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the-oaken-muse · 2 years ago

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Dannymay Day 7: Weapon

The History of the Fenton Thermos (1120 words) by The_Oaken_Muse Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Danny Phantom Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Danny Fenton & Tucker Foley, Danny Fenton & Jack Fenton, Jack Fenton & Tucker Foley Characters: Danny Fenton, Tucker Foley, Jack Fenton Additional Tags: ghost lore, Ecto-Science, The Fentons are scientists, The Fentons are inventors, DannyMay 2023 (Danny Phantom) Summary:

Why is it a thermos?

Read it on AO3 if that’s your thing.

“So, Mr. F… Why a thermos?”

“Tucker!” Danny hissed, making abort motions behind his dad’s back.

Tucker slightly widened his eyes and cocked his head in a look that conveyed, ‘What? This is a great way to get information.’

Danny responded in kind, rolling his eyes to say ‘Whatever. It’s your funeral, dude.’

Mr. Fenton turned away from the workbench where he had been tinkering to beam at Tucker.

“It’s great to see you kids taking an active interest in the finer points of ghost hunting! It’s not just about firing blasters and looking cool, you know! Although that is a big part of it.” He winked at the two boys. “Ecto-engineering and R&D are just as important, if not more so! After all, you can’t use a weapon that doesn’t exist!”

Danny grimaced, “I should really get back to my chores… If you need me I’ll be over there, cleaning test tubes.”

“That’s the spirit, son! Keeping a tidy workspace is vital to ghost hunting! You know what they say ‘Cleanliness is next to ghostliness!’”

Tucker eyed the mess of a disassembled Fenton Thermos™ on the table behind the large man critically.

“Nobody says that, Dad!” Danny called from the other side of the lab.

“Anyway!” Mr. Fenton clapped his hands together and turned his attention back to Tucker. “The Fenton Thermos was one of our earliest inventions. We started working on a ghost containment device around the same time as we began our work on the proto-portal, back in our college days! It was actually Danny’s mother’s idea, she realized that once we opened the portal, we would need a way to capture specimens to study. Ghosts are notoriously squirmy things to catch, what with the intangibility and all. Of course we played around with the idea of the traditional salt rings and devil’s traps and what have you, but those take time to set up and don’t really allow for easy transportation. We started experimenting with smaller rune circles on live traps designed for wild animals and those early prototypes eventually become our net guns, but they all had their flaws, their inefficiencies. We were running in circles, stumped, until one day I was sitting in my Eastern Literature class, practically falling asleep over my copy of The Arabian Nights when I was struck by brilliance! The Ancient Arabians used oil lamps to capture ghosts and bend them to their wills, so why couldn’t we?”

“I thought it was genies in the lamps, not ghosts.” Tucker interrupted.

“That’s actually a common misconception!” Mr. Fenton looked way too excited to correct Tucker. “Genies are actually a subspecies of ghost, rather than a separate species altogether! They’re trickster ghosts that gain power by making twisted contracts with humans and feeding on their wishes and desires.”

“O-oh, really?” Tucker stuttered out, abruptly reminded of his own encounter with a wishing ghost.

“Yup! Anyway! Back to my brilliant stroke of genius! The three of us started studying the techniques these ancient ghost hunters used to make their containment devices, what materials they used, what shapes, and working on a modern day equivalent. An oil lamp might have been a common sight back then, but not in modern day America, and subtlety is key when dealing with a tricky ghost, the element of surprise could mean the difference between life and death!”

“But why a thermos?” Tucker asked again.

“Well, we tried several different designs before the thermos. We figured that a lighter would be a pretty close modern equivalent to an oil lamp, but it was too small. Next we tried a flamethrower, but that wasn’t really subtle enough… and Vladdie pointed out that the lamps weren’t necessarily on fire when they were used, so the fire might not be an important factor, just the oil, or the fact that it could hold oil, because ghosts are slippery devils, or maybe it just needed to hold liquid. Then Maddie had the idea to use kitchen equipment, since a lot of cooking used oil. We ended up wandering the kitchen section of our local supermarket, tossing anything that looked like the right size and shape and would hold oil into our shopping cart. We hauled everything back to our lab and started running tests. The thermos passed all of them with flying colors! It met our criteria perfectly: not only does it hold liquid, soup often contains oil, it was metal, and the insulating qualities of the double sided walls would work for both hot and cold natured spirits, plus it had a lid! We had found the perfect modern day equivalent of an oil lamp! Not only would it be an ideal device for ghost capture and transport, it was also practical for everyday use! We went through quite a lot of coffee while we were working on the proto portal…” He chuckled good-naturedly. “Now that we had our vessel, we got to work redesigning it with cutting edge ghost hunting technology!”

He spun back to face his work bench, pulling Tucker with him, gesturing to the half disassembled thermos, all nuts and bolts and wires and curved metal pieces.

“Our research shows that the engravings on the lamps were more than just decoration, they were sigils to trap and bind the ghosts. Just looking at our thermos, you would see that it doesn’t have any of those, right?”

“Uh, right?”

“Ha! Wrong! They’re on the inside!” He picked up one of the pieces of the inner wall and turned it over to show glowing green circuits arranged in archaic symbols that almost hurt to look at. “One of our greatest breakthroughs was figuring out how to reinforce the walls of the thermos so that it could hold multiple ghosts at a time where the lamp could only hold one. Of course, we also had to make the opening a one way valve in suction mode so that the other ghosts wouldn’t escape when we caught a new one! Another improvement we made was changing the release mechanism into a button so people wouldn’t accidentally release the ghosts, which was a major flaw of the original design as evidenced by numerous historical accounts!”

Tucker could feel Danny’s eyes boring into the back of his neck from across the room. That was one time!

“So, is, uh, is that what you’re working on now? Making more improvements?”

“No, no.” Mr. Fenton’s face turned thoughtful as he gazed at the piece of technology he held, dwarfed by his massive hand. “The Thermos may have been one of our earliest inventions, but we could never get it to work. Until a few months ago... I’m trying to figure out how it turned on.”

#danny phantom #danny fenton #tucker foley #jack fenton #dannymay2023 #dannymay day 7 #weapon #fenton thermos #fanfic #my work

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lonelyassassin96 · 2 years ago

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I mean, with that snazzy new suit of hers, she is a walking weapon.

Dannymay day 7: Weapon.

#dannymay #dannymay event #dannymay 2023 #dannymay day 7 #valerie gray #danny phantom #red huntress

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decibly · 2 years ago

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It had started as a pretty good day.

Danny only needed to deal with two ghost attacks yesterday, and one of them was the Box Ghost, so he got a lot more sleep than usual. (Jazz would argue that 4 and a half hours was still a lot less than he should be getting, but what she didn't know wouldn't hurt her.) Today at school, he had only had to fight Technus during Math, and he only had one overdue essay! Not to mention, the English test today had gone wonderfully and Danny was pretty sure he would get a B.

He should've known that that was too much good luck to last.

Now he was laying on his stomach in the kitchen, the surprise ectoblast having knocked him to the floor. As green energy kept pelting him, making sure that he couldn't get up, he almost missed the sounds of his parents making their way up from the lab.

Danny forced himself onto his side despite the endless onslaught from the security system, just in time to watch his parents faces change from excited smiles to terrified horror.

Finding their son laying on the floor being attacked by their own security system probably deserved that kind of reaction, huh.

Suddenly, his mum snapped out of her shock and rushed over to him, while his dad stayed in a shocked stupor, slowly sinking to his knees. "Danny!" She called out, worry and fear emanating from her.

"Help…" he wheezed out, which had the bonus of snapping his Dad out of it too.

"Da-danno?"

"'urts… help…" Danny managed, before the black spots he hadn't noticed dancing around the edges of his vision blocked his vision, and he slumped, bleeding and unconscious, on the kitchen floor.

Danny didn't know how long he’d been out this time, and, more concerningly, why he had been unconscious. All he really knew was that he hoped he hadn’t actually been hit by a truck because that would almost certainly mean hospital. The last thing he could remember was going downstairs to make a sandwich, so unless the Lunch Lady was haunting his kitchen, he didn’t know what could possibly have happened.

Then, in a sudden rush, he remembered. When Danny had opened the fridge to get some cheese, he had been ambushed by the hotdogs. They hadn’t been acting up as much lately, and that planned attack was probably why. He had tried tried to fight back, but what had happened ater that.

Oh. Oh no.

Danny had tried to fight back with his ectoblasts.

The security system must have activated, which would’ve taken out the hotdogs… and him as well.

And his parents… his parents had come up from the lab. While he was being attacked, violently, by their security system. That only targeted ghosts.

Best case scenario, they forced him to go through a bunch of terrible tests to prove he wasn’t overshadowed, they realised how ghostly he was, and he had to run away before they dissected him.

Jazz would tell him to be more optimistic, but this wasn’t a time for optimism. This was a time to plan Operation Get The Hell Out Of Here So My Parents Don’t Kill Me On Accident While Misguidedly Trying To Save Me.

Maybe some planning for Operation Find Cooler Names For The Operation was in order as well.

Then Danny realised something that he probably should have earlier. He wasn’t strapped to a lab table, or still laying on the kitchen floor, or stuck in some other horrible place. Instead, he was tucked into his bed, which was probably a good sign.

After that realisation, he heard the doorknob turning, and footsteps as someone came into the room. Danny squinted his eyes open for a moment, but the sudden onslaught of light forced them shut.

“...Mum?” he guessed, uncertain. Jazz was out looking at universities for a week, and his dad’s footsteps were much heavier, so that was probably her.

“That’s right, darling! Glad to see that you’re awake already. Much longer and he would’ve had to take you to the hospital, even if the people there are useless at treating ectoplasm-based injuries…” she trailed off, muttering furiously. “Anyways, here’s some food!” Danny slowly opened his eyes. It was still obscenely bright, but manageable. He had been handed a plate with a hotdog that thankfully hadn’t gained sentience yet and a big lump of fudge.

His mum looked nervous for a second as he dug in to the hotdog perhaps a bit more viciously than usual. “Er, Danny… Jack and I were wondering if you maybe had any ideas about why the security was targeting you?”

Danny almost choked, but managed to use his intangability to redirect to chunk of meat back in the direction it was meant to go (and wasn’t that a neat, if extremely uncomfortable, party trick). Thank the Ancients that he tore out all the anti-ghost stuff in his room ages ago.

“Noooo?” he said unconvincingly, his voice cracking.

“I’m going to try that again. Daniel James Fenton, tell me what is wrong right now or so help me–”

“OK!”

She frowned at him. “Good. Now, start.”

Danny gulped and put down the ruined remains of his hotdog. “Um. So, remember the portal? When I turned it on, I might’ve… gotslightlyelectrocutedalittlebitandalsoabitdrencedinectoplsmandnowI’mghostlyenoughthatallyou’reinventionstargetmeallthetime?”

His mum glared at him, and he shrank backwards into the pillows. “And you didn’t think us any of this earlier so that something like this didn’t happen?”

“Well… yes, but…”

“No buts. Today, you’re going to rest and recover. Tomorrow morning, I’m calling you in sick to school and the three of us are going to either rework the security so it won’t attack you or scrap it entirely.”

Danny felt his eyes go wide. “You’d do that for me?”

His mum nodded. “The security systems are meant to protect you. If they do the opposite, what’s the point of them?”

Danny watched her leave, unsure what to think. Maybe… maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if they knew after all.

#dannymay2023 #dannymay day 7 #weapon #danny phantom #danny fenton #maddie fenton #an amazing amount of alliteration

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charming-doodles · 2 years ago

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Dannymay Day 6, 7, & 8 : Eclipse, Weapon, & Electric Core AU

Quick drawing! I wanna do the Eclipse prompt properly one day but basically Danny is experiencing Luna from MLP trapped in the moon vibes :333

As for Valerie, I wanna save her story for day 26 jejeje

#traditional art #danny phantom #fanart #dannymay2023 #dannymay day 6 #dannymay day 7 #dannymay day 8

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scarletsaphire · 2 years ago

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Weapons Training: Dannymay 2023 Day 7

Maddie's sweet, darling Daniel died the day the portal opened. The thing that took his place told her so. She would not let her chance at vengeance get away from her.

TRIGGER WARNING: Body horror, non consensual body modification, torture, brainwashing, dissection, dismemberment

Maddie’s baby, her beautiful son, died two weeks ago, when the portal first turned on. Her Danny had been the sweetest, kindest, most caring boy. She knew this for a fact. He had been so sweet that even the thing impersonating him couldn’t keep it a secret. It had told her that Danny had died, and tried to convince her that it was Danny. She knew too much about ghosts, spent too long studying them, to be fooled by this imposter.

She had given him the acceptance he had asked for, until he had gone to bed (not to sleep. The creatures didn’t need sleep.) The fact that she had managed to put a cage together in less than 12 hours, one that could hold a ghost, was nothing short of a miracle. Her and Jack had spent the entire day working on it. She drugged it while it lay there, dragged it down to the cage, and locked it. She started taking samples. She would need them, if she wanted to avenge her son. And she would most certainly avenge him.

When the thing woke up, it was groggy and confused, slurring its words together. Maddie couldn’t understand most of it, didn’t want to understand it; it was using Danny’s voice, and she wanted her last memory of his voice to be his, and not some creature impersonating it. When it was able to talk properly, it pleaded with Danny’s voice, begged with Danny’s hands, bargained with Danny’s memories. “Please, mom,” it said, grasping the bars to the cage tight. “It’s me. I can prove it. Do you remember that time when…” it never got a chance to finish, because Maddie had grabbed its jaw and squeezed hard enough to bruise. (If he had been her son, he would have bruised. It did not.)

“Don’t you dare call me mother,” she hissed, nails digging into too cold flesh. “You killed my son. You took his place. And you have the audacity to continue to pretend!” Maddie saw red. When her vision cleared, her arms were scraped by clinging nails, a mass of flesh in her hands. The thing was bleeding from a tongueless mouth, red blood dripping down his cheeks and onto his chest. It cried tears with Danny’s eyes. She took those too.

The red concerned her. When she looked at it, it was blood. Danny’s blood. Was the thing piloting her son’s corpse? Had it not only stolen his soul, his image, but his flesh and blood too. If she was made of weaker stuff, she would have vomited. If she was made of weaker stuff, she would not have been able to see her child’s bleeding, mutilated face, eye sockets staring blankly, rocking itself back and forth in a cage in the basement. Maddie Fenton was anything but weak.

When she woke up the next morning, the thing had grown them back. It did not call her mother again, just repeated the mumbled phrase “please” over and over again. She could have ignored it, if she tried. She took his tongue out anyway.

She found Jazz down there that night, whispering to the thing. Jazz had tried to defend it, say that if she just listened, just put aside her biases for one minute, she would see that Danny was here. Different, but here. “Lies,” Maddie spit out. “It has forced lies into your brain. We’ve spent so long teaching you about ghosts, only for one with a familiar face to replace a lifetime of lessons?” Maddie pulled Jazz out of the basement with more force than she intended to. The basement door stayed locked from then on, the only key kept around Maddie’s neck.

Ghosts started to come through and cause problems. Ghosts besides the one that spent its days cowering in a cage, covered in blood and ectoplasm.This was a blessing in disguise. Sure, people were getting hurt, things were getting destroyed, people were leaving Amity in droves. But every time a ghost was spotted, it was Jack and Maddie that were called. It was the only time Maddie left the lab, to gather the ghosts that would wander the streets. The destruction would start after they’d arrived, but they’d always get the ghost, no matter the cost. She kept all of them. She would need them, for what she wanted to do.

Jack and Jazz left at the same time that the thing stopped bleeding red, and stayed in…she couldn’t call it its own body. It was still Danny, just with white hair and green eyes and the hazmat suit they had built together. The three of them had gotten into an argument the previous day. Jazz had insisted that she was a monster, for torturing her own son like that. Maddie had, of course, denied that it was her son. It wasn’t. It had killed her son and taken his body, his memories, his shape. It was the monster, not her.

She had expected Jack to back her up. He always did. Always in her corner, always on her team. It was one of the things she loved about him. But this time, he took Jazz’s side. “Even if you are right, dear,” he said, his voice uncharacteristically quiet. “I can’t keep seeing my son like that. Let the ghost go. Let Danny rest.”

Maddie couldn’t remember her response, only that it was fully of fury and grief and ended with her storming back down to the lab to continue to try and rip Danny’s form away from the thing. Whatever it was was that she said, it was enough that there was a note on the kitchen counters when she next left the lab.

“You’re scaring me, Mads. I’m taking Jazz to safety. When you’re yourself again, call. - Jack” There was a phone number at the bottom of the note. She didn’t bother reading it before tossing it in the trash.

The creature had stopped trying to talk or cry altogether. It was learning, which is more than she expected from a ghost. It was a pleasant surprise, even if it was replaced with the endless scratching of its nails against the stone floor. She let it go until his nails bled green, and it began to write words on the ground. Most of them were just begging for her to kill it already. She took its hands instead. All the thing did while she sawed through its wrists was whimper. For that, she took its tongue. She added them to the pile of body parts she had cut off that she didn’t have a use for.

It took two weeks of splashing the creature with an ectoplasm based acid for it to begin to fully lose Danny’s shape. Instead it didn’t take any shape, just a mass of not quite solid glowing green gunk. Occasionally, a limb would appear at the edges, before being sucked back into the amalgamation. Maddie smiled. She could begin the training, now. She started with the blob ghosts. She had amassed quite the collection of the weak things, storing them in thermoses that lined the walls of the lab and had started to climb the stairs to the ground floor. She opened the thermos and dumped its contents into the cage. “You know what to do.”

The blob ghost didn’t move. The blob of limbs didn’t either, for the first minute. Then it snatched the creature up in an impossible combination of fingers and feet and teeth. No hands. No tongue. No eyes. It had learned well. She did not reward the thing for its kill. Not melting it back down to nothing was reward enough.

The howling started that night. Howling didn’t quite describe it accurately, but Maddie doesn’t think anything really could. It wasn’t the sound of an animal or a person, and it seemed to carry throughout the house, throughout her body, no matter where she went or what she did. She had tried to douse the thing in acid again, demanded it be quiet, but the howling hadn’t stopped even as the thing wriggled in pain. She thought the pile of tongues was moving too. She left the lab for the first time in weeks.

The howling made her lose even more sleep, barely getting an hour every day. That was ok. Whenever she closed her eyes, she saw her son's face mutilated by her own hands, heard his voice pleading with her to stop.

The thing got stronger as she gave it more and more ghosts to tear apart. It hesitated less, until she barely had to uncap the thermos before it was pouncing at whatever thing resided inside. The humanoid ones had tried to run. They had been devoured by the amalgamation. Maddie smiled. She was getting close.

The ghosts had killed her son, and left this creature to kill her, she was sure of it. But Maddie Fenton was not weak. She would take the weapon they had planted for her, and she would use it against him. She would avenge Danny with the same force that had taken him from her, and then destroy it altogether. Her precious baby boy would not go forgotten.

#dannymay2023 #dannymay day 7 #danny phantom #maddie fenton #tw body horror #tw brainwashing #tw dismemberment #tw dissection #danny phantom fanfiction

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five-rivers · 2 years ago

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The Intern

AO3

Inspired by a variety of DPxDC posts, but mostly this one by @gettingcomfyinyourwalls

Before Danny's Accident, he and Jazz had competed for the title of "the normal one" with an intensity and ferocity achievable only by siblings in families where there was no normal one. After the Accident, he had to cede the title, however reluctantly, to his sister, who then, in a turn around only possible for siblings, then dedicated herself to giving Danny the title of "the one everyone thinks is the normal one." Combined with his chosen friend group - a girl who pursued weird as a lifestyle, and the kid who once tried to use a tamagotchi to hack a vending machine, then gave the tamagotchi an Egyptian burial when the attempt killed it - it was very easy to forget that Danny was not normal at all.�� Not even if you ignored the whole "half-ghost superhero" thing, which was very difficult to ignore.

It was even easier to forget what kind of not normal he originally was, before the accident, and continued to be even afterward.

However, the world (and particularly Sam and Tucker) was about to be reminded.

"Guys!" shouted Danny, literally skipping up the hallway to come to a bouncing stop between Sam and Tucker. "Guess what!" He was quivering with so much excitement that his edges looked a little blurry.

Tucker put a hand on his shoulder to get him to stop. "I guess it's a good thing, and not that your parents invented a ghost wiggler or something?"

Danny stilled. "The ghost wiggler. My enemy."

"Wait, I was joking."

"Mom and Dad weren't. That thing was evil."

"Okay, okay," said Sam, raising her hands, "it didn't have anything to do with one of your parents' inventions. What did happen?"

"Two of my summer internship applications were accepted," said Danny, almost sparkling with delight.

Actually, he was sparkling. If he had an internship outside of town, he would have to get that under control.

"That's great," said Sam. "Which ones?"

"Lexcorp and Wayne Industries!"

"Lexcorp?"

"Wayne Industries?"

"You applied to Lexcorp?" demanded Sam, appalled.

"You're going to Gotham?" asked Tucker in the same tone.

Danny looked from Sam to Tucker, then back again. "Yessssss?"

"To work for the guy you call Bald Vlad? The one who keeps trying to kill Superman?"

"The place with all those crazy villains and mad scientists? That Gotham?"

Then, together, they asked, "Why did you even apply there?"

"Lexcorp is a civilian leader in astronautics, meteoritics, cosmochemistry, nuclear physics, quantum computing, robotics and medical research."

"Because Lex Luthor is trying to kill Superman."

"And even beyond Wayne Industries, there are so many great scientists in Gotham, like Dr. Isley, Dr. Crane and even Dr. Fries!"

"Danny, those are the villains."

"Well," said Danny, "I figure I'm never going to meet Lex Luthor, being an intern and all, but if I see any dangerous weapons, I can trash them! I have lots of experience."

"Don't you think it might be a little dangerous for you to work for an avowed human supremacist?"

"It’s not any different from staying home."

Sam leaned back to stare at a point over Danny's head, flummoxed.

Tucker, not liking his point being ignored, squeezed Danny's shoulder. "If you miss fighting that much, I'm sure any ghost you ask will be happy to spar with you. The villains, Danny. Why do you want to go somewhere with that many villains?"

"It's not like I'm joining them." Danny rolled his eyes. "I just want to talk to them. If you're so concerned, I can take Dr. Isley and Dr. Crane off the list."

"Why only those two? Why not get rid of the whole list?" asked Tucker, shaking him slightly.

"Because Dr. Isley was mostly for Sam and Dr. Crane was mostly for Jazz. Dr. Fries is for me, and Mom and Dad want me to try to convince cousin Hugo to try therapy again."

"Why," said Sam, as Tucker glared at her, "do you think I'd want you to talk to Poison Ivy?"

"Uh," said Danny, "because you admire her work?"

"Admired, past tense, and that was before she started turning people into trees."

“But the ‘turning people into trees’ part is way more applicable to our lives!”

“Forget about that,” said Tucker. “Why do you want to talk to Mr. Freeze?”

“Well, Doctor Fries is an expert in cryogenics and incorporating ice into technology. I want to be able to do that.” Danny looked back and forth between Sam and Tucker. “Come on, I’m not interning for him. I just want to expand my knowledge base! Just think about all the cool things I could make!”

Sam and Tucker, united in horror and purpose, grabbed Danny by the arms and dragged him bodily into Senior English.

"Jazz," said Sam, hauling Danny forward by the arm she held, "your brother is turning into a mad scientist!"

Jazz looked from Sam, to Danny, to Tucker, then back to Sam. "Yessssss?"

"Well," huffed Sam, "aren't you going to do anything about it?"

"No? Why would I?"

“Mad scientist,” repeated Sam.

“That’s generally a bad thing,” said Tucker.

“It’s fine. Danny has a very strong sense of ethics.”

“And lab safety!” chimed in Danny.

“And lab safety,” agreed Jazz, nodding. “Now, if you want me to help you with your internalized prejudice, I can refer you to some resources I’ve found quite helpful myself.”

“Internalized prejudice is when you’re biased against yourself,” said Tucker.

“Yes.” Jazz returned to the task of arranging her pens and notebook on her desk.

“Wait,” said Sam, “you are not calling us mad scientists, are you?”

“Well,” said Jazz, “Mad Science Disorder isn’t in the DSM, but there’s a movement to have it included in the next edition, and I think you would fit the proposed diagnostic criteria.”

“No,” said Sam.

“Yes,” said Danny.

“I have seen the inside of your greenhouse, Sam,” said Jazz. “You’re at least on the road to being a mad botanist, if not a mad ecologist.”

“I’ve been saying that for years,” said Tucker.

“And you’re obviously a mad computer scientist, with a minor in archaeology.”

“Wait, why are you saying this like they’re college majors?” asked Tucker.

“It’s easier that way,” said Jazz. She frowned slightly. “I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. It’s just that you should be aware of it, so you don’t wake up one day and start planning involuntary human drug trials, or something like that.”

“Jazz did that, once. I was five.”

The warning bell rang.

“You should go to class,” said Jazz, pleasantly. “You don’t want to be late.”

“Listen,” said Sam, leaning over the desk to whisper at Danny, “couldn’t you, I don’t know, just do the Wayne internship?”

“Hm,” said Danny, rubbing his chin, “maybe. But I kind of get the feeling I only got the Wayne internship because I got the Lexcorp one.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I mean, like we talked about way back, Bruce Wayne has to be funding the Justice League, at least a little.” He pushed his math homework - already finished - to one side. “It’d make sense for him to keep an eye on anyone Lex Luthor personally hires, on account of the Superman thing. It’s either that or corporate espionage.”

“Wait,” said Tucker, leaning in from the side, “go back to the ‘personally’ part.”

“It’s a special internship?” said Danny, somehow still managing to pull off the clueless innocent look. “It was, like, competitive? You know what I mean.”

“Luthor personally hired you? Reviewed your application and whatever?”

“Yeah.”

“And you think he isn’t going to meet you?”

“Why would he? I’m basically going to be getting a tour, then doing drudgework for a month.”

“I love you, man, but you are so, so dumb sometimes. The man is going to meet you. Jeez, I hadn’t even heard he was doing internships like that for our age group.”

“Age group?” asked Danny.

“Dude. No. Tell me it was at least limited to just high schoolers. Tell me you didn’t apply for an internship meant for college students.”

“There wasn’t any age on it as far as I remember.”

“Mr. Fenton,” said Mr. Falluca, “will you please come solve this triangle for the class?”

Danny huffed. “Rule of cosines,” he said as he stood. “Give me an easy problem…”

“Why is he even in this class?” mumbled Sam.

“Ghost hunting,” Tucker mumbled back.

“How are you even going to get to Metropolis?” asked Sam as they walked away from the school. “You don’t have your license yet.” He probably wouldn’t have his license ever. Three Fentons driving had, evidently, proven too much for the local DMVs. Jazz, as conscientious as she was, had gotten hers from the one in Elmerton before they, too, realized the horror that was Jack and Maddie.

“Jazz is going to take me,” said Danny with a little shrug. “She’s doing a pre-college thing there. Some kind of volunteer thing.”

“And how are you getting to Gotham?”

“There’s a train that goes there,” said Danny. “Like, a regular one.”

“And getting back?”

“Mom and Dad will pick me up.”

“Where will you be sleeping?”

“There’s on-site dorms on each site.”

Sam curled her lips. “The return of company towns in the modern era.”

“I don’t know, I think the Wayne ones are probably fine.”

“But you’re sleeping in the Lexcorp ones?”

“I figure I can disable any subliminal programming devices that might be installed there.”

“Do you not see how crazy that sounds? Tucker, back me up, here?”

Tucker sighed. “Honestly, I don’t think we’re going to be able to change his mind. I’ve been picking out funeral flowers. You still like lillies?”

“It’ll be fine. I’ll call you guys if I need help. Just like you’ll call me if some new ghost shows up and starts causing trouble, right?”

“Yes,” said Sam, exasperated. “But you understand those two things aren’t the same, right? That with the way things are here, there probably won’t be a new ghost causing trouble?”

Danny had made… peace probably wasn’t quite the right word, with the Fentons, the Guys in White, and the lack of an organized overarching social structure, but there was an understanding between him and the ghosts. Without that understanding, he wouldn’t have been able to take the time to apply for internships, let alone actually go to any.

“I mean, if it’s an imposition–”

“That’s not what she meant,” interjected Tucker. “Nope. Nope. You aren’t wriggling out of calling us when a supervillain kidnaps you. She’s trying to talk you out of taking an unnecessary risk.”

“It’s not really a risk for me, though.”

It really wasn’t. Danny might not be invulnerable, but the sheer variety of his powers along with his accelerated healing made that point academic. For most enemies.

“This is the guy who fights Superman, Danny,” said Sam. “For all we know, he’s got some kind of anti-ghost material in the same cabinet he keeps his Kryptonite.”

“I don’t think that’d work very well, actually,” said Danny.

“It was a metaphor. Be serious.”

“I am being serious. This is something I want to do. I want to go there and learn and prepare for the future.”

“You sound like Jazz, you know? You’ve got two more years here. You don’t have to do this. If this is some kind of overcorrection because of the ghosts–”

“It’s not. I told you why I wanted to do this.” He stopped on the sidewalk, pulling on the hem of his shirt. “Is it really that bad? Is it really that terrible that I’m going somewhere and doing something that I’m interested in?”

“No,” said Tucker, awkwardly. “We’re worried about you.”

“And I’ll be fine,” insisted Danny. “Really. I will be. And, you know, like I said, I want to do this kind of thing in the future, so it’s good practice.”

“For what?” asked Sam, crossing her arms. “Scamming supervillains?”

“Well, yeah,” said Danny. “That, too.”

Sam’s arms fell, along with her jaw. “What?”

“Scamming supervillains,” said Danny, starting to walk again. “Like, obviously, I want to either do something with spaceflight or something with a big humanitarian dimension, but scamming supervillains is definitely going to be my backup. Or maybe my hobby. They always have the coolest stuff, and a lot of money, too, usually.”

“Coolest stuff?”

“Yeah,” said Danny, almost skipping, now. “Ice rays, supercomputers, gene therapy, rapidly growing vegetation, limb regeneration, cloning techniques… Lex Luthor came up with a cure for, like, over half a dozen different types of cancer.”

“Because he wanted to kill Superman,” said Sam, taking up an earlier refrain. It had only

“Yeah, but imagine what he could do if we could convince him that Superman got his strength from, like, world hunger or something.”

“I hate it,” said Sam, after a long moment, “but I think you have a point.”

“You two could go into business with me. Some villains go through goons so fast, I bet we could hit them about a dozen times.”

“You’re not planning to do this now, though, are you?” asked Tucker.

“Huh? No. No, not until after graduation. Most I’ll do with any supervillains I see this time around is talk.”

“That’s a lie,” said Sam, immediately. “There’s no way. The first time Man-Bat or Brainiac jumps out of a sewer, you’re going to start swinging.”

“Man-Bat is a geneticist and a chiropterologist, you know,” said Danny. “I’d love to take Brainiac apart, though. Do you have any idea how many planets he’s wiped out? And the stuff he’s got to have–”

“You’re floating,” said Tucker.

“And glowing,” said Sam. “You’re really going to have to work on that.”

“Oops,” said Danny. “Sorry. It’s just, like, everything I’m Obsessed with.” He landed, but still fidgeted, as if shaping something invisible with his hands. Which he might have been. “It’s– I still want to help people.” The plaintive note in his voice made it clear that ‘want’ was, in this case, closer to ‘need.’ “I don’t mind doing the hero thing, and I can’t ignore a cry for help. But I’m not going to just waltz into someone else’s territory and start messing with stuff.”

“I think the territory thing is more of a ghost thing than a hero thing.”

“Eh,” said Danny, “I wouldn’t be so sure.”

Danny waved goodbye to Jazz as she pulled away from the curb, then grinned up at the Lexcorp building. Wow, it was tall. And probably had a lot of really sketchy stuff in the basement.

But! He wouldn’t start poking around with that stuff until he’d been there for at least a week.

(Okay, he’d probably last twenty-four hours at most, but who could blame him? How often did anyone get to poke around the lair of a supervillain who wasn’t their archenemy?)

He walked into the lobby, craning his neck this way and that to take it all in. It was… honestly pretty boring. Not unlike Vlad’s buildings. But he supposed that all corporate buildings were like that to some degree.

“Hello!” he said, walking up to the front desk. “I’m–”

“You’ll have to wait for your parents to come out, I’m afraid, sweetie,” said the secretary. “Company rules.”

Danny blushed. “No, um, I’m here for the internship? The Innovators of Tomorrow Today internship? I’m Danny Fenton. Daniel. Daniel Fenton.”

The secretary blinked at him, then looked down at her computer for a moment. “I’ll need to see some ID.”

“Will my passport be okay?” Danny asked, tugging on his bracelet to get it to lie more comfortably on his wrist. On account of the whole ‘no driver’s license’ problem, he didn’t have anything else, other than his student ID.

“That will be fine,” said the secretary, reaching for it. She looked it over carefully, becoming more and more confused. Danny wondered if she was expecting it to be fake or something. “You’re fifteen.”

“I know I’m short,” said Danny. “But I’m almost sixteen.”

“I see,” she said. “Well. Here’s your visitor badge. We’ll have someone come escort you to the meeting room shortly, and your internship badge will be ready when you start tomorrow. You can leave your luggage here, and it will be scanned and brought up to the dorms.”

Danny bobbed his head happily and took back his passport and the badge. He couldn’t wait to meet the other people he’d be working with. He bet that there’d be a lot of people his age, no matter what Tucker said after he looked it up and saw the website.

A tall man wearing an earpiece and some kind of weapon - a taser, probably - walked up to Danny a few minutes later and scanned his badge. With a few words, he directed Danny to an elevator - one with a keypad code - and brought him up to the tenth story. The elevator opened directly into a… Danny wasn’t entirely sure what to call it. It was square and very large and open, with soft, rounded furniture, a kitchenette, and a catered lunch spread out on several long tables. One wall was all windows, looking down into Metropolis, and another wall was covered in cool, art-deco Lexcorp posters.

There were a lot of people.

A lot of tall people.

A lot of tall, college-aged people. Older college-aged people, even. No teenagers.

Tucker had been right. Great.

A middle-aged woman extracted herself from the loose crowd and came over to Danny, smiling.

“Hello!” she said. “You must be Daniel Fenton. My name is Liberty Rue, I’m the coordinator for the Innovators of Tomorrow Today program.”

“Hi,” said Danny, “it’s nice to meet you.”

Ms. Rue nodded. “Thank you, thank you. We’re just giving everyone a chance to get to know each other before we start the orientation. Please feel free to take any of the refreshments and mingle. All of you are going to be working together closely. Your specialties were electrical engineering and space science?”

“Yes,” said Danny. Although, to be honest, he didn’t really have a specialty. He was more of a generalist.

(Unless you counted ghost science, but there was absolutely no way he was going to bring that up.)

“Excellent. Let me introduce you to the group you’ll be working most closely with–”

What followed was something of a whirlwind. It wasn’t that there was a lot of people, but it was one after the other, and Ms. Rue seemed to be… showing him off, almost? Or showing the other people off? In any case, there was a weird tension to it all.

Was it because he was younger?

He tried not to dwell on it too much, though, because everyone here had so much cool stuff to talk about. Almost all of them had been involved in serious graduate or undergraduate research projects. Strange matter, transient dimensions, reality fields, meta gene analysis, non-quantum teleportation, reproduction of extraterrestrial technologies… Danny was starting to feel a little inadequate. The project he’d sent in was a ‘theoretical’ blueprint for a spy-bot disabler. One that he was proud of, sure; getting a localized EMP effect without a nuke wasn’t easy, but it was doable. And the EMP part was definitely the ‘last resort’ stage of things. It was, after all, much better to hack into Vlad’s bugs and have them send him a hundred hours worth of rickrolls.

In the middle of a conversation about exactly how much room you needed for a decent particle accelerator, Ms. Rue stepped aside and put her hand to her ear. Danny hadn’t noticed the earpiece before, but now he looked at it with curiosity. It was well made, and he could barely hear it, even with his slightly augmented hearing. He wondered if they were designed to counter Superman.

“Mr. Fenton,” said Ms. Rue, “I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to steal you away for a moment.

“Okay,” said Danny. He followed her back to the elevator, stealing a cookie as he went. They weren’t as good as his Mom’s, but he was pretty sure they tasted the way they did because of their ectoplasm content, so…

Ms. Rue punched a code into the elevator and scanned her badge. “Alright, Mr. Fenton. Go ahead. You’ll be taken where you need to go.”

Well. That was maybe a little sketchy, but Danny was nothing if not curious. He got in. “I’ll be back in time for the orientation, right?”

“If you aren’t, I’ll make sure you’re shown around personally,” promised Ms. Rue.

The doors closed and the elevator went up. And up. Then stopped for a moment, during which Danny felt the tingle of a very thorough full-body scan. And up some more. All the way to the top. The doors opened to a sparkling office. Everything in it was white, chrome, or glass, with smooth straight lines and geometrically perfect curves. It blended perfectly with the skyline of Metropolis framed by the full-wall windows.

Between Danny and the windows was an enormous white desk. Behind the desk was Lex Luthor.

“Daniel Fenton,” said Lex Luthor, inclining his head ever so slightly towards Danny. “It is good to meet you.”

“Thank you,” said Danny, trying not to squeak. “I’m happy to be here. I’m looking forward to working here for the next couple of weeks.”

“It is heartening to see that you are more open to cooperation than Vlad.” Luthor turned away, slightly, surveying the city below him.

Danny took that as an invitation to come closer and peer out the huge windows himself. What did Vlad have to do with this?

“I confess, I found myself frustrated by his lack of vision,” continued Luthor, “but youth often holds wisdom that age lacks.” He turned back to favor Danny with a smile. “On seeing your application, I was charmed by your initiative in circumventing your mentor.”

Danny’s train of thought, such as it was, derailed.

“Mentor?” he asked.

“You don’t have to hide it,” said Luthor. “Not when we are both quite aware of the others’ knowledge. Considering my wealth, I am privy to a number of things that ordinary people are not. Including the beneficiaries of my fellow billionaires’ wills.”

Oh. Oh, no. Lex thought– But why– Was he– He couldn’t be right, but– But did this make Danny a… a… nepotism baby?

The sprout of confidence that had been flourishing ever since he got the letter announcing his acceptance to the internship program withered. This was even worse than finding out he and Jazz were test tube babies. (And that was only so bad because his parents had felt the need to go on a long tangent about how they had selected their donor-parents, as large portions of Jack and Maddie's genomes were unstable due to a combination of the family proclivities and a variety of curses.)

Lex Luthor stood. “Doubtless, you’re interested in the projects I outlined to Vlad when I proposed our cooperation. The device blueprint you submitted for the internship referenced them quite cleverly. I would like to show you how far they’ve progressed since I spoke to Vlad, and then we can discuss your contribution to their success.”

“I don’t have access to any of Vlad’s resources, Mr. Luthor,” said Danny, cautiously. “I couldn’t provide any, er, funding to these projects.”

“I am aware of that. But I think your value goes above and beyond the financial, Daniel.” He put a hand on Danny’s shoulder. “After all, the reason I approached Vlad was his science background. And in a few years… Well. Vlad Masters is not a young man.”

Was that a murder threat? Danny thought it was a murder threat. Oh, boy, did he have something else coming for him if he thought he could just kill Vlad like that.

Luthor directed Danny back towards the elevator, and this time they went down. Far down. Into those basements Danny had been thinking about before.

They stepped out into a vestibule, and a pair of much more openly armed security guards saluted Lex before running through a series of security measures. Danny took note specifically of the ones intended to detect mind control and shapeshifting.

From there, they passed through a series of locked doors and into a maze of gleaming white hallways. The color made Danny’s skin itch. Too much like the GIW for his taste.

Luthor opened a side door, and showed Danny into an empty lab. Empty in terms of people, that is. In terms of stuff… blueprints, prototypes, models, drawings, coffee cups… not so much.

“I had the team take the day off,” said Luthor. “I thought you’d appreciate the chance to look at things without any distractions.”

Danny surveyed the plans with interest. There were similarities between what was being built and the mini-EMP portion of his bug-zapper. There were also echoes of shield technology… some kind of energy projector or amplifier?

“What is it supposed to emit?” asked Danny, unable to hold back his curiosity. He touched, ever so gently, a hollow place he was sure the energy source was supposed to sit.

Lex smiled. “I’m glad you asked,” he said. “Follow me.”

They went back out into the hallway, but only briefly. The next room had even more security, but Luthor bypassed it all with businesslike efficiency and they entered a plain, all-white and bare room.

One wall of this room was taken up by a backlit display cabinet made of square cubbies. Within each cubby was a tiny chip of crystal, like a sample display of particularly expensive rock candy. Green, of many shades, was the best-represented color, but there was also red and blue. That made sense, because each crystal was made of delicious ectoplasm-infused quartz. Danny swallowed. They were making his mouth water, but the amount of death energy they would have had to be around…

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” asked Luthor. “Kryptonite. The key to repelling our would-be alien overlord.”

Yeah. Remnants of a planet that imploded while still inhabited by billions. That would do it.

“I intend to create a Kryptonite field over the whole of Metropolis, one that should, at the least, disable Superman to the point where we can drive him out. I will sell them to the great cities of America, and then, the world. One day, the whole Earth will be protected, and Superman must either leave, or die. But for now, it is still a dream. That is why I need you, Daniel.”

Danny didn’t think Luthor’s weapon would work. Not now. There was too much missing. Too much being missed by scientists and engineers expecting the Kryptonite to behave in a normal, logical way. He was certain, however, that he could make something that functioned exactly as described. He could even do it quickly, building off ghost and human shield technologies. He could see the pieces of it fit together, like a puzzle.

Making it, just to prove that he, Danny Fenton, could, was tempting.

So tempting.

But he had this little thing called morals, and driving Superman off Earth was definitely in the category of bad.

“Well, I don’t know if I can fix problems all your scientists can’t, but I can sure try to help.” He winced a little at the phrasing. Why did he have to use the word help?

“That’s all I ask,” said Luthor. “But that’s far from our only project. Shall we?”

“Sure,” said Danny, not at all faking his smile. Even though he’d have to sabotage this stuff, it was really cool to see it!

Later that night in his dorm room - which was, incidentally, a lot more spacious than he’d expected - Danny rotated the bracelet on his wrist and pressed a button on its side. Inside the thick band was a miniaturized and completely functional version of the spy-bot zapper he’d submitted as part of his internship application. He listened to it click as it went through the different modes available to it. It tweedled at him when it finished.

Only then did he pull out his phone and power it on. He clicked into his contacts and hit the button for his first favorite.

“Hey,” he said, when the call connected, “Jazz, so… Sam and Tucker might have been just a little bit right about my internship…”

May do more at a later time, but for now, this is it. I am incredibly forgetful, so I don't do taglists. Please consider subscribing to the AO3 version of this instead.

#dpxdc #dannymay #dannymay 2023 #dannymay 2023 day 7: weapon

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jackson-imbecille · 2 years ago

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Switched up styles for this one. I’m really happy with how it turned out.

Dannymay Day 7: Weapon

#mind control #danny phantom #my art #fanart #danny fenton #dannymay 2023 #day 7: weapon #dannymay2023

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underforeversgrace · 2 years ago

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Instinct

DannyMay2023 Day 7: Weapon

Words: 3035

Complete

AO3

Excerpt: He really hated it when his parents surprised him with the ghost version of weapons of mass destruction, honestly. It was getting old. When they’d unveiled the weapon and showed it to him and Jazz with more enthusiasm than a toddler sticking something new in its mouth, Danny had wanted to blow the damn thing up the instant they finished explaining what it did.

~~~~~~~

Don’t get Danny wrong, he was more than thrilled that his parents current weapon had entirely failed, as he usually was. This time, even more so, once his parents had explained to him what the weapon did, deep in the woods on what he had thought was supposed to be a normal (er, Fenton normal?) camping trip.

He really hated it when his parents surprised him with the ghost version of weapons of mass destruction, honestly. It was getting old.

When they’d unveiled the weapon and showed it to him and Jazz with more enthusiasm than a toddler sticking something new in its mouth, Danny had wanted to blow the damn thing up the instant they finished explaining what it did. Frankly, he probably would’ve if they hadn’t immediately turned it on while his brain was still processing exactly how bad a weapon that vaporized all ectoplasm within twenty miles was - in general and for him specifically.

He decided it was a small miracle when he felt nothing more than an irritating tug on his core. There had been no hiding the relief on either kids’ faces when Danny didn’t explode/implode/horrifically die (again).

An hour later, though, Danny realized his parents’ invention had somehow managed to be almost worse (he was slightly biased, he still preferred this to perma-death) than it’s initial function had been.

“Danny!” Jazz shrieked as he jumped to the side, tucking and rolling back under the barrier of the ghost shield, firing one last shot from the ecto gun in his hands before he was in the protective green dome. The shot - of course - landed true, the ghost bear roaring in pain as it slammed its paws onto the shield, getting thrown away the second it did so as the shield shocked it.

He didn’t even bother pretending to be out of breath as he ran back to the GAV, he had too much else to focus on.

“This one’s out, too,” he said, tossing the now drained gun into the growing pile of other weapons that had met the same fate.

“Shit,” Mom swore, not even bothering to hide her language from her kids as she joined them in the back of the GAV. “Mine’s out, too.” She said, all but throwing the weapon in frustration.

Jack - who had been quickly relieved from and forbidden to touch any of the weapons when they realized they couldn’t risk missing shots - looked up in panic. “We’re out of weapons.” He said.

“How can you be out of weapons?!” Jazz shouted.

“They run off ectoplasm!” Dad said, wiping sweat from his brow, the summer heat suffocating in the metal van. “We didn’t want to risk bringing too many and frying them!”

Jazz looked to Danny in a panic. Oh, right. She expected him to have a plan by now, he was sure.

Danny, however, had been entirely too busy to think of anything beyond aiming, ducking, and trying not to be too ghostly. He ran a hand across his face, desperately trying to think of something, anything.

They’d been under an onslaught of animal ghosts for over an hour at this point. The invention, instead of vaporizing ghosts (which still made Danny’s skin crawl at the sheer idea), apparently summoned them instead, the tug Danny had felt on his core. And while he’d known there were a lot of animal ghosts in and around Amity Park, he had not realized it was this many. It had been Jazz’s idea to turn off the GAV’s weapons so it could focus on the ghost shield, a suggestion Danny was immensely grateful for. The weapons and the shield were a huge power drain, the shield wouldn’t have lasted five minutes if the guns had been blasting too.

“How’s your hand to hand?” Mom asked, thrusting a staff at him.

“Uh, acceptable?” Danny answered.

Mom and dad had both tried to question his abilities when they’d given him a gun and discovered he knew what he was doing when he’d instinctively triggered the two buttons to charge it up, even though they’d never explained to him how this particular model worked. His dead on aim that rivaled his mother’s hadn’t done anything to assuage the questions, even when Jazz’s proved almost as good.

The longer he’d fought - jumping through and from the shield with practiced ease, since the weapons’ ectoblasts couldn’t clear the shield any more than the ghosts could - the less they’d questioned, focusing on the fight. He knew he’d have an avalanche of questions waiting for him when he got home, when they weren’t fighting for their lives.

Jack and Jazz grabbed close combat weapons as well and the four filed out, the sounds of roars and growls and barks filling the air.

Danny, throughout this whole ordeal, had been confident he could keep his secret intact by the end of this, even as the humans beside him began to flag from exhaustion.

Exhaustion he could see in the way his father’s chest heaved for air, the way his mother had begun to slow, the way Jazz held her shoulder, no doubt aching from the repeated recoil of the weapons. Only Danny had the ghostly endurance to continue fighting without starting to fall behind.

When the shield flickered out of existence for a moment before returning, though, Danny’s slow heart skipped a beat.

“Danny!” Jazz yelled again as a ghost panther leapt onto her, knocking her to the ground as she struggled to keep the bar of the staff in the creature’s jaws.

“Jazz!” Danny shouted back, too far away to strike the beast with the weapon in his hand, his parents dealing with another animal who had managed to enter their safe zone when the shield had failed.

Some part of Danny knew he should think his next actions through, but instinct and his protective drive triggered and he no longer had the energy to care about his secret as green saliva dripped from the ghost’s jowls onto his sister’s face.

The staff clattered to the ground as he dropped it, throwing an ectoblast directly into the beast pinning Jazz down, sending it crashing a fair distance away, where it whined and struggled to get up before going still.

“Danny?” He heard his mother ask softly, a witness to the display he had just put on as they felled their target too.

It was then he heard the soft sound of the GAV entirely powering down, entirely out of energy after powering the shield for so long. Then the horde was running towards them.

“No!” He cried, giving into the cold in his chest as he thrust his hands to either side, his own green shield bursting into existence around them.

“Danny?” It was his dad this time who asked, with the same quiet horror as Mom prior, both frozen in place.

He knew his eyes were glowing green when he looked up at them, as they always did when he used his powers as Fenton.

“Danny.” Jazz said softly, the only one with concern in her voice, as she put herself firmly between him and their parents.

He had never been so sick of hearing his own name.

He didn’t answer, glancing at the GAV, just barely still within his much smaller shield. He couldn’t keep the shield up forever and he couldn’t fight while maintaining it, either.

“I’m sorry,” he said, closing his eyes and tugging again on his core. His mother’s scream when he formed a duplicate hurt his soul more than his ears. The (human) duplicate took over the shield, grimacing as he did so, nodding to Danny. They didn’t have to speak, the duplicate was intrinsically a part of him, knew his every thought and desire as soon as he had it. “I’m gonna get the shield back up.”

Danny hurried to the GAV, throwing open the power source and resisting the urge to flinch as he felt the way it sucked in the air around it even as he reached for it.

“Danny, no!” Jazz said, catching up to him and grabbing his wrist, jerking it away before he could touch the Ecto-Converter.

Danny was really, really sick of hearing his name. “Do you have another idea?” Danny snapped. “I need the shield up. I can’t keep it up and fight at the same time, not yet!”

“And how are you supposed to fight if you feed yourself to the Ecto-Converter?” Jazz shouted back, clutching his wrist harder in her hand, though worry was all he saw in her eyes.

Danny glanced behind him, where his parents kept rotating their heads between him and his duplicate, though mercifully they hadn’t attacked.

“I have energy and ectoplasm to spare, Jazz.” Danny said, trying to soften his voice. “It’s concentration I don’t have, not yet, you know that.”

“But, Danny…” she trailed off, knowing he was making sense, though she was probably thinking the same thing he was.

I know it’s working when I hear the screams. Was how Jack had described the Converter. Danny had touched it once, for just a second and had been shocked with pain.

“Be careful.” She yielded, releasing his arm.

“Aren’t I always?” He quipped, almost relieved at the glare Jazz sent back at him, because no he absolutely was not.

He hesitated a moment. His secret was only half shattered right now. He could still pass this off as ecto-contamination but as he felt his duplicate shudder when several ghosts launched into the shield at once, he knew his entire secret was going to be exposed. His powers as Fenton weren’t as strong as Phantom. And he would need to be as strong as possible to fend off all of these ghosts. “I love you.” He added, slamming his hand against the Converter.

He screamed as electric agony flooded his senses, quickly brought to his knees though he stubbornly managed to keep his hand against the Converter as flashbacks of his death tried to edge their way into his memory.

“Danny!” Mom called, apparently broken from her trance, running to him and dropping to her knees beside him, reaching for him.

“Don’t!” Jazz snapped, grabbing her hands as she had Danny’s, keeping their mother from electrocuting herself.

Danny heard them and saw them through his duplicate’s eyes, his true body's senses too overwhelmed.

Almost immediately, the GAV powered back up, the shield erupting back to life. As soon as it had, he faded the duplicate, reabsorbing it back into himself. He couldn’t say how long he stayed like that, charging the GAV like a battery. He didn’t stop until he felt the power source at max capacity, unable to take anymore from him.

He jerked his hand away from the vehicle, blasted back a few feet as he did so. His head felt like static as he heard various voices calling his name again, hands touching his shoulders and slightly shaking him. He groaned, forcing himself into a sitting position. Ow.

“Danny? Son? Are you okay?” His father asked, putting a hand behind his back to help him sit.

“‘m fine…” he muttered even as his muscles spasmed from the electrical shock. By the Ancients, he hated getting hit by electricity.

“Can you sit up on your own?” Mom asked and he nodded, only to grab his head as nausea and lightheadedness shot through him.

“That’s a no.” Jazz said dryly.

He forced his eyes open, shielding them when the bright light burned them. Okay. Maybe he had underestimated how bad this would hurt.

Maddie sucked in a deep breath and stilled as he opened his eyes and the past several minutes crashed back into him through the static, as he felt ectoplasm burn in his eyes.

“Uh. Ta-da?” He said, giving weak jazz hands as he did so.

If his parents had been about to say something, they were distracted when a large animal slammed against the shield, the sound nearly deafening as it reverberated in the space. Danny’s eyes snapped back to the problem and he forced himself to his feet. He could deal with his parents when they weren’t all under assault and he didn’t want to have to charge the GAV again if they tried to wait the ghosts out and it died again. Dad grabbed at his shoulder and Danny instinctively winced. He pushed through his father’s hands, intangibly escaping his grasp. Jack stared at his hands in amazement and horror.

He did his best to ignore his parents as he marched forward, slipping pass the shield with ease as Jack and Maddie screamed for him to come back, it was too dangerous.

Danny crouched as the animals turned to him and growled.

He couldn’t help it, he grinned as pre-fight adrenaline surged through him, as he let human worry fade into nothing. He triggered the transformation, feeling the familiar sensation of cold spreading through his entire body as blood turned to ectoplasm, the sudden lack of gravity’s demand freeing him.

“I’ve got this,” he called, his voice echoing in the trees, his parents’ protests silencing.

~~~~~~

Jack hadn’t known how to react when his very much human son had shot an ectoblast from his hands. When he erected a shield, when his eyes glowed green, when there were suddenly two of him. He’d simply… frozen.

It had been his son’s very human screams that had spurred him and his wife into action, running for him as he seemed to be electrocuted by the Ecto-Converter. He’d been about to touch him when Jazz had stopped Maddie, shooting a look at Jack to stop, too.

He didn’t understand why his son was hurting, the Converter was designed to hurt ghosts, not humans! He’d still been adamantly refusing to acknowledge the implication of what he’d just seen until the GAV roared back to life so quickly, the large shield returning and the second Danny disappearing.

“No.” Maddie had whispered, her mind refusing to think about it, too. Refusing to realize their son was dead.

Still, Jack couldn’t stand to see his son so low when he got thrown back several feet from the vehicle, twitching and slightly smoking. Jack was still a father and that was still his child in pain.

Now, though, everything Jack had ever known was spinning around him, suddenly nothing a fact anymore.

Danny phasing through his hand, so very much a ghost.

Danny passing through a ghost shield, so very much a human.

Phantom suddenly appearing, so very much not his son.

Or so he’d thought until today, as he watched Phantom easily lay waste to ghosts that had been ruthlessly trying to get to his family the past hour, dodging attacks just to follow up with a blast of his own before catching them with a Thermos.

“He’s still Danny.” Jazz said gently after several minutes of silence, the two adults transfixed by the ghost child - their ghost child - in front of them. “He always has been.”

“He…” Maddie started, gulping. “How is he Phantom? Phantom’s been around for two years.”

How has our son been dead for two years and we didn’t know? Was the unspoken implication of her words.

Jazz just shook her head. “It’s his story to tell. If he chooses to. But… he isn’t fully dead, at least.”

Jack wanted to ask why he hadn’t told them before, why he hadn’t trusted them enough to tell them they were shooting their own son.

“He’s afraid of us, isn’t he?” Maddie asked, though it wasn’t really a question, the same conclusion Jack reached.

Jazz just nodded sadly, though the confirmation was unnecessary.

Jack was remembering every time he’d essentially ranted about how much he wanted to torture his own son to death. Maddie turned to him and cried, burying her face into his chest and he wrapped her arms around her.

“He still loves you.” Jazz added, placing a comforting hand on her father’s shoulder.

“How can he?” Jack asked, the first thing he’d really said.

“How can he because he’s a ghost and they aren't capable of that?” Jazz said, a sudden edge to her voice.

Jack vehemently shook his head. “No. Because of what we’ve done to him. God, how many times have we hurt him, made him bleed?”

“Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answer to.” She answered cryptically. Maddie just sobbed harder.

Several minutes passed in silence, the only sounds their breathing, the trees rustling, and their son beating ghosts down like a professional. Because he was, wasn’t he? A professional.

Finally, Danny caught the last ghost, closing the cap on the smoking Thermos, but he didn’t approach, just looked at them cautiously, as though scared to come closer to them, scared of what they’d do.

Jack stood, releasing his hold on his wife and pressed the button to disable the shield.

Danny took it for the olive branch it was - a sign they were not afraid of him - and approached cautiously, clutching the Thermos to his chest like a lifeline. He stopped a few paces back and Jack’s heart twinged as he realized the only reason Danny was willing to get this close was the same reason he’d finally showed them what - who - he was. It was because he knew they were weaponless.

“Danno.” Jack said, opening his arms but choosing not to step closer, afraid of scaring his son.

“Dad?” Danny asked, his voice shaking even through the echo.

“Yeah, son?”

Relief flooded his son’s face at the term and he launched himself forward into his dad’s arms, blubbering out apologies and mumbled explanations.

“It’s okay, Danny. It’s okay,” Jack mumbled, running his hand through Danny’s white hair despite the chill that pierced his suit.

“Everything’s okay, Danny. We’re sorry,” Maddie added, giving Danny’s shoulder a comforting squeeze before tucking herself into the hug as well.

“Told him so,” Jack heard Jazz mutter before she inserted herself too.

Jack had no idea what was going on, what had happened, how this was possible, how this was about to change his entire life. But what he did know, a truth that had not left him, was that he loved his son - human or not.

#danny phantom #grace writes #dannymay2023 #Dannymay #Day 7 #Weapon #danny fenton #jack fenton #maddie fenton #jazz fenton

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