#actually does he even say anything in this one? I don't believe so. whoof.

[darks-ink]

Welcome back! I saw you are taking story ideas so I wanted to submit two of the prompts I wrote for Phic Phight.

1) Danny's excuse when someone notices the resemblance between Fenton and Phantom and comes too close to his secret: The ghost is his dead twin who he ate in the womb. This might have more truth to it than he originally thought.

2) Long ago Clockwork had and lost a child, the young Ancient of Space. Even with his Sight of time, he could never see what became of them, only that they disappeared. Now another being that evades his Sight has crashed into his existence. Another child, and this one a boy with the stars in his eyes and the cold of space in his veins.

I hope you like either of these!

Thank you! I went with #1, but admittedly it turned out a little short.

Duplicity

Rating: Gen Warnings: focuses on vanishing twins & the formation of ghosts, especially in connection to each other Words: 770 Additional Tags: Post-reveal, Good Fenton parents

[AO3]

---

“You know, one thing still confuses me about ghost cores.” Danny resisted the temptation to fidget when three pairs of eyes turned to him. “Or, uh, the cores of half-ghosts, at least?”

“Do tell, Great One, and perhaps I can answer.” Frostbite turned further to face him.

“Well, um.” Danny’s eyes darted over to his parents, briefly, before returning to Frostbite. “Isn’t it kinda weird that my core is more stable than Dani and Vlad? Like, I thought Dani was just because she was a clone, so she was destabilizing, but apparently Vlad got really sick as he was developing his powers? But I was, well, fine?” He shrugged, unsure of how to put his thoughts into words.

His mother hummed thoughtfully, but didn’t say anything. Neither did his dad, though he did frown.

“Of course not. Both other half-ghosts you refer to had to develop their own cores, growing them from scratch. You, on the other hand, absorbed yours from another ghost, thus stepping past the initial growing pains.”

Danny felt his heart stop. His core freeze. Thoughts grinding to a halt.

“Excuse me?” he blurted out, automatically, incredulously. “Are you telling me I killed another ghost?”

“No, no.” Frostbite lifted his hands, voice dropping into a soothing tone. “Although it is not unheard of for proper ghosts to fuse together into one, this sort of core-binding is only possible with blob ghosts.”

“And blob ghosts aren’t truly sentient, right?” Maddie hummed in thought, saving Danny the effort of trying to figure out what, exactly, Frostbite meant. “They’re barely more than free-floating ectoplasm, which is common here in the Ghost Zone.”

Frostbite nodded. “Indeed. A more developed ghost couldn’t have been absorbed in such a manner, so there is no need to worry, Great One.”

“That’s a relief.” Danny heaved a sigh. It still felt weird to imagine that his core wasn’t originally his, that it had developed separately, but, well. At least he hadn’t killed someone in the process.

“Although,” Frostbite suddenly started, interrupting Danny’s thoughts. “It is very unusual.”

“Oh?” Danny felt like slapping himself. Why did he ask for more information? He regretted asking in the first place. Knowing more wasn’t going to make himself feel better, was it?

But his parents would probably have asked if he hadn’t. Right? Yeah, definitely.

“Typically, ghosts require some form of connection to be present to bind together. Two fully-formed ghosts can fuse over shared goals or other such traits, but such a thing isn’t possible with a blob ghost. To absorb one of those, a more tangible connection is required.”

Frostbite eyed Danny, but he couldn’t quite read the emotion in his eyes. “Obviously the power of the Ghost Portal let you bypass the part where you weren’t a ghost yourself—” or perhaps he was dying and turning into a ghost anyway, “—but that connection would’ve still been necessary.”

But how. What? Who? The blob ghost must’ve come from somewhere, something, someone, but Danny couldn’t imagine, couldn’t think—

“Oh, that makes sense,” Maddie said, voice casual. “Danny absorbed his twin in the womb, so it makes sense for him to do the same thing with his twin’s ghost.”

“What?” Danny blurted out, turning to her in shock. “I had a twin? A twin I absorbed?!”

“Well, yes.” Maddie nodded, looking at him in confusion. “Of course, it happened fairly early on, so he wouldn’t have become a real ghost. But the impression of it, the potential of a twin gained and lost, that would’ve been enough form a blob ghost.” She turned to Frostbite. “Right?”

“Right.” Frostbite nodded back. “And yes, a connection like that would have worked quite well. A connection of blood and spirit, an action repeated. An echo between life and death.”

Danny shook his head. Well. Jerked his head side to side. “Are you serious? Why are you all acting like this is—this is normal, totally expected?”

“I thought you knew, honey.” Maddie was frowning at him now, confusion deepening. “Weren’t you the one who started using it as a cover?”

“What?” He blinked at her, then realized. Yes. Yes, he had been using that as an excuse for the resemblance between Danny Fenton and Phantom. A dead twin, a ghost which looked just like the living Danny. “I didn’t—I didn’t think it was real.”

“Oh.” She shot an uncertain look at Jack, then Frostbite, then turned to him. “Well. You know now?”

Danny stared at her, incredulous. Then shook his head. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess I do now.”

But what the hell was he supposed to think of all this?

[stripedtabbycat]

finished the hitchhiker's guide books! final thoughts:

totally get what adams meant by being in a bad place when he wrote the last book because whoof that ending. that said i think if this is the final book it's not entirely unfitting to have it end with this kind of nihilism with jokes. at times like these all you can do is laugh

however it is especially jarring when the second-to-last book is almost unusually optimistic and lighthearted. book 4 is almost something like a breather episode in the midst of all the "everything happens so much" of the rest of the series.

book 4 contains a chapter ruminating on the fact that if you write a character who does not show any particular interest in sex or romance, readers will respond to them by basically saying "wtf is this guy's deal?" and be unable to get their minds off the subject. if you don't care about that and skip to the end as suggested, though, aroace arthur dent can still win

that said i actually do really like fenchurch and her and arthur's relationship. it was really sweet and i'm sad she doesn't get to show up again. i wasn't expecting to be invested in the romance plot in this book but it was good!

adams miiiight be one of those male authors who doesn't really know what to do with his female characters, as evidenced by trillian not getting much of anything to do in the first two books and kind of completely changing her characterization during her appearances in the last few. i like her saving the day in book 3 and i think she's probably the most interesting in book 5, with the two converging versions of herself and all, even though she also doesn't get much to do after a certain point.

i also like random. she's a surprisingly well-written teenager for her relatively small page time and i also wish we got to spend more time with her. sadly we will never have a sixth book so we can't (yeah, i am of the opinion that officially published fanfics written after the literal death of the author don't count)

"young zaphod plays it safe" was a fun story to tide one over between installments but when i finished i was feeling like there was some kind of point i wasn't getting. turns out that point was that the clone that was sent to earth who was dangerous because they could be allowed to get away with anything was implied to be ronald reagan and this was much more explicit in earlier versions

given the author's open admission of rewriting canon in every version and the books often contradicting each other (not too blatantly as far as i could tell though), it's probably true that there are multiple canon reasons for why the earth was destroyed. i think they can all be true at once even within one canon.

the humor remains very consistently good throughout the series, with ever-prescient bits about technological inefficiency and politics. my hot take is that the guide mk. ii is like previously reliable search engines pushing ai shit as "the future"

i'm realizing my version of the books is probably the us edition because of the use of "belgium" instead of "fuck" in book 3. does anyone know why they were required to censor this because as far as i know you were absolutely allowed to swear in books in the 1980s. yes the belgium bit is funny but i was not previously aware of any mpaa-like censorship guidelines in publishing back then. each subsequent book has i think one uncensored f-bomb ("does he not, to put it in a nutshell, fuck?" being particularly memorable) so whatever it was they got over it. apparently

i think some people on here would be very taken with the idea of someone on whom it is perpetually raining not because the rain gods hate them but because the rain loves them, and who has become an actual rain god because of this

i also wonder if the world had become more open to believing in unnatural phenomena such as the above after the near-apocalypse resulted in our world merging with a parallel one, but i may be overthinking a series that runs on jokes