It should've been an easy salt and burn to lay a couple spirits to rest.
All it took was a couple stakeout sessions, not even a full day digging through the local library's obituaries, and they had their ghosts — two of the three local teens killed in a fiery lab explosion: Tucker Foley and Sam Manson.
part 1 / part 2 (here)
the lost and forgotten kids (lead them toward other tomorrows)
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Danny Phantom, Supernatural (TV 2005)
Rating: T
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Dean Winchester, Sam Winchester, Danny Fenton, Sam Manson, Tucker Foley
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Mild Language, Hurt No Comfort, Angst, Harm to Children, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Danny Fenton Died in The Portal Accident, Full Ghost Danny Fenton, Dead Sam Manson, Dead Tucker Foley, Danny Fenton Has an Electric Ghost Core
Summary:
Dean thinks Amity Park could be a cute, idyllic city if it wasn't haunted.
And by haunted, he means that metaphorically and literally. Nothing he can do about the first thing, but the second? Well, here's hoping him and Sam don't go breaking their streak on such a straightforward case.
(Or, an atypical salt and burn blurs the line between monster and not. Lab safety first, kids!)
“Amity Park is flagged ‘do not approach, do not enter, do not interfere’ in the JLA database,” Batman commented. “There is a further note: ‘Stay the fuck away from the hellhole and its freaky ecosystem. I do not want to deal with a possessed Kryptonian.’ Signed, John Constantine.”
Constantine has valid concerns (chp. 3)
death echoes by Ocearna (AO3)
Danny Phantom/Justice League – General
#Alternate Universe #Crossover #Ghost King Danny Fenton #BAMF Danny #that is both a good and a bad thing #Swearing #because of Constantine #blurring the lines between canon and fanon #Creepy Danny Fenton #Danny is Not having a good day
Cold air on the back of his neck. Skeletal fingertips skittering up his spine, barely there and yet pressing so hard they would surely leave indents. A sound like an iceberg cracking apart echoing in his ears and through his head, pain following in its wake.
His throat went cold, his tongue suddenly numb.
And for a second - just a second - he smelled nothing but the stench of death.
---
Danny’s coronation is a big affair, with ghosts coming from all over the Zone to attend and celebrate.
Unbeknown to him, it isn’t only the Infinite Realms that feel his crowning.
Note: This is a restricted story and requires an AO3 account in order to read
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
Have you read death echoes (Danny Phantom)?
Yes, I am/was in the fandom
Yes, but I’m not in the fandom
No, but I’m in the fandom
No, I’m not in the fandom
Voting ended onJan 25, 2025
Summary: Cold air on the back of his neck. Skeletal fingertips skittering up his spine, barely there and yet pressing so hard they would surely leave indents. A sound like an iceberg cracking apart echoing in his ears and through his head, pain following in its wake.
His throat went cold, his tongue suddenly numb.
And for a second - just a second - he smelled nothing but the stench of death.
-
Danny's coronation is a big affair, with ghosts coming from all over the Zone to attend and celebrate.
Unbeknown to him, it isn't only the Infinite Realms that feel his crowning.
Author: @redskyeatnight
Mod note: This is a DC crossover, it was just not marked correctly as such on the spreadsheet
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
Memories have a habit of being tied to a place, a smell, a sound. Its not surprising that every time they enter the portal, they see the accident again. But is it really just memories that haunt them?
---
For Ectoberhaunt Day 16: Death Echo.
If you would like extra details on the au, see the end note. You don't need to, but it may help, or explain it if you don't understand at the end.
Danny remembered the first time he went into the portal; it would be difficult to not. It had been when he died, after all, and that was difficult to forget. But he never remembered it clearer than when he was going through the portal again. Every time he stepped into the swirling green, he could see the metal walls beneath the glow, the wires on a floor he could no longer feel. He could almost hear his footsteps echoing through the tunnel, see himself reaching out his arm, feel the cool metal, and then the fire of thousands of volts of electricity and the ice of even more ectoplasm and the ear piercing scream he'd let out, and then Danny would be on the other side of the portal. He'd take a moment to catch his breath, shake the memories out of his head, and move on.
---
Sam remembered Danny's accident very well. She joked about it now, and on some levels she was kind of glad it happened; it was selfish of her, but she liked being helpful, she liked being important, she liked being different. If she had the chance to go back and change it, she wouldn't. That didn't mean she didn't regret it, that Danny's screams didn't haunt her dreams, that she didn't occasionally get a whiff of charred flesh and static and that acidic tinge of ectoplasm and wretch. If she hadn't already been a vegetarian, that scent alone would have been enough to turn her.
The scent always seemed to be stronger whenever she went through the portal. All of the memories were stronger with the portal, honestly. The first time she'd gone through, it had taken her by surprise. She hadn't expected to be able to see the metal outline of the portal with it turned on, but she had. it had been far too easy to imagine Danny walking in, nervous, with her and Tucker cheering him on in the background. It had been far too difficult to stop imagining it as she saw with her minds eye Danny reach forward, touching a button that never should've been there. The smell filled her nose just like it had on that day, and Danny's scream echoed in her ear, and she vomited just as they made it to the ghost Zone.
Danny and Tucker had been concerned for her. She blamed it on motion sickness. It must have been believable enough; Tucker looked almost as sick as she was.
---
Tucker had blocked the actual event of Danny's accident out of his head. It hadn't been all that difficult, what with everything that followed. He'd been able to convince himself that Danny was lucky to have these cool powers and to have the attention of girls like Paulina. He'd convinced himself that Danny was lucky to be dead.
He hadn't even realized he'd done it until he'd gone through the portal for the first time, and everything came rushing back. Details he shouldn't have known, couldn't have known, filled in by his own mind. The haphazard arrangement of wires, the opened panels hanging off the wall. Part of him felt like he was standing outside the portal, watching Danny walk further and further into the darkness. Part of him felt like he was Danny, the anxiety of needing to prove himself a pit in his stomach. It was disorienting, and then Danny reached forward to a button that should never have been there, and the disorientation increased tenfold. The already bright green of the active portal seemed to get brighter somehow as it was reactivated in his minds eye. Danny was screaming, and Tucker's ears rang with the sound, both so close, as if it came from his own throat, and distant and echoed as it had been on that day.
The fact Tucker was still upright by the time they made it into the Ghost Zone was a miracle. Sam hadn't been as lucky, hunched over the corner spewing out whatever grass lookalike she'd eaten for lunch. She said the portal had made her motion sick. Tucker kept his mouth shut. He wasn't going to say anything if no one else did. He wouldn't dare admit to forgetting what he'd made his best friend do that day.
---
From the moment Jazz had learned Danny's secret, she'd lie awake each night, thinking of all the possible ways that this could have happened. Jazz was many things, but she wasn't an idiot. Phantom was undeniably a ghost, and Danny was undeniably Phantom, which meant that Danny was, in some way shape or form, a ghost. She also knew, from hugs a bit tighter and more awkward than they should be, that he had a pulse. That he was alive, somehow.
Jazz had come up with dozens of stories, each more outlandish than the next. Once Danny figured out that she knew, she'd bit her tongue for as long as she could. She didn't need to be a budding expert in psychology to figure out that whatever had happened must have been terribly traumatic. But, as much as she hated to admit it, she was a Fenton, and Fentons were known for their curiosity. It was only a matter of time before her desire to be a good big sister and a safe space for Danny was overrun by her ever growing thirst for knowledge.
When she asked, Danny had frozen for only a second before answering. "I'm sorry, that was insensitive." Jazz started to backtrack. "You don't have to tell me if you don't want to, I completely understand."
Danny turned to her with a smile a hair too wide. "Nah, it's fine. I'm honestly surprised that you didn't ask sooner." His tone was teasing, but Jazz could see the crease in his brow. He rubbed at the back of his neck, another nervous tick. "If I don't tell you now, you'll just wonder forever right?"
Jazz stood up and put her hand on his shoulder. "I can live with not knowing, Danny."
Danny brushed her hand off. "Yea, you'll live, but it'll just keep bothering you until you know. I know what we're like." His voice got quiet, and he didn't meet her eyes. "It was that curiosity that got me killed, after all."
Jazz had sat and listened and tried very hard to not let her horror show on her face. She'd assumed that it had something to do with the portal; there was no way it had happened any earlier, and Phantom had appeared so soon after that if it didn't have anything to do with the portal it would be a statistical miracle. Honestly, the actual events weren't that surprising. It sounded like her parents to put an on button on the inside of the portal. It sounded like Danny's friends to goad him into checking it out. It sounded like Danny to listen to them, both to seem cool and to satiate his own curiosity. None of that was the horrifying part.
The part that turned Jazz's stomach was the details. Danny described the sensation of being fried alive by more electricity than Fentonworks should legally be allowed to have with the nonchalance that most people saved for talking about burning their breakfast. He talked about the feeling of being torn apart and pieced together at a molecular level, with foreign pieces stitching together the parts that got destroyed in the process in the way that someone talked about their pet puking on the floor. "All I could do was scream. I don't even know how I was screaming, since I know at some point I'd lost my vocal chords. If I didn't, I wouldn't be able to use my wail, y'know?" he said, and it was wit the tone of someone who'd gotten stuck in some particularly heavy morning traffic.
It was as if none of it was actually important. As if it was annoying, but normal. When he'd finished, Jazz had pulled him into a too-tight hug, finding his pulse again like she had so many times before. "I'm so, so sorry you had to go through that," she said, holding him tight. "You didn't deserve it."
Danny had returned the hug for only a few moments before pulling away. "It's fine, Jazz. I only kinda died, so I basically lived."
Jazz bit the remark back down. Danny responded to stress and trauma with comedy, and while that wasn't the healthiest of coping mechanisms, now wasn't the time to address it.
The nights lying awake thinking about what-ifs quickly became replaced with imagining what had. It was hard to get it out of her mind, hard to get the imagined screams of her little brother to let her close her eyes for long enough to actually sleep. She managed, and every day she'd see her family long enough to exchange pleasantries, she answered the question "How did you sleep?" with as cheerful "Fine." If she let Danny know how much it bothered her, than he'd feel guilty, and she wasn't going to let him add another thing to his ever growing table of guilt.
She knew that when she went through the portal it was going to be bad. Having to essentially walk in Danny's shoes, to see where it all went down, was bound to be a triggering experience. It was one of the many reasons that she refused to go into the Ghost Zone for so long. And then the day came where she couldn't put it off any longer; she was needed on the other side of the veil, and there was no getting around it. So she made herself comfortable in the front of the Specter Speeder, and started the trip.
Jazz hadn't expected it to be so vivid. It was no where close to the nightmares she'd plagued herself with. She could smell the familiar scent of ectoplasm and metal that had been the backdrop to her entire life. She could hear the sound of Danny's hazmat suit in the echoing chamber of the portal. She could almost see Danny's face during that split moment of realization, between him hitting the button and the portal turning on. The dawning horror that he royally screwed up. That he might not live to see the consequences.
When she made it to the other side of the portal, and entered the barren green of the Ghost Zone for the first time, she was gasping for air, hand pressed to her chest to feel the pounding of her own heart, as if she was afraid that she'd died too. Her heart kept beating. So did Danny's, she reminded herself. And he was counting on her to help. Jazz steeled her nerves and drove off into the Ghost Zone.
---
"We've tested the ectofiltration system?" Maddie said, holding a clipboard in front of her.
"Yuppers!" Jack said. "Working just as good as always!"
Maddie checked that off the list. "We have the emergency rations and extra hazmats?"
Jack opened a compartment in the Specter Speeder, and the messily folded hazmat suits spilled out. Maddie could barely see, squished on top of it, a number of fudge protein bars. "Check!"
"And we have the ectoresistant camera and microphone system hooked up?" Maddie asked.
Jack twisted a screen around, showing live feed of himself in the speeder. "Working like a charm!"
Maddie checked those off the list. She ran back through everything on more time before tucking the clipboard under her arm. "Than we're finally ready."
Jack stepped out of the Specter Speeder and moved over to her, dragging her into a kiss. When they pulled away they were smiling at widely at each other. "It only took us two years of testing, but we've done it Mads. We'll finally be able to see the Ghost Zone."
Maddie grabbed hold of Jack's hands, gently guiding him to the speeder. "We'll be the first people to step through the barrier between life and death. We're making history, honey."
Jack took his seat next to Maddie as she got into the driver's seat. "We always knew we would."
Maddie let her one hand settle on the steering stick. She looked over at Jack and held out her hand, he took it, returning her grin. "Ready?"
"I've been ready for years." With a few clicks of a button, the speeder started moving forward. "Can I say it?" Jack asked. Maddie nodded. Jack cleared his throat. "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind!"
With that, they were surrounded by the swirling, pulsing green of the portal. Based on their tests, they had assumed they wouldn't be able to see or hear much of anything within the portal; any recording software they'd sent ahead had come back a mess of bright green and a sound somewhere between a churning and static. They'd always made it into the actual Ghost Zone and back safe and sound, so it had been assumed that that was just what the inside of the portal was like. Now, they were learning that wasn't the case.
Maddie could see the walls of the portal, almost exactly as they had been when they'd finished the construction of the portal. That was somewhat odd, but not concerning. What was concerning were the voices she could hear. She may not be able to place Samantha and Tucker's voice immediately, but she sure could place Danny's. She couldn't make out what they were saying, the hum of electricity and the whooshing of the portal still loud in her ears, but she knew it was them. Just like she knew it was Danny's footsteps that started to echo in the tunnel.
She opened her mouth to try and shout at him, demand what he was doing, tell him to go back, that it wasn't safe. And then she saw Danny. It was him, but it wasn't the Danny Maddie had seen only a few hours prior. This was Danny from when he was 14. When they had just finished the portal. A foreboding feeling climbed Maddie's spine as she watched Danny walking into a portal, his features tinged green, wearing the hazmat suit that they had made together. The one that had been damaged when he got shocked by the portal.
She saw the button on the side of the portal. Of course she did; she'd been the one to put it there. The why escaped her at the moment; had she put the panel on backwards? Had they designed it that way? She couldn't remember. Danny didn't see the button, even as he reached his hand forward to steady himself. Maddie lurched in her chair, reaching forward to try and grab him on instinct, but her hand met the cold glass of the speeder's window, and all she could do was watch in horror as her child, her precious, brilliant baby boy pressed the button.
She'd never heard anyone scream like Danny did. She hoped she never had to hear anything like it again, but she knew that was pointless. Maddie would hear that wail every time she tried to sleep at night, every time she heard the machinery of their work or the sounds of the portal, it would carry with it the sounds of Danny screaming. She knew that. Just like she knew, as she stared in horror at Danny being fried from the inside out, torn apart with the force of not only her invention, but the weight of an entire universe opening on top of him, that he could not have lived.
Her vision cleared as the Specter Speeder exited the portal, pulling into the expanse of the Ghost Zone. Maddie barely registered it. She fell back in her chair, hands shaking, staring blankly at the window where she'd just watched Danny-
Her thought process was cut off. "Did-" Jack swallowed hard, his voice just as shaky as Maddie felt. "Did you see that?"
Maddie could only give one, jerky nod in response.
"Was it real?"
Maddie choked down air, trying to get her body back under control. It took a few minutes, but Jack didn't seem to mind. He didn't even seem to notice. "I don't know," she said. "I think we need to turn back. Talk to him."
Jack nodded. "Yeah. Yeah we do."
Maddie turned the speeder around and back through the portal. Science could wait. Her kids were more important.
---
AU Details: When someone dies in an ectoconcentrated area, an echo of their death is left behind, visible for the living to see. Most of the time it isn't anything more than an imprint, the ectoplasm not strong enough to do anything but a general feeling of "Something bad happened here." Danny, who died in the highest concentration ectoplasm literally anywhere, has a very vivid death echo, that plays everything out from basically the moment he entered the portal to the moment he died.
Saw one of those posts that said to post a WIP so in effort to try and -ost things I make here’s a WIP for the fic Death Echoes by Ocearna. If you haven’t read it please do it’s a really good dp/dc crossover.
Faint laughter drifts through the door, happy and light, and his core pangs with guilt and annoyance and then more guilt. He burrows further under his covers at the thought of having to face his fright. He knows they'll be worried about him after yesterday, but their concern hangs from his shoulders like a lead scarf wound too tight; even just breathing feels like a struggle.
Danny just wants to rest. To relax and recover; to let his headache fade and his limbs lighten and his head clear. To have a day off from it all.
But he can't.
He considers getting up. Pulls his blankets more tightly around his shoulders. Contemplates the distance between him and the door. Wonders what his room would look like if he rearranged the furniture a bit.
I started writing death echoes two weeks shy of a year ago. Or rather, published the first chapter then. And it's been quite the journey, both being part of the DPxDC fandom and using it as a way to actively learn how to write fiction. But there's one thing that has made this story in particular a far more interesting experience than anything else I've written:
Being able to clearly see my progress as a writer.
I started death echoes with no plan beyond a couple vague ideas for events and conversations I wanted to happen. And unlike Overcast Skies, the only other long fic I've finished, I didn't have guide rails this time. Overcast is a canon rewrite. death echoes is such an insane mix of crossovers and headcanons that finding a stable basis for it has been half my issue half the time.
But next to writing something completely original, it's probably the closest I could have gotten to being dumped in the deep end in terms of novel writing. And that has been insanely good for my ability to write.
For one, I now write almost every day. I have several projects on the go, so you don't see updates as often as you would if I was focusing on one story. But I have a process now for ideation and outlining and drafting and editing, and I love it. I no longer get stuck on one chapter for weeks or months on end. I have strategies for working around writer's block, and I'm finding myself able to recover from it far quicker.
The other thing is that, as a way to check my progress, I've been occasionally going back and revising the first chapter or two. And by revising it I mean completely rewriting it from scratch, and attempting to apply everything I've learned since the last time I wrote it.
And my latest attempt... wow. I'm not even done, but the first chapter is already three times longer than the original. The point of view is clearer, the dialogue is smoother, the exposition is tighter, and there's action right from the first thousand words. Promises and plot threads are being set up. Foreshadowing is hiding all through out. Writing it is far easier too. Writing from a draft does mean my ideas are actually in order before I write, but still. I wrote two thousand words in just the last few hours.
I've sort of hinted at it, but I have a half baked plan to completely revise death echoes eventually. Partly as an exercise in learning to edit and revise properly, and partly to really see what I can create when I dig into a story that deeply. I'll have to see if I do actually get around to doing that; there's a chance another story might steal my attention before I can finish this. But I hope I can manage it. I'd love to show you all what death echoes looks like in my head these days, now that I actually know what I'm doing with it.
And I think... to those who write, if you haven't done something similar, it might be a fun exercise to pick something you wrote a while back and think about how you'd write it these days. Maybe even rewrite it. I'm sure you've seen artist redraws and the like, and how magical it can be to see how much someone has improved over the months and years. Wouldn't it be cool to do the same with our writing?
"You do not have to answer straight away," Wonder Woman said. "Take your time to think about it. The offer will not expire. In the meantime, we have other topics to discuss as well." Her gaze lost warmth as it turned away from Danny and slowly panned over her teammates.
For the first time since he met her, Danny thought he saw what her enemies saw; cold, steely, regal confidence.
He was glad she wasn't looking at him.
The other heroes all straightened under her gaze. Even Constantine tensed, tugging the open front of his coat across his chest and crossing his arms.
It was Superman who braved the tense atmosphere to speak.
