Fic: The Concession, Jay/Grant

[nakannalee]

Fic: The Concession
Author: Nakanna Lee
Pairing: Jay/Grant (Ghost Hunters fandom)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Character death (of sorts)
Word Count: 2,300
Summary: Frustrated by his abilities to see the paranormal, Jason meets Grant, who shows him that they share a special connection.
A/N: I am overly fascinated by, according to the Ghost Hunters book, how immediately connected Jason and Grant felt. This (wildly) speculates about that. It also delves into the unspoken event Grant had as a kid that sparked his interest in the paranormal. Hope you enjoy! Comments are love.


Jason arranged to meet the computer graphic designer at a donut shop. Jason was not in a good mood. He was pissed, in fact, annoyed at seeing things he didn’t want to see, shapes that emerged like fog from bodies and animals. He still wasn’t sure if it was energy or souls he was seeing. Maybe it was one and the same. Mornings after he showered he’d stand in front of his bathroom mirror and stare at himself, waiting to see if the fog would float out of him too. If it did, he couldn’t see it.

Sometimes the fog followed him. It crawled out from the body it inhabited and moved through the air, stretching out so thin it looked like the wisps would dissolve into nothing, the way airplane trails dissipated in the sky. Jason felt a sense of dread about that more than anything-that there was something essential that could be lost.

Jason and the graphic designer were supposed to talk about Jay’s ghost hunting website, but somehow between éclairs it turned into a discussion of the paranormal. The guy Grant investigated too. He’d even brought a three ring binder of places he’d visited, the cases he examined. He opened to one of the laminated pages of sporadic newspaper clippings. It was a yellowed report of a fourteen-year-old boy whose body had been found in the woods outside of Warwick, cause of death unknown.

Jay watched him shuffle his feet, put his elbows on the table and look down at his napkin. Grant said sometimes he saw things. Things he couldn’t control. Jason eyed him suspiciously, looking for a joke, a lie, but there was none. Jason asked what kind of things, and when he did he saw something dark cloud over Grant’s eyes, make him inaccessible.

They arranged to meet that Friday afterwards at midnight in the oldest graveyard in Rhode Island. It was located behind a small, dilapidated Protestant church, once converted into someone’s home, now condemned. The cemetery was overtaken by woods. Tall, narrow pines rose skeletally from the earth. The gravestones were beaten away by weather into thin, flat slabs that stuck out at crooked angles like broken teeth. A few had pebbles resting near them. Others had the shriveled remains of flowers that couldn’t grow in the rocky soil.

Neither had video cameras. Jason carried a camera that had so far failed at capturing the things he’d see. Grant introduced him to a recorder that he used to catch EVPs.

Jason stood along the rows of graves, tense and waiting to spring. He watched Grant circle slowly, then settle cross-legged on the ground amid the rocks and weeds. Bugs droned in the summer night heat. Owls cried out.

“You didn’t bring the rest of your group?” Grant asked after a pause.

“No.” Jason swatted a mosquito that landed on the back of his neck. “I wanted to see how you work.”

Grant looked at him for a long time, then turned away.

“Talk to me,” Jason said. He wanted to be firm with the guy, to get him to divulge things as quickly as he could make other people do just by looking at them. But Grant was different. He was composed, restrained. Jason knew already that he’d never be able to demand anything of Grant. He sensed it immediately: they were equals, in more ways than one. They had access to a world very few living people did, and it scared the hell out of them both.

“We need each other,” Grant said. He was watching the cemetery patiently, like someone untangling a knot. “The things you see, the smoke you talked about on the drive out here?”

“Yeah, what about it?”

Grant looked him from the ground. He smiled once. “I knew someone like you. When I was a teenager. Remember?”

“What do you mean, remember?”

Grant continued to watch him. Finally he got to his feet. “I don’t know how much you know, what exactly you’ve seen or what you’ve found when you investigate.  Maybe you call it by a different name.”

“Grant, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about The Concession.”

There was a distant ringing in Jason’s ears, like something far away but innate was whirring closer, rising to the surface. He shook his head once and it lessened. Grant reached out and grabbed his arm. He was stronger than Jason expected.

“I can leave, but I can’t control it once I do. I can interact but I can’t return.” Grant stared at him. “You need to direct me.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Jason said. He was beginning to panic, but he stamped it out with annoyance, then anger. His voice rose, the ringing increasing to a wail. “Grant, what are you doing-?”

“It makes sense,” Grant said. He smiled again, although Jason could see even in the dark the bright evidence of terror in his eyes. “Just don’t block it out. I trust you.”

“Grant-”

Suddenly Grant’s grip on Jason’s arm went limp. Grant’s body twitched, almost like a shiver, but more like something had wriggled through his bones. He closed his eyes and dropped to the ground, slowly enough for him to manage to return to his seated position of earlier. His back rested against a headstone.

Jason went to grab him when the smoke made him stop. White trails slipped out of Grant’s chest, came off of his shoulders like dry ice. It joined to become a spherical shape, wispy at the edges, but so dense and bright in the middle that it seemed thicker than anything Jason had ever seen. He couldn’t understand the depth of it. It seemed to go on forever, eternity in a ball of smoke.

For a split second, Jason tore his eyes away to look back down at Grant’s body. It was splayed like a person who had fallen asleep in an airport terminal, like someone on pause between destinations. It was strange. Jason felt no connection to it, no initiative to help the body. The body wasn’t Grant, at least not entirely. The smoke whirled and deepened, now emanating a fuzzy blue light. Jason couldn’t explain it to himself. It was color but there was also length and sound and language in it too. It floated nearer, hovering at face-level.

Jason raised his hand and, without thinking, grazed his fingers over it.

The smoke shuddered, spun wildly. Jason recalled no light but suddenly he was squinting, head throbbing, and when he opened his eyes the cemetery was gone.

***

A forest remained. White bark soared skyward and he trampled across ground that was equal parts covered in rocks and brown-orange leaves. At his side, walking stride for stride, was a kid in a sweatshirt with floppy black hair. Grant. Jason kept walking, unconcerned, and while he was himself his body was not the current one of familiarity. Instead he was scrawny, his hair trimmed in a buzz-cut. Jason was filled with information he could have no way of knowing: that he was blond, that he had a scar on his lower back from where he’d skidded over broken glass, that he’d know Grant forever, even if they had to keep finding each other.

It was all so poised, so reassuring, that Jason experienced no fear whatsoever.

In these woods the colors were brighter, like pleasantly overexposed film. Jason and Grant said nothing to each other, just moved further into the woods. The only sounds were attributed to calling birds, a hum of cicadas, their boots shuffling across earth and their breaths, harsh in the thin fall air.

“Up there,” Grant said. He reached out and tugged at Jason’s arm, holding him still beside him. “You see them?”

Jason did. Waiting against the trunk of trees, the surge of gurgling roots, were diving lights. They flickered in and out, so fast that they could be mistaken for wings of large insects catching the sun. Jason’s ears began ringing. He stepped nearer towards them but Grant pulled him back, wrapped an arm around his narrow shoulders.

“I know them,” Grant said. “They want to stay with us. But you need to keep them together.” Grant looked at him seriously. “Keep us together.”

Jason nodded, but he wasn’t so sure he could do it. The doubt was a strange sensation, foreign to this life. He observed the lights some more. There were four or five, it was hard to tell, because a few were faint and not as persistent.

“Where did you find them?” Jason asked.

Grant wet his lips. They were chapping in the wind. “I knew some of them in their bodies. Others found me in the graveyard, or they were still living in my house. Sometimes they just showed up, like they knew they were looking for me. For us.”

He looked at Jason and grinned, an expression Jason identified through every age, every existence of Grant, and the knowledge of it burned in his chest until it felt like he could become deeper than the lights themselves.

“I love you, G,” Jason said.

Grant smiled at him, then stepped away towards the lights. He waved. “Come on, you have to meet them.”

Jason followed. The lights met him halfway. They dipped and dove around, some hesitating, some overly anxious. Jason held out a hand towards each and felt in a flash everything they ever were, what they would be. A brittle grandmother at Ellis Island becoming a young woman steeped in genealogy; a black man wrongfully shot becoming a tattooed cop; a kid who vanished without a trace becoming an earnest magician. There were others, too. Jason was overwhelmed. He knew immediately he wasn’t meeting new people, but reconnecting to ones he’d known in lives after lives.

“You’re not like us,” Grant said. He touched his arm again. “You can organize us and keep us together. The only problem is you never remember until we can find you.”

Jason watched the lights bounding around. It made Grant’s eyes brilliantly dark.

“How many times have you done this for me?” Jason asked.

Grant grinned. “Never enough to get tired of it.” He took a deep breath. “Ready?”

“Ready for what?”

As much as Jason remembered about their connection, their concession to one another, there was still gaps. Grant observed the lights for a long moment, then turned back. Without a word, he leaned into Jason and kissed him on his lips, solid and sure.

Jason remembered it a thousand times over.

Then Grant was growing heavy, his limbs limp. Jason grabbed him by the arms and knelt down beside him as the fog rose upwards from his body. He watched as Grant’s head lolled back and the smoke whirled into a sphere, becoming bluer, denser, more infinite.

Jason felt wind surrounding him but nothing else was moving. The leaves and the trees were still, almost removed, as if time was misplaced and overlapping, not coinciding. Jason realized with certainty that there was no here, no now or then, just always.

“Grant!” Jason spun with the light, trying to keep Grant’s in front of him. “Grant, stop! I don’t know what to do!”

The lights hummed, the sound opening Jason up to another place he was just beginning to remember. Grant’s body lying on the ground frightened him. He wanted to save him, to be with him, but he couldn’t figure out how. He wracked his brain, searching for jogged memories, but none came, the fear too intense.

He felt himself slipping, and when he looked down at himself he panicked as he saw the fog rising from his chest, from his arms and shoulders.

“I’m not ready, Grant!” Jason yelled. His voice sounded strange, too young, cracking. He squeezed his eyes shut hard. He tried to force the fog back into his body. “Grant! Not yet, Grant!”

The wind stopped. The humming dissipated and the ringing in his ears shrank to nothing.

He opened his eyes. The forest was less bright, the lights were gone. At his feet sprawled Grant, just a kid, unmoving in the depths of the Warwick woods.

Jason ran.

***

A shudder made him take his hand away, and Jason was back in the cemetery, the light spinning in front of him. Jason swallowed the tightness in his throat, embarrassed but strengthened by it too. He felt the fog rising to the edges of his body.

“Not just yet,” he said quietly. “Not just yet.”

He watched the light with a fierce sort of pride, with something that might have been possessiveness if everything wasn’t already given to him. He urged it to return to Grant and it did, slipping back into the realm of the body and infusing Grant with glow that only Jason could sense. Grant shifted, murmured something drowsily, then returned to consciousness.

He met Jason’s eyes with a smile. Jason couldn’t yet return it.

“I never meant to leave you,” Jason said.

Grant nodded. “I know. It was only a matter of time, and there’s a lot of time.”

Jason sighed. He felt settled. A new sense of purpose and responsibility steadied him. He had the answers again, and a whole new opportunity to use them.

“Are the others here?” he asked.

“They’re around.” Grant stood, acquiring his balance. Jason reached out to steady him and Grant tilted his head to kiss his mouth in the process. “You ready? They’ve already found their bodies.”

“You’re all just waiting for me, then?”

“Yeah. Don’t worry. It’ll take a few years until all the pieces are in place again, but-”

“We’ve got time,” Jason said.

“Absolutely.”

They stood in the graveyard side by side, taking it all in. Owls called out in the night, as if they could remember morning, too, but could only exist in one.

end