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hailsatanacab · 10 months ago

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a father's son

Happy holiday truce, @dashing-through-ecto!! I was your gifter this year, I hope you enjoy the fic! Based on your prompt: "Do you need any help, Dad?"

Word count 2.2k - ao3 link

Things have not been going well for Danny Fenton.

Not only did he fail in intercepting Lancer’s call home, so now Mom and Dad know about his latest grades—he didn’t even get enough answers for an F this time, not when he fell asleep within the first five minutes—but they also caught Jazz taking the trash out for him.

“That’s one of your chores, young man! Heaven knows you don’t have many of them, which is why you need to be responsible and actually do the ones that we give you! It’s just not good enough, Daniel James Fenton, do you hear me?”

The full name.

It’s not often he gets it, but it sucks each and every time he does.

What sucks even more is that now, with what little free time he has, he’s cleaning the lab. It’s just not fair!

Broken glass skitters along the floor as he sweeps it up into the dustpan, ectoplasm still clinging to the bottom of the beaker.

He can’t even goof off—can’t even use his powers to finish quicker—because his dad is sitting at the workbench tinkering with whatever his newest interest is.

Great. Looks like he’s stuck cleaning the boring, human way.

The lab is quiet, but it isn’t silent.

Ectoplasm drips, maddeningly, from the gloop stuck on the ceiling. That’s a form of torture, isn’t it? Danny’s pretty sure he’s heard that before, that the constant sound of water droplets will drive someone insane. He can relate, because this is certainly testing him.

Dad’s talking to himself, too, little murmurs about what he’s doing, where he should be soldering, how it should be working and why it isn’t.

Vaguely, Danny wonders what he’s working on. Sure, it’s probably some ghost thing, but that’s not all they do! His parents made some pretty great advances before the portal switched on and monopolised all of their thoughts.

Yeah, that might be wishful thinking, but stranger things have happened! You never know.

Every 30 seconds, the motor on the ecto-filter whirrs into life, syphoning off the excess, pure ectoplasm from the portal and filtering it into something less volatile. In theory.

Underneath everything, the portal hums.

A droning beat that pulses in the same rhythm as his heart. Sometimes, he catches himself staring at it, leaning closer as it calls to him.

It scares him.

“Shit!” his dad shouts, dropping the soldering iron with a loud clang.

It’s enough to knock Danny out of whatever daydream he’d lost himself in and he whirls around to see his dad sucking on one of his fingers.

They lock eyes, both widening as they realise what’s happened.

“Ah, I mean, suffering spooks! That really hurt…” He shoves his fingers back into his mouth and his shoulders droop as he considers Danny. “Don’t tell your mother.”

Danny laughs.

“Are you alright?”

“It’d take more than that to put Jack Fenton down! All good, Danno, don’t you worry,” he smiles back before shaking his hand out and turning back to whatever he was working on. “Or, I would be, if this hunk of junk was cooperating with me!”

“What’s up?” Danny asks, curiosity getting the better of him.

Normally, he likes to stay out of the lab, as much as he can.

Obviously, what Phantom does doesn’t count. Phantom can’t help but come into the lab, set ghosts loose into the Zone, trash whatever weapons his parents have got going on, sneak out into the Zone when he can for some much needed R&R. The ectoplasm just hits different there.

“I’m trying to repurpose this toaster, but the ecto won’t run smoothly through the wiring. I think it keeps getting cooked by the element.”

“Oh? Do you need some help?”

Danny doesn’t like spending time in the lab, because if he’s in the lab then he’s either Phantom and he’s trying hard not to be seen or heard, or he’s Danny and he’s being punished.

But his curiosity is piqued.

“Yeah, come here, have a look! Perhaps another Fenton brain can knock some sense into it!”

So, he does.

Hell, anything beats cleaning the lab.

“You’re trying to run it through here?”

Dad nods and shifts in his seat to give Danny a better view.

“But you can’t, because the ecto is tripping the heating element… which is way higher than a toaster has any right to be, wow. No wonder it’s destabilising the ectoplasm, that would destabilise anything.”

Danny pokes around the casing, wiggling the wires back and forth to get a better look at the absolute mess his dad has made of it all. Sometimes it amazes him that his parents' inventions work at all.

“That’s what I’m thinking! But it has to be that high so we can completely break down the ecto!”

“You want it to break down?”

“Yep!” Dad says, clapping him on the back hard enough that he wheezes. He grins down at him when Danny turns around reproachfully. “Think of it, boyo, if we could figure out how to flash fry that ectoplasm high enough so that it evaporates—which it should do, it’s goopy gross liquid, after all!—then you wouldn’t be stuck down here cleaning for so long! We could take it to the streets after a ghost fight and clean up the whole town!”

Well, it’s not a Nobel Prize level invention… Danny’s pretty sure at this point that his parents would be laughed out by the Nobel committee. But, a quicker cleaning of the lab does sound nice.

It would mean he’d be stuck down here a lot less.

Besides… It's interesting.

“What if we…” Danny trails off and pulls the metal frame towards him, grabbing the tweezers as he goes. Vaguely, he’s aware of his dad leaning over his shoulder, the weight of him watching is a comforting presence that he’s not felt in a long while.

The real trouble is that you need ectoplasm to affect ectoplasm, and that’s not going to work if the object of the game is to evaporate it.

So what if they don’t introduce the reactive ecto until the end?

He makes quick work of stripping down what his dad’s already done and starts again, this time focussing on keeping the heat contained separately away from the ectoplasm. Just as he’s piecing together a trigger to concurrently shoot a blast of ecto towards the heated tip, Dad exclaims as he realises where he’s going with it.

“Oh! Danny, you’re a genius! Look at that!” Dad laughs and squints closer at what Danny’s doing. “Just wait until your mother sees this, she’s going to be so happy!”

Danny can’t help but grin as he ductapes everything to a piece of toaster casing to give it the first test try. Dad’s enthusiasm is catching as he whoops when the first puddle of ectoplasm burns off in acrid smoke.

They spend another couple of hours perfecting it, welding a case together and branding it with the Fenton F.

It’s not pretty—but then again, when are his parents’ inventions?—a long stick with a cattle-prod-like taser at the end. Instead of electricity, it launches ectoplasm from one rod and superheats the other. When activated, all you need to do is touch the tip to a puddle and poof! It’s gone.

Danny shivers as he watches another pool go up.

But, no! He’s thinking about it wrong. It’s not a cattle-prod, it’s more like one of those sticks you see people using on the highway to jab at the litter on the floor. It’s for cleaning. It’s going to make his lab cleaning chores way easier! It’s—

“Danny, just look at it!”

Danny looks at it, and then back to his father’s face when he can’t bear to see the smoking ecto anymore. It’s painfully happy and Danny does his best to be happy, too.

“Here!” Dad shoves the contraption into Danny’s arms. “You use that and finish what you’re doing and then when you’re done—I can’t believe I’m saying this, galloping ghouls, I’m so happy, I’m working with my boy—we can get to work transferring it over to the Jack o’ Nine Tails! Imagine it, Danny, with one whip and that pesky poltergeist Phantom will be gone!”

Danny freezes.

It feels as if Dad’s just dumped a bucket of ice water over him.

“Poof! Up in smoke!”

The fumes are getting to him. That must be it. His head is swimming and his stomach is churning. There’s a ringing in his ears and it melds with the sharp, stinging whirr of ectoplasm sizzling. It pulses in time with the portal behind him.

He stumbles, almost goes down—almost throws up—but it doesn’t matter. Dad doesn’t see him, already turned away back to the work bench.

It doesn’t matter.

You know what, it’s okay! It’ll be okay, Danny can sneak back down here later tonight and he can undo it all, it doesn’t matter!

Take a deep breath, now, finish cleaning the lab, ignore Dad—it doesn’t matter—and get this over with. Being here makes his skin crawl, he needs to finish—

“I’m so proud of you, Danny.”

For the second time, Danny stops.

Dad doesn’t say anything else, just sits with his back to him, opening and closing his hand over a screwdriver with the Jack o’ Nine Tails splayed out in front of him.

It takes longer than Danny wants to find his voice, but he manages to croak out, “What?”

“I’m proud of you, Danno. I know this year hasn’t been easy for you, don’t think we haven’t noticed. Your mom and I have been talking about how you're doing at school. We're not blind. We know kids can be cruel, and that Dash Baxter… But we're so proud of you for not rising to it. We love you so much, Danny.”

A lump grows in Danny’s throat and his eyes prickle.

His fingers bleach white where they grip the Fenton Evaporator too tight.

“Look at what you can do when you try, Danny! This is the boy that I know, this is the Danny that I love. I’m so proud of what we’ve done here today. It’ll make the world a better place, just you wait! Now, come on, boyo, pass me that soldering iron and let’s really get stuck in!”

And… And Danny does.

With shaky limbs and tears threatening to spill, Danny reaches over and passes Dad the soldering iron, watching as he gets to work, and when his dad asks him to get his hands dirty—“Here, run this wire up the rope, there’s a good boy!”—he does.

Danny does it all and he does it well.

He sucks in a deep breath, swipes a hand over his eyes, and he helps his dad.

He laughs when Dad tells his stupid jokes:

“Quick! What’s red, white, and blue all over?”

“I don’t know, Dad, what’s red, white, and blue all over?”

“A ghost that we’ve beaten into oblivion!”

And he hopes that his mom is going to be just as proud as Dad says she will be when she sees what they’ve done.

It’s easy, really.

If he doesn’t think about it, if he tucks his mind away and just lets his hands get on with it, then he’s just helping his dad and he can do that. He can do it.

He can do it.

So, no, he doesn’t sabotage what they’ve built. He doesn’t add in a failsafe. He doesn’t loosen a few screws, or overload the element, or untwist a few wires.

Danny does his best and at the end of the day his dad holds up the new and improved Jack o’ Nine Tails and absolutely beams at him. A work of art, he calls it.

Danny doesn’t sabotage it then and he won’t sabotage it later, because it’s a work of art. This is what he and his dad built. Together.

Danny can’t help but grin back, happiness curling in his belly even as it gives a sickening lurch.

He doesn’t eat dinner that night, he can’t.

He stays downstairs long enough to present the new weapon to Mom—very pointedly ignoring Jazz’s look—and then he heads upstairs. There’s an English essay he needs to get started on, after all.

He doesn’t miss the look Mom and Dad share, the fond tenderness, the love, the hope, all directed at him.

He’s happy.

They’re happy.

They’re proud of him.

And despite it all, he had fun today!

When he lays down on his bed, he smiles and he can’t stop the laughter bubbling up as he thinks about his dad. At one point, he had been holding up a circular piece of metal he’d cannibalised from the lamp shade to his eyes, moving it back and forth as he pulled his funny faces, and some of that full belly laugh creeps back in as he remembers doing the same back.

He laughs so hard until he cries, and he cries, and he cries.

Today, he and his dad built a weapon.

Tomorrow, it'll be used on him, but that's okay.

It's okay because today, today his dad was proud.

#danny phantom #holiday truce #holiday truce 2023 #jack fenton #angst fic #hope you enjoy!! sorry it's slightly late 😬#and happy holiday truce!!!!

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auroraphantasma · 10 months ago

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@finnsomersaults Merry Holiday Truce!

You asked for Ghost King Danny, and i hope you like it. I've never drawn GK!Danno before.

#danny phantom #holiday truce 2023 #holiday truce #ghost king danny #sorry for being so last minute my fridge was not running #i hope you like it #my art

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five-rivers · 10 months ago

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Daedalus

@regular-dog Hello! I am your holiday truce gifter this year! I hope you enjoy this labyrinth-themed fic. Happy New Year!

Only three years in, and it was already impossible to tell how big Amity Park was. Normal methods of surveying didn’t work. Physical maps were either always right or always wrong, and sometimes both at once. Driving across the city at a constant speed didn’t help, either. The outgoing trip and the return trip never seemed to match, and there simply weren’t enough one-way streets in Amity Park for that to be the answer to the problem.

Asking the residents didn’t help, either. They couldn’t even agree on how big the city they lived in was. Some of them acted like Amity Park was the second coming of Chicago, others expressed confusion when Amity Park was referred to as anything but a small town.

(The census data was almost worse.)

But no matter what version of Amity a particular resident believed they lived in, there were always similarities. There was always Casper High, and its Ravens, and every student went there, and learned from Mr. Lancer, and heard the rumors about Sydney Poindexter. There was always the Nasty Burger, and Valerie Gray working one of the many distasteful jobs that the place had to offer. There was always Amity Park Park, confusingly named and full of even more confusing paths, whether it was a city park or a county park, or something else altogether.

There was always Fentonworks, rising tall and strange from a small, ordinary neighborhood.

There was a heaviness there, around that particular building. A weight that drew in other things, that twisted. It was the heart of a labyrinth of streets, of old roads and new, of forest paths and disused hiking trails. It was the heart of Amity Park.

And it should be said that, at the heart of any labyrinth, there was a monster.

And it should be said that, at the threshold of every labyrinth, there was a princess.

And it should be said that the one thing that every labyrinth waits for is a hero.

Samantha Manson wound golden string around her fingers, thinking. It glowed faintly in the dark of her room, like the thinnest, purest beam of sunlight cast through morning mist and a thick canopy of leaves overhead.

However, her eyes didn’t linger on it. Instead, she looked out the window over her– garden– conservatory– greenhouse– private park– the place where she went to grow plants, and be among them, that may or may not have changed in nature and size while she was looking. Which may or may not have had many natures and sizes.

She closed her eyes. Insight was useful, as vital as the blood in her veins and the lightning in her nerves, but it had its drawbacks.

When she opened them again, a hedge maze stood dark and tempting beneath the light of a moon that should not be full and should not be there and had never been that big, in any case. The lights of Amity- rising high with skyscrapers or low to the ground and scattered among farmhouses– laid beyond it.

In her hands, the string hummed, as if it had been held taught and plucked. A single, clear note filled the air.

“Do you think it will work?” she asked.

There shouldn’t have been anyone in her room, and there wasn’t. But her nearest neighbors could be five miles from the walls of her home or five feet, and she rarely spoke to them. The distance between friends was greater, but also infinitely less.

Tucker looked up from his computer, which sat at his desk, in his own room, in his own house, the light from the moon shining in from the window behind him. His glasses reflected the pale, bluish light of his computer screen. The wheels of his desk chair rolled across the carpet of his room - so different from hers - with a squeak.

“You’re not getting cold feet now,” he said. It wasn’t so much a question as an exclamation.

Sam sniffed. “Of course not. But I’m not the one taking the biggest risk, am I?”

There was a third room. This one dark and starry. The glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to every available surface were normal. The patterns they were in were not. Nor were the eyes that stared out from beneath star-spangled bedsheets. Nor was the moon, gleaming from windows stationed on either side of the bed.

“I’m not sure if it actually matters if it works,” said the owner of those eyes, blinking slowly. “I mean, if it works the way it’s supposed to work. We’ll just go back to plan A if it doesn’t.”

“No offense, Danny, but plan A sucked,” said Tucker.

“How am I not supposed to take offense to that?” whined Danny. “Plan A is fine. It’s a normal plan. I know my city.” The last was said with a casual but deep possessiveness.

“Plan A wasn’t even really a plan,” said Sam. “Your plan was to just fly in and find them, never mind all the other things that are happening.”

“That’s not so different from this plan,” protested Danny. “It’s basically the same. It’s just the how that’s different.”

“Pretty big how, though,” said Tucker. “And I thought you liked this plan.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” said Danny. “I’m just saying, I’m just saying that even if it doesn’t work, we won’t be any worse off than we were at the beginning, before, you know. The research.” He pointed vaguely in the direction of his window.

Somehow, Sam knew that he was, in fact, pointing at the stack of thick books sitting on her desk. Only, instead of pointing at them across the there-not-there division between their rooms, he was pointing in their true direction, across the streets and forests of Amity Park.

The covers of the books shouldn’t have been legible in the darkness. Sam could read them anyway. Greek mythology. Sympathetic magic. Recurrence. Narrative causality. Daedalus, Icarus, Theseus, Ariadne, Asterion.

Four days ago, New Athens High School had sent a bus bearing the fourteen members of their track team and their coach to a meet in Elmerton. On the way back, the driver had made a wrong turn, knifing straight through the heart of Amity. The bus, the driver, and the coach had come out the other side. No one knew what had happened to the track team.

Danny had spent three of those days looking for them. Amity Park had spent those same three days winding itself more tightly than the ball of string sitting on Sam’s desk. Whether it was downtown, or the forest, or the suburbs, the part of Amity New Athens’ bus had passed through was a maze.

A labyrinth.

They’d thrown themselves into research, then, begging for information from their allies. Or, rather, from Danny’s allies. Most of them, with the exception of Dora, were there for him more than for the rest of them. Pandora was the one who had finally noticed the connections, the links with old stories, the resonance.

There was a labyrinth. There were sacrifices. Other roles–

“Or, if you don’t want to leave it, you could send Tucker in,” said Danny, shrugging slightly. “If it doesn’t work with just me. You know.”

Sam’s fingers slipped.

Sam was the obvious choice for the role of princess. Danny was the obvious choice for the role of hero.

He should have been, anyway.

“Hence why I’m asking if you think it’ll work,” said Sam, sharply.

“I hope it’ll work.”

Sam huffed. “Not what I’m asking.”

“It won’t hurt to try.”

“It might,” said Sam. “The monster dies at the end of the story. The princess is abandoned. Even Theseus doesn’t have a happy ending.”

“And we aren’t those characters. It isn’t as if Tucker is going to cut my head off.” Again, Danny waved in Tucker’s true direction, rather than across the emptiness of his room. “We’re the ones making the decisions. We’re just using the stories for– For narrative clout. Or however you described it.”

“Danny…”

“It’ll be fine. I mean,” he looked up at her with those too-bright eyes, the rest of his face black with shadows, “if you’re having second thoughts, it’s fine. We can try something else.”

“I’m not having second thoughts.” Sam began to unwind the string from around her fingers, wrapping it around the rest of the ball. The maze outside her window had become a winding garden path, and the neighbors were once again nearby.

Tucker cleared his throat. “First thing in the morning, then? We ride at dawn and all that?”

“Before dawn would probably be better, honestly,” said Sam.

Danny sighed. “I’ll set my alarm clock.”

It might have been neater to enter the maze in Sam’s backyard, or to start from the spiraling center that was Fentonworks, but that wasn’t where the bus had disappeared. The bus had disappeared going through downtown Amity Park.

Well. Insofar as the bus had disappeared in any particular location. And insofar as Amity Park had a downtown.

The lack of permanence of place made discussing things like this somewhat difficult.

Still. At the moment, there was a downtown. A historical shopping district, as a matter of fact. As he walked down the sidewalk in the crisp, gray, predawn light, Danny could feel beneath his feet a hum. The shopping district here was the mainstreet of small town Amity, even as skyscrapers loomed overhead, and the layers felt real enough for Danny to reach out and rub them between his fingers.

(They weren’t really, but they felt like it.)

He stopped in front of an alley that smelled of cinnamon and sea salt. Here, the layers parted, and you could slip between them, into the interstices and forbidden places of Amity Park.

“Is this the place?” asked Tucker.

“Yeah,” said Danny. “I think so.” He motioned them to the mouth of the alley, where they’d be covered by shadows and next to unnoticeable by those who were firmly in any one version of Amity Park. “Sam?”

She teased out the end of the golden string and cast it towards Danny. As it flew through the air, it twisted and knotted itself before falling over Danny’s head. The loops shrunk around his neck, creating a narrow golden collar.

Danny raised his hand to touch it and made a face. “It’s tight,” he said.

“Sorry,” said Sam, glaring at the ball of string as if it had betrayed her. “I don’t–”

“It’s fine,” said Danny, waving it off. “Just unexpected.”

“Right,” said Tucker, stepping forward. “Your sword, Theseus.” He handed Danny a Fenton invention that had a passing resemblance to a lightsaber.

Danny rolled his eyes and took the small cylinder. “Thanks. But don’t call me that.”

“Hey, that’s the story we’re trying to tell.”

“We’ll give it a tug if we run out of string,” said Sam.

“Mm,” said Danny. “Well. Might have to give it more than one. Don’t let me drag you in.”

Sam snorted. “What, like you drag us into everything else?”

“Seriously. Just let me go if I start pulling too hard.”

“No way,” said Tucker. “We’ll just tie you onto some building or something.”

“I have been known to bring down buildings.”

“Well, don’t,” said Sam.

“Wow. No sympathy here, I see.”

“Nope,” said Sam and Tucker together.

“Now go save the tourists,” said Sam, pushing him forward.

“They’re not really tourists,” said Danny. But even so, he stepped across the line and into the gap.

Into the labyrinth.

The in-between spaces of Amity Park did not immediately look like they were the in-between spaces of Amity. Danny sometimes liked to imagine that they were what Amity Park used to look like, before it became a dozen different, mutually exclusive places. That had to be impossible, though. There was too much, too many different things, afterimages and fantasies and illusions.

People walked on the streets, and cars drove, but they were transparent, projections from the layers of Amity immediately bordering this space. Sometimes, they walked through each other, not noticing at all.

Danny still flinched when it looked like cars were about to run into one another, and let out a breath of relief when they instead seemed to phase through each other.

So he walked.

He walked, and as he walked, the road began to change. He began to change. Facades paled. Grecian columns reached up the sides of skyscrapers and ranch homes. Brick turned to marble. Danny’s t-shirt and jeans slowly, gently, became a chiton and chlamys, trimmed in red. The Fenton Saber became a sword of green-tinted bronze, strapped to a belt around his waist. His shoes became sandals, laced up to his knees.

It wasn’t the first time Danny had worn clothing like this. He did visit Pandora. But he’d never worn it in Amity Park. It was a little embarrassing. The ancient Greeks’ idea of underwear was… lacking, in Danny’s opinion. But it wasn’t as if anyone here could see him.

The act of walking here also felt strange, and Danny couldn’t understand why this was needed. Not really. Not the act, not the ritual. By virtue of his nature, he could duck in and out of anywhere in Amity whenever he wanted. Mostly. At least, he could find places to duck in and out whenever he wanted.

He should have been able to find the missing students without any problem.

But he hadn’t.

And he still wasn’t finding them. There was no pull. No indication of what direction he should go, what direction he could find them in.

Danny sighed, and the sky above boiled with stars.

He looked up, not having expected that, then shrugged and continued to walk. Things here were strange.

There were words on the walls, now, carved into the marble alongside window displays for cell phones and stationary. Ἀστερίων, Ἀριάδνη, Θησεύς. He traced Ἀριάδνη with his fingers. It sparked gold, the same color as the string around Danny’s neck.

And then the string flexed. Pulled. Spooled forward, winding into a ball in front of Danny. A short thread was thrown off of the rapidly spinning ball and settled on Danny’s head before solidifying into something heavy and cold.

(Elsewhere, the end of the string tears itself out of Sam’s hand, disappearing into the rift between.)

“Oh,” said Danny. He bit his lip and closed his eyes, and mentally apologized to his friends for worrying them. “Theseus was from Athens. Ariadne wasn’t just rich, she had authority over Crete. We had the roles wrong.”

(Not that Danny really wanted authority over Amity Park. That… just wasn’t his thing. He didn’t want to be in charge. He just wanted to protect.)

But this meant… He needed to find one of the New Athens kids and get them to be Theseus.

He didn’t want to do that. He was here to rescue them, not to force them to rescue themselves. And… iIf he could find one of them, couldn’t he find the others? Finding them was the problem he’d started with. If he could find them, he could bring them out.

He stumbled as the section of string wrapped around his throat tightened. That actually hurt!

Then it loosened and Danny took a deep breath.

Narrative weight, right. They were already trying this story. Changing it or aborting it halfway would have consequences. Ones that Danny didn’t want to deal with.

He swallowed. He couldn’t help but remember that in the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, many people, many Athenians, had died before Theseus had finally defeated the Minotaur. When it was Danny in the role of Theseus, that hadn’t been a concern. He was certain he could fight any monster, any ghost in the role of the Minotaur.

But some random kid from New Athens? One who had probably never seen a ghost, and who had been stuck here for days?

That… that he wasn’t at all confident about.

Sam had been right to be wary of the risks. It was different, when someone else was facing them.

He rolled the ball between his hands, feeling it over. Power thrummed between his fingers, brighter and sharper than before. A thin stripe of gold ran down the sidewalk, twisting over on itself and turning away from the main street.

Danny sighed, and started to follow.

Danica was starting to panic.

One moment, she’d been on the bus, falling asleep after a difficult meet despite how risky it was to fall asleep anywhere near Georgie and his so-called ‘artistic impulses.’ The next thing she knew, she was waking up on a sidewalk in some kind of nightmare city. A nightmare city full of things that looked almost like people but were transparent and walked right through her as if she weren’t there.

She didn’t know how long she’d been here, trying to figure out how she’d gotten here, where the bus was, where everything else was, but it felt like hours, at least. She was starting to get hungry.

She was starting to wonder if she’d gone crazy. Or if this was what it was like to be dead. And that was before the buildings started to melt into weird, semi-Greek-Revival messes.

It was weird here, and she hated it. She wanted to go home. She wanted her mom. She wanted to quit the track team and never have to deal with anything like this ever again.

“Hello?” called a soft voice.

She whipped around. Up until now, this place had been eerily quiet.

Standing just a few feet from her was a boy, one who could have stepped out of a history textbook. He was wearing something like a cape, and a Greek-style tunic, white trimmed in red. Tangled in his hair was a thin, golden circlet. But the strangest thing about him was the ball of glowing golden string in his hand. One end of it was wrapped around his neck.

“You–!” said Danica, suddenly more furious than frightened. “Did you bring me here? Why?”

The boy shook his head. “I didn’t bring you here. Actually, I’m hoping to help you get out. You and the rest of your teammates.”

“They– They’re here, too? And the coach–?”

“No, just your teammates,” said the boy. He made a face. “You guys kind of… Ran into a story.”

“A what?” demanded Danica, incredulous. She’d also, incidentally, started to back away from the boy.

“A story. Have you heard of Theseus and the Minotaur?”

“What if I don't want to do this?” asked the girl, after Danny had finished explaining. “What if I can’t do this?”

Danny stared at her, a bit baffled. The thing about being a ghost, even half a ghost, the thing about thinking like a ghost… Sometimes it was hard to wrap his head around other perspectives. Especially when his friends, the only people he really talked to, were just as eager to jump in and help as he was.

He hadn't wanted to make anyone risk themselves. He wanted to bring them to safety without that. He also hadn't expected that anyone would just… not want to help.

“Well, I suppose… I suppose you could follow me until I found one of your classmates who could?” he said. “Although… I’m not sure if we can do that with this story. It might be that I have to find someone alone and then they find everyone… In which case you’d just have to wait for them. Speaking of which, how long has this been for you? On the outside, it’s been a few days, but you look a little too good for that.”

“I– What? Days? I haven’t been here for days.”

“Not from your perspective, maybe. Time is weird. Even without all this…” He waved his hand, trying to indicate ghost weirdness in general. “... stuff, even with just the things we can look at scientifically, it’s still relative. Right now, you’re basically in a dimensional pocket. Pocket dimension? Whatever. The point is, is time running at different rates really that strange, comparatively? At least, it made it so that you didn’t starve before me and my friends were able to figure this out.” He raised the ball of golden string, ignoring how the movement pulled on his neck. “Right?”

The girl gave him a ‘why are you using science-fiction terms in what is clearly a fantasy scenario’ look. At least, that’s how Danny chose to interpret it.

He sighed. “What’s your name, anyway?”

“Danica,” she said, then looked angry at herself and shrugged. “Or Dani, I guess.”

“Huh, small world,” said Danny. “That’s my sister’s name, too.” Not to mention his. Maybe Theseus’s story wasn’t the only one being echoed, with a coincidence like that.

The girl continued to stare at him, this time with a ‘why the heck are you bringing that up while I’m having a crisis’ look. Probably. Danny tended to make a similar expression from time to time. Usually when the ghosts he fought started having lovers’ quarrels in the middle of a fight.

“So,” he said, awkwardly. “You can come with me, of course, just to… test out what will happen?”

“Oh!” said Danica, suddenly. “Just– Just give me that!” She held out her hands for the ball of string.

Danny beamed, and passed it to her. It glowed even brighter.

“Now what?” she asked, staring at it nervously.

“Now, you need this,” Danny said, taking off the sword and holding it out to her, hilt first. “And then you search for your friends, and when you find them��” He pinched a length of the string between the finger and thumb of her free hand. “You follow this back out.”

Danica was much more reluctant to take the sword than the string. But that was fine. One of the two was for holding things together, the other was for taking things apart. Danny knew which was easier, and which he was more comfortable with.

“That's it. Remember, it's just the members of your track team, okay? The coach and the bus driver got out.”

“Okay,” said Danica. She took a deep, steadying breath. “Okay. I can do this.”

Danny nodded encouragingly. “Yes,” he said, “definitely.”

Danny stepped out of the in-between, back into the alley he'd left Sam and Tucker in. Except, it wasn't an alley anymore, but a thin dirt path between hedges.

He was immediately tackled.

“We thought we'd lost you!” said Sam. Then she pulled back and examined him closely before looking pointedly behind him. “Where're the track kids?”

Danny rubbed the back of his neck. “Well. In the story, Theseus is from Athens, remember?”

Sam groaned. “They're having to do it themselves?”

“Yeah. A girl named Danica. Dani. Believe it or not.”

“Wow,” said Tucker. “Really?”

“Really.”

Danny turned to look behind him, tracing the string where it twisted away from reality and into not-space.

Tucker sighed. “This is going to take a while, isn't it?”

It took Danica surprisingly little time to find her teammates. For all the time she’d spent wandering on her own, after she’d accepted the sword and the string, she’d located everyone in what felt like an hour. Some of them were even in groups!

The problem was, she found too many of them.

“Mm,” said Danny, still worried. “Probably. I hope she doesn’t have to fight anything.”

There had been fourteen of them. She knew there had been fourteen of them, because the coach and the driver had both done headcounts, because of the number of people they were allowed to field in each event at this particular meet, and because she remembered that someone had been sick. But there were, including her, fifteen kids now huddled in something that aesthetically hovered in-between the Parthenon and a shopping mall.

She couldn’t remember who had been sick. No one could. But everyone wanted to convince her that it wasn’t them.

Probably because she was the one with the sword.

“I think that if there was anything, it would have gone after Danny when he was searching earlier, right?” asked Sam.

“Maybe,” said Danny. “Unless it was scared of me. I am pretty powerful.”

“And if Danny’s Ariadne in this, he was Ariadne at the beginning,” pointed out Tucker. “The story was already going. Ariadne never fought the Minotaur.”

“Astarion,” said Danny.

“Huh?”

“That’s the Minotaur’s actual name,” said Sam. She frowned slightly. “He was Ariadne’s half-brother, you know.”

“Yeah,” said Danny, slowly. “He was, wasn’t he?”

“Listen,” said Danica, trying to mask the shake in her voice, “I’m sorry, but– But based on everything, you aren’t who you say you are.”

There was nothing she could do about how badly the sword was shaking.

“I am!” said the girl, who couldn’t be there, because Eliza had taken the one place in the 100 meter, and Jaylynn did the javelin, and Lachandra had done the high jump, and no one remembered her competing at all. “I really am, I promise!”

It was convincing, her act. But it had to be an act, it really did.

“Dani,” said Lachandra, “is it really that important? I mean, if we take her with us? We just want to get out.”

“But she could eat us,” said Kevin, who was a bit of a mythology buff on top of being a track nerd. “She could– If this is the Minotaur story– She’ll try to kill us and then–”

“I won’t!” shouted the girl. Her eyes– For a moment, they changed color. Red. Her teeth were sharp, too.

Danica gritted her teeth and swung the sword down.

Danny caught her wrist, panting. He’d followed the string back.

“Wait,” he said, breathless. “Wait.”

“Where–” said Danica, jerking back. “Why–?”

Danny turned towards the ‘Minotaur.’ “Hi,” he said, trying to be as nonthreatening as possible. “You’re one of Vlad’s aren’t you?”

Their face shimmered for a moment, and then– It was like looking into a mirror. This wasn’t Dani - his Dani, Danielle - but a boy with red eyes. He wore a chiton like Danny’s, but he looked starved, pale, terrified.

He nodded.

“There is,” said Danny, cautiously, “another story about escaping from the labyrinth. How would you like to be Daedalus?”

“What was that?” hissed Danica, as they walked away from… whatever that was. “Why are you here, now, leading us out, when you couldn’t before?”

“Story is different now,” said Danny, tightly. “And I was leading you out before. Just with the string.”

“What if you get lost?” asked Kevin.

Danny grinned at him. “I won’t. He isn’t trying to keep you in anymore.”

“Who isn’t?” asked Danica.

“Daedalus. Him. He just wanted out, I think. Sorry for– I’m sorry about all of this,” said Danny. “I didn’t want to get other people involved in Amity Park stuff, and I especially didn’t want to get you involved in family stuff, but…” He shrugged, then caught sight of an out. It looked, from this side, like a slightly darker than expected gap between stately white pillars. “Here we go! And I think this one is next to the police station, too, so just, you know. Check yourselves in.”

“Just like that?” asked Danica.

“Just like that,” said Danny. “I will need those back, though.” He nodded at the string and sword.

“Right,” said Danica. She shoved both at him. “I can’t believe– I would have kill that– Whatever– Whoever–” She stopped, looking very much like she wanted to cry.

“I’m sorry,” said Danny again, softly. “But it is over now.”

The New Athens kids walked into the gap and vanished.

The string dissolved into golden, glittering light and then settled in his hands as a pair of equally golden wings. Danny laughed.

“Okay,” he said. He turned, bouncing a little. “I get the picture. I think we can avoid the Icarus problem, being ghosts and all.”

#danny phantom #holiday truce #holiday truce 2023

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kostektyw · 2 years ago

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"Isn't it beautiful?"

i think if Danny figured out to visit space in a way that's safe for humans he would love to share the experience :)

this is my truce gift for @closet-thing, happy holidays!! i was inspired by the space/stars prompt and also a mention of Jazz in another prompt that i didn't exactly follow :p

#danny phantom #closet-thing #phandom holiday truce #2022 holiday truce

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oceankat8 · 2 years ago

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Happy Truce @plazmawulf !!

Prompt: Mariah Carey and Ember have combined their powers for a new Christmas single and Danny has heard enough.

I hope you like it!

#Danny Phantom #ember dp #mariah carey #christmas #2022 holiday truce #fanart #kat8 #art

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spookberry · 2 years ago

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@saxonroa Happy Holidays! I was your gifter for the holiday truce this year, all of your prompts had a lot of potential interest but I wound up going with the tucker and sam focused angst lol

Hope you like it!

#holiday truce 2022 #danny phantom #phanart #my art #no one knows au

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torscrawls · 11 months ago

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Pressurized

Happy Holiday Truce @ectospacecadet! This is my gift for you, based on the prompt “Sometimes all it takes is one bad day to break someone: Danny snaps.” Hope it tastes good!

You can also read it on AO3.

“Fenton! Get up that rope!”

Danny clutched his aching left arm tight to his side, cursing Skulker and his attack early this morning as he moved to do as Ms. Tetslaff had ordered. The wound throbbed and radiated pain up his whole arm as he grabbed the rope and started to haul himself up.

“Ha! Fenturd is too much of a wimp to get up that rope!” Dash laughed and was soon joined by the rest of the A-listers.

Danny grit his teeth and reminded himself that what Dash and the rest thought about him really didn’t matter in the big picture. He had more important things to worry about. Like how to keep his wound from opening back up while making it to the top of the rope. Maybe he could use a touch of flight to—

Suddenly the whole rope heaved beneath him, writhing like a snake come alive, and Danny lost his grip. Thankfully the fall wasn’t long, but it still hurt when he landed—of course—on his wounded left arm.

Danny groaned from where he lay on the mat and as soon as he opened his eyes he got a face full of a grinning Dash, leaning over him and looking proud of himself. He still held the rope Danny had been climbing in one hand. Of course he had been the one to mess with him. Danny couldn’t even find it in himself to be surprised.

Danny turned his head to his side and saw Tetslaff on the other side of the room, not looking. Of course.

Dash laughed. “Wow, I didn’t know Fentoe was so weak he couldn’t even hold on to a rope!”

Danny reminded himself that Dash didn’t matter and that he didn’t care about what they thought, that he didn’t care about any of this. He didn’t.

Danny got to his feet, keeping his left arm close to his side. He felt a slow trickling of warmth run down the inside of his arm and really hoped his wound hadn’t opened back up. It would be just his luck.

Tucker jogged up next to him and sent him a concerned look. “Hey, you okay man?”

Danny took a deep breath, relaxed his clenched hands and let it out slowly before looking at Tucker and giving him what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “Yeah. I’m good.”

Considering Tucker’s grimace, he guessed he didn’t manage it, but his friend thankfully didn’t push the issue. And he was fine, this didn’t matter. It was just a slight annoyance. He would fix the wound after gym was over and then it would all be fine.

They were interrupted by Tetslaff suddenly deigning to look over towards them now that Dash had started climbing his own rope to the cheers of his friends. She frowned and immediately screamed, “Fenton! Foley! If you have time to just stand around talking, then you have time to run twenty laps! Get going!”

So Danny pushed down his pain and started running, Tucker by his side.

—-

After gym was over he waited until everyone else had finished changing out of their gym clothes before doing it himself, ignoring Dash and his lackeys continuous jabs and insults.

He didn’t feel like explaining his wound—which he was now certain he had reopened as the warm wetness on the inside of his arm hadn’t stopped and only gotten worse as time went on—and his extensive bruising. It would just raise a lot of questions. And probably even more insults, and even if Dash and the rest didn’t matter, Danny was too tired to deal with it right now.

He had to convince Tucker to go on ahead without him, “There’s no reason why we both have to be late. Besides, I don’t want them to start bullying you too.”

Apparently that hadn’t been as convincing as Danny had thought, but in the end he had managed to convince Tucker anyway and that was all that mattered.

As soon as the door closed and Danny was alone he let out a long sigh as his shoulders slumped. He rolled up the sleeve of his left arm with a grimace and then let out another sigh at the sight. Oh, he would definitely be late for the next class. He dug out his beat up first aid kit from the bottom of his bag and got to work.

Ten minutes later Danny carefully eased the door to the classroom open and quickly slunk inside. His hopes of sneaking inside unnoticed were dashed as Mr. Lancer fixed him with a glare and didn’t waste any time before chewing him out in front of the whole class. He could see Dash grinning and elbowing Kwan, Paulina leaning in to whisper to Star as they both pointed at him, Mikey and Nathan looking annoyed at the interruption and aiming their glares at Danny. Danny felt his shoulders climb up towards his ears. Great.

The whole spiel ended with Lancer declaring that he had detention after school and Danny barely found it in himself to give the teacher an affirmative before making his way to his school desk.

Well, no matter. Danny had only planned to get his homework done as soon as he got home, do his chores, and maybe actually go to bed early tonight. Maybe sleep off some of the exhaustion and pain dragging him down. Guess that wouldn’t happen. He didn’t know why he even tried anymore.

He sank down in his chair and Tucker immediately leaned in towards him and hissed out, “Man, your eyes are glowing.”

Danny closed his eyes in defeat. He tried to calm himself down, taking slow breaths and consciously relaxing his shoulders. The last thing he needed right now was any more attention.

After a few tense seconds he turned back to Tucker, one eyebrow raised in question.

Tucker gave him a slightly uncertain thumbs-up.

Danny felt himself relax slightly. Crisis averted, for now.

He just had to get through today.

Just like always.

—-

When he, Sam, and Tucker stepped into the cafeteria it was already full of students and Danny’s head throbbed at the noise. He really wished he had been able to grab more than a few minutes of sleep in between ghost fights, trying to avoid his parents, and all the traps they had set in the house.

Sam and Tucker walked towards the line for food and Danny stumbled after them. Tucker put a careful hand on Danny’s arm and Danny did his best not to jerk away from the pressure it put on his wound. Tucker still dropped his hand, a worried expression on his face, “Hey, man, you sure you’re alright?”

Danny nodded groggily, trying to muster up a smile. “I just didn’t get any sleep last night.”

Which wasn’t a lie, just not the whole truth. He hadn’t gotten any sleep, but he had also been in two fights and one hunt spearheaded by his parents. Then his home had decided he was a threat and attacked him as well. And, oh right; he got woken up by an alarm in the middle of the night because the portal almost blew up because of some new tests his parents were doing. He didn’t even have time to eat breakfast. He looked down at the slop the lunch lady splattered across his plate and it was a testament to just how hungry he was that it actually looked appetizing.

He was doing great.

Thankfully, Sam and Tucker didn’t push it as they walked towards a free table. Danny did his best to follow along in their conversation, but he was too tired to make sense of their discussion about the math homework they had just gotten. Was it futile to hope that he would have enough energy and time to do it later tonight? Probably. Danny wished he had the capacity to feel bad about it.

He looked down at the food in his hands and allowed his thoughts to drift as he followed Sam and Tucker and their familiar voices. At least he would be able to sit down for a while with his friends and just breathe. And eat. Ancients, he was starving.

So of course that was when a foot suddenly appeared in front of his feet and despite his usually quick reflexes his tired brain reacted too late and he tripped, losing his hold on his tray and watching as it spilled absolutely everywhere. He had to use both his hands to catch himself against the floor to avoid smacking his head into it and groaned at the pain radiating up his left arm. Maybe the face would have been preferable to this.

He didn’t have time to get back up before Dash’s laughter rang in his ears.

Of course it was him.

“What’s this?! You can’t even walk correctly, Fentrip?!”

Danny pushed himself up on shaking arms and kept his eyes locked on the floor, ignoring the giggling he could hear from all around him. It was fine. Dash didn’t matter. This didn’t matter.

He blinked when a hand with back nails came into view before carefully grabbing his shoulders and helping him back up. Danny looked up to find Sam frowning at him. “Why do you let him push you around like this?”

Danny blinked at her. Yeah, why did he? His arm ached and he was so tired. If he just fought back once then Dash would know that he couldn’t just do whatever he wanted to him, they would all see just how—

Danny shrugged as he pushed the thoughts away. He couldn’t afford to think like that. He couldn't risk turning into him. Danny feigned nonchalance as he said, “He doesn’t matter.”

Sam frowned at him.

Danny shrugged her hand off.

“Ha! You need your little freak girlfriend to protect you, Whimpton?!”

Danny felt himself tense up. They could pick on him all they wanted, but he hated it when they picked on his friends. They didn’t deserve that. He felt the tension rush back, ensnare itself through his shoulders and his arms until he couldn’t help but ball up his fists.

Sam raised a hand again as if to touch him, but let it drop again without making contact. “…Danny?”

“Dude,” Tucker joined in, voice strained and eyes glancing around them, “calm down.”

“I am calm!” Danny gritted out.

Sam raised an unimpressed eyebrow and Danny forced his hands to relax. He bent down to pick up his spilled food.

“Come on,” said Sam, “let’s go eat.”

They walked away from the laughing table full of A-listers.

Danny looked down at his ruined lunch and couldn’t help but let out a petulant, “I’m not hungry.” If he said it, then maybe it would make it true. Where was Desiree when you needed her?

Both Tucker and Sam sent him pointed looks and Tucker said, “I know that’s a lie. I could hear your stomach rumbling the whole class.”

Danny felt embarrassed that he had been found out; he didn’t like to make his friends worry about him.

Tucker just smiled. “Come on, you can have some of mine. I have a couple of snacks in my bag. Besides, I ate a really big breakfast so I’m not that hungry.”

Sam didn’t say anything, just silently handed Danny an apple from her tray.

How had Danny been blessed with such nice friends?

Danny sank down on the bench to finally eat with his friends, but the moment his arms touched the table he felt a familiar feeling of cold claw itself up his throat. The taste of ozone and ectoplasm burst forth from his mouth and he looked at the small cloud in dismay. Danny groaned. “I have to go. There’s a ghost. Again.”

Sam and Tucker exchanged a look and Danny tensed up. He didn’t have the energy to argue with them right now.

Tucker began hesitantly, “Maybe you should leave it to someone else?”

“I can’t. You know that.”

Sam crossed her arms. “Then we’ll come with you.”

Danny looked at his two friends and their full trays of food, which they hadn’t had time to touch. He didn’t want to drag them down with him, he owed them that. So Danny made an effort to sound snappish as he said, “I don’t need a babysitter.”

Tucker held up his hands in a pacifying gesture. “Hey man, we didn’t say that. We’re just worried about you.”

And now he had made his friends worry about him. Great. He couldn’t do anything right, could he?

He got to his feet. “I have to go.”

“Danny, wait!” Sam called out, but before they could start arguing with him again, he left.

——

Thankfully the fight didn’t take long, and Danny closed the thermos on the tiger-ghost just as the bell rang. It did leave him with scratch marks down his back though, and Danny cringed as he changed back into human form; praying that his quick healing would make sure it didn’t bleed through his clothes and thankful for the thick hoodie he had put on that day. He ran to his locker and got out his things, but was still late for the next class.

Lancer merely shook his head at him and Danny stumbled over to his desk and sank down in it while ignoring the worried looks from Sam and Tucker.

He was fine. It was all fine.

And even if it weren’t; it didn’t matter. He just needed to keep it together and do his job, keep everyone safe.

—-

The bell finally rang and Danny let out a stuttering breath. He was free.

He didn’t waste any time before stuffing all of his things into his bag and getting up, ignoring the pain in his arm and his back as he shouldered his backpack. It was worth it if he could get out of there quicker. Sam and Tucker joined him as he made for the door.

Tucker lowered his voice as he looked Danny over and carefully asked, “Danny? You okay?”

Danny kept his eyes on the door, feeling his steps lighten as he passed through it. “I’m fine.”

Sam pursed her lips and asked, “…Who was it?”

“A tiger ghost.”

He knew that they wanted more information than that, but he just wanted to go home and crash. He was so very tired and he hurt.

Tucker huffed. “Maybe you should leave the hunting to your parents for tod—”

“Mr. Fenton! Get back here, now!” Lancer’s call interrupted Tucker and made dread pool in Danny’s stomach. Right. Detention.

It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. He’s fine.

Danny sucked in a shaking breath and stopped walking. He didn’t look at his friends as he said, “Well, see you guys tomorrow.”

Tucker let out a long sigh and sounded defeated as he said, “Please be care—”

Danny nodded and took a step towards the classroom and then he felt something collide with his back. Hard.

Immediately he was back fighting the tiger, its swiping claws on his back right in the same spot. The pain was immediate and intense, and Danny saw stars as he stumbled forward, falling to his knees.

His mind reeled. Was he still fighting? He wasn’t even transformed! He had to defend everyone!

He reached for the cold feeling in his chest, ready to tug on it and go ghost to—

Cheers erupted around him.

“Touchdown!” Dash crowed from above and Danny froze in place.

Right. He was in school. There was no ghost to fight. It was the A-listers. They didn’t matter.

For the third time that day he picked himself up off the floor.

His arm and back burned. The pain pulsed in time with his thrumming core.

Ghosts fought during stressful situations and right now his instincts were screaming at him to fight. To get them before they got him. Danny balled his hands into shaking fists.

He tried to force his heart and his core to slow down. It didn't work.

A part of him slipped, too tired to fight it anymore. They wanted a fight, right? Then he would give them one.

But then he registered movement beside him and he blinked. Right. Sam and Tucker were here, which meant that he couldn't fight right now. Not with them so close. He couldn't risk it. Risk them.

Danny pressed everything down down down.

Or, he tried to.

His breath clouded in front of his face, but it wasn't because of a ghost, but because of the sudden cold blanketing the hallway.

“…Danny?” Tucker said hesitantly from beside him. “Dude, calm down.”

“I am fucking calm!” Danny growled.

Sam looked at him with clear worry in her eyes. She leaned in and whispered, “Your eyes are glowing again.”

Danny covered his eyes with his hands. He tried to force them to return to normal, to force himself to calm down. It didn’t matter, it didn’t matter, he repeated in his mind.

Danny heaved in deep breaths.

“Ha!” Laughed Dash, “Are you going to cry?!”

Danny sucked in breath after breath. It didn’t matter.

He tried to force the tension down. Tried to stuff it all down. Down where it couldn’t hurt anyone.

It doesn’t matter.

He gritted his teeth.

It shouldn’t matter.

He was fine. They didn’t matter. He was fine.

…He didn’t feel fine. He ached and was so very tired. He hurt.

His arms fell down to his lap and before he could do more than open his eyes, Tucker was standing in front of him, shielding him from view and hissing out, “Your eyes, man!”

And Danny tried. He really did, tried to make them go back to normal, to look normal. So he wouldn’t upset anyone. So no one would notice. So he wouldn’t matter. Danny grabbed his hair in his shaking hands, winced at the pain radiating up his arm.

“What’s wrong with the freak?” Dash asked and before Danny could react there was a hand reaching for him. His mind screamed at him to get away, to make it all just stop.

“Man, don’t!” Tucker shouted out in warning and then Danny watched with wide eyes as his friend was showed aside by Kwan, making him stumble to the side.

Sam stepped in front of Danny and then got pushed into the wall by Dash as they all laughed.

Danny’s eyes jumped from the wince on Tucker’s face to the angry scowl on Sam’s. To the way she pushed away from the wall and grabbed her left shoulder that had collided with it, on how Tucker wasn’t able to hide the fear in his eyes as he looked at the people who had attacked him.

They had attacked his friends. Because of him. Danny had put them in danger.

After everything that had happened, after all the pain and exhaustion, he couldn’t even keep them safe. His core screamed.

Danny felt himself fracture, crack like a thin layer of ice beneath a boot.

Dash’s hand moved as if in slow-motion as it approached him and Danny viciously slapped it away. “Don’t touch me. And don’t. Touch. Them.”

Dash cradled his hand in stunned silence for a split second before he broke out into laughter again, elbowing Kwan in the side as he said, “Wow, would you look at that? The wimp is fighting back!”

Laughter.

Danny’s ears roared and his chest stuttered as he tried to get enough air into his lungs; to calm down. His eyesight narrowed into a thin point as he raised his shaking hands to grip the front of his shirt. There was a pressure on his chest. On his core. Building and building and building.

“Stop,” he managed to croak out. He didn’t know if it was a warning or a plea. His instincts were screaming, clamoring, demanding, that he fight.

“What are you going to do about it?! Cry on us?”

A rough hand crabbed Danny’s shoulder and his own hand snapped up to grab it as he hissed out, “You don’t matter! You’re fucking nothing!” None of them did. So what did it matter what he did to them?

“Danny!” Sam yelled out in warning. But she was still gripping her arm where she had collided with the wall and that as all he could see.

Danny managed to let go of the hand in his grip, but he couldn’t calm down.

Maybe he didn’t want to.

“Hey…” Dash trailed off. “What’s wrong with his eyes?”

Tucker took a step closer to Danny. “Danny, you have to calm down!”

“Why?!” Why did he always have to calm down?!

He hurt.

“Danny!” He couldn’t even tell who was speaking anymore. It didn’t matter.

The air was cold enough to sting his throat and he breathed it in in in in.

He couldn't breathe out. He couldn't—

“What the fuck?!”

“Shit!”

“Get back!”

He smelled ectoplasm. The cold snow.

He smelled sour mouthwatering fear.

Danny recoiled with nausea climbing up his throat. He shouldn’t like that. He shouldn’t be that ghostly. He had to control himself. Just get himself back under control and calm down and—

And he couldn't. He couldn't.

His heaving breaths stopped when he realized that he didn’t need them.

In the end, he was just like any other ghost wasn't he?

The cold spread through him, out of him, and Danny didn’t even try to stop it.

They didn’t matter.

And he h̵̪̗͊u̴̯͒r̴͍͈̈̇t̸̮̺͈́.

#danny phantom #dp fic #danny phantom fic #all of your prompts were so good!!#phandom truce 2023 #i started writing something for all of them but then i had to contain myself #happy holidays!#my writing

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