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daydreamsandcrashingwaves · 4 months

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Keeping It Close To The Chest Pt 1

Edited 12/25/23 ~~ Here's Part Two ~~

Part Three Part Four

I devoured the Damian Wayne and Danny Fenton are Twins tags and had to make something of my own to add. This is my first fanfic I've decided to post. I'm much more familiar with the DP side of things but I gave it my best shot. Hope this brings joy anyway. If I decide to post this on A03 I will have it beta'd since I made this in like four parts and then wove them together so the flow may not always be there whoopps.. but for now I just wanted to share this with all you!

TW/CW: Medical experimentation and trauma, parental abuse/neglect, wound description, blood-ectoplasm and human, death (it's danny, he's the culprit lol will apply to Jason too if I add to this), body horror (to be safe), PTSD and flashbacks, childhood trauma and abuse, dehumanization

If I missed a tag/warning please let me know! I've never been an extensive tagger so i tried real hard to get everything, but I am human and could've missed something. Much love, stay safe.

~Ren

He had to keep moving. He could still hear their screams of rage ringing in his ears. Faster, he had to be faster. His blind panic had created an opportunity, a sliver of hope Danyal was determined to twist to his advantage. He was limping forward on uncertain legs. His vision swayed with the movement, and he fought to keep upright. His chest was on fire, Danny pressed his hands tightly to the wound there in a desperate attempt to keep his organs from spilling out like confetti. He kept his arms tucked close and rounded his shoulders to try and keep his torso still while he moved quickly through the empty streets of his once home. His chest was by far injured the worst, but he had paid no mind to the others. If he dared to stop, he would fully die.

Even in his human form, Danny just knows he's leaving a glowing blood trail behind him, the ectoplasm burning into the ground behind him. Whatever side of his transformation his body was currently showing it didn't matter, he was simultaneously both, always. The trail was evidence he transformed due to necessity, he became so durable after dying that it took a lot to hurt him. Danny risked a glance down and paled further. The green he spilled as Phantom mixed with red. A fucked up corrosive bread trail right to him. He was sure he truly was in deep shit. He just had to get to his go bag. Over time with his parent's inventions getting more dangerous the more Danny had to think about putting into motion The Great Escape.

Anything important he had always kept hidden, but Danny had taken everything out of his room once he had died the second time, and Danny was grateful for the convenience to be able to phase things into walls, floors, ceilings. It made his things pretty secure; no human could find it and any ghost that came through was too focused on their obsession or fighting him to go on a treasure hunt for his hidden things.

Danny's willful ignorance of his body as he stumbles farther from FentonWorks doesn’t stop the slight burn of his ectoplasm against the edges of his wounds and the tatters of his hazmat suit pulling on the scabbing blood or the smell. Ancients the smell. It’s rancid, he hasn’t been able to cycle it properly without his normal supply of fresh ectoplasm from the Zone. Only provided in small bursts when his parents wanted to see how his body healed with and without ectoplasm. He can feel the whispers of his terror, anger, grief that’s flowing through his blood.

He had been overconfident way back when he had threatened Vlad with exposing his secret. He had thought they'd love him despite having kept his halfa status from them, he hadn't been prepared for the distrust, the hatred, the way they moved farther and farther from thought out experiments to revenge. Danny knows Maddie and Jack still see him as the quiet, shaken child so desperate to be good, craving acceptance by the eccentric family that took him in when they look at him. If Danny had to guess they had been so blinded in their rage to even realized it was their machine, their failure that made him this way. Now they really did want him dead.

He’s whole somehow, despite their best effort, he just needs time. Ancients, He’s not exactly the monster they pictured, but He's not human... He’s whole.

The thought tastes bitter and Danny strangles it before it can expand. He must be focused. Taking a measured breath Danny turns down a familiar alley, he goes intangible with a slight twinge in his core, slipping into the bathroom of Nasty Burger. He’s done this so many times the familiar path brings comfort, reassurance. Like maybe things will start to turn for the better. Making his way over to the stall Danny debated whether it was worth climbing the toilet or floating up there. No, it was better to grit his teeth and bare it. There were only three containers of ectoplasm in his bag, he needed to preserve what strength he had. He would soon have no way to access the Zone for a refill.

Danny took one hand and placed it on the wall before careful stepping up. Lifting his leg had sent waves of pain across his nerves but with a grunt he leveraged himself up. His vision went black at the edges, he was dizzy, and bile clawed at the back of his throat. Danny took a few breaths, while he might not need to breathe, he’s been human longer than not, and well.. he’s only half ghost so the habit carried over to when he's Phantom. Danny was immensely grateful for his time in the League, the training was brutal, he still has nightmares about dying the first time but.. he did learn how to survive in situations that if he was truly a Fenton, would've killed him many times over. As Danny was Danyal Al Ghul Fenton, he always had back up plans. His Mother had been heavy handed with those lessons.

It was painful to think about Talia. She had been Grandfather’s favored child and the weight of his expectations of his grandsons was enforced by her. Lessons or punishment, very rarely praise was given to Danny by his Mother's hand. Each milestone was meticulously observed and reported back, doubly so for their failures. Tiny bodies with too big of weapons, green and blue eyes, a face mirroring his own but twisted in determination, competition. His older brother, his twin. They were inseparable, until they weren't.

Danny's core throbs in his chest, he wanted to shy away from the thought, yet the inconsolable part of him screams at the injustice of being the only one to escape their Grandfather. If only Danny could've proven himself, perhaps his brother would've had a chance to leave in his stead, but Danny knows just how much he was lacking in comparison to his brother, and it was their skill, or lack thereof in Danny's case, that sealed their fates. Danny was able to avoid Ra's overseeing eyes when they moved off the failure of a Spare and homed in on his true Heir. The grandson who took to their lessons like a duck in water. Deathly beautiful, Danny used to think as he watched his brother dance and fly through his training. Talia couldn't defy Ra's orders but if she just.. misplaced.. the Spare that was abandoned, well, no one has come for him yet.

Danny knows she loved him, somewhere hidden, deep inside his Grandfather's perfect pet assassin. She loved him enough to send him away when it became clear Ra’s saw no need in the Spare that was no longer needed, she had loved him when she had beaten him and left mortal wounds-their only chance to fool Grandfather, she loved him when she had given him his packed bag and left him outside that orphanage in Chicago with lazarus water raging in his veins, and she loved him when she told him to forget.

Forget about the League her and his brother, his family.

With brief tight squeeze to his small shoulder her she told him if he was in danger to find Bruce Wayne and then Talia Al Ghul was gone and Danyal-just Danyal now- was left truly on his own for the first time ever.

Danny was definitely in danger now; his situation was grave and despite everything the pun brought a small smile to his face. He couldn’t go back home to the Fenton's. He tries to forget how he froze in his surprise when he realized his parents didn’t take his reveal as Phantom as well as they had let on. They had smiled and stalled until they had found a way to contain him. By then it was too late, he had gotten too complacent in his run on a normal life.

Only after Ancients knows how long he had been resisting, pleading, screaming-I’m still Danny, it hurts mom please, I’m still me, Dad I’m alive- did Maddie find his core. Too tired to move it away from her gaze any longer and when her fingers brushed it the wave of mind-numbing terror exploded out of him. Something must've been on her gloves because his core burned. It ripped a wail from his throat while he writhed on the table. Ice responded like it never was taken from him by the anti-ghost restraints.

Danny could still distantly feel the ghostly ice that had trapped them in place and shattered his restraints under the pressure the frozen water bursting into existence. Even trapped in his ghost ice they were steadily working on getting out and would be on the hunt for him again soon. He wouldn't allow them to catch him again.

The mere idea they’d be on their way already spurred Danny back into action. Slipping his hand into the wall he grabbed the strap and pulled his bag out, careful to keep it weightless, and slid off the toilet and back down to the floor. He hasn't seen his dagger in months, it hurt too much to practice without Dami, his other half. Here it is though, innocently tied to his bag and his gaze traced it lovingly, before searching inside the biggest pocket for his first aid kit. He didn't have time for stiches, so he reaches for the butterfly bandages and starts to pull the skin together before securing it. It's really the first proper look he gets, it's... unsettling at the very least, horrifying, to see a wound reserved for autopsies on his chest.

The Y incision is inflamed and still bleeding so he carefully follows its path until he's done. Grabbing gauze, he starts to reinforce pad, wrapping a roll of bandages around to hold everything in place. Danny bites his lip and thinks for a moment, he will need stitches, he's been wounded enough in this half-life to know that. The likelihood for his work to stay in place while he flies is less than he'd like. Making a decision and with a mental shrug he takes an ectoshot from the smaller pocket and stabbed it into his thigh before pressing the depressor. Pure energy zapped through his system hard, angerly surges to settle in his chest. Feeling a bit better but more.. wired Danny takes a second to calm. Steeling himself he tries to nudge his core, it responds in a weak pulse.

Danny's body protests, he can feel his muscles shred and reform, his bones twist like taffy, his organs melt together before settling to form his ectobody. It's all over in a flash of bright light, yet the pain felt endless. Overwhelming in its intensity but gone just as quickly as it came leaving Danny sweaty and panting. Transforming injured was tricky, he had to carefully picture where the bandages were, so he didn't lose all his hard work.

Confusion settled as a fog, clinging to his thoughts, making them murky. His hands were covered in blood, his body hurt, and he couldn't quite remember why, there was a siren coming closer. Everything in him screamed to run, to escape, but his hunters were too close now, freed from his ice to kill him fully. On instinct Danny's nails grew to claws, ripping into space to create a portal. He was weak, always had been, but he was good at running, hiding away in the shadows. Ghost was once a name of his, a proud title, not just what he is now.

Just as the doors burst open in a teal and orange blur Danny dove into the swirling green and hoped Clockwork was watching so at least someone knew things had exploded here in Amity. He hasn't needed to be on his own like this since after Jazz first saw him and demanded that her parents bring Danny home with them. He misses her now as the path out of Nasty Burger closes behind him. Danny's falling, dropping towards the ground too fast for eyes to track but his impact had definitely shaken the room. With a pained whine and a flash Danny was back to being human again, his landing had pulled at whatever scab was able to form in the twentyish minutes it took him to drag himself away from the basement. Danny was going to be sick, the sticky cool liquid that had his clothes clinging to him, was going to be very alarming when he finally could give himself a proper once over. He could feel the new bruises as he tried to roll off the pallets he had crushed.

"Oh! Someone decided to drop by! " A man called out with glee as he sauntered in his direction. "Shall we see who our special guest is?" Danny could feel the rotten soul as he got closer. Too close. Forgoing moving Danny tensed in anticipation. He was hurt, yes, but he would go down fighting. He could do that much to make his brother proud, even if he never realized Danny lived to 15 not 5. Before he could uncurl to swing at the man there was the soft sound of fabric rustling and a blade being drawn. Curling tighter Danny hoped he had enough juice to go intangible.

"You will not reach your goal Joker; Do you not get sick of trying?" The voice was smooth, deeper than he remembered but it's been 10 years, it's understandable that puberty changed his brother's voice. Danny would recognize it anywhere. Danny jinxed himself, somehow. How he ended up in the same room as the brother he hadn't seen in a decade, Danny wasn't sure. He was terrified though. Where Damian was the League and their Grandfather wasn't far behind. Damian had carefully hidden away his care as a child but would shower Danny in it in the darkness of their room. After years apart and Grandfather's continued influence Danny was uncertain how much of Damian truly remained.

There was a burst of noise, of movement and a struggle then silence covered the room. Danny's hands were shaking. "Nightwing, first aid is required inside, bring the kit." His brother paused, "No, a civilian, a metahuman if his unusually colored blood is to be taken into account."

Danny could feel his brother's scrutiny, his gaze held weight as it scanned over his collapsed form, he tried to curl more but a hand brushing his shoulder had Danny screaming and scrambling away.

Damian's hands twitched at his side, an aborted motion to draw his sword. He seemed to pause then they flew up empty, placating- it didn't bring Danny any comfort.

An assassin's greatest tool was always their hands. Green eyes tracked him, narrowing at the way Danny was shrinking into the shadows. Dread swam down his spine to settle hard in his gut. Of all the ways to meet his brother again, it had to be when he was dying, for a third time. Danny reached blindly for whatever was next to him to pull himself up, his knees wobbled precariously but he would be standing for this. He had to be. Black spots were now in his vision, but he forced a smirk onto his face. Danny was sure he was a sight to see, torn clothes, skin riddled with bruises, green and red blood splattered all over like a kindergartener's messy painting of Christmas, limp dirty hair.

Danny knows Damian is assessing him, taking in what he can see in front of him to efficiently deal with it as they were trained to do. potential strengths and weaknesses. Behind both the domino mask and his calm exterior Damian is taking in a snapshot. Danny wonders what he sees, if his brother recognizes the boy he’s grown into, Danny’s core thrums wildly and he tries not to fidget. The slight frown that pulls at Damian’s mouth means he caught the aborted motion.

"Damn, green, yellow and red... You look like a traffic light!" He gets one giggle in before he chokes on it. Danny can't breathe. His brother had gone deathly still when Danny spoke. He could see the war of emotions fighting through his brother, suspicion was quickly doused with rage. "How dare she." The Arabic was an unexpected comfort, but Danny felt confusion at the words. He's severely out of practice, he thought he understood but doubt settled in. He wasn't sure.

Damian had always stood firm next to him in the League, calm, driven and decisive, the perfect heir for their Grandfather. He was always warm to Danny though, would allow traces of his true feelings to be visible when Damian would inevitably catch Danny sneaking out of his bed to stargaze. Danny would get scolded, every time. Grandfather would punish him harshly for such indulgences, he knew it. Attachments were weaknesses and Grandfather would not grow weakness in the League, in his heirs. Danny may be weak and the Spare but he was smart. He knows what the looks of distaste meant from his Grandfather. He knew how his failures would catch up to him and how Grandfather disapproved of his influence on Damian. Yet Danny kept going back, hiding in the shadows to gaze at the stars and wait for his brother to come find him.

Danny had braced for Damian to be mad when he realizes Danny didn’t truly die that day and has stayed away from his brother, but Danny couldn’t have expected this.

Pure hatred lights up in Damian’s eyes when he finally realizes what is in front of him. It's Danny’s undoing. Everything else that has happened seemed like a cakewalk compared to being rejected by the person who had always understood him most. Ghosts are the manifestation of their emotions. Frostbite had explained once how injuries can manifest in a ghost's form on their own. Emotional pain could make them unravel down to their cores, until even that disappeared.

For Danny, there was uncertainty, halfas were so rare that there wasn’t much off hand knowledge, but Danny has always known from the second he died. There was no separation between his human and ghost halves. He just was. What fancy wrapping he showed off hardly mattered. Things bleed so easily between them, Danny Fenton and Phantom.

"I'll kill her painfully for this, but you abomination it will be swift." Damian has balanced on his toes, ready for a quick burst of speed. His sword now clenched so tightly in his hands it almost shakes.

An abomination the words looped through Danny's mind. The wounded sob that came forth when he opened his mouth to reply was unexpected. Danny took halting steps back from his twin. The hitching breath brought his attention back to his chest. This wasn't how Danny had pictured this moment, all those years of stolen daydreams. His core felt wrong in his chest. He felt cold, cold and brittle but his chest was on fire-and wet. The surgical cut seeping like its minutes fresh, this was by far Danny’s worst idea, to believe to ever hope, his brother would ever keep a monster by his side Danny was a fool to hope even for a moment-hands hands reaching for him to bring him back, grabbing his arm-

“No! I don't know! No please” Danny gasps as he flails weakly “I’m sorry I’m sorry!”

Damian hesitates again, before his resolve firms, "Danyal-" His name cracks over his brother's tongue. Danny isn't aware enough to unpack the way his brother's face twists in heartbreak the longer he watches Danny bleed. A warm body comes up behind him, blocking him in, he’s crying now, a weakness that he never could smother. "No!" Danny avoids his gaze scrambling to grip onto whatever fabric is in his hands. Danny wants the moment to last but he knows what’s coming. Damian won’t protect him now. His older brother had been steadfast by his side in their childhood, but now… now maybe it was better he’s bleeding out.

Danny vaguely registered the man behind him cutting off his shirt, kit at the ready besides him. Pressure on his wound forces a long high whine from his throat. He wants to shove it away, his hand swatting at it but he missed, and it thuds uselessly on the ground. He doesn't have the energy to try again.

The shock of a hot hand against his face brings everything into abrupt focus. Danny flinches but can’t move, the body unyielding behind him. He sees the room is covered in his frost and ice. Batman and Red Robin are farther back, their feet trapped in the ghostly ice, they had things in hand to try and hack away at the ice trapping them in place.

“Danyal” The pain in his twin's voice has him turning in that direction; his brother was there. For how well they could read each other in childhood Danny had no clue what his brother was thinking now. His twice dead brother, back to only die again at his feet. “Are you destabilizing? Why were you sent here? What does Mother want?”

“What?” Danny can’t help the laugh that bursts out of him, even if it hurts, it seems his ice kept his organs in place while he tumbled through his hastily made portal. He must've lost consciousness at some point though; his ice seems to have melted to leaving him fully exposed. “That bitch- She has nothing to do with this- wait. You think-” Danny laughs even harder until he can’t breathe and he’s hacking and spitting up more ectoplasm. He’s pulled more fully against the warm body behind him, his head lulls-oh it’s Nightwing, the blatant concern radiating from the man stings Danny’s eyes and a few tears scatter down his face.

“I’m not a clone Dami, I didn’t even know you weren’t with the League anymore." Danny's speech slurs more the harder he tries to piece sentences together, "I'm sorry I don't know how I ended up here.” Danny is growing quieter the longer he talks- can feel his life draining onto the floor and there’s panic in the air now, Batman had sprung up next to Damian's side. Seemed to say something to Damian before he retreated slightly. Batman was hovering ready to interfere but unsure in what actions needed to take place.

Damian is staring at him intently, looking to match his scars to the one's he remembers. He taps his fingers insistently on Danny's cheek and Danny doesn't fight looking back at him. The fingers linger against the scar hidden behind his hair next to his ear, traces the edges. Damian was the one to give it to him, a training error. He had looked at Danny similarly to how he was now. Fear, regret, panic. Words are being said, they blend together, warp, so Danny just hums in response. Everything is more distant now. Danny's own fear floating out of reach. He knows death intimately, he's not afraid to greet her a third time.

The words became frantic as he struggles to stay awake, and someone was talking again. “-ood to see you though- no tss okay no pain.. mma be cold soon-" Oh. That's Danny. The face he has ached to see for years fills his vision. The shade of green he could never replace. Danny was picked up and hustled out a door into the by Nightwing while a harsh discussion flew over his head. They were in some sort of vehicle now, the door shutting causes silence to blanket the group. His head is in Damian's lap, and it takes a second, but Danny realizes Damian is carting his fingers through his greasy hair. His other hand was holding Danny's, playing with his fingers like he did as children. Danny's vision fills with tears and spills down his face.

"Danyal? Can you hear me?" Damian calls his attention softly, his sweet, sweet brother tries to keep the concern out of his voice, off his face. Once he sees Danny focus on him a trembling smile makes its home on Damian's face. His domino mask is gone, Danny drinks in the unobscured view of his brother. "We'll be back to the Cave shortly, Alfred will attend to you, then you're going to tell me exactly how this happened so I can make sure it never does again." Danny can tell Damian is scared, the minute tremble in his petting only confirmed it. Danny let a smile tug at his lips too, "It's gonna be okay Dami" Danny slurred, he hears Damian insisting they were almost home.

Home with Damian. That was a fool's dream, just out of reach. Danny never indulged in the idea; he wouldn't put Dami in danger by reappearing. But- Danny was with him now, a twitch of his fingers against Damian's proves it. Danny went limp as the Batmobile skidded into the Cave, Damian was a silent statue watching Alfred take his brother away from him. Batman saddled up next to him- Damian should shower and change, whatever it was that changed his brother was making his skin itch- but he couldn't move. His baby brother was in there, dying, again.

"Damian, chum... what was all that?" Damian ignores his eyes itching as tears built, he clears his throat to report- reporting was vital with their nighttime activities, Father needed information to help Danny. He couldn't take his eyes of the little glowing red 'In Use' sign above the surgery door though.

Damian cuts a glance at the man next to him, more Bat than Father at the moment. "Once Danyal is stable, I will give you an explanation Father."

~~~~

I thought of a name, added it to the tags, I'll add a link to the next post if I write one, will tag future posts with 'Keeping It Close To The Chest' as well

much love

~Ren

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halfagone · 1 year

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I just found this hilarious story called “Adventures of Magical Girl Ghostly Star”, where Danny and his rogues get sent to the DC universe, with Danny pretending to be a magical girl because he doesn’t know how the DC universe feels about ghosts. My prompt would be a one shot about magical girl Danny meeting a legit magic user like Zatanna and Constantine with shenanigans ensuing from that point forward. What do you think?

Huehuehue~ Okay, so! There are a couple ways this could go... Let's go with the funniest option:

---

Zatanna squinted her eyes so close together that she could hardly see past her eyelashes. This hero from another universe, called "Phantom", shuffled his feet shyly as he stood in front of her, clearly trying very hard not to shrink under her scrutinizing gaze. Bruce had said Phantom identified himself as a "Magical Girl" (Boy??), and Bruce had requested her presence to confirm its validity.

Problem was... Zatanna hadn't even realized Magical Girls were a thing. In fiction and anime, sure, but in real life?

She would have no way of knowing whether it were true or not. Phantom did have an air of death around him, but half the hero community had an air of death around them so that was hardly telling proof. There was definitely something supernatural about him, but it was hard to say how 'magical' that could be considered.

She tilted her head to the side and examined him a little more closely. Honestly... It would make sense? He had white hair like starlight, that floated around the crown of his forehead with a will of their own like an aura of brilliant light. His outfit was... not nearly as magical, but hey, she did have to admit a hazmat suit was a lot more practical than a frilly skirt and knee-high boots. And she swore there was a perpetual sprinkle of stardust around his eyes, dusting his cheeks with constellations disguising themselves as freckles...

"Yeah, okay." Zatanna agreed with a shrug of her shoulders. "It seems pretty legit to me."

Bruce snapped his head towards her. "What?"

Phantom gaped at her. "REALLY?!"

[On the other side of things:]

Constantine took one look at the so-called "Magical Girl" before he dragged his gaze over to Bruce. When he saw the man's serious expression, he instantly knew that this was no joke. He took a swig of his liquor. (He was far too sober for this.)

"Sure," Constantine grumbled. "That seems legit."

He was not going to be the one to explain how they'd somehow winded up with a death entity.

He wasn't malicious. Constantine had slept at night with far worse guilt hanging over his head.

---

OR! In other words: As far as the magic users know, they have never met a Magical Girl before, and thus they have no way of confirming if Danny is lying or not. They can tell something is amiss, or that they're missing some things, but it's never enough to confirm for certain. Constantine at first is pretty certain that Danny isn't a Magical Girl, but then something really lucky, perhaps even ✨Magical✨ happens to or around him, and slowly Constantine is convinced that maybe he really is. Zatanna, meanwhile, is experiencing the opposite. She sees Danny doing really creepy, humanly impossible deeds and she realizes with dawning wariness that he is no Magical Girl. Still a pretty sweet kid, sure, but yeah, there is nothing Magical about Danny splitting his head in two for shits and giggles.

#halfagone replies #dpxdc #tw: slight body horror #dpxdc au

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cemoras27-but-writing-this-time · 1 year

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Danny's Evil Jaunt. Its Evil He Swears. Ignore the Charity. pt. 2

Hello! Im back with Part 2 Im honored that so many people were interested <3 HOPEFULLY THE COLOR STAYS RIGHT IM SO SORRY ABOUT THAT I DON'T POST ON TUMBLR OFTEN. also i have almost 0 history about Dc so if anyone wants to ramble about the charaters in the tags please do

Danny's outfit was based on @little-pondhead 's art and prompt was by @im-totally-not-an-alien-2

part: 1

AO3

Oliver Queen had thought he’d seen it all; however this Fenton guy just seems to be full of fun little gadgets. And puns. So many puns.

No one knows anything about the guy other than he’s a mechanical genius. Just magically appeared out of the blue one day with inventions that make Dr. Freeze’s gun look like a toy, claiming that ‘he’s not gonna be here long today but needs to do some field testing.’

And now here's Oliver listening to this kid(it had to be a kid, Fenton didn’t look a day over 14) ramble about how much fun he had today and that he had to come back soon(not looking forward to that). Green Arrow took a good look at the kid.

He was short, maybe around 5’4 without the boots, and didn’t have much bulk, but clearly had a lot of lean muscle from what Oliver could tell from the fight, and black shaggy undercut hair. He wore a red hazmat suit with black gloves and red with black tinted lenses goggles. All covered with a lab coat that is definitely not OSHA compliant for mad scientist children, not with the way it was singed at the bottom and the sleeves had been torn off at the elbow, and the amount of sewn on patches - the biggest being the Fenton logo on his back. He was also lugging around a massive cannon that had Oliver bound to a lamp post with a glowing green net, but nets weren’t the only thing it could shoot, no it shot out so many things within the half hour they had been fighting that Oliver lost count. The kid also had some weird meta biology if the sharp teeth and pointed ears were anything to go on. But Oliver’s thoughts were cut off by a phone ringing. Fenton looked down and started feeling around his suit until he found his phone, a small Iphone with odd attachments with a green ghost case covered with stickers, stopped the alarm and moved his goggles up to rest on his head wincing as the rising sun shined in his eyes.

“Hoo bright. Alright that's it for today I guess! Thanks for playing with me Mr. Arrow, I think I'm gonna pick up some energy drinks and a couple of snacks before heading home, I still need to write an English paper for Mr. Lancer and Jazz’ll finish me off if I don’t get home soon” Fenton grinned and started to punch in directions for the nearest convenience store on his phone. It was just around the corner from the street they had left the fight off on, nice.

‘Maybe I should grab some for Sam and Tuck’ Danny thought, ‘Oh wait I forgot!’ just as he was about to turn into the store he rushed back to where he left Green Arrow, who was trying to saw his way out of the Fentnet with his knife.

“Sorry! I wanted to do something before I left!” Fenton smiled and put his wiry arm around Oliver in a side hug and pulled out his phone and did a peace sign with the hand around Oliver. “Say Frootloops!”

Fenton pulled off Oliver and showed him the picture, Fenton had a Cheshire cat grin while he had a miserable expression.

“Ooph, probably not your best look but I think we look cool. And really, that’s all that matters at the end of the day. How I think we look.”

“You're a menace, what do you want?”

“You don’t know? I’m god’s playtester and I’m here for bug testing before the rest of the world sees my inventions. Consider Star City my testing sandbox. Anyway see’ya!” and Fenton was gone down the street.

And that was the day Oliver Queen knew that he needed to make sure that the world outside of Star City could never be exposed to Fenton. Especially the bat. If anyone found out his ego would never recover.

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if you want to be added to the tag list please put it in the comments! it's easier to see there!

@starkcravingmad@amuseofminds@emeraudesfateandfandoms@passivedecept@quirky-gardener@xarexraven@justwannabecat @fisticuffsatapplebees @blacksea21090 @lovelessnightfall @iceknight-of-sun @sabrina414 @moobloomrights @vortexbox @trickedri @naluforever3 @suppengott @angelsdeathsstuff @lesling123 @cosmicgesture @always-be-a-stranger @sealover89 @slapphapp1 @fantasticbluebirdfan @krzys2000 @xxwintrynightzxx @justgray15777 @littlegrayram @danisfra @kyrianclawraith @@thought-u-said-dragon-queen

#dp x dc #cem's writing #dpxdc #I hope this goes through right #it was a pain to fix the text last time

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bigbadmercer · 2 years

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Day 5 of Prototype week - AU. For this prompt, I decided to write instead of draw. I had an idea and I couldn't think of a good way to show it in a drawing. This is rushed (so please ignore any errors) but hopefully the concept is interesting enough to make up for it. Allow me to introduce and AU where Blackwatch weren't assholes!

Waking up in a morgue was pretty creepy. The scientists performing his autopsy ran away screaming, and honestly? Alex felt like joining them.

Alex... That was his name, he remembered. So, he knew his name was Alex, he had a sister called Dana and he should be dead.

Alex thought that was a scarily short list of things to know about yourself. Before he could ponder the thought any longer, alarms blared throughout the building. The sound was loud and rather terrifying, given the circumstances.

So Alex ran.

He followed the route that the scientists had taken by listening to their footsteps. Despite how little he remembered, he was sure he should be struggling to hear the steps. Was it odd that they were still loud? It was probably odd. Waking up in a morgue couldn't be normal, though. He decided he shouldn't be surprised by anything at that point.

Evidently, he'd taken the right path. After a couple of minutes of frantically running through the halls, he finally found a door leading to outside. He jogged out cautiously and ducked behind a wall, remembering one of the scientists yelling something about a 'kill team'. Alex was pretty sure he could guess what their job was from their name. He took in the details of his surroundings as his eyes scanned the scene in front of him nervously.

He saw the two blue hazmat suit men that had been moments away from slicing his chest open. The two were facing a group of what appeared to soldiers. They all wore a uniform but none of them had a country's flag on them. So, private military then.

How did he know that when he couldn't even remember the name of the city he was in?

Shaking his head slightly, he leaned a bit further out of his hiding spot to see better. And there were the guns - so this was the kill team, then. Just as Alex was about to lean back and slowly walk away, he noticed three blue dots looking at him.

Everything for the next thirty seconds after that was a blur. There was a lot of yelling and screaming (from both sides). Alex ran again only to be chased down by the tri-eye (that was their new name) squad. It ended with him running to a dead end and turning to face the soldiers that now blocked him in. They raised their loading guns, aimed at him and Alex felt a wave of panic wash over him. "Wait, wait!" He yelled as he hastily raised his hands to display his lack of weapons. He expected the soldiers to take their shot. Instead, they faltered and looked towards their leader. Their leader hesitantly motioned for them to lower their weapons. Alex felt himself relax marginally.

"What are you doing?" The tri-eye leader asked, confusion clear in his voice.

"I.. I'm not entirely sure." Alex shocked himself with his honesty. He didn't feel like he was an honest person. The solider seemed to study Alex for a moment.

"You're... Scared?" He asked.

"Uh, yeah? I woke up in a morgue and now people are pointing guns at me. I don't even know who I am!" Alex snapped back. The leader seemed to consider what he said for a moment before holstering his weapon.

"I understand why you're scared. If you work with us, we can help you. We can explain what happened. We can help you harness your new... Abilities." He said in a gentle voice Alex didn't expect to hear.

"I... What abilities?" Alex asked. He hadn't told them about his hearing. How much did they know about him? Instead of speaking, the soldier simply pointed at Alex's arm. Alex turned to look at him arm with a puzzled expression that quickly morphed into an expression of shock. Black and red strands of... something were ghosting over his arm, contrasting sharply with the deathly pale tone of his skin. His jaw dropped for a moment before he composed himself and turned back to the soldiers. They had all completely relaxed by then. The leader spoke once more.

"We are Blackwatch. We work with the company that developed the science behind that." He said, nodding towards Alex's arm. "We can help you control it so that nobody gets hurt."

Alex stared at the soldiers for a while. Should he trust them? He couldn't remember anything. He didn't know if Blackwatch were good or bad. His mind whispered the name Gentek, but he didn't know if that was linked to the soldiers in front of him. They had chased him with guns. Yet they seemed so relaxed now...

Alex slowly lowered his hands and stepped forwards. In only a few steps, he had reached the soldiers. The leader simply turned to walk back to their helicopter, motioning for the hooded man to follow them. Alex stood still as all the soldiers sat in the helicopter one by one. He didn't move until one of the other soldiers stuck his arm out of the helicopter and spoke to him. "Need a hand up?"

Alex stared at the limb for a second before taking the soldier's hand to get into the helicopter. He sat alongside them feeling much less scared than he had been five minutes ago. As he finally calmed down, he knew he had made the right decision in trusting them.

#prototype 2009 #alex mercer #alex mercer prototype #blacklight virus #alex j mercer #[prototype]#blackwatch #prototypeweek2022

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flamenwolf · 7 months

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So I've been reading a lot of Danny Phantom stuff lately and got inspired to write my own prompt/story idea. I call it, True Hybrid.

Just like usual, Danny goes into the portal. Maybe he doesn't wear his hazmat suit or maybe it's just dumb luck, but the portal does a better job at rearranging his molecules. He is 100% half ghost half human. No switching between forms. His hair is black at the roots but fades to white, his clothes are half color swapped, one eye is ectoplasmic green and the other is a freezing blue, and so on.

This makes Danny a lot more powerful. He has all the benefits of being a ghost and human. Human made equipment, even if specifically made for ghosts, have a hard time hurting him but can't end him. Ghost shields hurt a bit but he can pass through no problem. Even if his body is destroyed, he'll reform in the zone. Basically the boy is immortal.

Down side? Ghost instincts are always on. Super territorial and protective, very emotional, and eager to get into a fight. Dash keeps trying to pick on Danny and losing but doesn't learn his lesson. His eyes both glow when angered and the whites of his hair become misty, like liquid nitrogen, to foreshadow his ice powers/core. Sam and Tucker have to constantly remind him to breathe, or that his neck shouldn't turn that far, and so on. Imagine all the accidental power uses from the show, but replace them with Danny purposely using his powers and forgetting humans can't do that. Like phasing out of his bed and into the kitchen and just sit at the table like it's normal.

Because of this, he has a harder time hiding his identity. It's only thanks to his parents' biased towards ghost that they don't notice. If anything they think he's just very ecto contaminated and scold him for not wearing his hazmat suit all the time in the house like they do.

Danny also befriends some of the ghosts. They see him more as a new ghost who doesn't know better, or at least as a fellow ghost who might be able to understand. Like with Johnny and Kitty, Danny immediately confronts Johnny when they first meet. Johnny tries to calm Danny down by reassuring him he's just using his sister's body and doesn't actually like her. To a human, sounds disgusting, but to a ghost it's whatever. So, Danny explains why that's a bad thing and actually just helps Kitty get out of the zone and makes them promise not to cause too much trouble. Danny does fight them every now and then and send them back, but no hard feelings because that's just how ghosts are.

Now Vlad is still a classic halfa like in the show. That's because his accident was slow and incomplete thanks to the soda. But he doesn't know this. He thinks he is the superior ghost because he not only has more experience, but can switch back to human whenever he wants. Danny believes this too, and struggles with it.

So, basically we have an over powered Danny running more on ghost logic than normal who befriends some of his rouges and struggles to find the perfect balance with his human and ghost side. I think this would be a good opportunity to explore Danny's ghost side because in the original show he's more so a human with powers than a half ghost. I've read a lot of fan fics that explore Danny's ghost biology and psychology and always found them interesting.

Let me know what you think and please add on if you have any more ideas.

#danny phantom #op danny phantom #True Hybrid AU #first time writing something like this #danny phantom prompt

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lucifer-is-a-bag-of-dicks · 3 years

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In relations to my last ask, how would you write Danny revealing his ghost identity to Sam and Tucker? Set somewhere in the month between Danny being vaporized by the ghost portal and the opening episode.

sorry for sitting on this one for a couple days, I didn't have the spoons to go into the answer I felt it deserved

I know there have been fics and aus about Sam and Tucker not being there during the accident, but it's been so long since I read one so I guess it's time for my take on it!

Danny would have been Freaking Out after it happened, like he sees his reflection and realises that something fuckin' weird absolutely just happened to him, he might not twig at first exactly what it was because he figures he could be hallucinating or his vision could have been fucked up by the light in the portal, it isn't anything serious right?

the power surge from the portal would have alerted his parents who come down into the lab and they go absolutely buck wild with joy that the portal finally worked!! and oh my god Danny you weren't standing too close to it right?

Danny's thinking 'why the fuck aren't they saying anything about the white hair and glowing eyes' but he glimpses back at his reflection and it's totally normal again, okay so maybe it was a hallucination okay that's good

his dad is pretty much doing a victory dance while his mum is scanning him for any contamination, she says his readings are abnormally high and they should keep an eye on him and run some decontamination procedures

boy goes back to his room feeling pretty shaken up, he probably calls Sam and Tucker immediately to tell them what happened, he might mention that he was seeing things after coming out of the portal but everything seemed to be fine now, he feels really cold tho

his parents pull him out of school for a few days to keep an eye on him but nothing especially unusual happens, he mentions to his parents that he feels cold all the time and they keep checking his temperature and ectoplasmic readings

it's an unpleasant few days, he has to scrub his skin almost raw in the shower and wash his hair three times in a row every night, as well as drink a fuckton of water and take a diuretic to flush out his system, they make him take some kinda medication they developed that's supposed to keep him from absorbing any more radiation than he already has, it makes him really sick but they keep making him take it

but in the end despite feeling incredibly unwell his readings DO go down and his temp DOES climb back up so the Fentons breath a sigh of relief and just tell Danny to make sure he tells them if he feels sick again or if anything unusual happens

what they DON'T realise, is the treatments worked to flush what was currently in his system and on his skin, but it didn't do anything for the fact that he was now producing his own ectoplasm, which very readily began to replenish itself after the initial purge

he goes back to school and tells his friends all about his terrible last few days, and suddenly Sam is looking at him in alarm and whispers 'dude your eyes are glowing'

Tucker looks over like 'what do you mean? they look fine'

'they were absolutely glowing! like just for a second they were-'

'bright green?' Danny asks, mildly panicking

he tells them exactly what he saw in the mirror when he came out of the portal, and they finally start wondering if maybe it wasn't a hallucination

they go hide in some empty classroom somewhere and discuss what should happen next, Tucker thinks Danny should tell his parents, Danny does not want to go through another few days of decontamination procedures, Sam sides with Danny, mostly because she's generally anti-parent in general but also because she thinks that the Fentons' methods sound dodgy as hell because of how sick the medication made him

'I mean have they even tested those meds properly? how do they know it won't make him worse?'

it's at this point that the school-bell rings and Danny falls through the desk he was leaning on

Sam and Tuck think he just slipped, Danny also thinks he just slipped, but Danny also noticed that he felt really weird and tingly for a moment there

in class his pen keeps slipping out of his hand, in science he drops two beakers and is barred from handling anything fragile for the rest of class, he finds himself feeling weirdly lightheaded and motion sick at random moments, his stomach flipping and his feet feeling almost like they aren't completely touching the floor

he doesn't know that it's his body very momentarily ignoring gravity, not enough to make him float completely but just enough to make him feel weirdly unanchored to the ground

Tucker is very much convinced that Danny should tell his parents about this, Sam thinks he should probably go to a hospital instead, Danny thinks telling his parents is probably a good idea, but he's highkey terrified of them making him take that medication again, they kept assuring him that it's harmless to humans and the sickness is just a reaction to the ectoplasm in his body, but he knew that each time they made him take it he felt more and more like whatever was in it shouldn't be in him

so in the end he decides that he'll wait to see if the side effects go away on their own, so far they don't seem to be hurting him, and he'll take being lightheaded and dropping stuff constantly over taking those meds and feeling like he's got pins sticking into every nerve in his body

(like it was Bad, kid's lowkey traumatised)

and then in class he falls right through his chair, nobody sees what happened, he was at his desk and now he's on the floor, everyone laughs it off but after school Danny drags his friends around behind the gym to tell them what happened

he is freaking out, totally panicking and that's when Sam and Tucker notice his appearance change, it's wonky at first, flashes of light keep sparking off him and his eyes are glowing on and off, his hair is flashing streaks of white and his clothes keep shifting into something black

Sam snaps him out of it with a slap, but instead of going back to normal his whole body flashes and suddenly he's in his ghost form

he is SUPER confused about why he's in his hazmat suit again and why the colours are all wrong and Sam and Tuck have to tell him 'uh dude, that hallucination definitely wasn't a hallucination'

then a football comes flying past and some jock chases it behind the gym and see them standing there and is like 'what are you two losers doing back here'

and Sam and Tuck are like 'two?' and they realise that Danny isn't there anymore, the jock grabs the ball and runs off again

then Danny reappears

cue all three of them freaking out

the fact that he's fighting ghosts without hesitation in the beginning of the first ep probably means it isn't the first time it's happened, he's probably down in the lab with his friends, showing them the portal and telling them exactly how his accident happened, when something comes flying out

it immediately attacks them and Danny probably goes instinctively into protective mode, he transforms and lobs a punch at one of the fuckers, and it hurts it, a lot, he grabs it and hauls it around, throwing it back into the portal

Sam and Tuck are just like 'holy shit dude you kicked ass' and Danny's just like 'uhhhh I dunno what happened guys but that felt really super cool'

he turns back to normal as his dad comes downstairs and gets all excited about the three kids being interested in the ghost portal, cue opening of the first episode

at this point Danny is pretty convinced he's going to tell his dad, but Jack doesn't give him a chance to say much before going off on his monologue

and then the portal opens up again and the ghost comes back, this time with friends, Danny barely thinks before he's throwing himself at the ghosts, kicking their asses and lobbing them back into the portal, he turns around completely expecting to have to explain himself and finds his dad SOMEHOW hadn't turned around even once during the whole fight and by a miracle didn't notice anything unusual

Danny loses his nerve and transforms back without telling his dad anything, and then we have the events of Mystery Meat where he's still struggling to control his powers and whether or not to tell his parents

soooo yeah that's my take ~ hope you enjoyed

#asks #danny phantom #lula's headcanons

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cleanlenins · 3 years

Text

Ectober Day 6: Witching Hour

Words Spoken at the Witching Hour

Chapter 2

Jack and Maddie disproved Ouija boards in College, but why not give them another try? However, fixing their mistakes will take more than just an old board and some candles.

AO3

While her violent outburst had been cathartic, Maddie was regretting her rash decision to destroy the ancient spirit board. She sifted through the ashes, pulling larger pieces of charred wood from the pile and dumping them into the bin. Her gloves were covered in soot and charcoal, the dusty particles sliding over the rubbery texture. She grabbed the planchet, and examined it. The dark ash seemed grey next to the impossible black of the little cursor. She clenched her fist around it and started to toss it into the trash can. But hesitated.

“Mom? Oh my God, what happened here?” Maddie whipped around to see Jazz standing at the door to the kitchen. She had one hand covering her mouth as she gaped at the mess. The table, while still standing, had a huge whole burned into the center. Maddie knew that she must look a sight as well, eyes puffy and red from lack of sleep and soot stains on her cheek.

“We had a bit of an accident with our experiment last night,” Maddie said smoothly. It was what she and Jack had decided to tell the kids until they had a chance to sort through their thoughts. Before they had a chance to figure out if there was any validity to Phantom’s claim.

When Maddie had bought the spirit board, the lady had told her that spirits could not lie while communicating through the object. Maddie had never expected the blasted thing to work, so she hadn’t set up any more trustworthy methods for determining if a ghost was lying or not. An oversight on her part based on her own hubris.

“I thought you guys agreed that you would keep all of your experiments in the lab from now on?” Jazz crossed her arms.

“I’m sorry sweetie. We didn’t realize it was something that would turn...explosive. We will be sure to keep things downstairs from now on,” Maddie assured Jazz. Jazz looked skeptical, but did not press the point. Instead, she skirted around the stains on the linoleum and began to make her some breakfast. Maddie glanced at the planchet still held in her hand, and stashed it in her pocket.

Maddie removed her gloves and tossed them in the special tub she and Jack kept for their hazmat suits. She quickly washed her hands before putting on a clean pair. She rubbed her tired eyes, moving around Jazz to get to the coffee pot. How did she get through so many sleepless nights in college? She already felt dead on her feet. She must be getting old.

She reached to flick on the coffee pot, before jerking away as the coffee pot shocked her. Not hard, nothing more than simple static electricity. But it startled her.

“Mom? Are you okay?” Jazz asked.

“Fine, Jazzy,” Maddie stared at the machine in shock and reached out to touch it again. No shock occurred. “I think I might need to change the filtrator in the coffee machine battery. It just shocked me a bit.”

“Through rubber gloves?” Jazz raised an eyebrow. Maddie’s mind buffered, looking down at her hands.

“Maybe a more serious issue,” Maddie muttered. Jazz sighed.

“And I was really looking forward to coffee,” The teen slumped, still scrambling eggs. Loud steps were coming from the stairs, and Maddie turned to see Danny walking into the kitchen.

Well, walking probably wasn’t the best word. He was slumped over, backpack hanging from one shoulder. His eyes were rimmed in red and heavy bags laid under his eyes. He slumped into a dining chair, not even commenting on the hole in the table before laying his head in his hands.

“Danny, are you okay?” Jazz asked. Mother and Daughter wore matching looks of concern. The black haired teenager mumbled something incomprehensible. Maddie hesitantly walked over, putting her hand on his shoulder.

He was freezing. Cold enough that she could feel his temperature even through the thick gloves. Maddie swallowed thickly.

“Honey, did you not sleep well?” Maddie asked. Danny sat up, blearily looking up at his Mom.

“Weird dreams,” He mumbled, blinking up at his mom. Maddie rubbed his arm

“What kind of dreams?” She pressed. Danny grunted.

“Just...bad memories. Mistakes.”

“Was it...about the CATs?” Maddie startled, Jazz was suddenly by her side putting a plate of eggs in front of Danny. He looked down at his plate, but didn’t reach for them.

“No. The other thing. The first thing,” Danny said.

“What thing are you talking about?” Maddie asked. Dany didn’t react, but Jazz looked sheepish.

“Danny has had a lot of test anxiety over the last few years. I have been helping him work through it,” Jazz said quickly. She avoided Maddie’s eye and turned on heel to go back and grab another plate. “You don’t need to worry, Mom.”

Maddie looked at Danny, who was pushing his food around on his plate and slumping closer and closer to the table. And knew she was very worried.

~~~

Once the kids had left for school, Maddie unplugged the coffee maker and carried it down into the lab. Jazz had to nearly drag Danny out of his chair, her brother stumbling into her before catching his balance. Jazz had continuously uttered assurances that Danny was fine and did not need to go to the doctor. Jazz had chattered continuously, Maddie unable to get a word in as they slammed the front door behind her.

With a sigh, she set the coffee pot on the table. Jack was already in the lab, looking just as ragged as she. He was pouring over security footage from the lab, trying to find any evidence of Danny being Phantom.

“How’s it going?” Maddie asked. She massaged her hand.

“We really should have labelled these tapes,” Jack frowned. “We didn’t even order them. I keep switching between tapes from the last few months, to one before Danny was even born. This could take days. Weeks, even.”

Maddie nodded. She had been afraid of something like that. Instead of joining her husband by the small tv, she walked over to where she had kept the notes on the spirit board. She rubbed her hands together, before reaching to pick up the top page.

And dropped it immediately. Her hand trembled. Part of her didn’t want to know the truth. Because if all of this was true. If she and Jack had-

“Mads, come look,” Jack said, more chipper than before. Maddie turned away from the papers, holding her hand close to her chest. Jack had a video paused on the screen. He let it play.

It was Danny, when he was five or six. Jack and Maddie were working on a project in the corner, while Danny was running around. He had a toy rocket in hand, making zooming noises as he sent the little astronauts on a space exploration. He prattled on, making up ridiculous plots where aliens attacked, where wormholes opened to other galaxies, where he had to be a superhero to save the earth from a meteor. Maddie smiled at the memory. Until she watched Danny trip over a spare bit of wire and faceplant into the floor. He started wailing, past Maddie and Jack whirling around and scooping him into a big hug. Maddie felt tears in her eyes. She removed one of her gloves to wipe them away.

“What if we failed him, Jack?” Maddie’s voice trembled. Jack turned a baleful look up at his wife before stopping. An expression of shock on his face.

“Maddie. Your hand,” He jumped out of his seat to get closer. Maddie looked down at her hand.

A circular burn sat in the middle of her palm. Small Lichtenberg figures scattered from the center. But the most striking thing was that the figures were pulsing a bright green. Maddie stared at the mark in horror. Once more she felt a jolt in her hands, her fingers twitching, and the mark grew.

“Jack,” Maddie whispered in fright. Jack took her hand in his, examining it closely. “What is it?”

Jack let go of Maddie’s hand, before running over to the notes himself. He rummaged through them quickly. Maddie felt herself shaking, looking down at the unnatural mark on her hand. Jack let out a noise of triumph as he held up a piece of paper.

“Make sure to end your contact with the spirit when you are finished conversing. If not, you may attach the spirit to yourself. This can have many consequences, depending on the power of the spirit. It can result in something as mundane as constant bad luck or-” Jack faltered, gaping at the page.

“What? What is it Jack?”

“-or as severe as dying the same death,” Jack gulped. “Maddie. Maddie we didn’t do any of the things to close the ritual. You’re still connected.”

I just wanted to look inside. I tripped over a wire. I hit the button on the inside. The portal turned on. And I died.

“ He was electrocuted,” Maddie sobbed, hand spasming. “It’s true, isn’t it? We killed our baby?”

Jack had tears streaming down his face as he rushed forward and crushed Maddie into a hug. She sobbed into his chest. In grief. In guilt. In exhaustion. In fear. Her whole body shook with the force of her tears. Had Jack not been holding her, she would have collapsed onto the ground in a puddle of tears.

“We have to find a way to stop this. To stop the connection,” Jack said. He rushed over to the papers, fanning them out so he could see more than one of them at a time. Maddie joined him, her hand occasionally spasming.

The two of them poured over the notes, double checking them with the Nightingale notebook to see if they could find any correlation to the spirit board. But the notebook only condemned the use of such objects, and did nothing at all to say how to counter their effects. Burning it was briefly mentioned on an online source, but considering it was already a pile of ash that seemed unlikely. Maddie and Jack started to comb through more and more sources, each less reputable than the last. As time crept on, the spasms became more painful. The lighting marks spread up her forearm, up her shoulder, nearly touching her neck. Tears were constantly pouring from her eyes as she barely contained herself from screaming in agony.

The two started when they heard the door upstairs slam. Maddie looked up, sweat pouring down her face. Jack slapped his forehead.

“Of course. We should ask Danny. Maybe he knows something,” The man said, sprinting up the stairs. Maddie hobbled after him, leaning heavily into the wall as she made her way up the stairs. She slowly made her ascent, and opened the lab door.

Jazz was talking to Jack, but she was not alone. Sam and Tucker were standing in the kitchen, Danny’s unconscious body held between them. Maddie gasped at the sight.

“So he is like this because you and Mom did some hairbrained ritual that literally blew up in your faces?” Jazz was angry. Her face was nearly the color of her hair, red with the force of her rage.

“Jazz, we didn’t know,” Maddie whispered. Jazz finally noticed her mom entering the room and gasped in horror. Both Tucker and Sam wore similar expressions.

“Mom, what’s wrong?” Jazz rushed over to Maddie, offering her shoulder. Jack filled the teens in on what they had discovered, how Danny was now attached to Maddie, and how it was slowly killing her.

“Please, if you know any way to undo this,” Jack pleaded. This was their last chance.

“I do,” Sam said. Jack beamed, eyes brightened with hope. “But we will have to work fast. Things like this have a time limit.”

“How long?”

“We have to separate them before the Witching Hour of the next day, or else there is nothing that we can do,” Sam said confidently. Jack glanced at the clock. It was already six pm.

“That gives us nine hours, right? We should be able to do that,” Jazz said. But Sam frowned.

“I have to go to my house and get a lot of supplies, and it will take time to set it all up. And I can’t guarantee it will work. It’s not like I have ever actually had to do this,” Sam said.

“Please,” Maddie begged, as she looked at Danny’s slumped body. “Try.”

~~~

The setup had taken them the better part of six hours. Every ingredient had to be burned for a specific amount of time. Every line painted on the floor had to be at the perfect angle. The candles could only burn for so long, with certain herbs mixed in. The remains of the spirit board had to be collected into one space. It was time consuming. It was tedious. And there was no guarantee it would work.

Maddie and Danny were not able to help with the preparations. Danny because he had not woken up since Sam and Tucker had brought him home. He was resting on the couch, completely out of touch with the world. Maddie, however, was not in such a peaceful state.

It was taking all of her effort not to simply curl up and scream. It felt like both fire and ice had poured into her veins, both trying to kill her from the heat and the cold. Her skin looked ashen and pale, sweat and tears constantly pouring down her face. She shook and seized from the volts of electricity that started at her hand and burst through her whole body. She couldn’t stop the whimpers that escaped, causing the others in the room to look over at her with concern.

When the preparations were complete, Jack helped Maddie into the middle of the setup. The electric lights in the room were turned off, with only the candles glow illuminating the room. Maddie nearly crawled to the spot she was supposed to be. She pulled out the little planchet and placed it within arms reach.

Sam had done everything she could, but Maddie had made the connection. Maddie had to sever it.

Maddie took the sterile knife and cut the inside of her arm. She let the blood pour into a basin that held the remains of the spirit bored. Her quivering hands spilled some blood onto the floor and not just in the bowl. But not enough to ruin the painted words. Maddie used her fingers to mix the blood with the ash, creating a paint. With trembling hands, she reached one finger onto the floor and began to draw the Ogham script she remembered from the spirit board. Slowly, as she could afford no mistakes, she drew a new board on the floor. Each one had to be in the exact order as the board had been and she had never been so grateful to Jack for taking a picture of the thing before they used it. Inch by inch, she recreated the board on her kitchen floor.

Now, she had to wait. Wait until the blood had dried enough that she could roll the planchet across the words without smudging. Every second was an eternity of pain, every moment a new level of agony even higher than the last. It might have been five minutes. It might have been an hour. But eventually, she could tell that the bright red of her blood had faded to a sickly brown. She risked touching it, and found it completely dry. She grabbed the planchet, and place a single bloody finger on it.

“Phantom, I would like to speak to you today. Please, I beg you, talk to me,” Maddie’s voice cracked. She waited a breathless moment, before the cursor began to move.

Mom?

“Yes, it’s me,” Maddie bit her lip hard as her body was wracked with pain.

You’re hurt

“ I’m fine sweetie,” Maddie lied. She had to finish this. She didn’t know how much time she had. “Phantom, I have said all that I have to say. My questions are complete. I close this doorway. I close this connection. Your spirit is not bound here.”

Maddie thought she heard a gasp, but she didn’t know where. Suddenly, all the candles turned once more into the strange corona glow. The planchet moved once more.

Goodbye

Maddie watched in fascination as the planchet dissolved into dust. The candles snuffed themselves out and the room was filled with darkness. Maddie slumped in relief as the pain seemed to melt away.

“Mom?” Danny groaned, the light flickering on. Danny stood by the switch, rubbing his eyes as he took in the state of the kitchen.

Jack and Maddie rushed him, crushing him in a hug they hoped expressed everything they couldn’t bring themselves to say.

#Ectober Month 2021 #Ectoberhaunt 2021 #Ectoberhaunt trick #danny phantom #My writing #Cartoons #Ritual

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dalowlycommoner · 3 years

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i was actually been thinking of a plot, most probably an au if I put my thoughts like that

that what if, just what if, c!tommy has actually already died from his death tower in exile arc and that everyone just thinks he is still alive because, obviously a lot of characters has been thinking that c!tommy is the reason of the chaos? what if c!tubbo has also kept him from still being a disguised aliveinnit because he can’t cope with another death of an ally, specially his bestfriend that he has been guilty for about the exile, and c!tommy thinks he is still alive because he has unfinished business with his discs and lmanberg?

in the tales from the smp, tommy’s room chests was filled with cookies, which they quoted as ‘childish things’ or a ‘childish room’, which brought fans to speculate that did ‘c!tommy die of young age?’

in doomsday, he got hit by lightning mid-lore that seems to be perfect canon death placement but isn’t considered canon

in disc saga finale, c!dream said he cannot kill c!tommy because he is important in the smp but what if it’s actually because he can’t kill a ghost?

in egg-lore, he wasn’t affected by the egg, c!bbh implied that tommy was the only one to be seemingly of neutral feelings for the egg

in nuke testing, radiation seems to not affect tommy without the hazmat suits and he went in the crater with zero armor on, well except for his highness and blood vomiting

in general, tommy has just been putting signs in houses where he stole something because maybe those people doesn’t see disguised aliveinnit or ghostinnit before they remember or realize who he is, e.g. c!punz doesn’t actually have direct connection with c!tommy except they are always on opposite sides during wars and c!hbomb which c!tommy barely ever talks to.

what if like ghostbur that melts in rain or water, ghostinnit melts in lava instead? like how it is implied that tommy is afraid of lava after exile arc, disc saga finale and therapy arc?

in disc saga finale, what if c!wilbur from the afterlife has just been talking only to c!tommy that is in the bench with c!tubbo, c!wilbur said ‘it seems like there was a space growing for you in the afterlife, it felt like your presence was slowly entering the afterlife’ to only tommy. what if c!tubbo was only able to hear c!wilbur because c!tommy was there to connect him and wilbur as a ghost.

what if what ghostinnit keeps him as a disguised aliveinnit even though he has finished his mission about the discs in the overworld was people like niki and jack that who still holds grudges against him? or techno that deemed him a traitor?

what if what c!tommy’s doing now as disguised aliveinnit, building a hotel was because he has died after his last home a.k.a logestedshire was blown up? he specifically wants it the hotel accented with red because like ghostbur that has blue that removes/brushes the sadness away, ghostinnit has red that removes/brushes the anger away.

this au makes half sense and half bullshit but this kind of thoughts and self-story-making/overthinking-others’-plots keeps me up at night and here is the place I want to share and keep them

#dsmp #dreamsmp #au?#tommyinnit #ghostinnit #aliveinnit #ghostbur #tubbo

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rinkunokoisuru · 4 years

Text

I don’t normally write fan fics, not to mention actually share them, so I’m super nervous, but whatever, here we go This is based on the comic by @horrendoushag because I saw @lexosaurus‘s tags. Also some inspiration from some other fics seeing as I’ve read a lot of them.

Danny paused his game of Doomed and slid his over-sized set of headphones to his neck with a sigh at the knock on the door. He wasn't expecting Sam or Tucker to come over, and he knew that Jazz was at the library working on her thesis, so that really only left one or both of his parents as the one responsible. He swung his chair slightly towards the door as the knocking continued. "Yeah?" Danny called, voice raised. "Danny, can we come in? We need to talk with you." As suspected, it was his parents. Yes he'd forgotten to clean the lab again, and yes he'd only barely passed most of his classes, but this wasn't anything new for him. Besides, classes had only just ended for the semester, so it was unlikely that that was what they wanted to talk about since report cards hadn't even been sent home yet. Mentally preparing himself, he decided that he'd just have to let them come in and talk his way out of whatever it was they had to say or just accept the in-coming grounding. "Uh. Yeah, I guess." His mother opened the door and stepped to the side to allow his father space to enter the room.

"So what did you want to talk about?" Danny asked nervously. Maddie's lips were pulled tight and if the hood of her hazmat suit had been pulled back, Danny was sure the fire in her eyes would have been enough to make him shrink even further into his seat. Glancing towards his dad's more expressive face in hopes that he had just misinterpreted, Danny could see that he was just upset as his mother, though with a hint of confusion mixed in as well. "Would you care to explain this, young man?" She held up her phone for Danny to see the screen. From where he was sitting, he couldn't really see what the fuss was about. "It's, uh, twitter?" he shrugged before crossing his arms. "Danny-boy," his father stated sternly. "Alright, alright. Let me see," he grabbed for the phone. As he browsed through what his mother had passed to him, Danny felt his stomach flop in a mix of fear and embarrassment. "Well, Danny?" she tapped her foot impatiently. "What's all this about you dating that menace, Phantom?" Danny winced and sunk further into his chair. He never expected his parents would go on twitter in the first place, let alone find his profile. Phantom had had his own twitter profile for only a week before he'd been assaulted by people claiming ghosts weren't real, that they were his biggest fans, that he was scum that needed to be eradicated, people asking if he would date them, and other uncomfortable comments. Danny had learned to either ignore them or play along and quickly became known for his shitposts. The fact that he was dating himself had started as just a joke with Sam and Tucker to try to aggravate Wes, it had been inconceivable at the time that his parents would ever find those tweets. Yet here they were. "I can explain?" He could not explain. "Well let's hear it then, Danny," his mom replied, raising an eyebrow. The impatient foot tapping continued as he stared at the bedroom floor. He brought his hand up to rub at his neck, a nervous habit of his, as he wracked his brain for an excuse. The uncomfortable silence dragged on for what felt like hours to Danny, though was only about a minute before his dad broke it. "Danny," Jack soothed, placing his sizable hand on his son's significantly smaller shoulder, "we understand that you're getting older and starting to make a lot of your own decisions, but your mother and I are worried about you. It just isn't safe to spend so much time around such a dangerous ghost." "Phantom isn't dangerous." "I know Phantom is very popular with kids your age, but he is dangerous. He pretends to protect the town, but who knows what he could do if he decided to stop faking it," Maddie added. Danny jerked away from his father's hold and jumped out of his chair, only barely able to stop his eyes from glowing an unnatural ectoplasmic green. "No! Jazz and I keep telling you! Phantom doesn't pose a threat to humans." Jack narrowed his eyes with skepticism, and Danny was sure his mother was doing the same beneath her goggles. Letting out an exasperated huff, Danny continued, "You guys are too caught up in your 'research' to even consider that a ghost could be good. When was the last time you even talked with a ghost?" "Danny..." his mother started. Both of his parents had heard this same argument from Jazz plenty of times by now. "No, listen. You never listen. Phantom isn't going to hurt me!" "You can't know that." "Yes! I can!" "And how is that!" Maddie's lips impossibly pressed even thinner, her whole stance becoming more aggressive. "Because I'm Phantom!" His parents seemed to deflate at this outburst. As soon as he realized what he'd said, his hands flew to his mouth and he allowed the cold rush of invisibility to run over him. ---- It had been two weeks now since Danny had accidentally revealed to his parents that he and Phantom were one and the same. While the experience had been less than pleasant at the time, in hindsight it had been a pretty stupid way for his secret alter ego to come out. Jazz had come home not long after the confrontation. When she found out what had happened, she had some words of her own and stormed out to find Danny. As soon he returned safely, the whole family sat down to have a civil discussion about the news that Danny had been half ghost for almost two full years before they found out. To Danny's relief, his parent's had instantly accepted him, though that didn't stop them from feeling like they were at fault for what happened to him. Most of those two weeks since the outburst had been spent assuring his parents he was okay and that he didn't blame them. In fact he liked being part ghost. All things considered, things went much better than he thought they ever would have. Though that didn't stop things from being a little awkward when it came to Danny using his powers. ---- Danny and his friends slid into their usual booth at the Nasty Burger, Sam making sure to sit as far from the trays with meat as she could lest her stomach turn at the smell. Tucker lifted his Nasty burger and took a large whiff before shoving it into his mouth. "Sho how are your parentsh adjushting to you being Phantom?" "Please swallow your food before talking, Tucker," Sam rolled her eyes. Danny picked up one of his french fries and mindlessly dipped it into his ketchup. "I think they're doing alright. I'm still kind of hesitant to transform in front of them though." "I understand that. You basically lied to them for the past two years. It's going to take time for them to be completely comfortable with your ghost half," Sam said, picking at her slightly wilted salad. "Ugh, you sound like Jazz," Danny groaned, tossing his uneaten fry back onto the tray. "I know it's going to take time for them to get used to it." "They did say they want to support you, dude," Tucker gulped down the rest of the greasy burger. "Maybe you just need to expose them to a little more of your ghostly side," he wiggled his fingers for emphasis before pilfering some of Danny's fries, "Just use your powers around the house more often, man. Think of all the things you can do without worrying about getting caught now!" Danny glared briefly at the fry thief before turning back to his food with a sigh. "Maybe you have a point, Tuck." "Of course I do." "Maybe talk to Jazz about this plan first, just in case." "Better point," Danny replied before smacking Tucker's wandering hand away from his food once again. "Ouch! You weren't even eating those!" "They're still my fries." For the rest of their lunch, the group of teens mostly chatted about what movies they were looking forward to, which ghosts had been most annoying lately, and what other plans they had for their summer vacation. Eventually though, the trio had to go their separate ways. Sam's mother had plans to drag her daughter to some sort of benefit for the umpteenth time and Tucker had promised a group of his online friends that he'd help them out in some new game they were playing, so Danny waved goodbye and headed home by himself. It wasn't long before he'd arrived at his own doorstep and made his way upstairs. Danny considered dropping into bed and taking a nap before some ghost inevitably dropped in, but found himself wandering over to Jazz's room instead. Seeing the door was ajar, he quietly rapped on the door frame until his sister looked up from whatever she was working on. "What's up, Danny?" Jazz asked, a small smile on her face as she scooted her chair away from her desk so she could look at her brother while they spoke. He shuffled into the room and leaned against the wall. It took hardly any time for Danny to explain what he had discussed with Sam and Tucker, leaving Jazz looking pensive. "It actually seems like a pretty good idea to me," she finally said. "I think it might be good for all three of you. Especially since Mom and Dad aren't trying to shoot you anymore," she smirked. Danny let go of the tension he hadn't realized he'd been holding. "Thanks, Jazz." "No problem, little brother," she smiled gently. Danny sent back a small smile of his own and left the room, allowing Jazz to return to her work. --- "Danny?" "Yeah, Mom?" he called from the living room. "Can you help me with dinner, sweetie?" Rather than gather the energy to stand from his relaxed position on the couch, Danny tucked his phone into his pocket and allowed the cold feeling at his core to overtake him. There was a bright flash of light and suddenly where there had sat the blue-eyed, black-haired Fenton, was instead the blindingly bright white hair and toxic green eyes of his Phantom form. Now was as good a time as any to start using his powers around his parents more often. He let the weightlessness that came more naturally in his ghost form take over and lazily floated into the kitchen. "What did you need help with?" his voice echoed ominously. His mother jolted in surprise before once again composing herself. "I was just hoping you could reheat the leftover mashed potatoes to go with dinner," she started hesitantly. "I'm not interrupting a fight with a ghost, am I?" "Hm? Nah," he replied. "A-alright then." Danny hovered on over to the refrigerator and stuck the entire front half of his body inside. He soon emerged with the cold bowl of potatoes and popped them into the microwave. At least they were less likely to come to life since they'd only been in there a day or so. Maddie watched her son flit about the kitchen like this was the most normal thing in the world. She absent-mindedly cleaned up the mess from preparing the night's meatloaf and supposed that for Danny, it probably was the norm. If he'd been half-ghost for nearly two years, then it would be sillier to expect him not to use his powers from time to time. "So how long until the meatloaf is done?" Danny questioned. The microwave was still running, but rather than continue to float in various places around the room, he had instead elected to change back into his human form and play around on his phone. "Just a few more minutes." "Awesome." They settled into a comfortable silence, Danny tapping away at a game on his phone and Maddie putting the finishing touches on the sides for their dinner. The quiet was only interrupted when the shrieking of the microwave alerted them that the potatoes were hopefully done reheating. "Danny, go get your father for dinner," Maddie said as she went to take the meatloaf out of the oven. "Okay," Danny replied without even looking up from his phone. In an instant, Danny Fenton had once again been replaced by Danny Phantom. Maddie stared in wide-eyed confusion as her son bent down onto the kitchen floor and stuck his head into the basement below. Jack happened to be looking up at the clock when he saw a shock of glowing, white hair sink through the ceiling. He felt his jaw drop as his the rest of Danny's head followed. There was a moment where they stared at each other, neither saying anything. "Dinner's ready," Danny finally relayed. Jack managed to shake himself out of his stupor. "Great! Thanks, Danny-boy!" The ghostly head of his son retreated back through the ceiling. It was going to be a while before Jack and Maddie could be completely comfortable around their son in ghost form, but at least Danny got to be a little shit in the process.

#danny phantom #fan fiction #fan fic #danny fenton #jack fenton #maddie fenton #jazz fenton #sam manson #tucker foley #uh...#idk #how do tag fics?#identity reveal #this is stupid #sharing my writing is scary lol

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aedelia · 4 years

Text

Seven Lives (DannyMay2020- Favorite AU)

Warning, angst ahead. You have been warned. (Many thanks to @lexosaurus for putting up with my comma abuse and various grammatical mistakes)

Danny May 2020

Favorite AU

Seven Lives

There was a friendly ghost cat that liked to hang out a few streets over from Fentonworks. Danny saw her almost every day, whether he was trudging to school, or when he was patrolling. She would come out and wind around his legs, purring and meowing for his attention.

The residents of the street didn’t seem to mind her presence. She was very sweet, affectionate, and she helped keep the minor ghost pests down.

Danny didn’t think much of it when she didn’t come to greet him Wednesday morning, he didn’t see her every time he walked by. Sometimes she was busy napping in the sun, chasing shadows, or demanding affection from other people on the street. When he didn’t see her at all Thursday, he was concerned. By Friday morning, he was worried.

The walk home was uneventful and devoid of friendly tail or whisker. He kicked the door open with his foot, dumped his bag by the door, and headed down the basement stairs.

“Hey Mom, Dad, I’m gonna go hang out with Tucker and Sam,” he said while descending to the basement.

“Hey Sweetie!” his mother called back. “Since it’s the weekend that’ll be alright, just make sure you get something to eat before you go.”

As Danny hit the bottom step, his nose was assaulted by the electric-lime tang of ectoplasm. He took a hesitant step forward into the lab, not really wanting to see whatever experiment his parents had managed to cook up.

His mother smiled at him, ectoplasm splattered across her hood and hazmat suit. “How was school today, Danny?”

“Danno!” His father boomed, also covered in ectoplasm. “Do you have a lot of homework? Maybe you can come help us in the lab after you’re done hanging out with your friends!”

Danny’s eyes slid from his exuberant parents, to the lab table in between them. Dread filled him as they then followed the slow drip, drip of ectoplasm from the floor back up to the table surface. His muscles froze and his stomach dropped to his feet. An icy feeling crept up his throat. He felt the temperature drop around him and further chill the air of the lab. His heartbeat, normally very slow and steady, jumped in his chest like a panicked rabbit.

Danny couldn’t catch his breath. Every shallow inhale brought the sickening scent of lime fizz and chemicals into his lungs. His head pounded and a static tingling crawled from his shoulders to his fingertips. A roaring noise keened in his ears but over it all he could still clearly hear the slow dripping of ectoplasm rolling off the table and platting on the floor.

‘Oh no, oh no, no no no no...’ His hands trembled as they clenched into fists at his sides and he swayed slightly as he saw just where the friendly cat ghost had been.

He stumbled closer to the table.

His mother turned to him, the light reflecting off the red lens of her goggles at odds with her concerned tone. “Honey, are you feeling alright? You’re looking a little green.” She reached for his forehead with an ectoplasm stained glove.

He dodged out of her reach, barely avoiding the puddle of green at the base of the lab table.

He peered down at the table. “Ms. Chonkers?” he whispered faintly, just below the threshold of human hearing.

The partially dissected ghost lifted her head fractions of an inch and gave a pathetic wheezing, “Mew.” She then sagged back down to the table.

Danny’s eyes darted between his parents before settling back on the unfortunate ghost in front of him. Her core was exposed, the golf ball sized light quivering in the sterile air of the lab.

He swallowed down bile as he desperately tried to think of a way to get his parents away from the cat before they managed to hurt her any more.

“Danny?” his mother said.

Danny swallowed again. “Just wanted to check in.” He flicked his eyes to the cat and back, he had a ghost of a plan, but would need to hurry.

He quickly turned heel and fled back upstairs, trying to keep his revulsion and nausea down. As his foot hit the uppermost step, he heard his mother—no, Maddie say, “Careful Jack. Don’t disturb the core. We don’t want this one disintegrating before we’re done studying it. Just think of all the technological and scientific advancements we can make if we figure out how it works!”

He got to the kitchen and paced back and forth for a moment. He needed to get his parents out of the house immediately and without question. He stopped and yanked his phone out, nearly fumbling it in his haste, and called his sister.

She picked up on the second ring. “Hello? Danny?”

“Jazz. You need to call Mom and Dad and get them out of the house. Tell them you saw Skulker terrorizing some kids or something, but it has to be as fast as you can!”

“Okay, little brother. But please, what’s going on? Are you okay?”

“Jazz, they have Chonkers. Please hurry and get them out of the lab, it’s…really bad.”

Danny heard Jazz breathe in sharply.

“Alright, I’ll get them out. Do your best to save her!”

Danny resumed his pacing as he waited.

After the longest 20 seconds of Danny’s half-life, his parents came thundering up the stairs.

“We’re coming, Jazzy-pants!” his dad cried.

“No putrid ghost hunter will lay a hand on our daughter!” shouted his mother.

The second he heard the door slam, Danny raced back down to the lab. He jammed his thumb into the DNA scanner to open the portal before rushing back to the ghost.

“Ms. Chonkers!” He quickly unstrapped the ecto-resistant restraints. His hands hovered over the cat, trembling.

“Mew,” she whimpered, sides heaving in distress.

Danny gingerly unpinned the peeled strips of green flesh and gently pushed them back in place, protecting the fragile core. He carefully phased his arms through the table to gently lift her.

Once safe in his arms, she began a rasping, purr.

He turned to the swirling portal and hovered above the ground. He winced and tried to ignore the soft splats of ectoplasm dripping off of his arms to the lab floor.

She was melting in his arms.

Once through the portal and into the ambient energy of the Infinite Realms, Chonkers began to revive somewhat. Her tail twitched, and the dripping slowed.

Danny touched down on a piece of floating rock near the portal and tenderly laid her down. He rubbed around her ears and chin, being careful to avoid the incisions. The cat’s purrs rumbled slightly louder.

“Still not stable,” he muttered. Watching as steam rose off from the ectoplasm pooling around her body, he grasped at the loose soil covering their tiny island in frustration. He shuddered, gasping as he tried to keep the sobs in.

He couldn't fall to pieces right now, Chonkers already had that covered. He opened his eyes after a few seconds, faintly luminous tears falling and cleaning tiny dots on his gloves.

“What can stabilize a ghost that’s falling apart...melting?” he asked himself.

She was melting in his arms just like Dani. Wait. The Ecto-dejecto had saved Dani. Maybe it could save Chonkers as well. Clarity rushed over him now that he had a plan.

Danny gently stroked the side of Chonkers’ face. “I’ll be right back. It’ll be ok.”

He flew back through the portal and scanned the failed experiment shelf.

There it was. “Aha!” He snatched it and once again launched himself through the portal.

Once he was back at her side, he spritzed her with the ecto-dejecto.

‘Please work.’

Several agonizing seconds passed as Danny watched her sides heave, still sublimating and mixing into the ambient ectoplasm.

A ripple passed through her body. Then another, and another. The puddle under her receded as her body slowly reformed.

Danny let out a deep sigh as the minutes passed. The tight feeling in his chest finally easing as Chonkers took a few unsteady steps to him, butting her head against his leg where he knelt.

“That was way too close,” Danny said as he obeyed her demands for affection and petted her. His body sagged to the ground, unbelievably weary now that the crisis had passed.

Chonkers climbed onto his lap and purred.

“I know how cats usually feel about dogs, but maybe you could learn a few things from Cujo. If you could change size like him, this won’t happen again.” He hugged the cat in his arms, feeling the tension slowly bleed out of him. “It can’t happen again.”

Danny lifted the chunky cat up and held her at face level. “You have to stay in here for now, it won’t be safe in the human world for you for a while.”

She mewed at him inquisitively.

“I know you’re happy around people and doing cat things, but you have to stay here where it’s safe. At least until I can figure out how to keep this from happening again.”

The cat meowed again and butted her head against his chin.

“I sure hope you understand me. I know ghost animals are usually a lot more intelligent than their living counterparts,” Danny said, petting the cat.

Feeling slightly bad that he was about to trick her, Danny formed up a tiny glittering ball of ectoplasm in his hand and waved it in front of her whiskers. Once he was sure she had locked onto the temporary toy and had entered dumb baby mode, he threw it as hard as he could away from the portal.

With the cat distracted, Danny slipped back into the normal world. He sighed in relief—his parents were still out. Jazz must have set up a good distraction.

He slipped off a green stained glove and closed the portal. Hopefully, that would keep Chonkers out of trouble for a few days.

With one last glance around the gruesome lab, Danny fled to the bright sky and fresh air of the park. He flew past the common areas to a secluded picnic area that was overgrown and forgotten by casual visitors. He touched down at the table, slumping over and resting his face on his arms.

Now that he wasn’t just living in the moment, the full horror of what he had seen was starting to sink in. His parents had caught an innocent and friendly ghost, and instead of studying her intact, had proceeded to cut her open. And because when a ghost ends, they dissolve completely into base ectoplasm, she was aware and conscious the whole time.

Shudders wracked his body as he finally let himself sob, every breath bringing a sharp reminder from the persistent lime scent clinging to him. They knew what her core was when they saw it. His mother had warned his dad against disturbing it. They had done this before. How many ghosts had they ended on that table? How many had he failed to save?

He wasn’t sure how much time had passed when he heard the whistles and chirps of the pod of blob ghosts that lived in the park. It had been long enough that most of the ectoplasm staining his suit had steamed away, leaving it deceptively clean.

He felt feathery, gentle touches against his arms, shoulders, and head. A few persistent nudges later, and he lifted his head from his arms. He still had glowing tears running down to his chin, but he couldn’t help the weak smile that crossed his face when the blob ghosts cuddled all around him.

They nudged him to his feet and swarmed him, snuggling into his arms and resting on his head and shoulders. Danny held himself with one arm, the other holding a particularly insistent large blob ghost. The roiling nausea started to fade as the little ghosts cleaned away his tears and the rest of the stains on his outfit. He couldn’t help a giggle when one nibbled his ear, making him squirm away.

“I have to do something. I can’t let this happen again,” Danny told the little ghosts, his gaze focused in the direction of his house. He could see the top of the Ops Center above the tree line of the park. Even way out here, he couldn’t escape reminders of what his parents had done.

Determination filled him as the little ghosts continued to try to comfort him in their own way. “I can’t let any more innocent ghosts be harmed by them. It’s time I did something.”

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ghostsray · 4 years

Text

kin assigned fenton

(’nother @phicphight entry for @darks-ink‘s prompt: "Fenton/Phantom AU where during the Portal accident, a ghost bonds to Danny Fenton's body, bringing him back to life but maintaining their own ghostly memories and none of Danny's. Meanwhile, Danny himself died and became a ghost, keeping his own human memories.")

(words: 8645) (AO3)

(part 2)

The first thing Phantom noticed when he woke up was that he felt heavy.

Gravity did not exist in the ghost zone. He never felt heavy unless he was being pinned by another ghost. As such, he was filled with fear, and his eys flew open.

He immediately regretted this action, because the harsh light that met his eyes made him wince and close them again. How could his eyes hurt? Ghosts shouldn't even be able to feel pain unless it was dull, but just looking at something bright made his head ache.

Now that he noticed it, he felt much more than just a headache. There was the cold floor underneath his arms, and when he tried to stir, a sharp ache flared throughout his whole body.

What, sincerely, the fuck was happening?

There was ringing in his ears, but that faded over time. When the ringing was no longer there, he was able to make out voices. They seemed to repeat the same name over and over: "Danny!"

"Who's Danny?" he managed to say. Ancients, even his tongue felt heavy.

The voices suddenly fell silent. "Um," said one of them, "you are."

Phantom hesitantly opened his eyes again, slowly this time. He found two people standing over him, but something about them looked odd. Their skins weren't like any shade of blue, green, or gray he had seen on other ghosts, and they lacked any sort of glow emanating from their bodies...

Phantom's eyes widened, and he blurted out, "Humans!"

The concern on both humans' faces immediately deepened. "...Yeah?" the darker one, which wore glasses and a ridiculous red hat, said. "Should we not be?"

The paler one, which looked like a girl with black hair and even blacker eyeliner, leaned over Phantom with knitted brows. She held up a hand with four fingers raised and asked, "Danny, how many fingers am I holding up?"

Phantom wanted to scramble away from these strangers, but his body was too tired and--ugh--heavy for him to move, so he frowned at the human girl and said, "Four. But why do you keep calling me Danny?"

The two humans exchanged a glance, then the girl asked, "Do you remember anything about yourself?"

"Yeah," Phantom said, a little (okay, a lot) confused. "My name's Phantom."

Another exchanged glance, and the human boy said, "No, it's not."

Phantom eyed the two of them in turn and said, "How do you know? I've never even met you before."

The girl grabbed his shoulder, which made him wince because he was still in a lot of pain (which shouldn't be possible, but he was). She stated sternly, "Yes, you have. We're your friends--I'm Sam, he's Tucker, remember? And you're Danny."

Despite his pain, Phantom managed to push her away and sit up against the awful pull of gravity. "No, I'm not! I--" He froze, because just then a strand of black hair fell over his eye. His hair wasn't black. If that wasn't enough to confuse him, he then noticed his own hands, which in fact were not his own. He was dressed in a white jumpsuit, except it looked like it had been blown apart--tears and holes riddled it, and through these, the skin underneath was visible. Pink skin, just like the paler human's. Phantom brought the hand up to his face. Hundreds of tiny grooves were etched into it.

Again, what the fuck? This was not a ghost hand. It didn't even have any claws! Realization dawned on him. He wasn't in a ghost body...he was in a human's.

"Uh, Danny?" the boy--Tucker--asked.

Danny. That must be the name of the human he was inside. Phantom didn't even remember overshadowing this guy, but that must be what was happening, right? He focused on leaving Danny's body so the human can talk to his friends and get them to leave him alone. Except, well, no matter how hard he tried...

"I'm stuck," he said.

"Stuck?" Sam repeated.

Phantom was really filled with fear now. This--yuck--human organ in his borrowed chest began to beat harder the more anxious he got, which wasn't helping. "I'm stuck inside this body! Why can't I leave?"

He glared at the two humans before him, who looked dumbfounded. "...Um," Tucker finally said, "are you saying...you're a ghost?"

"Yes, I'm a ghost!" Phantom snapped. Ouch, his head hurt. Phantom tried to push Danny's stupid body to its feet, which was enormously hard with this stupid gravity, but he managed to succeed. "I'm not Danny, whoever he is. I need to get out!"

"Er, Da--Phantom," Sam said. "How do we know you're really a ghost and not just, uh..."

"Off your bonkers?" Tucker completed.

Phantom raised an eyebrow. "Why? What's so hard to believe about your friend getting possessed?"

"Nothing much," Tucker answered, "except that ghosts don't exist."

Of fucking course he would say that. Why would humans ever believe in ghosts? The two species interact so rarely that Phantom himself would not have believed in humans if several ghosts didn't previously exist as them in life. Phantom opened his mouth, trying to find a valid argument, but he came up empty. Not that it mattered anyway, because the blood rushing from the chest organ was growing too heavy for his thought organ to handle, and he felt Danny's knees buckle and send him falling to the floor again while his vision filled with black.

He woke up. Again.

This time, the surface underneath him wasn't so cold. In fact, it was warm and soft. Likewise, the torn up hazmat suit he was wearing before was now replaced by soft cotton clothes.

Phantom hurriedly brought a hand to his face and was immediately disappointed. He was still in Danny's body. How? Why? Why was he stuck?

"Danny, you're awake!" a voice next to him said, making him jolt in surprise. He expected to see the same girl as before, but when he turned his head (Correction: Danny's head) to the side, he saw a different human. She had ginger hair and teal eyes.

"I'm not Danny," he told her.

The girl frowned. "Sam and Tucker told me about this. They say you think you are...a ghost?"

"I don't think I'm a ghost, I am a ghost," Phantom retorted.

"Really?" the girl replied skeptically. "Can you prove that?"

That should have been easy. Ghosts still kept a few of their powers even while they were possessing someone--at least, that's what he heard from the few ghosts who did interact with humans and managed to overshadow one. He focused on Danny's hand, willing it to turn invisible.

It did not turn invisible.

He frowned and tried to phase it through the soft surface he was lying on. The hand only pressed against it, but it did not phase through.

Invisibility and intangibility were a ghost's two simplest powers, so why was he unable to use them?

"You're not a ghost," the girl said when she sensed his failure. "You're Danny Fenton, a human."

"I'm pretty sure I just told you that I'm not."

The girl's gaze was intense as she continued, "You just went through a traumatizing experience. It would be normal for your brain to make up memories to..."

"Woah, woah, woah," Phantom said before she could finish. He rolled his borrowed eyes and grumbled, "Awesome. You're a psychologist."

"I'm your sister, Jazz," she stated simply. "And...are you saying you know what a psychologist is?"

"Of course I do! Do you think all ghosts are eighteenth century peasants or something? Psychologists can die, too, you know."

Jazz was undaunted by his comment. "As I was saying, though..."

"I'm not crazy--I mean, Danny isn't crazy," Phantom cut her off. "Like I told you, I'm a ghost."

All of a sudden, the door slammed open, causing Phantom to jump in his bed. A very large human man dressed in a vivid orange jumpsuit walked in, followed by a shorter human woman in a matching teal suit.

"He confesses! So he's guilty," the man said.

Jazz groaned. "Dad--"

"Your father is right, dear," the woman in teal said. "You said Danny might be having a psychological crisis, so we let you talk to him, but it's clear now that the ghost inside him is saying the truth."

"Yes, thank you!" Phantom said, spreading his arms out gladly. "Finally, someone who believes me!"

The woman gave him a smile. "We believe you, dear. And we'll get you out of my son."

"Really?" he asked hopefully.

"Oh, yes," she said, and then whatever happiness Phantom felt immediately plummeted as she pulled out a very large weapon and aimed it at him. "And the only way to do that is by exterminating you."

Phantom's eyes widened, and he chuckled nervously. "Um, sike?"

The gun powered up, and Phantom yelped and shut his eyes as a blast came out at him.

Silence fell over the room.

Phantom opened one eye, then the other. The weapon's nuzzle was smoking slightly, so it must have fired already, but he wasn't harmed. He scanned the room to see any sign of where the shot might have landed, and he found a scorch mark--right behind where he should have been hit.

"Huh," the large man said. "I guess Jazzy-pants was right."

Phantom snapped his attention to him. "What?"

"The weapon didn't affect you," the woman holding the gun said. "It only affects ghosts, which means you're a hundred percent human."

"Wait, hold up," Phantom said, growing a little nervous and extremely confused. "How do you even know it works against ghosts? Did you meet any?"

The woman sighed, like this was a topic she had to explain many times over. "I assure you, it works. We don't need any practical testing to know that the theory is correct."

"But it's not," he argued, then gestured down to himself. "It didn't shoot me."

"Trust me, I know what I'm talking about," the woman said. "You're human."

Phantom paled. "But..."

He felt a hand rest on his shoulder and saw Jazz looking at him pityingly. "It's okay, Danny. I know you're confused."

"I'm not Danny!" he shouted. He couldn't be. There was no way his memories could be fake. The Ghost Zone, the lairs he visited, Frostbite, Dora, Sidney, all those ghosts he befriended...he was certain those couldn't be fake. Right?

But the humans seemed sure about their conclusion. The woman put her weapon away, got close to Phantom, and actually kissed his forehead. "I'm sure youre tired, Danny. Why don't you go back to sleep?"

Phantom wanted to argue that he wasn't tired, that he was the opposite of tired, but unfortunately, she was right. After she lowered him back into the bed with an immensely strong grip, he felt his (Danny's?) eyelids grow heavy. Well, heavier than usual.

The other people in the room, Danny's family, filed out as Phantom reluctantly fell asleep.

He saw himself back in the Ghost Zone, where he should be. He was flying around lazily, doing loop de loops in the air and poking the clouds of swirling ectoplasm that littered the Zone. He was bored. The Ghost Zone was a neat place, but he felt hed done all the exploring he could, and he wished something new would happen.

Luckily or unluckily, something did. Not very far, a spark of light appeared. Phantom raised his eyebrows curiously and approached it, but it disappeared. Weird. He floated to the spot where it had been.

Big mistake. The spark reappeared, except it was less of a spark and more of an explosion this time. Electricity burst through Phantom's form and fried him from the inside out. He screamed. His surroundings melted into nothing, and at some point, he thought he heard his scream mix with someone else's. His molecules were split apart, and he felt his consciousness go somewhere else, some body that was not his own.

And then he felt heavy.

Phantom gasped and jolted awake. He blinked several times, his brain filled with confusion. He wasn't in the Ghost Zone. He was still trapped in the human realm, so what was up with that vision?

Oh, he thought, remembering what Nocturne had told him about visions that humans saw in their sleep. That was a dream.

From what hed heard about dreams, they rarely ever made sense. This one did, though. He was certain that was a memory of what brought him here.

A lot of good remembering did him, though.

Phantom looked over the room he was in, which he didn't get a chance to do previously. It was too dark to see clearly, which was frustrating, because darkness had never impeded his vision when he was a ghost. Although, the soft light coming through the window was enough to let him make out a few things in the room, like the various models of what he recognized had been described to him as spaceships, and posters of what he heard were called stars.

There was also a mirror in the room. Phantom rose from the bed, and he noticed that the pain had blessedly subsided, although he still felt heavy. Stupid gravity. He managed to stand on his own after a few minutes of nearly falling off balance, then shuffled his way to the mirror.

Shit, he thought, because even though he knew he was in someone else's body, he never had a chance to actually see it before now. The boy he was inside had black hair and blue eyes, which he remembered were the same colors as that large man in orange had. This body was smaller, though, more similar in structure to the woman. That damned black hair kept falling in front of his eyes. He looked around as young as those two humans who first greeted him, which was also around the age Phantom (as a ghost) usually appeared, although he never kept count of how many years exactly that was. Not like keeping count of years was easy inside a dimension where there was no sun.

While Phantom was busy despairing over the frail body he was trapped inside, an object in the room fell with a sudden crash. Phantom jumped a foot in the air. For Pariah's sake, why was he so jumpy in this body?

He turned around and jumped yet again as he noticed the green glow that had fallen all over the room. A few objects started floating on their own, including the bedside clock that was knocked onto the floor before.

If Phantom were a regular human, he probably would have shitted himself. But Phantom was not. Instead, his face split into a relieved smile, and he opened up his arms and exclaimed, "Thank Clockwork! A ghost! You have to help me."

The floating objects paused, as if they were put off by Phantom's weirdly positive outburst. Then they fell back to their original places, and the glow gathered into a certain spot in the room until they formed a person.

Phantom frowned and tilted his borrowed head. The ghost that appeared before him looked familiar. Just as he was wondering why, he realized: it was the same image he had just seen in the mirror, only with inverted colors, so that he had white hair instead of black, grayish-blue skin instead of pink, and ectoplasmic green eyes instead of blue.

"You're Danny," Phantom said. Then he slapped a fist on an open palm and said, "Ohhhh, so that's why I couldn't return control to you! You're dead."

The ghost, who was indeed dead Danny Fenton, stiffened and yelled, "I'm not dead!"

"You're a ghost," Phantom said, gesturing to Danny's floating, glowing form. "I'm pretty sure that means you're dead."

Danny pursed his lips. Then he grabbed Phantom by the collar and repeated, "I'm not dead, because my living body is right here, and I would kindly like you to give it back."

Phantom chuckled and slowly raised a finger. "Um, about that..."

Danny's glare was intense. Phantom didn't think he could be a very strong ghost, considering how recent his death was, but he didn't have any powers to protect himself anymore, so he shrunk warily under his eyes.

"What about that? Give me back my body."

"Yeah, um, I'm kind of, stuck?" Phantom informed him.

"Stuck?" He shook his head rapidly and said, "Quit joking around! Let me get back in my body, or I'll get my parents to beat your ghostly ass."

Phantom paused, because he heard Danny's voice falter at the end. The hands grapping him were shaking. He realized Danny must be afraid.

"It's okay," he spoke soothingly, trying to pat his shoulder reassuringly. "You just died, I'm sure that's--"

"I'm not dead!" Danny screamed and threw him to the ground. Ow, ow ow, stupid human body that feels pain.

Phantom tried to get up and reason with him again, but then the door opened. Danny's mom was there, holding the gun from before.

Danny turned around, and he widened his eyes and smiled. "Mom--"

But the woman didn't hear him. She crossed the room in a few bounds and formed a barrier with her body between Phantom and Danny, except, well...she was protecting the wrong one.

"Leave my son alone, you ghost," she spat at Danny, aiming her weapon at him while Phantom lay behind her back.

"What?" Danny's smile fell, and he stared at her and said, "But that's not--"

He didn't have a chance to complete his sentence before she shot him. A ray hit him right in the chest, pushing him back and slamming him against the wall. When he looked up again, her stern expression didn't change, and her weapon did not lower.

Fuck, thought Phantom, and he pulled himself up behind her. "Miss, um, Mom--"

"Don't worry, Danny," she said over her shoulder. "Mommy's gonna take care of this nasty specter."

She powered up the gun again, causing Danny (the real one) to flinch. "Please, listen to me..."

She did not. When she pulled the trigger once more, Phantom saw one last heartbroken look in the ghost's eyes before he phased through the wall and fled from his mother.

Danny's mom blew on the gun and flipped her hair. "See? That ghost was no problem."

Phantom picked his jaw up and looked at her. "Why did you shoot at him?"

She frowned. "Because he was a ghost, of course. You can never trust a ghost."

"Why not?"

She looked like he had just asked her the dumbest question on the planet. "Because they're evil. Malicious. Violent."

"That's not true," Phantom said, truthfully feeling a little offended.

Danny's mom only laughed and patted his head. "I'm sorry, who is the ghost expert here? Me or you?" She smiled at him and said, "Don't worry, I'll protect you from any ghost that tries to harm you."

Phantom would have argued further, but the resolution in her voice scared him a little. For the first time, he found himself grateful for being in Danny's body, because he wasn't sure what she would have done to him if she saw him as a ghost.

"Come on, go back to bed. There's still a couple of hours left before morning," she told him, guiding him back to Danny's bed. After he was settled in, she started to leave the room, but he stopped her by asking, "Wait...did you add anything to your gun?"

She smiled at him and said, "Nope. I told you it works on ghosts."

"Oh," he said, feeling his stomach organ churn.

Danny's mom left, only pausing at the doorway to tell him, "Good night, sleep tight, and don't let the bad ghosts bite."

Phantom lay in bed for a long time, but he didn't sleep. He stared down at Danny's hand...at his hand.

Danny was dead, and he was fully human, which meant this body was now his.

That thought burned in his mind until the light from out the window grew brighter, and the alarm clock beeped from its fallen spot on the floor.

Jazz knocked on his door. "Oh, good, you're awake," she said. She grumbled something inaudible then told him, "Mom and Dad want you to go to school."

Phantom hesitated. "...School?"

"I know," she said with a huff. She rolled her eyes and said in a mimicking tone, "It doesn't matter if you got into an accident that almost killed you and made you lose your memory! As long as you can walk, you can walk to school." She shook her head then asked, "Are you feeling better, at least?"

"Um," Phantom said, "define 'better'."

"Whatever. I'll drive you to school." And she left.

Phantom stayed in bed for several moments while the alarm continued to beep sadly. And then...he felt his bladder act up. He knew, from talking to ghosts who were humans, what this meant.

"Fuck," he muttered. "I have to pee."

After wandering around the top floor of the house, he finally found what he was pretty sure was called the bathroom. Figuring out the mechanics of the toilet and the faucet were easy enough, as well as the mehcanics of the actual peeing itself. He tried not to look at Danny's private parts while he did his business...even though he wasn't sure how long he would be spending in this body.

He went downstairs, which was difficult for someone who spent most of his existence flying, but he reached the bottom safely and found Danny's family sitting around a table with some stuff on it.

As he watched, Jazz scooped up a spoonful of the stuff inside her bowl, and she stuffed it into her mouth and chewed. Oh, so it was food.

Jazz caught him staring and asked, "Well? Are you going to eat?"

"Oh," he said. That's right, didn't humans need to eat to survive? He sat at the table, across from Jazz.

Phantom looked at the bowl in front of Jazz and noticed it was filled with a white liquid with pieces of multicolored circles swimming in it. He turned his attention to the jug that held the same white liquid, the box with a cartoon toucan on it that he guessed held the small circles, and the empty bowl in front of him. Well, he could put two and two together, and in no time he poured himself a bowl of milk and cereal and brought a spoonful to his mouth.

Holy Unworld! That tasted great. I mean, food did exist in the Ghost Zone for those who missed eating, but it all had the same acidic taste of ectoplasm. This was different. It was tooth-rottingly sweet.

Jazz raised an eyebrow at his dreamy expression. "You look like you're enjoying your Froot Loops."

"Froot Loops," he repeated the name. "We didn't have this in the Ghost Zone." Or maybe they did, but it wouldn't have tasted the same.

Jazz lowered her spoon and frowned. "Ghosts. Are you still going on about that?"

Phantom stopped chewing. He cast his eyes downward and twirled the spoon in his bowl. "I'm right," he said. "You were wrong about the fake memory stuff."

"Oh really?" she said, sounding like she didn't believe him. "Why is that?"

Phantom opened his mouth to speak, but his words died when he noticed Danny's mom. She had her back on them and was washing the dishes, but he thought he saw her tilt her ear toward them. Had she been listening?

"It's fine," Jazz sighed. "We'll talk about it after school. We're going to be late."

Phantom nodded and finished his Froot Loops, happy not to talk. Not with the ghost hunter in the room.

After the breakfast was drained, Jazz made for the door. Phantom followed her, but she blocked him with a hand and raised an eyebrow at his clothes. "You're not going to school in pyjamas, are you?"

Phantom glanced down at himself and saw that he was still wearing the same soft clothes he had slept in. "Uhh..."

Jazz rolled her eyes. "Go change clothes."

"Right," Phantom said and went back to Danny's room.

Honestly, he wasn't sure what he was supposed to wear. Ghosts didn't have different clothes for different occasions (most of them spent their entire existence in the same set of clothes--either whatever they had died in, or if they were born in the Zone like Phantom was, then whatever they thought made them look scarier), and the Fentons weren't exactly a good example of what humans normally wear.

As he rummaged through Danny's stuff, he came across a photograph. It showed Danny with those two friends of his--the ones who greeted Phantom when he first woke up. The trio stood in a grassy park, smiling, their arms linked together.

Phantom was filled with guilt as he thought back to Danny's ghost, begging him for his body back. If only he knew how to do that. He set the photo aside, but at least it helped him in one thing: the three teenagers were wearing regular clothes. He managed to find some clothes that matched the ones Danny wore in the picture, and when he returned downstairs, he was wearing jeans, sneakers, and a red-and-white T-shirt.

Jazz was waiting for him. The two teens walked outside and entered her car, a small convertible. He sat in the passenger seat and copied what Jazz did to strap her seatbelt, but his mind was still thinking about that photo of Danny he found. After a moment's hesitation, he said, "I saw him."

Jazz's hand stopped in the middle of turning the key in the ignition. "Saw who?"

"Danny," he told her.

Jazz pursed her lips. She started the car and drove. "If you saw him, then where is he now?"

"Your mom shot at him."

"What?"

"He's a ghost. I don't think she recognized him, but...well, he's dead."

Phantom finally learned what the seatbelt's function was when he lurched forward as Jazz suddenly stopped the car. She gripped the wheel in tight fists and breathed through flared nostrils. "Don't."

"Don't what?"

"Don't say that," she pleaded. "It was bad enough when I thought you... I thought you might die. But you didn't. You're alive."

Phantom felt guilt gnaw at him from hearing Jazz. What could he tell her other than Actually, your brother did die, oops haha, sorry?

Jazz took in a deep breath, then she kept driving like nothing happened. Phantom stayed quiet.

Eventually, the car stopped, and Jazz unbuckled her seatbelt and stepped out. Phantom looked at the building they arrived at. Numerous humans around his general age were either milling about or going inside.

School. He never went to one himself, but he heard some stories from Sidney. They weren't nice stories.

Phantom gulped and exited the car. No sooner had he done that than he noticed the two teens rushing toward him.

"Danny!" that girl from last night said. What was her name...Sam. She hesitated and asked, "Do you...remember us?"

"You mean to ask if Danny is back," Phantom told her. That gave her the answer she needed, and she deflated.

Tucker glanced between them, then hooked his arm around Phantom's shoulder and said, "Hey, if you're amnesiac, you need someone to guide you through school again, right?"

"I'm not..." He sighed. Then he eyed the building warily and asked, "Are there bullies?"

"Oh, definitely," Tucker answered, which made his stomach sink.

His time at school actually went by pretty smoothly. He had wondered if anyone would notice that he wasn't Danny, but nobody paid him much attention, not even the teachers. He managed to breeze by two subjects already--one was math, which was admittedly gibberish to him, but Tucker told him no one understood it anyway. The second one he knew better--English literature. He had visited Ghostwriter's library a bunch of times in the Zone and knew about Lord of the Flies when the teacher asked him about it.

Sam raised an eyebrow at him. "You don't remember your name, but you remember reading a class assignment?"

Phantom almost screamed out "I'm not Danny" again, but he held himself back. He knew they would never believe him, not unless...

"Look, Sam, Tucker," he said nervously. He wasn't sure if they would react the same way Jazz did, but considering how close friends they were, then they probably would. The two waited for him expectantly while he tried to pick out the right words. "Danny...your friend...he's--"

"Hey, Fentina!" a sharp voice interrupted him.

"Oh bother," Sam grumbled.

Confused, Phantom turned around to the source of the voice. What greeted him was a tall and muscular blonde human in a letterman's jacket, sneering down at him. "I didn't see you at the beginning of the school day. I think we have some beating to catch up on," he taunted and slammed a fist into his palm.

"Oh," Phantom said numbly. "You're a bully."

The blonde released a laugh that sounded like a pig getting choked. "Me, a bully? More like you're a loser who deserves to get bullied."

"That...makes no sense."

That was apparently the wrong thing to say, because blonde dude's face turned beet red, and he picked up Phantom by the collar and slammed him into a row of lockers. At this point, pain was becoming a constant in Phantom's new, stolen life.

"Lay off, Dash," Sam snapped at him.

"You lay off, Manson," Dash bit back. "I'm only interested in Fenturd here."

"I hear you mispronouncing Fenton a lot," Phantom said in spite of his nerves. "It's really not that hard a name to memorize."

Dash's face turned an even deeper shade of red, and he punched Phantom in the face. All Phantom could think was, Man, Danny would not be happy if he found out I broke his face. Then Dash opened a random locker and stuffed him inside.

"Have fun, FenTON," he yelled at him and slammed the locker door shut.

This was fine. Phantom could handle being trapped inside a tight space with no intangibility to bail him out. I mean, he was already trapped inside this body, wasn't he? Haha.

But after the first few minutes passed, he grew nervous. There was no way he would be left here forever, right? Oh, Ancients, he was going to die just like Sidney, alone in a school locker.

Apparently, that was not to be, because suddenly the air inside the locker grew colder. A soft green glow washed over it, and Phantom felt two cold hands grip his arms. A tingle ran across him. He recognized the sensation: intangibility. The arms pulled, and he was tugged through the locker wall and brought face to face with none other than Danny.

Phantom blinked. "You again."

Danny scowled. "You're still in my body."

"Well, yeah," Phantom said simply. "If I left, it would die."

Danny pulled him closer so he can feel his glare more intensely, probably. Phantom felt it all right, and he squinted his eyes because dear Clockwork, were ghost eyes always this bright?

"I asked you before, and I'm asking you again," Danny growled. "Give me back my body."

"And I already told you, I can't," Phantom retorted.

"Why not? It's mine!" His grip on Phantom's arms were tight now. "I can't live as a ghost!"

"I mean, technically you wouldn't really be living because--"

"I'm not dead!" Danny denied. "I can't...I can't be..."

His grip on Phantom felt weak now. His eyes were dimmer.

Phantom gulped and hesitantly patted Danny's arm in what he hoped was a reassuring way. "Hey, it's fine. Lots of ghosts I know went through a crisis when they died."

"Did they have parents who wanted to hunt them down?" Danny asked softly. Phantom paused and didn't know how to respond.

Well, they were alone, at least. The hallway was empty except for the two of them, and he had a feeling that whatever teacher he had would be wondering where Danny Fenton was. He wasn't sure if this fact was a good thing or a bad thing, because then Sam and Tucker would not see proof of their friend being dead, and he wasn't sure if that knowledge was good or bad.

"No," Danny said, snapping Phantom out of his thoughts. "No. I'm not going to stay like this while you live my life."

"But I already told you..." Phantom began, but Danny's eyes returned their brightness, and he stared directly at Phantom.

"I'm a ghost. I can possess stuff, right?"

Phantom's eyes widened, and that was all the answer Danny needed before he overshadowed him.

A minute later, the bell rung, and students filed out of classrooms. He heard footsteps approach him and turned around to see his friends.

"Thank god, you made it out!" Tucker said once he saw him. "I swear, I told Lancer that Dash stuffed you in a locker again, but he didn't believe me..." He trailed off and pointed out, "Your eyes are green."

"They are?" Danny asked. "Huh, that's weird. I'm not surprised about Mr. Lancer, though."

"Um, didn't you technically only meet him today or something?"

"Today? I wish," Danny said, rolling his green eyes. "That guy's been following our class since third grade."

Tucker gaped. "You remember?"

"Third grade? Unfortunately."

Sam was staring. She stepped forward. "Danny?" she slowly asked.

Danny grinned. "Hey, Sam."

She laughed and hugged him. "You're back! How?"

Danny shrugged. "Come on, you can't expect me to forget you forever, can you?"

Sam and Tucker smiled. Danny smiled. In the back of Danny's head, Phantom mentally frowned.

The day passed. Danny was back. He took his classes as always. He got bullied by Dash as always, but that didnt bother him much. Funny how small things become once you've literally died.

Not. Danny didn't die. He told himself that.

More than once, he felt a hand twitch on its own. He sent a mental frown to Phantom and told him, Why won't you leave already?

Dude, how many times do I have to explain to you that I can't?

But I'm in my own body now.

Temporarily. Overshadowing someone isn't the same as taking their body.

Danny tuned him out and continued with his day.

There was a price, however. Phantom tried to warn him, but he got ignored. As the day went by, Danny felt himself grow exhausted at an awfully quick pace.

Tucker noticed first. "Are you okay? You're breathing heavily, and it's not even P.E. yet."

"I'm fine," Danny panted, but he didn't look that way. His skin was pale and covered with sweat.

"No, you're not," Sam said with a frown. "It's the portal--you shouldn't be walking around school after a near-death accident like that."

"I'm not dead!" Danny snapped, shocking his friends with his sudden volume. He faltered. "I mean...I need to go use the bathroom."

They let him go, though their eyes followed his back as he left. He entered the nearest restroom he found and immediately splashed his face with water.

You should stop overshadowing me, Phantom suggested.

Danny scowled. He gripped the sink to steady his shaking hands. "I'm not overshadowing anyone. This is my body."

I'm not saying it's not, but right now, you're a ghost. Prolonged overshadowing isn't healthy.

Danny gritted his teeth. "So, what? I let you steal my life again?"

It's just until we can figure out how to switch us back, Phantom said, but Danny could tell when he lied.

"You don't think we can be switched back, can you?"

Phantom hesitated. Luckily for him, he didn't need to think of a reply--just then, Danny shivered, and a blue mist escaped from his mouth.

Danny frowned. "What was that?"

Oh no, Phantom thought.

Suddenly, a shrill voice cried out, "Trespasser!" Danny jumped and whipped around to face whoever spoke. He squinted his eyes and said, "Who the fuck?"

The speaker would have looked like a regular scrawny freshman, except his skin was gray and transparent, and his torso was sticking halfway through a closed bathroom stall. It was a ghost, obviously.

Truthfully, Danny was almost disappointed in how un-scary he seemed. As a child, he had nightmares about ghosts from the stories his parents told him, but the specter in front of him was far from intimidating. He looked like one of the geeks that Dash and his gang would have picked on if he were alive.

The ghost pointed a finger at Danny and repeated in his nasally voice, "Trespasser! This is my haunt."

Danny eyed the row of empty stalls and asked, "You mean the restroom?"

"Yes! I died in this place, and I chose to make it my haunt instead of going to the Ghost Zone. I don't need another ghost like you to take it from me!"

"Okay, Moaning Myrtle, calm down," Danny spoke. "Why would I even want to steal a restroom? Also, what do you mean by calling me a ghost?"

The ghost left his stall and floated over Danny with a scowl. "I'm not stupid. I can tell when a ghost is overshadowing someone. And if you would steal a body, then you would steal a haunt."

Danny bristled. "I didn't steal this body! It was mine in the first place."

"Oh, sure, and I bet you're going to say this haunt has always been yours!"

"I'm not interested in your fucking water closet!" Danny bit back. "And this body is mine! I was born in it. I lived in it. I...it can't belong to anyone else."

The ghost narrowed his eyes. Then he said, "You're a nasty ass liar, you know that?"

"I'm not lying!"

"Whatever! You're clearly overshadowing a human, and you're clearly still standing inside my haunt, so..."

Um, maybe you should leave the bathroom, Phantom suggested. But Danny stood his ground, glaring at the ghost with his fists by his side. He was tired of this--tired of his death being pointed out to him.

"What are you going to do about it, huh? Give me a swirly?" he gibed.

The ghost's expression darkened. He raised his arm, and several stalls began to rumble. Danny faltered, and his anger melted into apprehension.

Run, Phantom said. This time, Danny decided it was a good idea to listen.

He managed to make it halfway to the exit when all the stalls suddenly exploded. Jets of slightly glowing water burst forth and hit Danny in the back, pushing him the rest of the way out and also drenching him completely.

He sluggishly picked himself off the wet floor. When he glanced to his side, he saw Kwan pausing mid-step. "...I'll just use the restroom on the second floor," Kwan said, turned a 180 and left.

Danny flipped himself over and faced the ghost floating in the restroom's doorway. "I left your stupid washroom alone, so can you leave?" he barked.

"But how do I know you won't come back?" the ghost challenged. "And you're still overshadowing the poor human."

Danny laughed mirthlessly. "Poor human?"

The ghost didn't seem to understand the irony in that. He tackled Danny, phasing the both of them through the wall and into the adjacent hallway.

A few stragglers were still idling in the hallway when they burst in. At the sudden sight of the ghost, most of them screamed and scrambled away. Only a few stayed behind: some redheaded human in a basketball shirt, and Danny's friends, Sam and Tucker.

"Danny!" Sam called out and ran to his side. Tucker froze in place. He lifted a shaky finger at the toilet ghost and stammered, "That's a g-ghost."

The toilet ghost floated away from Danny and crossed his arms. "Yeah, duh," he replied. "I'm not the only one, though."

Tucker was about to ask him what he meant by that, but then Danny began to heave. Sam hovered over him worriedly, but even she had to step away when his coughing became intense. He lurched over--then coughed himself out of his body.

Ghost Danny popped out and landed on the floor. Behind him, Phantom sighed and fell onto his side.

Sam gaped and stared between them, her mouth forming wordless questions, before she gulped and said to Danny, "Phantom?"

Danny frowned and said, "No, I'm Danny! He's Phantom." He pointed at the person inside his human body.

Sam chuckled weakly. "I think you must be confused. He's Danny, because he's a human. And you're Phantom, because youre a g..."

"He's right," Phantom interrupted from his spot on the floor. He pushed himself up, still panting heavily, and said, "That's what I've been trying to tell you. I'm not Danny. He is."

Sam stared at him, then back at Danny. "But...but that would mean--" She trailed off, and her face turned pale.

Whatever heartfelt conversation might have followed was cut off by another splash of water aimed at Danny. He growled and turned on the toilet ghost. "Will you go already?"

The ghost's fists were surrounded by swirling water (which Danny really hoped was clean). He shook his head and barked at him, "Not until you leave this school."

"The school? I thought your haunt was only the restroom."

"It was! But then you made fun of it, so I've decided to make this entire building my territory!"

He shot another beam of water at Danny. Danny grinded his teeth and wished the water would stop in mid-air...and to his surprise, it did. A transparent green shield suddenly appeared in front of him, blocking the water and keeping him dry. Danny blinked and floated back in surprise, and the shield dissapeared.

Phantom was watching him with interest. When the shield disappeared, he called out to Danny and told him, "Use your ghost rays!"

"My what?" was Danny's response right before another jet of water came at him. This time, he didn't summon an ecto-shield in time, and he got slammed back against a row of lockers. As he picked himself up, he noticed that redhead from earlier, who had been staring, trembling, as the whole encounter went down. Ah, fuck, what was his name again? He was in Danny's P.E. class. The poor boy was shivering like a leaf, which made sense--Danny would have done the same if he saw a real ghost when he was still human.

The toilet ghost approached Danny, but stopped and scowled at the redhead. "Leave, human," he ordered. "This doesn't involve you."

The guy (His name started with a W, Danny remembered. Walt? Wes?) stared at the ghost for a moment, then hurriedly nodded and ran. That left the ghost flying in front of Danny.

"Your ghost ray!" Phantom repeated from behind the toilet ghost, as if that would make Danny understand what he was saying. "Just think about shooting him with your hands!"

Shooting him...with his hands? That made no sense, but Danny did as he was told. He made a finger gun and aimed it at the ghost, then imagined a pew! pew! come out.

Pew! came out the ray and shot the ghost right at his chest.

The opponent had only time to widen his eyes before he was slammed against the opposite wall and dissolved into (grossly) glowing water.

Danny slowly blinked. "...Functioning fingerguns," he said. "That's useful."

"What the actual fuck, dude?"

He turned and saw Tucker approach him, wearing a bewildered expression. He gestured wildly to Danny and said, "You're a ghost now? And your body is conscious on its own?"

"Actually, it's conscious because a ghost is inside," he replied, not-so-subtly glaring at Phantom as he said so.

Phantom threw his (or Danny's...whatever) arms up and said, "I didn't choose to be stuck in your body, okay? It was an accident."

Tucker rubbed his forehead. "I still don't understand. How is all this happenning?"

Before either Danny could speak, Sam's voice suddenly cut through and said, "I killed you."

Danny stared at Sam. She was hugging her arms, eyes downcast, and still looked pale as a sheet. "You're a ghost," she said softly. "That means you've died. And I killed you."

Danny felt that same tightness in his chest, not exactly squeezing any heart, but something similar. "I'm not dead," he tried again, but after repeating that sentence so many times, the lie sounded weak even to himself.

Phantom sent him a pitying gaze. Sam bit her lips and squeezed herself tighter. "Yes, you are. It was the portal accident. Somehow, you died and got replaced by...whoever this is." She gestured weakly to Phantom, then choked up and continued in a wavering voice, "It was my fault. I told you to go inside that portal. You're--you're dead, because of me. I killed you."

Seeing her like that, hearing her, made any sorry feelings Danny had for himself disappear. All he cared about was wiping that melancholy from his friend's eyes. "No," he told her firmly. "It wasn't your fault. I agreed. I--" A lump formed in his throat, and he swallowed it down before saying, "I'm dead because of my own fault."

He could feel Phantom's eyes boring into him. Probably, that ghost (ex-ghost?) was thinking something along the lines of Fucking finally! You admit it to yourself at last, but the emotional intensity of the situation was likely what prevented him from voicing that thought out loud.

Sam raised her eyes and met his sadly. Tucker stepped forward, his brows drawn together. "But...but that can't be it!" he protested. He grabbed Phantom's arm and pointed out, "Your body is still alive, isn't it? Can't we...I dont know...redo the accident so it gets you back in your body the same way Phantom got inside yours?"

Danny perked up and felt a sliver of hope grow inside him, but Phantom was quick to shake his head and say, "That won't be so easy. The Ghost Zone is always shifting. Whatever spot I was in when the portal thing happened, it won't be the same place for Danny."

"Oh," Tucker said, deflating. His eyes turned downcast, and his hands fell limply off Phantom's arm. "I guess it can be it, then."

Phantom looked at the trio of friends, their broken expressions. He honestly didn't see what the big fuss was about, but he hated seeing them so sad, so he hurriedly added in a forcefully positive tone, "That's okay, though! Difficult doesn't have to mean impossible! I'm sure we can...uh..."

He trailed off after spotting a person at the end of the hallway. Confused, Danny turned to see who he was looking at. He found his sister, slack-jawed, her eyes darting between him and Phantom.

"Jazz!" he said, then looked down and noticed his ghostly appearance. "Um, I can explain."

Jazz didn't leave him room to, because she promptly fainted.

Danny rushed forward to grab her, but of course, she fell right through his arms. He winced when she hit her face on the hard floor. Tucker came forward and checked her.

"She's fine," he said with a cross between a smile and a grimace.

Jazz's eyes fluttered awake. She groaned and turned her head to the side. On the wall next to her was a silly cartoon infographic of flu symptoms. It took her mind a minute to recognize it, but she was at the school infirmary.

"You're awake?" asked a voice nearby. She turned her head to the other side and saw her brother's face.

"Danny..." She frowned and sat up on the infirmary bed. Her face hurt. "What happened?"

"You don't remember?"

Jazz tried to recall what brought her here. She remembered seeing seeing Danny, and...ghost Danny? She shook her head. "Must have been a dream," she mumbled.

"What?"

She saw Danny watching her curiously. She sighed and ran a hand across her face, which still ached for some reason. "I remember seeing you standing next to your ghost. I think you might have...died. But that couldn't have been possible."

"You think that was a dream."

Danny's expression was unreadable. Jazz frowned. "It had to be. Ghosts aren't real." Mentally, she added, I hope not.

Danny averted his eyes from her. She wondered if she said something wrong, but then Danny stood up from his chair and said, "You slipped and hit your face, so we brought you to the school nurse. You need some rest...I'll leave you alone."

It sounded reasonable enough, but something nagged at her. Danny wouldn't meet her eyes, instead choosing to fidget with the hem of his shirt. She had a feeling he was lying.

"Danny," she called. "You know you can tell me anything, right?"

Her brother stiffened. It looked like he was about to say something, but he must have changed his mind at the last minute because he left the room wordlessly.

Phantom exited the school infirmary. "She's okay," he told the air.

Danny visualized in front of him, wearing a frown. "I heard what went down. She thinks it wasn't real."

Phantom shrugged. He felt a little bad, but he wasn't sure he could handle her reaction if he told her that her brother was really dead...again. The first time he tried didn't go so cheerfully.

"Where are your friends?" Phantom asked, choosing to change the subject.

"You mean Sam and Tuck? What do you think?" He chuckled humorlessly, then gazed at his boots and murmured, "They just discovered that ghosts exist and their friend is dead. Of course they needed some time to process that."

Phantom bit his lip. "We'll find some way to switch us back. Maybe."

That "maybe" didn't sound so reassuring, and Danny didn't look reassured. Phantom grimaced and tried to think of a better way to lift his spirits, but then he heard footsteps approach. Danny made himself invisible while Phantom turned around and saw a familiar couple in orange and teal come toward them.

"Danno!" Danny's dad greeted him. "The school called--is Jazzy-pants alright?"

"She's fine," Phantom said with a steady voice. "She just had some low blood sugar is all."

The man patted his shoulder, then entered the room where Jazz was held. His wife went to follow him, but Phantom stopped her by calling, "Uh...Mom."

She spun to him and smiled. "What is it, sweetie?"

Phantom hesitated. He fidgeted with his shirt and asked, "Did you really mean what you said last night--about all ghosts being bad?"

The woman frowned. "Of course I did. Was I wrong?"

"It's just, well..." He focused on a random locker and said, "What if your son...I mean, what if I became a ghost? What would you do to me then?"

He braved a glance at her and saw a shadow cross her expression. She hesitated for a moment before replying carefully, "I don't like to think about that. I choose to believe that when you die, it won't be violent. I'll make sure of that." She forced a smile, then ruffled Phantom's hair and added, "But that doesn't matter right now. You're still alive and human. As long as you're with me, then I know that any ghost who looks like you is an imposter."

Phantom's stomach sank, and he swallowed down a lump that formed in his throat. Danny's mom only smiled at him once more before she followed her husband to see Jazz.

Danny didn't reappear. Phantom didn't see him for the rest of the day. But in that moment, he thought he heard a choked sob come from the air behind him.

#Danny Phantom #Phic Phight #phic phight 20 #phic phight 2020 #danny fenton #sam manson #tucker foley #jazz fenton #maddie fenton #jack fenton #dash baxter #fic #fanfiction #writing #au #mine

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mischiefandspirits · 4 years

Text

Living Phantom

Danny Fenton was fourteen and at the tail end of his freshman year of high school when his parents finished their life's work, a portal to the world of ghosts. There was one thing they overlooked when activating the portal, however: An emergency measure within the portal meant to disable it. A measure that was accidentally turned on while they plugged the machine in. A measure that was accidentally turned off while Danny was looking around the inside of the portal at his friends' instance.

A measure that caused Danny's death, but only for an instant.

But an instant was all it took.

In a small town in Minnesota, underneath a two-story home that was capped by a metal monstrosity, a trio of teenagers stood in a basement laboratory.

One, an African American boy with dark hair hidden under a red beret and green eyes peeking through glasses, was looking over some instruments scattered over the countertops. The second, a fair boy with black hair that fell over blue eyes and a flurry of freckles, was standing nervously near a tall metal tunnel with a hazmat suit in his hands. The last, a tanned girl with her sidecut hair dyed to match her purple contacts and amethyst fake nose stud, was holding up her phone.

“Smile!” Sam Manson said and took a picture as soon as Danny Fenton looked towards her.

The blue-eyed boy blinked the lights from his eyes. “Okay, I showed you the Portal. Can we get out of here now? My parents could be back here any minute.” He glanced at the tunnel with a frown and a shiver. “Besides, they say it doesn’t work anyway.”

Sam walked up to the tunnel’s entrance and snapped a picture of the inside.

Tucker Foley nudged Danny and he sent the dark-skinned boy a glare, but the boys followed her over.

“Come on, Danny,” Sam said, taking another picture. “A Ghost Zone? Aren’t you curious? You gotta check it out.”

Danny shivered again as he looked in. His parent’s inventions had always given him goosebumps -- a reaction to the ectoplasm they infused into the devices, his mom theorized, combined with a sensitivity he must have inherited from his father -- and the portal to the Ghost Zone was the worst of the lot. There was just something… foreboding about it.

It was hardly something he was going to tell his friends, though. Not if he didn’t want them teasing him for the next month. Besides, the faster he did this, the faster they’d get bored, and then they could go upstairs and watch movies like he’d told his parents they would.

There also might have been a small part of him that was honestly curious about the whole idea.

“You know what? You’re right. Who knows what kinds of things exist on the other side of that portal?” He smiled at his friends and stepped back to pull on the jumpsuit his parents had made for him.

“What are you doing?” Tucker asked.

“I’m going to put on the suit.”

“Dude, that thing is hideous.”

Sam snorted and grabbed the front of the suit, which had his dad’s face on the chest. “You can’t go walking around with that on your chest.”

Danny shrugged. “Mom and Dad say we have to wear them for protection.”

“It doesn’t even cover your head though,” Tucker pointed out. “How much protection does it really give? Just wear the gloves.”

Suit yourself, Danny thought with a shrug and pulled the gloves off the suit to put them on. He turned to the tunnel and gave another shiver.

Suddenly something fell over his head.

He blinked and pulled it off to see it was Sam’s pleather jacket.

“You looked cold,” she said with a smirk.

He shot her a look and blushed. “I’m not wearing your jacket.”

“Relax. I got it off the men’s rack. The women’s jackets sit weird.”

Danny hesitated, then slipped it on. He did admittedly feel better, having something more substantial on over his shirt as he stepped into the tunnel. He cautiously stepped over wires and glanced over his shoulder at the others. As he got further in and the tunnel grew darker, his hand went to the wall so he could catch himself if he fell.

The wall sank under his hand and a beep sounded.

Before he could do anything, the world became a swirl of green and Danny felt like someone had set a fire inside him. There was a blazing inferno within his abdomen that was burning him alive from the inside out, moving outwards from a place just under his sternum in a pulse of agony that left a stinging cold in its wake. At the same time, there was a numbness rushing up his arm, his shoulder, his collar-chest-face. He could hear his pulse beating rapidly in his ears until it was swallowed up by the numbness and everything froze.

Danny’s gaze went white and he knew he was dying -- was dead -- could feel himself slipping away.

Then the fire flowed through his chest and an almighty thump sounded from the frostbitten wasteland it left behind. His body jerked once, twice, then the thump sounded again and continued sounding.

The numbness gave way as stinging zaps settled over his body -- through his skin -- filling it and keeping the blaze inside like an electric fence.

Later he would think back on the accident and realize those events must have happened in less than a second. The portal turned on and the flow of electricity killed him before the ectoplasmic energy restarted his heart like a defibrillator. At the time, however, it felt torturously slow, which was reflected in the harsh wail he let out as soon as his consciousness snapped back into his body and the pain hit him once more.

He wailed and wailed as the lightning settled in his skin as a gentle buzz, the fires curled up into a warm glow, and the frozen wasteland within became a chilling void. Slowly the world returned to him and his wail died out. He gave one last gasp, then nothing.

He opened his eyes and looked down, surprised to see he was still standing. He raised his hands and his once bright orange gloves were now dark grey.

The gloves disappeared, then so did his flesh, then his bones, then there was nothing before his gloves snapped back into view.

He looked up and everything was swirling green, but there was a darkness behind him and he staggered towards it, slumping against a metal wall before falling out of the mists and onto a concrete floor.

~~~~~~~~~~B~~~~~0~~~~~0~~~~~~~~~~

Sam felt her heart stop as her best friend disappeared behind a flash of green, the only sign he was still there being the awful scream coming from the portal.

“Turn it off,” she whispered. She grabbed Tucker’s arm and shook him. “TURN IT OFF!”

“I-I don’t know how,” Tucker whimpered, not taking his eyes off the portal. “Oh, man. Oh, man. Oh, man. Oh, man! Oh, man! Oh, man!”

“TUCKER!”

“SAM!”

The screaming stopped and Sam froze.

Tucker sucked in a breath.

There was a moment of silence, then something tumbled out of the portal.

Tucker shrieked and leaped away, but Sam just stared.

The thing -- person -- slowly got onto hands and knees. Its skin was grey which contrasted with its bright white hair. It wore dark grey jeans and black hightops as well as a black hooded shirt underneath a white jacket.

A familiar white jacket, though the color was new.

“D-Danny?” she asked, taking half a step towards the person.

The glowing person. The glowing person with pointed ears. The glowing person who, when they looked up, had eyes and freckles that shined the same bright green as the portal behind them.

“Sssammm,” they slurred, blinking sluggishly.

“Danny!” Tucker gasped and Sam took another few steps towards him.

“Are-are you okay?” she asked hesitantly.

“Okay? OKAY?” Tucker muttered in a high voice. “He’s glowing! He’s… What if he’s… Oh man, is he a ghost? Did we just kill Danny? Oh, man!”

“Ghost?” Danny sat up slowly and looked down at himself. His eyes -- glowing, glowing green like the portal, eyes shouldn’t glow like that! -- widened as he took himself in. “I’m a-I’m a ghost?”

“We killed Danny!”

“Danny?” Sam whispered, taking another step towards him. She reached out to grab him. She had to grab him. Because if she could grab him, that would mean he was there. He couldn’t be just some apparition, right? You couldn’t touch ghosts, right?

“I can’t be a ghost. No, no, no, no, no -”

“Danny’s dead! Oh man, Danny’s dead! Danny’s -”

“- no, no, no, no no, no, no, no no, no, no, no no, no, no, no -”

“- dead! Danny’s dead! We killed him! He’s dead! Danny’s -”

“SHUT UP, TUCKER!”

Danny flinched back from Sam, falling backward.

Sam grabbed him and pulled him towards her because he was falling TOWARDS THE PORTAL! The portal that had just KILLED HIM!

Except no, it didn’t. It can’t have killed him. Danny can’t have died. Oh please, please, please! Don’t be dead.

“S-Sam?” he whispered, staring up at her. This close she could see that his freckles twinkled like stars and his canines were just the slightest bit too long, too sharp.

Her hand was wrapped around his arm. She had touched him. He couldn’t be a ghost.

Her hand slipped through his arm as he collapsed back on the ground.

No!

Tears filled her eyes and she dropped to the ground. She threw her arms around his shoulders and buried her face into his neck.

His skin was solid, but it sent a tingle through her like a static shock. He also felt warm, but at the same time, her face was cold where it was pressed into his skin.

“Danny’s dead,” Tucker said, quieter than he’d been before.

“I’m dead,” Danny mumbled.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Sam sobbed. “I should never have made you go in there. I’m sorry.”

“I can’t be dead. I can’t be a ghost. My parents… Oh man, my parents!” Danny shouted suddenly. “They’re going to kill me!”

Sam fell to the floor as Danny’s body disappeared from under her. She rolled over to see him floating just above her, shaking.

“Danny’s dead. You can’t kill someone who’s dead,” Tucker muttered, eyes unfocused and staring at nothing.

“My parents hunt ghosts. I can’t be a ghost. They’ll trap me. Kill me. I can-can’t be a ghost.” His eyes closed and he grabbed at his hair, hunching over in midair. “I can’t be a ghost. I can’t be a ghost. I can’t be a ghost.”

“Danny, we’re home! You kids in your room?” came Mrs. Fenton’s voice from upstairs.

“Can’t be. Can’t be. Can’t be.”

“We gotta get him out of here,” Sam hissed, climbing to her feet.

“Kids?”

“Can’t be. Can’t be. Can’t be.”

“How?” Tucker whispered back.

“Danny?” Mr. Fenton called.

“Can’t be. Can-”

A white light appeared at Danny’s waist, growing outward into a ring of light.

Like a halo, Sam thought and briefly wondered if humans could turn into angels when they died.

If anyone could, it would be Danny.

Then the ring split into two, one going up him and the other going down.

Danny collapsed to the ground at Sam’s feet, looking exactly as he had when he’d first gone into the portal.

No, not exactly, because there was also the Lichtenberg figure burn going up the side of his neck and face.

There was half a second where all three teens just stared at each other, then Danny gave a loud yelp and rolled onto his right side, clutching his left arm.

“Danny!” his parents shouted and came running down the stairs.

“What happened?” Mrs. Fenton asked, dropping down next to her son.

“Th-the portal…” Tucker stuttered, glancing between Sam, Danny, and the device.

“The portal? The portal!” Mr. Fenton cheered when he looked at the portal and saw it running. “Maddie, it’s working!”

“Jack,” Maddie snapped before turning back to Danny and carefully checking his face. “These look like electrical burns. What happened?”

“He-he was showing us the portal and it-it turned on,” Sam said, her own eyes never leaving Danny. “Is he okay?”

Of course not, he’s a ghost.

But he’s not glowing anymore.

Mrs. Fenton set one hand on his neck and the other on his chest, trying to get him to sit still. “Danny honey, I need you to calm down, please. Jack, get the first aid kit.”

“Right.”

As Mr. Fenton ran off to the side of the lab, Mrs. Fenton looked over Danny’s face. “Danny, please, deep breaths. Can you tell me what happened?”

“Sh-sh-shock, I th-think,” he panted, sitting up slowly. “Was looking at the portal.”

“You must have bumped a wire. You know you need to be more careful around our inventions.”

“Was wearing gloves.”

“That’s good, but it’s not always enough.”

“Sorry.”

Mr. Fanton returned with a white toolbox with a red plus drawn on the side and Mrs. Fenton helped Danny carefully pull off first his gloves, then his jacket, and finally his shirt.

Tucker spun around when the last piece started to come off, but Sam couldn’t pull her gaze away even at the sight of the binder hidden underneath.

The Lichtenberg figures trailed down onto his collar bone, around his chest, across his left arm, and ended -- started -- on his palm.

Mrs. Fenton took out a stethoscope and started checking his chest. “Your breathing and heartbeat are a little fast, but nothing more than what you’d get from a scare,” she sighed finally.

He nodded and shared a relieved look with Sam.

Mrs. Fenton looked up at her as well. “Did he pass out? Any spasms?”

She shook her head, trying not to think about how he’d been grey and glowing only moments earlier.

He was alive. Mrs. Fenton said he had a pulse.

The scientist turned back to Danny. “Any muscle pain or numbness? Nausea?”

“No, it just stings.”

“That’s good.”

“I’m okay then?” Danny asked hesitantly.

“Hopefully. We’ll need to keep an eye on you. Electrical shocks are not to be taken lightly.”

He nodded quickly. “I know. I’m sorry.”

Mrs. Fenton rubbed his unhurt shoulder for a moment, then tapped the binder. “You’re going to have to take this off so we can clean your burns.”

Sam finally looked away, a small blush on her cheeks. That put Mr. Fenton in her sights, who glanced at her with a frown.

“Maybe you two should head home,” he said seriously.

Mrs. Fenton agreed, “Danny’s going to need to rest after we get him cleaned up, and then we’re going to have a long discussion about the lab safety rules.”

“I’ll see you at school tomorrow,” Danny called as Mr. Fenton led Tucker and her to the stairs and they both said their goodbyes before heading up.

They paused once they were alone in the living room.

“I’m not crazy, right?” Tucker whispered. “Danny was… For a moment there, Danny was…”

“You’re definitely crazy, but yeah. Danny looked… like a ghost.”

They shared horrified looks.

“But he’s fine now. Mrs. Fenton even said so.”

“Yeah. Yeah. He has to be. We’ll… Let’s talk about this tomorrow. With Danny.”

Tucker nodded and they left.

They didn’t get to talk to Danny that next day. Danny’s sister, Jazz, met them before school to tell them Danny was staying home so their parents could keep an eye on him, just in case. He was also grounded so they gathered his missed schoolwork and gave it to Jazz to take home. As it was Friday, they didn’t get to see Danny again until the following week.

Thanks to a lucky break (and maybe a bit of secret bribery on Sam’s part) the three’s lockers were all next to each other, which meant that’s where Tucker and Sam were waiting when Danny met them Monday morning. He was pale, even for him, which made the soft pink scars curling up the side of his face stick out a little more. They’d clearly healed enough not to need covering, but Sam noticed his left hand was wrapped in bandages when he grabbed her and Tucker to pull them along.

“Woah, Fenturd, what happened to your face?” Dash Baxter jeered as they passed.

“He looks like he’s got a bush growing inside his face,” Kwan Yu laughed along.

“Loser probably got it in his parents’ freaky lab,” Valerie Gray added. “It looks like a weird burn.”

“Hideous is what it looks like,” Paulina Sanchez scoffed.

Danny blushed and ducked his head, but otherwise ignored the group of popular kids as he pulled his friends into an alcove. “It happened again.”

“You… turned into a ghost?” Sam asked and he nodded.

“Dude, what’d your parents say?” Tucker asked.

“Nothing. They don’t know. It didn’t happen in front of them and I couldn’t tell them. I don’t even know what I’d tell them.”

Without thinking, Sam’s hand rose to his neck. She blushed, but didn’t pull away until she felt the telltale beating beneath her fingers. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be. I’ve been doing the same thing,” Danny said, rubbing the back of his neck. “It’s always been there when I check, except…”

“When you’re a ghost?” Tucker suggested and Danny flinched.

Sam smacked the back of the geek’s head.

“It’s not just the transforming either. I… sometimes I…” Danny bit his lip then closed his eyes. His face scrunched up, then his body turned transparent. He opened his eyes again as he started sinking into the ground.

All three of them gasped. Tucker and Sam tried to grab him, but their hands went right through him. Danny made an aborted movement, like he was trying to jump, and he shot into the air. He hovered a foot off the ground for a moment before his body turned opaque once more and he dropped like a rock. Sam grabbed him when he stumbled over the landing and he gave her a grateful smile.

“I’m guessing that’s not what you were talking about,” Sam said as he righted himself.

“It was, kind of, but I was trying to turn invisible.”

“Wait,” Tucker said, a smile slipping onto his face. “You can turn invisible. And just now, that was intangibility. Dude, you’ve got superpowers!”

Sam shushed him and glanced out of the alcove, but no one was paying them any attention. When she turned back to the boys, Tucker was bouncing slightly.

“And you can transform into a ghost at will. It’s like you’re part ghost. Half ghost! That’s so cool!”

“It’s not cool, it’s freaky,” Danny argued. “And it’s not at will. I don’t know how I’m doing it. What if someone sees?”

“Well, we’ll just have to help you figure out how not to do it,” Sam said simply.

Although, it sounded anything but simple. How on earth do ghost powers even work? How do humans even get ghost powers?

Apparently by getting blasted by a ghost portal.

But Danny wasn't dead and it wasn’t her fault. She could help him. She had to. Please, just let his heart keep beating.

This is going to be a bit of a different reworking to canon because I'm going to be mixing up the order of events for a variety of reasons. Episodes will be out of order and their events might be changed anywhere from subtly to drastically. There's been a change to a certain someone's relationship to someone else. This is more a passion project than anything. It's headcanons, theories, and plot concepts getting merged together. If that's not your cup of tea, I get it. I hope you liked the pilot at least!

#danny phantom #danny fenton #sam manson #tucker foley #portal accident #living phantom

54 notes · View notes

five-rivers · 4 years

Text

Recipe (For Disaster?)

A holiday truce fic for @wastefulreverie ! I was your replacement gifter. I’m sorry it took so long to get this done. Your prompts kind of ran away with me. Or I ran away with them? I hope you enjoy!

Recipe (For Disaster?)

Before he opened his eyes, Danny knew he had died.

It had hurt. It had hurt a lot.

It still hurt.

His muscles (or whatever had replaced them) spasmed, grinding his skin into the harsh tile floor. Something else moved inside him, something cold, powerful, and lighter than air. It bubbled and roiled, twisted and turned, settling into his burnt and burning bones.

(Still, he was behind himself, in the portal, pressing that button, and screaming screaming screaming forever and ever two worlds straining through his brain and it hurt.)

He twitched, pressing his face into the floor, the rough edge of the tile and the grout abrading his cheek. A gust of air, a wheeze, just shy of being a whistle, escaped his throat.

(Why was he breathing if he was dead?)

He forced himself up onto his hands and knees. The tiles seemed to sting, biting into his flesh, his skin sticking to the inside of his gloves.

(Burning and tingling, outlines of lightning creeping along his skin. No.)

Slowly, he opened his eyes. The light against them made them feel like they were cooking.

(Like in the portal. Stop. Stop.)

His hands wavered into view, rippling beyond his tears, which dripped to the ground from the tip of his nose. They looked wrong. Why did they look wrong?

The gloves- They were white. A weird, silvery white that glistened and shone. His knees and elbows were gray-black, but somehow still glowed. His tears were glowing.

He knew he had died, knew he was dead, but seeing it was something different. He shuddered, and climbed to his feet. To his feet, and then farther. He floated, an inch above the floor. A squeak escaped his lips, and he dropped. More than an inch. He had fallen more than halfway through the floor before he managed to curl up on the floor again. His limbs flickered. Was that his eyes playing tricks, or..?

Once more, he stood up, this time successfully, and stumbled to the deep lab sink in the corner of the basement. There was a mirror hung above it. A dirty, tarnished mirror, but still. He needed to know what he looked like.

He gripped the edge of the sink and looked into the mirror. An alien face looked back. Instead of blue eyes, he looked into great green disks, the same color as the portal swirling behind him. Instead of black, his hair was the same moonlight white as his gloves. His skin was burnt tan, rather than milky. His freckles, usually almost unnoticeable, were a dim green. Shaking, he reached for the reflection.

That was really h-

Light.

Bright and blinding.

Almost as bright as the inside of the portal as it turned on.

(Almost as bright as the light that had killed him.)

He doubled over and vomited into the sink. Huh. He hadn't known ghosts could do that. Shouldn't his stomach be back with his body, if it hadn't been entirely vaporized by the portal?

Was- Was he dying again? He remembered his parents talking about how ghosts needed ectoplasm to survive. Should he have gone to the portal instead of the mirror?

Dazed, he looked up into the mirror. Blue eyes looked back at him through a fringe of dark hair, his skin was almost paper white and slick with sweat. His pulse throbbed visibly in the arteries of his throat.

... what.

He was-? Was that-? He didn't understand.

(Was he alive?)

Part of him wanted to drop to the ground, but he was afraid that if he did that, he wouldn't get back up. He shuffled around the sink, and slid against the wall until he reached a counter, and used that to prop himself up the rest of the way to the stairs. He crawled up them on his hands and knees, ignoring how burnt and melted his left glove was.

At the door, he rested. He put his forehead against the cool metal door, and breathed. In, out, in, out. With his right hand, he felt up the door, searching for the doorknob. As soon as he found it, he twisted it, not thinking about the consequences, and the door swung out under his weight, dumping him onto the kitchen floor.

He curled and wheezed.

"Danny?!"

Danny fiddled with the IV in his arm. Maddie took his hand with both of hers, and pulled it away.

"Alright, Danny," said Maddie, "tell us exactly what happened."

They were in Danny's room, which had been stuffed full of various ectoplasm-run and ghost-related medical machinery. His parents had stripped him of his hazmat and clothes, and gone over him with every scanner they had available, before finally putting him to bed in his pajamas.

There hadn't, as much as they searched, as ragged and burned as his clothing had been, been a single mark on him, inside or out. His temperature had been weirdly low, he was dehydrated, and he couldn't stop shaking, couldn't stop the pictures that flashed through his mind every time he blinked, afterimages of his death using his eyelids as a projector screen, but there wasn't a scratch, or burn, or bruise anywhere to be found.

Danny's eyes flicked from his mother to his father, one sitting by his bed, the other looming awkwardly in a corner, unable to find a safe place to sit.

"You're not in trouble," said Maddie, reassuringly. She had done so several times. "We just want to know what happened, so we can help you, and figure out what's going on."

Danny bit his lip. "I- Um. You and Dad, you were upset. You were really, really upset. When the portal didn't work, I mean, and I- Sometimes, sometimes when you're working on things, you miss things." He tilted his head to the side, finding the wall near his bed suddenly very fascinating. "Like, obvious things. Like- Like not plugging things in, or missing some wiring, or, you know... Forgetting about, you know, a button... on the inside of the portal... I thought I'd check." He trailed off.

"Oh, honey," said Maddie. "You hit it?"

"Not on purpose!" protested Danny. "I put on my suit, and looked around- I wasn't going to touch anything!- but I tripped over something on the ground. And it- It turned on. It turned on and it-" Tears started to prick at his eyes. "It turned on, and it... hurt. It hurt a lot and I-" How to describe what he had felt? What he had seen? The way he had been sure, absolutely sure, he had died? How, for a split second, he thought he had heard someone else screaming with him? "Then I was on the floor in front of the portal. And I got up, and I went to the mirror, and I realize I had- I had snow-white hair and glowing green eyes, and my skin was all weird, and I- Before I got to the mirror there were weird things happening." He bunched up his sheets in his free hand and rubbed them between his fingers.

"Weird things like what?" prompted Maddie, after he fell silent.

"Like... For a second I couldn't see my hands, even though I was looking at them. Then I kind of... I floated? Like, I flew. When I got back to the ground, I almost fell through the floor like- like I was in a video game with the collision turned off!" He bit his lip. "I thought I was dead," he admitted, quietly. "I thought I was a ghost."

"No way, Danny-boy!" boomed Jack. "You're a Fenton! Fenton's don't become ghosts! Besides, you're definitely alive now!"

"Jack's right," said Maddie, patting Danny's hand. "After all, you can't be alive and a ghost at the same time. I'm sure it was just a side effect of being exposed to so much ectoplasm all at once. A temporary thing." She sighed. "We'll look into it. Just focus on feeling better, alright, Danny? And then, maybe, we'll do a refresher on lab safety." She made a face. "You'll probably have to be decontaminated, too, but that can wait. It's a good thing school doesn't start for another month."

"Okay," said Danny, already dreading whatever decontamination entailed.

"Okay," repeated Maddie. "Jack, will you stay here? I want to go down and check on the portal, make sure it doesn't-"

Something inside Danny went deeply, impossibly cold. He arched back, grasping at his chest as whatever had come to life inside it pulsed and grew, rippling and buzzing as it intersected his skin, light throwing his room into stark contrast.

It stopped. Danny was wearing gloves. White gloves, over black sleeves. He looked up at his parents, flinched back at their shocked expressions, and kept going, floating into the corner of the ceiling above his bed.

"Mom?" he said, hugging himself, confused and alarmed. "Dad?" His voice broke. Where was the IV? Had he pulled it out of his arm as he levitated?

"Danny?" said Jack, oddly hushed.

Danny nodded convulsively. "What's happening to me?" he asked, desperate. The portal had done this, so they had to know, didn't they? They had built the thing, pouring their lives into it.

(Danny was honestly surprised his mother and father hadn't left to check on the portal earlier.)

Jack stepped up to the bed, and reached for Danny, gently taking him by the elbow and pulling him down to the bed. "It'll be alright, Danny. We're Fentons! We'll figure this out!"

Jack and Maddie frowned at the latest machine readout as Danny perched on his stool and fiddled with one of the wires attached to him. Jazz was sitting angrily in the corner of the room, her arms crossed. She'd been in denial about this whole thing, thinking Danny had finally succumbed to their parents' particular brand of insanity, until Danny had accidentally... transformed in front of her. Now she was just permanently angry at Jack and Maddie.

"Well?" said Danny. He'd been living with this thing for almost a month and he'd gotten better at preventing himself from changing, but he didn't want to be like this forever. He especially didn't want to be like this at school. Middle school was hard enough without a condition that turned him into a ghost once a day. "What is it? Can you fix me?"

Maddie pursed her lips, and shook her head. She looked at Danny, then walked to him, pulling out a (significantly shorter) stool to sit on so she would be at eye-level with him.

"Danny," she said, then paused for much longer than was comfortable. "Danny, I'm sorry. We can't do anything. Not yet."

"Why not?" asked Danny, trying not to hyperventilate.

"Simply speaking," said Maddie, "we don't have the tools to separate you from... whatever this is." She briefly touched Danny's glowing knee. "We're still not sure what's causing this and..." she trailed off.

"And what?" asked Danny, rather more harshly than he had planned.

"We aren't sure," she said, looking back at Jack, who shrugged, "but we think it might be keeping you alive. Some of the blood tests we did, when we filtered out the ectoplasm in the samples..." She looked pale. "There were a few promising trials, but after a while..."

"They disintegrated!" said Jack.

"Oh," said Danny, sagging. "So I would-?"

"We don't know that," said Maddie, quickly, "but we'd rather be safe than sorry, and it doesn't seem to be doing you any harm, now. In fact, your body seems to have adapted to it quite well, all things considered. It's just inconvenient."

"But we can help! We've got all sorts of things we can invent! Just you wait, Danny-boy!"

Maddie sighed. "If only we had more data on ghosts, then maybe-"

Jazz snorted. "Typical! Even after this, all you care about are your inventions and ghosts!" She stormed up the stair, slamming the door hard behind her.

"Oh, dear," said Maddie.

"Why don't- Why don't you go talk to her?" suggested Danny. He would be lying if he said he wasn't enjoying the extra attention he was getting from his parents, lately, even if he hated the reason for it. He understood how Jazz felt right now.

Maddie went upstairs.

"Well, Dan-o, don't you worry," said Jack, jauntily. "We Fenton men eat inconvenience for breakfast! Why, when I was a boy..." Jack rambled on, barely pausing for breath.

Feeling somewhat guilty, Danny tuned him out. He had heard all the stories before, and they rarely made sense. Instead, he turned inwards.

He was stuck like this, stuck as a freak. Could he even be called human anymore? Maybe when he looked normal, when he looked like himself, but in this ghost form? Not a chance. He had tried to distract himself with the idea that he had cool 'powers,' but he barely had any control over them.

What if his parents never figured out how to fix him? What if he was like this forever?

He would never be able to be an astronaut. Not with all the weird physical things that had shown up in his body over the last couple of weeks. Not with his low temperature, weird heartbeat, and contaminated blood.

A chill went through Danny's body, and he shivered, exhaling vapor. He tensed. Before, he'd been feeling sorry for himself, but he'd also felt... secure? Safe? Whatever. Now he felt on-edge. Something was wrong. Or about to be wrong.

He slipped off the stool, feet hitting the ground without a sound. Barely thinking about it, he phased off the wires and his hazmat suit reformed around his body. Something was wrong. Something was dangerous, a danger, a threat. His eyes roved over the inventions piled against the walls, the beakers of ectoplasmic sludge, whatever Jack was fiddling with, and finally landed on the portal.

Danny narrowed his eyes, and stepped forward, only to leap back as an over-sized, sucker-covered tentacle burst through the portal, and latched, perfectly silent, onto the wall and ceiling above. It flexed as Danny watched it, pulling from the portal a translucent, glowing, green octopus. A second one dragged itself out a moment later, and they floated in front of the portal, as if in water, malevolent red eyes scanning the lab.

Danny stayed still, holding his breath, hoping they'd go back to the Ghost Zone. Each octopus was bigger than him!

Jack kept talking.

The octopuses glare fell on him. Their tentacles reached out.

No.

"Tell me what happened again," said Maddie, as she cleaned a tiny cut over Danny's eyebrow.

"A couple of ghost octopuses came through the portal and tried to attack Dad, so I fought them and threw them back into the Ghost Zone."

"And you didn't notice this at all, Jack?" The question was delivered in a tone halfway between exasperation and real anger.

"Not until I looked up and saw Danny standing by the portal."

Standing was a far too generous term for what he'd been doing at the end of the fight, but Danny didn't dispute it.

"We'll have to pull the lab camera footage," said Maddie "But, you're alright, Danny?"

He nodded. Surprisingly, he felt better than he had in a long while, as if using his powers had taken a weight off his shoulders.

"Okay," said Maddie. "We'll need to make some doors for that." She frowned at the portal. "It isn't actually supposed to let anything in."

"It isn't?" asked Danny, surprised.

Maddie shook her head. "It was supposed to be a window, not a door." She put the swab aside, and stuck a band-aid over the cut. "Now, if you get any odd bruising, or start to feel odd, tell us right away."

After all the scrutiny at home, going to school was a relief. Sort of. At least it was a change. Every day, Jack and Maddie loaded Danny down with all sorts of things that were supposed to prevent his powers from surfacing and a cellphone with strict instructions to call and come home if anything unexpected happened.

For the first week, nothing did. It was school as usual. Banal, boring, and a little harder than middle school, but still. On the upside, he finally got to hang out with his friends again. Danny had been isolated from Sam and Tucker throughout his recovery from his 'illness.'

(Actually, if he thought about it, it kind of was an illness, wasn't it?)

But the second week, when Sam proudly revealed that she had convinced the school board to do a 'vegetarian' week? When she was, consequently, attacked by a ghostly lunch lady? One that interrupted their onslaught to ask if they wanted cookies?

Yeah, that was unexpected.

Sadly, Danny was too busy trying to keep her from killing Sam to call his parents, who would probably have done a much better job at containing the ghost. Well, at least his mom would have. Danny wasn't so sure about his dad. He had seen Jack practice with the ectoweapons before, after all.

So, he fought the ghost. He punched, he kicked, he threw random objects, and, finding all of that generally ineffective, he grabbed his friends and ran. Well. Flew.

Then he passed out.

"You understand that you can't tell anyone," said Maddie to Sam and Tucker, some time later. They and the Fentons, including Jazz and Danny, were seated around the kitchen table, three boxes of pizza stacked between them.

"Well, yeah," said Tucker. From his slightly glazed look, Danny guessed that he was still processing the situation. "It'd be, like, in a comic book or something, right? There'd be people wanting to study you. And, you know, cut you u-"

"Tucker! What is wrong with you?" demanded Sam, giving him a shove. "You can't just say that!"

Danny made a face. "Well, I don't think anyone is going to, like, dissect me or anything, but, yeah, basically." He shrugged. His parents had talked a lot about hunting ghosts before, but now they rarely brought the subject up. At least in those terms.

"Don't worry, Danny, we can keep secrets," promised Sam. "You know that."

Tucker nodded in agreement. "But, like, how does this all work? How did this happen? And those powers? Those were wicked man."

"It's a bit of a long story," said Danny. It wasn't. He just didn't want to talk about his maybe-maybe-not-death. "But what are we going to do about the lunch lady ghost? What if she comes back?"

"We talked to your school and asked them if we could do a sweep!" said Jack. "But they didn't believe us about the ghost!"

Maddie picked at her lip. "I think the best thing to do right would be to return the menu to the way it was. That would probably appease the ghost, at least temporarily-"

"What!" exclaimed Sam. "No way! I campaigned for vegetarian week all summer! We can't adopt a policy of appeasement! When will it end?"

"Well, I think that's a great idea, Mrs F," said Tucker. "The old menu is much better than this one, anyway."

Sam whirled on him. "Say that to my face, meat-eater!"

"Alright. I will. Your food sucks and tastes like dirt! Also, it made a ghost try to kill us!"

"You're just narrow minded!"

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah!"

When Danny arrived at school the next day, he didn't know what was worse, that his friends had both somehow whipped up utterly insane protests in front of the school overnight, or that his parents had decided to camp out in front of the school in the 'Ghost Assault Vehicle' (actually a heavily modified and armored RV, and a hazard to all other road traffic) all day, in case the ghost was still there and still angry.

A few minutes later he decided that, no, the worst part was how each of his friends were pressuring him to choose their side or face an unspecified doom.

Actually, no. The worst part was that Tucker's protesters had brought a lot of real meat that the lunch lady ghost could use to make a giant meat monster.

This sucked. A lot. But what could Danny do but fight?

Danny put the cap on the thermos, breathing hard, and stared at the invention. That had been... bizarre, at best. But what was his life except bizarre, at this point?

His friends came running up to him, followed shortly by his parents.

"Danny!" said Sam. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah!" said Danny, meaning it. "I'm fine. Better than fine! I-" he looked down at the thermos, turning it over in his hands. It gave him an odd satisfaction, knowing he had stopped the ghost from causing any more damage, stopped her from hurting anyone, stopped her from hurting his friends. He looked back up at his friends and family, at the other people still running around behind them. He had protected them. "I feel pretty good, actually. Exhausted, but good."

"Really?" said Maddie. "You've just used your... abilities more than you ever have before. We don't know how that will affect you."

Danny felt his good mood wilt somewhat. "It's just," he said, trying to rally, "I feel like I finally know why this happened to me. Why I got these powers. I mean, imagine if you got the portal opened without," he gestured to himself, hoping to get the point across, even though he was in human form, "this. How would this have worked out?"

Jack and Maddie exchanged a glance, and Danny could practically see what they were thinking. None of their weapons or techniques, bar the thermos after Danny had done... Well, Danny wasn't quite sure what he had done with it to make it work, but it had, and it was the only thing that had been really effective against the lunch lady. If Danny hadn't been here, hadn't had his powers, this could have been bad.

Danny glanced at the red smears of raw meat scattered across the school's front lawn. Really bad.

"We probably would have worked something out," said Maddie, but Danny could tell she was dubious. "I think we ought to go back home and give you a checkup."

"Mom," groaned Danny, "I'm fine."

"I still want to check. Would you two like a ride home, or..?"

Sam snorted. "Honestly, they're probably not even going to cancel school."

"Yeah," said Tucker. "I mean, what are they going to say, that they were attacked by a giant meat monster? Please."

"Hey, Mom?" asked Danny, as he ate breakfast the next morning. "Do you think ghost cookies are, like, a thing? I mean, what would they even be like?"

"Ghost cookies?" repeated Maddie. "Where did you even get that idea?"

Danny shrugged. "I don't know. Something that ghost said the other day. Never mind, it's not important."

"If you say so, sweetie."

"Jack," said Maddie, after Danny had left. "Have you noticed that Danny seems a bit depressed, ever since the accident?"

"Depressed? No! Quieter that usual, but not depressed!" Jack looked down. "But I'm not really the most observant person, I guess! Why would he be depressed?"

"Jack, really. Wouldn't you be depressed?"

The length of time it took Jack to respond was unusual, and showed that he was really thinking about the question. "I guess I would be. I'd be scared, too, not knowing what's going on." He paused. "I'm really glad he didn't get ecto-acne, though, like Vladdie! That would have been really hard."

"I think it's because of how well his body adapted to the ectoplasm," she said, then shook her head, pulling herself out of scientist mode. She sat down on the couch next to Jack. "I don't think we've been very helpful, either."

"What do you mean?" asked Jack. "We've been doing our best to help!"

"Emotionally, I mean," said Maddie. "You remember all the things we've said about ghosts. About how ghosts are evil. About what we wanted to do to ghosts."

"But Danny knows we'd never do that to him! And he's not a ghost!"

"Yes, but he's still... Some of our tests... I guess the best way to put it is that he's a sort of hybrid, and remembering what we've said, it must be disheartening." She paused. "Jazz gave me some papers on internalized racism, and some of it made me wonder. We haven't really taken any of it back, and it isn't like we ever had any empirical evidence for it! Just anecdotes, from your ancestors."

"All the ghosts we've seen so far have been bad!" protested Jack.

"Not Danny," said Maddie, "and based on our original theories, what happened to him shouldn't be possible. Based on Danny's description, the lunch lady ghost was more complex than we thought a ghost could be, too. We need to get rid of our assumptions, Jack, and we need to make sure Danny knows we aren't making those assumptions anymore."

Jack picked up one of the pillows on the couch, and began to fiddle with the embroidery. "I guess," said Jack. "But if he's really depressed, do you think it's going to be enough?"

"No," said Maddie. She slouched into the couch, almost sinking into the gap between the cushions. "I was thinking about something he said yesterday, and it occurred to me, maybe we're being too negative about this."

"It is a negative thing!"

"Yes, but it could be something he's stuck with for the rest of his life! We don't know if we can ever fix this, if we can ever remove this, and if we can't... Maybe we should focus on some of the positive aspects of this." She put her hand to her head. "I just- I don't know how to do that. I don't know how to make him feel better about this, after I shot him down, yesterday."

"You didn't shoot him down," said Jack, confused. "Neither of us hit him at all!"

"Metaphorically speaking," said Maddie. "I brushed off what he said about getting his powers for a reason. I ignored him."

"Well," said Jack, "when I was first diagnosed with autism, my mom made me my favorite fudge, and that made me feel better about it! Fudge always makes things better!" He frowned, and scratched his cheek. "I don't know if it will help Danny, though. This isn't really the same thing."

Maybe... Or maybe the two situations were more alike than they seemed at first glance. Maddie struggled up out of the gap between the couch cushions. "There was something he said, earlier, before he left."

"About his powers?"

"No," said Maddie. "Jack, do you think it would be possible for us to make cookies with ectoplasm?"

Maddie would admit that she was not the best cook in the world. In fact, cookies were the only food item she had consistent success with. Everything else had a slight tendency to come to life, explode, catch on fire, disintegrate, turn to mush, or somehow become so ectocontaminated as to be inedible. Or just be bad.

But now she was purposefully trying to contaminate a batch of cookies with ectoplasm, in a way that would make them edible and nutritious to him. In a way that would show him that she and Jack weren't against him, his new situation, and his ghost powers. In a way that would let them reconnect. In a way that would show Danny that they accepted him, that they would always accept him.

It was a lot to put on a batch of cookies. Especially when she wasn't sure they were even possible.

She poured over Danny's latest test results, picking at her lower lip. She didn't want to introduce anything harmful into Danny's system. That was the first priority, above appearance, taste, or any other condition.

Purified ectoplasm would probably be a safe choice to start with.

It had taken more time than Maddie had expected to actually get a cookie that worked as a cookie. Two months, to be exact. Two months in which her poor baby had been repeatedly beaten up by ghosts. Her little cookie project was pushed back by more necessary tasks. Such as setting up protections for Amity Park that wouldn't affect Danny and battling violent ghosts.

On a more and honestly shocking positive note, Danny had befriended one of the ghosts. A little gray ghost that haunted the school. If Danny hadn't already scrapped Jack and Maddie's theories regarding the morality of ghosts, this ghost would have done it.

In any case, here, now, in this first week of November, Maddie had a batch of fragrant and faintly-glowing cookies. They were rather plain. Maddie had wanted to limit the number of variables in the cookies, the number of things the ectoplasm could react poorly to.

But they wouldn't be a success until Danny tasted them.

She sat down at the table, exhausted. She could only imagine how Danny felt. She knew he snuck out at night to fight ghosts that their scanners missed but his 'ghost sense' picked up, and that on top of all the fights he had during the day and all his schoolwork.

The cookies sat delectably on the counter. She dearly wished she could do more to help him than make cookies. Yes, she was doing other things, but they didn't seem like enough. Not nearly enough.

Especially after all the trouble she and Jack had given him during their anniversary, and the trouble he had gotten into in the Ghost Zone of all places. With the Ghost Law. Or at least a ghost that claimed to be the law and attempted to arrest Danny. Maddie was still wrapping her head around the idea that ghosts had a society complex enough to support such a thing or a lie about such a thing, as the case may be.

She rested her elbows on the table, and put her head in her hands. Here she was, making herself depressed, right after her big victory. Or before her hopeful victory, she corrected herself.

The front door swung open and Maddie looked up.

"Wow, that smells good!" said Danny. "What are you making, Mom?"

She heard a thump, probably his backpack, but not the two that usually followed it as Sam and Tucker came in.

"Cookies," said Maddie, standing. "Are Sam and Tucker not with you?"

"No, they had to go home today," he said. "Apparently their families are missing them." He walked into the kitchen, rubbing his shoulder.

"Are you alright?" asked Maddie. "Was there a fight?"

"Nah, I just banged into the corner of the lockers at school. It's been pretty quiet today." He quickly rapped on one of the cabinets. "Knock on wood, right." His brow furrowed. "Are those cookies glowing?"

"Yes, I put some ectoplasm in them. I'd been thinking about it since you mentioned them."

"Really? But that was months ago." He sat down at the counter, and poked at one of the cookies. There was an odd expression on his face. "Can I- Can I try one?"

"I made them for you, sweetie. Just- Only one for now. I don't know how they taste, and they should be safe, but..."

Danny's lips quirked up, but something wavered in his eyes. Maddie's heart dropped. Did he think that she was using him as a guinea pig?

"I get it, you don't know how I'll react. Better safe than sorry, and all that. I had wondered, though, seeing all that ghost food in Walker's prison..." He picked up a cookie, and nibbled at it. He took a larger bite. Another one. His chin trembled.

"Is it not good?" asked Maddie.

"No," said Danny, his voice cracking. "It's good. It's really good." A tear tickled down his cheek. He sniffed and took another bite of his cookie. He hiccuped.

"Danny..?"

"I'm okay!" he said around the cookie in his mouth. "I'm okay. I just- Just-" He shook his head. "I'm sorry."

Maddie rubbed Danny's back. "Are you sure you're okay?"

"It's just- You made this for me. And it's not- It's not a weapon. It's a ghost thing, but it's not a weapon, and-"

"Oh, sweetie," said Maddie. "I'm so sorry that you thought that we..." she trailed off, not knowing what to say, even if it was what she had been afraid of.

"It's just- Ghost cookies." He laughed a little, and shoved the rest of the cookie into his mouth. "It's good," he said, slightly muffled. "Are you sure I can't have another one?"

"Maybe in a couple of hours? You don't want to ruin your dinner."

Danny laughed.

#danny phantom #holiday truce #holiday truce 2019 #winter truce #gift #my writing #wastefulreverie #phanphic #phanfic

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dp-marvel94 · 4 years

Text

Ghost in the Mirror

Summary: There’s a ghost living in Danny’s mirror….or is it only him?

For the Phic Phight. Prompts by @astridianmayfly (There is a ghost living in Danny's mirror.) and @seeminglynoticeable (Doppelganger)

Word count: 6,341

FF.net and AO3

Danny stumbles out of the now activated portal. It hurts. It hurts a lot. His stiff muscles burn with the still lingering electricity. He glances down at his white boots. White boots? There is something wrong with that. But he doesn’t linger on it, instead shuffling forward, leaning against the wall of the lab to keep himself up right.

Then something green flashes in the corner of his eye. His head whips to the side and he nearly falls, knees buckling. Right beside him floats something glowing and slightly transparent. The ethereal figure sports white hair and impossibly neon green eyes.

Ghost! Danny’s mind screams. His chest heaves but the intake of air felt unsatisfying.

He wants to move away, his body screaming to run but he can barely stand. Fear filled eyes fix on the ghost.

Who also looks scared. The widened eyes bore into his and Danny tilts his head, curiously. Why would a ghost look scared? The ghost tilts its head too. Shakily, Danny puts his hand forward, absently noting that his arm and hand, covered in black hazmat and a white glove, seem to glow like the figure. Dread surges but the boy continues reaching. Instead of meeting the ghost’s fingers, his hand hits something cold and solid. His face falls as he pushes forward but the surface doesn't give. Realization dawns on his sluggish mind.

It...it’s a mirror. It’s a MIRROR.

“No. No. NO!” Danny cries, his shaking voice echoing.

His reflection just echoes his cry silently, the lips following his.

“No! That’s...that’s not me. It’s not me. I’m...I’m not...I’m not.” Glowing green tears start falling down his face and the reflection just copies.

No. He isn’t dead. He isn’t a ghost. No NO.

Arm shaking, he tries to push against the mirror as if he can push his reflection away. No. No that isn’t his reflection because he isn’t a ghost. He isn’t a ghost.

With a swing of his hand, the mirror dislodges from the wall. Falling to the floor, it breaks but his ghostly reflection still haunts him, visible even in the broken pieces. With shaking legs, the boy runs away. If he can just get away from his reflection, it won’t be true. He won’t be a ghost.

At the foot of the stairs, he falls. Because he trips over his feet, not because his legs flicker intangible. Definitely not that. He stands again but it feels like his feet aren’t even touching the ground. He makes it into the luckily empty kitchen (no one else is home) before something sparks in his chest. Blindly white light seeps through his skin, blossoming into a line which spreads across his body.

Danny falls to the ground again, suddenly very warm and heavy. His breath heaves, taking in air greedily like he forgot to breathe earlier. Shakily, he puts his hands under him to push himself to his feet. And his hands are bare. Where did the glowing hazmat suit go? He doesn’t dwell instead suddenly feeling incredibly tired. He just wants to sleep. If he can just get up to his room and fall into his bed, everything will be okay.

Miraculously, Danny makes it up the stairs and into his room. He collapses on the bed, completely spent and passes out.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Danny comes to some time later, just as the sun is setting. The house is quiet, suggesting Mom, Dad and Jazz aren’t back yet. Blinking up at the ceiling, Danny sits up.

He feels...normal. Not sore or exhausted. He studies his hands as he clenches and unclenches them. They’re still bare and pale as ever. He looks down at his clothes, the jeans and tshirt he always wears. They look normal but he still has his shoes on which is weird. But everything looks and feels normal except for a strange cold place near his heart. (Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it.)

So...nothing happened earlier, right? He must have come home from school, gone up to do his homework, and fallen asleep. It must have been a dream. He definitely didn’t go downstairs, walk into the portal, and die. He didn’t see himself as a ghost in the mirror. And he’s definitely not a ghost now; he’s human, completely normal.

He doesn’t dwell on it longer as the front door opens and Mom yells for help with the groceries. He doesn’t think about it when his fork keeps falling out of (through) his hand at dinner.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Later Danny falls asleep doing his homework but he wakes up in the middle of the night. He shuffles to the bathroom, does his business, and washes his hand. Something eerily green flashes in front of him. Startled, the boy looks up and barely keeps from screaming. His own face- pale, with an open mouth, white hair, and inhuman green eyes- stares back. He blinks and looks down at his bare hands. It’s not real. It’s not real. That’s not him. It didn’t happen. He’s just tired.

Without looking again, Danny runs back to his room.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The next day, Danny wakes up late. He hurries to get ready, tripping over his own (intangible) feet as he walks into the kitchen and grabs a granola bar for breakfast. He scarfs it down while practically running to school and just makes it into homeroom before the bell.

Sam and Tucker smile at him but don’t say anything as the announcements start. Ten minutes later, they walk to first period gym class, idly chatting. Danny doesn’t think about the ghost he saw in the mirror last night.

Until he’s staring at it again in one of the locker room mirrors. Danny freezes, still in his normal clothes. His eyes widen with shock and fear as his knees start shaking.

“What’s up with you?” Tucker comes up behind him, already in his gym clothes. “Have you got a bad pimple or something?”

Danny looks between his ghostly reflection and his friend. “What? Don’t you see….”

“What?” The other boy raises an eyebrow as he ties his shoes.

“Does my reflection look….weird to you?” Danny asks.

“No. Just normal Danny Fenton.” Tucker shrugs casually as he finishes with his shoe. When Danny doesn’t respond, he frowns. “Are you okay man?”

Danny looks between his friend and his reflection. ‘Normal Danny Fenton’ The words ring in his head. “Yeah. I’m fine.” He lies.

He doesn’t tell Tucker and Sam about the weird reflection or his ‘dream’ about the ghost portal last night.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

After that the ghostly reflection seems to always follow Danny. In any mirror, his eyes are green, his hair is white, and he’s wearing the black and white hazmat suit. But when he looks down at himself, he looks normal. He feels normal (except for that little cold spot). And he keeps dropping things and falling...but that’s just puberty, his growth spurt making him more clumsy. (Liar)

He starts avoiding mirrors. In the locker room, the school bathroom, the bathroom at home, the one on his closet door. Even the rearview and side mirrors when he rides in Jazz’s car or the RV. He averts his eyes, unable to look at the green orbs that stare back. He tries not to shiver. It feels like those eyes are always watching him, even when he’s not looking directly at the mirror. Even if he’s not in front of the mirror at all.

And does the face frown at him, head tilting as if studying him? Sometimes he swears he sees the lips move or the head shake when he himself hasn’t spoken or moved. But…..it’s just his imagination. He’s just creeped out by this weird….. hallucination, dream. (Haunting)

Maybe he should tell Mom and Dad. But nonsensical fear and dread bubble in his gut. The passing thought that maybe his ‘dream,’ the accident, really happened, plagues him. Maybe the ghost in the mirror is real and maybe…. It’s just him.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

After a while, Danny gets annoyed. Having to avoid mirrors is surprisingly exhausting. And stiffening in fear, bracing himself to see a ghost, everything he goes to the bathroom is emotionally draining. And he can’t even look at his own face to fix his hair anymore!

He’s in his bedroom, getting dressed for bed when he catches another glimpse of his reflection’s eyes following him. Danny lashes out, staring straight at the mirror.

“I’m tired of not being able to see my own freaking face! Why won’t you go away?”

“Don’t yell at me! I don’t know why I’m here either!” An echoing voice bits back.

Danny faints.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Danny! Danny!” The boy returns to wavering consciousness. He blinks at the ceiling. “Dude, I can’t see you. Please tell me you’re okay.”

He blinks again. Is someone talking to him? Who’s in his room and why? And why does their voice sound echoey? He slowly sits up, rubbing his head. Then he stands.

“Oh. Thank god. You had me really scared.” remarks the voice again.

Danny searches for the speaker. His eyes fall on….the mirror. He sways. “Danny! Danny. Stay with me!”

“No No NO!” The boy balls his hands. “This isn’t happening!”

“I’m pretty sure it is.” says the creature in the mirror, one eyebrow raised.

“No It’s not! You’re not real!” Danny shouts.

“So, what? You’re crazy?”

Danny pales, dread balling in his stomach. He’s not crazy. He can’t be crazy but the other options…..

The silence lingers but his reflection says nothing. No. Not his reflection. Not his reflection. Danny’s not a ghost, or part ghost, or even remotely ghostly. So that is not his reflection. So…… what?

The green swirl of the portal flashes through his mind. The portal worked and ghosts are real so maybe……

“Hey! Wait!”

Ignoring a call in protest, Danny leaves his room and sneaks downstairs. He pads across the kitchen to find the Fenton Finder on the kitchen table where Mom and Dad left it. It beeps sadly once he picks it up (that definitely means something, right?). And he runs back up the stairs.

Opening his bedroom door, he growls at seeing the stupid image in the mirror again. The ghost’s arms are crossed, expression hard. Then his eyebrow raises as he points. “Hey. What’s that?”

Danny doesn’t respond but holds up the Finder as he approaches the mirror. The beeping increases in frequency. He frowns. “I knew it. You’re a ghost.”

The ghost gaps and then looks down at himself. “You don’t say. I had no idea.” The disbelieving looks drops into a deadpan frown. “We both already knew that.”

“Well….it means I’m not crazy!” Danny defends.

“I never said you were crazy.” The ghost deadpans.

Annoyance mounting, the boy grits his teeth. “Whatever.” His eyes trail the figure in the mirror. “Why do you look like me?”

After a second, the ghost shrugs. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” Danny asks skeptically. “How do you not know?!”

The ghost opens his mouth to respond but Danny cuts him off, a hand pinching the bridge of his nose. “Never mind, I don’t care. Just get out.”

An eyebrow raises. “What?”

“Get out of my damn mirror and leave me alone.” the boy balls a fist.

The ghost bites his lip. “I….don’t think I can get out of here.”

At the argument, Danny’s glare intensifies. “Bullshit.”

“No really.” Gloved hands reach towards the surface of the mirror but stop against a flat surface. The palms press forward, arms straining as if the ghost is just on the other side of a window and trying to push the glass out of the pane. “See I can’t get out that way.”

The ghost then backs up, farther away from the mirror and into the reflected version of Danny’s room. His back hits the wall beside the bed, which in the real world was behind Danny. Then the ghost walks to the left - the direction of the window- and out of the frame.

Danny furrows his brow. Did the ghost just disappear? Then it reappears in front of him. “If I try to walk out of view of the mirror, I just reappear back here. So I don’t think I can get out.”

The human boy growls. “Okay? Why are you even here then?”

“I already told you, I don’t know. I don’t even remember how I got here. I just suddenly was staring at your startled face and have been following you around since. I keep trying to talk to you, but this is the first time you’ve ever heard me.”

Jaw still clenched, Danny shakes his head. That...none of that made sense! This is too much to think about. He groans. He doesn’t want to deal with this shit. He just wants this freaky haunting to end. Scowling, he starts pulling the closet door shut.

“Hey! What are you doing?” The ghost protests.

But Danny ignores him. He doesn’t want to look at the ghost or talk to him or even think about him.

“Danny! Let’s just talk about this!”

No. Nope. Don’t respond.

“Danny! Please!”

The door swings closed, silencing the cries. But they keep ringing in Danny’s mind.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The next morning, Danny hesitates outside the bathroom. He really needs to get inside and ready before Jazz hogs the bathroom. But there is a mirror in there and if last night was any indication, he’s going to get an earful from an annoying ghost.

Danny takes a deep breath. He’d just ignore the stupid ghost. He throws the door open.

“Danny!” An echoing voice calls.

He fast-walks past the mirror, deliberately not even looking.

“Dude. Finally! We need to talk.”

Quickly stripping, Danny climbs into the shower. The water turns on, the sound drowning out the voice. After quickly lathering his hair with shampoo and washing his body, the boy turns off the water.

“So you’re done now?”

Danny sighs. Shaking his head, he pulls back the shower curtain and grabs his towel. After letting water drip off him for a moment, he wraps the towel around his waist and steps out. Head fixed down, he stands in front of the sink and picks up his toothbrush.

“Hey Danny look at me.”

The boy doesn’t acknowledge, while he squeezes toothpaste onto his brush.

“So I was thinking, what exactly happened before I showed up?”

Danny shivers, an image of the swirling portal invading his mind. He starts brushing his teeth.

“Like did anything important happen before? Cause I can’t remember anything before I saw you through the mirror a few weeks ago.”

Danny closes his eyes. No. Nope. Wasn’t going to think about this. He hums, trying to block out the sound.

“Damnit Danny! At least pretend that you’re listening!”

Spitting out the foam, Danny’s head whips up. His narrowed eyes fix on the glaring ghost. The ethereal figure wavers for a second, taking on a bluish tint as the toothbrush falls out of Danny’s hand, forgotten.

“No” Danny growls. “I’m not going to listen to you. So shut up and leave me alone!”

The ghost’s expression falls. One hand reaches out, palm against the inside of the mirror. “Danny….”

“I said shut up!” Baring his teeth, the boy leans forward, close enough that his breath mists on the reflective surface.

The green eyes in front of him widen in hurt. “Danny, please.”

“Stop! I don’t need you here, you stupid ghost!” Angry, his arm moves forward. He wants to hit the ghost so badly but his palm just slaps the cold surface, luckily not very hard. “Stop reminding me of the stupid portal! And what hap….” The word cuts off as his voice trembles. He swallows. “What….what almost happened, could have happened.” His head turns down, staring at the sink. But the memory of pain, of the electricity frying him…..of fleeing from the broken mirror…. invade. “It….it didn’t happen. It didn't. I didn’t...I’m not….”

The weak denials die in his throat but he remains frozen in place, his body shaking with emotion. His eyes feel wet but he doesn’t want to cry. He’s not going to cry. He lets out a small whine anyway.

The area under his palm seems to chill and something cold brushes his fingers. It curls down until the cold, misty things are brushing the back of his hand. Slowly he looks up. In the blink of an eye, he takes in the ethereal fingers projecting out of the mirror and cupping the back of his hand (as if trying to hold his hand.)

The boy screams and pulls away. His heart pounds in his chest. Shock and horror filled eyes fix on the ghost who returned a hurt expression.

“Danny! Are you okay?” Jazz calls from the other side of the door.

Danny’s gaze rips away from the mirror. “I’m...I’m okay, Jazz.” His voice wavers.

“Okay? Then get out of the bathroom, I need to get ready.”

Fear-filled eyes return to the ghost. His hand had returned to the mirror. With his head fixed down, he stands with arms around his stomach. He glances up, his shoulders falling.

The ghost says nothing as Danny walks out of the bathroom.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The ghost doesn’t try to talk to Danny for several days, though the otherworldly reflection still follows him. His not-reflection dons a sad expression, those glowing eyes only giving him cursory and cautious glances. Danny averts his eyes right back, pointedly ignoring the ghost.

But he doesn’t tell his parents for some reason. He’s not sure he even wants to. Just thinking about it sends a vague sense of wrongness and dread….like it would be a really bad idea. But Danny can’t make sense of it, so he distracts himself with homework, video games, and scrolling through social media. Anything to distract himself.

But Danny still doesn’t know what to do about the ghost so he just ignores until he can’t.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Danny walks across the dark lab. The white and black suit feels rubbery and unnatural over his clothes but he has to be wearing it...for some reason. Widen eyes survey the maw of the inactivated portal; a tiny green light wavers in the back of the tunnel. Something….something is calling to him. He crosses the threshold. The subtle buzz of electricity vibrates in and through him. It sets him on edge but also feels right. He takes a step forward, the sound of his steps echoing in his head.

A gloved hand lazily runs along the wall, the cold smooth texture surprisingly vivid despite the fabric. His fingers caress something raised. Something moves under his finger. A click.

Machinery wearls but Danny stays frozen in place, his heart pounding in his chest. The green light flickers and grows until all the boy sees is green. The light and electricity overtakes him. And his heart convulses. Frying, burning, freezing, ripping, tearing, crushing.

Danny’s heart stops but he still screams.

“Danny!”

The boy shot up in bed, the scream still on his lips. His chest heaves. It was a nightmare. Just a dream.

“Danny! Are you okay?” The same voice calls again.

Just a dream. It didn’t happen. His heart didn’t stop. The portal didn’t….it didn’t….

“Danny. It’s okay. It’s okay. Just take a deep breath, okay?”

Mind not connecting who is speaking to him, Danny obeys.

“You're doing great. Just breath in and out. In and out.”

Deeply breathing, the boy’s heart rate starts to slow.

“It’s over. You’re safe. You’re safe, Danny.”

Another breath and the shaking of his limbs slowly stops. Then his sluggish mind finally recognizes his comforter. With the young echoing voice so much like his own, it’s the ghost in his mirror.

Earlier that afternoon, he might have yelled at the figure. But now, the fight had drained out of him. He’s tired, so tired. And not just physically. He’s tired of the tension, the fear, the dread. He’s tired of ignoring his ghostly doppelganger and hoping he goes away.

With a sigh, he swings his legs over the edge of the bed. Walking to the closet, he slowly swings open the mirror. There’s none of the previous shock or dread as he faces the ghost in the mirror.

The ghost’s eyes remain wide in concern. “Are you okay?”

Danny’s eyebrow raises. He’d half expected a quip or even a biting comment. But the concern is authentic. Despite his misgivings, the boy replies honestly. “Not really.”

“Bad dream?” Danny nods and the ghost asks meekly.“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not really.” The boy put a hand on his head.

The ghost doesn’t say anything for a while, just biting his lip. Then he wrings his hands. “Well if you want to talk about it, I’m here to listen.”

Danny studies his mirror counterpart, biting his own lip. “Only because you’re stuck here. You can’t leave for some reason.”

The ghost shakes his head, looking down. “No...well yeah. I am stuck here.” He meets Danny’s eyes. “But….I actually want to listen, Danny.”

He doesn’t know why but he believes the ghost. The boy sighs. Then he realizes something; his double keeps calling him by his name (with a lot of familiarity and tenderness), but Danny just calls him ghost.

“What’s your name?” The boy asks, the softness of his own voice surprising him.

“What?” The ghost’s expression morphs into surprised confusion.

“Your name. If we stuck with each other, I need something to call you. Not just ghost.”

The other’s confusion only deepens. His brow wrinkles “I...I don’t remember.” He frowns. “It starts with a D, I think. Maybe. D something.” The ghost’s hand tapps his chin in thought. “And the last part? Ph…Ph...Phan... Phan-ton….Phanton. Phan-tom. Phantom. Phantom! Yeah that’s it!”

Danny raises an eyebrow. “That’s another word for ghost.”

Phantom’s (?) mouth rounds in an O. “Well…. I am a ghost so it fits, I guess.” He shrugs. “And I want to be called that, until I remember my real name anyway.”

“Alright Phantom.” The boy puts his arms around his middle. “I guess, since we’re stuck with each other, we should try to at least be civil. Until we figure out why you’re here anyway.” One hand rubs the back of his head. “So…..I’m going to go back to bed. Yeah.”

Danny starts turning away when Phantom calls out. “Wait.” He turns back. “So are we just going to go back to ignoring each other?” The ghost’s lips turn down, voice wavering in something like hurt.

Danny frowns, taking in the defeated posture. An eyebrow raises. “You’re really lonely, aren’t you?”

Phantom nods. “Yeah. But….” His arms went around his middle and his shoulder’s fell. “It’s not just that.” He sighs, biting his lips. Then when the ghost speaks, it’s a barely audible whisper. “You looking at me like you hate me, that….hurts.” One hand moves to his chest, gripping the fabric of his hazmat suit. “It hurts really badly. Really deeply.” Shining green eyes then met Danny’s. “Like you’re someone I know and love…...but you think I’m a monster.”

Danny’s mouth fell. There’s a lot there. A lot he partly wants to deny but…..he feels a tinge of familiarity too. How could he not? Phantom looks just like him (But there’s something more, isn’t there?)

His mouth closes. “I don’t want to think you’re a monster but….” He runs his hand through his hair. “I'm scared. I don’t know what’s happening or why. But maybe we can figure it out together.”

Phantom gives a subtle smile, surprise lighting up his face. “I think….we can do that, work together.”

Danny nods. “Let’s talk again then, tomorrow. I do have school in the morning.”

“Yeah. You do. Don’t let me keep you then.” The ghost waves him off lightly.

Danny walks back to his bed, leaving the closet open so the reflection of his bed rests behind Phantom. He lays down.

“Good night, Danny”

“Good night, Phantom.”

Soon after, Danny falls asleep.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Danny and Phantom talk a little the next day but neither learn much.

“So your parents opened a portal to the ghost zone, whatever that is?” The ghost asks. “And I showed up right after that happened?”

Danny nods. “That’s a yes to both.”

“So I obviously came from the ghost zone through that portal.” One hand goes to his chin in thought. “But why am I stuck in your mirror?” Phantom hums in thought. “Wait. I’m not stuck in this mirror.”

Danny furrows his brow. “I’m pretty sure you are. You’ve tried to get out before but can’t”

“No, I mean, I’m not just stuck in this one mirror. I can move to…. any mirror you’re looking at.” Neon green eyes widen. “I’m linked to you.”

Danny’s stomach drops as he averts his eyes. He wants to deny it but can’t find the conviction.

Phantom’s expression falls at the human’s withdrawal. He asks quietly. “Do you know why?”

Danny knows why. The image of the portal, of the dreams he’s vowed again and again never happened, assault his mind. Because they did happen. He did go into the portal. He did see himself as a ghost in the basement and he hasn’t stopped since.

Danny can’t meet his own eyes in the mirror. “I don’t know.” He lies.

There is a long pause and Danny holds his breath. He expects to be called out for his lie. While he still doesn’t quite understand what Phantom is and how he’s here, Danny knows who the ghost is. The ghost is just him, just Danny.

But his other self doesn’t detect the lie. “Okay.” He sounds defeated. “I’m sure one of us will figure it out.”

“Yeah.” Danny says, lithlessly. He rubs the back of his neck, still looking down. “I’m...uhhh...going to take a shower.”

“Oh.” Danny can imagine the hurt look on his reflection’s face. “I’ll see you later then.”

Danny leaves, fleeing to the bathroom. If tears start dripping from his eyes in the shower, he doesn’t notice.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Danny stays silent about his lie. Somehow, the portal changed him. It did turn him into a ghost, at least partially. And Phantom is that part. And as far as the human Danny can tell, his ghost self doesn’t remember anything at all. Not his real identity or life before the accident. Nothing, just a vague sense of familiarity.

And Danny doesn’t know how but he physically managed to lock that new part of himself away, to trap it in the mirror.

“What are you working on?” His own voice startles the boy out of his thoughts.

Danny looks down at the book in his lab. He had been trying to do homework before the confusing thoughts and nebulous guilt invaded his mind.

He looks up at his reflection. “Just math homework. I’m having trouble concentrating though. It doesn't help that my notes make no sense.”

“Can I see?” The ghost asks.

Getting up, Danny obliges. He holds the paper up to the mirror. After scanning the words, Phantom’s eyes widen slightly. “Oh, I see. You left out a step.” He points. “So here you have too….”

As he explains and Danny understands his mistake, he realizes as odd as this situation is, there are some perks to having Phantom around.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

With being in such close quarters, the two(?) inevitably start talking more.

Helping with homework, chatting about movies and video games, Phantom just asking about his day.

And it’s weird but Danny kinda likes it. Always having someone to talk to that’s a lot like him, but not quite. Someone who always seems to understand. Someone who’s really good at talking him out of nightmares (which he keeps having). He starts carrying around a compact mirror with him so he can talk to Phantom when no one is there.

Danny uses the small mirror to take Phantom star gazing. He lies on the roof with the mirror facing the sky.

“It’s so beautiful.” The echoing voice fills with awe. “Just imagine what it’d be like to be up there, so high.”

Phantom gives a sad sigh and Danny remembers that ghosts can fly, according to his parents. He wonders if Phantom knows that.

“Hey, Danny. You know constellations, right? Can you tell me some?” The question shakes Danny out of the thought.

“Yeah.” The human smiles. “So there is Gemini….” He pointed, describing the shape and the story behind the constellation. His smile slowly grows as Phantom asks him more questions about the stars excitedly.

Eventually it peters into silence as both boy and his reflection stare happily into the sky. But the peace doesn’t last.

“So Danny. Have you thought anymore about why we’re linked? Any new ideas?”

Holding up the mirror, Danny bits his lip. “No.” He denies.

One eyebrow raises. “Are you sure? Because you don’t sound that certain.”

Danny shakes his head.

“Well...if you’re sure then.” Phantom runs a gloved hand through his hair. “It’s just...I don’t want to be stuck in here anymore. I just wish we could find a way to get me out.”

Danny puts down the mirror to avoid Phantom’s eyes. Guilt turns in his stomach. He knows what he’s doing is a wrong and horrible idea. He’s just hurting himself and will keep doing it until the truth comes out. And he can’t keep holding this part of himself at an arm's length.

But he’s scared, scared at what admitting the truth will mean.

“I know there’s something.” The ghost in the mirror softly confesses. “Just...tell me when you’re ready okay? And whatever happens then, we’ll be okay.”

Danny relaxed a little at the soft promise. Clutching the mirror like it’s precious, the boy goes inside and to bed. He lays the mirror on his bedside table.

“Good night, Phantom.”

“Good night, Danny.”

That night instead of dreaming about the portal, Danny dreams of flying.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Danny floats, weightless above Amity Park. He flies up until he stops above the clouds. Whooping with excitement, he shoots across the sky with his ghostly tail trailing behind him. He dives and corkscrews, so lite and free. Then he stops, staring up at the stars. They’re so bright and clear up here. Close enough to touch.

Eventually, he has to come back to earth. Danny descends in the blink of an eye, coming to hover over the lake. His reflection wavers below him, the white hair and green eyes of his familiar ghost form. He smiles and his reflection smiles with him. Why had he ever been afraid of this?

Danny blinks awake to a still dark room. He turns onto his back and stares at the ceiling. His brow furrows in thought. Thoughts and memories swirl in his head, the portal accident, his ghostly double. Every conversation and revelation since he stumbled out of the portal as Phantom before somehow banishing that part of himself so deep, his ghost forgot who he was. Danny sighed. It was time for that to end.

He rolled out of bed and approached his closet mirror.

Phantom opens his eyes, blinking at him sleepily. “Oh hey, you’re up.” He frowns. “Is something wrong?”

Danny bits his lip. “I’m ready to talk now.”

The ghost’s eyes open more widely, seemingly more awake. “I’m listening.”

The human takes a deep breath. “About a month ago, there was an accident. Mom and Dad’s portal didn’t work when they started it.” He then closes his eyes, voice pained. “So I went to check it out by myself. I pressed the on button….inside the portal. It….it turned on with me inside it.” His voice cracks. “And….and I died. It killed me.”

Danny pauses, slowly opening his eyes to see Phantom surveying him with a kind expression. “That couldn’t have happened. You’re still alive.”

Taking another breath, Danny continues. “You’re right. I am alive, at least half-way.”

Phantom raises a brow. “But….”

Danny averts his eyes. “When I stumbled out of the portal, I was….a ghost.”

The ghost’s eyes widen. “Danny, you’re not a ghost.”

Danny shakes his head. He then fixes kind eyes on his ghost. “Oh, Phantom. You’re my reflection.”

“What?” Phantom tilts his head, startled.

The human’s left hand touches the mirror’s surface. “You’re my reflection. My ghost.”

The ghost’s brows furrows. “I don’t understand.”

“You’re me, Danny.” He says the name tenderly. “And I don’t know how but I trapped you in there, because I was afraid. And….and I don’t want to deal with this…..with you.”He whispers looking down. “But I’m ready now.”

Phantom’s hand meets his, his palm the exact same size and shape as Danny’s. A perfect reflection. His expression is tainted with hurt but his fingers press out of the mirror to hold his human self’s hand anyway. “I think… I get it.”

Danny’s expression softens. “I’m sorry, Danny. I’m sorry.” He leans his head forward until his forehead touches the mirror. He’s not sure what will happen once he does, but it’s time to set Phantom free of his prison.“But I’m ready to make this right.”

Phantom’s head rolls forward too. He says nothing but Danny can almost feel the acceptance and understanding from his counterpart.

After a moment, Danny moves his head away. He glances at their still clasped hands. “Are you ready?”

The other Danny looks at their hands too and nods. “I’m ready.”

Danny pulls with his left hand, Phantom hand sliding out of the mirror until they are truly palm to palm outside of the mirror. Both Danny’s grin. It’s working. The human puts his right hand on the mirror and Phantom happily clasps it. Danny pulls with both arms, now. Both of Phantom’s arms exit the surface, his body inching farther and farther into the real world. As the ghost’s head and shoulders exit, a threshold breaks. There’s a flash of light and Phantom just floats the rest of the way off.

Danny steps back, taking in his counterpart while the ghost’s eyes widen. His ghostly tail flickers in the air and he marveled, glaze flickering between his own hands and his human self. The silence lingers as emotions flitter across his face. Shocked confusion morphs into awed realization as the ghost’s mouth falls open.

The human stares in awe right back. Seeing Phantom….himself….outside the mirror is so vivid, so real. He can hardly believe this; Danny literally floats beside himself. He’s been talking to this part (?)….half (?)... himself for weeks. But now he’s actually here, physically in front of him and gaping like a fish. He wonders what his ghost self is thinking right now.

Those thoughts falter as Danny’s ghost floats closer. The ghost wraps his arms around the human, who reciprocates without hesitation. There is a pause as the human takes in the comfortable cold aura and subtle electricity of his ghostly counterpart.

“I remember now.” Phantom whispers. The statement is heavy, wavering with a dozen emotions. “I remember.” Danny’s eyes start watering, both pairs. The ghost stays hugging his human for several moments before he pulls away.

Shining green eyes meet Danny’s. “I remember who I am now. Who WE are.”

Despite the tears, the human Danny’s eyes light up with joy, what he had hoped for confirmed. He has so many questions. Is his ghost half upset with him or does the human’s guilt override that? What was being trapped in a mirror like? And how did that even happen? But one question weighs heaviest.

“How do we…” Human Danny starts but a yawn interrupts.

Ghost Danny furrows thoughtfully. “We need to get to sleep.”

The human frowns. “But….we need to….” He trails off, motioning vaguely between himself and his ghost.

“We will.” The ghost states with complete certainty.

The human raises a brow, silently asking for an explanation. When none comes, he argues. “But….”

Phantom rolls his eyes. “Come on. Bed.” Taking the human’s hand, he pulls the boy to the bed. After letting go, human Danny sits down on the bed.

“Phantom.” He whines, blinking sleepily.

“Fenton.” The ghost whines right back, one hand on his hip.

With one hand, the ghost gently pushes Danny on the shoulder. The human gives, flopping down with a grumble. He rolls onto his side, facing the ghost still floating beside the bed.

Wide blue eyes beg. “What happens now?”

Slightly exacerbated expression melting away, Phantom lowers his knees to the floor so he kneels beside the bed, at eye level with his other self. “Everything will be okay, no matter what.”

Now feeling sleepy, Danny wonders at how Phantom now seems to be the part of them that knows what’s happening. He puts a hand forward, palm up and Phantom takes it.

The ghost then points with his other hand, at the human’s chest. “I’ll be right here, when you wake up.”

The human blinks sleepily, still peering at his ghost. As he starts drifting off, Phantom’s form looks fuzzy around the edges, Danny’s vision blurring as he fights to keep his eyes open. At the same time, the ghost’s hand feels less substantial, like gripping ice turning into mist. Maybe it’s not just his vision.

With Danny Phantom’s hand in his, Danny Fenton falls asleep.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When Danny wakes up in the morning, the sunlight filters through his window. Only one seemingly human figure occupies the room. With a sleepy groan, the boy rolls out of bed and walks to his mirror.

In the mirror, his reflection shows him in his pajamas with blue eyes and black hair. One hand touches the mirror and the reflection follows as it should. He closes his eyes, resting his other hand rests over his chest. He breathes deep, reveling in the beating of his heart and pulsing of his core. Perfectly in sync.

Danny opens his eyes. In the mirror, they flash green and he smiles.

#Danny Phantom #phic phight #pitch pals #kinda #my fic

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etherealseesaw · 4 years

Text

Dannymay 2020 -- Day 1: EYE

Title: Don’t keep a eye out.

Words: 2,991

Rating: T

AO3: LINK Tags: Hurt/Comfort , Not too detailed descriptions of pain, Fluff. Summary: With a white flash as if someone took a photograph, Danny changed his forms to the more human one. Nothing out of the ordinary, he did this almost every day. Going from human to ghost and from ghost to human. And sure, he's practically sure that at least some part of him died in the incident... but mentally accepting that was still something he wasn't prepared for. For now, "going ghost" could suffice. Fuck- so why is it that my eyes hurt so damn much!? Or Danny experiences eye pain. -Keep reading for the whole fanfic-

After one whole week of only sleeping 2 hours per day and maybe some minutes in class, to say that he was beyond tired is an understatement. Was there a conspiracy against him going around the Ghost Zone? That must be the cause, because from Saturday to Thursday almost all his time was spent on fighting some noisy ghost who can't take a hint and leave him alone. Really, it wasn't asking much!

It was unrealistic just how many ghosts were coming through the portal. Right... it wasn't as if anything in his life made any sense from the start. Maybe he could ask Tucker to see if the portal has an actual glitch or something. And yes, Tucker may not be any real engineer, but he was flawless when it came to tinkering with tech.

Anyways, it was a fresh new day and he was up before his alarm rang... which isn't necessarily a great thing since he didn't even get to enter bed yet. Yep, another great day ahead. Hurrah!

Danny could already tell how stressed he'd be by the end of this, it must have become some sort of routine at this point. Not really healthy, but what was health anyways. Ha.. Fortunately, all his NASA and Promotional Space Expedition posters, the glow in the dark stars and space themed stickers all around, helped him calm down enough to not have a mental breakdown on his bedroom floor.

With a white flash as if someone took a photograph, Danny changed his forms to the more human one. Nothing out of the ordinary, he did this almost every day. Going from human to ghost and from ghost to human. And sure, he's practically sure that at least some part of him died in the incident... but mentally accepting that was still something he wasn't prepared for. For now, "going ghost" could suffice.

Fuck- so why is it that my eyes hurt so damn much!?

As soon as his transformation ended, his eyes started to tingle with a hot pain that made having them open a struggle. Unconsciously, his hands made their way to his face and grabbed at the sides, his fingers dipped into the eyelids of the now semi closed eyes. Danny groaned loudly and practically threw himself at his bed, one leg touched the floor while the other bent with the pressure of his body, almost kneeling. His upper body reached the middle ground of the bed and he harshly pushed himself onto it. His head was the only thing not pressed against the bed as he used his elbows to propel himself up. Oh it hurt, it really really hurt.

He couldn't see straight with all the tears that managed to form. Everything was swimming and had a strange ectoplasmic-green glow that was almost unnoticeable. With a little more force than needed, he rubbed his eyes with closed fists. Doing painful and quick strokes as he started to shake and tremble more and more. His mind was buzzing with panic, his ears where ringing and his heart thumped loudly against his chest. He heard a sound, was that the alarm ringing? He couldn't tell, couldn't think. Just kept on rubbing.

How does one go from perfectly normal to -this- in a matter of seconds? What he was doing wasn't very smart, but can you blame him? As much as he'd like to be rational right now, it had taken him by surprise. He hadn't been ready for this.

Ok, stop, stop, stop. Danny commanded himself and abruptly threw his arms to each side on the bed.

His breath came out in short puffs and the skin near his eyes stung from the pure force he'd used on it. Gosh, can't he have any peace? First, the number of ghosts pestering him just keeps on growing. Second, he doesn't have time to spend with his friends and family. Third, his grades are a mess and everyone can see. And now what, this? There most be some logical way, what had he done other than fighting Technus moments prior?

His mental thoughts came to a stop as he noticed the sharp pain he'd felt wasn't there anymore. Sighing in victory, he loosened the pressure on his arms and gently rested his face against the mattress. What the fuck.

Is this some new power forming? He remembered almost freezing himself with his ice when it first appeared and when his intangibility acted up and he almost spilled his organs, literally, but it wasn't the same.. didn't feel the same. Sighing once more, Danny rolled to his back and cradled his arms on his chest.

Well, he definitely wasn't doing a good job Resting In Peace.

After the freak out, Danny shrugged off, for now, any deeper meaning behind the sudden pain he'd felt. It definitely wasn't something good, but he was ok now.

He sat up and fished the fresh clothes he was planning on dressing. It was the usual white with red details and oval in the center T-shirt, dark blue jeans and red vans but washed. The alarm had long ago stopped it's infernal high pitched beeping and was now only showing the current time.

Current time... Wait- It's already 8:20? Oh, he was going to be late. Not that he kept perfect record, not after all those times he had to sneak off to fight some random ghost intruder, or didn't even make it into the classroom. But it never felt good to actively go against his morals, especially if it was in his power to attend classes. As boring as they may be. He really wanted to take a bath, guess it needed to wait. Gross, but school was important.

The clothes were dressed in the time record, mostly because he used his powers to slip out of the old ones in an instant. But no time to dwell. With the school bag in hand, his feet almost flew with the speed he'd taken to dash across the house to the front door. A quick glance around made him realise that his parents were probably in the basement and that Jazz had already left. Can't blame her.

Another thing he was grateful for being that people in the morning were always most distracted, be it because they are going to work or because they are coming from work. He used that opportunity to slip into an alley and switch personas. The same white energy ring formed around him as his hair whitened and skin darkened. The comforting sensation of the hazmat suit pressing on his skin as he'd naturally taken to float a few inches from the ground. Again, no time to dwell. He got to be quick!

His feet shifted into his ghostly tail as he turned on invisibility and intangibility and flew straight through the brick wall. Truth be told, Danny was half expecting a ghost to show up mid way to school, but he guessed he was in luck since he arrived safe and sound.

Oh Ancients, Mr.Lancer was surely going to kill him someday. More than he already was. In his opinion Lancer was one of the best teachers, he tried his best that's for sure. Sometimes may come out as too strict or maybe uncaring, but Danny had grown fond of the behaviour and frankly missed having classes with him.

Thinking just about how many times he'd let Mr. Lancer down made him sad. He already disappointed his parents with the fact that he was what they most hated, disappointed Jazz for not trying enough to have good grades and disappointed his friends for always needing to leave them alone.

He carefully slipped into a janitorial closet, it was a small space with no light and a lot of tools to keep the school clean. There was only one door and it had a small opaque window in the middle. There was no fear of getting caught, as the corridors were bare of anyone so with that in mind, he quickly changed forms once more.

The anxiety was making him feel weak, as if his bones decided to become play-doh all of a sudden. Danny didn't need to look at the time to know classes had started a long time ago. And, of course, he was more than late.

As he left the closet, a small hiss escaped his lips as a product of his frustrations. A habit he'd attracted along the years of ghost hunting, of being a ghost, of dying.

Nausea hit him at full force as the bright light of the corridor fully seeped into his vision. The halfa wasn't happy when the same familiar pain crept behind his eyes and, as if someone blew air against his eyeballs or slightly scratched them, he impulsively closed his eyes in an aggressive matter.

Clenching his teeth and angrily grabbing his T-shirt, he slowly walked without a real direction to what he assumed was his classroom door. The vertigo didn't help his walking as he slightly stumbled and almost tripped.

He was determined to have at least one class today, and this wasn't going to stop him. It simply wasn't. Not today, not the day the ghosts decided merely not to show up.

He didn't feel his upper face, or better explaining, it was as if a cold liquid had drenched the insides of his eyes. His eyelids were on a state of coldness and hotness and the skin around furiously itched. The need scratch it was aggravating, but he maintained his control. The imaginary liquid pooled behind his eyes and dripped from his nose, to his cheeks and finally to his lips. He shivered mildly as his face continued to dance around the sensations of cold and hot at the same time, making him feel as if something had paralysed it. When he opened and closed his mouth, it didn't feel real, but as he did the same with his hands, something more alarming made his way into his mind. He also didn't feel it.

He immediately stopped in his tracks. Where was he even going? He didn't know where his class was. Did he even want to go inside.. like this?

It doesn't matter, he needed Sam and Tucker. He knew they were inside, they all shared this period. Danny just needed to breath, open his eyes slowly and act normal. Yes, that's all.

...

Doing just that, he slightly crouched down and stroked his temple with his shaky hands. What a coward he was. He experienced things worse, so why was he like this?

Taking longs breaths and concentrating on the feeling of touching, hearing, smelling something, anything. Time passed rather slow for him as his eyes strained, almost as if touched with acid. But with effort came the reward, as slowly but certainly he lazily opened his sky-blue eyes. They were unfocused and clouded. He could see where he was, could see his class not so far away. That's a relief.

Pushing aside the weird feeling still all over his face and the burning sensation still in his eyesight, he rushed to the door without paying attention to lingering nausea.

The door opened strenuously and he hurried himself inside. His vision swam less that it was seconds ago, but from the looks Mr. Lancer and other kids were giving him, something must still be off.

"Well, look who decided to show up. Tardiness is not accepted, Fenton." Concluded the teacher, Mr. Lancer, not looking the slightest happiest.

"Sorry, something came up." Danny replied halfheartedly, still feeling weak in the knees. Sam eyed him up from across the room, Tucker doing basically the same, but pausing to copy whatever was on the board.

"Go ahead then, sit down." Lancer gestured to Danny's usual and empty seat, only giving him a short and concerned glace before turning again to the used board.

With a slight nod, the halfa did as he was told and hastened to his seat. The school bag flew on top of his table as he removed the books necessary for this class and sat down with a relieved sigh. Unfortunately, he almost directly started to doze off and only stayed awake because Sam decided to elbow Danny in the shoulder, making him yelp in surprise but not loud enough to alert anybody else.

A comeback was at the tip of his tongue, but died out as he remembered that he was needed urgently to talk with his friends.

"Excuse us, sleepy princess, but we practically haven't seen each other in 3 days or more." Said Tucker with a smug but concerned undertone.

"Sorry, you know how it is... Fighting evil doers and all that jazz." Apologised Danny, blinking the tiredness out of his mind.

He stared at his table, going into a trance of thought. He needed to tell them.

"I-" Started Danny off, but was interrupted by Sam shushing him.

"Whatever you're going to say, save it. Let's talk after class." She nodded to herself as she spoke. "Try to sleep a little now, you look like hell."

And that was it, he'd tell them and they'd probably have to go to the Far Frozen or something of the likes. He didn't want to think about what if the problem was something... human. Something close to his origins, that maybe not even the ghosts could help. It was scary thinking of something so realistic as maybe going blind. He studied a lot of books about NASA and what the astronauts needed to go on a mission. They needed to be healthy, have good grades, exercise. He was far from reaching one of those things.. didn't want that to turn two.

Worries filled Danny as he drifted into the dreamland. Dreams didn't await him on the other side, but it was peaceful and relaxed him enough.

"Sleeping in class?" Jokingly lectured Tucker as he shook Danny awake.

"Come on, it already ended." Continued Sam, already ready to leave.

Getting up and gathering all his not even used supplies into the school bag, Danny walked into their side and let out a little groan. They walked in silence until they've reached a small corner where most students don't stop at. The halfa wasn't sure why they weren't talking as they'd normally do, he himself wasn't just as energised but he did think this was weird. To his surprise, however, Jazz was already waiting for them there. Pacing around the small space, she stopped when seeing the trio approach and smiled.

"Jazz? Why are you here." Asked Danny confused, but not against the situation. It was his sister after all.

"That's the thing, Danny. We're concer-" With a nasty scream, he interrupted the middle of her sentence. The eye-thing came back, with full blown pain. It felt like the first time, if not worst. As if a butter knife tapped against his eye with scorching temperatures and left behind a trail of molten metal. Without hesitation, they all ran to Danny's side and supported him with their arms.

Small crystal clean tears dripped from the halfa's face and he tried to hold back the vertigo that was trying to settle in, he didn't want this to happen He wanted to talk to them normally, fuck.

"Danny? Danny!?" Called out Sam in a frantic manner. They already knew he was pushing himself, but not this much.

"Ok, deep breaths, deep breaths. Tell me what's wrong." Jazz bent down to look better at her brothers face.

Doing as he was told, he'd push air in and out slowly and excruciating. Keeping his mind concentrated in only the task at the time and nothing else. The tingle behind his eye and the strange sensation of being hyper aware of his eyelashes, wasn't helping but, with he was determined.

"Eh-Eye-" A shaky finger pointed at his eye, he wanted them to look at whatever was doing this to him.

With a silent nod, Jazz cupped his face and elevated it to have a better look. Tucker and Sam shuffled to her sides to see too. A gasp passed around them and he felt lightheaded and reminded that he was in school, he couldn't bring so much attention to himself, or them.

"Oh Danny, if we knew you were this bad.." She sighed and gently passed a hand down his hair in a comforting manner.

"What is it-?" His voice trembled as he forced out his voice. He didn't want to hear bad news, not something irreplaceable, please, not that.

"You just seem awfully sleep deprived." Responded Tucker when hearing the panic in the others voice. "There isn't anything sticking out or pools of blood.."

"Wh- Really? But it hurts like a bitch-" As if on cue, he'd let out a small groan and scrunch his eyes for a few seconds before opening them again.

"And, And, I see everything in a weird green tint-" He continued ignoring the interruption.

"Language." Jazz said strictly, before continuing. "Hmm.. I'm not a ghost expert, but It might just be your ghost side acting up, because you aren't reacting well enough with your human one." She speculated, hoping it could calm him down as much as it could calm her down.

"I can't just rest, ghosts keep appearing everywhere! I need to- I need to-" Before he could finish, Sam pushed a finger in his lips direction and said with an exciting smile.

"Are you forgetting us? We can keep up." Sam scoffed, gesturing to herself, Jazz and Tucker.

"Yeah. We learned a lot from watching and helping in your fights!" Nodded along Tucker.

"Why don't you take this weekend off while we work, ok?" Finish Jazz, giving Danny's forehead a little kiss.

His eyes still stung, a whole damn lot, but we was feeling better mentally. Giving them a small smile, he nodded in agreement. "Ok, I'll try to do that."

#Danny Phantom #dannymay2020 #dannymay #No eye gore chill out #I took 10 hours to write this #don't sue me

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