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charlietheepicwriter7 · 5 months

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Always a man, a city, and a lighthouse...

"Robin, Red Robin, stay back for a minute," Batman said as he dismissed everyone for patrol. "I have a new mission for you. Dozens of civilians have gone missing around the decommissioned Gotham City Lighthouse." A few clicks and the Batcomputer displayed a map of the Upper West Side, a highlight on the lighthouse. "I want you both to investigate the building. Everyone who's gone missing entered the lighthouse, but nothing has been found by the police. I suspect that the lighthouse is being used for gun smuggling, but we need more information.

"That's where you two come in."

Or, I've been reading too much of @virgamsysxvolumes 's Lucky Rush AU, and wanted a true Bioshock AU for dc x dp.

Underneath the city, in the vast and endless caverns beneith Gotham, lies the subterranean city of Amity. Amity was the pet project of the mad scientist couple, the Drs. Fenton, to investigate the effects of ectoplasm on humans, but with the help of their best friend, Vlad Masters, they transformed Amity into a Technocracy City filled with scientists, and completely lacking in morals.

Or at least, that's how it was ten years ago, before the creation of Plasm (the Adam replacement), a neon green goo that's basically meth that gives you superpowers. Everyone from the top scientists to the lower working class starting doping on Plasm, which gave people the ability to control fire, create hallucinogenic spores, summon bats, etc. Vlad, the mayor, was deposed in a cue let by the Fentons and the city descended into anarchy, with people from the surface getting lured down from the lighthouse so they can continue their experiments.

The Fentons are 100% not good people in this. Jack is in charge of all the technological advances in Amity, while Maddie has created human/ghost hybrids--the Little Sisters of the story--that can naturally harvest ectoplasm from dead bodies to use for experiments. Once everyone's hooked on Plasm, the Little Sisters are in danger from acting Splicers, so she creates Big Daddies to protect them.

Danny is the only Little Brother, and Jazz is the only Big Sister. Vlad turned them both into monsters as revenge against the Fentons for the cue, but the couple didn't really care, with Jack barely acknowledging he has children, and Maddie acting like they were never turned into monsters to begin with. Not sure about ages... Jazz is probably the same as her canon age, but if Danny is still 14, he looks 10, tiny and malnourished and pale.

Tim and Damian are trapped in Amity after an automatic system determines them as good test subjects. The AI filters out any cops, so that's why the police never found anything. The elavator brings them down into the city, showing a sweeping shot of neon in the darkness of the caves, and the boys figure out pretty quickly something is blocking their calls.

Tim gets super injured early on. I think, a Jack Fenton booby trap (that exclaims that it's a Jack Fenton Booby Trap moments before activating, which should be funny, but isn't when death lasers are being launched at him.). Damian gets captured, and that's when Tim is contacted by Vlad, who is our Atlas stand in for the game, only Tim immediately realizes that this man is sketchy af.

But unfortunately, in order to rescue Damian, Tim has to splice himself with Plasm. Maybe its for fire-wielding, or telekinesis but Tim can't get to wherever Damian is being held and, while torn, splices himself to save Damian.

Damian was kidnapped because his exposure to Lazirus Waters made a Big Daddy think he was a Little Sister, so it brought him back to the Casper Academy, which is where Little Sisters drop their harvests off in the care of William Lancer. Lancer looks after the girls because Maddie Fenton is too busy, but it's against his will despite him caring for them all. He's trapped in the building, can't leave or he dies. He's actually relieved to know that Vlad is still alive and trusts him, because to Lancer he was just a good mayor who was overthrown and the Fentons are the real bad guys, just look what they did to their kids!

This is where the batkids first learn about Danny and Jazz, although they don't meet them until a while after this. Danny actually ends up being the one leaving Plasm out for Tim every time he rescues a Little Sister. (Sidenote, they end up killing people while in Amity. While both do have death counts, the problem with Amity is that they have to use stronger and stronger levels of force to get people to go down, leading them to escalating and killing quite a few).

Lancer points them to communications to get their comms working again, and that area is run by Damon Grey.

At some point after comms are back on, the two learn that Red Hood actually came in after them after hours of no communication and has been captured by Maddie Fenton, who intends to turn him into a Big Daddy.

In late story, it's revealed that Jack Fenton was murdered before the cue even happened, and that the Jack Fenton they'd been communicating with the entire time was an AI assistant created by living Jack to keep his work going. The cue was actually retaliation from Maddie and the Jack AI for murdering Jack.

The story would eventually end with Tim, Damian, and Jason freeing all the Little Sisters along with Danny and Jazz.

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geraldmariaivo · 2 years

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I recently saw a DP/DC post about Jason being Danny’s bio dad, and I want to spit out my own idea of it:

1) Jason doesn’t know he has a kid. He’ done a lot of shady things and met a lot of shady people, and you can’t tell me he remembers every night of it.

2) Danny knows he’s adopted, he just doesn’t care. 3) Danny suddenly has to care one day because of Ghost Prince legality reasons where he needs his parent/gaurdian to sign something important because he’s a child, and Clockwork refuses to. Obviously he can’t bring this to Jack&Maddie, and Jazz isn’t old enough to sign either, so he tries to find his biological parents to maybe only slightly bully this hapless civilian into signing a piece of paper that says Danny *can* sign things, and then fuck off.

4) Danny sets off to find his bio-parents only to find that his mother is dead and not a ghost, and his father is somewhere in Gotham. Which is where the Bats are.

5) With a bit of help from his court and Wulf, Danny scours the city to find whoever the hell this “Jason” is, because just knowing his first name clarifies very little in a city like Gotham.

6) A few of the court physicians accompanies this search party because they’re headed to Gotham, and there’s no telling what kind of bullshit will happen, even if there’s no ecto-weaponry within a hundred miles.

7) One of the oldest physicians encounters Red Hood, and is immediately revolted by the nasty-ass ectoplasm they haven’t seen since Pariah was locked up the first time. Naturally their first impulse is to get this absolutely wretched ectoplasm out of this human as soon as possible.

8) Jason, naturally, doesn’t trust this glowing green person who makes the Pit writhe and try to get away. As such, he makes getting any kind of ghostly medical attention as difficult as possible.

9) Medic #1 gives up doing it solo, and conscripts the other medical personnel to help them effectively pin Jason (now out of costume) down while they filter out the nasty shit and replace it with clean ectoplasm from the Realms so his body doesn’t go through shock from suddenly having no ectoplasm.

10) Jason is still riled up and suspicious as hell, but he does notice that the Pit isn’t really there anymore. There’s still something there, but it’s not the constant anger he’s learned to live with. It’s calm, almost peaceful, actually. It takes all of two seconds listening to them giving out instructions to realize that they’re behaving like actual, good doctors giving out real medical advice. They repeat themselves when needed, and make sure to go over the whole of their instructions thrice to make sure he knows what they’re saying. It’s incredibly weird for Jason, but if drinking this weird not-pit-water stuff once a week or if he’s craving it from this weird glowing container is what keeps the Pit from bothering him 24/7, then so be it.

11) Jason asks what the actual fuck these people are doing here, because Metas generally know to stay away from Gotham.

12) They explain that they’re ghosts, and that they’re with a search party looking for a man with the first name Jason, and is likely to have black hair, blue eyes, or both.

13) Jason immediately puts together that they’re looking for him, because he knows his life well enough that he knows there’s no hope that the Jason they’re looking for is some random civilian who happens to have black hair and blue eyes.

14) Jason asks why they want to find this man, and if they have a way to confirm whether or not the person they find is actually the person they’re looking for. He nearly has a stroke when they say that they need him to sign some important thing because his son -which, WHAT?!?! When did he have one of those?!?!?!- is the High Prince of the Infinite Realms, whatever the fuck that means, but can’t sign official documents into law since he’s a minor.

15) Jason, against his better judgement, tells them his name, and says it’s possible that he’s the Jason they’ve been looking for.

16) He is right.

17) Jason has to grapple with the fact that he not only had a son he didn’t know about, but the son also died before he could meet the kid, and then apparently became the prince of the dead.

18) Somewhere in this time, Danny (as Phantom) finds out about the nasty Lazarus water from his physicians, and tells Jason that Amity Park is a place where he can find much better ectoplasm if the man needs it for health reasons, and that he just needs to contact the right people. Preferably one of the local vigilantes rather than the Drs. Fenton.

Timeskip (how far depends on what you want to do in the meantime)

19) Red Hood goes to Amity park on Bat business. This is where Danny and Jason each find out about the clusterfuck that is the other’s life.

20) Shenanigans.

#i made this post #dp x dc #jason todd #danny fenton #danny phantom

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strong-with-the-sarcasm · 9 months

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DP x DC AU idea:

Regent!Jazz

Having been ecto-contaminated since conception, Jazz is the most Liminal being in the world, which has her develop a proto-core. As in, death has about 30% claim on Jazz and every year it grows stronger the longer she lives above the portal.

Can Jazz walk through walls, disappear and fly? Sorta, occasionally, and no. It depends on how much Ecto she has in her system, otherwise she’s just got her inherent strength.

Jazz inherited the Fenton Law Loophole tendency.

She swaps out her psychology books for books on Realms Law, spends a week locked in her room with them in fact. It concerns Danny and co., because what is Jazz up to?

Jazz claims regency thanks to three factors:

1: Danny unconsciously views her as a third parent thanks to her raising him in a neglected household. She got him to fourteen before she looked away for a minute, ok?

2: Danny is a minor in both human and ghost culture, therefore he’s baby and needs time to grow up without bearing kingly responsibilities, right?

3: As mentioned before, Jazz is the most Liminal being in the modern age, with a slowly developing proto-core. This allows her to be able to not only survive the Infinite Realms on a long-term basis, but able to step up as Regent at all.

————

Sam and Tucker, while Liminal too (thanks to them getting flooded with it with Danny’s death) still have a ways to go in terms of contamination- give it a few more years in Amity Park and they’ll start to show more symptoms of death-claimed, though they’ll never be able to surpass Jazz. Not even Jack and Maddie Fenton could ever say that, considering they wear Hazmat suits daily that has limited exposure, but were also adults when first contaminated- the ecto would take a lot longer to bond to adult molecules than that of a just-conceived child.

Maybe Jazz even leeched off some of Maddie’s contamination in the womb? Whose to say.

Where does DC come in?

Perhaps the vivisection route? It’s a tried and true method of getting Danny to Gotham, but I raise you- Jazz essentially “kidnaps” Danny, taking him away from his haunt once she is Regent.

Gotham is a city drenched, drowning, in tragedy and therefore natural ectoplasm for a powerful Liminal and Halfa to survive on.

Lady Gotham welcomes the two eagerly into her city and directs Jazz to the soon-to-form Lazarus pit- corrupted ectoplasm, but nothing Danny can’t filter out with time, it’ll heal him and whatever happened to his core after being ripped away from his haunt.

It does cause a rift to form between the two, but Jazz is firm in staying in Gotham. Right on the edge of Crime Alley to be specific.

Here we can slide in Vigilante!Jazz, who is pissed off at the world and needs to work out some excess energy. Enhanced bone density means that Jazz doesn’t have to worry about screwing up her knees with a few ‘superhero landings’.

Liminalality means that she can sense the weird guy in the Red Hood whose territory she keeps crossing into while beating the crap out of some criminals and escorting the night workers home.

Revenant!Jason…

….possible Anger Management/Hardcover pairing?

[Im thinking about continuing this, but idk. I do have like a page written out with Regent!Jazz]

Masterlist

#dp x dc #jazz fenton #jason todd #danny phantom #dp x dc au #I want an anger management ship so badly

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stealingyourbones · 1 year

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Your asks are back! Im prolly gonna send a few tomorrow bc its late and i have many idea but an idea that Wont Let Me Go:

Danny gets caught by his parents. They dissect him and jazz is the one to free him, but he has to go. Now. But where does he go?

Gotham. The drs fenton went there once and caused enough chaos to be banned from the city or else risk arkham. Its the one place they might not find him.

Danielle goes with him. Maybe shed hunkered down in gotham for a bit, maybe shes passing by amity when sht hits the fan. Either way, its her and danny. They figure it wont be too hard to get by. Break into an empty apartment and hide out there until they get caught, couldnt be too hard, right?

Too bad the building they go for is the one jason stays in, as a civillian, and hes got every apartment on his floor so that the risk of a neighbor seeing him as hood is minimal. Jason has to figure out how these kids got into the apartment and who is making them spy on red hood.

He does this by giving them the one thing kids in need cant afford to turn down- free meals. He invites them over to cook and teaches them how, both to see what hes dealing with and give them those skills once theyre out of whatever situation theyre in.

This goes on for a while before jason had the horrifying realization.

Hes turing into Bruce. Two kids in need with black hair and blue eyes who tense up when vigilantes are brought up? Hes never going to live this down. Probably frantically texts dick(?) About how hes turing into bruce and then doesnt elaborate

Unbeknowst to him, theyve secretly been "treating" him by acting as filters/replacing some of his extoplasm so he can be sure of his control over his feelings. This doesnt necessarily make him 100% calm all of the time, he still gets angry pretty easily, but. Jason gets control of himself back.

As they get closer they start being significantly more domestic. Somehow nobody has crashed jasons apartment while theyre there (they dip invisibly) and jasons relationship with bruce has improved as he no longer has to worry about pit rage taking over. Hes trying to figure out how to break the news to bruce that hes a grandfather even though he hasnt officially adopted them yet.

Dani, on the other side of town, is gossiping with a cool girl at the library named barbara about how shes been trying to figure out how to tell her neighbor that Hes Her Dad Now.

(Danny doesnt call him dad. He cant, anymore. But theyre still family)

Jason decides to introduce the topic of them meeting bruce (because 1. even though its still rocky their relationship has improved and 2. He wants it to be on his terms) and dani bursts out with the "I have a GRANDPA???????" and from there on commits to calling jason her dad and bruce (unmet) her grandpa.

Bruce meets them first and is just. In awe. He has grandchildren. His emotional constipation vs his absolute adoration of the fact hes a GRANDPARENT fight fight fight.

When danny and dani eventually meet everyone theyre all like oh sick bruce picked up a duo this time nice to meet you. And they absolutely cannot comprehend it when bruce and jason walk in and dani goes to jason first. Nobody expected jason to take on bruces adoption tendencies but they should have.

(Also fun hc i couldnt work in naturally but i do fully stand by- the ectoplasm in dannys body does affect his injuries somewhat, meaning he heals naturally very quickly from most ghost fights. Why?

It heales based on emotional healing.

He doesnt really care all too much about the average cut from one of his rogues and they heal within the day, but a hit from valerie takes a few weeks.

The first injury his parents ever gave him still hurts.

He can barely move and cant talk for the first few weeks with jason. Only once he starts feeling safe with him do the cuts start coming back together.)

The casualness of “hi so glad your asks came back” [drops at least 1k worth of fucking stellar content that’s basically a fic] is just making me truly awestruck. God I’ve missed seeing y’all’s neat ideas.

I dont have any words that I can say that could describe just how wonderful this is so I’ll write a lil addition to it instead because I am in love with this sm.

Jason’s point of view when he’s slowly getting better and isnt afraid to meet his family because of the pit rage, has he explained that’s the reason he distanced himself? Do the bats just think that this is simply Jason finally getting the courage to reach out? Do they know that the Pit rage is stopping Jason and do they try to help him by using alternative means of communication? How much do they help and understand.

When Jason experiences his first injury. How much does it hurt? Valerie shoots him with an ectogun. How much is this man in pain for and does he have to fight pit rage inside him to not lash out and attack her after being injured?

And how does his core react to his new kids. This I NEED to know

#danny phantom #dp x dc #dc comics #writing prompts #dp x dc prompt #dpxdc #bones replies #this is some stellar writing my guy #ever-after-aaa

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helloilikepurple · 4 months

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DC X DP - Merfolk AU

Maddie and Jack Fenton are ecto-biologists, except, ecto-beings aren't ghosts but rather mermaids.

Amity Park is a small island, a 3-hour boat ride away from the nearest coast. The ferry comes by 2 times a day, and only once on Sunday at noon.

Mermaids are believed to be a myth by most. This is because they are only visible to the human eye when they choose to be. Every mermaid seems to have the base powers;

Invisibility (can choose to be invisible to only humans or everything/everyone else - can also make themselves visible to humans but choose not to. Most tend to be in a constant state of not visible to people)

Intangibility (how they've avoided capture and such)

Strength much more impressive than a human's

Ability to communicate underwater (clicks and chirps and such produced from their core)

Fast healing

Some also have additional powers unique to them. Danny's ice, Ember's music (siren song).

Mermaids only look somewhat human. They share no biological similarities to humans.

Mermaids are an ancient species that have been around far longer than humans have been. They are immortal and only die when killed or if they get "sick". This immortality is largely thanks to their biological make-up. Mermaids don't breath. They don't have hearts that beat. They don't have vocal cords or gills or lungs.

They have a core, that produces and filters ectoplasm which is all they need. Ectoplasm is their life force and magical, to an extent. Ectoplasm exists everywhere, to various degrees, but is especially potent in all forms of water. It's such to a small degree, though, that it doesn't affect humans and/or magic users.

For mermaids, though, this ectoplasm is plenty. Their bodies can naturally pull it from their environment and use it to fuel themselves. Generally, they don't need it, because they produce their own, but it can make them stronger, which is why they stick to water where much of it can be found (by their standards).

This ectoplasm is a result of feelings. Water experiences a lot - life, death, birth and pain. People drown. People drink. Animals drink. Water goes through the cycle and it remembers. It keeps those emotions and over a long, long time, that magical energy evolved to become ectoplasm (vitality).

Which is why we need water to live.

Maddie and Jack are so curious about these creatures, and have managed to collect various samples over the years. With all their research to occupy them, they didn't have time for their daughter, Jazz.

They invented many things. A contraption that could filter ambient ectoplasm from the water, devices that could detect the unique ecto-signatures of mermaids, weapons that could hurt them. They produced the Speeder to allow them to go far deeper underwater than anyone else has ever achieved. They found ways to use ectoplasm as a power source.

They were brilliant scientists, but still they'd never managed to capture a live specimen. Their methods have always proved too lethal, and mermaid corpses have this infuriating habit of sort of melting quite quickly back into ectoplasm that, although useful, is "corrupt" and has to go through an extensive process in order to be purified and thus useful.

Frustrated by this, they decide to create their own specimen using the samples they've collected and some of their own DNA to fill out any remaining gaps in hopes of getting as close as possible to the real thing.

The result is Danny, a halfa, who breathes and has a beating heart, albeit one that's slower than it should be. He can live underwater, thanks to having a core on top of that, that produces what the human-half of his body needs to stay alive without actually breathing. Hypothetically, he could survive underwater for the rest of his life even if his heart was removed, but only manage to last a few hours above water (where ectoplasm is nowhere near as strong) without that heart before dying.

Normal mermaids die if left without any access to water ranging from a day to week depending on their age and strength. Otherwise, they can survive alright for (hypothetically) a few years with only the rare drink and will be reduced to a strength equal to or slightly above a human's.

(Maddie believes that there are mermaids powerful enough to exceed Superman's strength without any water at all. However, their civilizations are so well hidden she has yet to find any proof to back this up.)

Danny, however, can survive in both environments indefinitely. A truly fascinating result.

On top of that, he can turn his inhuman features for human ones while above water. Once submerged, the influx of ectoplasm will force a change back to "mermaid".

His many documented powers and their original owners are:

His wail (Ember)

The transformation (Amorpho)

Ice (one of the Yetis, like Frostbite)

Ectoblasts - the ability to shoot excess ectoplasm in the form of powered beams (Skulker)

Maddie and Jack don't treat Danny well. They keep him caged, away from all other life, and run various experiments on him. Seeing as he can produce his own ectoplasm, they also syphon it from him to power their inventions, as they can get a lot more from him faster than they can extract it from the water.

Once, they test how his body reacts to different stimuli. When they get to electricity, Jack misreads the voltage and the shock very nearly kills Danny. The scream he lets out then is the sound he makes when he wails as it's this experience that unlocks that power of his. From then on he's deathly afraid of being electrocuted.

Jazz is not close with her parents. She had to raise herself, and never paid their research much mind. For a long time, she was sure they were just crazy. And then she saw Danny.

She went down to their lab to ask them to sign a school form and saw young, maybe 5 year old Danny in a tank, tail on full display. From then on she became his self-appointed sister, sneaking him snacks and telling him stories and teaching him things her parents hadn't bothered to.

Danny shows a clear like for the stars. Having never seen the sky before, when Jazz manages to sneak him out (just into the next room to look out a window) for a quick peak one night, he's absolutely in love. Jazz helps him learn as much as he can about them, smuggling in astronomy books and the like for him to read.

As Jazz grows older, she starts to worry for Danny more and more. Maddie and Jack are growing more greedy - more obsessive. They're treating him increasingly poorly and she hates it. She wants to help but finds herself afraid of how her parents would react.

So she times it perfectly. Maddie and Jack are out buying various household appliances to disassemble for a project, and Jazz is to leave that day for college, never to come back. And she's not about to leave Danny.

So she sneaks him out. As a human, Jazz takes Danny on the ferry too. The moment they reach land they move. Jazz rushes them off straight onto a flight. She's gotten herself on a scholarship into Gotham U for psychology with the intention of one day working at Arkham. By tutoring and babysitting, Jazz has saved up over the years and already has an apartment at the ready for the 2 of them and she's gotten a job at the library waiting for her once she arrives.

Most of her stuff excluding essentials was already waiting for her at her apartment, and she had a backpack full of essentials for Danny ready too. She already had plans to go buy him more stuff, letting him choose, once they arrived.

She's already emancipated herself and renamed herself Jazz Nightingale (more than willing to drop the Fenton name). She had a birth certificate for Danny (now Daniel Nightingale), her younger brother made and there are only a few more legal processes to go through that require Danny to be physically present for that they need to go through before she can sign him up for school.

Yes, it's a lot for an 18 year old; to raise a 8 year old child while going to Uni, working and hiding from her crazy parents, but she's more than willing. She loves Danny. Has loved him since she saw him 3 years ago. She can manage.

Danny has never been around so many people before. It's overwhelming. He tries to stick close to Jazz, hiding and cowering behind while watching everything with awe filled eyes. The airplane ride was fun. They were in the sky! And Jazz let him sit by the window. It was nice.

Then they got off in Gotham and Danny and Jazz promptly got separated. An ill-timed Rogue attack had Danny losing sight of Jazz and thus running for someplace safe to hide until she found him. A goon notices him and grabs him by his bag so he slips it off and runs. The goon chases.

Then Danny sees the river that runs through Gotham and dives in, thinking he's found somewhere safe.

Jazz, meanwhile, is losing her mind. They just got there and she's lost him! The rogue situation is wrapped up quickly thanks to the Daylight hero Signal but she can't find him. When she finds his lone backpack during her search she despairs.

She puts in a missing person's report, knowing it will probably be forgotten since it's Gotham. She searches for a long time, until dark, at which point she's forced to head to her apartment. She stresses.

Danny stays missing for a long while. Jazz goes out looking every single day. She calls the police often for updates (for which there never are any). She even hunts down the vigilantes to ask them to look, handing them pictures, Red Hood being the first.

(He keeps an eye out, asks his people to search too. He also helps Jazz make it home safe when she stays out too late searching, and even enlists Barbara's help.)

Meanwhile, Jazz has to start going to work.

She tries to put it off, and even gets an extra week before she starts but she has to start, and Uni is only a month or so away from starting too. Barbara is sympathetic and lets her go easy, seeing clearly how stressed she is.

Jazz does not stop looking. She makes sure to wander by all water sources, and even calls her parents, saying she's getting settled in at Uni in order to see if they had someone managed to get Danny back. They haven't, which is only a mild relief.

---

The water is bad.

It smells horrid and makes his skin itch. Danny doesn't quite know how to describe it but it feels like something angry and sad and hurt. There's trash all over, and the channels are so filthy the water's brown and smelly. It's nothing like his tank was - there at least the water was clean and nice. Danny's scared, alone and lost and all the bad feelings in the water aren't helping.

He swims blindly, getting further and further from Jazz in search for somewhere safe. He'd thought, when he saw the water, that it would be his safe place to hide, but now that he's in it he doesn't feel safe at all. He lets out a whine from his core, the water around him reacting to the young halfa's fear, rippling wildly and that only serves to scare him more.

He scrambles for the surface, teary and wanting Jazz. He doesn't want to be alone.

Unknowingly, he'd been underwater for hours, swimming rapidly and erratically. The sun had set, Jazz had reluctantly headed home, and he'd left Gotham. He'd accidently gone all the way to Blüdhaven, and when he popped his head out of the water and saw nothing familiar and a dark, smoggy sky he felt worse.

He was near the docks and it was night so of course Nightwing was out and at the docks, taking out a drug operation that had started trying to set roots in his city after having been chased out of Gotham where they tried the same thing. Danny heard the commotion and cautiously approached.

He poked his head out of the water again from closer and watched as Nightwing beat up the bad guys. Danny recognised him, as Jazz had made sure he knew of all of Gotham's heroes before they left for Gotham. If Nightwing was a hero, then he should be able to help him find Jazz!

He watched as all the bad guys were caught and tied up with stars in his eyes. Heroes are so cool! Nightwing ended up outside when he jumped a bad guy that had tried to sneak away. He was using some kind of sticks to fight, but the bad guy managed to knock one out of his hand and it fell into the water.

Danny immediately dove for it. He didn't have very much stuff, but he hated it when Maddie and Jack found something that Jazz had given him and threw it away. Nightwing would probably be quite upset too so it only made sense for him to go and get it.

Nightwing knocked out the guy while Danny was underwater and was looking at the surface of the dark, murky water mourning the loss of his weapon.

And then Danny pokes his head out.

Lazarus green eyes look at him, and Nightwing damn near has a heart attack, leaping back with a startled (not at all high-pitched) scream. Danny immediately ducks back under, also very startled. He fiddles with the stick, scales and skin itching the longer he stays still in the gross water.

He waits a bit, hoping the next time he peeks out Nightwing won't be looking at him anymore. After a few minutes, he cautiously pokes his head out, and immediately meets Nightwing's eyes, who'd been looking intently at the water torn between hoping that was a hallucination and hoping it wasn't, although river-monsters weren't much better.

Their eyes meet and Nightwing manages to catch a lot more details because he'd been staring so hard.

White, wispy hair, that floats like it's still underwater. Bright, green eyes, curious but afraid. Face dotted with scales, and weird, fin-like things where ears should be. Most of all though, whoever or whatever he's looking at, is young. They're gone back under just as fast as before, and Nightwing yells out for them to stay too late.

Danny's scared. He's not supposed to be seen like this. He promised Jazz. But he wants to give the stick back and he wants to find Jazz. Heroes help people, right? He steels himself and pokes his head back out. This time, he listens as Nightwing talks, gently reassuring him it's okay and he won't hurt him.

Slowly, Danny swims closer. Nightwing doesn't look angry or afraid or disgusted, so maybe he will help him even though he looks like this? Heroes help everyone after all.

Dick is losing his fucking mind.

There's a baby pit monster in the water - the filthy water that's probably more grime and oil than water at this point - with wide eyes that would be adorable if they didn't have him thinking of pit rage. But they aren't angry. Far from it.

Small, with scales on their face a top normal, albeit very pale, skin. They approach slowly, clearly anxious, and Dick waits, wondering what exactly he's supposed to do here. What even is the protocol for this situation? Is there a protocol? Knowing Batman, probably, but he can't remember it.

Danny carefully sticks one hand out of the water and passes Nightwing the stick, which he takes with a grateful smile and a thank you. Danny pokes his head out a little more so he can smile back.

The baby pit monster has fangs. Adorable, little fangs, but fangs. Okay. That's fine. This is fine.

Danny hesitates. He has to ask, but his voice won't come. So he does the next best thing.

They're chirping at him. The cute, baby monster is chirping at him. He gently says he doesn't understand and when they wilt, he asks yes and no questions. Like this, Nightwing slowly pieces together the child 1, needs help, 2, is lost, 3 has an older sister who's looking after him, and 4, is absolutely terrified of his parents.

Well, he's never been one to turn down a scared kid, no matter how inhuman.

(Everyone's going to make so much fun of him when they find out he took a baby pit-monster home with him. At least they don't have black hair and blue eyes.)

#dcxdp #dick accidently becomes a dad #the fentons are bad parents #jazz is stressed #danny's actually having a pretty good time

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aikoiya · 2 years

Text

DP HC - Liminality

I recently read an hc about liminality that I liked. It suggested that because organics & ectoplasm are 2 different forms of matter, that you can be 100% ghost & 100% human at the same time & that's how liminality works instead of what I formerly liked to use, which was 50/50.

At the same time, I'd like to put my own twist on it. There is a difference between being ecto-liminal & being a halfa.

For instance, liminality isn't so much being 100% human & 100% ghost as it is being a percentage human & different percentage ectoplasm. Halfas are actually a range of a percentage organic living being & a different percentage of ghost. The most powerful being 100% organic & 100% ghost such as Danny. This 100/100 status of halfa is the utmost rare. So far, there is literally only one in existence.

There's a big difference between having ectoplasm in you & being an actual ghost which is what being a halfa is.

If you are a halfa, then you are also liminal, but if you are liminal, that doesn't automatically make you a halfa.

Anyone can be ecto-liminal with the right background, but not just anyone can be a halfa.

Ecto-liminality is based on a mix of genetics & environment. It's something that builds up over several generations being exposed to ectoplasm or ectoplasmic entities.

However, you don't just become a halfa unless certain needs are met.

For one, you need to die & then be revived quickly enough that either the tether between body & spirit hasn't broken or it reconnects (in Danny's case, his entire body was atomized by electricity, the force of which created a tear in the membrane between universes, his molecules were flooded with raw ectoplasm to the point that a Core formed almost instantly & his body was reconstructed with ectoplasm in each & every cell in his body; done so quickly that his spirit & his body still occupied the same space, then more electricity restarted his heart, causing his Core to be anchored to his body), but not just in any way. It has to be in such a way that a Core forms during the interim & not everyone who dies becomes a ghost. Certain things need to happen.

Some of the reasons why some people become ghosts & others don't have remained a mystery, but what is known is that the individual needs to, at least subconsciously if not consciously, have a will or desire to remain in this life strong enough that they are able to resist the pull of death & of The End.

You also need a purpose or destiny that still needs to be fulfilled.

And you need earthly attachments strong enough to anchor you.

Without these things, you won't become a ghost.

Not only that, but a lot of ectoplasm needs to be in the process, which is what fast-tracks the formation of a Core.

Not to mention, there needs to be a catalyst in you that works as a buffer which would allow you to survive the process, otherwise, what would've made you a halfa, will just kill you & only possibly make you a full ghost.

It's also not as easy as a natural portal forming on top of someone. That would just send then to the GZ, not turn them halfa.

Not to mention, just because someone is a 100/100 liminal while alive that going through this process automatically means they'll also be a 100/100 halfa.

As mentioned before, you need a catalyst. Such can range from you having magic in you, to having a powerful ancestor such as a diety. Death deities are the best as they are adapted to things like ectoplasm & death magic.

Danny, Jazz, & Sam are all Legacies of death deities & thus their percentages will be higher than most. Danny & Jazz were also 100/100 liminal due to generations of Fenton & Fenton-Nightingale exposure to ectoplasmic entities & living in places with thin spots as supernatural hunters.

Sam, Tucker, & Valerie have only had the benefits of living in a thin spot for a few generations, but Amity does have a Lazarus Pit that filters into the drinking water & that has raised the percentage. Sam & Tucker specifically also had the benefit of being Danny's best friends & thus they were exposed whenever they went over to his house & were even more exposed after the accident. As such, Sam would be around 100/75 & Tucker would be 100/60.

Vlad was only somewhat ecto-contaminated due to his workings with the Fentons & has no history of exposure before that. Nor does he come from a line of hunter's or even have a godly ancestor. As such, his percentage is actually pretty low. The only real thing he had going for him were dormant dragon blood, a strigoi ancestor, being revived as a lugat, & his ecto-herpies slowly contaminating him more & more over time. As a result, he's actually 100% lugat & about 50% ghost.

Now, take for instance, Jason Todd. Much like the Fentons, he also had hunter ancestors, & in fact, is a Fenton-Nightingale himself, & his family for at least 3 generations back have lived in Gotham, which has a Lazarus Pit too & is also a thin spot. Even if it doesn't have a portal like Amity, it has a low-mid level of ambient ectoplasm at all times, much like Amity did before the portal. As such, Jason had a higher percentage of ectoplasm than most, all of the bats do. Bruce, Tim, & Damian especially do to also having Fenton-Nightingale ancestry. Dick has higher than normal, but not nearly as much as the others as he'd been a circus boy who traveled around.

Technically, Jason is somewhere halfway between liminal & halfa, & due to the Pit of Nanda Parbat being not only corrupted, but dark magic having been used to keep the corruption from filtering out, his Pseudo-Core's formation has been severely stunted. If I were to guess, he'd be 100/95 ectoplasm in favor of human.

For more on my DP hcs, go to my Ghost Zone Masterlist.

#danny phantom #dp #ghost lore #halfa biology #liminality

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five-rivers · 3 years

Text

Snow and Song Chapter 5

About five seconds after Danny registered the huge crowd of people gathered in the park (and why were they there? Had there been some kind of event he forgot about?), it began to snow. Danny looked around himself in alarm. He was often insensitive to temperature changes (and a few other things, according to his sister), but it wasn’t nearly cold enough snow. It was September.

He looked up. There weren’t even any clouds.

A snowflake, perfect and crystalline, stuck to his eyelash.

Alright. When something weird and unnatural started to happen in Amity Park, usually there was a ghost involved. All Danny had to do was find the ghost causing it to… snow…

Oh. Right. He was a ghost that could make snow.

He was an idiot. He hadn’t even noticed his core activating. His cheeks flushed with cold. This was so embarrassing.

Wincing, he looked back down at the crowd. Only about a tenth of the people had phones in their hands, winking camera lenses pointed up at him, but that was more than enough. He felt entirely too visible.

… Which he could fix because he was a ghost, darn it, something that he kept forgetting about tonight. Berating himself, he adjusted his visibility down to zero and flew away.

Almost at once, all the birds took off, the sound of wings obscuring whatever the humans down below were saying.

Danny didn’t stop until he got home, trailing snow all the while. He was not looking forward to tomorrow, but for tonight, maybe, he could forget what had happened.

He went human, phased off his clothes, laid down on his bed, closed his eyes, and started to-

“Maddie!” shouted Jack. “The ghost-kid is on TV again! He’s in the park!”

“Oh, good! Go start up the GAV! This time, we’ll catch him! I’ll be with you in a minute!”

Danny let out the breath he had been holding since his dad startled him from his doze in a long sigh. He resigned himself to being woken up at least once more that night.

The first rays of sunlight filtering through Danny’s window brought with them something that would have chilled Danny to the core if his core weren’t naturally frosty.

Music.

He peeled his eyes open slowly, grudgingly, because it was still September, and sunrise was still quite a bit before the time he had to get up in the morning. Hoping he was hallucinating, he trudged over to the window and pulled back the curtains.

Ah, yes. He hadn’t quite expected to find a bunch of cultists standing outside his house with a boombox, playing back a rather scratchy version of Tale as Old as Time, but, somehow, he was unsurprised to do so. What exactly were they attempting to accomplish here?

One of the younger (about six years old) cultists waved up at him. Resigned, Danny waved back, then let the curtain fall back down.

He rubbed his eyes. Normal teenagers didn’t have to deal with cults that worshiped them as a god. Even that dude from Nazareth was a full adult before he got hit with the heavy stuff.

(Yeah, because it wasn’t at all a sign of megalomania, mental instability, or good old-fashioned insanity to compare himself to that guy.)

(He didn’t want a cult, darn it.)

What did they want, anyway?

He got dressed and started downstairs. To his horror (but again, not surprise) he heard more music emanating from the kitchen.

“What are you guys doing?” Danny asked.

“Oh, morning, Danno!” boomed Jack.

“Shh, shh,” said Maddie. “We need to go over that last part again. There are pancakes on the stove, sweetie.”

“Oh,” said Danny. “Thanks. But, really, what are you doing?”

“Analyzing the sound patterns of Phantom’s voice!” said Jack. “We missed it before, but he must have a low-level mind control power! Just like that Rockstar ghost!”

“Sneaky post-human ectoplasm glob,” muttered Maddie. “That’s how he’s got so many people on his side. He’s brainwashing them. But don’t worry, sweetie. As soon as we figure out how he’s doing it, we’ll be working on a cure!”

“Well,” said Danny, trying not to sound bitter. They had made him pancakes. “That’s news to me.”

Danny stepped out of the house and sighed in the general direction of the cult.

As always, acknowledging them in any way shape or form proved to be a mistake. They rushed at him.

“Daniel Fenton,” intoned today’s leader, a man wearing robes colored in an approximation of Phantom’s suit. His beard was… interesting.

“What?” asked Danny. If only there was a way to skip through awkward conversations like this, like there was in video games. But, no, life was like one, huge, un-skippable cutscene. Tragic.

“Last night, our Lord Phantom gave us a message. A message, and a divine task.”

Danny was pretty sure he’d remember that. “What task?” he asked, resigned.

“To spread his word through song! And you, his prophet, his chosen, his blessed consort, shall reveal his intent upon the stage of the Casper High School Musical!”

“I’m begging you, call it anything but that.”

“We will do anything to make the Casper High School Musical go well! We are at your command!”

“Please stop picketing my house and harassing me on the way to school.”

“We have fine members of our choir here to audition for you! Please take word of their worthiness to our Lord Phantom.”

Several of the cultists began to sing.

“Danny!” called Jazz from the driveway. “Stop feeding the cultists, or we’re going to be late for school!”

“So,” said Sam. “The Ghost Watch feed blew up last night.”

“I know,” said Danny. “I feel so stupid.”

“Hey, it’s fine,” said Tucker. “But we really do have to put some time aside to test whether or not you really do have a pied piper ability.”

“I made it snow while I was singing,” said Danny.

“Ah. We’ll have to look into that, too,” said Tucker, making a note on his PDA. “Who wants to bet that the ‘Phan Club’ will try to incorporate last nights performance into the play somehow?”

“That’s not funny,” said Danny, closing his locker. “Guys, what if I accidently mind control the audience? Or start a snowstorm inside? The cultists are already on top of this. They were outside my house this morning.”

“Again?” said Sam, raising an eyebrow.

“Yes, again.”

“What did they want?”

“They seem to think that there’s going to be some kind of revelation in the play,” said Danny. He caught the look in Sam’s eye. “Sam. No.”

“Sam, yes.”

“Cults are not a toy,” cautioned Danny.

“Not the way you’re using them, they aren’t.”

“Seriously, Sam. No matter how much you want to change the world, do not use a cult to do it. It never goes well.”

“Christianity started off as a cult.”

“And would you say that went well? I’m asking you this as a Christian.”

“Are you a Christian?” asked Tucker. “I’ve never seen you in a church. Can you go in a church? Have we tested that?”

“I—What? I’m not a demon, Tucker. I went to church, uh… Last Easter. I can totally go in a church.”

“You had to think of that for an awfully long time.”

“What about a synagogue?” asked Sam. “Or a mosque?”

“I don’t know. But you’d think that if I could go into a church, that’d mean I could go into the other ones.”

“But what if you couldn’t?” asked Sam. “Would that mean that religion is more right than the others?”

“Or more wrong,” said Tucker, “since Danny is a good guy.”

“I—” started Danny.

“PHANTOM!” screamed Wes from down the hall, interrupting whatever revelation Danny could potentially have had.

“Oh, great,” said Danny. “I’m not Phantom, Weston!”

“Kids,” said Miss Lyn, poking her head into the hallway. “Please don’t shout in the halls. Class is about to start.”

“I have proof, this time!” crowed Wes. “I have video.”

“Oh, no,” said Danny, with perfectly flat affect. “Are you here to harass me with yet another badly photoshopped, grainy, vertically filmed, twenty-second clip of me ‘transforming’ into Phantom like some kind of anime heroine?”

Wes reared back, face coloring and nostrils flaring.

Danny would feel worse about what he had said, if half the videos in Wes’s last ‘Fenton is Phantom’ presentation hadn’t been exactly that. Tucker had made several of them and stealthily dropped them in various chat rooms for Wes to find, as something halfway between a joke and an exercise in misdirection.

As soon as Wes had included one of those in his presentation, it was doomed to be a laughingstock. Again, Danny almost felt bad.

“No!” said Wes. He puffed his chest out. “From Ghost Watch!”

“Uh huh.”

“I kind of feel like we’d be hearing about it from more than just you,” said Sam.

“Yeah,” agreed Tucker. “If the news decided Danny was Phantom’s dead twin or whatever, you’d think some of his groupies would be swarming.” He pointed at a pair of Phan Club members who were having a sedate conversation near the water fountain. “Where are the groupies, Wes?”

“Did you not learn your lesson from the beauty pageant?” asked Sam. “Or Egypt?”

“I don’t know, didn’t you learn yours from Desiree?”

“Who’s learning what from Desiree? Because you should ask her for a better naming sense. I mean, you just copied. Lame.”

“You’re talking to me about copying? You vegans are the copiers! Vegetable burgers, tofurkey, where does it end?”

“With the abolition of the cruelty of MEAT!”

At this point, most people would have started edging away from Sam and Tucker’s patented and infamous meat vs. veggies argument. However, Wes had long since proven himself to be of sterner stuff, and Danny wanted to hear what he was on about.

“Guys,” he said, “guys, it’s not working. He’s still here.”

Sam and Tucker turned back towards Wes. “Bummer,” said Sam.

“Yeah, Wes, why do you have to be such a bummer?” asked Tucker.

“Let him speak,” said Danny, magnanimously, twirling his hand.

Wes glowered. “Well, now I don’t want to,” he said, mulishly.

“Come on, Wes, what’s the video, don’t leave us in suspense!”

Wes attempted to glower harder but failed. Grudgingly, he held up his phone, which did, indeed, play a video from Ghost Watch. Danny watched himself singing for several long seconds before returning his gaze to Wes.

“I’m not sure what this is supposed to prove.”

“The song, you idiot! It’s from Beauty and the Beast! And I know the drama club gave you that music.”

“A movie that thousands of thousands of people have watched and know the music for?”

“That doesn’t matter! You’re the only one who has any reason to sing it.”

“You mean, other than everyone else in the drama club?” asked Sam, bored.

“Or anyone who likes Disney?” said Tucker.

Wes opened his mouth to make some kind of riposte.

The warning bell rang.

He closed his mouth. “I’m watching you, Fenton!”

“You and everyone else,” muttered Danny as Wes retreated down the hallway, pointing at him.

Why was everyone around him so ridiculous?

“We’re doing Snow White, not Beauty and the Beast!” howled Razor, baring his teeth at the hapless Phan Club member that had suggested adding ‘Tale as Old as Time’ to the song list.

“If you guys had taken that bet, I’d have so much money right now,” said Tucker.

“Students, please,” said Mr. Lancer. “We can’t have any actual copyrighted music in our play. Not without paying for it. And I’m not negotiating with Disney.” He looked into the distance. “Not again. Never again.”

Danny did not want to know the story behind that, but nevertheless, he had to ask… “Are you okay, Mr. Lancer?”

“I’m fine, Mr. Fenton,” said Mr. Lancer. “Thank you for asking. In any case, my lovely drama students! Today, we are going to do our first round of auditions!”

“But, sir, we haven’t finished the script, yet!” protested Mikey.

“Right you are!” said Mr. Lancer. “But I have found that things go more smoothly when we have people already in the main roles. There’s less… outright sabotage and script jockeying.”

“What does that even mean?” whispered Samhain (aka Kevin) loudly.

“People trying to change the script to fit a certain person so that person gets the role,” said Paulina. “Or exclude a certain person. Which I would never do, Mr. Lancer.”

The covetous glare shot in Danny’s direction indicated that Paulina’s words might have been less than truthful.

Mr. Lancer chuckled. “I didn’t think you would, Miss Sanchez!” He began writing on his whiteboard. “Now, we already have our Prince Snow White, our Princess Charming, and our Evil Queen.” He nodded at Paulina as he wrote the roles on the board. “Now, we need our seven dwarves—”

“Ghosts!”

“Excuse me, yes, ghosts. Thank you, Mr. Baxter. Our Huntsman—”

“Or woman!”

“Yes, thank you, Miss Thunder,” said Mr. Lancer. “Huntsman, or Huntswoman. And… Let’s see… Snow White’s parents, for the prologue, Princess Charming’s retinue, and… I think that’s it. Alright, let’s start with the ghosts.”

“Shouldn’t they have names?” asked Mia.

“Well, sure,” said Mr. Lancer. “But we can’t use the Disney names. You’ll have to come up with your own.”

“Phantom!” screamed Paulina.

“Here we go,” said Danny, burying his head in his hands.

“You want to bet that we’re going to wind up with your whole rogue’s gallery?” asked Tucker.

“If you need money, Tucker,” said Sam, “you just have to ask. Rates on my loans are very reasonable.”

“Isn’t usury against your religion?” asked Tucker.

“Nope,” said Sam. “Not at all.”

“I am incredibly against this development,” said Danny. “The cults are going to have a field day.”

“Ember! Ember! Ember!” Chanted the punk goth crowd, which had split off from the larger goth subgroup.

“I am somehow even more against this development,” muttered Danny. “Mr. Lancer! I don’t think it’s a good idea to include a ghost who gets power from people saying her name!”

“Shut up, Fentonnage, what do you know about ghosts?”

“My parents study them. I know a lot. More than I ever even—”

Danny narrowly dodged the workbook Dash flung at him.

“Mr. Baxter!” scolded Mr. Lancer.

Sadly, when everything shook out, Danny did not get his way. One of the seven ghosts was named Ember and was going to be played by Star. Because why not?

“At least the Box Ghost and the Lunch Lady aren’t on the list,” said Sam.

“But ‘Hamlet, father of Hamlet,’ is,” said Danny. “Why does that bother me more than Ember?”

“Because you hate Shakespeare?”

“No, I don’t,” protested Danny. “Shakespeare is a perfectly nice person. I just don’t like how his writing is taught in schools.”

“You’re going to break Mr. Lancer’s heart saying stuff like that,” said Tucker.

“He wrote love poems to boys. Why do they skim over that?”

“Excellent point, Mr. Fenton!” exclaimed Mr. Lancer, who had somehow materialized behind them. “Shakespeare was definitely bisexual. I wi—” The teacher stopped. “Nope, can’t use that word. It would be nice if the state let me teach it like that. Along with the crossdressing. School board won’t let me.” He shook his head. “Dale Baxter. Someday, someday he’ll lose an election. Eventually.” He took a deep breath. “Next time we meet, we’ll be doing auditions, okay? I want you all to think about what parts you would like! And, Miss Gray, I’d like to have a word with you about your role in our production, alright?”

#Danny Phantom #snow and song #fic #my fic #phanfic

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nocturna-starr · 3 years

Text

The Picture

Prompter: @gottacatchghosts

Prompt: Danny/Jazz swap AU: Jazz is the half ghost and Danny is the older sibling. Go wild on your take of how this would all play out

Words: 1811

Notes: Related to THIS fic

“Hey Jazz, can you stand still for a minute? The lighting by you is perfect!”

“Daniel!”

A flash went off. Jazz blinked away the spots. Where had he come from? She would have sworn that it had only been her in the kitchen a few seconds ago. How had he come in so fast, or alternatively, how long had Daniel been watching her? Sometimes Jazz wondered who really was the ghost in their family, him or her?

“That was perfect!” Daniel cheered, “Now I’ll need a couple more photos and then you can go.”

“I thought you wanted to be a painter, Daniel?” Jazz frowned, “Since when did you care about photography?”

“Since I was the first one in all of Amity Park to catch a photo of the ghost girl in action! I discovered that I really do have a natural talent for it.” Daniel gloated as he changed the filters on his camera. Jazz smiled. It had been a long time since she had seen this side of her brother.

“Okaaayyy” She tried to sound like she was doing him a favour. If he knew that she was actually happy for him, then Daniel would never let it go.

“I knew you would agree!” Daniel grinned, “Now I have a bunch a filters that I need to try out! How busy is your day today?”

“Well I was planning to meet spike at the mall…”

“Perfect! I swear these photos are going to make you a star!” Daniel smirked, “Or at least get your name in the history books when these pictures come through.”

xXx

“I’m so sorry I’m late Spike! Daniel is on another stupid project kick.” Jazz huffed as she sat down in the mall’s cafeteria. Her friend looked up from the phone game he was playing. She wondered how long he had been waiting for her. Spike rarely ever tried out mobile games unless he was absolutely bored.

“And he says that he is nothing like his parents. Dude really is clueless to his own tendencies, isn’t he?” Spike laughed, “Maybe it’s a Fenton trait?”

“What do you mean by that?” Jazz asked.

“You still haven’t noticed my- You know what? I’ll let you figure it out.” Spike took a huge gulp from his soda.

“Come on Spike! That’s not fair!” Jazz whined. How could she even begin to guess something if she didn’t have a hint? She wasn’t a genius like her parents or her brother. She couldn’t help it she accidentally overlooked something that she didn’t even know was supposed to be there!

“Nothing is fair in love and war.”

“What do you mean by that?” Jazz wondered. Spike only smirked. He was about to explain (or maybe torment Jazz some more) when he was interrupted by one of Daniel’s friends.

“Hey Jazz! Have you seen Danny?” asked her brother’s not-so-secret admirer, Sam Manson. Jazz sighed. Judging by the new camera hanging from her neck, Sam seemed to be encouraging Daniel’s new endeavor. That meant he would be taking pictures for the next month or so. It was something that Jazz was not looking forward to.

“He’s in the house taking photos of plants. Or he decided he wanted to go on another jungle adventure and went into the ghost zone.” Jazz rolled her eyes. She muttered under her breath, “Then I’ll have to save him again this week…”

“Do you think he’s dumb enough to do that again?” Spike laughed, “Last time he got chased half-way across the zone by Klemper!”

“But he got some awesome pictures!” Sam grinned. She practically skipped away. Jazz giggled at her enthusiasm. She could see what Daniel liked about Sam. Maybe by this summer they would finally get together. Then they wouldn’t have another Ember situation.

“Your brother is going to get eaten by a ghost one day and all his friends are going to care about is that he got a good picture.” Spike snickered, “Man, I feel bad for him.”

Jazz joined into his laughter, “Yeah, but don’t feel too bad for him. You should have seen him when Tucker got attacked by Technus. He managed to get the two of them to stand still long enough for him to take a sketch.”

“And he didn’t snap a photo why?”

“As much as he hates to admit it, Daniel is just like our parents! He wanted to prove a point or something.”

Spike nodded in agreement, “Wanna get some ice cream?”

“You bet I do!”

xXx

The two best friends sauntered in the park, enjoying the beautiful weather and the lack of ghost attacks. It was peaceful times like these that Jazz liked the most. Times where she could just be a regular fifteen-year-old kid.

Of course, peace doesn’t last long in Amity Park.

“Wanna take a selfie?” Spike asked, “It’s been a while since our last!”

Jazz smiled, trying not to feel too guilty. Since becoming Jazz Phantom, she had veered away from cameras. In all of her research, she had discovered that photos tended to… change while in the presence of other ghosts. Yet the photos Daniel had taken of her, always seemed to end well. Maybe she was just being too paranoid?

“Say cheese!” Spike said, sounding way too bright to be considered a goth.

“Cheese!”

Spike took the picture, then went to see the results, “Uh… Jazz?”

He handed over the picture to her trembling. Nervous, Jazz took a look and paled.

Spike looked happier than he has in a long time. She on the other hand… If you showed the picture to anyone else, they would probably think that Spike had gotten a picture with Jazz Phantom herself! Jazz’s eyes were the bright red of her ghost form. Her hair was blue as the ocean. Her clothes looked faded, though if Jazz squinted, she could make out her logo.

All in all, this was a disaster.

“We have to get those photos from Daniel!” Jazz squeaked. She dived into a bush, transforming into her other half. Without a second thought she took to the skies, heading towards her home.

“Guess my plans have been cancelled,” Spike muttered, “Better tell mom not to cancel that trip to my therapist.”

xXx

“Daniel?” Jazz called while entering the house, “Are you here?”

Fentonworks was too quiet… Like her entire family was ready to attack her. She shivered, were they watching her? Jazz was afraid to even consider this. Maybe… maybe… Maybe her parents were out, and Daniel was with his friends?

“I’m up here,” Daniel called from up the stairs.

That didn’t feel like a trap at all.

With the very little courage she had left, Jazz carefully made her way up the stairs. Her yes darted around, waiting to catch the slightest movement. She prayed that her life was not about to fall apart. How could she have been so trusting? Daniel was her brother, but he had also been raised by ghost hunters. What if he warned her that she would have to leave? What if the government was here to take her away? These seconds could be the last of the life she had once known.

“Hey Jazz! The filters worked like a charm!” Daniel called from the top of the stairs. The ghostly heroine nearly fell down the stairs in surprise.

“Danny?!”

“Oh sorry. Totally didn’t mean to scare you little sis! Sam, Tucker and I have finally come up with a filter that can properly take pictures of anyone. No more red eyes, or blurry pictures! And it’s not going to malfunction around you like all of our other inventions!” Daniel was talking at a mile a minute.

Jazz sighed in relief. He hadn’t mentioned how her picture had looked. Did it mean that her brother had discovered a way to properly photograph half ghosts? She would need to steal a dozen of these camera filters which, knowing her brother, he would have around.

Jazz practically skipped down the stairs, “I was just seeing where everyone was! I’m going to go find Spike again! Tell mom and dad that I’ll be home for dinner!”

“Okay? But don’t you want to hear more?” Daniel asked.

She answered his question by racing out of the door. It wasn’t that she didn’t appreciate her brother’s efforts. But Daniel could be just like Jack Fenton when explaining how something worked. She supposed she could be the same way when talking about psychology.

xXx

Daniel shook his head and sighed as his sister slammed the door. While he could understand her concerns, it still hurt to be rejected that way. It wasn’t like he could tell her that he knew her secret. She would freak out and try to trick him into thinking he just saw things. Now wasn’t the time for him to get down. He had just invented something revolutionary!

“How did you know that adding ectoranium to the filter would work?” Tucker asked, turning on the hall light, “And why did you have to tell her in the dark?”

“Cause it’s more fun to tell her that way. Who’d think that the ghost girl was afraid of the dark?” Sam answered for him, as she exited his room.

“Honestly, I forgot to turn on the lights.”

His two best friends howled but Daniel frowned. How could he have been so stupid? He’d after to reassure Jazz that everything was okay in a subtle way. Afterall, Jazz had a nasty habit of jumping to conclusions.

“I’m curious too,” Sam began, after she had calmed down a little, “how did you come up with the idea?”

“Ectoranium is the opposite or ectoplasm. I figured that the ectoranium would cancel out the effects that Jazz’s powers had on the camera. Now she can have her picture taken at school or join in family photos without a need for an excuse.” Daniel replied.

“That was very sweet of you Danny.” Sam gushed.

Daniel didn’t reply. Instead he headed back into his room. He put his hand under the mattress and pulled out the photo album he had been working on for the past couple of months. Carefully he placed one of the photos he had taken that day into the album. He flipped the picture over and wrote a note just like he had done to the other pictures.

This is the first photo taken with the new lens. Use the lens to reveal the true door. If the event has not happened, ignore this.

“Dude, the cryptic messages are a little freaky.” Tucker said.

“Call them safeguards, for just in case.” Daniel closed the book and hid it under his mattress again. Once he was done hiding his gift, he turned to his friends and smirked.

“Anyone want to see if we can get a picture of that Box Ghost again?”

“We’re in!”

#phic phight 2021 #jazz phantom #danny fenton #swap au

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avaritia-apotheosis · 3 years

Text

Phantom Children [DP x Batman Crossover] Ch. 2

In which: Danny thinks, Talia is concerned, and we finally see Ra's al Ghul's pride an joy: the Lazarus pit

AO3 | Prologue | 1 | [ 2 ] | 3 |

---

DANNY COUNTS THE DAYS by the hours he is in the monitor room. One hour is all that he is allowed. One hour after a day of learning and fighting, of ‘yes ma’am’ and ‘no sir’ and ‘stand up straighter, boy’ and ‘remember that you have feet.’ Of being handed a sword only to have it knocked out of his hand (pickitup-pickitup-pick-it-up). Of ‘here’s eight plants, only one of them is the antidote to the poison you just ingested, and you better hope you remember the difference because this is the life you live now, Danny.’ This is what you agreed to for some time in front of a few television screen.

One hour. Sixty minutes. Three thousand and six hundred measly fucking seconds was all he got to see his family before he’s ushered back to his room. Dark. Barren. Windowless.

God, when was the last time he saw the stars?

He spent his multitude of ‘one hours’ simply watching. That was all he could do, really. Watch and collect snatches of Amity—of Before. Like torn pieces of an antique photograph, unable to be restored but too precious to throw away.

Talia would call him too sentimental. Danny would love to remind Talia that if it wasn’t for her and her freaky older-than-dirt dad, Danny wouldn’t even need to be fucking sentimental.

Breathe in for four. Hold for seven. Breathe out for eight.

Repeat.

Repeat again.

One more time.

There’s a voice in Danny’s head that sounded too much like Jazz telling him that this kind of behavior was unhealthy. The Jazz in Danny’s head didn’t exactly know why, though they’re both pretty sure that constantly watching your family and friends move on after your death probably isn’t good for one’s sanity. Especially since Danny isn’t really dead.

Well.

Dead-er.

He isn’t—

(family-love-mememe-why aren’t they looking harder-don’t they care-they care-for their own good-what about-happy-no-me-them-me-them).

Truth be told, Danny isn’t angry that everyone in Amity seemed to be getting on with their lives. God, he’s seen how his suppsed-death affected them. He can’t—he won’t be responsible for holding them back from living when he can’t even be sure if he’ll ever be able to return to Amity again.

(He’s seen what happens when someone refuses to move on. Hell, the Zone is full of it. It’s either you obsess with grief…or you try to rip it out of yourself entirely.)

Danny wanted them to live on. Be happy. (With him.)The FentonWorks portal remained under constant vigilance, and since Pariah Dark, most ghosts recognized Amity as his haunt and tended to stay away. With any major threats he could only hope that Clockwork would step in somehow and at least keep it contained. Tucker and Sam were more than capable enough to handle most of his regular rogues gallery, especially if Red Huntress was backing them up too.

Amity…didn’t really need Danny anymore to protect it.

(Family-happy-protectprotectprotect-what?-safe-not safe-not needed).

For all that they tried to find out, Danny, Sam, and Tucker never did manage to figure out what his ghostly obsession was. Sam went out on a limb and said Heroism which…wasn’t quite right but fit the bill well enough.

And what was the point of heroes?

To build a world where they aren’t needed.

------

There was a noticeable shift in her son’s demeanor after he learned of the true nature of his parentage. Though it should be noted that while Talia showed a photograph of her beloved to Daniel, she did not disclose his true identity as to Ra’s al Ghul’s orders. Her father reasoned that it was more advantageous for Daniel to develop a closer connection with the maternal side of his family as opposed to the Waynes—a name that would be more familiar and thus better viewed than the strange people who kidnapped him.

No; ‘Recovered’ would be the most appropriate term. Daniel was her child. Would always be her child, no matter who raised him.

Daniel was…quieter. Somber. His eyes glazed yet sharp—blue eyes bloodshot despite maintaining a regular sleep schedule. Like pit madness with neither the madness nor the pit; simply the look of rage that bubbles beneath the skin, close to boiling over yet never there.

He continued to watch his false family obsessively. Yet…he had taken to watching Talia as well. Quietly. Unobtrusively. Small glances at the corner of his eye. Contemplative looks with furrowed brows whenever he presumed she did not notice. He had even taken to meticulously check his reflection in the mirror; pinching cheeks and turning his face this way and that, cataloguing his features as if to find what parts of him was from her—or perhaps if there was any part of him that ever resembled the paranormal scientists he once called parents.

Even if the physical similarities were not there, the DNA testing—regardless of the anomalies found in Daniel’s genes—was proof enough that he was her son.

“You have been keeping with your diet regimen, yes?” Asked one of the League’s physicians. He pressed his gloved fingers against Daniel’s skin, brushing the ridges of his ribcage. Marring her son’s skin was a large, faint scars. Fractals branching across his torso like the branches of a gruesome tree. “You are still too thin.”

“Fast metabolism,” Daniel mumbled. He is sat on an examination table in their medical wing, black shirt neatly folded beside him. His figure, though not skeletal, per se, was gaunt. His ribs poking from his pallor skin, stomach still concave for a boy who ate double the portions than any other member of the League of Assassins. “I’ve had it since the accident, but it’s never gotten this bad.”

The physician hummed, jotting his notes down along side the results of Danny’s vitals. The exact numbers were unknown to Talia, standing as she was by the door, though she could infer the results from previous physical examinations. (Low blood pressure and core body temperature. Faint pulse, slight tachycardia,) “Do you have any ideas why?”

Daniel’s lips thinned, eyes darting to the side as he always did whenever Phantom was related in anyway. His face was too open; Talia needed to train him out of that. “My…” He took a deep breath. “Ghosts aren’t supposed to stay very long in the Material world. It lacks the ectoplasmic energies that helps them ‘stay alive,’ so to speak. Usually they can supplement some of this by filtering some of the ambient energy in the atmosphere to strengthen themselves—it’s why Amity was such a hotspot for ghosts because of the large concentration of ectoplasm in the atmosphere—but it still isn’t a good long term solution.”

He scratched the back of his head. “Since I’m still somewhat human, I’m able to spend way more time in the Material world and can substitute spending days in the Zone by instead filtering ambient energy and eating.”

The physician made another noise, the tip of his pen tapping against the side of the clipboard. “So I take it then that, as your other half doesn’t have access to this ‘ambient energy’ as you call it, it is forced to take what energy it needs from the calories you’ve consumed, yes?”

“Basically.”

“What will happen if you do not have enough calories to supplement this energy?”

Danny shrugged, a rueful smile on his face. “Dunno. Maybe this time, death will stick.”

Talia narrowed her eyes.

Such a thing will not happen. She had been forced to give up on Daniel once, and then later on she lost her youngest to her beloved. Never again.

This child was hers.

------

“Father, did you not say that the anomalies found in Daniel’s DNA were similar in composition to the Lazarus pit?”

Ra’s al Ghul did not pause in pause in his reading to look up at Talia. The bird shaped magnifying glass held steady above the ancient manuscripts spread across his desk, eyes focused on the words and figures carefully inked onto the page. “Yes.” He set aside the magnifying glass and gently flipped the page. “It is what strengthened my belief of the connection between the Lazarus pit and these spirits.”

Talia straightened. “With your permission I would like to place Daniel into the pit.”

Her fathered looked up, curious. “You forget what the pit does to those who are in good health.”

She placed the results of Daniel’s most recent physical exam on to of his desk. Ra’s sat back in his chair and idly flipped through the folder, reading the contents as if no different to reading the newspaper instead of how his grandson is slowly being starved by his own biology. “Well, well. This would be a problem.”

He closed the folder, a wry grin curling at his lips. “Have him ready for tomorrow. I am curious as to how the pit would affect one already half-dead.”

------

Danny is awoken by Talia sometime the next day. “Come,” she said. “You do not need to change, so come quickly.”

He got off the bed with a silent groan, rubbing the sleep from his eyes with the heel of his palm. “Where are we going?”

“Not far. Somewhere that will help you.”

He snorted. “Letting me go home would help me.”

Talia doesn’t answer, simply waiting for him at the door. Danny groaned, combing away as much of his bedhead with his fingers as he followed her.

For the first time since being dragged to Nanda Parbat, Danny is allowed to venture beyond his small section of the compound.

He didn’t really know what to expect.

Still didn’t stop everything from being so…anticlimactic.

Beyond the steel door, normally kept locked and guarded by two of his shadow guards, was a hallway. Endlessly long with a wide pathway, lit enough by the fluorescent lights overhead but not enough to banish the shadows that clung to the stone walls. The hallway looked empty. ‘Looked’ being the key word, here. Even if he couldn’t see them, Danny would bet on his half-life that the shadows were teeming with life.

Talia led the way through the maze of twists and turns (were they underground?), a couple of shadow guards quietly following behind them.

“Are you going to tell me where we’re going?”

Talia looked at him from over her shoulder for a moment, then turned away. “Have you heard of the Lazarus pits?”

“Lazarus? Like the guy who came back to life?” Neither of his parents were really religious. His dad only really Baptist in name because he was born into a Baptist family that, too, wasn’t overly strict in their religion. The only reason why Danny knew of this Lazarus guy was because of Mr. Lancer’s unit on Greco-Roman and Christian allusions.

Talia nodded, turning a corner. “The Lazarus pits are natural pools with restorative properties, capable of rejuvenating the body, healing grievous injuries, and even bringing the dead back to life.”

Danny nearly tripped over his own feet. “What? That’s—” Impossible. He ran up to Talia, wildly gesticulating with his hands. “What’s dead is dead. Resurrecting the dead goes against the natural law of the universe!”

“Well, you seem to be doing fine.”

He frowned, crossing his arms. “That’s different. I’m still dead, even if my entire existence seems like the but end of a Schrodinger’s joke.”

“Be that as it may, what I speak is truth.” She stopped in front of a door and opened it. Then, stepping aside to usher Danny in first. “See of yourself.”

Danny stepped inside, Talia following behind him, and—

Oh.

Before he even saw the pit, he could feel it. A low and steady hum reminiscent of the ghost portal. But…different. Not necessarily fainter but garbled, like hearing someone speak underwater.

The room was a large, open space, with stone walls framed by red wooden pillars. It was dim, lit only by the green glow of the pit that consumed the majority of the space. A square pool of too-clear waters and toxic-looking steam rising from the surface.

The waters felt of the Zone but…not.

“Ah, Daniel.” He nearly jumped out of his own skin. Ra’s al Ghul stepped out of the shadows behind him, hands folded behind his back. The green glow highlighted the sharp contours of his face; the shadows that clung to him only making his visage harsher. “It is good to see you.”

Danny greeted the Demon’s Head with a League salute. “Grandfather.”

The word felt foreign on his tongue despite being in English. To formal for a boy who never really had the chance to interact with his own grandparents. But Danny was told to refer to Ra’s like this, and so he did. (He was only grateful Talia didn’t insist on calling her ‘mother.’)

Ra’s al Ghul was an enigma. Centuries old yet he looked only about a decade older than his mom and dad. (Jack and Maddie Fenton will always be his mom and dad. They raised him. Loved him, in their own eccentric, science-y way. No blood test or adoption or ninja-assassins could change that). Like Danny’s still-unnamed biological father, Ra’s carried himself with theatrical purpose. Comically villainous in his attire and grand gestures, though unlike Vlad, Ra’s had this overwhelmingly intimidating presence that engulfed whatever room he stepped in.

Ra’s was a man that commanded attention as opposed to demanding it. And now, at the focus of the man’s calculating gaze, Danny could not help but stand stiff at attention.

“You’re mother was right,” Ra’s said. Danny barely restrained himself from perking up at that word. “You are wasting away, Daniel.”

Tell me something I don’t know.

“Well, at least you still have that fire in you.”

Danny startled, slapping his hand over his mouth. Shit, he didn’t know he said that out loud. Out of the corner of his eye, Talia suppressed a small smile.

“You have that in common with the Detective,” Ra’s continue, circling Danny like a carrion that spotted its next meal. “That and the rather foolish notion on not properly reporting the extent of your injuries.”

“With all due respect, grandfather, I wasn’t expecting on staying here for this long.”

Ra’s gave him a knowing look. “But something is keeping you here, isn’t it?”

“Keeping my family and friends hostage is a pretty good motivator, apparently.” An insidious thought bubbled in Danny’s mind. But that isn’t all, is it?”

“I have consulted your mother and your physician as to the nature of your condition, and I have decided that the Lazarus pit would be a sufficient way to restore your health.” He gestured to the pool. “It appears that your DNA shares several similarities to the composition to the Lazarus pit.”

Danny crouched at the edge of the pit, hovering his hand above the water’s surface. “It’s because it contains ectoplasm. An impure kind, I think.”

“Will the impurities be harmful to you?”

He pursed his lips. “I don’t think so? My body can filter out the impurities just fine, it’s just that I’ve never encountered thistype of ectoplasm before. It’s so clear and—aqueous, I think is the word.”

There’s a strange glint in Ra’s eyes. Dare Danny say it, it even looked mischievous. It made him uneasy, and just as Danny made a move to step back, Ra’s al Ghul picked him up by the collar of his night shirt—

And threw Danny into the Lazarus Pit.

#danny phantom #batman #danny phantom x batman crossover #phantom children.txt

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ghostsray · 5 years

Text

@wastefulreverie helped me write a fic (i wrote the story, and she edited my shitty writing into something good) based on a prompt @dannyphantomisameme came up with in the pbs server

basic summary: wes gets captured by the giw (TW: implied vivisection)

word count: 4591

___

By Danny’s standards, it was a normal day. And by ‘normal’ that entailed battling a large, snarling ghost wolf in the middle of Amity Park Park. But it was fine. After a year of experience, he was getting good at these daily fights, and the wolf provided no challenge for him. He captured the ghost with little difficulty, and the bystanders who were watching erupted into cheers. Well, most of them anyway.

“Fenton!”

At the exclamation, Danny reflexively turned his head. Realizing his mistake, he immediately regretted his decision. Wes Weston, smug as always, was standing behind him. Wes turned to the crowd and pointed out, “See? He responded to his name. He’s Fenton!”

For a split second Danny worried that they might listen to him, but fortunately, his worries seemed to be pointless. On cue, the crowd groaned and collectively rolled their eyes. Paulina put her hands on her hips. “Really, Wes?” She spoke with enough expertise to deny his claim since she always watched Phantom’s battles.

With wide eyes, Wes sputtered, “But—come on, that was solid proof!”

“Right,” Paulina dragged out. “Just because he happened to turn his head in your general direction when you happened to say a name that happened to be Danny Fenton’s last name.”

The fury on Wes’s face was almost comical. He gestured again at Danny and yelled, “He literally looks the same!”

A mischievous smile crawled onto Danny’s face. His voice carried a mocking tone when he spoke, “Gee, Wes, I don’t know.” Floating closer to the boy, he placed a hand under his chin and pretended to inspect the red-headed teen. “I mean, you look kinda similar to me, too.”

Dash laughed, lightly elbowing Paulina. When it came to watching Phantom’s fights, he did his best to accompany her. “I bet Wes is Phantom, and he’s just trying to frame Danny to keep his secret!” the jock conceived.

The steam out of Wes’s ears was nearly visible. “Seriously?” he seethed. He held out his arms Will Smith-style toward Danny and shouted, “How can I be Phantom if he’s right here?!”

“Duplication, duh,” Sam suggested. She and Tucker had been observing the entire exchange, straining to stifle their laughter.

Wes growled and grabbed a fistful of his hair. “Whatever, I’m leaving!” he decided. He fled from the park, ignoring the snickers from the crowd.

Phantom gave one last heroic wave to his audience before he vanished from the visible spectrum. A few feet away, no one noticed the flash of light behind a nearby tree, nor when Danny Fenton stepped out beside it. He joined his friends and watched the crowd disperse.

Once they were out of earshot, Sam was the first to speak. “Do you ever feel bad, bullying Wes like that?” she asked. The three friends met eyes for a moment. Breaking the tension, they all burst into laughter.

“As if,” Tucker choked. “That guy deserves it.”

Swallowing his laughter, Danny straightened himself. “Anyway, I’m sure Wes will be fine,” he pointed out. It’s not like Wes was in danger or anything, he was just… a jerk. Danny wouldn’t joke about it if it was actually serious. As it stood, the worst thing that came out of Wes’s wild accusations was some mockery from his classmates.

Danny grinned, kicking his shoes against the sidewalk. “So,” he gestured to his left, “Nasty Burger?”

Sam and Tucker murmured in agreement and the trio finally exited the park. On their way to the restaurant, they passed a bulky white van, but none of them thought much of it. It was just a white van; it wasn’t peculiar or anything.

The next day, Wes didn’t come to school.

Nobody really cared. Wes was known to cut class everyone now and then. Since adopting his obsession with Danny, he spent so many nights plotting Danny’s grand exposure that he either overslept or simply forgot about school.

Everyone simultaneously decided to enjoy this Wes-free time; any break from having his conspiracy theories shoved down their throats was welcome. Tucker even joked that this was like a vacation for them. The day passed, and Wes remained absent, but nobody thought much about it. People missed school all the time! He must have gotten sick or something.

With all his other problems, Danny easily put Wes out of his mind… until later that night. He’d finally managed to find some time to do homework (for once) when Jazz inevitably interrupted his study-time. She entered his room with a knock and held out a phone, gesturing for him to take it.

“Someone wants to speak with you,” she told him. Danny furrowed his brows. The only people that ever called him were Sam and Tucker... and they only called his cellphone.

He spun his desk chair around and accepted the phone. Before putting it to his ear, he asked Jazz, “Who is it?”

Jazz shrugged. “Some adult. He says his son is your friend.”

The only person Danny could think of was Tucker’s dad (Sam’s dad would be caught dead before talking to him). So why would Tucker’s dad be calling him? Doing little to filter his confusion, Danny raised the phone to his ear and answered it. He was taken aback when he realized that he wasn’t talking to Maurice Foley; it was Walter Weston—Wes’s dad.

“Hi, uh,” Walter started, “have you talked to Wes today?”

Danny thoughtlessly shook his head, then realized Walter couldn’t see him. “No?” Danny replied apprehensively. “He didn’t come to school today. Why?”

He heard rustling on Walter’s end of the call and assumed that he was pacing back and forth. “He’s not home. I haven’t seen him… not since yesterday. Out of everyone, I thought you might know something since he’s…”

“Obsessed with me?” Danny completed.

Walter hesitated, “… yeah.”

And suddenly, despite not caring about Wes, Danny was worried. Wes wasn’t the type to run from anything, especially away from home. And if he’s been missing since yesterday, then it was logical to believe that something must have happened….

But Danny didn’t have the faintest idea where Wes might be. He bit his lip and told Walter, “I’m sorry. I don’t know anything.”

Walter sighed, obviously disappointed. “That’s fine. Just… call me if you see him.”

The line was hung, and Danny tried to go back to his homework, but he found it hard to concentrate. He tried telling himself that Wes was fine, and that he probably slept over at some fellow conspiracy theorist’s place or something. Still, that night when he patrolled the city for ghosts, he made sure to keep his eyes out for any red-haired teen. He didn’t find Wes.

The next day, Wes was still absent. Like before, everyone else at school didn’t mind. Heck, nobody really even noticed. Those who had picked up on Wes’s disappearance had decided that he was sick and was spending his days at home. But Danny knew that wasn’t the case—not after his phone call with Walter.

“So you think Wes is missing?” Sam asked. They were sitting at their usual table in the cafeteria. He couldn’t hold it in anymore and had told her and Tucker about Walter’s call.

“He hasn’t been home for almost two days now. What else could it be?” Danny replied and ran a hand through his hair.

“Maybe he…” Tucker paused, trying to think of a good reason for Wes to spend two days away from home. He came up dry. “Okay, fine, maybe it’s a little concerning.”

Danny picked at his nails anxiously. “What if something bad happened to him because of me?”

Sam crossed her arms. “You mean because he chose to spend his time trying to expose you?” she pointed out with a defensive tone.

“Well, yeah…” Danny amended, “but I still feel kind of responsible.” He stared straight ahead, looking between the A-List and geek tables. “Remember that time he followed Skulker into the Ghost Zone to go after me?”

“You think Wes might be in the Ghost Zone?” Tucker wondered.

Danny shrugged. “It’s possible. Otherwise, someone would’ve found him already.”

“So… what?” Sam figured. “You’re gonna search the entire Zone for him?”

Danny seemed to deflate, but then he perked back up as an idea came to him. “Maybe I don’t need to scour the entire Ghost Zone….”

Hours later, after school was over, Danny made his way to the Far Frozen. He found Frostbite inside one of their grand caves and pulled him aside for a favor. Frostbite bristled hesitantly. “I am not so sure,” he expressed. “The last time I lent you the Infi-Map…”

“It won’t be like last time,” Danny assured him. “I promise. It’s just to find my friend.”

The frost giant pondered a while longer, but he eventually acquiesced. “Very well,” he said. He strode to the center of the cave and stopped in front of a floating chest encased in pale blue light. He unlocked the chest with a shard of ice and pulled out a golden scroll. Carefully, he handed it to Danny.

Danny nodded and thanked the yeti ghost. “I promise I won’t lose it this time,” he assured. With a sound resolution, he held the map a few feet from his face and declared, “Take me to Wes.” For a moment, nothing happened, and he wondered if he had been too vague; but then the map lurched, and Danny’s world spun as it pulled him out of the cave. The Ghost Zone passed in a whirl of green and purple before he was finally led straight to a newly formed natural portal.

Danny wasn’t exactly sure where he expected to land, but it certainly wasn’t here. As soon as he fell through the portal, he was greeted with the distinct scent of antiseptics and concentrated ectoplasm. It reminded him of his parents’ lab, but there was something else here… some sort of coppery smell? Danny glanced around and realized that this was a laboratory. But why would Wes be here? he wondered.

He inspected his surroundings more and found that there were tables with beakers, microscopes, and other standard lab equipment. Metal shelves lined the wall, containing what looked like… ecto-weapons? And in the center of the room...

Danny’s stomach did a sickening flip. He felt like he had just floated upside down at two-hundred miles per hour, but his feet were placed firmly on the linoleum floor. Danny fought his nausea and forced himself to keep looking at the ghastly sight.

In the center of the room was a metal table with leather straps, like some sort of demented operating table. It was long enough for a human to be laid on, at least six feet long. And in the dim light of the room, Danny could perceive the sheen of dark, crimson blood. So, so much blood.

Danny practically clasped his hands over his mouth to keep himself from crying out, an alarmed scream halfway up his throat. His stomach lurched again, and this time he was aware that he might… might throw up. Oh Ancients, not good not good not g—

He was subtly rocking back and forth to ease his stomach, to refrain from vomiting. The soft motion helped a bit with his nausea, but did little to soothe his abject terror. And suddenly, he was aware of nearby voices—both male—speaking nearby. To preserve his presence, he quickly turned himself invisible to avoid being caught.

He realized a moment later that the voices were coming from an adjacent room.

“Are you sure?” asked one of the men.

“The evidence is indisputable,” replied the other. “He’s a living human. One hundred percent organic matter, beating heart, lungs, brain—he only has trace ectoplasmic contamination, normal for Amity residents.”

The first man cursed. “So we got the wrong guy.”

Danny hadn’t even realized that he was subconsciously backing away from the voices until he bumped into a metal table. The force of the impact toppled an empty beaker over the edge, breaking it into innumerable shards.

The voices lulled. Then he heard footsteps approaching the door. Danny panicked and turned himself intangible, shooting through the opposite wall and landing in a new room. He realized too late that he had accidentally dropped his invisibility along with his intangibility when a weak voice prompted his attention.

“Danny?”

He instinctively turned to face whoever spoke his name and froze. It was like a vacuum had sucked all the air out of the room, leaving Danny’s lungs empty. In front of him was a shimmering, green barrier—most likely a ghost shield—and behind that transparent wall was… “Wes?”

Admittedly, Danny didn’t even recognize him at first glance. His usually tidy hair was mussed in every direction, dull and greasy. His cheeks were prominently sunken, like he hadn’t eaten in a long time. Not to mention, his bloodshot eyes were weary and tired, emphasized by the dark bags hung under his eyelids. Fresh bruises were peppered across his skin, mottling his skin in hues of blue and purple.

“What—” Danny’s tongue felt like it was tied in a knot, crossed over itself multiple times. “What happ—why—” He struggled to comprehend why Wes was like this, who had done this. Danny stepped close to the ghost shield separating them and pressed his hand against it, trying to move it through the barrier, but it was rock-solid.

Wes’s lips curled into a perturbing smile. His eyes were humorless, chilling. “Why?” Wes’s voice cracked. He sounded dehydrated, broken… Danny doubted he had drunk anything all day, or… maybe he had spent all day screaming. His green eyes misted over and met Danny’s own terrified, neon stare. “They thought I was you.”

His words hit Danny like a hard blow.

The joke that Wes was Phantom had existed for a long time, long before Wes was set on exposing Danny. But that was all it was—a joke. To think that someone genuinely would believe it….

It was then that Danny noticed the bandages wrapped around Wes’s bare chest. At some point, they had stripped his shirt, which allowed Danny a good look at all the new scars gracing Wes’s torso. The white gauze of his bandages was stained with fresh blood, and Danny was instantly reminded of all the blood he had seen on the operation table. Once again, his stomach plummeted—and so did he. Danny dropped to his knees and scoured his gaze across all of Wes’s injuries (that were his fault).

In his peripheral vision, Danny saw his own hand shaking from where it was still pressed against the shield. He considered turning human so he could pull Wes out, but Wes read his train of thought. “Don’t bother transforming,” he informed. “The shield works for both ghosts and humans—you can’t do anything.”

Danny’s eyes darted back to Wes. His chest crumpled at how broken his classmate looked. Wes didn’t deserve to be in this situation. As annoying as he was, he should never have been mistaken for Danny. Despite his helplessness, Danny’s core throbbed with dedication. “I’ll get you out,” he promised.

For a moment, Danny thought he saw a glimmer of hope in Wes’s eyes, a small light in the abyss of dull misery. But it was short-lived. The footsteps—the men from the other room!—returned. Danny whipped around to find a group of white-clad men holding ecto-rifles. Guys in White agents. Of course, how could he have been so blind? The Guys in White were the only organization inept enough to truly mistake Wes for Phantom, ignorant government cronies.

Danny didn’t have time to prepare when they raised their weapons, aiming to fire. Blasts assaulted him from every direction and Danny did his best to fight them off, using the ghost shield behind him to his advantage—unlike a regular wall, the shield would deflect all of their blasts back at them. However, no matter how hard he tried, he knew that it was useless; Danny was outnumbered, and he wouldn’t last forever. It was impossible to defeat them all and break Wes out of the shield before the next round of agents.

In the end, he was pinned under a ghost-proof net, bleeding in about three different places. An agent, a man with cold eyes and calloused hands, stood over him with a lopsided grin. “Looks like capturing the human wasn’t useless, after all,” he said. He placed a foot over Danny’s crouching form. “We got the ghost boy.”

Danny gritted his teeth. He was out of options, and at this point, he wouldn’t be able to escape with Wes. Sure, he still had the map, but he couldn’t just leave him behind… left at the GiW’s mercy...

But what choice did he have?

Danny glanced sideways and met Wes’s desperate stare. Guilt and defeat wracked his conscience and Danny clenched his fists. He didn’t want to… everything in him screamed not to do it. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

Wes’s eyes widened. “What?”

Danny held the map in front of him, ignoring the agents’ curiosity and Wes’s gasp of realization. The red-headed boy crawled toward the shield’s wall, trembling as he fought tremors of pain, “No, no, don’t leave me—”

“Take me back,” Danny told the map, firmly holding onto the scroll. The GiW agent standing over him stumbled backward when Danny was pulled out from under the net. As he was whisked away, he heard one last desperate cry from Wes. And then, he was swallowed by a portal to the Ghost Zone, and everything vanished into green.

It was a matter of seconds before he was pulled onto a floating rock and collapsed on his knees. A glance over his shoulder confirmed that the portal he’d been pulled through had closed itself, meaning the GiW wouldn’t be able to follow him. Even though he knew that he was safe now, he couldn’t seem to calm himself down. His breath was still erratic and his hands—dang hands—wouldn’t stop shaking.

He couldn’t stop thinking about Wes and all the scars that had been marked across his pale body, followed by the image of that bloody table. Bile rose in his throat and he haphazardly swallowed it, forcing it down. If what he thinks happened did happen, then….

One of Danny’s biggest fears that he never spoke about, not even to Sam or Tucker, was the fear of being dissected. After all, he was threatened with it enough that it was a probable situation. His biology was rare; obviously getting him on a lab table was any scientist’s dream. His parents rambled on and on about dissecting ghosts that he dreamt about it too—being strapped to an examination table, crowded by scientists, sterilized scalpels digging into his skin. And in every nightmare, he was always the one staring into the eyes of the scientists, on the receiving end of their knives. Not Wes. It was never meant to be Wes.

He clenched his fists. It was never meant to be Wes. This was never supposed to happen, so Danny would make sure it never would… couldn’t… happen.

He made up his mind, stood from his rock, and propelled himself into the air. He knew the way to Clockwork’s lair like the back of his hand and was there in minutes.

“No,” Clockwork refused, upon his arrival.

Danny wasn’t surprised, but that didn’t make him any more content with Clockwork’s answer. “I know you saw what happened to Wes,” he pressed. “They… they thought he was me. It’s wrong. He shouldn’t have been captured.”

Clockwork’s red eyes studied Danny as he shifted into a child, unchanging. “So you’d rather they capture you, instead?”

Danny hesitated. Worst fear or not, Wes didn’t deserve what they had done to him. The images were burned into his eyelids: Wes’s body mottled with half-healing scars, curled up in a heap on the floor, and the sinister curl of the GiW agent’s lips…. He met Clockwork’s eyes with a determined stare. “Yes.”

Clockwork’s sharp gaze softened, shifting into an old man. “I’m sorry,” he stated, “I can’t help you.”

Danny clenched his fists. “So you’re just going to leave him there?” he accused, more desperate than angry.

“Of course not,” Clockwork replied with a staid frown. “He’s going to be released whether I interfere or not.”

Danny blinked in surprise. “Really?” he asked. Clockwork nodded and shifted into a young adult.

“The GiW have seen that he’s not a ghost. They’ll be sending him home by next morning.”

Instantly, Danny felt slightly relieved, but Clockwork’s news didn’t ease all his troubles. He believed the time ghost, seeing as he had no reason to lie. Still, he couldn’t help remember the blood across the table, slick and pooled across the metal surface. Wes’s dark bandages and his abject desperation when Danny left him alone with the agents. Even as a ghost, he found himself shiver. “He won’t be the same,” he realized, quietly.

Clockwork leaned against his staff and turned to look at the circular time window next to them. Danny couldn’t see anything but a swirling green vortex, but Clockwork seemed to discern something in the window. “He’ll heal with time,” he said, watching the swirling green window, knowingly. “You go home. I promise you will meet Wes tomorrow.”

Everything in Danny wanted to argue, to protest that he wanted to speak to Wes now. That he wanted Wes to be okay now, but he knew that it would be useless against the master of time. Reluctantly, he flew from Clockwork’s lair and (after returning the Infi-Map to Frostbite) returned to the human world through the Fenton Portal.

No matter how much he tried, he couldn’t sleep that night. Every time he closed his eyes, he was revisited by graphic images of Wes being tortured, tools of all sorts ripping him open, searching for evidence that he was Phantom—looking for something that only Danny had. He saw Wes pressed against the floor, clutching his bandages, and shaking as he bled. He twisted and turned until finally he couldn’t ignore the sunlight breaking through his curtains.

Normally, Danny flew to school, but something compelled him to walk today. Since it was earlier than usual and Sam and Tucker probably weren’t awake yet, he figured he’d walk alone. His body moved on autopilot, his legs carrying him mechanically to the direction of Casper High.

At least, he thought it was the direction of Casper High. He managed to deceive himself for a while until finally he looked up and found himself standing in front of Wes’s apartment building.

And there, sitting on the doorstep, was Wes.

Danny inhaled sharply. That action must have alerted Wes to his presence because seconds later the broken red-head lifted his head to meet Danny’s eyes. Danny lost himself in the emptiness of Wes’s eyes and realized that they looked just as tired as they had in the GiW facility.

“You’re okay,” Danny managed to say. Even as he said it, he knew it wasn’t true. After what he figured had happened to Wes, he was certain that he could never be okay. Who could?

Wes must have been thinking the same thing, but he kept his silence. His demeanor darkened and he growled, “No thanks to you.”

Danny gulped. “I’m sorry,” he expressed. His apology was heartfelt, but it did little to express his desire that none of this should have happened. He moved closer to Wes, who kept his posture still and guarded. “I didn’t want to leave you behind, but there was nothing I could do, and…” he trailed off and bit his lip. What could he possibly say to make up for leaving him? For any of this screwed up situation? He didn’t know, he couldn’t think. Staying up all night had stolen any coherent apology he might have been able to scrounge up. “I’m sorry,” he repeated, softly.

Wes’s eyes were glued to him, yet dark and unreadable. “Sorry for not trying harder, or for getting me into this mess in the first place?” he ground out.

Danny winced. “I—I never meant to… but you know I had to keep my identity a secret.”

“So you’re glad they caught me instead of you?”

Danny’s eyes widened. “No! Of course not—”

Wes cut him off by standing up. Danny didn’t miss the way that he winced when he moved, pulling himself to his feet. This time when Wes looked into Danny’s eyes, he didn’t mask his pain—Danny could sense his unfiltered agony and cringed.

“I told them I wasn’t a ghost,” Wes began, “but they didn’t believe me. Even after they ran all their tests, they thought I must be hiding my ghostliness in some way,” he emphasized bitterly. “So they…” A lump formed in Wes’s throat, and he turned his gaze to the sidewalk, letting his eyes roam across the sparkly concrete. He took a shaky breath, one so soft that Danny wasn’t sure he could’ve heard without his enhanced senses. He looked back to Danny and whispered, “They cut me up.”

Danny fell silent. He didn’t know what to say. After all, who could even respond to that? All he could do was watch, paralyzed, as Wes sniffled and wiped away a stray tear.

“It doesn’t matter,” the red-head finally decided. “They know now.”

That admission snapped Danny out of his guilt-ridden haze. “Know what?” He had a suspicion… but no. Not that. They couldn’t know that.

“I told them, of course,” Wes nonchalantly explained. “That you’re Phantom. They didn’t listen at first, but after realizing it wasn’t me, well… they did.”

Suddenly, Danny grew aware of the white van in his peripheral vision. A door slid open and men started stepping out of it, armed with guns aimed at the two of them. He knew, now, why Wes was sitting on the doorstep out in the open. They had been counting on his arrival. Wes was bait—and he had fallen for their trap. He felt his heartbeat accelerate, yet he didn’t look away from the broken boy standing before him.

“They were probably listening to our conversation,” Wes stated, eyeing the agents behind Danny. “If they had any doubts about what I told them, they’re gone now.”

The weapons whined as they charged. White boots crunched against gravel as they approached, closer and closer—

And Wes smiled, his first real smile since he had been taken. “You should run now,” he suggested. “I wouldn’t want you to go through what I did.”

Danny ducked at the perfect moment, barely avoiding getting shot. He felt the blasts from the weapons soar where his head had been a split second before and whipped around. He eyed the agents that were surrounding him, doing nothing to mask the fiery green glow in his eyes. It was too late. They know now, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

They know.

With one last glance at Wes, Danny turned himself invisible and kicked off the ground, using what limited flight he had in human form. Wes was right, he had to run—because once they caught him, it would be all over. He’d end up just like Wes, but they wouldn’t let him go. They’d keep him and use him as their sick little lab rat until he finally died.

He had to run… had to… run.

#consider this my entry for the last prompt of dannymay19 since i never made anything for that #danny phantom #wes weston #angst #fic #mine

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