Happy belated Phandom Holiday Truce, @domoquadrant ! Sorry I'm so terribly late—my original fic went "poof" so I had to rewrite it😅
I chose your first prompt: "Danny being hunted down/identity being revealed" and tried to fit in a couple of your likes (alongside prompt 6: "enemies"). Hope you like it!
WC: 5.4~K
Disclaimer for small injuries and destabilization as a weakening tactic but no gore.
{Paulina}
It wasn't supposed to be like this.
It wasn't.
Paulina would've worn better shoes if it was; as it is, her favourite ballet flats are ruined, every sharp stone underfoot jabs her through their thin soles, and she's nearly rolled her ankle twice.
Having stable ankle support while running for Phantom's afterlife would be nice.
"Left," is mumbled into her shoulder, the first word Phantom's deigned to speak from his position on her back for a while. It's the opposite of what Paulina wants to hear.
"Left, of course it's left," she mutters a curse under her breath, abandoning the clear, firm path branching to the right for the increasing overgrown and muddy option to the left. She wishes she could pretend it's just a temporary rough patch on an otherwise well-groomed path to safety, but Paulina's well-aware there's a swamp in the area somewhere ahead.
Phantom so owes me an autograph for this. And the GIW owe me Gucci.
She'd been hesitant when the government agency first approached her with their plan to talk to Phantom, but eventually chose to help on the basis that they were done blindly hunting ghosts. They'd claimed to seek understanding, coexistence, and that all she had to do was act lost in the woods for a bit as someone they knew Phantom would come save. It was supposed to be easy, and she was even allowed to bring a couple friends on the so-called secret mission for moral support.
And really, the whole mission thing for her was ultimately the perfect excuse to have a romantic encounter with the ghost boy. What was the point in telling Phantom to sit through a stuffy peace meeting when she could just relay the GIW's news during a moonlit date? They'd all be happy in the end; she'd get a love confession by morning, Phantom would get amazing news, and the GIW would still have their message reach him. She'd had the evening all planned out.
Maybe that's why she didn't notice the GIW's actual plans.
"Fine, I'll do it—but only if I get his heart."
"Very well," Agent K had looked at her consideringly that afternoon. "We'll help you get his heart."
She realized pretty fast once the shooting started that one of them hadn't meant it as a joke.
She should've known better than to believe the government would accept ghosts so easily, but it was hard to take the agency seriously; Phantom always saving the day had lulled her into a sense of security. Paulina had considered the agents essentially harmless, nothing the ghost boy couldn't handle, until he started literally melting before her eyes. There were none of the quips or artful aerial tricks seen in his previous encounters with them, the GIW emerging from their hiding spots completely unexpected. Most of their shots missed thanks to distance and low hanging branches in the way, but the effect of the shot that grazed him was immediate; one moment he was floating strong, and the next he was slightly-slimy deadweight. He started re-solidifying pretty fast once they left the area, but seeing him falter like that terrified her.
If not for her fellow Phans Dash and Kwan tackling a couple of agents to create an opening, and Paulina's own quick thinking throwing Phantom's unstable form over her shoulder, the world would be one ghost less by now.
"How much longer, Ghost Boy?"
She feels the vibration of speech on her skin, the silk shirt she'd spent hours picking out long-torn by stray branches and brambles, but she can't make out any words over the fast approaching sirens and men yelling.
I hope Kwan and Dash are okay.
Her skin stings with hundreds of little cuts, left thigh aching something fierce after partially running into a stump she didn't see. At least the air is warm, fresh and pleasant if not for the situation. She gulps it in greedily, breathing heavily as her stamina flags. She can't keep this up forever, the gap between them and their pursuers already shrinking.
She could stop; sit down, let the GIW catch up. Worst she'll get is a slap on the wrist, or an accidental blast from one of their guns if they arrive trigger-happy. The guns may pose a threat to her passenger, but they'd have no effect on her.
Phantom tenses on her back, likely realizing they're getting closer as well.
She keeps running, trying to be as quiet as she can, but she can't help the screech that tears itself from her throat when the ground beneath suddenly gives away.
An old yellow sign seen earlier that day flashes through her mind. She'd hardly paid it any attention at the time, busy re-applying her makeup, but it would've been hard to miss it completely. There's little else to do but look around when stuck in the woods for so long. It had felt like she wandered in circles for hours, waiting for Phantom to show.
'Beware of cliffs.'
Impossibly, the fall felt longer.
{Danny}
It isn't easy to sneak up on Danny. Not when he spent his formative years dodging misfiring and imploding Fenton-tech prototypes, and later resurrected dinners, properly aimed Fenton tech, and his fellow dead.
The dead are sometimes successful even with his ghost sense, but still. The dead sneak up on Danny; not the living, and certainly not the GIW.
What on earth possessed (hah) Paulina to be alone in the middle of the woods so close to dark?
Not that she was alone in the end, he recalls bitterly as he drags himself to his feet, relying heavily on his returning imperviousness to gravity to remain upright. Whatever they'd shot at him was annoyingly effective at draining his strength and shutting his powers down. His legs wobble, gradually regaining strength but unreliable. Moving in general feels weird, as if in imperceptible slow motion, and it reminds him of Dani destabilizing in Vlad's lab.
There had been a prototype Fenton blaster that could trigger destabilization, but Danny'd long destroyed all its schematics and notes. It's instantaneous lethality to ghosts, and the likely fatality of a direct hit for halfas, had made it far too dangerous to leave alone.
Maybe the GIW developed their own version?
Fat chance, without a portal to provide an energy source. Someone helped them.
Either way, he's glad Paulina didn't leave him there, even if his current situation's not much better.
They're technically still on the outskirts of the true swamp, but the recent spring rainfall has turned the average forest floor into a disgusting slurry. Great for cushioning their fall a little bit, but several levels of icky and extremely cumbersome to move in without flight.
Listening carefully, he hears the monochromatic jerks continue past where they fell, bits of underbrush falling downward as their collective weight shakes the less stable ground of the cliff edge. Luckily, none of them fall with the underbrush so him and Paulina finally get a chance to rest.
He scans the area, un-beating heart dropping when he realizes with no small alarm that Paulina is unconscious. He refrains from yelling her name in case it brings their pursuers back, flying over to her side at the bottom of the cliff. She's as covered in grime as he is, and victim to both bruises and scratches, but her chest rises and falls without issue and her pulse beats steady when he presses his fingers to her neck. Nothing seems broken, and the lump he finds when gently feeling her scalp isn't a concerning size. About a typical goose egg situation—enough to keep her down for a little bit, and give her a nasty headache, but so long as she takes it easy she should be fine.
Thank the Ancients, she's alright.
He hiccups mid-motion of moving her into a recovery position, chills running down his spine as frost escapes his lips. He instinctively summons an ectoblast, bracing for a fight as he whirls around, but his ectoplasm scatters faster than he can condense it, only a few sad green sparks flickering in his hands. His quick reflexes however do let him get in a nice, solid kick before he's thrown bodily into a tree.
Though I might not be.
For most ghosts, the kick would've been enough to stun them, or at least give them pause—even weakened as he is, Danny's strong enough for that.
For Vlad, it merely elicits a grunt and punch that Danny narrowly dodges while fumbling to pull the thermos from his side. The odds of getting Vlad in the thermos are low, but the odds of beating him without using it are even lower.
His flight cuts out momentarily when avoiding a particularly nasty swipe of Plasmius's claws, so Danny resists the ghostly urge to take the fight skyward. It's all he can do to play defensive under the constant barrage, accidentally dropping the thermos into the mud when he needs both his hands to block a strike. He isn't given a chance to retrieve it, forced to create distance from the spot or risk Plasmius noticing Paulina.
"What do you want, Plasmius?" Danny sneers with false bravado to cover up his breathlessness. "Something tells me you aren't here to help chase away the GIW."
"Please Daniel—as much as you take after the oaf, you aren't that stupid."
"You think I'm acting stupid? I'm not the one starting a fight in ghost hunter territory!"
"But you are the one who insists on being enemies, aren't you?" Vlad taunts, trading physical hits for ecto-blasts. Danny chills the air in response, frost blooming in his wake to prevent stray energy from setting anything alight.
"This isn't what I—"
"Regardless, Badger," the once annoyingly friendly nickname is altered, said like a confrontation on its own. "You are right. You're no family of mine."
"Wait—" Danny scrambles to make sense of the situation, the reality sinking in as copious Plasmius duplicates spawn into existence. They speak as one, converging on Danny to send him crashing back into a tree near Paulina.
"And I don't let threats live."
By the time Danny's back on his feet, Plasmius's already got him surrounded in a cruel repeat of earlier that night. A ghostly version of the GIW's ambush.
Was he always this strong? How the Zone am I supposed to win?!
In all their fights, Danny's never heard Vlad speak with the cold, detached efficiency that he does now.
"This is what being my enemy really means."
Yeah, that's not good.
Danny barely has time to create an ice shield over himself and the unconscious A-lister before Plasmius and his duplicates wash the forest in flame a vivid violet, opposed to his familiar pink. The energy burns like nothing else, bypassing the ice with ease. Danny collapses, his ectoplasm nearly boiling. It's a small blessing that he is alone in his misery, the forest and Paulina seemingly unaffected.
He fights to remain as Phantom, form starting to droop as the stress and pain exacerbates his destabilization but unwilling to leave his classmate defenseless.
"Handy skill, isn't it?" Plasmius gloats, taking his time to float closer as his duplicates fade. "Waiting for you to join me was holding me back in more ways than one."
He stumbles slightly when he lands, a power that strong taking a toll on Plasmius as well. If it's anything like Danny's wail, he'd be easy prey for the thermos if Danny hadn't lost it.
"Pity the fools in white couldn't finish such an easy job themselves," Vlad continues his monologue with disdain, as if they didn't do half the work driving Danny to this point. "Incompetent as usual."
Danny must've blinked, or blacked out momentarily, because suddenly there's a blaster in Plasmius's hand. It's all smooth metal and fluorescent energy veins, consolidating into a deceptively goofy-looking cone at the end of the usual blaster silhouette.
'To better disperse the destabilization agent,' it'd said in his parents' notes.
'To make it impossible to avoid,' it'd been recorded in his.
The Destabilizer's presence with Vlad solves the mystery of how the Guys In White had similar tech.
"Is there anything in our lives you aren't sticking your nose into, you creepy Fruitloop?" Danny growls, dreading what other deleted schematics Vlad must have copies of.
"Spying is hardly the worst of my sins, Daniel." Plasmius calmly places Danny in the blaster's sights. It whines, unwavering in its position and charging up. Vlad may have pointed weapons at him before, but there are no dramatic gestures or frustrated venting for Danny to take advantage of this time.
"And don't worry about your mother. With my comfort, I'm sure she won't grieve long."
Danny wants to move. He strains, gathering all his willpower and drive to survive as Plasmius pulls the trigger—
But he can't.
Click.
{Paulina}
Paulina is moving before she's fully aware she's awake. Muscle memory from years of ghost attacks and self-defence classes activating despite the thick fog of her thoughts. Like in a series of snapshots, she goes from unconscious on the ground to between the two most powerful ghosts in Amity with only a thermos and hope that Plasmius's weapon doesn't hurt the living.
Scene one: she's struggling for purchase, slipping and hardly able to see in the dim light.
Scene two: there's a thermos clutched tight in her hand, and the two ghosts are a lot closer than before. She can't hear anything, there's no audio beyond a ringing that won't go away and the thundering of her pulse, but their lips are moving. Her beloved Phantom is scared.
Scene three: Phantom is out of sight, a very scary Plasmius taking up the entirety of her vision as she plants herself between him and his target. It's here, a blaster going off in her face, that she starts actually registering the situation.
Paulina may not be sure what's happening exactly, but she's seen enough ghost fights to know what comes next. Taking advantage of Plasmius's surprise and recovering quickly from the essential flashbang thanks to years spent facing sudden camera flashes, Paulina has the thermos up, lid off, and button pressed before the shot's light has time to completely fade. She ditches the thermos the second the lid's back on, chucking it carelessly to the ground to check on Phantom.
She can barely make him out in the gloom; her eyes burn and her stomach churns with dread at what the lack of his ever-present glow could mean. She collapses to her knees at his side, herculean strength courtesy of adrenalin leaving her in the freshly fallen quiet. There are no sirens, no far off demands of surrender, no evil ghost monologues. It's just her, and the boy-shaped weight she clumsily props up against her side, abandoned in the dark. There's no sourceless light, no unnatural cold. Nothing indicates Phantom's presence aside from the body in her hands.
"PhaNtom...?" Her voice cracks with the burden of an unasked question.
Cuddling close, arms wrapped around him best she can in hopes of providing some small comfort, she buries her face in his hair and tries not to read into his silence.
***
It's to a splitting headache and the expected woodland sounds that Paulina wakes up the second time.
There's none of the chaos from the night before, just a soft filter of sunlight through the canopy and the rustling of wind.
Her memory is blank, at first, all mental strength focused on breathing through the pain and trying desperately to reorient herself.
She remembers agreeing to help the GIW meet Phantom for the chance to abscond with him on a date, then spending ages roaming the woods 'in need of rescue'.
It's clearly the next day, and she does not feel very wined and dined, so what happened after that?
Phantom finding her—bright lights and screaming—running terrified in the dark—Plasmius—the memories come back in nightmarish flashes.
Right. The GIW are liars and owe me new shoes.
She groans as her eyes adjust to what must be the afternoon sun. It had to have been up for a while, the ground dry and no longer sludge beneath her.
The worst of her pain gradually fades into something manageable, but she's definitely concussed to some degree.
A warm pressure against her chest, a body in her arms, shifts—movement that would alarm her if not for blurry memories of cradling Phantom's corpse close. Then, making a movement that does alarm her, said 'corpse' shoves at her with ample force.
She doesn't try to keep it —him?— close, happy to let whatever remains of Phantom break free to scamper backwards across their little clearing.
For a hot second, Paulina's too relieved that Phantom lives to register that there's a problem. Then the blatant differences sink in and make it obvious: there's too much life in him.
Dark, shaggy hair frames his face, blue eyes darting from her to the woods and back again. His breath comes fast and shallow, and there's a healthy pink undertone to his skin. The loose dirt has little effect on his jeans, but stains his white shirt wherever it touches.
"Paulina—it's not—I'm—this isn't what it looks like!"
There go any plans of denial, she thinks a bit hysterically, 'Phantom's' frantic dialogue not leaving much room for her to get a word in.
There's an odd flickering around his waist, some sort of ring struggling to become reality, but aside from that he's painfully human. Stumbling over his words and looking anywhere but into her eyes, he rambles about ghosts, accidents, secrets and his parents in an awkward fashion undeniably Danny Fenton.
The context may be new, but he isn't. She knows him as Danny. Loves him, as Phantom.
It gives her an anchor, a semblance of control she sorely needs.
Breathing deeply, she crams all her conflicting feelings into last year's closet and throws it out to better to redirect her shock into something productive. She can reschedule her own freak-out for later. Lead first, fall second, as her mom always says.
I don't like falling, everything hurts, I want to go home, I don't like what this implies—
Be a Sanchez, Paulina; control yourself, control the situation.
...Hair care was supposed to be meditative, and it's not like hers could be any worse at this point.
She grabs at the ends of her hair, once soft and glossy black now clumped and dull with dried mud, with shaking fists as she feigns seeing it for the first time. She contemplates standing up, but the world spinning and immediate nausea when she snaps her gaze up to Danny nips that part of the performance in the bud.
"My hair! My precious hair is ruined!" She screeches as loud as her sensitive ears can handle, sending Danny jumping back a several paces like a startled cat. He has equally large eyes, blinking slower and slower the longer she rants until he's simply staring. "I refuse to be seen with my hair like this! Do something!"
"...Me?"
"Yes, you! Here, now," she snaps her fingers, staring him down as he inches closer.
"This is stupid," he mutters, agitation beginning to override his wariness. He's still too on edge for her tastes, but he's calmer and hasn't run away yet so she'll count it as a win.
"Excuse you," Paulina hisses because she's committed and she really does hate the state of her hair. "You are not calling my standards stupid."
He rolls his eyes but lowers himself down behind her. "It's hair."
"Hair that's won me Miss Amity three years in a row," she huffs, mourning her loss when she goes to cross her arms and sees hair clinging to her hands instead of her head. Resigned to rocking a bob the next couple months, she sighs and lets the loose hair flutter to the ground. "Just focus on the hair, okay Ghost Boy? Nothing else matters."
She uses her nickname for Phantom deliberately, forgoing Danny or the usual 'Fenton' due to their history. This isn't an elite bossing around a nerd, but a leader looking after someone in their care and Paulina wants him aware of the distinction. Plus, he may somehow be 'Danny' now but that doesn't mean she can ignore his other identity. If she's treating him like Danny, the least she can do is acknowledge him as Phantom.
He begins without another word, hands awkward when they first touch her hair but finding a groove as time passes. Paulina can't see him, but his motions become gentler, more methodical and certain opposed to hesitant and jerky. They settle into place, the quiet between them turning peaceful.
She finds herself relaxing too, breathing in deeply and listening for sounds in the distance. She hears what might be signs of people—a whooshing too constant for wind but perfect for far-off traffic.
Good; we aren't too far from civilization.
Reassured they aren't entirely lost, her thoughts drift to reflection under Danny's steady ministrations.
Her conscious choice earlier to avoid the association between Danny's name and their usual dynamic at school was out of character for her. She didn't consider her behavior as something to shy away from, did she? It's not like she sought him out like Dash, or did any real bullying. She was simply been aware of her place and his in the social order and acted accordingly. An important girl has important things to do, so her treating the persistent boy with some extra attitude was par the course.
And, partially, it had been on him for not getting the clue.
Ghost Boy, though? Phantom existed outside human social norms and petty highschool hierarchies. That was part of the appeal. The mystery. The sparkle. Something new—something her money couldn't buy. He was honest and determined to a fault, character 'other' in the best way possible. He was everything she ever wanted, and she should be ecstatic to know his real identity. So why isn't she?
She feels slightly sick from more than just her concussion as she reconciles her previous thought process with what she now knows is the truth. It's an uncomfortable realization: if the two are the same, she was wrong twice.
Dismissing Danny had been a massive oversight that left them both missing out. Putting Phantom on a pedestal had led to unrealistic expectations and undue pressure to meet them. Their connection is obvious in hindsight, but she'd been too confident that she understood value when she saw it and couldn't be wrong to put the clues together on her own.
She'd wondered why Valerie, an A-lister if in temporary social exile, would so quickly warm up to the Trio that was Danny and his friends.
Did she know the truth too? Paulina hoped she didn't. World view changing or not, she loathes being in second place.
Deciding enough time has passed to subtly check in on Danny, Paulina shares what she'd been noticing for a while.
"You're... surprisingly good at this," she says, feeling his hands move carefully into braiding her hair once most the tangles are gone.
His fingers still for a moment, and when she cranes her neck back to see him there's a slight smile on his face.
"You're pretty good at this," she says again, softer this time.
"Lots of practice I guess," he shrugs off the praise before gently directing her to face forward again and resuming his nimble motions. "My little sister went through a braid phase after a trip to Africa."
"Really?" Paulina couldn't imagine the bookworm that was Jazz putting much effort into her hair. And wasn't Jazz the older sibling? "I didn't know you had a younger sister."
"You wouldn't," he hedges. "We don't advertise Dani much."
With one final adjustment, tucking the end of her braid into itself to stay coiled against the back of her head, he declares himself done.
"Can't do anything about your clothes though."
"Don't expect you too," she grins, feeling playful. "I'll be fine. If anyone asks, 'Hot Mess' is chic again. I'll make it so."
She's mildly disappointed when he doesn't return the energy.
"That's not very A-lister of you," he points out, probably thinking of the stink she made about her hair.
"I'd argue it's the most A-lister thing about me," she sniffs, irritation creeping in. "I'm All-capable. I can handle some dirt and my own problems if the situation calls for it."
I am way more than just a pretty face.
{DANNY}
"Well, when I asked for a date this wasn't what I had in mind." Danny falls back on humour to fix his apparent mis-step, but immediately regrets it. He's doesn't need to be rejected by Vlad and Paulina today. It's bad enough he's stuck here till his powers come back, and for all he knows he only has till Paulina escapes the woods herself till his secret is all over town. He has a runaway bag to pack.
"You want a date, Ghost Boy?" Paulina teases back with a flutter of her eyelashes, catching him off guard. He did not see that response coming, nor the way it'd make his heart ache. He moved on, dated Valerie. He should be over Paulina by now.
We're joking around, it doesn't mean anything. Don't make it a thing.
"I've asked you out a million times, Paulina." Danny's smile falls, sticking his foot in his mouth and making it a thing. She's been receptive of everything so far, and if he needs to leave town he'll never see her again, so why not try to get some closure? Maybe get an apology and heal some old wounds?
"Star called me a lovesick puppy last time."
"Sorry." She winces, a full body cringe, but doesn't elaborate. Not that he expects her to.
Then again, he didn't think he'd actually get an apology either. Is she really sorry for how she treated him?
Why—
Her likely reasoning stabs through his chest like one of Undergrowth's vines when it comes to him. The pain is sharp, insidious, burrowing deeper the longer it stays.
She's apologizing to Phantom for current events, not Danny for the past.
It was stupid to hope for anything else.
Time to deflect till my powers come back.
"Sorry? From the great Paulina Sanchez? Thought I'd never die to see the day."
"I mean it, Danny," she finally uses his name, clearly talking to him and not whatever ideal she's built Phantom to be. "This," she waves her hand in the air, gesturing at the situation, "had me re-evaluate things."
"If this is about participating in the trap last night, you don't have to—"
"It isn't. At least, not completely. It's because I want to," she cuts him off firmly. "I judged you prematurely, and I want to do better. Be better, and actually get to know you."
Danny can hardly believe it when she lightly taps his nose in a gentle boop. He's incredulous, amused and honestly a bit upset it took her so long to see him as his own person.
"That mean I got a chance?" He smirks, choosing amusement over anger. There are too many emotions involved to play it casual.
"Why don't you ask and find out?" Paulina says softly, hand delicately cupping his face. It's nice, but not nice enough.
"That, historically, hasn't ended well," Danny snorts, wrecking the moment building between them. It'd be nice if it was so straightforward, but all the ways asking her out has gone wrong in the past makes that seem impossible.
He takes stock of himself, noting his enhanced healing has kicked in. His powers are back.
He's contemplating changing, turning into Phantom and taking to the skies to escape the situation and get a head start packing, when she hugs him.
It's tight, fierce, and reminds him of when he and Valerie used to date. When they'd cuddle, and she'd swear to protect him from ghosts—except, Paulina isn't scared of ghosts. She knows who, what, Danny is, and isn't running or pulling out a blaster.
With trembling arms, Danny returns the hug, burrowing his face in her neck. It's starting to feel real.
"I really am sorry, Danny. You don't have to ask. I will." She squeezes him even tighter, as if she can sense he wants to flee. "Go out with me?"
"What?" Danny tries to ask, the question coming out strangled as he pulls away from the hug. Paulina meets his gaze with determination, grabbing his hands and not letting go. Keeping him close, staying close herself.
She means it. She genuinely means it.
"I don't expect you to forget the past just because I asked. We can go slow," Paulina continues. "Start off as friends, even. Partners in romance or crime, better yet both, as long as I'm by your side I'll help you any way I can."
"That is so cheesy," Danny breathes, too awed to laugh at it properly.
"I got it from a romance novel Dash lent me," she admits casually, as if that isn't one of the funniest, most out-of-pocket things Danny's heard this year. "Your answer?"
"No one else can know I'm Phantom, Paulina. You'd have to be seen with a loser. I mean it."
"I know, I don't plan on telling anyone. I want to show you off as you are."
"Stupid and clumsy?"
"Kind and dedicated," she's quick to correct, "responsible and independent, if occasionally silly and accident prone. I fell for you, albeit by another name, for a reason, you know. And I fell hard."
"I know," Danny's lips twitch. "You've still got the bruises."
"Careful, ghost boy of mine. Don't push your luck."
"Yours already, huh?" Danny leans closer, volume lowering as he savors the moment and proof Paulina likes him for him. Maybe he's wrong to do so, but he wants this. Wants to try.
"Mine," Paulina confirms, doing the same.
Their lips nearly brush, Danny able to make out small scars and blemishes on her usually flawless face. She's dirty, her nice clothes absolutely ruined, yet Paulina has never been more beautiful.
They squeeze each others' hands, a silent promise that they aren't going anywhere...then there's yelling from beyond the trees.
"Paulina! Can you hear us? Answer if you're out there!"
They break apart as if repelled, Danny reassured when he sees Paulina's face is as flushed as his.
He takes a moment to create a fan of ice which she accepts with a grateful smile.
"Over here!" She calls once her face cools down, the fan, retrieved thermos and Destabilizer melting invisibly into the shadows with Danny. Damage from the fight aside, there's no sign anyone but her was ever there.
The search and rescue team, complete with Paulina's father and Mr. Lancer, floods into their little space quickly. Mr. Sanchez wastes no time engulfing his daughter in a hug, while people Danny recognizes as other parents start pulling out first aid supplies and care items. It isn't long before the clearing is empty, the group making the trek out of the wood. He flickers into visibility long enough to wave when Paulina glances back, giddy when she sticks a hand behind her to secretly wave farewell too.
Certain she's in good care, and safe with her promise of secrecy, Phantom begins his own journey home. He may have a whole new level of problem in Vlad's recently changed stance on murder, and the GIW's destabilization tech, but he finds himself hopeful for the future none the less. Plasmius can stay in the thermos indefinitely for all he cares, and the GIW should be licking their wounds for a bit after losing the Sanchez's daughter in the wilderness. Knowing Paulina, Danny wouldn't be surprised if she leverages her injuries to issue a lawsuit. Ancients know her parents must be furious at the state of their little princess.
He performs flips in the air, relishing the breeze and freedom of defying gravity.
Whatever comes next, I can't wait for school tomorrow.
*Shoves this at you and runs*
…Sorry it’s nearly been a year since last update, life has been life and this chapter refused to be finished😅 At least you get to see Cas’s reaction to Danny’s true form now—hope it’s worth the wait!
Super special thanks to my beta @ladyquestion for their edit suggestions and SPN fact corrections!
Content Warnings: brief mention of gore, Fictional take on a religion/christianity (Supernatural's version with author possibly taking further creative liberty)
WC: 2k~ Masterpost
It's with a sigh of relief that Castiel notes the new quiet in the hall. Distracted by something further down, the Winchester brothers have finally ceased their bickering over the local library’s merits and he is now free to focus completely on his 'soul searching'.
...And sample taking, though he isn't entirely convinced that wanting the kid's guts in a bottle is common sense. It seems more like the collectionary habits of the things they hunt, rather than those of the hunters themselves. Barring the involvement of certain exorcisms and the like, of course.
Castiel is far from an expert on human behaviour though, so if the Winchesters insist such gathering is standard 'cop behaviour' necessary for their cover, he can get his hands a little dirty. It's just...unpleasant. He, as an angel, is far more accustomed to dealing with carnage of the metaphysical. That of the physical sort is... a lot slimier, he's finding.
And staining, he thinks, mourning his once clean trench coat as its edges start absorbing the blood where he kneels.
Swiftly capping said container and vanishing it into his coat, Castiel is quick to move on.
Hoping to feel a lingering soul, rather than the admittedly more likely residue of an ascended or stolen one, he reaches out with his Grace only to be met with nothing. There's no sign of a soul anywhere in the blood splatter; even the body's remains, where the soul's touch lasts longest, are devoid of its echo. Castiel is perplexed—while he may have struggled to feel the soul properly earlier, needing far more time than usual to even find the crime scene, that's because it was too weak to pick up at such a distance and his companions were distracting, wasn't it?
There shouldn't be any other reason why he, an angel of the Lord, would have difficulty tracking a mortal soul or its remnants. Even when devoured or stolen away, a soul's echo lingers on whatever it touches with no exceptions.
This seemingly normal body shouldn't be reading as empty mere hours after the murder. Not when he is so close to it, and looking so hard. Just once during this trip through Amity, Castiel would like things to work how they're supposed to.
The very town itself is strange, begetting caution the instant Dean's precious Impala crossed the boundary. Castiel had immediately done a precautionary sweep of the city, vanishing from the car and letting his Grace flow through the ground and homes as he explored the streets. He’d found nothing of particular interest during his search, aside from a weird number of men in white and a building bearing some sort of spaceship, but he did note an excessive straining of his abilities given the ease of his task upon his return to the impala.
Whatever the reason, the faith of God and His is fainter here.
But, again, not so faint that the soul of a child so brutally murdered should evade him so completely.
Regardless of what his Grace is telling him, Castiel knows the soul is there. He felt it, if intermittently, as they approached the school. No matter it's fragility, or what Dean speculates about the ghoul devouring it alongside most the victim's body, there should still be some sign of it and the soul being devoured is extremely unlikely. The soul, while innocent, was...off-putting...unappetizing...in a way that repelled his Grace. Castiel couldn't explain why—it didn't burn like the demonic, or harmonize like the angelic, energies he'd previously encountered influencing souls. It felt like something new all together, a hypothesis as exciting as it was worrisome to a being as old as he.
It was a child's soul, that was for certain, and mortal in that it Died rather than Ended, but that same something kept Castiel from confidently claiming it as such. It had registered as a normal mortal's soul, looked and felt the part, but he couldn't shake the feeling he'd missed the full picture. Like there was a lingering of energy after his acknowledgment of the soul that didn't quite fit, as if some part of the soul wasn't being seen, escaping his Grace. Dean would liken it to discovering a peculiar 'aftertaste' in a once familiar food. Not that Castiel is in the business of eating souls.
Either way, what he's attempting to rationalize is impossible; a soul incomplete, splintered so thoroughly it registers as different energies opposed to as a shattered whole, would not have felt as entirely intact as this one had in the glimpses Castiel caught of it previously. He also would have been able to properly separate the energies, and feel the soul’s pieces individually, without one remaining firming only in his metaphorical peripheral.
Reaching out again, both physically now as well as with his Grace as if being closer yet may help, he closes his eyes to better focus on what he recalls of the soul from his earlier brief brushes with it. He still can't find it, but this time he registers a firm resistance in the space between him and where the soul surely rests.
Is that...a wall?
He gently probes the 'blockage', Grace sliding smoothly across the invisible surface. Akin to cool glass, whatever it is is perfectly smooth and contact brings with it an eerie chill. It surrounds not the corpse, but Castiel himself, beginning right where he, his true self rather than his physical incarnation, ends. It swells and shrinks with him when he flexes his true self, 'separating' him from outside energies but not at all restricting.
Perhaps less of a constructed wall, and more a concentration of Nothing gravitating toward the Lord of Creation's Light?
It does not ensnare, but isolates all the same.
Mentally branching out, he can't feel Dean's Wild Fire or Sam's Pending Tsunami either, despite their closeness. He can, however, register flickering souls loitering outside the school once his Grace seeps through the school's brickwork.
The hallway, home to a presumably powerful Unknown, has suddenly become a dead zone for Grace. There's no way Castiel wouldn't have noticed if it was like this when they first arrived.
The heart in his vessel's chest skips a beat, the hairs on the back of its neck standing on end. His borrowed body is confused, like Castiel, and has chosen to react as prey. A rarity, for angelic vessels protected by divinity.
He chooses to prioritize his companions' safety over finding the missing soul or solving the hallway mystery, turning his full attention back to the nearby brothers to issue a warning—
Oh. So that's what's blocking me.
Towering over Sam is something Castiel can only describe, in human terms, as Darkness. Not the Nothing he compared the void surrounding him to before, but something that may as well be for all his Grace can feel it.
Whatever it is, this Unknown he has now met, it fortunately doesn’t seem inherently malevolent. Not one of Hell's many horrors, or earth's own twisted mutations like the potential ghoul they're hunting.
It's pure, innocent like a child yet Whole as the universe itself. It is Space, one of God's many dominions, yet It knows not of His control. It permeates the dimensional plane itself, yet exists outside of it even as It impossibly interacts with its inhabitants, the mortals beside It and Winchesters before It, on a physical level.
It Is, and It Isn't, not staying the same long enough for Castiel to get a stable reading on It. Him?
Castiel won't pretend to know the being, but then, he doesn't need to. The being is telling him, much in the same way as Father would, much about Itself. Not through speech, concepts and truths crammed into clumsy, ill-fitting sounds that always fail to encompass the whole message, but through Knowledge.
Simply by Knowing of It, Castiel is Learning.
The being is a boy; young, male and a mortal of the human variety.
Yet Castiel Knows the opposite too.
The being simply Is; unmeasurable by time, whatever it wishes to be, and the furthest thing from mortal.
Both are true, a certainty that grows the longer Castiel observes.
—radiates outward, the being exuding Its essence for all to Know—
Amity—Home—Crowned—Space—Bridge—Death—Life—
As his Knowledge grows, Castiel puts together a complicated picture. Despite his status as one working under the Lord, accustomed to receiving Knowledge this way when the world was new, he is unable to properly recall the Knowledge being passed on when he tries to review it. He can get close, but Knowledge is still lost. Further simplifying the being into human words, English none the less, would even further water-down the understanding.
The best Castiel could translate for his companions would have so much imperative nuance lost that there may as well be no information being passed on at all. There's no point in attempting translation of what he has Learned. Knowledge of It cannot be crammed into the boxes humans understand. Especially not when there is Knowledge even Ennochian has no translation for. Already, the Knowledge is diluting itself, slipping from his memory and leaving behind only vague renditions. King—Bridge—Other. The Knowledge too much for even angels to retain in completion.
Dean and Sam can pester him all they like, but if it comes up, Castiel will not be explaining how he knows what he does about the child.
What is it humans say?
It's complicated? A long story?
Explaining would be a dreadfully complicated and tedious process. It wouldn't be a lie, and having them draw their own conclusions based off what they perceive is probably for the best. The being would likely prefer that, and Castiel would rather It be pleased than upset.
Squinting, Castiel tries to focus on the physical half of the being: Danny. The human boy the being considers itself to be above all else.
At first glance, he isn't anything special. Ratty sneakers, blue jeans, an oversized white tee, fair skin, black hair, blue eyes—
Castiel braces himself against the emotional onslaught—nothing like the neutral and calm aura from before, instead a direct and violent in-pour of negative emotion—wrapping himself tightly in his Grace and withdrawing his Sight in an effort to protect the body he inhabits. Castiel knows what happens to mortal bodies that lay eyes upon the Other, can already feel the permafrost beneath his skin and shattering of slumbering spirit. Danny may not be of God, but he is undeniably of Something...possibly even Danny Hisself.
This reaction—am I his first sight of Divinity? The implications—
Is God aware of him? So like Himself, but so terribly young and lost?
He isn't part of the Plan—
It hurts, where it hurts when Dean is sad, that Castiel would strike such depthless fear into a youngling.
Was God like this once, young and terrified of the unknown despite the power within him begging to be used? To rend the world to ashes, or deliver unto it salvation, at the hands of a wielder fearful of what mere slivers of power they've seen?
It is a blasphemous thought process, but not one he can stop. Not when the Being, Danny, reminds him of his 'friends' as much as he does of Father.
The passionate emotions, spontaneous nature, and ability to exist in ignorance of the Plan, are all tell tale marks of 'humanity'.
Was the sharing of Itself, the projection of Its feelings, even intentional? Is It aware that It is screaming Its identity as something Foreign to Castiel, to God, for all who can listen to hear?
Castiel turns himself further inward, grasping for a message from his Father and doing his best to keep his physical body disconnected, sheltered, from the war of wills. He's so caught up in his tasks, that he doesn't even notice that what he's battling is the being's residue, the boy long gone.
*Spaceless text:
FEAR CONFUSION PAIN RUN DANGER LOSS FEAR PANIC WHAT WRONG WRONG WRONG DEATH FADING PROTECT RUN GHOST-ZONE PANIC RUN DESOLATE WORSE-THAN-THE-HOT-DOGS HOPELESS LOST WHY ANGER DEFEND PANIC BITTER INTRUDER MINE WRONG SCARED RUN MONSTER—
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Sorry if I missed anyone, but there is a masterpost for subscriptions :)
A reminder as to the rules of wishing, and a glimpse into what happens when Desiree gets out-wished. As always, one’s past greatly influences their present and it’s all too easy for time to change something innocent into something terrifying.
Content Warnings: brief mention of light ecto-bleeding wounds on Danny, implied offscreen injury/death of strangers.
WC: 2.4k~ Revised version on AO3 here
"Time to get up, little brother!" Jazz rips Danny's blankets away with a flourish, grinning ear to ear as she watches him squirm and try to hide behind his pillow.
"Nooo!"
"Yes!" Manhandling a sleepy Danny into a sitting position, a task she's had to do often lately now that he's going school, Jazz sits beside him and waves about two cardboard party hats. "Today's a day to celebrate, birthday boy!"
"I dun wanna sell-you-bait, though." Danny pouts with his arms firmly crossed, but he obediently stays still as Jazzy fastens a party hat to his head. He leans into his older sister, relishing the warmth of her and the familiar, if faint, scent of markers. She smells like the special fruity ones she got from Aunt Alicia, the ones she treasures so dearly Danny isn’t allowed to touch them. They usually just gather dust in her art drawer, brought out only for important occasions like when writing letters to Santa. Unfortunately for the siblings, they’re reminded every year that not even the scent of peppermint ink on Jazz’s equally beloved and smelly vanilla stationary is enough to entice the man to answer their letters.
Danny stares up at Jazz, noting the slight darkness under her eyes as she stifles a yawn and mumbles something to herself. There’s red and blue under her fingernails, and green, yellow and pink stain her palms. It's important, he thinks, and when he's older he'll know why. For now he is only six, and very, very grumpy at being woken up. He huffs, irritated further when Jazz stops him from removing the silly hat. The elastic holding it in place behind his ears itches, and it doesn't even have anything cool on it like aliens. It’s a plain boring blue cone dotted with cartoon sharks. With really pointy teeth. And red laser eyes.
...On second thought, he decides the hat can stay.
"Why not? It's fun to celebrate," Jazz stresses the proper pronunciation, "things, and today we get to celebrate you! And you get presents! Is there anything you're hoping to get?"
"There's no point," Danny mutters, turning his face away and kicking his legs back and forth as they dangle off the side of his bed. "Mom and Dad either won't remember at all, or I'll just get last minute 'Fenton-inventions' again."
"That's not true." Jazz stands to place her hands on her hips, the picture of confidence—if not for how she chews her bottom lip and casts nervous glances at his bedroom door.
In future years, Jazz makes a point of checking there are gifts as well as decorations before waking her brother.
"See? Not even you're sure."
"Mom and Dad mean well."
"I know."
There's a moment of silence, a mourning of what could be and an acknowledgment of what is.
"Don't let them ruin this for you, Danny."
Danny blinks, caught off guard when Jazz's voice wavers and her eyes glisten. She rests her hands on his shoulders and squeezes, making him look solely at her. He can feel her subtle shaking.
She always seems so strong, like Dad, and sure, like Mom. Seeing her… almost small, like him, is concerning. He doesn't like it.
"It's important to want things, to make wish lists and—and— I don't want you to lose hope, losing hope is terrible and nothing gets fixed if you give up. All my books say so. Mom and Dad might forget sometimes but there are other people who'll listen—"
Danny clutches her trembling hands in his tiny ones, now wide awake.
"I know Jazzy. You always listen." Beaming at his sister who always makes time for him, he sits up properly from his slouch and braces his feet on the floor for an easier take-off. For all she does for him, as her little brother, it's his rightful duty to provide distraction when her thoughts become too much. "But I still think your books are doodoo."
"Danny!" Scandalized, Jazz chases her snickering brother down to the kitchen, the siblings decorating the bare halls with their laughter.
***
"You can come out now," Phantom calls, reigning in his shadows and re-forming his more solid, humanoid, appearance. "I've scared the bad guys away."
There's no response, the street remaining silent save for the sparking of broken power lines and the grating of crumbled cement. Desiree can do a lot of damage with an innocent wish, but it's got nothing on the damage of an intentionally malicious one.
Phantom subtly tugs at his hazmat suit so his wounds, weeping noxious green, are better hidden by the ethereal fabric. Better, but not good enough. He allows parts of his body to relax back into the Void, but keeps it restrained by the confines of his suit. Odd patches of stars are less intimidating than weeping ecto. It also looks more like a fashion choice and less like he was put through a shredder, which is a nice plus.
The second Phantom is done here, he's going to find the wish-maker and kick their butt out of Amity.
Desiree might even help—beyond fulfilling their obsessions, Phantom's childhood rogues hold little desire to truly harm the living. An understanding he'd unfortunately only come to after years of unnecessary stress. There's a lot he's come to understand since he started joining his rogue gallery for tea and friendly spars in the Zone.
For one, ecto-entities, like all beings, are not as free or law-less as they appear despite their insane power scaling. There are unwritten rules Phantom has come to know, sicknesses and restrictions set upon them in place of those they lost in death. Ghosts can, to some degree, choose their Obsessions in their final living moments or at the cusp of their creation, but in pursuing it they oft have little choice. They can set the coordinates, but the powers that bind them set the course and speed.
...Ecto, with all its elasticity and mystery, is a very fickle power to be bound by.
What an ominous day it was, Phantom reflects, when the GIW discovered that too.
Case in point, Desiree being Compelled to grant a strongly-willed wish and promptly losing control of her power to the wisher.
Desiree is probably already tracking the wisher down; people can't make wishes if they're dead, after all.
Halfas withstanding; Phantom just loooves being an unlucky exception once again.
Phantom forgoes intangibility and closes his eyes to listen, straining his ears till the soft staccato thumping of a heartbeat reaches him. Following it, he carefully maneuvers over to a large slab of cement slanted precariously against what used to be the wall of a house. He grasps its sides and, with a bit of ice cast across its surface to assure it doesn't shatter, moves it aside to reveal a young girl.
"The bad guy's gone now, it's safe to come out."
Terrified, the girl shakes her head, eyes screwed shut. Blond hair, matted with dust, sways with the movement, dislodging a washed-out hairclip in the shape of a butterfly.
"It's okay, no one can hurt you now. I'm here."
She shakes her head again, but opens her eyes, large and blue, to steal glances at her saviour. Phantom is far less human-passing than in his own youth, but Amity is far less innocent too. Phantom is no longer a creature of moral debate in Amity. That stopped when things got worse.
"You can't stay here forever. Ruins don't make for good homes."
"If I go out I'll just get hurt again."
"You might—but you might not."
"My parents always say that, but—but— things always fall apart again. I'm not a baby," a flash of anger in the sadness, "I know things won't get better. I'm not stupid enough to fall for that again."
"Hopes, dreams, wishes; they're all very important." Phantom lets his head list to the side, humming thoughtfully. "There's no shame or foolishness in desire. In hoping for something better, dreaming of improvement. Even retroactively. It's what keeps you going. I've been told there's science to prove it." He huffs a laugh, thinking of Jazz's latest study on the topic.
"Even wishes?" The little girl shoots a fearful glance at the destruction behind him, and he shifts so his recently-added cape flutters to obscure it once more.
"Even wishes." He brushes tears aside, his gloves soft against her cheek and hiding the inky claws beneath, letting a hand rest on her shoulder. "It would be a shame for the actions of others to ruin something so beautiful, don't you think?"
***
Mom and Dad aren't downstairs, but there isn't any clanging from the basement either. There is, however, a beautiful birthday banner in all the colours on Jazz's hands and a cake on the table—one that isn't even glowing yet!
Jazz tsks, but by the time Danny looks away from the cake and back at her she's nothing but smiles, dragging a chair over to the cupboard where flammable items are kept. Danny watches, curious, as she returns to his side with candles and matches.
"What are you doing?"
"Teaching Mom and Dad a lesson."
"A lesson?"
Jazz shoves the candles in the cake, specifically impaling the hastily drawn green-icing ghosts with each one, before whipping out a match and setting them alight.
"Yeah," she says, grinning wickedly in the way only vindictive children can and brandishing a large knife he didn't see her bring over. "Not our fault if they're late and miss cake. And, as kids, we can hardly be blamed for not thinking ahead and only splitting it for those present, right?"
It's not a huge cake, small and round and lacking much icing, but the idea of getting to eat an entire half of any cake is enough to make any kid drool.
A matching grin breaks across Danny's face.
"Absolutely."
"Then make a wish and blow out the candles!" Jazz makes a shooing motion with her hands, clearly eager to dig in herself. Fortunately, she makes sure the large knife is set safely on the table first.
The candles flicker on the cake, flames dancing and illuminating the pictures on the walls. Jazz high on Jack's shoulders, and Danny nestled in his Maddie's arms. So many from the first few years that Danny can scarcely recall as anything more than vague feelings of warmth and safety. The photos of recent times are far fewer, dwindling to a single one taken this year. One sent by the school after picture day.
Danny misses the time they'd spend together as a family.
Danny's lips part as if to speak—
***
The young girl seems to calm, still wary, but reassured now that no harm has befallen her after leaving her small shelter.
Small grabby-hands metephorically stab his heart, and he sweeps her off her feet as requested. With the wave of a hand, ice paves the road ahead and ice sculptures swirl into existence behind whirling snow. His passenger flinches, then gazes in wonder at the ice's subtle white glow. That is, until Phantom steps onto it. With a gasp, she tightens her fist around the fabric on his chest to make him stop.
"Mommy... doesn't want me playing in the snow without her."
"Snow can be dangerous," he nods solemnly, not missing the way she gazes at the icy path with longing. "But there's no need to fear the cold with me. I could get rid of the ice, but surely taking the road like this will be more fun?"
"...You'll slip."
"Watch me." With a boop to her nose and a final step forward, Phantom stands sturdily on the ice. He walks in cautious circles, never straying far from the bare pavement they stepped from, till the girl whispers a mischievous 'what Mommy doesn't know...' in his ear.
Free now to glide across the ice, so not to jostle any injuries as walking might or startle her by flying, Phantom can't help but throw in the odd twirl. He gets contagious giggles for his trouble, and can almost forget the second reason he created the icy road.
Satisfactorily distracted, she does not question the statues' placements, nor inquire about what lay beyond the edges of the road. Especially in the places where the ice has formed great walls like crashing waves, gracefully arching overhead and so thick they've completely obscured the red behind them. The duo do not drift far, however, before she gently tugs at his suit to let her down. To the sixth 'house' over, to be exact, though it is no longer easily recognizable as one. Much of it is gone, vapourized, leaving behind mixed mounds of wreckage and furnishings still surprisingly intact that returnees may be able to salvage.
Among the more intact pieces is a winged doll, untouched save for its left leg pinned between a fallen rafter and the cracked wood panelling of the floor. Phantom is quick to lift the rafter after the girl's first unsuccessful tug at the doll, staving off an outburst of tears.
It's the little things, like a doll that won't budge, that brings everything crashing down.
Street lamps, the few that remain, flicker on as darkness falls; the shadows twist in an ominous, writhing dance.
The child shivers, no longer scared, but cold and lonely, the doll clenched tightly in trembling fists. The child is thinking, reminiscing, eyes darting between the dirty ground between her feet and the smashed remains of the home. A picture, the details long lost to broken glass and smoke, lay nearbye. Phantom, for all his improved eyesight, can only just make out what seem to be faces. One looks like hers.
The energies shift, a new weight added to the already heavy air. The kind of weight that would drag Desiree across the Barrier like a cinder block to the ocean floor.
The child takes an unsteady breath, hiccuping. "I—"
***
"Shh," Jazz murmurs, pressing a finger to Danny's lips as gently as an excited eight year old could. "You can't say it out loud, silly."
She lightly bounces on the spot with a wide smile, eager to share her aged wisdom with her naive little brother who is new yet to the ways of the greater world.
She speaks, lilting her words in mischievous sing song.
***
Phantom, weary but ever diligent, lowers himself to his knees and slowly holds a finger to his own mouth, interrupting and shushing the child gently. He smiles sadly, heavy under the burden of his responsibility, the knowledge he is to impart necessary but painful. He wishes he could let the child remain naive, but...
"You can't say it out loud, little one." His voice echoes in the empty street, reverberating off scrap metal to create a steady hum. Tears stream down her face, but she nods with a grim understanding one as young as her should never know. Would never know, had Danny left the portal broken.
Jason/Danny soulmates AU where neither is born with a soulmark, but gain one when they die and come back >:3
Danny after his accident: Oh shit, does this mean my soulmate is a ghost??
Jason after he gets his brain back: What the fuck? What the actual fuck?! What kind of demented bullshit fate is this?! I had to get brutally murdered to get a soulmate????
His body was different—stronger, more resilient, strange.
His mind, his soul, was different—driven more by instinct than logic, motivated in ways the never-dead could never understand.
His faults were no longer his own—they were ‘side effects’, ‘symptoms’, dismissed as consequences of his return rather than proof of his flawed humanity.
His self from Before became an Angel—smart, respectful, and kind in impossible multitudes. The perfect little brother, the perfect son.
He was Marked.
***
Soulmates, in mortal tales, are often thought to be a single soul split in two and therefore individually incomplete—a romantic notion, if somewhat insulting and scarcely true. Scarcely, but not never, as Fate could attest with the emergence of one such split. Two Infants, mortals complete unto themselves, born of a soul too strong, with a duty too heavy, to be borne alone. From birth, the connection between the two was undeniable, impossible to prevent…yet, in some small mercy, it may be postponed, as Life had done in the covering of their Soulmarks with Vitality. It granted them thick skin and strong hearts as both protection from the worlds in which they grew and a barrier to their Fate, their blood rich-enough in Humanity to cover the brilliant green glow of Life’s own other half, Death, that would otherwise engulf their palms. Death’s touch would come, but later, when the two knew love and sorrow—when they knew what they had lost. A cruelty considered favour in the eyes of the Other faced with Eternity.
Bound by their worlds’ laws and the restrictions of the Other, the two spent their youth grasping for higher heights. They leapt for the stars, and dreamt of travelling, finding themselves in better places where they’d know Love.
Worlds apart, their splintered soul yearned to meet its perfect match…unfortunately so, perhaps, in that it then made such terrible sense that the other so swiftly followed the first in death.
One bad decision—An implosion ripping his soul apart and scorching his mortal vessel. Burning, rending, a cut-short scream.
An unknown time between, where the latter felt alone. Desperate for connection, faced with a loss he could not properly comprehend.
Another bad decision—An explosion blasting his body apart and lighting his soul to flame. Burning, rending, a cut-short scream.
Two boys dead, far-shy the age of maturity but long past the age of blissful ignorance.
Two boys revived, different but the same. The prize of a three-way tug of war between forces unaccustomed to sharing.
Death had struck its claim in the way their black hair grew white and once-blue eyes glimmered green, but Fate’s claim stood strong in how their palms would glow with matching promise. With rings of flickering green emblazoned on their palms, edges branching out in delicate swirls like frost to form a figure not unlike a firework, their fate could be postponed no longer. Life, too, struck a new claim in a return of rushing blood and mortal flesh, though Fate’s Marks remained stark against their skin.
They laughed as the boys raged, pounding cavern walls with bloodied knuckles and screeching ceaselessly at the stars, knowing the discord temporary and giddy at their continued growth. Alas, like most things, the good humour could not last long.
Time passed, and Death could only listen as the two blamed it for their suffering.
Fighting filled their days, and Life could only watch as they treated it with reckless disregard.
Disasters struck, and Fate could only nudge as the two began to drift astray.
Existence sighed, when a nudge turned out to be enough.
Death relinquished its hold,
Life accepted their return,
And Fate, through Time, covered the cost.
Two families restored, them and a clown revived, for the creation of a Wildcard. A sliver of soul over which Death and Life held no power and to whom Fate had surrendered its own.
All was as it should be.
Families safe in Life’s embrace, the boys grew further into power, yet still they loathed their misattributed Gift, the Marks so long absent from their sight.
They took the Marks not as proof of love but as proof of fault; that they weren’t good enough, that they were Wrong, or meant for someone long gone.
Wrong they were, but only in their comprehension.
The Marks, Fate knows, had always been there; Death had simply changed them enough to see what Life had sheltered them from. Burdens heavy, and a promise of Eternity—a torturous path, if not for the fact they had each other.
Unique, like their bearers, the Marks rang with power and changed as fluidly as the green that filled them and brought their bearers back. A detail gone unnoticed, for worlds apart there was little for them to convey; especially to bearers unwilling to listen. They were unnatural, a gift of Fate that broke all the rules at Death and Life’s behest, but they were exactly as they were tailored to be. A conduit for two boys who excel in all the ways they are meant, upholding their duties and pushing their worlds onward, but at terrible cost to themselves. Individually, they are complete, but they are not happy.
One boy of Balance; forever bound to duty and equality. Too stable to feel much at all, cursed to an immortal life of stagnant peace.
One boy of Passion; forever to alternate between the utmost of everything. Too unstable to live in anything but the moment, cursed to an immortal life he cannot focus enough to grasp.
Two marks, who transfer between the two the Balance of one and the Passion of the other so that both may live in more than technicality.
And one day, when the barrier thins, or their strength grows beyond containment, they shall meet. A locking of eyes and a connection snapping into place—Marks spinning and shining brighter than ever before as they share more than just the emotion and strength needed to go on.
From there, Fate can no longer see; the two together, too bright and close to Fate’s brethren to subject themselves to Fate’s casual perusal.
Fate, however, feels no fear.
Not when knowing their meeting shall come, and not when it happens.
How could it, when it, and Death and Life’s, children are so overcome with the joy of finally being Known?
***
Many things stayed the same with his revival:
He still wanted to help, to serve however he could.
He still hid his truths, though now with higher stakes, from parents he felt may not ever understand.
He still hurt, suffering the violence, bias, demands that he change. The claims he could not.
Thank you all so much for the positive reception and your patience! And special thanks to my amazing beta the wonderful @ladyquestion !
Chapter Warnings: referenced/implied past canonical child abuse, light cursing. A bit of gaslighting Wes for his protection (worth a warning considering the situation is serious not comical).
WC: 2.7k Masterpost here
“The hell?” Dean curses, rapidly backing up while Sam stares at the floor, mouth open before he recollects himself.
“Not what I was expecting.”
“No shit, Sammy. Yo, Cas, you know what that was about?” Dean looks back at the angel still crouched over the blood on the floor. Cas doesn’t acknowledge him in the slightest, unmoving even as the edges of his trench coat gradually take on the same red hue as the floor it brushes against.
“Cas?”
Much to Dean’s frustration, Cas is as frozen as the boy was—eyes vacant, completely disconnected. Waving a hand in front of his face and some light face-slapping proves it. Following Cas’s line of sight, Dean isn’t too surprised to see he’s staring at where the boy used to be.
“Looks like our angel’s out for the count.”
“He’s out of it too?” Halting his examination of the floor, because he swears the boy felt Solid, Sam joins Dean and Cas at the original crime scene. “Any chance he’s just talking to God? Doing angel stuff?”
“No, that shit’s a different weird. Whatever this is, it’s what got to that kid.” Dean sweeps a hand towards where the teen disappeared. “Cas only froze up when he looked our way and the kid ditched.”
“We don’t know that.”
“We don’t not know that.”
A bell rings somewhere, and someone in a different hallway starts…yelling book titles?
“You think the kid’s a victim? Involved, possibly supernatural, but not a hunting target?” Sam watches Dean carefully, letting the heavy silence grow as Dean squirms. Dean’s rough, but he’s usually right about kids.
“Kid didn’t seem bad,” he admits slowly, tucking his hands into his pockets and studying the grad pictures on a nearby wall with feigned interest. “Has some kind of supernatural shit going on for sure, but he was genuinely terrified. Must not see crime scenes like this often.”
“Pity our ‘supernatural shit’ identifier’s out of it then.” Sam flicks Cas’s ear, amused when the man doesn’t react. The angel’s stillness is worrying, but seeing how he’s still breathing and the current unlikelihood of the boy being malevolent, they’ve got bigger things to focus on. Like the ghoul who caused the crime scene in the first place. Two students, ripped to shreds…
“We can identify creatures just fine without him!” Dean scowls, and the younger sibling in Sam perks up at the chance to tease.
“You have to admit he’s been helpful. How long did it take you to figure out that succubus last time he ditched us again?”
“She was hot okay?! And it’s not like the kid’s—“
“You’re talking about Danny Fenton, right?”
Falling back into ready stances, the brothers whirl to see another young teen. Despite years of being on high alert, paying attention to everything to avoid ambushes, the kids at this damn school keep getting the jump on them.
“Blasted town of creepy children…” Dean mutters under his breath, moving his hand away from his gun holster. “Fenton, who?”
The little menace redhead grins, pulling notebook after notebook out of his backpack and shoving them at Sam who accepts them on reflex.
“Danny Fenton, otherwise known as Danny Phantom, the town’s local ghost hero.” At the brothers’ interested but blank expressions, he rolls his eyes. “The black-haired kid you just saw phase through the floor—plEase tell me you saw that.”
His voice cracks, a manic desperation driving him forward to shove the one notebook still in his hands at Dean’s face. It’s open to a page of polaroid photographs, each featuring the aforementioned kid and often the two kids who were with him. Danny eating lunch with them, Danny secretly sleeping at a desk behind three propped-open math textbooks, Danny standing alone in a suspicious alleyway, the trio atop—is that the school’s roof?
There are a couple of candid shots, but the photo subjects usually have a scowl or knowing smirk for the camera. The boy in the backwards baseball cap especially; there’s not a single photo with him in it where he isn’t staring the camera down with unerring accuracy. One photo is clearly taken from inside a bush, the leaves partially obscuring the image of Danny arguing with the girl in black on the school football field, but the African-American boy is still staring directly into the camera.
“You gotta have seen it! He phased through the floor right in front of you…!”
“Woah, yeah, we saw it. Calm down.” Dean can already feel a headache coming on. He needs to get this kid to chill.
“Thank the Ancients.” The kid finally relaxes and gives Dean some much-needed space, stepping back to better display his photos.
“Ancients?” Sam darts a glance at Cas, well aware of the dangers that come with evoking the names of higher beings. He hopes he’s wrong, but given the sentence structure and the subtle ripple in the air when the name was spoken…
Dean doesn’t react, so Sam resolves to inform him about it later. Maybe Cas will know about them.
“Danny says it.” Wes shrugs as if he hasn’t been drawing the attention of potentially overpowered entities in casual conversation, and rambles on about the town ‘basics’ in an almost bored manner having noticed his listeners know nothing about the town beyond what they found during a rudimentary web search done outside Amity. In other words, thanks to the GIW’s strict ecto-information censoring beyond the city, they don’t know anything of actual importance. He discloses everything he knows about the four local ghost-hunting groups without any prompting at all.
Some of the information, like the fact there’s apparently an ongoing inter-dimensional war between the Fentons, a shady government organization called the Ghost Investigation Ward, and powerful entities called ‘ghosts’ courtesy of the inter-dimensional portal in the Fenton basement, is helpful. So is the proof via polaroid photographs that Fenton ghost weapons work, and that the ‘ghosts’ do indeed exist despite them not sounding like any ghosts Sam and Dean have run into before. That the living vigilante Red Huntress is more lenient towards the dead than her supposed weapon supplier would like her to be, and that the mixed Team Phantom is only hostile to aggressors of either side, is also good to know.
Other information, like how Jack Fenton likes his fudge and Danny hates toast, is not helpful even if it’s considered basic Fenton lore to anyone who’s ever been within earshot of ‘Jack’. The supposedly large man doesn’t sound shy, or quiet, that’s for sure; especially when it comes to ‘spooks’, himself, or his ‘perfect’ wife.
As if to make up for the unbelievably detailed description of her younger brother, the kid has little to say about the eldest Fenton child: a teenage girl named Jazz, whose Fenton Anti-creep Stick and big sister mischief-senses make it hard to gather information on her. He knows she likes psychology and is in on the ‘truth’ about her brother, but that’s about it. The kid’s eyes glaze over slightly when talking about her, but he recovers and moves on quickly.
It isn’t until he starts talking about the son, Danny, Phantom, that the passion returns. He shares written documentation, newspaper clippings, and his own observations with increasing fervour.
He even pulls out more Polaroid photos, this time of Phantom in various stages of battle or looking towards the sky. He showcases the ancient camera they were taken on with pride—something about older tech being more compatible with ectoplasm. How the bulky thing fit in his bag Dean has no idea.
“Admittedly, I haven’t been able to crack the why or how yet, but Danny and Amity’s ghost protector Phantom are the same person!”
Wes taps a photo in the scrapbook he originally showed them. It’s of Danny and his friends eating lunch at a picnic table outside; upon closer inspection, Dean can see it isn’t his own lunch he’s eating. There’s a fork in one hand laden with the goth’s cranberry salad, while Danny’s other hand was captured mid-action withdrawing a chicken drumstick from the other boy’s lunch kit. Once again, they’re the same two people Danny whisked away moments ago—Samantha Manson and Tucker Foley, part of Team Phantom and Danny’s best friends.
Danny’s lunchbox, metal and rectangular with a faded yellow rocket embossed on the lid, sits closed and ignored on an oddly green-tinged part of the table. As if the damn lunch kit is glowing.
Dean does not appreciate how strongly it reminds him of media-depicted radioactive material.
“I even nicked this from his lunch kit once!”
Dean and Sam both tense when the kid sets down the scrapbook only to pull a very ominous vial of a glowing, sickly-green substance from his bag. Much to the brothers’ horror, the kid just haphazardly waves it around unbothered before tucking it away again. “Nobody living can stand the stuff, but Danny’s been drinking it!”
“And that stuff is…?” Sam prompts, earning a rambled lecture on ectoplasm and its uses while Dean comes to terms with the fact the lunch kit was indeed glowing. And that its similarity to radioactive material is not a coincidence.
Like the previous rant on the hunter groups, it’s said at a rapid pace with no time for questions. Sam has long since set the kid’s books down, busy scribbling what information he can in a journal Dean doesn’t recognize.
“Hold on a second,” Dean interjects the moment the kid pauses to breathe, buying Sam time to catch up on writing it all down. “You’re saying that inter-dimensional ‘ghost’ goo keeps leaking into town from the ‘Ghost Zone’, actively contaminating the living like radiation, and none of you have thought to leave?”
“Eh, there’s more to it than that but sure.”
“But ‘sure—‘!”
“Dean,” Sam cautions when he sees his brother getting frustrated. They’ve had a long day and the sudden influx of confusing information doesn’t exactly assuage the weariness weighing them down. “We’ve got enough to go on for now. Let’s regroup and go back to the impala.”
Dean grumbles under his breath, but makes to acquiesce when the real cops show up and the redhead bursts into action again. Like an energizer bunny who never gets tired.
“Come on! We’ve gotta tell your boss!”
Sure enough, as Winchester luck would have it, the cop talking to what must be a teacher a little ways away is the head of Amity’s police force. Dean recognizes him from their preliminary research into the local authorities.
The kid pulls Dean closer to the chief with a surprising strength, Dean quickly having to fight to right himself before he falls over from the initial yank. Not one to miss an opportunity, and to cover up the fact he nearly fell for real, Dean takes advantage of the situation and bumps into the kid to lift the ‘ectoplasm’ from his bag. Dean’s fingers wrap around the smooth glass easily, a shiver running down his spine upon contact, and he manages to tuck it away in one of his own pockets with the kid none the wiser.
“Woah kid—“
“Wes!”
“Wes,” Dean corrects with an eye roll, “I don’t think—“
“Everything alright here?” David, according to his online APPD (Amity Park Police Department) profile, raises an eyebrow at the kid all but literally dragging a clearly reluctant ‘officer’. The teacher has already left, meaning all the officer’s attention is on them.
The APPD uniform was easy enough to throw together, lots of blue with some black accessories and a lie to explain the missing hat, but in a city as small as this one Dean doesn’t want to be under David’s scrutiny any longer than he had to be. All it’ll take is one good look for David to realize Dean isn’t one of the 15 or so cops under his command to get Dean on another wanted list.
Dean makes a point of looking away, slouching and preparing himself to play the part of a nervous newbie freshly arrived in Amity that the chief coincidentally hasn’t met yet. He can even make up a lie about the transfer papers possibly getting lost in the mail if he has to.
“Peachy—“ Dean tries to brush the encounter off and dip, but the kid interrupts before he’s hardly started.
“I have a witness this time! I can prove it!” Wes, with the same unnatural strength, shoves Dean at David, giving the police chief a perfect view of Dean’s face. “He saw Danny use his abilities!”
It’s to Dean’s immeasurable relief that David just as quickly refocuses on Wes, as if Dean isn’t there.
“Did he now?” David sighs, obviously fighting back the urge to roll his own eyes. “You’ve been on this for a while now, Wesley. Everyone in town knows Daniel is scared of ghosts. Don’t you think it’s time for a break?”
“I’m not crazy! Tell him!” Wes gestures frantically at the real cop, casting a pleading look at Dean. “I told you all about him, you know I’m right!”
“I’m not lying! I told you everything—it was monsters that hurt me! You know I wouldn’t lie about Sammy’s safety!”
“I don’t know what I saw,” Dean hardens his heart the best he can, choosing his words carefully to not completely invalidate the kid, “but as far as I know for sure, that Danny kid seemed pretty normal.”
Aside from his little disappearing act, anyway.
“But you admit you saw something unexplainable and he was there, right?” Wes persists, determined and sensing Dean’s hesitancy. The way he pleads is achingly familiar. A younger, less-jaded Dean may have caved.
“You heard the monster growls too, didn’t you, Mrs. Hopkins? You must have, the walls are thin.”
Older, jaded Dean knows that validating Wes here would only implicate him in more supernatural accidents later on. It’s better for the kid to stay far away from the hunter life even if it means a bit more bullying. Dean can’t encourage him.
“Sorry, Wes. I don’t know what you want me to say.”
Sam joins them, having manoeuvred Cas out of sight and deemed their cover as officers intact from the lack of yelling. Dean can hear the unspoken, teasing ‘softie’ as his brother overhears the conversation.
Alas, Dean isn’t the only one to notice Sam approach, and Wes doesn’t hesitate to change targets.
“You were literally touching him! You know what he—“
“I know there was a traumatized kid that didn’t want to stick around a crime scene,” Sam smiles gently, “and that trauma can present itself differently. It’s okay if you need to believe your hero is someone familiar to feel in control and safe—“
“Oh Dean, I know you believe it was a monster who hurt you, but one day you’ll understand that’s just you making what happened easier to process.”
“I’m not making this up!” Wes screeches, “I have photos! Written notes! Evidence! If you don’t believe me, everyone will keep thinking I’m crazy!“
“I’m not making it up! We’ve got real werewolf claws under the bed and everything! Don’t try to take us away, we’ll have to move again and Sammy just made friends—“
“Wesley, I need you to calm down or I will contact your father.”
“How did John find them—Protect the boys!”
“No! I won’t be grounded again!”
“No leaving the hotel room till that bruise goes away, got it Dean? Can’t have what happened in the last town happen again, can we son?”
“Your obsession with Daniel—“
The brothers slip away while the other two are distracted, smoothly looping an arm each through Cas’s once they reach him to drag him along.
They drag Cas in silence, Sam picking up on Dean’s restlessness but not wanting to speak up and draw attention till they’ve left the school and police force behind. They’re back outside, drawing close to the impala, when Sam decides to speak.
“What’s wrong?”
Dean visibly clenches his jaw, taking a moment before answering.
“That was cold. Saying that to the kid.”
“Like we could tell the truth.”
“Didn’t have to directly say he imagined it. Wes hears enough of that already.”
“Dean—oof!” Sam grunts under Cas’s full weight when Dean shrugs off his half of the man to storm off. “Where are you going?”
“To get a drink!”
I did wind up including a bit of a taglist for this chapter (sorry if I missed you), but I’m hoping I’ll figure out how to lock the masterpost soon so when you subscribe to the masterpost you’ll only be notified of updates. I see an option to stop reblogs but not replies/comments?
Your writing is really good, do you have an ao3? If so what is your name?
Thank you so much, I’m glad you think so! I do have an AO3 account under the same name (StygianWinter) but I only have one story posted there so far. Eventually my writing from Tumblr will be transferred over, but for now my AO3 account is rather bare😅
Which 1shot should I try to finish and finally free from drafts? (Individual story descriptions underneath the poll/read more)
Which 1shot should I focus on finally finishing?
Ghosts in the Night (DC, Dick-Centric)
Rooftop Rendezvous (DC, Jason-Centric)
Loop 57 (DC, Jason-centric)
Caught (DC, Jason-Centric)
Careful what you wish for (DP, kinda Danny-centric? Focuses on 2 similar events)
Meeting Vlad (DP, Danny-centric)
Late Night Wandering (Voltron, Lance-centric)
Voting ended onSep 29, 2024
DC fics
Ghosts in the Night:
The intro 1shot to a series of 1shots where Dick Grayson has the ability to see ghosts. It explores child Dick’s thoughts on his time with Bruce so far and how his secret ability affected it.
Rooftop Rendezvous:
A longer, Jason Todd-centric 1shot (currently 7k incomplete) following his first interaction with a despondent, grieving Dick after his return to Gotham and explaining his current actions through visions of his past. Has a hopeful ending (things are much better for both brothers but healing takes more than one conversation). May lead to a series involving the other batfamily members and Jason’s complete reintegration into the family. Trigger warnings for past canonical character death, off-screen substance abuse and implied child abuse (all curtesy of Jason’s past) and suicidal ideation.
Loop 57:
Another Jason-centric 1shot based off this post. Good ending (for Jason. Joker? Not so much. Bruce? …hopeful ending maybe?). Trigger warnings for gore.
Caught:
Inspired by a tumbler post I haven’t been able to find again; Red Hood captures Brucie Wayne, planning hurt him by threatening his kids (Dick and Tim) and poking fun at his own death. Bruce, however, does not react as expected and the pit’s interference when things get heated sends Hood’s carefully curated plan careening off the rails.
Danny Phantom fics
Careful What You Wish For:
A 1shot originally written for the DannyMay prompt ‘wish’. Another fic where the past is shown to influence the present, and how time can greatly change something innocent into something terrifying.
Meeting Vlad:
A follow-up 1shot where Danny meets Vlad in this AU. Someone else (other people, plural?) has already done a much cooler take on their meeting and future interactions in the reblogs, but I’ve got a fair bit written for this version so maybe I should finish it up and post it anyway.
Voltron fic (on a blog that’s primarily posted DC or Danny Phantom content? Apparently so.)
Late Night Wandering:
Follows a homesick Lance one night when he can’t sleep. Features Lance struggling to cope with everything that’s happened to him in space and coming to terms with his love for Keith. Bittersweet ending, though I may eventually write a sequel from Keith’s point of view showing Lance’s feelings are reciprocated.
…looking at the list, I really went through a “LET’S MESS AROUND WITH TIME!” Writing phase, huh. Also, infinite kudos to angsty protagonists’ best friends offering their presence as a gentle comfort.
For those curious, the next chapter of my SuperPhantom WIP ‘When Eldritch&Divinity Meet’ is complete and should be up soon after a little more editing; that story will still be my main focus, I’d just like to finish some 1&done stories too.
Dp-centric follow-up to this post. Spn follow-up and more to come. Masterpost available for subscription.
Was 1k, became 2k after editing. Whoops. Hope you guys like it as much as part one!
The flight home is a blur, Sam and Tucker’s protests falling on deaf ears as Danny puts all his energy into reaching the portal fast as possible. He isn’t entirely sure if he’s being followed, but he’s seen enough horror movies to know checking would just slow him down. He does not ever want to be on the same dimensional plane as that Thing, much less if it’s looking for him. At least in the GZ, if It follows, Danny has some strong friends.
Clockwork could maybe freeze it in time—even It’s gotta be subject to time right? Ancients, Danny hopes It follows some kind of understandable laws of nature because the ones he’s familiar with were not applying themselves in the hallway—and Danny’s sure Frostbite might have some idea about its anatomy if CW gets too cryptic with his answers. Not to mention, having a healer on standby is just good sense when Fading seems imminent. Or dying, for Danny’s liminal but still living passengers.
He recklessly phases through Fenton Works, setting off all the alarms. The
foundation shakes at the force of the blaring noise, a chaotic cacophony of his father’s voice and riot sirens. There might be a woman’s screams in the mix, but Danny is already in the basement by the time he vaguely registers the noise and lockdown occurs. He slips into the Ghost Zone long before the ghost shields have a chance to boot up, the heavy-set doors of the portal slamming shut behind him as yet another security measure takes place.
It’s only now, in the zone where Sam and Tucker are able to float of their own power when Danny lets them go, that Danny finally begins to calm down.
Positioned between his friends and the portal, ectoblasts at the ready, Danny stares down the disconnected, impregnable doors of the portal this side of the dimensional barrier half expecting the doors to come flying at him. For heavy hits from the other side to dent the metal, for claws to render them useless, for a wail to shatter them like glass and reveal the Thing behind them, on the hunt. His thoughts race, presenting one horrific scenario after the last, but the steady pulsing of the zone and familiar citrus aftertaste the ambient ecto leaves on his tongue calms him despite his persisting fears. The atmosphere, cool and green and thick, wraps itself around him like a blanket. It soothes the scrapes left over from a fight the night before, closing the wounds with its gentle touch. It whispers to him of safety, a promise of retribution, or power; he need only seek it and the zone itself will provide.
For he is a ghost.
And this is the ghost zone.
It is a heady feeling—Danny can see why so many ghosts fall to arrogance, their natural environment encouraging it so strongly. Why they always want to fight in the living world when they have such an advantage here he cannot fathom.
Yes, that is why Danny fled to the Zone. Here, he has the advantage, surrounded by an energy source that Thing has little to do with if What Danny saw in the hallway was right.
…Absolutely nothing to do with it, at all.
The jarring thought startles Danny into releasing the energy building between his palms. It dissipates harmlessly, and the urgent need to re-conjure it fades as the portal doors remain untouched.
Everything should have some connection to the Zone—to the afterlife. Not just the liminal residents of Amity Park, or the ghosts themselves, but there’s enough rogue ecto in the world for everyone to have an ectoplasmic echo of some degree. Even the out-of-towner cops had ecto-remenents on their souls. Ectoplasm is sticky, clingy by nature, going so far as to cling to itself and create blobs. It forces itself in deep wherever it can find an opening, delving into the cracks of reality and permeating even the most impenetrable of spaces with an unmatched tenacity and refusal to ever let go. It can loosen its grasp, leave you mortal still in all the ways that matter, but it always leaves a claim. A Stain.
It often shows itself as an exaggeration of features, a luminescence of the body, or an aura visible only to those sensitive enough. This goes for everything, alive, dead, animate and sentient or not, with ghosts being the most obvious examples given they’re literally made of the stuff.
The Thing? Completely clean. And not just clean as in lacking any noticeable amount, but as in actively repelling it—the thick ecto in Amity’s airspace sliding… off the Thing? Through the Thing? However the Thing works, the ecto wasn’t touching it.
If Danny wasn’t so familiar with eldritch entities curtesy of the Zone, he’d be calling it one. Sure fits the stereotype better than the homicidal jolly-green-giant knock-off, or the angry sentient-tornado. Nocturn comes closer, but he’s still no way a match for that particular brand of insanity-heralding horror.
Part of that, Danny acknowledges, is thanks to his own dead status. Danny, and the residents of Amity in general, are so ecto-contaminated that they’re able to process and understand the bodies of literal concepts like sleep and nature, compartmentalizing them into familiar if abnormal shapes.
Knowing this makes his inability to process the Thing even scarier.
“—anny?”
Cool, small and smooth hands clasp his, thumbs caressing the curves of his hazmat gloves. Long black nails scratch the fabric, tiny spider decals furiously scowling up at him.
An arm is thrown over his shoulder, positively radiating heat and bringing with it the thick stench of cologne, while another hand, warm, clumsy and rough compared to those holding his, musses up his hair.
There’s a chin resting on his shoulder, a face murmuring space facts into his ear as two more arms encircle his waist. The arms are freckled and long, overlapping each other as they hold him close, and long hair tickles his neck.
Hands, nails, arms, face, chin, hair; parts he knows, can describe and quantify.
Three voices he can understand.
Blinking, he looks down to the redhead hugging by him from behind.
“Jazz?”
“Hey, little brother,” she breaks off her regurgitation of Danny’s earlier given lecture on space travel, “you with us?”
Danny frowns, still staring at her.
“Considering all three of you are holding me, it’d be weird if I wasn’t.”
“Good to know your sass is fine.” She slowly untangles herself from him, brushing down the hair Tucker messed up.
“Why are you here? Don’t you have a math exam to study for?”
“I do.” She quirks an amused smile. “I was in the middle of said studying when you crashed into my room and unilaterally decided it was time for an impromptu Zone visit.”
“I didn’t…” Danny trails off. He doesn’t remember it, but he doesn’t remember much after entering the hallway period, and Jazz isn’t exactly dressed for an excursion anywhere. She’s wearing her bearburt PJ’s, thin and soft with absolutely no defensive properties, and her signature headband is missing. Her hair’s a wild mess, there’s ink on her cheek, and she’s barefoot. A disconnected set of earbuds dangle around her neck by the cord, said cord frayed at the input end as if violently ripped from her phone.
Or incompletely phased through the floor.
“It’s okay, Danny. Mom’s got extras. Focus on me, okay?” Jazz gently nudges Danny to look back at her face. “I’m here, for you, in what ever way you need me. Tucker and Sam, too.”
“Yeah. Some warning before the joyride would’ve been nice, though.”
Feeling better, Danny makes a point of stomping on Tuck’s foot hard. There’s no floor to stomp it against, but the message gets across. The mood is light, a fragile thing of love and support that Danny desperately needs.
But nothing good can last forever, especially not with Fenton luck, and eventually Sam clears her throat and breaks it. The gravity of the situation, that, Ancients, none of them know because Danny hasn’t told them, can’t tell them, comes crashing back.
“I may not know what happened back there, though it clearly spooked you.” Danny mourns the loss of her hands when she pulls them away to mash them together as fists. He can’t even appreciate her accidental pun. “But we’ll be okay. We just need a plan, and then we’ll be able to kick the ghoul’s butt into next week like we always do.”
“Or we could just not attack? Avoiding confrontation with whatever freaky monster massacred those kids sounds like a good plan—“
“Scaredy cat—“
“I agree with Tucker,” the words tumble past his lips unbidden, way too fast to be casual. Jazz observes him carefully, while Sam rounds on him with righteous indigence. Danny gets it, he doesn’t want the ghoul to go free either, but he doesn’t know how to track it down and avoid the Thing at the same time. Maybe the Thing will take care of it for him? A ghoul’s gotta be nothing to It, and then Danny wouldn’t have to endanger his friends in the hunt.
“What?!”
“I’m just saying that we might want to be more careful than usual.” He shuffles his feet awkwardly. “We haven’t had casualties before…”
She stares him down, violet eyes peaking out from smeared makeup and windswept ebony hair. She’s a mess, like jazz. As too, is Tucker, Danny belatedly notes. His hat is missing, and one of his glasses lenses is broken. Guilt shoots through Danny at the realization that they very well could’ve been ‘casualties’ of the flight. Danny is too powerful to lose control like that. He can’t afford to let his guard down or act on instinct, lest he be the one to hurt them.
“It’s not just the ghoul, is it?”
Danny swallows, breaking away from under Tucker’s arm and floating back to create a bit of distance. Sam’s always been observant, even if she likes rushing into things.
“…We should visit Clockwork.”
“Not an answer, dude.”
The three liminals share a silent conversation, but Danny doesn’t try reading their faces, too busy staring off in what he hopes is the right direction. He’s normally confident traversing the Zone, long having graduated from needing the infinity map as the Zone tends to just bring him wherever he wants to go lately, but his encounter with the Thing has left him shaken and there’s a large blob where there shouldn’t be. It looks oddly familiar, but without getting closer he can’t be sure. It must be a lair, but to have one of that size so close to the portal? Danny could touch it and be back in five minutes tops. The Zone suddenly changing on him doesn’t bode well.
Danny flexes his hands, open, shut, repeat, hit with the sudden urge to leave without the liminal trio. He doesn’t want them involved, not if even the zone is changing on him, but he can’t deny it’s already too late for that. The Thing saw him together with his friends, and he doesn’t exactly want Jazz on the same plane as that Thing either. It’s best they stay with him until it’s safe.
…his parents can probably look after themselves.
It’s fine.
He’s sure he’s lying.
Phantom’s core aches, wordlessly begging to lock them up, freeze them in his ice until the danger has passed. Ensure they stay safe even if they hate him for it.
Danny’s heart aches with the knowledge that that is not safety but captivity. And what if he Fades before he can free them?
Human and ghost agree, with no small amount of pride, that they likely couldn’t keep them contained for long anyway.
“Answers after, ghost boy.”
Danny meets Sam’s sharp smile with a tentative one of his own.
“Answers after.”
Tag list of some people I noticed seemed to want to be informed of a fanfic/if there was more. Sorry for the unsolicited tagging if you’re no longer interested!
He’s dealt with a lot of creepy things as Phantom, is a creepy thing himself in fact, but everything he’s faced so far has at least been… somewhat humanoid, or familiar, in form. He could always recognize some kind of a face, a chest or other ‘main body’, and limbs.
Ghost powers, with their alarming variety and blatant defiance of basic physics, made it anything but a clean science but Danny always knew at minimum the basics of how to fight them. Avoid the limbs, aim for the main body, watch the face for clues like eye movement. And ghosts aren’t exactly known for being physical either, even if Danny’s own abilities and Fenton-tech make that particular quirk of the species obsolete…but the Thing hovering in the hallway by the police?
The large, ethereal mass of floating spectral wings and blurry eyes bound by nothing but sourceless light? There is no face, no limbs, no body at all, it just is. And yet, it also just isn’t, the very dimensional fabric making up Casper High distorting around it into something equally unrecognizable. It shifts in and out of focus, filling the space with colours Danny has never seen and an unsettling echo of senseless voices at frequencies he didn’t know he could register.
The cold leaching the strength from Danny’s limbs has nothing to do with his ghost-sense or Core Affinity, but rather everything to do with Fear.
How is he supposed to fight that…?
Distantly, he can feel Sam jam her elbow into his side and hear Tucker talking to one of the cops—when did he get so close? Are they a ‘he’? A ‘she’? Danny shouldn’t assume, right?
Danny can’t take his eyes off the…Mass… to check, but then the cop is gazing into his eyes, crouched between Danny and the thing and Danny can no longer see It. Danny swallows, the world gradually re-twisting itself into something more manageable around him. The cop speaks slowly, gently, asking if he can touch Danny.
Danny nods, syrupy thoughts still stuck trying to comprehend what’s happening. The Thing stays in his mind, its hooks in buried deep and dragging his focus away from reality even as a mere memory. As a result, Danny doesn’t think of what might happen if the cop were to touch his cold hands, stiff with nails turning blue, and notice there’s no pulse before giving his consent. Danny’s heart, instinctively shut down at first sight of the Mass, has yet to start up again. Danny can’t help but wonder, with a morbid curiosity, if it stopped to keep itself from bursting—
The cop, thankfully, instead sets a heavy hand on Danny’s shoulder, thumb moving in steady circles. It’s grounding, physical in a way that Thing could never be.
“….with me buddy?”
“Hmm, hmm.”
“Good, you’re doing good.”
Danny blinks, his eyes suddenly feeling very dry. He had stopped blinking all together, and his chest is so still he must’ve not been breathing either.
The cop must assume his breathing is just unnoticeable under Danny’s baggy shirt, because he—for now Danny can register that they are a he—continues talking slowly and calmly to what Danny knows could be effectively classified as a corpse. Danny’s corpse.
“I’m sorry you had to see this, no kid should ever…” the cop trails off, his long hair falling into his face as he shakes his head before continuing. “I promise you that my partners and I will do everything we can to stop this from happening again—“
“Partners?” Danny immediately latches onto the plurality, remembering how there were only two humans and the Mass beyond the caution tape when he rounded the corner. “You’re partners with it?!”
Oh good, he’s breathing again.
Oh crap, he is breathing way too fast.
“It?” The cop frowns, but doesn’t react to Danny’s now very prominent panic, clearly caught off guard.
“You know something, kiddo?” A new voice interrupts, gruff and ragged, but in a way that sounds false. A tone built from habit, not natural development.
If Danny were feeling better he might point that out, make some fun of the new cop trying to sound tough next to his far taller partner, but as it is Danny just wants to run. Unfortunately for Danny, his feet refuse to budge, and without going ghost, his tail is of no use either.
Raising a shaky hand, because of course those can still move, he points behind the first cop to where the Mass once hovered, his finger brushing the right side of the guy’s police uniform. Danny doesn’t move to see around the guy and check if It’s still there.
Please be gone, please be gone, please be gone—
Both cops are frowning now, and they exchange a meaningful glance before looking back down the hall. As the crouching cop does so, his body twisting to look, Danny catches another glimpse of the still-there Thing. Including a nearly luminescence-obscured flap of beige fabric he didn’t see the first time.
“Why…is it in a trench coat?” Danny says faintly, the surreality of seeing such a mundane item amongst It nearly sending him into shock.
Or is he already in shock…?
But then the creature turns away from the viscera on the floor—or at least, Danny assumes it turned away, because he still can’t wrap his mind around it. He still can’t locate anything resembling a face, or any other comprehensible features in the borderline-impossible shapes it consists of, that could indicate movement. What Danny can understand though, is that he feels, carved deep inside his soul, the very moment it sees him.
“Are you talking about Cas—?”
Danny is gone before gruff cop can finish speaking, a friend in each hand as he drags them through the floor in broad daylight, right in front of two cops that could very much hand him over to the GIW and a monster that might not even be escapable in the first place.
His friends yell at him, scared by his behaviour, but they don’t fight his grip and that’s all he needs to know. They trust him to protect them, and protect them he will.
4am and im thinking about a time travel/time loop au where jason is reliving his death over and over again. its been years since that day in ethiopia, and more than terror — jason is tired. he sees this same event, word for word, metal against bone, blood in his mouth every day of his life. reliving it is no different than seeing it every time he closes his eyes.
until, he notices that the jokers smile growing wider and more sinister might not just be his imagination. then the third, or fourth time the day starts again, the joker changes the script. he can't help but adlib an extra insult in between the torture, too high with power and glee.
and all of a sudden jason is revitalised. in just one second, it's no longer I'm stuck in this horrifying time loop, it's We're in this time loop and I'm not stuck with you — you're stuck with me.
jason discovers new ways to torture (hyperbolically and literally) the joker now that he knows they're stuck in this impossible infinity together for a unforeseeable stagnant future. it starts as a game, only because the joker hasn't yet realised jason's the only one playing. it's too late when he realises that jason can do whatever he wants, because the day resets no matter what, and they'll see each other and jason will be ready with a new way to get his vindication.
very quickly, jason looks forward for the day to start again. he's still got 42 plans against the joker he wants to enact, and he doesn't think his thirst for revenge it yet quelled.
except — a couple miles away, someone else keeps waking up too. this is his worst nightmare come alive. the universe knows no bounds of cruelty and he's barely hanging on to the thead. what is this, the fifteenth, twentieth time he's been forces to relive this horrible day? he can't do this anymore. he's always too late.
So I read this amazing prompt(?) a while ago, coincidentally also around 4am, and wound up writing roughly 3k of a short one shot for it (focusing on the time before, during, and immediately after, Jason figuring out joker is in the loop too). Problem is, I cannot for the life of me figure out story flow/formatting as it’s written in pieces (different time frames and POVs) no matter how I try to tweak it. It doesn’t help that the few things I could take out to help make it flow are parts I really want to keep.
If anyone is interested in acting as an Alpha reader (similar to a beta reader but participates in the creation process more than review), let me know!
(General Gore and disassociation warning for the fic; also, alpha reader beware it is very disjointed and all over the place at the moment. Hence the fact I require assistance figuring out how to move forward with it😅)
Thank you for the great concept and inspiration, @damianbugs!
Story element/concept I might turn into a proper fic myself one day, but for now has its home in the communal sandbox :)
Context: Danny and Damian are twins, and Damian believes Danny dead by the time he goes to live with their father. Danny, meanwhile, is with the Fentons getting up to ghost shenanigans.
Forbidden from mourning his twin or acknowledging his once existence at the league, it's of grave importance that Damian has something in memory of Danny at Wayne manor. To keep it and Danny a secret from his new 'family', Damian sets the location for Danyal's grave deep in the forest on Wayne's extensive property and he only ever goes there when he's confident no one is watching/tracking him. Needless to say, making the grave takes a while because the bats watch him very closely at first. It also takes a while because not any grave will do, not for Damian's beloved other half.
No matter how detailed, expensive, or well-meant, cold stone is far too lifeless to ever be worthy of marking Danyal's resting place. No, Danyal's monument shall be as bright and alive as he used to be.
And not any location would do, either. The grave couldn't be hidden away somewhere impossible to find, it had to be out in the open, for the same reason that Damian didn’t want to just bury something in his twin's name.
Danny never should've had to hide while he was alive, and his existence has been denied too much already for Damian to even consider hiding it further than absolutely necessary.
Danyal spent long enough trapped underground in the tunnels of the league. He deserves to at least see the stars he loves in death.
And so Damian spends painstaking hours hunched on a muddy lakeside carving his brother's likeness into a tree, the face in the bark directed upward to always watch the sky visible over the lake. The lake is more of a pond, stagnant and littered with weeds and insects, but it reflects the moon none-the-less and provides a clear view of the sky by breaking up the thick overhead foliage. Thanks to the distance from town and lack of lighting on the Wayne's large, mostly un-lit forested property, the stars can be seen startlingly clearly considering the thick smog and light pollution that clings to Gotham like a shroud.
After the strict regimen of the league, the messy imperfection of it all is what makes it so perfect.
It's wild and free, exactly how Danyal always wished to be.
After the face and torso are done, Dami fashions a low-sprouting, skyward-reaching branch (a limb, if you would) into one of Danny's hands. It's as if Danny is reaching for the stars, his hand getting closer each year as the branch grows.
Damian loathes the rogues of Gotham—overly dramatic and frequently nonsensical, he does not understand his father's desire to keep them alive.
That said, his chosen tree lacks the branch necessary to continue pursuing his artistic vision, all hanging too low or sprouting too high. It is a grievous oversight he must rectify immediately, and if Poison Ivy's knowledge and finesse regarding botanical growth are as she claims...
For Danyal, he'll grant Isley a chance to prove herself useful.
For Danny's legs, Damian uses two of the many thick roots spreading out from the tree. A third, partially-unearthed, root becomes Danny's other arm, appearing to rest at his side.
Damian slaves away every chance he gets, bringing the memory of his brother to life with a careful whittling of his blade then gentle brushstrokes of tree-friendly, outdoor-worthy paint, until finally it's as if Danny is still with him.
The first time Damian visits the grave post-completion, his breath catches in his throat and it takes all he has not to collapse where he stands. From a distance, the carving looks to be no more, and no less, than a young, living boy that looks an awful lot like Damian sitting on a muddy shoreline leaning against a tree and waving at the sky.
If not for the hours of loving labour in his memory and his firm disbelief in miracles, Damian might have been inclined to believe Danyal was truly back.
Even with them, it's a good many minutes before Damian can bring himself to move closer and shatter the illusion.
Every year on Damian's birthday he skips patrol to spend the night with his ‘twin’.
With gentle hands he re-paints the blues of Danny's eyes, trims leaves from his fingers, and uncovers his legs where mud has them hidden.
Damian leans close to unhearing ears, and whispers of the truth—of how lonely he feels at the manor, how lost. That every time he tries to prove himself, do as he was taught, their father's disappointment grows.
He squeezes unfeeling hands, and wraps his arms around rough bark seeking warmth—a comfort he knows deep down his brother's imitation will never offer. Not like Grayson with his insufferable hugs, Todd with his aggravating hair ruffles, and even that infernal Drake who never fails to jostle Damian in the halls yet never harms him.
He stares into unseeing eyes, and allows himself to let go—to break down and cry, staining newly-rumpled clothes with mud. He wants desperately to be seen, yet his pride only allows the walls to fall in the safety of anonymity.
Maybe eventually the bats start picking up hints of a possible twin, or Danny makes an appearance in Gotham.
"...Danyal?" Ignoring the outcry of his siblings and the risk of exposing his vigilantism, Damian flings himself from the escalator, dropping the couple levels to the ground floor and landing with a roll to absorb the impact. There, between some tacky advertisement for lemonade and a display of outrageously coloured swimsuits, is a dead-ringer for his twin.
Damian doesn't move from the spot he landed in, remaining several feet away and partially obscured by the oversized fronds of a fake plant. The look-alike's eyes are downcast, focused on his phone and only occasionally glancing up to check on a girl in black sorting through a selection merchandise. His foot taps impatiently, indicating he's been waiting for a while. It's a perfect opportunity to approach him.
Damian doesn't move.
The girl seems to notice the boy's impatience, leaving the store empty handed. Their lips move, and their hands wave about as if arguing. Damian should be able to hear them, but the mall's air conditioning must have picked up in intensity because he can't make out a single word over a low, droning static.
Damian needs to hear the boy's voice, needs to compare it to the one in his memory.
He doesn't move closer.
The boy and girl depart together, and Damian catches a glimpse of a very familiar scar on the boy's nape.
Danyal exits the mall, and, distantly, Damian can feel a hand fall on his shoulder—it's Grayson, worried and requesting an explanation. Damian's twin, for it could only have been Danyal, is gone. Damian might never see him again.
Damian doesn't move.
He can't.
Or maybe not.
Maybe Damian tells his family unprompted, inviting them to join him on his overnight, birthday tradition.
"We can get him a proper gravestone—"
"No," Damian cuts them off mid-speech, his tone sharp and cutting, at odds with the delicate placement of his knife against the tree.
“Dami-"
“No!"
Instantly, all conversation stops, the silence of the night broken only by the rustling of wind through the trees and the chittering of insects. Damian takes a shaky breath, unsettled but still steadily chipping away at the overgrown bark to straighten his twin’s jawline.
Damian has moved on to re-defining Danyal's arms by the time he speaks again, the first to breach the silence. His words are soft, but heavy with a weight no child should bear. They echo amongst the trees, foreboding lyrics to accompany the chills running down his family's spines.
"It was my blade that took his life," chink, a sliver of wood plops to the ground, "so it will be my blade that makes his grave."
Or maybe not.
Wherever you imagine this concept going, I hope you find the idea of Tree Danny as fun as I do.
One of my favourite ideas to poke at is a reverse Nobody Knows AU
As in Everybody but Danny knows that Phantom is Fenton because Danny died all the way and came back as a normal ghost.
Has no clue who he was. Still acts the same, still protects people, thinks bullies and assholes are losers and tries to save the day with the least property damage and civilian injury possible, but has no clue why people get so sad around him. He just assumes he has an aura he doesn't notice.
He spends some the little downtime he has not fighting other ghosts haunting the school when it's empty and hanging out invisibly in the sky when it's not. He hangs out a lot in the observatory and breaks into the Fenton's basement often. Usually just poking around and never actively malicious. He has no clue how he feels like he knows how their stuff works, but he does.
The Fentons themselves are actually pretty nice to him. He thanks them every now and again for shooting at the other guys but not him (even though their aim sucks). To him, they're Ms. Maddie and Mr. Jack. They never had the heart to tell him anything else.
Tucker and Sam don't become friends with Phantom again right away, of course, considering he popped out on the ghost side of the portal, but they are one of the first people to meet him.
It's incredibly early on, between when the Fentons get their first ghost detectors running, and before they even got a headstone on the grave. (closed, empty casket, of course) Phantom's started his hero career scaring muggers, returning lost kids to their parents, and the like.
Sam and Tucker came to the Graveyard to give their friend a little visit before the school year could begin, and what do you know? The sensors Jack and Maddie gave them are going off before they even step past the gate.
Being the brave little teens they are, they go in anyways after deciding there's no immediate danger and they'll probably be fine.
Only to find their very dead best friend looking very alive and chilling on his own unmarked grave.
He looks at them with zero recognition in his eyes (but an odd feeling that he knows these two and that they're safe) and excitedly asks them if they knew who was buried there, before realising that Oh wait these people are sad, apologises, and asks if they were here to mourn at this grave cause he had no issues leaving them alone.
Sam recovers first, laughs a little bit as much as it hurts, cause this is their friend, he's here, and they tell him there's no issue because it belongs to him.
They expect they'll have to answer some questions and give him the whole story about how they were his best friends and then he died, but he pretty much just goes "Huh, neat!" and goes back to chilling.
By this point Sam and Tuck are well and convinced that Yup, this is Danny. They have introductions and say that they'll see each other around soon.
Sam and Tucker are just as amazing at the deflection game as Danny is, so they adjust to their friend being a ghost now surprisingly well.
Potential wrench to throw in things. What if Danny is still a halfa in this, but his human side was damaged in his accident. He’s completely stuck in his ghost form until his human side recovers.
No one but Vlad (and Clockwork) knows of the existence of halfas so everyone Danny included think he’s a normal ghost.
"Hello? Mrs. Maddie?" Phantom sticks his head through the front door, weary of waiting on the porch. He's not sure what's inside the cardboard box, but Clockwork's package for the Fentons is heavy. "Mr. Jack?"
Instead of the jubilant welcome he's grown accustomed to when dropping by, what greets him is an eerie silence. Even the air seems hushed, the sharp scent of ectoplasm and steady hum of electricity that usually fill the house unprecedentedly faint.
He phases the rest of the way inside, not missing how suspiciously clean the living room looks from the entryway.
Gone are the odd metal inventions that littered the tables, and the tangled wiring is missing from the walls. The room isn't empty by any means—there are still magazines scattered by the couch and family photos on the walls, but something about it doesn't feel real to Phantom. It's as if he's wandered into a dream.
Dream or not, Phantom avoids looking at the photos for too long. Seeing the blue-eyed boy that died so recently, and young like Phantom himself, makes him uneasy.
On bad nights, when Phantom drifts above Amity to the imagined scenery of the boy's family in tears and the all-too-real memory of a gothic girl and beanie-ed boy coming to cry at a grave he's yet to find, only to meet him instead, he can't help but regret leaving the Infinite Realms so late.
Other ghosts left right away; Lunch Lady was eager to check up on her beloved Casper-High menu, and Ember couldn't wait to spread her music further. They both rushed through the portal the moment they could.
Phantom, freshly dead and confused, had explored the Realms first. Had spent several weeks making ghostly friends in Clockwork and Frostbite, and watching the portal from afar. By the time he crossed into the land of the living, the Fenton boy had already died a week prior.
He doesn't know how the boy died, but, seeing as his death coincided with the arrival of the other ghosts, he must've been a casualty of the culture clash.
Thoughts of the boy he didn't save weighing heavily on his conscience, Phantom does his best to ensure there are no further casualties. Getting souped annoys his fellow ghosts, but if Phantom had gone through the portal and started souping them sooner... maybe the boy would still be alive.
He knows the Fentons don't blame him; they burst into tears when he tried to apologize, and hugged him so tight he was grateful for his malleable bones and that he didn't need to breathe. The boy's friends also quickly shut down the idea when he brought it up, and proceeded to become fast friends with Phantom himself.
On especially bad nights, Phantom feels like a fake, parading about with the boy's friends and family as a mere replacement for the boy rather than as a friend in his own right.
In the current moment, Phantom cocks his head to the side, trying to come to terms with how normal and not-futuristic the Fenton home looks.
It's great for him, the various Fenton inventions' favourite target as his visits increase in frequency, but no way is it a good sign for the Fentons.
Why would they put everything away? What if a mean ghost phases inside? They could get hurt.
Worried now, he travels further in. The lack of ecto-technology persists in every room he passes.
"Anyone home?"
He spots a blue headband on the bathroom counter and realizes it's late enough that a certain redhead could be back from school. They haven't hung out casually much, the way she looks at him painful in a way he's never quite ready for, but she's great company on the bad nights. A sad Phantom miles above in the sky is no match for a concerned Jazz with a picnic blanket and Fenton Ghost Fishing Rod.
It's almost comical, how good she is at dragging him back down to earth. Both literally and figuratively.
She loves to deny it, but she's as dramatic and passionate as her parents.
Unlike her parents however, her eyes glow and the tips of her hair flickers like flame when she gets particularly excited. It's fascinating—reminiscent of ghosts, but entirely alive. Phantom loves seeing it.
He tried to mimic her once, dimming and softening parts of himself to attain that same liminality, but quickly gave up at the sensation of Coming Undone. He doesn't recall the scream or bright flash of light that woke the Dr.s Fenton and brought them running outside, but he remembers the searing pain of electricity and the sensation of being turned inside out.
He tries to forget the feeling of scorched flesh meeting new, baby-soft tissues, and the thudding in his chest rudely battering his glitching core.
The Fentons forbade him from ever trying it again, and Phantom's stargazing session with Jazz was cut short for a cup of Jack's special fudge-cocoa in the FentonWorks kitchen.
"Jazz?"
There's no response, but Phantom isn't surprised. He's usually pretty good at telling when Jazz is nearby thanks to her strange liminality, and he's not picking anything up at the moment. The headband might just be an extra.
He finishes his rudimentary search of the ground floor, finding no one. If Mrs. and Mr. Fenton are home, they're either in the basement or upstairs.
Having been in the basement before, familiar with it as it was his first introduction to the living world, Phantom opts to check there first, phasing through the ground till he finds it.
The lab, unlike upstairs, is relatively unchanged. There's ecto-tech, now including the tech once spread throughout the living floors, absolutely everywhere.
The giant hunk of metal leaning against one of the far walls is new, but its hexagonal shape and rough measurements imply it may just be an upgraded version of the portal door. The open blueprints nearby confirm it, and show that the Fentons have worked in multiple new security measures, including a filter to prevent random ghosts from crossing over freely. Phantom's core purrs, temporarily distracted by the entrancing mathematics and his own suggestions scribbled in the margins via Maddie's neat cursive.
Nice to see they're taking my words on ghost capabilities and ecto-mechanics seriously. Still no clue where the mechanics knowledge comes from, but if they're listening it's probably sound.
Maybe I'll finally be able to rest a bit once this new door's installed.
He also sees the Phanton Belt (lovingly 'misspelled' by Jack and gone uncorrected by Maddie) he and the couple worked on last time he visited the basement. It's nearly completed, the Signature Blocker wiring they were having trouble with all connected and tucked away behind smooth metal. Once complete, he won't have to worry about the GIW finding him so often.
He likes the Fentons, and Huntress is cool, but the GIW? No thanks!
The only thing making the MIB knockoffs bearable after they ambushed him and Maddie at the supermarket a couple weeks ago, is that the majority of them have been away in Wisconsin lately. It was such a great day before they interrupted too—he'd successfully souped both Skulker and Technus, then ran into Maddie while phasing through the store as a shortcut. He was pleasantly surprised to hear she needed some help picking out a model rocket in the toy section, even if he had to redirect her to said section. She was so far past it when he found her, that she was practically at checkout!
They had to hurry before the ice cream in the cart melted any further, but it was still fun. He remembers wrinkling his nose when he noticed it, the treat sloshing about in its container every time Maddie pushed the cart. He tried asking why she didn’t choose the model before getting the frozen stuff, but she just smiled in that weird, bittersweet way most Amity Parkers do when he asks them questions unrelated to ghosts.
Then the GIW blasted through a nearby wall and he had to run.
Shaking his head to re-focus, he leaves the Phanton Belt where it is. It’s still missing an ecto-converter, so it’s of no real use yet.
He phases through the basement ceiling, finding himself in the kitchen. Feeling more comfortable in the house after his jaunt to the lab, he lets himself settle, the cool tiles a reassuring pressure against his feet once he lets gravity take hold.
Taking the room in properly, opposed to the quick scan for life he did earlier, he sees that the kitchen is in pieces. The countertop is smashed, a dented fire extinguisher on the floor nearby, and the fridge is on its side. The microwave and toaster are missing, but they could’ve just been sacrifices to the Phanton Belt.
There's a new scorch mark on the wall, and a pan of green-tinted eggs upended on the ground. They're still warm, and wriggling slightly, so Phantom finishes them off with an ecto-blast.
Phantom still doesn't sense any ghosts, but the room drops in temperature anyway at the encroaching fear that there's more going on than just the couple being out of the house. He's already on edge from the abrupt lack of anti-ghost defences, so the scorched wall and abandoned eggs paint a very scary picture in his mind.
Please be okay.
The only place left to check is upstairs.
He walks, as the Fentons would, to the staircase. His body feels heavy with the weight of the situation, each foot forward dragged reluctantly into position.
He hesitates at the bottom step.
He's never been upstairs before, not even as a fly-through. He's always flown around the house to not set off the alarms.
Something about the upper floor just...feels too personal?
It's where the Fentons rest, and let down their guard. Where they end their days, and where he will find the spaces they've truly claimed as theirs.
Sam made it pretty clear bedrooms are sacred and private places to be respected. The living version of haunts. Houses, too, but bedrooms especially. He's welcome to drop by, but repeatedly phasing in when the occupants need time alone, or rearranging their stuff, is bad.
It makes sense, but, like most social etiquette of the living, it didn't quite click with him until he caught Sam in hers crying inconsolably over a picture of the Fenton boy standing in an incomplete ghost portal. He knocks before entering bedrooms now.
That Phantom refused to enter the FentonWorks' upper floor specifically, despite invitations to Jazz's room, even before Sam's explanation is a fact he studiously ignores.
As it is, Phantom is stuck. There's no logical reason he can't move forward, but something up there scares him. It pulls at his very being, drawing him in with promises of something he can't decipher. He wants to know what it is so badly, that he doesn't want anything to do with it at all. The familiarity he feels looking upward is unnatural in its strength and surety, his instincts screaming at him to run—both closer, and as far as he can.
He wants to stay downstairs, where it's a natural kind of familiar because he's actually been there before. He's had Jack's special fudge in the kitchen, made ice sculptures in the living room with Maddie, and quizzed Jazz on her schoolwork as she rushes down the hallway and out the door for school.
Better yet, he could slip back through the floor to the safety-rebirth-rest-pain-love-passion of the lab. Enter the 'Zone' as the living call it, and forget about today.
Maddie and Jack could be in trouble.
With shaky movements, he ascends the steps. Each step lands with a soft thud, like drumbeats to a Bad Ending in a horror movie. The air near-solidifies, getting heavier and heavier the further up he gets, yet he can't bring himself to escape it with a simple power activation. Whatever is up there still calls to him, louder and louder. Instinctually, Phantom knows that things will irreversibly change if he gives in and follows it.
He prays it doesn't come to that.
Clockwork wouldn't send me here if I was actually in danger...right?
He reaches the top of the staircase.
Looming ahead is an anticlimactic, simple hallway, with four closed doors.
The first three are rather plain with nothing to note, the second one smaller and likely leading to another bathroom, but the fourth instantly sets him on edge. He found it—the thing that will end this tentative peace he's found in Amity, with the Fentons and the few ghosts that coach him through their fights. A catalyst, his mind whispers.
The door appears innocent, identical to the rest save for the addition of stickers. A small rocket ship decal is plastered in the center at roughly Phantom's height, and smaller stick-on stars circle it before spiralling outward into constellations. Orion, Andromeda, the Dippers—
Soft sobs sound from behind the first door, leaving Phantom disoriented when they break through the pseudo-trance caused by the final one. He shivers, realizing he'd unconsciously stepped further down the hall, and quickly steps back, retreating to the staircase again.
"H—" His mouth snaps shut, greeting aborted at the sound of a particularly loud wail. There's speech before he can phase in to see if they need help, however, the words not indicative of an attack.
"It's our fault, Jack!"
Mrs. Maddie?
Phantom leans against the door blocking him from what must be the couple's room.
"The eggs were glowing, Jack. Five minutes on the stovetop before I took my goggles off and realized they were glowing. Considering their sensitive chemical makeup and the room's position right above the lab, they were probably contaminated the second they entered the kitchen! We've been feeding our babies ecto-radiation and didn't even notice! We kept our ecto-samples in the family fridge!"
"Shhh, it's okay Madds, we can fix this—"
"How?! How could we possibly fix this?! Our little boy, dead! Our little girl, god knows what—"
"Our daughter," Jack interrupts gently but firmly. "Jazzikins is our daughter no matter what effects we discover our science has had on her."
"...I know. I didn't mean—"
"I know you didn't, you're scared for them and beating yourself up."
"How are you not? It's killing me, Jack. They mean the world to us, and we've failed them. I'm a terrible mother—"
"We've been," he places emphasis on the past tense, "terrible parents, and I've never blamed myself more for anything else, never been this terrified, but I still have you, we have still Jazz, and in some way, we've been granted the miracle of still having Danny."
There's an unsteady inhale, and his next words are thick and cracking.
"And there's no way to go back to the way things were, so I'm gonna do my best to be better and fix things."
Now it's Maddie's voice uttering the soft reassurances, the shifting of fabric barely audible through the door. She's probably rubbing his back.
He can't see them, won't breach the door to intrude even further, but he can envision them so clearly. Collapsed on the floor just inside, Maddie curled up in Jack's arms as he hunches over, hiding her smaller frame and tears from the world even in the privacy of their bedroom. Her eyes red-rimmed, and face splotchy, his eyes welling with tears of his own, lips wobbling as he chokes out the words. Maddie's arms snaking past her husband's to caress his face, rubbing soothing circles into his skin before the tears threatening to fall can break free as she swallows her own down.
When one is weak, the other finds the strength to be what they need, no matter what.
It was a shock when, somewhere along the line, Phantom realized it applied to him too.
That all-encompassing, unconditional love they all practice is why Phantom got close to Fentons so quickly. Even faster than he did to Sam and Tucker. He still doesn't understand how they could offer it so freely to him, a stranger when they first met, but it's an honour that always leaves him awestruck and unable to refuse.
He wishes they'd care more about themselves, though, instead of getting tunnel vision on each other when things get sticky. Jazz mercilessly knocking out a GIW agent twice her size with a psych textbook after he made some snide remarks about Phantom is a memory he'll always cherish, but he didn't like that she had to hide under Lancer's desk till her parents cleared the assault charges. Watching them defend their daughter, with the same relentless fierceness Jazz defended him with, almost made Phantom feel bad for the GIW.
The Fenton Creep Stick looked downright fatal in Jack's large hands.
Phantom is about to retreat back to the main floor of the house, guilty for eavesdropping on such an emotional conversation now that he's no longer so worried for their safety, if still concerned about the state of the house, when Jack speaks again, rooting him to the spot with the mention of his name.
"We can start fixing things by inviting Phantom to live with us."
There's a questioning noise from Maddie.
Phantom's sentiment exactly. Yeah, he likes them, but to start living with them? They've usually got ghost weapons everywhere too, so it wouldn't exactly be safe?
And they have the space door. What if the temptation grows too strong to resist and he loses everything to change?
"I would love that Honey, but he's not going to say yes. We're ghost hunters."
Phantom is relieved she's okay with the idea, unsure how he’d handle a negative response even if he’s not so sure he’ll take them up on the offer anyway. A part of him yearns to accept and truly be Fraid with them, but the risks are too high.
What if I say yes only for them to change their minds? They hardly know me—I hardly know myself.
Maybe it's because their son died and they miss having another kid?
Phantom thinks back a bit on the conversation.
Didn’t Jack say they still have their son? No, I've never seen his grave, but Tuck's shown me videos of the boy's funeral.
It was odd, and made him feel squirmy, but it was nice to see the speech-givers and other attendees so respectful of the dead. The boy was well-loved, and didn't deserve to die young.
It made Phantom wonder what kind of person he was in life, and if he did.
If it is because they miss their son...
Phantom doesn't want to be a replacement.
"Phantom's a ghost hunter too."
Point.
"And we've already started making the house ghost-friendly for him," Jack continues, his voice getting loud with enthusiasm.
A pleasant warmth settles deep in Phantom’s chest, just behind his core, and he finally allows himself to relax now that the emptiness of the house has been explained. For his comfort, at that!
"Only thing left to dismantle are the Fenton Blenders in the ventilation system, then the only ghost tech we'll have running is the manual ghost shields!"
"He still doesn't have reason to join us," Maddie protests again, but her voice is clearer, stronger with what surely can't be hope?
"We'll convert the kitchen into an observatory leagues better than the public one—you've already started the demolition!—and build a new kitchen, free of ecto-contamination for our Jazzrinces."
My own observatory—?! Stay cool Phantom, stay cool. Fanboy over the stars you'd be able to see later.
"Will he even have a good view from there? The kitchen doesn't have a lot of windows."
"Dunno, that's where you come in!"
Maddie chokes a laugh. There's a thud sound and Jack says ow.
"We'll convert part of the Emergency Ops Center instead, and use the contaminated kitchen to prepare his food. We can power down the FentonWorks sign at night," Maddie starts speaking faster, warming up to the idea, "and build a device to cancel out the local light pollution. If we can get the energy levels right, we can make the stars clearer for the whole city," she grows quiet again, "Danny would like being able to share them."
"Danno will. Your plan sounds perfect."
"Our plan. We came up with it together."
"I love you, Madds."
"I love you too, Jack."
The couple lapses into silence, perhaps drifting off for an impromptu nap on the floor, while Phantom is left feeling off-footed. Without noticing, he'd started floating again. Mind whirling with what he's heard, he's too emotionally preoccupied to deal with whatever is going on with the space door.
Unprepared to face them and needing the comfort of his yet-to-be marked grave, Phantom leaves Clockwork's package in the foyer and books it from the Fenton home.
As he flies away, he offers one last glance at the upper floor and the terrifying final door within.
I was really nervous about posting it, so I’m overjoyed you like it! Reading your response made my day😊
I was hoping to tack on another story segment to this, but it’s been a while and the addition is fighting me so have this small idea instead:
Mr. Lancer notices/finds out about Phantom sneakily attending classes and wants to give him a proper seat but knows the school board (perhaps being mostly non-amity Parker’s?) won’t go for it, so he gets sneaky himself. Sam and Tucker confront Dash while he’s being mean to someone, and Lancer ‘overreacts’ using the fight as an excuse to rearrange the class seating plan mid-term and ‘punish’ Sam and Tucker (Dash gets proper punishment). Lancer forces Sam and Tuck to sit with one empty desk between them in all their classes so they ‘can’t be disruptive together’ or ‘pester whoever would unluckily sit between them’.
At least, that’s what the paperwork to his boss says, and what he tells other curious faculty staff. In actuality, it’s to ensure Phantom always has a seat between his friends so he can attend class properly instead of invisibly floating above the chalkboard. Lancer gives the trio the good window seats too.
Sam and Tucker complain about this (the forced seating changes) to Phantom the day Lancer tells them their punishment, only for Phantom to appear sitting between them the next day with a mischievous grin and armed with school supplies of his own (curtesy of Mr. Lancer).
I can’t say when the one-shot addition will be done, but I hope you’re up for a little bit more :)
One of my favourite ideas to poke at is a reverse Nobody Knows AU
As in Everybody but Danny knows that Phantom is Fenton because Danny died all the way and came back as a normal ghost.
Has no clue who he was. Still acts the same, still protects people, thinks bullies and assholes are losers and tries to save the day with the least property damage and civilian injury possible, but has no clue why people get so sad around him. He just assumes he has an aura he doesn't notice.
He spends some the little downtime he has not fighting other ghosts haunting the school when it's empty and hanging out invisibly in the sky when it's not. He hangs out a lot in the observatory and breaks into the Fenton's basement often. Usually just poking around and never actively malicious. He has no clue how he feels like he knows how their stuff works, but he does.
The Fentons themselves are actually pretty nice to him. He thanks them every now and again for shooting at the other guys but not him (even though their aim sucks). To him, they're Ms. Maddie and Mr. Jack. They never had the heart to tell him anything else.
Tucker and Sam don't become friends with Phantom again right away, of course, considering he popped out on the ghost side of the portal, but they are one of the first people to meet him.
It's incredibly early on, between when the Fentons get their first ghost detectors running, and before they even got a headstone on the grave. (closed, empty casket, of course) Phantom's started his hero career scaring muggers, returning lost kids to their parents, and the like.
Sam and Tucker came to the Graveyard to give their friend a little visit before the school year could begin, and what do you know? The sensors Jack and Maddie gave them are going off before they even step past the gate.
Being the brave little teens they are, they go in anyways after deciding there's no immediate danger and they'll probably be fine.
Only to find their very dead best friend looking very alive and chilling on his own unmarked grave.
He looks at them with zero recognition in his eyes (but an odd feeling that he knows these two and that they're safe) and excitedly asks them if they knew who was buried there, before realising that Oh wait these people are sad, apologises, and asks if they were here to mourn at this grave cause he had no issues leaving them alone.
Sam recovers first, laughs a little bit as much as it hurts, cause this is their friend, he's here, and they tell him there's no issue because it belongs to him.
They expect they'll have to answer some questions and give him the whole story about how they were his best friends and then he died, but he pretty much just goes "Huh, neat!" and goes back to chilling.
By this point Sam and Tuck are well and convinced that Yup, this is Danny. They have introductions and say that they'll see each other around soon.
Sam and Tucker are just as amazing at the deflection game as Danny is, so they adjust to their friend being a ghost now surprisingly well.
Potential wrench to throw in things. What if Danny is still a halfa in this, but his human side was damaged in his accident. He’s completely stuck in his ghost form until his human side recovers.
No one but Vlad (and Clockwork) knows of the existence of halfas so everyone Danny included think he’s a normal ghost.
"Hello? Mrs. Maddie?" Phantom sticks his head through the front door, weary of waiting on the porch. He's not sure what's inside the cardboard box, but Clockwork's package for the Fentons is heavy. "Mr. Jack?"
Instead of the jubilant welcome he's grown accustomed to when dropping by, what greets him is an eerie silence. Even the air seems hushed, the sharp scent of ectoplasm and steady hum of electricity that usually fill the house unprecedentedly faint.
He phases the rest of the way inside, not missing how suspiciously clean the living room looks from the entryway.
Gone are the odd metal inventions that littered the tables, and the tangled wiring is missing from the walls. The room isn't empty by any means—there are still magazines scattered by the couch and family photos on the walls, but something about it doesn't feel real to Phantom. It's as if he's wandered into a dream.
Dream or not, Phantom avoids looking at the photos for too long. Seeing the blue-eyed boy that died so recently, and young like Phantom himself, makes him uneasy.
On bad nights, when Phantom drifts above Amity to the imagined scenery of the boy's family in tears and the all-too-real memory of a gothic girl and beanie-ed boy coming to cry at a grave he's yet to find, only to meet him instead, he can't help but regret leaving the Infinite Realms so late.
Other ghosts left right away; Lunch Lady was eager to check up on her beloved Casper-High menu, and Ember couldn't wait to spread her music further. They both rushed through the portal the moment they could.
Phantom, freshly dead and confused, had explored the Realms first. Had spent several weeks making ghostly friends in Clockwork and Frostbite, and watching the portal from afar. By the time he crossed into the land of the living, the Fenton boy had already died a week prior.
He doesn't know how the boy died, but, seeing as his death coincided with the arrival of the other ghosts, he must've been a casualty of the culture clash.
Thoughts of the boy he didn't save weighing heavily on his conscience, Phantom does his best to ensure there are no further casualties. Getting souped annoys his fellow ghosts, but if Phantom had gone through the portal and started souping them sooner... maybe the boy would still be alive.
He knows the Fentons don't blame him; they burst into tears when he tried to apologize, and hugged him so tight he was grateful for his malleable bones and that he didn't need to breathe. The boy's friends also quickly shut down the idea when he brought it up, and proceeded to become fast friends with Phantom himself.
On especially bad nights, Phantom feels like a fake, parading about with the boy's friends and family as a mere replacement for the boy rather than as a friend in his own right.
In the current moment, Phantom cocks his head to the side, trying to come to terms with how normal and not-futuristic the Fenton home looks.
It's great for him, the various Fenton inventions' favourite target as his visits increase in frequency, but no way is it a good sign for the Fentons.
Why would they put everything away? What if a mean ghost phases inside? They could get hurt.
Worried now, he travels further in. The lack of ecto-technology persists in every room he passes.
"Anyone home?"
He spots a blue headband on the bathroom counter and realizes it's late enough that a certain redhead could be back from school. They haven't hung out casually much, the way she looks at him painful in a way he's never quite ready for, but she's great company on the bad nights. A sad Phantom miles above in the sky is no match for a concerned Jazz with a picnic blanket and Fenton Ghost Fishing Rod.
It's almost comical, how good she is at dragging him back down to earth. Both literally and figuratively.
She loves to deny it, but she's as dramatic and passionate as her parents.
Unlike her parents however, her eyes glow and the tips of her hair flickers like flame when she gets particularly excited. It's fascinating—reminiscent of ghosts, but entirely alive. Phantom loves seeing it.
He tried to mimic her once, dimming and softening parts of himself to attain that same liminality, but quickly gave up at the sensation of Coming Undone. He doesn't recall the scream or bright flash of light that woke the Dr.s Fenton and brought them running outside, but he remembers the searing pain of electricity and the sensation of being turned inside out.
He tries to forget the feeling of scorched flesh meeting new, baby-soft tissues, and the thudding in his chest rudely battering his glitching core.
The Fentons forbade him from ever trying it again, and Phantom's stargazing session with Jazz was cut short for a cup of Jack's special fudge-cocoa in the FentonWorks kitchen.
"Jazz?"
There's no response, but Phantom isn't surprised. He's usually pretty good at telling when Jazz is nearby thanks to her strange liminality, and he's not picking anything up at the moment. The headband might just be an extra.
He finishes his rudimentary search of the ground floor, finding no one. If Mrs. and Mr. Fenton are home, they're either in the basement or upstairs.
Having been in the basement before, familiar with it as it was his first introduction to the living world, Phantom opts to check there first, phasing through the ground till he finds it.
The lab, unlike upstairs, is relatively unchanged. There's ecto-tech, now including the tech once spread throughout the living floors, absolutely everywhere.
The giant hunk of metal leaning against one of the far walls is new, but its hexagonal shape and rough measurements imply it may just be an upgraded version of the portal door. The open blueprints nearby confirm it, and show that the Fentons have worked in multiple new security measures, including a filter to prevent random ghosts from crossing over freely. Phantom's core purrs, temporarily distracted by the entrancing mathematics and his own suggestions scribbled in the margins via Maddie's neat cursive.
Nice to see they're taking my words on ghost capabilities and ecto-mechanics seriously. Still no clue where the mechanics knowledge comes from, but if they're listening it's probably sound.
Maybe I'll finally be able to rest a bit once this new door's installed.
He also sees the Phanton Belt (lovingly 'misspelled' by Jack and gone uncorrected by Maddie) he and the couple worked on last time he visited the basement. It's nearly completed, the Signature Blocker wiring they were having trouble with all connected and tucked away behind smooth metal. Once complete, he won't have to worry about the GIW finding him so often.
He likes the Fentons, and Huntress is cool, but the GIW? No thanks!
The only thing making the MIB knockoffs bearable after they ambushed him and Maddie at the supermarket a couple weeks ago, is that the majority of them have been away in Wisconsin lately. It was such a great day before they interrupted too—he'd successfully souped both Skulker and Technus, then ran into Maddie while phasing through the store as a shortcut. He was pleasantly surprised to hear she needed some help picking out a model rocket in the toy section, even if he had to redirect her to said section. She was so far past it when he found her, that she was practically at checkout!
They had to hurry before the ice cream in the cart melted any further, but it was still fun. He remembers wrinkling his nose when he noticed it, the treat sloshing about in its container every time Maddie pushed the cart. He tried asking why she didn’t choose the model before getting the frozen stuff, but she just smiled in that weird, bittersweet way most Amity Parkers do when he asks them questions unrelated to ghosts.
Then the GIW blasted through a nearby wall and he had to run.
Shaking his head to re-focus, he leaves the Phanton Belt where it is. It’s still missing an ecto-converter, so it’s of no real use yet.
He phases through the basement ceiling, finding himself in the kitchen. Feeling more comfortable in the house after his jaunt to the lab, he lets himself settle, the cool tiles a reassuring pressure against his feet once he lets gravity take hold.
Taking the room in properly, opposed to the quick scan for life he did earlier, he sees that the kitchen is in pieces. The countertop is smashed, a dented fire extinguisher on the floor nearby, and the fridge is on its side. The microwave and toaster are missing, but they could’ve just been sacrifices to the Phanton Belt.
There's a new scorch mark on the wall, and a pan of green-tinted eggs upended on the ground. They're still warm, and wriggling slightly, so Phantom finishes them off with an ecto-blast.
Phantom still doesn't sense any ghosts, but the room drops in temperature anyway at the encroaching fear that there's more going on than just the couple being out of the house. He's already on edge from the abrupt lack of anti-ghost defences, so the scorched wall and abandoned eggs paint a very scary picture in his mind.
Please be okay.
The only place left to check is upstairs.
He walks, as the Fentons would, to the staircase. His body feels heavy with the weight of the situation, each foot forward dragged reluctantly into position.
He hesitates at the bottom step.
He's never been upstairs before, not even as a fly-through. He's always flown around the house to not set off the alarms.
Something about the upper floor just...feels too personal?
It's where the Fentons rest, and let down their guard. Where they end their days, and where he will find the spaces they've truly claimed as theirs.
Sam made it pretty clear bedrooms are sacred and private places to be respected. The living version of haunts. Houses, too, but bedrooms especially. He's welcome to drop by, but repeatedly phasing in when the occupants need time alone, or rearranging their stuff, is bad.
It makes sense, but, like most social etiquette of the living, it didn't quite click with him until he caught Sam in hers crying inconsolably over a picture of the Fenton boy standing in an incomplete ghost portal. He knocks before entering bedrooms now.
That Phantom refused to enter the FentonWorks' upper floor specifically, despite invitations to Jazz's room, even before Sam's explanation is a fact he studiously ignores.
As it is, Phantom is stuck. There's no logical reason he can't move forward, but something up there scares him. It pulls at his very being, drawing him in with promises of something he can't decipher. He wants to know what it is so badly, that he doesn't want anything to do with it at all. The familiarity he feels looking upward is unnatural in its strength and surety, his instincts screaming at him to run—both closer, and as far as he can.
He wants to stay downstairs, where it's a natural kind of familiar because he's actually been there before. He's had Jack's special fudge in the kitchen, made ice sculptures in the living room with Maddie, and quizzed Jazz on her schoolwork as she rushes down the hallway and out the door for school.
Better yet, he could slip back through the floor to the safety-rebirth-rest-pain-love-passion of the lab. Enter the 'Zone' as the living call it, and forget about today.
Maddie and Jack could be in trouble.
With shaky movements, he ascends the steps. Each step lands with a soft thud, like drumbeats to a Bad Ending in a horror movie. The air near-solidifies, getting heavier and heavier the further up he gets, yet he can't bring himself to escape it with a simple power activation. Whatever is up there still calls to him, louder and louder. Instinctually, Phantom knows that things will irreversibly change if he gives in and follows it.
He prays it doesn't come to that.
Clockwork wouldn't send me here if I was actually in danger...right?
He reaches the top of the staircase.
Looming ahead is an anticlimactic, simple hallway, with four closed doors.
The first three are rather plain with nothing to note, the second one smaller and likely leading to another bathroom, but the fourth instantly sets him on edge. He found it—the thing that will end this tentative peace he's found in Amity, with the Fentons and the few ghosts that coach him through their fights. A catalyst, his mind whispers.
The door appears innocent, identical to the rest save for the addition of stickers. A small rocket ship decal is plastered in the center at roughly Phantom's height, and smaller stick-on stars circle it before spiralling outward into constellations. Orion, Andromeda, the Dippers—
Soft sobs sound from behind the first door, leaving Phantom disoriented when they break through the pseudo-trance caused by the final one. He shivers, realizing he'd unconsciously stepped further down the hall, and quickly steps back, retreating to the staircase again.
"H—" His mouth snaps shut, greeting aborted at the sound of a particularly loud wail. There's speech before he can phase in to see if they need help, however, the words not indicative of an attack.
"It's our fault, Jack!"
Mrs. Maddie?
Phantom leans against the door blocking him from what must be the couple's room.
"The eggs were glowing, Jack. Five minutes on the stovetop before I took my goggles off and realized they were glowing. Considering their sensitive chemical makeup and the room's position right above the lab, they were probably contaminated the second they entered the kitchen! We've been feeding our babies ecto-radiation and didn't even notice! We kept our ecto-samples in the family fridge!"
"Shhh, it's okay Madds, we can fix this—"
"How?! How could we possibly fix this?! Our little boy, dead! Our little girl, god knows what—"
"Our daughter," Jack interrupts gently but firmly. "Jazzikins is our daughter no matter what effects we discover our science has had on her."
"...I know. I didn't mean—"
"I know you didn't, you're scared for them and beating yourself up."
"How are you not? It's killing me, Jack. They mean the world to us, and we've failed them. I'm a terrible mother—"
"We've been," he places emphasis on the past tense, "terrible parents, and I've never blamed myself more for anything else, never been this terrified, but I still have you, we have still Jazz, and in some way, we've been granted the miracle of still having Danny."
There's an unsteady inhale, and his next words are thick and cracking.
"And there's no way to go back to the way things were, so I'm gonna do my best to be better and fix things."
Now it's Maddie's voice uttering the soft reassurances, the shifting of fabric barely audible through the door. She's probably rubbing his back.
He can't see them, won't breach the door to intrude even further, but he can envision them so clearly. Collapsed on the floor just inside, Maddie curled up in Jack's arms as he hunches over, hiding her smaller frame and tears from the world even in the privacy of their bedroom. Her eyes red-rimmed, and face splotchy, his eyes welling with tears of his own, lips wobbling as he chokes out the words. Maddie's arms snaking past her husband's to caress his face, rubbing soothing circles into his skin before the tears threatening to fall can break free as she swallows her own down.
When one is weak, the other finds the strength to be what they need, no matter what.
It was a shock when, somewhere along the line, Phantom realized it applied to him too.
That all-encompassing, unconditional love they all practice is why Phantom got close to Fentons so quickly. Even faster than he did to Sam and Tucker. He still doesn't understand how they could offer it so freely to him, a stranger when they first met, but it's an honour that always leaves him awestruck and unable to refuse.
He wishes they'd care more about themselves, though, instead of getting tunnel vision on each other when things get sticky. Jazz mercilessly knocking out a GIW agent twice her size with a psych textbook after he made some snide remarks about Phantom is a memory he'll always cherish, but he didn't like that she had to hide under Lancer's desk till her parents cleared the assault charges. Watching them defend their daughter, with the same relentless fierceness Jazz defended him with, almost made Phantom feel bad for the GIW.
The Fenton Creep Stick looked downright fatal in Jack's large hands.
Phantom is about to retreat back to the main floor of the house, guilty for eavesdropping on such an emotional conversation now that he's no longer so worried for their safety, if still concerned about the state of the house, when Jack speaks again, rooting him to the spot with the mention of his name.
"We can start fixing things by inviting Phantom to live with us."
There's a questioning noise from Maddie.
Phantom's sentiment exactly. Yeah, he likes them, but to start living with them? They've usually got ghost weapons everywhere too, so it wouldn't exactly be safe?
And they have the space door. What if the temptation grows too strong to resist and he loses everything to change?
"I would love that Honey, but he's not going to say yes. We're ghost hunters."
Phantom is relieved she's okay with the idea, unsure how he’d handle a negative response even if he’s not so sure he’ll take them up on the offer anyway. A part of him yearns to accept and truly be Fraid with them, but the risks are too high.
What if I say yes only for them to change their minds? They hardly know me—I hardly know myself.
Maybe it's because their son died and they miss having another kid?
Phantom thinks back a bit on the conversation.
Didn’t Jack say they still have their son? No, I've never seen his grave, but Tuck's shown me videos of the boy's funeral.
It was odd, and made him feel squirmy, but it was nice to see the speech-givers and other attendees so respectful of the dead. The boy was well-loved, and didn't deserve to die young.
It made Phantom wonder what kind of person he was in life, and if he did.
If it is because they miss their son...
Phantom doesn't want to be a replacement.
"Phantom's a ghost hunter too."
Point.
"And we've already started making the house ghost-friendly for him," Jack continues, his voice getting loud with enthusiasm.
A pleasant warmth settles deep in Phantom’s chest, just behind his core, and he finally allows himself to relax now that the emptiness of the house has been explained. For his comfort, at that!
"Only thing left to dismantle are the Fenton Blenders in the ventilation system, then the only ghost tech we'll have running is the manual ghost shields!"
"He still doesn't have reason to join us," Maddie protests again, but her voice is clearer, stronger with what surely can't be hope?
"We'll convert the kitchen into an observatory leagues better than the public one—you've already started the demolition!—and build a new kitchen, free of ecto-contamination for our Jazzrinces."
My own observatory—?! Stay cool Phantom, stay cool. Fanboy over the stars you'd be able to see later.
"Will he even have a good view from there? The kitchen doesn't have a lot of windows."
"Dunno, that's where you come in!"
Maddie chokes a laugh. There's a thud sound and Jack says ow.
"We'll convert part of the Emergency Ops Center instead, and use the contaminated kitchen to prepare his food. We can power down the FentonWorks sign at night," Maddie starts speaking faster, warming up to the idea, "and build a device to cancel out the local light pollution. If we can get the energy levels right, we can make the stars clearer for the whole city," she grows quiet again, "Danny would like being able to share them."
"Danno will. Your plan sounds perfect."
"Our plan. We came up with it together."
"I love you, Madds."
"I love you too, Jack."
The couple lapses into silence, perhaps drifting off for an impromptu nap on the floor, while Phantom is left feeling off-footed. Without noticing, he'd started floating again. Mind whirling with what he's heard, he's too emotionally preoccupied to deal with whatever is going on with the space door.
Unprepared to face them and needing the comfort of his yet-to-be marked grave, Phantom leaves Clockwork's package in the foyer and books it from the Fenton home.
As he flies away, he offers one last glance at the upper floor and the terrifying final door within.
Danny’s ghost sense doesn’t go off, but things don’t seem quite right either… Welp, time to explore the weird new construction site by himself! And as a living human, at that! What could go wrong?
Word count: 1.2k
Warnings: some description of being buried alive, and fear of/implied possible death. Danny isn’t actually in any danger, but he’s panicking and comes to wrong conclusions.
NAILS
Thunk. Thunk. Scritch.
Danny flinches, the sudden sounds oddly grating to his ears. There’s nothing in the cafeteria that should sound like that.
“Did you guys hear that?”
“Hear what, Danny?” Tucker asks before swallowing, giving a grotesque display of chewed burger that makes Sam scowl.
“Was it Tucker’s disgusting lunch giving one last hurrah for life?”
“No,” Danny cut in quickly before they can start another fight. “I just… thought I heard some construction, or something? But weirdly echoey?”
“Are you telling or asking us?”
“Give him a break, Sam.”
“I’ll give you a break—“
“Please, guys. It didn’t sound right.”
That gets their attention. Instantly their focus is off each other and on the surrounding area.
“Ghost, not right?” Sam asks, fiddling with her lipstick laser keychain.
“Not sure.” Danny rubs the back of his neck as if to smooth back down the hairs that stood on end at the noise, unsure how to put the unsettling feeling into words. “My ghost sense didn’t go off, but it could be that they just aren’t close enough yet.”
“Your parents’ scanners aren’t picking anything up either,” Tucker chimes in, already working his way into the Fenton system on his PDA. “Should we go looking for it?”
“Nah,” Danny pushes himself up from the table after a quick glance at the cafeteria clock, “I’ll just do a quick walk around the school by myself. Lunch is almost over and neither of you are anywhere near done your food.”
“Are you sure walking is smart, Danny? Maybe there’s a better way to search? So you’re already prepared if you do find something?”
Danny brushes off Sam’s suggestion, shooting her a reassuring smile. Tucker needs no reassurance, already digging back into his burger. Danny just knows the moment he leaves Sam’ll have something to say about it again. Or maybe Tucker will start the next argument and ask when she had time to mow the football field… Her salad is looking extra fresh today.
If they focused more on their own food than each other’s, they’d be done even sooner than Danny.
“I don’t want to risk setting off any sensors and bringing my parents running unless I have to. I’m hoping it’s a false alarm.”
“Alright, but if you’re not in class we’re setting Jazz on your sorry butt.”
“I’ll be fine, cross my heart and hope to die the rest of the way.”
“Danny!”
Dodging a thrown piece of lettuce, Danny books it for the exit.
Nothing sets off his ghost sense outside, and his walk goes uneventful until the end. About to head back inside, he spies a building he doesn’t recognize down the street.
🎶Nails on the wood, thunk, thunk, thunk. 🎶
He’s torn for a moment between checking it out and ignoring it, but ultimately decides to play it safe and makes for the building.
Up close, Danny can see the building is still in the process of being built, which helps explain why he doesn’t recognize it. He still feels unsettled, though, a sense of foreboding coming over him. The building is too far away for the sounds of construction to have naturally reached him inside the school. There’s also the fact that nobody seems to be around, much less actively doing construction work, to take into consideration.
There’s no door, or any other kind of barrier to entering the mostly-finished first floor, so Danny just jumps inside after doing a final check for witnesses.
He tries a light switch, only for it to come off the wall into his hand.
Must’ve been a temporary placeholder.
The place is dimly lit thanks to sunlight shining in from the open upper floors, with incomplete walls and construction gear scattered about. The first floor may have its exterior complete, but the inside is little more than a skeleton. He accidentally dislodges some loose nails from a random pile on the ground and startles, automatically stepping back and bracing himself for a hit.
After a beat of nothing happening, he slowly relaxes, slowly letting out a long breath.
“It’s fine Fenton, get a grip.”
I fight ghosts on the daily, a weird construction sight is nothing. It’s not even that spooky.
Taking one more step back, in preparation of turning around, he promptly falls down a hole, nearly nicking his elbow on the way down.
🎶Nicely cushioned, it’s a well-made bunk.🎶
With an oomph, he lands on something soft. Soft, and slightly fuzzy, his hands running over it smoothly.
Is that velvet?
Sure enough, his eyes can pick out what appears to be plush velvet cushioning both below him, and to his sides. It’s soft, so squishy and smooth he can feel his body sinking into it. It’s dark and quiet, very little light making it down the hole, and Danny is suddenly very much aware that he hasn’t gotten a decent night’s rest in over a week.
He yawns, and debates the pros and cons of chilling there for a bit. He’s so comfortable, and it’s been forever since he got the chance to sleep uninterrupted by ghosts or his parent’s antics… some instinct tells him he’s safe there, that he won’t be disturbed…he’ll send Sam a message that he’s skipping, that’s what he’ll do… in a minute…
It feels like he’s only just closed his eyes when a loud thunk pulls him from his dreams. Still half-victim to the lull of sleep, Danny rubs at his bleary eyes and groans.
All light from above is gone, and he brains himself on more velvet cushioning the second he goes to sit up.
🎶Nails on the wood, scritch, scritch, scritch.🎶
Nonononono—
“Hey!” he yells, banging on the material with all his strength. The upper cushioning, while notably thinner than that below him, only gives in the way it would had he gently pressed it. His punches, his kicks, do not go through and no sound is made when his attacks land.
He knows he’s in danger, but cool flashes of safety—love—rest repeatedly wash over him, keeping his movements weaker than they should be and his thoughts scattered.
There’s no answer to his call, save for the shifting of something far above. The sound is dampened by the fabric, but something keeps hitting whatever’s got him captive. Looking back, taking a nap in a weird padded spot at the bottom of a weird hole in a weird construction site wasn’t his best idea.
He changes tactics and claws at the ceiling instead, doing his best to tear the fabric with his nails but to no avail. He can feel them scrape something hard and unyielding behind the soft lining, but the only think breaking with each frantic swipe is his nails.
Safety—love—rest.
He braces his back against the cushioning below him and pushes at the blockage above, which serves to only push him further into the cushioning below and doesn’t actually budge the top. His limbs flop back down, limp.
His panicked yelling turns to wailing, mind still foggy from sleep and the coffin’s strange hold over him despite the adrenaline.
Ancients, I’m in a coffin—why does it need to be a coffin!?
Memories of horror films and his own nightmares make his heart race and breathing come short and rapid. He’s running out of air, nobody knows where he is, he can’t think straight, he feels safe, Safety—love—rest, but he knows he’s not, something’s wrong—
An accidental Wail of the ghostly variety shifts the lid above just enough to allow a trickle of dirt to pool on his shoulder and sully the coffin’s once pristine interior. The scent of dry earth mingles with the that of his mother’s perfume, baked fudge and the new paper smell that seems to follow Jazz everywhere. Safety—love—rest.
Danny knows nothing else, dead to the world.
🎶6ft under, the top doesn’t budge an inch.🎶
[AFTER THE FACT]
—Hours of much needed rest later, Danny wakes up, remembers that breathing is very much optional for him, and phases to freedom now that he’s able to think rationally? He sends more than a few ecto-blasts at the coffin.
—Days later, he lectures Jazz for saying the word ‘wish’ out loud, and Desiree for the absolutely traumatizing way she went about ensuring he got the rest Jazz wished for him (to not get caught, Desiree granted the wish the old fashioned way, keeping her distance from Danny and overshadowing the living for the more hands-on parts). The fact that ghosts, and apparently by extension Danny, enjoy and benefit from sleeping in coffins (to an unnatural extent as Danny experienced) notwithstanding.
—If he buys a coffin (very much NOT lined with velvet) weeks later, it’s a secret between Team Phantom and the Manson floorboards.
