#phango19

"I could have saved myself, Fenton," Wes Weston grumbled in his arms.

Danny's eye twitched, and he considered dropping Wes right then and there. He had to remind himself that he was supposed to be a hero, and heroes didn't drop citizens out of the sky. So, he waited until they reached the ground before setting the redhead down.

"Wes," he began, "what were you doing standing under that building? You know that areas where ghost fights happen are dangerous to be in."

"You just say that because you don't want anyone to see you," Wes spat back. "I know your energy is depleting. I know you'll transform into a human when it's gone. And I'll get the evidence when you do."

Deep breaths, Danny. After taking a deep inhale then letting it out, the hero glared at Wes and spoke, "I'm serious. I know you're obsessed with exposing me or something, but you really need to stay away or you'll get hurt." He looked down at Wes's hand and saw him holding a camera, so he snatched it from him and added, "I'll take this, thank you very much."

Wes simply reached into his pocket and pulled out another camera. Of course he had a backup. Danny rolled his eyes and, after destroying the camera he took, sprang back into the air. He headed back toward Skulker, but not before shouting to Wes, "Seriously, stay back!"

Danny flew into battle, his fists ablaze with ectoplasm. Ectoblasts were shot from his hands at Skulker, but it seemed that the ghost had built a new shield into his metallic suit because all of them were deflected. Once Danny got too close, the robotic hunter punched him, and the halfa slammed against the concrete wall of a building.

He groaned and peeled himself off the cracked wall. When he looked up, he saw Skulker smirking at him. Danny bit his lip. He knew continuing to fight this way won't work... He had to pull out his emergencies attack.

His eyes made a quick scan across the street, but he wasn't that attentive about it. After all, he had already made sure that everyone left the scene when the brawl started. Hopefully, Wes listened to him and did too. There was no one around but him and Skulker.

He floated down to the road and planted his feet firmly on the asphalt. He faced Skulker, took a deep breath, and let out a bloodcurdling scream. That scream transformed into ectoplasmic energy that tore down everything in its path. Skulker was caught in the attack, his body thrown against a building before he could become intanngible. As the wail died down, Danny swiftly whipped out a thermos and trapped the ghost in.

As soon as the lid was on the thermos, he fell to his knees. The exertion finally reached him, and he felt all the energy being sucked from his body. He let the transformation rings run through him as his body went from ghost to human. The wind blew against his human skin--but not before he heard a click.

He turned around and saw...goddamnit. "Wes?"

Wes lowered the camera from his face to reveal a smug grin. Before Danny could say anything, he turned and sprinted.

Danny tried to get up and cursed when he fell back down. Why did fighting ghosts have to be so draining? He glared as the other boy fled from him--and then his eyes widened.

"Watch out!" Danny shouted.

Wes paused just long enough to look at him. The only problem was that he stopped right under the building Skulker had earlier been slammed against. The building that was severely cracked and about to collapse.

Danny pushed himself to his feet despite his body's complaints. He summoned the last vestiges of ghost energy he had to transform himself into a ghost and kicked into flight. He reached out, going as fast as he could to reach Wes before the rubble could crush him.

He was too late.

The last thing he saw was Wes's green eyes staring into his own before he was buried under the building.

"No!" he screamed. He reached the pile of crushed concrete where Wes once stood. It didnt matter if his body screamed at him to rest; he gathered all his supernatural strength and lifted the rubble out of the way. Wes can't be dead. He can't be. If he moved all this rubble away, then surely he'd find him injured but alive, and then he can take him to a hospital and--

His body froze at the sight he had unburied. If he weren't in ghost form at that moment, he was certain he would have vomited. He clamped a hand over his mouth and sunk to the ground, unable to take his eyes away.

There was no way Wes survived, and Danny didn't need to check his pulse to know. After all, the boy was nothing more than a pie of blood on the ground. Danny's form shook, and he couldnt stop the tears leaking out of his eyes. If only he made sure that Wes had left before he used his wail. If only he didn't make him stop underneath the falling building. If only he hadn't reverted to human before he could save him.

If only, if only. None of that changed what really happened.

Wes was dead. And it was Danny's fault.

____

Walter closed the door behind him as he entered the apartment. It was late at night; he had to stay at work to do some extra accounting. He was about to take off his coat, but an unusual cold that permeated the room made him keep it on.

He thought he heard someone in the living room, and his muscles tensed. "Wes?" he called out. No reply came.

He cautiously stepped into the room, and the person came into view. A glowing person sitting on air. He recognized those white hair and green eyes...wasn't he the ghost Wes was obsessed with?

Something was wrong. The ghost looked terrible, both physically and emotionally. But the physical injuries weren't unusual; he did fight enemies daily, after all. No--what made Walter's blood freeze was the intense grief on the phantom's face, evident in puffy eyebags and glossy eyes. And he was looking directly at Walter.

Before Walter could ask what was wrong, he said in a voice so soft he almost didn't hear him, "Your son died."

It felt like the whole world dropped beneath his feet. "What?" he asked, because he had to have heard that wrong, right?

"Wes died," the ghost repeated, his voice one decibel away from a sob. "I couldn't save him."

This couldn't be real. It had to be a dream. It certainly felt like one.

Phantom gave him one last, sad gaze and said, "I'm sorry." Then he vanished.

For a long moment, Walter stood there, trying to process what has been said to him. Once he did, he scrambled to grab his phone and quickly dialed Wes. The phone rang. No one picked up. He tried again, and again and again. But Wes never answered.

Wes was...

No. It couldn't be true. He didn't want to believe it...but he knew Phantom was telling the truth.

He let the phone slip through his fingers, then he buried his face in his hands and mourned his only family.

____

Everyone was shocked when they learned about Wes's passing. The pain was made more apparent when they went to school and realized just how much difference his absence made. The halls were too quiet, the classrooms too peaceful without Wes's crazy blabbering. No one thought they would miss hearing him ramble about conspiracy theories, but then again, you never know when you'd miss something until after it's gone.

Danny's enhanced senses let him pick up whispers around him, and everywhere he went in the school, people were talking to each other in hushed whispers, asking Is it true? Is that Weston kid really dead?

He wished he could shut his ears and forget all about Wes. But everytime he closed his eyes, he saw Wes's bloody, squashed remains, and he had to swallow down bile that rose in his throat.

"It's not your fault."

Danny opened his eyes to see Tucker standing in front of him. He held a look in his eyes that seemed an awful lot like pity. Danny looked down and clenched his hands into fists. "I could have saved him," he insisted.

"You did what you could," Sam said, walking from behind him to stand next to Tucker. "He was the one who stayed around despite your warnings." She tried to say it with confidence, but Danny heard the falter in her voice. Not even she could accept Wes's death without shock.

Danny was quiet. He closed his eyes, but then that sickening image appeared again, so he opened them and sighed. "I just...need some time alone."

He waited for them to leave. A part of him expected them to stay and argue, but it seemed they could tell that he needed space. Sam reminded him that they were there for him, Tucker agreed and added that he could talk to them whenever, and Danny simply nodded wordlessly until his friends turned and left.

He stood in the hallway, leaning against the lockers, until everyone else was gone and he was alone. No matter how much he told himself to go to class, he felt a weight dragging him down and preventing him from doing anything productive. He just wished he could curl on the floor and stay there until the day was done.

Eventually, though, he managed to get his body to walk. He dragged his feet step after step down the hallway, trying to remember which class he was supposed to attend this hour. He made it past a few lockers when his ghost sense was triggered.

As soon as the mist escaped his mouth, his body tensed, and he whipped around in place, trying to spot whichever ghost he was alerted to. He couldn't find anything. While his eyes scanned the hallway, he suddenly heard a click. He turned around and didn't spot anything unusual at first--but then he looked down and found a polaroid photograph on the floor which wasn't there before.

Danny narrowed his eys. He bent down to pick up the photo and studied it. It was...a picture of him. Caught in the middle of a transformation between ghost and human. He was kneeling on the ground, looking tired and haggard in his ghost form. Two rings of light surrounded his midriff, revealing the human clothes underneath his ghost jumpsuit.

Danny's blood turned to ice. He recognized the background of this photo. It was the same street he fought in yesterday. The same one where Wes--

The lights flickered. Danny's eyes snapped away from the photo. He could sense the ghost nearby.

Danny focused the ectoplasm from his body into his eyes. They lit up green, and the world around him changed colors. Everything was blanketed in shades of teal and purple--the colors he saw as a ghost. There, in the middle of the hallway, he saw the outline of a humanoid specter.

The air left Danny's lungs. He recognized that outline. Paired with the photograph... it had to be him. "Wes?" he called out hesitantly.

The ghost came into view, and now it was unmistakable. Even though the eyes that were staring at him were red instead of green, and the skin green instead of pink, Danny was certain that it was him. He had the same messy hair and wore the same basketball shirt.

It was Wes, back as a ghost.

Danny's heart jump in elation. Wes was back! He had an apology on the tip of his tongue, ready to spill so many things he thought he would never get to say to him. But then he stopped at the sight of Wes's expression. He didn't appear to share the same joy Danny felt.

In fact, his face held what could only be described as rage.

"Phantom," Wes growled. Even though he had the same voice, it made Danny's blood run cold in a way it never had when he was alive. Before the boy could blink, Wes lunged at him.

Danny yelped as he was tackled through a wall. Screams rose around him as they emerged in a filled classroom. He tried to convince himself that he did not hear something crack when Wes slammed him against the teacher's desk.

"Hey, let's talk this out!" Danny wheezed out, holding an arm out placatingly. But Wes was not placated.

The ghost that was once his classmate hovered over Danny with a growl. His eyes were glaringly red, his hair burned like fire, and his entire form shined with angry intensity. His hands curled into fists, and Danny rolled out of the way just in time before Wes sent a punch that smashed the entire table.

Danny pushed himself to his feet, ignoring the wincing pain throughout his human body. Behind him, he could hear the students talking loudly amongst themselves, the words "Wes" and "holy shit" sticking out a lot. Wes didn't seem to pay any attention to them; his eyes were focused on Danny.

"Come on, what do you want from me?" Danny pleaded. "I'm sure I can give it to you without fighting."

Wes paused in the middle of a swing. Honestly, Danny wasn't sure the ghost would listen to him, but he hesitated. Then his mouth split into a grin, revealing fangs that looked out of place on Wes's face. "Then transform," he said.

Danny froze.

He understood, now, why Wes was attacking him. He wanted him to fight back...as a ghost. But in a filled classroom, the others will see his transformation. He could feel their eyes boring into his back.

It made sense. Of course the conspiracy theorist would refuse to pass on just so he could reveal Danny.

He gulped. Well, there was always one option besides fighting...

Danny ran.

But of course, the angry ghost fighting him wouldnt let him escape. Wes grabbed a piece of wood from the broken table and threw it at Danny. His first thought was to turn intangible, but then he remembered about the many humans watching them, and he couldn't dodge fast enough to avoid the sharp splinter from grazing his arm. He gasped and gripped at the wound on his limb.

Cold claws clasped around his neck, and Danny was turned around to face Wes's burning eyes. The ghost's claws dug into his skin, enough to draw blood. Danny couldn't breathe. Wes was squeezing his throat, and Danny could see blackness creep into his vision. The halfa knew he couldn't escape without revealing his ghost powers, but if he didn't, he would die.

Suddenly, there was a thump. Danny's vision cleared just enough for him to see a book bounced off Wes's back. Wes whipped his head around to face...Danny couldn't believe it. Dash was standing behind his desk, an arm outstretched. Who would have thought the jock would help Danny?

As Wes growled, another book was flung at him from a different spot in the room. Danny didn't see who threw it that time, but soon more and more students rose up to protect him. A flurry of books, notebooks, and pencil cases flew across the room...not that any of it hurt Wes, since he simply turned intangible and let the objects fly through. They hit the wall behind him, and quite a few hit Danny, but at least there was one good thing resulting from this: Wes was intangible. Now was Danny's chance to phase his way out without raising questions.

He slipped through Wes's grip while the ghost was distracted. As soon as his feet hit the floor, he ran through the classroom door, ignoring the sting on his arm and his throat. His shoes flew across the floor as he sped down the hallway, his lungs gasping for air. There! The janitor's closet. He jumped inside, closed the door behind him, and swiftly transformed. Black became white, blue became green, and blood became ectoplasm. The pain dulled as soon as he became a ghost, and he felt ready now to take on Wes...at least, he was pretty sure he was. Maybe. Probably?

He still couldn't believe it. Sure, Wes was obsessed with him, but he would never willingly hurt him...but of course, that was before he became a ghost. Ghosts were driven by their obsessions. It didn't matter if anyone got hurt or not as long as their goal was achieved.

He shut his eyes and leaned against a shelf, wincing at the slight pain that shot through his form. It was hard to accept, but it was the truth. Wes was a ghost.

For a while, Danny stood there in the silent darkness, taking deep, steady breaths. His moment of peace was interrupted when his ghost sense was triggered again, causing his eyes to fly open. Wes must be nearby.

He took one more gulp of air and steeled himself, then he pushed himself into a straight position and walked through the door, ready to face his former classmate.

Wes the ghost looked the same as he did a few minutes ago, except for the apparent increase of rage on his expression. He wasn't happy to see Danny in his ghost form. "Why do you always have to hide when you change?" he hissed.

Normally, Danny would have cracked a humorous reply, but today didn't feel like the right time. Instead, he calmly said, "This isn't you, Wes."

The ghost tilted his head. His sharp teeth were bared midway between a smirk and a snarl. "Really? And who else would I be, Mr. Fenton?"

Danny told himself that his hands werent shaking as he continued. "You don't have to do this."

Wes gnashed his teeth, and his eyes burned brighter. "Yes I do," he argued. "You'll never reveal yourself on your own, and I can't give up on something I've died for."

Even though those words weren't news, they stabbed through Danny's core. The images of Wes's death flashed across his eyes again. Wes had died in an effort to expose Danny, and now Danny was the one responsible for the existence of the aggressive ghost before him.

He opened his mouth to say something, but no words came out. What was there to say? Wes had a point.

He heard murmurs and turned his head to see several students peeking out of their classrooms, ignoring their education in favor of their curiosity. This was far from the first time Phantom had fought a ghost in their school, but it was the first time that ghost was of someone they knew.

When he turned back to Wes, he didn't like the grin on the ghost's face at the sight of so many onlookers.

This time, Danny was prepared when Wes attacked. He called up a shield before the ghost's claws could scratch him. Wes didn't relent, and he continued to attack Danny from different angles.

Danny knew that this small hallway was not appropriate for a ghost fight. He also knew that Wes was only fighting him because of the onlookers surrounding them. He had to take the fight somewhere else.

As soon as the opportunity arose, Danny let down his shield just long enough to grab Wes, and he yanked them both through the floor. They landed in an empty cafeteria, where Wes promptly broke away from Danny's grip.

Wes hissed at him, clearly unhappy. Apparently, the ghost decided to take out his anger in the form of violence, because he began to shoot red ectoplasm at Danny. The room lit up with bursts of color as the ghosts exchanged attacks...okay, so maybe "exchanged" wasn't an entirely accurate description. Because no matter how much Wes fought him, Danny stayed on the defensive.

It was stupid, but he couldn't get himself to hurt his opponent back. Not when it was someone he knew in life.

He wasn't sure how long he spent blocking and dodging, but soon enough, the halfa was getting tired. His breaths came out in short puffs. Breathing automatically in ghost form...that wasn't a good sign. He paused for a second to lean against his knees--and that was long enough for Wes to make his move.

He blinked, and suddenly Wes was tackling them through a wall. Students and staff jumped out of the way as Danny was thrown against a row of lockers. So they were back in the hallway, and this time it was even fuller when everyone was going to their next class. (In the back of Danny's brain, he absently noted that he had missed another class. Mr. Lancer would not be happy.)

He barely finished that thought when Wes suddenly appeared in front of him. Before Danny knew what was happening, the ghost had plunged his claws into his chest.

It hurt. Pain flared from his chest and throughout his entire body. It felt like Wes was squeezing his very core. Danny couldn't help it--he screamed. He was paralyzed with pain, and Wes appeared to be enjoying it.

"Let him go!" someone shouted, and Danny blinked through the tears in his eyes to see Sam pushing her way in front of the crowd to face Wes. Wes turned his glaring eyes at her with a snarl. He straightened up and let his scarlet eyes flash with intensity, daring Sam to take another step. The girl kept her back straight, but it was apparent from how pale her face became that she wasnt as fearless as she was pretending to be.

Somehow, seeing Sam gave Danny more clarity. He forced himself through the thick waves of pain, and--ignoring his previous decision of holding back in his attacks--he sent the strongest ecto-blast he could muster at Wes. The ghost was shoved away and smashed into the opposite wall. As he went, his claws scraped at the wound on Danny's chest, making it bleed further. He winced. The damage had been done. Ectoplasm now leaked from a hole in his chest.

Danny could feel his energy gushing out from his wound. All of a sudden, the world tilted underneath his feet, and he staggered. His vision blurred into splotches of color, like a painting caught out in the rain.

Was it normal for him to taste ectoplasm leaking from his mouth? Danny was fairly certain that wasn't normal. He heard Sam calling his name and sluggishly lifted his head to see her standing before him, her hands hovering over his chest. When had she made her way to him? He followed her wide eyes to the spot on his chest. Right, the wound. The ectoplasm was gushing out at this point. He could feel the gravity increasing on him the more he bled. He blinked away the haziness in his eyes, and as he did, he saw something rise over her shoulder.

Danny had just enough alertness left over in his brain to recognize it as Wes. As fast as his exhausted mind would let him, he pushed Sam away and summoned a shield. He strained to keep the last wisps of ghostly energy he had to keep the shield up as Wes beamed ectoplasmic energy against it. How come Wes was so strong, anyway? His ghost just formed. It wasn't fair.

Not much time passed before Danny's energy completely drained away, and the shield cracked like a thin sheet of ice. The blast slammed against him, and he was shoved against the wall before collapsing onto the floor. He tried to stand up after that, but the task turned out to be as easy as walking on slippery oil. He immediately fell back down and stayed there. He was tired. Why was he so tired?

He waited for another attack, but none came. He forced himself to look up and saw several pairs of eyes. At first, he thought he was seeing double vision, but the eyes didn't belong to Wes. They belonged to the several students and teachers who were surrounding the two ghosts, wanting to help their hero but unsure how. In the center of the free space left by the crowd, Wes hovered.

His face was split into a grin. He was watching, waiting. For what? For Danny to die? That sounded fair. After all, Danny let Wes die. It made sense for him to return the favor.

Danny was about to surrender to the blackness creeping around his vision when a movement in the crowd caught his eye. A boy...Tucker?...pushed himself toward the scene, holding in his hand a familiar metallic cylinder. Wes's eyes widened at the object, but it was too late. With the press of a button, a beam of light shot at Wes and pulled him in.

"No!" Wes screamed. "No! I have to see it!" He tried to claw his way away from the thermos, but his effort was futile. He was captured inside the cylinder, which Tucker immediately put a cap on as soon as he was inside.

"Da--Phantom!" the geek cried out and ran toward him. He knelt next to his friend. Beside him, Sam did the same.

Danny's breath was ragged. It felt impossible to keep his eyes open anymore. He let his heavy eyelids fall over his eyes, and as he did, he felt a cold tingle travel across his body.

All around him, he heard gasps. He forced his eyes open again just to see what caused so much shock. Everyone was staring at him with wide eyes. When he looked down, he realized why.

The green leaking from him was turning red. His cotton shirt was wet and sticky from the blood. The hair drooping in front of his eyes was black. In his mouth, the lime taste was turning to copper.

Of course. How couldn't he have seen it earlier? All ghosts had some power related to their obsession. That was why Wes could beat his ass so easily--enough to revert him into his human form.

Normally, Danny would have been more alarmed at the reveal of his identity and the fact that he was maybe possibly dying. But now, he found that he didn't have enough energy to care. He was tired...maybe a small nap wouldnt hurt.

And that was how Phantom found himself borrowing the courtroom of the Dragon Queen Dorathea, surrounded by hundreds of important ghosts from the far reaches of the Zone, glaring at Wes Weston. He had plans for the evening, damn it, and now he was here, holding court, because Wes freaking Weston didn’t know when to stop. The air around Phantom seemed to warp with power and annoyance. Wes did not seem to understand the gravity of his situation.

“What the hell, Fenton?” One of the ghosts, a tall sharp fellow, stepped forward towards Wes and raised his hand menacingly.

“You shall refer to His Majesty by his proper title, or not at all, human.” He spat the last word like the worst possible insult. Wes didn’t seem bothered.

“It’s alright Cornelius. He is unfamiliar with our customs.” Phantom called back his herald in the ghost tongue common in Dorathea’s kingdom. “As far as he is aware, I am simply his weak classmate who happens to be dead.”

“That does not excuse his behaviour, Your Majesty,” Cornelius spoke angrily. “He must be punished for his insolence.”

“I’m aware, Cornelius. And I plan on doing so-”

“Seriously Fenton, what’s going on?” Wes was annoyed that no one was explaining anything to him. Phantom groaned. As much as he was pushed around at Casper High, no one dared interrupt him when he was holding court. Even Technus shut up when the Ghost King was speaking in court, and Phantom would not allow Wes to ruin that reputation.

“Cornelius.” Phantom muttered and nodded towards Wes. Cornelius stepped up, and with a giddy expression, slapped Wes across the face. “Thank you.”

Wes didn’t say anything, but he had fallen over backwards, eyes and mouth open in shock. Phantom waited for a few seconds. When Wes didn’t show any signs of getting back up, Phantom sighed and began the official court proceedings.

“For the sake of the human, I will continue in English. I am aware that not everyone understands English, so there are translators among you.” There was a pause as many of the onlookers moved around the stands to find said translators. When the shuffling quieted down, Phantom continued. “As of now, the High Court of the Ghost King is in session.” There was a flash of bright light, and suddenly the Crown of Fire sat amidst Phantom’s white hair and the Ring of Rage glowed on his right hand.

On the ground, Wes muttered “Ghost king?” under his breath. Phantom made eye contact with him, and continued.

“This human, Wes W. Weston, stands on trial, as requested by Lord Frostbite of the Far Frozen. Could the legal representative of the Far Frozen read the charges?”

A smaller yeti stood from within the crowd, and leaped down next to Wes, cracking the ground beneath them.  Phantom and Wes both turned to the yeti. They pulled a scroll from a hidden pocket, opened it, and began to read. “The Far Frozen charges this human with stowing away on the Great One’s speeder, trespassing in the homes of Wintermire, Icebeam, and six others, and stealing food from Lord Frostbite.” The yeti rolled the scroll back up, bowed to Phantom, and leaped back into the crowd.

“And how do you plead, Weston?” Phantom turned back to Wes, who had finally managed to close his mouth.

“Um, uh…”

“Do you plead guilty or not guilty?” Phantom asked, emphasizing the first option. It would be so much easier for both of them if Wes stated his own guilt.

“I uh, I plead guilty?” Wes whispered, confusion written across his face. Cornelius turned to Phantom, who nodded back.

“The King accepts your guilt,” Cornelius shouted. The crowd applauded, though many were disappointed. They had wanted to see the human on trial for more.

“Are there any other charges to be brought against Weston?” Phantom scanned the room. He could see the various nobility and common ghosts alike frantically trying to come up with a crime Wes had committed, but none of them were confident enough in their ideas to challenge Phantom. They could see the King was tired and wanted to get this over with. “Alright then. By the power vested in me, I declare you, Wes Weston, guilty of stowing away, trespassing and stealing. For stowing away, I sentence you to twenty hours of service, as dictated by Lord and Lady Fenton of Amity Park. For trespassing eight times, I sentence you to eighty hours of service upon your death, as dictated by Lord Frostbite of the Far Frozen. For your thievery, I sentence you to fifty hours of service upon your death, as dictated by Lord Frostbite of the Far Frozen.” Phantom finished, and the crowd cheered. The yetis present were by far the loudest, especially Wintermire, who already had plans for what Wes was going to do for him.

“I now declare the High Court of the Ghost King closed. All are dismissed.” Phantom floated up from his seat as the Ring and the Crown disappeared in another flash of light. The rest of the ghosts began slowly filtering out. Many were taking their time to converse with friends or to see what would happen next. It had been quite some time since a human had stood trial and not been sentenced to death in the Ghost King’s Court. It had also been quite some time since the Court had been held, and Phantom was so different to the previous King, that many weren’t sure that was a bad thing.

Phantom lowered himself down to where Wes had managed to finally stand up, and switched back to English. “And now, asshole, I’m taking you back home. Follow me.”

Wes followed as Phantom floated down a corridor hidden in shadows in the back of the room. They moved in silence for a few minutes, before Phantom pulled a hidden ladder down from the roof.

“Up you go,” he said. Wes climbed the twenty feet up to a panel in the roof of the hallway. Phantom had already flown through the roof, and Wes was not keen on being left behind.

He poked his head out into surprisingly bright open air. The Fenton Specter Speeder was parked twenty yards away, and Phantom was off to the side talking to a very well dressed female ghost.

“Thank you for letting me know, Dora. And thanks for letting me borrow the courtroom.”

“Of course, Danny. You’re my friend.”

“No, but seriously, thank you. If there’s anything I can do,” He gestured vaguely.

“Come by tomorrow for tea. And do bring your friends. It’s been too long since we’ve had time to relax together.”

“I will. School is still closed for at least a week, so we can stay for longer this time.” 

Dorathea laughed. “From what I heard, you may have had something to do with that.” Phantom winked, but didn’t answer.

“I will see you tomorrow, Your Majesty.” He bowed.

“And I will see you tomorrow, Your Majesty.” Dorathea bowed as well. When they both straightened up, Phantom went in for a hug. If Wes didn’t know about Danny and Sam, he would have thought there was something going on here. They were hugging very tightly.

“Now then, Mister I-Think-It’s-A-Good-Idea-To-Sneak-Off-Into-The-Land-Of-The-Dead,” Phantom was right in front of Wes now, shocking him out of his thoughts. “Get in the Speeder.” Wes did as he was told.

Phantom expertly piloted the ship into the Ghost Zone’s sky and set it on autopilot to the Fenton portal, before making his way to the passenger section of the ship, where Wes was being uncharacteristically quiet. He let his transformation rings wash over him, reverting his color scheme back to normal and setting him down on the floor with a clunk.

“I know you have questions. We have two hours before we reach the portal.” Wes made eye contact with Danny, who was relieved to see confusion and anger. He had been expecting emptiness, so this was a good sign.

“They called you the Ghost King.”

“Yes.”

“You’re the King of the ghosts?”

“The ghosts, and the Ghost Zone, and sort of the human realm as well, but that’s more just a title than anything. It keeps most of the ghosts out of Amity though, so I guess it comes with some perks.”

“Do they know you’re,” Wes gestured wildly at Danny. “You?”

“You mean, do they know I’m just an undead corpse being possessed by my own revived soul?” Wes nodded apprehensively. Danny snorted. “Yeah, yeah they do. I actually think it makes them more likely to respect me as their king. I’m not your average ghost. I’m powerful. They like that.”

“Who was that ghost you were talking to, that lady at the end?”

“Dora? Oh, she’s the Dragon Queen. We were in her castle.”

“Wait,” Wes held up his hands to make sure Danny would listen. “If she’s the Queen, and your the King, does that mean…” He trailed off. Danny laughed once and shook his head.

“No, not at all. I’m the Ghost King, as in, all ghosts everywhere and that whole thing. She’s the Dragon Queen, meaning she’s the queen of the Realm of the Dragons. It’s sort of like she’s the governor of New York, but I’m the President. There are a bunch of other minor kings and queens throughout the Zone, but I’m on top. Dora’s just a good friend. She helped a lot with teaching me how to actually be the King.”

“Do your parents know about all of this?” Wes asked.

“Yeah, they do.”

“That’s why they’re always so quick to shut me down whenever I say anything about you as Phantom.”

“Yup!” Danny said, popping the ‘p’ sound. “It’s not super helpful to my whole ‘stay under the radar because there’s at least one government agency that would love to take me away’ thing when you’re going around shouting about how I’m Phantom.”

“But you are.”

“Uh huh, but I don’t want anyone to know. It’s safer for me when they don’t know.”

“And you’ve never said any of this before because?” Wes trailed off, waiting for Danny.

“Because I fully expected you to go off and tell the whole school if I said anything. I’m only telling you now because I had Cornelius slap you and I want to make up for that. Also, because now you’ve seen what I can do if you do to you if you say anything.” Danny smiled, and Wes could have sworn he saw a glint of light reflecting off of fangs. “By the way, that sentencing was serious.”

“Wait, what?”

“Oh yeah. I can’t just let you get off. You committed some pretty serious crimes, at least by ghost standards. When murder’s off the table, other stuff is significantly worse. The only reason you aren’t being executed right now is because I’m nice. Pariah would have had you killed without a second thought.”

“What was my sentence again?”

“Of course you weren’t listening,” Danny muttered. “Just a lot of community service. Most for Frostbite when you actually die and become a ghost, so you got some time there, but some for my parents.”

“Why for your parents?”

“You snuck into their house, onto their Speeder, and now they’re taking the flack because you’ve been gone for two days and everyone is blaming them and their ghost portal. And the ghosts recognize them as being positions of authority over the human realm, so I can.”

“So you’re making me work for them? For free? Isn’t that child labor, or slavery, or something?”

“No, not at all,” Danny said. “Because neither Danny Phantom nor Danny Fenton are going to make you do anything. Danny Fenton has no authority over you, so that’s useless.” He smirked. “Danny Phantom, on the other hand, is both the ghostly ruler of your entire town, and also the dead guy who saved your life, so when he suggests you do something, it’s a good idea to listen.”

Wes nodded, eyes wide.

“So, you’re going to get back to Amity Park and tell everyone how you were kidnapped by a ghost, just any generic ghost, please don’t come up with or use a preexisting name, and then you’re going to say that Phantom came and rescued you. Now, like anyone who was just threatened by a dead man, you want to learn how to defend yourself and how to protect the town from ghosts in the future, so you’re going to tell your parents that you want to help out at FentonWorks. My parents can find something for you to do. Of course, all of this is just a suggestion from Phantom, but I’d recommend you listen.” Wes nodded again.

“No, I got it. I got it.”

“Good, because if you don’t, I will have to change your sentence to something significantly harder. After all, as the eternal overlord of the dead, the god of the cold, and the junior apprentice of Time,  I need to set an example, and many of my subjects have a deep-rooted sense of justice.” Wes stayed silent as Danny finished. After a few minutes with not a peep between them, Danny made his way back to the cockpit and took over the controls.

“I got Bobby on it, Dean.” Sam took the folder and threw it in the back seat. “Come on. We’ve got a witness to interview.”

Dean pushed open the door to the drivers side of the car, stepped out, and slammed it behind him, blinking in the light of the summer sun. He let Sam take the lead as they strode up to the front door. Sam pressed the doorbell, and they waited.

There was a sound of hurried footsteps, socks sliding on the floor, and a loud thud, then the rattling of a doorknob being fumbled with, and finally it was opened by a freckly, dishevelled, red-haired teenager who was clutching his side.

“Hey,” Sam put up his sunniest smile, “are you Wesley Weston?”

“It’s Wes.” The kid’s eyes darted to and fro. “You the reporters from Daily News?”

Sam nodded. “Yes, I’m Sam McQueen, and this is my partner, Dean Reid. May we come inside?”

“Yeah, yeah, of course.” Wes beckoned them inside with a lanky arm. Once they were both in the entryway, he poked his head out the door and had a long, paranoid look around before shutting it quietly. He led them into the living room and motioned them to the couch, sitting across from them in a puffy armchair.

“So Wes,” Dean began, pulling out a notepad and pen, “you said you had some, uh, important information about this Danny Phantom. What is it exactly that you wanted to tell us?”

A wild gleam appeared in Wes’ eye, and from beneath the coffee table he snatched an overstuffed black binder. A few loose scraps of paper fluttered to the ground, and Dean glimpsed words like, “ghost???” and “Fenton”—the local ghost hunters, with the son conspicuously named Danny. “THIS,” Wes declared in a loud whisper, “is all the information I’ve compiled on Phantom over the last three years. Everything the public needs to know is in here, from his favorite color to his secret identity.”

Sam blinked, taken aback, and Dean could confidently say that this kid seemed a little nuts.

“Secret identity…?” Sam said slowly, his own notepad in hand.

Wes nodded frantically, the gleam in his eyes reaching blinding levels of intensity. “Yes, based on a number of factors, I have concluded that the ghost boy is secretly…” He slammed the binder down on the coffee table and dramatically flipped it open. “...Danny Fenton!”

Dean leaned closer to peer at the photos, though not too close—he didn’t want to be within striking distance of this kid.

The first picture was a candid of a smiling Danny Fenton, eating fries in the Nasty Burger restaurant on the other side of town. The second was a slightly blurry image of Phantom, punching some kind of animalistic “ghost” with a fierce expression on his face.

Dean looked from one to the other for a minute, comparing build and coloring and facial structure, and came to the only natural conclusion. He let out a groan, leaning back in his chair. “So it really is a hoa—ow!”

Sam withdrew his elbow from where it had been digging into Dean’s ribs, his polite smile still pasted perfectly in place. “Really? That’s fascinating.” He started scribbling something on his notepad. “What are the factors that led you to this conclusion?”

“Well, the first hint was this—” He pointed to the photos. “—I mean, it’s immediately obvious that they look really similar, right? Like the only difference is the hair and eyes. And then—” He flipped to the next page, a graph. “—we have some classes together and I noticed that whenever there’s about to be a ghost attack, Fenton just happens to leave right before Phantom appears. On top of that,” he flipped the page again, “whenever Phantom is seen in public, Fenton isn’t there. Just poof, completely vanished—I’ve asked around, no one sees him.” Wes swung his head up to look them both in the eyes, breathing heavily now. “Danny Fenton is half ghost.” And with a note of desperation in his voice, “You believe me, right?”

Dean rustled up an agreeable grin. “Of course we do. We’ll make sure this goes through all the right channels, it might even end up on the front page.” He gave the kid a firm pat on his shaking shoulder and stood. “We’ll be sure to follow up on this soon, but now it’s getting late, we should be going. Thank you for your time, Wes. Come on, Sam.”

“But you’ve only been here for three minutes!” Wes protested.

Sam opened his mouth to say something, but whatever it was never made it out, because Dean got there first. “We are very busy people, Mr. Weston, and we can’t spend all our time today with you. Don’t worry, we’ll be calling to set up another appointment later.” He speedwalked to and through the door before he could hear whatever protests were sent his way next, Sam right behind him.

“Seriously, Dean?” Sam hissed as they climbed into the car. “He could’ve been onto something. Weirder things have happened.”

Dean rolled his eyes. “Are you kidding? You could fertilize a field with that much bullcrap. I am not going to believe that a superpowered teenager is living is this town fighting ‘ghosts’—I mean, those aren’t even ghosts! They all look like they came out of Ghostbusters, and according to reports, they’re much more… interesting than real ghosts.” He plugged the keys into the ignition and pulled into the road.

Sam turned his gaze to the windshield. “I guess it doesn’t make much sense when you put it that way.” He chuckled. “Actually, it’s pretty ridiculous—you might be right about the whole hoax thing. And Mayor Masters is definitely making money off this.”

Dean’s brow furrowed. “You know, didn’t it seem like he had a weird obsession with Maddie Fenton?”

Ten minutes later they pulled into the Nasty Burger parking lot for a late lunch. They’d been by yesterday as well, and found that despite the name of the place, the food actually wasn’t terrible. Though their “nasty sauce” was… really something.

Dean perused the menu thoughtfully. “I’ll have a… number two,” he informed the grumpy goth girl behind the counter, whose name tag read “Samantha”. “And, uh, no onions please.”

She punched the order in with a little more force than strictly necessary and then turned to Sam with a disdainful raised eyebrow.

“I’ll have the Nasty Salad,” Sam said.

“Really, Sam? Just a salad?”

Samantha looked confused for a second before wiping the expression off her face.

Sam sent him a glare. “Fine. And a small fry.”

“Finally, someone with taste,” the girl muttered, then louder, “And to drink?”

“Just water.”

Samantha typed in Sam’s order with much less aggression, then handed them cups and sent them on their way to the soft drinks station. Drinks in hand, they took their seats in a booth by a window.

“So,” Dean said after taking a sip from his soda. “That kid was kinda crazy.”

“Dean,” Sam admonished.

“What? That was some stalker level obsession. He had pages of random info on—”

“Do you think anyone would notice if I put some ecto on my fries?”

Dean stopped. Twisted around to look.

On the other side of the aisle, one booth down, sat Danny Fenton, holding an open thermos whose contents were definitely glowing green.

“If you keep talking so loudly, yeah,” hissed the black kid seated across from him. “But I dunno, give it a shot. I bet Vlad would be scandalized.”

“Tucker… that is an excellent point.” Fenton smirked and overturned the thermos on his fries. The green glowing substance came oozing slowly out with a similar consistency to ketchup, though it somewhat resembled ectoplasm.

Dean turned to exchange a glance with Sam, whose eyebrows were so far up his forehead he was afraid they might fly away. He leaned over the table and hissed, “Do you have the EMF meter?”

Sam nodded, reaching into his jacket and pulling out said ghost detector. He switched it on, pulled out the antenna, and flicked it off again when it immediately started making a high-pitched whining noise.

The Fenton kid’s head snapped in their direction, eyes narrowed. Dean froze with his hand halfway to the salt packets. Fenton’s eyes were unblinking, unnerving. Not normal.

“FOR GOD’S SAKE, SAM, JUST TAKE YOUR LUNCH BREAK!”

The moment was broken.

The door to the kitchen slammed open, and Samantha—or Sam, it seemed—came storming out. She flung herself into the seat next to Tucker, laid her head on the table, and gave a drawn-out groan. “I hate this place.”

“Maybe you should quit,” Tucker suggested.

“And have my parents make me work somewhere worse? No thank you.” She sat up. “Also, I’m pretty sure they’re paying my boss to make sure my name tag says Samantha.”

Fenton picked up a possibly ectoplasm-covered fry and popped it into his mouth. “How about we—”

“Order sixty-six please, order sixty-six.”

Dean glanced at his receipt. “That’s us. You go get the food, I’ll watch them.” He turned back to their table, keeping one conspicuous eye on the teenagers.

As soon as Sam was out of earshot, Fenton grabbed his fries and stood up. “You know what Sam, I bet you’re sick of Nasty Burger food. Let’s go somewhere else for your lunch.”

“Please,” Sam agreed.

“But—” Tucker started.

Fenton sent him a sharp look. “No, Tucker, we really should go somewhere else.” His eyes flicked to Dean and back. “It’s getting a little crowded, don’t you think?”

Dean quickly turned his head away, but he was pretty sure Fenton’s friends had spotted him anyway.

“Oh yeah, I guess it is getting kinda stuffy in here,” Tucker said. “C’mon.”

Sam came back with the food in to-go bags as the kids were hightailing it out the door.

Dean shot to his feet, grabbing both their drinks and a couple salt packets. “Let’s follow them.”

“Dean, don’t you think this might look a little creepy? Two guys following a few teenagers? The EMF might have just been coming from the restaurant.”

He dropped the drinks in the garbage and pushed the door open. “Yeah, but I’ve got a gut feeling. Something’s weird about that kid. Also, ecto fries.”

Sam frowned. “I thought we weren’t going to believe Wes about this.”

“We’re not! He was definitely wrong about the Phantom thing, but he was right that something’s off.”

Fenton and his friends were waiting at the crosswalk down the block. Dean went ahead while Sam dropped the food off in the car, and he tailed them from about half a dozen yards. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, but they were casting around a lot of shifty glances.

A look behind him told him Sam was hanging back. Dean gave a nod of approval—it was much more noticeable when two tall men were trailing a couple kids than when there was just one. Though it might look like Sam was stalking him.

Two blocks later, Dean was sure they’d both been spotted. Fenton abruptly pulled his friends into an alley, and Dean sped up, brushing past other pedestrians, and turned down the alley to find it… empty.

Sam caught up a moment later, and Dean turned to face him with arms spread wide. “Well, that was a bust. They just disappeared!”

Sam rummaged around his pockets and pulled out the EMF meter again. It squealed and lit up bright red.

“Crud,” muttered a sourceless voice down the alley.

“Show yourself!” Sam barked.

There was some shuffling, a flurry of whispers, and Fenton and his friends stepped out from behind a dumpster that shouldn’t have been able to hide them.

The EMF got louder and brighter. Dean ripped open one of the salt packets and threw it.

Tucker let out a girly shriek, and Samantha and Fenton threw up their arms to shield their eyes. While they were distracted, Sam stowed the EMF and they both reached for their guns.

“What the heck? Is this salt?”

Dean stopped with his fingers on the handle of his colt.

Fenton was examining the salt on his hands with a look of utter confusion. It didn’t seem to be affecting him at all.

Sam’s arm lowered slightly. “Aren’t you a ghost?”

All three of them froze.

“Of course Danny’s not a ghost!” Tucker blurted out. “He’s totally normal. Regular old teenager.”

“Yeah!” Samantha smiled nervously. “Nothing to see here, just normal people doing normal people things.”

Dean raised his eyebrows. “Really? Then what was up with the EMF just now?”

Fenton gasped suddenly, his breath fogging in the warm air. “Get down!”

Dean ducked reflexively, Sam doing the same next to him. There was a flash of green light and an ear piercing shriek, and Dean looked up just in time to see a shapeless green blob go careening through the air, screeching horribly.

A nervous chuckle had him looking back at Danny. “Uh—I can explain?”

“You better,” Dean growled. His fingers itched to grab his gun. “What are you, what was that, and what did you just do?”

“Um, well, you know who my parents are, right?”

“Yeah,” Sam said slowly. “Jack and Maddie Fenton, the… ectobiologists.”

“The ghost hunters,” Danny emphasized. “They gave me and Sam and Tucker some weapons for in case ghosts attack. That was a ghost, by the way, the green thing? So I shot it with an ecto gun. That’s what just happened.”

“Ghost hunters?” Dean scoffed. “Yeah right, they couldn’t catch a ghost if it was right under their noses. Their phony science is hardly ‘ghost hunting’.”

Danny’s eyes narrowed. The temperature dropped several degrees, and if he wasn’t much mistaken, the kid’s eyes had turned a radioactive green.

His hand flew to his gun before he could think about it and aimed at the thing in front of them in one smooth movement.

“Danny!” Samantha hissed.

The kid blinked and the glow was gone. He paled, normal blue eyes flicking from Dean’s face to the gun and back again. “Double crud.”

“So kid,” Dean said, voice low, “what are you?”

Fenton shifted. His gaze darted from alley wall to alley wall to the entrance, which was blocked by Dean and Sam. His two friends were equally tense, Samantha clutching something in her pocket that was probably dangerous.

Tucker held up his phone. “I-if you don’t put that down—” He gulped. “I’m calling the police.”

“Dean,” Sam said, “I don’t think he’s planning to hurt anyone. We should talk.”

Dean looked the kid in the eyes for a long moment, then nodded. He relaxed his stance, lowered the gun slowly, and tucked it into the back of his jeans again. “You can relax. Safety wasn’t even off.”

“I feel so much better,” Samantha muttered.

They ignored her.

“What happened just now?” Sam demanded.

Danny took a deep breath. “If I tell you this, you have to promise you won’t tell anyone. I could get in huge trouble if some people found out, you have no idea—and you have to promise you won’t try to kill me!”

“Okay,” Sam agreed, “we won’t tell anyone. And we won’t try to kill you.” Unless we have to, was the unspoken addition that only Dean knew was there.

“Danny, you’re seriously going to tell these guys?” Tucker exclaimed. “I thought this was supposed to be a secret!”

“Yeah, well, they already know I’m not normal. If I tell them they might think twice before trying to end me, and if I don’t they might just try to hunt me down anyway.” He looked Dean in the eyes, and his resolve almost seemed to falter for a second. “I’m—” He swallowed heavily. “I’m half ghost.”

Dean’s train of thought screeched to a stop, but not before bowling over his precariously balanced sense of normal. “Excuse me?”

Now that the words had left his mouth Fenton appeared to be unable to stop talking. “Well, I kinda went into my parents’ ghost portal and got shocked and now I’m half dead, we don’t actually know how it works, but we’re trying to figure it out, kinda.”

“Next thing you know he’s gonna be telling us he’s actually Danny Phantom,” Dean grumbled.

“Yeah… about that…”

Dean’s jaw dropped. “So you’re saying the Weston kid was right?”

The trio’s faces scrunched up in matching expressions of distaste.

“Seriously? You talked to Wes?” Danny shuddered. “He’s always trying to out me. And he’s been kinda more nuts than usual lately. He followed me with a camera for six blocks yesterday.”

“Creepy,” Sam muttered.

“So you get ghost powers,” Dean said slowly, “and the first thing you do is become a freaking superhero?”

“Uh, not quite first thing, but yeah, pretty much.” Danny grinned sheepishly.

“Wait,” Sam interrupted. “So if all the stuff going on around here is real, what’s with all the ghosts?”

“Well, they’ve been escaping the Ghost Zone through the portal,” Danny explained matter-of-factly.

“Yeah, but… why do they look like that?”

Danny’s face turned to a puzzled frown. “What do you mean? They’re ghosts. Aren’t you guys ghost hunters? You should know what they look like.”

“These ghosts you have don’t look anything like what we’ve seen. Yours are…” Sam trailed off. “Very colorful. More inhuman, and more powerful. We actually thought it was some kind of show put on for tourists, though the property damage was weird enough. That’s why we came to check it out in the first place…”

“Huh. I thought this was normal. I think I’ve only met one ghost that wasn’t crazy weird, a kid at my school.”

“Maybe it’s a different type of ghost,” Sam suggested. “Or something else entirely.”

“Uh, no,” Danny scoffed, “I’m definitely half dead, not part monster-from-another-dimension, or whatever.”

“Right, different type it is,” Dean decided.

Sam frowned like a thought had just come to him. “Did you notice the mayor has a weird obsession with your mom?”

Danny hesitated. “Yeah. I noticed. I can’t really do anything about it, though.”

“Why not?” Dean raised his hands. “You have ghost powers, why not go in there and set him straight?”

“I can’t. It’s complicated.” He looked down at his shoes, then back up again. “So, you guys sticking around, or are you gonna take off now that you know what’s going on?”

Dean exchanged a glance with Sam. “You got everything handled here? Your parents helping?”

Danny shrugged. “More or less. Mom and Dad do their best.”

“They approve of you ghost hunting?”

His eyes shifted. “...Yeah. They’ve been trying to get me into it for ages.”

“All right then. Here, gimme your phone.”

Danny took a step back, hand drifting toward his pocket. “What? Why?”

“So I can put our numbers in it in case you ever need help. Come on.” Dean gestured impatiently.

“It’s fine, really, I have Sam and Tucker and my parents—”

“Yeah, and we can help you too. Never hurts to have extra backup.”

Danny paused a moment longer, then sighed. “Fine, here you go.”

He handed Dean a beat-up flip phone, and he wasted no time punching in two of his three numbers as well as Sam’s. “If you run into a ghost that’s different than the ones you’re used to, more human—or anything else—and you don’t know how to take it out, give us a call. All right?”

-Next Morning-

Danny walks up to his locker with a cocky grin, spotting Sam and Tucker. Danny quickly leans against the lockers and puts his hand on Tucker’s shoulder, “hey”.

“Did you just...give me the shoulder touch?”, Tucker snorts, “dude, that’s so gay”.

Danny just wiggles his eyebrows dramatically and waits for Tucker to notice. Sam notices first however and promptly facepalms. But her eyeballing gets Tucker to look down at Danny’s shirt, reading ‘it’s not gay if he’s dead’. Tucker blinks once, twice, three times, before curling up and laughing; clapping Danny on the shoulder multiple times in the process.

“Dude! Where!”, straightening up, “also, that was the single best joke you’ve ever made”.

Danny smirks, the joke really only works because he knew what Tucker would say, “lets just say, there’s a wonderfully spooky new store in town and I am broke”, Danny waits a bit while his two friends shake their heads with mischievous smiles before he picks back up, “I also need a bigger closet”.

Sam and Tucker share a look before Tucker looks at Danny, “so you’re actually going the wear different clothing every day for once?”.

Sam smirks, “do we need to set up a fashion runway? I’m pretty sure there’s actually one in my house”.

Danny smirks almost cruelly, “wonder how long it’ll take before people start questioning my fashion choices”.

Sam and Tucker sigh, speaking in unison, “this is going to end badly”.

--Line Break--

Danny’s pulling books out of his locker and quickly hides his smirk as his two friends approach. Speaking as Tucker opens his own locker, “so the new Pokemon game’s coming out. Who you gonna choose?”.

“The rabbit thingy I think, you?”.

Danny closes the locker door and smirks. Tucker, remembering yesterday's bullshit promptly looks down. Danny’s shirt reading, ‘CHOOSE DEATH’, Tucker can’t help but laugh, “now that’s a little on the nose”, pointing at Danny, “and you didn’t choose shit”.

Danny huffs, “hey now, I went in knowing full well what would happen the second time. And y’all never forced me to go it in, in the first place”.

Tucker rolls his eyes, “debatable. Plus, you’re not technically dead. At least not entirely”.

“Yeah, I guess death isn’t one of those things were a half-off coupon really applies”, Danny smirks slightly, “and if y’all think you’re even slightly truly responsible, then maybe you two should get ‘Reaper Crew’ shirts. Thinking you’re my little personal reapers and shit”.

“Danny dude, we literally reap ghosts. As in we gather them up? You really should study vocabulary once and a while”, Tucker slightly regrets his words as he watches a wicked smile spread across Danny’s face.

--Line Break--

Danny’s still trying to figure out how he’s going to make a joke out of today’s fashion choices when Dash practically hands it to him. Overhearing Dash jeering at some freshman, “what you think hiding around your tall friend’s gonna make you bully-proof?”.

Danny snaps his head around painfully and near inhumanely fast, Sam and Tucker exchanging a glance as Danny strides over and floor slides dramatically to be in front of Dash. Danny grins, “everybody knows I sure as shit ain’t, but guess what I am?!?”, Danny gestures at his shirt because he knows Dash is an idiot.

Dash looks down and reads Danny’s shirt ‘Death Proof’ and mutters, “goddamnit Fentoast”, and restrains a chuckle.

Tucker leans over to Sam, “I like how yesterday’s shirt basically said ‘I’m dead’ and today’s says ‘I’m not dead’. Not to mention subtly hinting at the whole probable immortality thing”.

Danny smirks at them as he dodges out of the way of Dash trying to grab at him. Both of them running after him to hide behind the school.

Danny digs in his pockets and shoves t-shirts at them. Tucker quirks an eyebrow, “seriously? I thought you were broke”.

“I’m broke-er”.

Sam looks over the black ‘Reaper Crew’ shirt and shrugs. Pulling it on while gesturing at Danny’s pans, “why do you guys always get to have such massive pockets”, looking down at the shirt before quirking an eyebrow at Danny, “did you memorise our clothing sizes?”.

Danny rolls his eyes, “I’ve literally worn your bodies, I know how they fit”.

Tucker blinks, “you know, that sounds way creepier when you actually say it like that”. Danny just chuckles.

--Line Break--

Danny’s laying in his desk as Mr. Lancer comes in. Quickly calling attendance and ignoring how Danny smirks when he says, “here!”. But he can’t help but chuckle, amused by Danny’s antics, when he gets fed up with Danny’s inattentive resting and calls on him to sit up straight. Actually having to pause and laugh to himself a bit at Danny leaning back in the chair and throwing an arm over the back of it. Making his shirt, which reads ‘Here Lies’ over the image of a tombstone, very noticeable.

Lancer grumbles to himself, “I wish he’d put as much effort into his classwork as jokes”, then raising an eyebrow ever so slightly over Daniel suddenly looking a little sheepish and rubbing his neck; pretty well sure Daniel has somehow heard Lancer's mutterings.

--Line Break--

Danny planned out his next apparel choice with precision. Waiting till Red was in a pissy enough mood to go after Phantom a bit more aggressively before school. Struggling to keep the smile off his face as he slips out of the bathroom after changing back human and fixing up his wounds.

Sam grumbling at him as he gets to his locker, her looking at her phone -going over today’s morning ghost news- all the while, “she’s going after you pretty aggressively again. What did you do to piss her off now?”.

Danny shrugs, “might be because I kept stealing her captures”.

Tucker elbows him, “one of these days she’s going to genuinely get you good, you know”. The girl was cute and he knew Danny still liked her but she was really a threat.

Danny smiles more earnestly then, sighing almost wistfully, “maybe she’ll really be the death of me”, shrugging, “not that I mind”. Since, apparently, he liked danger even in his love life. Which yes, was absolutely stupid, but he did stupid damn well.

Sam rolls her eyes and sighs, she really wished Danny would cut it out with his soft spot for the huntress, “you should mind”, glaring at his soft-looking smile, “and you better not still be interested in her. She hates ghosts, no matter what that’ll get in the way”. Tucker firmly decides not to comment on that.

Danny just grins wide and you could practically smell the mischief wafting off of him. Sam pinches her nose but Tucker bursts out laughing just before she looks to Danny’s shirt. Danny just grins smugly as she groans at reading, ‘Death Cannot Stop True Love’. Glaring at Danny, “I hate you, you moron”.

Valerie walks by and comments with a smirk, “well I don’t”.

Danny sticks his arms out dramatically at Val’s retreating form, “at least someone loves me”.

Both Sam and Tucker replying, “she just doesn’t know any better”. Danny just rolls his eyes exaggeratedly, though he honestly loves all the shit they give him.

--Line Break--

Danny makes a point of massaging his sore shoulder and thusly covering up the chest of his t-shirt as he walks over to his two friends at the being of school.

The two give him worried looks over what looks like blood having seeped through the side of his white t-shirt. Tucker frowning as it doesn’t really look right, “you really should just stop wearing white”. Sam, being more sensible, asks the more important question, “are you okay?”.

At that Danny smirks, as he’s finally close enough to them that he knows they damn well will pick up really quickly that the ‘blood’ is just part of the shirt's design. Lowering his arm to the side so they can read the ‘I’m fine’ written across the shirt. Both of them promptly start hitting him.

Though they both do have to admit, as the day goes by, that everyone doing double takes over Danny’s shirt is rather hilarious. Even if everyone’s used to Danny’s shit enough to not freak out too much.

--Line Break--

Sam and Tucker chuckle at Danny’s ‘Ghost Gym’ Gengar gym shirt, pretty sure the only reason Tetslaff is letting him get away with it is because the design is workout related. Well that, and, if you knew what to look for, Danny was clearly extremely physically fit.

Tetslaff looks around at everyone and nods curtly, “alright you maggots, it’s gymnastics day. So I want to see some serious acrobatics and running!”.

Dash gapes as Danny does a clean and one of the fastest obstacle runs in the entire gym class. Shaking his head before shouting, “you cheated Fentwerp!”. Dash is honestly only more annoyed as Danny locks eyes with him, grins wickedly and walks into the changing room.

Dash was about to storm after the little freak when Danny exits the changing room, still grinning a bit manically. Dash scowls but can’t help but feel a little less interested in beating the weirdo up. After reading the sweater, ‘CHEAT DEATH’. That is until Danny speaks up, why did the little freak have to have such a damn mouth on him? And why’d he have to use it to diss him? Why didn’t the weirdo know his damn place!

Danny flips Dash off, “there’s only one thing I cheat bitch”, before booking it off. While Dash shouts at him, “why you little-FENTON!”, and runs after him.

Tetslaff is far too pleased over the physical improvements of what was formerly the worst excuse for physical fitness, to really care about reprimanding him for his language.

--Line Break--

Vlad walks into the Fenton household, he’s a little early but that hardly matters. Gives him plenty of time to scope out any new inventions or lord his mental and ghost power prowess over Daniel’s head.

Looking around to quickly spot Daniel and those two friends of his all sitting around the living room. All three promptly getting up, Daniel snapping, “you’re early frootloop. What? Cat brush you off for date night?”.

Vlad rolls his eyes but stops halfway and stares at Daniel’s shirt ‘WANTED DEAD & ALIVE Schrödinger’s cat‘. Shaking his head, coming to stand in front of Daniel and gesturing at his attire, “I know you’re reckless, but isn’t this a little on the nose Daniel?”.

Danny grins almost wickedly at that, “nope, but you know what is?”. That’s the perfect set-up for their little ‘no one expects the geek’ plan.

Vlad quirks an eyebrow as Daniel leans to the side; only for Tucker to punch him in the nose. Daniel chuckles, “that was”, while Vlad steps back, hand over his now bleeding nose, and glares at the teens.

Tucker looks back at Danny with a giddy grin, just as Jack and Maddie come in trough the door.

Maddie smiles slightly over seeing the creepy old Masters bleeding, she’s got no clue what’s happened but she’s sure that whoever had more than good enough reason. While Jack, bless his heart, takes Vlad into the kitchen to help fix up Vlad’s nose.

Vlad glares bloody murder at the teen trio from a stool, while Jack honestly just makes the bleeding a bit worse. Maddie eventually taking pity and actually helping.

--Line Break--

Tucker closes his locker door and immediately looks at Danny’s shirt as he approaches. Tucker raising an eyebrow over the simple grey shirt with a tiny grim reaper poking out of the chest pocket, “what? Ran outta joke shirts already?”.

Danny snickers, “naw, just figured I should stop brushing off other body parts”.

Both turn as Sam slams her locker door closed rather aggressively. Tucker muttering, “well someone’s clearly in a piss poor mood”.

Sam flips him off, “I’m a ray of fucking sunshine, fuck off”.

Danny beams, yet another perfect setup, “is it something I can shoot?”.

Sam sighs, “not really, but...”, Sam throws a flower-girl behavioural Guidebook into Danny’s locker which Danny wastes no time in shooting an ecto-ray at while giving Tucker a shit-eating grin.

Sam slams Danny’s locker door shut on his hand when she sees why he’s smiling like that, reading the words on the backs of his gloves ‘Death Rays’, and then storming off.

Danny rubs the forming bruise on his hand, “worth it”. While Tucker wheezes.

--Line Break--

Mr. Lancer stands at the front of the class, “alright everyone, as you know there is a group assignment portion to your grade. Now I will be assigning the groups...”, glaring at a few jocks in the room, “due to certain actions last year”.

Dash and Kwan glare at Danny as he snickers but don’t say anything as Mr. Lancer lists off the different groups, eventually getting to the jocks, “Dash, Tucker, and Danny. And for the final group, Kwan, Sam, and Valerie”.

Sam, Valerie and Tucker all look horrified; Kwan doesn’t honestly mind all that much.

Dash grins cruelly while Danny looks down at his shirt, reading ‘this is booshit’ and grumbling, “this one was a bad idea”. Deciding not to waste his opportunity, he shouts, “oh that’s booshit!”, and uncrosses his arms to throw them out to the side.

Lancer sighs and shakes his head, slightly confused as to why no one’s told Daniel to change his shirt; it’s definitely against dress code. Pointing at Daniel’s shirt, “please change your shirt, Mr. Fenton”. While Dash sneers at Danny, “you should be thankful, not often shoe scum actually gets to work with Highschool perfection, Fentenisshoe”.

Danny blinks, he firmly can’t believe his luck, before turning and giving Dash a slightly manic open-mouthed grin. Promptly ripping off his top shirt -of course he expected someone to call him on the first shirt- revealing the second shirt underneath. Revealing what he’s sure is just an Amity version of an online ‘pop culture’ shirt, reading ‘ECTOPLASMIC SCUM’.

Tucker slams his face into his desk, wheezing slightly. Both Sam and Valerie burst out laughing, multiple people joining them. Dash glares around at everyone, making most people shut up; but really, Sam, Tucker and Valerie just laugh harder.

--Line Break--

Tucker takes one look at Danny’s shirt the next day, ‘let’s have a wail of a good time’ and promptly claps a hand over Danny’s mouth, “no”.

Danny tilts his head down and makes a show of seeming completely downright defeated. Speaking as Tucker removes his hand, “awwww”.

--Line Break--

Sam and Tucker shake their heads at Danny’s shirt ‘this is my ghost costume, I’m just dead on the inside’. Tucker gesturing at Danny’s shirt, “okay this one is definitely pushing it, dude. It’s literally literal”.

Danny rolls his hand in the air and tilts his head around, “not quite, I’m not literally in my ghost costume. Unless you want to say that my Screaming Fan form is a costume my ghost is wearing”.

“Dude, that's basically correct. Frying Pan is closer to who you really are. This”, Tucker pulls on Danny’s black hair gently, “is pretty well just your disguise at this point”.

Danny shrugs, they weren’t really wrong but smirks as the new ghost drill alarm goes off. Snickering as everyone pulls ghost masks/costumes on quickly, as part of a new plan for dealing with any ghosts. Because someone had the ‘brilliant’ idea of ‘tricking’ ghosts into thinking the students were ghosts. Ghosts were not this stupid. Not even kind of.

Mr. Lancer, who always gets stuck playing the role of the ‘real’ ghost, stops and stares at Danny. Who just gestures at his shirt with a wily smirk. Mr. Lancer shakes his head, “that would never work”, remembering the role he’s supposed to be playing, “boOOoOOoOooOOOo”.

Danny chuckles and grabs Tucker's red ghost mask, pulling it off his face slightly and snapping it, “neither would this”. Tucker just turns his head and glares slightly at Danny, even if that didn’t really hurt.

--Line Break--

Danny saunters into the school with a massive lopsided grin on his face. There was absolutely no way he’d be able to make reference to his shirt today but the recent situation he’s found himself in made it too good to not get this shirt.

Valerie pauses as she was walking past, looking at Danny’s shirt ‘I for one welcome our new ghost overlords’, squinting slightly, “you’ve sure had some interesting clothing choices but what could this one even be referencing?”, glaring slightly, “the ghosts defiantly do not rule us or this town”, glaring a bit more, “and why would you support that?”.

Danny chuckles, in the eyes of the ghost Phantom had always ‘ruled’ Amity Park. Shrugging, “well if you wanna get technical about lairs and shit...”, Danny trails off as Val just glares even harder.

Valerie snaps slightly, “Amity is not a ghosts lair”. Danny can’t help but snort and laugh a bit.

Danny sends her a bit of a sympathetic smile, not really looking to get into it with her. Instead deciding to throw her through a loop and throw her a bone at the same time, putting a hand on his hip, “got nothing to do with that though”, smirking at her raised eyebrow and leaning his elbow on her shoulder, speaking with a slightly sultry look, “don’tcha know? The ghosties got themselves a knew high and mighty king”.

Danny winks as he walks off, Valerie gapping at him before speed walking to catch up with him. Sticking her head around to be in front of him, “who?!?!???”.

Danny tilts his head back and laugh exaggeratedly, “who do you think? Literally only one reckless idiot went and fought the previous one”.

Valerie mutters, “oh my Zone”, before walking off, clearly a little in her own head.

Not even seconds later Sam and Tucker punch him in the shoulders. Tucker smirking, “fucking congrats dude, but you are also an idiot”.

Sam shakes her head, “we all really shoulda seen this coming. Why did you tell her though”.

Danny smirks, “tell me about it and because of timing”, slapping a hand on his chest, “I had a joke to make”.

Tucker looks at the shirt and shakes his head, “we should be the ones wearing that. You’re welcoming yourself”.

Danny just smirks as the sit down in class.

--Line Break--

Sam and Tucker both facepalm as Danny walks towards them like he owned the entire damn school. He was decked out head to toe in ghostly fashion. ‘I AM A GHOST’ t-shirt, ‘I’m dying inside’ beret, ghost emoji leggings, knee-high ‘#LITERALLY DEAD’ socks, ‘the ghost inside’ shorts, blood and ectoplasm spattered shoes, ‘monster mortuary’ jacket, coffin sunglasses, and a ‘BOOOO!’ choker.

Danny poses dramatically in-front of his friends while Tucker groans, “Danny dude, you are practically begging to be shot or found out at this point”. But Tucker gestured to his own t-shirt, Ash vs the Evil Dead ‘Ghost Beaters’ design. Danny smirks and gives an approving nod. Sam takes this as her queue and gestures to her T-shirt with a little ghost nurse carrying bandaids reading ‘Boo Boo Crew’. Danny looks over and laughs.

Danny claps them on the shoulder as they start walking to class, “so y’all found the store huh? Spook Spot is a name I certainly approve of”.

Sam smirks, “damn right we did, this town is the only damn place we’re a ghost focused apparel store would actually be profitable. Fucking capitalism”.

Danny chuckles, personally he was glad, there was so many good jokes to be made and it really would get lots of business. “Think I should collect part of the profits? Seeing as I’m the entire reason why it’s able to be successful”.

Tucker, ever interested in a quick buck, “you damn well should!”. While Sam just grumbles about, “not feeding the man”.

Dash glares at the little Fenton freak as he enters the classroom, “what you think all that’s gonna make you cool enough to be like Phantom? Fentoenail”.

Danny chuckles darkly, “oh I’m certainly spooky enough”.

Sam smirks, “a spooky baby”. While Tucker elbows Sam, “more like spooky babe, riiiiiight Sam”, he wiggles his eyebrows at her earning a glare from the goth.

The two friends stop and gape a little as Valarie walks in and pelts Danny in the face with a t-shirt. Danny just letting it fall off his face and onto the floor. Raising an eyebrow at Valarie while she says, “you absolute fool, I can’t believe you”, before taking her seat.

Danny looks down at the t-shirt, one half has a skull on it the other half reads ‘only half dead’. Danny chuckles, picks it up, stuffs it in his pocket and mutters into his hand, “well damn”.

Sam and Tucker exchange a glance and then facepalm.

—The Previous Night—

Valerie crawls into her bed, puts a sore arm over her eyes and sighs. Snapping her eyes open seconds later before blinking and jerking to sit up, muttering, “oh my Zone, he fucking winked at me. And halfas and she looks just like Phantom but black hair and blue eyes and oh my Zone, Danny.....”. Thinking over the past weeks before shaking her head after a beat, “I dated the most colossal idiot ever”.

Glancing to her computer before scrambling over to it and heading to google to find some joke shirt, muttering at it, “I have to get you back, you damn Spook”.

“November 24th, 2006. 9:43 p.m. This is the ninth full examination of the ectobiological aberration self-identified as ‘Phantom,’ legal name Daniel Fenton. General details of the aberration's previously accepted physical characteristics can be found in the recording and transcript of the first examination. General details of the aberration's current physical characteristics can be found in the first, second, and third examinations. Detailed characteristics that have remained unchanged between forms—the wholly living, the selectively living, and the wholly deceased are also recorded in the first and second examinations."

“For the record, I still don't think I qualify as an 'aberration,'" the body says.

He breathes. Swallows. Chooses to ignore the interruption. 

“This examination will consist of further study of Phantom's physical deterioration, to include the taking of samples of hair, skin, bone, and various fluids and tissues as necessary. Additionally I—" 

He hadn't identified himself, despite the GIW's explicitly written protocols on ghost examinations. He curses inwardly, decides not to bother. He's the only examiner on any of the recordings, after all.

The body takes advantage of his pause to add, “Oddity maybe. Hell, anomaly sounds pretty cool. But aberration? That makes me sound like I'm on the verge of a villainous origin story or something."

He presses on through gritted teeth. "I'll be conducting several tests as outlined separately—exact location in the Phantom file will be added to this examination's transcript—to see if it's feasible to separate the Phantom aberration from Daniel Fenton's remains."

"How many times do I have to tell you that Phantom has always been—"

"Danny."

The body sighs. Well. Its inhabitant does anyway. "Sorry, sorry."

He resists the urge to thank the body. He resists the urge to pat its mottled green hand. He doesn't trust his voice to remain steady if he does either.

"External examination.” He describes the body from toe to tip, his voice measured, unhurried, detached. Dark green skin, healed as flawlessly as it had seven times before. Untamed black hair that shines a glossy green in the harsh overhead lights. Eyes red as holly berries that shine with the predatory gleam so common among true ghosts when the overhead light hits them. The skin is firm, and firmly attached to the lean muscles beneath, and those too still conform to the bones as if the body hasn’t been dead for months. The body is as limp-limbed as a ragdoll in his hands as he goes through the checklist. He confirms that it’s continuing to lose weight incrementally despite no outward signs of decay or starvation—

(Can a dead thing still starve? God, but what were those two years like for Danny? All those worries, those fears, all those questions without answers, and now….)

Nothing untoward or abnormal—in shape, if not in color—can be noted. A normal male distribution of body hair. Teeth in fair repair. Gums, tongue, and oral cavity all normal, albeit pale green. Symmetrical and normal in appearance are checked off wherever they need to be checked off. On, and on, and on. An exhaustive process that embarrassed the body’s inhabitant horribly the first few times. Now it’s borne in silence, with only an occasional gruff sigh.

No deformities. No injuries, except for the postmortem thread that’s bunched up at weird angles as the body stubbornly insisted on healing practically overnight. He makes a note of it as he takes a small pair of shears to the tangles, snipping and pulling as needed. The small holes trace out a capital letter Y that’s gone a bit hunchbacked and knock-kneed. Another day or two and that scar will be gone, replaced by a new one that will stretch stark and symmetrical, for a little while. The small holes left behind don’t bleed. There isn't any blood or ectoplasm pooled or pulsing through the body. The heart is still, a fist-sized lump of dark green muscle. He'd drained the clay-colored fluid that had operated as blood out into a jar marked DP Specimen #58 - 3.85ltr ecto found w/in complex circ sys(!) w/ unk contaminant(s?). It hasn't clotted, and the body hasn't produced more.

They don't know why. They still don’t know why the body continues to heal. There’s not enough energy in the remaining ectoplasm to generate such a speedy recovery, but neither does it heal enough. Danny’s ghost—the aberration—is still bound to this inanimate, impossible corpse. Danny is still trapped.

Not to mention that the healing seems to be failing incrementally as the days pass. He doesn’t know what it means. He doesn’t know if they’re running out of time or not. He doesn’t know what will happen to Danny if—

There’s no ‘if.’ He’s fixing this. 

He has to.

“You’re staring,” the body says quietly.

He swallows, shaking himself out of it. “I—I will now begin the internal examination to compare the body’s current state to that of the eighth examination conducted on November 16th. Additionally, with the data gathered from the previous examinations and tests conducted upon various tissue samples and the body itself it’s believed that optimal results might be achieved with as little biological interference as possible.”

“You said full examination,” the body interrupts. “Brain included?”

“Brain included,” he confirms. He can’t quite keep the apology out of his voice. Not as if those bastards would notice an ounce of kindness if it—

Focus.

The body doesn’t breathe. It can’t. Those lungs gasped their last 36 seconds after Maddie landed a neat hit on Phantom with a full 450 milliliters of their experimental paralytic. 

(He’d said it himself, not 24 hours before that day. Enough to lay out a ghost ten times his size! What a damn stupid, blind idiot he was.)

The inhabitant inside the body makes the sound of a slow, steadying breath. It shouldn’t shake. It shakes anyway. “Just. Don’t keep my face c-covered any longer than you have to.”

Danny’s made this request each time. As if he’d forget to give Danny what mean comforts he can through—through this. Danny had screamed all throughout that first examination. Not out of pain—he insisted he couldn’t feel anything anymore—but out of sheer, visceral horror. He doesn’t blame Danny one bit for that. 

(He’d hoped removing the brain would do the trick, that it would free Danny’s ghost, put him out of his misery. But it just grew back. There are three of them resting in glass jars of glowing formalin now. At the rate he’s going the entire lab will soon be nothing but bits of Danny in jars.)

“Sure thing,” he whispers, and picks up the scalpel. 

He narrates as he works, making small notes on the diagram at his elbow with a gloved hand that grows damp over time with green fluids. He makes the initial incision, running over it repeatedly where necessary, and inch by inch peels the anterior thoracic musculature and subcutaneous layers away. 

(He’s almost gotten used to making these incisions, to applying the necessary force as pulls the layers apart. The motions have almost become habit. It’s all the sounds of peeling the body open that continue to haunt him.)

The flesh folds like a thick blanket, draping over the body’s elbows out of the way. There’s no need at this time to study the neck musculature or organs. He leaves that stretch of skin where it’s meant to stay. He focuses on cutting away the pale bits of fatty tissue that might interfere, fully exposing the deep black bones of the body’s rib cage. 

(That had been a hard shock, the first time. He’s almost used to the sight now.)

As with the body’s hair and eyes, the bones have a faint green gleam to them. The same iridescence of a raven’s feathers. They yield to a rib cutter the same as any human’s would. He makes the cuts close to the sides rather than near the breastbone; he wants to get a good look at the heart and lungs in situ today.

The inhabitant begins to breathe rapidly. 

He pauses, the front of the body’s rib cage gripped carefully in both hands, pulled halfway out. “Do… do you want me to move the mirror?”

Oh, but he had put his foot down about the mirror. There was no way, no way, he would force Danny to observe as his own father cut him open—did this to him. Danny had asked first that his eyes not to be taped shut, because laying there paralyzed and feeling nothing in the dark was so much worse and anyway his eyes don’t seem to be going anywhere, right? The third examination is when Danny had asked for a way to watch him work, and he’d protested and blubbered and even shouted, enough that Maddie had called down the stairs in a voice thick with tears if everything was—if everything was—did he need help?

Yes, he needed help. But he didn’t tell her that. He told her everything was—was—that she needn’t worry, that he had everything handled. 

Danny had asked again. Again and again and again, and every time he said no, told Danny all the reasons why he wouldn’t, couldn’t, would never—

But Danny kept asking.

I want to understand, Dad. Please. I’m gonna go crazy if I all I do is just lay here until you and Mom fix me. I—this is all I can do. I want to see what you’re doing to me, instead of trying to imagine. Please. Please, Dad.

He’d relented for the seventh examination. He’d attached an arm to the observation rig above the table, attached a mirror to the arm, and messed with the angle of it until Danny said he could see himself perfectly. 

It had been such a terrible thing to do to Danny, but Danny had thanked him all the same.

The body sighs, chuckles weakly. “N-no. No. I just—hate that sound. That—cracking. Gets—gets me every time.”

He nods, not trusting himself to speak. He tries to be as gentle as he can, separating the breastbone from the clavicle, but some sounds are unavoidable. After setting the rib cage aside he swallows, and swallows again. His voice betrays him anyway. “M-mediastinum intact again as well. Comparable in color to previous examinations. The residual fatty thymic tissue present….”

And on. And on. Cutting and pulling and weighing, comparing weights and textures and colors to the eight other times he’s already done this.

How many more times will this be necessary?

Danny breathes, sometimes, hitching like he means to say something, or like he's trying not to cry.

 Danny doesn’t do either, but he hates himself anyway.

“Decellularization continues apace,” he murmurs near the microphone, tracing a careful finger across one lung in the scale. It and its twin had been a vivid lime green in the beginning, but like nearly every other organ it’s begun to shed its inhabiting cells, leaving a colorless scaffolding in the same rough shape of itself behind. 

Ghost organs. He’s never heard of such a thing happening outside of a microbiology lab. It’d almost be funny.

He doesn’t know what it means.

 He doesn’t know what any of this means.

The accident should have killed Danny completely, left a well-cooked corpse and an entirely separate ghost behind. Not hybridized him. Not at the risk of this. Their paralytic is what killed him—

(his son, his boy, little Dann-o, gone gone gone and it’s all his fault)

—but if he’d died another way would this have been the same result? This powerlessness, this fading? There’s no knowing, and that most of all is what keeps him up at night.

He finishes comparing all the numbers to those previously recorded. Then samples are taken and the cell debris drained, all the vials and containers marked appropriately. Lastly he bags the organs he intends to keep for study to minimize leakage, leaving the rest in their individual trays. If he were to place them all back in the body the bags would—somehow—vanish within a few days, all the organs reorganized and reattached exactly as they should be. If he doesn’t, new ones will take their place. 

Maddie suspects this to be the cause of the decellularization. The body is drawing on its own limited materials to regenerate because the ectoplasmic core once sustaining it has been snuffed out. None of their instruments can even pick up that Danny’s still in there, but there he is all the same. No one knows what to make of that.

All in all, it’s been over an hour by the time he carefully suctions out the last of the fluids pooled within the emptied cavities, filling and marking one more container to join the collection on the stainless steel counter. He’d lined the interior of the body with cotton, the first time. It had gone the same way as the bags, vanished or vaporized or who even knows. He doesn’t bother this time, returning the unbagged organs to rough approximations of where they should be. He gives the small intestine up as a bad job, grimacing apologetically. In the space where the right lung sat he places an oblong monitoring device small enough to fit in the palm of his hand. Something clever Maddie cooked up to measure all sorts of things, all potential avenues to make sense of the body’s physiology and shake the ghost clean of it. It shouldn’t be too intrusive once the lung grows back. Not that it matters.

It’s far too late to save their son. They know that. That doesn’t make this any easier.

“Brain next?” The body asks once he’s finished up the new Y incision. 

“Brain next,” he confirms wearily, setting aside needle and thread. “Your moth—”

He bites his cheek hard enough to taste blood, but that’s not enough to take back the slip. No familiarity. No acknowledgement of their relationship. No divulging more details than strictly necessary. That had been part of the agreement.

He wiggles the rubber block out from under the body’s back, moves it to support the head, cards his fingers—a fresh pair of gloves on—through its thick dark hair. Danny can’t feel it but hums a wordless thanks anyway, watching in the mirror. There’s the faintest shiver of motion at his eyes; not the eyeballs themselves but of a fey light within. It’s the only sign anyone’s still in there.

He makes the incision across the crown, sloping from behind one ear to the other. The scrape of the scalpel against bare bone makes Danny suck in a breath. He peels, he cuts, he peels. He whispers an apology as the anterior flap covers the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the chin. The inhabit’s imagined breaths come faster than ever, but it’s only the dark that upsets him. It is. The dark, the numbness, the helplessness. A hell that can’t be imagined, only experienced.

He moves quicker now, his narration stuttering in favor of action. The posterior flap peeled and cut and folded out of the way, then both of the temporal muscles severed. The scalpel traded for a blade like a bread knife to etch out a rough guideline around the crown of the exposed skull. Then the hammer and chisel.

Danny whimpers all throughout.

As soon as the brain—the same gray-green color of mold—has been removed, he gently pulls the anterior flap back, lets it dangle over empty space as he wipes the body’s face clean of a few green drips. “Keeping this one for testing, I’m afraid,” he says.

“Okay,” the body whispers.

“Nearly finished now.”

“I know. I’m okay.”

He doesn’t acknowledge that. He can’t afford to. The brain—what a brilliant kid, a professional ghost hunter, reaching for the stars since he first realized they were up there, the sum of his son cradled in his hands and this isn’t ever going to get any easier, it’s not, it’s not, it’s not—

He takes a deep breath. Steadies himself. Sets the brain carefully aside to be dealt with shortly. Soft as Jell-O, brains are, but unfathomably powerful. Science has only scratched the surface of what goes on in that three-pound mass. Danny might still be—somehow—tied to the body, but maybe the answer lies in the brain. 

Nearly finished. He can do this.

The skullcap is held awkwardly in place as he sews the scalp closed. It’ll be good as new in no time, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t still take care to make the stitches tidy. He uses the back of his hand, the cleanest part of his glove, to smooth the dark hair over the seam.

“This concludes the ninth examination of Daniel Fenton, AKA Phantom,” he croaks into the microphone, and at last, at last, he can kill the recording. As soon as he has he reaches up to nudge the mirror askew so Danny doesn’t have to stare at himself a second longer.

“Done,” he says, his voice gone hoarse again.

“Yeah,” the body says.

He stands there a long, long minute, braced on the examination table staring down at the twisted corpse of his son, both splashed with any number of ghostly-bodily fluids. Arms shaking, his knees rubbery, breathing through a throat of sand. He’s tired. He’s tired. He doesn’t know how much longer he can do this.

As long as he has to. As long as it takes to help Danny. That’s how much longer he has to. No ifs, ands, or buts. 

“Are you okay?” Danny asks.

He laughs. It comes out wetter than he meant it to, but it’s fine. All of the recording equipment is off. The only person who’ll see him cry now is Danny. “Sh—shouldn’t I be asking that?”

“Maybe,” Danny says, “But it’s not easy on anybody. Is it?”

“...No. No, it’s not.”

He’s made such a mess of this corner of the lab. Maddie’d be furious with him if she saw. Not that she will. He’s cordoned it off with tall curtains and begged her on bended knee to leave this whole ugly mess to him. She hasn’t looked yet. He’d know if she had. He's seen the way her eyes linger on the curtains while they're working in another part of the lab, how her hands fumble, how her mouth thins. She's not slept more than four hours at a time since—

Since.

"Quit staring," the body orders. "Mom'll blow a gasket if you leave the lab like this. So c’mon now. Hop to it."

He laughs again, sniffling thickly as he pats the mottled green hand nearest him. Danny can't feel or see him do it, but it feels right to do it all the same. "You're a good boy, keeping your old man on task."

Danny hums. "Somebody's got to."

Well. That’s true enough, isn’t it? He’s always needed a firm hand to keep him focused. It’s been Maddie since the day they met in college, his rock in all things. All things but this. He won’t let her carry this burden. Not the messiest parts he can protect her from anyway.

So. Another checklist.

Juggling trays full of specimens off the second examination table to the counter so he can wipe the table clean. Then cleaning the body. Then moving the body to the second table so he can clean and sterilize the first. 

(Like a twisted game of musical chairs, Danny had joked once. Neither of them had laughed.)

But before that comes organizing and storing all the specimens for Maddie to study tomorrow with that eagle eye and incredible patience of hers. She’s doing the real work, laying out all the pieces of Danny to see what makes him tick, working on a way to free him even as she tries to understand him. They’ve dedicated another corner of the lab to this; nearly an entire wall, really. All their other work has gone by the wayside, shelved apart from the necessity of dealing with any ghosts that slip out to wreck a little havoc. 

Funny, how few times that’s happened—since. They’d worried, once Jazz and Sam and Tucker had told them the whole terrible truth, that the ghosts might celebrate Phantom’s condition. Take advantage of his helplessness to get revenge or at least run amok in Amity Park. They know news got out; the ghost Phantom had been after the day Maddie got her lucky shot in had gotten away. 

But there’s been nothing. Almost nothing, apart from a few non-sapient threats. Mean and cunning things, but nothing half so dangerous as they’d feared would come. Danny doesn’t seem surprised, or worried for that matter. If he knows something though, he’s staying quiet.

Once he’s passed back through the curtains the body says, “Jazz visited me again last night.”

The curse slips out him before he can help it, anger and worry and shame and grief a hot migrainous mess hammering away at his skull, matching the pace he’d chiseled at Danny’s. “She knows better—!”

“Yeah, and I told her to get out too.” Danny chuckles. “She never listens though.”

“I….” He sighs and shakes his head, exasperated. “...Yeah. She gets that from your mother. How is she?”

“Figured that’d be obvious.”

“She won’t talk to either of us,” he replies, and goes to clean and disinfect the table and floor. Easiest to get that done with before he spends 20 minutes hunched over the sink and autoclave. His back’s already clamoring for a hot shower and a handful of ibuprofen after—

Well.

“She’s not as angry as she was,” Danny says in a pause between clangs. “She hardly cried at all this time.”

“Good. That’s—good.”

“Hey, Dad? Do me a favor?”

He’s at Danny’s side at once, taking one hand in his and leaning enough to be in more than Danny’s frozen peripheral. “What is it?”

“She’s gonna try to sneak Sam and Tucker down here this week—”

“What?”

“—so can you make sure the security system will let them in?”

His knee-jerk reaction is to put his foot down, to remind Danny and then Jazz of how tenuous a position they’re in with the GIW, of how they can’t afford the littlest slip or look for loopholes or do anything to risk Danny—

But.

Danny’s been down here so long now. Alone apart from him, from Maddie’s voice on the other side of the curtains, Jazz’s midnight visits. Just his family and the ceiling and hours of silence and a hundred experiments and failures and—

And that’s no way to live. That’s no way to live at all.

“Is that what you want?” He asks.

“I… I really don’t want them to see me like this,” There’s nothing but revulsion in Danny’s voice, self-loathing and guilt and horror. “But they’ll do it no matter what I tell Jazz, and I don’t want them to get caught either.”

“Okay. Okay then. I think I can finagle three days before anyone might notice. Make sure she knows.”

“Yeah. Thank you.”

He goes back to cleaning, finishes the area and moves to the instruments and trays. Ectoplasm is notoriously difficult to scrub out. It takes time. The smell of bleach burns his eyes and nose, eventually overpowering the citrus sting of ectoplasm. Once the autoclave is set to run he tosses the latex gloves into the hazardous waste bin and takes a moment to let his hands breathe. Never did like the feel of latex, but his usual pair don’t allow him the finesse he needs for—well, this kind of work. His fingertips have gone pale and wrinkled. His fingers ache. His wrists are on fire, to say nothing of his shoulders and back.

How many more times is he going to do this?

“How do you feel?” He asks.

“I’m fine,” Danny says. Too quickly.

“Be honest, kiddo. Please.”

“I… Cold. Heavy. Like I got stuck phasing through the ground, and any second I’m gonna slip up and go solid and it’ll—” Danny makes a small, miserable noise and falls silent.

He rubs his aching eyes, gritting his teeth against every stupid, useless thing he wants to say. He’d asked, hadn’t he?

“Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s been months.”

“I know.”

Danny’s voice breaks. “I have to get out of here.”

“I know,” he repeats. It’s the only thing to say. He’s exhausted all apologies. “We’re trying, son. We’re working on this day and night. We’ll get you sorted, you know we will.”

“...Yeah. I know.”

He forces his aching legs to the cabinet to pull out a fresh sheet to drape over the body, then Danny’s comforter over that, pulling them both up to the body’s chin to hide the edges of the incision. “Eyes open or shut tonight?”

“Um. What time is it?”

He glances at the wall as he carefully swaps the rubber block under the body’s neck for a plastic-wrapped pillow. “Just after midnight.”

“When will Mom be down?”

“Six sharp, same as always.”

“Right. Um. Shut’s fine.”

He gently tugs the medical tape off the body’s face, smoothes the eyebrows flat and brushes the bangs aside. The green skin feels even colder on his bare fingers. 

This is the part where he bids his dead son good night and retreats upstairs. This is the part where he passes by Jazz and Maddie with his eyes firmly on his feet. This is the part where he near boils himself in the shower until he feels almost clean again, scrubbing his skin raw to wash the smell of ectoplasm away. This is the part where there’s only nightmares followed by silent hours spent staring at the ceiling of their bedroom, trying to imagine how helpless and terrified Danny is down here.

He stays where he is, hands braced on the table again. He asks the question that's festered in his gut ever since Jazz threw herself over Phantom's prone shape and spat the truth out through a stream of furious tears. "...Why didn't you tell us?"

Danny is quiet for a long, long time. Then, "I was always gonna end up on this table."

He shudders, pulling away. "We— you don’t really think that. Do you? We love you, Danny. We wouldn't. If we'd known, we wouldn't have."

Another long silence. Then, "Good night, Dad."

“I….” He shuts his eyes, weary in a way he’ll never find the words to express. “Good night, Danny-boy.”

He shuts the lights off on his way up the stairs.

=

Notes: Decellularization is cool as hell. Check out the >Wiki page< for it, and if you don’t some close-up pictures of a pig heart >here< is a fascinating DIY to create your very own ghost organ as a Halloween decoration! (Scientists are amazing.) For the rest of the research I did for this, I’ll just say that boy! You sure can find some extremely specific How-Tos on the Internent, huh? I sure learned a lot this week!

His secret was out to the world alright, he was sure of it. But somehow, when he woke up the next morning, even his parents didn’t remember there was an asteroid in the first place. The only thing different was a mysterious machine in Antarctica had appeared overnight, and there was a strange conspiracy going around about ghosts being aliens.

Either way, after thinking about it, he was much better off without worldwide attention. He was having a hard time living normally with just four people knowing his secret, namely his sister, his best friend and girlfriend, and Valerie.

And after confirming with him, they too were confused that no one seemed to remember.

“I’m telling you guys,” they heard Wes, a kid one grade ahead of them that was on the Casper High Basketball team. “That nerd kid Danny Fenton is actually Danny Phantom.”

“Him? Are you getting high again, Wes. Lay off the munchies.”

“It’s not...” He spotted Danny and rushed over to him. “Hey, kid, tell them the truth!”

“Uh.” Danny didn’t know what to say, but he wondered why this guy remembered when no one else did. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Wes’s friends laughed and went off.

“Just great!” Wes tore off his baseball cap and threw it down. “You made me look like a complete idiot. Why does no one see it?”

“Do you remember the meteorite?” Tucker asked, and Sam leaned in.

“Meteorite? What meteorite.”

“Why do you think he’s Phantom then?” Sam added.

“I’ve seen it...I’ve seen you transform. That day when the ghost came into the gym. I’ve done a lot of research. My friends won’t believe me! You’re an alien, right?”

“Since when are ghosts aliens?” Danny said. He couldn’t believe this guy.

Wes pulled out a book titled “Aliens are Coming: The Conspiracy No One Wants You to Know.”

“It says here that after the world is exposed to ecto-cosmic radiation, it will use the memories from this event to power some kind of device that primes this planet for takeover. You know, that machine in the Arctic?”

“That thing? That was just for making the earth intang- I mean-”

“You see? You know what it’s for! You really are Phantom, aren’t you?”

“Look Wes, can you promise to keep a secret? I can’t exactly protect this town with fans going crazy on me.”

“You...you’re really.”

Danny flashed his eyes green briefly. “Yep, congratulations.”

“I was right? I was right!”

“You’re loud,” Sam said, putting a hand on Wes’ shoulder.

Tucker loomed over him - well, as best as he could since Wes was at least 6 feet tall. “Now that you’re in on it, you have to hang with us now. And any blabbing will get you sent straight to a ghostly prison.”

“G-ghost prison?” Wes said.

Danny was sure they were enjoying intimidating one of the popular kids.

A week later, they had gotten to know Wes a bit more, as well as some of his wild theories on aliens.

“I think they kidnapped Mayor Masters,” Wes said over fries. “Don’t you think so? Why else would he have disappeared. Plus, with that meteorite you guys said everyone forgot about, our memories have probably been absorbed and somehow you guys were protected.”

“Maybe it’s because we sleep with these Fenton Headphones?” Tucker said, showing off the device from his pocket. The three of them made it a habit ever since Ember’s mind control messed with their heads, but slacked off until Nocturne’s takeover.

“...Can I have some? They might prevent the aliens from getting inside my head.”

“Right,” Sam said, rolling her eyes. “I’m sure Danny’s parents would love to make you some for the low price of $39.99, tax not included.”

“Take my money!” Wes took out his wallet.

“Hold up there,” Danny said. “Money can wait. Anyway, I kind of am worried about Vlad. You know, this whole time he was acting kind of...erratic up till the meteorite.”

“He must have been controlled by the aliens to bring down the meteorite!” Wes insisted.

“That idea’s totally not out there,” Tucker said, before taking another bite of his burger.

“He must be in space. Danny, let’s go look for him.”

“...Why?”

“You said you were worried about the old fruit loop,” Sam said, prodding him with an elbow. “Go ahead on a little space trip. I won’t miss you too much. We can talk through the coms anyway.”

Tucker added, “I can update that space ship your dad used last time with a wider space map and get it hooked up to our system. We’ll guide you from down here.”

Danny smiled a bit. He still had his astronaut helmet in his room.

Here we go again, Houston!

On Saturday, Danny and Wes flew up to the rock Vlad was apparently abandoned on. There were signs of a struggle, and a picture of Maddie left behind.

“He was taken after all!” Wes cried from the ship, viewing from the camera attached to Danny’s space helmet. Danny flew out and picked up the picture. Surprisingly this rock was big enough to have a gravitational pull. On the back of the picture there was a hastily scribbled note.

“Daniel, if you’re seeing this...I was wrong. I have a tracker. Please, save me, if you have a heart.” Hidden in the corner of the frame was a memory card.

Always pulling the purse strings. Why do I care about this guy anyway?

It wasn’t just that he pitied him, but he knew that Vlad wasn’t all evil, even though he said he was.

“Rescue mission!” Wes cried out like a mantra.

“Space! Trip!” Tucker cried from over the com.

“As long as you’re back by Monday?” Sam added. “And besides, you can use some blackmail on Vlad, and he’ll owe you big time if you save his butt.”

“Okay fine,” Danny said, flying back to the ship. “We’ve gotta try to get back by Monday. Wes, did I ever tell you how much I like space? Oh, this is gonna be great.”

He was excited already. He couldn’t wait to use the ship’s features to take pictures of the asteroids. But what about the Milky Way? What would he do if he saw a black hole? He wondered if they led to the Ghost Zone or let him time travel.

Tucker poked fun at him over the intercom. “Did you switch to space mode again? Come on, I like Super Danny. Hero Danny. Stop it with the glittery space mode.”

“I don’t sparkle like a vampire when I think about space, I have acne, not freckles, and I don’t have an obsession! Let alone two.” Danny yelled.

“Ow, loud,” said Sam.

Tucker didn’t know when to quit. “Don’t you have three? One being this lovely lady over here.”

“Ghosts have obsessions?” said Wes, interested.

“Not me, at any rate! It’s just a joke Tucker likes to pull on me,” Danny said. “I’m kicking your butt when I get back, Tucker.”

“But I’ve gotten faster at running...” Tucker chided. “Ow!”

“I kicked his butt for you, so get a move on!” Sam said.

“Love you too,“ Danny said, then sat back down in the pilot seat.

Wes pulled out his mp3 player and played “The Final Countdown”.

“Now we’re talkin’!” Danny exclaimed while Wes started jamming out. He inserted the memory card and the system drew up a navigation plan. Apparently it would take them a day to fly to Vlad’s location, wherever he was. And if Wes was right, they might would run into aliens.

Who cares. Space Trip.