Part 1: what's lost can be found
"She won't make a sound, alone in this fight with herself and the fears whispering if she stands she'll fall down. She wants to be found, the only way out is through everything she's running from wants to give up and lie down. So stand in the rain, stand your ground. Stand up when it's all crashing down. You stand through the pain, you won't drown. And one day, what's lost can be found." -Stand in the Rain by Superchick
Regent Masterlist Part 2
The decayed ghost siren echoed through the abandoned streets of Amity Park's Witching Hours. Its residents were well acquainted with what that sound meant, fear and exasperation a potent (strange) mix to keep them tucked in their homes, their beds, as the Fentonworks building seemed to come alive.
Of course, figuratively speaking.
(Nothing was truly alive there anymore.)
Jasmine Fenton had just arrived back from the Infinite Realms, muscles pleasantly sore from training with Pandora and very much looking forward to hugging her little brother before he begun his nightly patrol. The siren caught her attention before she’d stepped fully out of her portal, dread filling her gut like a rock dropped into a lake.
Oh no.
Team Phantom were young, no one could ever argue that, with some scars to show for all their battles to protect Amity from those that would claim their haunt- but no one outside the team understood just how paranoid they’d become since Pariah Dark and Dark Dan
The contingencies had begun when Jazz started to remember bits and pieces of a timeline that Danny himself had erased using the reality gauntlet. He’d never told anyone of what had happened, with Freakshow’s plan to make himself ‘ringmaster of all reality’ and all, but Jazz had somehow recalled flashes of sheer panic at watching her little brother accidentally reveal himself as Phantom on live tv, in the Fentonworks kitchen on that little box set. The white rings of light that emerged from his core to switch from half-alive to half-dead and vice versa damned him.
The elder fentons had gone on the offense immediately, Jack’s screech of ghost! Echoing in the house and they raced down to the lab to get whatever latest weapon they’d built to capture Phantom.
It didn’t matter that their son was dead, that he had died, that their ‘greatest work’ was Danny’s grave. That Jasmine was…well, she wasn’t entirely human anymore, not when she turned on her heel to follow her progenitors down down down into the darkness, sword tightly grasped in hand as her teal eyes glowed a sickly green.
She hadn’t hesitated then, to protect her little brother.
One slash, two, three
Danny hadn’t known she killed their parents in that timeline. She would never tell him.
She would never tell him how they hadn’t even noticed her presence, her ever loyal weapon Faithkeeper about to take their lives, how she hadn’t even needed to summon her armor. She would never tell him how they begged for their lives, not to protect their children, but to kill the ghostly menace.
Danny never knew she’d dumped their corpses in the landfill.
(Right where they belonged.)
WIth the rewrite of the timeline, reset to the same day of the ill-fated Humpty Dumpty concert, Jack and Maddy Fenton’s deaths were undone, but not the blood on Jasmine’s hands.
With Danny’s defeat of Pariah Dark, came another revelation.
Jasmine was still mostly alive. Somehow she’d survived her childhood, but Danny hadn’t. She’d looked away for five minutes, forgotten to lock the lab after their parents left and he’d died for it.
With the weight of being schrodinger’s hero, could her little brother withstand becoming king of the infinite realms?
Perhaps not while he was still learning, still gaining his own grip on his strange existence. In time, he would become a great king- one of mercy and benevolence, but he still had a long ways to go.
Jasmine had borrowed ancient ghost law books from Ghostwriter and locked herself away for three days, cycling between crying for her and Danny, reading through the complicated laws of ye olden times, and writing down her findings- just in case another reality rewrite was due.
Jasmine had accepted Regency on Danny’s behalf with a grace she didn’t know she possessed.
It had been a small ceremony, with Danny and his friends present and Pandora, Jasmine’s mentor, acting as sentry as she accepted the Crown of Fire.
She knew it was a long road till she could pass it down to its rightful owner, but Jasmine was prepared to shoulder the burden for her little brother.
Pandora had simply laid one of her many hands on Jasmine’s shoulder with a solemn air, in understanding.
There was work to be done before any of them could have peace.
(Not even the afterlife was safe from paperwork.)
Her favorite journal contained the scraps of her hope and dreams bound in maroon leather, soft with age and imprinted with every emotion Jazz had unwittingly (and later knowingly) poured into every word.
Its pages were a kaleidoscope of her life.
Sure, it began with the soft tinge of curiosity-exasperation-fondness, some sentiment of better times before her progenitors began working on that damned portal, constructing the future grave of their son without the slightest clue.
The emotions began turning a darker turn when the work turned into an obsession. Jazz had plunged into her schoolwork and part-time jobs to afford whatever was needed for the siblings to survive, fondness becoming slowly poisoned by anger. Anger for the portal. Anger for the food other kids had, that they didn’t have to work so hard for. Anger that she knew what starving felt like.
Anger that she was so weak.
Then the day of Danny’s death.
The darkest part of her history, the last embers of her hopes and dreams, of the siblings escaping smothered. Danny’s death scream forever etched into her brain.
(It should’ve been her.)
She hated those pages of her journal, the emotions of grief-anger on her tongue, but she couldn’t bring herself to rip them out. No more than she could destroy the confessions of protect-rage-grief, the confessions of the darker timeline she shouldn’t remember.
On very last page was the contingency plan Jazz herself had created.
Code Graverobber.
That siren wasn’t any ordinary ghost siren, no, it was the one Tucker had programmed himself- it was the quickest way to alert every member of Team Phantom and Tucker had made sure that none of them could mistake it for a Fenton ghost alarm. No, Code Graverobber was in effect.
Phantom had been captured by the elder Fentons.
(Fate has a way of setting itself right.)
(Death wants its due.)
With a bleeding, sobbing and vivisected Danny cradled in her arms, Jazz left Amity Park behind for what she prayed to the Ancients was forever.
The Fentons died that night, though the official records would claim they were killed in a explosion due to the highly unstable inventions they created, taking the lives of their children as well. No one really dug around in the wreckage of Fentonworks, not for the bodies of the family within, with the chance of another explosion happening should rubble be shifted the wrong way.
Jack and Maddie Fenton died..
But Jasmine and Danny Nightingale lived on, in Gotham City.
The last of those three days she spent locked in her room, Jasmine wrote a letter to a future version of herself, tucked inside one of her favorite books now lost in the destruction of Fentonworks.
To my future self,
Forget me in your happiness.
Love, your past
A/N: BEHOLD!
Ahem. This is the original chapter 1 that I never finished or published.
It's not my favorite or my best, but I unburied it for the 300 milestones. Thanks for reading!
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wild to me to see posts like "wow everything in the tempest is named after shakespeare...emet you melodramatic bitch you sure loved theater". because the prospero-emet thing gets played up so hard in the english script and you can carry it so far!
like prospero is an asshole magician who, after being deposed by his brother as duke of milan, settles himself and his daughter on a remote island, enslaves the local spirits using his magic, and bitterly plots to reclaim his past glories. he rules through violence and deceit, and only survives and is reconciled when his plots reach their fruition and his brother is taken to his remote island and plots ensue and everyone decides he was totally right all along and they were huge dicks to him and they're sooooo sorry and he gets to go back and be duke again wow! and it's okay because he's like "i was only doing mean magic to get my rightful spot back and now i'm giving it up because magic is evil. :)"
the tempest is what emet wants his life to be. prospero is not a villain in the text of the tempest. he is barely treated as antagonistic by the text and framing of the play itself. all his abuses, his neglect and control of his daughter, his enslavement of caliban and ariel (local spirits/monsters/people of the island), his deception and plots against his brother, his abuse of magical powers (not awesome, from the pov of the contemporary audience), all that ultimately gets swept aside in the rightness of his return to milan and the warm feeling of the world being set to rights. prospero can't undo the years he spent on the island but they are ultimately a blip in his life before he returns to the rightful state of affairs. his abuse and enslavement of caliban, easily the worst thing he does in the play, is totally set aside when caliban goes "wow now i see how truly benevolent my master is. i love him and see the ways of christian good and i'm so, so appreciative he chose not to kill or beat me even though he totally could have and would have been in the right. he's so just and intelligent." everyone loves and forgives him and they all agree both his management of the island and his ultimate return are so good and so wise and so right.
emet comparing himself to the tempest (or being compared to it, depending on how you want to read the diegetic status of the place names) is absolute wishcasting. it is an attempt to manifest the happy ending he will never, ever get because his sins cannot and would not be forgiven in the way he wants. he wants to imagine himself as the righteous returned duke whose crimes, including the enslavement, abuse, and exploitation of those he saw as his rightful inferiors, were totally worth it, i promise. and if emet is prospero, the warrior of light is his caliban.
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