Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Boss, this guy wants to talk to you!”

Ray abandoned organizing the latest batch of books and headed for the front desk where Kylie was sitting, the phone dangling from her hand.

“Ray Stantz here.” The guy on the other end was mad. And unreasonable. “No, sir, there are no refunds if a book fails to help you conjure a demon.” Wow. He might be kind of crazy, too. No one was going to stick a book in that orifice. “You really shouldn’t be conjuring anything, anyway.” There was more yelling and possibly some frothing at the mouth, and Ray decided the conversation was over. “Have a nice day.”

Kylie smirked at him as he settled the receiver back on its hook. “I figured you’d be more polite than me.”

Which was true, mostly. 

“I suppose if he did conjure something, maybe it’d fix our problem,” he mused. He loved his bookshop, but he was bored . 

They hadn’t gone out on an exciting call in more than a week. Peck’s restrictions pretty much resigned them to Class Twos or Class Eleven megaspectres and Ray was seriously hoping for the latter as the days dragged on. Okay, maybe not. His jaw still hurt from Idulnas’s punch a couple of weeks ago. 

Still, if someone like that guy on the phone got into something that needed a real team effort, Peck would have to let them back out into the field, right? And someone was always bound to get into something. It was inevitable. This was New York City , for goodness sake.

Really, this all came down to the perennial pissing contest between Venkman and Peck. Peter and Peck’s Perennial Pissing Contest. Heh. 

If Peter hadn’t taken such an instant dislike to the man, then maybe Ray himself wouldn’t be restricted to English muffins and peanut butter for breakfast until he lost the requisite 15 pounds (and really, did he need to lose 15 pounds? He was perfectly healthy!).

But that was maybe giving Peter too much of the credit for this battle of the wills. Peck earned his dickless moniker: Unyielding, self-important, power-hungry… Huh. That was kind of Peter, too, though, wasn’t it?

“Static in the intersection,” he murmured, a smile on his face.

“What?” Kylie looked at him with only mild curiosity. She was used to him blurting out things as he thought.

“Nothing,” he assured her. There had to be a huge cosmic Venn diagram that explained Peter’s relationships with people like Peck and Janine and Egon, electricity and friction dancing along the edges where his greed and Peck’s, his cynicism and Janine’s, his biting humor and Egon’s combined.

Oh my God, he moaned mentally, as he realized he was actually considering sketching this out, we need a decent job soon!

Ray shook his head and tried to dislodge the mathematical image from his brain.

“I’ll be in the back, sorting books,” he told Kylie, sighing.

If only they could figure out a way out of Peck’s restrictions….

Chapter Text

Peter’s nerve-endings still reached for something dark and weird and exhilarating, even as he took a huge ohmyfuckingodthatwaspainful breath and reveled in his freedom. His pack weighed a thousand pounds and the world around him was sharp and untainted and fabulous and wow, did he need to just run in forty directions and curl up in a ball and sob at the same time.

So, pretty much what it was like last time. This time, though, he was fully conscious and not dying from lack of oxygen, which gave him a chance to feel all of it more clearly. 

He only had one question as his muscles shook and ground his broken ribs against themselves:

“So, which one of you mooks shot me?” 

“He did it,” his three friends replied in unison.

Peter glared at them all. Not that he could see them so well, the way the world was blurring in and out. But their fake innocent looks as they pointed at each other still came through. 

Of course, Egon and Ray were going to cover for Winston, and of course, Winston had been the one to do the dirty work. Which was actually pretty reassuring. If he hadn’t already been taking care of business himself, Peter would have wanted Winston to end this any way he could.

Not that that helped the agony from his fall any. He should probably be in a hospital sooner rather than later. The one good thing you could say about possession was that there was a hell of a massive endorphin rush at the end. The pain should have laid him out flat, but he was on his feet and conscious, for now. Hell, the last time, the after-effects had even kept him from asphyxiating. Well, for a couple of minutes, anyway.

He gave Winston a scathing look, and turned toward the exit of the amusement park that had reverted to its benign, overpriced self. Even the damn stuffed animals they’d been shooting all afternoon were miraculously unhurt, hanging in their booths. He did love it when the ghosts hit the reset button at the end. No annoying lawsuits or Peck bitching at them about property damage. If he had 206 intact bones, this could be considered a good day.

The stomachache he’d brought with him from New York flared to life a little and he sucked it up and didn’t barf, because that would have hurt enough to kill him right now. At least his legs were in working order. Rubbery, but he was putting one foot in front of the other, damn it.

“Well the Marine who shot me gets to carry me if I pass out before I get to the ambulance.”

Which of course, he did.

He came to on the way to the hospital, which just reminded him that he’d broken a whole lot of somethings in his torso. The gurney was like a rock grinding against raw bone ends as the rig trundled down the street, and he couldn’t wait to get the good meds from the ER docs.

“Dr. Venkman, my name is Barry,” said a skinny paramedic who was probably taller than Egon from the way he was hunched over the gurney. “Do you remember what happened to you?”

“Pretty sure you don’t want to know the details, but yeah.” Which proved that Egon was probably pulling his leg earlier when they’d been discussing what would happen when they found the kid the gooper possessed.

“In that case, yes, we blast them. A weak spread shouldn’t do the host… too much harm.”

“And by that, you mean…?” Peter had asked. Just wanting to be clear.

“Some short term memory loss and possible violent bowel evacuation.”

The real problem with Egon was that you could never really tell when he was joking.

“Do you know where you are?”

“Schenectady,” he answered readily, blinking at the hellacious bright light the guy flashed in his eyes. He gave him the date and the name of the place they’d dehaunted to prove he was really oriented to time and place. He hadn’t landed on his head, after all, and the Six hadn’t had a chance to eat any of his brain.

“Your friends told us you were, um… partially neutronized?” He stumbled over the word.

“Yep.” Peter closed his eyes. Winston was responsible for the tingly buzzing in his feet and hands, all right. The movement of the ambulance was making him nauseated.

“And fell about 20 feet?”

“Sounds right.” He hadn’t actually noted the distance, what with the being dropped out of his own brain onto the midway.

“It looks like you landed on your shoulder.” Back on solid medical footing, the guy’s voice firmed up. “It’s possible you broke your shoulder blade and at least a couple of ribs. Maybe your arm.”

“Isn’t that a fun list? Speaking of which, not that I advocate drug-seeking behavior, but…”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Venkman.” At least he really did sound apologetic. “We’re going to have to wait until the doctor assesses you. We’re nearly to the hospital. It won’t be long.”

Peter tried really hard to drop off to sleep. “I’ll be counting the minutes.”

Turned out it was at least 30 of them, give or take—he didn’t fall asleep, but he might have blacked out briefly when they transferred him to a hospital gurney to take him for imaging—before someone stuck his uninjured arm with a needle and started the good drugs. By that time, the vaguely bouncy-ball feeling of Winston’s assault had mostly worn off. 

Even with the meds easing away the worst of the knives jabbing into his side and arm, his stomach was still bothering him. Hadn’t started up again until he was in the MRI, and it wasn’t any worse than it had been after the gym this morning, but still…. By the time the doctors had bound his arm to his side and moved him into a room, he was ready to ask Egon a very important question, which he did the moment Spengler and Ray and Winston were finally allowed in to see him.

“You were joking about the bowel thing, right, Spengs?” Because if there was any explosive evacuation, he needed a little extra time to get to the bathroom and lock the door.

Egon gave him a momentary blank look before the question connected. “That would only have applied if the Class Six had vacated during the neutronization,” he assured him.

Didn’t stop his gut from churning. Maybe it was the drugs, in which case it was going to have to just churn because he was not giving those up.

“How you feeling?” Winston asked. 

“Like I got neutronized, fell two stories onto unyielding concrete, and broke a total of four bones.” He didn’t glare this time, because, really, Winston had only been doing his job. “Thanks for that, by the way.”

“Sorry, man,” he replied sincerely.

Peter shrugged with his eyes because it was the only part that didn’t hurt. Winston being Winston, he got the message, and a measure of stress seemed to wash out of him as he leaned against the window sill.

“You ready to tell us how you fought that sucker off?” Zed asked.

“We had a little counseling session in my old office at Columbia.” Egon and Ray looked ridiculously excited, so Peter went into detail, going over how the ghost had been able to carry on an engaged conversation with him in that imaginary space while it was also doing whatever it was doing in the real world. (Winston filled that in, and it was basically just trying to kill everyone in sight and warp reality for the hell of it. Pretty standard.)

“The thing was, it wanted to eat me, but it couldn’t. I’m still not quite sure whether it needed me to be afraid or needed me to run, but I wasn’t doing either so it was just… stuck.”

“That’s fascinating,” Egon murmured. Because of course it was. “Perhaps it had a code or edict that stated it could only devour those who acted like prey.”

“I’ll have to ask Kylie to research that when we get home,” Ray put in, bouncing on his toes.

“That doesn’t explain how you got it to vacate the premises,” Winston reminded him.

Peter smiled. He was really sort of proud of this part. “I convinced it that anywhere would be better than trapped in my brain for eternity.”

“You got my vote.”

“I love it when you think you’re funny, Winston.” Peter tried to get himself comfortable, but it was impossible. “It didn’t want you ‘cause you’re a Boy Scout on steroids, it thought Egon and Ray were bland, and I told it you’d probably gotten everyone else to safety while we were in session. So it was either hang out in my office for a hundred years or go look for someone else.”

“Well reasoned, Dr. Venkman,” Egon said quietly. Which meant a lot. And would have meant more if Peter hadn’t exhausted himself just telling the story.

“How were you so sure it would need to go looking for someone else?” Ray asked.

“Simple,” Peter replied. God, he ached! “It had been chowing down on people every generation like clockwork. It couldn’t go without a regular fix, could it?”

“Like an addiction,” Winston muttered, impressed.

“Like an addiction,” Peter echoed, eyes closing of their own accord.

“You’re starting to become a real expert on possession, Pete,” Ray offered after a long moment of silence while Peter tried to catch his breath.

“An expertise I wouldn’t even wish on Peck.” The whole idea of Peck, possessed, was not a pleasant one. The guy was bad enough when he was in charge of his mind.

“Hey, Pete, did they tell you you had to eat their slop?” Winston asked. “We thought maybe we’d stay for dinner before they kick us out.”

Just the thought of food made his stomach gurgle and he opened his eyes and made a face. “Knock yourself out, Zed,” he told him. “I can still taste the metal in the back of my throat.”

Another weird holdover. Far less appealing than the post-possession high. Sort of wished he had that back right now, as the pain kept trying to catch up to him. The guys took him at his word and started discussing what they’d order, and Pete drifted in his mind, going over the afternoon’s festivities.

“I bet after a few hundred years you built up a little soul addiction, didn’t you?”

The high really was something. So was the crash that came afterward.

“Hey, Egon?”

His friends all stopped dead in the middle of their conversation and looked at him. Maybe it was something in his voice.

“Yes, Peter?”

“Could a human get addicted to possession?” 

“Humans can get addicted to almost anything, Peter,” Egon replied. He didn’t have the thoughtful look on his face that Ray had. Or the worried one that Winston did. Which was funny, because Peter was asking as a professional. “You would know that better than any of us.”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t think it would work that way, though, Pete,” Ray jumped in after a moment. “I mean, sure, the endorphin rush that’s a normal biological process following that kind of major psychic disruption might seem like it could be addictive, but a person’s body wouldn’t crave it the way it craves, say, speed or methamphetamines.”

Probably not. Not the body anyway.

“I think I’m going to try to take a nap.”

And he settled in and did just that.

Chapter Text

“You okay, Pete?”

“Fabulous, Winston. Thanks.” 

“Uh huh.”

Peter Venkman’s color was off, and he sat ramrod straight and braced against the pain as they waited to board the jet back to New York City. He’d pretty much insisted they go right to the airport from his hospital room, eager to “get the hell back to civilization.” The hospital wasn’t thrilled to let him go, but he’d waved off the low-grade fever that had started overnight and promised to sign himself out AMA if they didn’t release him willingly. Twenty-four hours was all he was willing to put up with.

Once he’d napped after the weird conversation last night, Pete had bounced back to his usual self, but with more groaning and whining. He’d sort of shrugged off the first possession, too, actually. Sure, the first one was more a case of being shoved out of his body and into Purgatory, but from what he’d said, this time he’d been shoved into an office in his mind, which was kind of the same thing.

And sort of reassuring. Winston could admit to himself that he almost hadn’t fired at Pete in that amusement park. He knew at the time that they were getting nowhere shooting at the toys the Class Six had sent after them. He knew the only way to end it was to take the fight to the thing renting space in Peter’s body. 

But firing a proton stream at one of your best friends? 

It had almost been a relief to have Peter call him on it in such a way that it was clear he hadn’t experienced the shot first-hand. Back in control of himself and at least able to heal from his injuries, Peter had done what he did best and put them all at ease.

And then he’d collapsed between one step and another.

The three hours of waiting in the ER before they’d been shown to his hospital room had been hell, and the doctor’s list of injuries had tied Winston’s gut in knots, but, as always, the whole thing had quickly become just another interesting story for the memoirs Peter would undoubtedly write about their lives as Ghostbusters.

“Dr. Stantz, we’re ready for you gentlemen to board now.”

“Thank God,” Peter murmured exhaustedly. He struggled to his feet with Winston’s help and stumbled toward the door. The unsteady gait was as much the pain pills he’d taken way too willingly as it was the weakness, but the knowledge didn’t calm Winston’s mental alert system a bit.

If this was all one more day in the life, why was Winston still waiting for the other shoe to drop?

“Peter, you look horrible.”

Winston looked up from his book at Ray’s comment and saw the engineer leaning over the seat in front of Pete’s, watching their friend. Winston had sat across the aisle to give Peter space to stretch out, but now he was worrying that he’d left him alone too long.

Peter was sweating. His face was pale, even a little greenish and waxy, and he was curled up uncomfortably on the seats.

“Pete, you okay?” he asked, moving to kneel next to his friend. He looked up at Ray and saw his own concern mirrored. “What’s going on?”

“I think the meds they gave me for the flight….” Peter jerked upright, his face going strange. “Barf bag. Now.”

None of them made it to the bag in the seatback in front of him before it started.

Peter made a sound of complete disgust as Ray finally got the bag in his hand and caught the second round of puking. It took about a minute but felt endless, and by the end of it, Egon had joined them, a dark alarm in his eyes. 

“What’s happening?”

“I am never taking that crap again, for one.” Pete was trying for his usual humor, shaking the chunky bits off his hands in annoyance, but he clearly wasn’t okay. Winston reached out and put a hand on his forehead. 

“Your temp’s gone way up, Pete.”

“Great,” Peter replied, curling in on himself and letting out a little groan. “Bet I caught something in the damn hosp—”

And he was back at the puking. It seemed to hurt more this time, and he wrapped his left arm around his lower abdomen, his right one in its sling trying to dig a hole in that side, low down by the hip.

Right lower quadrant… shit.

“How long until we’re supposed to land?” Winston asked, looking up at Egon, who probably knew that to the second.

“Twenty-six minutes,” Spengler replied promptly. Peter had finished the latest round and was curled up on the seats, miserable and shaking now. “Why?”

Chapter Text

Egon stood by the waiting room’s window and stared distractedly as Winston played with the rubberband from the newspaper he’d picked up before they left Schenectady. Up and around his pointer finger, over his thumb like an elastic pistol, shot off and caught before it fell, only to be looped around again. It was mesmerizing. And annoying. And inadequate to take his mind off the last four hours.

It seemed utterly ridiculous that, after surviving an ordeal that could easily have killed him, Peter’s appendix had to turn their trip home into a frightening case of deja vu.

They’d had the pilot call ahead to LaGuardia to have an ambulance meet them at the private landing area. By the time they taxied to a stop and he and Winston carried Peter down the stairs to the emergency vehicle the way they’d carried him through the amusement park, Venkman was, at best, semi-conscious. Again.

Then it was off to the hospital to wait for word, going through the same motions they’d gone through not 48 hours before. The difference being that this time, Peter had been whisked into surgery without being well enough to give them a reassuring quip on the way.

Winston missed catching the rubberband this time and bent down to retrieve it. The break in routine seemed to shake Ray out of his own paralysis and he popped to his feet. “I’m going to…” he gestured toward the door and headed out. Soda, coffee, the bathroom. It didn’t matter. He’d be back.

Janine was at the firehouse, waiting for word. She’d bought donuts for all of them this morning, so they’d have them to celebrate when they finally got home. Which would be when?

Elastic: up, around, thumb, shot, catch.

Peter hadn’t been eating much yesterday morning when they left to go upstate, Egon remembered now. Or the day before. Peck and his asinine physical requirements. Venkman had never been truly beyond the norm for a man his age and height, but Peck was unreasonable purely because he was Peck, and Peter was determined to show him he could win at any game the official saw fit to throw him into.

So Egon had thought he was eating less to lose weight quickly. He had been a little more out of breath than usual at the gym because he hadn’t slept or had had a late date or…

Up, around, thumb, shot, catch.

All this speculation was ridiculous. No one would have thought he had appendicitis at that point. If Peck hadn’t sent them upstate, Peter would have continued to feel worse and eventually went to the doctor and would still be in an operating room.

But he wouldn’t have been possessed. Wouldn’t have fallen nearly two stories and jarred an already inflamed organ…. It was possible he’d ruptured and was simply too drugged from the injuries to notice, his refusal to stay in the hospital ensuring that no one caught the crisis before it intensified. The doctor here in New York who’d told them they were taking Peter into surgery had said it was a solid possibility, but that was merely academic at this point. It was coming out and he’d already been started on antibiotics.

Which still left a question that they’d never really answered: What actually happened to the body when it was possessed?

Dana and Louis Tully hadn’t been possessed in the classic sense, after all, though Egon had run a battery of tests on them and had them request exhaustive blood panels from their doctors. They’d undergone complete transmogrification, which had reverted their bodies to the states they’d been in just before the entities had taken them over.

And the first time Peter was possessed was an entirely different case, as well. He’d been evicted, his body taken over without any transformation at all—a fact that had saved them all and nearly cost him his life. In the end, he’d launched his soul at his body, violently ejecting the ghost who held it, and then dropped to the ground in Purgatory, clawing at his throat as he fought for oxygen where there was none. 

Divine intervention had saved him then, not his wit or the team. They’d stood above him, helpless, calling encouragement as he faded away, and then they’d been… elsewhere. Three of them still dead on the shore of the East River, as Peter sucked in air and they watched Ecto rise from the river with the rest of their bodies inside.

They’d all been divinely healed, in fact, so any tests he’d run afterward had been specific to that scenario. This time, there was at best a partial transformation and no intervention at all. They didn’t even really know what it might be like to be possessed the way he had. Egon had arranged for the doctors in Schnectady to keep him abreast of the results for the boy whose possession Peter had interrupted, but little had come of that beyond his health being established as “good”.

Up, around, thumb, shot, catch.

“Sit down, Egon,” Winston said reasonably, still playing with his toy. “He’ll be fine. They do this surgery twenty times a day.”

They did. He knew that. He also knew that, as soon as Peter was in recovery, Egon was going to insist that he have a full battery of tests to ensure that he was, truly, all right.

“Guys?” 

Egon turned to the door to see Ray, juggling three cans of soda, enter with a short man in his sixties, wearing scrubs.

“This is Dr. Thiel.” Ray was grinning in relief. “I ran into him on my way back from the vending machines.”

“Dr. Venkman is in recovery,” Dr. Thiel told them, a relaxed smile on his face. “His appendix did rupture–given the bruising, you were likely right about the fall causing it—and there was a distressing amount of spillage before we got him opened up. He’ll be with us for a few days at least, to make sure the peritonitis is taken care of, but once that is cleared up, he’ll be just fine.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” Egon said, stepping forward to shake his hand. “If I might have a moment of your time?”

Just fine wasn’t nearly as specific as Egon wanted.

Chapter Text

It took a week for the hospital to let Peter go, and Janine was pretty sure he had to have milked that. It hadn’t taken any work at all for the guys to convince him to stay at the firehouse until he was recovered—he did so love to be pampered. 

He climbed out of Ecto, Winston hovering unobtrusively beside him, and, with an admittedly duller twinkle in his eye than usual, grinned at her across the garage.

“Hey, Melnitz!” he called. “You miss me?”

“Like clap, Dr. Venkman,” she shot back. He was fine.

Except maybe he was hobbling a little, holding himself like every movement threatened to jar something loose. His right arm was still in a sling, strapped down now like it hadn’t been in the hospital—whether he’d pushed himself too soon and reinjured it or they’d strapped it down for safety while he was heading home, she couldn’t say. 

“Is that any way to talk to your favorite boss?” he asked as he and Winston reached the bottom of the stairs. He was minutes from sleep, clearly, and up close, she could see the dilated pupils that said he was still on something. Which might be the only reason he was still upright.

She grinned facetiously. “I just wanted you to feel at home.”

And then her gaze drifted to his left arm, where it stuck out of his t-shirt, and froze on the maze of needle marks there.

On Egon’s insistence, I had a full work-up done so he could look for any post-possession physiological changes.

Which were all normal. Better than normal. Regardless of the shadows in Egon’s eyes that first night they’d come home from the hospital, Peter was fine. More than fine.

Different than fine.

“Home means a bed,” he said, every bit of his exhaustion showing in his voice. “Use that alarm for any bust in the next 24 hours, and I’ll fire you. Got it?”

Janine shook herself out of it. Not different. Just Peter.

“You wouldn’t know what to do without me, Dr. Venkman.”

And we wouldn’t know what to do without you.