Chapter Text
With all the chaotic and terrifying things that tended to happen to his family, Louie sometimes wondered if it wouldn’t be safer – easier – to curl up in a corner with his hood pulled over his head and never move again.
He couldn’t, of course, no matter how much he wanted to at times. Because sure, it’d be easier, but his family would still be out there adventuring and fighting the weekly villain and ultimately being in danger like, 24/7, and if Louie curled up in a corner and shut himself away then who would look after them?
Not that he could do much, or anything at all, really, but he’d rather be there and pretend he was making a difference than sit at home and worry, so he usually ended up tagging along, and everyone thought it was for the treasure.
Which it was, up to a point.
His main problem with adventuring was that it never seemed to be worth the risk. Louie could see the angles, and while that brought a lot of good things with it, it balanced itself out with the bad things, too. He could see the ways that things could go right, but he also had to acknowledge a million ways that things could go wrong, and the latter images were always hard to shake.
Things constantly went wrong.
Louie would never be able to put into words the horror he felt when one of his worst-case scenarios started to play out right in front of him, when he had to watch the exact thing he’d been dreading begin to unfold before him and he still hadn’t come up with anything to counter it, because he felt like maybe that was his job. His role. His way of being useful.
It was difficult work, keeping Dewey from leaping heart-first into danger, because his brother would sooner fling himself off a cliff to test his flight capabilities than play it safe. And then there was Huey, who was likely to stumble over that same cliff because he’d been distracted by his own thoughts, caught up in his head so much that he hadn’t even been aware of danger until it was upon him.
Louie loved them, he really did, and no matter what he knew that he’d be over the cliff right after them, regardless of if he had a plan or not, knowing that he couldn’t save them if he wasn’t right there with them.
Louie tried not to think about that too much, shaking his head to dislodge the thoughts when they popped up, because he was smart enough to know that it wasn’t all on him. If it was, they’d surely all be dead by now. Huey was smart, and Dewey was bold, and the truth was that they didn’t really need saving. If the three of them happened to fall over that hypothetical cliff, Dewey would do some crazy athletic stunt to get himself back to the top – climbing up with a sheepish grin, because he couldn’t fly after all – and Huey would definitely have some sort of Junior Woodchuck trick for that exact situation, and he’d be fine, too.
And that left Louie, hurtling towards the ground with no one left to save but himself, having severely overestimated his importance. He’d never been good at saving himself. Toth-ra was proof enough of that.
Anyway, the point was, he’d move heaven and earth for his family, and those were pretty heavy things, probably. They were big things, but Louie cared enough to do the small things, too.
Which brought him here, to Gyro’s lab, with Huey excitedly showing him and Dewey around as if they hadn’t seen the place a million times already.
Huey loved the lab, and on days where they didn’t have much to do around the mansion, he went there to help out and observe and geek out with Fenton, and he always came back happy. So he’d been asking Louie to come with him for a while now, because Huey liked to share the things that made him happy.
Dewey had already gone a few times, willing to do basically anything when he was bored, but Louie usually turned him down, because if he had a day off he’d rather spend it watching Ottoman Empire and lounging around on the couch. Today, though, Huey had looked at him and been more excited than ever, and yeah, he gave in pretty quickly.
Dewey had decided to come with them as well – never one to be left out – and the three of them had cleared the trip with Uncle Donald, who’d hugged them and agreed to let them go as long as they checked in with him.
They’d gone to the lab soon after, Huey practically buzzing with excitement the whole way there, and now they were standing in front of some shiny new device that every scientist on the planet would drool over if they saw it. Fenton was there, looking as enthused as Huey, and Louie shared a look with Dewey, because neither of them knew what the big deal was yet.
“So,” Dewey began, propping his elbow up on the table the thing was sitting on and staring at it. “What is it?”
“It’s— Well, it doesn’t have a name yet,” Huey said, shrugging and smiling sheepishly. “We’ve just been calling it the Memory Machine.”
“Memory Machine?” Louie parroted, sticking his hands in his pockets and trying to pretend he wasn’t already getting bored. “That’s… alliterative.”
The device on the table was about as big as a coffee maker – a weird system of measurement, sure, but it was what came to mind – and it basically just looked like fancy cylinder. A shiny, metallic, black cylinder with countless tiny crystals stuck into it. He wondered how much it was worth.
“What does it do?” Dewey asked, already reaching out to poke it. Huey didn’t even have to look to know to slap his hand away.
“It’s supposed to help regain lost memories,” Huey explained, “or even just improve memory in general.”
“It could help people with amnesia, or other similar problems,” Fenton chimed in, fiddling with the wiring of a completely separate device but looking no less excited for it.
“It could be a big breakthrough,” Huey said, momentarily distracted when Lil Bulb jumped up onto his shoulder. “If it works. It hasn’t been tested yet.”
Louie hummed absentmindedly as Huey and Fenton started bouncing theories and ideas off each other, opting to turn to his phone and let Uncle Donald know they were still alive.
“Texting Uncle Donald?” Dewey asked him, and Louie nodded.
“Just letting him know we haven’t been abducted or anything,” said Louie, sliding his phone back into his pocket.
“He worries too much,” Dewey said with a grin.
His brother nudged his shoulder playfully, maybe trying to get him to engage in the usual sibling banter, but Louie was focused on something else entirely.
On the table was the Memory Machine, just as it was before, but now all the little crystals were glowing a bright red, and an unmistakable whirring noise was beginning to grow in volume. It kicked into high gear quite suddenly, hitting them with an awful shrieking noise just as all the lights in the lab flickered and died. The red lights from the crystals dimmed soon after, leaving them in near complete darkness.
Louie was pretty sure that everyone had either been screaming or covering their ears, and in the silence that followed, Huey and Fenton let out twin cries of shock. Louie held on to Dewey’s arm in a tight grip and squinted. His heart was racing, and he could feel that Dewey was tense; whether in excitement that something cool was happening or fear that it was dangerous, Louie didn’t know.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the machine began beeping in low tones, and the crystals lit up again, a million times brighter, still burning red.
Gyro’s voice floated over from some remote corner of the lab, indistinct and irritable, but Louie could only stare at the little red points of light that had been cast around the room, so that everywhere he looked was covered in what resembled stars.
“What’s going on in here?” Gyro’s voice was closer now, as Huey and Fenton desperately scrambled to figure out the answer to that question. Their faces were cast in an eerie glow as they bent over the machine, and Louie was struck with the urge to get them away from it, so that none of them had to be near it.
The red lights began moving without warning – resembling a hundred laser pointers, controlled by separate people but still eerily in sync – and they kept moving until they converged on Louie’s chest in a single red dot, like a target.
“I don’t think Uncle Donald worries enough,” Louie said, in a choked sort of voice that he couldn’t hear over his own heartbeat.
“Louie—” Huey’s frantic warning was cut off as the device beeped once – loudly – and the light on his chest abruptly turned blue.
Then the machine exploded.
Everything flashed bright blue and white, and all Louie could think in his terrified mental state was that this must be what the inside of Dewey’s mind looked like.
A shockwave swept them all off their feet, screams echoing in his ears, and he felt a jolt of something electric travel all the way through his body.
His skin felt like static when he finally hit the ground, gasping and coughing as his breath had been knocked out of him. He managed to get to his knees, mostly fueled by fear and adrenaline and the need to make sure that everyone was okay.
Strangely enough, he didn’t feel like he’d been hurt, or injured, or even bruised, and that worried him more than actually being hurt would have, because Louie always got hurt. It was practically tradition, at this point.
The room was still cast in darkness, and Louie couldn’t yet hear anything over the ringing in his ears, accompanied by his wildly beating heart. He called out to anyone who might be listening, but his voice was quiet – echoey and distorted – and he got no answer.
He closed his eyes tightly – though it made no difference in how much he could see – and he desperately tried to calm himself enough to be of use, taking slow, measured breaths. His skin felt like it was crawling, like it was buzzing with some indescribable energy, and he would give anything just to know if it was something he needed to worry about, just to be able to see, to check on his brothers. Huey had been right next to the thing when it blew, and every second that passed had Louie growing more and more anxious. Especially because he hadn’t heard anyone else say anything yet; although that could just be the fault of his temporarily messed-up hearing.
Louie used his panic to fuel his adrenaline enough to get him to his feet, using the wall he’d landed against as leverage to get up, leaning against it and standing on shaky legs. The wall felt strange beneath his hands, like he was trying to push the repelling ends of magnets together, and he was struck by the worry that maybe it wasn’t a wall at all; maybe it was another of Gyro’s disastrous inventions.
Then the emergency lights flickered on, and Louie came face to face with a grey, ordinary, completely normal wall. It was his hands that were the problem. He was pretty sure that hadn’t used to be transparent, or— or distorted. His heart tripped over itself in his chest, and he shoved himself away from the wall with a choked sound of surprise.
Louie blinked fast, clenching his hands into fists, holding his breath and watching as the edges of his fingers blurred, as the separation between his skin and the air became less distinct. There was a weird aura surrounding him – thin lines of faint red and blue – and the colors kept leaping out and back in, making him look like he was— like he was glitching. His hoodie seemed to be a different, lighter shade of green than it usually was, and now that he was really looking, his feathers looked strange, too, like they were covered in a barely-there field of vaguely blue energy.
Louie just stood there and blinked, trying to convince himself that it was just his eyes playing tricks on him, that his vision had been affected by the explosion, rather than his body. He forgot to breathe for several seconds, and then poorly compensated by breathing way too fast, causing his knees to wobble and his eyes to tear up. His hands were shaking, and whatever was going on with him – the glitching – was getting worse and worse as his panic grew.
He might’ve collapsed back to the ground or passed out altogether if it weren’t for Dewey, who chose that moment to groan rather loudly from somewhere in the room, pulling Louie out of his spiraling, nonsensical thoughts. He whipped his head around, finally able to locate his brother, who was sitting up from where he’d landed a few yards from him, a hand to his head as he looked around in confusion and visibly growing worry. His eyes landed on the table – which was now charred black and devoid of the machine that had once rested on it – and widened in alarm.
Dewey jumped to his feet, stumbling and swaying, and he swiveled his head to look around the room frantically. He must have found what he was looking for, because he suddenly took off for the opposite side of the room, running by and completely ignoring Louie – who had been standing and staring and doing nothing to gain attention, but still. He was slightly offended by the lack of acknowledgment, but then he saw what – who – Dewey was racing towards, and he no longer cared.
With a lot of willpower and a healthy amount of sheer stubbornness, Louie managed to get his legs to cooperate enough to take off after Dewey as fast as he could go.
The floor felt a little strange beneath his feet, and he steadfastly avoided looking down – looking at any part of himself. He’d deal with whatever was going on with himself later. Right now, Huey wasn’t moving.
Dewey was already kneeling next to Huey when Louie arrived and collapsed next to him, watching as Dewey reached out to gently shake their older brother.
“Huey,” Dewey choked out, his voice thin and worried. “Come on, wake up.”
Louie held his breath, watching as Huey’s face scrunched up and he began to stir, a quiet sound of pain and confusion crawling out of his throat. The moment felt fragile, with Dewey beside him breathing unevenly and sitting so still that it was like he was afraid he’d break something, if he moved. He hadn’t looked over at Louie yet, but he didn’t blame him. Louie was awake and moving. Huey was decidedly not.
Slowly, Huey’s eyes opened, seeming unfocused and nervous until they met Dewey’s and sharpened, blinking as realization dawned on him. Huey shot upright, gasping as his head swam and he swayed, Dewey reaching out an arm to steady him.
“Hey, careful,” Dewey said, keeping his voice low and calming. “I’m pretty sure you hit your head.”
Huey glanced around the lab, his gaze passing over Louie with eyes that were still unfocused. It was like his brother was looking through him, rather than at him. He was worried that Huey had sustained a serious head injury, if this was how he was acting.
“Are you okay?” Louie asked, suddenly nervous for a reason he couldn’t pinpoint.
His voice still sounded strange to his own ears. Wrong, somehow.
“What—What happened?” Huey asked, ignoring Louie’s question in favor of asking his own.
Dewey turned with resigned eyes to gesture at the general destruction that had been caused by the explosion. Louie huffed a laugh as Huey simply sighed, dragging a hand down his face as he accepted the failure of his project. His shoulders slumped, and Louie felt a pang of regret and sadness for his brother as he remembered how happy he’d been when he’d shown it to them – how proud Huey had been to be a part of it.
Louie reached out to comfort him, but he froze as soon as his own hand came into view, reminded of the issue he’d been having. His arm was still doing the weird glitching thing – as was the rest of him – and his breathing picked up again, because he could no longer blame it on his vision. Huey and Dewey looked fine; they looked normal. So it was just him that was the problem.
“Hey, do— do I look weird to you guys?” Louie asked his brothers, trying and failing to keep his – distorted, echoey, crackling – voice steady.
Neither of his brothers turned to look at him. They didn’t acknowledge that he had spoken in any way, instead carrying on a conversation about where Fenton and Gyro were. Dewey helped Huey to his feet as they stood to go look for them, and they left Louie kneeling on the ground, growing hysteria and panic forming a tangle in his chest. The glitching got worse.
Tears stinging at his eyes, he pushed himself up to chase after them, thinking that maybe he hadn’t spoken loud enough, or maybe Huey and Dewey were playing a trick on him. (They wouldn’t. They wouldn’t. Not like this.)
“Huey?” Louie called, a bit louder but still painfully unsure.
Huey didn’t respond.
Louie followed his brothers across the lab until they knelt next to Fenton, who was blinking his eyes open and looking around in foggy alarm. Gyro rounded the corner, a little worse for wear but better off than the rest of them, and Louie stood apart from the small crowd that was forming, checking in on each other and making sure that they were all okay.
No one looked his way.
Louie felt his mind go a little fuzzy, like a part of him was trying to escape the horror of the situation he’d found himself in. Deep down, he’d known what was going on since the second Dewey had walked past him, but he could only now bring himself to admit it.
They couldn’t see him.
They weren’t ignoring him on purpose, or playing a mean trick on him – they couldn’t see him. No one could see him or hear him, and on top of that no one even seemed to be concerned with his absence. Maybe they assumed he’d run away.
Maybe it was something worse.
“Dewey?” Louie called tentatively, because he couldn’t help himself, because he wanted to be wrong. His voice cracked and wavered. “Dewey, please.”
His brother kept talking to Huey, showing no sign that he’d heard him, and Louie threw his arm out in a fit of desperation, reaching out to grab Dewey’s shoulder, except he couldn’t. His hand was slightly transparent, and his hand was glitching, and his hand wouldn’t touch Dewey’s skin. Some invisible force had stopped him from making contact, kept his hand hovering a mere centimeter above his brother’s shoulder, until his whole arm began to shake. The distance felt far, far greater than what it was, and Louie yanked his arm back to cradle it to his chest, breathing hard as panicked tears rolled down his face, fizzling out into static before they could fall any further.
Louie stood in stunned, horrified silence, watching as Huey checked a playfully grumbling Dewey over for any injuries, grinning at his griping. Fenton and Gyro had gone back over to the scene of the crime, where the stupid machine had made its dramatic exit and taken Louie down with it. His heart was still hammering in his chest, but he felt separate from the panic that was causing it – separate from everything. He would think he was a ghost, if it weren’t for the fact that he’d seen ghosts, and this wasn’t it. This was something new.
“Uncle Donald is not going to be happy with us,” Dewey said, sounding a bit amused, and Louie finally managed to focus on the conversation now that his Uncle’s name had been mentioned. “He wanted us to text and check in and instead we were involved in the destruction of a million-dollar invention.”
“We weren’t involved,” Huey insisted, examining Dewey’s head for injury. “We just— we just happened to be here.”
“Somehow I don’t think he’ll care about the difference, with how dangerous it turned out to be. He won’t let us come back here for a while,” Dewey said, subtly checking Huey’s head, too. “None of— Neither of us texted him.”
Louie grasped onto the confusion that sparked within him at that statement, desperate to feel an emotion that he understood and knew how to deal with. He had texted Uncle Donald, so why was Dewey saying that they hadn’t? His brother had been standing right next to him when he’d done it, and they’d even had a conversation about it. Why wasn’t he bringing it up? Why was he ignoring it?
Something was tugging at the corners of his mind, something resembling an answer, but he was too scared to really think about it. It felt like it was too big. Like if he looked at it, there would be no going back.
Louie snapped out of his thoughts as Huey and Dewey started to head towards the lab exit, waving and calling out goodbyes to Gyro and Fenton. They walked past him, once again making no move to acknowledge him, and he followed after them somewhat reluctantly, his feet feeling strange and foreign against the ground.
Louie finally accepted that his vision was bluer than normal for reasons other than the afterimage of bright light.
He trudged along behind his brothers, wondering when they were going to get around to looking for him, wondering when they’d rally the family together to find out what happened to him and save him. Neither Huey nor Dewey looked very concerned that he wasn’t there, and he was as hurt by that as he was confused. What did they think had happened to him? Where did they think he had gone?
“Thanks for coming with me today,” Huey said suddenly, glancing at Dewey and smiling sheepishly. “It didn’t really go how it was supposed to, but thanks anyway.”
“Please, things never go how they’re supposed to.” Dewey waved it off, opening the door and holding it for Huey as they went through. Louie just barely managed to slip through before it closed. “I mean, it was a lot more exciting than I was expecting, at least.”
Huey huffed a laugh, rolling his eyes. “It would’ve been more exciting if it had worked.”
“Agree to disagree.”
“You’re the worst, you know that?” Huey said, but his voice was lighthearted, and Dewey stuck his tongue out playfully. “Sometimes I can’t believe we’re twins.”
“Trust me, I find it hard to believe, too,” Dewey said, and Huey laughed, and Louie stopped dead.
His heart picked up from its already fast pace, and his eyes were wide and unblinking, staring after his brothers, who were still walking and joking and finding absolutely nothing wrong with what they’d just said.
Twins.
Louie choked on a gasp for air, stumbling to the side until he hit the wall, feeling the same strange resistance from before as he tried to ground himself in reality – a reality that he wasn’t a part of.
(“It’s— Well, it doesn’t have a name yet,” Huey said, shrugging and smiling sheepishly. “We’ve just been calling it the Memory Machine.”)
No one was looking for him. No one was wondering where he was or what had happened.
(“What does it do?” Dewey asked, already reaching out to poke it. Huey didn’t even have to look to know to slap his hand away.
“It’s supposed to help regain lost memories,” Huey explained, “or even just improve memory in general.”
”It could help people with amnesia, or other similar problems,” Fenton chimed in.)
No one was worried because no one even—
No one remembered him.
The machine had done the opposite of what it was supposed to do, and Louie – like so many times before – had been the unfortunate target.
(“Louie—” Huey’s frantic warning was cut off as the device beeped—)
Louie slid down the wall until he hit the ground, squeezing his eyes shut and trying to pretend that it was all a dream, that there wasn’t the sound of static in his ears, growing as his panic did. He could feel his physical form wavering, quivering as the rising tide of his emotions overtook him. It seemed that his emotional stability was directly tied to the stability of his body, but he didn’t know how to calm down. He couldn’t. How could he possibly come back from this? How could he be saved if no one knew— If no one even remembered that he—
The lightbulb directly above him in the hallway shattered, and small shards of glass rained down on him, falling through his hands and making him jump at the odd sensation, at the way he’d almost felt it coming before it happened. Staring down at the tiny pieces of the once functioning lightbulb, Louie felt a little more whole, like he’d finally encountered something in the world that was more broken than he was.
It helped to put things in perspective.
Louie wasn’t like Huey. He couldn’t work his way out of this problem with scientific know-how, or facts, or by understanding how the machine had been supposed to work. He wasn’t Dewey, either, who surely would’ve done something other than panic by now, who probably had the guts to try things that Louie wouldn’t even dream of.
Louie wasn’t his brothers, sure, but he wasn’t going to give up on himself just yet.
…
Admittedly – even after his little self-motivational speech – he still didn’t feel much better. Just less likely to fall apart.
He heaved a shaky sigh, looking down at his hands, the colors and edges of them shifting and jumping. He counted the seconds between his breaths, staring unblinkingly as the glitching became less and less intense, until it only happened every few seconds.
That seemed to be as good as it was going to get, for a while.
He closed his eyes once again – briefly, this time – before standing up, turning silently in the direction that his brothers had gone. Like a lost, forgotten ghost, Louie followed them home.