Chapter Text
Time seemed to congeal as the shadow in Danny’s soul stretched backwards. This one had a name. It skittered between the dark and the part of Danny’s mind that still resembled a human’s. He breathed in, slowly, then out, tasting it on his tongue. Once, it had been two.
Finally, it coalesced into something he could actually speak. “Skultech,” he said.
“Relative of Skulker?” asked Tucker. “Or Technus?” He didn’t look at them or at Danny. He had protections, but they weren’t perfect, and he’d already taken a step away from the light.
“Yes,” said Danny, internally translating the vibrations of air into something with meaning and weight.
Skulker. The hunter, fleshless and tireless. A pursuer of the mind more than the body. Almost sporting in his own way. The library with all its labyrinthine but immaterial paths was the best place to lose him.
Technus. A horror that lurked in the depths of the internet, luring in deep-web users and more than a few unluckly click-bait and phishing victims. Technus didn’t kill them, did very little to them, really, but there was a reason there wasn’t a computer club at Casper High anymore.
They had been two. Now they were one. Part of Danny was fascinated. Another was thrilled, happy, as it always was when these dark things manifested themselves in Amity Park.
His shadow stretched, whispering over his features. He could feel it curl over the texture of the ground beneath him, grasping at grass and bark and soil as if it were possessed of a thousand thousand tiny fingers. It wanted to open up and play.
(’It,’ Danny said, as if it weren’t him, an extension of himself.)
“What do we do?” asked Sam. She, unlike Tucker, looked directly at him, even half-shrouded in shadow as he was. She always did, even if she averted her gaze from the likes of Skulker and Technus.
Near the beginning, Sam had made the connection between the others, especially ones like Ember, who were as beautiful as they were dark, and cults. She had started a joke about making one for Danny. Over time, it had become less of a joke.
Danny tried to ignore the pleasant buzz of his skin as he imagined a cult attempting to do something as sweet as bind him to their will.
Because, really, he shouldn’t be thinking of something like that as ‘sweet’ at all.
“It’s still Skulker and Technus,” said Danny, even if he had never seen them like this. “I think... the same type of thing should probably work. I distract, Sam gets people out of the way, Tuck, you get the computers at the library ready and tell me when to lead them there?”
“Do you think it’ll really work when it’s both of them?” mumbled Tucker. “I don’t know if I can even do both of the things at once...”
“The alternative is not doing anything,” said Sam, “and considering that they seem to be after Danny...”
Tucker made a face, the glow from his PDA reflecting from his glasses. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t try.”
“Remember,” said Danny, “don’t give me the go-ahead until you and everyone else is out.”
“Yeah, I remember, I remember,” he said.
“Go do your thing,” said Sam.
Danny nodded and left the shelter of their hiding place. He did not stand up, or walk, or move. He simply stopped being there and started being in front of Skultech.
From a distance, he probably still looked human.
They fought.
It was hard to describe how they fought, exactly, in human terms, but they did. Right up until one of Skultech’s three-fingered hands wrapped around Danny’s ankle and his shadow vanished.
He, breathing hard and falling, remembered what it was to be human. To be vulnerable. His shadow came back to him, flickering. He came back to himself.
There was a darkness that was himself, and he was so relieved. Why? How often had he wanted this gone? But he was whole, and like that he was half, and-
He’d gotten distracted.
Skultech had surrounded him, a hunting ground strobed with lightning. This kind of fight was an oddity to both Skulker and Technus, this kind of movement, this kind of strategy. Danny began to doubt that his earlier plan would work.
What was a library but another kind of forest?
With only enough warning for his self to wrap around him protectively, Skultech yanked him down into the Dream. The pale seaweed threads of human consciousness gave way to the dark and the other. He fell to the floor of a midnight palace and rolled to his back, coughing up not-water from the idea of his lungs.
Here, said Skultech, in something that wasn’t quite language. The True Voice. Danny had seen people fall to their knees when the others used that. Had seen sane men turn into blind faith worshippers. Had heard lies that became true in the speaking, or near enough that it didn’t matter.
He had never quite managed to speak that way himself, no matter Sam’s cajoling.
Danny managed to open his eyes. He did not come to the Dream often, no matter how much it called to him. Both his halves agreed, here, where every place was also a person, it was dangerous even in the shallows.
The ceiling was covered in layers upon layers of spiderwebs, and he did not like what that meant. Skultech was nowhere to be seen.
He pulled himself up and got to his feet.
The floor beneath him was glass. Beneath that was clockwork, but the gears were galaxies and solar systems, the springs were entropy and enthalpy, and the chains were the laws of physics themselves. Clockwork. It was... It would do, as a name.
The distant sense of amusement was disturbing.
Danny looked around. He needed a way out, a way back up, to where he could leave the Dream.
Why did Skultech bring him here?
Spiderwebs and gears. Symbols of control, of interconnectedness, of carefully laid plans. Was he stuck in a web he couldn’t see?
He spun, slowly, trying to see if he could see any doors or other openings. Something flashing, moving, in the distance caught his eye. His first instinct was to move away, but...
But it was like he was being drawn in. Like he couldn’t turn away. It was a mirror. A window.
It showed him himself. At first, a hundred paces away, just himself, as he was, but then at pace ninety-nine it changed. Mirrors did that, in the Dream. Everything did that, in the dream.
Time sped up. The mirror reflected not just light, but sound and feeling. He could see himself, his shadow, and-
He felt it when all the little Loves that kept him tethered to his humanity snapped, the lives they were anchored to burning up as they met their deaths. He screamed and heard it echoed back to him a thousand times over.
He could not stop walking. He could not stop watching. Ninety steps away.
His shadow in the mirror was wild. Unbound and grieving. Flesh and blood and bone existed, but his two part mind was unbalanced and divided from itself. He sought aid from the only other like himself and received a knife, received Hate to replace love and at seventy-five steps he watched as what he had once been embraced Vlad and devoured him whole, eating and becoming everything that made him him.
The shadow unfurled, hungry and seeking. The memory Love it once had and the Love it had desired for so long driving it onward and outward, the center pulsing like a diseased star. Seventy steps. It had eyes like constellations.
The mirror showed the Dream, now. Veins of sickness wound through the garden of human thought, through the tangled vines and twisted paths. What it found did not satisfy, and it sought more, and more, delving deeper. Sixty steps, then fifty.
It ate at the best of people, of others. The singers fell silent. The doctors could no longer heal. The kind became cruel.
Darkness fell. Then war. The shadow ruled all from its misery.
It was not enough.
Forty steps. It’s eyes met Danny’s. It knew he was here, knew he was watching. It began to speak in its True Voice, and Danny could not cover his ears to keep it out.
It spoke of the things it had done, of the things it would do. Danny watched as it carried out its plans, and even more. It spoke of how it, he, was Danny, and all this destruction, all this suffering was wrought by his own hands. It spoke of Love Danny did not cherish sufficiently, of fragility, of how it was determined to Be rather than Be Not even though its every moment was loneliness and Hatred to the point of agony.
Danny’s ears were bleeding.
Thirty steps.
It spoke of how it would hurt Danny, in particular. How it would rend his shadow, wound so there was no hope for him to escape his fate, even with foreknowledge of it. It spoke of how, with Danny watching, the mirror was a window, was a door it could reach through and Danny saw it reaching.
Saw it reaching out and in and towards now and those that he Loved, those that he cherished and Danny would have pushed himself to run but he couldn’t stop walking.
Twenty steps. It could make itself look like Danny, and even though it was wrong, Danny was wrong too, he was so, so, so, wrong and his wrongness was going to get them killed. It was going to get everyone killed.
They were looking at it, not him, speaking with it, not him. His darkness was covered. With it, these things were like staring at the sun.
It tore away the protections he had so painstakingly layered over those he Loved.
Ten steps.
He saw his parents with a bomb made by their own hands, one that would devastate the Dream for miles around, killing anything that dared to imagine, the culmination of their work. Nine steps. He saw Mr. Lancer writing lesson plans with his own blood, each sentence less English than the last. Eight steps. He saw Sam with the ritual knife, her smile full of blood and sacrifice. Seven steps. He saw Tucker clawing out his eyes, surrounded by computer screens flaring with symbols humans were never meant to use. Six steps. He saw Jazz-
He saw Jazz notice.
Five steps.
He could have wept.
She armed herself with stories and legends and saltwater and truths that made Danny seize and the fact that this thing was not her brother. Four steps.
He watched her confront it.
Three steps.
He watched it toy with her, her machinations only delaying her doom.
Two steps.
He watched it k-
One step.
No!
For the first time, he screamed in his True Voice. His fist snapped out, striking the mirror dead center. It shattered.
Was that enough? Was he in time? He- He couldn’t feel them. He couldn’t- They couldn’t be dead. They couldn’t be gone.
He dropped to his knees. The shards of the mirror glittered up at him, calling him. His hand shook as he reached out and picked one up. Slowly, he raised it to his lips. He opened his lips and as soon as the shard was even with his teeth, he bit down, the glass crunching like thunder.
Already, he was reaching for another piece. He swallowed. His hands went out, nails scrabbling along the floor in his hurry. Mirror shard after mirror shard was shoved into his mouth and choked down.
There was something around his neck. With one of his many hands he reached up, feeling up his chest to throat. There was a collar there. It felt like control, like ownership, like Love.
Something liquid dripped from his eye.
Even as he gagged on glass, two of his hands, his human hands, explored the circumference of the metal piece. There were delicate fractal patterns on the surface that had doubles on the interior. As his fingers pressed down on them, they in turn pressed on the skin of his neck, sending pleasant curls of thought down his limbs.
His questing fingers found the collar’s lead. It was, at the same time, like the spider silk above and the clockwork chains below. Flexible. Strong. Indelible. It was as inevitable as gravity that he should Be Loved and Love in return.
He licked the last powdery pieces of mirror off his fingers and his extra arms slowly evaporated back into the Dream as if they never were.
Who would Love him like this? Love him to the point that it manifested in the Dream like this? The answer was all around him, was inside him, as his heart echoed back the Love as best it was able, but he could hardly believe it.
The sound of footsteps on the hard floor jolted him out of his reverie. He looked up and met the red eyes of Clockwork’s avatar.
It had the appearance of a blue-skinned man wearing a cloak and festooned with symbols of time. A few long white hairs peeked from beneath its hood, and a painful-looking scar laid over its eye.
For a moment, Danny was stunned, because this was a true avatar, an extension of Clockwork himself, not a human hollowed out for use as a vessel. For someone as powerful as Clockwork had to be to be so vast in the Dream to bestow such attention on Danny-
He opened his mouth to say something, anything, but the only thing that rolled off his tongue was blood. Shame crept up his cheeks. He didn’t know if it was his use of his True Voice when destroying the mirror, or consuming all those shards afterwards, but his normal voice was gone.
Shh, soothed Clockwork’s avatar, gloved hands cupping Danny’s cheeks and forcing his lips closed. You need not speak, child. Those who Love you will know your intent.
Danny nodded slowly, beginning to feel dazed. He remembered the scenes in the mirror. Remembered what the shadow-him had done. His fingers bent around the lead- it was almost as thick as his wrist- and looked up at Clockwork’s avatar.
Clockwork could strike him down, now, could destroy him so completely that even the merest memory of him was gone, and he would not care, because he would know it was done out of Love.
The lead shivered against his palms and grew.
No need, said Clockwork’s avatar. You have devoured your destiny and become free of it.
That sounded reasonable. The avatar brushed a thumb across Danny’s lips and smiled.
You have given yourself fangs.
Danny blushed again. He hadn’t meant to.
The avatar released Danny’s cheeks to reach for his hands, arranging them in Danny’s lap and rubbing circles into his palms. Then the avatar gently brought Danny’s attention to the door in its chest.
The door was glass. Beyond the glass laid an approximation of a heart made of the same elements as what laid beneath the floor. A metaphor for Clockwork’s heart, Danny guessed, though what laid in the avatar’s chest couldn’t be anywhere near as grand as the real thing.
The avatar nodded, and then leveled a gloved finger at Danny’s own chest. He looked down.
There was a door, there, too.
His breath caught in his throat and he tried to scramble away, some still-human part of him objecting strenuously to whatever was going to happen.
All at once, the whole of Clockwork’s attention turned in on him, and for an infinite moment of time he was held in a perfect embrace. His thought from earlier returned. Anything, and he would not object, because it was done out of Love.
His edges, usually so sharply defined, even in the Dream, went fuzzy, almost blending with his surroundings, those surroundings being Clockwork.
The avatar reached for Danny’s door and opened it. It hurt, but not as much as he thought it would. Within, laid his heart.
The surface, the shape, of it looked human enough. The veins and arteries were all in the right places. The atria and chambers all looked to be the proper sizes. It beat an even rhythm.
But inside it was as black as night and something like a star twinkled in its depth.
It was... odd, how closely it resembled Clockwork’s galaxies while being at the same time so different.
Clockwork’s avatar opened the door to its own chest, pinning it to his cloak, then he reached into Danny’s chest.
There was the pain he had been expecting, radiating from his core to the very tips of his fingers and toes. If he were not held immobile by the sheer force of Clockwork’s regard, he would have arched backwards and screamed.
Methodically, the avatar cut and tied off every one of arteries, veins, and nerves that led from the rest of Danny’s body to his heart. Finally, the heart excised and cradled in its hands, it drew back.
Danny should be dead. The Dream did not follow the same rules as the reality he had been born into, but his mind would not let go of the fact that he had no heart. He should be dead.
The avatar inserted Danny’s heart into its chest, next to its own, and closed its door. Slowly, the image of Danny’s heart faded into metaphor as it sunk down into the deeps to nestle next to Clockwork’s true heart.
Danny understood, then, that from this moment on, Clockwork would decide the direction of his heart, would determine who he Loved and who he Hated. If he should Love or Hate. Danny rather doubted Clockwork would let Danny do anything so damaging as Hate.
I shall keep it safe for you, said the avatar, something more profound behind its words that might have been Clockwork himself, until you are old enough to protect it on your own.
Danny understood, too, that although this promise was not a lie, he would never be old enough to reclaim his heart, no matter how much time passed or how powerful he grew. Clockwork’s Love and protection would keep both him and it safe, young, fragile. How could it do otherwise, when time itself would flow around him? When Love would keep him anchored to one form?
Clockwork’s attention relaxed, then, and Danny could move again, curling around the gaping hole in his chest. The avatar ruffled his hair and, with his other hand, held something out to Danny.
Six paired sets of life and death glimmered against the lavender of the avatar’s glove. Danny recognized them. They belonged to the people he Loved. He had not realized he Loved Mr. Lancer, but he could see now that it was true.
Moving slowly, as if underwater, Danny held his cupped hands beneath the avatar’s. His breath caught as the avatar tipped the lives and deaths into his hands.
So precious. He brought them down to his lap and, with painstaking care, began to peal the deaths away from the lives. Each death he ate, consuming it and breaking it down into nothing. Each life he placed in the hollow that had once housed his heart.
Like this, they would not die, they would not leave him. They would be with him, always, just as he would always Love them.
Exhaustion hit him all at once, and he slumped forward to rest his head on the Avatar’s shoulder. It laughed, lightly, and helped him close the door in his chest. Then, it took a heart-shaped padlock from within its cloak and threaded it into the latch of Danny’s door. The click as the padlock closed echoed off the floor and distant walls.
With a kind of detached curiosity, Danny watched as the edges of the door, latch, padlock and all, melded into his skin and vanished as if they had never been there at all. He knew that he would not be able to find the door again without help, and that, even then, to open the door he would need the padlock’s key. A key he had not yet seen.
But what reason did he have to open his chest? Others might have cause, those who wanted to hurt him, or those that he Loved. This was another protection, another way to keep him safe.
This time you devoured your destiny, said the avatar, petting him. The sick futures have been cut away. Next, we shall remove the presents where you Are Not. After that... The sentence trailed away in a buzz that made Danny’s thoughts go quiet.
The avatar began to do something that could only be described as singing even though neither voice nor sound were involved. It was a lullaby, and Danny felt himself become even heavier and softer than before. He curled into the avatar’s side, feeling small. The pain of his missing heart eased itself into something more bearable. The threads of love that kept him from becoming a monster wound tighter around his limbs and sewed themselves deeper into his skin.
His eyes drifted closed.
When he woke, he was in his bed, in Fentonworks. He blinked several times at his ceiling, and leapt to his feet only to be waylaid by dizziness and static across his eyes. He brought a hand up to his neck, half expecting to feel metal.
He didn’t.
He shifted, pressing two fingers against an artery. No pulse. He switched his grip to his wrist. Nothing.
Right. No heart.
No heart but six lives and-
He stumbled out of his room and started banging wildly on her door. Jazz threw it open and froze.
“It’s really you?” she asked, voice quivering.
Danny opened his mouth to answer, but no sound came out. It didn’t seem like Jazz really needed a verbal response, because she threw herself at him, enveloping him in a hug.
“I was so scared,” she whispered. “The- the not-you-” She sucked in a shuddering breath. “Everyone was dying, and then- and then it was just- It was like a dream. Like it didn’t happen. But you were gone.”
Danny nodded, even though she couldn’t see him.
“I’m so glad it’s you,” she said. “I’m so glad it’s you.”
Her love, so tenuous and slender compared to Clockwork’s, but no less genuine, wound around his wrist. He hugged her back.
If he had been able to speak, he would have said, Me, too.