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five-rivers · 1 year

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The Hit

AO3

@dizzlypuzzled

It was a beautiful day. Mostly. Maybe a little cloudy, a little drizzly, but the sun kept coming out, and that wasn’t a given for this time of year. Unfortunately, Danny couldn’t appreciate it.

He trudged home, only limping a little. Hopefully, by the time he got home he’d have whatever had gotten knocked loose in his ankle worked back into place. That wasn’t what was bothering him, though, wasn’t what had his shoulders hunched and his fingers drumming nervously on the thermos, not really. Minor injuries like that came with the job.

But the job had gotten a lot harder recently.

Today, for example, there had been three moderately powerful ghosts he’d never seen before. And they’d all been after him, specifically. There had been at least one every day this week, and, if he wasn’t misremembering the math vocabulary he’d been studying, the number of ghosts per day had a positive trend.

How long had that been going on, anyway? He hadn’t been keeping track of numbers, but maybe he should have. If he’d thought of it before, it probably would have seemed like unnecessary extra work, but he would have liked to know if there was some kind of pattern beyond just more of them.

And it wasn’t as if his usual ghosts had stopped coming! They were just as active as ever and just as capable of keeping him from getting a good night’s sleep.

Speaking of sleep, the lack of it was definitely to blame for what happened next.

He threw his head back, groaned loudly, and said, “I just wish I knew why there were so many ghosts after me, all of a sudden!”

There was a ghostly and terribly familiar chuckle. “As you have wished it, so shall it be!”

“Oh, heck–”

Danny tumbled onto his face. The chill, ectoplasm filled air clued Danny into the fact that he was in the Ghost Zone. The exclamations and the sizzle of charging ectoblasts told him he was somewhere unfriendly.

He transformed as quickly as possible and called up a hemispherical shield just in time to deflect a volley.

Desiree had sent him to… some kind of amphitheater? Full of eyeball ghosts? Why–?

He dodged another burst of ghost rays. Forget it! He’d figure it out later. For now, he had to get away. Escape route, escape route… There!

He used a wave of ice and an overcharged blast to clear the doors, and flew as fast as he dared through twisty, labyrinthine hallways, chased by the weird eyeball ghosts.

(It was kind of strange, wasn’t it, so many of the same kind of ghost all together? They’d looked practically identical. Eye-dentical. Heh.)

Then he remembered. Humans could walk through walls here. He went human, still in flight, and tumbled through the nearest one into a small room full of, you guessed it, yet more eyeballs. He let himself fall through the floor.

The pace he had to set now was a good deal less desperate, seeing as the ghosts couldn’t follow him through the walls, but he wasn’t any less lost and confused. People shouting get him or kill him weren’t exactly very enlightening. Or unique.

… Although, he didn’t think any of the ghosts who came after him in Amity Park had been actually trying to kill him until… Until Box Lunch.

Well, maybe Spectra, too, but he got the impression she was a bit of outlier, even among ghosts.

He ran into an empty room and paused to catch his breath. He tried his best, but he didn’t think it was physically possible to be as fit in his human form as he was in his ghost form.

Straightening, he saw– Was that a wanted poster? Of him?

He picked it up, noting that it was only one of many stacked on the tables of the room. This one happened to be in English.

Was this Walker’s…? No, Danny had seen Walker’s posters. These were different. Flimsier, thinner paper, more colorful ink, different font. They didn’t have the mugshot Danny had gotten at Walker’s prison. More importantly, Walker always specified that the reward was for ‘bringing the punk in for trial, relatively intact.’ This one just said ‘for proof of Ending.’

This wasn’t a wanted poster. This was a hit.

He looked around the room again, seeing it in a new light. The posters weren’t posters. They were meant to go in those envelopes with those letters.

He grabbed one and stuffed it into his pocket before calling a ball of ghostly fire to his hand. Arson usually wasn’t part of his moveset, but this was only the second time someone had taken a hit out on him, and this time he wasn’t even on the verge of causing an apocalypse.

At least, he was pretty sure of that last point. Except for the increased number of ghosts he wasn’t under that much stress, he was getting tutored after school, Sam had gotten her mother to sue the Nasty Burger, and he’d changed the ecto-filtrator recently. That should cover most of the potentially apocalypse-causing stressors, right?

But, anyway, arson. He threw the ghost fire onto the nearest table and ran, barely dodging the reaching claws of several eyeball ghosts, because they’d been surrounding the room. He should have expected that. This was their stupidly large building, they would know where stuff was.

His saving grace seemed to be that they sucked at fighting. That was probably why they were having a hit taken out on him, come to think of it. They needed to get other, stronger, ghosts to do their dirty work, the creeps.

The next wall led out into the void of the Ghost Zone. Danny plummeted, shrieking, falling through several cloud layers before he was able to pull his ghost form up over him.

He righted himself, his core buzzing with excitement and attention, but kept his downward trajectory..

Heck. So. He’d been right about there being more ghosts. Why would anyone want to take a hit out on him? Well, other than Vlad, maybe. Vlad wouldn’t kill him, though. He wasn’t that kind of a creep.

It had to be something he’d done. But he had never seen the eyeballs before. He’d never even heard of them.

Briefly, he entertained the idea that they meant to target Vlad, but even if they were both half-ghosts and people who didn’t know much about half-ghosts got confused, Danny and Vlad were notably different. For one, Danny was much better looking and only about fifteen, maybe twenty percent as pathetic.

Or maybe it was about his parents? Danny hadn’t noticed them getting any ‘materials’ for their nightmarishly unethical experiments, but maybe they had hidden something, somehow? No, ghosts tended not to do the proxy thing. No reason they couldn’t take their ire out on whoever had caused it.

No. This had to be about him, from both sides.

But what could he have done? He understood the whole ‘kill baby Hitler’ reasoning that had caused the last incident, even if he didn’t agree with it, but that had been a one-off thing. Hadn’t it?

Below him, a very familiar clock tower loomed up from the darkness.

Alright. That was uncanny.

Danny landed on the balcony railing, choosing to forgo the usual rituals of knocking and passing through the vestibule into the larger part of Clockwork’s lair. He had questions to ask and possibly an apocalypse to prevent.

Clockwork was waiting for him.

“What did I do this time?” Danny asked.

“This time? Absolutely nothing,” said Clockwork. “Or, perhaps, a vast number of things, depending on perspective.”

“You know what I mean. Why do those guys want me dead so badly? It’s not like I ‘ve done anything to them.”

“Again,” said Clockwork, “a matter of perspective.”

“Okay, and what did I do from their perspective?”

“You challenged it,” said Clockwork with a slight shrug.

“That’s really descriptive, thanks,” said Danny. “I’m not on the verge of causing the end of the world again, am I?”

“No more than anyone else,” said Clockwork, still calm.

“Then why are they after me? Why take out a hit on me? Really. No cryptic double-speak, please.”

“Simply put?” asked Clockwork. “They’ve had one out on you since before you defeated Dan.”

That… was almost reasonable. “So, are you using that to draw a connection, or are you just saying it because it’s a temporal roadmark?”

“It is a useful roadmark, but they did in fact try to kill you because of Dan, the first time.” Clockwork adjusted his grip on his staff. “The first time, they asked me to do it. Although asked is, perhaps, not the right word.”

“And you didn’t.”

“Clearly.”

Well, yeah, okay. Make stupid comments, get snarky comments, he got it.

“But Dan doesn’t… he’s not going to happen.”

“He has already happened. But despite common wisdom to the contrary, history does not, in fact, repeat.”

“So why are they after me now?”

“A number of reasons. Many of them believe that although you have not become Dan yet, you cannot be trusted to exist. Others have their own personal reasons, but beyond that it is as I told you. You hurt their pride.”

“Their pride.”

“They are very pleased with their ability to look through time,” said Clockwork in a tone that indicated he wasn’t. “Very proud of it. You surprised them, upended their predictions, defeated them, you could say.”

“Only with your help.”

“Perhaps,” said Clockwork, a smile pulling at his lips. “But I am somewhat more useful to them. Also, in any group of that size, you do get a number of people who simply despise anyone who does not fit into their worldview. Again, a matter of perspective.”

Danny clutched at his hair. “I don’t believe this! Why did you even help them in the first place?”

“If you will recall, I did not,” said Clockwork. “You will also note that my refusal to do so is what has led to the current situation.”

“Right, because if you killed me, they wouldn’t need to send other people to kill me.”

“Quite so.”

“Aaaaargh! This isn’t funny, Clockwork, What am I supposed to do?”

“For the time being, might I suggest coming inside? The Observants will eventually realize you are no longer in the Panopticon.”

“Shouldn’t they already know I’m not? If they can see through time and all?”

Clockwork hummed. “Time is one thing. Preconceptions are another. And the Observants, for all their broad field of view, tend to get tunnel vision.” Another small smile. “I have made tea. We are… somewhat overdue for a chat.”

“About what?” asked Danny, still hesitant. Although he’d visited Clockwork since the Dan incident - the time with the ecto-acne being a notable one - the topic at hand was strongly reminding him of all the times he’d been slammed into a bell, courtesy of Clockwork’s time powers.

“Your future.”

Danny’s shoulders slumped. “I was afraid you’d say that.”

#danny phantom #phic phight #phic phight 2023

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