Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The only thing Danny can smell is lemons. Maddie always hated the smell of disinfectant, and since it’s necessary to be as clean as possible when performing tests on “live” subjects, she started hanging lemon-scented air fresheners all around the lab. It made working in the lab for long periods of time just a little more bearable.

She methodically accounts for every tool, setting up her workspace with practiced efficiency. She takes a breath to remind herself that this is not any different from her normal trials. Phantom had been so hard to catch. She and Jack had tried for months to at the very least detain him. Who knew that his downfall would be blood blossoms?

When they went to visit Jack’s family over the summer, a familiar flower caught her eye. Apparently, his family had been growing them for generations, as a crop. Nearly every recipe they have calls for the use of Blood Blossoms, and they gladly gave her a few cuttings to cultivate. Previously she had only read about them in books since they were thought to be extinct, so growing them was definitely a learning curve.

She learned that they grow best in the lab, so maybe it’s related to ectoplasm exposure? That would be strange because the entire premise of the plant is to ward off ghostly entities. A poison that can only grow near its potential victims.

She planted some at Amity Park, (with permission from the mayor), on every floor of Fenton Works, and even donated some to the GIW. (She figures they could use some help.) At Amity Park they sprouted but withered away after only a week. The only place other than the lab where they successfully grew was the 3rd floor of Fenton Works.

She had put a tray of the seed starters in the hallway window sill, right between Jazz and Danny’s room. It was quite strange because when she moved them away from that wall they would instantly start wilting. She needs to study it more with help from Jack, once he gets back from his “fishing trip”. Half of the time he forgets to even put bait on the end of the pole so she isn’t sure if it can even really be considered fishing.

Her working theory is that there are ectoplasm hotspots, or areas where the ectoplasm is above the background levels, maybe because of extra portal radiation or excessive ghost activity. She and Jack still haven’t quite figured out how exposure to the ghost zone will affect Fenton Works in comparison to the surrounding town. It might be like radiation exposure, but so far there hasn’t been any evidence to support that.

Danny’s room is the most ectoplasmic aside from the lab, and they aren’t sure why. It could be due to a lack of ventilation, or maybe just the devices malfunctioning due to long-term exposure to the lab. She has actually been waiting for the GIW to send her some of their specialty equipment, that way she can get to the bottom of this.

She reminds herself that she needs to focus while she is documenting her capture of Phantom. When she gives the journal to Lance Thunder and Harriet Chin she wants to make sure that it is thorough enough that they can’t mess up the broadcast. Disinformation will only further harm the already incredibly stigmatized job of being a ghost hunter. She does not want people to see her as a hoax.

Okay, back to writing. Jack was in the Specter Speeder, hot on the tail of the lunch lady, while Maddie followed on foot with the Fenton Bazooka. They were determined to catch a ghost and find something note-worthy enough to report to the news station. They needed the people to understand that all ghosts are monsters! Just because Phantom plays pretend as some sort of superhero, doesn’t mean that he is one. Where was he when she and Jack were building the portal and had to work daunting shifts every night to protect the town? It’s not like he is some kid who died recently, ghosts are bound in the town that they died in until they are old enough to have lost every shred of humanity they once had.

No one in town has a kid who died or went missing recently, so he must be around thousands of years old. If she's right about his age, then he doesn’t actually care about the town, he just got bored one day in the ghost realm and decided he wanted more attention, and he got it! Why can’t everyone else see him for who he really is? Alas, it is the life that she signed up for, after all.

As they were catching up to the Lunch Lady she spotted something down the alley, right beside the Nasty Burger. She motioned for Jack to keep pursuing the Lunch Lady while she went to check out what she saw. Even if it was just a blob ghost it might be helpful to their research. What she didn’t realize was that she had just struck gold!

As she approached the end of the alley, she saw Phantom. He seemed injured, more than usual at least. He always seemed to have scratches or open wounds, but not to this extent.

He had horrific gashes running all the way from his left shoulder to the bottom of his torso. He seemed very out of it like he didn’t even know there was someone standing in front of him. It was also strange because his gashes were leaking green and red, (very Christmassy for someone who ruined Christmas last year), she giggled to herself.

She shot him with the Fenton Bazooka for good measure, and he just collapsed. What a fantastic find! With him, she would be able to get so much more information about ghost anatomy than she normally could. She called Jack to the front of the Nasty Burger and chucked Phantom into the backseat. They strapped him in, just to be safe, and took him back to the lab.

A few days passed, and after immeasurable amounts of tests, they found that he had blood blossoms in his system. That must have weakened him. That's probably how he got the gashes, some other ghost took advantage of his state of health. She doesn’t know how he got a hold of blood blossoms and knows even less about why on earth he would ingest them, but either way, her research has its missing piece, a live subject!

She would squeal with delight if she weren't about to vivisect a ghost. Could it count as vivisection since they're already dead? She thinks it should since they’re semi-sentient, but will consider it more later.

Blood Blossoms also don’t grow naturally anywhere in town, so Phantom was either poisoned, or he intentionally stole them from Fenton Works, which is improbable. Could it have been on purpose? Maybe ghosts got depressed just like people, she writes herself a note to ask Phantom about it after the vivisection if he survives.

However, they weren’t missing any of the Blood Blossoms they had in the lab, so that theory probably won’t lead to anything.

All she and Jack use them for right now is cooking. They snuck them into the kids ’ breakfasts and lunches because, alongside their ability to ward off ghosts, they’re also surprisingly healthy. The only reason they didn’t tell the kids is because they can be so picky sometimes!

When she proposed the idea of using them as seasoning, because she just wants them to be safe from ghosts, they both looked disgusted and their only justification was that “they stink and look really unappetizing.”

Jazz is at her counseling session with Spike, and Sam texted her that Danny is staying at her place tonight to work on a class project. She honestly didn’t even know they had classes together.

When they come home she is going to bother them so much about the Blood Blossoms. They both ate their entire meal with no complaint, so they couldn’t have tasted that bad. They are just kids though, they’re allowed to be picky. She remembers what it was like when she was their age.

Chapter Text

Danny is confused. The last thing he remembers is walking for miles and miles, not being able to feel his limbs at all. His vision was faded and he could hear people speaking but was not able to interpret their words. It was just too much. Everything was too much. Now he’s here. Back where it happened. He isn’t sure if this is some nightmare that the fright knight trapped him in, or if he is just so out of it that he can’t separate his memories from the present.

When he told Jazz about what happened he lied a little. Tucker and Sam were never there with him when he went into the portal, he was alone. He only ever told one person about what happened to him that day. It was too depressing, too constricting, he could never muster the words, afraid that they would find it all too upsetting to still want to be around him. Danny does not want to be pitied, he wants to be understood. Here he is, reliving one of the most traumatic events of his life, an unspeakable incident known only to him and well… one other person.

After slipping on the hazmat suit, Danny walks into the portal. In the background, he can hear faint yelling. His parents are fighting, yet again, over whose fault it is that the portal doesn’t work. It’s kind of like living in a dream, but he can only watch and wait for what he knows is going to happen next.

He slides into the portal and takes a look around. As he leans against the wall he feels his back press the button that turns on the portal. The worst part is that Danny isn't upset, not at first. For a split second, when the sparks lit up the air around his body, he was hoping that it would kill him. Hoping that he would get completely disintegrated, making for an easy clean-up afterward. Then he wouldn’t have to tell his parents that he was the screw-up that destroyed their most prized invention, even if it didn’t work yet. They LOVED that portal, more than they loved him at least.

He couldn’t remember the last time he had actually spoken to them. Every single day they toiled away in the lab, and Jazz started coming to his parent-teacher conferences because they were never available, ever. When they couldn’t get the portal to work it got even worse. They went from rarely ever speaking to him, to never speaking at all. Unless, of course, it was to scream in each other’s faces.

As the sparks stung his flesh, the rows of lights in the portal lit up one by one. He was ready to burn, ready to get this life over with.

It

Turned

On

Waves of nausea hit him, knocking him to his knees that he could no longer feel. His flesh crisped up, peeling off in layers like an old book. Flakes of his skin and bone floated through the air, no longer attached to anything. The agony hit him over and over until he couldn’t actually feel what was happening. Throwing up and crying and burning all blended together within the few seconds it took the portal to kill him.

Oh God, the BURNING. His bones were on fire and the fire was inside of him and it burned everything in its path. He only had the vague knowledge that he was getting torn apart at a cellular level. He had to watch himself disintegrate. Everything went black and the last cohesive thought he could muster was that no one would ever be able to find his body. No one would ever be able to find his body. His life was gone, it was over, it was done. This is how it was going to end. He was going to die without ever accomplishing anything worthwhile in life. He was going to be talked about in the newspaper like his life was a tragedy, a candle snuffed out too soon. The worst part is that IT WAS. HIS LIFE WAS A FUCKING TRADGEDY. He was never going to be able to graduate, or go to school, or buy a house. This is it. He's dead. It all faded away.

Then he woke up.

He was different. Lighter, unbound with gravity. His head was scrambled, and the green was… everywhere. The pain was a distant friend, his fried nerve endings assured that. He stood up, but it didn’t feel quite right. After a step he fell, and found himself back inside the lab. That wasn’t quite right… was it? He was somewhere else, before, wasn’t he? He stumbled over to the mirror and looked inside.

W h o i s t h i s?

His hair was pure white. His skin was covered in Lichtenberg scars as if they had been struck by lightning. The hazmat suit he was wearing was MELTED TO HIS SKIN.

It was s u f f o c a t i n g.

No matter how much he pulled he only managed to partially rip the skin off his neck, fingers ripping through his flesh like plastic wrap. This suit would never be coming off, would it? His breath hitched as he realized that this is his life now. Danny slid down the wall, taking deep breaths to soothe his panic but it was to no avail.

That's when he saw it. A charred and twisted body, half falling out of the portal. It was him. IT WAS HIS OWN BODY. How fucked up is that? He isn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. His body was… he couldn’t stomach the thought. Several rounds of retching only brought up the bile from the pit of his stomach. Danny died in that portal. He was a ghost, sitting in the lab of two avid ghost hunters, leaning over the body of their dead son. What should someone even do in this situation? Was he even… real?

Danny’s parents always taught him that ghosts are unfeeling. They don’t care about others, they only exist as manifestations of other people’s emotions. Killing them is the greatest mercy they can be granted. But what if Danny doesn’t want to die? DANNY DOESN’T WANT TO DIE. Maybe now his existence is worthless, but what if he can counteract that? If he does something good with his pathetic “life,” then will he finally deserve to live? Will he be good enough to just exist? He knows what he needs to do then.

He

needs

to

hide

the

body

He haphazardly drags his own charred body across the floor, leaving a trail of burnt skin in his wake. When he initially tried to lift the body, an entire sheet of skin just slid off of the arm, and now rests in front of the portal. A sick reminder of his current situation. He tries to refrain from referring to it as his body, it’s the only way he is going to be able to finish the job without any more retching.

He goes intangible, which is surprisingly easy, and drags the body through the wall of the lab, heading for Amity Park. The sky was pitch black, indicating that it was later than he thought it was. What a gory sight! Danny deliriously giggles at the thought of someone seeing this horrifying ghost dragging the charred body of a child through the woods. What would the people think?

As he approaches the cherry tree he gets tired. Danny knows that he needs to start digging but it’s all so exhausting. He lays down on the exposed roots of the tree, and the world fades away.

“WHAT THE FUCK?” Danny was woken up by the sound of pure terror in someone’s voice. He opens his eyes and realizes that he is lying right beside his decimated remains, precariously laid against a large oak tree. A blonde guy is standing over him. Wait… is that Dash? Why was he here? Looking around brought some clarity into his scrambled mind. He was in a park. With a dead body. Just normal activities for a teenager on the weekend, he thinks satirically to himself.

Dash looks at him like someone would look at a nuclear reactor about to meltdown. That is to say with a lingering fear that is justified, and very, very, inevitable.

“What the actual fuck are you doing?” Dash backs up, dragging his curious dog, Pookie, away from the body. “Is that?” He actually gags, “Is that Danny Fenton?” Dash covers his mouth, trying to block his quaking voice. He slides down the tree opposite to the one Danny is lying on, holding his dog and trying to cope with the reality of what he’s seeing. It’s still fairly early, no one else is around to witness this.

“I can explain, I swear! It isn’t what it looks like!” Danny just hopes in that moment, Dash will be able to sense the truth behind his words and hear the anguish in his fried voice. Danny wills himself to calm down, wills himself to seem like the person he once was. As he closes his eyes and takes his breath, a flash of light both envelopes and scares the shit out of him. He opens his eyes but it’s already gone.

“What's going on?” Dash is back to his high-pitched panic, probably brought on by whatever he sees that Danny doesn’t.

“Danny? What happened to you?” Danny looks down only to realize that he is now wearing a T-shirt and jeans. The same ones he wears almost every day. The only difference, he notices, is the Lichtenberg scars running all the way down his arms. He’s kinda grateful he doesn’t have a mirror, sparing him from the, (probably gruesome), sight of his face.

“I’m gonna be so honest with you right now Dash, I have no fucking clue.” and he really didn’t.