It all began when Dr. Jasmine Fenton—Jazz, to the brave and traumatized—walked into the Avengers Compound in five-inch block heels, a blood-red blazer, and a clipboard with everyone’s most damning psychological profiles printed in 12-point Times New Roman. She had been hired because, quote, “the last six therapists either quit, cried, or developed their own hero complexes.” SHIELD had gone through the best and brightest the world had to offer. They even tried a Wakandan empathy AI once. It cried. The AI cried.
So when Jazz Fenton walked in, armed with a dual PhD in clinical psychology and trauma therapy, the last thing they expected was that she’d personally know what hero trauma looked like. But she did. Her baby brother was a half-ghost interdimensional guardian who once got hit by a nuke and walked it off. Her parents were mad scientists who tried to dissect him. And her godfather was an immortal corporate vampire with a crown kink and a habit of kidnapping. She had seen things. She understood. And more importantly, she didn’t care. She wasn’t here to coddle them.
“Dr. Fenton,” Steve Rogers greeted politely that first morning.
“Please, call me Jazz,” she said with a smile that made even Natasha lower her coffee. “Or Doctor Fenton if you’re about to lie to me.”
Tony Stark made the mistake of raising an eyebrow. “Oh? What are you gonna do, psychoanalyze me into submission?”
She flipped to his file. “‘Severe abandonment issues, destructive self-worth tendencies, martyr complex buried under layers of narcissistic deflection, sleeps three hours a night, probably cries in the shower—’”
“I don’t cry in the shower!”
“That is because you don’t shower, Mr. Stark.”
That shut him up.
From that day onward, fear fell over the Avengers Compound like a thick, fragrant fog of anxiety. Jazz was everywhere. One moment she was on the roof with Clint discussing his grief over Budapest, the next she was in the lab with Bruce making him cry, and the moment after that she had Loki in handcuffs—not because he was arrested, but because he asked for them.
“I just think maybe I’m too attached to the idea of being hated,” Loki muttered, slouched on the therapy couch.
“You are,” Jazz replied, checking her notes. “You’re addicted to conflict because you’ve built your identity on being an outsider. Every time you’re offered genuine affection, you self-sabotage. You’re not a villain, you’re just a lonely youngest child.”
“I—” Loki blinked. “That is horrifically accurate. And incredibly offensive.”
“Cry harder, Sparklehorn.”
Thor, meanwhile, loved her. Adored her. Followed her around like an emotional support golden retriever with lightning powers. He kept trying to give her things—golden goblets, fur cloaks, an entire goat—until one day she casually picked up Mjolnir while fixing a crooked painting and everyone screamed.
“How the fuck—” Sam Wilson shouted.
“Why can she do that?” Peter Parker asked from the ceiling.
“Therapists shouldn’t be worthy!” Tony wailed. “It’s not natural!”
Jazz shrugged and handed the hammer back to Thor. “I was forged in the fires of Midwestern neglect and ghost radiation. You think Odin can break me? Try surviving your brother getting publicly disemboweled by a government robot while your parents take notes.”
She had no chill. None. She was the only person who called Wanda out on her grief projection, made Bucky talk about his repressed ballet skills, and forced Steve to draw a family tree so she could scream “YOUR ENTIRE FRIEND GROUP IS CODEPENDENT.”
“Group therapy!” she declared one Tuesday.
“No,” said literally everyone.
“Too bad. Show up or I will personally guilt you in front of the media using your own trauma receipts.”
And they did. They came. They came because they were afraid.
Tony sat with arms crossed. “This is stupid.”
“Tell that to your inner child.”
“I don’t have one.”
“Exactly.”
Clint sighed. “This is worse than Budapest.”
“Everything is worse than Budapest,” Natasha replied.
Wanda blinked slowly. “I think I just astrally projected my own anxiety. It’s hovering above me like a raincloud.”
Jazz didn’t even blink. “Let it hover. Let it watch you cry. Maybe it’ll finally grow up.”
Civil War? Canceled.
No one dared fight each other under Jazz’s watch. When tensions began rising between Tony and Steve over the Sokovia Accords, she locked them in a soundproof room with juice boxes and didn’t let them out until they hugged it out like the emotionally repressed golden retrievers they were.
“I will tranquilize you both,” she warned through the door. “I have the darts and the upper body strength. Don’t tempt me.”
They made up within the hour.
At one point, Nick Fury tried to get involved. He barged into one of Jazz’s sessions like he still ran SHIELD.
“What the hell kind of therapy involves throwing knives at a target while crying?” he demanded.
Jazz, unfazed, handed him a stress knife. “Want to try?”
He did. And then immediately rebooked weekly appointments.
By week four, the compound was transformed. Hulk was journaling. Peter was actually doing his homework. Wanda was learning healthy coping mechanisms that didn’t involve mind-controlling entire suburbs. Clint and Natasha were having pillow talks about emotional vulnerability. Even Loki was crocheting.
“Do you know what I’ve done?” he whispered as he stitched a duck.
“I’ve read your file,” Jazz said. “And your Tumblr tag. You’re not special.”
“I am special—”
“You’re traumatized, sweetie.”
Meanwhile, Tony—still deeply suspicious—began following her around trying to find proof she was a Hydra sleeper agent. What he found instead was her absolutely unhinged family.
“You’re related to who?” he asked over coffee one morning.
Jazz sighed. “My little brother is Danny Phantom, ghost-powered superhero and part-time physics major. My godfather is Vlad Masters, ex-billionaire and full-time supervillain with a complex. My parents are Jack and Maddie Fenton.”
Tony blinked. “The guys who duct-taped a rocket to a lawnmower and called it science?”
“The very same.”
“No wonder you’re like this.”
Jazz nodded. “Exactly. I was forged in chaos and trauma. Now I’m here to fix you.”
“I don’t want to be fixed.”
“Too bad. I’ve already started rebuilding your psyche.”
“What does that mean—”
“Check your inner monologue. Notice how it’s stopped calling you a worthless meat puppet?”
Tony screamed.
Even Doctor Strange, who allegedly had the answers to the universe, found himself in a corner drinking tea and rethinking the way he suppressed his emotions with sarcasm and facial hair.
“You’re not mystical, Stephen,” Jazz told him. “You’re just emotionally constipated.”
“I literally astral project.”
“Cool. Now try emotional projection. Maybe apologize to Wong.”
“…Wong is asleep.”
“Wake him up.”
By month two, even the press noticed. The Avengers were glowing. Smiling. Making eye contact during press conferences instead of brooding like middle school theater kids.
“What changed?” a reporter asked.
Tony grabbed the mic. “Her name is Jazz Fenton and she scares the hell out of us.”
Steve nodded solemnly. “She made me cry six times in one session. I told her about my dad.”
“She made me draw my feelings,” Clint added.
“I finally cried about Pietro,” Wanda whispered. “In public. It felt amazing. I think I vomited emotions.”
“Dr. Fenton helped me write a song about my grief,” Thor said proudly. “It’s a power ballad. With goats.”
And then came the incident.
The one time the Avengers tried to disobey her. Sam and Bucky had been arguing again. Loudly. And somewhere in the chaos, someone dared say, “It’s not like Jazz can stop us.”
Wrong.
So, so wrong.
Jazz calmly walked into the sparring room, confiscated Bucky’s knife mid-twirl, took Sam’s wings with one hand, and sat both men down with the force of divine intervention.
“You two,” she said in a voice that made the walls tremble, “are not enemies. You are trauma-bonded enemies-to-friends-to-exes-to-besties. You are a trope. You are a fanfiction tag. You are not about to regress into kindergarten slap fights because one of you forgot the others’ favorite breakfast order.”
“…He forgot my birthday,” Sam muttered.
“Because he has memory trauma! You have it too! You both need to go on a spa day and cry it out in a hot tub like normal people.”
And they did.
They actually did.
The day Jazz left for a conference—just one day—the entire compound fell into shambles. Loki started monologuing again, Peter accidentally built a sentient AI who wrote poetry about death, Wanda started glowing red again, and Tony tried to weaponize emotional damage via sarcastic limericks.
The moment she came back, they all lined up like chastised children.
“What did I say about emotionally projecting without supervision?” she asked.
“Don’t do it,” they chorused.
“And?”
Peter sniffled. “We missed you.”
“Damn right you did.”
Jazz smiled, terrifying and fond, and flipped her clipboard. “Now. Who wants to talk about their mother?”
And the Avengers, Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, sat down.
Because nothing—not Chitauri, not Ultron, not even Thanos—was scarier than the therapist who could lift Mjolnir and your deepest childhood wound in the same breath.
Dr. Jasmine Fenton was the real hero. And everyone knew it.
The portal sparked violently, howling like a wounded beast before collapsing into itself. Jazz barely had time to scream before everything twisted, the lab lights blinking out and leaving her falling—through time, through reality, through the very bones of history. When she landed, it was hard, cold, and smelled like smoke and iron. Dazed, heart hammering against her ribs, she stumbled to her feet, trying to orient herself, but the world that met her was not her own.
It was 1943.
Jazz didn’t understand it at first. She thought maybe she’d fallen into some kind of themed fair, or maybe a movie set. But the guns were real, the soldiers even more so, and the war was very, very alive. She barely had time to realize she was in occupied France before she was arrested by Allied soldiers who thought she was a spy. Shackled and marched to a base, her heart thundered against her ribs, mind racing for a plan. She was terrified. Terrified and alone.
And then there was him.
James Barnes, “Bucky” to his friends, all cocky smiles, roguish winks, and a soldier’s careful eyes that missed nothing. She first saw him when she was dragged into the tent, his face bruised but bright with the kind of restless energy that Jazz recognized immediately: a man trying to outpace death.
“She doesn’t look like a Kraut,” Bucky had muttered to Steve, who was already Captain America by then, muscles stretching the thin fabric of his uniform. “She looks like she could knock you flat.”
Steve had only laughed, but when one of the soldiers tried to push her roughly, Jazz reacted purely on instinct. She grabbed the man’s wrist, twisted, and slammed him over her shoulder onto the ground. The entire tent went still.
Bucky had whistled low, grinning like the devil himself. “Marry me.”
Jazz, breathing hard, shook her hair out of her eyes and glared at him. “Buy me dinner first, soldier.”
The entire unit erupted in laughter.
After that, things moved quickly. With no other options, no way to contact Danny or even hint at her true origins, Jazz used her sharp mind. She claimed to be Jasmine Ford, a physicist and psychologist recruited by British Intelligence to aid the American efforts on the ground. It wasn’t entirely a lie. She was a genius. She was trained in psych ops. It earned her a place in their ranks—albeit reluctantly at first—and it earned her proximity to Sergeant Barnes.
Bucky followed her around like a bad penny.
He teased her shamelessly, offering his rations, trying to slip flowers into her pockets, leaning far too close when she was trying to explain something complicated to Steve. She should have pushed him away. She tried to. But under the swagger and the Brooklyn charm, there was something broken in him, something raw and brilliant and beautiful. Jazz understood broken things. She knew how to love them.
Late one night, after a mission gone wrong and too many glasses of whiskey in a too-small tent, Bucky found her sitting alone outside, staring up at the stars. He sat down next to her without a word, shoulder brushing hers.
“You’re too good for this place,” he said eventually. “Too good for all of this.”
Jazz huffed a breath. “No one’s too good for fighting monsters.”
He looked at her then, really looked, and the air between them shifted, turned sharp, electric.
“Jas,” he whispered, and she turned to him, her heart already splintering because she knew—she knew—that loving him was going to destroy her.
She kissed him anyway.
Their romance was fierce, bright, and all-consuming, born from blood and fire. They made love in stolen moments between missions, curled around each other in abandoned buildings and muddy tents, fingers clinging like they could keep time from moving forward. He gave her his dog tags, sliding them over her head with a hand that trembled. She promised him forever, whispered it against his lips, wrote it into the hollow of his throat with her mouth.
“I’m gonna marry you, Jas,” he said once, pressing his forehead to hers as bombs rumbled in the distance. “Soon as this damn war’s over.”
And Jazz, foolish, aching Jazz, believed him.
But the war was a greedy thing. It devoured everything it touched.
It happened during a mission in the Alps. Jazz wasn’t supposed to be there. She was supposed to stay back at camp. But she refused to sit idle. She refused to let Bucky go without her.
HYDRA ambushed them.
There was screaming, gunfire, blood everywhere. Jazz fought viciously, using everything Danny had taught her and everything she’d learned on her own. But she wasn’t a soldier. Not like them. She caught a glimpse of Bucky, fighting hand-to-hand with a soldier twice his size on the edge of a cliff, and her scream tore through the night when she saw him fall.
She ran.
She ran to the cliff, dropping to her knees, screaming his name into the abyss, but he was already gone. The river below swallowed him whole.
Jazz didn’t remember much after that. She remembered the cold, the bone-deep grief. She remembered punching Steve in the chest when he tried to pull her away from the edge. She remembered clutching Bucky’s dog tag so tightly it cut into her palm.
And then Danny found her.
He burst through a portal like a ghost, tackling her to the ground, sobbing her name into her hair. He had been searching for her for months in his time. She had only been gone a year in the 40s. To him, it had been weeks.
She didn’t want to leave. She fought him, screamed at him, beat her fists against his chest. But Danny held her through it all, whispering, “Jazz, please, I need you,” until the last of her fight drained away.
He took her home.
But Jazz never let go of the past. Never let go of Bucky. She kept his dog tag on a chain around her neck, tucked under her clothes, a ghost of another life.
The years passed.
When S.H.I.E.L.D. fell, when whispers of the Winter Soldier began to circle the globe, Jazz knew. She knew. When she saw the blurry footage—him, silent and deadly, with a metal arm and dead eyes—her heart shattered all over again.
No one could stop her.
Not Nick Fury. Not Natasha Romanoff. Not even Steve Rogers himself.
She forced her way into the Avengers Compound one rainy night, shoving aside security, glaring down anyone who dared to step in her way. Steve intercepted her outside the medical wing, his shield slung over his back.
“Who the hell are you?” he demanded.
Jazz ripped the dog tag from around her neck and hurled it at his chest. Steve caught it instinctively, staring down at it, eyes widening.
“Where is he?” she demanded, voice trembling.
Steve didn’t speak. He just stepped aside.
Inside, the room was dim, quiet except for the beeping of machines. Bucky sat in a chair by the window, staring blankly out at the rain, his long hair obscuring most of his face. He looked older, haunted, not the boy she remembered but something colder, sharper.
She didn’t care.
“Jamie,” she whispered.
His head jerked up.
For a long, frozen moment, neither of them moved. Then Bucky was on his feet, stumbling, reaching for her like a drowning man. His gloved hands cupped her face, trembling, as he stared at her with wild, disbelieving eyes.
“Jas?” His voice cracked on the word.
She smiled, tears spilling freely down her cheeks. “Hi, soldier.”
He crushed her into his arms, burying his face in her neck, sobbing so violently she thought he might tear apart. She clung to him just as desperately, fingers threading into his hair, feeling the cold metal of his arm against her back.
“You’re real,” he kept muttering. “You’re real, you’re real.”
Steve stood in the doorway, silent, watching with something like wonder and grief tangled across his face. He remembered Jasmine Ford. Everyone had. The girl who had been too brilliant, too fierce, too good to survive the war. Except somehow, she had.
Later, when Bucky had calmed enough to speak, they sat together on the floor, limbs tangled, heads pressed together like they were afraid to let go.
“How?” he rasped. “How are you still—?”
Jazz smiled tiredly. “Long story. Short version? My little brother’s a half-ghost and time’s weird.”
Bucky gave a broken laugh and kissed her forehead. “Of course. You’re still beautiful you know that?”
She snorted, nudging his shoulder. “While you’re still an idiot.”
He caught her hand, bringing it to his lips. “And you’re still mine.”
She didn’t argue.
The road ahead wasn’t easy. Bucky was still broken, still healing. Jazz had decades of pain buried in her bones. But they were together.
And for now, that was enough.
Jazz was sitting cradled against Bucky, who refused to let go of her as if she might disappear if he blinked. They were murmuring low things to each other—half promises, half confessions—raw and shaky. Steve hovered nearby, torn between wanting to give them space and still needing to be there in case Bucky spiraled.
The door slammed open with a bang.
“What the hell is going on?!” Tony Stark’s voice cracked through the room like a whip. He looked wild, hair messy, arc reactor bright under his shirt, already in full damage assessment mode.
The most ungodly, high-pitched, bloodcurdling scream ripped out of Tony’s throat. Everyone jumped. Even Bucky jerked back slightly, startled. Steve winced like Tony had just physically assaulted his eardrums.
“OH MY GOD!” Tony shrieked, pointing with a shaking finger. “YOU’RE—YOU’RE—YOU’RE JASMINE FUCKING FORD?!”
Another scream, higher this time, somehow even more unhinged. Tony staggered backward like he’d seen the literal ghost of Christmas past, clutching his chest dramatically. “OH MY GOD! MY OLD MAN NEVER SHUT UP ABOUT YOU! HE—HE—”
He whirled around, ran back out the door at full speed, clattering down the hall.
Bucky stared after him. “…What the hell just happened?”
Steve dragged a hand down his face, grimacing. “You’re about to find out.”
Sure enough, less than a minute later Tony came sprinting back in, clutching an ancient, battered folder in his hands. He skidded to a stop like a cartoon character, nearly crashing into a medical cart, and started flinging out old black-and-white photographs with manic energy.
“LOOK. LOOK AT THIS SHIT!” he howled, tossing the photos like oversized confetti.
One fluttered into Jazz’s lap.
It was a photo—clearly candid—of her and Howard Stark, both covered in soot and laughing manically over what looked like a half-destroyed prototype tank. Jazz was flipping off the camera. Howard was holding up a flask like it was an Olympic torch.
Another photo landed on the couch: Jazz standing between Howard and Bucky, her arms casually slung over both their shoulders like they were brothers. Howard was grinning like the cat that ate the canary. Bucky looked vaguely exasperated but fond. Jazz herself looked like she was mid-sass, mouth open, probably insulting someone.
There were more—dozens more. Jazz with the Howling Commandos, Jazz tinkering with Captain America’s shield while Steve watched nervously, Jazz judo-throwing a massive HYDRA agent while Dugan cheered in the background.
Tony pointed at each one with frantic emphasis. “THAT’S YOU. THAT’S YOU. MY FATHER TALKED ABOUT YOU ALL THE FUCKING TIME! YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO BE MY AUNT! HE SAID—HE SAID—”
He started flipping through the folder again, muttering incoherently. “He said you were his platonic soulmate, his sister in arms, his favorite scientist, his drinking buddy—HE NAMED A FUCKING PROTOTYPE AFTER YOU, I SWEAR TO GOD—”
Jazz covered her mouth with her hand, tears stinging her eyes. A small, choked laugh escaped her.
Tony snapped his head up. “DO YOU KNOW HOW CRAZY THIS IS?!” he screamed. “MY OLD MAN NEVER LIKED ANYONE! HE CALLED STEVE A ‘TIGHT-ASSED SHINING IDIOT’ FOR YEARS—AND YET YOU—YOU WERE ‘THE GIRL WHO SHOULD’VE BEEN FAMILY’—HE SPENT YEARS LOOKING FOR YOU AFTER THE WAR!”
He sounded utterly betrayed, like the laws of physics had personally insulted him.
Steve cleared his throat awkwardly. “Tony—maybe give them a minute—”
“NO.” Tony jabbed a finger at Jazz, practically vibrating with energy. “NO. I NEED TO PROCESS. I NEED TO ASK—WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU?! WHY ARE YOU STILL HOT?! WHAT BLACK MAGIC IS THIS?!”
Jazz burst out laughing, full-bodied and bright, the sound making Bucky’s chest ache with something close to awe.
“Tony—” Steve began warningly.
“I MEAN—LOOK AT HER!” Tony shouted, gesturing wildly. “SHE’S STILL GOT THE SAME DAMN SMIRK SHE HAD IN THE 1940s! I’M HAVING AN EXISTENTIAL CRISIS!”
Steve sighed heavily, marched over, grabbed Tony by the collar of his jacket like he weighed nothing, and started bodily dragging him out the door.
“Wait—WAIT—I HAVE MORE QUESTIONS—” Tony yelped, flailing.
“Later,” Steve grunted, hauling him like a misbehaving dog.
“BUT HOW?! IS SHE A VAMPIRE?! A TIME TRAVELER?! A CLONE?! DID HE SECRETLY BUILD HER A TIME MACHINE?! I DESERVE ANSWERS, ROGERS, I DESERVE ANSWERS!—”
The door slammed behind them, cutting off Tony’s continued hysterics.
Silence fell.
Jazz wiped at her eyes, still laughing weakly. “God, I missed this chaos.”
Bucky leaned in, forehead resting against hers. His voice was rough and low. “You and Howard were terrors together. I remember… you two got arrested once for stealing a tank.”
She snickered, the sound muffled against his collarbone. “We didn’t steal it. We borrowed it.”
He shook his head, smiling faintly. “You flattened a HYDRA base.”
“Effective, wasn’t it?”
Bucky’s smile faded into something softer, more painful. He cupped her face, thumb brushing under her eye. “I thought I lost you.”
Her own hands came up to cover his. “You did. For a while. But I’m here now.”
His voice cracked. “You look just like you did back then.”
“And you…” She swallowed hard, searching his face. “You’re still you, Jamie. You’re still my Jamie.”
He closed his eyes, breathing in the moment like it was the only thing keeping him alive. His metal hand trembled slightly where it rested against her ribs. Jazz leaned into him, letting herself be held, letting herself believe, for the first time in decades, that maybe—just maybe—she could have this again.
“You stayed,” he whispered.
“Always,” she said.
He tilted her chin up and kissed her, slow and aching, a kiss that tasted like salt and broken years. It was different now—less frantic, less desperate—but no less consuming. She curled into him, fitting perfectly like she always had, like no time had passed at all.
When they finally broke apart, Jazz leaned her forehead against his.
“So…” she said slyly. “Still wanna marry me, soldier?”
Bucky gave a hoarse laugh, the sound like a prayer. “More than anything.”
Jazz grinned. “Good. Because you’re about seventy years late.”
They stayed there, wrapped around each other, the outside world temporarily forgotten.
Outside, Steve was still dragging Tony down the hallway by the collar as Tony kicked and shouted, “I’M FILING A COMPLAINT—THIS IS ABUSE OF POWER, ROGERS—”
Natasha and Sam peered out from around a corner, amused.
“What the hell is going on?” Sam asked, raising an eyebrow.
Steve just grunted. “A lovers reunion.”
Tony twisted in Steve’s grip like an angry cat. “SHE’S SUPPOSED TO BE MY COOL AUNT! I COULD’VE HAD A COOL AUNT AND YOU BASTARDS KEPT HER FROM ME!”
Sam blinked slowly. “I need to sit down.”
Natasha smirked. “Told you the old-timers had secrets.”
Back inside the room, Jazz traced the edge of Bucky’s jaw with her fingers, marveling at the small silver threads in his hair, the faint creases around his eyes. She loved every one of them. Every scar, every imperfection.
He kissed her palm, reverent.
“Stay with me,” he said. Not a command. A plea.
She smiled, radiant and fierce. “Always.”
And for the first time in a long, long time, hope bloomed in the ruins of their war-torn hearts.
Dani Phantom wasn’t exactly trying to join a government-sanctioned group of reformed (read: questionably reformed) assassins, mercenaries, and general menaces to society, but in her defense, she didn’t know what a Thunderbolt was. She thought they were just a bunch of really cool weirdos with snappy outfits who didn’t mind that she phased through walls sometimes or accidentally vaporized a training drone.
It started when Dani, on the run from some GIW idiots, phased through several realities and crash-landed in the middle of a Thunderbolts operation — specifically, right between Bucky Barnes (grumpy, armed, tired) and Yelena Belova (chaotic, armed, also tired but hiding it better).
“Is that a child?” Yelena asked, peering over Bucky’s shoulder like he was a slightly inconvenient lamp.
Bucky, gun still raised, frowned. “That’s a floating child.”
“I can see that, Captain Obvious,” Yelena snapped, flipping her knife casually in her hand. “Why is she floating like—”
Before she could finish that thought, Dani spun midair and zapped the rogue Hydra agents sneaking up behind them with a giant neon green energy blast. The agents went flying into a brick wall like someone had yeeted them across a football field.
“…Okay,” Yelena said brightly. “I like her. She can stay.”
“I—what?” Bucky sputtered, lowering his gun slightly. “She’s a kid, Yelena.”
“And she vaporized five men without blinking,” Yelena pointed out, beaming like a proud aunt. “I say we keep her. She’s Thunderbolt material. Very murder-y. Very spunky.”
“She’s like ten.”
“Exactly. She’s moldable. We can teach her the good stuff early,” Yelena insisted, already imagining Dani learning to throw knives and argue over which snacks were superior.
Meanwhile, Dani floated down to their level, blinking wide green eyes. “Are you guys… superheroes?” she asked hopefully.
Yelena immediately lied through her teeth. “Yes. Very professional. Very respected. No felonies.”
Bucky choked on absolutely nothing.
Thus began Dani’s unofficial, highly illegal induction into the Thunderbolts.
Nobody officially signed paperwork. Dani just started showing up. She helped steal Hydra files. She broke into a SHIELD safehouse for snacks. She haunted a couple of corrupt senators for laughs. The team decided if the government didn’t want her around, they should have given them actual HR training.
The real problem started when Bucky and Yelena decided they were both, separately, her legal guardian.
“You are not responsible enough to raise a kid,” Bucky said one evening, arms crossed while Dani hovered upside down from the ceiling chewing bubblegum she definitely stole from somewhere.
“And you are?” Yelena scoffed, tossing popcorn at Dani, who caught it in her mouth mid-flip. “You still get confused by TikTok.”
“That’s not the same as raising a kid!” Bucky barked. “She needs stability. Structure. Rules.”
“She needs to learn how to properly dismantle a car bomb in under thirty seconds,” Yelena said cheerfully. “You Americans are so boring.”
“I fought in World War II, of course I’m boring!” Bucky exploded.
“You’re ancient,” Yelena sniffed. “You probably think letting her get a tattoo is ‘dangerous.’”
“She’s a kid!” Bucky nearly screamed.
In the background, Dani giggled and skated on a conjured green energy hoverboard through the briefing room, knocking over chairs and sending a very concerned Red Guardian flying out of the way with a yell.
“This is fine,” Yelena said as Bucky watched in silent horror. “She is thriving.”
Thriving was one word for it.
Things escalated when Bucky tried to enforce an 8 PM bedtime.
“I’m literally a half-ghost,” Dani said, deadpan. “I don’t sleep.”
Bucky blinked. “What do you mean you don’t sleep? Everyone sleeps.”
Yelena, sitting smugly on the couch with a tub of ice cream, smirked. “Ha! The child sides with me. We binge-watch shows until 3 AM.”
“You’re killing her brain cells,” Bucky growled.
“Undead,” Dani corrected sweetly, phasing through the ceiling to avoid capture when Bucky tried to confiscate her ghostly hoverboard.
Meanwhile, other Thunderbolts members slowly realized there was a child among them and had no idea how to handle it.
Red Guardian tried to teach her Russian wrestling moves.
Taskmaster, after three failed attempts at babysitting, locked themselves in their room and refused to come out without bribes of coffee.
Ghost (Ava Starr) just accepted Dani as a background gremlin who occasionally made her coffee float across the room when she was too tired to move.
The real bomb dropped when Jazz Fenton stormed into the Thunderbolts’ compound.
Not walked. Stormed. Like an avenging angel armed with binders full of academic papers, parental rights lawsuits, and the righteous fury of an older sister forced to deal with supernatural nonsense since age twelve.
“What. The hell. Is going on,” Jazz asked, her voice eerily calm as she stared down Bucky, Yelena, Red Guardian, and Taskmaster at once.
Nobody moved.
Even Dani froze, halfway through trying to fit a stolen grenade into her backpack.
“You—” Jazz pointed at Bucky. “—brought my minor sister to an assassination mission.”
Bucky immediately tried to stand at attention like she was a general. “In my defense, she’s very good at it—”
“And you—” she pivoted to Yelena, who grinned unrepentantly. “—taught her how to hotwire a motorcycle!”
“Useful life skills,” Yelena said brightly.
“And you—” Jazz growled at Red Guardian, who tried to blend into the wall. “—gave her vodka!”
“It was for medicinal purposes,” Red Guardian said weakly.
Jazz took a deep breath, cracked her knuckles, and pulled out a thick legal document titled “Fenton v. Thunderbolts: Custody Hearing” that somehow already had signed pages, notarizations, and citations of obscure interdimensional child protection laws.
“I am taking her home,” Jazz said, enunciating every syllable like she wanted to bludgeon them with the concept of language.
Dani immediately wailed, “Nooooooo! Jazz! I like it here! They let me have grenades!”
“You are eleven!”
“Twelve and a half!” Dani insisted.
“I was giving her a flamethrower for her half-birthday,” Yelena said proudly.
Jazz pinched the bridge of her nose like she was resisting the urge to start swinging.
“I don’t even know how you people are still alive,” Jazz muttered.
“Luck,” Bucky offered helpfully. “Mostly luck. And sarcasm.”
Jazz turned to Dani, crouching so they were eye-level.
“Sweetie,” she said in the voice adults use when they’re seconds from committing a homicide, “you cannot just…join a government hit squad.”
“But they have matching jackets,” Dani said, voice wobbling. “And Bucky taught me how to punch people really hard without breaking my own hand!”
“She is surprisingly good at it,” Bucky muttered under his breath, rubbing his jaw where Dani had accidentally socked him two days prior during sparring.
Jazz looked up at the group, expression utterly blank.
“You realize that she’s technically a meta-human, a half-ghost, and a minor with no legal documentation in this universe, right?”
There was a pause.
Bucky blinked. “Technically…?”
Yelena shrugged. “Technicalities are boring. She lives here now.”
Jazz threw her hands in the air. “That’s not how this works! That’s not how any of this works!”
Dani, sensing weakness, clutched Jazz’s arm and put on the biggest, saddest puppy eyes she could muster.
“But Jazz…I finally have a family here…” she sniffled, lip trembling.
Bucky and Yelena, without missing a beat, immediately looked at Jazz like how dare you break her little heart you monster.
Jazz stared at them. “You are manipulating me.”
“Yes,” Yelena said brightly. “It’s working, no?”
Jazz closed her eyes, counted to ten in Esperanto, and resigned herself to the fact that apparently her life was now a living sitcom.
“I want a full academic curriculum. Supervision. No war crimes without prior approval. And absolutely, absolutely, no assassinations unless it’s self-defense and I’m there to supervise.”
Dani fist-pumped midair. “YES!”
Bucky and Yelena high-fived behind her back.
“I’m going to regret this,” Jazz muttered.
“You already regret it,” Bucky said, smirking.
And that’s how little Dani Fenton, half-ghost clone, menace of Amity Park, became the official junior Thunderbolt, the semi-official godchild of two retired assassins, and the proud holder of a laminated “Certified Baby Badass” card that Yelena made with glitter pens.
There were explosions. There were lawsuits. There were training montages.
There was Jazz drinking an entire bottle of wine while watching Dani yeet herself at Taskmaster with a battle cry of “YEET OR BE YEETED!”
There were Bucky and Yelena arguing over which martial arts Dani should master first (“Russian Sambo!” “No, Krav Maga!” “SHE’S A CHILD YOU MANIACS!”) while Dani snuck off to teach herself breakdancing instead.
There was Dani winning the team sparring competition by phasing through everyone’s attacks and slapping sticky notes labeled “LOSER” on their foreheads before they even realized what was happening.
There was Jazz realizing too late that she was now somehow not only Dani’s sister, therapist, and guardian…but also the unofficial mom of the entire Thunderbolts squad, a title she did not want but was too tired to fight.
And there was Dani — floating over the compound at sunset, arms spread wide, grinning so hard her face hurt — who realized for the first time in a long time that maybe, just maybe, being a weird half-ghost clone kid wasn’t the worst thing in the world.
Especially if you had a dysfunctional murder family to back you up.
Jazz Fenton did not mean to become a Black Widow. It just kind of happened. One minute she was babysitting Danny’s mess because he decided to pick a fight with Kang the Conqueror (again), and the next she was knee-deep in S.H.I.E.L.D. files, covered in blood, and being hailed as “one of the most promising Red Room graduates they had ever seen.” Which was strange, considering Jazz had never been to the Red Room. Or Russia. Or… spy school at all. She was a licensed therapist. She had a degree. She paid taxes. She made salad. She was a normal woman, damn it!
“You killed fifteen HYDRA agents with a clipboard, Fenton,” Director Fury said, pinching the bridge of his nose as Maria Hill silently sipped her coffee and refused to make eye contact. “That’s not normal.”
Jazz folded her arms stubbornly. “In my defense, they attacked me first. And they insulted my handwriting.”
“You wrote ‘Your unresolved childhood trauma is not my problem’ on a sticky note and taped it to one of their foreheads.”
“And it wasn’t my problem.”
Across the room, Natasha Romanoff watched with the wide-eyed horror of someone seeing their own ghost. “She’s… she’s me,” Natasha whispered, pointing at Jazz. “But worse. Worse.”
Clint Barton leaned in. “I think I’m in love.”
“Shut up,” Natasha and Fury barked at the same time.
Things had spiraled out of control after that. Somewhere along the way, some Russian spy network got hold of a very blurry surveillance photo of Jazz decimating an entire mercenary squad with nothing but a heel, a pair of chopsticks, and a very aggressive therapy session. They promptly assumed Natasha had gone rogue (again), and put out a bounty. A very large bounty. The kind that made even the Winter Soldier raise an eyebrow and go, “Damn.”
Naturally, Danny found out.
Naturally, he panicked.
“JAZZ,” he screamed through the phone while flying upside down over Manhattan traffic, “WHY IS THERE A TWENTY MILLION DOLLAR BOUNTY ON YOUR HEAD?!”
“I don’t know!” Jazz screeched back. She was currently riding on the back of a stolen motorcycle with Deadpool (who thought she was Natasha and wouldn’t take no for an answer) while simultaneously answering frantic S.H.I.E.L.D. calls and rerouting an emergency therapy hotline. “ASK THE RUSSIANS!”
“WHICH RUSSIANS?!”
“YES!”
Meanwhile, Deadpool, wearing a T-shirt that said “I Heart Therapy,” shouted over the wind, “YOU’RE MY FAVORITE AVENGER NOW, NATASHA!”
“For the last time, I’m not Natasha—”
“I LOVE YOU TOO!”
Things escalated when Bucky Barnes appeared out of nowhere, tackled Jazz off the motorcycle midair, rolled into a perfect crouch, and then pinned her to the ground with a knife to her throat.
“I thought you were dead,” Bucky hissed, eyes wild.
Jazz blinked up at him. “Buddy, I don’t even know you.”
“That’s what you used to say before,” Bucky whispered, full of tragic anguish.
Deadpool sniffled loudly from behind them. “I love a good forbidden lovers-to-enemies-to-strangers-to-lovers again trope.”
Jazz kicked Bucky in the face and ran.
Within three hours, every major faction of Marvel’s expanded universe was hunting her down—S.H.I.E.L.D., HYDRA, the Russians, Deadpool, Bucky, a very confused Peter Parker who thought he was supposed to save her, the X-Men (who thought she was a rogue mutant), and Kang the Conqueror (who thought she might be a time-displaced Natasha clone sent to assassinate him).
Thor, meanwhile, simply declared her “a most worthy warrior maiden” after she threw an entire food court table at Loki during a hostage situation.
“It’s about time Midgard produced more women of valor!” Thor bellowed, swinging Mjolnir with dangerous enthusiasm. “I SHALL TAKE HER TO ASGARD.”
“Get in line,” Deadpool snarled, adjusting his “I Heart Therapy” shirt.
Meanwhile, Natasha was trying to commit actual murder.
“I swear to GOD,” she growled, stalking down a S.H.I.E.L.D. hallway, “if one more person says I’m being so quirky today—”
“Natasha, babe,” Tony Stark said, popping out of a side door, “your emotional dysregulation is off the charts and honestly? It’s refreshing. You should get cloned more often.”
Natasha shot him a look so cold that even JARVIS’ firewalls froze.
Tony raised his hands. “Okay, okay, chill, Strawberry Shortcake. No need to murder me. Save that for—” he pointed dramatically— “your emotional support twin.”
“She is NOT my emotional support twin.”
“That’s not what the footage says.”
On a giant monitor, Jazz was currently choke-slamming Sabretooth into a dumpster while shouting, “YOU NEED TO LEARN HOW TO HANDLE REJECTION HEALTHILY!”
“Icon,” Clint whispered, wiping a tear.
Even Steve Rogers, paragon of old-fashioned dignity, was looking a little starry-eyed. “She’s very… efficient.”
“Efficient?” Natasha barked. “She’s deranged!”
“I like her,” Steve said firmly.
Jazz, blissfully unaware of the chaos she was causing, had holed up in a New York City bookstore, eating chocolate muffins and trying to finish her psychology notes while surrounded by six unconscious mercenaries she had “politely discouraged” from kidnapping her.
Danny phased through the ceiling with a pop and immediately tripped over one of the bodies.
“OH MY GOD, JAZZ!”
“Don’t use the Lord’s name in vain, Danny,” Jazz said absently, underlining a particularly important point about cognitive-behavioral therapy.
“YOU’RE IN A BOOKSTORE FULL OF CORPSES.”
“They’re not corpses, they’re just resting. Violence-induced naps.”
“WHAT—”
“Keep your voice down, you’re disturbing the literature.”
Meanwhile, Nick Fury was in a meeting with the Avengers yelling so loud birds outside fell out of the sky.
“I WANT HER ON PAYROLL,” Fury shouted, slamming his fist on the table. “GET ME FENTON.”
“Already tried,” Maria Hill said wearily. “She hung up and said we needed therapy more than she needed a paycheck.”
“She’s not wrong,” Bruce Banner muttered.
Tony smirked. “I mean, I am kind of curious. What happens if we just… hire her?”
“World peace,” Clint said instantly.
“Or total annihilation,” Natasha said darkly.
“Either way, it’ll be entertaining,” Deadpool chimed in, somehow already sitting in one of the chairs with popcorn.
“WHO LET HIM IN HERE,” Fury bellowed.
In the bookstore, Jazz finally looked up from her notebook to find Deadpool holding out a bouquet of slightly singed daisies.
“For you, my queen,” he said solemnly.
“I will mace you,” Jazz promised.
“Just like Nat used to,” Deadpool said, sniffling again.
Peter Parker dropped down from the ceiling. “Hey, uh, hi, Miss Fenton? I don’t really know what’s happening but I think you’re amazing and could you maybe not kill me?”
“I don’t kill people,” Jazz said, affronted. “I help them confront their inner demons and process their suppressed trauma through intensive violence-based therapy.”
“That’s… oddly comforting,” Peter said.
It all came to a head when Kang, exasperated beyond mortal comprehension, opened a portal above the bookstore and tried to yoink Jazz into the timestream.
He succeeded.
Sort of.
Danny grabbed her ankle mid-yoink. Deadpool grabbed Danny’s ankle. Peter grabbed Deadpool’s ankle. Clint Barton, swinging from a grappling hook, grabbed Peter. Then Thor decided he wanted in and hurled Mjolnir into the pile for good measure. The portal overloaded with a sound like an air fryer exploding in a church.
When the dust cleared, Jazz was standing on top of Kang, holding his own dislocated arm in one hand and a muffin in the other.
“HOW?” Kang wheezed.
“You tried to abduct a woman during her muffin break,” Jazz said sweetly. “Actions have consequences.”
Thor roared with laughter. “TRULY A MAIDEN OF WORTH!”
Fury appeared, looking absolutely done with existence. “You’re hired.”
“I don’t want a job.”
“Too bad. You’re in.”
“Can I negotiate for dental?”
“You already have dental.”
“…Sold.”
And that’s how Jazz Fenton, licensed therapist, ghost expert, and once-proud civilian, accidentally became a Black Widow. She wasn’t trained. She wasn’t programmed. She wasn’t brainwashed.
She was just tired.
And honestly? That was worse.
By the time she got back to Amity Park, her parents had no idea why Nick Fury was sending them fruit baskets or why Deadpool kept showing up at their front door with mixtapes titled “For My Future Therapist Wife.”
Danny refused to speak to anyone for a week.
Tucker made it worse by posting “Jazz Fenton, New Black Widow” memes online. Sam bought Jazz a leather catsuit “for the aesthetic” and refused to take it back.
And Jazz… Jazz just made another cup of tea, put on a sheet mask, and scheduled herself a very long therapy session.
Danny Fenton stormed into the Daily Bugle building like a man possessed, camera slung over his shoulder, sneakers squeaking against the linoleum. His black T-shirt was on inside-out, his jeans had something suspiciously green on them (was that ectoplasm? Probably), and he looked two seconds away from spontaneous combustion. “I GOT THE SHOT!” he howled across the bullpen, startling at least three interns into dropping their coffees.
From behind a stack of papers that looked like it could topple and kill him at any moment, Peter Parker popped his head out like a whack-a-mole. His brown hair was tousled from stress and probable head scratching, and his sharp brown eyes narrowed like a cat spotting a laser pointer. “What shot?” he said, voice dripping with suspicion.
Danny slapped a photo onto the nearest desk, narrowly missing someone’s lunch. It was a pristine, perfectly lit shot of Phantom — that is, himself — battling some ugly sludge ghost over Times Square. Midair. Lighting perfect. The skyline behind him dramatic as hell. He looked like he belonged on a propaganda poster for ghost superheroes.
Peter’s nostrils flared.
J. Jonah Jameson himself, like a vulture sniffing out fresh blood, materialized from his office with the speed of a man half his age. “FENTON! MY BOY!” he bellowed, grabbing Danny’s shoulder with a grip that felt like being caught in a bear trap. “THIS is what I’m TALKING ABOUT! Parker, you see this? This is journalism!”
“I take great shots!” Peter barked defensively. “Better than this amateur!”
“You take shots of that masked menace Spider-Man standing still like a mall Easter Bunny!” Jameson roared. “Fenton here got the flying ghost punk throwing a goddamn ghost punch! Action! Drama! Fear! It’s what the public wants!”
Danny tried very hard not to preen like a smug cat. Peter looked like he wanted to throttle him with the camera strap.
Danny leaned over Peter’s shoulder with all the subtlety of a Mack truck. “You know,” he whispered, “maybe if your subject actually moved once in a while instead of just posing for you, you’d have better material.”
Peter gritted his teeth so hard Danny could practically hear them shattering. “Maybe if your subject wasn’t a literal glowing neon sign with no sense of stealth, your photos wouldn’t look like paparazzi shots from a concert.”
“Oh, is that why my shots sell and yours just gather dust in the bargain bin?” Danny chirped.
“Screw you,” Peter said sweetly.
“Boys!” Jameson barked. “Less flirting, more photos!”
Danny and Peter exchanged murderous glares, which lasted exactly until Jameson stomped away and slammed his office door so hard the windows rattled.
“I hope Phantom drops you off a building,” Peter muttered.
“I hope Spider-Man webs your face to a moving bus,” Danny hissed back.
Neither of them knew that later that night, Phantom and Spider-Man would be perching on a water tower together, eating street tacos and gossiping about the villains they’d fought that day.
“You’re kidding,” Phantom — aka Danny, in his ghost form, white hair glowing faintly under the moonlight — said, laughing so hard he nearly fell off the water tower. “Green Goblin threw a pumpkin bomb at you? Seriously?”
Spider-Man, legs dangling off the edge like a kid on a swing set, groaned into his mask. “It wasn’t even Halloween. I don’t even get thematic consistency. And he monologued for like twenty minutes about being the ‘spirit of mischief’ or some crap. Like, bro, get new material.”
Danny howled with laughter, clutching his stomach.
“And what about you, Casper?” Spider-Man teased, nudging him with an elbow. “You and that sludge monster. Heard it made Times Square look like a Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards slime zone.”
“It tried to eat a hot dog cart,” Danny said, still giggling. “I had to bribe it with a corn dog just to get it off the vendor.”
There was a long, comfortable silence as they sat there, munching on tacos, the city sprawling out beneath them.
“Hey,” Spider-Man said after a moment, “you ever feel like… weirdly lucky? Like… we’re the only sane people in this town?”
Danny snorted, accidentally inhaling some shredded lettuce. He coughed violently. “Oh, God, no. I’m the most unhinged person I know. You’re just enabling me.”
“Glad to be a bad influence,” Spider-Man said solemnly, bumping his shoulder.
They grinned at each other, the best of friends, utterly oblivious that by day they were mortal photographic enemies ready to commit homicide over who got the front page.
The next day, Peter and Danny both showed up to the Bugle at the exact same time, both slamming their best new action shots onto the desk with the kind of passive-aggressive force that cracked the laminate.
Jameson, sipping what smelled like pure battery acid from his coffee cup, squinted at both photos. One was Spider-Man in a perfect mid-swing action shot, muscles taut, city blurred behind him. The other was Phantom blasting a giant ghost in the face with a green energy blast, looking like an angel of vengeance with glowing eyes.
Jameson looked up at both of them. “I’m putting them both on the front page,” he said gruffly.
Danny and Peter stared at each other in horror.
“Joint credit,” Jameson added gleefully.
“WHAT?!” they shouted in perfect unison.
“I’M NOT SHARING A BYLINE WITH HIM!” Peter shrieked.
“HE STILL USES AUTOFOCUS!” Danny screamed.
“I’LL AUTOFOCUS YOUR FACE!”
“I’LL SHOVE A CORN DOG UP YOUR–”
“OUT!” Jameson roared. “OUT, BOTH OF YOU, BEFORE I THROW YOU OUT!”
They bickered all the way down the hall, accidentally knocking over a filing cabinet, a poor intern, and somehow setting a potted plant on fire.
Later that night, Phantom showed up to their usual rooftop hangout with two burritos and a soda.
“You will not believe the jackass I had to deal with today,” Danny said, dropping dramatically next to Spider-Man. “This punk at my job thinks he’s better than me just because he’s been there longer or whatever. I swear to God, if I wasn’t trying to maintain a secret identity–”
“Bro,” Spider-Man said sympathetically, handing him the soda. “I feel you. There’s this guy at my job too. Cocky little bastard. Thinks he’s so great because he got a few good shots of you.”
Danny nearly choked. “Of me?”
Spider-Man nodded. “Yeah. Just because you are a little flashy, everyone thinks it’s hard to get a decent shot of you. Like, no offense. All that brat needs to do is just stand there with a camera for five minutes and he’ll get praised by our boss.”
Danny felt personally attacked but chose to let it slide. “Sounds rough, man.”
Spider-Man peeled off a piece of his burrito. “Maybe we should swap workplaces. You go deal with my guy, I deal with yours. Mutual destruction.”
Danny smirked. “Tempting. But I don’t think I could survive two minutes without punching Parker in the face.”
Spider-Man nearly dropped his burrito. “Wait. Did you just say Parker?”
Danny froze. “Uh. No? Maybe? Shut up.”
Spider-Man leaned closer, suspicious. “Do you work with Peter Parker?”
“Do you?” Danny shot back.
They stared at each other.
“Wait,” Danny said slowly. “You know him?”
Spider-Man shrugged. “Yeah, kinda. I work…in the vicinity.”
Danny narrowed his eyes. “So you know he’s an annoying, smug, camera-hogging little–”
Spider-Man laughed nervously. “Haha, uh… yeah… he sucks…”
Danny glared at him, not buying it.
Spider-Man cleared his throat. “ANYWAY. Uh. You know what else sucks? Ghosts. Ghosts suck. No offense again.”
Danny laughed and threw a chip at him. “None taken, Webhead.”
Meanwhile, across town, Peter was already spiraling internally.
“Oh my God, my best ghost buddy is probably best friends with my biggest work rival.”
“Oh my God, my best ghost buddy IS my biggest work rival.”
“Oh my God, I am the problem.”
The true chaos didn’t erupt until the annual Bugle Staff Picnic.
Danny showed up late, sweating through his T-shirt, sunglasses perched on his nose, and a single bag of chips as his contribution. He was halfway through dodging Karen from Accounting’s attempt to set him up with her niece when he froze.
Peter Parker was across the lawn. Talking animatedly to someone. Gesturing. Laughing.
Laughing exactly like Spider-Man.
Danny’s soul left his body.
“No,” he whispered. “No, no, no, no, no.”
Peter turned. Their eyes met across the sea of coworkers.
Danny saw realization dawn in Peter’s eyes at the exact same time.
Both of them mouthed a silent “OH SHIT.”
Peter dropped his burger. Danny dropped his chips.
They sprinted toward each other at full speed. Everyone else thought it was some dramatic teenage romance moment and started cheering.
“What the hell!” Danny whispered-hissed as they collided behind a conveniently parked hot dog cart. “You’re Spider-Man?!?”
“What the hell!” Peter whispered-hissed back, grabbing Danny’s collar. “You’re Phantom?!?”
They stared at each other in horror.
And then, slowly, devilish grins spread across both their faces.
“You know,” Danny said thoughtfully, “we could use this.”
Peter leaned in conspiratorially. “Team up?”
“Ruin everyone’s lives?” Danny agreed.
“Front page domination,” Peter said.
“Partners in crime,” Danny added.
They shook on it, sealing a blood pact of chaos neither the Bugle nor New York City would ever recover from.
J. Jonah Jameson watched from his office window, sipping his coffee suspiciously.
Something told him he was about to have an aneurysm before the summer was over.
Danny wasn’t trying to become a supervillain’s protégé. Honestly, he was just trying to survive another semester at MIT without spontaneously combusting from stress. At nineteen, between triple-majoring in Astrophysics, Mechanical Engineering, and Paranormal Biochemistry—and moonlighting as the occasionally-glowy, occasionally-exploding, semi-competent vigilante known to the public as Phantom—Danny was hanging on by a thread. A very frayed, very caffeine-soaked thread. So when one of his professors suggested a special “independent study project” with a visiting Latverian dignitary-slash-scientist, Danny said yes without thinking. He needed the credits. He needed the money. He needed the free lunch vouchers. What he did not need, apparently, was to accidentally apprentice himself to Doctor Fucking’ Doom.
At first, he didn’t know. To Danny, “Victor” was just this weird, intense European dude with a crazy sense of fashion (who the hell wore a green cape in broad daylight?) and a laugh that definitely belonged in a villain origin story. But Victor paid well, never judged him for falling asleep mid-sentence, and always had the best coffee imported from who-knows-where. Danny figured he was just some rich old nerd with a lot of quirks. Maybe a little murder-y, but hey, Danny was from Amity Park. His standards for “dangerous mentor figure” were catastrophically low.
“Daniel,” Victor intoned one day, standing over a schematic that looked suspiciously like a laser death satellite. “Tell me: what improvements would you make to a mobile interdimensional particle cannon capable of vaporizing Manhattan?”
Danny, who hadn’t slept in three days and thought this was just a theoretical design, squinted at the blueprints and muttered, “Uh… you forgot the phase stabilizer. Without it, the cannon would rip itself apart before you could fire. Also, your aim’s gonna suck unless you recalibrate the gyroscopic system.”
Victor went unnaturally still. “Explain.”
Danny yawned so hard his jaw cracked. “M’kay, so if you adjust the vibrational harmonics here”—he drew all over the deadly weapon diagram with a crayon—“and rework the mana-infused crystal lattice to resonate at a higher frequency… boom. Stable, precise, terrifying. A+ on your murder machine, Professor Von Evilcape.”
Victor stared at him for a long time. Then he laughed. Not just any laugh. A full, villainous, booming laugh that echoed through the lab and set off three alarms in the next building over. Danny didn’t even blink. He just kept doodling tiny ghosts on the margins of the schematic.
From that moment onward, Victor—Doctor Doom, actual dictator of Latveria, sorcerer supreme wannabe, world-class narcissist—decided Danny was his heir apparent. His secret weapon. His beautiful chaotic son who understood him better than any of the clowns in Latveria ever had. He didn’t ask Danny if he wanted the role. He just started sending Danny increasingly absurd “assignments” that Danny, running on Monster Energy and bad life choices, completed without registering how criminally insane they were.
Case in point: one evening, Danny stumbled into the lab with a Red Bull in one hand and a half-eaten burrito in the other. Victor handed him a device.
“Install this at Stark Tower.”
Danny blinked at the tiny, harmless-looking black box. “Uh, what is it?”
“A signal booster for quantum research purposes.”
Danny, who trusted absolutely no one and also didn’t care because he had a paper due at midnight, shrugged. “Okay, cool.”
He broke into Stark Tower that night with the ease of a sleepwalking raccoon, installed the “signal booster” inside one of Tony Stark’s servers, and left. The next morning, the news was screaming about a massive data breach that almost triggered World War III. Danny was too busy trying to finish his midterm essay on quantum entanglement to notice.
“Good work, Daniel,” Victor said approvingly during their next meeting, clapping him on the back so hard he almost faceplanted into a dimensional rift. “You have the soul of a conqueror.”
“Thanks, man,” Danny mumbled, chugging coffee straight from the pot.
Victor took it a step further. He started introducing Danny at fancy functions. “This is Daniel. He is my most promising apprentice. One day he will inherit my empire.”
Danny, half-dead from exams and not paying attention, just nodded absently and said, “Yup. Love the Empire Strikes Back. Great movie. Big fan.”
Victor beamed.
It wasn’t until six months later, after the “Study Abroad” paperwork (actually an all-expenses-paid trip to Latveria) and the suspiciously grand laboratory gifted to him “for his brilliance,” that Danny realized something was deeply wrong.
He was skimming through some documents on Victor’s encrypted network—because of course Doom had an encrypted network called “DoomNet”—when he found it.
Last Will and Testament of Victor Von Doom: In the event of my death, all of Latveria, my scientific research, all proprietary technology, magical artifacts, nuclear launch codes, hidden doomsday devices, and the title of Supreme Monarch will pass to my chosen heir: Daniel Fenton, aka “Phantom,” aka “My Beautiful Disaster Child.”
Danny read it three times.
“Wait. Wait, wait, wait,” he whispered, voice cracking. “Am I—AM I A VILLAIN PRINCE?!”
Cue the world’s most pathetic breakdown.
“NO NO NO NO NO. I JUST WANTED A DAMN SCHOLARSHIP!” He hurled a coffee mug at the wall. It phased through because he lost control of his intangibility again. “THIS IS WHAT I GET FOR TRUSTING ANYONE IN A CAPE.”
Danny spent the next two hours panic-researching Victor Von Doom. It was bad. It was really bad. It was, like, world-endingly bad. Murder records. Wars. Kidnapping Reed Richards’ kids. Banning Beyoncé from Latveria because she rejected his dinner invitation. BAD.
And it was too late. Doom had gone on international television that morning and announced Danny’s name as his successor.
“I have chosen my heir,” Doom declared, standing proudly atop his gold-plated balcony while cameras flashed below. “The boy shall inherit everything I have built. Bow before your future king, Daniel Fenton!”
Meanwhile, in his MIT dorm room, Danny choked on his cereal.
“Oh my God,” Tucker screamed over Facetime. “YOU’RE DOOM JUNIOR!”
Jazz was furiously typing. “Danny, that’s treason. Like, actual treason.”
Sam just stared at him with unholy glee. “So… when are you conquering America?”
“NEVER,” Danny screeched.
Too late. The Avengers showed up at MIT the next day. It was not subtle.
Tony Stark crashed into Danny’s quantum physics lecture, kicked open the door, and pointed dramatically at him. “YOU!”
Danny, hunched over his notes and running on negative hours of sleep, blinked. “Me?”
“Yeah, you, Doom Boy,” Tony said, stomping down the aisle while half the class screamed and ducked for cover. “You hacked my servers, hijacked my satellites, and installed a literal doom-signal into my mainframe. Care to explain, junior dictator?”
Danny held up his hands. “Okay, look. In my defense, I thought it was a Wi-Fi booster.”
Steve Rogers leaned in. “Are you actively trying to destroy America?”
Danny’s eye twitched. “Sir, I am actively trying to pass Organic Chemistry.”
Natasha Romanoff clicked a pen menacingly. “Are you or are you not plotting to overthrow the world?”
Danny hesitated. “I mean… define ‘plotting’?”
There was a long, painful silence.
Tony sighed, dragging a hand down his face. “Kid. You’re on, like, several different international watchlists. Half of SHIELD thinks you’re planning to nuke New York.”
Danny’s voice cracked. “I didn’t even know how to do laundry until last month.”
And thus began the most chaotic custody battle in history: Doom versus the Avengers versus Danny versus himself.
Victor, naturally, was thrilled. He sent Danny monogrammed armor. A custom throne. A letter that read “My son, all great rulers are hated before they are loved. However feat not. Seize your destiny.”
Danny sent it back with a post-it note that said “pls stop.”
Tony tried to recruit him instead. “Work for me. You like tech, you like coffee, you’re already better at hacking than Peter—”
“HEY,” Peter Parker shouted from across the hall.
Danny groaned into his hands. “I don’t want to work for anyone! I just want a nap!”
Sam Wilson patted him on the back sympathetically. “Welcome to adulthood, kid.”
Things escalated horrifyingly fast. Latverian officials tried to smuggle Danny out of Massachusetts under the cover of night. Doom built a life-sized gold statue of him in Latveria’s capital square. The Avengers started putting “Phantom Threat Level: High” on their briefing files. Nick Fury cornered him in a diner and deadpanned, “Son, you’re one bad day away from becoming an international incident.”
Danny, shoving pancakes in his mouth, muffled, “I don’t wanna.”
Of course, life didn’t let him off that easy.
When Doom inevitably “died”—allegedly vaporized by a malfunctioning time machine because of course he did—Danny woke up to find a legal team at his dorm room.
“Congratulations, Your Majesty,” the lead lawyer said with an evil smile. “You are now King of Latveria.”
Danny fainted on the spot.
He woke up fifteen minutes later to find Sam fanning him with a Doom flag and Tucker wearing a Latverian general’s hat he stole from one of the lawyers.
Danny didn’t really think it through. In his defense, there weren’t a lot of guidebooks titled “How to Deal with the Psychotic Future Version of Yourself You Accidentally Redeemed But Are Still Terrified Of.” Jazz suggested therapy. Sam suggested containment. Tucker suggested launching him into deep space. Danny, brilliant and seventeen and sleep-deprived after three days of babysitting a now mostly-reformed Dan Phantom, decided, “Screw it,” ripped open a portal to another dimension, and told him to “go make friends.” Dan grinned, sharp-toothed and wicked, and without hesitation dove through the swirling green and blue mass of unstable ectoplasmic energy.
Thus began the Marvel Universe’s greatest headache.
The first incident happened barely four hours after Dan’s arrival. New York woke up to a brand new urban legend: a demon with burning blue eyes and silver-streaked black hair beating the living shit out of Shocker in the middle of Times Square. People recorded it, of course. Viral videos showed Shocker screaming, running, trying desperately to aim his gauntlets while Dan literally phased through every attack like he was swatting a mosquito. Somewhere in the footage, Dan shouted, “C’MON, MAN! HIT HARDER, YOU’RE EMBARRASSING YOURSELF!” before drop-kicking Shocker into a halal cart.
The Avengers noticed. Specifically, Spider-Man noticed, because Peter Parker had never been so personally offended by something in his life.
“He’s stealing my bit,” Peter whined to MJ later, scrolling through TikTok and watching the mysterious “Blue Devil” bodyslam the Rhino into a GAP storefront. “That’s MY thing. Wisecracking and beating up guys in animal costumes.”
MJ, deadpan as ever, didn’t even look up from her book. “Maybe if you hit the gym once in a while, you could still compete.”
Elsewhere, S.H.I.E.L.D. was losing their collective shit.
Nick Fury reviewed the footage with the grim severity of a man preparing for war. “I want every available agent tailing him. Find out what he is, what he wants, and for God’s sake, do not engage.”
Unfortunately, Dan had other plans. He wanted engagement. Constant, chaotic, no-holds-barred engagement.
When the X-Men tried to approach him peacefully—because, to be fair, a floating, smirking, six-foot-seven superpowered anomaly screamed “mutant”—Dan responded by challenging Wolverine to a fistfight in the middle of Central Park.
“You smell angry,” Dan said, cracking his knuckles and grinning wide. “I like that. C’mon, Knives. Show me what those claws can do.”
Wolverine, never one to back down from a challenge, growled and immediately lunged. It took six X-Men to pull them apart. Logan was half in love and half homicidal.
Jean Grey, massaging her temples afterward, sighed, “He’s not a mutant. He’s something else. Something… worse.”
Meanwhile, Dan wasn’t picky about his opponents. Hero? Villain? Civilian? If you looked at him wrong, he was ready to throw hands. He got into a screaming match with Daredevil over a parking spot. He suplexed Deadpool into a dumpster for calling him “Discount Nightcrawler.” He made Venom cry after a fifteen-minute insult match that Eddie Brock would never fully recover from.
The Fantastic Four tried to reason with him.
“We can help you,” Reed Richards said, voice patient like he was talking to a rabid cat. “We have resources—”
Dan blew up the top three floors of the Baxter Building and left a sticky note on the ruins that said, “UR WELCOME - D.”
The thing was, Dan wasn’t evil anymore. Not really. He wasn’t trying to take over the world. He wasn’t murdering anyone. He just had a lifetime’s worth of rage, grief, and unresolved abandonment issues—and no idea what to do with them except get into constant, escalating, deeply unnecessary fights.
It got to a point where the heroes started treating Dan like a natural disaster.
“Code Blue,” a harried S.H.I.E.L.D. agent barked over comms one afternoon. “I repeat, Code Blue! The entity is currently body-slamming Juggernaut through Grand Central!”
Cap sighed, already pulling on his shield. “Alright, team. Let’s move out.”
Black Widow holstered her guns. “At least it’s not another alien invasion.”
Thor, cheerful as ever, grinned. “I relish a good battle!”
Hawkeye muttered, “You relish being concussed.”
Dan, for his part, loved the attention. He loved the chaos. He loved the feeling of letting loose in a world that could actually handle him, where nobody flinched when he punched through a concrete wall or melted a tank with a blast of pure ectoplasmic fire.
He was happy, in his deeply deranged, borderline-psychotic way.
That didn’t mean he was easy to deal with.
After Dan singlehandedly wrecked a Hydra base (“I was bored, okay?” he said when the Avengers confronted him), Tony Stark decided to try a different tactic.
“Look, Big and Blue,” Tony said, lounging on the ruined remains of what was once a cutting-edge jet. “Ever think about channeling that rage into something… productive? Like, say, joining the Avengers?”
Dan blinked, actually considering it for a full five seconds.
Then he laughed so hard he almost dropped a car on Tony’s head.
“Me? Work with you guys? Under orders? Are you high, Tin Man?”
Steve Rogers, exhausted and already developing a migraine, tried. “You could do a lot of good—”
“I am doing good,” Dan said brightly. “I’m keeping you on your toes. No need to thank me.”
“You broke Clint’s arm last week,” Natasha reminded him.
“He’ll live.”
“He was trying to give you a granola bar.”
Dan shrugged, utterly unbothered. “He looked suspicious.”
The closest thing Dan had to a friend was Deadpool. Not because they got along—they didn’t, not even a little—but because Deadpool was the only one insane enough to keep up.
They had a rivalry. A bloody, chaotic, absolutely incomprehensible rivalry that involved prank wars, bar fights, and one extremely regrettable karaoke contest that left three bars in ruins and a citywide ban on musical gatherings involving either party.
“I hate you,” Dan snarled once, pinning Deadpool to a wall after a four-hour chase across Manhattan.
“I hate you more!” Wade screeched back, thrilled beyond belief.
“Great! Friends forever!” Wade cackled.
Dan screamed into the void.
Meanwhile, Danny Fenton was back in his own dimension, blissfully unaware, telling Jazz, “See? Everything’s fine.”
Jazz, reading a news article titled “Unknown Supernatural Entity Causes $3 Billion in Property Damage, Punches Doctor Doom in the Face” quietly considered strangling him.
Eventually, the heroes adapted. Dan was like bad weather. You prepared for him. You kept an eye out for ominous blue clouds and spontaneous outbreaks of screaming. Sometimes he helped. Sometimes he made things worse. Mostly, he made things interesting.
There were even betting pools.
“Fifty bucks says he crashes this gala,” Sam Wilson said, tightening his bowtie before a high-profile Avengers event.
“Hundred says he wears a suit to crash it,” Bucky Barnes added, deadpan.
“Two hundred he punches Tony before dessert,” Carol Danvers said, sipping champagne.
Dan did crash the gala. In a tuxedo.
He punched Tony before the entrees even made it out.
By then, nobody was even surprised.
The turning point came when Galactus tried to devour Earth (again). The heroes mobilized. Big stakes. High drama. Apocalyptic dread.
Dan showed up in the middle of the chaos, lazily floating beside Captain Marvel.
“Hey,” he said, tilting his head at the giant cosmic entity looming in the sky. “I’m gonna punch that.”
Carol, blinking, said, “You can’t just punch Galactus.”
Dan, already cracking his knuckles, grinned. “Watch me.”
And then he did.
Nobody knew how. It defied physics, logic, and every law of reality. But somehow, Dan punched Galactus so hard the giant stumbled, clutched his jaw, and left.
There was a beat of stunned silence.
Deadpool clapped. “THAT’S MY BEST ENEMY!”
Thor dropped his hammer.
Tony sat down on the ground and decided to reconsider all his life choices.
Steve very seriously said, “We are never letting him leave.”
Thus, against all odds, Dan Phantom—the violent, chaotic, semi-redeemed ghost of a now-erased dystopian future—became an honorary Avenger much to his own dismay.
He didn’t exactly follow rules. He certainly didn’t behave. But when Thanos invaded three months later and Dan showed up by suplexing a Leviathan out of the sky and riding it into battle like a demented cowboy, nobody complained.
Well. Except the Leviathan.
In the end, Danny was right.
Everything was fine.
If your definition of “fine” included a psychotic ghost terrorizing both heroes and villains equally, destabilizing multiple governments, and becoming a beloved menace.
Danny Fenton hadn’t meant to punch Captain America in the face. In fact, he’d spent the better part of the week trying not to punch anyone, despite the rapidly growing laundry list of reasons to lose his cool—like not sleeping for seventy-two hours because Technus decided to merge his data with every Bluetooth speaker in the tri-state area, or the GIW tracking his every move again, or that weird, suspicious portal energy he kept picking up from somewhere labeled Stark Tower. Danny was running on fumes, ghostly adrenaline, and one too many Red Bulls when it happened. Really, the stars aligned perfectly for an international incident.
He’d only been in New York for six hours, trying to find the source of the energy spike without alerting every superhero on the block—because the last thing he needed was to get into it with the Avengers. Again. The last time had involved Hulk trying to punch a ghost and failing miserably, Thor throwing Mjölnir into the Ghost Zone, and Iron Man demanding to know if ectoplasm was FDA approved. It was a whole thing.
Danny was crouched on the rooftop of some high-rise, scanning with a modified Fenton Specter-Tracker, eyes bloodshot and twitching slightly. He hadn’t slept since Monday. It was Thursday.
“Hey, kid,” came a voice behind him, calm but firm.
Danny spun like a feral cat, eyes glowing, hair frizzed out with ghost static. He registered the silhouette of a man—tall, broad-shouldered, carrying a star-shaped shield—and his brain went danger. Ghost hunter? No. GIW agent? No. Super-soldier-hydra-time-travel-experiment?
He didn’t even process it. He just swung.
There was a crack like a thunderclap, followed by the very human sound of pain—a grunt that broke mid-voice like it had surprised the man himself. Captain Steve Rogers staggered back, hand pressed to his jaw, blinking stars out of his vision and trying to comprehend the fact that someone had just hit him hard enough to make him feel it. Not just feel it—wince. His serum-enhanced, war-hardened, literally-punched-by-Thor-once jaw hurt.
Danny stood frozen, fist still outstretched, pupils blown wide in horror.
“Oh my God. Oh my God. I just punched Captain America. I just decked the star-spangled man with a plan. I am so sorry—I thought you were a ghost! Or like—a time-traveling war criminal! Wait, that’s redundant—”
“Okay, wow,” Steve mumbled, touching his jaw again. “That’s definitely gonna bruise.”
Danny looked like he was about to combust. “Why were you behind me like that?! Who just materializes out of nowhere and says ‘hey, kid’ in the middle of a rooftop stakeout?! I thought I was being ambushed!”
Steve blinked. “I was asking for directions.”
Danny gasped. “You were WHAT?”
Steve looked sheepish. “Tony dropped me off on the wrong building. Said, and I quote, ‘GPS is for cowards.’ I’ve been circling the same three blocks for twenty minutes.”
Danny stared. “Captain America got lost and asked a sleep-deprived half-ghost teenager for directions?”
“I didn’t know you were a sleep-deprived half-ghost teenager,” Steve said defensively. “You looked… competent. Specter-tracker aside.”
Danny made a strangled noise and sat down hard, face buried in his hands. “I’m going to be assassinated by your PR team.”
Steve rubbed his jaw again. “You’re stronger than you look.”
“That is not the point here!”
“No, seriously,” Steve insisted, kneeling down. “That punch? I’ve taken hits from Thanos. You rattled me.”
Danny peeked through his fingers. “Are you flirting with me?”
“What? No!”
“You’re complimenting my punch like it’s a pickup line.”
“I’m—okay, no. You’re a kid.”
“I’m nineteen!”
Steve squinted. “You look like you’ve been through five timelines and one midlife crisis.”
“I have!” Danny wailed. “Do you know what it’s like to babysit the entire ghost population of the afterlife and then accidentally elbow Thor in the ribs during a training session because you forgot he was behind you?! I’m a walking international crisis!”
Steve paused. “Wait. You trained with Thor?”
“Long story. I died once, came back, now I punch ghosts for fun and may or may not be legally considered a WMD by six governments.”
Steve took a long breath. “Do all teenagers do this now? Or is this just a… you thing?”
Danny groaned. “Just me. I’m special.”
Steve lowered his shield and sat cross-legged like they were about to have a heart-to-heart. “You okay, kid?”
“No! I haven’t slept in three days, my enemies keep possessing animatronics to scare me, and I just committed accidental patriotic assault!”
Steve tried not to smile. He really did. “You got a name?”
Danny sighed. “Danny. Danny Fenton. Or Phantom. Depends on how you know me.”
Steve looked intrigued. “You’re the ghost kid.”
Danny flinched. “I prefer ghost young adult, thank you.”
“You’re the one Nick Fury won’t shut up about.”
Danny’s eyes widened. “He talks about me?”
“Nonstop. Every meeting. ‘The ghost kid leveled a tank with his pinky finger!’ ‘The ghost kid opened a portal to another dimension with a yawn!’” Steve did a passable impression of Fury’s gruff voice. “‘You think your team’s strong? Try containing a seventeen-year-old who talks to the dead like it’s a podcast!’”
Danny laughed, a bit unhinged, definitely sleep-deprived. “I did do the tank thing. That was an accident.”
“Fury thinks you’re the future.”
“That’s horrifying.”
“You’re not wrong.”
Danny looked at him warily. “Are you gonna try to recruit me?”
Steve considered. “Honestly? Not until you’ve slept. You look like you’d punch Thor if he asked you for coffee.”
“I have, and I did, and he was proud of me.”
“…Of course he was.”
There was a moment of silence, just the city humming beneath them, both of them sitting cross-legged like two war veterans who somehow found themselves on a rooftop in Manhattan instead of the battlefield they were clearly built for.
“So,” Steve said eventually. “You gonna tell me why you’re camped out here?”
Danny pointed to the tracker. “Someone in that building”—he gestured vaguely toward Stark Tower—“is leaking interdimensional ghost radiation like it’s designer cologne. I was trying to be subtle.”
Steve looked at the tower. “That’s Tony.”
Danny blinked. “Tony Stark is radiating ectoplasmic energy?”
“Yeah. He bought a ghost portal off eBay last month. Said it’d be good for ‘multiverse surveillance.’ It… got loose.”
Danny stood up so fast he swayed. “I knew it! I told Jazz that someone was messing with rogue ghost portals again and she said I was paranoid! I am paranoid! But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong!”
“You’re… very high-strung.”
Danny glared. “Do you have a collection of alternate-universe versions of yourself constantly trying to kill you?”
Steve held up his hands. “Fair.”
Suddenly, Danny wobbled. His legs buckled, and Steve caught him with a grunt. “Woah, hey, hey! Okay, that’s enough hero time for now.”
“I’m fine,” Danny slurred. “I’ve just been awake for three days. It’s not a problem unless I—”
He passed out.
Steve stared down at the kid—a half-dead, glowing teen who apparently punched like a demigod and talked like a sitcom character on speed—and muttered, “…Tony owes me so much alcohol for this.”
He slung Danny over his shoulder and started walking toward the Tower.
A few floors down, Tony Stark looked up from his holograms and blinked as the elevator pinged open.
Steve walked in carrying what looked like a sleep-dead raccoon in human form.
Tony blinked. “Did you adopt a raccoon?”
“He punched me.”
Tony raised an eyebrow. “…You?”
“Knocked me back five feet.”
Tony whistled. “Damn. Strong raccoon.”
“He’s nineteen. Name’s Danny Fenton. Ghost kid.”
Tony’s eyes widened. “Oh. Oh. The one Fury thinks is a nuclear bomb with social anxiety.”
Steve dumped Danny on the nearest couch. “Let him sleep. He earned it.”
Tony looked down at Danny. “Should I be worried he’s glowing?”
“No. But maybe hide the ghost portal.”
Tony scoffed. “I knew someone was tracking it.”
Danny stirred, groaning, “Stark, I swear to the Ancients, if I wake up and your toaster is haunted again, I’m putting salt in your arc reactor…”
Steve stared. “Wait, what?”
Tony sighed. “Long story. Ghosts don’t like me. Something about my attitude.”
Steve sat down, already dreading explaining this to Fury.
Across the room, Danny turned on his side, mumbled, “Tell the Captain I didn’t mean to punch him…”
Steve looked over, surprisingly fond. “It’s fine, kid. I’ve had worse.”
Danny let out a soft snore.
Tony grinned. “You’re getting soft.”
“He reminds me of Bucky.”
Tony choked. “Excuse me?”
Steve shrugged. “If Bucky died and came back with ghost powers, he’d absolutely punch me in the face for fun.”
“…Okay, yeah, that tracks.”
And thus began the weird, wonderful, mildly catastrophic journey of Danny Fenton, ghost boy, menace to the Avengers, and accidental best friend to Captain America, who still rubbed his jaw now and then, remembering the punch that nearly knocked out a super-soldier’s tooth.
When Danny Fenton got into MIT, he thought the biggest challenge would be balancing ghost hunting with college coursework. What he didn’t expect was to impress Dr. Jane Freaking Foster—renowned astrophysicist, literal genius, the mind behind the Foster Theory, and, unbeknownst to her, his idol since age thirteen—during a campus science expo when he presented his thesis on interdimensional ectoplasmic lattice fluctuations as a potential fuel source for wormhole stabilization. He thought she’d walk by his booth with a polite smile. Instead, she paused, squinted at his equations, asked three rapid-fire questions, then turned to the MIT faculty and said, “Is this kid legally allowed to work in a government lab yet?”
That’s how he became her apprentice.
Danny thought it would be, you know, an internship. Fetch coffee, carry papers, maybe input data if he got lucky. What he didn’t expect was to be living in New Mexico three months later, standing on a roof beside Jane Foster while she casually pointed at the sky and said, “If this gravitational anomaly maintains its trajectory, we’ll have a Yggdrasil branch brush up against the heliopause by Tuesday. That’s new.”
Danny nodded, mostly pretending he understood.
What neither of them anticipated was Thor crashing into their lives again like a golden retriever with a god complex and a hammer. He landed dramatically during a research presentation, lightning still fizzing off his cape, and made such eye contact with Jane that the projector screen behind them shorted out.
And then he saw Danny.
“Young one!” Thor bellowed, eyes wide, blond hair tousled by divine winds, “You must be her son.”
Danny blinked. “I—what?”
“Of course!” Thor clasped his shoulder. “You have her radiant intellect and tenacity. Truly, you are worthy of Midgard’s finest mother.”
“I—she’s not—” Danny tried.
Thor turned to Jane, face alight. “You did not tell me you had borne a child! And one so strong in spirit! A scholar of the stars!”
Jane rubbed her temples. “Thor. He’s nineteen. I met him last month. He’s my apprentice. He is not my son.”
Thor shook his head gravely. “Say no more, Jane. I understand. You wished to protect him from the dangers of our past. But I vow upon Mjolnir’s handle, I shall be a father to him.”
“What the hell,” Danny muttered.
Over the next few days, things escalated fast.
Danny woke up one morning to find a goat outside the lab. A live goat. Wearing a ribbon. The tag read: For my brave son, may his mornings be strong of milk and noble of beard. Jane nearly choked on her cereal. Darcy screamed and immediately named the goat “Spacey.”
Thor showed up during Danny’s lecture on cosmic radiation and brought a sack of Asgardian textbooks written in glowing runes, which promptly caused two lab interns to faint and one professor to file a complaint.
Danny begged Jane to tell him this would stop.
“No,” Jane said, sipping her coffee without looking up. “You’re his emotional support stepson now.”
“I don’t want to be anyone’s emotional support anything!” Danny cried. “I have ectoplasmic trauma and insomnia!”
But Thor persisted.
He invited Danny to spar in the desert, claiming it would “toughen his warrior instincts.” Danny blasted a crater in the sand when a ghost startled him mid-match, and Thor wept with pride. “Such fire! Truly, a son worthy of thunder.”
Jane sighed. “You’re going to give him a complex.”
“I already have a complex!” Danny yelled from where he was half-buried in sand.
Then came the night Thor pulled Danny aside with intense solemnity.
“Daniel,” he said, kneeling, “I seek your blessing.”
Danny froze, halfway through a sandwich. “I—what—blessing for what?”
“To court your mother.”
“She’s NOT my—!”
Thor raised a hand. “Please. I know you wish to protect her. But my heart is true. I have spent long hours learning Midgardian courtship. Observe.”
He pulled out a guitar. A guitar. From nowhere. And began strumming aggressively while singing off-key.
“Oh Jane, fairest in the stars, your eyes burn like a neutron quasaaaaaar—”
Danny screamed into his sandwich.
Jane screamed into her coffee.
Darcy recorded the entire thing.
By the time the Avengers got wind of what was happening, it was too late. Tony Stark showed up purely out of pettiness.
“So this is the ‘son,’ huh?” he said, looking Danny up and down like he was a new model of iPhone. “You do look like Jane. Same ‘don’t talk to me before coffee’ vibe. But with a sprinkle of sleep-deprived raccoon.”
Danny glared. “You must be the one Jane threatens to launch into orbit when she’s annoyed.”
“See? Family resemblance,” Tony muttered.
Then Steve Rogers took Thor aside and whispered, “Are you sure he’s her kid? Jane would’ve told us if she had a child.”
Thor nodded gravely. “It is the only explanation. He speaks with passion, has knowledge of the stars, and I saw him summon green fire from his hands!”
“It was a ghost, Thor,” Danny shouted from across the lab. “It was literally a ghost trying to possess a vending machine!”
“Exactly!” Thor beamed.
“Thor. I’m nineteen. Jane is thirty-seven.”
“She is a goddess among mortals. Perhaps she birthed you when she was five.”
“That’s not how—YOU KNOW WHAT, NEVER MIND.”
Soon, even Loki showed up, slinking into the lab with a smirk like a serpent in silk.
“I had to see for myself,” he purred, circling Danny like a shark. “The mortal child who ensnared my brother’s affections.”
Danny just blinked. “I’m not his kid. Or Jane’s. I’m not even sure I’m awake right now.”
Loki chuckled. “You’ll make an excellent prince. Do you have any interest in necromancy?”
“I’m a ghost half the time,” Danny deadpanned. “Define interest.”
Loki grinned wider.
Eventually, S.H.I.E.L.D. got involved. Fury showed up, took one look at the scene—the goat eating research notes, Thor trying to build Danny a golden throne, Jane yelling about radiation levels, and Danny levitating out of sheer stress—and muttered, “Nope,” before turning around and leaving.
But beneath all the chaos, Danny… didn’t hate it.
Jane never treated him like a kid. She taught him everything, from solar flares to Bifrost trajectories. She let him make mistakes, then helped him fix them. She told him he was brilliant, and for once, he kind of believed it. And Thor, for all his thunderous confusion, brought him starfruit from Alfheim and carved him a wooden Mjolnir as a “coming-of-age” gift.
Danny didn’t even mind the goat anymore.
He still insisted, every day, that Jane was not his mom.
But when Thor presented him with a massive, hand-forged broadsword inscribed with: To my noble son, may your ghosts be vanquished and your GPA ever high, he kind of teared up.
A little.
One evening, as they watched the stars from the roof, Jane handed Danny a cup of tea.
“He really does think you’re my kid,” she said.
Danny took a sip. “Yeah. I gave up trying to convince him.”
“Is it weird?”
“Kinda. But… not bad.” He hesitated. “Do you… mind?”
Jane looked at him, surprised. “No. I mean—you’re not. But if you were, I’d be proud.”
Danny stared at the stars until they blurred.
Later, Thor appeared beside them, cape fluttering dramatically despite the lack of wind.
“I have returned with tales of valor,” he declared, “and also cheesecake.”
Danny took the box.
“Son!” Thor beamed.
Danny sighed.
“Fine. You can have my blessing.”
Thor dropped Mjolnir in joy.
Jane looked horrified. “Danny, what the hell?!”
“I didn’t say I wanted it to happen,” Danny muttered. “I just figured he’d stop bringing me swords if I gave in.”
“He won’t,” she said flatly.
He didn’t.
The next morning, Danny woke up to find a full set of Asgardian armor beside his bed and a note that read: For my beloved heir. P.S. I have begun planning the wedding. Do you think your mother would prefer swans or flaming eels as decoration?
The day started like any other in the Ghost Zone: tense, glowing, and humming with the promise of disaster. Danny had only popped by Clockwork’s tower to ask a simple question—something about paradox prevention or whatever—and definitely didn’t mean to touch the ancient, glowing relic perched delicately atop a cursed pedestal of time-forgotten sorrow and screaming. But he did. He touched it. And then everything exploded in green light and dramatic violin music (which might have been in his head).
And just like that, Danny Fenton was five years old again. Five. Chubby-cheeked, wide-eyed, pint-sized kindergarten-age with all the raw ghost powers of his seventeen-year-old self packed into a body no taller than three feet of chaos. Worse, he remembered everything—every awkward high school moment, every near-death experience, every ghost fight, every existential meltdown.
“Clockwork!” Danny shrieked, his voice now horrifyingly high-pitched and squeaky. “What the actual hell?!”
“Language, Daniel,” Clockwork said in the maddeningly serene way only a time god could manage, waving his staff with an infuriating smirk. “Consider this a learning experience.”
“I hate learning! Learning’s for school and people who don’t get turned into toddlers by rogue hourglasses!”
But Clockwork only chuckled like this was all going according to some elaborate cosmic lesson plan. Probably because it was. He vanished mid-scolding, leaving Danny alone in the tower, stomping around in his little sneakers and throwing ghost-powered tantrums that cracked the marble tiles.
Which is when the floor opened.
To be clear, Danny did not jump into the swirling blue portal. He fell. He fell dramatically with limbs flailing and an undignified scream that would later be blamed on the wind. The portal spit him out in the middle of what could only be described as a cathedral on steroids: tall golden columns, floating runes, and people in robes glaring like he’d farted during a funeral.
He crash-landed on a silk-draped table in front of the actual gods.
“…Ow,” Danny groaned, blinking up at a very tall, very unimpressed man with a horned crown and cheekbones so sharp they could cut reality.
The man frowned. “Why is there a child in the royal seidr sanctum?”
“I didn’t mean to be here! I touched a stupid relic and now I’m five and I fell through a portal and—wait, are you Loki?”
There was a pause. “Yes.”
“Cool. Love your work. Big fan. Please don’t murder me.”
Loki blinked. “…What?”
Then the child burst into blue flames and hovered six inches off the table, sparking with ghost energy like an angry firecracker. Everyone screamed. A robed man passed out. Someone wet themselves. Loki, to his credit, looked intrigued.
“Fascinating,” he murmured, circling the small floating menace. “You’re not of Midgard, are you?”
“I’m Danny from Earth, actually! I’m from Illinois! I’m just—also—kind of a half-ghost and currently five and possibly stuck like this forever!”
Loki raised an eyebrow. “You’re an abomination of magic.”
“Thank you?”
“I like you.”
“No thanks?”
But Loki had already scooped him up like some cursed kitten that wandered into his life. Danny screamed the whole way down the palace corridors, zapping walls, guards, and an unfortunate tapestry depicting Odin’s triumphs. Loki just looked delighted. Like this was the best pet he’d ever found. Like this was revenge against Thor just by existing.
“You are now Dánjal Lokison,” Loki declared.
“I AM NOT—STOP—PUT ME DOWN—”
“I shall raise you in my image.”
“I already have a dad and he’s stupid but he’s mine—put me down or I will scream and explode and possess your furniture!”
“You’ll fit in perfectly.”
Thus began the unholy saga of Danny Fenton, age five, accidentally adopted by the God of Mischief and forced into Asgardian nobility under duress. It was, somehow, not even the weirdest thing to happen that month.
Loki dressed him in child-sized black leather and tiny green cloaks. He taught him how to chant spells in Elder Seidr, how to bend illusions with his hands, and how to summon fire with a thought. Danny, in retaliation, taught Loki about Earth cartoons, fart jokes, and TikTok dances. It was a two-way cultural exchange of chaos and regret.
“I’m telling you,” Danny said one day while floating upside down and eating apples he stole from the royal garden, “if you say ‘We’re going ghost’ and then transform, it’s at least thirty percent more dramatic.”
“That’s idiotic,” Loki replied, watching as Danny exploded into white light and ghost form, now slightly glowing with new magic enhancements.
“You’re just jealous I sparkle when I fight.”
“I do not sparkle.”
“You sparkle on the inside.”
“Stop talking.”
“Dánjal Lokison, feared child warlock of the Nine Realms,” Thor once declared when he saw the tiny menace casually phasing through walls and summoning frost giants to play tag.
“DON’T NAME ME THAT,” Danny screeched, blasting Thor into a wall. Loki applauded from the doorway.
“Good aim, my son.”
“I’M NOT—STOP CALLING ME THAT!”
But Danny was starting to enjoy the magic lessons. Seidr wasn’t like ghost powers. It was older, wilder, sometimes alive. Loki was a surprisingly good teacher—equal parts unhinged chaos and genuine brilliance. He explained the threads of fate like they were spider webs and taught Danny how to pull on them without being noticed. He spoke about illusion like it was poetry and destruction like it was art.
Danny, in turn, taught Loki to prank Thor using invisible slime bombs and existentially disturbing hand puppets that whispered secrets in Old Norse.
They became a problem.
Every time the Avengers tried to contact Asgard, they were met with grainy magical holograms of a tiny child in a green cape flipping them off while floating upside down on a summoned ghost-storm cloud.
“Tony Stark looks like a soggy crouton!” Danny shouted once.
“And smells like cheap cologne,” Loki added.
“High five, evil dad!”
“High five, tiny curse.”
Eventually, Odin tried to intervene.
“This child is not of Asgard,” the All-Father declared.
“I’m not trying to be!” Danny yelled. “Please take me back to Earth! I miss McNuggets and not wearing robes!”
“He’s mine now,” Loki said, summoning a massive magical contract written in fire and Loki’s own blood. “Legally and spiritually bound. I did the adoption ritual and everything. It involved a screaming goat.”
“I HATE THAT GOAT,” Danny screamed.
“I love that goat,” Loki sighed.
“You’re both mentally unstable,” Odin muttered, rubbing his temples.
Danny was eventually granted limited “portal privileges,” which meant he could sneak back to Earth and terrorize his friends while still technically being a Lokison. Sam and Tucker didn’t even question the fact that he was a child again. Jazz just nodded like this was expected and handed him a juice box.
“Have you emotionally bonded with your captor yet?” she asked.
“I am not bonding with Loki!” Danny snapped.
“You call him ‘evil dad’ and wear his colors.”
“THAT’S NOT A BOND, IT’S A THREAT DISPLAY!”
Back in Asgard, Danny practiced summoning tiny void rifts, which Loki encouraged.
“Good,” he said, sipping wine as the rifts swallowed another fruit bowl. “Let the darkness consume you.”
“I just wanted an orange.”
“Even better.”
Eventually, Danny grew attached. It was subtle. A twitch of the lip when Loki conjured birthday cupcakes with green fire. A soft “thanks” when Loki wordlessly cleaned his scraped knees with glowing runes. A quiet night where Danny fell asleep reading next to Loki and didn’t wake up until morning curled in a pile of fur cloaks and dark magic.
“Do you miss being big?” Loki asked one night, watching the child version of his adopted problem-child sketch battle plans in crayon.
“Sometimes,” Danny said. “But…this isn’t bad. Just weird. You’re weird.”
“Thank you.”
“That wasn’t a compliment.”
“Take what I can get.”
Loki never asked too much. He didn’t push Danny to call him ‘Dad’ or act like anything other than the feral little ghost-child he was. But he was there—smirking through tantrums, snarking through training, protecting Danny like a dragon hoards gold.
So when some ambitious frost giant tried to kidnap “the ghostling Lokison,” they were met with a five-year-old banshee of death wielding seidr, ghost rays, and an unholy screech that shattered icebergs.
And behind him, Loki arrived in a storm of green fire and fury.
“Touch my son again,” he said, “and I will erase your ancestors from the time stream.”
“I’M STILL NOT YOUR—wait, okay yeah, get him.”
They were a nightmare pair. A chaos duo. A tiny tornado of destruction and his too-proud magic tutor/father/roommate/menace.
Eventually, Danny stood in front of a new portal, Clockwork hovering beside him with his usual smug patience.
“You’re ready to go back,” Clockwork said. “To your age. To your world.”
Danny glanced over his shoulder. Loki stood there with his arms folded, expression unreadable but eyes a little too bright.
“I’ll come visit,” Danny said, voice small but steady.
“You’d better,” Loki replied, voice quiet and sharp as always.
There was a long pause.
“Bye… evil dad.”
“Goodbye, Dánjal.”
Danny turned. The portal shimmered. His small form stepped through, glowing with ghost light and seidr and something else—something new.
Back home, he hit the ground as a seventeen-year-old again. Taller. Older. But he still wore green.
Nick Fury hadn’t known peace in years. Aliens, HYDRA, interdimensional rifts, Tony Stark’s emotional instability—he thought he’d seen it all. That was until a small, gremlin-like twelve-year-old girl phased through the wall of the S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier, exploded three vending machines with a casual flick of her wrist, and declared with unshakeable confidence, “You guys owe me a snack for saving the multiverse.”
Her name was Danielle Phantom—Dani, with an “i”—and she was, allegedly, a clone of a ghost-human hybrid from another dimension. She was twelve, made entirely out of spite and ectoplasm, and Nick Fury made the catastrophic mistake of not immediately tossing her into a containment chamber.
Not that it would’ve helped. The last time they tried, she melted the titanium walls by burping.
“She’s not a threat,” Banner had insisted.
“She’s twelve!” Steve argued.
“She called me a rotting rotisserie chicken and set my cape on fire,” Thor grumbled, looking genuinely unsettled.
“She’s perfect,” Tony said. “Can I adopt her?”
“NO,” Fury barked. “She’s mine.”
And that’s how Dani Phantom became Nick Fury’s personal chaos goblin.
It started with the incident in Belarus. Fury had sent her to shadow a low-risk intel extraction mission—get in, get out, observe. She got bored. Two hours later, she returned with the mission completed, three HYDRA bases blown up, and a new trench coat she’d stolen off an agent twice her size. She looked proud. She also had a churro.
“Where the hell did you get that?” Fury asked.
“Multiversal Costco. Long story.”
She ate it while hovering upside down.
Dani didn’t walk. She floated. She didn’t knock. She phased through walls, floors, and sometimes people, which she claimed was “great for making dudes pee themselves.” She kept trying to haunt Clint Barton’s hearing aids (“for funsies”), called Natasha “Murder Barbie,” and threatened to sell Peter to the Tooth Fairy for “a good price.”
“I don’t even have ghost teeth!” Peter shrieked.
“Exactly. You’re rare,” Dani replied ominously.
She made the mistake of touching Loki once. Just once. She’d been told not to.
“Don’t touch the Asgardian,” Fury had said.
“Why not?” she asked.
“Because he’s the God of Mischief.”
“Oh. Cool.”
She poked him.
Loki screamed. She screamed louder. Everyone screamed. For some reason, there were snakes involved by the end of it.
Now, every time Loki sees Dani, he immediately teleports to another continent. “She’s worse than Odin,” he whispers, eyes wide and glassy.
Fury had to admit: Dani got results. She was an absolute menace—a glowing, cackling, miniature poltergeist in ripped jeans and combat boots—but she could sniff out a Kree spy from fifty yards away, beat an Ultron drone with a piece of rebar, and disable alien tech by licking it. (He didn’t approve of that one, but she claimed it was “a ghost thing.”)
“Why do you keep her?” Hill asked him one day, as Dani was in the background convincing a rookie agent that she was a resurrected Soviet weapon.
Fury sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Because the little gremlin saved my life.”
That part was true. He’d been cornered by a Skrull impersonating Agent Coulson, and before he could blink, Dani had flown through the ceiling screaming, “NOT MY BALD DAD, YOU SLIMEY LIZARD BASTARD!” She obliterated the Skrull with a ghost ray and threw Fury over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes.
“You weigh like a thousand pounds!” she’d grunted, struggling to fly him out of danger.
“Put me down!”
“No! You’re grounded and dying on my watch is against the rules!”
It was, somehow, the most competent rescue Fury had ever experienced.
From then on, Dani followed him everywhere. She sat in on briefings, chewing bubblegum obnoxiously loud. She hacked into S.H.I.E.L.D. files just to draw little ghost doodles on top of agent profiles. She replaced the AI’s voice with her own. Every time the intercom came on, it was her:
“Attention all agents, remember to hydrate or I will personally possess you and make you chug milk.”
She terrorized the Avengers with zero remorse. Steve got glitter-bombed. Clint was stalked by a floating sandwich. Banner’s lab notes were mysteriously replaced with eldritch doodles and “Dani was here” scribbled in the margins. Tony found all his Iron Man suits programmed to play “Ghostbusters” every time they powered on.
“I SWEAR TO GOD, IF I HEAR THAT SONG ONE MORE TIME—”
“Who ya gonna call?” Dani whispered from inside the vents.
Tony screamed.
But in her own completely deranged way, she was loyal. Deadly. Protective.
When some alien parasite tried to mind-control Fury, Dani showed up mid-briefing, opened her mouth, and screamed—a full-on ghost wail that shattered the windows and disintegrated the creature instantly.
Silence.
Everyone stared.
Dani wiped her mouth and grinned. “Oops. Was that loud?”
Fury was on the floor, bleeding from the ears. “You think?”
Later, she brought him noise-canceling earmuffs with skull stickers. “For next time.”
Fury eventually stopped questioning it. He’d wake up and find her floating three inches above his bed.
“Sleep check,” she’d say.
“I am very awake now.”
“Good.”
She haunted meetings, stole alien artifacts to make jewelry, and referred to Maria Hill exclusively as “General Mom.” She threatened to possess Tony’s coffee machine and did it. It only made decaf for three months. He cried.
And somehow, Dani ended up as the unofficial child mascot of S.H.I.E.L.D.
She was terrifying.
She was beloved.
She bit Deadpool once. He cried.
And yet, when Fury got taken by a rogue faction of former S.W.O.R.D. agents trying to expose classified data, the first person to show up wasn’t Steve, or Natasha, or even Carol.
It was Dani.
She burst in mid-interrogation, glowing, floating, and furious. Her eyes blazed green. Her ponytail whipped behind her like a comet trail. She didn’t say anything.
She just started throwing people.
“YOU THINK YOU CAN KIDNAP MY DAD?!” she screamed, hurling a desk at someone’s face. “I live in his walls! I KNOW THINGS!”
“You’re not even related to me!” Fury yelled as she fried a guy with ectoplasmic lightning.
“I TOOK A BLOOD TEST ONLINE AND IT SAID I’M 78% NICK FURY, 22% CHICKEN NUGGET!”
“You WHAT?!”
She ghost-punched the lead agent into the ceiling, caught Fury by the collar, and flew him out of the crumbling compound as everything exploded behind them.
When they landed, she wiped the soot from his coat, then hugged him hard.
He stood there stiffly before awkwardly patting her head.
“You’re insane,” he muttered.
“Thanks, Dad.”
“I’m not your—”
“Too late. I already wrote it in my diary.”
Later, at S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ, Dani threw her feet up on the command table and declared, “This whole place is my haunted house now.”
Nobody argued.
The AI was programmed to greet her.
The agents stepped aside when she passed.
She had a personal couch that she’d painted green and black, and a glowing “NO NERDS” sign that Tony kept trying to steal.
Every so often, she disappeared into the multiverse. “Gotta stretch the legs,” she’d say, then come back two hours later with three infinity stones, a new jacket, and a baby goat.
Fury didn’t ask.
He learned not to ask.
But when the next alien invasion hit—when half of Manhattan lit up with something eldritch and writhing and very not-from-Earth—it wasn’t Thor who responded first.
It was Dani.
Hovering above Times Square, cracking her knuckles, eyes glowing like nuclear fallout.
“Alright, weird space tentacle thing,” she said. “You just messed with the wrong twelve-year-old.”
And from the helicarrier, sipping his bitter coffee, Nick Fury watched the ghost girl he never asked for absolutely wreck an interdimensional horror, cackling like a goblin while civilians cheered.
Tony Stark had a lot of regrets in life. Most of them involved tequila, a few bad tattoos he had paid to laser off before Pepper found out, and one especially haunted incident involving a mechanical bull, a congressman’s wife, and the phrase “I dare you.” But none—not even Ultron—could have prepared him for the living, brooding, wall-punching cryptid that was Dante “Dan” Masters.
Dan was technically human. Probably. No one was brave enough to check. He stood 6’7”, made of nothing but scarred muscle and menace, had jawlines sharp enough to commit tax fraud, and wore an expression that screamed “I bench press semi-trucks for therapy.” His hair was raven black and permanently tousled like he’d just walked away from an explosion—which, considering the fact he had actually walked away from an explosion that morning, tracked. His eyes were the kind of ice-blue that made AI go glitchy and interns cry.
Also, he was Tony’s bodyguard.
“I didn’t hire him,” Tony said the first time the Avengers saw Dan.
“You absolutely did,” Pepper replied, not even looking up from her tablet. “You drunkenly told Happy to ‘get me someone who looks like a Greek tragedy and hits like daddy issues.’”
And so Happy had found Dan. Or, more accurately, Dan had found Happy—by appearing in his passenger seat uninvited while Happy was getting a cheeseburger.
Dan never explained how he got there.
“Didn’t open the door. Didn’t break the lock. Just was there,” Happy muttered for the next three weeks. “I looked down to grab fries, looked up, boom. Bodyguard. Demon. Something. He just nodded and said, ‘I eat souls of cowards.’ Then asked for curly fries.”
Tony loved him instantly.
“Look at him,” Tony whispered one night, wine drunk and emotionally vulnerable. “He’s like my own personal murder puppy.”
Steve thought he was horrifying. Natasha called him “the Babadook with a gym membership.” Bruce kept trying to blood test him, but the last time he tried, Dan snapped the needle with his eyelid.
No one knew much about Dan, other than that he was the estranged heir to DALV.CO, the global tech giant run by Vlad Masters, a man whose Wikipedia page had to be locked due to repeated edits claiming he was “the literal Antichrist.”
“Why don’t you go back to your dad’s company?” Tony asked once, halfway through their fourth bottle of scotch, lounging on the penthouse balcony like rich, emotionally constipated divorcees. “You’d be the richest guy in the world.”
“I’d rather castrate myself with a melon baller,” Dan replied.
“Hot.”
Dan just grunted and stared moodily into the skyline, brooding like Batman’s taller, angrier cousin.
There were… signs that Dan wasn’t quite normal. Like the way he phased through walls when he thought no one was looking. Or the time someone tried to stab Tony during a charity gala and Dan grabbed the knife mid-thrust, crushed it into dust with his bare hand, and said, “You missed his heart. Want a second try?”
Tony had to excuse himself for five minutes and blame it on the shrimp cocktail.
Also: Dan never slept. Ever. Tony caught him once at 3 a.m., levitating midair in a meditative pose above the workshop floor, glowing faintly green and whispering what sounded like Latin but angrier.
“Cool trick,” Tony said, filming it for Instagram.
Dan’s eyes snapped open, glowed neon, and he growled, “Delete that or I’ll haunt your teeth.”
Tony deleted it. Reluctantly. But saved a copy in a secret drive labeled “hotboy_shit_DO_NOT_OPEN.”
The first time Dan met Thor, he sized him up for half a second and muttered, “Nice hair, Renaissance frat boy.”
Thor blinked. Then grinned. “I like this one.”
The first time Dan met Loki, he pinned him to the wall with one hand, sniffed once, and said, “You smell like lies and lavender. I don’t trust you.”
“I’m flattered,” Loki purred.
“I wasn’t complimenting you.”
Loki avoided him for two weeks. Claimed it was allergy season.
Dan did not talk. He growled. He glared. He loomed like a death omen in leather jackets. And still—still—every villain who tried to attack Tony ended up launched through a wall, disarmed in under two seconds, or knocked unconscious with a flick of the wrist.
“Are you sure he’s not a meta, or like, a ghost, or something?” Sam asked one day.
Tony blinked. “Ghost? That’s oddly specific.”
“I’m just saying. I saw him walk through a vending machine yesterday and pull out a pack of gum.”
“Maybe it was broken.”
“He reached in, grabbed the gum through the glass, and said, ‘I don’t pay for artificial happiness.’”
“…Okay, that’s just poetry.”
Dan, as it turned out, was a ghost. Sort of. Not the Casper kind. More like the “cursed anomaly spawned from grief and rage after a catastrophic supernatural meltdown in a parallel dimension” kind.
But he didn’t talk about that. Ever. Unless it was to threaten someone into shutting up. Which he did often.
Tony once asked if “Dan” was short for something other than Dante. Dan deadpanned and said, “Damnation.”
Tony laughed. Dan didn’t.
The Avengers all had bets on what Dan really was. Bruce thought he was a failed gamma experiment. Natasha swore he was an eldritch entity in disguise. Steve thought he was “just a really intense guy with trauma.” (Steve was wrong.)
The truth came out, as these things do, during an alien invasion. A random Tuesday. Buildings were exploding, civilians were screaming, and Tony—stupidly, heroically, idiotic as always—got cornered by a space hydra in a burning alley.
“Dan!” he shouted through comms, panicking. “I need backup! Big slimy bastard, eight mouths, hates sarcasm!”
The hydra lunged.
Then Dan exploded out of nowhere in a swirl of black and green fire, his body wreathed in spectral energy, eyes glowing like apocalypse lanterns. He opened his mouth—and screamed.
Not like a human scream. No. Like a banshee from the ninth ring of hell having a breakdown.
The hydra disintegrated. Vaporized into cosmic ash.
Dan turned to Tony, eyes still glowing, hair on fire, his voice doubled and demonic: “You okay?”
Tony, covered in alien guts and halfway to fainting, whispered, “Okay? Okay? I think I just came.”
Dan dropped him.
“Deserved.”
From then on, everything was chaos.
SHIELD tried to recruit him. He burned their files.
HYDRA tried to kidnap him. They didn’t survive the attempt.
Someone from a ghost-hunting organization named G.I.W. showed up once, claiming he was a danger to the world. Dan stared them down and said, “I’ve killed gods for fun. You think I’m scared of a man in khakis?”
They ran screaming.
Tony, of course, was obsessed.
“You’re my new favorite thing,” he declared one night, flopping dramatically onto the couch while Dan watched reruns of Iron Chef in silence. “Like, my favorite. Sorry, Pepper.”
“Don’t drag me into your kinks,” Pepper replied from the hallway.
Dan never officially moved in. But his things started appearing—a toothbrush here, a punching bag in the gym, a fridge filled with nothing but protein shakes and hot sauce. Eventually, Tony just gave him a keycard.
And maybe a second suit in case he ever wanted to try flying. Dan declined. He could already fly. Casually. Like it was no big deal.
Also: he could turn invisible. Tony found this out when he walked into his lab naked at 2 a.m. and muttered, “If there’s anyone here, speak now or forever hold your—”
“I’m here.”
Tony screamed. Dan was perched on the ceiling.
“Why are you like this?!”
“Because I hate peace.”
Eventually, the world found out. A viral video. A fight gone wrong. Dan going full phantom mode on live TV and decapitating an alien with a manhole cover.
Headlines exploded.
“Heir to DALV.CO Is a Literal Ghost.”
“Tony Stark’s Bodyguard Is an Interdimensional Specter, and Honestly, Same.”
“Dante Masters: Hot, Haunted, and Horrifying.”
Vlad Masters showed up. Tried to reclaim Dan.
Dan answered the door shirtless, covered in blood, holding a spatula. “I’m cooking pancakes. Leave before I use you as syrup.”
Jazz Fenton was not supposed to become an urban legend, a media conspiracy theory, or a widely feared intern with multiple Tumblr fan accounts, but alas, here they were.
At 19 years old, Jasmine “Jazz” Fenton had moved to New York on a full scholarship to Columbia University, double majoring in psychology and business, with a minor in engineering just for fun. She wore blazers older than most Columbia freshmen, carried a briefcase instead of a backpack, and maintained a 4.0 GPA while ghost-proofing her dorm room using proprietary tech she’d built in high school. On the third day of orientation, she calmly tased a literal demon that crawled out of an upper-floor window of Butler Library and continued sipping her iced matcha like it was a Tuesday. Which, unfortunately, it was.
This act caught the attention of a lot of people, including—but not limited to—an NYPD exorcist division, a priest named Father Julio, two SHIELD interns on a coffee break, and Pepper Potts, who was in the city for a Stark Industries panel on sustainable weapons of mass deterrence.
“She tased a demon,” Pepper said slowly to her assistant.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“In broad daylight.”
“Correct.”
“And then she—what did she say again?”
The assistant glanced at their notes. “‘Don’t manifest on Ivy League property, it lowers our national rank.’”
Pepper stared into the distance. “Find her. And hire her.”
Within forty-eight hours, Jazz was sitting in a glass elevator ascending Stark Tower. She hadn’t applied for anything. She hadn’t submitted a résumé. But her phone pinged during a psych lecture with a Stark Industries-branded email that simply said, “Ms. Potts would like to speak to you,” followed by a GPS pin and a non-negotiable appointment time.
Tony, predictably, was not consulted.
“What do you MEAN she’s nineteen? What do you MEAN she’s your intern? Pepper, she built a plasma cannon in your office. In two hours. Using my old espresso machine.”
“It was broken,” Jazz added politely, scrolling through quantum schematics on her StarkPad. “And under OSHA, coffee-related injuries are still injuries. You’re welcome.”
Tony pointed a wrench at her like it was a gun. “You don’t scare me, you ginger menace.”
Jazz smiled faintly. “You should be scared. You tried to patent a neural override system with an open-ended quantum key. You’re lucky I fixed it before it broadcasted the location of every Stark tech asset on Earth.”
There was a pause.
Tony turned to Pepper. “She’s you. But worse. Why is she you but worse?”
“I don’t know,” Pepper murmured. “But I think I love her.”
The rumors started on week three.
At first, it was office gossip. Just little things. Intern was too tall. Too confident. Too quiet. You don’t trust the quiet ones. And then she reverse-engineered the Arc Reactor because she was bored on lunch break, and the quiet turned into fear.
“Is she—like—a clone or something?” asked one junior developer to another over ramen in the cafeteria.
“I heard she’s Tony’s secret daughter,” the other whispered. “Raised in a lab. Trained from birth. Like that kid in Kingsman but with algebra.”
One engineer swore they saw her casually deflect a pulse grenade using a file folder. Another caught her manually rebooting the Tower AI after it shorted out during a lightning storm—something that shouldn’t have been possible unless you had admin-level clearance, which Jazz absolutely did not have. In theory.
“Pepper,” Tony said slowly one morning, watching Jazz reprogram a malfunctioning security drone while also Skyping her Columbia psych professor, “do we have a bioengineered heir you forgot to tell me about?”
“No,” Pepper said, sipping coffee. “But if I die, she gets the company.”
Tony sputtered. “Excuse me?!”
Jazz didn’t look up. “I accept.”
The media got involved during Stark Industries’ spring gala.
Jazz, dressed in a midnight blue suit that cost more than her entire tuition, arrived at Pepper’s side like a storm. She was calm, composed, stunningly competent, and intercepted two would-be saboteurs in the first thirty minutes with nothing but a suspicious stare and a champagne flute.
“She’s Pepper’s daughter,” someone tweeted.
“She’s not old enough to be her daughter.”
“She’s her clone. Pepper 2.0. She even walks like her.”
“I would let her step on me.”
By the next morning, “#StarkHeir” was trending worldwide, and conspiracy theorists had posted side-by-side comparisons of Jazz and Pepper’s bone structures, speech patterns, and typing styles. Someone even made a Google doc of all their shared quirks. It had color-coded sections. There were charts.
Tony spent the entire week yelling.
“She’s NOT my kid! She’s not even related to Pepper!”
Pepper, annoyingly, did not help. “Technically, we don’t know she’s not.”
“Oh my god.”
Meanwhile, Jazz was unfazed.
“Should I post a clarification?” she asked.
“No,” said Pepper, texting casually. “Let them fear you.”
The Avengers had mixed feelings.
Steve was terrified of her. She reminded him too much of Natasha, if Natasha had spent her childhood in AP classes and the rest of her time inventing hover grenades. Sam and Rhodey liked her, mostly because she was polite and explained quantum mechanics in metaphors that involved pop tarts. Peter developed an immediate and debilitating crush, which she ignored with expert precision.
“Hi, Miss Fenton,” Peter said shyly one day, watching her reprogram a Stark drone mid-air while eating a bagel.
“Peter,” she said without looking up. “You have a calculus exam in twenty-two minutes and your spider-suit’s magnetic lock is uncalibrated.”
Peter turned pink. “Oh. Thanks. Wait—how did you—?”
She looked at him. “I am your god now.”
Peter nearly fainted.
Natasha liked her. Clint was afraid of her. Thor called her “Little Flame Witch” and offered to train her in Asgardian battle strategy, which she accepted, just to make Bruce nervous.
But it was Loki who said it first.
“She’s not of this world,” he muttered to Wanda during a conference meeting. “She carries too much silence for a mortal. Something follows her.”
He was right, of course.
Because sometimes, at night, the tower cameras would glitch. Alarms would blip off for three-point-two seconds. And if you reviewed the footage frame by frame, you’d catch a flicker of something—green light, spectral claws, shadows moving too fast.
Jazz never addressed it.
She just carried her ghost-hunting thermos in her tote bag and once drop-kicked a poltergeist out of the 35th floor without spilling her coffee. Pepper made her head of paranormal security the next day. Tony threw a chair.
“I HATE HER.”
“You’re jealous.”
“She made a hover-bomb out of printer ink and stale Red Vines. WHO DOES THAT.”
“She’s better than you, darling. Accept it.”
The Pentagon called.
Then SHIELD.
Then the President.
They all wanted meetings. Wanted the Stark Intern. Wanted the girl who built an anti-phasing grenade in her sleep and then used it to banish an interdimensional wraith that had haunted the UN for seventy years. She’d done it in kitten heels. While on speakerphone with Columbia discussing her thesis on behavioral disassociation and spectral trauma.
“Ms. Fenton,” said General Ross one day, sitting across from her in a secure Stark lab, “how old are you again?”
“Nineteen.”
He blinked. “And you… developed this ectoplasmic nullifier?”
“Yes.”
“From scratch?”
“I didn’t steal it, if that’s what you’re implying.”
Tony watched from the corner, snickering into a bag of popcorn.
“Careful, Ross,” he said. “She’s been known to vaporize military-grade egos.”
Jazz didn’t smile, but her eyes sparkled just a little.
The conspiracy peaked when a tabloid published an article titled “Pepper Potts’ Secret Daughter: Genius Intern or Bio-Engineered Successor?”
There were pie charts. Photos. A leaked voicemail from Tony yelling “SHE ISN’T MINE, YOU IMBECILES” that only made things worse.
One Tumblr post had over 800k notes and a list of reasons why Jazz was definitely a Potts-Stark hybrid, including, “built a laser harp,” “once told Elon Musk to ‘shut up before I make a better Tesla with a coffee maker and two forks,’” and “terrifying corporate aura.”
Jazz printed the post. Framed it. Hung it in her dorm.
Pepper just looked fond.
“I think you’ve officially surpassed me in public fear,” she said one afternoon as Jazz filed patents under twenty different shell companies.
Jazz shrugged. “You set the bar very high.”
“I’m proud of you.”
Tony sobbed in the background. “This is my nightmare.”
“Jazz,” said Pepper sweetly, “could you file a cease-and-desist against MIT for trying to recruit you illegally?”
“Already did. Also, I bought MIT using the company card.”
Tony screamed.
And through it all—ghost attacks, PR disasters, tech blackouts, alien entities, and one incident where Jazz weaponized her psych minor to dismantle a HYDRA agent’s entire worldview in a hallway—she remained completely, terrifyingly composed.
Because this was Jazz Fenton. The girl who survived Amity Park, ghost portals, mad science parents, and her half-dead little brother who punched death in the face on Tuesdays.
The Marvel universe had no idea what it had just unleashed.
But Pepper did.
She just smiled and handed Jazz her new badge: Chief Innovation Officer, Spectral Division.
Pepper Potts prided herself on her ability to adapt. She’d survived Tony Stark’s post-cave existentialism, Stark Expo 2010, the entirety of the Avengers Initiative, and several global cataclysms. But nothing—absolutely nothing—prepared her for the day she received a glowing scroll via flaming raven at 3 a.m. It exploded into glitter and legal jargon the second she touched it.
The Temporal Child Reassignment Authority—TCRA for short, like an IRS from hell with better penmanship—had declared her the legal guardian of four de-aged minors, all results of an “interdimensional ghost war and subsequent reality collapse.” The document even included a family tree, pointing out her half-sister Maddie Fenton as their maternal parent. The kicker? Three of the children were meta-class ecto-beings. And the fourth was an “anomalous prodigy with cognitive potential exceeding known human thresholds.”
Pepper blinked at the words, reread them, and poured herself the strongest wine she owned.
By the time she finished the bottle, her living room shimmered with unnatural frost, and a swirling green portal opened with the subtlety of a chainsaw. Out stumbled four children—if one could use such a soft word for what appeared to be three weapons of mass destruction and a tiny, furious psychologist in the making.
Jazz was nine years old, with blazing red hair in a ponytail so tight it looked like a weapon. Her eyes scanned the room with military precision. She was holding a notebook, already scribbling down assessments.
Dan, aged seven, had black-and-white hair that flickered between forms, red eyes glowing faintly, and a permanent scowl that screamed war criminal in a booster seat. His tiny boot crushed a Stark Industries coaster underfoot.
Danny, five, looked like an overcaffeinated sugar cube in a “Ghostbusters are Bigots” shirt. He levitated six inches off the ground, phasing through the coffee table like it offended him personally.
And Dani—dear sweet baby Dani—was three, wore a tutu over her jumpsuit, and was gnawing on a Stark tech screwdriver like a teething raptor. It sparked. She giggled.
Pepper stared.
Tony wandered in wearing Iron Man pajama pants and blinked at the chaos.
“Huh. Why do I suddenly feel like a dad?”
Pepper stood up and handed him the scroll.
Ten minutes later, Tony was grinning like a proud, chaotic uncle who just realized he’d inherited a feral army. “Oh, I love them.”
“I want to kill Maddie,” Pepper muttered. “I want to re-kill her if she’s already dead. I don’t care. I will unearth her soul and yell.”
Jazz looked up from her notes. “Statistically, yelling is ineffective when dealing with narcissistic sociopaths with academic degrees. But I can write up an interrogation protocol if you give me twenty minutes and a war room.”
Tony looked at her like she was a gift from God. “Pepper. She’s a baby you.”
“She’s a terrifying baby me.”
“I love her.”
Dan crossed his arms, floating ominously. “I’m only here because they said I can’t go back to the timeline where I killed everyone.”
Dani beamed. “I like juice!”
Danny phased up to the ceiling fan. “Does this house have ghost-repellent death lasers like the last one? I hate those.”
Tony raised an eyebrow. “You got hit by ghost-repellent death lasers?”
Pepper was already dialing every Avenger in existence. “Tony. Tony, their parents worked with the GIW.”
“The what?”
Jazz narrowed her eyes. “The Ghost Investigation Ward. They are basically interdimensional fascists who want to wipe out all ghosts and hybrid anomalies. Also, they tried to vivisect us.”
Tony blinked. “Vivisect?”
“Scalpels, restraints, anti-ecto shackles, and a man named Agent O who smells like ham and crime,” Jazz said flatly.
“I’m going to kill someone,” Pepper muttered, pacing. “I’m going to launch an HR-approved war.”
Dani blinked. “Are we allowed to bite?”
“No,” Pepper said.
“Yes,” Tony said at the same time.
Dani cheered.
By the time Natasha arrived, Dani was in the air vents, Danny had short-circuited the AI, Dan was brooding in the fireplace like a Dickensian ghost of vengeance, and Jazz was lecturing FRIDAY on ethical protocol failure.
Natasha stood in the entryway, staring, her eyes wide with either horror or admiration.
“Pepper. Did you birth little Widows?”
“No,” Pepper said tightly. “They’re Maddie’s kids. Maddie’s. As in, I share DNA with them and now legally own them. Apparently.”
Jazz tilted her head. “Ms. Romanoff. I’ve analyzed your fight patterns from Battle of New York and determined you have unresolved trauma related to institutional betrayal. Would you like to unpack that?”
Tony leaned over. “She’s nine.”
“She scares me,” Natasha whispered.
Bucky showed up next and read the full report Jazz had printed out for him, complete with footnotes, photos, and color-coded trauma timelines.
The super soldier sat down, dead-eyed. “I just had a Hydra flashback from a PowerPoint.”
Jazz gave him a lollipop. “That’s a common symptom. I recommend candy and validation.”
Dan muttered something about weak mortals and floated upside down through a wall.
“I like him,” Bucky said faintly.
Steve walked in, saw Dan breathing ectoplasmic fire at the neighbor’s cat, and noped back out.
Wanda arrived and blinked at Jazz, whose psychic aura flared like a dying star every time she got emotional.
They stared at each other for a long time.
“I sense wrath,” Wanda said.
Jazz nodded. “I contain multitudes.”
Pepper was halfway through arranging a legal drone strike on the GIW when Rhodey FaceTimed her. “Hey, uh, why is CNN reporting that four tiny gods have occupied New York and turned the Stark Tower into a haunted war bunker?”
“They’re children,” Pepper said.
Tony poked his head into frame. “Children who can melt tanks.”
Danny flew by holding the Iron Man helmet upside down like a bowl of cereal.
“Dani just set the couch on fire,” Pepper added, dead-eyed.
Rhodey blinked. “I’ll bring extinguishers.”
The thing about children, Pepper had learned, is that they operate entirely on vibes, sugar, and trauma. And these four had plenty of all three. Jazz was terrifyingly competent, and within a week had formed an inter-Avengers child committee, wrote a new AI ethics guideline, and had Bruce Banner signing waivers just to talk to her.
Dan blew up a parking meter because it “looked at him wrong.”
Danny asked Tony if they could build an ecto-bazooka together and promised not to use it on Steve “unless Steve said ghosts weren’t real again.”
Dani tried to use her powers to possess a Roomba and ride it into battle.
Pepper walked in on all four of them forming a pact to “annihilate GIW headquarters” with something called Operation Ghost Buster Buster.
Tony approved instantly.
Pepper did not.
“Pepper,” Tony said. “We have kids now.”
“We have war orphans now.”
“They’re adorable!”
“They’re armed.”
“They’re basically Avengers Junior.”
Dani crashed through the ceiling riding a ghost dragon she “found in the laundry room.”
“I changed my mind,” Pepper muttered. “They’re perfect.”
Pepper flew to Amity Park a week later, dressed in corporate armor and rage. She walked into the Fenton household with Natasha, Bucky, and a glowing legal team of literal demons (Tony’s idea) and found Maddie and Jack cheerfully explaining how ecto-dissection worked on “halflings.”
When Maddie smiled and said, “It’s science, dear,” Pepper threw her coffee in Maddie’s face.
Tony had to hold her back while Bucky dismantled the Fenton portal and Natasha found enough surveillance footage to convict them of several counts of attempted child murder.
Jazz watched the entire thing from the jet via livestream, calmly taking notes.
“Pepper’s my favorite aunt,” she said.
Dan nodded. “She has potential.”
Danny was asleep on Tony’s shoulder, clutching a ghost plushie.
Dani was drawing herself riding a unicorn with a flame thrower.
The Avengers voted unanimously to make the kids honorary members. Jazz requested clearance access to S.H.I.E.L.D.’s trauma archives and got it. Dan received therapy. Danny built a ghost-safe treehouse. Dani declared herself queen of the Stark kitchen and banned kale.
Pepper watched them play in the yard one day and finally exhaled.
“I don’t know what the hell I’m doing,” she whispered.
Tony grinned. “You’re doing fine.”
Jazz ran by wielding a dagger made of solidified ghost energy.
Danny chased her screaming something about shared custody of the Lunchables.
Dan floated overhead like a sullen storm cloud.
Dani cackled, flying past them on her Roomba dragon.
Dan Phantom had been grounded for a millennium. A million years of suspended animation, locked in the coldest prison the Infinite Realms could provide, where time dripped like sap and the echoes of his own murderous past whispered lullabies into his ears. It had been fair punishment for ripping his original timeline to pieces like confetti at a funeral. He’d deserved it. Probably. Maybe. Not really.
Regardless, he was out now.
On probation.
Which meant he couldn’t technically destroy anything major.
Which meant he technically had freedom.
Which meant—
Dan burst through the veil between dimensions with the violent grace of a dying star and made a beeline—no, a comet-line—for Asgard.
Why? Simple.
Because Loki Odinson existed.
And Dan was going to court him.
With intention.
And possibly fire.
And maybe a few stolen artifacts from the Vault of Eternity.
It was fine.
Everything was fine.
Odin Allfather, great and wise and absolutely exhausted, nearly choked on his mead when a 6’9” white-haired, blood-eyed menace of a man fell from a tear in reality and landed in the center of Asgard’s Golden Hall, bleeding ambient chaos and making Thor drop Mjolnir mid-rep.
“I AM DAN PHANTOM, PRINCE OF THE INFINITE REALMS!” Dan announced, fangs bared in what could be interpreted as a smile—or a declaration of war. “I HAVE COME TO COURT YOUR SON.”
There was a pause.
A long one.
A holy shit what is happening one.
“Which one?” Odin asked slowly, glancing between Thor and Loki.
Dan turned, eyes glowing with the light of a billion dead stars, and locked onto Loki like a predator sensing a god-shaped snack.
“That one,” he said, voice low and reverent, gesturing toward Loki with a clawed finger. “The dark prince. The bitter frost. The storm in the still. The god carved in hunger and ash. The one whose smile haunts the black spaces between galaxies. You.”
Loki blinked. “…I’m sorry, what?”
Thor, meanwhile, had instinctively shoved his brother behind him and picked up Mjolnir. “He’s clearly mad. A danger to Asgard!”
Dan didn’t even look at him. “I’ve fought worse things than thunder, little boy. I would pluck the sun from Sól’s chariot and offer it like an apple in your brother’s palm.”
Odin stood up. “I forbid this! I don’t know what corner of Hel you’ve crawled from, but you will not—”
“Oh, actually,” Dan interrupted, tilting his head in thought. “Hela and I are old friends. She braided my hair once and taught me how to decapitate a frost giant using only a jawbone.”
In the bleak frost of Hel, Hela laughed so hard she cracked a rib. Her skeletal horde stared at her with a mix of reverence and terror as she shouted, “My brother-in-arms is finally out of time jail! Get me a death-swan, I need to pick a dress. I’m gonna be the best-damned best woman this side of Ragnarok.”
Back in Asgard, Loki had been dragged to a secluded room by Frigga who kept whispering things like “He’s clearly unstable” and “You attract danger like a frostflower attracts flies.”
But Loki was not listening.
Because Loki was already halfway in love.
He was a connoisseur of madness and beauty, of poetry stitched in blood, of things ancient and unfathomable. He saw Dan Phantom’s sharpened fangs and glowing eyes and heard the way he whispered promises of devotion that sounded like death threats.
And he felt something.
Dan knelt in Loki’s chamber, holding a gift in outstretched hands.
“This is the heart of a fallen titan,” Dan said solemnly. “I carved it from his chest after he insulted your intellect.”
It was still beating.
Loki took it and blushed.
“…You’re insane,” he whispered.
Dan leaned closer. “I have watched a thousand dying universes collapse, and in each one, I saw your reflection in the shattered light. I have dreamt of you while floating through collapsed stars. I would slit the throat of time itself for the curl of your smile.”
Frigga burst into the room. “Loki, don’t encourage him!”
But Loki was already petting the heart like a kitten and looking at Dan like he hung the stars in the sky personally.
“I think I might love him,” Loki whispered.
“Oh no,” Frigga said.
Three weeks in, the betting pool had gone viral in the Infinite Realms.
Danny bet Loki would stab Dan by day five.
Jazz bet they’d elope in less than a month.
Dani bet both. Simultaneously.
Clockwork refused to comment.
Dan brought gifts every day.
A Valkyrie’s wing, still twitching.
A singing skull that whispered Loki’s name in every language known to god and ghost.
A crystal vial of Odin’s tears (he didn’t explain how he got them, just that he did, and Odin now had anxiety).
A necklace forged from the melted-down bones of a time-wyrm, engraved with love poetry in the lost language of the Void.
“Your gifts are… unsettling,” Loki said, holding up the skull as it crooned a lullaby in Abyssal.
“They’re tokens of devotion,” Dan replied. “I would make war with the gods for you—not for justice, not for vengeance, but for worship.”
Loki melted on the spot.
Odin cornered Loki one evening. “You must stop this.”
“But father, I love him!”
“He brought you a bouquet of spinal cords, Loki!”
“They were beautifully arranged!”
Eventually, Dan seduced Loki in the way that only an interdimensional menace with apocalyptic charm could. The kind of night that left the Bifröst cracked, Thor traumatized, and half of Asgard whispering in awe and fear.
Loki didn’t walk the next day. He floated.
Odin cried in private.
The wedding was held in Hel. Of course it was.
Hela presided in a gown made of grief and velvet, surrounded by undead musicians and skeletal bridesmaids.
“I now pronounce you harbingers of doom,” Hela intoned with a grin. “You may now kiss your ruin.”
Dan did so with gusto.
Odin fainted.
Thor refused to speak for three weeks.
Frigga gave up and drank with Jazz, who won the betting pool.
Danny and Dani got into a fistfight over who gave the better toast.
On their wedding night, Dan carved a poem into the sky using a blade of starlight and sorrow. It read:
“Let the worlds tremble and the stars scream. You are mine. My ruin, my resurrection. My frost in the flame. My apocalypse wrapped in silk and venom. I have no name but yours, and no destiny but your hand in mine. Until the gods are dust.”
One week. One fucking week. That’s how long it took before the universe’s reality collapsed in on itself like a toddler knocking over a block tower made of cosmic rules, and Danny Fenton—sorry, High King Phantom of the Infinite Realms, Keeper of Balance, Ghost King of All Dimensions, Supreme Bureaucratic Overlord of Death and Souls, or whatever other bullshit title Clockwork slapped on him—was done. He was so done. With everything. With life. With afterlife. With bureaucracy. With math. Goddamn, he hated math.
He phased through the ceiling of what was left of the Avengers compound without so much as a knock because, frankly, he didn’t care anymore. People were dead. Everyone was dead. Half a fucking universe. And universes are fucking infinite. Literally. He’d been counting. Or trying to. But the math broke somewhere around “nine trillion decillion” and his brain short-circuited.
Inside, the Avengers were scattered around like bad leftovers. Steve was slouched in a chair like someone told him America lost the war. Thor was cradling a bottle like it was the last warmth in the world. Natasha looked like she hadn’t blinked in hours. Banner was trying to fix a coffee machine that had already given up on life. Tony—oh, Tony—Tony looked like he’d been held together with duct tape and sarcasm, and not the good kind.
“Yo,” Danny said, arms folded, crown floating behind him, cape swishing dramatically like it had beef with gravity. “Which one of you assholes thought wiping out half an entire goddamn universe was a great idea?”
They blinked. Steve slowly got to his feet. “Uh… who—?”
“No. Shut up. Don’t talk. I’m not in the mood. I haven’t slept in a week. Time doesn’t even exist in the Infinite Realms, and I somehow managed to be late to ten meetings that haven’t happened yet. Do you know what kind of eldritch administrative nightmare I’m dealing with? Do you?”
Tony blinked. “Not really, no.”
Danny whipped around to face him, pointing a glowing finger. “I don’t care, Stark. I don’t care that your kid sidekick is dead. I don’t care that half your team is sad. I don’t care that your billionaire ass is depressed and growing a sad beard like you’re auditioning for ‘Survivor: Superhero Edition’. I have literal oceans of paperwork made out of the screams of the damned piling up in my inbox because some purple California Raisin thought committing universal homicide was a vibe.”
“Hold on,” Natasha said, standing now, brows furrowed. “Who even are you?”
“I’m the janitor,” Danny deadpanned. “Of death. And you—you are all on my shit list.”
Steve opened his mouth.
“NO. I said no talking. Do you know how many souls half a universe is? Do you? BECAUSE I DON’T. THAT NUMBER DOESN’T EXIST. That’s not even math anymore, that’s heresy. There are species no one even knows about! I had to learn seven extinct galactic dialects in five minutes just to sign their death certificates!”
“Wait—wait,” Bruce said, cautiously stepping in like someone trying to defuse a bomb made of feelings. “You’re… the King of the Afterlife?”
“Infinite Realms,” Danny corrected. “Afterlife implies one dimension. I’ve got infinite. One of them is just an endless IKEA. You think you’re in hell? Try getting lost in that one for eternity.”
Tony blinked. “That explains the floating crown.”
“Oh, you noticed?” Danny snapped, sarcasm thick. “Yeah, the crown’s real subtle. You know what else I’m wearing? These.”
He held up his fingers. On them gleamed the actual Infinity Stones. Not the ones Thanos used. No, these were the OG versions—before the universe dumbed them down for mortal brains.
“I’m wearing multiversal cosmic artifacts as fucking accessories, Stark. I clapped death back into submission on my way here. I threatened Time itself with a lawsuit. I am so tired.”
Everyone was staring now. Thor slowly lowered his bottle.
“I have one question,” Thor said, eyes narrowing. “Can you bring them back?”
Danny didn’t respond immediately. He paced, muttering under his breath about soul processing queues and spectral overflow reports and ghost union strikes.
Then he turned, threw up his hands, and shouted, “Fine! Fine! But only because if I see one more Ectoplasmic Reconciliation Form I’m going to scream my own name and rip reality in half!”
Tony raised a cautious hand. “Just to clarify… you’re not doing this out of the goodness of your heart?”
Danny glared at him. “I am doing this because your collective idiocy has backed up the Infinite Realms so badly, I have ancient god-beasts getting angry Yelp reviews for not guiding souls fast enough.”
Bruce choked. “You get… Yelp reviews?”
“Do not ask. Do not google ‘Spiritual Bureaucracy Yelp.’ You’re not ready. It’s worse than you can even imagine.”
He clapped his hands. The power reverberated like a sonic boom made of lightning and bass drops. Light cracked through the floor, time folded, and space rewrote itself. In an instant, everything was back. People. Planets. Souls. Loved ones. Unsnapped. Safely. No one reappeared in traffic or mid-air. They were all fine.
Everyone stared.
Tony gasped. “…Peter?”
Somewhere in the compound, Peter Parker screamed, “MR. STARK I THINK I DIED?!”
Danny muttered, “Yeah, well, get in line, kid.”
Tony looked like he might cry. Steve looked like he might cry. Even Thor blinked back tears.
Danny didn’t give them a second to bask.
“Listen to me and listen hard, because I am only going to say this once. The next time you idiots let some glorified space grape get his hands on cosmic power and kill half the universe, I’m not bringing anyone back.”
Natasha stepped forward. “Wait—what—?”
“I said,” Danny growled, eyes glowing green and crown sparking violently, “the next time this happens, I am going to let the universe rot. I don’t care if it’s your kid, or your moms, or your emotional support dog. You will live with it. You will suffer. Because I’m not spending another week cleaning up your mess like the goddamn galactic janitor!”
Tony muttered, “Kinda thought you said you were the janitor.”
“I will kick your kneecaps off.”
Tony shut up.
Danny took a deep breath, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I’m going home. Do not call me again unless the universe is actually ending. And even then, it better be certified by at least three gods and signed in triplicate.”
He started floating upward, preparing to phase out, when Steve blurted, “Wait, thank you. Really.”
Danny paused mid-air, sighed, and turned around. “You’re welcome. I guess. But seriously. If another genocidal space maniac so much as coughs on the timeline, I’m filing a restraining order on this entire dimension. Bye.”
And with that, he vanished in a swirl of ectoplasmic smoke, leaving the Avengers staring at each other in the awkward silence that followed a divine ass-whooping.
Thor finally muttered, “I liked him.”
Tony sat down, blinked a few times, then said, “He just wore the Infinity Stones as rings. Like mood jewelry.”
Bruce nodded solemnly. “He’s not paid enough.”
“Was he even paid at all?” Steve asked.
And somewhere in the realms between life and death, Danny Phantom screamed into his pillow made of souls: “I AM NOT GETTING PAID FOR THIS BULLSHIT!!!”
It started, as these things often did, with Clockwork showing up at 3:07 AM in Danny’s bedroom and dragging him out of bed by the ankle like a disappointed father dealing with a child who had failed Algebra. Again.
“Wha—Clockwork?!” Danny shouted, flailing in his space-themed pajama pants as he was unceremoniously yanked into a swirling portal of green and purple time goop. “I have school in four hours!”
“You won’t need it where you’re going,” Clockwork said with the kind of deadpan that made you suspect he hadn’t laughed in several centuries.
“That sounds like a threat.”
“It is.”
Next thing Danny knew, he was falling face-first onto a Persian rug that smelled faintly of incense, ancient secrets, and emotional trauma. He groaned and looked up just as a swirling portal closed behind him, revealing a tall, caped man sipping tea with the patience of a man who had seen God, mocked Him, and been promptly smacked in the face for it.
“Stephen Strange,” Clockwork said, materializing again because apparently he didn’t believe in exits, “meet Daniel Fenton. You’re going to teach him how to not accidentally vaporize the concept of space.”
“I what?” Danny blinked.
“Wait—this is the child you were talking about?” Strange said with a distinct expression of “I expected someone taller and more eldritch.”
Danny raised a hand. “Hi. Still in my pajamas. Please explain.”
Clockwork gave him a look. “You’ve been randomly tearing holes in the multiverse with your emotions. If you continue, you’ll accidentally delete the timeline where pizza was invented.”
Danny went pale. “That’s my favorite timeline!”
“That’s why you’re here.”
And that’s how Danny ended up training at the Sanctum Sanctorum instead of going to college like a normal eighteen-year-old. Not that Danny was ever normal. Or functional. Or even consistently corporeal at this point.
“Why is there a ghost teenager eating cold Pop-Tarts in my artifact room?” Wong asked the next morning, frozen mid-step with the sling ring still on his fingers.
“I live here now,” Danny said through a mouthful of Strawberry Frosted. “Clock Daddy said so.”
Wong stared at Strange. “We don’t even let you eat in here.”
“He’s technically a spectral demi-being empowered by quantum echoes,” Strange muttered. “I’m not sure he can be stopped.”
Danny quickly became the Sanctum’s chaos gremlin. The Cloak of Levitation hated him, loved him, used him as a chew toy, and then dragged him into a corner and cuddled him while he tried to watch anime at 2AM. Danny responded by naming it “Blanky.” The Cloak permitted this. Wong did not.
There was one particular week when Danny got stuck halfway between dimensions because he got emotional watching a Pixar movie. “I JUST—THEY FORGOT ABOUT BING BONG, STRANGE, THEY FORGOT—”
“Kid, I swear to the Vishanti, if you collapse another nexus realm because of children’s media—”
“HE SACRIFICED HIMSELF FOR JOY, OKAY?”
Training with Strange was like being punched in the brain repeatedly with Shakespearean insults and quantum theory. Danny tried. He did. But he was more of a vibes-based learner, while Strange was a “recite this 900-word incantation backwards while dodging metaphysical arrows” type of teacher.
“I can just blast it, though?” Danny argued, half-asleep, floating upside-down above the kitchen one night.
“No. No blasting. No phasing. No yelling ghostly wail and reducing my library to ash.”
“But I’m good at those!”
“You also set the Time Fractal on fire.”
“It had a face. It looked at me first.”
Clockwork would appear now and then, mostly to drop Danny cryptic warnings like “Avoid the one with the metal arm,” or “Never trust a raccoon with a gun,” or “Don’t play Uno with Loki. He cheats.”
“I don’t even know a Loki,” Danny protested.
“You will.”
Danny’s powers kept getting weirder. One time he coughed and spat up ectoplasm that turned into a sentient clone of himself, but with an Australian accent and a nicotine addiction. They had to banish him to the Mirror Dimension after he started flirting with Strange.
“Who made you like this?” Strange hissed, trying to undo the spell with rapidly twitching fingers.
“I think I made myself like this,” Danny whispered.
Somehow, the multiverse noticed. A portal opened on a Tuesday—because of course it did—and dropped in Peter Parker mid-panic with a half-dead demon strapped to his back and a terrified expression.
“HELP! I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M DOING!”
Danny stared, eating a microwaved burrito. “Are you a spider?”
“Are you a ghost?!”
“Do you want a burrito?”
“Yes?!”
And that’s how Danny accidentally made a new best friend. Peter and Danny had exactly the same amount of brain cell(s), which meant Strange had to install magical barriers to keep them from combining into a singularity of disaster.
“Stop bringing the Spider-Child into my Sanctum!”
“He brought himself! Through a hole! In the air! Like me!”
“Oh god, there are two of them now,” Wong muttered, lighting incense aggressively.
The Sanctum slowly became a hub for the weird and unstable. Kamala Khan stopped by and declared Danny her new weird older cousin. America Chavez tried to punch him once and fell into his thermos. Loki found him and said, “Ah. You’re one of those,” and walked away very quickly.
One particularly cursed day, Tony Stark walked in, saw Danny floating above a bowl of ramen while casually moving furniture with his mind, and said, “Nope,” before immediately walking out.
Danny’s magic was…unconventional. When Strange taught him how to summon a shield, Danny ended up with a glowing neon green circle that said “NOPE” in ghostly cursive. When told to summon a blade, Danny pulled out a glowing halberd shaped like a Fenton Thermos with an axe edge.
“I call her ‘Big Suck.’”
“I hate you,” Strange said.
“I love me.”
Then came the Incident. Danny got bored, which, to be clear, is always the beginning of the apocalypse. He found a cursed artifact that looked like a snow globe with a tiny screaming soul inside and thought, this seems fun.
It was not fun.
He broke it open trying to use it as a nightlight and released an ancient chaos entity named The Unfathomable Carl. Carl had a god complex, seventeen mouths, and a Twitter account within four minutes of escaping.
“HOW DID HE EVEN GET A PHONE?!” Strange screamed while fending off a barrage of cursed pigeons.
“HE FOLLOWED ME ON INSTAGRAM!” Danny shouted from behind a sofa.
It took three Avengers, a packet of Mentos, and Danny screaming “YOU’RE NOT EVEN THAT SCARY, CARL!” to trap him back in the snow globe. Clockwork appeared mid-chaos, sipping ecto-tea.
“This was necessary for your growth,” he said calmly.
Danny hurled a shoe at him.
Eventually, Strange came to a horrifying realization: Danny wasn’t learning magic in the traditional sense. He was absorbing it. He was like a sponge that had been dunked in eldritch Kool-Aid and now radiated unpredictable power every time he sneezed.
“Do not, under any circumstance, let him near the Time Stone,” Strange told Wong.
“He already touched it.”
“WHAT?!”
“He said it ‘smelled like cosmic fruit roll-up’ and tried to lick it.”
“I HATE THIS CHILD.”
Danny was currently learning how to open a rift without screaming “YOLO” at the top of his lungs. Progress was…questionable.
“Did you just use Ebonic incantation slang to fold space?”
Danny grinned. “Magic, but make it ✨feral✨.”
“You’re going to give me an aneurysm.”
“I already gave Wong one.”
“You what—?”
At some point, Nick Fury showed up, stared directly into Danny’s glowing green eyes, and immediately called for backup.
“He’s a threat to national security.”
“I’m seventeen!”
“You’ve destroyed seven timelines.”
“Okay but they were minor timelines! Who needs a universe made of talking cats, anyway?”
“…I did.”
Even the Watcher started side-eyeing Danny like a nervous babysitter. Carol Danvers tried to spar with him once and ended up in a ghost trap he made out of duct tape and ambition. “I respect you,” she told him from inside the glowing cube. “But I hate you.”
“Get in line.”
By the time Danny hit six months of training, he’d accidentally absorbed a minor chaos god, reinvented ice magic as a form of dance-fighting, made friends with Mephisto (“He’s not that bad once you get past the brimstone”), and turned his hair permanently silver-blue from temporal exposure.
Strange sat in his chair, robes scorched, tea long gone cold.
“Wong,” he said softly. “I think the child is the apocalypse.”
Wong nodded solemnly. “And yet…I fear I love him.”
Danny phased through the wall with sunglasses and a churro. “Hey! Want to help me prank Odin?”
Strange sighed like a man whose karma had caught up with him.
“I’ll get the goat.”
And so it continued. Danny Phantom: Ghost Kid, Sorcerer-In-Training, Time-Space Menace, and unofficial emotional support chaos goblin of the multiverse. He may not have understood quantum geometry, astral projection, or taxes—but damn it, he had style.
And, apparently, a date with the Living Tribunal next Tuesday.
“I hear he’s into jazz,” Danny said. “Think I should bring cookies?”
