#subtlety hinting to Maddie that Vlad is better

[tanglepelt]

Dc x dp idea 101

Know one knows Danny is phantom except for Vlad. So after Danny rejects the fruitloop Vlad still does his whole clone thing.

Only Danielle is the “successful” halfa clone.

Vlad successfully clones Danny as a full human.

Vlad then accuses the real Danny as being a ghost pretending to be Maddie’s son. Everyone believes Vlad. They have no reason to believe that their son/friend is half ghost.

It’s easy for him convince everyone the ghost stole their sons memories. That’s why poor Danny doesn’t remember anything.

They run Danny out of town. Threatening to kill the ecto scum masquerading as Danny.

Danny meets up with Danielle and they go off exploring and heroing. Running into the teen titans. Ellie instantly vibes with their over all chaotic energy.

Eventually Ellie and Conner connect about being clones. At some point someone asks Danny how he felt when he found out he was cloned.

Danny doesn’t miss a beat.

He loves his first. Like She’s his baby sister. He doesn’t care she originally kidnapped him for her creator. She figured out the man was a fruit loop.

The second clone. That clone he hates. Stole his life and convinced his parents and friends that he wasn’t the original.

[ladylynse]

Chapter 10 [FF | AO3] of Revision: Maddie can’t deny it any longer. If ectoplasm can become blood, there’s more to this story than she ever realized.

Beginning | Previous

-|-

Time stretched.

Stopped.

Snapped back into place.

Slowed again.

At some point, Maddie realized that Alicia had given her another cup of coffee—already sweetened—even though Maddie couldn’t remember drinking the first. A piece of rhubarb crumble sat in front of her, heaped with an extra helping of the caramelized sugar and oat topping. The plate by Alicia had been pushed aside in favour of the local newspaper and was empty but for a few streaks of sticky pink, the odd rolled oat, and her fork.

Maddie wasn’t aware that she’d made any sound, but Alicia glanced in her direction. “You holding up? You can talk to me if you’re ready.”

“I’m fine,” Maddie said, but even as the lie passed her lips, she was reminded again of how often she’d heard that from Danny.

Had she gotten the habit from him without realizing it?

“I’ll be fine.” The correction didn’t have as much strength behind it as she wished it would. “I’m just….” She let the sentence die, but Alicia nodded.

She still understood Maddie better than Maddie understood her. Or Danny. Or Jazz.

Maddie licked her lips, but her entire mouth felt dry. She took another sip of coffee. “So you know about Danny. And…and Phantom.”

Alicia folded the paper and set it aside. “Saw it with my own eyes. Didn’t ask for an explanation; didn’t really need one, even if there had been time. My priority was to help them, not question them.”

“Right, of course. But you….” How could she say this? “You always thought the same as Mom and Dad. That I was throwing my life away by studying the paranormal.”

Alicia arched an eyebrow. “Don’t you go putting words in my mouth. What you did with your life was always your business as far as I was concerned. I was happy for you when you got accepted into that program of yours, you’ll recall. So was Mom. She didn’t burn that cake on purpose.”

“But you still…. You never used to believe in ghosts.”

“People are allowed to change what they believe.” The response was dry, but Alicia had a hint of a teasing smile on her face. “Or are you gonna try to tell me that you believe exactly what you believed about ghosts before any of this happened?”

“I’m not, I just—” Maddie raked a hand through her hair. “Vlad’s the same way. He’s like Danny, I mean. There was an accident back in college, something that had Vlad in the hospital for months. You might remember me telling you about it. Jack and I had known it was bad, and we’d tried not to take it to heart when Vlad said he didn’t want to see us, but—” She shook her head. “We didn’t realize what had happened then. We didn’t realize what happened to Danny when it somehow happened again. I don’t know about Danielle, but—”

“But you know now,” Alicia interrupted, “and you’re acting accordingly. You’re changing your approach based on what you’ve discovered. Scientific method, isn’t it?”

Maddie gave her sister a weak smile she wasn’t really feeling, though she doubted it was enough to fool Alicia. “Yes, I’m trying, but this entire thing with Vlad— He says Danny won’t accept him as a mentor, so he’s been playing the part of the villain to help Danny learn the things he needs to know. Danny’s never liked Vlad since they met. Jazz was pragmatic for a while before she dropped all sense of subtlety about it, too, and I know it has to do with the enmity Vlad has fostered between them, but I don’t—”

“Take a breath. We’ve got time to talk.”

Maddie did as instructed, taking a moment to try to organize her thoughts. “I don’t know what came first. What sparked the animosity. Danny’s worry about Vlad is real, but I don’t know if there’s more behind it than what Vlad told me. I wanted to talk to them both going forward, to help Jack and I learn, but Danny’s reaction to that bug—”

He’d recognized it as Vlad’s technology as readily as she had, and he hadn’t even had the luxury of seeing it intact.

It begged the question of how often he—or possibly Tucker—had dismantled or straight up destroyed something similar.

“Ask him once he’s back. That’s the simplest.”

“He wanted to leave Vlad out of it.”

“That was before he knew how involved Vlad was.”

“But I don’t know—”

“And you still won’t have a hope of knowing until you hear both sides of it,” Alicia cut in. “If you ask and Danny decides to tell you, then it should be a little easier to figure out then, don’t you think? Since Vlad’s told you his side, now you need to listen to Danny’s, not just Jazz’s version of it. You might not be the only one he’s keeping secrets from. If he was so ready to be open about all of this, he might have told you and Jack everything before this ever happened. But he wasn’t ready, and he didn’t, so here we are.”

If only Danny had told them, if only she’d known, if only she could turn back the clock and make another choice—

But he hadn’t told them when he’d had the opportunity—because surely, at some point, there must have been even a single moment where he’d considered telling them; the thought that there hadn’t been only made her feel ill—and she hadn’t stopped what she’d been doing when she’d had Danielle in the lab with her even though she’d had the opportunity.

Maddie swallowed, but she knew Alicia raised fair points. What ifs aside, it was highly unlikely that Jazz knew everything, and if Sam and Tucker had been able to fill in the missing pieces, wouldn’t they have at least told Jazz once Danny had disappeared?

There were still things she didn’t know.

There were things she might never know.

“You’re right.”

“Of course I’m right. Now eat your crumble or you’re cleaning out the spittoon Jasper uses when he’s over visiting while I eat your crumble; maybe that’ll keep you out of your own head for a bit.”

Maddie snorted, but she picked up her fork and let the sweetened tartness of the crumble fill her mouth.

-|-

Danny had told her to punch in the date of their parents’ wedding for the override code, but he had failed to tell her which format to use. Jazz cursed under her breath as she started for a third time, this time putting the year first. If she went through all this and it turned out that Tucker had used the wrong day….

The computer let out a series of beeps but didn’t light up. That was more than it had done before, but it wasn’t any proof that the override was working. Jazz tapped her Fenton Phone to switch the transmitter back on. “Tuck, if I’ve got in your override code, is there any easy way to bring up the display?”

There was a beat of silence before, “Wait, you only tried the override now?”

“Yeah, because it’s something you forgot to tell me about. Danny told me.”

“You spoke to—”

“—heard from—”

“—Danny?”

Jazz wasn’t entirely surprised Sam had jumped into the conversation. “He’s okay. So is…our cousin.” The words felt like a lie, and it had been so long since she’d had any reason to lie to Sam or Tucker. “Sorry, I was going to tell you after I got this going. He’s not in the Ghost Zone, but Dad still is, and Vlad’s definitely pulled something. I just don’t know what. That’s one of the reasons I need to break everything he’s trying and you need to keep your eyes peeled.”

They’d want to keep asking her questions—how could they not? She would if their situations were reversed—but they knew enough to focus on the task at hand first. Tucker took a bit of time to collect himself and then started talking her through things. She had to get him to clarify whenever he described something she didn’t see, and then she’d have to tell him what was in front of her, and the process was not short.

Still, she didn’t realize how long everything was taking until she heard Vlad’s voice coming from directly behind her. “Got a little lost on your way to the kitchen, did you?”

Jazz’s shriek was not dignified, and the pained hisses in her ear from Tucker and Sam meant it had sounded entirely too piercing to them, but it had been a rough couple of days. They wouldn’t blame her. “Don’t act like you’re surprised,” she groused. She’d leave the transmitter on in case Vlad decided to try something else; might as well give Sam and Tucker as good an idea of what was happening to her as she could. “Danny’s secret is out, your secret is out, Mom and Dad will figure out what the truth means sooner rather than later, and suing you for patent infringement is the least they’ll do once the restraining order is in place.”

Vlad let out another world-weary sigh, and he moved to put the plate of omelet he was holding onto one of the work benches. Jazz kept her back to the computer and braced herself against the console with both arms, wanting to make his touching it as inconvenient as possible even if he tried to sneak around her with an invisible clone. As long as she was wearing the Spectre Deflector, he couldn’t stand in the same place she was occupying any more than he could overshadow her.

That was assuming he hadn’t already been countering everything she’d done before ever making her aware of his presence, of course, and it wasn’t an assumption she was sure she could make. For all she knew, he wouldn’t even have needed to use the same console to override her. She doubted Vlad did much without having a backup in place—Danny was too good at destroying his first attempts for Jazz to think he hadn’t learned if it wasn’t something he’d been doing all along—and even with Tucker talking her through things, she wasn’t confident that she would have noticed Vlad doing something right under her nose.

Not that she’d bother accusing him of this. She wouldn’t even get any satisfaction out of it. He’d deny it, just like he denied everything else, and she wouldn’t believe him because he hadn’t given her any reason to believe him.

There was absolutely no part of her that trusted Vlad, and that was not going to change.

That ship had sailed even before she’d pretended to run away to him and he’d tried to have her fight her brother to the death.

Of course, he wouldn’t necessarily have needed to counter her right now as long as he’d stood there and watched and listened long enough to figure out what she’d done.

She might have shown him enough of Tucker’s override for him to work out how to undo everything the moment she walked away. If he found a way to counter it, Tucker would have to start from scratch, and whatever Vlad had sent after Danny and his friend, after Maddie, after Jack—

“Just for a moment,” Vlad said without flinching under Jazz’s steely stare, “let us entertain the notion that I really am as terrible as you think.”

“Sure, since you are.”

“Do you truly believe your parents would win a court case against me?”

“Seems pretty open and shut to me. We’ve got multiple records of original blueprints that you stole, Danny will have ample proof of—”

“Beyond a reasonable doubt is a higher bar to clear than you think, I suspect, and—quite frankly—I would be able to invest more in my case than they could in theirs. You aren’t the first person to threaten to take me to court—”

“No surprise there. I’m not convinced you’re half as good at managing your business as you pretend.”

“—and I know the system. If I wanted to—and if you were somehow able to convince your parents of your delusions about me to the point that they were foolish enough to follow through—I could easily financially destroy you.”

“Do you seriously think any of this is helping your case right now?” With any luck, Tucker had figured out a way to record this. Vlad’s words wouldn’t be loud, but he was close enough to her that Jazz hoped her mic would pick him up.

“I’m not saying I would—”

“Except you would. Without hesitation or remorse.”

“Jasmine, please. I’m merely pointing out that doing something so drastic would be a mistake.”

“And that doesn’t sound like a threat to your ears? You’re further gone than I’d thought.”

“None of this is a threat,” Vlad said, his voice flattening into something more of tried patience than anything else. “Now are you going to keep making baseless accusations or are you going to eat your breakfast?”

“Let him think he won for now,” Tucker’s voice whispered into her ear. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and he won’t figure out what you did.”

Jazz wasn’t about to bet on that, but she swallowed back her protests nonetheless. Baseless accusations, my foot. More likely than not, Vlad was betting that she’d figured out some way to record their conversations and was trying to appear all nice and sane instead of showing his true colours.

This was not paranoia.

Not when Vlad was involved.

Jazz held her glare for a beat longer before moving away from the computer console and picking up the plate Vlad had left for her. The food looked like it had come straight out of a restaurant—not something she’d put past him, frankly—and smelled heavenly. The plate was surprisingly warm in her hands, so she knew the omelet wouldn’t have gone cold in the meantime, but— “How do I know this isn’t drugged?”

“You would have known if you’d come to the kitchen when I’d made it instead of sneaking back to my lab to try to sabotage my search and rescue efforts,” Vlad said dryly, “but if you prefer, I can eat a few bites of that one or you can make your own.”

Jazz scowled. “Let’s just go back to the kitchen.”

She might not have done any good, but she’d tried. If she could at least keep her eyes on this Vlad, even if she couldn’t track his clones, hopefully she’d have done enough to help Danny.

-|-

Danny’s return was almost as unexpected as his leaving.

Alicia had coaxed Maddie into baking cookies—not that it had taken much coaxing, even after Maddie had realized Alicia’s pointed suggestions were more to ground her sister than to give her nephew something sweet to eat. Still, being otherwise distracted, she’d yelped when she’d turned to grab a bit more flour and saw her son standing by the fridge, watching her in silence. Maddie took some small measure of comfort in seeing her sister pointedly relax and roll her shoulders; Alicia had been just as startled by Danny’s appearance, whatever she might pretend.

If acceptance of, well, all of this, meant there was a bit of a learning curve even though you pushed through it, it gave Maddie some hope that this might not all be too little, too late.

“They’ll be chocolate chip,” Maddie offered with a nod at the bowl.

“Cookies aren’t going to fix this, Mom.”

The words hurt more than she wanted to admit. “I’m not trying to fix everything with cookies, sweetie. I…. I know it won’t be that easy.” She was afraid to call this a peace offering, even if that was what it had become, for fear that he wouldn’t touch them once they were baked as a consequence. “They’re just cookies.”

Danny shrugged instead of answering and moved to sit down at the table by his aunt.

Maddie swallowed and plunged her hands back into the cool dough, churning in the chocolate chips as if making the perfect cookie were indeed the start of fixing this mess of her own making. “Was everything all right?” The cheerfulness in her voice sounded false even to her own ears. “Nothing unexpected?”

“Vlad hasn’t found us yet,” Danny said flatly. “Doesn’t mean he won’t, but Dani’s still safe for now. I didn’t find anything else around here when I looked, but that’s not a guarantee there isn’t something. Jazz is going to try to keep him at bay, though.”

Jazz.

Meaning he’d spoken to his sister.

He hadn’t done so earlier; she was sure of that. Maddie wasn’t convinced Jazz would have contemplated going to Vlad at all if she’d had an inkling of Danny’s true whereabouts.

Well.

That wasn’t quite true.

It was entirely too likely that Jazz would have pointed her in one direction and gone to confront Vlad on her own.

Maddie swallowed and picked up the ice cream scoop in preparation of placing perfectly sized balls of dough onto the cookie sheet. Alicia, aside from an interested hum that meant she was listening, was once again doing her best impression of a lump on a log. She might be talkative enough when it was just the two of them, but she was perfectly content to let Maddie tackle this conversation with her son on her own.

“Are you willing to tell me what happened between you and Vlad?”

Danny snorted. “What didn’t happen between us? He’s messed up. I’ve known that since we met at your reunion, and that first impression has not improved. It’s actually gotten worse. Look, whatever Jazz said, whatever you think, the truth is worse. I haven’t even told Jazz everything he’s done. I never figured out how to tell her. Even Sam and Tucker….” Danny shook his head, and Maddie’s heart sank.

Danny had stopped confiding in her and Jack, but until recently, she’d hoped he was at least confiding in his friends.

Having confirmation that he’d stopped before now—

No. She could be methodical about this and not jump to conclusions before she had all the facts. She’d been doing too much of that of late as it was. “Could you give me an example?” She kept working as she talked. Three evenly spaced balls of soon-to-be cookies stood proudly in a row across the short end of the tray. Maddie grabbed another spoonful of dough, rolled it between her palms, and started down the long side.

Danny glanced at Alicia this time before looking back at Maddie. “You’ve already seen the best example I can give you.”

The tracking device, he meant. Maddie grimaced. “I really don’t like the idea that you know Vlad’s technology from its parts.”

Danny blinked. “What?” The question sounded almost reflexive. Then, “Oh, right. Yeah. Not the first time I’ve seen one of those things. Probably won’t be the last. He chased us through time using one of those.”

He’d what?

“It’s just….” Danny leaned his head back to stare up at the ceiling. “You remember that time it was just the two of us and we ended up by Vlad’s cabin in the woods?” He looked over at her again and must have seen the recollection of the time on her face because he continued, “That wasn’t bad luck or happenstance. I mean, I would’ve hoped that the gift baskets gave him away, but in case they didn’t? He orchestrated the entire thing. And that stunt is on the tamer side of what Vlad’s pulled.”

“He said—” She broke off at Danny’s sharp look, but Alicia was right. She needed to know both sides of this. “Vlad knows you don’t like him.”

“So?”

“He said that’s deliberate on his part.”

Danny frowned. “What, him being a creep?”

The dough she was rolling squished flat in her hands, and she had to start again. “No,” she said carefully. “He said you wouldn’t accept him as a mentor, so he’s taken up the role of villain to do what he can to help you learn how to handle everything.”

Danny laughed.

It wasn’t the gentle, carefree laughter it should be.

It was bitter, broken. Hard.

“Even if that’s the line he’s going with,” Danny said when that horrible laughter had died away, “anyone with sense would look at what he’s done and say he’s gone too far.”

Maddie opened her mouth to ask what exactly Vlad had done that Danny meant—the tracking device was unnerving, admittedly, if that was all it was, but it may not be unwarranted if it was more along the lines of an emergency transmitter than a tracker—when Danny added, “Did he say anything about Dani?”

“He said she wasn’t stable and that he’d tried to help her but couldn’t.” Wasn’t that what Vlad had said? Danielle had been to his lab, Maddie could remember that much for sure, and if she was still unstable, then it must mean Vlad hadn’t been able to help her.

“That’s a rich way of saying trying to melt her down didn’t get rid of her.”

Even Alicia couldn’t hide her sharp intake of breath at that. What had poor Danielle gone through before Maddie had captured her? Maddie could imagine a number of setups that might serve to force a ghost to shift form, and it wasn’t a stretch to think that something could be modified to force destabilization, but Danielle wasn’t simply a ghost.

The amount of energy that would have been needed to destabilize her human cells to the point that it mimicked melting—

It wasn’t something that would be accidental.

Mistakes could be made, of course. She knew that. Still, it wasn’t like Vlad to mess up his math, misread the power meter, or get his wires crossed (literally or figuratively). Of the three of them, he’d never been exceptionally careless. She’d gone over enough of his calculations in the past to know that he took pride in being precise.

Maddie picked up the ball of dough that had fallen back into the bowl and placed it onto the cookie sheet without perfecting it first. “Are you—?”

Danny levelled her with an icy glare, and the words died in her throat. “I’m sure.”

“But there could have been—”

“Mom. I know what I saw.”

She swallowed, nodded, and put the last ball of cookie dough on this tray.

She had to listen to him, not argue with him.

Whether or not there was still some mistake or misunderstanding or misremembered exaggeration could be cleared up later; as it was, Danny’s beliefs about what had happened couldn’t be clearer.

It made Maddie feel sick.

“Can you tell me what exactly happened?”

He shook his head. “Not until I talk to Dani. I don’t know how much she wants to tell you, and that would get to a point where I can’t be vague anymore.”

Alicia moved to stand by Maddie long enough to grab the full cookie sheet, replace it with an empty one, and murmur, “Since he’s talking about Vlad, ask how it started.”

Alicia had the cookies in the oven and the timer set before Maddie found her voice again. “How did everything start with Vlad? You said at the reunion—” She broke off. Jazz had also told her this had begun at that reunion, and she was starting to think she and Jack should have never attended. It had been so nice to catch up, but if Vlad—

If Danny—

“If you knew he was the same as you,” she started again, “wouldn’t that spark friendship and not animosity? I’m not trying to criticize your choices, really, I’m not, but having a mentor—”

“He doesn’t want to be my mentor,” Danny said, the fierceness in his voice enough to stay her hands from picking up a fresh scoop of cookie dough. “I mean, yeah, sure, I guess he technically does, but what he really wants is to have Dad out of the way. You have no idea how many times he’s asked me to renounce Dad and accept him as my father. Which is why the fact that Dad’s in the Ghost Zone right now is bad. Aside from the fact that you guys aren’t the most popular people in the Ghost Zone, Vlad has ghosts on his payroll. Do you see where I’m going with this?”

She knew what he was implying. She’d have been able to figure that out even if Jazz hadn’t expressed similar worries. But— “Vlad said he doesn’t have the resources—”

“Vlad lies,” interrupted Danny sharply. “Can you just take a minute and get that through your thick skull?”

“Tone,” Alicia said quietly, and Danny huffed out a breath.

“He lies,” Danny repeated, anger and frustration still tightening his words. “He will tell you what he thinks you want to hear and blithely deny whatever accusation you throw at him. He will take a situation and find some way to spin it so he doesn’t come off looking as bad as he is. I might not know what he was like twenty years ago, but I know what he’s like now, and I know that way better than you do.”

“I don’t mean to say that you don’t, but—”

“But you don’t want to believe me because I’m just a kid? Because he was your friend and you don’t want to think he’s this big of a creep? Or because he’s always really nice to you?”

Maddie sighed. “I’m still trying to understand, that’s all. I know it might not seem like it right now, but I’m trying.”

He didn’t glower at her and spit out so try harder.

He didn’t say anything at all.

She kept making cookies, hoping he’d break the silence.

In the end, she broke first, unable to take the building pressure of everything that was unsaid between them. In as neutral a tone as she could manage, she asked, “If you take a step back and look at the situation objectively, do you see even the possibility of truth in Vlad’s words? That he’s fostered this dislike—”

“Hatred.”

“—loathing, then, in a misguided attempt to help?”

Danny stared at her for a beat and then drew an invisible line in the air at his knees. “This right here? Where the line would be if someone was actually trying that. With the floor being normal people who don’t do that. Vlad?” He drew another line as high above his head as he could reach without getting up from his chair. “And that’s a conservative estimate. I mean, I’m not saying I didn’t learn a lot of my powers on the fly. I did. But Vlad doesn’t get credit for that when I’d been doing that before I met him.”

“Even if—”

“Mom.” He could put so much weight into that word. “I can put this a different way for you, okay?”

She nodded, grateful that he was willing to try.

“You know what you did to Dani.”

Ice filled her chest, her entire being, and brought her to stillness.

Danny’s words weren’t accusatory this time. They weren’t lobbed at her with enough force to make her crack, nor were they diamond hard or sharper than her scalpels. There was no poison in them. No promise of retribution.

Instead, they were a simple statement of fact, spoken with as much gravitas as Danny saying he was going to have cereal for breakfast again.

That made this worse, somehow.

“You didn’t know until after. Vlad knew from the very beginning.” The edge had crept back into Danny’s voice, bitter and building to blistering. “Would you go back, do that all again, and say it was to help her?”

“He wouldn’t have—”

“He. Knew.”

Maddie did not need Alicia’s warning look to keep her silence.

She wasn’t sure her mouth could form any words right now even if she had an idea of what she wanted to say.

Vlad had said that Danielle had come to him for help, but he hadn’t said what sort of help he’d given her.

She hadn’t asked.

She hadn’t thought their definition of help would differ that much.

“Just—” Danny blew out a breath. “Even if you don’t believe me because you think he’s fooled me—when you’re the one he’s fooling, by the way—don’t trust everything he says. And don’t trust him with anything important anymore. Can you at least do that?”

Maddie nodded.

There was no other answer to give.

-|-

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