Chapter Text
Danny didn’t have much time left.
There was no chance to pack, to say his final goodbyes, or even to hug Jazz one last time because his secret identity wasn’t so much of a secret anymore. They were coming for him.
Danny phased through the walls of his house, and into the laboratory. At the back of the room, the Ghost Portal shone with a brilliant ectoplasmic light. It kept the area well lit, even when the overhead lights were off. As he always did whenever he came downstairs, he took a moment to breathe and steady himself against its calling.
It wanted him. Or he wanted it? So many months after his death, he still wasn’t sure what it was about the portal that enchanted him so. Its siren call beckoned him forth, but did not ask him to enter. All it asked for was his presence. His touch.
It’s mine.
Danny drifted into the room proper, and touched down in front of the portal. He wished he could avoid this, but there was no other choice. Danny was certain of this now, after so many hours spent defeating the ghosts that spilled through it.
How could Danny ensure its destruction, and leave through it at the same time?
Was that even possible?
If he destroyed the portal, he would be stranding himself in the Human Realm. His only hopes of retreating to the plane meant for ghosts would be reliant on finding himself a natural portal. With Danny’s luck, a new one wouldn’t form near him. Or, alternatively, he could wait until his parents reconstructed the portal, making the act of destroying it entirely useless.
Destroying it from the other side was equally as unlikely, if only because the only thing on the other side—in the Ghost Zone—was the portal itself. Not the machinery that breathed life into the Fenton Ghost Portal. Not to mention, Danny's knowledge on how to demolish ghost portals was unsurprisingly sparse, especially with the fuel this one was receiving from the Human Realm. Unless he was able to permanently siphon away the energy, or take away the Realm’s ability to create a portal that opened to this location, he was—yet again—out of luck.
His parents knew just as well as him that this was the easiest way to get in and out of the Ghost Zone. If they came in here and found him gone—not in his room, not in the laboratory, nowhere to be found—there were only a few possibilities.
Either he was in the Ghost Zone, or frantically scouring Amity Park for a naturally generated ghost portal. The second option became exponentially more likely if the portal was reduced to a pile of broken machinery.
His core twisted with unease, and he exhaled sharply.
It wasn’t safe to leave the portal active, not with his parents acting so vengefully. They would come after Danny till not a speck of his ectoplasm remained, and his soul was finally at rest. Leaving the portal open would only give them a better chance of doing so.
Danny glanced back at the entryway. The staircase was untouched by the phosphorescent green glow that illuminated the rest of the laboratory, drenched in a thick layer of shadows. Thankfully, it was empty. Ominous, but empty.
It wouldn’t remain that way for long. Time was running out.
Nonetheless, this was his easiest method of escape.
It was also one that would provide Danny’s parents with the easiest method of coming after him. It’s not like I don’t know ghosts that could lend me a hand, he reasoned. Poindexter’s Lair was connected to Amity High. As clueless as Danny was about Lairs, he’d be surprised if Poindextor’s didn’t have a doorway into the Zone.
So much of their life’s work is in here, his mind whispered.
Almost against his will, his eyes found their way to the terminals and servers against the wall. The crates of weapons behind a wall, in a storage room to the side. Their materials, their achievements, their everything.
In the past fourteen years, they’d invested more time and energy into the family business than they did into himself and Jazz. It was a bitter thought, and one he had often. This time, however, he did not shove it aside.
He swallowed sharply, ectoplasm coalescing around his fist. It’d be the work of a minute to ruin it all. Mom and Dad would eventually recover, of that he was certain, but it would take time. They would be forced to pick between pursuing him, and recovering their livelihoods. In a way, they’d be getting what they deserved.
A single Wail, and it’d all come crashing down. Danny looked up at the ceiling, envisioning the house above. He’d be lucky if the rest of the building survived the assault.
Was this really his only option?
Above, the front door of the house slid open on silent hinges. There were two—no, three—pairs of footsteps. Two were especially loud. One was almost silent. Danny stilled and his ears twitched, folding back against his head nervously.
There was his father, whose bulk and almost too boundless enthusiasm rendered him useless at espionage, and his sister, who was crashing about the house far louder than she typically did. With the noise Jazz and their dad made combined together, Danny had no issue at tracking their progression across the house. He had a feeling Jazz wasn’t being any louder because their mom would flip out, otherwise. He couldn’t help but smile at Jazz’s thoughtfulness.
And then, there was his mother. Though his hearing had improved significantly since the accident, Mom barely made a sound as she crept closer to the basement. She was practically a ghost, but he was certain she was there. Mom was never far from Dad, anyways.
Danny extinguished the ectoplasm around his hands, and looked back at the portal. Its siren call turned pleading, and the spiral of the breach, though once placid, became twisted and frantic. The ectoplasm swirled inwards in jagged waves, reaching towards salvation, yearning for safety.
It was a deliverance that would never come.
He felt its terror as if it were his own, and perhaps it was. Maybe he was imagining things, putting thoughts and fears into something that didn’t have an identity, but… in that moment, he didn’t care. The fearful drumbeat of his heart was there, regardless of who it came from. Same with the trembling that had overtook his hands.
“What other choice is there?” Danny choked out, transfixed by the rippling green depths of the ghost portal. “What other option do I have?”
The portal pulsated in time with Danny’s pounding heart. He breathed in deeply, shudderingly, in this final moment of silence. The eye of the storm, as it were. Danny almost wanted to chuckle at the thought, but he couldn’t bear to break apart the quiet. The sound caught in his throat, and was swallowed just as quickly.
The whirling vortex of the portal slowed, stripped of its overwhelming dread.
Mom, Dad, and Jazz’s footsteps drew to a stop in front of the basement door.
There is no other choice.
“There is none,” he said.
The doorknob turned, and Danny reached for the cold. He let it fill him to the brim, till he was shaking with power rather than terror, and his eyes glazed over icy blue.
Slowly, Dad opened the door. He flinched back when he noticed Danny standing there at the far end of the room, at the base of the Ghost Portal. He must’ve looked a sight, silhouetted by the suddenly baleful ambience of the portal and visibly radiating an aura of pure cold. Dad’s finger hovered over the trigger of the ecto-gun at his side.
“Danny?” Dad whispered to himself, eyes wide. Mom pushed past Dad, gun sights held up. He held her shoulder before she could make her way further down the staircase. “Maddie, wait a moment. Surely we can—“
Mom ripped out of Dad’s grasp with a furious snarl. Her eyes were burning with tears. Dad backed away as much as he could on a tiny staircase, holding his hands up. All combined, Mom looked an inch away from killing someone. Me, he thought, her son. Am I really so different as a ghost, as I was when I was fully alive?
“No! That’s not Danny—it’s not! It can’t be! I won’t allow that abomination to—“
Abomination.
The word drove a dagger of pain through his heart, and he only barely managed to control his expression. That’s enough of that. Danny thrust his hands out at the door. Ice flooded out of his open palms and obstructed the staircase with an almighty groan. It pushed up the stairway into the laboratory-basement, and forced his parents to scurry backwards.
“Phantom!” Mom screamed.
“Danny, no!” Dad shouted. “Wait!”
Danny turned away once more to face the portal. That would hold them for a little while, at the very least. It’d give him enough time to do what had to be done. Mom had taken no time at all to begin drowning his barrier in a volley of corrosive ectoplasmic bullets.
Ectoplasm spilled out from his core, surging into his throat, and he held.
He could only hope using his Ghostly Wail wouldn’t hit him as hard as it did last time. He’d built up endurance since using it last, but it still knocked him for a loop. Over the last year, it was becoming increasingly obvious to him that in order to protect the Zone, Amity Park, and the people and ghosts he was growing to care about, he would do whatever had to be done.
Jazz hadn’t spoken a word for him, since she’d entered the house. If only he’d told her how his hearing was, while he was in his ghost form. He could only hope she would forgive him for this. The Fenton house was sturdy, and Jazz was the smartest of all of them, so he was confident she would come out unscathed.
Perhaps, if he was lucky, he could speak to her one last time before he escaped to the Ghost Zone. Somehow. He’d never admit it otherwise, but he really wanted his big sister, right now. A hug sounded nice.
I’m sorry, he thought.
A thick line split across the iceberg. The energy building up within him lurched into his mouth, thrashing against his teeth.
I’m so sorry.
A ghostly Wail tore from his mouth, and slammed against the ghost portal in a rush of screaming, destructive ectoplasm. The air itself seemed to shudder, trembling under the force of the attack. A chunk of ceiling fell to the ground, and cracks spidered down and into the walls below. More looked to be soon to follow.
The metal casing of the ghost portal collapsed in on itself, and his Wail faltered. The breach fell to its figurative knees, and—for a brief moment—he felt its [loss/absence/agony] like a jagged spear through his lungs. Where the frame once stood, the portal was nothing but dying wisps. It was—white-hot. Torturous. Painful.
There were far too little synonyms in the world to describe just how much it hurt, nor enough time to find a proper one.
The pain was a steadily increasing thing, vibrating across his bones, churning through his bloodstream, throwing his heart into a frantic, petrified tempo. His head spun, and spun, and spun. Before he could be rendered utterly comatose by it all, he shoved it into something more useful.
Spinning to face the wider lab, he let out a bloodcurling howl. Under the weight of his Wail, the room crumbled. Anything not anchored to the floor rocketed back, leaving behind indentations into the walls with a loud crash. Glass shattered. Metal warped. The more permanent floor fixtures were removed from their places, shearing off the ground in terrible metal shrieks.
For a place he’d known for his entire life, it was a terrible sight.
He took a few steps toward the storage room, forcing the span of his Wail to narrow and break down the wall. The wall broke in, and the debris was tossed violently back. The ceiling overhead fell in more. In his periphery, the laboratory had been turned into a sea of sparking machines, broken appliances, and rubble.
He only closed his mouth when the weapons and materials within were ruined beyond repair.
Danny was shaking. The room was, too. No, not shaking, not exactly. Trembling. The roof had begun falling in properly, now. The lab-basement was well and truly ruined.
There was no going back, now. This bridge had been more than burnt—he’d practically dropped a nuke on it.
His eyes landed on the stairwell, and a wave of guilt washed through him. He swallowed, throat feeling dry. He couldn’t see the iceberg anymore. The stairway had collapsed, leaving behind a pile of rubble and billowing dust. It concealed the iceberg almost entirely, except for a few glimpses of it between chunks. There was no blood, as far as he could see. He could only hope his sister was alright.
Dizziness swept over him, and he stumbled back, groaning.
His head…! Without his Wailing, there was nothing to distract him from the pain any longer. It was rushing back, pouring into his skull, and descending into the rest of his body like a waterfall. The pain was crawling into his core, and wrapping around it at the same time. Squeezing and squeezing and crushing it, but swelling inside and making it grow, too!
There was so much of it. Too much.
His foot caught on a big piece of ceiling, and he fell backwards. He barely noticed landing on his rear. His eyes were blurry.
“What..?” he groaned, curling into himself. It wasn’t solely hurt and pain choking him, but an overwhelm of energy. A vast, vast energy. It was spilling into him from—from somewhere, but he was but a small pond compared to whatever veritable Ocean it was coming from.
A water bottle versus a pool, times a thousand, he thought, only a bit hysterically.
Was this from the portal? Was all this pain not just backlash from breaking the portal, but from the supposed energy of the portal going into him?
That—made sense, in a way.
But why him?
Because you made the portal, you dimwit. You died in it, and came back alive in it, said his mind.
Then why doesn’t this… energy go back to the Zone, then? he snapped at himself. I am not an energy receptacle!
A darkness washed across his vision, and his eyes almost rolled back in his head. He gritted his teeth, pressing his forehead hard into his knees. There was something pushing up against the inside of his skull. It wasn’t his brain, but it sure felt like his brain was expanding to become too large to fit his head.
“Stop,” he moaned, gripping his head. “No—no more. No!”
It didn’t stop.
The energy pushed into him, swelling and swelling until it was almost too much, and he knew he would genuinely explode if it built anymore.
Then, a strange lightness spread over him. He could breathe, if only for a moment.
The energy stilled, hovering and buzzing—almost like a wasp, he thought dazedly. One of those really dangerous, angry ones.
Contemplative. Considering.
To sting, or not to sting?
Sting.
It all rushed inwards, and he screamed. Before, the flood was dripping from the tap, because this—this was a proper tsunami. Into his brain, into his eyes, his heart, and most importantly, his core.
Darkness was encroaching on the corners of his vision. He felt sick. His body was being crushed from the inside-out, by millions of weights, and he was being pushed out of his skin. He was going to pass out soon.
When he woke up, would he still be alive?
Would his parents have found him, passed out in their basement?
His hand moved, and his eyes flickered open. When had he closed them? It was hard to keep them open, like this. His fingers were stretching, curling without his permission. They moved strangely, as if puppeteered by sticks and strings, or a person unused to manipulating their own body. Panic dashed through him, and died as quickly, extinguished by an outside force.
Who are… he thought, weakly. He didn’t want to pass out now, but the darkness was nearby. His eyes were slumping, again. Don’t… don’t… MINE.
Don’t worry. We will bring you home.
He blinked, hard. His limbs jerked, out of his control. His toes curled, his arms pushed his body up, and his legs pressed up underneath him. He rose on steady feet. He felt anything but. He couldn’t fight against this, even if he wanted to.
His mind was… was…
Rest, Danny Phantom. Exhaustion and sickness bore down on him. His mind was slow, as if it were dragging through sludge. He hurt.
“Yo—you’ll,” he gasped, his voice a barely audible rasp, “I’ll be… o-okay?”
Yes. Sleep, the voice said. Recover. Knowledge will come later, when you are well.
Danny struggled to stay awake for just a moment longer, but his eyes were too heavy to open. He didn’t want to sleep. He didn’t want to pass out. Unconsciousness was a pit of unfathomable shadows below him. He didn’t want to enter it.
He wanted…
Sleep, they pressed.
Danny’s mind collapsed into the darkness, and he slept.