The first shot missed Danny's head by inches.
It shattered the picture frame hanging behind him instead.
Danny stared at the smoking barrel of the ecto-rifle in his father's hands.
Jack Fenton's face twisted in horror.
His father pulled the trigger again.
Maddie Fenton had always said she would protect her children.
She had just never imagined she'd have to protect them from one of them.
Danny barely managed to turn intangible before the second blast tore through the kitchen wall.
"Danny, run!" Jazz screamed.
"You... you replaced our son..." Maddie whispered, aiming another weapon at him with shaking hands. "What did you do to my baby?"
The blast hit him square in the chest.
Not enough to kill him, but enough to send him crashing through three walls.
Within twenty-four hours, every portal in Fenton Works was sealed.
Within forty-eight, Jack and Maddie had stopped referring to Danny by name.
They called him the specimen.
Every day, her parents became less like parents and more like hunters.
Blueprints covered the dining room table.
Containment cells were built in the basement.
Jack proudly announced he'd increased the dissection table's restraints.
"In case the ghost struggles."
Jazz had nearly thrown up.
Every time he closed his eyes, he dreamed about hearing his father discussing which organs ghosts had.
The Guys in White arrived.
Jack welcomed them with open arms.
"Our son was replaced by a ghost years ago."
Jazz nearly dropped the tray she was carrying.
How long had they believed that?
Had they simply decided it was easier than accepting the truth?
The attacks became relentless.
If Danny appeared in Amity Parkâ
If Phantom stopped a ghostâ
If he tried to come homeâ
The front door was locked.
Jazz found him sleeping in an abandoned warehouse.
Curled around himself with Cujo keeping watch.
There was dried green blood on his sleeve.
"I'm dead, remember?" Danny laughed weakly.
"I think they wish I was."
Therapy pamphlets mysteriously appearing on the kitchen counter.
Jack proudly announced he had developed a weapon capable of permanently destroying ectoplasm.
Maddie helped him improve it.
Jazz realized she was out of time.
Clockwork appeared beside her while she sat on the roof one night.
"You are considering something terrible."
She didn't even flinch anymore.
Ghosts appearing had become normal.
"I don't have another choice."
"The choice will cost you everything."
Clockwork closed his eyes.
The Fenton Thermos sat on Danny's desk.
The very device built to imprison ghosts forever.
"You'll die if you stay."
"I'd rather stay with you."
"You won't be staying with me."
"You won't know where I go."
Danny hadn't admitted that in years.
"I don't want to disappear."
"What if no one ever finds me?"
She had no way of knowing.
Danny's body dissolved into streams of green light.
Forced into impossibly small dimensions.
Jazz cried harder than she ever had.
The thermos rattled once.
The portal to the Ghost Zone hummed.
Clockwork stood beside her.
"You understand that you may never see him again."
Jazz clutched the metal thermos to her chest.
"He will awaken in another reality."
"I love you, little brother."
She kissed the cold metal.
The thermos disappeared into the swirling green portal.
Jack came running downstairs seconds later.
"Jazz! Have you seen the ghost?"
At the man who had once tucked Danny into bed.
At the man now carrying enough weapons to invade a small country.
It wasn't entirely a lie.
She would never see Danny again.
Time had little meaning there.
Entire civilizations appeared and vanished in moments.
The silver thermos floated.
Sometimes it spun lazily.
Sometimes storms hurled it across dimensions.
Pariah's old soldiers ignored it.
The Observants recorded it.
Clockwork watched it pass.
The thermos drifted into places even ghosts feared.
It struck something impossible.
A tear between realities.
The Ghost Zone was connected to every universe.
The thermos slipped through.
It landed inside an abandoned warehouse.
Buildings rose around it.
The warehouse became forgotten beneath Gotham City's endless expansion.
Children grew into adults.
Sidekicks became legends.
A masked vigilante chased smugglers through the forgotten underground tunnels beneath Gotham.
Red Robin vaulted over a collapsed support beam.
One of the smugglers threw an old metal cylinder at him.
It bounced off his staff.
Definitely not from Gotham.
The seal exploded open with a burst of blinding green light.
A wave of ancient ectoplasm rushed through the tunnel.
Red Robin barely had time to throw himself backward before something crashed into him.
He hit the concrete hard, coughing violently.
His glowing green eyes darted wildly around the unfamiliar tunnel.
The last thing he remembered was Jazz's tear-streaked face.
Danny whispered the first words he'd spoken in what felt like an eternity.
Red Robin slowly lowered his bo staff, staring at the frightened ghost boy who looked as though he'd just woken from a nightmare.
Danny looked up at the stranger in the red-and-black suit.
That sounded like the most important question in the world.
