Chapter Text
Danny Fenton was a star, the nation knew, so what a shame it was that he had died so young.
The pop idol was one apart from his family, always in pursuit of the arts more than the sciences, much to their confusion. His sister Jasmine Fenton, the psychologist, had always tried to pry a reason out of him, but had never gotten anything more than a simple, “It’s what I love.” There was little more that his parents, both of them inventors renowned in their field, could do to understand.
Then, on the 6th of December, the news came out: Danny had died in a freak accident relating to a machine his parents had built.
It was an overstatement to say that the nation wept for him, but his hometown, his die-hard fans did. The day after, more than half the student body of Casper High refused to attend in his honor.
The week after, Jack and Maddie Fenton became two of the most hated figures in Amity Park.
The month after, with Jasmine’s encouragement, the two gave up their lifetime goal altogether-- the capture and study of ghosts.
And as they broke into their ghost portal, the device which had killed their son, to turn it off using the very same switch Danny had turned it on with, they could have and did not notice a prone figure against the back wall, shadows concealing a shock of white-and-black hair, its face stained with softly glowing tracks of tears that had long-since dried.
The day after the portal switched off, there was one ghost who remained.
The week after, that ghost woke up.
Danny came to his senses slowly. Disoriented, he racked his brain for what he last remembered doing. Right-- the portal. The on switch was inside it. I pressed it, and… Did it work?
Danny sat up and looked around. Everything looked different in a way he couldn’t place. There was too much green, too many hues of purple where they shouldn’t be. He was inside the portal, he guessed, judging by his perspective. However, every light was off inside it, even those illuminating the wires-- and the one illuminating the on switch.
“It didn’t work?” Danny thought. “I thought for sure…”
He marvelled at how much the interior of the portal made his voice echo. He would have thought the acoustics of a chamber this small wouldn’t have made much of an impact on the sound. All the stadiums he had performed in were huge compared to this, after all. But then again, he decided, he had had microphones and amplifiers then. Now it was just his own voice and a broken ghost portal.
“Hello!” he shouted experimentally. Again, his voice echoed. Danny smiled, then decided he should head upstairs to tell his parents the bad news. Dad would be devastated, he suspected, but it wasn’t anything a large enough helping of fudge wouldn’t clear up.
He stepped outside the portal, fumbling around for the zipper of the hazmat suit he had thrown on. He looked down at it and almost jumped out of his skin.
The suit, formerly white with black accents, had become just the opposite-- black with white accents, and what’s more, it was glowing.
Wow, he thought, plucking at the rubbery fabric. It was tailor-made, but it still looked clunky on him. This looks like a really bad superhero costume. Or something a ghost would wear. He stopped and considered wearing something like this for his next concert. It would be a nice shout-out to his parents’ career. But then again, what would his fans think?
Danny snapped up as something clattered onto the floor.
The first thing he saw was Mom’s prototype for the Fenton Thermos. Except-- it wasn’t a prototype. It looked to be a working, fully-fledged ghost containment canister, in mint condition save for the thin layer of dust that it had somehow collected and was now dislodging as it rolled across the floor.
The second thing he saw was his sister, flat against the wall, terror wracked through every move she made. Or didn’t make. She seemed frozen.
Danny took a step towards her. “Jazz? Are you alright?”
Jazz’s breathing quickened. She pressed herself harder against the wall.
He stopped. “What’s wrong? You look like-- heh --like you’ve seen a ghost,” he joked.
Jazz looked like a cornered animal now. She seemed to realize this, and began calming herself down, it looked like to Danny. Finally, she said something, voice quavering ever so slightly. “Do you not get it?”
Danny stared at Jazz, confused. She looked away. “Get what?”
“That portal wasn’t supposed to work. We turned it off. You-- ” she gestured at him, “--shouldn’t be here. There’s no possible way…”
“Wait, are you saying the portal worked?” interjected Danny. “I thought the switch didn’t do anything.”
“We turned it off. I convinced Mom and Dad to turn their back on ghosts, after the accident -- ”
“Accident?” asked Danny. “And what do you mean, turned it off? And why is that Thermos finished instead of a prototype? And why is my suit--”
“ Stop. ” Jazz had stepped away from the wall and was now towering over Danny, putting her four inches on him to good use. “I live here. I interrogate you first.”
Danny wanted to add on that, technically, he lived there, too, but he let Jazz talk. After all, she was older than him, and smarter than him, and generally had better advice than him. He just didn’t get why she was treating him like she didn’t know him.
“First things first. I know what you are. But who are you?”
Or maybe, Jazz really didn’t recognize him. Somehow, he didn’t expect a question from Jazz to be more confusing than an open-ended question on Mr. Falluca’s bio tests, but there he was.
“Hello?” asked Danny. “Earth to Jazz? I might be wearing a glowing suit for some reason, but that shouldn’t stop you from recognizing your own--”
“Another thing. How do you know my name? I’ve never seen you before, and you probably haven’t seen me before, either, unless I have a ghost stalker that I don’t know about and wouldn’t hesitate to trap in this thermos.” She eyed the thermos in question with a dangerous glint in her eye.
“Jazz, I’m your-- Wait.” Danny’s stomach dropped. “Did you say ghost? ”
Jazz’s anger seemed to evaporate. “You don’t… know? You don’t know you’re a ghost?”
“I’m a ghost?” Danny tensed. “Oh, no. Oh, no. ” He took a step back. “What happened to me?”
It sunk in. The portal had worked. There had been an accident, and they had turned it off, and now Jazz didn’t recognize him and was calling him a ghost--
Danny was dead.
His breath caught in his throat. ( Why was he breathing? He was dead.) His eyes widened. He froze, panic clouding his thoughts. (What was he doing? Ghosts don’t have emotions.) He didn’t know what to do. He curled into himself, all too aware of his feet leaving the floor, all too aware of his ghost floating in midair. He felt trapped. He was trapped. He was dead.
Dead, and buried, and--
A hand around his wrist tore him back into reality. He felt his pulse racing against the hand. (How did he have a pulse? He was dead.)
He saw Jazz’s face, concern and sympathy and determination lighting it all at once. “Look,” she began, “I get that being, well, dead, is hard. It was hard for everyone when my brother died, too.”
He knew it was true, but hearing it all again cut into him. He shuddered. In his throat, a sob began to rise up. Tears blurred his eyes.
He didn’t want to be here. Anywhere but here would be good enough for him.
“But I can help you. I think. After all, I’m going into psychology when I graduate.”
Danny flexed his hand and met Jazz’s eyes again. “You know how you can help me right now?” he quavered.
Jazz loosened her grip on his wrist. “How?”
“By leaving me alone! ” Danny wrenched his arm out of her hand and flew-- literally, flew -- out the lab and into the kitchen.
He ran upstairs, into his room, and stopped dead.
Everything had been cleared out. His room was empty, save for his zebra-striped keytar case and a simple red-and-white calendar with the dates crossed out, like Mom liked to do.
Danny took a closer look at the calendar. It was new, having just been opened to January. Everything up to the 21st had been crossed out.
That wasn’t right. None of this was right. It had been December when Danny had gone into the portal, right?
The thud of footsteps, Jazz’s footsteps, racing up the stairs caught Danny’s attention. “Ghost boy, I--!”
“...Jazz.” He gestured to his room. “How long have I been dead?”
It had been an hour since Danny had learned of his own death, and since Jazz had learned of his existence, and now Danny wanted more than anything to break down crying.
Instead, he stood up. “I’m going to the bathroom,” he told Jazz, and trudged off. Maybe some cold water on his face would make him feel a little less like he was dead, and a little more like he was only half dead.
Or, he thought as he walked into the bathroom and glanced at the mirror, he could take a look at his own reflection and feel even worse about himself.
His hair, once dark brown highlighted with white, was now completely the opposite-- snow-white with stripes of pitch black peeking through.
His eyes were green and glowing, such that he hardly recognized himself in the way it lit his face.
His skin, once rather pallid, looked tanned, or perhaps burnt. It would make sense, he thought, considering how he had become a ghost-- fried to death. Crispy golden-brown, like a McNugget.
He smiled to himself. After making that joke, he felt a little better, although the weight of being dead still hung inside him like the counterbalance in a skyscraper.
Wistfully, he wished to himself that he was still alive, that he still looked like himself.
Then his whole body seemed to freeze.
A bright light filled the room, flashing like mad. Danny squeezed his eyes shut, trying to avoid a small migraine. He’d had enough trauma today as it was. When the frozen sensation had disappeared, and he was absolutely sure the flashing had stopped, he cracked an eye open.
A blue eye.
Danny looked at himself. The hazmat suit was gone, replaced with his white and blue day clothes, and his hair and skin were back to normal, too. He gasped, and noticed that the echo was gone from his voice. He even felt less like a corpse.
Somehow, he had brought himself back to life.
He would have screamed if he hadn’t heard the front door downstairs creak open.
“Jazz, sweetie?” called out Mom.
“In a second!” Danny heard Jazz call back. A few seconds passed, and there was a knock on the bathroom door. “Danny, are you in there?” she whispered.
“Yeah,” Danny said back. “Just had to splash some water on my face. You know, make sure I’m not having some large-scale, trauma-inducing nightmare.”
“And you’re not?” asked Jazz back.
“Worse,” said Danny, opening the door and showing his human self to Jazz. “I think I am.”
The shock on Jazz’s face was palpable. She would have yelped in surprise if Danny hadn’t covered her mouth. “Just go downstairs, pretend everything’s normal. Please don’t tell them about me.”
Jazz nodded, backed away, and went downstairs.
Danny turned and left the bathroom after her, heading for his own room. The window had been left open, he noticed. He was thankful for that-- it squeaked when someone tried to move it. He grabbed his keytar case, noting that yes, it did contain the keytar, swung through the window, and dropped onto the ground.
That was a mistake.
Landing on your foot wrong is an unpleasant experience, but it’s livable. At most, you end up with a bad sprain. Landing on your foot wrong, then slipping on ice, is worse, but still, the unluckiest you can get is a hairline fracture.
Falling from a second-story window, landing on your foot wrong, then slipping on ice? That’s a bad experience.
And Danny was currently going through a bad experience.
“Note to self,” he hissed as he gripped his ankle, which felt and looked like very much it had broken. “Put today on the list of ‘days I would not like to relive’.”
The good news was that his case had landed on top of him, and would certainly be intact.
He was a different story. He would not be putting weight on his foot for a good while.
An idea came to him. Ghosts didn’t need to walk, right? If he could, somehow become a ghost again, like he had somehow come back to life, he could fly his way to Tucker’s house.
Great idea, Fenton, he thought. That’s really cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Still, he inwardly searched himself for that feeling of being a ghost. The weightlessness, the weird colors, the glowing…
And he found it in a small patch of cold nestled where his throat met his chest.
He imagined the patch expanding to encompass his whole body, and expand it did.
Before he knew it, he was two inches off the ground, staring at his gloved hand.
In his chest, he noticed where his heart had been was a crystal of warmth that pulsed much like a heart did. That must be how he had turned back into an alive version of himself.
“This is amazing!” he said aloud. “I can change back and forth whenever I want to?”
He remembered the task at hand. “Right. Go find Tucker. He’ll want to know about this.”
He found Tucker lying on his bed and playing Rainforest Demolition 2 on his Virtual Boy system, completely oblivious to the world around him.
Danny went to tap on the window, and yelped when his hand went through the window. He thought for a second. Well, what he was about to do beat waiting for Tucker to let him in. When Tucker focused on something, he focused on it.
Not wasting another second, Danny imagined himself going straight through the window. He flew forward, bracing himself in case he actually did smash into the window.
Thankfully, the change from cold to warm air ensured him that he had instead phased through the window entirely. Amazed, he gazed at his hands. For a second before solidifying, they appeared translucent, like frosted glass letting through color but not image.
Now for the fun part.
He put down the keytar with a dull clunk . Jumping off the ground and hovering there, he prepared himself to lunge.
Focus, and…
Light washed over him, and an entirely human Danny Fenton hit the floor with a decidedly less dull crash , grabbing his foot and shouting in pain.
Tucker jolted up and whirled around, completely prepared to weaponize his Virtual Boy. Danny was actually impressed at how fast his reaction time was. He guessed it was the video games.
When Tucker saw Danny, he froze. It looked to Danny like he was going through all five stages of grief-- in reverse. Fitting.
Danny raised a hand in greeting, wincing as he shifted weight over his foot. “Uh… boo?”
Tucker looked like he was about to cry. Danny didn’t blame him. Tucker shook his head. “How are you… How?”
“I would tell you if I knew,” said Danny. “Last thing I remember, it was December and I was turning on the Fenton Portal, and now it’s January, the portal’s defunct, and I’m not entirely sure I’m not dead.”
“Dude, I…” Tucker dropped the Virtual Boy. “I went to your funeral. I saw your body. Why am I seeing you right--” He stopped for a second, thought to himself. Then he turned to Danny. “Didn’t your parents study ghosts for a living?”
“They did, ” said Danny. “They made a bunch of hypotheses about what they would look like, what drove them to exist. But Jazz told me they gave it all up after… after I died.”
“So I’m looking at a ghost right now?” Tucker sat up.
“Yes… and no.” Danny prodded at the icy patch in his throat. It set off the transformation. For the first time, Danny actually watched it happen-- a halo of blue light appeared around his waist. It split into two as Danny watched in amazement. Everywhere the light passed over took away his human body and left his ghost in its place. When it was finished, the green-eyed Danny stared at a gaping Tucker. “Now you are.”
“I can change between being a ghost and being… alive,” Danny explained. “I don’t know how, or why. I bet my parents would, but I can’t face them. Not as a ghost, and definitely not as a human.”
Danny was suddenly distracted by a loud click in his ankle. He looked down in surprise. His ankle seemed to be mending itself, bone shifting itself back into place, tendons repairing themselves. He wiggled his foot experimentally. No jolt of pain accompanied the movement.
“Aaand I have super healing. Good to know.”
Tucker was on his knees now. “Dude, this is amazing.” He got out of bed and sat down level with Danny. “You’re like, like Frankenstein’s monster, or the modern Eurydice.”
“Who’s Eurydice?”
“I don’t know. Sam told me about her.” Tucker hesitated, then poked Danny experimentally.
Danny flinched back. “Hey! Mind the face!”
“Man, you’re… This is so weird.”
“The dead part? Or the alive part?”
“ Both! ” Tucker took off his beret, squeezing it in his hands. “If I were you, I would freak ! What are you going to do now?”
Danny thought for a moment. What was he going to do? He thought about the concert that had been coming up before the accident. “Remember Elmerton?”
“The concert? Wh--” Tucker stopped. “No, no. No way. You are not going back up there. Everyone thinks-- no, knows you’re dead.”
“And what’s stopping me from going up there and proving it? Think about it, Tucker.” Danny swept his arm in a wide gesture. “Danny Fenton’s back in business-- from the grave to the stage!”
“You should at least tell your parents you’re back before you go telling the whole world. Wouldn’t want them to miss out on your grand debut.” Danny turned to see Sam standing in the doorway, shopping bag in hand, as if she wasn’t staring right at the ghost of her best friend.
“How long have you been standing there?” asked Tucker.
“Long enough,” Sam said. She went over to Danny and swept him into a hug. “Good to see you again.”
Danny smiled, feeling rather warm inside-- and not because he was changing back. “Yeah. Nice to see you.”
Sam placed Danny back on his feet. “Anyway, I super get what you’re going for here. Also, I love the undead popstar vibe you’ll be giving out from now on. But I think your parents should know before the world does, alright? It’s only fair-- they gave up ectology for you.”
“And I think you shouldn’t go for it at all!” broke in Tucker. “Tell your parents if you have to, but a ghost popstar? Think of the reception!”
“And since when did you care about Danny’s reception, Tucker?” said Sam.
Danny suddenly wondered if turning invisible was a ghost power. He watched his field of vision widen and concluded that it was.
“All I’m saying is that it’s not safe for him to just come back from the dead!”
“Corpses have rights, Tucker, though yours might not when I’m done with you.”
Danny decided that the argument would continue whether he wanted it to or not. Silently, he picked up his keytar, noticing that it became just as invisible as him when he touched it, phased through the window, and flew out. They didn’t even notice that he had disappeared.
Danny phased into the house, and only dropped his invisibility when he was sure there was nobody around.
He was wrong.
He’d know his mother’s shocked gasp anywhere-- when he dropped a plate, when he carelessly walked into a painstaking experiment, when Dad would burst through the door waving a new breakthrough in the air, when a ghost appeared in the living room.
He whirled around to meet her. Her expression was unreadable.
“Hey,” he managed. “Didn’t see you there.”
No sooner did those words come out than did Maddie whip out a Fenton Thermos. Another finished one, he noticed.
“You have five words to convince me not to use you as a look into bringing back our son,” she growled. “Use them wisely.”
“Is it not obvious? ” exclaimed Danny, who very quickly realized that he had exactly one word left to explain the events of the day. “Uh… oops.”
That last word wasn’t inaccurate, he thought, even as he felt himself being drawn into the Thermos.
Danny was in the dark for a long time.
And he was very uncomfortable.
He had considered singing to himself, but for one reason or another, he couldn’t speak. Maybe it was because his throat was crushed. Maybe it was because his throat didn’t exist at the moment. He didn’t know.
He didn’t know a lot of things. One of which was how long he had been in there. Maybe it had been days. Maybe it had been thirty seconds. He couldn’t think straight. It was dark. He couldn’t breathe. He realized that he didn’t need to breathe.
Everything was covered in a thick fog. His senses felt dulled. He wasn’t using his senses, he noted. Great. I’m hallucinating.
It had been a long time, then, or maybe no time at all had passed. Danny couldn’t perceive a thing.
Then, suddenly, he perceived everything .
Danny stumbled out of the Thermos, with a gasp, suddenly aware of things he had never noticed before. Was the fan in Jazz’s room always that loud? The room smelled vaguely of antiseptic, but mostly of snack foods. He could taste some of the salt in the air. He squinted his eyes shut at the vibrant purple wallpaper, but they adjusted quickly.
“Are you alright?” asked Jazz, startling Danny.
Danny shook himself off. The stare he gave the Thermos then could have curdled milk. “That thing should violate the Geneva Convention.”
Jazz winced. “That bad?”
“Worse. It’s like being alone in a dark room with that Charlie guy who lives down the road. You realize how crazy your thoughts are, but you can’t stop thinking ‘em. Feedback loop.”
“Right. I’ll be sure not to take two hours to get you out next time. Dad never taught me how to use the Thermos. There was a lot of trial and error.”
“It took you two hours to open a thermos?”
“The first hour and a half was me actually getting the Thermos from Mom. The next thirty minutes was the puzzling-it-out part.”
Danny smirked. “Impressive. Would have taken me at least a day.” He sobered. “But what Mom said to me makes me nervous. She said she was going to use me to revive… me, I guess. But you said they were turning their back on ghosts.”
“That’s what they said to me,” Jazz said. She turned, worry creasing her face. “Were they planning to keep researching behind my back?”
“Well, uh,” Danny said, racing to find something that would reassure his sister, “They haven’t reopened the Fenton Portal.”
“For now, ” said Jazz.
There was a knock on the door. “Jazz?” asked Jack. “Can I come in?”
Danny disappeared without trying. Jazz looked at the space where he had been in surprise, then nodded to herself and called back, “Yeah, Dad.”
Jack opened the door gently, an antithesis to the Jack Danny had known before the accident. “Hey, Jazz. I wanted to let you know something.”
“What is it?” asked Jazz, sitting down at the bed. Danny was sure they both knew the answer to that one.
“Your mother wants to, ah, resume studying ghosts,” confirmed Jack. “Like you heard at the dinner table, she caught one just today, and she thinks it could be a window into reviving loved ones. Like… like Danny.”
So that was how Jazz had known about his capture.
“Dad, you know how I feel about ectology,” said Jazz. “Especially since the accident. I don’t want you to get hurt, either.”
“I’m sorry, Jazz-erincess,” said Jack, patting her shoulder. “She’s made up her mind.”
Jazz looked down into her lap.
Wordlessly, Jack stood up and left the room, leaving the door open. Danny kicked it closed.
Making himself visible again, Danny floated down to Jazz. He tried to make light of the situation, for her sake and his own. “Guess the hunt’s on, huh?”
“Guess it is.” Jazz looked up at Danny. “You should go. Before Mom finds you.”
“Yeah,” said Danny. He noticed for the first time that his keytar case was on his back. “Hm. Maybe I should take this off next time I get trapped in the thermos.”
Jazz looked at what he was talking about, and chuckled. “Maybe. I’m surprised it went in.”
“Anyway,” Danny turned from the wall, “I’ll see you around, I guess.”
“Don’t guess,” Jazz said. “You will. Count on it.”
Danny left his house with a smile. Not bothering or willing to turn back to his human half, he made his way on foot through the dark to his last safe place.
The café was small, a simple mom-and-pop kind of place with wooden flooring and handmade chairs. The drinks and pastries were made in-house, but that wasn’t what Danny had come for.
The café was home to a stage with a microphone and an amplifier. That stage had been where he had first become well-known among Casper High students, then popular in Amity Park, and when a video of a performance had gone viral, he had gained fame along the nation as well.
Now he would come here again, and make his second debut. Oxymoronic as it was, it should happen, he thought.
Nobody was on that stage yet. Danny Fenton had been one of the only performers, after all. After checking with the manager, Danny got the okay to climb onstage.
He spent more time than he needed to set up his keytar. Once he was done, Danny stood in front of the microphone and looked at the sparse people here.
It was around seven, after all, and most people would be at home now, not here. One of the few people who were here tonight, Danny noticed, was Dash Baxter.
“Hello,” he said experimentally into the microphone. It amplified his voice like it would a normal human’s. That was good.
“Who do you think you are?” jeered Dash. “Some Fenton copycat?”
He was right, Danny guessed. But now, he had to come up with an alias on the spot. Think, think, think. What are synonyms for ghost ? Spirit, specter, apparition, wraith…
“Phantom,” he said without thinking. “Call me Phantom.”
“Whatever,” said Dash, taking another sip of his drink. Danny could smell the Red Bull from here. “Bet you’re not as good as Fenton.”
Danny ignored him. He tapped out a couple melodies, before deciding on a song he hadn’t played in a while.
He played out the beginning of his song. Once, twice, he hit the wrong key, and once he mistook the melody for some other song, but eventually, he found what he was looking for.
“Ooh, it makes me wonder,” he started, guiding his keyboard hand at first, then letting muscle memory take charge. “Makes me wonder…”
“Well, it’s whispered that soon, if we all call the tune, then the piper will lead us to reason.
“And a new day will dawn, for those who stand long, and the forests will echo with laughter.”
“Stairway to Heaven” was a song that brought back memories. Jazz had convinced him to learn the entirety on the piano when he was twelve, before he had even dreamed of stardom. Even now he could play it with or without music. He leaned into the melody.
“If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now. It’s just a spring clean for the May queen.
“Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run, there’s still time to change the road you’re on. And it makes me wonder.”
The interludes were his favorite part. The shift and changes in chords had always mystified him before he had learned the song. Now, they were vertebrae, a part the song couldn’t stand without.
“Your head is humming and it won’t go, in case you don’t know, the piper’s calling you to join him.
“Dear lady, can you hear the wind blow? And did you know? Your stairway lies on the whispering wind...”
Danny hit the last interlude, then stopped, letting the last chord hang in the air. He looked out on the crowd. Silence, then a smattering of applause.
Danny leaned into the microphone. “Thank you,” he said. He unplugged his keytar, packed it up, and left without another word.
Danny leaned against the café’s brick wall. Outside, it was silent, but inside his mind, he was that piper, playing and following the melody all at once.