Chapter Text
Back when Phoebe Spengler was fifteen, she had a whirlwind romance full of wonder and betrayal that ended in a tragedy no one around her could help her mourn, and it changed the trajectory of her life. How do you help someone mourn a loss when they themself didn't know what exactly they lost. Her family tried, they really did, Gary, Callie, even Trevor and Dr. Ray and the others. But all they knew was that this ghost girl appeared in their time of need, lit the match that saved the world, and passed on to the afterlife after delivering the most heartbreakingly romantic goodbye they had ever heard.
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"I'll see you in the fabric of the universe."
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God, how could she even begin to explain to anyone that she was mourning a relationship she didn't even get to have. Where do you begin to tell anyone about how you fell in love with a girl whose time on this earth had already passed. The Phoebe back then who'd never even thought about, let alone considered romance as part of her five-year plan, who barely even had any friends her age sans Podcast, just didn't have the words to explain what she was going through. It took a month spent basically living at the library [that she was thankfully not banned from] to really start putting together why the loss of Melody felt so different to losing her grandfather, why his loss that had felt cold and empty was so different to the burning in her veins when she thought of Melody.
Between all the 'what ifs' and 'could have beens' that stayed unspoken between them, she had foolishly fallen in love. But with Melody gone, those feelings had nowhere to go, especially when she didn't even know what it was she was feeling. That had been what the burning in her veins was, this tangible moving mass of regret that got stronger with each pump of her heart. Loss so deep and visceral that even without the words to name it, her entire being could feel it.
That had been the first thing that had really helped: putting a name to what she was feeling. Her grief was tangible because she wasn't just mourning a friend who truly understood her. It burned and burned because she was mourning a love lost. But the knowledge also made it all worse because she had been so foolish. She had had one singular chance to make it real, to feel physically what her heart had been screaming at her since that first night, and she blew it.
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"Boo. What's wrong?"
"I'm sorry."
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That evening had been rough. The realisation of what she lost alongside realising that it wasn't just her who blew it, Melody had in no small part ruined their one chance together, too. It had blown her straight past denial into anger. She just felt so so angry that Melody couldn’t have waited a few seconds longer, or asked her to ghost walk a minute longer so she could have just kissed the girl. She knows, she does, that that kind of betrayal would have ruined her, but she still wishes it had happened anyway. That would have been easier to get over than this constant regret. At least she would have known what she was missing. But she didn’t, and they didn’t, and now the only one left to regret was Phoebe by herself, and it finally made her snap.
Her anger that night felt so painfully physical, like a deep red shadow had been cast across her eyes. She only blearily remembered taking the hand strapped proton pack Ms. Melnitz left behind after the Garakka incident and charging into the attic. Suffice to say, the poor attic ghost had a really terrible night, and Gary and Callie were not happy about the state the room was in come morning.
Their anger quickly dissipated into nothing in the face of her bursting into tears and crumbling to the floor, though. It was like the dam had broken, and it all came flooding out of her. She’d skipped another step and fallen straight from anger, past bargaining, into depression. Of course she couldn’t even do that right. They could do nothing but kneel around her and pull her into a hug while she laid out the broken shards of her heart for all of them to see.
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"She's gone. I'm still here and she's gone, and she was always gone but she used to be gone in a way that was here and now she isn't and I don't know what to do. I always know what to do but no one ever told me how you move on from something this big. I miss her. I loved her. I still love her."
"Oh honey, it'll be okay, we've got you. Do you want to tell us about this ‘she’? Was... was it the ghost with the match?"
"Her name was Melody, and she made me feel seen. She was better than me at chess and she broke my heart, but she also saved the world for me. Mom... Dad... I don't know what to do anymore."
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She loves her parents for that, for putting their anger aside to comfort her when she needed them. She knows it couldn't have been easy, to try and help her process the death of someone who was already gone by the time she knew them. But they tried, and that mattered more to her. That incident made it easier to talk to her family about Melody. She wasn't even sure when Trevor had climbed into the attic and joined the hug, all she remembers is that when she stopped crying, they were all wrapped tightly around her and that they cared and loved her anyway.
She told them more about her, as time went on. It made her feel like she was keeping Melody's memory alive. She was already immortalised in the article the news ran about the fight with Garakka - Phoebe fought everyone tooth and nail to find out what her full name was so the city would remember her as one of their heroes. It made the ache less, letting her family know what Melody had been like in the brief time they'd known each other. She never told them everything, some things about their relationship felt too personal to share, but things like her dry humour and chess prowess, and the way she met Phoebe's verbal volleys blow for blow, it felt good to share that with other people - so they might remember her as fondly as Phoebe does.
But the dark cloud still hung over her, because all the talking in the world couldn't bring her back. Grief is a cruel beast that way, it can never be tamed, only temporarily soothed. But Phoebe tried her hardest to try to live on, to persevere the way Melody and her granddad would have wanted to.
Her first step had been to start facing her fears. So, she carefully crafted a fire resistant glass box with a Faraday cage built around it as somewhere to safely keep Melody's match box that she'd refused to look at since that fateful day at the firehouse. She even secured a brass chain to the clasp she soldered onto the Faraday cage to make it into a necklace - exposure therapy at its finest. That necklace still hangs faithfully around her neck and close to her heart, nearly three years later. It had become a sort of comfort to her on days when the ache grew too strong, because even now, years later, Phoebe can think of no one but Melody when she thinks of love. It's what motivated her to be where she is today - early entry into MIT and on course for finishing two years early, instead of staying as a full time ghostbuster.
This had always been her plan of course, even before Melody, but if it had been up to her parents she'd be "enjoying things your age!" until she was officially old enough to go off to college. Maybe the old her might have even folded, but she was different after Garakka... After Melody. She had a theory, one she needed a lot of resources and even more privacy to hopefully prove right. So, she fought her parents for a month straight until she finally exhausted them into submission.
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"I am rotting away in this building and I know you can all see it, too. I want to be a ghostbuster, I'm a Spengler and I was born for this. But I can still feel her in these walls. The ghost of a ghost follows me here, I need to go somewhere else, somewhere different, and focus on the things I'm good at. I can't move on if I keep living in a tomb."
"And will this help? You're sure this is what you want? You're my-our kid, and destined for great things Phoebe, we just... want to be there to support you when you need it. So, you have to promise that this will help. That us not being there to check on you won't make you... worse. We've seen the worst before, please just promise us you're sure... And that you'll call at least thrice a week."
"I need this mom... dad. I promise I'll call."
"Don't think we don't see you dodging half the question Pheebs, but, we'll trust you."
"Thank you! Thank you thank you thank you!!"
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She's thankful her parents didn't object to her move here, or worse, move down with her. She's absolutely positive that if they knew what her thesis subject of choice was going to be they'd have pulled her out before you could say 'Ghostbusters'. So far she's gotten away with her research by making sure to keep far ahead on all her class work and regularly presenting both her parents, and the MIT education board the other studies she's been conducting to make sure she has constant access to the lab. Being part of the Ghostbusters has given her a rare opportunity in that the college made a deal with the Paranormal Research Center that she be given a private lab due to the volatile nature of paranormal research. She's made great strides in creating better, more varied tech for ghost-busting, both by perfecting the brass plated proton pack as well as making a more stable containment unit for safer transport and transfer of ghosts from their location of capture to the new labs. Just enough progress that any regular overachiever would be pulling off with the hours she works, but she's no regular overachiever and thankfully no one accounted for that.
Behind all of that very important and real research is where she's been working on her secret project. Energy spikes under the guise of testing new tech and strange reading from the room covered by the idea that she's testing on ghosts have given her the time and resources she needed to build her magnum opus. A machine that she will have to destroy the moment it works, if it works, because she is dangerously playing god.
The Law of conservation of energy states that energy cannot be created nor destroyed, it can only transform. Phoebe has been holding onto that law as a lifeline ever since the idea first took root in her head. In theory and most practice, if energy can be transformed once, it can be transformed again. She's spent every free moment she could drag together these last two years checking and double checking her theory based on that fact before putting it all into practise, and even then this machine still needs a bit of faith to work.
If Melody was waiting for her in the fabric of the universe, then she was going to rip apart space-time itself to stitch her back into existence. But she made sure there is a fail-safe. If the machine works and Melody still chooses to stay gone, then Phoebe will respect her choice and reverse it all, destroy the machine and all her notes and make sure no one knows she ever tried this. But she has to try, at least once, or this guilt and regret will eat at her for the rest of her probably short life. She knows for a fact that if she doesn't do something, anything, about these feelings, they will be what lead to her end. It almost did, once last year when she went back to visit her parents for break.
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"Pheebs, why would you do that? You promised you wouldn't do anything like that again. You said MIT would help! Ghost walking isn't some science experiment Phoebe, you are temporarily killing yourself. Do you understand that? That if something went wrong we could lose you forever and it would be our fault for not being there for you?"
"I-I kn-know. I had t-to try re-reaching h-her. The ot-other d-dimension is the on-only way I-I know how. I’m-m s-sorry."
"Phoebe... Honey we love you, but this... Killing yourself isn't the answer. It's not what your grandfather would have wanted for you, and it's certainly not what she would have wanted for you. You know that. You taught us that about her, that in the end she just wanted you safe. I- We know you've turned down a therapist before but... We can't let you go on like this."
"I-I won't d-do this again. I-It didn't-t work an-anyway."
"If you're sure. We're trusting you here, please. One last chance, or we will be moving up with you. Just, tell us and we'll get you the help you need okay? We love you."
"I l-love you, too-o."
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That had been a... well not new low, she'd done it before for the exact same reason, but a low nonetheless. Admittedly, last time her ghost was right in front of her, and not stretched across the known universe. It was stupid, and foolhardy, but her tests on the Particle Reorganiser had been going terribly for weeks and she just really missed Melody. She felt like she'd hit the wall on her research and had to try a Hail Mary. It didn't work, and she probably won't be doing that again, ever. The pain of her atoms being ripped apart to separate her very soul from her physical body, combined with the chill that seemed to settle into her bones for days after felt even worse the second time around. If she was willing to unpack that, it probably felt too close to Garakka attacking her in her home, but she's sealing that box tight until she has the time and bandwidth to unpack it [Read: Never.].
But her stupid risky idea did give her an intelligent one. What the Particle Reorganiser was missing was some kind of tether - ‘Any emotionally charged object can contain a ghost, as long as it’s experienced some sort of horrific event’ echoes harshly in her mind - so if she wanted to reverse the process, the tether was an even more integral part of the equation. Melody had lived and died and died again with her matches in hand, it would have to work. She'd felt foolish after, for not considering the obvious. But Melody had had a great talent for scrambling her neurons in the brief time Phoebe had known her, of course she could still pull that off even in death [extra death?]. Phoebe thinks her mom would be really proud of her for doing this one thing the regular teenage girl way - pathetically pining and losing a few functional brain cells at the mere thought of a girl. Her mom did say to make mistakes, she's sure playing god comes under that somewhere... probably.
She checks her watch - 2:49:07am - nearly time for her to run the machine.
Phoebe is a woman of science, but she hunts ghosts for a living and comes from a family line that does the same. She’s had to adapt to some superstitions, for many of them are based in fact, and she doesn't think herself above empirical evidence. Besides, three years ago she met a man who could firebend, her suspension of disbelief has no limits it won't stretch to anymore. The Witching Hour on the dot has to be exactly when she pulls this lever. She gently takes off her necklace and places it into the homing beacon slot of the Particle Reorganiser. That matchbox had belonged to Melody in life and in death, it should be able to pull her essences from both walks back together. She double checks all her wires and cables, the numbers on her screen and that the doors are locked. She is... panicking. Deep breaths, if this works, she's a genius unlike any before, and if it doesn't, she's finally going to have to go to an actual therapist. She's got this.
She checks her watch again - 2:59:57am - three... two... one... Here goes everything.
She throws down the lever.
A bright white light starts swirling at the centre of the portal and Phoebe feels a brief sense of deja vu, where has she felt this before..? Then, as the force of the Reorganiser implodes, she remembers .
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"So, was any of it real?"
"Yeah. I actually did beat you at chess."
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The memory flashes through her mind at light-speed before she's blown onto the ground by the force of the implosion at the center of the device, her head knocking harshly against a table leg. She dazedly touches the back of her head, feeling a small bruise forming there. Why didn't she learn from last time and strap herself onto something, Christ. Then the adrenaline kicks in and the pain fades away, because nothing is on fire, and that means that if she looks up, that's it. Either she succeeded, or she might just kill herself in an 'accidental' fire at this lab tonight.
She wants to look up except... she's afraid. What if any of this, all of this, wasn't enough. She can't face it.
Until.
A soft hand, a warm soft hand is on her chin, slowly tilting her head up, while the other is reaching around to gently replace where her own hand still rests on the rising bump on her head. It can't be. She squeezes her eyes shut.
"All of that for a girl you knew for, what? Four days? And you still won't look at me Spengler? That's cold." That voice… That jokingly low tone to sound eerie… It can’t be.
Phoebe's eyes snap open.