#phics

[the-fenton-anticreep-stick]

Teensy little drabble

————

“Hey, mom?” Danny called as she left, sitting up in his bed and rubbing at the bags under his eyes.

Maddie paused in the door, turning to give her son a smile. “Yes, sweetie?”

He was so, so tired, he hadn’t gotten a chance to sleep in days, too busy fighting off whichever ghost decided to bother him. He just wanted to rest. He couldn’t rest. “Can you…” He choked down the lump in his throat. “Can you check my room for ghosts? Like you did when I was a kid?”

“Of course, sweetie. Let me go grab the Fenton Ghost Finder!” She was out of the room and back in under a minute, in full Dr Fenton regalia, the blocky device in her hands. She made a show of sweeping it under his bed, in his closet, in the corner by his bookshelf.

The device never said a word, even when she pointed it right at him. (It had long since been programmed to ignore his ectosignature.)

“All clear!” Maddie declared, pulling down the hood of her HAZMAT suit and raising her goggles. She ruffled his hair and kissed his forehead. “You’re safe, Danny.”

He couldn’t look her in the eye. “If… If something happened, if I died… would…?”

“Danny, my sweet baby boy,” She held his face in her hands and her gaze was full of love. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you. I promise. Get some rest.”

He closed his eyes and trembled with held back tears as she left. “You’re too late, mom.” He sobbed quietly to the empty room. “I’m already dead, and no one’s noticed.”

[violetsdaisy]

Reading a comfort phantom fic and Christine says “I’ll marry you” ya know, after Erik makes her choose between blowing up a whole building full of people in it or her childhood lover…

And all he asks is… “If we married, would you hold my hand?”

NOTHING ELSE. That’s all he wanted 😭

just to hold her hand.

kill me.

[ecto-american]

Fenton Family Values Chapter 3

Summary: During the yearly family reunion, Danny learns an interesting assumption his ghost-centric extended family has about a curse that's plagued the Fenton family for centuries.

NOTE: Danny is 23 here

Read on tumblr here: Chapter 1 | Chapter 2

Or on FFN or AO3

-------------

The portal accident was painful. The worst pain he had ever felt, a blindingly hot pain that he'd never forget. His life-changing accident was the central focus of the day, and even now nine years later, it was his clearest memory of that family reunion. He vaguely remembered his parents realizing the portal had activated and their assumptions that the Fenton Curse was somehow behind it, remembering Bryan's low mood and Jazz's attempts to cheer him up utilizing everything she had learned about the grieving process, and some of the obviously-ghost themed games they played.

What was most clear was that final step before the shock, and then. Zap.

He remembered it being over, and the pain slowly fading. His chest had no breath and his throat was incredibly tight, and he couldn't breathe. Smoke was consuming his vision as it surrounded him. Looking at his feet, he was slowly disappearing. Danny tried coughing, choking as he fell to his knees, hands bracing himself on the floor. Ears ringing, but he could hear Sam and Tucker's frantic calls for him. It lasted for forever and another minute, until he felt Sam's touch on his back. Everything seemed to go back to normal. No smoke, no intangibility or invisibility, and he could take in a deep breath.

For years…he assumed it was his powers coming into fruition and settling. That it was a side effect of severe pain, him being unable to control his powers from that very start. But that feeling was so incredibly distinct…It had to be…

Danny's eyes snapped open, and he took in a panicked, deep breath. He recognized the ceiling immediately, and fear overcame him. He was in the funeral home. He could tell by the cold metal-like surface that he was on one of the embalming tables too, and he immediately assumed the worst.

"Oh god, the curse got me," he whispered to himself.

"It did not get you, drama king."

Danny glanced to his right to see Sam nearby, standing next to the table, and he felt a wave of relief at her confirmation. His hand reached out for his wife, and she immediately grasped it, giving him a comforting smile. He couldn't return it.

He slowly sat up, gripping her hand tightly as she passively helped, and he realized that Bryan and Shawn were sitting in chairs dragged in from the office.

"What happened?" Danny asked.

"Danny, you saw her, right?" Bryan blurted out. He snapped out of his chair, taking a hurried step forward to lean on the embalming table.

"Saw who?"

"Mom."

Danny's head jerked to give him an odd look. Bryan looked desperate for a confirmation. Sam leaned into her husband to whisper in his ear.

"Ever since we got you inside, that's all he's been talking about," Sam spoke softly. "He thinks he saw his mom."

"I know I saw her!" Bryan protested. Danny rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands. He had a headache, and his back hurt from the gravestone.

"I gotta pee," Danny complained lightly, ignoring his question. Carefully, he slipped down from the table. He began to walk to the door, motioning for his cousin to follow him. "Come with me."

"Wait, wh-oh yeah. You guys can't even be alone to pee," Shawn mused. "Couldn't be me. I get pee shy."

"Fentons have become immune to almost every possible shame at this point," Danny said. "Just look at my dad." Bryan snorted. "Come on."

Bryan followed Danny into the hallway as the halfa dragged his feet to the men's room. They had four bathrooms at the funeral home, all single person restrooms. Three were in the main area of the client area, where services were held and the Fentons met with the grieving families to arrange services. Only one was in the back, where the ghostly magic happened, and it was the closest one.

Danny opened the door, Bryan following him in. Bryan went to the counter to sit on it, Danny taking his own seat on the closed toilet lid without undoing his pants. Instead, he rested his elbows on his knees as he rubbed his face.

"I saw her! I'd know my mom anywhere!" Bryan began. His voice began to pitch with hysteria the more he spoke. "And I think she was alive! She didn't look like a ghost! She looked so real, she looked so human. I've seen ghosts, Danny! She looked exactly as she did the last time I ever saw her! She wasn't pale or green or glowing or anything!"

"...Why did I pick for you to come with me to the bathroom over my wife again?" Danny questioned. Bryan ignored him.

"She might not be dead," he continued to ramble. "She might be alive, and after all this time!"

His cousin continued, and Danny stayed seated on the toilet, silent. He let the other go on as he tried to process everything.

Those red eyes. That smoke. The tightness in his chest. It was too familiar for it to be a coincidence. Danny had been in so many ghost hunting predicaments over the years. Choked out, electrocuted, been on fire, the whole nine yards. He had never felt that sensation before or since…the portal…

"Bryan!" Danny snapped. His cousin stopped talking, his shoulders slumping some. Danny exhaled softly. "I didn't see her. But I did see something. It wasn't Aunt Amy, but it was…it was something."

"Are you sure it wasn't Mom?" The pure desperation made Danny feel terrible.

"Positive," he confirmed.

Bryan exhaled deeply. The cousins stayed silent for a few moments. Danny felt a twinge of pain as he hit his funny bone, and he inhaled sharply through his teeth. It briefly reminded him of the shock.

"So," Bryan spoke up. "Did you really have to use the bathroom, or did you just wanna tell me that?"

"...Nah I actually have to go," Danny confessed as he stood back up to undo his belt.

-------------

"Alright, you guys set to go?" Shawn asked after the cousins both slipped back into the room with him and Sam. Sam put her phone back into her pocket. Danny shrugged, walking over to the wall.

"I mean, we might as well check on everybody while we're here," Danny mused, and he opened up a mortuary cabinet. He immediately sighed. "Because like this. See? Mr. Barlowe's mouth is open and the wires are poking out, he had dentures. I keep telling Grandpa to not use the needle injector to close mouths when people had dentures."

"He does it cause you can tell his hands are starting to get too shaky to do it the other way," Sam commented. Danny nodded in agreement. "He should have just left Mr. Barlowe for you or I to do."

Shawn raised an eyebrow.

"What's a needle injector?" he asked. Danny hid a morbid grin. Bryan already was making an indescribable face.

"It's this tool we use to close the mouths," he explained. "It's this little gun that we put a pin in, attached to a wire. And then we just." Danny put finger guns on his upper gum. "Ka-chink." Bottom gum. "Ka-chink." He snickered at Bryan's disgusted face. "And then we twist the wires together like it's a loaf of bread, tuck them in the cheek."

"Stop it!" Bryan cried out, giving a creeped out, full body shake. "I hate that thing, it's so creepy. That thing alone stopped me from getting into the funeral business."

"That and you faint from blood half the time," Shawn reminded him.

"Come on, Bry," Danny laughed. "We used to play with the needle injector all the time. Grandpa got super pissed cause we injected and twisted Grammy's old dining room chairs together."

"Yeah, but that was before I knew it…did that," Bryan protested.

"But the needle injector just always runs the risk of the jaw opening if your gums aren't the best. Like if you wore dentures for thirty years like Mr. Barlowe did," Sam explained. "So we normally suture them closed. I'll get you the stuff."

Danny nodded, and Sam walked over to some cabinets, fishing around.

"Wait, suture?" Shawn looked fascinated by all of this. Bryan, on the other hand, was sitting down and looking pale. "Like hospital stitches suture?"

"Yeah, exactly!" Danny grinned. "I'm really good at it. Lots of experience stitching up the dead," he joked. He couldn't even count how many times he was stitching up his own arm. He got super good at it, basically a pro by the time he began working here. Though Grandpa Fenton called the practiced skill Danny had a natural talent, and Danny didn't bother to correct him.

Shawn cocked his head curiously.

"Did you intern here or something when you were in like, high school?" he asked. Danny paused.

"Uh. Yeah," he lied.

Sam returned with the stuff, handing it over. Bryan did another creeped out shiver, snapping to his feet.

"I don't wanna watch this," he complained. "Shawn, Sam, one of you, please."

He rushed for the door, grasping the handle and looking back desperately.

"I'll go," Sam offered to Shawn. "You seem interested in the whole thing." She gestured to Danny, who was already beginning.

"Yeah, it's fascinating," he agreed. "Bryan, we should do an episode on funeral homes."

"Oh hell no!"

"I like that, I can use Bryan to demonstrate the needle injector," Danny teased.

"NO!"

"Ka-chink," Danny ignored him. "Ka-chink."

Bryan made an odd noise of disgust, ripping the door open and rushing out, Sam hot on his heels. Danny was choking on laughter as he continued, Shawn also chuckling.

"I'm going to talk him into doing something on funeral homes," Shawn told Danny. "I think it's good to quell some of the fears people have about death."

"Yeah, definitely," the halfa agreed as he continued his work. "I mean. I've been surrounded by death for most of my life in one way or another. Kinda…very intimately familiar with it." He thought about the portal accident. That smoke. That tightness. It was way too familiar. "Between the funeral home, my parents hunting ghosts, and just living in Amity Park, I almost feel like I can morbidly embrace death."

"...When you say you're intimately familiar with it, it honestly gives me the impression that you've fucked a ghost," Shawn said bluntly. Danny looked at him like 'what the fuck man?'. Shawn shrugged his shoulders. "Well, have you?"

"No!" Danny scowled. "I thought you didn't believe in ghosts anyway?"

"I don't," Shawn asserted. "But we've talked to people who claimed they have slept with ghosts before."

"...What?" Danny was absolutely baffled.

"Danny!" Sam's voice caught both of their attention, snapping it away from each other and to the door. "Danny, baby, why are there so many boxes in the hallway?"

Danny paused, trying to process her question.

"...What?" he repeated himself, only louder so that his wife could hear.

"Come here, there's like boxes all over the hallway," Bryan added.

Shawn raised an eyebrow at him, and Danny looked equally confused. He quickly tied off his suture, cutting the excess off before picking up his equipment to put on the counter as he walked to the door, Shawn behind him.

Danny opened the door into the hallway, and he immediately paused. The hallways were always kept fairly clear and clean of anything. So to see it so full of boxes dumbfounded him. Normal moving style boxes, some noticeably older than others. It almost blocked the hallway leading to the back door entirely. Glancing behind him, it nearly blocked that way too, and it gave him goosebumps. They weren't quite trapped. He could clearly see that there were technically paths out, but they seemed narrow and difficult to climb through. If you didn't have intangibility, anyway.

"Were these here when you went to piss?" Bryan asked, his voice hushed as if worried somebody would hear. Danny could see that his cousin had become a bit pale. Whether it was from the needle injector teasing or the sudden boxes, he didn't know.

"They couldn't be," Danny replied, motioning to the other end of the hallway. "We would have noticed on our way in." That observation made Bryan's face drop.

"We weren't expecting any shipments, rights?" Sam asked. She went to one of the boxes, tilting it towards her to scan it. "I don't see any names or labelings."

"I mean." Danny paused. "We are, but who delivers a shipment at this hour? And drops them off like this?"

"I'm recording this," Shawn announced. He began to fish around in his bag for his camera. "This is some weird shit."

"Yeah, yeah! Record!" Bryan encouraged. He seemed to instantly relax at the idea. "Let's see what we can capture!" He glanced over to Sam. "Wait, what are you doing?"

Danny turned his attention to her. Sam had taken her pocket knife out, and she was cutting the box's tape. She glanced at him with a shrug.

"It's in our funeral home," she replied. "I wanna see what's inside. It might be our shipment, who knows? I mean, I doubt it." She had added it upon seeing her husband roll his eyes. "But either way, I wanna make sure it's funeral home stuff."

She opened the box flaps, and she raised an eyebrow. Danny came over to check it out. The first thing he saw was an ancient looking ball in a cup game. He picked it up, turning it over in his hand. There was nothing remarkable or unique about it.

"We're rolling," Shawn announced. The couple made a noise of acknowledgement. "What's in there?"

"A ball in a cup," Danny said, holding it up for Shawn and Bryan to see.

"And some really old clothes," Sam added. She pulled out a neatly folded item of clothing, but nobody could immediately identify the type. Using another box, she gently set it on there and unfolded it, revealing it to be a child's shirt. She glanced in the box, pulling out a pair of pants that unfolded itself as she retrieved them. She set it on a box next to the shirt.

"Lemme see," Bryan requested.

He stepped forward to look at the outfit, Shawn following him. Sam shifted off to the side to let him, tilting the box towards herself to check for more items. Danny peered in too, and the only other item in the box was a wood carved horse.

Danny focused his attention on another box. He picked up Sam's pocket knife, slicing the tape on that one and opening it. Inside was another outfit, this time much more colorful and clearly for an adult woman. He picked the clothes up some to check underneath, seeing a cassette tape player and old headphones resting at the bottom next to a pair of sandals.

"It's another outfit, and like, an old cassette player," Danny announced. Sam put her hand on the box, tilting it towards her to look. Bryan gave a curious hum.

He reached into his pocket for his keys as he stepped to another box. Shawn followed close behind him. Bryan opened the box, checking it out and rummaging through it. Sam peeked over his shoulder.

"Uh, more clothes and some books," he announced.

Sam knelt by another box. Danny passed her the pocket knife, and she repeated the process. The men all stood over her as she opened the container, exposing more clothes. This time, it looked like a suit, and Sam shifted the clothes around to look.

"Yeah, same here," she reported. "Outfit and a set of car keys, sunglasses, and some whiskey."

"Are these all just a single outfit and a few items?" Shawn wondered.

"I guess so?" Danny said. He picked up a few boxes at a time experimentally before setting them back down. "I think so, cause none of these boxes are really all that heavy."

"This is so weird, cause like." Sam paused, collecting her thoughts as she leaned forward on a box. "I can kind of understand having all these random outfits. People wanna be buried in weird things sometimes. But none of these clothes are from the same period of time."

"What do you mean?" Danny asked. "Like, aside from the first one, these all look fairly normal."

"The first set of clothes is like, ancient," Sam explained. "They gotta be from like, colonial times."

"Well yeah, but that's the outli-," Shawn began, but Sam interrupted.

"Those are from the 80s, they gotta be," Sam said as she jerked her thumb to the box Danny opened. "The style, the colors, the cassette player. That's the 80s. Bryan's clearly from like, at least the 40s. Just read the book titles, look at the covers. This box has also gotta be from years ago. Look at this label!" She held up the bottle of whiskey. "And these glasses, they're not modern." She set the bottle down and picked up the sunglasses to show them off.

"Okay, so where did they come from then?" Danny asked. Sam shrugged.

"Beats me," she said.

"This has just gotta be old funeral home stuff," Shawn spoke up.

"Oh, no no no!" Bryan protested. "This has ghost written all over it!"

"Come on, dude, like Sam said, people get buried in weird stuff all the time!"

"Yeah, but like Sam also said, the different eras-"

Danny just watched the two as they began a light argument over how supernatural everything was. He glanced at the wall of boxes, standing on his tip-toes to grab one. He copied Bryan's method from earlier, fishing for his keys to use his car key as a makeshift knife. This outfit was another much older one. He couldn't place the time period for sure, but it had to be really old based on the simplistic items paired with it, the alphabet on a piece of board with some snow gear.

He and Sam continued going through the boxes silently, listening to the Youtubers as they debated. After a few minutes, he felt Sam nudge him.

"Danny," Sam whispered softly, as to not draw the attention of the others. She gave a subtle nod towards the box she was looking in. Danny took one glance inside, and he froze.

Like the others, the box had an outfit and two personal items. A very familiar t-shirt, dark green bomber jacket, jeans, an Apple watch, colorful socks, and a set of sneakers. A notebook and a camera. The couple looked to Bryan as he stood talking to the camera in Shawn's hands, animatedly moving his hands, one gripping the same notebook. And Danny couldn't help but notice that he was wearing the exact same outfit that rested in the box.

[forlorngarden]

im not defending myself against a vampire. suck away gorgeous

[faeriekit]

Feet on the Ground

loose phic phight fill for @oldfashionedbattlehymn

warnings for: murder attempt, discussion of child death

********

Danny wakes up in a garbage bag.

It isn’t as gross as it sounds. Danny’s the only thing in there, and it’s not like the lack of air is going to kill him; he could rip his way out, but honestly, going intangible is just as effective and twice as easy.

And, of course, once he’s phased his way out of the dumpster behind the gas station, Danny is very, very grateful that he didn’t even try. Everything else in there is….eeugh. He shivers.

Well. It’s got to be early morning now—it’s dark. There’s no other cars on the highway. Even the gas station itself is closed, and the stars have already lost their spark.

Time to head home.

*

Danny wakes up behind the gas station. Again.

…Okay?

The first time, Danny had just assumed he’d fallen asleep somewhere weird while flying around the neighborhood, but a second time is a pattern. It’s definitely not his fault this time either, because there’s no way he would have duct taped his arms and legs together or slapped a gag on his mouth.

That’s kind of. Ominous.

Danny frees himself of the garbage bag first— and thank goodness he doesn’t have to breathe— he floats himself out of the bag and the dumpster, which had…thankfully been given a good scrubbing since last time? There’s some other trash, apparently, but nothing sharp enough to cut through his durable, tape-based bonds. It takes some finagling and some eye lasers for Danny to finally get his arms free.

And. Hoo Boy. There’s no more liberating a feeling than peeling tape off your mouth, even if your mouth skin kind of comes off with it and you bleed a little. But it’s fine! It’s green, which means it’ll heal.

Fabulous. Danny zooms off invisibly into the night, more than willing to put the night behind him.

*

…Okay, the third time is what makes it more than a coincidence.

Danny shucks out of the bruise-tight ropes around his wrists, torso, knees, and legs, spits out his gag, and flies home. He finally has to give into the inevitable, and attempts the last resort:

“Jazz?” he whispers, slowly rocking his sister in her bed. Jazz mumbles in her sleep.

“Jaaaaazzy…” Danny tries again, trying not to look either too spooky or too imposing. Jazz’s reflexes are such that—

The laser she keeps under her pillow goes off. Danny loses a few millimeters of hair, which means that her aim is getting better.

 He doesn’t have any trouble seeing in the dark (or, uh, not anymore, anyway), but it’s easy to see Jazz’s sleepy squint as she pulls herself somewhat upright. More like a shrimp with scoliosis, but, well. You know.

“Whuh,” Jazz asks. “...Danny?”

“Hey,” Danny whispers, a ghost at her bedside. Jazz grunts. “Uh. What does it mean when you keep waking up in a trash bag behind the gas station?”

Jazz blinks. Jazz rubs her eyes. Jazz blinks again, looking more sleepy than coherent but at least somewhat aware of her surroundings.

“Garbage bag?” Jazz asks blearily. “You were in a garbage bag?”

“Yeah,” Danny whispers back. “My legs were tied down?”

“...Danny, were you murdered?”

Danny stops.

“Huh?” says Danny.

*

“So, if you look here,” Tucker points out, finger not quite touching the glass of his CRT monitor, “That’s when Danny gets murdered.”

There is a collective eeew from the assembled viewers— Jazz, Sam, and Danny, all crowded in Tucker’s room.

“Yeah, Tucker agrees. The light from the black-and-white footage flashes in the reflection of his glasses. “Here’s where he’s tossed in…there. And this is when they tossed him in the dumpster.”

There’s no sound on the gas station surveillance footage, but Danny imagines that his body clanged on the way in. What the hell. Danny got murdered behind a gas station, and he didn’t even notice?!

They watch the archived footage of a Ford F-150 driving off the property, and then Danny’s dead body being unceremoniously tossed in a dumpster. It’s kind of surreal. No one had noticed. There was no one to report the crime committed.

“I can’t believe that guy just clocked you over the head, like that,” Sam points out. “It’s just a regular car jack. It shouldn’t have gotten you in the first place.”

The observation isn’t appreciated.

“Be nice! My brother was just murdered,” Jazz scolds. Danny doesn’t think she sounds as offended as she should be. “Either way, it’s certainly an attempted murder, if not a successful one. We have to do something.”

“…Can’t we just call the cops?” Tucker asks, turning away from the computer. “I mean. Look. That’s proof. We have proof right here.”

Sure enough, there is footage. Right there. There’s Danny’s murder, in 240p black and white.

“Where’s the body?” Sam asks dryly, and. Uh. That’s a problem they’ll have to solve.

Everyone looks at everyone else. No one has a good solution.

“…Do we have to do this?” Tucker realizes at the same second as the rest of them.

Jazz looks at Danny. Danny looks at Sam. Sam looks at Tucker.

Tucker stares back at them, entirely unenthused with the conclusion they’ve come to.

“…Okay then,” Jazz exhales. “How do you want to do this?”

*

Sam ends up on top of the gas station, a cell phone in her hand.

Tucker, PDA in hand, sits in Jazz’s passenger seat. The camera feed is ongoing and recording for posterity.

Jazz taps her fingers on the wheel of her car. There isn’t anywhere better to hide than down the road and around the corner, so she does, hoping that they’re on the other end of the road from whoever’s killing her brother every night.

Danny is, of course, wandering through the neighborhood.

Losing her baby brother—on purpose—is the worst thing Jazz can imagine. She feels sick. She wants to throw him into the car and speed away, and break every speed limit law in the county on her way out. She wants to pack him in bubble wrap and ship him expedited to France.

But she does leave her brother alone. She lets Tucker look over the footage as Danny roams around town, just as unaware and unsuspecting as his last few outings.

Tucker sees the man first.

He bolts upright, eyes on his PDA. “Jazz.”

Her head whips around. They watch, silently, as someone approaches Danny’s lone figure on the doorstep outside the gas station.

They can’t hear anything. That’s the scariest part.

“Call,” Jazz demands. Tucker does.

Doubtlessly, on the roof of the gas station, Sam is dialing too.

*

So. Danny knows this guy.

And. Uh. It’s kind of embarrassing; he’d asked if Danny was okay walking home alone at night a few hours before his dumpster wake-up call, and Danny had said it was fine.

Apparently, no, it wasn’t fine. That being said, Danny hadn’t been expecting a guy in a button-up and khakis to be the guy murdering him on the down low. He kind of looks like the dude who sells you televisions and burner phones at a Wal-Mart.

The guy comes all the way over to where Danny is sitting on the thin concrete step of the gas station. His breath fogs up from the weather and his eyes rake over Danny, up and down; down and up.

“Hey,” he says, looking all the world like any other concerned citizen. Danny’s heart throbs. “It’s cold outside. You need a ride back to town?”

“…No,” says Danny, who doesn’t.

“Your mom okay with you comin’ home late by yourself?” the man asks nervously, hands going to his hair.

Danny thinks about how many times he’s woken up in the dumpster. He thinks about seeing his own body on the camera tape. Prone. Dead.

“You still keep a car jack in your passenger seat?” Danny asks instead.

The man freezes. An attempted murderer he might be, but he’s not exactly an Oscar-winning actor. “What?”

“The car jack,” Danny repeats. He doesn’t know if he’s mad the man keeps targeting him, or whether he’s grateful Danny’s the only one who’s died so far. “It’s got a lot of sharp corners. They hurt, you know.”

The man…carefully laughs the statement off, but he looks. Nervous.

Danny doesn’t really need to confront him; he only has to stall long enough that Tucker or Sam can call the cops, so that they can see this man’s face and get him on the record. But.

There’s a part of Danny…

The man looks so human. Flush with blood. Solid enough to break. Fragile enough to be made broken.

Danny still resents being made dead. This man didn’t kill Danny—not in any way that mattered, but he’s an easy target.

He doesn’t breathe. The man watches a boy sit in the shadows of a building where he’s been dumping bodies, and Danny can taste his fear.

“It hurt a lot,” Danny says, and he isn’t referring to waking up in the bags every couple of mornings in the last few weeks. “It hurt so much. I was screaming.”

The man is silent.

“Do you like to hear the screaming?” Danny asks, suddenly curious. Did he care, if Danny had screamed, or if he had been too unaware to notice he was dying? Would he have cared, if there were others more breakable than Danny that he had hurt?

He doesn’t answer.

“I don’t like it,” Danny confesses. In a horrible way, it’s easy to tell his would-be murderer about his death—unlike Tucker or Sam, who witnessed it, or Jazz, who loves him, this man can’t be affected by Danny’s take on his own death. In fact, if he is hurt by the thought of Danny’s death…good. It’s better if he is. If there is remorse in him. “I don’t like to hear screaming. I screamed for so long, and so loud. It felt like forever.”

The man’s hands curl. He steps back.

Danny can’t help but to frown. If he leaves, the whole point of calling the cops will be for nothing, and he’ll be warier of coming back to where Danny’s body was dropped. “Where are you going?”

The man takes another step back. Danny rockets upright. He’s on his feet in seconds. “Weren’t you here for me?” Danny asks, genuinely confused, arms outstretched. “We’re here. You dumped me here over and over again.”

“Shut up,” the man snaps, startling the both of them with his volume. “He—you’re not real. You’re… Be quiet. I have real things to get done tonight!”

Danny’s dead heart throbs. Is there another dead kid? Did Danny let another kid get killed in Danny’s place? “Do you?”

The man loses his voice.

“We’re already here,” Danny points out. He steps closer—closer to the truck that drove his dead body around town, further from the dumpster where his body had been dropped. The disposal hadn’t been a funeral, but it’s closer than anything Danny’s ever had. “You’re here. I’m here. Aren’t you here for me?”

A choked breath. Danny gets closer. The ectoplasm in his skin is too warm and too cold—but he has no idea what he looks like from the outside. Is he glowing? Is he see-through? Does he just look like any other dead kid: a little too cold, a little too pale?

They’re eye to increasingly shorter eye. Up close, the man just looks like any other guy. Shaved in the face. Wrinkles around his eyes. A nose. A mouth.

Danny’s not afraid of him. His head tilts. “You’ve already killed me three times. What are you going to do now? I’ll just come back again. I won’t even notice. I died. I know what you look like—I know how to find you. It’ll be easy.”

The man’s pupils dilate—

And then there’re hands on Danny’s neck. And. It’s kind of painful, but Danny doesn’t have to breathe. So. He just kind of…pretends to be hurt?

He’s meant to be stalling for time. The cops are coming. All he needs is time.  

So Danny makes some somewhat dramatic sounds and kicks out with his feet, because a fight lasts longer than a passive victim. He lands a hit to the man’s stomach, and another to his chest—he doesn’t drop Danny the way Danny might have expected, but Danny isn’t going to run out of air, so this can last forever until the man lets go. Or does something.

“Stop— coming— back,” the man snarls, and suddenly sounds nothing like the dudes who man the tech counter at the Walmart. “I got you— you should be gone!” 

Danny is gone. But he’s also here. And he’s also been gone for a very long time, and he’s also getting choked out by a guy in a gas station parking lot. It’s been a rough few hours of waiting for this dude. He might as well make it worth it. 

So maybe his body turns a little translucent. Just a little. Just enough to see the streetlight through his skin, probably, and the hazy road behind them. 

Getting thrown to the concrete hurts, but, you know, not as badly as getting tossed into a wall by Skulker on a rampage. Danny’s barely going to be bruised after this. 

The guy runs to his car, and Danny frowns, scrambling back up, and, wait. Wouldn’t having bruises be better? As evidence? They better not heal too quickly, or else that’ll be it of his physical proof. 

“Where are you going?” Danny asks, more perplexed and angry than anything. Isn’t he supposed to try to kill the witness??

But the guy hauls butt into the cab of his truck— and then the lights go on and the tires start spinning, the engine roaring to life. 

If Danny wasn’t actively on camera at the moment, it would be easy to fly after the car. As it is, he’s pretty fast, but he’s not quite quick enough on his feet to chase after a pickup truck careening down the highway in the dark. 

The man’s gone in a few seconds. Honestly, Danny’s kind of annoyed about the whole thing. It would have been nice for it to work. 

Sam climbs down from the roof of the gas station, phone in her hand. “No, I just— he choked out my friend and drove off! Send someone over here already!! You— do you need the license plate again?!” 

Danny just looks at her. Sam covers her phone’s mic with a hand: “They’re saying five minutes,” she mouths. 

Great. 

Danny hunkers down, throat bruising, and Sam sits down beside him. They wait.  

By the time the cops pull into the gas station, the guy’s more than out of sight. Sam’s the one who takes the lead on dictating their story. Danny sort of doesn’t realize how out of it he is until someone tries to throw a shock blanket on him. He almost hits the guy square in the face— and Sam’s the one who has to catch his arm. 

Uh. Oops. 

Jazz and Tucker roll in, hardly pretending to have not been nearby; Jazz wraps her arms around him, and Danny lets her. 

Sue him. It’s late. He’s tired. 

“...And I can’t believe you weren’t able to get down the road in time to catch a man who choked out my best friend,” Sam snaps, which, aw! Danny’s a best friend. The cop she’s attempting to strip down for parts looks less sympathetic than Danny feels. “You’re barely a ten minute drive up the highway! What were you doing, meandering?” 

“No,” the cop grits out, eying Sam like a bug on his shoe. “We were telling the officer down the road what to look out for.” 

Apparently, jamming the gas down hard enough to bust your speedometer gets you pulled over at the speed check. 

The night is over before Danny knows it. Someone gets him to the station, someone takes photos of his bruises and takes his statement. Someone calls Mom and Dad and then Danny’s in the GAV, half asleep and exhausted beyond belief. 

He falls asleep on the couch, Mom’s fingers in his hair. 

*

It’s not like the Amity Park police tell them anything, but Jazz is the one who finds the report on the news. 

She records it on the TiVo for him. 

“Eustace Miller, from Tennessee,” Sam reads aloud, knee to knee on his couch. Tucker adjusts his glasses. “Looks like he was already on the run.” 

“Or as good as,” Tucker agrees quietly. “Looks like they’re pinning a couple of cold cases to him.” 

They watch; there’s pictures of him from his hometown, and from the towns he would visit on his joyride across the country. There were pictures of his family. There were pictures of kids Danny would never meet: kids who were already dead, and who had been for months. Years, even. 

They’d looked so happy in the photos from when they were alive. 

…Danny could relate. 

Jazz turns the report off that night, thumb on the power button. And that’s all it takes for Danny to stop waking up in a trash bag. 

[wastefulreverie]

fixed point

“Would you like to know how much time you have left?” Clockwork asked.

Danny had never wished more that he’d died in something with pockets so he could hide his shaking hands. The endless ticking in the lair—hundreds of hands TICK TICK TICK -ing in perfect sync—had never sounded so ominous.

“I—” his voice rattled his throat, a raw thing “—I didn’t think you gave spoilers.”

With an absent spin of their staff, Clockwork shifted from adult to child and said nothing. Dread hung heavy in the air, Clockwork’s unblinking stare piercing through it all. Danny pointedly did not make eye contact. Instead focusing on the oscillating hands of the wall behind them.

He took a breath.

“Will it make it easier, knowing?”

Clockwork blinked once, face betraying nothing.

Dammit.

He wasn’t an idiot. There was really only one outcome of this conversation. Just as there had been the day he’d first pulled on his jumpsuit, walking—tripping—through the threshold. Life snuffed out of him in less than a second.

He brought his shaking hands together and met Clockwork’s even gaze.

And answered.

Thirteen days.

Seven hours.

Thirty-six minutes.

It was somehow both longer and shorter than he’d expected.

It was also a weight off his shoulders, at least in the beginning. It wouldn’t happen any earlier than the date Clockwork had recounted that night. Thirteen days of freedom. Peace. Liberation.

Because if he thought too much about the length of thirteen days, how three-hundred or so hours wasn’t enough time— it’s not fucking FAIR —he would be swallowed by the crushing anxiety that made its permanent home in his stomach.

So there was that.

He didn’t bother telling his friends. They were already all on edge, but if he could act like all was well he could ease their worries. Because ultimately they were just worried about him, and if he was fine they would be too.

He did, however, make contingency plans. Farewell videos on a USB drive taped to the underside of his bed.

He wanted Clockwork to be wrong. Some nights he laid awake, trying his damndest to find a way off this track. This self-fulfilling prophecy. But there was nothing. That moment had already passed with that stupid news broadcast that had glued him to the couch, shaking, as his parents had shouted and jeered at the screen. Dismissive. Furious. Invested.

They hadn’t noticed when he pushed himself off the couch and stumbled, shaking, to the bathroom to purge the contents of his stomach.

It was a miracle he’d only gotten a two-day suspension for slugging Wes in the face in front of the whole cafeteria. Even more so that no one had pieced it together from that.

No one saw him. But they would. When it was too late.

He couldn’t stop it. But as he didn’t acknowledge it in the waking world it wouldn’t exist. So he reserved his existential crises for when there was nothing to distract him from the looming, inevitable deadline.

He wished he could tell Mr. Lancer that whenever he was given detention that afternoon.

On the night of the twelfth day, he didn’t sleep a wink. No amount of coffee could keep his head above his desk that morning, and so, Danny spent his final hour in detention. He considered skipping. Detention was not the place for everything to come to an end.

But wouldn’t leaving—deviating from his normal routine—up the chances of putting events in motion?

Avoidance was his specialty, after all.

Jazz could write a paper on his coping tactics alone if she hadn’t already. 

At nineteen minutes Mr. Lancer stopped in front of his desk. It was only him and Valerie today, and she sat somewhere three desks behind and to his left of him. Her hair was in a loose ponytail, loose yellow sleeves draped over her hands. The bags under her eyes rivaled his own, even though he was sure there hadn’t been too many ghosts in the past week or so—but then again, he’d not been the most attentive to things on the ghost front lately. It was probably his fault she was here at all. 

“Mr. Fenton,” Lancer said. He forced his head to turn, a feat much more difficult than it sounded. His head felt full of lead. “Is everything alright at home?”

Danny forced himself not to cringe.

“Uh.” He ignored the sound of Valerie shifting in her seat behind him. Great. An audience. “Yes.”

“I’ve noticed you’ve been getting much less sleep of late, is all.”

Now this was a load of shit. Danny’s sleep schedule was normally trash. This current existential crisis was no more taxing than his normal night activities.

Lancer continued. “And your parents have—” he paused, eyes flitting somewhere behind him. “—in light of recent revelations, I just worry, Mr. Fenton.”

Hm.

Did he know, then?

Was this it?

Danny stared stupidly for a moment, forgetting to shut his mouth. And then shrugged.

Falling back on ignorance.

If he was honest, he hadn’t quite expected Lancer to be the one to put it together, but it also made sense. 

Lancer’s mouth thinned. “I know they can be intense, especially with the scrutiny placed on our school now. No one should feel scared to come to school. Or go home,” he said, letting the words hang in the air for a moment. “This is a safe space.”

For a moment all he could hear was the drum of his heart in his chest. And then behind him, Valerie cleared her throat.

“With all due respect, Mr. Lancer,” she said, “nowhere is safe with that putrid ghost hiding among us.”

Danny didn’t turn around. Lancer’s reaction was subdued, but there was a protective fire in his eyes that confirmed Danny’s suspicions. He wondered how long ago he’d put it together.

“Ms. Gray,” Lancer said, “I see your point, but I’m just trying to ease tensions.”

Danny checked the clock.

Seventeen minutes. 

Maybe he should’ve skipped detention after all.

(No escaping the inevitable. No do-overs this time.)

Valerie scoffed. “So what? We let our guard down?” he chanced a glance behind him, and Valerie’s eyes were red-rimmed—from lack of sleep or otherwise he had no idea. “Someone here is a walking weapon and we’re supposed to ignore this? Fenton at least knows he’ll be safe at home, but what about the rest of us? We don’t get to go home to ghost-hunting parents—we have to hold our own.”

Lancer nodded. “I understand. I just think that it’s very frightening for all of us, ghost hunters or not.”

Danny’s voice cracked when he spoke. “Yeah.”

Valerie’s expression softened. “I didn’t mean to make light—”

“No. No, you’re right,” he said. “It’s not safe with Phantom as a student here. Whoever he is.”

She sighed. “Danny, I don’t know what it’s like with your parents, but—”

“But what?” he cut her off. “Because they’re ghost hunters they’re automatically the safest people in the room?” He lowered his voice. “You would think that.”

She froze. “What does that mean?”

Hm. Whoops.

“People don’t know what it’s like, I guess.”

Danny turned back around. Lancer’s stare was dripping with sympathy.

Fifteen minutes.

There was a scrape of a chair, a thud of feet, and a warm hand on his shoulder. Valerie released him just as fast. When he met her eyes, they were as wide as saucers.

“D—Danny,” she said with a note of panic. “You’re cold.”

“Yeah?” he asked.

She took a step back. He hadn’t seen her this scared since they’d been stranded on Skulker’s island together. He could see the realization dawning. 

“Val,” he said, knowing full well what was going through her head, “what’s wrong?”

“It’s not you,” she said, a desperate plea. “I can’t be this stupid.”

He sighed and Lancer stepped between them.

“Ms. Gray,” he said, “now let’s not jump to conclusions—”

“No!” she shook her head. “No, no, no! It doesn’t make sense. You’re—your parents hunt ghosts. Hunt Phantom.”

Danny crossed his arms.

“So do you.”

Lancer looked between them like Danny had announced that he liked eating golf balls. “What.”

Tears welled in Valerie’s eyes. “I trusted you!”

The minute hand inched forward.

Fourteen.

“You trusted me to what?”

Valerie clenched her fists. “Don’t do that! Don’t play stupid!”

“Ms. Gray—”

“I’m not playing.” Danny turned sideways in his desk, facing her head-on. “Tell me what you think I’ve done, Val.”

“Mr. Fenton—!”

“You replaced him. You replaced Danny. How long have you been pretending to be him? To be alive? How can you live with yourself, going home everyday and seeing his parents and—and—acting like you’re still—” she choked on her tears. “You terrorize this town, Phantom. I won’t let you take anything else from me, or anyone.”

Lancer’s eyes were wide. He’d never seen the man so shocked, in such foreign territory.

Valerie, on the other hand, was resolute. There was as much determination in her face as tears.

“I’m still me,” he said. “I died, but I came back. I never replaced myself, however that works. I am sorry, Val. There’s a lot that—”

“Shut up! Shut up shut up shut up! ”

“—that I didn’t mean to happen.”

Lancer slammed his hand on Danny’s desk.

“Can we all settle down!”

It all happened in a matter of seconds. The clock in his peripheral kept him tethered to the moment. 

Valerie reached behind her and pulled a blaster.

A flash of red—

(The minute hand moves.

Thirteen.)

—and a burst of hot pain through his side.

He crumpled forward, his head meeting the linoleum floor with a SMACK and somewhere above him a distant shout.

Everything from his side to his cranium THROBBED and it wouldn’t fucking stop.

(He’d taken hits from Val before. This shouldn’t hurt so much. Why does this—?)

Iron pooled in his mouth. 

Oh right.

Ectoplasm was thicker than blood.

Danny tried to push himself up from the floor but the world spun and his arms gave out below him and he slumped back down to the cold, hard floor.

The floor felt better.

Maybe he would…

Stay here for a while…

***

The television clicked on. A rerun of the six o’clock news.

He didn’t let Jazz turn it off.

“According to a recent report, there is speculation that our local ghost vigilante Phantom might be living among us. Care to tell us more, Lance?”

“Yes, Tiffany.” Lance Thunder’s stupid blonde hair was polished and perfect as usual and he wanted to wipe that stupid half-smile off the bastard’s face. “A ghost ID’ed as Walker —” at this, a crude picture that was mostly just a white blur appeared on the screen “— has publicly announced that our hero is a student at Casper High fooling us, flying under the radar.”

“And as far as we understand, tips from ghosts aren’t verifiable…?”

“Normally, yes, but there is evidence to suggest that—”

“This isn’t good for you,” Jazz hissed. “I know that it’s scary, but—”

“Exposure therapy,” he snapped back. “It’s gonna be the talk of the school anyway.”

She slumped back down onto the couch. “Take care of yourself.”

The door to the lab was thrown open. His parents marched through the kitchen and into the living room, perfectly eclipsing the TV.

“—telling you, Jack. The DNA scans are inconclusive at best. Their so-called ‘experts’ are out of their depths.”

“We’ll show them once and for all. If we can find out which student it’s using as cover—”

“—we’ll expose Phantom for the monster he is!”

His parents disappeared upstairs for the night, but he could still hear snippets of their vows to destroy him. 

He shot Jazz a tired look. “Easier said than done.”

***

Someone was touching him.

Everything on his left burned. Far above him were LEDs and beige ceiling tiles. He wasn’t sure when he’d been rolled onto his back. But he was now, and someone was pressing down on the spot that burned burned burned—!

Blood trickled down his throat.

How many minutes had it been?

How many did he have left?

There were voices, somewhere, but everything sounded like it was underwater. Maybe it was. Drowning would be preferable to many of the other deaths he’d prepared for. Still terrible, sure, but vivisection lowered the bar considerably. 

“—have you done!”

“He’s—” A girl’s voice wavered, quiet. “He’s Phantom. He’s not supposed to—to—”

Wow. Valerie had the decency to sound ashamed.

At least he could die knowing that his killer at least had a few shreds of regret.

(Is it sad that it’s more than he expected?)

“—little first aid.” The pain came in waves, and all Danny could hear was the rush of his stupid heart in his ears. “—expecting shootings in America, but not from a—” 

Just as fast as it came, the world melted away. His last grasp on consciousness slipped away.

(As fast as the click of a button.)

***

Wes had a punchable face.

But hey—that’s what you get for talking to the press. The accusations were written off as pretty baseless, but the damage had been done. He got inquisitive stares now and again. After all, Wes was a joke, but his interview put Danny’s name on the list of suspects and that was enough to fuck his entire life over.

After his two-day suspension, Danny had little opportunity to survey his work. Honestly, more people asked him about how bad he fucked up Wes’s face than whether or not he was Phantom.

(From what he had seen, it was in a perpetual state of purple and that was enough to curb his anger for now.)

So. He had two days off from school.

Danny went to see Clockwork.

Long Now welcomed him with welcome arms, and he broke down into a fit of whines and gripes about how it seemed like everyone was out to get him, that everyone wanted to put his head on a pike. Everyone wanted to ferret out the wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Clockwork shared their sympathies.

“No matter what I do, I just—I’m a wreck. I think someone’s figured it out. That they know, but then I mention it to Jazz or Sam or Tucker and I’m just paranoid and I think I’m paranoid now and—” he groaned. “I don’t know what to do. I’m losing my mind.”

“You do know that it’s inevitable that the truth comes to light.”

He froze. “What.”

Clockwork shifted from senior to adult. “Your paranoia isn’t for naught. It’s a matter of time.”

No. This couldn’t be happening.

He’d figure a way out.

There had to be something.

“I thought nothing was inevitable.”

“Not nothing,” Clockwork hummed. “Often, it is nothing. But not this time.”

Their words shook him to the core. He’d suspected it, sure, but confirmation was—

“I know it isn’t fair.”

“Don’t tell me what is and isn’t fair!” Danny snapped. “Your entire life isn’t—isn’t under scrutiny for everyone. If they know that I’m me, I—”

He pressed his hands to his chest.

He would be finished.

One way or another, someone would find a way to put him on their table.

The government.

His parents.

Maybe someone else out for his blood.

(His body.)

“I can’t see what will happen past them learning the truth,” Clockwork said. “But it is a fixed point. Everything past that diverges, a thousand roads. Timelines. Possibilities. I can’t tell you what to expect. The best, the worst. I cannot offer that reassurance.”

“Oh.”

They nodded. “It’s a lot to take in.”

“I don’t want them to find out,” he said in a pathetic whine.

For a long moment, Clockwork said nothing. If not for the constant ticking of clocks, he would have thought they were frozen. But then Clockwork’s expression shifted.

And they asked: 

“Would you like to know?” 

***

…

……

………

Warbled voices were around him again. Different.

But this time more in focus.

“Sir, Ma’am, if you could leave the room—”

“I will NOT. That is my son, and I am not leaving until someone tells me why there is a HOLE in his chest—!”

And somewhere else, a shriek of sobs.

“We’re transporting him to the hospital, you can’t—”

“I did it,” said that same, sobbing voice. “I shot him. I shot him.”

More people were touching him and Danny didn’t like it oh god no no no —

“—get him on the stretcher—”

“—the hell DID you—”

“—Ms. Gray, you—”

“—no! I want to know why—”

“—securing him, just—”

And now time did slow.

The EMTs lifted the stretcher.

And his face lolled to the side, giving him a clear view of the clock.

The minute hand moved one last time.

Just as:

“I didn’t mean to! I didn’t—he’s Phantom, I didn’t think that it would—!” Valerie, cut off, sobbing. “I’m so sorry, Danny. If you can hear me, I’m so sorry.”

And then there was silence.

Crushing darkness.

***

If he had any last doubts that his secret was out, they were snuffed out when he woke up in the hospital to the pained faces of his parents. Jazz was in the chair to his left, hair mussed up and asleep. His parents’ eyes were red with tears. In his delirium, he also noticed Sam’s backpack discarded in the corner.

How long had—?

“Two days.”

Clockwork appeared before him in their adult form. They swung their staff, looking rather pleased with themselves. Danny then realized the occupants of the room had been frozen as long as he’d been awake. 

“You’re recovering well, all considered.” Clockwork tapped a clipboard on a nearby table. “I will say, I am surprised that we took this route. It is what you might call a ‘spoiler,’ but it’s kinder than most.”

“Is it,” he said, voice hoarse.

Clockwork waited for him to finish coughing up his lungs before speaking again. “They’re handling it as best they can. I won’t say it’s great, but you’re on the way there.”

“I—what happened, again?”

And as he asked, it came rushing back.

Lancer. Valerie.

And paramedics?

Clockwork gave him a knowing smile. “Your teacher called an ambulance. In his panic, he might have let it slip that you were having a reaction because of a ghost weapon, and your parents were looped into the call.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

Danny’s eyes found his frozen heart monitor, time stopped between beats. Below, his mother had tied off the top half of her HAZMAT suit and was wearing a black shirt beneath. He did notice that the contents of her weapons belt were emptied.

He turned back to Clockwork. “How did they take it?”

They shrugged. “Why don’t you ask them?”

“Wait—wait, I'm not ready.”

“How about this? I tell you how much time you have left.” They raised their staff. “Three—”

“Clockwork—”

“Two—”

“Don’t you dare!”

“Time in.”

[five-rivers]

wandering heart

For @phantomphangphucker for phic phight!

.

.

.

The needle was bronze.  

The copper alloy stood out better against ectoplasmic flesh than it would have against red blood.  It dipped in and out of Danny's skin with machine-like precision, drawing a slender purple string in its wake.  Appropriate.  Clockwork was at least partly mechanical.

“You're getting close to my liver,” said Danny.  “Careful.”

“You are aware that these facsimile organs are not at all essential to the function of your body.”

“Sure they are,” said Danny.  He leaned his head back on the cushion Clockwork had provided him.  “That's why you're sewing me up.”

Clockwork's tower wasn't Danny's usual post-battle stop, but the fight had been nasty and it had been close. His other choices had been flying an hour to reach the Far Frozen and leaving an ectoplasm trail through the mad science lab dedicated to dissecting ghosts.  The decision had been easy.  

Clockwork had complained, of course.  Ninety percent of the time spent stitching had doubled as time spent snarking.  It was fun.  

“You have more than fake human organs in here, and losing that much ectoplasm is unhealthy for a ghost regardless.  You are friends with the doctors of the Far Frozen.  Perhaps you should avail yourself of their knowledge more frequently.”

“I already have one health class I'm failing.  Don't need another.”

“You are not failing your health class.”

Danny peeled back an eyelid that had fallen shut at some point during the exchange.  “Are you using your time powers to spy on my grades?”

“Hardly.”  Clockwork picked up a pair of ornate scissors and snipped the string he'd been stitching Danny up with.  “But even so, I doubt you would notice if I removed one of your so-called organs.” 

“You could try,” said Danny.  He closed his eyes again and leaned to the side until he was slumped over on Clockwork, who made an offended noise.  “You’re trapped now.  Stuck.”

“I am a shapeshifter,” said Clockwork.  “You cannot ‘trap’ me simply by leaning on me.”

“Can too.”

Danny was tired.  Sometimes, he could shrug off both fights and injuries like they were nothing, but unicorns were vicious and Technus was mean.  Electricity always took a lot out of him.  

Clockwork sighed heavily.  Danny smiled.  

“You aren’t nearly as charming as you think,” said Clockwork.  

“And yet, you are neither kicking me out nor stealing my pancreas or lower intestine or anything like that.”

“I could.”

“But you haven’t.”  Danny tucked his feet underneath him and snuggled more heavily into Clockwork’s side.  

The ghost groaned, but obligingly made room for Danny.  Yes, yes, exactly according to plan.  The evil one, where he made friends with Clockwork.  He figured he was already halfway there, if Clockwork was willing to sew him up, but with this it was definitely closer to three quarters.  

Having thought this, Danny promptly fell asleep.  

.

The front doors of Clockwork’s tower were not made to slam open, but Danny, fingers of one hand clenched over his chest and still wearing a Far Frozen medical gown, managed anyway.  He was resourceful like that.  

“Clockwork?” he called.  “Clockwork!”  He flew from room to room, only sticking his head in long enough to assess them for Clockwork's presence.  

Finally, he found him.  

“Clockwork!” he shouted, re-energized by the sight.  “Did you steal my heart?  My heart?  My actual heart from my actual chest?”

Clockwork stared blankly at Danny for long enough that his panicked doubled and doubled again.  This was, quite literally, his only lead.

“No,” said Clockwork, finally.  “I stole the replica of your actual heart.  From your chest.”

“That’s the same thing!”

“Is it?” asked Clockwork, smugly.  “After all, you didn’t even notice this one was gone.”

“Oh my god, I cannot believe you did this.”  Friendship plan canceled.  Or something.

“I cannot imagine why,” said Clockwork.  “After all, I told you exactly what I was going to do.  You even gave me permission.”

“I thought you were joking.  Who’s going to think that you’re serious about stealing a friend’s organs?  That’s a joke.  A joke.  Banter, if you would.  Not an invitation to steal my literal heart.”

“Even so, it has been done.”

“Well, can you undo it?  Put it back in?  You didn’t, I don’t know, toss it out with last week’s eggshells or something?  Stick it in the back of the kitchen junk drawer.”

“No, I know exactly where I put it,” said Clockwork.  

“And you can undo it, right?  It’s not, like, expired?”

“It is difficult to get more expired than a ghost’s heart.”  

Danny stared at Clockwork expectantly.  

“Yes, I can undo it.  It will be the work of a moment to return it to its proper place.”  

“Great, so…  Lead on.”  Danny made a forward sweeping motion with both hands.  

Clockwork’s eyes slid back towards his time screen.  “Can it wait?”

“No!”

“You haven’t had it for weeks.  You won’t miss it for a few more minutes.”

“Uh, yes, I will!  You can time travel.  Whatever you’re doing, you can do it later.”

“I suppose,” said Clockwork.  “Very well.  Follow me.”

Clockwork led him back, through narrow halls, into a towering closet with spiral shelves.  It was full of what could only be collectively referred to as stuff.  

“Wow, I wasn’t serious about the junk drawer thing.”

“Oh, please,” said Clockwork.  “This is hardly junk.”

“You’re a hoarder.”

“I resent that appellation,” said Clockwork, flying up and rotating slightly.  Danny kept his feet on the ground, slightly intimidated.

“The only reason you aren’t drowning in all this is because your house doesn’t have to exist in Euclidean space.”

“And yet, I am not drowning in it.” Clockwork continued to float upwards, a faint frown on his face.  

“You do remember where you put it, right?”

“Yes, Daniel,” said Clockwork, visibly rolling his eyes.  “I put it right– Ah.  Interesting.”

“Interesting?  What do you mean interesting?” demanded Danny.  He flew up to hover near Clockwork's shoulder.  “Did something happen to it?  Is it– It's not there?  You said you knew where it was!”

“I said I knew where I put it, which is rather a different thing altogether.”

“No, it isn't!  It's not like it has legs!  It couldn't have wandered off on its oooohhhhhhhh my God, it could have wandered off on its own.  That thing had more ectoplasm in it than a Christmas turkey.”

“It is, in fact,” said Clockwork, “entirely made out of ectoplasm.”

“If it’s moving around like that, can we put it back in?  Would it– Would it try to escape?  Like, escape my chest?  Is that a thing?”

“Unlikely.”

“As unlikely as it starting to move around in the first place?”

“Unlikely,” repeated Clockwork.  

“Where even is it?  Do you know?  Can you tell?  Obviously, your whole ‘I know everything’ shtick is a lie, but can you, like, rewind things so that it’s here?”

“No,” said Clockwork.  “We will just have to look for it.”

“In your hoarder cave?”

“It is not a cave.”

“Ah, but you don't dispute the hoarder part?”  He spun, head over heels, trying and failing to see the entirety of the not-really-a-closet.  “What if there are things in here?  Like, living things?  Could it have been eaten?  By, like… Clockroaches?  Do you have clockroaches here?”

“Media tends to grossly exaggerate both the aggression and size of temporal boggles–”

“They’re real?”

“Why would you ask about them if you didn’t think they were real?”

“I don’t know.  It turns out I don’t think through the things I say to you very well.”

“Clearly.” 

Danny arrested his motion.  “Where do we even start?  This place is huge!”

“That statement assumes that it is still in this particular room.”

“Oh my God.”

“Although, if we are to search this room, it would make the most sense to start from either end and work towards the middle.”

Danny flipped over.  “I can’t even see the other end.”  This was only barely an exaggeration.

“Then we had best get started soon.”

Danny rubbed his face.  “Am I even going to recognize it?  What will it look like?”

“Like the organ it was imitating, of course,” said Clockwork.  “Oh, and don’t touch anything.”

Danny groaned.

.

There was something quivering and green huddled behind a bank of jars.  Was that… it couldn’t be…  He formed a stick out of ice and went to poke it.  

“What are you doing to that poor frog?” asked Clockwork.  

“Holy– It’s a frog?”

“Yes.” 

Danny stared.  Clockwork was covered in splatters and streaks of ectoplasm from head to tail.  

“Why do you– I don’t even want to know.  Did you find it?”

“Yes,” said Clockwork, holding up a jar.  There was…  Well.  It was a heart.  “Are you sure you want it back?  Surely, the sentimental value cannot be that great.”

“Wh– It’s not about the sentimental value.  Open it up, put it back in!”

Clockwork’s sigh was incredibly put-upon.  “Alright, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

He unscrewed the lid of the jar, and the heart, which had up until that point, laid quiescent on the bottom of the jar, flew out, smacking Danny in the face.  

“Augh!”

“Grab it!” 

Danny managed to get a hand around a ventricle, but ectoplasm and ectoplasmic muscle was slippery.  It escaped his grip.  It flopped-flew its way down to the bottom of the genuinely-not-a-closet and made for the door.  Danny dove at it, only to get a faceful of ectoplasm from an artery for his trouble.  

Danny wondered if this was what Skulker felt like.  He let ectoplasm dribble out of his mouth.  

“That, bleh, that tastes like my ectoplasm,” he said.

“That’s because it is,” said Clockwork, tiredly.  “I will refrain from asking you to elaborate on your ectoplasm-tasting experiences.”

“Look, when nature gives you a weapon, and afterlife gives you enemies, you use the weapon.”  He peered cautiously out of the door, wary of being sprayed with what was essentially his own blood once again.  “Where do you think it–”

He got another mouthful of ectoplasm.  

“Bleh,” he said.  

“I don’t suppose you saw it?” asked Clockwork.  “Which way it went, etcetera, etcetera?”

“No,” said Danny.  

“Then this will be a long night.”

“Can���t you just, like, stop time or something?  So it won’t move around while we look”

Clockwork gave him a look.  

“I’ll take that as a no.”

.

“I think,” said Danny, from where he was dangling from the ceiling, a tangle of clock chains wrapped around his ankle, “that we need help.”

“Unfortunately, I must concur,” said Clockwork, who was underneath a pair of couches even he’d been surprised at owning.

“Unless you want to use your totally awesome time powers to find it.”

“No.”

.

“I’m sorry,” said Sam.  “What did you lose?”

“My heart,” said Danny.  “And I didn’t lose it.  Clockwork stole it.”

“Is this some kind of Ice Queen situation here?” asked Sam.  “Are you going to lose all empathy and care for other people?”

“No,” said Danny.  “It’s just the, um, physical thing.  And only my ghost half’s physical thing.  Apparently.  Apparently, the ‘human organs’ I have in my ghost form aren’t functional, unless the functionality is, like, the functionality of being incredibly annoying and spraying ectoplasm everywhere.”

“So, what should we bring for this thing?” asked Tucker.  “Butterfly nets?  Bow and arrow?  Guns?  What’s the endgame?”

“You want to shoot my heart?”

“I don’t know what you want here, dude.  I’m still kind of reeling over the fact that the guy you were hanging out with literally stole your heart.  Do you need someone to give him a stern talking to, make sure he gets you home before curfew?”

“That’s disgusting.  He could probably be my great-great-great-great-great-great–”

In ghost form, Danny didn’t have to breathe all that much, so he was able to go on like that until Sam and Tucker joined forces to stuff socks in his mouth.  

.

“How in the world did things escalate to Clockwork stealing your literal heart?” asked Jazz.  

“Okay, yeah, I see how that’d seem bad, out of context, but you see, it isn’t actually my literal heart–”

.

Danny glared at Clockwork’s idea of ‘help.’ “I bring three completely reasonable and competent people, and you bring them?”

“From my point of view, I am the one with the reasonable and competent people,” said Clockwork, gesturing at the combined forces of Nocturne, Ghost Writer, and Skulker.  “You, meanwhile, have brought three teenagers.”

“Are you really calling Skulker competent?”

“If not, he at least has experience in being outsmarted by you.”

“Hey!”

.

“Alas,” said Tucker, “the heart wants what the heart wants, and what it wants is freedom.”

“Where,” said Sam, kicking at a puddle, “is all this ectoplasm even coming from?”

“Around,” said Danny.  

“Ooh,” said Jazz, “it’s condensing it from the atmosphere?”  She paused.  “What are you all looking at me like that for?  I can have scientific curiosity!”

“I think it’s more because of what’s happened to your hair,” said Ghost Writer.

“What’s happened to my hair?”

“You don’t want to know.”

.

“Danny, I think I hate you,” said Sam.  They were sitting on one of Clockwork’s couches.  Clockwork had a lot of couches.  A fact that Clockwork seemed both bemused and distressed by.  

“Oh, trust me, the feeling is mutual.  As in, I hate me too.”

Clockwork sat down on the couch next to Danny.  “Daniel, I must tell you that while hate is beneath me, I am seriously regretting my earlier decisions.”

“Does that mean that you’re going to time travel back to–”

“Absolutely not.”

Tucker ran past them with a butterfly net, chasing down a green blur.  

“That’s a blob ghost, isn’t it?” asked Sam.  

“I do believe so,” said Clockwork.

“Well,” said Danny.  “At least this all makes us friends, yeah?  Can’t go through something like this without being friends.”  At least he’d get something accomplished with all this insanity.  

“I wouldn’t call myself friends with Skulker.  Or Nocturne.  Acquaintances, more like.”

“I notice you didn’t say anything about Ghost Writer.”

Clockwork shrugged.  “He’s somewhat more tolerable.”

“And me?”

“I suppose.”

The heart fell straight down, into Danny’s lap.

“Are you serious–”

[redactedgoose]

In a bid to win more of Danny's affection, Vlad uses his power as Mayor of Amity to enact some pretty strict light pollution laws, making the sky much darker at night and the stars easier to see.

To his shock, it kinda works.

[currentlylurking]

why write fics when you can make memes for them to share without context?

[the-fenton-anticreep-stick]

Whoa I wrote, edited, AND posted! I think Tucker deserves better (*makes him cry*)

[torscrawls]

Batman’s no-kill policy is ectophobic

Summary:

“Well that just makes it sound like he thinks ghosts are worse than humans, you know? And! It got me thinking, Batman refuses to kill his enemies, right?” “Right,” Tim faintly agreed, desperately trying to make sense of this conversation. Phantom relentlessly continued, oblivious to Tim’s spiraling sanity. “Maybe that’s because he thinks that ghosts are less than humans! He doesn’t want to create more of us.”

Phantom is upset that Batman refuses to kill his enemies. Tim just wants his shift to start so he can get out of this conversation.

Words: 1 245

You can read the whole thing on AO3.

-

Tim was sitting in the break room of the Watchtower, mindlessly flipping channels on the big wall-mounted TV while trying to wake up for his next shift. Out of the corner of his eye he watched Phantom slowly drift in front of the big windows, face almost pressed against the glass and his whole attention fixed on the stars outside.

This in and of itself wasn’t anything uncommon; Phantom seemed to have an almost obsessive fascination with space, but what had caught Tim’s attention was the frown on the ghost’s face. Normally he would have a dreamy expression if not a big smile on his face as he watched the expanse outside the windows, but not today. And Tim was willing to admit that it was getting to him.

After another few minutes of switching between channels, silence, and no change in the frowning Tim pressed the off button on the remote and heaved a sigh as he turned to face the window and the floating ghost. “What’s wrong?”

Phantom startled as if he had forgotten he wasn’t alone in the room, or as if he had forgotten he could be seen by others. He had a bad habit of forgetting to turn himself visible and scaring the shit out of people around the tower. He looked over his shoulder and fixed Tim with a wide eyed, literally shining, look of confusion. “What do you mean wrong?”

Tim made a vague gesture at the ghost. “You’ve been frowning ever since I got here. Did something happen?”

Phantom turned around in the air, spinning on his own axis until he was looking at Tim upside down. Tim noted that his hair stayed in the same position throughout. He wasn’t jealous, not at all.

“Well, I was just thinking... Does Batman hate ghosts?”

Tim blinked, thrown by the direction the conversation had taken. “What? No?”

The frown on Phantom’s face deepened as he righted himself in the air. “But he just told me that he ‘was sorry for my loss’, as if something bad had happened? And when I asked him what he meant he said he regretted not being able to save me.”

Tim paused, weighting his words carefully before slowly saying, “I’m sure he just meant that he was sorry that you had… You know…” Tim trailed off, winced, and then forced out, “Died.”

It was always a hard subject to breach, nobody liked to think about death. The Justice League and the Batfamily had all come to the unanimous decision to avoid the subject around their newest member since they were convinced that he would react badly to the topic.

Phantom snorted. “Yeah I know. Kinda hard to miss.”

“I didn’t mean—”  

But Phantom cut him off, “Wait. Is that why none of you talk about death around me? You’re scared that I’m gonna be, what? Offended?”

“Well… No?” Tim said unconvincingly.

Phantom laughed. “Oh my Ancients! You did! That’s so cute!”

“You know, we don’t really talk about death with each other either,” Tim said, feeling like he had to defend himself somehow.

Phantom tilted his head, still smiling. “Why?”

Tim blinked, thrown by the question. “Because… People don’t like to think about that?”

Phantom pursed his lips in thought. “See, that’s what I meant! Isn’t that just kinda rude? I mean, I’m dead, does that mean you guys don’t wanna think about me?”

“No?” Now it was Tim’s turn to frown. “That’s different.”

“Hmm,” Phantom hummed, looking unconvinced.

Tim scrambled for a change in subject and latched onto the first thing that came to mind. “So why would you think that Bruce hated you just because he said he was sorry for your loss?”

“Well that just makes it sound like he thinks ghosts are worse than humans, you know? And! It got me thinking, Batman refuses to kill his enemies, right?”

“Right,” Tim faintly agreed, desperately trying to make sense of this conversation.

Phantom relentlessly continued, oblivious to Tim’s spiraling sanity. “Maybe that’s because he thinks that ghosts are less than humans! He doesn’t want to create more of us.”

Tim had to step in at that, feeling like they weren’t on the same page when it came to some very important fundamentals. “Phantom, you—you understand that people don’t like dying, right? It’s the end.”

Phantom tilted his head with a look of confusion. “It’s not though?”

And Tim guessed that was true. He couldn’t really argue the point with a literal ghost, now could he?

“The town I come from, people don’t really care. Death, life, it’s kinda all the same,” Phantom said happily, as if that wasn’t a very troubling statement to make. And with no respect for Tim’s quickly dwindling sanity, he continued with a thoughtful finger tapping at his lower lip, “Except that death has a lot more flying in it. And energy beams.”

Tim made a mental note to try and find out exactly what town Phantom was talking about. Hopefully it wasn’t one on Earth. He managed a resigned, “Of course,” and hoped that was the end of the conversation. He needed to have enough energy left for his whole shift after all.

But Phantom just nodded and continued on, “Batman refusing to kill his enemies is all just an obvious ploy not to have them move on as ghosts!”

“Obviously,” Tim faintly agreed.

“That’s messed up! He just wants to trap them in the human realm with him so he can torment them forever!” Phantom shook his head. “I know a couple of people in the Zone who would love to exchange torture ideas with him. I thought that Fright Knight was scary and now I’m working with a guy like that, can you believe it?”

Tim couldn’t. “I—I don’t think that’s what he means by that.”

Phantom huffed in annoyance and crossed his arms. “It’s blatant ectophobia, is what it is!”

Tim opened his mouth to try and come up with an argument when the subject of their argument stepped into the break room. Bruce addressed him with clear disapproval in his voice, “Red Robin, you’re late for your shift.”

Tim had never been so grateful to receive Bruce’s disappointment. At least he wasn’t alone in this shitshow of a conversation anymore. “I’m sorry. Me and Phantom was just having a conversation about how you’re clearly discriminatory towards ghosts.”

Bruce stopped from where he had turned to leave. “…What?”

Phantom nodded. “Yeah! Don’t think I’ve forgotten your rude comment earlier about your condolences!”

Despite the bizarre situation, Tim almost laughed at the shocked expression on Bruce’s face, visible even under the mask. His father opened his mouth, closed it, and tried again, “I was just saying that I wish I could have helped you before you ended up as a ghost.”

“And I’m saying that that’s clearly showing a preference for living people!”

Bruce pressed his mouth into a thin line before saying, “I think we need to have a conversation about the value of life if you’re going to be joining us on any more rescue missions.”

“See!” Phantom looked at Tim as he gestured angrily at Bruce “There he goes again!”

Tim got up from the sofa. “I’m late for my shift.” And he left the break room as if the ghosts of hell were at his heals. Which they kind of were; Phantom’s angry voice following him down the corridor. He really wasn’t awake enough for this shit.

[violetsdaisy]

Phantom of the Opera Masterlist

by violetsdaisy

The Song of the Basement

Oneshot. Rated T. Erikstine

Christine is orphaned and left in an orphanage where she hears beautiful music from the basement which follows her throughout life.

The Unfinished Race

11 chapters. Rated M. Erikstine

He had no intention of invading her life again after letting her go. Now her life is in his hands and he must protect her at all costs. The plan was to get her to safety. He should have foreseen that any plan regarding her wouldn’t play out how he had expected.

six thirty

Oneshot. Rated E. Erikstine

Christine wants to thank Erik for everything he’s done for her. Meg and Sorelli told her how. Now, she just has to put the plan into action.

Je Veux Vivre

7 chapters. Rated M. Erik/OC

Still recovering from her husband’s sudden death, Claire’s life takes another unexpected turn when a shadowed figure appears in her bedroom one night. Nadir says he knows him. Claire doesn’t want to, but fate has other plans.

[phicphight]

Sorry for the wait but the sign-up form for 2024 Phic Phight is now open! You have until March 27th to sign up!

What is Phic Phight?

Phic Phight is a Danny Phantom fan-fiction writing competition, were writers are asked to provide prompts. Then they are split into two teams; team ghost and team human. The teams are given prompts from the opposite team and gain points for creating fics based on the prompts. The winner gains bragging rights for the year. This was created as a friendly competition to inspire new ideas and stories for the phandom.

Phic Phight begins April 1st and ends April 30th.

You will be required to join the new Phic Phight discord server to participate.

A full list of rules can be found HERE

No OC prompts are allowed. And no crossover prompts are allowed.

Please tag works as #phicphight24

[forlorngarden]

you and that fucking wasp

[faeriekit]

Salt Mirror

phic phight fill with two prompts; for @echoghost1 and @fuyuthefoxwriter

(Sister fics are Snow Day, Snowdrift Sanctuary, and Frozen Out)

********

The first thing Danny noticed was the teeth. 

Or. Well. The first thing Frostbite noticed were the teeth. What Danny noticed was that suddenly he was being offered bigger and bigger bones with his meal, which were very much not typical human-appropriate food. 

“You break them,” Frostbite showed him, pinning the bone between two sharp canines and biting down. The bone broke clean in two. Hot-dog style. “Then you are free to eat the marrow inside.”

Danny stared. “I don’t… I don't think my teeth do that.”

“Try it,” his guardian encouraged. 

…Well. He hoped Far Frozen had as good a dentistry practice as they did medicine. Danny shoved the bone between his canine teeth, and clamped down—

—And the bone broke clean through. 

Huh. That was…new. 

Well. Marrow tasted good, anyway, and scooping the butter-soft marrow out with a spoon was easy. Danny might have clunked the wooden spoon against his teeth a couple times (man, was he clumsy today) but he was very happy with the results. 

The next day Frostbite offered him an arm-length rib bone, Danny didn’t even hesitate to chomp down. 

He ate through four ribs before he felt full. He was happy. 

*

The second thing Danny noticed was how pale he got. 

Like. As in ‘his arm matched the snow-white fur of his tundra-proof coat’ level pale. ‘White as a glacier and just as blue’ level pale. Like. There was no red left in his skin. 

He pressed his thumb to his palm. It went yellow, and then flushed back to white as his blood went back in. 

…Spooky. Uh. Danny blinked loudly. Maybe he was…sick…?

There wasn’t a mirror in their cave dwelling, and nothing was shiny enough to reflect in— everything that wasn’t medical was cast iron, or not quite mirror smooth, like Frostbite’s round cooking knives. 

Danny needed a mirror. 

He bundled up and walked through fresh snow drifts to the closest medical facility: an ice cave across from Ledyanoy and Avalanche’s home, carved into one of several dozen pillars of ice embedded into the floating island. Danny knew that there was a mirror there, since Frostbite went in for mirror therapy every time his ice-carved arm began to itch psychosomatically. 

He darted inside. Pritla was the only one in there, so they ignored him in their quest for additional data. Great. All Danny needed was the mirror set up in the corner, ready and waiting to be rolled into place for Frostbite’s next session. 

Danny peeked at his reflection. He looked…wow. 

For one, Danny looked spooky as hell. The blue went all around his eyes, now— no whites to be seen, creating an uneasy, inhuman look. He was pale. He was very pale. He looked like the printer had run out of any colors that might have given him some sort of standing to wander reality with. 

The insides of his lips were blue. The wet inner linings around his eyes were blue. 

…What. 

And. Speaking of…lips…his gums were a deep, sapphire blue, as was his tongue. None of that was as important as his huge freaking fangs, though!

Like! Huge! Not yeti huge, of course, but still!! Danny had no idea how they weren’t sticking straight out of his mouth when he closed it. Big, pearly fangs. 

What the heck was happening to him? 

*

“I think you’re turning into a Yeti,” Tundra decided primly, and flung himself at Arctic without any further thought. The teenage Yeti— still taller than Danny by two heads and a half— squawked, barely seeing the projectile cub in time to dodge appropriately. 

“No,” said Danny. It was more outright denial than certainty. He wrapped his coat tighter around himself. 

Avalanche, who was the closest to adulthood out of all of them, watched the two wrestle balefully. Tundra was barely out of cub age, and Arctic wasn’t much better than Sidney Poindexter when it came to having his crap together, so it was kind of like watching two frogs mud-wrestle in knee-high snow. 

“I mean,” said Avalanche, mostly bored by the spectacle of Arctic getting his butt whipped by what amounted to a kid, “I’m pretty sure it’s normal for human-born ghosts to adapt to their Obsessions after they form. You have to change a little to match your environment. And we have a lot of snow.” 

“So much!” Tundra howled from where he was perched on top of Arctic. His victory lasted as long as it took for Arctic to get his legs underneath himself, push himself to standing, and launch Tundra into a snow drift with a surprised squeal. 

Arctic shook himself off. His fur fluffed up with the effort, which made him look larger in size than usual. “I think that if you were turning into a yeti, Frostbite would have noticed. Or said something. Or done something.”

Avalanche shook her head, gamely ignoring how Tundra had turned from a fallen-in-the-snow position to a crouching-and-ready-to-pounce position. Danny had seen this a million times now; either Arctic would notice (he wouldn’t) and dodge, or he’d once again fall victim to Tundra’s childish enthusiasm. 

Danny and Avalanche largely had no comment on Tundra’s second leap of faith, nor for their mutual struggle for pubescent dominance that ensued. 

There were other questions to ask. 

*

“Am I turning into a yeti?” Phantom asked. 

Frostbite looked down. 

The half-ghost looked nervous— picking at his lip until green beaded under his teeth, his hands in the sleeves of his coat. 

“No,” Frostbite confirmed. He didn’t smile, as it would have seemed condescending in the face of Phantom’s genuine worry. It was better to keep calm. “Why are you worried about turning into a yeti?” 

Phantom stared up at him, eyes deep and luminous. Frostbite had seen similar coloration on deep-sea creatures, long-travelled things desperate for any sort of light. The sight was compelling, yes, but could not substitute for a verbal answer. 

“...Because I’m changing colors and now I have sharp teeth and I think I’m growing claws,” Phantom pointed out. All of these things were true. They were very good, sturdy teeth, and very good, sturdy claws, which was a good sign; anything otherwise would have indicated a lack of support on Frostbite’s end. 

“It is a very normal thing to want to explore other forms of expression at your age,” Frostbite pointed out. He threaded his paws through Phantom’s pale hair, and found, to his pride, little buds of ice horns. “And I am very flattered that you think so highly of us that you are interested in mimicking some of our more obvious traits; that being said, if it distresses you, you are always free to change back.” 

Phantom’s face turned…lost. “Oh.” 

Frostbite continued petting. More explanation would come, or it wouldn’t— but in the meantime, the human tinge returned to his charge’s cheeks, flush with red blood, and the bud horns collapsed where they grew. His charge’s hair turned dark once more, his teeth flat and human. 

Phantom’s eyes were always blue. The human color was not as deep, but was just as nice. Now, there were tears in them. 

“What is wrong, little one?” Frostbite rumbled, concerned. Phantom took his paw and pressed his face to it in search of tactile comfort. 

“I didn’t know why I was changing,” Phantom admitted, sniffing. His voice was wet and raw. “I was scared I couldn’t go back. Humans don’t just…change like that, 'cause we're made of matter. I was scared…”

Frostbite rumbled wordlessly. His charge had adapted very well to a non-human environment, but there were knowledge gaps that would have come naturally to any Realms-Borne being; most intuitively was knowledge of the self, as well as the rigidity (and fluidity) of one’s own manner of expression. 

Changing without realization would be distressing. Frostbite still remembered what it felt like to wake up some mornings and realize that his arm was gone. 

“You are alright,” Frostbite reaffirmed. “It it healthy to change, and it is a good time to find out how you will want to present yourself. That being said, there is no rush.”

Frostbite paused. 

“There is one rush. If you intend to partake in eating marrow with our dinner tonight, you may want to manifest your teeth again—”

Phantom laughed, little cub’s fangs poking out between his teeth. All would be well; but first, there was dinner to be had, and a good night’s sleep to be found.

[wastefulreverie]

"This can't be legal," Danny said in a weak voice. "I mean, how are they allowed to do this?"

Lancer tensed. "It falls under a gray area. If you ask me, the Anti-Ecto Prevention Act gives them far too much jurisdiction."

The GIW, full in pure white HAZMAT suits from the overlarge hoods to the fitted boots, ushered in the next student from his class. Poor Lester walked into the tent, looking green in the face. Sweat rolled down his temples and his hands shook as the suited agent clasped his shoulder and pulled him through the curtains.

Paulina sniffed. "I don't want to be microchipped."

"Were you even listening at all?" Wes scoffed. "It's biodegradable. It'll be out of your system within a year and prevents you from being overshadowed. Unless, of course, you are a ghost." His eyes flitted to Danny. "Then who the hell knows what it'll do to you?"

"I'm not doing it." Sam crossed her arms. She was sitting on the gym floor, cross-legged. "It's unconstitutional, the total principle of it."

"I can't believe I'm agreeing with Manson," Paulina said. "But they'll have to drag me in there before they insert something underneath my flawless skin."

Valerie rolled her eyes. "Not that I object to being overshadowed, but I'd rather not have the U.S. government tracking my every move."

"There's not trackers in them," Lancer said. "They were adamant about that when we were told about this."

"Great," Sam drew out, "the untested ghost repelling microchips with unknown side effects being nonconsensually administered to minors allegedly doesn't broadcast our current locations to the government. That eases my nerves."

The tension in the room was palpable.

"I have uh, I have epilepsy," Nathan spoke up. His voice was short and clipped. "Do they even know how this'll affect that?"

Lancer put his head in his hands. "Dear Lord. I didn't sign up for this. I hate this."

The curtains were drawn back again. An agent, possibly the same one from a minute before but it was hard to tell since they all looked the same in the HAZMAT suits. He looked down at a clipboard.

"Fenton?" he called. "Daniel Fenton?"

Danny stared at the floor from where he was standing, not daring to look up and inevitably see everyone's eyes on him. The tiles on the gym floor looked like maple-colored planks of wood, but there was a thin film of clear plastic—or maybe rubber—when he slid his shoes against it.

"Fenton," repeated the agent, "come with me."

He didn't look up.

No. Because if he looked up, that meant he would have to do something. He wanted to avoid this for as long as he could.

There was a sound of rustling and in his peripheral vision he saw his classmates move out of the way as the agent stalked toward him.

He stumbled backward, not quite tripping, but struggling to keep even footing. Oh. He hoped he hadn't phased his feet through each other. He used to be bad with that. This would be the worst time and place to fall into old habits.

The agent gave him an unreadable look, face obscured by the HAZMAT mask, but Danny could feel the man's impatience as he waved the clipboard.

"Fenton. You're up."

"No."

His classmates glanced at him nervously and the agent shifted his weight, giving an agitated huff.

"Kid, you don't get a choice in this. This is for your protection."

"I can protect myself, thanks," he snapped. "I think I'll do fine without your little ghost zapping chip embedded in my arm."

"I don't know who you think you are, but just because your parents are ghost hunters doesn't make you exempt from this. All students, no exceptions."

He locked eyes with the man behind the mask. Well, it was a calculated guess at where the man's eyes were but Danny hoped his stare came across as menacing.

"It's nothing more than a pinch. I promise this won't be half as bad as you're imagining."

"Oh, I'm sure it will be."

Wes cleared his throat.

"Fenton's a—"

Without warning, Sam pulled herself to her feet and slugged Wes in the face. Hard. He stumbled backward and almost fell on one of the bleachers. Blood dripped from her knuckles and from his nose. Oh. That was going to bruise badly.

Lancer cried in alarm.

"Miss Manson!"

"Sorry, Mr. Lancer. Muscle spasm."

"We don't have time for this." The agent reached forward and grabbed Danny's shoulder as he'd done to Lester minutes before. "Come on. Let's get this done."

Danny stood his ground, and the agent pulled against him. He was stronger than the agent, and despite that, he'd phased the bottom of his shoes into the uppermost layer of the gym's floor. He wasn't going anywhere.

"How in the world—?"

Paulina started sobbing at the top of her lungs.

"I don't want to be here! I don't want to be chipped! I want to go home!"

The agent turned toward her, startled. "Now, calm down now—"

Wes staggered forward, blood dripping onto the floor as he moved. Some fell onto the agent's pristine, white boots. He jumped away from Wes like he'd been burned.

More students joined Paulina, clamoring that they didn't want to be chipped either. Sam raised her bloodied fist and shouted—an unhinged, almost feral scream while Danny gradually phased his shoes deeper into the floor. Mr. Lancer pulled a book out from somewhere and was waving it around, a loose bookmark falling out as he did so, in a futile attempt to capture everyone's attention.

Three identical agents ran out of the curtained tent at the sound of the chaos.

"What is going on!" one of them barked.

"Sir, the students are being uncooperative," the first agent said.

"I need medical attention," Wes said, unhelpfully.

The new agent, who Danny decided was the boss, accessed Wes and the drops of blood on the first agent's boots with horror.

"Agent Kilo, you didn't…"

"No, no. It was the girl."

He nodded his head to Sam, who hid her bloodied fist behind her back.

"He's a liar!" she said. "He hit Wes! We all saw it!"

The other students gave tentative nods. Ever the performer, Paulina flinched away from Agent Kilo, as if afraid he might strike her. In the midst of it all Lancer did nothing.

"Kilo," the boss's voice was stern. "That's not how we do things."

"But I didn't—"

"You're dismissed for now. We'll discuss this later." He turned to Wes. "I do apologize."

Wes looked at him like he'd grown an extra head. "Alright?"

Agent Kilo stormed away, muttering something about lying, conniving brats and threw his clipboard on the ground.

Lancer stepped in. "If I may, I do say that my students have been through an emotionally stressful experience here and I don't know if they should continue with this today. Besides, Mr. Weston does still need medical attention and I believe that should be our top priority."

The boss grunted. "Right. Return to class. We'll continue this at another date."

He waved a hand and the other agents headed back to the tent. Meanwhile, the students trailed after Lancer toward the opposite end of the gym—all sighing in relief.

As they left the gym, Sam caught Danny's shoulder and hissed in his ear. "Danny, the clipboard."

The discarded clipboard was forgotten on the floor.

"Mark our names off," she hissed. "I'll keep them distracted."

He nodded. He tapped into invisibility and retrieved the clipboard. A ballpoint pen was clipped to the top of it and he marked off the box beside his and Sam's names, doing his best to emulate Agent Kilo's loopy initials for the official confirmation. With any luck, the man wouldn't remember it later among all the chaos. With better luck, the man would be dismissed from the GIW completely.

He flipped the clipboard face-up and left it closer to the tent so that the agents would find it. He flew back into the corridor and met up with Sam, who was lingering near the end of the group.

"Got it." He dropped back onto the visible spectrum. "We're officially chipped."

"Oh, thank God. You're a literal lifesaver."

Wes turned, holding a wad of paper towels against his bloodied nose. "Please tell me I'm not the only one who just saw Fenton appear out of thin air, right?"

"You're concussed, Weston," Valerie said, not bothering to turn around and check. "He's not a ghost."

"Manson did not give me a concussion!"

"Yeah, Agent Kilo did," Nathan brushed off. "Keep up. The GIW can suck it."

That was something they could all, unquestionably, agree on.