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#Vlad's 'normal' eyes
satureja13 · 6 months
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Their expedition to Selvadorada starts at the Space Port in San Myshuno where they all meet again.
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Jeb missed Sai so much. Haha I agree wit Noxee. Saiwa doesn't have to worry if Jeb likes the way he dresses :3
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Let's hope Jack lives up to the moodlet ö.Ö (the box contains Kiyoshi's heart...)
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The adventurer shop is too tiny for all of them to fit in so Rubyn starts outfitting them with Ji Ho and Jeb.
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While Saiwa and Jack explore the Arcade ^^'
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And Vlad went to enjoy the view, now that he can finally see again.
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Vlad already noticed that something has changed with his eyes. The Bond is playing tricks on him again. But it got worse after he sees Ji Ho together with the others.
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THEY are the reason why Ji Ho wants to cut the Bond. To protect THEM from the Council! (Uhm Vlad, you wanted that too (?)) Vlad could live happily with his bonded Ji Ho if it weren't for THEM! Oh oh ö.Ö'
Didn't you promise Francine to tell her if you notice something odd?
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And poor Noxee is sad having to let her babies go on a possibly dangerous expedition...
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Greg will be there for her.
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'… No one could ever know me No one could ever see me Seems you're the only one who knows What it's like to be me Someone to face the day with Make it through all the rest with Someone I'll always laugh with Even at my worst, I'm best with you, yeah' I'll be there for you - The Rembrandts RIP Matthew Perry
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cookietastic · 8 months
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I haven’t drawn Danny for a while in his normal form that legit forgot this MF had blue eyes
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ghoulysaphomet · 4 months
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Had a weird fkn dream where danny somehow turned into a dog who forced vlad who didnt know to get therapy. New au i guess
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Talk (Silence)
~
Danny has gotten used to not having to watch what he said as the years went by.
In Amity everyone basically knew he was Phantom and just treated it as normal, and he had already told his parents what had happened,
They did a total 180 on their opinions, now chasing after ghosts to question them about everything they could squeeze out of them.
They were very proud of Danny too, often helping him with their technology.
Having said that he got used to not watching what he said in Amity, everyone knew so why bother right?
Unfortunately he was not in Amity
He was in Gotham visiting Jazz, who had moved for University.
They were currently in a cafe catching up, talking as their used to.
Not realizing that their conversation without context sounded very worrying.
~
Jazz: " So how are mod and dad?"
Danny: "Oh you know the usual, they're making new weapons, hopefully this time they wont target me, getting shot sucks, but I prefer it over getting electrocuted "
Jazz: " Good luck!"
(TOPC)The other people in the cafe: What the fuck
~
Danny: " Vlad keeps putting cameras in my room, so I went and confronted him about it again, I don't care that he's the mayor! "
Jazz: " He really needs some therapy"
Danny: " He's a fruitloop, he's beyond help"
TOPC: *concerned side eye*
~
Jazz: "You know I was a bit more worried about the criminals here, but honestly weak, I miss actual competent villains"
Danny: "I told you!"
TOPC not sure if they should be offended or wary of where they live
~
Jazz: " You know I kinda miss the food back home"
Danny: "What that it would come back to life and fight you to the death?"
Jazz: " I mean that too, but I was talking about the taste"
Danny: " Oh yes the chemically contaminated food really has some extra flavor compared to this" *gestures at his plate*
~
Danny: " I went to the park to play with Cujo and got kidnapped and they almost cut me in half"
Danny/Jazz: "Typical Friday!"
TOPC recording on their phones to make sure they're not hallucinating, someone is live tweeting.
~
Just an Idea
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deadsetobsessions · 4 months
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Alley Drunk! Danny AU- Part 1
[Pt.2] [Pt.3] [Pt.4]
To not turn into a giant raging asshole hell bent on murdering people and destroying the world after everyone he loved died, Danny had ran from Amity with his chosen vice.
A bottle. That’s right. Even after Jazz’s talks about alcoholism as a poor coping mechanism as a form of self harm, he still chose alcohol. Or maybe that’s why he picked it, because it reminded him of her, right before the booze took the sting of grief off of her memory. He was never really all that good at listening to Jazz.
And now she’s gone, so it’s moot point. Danny really hated Nasty Burger.
Danny made it all the way to Gotham, bottle constantly glued to his hand. It’s better than Vlad’s creep-o-self looming over him all of the time. He bummed out on the streets, fitting into crime alley like a native. Danny learned to pickpocket. Not much, just enough for a bottle when his ran out. He stayed human. At first he tried to convince himself that it was because he didn’t want to be perceived as a meta in a city where Batman notoriously disliked metas. Then, as he sunk deeper, he admitted to himself in a shameful curl of a whisper that it was really because alcohol affected his human side much easier.
Ghosts need an ungodly amount of alcohol to even get slightly buzzed. Danny’s human side? Only one full bottle the shittiest tequila he could find could even hope to be more than buzzed. It sucked.
He’s spent two years being an alcoholic that didn’t actually get that drunk. Technically, underage drinking was a crime. But then again, so was being a vigilante ghost. So, whatever. He does what he can to dull the grief. Mostly, he slept on covered and hidden nooks on top of Crime Alley’s roofs. Gotham city had taken pity on him and cleared her smog clouds when he was awake at night. Stargazing helped, at least. It gave him a little hope. It gave him a little wish to change and better and live like he wants. But then the night ends and when the day comes, Jazz isn’t there. Sam isn’t there. Tucker isn’t there. His mom and dad are not there.
Danny always went back to the bottle, in the end. Not that it did much.
Which was why, when he saw three looming figures over a tiny child, Danny’s saving people thing flared with a vengeance and his surprised ectoplasm burned what little buzz he had achieved by downing most of the bottle away, leaving him stone cold sober and pissed.
Danny sighed, dumping the rest of the nasty tasting liquid out. There’s no point drinking that little.
He approached the trio, who were beating up an actual child. Ancients, he hated Crime Alley sometimes.
“Give me your shit, you little punk!” Asshole 1 decided to say like a typical mugger, raising his leg to kick the curled up kid below. Danny doesn’t let him land the kick, smashing the bottle on the asshole’s head before any of them clocked his presence. He pivots, pushing a bit of that extra strength he normally keeps on a tight leash into his hands, and punched the other two in a quick fashion, knocking them out.
With that taken care of, Danny turned back to the kid who was still curled up. Danny sighed again, the trembles in small shoulders plucking on his heartstrings.
“You okay, kid?”
The kid uncurls, and Danny stared. Holy shit, is he looking into a mirror? Blue eyes, black hair, and tanned skin. Holy shit, he’s even got similar jaws to Danny.
“Huh.”
The kid flinched.
“Y-y’er the drunk,” the kid flinched again, eyes darting to the broken bottle still clenched in Danny’s hand. “I- I ain’t got money, honest. Please-”
Danny blinked down at the kid, brain connecting the dots after so long without actual interaction. He’s panicking and staring at the bottle in Danny’s hand like it’ll kill him. Danny raised the bottle and the kid closed his mouth with a click, terror worming its way into the kid’s eyes.
“I wasn’t going to mug you myself, kid.”
“But- y’er the- the Alley drunk.”
Danny blinked. Did he get a reputation without knowing again? Goddammit.
“I guess. Am I famous or somethin’?”
“Nobody- nobody fucks wit’ ya.”
“I also don’t hurt kids.”
“…”
The kid stared at him dubiously and with a sinking feeling, Danny realized that maybe the kid already had some terrible experiences with a heavy drunken hand. He promptly chucks the bottle further into the alley.
“I drink, yes. But I’m also not the kind of scum that would lay hands on a kid, let alone anyone that didn’t provoke it first.”
“Oh.” The kid uncurled more, looking at Danny warily, more at ease now that the bottle has left the chat.
“Yeah. I’m Danny. Stone cold sober, right now.”
“…”
Danny waited.
“Peters.”
“Okay. Peters, do you wanna take their shit?” Danny pointed a thumb at the knocked out would-be-muggers behind him.
“Y… yeah, sure. What’s my cut?”
“All of it.”
Peters stared.
Danny shrugged and started looting.
"Y'er so fuckin' weird."
----
See, the thing is, Danny hadn't anticipated saving Peters- "'s actually Jason"- would result in having a duckling following him around. The kid, Jason, glared at everyone who even looked at them wrong. But that's not the problem, because Danny could take anyone who took issue with Jason's looks, it's more like there's a child following him around now and Danny doesn't want to be the reason Jason turns into an alcoholic. It's- well, it made him cut down on the drinking. He even got jobs- legitimate jobs that sucks out his his poor ectoplasmic soul.
Why? Because Jason's apparently homeless. While that's something Danny's okay with for himself, he can't ever condone that for an actual child. Jason's walking around in threadbare clothes and thin soled shoes in the middle of Fall, for Ancient's sake.
Danny grumbles as he piled a bunch of clothes into the shopping bag as he checked out. Gotham's Walmart is a different kind of hell, but Danny feels right at home.
Sure, the work might suck out his soul and he might hate being sober, but Jason's face every time he comes home to an actual place to live, warm clothes, and food was worth everything.
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ririblogsss · 2 months
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Danny the park crazy guy
Ok this follows Danny with him deciding he needs to get out of Amity Park cause he's parents are getting more and more obsessed with catching Phantom. And the plans he'd over heard were sending him into panic attacks. Not only that a new management was placed for the GIW, and with that they had become more brutal and accurate with their capturing. Danny couldn't make sure ghosts were safe and protect civilians, so Danny made a deal with Technus in exchange for most of the tech Danny has made in the past 6 months Technus has to hack into the portals that his parents and Vlad owned and permanently destroy them. Technus also made sure to wipe all the information on how to re-build the portal and planted a bug that will corrupt any file trying to mimic the portals code/mechanics. 
At first Dannys plan was to play the part of the defenseless boy who just witnessed his parents whole life work go down the drain, and pretend that ghost never happened. He's parents were sad (understatement of the century) but they soon found something to hyper focus on, before becoming ecto-biologist, they were trying to find ways to make liquid that would dissolve plastic in a non-lethal and non-toxic way. So after 2 months of not doing anything and only staying in bed eating ice-cream and fudge its like a light bulb turned on onto of their heads, and Madeline and Jack went back to their old selves. They still had moments were they would gaze back at their projects with heartbroken eyes, and Danny could help but blame himself for his parents suffering. 
Its like one day everything was close to normality (as normal as amity park could be) people weren't mentioning ghost in fear that one would appear out of spite. Classes went uninterrupted people were actually happy for that. 
But then the GIW started making moves, as they were getting more and more restless with no ghost sightings in the last 6 months. 
Then 3 months ago everything went to shit......
Danny could only explain it as if the Salem witch trials had started. But instead it was the 21st century and people were being accused of being / cooperating / aiding ghosts. The GIW had stormed into the town hall and had claimed that Amity park was in full quarantine. No one in no one out. Vlad was taken in for 'investigation' accused of working with the ghost because he never helped the GIW or offered funds, hence committing treason the US government. 
After that People would be taken out of their homes and obligated to take tests to prove they weren't with the enemy, if they passed they went back to their homes traumatized. if they failed.... Well no one really knows, but one might guess from all the screaming. 
Ironically. Dannys parents were the fist accused of cooperating with the enemy. The GIW stated that they seemed suspicious from the start as they never truly caught anything. he hadn't seen them since they were drugged and stuffed into the back of a van. Danny was thankful that Jazz (for collage) and Dani (traveling in Bangladesh) were out of Amity, but it wasn't like he could contact them and tell them what was happening. 
The GIW had cut all contact to the rest of the word from Amity Park probably because what they were doing was considered illegal and definitely were crossing human rights. 
Luckily Sams and Tuckers family were able to come to an agreement with the GIW so they could be exempted from the quarentine (buy themselves a way out). Unluckily Danny like most families didn't have those types of resources. 
But Danny isn't a Fenton for nothing, craziness, gull and genius ran through his veins. So every morning when they were obligated out of their homes and made to sit on the grass of the park square while the agents searched for any 'evidence' in their homes. Danny would use his core to emit a frequency that only other ghost and some metas could hear. But that wasn't what Danny was communicating to no. 
He was sending commands to all the animals he had befriended the last 15 years of his life. You see ever since Danny was a kid he loved how one could be able to domesticate any animal as long as you had food. So Danny when he was a kid applied The Operant conditioning to all the animals he crossed paths with. 
A few weeks after his accident (death) when Danny was making his daily feeding times for the animals in exchange for trinkets and money he realized something. He could understand what the animals 'spoke' and the animals could understand him through the vibrations of his core. When he asked CW about it he only told him that ghost speak allowed him to communicate with anything and anyone if he had a close enough relationship towards them. 
Basically this meant that Danny had hundreds if not thousands of animals (rats, street dogs and cats, pigeons, squirrels ect.. ) at his disposal. The only reason he never used them when fighting Ghosts was obvious he wasn't going to risk the life of his friends. 
And right now his friends were making underground escape routes for all of the Amity Parkers. The plan was already being set in motion. Everyone knew their part. 
One group would be distraction, a group of kids would scream and point in the opposite direction of the escape route and say they had seen a ghost and it was trying to hurt them. The GIW would be guided into a wooded area were they would be attacked by the more predatorial animals. Making them call for back up. 
One group would composed of the most athletic adults / young adults would go into the main base of the GIW (check for survivors and help them get out). 
Another group (the elderly) was in charge of checking that everyone was accounted for. 
Mothers, would be evacuated first with their children, they would be the get away drivers. Different drivers would take different routs. Some left the country other the continent itself. Some when to larger cities for hiding amongst the crowd. But the main goal was stick to your family and preferably if you can go alone. The less people the less likely you are to getting caught. 
And the teenagers from casper high, would ensure all their traces were lost making sure all phones and gadgets were left behind, as to avoid getting tracked down. 
And that's how Amity Park became a dead town (pun intended) in less than 60 minutes. 
This leads us to the present. 
It had been 7 months since Danny had left Amity park. he hadn't seen anyone or contacted anyone from there since. The over all consensus was that everyone had to go no contact with one another as to not raise awareness as to why so many people from different places were constantly calling one another. Danny was certain that Jazz and Dani had been contacted by Sam and Tucker about the situation in Amity. What he wasn't sure of is if they knew he was out of Amity or even alive for that matter. 
Danny was not dealing with what happened well. One of the guys who went into the Town Hall pulled him a aside for a second when they were evacuating to tell him. That he had seen both his parents bodies. They had not survived. Not many who were taken against their will into the Hall came out spared. 
Danny was devastated with his parent untimely death, he only hoped they had a humane one. 
So no Danny was not ok. he knew Jazz would criticize his copping methods. But if taking over a park in the middle of a crime riddled city was sooooo bad then why did he have the support of the Bats. (not the vigilantes the actual cave bats). 
Danny had gotten to Gotham not too long ago (about 4 1/2) months, and decided that the GIW wouldn't dare on their life go into a city were the 'wolds greatest detective and most feared man live'. Danny made an abandoned building overlooking the park his own. he quickly became allies with the fauna there and soon his rein over the part began. 
---
It started slowly, honest to god not a single local though anything of the bony kid laughing his ass off as he oversaw birds and other critters alike help him build what looked like a greenhouse. They did what any Gothamite would do mind their own damn business and go on with their day. 
It wasn't unlit the trees and torn plants started to build a wall like structure around the park that they started to think that the kid was going to be the next Poison Ivy. Worst of all they some have speculated seeing Pamela and Harley go in and out of the park... both smiling like proud parents. Some say that the kid was an ex Wayne kid that was sent into an asylum, and was kept quiet. Some speculate that the kids a meta that controls all animals. Some state they saw the kid talk to the animals and the animals actually listened and did word for word what he asked. 
But Gothamites weren't that worried if they were honest. The kid (Danny as he was now known) brought more entertainment (of the good kind) to Gotham he fit right in. The only thing that made him stand out was his mid-western accent. When asked where he was from he would only stare at you while an animal (different every time mostly racoons) would chase you away. Other than that the kid was a sweetheart he would often bring the veggies and fruits he cultivates in the park to homeless shelters so that the residents would have a 'more nutritious and full diet'. 
The kid would send animals to keep watch on kids and be alerted if any were at risk he would drop in and help in a very unusual way. And he always traded money for little things and bottle caps anything handmade (especially by kids) was infinitely rewarded with money and an automatic meal. 
Danny was known as the Gotham parks crazy. But he was their crazy and no government (illegal) agency of a brigade of bats and birds was going to take him away from them. 
(waaa this was way longer that expected I only wanted to write a sentence of local crazy Danny, and I just ended up writting mostly art other stuff)
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sentient-stove · 5 months
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“Okay, first off don’t call me that, it’s kind of rude, imagine if I went around calling you the base template.”
Elle leaned over Danny’s shoulder, propping her chin in her hands as she smiled with too many teeth at Damian. “You can call me it. It’s kinda funny. ‘Cept I’m a Xerox of a Xerox.”
“So you’re not a clone of—” Damian started, glancing between the pair in confusion. “Is that why sh-”
“Not a clone of you.” Danny interrupted, seeming to find his plate of scrounged up desserts more interesting than eye contact. “I’m a clone of Damian Wayne, she’s a clone of Daniel Fenton.”
“Xerox of Xerox.” Elle held up a peace sign, her fingers cutting the air. “Clone of a clone. Very unstable, very fun. I have a tendency to nearly melt into primordial goop.”
“It’s not that funny, Vlad’s raised you on terrible humor.”
“Dad’s raised me fine.”
“You swear in breakfast foods. Say fuck like a normal clone.”
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tanglepelt · 9 months
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Dc x dp idea 105
Danny and billy are homeless besties. Living their best life. Tricking the JL into thinking they are both the adultiest adults.
Danny is backed by having evidence of being alive in the past. He obviously just doesn’t age. Billy just looks like an adult as Shazam.
Now. Danny swears it’s not his fault they got caught. He wasn’t expecting to get turned human. Honestly after the nasty burger explosion he didn’t think he’d be reported missing. Plus how does Batman know Vlad has a missing persons report on him.
Batman: *batglare*
Danny: i never said i was an adult. You guys assumed. I just didn’t say otherwise. Thank you very much.
Shazam: *avoiding eye contact with danny*
Superman: *disappointed look*
Danny: *looking everywhere but at Shazam* ha… well. At least I’m the… only kid.. the single one masquerading as an adult. All by myself….
Shazam very much not looking at anyone. Turned away looking very guilty.
Superman: *arms crossed looking at Shazam* Shazam
Billy knows he’s not getting out of this. Goes to his normal form begrudgingly glaring at Danny.
Billy: it’s not like we’re homeless or anything.
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radiance1 · 5 months
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Vlad Masters has died.
Or at the very least, that is what the upper class was lead to believe. Could you blame them? His death was wildly convincing, and the thing was.
No one knew who would inherit Vladco and his fortune.
As far as they knew, Masters never had any heirs to speak of at all. Not even an illegitimate child, or a foster care. He doesn't even have relatives that the fortune and company could go to.
So, safe to say, they were quite looking forwards to what would happen to the company. Would it sink, or stay afloat?
Now, normally, Damian wouldn't have cared a single bit about what would happen. But seeing as he is forced to go to an event held at the very dead Vlad Masters' mansion, he thinks he should have the right to see what'll happen.
The company's various stockholders were all gathered together, as well as Lex Luthor and other rich upper-class individuals. He knows that Vlad and Lex didn't like each other very well, so he thinks that Lex Luthor may or may not be backing the biggest current stockholder so that he'll have a say in the man's company when they take over.
Honestly, the event was pretty boring. He thought there would be... more, happening. Considering the context of this event.
So, he leaves. He's really just exploring to stave off his boredom, but if he found Vlad Masters' secrets before his death, well. Might as well, really.
He comes upon a room filled wall to wall with merchandise that screamed Masters was a packers fan before his death. Quite the large one at that as well. He picked up one item just to take a look at it, it wasn't something he was too interested in, but it was sort of impressive.
He turned when he heard the door open behind him, and saw a girl that was probably around his age staring at him with concern.
The thing is, she wasn't dressed like a guest. Or even a maid. She was dressed like a poor person.
So obviously he thought she was breaking in to find things to steal and sell off.
"I'm telling dad you tried stealing his packers merch." And with that, the girl was off, and Damian found himself running after her.
Why?
Boredom.
But also, father? He genuinely considers who she was talking about, clearly it couldn't have been anyone participating in the event, so was he also another thief that wanted to steal from Masters?
What sort of thief reveals they have another roaming around where they're stealing from? And their blood relation at that?
He realized that they were running towards where all the guests were gathered, and Damian thought that this girl was either lost, or genuinely didn't know what she was doing.
"Dad! Some kid is trying to steal your merchandise!" Said the girl, slamming open the doors and causing the attention of everyone present to fall directly on her as she paused.
Damian couldn't see it, but he thinks she's quite stupefied in that moment, paused on her pause. It was completely, and utterly quiet for a moment as the guests stared at her, and she stared back.
However, the next moment. The very detailed coffin laying in the center of the room suddenly swung itself open with a great pillar of green fire that reached the ceiling, causing his attention to switch over to it.
He saw lines on the floor around the coffin, lines that he previously ignored as some kind of design choice.
Lines that were filled with a liquid none to dissimilar to Lazarous Water.
A hand reached out of the coffin. "WHO DARES TO TOUCH MY PRECIOUS MERCHANDISE!?" And from beyond the grave the previously dead now arisen body of Vlad Masters pulled himself out of his own coffin, with inhumane red eyes.
So. Damian came to two conclusions that night.
One, Vlad Masters may or may not have had ties with the League of Assassins in some way, leading to his now ressurection.
Two, Vlad Masters has a daughter that was extremely well hidden from basically everyone present at the gathering and, maybe even the world at large.
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phantomrose96 · 10 days
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Sham Sacrifice: Chapter 2
(Sham Sacrifice: Chapter 1)
Chapter 2, because @ciestess voiced an idea that absolutely consumed my entire mind and I could not rest until I made this
...
Danny’s eyes tracked the swing of gunfire raining bullets across the horizon. Tucker reloaded, crouched, dodged left and pivoted, another blast of bullet confetti launched through a gaggle of zombie heads. He tossed the magazine and reloaded. Click. Ching. Danny flinched when a zombie smashed a hammer clean through Tucker’s head.
 “God. Fucking…” Tucker pulled out of his hunch. He unclamped his fingers from his controller like bug legs unfurling. He extended the controller to Danny, bouncing it in his grip. “Your turn.”
“Huh?” Danny asked, as if he hadn’t been watching Tucker’s game the whole time.
“You. You’re up. I died.”
Danny accepted the controller, reloaded the screen, and jogged about a hundred feet forward before the first horde of zombies took him out football-style from the left. The death screen rolled.
“Oops,” Danny said.
“Not your best work.” And Tucker took the controller back. Tucker shot a few spare glances to Danny while the level restart loaded in. “Is it Vlad?”
“No. Well, yes,” Danny answered, flopping back into his normal position on the Foley attic armchair. Tucker’s mom had planned to toss it ages ago, before it became Danny’s chair. “But at least he left when my parents went all zombie mode into the basement.” Danny picked absently at the scabs of leather flaking from the armrest. “It was just weird.”
“I don’t mean this as an insult, but it’s definitely not the first time your dad’s gotten some math wrong,” Tucker said. “He blows up like three things a week doesn’t he?”
“He does. But he doesn’t care when he gets that math wrong. This one was like I broke something important.” Danny’s expression soured, and he picked a leather flake clean off the chair. “Vlad did, I mean.”
“Does any of the math actually work?” Sam offered from Tucker’s desk. She leaned an elbow around the back of his chair, head tilted to Danny. A pencil dangled from her loose fingers, nib-half worn to the History of an Invention report she was actually working on. Tucker had half-assed his earlier in the day about the palm pilot. Danny had not done his. “Like, it’s all crackpot theory, right? Do ghosts even follow math?”
“I think they follow some math. It’s not magic that makes the ecto-bazookas work, or the Fenton-phones work, or—well the thermos DIDN’T work—until I made it work.”
The unspoken thing Danny had been not-quite-saying hung in the air. He said it this time.
“So I’m wondering if I did it. Like the Fenton thermos. And now maybe they’re gonna do the math all over and realize the missing piece of the equation is one half-ghost son.”
“Well the order is backwards, for starters,” Sam said. “Thermos worked because you pumped ghost-energy into it. How would you have done that to the portal? You were human when you walked in.”
“Sam’s right. What do you think you brought to the table exactly? Button-slapping abilities?” Tucker loaded up the next level. “It was their portal, and their math, and it worked. There’s a million-billion kinds of math and they probably just forgot one thing.”
Tucker took a headshot and died. Mechanically, he handed the controller back to Danny.
“Yeah, probably.”
“Ask Vlad. He’s got a portal.”
“Like Vlad’s gonna tell me.”
“Just promise to be his diligent little son minion or whatever. He’s easy. Wait, let me do the next level. You know I like the cyberpunk levels.”
“It’s not your turn,” Danny said, reeling the controller just out of Tucker’s wiggling grasp.
“I’ll let you do two in a row for your next turn.”
Danny knocked Tucker away, distracted just long enough for a zombie cyberbeam to launch from the horizon and take him out through the head.
The screen washed sepia. Danny stared at it. You died.
Danny hadn’t really meant to stay the night at Tucker’s place. They’d just gotten really far in Man vs. Zombie, and Sam had gone home, and Danny was just resting his eyes between his turns with the controller.
So when he woke to the bright strip of sunlight beaming into his eyes through the attic skylight, his first thought was Fuck.
He was awake, here, morning, school. Fuck he had not actually done his History of Invention report, despite the stupid amount of grief it had already caused him this weekend. He pulled his face out of the armrest, now pineapple-patterned from the decaying leather, and pawed for his phone fallen on the floor. If it was still early enough, he could maybe still afford to desperately half-ass something before sixth period science.
He flipped his phone open. A text from Jazz. “Don’t come home. Make up an excuse.”
“…Fuck,” Danny whispered, through the sensation of his heart launching itself into his throat.
He scrambled upright, whole body shaking at the mercy of adrenaline shock so soon after being pulled from dead sleep. His mouth was dry, teeth unbrushed, wearing his old clothes from yesterday, report not done, Don’t come home, Don’t come home, Don’t come home.
They knew. He’d fucked it up. Somehow they knew. The math. Something. And it had to be with guns blazing, because Jazz would not send that text if they’d taken the “We accept you” angle.
Were they coming for him? On their way here? Tracking by his phone? Did they like Mrs. Foley enough to not SWAT-slam her against the wall when she opened the door for them so they could come capture the ghost pretending to be their son?
Fuck.
Danny was upright. Danny was standing. Danny was shaking. Danny wasn’t actually sure what the next thing was he was supposed to do.
Tucker’s ball of blankets rustled from the couch. “Mmph?” he asked, articulately.
“I have to. Go deal with my parents, I think,” Danny said, because any plan felt a little better than no plan. “I think they know.”  
Danny was a ghost. Danny was gone. Tucker sat upright, alone, blinking himself awake. He was staring at the You Died sepia screen still displayed on monitor, now burnt into the plasma of the tv.
Danny paused with his human hand slick on the Fenton front door. The gears in his mind turned as his plan quickly unraveled into no-plan. He had no plan, right? What was his plan? Handle this Man vs Zombie style—open the front door ready to dodge wide, because both zombies and parents liked to camp behind closed doors with bazookas at the ready?
“—absolutely absurd, and entirely unscientific, with no probability of being true. It goes against everything we know about neurology.”
Oh, Jazz. Was Jazz enough of a bazooka-deterrent? Probably not. Knowing his parents.
Danny turned the knob. His heart hammered. If bazookas, dodge left.
The first thing he noticed was in fact the no-bazookas. It was what he was most looking for. And so it was Jazz’s expression he did not notice until second—whites of her eyes wide, snapped to Danny, with a look that would be accusatory if worry hadn’t won that battle. Her cheeks were pale. Her hair was unbrushed.
He noticed his parents third. Compulsively, he rocked back onto his right foot, still outside the doorway, still outside the threshold of the Fenton family household.
Seeing his parents tired was of absolutely no shock-value to Danny. It was at least a twice-per-month tradition to see them haul themselves up from the basement sweaty and glaze-eyed at 7am, babbling excitement about some new ecto-spectral-hoozy-whatsits whose concept had shimmed into their minds at 8pm and now existed, fully operational, 11 nonstop hours later.
So it wasn’t the exhaustion on their face. It wasn’t the stagnant smell of sweat or the paleness of their faces or the stains on their clothes.
It was the way they looked at him. Like their whole world had fallen apart with his foot passing over the doorstep.
“Danny,” Jazz said, choked, a break in the silence. “Things are…! A little weird here. So maybe, if you wanna just get to school, I’ll finish clearing up—there’s a misunderstanding Mom and Dad have with their math. I am state finalist in Math League and have been studying college-level calculus in preparation for school applications so I’ve offered to help them fix their math, or prove to them—”
“Danny,” Maddie said, an echo of Jazz, but it felt worse. Danny scanned her hands for anything pointed enough to be a weapon. They were empty. “Danny can I just ask you something honestly, just quickly? Jazz is right. I’m just trying to clear up an issue with our math. And I won’t be mad. Whatever the answer is, I won’t be mad. I just want an honest answer.”
She stepped closer. Danny fought the urge to match her with a step backwards. Her eyes roved over him in a starved way, looking for something.
“Were you there when the portal turned on?” she asked.
“No, I wasn’t,” Danny answered. He wasn’t sure what to do with his face to make it look convincing. “It just. It needed some time to boot up, or something, right? That’s what you two said.”
“That was our guess ,but we don’t really know. The security tapes are wiped. We tried to make them EMF-resilient but a very, very strong blast of EMF could still corrupt them.”
“Yeah. I mean the portal’s gonna do that, right? When it turned on? Ripping open the Ghost Zone that’s—gotta be huge EMF.” Danny’s focus bounced between his mother’s eyes. “Just a guess. I really don’t know. I was in bed, already, whenever the portal started working.”
Left eye. Right eye. Why was she looking at him like that? Like she was sad. Was this part a trick? Make Danny let his guard down, go hey Mom need a hug? and that’s when the bazooka-whipping starts? It made his ribs feel scratchy. Stop looking at me like that.
“Have you felt anything weird at all, since the portal started working? Any gaps in your memory? Any parts of you that don’t feel right? Is there any part of you that feels like it’s changed in a way you can’t explain?”
She reached a hand out. Danny instinctively recoiled.
“Uh, yeah. They taught us about this in health class. They call it ‘puberty’ there.”
“Danny,” Jack said, and his voice was scratchy from disuse, from a long and uncharacteristic amount of time spent not speaking. “Did you die in the machine?”
A beat. A moment. Like when the zombie sends a hammer through your head.
“I’M alive!” Danny declared with a crack in his voice, with hands slammed to his chest. “Look at me. What are you talking about?”
“It’s the only math that works,” Jack continued, his words like chalk, his voice too dead. He looked too much at Danny. “If one of you two walked into the portal, and died in it. And I don’t think it was Jazz.”
This was bad. This was weird. Danny had ghost powers, sure. ‘They can’t kill me I’m already dead,’ was a funny joke sometimes. But it was funny as a joke. He was a ghost sham, really. A faker, a LARPer, whatever Tucker had called it. He was a human who was just kind of a freak now. More of a freak than he already was. He looked dead, for someone who was super-duper still alive.
He’d buried that worry, already. They weren’t allowed to bring it back.
“Look… at me!” Danny continued, mouth dry. He threw his arms wide. “Look how super alive I am! I’m awake! Using energy! Eating food and sleeping with my human body. I’ve got flesh and blood and bones and stuff! I’m not a ghost-expert but ghosts don’t have that.”
This was weird. This made Danny feel like something was scratching to get free from inside his rib cage. It twisted his entrails. Sure Tucker and Sam had thought he was dead, for those first horrible few minutes, but then he changed back to a human and the nightmare ended there. Jazz never called him dead. The ghosts called him freak and halfa and whelp, but never ‘one of them.’ That was his whole thing: being different from the ghosts who became ghosts by something so normal as dying.
He was not dead.
“If you died in the portal, your ghost wouldn’t have been ripped out of your body. It would have been allowed to stay, and then you’d be…” Jack hesitated. “I don’t know what you’d be, but you wouldn’t be alive.”
“Dad,” Jazz said, and she stood herself bodily between Danny and Jack. “What an absolutely messed up out-of-line thing to say to your son! You don’t know that! Dad you’re tired, and just because you weren’t able to solve your math problem in one night doesn’t mean you get to treat Danny like this! I said I’d help you with your math! Now apologize to Danny.”
Jazz looked over her shoulder to Danny, her expression falling at the sight of Danny’s face.
Danny backed up over the door threshold. He shook his head. “I’m not comfortable with this. This is weird. I’m gonna go to school now.”
“Danny, I promise they’re just—”
Danny turned on heel. No backpack, no change of clothes. He took to the street without a single school supply and moved, and moved.
It was supposed to be guns-blazing. Molecule by molecule. Headshot you died. He’d prepared for that this whole time, in the shower, in his dreams, in his daydreams in class. He’d duck and dodge and explain himself over and over until they understood him.
Danny wasn’t sure he was capable of explaining himself anymore.
Danny knocked the heavy iron knocker. He was in ghost form, as a threat. He wondered if he still smelled like yesterday’s sweat now that he wasn’t wearing yesterday’s clothes. Now he was wearing the clothes he died in.
No one answered the door. Danny phased himself in.
“Vlad!” he called, and his words echoed along the slope of the two elaborate winding staircases that twirled and met at the top like caduceus. Gold-plated banisters. A security camera buried somewhere in the ceiling, no doubt.
Danny phased into the library. His eyes roved the three stories of bookshelves wrapping the perimeter like a sheath. Gaudy. Audacious. Like Vlad would ever read that much. Danny racked his brain because some something in here was the secret to opening Vlad’s laboratory. Jazz had told him. Some gold something to be touched, and pressed down, or pushed up? Or it opened to a button. Or a keypad, maybe.
Danny spat a curse. He was being stupid. He was frazzled. He wasn’t thinking straight.
He dove into the floor below. Intangibility was the only key he needed.
The sheetrock was cold, even when he wasn’t touching it. The darkness was so piercing it made static jump in his vision, some weird trick of the brain Jazz had explained where, in the absence of all light, the brain hallucinates its own. It came with a sensation of pressure against his eyeballs, and a complete disorientation of direction, and he simply just kept going down.
Danny emerged into a wash of cold air. Cold like metal was cold. The low lights of dials and clicking machines were bright to his eyes previously dunked into the pitchest nothing. He drank it in, eyes grateful for light no matter how little, inner ear grateful for orientation that had left his head swimming and his stomach tight.
His feet tapped down to the stone ground, and the air that breezed past him was chilled.
“Vlad!” Danny called again.
Nothing.
He moved by the floor lighting, which ran in trim along the perimeter of the laboratory rooms. It lit things from beneath, made machines gaunt and specimens into sharp geometries of darkness and flesh. It made the Fenton lab feel warm in a way Danny had never considered it warm.
His feet clacked. His breath puffed.
“Vlad!”
He followed light, followed a wash of green miasma percolating from some far room and catching on the particulate of water and dust that disturbed with the air currents. Danny disturbed it too, walking through, wearing its shade of green which his shadow robbed from the wall behind him.
“Vlad. I swear to god Vlad.”
He crossed the threshold of the portal room, where the dusting of green ambience became a medallion wash of golden-green coating, painting every surface of the room. The Fenton lab was one single expansive room, portal anchored into the far wall and facing all the dead and empty air in front of it. This was different. A much smaller room, walled on all sides save for the simple doorway, and each surface reflected the color back deeper and heavier. It was like a fishtank in the wall of an aquarium lit radiant aqua-blue by all the lights within, but green instead, pure ecto-green.
Danny approached the open portal. He stared into its placid swirls, mesmerized, and scared of it, in a way he hadn’t previously felt about the portal in the Fenton basement.
“Ah, seems the cat is a good mouser after all, it dragged you in my boy.” The words came sing-song. They came spine-shivering for Danny, who felt them like hot breath on his shoulder and reeled back, pivoted, fire crackling to life in his palms.
Vlad stood at the doorway, a solid 20 steps from Danny.
“Vlad.”
“So I’ve been hearing.”
“I need you to explain the portal.”
“Ah, I see you’ve spoken to your parents.” Vlad stepped in, washed in the ecto-green which muddied his ruby red eyes. He held his hands behind his back, cape trailing, a smirk on his fanged face. “Last I heard they weren’t taking the news very well.”
“What news. What did you tell them?”
“Me? Nothing. In fact, very kindly for your sake I even tried to drive them away from the answer but… We know how stubborn your parents can be.”
“What answer?”
“That you’re dead, Daniel.”
Shock washed like ice down Danny’s spine. It sent prickles like spider legs across his skin.
“Well, I suppose there’s still chance for some doubt. It could be Jazz. She could take the fall for you, if there’s any benefit to that at all.”
“I’m a halfa. We are halfas,” Danny said.
“A silly made up word by a silly child,” Vlad mused, and the light smile left his lips. “We are dead.”
“I’m not dead,” and Danny’s words were small, and they were childish.
“You are. I am. Embrace it. It’s nicer this way.” Vlad took a few steps closer, lionously tall in his saunter, feet clacking the ground. “It’s very freeing. After you’ve died already what is there left to fear?”
“I’m alive.”
“You’re a dead body with its soul still stuffed inside it like a Christmas goose. A lot of things in your body don’t work anymore, but ghosts don’t work right anyway and it is, for all its defiance of nature, a perfectly symbiotic relationship.” Vlad’s smile brushed his lips again, warm. “It’s nice to share this with you. Isn’t it nice to share things with people?”
Danny’s heart was beating too fast in his chest, and it was a human heart, a human beat. “I’m not dead,” he declared.
“Your wounds heal quickly because the ghost piloting you only needs to remember form. It stacks cells back into place and calls it good. You’ll endure fatal injuries as you no doubt have many times in your fights, but they’re trivial because physical trauma is not what kills a ghost. It’s what creates one. You’ll necrotize in places but it’s okay, because you’ll carry on, and it will bother you only if you let it bother you, if you’re too sentimental about the puppet you’re still inside.” Vlad closed in closer, neck craning to appraise Danny. “Ghosts love a facsimile of life so you will keep your heart pumping, your lungs breathing. You’ll eat and you’ll sleep but you’ll find you won’t perish if you don’t. It just won’t be a good time if you want to keep occupying your flesh form. Take better care of it. You won’t get another.”
“You’re psychotic. And you’re wrong.”
“I have all the math to prove it.” Vlad leered from over Danny’s shoulder. He circled the boy, knocking Danny’s balance, who still on a hair trigger stood ready to fight. The light from the ghost portal painted Vlad’s face like the phases of the moon as he moved. “Did your parents explain that part to you properly?”
“No, because they didn’t get the math right.”
“Oh they’ve gotten it right. This time. It only took them two decades longer than it took me.” The portal rolled like static, and its fizzling pattern crashed like an ocean wave across Vlad’s cape. “No amount of man-made power is sufficient to drag the entire fabric of the Ghost Zone up against our own, tear a hole through it, and anchor it to a stable frame. It requires something with a pull on the Ghost Zone, a strong pull, and that thing is a human life at the moment of an extraordinarily violent death.”
Danny backed a step away from the portal, from Vlad, but the walls boxed him in. He swam in its green light.
“You stepped in and you turned the portal on, that’s what you thought, right, Daniel? Pressed a careless button on the inside and now here we are. Silly parents for not finding that button first.” Vlad’s face hardened. “No. Jack and Maddie knew about the button. Maddie explained it to me over the phone. What engineer designing and building their own portal would forget the location of the on button? They’d pressed it from the outside. It didn’t work. And so you pressing the button was not the important part. It was you dying to the electrocution that clicked everything right into place. And while your ghost should have been torn from your lifeless corpse and pulled to the Ghost Zone you instead pulled the Ghost Zone here. Your ghost got to stay put. You opened the portal. You became the undead freak you are. And now we’re here.”
Danny’s eyes bounced between Vlad’s. His cheeks felt hot, like he was enduring an accusation of wrongdoing. And he had none of the knowledge to refute what was being said.
“You’re messing with me. You’re wrong,” Danny shot back. He thrust an arm out, drenched in the fog of the portal. “If the portal needs a person to die in it then explain your portal! Are you so casual about it? You killed someone? You’re admitting to murder and you think I won’t do anything about it?”
Anger flashed like a storm across Vlad’s face. His aura swelled, pressing down with a pressure on Danny as Vlad halted and cast his shadow clear across Danny, coating the back wall. “The killing of other people with the wanton carelessness of half-baked machines is the domain of Jack and Jack alone. I’ve brought no such harm onto anyone else.”
“Then how do you have this portal?”
“This portal? This portal that I’ve had for 20 years? Which I opened when I solved the piece of Jack’s broken math that he was never able to solve until this morning?” Vlad stalked closer, hunched, imposing. Danny stepped back. “My boy Daniel you’ve had it so easy. You had it so simple. A truly clean break. So clean so lucky. A single lethal dose of electricity and it was already over. I’m jealous. You never even suffered.”
Vlad stepped closer, striking distance, arm extended. Danny flinched, but Vlad only swept his cape around, clenched in his fist, and pivoted to approach the portal.
“Put out of your misery before it even started.” Vlad slammed his fist against the portal rim, and the explosive metallic clang bounced through the rooms. His laugh belted out. “I should have been so lucky.”
19. Vlad Masters was 19. A sophomore in college. A man actively in the midst of sabotaging his social life to chase a woman who was already deeply in love with Vlad’s best friend who he hated more every day. He wasn’t sure what he ever enjoyed about Jack’s bumbling ineptitude, or his loudness, his brashness, his poor social skills, his bad breath, his mullet. Maybe Vlad had gravitated to Jack because deep down he loved how superior it made him feel to surround himself with the likes of Jack Fenton… And now, he hated how enraged it made him to watch Maddie’s eyes skip past his to focus on Jack Fucking Fenton again and again and again and again.
But surely there was hope still. Surely it was a matter of time before the rose-tinted glasses fell away and Maddie saw bumbling and inept and every such word in the basket when she looked at Jack. There’d come the day she tested the waters with Vlad to complain about one of Jack’s little quirks, and they’d find solace together in all the things Vlad was that Jack wasn’t, and all the things Vlad had that Jack didn’t. And he’d be gone, back to bumble elsewhere, and it would be just them.
The day didn’t come. It wouldn’t come. And maybe Vlad needed to change himself for Maddie. If he listened to her and Jack’s ghost ramblings, if he could put Jack in his place and solve the things Maddie couldn’t, it would show her. She’d understand.
Because that was the thing about Jack. His math was never right. Enduring Calculus 1 with Jack was all it took to prove this to Vlad. How many times he’d caught a single error on a single line for Jack, like a dropped stitch that would unravel the whole sweater. Every problem, without exception. Jack only passed on his homework grade with Vlad’s help. On his tests, he failed.
So Vlad was staring at Jack’s equation, full of bogus math, which Vlad knew was wrong because Jack had penned it, and Vlad had not yet fixed it himself.
“I’m telling you Jack, it won’t work.”
“Bogus V-man it totally will!”
It wouldn’t. But Vlad wouldn’t fix it for him. Not yet. Vlad would let Jack embarrass himself first, fully in front of Maddie, watching on, judging. Vlad would solve it for her. After. Once Jack had made a fool of himself for the hundredth time since college began.
He leaned in to study the portal frame. The gears were turning in his head already. He didn’t hear the whir of the power source catch.
19. Vlad Masters was 19. A tube ran down his nose and into his lungs, supplying oxygen for lungs which were failed by a diaphragm sloughing itself away. He was poisoned from the outside-in. Irradiated by ecto-energy none of the nurses or doctors could fully understand. It damaged his DNA. First obvious in the skin of his face where the blisters of his ecto-acne drained and sloughed. “Acne” was the wrong word. An unkind word. They were boils where the blast had cooked his skin, microwaved his cells. The skin on his body blackened over time. Organs decayed. Vlad Master read a lot about radiation sickness. He knew everything he had to expect.
Jack and Maddie had stopped visiting. They were dating now. It was on their last visit they’d told him, and Vlad hadn’t taken it well, and he’d perhaps burned a few bridges with the words he chose. It was deserved. Considering what Jack did to him.
He’d found the error in Jack’s math, by the way. Errors, but all the rest paled in impact compared to the lambda. The ecto-energy. The necessary ecto-potential to pull the Ghost Zone here. How stupid. How idiotic. For Vlad to die to a machine so botched in its construction.
When Vlad was released from the hospital, it was not because they’d cured him. It had been because there is a certain cruelty in making a 19-year-old live the last of his days bedded down in a white-walled room with just his books, his equations, and no one coming to visit anymore.
He was released with bedrest instructions. Vlad did not heed them. In his beater car, every cell of his body aching, he drove. At the materials lab, he disconnected his oxygen tank and moved through the lab space with the tube dangling loose from his nostril. No one was Vlad Masters’ friend. No one cared to stare long at his ugly boil-ridden face. No one stopped him as he hauled sheet metal, and supports, and bolts and wiring and resistors and power tools, checked out with a valid student ID, from the lab. The lab inventory room would not be seeing these back.
It was a prep bunker, buried beneath a vast lot of empty Wisconsin land, that Vlad hauled his materials. He and Jack had discovered it as freshmen. Poked through its bowels with flashlights and quipped and laughed over how eerie it was. Deep beneath the sheetrock, boxy rooms carved out of walls of stone. Shelf upon shelf of dusty canned foods, and shotguns sealed in cases fastened to the walls. The locks had rusted with water damage.
His arms ached until they throbbed, dragging beams of metal across the stone floor, scratching chalk-mark stains into the ground. His skin sloughed, inflamed, burning to the touch. Vlad didn’t bother to rest, because these injuries would never heal anyway. He hauled, and welded, and wired up his circuitry and resistors with a care and caution Jack would never have bothered to practice. He checked it against his math by flashlight. He took naps on the cold stone floor and woke with deep purple bruises on every part of his body that had pressed against the ground.
His appetite left him. His lungs filled with mucus. The boils on his face had spread down to his chest, his shoulders. The touch of his shirt chafed them, so he worked without one, a figure of skeletal rib ridges jutting from tight skin that bloomed with the projection of his shadow against stone walls.
He knew why Jack’s math was wrong.
A silly mistake. A stupid mistake. Anyone with half a mind for the paranormal should have realized the Ghost Zone was not so easily at your beck and call. Not without chumming the water with something it would rise to feast on.
And in that violent death, what would happen to the ghost? It would stay, wouldn’t it? If it successfully anchored the Ghost Zone to the portal it stood inside, then by definition the ghost would stay?
And was that death? Yes, in a way. But it was a death one would get to keep living. As opposed to the death Vlad was headed for, whose coldness and finality scared Vlad more than anything he could put to words.
He’d fixed the oxygen tank back to himself. He couldn’t work without it, hauling it about on a little dolly with him, back and forth, while he fetched and affixed the last of the plating he needed to craft the frame of his silent soulless portal.
He’d stolen a generator from the sports storage shed. It was meant to be enough to power the portable stadium lights they hauled onto the fields for late games, an absolute obelisk meant to cast light across an entire football field.
Surely, it contained enough power to kill one simple human.
Vlad fixed the last bolt in place. Jumper cables clamped generator to portal wiring. It was a pure skeleton. A paltry thing, like the bones of something already picked clean. Built in haste, sloppy, by a 19-year-old whose fingers were too inflamed to clutch a wrench any longer.
He could have asked Jack for help. Maddie. But he wouldn’t let them have this. They had to solve the portal on their own. They didn’t get to know his hard work. They did not get to save him.
Vlad would save himself.
A ghost anchored to a body. What was that? What monster was that?
Vlad moved. He coughed mucus from his lungs. It made it hard to breathe. So he moved slowly, and crouched, bony jutting angles, painted blotchy purple, all bruises and skin, sloughing away.
He crouched, because the portal he’d constructed was not large enough to hold him standing up. He bowed inside it, a small thing, a pathetic man of little life. He wheezed. He hurt. His eyes burned.
And he held in his hands the remote to flip the generator switch, and connect the circuit, and bring to life the math Vlad had so kindly corrected out from under Jack’s grip.
Vlad did not. Because throwing the switch would kill him.
Deep in his animal brain, his dying brain, he knew this intimately. It filled him with a drowning fear like paralysis. He did not want to die.
He would die if he did nothing.
It would be this one throwing of the switch which could save him. Which would burst the portal to life right through his heart. Electrocute it out of its rhythm, slaughter him like a pig on spot and… maybe… hopefully… drag the Ghost Zone here. And whatever he was, dead, would stay.
And whatever he was, dead, would be better than this.
Vlad held the remote in his clammy hands.
And from within the humming skeleton of his portal, his fingers caressed the on button.
The portal sung its happy contentment, mused in its healthy green aura, staining all the slabs of rock wall. Danny swiveled his head, recognizing now the bunker this had been before it had been a laboratory.
“I’ve harmed no one, Daniel,” Vlad concluded, his voice too measured for the horrors it had spilled forth. Too calm against the blossoming terror its words had wrought across Danny’s face. “I opened the portal to save myself. You’re lucky, Daniel. It was because of my fast thinking that your father is not a murderer. I took that honor from him.” Vlad’s head tilted to the side, suddenly sympathetic. “Although, you’ve maybe made the title whole for him.”
Vlad reached out, Danny shot away.
“Dad didn’t kill me,” he choked. “I did this to myself.”
“How lucky Jack is, to always dodge responsibility for his actions.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Of course you don’t. If you believed me, you’d have to accept you’re not wriggling out of this. There’s no denial you can bring home to your parents. If you believe me, then this is reality.” Vlad smiled, a playful glint to his fangs. “I suppose I should have more sympathy. I quite like being this way. It is so much nicer than wasting away to death, like I was. But you. You were healthy before this. This killed you, and it didn’t save you from anything.” Vlad cocked his head. “Such tragic fates, both of us, due to the carelessness of Jack Fenton.”
Danny shook his head. His heart beat—his human heart beat—all too fast in his throat. It made him sick. It made him feel like the walls were closing in around him. This was Vlad’s doing. Vlad’s trap. Vlad’s prison he’d been forced to join.
"That's not true. I'm not like you."
“Of course not,” Vlad said, sweetly. “How sweet denial is. Deny it if you like. Call me a liar. But if you ever want to come to terms with what your father did to you, consider coming to me. I understand you in a way no one else will.”
Danny gave no response. He gave no acknowledgement of Vlad’s words. He took to the air, phased himself up through the sheetrock that had been packed atop the doomsday prepper bunker. Up through the mansion, which had been built atop the portal beneath it, and not the other way around. Into the open sky, he breathed fresh air not stagnant and damp beneath the ground, bathed in light pure white from the sun and not tainted green like the bowels underneath him.
And he flew back toward the portal that made him, leaving Vlad with the portal from which he’d made himself.
...
(inspiration post from @ciestess)
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moneypriestess · 1 year
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I have seen this before on imagines but i wanted to write my own so
I Headcannon that whenever danny gets caught off guard, his first instinct is to bite, he has tiny halfa fangs, and I want him to use them.
Amity Park is just so used to it though.
Imagine:
Danny was not having a fun time.
Sam forced him to come to a gala in gotham as her plus one, and honestly, he only went so he wasn't forced to go with vlad instead and as a plus, he got free food.
Danny was currently feasting on some gourmet food (don't look at him like that, turns out fighting ghosts nonstop would be pretty hunger indusing, who knew?). When suddenly his danger senses went 🚨🚨🚨🚨!!!
Danny turned to the sight of the danger. it was right beside his head!!! He zeroed in on it before...CHOMP!!!
Bruce was not having a good time.
He was invited to a gala by a investor so he had to go, honestly he was just glad that none of his sons tried anything.
"Bruce Wayne! As I live and breathe" the man who spoke walked up to him "vlad masters" Bruce recognised "how are you?" Vlad chuckled and put his arm around Bruce's shoulder.
"Fine old friend, how are those kids of yours doing? I heard you got a new one already"
Bruce grinned "yep Damian and the others are doing good." vlad grinned just as fake. "That's great,hey, I want you to meet someone, my honorary son," vlad put a hand on his own chest.
That shocked Bruce he never saw vlad masters as someone who had wanted or even liked children, "Oh, I would be honoured." Bruce laughed.
Vlad seemed to spot the kid after a few seconds, "ah there he is, danny!" Vlad called out to him but danny didn't seen to hear anything, Bruce frowned when he saw the kid stuffing his face with the food at the snacks table, the boy was skinny, dangerously skinny, even the expensive suit he was wearing couldnt hide that.
When vlad and Bruce reached the table, danny still haven't seemed to notice them making vlad chuckle before reaching out to ruffle his hair when the kid seemed to freeze up, before anyone could do anything Danny's eyes snapped to them and he lunged,snapping vlads hand in his jaw, Bruce saw little fangs poking out of his teeth and drawing blood.
Vlad just smiled fondly though there was pain in his eyes before lifting his other hand to ruffle Danny's head while danny was still knawing on his hand before he seemed to calm down and let go, "hey vlad" the teen did not seem too excited to see his supposed honorary father figure.
Bruce was just wondering why there was never a normal gala.
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too-much-tma-stuff · 20 days
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Finally Getting Help (pt 15)
Masterpost
The conversation trailed off as the stars came out and Danny started to watch them, head propped against Jason’s shoulder as he stared up at the sky. Jason was content to watch the fire, the flickering was hypnotic. Time passed slowly, until Danny gave a jaw cracking yawn that made Jason chuckle.
“How about we douse the fire and head to bed huh? It’s been a long day,” Jason suggested and Danny nodded, reluctantly pulling away from Jason he got up with a groan. Jason was about to go grab a bucket of water when Danny gestured and a wash of frost rushed over the ground and doused the fire with a sizzle and a puff of smoke and steam. “How many powers do you have?” Jason blurted.
“I don’t even know, I’m still developing them sometimes,” Danny sighed as he shuffled towards the tent “Clockwork says it’s something to do with me being half human. Most ghost’s powers are sort of stuck but I’m still growing and changing so I can keep learning. I sort of eventually figure out any power I see anyone else use. As long as they’re not too specialized, I’m not going to learn time manipulation just cause I saw Clockwork do it.” 
“Clockwork?” Jason asked as he followed Danny. 
“The ancient of time, he keeps an eye out for me. He means well, even though he’s a cryptic asshole most of the time.” 
“Daniel!” A voice Jason didn’t recognize shouted, but he was guessing Danny did, and it was not a welcome visitor by the way he flinched and immediately looked up with glowing green eyes. “I knew if I kept the trackers on you you would leave that god forsaken mansion eventually.” An odd, almost vampiric looking man with red eyes said as he floated down towards them. 
Jason still didn’t recognize the man but he didn't think anyone who looked That sinister could be a good guy. From the way that he was floating and context clues Jason could guess that this was a ghost. God Damn it! He only had one of his normal guns on him, he had put down the blaster! With the stranger's attention on Danny Jason scrambled for his gun.
“Vlad, what part of ‘stay the hell away from me’ don’t you understand?” Danny snarled.
Shit Vlad? Vlad masters the baby daddy? Jason felt a snarl rip its way out of his own throat, the pit swirling furiously inside him making him want to kill something. It wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling though it didn’t happen as often these days. At least Vlad only seemed to have eyes for Danny, he probably didn’t register Jason as a threat, or even a person of interest. It was a little unflattering but it gave Jason an opening to go for the blaster in his bag.
“I thought you said you would never allow a billionaire to adopt you, clearly something has changed. Come with me Daniel, I understand you infinitely better than Bruce Wayne,” He spat the name with contempt. “I can take care of you and-” 
Jason got the gun and fired, his aim was true, the glowing green blast struck Vlad squarely in the stomach and he reared back with a pained yowl, red eyes snapping to Jason. He touched the wound in his stomach, dripping green blood, it wasn’t as deep as Jason would have liked and it was already healing fast, but Still, he’d done some damage and Vlad seemed furious. 
“You insolent brat!” He growled, holding out hands that were glowing with energy. Jason tensed to dodge but before he could Danny was in front of him, a shield of green energy in front of him. 
“ENOUGH!” Danny yelled, and changed form, shooting up into the sky he fired back at Vlad, rabidly throwing bolts of green energy at him. “I have had ENOUGH! You have drugged me, kidnapped me, threatened my friends, cloned me, and then killed the clones when they weren’t perfect.” Danny landed a hit, Vlad was unable to dodge or block so many in a row and he let out a grunt as Danny struck his chest, pushing him back a few feet. 
Vlad tried to duplicate himself to shield himself but Danny shot them as quickly as they were made, making them disappear in puffs of smoke and screams. Once they were gone he focused again on Vlad. His eyes were glowing even brighter with frustration and rage as he directed both hands at his attacker and shot an even more powerful blast, landing a hit on Vlad that sent him trembling back, clutching a bloody and swollen nose. 
“You are a pathetic, terrible, Lonely failure and you always will be! You will never get what you want! NEVER YOU HEAR ME?! YOu stay the hell away from me and my kids! MY kids! Or I will fucking kill you!” Danny swore, shooting at Vlad again, who barely managed a clumsy dodge. 
“Come now Daniel you don’t mean that,” Vlad said but for the first time he sounded nervous. Danny had never lost his temper like this before, they’d fought, but he’d never even sworn.
They were distracted again and Jason had a clear shot, Vlad was clearly tough if he took a shot to these shots running but he couldn’t be indestructible. He shot again, aiming for the head this time, unfortunately the green glow gave him away and Vlad dropped down to avoid it. Vlad shot back, and Jason threw himself out of the way and rolled back up to his feet, ready to dodge, or fire again. 
“No!” Danny shouted at Vlad, flying at him so fast he barely had time to throw up a shield of his own before Danny collided with him, forcing him back again. His hands pressed against the shield, glowing toxic green before the close range blast broke the shield and sent Vlad tumbling through the air. “I put up with you for the sake of my parents and my secret but now that doesn’t matter anymore I have no reason to go easy on you! I’m done! I’m done with you!” 
And then he screamed, that same earth shattering wail, and with Vlad already knocked off balance, bleeding green from his chest, his nose, and generally beaten to hell, he had no defense. The sound forced him down with more than the force than gravity, the sound and impact leveled trees in a near perfect circle and left a crater in the soft earth at the bank of the lake. And Danny just kept screaming, pushing Vlad deeper into the wet earth. Jason could see that Vlad was screaming too, probably from the pain, but he couldn’t hear anything over the feeling of Danny’s wail.
Jason wanted to clamp his own hands over his ears and block out the sound but he couldn’t, he needed to keep hold of his blaster, and remain ready. The water rushed in and covered Vlad quickly once Danny stopped screaming. Jason bolted towards the edge of the new cove for Vlad to emerge. 
He came up gasping and coughing, floundering before he grabbed the edge of the hole and dragged himself out. Jason was there to meet him with a gun to his head and a glowing green glare of his own. Jason wanted to shoot Vlad and kill him, but he didn’t want to do that in front of Danny. For all he had just said he would kill Vlad Jason didn’t think he really meant it. Danny wasn't a killer at heart.  
“Stay very still,” He said calmly once Vlad had finished hacking up all the water he’d breathed in. He kept one hand on the gun and his finger on the trigger as he pulled a com out of his pocket, sliding it into his ear and turning it on. “O? Are you there?”
“Hood? Report?” Bruce’s clipped ‘batman’ voice came through.
“Vlad crashed the party, Track our location, I have him pinned,” Jason said without taking his eyes off Vlad who was still breathing hard and bleeding, glaring up at him. 
“On our way,” Bruce said quickly. “ETA 18 minutes.” 
“Very well done Todd,” Vlad drawled dryly and Jason twitched, of course since he’d been to Galas Vlad would know who he was, but Jason still did Not like it. “But you might want to look out, I believe young Daniel is in need of rescue.”
Jason knew better, he really did, but he couldn’t help glancing up quickly, and he was glad he did. He was just in time to see Danny revert to his human form and fall. Jason barely managed not to drop the gun as he ran to catch Danny, taking the brunt of the impact and going to his knees to keep them both intact through the landing. 
“Danny?” He gasped, pushing the other man’s hair back from his face, his eyes were closed and he wasn’t responding to his name but he was breathing. Jason glanced over to see Vlad was already gone. “Shit. B, you still there?”
“Yes. What happened Jay?” He asked, sounding more worried, more like Bruce. 
“Danny passed out,” Jason said as he set the other man down, grabbing a light and checking his pupils. “Pupils are responsive but he’s not waking up even with the light shining in his face. Vlad escaped but he couldn’t have gotten far in that condition. Danny really gave him hell.” 
“We’ll be there soon,” Bruce said, clipped and determined. Jason could hear the motor in the background, if he was pushing the usually silent jet to the point it was making that sound he really would be there in minutes. 
Jason sat down and pulled Danny nearly into his lap, still holding the gun just in case. He thought Vlad had made a break for it but he didn’t want to let his guard down. After all he had thought Vlad would be smarter then to attack them today, he had clearly underestimated the man’s obsessiveness and stupidity. The last thing he needed now was for Vlad to try and make a break for it with Danny while he was so vulnerable. 
He was rocking just a little, he didn’t know if he was trying to sooth Danny or himself as he waited for Bruce and whichever of his siblings were tagging along to arrive. He thought that he was in shock judging by how vague he felt and the odd aura at the edges of his vision. It was always sort of funny having the vague knowledge that he Was in shock but not really being able to do anything about it.
He looked up when he heard the bat-plane overhead and watched it coming in for a water landing. Finally feeling safe enough to holster his gun, freeing both hands to scoop Danny into his arms, getting up with Danny still cradled close. It wasn’t like the other man was heavy, Jason stumbled just a little as he went over to meet his family as the ramp dropped and they came rushing out. 
“Any idea what’s wrong with him?” Batman asked gruffly, going straight to them pushing a medical gurney.
“I think he just overused his powers,” Jason said numbly, putting Danny down on the rolling bed and followed Bruce back into the plane and the same time Spoiler, Blackbat, and Red Robin took off into the woods, to search for Vlad no doubt. Jason hoped they found him but somehow he doubted they would, Vlad could turn invisible and intangible after all, and Danny hadn’t had time to build them everything they’d need. Even with a decent amount of confiscated Fenton tech Jason didn’t like their odds. 
“He has this sonic attack that's really strong but seems to take a lot out of him. He passed out pretty soon after using it the second time,” He explained, sitting down heavily next to the bed as Bruce fussed and checked Danny’s vitals. 
“His heartbeat is slow but strong, pupils responding, like you said, he isn’t visibly injured. I think you’re right he over used it. We’ll set up an IV just to give him some energy and hydration and hopefully he’ll wake up soon. He’ll be okay Jay,” Bruce said, pausing to rest a hand on Jason’s shoulder. “I’ll take you back to the manor, I’m sure the others will find Vlad.”
“They’ve all got their wards?” Jason asked distractedly and Bruce nodded as he buckled Danny and the gurney in securely so he wouldn’t roll around during transport. “Good, ya, let's go home. I’m sorry, taking him camping was stupid. It was helping but I should have known that with Vlad still out there-”
“No, we didn’t see this coming, it’s not your fault,” Bruce interrupted, before sitting back in the pilot's seat and taking off. 
Jason didn’t agree, but he didn’t argue either. No one had argued with him, he was sure they’d all thought, like he did, that with the entire justice league after him and the ‘woman of his dreams’ behind bars Vlad would have bigger things to worry about. They’d all underestimated just how obsessed with Danny Vlad was, in this family of obsessive assholes it was a particularly foolish mistake.
Next
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help-itrappedmyself · 2 months
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Dead on Main part 6
Masterpost
This town is weird. Jason knows he shouldn’t be one to judge, considering Gotham and his own attachment to it. But this place is like a nightmare, stuck in time backwards-ness intermingled between the people and the place itself. It reminds him of Fawcett, which is not a good thing. He feels judged just walking down the street.
The head into a diner looking restaurant, fast food by the looks of it, that is in fact named Nasty Burger. Jason knows he shouldn’t judge. He’s doing it anyway.
There’s a girl behind the counter who seems to be glaring at Jason. Or Danny, but since he’s Jason right now, he decides he doesn’t need to deal with whatever her issue is. With little faith, Jason tells Jazz to order for him and goes to sit in a booth. 
The couple in the booth next to him watch him as he heads to his booth and gape at him as he sits down.
“Danny, come on.” The guy whines, he and the girl both stand and come over to sit across from him. “What was that? Don’t want to sit with us?”
 Jason tenses. “Uh.” 
“Hey guys!” Jazz says, coming to sit next to Jason. She places a tray with a burger, fries, and a soft drink in front of him and he eyes it warily. “This is Jason.”
They two across from them get these stupid dumbfounded looks. The girl behind the counter is listening to their conversation.
“Jason, these are Danny’s friends, Sam and Tucker.” Jazz motions to the girl and then the boy.
“Nice to meet you.” Jason inclines his head at them, and decides to try a fry.
“Is he…” Sam stops herself. “Does he know about Danny?”
“Not much, but they haven’t officially met yet, obviously.” Jazz is eating her food like it’s normal, so Jason follows her lead on the burger as well. “Danny should be here sometime tomorrow.”
“Where is Danny now?” Tucker asks, concerned.
“With my family.” Sam and Tucker look at him strangely. He can tell they’re concerned for their friend though. “He’s being driven back now, they’re rotating drivers so they don’t have to stop for the night. He’ll be here as soon as he can.” 
“Danny will be fine until he gets back.” Jazz comforts them. “Danny was more concerned about Jason, considering the food at our house.”
Sam and Tucker tense in response. “Right. I’d be worried about that too. Might want to stay at the house after this anyway.” Sam says lightly. Jason can tell he’s being talked around. Can hear them talking about something they don’t want him to know under the guise of their conversation, but he doesn’t know enough to make sense of it. 
“Let us know if anything comes up of course, but Danny won’t be able to hang out for a while.” Jazz smiles at them, but her eyes are concerned.
“Sure thing.” Tucker says. 
“If you guys want to have a chat where you can actually talk to each other, I can leave you along for a bit.” Jason tells them all. 
“No!” Tucker says quickly. They don't seem like they care that he caught on, there's no shame to be excluding him. They all just seem worried about something. “Best you stay with Jazz.” He turns back to her. “The GIW tools were deactivated. The whole fiasco yesterday was a lot for everyone. But they should be up and running again by tomorrow.”
Jazz nods at them and Sam and Tucker leave, whisper-arguing to each other as they go.
They eat quietly for a minute, but Jazz stiffens as she looks at something out the window.
Jason follows her gaze to see her tracking a man outside. He’s pretty smarmy looking. Long grey hair, in a full suit, seems like more Brucie’s crowd than someone who would be in a place called Nasty Burger. But he’s spotted them through the window and does seem to be on his way in. ““Hey Jason, would it be cool if you went to the bathroom for a second? Nevermind, there’s no time, follow my lead.”
The man walks right up to their booth.
“Daniel, Jasmine, lovely to see you both.”
“Vlad, can we help you?” Jazz asks politely, Jason just glares at them man.
“You know I always love to see you, but I would like to speak with Daniel for a moment.”
“Unfortunately, Danny and I have places to be, Vlad. I’m sure my parents would love to speak with you though. Dad has been meaning to stop by.” Jazz gathers the trash and remnants of their meal and stands, going to throw them away. Jason gets up to follow her, but is stopped by a hand on his shoulder. He feels a tickle in his throat and his next breath comes out cold and foggy, visible in the air. 
“Daniel, don’t you want to have a talk?” The hand on his shoulder is forceful.
“Don’t touch me.” Jason turns himself out of his grasp, backing away towards the door. Jazz pulls him quickly back onto the street towards home.
“Who the hell was that guy?”
“Danny’s godfather, friend of our parents. They went to college together.”
They’re walking past an alley when Jason feels that tickle again, he stops as his breath comes out cold, then something rams into him, pushing him to the ground farther in the alley.
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disillusioneddanny · 8 months
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Welcome to the Family DPXDC
And yes, he was thankful for that space, honestly, he needed it more than he could even explain. Every time he closed his eyes he saw his parents strapping him down to the operating table. To his sister finding him when she came back for spring break three months later and trying to rip Jack away from Danny’s broken body, only for her to be thrown back. They said that she had hit her head on in just the right spot on the corner of the table. That her death had been painless. Danny had waited, hoping to see his sister come back as a ghost but she never did.
The anger had welled up inside of him, though, enough for him to break out of his bindings and run to Sam’s house for help. From there it had been quick. The Fentons had no proof that Danny was a ghost, Jazz was dead in their lab and Danny had a large vivesection wound held together by pins and needles.
From there it had gone by fast. Bruce Wayne had heard his story and opened his doors to him, an offer that Danny was quick to accept considering his only other option was Vlad and that was a major no for him. Danny had gotten stitched up rather quickly and the Fentons had been taken to trial where they had both been found incompetent by the courts and were sent to some prison for the mentally insane in the midwest. Thank the Ancients it wasn’t Arkham.
But things were starting to settle now. Danny was healed up. They had finally held a funeral for Jazz. And he was set to start school at Gotham Academy with his new little brother, Damian. Things were finally starting to settle.
Things were starting to settle and Danny was finally able to really look at his new family and notice the strange things about them. Honestly, coming from a weird family himself, he was more able to spot the bullshit from others. The first he had noticed was Damian. Apparently he hadn’t ocme to live with the Waynes until he was ten and Bruce had discovered he had a biiological son he had never known about.
Damian was fourteen now and he wasn’t normal, if Danny was going to be honest. Danny knew that the teenager had at least four weapons on him at all times. He had thrown a knife at Danny’s head one of his first nights here when Danny had made a joke that the kid didn’t like. He also struggled to understand common cues and comments, but not in a neurodivergent way. In a way that he had genuinely grown up without ever hearing about those things and it had Danny curious.
The others were strange too. Tim seemed like he had never slept, like he barely operated at all. Duke always looked at Danny like he had seen a ghost and tended to keep his distance more than their other siblings did. Cass looked at him the same way some of Danny’s rogues did, like she was watching his every single move. Jason reeked of death every time Danny saw him. The souls that latched onto him showed that he had taken quite a few lives. And not only that, but everyone in this family smelled and felt like they had all died and come back. He had never met a family so liminal outside of Amity Park.
Even Dick, the most normal of the siblings was liminal. It was throwing Danny for a loop because no one else in Gotham seemed to feel this way. So what were they hiding? Was this why they wanted Danny to join their family? Because like called to like and they knew Danny was something different?
Or was Bruce telling the truth when he had said that he had seen a teenage boy lose everything in a day and decided he couldn’t not help out?
It had been two months now and if he was going to be really honest, Danny was starting to grow bored. No more ghost fights, no more running from the Fentons, hell Bruce had even decided that he was going to go after the GIW and the Anti-Ecto Acts because even though he didn’t know Danny was actually a ghost, he found the acts ghastly and problematic. Danny nearly hugged him when he had said so. But the more bored he got, the more curious he seemed to get as well, he needed to know what was going on with this family.
“It’s not like they would know if I decided to take a look around. I live here,” he murmured to himself, staring at the fire crackling within the fireplace, still chewing on his thumbnail. “All I’m doing is seeing what kind of fruit loop my new dad is. All billionaires hide something and Bruce is definitely hiding something,” he reasoned to himself.
The halfa shook his head, the curiosity was going to drive him absolutely insane if he didn’t go and snoop. He stood from where he laid curled up on the couch and trekked back up to his bedroom. A room that was literally through times the size of his old bedroom.
It was still hard to believe that this was his life now. He carefully locked his bedroom door and felt the familiar rings of light wash over him before he transformed into his ghost form. The sixteen year old smiled at the familiar feel of intangibility wash over him and he slowly sunk through the floor, staying invisible as he went through each room of the house that was not a bedroom, looking through each one carefully to see if anything jumped out at him.
Then he made it to Bruce’s office just as Bruce himself stepped out of a door hidden behind an old grandfather clock and that’s when Danny knew he had caught him. Of course this was too good to be true! Bruce was far too perfect to not have something hidden deep inside.
He flew through the wall and found himself in an elevator and frowned before continuing down, down, down until he found himself in a large cave underneath the cave.
“Holy shit Batman,” he whispered as he started to fly around the stalacites, taking in the Batcomputer, the weird prizes the different vigilantes had one in their countless rogue fights. His eyes widened as he found Tim typing furiously at the Batcomputer, bags deep under his eyes and Danny took a look at what he was working on and held back a gasp.
When Bruce had said he was going to get rid of the GIW and the Anti-Ecto Acts he hadn’t really thought too much of it. It was Bruce Wayne, the playboy extraordinare who cared about all social causes that came across his desk.
But to know that the Bats were investigating it? With the Justice League? Danny’s mind was blown. He watched as Tim fought through the firewalls that Danny, Tucker, and Technus had set up to keep Amity Park a secret from the rest of the world and glanced down at his new older brother before back up at the screen and let out a sigh.
He could at least make their job easier.
He flew into the computer and started to break through each of the firewalls that they had put in place one by one before Tucker and Technus zoomed in on him.
Tucker had become just liminal enough to learn how to go into technology. He gave Danny a disapproving look as Technus stared at all the hard work they had done be ruined by Danny.
“What are you doing in here?” Tucker demanded, his eyes bright green as he stared Danny down.
“Red Robin is trying to get rid of the acts,” Danny said with a small smile. “Let him learn everything he can. I trust the Bats.”
Tucker and Technus scowled.
“Fine, Ghost Boy. Now get out of our territory before you destroy it even more,” Technus said, glaring at Danny over his sunglasses. Danny just grinned and flew out of the computer once more to find Tim dialing a number on his cellphone furiously.
“Babs! I finally got in! I don’t know what happened but all of the firewalls fell and Jesus Christ it’s worse than I thought. The Fentons recorded their experiments on Danny,” he said and Danny shuddered as he looked at the scream, hearing his screams fall on deaf ears. He had Tucker hide all of the video tapes as soon as he could to make sure that no one would see proof that Danny was more than just a human. But if they were going to get rid of the Anti-Ecto Acts then they needed all the proof that they could get that ghosts were sentient creatures.
He flew out of the Batcave quickly and made it back to his room where he turned back into his human form. Now he needed to decide. Did he tell the Waynes that he knew their secret? Or did he leave it alone?
He pursed his lips and fell back onto his bed as he fell into thought about it. Once Tim got through all of the videos, he was going to know that Danny was different, that he wasn’t just a normal human boy. Especially when he would get to the part where they cut Danny’s arm off and it grew back just a few days later.
Right now the ball was in his court, though. He knew that the bats were going to know that he was different, but he didn’t know if they were going to say anything about it. He could play with this. He grinned to himself.
He could have some fun with this.
“Danny! Dinner’s ready!” Duke called through his door and Danny grinned and headed out, already having come up with a plan for how he’s going to fuck with the bats.
He wanted to see how far he could push them until they admitted that they knew his secret and and that they were the bats. He wondered how long his new family could hold out before giving in and saying something.
So with that, Danny opened the door and grinned at Duke, who he now realized was the day time hero signal and explained why he not only kept his distance but looked at Danny like he had a second head most of the time. Now that he thought about it, Duke probably could see his true form and wouldn’t that be fun to mess with.
While Phantom was technically tucked away in Danny’s core, he was visible for those who could see beyond the veil. Duke was someone who could see beyond that veil and if Danny focused just enough he could alter his ghost form without even being in that form.
“Hey, thanks for grabbing me,” Danny said, imagining Phantom with ecto dripping from his eye sockets, his fangs grew longer and longer and his eyes turned pitch black. Phantom was looking like he came straight from a nightmare from what Danny could see in his mind’s eye and he smiled as Duke cringed away from him slightly.
“Of course,” he stammered out nervously. “Are you doing okay?”
Danny grinned, perking up slightly. “Yeah, I’m doing great actually. I’m really excited for school tomorrow. Why do you ask?”
Duke just shook his head and shuddered lightly. “No reason.”
The two continued down to the dinner table and took their seats. Tim trudged in just a few minutes later and his eyes immediately fell onto Danny’s form. His eye twitched slightly as they raced up and down Danny’s body, taking in all of Danny’s limbs and noting that his facial features were all there.
“Are you okay, Tim?” Danny asked with a frown, his lips twisting up slightly.
Tim just stared at him warily and nodded once. “I am, are you? Doing okay, that is?” He asked, nerves apparent in his voice.
Danny just smiled and tilted his head to the side. “Yeah, as far as I can tell I’m okay. It’s funny, Duke was worried about my wellbeing too. It’s really nice, though. I wish I had someone asking if I was okay when my parents had removed my eyes during one of their sessions with me,” he said just as Alfred set a plate before him, the porcelain clattering against the table as he tried to recover from shock.
“You mean like, blindfolded you, right?” Dick asked hesitantly, looking up from his own plate of food and Danny just grinned and shook his head.
“Nope,” he said, popping the P. “I’m pretty sure my da-Jack used a melon baller to remove them, it was very painful and weird experience,” he said with a slight shudder. It was the frist time he had mentioned out loud some of the trauma he had experienced at the hands of the Fentons. And if he was being honest, it felt rather cathartic for him to actually talk about the torutre he had endured. Sure, judging from the horrified expressions of his new family members, it might not be hte most comfortable conversation but for him, it was nice to just say it, out loud.
His parents had tortured him. Had ripped him apart molecule by molecule and his body just forced him to regenerate, the electric ectoplasm that brought him back that fateful day in the portal continued to live inside of him, continued to bring him back from death over and over. It had made him realize that there’s a good chance that he was immortal. That his human half may never actually die.
And that was a terrifying thought.
Danny just happily continued eating his dinner, ignoring the horrified stares all around him. Oh yeah, this was going to be so much fun, he could feel it in his core.
….
It was a few nights later when Danny woke up to his stomach growling at like three in the morning. And of course, that mean he needed to go down to the kitchens and rifle through the refrigerator to find something to eat.
In all honesty, he had a major hankering for some fruit loops. Which led to him digging through the pantry that Alfred kept stocked up on all of Dick’s favorite cereals since he was the one who primarily ate them. He let his eyes glow in the dark as he searched, too lazy to turn on the lights and not particularly wanting to have the light ruin his post sleep glow. He dug around until finally find the box of sugary, fruity goodness and silently cheered to himself. Now he just needed to get some milk and a bowl and he would be a very happy ghost.
Danny allowed the box to float to the kitchen counter before he skipped towards the fridge and hummed. Did he want oatmilk, almond milk, whole milk, ancients there were so many options for milk.
He let out a hiss as the lights flickered on in the kitchen and slowly allowed his head to spin around on his neck to glare at whomever was evil enough to turn on the lights in the middle of the night. An ear piercing scream shook through the manor as Dick scrambled away from Danny and oh what a sight Danny was to see. His hair was bird’s nest on his head, his eyes were glowing bright green and he had twisted his head around his neck one hundred sixty degrees and let out an inhuman hiss.
Dick slammed his back against the wall as Danny allowed his eyes to turn blue once again and his head spun back around to normal just as Bruce and Tim came running into the room.
“What is it?” Danny asked innocently, cocking his head to the side, blinking his eyes owlishly at Dick. The poor vigilante was white as a sheet as he stared at Danny in horror. Bruce looked between his sons curiously.
“Three am cereal?” He asked, the corners of his eyes crinkling slightly as he smiled at Danny. “I think I may make myself a bowl as well. How about you, Dick? Tim?”
“I-I think I’m going to go home to Bludhaven,” Dick stammered out, unable to look at Danny.
“Oh, well I hope you get home safe. Text me when you get home so I know you made it safely,” Bruce said cluelessly as he walked over to start making his own bowl of cereal. Tim gave Danny a wary look before he shook his head.
“I’m heading back to bed,” Tim muttered and Danny smiled to himself as he poured himself a large bowl of cereal.
“How are you doing, Chum? Are you getting settled?” Bruce asked, looking Danny over for a moment. Danny nodded and took a bite.
“You know that I know that you know,” he said simply as he chewed his cereal.
“I do,” Bruce said simply. “It’s pretty entertaining to watch the others.”
Danny swallowed his bite of cereal and grinned. “Glad you think so because this is the most fun I’ve had since you adopted me.”
“It will be good training for the others,” Bruce said as he poured himself a bowl of–
“You have your own brand of cereal!?” Danny exclaimed, looking at the cereal called Batman Crunch.
Bruce smiled. “Unfortunately, I don’t get any of the royalties for it. But it’s cookies and cream flavored,” he said before looking at the milk that Danny had pulled out, and poured some into his bowl. “Oatmilk, good choice.”
“I like the flavor,” he said with a shrug.
“Just so you know, if you ever want to join the nightlife, you’re welcome to it. But from what I understand, you never wanted it in the first place,” he said and Danny nodded his head.
“Too much work. For now, I just want to focus on school. Maybe when I graduate high school I’ll join you guys. But for now, I just want to focus on recovery and graduation. I appreciate all the space you’re giving me,” Danny said softly, stirring his spoon around in his bowl. Bruce just smiled and leaned his arms against the counter as he took a bite of his cereal.
“Of course. And when you’re ready to talk about it, without trying to scare your siblings, we can talk about it,” he said.
“You’re not mad?” Danny asked, glancing up at the older man. “That I didn’t tell you about me being, being dead? Or that I was a hero or how bad the Fentons,” he stopped and shuddered slightly. He couldn’t say the words out loud. It was one thing to joke about them removing body parts, it was easy to call them sessions. But to say out loud how badly he had been tortured? He couldn’t do it.
“Of course I’m not mad, Honey, you went through a very rough and traumatic time. Take all the time you need and we’ll be here for you as you heal and recover. And if any of your brothers or sister give you a hard time, I’ll tell them I was in on it.”
“How’d you know about me?” Danny asked before he took a bite of his fruitloops.
“Phantom disappeared the same time Danny Fenton allegedly ran away. Not to mention just taking one look at Phantom you can see the resemblance.”
“Phantom has blue skin!” Danny argued.
“And the exact same facial structure, Phantom just has a more prominent lichtenburg scar that you also have, just not nearly as noticeable.”
Danny hummed. “Guess they don’t call you the world’s greatest detective for nothin’,” he muttered before he picked up his bowl and started to drink the milk.
Bruce just chuckled and patted Danny’s back once he finished. “Get some sleep, Kiddo,” he said softly. Danny gave him a salute, a milk mustache on his face as he floated up in the air and through the ceilings to get back to his room.
Danny was bored again. He found himself haunting the manor late in the evening. Most of the bats were prepping for their night out on patrol. They were all under the impression that Danny was upstairs doing homework. He soon turned invisible and made his way into the Batcave where he found his siblings gathered around the Batcomputer watching one of the videos of Danny being tortured.
“Danny’s not fully human,” Tim stressed. “I’ve watched his parents remove his limbs and they just grow back in a few hours. Like good as new, no scar or anything! He wasn’t kidding when he said they removed his eyes!” He exclaimed.
Jason let out a hum. “It’s possible that the Fentons did it to him,” he reasoned. “Like their experiments turned him into a meta that let him regenerate.”
“How does that explain the fact that he was able to twist his head a hundred and sixty degrees?” Dick asked, shuddering slightly. “Or the way his eyes glow Lazarus green?”
“Or the monster that’s constantly floating behind him,” Duke whispered, looking like he had seen absolute horrors. Danny held back a snort, he still hadn’t even let Duke see his full eldritch horror form. It had been child’s play so far.
“He died in those experiments,” Dick said softly. “You can see him flatlining multiple times. Being killed and brought back so many times probably fucked up his body a lot. It probably did a lot to him.”
Danny hummed, that was a good theory. Wrong but made sense where they were coming from.
Bruce walked forward in his Batman suit and looked at Danny’s siblings. “Regardless of what you think is wrong with Danny, he’s our family and maybe one day he will feel comfortable telling us what happened to him. And if he doesn’t, that’s fine too. But until then, give him space and quit trying to investigate him. We’re trying to get rid of the anti-ecto acts, not investigate Danny,” he said seriously.
Danny smiled to himself and flew back up to his bedroom.
Jason sucked in a breath when he saw Danny asleep on the couch. He didn’t know why he was nervous. Sure, there was something slightly unsettling about Danny but he wasn’t a bad guy. The kid was insanely sweet and funny. He handled his trauma the same way Jason did, with constant jokes about his vivisection the same way Jason joked about his death.
But between the stories from Dick, Tim, and, Duke and watching the videos of what the Fentons had done to his newest littler brother, something about Danny just unnerved him. But Bruce had asked him to wake Danny up so that he can come down for dinner. It was simple, he just had to wake him up. What was the worst that could happen?
He padded over to Danny’s sleeping form and alost immediately realized something majorly wrong with the image in front of him.
Danny wasn’t breathing.
Jason rushed forward, shouting out for help, help from anyone really. He knelt beside Danny’s prone form and pressed his fingers to the pulse point on Danny’s wrist and frowned when he didn’t feel anything. He cursed before moving to start doing chest compressions, desperate to get him to open his eyes and breathe.
Dick and Bruce skidded into the room and ran over just as Danny sucked in a deep breath and opened his eyes.
“What are you doing!? Ow!” Danny shouted, slapping Jason’s hands away from him. “I think you broke my fucking rib,” he whined, rubbing at his side.
“What happened?” Bruce asked, looking between them concerned.
“He wasn’t breathing! He didn’t have a pulse!” Jason spluttered out, pointing at Danny who was frowning and pulling up his shirt to see if he was bruising yet or not. Beside Bruce, Dick let out a squeak, taking in the vivisection scar that still marred Danny’s chest. For some reason, all of Danny’s wounds from getting his body parts removed had healed just fine but the scar from being cut open over and over again stayed with him forever.
Bruce had given him scar cream to see if it would help but Danny had told him it would do nothing to help him.
“Oh yeah, it’s gnarly,” Danny said offhandedly. “The joys of having mad scientists for parents,” he said and sucked his teeth before he dropped his tshirt. “It’ll heal in like thirty minutes. Thanks for trying to save me I guess, but don’t stress, my heart just does that.”
“I thought you were dead!” Jason shouted, running a hand through his hair, utterly distraught.
Danny laughed and stood up, stretching as he did, his back popping a few times with the stretch. “Because I am,” he said simply.
Damian watched as his brother walked down the hall, texting on his phone as if he didn’t have a care in the world. He was not even bothering to raise his head to watch where he was going as he walked and Damian smirked to himself.
The idiot teenager was about to run face first into the wall and it would serve him right to break his nose for not paying attention to his surroundings. His smirk turned into a look of dismay, though, as Daniel walked straight through the wall without ever looking up.
There was something strange going on with his newest big brother and Damian was going to get to the bottom of it. It was clear that his siblings were not unfounded in their theories that Daniel was something other.
Danny grinned as he walked in on his final victim. He had managed to scare each of his siblings so far with his shenanigans and now he was finally going to get Cass. He had been trying to think of ways to throw her off kilter for a while now, but he had finally come to the perfect idea.
His family were gathered in the family room preparing to watch a movie together. Cass was curled up on the couch beside her girlfriend, the two talking quietly to one another. No one had noticed Danny walk in yet, which was rather typical.
He was lighter on his feet than any bat could ever dream. Even in his human form he had a sense of weightlessness to him that could only be attributed to his ghost form. Something that Danny had thought was interesting and also insanely thankful for considering it made it so much easier for him to sneak around when he was still living with the Fentons.
Danny creeped up behind Cass and Steph, a wide smile slowly growing on his face as he leaned down. “Mind if I sit with you two?” he asked, taking joy in the way both girls jumped in surprise, the rest of the family reacting similarly before giving Cass a shocked look of their own.
She turned to stare wide eyed at Danny and silently nodded once, unable to say a word.
“Sweet,” he said before hopping over the back of the couch and settling into the seat beside his sister. He reached over and grabbed a handful of popcorn from Tim’s bowl and looked at the large screen. “What are we watching?”
Danny took his seat at the dining room table for dinner a few nights later and looked around at his siblings. Each one looked to be on edge, sending Danny worried, concerned looks every now and then. Danny had upped the hauntings in the manor, feeling more and more comfortable with changing to his ghost form and giving in to his ghostly behaviors. He had never really been able to do it in Amity, too much of a risk to haunt the house when his family hd weapons to destroy him at every corner.
But in Wayne Manor? He was free to roam the halls, to stare at dark shadows and just do what ghosts were meant to do. Haunt the manor. And the fact that his siblings would catch him every so often and get the life scared out of them was honestly just a nice bonus.
His core had never felt so content in his life. He was finally getting to give in to all of his ghostly behavior and now it was time to make it known to the others that he knew.
“You know,” Danny stated, taking a bite of his oatmeal. “I wasn’t expecting you all to be so chill about the whole dead thing. I thought you all would be more on edge with my weirdness. But considering you all are vigilantes it makes a lot more sense now why you were okay with a dead guy moving in.”
Tim choked on his coffee, drips splattered onto the table. “I’m sorry what?”he wheezed out.
Danny sat up and grinned. “What?” He asked before he took a sip of his chocolate milk. “You’re telling me that you watched all those tapes of my parents having their fun with me and never once realized I was dead? No living human being can endure the things I did and live to tell the tale. I’m dead.”
“But you have a heartbeat, you breathe,” Dick breathed out and Danny looked over at Jason.
“Do I, though?” He asked and Jason swallowed harshly as he remembered the way Danny’s chest didn’t move, how he felt no pulse no matter how hard he checked. “I thought a family of detectives would figure it out pretty quickly.”
Bright rings of light surrounded him for a moment and he showed his ghost form. “I’m Phantom,” he said with a sharp smile. He changed back to his human form and looked over at Bruce. “Bruce had me figured out before he even adopted me. I thought you all knew as well.”
“How did you know about us?” Duke asked.
Danny hummed. “Got bored, decided to explore the manor and imagine my surprise when I found the Batcave in the basement! From there it was easy to put together and I decided well, if I’m going to be living in a family of vigilantes there was no point in me hiding who I was. If anyone was going to accept the half dead kid, it would be you guys.”
“This family just keeps getting weirder and weirder,” Dick mumbled, massaging his temples.
Bruce just smiled. “Danny, did I ever tell you that you have an alien starfish for a brother? His name is Jarro.”
I don’t plan on continuing this. Feel free to add if you want 💚💚
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satoshy12 · 4 months
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Bat Archer
Danny, during a new power going awry, finds himself transformed into a spectral bat. And it turns out he can still use his sonic scream/ghostly wail while doing it.
So while playing in CW Tower in his new body, Danny discovers a portal he didn't see before with cool new things! And he did the only normal thing. He flew into it. If it were bad, clockwork would have stopped him!
Danny was now in Star City, and he helped the hero as a bat. He kind of likes this form; it's fun to use.
Green Arrow wasn't sure what he saw when he saw the bat use a Black Canary scream against the goon who was behind him.
But Oliver was a simple hero; he did dibs! As he saw the tiny bat with Dinah's powers.
He now has a new Meta Bat sidekick! An adorable white bat with green eyes.
Imagine his surprise as the bat turned into a tiny child! With black hair and blue eyes. Yeah, he and Dinah are now parents again! And Roy is a big brother.
Danny had no fun being taken with that hero. He seemed to be having fun, and he learned new things! If Vlad were this way without being creepy, he wouldn't have a problem with a mentor.
Danny's human form is him having a bow and arrow, and in his Bat phantom, he doesn't have it, but he uses ghostly wail and ghost powers. And flee if it's dangerous or he is tired.
Oliver walks most of the time with Danny sleeping in his green Arrow hood. When Danny is a bat and bored,
+ Danny was able to find the OG. Roy, who was 1 arm after a short time, Oliver asked Danny to find him. Danny took a short time to find him.
++ Yeah, Green Arrow had a Bat sidekick before Batman had one. Batman has just his Robins.
One of Danny powers is a small heal, so he helps as Arrow Bat the people in the city who are attacked by doing first aid.
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deadsetobsessions · 4 months
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Danny Phantom Writing Prompt:
When she comes to, a silver haired man with a matching goatee greets her. Kind of. He’s disappointed.
She’s surrounded in neon green and she is so, so, so confused.
——
Her name is-
Well. It was something else.
What matters is that Vlad doesn’t call her by anything other than “Danielle” and “you.”
She thinks if she wasn’t who she is- if Vlad hadn’t ripped her out of her own life, poured her tattered soul into this imperfect body- she’d believe the father like figure he’s poorly pretending to be. But she knows. This is a show she’s watched many times. Vlad, even if she hadn’t had years of actual life and the foreknowledge of Danny Phantom, she’d eventually clock him as a villain.
“You can do it, Danielle.” He says.
“Obey, or suffer the consequences,” she hears. She knows manipulation when she hears it. Vlad thinks it’ll work. After all, little pod baby Danielle would know no different than the confining walls of her room. But she does know, and the voices of her loved ones bolster her in this delicate balancing act.
So, she pretends to let him mold her. Let him shape little Danielle into a puppet he could pilot as he wishes.
To act like her body’s template, but to be obedient in ways Danny would never allow himself to be. To turn trusting blue eyes up towards the drawling billionaire and pretend to take his word as gospel.
In return, he gives her more freedom. He thinks it’s control, that she returns even when he gives her ample chances to leave. She knows it’s a test, and she’s always been good at those.
She collects evidence, slowly. Because Vlad might have overshadowed people and signed their companies over to him, but he was sloppy. He was sloppy and she was a paralegal.
——
Vlad gives her the mission she’s been waiting for. She goes to Danny with a neutral mask and acts like a person who knows nothing of normal social cues.
It’s what Vlad expects of her.
The time is not yet right.
——
So when the time comes, Danielle makes a decision. She was never the baby Dani. She will never be. When she punches Vlad, she tears into him with everything she has. She makes him bleed and she breaks him and she slaps the anti-ghost belt on him to lock his ability. And she breaks more, just to make sure he might not heal all the way, all the while Danny watches in horror.
And then she starts the process of legally beating him up. Danielle bankrupts Vlad in two months with legal fees, and she takes vicious pleasure in rendering him destitute.
Hah. Try creating clones of your one sided love now, you creepy motherfucker.
——
She’s melting. She makes a joke, because Danny looked terrified and she got attached. Well, it’s hard not to get attached, considering he risked his neck for her even after learning she was there to…
Well.
He saves her. She knew he would.
She’s whole again. Stable. But something in her breaks, because she knows, with a sense of unfathomable knowledge, that she will never rid herself of the name Danielle again. She’s bound to this world. The price for her life was an eternity of imprisonment in a realm where she will never see the people she loves again.
——
“I’m not… I wasn’t always Danielle.” She admits to Danny, Tucker, and Sam.
“What does that even mean?”
She sighed, leaning against the window sill.
“The reason I was stable and my… siblings weren’t was because Vlad ripped my soul out from my body and shoved it into the body of a clone. He killed me.”
Danny stuttered to a close. Grief. She smiles at him.
“Technically, I’m older than you and Jazz.”
“I’m sorry,” Sam says, head buried in her hands. Tucker just stares at her.
“Yeah. Me too. But you shouldn’t blame yourself, Danny.” Danielle knows that look on his face. “I hate him, yeah. But… I can’t change it now. So, I’ll see what this world has to offer.”
“I’m sorry,” Danny says to her.
“I get it.”
And she does. Because Danielle knows what it is to die, now. So does he.
So she flips off the window sill, enjoying her always novel powers of flight, and laughs.
“I’ll be Nellie. You can call me Nellie.”
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