You've heard of "Danny Phantom Corpse AUs," right? Where every time Danny goes ghost, he dies, leaving behind a body he has to worry about hiding or destroying (and creating a new one every time he turns human again)?
I propose a similar concept: ASTRAL PROJECTION AU! Same concept, but the body Danny leaves behind is alive and he has to go back in to "change back."
Pros (for Danny):
Go ghost almost anywhere! With family? In class? On a roller coaster? Just invisibly slip out! Hit da bricks!
No need to worry about changing back and revealing himself to a ghost or hunter if he's defeated! Sorry, Reality Trip.
Cons (pros for writers who love drama/humor):
Now we gotta find a safe place to put the living body so it doesn't die
Danny passing out in the middle of class even more often than usual, and if he's in ghost form he isn't actually technically getting restful sleep, so he appears to sleep all day yet is always tired
Being knocked out in ghost form doesn't automatically send his soul back to his body
Living bodies without souls are sitting ducks for being overshadowed, and if nobody's in the body and caring for it for too long, uh...Danny would be a ghost full-time. Thankfully that would take days, but then there's the problem of his body being unresponsive when concerned family/acquaintances/etc. discover him.
Depending on how 'alive' he still is (as in whether he's fully living and can leave, or the portal accident left him braindead so he's just possessing his own body), he may not be able to return instantly, feel what his body feels while outside it, or even be able to locate it if it's moved (or he forgets where he left it)
Additional thoughts:
He can still use powers while in his body, but things like flying, intangibility, or invisibility are more draining since he's using those powers on a body. It's akin to turning someone else invisible/intangible or carrying them while flying.
If he can still experience his body's senses, Tucker and Sam can use his body as a communication device with him when he's out. The Danno Phone™️
If he's possessing his own body rather than still being connected to it, devices such as ghost shields could not let him in (or just rip him from his own body), adding an extra thing to juggle when keeping his powers and identity secret.
Feel free to use/modify this idea as desired. Honestly I'd love to see stuff on this.
When Danny Fenton was fourteen years old, he buried his body in the woods.
The accident had been fatal, he knew that from the moment he stepped through the portal and into his parent's lab. But even in this clarity, he remembered feeling as though he was in a fog, as if this was a dream. Still he didn't want his parents or sister to find his body, he didn't want them to grieve for him, and he was convinced he could maintain a charade of being alive. So he hauled his corpse up the stairs and out the front door, miraculously unseen.
Danny wouldn't have tried though had he seen what he looked like.
He didn't remember getting from the steps of his house to the woods, only that he had been determined to get there. He came upon a tree and couldn't walk any further, he didn't even try, he just knew he couldn't. So he fell to his knees, and began to claw at the ground, digging at the dirt and piling it next to his corpse. He thought about how he was going to have to go home and wash the dirt from himself and act as if nothing had happened; he was going to have to act like his left arm wasn't searing still. Danny was completely unaware that he didn't even have fingernails to get dirt under anymore.
He buried himself in a shallow grave, tamping down the cold, wet dirt with his sharp hands, and then he pushed himself up and turned away without so much as a lingering glance.
Danny leaned forward and fell from the dock. He slipped through the ice as if it were no more than air, gliding through it as he plunged into the frigid water.
Danny next found himself at a lake, half frozen from the coming winter, and stared at it. Not out across it, like most people would do, no, Danny stared at the ice below the dock. It seemed cold, and clear, things he couldn't feel anymore, things he didn't think he would ever feel again.
The icy water underneath was cutting, it should have bit into his skin, chilling him to his bones. But Danny didn't have skin to feel with, and his bones were buried in a shallow grave near the base of a tree at Amity Park's border. They couldn't feel anything anymore.
The icy water brought him clarity despite his earlier thoughts, and the water soothed the sparking pain that shot through him. It traveled up from his fingers, where the tiny tear in his rubber gloves had been that had brought him his death, and then it spider-webbed across his shoulder and into his neck. It felt sharp, piercing like he had walked into a collection of hornets' nests, and hot, burning, like he had stuck his arm in a scorching fire.
But now all he felt was peace, and the cold. Danny remembered closing his eyes as he sank to the bottom of the frozen lake, and he remembered thinking just for a little bit. He would go home in a little bit, when the cold had fully sapped the heat from his core, and then his parents, his sister, his friends: none of them would have to mourn him. None of them would have to wonder where he had gone, where his body was, if someone had taken him. They'd be calm, and at peace, and he could help them; he could protect them from that loss.
But not even the freezing water could chill the spark at the core of his being now, and he would have to fight to contain it. The calm he felt as he touched the bottom of the lake was a farce.
The last thing Danny remembered as the water around him went black, was wondering if things were really as clear as they seemed. And when he awoke, he was in his bed, jostled from sleep by his sister's scream.
He remembered hearing clambering as his parents rushed to her aid, and Danny should have too, but when he pulled back his blankets, dirt littered his sheets. He was covered head to toe in it, and with a chill that only matched the icy water of the lake, Danny realized none of it had been a dream, and somehow, in some way, he was back in his body. His corpse had come back to life, and he was wearing it like a costume. He had swallowed as he looked in the mirror, his stomach cinching like it wanted to hide as much as he did.
Danny had died. He had actually died. He was no longer human, but maybe, he wasn't really a ghost either. Maybe he was something worse, something that could act human, something that could hide behind a human mask. He couldn't let anyone know. He had to protect his friends and family from the truth, he had to help hide them from it, from himself. Not just because his parents were ghost-hunters, but because he thought it might hurt them more to know.
He didn't want them to grieve for him.
Downstairs, Danny would find a trail of green splattered across the floor at the base of the portal. It traveled up the stairs and stopped abruptly at the front door. But the portal was on, and even if his parents had been concerned over the ectoplasm that had been drug across the floor, they were more delighted to see it had worked. Danny felt his corpse smile, a small thing that made something in the center of him flicker.
He was just happy to help after all.
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You Wouldn't Like Me Alive is my fic up on AO3! I have more info about it here!
We the Phandom like to elaborate on Tucker’s Pharaoh connection and maybe give him powers related to it.
Let’s throw that at a Corpse AU, because I love Corpse AUs and I was an Egyptology kid. Imagine for me if you will, all the usual Corpse AU stuff happens, and Danny has to admit his secret identity to a small group of detectives to get them to believe that yes, it was an accident and no, I don’t want to press charges now will you please put my carcass back in the ground this is making me very agoraphobic. And the detectives, naturally, want Danny to come out of the casket to his parents because Holy Fuck Dude, and Danny naturally does not want that. They reach a compromise: Danny doesn’t have to admit his secret identity to anybody else, but he does have to let the city give him a proper spot in the cemetery with a headstone instead of going out and making another unmarked grave for somebody else to find and freak out about.
Danny is wary of having a marked grave because he’s afraid his rabid fans or rabid enemies might dig it up. Enter Tucker! The ancient Egyptians were all about funerary rites, and Tucker convinces Danny to let him put some good old fashioned curses on the new grave. Egypt was sometimes a theocracy, it’s very possible that “appeasing powerful ghosts through grave magic” was Tucker’s ancestor’s/previous life’s whole job description.
Tucker starts getting occasional visits from cobras. Cobras do not naturally live in Amity Park, and they definitely don’t talk, but they show up in Amity Park and occasionally talk to Tucker. Why cobras? Because they’re associated with Meretseger, the guardian goddess of the Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Queens in Thebes. The tomb builders prayed to her for protection from the snakes and scorpions that lived in the Valleys, and she was invoked to blind grave robbers with her venom.
Imagine you’re a random kid at Casper High, and suddenly a bigass snake comes from nowhere and crawls up that weird techie kid’s shoulders. It puts its mouth near the guy’s ear and he stands up like “excuse me teacher, the Guys in White are trying to dig up Phantom’s grave, can I please go chase them off?”
Imagine you’re Wes Weston and you know that Fenton is Phantom, and you see a snake whisper something in Tucker Foley’s ear. He turns to Fenton and says, just loud enough for you to also hear it because Fenton and his friends are all dicks, “hey, somebody just put a blunt on your grave, do you want it?”
Imagine you’re Jack and Maddie Fenton and you really want a look at Phantom’s body to see if there’s any clues to why he got so strong so fast. Before you’re even a foot into this grave, your son’s best friend shows up with an enormous snake wrapped around his shoulders and they’re both glaring at you. All of the usual wildlife of the night has gone completely, creepily silent (Meretseger means “she who loves silence”) and the cobra is absolutely making eye contact with you.
thoughts for the corpse au (where when danny changes to ghost form he leaves behind a corpse, and when he changes back he generates a new body)
Because of him shedding a corpse, hes theoretically no longer tied to his humanity for that brief time, so what if that stops his aging for the time hes in ghost form?
Of course it wouldnt get noticed right away, but once him and his friends hit their 20s and they look Adult and he Doesn't...
Maybe if it's set in a crossover with dc or marvel or smt, he finds a trusted doctor who can find out his current biological age, and he finds out while hes chronologically 24, hes physically about 18 or so
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
(Originally posted: 6 May 2021)
Summary: Officer Roald is not having a good day. Instead of chilling and writing traffic tickets like usual, he's out searching for the town's ghostly vigilante. At least he has Kite, the force's dog, to keep him company.
My last phic for Phic Phight 2021!
Team human, prompt by Star G, "The police wanted to know more about the town's own vigilante, but in the process they got more than they bargained for. (Corpse au)"
