by Kitty Woldow

postscript to Ghost of a Chance by Sheila Paulson, in which Sam Beckett leaped into Slimer in order to save Ray from being killed in an accident. Al's data indicated that after Ray's death the Ghostbusters had stayed together for another two years but when Winston was killed in a second accident, Peter blamed himself and disappeared, and had not been heard of for three years. But in order for Al to know that, it had to have happened....

New York, 1996

The scruffy man leaned in the concealing shelter of a doorway and regarded the building across the street, dimly visible in the evening twilight. It was an old firehouse, though it had been long since converted to other business; the wide, double front doors were the only external clue left to its original function. But he knew very well what other remnants of its first incarnation's furnishings remained inside, or had up to about three years ago when he'd left without saying goodbye. He hadn't been back since then, and wasn't sure why he had made this pilgrimage now.

The old firehouse had called to him repeatedly over the years, appearing in his dreams, and he had never been able to outrun it. Sometimes it was a brightly lit home overflowing with laughter and fun, sometimes he saw it as a haunted place where the cries of dead friends echoed in cold, empty rooms. Sometimes the images were more specific; Ray laughing as he left the lab to go check the secondary generator in the basement, the look of horror on Egon's face when the blast echoed up the stairwell, the mad rush down the stairs to find the burned and smoking ruin of the generator. With awful, perfect clarity, he would see Egon's anguished face as he lifted Ray's body, fresh blood smeared stark against his pale uniform, guilt and tears filling his eyes until they overflowed and his composure deserted him with a terrible, wordless cry of denial, and felt the same cry torn from his own throat.

Peter's lips twisted. Those were the nights he hadn't slept at all, when the memories that five years had not stripped of power drove spikes of pain clear through him. The containment grid hadn't been breached by the explosion, but their hearts and lives had sustained irreparable damage. Winston had held them together through those first months while they had pieced back together a semblance of normalcy, but there were too many holes to be filled. They had limped along, like a dog missing a leg, until the horrible accident that had taken Winston's life. Peter had given up and bolted then, taking the blame for Winston's death and fleeing to the anonymity of the streets.

Now he was back, and he wasn't sure why. Maybe his self-imposed exile and pennance were drawing to a close. Maybe he had finally forgiven himself. Green eyes narrowed in mockery at such sappy inanity. Maybe the guilty man always returns to the scene of the crime.

Looking at the building from this vantage, one he had hardly ever seen it from despite the years he had lived inside, he noted the changes in it. The discreetly lit sign with their unique logo was gone, and nothing had replaced it. Its red trim in need of repainting, the firehouse looked older, sadder somehow, as if it had not harbored laughter for a long time, but it didn't have the empty air of total abandonment.

As if drawn by the call of an old friend, he crossed the street and approached the doors. Reaching out, he caressed the worn brass handle, briefly wondering if the current occupants would mind if he just looked around a little before hitting the road again. His expression fell easily into the same look of unkind self-mockery it had taken a moment before. Yeah, right. "Hello, I used to be Dr. Peter Venkman, mind if I tour the ruins of my life?"

From inside came the sound of a large engine being cranked repeatedly without catching, and then a heavy car door being slammed shut with angry violence. A deep voice roared in frustration, "Damn it, I don't have time for this!" The snarling bass was familiar, though he did not recall that it had ever been so surly. Surprise and that second of introspection cost him the lead he would have needed to get out of the way before the door banged open and he was knocked flat by the hurtling form that exited.

As he struggled to his feet, he caught a glimpse through the open door of the great brick-floored main level hall. Squatting sullenly in the middle of the floor, Ecto 1 looked bare, as if it had been stripped by vandals. The logo on the doors had been painted over and the rack of equipment had been removed from the roof, leaving a line of raw boltholes and flawed paint. The tiny No-Ghost hood ornament was all that was left of its former glory.

Not having expected to find anything at all of his former life left living in this place, he hadn't planned on such a meeting and the prospect abruptly terrified him. Averting his face, he scuttled out of the way, trusting that his hair, now long enough to reach his shoulderblades, would disguise him sufficiently in the twilight.

Scattered on the sidewalk were a half dozen heavy textbooks and a sheaf of papers that looked like graded midterms. His perfunctory apology ignored, the tall blond sighed and stooped to gather the tests together. "I'll never make it now." The furious haste had vanished, replaced with a detached unhappiness filled with disgust at the world.

Forgetting his own retreat to watch in fascination, Peter saw that time had left its mark on Egon, too. He was thinner, his proud bearing shifted from the easy assurance of one who is in good shape to the stiffer movements of a body aging without enough exercise to keep it completely healthy. The full lips no longer curved slightly upward with perpetual inner humor, and the lines around his mouth now settled in a pattern that had been formed by too few smiles. Even his eyes were dulled when he looked up suddenly, sensing Peter's scrutiny.

"Are you all right?" he asked again, standing. It was clear by his tone that he didn't really care, the ready compassion he had once had now only a mere semi-polite formality.

Peter nodded, ducking quickly to hide his face behind his long hair. Not allowing himself another look back, he shuffled away, radiating an uninviting resentment perfected by three year's practice until it was almost as natural to him as confident arrogance had once been. Behind him he heard the dry splash of paper hitting concrete and the husky, disbelieving whisper of his name. Panic washed through him; after all the time he had been gone, he still hadn't been able to distance himself enough to face the unforgiving hurt that he knew would be his first greeting. Slitting his eyes, he hunched his back and half-turned with a snarl, every inch the angry, anonymous dweller-in-alleys who wants only to be left alone and expects nothing but rejection from the more fortunate.

The flare of hope died away in Egon's eyes, leaving a momentary vulnerability that was quickly shuttered. His half-raised hand fell back to his side as he said, "I'm sorry. I thought you were someone I used to know." Kneeling back down to recollect the scattered papers, he missed the softening of Peter's look that stripped the cold, pain-filled bitterness from him and left him recognizable for a moment. It was only a moment, then he continued on his way, leaving behind the ruins of his life and of his friend.

Egon slept poorly when he retired early that night. His dreams were filled with images of the two accidents that had destroyed the Ghostbusters, soaked through with the salt taste of blood and tears, and he awoke after only an hour with the old, familiar ache in his chest. Knowing from experience that going back to sleep would be futile because continued nightmares would leave him unrested come morning, he dressed again and returned to the lab.

Nothing in particular needed attention immediately and rather than begin a new project when he was not feeling alert and interested, he began to sort through the boxes of stored equipment, culling the expendable items from those he thought he could hold on to a little longer. After the business had collapsed, he had been forced first to let Janine go despite her protests that she was willing to compromise for a while on salary. It was simply impossible to pay her and the power bills for keeping the containment grid running, and he could not in any conscience allow it to shut down. Then he'd sold most of the equipment for parts, piece by reluctant piece, and patented a few things that brought in minor royalties, but it was never quite enough and he still had to sell off nonessential bits of the technical horde at periodic intervals to supplement his teaching salary. He'd refused to pursue having Peter declared dead and his will probated, at first from the conviction that Venkman would return. That conviction had slowly deteriorated to mere hope, and over the passing months the hope had withered to resigned sadness. Now the unexecuted will was a monument to their friendship, the only headstone he could give it, and the last indication that somewhere deep in his heart the hope still lived.

The boxes held very little any more. Their contents had been scavenged repeatedly for his own research as well as to support the more mundane expenses, and most of what was left was at least partially disassembled. Pulling out one of the few exceptions, he tested the batteries by flipping the power switch on. The modified PKE meter came to life, though its lights flashed only once and the needle registered less than a hair's breadth above the zero line. The activity elicted a response all out of proportion to its insignificant size. Egon's eyes widened as if the meter had suddenly bitten him, and his hand trembled briefly before he stilled it with deliberate control.

Methodically, he pulled the batteries from the unit, replaced them with a freshly charged set, and turned it on again. When it repeated the single flash, he carried it downstairs and out to the main doors. Running it over the pavement outside, he observed the infinitesimal increase in the reading with an outward calm that he did not feel inside. This was the meter he had adjusted to Peter's biorythm aura frequency, when he had quartered the city relentlessly for twenty days looking for his missing friend after the cops had given up. It had not helped then, nor on the other two occasions when he had taken it up and wandered the streets on the chance that Peter had passed nearby recently enough to leave a trace. Now it was telling him the same thing his heart had said for a few wildly elating seconds earlier that evening. Peter had finally come home.

The shapeless brown mass huddled against the building was not intrinsically different from any of the other innumerable homeless people trying to keep warm from the midnight chill, but the meter in Egon's hand flashed with a reading as high as normal auric energy could generate, dead on Peter's frequency. Shutting it off to still the soft, high-pitched beeping, he stowed it in his jacket pocket without taking his eyes off the man it had led him to. The faint streetlight filtering down the littered alley was enough to show him the long, brown hair of the person he had run into that evening, though the clothes were so nondescript that he had no way of distinguishing them with absolute certainty. Not intellectually. But he knew, and trusted that knowledge well enough to kneel next to the slumped figure and gently lift its chin with his hand. The sharp jawline was as familiar as the pure green color of the eyes. "Peter," he breathed, and even in the dim light he saw the recognition in their depths.

Groggy and cold, there was no point to denial or attempted escape and Peter clearly knew it. Raising his head, one hand pushing back the long bangs that trailed in his eyes, he said wearily, "Hello, Egon." His tone was unwelcoming, and made it plain he thought that if Spengler would go to the effort of hunting him down then his own stupidity in making the meeting possible left him owing the courtesy of sitting still for whatever had to be said. But when he reluctantly met Egon's eyes again, he could find none of the anger or accumulated contempt born of three years of abandonment that he seemed to expect. Instead, barely visible behind his glasses in the poor light, the fogged blue was darkened with a complex mix of emotion. Over the pain that had blossomed the day Ray Stantz had been killed and never quite gone away, was an overlay of joy - not enough to erase the lines of hurt, but sufficient to light them in a way Venkman had never thought to see again. Uncut with any hint of accusation or acrimony, Egon's expression was filled with an unambiguous pleasure and it disarmed his resentment with its innocence and depth.

Seeing the hostile defensiveness falter, Egon's last uncertainty vanished. Leaning against the filthy brick wall in sudden weakness, he slid one arm around Peter's shoulders and pulled him close, enfolding him in a tight embrace. "I thought you were dead." His voice cracked twice in those few words, and his eyes shimmered in the low-angled light.

"I was," Peter whispered bleakly. For the last three years he had been running from friendship and the pain its loss had brought him, believing that being alone was the best cure, the safest way to avoid hurting like that ever again. Now, sinking into the warmth of Egon's touch and finding that he was beloved despite his efforts to the contrary, he no longer understood why he had fled the only support that could carry him through the pain life held. "Oh, Egon, I am." Half-turning, he reached out and wrapped his arms around Egon's narrow waist and hugged him back. "I think I have been since Ray died." A quick tremor ran through Egon's body, for the memories that haunted Peter followed them both with equal power and the same visions filled their dreams.

Without letting go, Egon asked the one question that all his science had never come close to answering. "Why did you go?"

He flinched, for it was a question he had spent many hours asking himself. After the near-meeting earlier that day, he had finally come to a conclusion, and he gave it honestly. "We had it all and now it's all gone. I couldn't bear to stay and watch you die next. There would have been nothing at all left of me then."

Egon's breathing caught at that. He bowed his head over Peter and let the tears come, mourning their past and their present, and the future they had lost with Ray's death.

Not for the first time, it occurred to Peter that they had been too happy, and had angered some jealous god into teaching them the folly of mortal affection. Pressed against Egon, listening to the hoarse, uneven sobs echo deep in his chest, his eyes stung and filled and his own control shattered. "I miss them," he choked. "I missed you. I miss us."

A long time later, he shifted slightly and as Egon's cheek lifted from his hair, he sighed, "I want to go home."

Shooting straight downward through the floors of Ghostbuster Central, the green ghost temporarily inhabited by a time-hopping physicist made it to the basement in time to move a man out of the kill zone of an exploding generator, and the universe readjusted itself into a new configuration with a tiny hiccup.

Bolting upright on his bed, Peter stared wildly around. It was late in the evening and the dream had been so vividly real that he still felt the years of grief and deprivation hanging on him. "Egon?" he called, an unintentional quaver in his voice. The dream world meshed with his surroundings and he scrambled for the door, throwing it open, looking frantically for some sign to reassure himself that he had truly only laid down to take a nap after a long hard day busting an ugly Class 5, the whole team alive and well.

Across the hallway the lab door was open and he headed in that direction, confusion and fear building to an almost unbearable pitch until he stepped blinking into the fully lit room. The horrible visions from the dream retreated at the sight of two heads, one golden blond, the other auburn, bent together over the mass of electronics spread over the bench.

"It had to be a temporal inconsistency," Ray was arguing. "Nothing else could have tripped this circuit like that." He glanced up and saw Peter in the doorway, and his welcoming smile was at that moment the most wonderful thing Peter had ever seen. "Come here and tell us what you think, Peter," he invited.

Also glancing up to greet Peter, Egon returned his attention to the problem at hand without noticing the appraising look Venkman gave him. "The crystal matrix in the transtator is an experimental one and it may respond to any number of ectoplasmic as well as temporal surges. There's no way to tell what this reading was caused by without repeated observations."

Compared to the version of Egon he had dreamed, the living one before him appeared years younger, with a sparkle of life and humor in his eyes even when totally dedicated to a dry scientific problem. There was a subtle air of confidence and happiness about him that had been missing from the other, and his body language was the assured, natural grace that Peter had never consciously noticed until he had seen what its absence would look like.

Ray shook his head. "But you wouldn't have sensed an ectoplasmic disturbance that small. I thought you were going to pass out for a minute there, and you said yourself that you felt like someone was walking on your grave."

Peter shivered. "Or yours," he mumbled, moving closer to peer at the bench-scale prototype whatever-it-was. Leaning over Ray's shoulder to see it, he drew immeasurable comfort from the warm, living body under his hand.

Egon's head snapped up and he pinned the psychologist with a look. "What did you say?" he asked, and there was an odd urgency in his question.

Peter shrugged uncomfortably. "Nothing, really. Last time I ever take a nap after eating pickle and mayonnaise sandwiches. I just had this really awful dream..." Combing his fingers through his hair in an automatic gesture, his expression betrayed an odd surprise at finding his bangs ended in a short curve over his forehead instead of trailing into a longer mane. The quirk of his eyebrows as he made the mental adjustment appeared to make perfect sense to the physicist.

"Let me guess." Straightening, Egon folded his arms. "Ray killed in an explosion, Winston dead of a thrower accident a couple years later, after which you left." There was a flicker of undefined pain in his eyes that suggested he had 'remembered' the events with as much clarity as Peter had.

"Good guess." Even now the dream was fading and he could recall few of the details. Only the pervasive feeling of loss and despair still remained clear. "How did you know?"

"It was no dream. It actually happened, all of it."

"But it couldn't have," Ray protested. "I'm still here, and so's Winston, he's downstairs reading the new Katharine Neville book."

"Up until a few minutes ago, it was all true. You were right, Ray, it was a temporal inconsistency that tripped the circuit. What the transtator registered was the resettling of the timestream into the new pattern when Sam Beckett leaped into Slimer and saved your life."

Peter snapped his fingers as he remembered Sam inhabiting Slimer's body five years before and the reason he had heard then for the 'leap.' "Of course! We had to have lived the first version through until the time that Al retrieved the information and Sam changed things, so this has to be the day Al was being projected from."

Delighted fascination filled Ray with enthusiasm. "This is great! We've actually lived the last five years over twice!"

Peter shuddered delicately. "Some of us did, anyway. I can't say I was real fond of the first version." His casual leaning on Ray's shoulder was a typical pose, but there was an overt possessiveness to his stance that hadn't yet relaxed. "I'd say we owe Sam a hell of a debt."

Egon nodded. "If our analysis is correct, to Al Calavicci, Sam will have just leaped out of Slimer after saving Ray in 1991. We can confirm the hypothesis by contacting him."

"I'll call him." Peter reached for the phone, but halted in mid-gesture, a thought striking him. "Beckett's still leaping now, isn't he?" At the same moment, Egon's eyes widened in an inspired look.

"They said they had no control over it," Ray recalled, then brightened. "We could help him! We came close when he was here and we were five years behind his technology at the time."

"Precisely my thought." Egon leaned one hip on the table, surveying them each in turn. "I propose we go to New Mexico and offer our assistance in retrieving Dr. Beckett, as a gesture of our gratitude."

"Works for me." It took almost ten minutes and as many intermediate operators and secretaries before Peter said into the phone, "Al? Peter Venkman here..." and the others could tell by his expression that their analysis had indeed been correct.

"Actually, it's not a coincidence; Egon had some gizmo here hooked up that detected time realigning to the new history. There were also some other, well, interesting perceptual effects as well." He fell silent, nodding to himself once or twice, then broke into a grin. "That's just what we were thinking. Give us a day to pack up half of Egon's lab and we'll be out there." His eyes twinkled evilly at whatever Calavicci said next, and his voice took on the patented Venkman 'Trust me!' smoothness. "Why no, of course we won't. Wouldn't want the little slimeball running loose in a top secret installation, would we?" After a couple more pleasantries he hung up and immediately bounded to the door calling, "Oh, Slimer? Wanna go on a trip?"

Ray and Egon laughed, both of them remembering the admiral's initial dislike of the ghost's looks and Sam's enjoyment (to an impolite extreme) of his ability to slime the hologram. Glancing back over his shoulder at the utterly normal scene, Peter's eyes suddenly stung and he turned back. Giving Ray a quick, hard hug, he then grabbed Egon, who hugged him back with a brief intensity the habitually reserved physicist hardly ever allowed to enter his physical expressions of affection.

"Welcome home," Egon breathed in his ear, then let him go.

Peter's eyes shone with suspicious brightness for a second, then his look held only devilish amusement. He headed back out the door, and his voice echoed up the stairwell as he jogged downward. "Winstonnnnn! Sliiiimmmmerrrrr!"