#lets fix that

But then there were news reporters seconds away from breaking into his house, and Danny actually had to stop one from trying to climb through his window. Sometimes he’d let one ask him a question from his window, or floating above them as Phantom, just to offer a few crumbs before they started making stuff up about him just to get something out there. He didn’t want another Inviso-Bill situation, especially internationally, and he had at least learned it was better to have a hand in the narrative than let it run wild without him. So no, he wasn’t getting much rest.

Sam and Tucker were also in their own form of social lockdown, which both of them took far more advantage of than he did. Tucker used it to score brownie points, and also got to talk to some big names in tech. Sam used the publicity to push her various causes and had developed an internet cult following overnight. Valerie took to it worse than he did, especially since she had developed a tendency to growl at the reporters if they tried to bother her at work, and nearly broke some tech-guy’s hand when he pushed too hard about her suit, leaving him little time to talk with them himself. The Nasty Burger was doing surprisingly well the past few days at least.

His parents decided to approach him sometime on day three. In short, it was awkward and uncomfortable, and Danny was infinitely thankful for Jazz’s ability to play interference. Danny had ended up spending most of that night trying to explain to his very confused parents that he really wasn’t possessed, hadn’t taken place of their son, did not have any evil influence affecting his every waking moment due to being a ghost, he had actually wanted to do the things he did (mostly), and clearing up any other miscellaneous misconceptions that came up. Jazz was probably the only reason it didn’t devolve into shouting or Danny getting jumped by his own parents and dragged into the lab. He just hoped some of it stuck with them, so he wouldn’t have to explain it again. The hardest part was when his parents asked if he had really died. That of course wasn’t something he really wanted to go over, but he told them all he could about the day in the lab. It seemed to pain them as much as it did him to go over it.

By day four, Danny was sure he could actually start to catch a break. His parents were talking to him (mostly ghost questions), and the news reporters had all miraculously disappeared sometimes late the night before. But he also hadn’t heard much from any of his friends either, just a partially concerned call from Mr. Lancer who wanted to talk to him about accommodations and making up schoolwork over the summer, tacked on to a ‘thank you for saving the world’ and an offer to talk whenever he needed it. Which was nice, but Danny wasn’t so sure Mr. Lancer was equipped to handle even half of his problems, even if he did appreciate the gesture.

Then, that afternoon, it all went to shit. The GIW rolled up to his house and demanded his parents hand him over to their custody. They cited the Anti-Ecto Acts and everything, and suddenly the lack of reporters made sense. The news reported had been chased off by the government. They didn’t want the public to know that they were going after his head. His parents confronted them, while Danny watched from the window. The answer was a resounding ‘no,’ and the GIW didn’t take it well.

Danny, Tucker, Sam, and Jazz had planned if things ever went south, but most of that plan depended on all of them being available. None of them except Jazz now were, but he had to make do. So, he took off, without the money from Sam or way to get in contact from Tucker. Jazz provided the cover and distraction for him to sneak through the perimeter the GIW had set up around his house. It was a close thing, and Danny had to stay human to keep him from pinging on their equipment, along with limited power use. It didn’t help that he was still exhausted, but he had no choice. He had to leave.

And so, Danny fled, and kept running. The entire world knew his face, so he couldn’t find any reprieve either. The GIW’s newest slander campaign was doing its damnest to make him a villain, and while that wasn’t very successful, everyone knew he was on the run. The news fought back, and there had been a reporter near his house anyways and had managed to catch part of the confrontation. He became more intensely nocturnal to avoid people, sleeping in empty hotel rooms during the day, and sneaking around at night. He stole food he needed during the night as well, but only from places he knew wouldn’t miss it. He could get into libraries and cafés to send out an email to Sam, Tucker and Jazz, but those messages were few and far between, and he was never able to get a message back.

The GIW were always on his tail, in some sort of twisted game of cat and mouse. They followed him all across the country, from the big cities to the boonies. Anytime he transformed, he knew he set off their alarms, and his only hope was leave faster than they could get to him. He couldn’t not transform either, he was still recognizable, and someone ended up tipping them off after a time anyway. He didn’t dare return to Amity or anywhere near there. It was too dangerous to both him and those he cared about. It was better to be constantly on the move.

Danny did get his few moments of rest. There was a nice couple in New York who hid him for a while, though he only suspected they did it due to their lost nephew. He also found his way to Aunt Alicia in Spittoon and had managed to hole up there for a good couple month. The people there were protective of their own, and when the GIW came knocking, they fought tooth and nail to buy him time to escape. There were less GIW agents after that. Another small town in Oregon had the GIW chasing their own tail more often not, until some of the locals decided he was too suspicious and chased him out themselves.

Danny fled to Canada for a while, and honestly should’ve stayed there. But it was harder to survive on the move since he didn’t know how to get food in the middle of the Canadian wilderness, even if it was the best hiding spot he found. He would have to venture into a settlement of some kind eventually. He had considered going more abroad to hide, where the US government couldn’t both him, but he didn’t think he could make it over the ocean on his own and didn’t feel like hiding in a place so close to people such as a plane or a boat for an extended period of time longer than an hour. It was too risky.

As for the ghosts, Danny would find one every now and again. He didn’t fight them, and they didn’t try to start anything with him. These encounters were brief, mostly to exchange news since the ghosts didn’t want to associate with him either. Danny never really did check the news himself anyway. His mental state was fragile enough without hearing the GIW blasting ads about what an awful being he was.

It was… lonely, especially once Danny found the rhythm to moving around and his days shifted from intensely stressful to more monotonous. He was too recognizable to be anonymous, and with the GIW chasing after him, no one wanted to get caught in the cross-fire, no matter who he was and what he had done. It had been years since he had seen his friends, only sending the occasional email when he could, and even then, those had become less detail oriented, more like personal journal entries. He wondered if there was anyone other than the GIW still looking for him. It had started to feel like his only hope was to just keep moving until the GIW eventually gave up.

But by year five, it didn’t seem likely, and the GIW were getting closer to catching him every time Danny took a chance or didn’t get out soon enough. They’re weapons were getting better, while they agents themselves got more skilled. But Danny had gotten a lot stronger himself, now that he was an adult. His powers were off the charts, at least he thought so. He hadn’t checked in so long, he no longer had a full bearing on what he was capable of. But he did get really good at hiding and using his powers while in human form. Danny was pretty sure he could completely hide his ectosignature if he needed to at this point.

Danny had just turned twenty-two when it all went further downhill. The slander campaign reached a peak, and now normal humans were gunning for his head, with the media finally backing off of his defense for some reason. He had been camping out in the woods for the day, sleeping far too high in a tree. Someone had spotted him, and the GIW swarmed that small town like nothing else he had even seen. They had new weapons. Ones that looked distinctly FentonWorks in design. They hurt, in more ways than one. Two agents found his tree and shot at him before he could fully wake up.

“Where did you get those?” Danny spat.

The agent snarled, “what? You didn’t think your parents would sell you out, freak? I was honestly surprised it took this long for them to crack, those failures of ectoscientists.”

“What did you do?” Danny hissed, his unused powers boiling under his skin, begging to bet let out.

The other agent laughed at him. “Got rid of those fools years ago! It only took us so long to get our hands on their tech because they tried damn hard to hide their more interesting inventions from us. They tried to protect you, even in death. How pathetic.”

Danny stopped running at that point. After seven years of it, he was tired, and decided in that moment, he had given up on waiting it out. No. His parents were gone, and he had no idea if his sister and friends were okay either. He halted in his tracks and snapped around, switching his tune completely. He was tired of being hunted; it was time to try to opposite to see if that worked instead. Those two agents never left the forest that day.

Cat and mouse became a different game. Danny would wage guerrilla warfare on the GIW, while they, in-turn, hunted him endlessly. Neither of them would relent, and neither would leave that small town as long as the other was there. So that small town in North Dakota became a battle ground. He should’ve felt bad about hurting the GIW, they were just human after all, but after all those years living in fear, Danny didn’t hesitate to strike down an agent. It was a ‘them or him’ situation. And they had killed his parents. It was a clear-cut decision from his perspective.

After so long without being on the offensive, Danny felt like the ectoblasts were burning through his hand, along with whatever he had managed to hit. They were much stronger than he remembered, and his ice came out more freely than it ever had before, but was that much more difficult to reign in. Between his lack of control and the GIW general indifference to collateral damage. That small town somewhere in North Dakota was nearly leveled in the process. He did feel bad about displacing the people that had lived there and hoped somewhere in the back of his head that they had all managed to get out safely.

But Danny could only keep up so long. There was one of him, and hundreds of them. They had managed to get more than a few lucky shots. Danny was littered with holes that burned, and it sapped his strength. But he ground his teeth and pushed through it. Then, it was no longer about survival; he wasn’t going to last much longer either way. He wasn’t going to get to finish growing up, or any of that. He knew what lied ahead of him. Danny was going to take those bastards with him on his way to hell.

Danny stood in the middle of the carnage, right out in the open. He let them fire first, but then unleashed carnage. His wail ripped from his throat, decimating what little infrastructure was left, full of grief and rage. He fired blasts after blast and encased the entire town in an early winter. He fought tooth and nail, hitting with as much strength as he could muster, tanking more hits than he blocked or dodged. He could almost see how Dan had taken comfort in the absolutely violence he wrought. But this was difference than mindless slaughter, he was more of a cornered animal than predator. He only stopped when the agents did, deep into the night. They didn’t come back with reinforcements in another wave, if they even had any left in this this horrible, small town in the middle of nowhere.

Danny collapsed, felt himself switch back, and bleed out in the middle of it all. At least he could see the stars, even if he would never reach.

   Danny awoke with a choked gasp, clutching the sheets and whipping his head around wildly, confusion fogging up his mind. His entire body ached and burned, and his grip on his powers was slippery at best.

Danny awoke in a bed, a familiar one, and that was the first thing he noticed that was wrong. He was in a room, his room, that he hadn’t seen in years. All of his models and posters perfectly in place, just as he remembered, even the ones that had suffered since he had gotten his powers. But his room didn’t have the small stains that at had built up on the carpet from when he would sit on the ground to patch himself up. His sheets were untouched by small burns from ectoblasts set off by nightmares. It was like nothing bad had ever happened, but Danny could feel his powers, dancing in an uncertain flux under his skin. They hadn’t been this unstable since he had first gotten them.

As Danny shook the sleep from his head, the scenery didn’t change, and neither did his memories of the past seven years. It was distinctively not a dream, but here he was, in his own room, after what he knew had been his second meeting with death. Danny climbed out of his bed, and immediately wobbled on his feet. He should be taller than this, and the sudden height change threw him for a loop. He stumbled and wavered on his now too-short legs out of his room, across the hall, and practically crashed into the door of the bathroom when his intangibility refused to cooperate.

The face staring back at him was his own, but not the one Danny had come to know. This one was still padded by baby fat, eyes wide, flesh unscarred by anything other than the bright red Lichtenburg shooting up from the collar or his pajamas. It was seven years too young to be the face he had come to know as his own. Danny swayed and crashed to the bathroom floor. There was a shout from someone else in house. He was fourteen again, just after the accident that had taken his life from him. The past seven years were gone. Danny shuffled himself over the toilet and hurled.

The door opened and he was embraced. Danny stiffened and looked over his shoulder to see bright red hair and teal eyes he hadn’t seen since he had left. Jazz gave him a worried look.

“Danny? Are you okay? You don’t have to go to school if you don’t feel up to it. I’m sure we can convince mom and dad to call you in sick, especially after what happened yesterday. You need the rest, even if it is your first day of high school.”

“Jazz,” Danny whined, his eyes filling with tears. He sunk further into her embrace.

“Oh, Danny…” Jazz said gently, embracing him tightly.

Danny let himself cry and be led back into his room and back into his bed, taking any comfort he could get. Jazz planted a small kiss on his brow before giving him another soft, worried smile.

“I’ll talk to mom and dad. You just focus on getting better, okay?”

Danny nodded, tears blurring his vision as he watched Jazz walk away and out of his room, shutting the door gently behind him. As soon as the lock clicked, he broke down, choking on his own sobs so that no one would hear. He hadn’t cried in years, there had been no time, but now his jumbled mind couldn’t think of anything else to do. His eyes flares with his surge in emotions and he screwed them shut. He was all they way back at the beginning of everything, but a day too late to stop it all. He was already dead, but still too weak and unsteady to be of any use. Was this even a second chance? He could be hallucinating it all, or it could be some sort of twisted joke.

Danny took a deep breath to prevent himself from hyperventilating and grounded himself by focusing on the near-silent hum of his core. It was hard to pick out, which helped him focus in its own way. Last time, he hadn’t noticed until he was already on the run, but now he could feel his core steadily forming and solidifying in his chest after being used to a fully-developed one for so long. This one was still too fresh and fragile, smaller than he was used to. Danny curled up on himself and made a keening noise his throat wasn’t yet equipped to make.

Danny let the exhaustion sink deeper into his bones, which ached, and he fell into an unsteady sleep.

    Danny awoke to the unfamiliar sound of a cell phone. It had been ringing for the past several minutes, forcefully dragging him from his slumber. It took his mind a couple second to catch up to his current situation. It had been hours since he had fallen asleep, apparently, now early afternoon instead of morning. He grabbed the distantly familiar device and struggled to remember his passcode, before figuring it out after a minute of trial and error.

His cell was full of messages from both Sam and Tucker throughout the day, asking him where he was. Danny noticed the messages seemed to get more worried as the day went on. It made sense that they’d be concerned. He had died yesterday, after all. He responded simply and truthfully, with the fact that he’d been allowed to stay home and had been asleep. Their responses were immediate, asking if he was okay and if they could come over.

At the thought of seeing Sam and Tucker, Danny froze. Jazz hadn’t picked up anything different with him, and Danny hadn’t really been acting his (mental) age, but it was possible that either of them could pick up the sudden change. Sam had always been an extremely critical person, and Tucker had known his for so long he new every last one of Danny’s quirks, which had drastically changed over the past seven years. He could be spotted immediately.

Danny could always just tell them. It would be better than lying and pretending, but he wasn’t sure if they’d believe him. They weren’t the same Sam and Tucker he knew, not really. These ones didn’t have the experiences his did. No ghost fights, no possessions, no time travel. They had yet to go through the rough experiences that would follow in the next two years. He wasn’t even sure if he should drag them into all of this ghost business again, but he knew them better than that. They already knew he was a ghost; he wouldn’t be able to stop them from at least helping out.

Danny sent a text back out to the two that he was still really tired and wanted to continue resting. He was fine. It was a lie, but it would be a small one. It was a lie to buy time. Danny went and dragged himself out of bed, and stretched out his hands, trying to get used to them again. The dissonance was still there, but nearly as bad as it had been that morning. It was worse when he overshadowed someone.

Danny’s desk wasn’t the absolute mess it always became during the school season, so it was pretty easy to find a composition book that had been bought for the upcoming term. It gave it a nondescript title, ‘Future Plans.’ It took him hours, and his hand cramped up more often than not, probably from the nerve damage his ghost half had yet to fully repair, and not from no writing anything in years like his mind suppled, even if holding a pen felt foreign to him.

Danny wrote it all down, messily scribbled down in Esperanto. He jotted down everything he could remember, starting from his accident and continuing on over the years, but mostly just until he left. He wrote down what he felt were the causes of certain things in retrospect, and some events he hadn’t known about until long after they happened. He didn’t want to forget anything, or struggle to recall anything in the heat of the moment. If he could stop the worst of it all from happening, then he would consider it a resounding victory.

Danny’s pen stopped in the middle of a phrase. He knew better than to meddle, didn’t he? He had messed with the past before and he knew exactly where they would get him. He wanted things to change, all of the stuff from this point forward, other than certain things he needed to happen, he wanted to alter, but should he?

Danny set the pen down and tried to rub the pain out of his hand, only cramping it further. He let out a low groan. If his parents weren’t in the lab, he could’ve tried to get to Clockwork. He had to know about what was going on and could even be the reason Danny had ‘Returned to Go’ in the first place. But with the portal being newly opened, his parents would be holed up in there for the next week, just like last time.

That brought it into question on if he could even handle the Ghost Zone at this point. He had no control over his own powers, and his core was underdeveloped. It would probably help him stabilize to be in such an ectoplasm-saturated environment, but people would notice is he was gone, especially if he didn’t have anyone to cover for him. No, he couldn’t go to the Long Now yet, but that didn’t write off going into the Ghost Zone in general.

Danny went back to writing, finishing up what had to be the story of what had been the first two years of his life as a ghost in messy, Esperanto-shorthand. It was completely indecipherable to anyone else. Perfect. Danny flipped the book to the back, then upside down, and began again. This time, constantly referencing what he had already written in the first three-quarters of the notebook, Danny started making plans to counter the big bad events and possibly turn things in his favor, sorting events into preventable, unpreventable, and need-to-happen. This time, he had the advantage of information and experience, something he sorely lacked the first time around. He needed to make sure he put them both to good use, both to make some of his battles easier, and to possibly prevent them altogether. He had about a month before the first thing he wanted to change occurred, so that was what he dedicated most of his time to, ironing out all the details he could. It would be great if he could pull this off without getting slammed through a few walls.

Danny had about a month before the larger ghosts started coming through, and about two weeks before the smaller ones learned of the portal’s existence. He had a few good weeks to get his powers under control, now that he knew what he should be capable of. Danny wondered if he could change the time frame and get stronger faster. He would need to be stronger, and more cautious than before.