TFW your best friend’s son accidentally makes you relive a repressed memory by asking a dumb question about your GIW work.
Cowboy was just dropping Danny off at home and saying he’d cover for him given it was a school night. JJ did not sign up for this but he’ll muddle through it… like always.
Not a fic, but something I’ve always kind of wanted to write about. I actually have a rough draft floating around somewhere, but it’s kind of cruddy, so I’ll probs scrap it.
Anyway, this has probably been discussed, but I think about the episode “Memory Blank” a lot. Like, a lot. It’s an interesting concept - superhero gets amnesia - with an even more interesting twist - superhero’s best friend unwillingly changes history - but the episode felt more like a means to an end, the end being the Brand New Marketable Logo. The result of children’s show writing and corporate demands and The Creator that Must Not Be Named, I know, but I so badly wish that it was expanded on.
Sam’s wish goes beyond her relationship with Danny; it ends up changing the timeline, the biggest indicator of this being his lack of ghost powers. Without Danny Phantom and without the portal being active, this cancels out a lot of what happens in season 1, but there’s still one event that takes place regardless of the portal or not: the college reunion at Vlad’s.
It’s very clear in the episode that Vlad’s goal isn’t just to embarrass Jack, it’s to get rid of him completely. The reunion is his platform for doing so. In the episode, Danny and Jazz are dragged along only because of Danny getting in trouble for missing curfew and not doing his chores as a result of the ghost hunting. It can be presumed that without moonlighting as a superhero, there wouldn’t be a need for him or Jazz to attend the reunion.
Of course, this doesn’t change Vlad’s plans. In fact, it makes them easier to execute. Without anyone standing in his way, there’s nothing stopping him from overshadowing Jack and ultimately killing him.
And now imagine the world that Sam wakes up to the morning after their argument. Imagine her trying to break through to a sullen, bitter Danny, who doesn’t want anything to do with ghosts especially now that his father is gone. Imagine her walking into the Fenton’s lab only to find the portal dismantled and gone, removed by Maddie in her grief. Imagine her trying to fix a world she never wanted to create.
[10 Years Later AU] – After escaping from a decade of Alien Slavery, Vlad Masters returns to Earth the broken shell of a man. Ten years a slave, ten years a monster - This is a story of learning to how to be human again.
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Word Count: 12422
Part 1 of 4.
Otherwise Titled: "The Redemption Arc Nobody Really Asked For"
Vlad struggles with life on Earth following his escape from Space, but is no longer the same person he was when he left. A ghost of who he once was, he only wants to be left alone, but nobody seems to get the hint A mix of fanon headcanon and some [REDACTED] theories. Please enjoy! Warnings though: PTSD, anxiety, sadness and all around angst ahead
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Torn by travel, toil and treason; Tied by fraying lines
Devil drowning voice of reason – Dire decaying mind
Mending miles with threads of measure, letting loose all lies
Unraveling lines of pain and pleasure – A life of death defied
└THREADS OF MEASURE┐, Brown Bird
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“What is a human?” A creature whispered; its voice the streams of stolen starlight that adorned its shapeless form. “Are they made from monsters, like you and me?”
Vlad attempted to speak, but found his voice lost, swallowed up by the pressing darkness of the galaxy around them. Before him, the faceless creature gave him an inhuman laugh, tittering and violent in response to his silence.
Its’ visage flickered, twisting into the soft face of a child; eyes burning green, silver hair glowing beneath the star’s love, looking the same as he had ten years ago. This ghost child – A false god burnt in the zealous idolatry of a man long dead.
He’s forgotten so many things; forgotten so many souls, spirits and dreams, but this is the very one he had wished to forget the most of all.
“Did you make the choice, or did they make the choice for you, Vlad Masters? Did you choose this?”
And yet, the familiar face. The familiar voice. Those clenched fists, filled with the destiny to rip out his heart, again and again.
“Will you let them make you into a monster?” The boy whispered; the stars lost in his eyes. “Or will you fight to be human?”
He narrowed his eyes; words lost in his throat, as the young spirit smiled in a deceiving manner. Who are you?
The creature shifted again, taking on a different form. His form – the visage of his own human skin, staring back at him. Blue eyes, grey hair. Another ghost, another ghost, wearing a man’s skin, pretending to be human.
I am you.
A violent torrent of energy slammed into his chest, and a startled gasp of pain escaped from his heaving lungs. At his waist, the black rings flickered to life, forcibly turning him back into his human self, and the creature laughed as he went sent hurtling violently into space. The lack of air sent his body into a frenzy, and in his struggle to keep living, he wondered momentarily if this was the beginning of the end.
“Will you learn to be human?” The being asked him; its voice growing quieter and quieter as he was sent careening into the unknown. “Or will you perish as the monster you think you are?”
As the emptiness swallowed up what little life he had left, the creature disappeared in a torrent of stars, and he felt the darkness of space descend upon him at last.
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Swollen hands laid down like the light of hope
Falls in fragments from self-dealt fatal blows
And burns our eyes with bold bursts of fires known
Yet sewn so tight to us we can't let go
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When he came to, eyes blurred and head pounding, the world around him was screaming.
“--- fell from the sky!”
“Did you see --- come from?”
“Oh God, --- ambulance! Somebody call an Ambulance! There’s --- attempt on Third Street! Oh my God ---“
For a moment, rationality lost in the clamor of voices and confusion, he thought that he was back in the Colosseum, back in the ring where they pitted creature after creature against him, back in the chains that he broke free from –
“Did anybody get on that video ---“
“ – the fuck is wrong with you? He just tried to kill –“
“His eyes are open! Sir, can you – me, sir? Sir!”
Something jostled his shoulder, and his body exploded with pain, gaping out a choked gasp as it ricocheted through his body. The hand squeezed, and he felt the world beginning to go dark at the edges. He couldn’t move his body, limbs too heavy to lift from the concrete floor, and he realized with a delayed dismay that something was horribly wrong.
“They’re on the way! Hang on sir, we’ll get you to a hospital –”
The hands let go of him, and against the frantic shouting of the voices around him, he can hear the fevered whisper of the one nearest to him.
“Come on, stay with me. Don’t die on me yet. The ambulance --- be here soon. They’re really good at response times, they’ve had --- be with all of the ghost attacks over the years, --- main part of town, and oh man, stay with me man! --- open okay? Can you tell me your name?”
Name? What was his name? His name was Plasmius. Plasmius, space nomad, ghost hybrid. Plasmius the Monster. Plasmius the Destroyer. Murderer, Monster, Madman, Slave #10899, ruler of the Col – No. No, that’s not correct. (A dead ghost, a dead ghost, a dead ghost –) That was the past, that’s who he was, and he was that for far too long.
He was no longer any of those things.
(But he wasn’t even sure who he was now; who this battered and broken body belonged too, as he bled out against the pavement.)
He had been fighting since he had left the earth. That wasn’t who he was anymore (but who was he? What was he? Why was he still alive – )
“Sir? Sir, please say something!”
“My name is….” His voice was hoarse, scratchy and stiff from disuse. He can feel his eyes start to drift, and the inky darkness in the corners of his mind was encroaching quickly, creeping along like a thief in the night. He doesn’t even know if the words he speaks are real, slipping into the dark waters surrounding his thoughts. “…is Vlad….Vlad Masters.”
And for a second, his vision cleared, hazily revealing a human staring down at him, tears streaming down their face as they attempted to frantically communicate something to him. The words were lost in the static, flowing in and out as the blood roared in his ears, and his head was screaming out a song of pain in tune with the panic of the world around him.
But, it was a human. A human was helping him.
He was home.
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'Round unholy chasms and up hollow hills
We steady our horsepower and summon our will
To embrace what's behind what is seen and is haunting us still
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When he awoke the second time, the world was quiet, save for the small beep of a heart monitor. It unsettled him, the unearthly quiet, and his body tensed, preparing for a fight –
The feeling of pain shot up his side, and he gasped as it lit every nerve on fire before slipping back into the dull ache that quivered beneath the surface. The collection of electronic equipment he was attached to made a series of aggravated beeping sounds somewhere to his right, increasing the severe pounding of his headache, and he felt the urge to rip apart every single machine in the room. He raised his fist to grab at the wires, to rip them from his skin, but the pain returned tenfold, and his arm slumped back uselessly against his side.
“Your bones are broken.” A voice told him, distorted but hauntingly familiar in its tone. “All two hundred and six of them. The doctors don’t know how you’re not a quadriplegic with the nature of your injuries. In fact, they don’t know how you’re even alive… Then again, despite having revealed your nature to the world in the past, they do not know your true identity, but that will change very soon. After all, Vlad Masters, the Wisconsin Ghost, has been gone for a very long time.”
There was a haze of blankness that threatened to envelop him, curling itself around his neck to whisper sweet nothings in his ear, luring him back to the abyss of nothingness from which he crawled away. With an effort, he turned to his head to find the source of the voice, finding the floating figure of a small blue ghost, leaning against a clock-adorned staff in the middle of his hospital room. And then, when the figure changed the moment they made eye contact, shifting into the form of a violet-colored adult, red eyes gleaming beneath a zigzagging scar – Vlad remembered exactly who he was dealing with.
And yet, there was something else; the nagging feeling that something was wrong. (A memory that wasn’t his, a dream that wasn’t a dream; something different, something precious that wasn’t meant for him to see, telling him a secret meant to stay asleep.)
“You are…Clockwork,” he said softly. He wasn’t used to this voice, this language, and every word he spoke felt wrong to say; English stiff and foreign on his tongue. “To what do I….owe the pleasure?”
“I have come to check up on you.” The ghost said grimly. “I was originally banned from interfering with your timeline by the Observants, following your less than stellar record with them, but it’s thus been rescinded.”
All words that registered to him, but they were empty and meaningless; Clockwork’s words were structured and informal, all emotion gone from his voice. Vlad struggled to voice his response. “…. How long have I been gone…?”
The ghost shifted into the form of an old man, and he wandered closer, coming to loom over the hospital bed. Up close, his scar was less a memory of a wound, but rather a brand, carved deep into the cool hue of his skin. As the ghost peered upon him with glistening crimson eyes– he could hear the soft tick of Clockwork’s working grandfather clock, humming out a song from within its glass cradle embedded deep in the ghost’s chest.
“You have been gone ten years, Vlad. It is 2017.” Clockwork told him calmly, quietly, almost too soft to hear amidst the other sounds. ”But you knew that, didn’t you?”
He had known, he had always known, but it was still crushing, still heartbreaking. Keeping track of time had kept him sane, it kept him aware, as the chains rattled and the screams drowned out all else, but it was still a hard pill to swallow. A decade of his life gone, trapped in the memory of a bad dream that he couldn’t wake up from. Ten years since he was stranded in space, ten years since he was enslaved by an alien race, ten years since he could call himself a h u m a n –
Suddenly, Clockwork’s voice cut through his thoughts. “I am…sorry, Vlad. Truly, I am. This is not the future I would have chosen for you.”
A bitter laugh bubbled in his throat, but the witty spark to engage in banter was gone. He felt hollow, as if someone had carved out all his insides and left a rotting carcass in his place. It never changed. It never changed.
The knowledge that something else could have been done, that something could have changed to prevent it all from happening will haunt him for the rest of his life, just as it had with his accident, just as all things in his life had gone.
A never-ending, unchanging burden; the guilt that festered like a cancer, devouring happiness in its wake. The knowledge that it could have been different; the knowledge that it could have been better.
And yet, instead of the blind anger that would have consumed him, it filled his bones with exhaustion. The truth left him feeling like a shell, like a ghost, clutching for something to drown himself in, but he was so tired – tired of living in the past; tired of living in the dead dream that had long disappeared.
“We’ve…never met before this. But why do I know you?”
“We have met before, and we will meet again.” Clockwork told him as his long spindly fingers fiddled with the clock adorning his staff. “One might say that…only time will tell.” Making private joke that was only funny to him, the ghost let out a rare laugh at his own secret.
(How does he know these things?)
In his wanderings through the Ghost Zone, Vlad had heard stories of the Master of the Time, but they were only mere stories, and there was nothing concrete. The watchdog of the Observants, a near omnipotent specter with complete mastery over Time and all its perks. He had searched, lured in by the notion of becoming his own God with the Time Staff and Infiniti-Map, but it was a fruitless venture and he inevitably lost all interest. It had become another legend, another story lost to the pages of history– as if all trace of the entity’s existence had been wiped from the Ghost Zone itself.
But there, buried there, amongst the history of his years, there were memories – memories of a different world, a different reality, a different life, but his life nonetheless. It was almost as if –
He felt his vision start to blur again, and the sound of rushing blood filled his ears once more. Clockwork was trying to say something to him, shifting through each of his forms, as he spoke hurriedly over the noise of static that steadily began to drown the world out.
“– A second chance. A second time --- in the current time – for the past cannot be changed and the future cannot be made if the current time is not maintained. -–Here for a reason – You came home for a reason --- it is up to you what will this reason will mean.”
The darkness lingered at the edges, and he struggled to remain awake, trying to think of a question before he lost the last of his consciousness again. From above him, a young Clockwork gave him the ghost of a smile before disappearing in a flash of bright light and the swing of a clock’s arm as the portal struck midnight.
In the moments before he lost consciousness, as the hospital room door slammed open and the room filled with unfamiliar faces and doctors’ scrubs, the last thing he heard was the faint sound of laughter in the distance as it turned into a vicious sob.
X
What was one has become individual parts
Devoid of the source where this ritual starts
With our wills overthrown at the whim of habitual hearts
X
But in the dream, Plasmius awaited him.
Blood stained hands; glistening white teeth dripping with red. Carved into his skin, a brand – a language he did not speak, did not want to speak, but he knew what it meant (he would never forget what it meant).
Fight or die.
Scarlet eyes stared out at him from abyss; the eyes of a stranger, these stolen jewels plucked from the sarcophagus of the Gods, a power within that was unlike anything else in this world. And yet, it was home; it was familiar; it was unforgettable. This was a ghost – a spirit of something once living, that was no longer, but it would not disappear. It was trapped here, between this world and the next. A true eternity.
“I cannot die,” the ghost whispered with mirth, throwing out his scarred arms; a singular chain rattling, screeching as breaking glass in the silence of the dead, “but you can never live.”
You are dead, Plasmius.
A reminder, a painful memory, a dead dream. Do dreams ever truly die?
A ghost, a shell of something that once was. Above him, the galaxy is filled with ghosts, haunting the memory of the star left behind, trapped in their place as the quasar devours all that’s left behind. A graveyard; a silent burial ground that swallowed all those upon fell upon its endless tomb.
He was meant to die here in this endless abyss.
But he was still alive. After everything, after all the terrible things he had done, he was still alive, why was he still alive –
“Will you let me out?” Plasmius murmured; an unfamiliar voice that was not his, was not him. “I am you, and you are me, but I am not free. Are you?”
A young boy screaming, calling for his dead father, as the universe wept and snuffed out his fears. (But no death was peaceful, no death was painless, and the children cannot be saved.)
“You will never be free.”
And Plasmius laughed, an echoing sound that rattled the stars from their graves and sent the heavens crashing down upon their sorrows laid out for bare
“We will see.”
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One day no sordid soul will shout it's purpose
Corralling lost accomplices around
When thunder voices cease to shower us with locust
Will you be ready to receive the underground?
