#I might do ectober week

[nyk-is-always-lurking]

Dora my beloved

[bongo-clash]

I Want To Break Free

Ectober week prompt: Six Feet

'When three members of Casper High’s football team make one mistake too many, they’ve got no choice other than to bury the evidence. But, both fortunately and unfortunately for them, dead doesn’t mean gone, and they’ve been living in a ghost town for years.'

(Content warnings in tags || fic under cut!!)

-

For all that Amity Park is the poster child for widescale property damage, the crime rate is practically nonexistent. There’s something about finding a common enemy in the violent ghosts ravaging their town that wards off that willingness to go against another human being’s interests like that; murder, in particular, has been shoved off the table since the moment the victims started coming back to haunt them. It’s common knowledge that if you kill someone in Amity Park, everyone is going to find out.

This is exactly why three A-listers are shitting themselves right about now. 

Look, they hadn’t meant for it to go this far. It’d been such a harmless thing in theory- or, well, maybe not harmless, but it shouldn’t have gone any further than humiliation and maybe a bruise or two. They should’ve known it only takes a bad fall. They’re footballers- they should’ve known. But it’d been thoughtless, a split second decision made in the incredibly brief time the opportunity had been presented to them. All Dale had said was ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if you tripped him?’.

And it had been funny, until he hadn’t gotten up again. Now Danny Fenton is dead on the shower room floors, and every single one of them is guilty. 

There’s a long time where none of them know what to do. God, they’ve just killed someone, is this second-degree or manslaughter? There certainly wasn’t any express malice, but they’d definitely thought about swiping his feet out from under him without considering that he might hit his head; that could definitely been seen as implied malice. But they hadn’t meant to! They’d never wanted to, it was never supposed to go this far, and it was especially never supposed to go this far here. 

‘Here’, as in some place at the end of the school day, when the buses were about to leave and the teachers weren’t waiting up for them, having let them lock up before and having been willing to do it again. ‘Here’, as in Casper High in the first place, that had already seen tragedy in a fire taking almost the entire student body in the fifties, and had now witnessed a murder in its reconstructed halls. ‘Here’, as in Amity Park, the ghost town, where there’s a non-zero chance of this literally coming back to get them. 

The silence charged with the smell of deodorant and a wet body already beginning to self-digest is broken, finally, by Dash- the one to trip him, and the first one to back away when he’d felt Fenton’s limp hand for a pulse and found nothing. 

“What the Hell do we do?” He whispers, voice barely reaching anyone else in the room, but you could hear a pin drop beneath the still-running showerheads, and everyone was straining to hear it, desperate to divert their attention. My dad’s a lawyer, he thinks, is there any chance he could save us from this?

As if reading his mind, and said like the instigator that knows they’ll be thrown under the bus for suggesting this in the first place, Dale interrupts the train of thought with a sturdy “We can’t go to the police.”

“Dude, are you insane?” Kwan splutters, barely able to keep his gaze from flitting back to the crime scene. And holy shit, this really is a crime scene. “Dale, we can’t just try and bury this, that’s so much worse.”

“You’re only saying that because you’re a witness!” Dale snaps, looking overwhelmed but outsourcing it to aggression, eyes wide and afraid but brow furrowed. “You’re really gonna let us take the fall like that? We’re your friends.”

Kwan, to his merit, is standing his ground, despite looking incredibly green around the edges. In fairness, all three of them probably look that way. “I’d rather be a witness than an accomplice! I can’t- we can’t-!”

“We’re the only people here.” Dash interrupts numbly, and this is probably the second most awful thing he’s ever done apart from actual murder, but all that’s running through his head right now is I can’t go to jail. His life can’t be over with one dumb mistake even if Danny’s is. “Who’s to say it wasn’t you who did it? All the teachers have seen how we act around the school; we work as a group, always. They’re not gonna believe it was just one of us. They’re gonna believe it was all of us.”

This is his best friend, and he’s convincing him to help hide a body by threatening him, because Dash accidentally committed murder and this does not in the slightest feel like something that’s actually happening to him right now. The whole world feels like a smudged trail against the lens of a window pane. There are tears in Kwan’s eyes.

“I’m never fucking talking to any of you again.” Kwan spits, voice damp with distress. “You- You’re monsters for this. It stops being an accident the moment you start trying to cover shit up, I just- this is horrible.”

The realisation that he’s never heard his friend swear before is a thousand miles away, back in some world where Dash’s biggest problem was getting detention for making Mikey late to class on Tuesday. It would’ve been funny if it wasn’t sad. “But you’re gonna help us.”

His expression is the picture of helplessness, but he doesn’t say a word in retort. Silently, the agreement is made that no one is going to know. 

Figuring out what they’re supposed to do with the body is a completely different ball game, though. Kwan had enough of an interest in forensic science (wrenched from him completely two minutes ago, but he can’t erase what facts he already has) to know that dead bodies are apparently heavy as Hell, and the woods is too far to carry one towards. It’d be a terrible idea to bury the body under or near the football field- the disturbed soil would be way too noticeable- but to get to any other place with easily accessible ground, they’d have to transport the body through town and none of them could drive. That doesn’t leave them with a lot of options.

“Behind the bike shed.” Dale exclaims suddenly. “The gap between the shed and the hedge is so tiny no one even goes there to make out- no one’ll even notice the difference.” 

“But won’t people look around the school if someone got murdered here?” 

Dale looks to the showers nobody bothered to turn off, and down at the body with glazed eyes. “They won’t know it was here if all the blood’s down the drain.”

There’s not much to argue with there. Dale has the forethought to go outside and make sure the coast is clear while grabbing a sheet of tarp from the equipment shed, bringing it back into the room with lips pursed into a hardset line. 

Kwan keels over and spills his guts into the shower drains the moment Dash lifts the body, blood and water congealing at the back of Fenton’s head and spilling onto the floor, but no one says a word about it, they just wait until he’s finished. They wrap the body in the tarp until only the ends of his hair and the tips of his shoes are visible, and Dale directs the showerhead to wash away the gore. He tries not to squirm at the knowledge of what he’s holding in his hands right now, because if there’s any time to freak out it’s not now. Not when there’s still stuff left to do. 

When they’ve gotten to the spot behind the shed, there’s already three shovels leaning against the back. Dash puts the body down underneath the hedge, and grabs a handle. 

“Six feet.” He says. “And no one’ll have to know.”

-

It’s probably the most stupid thing he’s ever done other than trip Danny Fenton in the showers, but that same night, he goes back to the place they buried the body. 

He doesn’t know why he thought it was a good idea. He hadn’t, most likely, but still, a piece of him felt like he needed to go back, that dumb part of his brain where all the morbid curiosity comes from and all his meanest ideas go. Regardless of the cause, though, at two in the morning not eight hours after they’d tried to flatten the soil, Dash is back at the grave. 

His heart still aches with everything Kwan had said, begging them to just go to the police and come clean, because no matter how much he doesn’t want his life ruined he knows it already is. There’s not going to be any coming back from this- whether anyone finds the body and discovers their part in it or not, this is going to follow him for the rest of his life. That soil disturbed amongst the grass from upturning, wedged between the bike shed and the hedge, the ground shaking with motion. 

…The dirt. The dirt’s moving. Why’s the dirt moving?

All at once, he jumps back about five paces and freezes stock still, gaze transfixed towards the soil rumbling like the epicentre of a personal earthquake. His mind is terrifyingly blank as he watches, hearing more and more coming from beneath as the time passes somewhere between a good few minutes and an eternity, something like muttering or moans permeating the earth. 

A hand grasps for purchase as it breaks through the top layer of the soil- pale, grimy, and fuzzing at the edges with translucence. The palm finds flat ground some centimetres away, and with a sound like a grunt or a cry, the corpse pulls itself out of the ground. 

Danny Fenton stands in full form before him, brown blood smudged across his temple from the back of his head and dirt caking every other inch of him. The tarp is sticking out from the ground like a tongue. “Hey Dash,” Fenton sighs, like he hadn’t just crawled out of his own unmarked grave alive. “What are you doing here? It’s… oh man, it’s totally past curfew. My parents are gonna kill me for sure.”

It’s that comment in particular that snaps him out of his stupor, catching the weird look in the other boy’s eyes. “Fenton, what the fuck?” His voice is half-wheezing with disbelief, surprised he’s able to breathe between it at all. This is impossible, shouldn’t be happening, but, this is Amity. The dead come back to haunt them all the time. 

“What?” He asks blithely, before tilting his head to look back at the mound in the dirt, the hole that had been filled to hide him. “Oh, that? Don’t worry about it. No one comes back here anyway, and it’s not like they’ll care if they do.”

He can’t for the life of him process the calm in Danny’s voice. “You were dead.” He says. “I killed you. We buried you.”

“But you didn’t report it to the police, huh?” Not knowing how else to respond, Dash shakes his head. “Yeah, makes sense, they never do. Still, guess that gives me less issues to deal with in the long run, and I can’t really complain about that even if the morality of the whole thing bugs me. You really should tell people about these kinds of things before they find out on their own, y’know? Oh, but Dash?”

Fenton has his back turned by now, having stretched his limbs out and began to walk off during his talk, but he turns his head just a little, then. Just enough that Dash can see the glint of sharp teeth underneath his lips. Just enough for his eyes to catch green under a light that doesn’t exist. 

“No one’s gonna believe you.”

…

(When Kwan and Dale come to school with him the next day like nothing’s wrong, and they spot Danny Fenton talking with his friends by his locker like any other stupid day, they don’t say a word. They don’t make fun of him when he falls asleep in class after claiming to have had a ‘long night’, and they don’t tell their friends why they weren’t at Star’s house by eight, and they don’t ask Kwan to talk about it when they go to bathroom together at lunch and he has a panic attack over the sinks. Because Danny Fenton being alive is not possible, but if the dead won’t tell their secrets, then neither will they.)

(Neither will they.)

[the-random-phan]

Ectober Week Day 28- Scream

"Danny!" Danielle cried. Tears flooded her face and she struggled, but her nerves were alight with electricity. Danielle tried her best to stay conscious, to keep herself together. But her body was giving up on her. Try as she might, Dani was loosing.

She could just barely open her eyes now. Or what was left of them. She couldn't feel most of her body, and wasn't completely sure if she was seeing from one eye or two. Everything was either numb or on fire, and the numb was spreading. Which was definetly not a good thing.

But some part of her couldn't help but want the release. Better than the pain she had been soaked in for... it was hard to tell the time. It could have been 15 minutes or ten seconds. The moments seemed to slip through Danielle's fingers.

Everything was slipping. Dani felt herself breaking. Her thoughts became muddled and as everything went dark and numb, she felt a last pang of loss. A life so short and so full of hardship.

But that wasn't how this was supposed to end, Dani knew. In two seconds she would burst back up like a phoenix, good as new. But two seconds slipped back and it stayed dark. And cold. And numb. And quiet.

Dani didn't do well with the quiet. It left too much space for other things. For wanting and lamenting. Luxuries she couldn't afford and didn't want to indulge.

Dani couldn't handle the silence. Despite having no voice, she began to scream. And scream. Scream in to the void and hope that something called back.

"-ani!"

Huh?

"-ielle!"

A voice? It sounded familiar. Despite having no legs, Dani forced herself towards the sound. Who was here? Who had reached for her?

"Danielle!"

Dani jolted awake, sitting straight up. Her skull cracked against another. Dani and Danny both cradled their battered heads.

"Ow," Danny grimaced.

"I'm sorry!" Danielle fretted. She didn't know what to do with her hands, urged to help but unknowing what to do.

Danny's right hand glowed a soft, icy blue. He held it to his forehead to sooth the forming bruise. Dani wished that she could do that.

"I should be asking you that," Danny looked at her from under his arm.

"Are you okay?" Dani worried.

Dani's jaw clicked shut. Images flooded her brain. She wished for that split moment when she had forgotten her dream. No, not a dream. It was too horrible for that title. Call it what it was, a nightmare. One that had haunted Dani ever since the events it was based on had transpired. Events she had tried her best to push back into the depths of her brain. But her subconscious kept unearthing them and shoving them in front of her face.

"You were the one screaming in your sleep."

"I'm fine." Dani said, strained.

"Perfectly fine." Her smiled was thin. Danny looked at her funny. But he accepted the answer. For now.

"I'm gonna get some more sleep." Dani rolled over in her sleeping bag on Danny's floor. The ground was cold against her skin and Dani relished in it. She was too hot.

The room temperature cooled. It caught Dani's attention. She looked back up at the bed to see Danny's hand stretched out holding a ball of white and blue. He smiled at her.

Dani rolled back over. Danny, saving her yet again. Dani's hero.

The rest of her sleep was dreamless.

[kinglazrus]

ohhh for the wip game I’m v curious about ghost ptsd and fog-splatter

Send me one of my wip titles and I'll tell you about it

Ghost PTSD

Originally a phight fic that I didn't continue. The premise was that a random GIW runs into a teenager in Amity Park and recognizes signs of PTSD that he assumes is from ghost attacks, and he ends up trying to comfort/help the teen in question. I only wrote a few paragraphs for it in the end, so I'll just post all of it.

Fast food is not something Alexander Wells indulges in often. His job as a government agent requires him to stay in top shape. That means a strict diet and exercise regimen with very little wiggle room. But even he has his cheat days, and after a long afternoon of tracking down the ghost boy, only to lose him in the residential district, Alexander needs something greasy to sooth his wounded pride. The guys back at base are going to laugh him out the door when he returns empty-handed. He spent much of the morning boasting to the others that he would make a better show of things in Amity Park. The agency is wasting his talents keeping him stationed out in the countryside where nothing ever happens.

What a load of shit that had been.

Once he realized the hunt had failed, he changed out of his work clothes, got into something comfortable, and headed for the nearest fast-food joint. The Nasty Burger. It's not an appetizing name, nor is the smell that hit him when he first walked through the door, but greasy food is greasy food. Looking around, it seems to be popular with the younger generation. Alexander can't tell if that's good or bad. Kids these days have interesting taste.

At the very least, the food is cheap. Alexander eyes the board while the line shuffles forward. Nothing really appeals to him. Mighty Meaty Melt. Mini Mighty Meaty Melt. Meaty Cheesy Melt. Everything has the word "meat" and "melt" in it. Even the fries: Meaty Melty Fries. What does that even mean? Melty fries? Alexander isn't sure he wants to know the answer to that.

Fog-splatter

Started for Ectober 2020. Jack has been having strange gaps in his memories, hearing about conversations he never had, finding inventions he doesn't remember working on. And his son is being incredibly strange around him. Basically a fic where Vlad has been overshadowing Jack for some nefarious plot. I didn't get far into it—I never do with these week/month events—but I still like the idea and might finish it some day.

"Damn sentient soups," Jack muttered, eying the green sludge. He knew it was last night's dinner. Or it was supposed to be, until a single drop of ectoplasm infected the whole pot and turned it into a conscious, quivering mass. Dumping it down the kitchen sink probably hadn't been a good idea, but it was certainly convenient.

The thick green drops trembled, then started creeping along the porcelain, joining together into a single blob at the bottom of the sink. Several oily eyes blinked open and locked onto Jack. The blob opened its goopy mouth and hissed, then slipped back down the drain.

Jack shrugged and turned the tap on. Murky water flowed from the faucet, but it was quickly clearing up. He could deal with the sludge in the pipes later. For now, he kept the tap on until the water ran clear and drinkable. Even then, it wouldn't be the worst thing he'd ever eaten. As he filled his glass, he glanced in the darkened mirror.

A horned shadow loomed behind him.

[goodfish-bowl]

EctoberHaunt and Ectober Week 2022 Master Post

Happy Halloween! Here’s my complete collections of prompts for this month. Big thanks to those over at @ectoberhaunt and @ectoberweekofficial for the prompts! All fills should be correctly tagged, fics contain summaries and AO3 links, and please do mind the warnings if they’re there.

All my Ectoberhaunt22 fics can also be found here on AO3

Ectoberhaunt22

Day 3 - Order: Order to Entropy (poem)

Day 3 - Chaos: Refraction Chapter 3: Break to Build (fic)

Day 4 - Box: All Boxed Up (art)

Day 4 - Staff: Spirit of Rock (art)

Day 5 - Wraith: Paved with Good Intentions (fic)

Day 5 - Banshee: The Last One (art)

Day 6 - Burn: Fevour (fic)

Day 6 - Freeze: A Mercy (fic)

Day 7 - Purify & Infect: Detox(ic) (art)

Day 10 - Hunger: Taste Test (fic)

Day 10 - Harvest: Harvest Moon (art)

Day 11 - Drown: A Nap with the Fishes (fic)

Day 11 - Thirst: A Craving to be Sated (fic)

Day 12 - A Way of Life & Cause of Death: A Way of Death (fic)

Day 13 - Restored: Humanity Restored (comic)

Day 13 - Abandoned: The Haunting of Amity Park: Part 1: The Neon District (fic)

Day 14 - Haunted House: The Haunting of Amity Park:Part 2:  FentonWorks (fic)

Day 14 - Costume Party: Double Trouble (art)

Day 18 - Eyes: A Trick of the Light (animation)

Day 18 - Teeth: Teeth Bared (art)

Day 19 - One & One Hundred: Hall of a Hundred Eyes (art)

Day 21 - Coronation: The Dragon Queen (art)

Day 24 - Future: The Price of Knowing (art)

Day 24 - Past: Too Dead for This: Chapter 1: Seven Years is a Long Time (fic)

Ectober Week 2022

Day 26 - Six Feet: I’ll Come Home if You Call (poem and art)

Day 28 - “Psst, you’re dead. Pass it on.“: Two Paths (animation)

Unprompted

Cosmic Perspective (art)

Dead and Gone (transparent art)

Squeaky Toy (animation)

Ectoberhaunt21 Master Post

Commentary Under the Cut

It has been supremely challenging and fun to do all of these prompts! I know I’m not a super prolific author and artist, but I really enjoy events like this. While it’s been hard on me to produce this sheer amount of content, it was engaging and active, giving me something to do and has motivated me to put out more content in a month than I would normally do in a year on my own. I also love seeing the improvement in my content from this year to last year, when I first took part in this event, along as throughout the event itself, I noticed improvement. While I might not have been able to fill all of the prompts I had planned to do, I also did much more than I originally planned as well, shooting to fill all of the prompts, both for each day. But with 29 fills, 3 of which have no prompt at all, instead inspired by other things throughout the event, I’m satisfied.

I’ve had so much fun throughout this entire event, from planning my fills, to the story line made up by the Ectoberhaunt crew, to drawing and writing my fills themselves. But of all of them, I do have some favorites.

I found my trend of horrible angst holds true, with some of my most severe fill, at least in my opinion, being Paved with Good Intentions. Vlad’s perspective of Danny’s grief was definitely something I found fun to write.

I noticed I used a lot of Outside, or limited perspective, especially with The Haunting of Amity Park, where you only get the perspective from the camera, so it ended up being mostly descriptions and dialog. The morticians perspective in A Way of Death was also amusing to write.

I tried out a lot of different art techniques this year as well. I messed with my style, bouncing back and forth between a more semi-realistic style and then a more cartoon-esque style for the more humorous fills, and then the simplistic style for a few other ones. I definitely think I’ve improved over the past month, just due to the sheer amount of art alone. The animations were fun themselves.

My ask box is always open if you want to talk to me about a particular piece.

See ya around!

[sykloni]

Ember (From DP) and Vepar? If you're still doing the palette challenge that is,

I was also wondering if I had permission to use these palettes myself? Thank you!

I never said I stopped doing the palette challenge (because I was kind of hoping to do few more), but after keeping the color palettes as my pinned post few weeks I kind of figured I wasn't going to get any more requests than that..

I am currently commited on finishing as much of Ectober as I can, but these palettes are really pretty so even if I don't have time for this request right now, I might still do it after I'm done with Ectober <3

But most importantly the palettes are not mine! The color palette post is just a reblog. They are by @ultrainfinitepit who said in the post "feel free to use these colors" :) So go ahead! They are really fun to use! :D

[raaorqtpbpdy]

I couldn’t think of anything for Ectober Week day 5’s prompts, so since I’m only doing the week and not the month, I stole a prompt from earlier in the month: Cause of death.

Coroner’s Report

[Warnings for autopsies and death and gratuitous swearing]

[Recording Begins]

"Subject is Daniel J. Fenton, age fourteen. Rushed to the hospital after a supposed accident in his parents' home laboratory. Pronounced dead on arrival at 4:18 PM, September 20th, 2004."

The voice of Amity Park Medical Examiner Dr. Osiris Blanch speaks into his recorder. He does this so he doesn't forget anything when he writes his official reports. He will transcribe the recording into his written report later, as he always does, for the police and insurance company and whoever else to use in their investigation of the boy's parents.

He has a habit of talking to himself while he works anyway, narrating his actions, so recording is the most efficient way to ensure he provides an accurate coroner's report.

"Cause of death appears to be electrocution," he continues.

As he records, he is looking at the state of the corpse, covered in subdermal burns. Even hours after his death, the coroner could still smell ozone in the air, and he could feel the hair on his arms slowly standing on end from the static.

"In addition to electrical burns below the skin, the body appears to have some peculiar burn marks spanning from the left hand to the heart, atypical of electrical burns. Possibly... plasma burns, or some kind of radiation burns? Do I need to get a Geiger counter in here? Christ alive, what kinda lab did this kid get fried in exactly?"

There is a sigh on the recording, the sound of coffee being sipped from a mug, a loud, metallic clack as the recorder is placed on a steel implement stray, and another, quieter clack as Dr. Blanch puts down his coffee cup. The scraping of a scalpel being lifted off the implements tray very near the recorder.

"I will now begin the autopsy by making a Y-incision of the abdomen—AH!" The scalpel clatters against the metal autopsy table. "Ha... static shock."

Dr. Blanch's voice begins to sound uneasy here.

"I'm uh... I'm making the incision now." The quiet squelching of skin being sliced by a sharp blade is almost drowned out by the coroner's shaky breaths. "Shit, keep it steady..." he mutters to himself. "When did it get so goddamn cold in here?"

The scalpel quietly clicks against another tray, away from the sterilized instruments near the recorder.

"I'm opening up the chest now to begin the autopsy."

A sickly squelching of flesh and sinew being pulled apart is heard on the recording, and then a gasp from the coroner.

"The uh... the lights just flickered a little," Dr. Blanch explains. "There's no storm or anything that might cause a blackout, but if some idiot crashes into a telephone pole and knocks out the power, I'm gonna be pissed. This jobs a pain in the ass if the lights go out. Not to mention all the corpses in the drawers'll start to decay if the freezers turn off, and then I'll be up a creek."

An electric buzzing sounds briefly.

"Damn. The lights again," he says. "I can't just leave this kid cut open on my table and check the fuse box. Somebody else had better get it fixed though, or I'll give 'em hell." He sighs and scoffs before resuming the autopsy. "Anyway, I've opened up young Mr. Fenton's chest cavity and christ alive, I've seen a lot of people's entrails but this kid's look like an overcooked stew—"

The electric buzzing returns, louder, but only for a moment before the sound of glass shattering hits the recording, along with the thud caused by Dr. Blanch jumping in surprise and bumping hard against the other autopsy table behind him.

"Ow, fuck!" he shouts. "The fucking bulb just blew, and I hit my hip on... on... uh..."

All that can be heard on the recording for several seconds is an eerie distortion that hadn't been present before, almost melodic in the way it makes one's stomach turn with dread

"The... corpse... it's... shit it's definitely glowing..." the coroner says finally, voice overwritten by the strange distortion. "Fuck. Fuck! Should I be wearing a hazmat suit for this autopsy? There's no way this kid isn't radioa—what that fuck was that?" Dr. Blanch interrupts himself, followed by another thud as he backs desperately into the other table behind him.

"There was just... for a split second there was—there it is again!" he shouts. "Like, a ring of light, around the middle of the kid's body, flickering in the blink of an eye and then vanishing," he describes, voice awed and terrified. "I do not get paid enough for this freaky shit. If this kid sits up, I'm quitting."

His words are drowned out by a scream, the scream of an adolescent boy, quickly joined by the scream of a middle aged man. The screaming continues for a long time, until finally, both run out of breath.

"What... what's happening, where am I?" asks a young voice, alongside the sounds of skin sliding against metal.

"You're... I was... this is..." for once, Mr. Blanch seems to be at a loss for words. He is watching a pale and naked young boy try to hold the Y-incision in his chest cavity closed with his bare hands. "You were dead!" the doctor finally manages to shout.

"I'm not dead!" the boy shouts back.

"I can see that now!"

"Did you cut me open?"

"You were pronounced dead hours ago!" Dr. Blanch defends himself. "I was only doing my job! How the hell was I supposed to know you were still... alive... oh lord am I glad I didn't remove your brain first, christ alive!"

"My brain?!"

"Forget about that now," Dr. Blanch says, and he takes a deep breath. "You're not bleeding. Do you feel pain?" 

"I... no... no I don't why doesn't this hurt?" the young voice asks frantically.

"Lay down, I'll stitch you back up," says the coroner, and the quiet metallic sounds indicate that the boy obeys. "I don't know what's happening, but this kinda thing happening sure as shit isn't normal. I'm gonna start with the stitches now, alright?"

"Okay."

"You're Daniel Fenton, aren't you?"

"Yeah. I go by Danny though."

"Well, Danny, the fact of the matter is, you were definitely dead when they put you on my table earlier," Dr. Blanch explains, sounding resigned, if not actually calm. "Fuck if I know what that makes you now, but I do know that I don't get paid enough to make a fuss about it. Lord knows I'm gonna ask for a raise after this, though."

"So... what now, then?" Danny asks.

"Now, I'm gonna finish stitching you up," the coroners tells him. "I'm gonna give you a sheet to cover yourself with, and I'm gonna call up to the hospital and give them absolute hell for sending me a corpse that wasn't actually dead."

"I thought you said I was dead."

"You were, but I'm sure as shit not gonna try to explain that!" he lets out a brief, hysterical bark of laughter. "I'd be sent to a loony bin before I could blink! No way am I telling 'em that. I have a doctor friend who'll give you discharge papers if I ask without actually checking you over if you want, so you won't have to worry about them finding anything... unnatural. We went to med school together, and he trusts my expertise."

"That... would be for the best, probably," Danny agrees. As he says this, he is looking down at the incision on his chest, halfway stitched up and still not bleeding.

"I'd say so," Dr. Blanch concurs. "I definitely don't wanna get in any trouble for cutting open a living kid, even if you weren't when I did it." He sighs heavily again. "Jesus christ what is my life coming to, today? Anyway, after you're discharged, you can go home to your family, and I'll wipe any and all information about your autopsy from our systems and we can both pretend this never happened, and your quote-unquote 'death' was just a horrible misunderstanding. What do you say, Danny? Sound like a plan?"

"Yeah," the boy's voice sounds even more relived than the coroners. "Sounds like a plan."

There's a quiet click of the needle onto an instrument tray.

"Ah, I forgot..." Dr. Blanch mutters.

His footsteps are heard walking to the other tray, the one of sterile instruments. There are loud thumping and fumbling sounds as Dr. Blanch picks up the recorder to turn it off.

[End Recording]

[casadefreewill]

Day 26 - Pulse

[shinobicyrus]

Monster Heart

A late, late entry for Ectober Day 6 because I am bad with deadlines. Decided to do ‘Shipwreck,’ with a bit of a sci-fi/horror theme. Warnings for squicky alien biotechnology. 

Computers aren’t known for their sympathy. Just efficiency. 

The shipboard AI pitilessly shocks Valerie back into consciousness like it’s turning on just another machine. Her whole body locks rigid like a muscle spasm, heart pounding and drowning in stims as her mouth gasps agape with a throat that can’t scream and intake oxygen at the same time. 

Eventually, the agony subsides and she slumps in the cockpit’s heavy-gee couch, body and brain swimming in exhaustion and a chemical cocktail sharpening her nerves into a raw razor. Training helps her keep her last meal down instead of getting into her helmet. The suit would eventually clean it, but never thoroughly enough to get rid of the smell.

MAD-E pipes up in that calm, motherly voice its programmers thought was soothing. “Welcome Back, Lieutenant Gray!” 

Valerie is unsoothed.

She’s painfully aware of every sore, aching inch of herself. Each inhale presses down hard on her chest, but she manages to rasp: “Status.”

“Emergency landing maneuver successful! We have touched down on Nova Ventura with only thirty-four percent damage to-”

“What happened?”

“On the twenty second of July, at approximately zero-three hundred hours standard, coded orders from the-”

“To me, you glitchy pile of-”

“Of course, Lieutenant,” MAD-E says agreeably. “I’m afraid you sustained life-threatening injuries on impact, despite the forced landing countermeasures. You were put into emergency stasis until the pod’s medical program and your internal nanites could repair the damage.”

That would explain the splitting headache, yeah. “How long was I out?”

“Stasis was initiated thirty-six hours, twenty seven minutes ago.”

“Good thing I get paid by the hour.” Valerie raises a palm and brings up the holo-displays with a thought. The walls of her pod buzz to life- most just showing black and three-dimensional scrolling text the computer diagnostic is spitting out. Her fingers tap at the controls and she’s given another error notice. “I can’t raise anyone on comms.” 

“Communication with the Hartmann and other support elements was cut off thirty-three hours, thirteen minutes ago.”

A cold claw of dread squeezes something in her chest. “Cut off?”

“A signal of unknown origin is interfering with communications and long-range sensors. If there are still friendly elements in this system, we have no way of contacting them- or even ascertaining if they are even there.”

Valerie slumps in her gee-harness, suddenly feeling worlds heavier. “So we’re on our own.”

"For the moment, Lieutenant.” It goes for soothing again.

Like hell. 

Valerie sweeps aside the mess of diagnostics and accesses the hatch controls. “Lieutenant,” MAD-E says, chiding. “I do not recommend egress at this time. Forced-Landing Protocol states-”

“First Lieutenant Valerie M. Gray, Lexic: Red Nine-Two-Four Slash-Wolf-Vee. Override Code: Shut Up and Do The Thing.”

“Override Accepted.”

Either the Hartmann and her entire wing were debris up in orbit, or the battle is still dragging on. Both options mean there are still hostiles in-system. Maybe even on the planet with her. Staying put in a tin can like a good little regulation soldier strikes her as a profoundly bad plan.

The pod floods with hissing mist as the pressure equalizes and hatch finally blows open. Valerie’s helmet visor immediately darkens so she isn’t blinded by the rush of natural light. 

Crashing at Mach-3 and laying in a death-coma for thirty hours would give anyone sore legs. Valerie still manages to climb out of what’s left of her fighter. She’s outside, her pod resting in a crater-bed of cracked insta-crete on the rooftop of some building. There’s an entire city skyline behind her, fresh nanofactured towers barely a few years old glittering like diamonds in the shine of an alien sun. One of them has a hole in it, clean as a gunshot, lining up where Valerie’s pod had finally come to a rest.

“Damn,” Valerie whistles. “Any landing you can walk away from.”

From the quick briefing they’d all gotten before dropping in-system, estimates had Nova Ventura at around fifty thousand colonists. Not bad for a fresh terraform on the rim. 

Walking down the street, sidearm ready in her hand, Valerie didn’t find a single person left.

Everywhere the juxtaposition of life: lights, scrolling holo-advertisments, parked cars, half-finished meals spoiling on outdoor cafe tables; but no people. No indications of a struggle. A dropped bag here, a crashed groundcar there. Hell, the worst damage in the city was caused by Valerie when she crashed.

There hadn’t even been a distress signal. It took days for people to figure out that something was wrong. The Hartmann just had the luck of being the closest ship that could investigate. 

She almost jumps straight out of her suit when a shop’s automatic door slides open at her presence, raising her gun at cheerful holograms. Re-purposed pop-songs for last year’s fashion lines echo down the hollow streets. Valerie chuckles a little to herself, tension leaking as she lowers her pistol. The outer colonies were always behind on the trends.

“Mads?”

“Two-point-six kilometers ahead,” it reported, no irritation at being asked for the sixth time that hour.

MAD-E had reported when Valerie made it down to street level that there were signs another ship had crashed. Residual radiation from engine wake, unusual EM readings...the great big collapsed building Valerie could spot from the roof.

“Still no contacts on motion, heat, or biometric sensors,” MAD-E reports.

“Any change upstairs?”

“My attempts to cycle through all military and civilian bands remain unsuccessful.”

“Great.”

Valerie decided to keep her helmet on. MAD-E had said there were no detectable bio-chemical agents or radiation. Yeah, real assuring- no telling what the hell happened down here. 

Normally, hiking the streets of a completely habitable colony would have a literal walk in the park. Fresh off a patch-job on her bones, head, half of her internal organs, it feels like barely holding together with nothing more some little robots and teeth-grinding stubbornness. Even with the the suit picking up the slack every breath is effort, every step is a fresh ache on a somewhere she didn’t even know could bruise.

Machine efficiency, of course. MAD-E didn’t care how uncomfortable Valerie is, only that she’s functioning.

Three blocks from the crash, street signs and wall screens flash warnings in a flurry of different languages and universal symbols for ‘get the hell away from here.’ Even without any people the city’s automation is still trying to respond to the emergency of a spaceship crash downtown. All citizens were advised to vacate the area with assurances that emergency personnel are ‘being dispatched.’

Too bad there’s no one left. Poor dumb computer’s probably trying to figure out why the slow response time.  

Danger! Peligro! Achtung!

“Yeah, yeah, I hear you.”

She steps over the emergency barricades that have sprouted up from the road, ignores the persistent warnings (Zorgema! 危険!) and passive-aggressive holographic legal notices about failing to respond to municipal instructions during an emergency situation. A path of destruction carves right through the main thoroughfare, flattened groundcars practically embedded into pulverized insta-crete. Long furrows swipe across building faces like scratches from enormous claws. 

There’s less dust and smoke than Valerie expects- maybe cleaned up by municipal nanites that are supposed to keep the air clear. The crash site ends at an intersection, crashing into a building when it ran out of road. Valerie’s boots crunch glass shards and pulverized road as she heads towards it. 

She almost slips on something and loses her footing. Swearing, she lifts up her boot and sees a glowing greenish fluid- like she stepped in a broken glow-stick.

“The fuc-”

Oh.

Oh shit.

A surge of adrenaline rushes through her, spiced with dread and danger. Her pulse pounds in the narrow confines of her helmet. The canyon of the buildings press around her, menace at every angle. 

Le Danger! A sign says. Valerie agrees, but still approaches the end of the road, pistol raised. 

(It’s not enough, just a measly little peashooter. She needs to be strapped in, enclosed in her cockpit pod- grip tight on the control yokes)

“I should have stayed in the pod,” Valerie mutters.

“I would agree, but I have been prohibited from speaking about the Forced Landing Protocols.”

Bucketfuls of lambent green stains smears down the street, a path for her follow. The air is thicker at ground zero, clogged with dust, but its still enough for Valerie to make out the shape of the ship.

It’s enough to recognize it: the blurry, blown-up images on her displays. An elusive sensor profile. A black shape against a blue sky, blurring past when Valerie slammed the air brakes in an ill-advised maneuver. 

Valerie’d seen enough crashes to piece together what had happened. Hit the street skidding until a bad angle twisted it into a rolling tumble, stopping only when it crashed into the side of a building. Laid out on its side like a beached whale. 

No, smaller than a whale, but the comparison is too accurate. The thing looks more like a dead animal than a shipwreck- cracked iridescent black plating like a bug’s chitinous exoskeleton. The sickening bend of its fuselage reminds Valerie of cracked bone. More green fluid pools beneath it, fed by a steady drip.

"Jesus, you guys are ugly up close.” Valerie tells it. 

Dogfights were for fantasy sims and anachronistic biplanes. Most engagements were hundreds if not thousands of kilometers away, the enemy just green blips and sensors ghosts on screens. Never with her own flesh eyes. Never close enough to reach out and touch. 

Not that Valerie would actually walk up and poke the goddamn alien ship. That would be beyond stupid. She was a combat pilot- screened, trained, and tested. A veteran of a three-dozen combat missions- a goddamn professional.

...she also has no idea what to do now. She doesn’t think she’s ever heard of anything like this happening, before. 

After weighing her options, Valerie decides to hunkers down and observe the thing from a presumably safe vantage point behind some rubble. Watching it for for any signs of activity. 

No heat or energy fluctuations. Nothing on the EM band save the slowly dissipating particle trail from its engine wake. No activity coming from it at all except the slow and steady drip of green fluid on the broken insta-crete, pothole puddles vaguely glowing like a cartoonish caricature of ancient nuclear waste, because how stupid had nuclear-age humans been before space colonization, right? 

An hour goes by. Two. Still nothing on comms either, that makes over twenty-one hours of radio silence. Valerie cleans her gun five or six times, suggests MAD-E try one trick or another that it has probably already tried before, but will do again anyway if only to humor her. She tries to weigh all the worse-case scenarios she knows are horribly likely with all the less-grim reasons why she couldn’t get a hold of anyone friendly. It doesn’t really help. 

Maybe they really were all dead, and she’s the last survivor. 

(Drip drip drip, the ship bleeds)

That still wouldn’t explain why everything was still being jammed, if the battle was over and done with. If the enemy won, why weren’t they sweeping for stragglers, or coming to collect their fallen buddy? Was that even something they cared about? Rescuing wounded, collecting their dead? 

Fucking aliens. They made no sense. No declarations, no demands. Just death and a dozen outer colonies scared shitless from the horror of humanity’s first real glimpse at an unknown that nature never intended them to meet. 

It’s not lost on her how much the wreck almost resembles an old DP-4 starfighter. As though they tried to make their own cheap knockoff by...growing it, or something. Used to be they took less conventional forms. The classic squiddies: amorphous, protean things that swam through space and captured ships with their tendrils. Or those sharp angled fast-movers that were like the skeletons of winged, alien predators. 

Others were immense and asteroid sized- impossible geometric shapes that fizzled out sensors and gave pilots vertigo if you tried to look at if for too long instead of shooting it. No two were ever the same, each one a species all their own. 

Now there were these new...ship-shaped ones; no one had answers, but everyone had a theory. Are they adapting to human tactics? Or is it all just single-celled mindlessness, evolutionary mechanisms reacting to new stimuli without any real intelligence or malice? For all they knew, the whole damn war is an gigantic misunderstanding between two races that were so different it’s impossible to understand the other. The death toll just a side-effect of bad communication.

Valerie doesn’t care for that last theory. 

A practiced flick of her eyes summons the clock in the corner of her helmet display. Hour three and still nothing from the wreck. Maybe it really is dead, and Valerie’s gotten herself skittish over what amounted to giant roadkill. The slowly building restlessness that’s been building since Valerie woke up, the ingrained military need to do something accumulating in her like itch, all the maddening for being ignored.

...oh hell, she’s gonna go poke it, isn’t she? 

A growl escapes between her teeth- half determination, half berating herself. She checks her sidearm again, as it would do shit against that thing’s hull if it did try to pounce. Still, it was a security blanket. A 5 millimeter security blanket. 

Valerie steps out of cover, gunsight trained on the bogey, still inert and dripping. Minds her footing to avoid the worse of the smears of green fluid that still show no sign of drying up. 

Closer. Closer. This is what it must have been like for some ancient ancestor, stalking up to a mammoth as it slept. Roar, I am woman, Fear my pointy stick, giant sky-monster.

Just an arm’s length away, now, and so far Valerie isn’t dead. Clearly, the gods have blessed this hunt. 

Up close she can see the damage (wounds, she almost wants to say, but doesn’t): holes piercing the hull, fist-sized and larger that could only be hits from a fighter’s kinetic guns. Valerie raises up her hand and feels the edges of one of the bullet-holes. 

(Grip on the yokes, thumbs on the toggles, threading the needle at mach six.)

Valerie feels a swell of satisfaction. She might have gotten shot down, but she sure as hell didn’t go down alone. “Bullseye, you alien fuck.”

Touching the thing’s hull, Valerie feels a vibration from deep inside, shuddering through her suit right down to her bones. Like a purr without a sound- the low reverberation notes of some great undersea thing, immense and mourning.

HolymotherofstarspangledChrist that thing is still alive.

Valerie springs back like she’s been burned, gun raised on instinct. The hand is still tingling, her grip numb and insubstantial. The need to be airborne hits her like a phantom ache. Grip on the yokes, thumbs on the toggles, flick a switch so she could shred it apart with her cannons. 

She waits for the feeling to come back to her hand. “Mads? What was that?” 

"Please specify.”

“I just felt something from inside that thing. Like...like...a vibration, or something.” 

“I did not detect any variances in the ship’s hull.”

“So it’s just a coincidence it did that when I touched it?”

“There is no indication that the vessel has the capability to perceive individual lifeforms of your size, were it operational.” MAD-E’s reply is even and calm, but Valerie friggin’ hears the ‘lol look at the dumb human’ in its tone. “I can only theorize it was psychosomatic, perhaps an adrenal response to being in close proximity to something you have instinctively registered as dangerous.”

If it was alive before- if a thing like this could even qualify- did that make what just happened its death throes? One last whimper before it was finally spent?

Well...its engines are still cold. It’s not going anywhere. She ain’t gonna scurry off like a dog running from a cleaner bot. Enough jumping at nothing. Time for morbid curiosity cleverly disguised as critical intelligence gathering. 

A few cautious, gingerly steps in the slick green mess of whateverthefuck, Valerie's boots slide like she’s skating on grease. Easy Gray, don’t want to fall ass-first in the alien juice- be embarrassing on the footage playbacks.

The biggest...wound is at the neck of it, broke like two halves of a snapped twig still stubbornly hanging onto each other.  Probably happened when it first crashed into the street nose-first. Now there’s a gaping hole- cracked hull and gooey insides like an egg. 

The...shell is scraped all to hell with the world’s worst case of road rash. It also looks more...melted at the mouth of the wound. Heat from entering the atmosphere...or maybe it was a sign of it slowly repairing the damage? Healing itself? This was way above her paygrade.

Still: know your enemy, like The Lance would say. He loved to throw out proverbs like that from those ancient books of his.

“Okay squiddy, let’s get to know each other a little.” Yeah, perfect. Let’s stick our head in the probably-but-maybe-not dead alien ship creature thing like a disposable side-character in a horror sim. Why the fuck not.

Oh hell, her jumpsuit is even red. Foley would have a goddamn field day. 

Needing both hands for this, Valerie holstered her gun gripped the sides of the hole, and hoisted herself up into the belly of the beast.

¡Cuidado!  

If this thing was...alive, its insides weren’t anything like dissection in science class. She’s in a cavity lined with a white fibrous membrane filled snaking tubes like veins and thousands of hair-thin strands branching off in every direction. It’s a twisting, coiling mess that reminds her of fungal closeups under a microscope. A marriage of biology and architecture. 

Jesus. This is officially the most disgusting thing she’s ever seen. The record has been set for all-time, never to be surpassed. Why is she even doing this again?

“This is very exciting!!” MAD-E chirps.

“You want to trade places? Be my guest.”

“If only!” it replies with disturbing sincerity. “I will have to be satisfied with purely vicarious observation.”

“Yeah, guess I’m just born lucky.”

She decides to follow the snaking cords- some as thick as her arm, others thin as straws from a fizzy-bottle. More than a few were torn and leaking new and exciting fluids, white and snotty. Follows their route further into the main body of the ship-thing. 

The cords and wires terminated at the base of the neck, right before the main body of the ship. Some kind of round...organ....sack? Big enough to wrap her arms around; a semi-solid translucent mass like an egg without a shell, layered in an iridescent film like oil on the surface of a bog. All of the sharp white hair-like things and the tubes were feeding into it. 

“The hell?” Her emergency pack has a med-kit, she takes it out and waves a bio-scanner at the egg-sack. It was designed for finding cracked bones or dangerous pathogens- not amateur xeno-biology. Whatever. Close enough for government work.  

“Mads?”

“The scanner is detecting electrical signals coming from the unknown mass, too complex to be random discharges.”

“Is it...a control unit, maybe? A brain?”

“Unknown.”

"Great,” Valerie mutters. 

It doesn’t quite...move, but beneath that sticky membrane is a hint of swirling viscosity. Like a squirming bacteria or a dollop from her dad’s antique “lava lamp” he insists is “cool.” As if lava is supposed to be cold.

So, like a moron who has already peaked at ‘huge idiot’, Valerie slowly stretches out her hand and lays it flat on the thing’s surface. It’s...surprisingly firm, soft but not a lot of give. It’s hard to get much sensation through her gloves. 

Then the shadow of another hand touches hers from the fucking inside of it. 

Valerie screams and pulls away so sharply she slips on green sludge underfoot and falls backwards out of the hole, landing hard on her back onto the goop-stained pavement below. Not as rough as her earlier landing, but it’s a rude reminder. She lays there for...a while, panting hard and swimming in the agony like a pulled muscle- but everywhere. 

She waits out it, mind still reeling because: “What. The. Fuck.”

“Lieutenant Gray, are you alright?”

“What the fuck was that?!” She never thought she’d be grateful to have MAD-E with her- ever- but having something to talk to that could at least talk back...Well, if anything she’s got a newfound appreciation for those stupid programmers or whoever the hell thought up having a computer-nanny momming into her ear.

“You saw that right? Tell me you saw that.”

“Image recorders captured what appeared to be-”

“There’s...there’s a fucking person in there!” 

“Based on the dimensions of the hand, that would be a likely conclusion.”

“Marvel of technology, you are.” Getting up felt like high-gee in basic again. Pushing past the pain, Valerie climbs back up into the hole and crouches in front of the egg sack thing again. The thing with a fucking person inside it. 

Oh God. Is...is that what happened to the colonists here? To the crew of all the ships that vanished on the Periphery, the people in the orbital space stations and asteroid habs? There were never any remains- no bodies to recover. Just dark, gutted, and exposed to hard vacuum. Were they all ripped away, processed, shoved into the guts of a monster-ship to be used against their own families like parts?

“Lieutenant Gray, your heart rate is elevated.”

She has to. Needs to. Not just...stand there...gawking. Rummaging through the crash kit doesn’t yield a whole lot of options to work with: extra clips, repair tools, med kit, nutrient packs, a deployable lean-to.

Tycho Station was a floating cloud of debris ten trillion miles away and this whole colony’s gone Croatoan, like old spacers whisper about over engine-room moonshine. Valerie is going to save one goddamn person for once.

“Lieutenant, I am recommending you have your suit administer a mild sedative.”

The repair tools? No, those were designed for patching up ships, the plasma torch would probably hurt whoever was in there. Wait. A standard combat knife. Whose bright idea even was that? She flies fifty billion dollar star fighters; a knife is goddamn neolithic. Still, there’s a satisfying shnk as she yanks it from its sheath.

By now, MAD-E’s probably figured out what she’s planning. “Lieutenant. I don’t think-”

“Shut up and just keep recording.” If she’s going to play amateur alien dissection, might as well have some documentation. Yeah, nice home movies. Put that on the net, she’ll be a star. 

The knife’s a carbon composite, manufactured by industrious little nanobots on the cheap, shaping the blade down to the nanometer. There’s barely any resistance at all when she stabs it into the oily membrane. She put too much force into it, expecting more resistance. She’s already wrist-deep in it, has to pull back her arm to try again. There’s some suction- like it’s almost try to pull her into it. Yanking her arm free, she goes at it with a lighter touch. More precise. At least pretend she knows what the hell she’s doing.

Distantly, Valerie knows she should be disgusted by this. Crawling into some alien thing and carving her way through it like a burrowing carrion eater. She’s goddamn Jane the Ripper, striking fear into all the little aliens. If the Hartmann’s really gone and this thing’s buddies come to find a crazy goo-covered human with a knife, at least they’ll have a story to tell. 

She remembers herself, gets tangled in the fungal cords like a mess of wiring. Yanks the knife free and starts sawing instead- less hack, more scalpel. Don’t want to shank the person she’s trying to rescue by mistake. 

No commentary from MAD-E, obeying her order to letter. Just her own grunts and heavy breathing filling the helmet, the wet scraping noise of the blade meeting white tissue, the hiss of suction as the membrane splits open like a mouth. 

“I-I don’t know if you can hear me in there,” Valerie starts babbling, “But just...hang on, okay? I’m almost- I think I’m almost through. We’re getting you out of there, Okay?”  Goddamn it, just a little bit more.

(There hadn’t even been a body, at her mother’s service. Just the artifice of an empty urn. No one to say goodbye to.)

She slices through something big. Green water the color of rotted limes hits Valerie full-on like a floodbreak, rushing past her and escaping the hole behind her to pool outside, as if it wasn’t a mess already.

And just like that, Valerie finds them. 

Their skin matches the soft issue of the ship’s innards: washed-out white like antiseptic bleach. At first she doesn’t understand what she’s found until she hears a soft gasp. They try to move- a pale, painfully thin arm lifts towards her, reaching. Valerie grabs it and they recoil, struggle, try to pull away, but they’re so weak it’s hardly any effort at all to hold on.

She tries to pull, almost loses her grip. Their skin is slick, covered in more of that oily, goopy crap. 

“It’s okay! I’m not trying to hurt you! I’m getting you out of this, okay?”

More of those cords and wires get in the way, like they’re tied up in- oh. Oh God. It takes a minute to fully process what it is she’s seeing: that shit is...fused to them. Like they’re plugged into the goddamn ship. Jesus, as if this isn’t already enough of a horror show. 

Whatever this crap is, it wasn’t made to be sturdy. Just thrashing around on their own is enough to snap and tear some of the tangle. It has to hurt too, with how pained mewling their gasps are getting as more of the mess breaks off. 

Fuck it. Time to rip off the galaxy’s nastiest band-aid. Valerie hacks away at the thickest of them, simultaneously fighting the nausea in her throat. The knife has to go back into its sheath messy- she needs both arms to get a good grip under their armpits and pulls back with all the force she can muster. They continue to thrash limply, probably too confused to understand what’s happening to them.

The legs are the last to go, too-white and slick. Valerie watches them slide out of what’s left of the ruined egg sack with a final sucking sound until all of them is free. Almost falls backwards on her ass, again. 

It’s a pain to climb out of the hull. Everything's been washed in more gross alien goop and Valerie needs both arms to hold onto them steady. Leftover green stuff patters from the edges of the hole onto the ground like dripping rain.

“There we go, I got you. It’s okay. You’re safe now, alright? I got you, I promise.” Dammit, is she even doing this right? Talking to shell-shocked civilians- nevermind victims of alien abductions- wasn’t exactly covered in flight school. 

She looks down to check her footing and- oh. She’s a girl, thin and frail looking in Valerie’s arms. Her skin is caked in an oily film of greenish spume, giving her a sickly pallor. Pieces of those cords and wires still dangle off her skin like hangnails. Her hair is an oily rope hanging heavy off her limp head, washed-out white as the rest of her. 

Boots back down on solid ground- the girl is spasming pathetically in her arms, barely any trouble. She’s so damn light, Valerie doubts she even needs the nanites in her muscle fibers to carry her. 

The girl makes a choking sound and coughs, hacking up more of the gooey crap. 

“That’s it, let it out.” Valerie coaches her. “Try to breathe.”

It becomes obvious that’s she’s not, though. It doesn’t sound like choking anymore, more like a desperate wheezing of someone slowly suffocating. 

“What’s wrong?” Valerie instantly feels stupid for asking. The girl’s gasping like an asthma attack, squirming like she can somehow wrestle air into her lungs. 

Valerie puts her down on the least uncomfortable-looking patch of gooey road and fumbles with the med-kit’s scanner. “What’s wrong with her?”

Shut-up order officially rescinded, MAD-E syncs with the scanner and starts pouring over the data it’s pulling from her. Come on, come on, if it could put Valerie back together again it should be able to help her, too. 

“The patient’s lungs are dangerously underdeveloped,” MAD-E is unaffected even as the girl imitates a suffocating fish. “She needs a proper medical facilities with the ability to augment or stimulate their growth.”

“We don’t have ‘proper facilities!’”

“Working. The medical kit: second row, third vial from the left.”

MAD-E walks her through preparing the dosage. This, Valerie can do. She keys in the proper delivery ratio into the injector gun, then presses the business end on the girl’s chest.

Valerie warns, “Sorry, this is gonna hurt.” and fires. 

From the looks of it, it does. She jerks and goes rigid, whimpering while the dose of nanites goes straight to her heart. Valerie hovers over her with the scanner while they start being distributed through her entire circulatory system, oxygenating her blood directly to compensate for her weak lungs. Within a minute, her breathing isn’t nearly as labored. 

“That was only a temporary measure,” MAD-E says. “She will need another injection in four hours, or her respiratory condition will deteriorate.”

“Temporary is good. I can work with temporary. Set a reminder for me.”

“Yes, Lieutenant.”  

Breathing easier, the girl hugs herself and shivers. Right, one problem solved, on to the next.

The survival kit has what she needs. Valerie places a fist-sized disc on the girl’s bare back, still pockmarked with angry green wounds from where the cords had been torn loose. They’re all over her; arms, her legs, the prominent ladder of her ribcage. Valerie pushes a button on the disk and watches the material flatten and spread itself over the girl’s skin until forms a simple white and black jumpsuit. Not nearly advanced as Valerie’s flight-suit, but enough to regulate her temperature, monitor her vitals, and is a touch preferable to nudity.

There’s also a heat-reflective blanket, which Valerie expands and drapes over her. Even asleep she instinctively wraps it around herself and curls smaller into herself. 

MAD-E reads the data from the jumpsuit. “Her vitals are holding steady for now, Lieutenant. I think this is a good opportunity for you to get some rest as well.”

The last thing on Valerie’s to-do list is to sleep within 10 klicks of a goddamn alien monster ship, dead or no. But seeing the girl wrapped in her blanket flips a toggle in Valerie’s head, like the weight of everything that had happened since she’d woken up six hours ago finally settled into her, like gravity-sickness.

Guess her body isn’t counting being in stasis for thirty-six hours as proper sleep.

First step is a proper camp. The girl doesn’t stir when Valerie picks her up, blanket and all, and sets her a few more meters away from the crash, back near the rubble piles Valerie used as cover before. Not much of an improvement, but at least they’re not completely out in the open, anymore. She lays out a few thumbnail-sized security sensors around the perimeter and sets up a UV lamp in the middle for when it starts to get dark. There, now all they need are those marshmallow and graham cracker ration packs the brass won’t approve for inscrutable reasons. 

Sitting is a more complex maneuver than Valerie remembers. Maybe carving her way into a giant alien corpse-ship was a thing that you shouldn’t do while recovering from a near-fatal crash. Maybe not. The universe may never know. Her only blanket is currently being hogged by the new addition. The crash-kit also has the deployable lean-to, but the idea of getting that damn thing unfolded properly is a task she should have thought about while she was still on her feet. This nice pile of rubble she’s got her back up against will do just fine. 

With a final what-the-hell, Valerie also pops the seals of her helmet and gets her first breath of fresh, un-recycled air since she was planetside three months ago; is immediately filled with regret and something else that makes her nose crinkle.

Oh. Right. The dead gutted space monster-ship. What an amazing smell she’s discovered. 

Inaction looks to have been a signal for her entire body to start clamoring with a vengeance. Food not being a thing she’s had in technically two days, her stomach starts growling. Wonderful. The flavors are all universally bad, so it doesn’t much matter which ration pack she picks from the survival kit. Those hard-working little nanites floating around in her have to get their energy from somewhere.

She breaks the seal and starts sucking up flavored nutrient-gel through the nozzle. There was no escaping the slimy-goop bullshit today. Of course she could have just had the suit inject her with an infusion instead, but MAD-E would probably raise a fit about it being reserved for massive blood loss and other medical crap.

Valerie keeps slurping on her goop-dinner, watching the strange girl she pulled out of an alien ship sleep. Even scrunched up fitfully her pale face is ethereal in the lamplight; the shallow rise and fall of her assisted-breathing a pattern Valerie finds reassuring. 

The packet falls half-deflated onto Valerie’s lap when she finally falls asleep.

Valerie doesn’t realize she’d dozed off until a noise wakes her. She’s reaching for holster before she’s even half-awake, faltering when it registers that its the tell-tale siren-call of the heat blanket, crinkling loudly like a crackling fire. 

The solar lamp had turned itself on when the sun set, casting soft light over their little makeshift campground. At the edge is the shape of the wreck, a looming dead presence like the bones of some primeval beast. Valerie shivers from a half-dissolved dream: a hunting shadow slithering over a field of stars, the red glow of her emergency cockpit lights, the fear of being buried alive in a universe’s worth of nothing. 

She breathes deep and almost welcomes the bracing rot. At least it wakes her up.

The girl is already awake herself, sitting up and wrapped in her blanket like an extra-large ration pack. Most of that gunk from the ship’s innards looks like it’s finally dried off into a tacky, flaked mess. Her snowy hair is stained and matted in crusty clumps. 

She doesn’t acknowledge that Valerie had woken up at all. Too busy examining  her own hands in the lantern-light with a peculiar fascination.

“How are you feeling?”

The girl looks up at the sound of Valerie’s voice and-

It’s like being back up in the sky again, seeing streak of green plasma blur past her ship in the corner of her eye. Never saw the one that hit her engines and sent her in an uncontrolled spin- tore her out of the sky.

Her eyes are bright, luminous green. As piercing as those shots, impossible and strangely beautiful.

“Lieutenant.” MAD-E says. 

A wire of tension unspools in her. Valerie is surprised to find her hand tight around the grip of her gun. 

Valerie finally grasps the edges of her mistake, slippery for all the alien goopsnot. That isn’t the glowy-eyed, thousand yard stare of young civilian still reeling from the trauma of a violent abduction. 

“What is hell is this, Mads,” it’s a demand, not a question. 

“Underdeveloped lungs, muscle atrophy, deficiencies of vitamins D and K, calciu-”

“I’m talking about her fucking eyes.” She hisses, because they’re still goddamn staring at her. 

“Based off the limited capabilities of the medical scanner, I cannot definitively-”

“MAD-E.”

“There were anomalous results from her genetic scan. I noted several unknown variations and genesets that do match any known human genome.”

Valerie could almost swear she felt her insides go still- breath, blood, and all. Just a few steps away the girl’s otherwordly eyes blinked, uncomprehending. 

“Furthermore,” MAD-E goes on blithely, as if she hadn’t already dropped a fucking bombshell. “Despite the subject’s decreased bone density, her skeleton shows no detectable traces of breaks, stress fractures, or microfissures that would be present for a human in her age range.”

That...shouldn’t be possible. Even with nanites or collagen regeneration, there was always going to be scarring. Signs of damage and healing. Of...of...living.

Unless.

“How old is she, Mads?” Valerie asks quietly, eyes never leaving the girl. 

She looks like she could be any average college co-ed. Skinny like someone raised in low-gravity, but not stretched out. Even the hair is pretty tame compared to the crazy augs some people did, but those eyes-

It’s not just the glowing. It’s the wide-eyed, naked bafflement of everything she’s looking at. Clueless as a kitten. 

“Her telomeres have been altered, making the margin of error for any estimate-”

They-

They fucking grew her. 

Had she ever been outside of that ship, before now? Even sitting up she was swaying unsteadily from the strain of her own weight. Forget walking, standing is probably beyond her at this point. 

In the sky, it’d been a different story. Like trying to outswim a shark. A creature made for the Black. Picking off Valerie’s wingmates one.

By.

One.

Something in Valerie’s body language makes the...girl (the pilot, the heart of that monster) tilt her head, quizzically. Almost birdlike. 

The gun’s out of its holster, sitting in Valerie's lap next to the unfinished ration pack. She never thought about its weight since the first time she had to pick up a gun in basic. The density. The complexity of so many moving parts just to fling a few grams of bullet faster than a pair of glowing alien eyes could see coming. 

“Do you remember what it was like when you were in that thing?” Valerie gestures at the dark husk overlooking them with the gun. The alien-eyes remain fixed on her, captured by the sound of her words but deaf to the meaning.  “Did you realize what it meant, when you shot those other ships down?”

She’d burned her engines past red and still couldn’t reach them before their radios let out an garbled scream and a burst of static that meant Orion and Hotshot hadn’t had time to eject. No waiting it out safe and cozy in stasis. Only the hard vacuum and the wreckage of their birds for company.

The girl doesn’t answer. Keeps watching Valerie with those bright, ghost-light eyes as though Valerie was the most perplexing puzzle. Keeps sitting there, wrapped in the foiling cape of her blanket. Like she’s waiting for Valerie to keep going. 

Benign only in ignorance, she tells herself. If she understood the noise Valerie was making with her mouth, if Valerie told her that she’d been the one to bring her down, would that blank, soft face contort with a twisted snarl and try to lunge at her, atrophied muscles be damned? 

No. She’s just grasping for any excuse to finish off the last living piece of that Thing that killed her wingmates. Leave her body in a puddle of goo next to her corpse-ship like they were floating cold in their own wreckage.

"This would be a lot easier if we were both back up there, instead of down here,” Valerie tells her.    

A chime from her helmet on the ground beside her. “Lieutenant.”

Valerie stands up sharply, pistol still in her grip. Crosses the distance between them and stands over her.

The girl blinks up at Valerie. Her breath rasps.

Valerie crouches down in front of her and prepares a new dose. The weight of the injector in her other hand makes her feel titled. Off balance. 

(Grip on the yokes, thumbs on the toggles, flick a switch and )

To her credit, the girl doesn’t even flinch. She puts her hand up to the injection site on her neck, grasping at her own steadying pulse. Valerie can almost hear the connections are being made. Basic animal cause and effect. 

Valerie holsters her sidearm and lifts injector a hair higher. “That should keep you for a bit. You’ll need another injection in a few hours.”

The girl opens her mouth. “Jeck-shun” Her tongue stumbles on the syllables. 

Valerie freezes in the middle of packing the kit back up. “...yeah. Jeck-shun. Close enough.”

“Klo Seenuff.”

Goddamn it that one actually makes Valerie burst out a surprised laugh. The girl tilts her head again at the unfamiliar sound.

Valerie stands up, considers the speculative look on the girl’s face. She turns around and walks back to her side of the camp and eases herself back down. 

“You’re lucky I have a thing about strays.”

“Luh-key.”

“You have no idea.” 

“Eye-Deeya.”

“You still recording this, Mads? Riveting stuff going on here.”

“Yes, Lieutenant,” it pipes up from Valerie's helmet.

She frowns with concentration. Valerie's tempted to almost call it adorable. “Loot..ten. Ant?”

“Congratulations, you officially say it better than Dash.”

“Dha-sha.”

Valerie sighs. “What am I going to do with you?”

Surprisingly, she doesn’t answer. Maybe it’s the tired resignation in Valerie's voice.

Whatever. Ultimately, the question was moot. A decision will be made all on its own, with or without Valerie's input. All there is to do is sit around and wait to see who drops out of the sky first. 

The sky. Valerie cranes her head up. The stars grow thicker here, on the edge of settled space. Diamond dust overflowing on a black canvas. She’d almost forgotten why she enlisted all those years back, before the Amitié Mission vanished, before Elmerton Station and her mother’s empty urn. 

Danny was right. It really is everything, up there. 

A movement at the edge of her vision. The girl was looking up too, transfixed at the starry dome over their heads.

“Like the stars too, huh?”

“Stars.” She mumbles, barely blinking. 

The crash must have knocked out the power on this block- the UV lamp is a lonely circle of light surrounded by indistinguishable dark. Their own little Island on a seas of stars.

It’s like something out of a bad sim: a pair of unlikely castaways alone on a conveniently habitable planet. Then again, in all likelihood, the two of them probably are the only people left on the entire planet- alien weirdness notwithstanding. 

Valerie points at a thin white streak. “Look, a shooting star.”

“Shoot.”

“No, a shooting sta-” A blast of thunder shudders down from above, a long echo grumbling through the empty city spires. The girl squeaks with surprise, but Valerie shoots to her feet. There is not a single stormy cloud up there, and the shooting star is getting larger. 

“Something’s just hit atmo...” Valerie dives for her helmet and put it back over her head. “MAD-E!”

“Three distinct shockwave events.” MAD-E reports. 

She clenches a fist. “Profile?”

It takes four long, agonizing seconds for MAD-E to deliver its verdict. “One Riptide class shuttle and a fighter escort. They have already breached the stratosphere and are decelerating. Most likely vector is towards Nova Ventura.”

“Yes! Hell yes!” The weight of the past two days slides off her shoulders from the tide of sheer elation. “Hail them.”

“Working...I am unable to raise them on emergency channels. There is still interference from the jamming signal.”

Shit. That means there were still unfriendlies around. Without comms or sensors any of search-and-rescue op would be risky at best, hugely dangerous at worse. Someone up there must really like her.

The pilot trades off between glancing worriedly at the sky and back to Valerie rummaging through the crash-kit. “Loot-ehn-ant?”

“We are out of here, bright-eyes,” Valerie points skyward. “Take a look up there, that’s our ride.”

The shooting star from before has grown in size, flaring with the heat-bleedoff from a steep entry. 

“Shoot.” the girl says again. 

For once, Valerie appreciates the neurotic preparation of the nerds who designed the crash kit. Flares were ridiculously low-tech, but without a way to signal the ships, the only other option Valerie has is sticking out her thumb.  

They ignite with an angry hiss, throwing dark green light that make the shadows dance. Lighting every single one, Valerie tosses them down a few meters down the road to mark a good LZ. 

The escort fighters do their flyover first, the rumble of their own engines lags behind after they pass. Valerie watches them circle in a holding pattern with a tinge of envy. Down the road, the lights of the shuttle come toward them, following the same route the alien ship made on its way down, if less crashy. 

Spotlights orbit around the crash sight, settling over them and the ship. The visor of Valerie's helmet compensates automatically, but the the girl flinches and hides her head under the flaring surface of her blanket. 

Engine backwash blows gales of dust as the shuttle’s thrusters pivot, leveling it out and slowly easing it down on the broken road. 

“Strange,” MAD-E remarks. “I am not receiving any IFF transponder signals from the shuttle, even at this range.”

“Can’t imagine why they wouldn’t want to broadcast their position,” Valerie replies, more focused on the decent of the shuttle’s gangplank. 

The girl is outright trying to hide under the heat blanket at this point, frightened by the noise the strange ship. Valerie goes to her and lifts up a corner of the blanket. Two panicked, neon green eyes peer at her.

“It’s okay, you don’t have to hide. You’re with me, I’ll take care of you. Promise.”

“...pra-miss?”

“Yeah. Promise.” Valerie holds out her hand. The pilot looks at it, incredulous. Slowly, her pale, thin fingers lightly touch the glove of Valerie’s suit. Valerie grasps it as firmly as she dares before letting go and standing up. Should probably warn the SAR team about this so they don’t spook the-

A swarm of boots drum down the gangplank. Not Search and Rescue medics, but two full squads of troopers geared head to toe in bone-white armor sweep the landing zone. Their rifles are primed and ready- as though they were expecting an ambush from every corner. 

Valerie raises a hand. “Evening, fellas. Glad you could finally join us. Not to sound ungrateful or anything, but-”

None of them even look her way, their full-faced helmets betraying nothing. Sometimes she’ll see them glance at one another, a nod here or a minute motion there that suggests they were talking to each other in a way Valerie couldn’t hear. Probably all sharing scrambled, short-range comm. 

One squad breaks away and starts marching her way. “Finally. Hey guys, can anyone tell me what’s going on upstairs? I haven’t been able to get through to-”

They march past her like she was invisible, guns raised and cautiously approaching the crashed alien ship. 

“Don’t worry about that thing. If it wasn’t dead on-impact, it definitely crashed after I-” She trails off, because a four-man team just formed a semi-circle in front of them and have all trained their guns on her. No, not just her.

“Loo-Ten-ant?” The girl huddles in her blanket anxiously. 

Valerie steps in front of them, blocking most of their shots. “Whoa, whoa hey now, safety those things. The hell are you-”

“Stand down, Lieutenant Gray.”

Two of the soldiers part without breaking their sight lines. A pair of men in the plain, unassuming white uniform of the Observer’s Office step through the gap. Their hair is shaved even shorter than regulation length to the point of baldness and their eyes are hidden under black specs. 

“Finally, some human contact.” Valerie snaps. “Can someone explain to me what the hell is going on?”

The first Man in White motions at the girl hiding behind Valerie’s legs with a gloved hand. “Please step away, Lieutenant.”

“Loo-ten-ent?” She asks quietly. 

“Listen-” Valerie pulls off her helmet- one of the solider tenses and raises his rifle a little higher before. “I’ve been down in this creepy-ass colony for the past forty-six hours. The whole city is empty, I haven’t been able to raise anyone on comms, I’ve got no idea what’s going on up there-”

“The situation is under control,” The Second Man says coolly. 

“What does that even mean? What happened to the Hartmann?” 

“Relax, Lieutenant. The battle’s over. The Hartmann is intact and station-keeping in high obit about the planet’s southern pole.”

Valerie exhales. “Thank God- wait. That doesn’t make any sense. How are we still being jammed if the enemy is-” 

It’s like crashing all over again. First the hit, losing control as the world spins.

“It’s been you,” she breathes. “The squids haven’t been jamming comms. It’s been you the whole time.”

The First Man in White starts reciting: “Under Special Directive granted to the Observer’s Office by Director Masters and the Ecumene Council, this area is under quarantine.”

The second man continued. “Lieutenant Gray, you are hereby ordered to report for a full debrief. All footage starting from when you came out of emergency stasis will be confiscated and classified Above Top Secret, including the full contents of your Virtual Intelligence Asset.”

MAD-E starts to say, “I would be happy to assist however I can. However, I-”

“Lexic: White Zero-Six-Three Over Specter-Kay.”

“Confirmed,” MAD-E responds obediently, then, apologetically to Valerie: “Their credentials are valid, Lieutenant. The orders are legal.”

Years of military discipline keeps her mouth fixed in a firm line. “...what about her?”

“That,” The Man in White nods first to the wreck, then to the girl. “And that are to be taken into custody.” 

“Step aside, Lieutenant.” The cold edge in the second’s one voice is as subtle as a knife to the throat. 

A gloved hand motions one of the troopers to stow away their weapon. Valerie watches them move towards the girl and is very aware that the other three still have theirs leveled at her. She’s standing in political black hole, where scruples get devoured and crushed beyond recognition. It wouldn’t be hard to sell that one lone, relatively skilled but ultimately insignificant fighter pilot had been shot down and died in the crash. Too much damage to the pod on impact, full stasis and life support failure. Her father would get a flag, a posthumous medal, and an empty urn to put beside his wife’s.

Valerie does nothing as the trooper grabs the girl. Hears the frantic crinkle of the heat blanket, the weak grunts and a shout. 

“Loo-ten-ent? Lootenent!” 

Valerie can’t even tell her she’s sorry. Not now, not with those hidden eyes watching.

The trooper walks past. Valerie feels a desperate tug on the sleeve of her flight suit and she has to keep her eyes locked on the Man in White. It’s the only way to keep her expression from betraying her. 

Another four man fireteam escorts the trooper carrying the thrashing girl to the shuttle, where a pair of medics wait at the gangplank and administer a sedative that reduces her to a ragdoll in seconds. 

Jeck-shun, Valerie thinks. “What’s going to happen to her?”

“That’s outside both of our paygrades.” The other Man in White snorts. His partner shoots him a look- probably the first damn show of emotion she’s seen from either of them since they landed.

Valerie looks past them and watches the girl be carried up the gangplank and vanish into the shuttle. Valerie can’t hear what any of them are saying, but their body language speaks volumes. None of them seemed confused or alarmed at the sight of ghostly pale, glowy-eyed girl being dragged from the site of a crashed alien ship. Certainly not as bad as Valerie had taken it, when she found out. 

Her heart jumps at another sonic boom. More ships entering the atmosphere, probably bringing in the personnel and equipment they’ll need to start preparing the main body of the wreck for transport. Half the troopers have already moved from securing the scene to setting up tripods for high-powered lights and portable generators. It all plays out with the clockwork smoothness of a routine well-practiced.

Crossing her arms, Valerie looks right into the image of herself in the lens of the Man in White.

"She’s not the first you found, is she?”

[jackdaw-sprite]

06 - Twilight

Late naval twilight still counts as twilight, right?

A Void!Danny design.

A self-indulgent blurb, a bit of an explanation, and some sketches are under the cut.

Warning for body horror and mind control, because Void!Danny.

When the wind lows against houses and rattles windows, when the trees cast away their leaves and the electric expectation of change saturates the air, they know the night is close. After so many years, it's become tradition.

The first sign of his presence: a shifting, eerie song hovering just on the edge of hearing. It whispers long moments before bursting forth, sliding up and down the scale in a way halfway between a whoop and a rasp.

It's the same song the lake sings in the dead of winter: the song of heaving ice.

It hadn't been there, the first year.

But then, the first year many things had been different. Phantom had vanished only a few days before, and there was still hope he might return.

The second year had borne with it the second sign of his presence too: as the night drew closer the song shifted higher, more insistent. It filled the mind in a slow crescendo, and like fishing-line caught you. Drew you in like a fish and hung your mind out to dry until morning.

After the second year, everyone in Amity knew: don't drive if you don't have to, once the singing starts. It's not worth the risk of falling asleep somewhere you don't want to.

The fourth year Tucker figured out how to keep their little group awake.

And ever since then, they've tried to hold the ghost, to save him. They've pleaded with him and cajoled him. Bribed and fought and a hundred other tactics.

Because while the ghost always leaves at dawn, they don't want him to. They want him back. To strip away the years and have Danny again.

Each year, Nocturne lets Danny return to Amity for a single night. They don't know why. As a reminder, perhaps. A kindness, a taunt? There's no way of knowing. The Ancient hasn't bothered with their little town since that fateful night. Hasn't explained any of the times they've caught him elsewhere, instead slipping through their fingers like an oil slick.

They do know this: every year in the depths of autumn, they have a chance to save their friend from Nocturne's control.

And every year, it wanes.

---

So! I mentioned in my day 04 post for ectober 2021 that the idea of a Void!Danny with a mask ate my brain a little bit.

Well, it was true.

Even if we take Nocturne at his word on his motivations, it doesn’t seem like Nocturne’s scheme for putting everyone to sleep could last all that long, or would at least need to move around. Humans need to be alive to dream, and they won’t stay alive long if they and everyone around them are asleep. Infrastructure needs maintenance. People need maintenance, in the form of food and drink and all the other necessities of life. So I don’t imagine a world where Nocturne ‘wins’ being one where humans are all asleep, all the time. 

In Urban Jungle, we see Sam's outfit change as she spends more time under Undergrowth's control. It becomes more sinister and seems to indicate she's farther under Undergrowth's control -- farther from herself.

And then, I read the phrase "moon-like mask" and, well.

What if it became more moon-like as the possession progressed, pulling Danny farther and farther from his humanity the longer he spent under Nocturne's control? How would he look after weeks? Months? Years?

What if it stopped being a mask and started being his head?

The idea here is that after enough time, Void!Danny is almost completely inhuman, and seems as alien as Nocturne actually is.

Danny might still be in there somewhere, but it's not in a form any of his friends would recognize. Nocturne deals with the mind, after all. Why puppet with strings when he can be so much more...delicate?

The jellyfish tentacle thing was a later addition, when I asked myself what the most disconcerting possible way would be for his moon head to slowly reintegrate itself with his body over time. My answer: jellyfish tentacle spine :)

[lexosaurus]

hi! I’m so sorry if this is a bother, but i thought you might be a good person to ask. i recently rewatched danny phantom as an adult - i loved it as a kid and wanted a good dose of nostalgia. after typing in the tag it was wild to find the phandom still up and kicking (honestly with more passion than i’ve seen from any fandom in my 8 years of tumblr). i immediately came across fanart for phantom of truth which i devoured along with its sequel in just a few days. i also read pits by cordria and loved it, but in the last week i’ve hit a bit of a research lull. i was wondering if you could fill me in on some details - maybe point me in the direction of popular fics or material? also, could you please explain wes weston to me - is there a particular fic he was born from or did he just sort of appear in fan lore? if not no worries, but i’d appreciate anything you had to offer!! thanks :)

Welcome to the phandom!

So the phandom in general is SUPER big on events. We have a year round event's calendar of which we're currently celebrating Ectober Month! You can find the details to that in the calendar along with other upcoming events!

In general, you'll find a LOT of incoming dp fan media through events and their tags, and that's where I tend to find new writers/artists to follow each year.

I've made two in depth posts on Wes Weston, so I'll just link them here [1: the older detailed wes] [2: a more updated wes]. The basic intel though is that yes he's entirely a phandom made OC that we've just adopted to fill a social hole in the dp universe.

There are tons of amazing DP writers and fics. I'll link you a few of my faves! In no particular order,

1. @imekitty (her ffn) is an older phandom writer who is kinda my personal gold standard for angst. She's also done some awesome slash fics though! Her current most popular series is the Disparaged/Dissembled series and fair warning, it's pretty dark!

2. @ecto-american (ghostanimal on ao3) is another older phandom writer who's still super active! He's currently most known for his fic Broken Ectoplasm, which is a bit darker than his usual pieces. Regardless, he has a pretty good range!

3. @five-rivers (marsalias on ao3) is an absolute writing fiend. I literally can't think of a genre of fic that they haven't written. They're currently best known for their monster of a longfic Mortified, which is ongoing and currently sits at a 258 chapters, or a little over a half million words. I personally am a big fan of their Exhumed series.

4. @wastefulreverie (her ao3) doesn't write a ton for dp anymore, but her archive of fics is AMAZING. Every so often I'll just go binge her writing, it's seriously fantastic. I think she has written some of my favorite angst fics that I've found so far.

5. @ladylynse (lynse on ao3) is another really big writer who also does a fair amount of crossovers if you're into that. Currently, her biggest fic is The Trouble With Ghosts which is an extremely popular fic currently. Good stuff!

6. @things-i-cannot-do-in-amitypark (their ao3) has several extremely popular fics on ao3 and ffn. I definitely recommend checking out their stuff. They've been writing DP for years and really have a great grasp on narration and building an exciting story.

7. @kinglazrus (UnluckyAlis on ao3) is actually one of the fastest writers I've ever freaking met. They're most known for their fic The Survivalists which is about Danny's class disappearing only to be found stranded on an island. Overall, really fun writer and also a cool person as well.

8. I know you said you read Pits, but @cordria has a TON of oneshots on her Tumblr as well as her ffn and ao3. I've been following her works for years and she really is an absolute S tier writer.

9. Shift by CaptainOzone is literally my favorite dp fic ever written. The basic premise is that Danny didn't grow up in Amity, and is revealed as Phantom right before he moves there. Oz is an outstanding writer and I'm super pumped they dipped their toes into DP for this fic.

10. when im dead, my dearest by redrobin1989 is only three chapters long, but i think honestly it really exemplifies an incredibly well written Valerie-centered fic. I go back and reread it every so often because wowowow.

11. Roughing It by Haiju is a big phandom favorite. You already read PoT/SOAD, so I know you'll like this one hahaha.

12. The Ghost Of Heroes by Enigmaris and ScarletNightFury is a really popular DP/MCU crossover starring an amazing bond between Danny and Spiderman. It's a pretty lighthearted fic, but it's super fun and the storylines are really engaging.

13. Don't Threaten Me With A Good Time by MissMegHolden is a DP/Young Justice fic that's very popular right now if you like that crossover. It's ongoing and updates semi-regularly. I've been following it for a while and I love it, though this is one of my fave crossover types (and I'm a big fan of DP crossovers lmao).

14. In The Eye of a Needle by mystyrust is an extremely popular DP/BNHA crossover fic that is completed. This is another one of those fics I go back and reread a lot.

Okay I could keep going but I'm going to stop here for now. All in all, I definitely recommend scouring event tags for new writers/artists. The phandom also has a discord that you can always DM me for an invite. The phandom in general is extremely chill. We're an older fandom so we really don't have drama or anything.

Once again, I welcome you and I hope you have fun!

(oh quick plug my own ao3 i write a lot of angst)

[ghostly-penumbra]

Ectober Week 2021. Day Five

“Circus”

Ao3 FFN

Summary: Dick Grayson meets a runaway.

- - -

Dick found out about the boy by eavesdropping on his parents.

“Has Haly had any luck bringing him down?” His mom asked when they thought he was asleep.

“I don’t think so, but last he told me, he was coming around to eating something. The kid says he’s got snacks, but…” His father trailed off.

“Poor little thing,” his mother continued, “why do you think he ran away from home? If he was so desperate as to leave everything he knows…”

“He’s a kid, Mary, sometimes they just overreact.” His dad said in a placating tone. “And we won’t find out until he tells us, so there is no point in speculating.”

A kid! A kid like him, maybe younger! Would he want to play with him? Dick could teach him how to use the trapeze! And if he didn’t have parents, Dick could share his, and they would be brothers! He would be a big brother!!

First things first, though, Dick had to meet him.

- - -

“Hello. Is anyone here? New kid?”

Danny flinched back, and would have hit his head if he hadn’t phased through the low ceiling (though, to be fair, it wasn’t low, but he was in a high place), and then he crouched down again, burying his face on his legs and hugging them tighter.

“Here you… are…” Danny looked up for a second and saw a kid looking at him. “You are older than I thought.” The kid said.

“It wouldn’t do to break my track record as a disappointment.” He grumbled to himself.

“Do you know how to use the trapeze?”

Danny looked up again, in confusion this time, and found eagerness and anticipation on the kid’s face. Still with some hesitation, he shook his head no.

A bright smile broke on the kid’s face. “Then I don’t mind that you’re older! I can teach you!” He pushed himself up and sat across Danny on the rafter he had chosen so he could not be reached. “Do you want some lunch?” The bright boy asked the moody teen.

Before Danny could grumble a no, his stomach beat him to the punch with a growl.

“You can have it all, I already ate.” The kid extended the lunchbox, and Danny took it with a sigh, crisscrossing his legs. “My name’s Dick, what’s your name?”

“Danny.” He said, biting on an apple.

“Do you wanna join the circus, Danny?”

“I’m not here to stay,” the teen said, “I just needed a ride. I’ll get out of your friends’ hair as soon as I can sneak out.” Without using his powers, that is, and what was the point of turning invisible when you couldn’t sneak out because you couldn’t control it?

“You can stay if you want.” Dick said, and he was starting to sound sad. “Haly won’t mind, he’s very cool!”

Danny gave a short, bitter laugh. “He’ll kick me out as soon as he knows I’m a freak.” He mumbled.

Now that made Dick furrow his brow. “He won’t, even if you’re weird, there a lotta weird people here, you’ll fit right in!”

Frustrated, Danny retorted, “They are not my kind of freak, kid.”

A pensive look crossed Dick’s face, and he asked bluntly, “Are you gay?”

“Wha-”

“Because my parents say some people don’t like the gays and are mean to them, but not in here, that’s fine! Deadman is gay and he’s alright!” The kid was quick to reassure him.

“I- well, yes, kinda but- I don’t mean that kind of different. Ugh, I just-”

Maybe it had been on purpose, because Danny was rather tired and in a bad mood. Or maybe it had been an accident, because Danny could barely control his new powers, and they would act up when his emotions spiked. But one second Danny was talking to this little Dick, and the next there was a half-eaten apple floating before the kid.

“Whoa, cool.” Dick said.

Danny turned visible again on reflex, making sure he wasn’t falling through the wood.

“Okay, we don’t have a show like that, but if we talks to Haly, you can have your own. With a part in the trapeze!”

Even though he was hungry, tired, on edge, and running away because his parents might dissect him if they found out he was a ghost, Danny couldn’t helpt but laugh, and laugh, and laugh some more, until even he couldn’t tell if the tears running down his cheeks were of joy or pent-up grief.

[ectoentity]

2021 Fic List

I only really started writing in October, but I figured I would do one anyway. Inspired by @apinklion01​ and @kawaiijohn​.

Total works: 13

Total wordcount: 19,959

Events: Ectober Month and Holiday Truce

All There Is or Was or Ever Will Be: 697 || T Rating || Gen || There were stars in the Ghost Zone. (Just a little fic about Danny learning about ghost stars.)

Taste: 1.6k || G Rating || Gen || As Danny's ghost powers develop, his tastes start to get a little weird. (Injury, minor gore.)

Last Stop: 1.4k || T Rating || Gen || Tucker just wants his ride home to be quick and peaceful after a long day at school. He doesn't want to deal with creepy, spontaneous laughter. (Rated T for spooky corpse lady.)

Weird: 1.1k || G Rating || Gen || The Fenton boy was weird. For most kids at Casper High, that was just a fact of life. The sky was blue, water was wet, and Danny Fenton was weird. Most of them wouldn’t really be able to tell you why. They might mention his crazy parents, or the fact that he ran out of class a lot. Some of them would bring up his friends. He seemed pretty boring himself, sure, but he wouldn’t be friends with those two if he was normal, right? Those were good enough reasons to call him weird, so most people left it at that. Dash knew better.

Sir, This is a Nasty Burger: 416 || G Rating || Gen || Valerie has to deal with some cultists trying to summon their god.

Late Night Answers: 1.6k || G Rating || Gen ||  Danny keeps waking up in the middle of the night. The same exact time every night. He decides to take a flight around town and runs into a couple ghosts who're willing to give him some answers.

Depths: 531 || G Rating || Gen || How far down does the Ghost Zone go? (Just a little bit of angst and worldbuilding.)

Ghost Lights: INCOMPLETE, 1/2 ch || 978 || G Rating || Gen ||  It's the annual Foley family Halloween party, and the trio are enjoying carving some pumpkins. They weren't expecting some ghosts to possess them! (Something silly that I need to finish.)

Janus Spirit: 1k || G Rating || Gen || Janus was the god with two faces. Danny had two forms, two faces he showed the world. He tried not to think of the implication that he was ‘two-faced.’ At first, he insisted that he wasn’t a liar. Not really. Not any more than anyone else.

Turnabout: 1.2k || G Rating || Gen || The closer to Halloween they got, the weirder Danny acted. It wasn’t too obvious at first. He floated a little more, even in human form. That happened normally a couple times a month, but suddenly Sam and Tucker were having to pull him down to the ground multiple times a week. Then it became a daily thing.If that was the only ghostly habit, Sam and Tucker wouldn’t have been so stressed out. It seemed like Danny’s eyes were green more often than they were blue recently. Cold practically radiated from him. He was even more quiet and seemed to go invisible as soon as he knew no one was looking at him. Even that wasn’t the worst of it.

One Way or Another: 978 || G Rating || Gen ||  Clockwork needs to explain to Sam and Tucker how they can help Danny, but he has to find a way around the rules that the Observants have made for him. (Angst.)

Plan C: 1.4 || G Rating || Gen || The whole building reeked of mildew. Some of the doors were broken off their hinges, and bits of what had once been ceiling peppered the floor. Sam was very glad she’d worn her good boots. At the end of the hall she found a directory. It listed a bunch of doctors by their office and specialty. Initially she just skimmed it just to try and figure out what might need to be close to a lab, but then something caught her attention. Dr. Penelope Spencer: Inpatient Psychiatry.

Can’t Go Home Again: INCOMPLETE, 2/5? || 2.8k || T Rating || Gen || Three weeks ago Danny told his parents about him being Phantom. They didn't take it well. His friends haven't heard from him since then, so they summon him back to Earth.

Family Secrets: 3.5k || G Rating || Gen || The Fentons take a week during winter break to fix up the old family cabin. When Danny and Jazz stumble across a secret, an old artifact has a strange effect on Danny.

[cleanlenins]

Ectober Day 6: Witching Hour

Words Spoken at the Witching Hour

Chapter 2

Jack and Maddie disproved Ouija boards in College, but why not give them another try? However, fixing their mistakes will take more than just an old board and some candles.

AO3

While her violent outburst had been cathartic, Maddie was regretting her rash decision to destroy the ancient spirit board. She sifted through the ashes, pulling larger pieces of charred wood from the pile and dumping them into the bin. Her gloves were covered in soot and charcoal, the dusty particles sliding over the rubbery texture. She grabbed the planchet, and examined it. The dark ash seemed grey next to the impossible black of the little cursor. She clenched her fist around it and started to toss it into the trash can. But hesitated.

“Mom? Oh my God, what happened here?” Maddie whipped around to see Jazz standing at the door to the kitchen. She had one hand covering her mouth as she gaped at the mess. The table, while still standing, had a huge whole burned into the center. Maddie knew that she must look a sight as well, eyes puffy and red from lack of sleep and soot stains on her cheek.

“We had a bit of an accident with our experiment last night,” Maddie said smoothly. It was what she and Jack had decided to tell the kids until they had a chance to sort through their thoughts. Before they had a chance to figure out if there was any validity to Phantom’s claim.

When Maddie had bought the spirit board, the lady had told her that spirits could not lie while communicating through the object. Maddie had never expected the blasted thing to work, so she hadn’t set up any more trustworthy methods for determining if a ghost was lying or not. An oversight on her part based on her own hubris.

“I thought you guys agreed that you would keep all of your experiments in the lab from now on?” Jazz crossed her arms.

“I’m sorry sweetie. We didn’t realize it was something that would turn...explosive. We will be sure to keep things downstairs from now on,” Maddie assured Jazz. Jazz looked skeptical, but did not press the point. Instead, she skirted around the stains on the linoleum and began to make her some breakfast. Maddie glanced at the planchet still held in her hand, and stashed it in her pocket.

Maddie removed her gloves and tossed them in the special tub she and Jack kept for their hazmat suits. She quickly washed her hands before putting on a clean pair. She rubbed her tired eyes, moving around Jazz to get to the coffee pot. How did she get through so many sleepless nights in college? She already felt dead on her feet. She must be getting old.

She reached to flick on the coffee pot, before jerking away as  the coffee pot shocked her. Not hard, nothing more than simple static electricity. But it startled her.

“Mom? Are you okay?” Jazz asked.

“Fine, Jazzy,” Maddie stared at the machine in shock and reached out to touch it again. No shock occurred. “I think I might need to change the filtrator in the coffee machine battery. It just shocked me a bit.”

“Through rubber gloves?” Jazz raised an eyebrow. Maddie’s mind buffered, looking down at her hands.

“Maybe a more serious issue,” Maddie muttered. Jazz sighed.

“And I was really looking forward to coffee,” The teen slumped, still scrambling eggs. Loud steps were coming from the stairs, and Maddie turned to see Danny walking into the kitchen.

Well, walking probably wasn’t the best word. He was slumped over, backpack hanging from one shoulder. His eyes were rimmed in red and heavy bags laid under his eyes. He slumped into a dining chair, not even commenting on the hole in the table before laying his head in his hands.

“Danny, are you okay?” Jazz asked. Mother and Daughter wore matching looks of concern. The black haired teenager mumbled something incomprehensible. Maddie hesitantly walked over, putting her hand on his shoulder.

He was freezing. Cold enough that she could feel his temperature even through the thick gloves. Maddie swallowed thickly.

“Honey, did you not sleep well?” Maddie asked. Danny sat up, blearily looking up at his Mom.

“Weird dreams,” He mumbled, blinking up at his mom. Maddie rubbed his arm

“What kind of dreams?” She pressed. Danny grunted.

“Just...bad memories. Mistakes.”

“Was it...about the CATs?” Maddie startled, Jazz was suddenly by her side putting a plate of eggs in front of Danny. He looked down at his plate, but didn’t reach for them.

“No. The other thing. The first thing,” Danny said.

“What thing are you talking about?” Maddie asked. Dany didn’t react, but Jazz looked sheepish.

“Danny has had a lot of test anxiety over the last few years. I have been helping him work through it,” Jazz said quickly. She avoided Maddie’s eye and turned on heel to go back and grab another plate. “You don’t need to worry, Mom.”

Maddie looked at Danny, who was pushing his food around on his plate and slumping closer and closer to the table. And knew she was very worried.

~~~

Once the kids had left for school, Maddie unplugged the coffee maker and carried it down into the lab. Jazz had to nearly drag Danny out of his chair, her brother stumbling into her before catching his balance. Jazz had continuously uttered assurances that Danny was fine and did not need to go to the doctor. Jazz had chattered continuously, Maddie unable to get a word in as they slammed the front door behind her.

With a sigh, she set the coffee pot on the table. Jack was already in the lab, looking just as ragged as she. He was pouring over security footage from the lab, trying to find any evidence of Danny being Phantom.

“How’s it going?” Maddie asked. She massaged her hand.

“We really should have labelled these tapes,” Jack frowned. “We didn’t even order them. I keep switching between tapes from the last few months, to one before Danny was even born. This could take days. Weeks, even.”

Maddie nodded. She had been afraid of something like that. Instead of joining her husband by the small tv, she walked over to where she had kept the notes on the spirit board. She rubbed her hands together, before reaching to pick up the top page.

And dropped it immediately. Her hand trembled. Part of her didn’t want to know the truth. Because if all of this was true. If she and Jack had-

“Mads, come look,” Jack said, more chipper than before. Maddie turned away from the papers, holding her hand close to her chest. Jack had a video paused on the screen. He let it play.

It was Danny, when he was five or six. Jack and Maddie were working on a project in the corner, while Danny was running around. He had a toy rocket in hand, making zooming noises as he sent the little astronauts on a space exploration. He prattled on, making up ridiculous plots where aliens attacked, where wormholes opened to other galaxies, where he had to be a superhero to save the earth from a meteor. Maddie smiled at the memory. Until she watched Danny trip over a spare bit of wire and faceplant into the floor. He started wailing, past Maddie and Jack whirling around and scooping him into a big hug. Maddie felt tears in her eyes. She removed one of her gloves to wipe them away.

“What if we failed him, Jack?” Maddie’s voice trembled. Jack turned a baleful look up at his wife before stopping. An expression of shock on his face.

“Maddie. Your hand,” He jumped out of his seat to get closer. Maddie looked down at her hand.

A circular burn sat in the middle of her palm. Small Lichtenberg figures scattered from the center. But the most striking thing was that the figures were pulsing a bright green. Maddie stared at the mark in horror. Once more she felt a jolt in her hands, her fingers twitching, and the mark grew.

“Jack,” Maddie whispered in fright. Jack took her hand in his, examining it closely. “What is it?”

Jack let go of Maddie’s hand, before running over to the notes himself. He rummaged through them quickly. Maddie felt herself shaking, looking down at the unnatural mark on her hand. Jack let out a noise of triumph as he held up a piece of paper.

“Make sure to end your contact with the spirit when you are finished conversing. If not, you may attach the spirit to yourself. This can have many consequences, depending on the power of the spirit. It can result in something as mundane as constant bad luck or-” Jack faltered, gaping at the page.

“What? What is it Jack?”

“-or as severe as dying the same death,” Jack gulped. “Maddie. Maddie we didn’t do any of the things to close the ritual. You’re still connected.”

I just wanted to look inside. I tripped over a wire. I hit the button on the inside. The portal turned on. And I died.

“ He was electrocuted,” Maddie sobbed, hand spasming. “It’s true, isn’t it? We killed our baby?”

Jack had tears streaming down his face as he rushed forward and crushed Maddie into a hug. She sobbed into his chest. In grief. In guilt. In exhaustion. In fear. Her whole body shook with the force of her tears. Had Jack not been holding her, she would have collapsed onto the ground in a puddle of tears.

“We have to find a way to stop this. To stop the connection,” Jack said. He rushed over to the papers, fanning them out so he could see more than one of them at a time. Maddie joined him, her hand occasionally spasming.

The two of them poured over the notes, double checking them with the Nightingale notebook to see if they could find any correlation to the spirit board. But the notebook only condemned the use of such objects, and did nothing at all to say how to counter their effects. Burning it was briefly mentioned on an online source, but considering it was already a pile of ash that seemed unlikely. Maddie and Jack started to comb through more and more sources, each less reputable than the last. As time crept on, the spasms became more painful. The lighting marks spread up her forearm, up her shoulder, nearly touching her neck. Tears were constantly pouring from her eyes as she barely contained herself from screaming in agony.

The two started when they heard the door upstairs slam. Maddie looked up, sweat pouring down her face. Jack slapped his forehead.

“Of course. We should ask Danny. Maybe he knows something,” The man said, sprinting up the stairs. Maddie hobbled after him, leaning heavily into the wall as she made her way up the stairs. She slowly made her ascent, and opened the lab door.

Jazz was talking to Jack, but she was not alone. Sam and Tucker were standing in the kitchen, Danny’s unconscious body held between them. Maddie gasped at the sight.

“So he is like this because you and Mom did some hairbrained ritual that literally blew up in your faces?” Jazz was angry. Her face was nearly the color of her hair, red with the force of her rage.

“Jazz, we didn’t know,” Maddie whispered. Jazz finally noticed her mom entering the room and gasped in horror. Both Tucker and Sam wore similar expressions.

“Mom, what’s wrong?” Jazz rushed over to Maddie, offering her shoulder. Jack filled the teens in on what they had discovered, how Danny was now attached to Maddie, and how it was slowly killing her.

“Please, if you know any way to undo this,” Jack pleaded. This was their last chance.

“I do,” Sam said. Jack beamed, eyes brightened with hope. “But we will have to work fast. Things like this have a time limit.”

“How long?”

“We have to separate them before the Witching Hour of the next day, or else there is nothing that we can do,” Sam said confidently. Jack glanced at the clock. It was already six pm.

“That gives us nine hours, right? We should be able to do that,” Jazz said. But Sam frowned.

“I have to go to my house and get a lot of supplies, and it will take time to set it all up. And I can’t guarantee it will work. It’s not like I have ever actually had to do this,” Sam said.

“Please,” Maddie begged, as she looked at Danny’s slumped body. “Try.”

~~~

The setup had taken them the better part of six hours. Every ingredient had to be burned for a specific amount of time. Every line painted on the floor had to be at the perfect angle. The candles could only burn for so long, with certain herbs mixed in. The remains of the spirit board had to be collected into one space. It was time consuming. It was tedious. And there was no guarantee it would work.

Maddie and Danny were not able to help with the preparations. Danny because he had not woken up since Sam and Tucker had brought him home. He was resting on the couch, completely out of touch with the world. Maddie, however, was not in such a peaceful state.

It was taking all of her effort not to simply curl up and scream. It felt like both fire and ice had poured into her veins, both trying to kill her from the heat and the cold. Her skin looked ashen and pale, sweat and tears constantly pouring down her face. She shook and seized from the volts of electricity that started at her hand and burst through her whole body. She couldn’t stop the whimpers that escaped, causing the others in the room to look over at her with concern.

When the preparations were complete, Jack helped Maddie into the middle of the setup. The electric lights in the room were turned off, with only the candles glow illuminating the room. Maddie nearly crawled to the spot she was supposed to be. She pulled out the little planchet and placed it within arms reach.

Sam had done everything she could, but Maddie had made the connection. Maddie had to sever it.

Maddie took the sterile knife and cut the inside of her arm. She let the blood pour into a basin that held the remains of the spirit bored. Her quivering hands spilled some blood onto the floor and not just in the bowl. But not enough to ruin the painted words. Maddie used her fingers to mix the blood with the ash, creating a paint. With trembling hands, she reached one finger onto the floor and began to draw the Ogham script she remembered from the spirit board. Slowly, as she could afford no mistakes, she drew a new board on the floor. Each one had to be in the exact order as the board had been and she had never been so grateful to Jack for taking a picture of the thing before they used it. Inch by inch, she recreated the board on her kitchen floor.

Now, she had to wait. Wait until the blood had dried enough that she could roll the planchet across the words without smudging. Every second was an eternity of pain, every moment a new level of agony even higher than the last. It might have been five minutes. It might have been an hour. But eventually, she could tell that the bright red of her blood had faded to a sickly brown. She risked touching it, and found it completely dry. She grabbed the planchet, and place a single bloody finger on it.

“Phantom, I would like to speak to you today. Please, I beg you, talk to me,” Maddie’s voice cracked. She waited a breathless moment, before the cursor began to move.

Mom?

“Yes, it’s me,” Maddie bit her lip hard as her body was wracked with pain.

You’re hurt

“ I’m fine sweetie,” Maddie lied. She had to finish this. She didn’t know how much time she had. “Phantom, I have said all that I have to say. My questions are complete. I close this doorway. I close this connection. Your spirit is not bound here.”

Maddie thought she heard a gasp, but she didn’t know where. Suddenly, all the candles turned once more into the strange corona glow. The planchet moved once more.

Goodbye

Maddie watched in fascination as the planchet dissolved into dust. The candles snuffed themselves out and the room was filled with darkness. Maddie slumped in relief as the pain seemed to melt away.

“Mom?” Danny groaned, the light flickering on. Danny stood by the switch, rubbing his eyes as he took in the state of the kitchen.

Jack and Maddie rushed him, crushing him in a hug they hoped expressed everything they couldn’t bring themselves to say.

[datawyrms]

Ectober Day 25/1 Boo!

On Ao3

If you’re new only seeing Ectober Week, you might want to start at the beginning :V

It was a bit much to take in. She was barely getting used to the fact there was a demon in their lives that wasn’t going to go away, and now apparently he’s human? From something they did?

It felt gross. Phantom was…difficult but she wouldn’t want to just make him different to make their lives easier. That was her parent’s crap, she was better than that. There was a pretty big difference between just teaching the demon and forcibly making him something else. Something he clearly didn’t like all that much, and was just stuck accepting it. What did it even mean by giving him an ‘abomination soul’? That Phantom’s humanity was somehow part of them?

She had so many questions, but the issue of the ‘guy who wants your demon’ had been more important. Which still wasn’t answered all that well before the demon slid back into his more unhelpful mood. So now there was absolutely someone their hybrid demon was worried about, but he wasn’t going to warn them of what to look out for. Great! That totally wasn’t going to be a massive problem.

Even if the demon didn’t see it, she did. Phantom had said it himself, he was apparently powerful, but could only dish out a small amount of harm in retaliation. If demons were just magic batteries, he’d be the equivalent of an extremely good one. That wouldn’t explode in your face as easily as all the other ones you could get. No wonder Gregor wanted him- especially if he didn’t lose anything to take the demon. Could he seriously not see that? Or was he busy trying to just ignore the problem to hope it went away?

Tucker spent more time chattering about human stuff they could try out, probably trying to cheer the demon up again, earning most of his attention. That, and body weight, considering the shadowy presence kept leaning against him, or kept his tail curled around his back. Phantom didn’t really do personal space when at ease, apparently. For someone that insisted he ‘wasn’t there’, he sure made an effort so Tucker knew he was.

Part of her wanted to bring it up, but her friend didn’t seem to mind it. Tucker could stand up for himself if the demon was getting too comfortable. Even if she’d rather sit closer, but didn’t feel comfortable doing so with those dead green eyes staring at her. It was just nervous energy, probably. She moved back to the window, mostly to see the sky and the setting sun. The sun was indeed starting to slip behind the buildings, but that wasn’t what made her freeze.

The wolf was standing outside, head cocked towards the house. Had it followed them? How long had it been standing there? “Tucker? You know that wolf I was talking about?”

“Yeah? Why? Don’t say-”

“It’s outside.”

“-It’s outsideeee darn it. Her friend let out a groan, but got to his feet to look. “That’s a big bad wolf. Uhhh. Danny, are you good at scaring wolves?”

“Animals are easy to trick. Or you could just throw a dog toy at it or something. Probably do the same thing.” Instead of getting up, the demon yawned. “It’s too scared to come in here, obviously. Forget it.”

“I’m kind of getting a bad vibe from it? Does that make sense?” Tucker asked, eyes flicking from the wolf and back.

“You’re human. You couldn’t detect a malignant presence if it punched you in the face.”

“No, I’m definitely getting that too. Same as when I’m around Gregor.” Sam said, ignoring the demon to focus on her friend.

“It’s a familiar, so the thermos should work? Maybe?”

“Unless he wants us to do that, to have an excuse to talk to us again. Say he sent the wolf to make sure you’re okay and thinks Phantom attacked it.” Which was another problem. It wasn’t like there was anything to see, but she didn’t like the feeling of it just standing and staring. Waiting.

“Okay fine, I’ll deal with it. Sheesh. What did it do, stand on its paws and go ‘boo!’?” Phantom finally got up, and joined them in staring out the window. “Wait a second.” He no longer sounded bored, instead confused. “Wulf?”

Tucker didn’t seem to catch what the demon was saying. “Yeah, it’s a wolf. Kinda big for a wolf.”

“No, not wolf, Wulf. What’s he doing here?”

She liked this even less now. “You know the wolf? He has a name?”

“Of course he does, why wouldn’t he? I haven’t seen him in...I don’t remember how long.” The demon looked as if he might slip between the space between wooden frame and glass if Tucker hadn’t grabbed his shoulder.

“Danny. That’s Gregor’s familiar.”

He glared at her, showing too many teeth. “Wulf isn’t a familiar.”

“If that’s Wulf, yes he is. I saw him order that wolf around and keep it in some pen.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“Sam wouldn’t lie about something like this.” Tucker quickly backed her up. “He looks exactly the same way she described the first time, green in the ears and those claws…”

Phantom clung to the window ledge, ears flat as he stared out the window, strangely still.

“Didn’t you say he had a collar?”

“Yeah, he did.” Sam did a double take, surprised she hadn’t noticed the shiny metal thing was absent from the watching creature. He did have a lot of fur, but not enough to cover something that large. So where was it?

With those words, she had Phantom’s full attention. “So maybe you didn’t see Wulf.” 

“He’s identical otherwise, I don’t like this.” Was this wolf meant to bait out Phantom specifically? The demon clearly was on the edge of going out there, claws digging into the wood as Tucker made him wait.

“Yeah, man. This is pretty convenient, you know? A wolf that looks like someone you know just happens to show up?”

“He got away, he promised-” the shadows around the demon twisted, spiked and angry before he slid outside before Tucker could try and stop him.

“We’re gonna need to make more thermoses, aren’t we.” His shoulders sagged, giving Sam a helpless shrug.

“Come on, before he walks right in the obvious trap.” Sprinting and taking stairs two at a time was about as exciting as she wanted things to get, even though explaining to Tucker’s parents why they’re dashed off in such a hurry was going to be interesting.

Phantom was already near the wolf, one hand reaching out, though not quite in biting range. “Wulf? You okay buddy?”

The wolf whined, but kept still.

“You can stand up, right? Come on. You’re still you, right?” 

The demon was pleading. So maybe he wasn’t as hopeful as he’d acted inside. The two kept staring at one another, neither making another move as both of them became harder to see as the sun dipped beyond the horizon.

“Phantom, maybe it isn’t your friend?”

“Keep out of this.” he spat the words, even though he didn’t even look back. “Say something! I know you can!”

The wolf didn’t respond, though he crouched a little. Flicked an ear.

“You have to. Come on.”

“I don’t think he can.” Tucker tried to get through to him, but it was hard to give a reassuring hand when it went through like the demon wasn’t even there.

“He has to! He can’t be gone!” He turned, a green liquid pooling near the demon’s eyes, face drawn back in a snarl. “He was fine! That was the deal!” Sam only realized the demon was crying when his voice hitched.

“Maybe we can help him?” She had no idea how, or even what it meant to have a demon become a familiar, but the sheer upset made her own heart hurt.

The wolf whined again and sat down, but it was hard to tell if he was just tired or could understand them somewhat.

“It’s just a small thing, in and out. I keep trying to tell the guy he doesn’t need a familiar for it, that I know a few decent demons. I hate asking, but I feel bad for Wulf, you know? He looks so upset and confused.”

“So I do it, and you’ll get him to back off? Let Wulf go?”

“Would you? Even if it’s a bit...below your standing?”

“No one will even know I was there.”

Sam’s brow wrinkled in pain, shaking her head to clear the strange conversation from her head. Okay, if Phantom had been yelling in her head before, that was absolutely something he’d sent. A memory? It was pretty muddled, but it had to do with Wulf...who Phantom was clearly upset about.

“Come on, you have to be in there.” The demon had given up on staying away, a hand  on the side of that massive jaw, apparently no longer caring if he got bit in half. “I went right away, it shouldn’t have been too late. You remember?”

He only got a half hearted tail wag in response.

Would it be better to put the wolf in the thermos? Just to keep the demon from pleading with a wolf that wasn’t listening?

“What was the point?” Phantom kept muttering, still giving the wolf gentle pats. “Why are you like this?”

Before Sam could try to convince Tucker that it might be best to catch the eerie wolf, it got back to its feet and gave the shadowy demon a headbutt to the chest and padded away.

“Where are you going?”

The wolf didn’t answer that either.

“I’m sorry if that was your friend, that’s rough.” Tucker tried again, managing to get the demon to look at him this time.

“You said they were Gregor’s familiar?” His question was raspy, face still stained with whatever mess demons used for tears.

“That’s what it looked like, at least.”

His eyes flared with a fury she hadn’t seen the demon show before. “I’m going to kill him.”

Crap. This was the actual trap, wasn’t it.

[ave-aria]

Rewind

Ectober Week 2020 Day 3: Rewind Summary: Maddie can't believe what she's seeing on the security tape. In shock, she hits rewind. Tags: Reveal fic, Blood, Angst, Implications of character death, Tragedy, Trauma, Oneshot

-

Rewind.

Maddie keeps her eyes on the tv screen as the figures wind their way backwards to the start of the video. She won't look away. Can't. Doesn't dare.

If she looks away, she'll have to focus on something else. The quiet, dusty lab around her. The uncleaned ecto-weapons by the door. The green blood smattered on the blade.

The hollow, empty house looming over her head…

The video hiccups a bit as she hits the start of the feed. Old VHS tapes are odd like that, buzzing out with static where the film wore thin from too many pauses and restarts. It's a sign she's hit the beginning. Maddie presses play.

"Mom and Dad would kill me if they knew I let you down here."

It was an old security tape, filched from the lab. Onscreen, three teenagers, her son at the lead, slip into the camera's field of view. Maddie leans closer, enraptured by the movement, even though she's seen this moment enough times to have it seared into her brain.

Maybe, if she focuses hard enough, she can learn the secret - how to rewind her own mistakes, go back to a time when none of it has happened, just like in the video.

"Whoa, check it out! This thing's huge! I can't believe your parents built this!" A pause, while the kid adjusts his glasses. "Bummer that it doesn't work though, dude."

"Damn. Was it really supposed to open a portal to the underworld?"

"It's 'The Ghost Zone,' Sam. And yeah. My parents were pretty heartbroken when it didn't work. It kinda just… fizzled out. I hope they're not too upset."

The detached, clinical angle of the shot doesn't do the moment justice. Danny'd always been such a kind boy, thoughtful and empathetic to a fault. Maddie's throat closes up a little, leaving her struggling to breathe. They had been upset. Unbearably so. Their life's work - as Danny put it - fizzled out before their very eyes. It'd been a hard loss to take, one that she and Jack might never have recovered from, had the Portal not miraculously started working on its own, days later.

God. Now she almost wishes it hadn't.

A bright flash draws her from her reverie. Maddie blinks at the screen. A camera flash. In her distraction, she's missed part of the video; Tucker's casual "Lighten up, dude,", Sam's request for a photo op, Danny grabbing a hazmat suit to pose with while she dug the device from her backpack.

"—Got it," Sam waves the printed Polaroid to air out the negative.

"Okay. I showed you the portal. Can we get out of here now? My parents could be back here any minute."

Where had they been that day, anyway? Maddie wonders. Grocery shopping? Visiting the park? Moping, as they tried anything to get their minds off of their most recent failure? If they'd been there —

If they'd been there—

"Come on, Danny," comes Sam's voice, treacherous in its fascination. "A Ghost Zone? Aren't you curious?"

Danny looks into the Portal, clutching the custom white suit made specially for him. Sam smirks, knowing. "You gotta check it out."

Maddie hits pause.

Rewind.

"You gotta check it out."

Pause. Rewind.

"You gotta check it out."

Rewind.

"—gotta check it out."

The remote feels cold and heavy, like ice in her hand. In that moment, a selfishness grips her. She could blame Sam. For all if it. Everything that happened, it all started here, and it started because—

—But she can't blame Sam, because the next moment, Danny turns back, his eyes sparkling with an adventurous spirit. It's a spark of curiosity, brimming at the thought of the unknown; a look she's all too familiar with, one she's seen often on her daughter's face, her husband's - even her own, in the mirror.

"You know what? You're right. Who knows what kind of awesome, super cool things exist on the other side of that Portal?"

That curiosity, it's a Fenton trait, not one that needs to be stoked like a fire. That spark's been burning within him, since the cradle.

"Don't go in," she whispers, as if her advice could change the course of history. Even if he could hear her, though, it would be no use. He can no more resist the call than he can resist breathing.

He pulls on the hazmat suit. Skintight, white with black edging. It's like staring at a photo-negative. Watching her son, Maddie's stomach twists.

How couldn't she see it before?

"Alright. I'm going in." He says. His first footsteps echo, loud, in the hollow of the blacked out Portal…

Maddie's breath shudders in. She grips the remote and, before she can stop herself, hits the button.

Rewind.

She watches as her son walks backwards, double-time, out of the entrance to the Portal. The panic that gripped her fades.

"Mads?" From somewhere up above, echoing down the staircase, comes her husband's voice. Maddie is glued to the video screen, and almost doesn't hear him. Regardless, she definitely can't answer. What would she even say?

"Maddie?" His heavy footsteps echo in the stairwell, trudging closer. "Are you down there?"

A hitch in the tape. Maddie presses play.

"Mom and Dad would kill me if they knew I let you down here."

Drawn by the sound, Jack trudges the rest of the way down the narrow staircase. She feels a slight reverberation in the floor when he reaches the landing behind her. She doesn't turn around.

"The police called back. Officer McNally said he'd file a missing persons report, and they promised to keep their eyes open. But—" she hears the way uncertainty causes his voice to die in his throat when she doesn't turn to greet him. After a long moment of silence, he draws up to her side. "What are you watching?" he asks at last.

"It kinda just… fizzled out. I hope they're not too upset."

Question. He'd asked a question. Maddie swallows and struggles to answer. "Security tapes," she chokes out.

Understanding, an incomplete kind, dawns on Jack, and vigor jumps back into his bones. "Mads, that's brilliant!" he booms. "Why didn't I think of it? He comes into the lab all the time! We can use the security tapes to see when he last—"

"I found this tape in Danny's room," she interrupts.

Again, his voice falters in confusion.

"Under the bed," she elaborates, as if that will help. And continues watching, detached.

"Can we get out of here now? My parents could be back any minute."

The flickering light of the tv fills the lab, ominous in its glow. Jack hesitates. Maybe he's picked up on the subtext by now. Maddie can picture his eyes drifting from the staticy screen to the items in front of it, scattered across the table. He reaches out fro the shoebox sitting beside the tv. Taped to its front, written in the cursive, unmistakable scrawl of their son's handwriting, is a note that reads:

'If I Never Come Home'

"Maddie, what is this." Jack's voice is uncharacteristically heavy. Looking to her for guidance. For answers.

For once, she has none to give.

"Watch," Maddie whispers, still trapped by the screen. Automatic, her fingers hit the button.

Rewind.

With no other options to grasp at, he does.

"Mom and Dad would kill me if they knew I let you down here."

Watches as the kids approach the Portal.

"Aren't you curious?"

Watches as their son zips up the hazmat suit.

"Alright, I'm going in."

Watches as he disappears into the empty cavity of their greatest invention.

Click.

Watches as it thrums to life, with a scream.

"Da—Danny no!" Jack yells in tandem with the two remaining teens. He lurches forward, hand outstretched, to stop the agony onscreen. "He's not - when did he -"

"It's old, Jack," Maddie whispers. "From when the Portal started working."

Jack spins to stare at her. "You mean - Danny's the one who—" he's visibly struggling with the information, the same way she did, on her first viewing. "But—he never said—"

Right, Madie thinks. He never said anything. Jack's confusion is laughable, though. Why Danny never told them—that much is painfully clear.

"Guys?" Over the yelling and the panicking and the electric cackle from the Portal, their son's terrified voice cuts through the din. "G-guys help, what's happening?!"

Tucker and Sam are black silhouettes stumbling backwards from a swirling green glow, but they freeze and scramble to right themselves, lurching forward to catch someone as he stumbles through the gate.

Phantom - Danny - emerges from the portal, falling to his knees.

"…No," Jack says. Disbelief is thick in his voice. "That can't be… no."

Maddie lifts the remote.

Rewind.

A flash of light. A curdling scream. A shock of confusion, panic, scramble.

Danny Phantom stumbles from the portal.

Jack stares for a long time. Then he reaches out, snatching the lid of the shoebox for a second look at the evidence. The note, accusatory, stares back at them.

"This is how he tells us." Jack doesn't often whisper, but it seems like he can't do anything else. Her husband looks at the empty shoebox, the screen, the VCR. "Our son is Danny Phantom, and this is how he tells us. I…" he trails off.

Maddie almost can't believe it, how easily Jack arrives at the conclusion. It took her twelve viewings for her to wrap her mind around it, and it still hasn't really sunk in. But then, that's always been Jack's strong poing - those intuitive leaps of logic. Ones every scientist both loathed and envied.

"Did it kill him?" he moves seamlessly onto the next question that tripped her. Somehow, Jack's voice is even quieter this time.

Maddie shakes her head no. If they watch the video long enough, about ten minutes in, Danny manages to change his way back to human. If their invention did kill him, it wasn't permanent. Not that time, at least.

She's too close to thinking about it.

Rewind.

"But—" she can't stop Jack from thinking, though. He barrels on, heedless of breaking the fragile grasp Maddie has on her sanity. "But if all this time — Phantom—"

A hitch in the tape.

"We've been—"

Press play.

"Mom and Dad would kill me if they knew I let you down here."

"—Don't tell me we've been trying to waste our own kid—"

If Maddie weren't so detached, she might laugh. Waste. God, he can't even say it.

"Trying?" she asks instead. Bitter, the word sticks to her tongue.

She's not looking at the tape now. She's looking at him. And Jack, oh, Jack, he just stares down at her, a dark horror growing in his eyes.

He whips around to look at the bloodied weapons sitting at the base of the stairs.

Exactly where they left them two days ago, after that nasty ghost fight. When they came home to find a broken house, their daughter crying at the kitchen table, and their son just - gone.

"No." Jack backs up a step. "No no no no no no no—"

A flash of light. A curdling scream—

In an instant, Jack is moving. He snatches up weapons, whatever he can find, and bolts for the staircase, vaulting his way up to ground floor. Distantly, Maddie hears the doors slam. The RV thrumming to life. The screech of tires as Jack peels out of the driveway.

In the cold wake of his departure, Maddie turns back to the tv. She should go after him, she knows. But she's not quite done watching. Jack's always been a man of action, after all, but she's the analytical one, who studies, who marvels, who gathers the facts she sees.

Phantom, onscreen, slumps against his friends while he drips ectoplasm to the floor. He stares down at his white-gloved hands, his glowing green eyes wide in shock. Maddie wonders if he knew, then, what would become of him. What his parents, who raised him, who swore to protect him, would do.

She can't face those questions. Not yet. Not yet. Instead, she lifts the remote.

And rewinds.

A good scientist, a rational scientist, never draws conclusions while she's still gathering evidence. So as long as she's still watching—

A hitch in the tape. She's at the beginning. Maddie presses play.

"Mom and Dad would kill me if they knew I let you down here."

As long as she keeps watching, she doesn't have to do anything with this information. All she has to do is watch.

So she watches. She rewinds. And she plays. She can't look away—

"Mom and Dad would kill me if they knew I let you down here—"

She doesn't dare.

"Mom and Dad would kill me if they knew I let you down h—"

All she can do is rewind—

"Mom and Dad would kill me if they knew I let y—"

And rewind—and rewind—

"Mom and Dad would kill me if—"

Until she finds evidence contrary to her theory…

"Mom and Dad would kill me—"

Or she finds Its inevitable End.

"Mom and Dad would kill me if they knew I let you down here."

Rewind.

"Mom and Dad would kill me if they—"

Rewind.

"Mom—"

Rewind.

"Mom—"

Rewind.

"Mom—"

-

[AO3] [FFN]