Chapter Text
After the end of the world, Joey and Red go home.
It’s hard–Red’s unconscious the whole way and Joey barely remembers what it’s like to be in a living body, but he knows that cold like this will kill them both if they don’t get out, so Joey gets her home. The body Red gave him is a good one–strong as he was before he caught a bunch of lead pills, maybe stronger–so he half-carries, half-drags her all the way back home. It’s hard, but as long as Red’s still breathing, it’s the only thing he can do.
Clumsily, Joey strips off Red’s coat and boots and socks and her wet outer layers–he’s grateful to touch things, to be solid and actually do something, but his limbs are stiff and his fingers sting from the cold and it feels like he’s trying to manipulate objects with a bunch of bananas for hands. Eventually, he puts Red to bed under heaps of blankets to try and warm her back up. Her face is red from the cold and her breathing is hoarse but steady.
Joey holds a hand to her forehead to see if she’s running a temperature. She feels hot, but he doesn’t know if that’s because he’s cold or he just can’t remember what a normal forehead temperature feels like. It doesn’t matter anyways–even if she has a fever he can’t do much until she wakes up. He takes a deep breath and keeps his mind away from maybe he was too late. She’s alive for now, and that’s what matters. He’ll do his damn best to keep it that way.
It’s a long wait. Joey hangs up his wet jacket and hat and paces the short length of the apartment. Bangs his legs on a few things he forgot he couldn’t walk through. For a while he sits on the ratty old couch that’s just as uncomfortable as he always imagined it would be, then at one of the chairs in the kitchen. Eventually, he comes right back to the side of Red’s bed and he can’t bring himself to let her alone again.
Waiting hadn’t been so hard when he was a stiff–he’d watched Lauren and Patty all those years and weathered it just fine, or as fine as anyone could weather waiting decades in a mental ward. He’d let the time pass and try not to think too hard about the doped-quiet girl laying senseless in the bed beside him. He didn’t like it, but he did his time. He didn’t even complain that much. Maybe it’s because he’s alive now that he’s so restless.
Maybe it’s because this time, he dares to hope.
“You’ll be angry when you wake up, won’t you, doll?” he asks. His voice feels strange and visceral–he can feel it out his throat, taste the air past his lips, hears it fill the physical space of Red’s closet of a bedroom. It hardly seems like his voice at all. “Coming into your bedroom uninvited, that’s no way for a gentleman to act. But I guess you never thought me a gentleman in the first place.”
Joey looks at Red. Her cheeks are still a little flushed, but she looks peaceful enough. Sleeping like the dead.
Joey sits back in his chair and squeezes his eyes shut. He’s aching all over–he’d forgotten that, what it was like to push his body hard enough that it pushed back. He’d never needed to, as a ghost. All those lost souls who needed help moving on, there wasn’t ever any rush–it wasn’t as if they could get more dead than dead. Well, short of the events of the last forty-eight hours, anyways.
The absurdity of the situation hits him all at once. Just a few days ago, everything was normal. Red was telling terrible jokes and he was ribbing her over how much sugar she put in her coffee. But then that police dick called them to look into that condemned hotel and everything went downhill so fast. There were spirits torn in half and the Grace Group and Madeline and the end of the damn world. He doesn’t think he’ll ever forget it, the light in Red’s eyes and the voice of the whole universe coming out her mouth. She was powerful like she was eternity itself, and in some ways, she was. She did what nobody else could do, made the impossible possible because that’s just what she did, and just like that, it was over.
Now he’s here, a dead man walking, his shirt still crisp like he’d pressed it yesterday.
He tries to take a deep breath and only makes it about halfway before his lungs catch and the air wheezes back out his throat. Before he even knows what’s happening, he’s doubled over, face in hands, hot tears spilling over his fingers. It shakes him and aches him, the blood pulsing through his ears, the ragged breath in his chest, the harsh noise that vibrates all the way to the back of his teeth. He hasn’t cried in decades, and never like this. He never had a reason to–maybe he would have back in the day, if Danny had gotten squibbed off by the mob, but things hadn’t shaken out that way, had they?
Here and now, Red’s all he’s got.
“Please, Red,” he begs. “I’ll wait as long as you want me to, sweetheart. I can be patient if I gotta. But please. Please wake up.”
Red doesn’t answer. It figures–begging never worked with Lauren, either.
Joey wakes up who knows how many hours later to the sound of something moving.
It’s a novel sensation, waking up. He’s not sure when he fell asleep. The novelty wears off pretty fast, though, as pain in his back and neck makes itself known, along with the dryness in his eyes and the ache in all his body. Why is he hurting to begin with? He’s dead–spooks aren’t supposed to feel pain. It’s one of the few benefits of the job. Even when they do hurt, it’s not hurt like this.
A rustling sound snaps him to reality. He looks up to find Red twisting under the covers. She’s moving.
“Red?” he asks, scrambling to his feet. “Red, are you–”
His leg hits something hard and he overbalances, tumbling straight to the floor in a painful thump. He stares at the floor a long moment, trying to figure out what the hell happened. He sees his hands, and…
They’re solid flesh.
That’s…right. He’s alive now. Red brought him to life.
Carefully, he gets back up and straightens his shirt, then goes back to the side of the bed.
Red moans softly. Not like she’s in pain, just somewhere on the border of sleeping and waking.
Joey puts a hand on her shoulder. She’s warm and solid under his fingers. Alive. That settles him a little. As long as she’s okay, he can deal with everything else. He makes his voice gentle and asks: “Is everything okay?”
Slowly, ever so slowly, Red opens her eyes. She looks dazed, but she doesn’t look out of her mind or scared or hurt the way Lauren had in her brief lucid moments. Just confused. Red blinks a few times then looks over to Joey. “You…”
“Me,” Joey says. “How are you feeling, sweetheart?”
Red coughs a few times, then looks around the room again. Some disorientation is probably normal, after what she’s been through. Eventually, she turns back towards Joey. She licks her lip.
“Um,” she says. “I don’t mean to be rude, but who are you?”
Amnesia, is what Red calls it. Joey calls it nothing but trouble.
He knows he should be grateful. Red had the whole universe in her head, same as Lauren and Patty, and Joey knows better than anyone how that usually turns out. In comparison to that, losing a little memory is getting off with a slap on the wrist. Maybe the universe felt sorry for her.
That doesn’t make it easier, though. Red hardly remembers anything. Not her apartment, not who she is, certainly not anything from the last five years.
“Rosangela Blackwell?” Red asks, thumbing through her wallet. “Is that me?”
“The snapshot matches, doesn’t it?” Joey asks.
Red frowns. “I don’t remember.”
“Oh.” It would stand to reason that if Red forgot everything, she wouldn’t remember what she looks like, either. “There’s a mirror in the bathroom, if you want to look.”
Red shakes her head. “It’s fine. You’re definitely not Rosangela, so it’s got to be me. Process of elimination.”
“Most your friends call you Rosa,” Joey supplies.
“Really?” Red asks. “Then what does that make you?”
It’s a fair question. They’re not exactly spirit guide and medium anymore. They’re not exactly…anything, anymore. Thirty feet can’t stop him now–if Joey wanted, he could dust out of here and never look back.
Joey settles on something that’s not quite the truth and not quite a lie: “I’m…family, I guess. Your aunt and I were close.”
“Aunt Lauren, right? That’s the lady in the photo.”
“Yeah,” Joey says. “We were practically joined at the hip. Never went anywhere without each other.”
“You’re not in this photo,” Red points out.
“Well,” Joey says. It’s not like he’s about to explain the ghost thing right now. That’s too much to drop on her all at once. “Um. I’m there. You just can’t see me.”
“Oh,” Red replies. She looks at the photo again. “I guess you were the one behind the camera. Yeah, that makes sense.”
Joey nods. That’s a better excuse than he would have thought of.
“So, um, again. Don’t mean to be rude,” Red continues. “But you seem like you’re kind of…young to be close friends with Aunt Lauren. Like this picture must have been twenty years ago?”
“About twenty-five,” Joey says.
“Yeah. But you don’t look that much older than me. If you’re close friends with Aunt Lauren, shouldn’t you be like, fifty?”
Sometimes, Red’s just too perceptive–a good thing to have in a spirit medium, but Joey appreciated it more when it wasn’t being turned on him. “Take my word for it, sweetheart. I’m a lot older than I look.”
“Well, you definitely talk like it,” Red mutters under her breath. She puts her wallet away and looks at the other things hanging on the walls. “So I’m Rosa. I live in this apartment in New York City and I do…writing? I guess?” She squints at the Village Eye articles tacked to the corkboard. “I don’t seem to be very good at it.”
“I think you’re all right,” Joey says. “You’ve, um, gotten better since then.”
“Really?” Red asks skeptically.
“Good enough to get published. It pays the bills,” Joey says diplomatically. Red hasn’t written that kind of stuff for years, and she’s better off for it. He waves to the couch. “Come sit down, kid. I’ll get you up to speed.”
There’s a lot to cover. Besides telling Red her life story minus the spirit medium stuff, there’s the whole mess of…everything from yesterday.
True to Red’s–or the universe’s, Joey supposes–words, everyone in the city had passed out when Madeline’s vortex had started spewing out void energy, or whatever the hell was going on there. Not a big deal for most people at home or work, but there were people in cars, in the middle of cooking, out in the snow. Nobody knew or remembered what had happened, but that missing time made a big difference that couldn’t be erased–a difference with a body count. According to the news reports, emergency services and hospitals were completely swamped with people caught up in car accidents or injuries from falls or frozen stiff from the storm. In retrospect, it was probably a good thing Joey hadn’t tried taking Red to one.
The news made a big stink about the whole incident, but for once Joey could forgive them–the entire city nearly got blown off the map, so a little bit of panic is warranted.
Red makes the reasonable assumption that her memory trouble is due to the weird city-wide blackout. Joey doesn’t have the heart to correct her–it is technically true, after all. The whole thing just really drives it home that Joey’s…the only person who knows what happened, now. Probably the only person in the whole world. How’s he supposed to deal with that? It’s not like he could tell anyone. They’d toss him in the looney bin faster than he could say “just kidding!”
“Um, Joey?” Red asks.
“Yeah, doll?”
Red sips her mug of coffee and asks: “You brought me home, didn’t you? Last night. You didn’t have to do that.”
Joey frowns. “You think I’d leave a girl out in the cold? I know you think my personality needs work but I’m no heel, sweetheart. You might have died out there.”
“Yeah,” Red says. “I, uh, that came out wrong. I meant to say…thanks? I guess?”
Joey’s brows draw together. He’s not used to Red saying thanks. “Well. You’re welcome.”
“But, um,” Red continues, “I’m feeling a lot better now, outside of the amnesia thing. I’m really not trying to be rude or anything, but–I mean…”
It’s been a while since Red was so awkward with her words. Joey raises a brow and says: “Just spit it out, Red.”
“How long are you staying?”
Joey stares at her. “What do you mean?”
“I mean you…obviously don’t live here,” Red says. “The apartment’s too small for two people and you don’t have clothes or anything here.”
That’s right. Joey doesn’t have anything in the world besides the clothes off his back. Of course she’d think he doesn’t belong here, because in the flesh he doesn’t belong anywhere anymore. Not even with Red.
Joey doesn’t know what kind of face he’s making, but Red seems to get nervous again and says, “I-I can help you get a ride home–I can pay for the cab. That’s the least I can do.”
Joey forces a smile. “A cab in this city? Don’t put yourself out for me. I’d get there faster by walking.”
“What? But it’s freezing out,” Red says.
Joey stands up and shrugs his jacket back on. It’s still a little damp from the snow but it’s dry enough. “You’ve got everything taken care of, right? Not going to pass out again or hurt yourself,” he says. “Don’t need old Joey to hold your hand or tell you what to do. As long as you’re good, I can head out.”
“I didn’t–you don’t have to leave right now,” Red protests.
“If not now, then when?” Joey asks as he buttons up the jacket. “You don’t remember me. You didn’t want me around even when you did. You don’t need a strange man in your apartment causing you trouble at a time like this. I can take a hint, sweetheart.”
He reaches his hat off the end table and puts it on. Even though he’s worn it for the last fifty years as a ghost, it feels different now that it’s real and he’s alive. Heavier and more snug against his brow. Maybe it was always like that and he never bothered to notice. It’s not important anyhow. He opens the door.
“Joey–” Red says.
“Take care of yourself, Red,” Joey says. “You deserve great things. I mean it.”
He goes out of the apartment.
The sun is shining when he steps outside, though that doesn’t count for much when the snow’s almost four inches deep. Usually all these roads would be salted and plowed, but with recent events maybe everyone’s got more important things on their minds.
It’s cold. Joey wishes he had his overcoat, but it’s not his fault he got bumped off in spring. Maybe if he’d known he’d end up like this he would have asked the mob’s trigger men to let him put on a trench before they shot him full of holes. Maybe they would have thought it funny enough to let him do it. After all, what kind of tailor wouldn’t want to pick the clothes they died in?
He picks a direction at random and walks. The cold bites, cold like death except now he can feel the teeth. At least the wind is tolerable–that’s the real killer.
It occurs to him about halfway down the block that he’s probably going about this all wrong. He oughtn’t have walked out like he did, he ought to have stayed put and explained everything to Red–explained it properly, ghosts and all. But he doesn’t want to explain how her family tragedy’s his fault, or about all the trouble she’s caught over the last five years. Even for Red, that’s a lot to swallow–at least the first time around, he had his ghostly self to back him up. Now there’s nothing. Red’s not a spirit medium and he’s not a spirit guide anymore and she doesn’t remember a damn lick of it. That’s a clean break if there ever was one. The perfect opportunity to be free from all the spooks, and him along with them.
Well, it’s too late to go back now.
He’s screwed. He knows he is. He’s got nothing to his name–no home, no job, no papers. He died with four dollars and two bits in his pocket–in his day, that was a good amount of walking-around money, but now it’s not even enough for one of Red’s over-sweetened coffees. He could make a call on a payphone, he supposes, but it’s not like he’s got anyone to call in the first place.
He doesn’t know why Red did this to him–why she’d spend her last morsel of energy to drag an old spook like him back to the world of the living. She had to have known a man couldn’t appear out of the air and everything would be okay. Or maybe she hadn’t. She’d been under a lot of stress at the time.
It’s obvious this wasn’t her first idea. That’s what she said, she wanted him to head out into infinity just like everyone else, and the infinity said no, so plan B was a good old-fashioned resurrection. A regular Lazarus, that’s him.
The point is, she wanted him to pass on, so maybe living is just meant to be a detour to death. Give it a second try and do the paperwork right this time. Madeline had certainly thought so when she caused all these problems. If that’s all Red wanted, Joey could take care of that easy. There were plenty of bridges to jump off of and finish things clean. Drowning couldn’t be worse than getting shot.
Red probably didn’t mean for him to immediately go out and die, though. She got guilty enough over trying to help people who were already dead–if she saw that he died right after leaving her apartment, it would haunt her forever. Especially now that she doesn’t remember he’s supposed to be dead.
He stops at a street corner and leans against a wall to breathe deep. It burns all the way down, the air cold enough to freeze the inside of his nostrils. That’s one feeling he hadn’t missed. His legs feel heavy and there’s a headache pounding between his temples. Did living people deal with this all the time? Maybe he should have cut Red some slack all those nights. He definitely wouldn’t have managed what she did if he’d constantly felt like this.
After a while, he gets up again and instantly, he’s hit with a wave of dizziness that almost blacks him out. He stumbles back against the wall, stars dancing in his vision. Try as he might, he can’t get it to stop. He gasps and his legs buckle and suddenly he’s knees-down in the snow–a small part of his mind knows he’s making a mess of a perfectly good twenty-dollar suit while the rest of his mind scrambles to figure out what the hell is happening to him.
Maybe he’s dying? It doesn’t feel like the last time he died, but that one was pretty sudden. Maybe under more normal circumstances it’s supposed to be like this–the creeping dread and confusion before the big sleep pulls him under.
Nuts. He hadn’t gotten very far from Red at all, had he? She’ll probably hear about this. Well, at least she didn’t have to watch it happen. That would probably be worse.
The world spins for a nauseating second and all at once, the ground rises up to meet him. Wet snow hits him in the face and it’s not soft at all.
What a crummy second run. Well, at least he’d gotten Red home safe. That’s what matters. Darkness creeps up in steps, and Joey closes his eyes.
Just before he blacks out, he thinks he hears Red calling his name.