.
“Gods, my handwriting is gonna be the death of us. Mads,” he tapped something unseen on the second page. “That’s the genius of Vladdy. Cracked this puppy wide open with just a glance. I never noticed that in all my checking. That explains the missing 30%, at least. That explains how the portal took. Lucky for you Danny that Vlad was here—”
“Jack,” Maddie said.
“—your report can have the correct formula. It’ll be—”
“—Jack—”
“—A+ worthy—”
“—Jack,” Maddie said, curt. “Lambda is the ambient ecto-energy. It’s a few ten-thousandths of a unit.”
“It—huh.”
Maddie had surfaced a pen from her pocket. She sheared a few blank pages out from the back of the pad and started the formula fresh. She made quick work of copying it over, quicker work of solving it through – lambda-squared intact.
She hit the final line and hatched a pen mark beneath the number. Jack stared, confused.
“That can’t… no.”
He repeated the same. New pages torn loose. Formula copied over, processed, line by line by line—lambda squared—by line by line by line.
Jack settled on his answer. Same as Maddie’s.
Confusion made his face tense.
“So it’s not 70% of the way to the threshold… It’s 0.013% of the way to the threshold.”
He held the pen hard, his whole body holding firm and taut as the gears turned in his head. Jack’s eyes flickered across the formula, again and again and again. He looked to Maddie, like a dog issued a command he did not understand.
“But it worked,” he said, small. “But it worked.”
Jack stood, robotic almost, eyes lost in something far away. He disappeared into the lab almost as quickly as he had a few minutes before, but now he exited with a smoothness and a quietness so very uncharacteristic of him. It bothered Danny, somewhere deep in his gut.
Maddie followed, a possession matching Jack’s.
Danny’s fingers curled and uncurled. He’d succeeded. He’s successfully interrupted Vlad’s… whatever this was. But the disquiet infected him. He didn’t like it.
“So what does that mean?” Danny asked, perhaps to Vlad. “What’s wrong with the calculation?”
Vlad sipped on tea ice cold.
“Who knows?” Vlad lied.
…
The math didn’t work.
Maddie and Jack burned through paper, burned through pencils, burned through hours.
The math didn’t work.
Clothes stuck to skin. Sweat lingered fetid and stale in the cold basement air. Exhaustion beat like a slurry through their veins.
The math didn’t work.
The portal supervised all, placidly green, the light for their table, the light for their work when the lightbulb overhead burnt clean out and neither Jack nor Maddie could be pulled away to replace it. It stood, it watched, a testament of contradiction to everything they could not solve on paper, and yet everything they built directly into the fabric of reality.
And it should never have worked.
They threw every radical what-if they’d ever conceived over 20 years of ghost research.
The ecto-ether layer.
The latent activation stitches in space fabric.
The anti-ectomatter collision proposal.
The positive-feedback crystallization theory.
And still nothing worked.
All together, every crackpot theory in their favor taken for granted, racked them up to an activation energy 200x more potent than the calculation, and still just 2% of what would be needed to rip open, and hold open, a stable fissure between their reality and the ghost zone.
Maybe by pure luck, unfathomable luck, Fentonworks basement was directly situated atop a natural portal.
Maybe that would explain ripping it open. It did nothing to explain the stability. Natural portals were unstable by definition. There and gone in a few seconds. Not hours, days, weeks, months, a year, that the Fenton Portal had been open. Never so much as faltering.
It was late. 3am ticked away to 4am, and 4:30am. The discarded paper stacked higher than Jack and Maddie both. Calluses oozed from their hands at another attempt, and another, and another.
Maddie flipped through a folder’s worth of yellowed papers, aggressively thumbed over and over after two decades left untouched. And she settled on the one she’d passed over a few dozen times already, always seeking something else, something better.
This time she unsheathed it, and she placed it on the lab table.
“…If a mouse died. In the machine. If a mouse ran through the machine and accidentally bridged two live wires, and died of violent electrocution. 500 milliamps. Instantly melted into the circuitry.”
Maddie’s mouth was cotton-dry while she wrote. Ambient ecto-energy was low. Always very, very low.
Unless something very, very bad happened to something with the capacity to become a ghost.
The numbers wove. Maddie started the formula fresh, and it was pure muscle memory. A mouse. A big mouse, even. A 99th percentile beast of a mouse. And a wire that had been wired incorrectly. Something grounded that never actually grounded. An absolutely horrific amount of electricity.
0.37%, by pure numbers. If she included every permissive crackpot idea they had thrown on top, it topped out at 6% of the needed activation threshold.
Not a mouse.
“A cat,” Jack said, words gummy, tongue dry, face tired. “If we’ve got mice down here, maybe… a stray cat wandered in. Chased the mouse.”
Maddie nodded. It didn’t matter if it made sense.
She penned it in. A large cat. A devastating electrical short. Cats carried more ecto-potential than mice did. Ecto-potential did not necessarily go up with size. It went up with complexity. The things with the most ecto-potential were the things that most became ghosts.
1.45%, by pure numbers. 18% at absolute, absolute crackpot best.
“A dog,” Jack proposed with a shaky laugh. He swallowed. “A mouse… chased by a cat… chased by a dog… all electrocuted at once”
Maddie didn’t say the thing they both knew, which was that both of them would have noticed the evidence left behind by the electrically exploded pieces of a dog.
Maddie did it anyway. A mouse and a cat and a medium-sized dog, maybe just small enough to notice no evidence of, all together. All at once. All violently ripped apart, sacrificed to a machine still asleep in its wall.
Mice did not often make ghosts. Cats did not either. Dogs, occasionally. But infrequently. Very infrequently.
37%. At best.
“Jack.”
“Maddie, I know just—maybe something really smart—”
“—Jack—”
“—like an octopus—”
“Jack.”
“I hear, maybe, pigs are smart. If it was—”
Maddie was writing, already. Not for a pig. Not an octopus. Jack watched, and he knew what the numbers meant. The ecto-potential she penned gave her away. An ecto-potential that high.
65kg, an estimate
10,000 milliamps, a catastrophic accident, a death certificate.
A human’s amount of ecto-potential.
Maddie wrote.
And she wrote.
And she did not apply a single crackpot theory, not a single discredited proposal, not an ounce of exaggeration.
138%.
Threshold, and then some.
Comfortable, easily, then some.
For the first time, after all the hundreds of times she and Jack had penned this equation over the course of 2 decades, the number met her and Jack’s threshold.
A breakthrough.
A revelation.
A pure eureka moment.
Jack and Maddie were silent.
Alone in a humming basement. Alone with only the soft swirls of the portal for company, happy, stable, purring its contentment, singing to the cold air.
“It has to be something else,” Maddie said. And she said it weakly. And she said it childishly.
“You’re right. It can’t be this,” Jack echoed. “If someone died down here, we’d know. Dead bodies don’t walk away. We’d have seen it. O-or even if, if the body got stuck in the portal, we’d have heard of someone going missing.”
Maddie sat, quiet. A thought held her mind hostage.
“Unless they didn’t go missing,” Maddie said, and she said it barely audibly. “Unless the portal spit them right back out.”
“Then—that’s what I said—a dead body, on the floor, we’d have seen.”
“Not a dead body.”
“It had to be lethal, Mads—”
“I know Jack. But if they died, here, in the portal Jack, then their ghost did not get ripped away from the body and sent to the Ghost Zone. …They ripped the Ghost Zone here.” Palms slick with sweat smoothed over her notes. She pointed to one specific line and found her pen tip trembled no matter how badly she stabilized it. “The ecto-potential of a creature is how strong of a pull their ghost creates on the Ghost Zone. A strong enough pull means the ghost can reach the Ghost Zone and stabilize, like a fish reeling itself up, yeah? We agree on this Jack, yes?”
“Yes,” Jack answered.
“It’s what makes the math even work, Jack. Someone dying in the portal didn’t reel themselves to the boat. They reeled the boat in. Jack, they brought the Ghost Zone here…” Maddie wasn’t breathing right. She pulled sweat-soaked bangs away from her face. “Their ghost never left their body Jack. They died, Jack. And they walked back out.”
“…No. No,” Jack said. “No, they didn’t.”
“Then what?” Maddie asked.
Jack stared. He looked away. He didn’t like the expression on Maddie’s face.
“It—what about the ecto-ether theory?” Jack said, of the theory they’d tested and retested and tested all over, all night. He grabbed his pencil back up and pointed it aimlessly at Maddie’s piece of paper, pointed end out in self-defense. “If the ecto-ether is maybe… if it’s only 250-times stronger than we calculated. Then it could…”
Jack’s voice died. His pencil hung idle. Maddie’s paper remained unblemished.
“If it… was a pig,” Jack offered. “If it was a pig that died in the portal.”
“How, Jack? How would a pig get in? We lock all the doors at night, Jack. No one else can get in, Jack. It’s just us, Jack.”
Jack and Maddie were not there when the portal turned on.
Maddie’s statement carried two possibilities. Only two. Both felt like claws digging all the flesh right out of Jack’s heart.
“I want… I want to try the ecto-ether theory again,” Jack choked. “I think it’s the ecto-ether. I think it’ll work.”
Jack slid a piece of paper over, already covered in scribbles. In its single untouched corner, he started the equation for the several-thousandth time that night.
Above their head, birds were singing.
Sunrise hailed unseen from the windowless laboratory.
…
At 6am, Vlad answered his cell phone. The reception crackled, struggling through the layers of sheetrock above his head.
“Vlad?” Maddie’s voice crackled. “Sorry, did I wake you up?”
“Not at all my dear.” Vlad leaned his weight against the wall, playing with the singsong melody in his voice. “But you sound exhausted. Is anything the matter?”
“Yes. Well… Yes. Jack and I have—all night—trying to fix the equation.”
“Naturally.”
“We found something that maybe works.”
“Oh?” Vlad asked. He straightened, pacing now, cracklingly attentive. “And what might that—”
“If someone died. Activating the portal. We have an on-switch inside the portal’s interior. The trigger we use to press it is external to the portal, of course. But if someone went inside the portal, and they pressed it directly, and if they died, and pulled the Ghost Zone here—”
Vlad’s red eyes reflected pools of iridescent green. He twirled his free hand in the fringes of his cape, tongue working over the fanged edges of his teeth. He stared, consumed, forward.
“—and just, you, I was thinking, you’re the only other expert I’d trust to… maybe weigh in.”
“What does Jack think?”
“He denies it. He’s still. He’s trying other theories.”
“Well who knows, surely? The answer may lie somewhere you haven’t looked.”
“…I’ve looked everywhere, Vlad. That's the thing. There is no more ‘somewhere else’. I’ve looked.”
“You sound like your mind is made up.”
“I just… if maybe you have some idea.”
“Am I meant to talk you out of this idea?”
“Vlad.”
“Do you think I have some secret information you don’t? Sorry to say, I’m just your skeptic.” Some noise came through muffled from the other side. Vlad flashed a smile. “But…as your skeptic I will offer you this—It all sounds a bit absurd, doesn’t it? To kill someone and have them come back intact and… for you to never notice? Who would they be? How would they be? Surely not human anymore, surely. How would you never notice?”
Vlad paced forward, booted feet clicking along his laboratory floor.
“It would be ridiculous,” he continued, with a building crescendo, “so unfathomably self-centered surely, to not notice something like that befall someone so close to you, who died at the hands of your own invention? …If I’m correctly inferring who, in your household, you suspect of having activated the portal?” Vlad’s tongue lingered along his teeth.
Maddie’s line held, quiet. And the seconds of static drew long.
“Ah, apologies. I’ve overstepped,” Vlad continued. “I meant this as a vote of confidence in you. You and Jack both. Two people as attentive, caring, compassionate as yourselves. You would notice. I promise.”
“You’re… Okay, thank you, Vlad. I appreciate it.”
“Is there anything else, my dear?”
“No. No. Thank you, Vlad. I’ll think about this.”
Maddie’s line clicked dead. A chuckle built to Vlad’s lips and he let his head tip back with mirth. It lasted only a moment. He stowed his phone. And as if the interruption had never happened, Vlad reaffixed his attention on his own portal swirling in front of him. It bathed him, swimming green, purring contentment.
And Vlad vanished into his portal.
(Chapter 2)
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