Vlad felt like his world was crumbling all over again. It had been bad enough when it was Maddie, a college crush that never got to go any further, but now, Jack Fenton had stolen the affection of another from him.
“Vlad,” Harriet called from the opposite side of the room, “come on…”
“How,” he asked, staring haunted into the side of the room, “how did this happen, Harriet?”
Somehow he could hear her roll her eyes. “It’s not like I planned this, I was just going through some old albums and then…”
He could still hear her excitedly asking to see him. Was he not enough? The house, the gifts, years of unconditional love and everything money could buy, and she was ready to leave it all to go see him. “Harriet… my heart is breaking, I can’t take this…”
“Oh for the love of-” there was the sound of her crossing the room and then the quick ‘fwap’ of a pillow smacking his face, knocking him back onto the bed where he laid in a daze and stared at the ceiling, wondering where it had gone wrong, “she’s seven years old you big drama queen, and it’s a sleepover! Don’t you think you’re overreacting?”
“Over…” Vlad felt indignant, “Harriet, for the last three weeks it’s been ‘Uncle Jack’ this, and ‘Uncle Jack’ that, and now she wants to go spend the night with… with him! On her birthday weekend Harriet! Her birthday! ‘Overreacting,’ please, if anything you’re UNDERreacting!”
Sighing, Harriet joined him on the bed. This was technically her fault, she had been looking over some college scrapbooks when their daughter, Dana, tumbled into the room -literally- and had to be stopped from colliding with a vase more expensive than some people’s cars. Naturally, the curiosity of a child saw the strangers in the book beside her parents and responded with a thousand questions, most of which had to be answered with a PG retelling. Dana had taken a particular interest in ‘Uncle’ Jack. when Harriet slipped on a bit of nostalgia and told her that they were like brothers a long time ago. She had never had an uncle before, Harriet only had sisters, and for a girl who was used to having everything, the concept of something new to add to her treasures made her eye’s light up. Of course, she also had her father’s annoying habit of never letting anything go.
“Mommy,” she had said weeks ago over dinner, “I know what I want for my birthday.”
“Oh,” Harriet had replied, her and Vlad sharing a look of amusement at her assertiveness, “and what’s that?”
“I wanna go see Uncle Jack.”
Vlad had almost choked on his salmon at the announcement, forgoing his wine glass and reaching straight for the bottle. He spent the entire night in his library pacing and listening to Liza Minnelli records and any attempts he’d made to bargain with their daughter to change her mind in the subsequent weeks had been met with failure.
“...Is it too early to ground her?”
“On what grounds, Mr. Masters.”
He paused as he racked his brain looking for probable cause. “Treason?”
fwap.
“Look Vlad, you know I’m not Jack’s biggest fan either,” she began.
“So it’s two against one now, great, now YOU go tell her no.”
“BUT,” Harriet continued, ignoring her husband, “it is only going to be one night, and I’m sure Maddie will keep things in order enough that if anything goes nobody will get hurt.”
“Ah yes,” Vlad said, eyes flashing red, “because that worked out so well last time, didn’t it dear.”
“No,” she rebutted, “but last time they didn’t have two kids or their own to look after either. I mean, little Danny’s just now walking and Jazzy is about Dana’s age so at the very least they’re capable of keeping children alive for the twenty-four hours it’ll take us to set up the p-a-r-t-y. Besides, much as I hate to admit it, kids have always loved Jack, remember when you guys had to volunteer at that daycare for class credit?”
“Well, you know what they say about those of like minds, my dear”
“Mmhmm,” she said, kissing his forehead, “and I also know what they say about opposites, Mr. ‘Accidentally sat on the class hamster and made the children cry.’”
Vlad grumbled as he thought about the family postcard the Fentons had sent them last year. Jack, mountain of a man that he was, tears nearly in his eyes as he cradled the two small children and his wife in his massive arms as if they were the only things in the world. He’d almost looked… competent, and Harriet had gotten serotonin from the smile he let slip looking at the photo longer than he cared to admit. He supposed one day wouldn’t kill anyone… also, he could always send a duplicate sentry to invisibly watch the house for signs of excess buffoonery.
“Besides,” Harriet said, leaning in to whisper in his ear, “it’s been a while since we’ve had a night just to ourselves, and I think my Dairy Queen outfit is getting a little sad boxed up in the closet, eh?”
Turning red, his ears perked up like an excited bat. “I… yes… well… I- I don't suppose one night is entirely unreasonable.”
Summary: Dogs have a long and complicated relationship with death in mythologies all around the world, and even though he doesn’t get a lot of moments in the series, Damon Gray -coincidentally- also has a complicated relationship with death and dogs..
“There is a flame that I've been fanning, there is a fire waiting to catch
There is a Hell that has been building from the moment we first met
If there ever was a time, if there ever was a chance
To undo the things I've done and wash these bloodstains from my hands
It has passed and been forgotten, these are the paths that we must take
Cause you and I, Tom, we are men, and we can bend and we can break”
-The Hounds, The Protomen. Act II: The Father Of Death
The sound of a dog barking near his ear and the sensation of fur covering his whole body made Damon Gray shoot awake and instinctively reach for the gun he’d begun keeping in his desk.
Disoriented from sleep, his scrambling hands found nothing but the lamp beside the couch where he had fallen asleep, knocking it to the ground and causing him to fully compose himself as his mind caught up with his body. He wasn’t in his bedroom, he was in their tiny apartment’s living room. There wasn’t a dog, there was a movie playing on the TV that he claimed to be watching as he ‘rested his eyes.’ And lastly, he wasn’t covered in fur, but rather a blanket that Valerie had no doubt tossed over him when she came home from work and found him sleeping. He smiled to himself at what a paranoid old man he’d turned into since becoming a father so many years ago.
Rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, Damon made his way down the hall to the bathroom to wash off his face. The dog on the tv was aggressively barking now, and even though he’d turned it down before getting up, the sound was enough to flash him back to the incident at Axion that had nearly cost him everything. He had never exactly been a fan of dogs -in fact he had always preferred cats- but he had also never been able to hate them either. In fact, when he learned about the Mastiff Protocol at Axion Labs, he’d been thoroughly impressed by how well trained the “volunteers” (the corporate word for the dogs they had been preparing to use as security) had been. He knew that the breed was highly intelligent with an excellent memory and even better guardian senses and he had to respect the work ethic of any creature that determined… but he also had to acknowledge how superior his security system was.
.Was.
He stressed the last word in his mind as he sighed and finished cleaning his face. No matter how much he tried to convince himself otherwise,he couldn’t help but blame himself for the Green Hound incident. Of course, he hadn’t known what they would do with all those dogs after agreeing to use his system, let alone that one would ignore the old adage of ‘letting sleeping dogs lie’ and instead start tearing up the lab in what seemed to be some act of revenge, but maybe it their (or rather his) security was a bit better they could have cut down on the damage and he’d still have a much better job. Maybe then his daughter wouldn’t be spending her school nights giving herself gray hairs chasing ghosts and he wouldn’t feel himself flinch every time a dog barked too loudly in his direction.
Speaking of, he thought, suddenly aware of the relative silence of the apartment, Valerie’s way too quiet tonight…
Damon loved his daughter, really he did, but that girl could snore in a way that gave a sawmill noise envy, and the fact the he didn’t currently hear her cutting logs drew his attention. They had an agreement that she’d always be back in the house by 10pm on a school night and a quick look at his watch told him it was too late in the evening for the silence of an empty room. Rounding the corner to her room, he listened at the door for a bit for the miraculous sound of a normalized sleep volume, but instead he heard nothing. Well, nothing would be an understatement; Damon Gray heard the absolute sound of emptiness on the other side of the door.
Knocking twice on the door, he whispered her name.
“Val? Sweetie?”
Silence greeted him. A door cold to the touch.
“Valerie…” he called again, this time louder and slightly concerned.
There was a response this time, the sound of tiny claws scraping against the door. Damon recognized the sound from a trip to his grandmother’s house in Florida years ago, it was the sound of a dog excitedly scratching at the other side of the door. Desperately flipping the mental switch away from fear, his mind went back to rational parent mode and the scratching became more excited at his presence. As disappointed as he was that his daughter was apparently breaking curfew again, he was entirely too tired to deal with a smuggled animal ruining the security deposit. “Not the worst thing your teenage daughter could bring home, old man,” he told himself as he grabbed the doorknob, “count your…”
The door opened inward into an ice cold abyss. In front of him there was only the top of a glowing white stone staircase and, as far as he could see in any other direction, there was simply darkness. He moved to close the door as an immediate reaction to the sight, his mind shutting down and opting to reset the scenario. However, halfway through the motion a voice cut in to his mind.
But then where’s your daughter, Damon?
It was a rough and scratchy thought, a mocking thought that rested in his mind despite the voice that had put it there not belonging to him in any sense.
His angered grip tightened on the doorknob to the point of almost causing him pain, and as he grabbed a few deep, panicked breaths, he stepped silently into the blinding darkness, the phantom scratching at the door transforming into a wood splintering fervor the second he released his hold on the anchor to the outside world
The staircase into nothing was held up by nothing and was seemingly eternal. He almost wasn’t thinking straight as he made his way down; turning around was out of the equation (even if he’d wanted to, the one time he had looked behind him whatever entrance or exit to the path had existed was replaced with more stairs curling up into more darkness) and there were a few moments when he considered just rushing into the darkness just to get to the bottom so he could throttle whatever was at the end of this haunted path. He couldn’t bring himself to sprint forward though, the thought of the path ending abruptly and him falling into the nothingness forever kept him from making any careless moves.
He wasn’t sure how far down he’d traveled before he reached some sort of bottom, but given how strong the damp smell of mildew and age had gotten for him he was sure he was approaching some sort of end. As if on queue, the steps ended and he found himself deep enough in what he chose to believe was warm water that the bottom of his feet were submerged. Suddenly, a light appeared from the north of his position, pale red illuminating everything around him and giving him a definite direction to move in as he heard something splashing around behind him in the darkness
The water was foamy and churned, and as he skimmed towards the light he couldn’t help but think of the beach in the summer. It was a delusional thought for sure, Damon knew it, but he needed the familiarity to keep himself sane moving forward and not a sobbing mess scared out of his mind. There was no sunlight in this place, but there was a light to guide him.. There was no ocean breeze but there were waves lapping at his ankles.
There are no sharks in this place but there are things with teeth and hunger all the same…
The voice in his head was louder this time. Closer.
The world shook at this realization, and whatever imagined path in the darkness Damon was standing on sunk for a bit, submerging him before being bobbed back to the surface. He gasped for air as he resurfaced, scrambling in the churning fluid for stability and desperately wiping his eyes clear to avoid being robbed of any other senses in this place. When he finally got his vision back fully, he noticed that the environment had changed once again. Whatever floated through this space with him had risen up to his knees now, his feet completely lost to him beneath roiling foam. He was walled in by what seemed like cages on both sides now, but rather than the polish of smooth steel, the bars he saw around the pool that was once an ocean were all roughly hewn from one continuous block of ancient yellowed stone. The red light from before was now directly over him, and even though he still found no source for it, he chose to believe he had made some kind of positive progress.
Curiosity got the better of him however, and as the paralyzing thought that he was actually the one in the cage started bubbling in his mind, he made his way across the flooded path towards the wall on his left. At first he saw nothing on the other side of the bars, just more of the same darkness he had wandered down stretching ad infinitum, but as he opened his mouth to call out, two burning yellow lights manifested from the blackness.
Instinctively, he jumped back just as the sound of paws scrambling across stone filled the room. Some were farther away than others, but the one that he had just peered into wasted no time filling with the massive visage of a ragged and decaying dog. Its eyes were lanterns against a midnight sky, circles of pure gold set against the green fur lining most of its body. The creature snarled at Damon, baring its teeth against the bars before going into a barking frenzy and bashing its skull against the solid brick separating them. It was unrelenting in its attempts to get out, and as the sound of bones breaking against stone intermixed with the feverish barking, Damon could only watch in horror as the creature’s head split open from the central impact, its eye bulging out from a freshly shattered skull and teeth bending against each other before breaking loose of the jaw and dribbling down the wall. Blood, thick and black against the red lighting, pooled in the cage before overflowing into the flotsam, bone fragments and brain matter carried out towards him on a wave as the beast continued thrashing against the prison.
Now he ran. The corridor went on endlessly in either direction, and even though he no longer had a sense of direction, he no longer cared. Damon ran straight in the direction he was facing and he prayed that there would be an end to this. Every cage he ran past, the creatures seemed to get more and more intense in their desire to be free. Teeth breaking against stone, reabsorbed and healed into the shattered jaws of monsters only to fly out again in a mist of blood and tissue. Fur coming off in slick sheets from full body charges against something archaic and unbreakable, bones that wished they could say the same snapping against the impact before mending themselves back into gouged flesh.
Maybe they were telling him he was going the wrong direction. Maybe this was all some cold pizza and guilt inspired nightmare to teach him a lesson. Maybe he didn’t fucking care. Damon ran… until the sound of breaking stone behind him crumbling into the building river of viscera finally caused him to look back.
What he saw was massive, just looking at it almost caused Damon to drop to his knees as a sense of hopelessness washed over him. It was easily the size of a passenger plane, a body of pure cosmic black that rippled with muscles and purpose, the pool barely soaking the base of its massive paws as it trudged into the room and stared him down amidst the cacophony of violence that still played all around them. However, the creature almost looked bored watching him frozen in terror, or rather it would have if there was only one head to be bored of him. In addition to the eyes that watched him, Damon noticed an additional head on either side of the creature's central one, each one resembling some combination of wolf and, ironically enough, a mastiff. Something writhed in the spaces between the creatures’ ears, barely visible in the dim light if not for the reflection from the snake’s scales. The auxiliary heads growled at the walls as it moved towards him, each step sending a tidal wave of gore in every direction and quieting the prisoners as they retreated back into the nothing that they’d sprung from with whimpers of defeat.
The dog had not barked since it arrived, and now that it had quieted the hell-raising around them, it looked content to temporarily puzzle over Damon’s existence in this space. Each head tilted to the left in confusion, and as he slowly stepped back, he watched its ears perk up, alert but not making any direct move against him as the others had. After watching each other in silence for a bit, the dog decided to take the lead, throwing his massive body across the path and blocking the direction he had just run from. It laid all three heads on its paws and proceeded to ignore Damon with a huff of further boredom, the ripples churning the waters again even across the parking lot of distance between them still.
He didn’t need to be told twice. Turning to go once again, he shuddered as the pale eyes from the cages watched him with burning hatred. Something shimmering in the ‘water’ caught his eye before moving on though, and as the creature behind him howled loud enough to shake the planet, Damon Gray picked up the Axion Lab dog collar and ran harder than he ever had in his life
He ran until the minutes became days, ignoring the rising sensation of the slurry that now reached to almost his waist as deafening fear drove him through the darkness. By the time he stopped, the eyes on either side had fully retreated back into their stone prisons, leaving him alone in the quiet again under the hazy red light. He had started calling out Valerie’s name again once he was sure he was alone, convinced that finding her was the key to finding the way out.
Of course, he thought, heartache dragging him down as he moved forward, that’s assuming she’s actually even here.
As if responding to his thoughts again, something else splashed in the nearby darkness, something large, snapping his concern from the internal to the external again.
“Val?” He called, taking a tentative step forward. “Val is… is that you?”
Burning hope and icy fear clashed in his heart as he called out again to the noise.
“Valerie!” He yelled, the steam of uncertainty driving him forward as another unseen splash sent waves in his direction. “Valerie, can you hear me?!”
He was terrified of an answer. If It was her, then they’d be together and maybe they could figure this place out. Maybe. But if they couldn’t? If the sea just stretched forever and this was some cruel glitch in reality, well… the idea of dragging his daughter through a directionless void forever was worse than anything he’d been through. Honestly, his mind was racing so quickly in the direction of the noise being his daughter, he almost didn’t consider the alternative.
Almost.
“Va-”
A flash of teeth appeared in Damon’s mind, biting into the name and dragging it away into the muck. He stumbled in his motions, kicking up his own wave from the infinite pool and splashing it against the nearest wall. He couldn’t afford to fall again, couldn’t bear to see what happened when the ‘water’ got too high against him and the horrible things he imagined below the non-surface moving their way upward.
As he prepared to creep forward, now trying to be more cautious despite all his previous thrashing, a geyser erupted directly in front of him, throwing foam and debris against the cages and completely soaking Damon again. Luckily for him, he had thrown his arm across his face this time, shielding his eyes and mouth from the ocean spray. His dripping body was the only sound now, and the water around him had gone completely still, only disturbing where the drops from him hit the surface.
He could also feel someone else there with him now.
He didn’t bother calling out to his daughter again, he knew that whatever had calmed the waves was too cold of a presence to be anything living. It reminded him of the lab incident, it reminded him of being in the Fentons’ basement, it reminded him of being the last one in the cemetery after his father’s funeral; it was the feeling of death walking. And walk it did. Damon heard each movement as it closed the distance between them, a casual stride through the flood to reach him. He didn’t run. He couldn’t run. It felt as though gravity had magnified a thousand times and glued him to the spot where he stood, a primal fear that recognized that hunters responded more aggressively to sudden movements.
Hot breath coated the back of his neck, a primal warning from a thing that didn’t breathe and didn’t care. Damon wanted to close his eyes and swing on it, if he couldn’t flee, he wanted to fight so badly, to fill the silence with something other than the judgmental huffing of something that reeked like ancient tombs. Fear and anger made him tear up, violently shaking in the stilled waters as the image of his daughter flashed in his mind again. Suddenly, the feeling moved from behind him, and as Damon looked up for the first time he saw the creature was now directly in front of him, red eyes peering down and cutting through the darkness like wet clay.
It was massive, easily over seven feet tall, with the head of a large or white wolf sitting atop the body of a lean and athletic man whose skin was the same color as Damon’s. They wore a white and gold longskirt and on their right hip they carried a massive mace. It raised a hand to his chin, lifting Damon’s eyes to meet their own as their ears perked up and their nostrils flared, and while the hand was human in shape, its nails were rough and jagged claws.
TO ME UNHAND THE STONE ANCHORED TO YOUR SOUL. FROM ME SEEK PASSAGE.
He heard a voice in his head again, different this time, and as he was about to ask what they meant, the creature jabbed its free hand into Damon’s chest and squeezed. Shock ran through his body, and the horror of the situation demanded his attention enough that Damon’s eyes shot down the fresh wound, expecting a splatter of blood and pulp to be running down his chest. To his surprise though, what he saw was somehow even worse; hands, not his own but coming from him nonetheless, had grabbed onto the stranger's wrist where he had been punctured.
He did scream this time, and as the silence was disturbed, the wolf-headed creature slowly withdrew their hand from Damon’s chest, pulling more and more of an alternate body out as he retreated. It didn’t hurt him in a physical sense, but the more the others struggled against each other the more Damon flashed in and out of memory, his mind struggling under the weight of whatever was happening.
There had been an accident. A man was dead and the lab was giving him the day off.
The sea had started to recede from him, which is lucky considering he would have fallen to his knees screaming anyway from the pressure inside his head.
A secret folder. Layouts to a model of his security system that was supposedly not in use anymore. Termination order.
The phantom was fighting back, trying to push its way back inside of his chest despite the claws shredding whatever soulself had been stitched together in its new home.
Termination order. Stolen funds. Termination order. Poisoned bags of dog food. Termination order. A speeding car blowing through a red light. TERMINATION ORDER.
With one final pull and one final scream in the darkness, Damon watched as a pale husk was separated from his soul, the new body thrashing in the water as the wolf-headed figure offered him a hand up from the shallows. The last memory burned away as he accepted the help, standing in the ocean again with only the bottom of his feet submerged.
A Black Dog on a highway, smiling with human teeth. A speeding car unable to stop at a red light. A sudden weight in his chest. A hazy face in the mirror that wasn’t his. A man was dead and the lab was giving everyone the day off.
“....T-Tom?” Damon asked, looking into the eyes of a dead man once again, “Tom Callumson?”
The figure stopped trashing and laser focused on Damon, completely ignoring the clawed arbiter that stood between them. Tom Callumson had been the man in charge of Axion Labs security, he had hired Damon and when he had been fired the first time they said that Tom was the one who agreed to let him come back in any capacity. Tom Callumson had also died earlier that day, a car crash after running a red light and meeting the grill of a freight truck with the driver’s side of his Camaro. Tom Callumson had also also been reported to have been mumbling to himself over the past two weeks about how ‘they’ were out to get him, which had begun to worry the company about competition stealing their designs…before Tom began complaining about hearing…
“Scratching at the door…” Damon whispered to himself.
“Gray? GRAY?!” Tom yelled, a wild look of fury in his eyes. “It should have been you, Gray! You uppity fucking prick! Over some rank fucking dogs?! SOME FUCKING DOGS?!”
His eyes darted around the room in paranoia, but whatever Tom was seeing now Damon was completely blind to it. He wouldn’t have cared anyway, his mind was too busy connecting the threads from their jumbled up set of memories, piecing together a timeline that made sense for him. The termination orders, they’d been signed right before Damon even had his interview, but the names… Curie, Turing, Tesla, Kirby, Redi, Lovelace… he recognized them as the ‘volunteers’ that Axion had gotten rid of as security due to poor performance. That would explain why they were so eager to get rid of him after the Green Hound incident, he was just the fall guy, those poor dogs never had a chance but he was the sucker who, unfortunately, gave them an excuse.
He had also been covering up some less than spectacular security failures in his free time too, taking bribes from other companies to look the other way as some equipment had been messed with before major testing could be done. In fact Damon was remembering right, Tom may have cost a few scientists more than their pound of flesh when things had gone wrong.
All Damon could do was look at him in disgust. Death had stolen his body but it seems his rotten spirit was just as determined to break the rules, staying behind like so many others in the last few years to make things miserable. Fishing the Axion collar he’d gotten earlier out of his pocket, he rolled it between his fingers, the silver of the pendant a perfect match for fading light of the broken soul glaring at him while pinned standing to infinite nothingness.
“Somehow, Tom,” he said, flipping the tag over to see his hitchhiker's name etched into the stained metal in the dim red light, “I think the dogs are the least of your worries now.”
The wolf-headed creature had been standing beside Tom this whole time, and with a nod he reached out his hand for Damon to place the collar. Relieved to be rid of it, he tentatively dropped it into the beast’s palm, flinching a bit as Tom made another attempt to lunge at him with hatred in his eyes unbound to humanity.
The attempt was short lived however, and as the wolf-headed man wrenched Tom’s head back into his grasp and jammed the silver medallion of the collar into his mouth, Tom began to scream. The noise cut through the darkness like an explosion, bringing back a collection of barking and howling from the cages as eyes lit up observant and hungry on the other side of the darkness. Liquid silver began running out of the corner of Tom’s eyes like tears, and Damon noticed that the water had started boiling underneath him, the sea churning into a mass of whip-like tentacles each lined with cynodonts that had seemingly leaked through their confinement for the sake of furthering punishment. He took a step back and closed his eyes as the mouths began ripping chunks out of his former coworker, each bite stripping away spectral flesh. The falling silver began to harden into chain-links still connected to his eyes, and as Tom tried to choke out defiant screams, something under the surface began pulling at either side of the chain, slowly dragging him deeper into the nothingness as the sound of ripping and tearing increased in ferocity. Damon didn't want to see what was happening to him, but as the sounds of muffled screams slowly trailed into rattling metal, he couldn't help but spare one final look. Tom was waist deep in the infinite by the time Damon managed the strength to open his eyes, silver chains being pulled from his eyes and mouth where the obol had disintegrated and started overflowing. His skin was tiger-striped with gashes, and where there was once what could be called flesh, there was now matted and disgusting fur, the scabbed lines where they met oozing a vibrant green in the darkness.
Damon wanted to reach out to him, he wanted to make it stop even if for the selfish reason that the longer he watched the sicker he felt, but as he moved forward, the wolf-headed creature rounded on him, putting themself squarely between Damon and a steadily sinking shade of Tom.
He hesitated, waiting for the creature to make a move or even speak. “Is…is my…”
SHE IS WHERE YOU SHOULD BE DAMON GRAY. NOW BEGONE FROM HERE, THIS IS NO HOME FOR INNOCENCE.
Once again not waiting for him to respond, the creature shot his hand out with impossible speed and jammed the tip of his pointer finger into the space between Damon’s eyes. The world collapsed into true darkness as his eyes rolled back into his head, and he stumbled for a moment before he began to fall backwards Expecting to feel the warm sensation of water on his back at any moment, he braced himself for the soft impact of waves, only to instead feel the hard crush of drywall against the back of his head. His eyes shot open on impact, the blurry shapes in the darkness across from him no longer the hulking visage of a monster but instead forming into the door to his daughter’s room once again.
Senses flooded back into him; the mildew smell was released into the artificial citrus scent of the air fresheners around the house, the static quiet replaced with soft snoring bleeding through the hallway, pale light at the end coming from the tv where the dog was no longer barking for its owners attention. He was home… but he had to be sure. For the second time tonight, he grabbed the doorknob to Valerie’s room with fearful intensity, opening it slowly, but this time rather than the yawning silence of a void, Damon was met with a wall of sound, his daughter passed out at an impossible angle that would have destroyed his back if he ever tried to recreate it. Despite everything he’d been through tonight and the near airplane level decibels, he smiled at the small victory
Well, this should be a home for innocence, he thought to himself, the burning eyes of a wolf-headed man still engraved in his mind. With a sigh somewhere between He closed her room door and made his way back to the living room where his laptop was, flopping on the couch as the credits rolled on what he was supposedly watching. He knew he wasn’t going to be sleeping for a while, he knew that there’d probably be a long while before he could comfortably close his eyes and not have to hold his breath at the slightest chance of eyes glaring back at him in the darkness, hungry and resentful, but for now at least… he could start searching for a new job.
—-----------------
Hello everyone, thanks for reading. I haven’t done a strictly horror piece in a while but I wanted to pull something from my drafts and I figured I’d start the year with something a little more off the wall. I’m a big fan of horror in short story format and especially with a show like Danny Phantom I feel like if you look beyond the action angle that they typically take with the children and think about the adults who aren’t strictly dedicated to fighting the supernatural there’s a lot of potential to explore the darker elements, hope you enjoyed, and remember: No corporation is your friend and they’d all just as soon drag you into hell as they would flip a light switch.
Summary: Inspired by the song “Pitch Black” by Heart Attack Man, we take a look at one of those rare “weaker moments” Danny mentions himself having in The Ultimate Enemy.
Characters: Dark Danny/ ‘Dan’ Phantom, Tucker Foley (major significant mention)
Word Count: 1,055 (quick read)
Rock bottom smile bares its rotting teeth again
Acts like there’s nothing wrong and they’re still my closest friend
Romanticize the fondest memories and good times
And hope that I forget the rest...
Amity Park hadn’t known many days of unanxious peace since the Nasty Burger exploded almost a decade ago, but every few years there seemed to be days of relative calm. Sometimes it was a week in May when the attacks stopped, other times it was a day in either June or September that the city was given a reprieve from assault. March had been worryingly uneventful for them, and while a few citizens saw this as a reason for concern, the majority took the chance to enjoy this nonviolent clarity, since it could be months or even years before the next ceasefire. They were distracted, they knew it, wide open to be blindsided by an attack from the former hero of Amity Park with a new trick up his sleeve, but after seeing so much death and destruction just beyond the barrier, they were desperate for any sliver of hope, any moment of weakness.
That’s all this was for Danny, or at least, that was how he justified his so called “off days”; weaker moments. He was standing in the ruins of the movie theater outside of the dome’s radius. He couldn’t remember when he had destroyed the building, he had torn down so much these last 3,200 days that unless Valerie or some lesser idiot with a gun and too much ambition challenged him, the wreckage all just blurred together at this point. He wondered if she remembered what today was, if she was going by that pat-on-the-back statue that they’d put across from the Nasty Burger. That should be the first thing I break when I get home, he thought, anger causing his hair to flare up, maybe then I’ll finally tear down that joke of a school, for old time’s sake.
Finally finding a seat that hadn’t been wrecked beyond function, Danny sat back and closed his eyes, his arms outstretched so that he had a grip on the seat to either side of him, a habit he hadn’t managed to break. In his mind, he could see what this place used to be: he smelled artificial butter flavoring and cheese sauce, he could hear hushed conversations coming from different pockets of the room, various groups excited for the communal experience within a communal experience. They had come here without Sam, he remembered, she had gotten sick and Tucker had convinced Maurice to take them out for the day. Of course, he’d meant after school, but Maurice was the cool dad, so he had foregone school (and work, boy did that man work, maybe he had needed the day off too…) and taken them to see the new Bomberboy movie. Even though the theater had been empty except for the three of them, Danny and Tucker still sat right beside each other, center row for the best experience of yelling at explosions and cheering on implausible violence.
“I looked for you all,” Danny said to the memory, a fragment of a life taken from him, “I figured: ‘Hey, dead things come back all the time, surely they all can’t have just vanished like that’ and yet, that’s exactly what happened. One minute you were here, the next… boom, and gone. I must’ve searched the entire ghost zone five times before I crawled my way back through a portal. Before I gave up and went crawling to the wizard of whiz with my tail between my legs, I spent weeks just looking for someone, anyone, and I’m gonna be honest, I figured it would be you… I thought if nothing else, Tucker would always have my back.”
He paused as the memory shifted back a few years to them playing at the Foley’s house when they were about six.
“I was right in a way, y’know?” Danny whispered, “Out there, in the ghost zone, after almost two months of nothing, I saw that stupid stoplight outfit and flew straight towards it, happy as hell, but do you know who it was? That stupid green monster I pulled out of you the first time I fought Desiree! Turns out it had just been wandering in the deepest areas picking fights with weaker spirits to make himself stronger... for all the good that did him anyway. Hahahahahah oh I was so goddamn angry! Straw on the camel’s back probably, all downhill after that!!”
Fabric ripped as his grip tightened on the adjacent seats, spectral fire spreading from his fingertips and began turning the weathered molton molten under the pressure.
“I remember the game we used to play at your parents’ house, tag with a twist we made up: the tagger was a super hero and the runner was a bad guy. I was Crash Nebula, you were Tucker, I was Mr. Nightsky, you were Tucker, I was Dan Dangerous… and you were still Tucker. Good or bad, Danny Fenton or Danny Phantom; you were always Tucker. ‘Why be anybody else, I like being me’. I can respect that way of thinking now more than I ever did before.”
Finally standing as the flames spread from the seats to the walls of the room, Danny pulled the tattered beret he had with him and brought it to his eye level.
“You always did say that I’d be lost without you, Tuck,” he said, a wicked smile dancing in the light of the fire, “but, if I remember right you never did catch me that last time we played…”
Gradually turning his hand intangible, he watched as the faded red artifact slowly sunk through his palm before dropping into the white flames, gone in a flash just like its owner. The theater itself was a dome of roaring white fire at this point, a pale, mocking facsimile of the shield that kept him from Amity. He knew that the flames would be visible from the edge of his hometown shortly, steadily growing as it consumed the ruins around it, a reminder that the safety of their shield was just an illusion he would find the trick to one of these days. Good. Let them know that he was close, that his moment of weakness had lapsed and that he would be at their doorstep again soon enough.
“...and I do believe it’s time good ol ‘Dan Dangerous’ found some new people he could play tag with.”
Summary: Thunderstorm outside so what better time to put a few words to the page. In fact, many cultures around the world associate rain with new beginnings and a chance to reinvent yourself through introspection.
Characters: Kwan, Sam, OCs
Word Count: 4,450
Kwan woke up on the floor… again. He’d lost another fight to the yet unbeatable combination of his comforter and the building spring heat sometime during the night and the cool space between his bed was a nice levee against the sting of defeat. Pulling himself up to his bed-level and dealing with the usual bout of morning blindness that came until he put his contacts in, he fruitlessly tried to read his alarm to gauge just how much time he had to get ready before the day really began. At best guess, he had somewhere between three hours and thirty minutes before he had to leave for school, so he quickly grabbed a shirt from the monstrous pile of laundry growing in his ‘reading’ chair and gave it the smell test before hitting the shower.
They were calling for rain again today, and at this point he couldn't be bothered to be bothered by it. In fact, it felt like he'd spent every morning of his sophomore year so far cutting through the downpour before homeroom, longingly staring out at a football field he hadn’t gotten to appreciate up close in far too long. Further zoning out in the shower, he began humming along as Johnny Cash played on the radio he and Xue kept in the bathroom. His brother didn’t have the same love for The Man In Black that Kwan did -he was too young to have picked up the appreciation from their grandfather on the long drives out to the lake- and as Kwan reached the end of (I Heard That) Lonesome Whistle, he felt the familiar twinge of grief that had come from thinking about Yeye in the six years since he’d passed.
Six years…
He repeated the number on the way out as he waved goodbye to his mom sitting at the table. It was hard to believe that it’d been that long since he’d seen his grandpa. The last time they saw each other, Kwan hadn’t even cracked the five foot threshold, but looking at him now he could almost be one of the giants from the stories he used to tell. As he reached his beat up old red pickup truck, the first drops of rain began to fall, slowly at first, but gradually building to a steady spring shower by the time the engine had warmed up. He was getting ready to put the ancient beast in reverse when he heard the first croak. Freezing with his hand on the gearshift, Kwan looked around to see where the noise had come from, finding the cab of the truck empty except for him and the growing pile of tools on the floor he kept “borrowing” from his dad for small repairs.
“...Hello?”
He knew the sound had to come from close by to be heard so clearly over the sound of the rain and the rough idle, and he’d rather not make an unfortunate discovery when he went to accelerate or shift gears down the road.
Ribbit
As if in response to his question he heard the second croak even louder, definitely coming from his right this time, thankfully safe from the dangers of the pedals. Looking to the passenger side, he leaned over to where a wrench rested on an old Nasty Burger wrapper, searching from the floor up until he heard another croak come from just under the air vents. Turning off the truck just to be safe, Kwan really hoped his visitor wasn’t stuck in his engine. He knew it was ridiculous to be so paranoid about what was probably a single frog, but considering how lucky his family had always told him it was to find a frog indoors, he wasn’t about to chance a sudden stroke of bad luck, not with the way his grades were just starting to level out at least.
Ribbit
A thump against the glove compartment reassured him that he hadn’t ruined his fortune. It was a surprisingly loud hit though, and for a second Kwan had the surge of fear that his companion wasn’t a regular amphibian but some sort of spirit that was playing a trick on him. Hesitating, he grabbed the wrench with his left hand and the handle with his right, ready for a surprise attack should one come. Taking a deep breath, he threw the door open and laser focused into the compartment, watching for any unnatural movements and cursing himself for never changing the light that would illuminate the dark pocket the creature hid in. The frog took its time coming out into the light of the cab, a bright red passenger with black spots and white feet that slowly pulled their way onto the dashboard of his truck Once it was closer to Kwan’s eye level, the frog stared at him, watching unimpressed as he still brandished the wrench for defense.
Ribbit
Lowering his weapon in embarrassment of the frog’s judgmental stare. Kwan breathed a sigh of relief and laughed to himself.
“Just wanted a ride, huh, little guy?”
A croak of confirmation steadied Kwan as he checked his watch. He wasn’t quite running late yet, but he was definitely going to be pushing it if Amity morning traffic was consistent in holding him back as it usually did. Looking at the frog still perched on his dashboard, Kwan couldn’t help but notice that the smooth skin of the amphibian resembled his letterman jacket, and he decided to take that as a sign of further fortunes to come.
“Alright then,” he said, shifting back into 1st gear and spraying gravel as he shot out of the driveway onto the path to the main road, “let’s go Ravens!”
Splitting his focus between the rain, the road and the frog -unbothered by the acceleration as he appeared to be- Kwan found himself driving a lot more self consciously, a previously unfelt sense of judgment guiding his hands and feet as he reached the first stoplight between his home and the school. The frog had been unnervingly silent on the initial drive through the woods, only moving to avoid the vents when Kwan switched the heat on, otherwise stationary in his guardian's gaze. The light was taking forever to turn, and as he drummed his hands on the wheel, Kwan finally registered that uncomfortable silence wasn’t due to any supernatural presence; he had just forgotten to turn the radio on during his morning ritual.
Laughing to himself in relief, Kwan reached to turn the volume knob to a reasonable level, the low notes of a country station no longer buried under the rain beating down on the truck.
“What do you think, little guy? You a fan of 102.1 The Lasso?”
The frog, being a frog, said nothing, instead offering a quick blink in acknowledgement that it had been spoken to. Despite the silence, Kwan found himself smiling as the light finally turned green.
“Don’t like the newer stuff they play myself, but the classics,” he said, gesturing to the air, “man, you gotta respect the classics.”
A croak of agreement further galvanized him to keep the conversation going, rambling off the pros and cons of several artists from before and after the new millennium. Dolly Parton? Agreement. Garth Brooks? Silence. Waylon Jennings? Agreement. Toby Keith? Silence. Johnny Cash?
“Johnny Cash?”
Afraid he’d hit his first disagreement with his amphibious passenger, Kwan looked to where the frog had been sitting and instead found nothing. With his eyes wide and his grip on the wheel tightening to a dangerous level, he almost cursed in shock before a loud croak from his right-hand side drew his attention. He felt ridiculous for numerous reasons, with the primary being the amount of fear a small frog had delivered by simply changing positions. Turning almost as red as the frog, he felt a secondary wave of embarrassment at the thought that he’d spent the last fifteen minutes going over discographies with a creature that literally spent their life under a rock. Oh thank god Dash and Paulina weren’t here to see that, he thought, placing his head on the wheel in shame once he reached another braking point.
“Living in this town turns everyone into a freak,” he said, still conversing with the frog despite the insult, “but still… nothing for Cash?”
The frog said nothing, instead moving to rest on Kwan’s thigh as he idled in the parking lot. Before he could question the movement, the frog croaked. Seconds later, lightning illuminated the city and the truck’s radio crackled with static against the rain. As the disturbance cleared, Kwan recognized the song playing had changed, going from Randy Travis’ “Deeper Than The Holler” into a song he’d never heard before. The voice was familiar, but significantly older than the last time he’d heard it, and as Kwan took in the haunting lyrics he quickly found himself on the verge of tears. He sat there in the music for a while, the rain softening against the body of his beat up old pickup truck as the sound of the guitar and chains ebbed from its worn speakers, his carriage seeming to age faster under the influence of the music. Once again he found himself thinking of his grandfather; how the two of them would sit outside in the old rocking chairs on the porch, silent as the ancient battery powered radio he kept on an end table tried its best to match the volume of the stormy season.
“…There ain't no grave, can hold my body down”
Finally opening his eyes as the song finished, Kwan saw that the frog had moved again, this time back into his direct line of sight. He couldn’t meet its gaze though, and as he looked out the window towards the school, he saw that the rain had died down into a low drizzle. He didn’t know how long he’d been sitting in the parking lot but he noticed that students had already begun trickling into the school. Or maybe they’d been going in for a while and he was now just watching the last few stragglers make their way inside before the bell rang, truthfully he’d been so engrossed he figured either scenario was just as plausible. Shaking himself out of the memory, Kwan reached for the door handle and began to pull, stealing one last glance at the creature perched behind his steering wheel.
He let out a sigh. He felt crazy for even considering the possibility, but this was Amity Park, and crazier things happened every day. Finally making eye contact with the frog again, Kwan steeled himself, outstretching his hand and offering a more personal perch for his amphibious passenger. Hopping into his palm with almost no hesitation, the frog centered himself, crossing his arms and staring as if awaiting further instructions. A jolt shot up Kwan’s arm as the creature’s slick, smooth skin truly made contact with his own for the first time since they met, with the frog being much lighter than he expected given its size. There was quite as the two of them looked at each other, the rain now too soft to even disturb the silence that filled the cab. He realized it would look insane to anyone walking by, and considering how fast rumors and whispers passed through the halls of Casper High, he knew if he didn’t ask the question now he’d spend the rest of the day haunted by it.
“...Yeye?”
…Ribbit.
__________________________________________
Kwan was nervous walking the halls to her locker. Everyone he passed felt like they were watching him, waiting for him to stumble and spill his hand so that he could be judged. Hugging his jacket tight to his body, he picked up his pace and weaved through the gathered mass like a defensive line, careful to avoid collision and risk damage to his questionable cargo. They both had a study period first thing in the morning, so it was his best chance to handle this without too much attention. Unfortunately, her locker was also close to Dash’s, so even if he could catch her before she disappeared, he was still working on a tight schedule to avoid a lot of eyes.
“Sam!”
He hadn’t meant to call for her so aggressively, but a combination of adrenaline and excitement at catching her boosted his voice beyond his intended level. She jumped, her shoulders visibly tightening at the sound of his greeting. As he closed the final distance between them, he felt bad for startling her so early in the morning, with the frog offering a low croak of admonishment to compound his shame.
“Sorry,” he said, now visibly exhausted from the run, “sorry! Didn’t mean to scare you! I need your help!”
He was yelling at a low volume, which simultaneously impressed and concerned her. She was also mildly intrigued by whatever could make the occasionally gentle giant break social conventions enough to talk to her in a semi-public setting, though the way his eyes seemed to be darting between here and either side of the hallway told her that the fear of being seen with someone of a “lesser” status was still alive and well within him. Well, either that or drugs, Sam thought, closing her locker to face him, who knows how the jocks are coping after two weeks of no practice.
“Sorry Kwan,” she began, refusing to look up at him in a show of dominance, “I don’t do study buffs and I don’t sell to narcs.”
Momentarily confused, he quickly shook off the comment and reached into his pocket, desperately hoping that his friend hadn’t decided to disappear again. With his hands finding purchase, he slightly opened his jacket and revealed the large amphibian to her.
She quickly threw her hands up in a defensive position, using one to cover her face and one to maximize the distance between their bodies for what she was sure was a prank in waiting. “Whoa there big guy let's slow it… wait what?”
His brain was racing a mile a minute, hurrying to put the frog back into his jacket pocket before anyone else noticed his display. Giving the hallway another paranoid reconnaissance circuit, he closed his hands in a gesture of deference as he noted the look of confusion on her face.
“Frog.”
“Yes, Kwan,” she said, rolling her eyes at the obvious statement, “I’ve heard most girls prefer flowers but point for creativity. Hand him over and I’ll go put him back in a puddle so-”
“NO!”
This time he didn't keep himself from yelling, hushing every conversation in the hall and drawing the full attention of the scattered students. Automatically course correcting, Kwan stood at his full height and blocked Sam from their view, a subconscious protection stance he’d adopted for Star and Paulina multiple times.
“Not your business,” he commanded, the additional bit of wildness in his eyes from the morning lending it more of an edge than he meant. It served its purpose though, with their eyes averting almost as quickly as they had focused on the two of them.
Impressed, Sam let out a whistle that carried slightly less of a sarcastic tone than usual. “Oh that is a useful skill.”
Smiling at the praise, Kwan deflated again so as to not tower over her. His mom had always told him that when talking to girls it’s important not to look too aggressive, and since he was already soaked, heaving, and paranoid looking he figured it would be best to try to be as relaxed as possible if he was going to get Sam’s help. Of course, he wasn’t actually sure what all she could help with in this case, but he knew that she was objectively his best resort in this situation. Sam was friends with Fenton -maybe more if the rumors were true but Kwan didn’t really see it- so between that and her general graveyard aesthetic he figured she at least knew more than him about ghosts in this moment and that’s all he was looking for. Plus, she had championed that whole “save the frogs” campaign last semester, so Kwan figured she would be less likely to turn over his new friend to the Fentons; a (potential) ghost frog was still protected under her banner, right?
“I just need to ask you some questions,” he said, turning his attention back to her, “I promise it’s not weird except for the part where the frog might be my grandpa.”
“.....what?”
It might have been his imagination, but he could feel the eyes starting to turn on him again, causing him to blush slightly. Moving quickly, he slid a piece of paper into her hands and took off in the opposite direction from which he came. She should have been used to weird behaviors like this in a town like Amity Park, but it still took her brain a few seconds to catch back up to everything that just happened, long enough for Kwan to be out of sight before she could ask any follow up questions. Unfolding the paper, she saw that it had a single word quickly sprawled across it, with no time or additional instructions to be found; BACKSTAGE.
“Oh I hate that I’m even about to humor this,” she sighed, crumpling the note and throwing it into the recycling bin marked for paper, “I should’ve just took the frog and ran.”
Protests aside, Sam still made her way to the theater. It had been closed ever since the stage started to collapse a few weeks ago, and was now mostly used by students looking to skip class. Really though, she thought, sneaking into the backstage area with the minimal effort of someone who’d done it many times before, if the school had been better funded there would probably be less places for students to have secret rendezvouses, so low attendance is on them at this point. She didn’t go carelessly though, and with the lingering concern of this turning into a Carrie situation nestled at the forefront of her mind, she scanned the rafters and corners for any errant A-listers lying in wait to surprise her. Once she was confident that the room was (relatively) safe, she made her way to the stage where Kwan was currently sitting, the large red and black frog now cupped in his hands as thunder rumbled in the distance.
“Thirty seconds,” she said, cutting him off as soon as he opened his mouth, “you have thirty seconds to explain before I walk.”
“Okay, yeah, right,” he said, nodding and taking a deep breath, “so; I woke up this morning and Cash was on the radio which was cool and it was raining again which sucks cause like the field would be wet again so no practice and it’s been forever since we had a decent practice without slipping on the field but it’s whatever so anyway i got to my truck and there was a noise and i thought it might have been a ghost so i was gonna hit it with a wrench but it was a frog and that's cool so I was chill with it and he was chill so i just drove with him to school and i was talking to him but not in a weird way like in a normal way and then-”
“Kwan,” she cut in, pinching her forehead at the rapid fire way he was speaking, “okay, wow… timer’s off dude, ya gotta breathe.”
The frog croaked its agreement.
“Just… get to the part where you think your grandpa’s a frog now, please.”
“...it sounds stupid when you say it like that.”
Watching as he deflated, Sam couldn’t help but feel bad when she saw the look in his eyes and the way he drummed his fingers on his lap. She wasn’t heartless, and for all his many, many faults, she knew that Kwan was generally very earnest in the way he spoke. Simple? Absolutely, she didn’t believe anyone with serious complexity could stand to be around Dash Baxter for more than forty-five minutes any given day, but still earnest. Besides, she had seen the way he’d behaved in the hall a few minutes ago and she highly doubted he’d risk a second social self-destruction of that level for something he wasn’t 100% convinced of. Sighing, she stepped further into the auditorium, closing the distance between them and joining him on the opposite side of the stage.
Dammit, she cursed to herself, Tucker and Danny have made me soft.
“It’s not stupid, Kwan,” she said, looking out at the empty room, “if anything it’s just a very literal interpretation of nafesh that my Rabbi would lose their mind over.”
“Is that… good?”
She paused for a moment before answering, a slight smile dancing on the edge of her lips. “It has the potential to be interesting, if nothing else. But back to him; why do you think this frog might be your grandpa?”
It was Kwan’s turn to pause, desperate to make his case for both of their sakes.
“Growing up, I used to spend every summer at Yeye’s -my grandpa’s- lakehouse. He was so close to living on the water, frogs used to hang out all over the porch, especially after it rained. He loved the little dudes. He used to tell me how they were symbols of good luck and fortune so they were welcome to stop by as long as they wanted,” there was a wistfulness in his voice as the rain dripped through a hole between them, “said maybe one day they might even bring us some winning lotto numbers and then they could have the damned place.”
He laughed at the old joke, another ghost he seemed to be carrying around with him.
“He, uh… he died six years ago. Dad keeps saying he wants to fix up his old place and sell it but I don’t think he really wants to. I don’t think I want him to either….” There was a longer pause after that statement, but Kwan did his best to shake it off. “Um, yeah, so anyway, this morning after I pulled him out of my glove compartment, something weird happened with my radio. You know Johnny Cash right?”
“The abolitionist Man In Black,” she said, a layer of defense temporarily peeled off, “yeah I know him… why?”
“Okay, my grandpa loved Cash, like… loved the guy. We spent so much time listening to his records. I don't think there’s a single one of his songs that I haven’t heard at least twice. But this morning something weird happened, I was talking to the frog and I asked him about Cash and he like, blinked in and out for a second, and there was lightning… and then there was this song.”
He turned to look at her, a haunted sort of joy on his face as he fought the tears starting to form.
“It was him. Not him like I’d ever heard him before; he was older, and he sounded closer to the end but it was Cash without a doubt. He was saying something about no grave holding him and there were chains and the guitar, Sam you should have heard it, it was so simple but it was just… it was so much. I was back there on the porch with Yeye, I had my grandpa back for just a moment and when it was just the two of us again I felt like this little guy was here in his place”
Sam felt slightly uncomfortable with how much he was sharing with her, but at the same time it was easy to see how much of a relief it was for him to tell someone else. Honestly it reminded her of how her father and her Grandma Iida used to talk about her Grandpa Erik when she was growing up, how despite all their differences their love of him and his love of them was able to live on long after his physical self had stopped existing in the world.
We get a thousand chances to get it right, Sammy, her grandma had told her once while looking through a scrapbook, but find someone with a big enough heart and they’ll have you convinced they got it in one.
“So,” Kwan said, his voice breaking through her thoughts to pull her back, “I know it might sound crazy but I just… I don't know how to take care of a frog but I can't just let him go outside. What if a bird got him? Or worse, what if a science teacher scoops him up! Or the Fentons!”
“Oh okay,” Sam said, finally connecting the dots, “so you just wanna know how to take care of your new best friend, right?”
“Yeah,” he cheered, a little louder than probably expected, “even if I’m completely just going bonkers from living in this ghost town so long. I’d feel, y’know, guilty or whatever not taking care of him. Either way, I can't just keep him in a shoebox on my dresser… that’s how our bird got out the window.”
The frog let out another croak of disappointment at this confession..
“Plus I still had this,” he said, pulling out a faded ‘Save The Frogs’ pin from the inside of his jacket, “so it had to be a sign, right?”
“Wow,” she said, once again impressed with his earnestness, “I can’t believe you kept that.”
“I found it in my truck when he was hopping around, guess he’s still got a way of pointing me in the right direction.”
“Hmm,” she said, adjusting herself to leave before things took a further turn towards sappytown, or worse, someone walked in on the two of them, “well maybe next time he can point you in the direction of a herpetologist if he really wants to avoid living in a shoebox.”
There was suddenly a strange weight in her hand, and as she looked down she saw that the amphibious wanderer had found its way into her palm, hopping silently between the two of them as they conversed on the stage. Getting a better look at him, Sam could see how bright the colors on the frog were, and if she stared too long at the reds and blacks of its back she felt as though she’d start to have her own questions about the supernatural possibility of its origins. For now though she simply let the frog rest between her fingers, a comfortable warmth that seemed to echo the potential Kwan had should he ever free himself from the clutches of more shallow company.
Summary: In The Ultimate Enemy, Valerie blames Danny (Phantom) for the inciting incident, so I thought we’d look at that a bit more. Further Inspired by the song “Cringe” by Matt Maeson too.
Characters: Valerie Gray, Damon Gray, Dark Danny/ ‘Dan’ Phantom
Word Count: 2,400
[...] She said I’m looking like a bad man, smooth criminal
She said my spirit doesn’t move like it did before
She said that I don’t look like me no more, no more
I said I’m just tired, she said you’re just high lying [...]
It was raining again in Amity Park. These last few weeks it had been a near constant -morning, noon, and night- as if god were trying to either wash away any trace of the city or clean a stubborn spot that no one else was noticing. If you asked Valerie Gray, she’d definitely tell you it was the latter, and she could even point out the blemish; the bombed out ruinscape that had once held the dignified title of “The Nasty Burger.” She stood silent in the crumbling wreckage, her face still despite how much she wanted to scream from just being near the place anymore. It had been three months since the accident, since the explosion. Six dead. Twenty-one injured. Hundreds of thousands in property damage. Zero actual answers as to what happened that night.
She should be thankful, really. She was scheduled to work doubles that entire week, but since the fight a few days before the explosion had ruined the side of the building, she had taken the extra free time to study for the C.A.T exams. Her grandpa had always said that book learning would save her life, and unfortunately, he seemed to hit the nail on the head this time. Shame it didn’t do anything for the others, she thought, kicking a piece of rubble into what used to be the dining area.
She should be thankful…but once again she just found herself angry and sad.
Valerie told herself she wasn’t going to cry when she finally visited the restaurant. It had actually become a sort of local memorial to the fallen. “The Six” they had been called in the papers, a sick joke that served to give an air of celebrity to the victims of the tragic accident. There’d been after school group trips to The Nasty Burger by the students and faculty to put flowers in the wreckage, reporters trying to get a quote from anyone and everyone with the slightest connection to the victims or the establishment (they almost had a field day after Valerie slammed one to the ground for taking pictures of Mrs. Fenton’s sister when she came to take her home, vultures) and even a surprise appearance from Vlad Masters early on, who - in a state of shock - had offered to pay for all of the funerals. She should have felt more at ease seeing her benefactor in all of this come swooping in to play clean up, but he seemed… off. He was visibly rattled, audible mumbling about changing plans and completely losing the composure he’d had the last time they had seen each other. Even in a town already plagued by ghosts, nothing shook people quite like being too close to the dead.
Thunder rumbled and lightning illuminated the sky as Valerie remembered the last thing Mr. Masters had told her months ago; I- they haven’t seen Daniel in days… if you see him… hear from him, please, do let me know?
He hadn’t looked at Valerie the entire time he spoke to her and honestly, she could understand why. She remembered him and Mr. Fenton discussing football and loudly laughing as they worked hard together after the town had been sucked into the ghost dimension. Zone, she corrected herself, a minor annoyance in the memory, it’s more of a ghost zone, actually. Regardless of what she or anyone else called it, when they were stranded there the Fentons had stepped up big time, offering their technology and their home to anyone who needed it, including her and her father.
He was currently holding the umbrella for her while she took the scenery in. An ever calming presence in her life, Damon was holding back his own tears, determined not to give the rain running down his face any more company as he provided strength for his daughter. His selflessness reminded her a lot of both Tucker and Jazz, two people she didn’t get to know as well as she probably could have. Valerie remembered the dozen texts Tucker had sent the night he stood her up, apologizing and explaining that he had to go help Danny with something at the last minute. There was just something about him she couldn’t stay mad at, something genuinely charismatic there; someone who was used to playing peacemaker without a second thought because, as he said, he’s a lover not a fighter.
Well, he was.
She kept going like that for a while, thinking of all the good things about the people who were now gone. Romanticizing them a bit, sure, but not enough to dehumanize them. She thought of how often she’d seen Jazz running study groups afterschool, juggling multiple subjects with a smile on her face as she bounced from student to student. She thought about Mrs. Fenton in the lab, throwing her weight around as effortlessly as her husband while they tried to find a solution to the town invasion but still checking in on the kids to ease any building worry. She even thought about Sam and how for all her edge and venom, she was one of the most protective people Valerie had met in her long fifteen years of life.
Reflecting in grief, Valerie pictured the three of them -Danny, Tucker, and Sam- all, laughing at a booth in the Nasty Burger while she worked the counter, eavesdropping and silently wishing she had even been that close to any of her friends when she was still on top of the world. A small part of her took that thought and ran with it, wondering if there would be flowers for her too if she had met a similar fate.
Fortunately/unfortunately, she didn't have too much time to continue her morbid march down memory lane before she noticed the figure standing in the center of the destruction. He hadn’t been there when she looked up before, and given the way he shimmered in the rain, Valerie knew it wasn’t human either. Racing from the protections of her father’s umbrella, she brandished her weapon and prepared to get an answer from a dead man.
—------------------------
Danny heard the rifle charge up before he noticed anything else. A roar like a car wash vacuum cleaner starting came from behind him, the telltale sign of a weapon specifically designed to hurt things like him.
“Put your hands up.”
It was a command nearly drowned out by the shaking in Valerie’s voice, her confidence buried under rain and rage. The roar grew closer. As did she.
“I said put your fucking hands up!”
Danny obliged her this time, raising his arms and opening his palms to show his hands were empty. She couldn’t see the smile on his face, she thought she was in control here, that she had any kind of upper hand in the current situation. Cute.
“Turn around… I want you to look at me, Phantom.”
This is where his fun began.
—-------------------------------
This is where her nightmare began.
Rather than turning his body around to face her, Valerie heard a sound like expanding plastic, a hollow mockery of what something inhuman would imagine bones bending and breaking to sound like. Watching in horror, she saw Phantom twist his head completely around, the skin of his neck binding and piling into coils as he locked eyes with her, his hand still raised as per her previous demands. Something was wrong, and she could see that very clearly now.
Because of their previous encounters, Valerie had gotten a pretty solid mental image of Danny Phantom, and while the thing in front of her checked a few of those boxes, it was undeniably wrong in others. Starting with the eyes, whereas he used to have eyes the color of irradiated emeralds, he was now sporting red pools of malice, windows into a place far too gone to even be called a soul. His face had warped too. Gone were the cute cherubish features she had secretly appreciated, replaced instead by sunken skin with a sickly green hue and faint red veins branching out from his eyes. Taking a step back, she noticed that the rain wasn’t even touching him, not really. Instead it was boiling and steaming as it came into contact with his hair, a roiling platinum mess of fire burning from his scalp. Valerie knew that ghosts could look bad, but this was a new level. This was bad.
“Wha-” she began, he finger slightly easing off the trigger in pure horror, “what happened.”
Moving his still rotated head from side to side in further disregard for human anatomy, he smiled at her, enlarged fangs visible for the first time in his mouth. Before she could react further, he was in front of her, a smooth motion the force of which broke through the rain and pushed her back into the wall that was her father. Damon’s stationary mass wasn’t enough to stop their momentum though, the combination of the shockwave and the rain slicked ground sending them sliding against one of the Nasty Burger’s few remaining structures. This was definitely new.
Normally when Phantom fought, there was a floatiness to him that was equal parts whimsical… and annoying. This though, he was too grounded, almost as if he were being defiant and grinding his foot into the earth out of a single-minded hatred, determined to mar the surface of reality in any way he could. He was also laughing too much, enjoying her fear and disorientation in a way that Valerie had never seen in him before. Weapon or not, she felt terrified just being near him anymore.
“Well,” he finally said, hands glowing and sizzling as he towered over the two of them, “I’m looking, Valerie, but I can’t say I'm impressed with anything I’m-”
—------------------
Danny stopped mid taunt as the rain around Valerie and Damon began to shimmer against the outlines of a group of people. He’d been having this issue for days now, avoiding reflective surfaces as much as possible. for this exact reason. Recoiling slightly when one of the mist figures reached out to him, he snarled and hissed as they surrounded him. He recognized their faces of course; his mother and father, his sister, his friends… but they weren’t real, they couldn’t be real, he reasoned, growing more angry and unstable as the images flickered around him.
He watched their faces shift between pity and sadness as they stood between him and Valerie, his eyes flickering between red and green faster than a human eye could see. The whispers had started now, he was hearing their voices in the rainfall that gave them form. His mother offering a seat for him amongst the rubble, his sister telling him it wasn’t too late to turn back, his father standing with open arms as if that could make it all go away like he was still some simple child. There was another figure in the rain, too, a hooded figure holding a staff that seemed to stay at the edge of his vision, he seemed more real than the others, something that infuriated Danny even further. He was grabbing his head now in frustration, fingers burning themselves in the hearth of agony as Valerie and her father watched on in horror, feeling as though time was slowing down as he broke into a screaming fit in front of them.
“Killed you all,” he murmured, pushing through the rain specters to step closer to Valerie and Damon, hands crackling with energy “again and again and again… long as it takes… killed you all.”
—----------------------
Valerie didn’t understand what was going on, but she didn’t care anymore, she’d heard enough.
Killed them all.
She squared herself to take the shot while Phantom was battling whatever demons had finally caught up to him, confident that she could finally give this town and herself some closure. Unfortunately for her, Danny had regained himself enough to deny her that. Waiting for her to take the shot, he opened a hole in the side of his head she had aimed -moving the flesh and ectoplasm into an undulating portal like he had done so many times before- before shooting the gun out of her hands and lunging at her...In the space between them, a crack like thunder struck between the two of them, and suddenly Danny found himself on the ground, his scrawny frame pinned under the massive paternal presence of Damon Gray wearing a modified version of the Fenton gauntlets.
“Valerie,” he barked, snapping his daughter out of the shock of such a close call, “go!”
Before she could respond in either way, Danny sunk his fingers into the flesh of Damon’s left arm, a roar of pain echoing the explosion that set all of this off. Glowing red eyes bored into his own the elder Gray felt the ground began to soften and bits of rubble sunk into the concrete.
“Sorry, Mr. Gray,” Danny sneered, his own body now halfway sunk into the portal he’d just begun to open, “if you wanna teach me a lesson then you’ll need to be a bit more hands. On!”
Sadistically digging in further and eliciting another scream of pain, Danny didn’t notice that Valerie had picked up the gun again. With the sound of a rotting watermelon slamming into the pavement, the two separated in a cloud of dark red mist and luminescent green slime, with Damon falling back out of Danny’s area of effect and Danny holding up his freshly destroyed hands in a pantomime of clapping; laughing with maniacal glee while he finally sunk all the way into his portal with a smile.
Scrambling to reach her father in the downpour, Valerie looked at the mess around her and began to sob, careful not to touch the bleeding stump of his arm as she hugged him until she felt herself stop shaking. Relying on each other for support, the two of them stood and began to make their way to the car, more on edge than ever before and flinching at every noise they couldn’t find a source for. Helping her father into the passenger seat -his arm now freshly tourniqueted with the shirt he was wearing- Valerie took one last look at the Nasty Burger before wiping the remaining tears from her eyes and sliding herself in the driver’s seat.
Summary: Part six of The Lying Game. Harriet confronts Vlad about the true nature of the Wisconsin Ghost.
Characters: Vlad Masters/Harriet Chin. Mention of Ivan & Irina Masters (we-serve-spirits OCs) and Jack and Maddie Fenton.
Word Count: 3,400
Vlad hadn’t been this nervous in years. As he sat in the empty restaurant again, he thought it was funny how fast his life had been completely restructured in the last few months. Despite what his detractors would have you believe, he had never been into the overt acts of villainy to get what he wanted. A slight possession here or there when deals were on an unsure footing was fine, but it wasn’t like he was hiding out in some cartoonish space station planning to rule the world. No, he knew his limits, and even though they were sometimes flexible, he had clear guidelines on how he chose to move through the world; move confidently, but don’t make any more noise than necessary. His father had a saying that he often kept in the back of his mind when he made any plan: No one wants to be the idiot in the library who knocked over the shelves.
He could understand that more as an adult than he ever could as a child. Back then, sneaking around that huge house, trying to be as quiet as possible, he figured it was just his father’s way of telling him to stay out of his private library. Of course it had the opposite effect, he was a child after all, telling him not to do something may as well have been an engraved invitation to disobedience. Vlad remembered the first -and only- time he had found himself in the room. His father, Ivan, had left on a business trip, instructing Vlad to remain sharp and keep the house in order as a man. Not wishing to upset Ivan, he had mostly followed the rules of his estate for six days… but on the seventh, he found himself wavering. Wandering into the library to sweep, he couldn’t help himself but to pull a book from the shelves. Touching the spine, he had felt an unseasonable cold run through his body, and as he cracked it open to flip through, he happened to cut his finger on the unyieldingly thick pages of the book. He remembered he dropped it in shock, the violent sound of it hitting the stone floor of the room driving him out faster than lightning. He had been terrified in that moment, certain that the book would somehow report back to his father about his disobedience in his absence. It was only after several hours that Vlad once again worked up the nerve to enter the room again, determined to place the book back where he pulled it from to minimize suspicion. The book had been significantly warmer when he touched it again, and he was relieved to see that none of his blood had stained the pages in his fumbling, but it didn’t keep him from having nightmares for a week that the book had somehow bitten him on purpose and was waiting to take another drink.
He supposed that some would consider that experience a lesson on the consequences of broken trust, but Vlad had found he was nothing if not a man of tenacity in the face of repeated failures.
He’d promised Harriet an exclusive interview about the Wisconsin ghost after an outburst of less than gentlemanly behavior on his part, but as he watched the clock tick slowly towards the hour of her arrival, he began to have second thoughts. This is a mistake, he said to himself, there’s nothing to be gained here other than a crumb of forgiveness and another target on your back. Narcissistic enough to openly agree with himself, Vlad knew that valid points were being made, however, before he could talk himself out of it, the bell to the restaurant chimed, signaling that his guest had arrived. Digging his fingers into his palm in an iron grip, he took a deep breath and exhaled one last time before opening his eyes to see her, the time for second guessing finally over whether he was ready or not.
“Harriet, my dear,” he said, rising to greet her, “lovely as always to see you.”
He was putting on the air of a politician, a neutral charm that would gradually put people at ease, but he was met with the equally effective stone face calm of a reporter.
“Mayor Masters,” she said, a professional tight lipped smile as she shook his hand, “I believe you contacted me with regards to information on the Wisconsin ghost?”
Vlad wanted to break down then and there, but he kept his composure nonetheless. Gesturing towards a table centered in the room, he guided the two of them to their seats, taking extra care to pull her chair out for her before pouring two glasses of wine for them. She looked beautiful, wearing a solid white suit with pearl buttons and gold trimming on the sleeve. It was hard to look directly at her, she was thoroughly in her element now and between the pristine outfit and the cold professional look on her face he couldn’t help but be reminded of an angel that had decided to lessen itself down here with the riff raff.
“I thought you would appreciate that I took the liberty of recreating our first da-” he caught himself, “interview. Though I hope you won’t mind the extra precaution in sending the staff home for the evening, sensitive information you know.”
“Yes I believe i’m quite accustomed to your odd habits by now, Mayor Maters,” Harriet replied, taking the room down another few degrees with the accusation, “but you called me here on business, remember?”
Vlad had been knocked through walls that hurt him less. A pain deserved is still pain. Sighing, he sipped his wine and loosened his tie, the feeling of two ropes around his neck being more than he could handle.
“Fine then, let’s play this your way, on record let me just say: Harriet Chin, I owe you an apology.”
She visibly softened at the words, her shoulders dropping slightly as the grip on her tape recorder relaxed from iron to stone. “...for?”
“The other night, after the storm, when I rushed you out of my home, I… it was an ungentlemanly course of action to see you off like that, and again, I’m sorry. Now, on the subject of our rendezvous tonight, let me begin by asking you a question; how do you feel about me?”
Harriet blushed at his query, the color in her cheeks a stark contrast to the serious face she was trying to maintain between the two of them.
“W- well Mr. Masters, I believe, or rather I believed, that I've made my feelings towards you quite obvious from our first interview. As mayor you’ve seen an increase in jobs, a minimization of collateral damage and a consistently faster response time to e.e’s. Some would say that you’re arrogant but I would argue that you simply move with the necessary confidence of someone who believes they have the answers. You’re smart and you’re focused, and I can admire that…”
She had to stop herself from going any further, leaning back in her chair to put more space between them. Vlad had his head down at this point and the look on his face had told her that the question hadn’t meant to be a trap but it was one he was glad she had fallen for nonetheless. It was cute to her, seeing him like this with someone other than Maddie (or Jack for that one dorm party where Vlad had one too many and had to be carried out) but she couldn’t allow herself to lose focus.
“But,” she began again, taking out a notepad to make physical notes, “I’m not sure what that has to do with the Wisconsin Ghost. I’ve noted in the past that it seems to show up to ruin your life in particular, are you finally ready to elaborate on your connection to the mysterious spirit? A family curse perhaps? Or maybe something you unfortunately picked up during your quiet years accruing wealth?”
Vlad laughed then, the sound of a book slamming against cobblestone once again echoing in his mind, his father’s disappointed scowl looking down on him at the same time as his mother’s worried glance.
“I’m sorry, I'm not laughing at you I promise,” he said, noticing the same tint of worry begin to decorate the corner of Harriet’s eyes, “but you mentioning a family curse reminded me of an accident I had when I was younger. Not the accident mind you, but something older.”
“For the record, when you say ‘the’ accident, you are referring to the UW Madison incident during your junior year of college wherein you were exposed to near-lethal radiation due to unstable technology, correct?”
“The very same.”
“Just checking.”
There was a pause then, the two of them having avoided this topic over the last few months of their relationship. Finally, Vlad finished off the last of his first glass of wine before speaking again.
“If I may ask you another question, Ms. Chin,” he began, “how do you really feel about ghosts? I know that there is a fascination with them as much as they caused an… abrupt change in your career, but what do you want out of pursuing them?”
“Well Mr. Masters, I’m no expert in that field of study, but after the incident at our class reunion in your Wisconsin home last year I can’t say they didn’t spark my curiosity. What keeps them around after a disconnect from the living? Are they inherently beings of destruction and malice as the Fentons believe or are they just operating on a level we just don’t understand? Journalism is about seeking the truth, ideally, and when a new truth presents itself why shouldn’t I be the first one to investigate? Would I prefer my old career? Of course, but…” she paused to look at him, the faintest smile on her lips as they locked eyes across the table, “there are some perks to being where I am now.”
Rip the bandage off.
“I do hope you’ll keep that in mind.”
The air turned dark and cold, the dimly lit restaurant succumbing to pitch black for the faintest of moments before snapping back to reality. The flash as light cycled in and out of the room had caused her to cover her eyes for a moment, and when she opened them again, Vlad Masters was gone, and in his seat sat… something else.
The ghost held the wineglass in his now gloved hand as if giving a toast to her, the pale blue tint of his skin contrasting with the demonic red eyes that were watching her for a reaction. His hair had sucked all the black from the suit he was wearing, leaving only a stray tuft of white in the center, like a printer finally running out ink. She could see the fangs when he opened his lips to sip the last of the drink from the glass, and when she noticed them in conjunction with the flowing cape that now draped his shoulders she couldn’t help but think of the classic vampires that would stalk the screens in black and white.
Harriet had never knowingly been this close to a ghost before -she was adventurous not foolish- but something compelled her to reach out and touch his face, to make sure what was in front of her was real and not some trick of the light or whatever other excuse people gave to make themselves feel in control of their fear. She was surprised how cold he was, and the rational part of her brain wanted to scream and run away from what was realistically closer to a dead body than the living man who’d sat in the same spot seconds ago. The journalist in her though… well, she had come for an interview after all.
“Oh Vladdie… what did they do to you?”
Her voice was so soft that Vlad almost imagined he’d been hearing things, but as he leaned his head into her palm, he saw concern winning out as the dominant emotion on her face. Pressing his palm on top of hers for a moment, he gave her a squeeze of support before she removed her hand from his face.
“We proved my father right, unfortunately,” he said, pouring another glass for each of them whilst hovering slightly above the ground, “tell me Harriet have you ever heard the phrase ‘man makes a better monster than god could ever dream of’?”
Harriet was silent now, listening to him recount his years after college going from hospital to hospital before setting out to find his fortune. He’d also done the kindness of putting on the human façade again, though she wasn’t sure if that was for her sake or for his. Most reporters would kill for this kind of exclusive, and before today she would have been one of them, but the more he talked about his post collegiate life the more Harriet felt herself become a minor character in something much bigger.
He wasn’t so foolish as to outright admit to any serious crimes to her, he was still a politician after all, but the way he told some of the stories she was sure that there had been a few less-than-legal acquisitions of wealth in his past. Of course, she had no way of proving any wrongdoing on his part -and to be fair she wasn’t exactly shedding any tears about billionaires being cheated out of what they themselves had probably stolen in another way- so from a journalistic standpoint nothing she could put to paper would actually stand up. Still, the longer she listened to him, the more puzzle pieces began to slide into place in her mind. She thought back to something he had said to her earlier in their relationship, something that had been looping in her head since she’d been rushed out the other night: Obviously I’m only gaining your favor to use you later once the citizens turn on me after discovering the skeletons in my closet…
He was waiting for her now, done charting his rise to power.
“So at the reunion,” she began, marking something down in her notes, “when we were all together at the party, why would you do that?”
There was no neutrality in the question, Vlad noticed, it was a personal matter at this point.
“Possessing Jack, putting Maddie in danger like that… making me lose my job?”
“I… was angry, and perhaps didn’t make the best judgment call. Harriet you have to understand, Jack’s foolishness had cost me everything; years of my life gone to hospital beds, Maddie taken away and not even so much as a courtesy call to see how I was! Seeing him again, smiling and acting like nothing was wrong and no time had passed after two decades of silence… it was all too much for me.”
Ahh… Maddie…
“Then it was jealousy over unrequited love? Shakespearean, Mr. Masters”
He deflated at that, like a blobfish dragged to the surface and depressurized. “Don’t say it like that, Harry…”
“I’m just making an observation,” she said, the ice creeping back into her voice, “it just seems to me like you were so caught up with the past that you couldn’t see how your actions could affect the future. Yes, Jack made a mistake, there’s no denying the man has a penchant for leaping before he looks, but he cared about you more than anyone. In fact, did you know that it was his idea for us all to go to Irina’s funeral while you were in quarantine? He said that’s what you would have wanted and that you would have done the same for us.”
The mention of his mother’s name caused Vlad to shatter his glass, the wine and blood mixing as they ran down his fingers. He genuinely hadn’t meant to do it, but seeing how horrified Harriet became in the moment embarrassed and shamed him more than anything he’d previously admitted to.
“Harriet, I-”
He almost reached out to her, but in the split second between actions reconsidered it. His hand looked remarkably like he remembered his father’s at that moment.
“I’m sorry, truly, I didn’t mean to frighten you. To answer your question though, no, I didn’t know that, but again, had it not been for Jack’s carelessness I would have been able to attend myself, so that is still a…” he examined his hands for any stray shards of glass before wrapping it with his handkerchief, “sore subject for me.”
“...I’m sorry too,” she said, not quite closing the distance between them, “that was inappropriate for me to bring up something so personal.”
“I suppose that may be another reason I held onto my resentment as long as I did, my mother was… she was an amazing woman. She was kind, she was smart, and strong enough to make even my father reconsider some days. I miss her, more than I think I would admit to anyone else, and I’m truly sorry you never got to meet her at her best.”
“Would you…” how to phrase this as a professional “would you like to discuss any other women in your life?”
She had decided she wasn’t going to push this subject, there had already been a lot said between them today and she wasn’t sure how much more she could take. To her surprise though, Vlad was open with her, a defeated almost dreamlike quality to his voice.
“Yes well, while I have a tenuous relationship with Jack Fenton, Maddie… well I always thought that we were meant to be. You know, there was a point a while ago when I told her such.” News to Harriet, definitely going in the notes. “Of course, she spurned my advances, but for a while, I had this idea that if she could just see Jack how I see him then she’d come running. Never panned out, and if anything over time I think I began to realize I was chasing a fantasy more than an actual person, not my best moment but…”
He shrugged, the words coming out as a waterfall admission like decades of pressure had been relieved.
“You’re talking in past tense,” she asked, crossing her legs, “so what changed.”
“I took the time to get to know an actual person,” he said, color in his cheeks now, “and it’s amazing what you can realize when you aren't chasing a daydream. Finding a real connection after years of playing it close to the chest, well, forgive my forwardness Ms. Chin, but it’s been a fantastic experience.”
She took time to let that last bit marinate before closing her notebook. There was a sad finality in the way he phrased it.
“Well Mayor Masters, I think that’s more than enough for tonight, we should call it here.”
“Are you sure? We can-”
“Vlad, please, stop,” there was a definitive edge to her voice that physically stopped him from even gesturing, “just… not now, okay? This was a lot, and I know this couldn’t have been easy for you but… god this was all so much. Honestly just the fact that you’re… and all the stuff with Jack and Maddie… I need to sit on this for a bit.”
He felt foolish, he felt like phasing through the floor and sinking straight through the earth.
“But…”
His head shot up, watching her as if he were an ice sculpture hanging over a fire and she could extinguish it.
She sighed. “Trust goes a long way, and the fact that you trusted me with this at all… it says a lot, so thank you.”
“It’s the least I can do,” he said, reaching the spot where his glass had rested before he shattered it, “believe me… I never meant to hurt you in any way.”
“That’s the funniest part about this whole thing,” she replied, gathering her bag and opening the tape recorder to reveal an empty deck, much to Vlad’s surprise, “I really do believe you. I’ll… I’ll call you later”
Watching as she exited the restaurant into the night air, he sat alone in the darkness, listening to the last drops of spilled wine drip onto the carpet. Another book dropped in his haste and another cut to show on his careless hands.
Part five in the Lying Game series, taking place directly after Heretics.
The shirt Vlad Masters was wearing cost more than some people's rent and had a higher thread count than some sheet sets. The wine staining said shirt was also quite expensive, easily clocking in at $3000 a bottle, which he noted with a sneer before launching what would be his third bottle into the stone wall across the cellar. He was alone again, with only the echoes of shattering glass to keep him company and while normally he would abhor wasting such fine vintages without the benefit of manipulating some potential client, tonight he was making a special exception; a toast to his own self destruction. Of course, he was used to skulking after a misstep or two, but this one not only took the cake, it had foreclosed on the entire bakery without notice.
Harriet Chin had been a bright spot in his life recently, so the natural course of action was for him to blot it out in the most Vlad Masters way possible, which wasn’t helped by the constant flashes he had of Clockwork literally shattering his dreams beforehand. He’d kicked her out after the storm, muttering about how this was a mistake and that he was sorry but she had to leave. He’d also left no room for conversation, as by the time the heavy door had slammed behind her he had already taken off down the hallway.
He probably would have just gone to sulk in his study if he hadn’t caught a glimpse of himself in the vanity mirror between his Packers display. The reflection reminded him of the windows of the church where he’d been trapped in his nightmare, the sound of breaking glass in his memory ringing out like a shotgun and sending him downstairs, not quite to his lab but towards the wine cellar he had installed, more for aesthetic than practicality in the moment. Currently though, he was finding plenty of practical uses for the fermented fruit cache, no cheese platter pairing necessary.
"I've got to get out of here," he mumbled, weighing another bottle for the pitch before spinning it on the ground instead, "I just need to clear my head, get back to, to…"
He trailed off as he actually thought of what he had to look forward to. Another unsuccessful scheme in pursuit of a woman who wouldn't love him? Another confrontation with a gaggle of teenagers who saw him as a nothing more than a delusional Scooby Doo esq villain? No, inebriation had unfortunately come with a high degree of reflective sobriety, something that burned just as much as the alcohol on his breath.
As he managed to finally pull himself out of the cellar, Vlad shambled into the bathroom and splashed cold water onto his face. Catching his reflection for the second time, he wished he were surprised by the glaring red eyes staring back at him.
Pathetic, it sneered, drowning your sorrows in spoiled grape juice
"Oh fantastic," he breathed, "another critic."
Crying over could bes and maybe sos like a schoolboy, the monster in the mirror taunted, honestly, it's for the best you finally managed to run her off, now you can get back to what's important...
"And wha… what exactly would that be hmm?" Vlad replied, steadily raising his voice. "What do I have that's so damn important?! Do I have friends? A family? Please, elaborate on what I have because I am dying to know!"
Power, you dolt! The power to do WHAT you want, WHEN you want! There's an entire world out there to conquer and yet here you are, honestly considering settling for a second place prize after letting Jack take what was rightfully yours to claim. WE DON'T SETTLE FOR SILVER, VLADIMIR, WE-
Even though he realized the conversation was taking place in his head, Vlad couldn't resist putting his fist through the bathroom mirror to stop the taunting, shattering it and sending pieces raining down around the sink. Temporarily relieved, he felt himself get sick when he noticed the distorted reflections staring back at him through the shards.
"No more poor reflections dictating how I move for the night," he said, rubbing the fresh cuts along his knuckle, " I believe there's enough broken glass to clean up as it is."
Taking a moment to recompose himself and change out of his ruined attire, Vlad floated through the manor, gradually passing through each floor until he hovered above his home. With the wind cutting through his hair and the chill of the night making his breath visible, Vlad glided through the air, directionless at first but slowly finding himself drawn to downtown Amity. Despite what he had told himself (and Harriet for that matter), he didn't truly want to be alone right now, afraid of getting into another losing argument with himself.
After half an hour of flying through the city unseen, Vlad finally touched down outside of a local tavern, drawn in like a moth to the pulsing neon blue and purple lights. He listened to the muted rumble of music spilling out into the street, dropping his invisibility as he tried to place the song despite the thick walls of the building distorting the lyrics. Before he could stop himself, his hand was on the handle and he was opening the door, the muting effect broken as the sound seemed to swallow him into the building in a whirlwind of drums and synths.
He was shocked to open his eyes in the 1980's. There was leather and denim everywhere, with checkerboard accessories and overalls to match. Dual toned jackets, crop tops and frilly skirts dominated the dance floor. Vlad froze for a moment at the sight of it all, worried that he had been thrown back in time unprompted (stranger things tended to happen in his line of work) before the illusion was shattered by a disinterested bartender playing on their smartphone, earning a sigh of relief.
"Yo, Mayor Masters!"
Jumping at the sudden acknowledgement, Vlad quickly recomposed himself and turned to greet the stranger.
"Hello," he began, stretching out his hand to shake on politician's reflex, "to whom do I have the pleasure of speaking with?"
Laughing at the formality despite the environment, she met his hand with her own, her massive bracelets bouncing with the movement. "Rosie Gold, I own the place, well, co-own, my wife has her hands in the pie too."
"Ah," he said, watching her watch him for a reaction to her saying her wife, "well you two have carved out quite the gem here madam, it appears that business is booming."
"80's night" she yelled over the music, "always a hit!"
Satisfied that she apparently didn't need to have an issue with the mayor, Rosie lifted her drink to him as if to say "have fun" and disappeared back into the sea of big hair and track suits, leaving him alone again. Normally, he wouldn't be caught dead in a place like this for longer than a photo op, spending too much time in taverns and clubs was bad for the public image, especially for a man his age. However, Vlad found himself getting comfortable at Goldrush -a quick look at the menu had told him the name- and while it would be easy to just claim it was because it made him look sociable to the voters, he couldn't deny that the atmosphere reminded him of better times:
Late nights with Maddie and Jack, trading schematics across a greasy table while Billy Idol ripped through the air and Harriet did mock interviews.
Watching Harriet run while he and Jack sat shirtless with painted faces cheering her on in chilly Wisconsin spring.
The four of them passing out together in the library, each studying for a different class' upcoming test.
Their days off wandering the mall, raiding Silo for parts before going to Tape World and arguing artists.
In his weakest moments, Vlad missed all it, he missed all of them together. This wasn't one of his weakest moments, but he could admit it was a weak-er moment, because reminiscing had reminded him of her. Except this time the 'her' haunting him wasn't Maddie… it was Harriet.
Staring into the water he had apparently ordered at some point and poking at his half eaten grilled cheese cheeseburger -rich or not there were some pleasures no man was too good for- he found himself getting angry at his reflection again, unintentionally causing the water to boil in the glass.
Control yourself, he thought, watching as the red faded from his eyes and the boiling died down, I believe you've made enough of a spectacle of yourself for one night.
Dropping $50 on the table, Vlad began to make his way to the door. He was halfway across the room when the music died down and he heard Rosie announce herself over the speaker system.
"Alright, everybody having a good time?" She asked, answered by a sea of cheers. "Yeah baby, that's what I like to hear. Now, we can't have an 80's night without a bitchin live karaoke sesh or two, can we?"
"Hell no!"
"I thought so! So, lemme call up a special guest we have in the house tonight, you might know him, you might love him, hell you might've even voted for him…"
Oh no…
"Let's get Mayor Vlad Masters on the stage!"
Suddenly he was surrounded by applauding people in hoop skirts and high tops, cutting off his exit and guiding his path exclusively to the stage. A lot of them were drunk, he noticed, and more than a few were on something a bit more… herbal. Nonetheless, he smiled and waved like a good politician, giving a fake chuckle as hands patted him on the back and people whooped and yelled for him to "rock out." Before he knew it, he was on stage, taking the mic from Rosie, and sweating under the same neon stage lights that had hypnotized him into there in the first place.
There were ways out, he knew, for example: he could simply disappear. Honestly, given the mood he was in he could fake a ghostly possession and turn this tavern from a hotspot to a horror show. It might even feel good, throwing chairs and terrorizing his constituents with the half-truth that a ghost had decided they had had enough fun for one night. But he had been drinking, and he was emotional, and against all odds he liked this place -the cheering crowd certainly didn't hurt- and most importantly… he had been drinking.
"Any requests Mr. mayor," the drummer asked. He couldn't have been too long out of college himself, with heavy eye makeup on one and a blood red streak of dyed hair covering the other, "we've got every big thing from 79 to 89 in the playbook?"
Looking from the drummer to the crowd to the blinding lights causing them to sweat, Vlad mouthed the word "Asia" and took in a nervous breath. He hadn't sang in public since his mother made him do choir all those years ago, but tonight he had a new congregation to sing to, so he began:
"I never meant to be so bad to you, one thing I said that I would never do…"
The tavern goers lost it as the song began, some singing along as he poured his heart into the music while others just kicked their dancing into a higher gear.
The guitarist was good, the whole band was good and even if he wouldn't admit it, Vlad lost himself for a bit in all of it. Burning through the chorus with the crowd, sweat dripped down his face, and before he knew it he was standing on the stage in only his untucked shirt. His jacket was in a crumpled pile beside the band, and his tie was wrapped around his fist, the satin kissing the fading scars from earlier that night. She would have loved to see him like this.
Looking into the mirrors above the dance floor, Vlad locked eyes with a furious reflection, enraged at their machinations being ignored for so long while he enjoyed himself. Pointing directly up as he entered the last verse, he felt the entirety of the lyrics hit as the music faded down.
"And when your looks are gone and you're alone, how many nights you sit beside the phone, what were the things you wanted for yourself… teenage ambitions you remember well!"
He was out of breath now, with everything off his chest, but that didn't matter as the audience was more than happy to finish the chorus for him, ushering him off stage in a sea of cheers as the band continued to play. Gathering his discarded jacket and dabbing the sweat from his forehead, he found himself slumping back into his booth rather than heading for the exit. If this place was going to embolden him to this extent, then he was going to use it to his advantage.
Taking out his phone, he hovered over Harriet's name for a bit, his fingers struggling to find the words for her.
I owe you...
An apology? An explanation? He drummed his fingers as the words bounced back and forth in his head. Finally, he came to a realization: he was still trying to approach this in a way that was politically neutral, with carefully guarded words that he could work around if necessary. He didn't want to be that way tonight, not with her at least.
I'm sorry for earlier...
He began, sweaty loose hairs dangling over his face like the night in sophomore year she had convinced him to run with her, the first night the two of them had really hung out alone.
I believe I owe you an exclusive about the Wisconsin ghost.
