#does it count as blood?? since its ectoplasm??

[mossydoodles]

experimental catified dp piece!

[starry-bi-sky]

Becoming Phantom - Clone^2 (and by extension, clone danny)

I said I would make it, and so i did! Here's a little ficlet of how danny became Phantom - the human ghost-fighting vigilante in the clone^2 and clone Danny au. Since this does include themes of dissection/vivisection, i'll put in a minor trigger warning list down below.

TW: experimentation - implied torture and vivisection/dissection of ghosts TW: Non-graphic mentions of injuries and blood

TLDR: Danny's parents have been catching ghosts ever since the portal was opened after Danny's lab accident. Danny knows this because he can hear them screaming from the basement. After finally telling his friends about it, he resolves to free the ghosts - and he does. He ends up having a conversation with one of the ghosts, and comes to the decision that he will catch ghosts before his parents do to prevent this kind of harm from happening again.

word count check: 4.9k

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

His parents caught another ghost.

Danny can tell because he can hear their screaming from the kitchen, even with the doors closed. It's horrific - the voice is doubled over itself like something out of one of Sam's demonic horror movies, and Danny's heart races like he's run a mile at the sound.

It warps and twists, and almost sounds like its saying 'please.'

He rubs his chest uncomfortably, and pushes his breakfast away from him. His appetite lost and his stomach churning with a deep sense of dread.

Across the table, Jazz notices, and her eyes narrow dangerously at his hand gripping his shirt - right over his heart. He just got out of the hospital last month, and he knows what she's thinking - they don't want to have to send him back.

"I'm fine." He blurts out immediately, dropping his hand. He's not fine, but it's because he feels ill as the lights above flicker and another terrified shriek echoes through the floorboards. He swallows, ill. "I- it's just-" his eyes flick to the door to the lab. "the lab."

Jazz's lips press into thin line, and she pushes her chair back and stands up. "I hate that they're doing this," she says, stomping towards the lab. "It's inhumane, Danny. They're people too, even if they don't look like us!"

Before the portal, Danny might've just shrugged his shoulders and not said anything. He never really cared about his parents' ghost hunting stuff, but figured that since they knew more about it, their rants about them being unfeeling were correct.

Now, though? When he's been woken up in the middle of the night by the house rattling and his ears ringing with the pained cries of one of the ghosts' in the basement? His heart beating so fast he thinks he's been transported back to the lab a month ago, lying on the floor after being electrocuted by the portal?

He's really not so sure anymore. And he thinks he's starting to agree with Jazz. This isn't right. He doesn't think so, at least.

An unsure 'hm' comes out of his throat, eyes tracking Jazz as she swings the heavy metal door open and breathes in deep. "HEY!" She yells, her voice miraculously sounding out over the ghost screaming. The screams stop. "MOM! DAD! CUT THAT OUT, YOU'RE SCARING DANNY!"

There's no sound, and Danny sighs a breath of relief. Not that it does much to slow his anxious heart, the shrieks are burned into his ears, and he's already thinking about leaving now rather than later. He can meet Tucker at his house.

His parents - his mom, actually - appears at the entrance to the lab, her hands drip bright, ectoplasm green, and there's splatters of it across the front of her suit and goggles like blood. Danny feels white in the face, and Jazz looks enraged.

Mom pulls off her goggles, frowning apologetically. "I'm sorry, sweetheart. Your father and I just got carried away, we caught this one just this morning by the park." She says, as if that makes it any better. Danny's eyes are glued to the ectoplasm dripping onto the floor. "We'll wait until you get to school."

Danny wishes they wouldn't do this at all. But he just nods mutely, unable to make his lead-heavy tongue do anything. Jazz speaks for him, and whirls on mom like a tornado about to break loose. "At school? This shouldn't be happening at all - it's wrong, mom!"

Jazz has been the only one vocal about this whole thing ever since mom and dad came home with a ghost trapped in one of their nets - their thermos wasn't working - while Danny was on sick leave after he got out of the hospital. Danny still remembers the utter shock he was in after mom and dad came in dragging it behind them.

The ghost looked like a grown woman, but it - she - had the brightest blue eyes he'd ever seen, and ice-like skin. She'd been thrashing in the net, saying something in a hissy, whispering language that made static build behind his eyes. It had surprised him that he could somewhat make out what she was saying.

It had been fascinating. Up until the screaming started.

He watches Mom make a face that looks like endeared annoyance, and she turns to Jazz with a light sigh. "You're a kind girl, Jazz, but ghosts aren't human, sweetheart. We've told you this." And they have, multiple times. It's become a reoccurring argument.

"Does it matter?!" Jazz exclaims, her cheeks turning an inflamed red with indignancy. She looks appalled. "They're still in pain! You're hurting them!"

Danny silently nods, but they don't see. Jazz is glaring at mom with the burning anger of the sun and Mom just looks exasperated. "Your father and I know this already, Jazmine." Mom says, her arms crossing across her chest.

Jazz's mouth drops open.

Danny's almost does the same. The bone-chilling blood rush leaves him shivering, and his vision spots out in black, fuzzy dots for a few seconds. Maybe, he thinks, it's his heart stopping again with the cold horror.

They know this?

They know this?

And they're still doing it?

He thought he knew his parents - now he's second-guessing himself.

Jazz is just as much at a loss for words as Danny is. And then her expression shutters closed with a fury-kind of icy. "Danny," she says, still staring down their mom. "Go get your stuff, I'm driving you to school."

Normally, he hates how.. parent-y Jazz gets. She acts like a second mom, and like a helicopter one to boot. It drives him nuts on the worst of days. Right now though, he's already rising to his feet before he's even opening his mouth.

"Okay." He croaks, and beelines it up the stairs for his backpack. He doesn't look at mom when he comes back down, he doesn't think he can. He can see her still-dripping hands in the corner of his eye though.

------

"Man, you look like shit." Tucker says the moment Danny sits down in their homeroom class, he's frowning. Danny doesn't say anything to him, he just grunts and drops his head into his arms.

Sam, sitting behind Danny, leans across the aisle and smacks Tucker in the arm. He yelps in pain, and rubs the spot she hit with a glare. "He's right though," Sam says, leaning over his shoulder. "You looked like you were gonna yak over the front row when you walked in."

"It's good that you didn't," Tucker grumbles, "Dash would've killed you."

Danny, despite the shit morning, manages a smile and tilts his head so that his cheek is resting on his arm instead. "Mr. Lancer wouldn't've let him." Sam sniffs, and her fingers are in his hair already - it's been growing out for a while now. He meant to cut it but then the lab accident happened, and he was in the hospital, and then on sick leave, and -- long story short, he was growing it out.

Besides, Sam pulling it back for him was relaxing, and he feels the tension bleeding out of his shoulders already. His anxious heart slowing. "Yeah, he's been weirdly protective since the accident." He says. It was kinda nice, Dash was being forced to back off - finally, more than he was before.

"Probably because if you have a heart attack in class from Dash bullying you, he'll be liable." Tucker snorts, relaxing back into his chair. Up front, the three of them see Dash shoot them a glare from over his shoulder. He probably heard them -- and Tucker doesn't help by giving him an innocent, too-wide grin.

There's a tug, and Danny lifts his head slightly as Sam ties his hair back with whatever hairband she procured out of nowhere. And she says she's not a witch, honestly.

His smile falters, however, when Sam leans back around his shoulder with a frown still evident on her face. "Seriously though, what's up? You were really pale -- paler than normal, that is."

Danny doesn't really wanna tell them - he's kept the whole 'my parents are torturing ghosts' thing to himself ever since he first woke up to the house shaking. It wasn't any secret though that there were ghosts now actually 'infesting' Amity Park though, they'd been popping up ever since the portal turned on.

But Jazz says talking about things helps alleviate stress of what's burdening you, and Danny doesn't usually listen to her. She's his annoying older sister, of course he doesn't. But... this... wasn't really something he wanted to keep secret forever, either.

His teeth sink into his bottom lip, and he averts his eyes. It's like tearing off a band-aid, Danny, he thinks, just... blurt it out. "My parents are torturing ghosts in the basement." He says, only to immediately wince as both Sam and Tucker drop their jaws.

"What!?" They both yell in unison, and Danny ducks his head down as everyone else sitting around them turn their heads.

"Not so loud!" He hisses, peeking through his arms and glaring at the both of them. They both grimace, embarrassment dusting red across Sam's face and Tucker's darkening slightly, and duck their heads down towards him.

"Sorry, what!?" Tucker whispers back at him, his face all scrunched up in disbelief. Sam's redness has faded into pale horror and -- and yeah, yeah, Danny gets it. He feels that way too.

"They keep catching the ghosts and dissecting them." He whispers, and god, he feels sick just saying it. Tucker's face falls slack, and he looks about as ill as Danny feels. "I don't- I don't know what to do about it, I keep waking up to them screaming, and Jazz keeps getting into fights about it with them."

"Oh my god." Sam mutters, her hands pressing together and covering her mouth. Danny nods mutely, chewing on his lip.

"They know its hurting them." He adds, and its still dizzyingly terrifying to think about. He thought he knew his parents. He thought he knew them. He guesses that saying of people being multi-faceted was true. "They don't care."

Sam and Tucker both look green. Or as close to green as they can get. "That's- that's inhumane." Sam breathes, and Danny huffs sardonically - funny, that's what Jazz said this morning. That's what she keeps saying. "And there's really nothing you can do?"

"Not unless I go into the lab myself and release them," he mutters, hiding half his face in his arms. "And I haven't been back in there since I got electrocuted." His parents wouldn't allow it, and it's not like he he was chomping at the bits to go back inside anyways.

...Hm.

"I'm sorry, Danny." Tucker says, his voice low and horrified, "that's- that's awful."

Yeah. He knows.

--------

This is a bad idea. This is a bad idea. This is a bad idea.

Where was Danny you ask? Sneaking down into the lab at sometime past midnight, long after his parents have gone to bed. It's been a week since he said, sarcastically, that the only thing he could do was release the ghosts in the lab, and it hasn't left his head.

Even though he was utterly terrified as he took slow, sneaky steps down the stairs. The thought had been keeping him up at night. He could do it. He could go down into the lab and let them go. He could do something.

It's not like his parents had put a lock on the door. He hadn't even thought about it - if he thought about it, he'd back out. So when he heard his parents go to sleep that night, he waited an hour before sneaking out.

Every sound felt so loud, and his heart had raced in his ears as he creaked open the door to the lab, and closed it behind him for good measure. And his hands were shaking as he reached the bottom of the steps and stepped into the lab for the first time in two months.

And good god, did he almost regret it. There were ghosts in cages of all kinds, and ectoplasm seeping down onto the floor of their cages. They were clutching their chests, of which bled sluggishly through stitched up y-scars. They were moaning, and crying, curled up in the back like frightened animals. And there was a metal table in the center of a room that was stained green, green, green.

"Oh my god." He breathes, horror driving itself up into his throat with the churning of his gut. That's another thing he almost regrets - if only because half a dozen ghosts all snap their heads towards him, and it becomes pandemonium in an instant.

Rattling, yelling, crying, they're all screaming at him. Either to tell him to go away, to give them mercy, or to spew threats at him. It's in that same, hissy language that he's heard before. Whispery, echoing, and overlapping like multiple languages being played backwards and forwards at the same time. It gives him an immediate headache as his mind tries to comprehend and translate it.

Go away. Don't hurt us. Go away. I'll tear you apart. Leave. Leave. LEAVE.

It's all so much. Danny wants to throw himself up the stairs and back up to his room in a prey-driven instinct to flee, flee, flee. He doesn't. He covers his ears and digs his nails into his hair.

He yells. "I'M NOT LEAVING. BE QUIET!" and somehow, it silences everyone in an instant. He looks up, and everyone is staring at him, their multi-colored eyes burning into him.

Tentatively, he lowers his hands, they're shaking. He's still so scared. But courage isn't a lack of fear, its doing something despite it. He blinks back the terrified sting in his eyes, and twiddles with his hands. "I'm- I'm not here to hurt you." He stammers, "I promise. I'm not my parents."

It's silent for a long moment, and then there's an animalistic-like hiss from his left. He turns his head, and there's a ghost of a man curled up in a cage, staring him down with a thunderous look on his face. "Liar." He hisses, his voice warping in that hissy language. There are goat-like horns protruding from his head, and his eyes are yellow and slitted. He's dripping ectoplasm from his chest.

Danny swallows the bile in his throat.

And frowns. "I'm not lying." He says, and the ghost doesn't get hostile, much to his surprise. But there's a ripple of murmurs that spreads through the room like a wave at a ballgame. The ghost that spoke stares at him, then squints.

"You understand us, child?"

And - okay, Danny doesn't like the 'child' comment. He's fourteen for goodness sake, and he bristles silently like it's an insult, but he's no there to argue, he's here to help. So he swallows his pride and starts to walk towards the closed portal.

His legs are shaking, he's afraid they're gonna give out beneath him. The portal scares him, more than it did when he first saw it. But maybe that's because when he first saw it, he hadn't almost died from it.

His heart is pounding in his ears. Is it going to give out again, will he have to go to the hospital again? Despite his insistence that he's fine, Danny's heart hasn't beat right ever since the accident. He's checked. He spent an hour every night with his fingers pressed against the pulse point at his throat, at his wrist, terrified of the slow-beating he could feel thrumming against the skin.

Hearts aren't supposed to beat that slow - that much he knows. He's afraid he's going to drop dead if it drops any lower.

"Of course I do." He swallows, glancing back at the ghost. Everyone's eyes are on him, they burn into him, curious, wary, afraid. He's in front of the portal, in front of the keypad to open it. Shit, did dad put in a password? "Am I- am I not supposed to?"

He pauses to look at the ghost, and the man has moved to stare at him from a new angle in his cage - god he's gonna need to find the key. Mom and dad probably have it in their desk, right?

The ghost is silent. "...No. You're not." He says, and his head tilts to the side as Danny mentally translates in his head. he looks at Danny like he's trying to inspect him, like he's trying to look into him like his parents have looked into the ghost. "What is your name, child?"

"I'm not a child." He bites out, and immediately winces. Shit- he just said not to antagonize them. But the ghost doesn't look offended. In fact, he just grins a sharp, toothy grin like a shark, and raspy giggles and titters echo through the room.

...That's... probably a good sign. "Um," he continues, and turns his back to the keypad. Dad's birthday? He punches into the keys. "I'm- uh, Danny. Danny Fentom- Fanton- Fenton. My parents are- uh, the ones who took you guys." The keypad buzzes and the bar spots red. Wrong password. Dammit.

"Phantom." The ghost says, and the name crawls like a spider across the walls, sneaking up his spine and ringing in the air like the leftover taste of rain and thunder. the rest of the ghosts whisper it amongst themselves.

Danny shivers, it feels like a weight in his chest. It's Fenton, he thinks, but doesn't correct. He doesn't want to push his luck with the being that could tear him apart. "Uh, sure."

He punches in mom's birthday. Wrong. He puts in Jazz's. Wrong. "How come we haven't seen you down here, Phantom?" The ghost asks, and Danny shrugs helplessly. "You are the Danny that the unknown girl yells about?"

He tries his own birthday. Wrong. Fuck. What's the password? The tremor in his limbs worsens with his anxiety, and he tries to keep his breathing steady. What if he can't get this open? What if he can't get them out? He nearly forgets to answer the ghost, and licks his dry lips. "Um- yeah, that's me. The Danny guy." He says, turning to the cages again. "And uh, I don't come down here because my parents don't allow it."

The ghost, uh, goat-man? Tilts his head, there are whispers throughout the room that pick up. And Danny feels like the kid late to an all school assembly and now has to walk past the whole school to find a seat.

Goat-man smiles again, or bares his teeth? "You are the reason why the human doctors haven't cut into us more than they already have." And- that's- that's good? He thinks?

"That's- good, right? You- you don't want to be cut open, so it's good that I, uh, indirectly stopped it a few times?"

A round of titters goes through the room again. The man's grin widens inhumanly so, and Danny's heart spikes with fear. "Yes, it's a good thing, Phantom child." He says, "Why is it that your parents do not let you come down here?"

Danny stares, and swallows again, dry. The back of his neck tingles, and he tastes electricity on his tongue. "I had an accident down here, um, nearly two months ago." His eyes flick to the cable cord where the portal was plugged in, and his heart flutters with the images of green that got burned behind his eyes. He looks away. "The portal, it, ah, electrocuted me. I was in the hospital because it nearly killed me."

"It did kill you." The ghost says immediately, and terror fills up in Danny like water flooding a room. What? What? What? He was alive. His heart was beating, he was alive. "But only for a moment. You've been touched by death, Phantom."

That was so fucking ominous. And terrifying. And terrifyingly ominous. And also really horrifying. Danny does a swift pirouette and turns back to the keypad. Time to figure out the passcode and not think about that, ever again, actually.

"Wow." He rasps, his mind numb as he punches in a random code of numbers and gets a red screen. "How reassuring. Tell death I want a refund." He gets laughter again, and his shoulders scrunch up to his ears.

"It is the reason you can understand us, then." The ghost says behind him. "We are not speaking your language child - rather, you are speaking ours."

Again. Fucking ominous. Danny furrows his brows and stares hard at the keypad - if he was dad, and he wanted to put a password lock on his lifetime achievement in something that was easy to remember and equally important, what would it be?

Oh. Right.

He bites back a groan - how obvious. Danny's an idiot. Or maybe just so scared witless that his brain isn't working right. "Fudge." He grumbles, and punches it into the keypad. It dings green.

Of - fucking - course. Danny rolls his eyes.

He hears a hiss, and Danny rapidly scuttles back as the massive blast doors twisted open like something out of a scifi movie - he'd be geeking out if he wasn't aware of his own rapid heartbeat. Like a gun charging up, an unearthly green glow appears at the back of the tunnel an d then rapidly moves towards him, growing larger and larger.

Danny flinches, half-convinced its going to hit him. He was going to be vaporized, and he brings up his arms to protect himself. But nothing happens, and he peeks open an eye that he closed when the ghost from before murmurs for him to open them.

The portal is - is, well. Indescribable. It fills the dark room with its glow, swirling like a those weird, shimmering liquid dyes put into martini glasses in those aesthetic gifs on the internet. And the light it casts on the walls shimmers and moves like the aurora borealis.

Danny is speechless. It's... oddly beautiful. And terrifying. There's a whole new world in that dimension - if he steps through he won't be on earth anymore.

And... his parents wanted to eradicate the people on the other side of it?

He whirls on foot, his back to the portal - a thing that fills him with dread. his shaking - its worse. Danny almost thinks his feet will give out. "Do - do any of you know where mom and dad keep the keys to the cages?" He asks, but he's already stalking towards the desk on the other side of the room.

The people in the cages grow restless, and they've been silent for the most part - but with the portal open, and him going to find the keys, they'd begun to grow talkative. They were moving more in the cages, talking to each other, excitement filling the air with so much hope Danny could feel it resonating between his ribs.

A new voice, quiet and feminine, speaks up on the opposite side of the goat-man's cage. She's closer to the desk, and she has also been cut open. There are black tears staining her face, and her shock white hair floats like she's underwater. Immediately, on instinct, Danny's head supplies him with a word.

Banshee.

"In the bottom drawer, Phantom." She whispers, her voice lilting and melodic. Her pitch black eyes follow him across the room. "I've seen them put it there after putting us back into our cages."

He nods mutely, and again feels horrified by their treatment from his parents. His pace quickens to the desk, and just as the banshee woman said, there are keys in the bottom drawer sitting on top of a bunch of research papers that have a suspicious green stain on them.

Danny ignores the stain and grabs the keys, holding them up as he closes the drawer. When he turns back to the cages, all eyes are on him. "Um," he rasps, "I found the key." Who do I free first?

His eyes land on the banshee woman first, she's the closest to the desk. And in an arc he follows the lineup to the other side side of the room. He moves to the banshee woman's cage first, and she perks up as he kneels down to the door.

"I'll- I'll go in a circle, first." He announces, fingers fumbling with the key as he inserts it into the hole. The banshee woman had her fingers - clawed and knife-like, capable of tearing out his throat in an instant - around the bars of her confinement. She was staring at him intently.

He hesitates, and looks up. Her eyes are pitch black, he noticed this before, but this close its like its threatening to suck him in and send him swirling through a blackhole. "If- if I free you," he stammers, licking his lips, "will you attack me?"

The banshee woman bares her razor teeth at him, and reaches through the bars to touch his face. It takes all Danny's restraint not to flinch as her nails drag down his cheek softly. "No," she says, "you're freeing us, Phantom. We will not attack you."

Danny.. will just have to take her word for it. He nods, and with a sharp twist of his wrist unlocks the cage with one hand, and flings open the door with the other. In an instant, the banshee dives forward -- Danny thinks she's lunging at him, and flinches violently.

She goes through him instead, leaving him with a bone-deep chill and a heartbeat in his ears. He turns, and sees her dive through the portal like a swimmer diving into a pool.

There is silence throughout the room. And then everyone else begins to clamor once again, just like when Danny first walked in. Danny hurries to hush them - he said he was going around the room! He'll free them, but be quiet, or you'll wake his parents!

He rushes for the next cage, and one by one opens each and every cage. There are cheers, and thank yous, and cries of gratitude. He has to help the weaker ghosts out of their cage and limp them towards the portal. His shirt and hands are stained green with their blood.

(When he goes back up to his room later, he throws it off and throws it away. He can't stand the sight of it, and he scrubs his hands until they're raw.)

It's a lot for Danny to not burst into tears, or to throw up. Until finally he reaches goat-man's cage, and releases him. He is one of the ghosts too weak to fly on their own, and so Danny lets him lean against him and helps him to the portal.

"Will you be okay?" He asks once they are at the threshold, the portal hums softly this close to it. Almost like its trying to beckon Danny inside, like a siren song. Danny ignores it. "Will everyone else?"

"We will heal, Phantom." Goatman says, holding a hand to his chest. He looks tired, this close, and Danny can feel him looking at him, even without any pupils to show it. "Once back inside the Infinite Realms our bodies will heal on its own."

Danny nods silently, and his frown begins to wobble. The stress he's been under is finally starting to take its toll, and he is emotionally exhausted. There is still a lingering taste of fear in the air that doesn't belong to him - but the ghosts that have left. "I'm sorry." He croaks, his voice cracking. "I didn't - I didn't think you guys were human. I'm sorry."

The ghost's expression softens, but he still looks stern. "We aren't human." he says, and Danny frowns, confused. The ghost continues, and reaches out a long finger to tap against Danny's chest, where his heart is. "But do not think for a moment that humanity can be measured by the sound of a heartbeat, child. We are just as humane as you living can be, and we are just as sentient and sapient as you. Do not forget that, and you will not become your parents."

There's nothing for Danny to say to that, except nod once again. His tongue is heavy in his mouth, made of lead. "This will happen again," he continues, and his eyes prick, "they're gonna keep catching ghosts and bringing them down here." And hurting them.

Goatman nods curtly, and raises an eyebrow at Danny. "What will you do to stop them, Phantom?" He asks, "You could keep releasing them after they have been already caught, but that will not stop the pain they face under the hands of your parents."

He's right. He's right. And if Danny keeps releasing them afterwards, his parents will grow suspicious. They'll start sticking around trying to catch whoever is freeing the ghosts. And Danny doesn't want to face what will happen if his parents realize that he's the one freeing ghosts.

His eyes flicker rapidly around the room, trying to think of a solution - what could he do? What can he do?

His eyes land on the thermos sitting on the table.

"I... I could catch ghosts?" He says, unsure, and looks back to the ghost. He nods, beckoning for Danny to continue. "I can catch them in the thermos before my parents do, and then release them back to the Zone."

"That will work." The ghost says, "The thermos doesn't hurt to be in, it's merely cramped. Will you follow through on this?"

"Yes."

The ghost smiles at him a third and final time, his teeth glinting in the green portal light. "Then good luck, Danny Phantom."

He lets go, and disappears into the portal.

[era-the-witchy-birdkid]

What’s wrong with Dani and how to fix it By: Haibara Ai

Three weeks have past since Dani came to Beika. I solved ten murders, stopped three kidnappings, and ended up in the middle of the robbery that wasn’t a KID heist. A surprisingly slow month for crime all and all. I can’t help but think as I head down to Haibara’s lab as Conan. Ai called me earlier to come over right away because she figured something out and she want to talk to me face to face.

Reaching the bottom step brings me face to face with Ai, and she quick tries to drag me into her lab. Thank goodness I’m so good at floating on a dime in human from or I would have tripped and fell on my face. 

“Good your here.” Ai says, “I finally figured out why Dani is so unstable,” as we pass by the caged and de-aged rats she that survived her little test with APTX and ectoplasm, heading towards the table on the far side that is heavily layed down with various notes and papers.

I look at the cages and ask, “Hey Ai, why are you missing a few rats? I only count fifty rats here, didn’t you say you were going to keep them to help check for potential long term side effects for the de-aging from APTX?”

Ai stops walking and gives me an annoyed look but she does reply with, “The missing five escaped because they joined the ranks of half-ghost Rats after I accidentally dropped one of your blood samples into the cage they were in, but we didn’t come down here to talk about my experiments, remember?”

I really want to ask which version of my blood sample did it, but Ai’s right Dani is more important right now... though I feel I have to add, “It’s probably a good thing that you used only one gender for the rats tests. Thinking about it I mean, or all of Tokyo would be dealing with a Half ghost rat infestation by now. Your right though Dani is more important... So what did you figure out.” I ask while sitting in the air because there is no free chairs, since Ai has already sit down in the one chair in this room.

Ai gains this annoyed twitch in her eyes at my compete defiance of physics but in honestly she should be used to it by now... I’m not exactly shy about what I am after all... even when I should be like at school. Thank Kami the other detective boys and Ran help out when I inevitably mess up.

Ai grabs some of the papers off the desk and passing some to me, and I don’t bother trying to read them now, because she’s likely about to explain the basics right now. “From what I can tell, Danielle a.k.a Dani his prefect healthy on the human side its her ghost half that the issue. I had a hard time narrowing down the issues at first but once the least batch of Fenton tech came I found something.” Ai pauses to take a breathe, “The vast majority of Dani’s ectoplasm doesn’t count as her own, it counts as Danny’s and has Danny’s Ectosignature not Dani’s. Which is different from Danny’s by the way though it is related, if Ectosignatures are the ghost equivalent of DNA then Dani counts as Danny’s close genetic Sibling on the ghost side of things-”

“Ai focus, this is fascinating and all but what wrong with Dani and how do we fix it. We can go over the weird, wild world of Yūrei Hanyou biology after Dani stops trying to melt into a puddle of green goo.” I interrupt Ai as she was starting to get sidetracked.

Ai startles and gains a very near undetectable flush of red in her cheeks and leans back in her chair. “Right... so to make a long sorry short, Dani’s Core is rejecting the Ectoplasm in her body that counts as Danny’s, basically just like an improperly matched organ donation among humans, this fact is made even worse by the fact the percentage of the ectoplasm in her body that counts as Danny’s is as high as 85%, though almost all of that is bound up in her cells thank the Kami.”

“Why is it being bound up in her cells is a good thing?” I ask honestly curious.

“Its why she’s almost stable if she doesn’t use her powers and she takes care of her human needs, in fact if she stays human 24/7 and doesn’t use powers ever, she will naturally replace Danny’s ectoplasm with her own in about an estimated five years going by the samples I’ve taken. The only ectoplasm that regularly passes though the core as a human is in the blood and looking at Dani’s blood 99% of the ectoplasm in the blood counts as hers.” Ai states, “Granted relying on a slow natural processes is completely unnecessary when I’ve already figured out how to speed it up and doing so is likely as detrimental to her mental health as forcing you to stay in your attic for so long was for you.”

I internally wince at the mention of my attic. “Right... so what do you need me to do to help you get started? You need me for some reason right? That’s why you called me?”

“I need some of your blood.” Ai flatly states

“Um why? also which age and state?” I ask confused

“Teen and human for blood type, and as for why? Remember that accident I mentioned with the rats? Some of your blood also got into the samples I was studying for Dani’s case back then and surprisingly it caused the two ectosignatures to play nice for a little while. There's something in your blood that acts like a ghostly immune suppressant and I hope if I have more of it I can find it and either synthesize it or failing that extract it for my use in the future cure.” Ai explains

That makes a lot of sense actually, and in lieu of an answer I simply became my teenaged self right then and their and start sanitizing my arms as Ai was blinking the spots out her eyes. The transformation is quite bright after all. 

Things get done quickly after Ai recovers from the blue flash of the change age transformation, and as my blood got added to a blood bag, Ai is going to need as much blood as possible to find the unknown chemicals in my blood, I ask. “So Ai, what’s the next step after you get my blood?”

Ai seems to think the question over as she watches the bag fill with my green tinged blood while tapping her gloved hand against the blood bag. “Well... the next step is coming up with a chemical regimen designed to slowly strip the ectosignature from ectoplasm making it neutral enough to be taken in by any ghost and making it target the ectoplasm that matches Danny’s over Dani’s. The finished product is probably going to be something like a chemotherapy regimen with likely similar risks and side effects. Agasa is looking into picking up a decent movable bed that can work as a makeshift hospital bed for when the time comes...” at this Ai stops talking to focus on stopping the flow of blood and bandaged up my arm until my fast healing takes care of it.

I rub my arm because my arms always seems to be sore after Ai extracts any amount of blood from them, and as Ai regathers her thoughts. I turn back to Conan with a bit of relief. I’m thankfully not as bad as I was, where I got full on panic attacks if I stayed a teenager for to long, but I’m still extremely uncomfortable to be a teenager in Japan. 

Ai gives me an annoyed look once more, as she is rapidly blinking the spots away, and I give a sheepish look as I regret not warning her I was going to transform again. Ai sighs, “Well... now that’s done. I will continue with what I was saying. I hope by finding what is in your blood I can make the future regimen more efficient as well as hopefully make a suppressant that can tide her over until my research is complete. Thankful some of Danny’s parent’s research is looking very promising for this, though I haven’t looked at it in full detail yet...” Ai pauses

“I also hope to figure why Dani’s is a girl as that shouldn’t have happened in a proper clone... I bet Vlad did something stupid...” the last part was angrily grumbled.

I give Ai a big smile and say, “Ai I know you got this, you’ll figure out the answer eventually. Plus until you finish with the cure Dani is the best hands with Ran, Agasa, you, and I working together as a team.”

Ai gives me a hesitant smile and pulls me into a hug. I know this is important to Ai because this gives her a chance to use her skills to save a life, opposed to making things that take it away. It never was Ai’s fault as she was practically born into the Black Organization and never really had a choice about working for them, but I know APTX weighs heavily on her mind. In the end though... I just know everything is going to turn out fine, the road to get there might be long and treacherous but if we all stand together we’ll make it through.

[kinglazrus]

Not Your Danny – Ch 5. Fresh Air

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Word count: 3075

Dani hesitates at the top of the stairs. The lab door, when closed, looks comically when compared to the rest of the house. Set halfway down the hall that bisects the house, from either end, the doorway appears normal. When you get closer, however, and the door itself comes into view, a smattering of warning signs greets your eyes. The yellow and black stripes, the deep red biohazard symbol, one bright green sign that just reads GHOSTS AHEAD!, are the only pops of colour against the off-white walls.

The signs draw the eye to a comical degree. They remind Dani of cheap Halloween decorations, slapped on the nearest empty surface in the hopes that more signs equal more scares.

It's not as funny when the door is open. Metal plating gleams along the walls, some of the seams between them crusted with dried ectoplasm. More stains litter the stairs, left by careless, unclean feet. Far below, the pristine white tiles of the lab floor are lit by a soft green glow.

She hasn't even entered the lab, but just a glimpse of the room below transports her back to Vlad's place in Wisconsin and that cold room where she spent hours alone. It was the worst before she learned how to go intangible, when she was stuck with nowhere to go. Vlad didn't have the time to go down to the lab every day, but when he could, he worked feverishly on making newer, better clones than her.

"Siblings for you," Vlad called them, but Dani knows the truth now. Replacements, since she hadn't been good enough for him.

So many times, Vlad made a clone that was almost stable, almost life-like, but they would die overnight. Dani could never take her eyes away from it, no matter how much it horrified her. Seeing other clones melt away to nothing, their skin sloughing off, muscle dripping from their bones until those, too, liquified into nothing.

If Vlad had known Danny was transgender, maybe he wouldn't have seen Dani as such a failure. He might have loved her properly—or at all.

She doesn't want to go down the stairs, not when such horrible memories are already clamouring for attention. But Maddie is down there, and it might be hours before she comes upstairs. Bracing herself against the wall, Dani leans forward on her toes and calls down. "Maddie?"

Although she can hear shuffling coming from below, she gets no answer.

"Maddie?" she says again, a little louder.

Still no answer.

Swallowing her nerves, Dani goes down the steps. She keeps her arms in, even as her legs shake and threaten to give out on her, she doesn't want to touch the walls. Her gaze doesn't stray from her feet, either, fixed firmly on where she is stepping. When she reaches the last stair, she squeezes her eyes shut.

It's fine. This isn't Vlad's lab. There might be some similarities, they aren't the same. Like her and Danny.

I am at Fenton Works. I am at home. I am at Fenton Works. She repeats the mantra over and over. Her heart doesn't stop pounding, but eventually, she has to look up or turn back around, and she doesn't want to give up now. Steeling herself, she looks up and opens her eyes.

It's not Vlad's lab.

Of course, it isn't. Dani knew that the whole time. Actually seeing it, however, fills her with relief. Instead of bubbling vats full of half-formed bodies, they have long counters full of inventions. Although the floors have a few scuffs and some noticeable burn marks, there are no dubious stains of questionable origin.

The only true similarity Dani can find is the specimen cabinet. Its glass doors reveal the rows upon rows of ectoplasmic samples hidden inside. The vials sit on labelled racks, sorted through some mysterious method Dan is not privy to.

One rack, near the front of the cabinet, is labelled PHANTOM, DANI. Out of the four vials, two are empty, the third is missing, and the fourth—her blood sample— is half-full. Looking around at all the weapons down here, Dani hopes her samples went to good use. The last thing she wants is one of these guns firing at her without warning.

Dani finds the missing vial with Maddie on the other side of the lab. Maddie sits at one of two desks, hers far neater than the other. The vial of ectoplasm, still capped, rests by Maddie's elbow. In front of her, a gun sprawls out in pieces. Maddie's head is lowered over the gun as she works on it.

"Maddie?" Dani asks.

Maddie takes a deep breath before looking up. She can't hide the slight widening of her eyes when she sees Dani's human face, but she doesn't flee, which is a vast improvement from last time. "Yes, dear?"

"Is it okay if I go out somewhere?"

"Of course. Where do you want to go?"

"Nowhere in particular. I haven't left the house since I got here."

"Really? That can't be right."

"It is." To be completely honest, Dani hadn't been sure if she was allowed to leave. The Fentons never laid out any ground rules for staying with them. Nor did they let her in on what a usual household day is like. After a week and a half, Dani has figured out more or less how things go, but only now does she realize that the Fentons never did anything to accommodate her.

Not that she knows what accommodations she needs, but it's odd, isn't it? Someone new moves in and they keep doing what they have always done.

"I didn't even notice," Maddie admits. "I'm so used to D—the kids doing whatever they want as long as they aren't out late. You don't need to ask us if you want to go somewhere." She leans back over the dismantled gun, grabbing a core piece with a dozen little wires sticking out of it. "Don't forget to text. And be home by curfew, young man."

—

Depends on when that is.

Maddie's mind fills in the automatic response, a perfect copy of Danny's usual snark. Several seconds pass before she realizes no one said it out loud. She glances up from her work and finds herself alone in the lab. Dani left without saying anything. The discovery cuts her deeper than it has any right to.

Maddie's parting remark runs through her head again. She gasps, finally registering what she said, and drops the barrel component in her hand.

She goes over her parting remark in her head and gasps. She didn't mean to say that. The words rose instinctively to her lips, spoken without any consideration of who she had been talking to. It was such a small thing, too; a meaningless ritual built between Danny and Maddie over the years.

"Be home by curfew," she would say.

"Depends on when that is," he would answer.

When was the last time she and Danny had this exchange? It only happened when he told her he was going out, which wasn't very often in recent years, but the instinct was still there. Maddie presses a hand against her eyes.

Danny's absence resonated throughout Fenton Works, but little moments like this cut deeper than they should. All their little rituals. Backwash soda. Small things Maddie didn't realize she would miss until they were gone. And at the centre of it all was Dani, subject to Maddie's moments of weakness, filling in that piece of her Danny took when he died, but not quite fitting.

Maybe this was a mistake.

"I'm sorry, Dani," she tells the empty lab.

—

It feels good to fly again. Sitting in the house with nothing to do, Dani was starting to get stir crazy. Finally getting some fresh air in her lungs and some wind in her hair does wonders to alleviate her mood. Not even Maddie's slip up in the lab can bring Dani down now, no matter how much thinking about it makes her skin prickle.

She soars far over the city, letting her instincts take over as the people below get smaller and smaller.

Amity Park airspace is perfect for flying. It sees so little traffic from planes, drones, or anything else like that. People in the area know to steer clear of the skies in case a ghost is about. Danny once told her that the airport actually diverts planes around the city if they're flying too low.

Not even birds like to be up here.

Dani relishes the feeling of wind buffeting her body. She lets her control slip, plummeting through the air. Spreading her arms, she guides her fall without the use of her powers, grinning wide against the roaring wind. She and Danny might not have liked all the same things, but they could certainly agree on this: there is nothing more amazing than flying.

A good hour passes with Dani in the air. She dips down toward the city a few times, swooping through the streets. The tall downtown buildings and fast-moving cars make a great obstacle course, especially when she flies at top speed.

"Is that Phantom?" someone shouts.

Dani has to stop and backtrack, flying by the voice so fast she almost doesn't hear it. Lounging in the air, she peers down at the sidewalk. "Someone called?"

A kid holding his mother's hand scowls. "You're not Phantom."

Dani sticks her tongue out at the brat. "Dani-with-an-I Phantom, thank you very much."

"I don't care. You're not Danny Phantom."

Dani's smile freezes in place. The brat, who can't be more than eight, makes a rude gesture over his shoulder as his mom pulls him away.

"Charming kid!" Dani shouts after them. The woman pulls her son along faster. Dani's expression goes flat. The brief exchange leaves a sour taste in her mouth and an ache in her chest. Flying right now doesn't seem fun anymore. She lowers herself to the street, ignoring the whispers around her, and transforms.

A few people gasp, but she ignores that, too. Who cares if they see her? The whole city already knows the truth about Danny. It wouldn't take a genius to reach the same conclusions about her.

Her hands go to the front of her shirt, seeking out her hoodie pocket. Belatedly, she remembers that she hasn't worn the hoodie in days. At night, she puts on the pyjamas Maddie bought for her, and in the morning she dons her new favourite shirt along with one of the several skirts Jazz gave her.

The first time Dani transformed from human to ghost wearing these clothes, she was worried they might disappear, or her hoodie and shorts would reappear. To her utter delight, no such thing happened. The skirt she wears now is a little long for her. She has it pulled up to her waist, with the star shirt tucked underneath, and rolled the waistband several times until the skirt rested around her knees. The soft fabric swishes about her legs, so much lighter than what she is used to.

Taking in her surroundings, Dani notes the big box stores around her. She recognizes the area, although she has only seen it from the air. The Amity Par Mall should be somewhere close by. Although Dani doesn't have any money for clothes, she could window shop and look at what's available. That should help lift her spirits.

—

The usual chatter blankets the mall food court. Beyond the tables, a kiosk for a local store advertises unique Danny Phantom merch. T-shirts, phone cases, and hats bearing Danny's iconic logo sit out on display. From her seat facing the kiosk, Sam can see water bottles shaped like the Fenton Thermos, plushies that vaguely resemble the local haunts, and even a few fake ecto-guns.

But the centrepiece of the display is a poster, unmistakably new. It features Danny twice over, as Phantom and Fenton, standing back-to-back with himself. The sight of it fills her with rage.

"How dare they." Sam seethes.

Seated across from her, Tucker nods. The soda cup in his hand crumples as his grip tightens. "Isn't that illegal, too? Using his likeness and all?"

"Absolutely. Especially since he's a minor."

"Was," Tucker corrects her, his voice soft.

"Right. Was." The memory of Danny's last moments flashes through her mind. Sam flinches, closing her eyes in an attempt to shut the image out. It doesn't work. The moment is all too vivid in her mind and she doesn't think it will ever fade.

Movies like to give heroes slow deaths, dramatic last words spoken with a final breath, the warmth of a loved one nearby. They make it so easy to forget that most of the time people don't get anything like that. Most of the time they drop, and they're gone.

Her hands feel sticky and warm, her throat hoarse.

The stunned silence of the street after it happened presses down on her.

"Looks like they have a website. I take care of that and you take care of the lawyers?" Tuck says.

Sam opens her eyes. She has to rub her hands together to remind her they're dry now, have been for weeks. Still, that doesn't stop her from picturing dried blood beneath her nails.

"Yeah," she says after a moment. "Sounds like a plan."

Whoever owns that kiosk is going to regret using their dead best friend for profit. Sam and Tucker will make them burn.

Sam's glare turns from the man working the kiosk to the shoppers browsing its wares. Her anger stretches to them, too, though not as much. She can't blame a child for wanting merch of their hero. Three of the five shoppers lingering around the stand are children, the oldest in her teens. Except instead of happily perusing the merch like her younger counterparts, this girl glares at the stand with nearly as much hatred as Sam.

Something about her is familiar, too. Sam can't see her profile in full, since the girl is angled away, but she can't shake the feeling that she's seen this girl before.

"Holy shit, is that Danielle?" Tucker asks.

Sam's eyes widen. He's right. Without the signature red and blue, Sam didn't recognize her. Dani's new outfit suits her, though. "Jazz said she saw Dani before the funeral. Where has she been?"

Sam stands up. Tucker rises with her, having the same idea. They dump their food trays at the garbage station and make a beeline for Dani.

"Danielle!" Tucker waves to the halfa, who turns at his shout.

Dani smiles when she sees them. "Hey!"

"Nice shirt." Tucker flicks Dani's collar. "About time someone put it to good use."

"Are you staying at Fenton Works?" Sam asks. Like Tucker, she recognizes the shirt and knows there's only one place Dani could have gotten it.

Dani kicks the floor with her heel, the sole of her shoes squeaking against the tiles. "Yeah. Jazz invited me to move in. It's... okay."

Over Dani's head, Sam and Tucker share a concerned look. They recognize that tone. It's one of the few things Dani and Danny have in common, at least that Sam has seen. Dani's voice dips at the end of her sentence, going low and flat. Jazz does it, too, sometimes. It's probably a Fenton thing more than it is a Danny and Dani thing.

"What's wrong?" Sam asks.

"Trouble adjusting, that's all. It's not a big deal." Dani shrugs.

Sam wants to question her further but lets the subject drop. It's fine if Dani wants to keep it to herself, although Sam prefers if she didn't. Either way, they aren't going to leave her like this.

"Doing some shopping?" Sam already knows the answer, though. Dani doesn't have a purse, or a wallet, or any money with her by the looks of it.

Dani confirms her suspicions. "Just looking."

"Cool. Can we look with you?" Tucker rests an arm on Dani's head, using her as a post for leaning. It works like a charm, drawing a half-hearted grumble and a small smile out of Dani. "We're here to people watch. And take care of assholes like this." Tucker nods toward the Phantom kiosk.

This time, Dani giggles. "Yeah, sure. We can take you to all the girl stores."

Tucker pales. "Wait, no. I change my mind."

"Too late!" Dani latches onto the arm resting on her head.

Sam quickly grabs Tucker's other arm until he's squished between the two girls, growing rapidly more distressed as they steer toward the closest store with a bright pink sign. These kinds of stores aren't Sam's thing, and she normally wouldn't be caught dead in one, but she can put up with it for a while if it keeps the smile on Dani's face.

—

Dani takes her bag from the store clerk with nothing short of reverence lighting her face. Even though she just watched the clerk pack it, Dani can't help but open the bag and peer inside at her new purchases: a skirt, a pair of shorts, and a handful of button-ups like the one she already wears.

Beside her, Sam slips her wallet back into her pocket.

"Have a nice day!" the clerk says.

"Thanks. You, too!" Tucker's hand settles on Dani's back, nudging her out of the store.

As soon as they exit, Dani spins and jumps at Sam. "Thank you so much!" When they went into the store, she didn't expect to find anything she liked, but everything inside was so different from what she found in Danny's closet. Especially the pastel colours.

"Consider it a welcome home present," Sam says. Her arm curls around Dani's back, squeezing her tightly.

"Group hug!" Tucker says before draping himself over both of them.

Dani's breath catches in her throat. When was the last time she touched someone like this? Sam and Tucker's arms surrounded her, their warmth making her skin tingle. For a second, she can't breathe, so overwhelmed by the contact that everything else ceases to exist.

Against her will, her shoulders start to shake. She clings to Sam and Tucker tighter, fists gripping the back of their shirts as she draws them closer. Tears welled in her eyes, rising from somewhere deep within her that she had been pushing down. Now, though, in the warmth of Sam and Tucker's embrace, Dani cries for the first time since Danny died.

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[pokelolmc]

Ectoberweek Day 2: (Pulse)

Sadly, my Ectoberweek submissions are a few days behind because of...pesonal reasons. This is what happens when I wing it last-minute, I guess (also, this one turned out much longer than I anticipated).

This one is also a crossover, with Doctor Who (featuring the Ninth Doctor), but hopefully it’s not too much trouble to get the gist of if you haven’t seen it:

ff.net: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13729906/2/EctoberWeek-2020-Collection

‘A faint spectre of a familiar wheezing noise—something roughly halfway between an electric train engine and some contraption from the mind of H.G Wells—drifted through Danny’s window, bolting him unceremoniously up off of his bed in a messy paradox of fear and excitement. A quick ghost-aided hop out of the second-floor window landed Danny safely onto the manicured lawn of his backyard with nary a giveaway crunch of grass. He leapt into a hurried sprint out to his front yard and down the footpath, a prayer on his lips that Jazz—or, god forbid, his parents—wouldn’t find it odd he locked his bedroom door for something as mundane as an alleged “nap”.

He couldn’t tell them why he was leaving, not without admitting a secret he dreaded they wouldn’t understand.

He sadly had little justification to convince him they would, considering the misery of the past hellish year that slipped by his hitherto closest loved ones completely unnoticed, let alone understood. The only person who could understand his discomfort was a once-stranger who had properly noticed, pulled him back to his feet and saved him when everyone else couldn’t.

For someone as guarded in lies as Danny, the hefty pile of trust he invested in the Doctor after only half a year still continually stunned him…

…For all the time that he had been a halfa, Danny adamantly ignored the implications of his own modified biology. As he zeroed his focus in on his early superhero-esque impression of the outcome, the notion of becoming something not entirely human sat tightly folded and stuffed into the belly of his mental closet where it could no longer hurt him—out of sight, out of mind. The notion of an otherworldly, freakish creature—one of the only two on the entire planet—alone amongst a crowd of normal humans, ready to tear him apart should they find out he was not one of their kind…

It reared its ugly head out of depths of his psyche in his nightmares.

An unfortunate doubt had burrowed its deep way into his heart that, no matter how well his family and friends knew him, the intricacies of his situation were impossible for them to understand— unlike him, they all remained fully human…powerless, mundane, living without fear of being found out as something else… Vlad, for all that he was Danny’s fellow in physical nature, remained his moral opposite. Danny lost count of just how many times that broken record had replayed his denial of Plasmius’s contemptible deal to the stubborn maniac. By all accounts, he should’ve had no one to turn to.

However, for all of the paranoid secrecy that lodged the topic close to the vest, Danny felt fare more at ease breaching it with the Doctor, minus the unpleasantness of the touchy subject matter tasting bitter in his mouth…

…“…Something wrong?”

“Can we talk about it inside...?”

The Doctor nodded carefully, letting Danny into the vast exterior of the disguised time machine and locking the door behind him.

The teenager shuffled in as the Doctor paced to a cooler bag resting beyond the edge of the main console to grab a drink for them both, returning to break his companion’s awkward silence.

“I assume this is something difficult, then?”

“Well…yeah.” Danny responded pathetically, rubbing the back of his neck as he averted the man’s gaze. “It kind of occurred to me earlier, but I’ve never wanted to think about it…”

Those ancient eyes pierced immediately into him.

“Does it have to do with your family?”

“No!” he stammered hastily, “It’s just…”

His throat moved as if possessed, his voice lowering carefully from a reflex honed for reasons he wished never had to be.

“I…what do I do?  …What if people find out what I am?”…

The Doctor’s eyes blinked almost owlishly for such a scant second that Danny wasn’t even sure if he had just been imagining it, before his features schooled into a pensive frown.

“Oh…”

“I can’t take it! I told myself I was normal, still normal, forever…but I’m just deluding myself!” his hands clenched tightly into shaking fists by his sides, “I’ll never be a normal human like everyone else again! I have powers they don’t; DNA that’s different to theirs—how different is my body, even, to a normal human’s?! How much physical, undeniable proof is there that I’m not normal?!  Have I got some sort of freaky biology that would set me apart from everyone in a hospital—that as soon as they took a look at me, they’d know I wasn’t like them?! A monster?! A weird thing that needs to be locked up?! What am I supposed to do when everyone finds out that I’m some freak?! How…how can I live with something like that?!”…

…“Danny, there’s nothing ‘freakish��� about being other than human; normalcy is in the eye of the beholder.”

Danny’s gaze sank to the floor, fighting a losing battle to keep his face restrained, eyes dodging away from the Doctor as he put a hand on the teen’s shoulder.

“You say that…but you don’t know what people are like.”

“Oh, I think a good 700 years of being acquainted with Earth had made sure I know.” The Doctor scoffed.

“You don’t know what being human is like! You don’t know what I’ve lost!” ripped itself from Danny’s trembling throat.

“I don’t, I’ll admit that—but for all it’s worth, why does it have to be something to mourn? There’s nothing wrong with having biology different to a human’s, and that’s not going to change what you’re worth or take away your ability to find a place to call your own.”

“What about my parents and the people in town? Even Tucker and Sam, forgetting what they already know, would still find me weird if they found out how deep it went! It would matter to them!”

“—You already know I’m not human; you just said so.” the Doctor replied simply.

“Do you think it would matter to me?”

Danny choked on a dumbfounded stutter.

“I…I don’t know.”

The older of the duo tapped a hand on Danny’s shoulder, trying to coax the younger’s gaze upwards, with a thoughtful pause…

“Danny, did you know I have two hearts?”

Danny snapped up to look him in the eye.

“It’s true!” the alien crowed in mock defence, “You must��ve forgotten if you don’t remember! I’m sure I’ve mentioned it at least once!”

A cocked brow from the boy told him to return to seriousness, “For all I look like a human to you, Danny, Time Lord biology has quite a few major differences on the inside; mainly, two hearts—additionally, also a respiratory bypass system in the same area. It’s quite useful in situations of air blockages. That is a clear, solid reminder that would prove me vastly different to any human who took a look—and they have, too...a hospital had the unfortunate shock of taking my bloods and chest x-rays in the 1970’s. It’s happened quite a few times since.”

Leather wrinkled as he rolled up one sleeve in response to Danny’s gaping face, offering his bare wrist to him.

“Go ahead—feel my pulse; it’s right there, double time—the vascular valves have to work twice as fast to keep up with a second heart.”

Danny cocked an eyebrow, taken aback for a few short seconds before gingerly taking the Doctor’s wrist in his hand…

…As Danny fumbled to find the right spot and gesture, the Doctor mimed with his own free hand on the wrist to guide Danny on the correct position.

He fought down the light tremors of emotion in his hand as he tried to focus on the right spot beneath the time traveller’s skin, tactile attention peeled for any slight movement.

Thump-thump,

The hybrid’s eyes shot as wide open as dinner plates.

A beat rippled under the pads of his fingers, rapidly fluttering in quickly succeeding rounds of two each third of a second…

…Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump…

A vague fog spilled into his brain an isolated fact from tenth-grade science—a snippet of the teacher’s comparisons to show the rough scale of average resting heart rates.

The Doctor’s pulse hurried like a human pumped up on terrifying high of adrenaline…all, incredibly, while still at rest. Such a pace remained impossible for a human heart to handle alone…

A chest far more bizarre than any of the freakish physiological anomalies he had ever fathomed or dreaded discovering in his own mutated body.

“How…how fast is that?” Danny stammered in awe, pulling his hand away.

“Roughly around 126 beats per minute, resting.” The Doctor grinned proudly, “That can go up to 150 when I’m running. The hearts themselves are even faster than the pulse—in rounds of four. You think that’s too different from human for you to have no problems with?”…

… He glanced over the other’s smaller frame.

“Want to try yours? Take some vitals to see if there’s anything different we need to know of?”

Danny frowned, unease starting to pool in the bottom of his stomach.      

“But, we’re in Amity Park…”

“We’re in Amity Park in the TARDIS” he corrected, “safe from any prying eyes—those walls are impenetrable. There’s no better place than here to take a look—and knowing how your own body adapted to ectoplasm will very likely come in handy later.

If not now, that’s alright—but consider it for later some time; self-knowledge is very important, and courage starts with stepping up to face what frightens you.”

“No…I’ll give it a go now.” Danny decided hesitantly.

“Alright, then.” The Doctor strolled briskly down a branching corridor, disappearing down the amber hallway.

The console room fell into silence, only broken by the faint drone of the TARDIS engines in the background. Left to his own devices in the empty room, curiosity lightly crept in over the upset in Danny’s chest, tempting him into a quick glance at his own wrist.

He’d gotten to check the Doctor’s pulse…so what about his own?...”

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A faint spectre of a familiar wheezing noise—something roughly halfway between an electric train engine and some contraption from the mind of H.G Wells—drifted through Danny’s window. He sprung up off of his bed with the suddenness of a wound-up spring, in a messy paradox of fear and excitement. Hardly a blade of backyard grass crunched under his step as he ejected himself, ghost-aided, from the second story window. He leapt into a hurried sprint out to his front yard and down the footpath, a prayer on his lips that Jazz—or, god forbid, his parents—wouldn’t find it odd he locked his bedroom door for something as mundane as an alleged “nap”.

He couldn’t tell them why he was leaving, not without admitting a secret he dreaded they wouldn’t understand.

He sadly had little justification to convince him they would, considering the misery of the past hellish year that slipped by his hitherto closest loved ones completely unnoticed, let alone understood. The only person who could understand his discomfort was a once-stranger who had properly noticed, pulled him back to his feet and saved him when everyone else couldn’t.

For someone as guarded in lies as Danny, the hefty pile of trust he invested in the Doctor after only sixth months still baffled his own judgement.

Sheer serendipity had smashed them into each other in the dirty, deserted alleys of Amity Park in the heat of late spring—in retrospect, it was only sensible that Amity Park’s run-ragged local protector was pulled head-first into the Doctor’s mission to chase down an alien threat to the town. Danny’s experience with danger, quick thinking and compassion received the unbelievable surprise of an approving eye from the peculiar “traveller”—and at the end of an averted crisis, their exchange switched from a currency of snarky banter to their inevitably unveiling secrets. Two pairs of light sapphires locked into each other’s depths, piercing through the icy surfaces to glimpse at mutually familiar reflections of loneliness and pain. With the planting of a hand on Danny’s shoulder, and the man’s lighthearted switch to a casual offer to take him on a trip (he owed the boy one for the help, was his excuse), and Danny had finally witnessed the unthinkable: the miraculous salvaging of the hitherto unsalvageable.

His childhood dream of becoming an astronaut, struck down by the brutal consequences of recklessly buckling to peer pressure at fourteen (sacrificing one half of his life to get his powers, and the other half to the ungrateful town he used them for), had somehow been resurrected from the ashes. In the blinding abyss of despair that tore from him all motivation and vision of his own meaning and future, he had finally regained sight of what he had longed for so long ago:

He was offered a chance to see the stars.

…not just gazing at constellations from the roof he vastly preferred to the entire home that sat underneath, but a chance to spare a glance up close and personal—on the densely populated planets pulled into the stars’ orbits. To bask in the colourful evidence of those stars in an alien sunrise, and set foot on the moons and asteroids bizarre geological impossibilities called their ancient homes…

One trip turned into a second…which, unsurprisingly, turned into a third…

From there, the call of Danny’s responsibility to stay in Amity brought a semi-regular schedule of visits back and forth—from Danny relearning what hope felt like from the firsthand wonders of space, to the Doctor’s frequent check-in visits to the child’s haunted hometown. Hours filled with conversation and strengthening rapport that Danny’s busy double life deprived him of having with his family and friends. A fresh perspective on the universe leapt into his life out of the blue and sat, in a worn leather jacket and raven buzz-cut, listening to his pain and pushing him to heal.

That report nagged at Danny from the recesses of his mind, insisting on the only person he could take his dredged-up dilemma to.

For all the time that he had been a halfa, Danny adamantly ignored the implications of his own modified biology. As he distracted himself with his earlier superhero-esque impression of gaining ghost powers, the notion of becoming something not entirely human sat tightly folded and stuffed into the underbelly of his mental closet where it couldn’t hurt him—out of sight, out of mind. The concept of an otherworldly, freakish creature—one of the only two on the entire planet—alone in a crowd of normal humans with the tenacity to tear him apart as soon as they knew…

It reared its ugly head in his nightmares.

An unfortunate doubt burrowed a deep beeline into his heart that, no matter how well his family and friends knew him, the intricacies of his situation were impossible for them to understand. Unlike him, they all remained fully human…powerless, mundane, living without fear of being found out as something else… Vlad, for all that he was Danny’s fellow in physical nature, remained his moral opposite. Danny lost count of just how many times that broken record had replayed his denial of Plasmius’s contemptible deal to the stubborn maniac. By all accounts, the second halfa should’ve had no one to turn to.

However, for all of the paranoid secrecy that lodged the topic close to the vest, Danny felt almost entirely at ease breaching it with the Doctor—minus the unpleasant sting of the touchy subject matter tasting bitter in his mouth.

His hasty feet scraped to a stop at a sliver of blue wood past a corner. Relieving his straining lungs, his legs strolled the last few metres steadily of their own accord, ceasing before he bumped into the hilariously unfitting shape of a 1960’s British police box at the mouth of an alleyway. An unearthly glow pulsed faintly from the lantern atop the booth, tinting the deep Aegean-blue paint with scant patches of flashing turquoise. A soft orange glow streamed out in beams from the two windows on a pair of double doors at the entrance. Danny’s fingers reached up, sensitively, to the sturdy corner framing of the booth, his eyes catching the ebony sign that read “POLICE PUBLIC CALL BOX” along the length of the roof. A shudder through the wood brushed feather-light underneath his fingertips in greeting, the warm purr of an impossibly ancient—and just as volatile—housecat eagerly welcoming its familiar guest.

After a quick rap on the doors, they swung open with a long creak, accompanied by a Northern British accent rising in a pleasant tenor.

“Ah, Danny—right on time again!” faded eyebrows shot up a bare forehead under the familiar black buzz-cut. A welcoming smile spread over half the distance from one embarrassingly prominent ear to another.

“I heard you landing.” the forced cheer in Danny’s words fell in ruins to the awkward, shaky tumble they came out in.

The grin quickly turned into a serious frown, those electric blue irises lowering their gaze in concern.

“…Something wrong?”

“Can we talk about it inside...?”

The Doctor nodded carefully, letting Danny into the vast exterior of the disguised time machine and locking the door behind him.

The teenager shuffled in as the Doctor paced to a cooler bag resting beyond the edge of the main console to grab a drink for them both. He broke his companion’s awkward silence.

“I assume this is something difficult, then?”

“Well…yeah.” Pathetic as it was, it was all the response Danny could momentarily muster. His gaze darted from one side to the other and he rubbed the back of his neck, “It kind of occurred to me earlier, but I’ve never wanted to think about it…”

Those ancient eyes pierced immediately into him with a protective air.

“Does it have to do with your parents?”

“No!” he stammered hastily, “—not exactly, it’s just…”

His throat moved as if possessed, his voice lowering carefully from a reflex honed for reasons he wished never had to be.

“I…what do I do? …What if people find out what I am...?”

The Doctor’s eyes blinked almost owlishly for such a scant second that Danny wasn’t even sure if he had just been imagining it, before his features schooled into a pensive frown.

“Oh…”

“I can’t take it! I told myself I was normal, still normal, forever…but I’m just deluding myself!” his hands clenched tightly into shaking fists by his sides, “I’ll never be a normal human like everyone else again! I have powers they don’t; DNA that’s different to theirs—how different is my body, even, to a normal human’s?! How much physical, undeniable proof is there that I’m not normal?!  Have I got some sort of freaky biology that would set me apart from everyone in a hospital—that as soon as they took a look at me, they’d know I wasn’t like them?! A monster?! A weird thing that needs to be locked up?! What am I supposed to do when everyone finds out that I’m some freak?! How…how can I live with something like that?!”

Silence.

“Danny, there’s nothing ‘freakish’ about being other than human; normalcy is in the eye of the beholder.”

Danny’s gaze sank to the floor, fighting a losing battle to keep his face restrained, eyes dodging away from the Doctor as he put a hand on the teen’s shoulder.

“You say that…but you don’t know what people are like.”

“Oh, I think a good 700 years of being acquainted with Earth had made sure I know.” The Doctor scoffed.

“You don’t know what being human is like! You don’t know what I’ve lost!” ripped itself from Danny’s trembling throat.

“I don’t, I’ll admit that—but for all it’s worth, why does it have to be something to mourn? There’s nothing wrong with having biology different to a human’s, and that’s not going to change what you’re worth or take away your ability to find a place to call your own.”

“What about my parents and the people in town? Even Tucker and Sam, forgetting what they already know, would still find me weird if they found out how deep it went! It would matter to them!”

“—You already know I’m not human; you just said so.” the Doctor replied simply.

“Do you think it would matter to me?”

Danny choked on a dumbfounded stutter.

“I…I don’t know.”

The older of the duo tapped a hand on Danny’s shoulder, trying to coax the younger’s gaze upwards, with a thoughtful pause…

“Danny, did you know I have two hearts?”

Danny snapped up to look him in the eye.

“It’s true!” the alien crowed in mock defence, “You must’ve forgotten if you don’t remember! I’m sure I’ve mentioned it at least once!”

A cocked brow from the boy told him to return to seriousness, “For all I look like a human to you, Danny, Time Lord biology has quite a few major differences on the inside; mainly, two hearts—additionally, also a respiratory bypass system in the same area. It’s quite useful in situations of air blockages. That is a clear, solid reminder that would prove me vastly different to any human who took a look—and they have, too...a hospital had the unfortunate shock of taking my bloods and chest x-rays in the 1970’s. It’s happened quite a few times since.”

Leather wrinkled as he rolled up one sleeve in response to Danny’s gaping face, offering his bare wrist to him.

“Go ahead—feel my pulse; it’s right there, double time—the vascular valves have to work twice as fast to keep up with a second heart.”

Danny cocked an eyebrow, taken aback for a few short seconds before gingerly taking the Doctor’s wrist in his hand.

“Umm…how do I check for a pulse?”

“Take your index and middle finger together and put them on the wrist, underneath the base of the thumb; there’s a palpable vein there in most ‘humanoid’ species, a similar one in Time Lords as well.” As Danny fumbled to find the right spot and gesture, the Doctor mimed with his own free hand on the wrist to guide Danny on the correct position.

He fought down the light tremors of emotion in his hand as he tried to focus on the right spot beneath the time traveller’s skin, tactile attention peeled for any slight movement.

Thump-thump,

The hybrid’s eyes shot as wide open as dinner plates.

A beat rippled under the pads of his fingers, rapidly fluttering in quickly succeeding rounds of two each third of a second. It throbbed as fast as the metal-style Dumpty Humpty song he’d listened to on loop for the last two months, accelerated beyond the rabbiting thud of his heart in his chest when he ran himself ragged in the two-minute mile in ninth grade. The very rhythm of life that kept the Doctor in the universe, pushing his physiology onward, spoke clearly of the hidden contents of his ribcage.

Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump…

A vague fog spilled into his brain an isolated fact from tenth-grade science—a snippet of the teacher’s comparisons to show the rough scale of average resting heart rates.

The Doctor’s pulse hurried like a human pumped up on terrifying high of adrenaline…all, incredibly, while still at rest. Such a pace remained impossible for a human heart to handle alone…

A chest far more bizarre than any of the freakish physiological anomalies he had ever fathomed or dreaded discovering in his own mutated body.

“How…how fast is that?” Danny stammered in awe, pulling his hand away.

“Roughly around 126 beats per minute, resting.” The Doctor grinned proudly, “That can go up to 150 when I’m running. The hearts themselves are even faster than the pulse—in rounds of four. You think that’s too different from human for you to have no problems with?”

Sixth months of travels, venting and understanding, everything he owed the miraculous alien in front of him, won out beyond questioning.

The halfa shook his head vigorously.

“No…never…”

“Well, with the body I’ve got, yours certainly wouldn’t ever a problem for me. Even if there are people in your town who wouldn’t accept you, I do—and there will be other people out there in the larger universe who would, too. Even if you lose one place, you don’t lose the ability to find another—and I’m sure there are people already in your town who would find a closer place with too. From what you’ve said of your friends and sister, I’m sure they’d handle it fine in the end.”

“But I’m pretty sure they couldn’t take something like that in stride.”

“Oh, come on! What’s a little non-human physiology between friends?” the Doctor jabbed warmly, “An initial shock, inevitable as it is, wouldn’t end bonds that old just like that!”

He glanced over the other’s smaller frame.

“Want to try yours? Take some vitals to see if there’s anything different we need to know of?”

Danny frowned, unease starting to pool in the bottom of his stomach.      

“But, we’re in Amity Park…”

“We’re in Amity Park in the TARDIS” he corrected, “safe from any prying eyes—those walls are impenetrable. There’s no better place than here to take a look—and knowing how your own body adapted to ectoplasm will very likely come in handy later.

If not now, that’s alright—but consider it for later some time; self-knowledge is very important, and courage starts with stepping up to face what frightens you.”

“No…I’ll give it a go now.” Danny decided hesitantly.

“Alright, then.” The Doctor strolled briskly down a branching corridor, disappearing down the amber hallway.

The console room fell into silence, only broken by the faint drone of the TARDIS engines in the background. Left to his own devices in the empty room, curiosity lightly crept in over the upset in Danny’s chest, tempting him into a quick glance at his own wrist.

He’d gotten to check the Doctor’s pulse…so what about his own?

A bombardment from his brain halted that train of thought at a railroad crossing, forcing it to make way of a nuisance little car that jeered, ‘Try, and you’ll seal that proof in stone; if that pulse is anything non-human, you’re never unseeing that, you frea—’

Danny pounced at the scathing thought in defensive irritation as it sent his hands into another series of light shivers. Another part of him stepped in to remind him of the Doctor’s words—receiving a reluctant welcome by his conscious.

How different would it be? Was it any different from a full human’s at all? How different was it when he hadn’t really had a strong concept of what a normal human pulse actually felt like in comparison to his own? Using his own heartbeat as a frame of comparison for the Doctor’s was one thing—a point of reference to compare his pulse to another normal person’s, he did not have.

He pulled a deep, slow current of air into his lungs, trying to settle his nerves again as he fumbled with the posture of the middle and index finger, stumbling embarrassingly for a few seconds to find their claim on the thumb-side of his other wrist.

His nostrils flared with another deep breath as he steeled himself in anticipation, seconds dragging their heavy feet as he searched for a feeling of movement in his veins.

He froze in astonishment as plodding pulse gently thrummed to his touch.

Thump…thump…thump…

His…

That was his.

The giver of his own life—half-life—the very perpetuator of his existence; the fundamental thing that kept him alive from the inside, human and post-…the emissary of the complex organic pump at the centre of his once-human body…

A dizzying rush of…something indescribable surged through his body, bringing a surreal tickle of cold everywhere it flowed; the hairs on his arm stood straight upwards atop a desert of countless goosebumps cluttering his thin skin. A breath caught itself in his throat, straining his diaphragm as it pulled tightly around his chest. The sluggish pulse accelerated to a more vigorous flutter under the light touch, as adrenaline hit in the snap-short second his body screamed for air—responding to his own emotions in real time, like a viewing window cut neatly into the exterior steel plating of a mechanical marvel, giving a tantalising glimpse of a small section of the mechanism inside as it continued playing its part in the unknown, concealed whole…

He snapped out of his reverie as the Time Lord re-emerged into the console room, his arms cradling a steel bin stacked with medical equipment, a stethoscope coiled around his neck.

“…You know, I thought you weren’t that kind of doctor…?” Danny probed with shy wit.

“I am now!” he grinned, sapphire orbs glimmering humorously as a quick yank saved a digital thermometer from falling to its death off the top of the overflowing pile.

His head took on a slight tilt like a contemplative owl as he lay down his cargo and eyed the halfa’s fingers drawing a pattern into the skin of his wrist as his mouth seemed to temporarily malfunction.

“My pulse…it’s there.”

“Well, that’s one thing you have over other ghosts, then.”

The halfa probed hesitantly, “Is it too slow? …Is it human?”

“Hold on, let me take a look.” The Doctor insisted, brows squashed downwards in a neat line of concentration as thick, calloused hands took a hold of Danny’s wrist. The concentrated frown descended further as his throat hummed in thought for a few, lagging moments.

“That’s rather slow,” he rated, “Usually, the average resting rate for humans is between sixty and eighty beats per minute. Considering that you’re hardly an elite athlete, you wouldn’t be expected to go below forty to fifty at a healthy rhythm…but here it is.”

An uncomfortable gulp didn’t cure the tension in Danny’s throat.

“…how slow?”

The Doctor’s face stilled for a scant second in a familiar schooling of intense focus; six months of seeing the Time Lord in action told Danny that superhumanly precise calculations of the flow of time were running through that head, measuring speed in all but brief moment, like a supercomputer.

“…45 beats per minute, rounding up the half-seconds.”

“Damn…” his gobsmacked mouth fell open.

“It’s the ghost half affecting the human one, likely.” His friend explained simply. A pair of leather clad arms burrowed into the box and returned with handheld metallic box, snaking around a cuff of rough cloth on a length of rubber tubing, “What would be interesting is to see whether your blood pressure compensates for the heart rate in any manner—and what it does to your temperature, for that matter.”

Danny grimaced in anticipation as the blood pressure cuff slipped over his bicep. For some inexplicable reason, insistent check-ups back in the forgotten times his parents fretted constantly over a risk of childhood ecto-contamination had given him a mild aversion to blood pressure machines. It left a mark so strong, that being thrown violently across the pavement by a volatile ghost while fighting remained a more tolerable preference to having his blood pressure taken.

“It won’t take long,” the Doctor insisted as he picked up the thermometer he’d intercepted earlier, “Just stay still.”

Danny’s upper arm pressed in on itself like a squashed balloon about to burst; he ground his teeth together as a few, unpleasant seconds passed, relief flooding through him as the crushing push of the cuff retracted and gave his limb free room again. The few seconds of a thermometer pressing against his middle ear lasted for a few less, far more comfortable seconds before it chimed a small, synthesised beep.

He watched the Doctor’s eyes widen to the size of dinner plates.

“Well, your blood pressure seems to be within normal human range–not compensating for the slow blood flow at all, something else must be at work...” the Time Lord quickly evened his voice, hastily attempting to salvage the second that he looked taken aback, “…your temperature, though…that’s 26 degrees.”

“WHAT!?”

The Doctor locked onto Danny with a dumbfounded look, “…Celsius.”

Danny groaned.

“You almost gave me a heart attack! …what is it in Fahrenheit?”

“78.8, almost 79.”

“Oh…wow, that’s cold. Average people are around 90-something, right?”

“Yes; 79 would be hypothermic for full humans.” he continued, his voice leaking a hint of fascination, trailing off lightly into a short, pensive silence…

“You’re not a lot colder than I am…” his voice tumbled out airy and absent, hints of buried emotion leaking through his cracks in his straining voice…

…such a foreign tone from the elder that Danny froze.

“Time Lord core temperatures sit generally at around 12 degrees Celsius—around 53 in Fahrenheit. ” he continued, “Any human that cold would be on the brink of death—or already dead.”

As soon as the cracks opened, they sealed themselves shut—the Doctor’s voice evening to a low, serious tone leaking with hints of curiosity, leaving little trace that tension had ever been there, “Whatever is happening in your body, the ghost aspect of your biology is somehow enhancing or interfering with the human body; there has to be a trace of something sourcing all of that…”

Danny blinked as the azure light of a Sonic Screwdriver emerged out of the Doctor’s pocket and intruded into the path of his vision. The shining spot smeared a line of light, alongside the device’s typical warped buzzing, as it swept through the air in all directions along Danny’s body. He fidgeted bemusedly as the screwdriver’s whine spiked to a much higher pitch as it aligned with his chest.

“The scan has just found ectoplasmic energy readings trailing through your entire body,” Danny’s elder translated as he pulled the Sonic Screwdriver back with a deft flick of the wrist, “and it’s all gathering in one place in your chest, like streams of energy all flowing into one, teeming reservoir. There, it’s a singular point of high ectoplasmic concentration, but the overall energy doesn’t seem stationary; it seems to continue flowing around the body, become attracted to the centre point and travel through it before flowing out again, temporarily spiking the energy level in that point.”

“I don’t get it…” Danny frowned.

“It’s like a…core…” The Doctor reasoned, “Like planets have cores, and atoms have nuclei; there’s a central ‘core’ of denser energy all held together in one localised area, and the rest of the energy flows around it, like an atmosphere. As the energy changes, it’s attracted closer to the centre; the centre is the waypoint that keeps all of the ectoplasm in your body on a leash—keeps it flowing and cohesive. I wouldn’t be surprised if it also controlled your ghost half itself.”

In essence, it’s highly likely that ‘core’ is keeping your ghost form together.”

The words assaulted Danny’s ears like a crack of thunder.

His hand glided to his chest, attention peeled for a single movement, a charge, anything…a sign that wasn’t the tell-tale beat of his heart…

As he settled in the very centre—just to the right of his trudging heartbeat—he found it.

A wave of surreal, visceral lightness overwhelmed him, flooding through his very bones.

A rapid, blurry buzzing flashed in and out of existence under his palm, pulsating in his chest like a crackling electrical circuit. Dizzying confusion flooded him as fear and resentment gave way to a profound sense of relief, of near-euphoria. A spark of life erupted from the blurry sphere in his chest to every tissue, every muscle, every vein and bone in his being.

His whole body stiffened in surprise, his diaphragm forcing his lungs to take in a stuttering gasp of awe.

A desperate voice cried out in familiarity from somewhere deep within him, a cry for help, a cry for acceptance…and an overwhelming sense of oneness.

‘…This is me.’

His weak knees threatened to give out underneath him, and the concerned Doctor bolted forward to grapple him under his arms as he collapsed to the TARDIS floor like a ragdoll.

“What happened?!” the words rushed out in a tense demand.

Danny’s head snapped upwards in a swift, stiff motion; their wide eyes locked. Young sapphires bore for relentless, painstaking seconds into ancient ones.

“I can feel it…” he breathed, “It’s there...”

The Doctor’s hands flew to the stethoscope around his neck, hastily uncoiling and fitting the two prongs in his ears in a frenzy as his instructions under pressure came out, clear and sharp.

“That’s it—I’m taking a look. Shirt up, now!”

Lifting the hem of his own shirt became a fumbling mess in the boy’s dazed state as the alien placed the bell end on his chest. The cold metal of the stethoscope sent shots of ice through Danny’s skin.

Seconds drudged on in the apprehensive silence as the Time Lord listened.

“…It’s pulsing…” he concluded at last in a daze.

“That buzzing in and out, right?”

“Yes—can hear the vibration.” He elaborated, “It’s very clearly there, lodged almost over your heart; it’s nearly completely mixed in with its motions…”

His voice lowered thoughtfully.

“They appear to be working in conjunction. As the heart beats, the ectoplasmic core flares up, then quickly peters out...”

A mud of dissonance lurked in Danny’s gut as those lips twitched into a restrained smile—he could’ve sworn those worn eyes above them flickered with a glimpse of conflicting melancholy.

“In a way,” the Doctor proposed, voice trailing off absently, “it functions like a second heart…”

The smile widened warmly, though hints of vulnerable emotion cracked through a strained veil of positivity.

“In a way, you almost have two hearts as well…or perhaps one and-a-half hearts is more accurate, considering its difference to a proper organ.”

The Doctor reached down and grabbed him by the wrist to haul him to his feet; Danny’s other hand clenched instinctively on that similarly cold joint above the clamping hand in response. Two vastly conflicting pulses thundered through the pair’s sensitive tactile reception as they pulled on each other’s weight—one too rapid to be a human not sprinting down a racetrack, the other too plodding and slow for one not in a deep slumber.

Two pulses at opposite ends of a spectrum of the blatantly unearthly, but simultaneously indicators of a vaguely similar common ground…

…common enough to flood Danny’s bones with a primal, euphoric relief of belonging.

“I haven’t met anyone like that in a while—we could start a club, the two of us!” the Doctor smiled proudly, “The two-hearts club…or approximately-two-hearts, I suppose.”

“Y-yeah,” Danny grinned as his uneasy legs strengthened beneath him; the realisation that he was standing without help didn’t loosen his grip on the wrist in his hand.

“The ectoplasmic output is like background electrical interference in your chest, though, so you’ll certainly never want others to be looking at you on an electrocardiogram,” he interjected casually, “but otherwise, you’re perfectly fine.

…just remember, ‘fine’ and ‘human’ are not the same. If you can’t trust your own word, trust mine—not being ‘normal’ or ‘human’ in  the eyes of planet Earth doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you. Even if you came across all the close-minded humans out there who’d be happy to shove that opinion down your throat—aware of your secret or not—don’t give them that power over you and they can’t take away the fact that you’re not wrong.”

A small grin split across the half-ghost, half-human hybrid’s face.

Even if for just a small while, he could believe that.

[jekyll-hyde-transformation]

Bram and Vlad’s Jekyll is so cute

To look death in the eyes

“Dad, do you mind if we go a little early?” Bram asked, putting two bottles in his basket. He was a tall, 15-years-old redhead with an extremely expressive face.

“Go ahead”, his dad answered promptly. They had an unmistakable family resemblance. “Just be extremely careful.”

“I am always careful.”

Dr. Van Helsing smiled at this light poke at his famous recklessness. He tossed a picnic towel to his son, who used it to cover the basket.

Bram went to the hall of the cottage with a radiant smile. Two other teenagers were there, both utterly bored. One looked seriously sleep-deprived. He had sculpted abs and chest muscles and only used an old, rotten leather vest over them to pretend that he weren’t showing off. His hair was carefully made into a fauxhawk (he didn’t have the heart to cut it into an actual mohawk) and he had more piercings than one could count at a first glance. Every time he yawned, you could see that he had sharp fangs. This was Vlad. The other teen was a sad-looking boy with rebel hair and big, round glasses. He was reading a book with a facial expression that showed obvious discomfort. This one was Henry. Bram looked at them warmly and invited, cheerfully:

“Hey guys, mum and dad will take a little more time to pack their baskets and I think we should go earlier. I want to set the mood before the actual picnic.”

“Do we really have to go?” asked Vlad, grumpily.

“You knew that we were traveling to do the All Souls’ Day picnic and you knew we would do it at day time. You could have stayed in Exeter like you do every year.” Bram retorted calmly. His friend shrugged angrily to that and glared Henry, like it was his fault.

Vlad would never admit that he was jealous that Henry had to spend so much time with the Van Helsings due to his condition. The young vampire was the unofficial son of that family and he didn’t want any more siblings.

“I don’t have much choice, do I?” Henry said, with a sigh, unaware of Vlad’s silent vitriol.

“Sorry, Henry.” Bram had a little touch of guilt in his voice. “I promise that you will like it. Or, at least, you will find it very interesting.”

He went outdoors and the others followed him. They soon start following a beautiful path through woods with picturesque trees in autumn colours. A moderate walk brought them to a patch near some mossy rocks. A little water streaming bubbled happily through the rocks, birds chirped around the boys and you could almost forgive the cold weather. They were in the quintessential English countryside.

Bram placed the basked on the ground just before the slippery rocks and asked, with a curiously flat voice: “Here we are. Did you like our picnic place?”

Henry and Vlad had only one thing in common: they didn’t like walking outdoors. Both looked unimpressed at the brook before them. “I’m sure that we have similar places closer to home.” Vlad pointed.

“Oh, no.” Bram’s voice was still flat. “That’s no place like it near us, in Exeter.”

At this point, both teenagers were acutely aware that Bram was up to something. When they looked at him worriedly, he said, as deep as his breaking voice would allow him: “This is the scariest place in England.”

Vlad and Henry looked around them doubtfully. The trees were gorgeous, the water streaming was noisy but very narrow and cute – everything looking like a random photo of cheap calendars.

“OK, do your number. I’ll give you your cue.” Vlad said, at last, sarcastically. “What’s so scary here? How many ghosts haunt this place? Or maybe this thing on the rocks is killer moss?”

Bram gave him a little smile and shook his head.

“You should know if you read the signs when we were getting here. Or if you were paying attention to the scenery.”

“Just spit it out already!” Vlad growled.

“If you were paying attention,” Bram went on, calmly “when we were getting in the cottage, this morning, you would have seen that, a few kilometers south, we drove by an honest-to-God big river. Remember it?

“Barely” Henry confessed. “What the river have to do with this place?”

“Everything” Bram smiled broadly, and added, his voice low and calm: “We are in River Wharfe’s Strid. This little cute brook is the river. Not a part of it, not a little stream that joins it. It’s the whole river.”

There was a moment of silence. The boys were still trying to understand what was so scary about this, and Bram explained, now almost whispering:

“This river is about 9 meters wide outside the woods and a couple of meters deep. All this water is here, in a channel that is, at most, 2 meters wide. Now, think. How deep a narrow channel has to be to accommodate all that water? What stygian abyss exists just under that harmless-looking surface?”

Looking again the “streaming”, Henry shuddered and went back a step. Since Vlad was still too unaffected, Bram added: “No one was ever able to measure how deep the Strid goes. The currents here are incredibly strong. I’m able to get some sweet data putting Vlad in situations that would kill a human, but I would never dare to make him swim in the Strid to measure its depth. You know, every single person that ever fell in that water died. Everyone. 100% of them. Some bodies are never recovered. If Vlad tried to swim in it, he may not have enough strength to fight the currents, because they are a veritable force of Nature. In this case, he may end his life slowly rotting away in a hole in the rocks or in wherever this accursed river puts the bodies that it doesn’t give back. Vampires don’t need to breath constantly to live, but they need to breath to move. Now, tell me Vlad, how you fancy being alive and conscious, but paralyzed in a deep, dark gorge of agitated water? Or being swung endlessly by unseen forces in a dark, cold void until something hits your head hard and you never wake up again?”

At this point, Bram won. Vlad finally stopped to gaze the Strid and turned his head with a grimace. “If this place isn’t haunted, it

should

be.”

“Agreed. People die here every year or so. They think they can jump it, it’s so narrow and all. Yes, the rocks are slippery, but everything will be fine, right? Wrong. Or they visit here when it’s raining and are taken by quick floods. The Strid doesn’t forgive recklessness.”

“And why

on Earth

does your family think that this is a good place for an annual picnic?!” Vlad was used to the peculiar thought-processing ways of the Van Helsings, but sometimes, he simply couldn’t follow them. “You guys have the weirdest family traditions!”

Bram was very serious, now. He got uncomfortable closer to the raging waters. Both of his friends made an involuntary movement to catch him, but he was quicker.

“We come here to look death in the eyes. You see, my family deals daily with things that would make other people die of fright. We have to clean loads of ectoplasm of our house every spring, for God’s sake! Under the right circumstances, we can stare down vampires! Things that normal people call ‘horror movie’ are ‘chores before breakfast’ for us. It’s easy to forget how small and vulnerable we really are. It’s easy to forget that just beneath a layer of familiarity” and he pointed to the water with his head taking another step closer, “it may lay an abyss that we can’t even hope to fight. We are always on the edge of certain death, we just don’t know it. The jump looks easy, and most times, it really is. But one single small failure means nothing but death.

What makes me think it’s the scariest place in England is not the high mortality. Falling in a lava pool also has a 100% mortality rate. It’s that most dangerous things in nature give warnings. Lava pools are hot. Tornadoes are big and make all kind of sounds as the winds twirl quickly. You can see how powerful those things are before deciding that you are stupid and want to touch them anyway. The Strid gives no warning. It looks like a turbulent little streaming, not unlike many others out there. It looks narrow enough to be conquered by a well-placed jump. It looks familiar and safe. And yet, it will kill you remorselessly if you get too close.”

Bram was now as near the Strid as he dared. He tried to picture the deep chasm behind the water line, but he couldn’t. All he managed to do was to feel really, really small.

“Son! Get back right here!”

At this point, Bram’s parents were already there. The boy joined them carefully and they started to spread the food in the towels. Vlad even got his cup of blood.

The picnic was a silent ordeal, as a deep sense of foreboding hung in the air. After they finished eating, everyone went closer to the Strid and sit by it. No one shared their thoughts.

Henry discovered that he and Vlad had a second thing in common: both thought that the Van Helsings had some weird family traditions.

[presumenothing]

once more with feeling

(or, spooky action at no distance)

belated halloween-ish fic, aka questionably-serious crackfic with a heavy side of casual morbidity and inappropriate science. also entirely unedited phonefic which i refuse to even reread before posting. beware of character death (sorry shiho) and property destruction (not sorry). working title: the ectoplasmic method. this is what happens when grad school deadlines meet the looming shadow of finals?? idk just have it anyway

Somewhere, in the cell of a singularly dismal back room –

A figure falls to slump against the wall, the handcuff on one wrist letting out the sad jingle of a clink as it takes on most of her weight.

The same somewhere, scant minutes later –

"Oh, bollocks," says a disembodied voice, two feet up and several inches to the left, with more heartfelt feeling than its owner ever really displayed in life. "This isn't even scientific at all!"

…ahem. Anyway.

The first thing that Shiho does with her newfound freedom from both matter and gravity (along with most of physics and the sciences, really, natural or otherwise) is to float back out to the main lab, and sigh a non-essential breath of relief at the absence of a tiny horde of spectral lab rats scurrying about.

Admittedly the process of doing so is rather less smooth than imagination might suggest, with more error than trial in the grander scale of things, but such is the steady march of science.

Either way, some brief confusion of force and acceleration aside, the lab proves empty of any (other) less-than-corporeal entities.

Hypothesis: either said rats were once here and had since dissipated with the pass of time (because she refuses to use such a vague phrase as move on, even setting aside the question of whether it would even – theoretically – apply to animals of questionable self-awareness), or this… ectoplasmic… existence is yet another astronomically-rare effect of the apoptoxin.

Shiho's still mulling over the question when she reaches for the coffeepot from long habit…

…only for her hand to pass right through it. Predictably enough, in hindsight.

Her eyebrow twitches.

…

……

………………

Revised hypothesis: the afterlife sucks.

The moment of decaffeinated betrayal is interrupted by the insistently loud tick of the wall clock.

Her baleful glare at it yields nothing much of use, since she hasn't had any way of reliably telling the time over the past couple days, given her spectacularly cozy accomodations.

If nothing else, it's probably going to be a couple hours until someone discovers her very dead body and alerts Gin, she thinks in no little vindication – followed by an itemised list of unprintably detailed expletives.

Because, in that moment of thought, she'd suddenly found herself elsewhere in a quantum blink, with no experience or memory of having crossed the intervening space.

And staring Gin almost in the face, no less.

Shiho definitely does not shriek as she throws herself aside, all the while cursing stupidly broken FTL teleports that didn't even have the decency to deposit her somewhere more pleasant. Like Majorca, maybe. Or even back to America.

…actually, on that thought – Shiho narrows her eyes in concentration.

Several (failed) attempts at geographically displacing herself later, she gives it up as a bad job, earmarked for further study. At the very least Gin didn't act like he'd heard any ghostly screeching that may or may not have happened, even if he also failed to display signs of the sudden chill – more's the pity – that featured so consistently in those terrible movies she'd had the misfortune of being coerced into watching by certain people one time too many.

Though she supposes that could also be due to the fact that she'd dodged with the express purpose of not having him walk through her. Not that intersecting spaces with a corridor wall had turned out to be a much more comfortable option, on the whole, but it's mostly a matter of metaphysical principle.

Either way. Shiho inches forward until she's no longer coexisting with shoddily-constructed cinderblock, all the while cheerfully ignoring whatever nefariously above-her-paygrade evil Gin is monologuing about to Vodka, over the increasingly loud click of heels.

…wait. Heels? she repeats mentally, before promptly noping back through the wall before she has to experimentally verify whether Vermouth, of all people, can see her or not.

Which is how she finds herself somewhere that looks suspiciously like Gin's dressing room, complete with shelves of overpriced hair product, full-length mirrors, and a wardrobe she assumes must be full of identical white turtlenecks and black trenchcoats.

"Hm," she says, aloud, as she sets to work. All in the name of science, of course.

(Careful recollection of events, multiple attempts, and a fair assortment of choice swears later, she figures out what her previous attempts at properly haunting ghosthood had been lacking: emotion.

Fortunately, she doesn't lack for any degree of anger in this circumstance. It still takes some trying to have the conditioner bottles explode messily rather than just fall off the shelves with a series of dull thunks, but eventually she manages it.

Though she limits herself to breaking only one mirror. Just in case the bad luck accrues to her instead of Gin.

Then again, she is dead. How much worse can it get, really?)

Armed with her newfound discovery, she attempts to teleport again. A few minutes' intense concentration on the comfortable familiarity of her lab brings her back to where she started, but thinking fondly of her doctoral research lab garners her nothing but a faint headache and an impending sense of hypocrisy.

At least she confirms that her body is still where she left it.

Honestly, she's almost unsure whether to be offended or not, Shiho thinks, as she watches the slow creep of rigor mortis across her muscles.

Unbidden, the lone photo from that newspaper clipping flashes to mind –

"…oh, come on!"

Look, it's not like Shiho can deny the miniature cataclysm of feelings surrounding even the echo of that image, but really? Really? After everything else she's tried?

And why to an elementary school, of all places? Jeez.

Shiho rolls her eyes at the corridor – which stands empty, this time – and swears off shattering any more mirrors before floating off again. There's an awkward moment when she vaguely recalls something about children supposedly being more sensitive to unscientific phenomena, though that's quickly falsified by the inhabitants of the first half-dozen classrooms she passes through, teacher or student alike.

Ironically enough it's the de-aged Kudo Shinichi who does react somewhat to her presence, when she finally manages to locate his classroom – and honestly, couldn't he have at least faked his way into a higher grade? Pretend to be very unusually short for his age or something? That can't be enjoyable at all.

Shiho tries to imagine herself stuck with this bunch of seven-year-olds and can't help a shudder, which is why she almost misses one of said children leaning slightly backwards in her seat to whisper far too loudly. "Are you alright, Conan-kun? Do you need a sweater?"

"No, I'm fine," Kudo-kun demurs, rejecting the profferred garment – quite rightly too, Shiho thinks, since that's just plain asking to be a vector for germs. "Just a cold draft, that's all."

He doesn't look even once in her direction, but relaxes visibly when she finally floats back out of the classroom to observe via a window.

Huh. Interesting. Maybe it's something about having seen too many corpses?

Shiho almost discards that out of hand on grounds of Gin, who had seen easily ten times as many dead bodies, most by virtue of having put them there by his own hands.

Admittedly, now that she thinks on it, it does seem entirely possible that Gin would not notice a localised drop in temperature due to being cold-blooded to start with, anyway.

She has insufficient data, she decides, and three working guesses: either Kudo-kun has seen too many deaths, too many corpses, or he's just looped into the same cosmic joke for having taken the apoptoxin as well.

History and statistics suggest that she'll eventually run into both mass murderers and homicide officers if she hangs around him long enough. Which leaves the third category quite unverifiable, but at least it'd make more sense than some high school detective managing to be the single outlier that should not be counted in any statistic, ever.

Though even waiting out the school day in the hope of some murders happening feels like an increasingly unattractive prospect, she thinks, pulling a face at the chalkboard's worth of mind-numbingly basic math when the bell stubbornly refuses to ring the end of first period.

She didn't skip through the first half of her education just to subject herself to it in death, of all things, and besides it's about time someone found her body anyway.

Shiho contemplates the hallway ceiling for a minute before managing to rebel further against gravity until she reaches the rooftop, already preparing to move herself back to the lab once she gets her bearings straight.

Then someone behind her gasps Shiho? in a voice all too familiar, and she –

Shiho isn't actually too sure what happens, in the following minutes.

Somewhere in the glassy shards of thought left fractured by her sister's voice is a swift-rising horror that it'd all been a lie – that the bullet which killed Akemi-oneechan was one she'd made with her own hands –

And maybe she says some of this out loud, maybe she doesn't, maybe it's simply that her sister has ever been the sole person in this world who understood her (even if she'd only realised that too late), but when the unrelenting static finally clears Shiho find herself not-quite hyperventilating on the rooftop of one Teitan Elementary, head spinning from the lack of air that she doesn't even need, and the one voice she'd never thought she'd hear again.

Even through the haze she can hear onee-chan saying things like it's not your fault, never was and Shiho almost shakes her head in reflexive denial, even as her mind whirrs back to that thrice-damned photograph and whispers agreement in logic, that death by apoptoxin is instantaneous and a gunshot wound would've left a significantly different blood spatter post-mortem, which meant –

"How are you here?" she chokes out, unable and unwilling to look up and meet those eyes. "If it wasn't the APTX – "

"APT– oh, is that the drug you were working on? No," Akemi says, with a sudden vindictiveness that startles Shiho into looking up anyway. "No, it was that utter scumbag Gin who shot me, you can take my word for that."

Shiho supposes that she must look unconvinced somehow, because Akemi adds, "I'd say that you could confirm with that little detective about that, but… well…"

Her gaze follows the wave of onee-chan's hand down to a cluster of small figures in the field, one of which is barely identifiable as Edogawa Conan, from this distance. It raises another dozen questions in turn, but still Shiho persists. "But how are you still here? Why haven't you… moved on?"

"Unfinished business, I suppose you could say."

"Huh?"

Akemi-oneechan blinks at that, in some apparent surprise. "Isn't it obvious?"

Shiho shakes her head in full earnesty.

"Oh, Shiho," Akemi almost-sighs, as she floats over and – catches hold of her hands, with a bout of warmth against all logic, the first solid thing Shiho's felt since this all started. "It's you, of course, it was always you."

…her words won't work and either way she knows not what to say to that, so Shiho just stands (floats) there, gaping silently like an idiot.

Somehow Akemi-oneechan is still smiling. "Well, I mean – I did manage to track down Dai-kun by accident, and I've been keeping an eye out for anything around Conan-kun, you wouldn't believe the amount of trouble he gets into. But the only one I worried over was you, and yet I couldn't find you, no matter what I tried…"

Shiho tries – and mostly fails – to process all this, and pieces together the next logical question. "Then what about me?"

She'd thought that it'd been because of the apoptoxin, but that's obviously invalid now, even if it galls her to replace that with such a ridiculously nebulous notion as unfinished business –

"There must be something you haven't done, a wish you haven't fulfilled, or… well," Akemi pauses, and Shiho can tell just from the lilt of her tone that she's not going to like whatever follows next, "like I've always been telling you, maybe it's just that you need to live a little. Have some fun, you know!"

And Shiho surprises them both by snorting a laugh at that. "In that case, I've gotten a start on that already."

To describe Akemi-oneechan's expression as starry-eyed would not be amiss, nor her voice as a squeal. "What did you do?"

"…destroy all of Gin's hair products?"

"Really?! Oh my god, Shiho-chan, I'm so proud, I always knew you had it in you – "

.

.

.

(AO3)

listen i literally?? don’t even?? know???? i did not see this coming, no plans here only bad jokes. the semi-crack antidote to this previous fic or something i guess, except not. don’t @ me 

[spaceagesap]

Mountains II

Whoops sorry it’s been literally forever, hope someone somewhere still gives half a shit about this thing <3

Previously on Mountains: Pt 1

- - - - -

“So this is it.” 

“This is it,” Maggie confirmed, watching Alex with equal parts apprehension and amusement. 

Alex scanned the room, nodding appreciatively. It was a small place, with room for only a few mismatched tables inside. The real selling point, Maggie had told her, was the patio.   

Two large garage doors made up one wall of the restaurant. On nice nights, they were pulled up so that the smell of pizza was all but lost to the smell of dirt and leaves. The patio was lit with a few strands of string lights strung between the building and the trees, which stood atop a narrow strip of earth that unraveled into big boulders that made up the riverbank. The river beyond rushed over the rocks and tree roots in its path with rumbling enthusiasm. 

That night, the restaurant was empty, save for Maggie, Alex, and the skeleton crew who held down the fort in the offseason.   

“Best pizza place in Aspenvale,” Maggie said as she ambled out onto the patio with her hands shoved into her pockets, picking the table closest to the river before taking a seat.   

“Only pizza place in Aspenvale, you mean.” Alex sat down across from Maggie, leveling her with a knowing smirk. 

Maggie hung her head, shaking it as she laughed lightly. 

“Who tipped you off?" 

“The phonebook,” Alex shrugged as she scanned the beer list. 

“The phonebook? Who uses phonebooks anymore, Danvers?” 

“I forgot my book. I was bored.” 

“You know there’s a TV in the room, right?” 

“Yeah, well. For what it’s worth, I saw that there are three different ice cream shops, so I have some questions about that.” 

“I’m sure we can find some answers.” Maggie paused and had the decency to look a little contrite. “Sorry. Usually I don’t look to build friendships on lies.” She picks at the label on the bottle in front of her, looking sheepish. “Had to give you a reason to call me, right?”   

“Called you anyway, didn’t I?”   

Alex arched an eyebrow and Maggie felt her heart give a little flip, but did her best to ignore it. 

- - - - - “No way.” Alex shook her head. “No. There’s no way that’s real."

Maggie leaned back in her chair, smirking. “Swear on my badge.”  

“You’re exaggerating. Again. Show-off.” 

“Maybe a little,” Maggie grinned, shrugging. "But it was definitely a bear and I definitely saved at least two rabbits.” 

“A hero the likes of which this world has never known,” Alex deadpanned, taking a generous swig of her second beer. “I’m sure they’re already making plans for a statue in the middle of the town square, Sawyer.”

“That’s Ranger Sawyer to you, Danvers.” 

“Doctor Danvers, if we’re getting formal.” 

“Right, right,” Maggie nodded. “Doctor of what, exactly?” 

“I studied bioengineering." 

“Really?” 

“Why would I lie about that?” 

“Maybe you’re trying to impress me,” Maggie shrugged. 

“Don’t have to lie to do it. That’s your wheelhouse.”

“Noted,” Maggie laughed. “So, tell me, how does a bioengineer end up with the Geological Survey?” 

Alex shrugged. “More partial to dirt than blood."  

“Of course,” Maggie nodded, smirking. "Anything else I should know about you, Doc? Going to tell me what brings you to our fine corner of the range just as the weather’s starting to turn to shit?” 

Alex eyed her carefully for a moment, considering the question.   

Because Alex Danvers was good at undercover assignments. Whether she was working or not, Alex focused on the needs of the people around her constantly — what they needed to hear, what they wanted to hear, what might put them at ease, what might make them trust her. Alex Danvers was good at undercover work because she was good at using trust to her advantage. 

But she didn’t need Maggie’s trust, didn’t need her help. She was undercover, sure, but only insofar as she couldn’t very well say that she was a part of a government organization that didn’t, strictly speaking, exist. She was on a bogus assignment looking for something that wasn’t there. There were no complex roles, no involved backstories, no need for layered lies or deceit. For the most part, she could tell the truth. Or at least, some version of it. Alex was surprised to find that it was something of a relief. 

“Chasing ghosts, mostly,” Alex said. 

“That’s a first. Ectoplasm in the soil?” 

Alex chuckled, absently running a finger over the scarred table top in front of her. “Not as such, no.” She chanced a look up at Maggie. “My boss sent me here for a few weeks. Said that I needed a break and that if I was too stubborn to take a vacation on my own, he’d mandate the next best thing.” 

“Your boss put you on an assignment a hundred miles away just to get you out of the office?”

“Something like that." 

“Right,” Maggie smirked. “Sounds like you’ve got a healthy relationship with work. So who’s up here with you?” 

Alex frowned, confused. “No one. Just me.” 

“Oh,” Maggie said. “I mean, I just thought...” she trailed off, hesitating for a moment. "You said that you had a ride coming the other day when I met you. I figured she was here with you.” 

“Right,” Alex remembered. “My sister. She wanted to see the town. But she lives in National City. She, uh, flew back.” ��

"So you’re here by yourself for a few weeks of peace and quiet while you tear up my beautifully maintained trails for soil samples?” 

“Guess so.” 

“Let’s hope you find something good, then.” 

Alex laughed lightly, “I wouldn’t count on it.” 

Maggie raised an eyebrow. 

“There’s some evidence of a rare mineral here, but it’s flimsy at best,” Alex said. "I think my boss expects that I’ll spend a lot of time outside finding a whole lot of nothing."   

Maggie nodded, smirking. “So you have a sister, you like Bill Withers, you read phonebooks for fun, and you work too hard,” she said. “That about sum it up?" Alex laughed, worrying the paper label of the bottle between her fingers, “Guilty as charged.” 

“Lucky me,” Maggie tilted her head. “Can’t say that I’m not a little thrilled to have a new face in town. Things tend to get pretty slow around this time of year. Town shrinks back down to 200 and suddenly you’re hearing the same boring stories you’ve heard from the same people every year since you were 11.” “I’m sure they’re nice stories.”

“And I’m sure you’ll hear plenty of them. Reserve judgement.” Alex chuckled, and then it hit her all at once. It was one of those moments when, without meaning to, you suddenly finding yourself taking stock. You take notice of the way the light’s hitting the trees, the way the breeze carries the smell of afternoon rain and conifers, the way the music from inside the restaurant is just the right volume as it mixes with the sound of the river and they seem to have agreed on the same key.   

Alex took stock and realized that without design or intention, she felt remarkably content. Good, even. Her cheeks hurt, tired from smiling more than she was used to, and her shoulders held none of the tension that seemed permanent in National City. She wasn’t thinking about bullets or bad guys or national safety. She was just a girl, eating pizza and drinking beer with Maggie Sawyer, who was funny and smart and had dozens of stories that were vivid and thrilling, if half-true at best. 

Ostensibly, they were two people who’d met by chance, getting pizza because Maggie was hungry and was also the only person Alex had spoken to in Aspenvale, outside of Loretta. But Maggie didn’t treat her like she was just someone she’d happened to pick up, someone who was just an excuse for company.   

She listened when Alex spoke, teased her gently, talked to her like they didn’t need the grace period most require to become comfortable with another person. She was open and honest (save for exaggerated accounts of heroism) and kind, and Alex found that there was something in the way that she smiled that made Alex feel like if goodness still existed, it called Aspenvale home. It had been a long time since Alex had been close to anyone outside of Kara. She was friendly with Kara’s friends, sure, but they didn’t often spend time together unless Kara was around, too. Suddenly, the idea of Maggie as a friend, as someone who was just hers, made Alex feel — 

“You still with me, Danvers?” 

Alex turned her attention back to Maggie, shaking her head to dispel thoughts too heavy for an uneven patio table topped with a couple of empty bottles and a few remaining slices of greasy pizza. She returned to safer thoughts of rivers and trees and the Stevie Wonder record playing inside.   

“Yeah, sorry,” Alex said. “What did you say?” 

“Just wondering if you wanted to see a man about some ice cream." - - - - - “Sometimes I think about it,” Alex admitted through a spoonful of ice cream as she and Maggie walked side-by-side along the bank of the river. “I mean, I wonder where I’d be if it hadn’t been for Kara, if she'd never come to us, if we’d never adopted her.”   

Alex stopped near a large boulder, promptly climbing atop it and sitting down, elbows on her knees. Maggie joined her a second later. 

“I’d be worse off, I’m sure,” Alex said, watching the river as she ate another spoonful. “Kara’s the best thing that ever happened to me. Even when she’s insufferable.” 

“I’m jealous,” Maggie said. "I always wanted siblings.” She grabbed a nearby pebble and tossed it into the river with a satisfying plunk. “I was a pretty happy kid, but I always felt like I was missing something.” Maggie squinted up at the dark sky, considering. “You know, someone willing to back you up, no matter what.” 

“You need a lot of backup as a kid, Sawyer?” Alex said, half-joking. 

“Oh yeah,” Maggie blew out a sigh. “Don’t get me wrong, I love it here now, but that took a long time.” 

Alex quirked an eyebrow in question.   

"Aspenvale’s a small town,” Maggie explained. "People talk. As soon as you get caught kissing the Mayor’s daughter backstage after theater practice, your personal life is suddenly everyone’s business.” 

There it was. 

Alex had been pretty sure she’d read Maggie right, but the subject hadn’t really come up. And in truth, Alex was still new to this. She’d come out a little over a year ago, but in that time, she’d only been on a handful of relatively unsuccessful dates. Aside from a label to put with the sensation of turning into a blushing, stuttering mess around pretty girls, not much had changed. Alex Danvers still didn’t have much time for a love life. 

Somehow, knowing that Maggie was gay made things feel different. Not for the first time tonight, Alex wondered what it might feel like to be on a date with Maggie Sawyer. She wondered what it might be like to mean something to Maggie, to be more than what they were, which was something between acquaintances and friends. 

Perhaps it was a testament to just how few friends Alex had and just how long it’d been since she’d allowed herself to connect to anyone in any way, outside of her immediate family and friends, but Alex found herself sort of thrilled by Maggie.   

“The Mayor’s daughter, huh?” Alex smirked, fighting to keep her voice steady.   

“Yeah,” Maggie laughed. “Too bad she was dating the quarterback of the football team at the time. Big guy, lot of big friends.” 

Alex turned to look at Maggie, concern etched on her face. “Did they...?” 

“I was quick and scrappy. They usually didn’t get the opportunity.” 

“Usually?” 

“They might’ve caught up once or twice.” 

Alex tried hard to swallow the lump in her throat, tried to quell the rage building in her chest. The idea of Maggie becoming an outlet for the anger of an entitled teenage boy made her furious and nauseous in equal measure. 

“Jesus,” Alex breathed. “I’m sorry, Maggie. I can’t imagine.” 

Maggie shrugged. “It’s nothing. Ancient history now,” she said.   

It wasn’t nothing, Alex knew. “And it’s better now? People don’t give you a hard time anymore?” 

Maggie nodded. “For the most part, yeah, it’s better. It’s not perfect, but it’s good.” 

Alex took a deep breath. “I’ve wondered how things might’ve been if I’d been out when I was in school,” she said. 

Maggie turned her attention to Alex. “Where’d you grow up?” 

“Midvale." 

“Probably a little different, then,” Maggie smiled good-naturedly.

“Probably,” Alex agreed. “For what it’s worth, though, if I’d grown up here, I would’ve stuffed more than a few of those jocks into garbage cans.” 

Maggie laughed, head tilted ever so slightly as she looked carefully at Alex. “I appreciate it, Danvers. And I don’t doubt it.” - - - - - “Danvers,” Maggie Sawyer’s voice came over the speaker on Alex’s phone the next morning. "Got something you might want to see.” 

“O…kay?” 

“You free? I’ll pick you up.” 

“I-uh, yeah. Definitely.” 

“Perfect. You ready now?” 

“Sure.” 

“Great. Ten minutes." 

Alex was not, in fact, ready. She was, as it turned out, still in bed. 

It was 6 a.m. on a Thursday. And while National City Alex Danvers would’ve been awake and halfway through a run at 6 a.m., Aspenvale Alex Danvers was finding that staying in bed with a cup of coffee as the sun made its lazy debut was, at least on occasion, deeply preferable. Alex saw nothing wrong with her bed in National City, but this bed was bigger, softer, warmer, and came with the added bonus of being far, far away from national emergencies and alien crises.  

Though she’d never admit out loud, Alex could acknowledge privately, in the security of this room, that perhaps J’onn had been right. Maybe she had needed a break. 

As soon as she hung up the phone, Alex stowed her coffee on the nightstand and hopped out of bed, pulled on her black jeans and sweater, and did her best to smooth out the part of her hair that always seemed to lay funny after she slept on it. 

Eight minutes later, she was outside, coat and hiking boots on, hair laying mostly flat. Maggie pulled up a moment later, the windows of her truck rolled down. 

“Morning, Danvers,” she greeted as Alex slid into the passenger seat. “Nice glasses.” 

Alex’s hand flew to her face, touching the plastic frames of her glasses self-consciously. “Shit. I don’t usually — I just forgot to — " 

“Stop. They’re cute,” Maggie assured, turning toward Alex and tilting her head, eyes warm as she smiled. Alex felt a blush rising to her cheeks.   

“Thanks,” she said, her voice barely loud enough to be heard over the engine as Maggie put the truck in gear and pulled away from the inn. 

“Sorry, after I called I realized that not everyone here runs on Ranger time. Hope I didn’t wake you.” 

Alex waved her off. “No, I was up.” 

“Here, brought you some coffee to atone.” Maggie handed Alex a cup from the cupholder.   

Alex accepted gratefully, taking a sip. And, to her credit, she tried very hard not to grimace when she tasted it. She failed, though, and Maggie noticed. 

“Sorry. I should’ve warned you. I’ve been told I tend to make my coffee a little strong.” 

Alex thought that “a little strong” was something of an understatement for a substance that , but kept that to herself. 

“No, no it’s fine.” Alex took another sip. “It’s nice. Thanks.” 

In so many ways, Alex wasn’t used to this. Wasn’t used to having someone other than Kara or J’onn or her mother call her. She wasn’t used to spending so much time with anyone other than Kara, let alone several consecutive days -- for pizza, for coffee, for ice cream. She wasn’t used to someone thinking about her, to being on someone's mind. 

But Maggie thought about her. Alex knew she did. Maggie texted her to ask her about her day of "ghost hunting." She sent her pictures while she was out walking trails with captions like “look at this rock, doesn’t it look like J.K. Simmons?” or “you ever seen a marmot, Danvers?” or “in case you still had doubts about the axe.” Maggie had even called yesterday to warn her about another unexpected afternoon storm.   

“Are you warm enough?” Maggie asked, glancing at her as they drove down Main Street and toward the edge of town that bordered the park. “I can close the windows. I just — “ 

“Nope,” Alex shook her head. “I’m great.” She took another sip of coffee, relishing the way that the cup warmed her hands. In truth, the cab was chilly, but it was the kind of chill that can make you feel lucky to be out, to be out in the world so early in the morning. The kind that’s just this side of uncomfortable, that’s a reminder that fresh air is a powerful drug and that hot coffee in cold weather is a little something like everyday magic. 

They drove in silence for a few minutes, the town disappearing behind them as tall trees cropped up on either side of the increasingly winding road.   

“Am I allowed to ask where we’re going?” 

“You are." 

“Are you going to answer?”

“Nope.”   

Alex rolled her eyes. “Is this how it ends? Are you kidnapping me for real this time?” 

“Kidnappers don’t usually bring coffee, Danvers.” 

“Good point,” Alex nodded. “But I have to say that the amount of Dolly Parton you listen to strikes me as kind of suspicious behavior.” 

“Yeah, that tape’s been stuck in there since I was in high school,” Maggie laughed. “Given my musical preferences back then, let’s just say it could’ve been a lot worse.” 

“It’s growing on me, I’ll admit.”     

Alex almost didn’t catch it then. If her head had been turned a little bit further, if she’d just a little more focused on something outside the window instead of on the music and the coffee and Maggie, she probably wouldn’t have noticed it at all. But as it happened, she did notice. She noticed the way Maggie took her eyes off of the road for just a second to look over at Alex. She noticed the way Maggie smiled, the way she bit her lip, the way she drew in a deep and almost-silent breath. Alex noticed, and it made her heart feel full — so full it almost hurt.   

Because something about being there with Maggie, something about the way the mountains looked in the early morning sun and the way the trees stood tall over the road and the way the coffee was just a tad too strong but just the right temperature made Alex feel good. Really good. 

Maggie pulled the truck to a stop in a tiny dirt pull-off on the side of the road a few miles from town and stepped out, slinging a pack over her shoulder. Alex followed, coffee cup still in hand. She wanted to ask what, exactly, they were doing, but Maggie beat her to it. 

“Don’t ask, Danvers. It’s hard to explain." 

And so they made their way over fallen leaves and twisted roots and dirt that still held a hint of yesterday’s rain and a near-brush with frost overnight. They walked for a handful of minutes before Maggie stopped several feet back from the point where the ground dropped off sharply into a deep valley. Maggie stooped, waving Alex closer.   

“Here,” she said, pointing. “You ever seen anything like that?” 

Alex bit the inside of her cheek, hard. Because the truth was that she had seen something like that. It was blue and glowing, its crystalline surface catching the morning light just so. Though she hadn’t ever seen it in person, Alex knew what it was in an instant that it was Rag’norium. 

Maggie reached forward, extending her hand toward it, but Alex caught it, stopping her. 

“Don’t touch it,” Alex cautioned.   

“What is it?” 

Classified was the word on the tip of Alex’s tongue. Because it was true. Technically speaking, Rag’norium didn’t exist. It wasn’t in textbooks or on periodic tables accessible to anyone without a hefty government clearance level.   

But this was Maggie. Maggie, who brought her coffee and asked about her family. Maggie, who had only known Alex for all of five days but treated her like she meant something to Maggie, like she mattered, like they were friends. Maggie, who thought about Alex at least once a day and made sure she knew it.   

Alex couldn’t tell her what it was, but she also couldn’t just shut her down with the “classified” card.   

“It’s hard to explain,” Alex said, hoping that Maggie might be satisfied with that.  

“Try me.” 

Dammit. 

“It’s a mineral,” Alex ceded. “Really rare, really volatile.” 

“Okay, so why’s it here now?” 

Alex frowned. “What do you mean ’now’?” 

“I run this trail every morning. I’ve never seen it before.” 

Everything Alex knew about Rag’norium flew in the face of a claim like that. The deposits weren’t naturally occurring — they were, essentially, a byproduct from ships powered by super-dense Thalydian cores. It started with something like exhaust and condensation — trace amounts of concentrated Rag’norium left behind by the ships react with the nitrogen in Earth’s atmosphere — and, a week or two after the ship’s departure, a Rag’norium vein was discovered. 

It’d happened exactly twice in the entire history of the D.E.O.: Once in 1968 and again in 2003, the latter occurring several miles away, the epicenter of Alex's field work thus far. 

But a Rag’norium vein here, now, meant that a ship had been here recently and that Alex wasn’t searching for decades-old deposits. It meant, of course, that all of a sudden, Alex was investigating undocumented contact, possibly with a group that meant Earth harm.   

Thalydian cores were outlawed in many parts of the galaxy. They were a notorious staple of older ships, now used almost exclusively by smugglers. Whoever they were, they likely weren’t stopping by to check out the World’s Largest Ball of Yarn. 

“You run this every morning?”   

Alex chided herself internally for sounding less than professional as a note of admiration crept into her tone. 

“We all have our vices, Danvers.” 

“And you’ve never seen this?” 

“Pretty sure I’d remember it.” 

Alex nodded. “I need to get some samples. Can you —“ 

“Way ahead of you.” Maggie opened her back to pull out a small field sample kit. It wasn’t quite D.E.O. caliber, but it would do. Alex arched an eyebrow, impressed. 

"Rangers are more than crowd control and saving pretty girls from surprise rainstorms, Danvers." 

Alex felt a blush rising to her cheeks and ducked her head as she accepted the kit from Maggie.   

"Yeah, I've heard rumors of a fair amount axe-wielding." 

"You and that axe," Maggie shook her head. "Should I be worried?" - - - - - "This mean you found your ghost?"   

Alex climbed into the passenger seat and pulled the door closed, trying and failing to find a graceful way to answer the question without really answering it.   

"I don't know," she said.   

It was true. In a way. Alex didn't know what she'd found and she had even less of an idea about what it meant.   

"Best guess?"   

Jesus she's persistent.

"Some version of it, yeah."   

Maggie nodded. "This where we run into the 'Classified' wall?" 

"Sorry." 

"S'alright," Maggie shrugged. "You'll tell me if it's something dangerous, right? If it's something that puts the town or the Park at risk?" 

If Maggie noticed Alex's hesitation, she didn't let on. 

“Of course,” said Alex. And as Maggie pulled the truck back out onto the two-lane road, she tried hard not to think about the fact that outside of the usual, unavoidable things like who she worked for and why she was in Aspenvale, this was the first time she’d lied to Maggie.   

Alex Danvers had lied plenty of times about plenty of things on plenty of occasions, but something about this lie, here, to Maggie Sawyer, settled in her heart like a stone.

[flightyrock]

Ectober Day 3: Spirits

Summary: Vlad snatches Danny from his bed at an unreasonable time with an unconventional invitation.  It’s not at all what you’d expect.

Warnings: I can’t really think of anything?  This one is more melancholy than anything

Relationships: Platonic Danny and Vlad

Word Count: ~2500

Notes are at the end. Enjoy!

Danny was roused from slumber by a cool hand enclosing around his ankle, and pulling him unceremoniously through the floor into the basement of Tucker’s house before he could so much as yelp.

He reflexively glanced down, registering a black glove releasing its grip, before triggering his transformation, trading pajamas for his signature hazmat, and charging an ectoblast.

“Daniel, wait!” Vlad exclaimed, quietly, sparing a quick glance at the ceiling before releasing his ghost form.

“I simply wish to speak with you.”

Danny was understandably suspicious, not to mention incredibly confused.  But since Vlad was here, in human form, he supposed it couldn’t hurt to hear him out.  Appearing so late at night while Danny was at a friend’s house was incredibly unusual behavior for him.  And, now that Danny took the time to look a bit closer, he could feel that something was a bit different about Vlad tonight.

He was fidgeting; just his fingers, drumming impatiently against his leg, waiting for Danny to join him on the ground.  Vlad was always so carefully controlled, every action planned and deliberate, impossible to read, poker face firmly in place without fail. But now, he was getting a strange, nervous energy from Vlad, a level of vulnerability he had never witnessed before.  It was…weird.

Before he knew it, Danny found himself releasing the transformation and standing next to a musty pile of opaque plastic bins in place of the traditional cardboard boxes. Tucker’s parents obviously paid attention to the ghost prevention bulletins that had been issued to minimize ghost activity in the area, bringing Danny an odd rush of satisfaction.  It was nice to have his suggestions taken seriously.  It made him feel like a productive member of society and less like—

“—a child?  Daniel, are you listening to me?”

Jeez, he supposed he was still waking up.  Not that Vlad should blame him for that; it was very late and he had been awoken pretty rudely.  He did idly register Vlad speaking a bit too fast, but truthfully had no idea what he had been saying.

“Huh?” Danny replied intelligently, only to be met with an eye roll.

“Honestly Daniel, did you get any of that?”

Danny’s expression must have been answer enough, because Vlad just sighed and massaged his temples briefly with index and middle fingers.

“Fine, let’s try this again. Daniel, as I’m sure you are aware, we are the only two half-ghosts in existence–”

Danny groaned.  Not this again.  At least once a month, Vlad would give him his usual spiel about renouncing his father, and becoming his evil apprentice, or something.

“Would you please just hear me out?” Vlad snapped.  

Danny snorted in disbelief, but made a show of sitting down on one of the bins, before sarcastically gesturing for Vlad to continue with a careless wave of a hand.

Vlad visibility gathered himself, before bracing himself and starting his spiel over again.

“As I was saying, we are the only two half ghosts in existence.  That means that it is my duty as the eldest to educate you in the ways of our culture—“

“Whoa, whoa!”

Vlad’s glare was cutting, but strangely enough, wasn’t threatening.  Super weird.

“You can’t be serious! Our culture?  You said it yourself, there are literally two of us!  Any ‘culture’ we have you totally made up!” Danny snarked, emphasizing his point with air quotes.

Vlad crossed his arms, with a huff.

“I realize that the educational system in this country has done you no favors, Daniel, but I didn’t take you for a fool.  Like our unique physiology, our culture consists of both human and ghostly elements.  Since you have been a human for most of your life, you’ll forgive me if I skip over that part.

“I was referring to ghost culture, as we are ectoplasmic in addition to flesh and blood.  In this, I have had over twenty years to struggle through the research process, alone, and though I am aware that we do not exactly see eye to eye, this does not change who we are, nor minimize my duty to you.”

Danny was just as confused as when they started this bizarre meeting.  Vlad was saying quite a bit, but communicating almost nothing.  Add his erratic mannerisms into the mix, and it was vaguely alarming at least, utterly bizarre, and almost inexplicably out of character.  Unless…

Vlad was nervous.  

Danny was surprised he didn’t pick up on this sooner.  He was usually great at reading people.

On second thought, perhaps it wasn’t so surprising.  Danny didn’t exactly think of Vlad as another person, he realized, with an idle stab of guilt.  To him, Vlad was less than a person, just an evil obstacle that Danny was forced to overcome.

Right now, Danny didn’t see an obstacle.  He saw another person, a person that was still making no sense whatsoever.

“Oh-kay…” Danny drawled. “But why now?  Why risk talking to me at” he glanced at his wrist out of habit, only to flush in vague humiliation, idly recalling that he had removed his watch before going to bed, “whatever time of night it is, in hostile territory?”

“Well,” Vlad began rubbing his upper arm, “tonight the ghost zone is hosting a display that only occurs on this scale once every seven to ten years or so, and I didn’t want you to miss it. I have only caught it once before.”

Danny blinked in surprise. This was…not even close to what he expected.  Not that he had any idea what he had been expecting when Vlad yanked him through the floor.

“Why? No,” he said, cutting Vlad off as he opened his mouth, presumably to launch into that awkward torrent of word vomit again. “I did figure out that whatever this is is pretty special.  Why would you care if I miss it?”

A strange look flitted across Vlad’s face, before being smoothed over by his usual façade.

“I am not so petty that I would allow our rivalry to prevent you from bearing witness.  But, as you are clearly not interested, I’ve said my piece and fulfilled my duty, so you are free to go back to your little sleepover,” he sniffed, before turning sharply on his heel and transforming.

“Wait!” cried Danny.  “I never said I wasn’t interested.  I’m just…” he paused, trying to gather all his vague disjointed impressions of the evening into a coherent explanation, “it’s just, well, I’ve been dying to learn more about ghost culture for so long, but with the way things are between you and me, I never dreamed that you’d want to share this with me.  Not that you’ve told me what this is,” he said, staring pointedly into glowing red eyes.

Vlad blinked, taken aback.

“So, are you saying you’ll come with me?”

“Wait, what?”  Daniel asked, confused again.  “You are not making any sense tonight.  Maybe you should give it to me straight.  Are you asking me come with you?  Because I can’t even tell.”

Vlad chuckled, relaxing slightly.

“Yes, well, I didn’t really…plan this out.  I was just up, and my calculations indicated that it would peak in about,” Vlad glanced at his phone, “thirty minutes.”

Danny was beginning to lose patience.

“What is ‘it’?!”

Vlad smiled, not smirked, but smiled.  Gah, did he cross over to some weird parallel universe?

“It’s…hard to explain, in words.  It would be much better to show you.  You’ll understand then.  But we should leave now; we need to get to a very specific corner of the ghost zone.”

Danny was admittedly torn. Normally, he’d question his sanity for even considering following Vlad, his arch-enemy, anywhere with virtually no information.  Vlad had outsmarted him, tricked him, more times than he could count, displaying smug delight every step along the way.

But perhaps that was what was so different tonight, and what was putting him strangely at ease.  Absent were said smug undertones, only to be replaced by what only could be described as authenticity.  There was an inexplicable air of sincerity about everything Vlad had said and did tonight.  Nothing sounded rehearsed, heck, Vlad had even sounded sloppy, stumbling through disjointed thoughts like a nervous teenager.

So Danny found himself transforming, and following Vlad out into the night.

Vlad was pleasantly surprised by Daniel’s easy agreement to accompany him tonight.  He wasn’t entirely certain what he was expecting, or what had compelled him to ask Daniel at the last minute like this.

No, he supposed he wasn’t being completely honest with himself.  He knew why he had asked Daniel to come with him.

But he didn’t wish to dwell on that at the moment, so he didn’t, leading Daniel through the Fenton Portal and through the surreal green environment of the ghost zone.

Vlad sighed, taking a moment to enjoy the temporary physical relief granted by the rejuvenating ecto energy that permeated this reality.  It was a strain on his ghost form to exist solely on the human plane for too long.  He could see the boy relax as well, out of the corner of his eye, no doubt enjoying the sensation as much as he.

He led them through a series of doors, one ornate and wooden, one made of a shiny volcanic glass, and one no bigger than a window, into a unique area of the ghost zone split by a dark chasm below and above, infinite in depth and too vast to see across. Vlad wasn’t eager to test his theory about the extent of this anomaly.

The boy stiffened, clearly reevaluating his decision to follow someone less than friendly into a dark, isolated corner of the ghost zone without leaving so much as a note behind.

He really is naïve.  Not that he’s wrong; I could easily take advantage of this, if I was so inclined.

“Relax, Daniel,” Vlad rolled his eyes.  “If I truly wished to dispose of you, there would be no warning.  I would not bother to ask you to accompany me.”

“Oh, is that what you were trying to do?”  Daniel had the gall to laugh, but oddly, the sound put him at ease, rather than on edge as it normally would.  Not mocking, but dare he say, friendly?

“Vlad, most people don’t sneak into rooms and talk circles around someone.  They just ask.”

“How?” Vlad said plainly, curious despite himself, though he hadn’t exactly meant to vocalize that particular thought.

Danny did a double take.

“You mean…you’ve never…”

Vlad chuckled bitterly.

“Do I strike you as someone to indulge in idle companionship?  Most of the time I have a secretary write up paper invitations if the situation truly demands it.”

“Vlad,” Danny looked him in the eye, “seriously, just say, ‘hey, I’m going to do this thing, would you like to come along?’ It’s not hard, though,” he conceded, “I guess it does take some getting used to.  At least that way, as the other party, I’d have some idea of what I’m being invited to…do? Watch?  Could you, maybe, explain now, because I’m still pretty confused.”

Vlad felt his face flush a bit, flustered despite himself.

“Yes, well,” he coughed, awkwardly.  “It’s…quite the experience.  I’m honestly not sure how to explain it.  You’ll know it when it starts, though.”

And know “it” he did. Danny could only watch in awe at the spectacle that unfolded before his wide eyes.

Vlad was right.  The event, for lack of a better word, overwhelmed all senses, known and unknown.  

Visually, the closest frame of reference he had was a scene from that popular movie with the girl and the hair, when they were on the boat on a lake, surrounded by thousands of paper lanterns.

These were not paper lanterns.  But, rising from the lower darkness by the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, he could claim the effect was similar, much in the way a trickle from the faucet in is bathroom was similar to Niagara Falls.

There was no way to describe the scale of the majesty.  He was powerless before its might, the only possible course of action to bear witness. Somehow, he knew he was in for the duration, but this neither good nor bad.  It simply was.

His heartstrings twinged painfully at the sheer beauty of the lights, shimmering up from the depths with an ethereal quality that he simply couldn’t convey with an adequate degree of coherence.  The toxic ectoplasmic green of the ghost zone fell away, powerless before the gold, silver, and white lights that shone forth radiantly.  They were roughly spherical in shape.  He thought?  Honestly, they morphed and shifted so rapidly, it was much too difficult to follow.

The light.  He felt that light, it pierced him to his very core, and it was everything.  He was almost unbearably happy, devastated, freezing to death, boiling in acid, awash in a dream, painfully lucid, completely numb, and awash in a near infinity of other sensations, blurring together and filling him to a point that pushed him to the brink of sanity.

And the sound.  He would never be able to do it justice, but it cut deep.  He wouldn’t revert to stereotypes and crass comparisons, but it rose and fell endlessly. He was soaring, immersed in the light. He was the light, and it was him, inside and everywhere and nowhere, heartbreakingly beautiful, singing of the essence of existence and void, unceasing in its melodious call.

Tears swelled and overflowed, running unbidden and unacknowledged down his cheeks and from his nose, gathering and dripping off his chin, authentic and unapologetic.

There was no telling how long this short eternity continued, and Danny lost all track of self during that time.  It ended slowly, a few straggles climbing upward, only to disappear into the mysterious darkness above, leaving a tenuous peace to settle over the observing parties.

Only to be broken by a sharp, wet inhalation.

Danny jolted as the heavy silence was broken by Vlad sniffing and wiping at his face with a silk handkerchief.  He had completely forgotten that Vlad was here, was the one who had brought him here in the first place.  To “bear witness,” he vaguely recalled.  Indeed.

Vlad seemed to jolt in a similar realization as he glanced over at Danny, sniffing messily, and wordlessly procured a fresh cloth and handed it to him.

Danny accepted gratefully, taking the time to clean himself up a bit, strangely unaffected by his unconventional companion grossly sobbing alongside him.

They floated in companionable silence for awhile, the spectacle having temporarily erased all barriers between them.  No words were necessary, and it felt wrong to pierce this comfortable atmosphere, but Danny had to know.

“What,” he choked off, voice cracking from disuse, “what was that?”

Vlad seemed to get the idea, though.  He stared straight ahead into the void.

“Spirits,” he stated, content, for once, to leave it at that.

And Danny understood.

A/N:  Sorry, I know it just kind of cuts off there with no real explanation, but at that time, it was more important to maintain the mood.  Danny understood inately what these beings were, but he wanted confirmation from Vlad.  These were spirits of various beings throughout time and space.  I drew inspiration from La Dia de Los Muertos and lantern festivals.

At first, these Ectober one-shots weren’t meant to be connected, but I think they all will read equally well separately or as part of a larger narrative.  I’m mainly using these to practice writing on a daily basis and to push past perfectionism, so I don’t spend as much time editing as I should.  But I love feedback, so feel free if the mood strikes.  Thanks for reading!

[seengularity]

Code Blue part 3

Pairing: At the moment, none. One might come soon.

Summary: Double threat. Saving lives and killing monsters.

Word Count: 1.2k

Warnings: little bit of angst, talk about dead family

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of Code Blue

*one week later*

"Wow! So you guys live here?" You asked, bringing in your bags and placing them in the main room.

"This place is like a mansion. Can I get lost in here?" You asked, continuing to stare at the place that Sam and Dean called the "bunker".

"I got lost in here a few times when we first found the place. It's really roomy and has several bedrooms. Sam and I have rooms in separate hallways. You can go ahead and pick which one you want to stay in for this hunt," Dean placed his bags on the table in the library. He stared at you as you took in the many books that filled the library room.

"There are so many books! Hybrids of vampires and werewolves, curing demons, and," you paused on one of the books slightly confused, "leviathans? What are those?"

"The nastiest things you could ever kill. Borax weakens them," Sam said taking a seat at one of the tables.

"Borax? Like the stuff kids put in slime? I heard that can irritate your skin. Does it kill them or it just weakens them?" You asked, picking the leviathan book off the shelf.

"It only weakens them. To kill them, you need a bone of a righteous mortal washed in the three bloods of the fallen," Sam said laughing as he seen your eyes grow wide.

"Sounds like hard work," you put the book back, hoping you would never run into those things.

Sam took his laptop out of his bag, tucking his hair behind his ears, and began typing away. Dean walked away into another room that you had no idea where it led to.

You continued looking through the books, amazed at the many things you never heard of. You had been hunting monsters ever since your first year working in the hospital, when a body was brought in with its heart cannibalized out of its body.

It was crazy at first, hunting the things that go bump in the night, but ever since you were small, you always had an eerie feeling that the monsters in your closet were real.

It had actually been a while since you had last hunted. You usually found your hunts when people with weird marks or weird wounds would come in. That's how you found your cases.

"So, apparently a couple of women went missing in a month, each within a one mile radius of an abandoned building. Says that there was a 'blue residue' left behind where the women were last seen. Cops stopped searching when they no longer had any clues as to where the women would be," Sam caught your attention and you walked over to the table and sat across from him.

"What leaves blue residue? A ghost?" You asked confused. Nothing you had ever hunted left behind blue residue before.

Sam shook his head, making his hair cover his ears. "No, ectoplasm is usually black."

"It can be a djinn," Dean said, walking into the library with three plates of food.

Sam furrowed his brows. "A djinn? They don't leave residue, Dean."

"Yeah, but we're in 2017 now Sammy. We hunted a were-pyre once," Dean sat down next to you, handing you and Sam a plate that had a giant burger.

"It wasn't a were-pyre, Dean. Cas said it was a Whisper, which was a ghoul like vampire," Sam rolled his eyes and continued reading the article he found.

The smell of the burger made your mouth water and you couldn't hold back. You grabbed the large burger and took a big bite, letting the juice from the meat and the tomatoes drip down your fingers.

You moaned in pleasure, receiving a smile from Dean. "This is so good, Dean! Where did you learn to cook like this?"

Dean shrugged his shoulders and continued to smile. "Uh, Rachel Ray."

You stopped chewing, and both you and Sam looked at him in shock, receiving a glare from Dean as he bit into his own food.

"Anyways, I believe it's a djinn," Dean said chewing and talking at the same time.

"I'm not going on a hunt with such little information," Sam said, slamming his laptop shut and grabbing his burger.

"We've gone for less, Sammy."

Sam took a bite of his food and stopped chewing, rolling his eyes again. "I hate when you use that on me."

"You use it on me too, brother."

The three of you ate in silence, which was a comforting silence to you, considering you always ate without speaking a word. Dean was the first to finish, then you and then Sam. Dean got up and grabbed the plates and walked back into the other room.

"So can it really be a djinn?" You asked Sam in a low voice.

Sam shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know. He's been acting weird lately. To him, it's been nothing but case after case. He even gets a little too carried away and goes on cases by himself. Which didn't end good last time. It just ended with him in the hospital."

"How long has he been acting like this?" You asked, concerned for Dean's well being.

"For about," Sam stopped talking to think, and then his eyes went wide, "since Cas died."

"Who's Cas?" You asked Sam.

"Cas was this angel that we were both close with. He was our best friend but Cas and Dean were closer than I was to Cas. But it's already been almost a year. Can he really still not be over it?"

You began to feel bad for Dean. You had lost your best friend in the past as well. You had been traumatized for years when you seen the way she died. She jumped off of a cliff right in front of you and landed on nothing but sharp rocks. You needed therapy for four years before you considered yourself "normal" again.

"Sam, Cas was his best friend. You can't expect Dean to just get over his best friend dying. This Cas guy must've been special. I've met nothing but angel morons trying to convince me to allow them to use my body," you tried to get Sam to understand, although you knew he wouldn't be able to fully understand until he's lost a dear friend.

"Just give him time, alright? That's all it takes is some time and something to get his mind off of it. Trust me. I've been through this situation before."

Sam nodded his head. "Yeah, you're right. I just hope this doesn't eat him up alive, or worse."

You and Sam sat in silence. You knew he was thinking by the blank look on his face. You couldn't help but wonder if these two men had gone through the same hardships that you went through. Your family. Your best friend. Your childhood home.

You shook your head, not wanting those terrible memories to come flooding in. It once took you a week to recover the last time you let yourself remember what happened to your family.

"Alright, I'm all packed. Let's go catch ourselves a djinn!" Dean said, coming into the library smelling clean and his bag packed.

[thefrigidlightofday]

Savored Petal, the Auld Locomotor

The Locomotor is machine, and beast, and ghost - or, at least, machine composed jointly of metal and gears, flesh, and ectoplasm. Few such miracles survive from the Last Flowering - hence the name. Hopping and springing along its course, the Locomotor hops and jumps from the frosty coalfield tropics to the torrid arctic, drawing a line as he does - the Savored Petal - and carrying soldiers and sorcerers, luxuries and food up and down that little line of civilization. The Petal is a mechanical river whose current holds together what can still, just barely, describe itself as a hemispheric economy.

The Locomotor Itself

The Locomotor resembles a gargantuan snake or locust, hopping and slithering, apt to destroy most anything in its path. Fortunately, these paths are precisely determinate: it is connected to a series of fourteen rings, and will always move in a straight line, or very near so, towards the closest ring which is not one of the last two rings it passed through. If the path is through the air he will fly, if it is through the ground he will burrow. He will always take exactly one day to reah the next ring in his destination; if the destination ring moves, he will adjust his direction and velocity in order to allow this to be true. At each circle, it is possible to load and unload cargo.

The Locomotor requires arcane energy in order to function; if it runs out, he will stop. (Time spent stopped does not count against his calculation of getting to the next circle in one day - if he runs for four hours, stops from exhaustion, and remains idle for several days, he will reach its next destination twenty hours after being refilled.) This fuel comes in the form of blood sacrifice performed at the location of any one of the circles between his passing, or at the site of the Locomotor himself to restart him if he has gone idle.

For its typical needs, these sacrifices amount to one or two persons per day at the next circle, and since each circle is placed at or nor a major urban center, violent criminals as a matter of course suffice to feed it. Sometimes ectoplasm of a different psychic flavoring is required; these needs are communicated through dreams, omens, &c. to druids and warlocks sworn to the Petal. When required to shed the blood of the provably pure of heart, most operating centers employ principled political enemies when possible and trained votaries - religious volunteers, often pledged by upper-caste parents seeking to show their loyalty to the state - when necessary.

The rings, although nigh-indestructible and gargantuan, are of such slight density that a child could lift and run with one. It appears that they were meant to be mobile, though the destruction the Locomotor can cause tells against that theory - and, indeed, their capture of one by the Floating City of Dheb-Eir was intended by the leaders of that pirate metropolis to be used as a weapon, since Dheb-Eir could move and therefore place other locales in the path of the train-behemoth. This was eventually solved by the relocation of the nearest connecting rings to the shore, and, in the usual case, is simply solved by security.

Additionally, because of the Locomotor's routing algorithm, the removal of one or two links sufficiently far from the line can sever it completely, causing him to act as if he has reached the end (that is, when he looks for the closest ring other than the current one and the one before it, he finds the one two previous in the one ahead is further away than that.) It is believed that this has happened in the past, and is why the Southern hemisphere remains inaccessible.

The Custody of the Petal

During the Last Flowering, the organization which operated the Locomotor and its line was a private capitalist firm. In many ways, the Custodians of the Petal, which are its direct organizational successor, remains similar in form - it is a ruthless organization which attempts to leverage the transporation resources of the line in order to distribute the winnings to its owners in aliquot parts. But in the meantime, of course, the context has changed - gone are many alternative sources for investment, as are external sources of political power. The Locomotoral Custody still offers the services of transporting goods and persons themselves, but its transporation choices are more motivated by considrations (or the justification of) keeping civilization going, and its revenues are achieved more through taxation, rent, and tribute than services. Those revenues are still distributed to its principals, but less because these principals would otherwise take their investment elsewhere but because the families and other organizations that have a lock on ownership consider themselves socially obliged to maintain a certain level of conspicuous prosperity.

A complicated organizational chart exists, but fundamentally, the Custody is dominated by its dependence on every one of the circles to remain operative, and its difficulty in ensuring compliance at much detail anywhere. The result is a decentralized structure with promises of coordinated retaliation against anyone who allows the flow of blood to go dry or for the Petal to otherwise wilt. Local elites of whatever form operate the local franchises; the links of culture, people, and economic interdependence fostered by the Savored Petal itself lend them a degree of coherence. Beside this there are the druids and warlocks sworn to the Petal, its priests, and all the rest - a supplementary but essential structure of technical-ideological elites that transcends local loyalties in theory. "Secular" offices of either the global or local variety, and sometimes the less secular ones as well, tend to inheritable conditional on satisfactory service, though some are purchased for the short rather than long term and others are awarded purely on merit.

The Nodes of the Line

The Gleaning, where no one lives for long; those with naught else work to find or land to work come here to gather scraps of coal-dust from the ice fields, and bring them to the staion here. A large gantry stands here: once, it exploited the position close to the equator for launching orbital rockets; now, it still maintains a serviceable (for this age) observatory used by a College of Diviners. The coal is as essential for the Locomotor in its own way as the souls, and so prisoners are brought when labor reserves are weak - another form of sacrifice to keep the thing running.

Nemm.

Tschor Glagan: this malarial taiga is the breadbasket of the whole line. In addition to staples like honey, snow-rice, and timber, it also provides luxury monoculture such as marajuana and dreaming ejm. Like the Gleaning, it is a common destination for slaves.

Bitter Canyon* was once sweet, as fertile as Tschor - much grew here, and the canyons were carved by waters. After the changes to the climate, this is no longer so. Its ring might have been relocated, but it was as if an occult hand had grasped it near the end, and rigor mortis set in, for any attempt to steal the ring results in empowerment of its (whatever It is's) own sworn servants to prevent the theft. Because it is mighty and single-minded but not very clever, its priesthood has engaged in an effective deal with the other local franchises to regularly make attempts on their holy of holies, thus continually renewing the source of their power - which they can then use to repay (in a friendly, non-ironic way) those who have awakened it. Beyond this hoary dungeon and its scheming priests, Bitter Canyon is a blasted expanse of dead forest and half-sacked ruins.

Lath Alar.

The Floating City of Dheb-Eir, mentioned above, and under great threat should it turn to further shenanigans.

Nine Phrases of Respect.

Stonelorn.

The Even More Floating City of Zalle, which rests up in the atmosphere where the air is thin and breath can turn to ice before one's eyes. No one is quite certain why the platform of Zalle remains aloft, but the residents do know that particular minerals can be mined from the clouds themselves, and energy also "mined" by the heavy objects which the Locomotor can bring up, seemingly without effort, to be sent down a great mechanical elevator shaft to...

Undersky, the underdark city. A subterranean resevoir of spoiled milk serves to meet the food needs of most of its residents, although the food chain required for such is complex.

Shardmuck.

Thornreach is a city amidst the largest trunks and branches of the Great Cactaceal Forest. It was fashioned as such about 150 years ago as a new utopian community for some of the surviving elves - a place where they could live not as nobles over servants of other races, but utterly as equals of their own kind, unburdened by even having to think thoughts of mortality - but this collapsed rather quickly.

Old Darn is a great mountain which the Locomotor passes through - as in, literally passes though, as though all of it were a ghost. Moreover, it is just about impervious to anything else. Clearly, there is a ring inside, since the rings at Hellpont and Thornreach have moved, and the Locomotor treats the inside of the mountain as a node. The mountain has become the site of scientific investigations and religious pilgrimage, but, however, lacks the utility of actually being a load/unload station.

Hellpont, amid the great fungal forests of the arctic, is currently shut down on behalf of the Great Myconoidal Ukase. It is hoped that the situation will be resolved soon enough.

[kinglazrus]

Not Your Danny – Ch 3. Familiar

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Word count: 3814

The city had looked unremarkable that day. It shouldn’t have surprised Dani, considering Amity Park rarely looked remarkable, but it upset her anyway. After nearly three days straight of flying, coming all the way from Australia, she collapsed on the outskirts of the city, gasping for breath. Every inch of her body ached.

Flying wasn't like running or jumping; it didn't use muscles the same way. Being in the air for too long could make your head dizzy and your vision blurry. It gave her headaches and watery eyes and filled her with exhaustion so heavy she wanted to sleep for days on end. But, if Dani was desperate enough, she could push through that. This is exactly what she did when she found out Danny Phantom had died.

It was a long flight from Australia to Amity Park, over vast, empty expanses of ocean. She rested when she could, stealing a few minutes of shuteye whenever she came across land, but never more than that. She pushed herself in a way she never had before, until the headaches turned to full body aches, and every muscle in her body was tense and cramped, and she could barely stay upright when finally, finally, she saw the cheerful welcome sign of Amity Park.

On her knees in the dirt, Dani held herself up with trembling arms.

A Nice Place to Live!

The soft green letters loomed over her with their deceptive message. Nice for who?

She might have fallen asleep there, collapsed in the ditch, because the next thing she knew, she was face down in the soggy grass, her clothes damp from the drizzling rain. When she had arrived, the sun was nearing its peak. Now, it barely breached the horizon, warming her face even as the sunshower soaked her through.

It took her a moment to realize the sun was rising, not setting, and she had been out for a full day. Exhaustion still pulled at her, but her headache was gone, at least, and she had enough strength to take to the air once more. She flew around the city, not sure exactly what she was looking for.

(A lie. She knew exactly what she wanted to find, was so afraid of not finding.)

Below, the city looked the same as ever. Despite the early hour, people were already out, cars filling the road, a few stray souls strolling along the sidewalk. They didn't even look bothered by the rain, which was more of a mist, really. Dani tugged on her sopping gloves, grimacing at the squelch of water between her fingers. That's just what happens when you lie prone in a ditch for hours in the drizzling rain.

As she flew, she found no signs of spectral activity. No ghost attacks, no ghosts. No halfas. Her heart plummeted.

Fearing the worst—fearing the truth she didn't want to believe—she finally turned toward Fenton Works.

—

At the sight of the ecto-gun, Dani pales. She scrambles to her feet, shoving Danny's old t-shirts aside, and throws herself to the farthest corner of the room.

"I didn't mean it!" she shouts.

Jack blinks, confusion marring his smile until his gaze drops to the gun in his hands and his eyes widen with realization. He quickly hides the weapon behind his back. "Sorry! Didn't mean to startle you."

Dani doesn't step away from the wall. Her back tingles, itching to go intangible and let her disappear into the alley just outside, away from this potential danger. But Jack's apology feels genuine. He smiles at her, though he doesn't step any further into the room. That gets Dani to relax after a few tense seconds. The tingle fades, her desire to flee going with it.

"What's the gun for?" Dani asks. It is the first thing she has said to Jack since moving into Fenton Works, she realizes. This is the most they have seen each other in four days, and she does not know what to think about that. She assumed he had been avoiding her.

"Some of our weapons used to go off around Danny," Jack says. He pulls the ecto-gun out from behind his back, this time with the barrel pointed down, and fiddles with something along the barrel. "Never really thought about why. So, I've been trying to make them safe for you to be around. I can only do so much without an ectoplasmic sample, though."

Finally, Dani steps forward, skirting around Danny's bed. Still, Jack does not make a move closer, letting her come to him. Dani stops with a few feet left between them. "Is that what you wanted to talk about?"

Jack shrugs. "Partly. I also never said hello."

"Hi, I guess."

Jack smiles. "Hi, Dani. Nice to officially meet you."

Dani can only meet his gaze for a few seconds. He looks a lot like Danny, with kind eyes, but that is not what bothers her. Something about the way he looks at her is different. Over the past few days, she has gotten used to Maddie and Jazz, how they look at her like she is a ghost—like she is Danny.

She casts the thought out as quickly as it comes.

"So, about that sample?" Jack presses.

Dani rubs her arms, feeling phantom prickles along the inside of her elbow. If she were to roll back her sleeves, she could easily find the pinprick scars left by Vlad's needles. In fact, she does not even need to look. Skimming the sleeve, her fingers stop, instinctively, over each scar.

"What do you need it for?" she asks.

"Your ecto-signature, mostly. But we've found that a ghost's ectoplasm has its own form of DNA beyond the ecto-signature. If we can isolate yours, we might be able to make ammunition that won't harm you," he says.

Dani squeezes her arms tighter, memories of Vlad's lab flashing through her mind. No matter how rough the nomadic lifestyle got, nothing ever compared to those first few weeks of life when she spent every second being poked and prodded, not understand how wrong that was. It makes her shiver.

"Do we have to go downstairs for it?"

Jack looks about the room, taking in the mess of Danny's clothes, and the general clutter Dani hasn't bothered to clean up during her stay. "I don't see why not. I can bring the equipment up here."

"Please."

Jack nods and leaves, returning not even a minute later with a case. He must have had it ready to go. The case looks small compared to his large hands, but when he sets it down on Danny's bed, it is nearly half as wide as the mattress. Dani floats to the top of the bed, setting herself down on the pillows while Jack gets set up. Inside, the case holds a few packaged syringes, some sample tubes, swabs, and medical plasters. Hardly enough to fill it. Most space is taken up by the foam padding that holds the delicate glass tubes in place.

"I'll need to take two or three samples if that's alright. It's easier to work with more ectoplasm. And a blood sample." Jack grabs a syringe. "If you're comfortable with that."

"I guess that's okay."

He talks throughout the entire process, describing what he is doing. While he does, Dani fixes her gaze on the shirts laid out across the bed.

"This is called a phlebotomy," Jack says as he rolls up her sleeve. "It actually refers to drawing blood from a vein, but I think ectoplasm is close enough. I need to swab the area first; it might be cold."

What little tension remained in Dani's shoulders bleeds out as Jack talks.

"First needle. I'll use this one to get your ecto-signature. We have some devices that can focus on a ghost's signature without taking a sample first, like the booo-merang, but power use and exhaustion can actually alter those results. A stable sample taken in a relaxed environment works better. We can also use it to measure how a ghost's signature changes over time. Second needle."

Dani's eyes widen. Pulling her hand back from one of the shirts, she turns and finds Jack inserting a second syringe into her arm, the first already back in the case, filled with glowing ectoplasm. She hadn't even felt it. The second needle stings, although she blames that on her watching it go in, and she quickly focuses on the shirts again.

They're plain overall, basic colours with simple graphics, and a little on the baggy side. The one she likes the most is a button-up, one of the few Danny had, with short sleeves and covered in large stars. She pulls it closer with her free hand, tracing the stars as Jack finishes with the third syringe. It does not seem like the kind of shirt Danny would wear. Too gaudy for him. Dani likes it, though.

A tap at her shoulder distracts her.

"Can you change to your human form?" Jack asks.

"Why?"

"Can't exactly draw blood from this form."

"Oh. Right." Dani chews her lip, contemplating. Except for when she's asleep, she hasn't been in human form at all the past few days. Even then, the only reason she changes is that it is easier to sleep as a human. Jazz has not asked her about it since that first day, and neither has Maddie.

In the relative safety of Fenton Works, there is no reason for her to choose one form over the other. When travelling, it is easier passing along as a ghost. Fewer people bother her then—if they don't run away screaming—and her powers come easier. Making up her mind, she closes her eyes and lets the transformation take over.

It passes in a flash, her jumpsuit disappearing, replaced by the comfortable weight of her hoodie. Unable to help herself, Dani touches the star shirt again.

Jack doesn't go for the next syringe right away. His gaze lingers on Dani's face. The weight of his stare bears down on her, but she refuses to look up.

"Is something wrong?" she asks.

The mattress shifts as Jack moves, neither closer nor farther away. A nervous jump and nothing more. "No. Everything's fine."

He only needs a few seconds to take the last sample. He presses a cotton swab against her arm, blotting the fresh needle marks to wipe away the blood, then covers it with a plaster. That last part is unnecessary since all Jack did was prick her, but Dani does not say anything. It is too funny that the Fentons even have their own plasters, covered in little fiery Fs. They really know how to lean into a brand.

"What are obsessions like?" Jack asks.

The question takes her by surprise. "I don't know."

"Really? Don't all ghosts have obsessions?"

Dani shrugs. "Probably." She isn't a ghost, though. Not a proper one. "Nothing's ever compelled me the way an obsession is supposed to. There's stuff that I like, but none of it draws me in."

"Is that how it works?"

Dani frowns. "Aren't you supposed to be a ghost scientist?"

Jack chuckles. "True, but we don't know everything about ghosts. You can only find out so much through watching them." And experimenting on them, but he doesn't mention that part. Dani doesn't need him to. "Asking one about their experiences can tell us a lot more. I can only imagine what we might have known if... if we had known."

"I guess I can tell you about them," Dani says. A good part of her education under Vlad's "care" was about different aspects of being a ghost, prepping her for the rest of her existence. A good portion of those lessons were not as necessary as Vlad thought they would be.

Jack scoots closer, nodding enthusiastically. Suddenly, he looks less like a trained scientist and more like an enthused child. The thought makes Dani giggle.

"Okay, so. I was told that an obsession can be anything. Like, food, a specific colour, an object, a person. There are no limits. Most ghosts have more than one that helps sustain them. They don't need an obsession, or they don't need to fulfill it, but it helps keep them grounded. Really old ghosts have a lot of obsessions. Young ones might only have a few."

Jack grins as Dani speaks. Even though he doesn't write anything down, she knows he won't forget a single thing. He hangs off every word, taking in Dani's lesson as easy as air.

"They can also change over time. A ghost can go from having a lot of obsessions to only a few, or the other way around. It depends. If they lean into one obsession too much, it can completely alter their personality. Having only one can be dangerous, though, because it makes them unstable. If something happens and they lose that obsession, it can really unbalance them. I can't tell you what having an obsession actually feels like, though."

"Are you sure?" Jack asks.

"Pretty sure. I think I would know if I had an obsession. And if I did but I never did anything about it? I probably wouldn't be here right now." It comes out grimmer than Dani meant it to. A ghost doesn't die without an obsession, but the way Vlad explained it, existence became painful, confusing. Hard to cope with.

Jack leans back, nodding slowly. The room falls silent for the next minute as he absorbs everything Dani said. "Did Danny ever tell you about his obsessions?"

"No. It never came up."

The answer obviously does not please Jack. His hopeful smile slips away, and he falls silent. He packs away the sample case, locking it shut, and rises from the edge of Danny's bed. As he walks away, Dani can't help but think she did something wrong.

—

After Jack leaves, Dani stays in her human form.

When Jazz comes into the room an hour later asking for some TV time, a smile breaks out across her face. "You're human."

Dani shrugs, having no better response than that.

"About time," Jazz teases. Reaching out, she ruffles Dani's hair and gives her a playful shove. Dani doesn't find it as comforting as she should.

—

"Are you sure you don't have an obsession?"

Dani nearly jumps at how close Jack's voice is. She heard him coming, since his pounding feet were hard to ignore, but hadn't realized how close he got before speaking. The plate in her hand becomes tangible again as her focus slips. The water that had been passing through sprays outward, soaking the front of her hoodie. She ignores Jazz's snicker.

"Yeah, I'm pretty sure."

Jack makes a disappointed hum. "Not even a little one?"

"Not even a little one."

He sighs but doesn't press her further. From the counter, he grabs one of the dinner plates set out, loaded with a stir-try that Jazz and Dani spent the last hour making. To Dani's surprise, he sits at the table rather than heading downstairs.

"Mads had a call, but she'll be right up," Jack says.

Dani nearly asks, "Why?" Ever since she arrived, everyone seems to have done their own thing, including during mealtimes. Having no long-term household experience, Dani was starting to think this was the norm. She looks to Jazz for an explanation but finds none.

Jazz already has her plate in hand and quickly takes the seat next to Jack. She waves Dani over. "Come on. Can't be family dinner if the whole family doesn't sit down." There is a twinge of sadness in her voice, one Dani completely understands. It's not the whole family, never will be. Jazz and Jack must be thinking the same thing, but none of them say it out loud.

Dani grabs her plate and sits down on Jack's other side.

"You don't want to sit here?" Jazz asks, patting the chair next to her.

"I'm fine here," Dani says. Her chair places her back at the wall, giving her a good view of the room. And, more importantly, the entrance. She doesn't expect a threat to come barrelling through, but it is instinct by now to keep an eye on things like doorways and windows. She can see both from here.

This is the only seat at the table she has sat at since arriving.

Jazz presses her lips together. "Are you sure? It was Danny's spot."

"Great. This is my spot."

"Jazz," Jack says. "It's just a chair."

Jazz has the mind to look embarrassed at being scolded. Dani thinks she is going to drop it there, but Jazz opens her mouth again, about to say one last remark.

A sharp intake of breath cuts her off.

Maddie, standing in the doorway, stares at Dani.

Jack and Jazz must see something Dani doesn't, because they both jump to their feet.

"Mads," Jack starts, but Maddie turns and flees before he can say anymore.

Jazz pushes her chair back. "Dad, I'll—"

"No, it's fine. You two eat." Jack goes after Maddie, leaving Jazz and a very confused Dani alone.

"What was that?" Dani asks.

Jazz sits back down. "She hasn't seen your human form before."

It hardly sates Dani's curiosity, but it's the only answer she gets.

—

Maddie's cellphone rings just as she's about to follow Jack upstairs. A glance at the caller ID shows it is an unknown number.

"I'll be up in a minute," she says.

She gets no answer from Jack, but that's expected. Ever since he came back down with Dani's ectoplasmic samples, he's been muttering about obsessions. When he gets like this, he rarely acknowledges the people around him, although over the years Maddie has learned that he still hears them. Answering them just is not high on his priority list.

She turns away from the stares and answers the phone. "Hello, this is Dr. Madeline Fenton. How can I help you?"

"That's an awfully formal way to greet a friend," Vlad says.

"What the hell are you doing, Vlad? I blocked your number."

"And I got a new one. Just hear me out, Maddie."

There's an edge of desperation in his voice. Maddie can't decide whether to roll her eyes, cuss Vlad out, or hang up immediately. Maybe all three. If he honestly tries to play that pathetic act again, she will be livid.

"You have two minutes," Maddie says. Better to hear him out now than hang up and have him leaving message after message again.

"I wanted to apologize for how I acted the other day. It was incredibly inappropriate."

"Yes, it was. And if you're looking for forgiveness, you won't get it." She shouldn't even give him the time of day.

"I understand. And I know we've grown apart these past couple years—"

"You mean when you finally wised up, stopped hitting on me, and left us alone?"

"Yes. But I wasn't lying before, Maddie. I need you!" His tone actually makes her pause. It reminds her, briefly, of the young man she used to know. One who had to beg his family not to cut him off when they discovered his chosen career. His voice now makes her think of the day she caught him on the phone, pleading with his mother.

They had only been college freshmen, then. Vlad was hardly more than seventeen at the time, having graduated high school early. Maddie had never heard him so distraught before, or ever since. But now, his voice cracks with distress. It almost makes her feel sorry for him.

"This has been hard for me, too, for reasons you can't begin to fathom. I wasn't lying when I told you about my friendship with Daniel."

Maddie's pity for Vlad evaporates in an instant. "Stop. Don't call me again, Vlad."

"Maddie, you don't understand—!"

She hangs up before he can finish. Disgusting. She can't believe she actually felt for him for a moment. She had half a mind to call him back and tell him the truth, tell him that she knew everything. But that would mean telling him Dani was here, and Maddie was not comfortable with that. Who knows what Vlad would try if he found out the clone he created was so nearby?

She takes a moment to compose herself before heading upstairs.

When she reaches the main floor, the smell of garlic, ginger, and spice greets her. It has been a while since they had stir-fry, and even longer since they sat down at a full table. Something like this is exactly what she needs after that brief call.

Maddie steps into the kitchen and sees Danny at the table. Her breath catches in her throat. The dark hair, the baggy hoodie, the sharp edge of his nose in profile. But then he turns and it's not Danny, it's Dani. In the form Maddie had yet to see, with a face so familiar that seeing it feels like a stab to the chest.

Jack stands, calls out, but Maddie doesn't stay to listen. She bolts. Her feet carry her to the back of the house, past the weapon's lab, and out the door into their cramped backyard. She crouches on the poor, one hand cupped over her mouth.

She knew, when they took Dani in, that she looked like him. Her face wasn't so different from Phantom's. A little softer, a little less worn, but with a wary edge. Maddie knew. But she hadn't known how bad it would be when she finally saw that face in human form. Not Phantom's face, who still felt so separate from her son, but Danny's.

Maddie's willing to bet that, when Dani was first created, she looked exactly like Danny in his middle school days, before he came out and started presenting as male. If Danny hadn't started taking hormones, would he have looked like Dani does now? On the shorter side, with rounder features. It's not the same as having Danny back, not even close. No clone can ever replace her baby.

But it still hurts so much.

Maddie squeezes her eyes shut, fighting against the burn of her tears. She can't stop them, though. No matter how much she tries, rubbing her eyes, pressing the heel of her palms against them. The tears keep coming, and a sob follows soon after.

Jack's arm wraps around her shoulder, pulling her into a tight embrace. Maddie falls apart completely, then, clinging to her husband and crying into his shoulder. It isn't fair. There was so much about Danny they never got to see, never got to know. All that time they wasted trying to hunt him down.

He died too soon, too young. But worst of all, he died believing his parents hated a part of him, and Maddie can never change that.

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[kinglazrus]

A Helping Hand

Phic phight 2020

Submitted by @trainernick: Lancer telling Danny he knows his secret and admitting trying to help him throughout high school (maybe at prom or graduation) - wholesome found family

Summary: Everyone says prom is supposed to be one of the best nights of Danny's life. And even though he wrecks his suit, ditches his date, and gets attacked by Skulker, it sort of is. But not for the reasons everyone says it should be.

When Lancer sees his student feeling low, he does what he can to make sure Danny knows there are always people rooting for him.

Hurt/comfort

Word count: 3923

People like to talk about milestones. They divide their lives into neat little segments and mark the years with special occasions. First steps, first words, first day of school, first car, first kiss, first job. Lots of firsts. They're important. But they aren't the be-all, end-all of those experiences. People keep talking after their first word. They keep walking after their first steps. They continue to learn, and drive, and kiss—if they're into that sort of thing—and work, and work, and work until that's all they ever do.

The firsts matter, but they don't matter so much that you can never do any of those things ever again.

Some milestones can't be repeated, though. Or, at least, people build them up so much and make such a big deal out of it that even if you can repeat it, it'll never be the same. They make it sound like if you do it wrong then you'll never get to do it right. That's how Danny feels about prom.

It doesn't matter how often he tells people there will be other parties, that this won't be the only time he ever dances with his peers, that this won't even be his only prom because he probably won't be able to graduate this year. Prom is big. Prom is important. Prom is special. He has to do it right or else he'll never get to do it again.

Danny tries his best.

He gets a date, one of his best friends, Sam. It takes him a few weeks to ask her out, because he can't figure out how to do it. He wastes hours writing out what he wants to say. Four days before prom, he sees Sam in the middle of a ghost fight, grinning like mad, hoisting a bazooka on her shoulder, ectoplasm stuck in her hair, and Danny blurts the question out right there because holy shit she's beautiful. It totally throws all his careful, romantic planning out the window, but she still says yes.

He gets a suit. Black jacket, black shirt, purple vest, purple tie, because he thinks Sam will like it. She calls him a dork as soon as she sees him in it, which means she does like it, very much so. He gets a corsage of blue poppies for Sam's wrist, to go with his boutonniere. He gets Jazz and Dani to watch the city for the night so that nothing will distract him from the dance.

He does everything he can to make sure he does prom right. But, in the end, he still gets in a ghost fight.

Danny leans his head back against the wall of the shower stall in the boys' locker rooms. His lungs burn, his body aches, and his knuckles are bruised. The water's turned up as hot as it can go. It succeeds in getting the worst ectoplasm out—cold water would have set the stains—but now he's completely soaked, and his suit is still ripped.

Looking down, he catalogues the damage, both to his body and his rental suit. A gash on his right shoulder to go with the torn seam of the sleeve. The left sleeve is ripped from cuff to elbow, his cufflink lost somewhere on the street outside. There's a matching slice in his arm, stretching from his palm around to the outside of his elbow.

The cut stings in the hot water, same with the wound on his shoulder, and he should probably take care of both before he loses too much blood. But he has a couple minutes to spare.

His pants got out of the fight okay, minutes a little tearing on the knees, the skin beneath scraped and red. He doesn't think the store is going to take the suit back.

There's a knock on the stall door and Danny lifts his head. Through the foggy glass, he sees Tucker.

"You good, man?" Tucker asks.

Danny swallows, glad he doesn't taste blood. Skulker really held nothing back today. He calls back, "Yeah, I'm good. Suit's a little torn, though."

"Why'd you fight in your suit?" Tucker asks, a hint of laughter in his voice.

"I think Skulker borrowed some of Vlad's tech. He shorted out my powers for a little bit, but," Danny raises his hand and forms a swirling ball of ectoplasm in his palm, "they're back now."

"Okay. Lancer's doing a headcount. I told him you had gone to the bathroom just before Skulker showed up, so I'll let him know you're safe."

"Thanks. I won't be long."

Tucker's silhouette does finger guns and he clicks his tongue twice, then leaves. Danny waits until he hears the locker room door closing before he stands up. The ectoplasm in his hand turns blue, its temperature dropping a few degrees, and he drags his palm along the cut on his left arm. Ice seeps over the wound, sealing it shut and stopping the bleeding. It also works fantastically at numbing the entire limb so it doesn't hurt to move.

After rotating his arm a few times, testing its mobility, he does the same to the gash on his right shoulder. It's only a temporary measure, until he can get home and get Jazz to help stitch him back up. Sam and Tucker used to be in charge of doing that, but Jazz is by far the better seamstress, and leaves fewer scars behind.

Danny shuts the water off and heads toward the lockers. Rather than going for his own locker, he stops in front of Tucker's. Danny usually has extra clothes for emergencies like this, but he used them last week and hadn't brought them back since. Tucker keeps a few spares, though, because of the last few times Dash and Kwan stole his clothes while he was in the shower.

Turning his hand intangible, Danny sticks it through the locker door and grabs a shirt from the top shelf. When he pulls his hand out the shirt unfurls, and he stiffens.

"You've got to be kidding me," he says. It's a black button-up shirt, which is perfect. But it's also covered cartoonish pictures of Danny Phantom's face. Reaching back into the locker, he tries to find another, but this is the only one. He could use his gym shirt, but he needs the long sleeves to hide his left arm.

With a groan, Danny strips, laying his jacket, vest, tie, and shirt out on the benches. He and Tucker are around the same size, so the shirt fits, for the most part. It's a little tight across the shoulders and bites into his skin when he bends his arms, but it'll do. As long as he doesn't get into another fight and tear this shirt up, too.

Danny pulls his jacket and vest back on, although he does neither up, and drapes his shirt across his arm. With his left hand facing down, you can't even he's injured. Minus the scrapes on his knees, but if anyone asks, Danny will just say he tripped running away from the ghost

When he exits the locker room, Danny looks left and right, checking to make sure the hallway is clear before slipping out. His wet shoes squeak on the floor, and water drips from his hair onto his nose. He probably should have tried drying off. Especially since the water from his jacket is now seeping into Tucker's shirt. But, Fentons are stubborn, and Danny's already on his way back to the gym.

Prom posters featuring smiling members of the dance committee stair down at him as he walks, silently judging him. Their blank eyes follow his every move. Somehow, Danny feels like he's failed them.

He expects the dance to be back in full swing by the time he makes it back, because Casper High is just like that sometimes, but he couldn't be more wrong. The music has stopped. No one's dancing. There's a massive hole in the outside wall, letting in the cool night air. A wave of shame rolls through Danny as he remembers he did that.

His gaze drifts up to the ceiling, where there's another, smaller hole. That's where Skulker burst through, shouting about the glory of capturing his prey on such a momentous occasion. Seconds later, Danny blasted him through the wall and took off after him. Without even a single glance back at the chaos he'd caused.

Paulina, Star, and other members of the dance committee hustled about, directing people to help with the cleanup so they could get things started again. City protocol said to wait for an official cleanup crew, but this was prom, damn it, and Paulina wasn't about to let a couple ghosts ruin her chances of getting crowned queen.

He finds Sam and Tucker quickly. They're helping Elliott move one of the larger chunks of concrete. The front of Sam's dress is covered in dust and her corsage it crushed.

Another wave of guilt pushes Danny out the door. He backs into the hallway, gives the ruined dance one last look, then turns and heads for the front door. There's no point sticking around and risk ruining things even more.

The cold air and his wet clothes shill Danny to the bone when he gets outside, but he doesn't mind. The benefits of having an ice core means he can weather the cold better than most people. But, being half-human still, he's not infallible. Danny sits down on the front steps, slipping his hands into his pockets, and sighs. Maybe he should just go home.

Since Danny doesn't have his license—he never had time, with all the ghost fighting—Tucker gave Sam and Danny a ride. So, if he does leave, he won't be abandoning Sam without a way home. Going for a fly sounds pretty nice right now. There's not much he can screw up when he's miles above the city. Although, if anyone could find a way, it would be him.

The only thing he can ever seem to do right is fight ghosts. It's not too late to make a career out of it. At this point, it's basically his job already, and it'd be nice to get paid for it. Maybe the G.I.W. are hiring.

Danny laughs. It's a bitter, self-deprecating sound.

"They'd probably cut me open first," he tells the open air.

"Modern Prometheus, Mr. Fenton, that's quite the accusation."

"Holy sh–" Danny jumps, nearly toppling off the step, and whips around to see Lancer behind him. "Mr. Lancer! Uh, what are you doing here?"

"Checking on my student," Lancer says. "I wasn't satisfied with Mr. Foley's assurances and wanted to make sure you were safe myself."

He steps forward and looks down at Danny, frowning. "Are you... dripping, Mr. Fenton?"

"Uh." Danny glances down at his soaked clothes. "I fell in a puddle."

"While you were in the bathroom?"

"I went for a walk and then fell in a puddle."

"It hasn't rained in three weeks," Lancer says.

"So crazy, right?" Danny chuckles. He silently wills Lancer to go away, preferring to be alone right now. Instead, Lancer does the complete opposite and sits down next to Danny.

"Is something bothering you?" he asks.

"What makes you think that?"

"I've worked with teenagers for a long time, Mr. Fenton. I can tell when things aren't okay. And I think, by now, your tells are somewhat obvious to me."

Danny refuses to meet Lancer's gaze. He's probably the last person Danny wants to see right now. Not because he hates Lancer, but because he cares too much what Lancer thinks. While he didn't like the man much during freshman year, things changed over time. Lancer started actually believing in Danny. He's the only teacher who never gave up on him, who always had their door open.

Lancer even leant Danny his ear on more than one occasion. Danny tried to avoid this as much as possible, but there were some things he just couldn't talk to his sister or friends about.  And Danny's willing to admit, although somewhat grudgingly, that he's become attached to his English teacher.

"Prom's ruined," Danny finally says.

"Is that so?"

"I mean, yeah. Sk– uh, that big metal ghost dude kind of crashed the party. And then Phantom fucked it all up."

"Language," Lancer says. He gives Danny a critical look. "Why are you blaming Phantom?"

"He kind of destroyed a whole wall. He could have just, I don't know, thrown the ghost back through the hole that was already there?" If only Danny had thought of that at the time. But in his desperation to not ruin prom, he went ahead and ruined prom.

"I think Phantom did a fantastic job," Lancer says.

Danny gapes at him.

"Yes, the wall was damaged, but no one got hurt. And your classmates are displaying wonderful teamwork skills by clearing out the debris so the dance can go on. It wasn't Phantom's fault the ghost decided to interrupt," Lancer says. "Although I have to say, it's extremely lucky of us that he was so close by. In fact, it was almost like he was there before the ghost arrived."

Lancer smiles. Something about it puts Danny on edge. It's a familiar smile, a fond one. It's the smile he gives students who do exceptionally well. It's the smile he gives Danny when he does well.

"Oh, yeah. That's really lucky, yep. Must be because of how often the school gets attacked. I mean, if I were him, which I'm not, I'd probably hang around the place that gets attacked the most, too," Danny says, a little too quickly. He was cold seconds ago, but now he's uncomfortably warm.

"Which you're not," Lancer repeats slowly. His gaze is intense and critical. Danny can only bear to meet it for a few seconds before he has to look away.

He tries to distract himself, looking at the cars lined up along the street. There are a few limousines amongst them. Danny would bet his ghost half on one of them being here for the A-listers', who came together as a group rather than bringing dates. There were so many cars already parked by the time Danny and his friends got here that Tucker was forced to park his old Camaro around the block.

It's a pretty nice car, despite how old it is. A hand-me-down from Tucker's dad, they fixed it up together, making it good as new. Danny tries to picture doing something like that with his own dad. Jack would probably deck the car out in ghost weapons and stamp the word "Fenton" across it.

They could call it the Fentonmobile.

"Danny," Lancer says.

The use of his nickname gives Danny pause. Lancer never calls him Danny. It's one of his most frustrating traits. Every student is always Mr., Ms., or Mx. As annoying as it is, Danny can't deny that it feels nice at the same time. Like Lancer actually respects them as people, doesn't look down on them the way most adults do.

After everything Danny's been through, he thinks he warrants a little basic decency.

Lancer continues. "I know."

Everything stops. Every thought in Danny's head comes to a screeching halt. He stares at Lancer. Maybe he heard it wrong. Maybe he doesn't mean what Danny thinks he means. But the longer Danny stares, the longer Lancer stares right back. At first, dread fills him. His secret is blown. This is it. The G.I.W. are on their way.

That dread quickly drowns in a tidal wave of relief, because Lancer knows. And he isn't hurting Danny, or calling him a freak, or doing anything.

"You know," Danny repeats in a breathy whisper.

"I know."

Danny slops backward, burying his hands in his hair. He lets out a soft laugh. "You know. How long?"

"Almost three years now," Lancer says.

Danny's stunned into silence. Three years. That's nearly as long as he's been a ghost. He had his accident a couple months into freshman year and started fighting ghosts a few days after that.

"I," he pauses, "am a terrible liar. Aren't I?"

"I'm surprised you've lasted this long," Lancer says.

Danny laughs sharply. Sitting back up, he turns to face Lancer proper, running his hands through his hair again. It's a nervous habit he's never been able to kick. "What gave it away?"

"Your first weeks at Casper High, I thought you were a talented student with a lot of potential. You managed average grades on your first couple of assignments, but I could tell you were struggling in the environment. Not a fan of classroom learning?" Lancer asks, quirking his eyebrow.

"It's hard to focus. Sometimes," Danny admits.

"But you managed. And then you disappeared from school for two weeks. When you came back, your grades plummeted. I blamed it on the stress of your accident, at first, which I excused. But then your delinquent behaviour started."

Danny winces. He knows exactly how he looks to other people. A problem child, skipping school, not doing his assignments, barely studying. Coming to class with bruises on his knuckles. Tetslaff tried to "set him straight" once. She said some good physical activity would help him channel his issues and convinced his parents to sign him up for volleyball.

Tetslaff kicked him off the team after his third missed game.

"To me, my students are my children. I want to see them succeed in every way they can, and do what I can to make that happen. In that way, I failed you freshman year. I'm ashamed of how I reacted." Lancer pauses. He looks away from Danny, tipping his head back to search the sky instead.

Danny wonders what he's thinking. He wishes he knew.

"I'm even more ashamed of the fact that if I hadn't seen you transform, I might not have changed my attitude at all."

"You saw me transform," Danny deadpans. First Jazz, and then Paulina—although she was possessed at time, Danny still counts it—and now Lancer. How many times is this going to happen? He asks, "Where?"

"Here, at school."

Danny sputters in disbelief. "What?"

"You were in the middle of the cafeteria, Danny. You stood on a table and cried 'I'm going ghost.' I'm surprised more people didn't see you," Lancer says. He shoots Danny an amused grin.

Danny blushes, burying his face in his hands. "I thought it was cool," he mumbles into his palms. It made him feel like a superhero. Until he wizened up and stopped shouting out warnings to every ghost within earshot.

Lancer had a point, how did people not see him more often? Maybe there's an entire cult in Amity Park of people who have seen Danny transform. They could call themselves the Phentons. Or the Fantoms. Or the Keepers of the Great One. Frostbite would probably like that last name.

"Why are you telling me this now?" Danny asks.

"Because I think you need to know there are people on the sidelines who are willing to help you, who have helped you, even if you don't realize it."

"How do you mean?" Danny already knows he has people looking out for him. Jazz, Tucker, and Sam always have his back and they've helped him more than he can ever thank them for. He's going to miss Sam and Tucker next year when they move on to college and he's stuck repeated senior year.

Lancer reaches into his pocket and pulls out a folded piece of paper. Unfolding it, he smooths it out on his knee and passes over.

It’s a schedule for April, May, and the first week of June. Two dates are circled. April 18th, today, and June 4th, the graduation day. The weeks between are full of markings. Squinting at the thin writing, Danny reads "Packet One: Biology" written over next week. Skipping over the rest of the schedule, he finds "Packet Two: History," "Packet Three: Applied Math," all the way up to "Packet Six: English" the final week before June. They're all classes Danny is taking this year, including ones he already failed last semester.

"What is this?" Danny asks.

"A study guide, of sorts. I spoke to the other teachers about your grades. Because of 'special circumstances,'" Lancer makes finger quotes, "they agreed to give you a chance to redeem your grades. You did well on your exams overall, but it's your course work that failed you. Each of your teachers has put together a packet of bonus assignments that, if you finish successfully, will earn you a passing grade in each class."

Danny's breath hitches. "You mean..."

"With any luck, I will not be seeing you again in these halls next year."

Danny's eyes burn. He lowers his head, hiding his face in the crook of his elbow. He tries to stay quiet, because the last thing he wants to do is cry in front of a teacher, but he can't help it. The tears won't stop. A few gross sobs fight their way through his hiccups. Lancer rubs Danny's back as he cries, a soothing gesture.

"Thank you," Danny says, as soon as he can gather the breath for it. He wipes his nose on his sleeve and shoots Lancer an elated grin. "I hope I don't see you here next year either."

Lancer smiles in return. "We could head back, if you'd like. The dance should be starting up again right about now. Ms. Sanchez certainly knows how to whip a cleaning crew into action. I never expected such leadership from her."

"I did kind of ditch Sam," Danny says. He hopes she's not too mad. "But I kind of need to take care of something first."

"The ghost? I always did wonder what you did with them after capturing them in your... lunchbox?"

Danny laughs and shakes his head. "It's a thermos. But, no, he'll be fine in there for a while. I actually, uh," he trails off. Sheepishly, he pulls back his left sleeve and shows Lancer his injury.

"The English Patient, Mr. Fenton, you need medical attention!" Lancer shoots to his feet, digging his phone out of his pocket.

"No hospital!" Danny shouts. He scrambles up after Lancer and covers his phone. "My body's different. They'd notice something. I just need some stitches and my healing will take care of the rest."

"That's reassuring, I suppose." Lancer lowers his phone. "I have keys to the nurse's office, and I'm no slouch with a needle."

"Oh. I can just take of it myself, at home. Or get Jazz to do it."

"Nonsense, Mr. Fenton. What kind of teacher would I be if I let you go home in that state?" Lancer beckons for Danny to follow. He only hesitates for a second before complying.

Danny doesn't want to see Lancer in these halls again, but he certainly hopes graduation won't be the last time he ever sees the man. It's nice, knowing there's another person out there who has his back. Someone who can give him a stern word when he's being stupid, and a helping hand when he's lost. It's almost father-like, now that Danny thinks about it.

He stares at Lancer's back and thinks. Lancer looks the kids of Casper High and sees them not just as students, but as his children. Danny doesn't mind looking back and seeing a parent instead of a teacher.