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Sham Sacrifice: Chapter 2
(Sham Sacrifice: Chapter 1)
Chapter 2, because @ciestess voiced an idea that absolutely consumed my entire mind and I could not rest until I made this
...
Danny’s eyes tracked the swing of gunfire raining bullets across the horizon. Tucker reloaded, crouched, dodged left and pivoted, another blast of bullet confetti launched through a gaggle of zombie heads. He tossed the magazine and reloaded. Click. Ching. Danny flinched when a zombie smashed a hammer clean through Tucker’s head.
“God. Fucking…” Tucker pulled out of his hunch. He unclamped his fingers from his controller like bug legs unfurling. He extended the controller to Danny, bouncing it in his grip. “Your turn.”
“Huh?” Danny asked, as if he hadn’t been watching Tucker’s game the whole time.
“You. You’re up. I died.”
Danny accepted the controller, reloaded the screen, and jogged about a hundred feet forward before the first horde of zombies took him out football-style from the left. The death screen rolled.
“Oops,” Danny said.
“Not your best work.” And Tucker took the controller back. Tucker shot a few spare glances to Danny while the level restart loaded in. “Is it Vlad?”
“No. Well, yes,” Danny answered, flopping back into his normal position on the Foley attic armchair. Tucker’s mom had planned to toss it ages ago, before it became Danny’s chair. “But at least he left when my parents went all zombie mode into the basement.” Danny picked absently at the scabs of leather flaking from the armrest. “It was just weird.”
“I don’t mean this as an insult, but it’s definitely not the first time your dad’s gotten some math wrong,” Tucker said. “He blows up like three things a week doesn’t he?”
“He does. But he doesn’t care when he gets that math wrong. This one was like I broke something important.” Danny’s expression soured, and he picked a leather flake clean off the chair. “Vlad did, I mean.”
“Does any of the math actually work?” Sam offered from Tucker’s desk. She leaned an elbow around the back of his chair, head tilted to Danny. A pencil dangled from her loose fingers, nib-half worn to the History of an Invention report she was actually working on. Tucker had half-assed his earlier in the day about the palm pilot. Danny had not done his. “Like, it’s all crackpot theory, right? Do ghosts even follow math?”
“I think they follow some math. It’s not magic that makes the ecto-bazookas work, or the Fenton-phones work, or—well the thermos DIDN’T work—until I made it work.”
The unspoken thing Danny had been not-quite-saying hung in the air. He said it this time.
“So I’m wondering if I did it. Like the Fenton thermos. And now maybe they’re gonna do the math all over and realize the missing piece of the equation is one half-ghost son.”
“Well the order is backwards, for starters,” Sam said. “Thermos worked because you pumped ghost-energy into it. How would you have done that to the portal? You were human when you walked in.”
“Sam’s right. What do you think you brought to the table exactly? Button-slapping abilities?” Tucker loaded up the next level. “It was their portal, and their math, and it worked. There’s a million-billion kinds of math and they probably just forgot one thing.”
Tucker took a headshot and died. Mechanically, he handed the controller back to Danny.
“Yeah, probably.”
“Ask Vlad. He’s got a portal.”
“Like Vlad’s gonna tell me.”
“Just promise to be his diligent little son minion or whatever. He’s easy. Wait, let me do the next level. You know I like the cyberpunk levels.”
“It’s not your turn,” Danny said, reeling the controller just out of Tucker’s wiggling grasp.
“I’ll let you do two in a row for your next turn.”
Danny knocked Tucker away, distracted just long enough for a zombie cyberbeam to launch from the horizon and take him out through the head.
The screen washed sepia. Danny stared at it. You died.
…
Danny hadn’t really meant to stay the night at Tucker’s place. They’d just gotten really far in Man vs. Zombie, and Sam had gone home, and Danny was just resting his eyes between his turns with the controller.
So when he woke to the bright strip of sunlight beaming into his eyes through the attic skylight, his first thought was Fuck.
He was awake, here, morning, school. Fuck he had not actually done his History of Invention report, despite the stupid amount of grief it had already caused him this weekend. He pulled his face out of the armrest, now pineapple-patterned from the decaying leather, and pawed for his phone fallen on the floor. If it was still early enough, he could maybe still afford to desperately half-ass something before sixth period science.
He flipped his phone open. A text from Jazz. “Don’t come home. Make up an excuse.”
“…Fuck,” Danny whispered, through the sensation of his heart launching itself into his throat.
He scrambled upright, whole body shaking at the mercy of adrenaline shock so soon after being pulled from dead sleep. His mouth was dry, teeth unbrushed, wearing his old clothes from yesterday, report not done, Don’t come home, Don’t come home, Don’t come home.
They knew. He’d fucked it up. Somehow they knew. The math. Something. And it had to be with guns blazing, because Jazz would not send that text if they’d taken the “We accept you” angle.
Were they coming for him? On their way here? Tracking by his phone? Did they like Mrs. Foley enough to not SWAT-slam her against the wall when she opened the door for them so they could come capture the ghost pretending to be their son?
Fuck.
Danny was upright. Danny was standing. Danny was shaking. Danny wasn’t actually sure what the next thing was he was supposed to do.
Tucker’s ball of blankets rustled from the couch. “Mmph?” he asked, articulately.
“I have to. Go deal with my parents, I think,” Danny said, because any plan felt a little better than no plan. “I think they know.”
Danny was a ghost. Danny was gone. Tucker sat upright, alone, blinking himself awake. He was staring at the You Died sepia screen still displayed on monitor, now burnt into the plasma of the tv.
…
Danny paused with his human hand slick on the Fenton front door. The gears in his mind turned as his plan quickly unraveled into no-plan. He had no plan, right? What was his plan? Handle this Man vs Zombie style—open the front door ready to dodge wide, because both zombies and parents liked to camp behind closed doors with bazookas at the ready?
“—absolutely absurd, and entirely unscientific, with no probability of being true. It goes against everything we know about neurology.”
Oh, Jazz. Was Jazz enough of a bazooka-deterrent? Probably not. Knowing his parents.
Danny turned the knob. His heart hammered. If bazookas, dodge left.
The first thing he noticed was in fact the no-bazookas. It was what he was most looking for. And so it was Jazz’s expression he did not notice until second—whites of her eyes wide, snapped to Danny, with a look that would be accusatory if worry hadn’t won that battle. Her cheeks were pale. Her hair was unbrushed.
He noticed his parents third. Compulsively, he rocked back onto his right foot, still outside the doorway, still outside the threshold of the Fenton family household.
Seeing his parents tired was of absolutely no shock-value to Danny. It was at least a twice-per-month tradition to see them haul themselves up from the basement sweaty and glaze-eyed at 7am, babbling excitement about some new ecto-spectral-hoozy-whatsits whose concept had shimmed into their minds at 8pm and now existed, fully operational, 11 nonstop hours later.
So it wasn’t the exhaustion on their face. It wasn’t the stagnant smell of sweat or the paleness of their faces or the stains on their clothes.
It was the way they looked at him. Like their whole world had fallen apart with his foot passing over the doorstep.
“Danny,” Jazz said, choked, a break in the silence. “Things are…! A little weird here. So maybe, if you wanna just get to school, I’ll finish clearing up—there’s a misunderstanding Mom and Dad have with their math. I am state finalist in Math League and have been studying college-level calculus in preparation for school applications so I’ve offered to help them fix their math, or prove to them—”
“Danny,” Maddie said, an echo of Jazz, but it felt worse. Danny scanned her hands for anything pointed enough to be a weapon. They were empty. “Danny can I just ask you something honestly, just quickly? Jazz is right. I’m just trying to clear up an issue with our math. And I won’t be mad. Whatever the answer is, I won’t be mad. I just want an honest answer.”
She stepped closer. Danny fought the urge to match her with a step backwards. Her eyes roved over him in a starved way, looking for something.
“Were you there when the portal turned on?” she asked.
“No, I wasn’t,” Danny answered. He wasn’t sure what to do with his face to make it look convincing. “It just. It needed some time to boot up, or something, right? That’s what you two said.”
“That was our guess ,but we don’t really know. The security tapes are wiped. We tried to make them EMF-resilient but a very, very strong blast of EMF could still corrupt them.”
“Yeah. I mean the portal’s gonna do that, right? When it turned on? Ripping open the Ghost Zone that’s—gotta be huge EMF.” Danny’s focus bounced between his mother’s eyes. “Just a guess. I really don’t know. I was in bed, already, whenever the portal started working.”
Left eye. Right eye. Why was she looking at him like that? Like she was sad. Was this part a trick? Make Danny let his guard down, go hey Mom need a hug? and that’s when the bazooka-whipping starts? It made his ribs feel scratchy. Stop looking at me like that.
“Have you felt anything weird at all, since the portal started working? Any gaps in your memory? Any parts of you that don’t feel right? Is there any part of you that feels like it’s changed in a way you can’t explain?”
She reached a hand out. Danny instinctively recoiled.
“Uh, yeah. They taught us about this in health class. They call it ‘puberty’ there.”
“Danny,” Jack said, and his voice was scratchy from disuse, from a long and uncharacteristic amount of time spent not speaking. “Did you die in the machine?”
A beat. A moment. Like when the zombie sends a hammer through your head.
“I’M alive!” Danny declared with a crack in his voice, with hands slammed to his chest. “Look at me. What are you talking about?”
“It’s the only math that works,” Jack continued, his words like chalk, his voice too dead. He looked too much at Danny. “If one of you two walked into the portal, and died in it. And I don’t think it was Jazz.”
This was bad. This was weird. Danny had ghost powers, sure. ‘They can’t kill me I’m already dead,’ was a funny joke sometimes. But it was funny as a joke. He was a ghost sham, really. A faker, a LARPer, whatever Tucker had called it. He was a human who was just kind of a freak now. More of a freak than he already was. He looked dead, for someone who was super-duper still alive.
He’d buried that worry, already. They weren’t allowed to bring it back.
“Look… at me!” Danny continued, mouth dry. He threw his arms wide. “Look how super alive I am! I’m awake! Using energy! Eating food and sleeping with my human body. I’ve got flesh and blood and bones and stuff! I’m not a ghost-expert but ghosts don’t have that.”
This was weird. This made Danny feel like something was scratching to get free from inside his rib cage. It twisted his entrails. Sure Tucker and Sam had thought he was dead, for those first horrible few minutes, but then he changed back to a human and the nightmare ended there. Jazz never called him dead. The ghosts called him freak and halfa and whelp, but never ‘one of them.’ That was his whole thing: being different from the ghosts who became ghosts by something so normal as dying.
He was not dead.
“If you died in the portal, your ghost wouldn’t have been ripped out of your body. It would have been allowed to stay, and then you’d be…” Jack hesitated. “I don’t know what you’d be, but you wouldn’t be alive.”
“Dad,” Jazz said, and she stood herself bodily between Danny and Jack. “What an absolutely messed up out-of-line thing to say to your son! You don’t know that! Dad you’re tired, and just because you weren’t able to solve your math problem in one night doesn’t mean you get to treat Danny like this! I said I’d help you with your math! Now apologize to Danny.”
Jazz looked over her shoulder to Danny, her expression falling at the sight of Danny’s face.
Danny backed up over the door threshold. He shook his head. “I’m not comfortable with this. This is weird. I’m gonna go to school now.”
“Danny, I promise they’re just—”
Danny turned on heel. No backpack, no change of clothes. He took to the street without a single school supply and moved, and moved.
It was supposed to be guns-blazing. Molecule by molecule. Headshot you died. He’d prepared for that this whole time, in the shower, in his dreams, in his daydreams in class. He’d duck and dodge and explain himself over and over until they understood him.
Danny wasn’t sure he was capable of explaining himself anymore.
…
Danny knocked the heavy iron knocker. He was in ghost form, as a threat. He wondered if he still smelled like yesterday’s sweat now that he wasn’t wearing yesterday’s clothes. Now he was wearing the clothes he died in.
No one answered the door. Danny phased himself in.
“Vlad!” he called, and his words echoed along the slope of the two elaborate winding staircases that twirled and met at the top like caduceus. Gold-plated banisters. A security camera buried somewhere in the ceiling, no doubt.
Danny phased into the library. His eyes roved the three stories of bookshelves wrapping the perimeter like a sheath. Gaudy. Audacious. Like Vlad would ever read that much. Danny racked his brain because some something in here was the secret to opening Vlad’s laboratory. Jazz had told him. Some gold something to be touched, and pressed down, or pushed up? Or it opened to a button. Or a keypad, maybe.
Danny spat a curse. He was being stupid. He was frazzled. He wasn’t thinking straight.
He dove into the floor below. Intangibility was the only key he needed.
The sheetrock was cold, even when he wasn’t touching it. The darkness was so piercing it made static jump in his vision, some weird trick of the brain Jazz had explained where, in the absence of all light, the brain hallucinates its own. It came with a sensation of pressure against his eyeballs, and a complete disorientation of direction, and he simply just kept going down.
Danny emerged into a wash of cold air. Cold like metal was cold. The low lights of dials and clicking machines were bright to his eyes previously dunked into the pitchest nothing. He drank it in, eyes grateful for light no matter how little, inner ear grateful for orientation that had left his head swimming and his stomach tight.
His feet tapped down to the stone ground, and the air that breezed past him was chilled.
“Vlad!” Danny called again.
Nothing.
He moved by the floor lighting, which ran in trim along the perimeter of the laboratory rooms. It lit things from beneath, made machines gaunt and specimens into sharp geometries of darkness and flesh. It made the Fenton lab feel warm in a way Danny had never considered it warm.
His feet clacked. His breath puffed.
“Vlad!”
He followed light, followed a wash of green miasma percolating from some far room and catching on the particulate of water and dust that disturbed with the air currents. Danny disturbed it too, walking through, wearing its shade of green which his shadow robbed from the wall behind him.
“Vlad. I swear to god Vlad.”
He crossed the threshold of the portal room, where the dusting of green ambience became a medallion wash of golden-green coating, painting every surface of the room. The Fenton lab was one single expansive room, portal anchored into the far wall and facing all the dead and empty air in front of it. This was different. A much smaller room, walled on all sides save for the simple doorway, and each surface reflected the color back deeper and heavier. It was like a fishtank in the wall of an aquarium lit radiant aqua-blue by all the lights within, but green instead, pure ecto-green.
Danny approached the open portal. He stared into its placid swirls, mesmerized, and scared of it, in a way he hadn’t previously felt about the portal in the Fenton basement.
“Ah, seems the cat is a good mouser after all, it dragged you in my boy.” The words came sing-song. They came spine-shivering for Danny, who felt them like hot breath on his shoulder and reeled back, pivoted, fire crackling to life in his palms.
Vlad stood at the doorway, a solid 20 steps from Danny.
“Vlad.”
“So I’ve been hearing.”
“I need you to explain the portal.”
“Ah, I see you’ve spoken to your parents.” Vlad stepped in, washed in the ecto-green which muddied his ruby red eyes. He held his hands behind his back, cape trailing, a smirk on his fanged face. “Last I heard they weren’t taking the news very well.”
“What news. What did you tell them?”
“Me? Nothing. In fact, very kindly for your sake I even tried to drive them away from the answer but… We know how stubborn your parents can be.”
“What answer?”
“That you’re dead, Daniel.”
Shock washed like ice down Danny’s spine. It sent prickles like spider legs across his skin.
“Well, I suppose there’s still chance for some doubt. It could be Jazz. She could take the fall for you, if there’s any benefit to that at all.”
“I’m a halfa. We are halfas,” Danny said.
“A silly made up word by a silly child,” Vlad mused, and the light smile left his lips. “We are dead.”
“I’m not dead,” and Danny’s words were small, and they were childish.
“You are. I am. Embrace it. It’s nicer this way.” Vlad took a few steps closer, lionously tall in his saunter, feet clacking the ground. “It’s very freeing. After you’ve died already what is there left to fear?”
“I’m alive.”
“You’re a dead body with its soul still stuffed inside it like a Christmas goose. A lot of things in your body don’t work anymore, but ghosts don’t work right anyway and it is, for all its defiance of nature, a perfectly symbiotic relationship.” Vlad’s smile brushed his lips again, warm. “It’s nice to share this with you. Isn’t it nice to share things with people?”
Danny’s heart was beating too fast in his chest, and it was a human heart, a human beat. “I’m not dead,” he declared.
“Your wounds heal quickly because the ghost piloting you only needs to remember form. It stacks cells back into place and calls it good. You’ll endure fatal injuries as you no doubt have many times in your fights, but they’re trivial because physical trauma is not what kills a ghost. It’s what creates one. You’ll necrotize in places but it’s okay, because you’ll carry on, and it will bother you only if you let it bother you, if you’re too sentimental about the puppet you’re still inside.” Vlad closed in closer, neck craning to appraise Danny. “Ghosts love a facsimile of life so you will keep your heart pumping, your lungs breathing. You’ll eat and you’ll sleep but you’ll find you won’t perish if you don’t. It just won’t be a good time if you want to keep occupying your flesh form. Take better care of it. You won’t get another.”
“You’re psychotic. And you’re wrong.”
“I have all the math to prove it.” Vlad leered from over Danny’s shoulder. He circled the boy, knocking Danny’s balance, who still on a hair trigger stood ready to fight. The light from the ghost portal painted Vlad’s face like the phases of the moon as he moved. “Did your parents explain that part to you properly?”
“No, because they didn’t get the math right.”
“Oh they’ve gotten it right. This time. It only took them two decades longer than it took me.” The portal rolled like static, and its fizzling pattern crashed like an ocean wave across Vlad’s cape. “No amount of man-made power is sufficient to drag the entire fabric of the Ghost Zone up against our own, tear a hole through it, and anchor it to a stable frame. It requires something with a pull on the Ghost Zone, a strong pull, and that thing is a human life at the moment of an extraordinarily violent death.”
Danny backed a step away from the portal, from Vlad, but the walls boxed him in. He swam in its green light.
“You stepped in and you turned the portal on, that’s what you thought, right, Daniel? Pressed a careless button on the inside and now here we are. Silly parents for not finding that button first.” Vlad’s face hardened. “No. Jack and Maddie knew about the button. Maddie explained it to me over the phone. What engineer designing and building their own portal would forget the location of the on button? They’d pressed it from the outside. It didn’t work. And so you pressing the button was not the important part. It was you dying to the electrocution that clicked everything right into place. And while your ghost should have been torn from your lifeless corpse and pulled to the Ghost Zone you instead pulled the Ghost Zone here. Your ghost got to stay put. You opened the portal. You became the undead freak you are. And now we’re here.”
Danny’s eyes bounced between Vlad’s. His cheeks felt hot, like he was enduring an accusation of wrongdoing. And he had none of the knowledge to refute what was being said.
“You’re messing with me. You’re wrong,” Danny shot back. He thrust an arm out, drenched in the fog of the portal. “If the portal needs a person to die in it then explain your portal! Are you so casual about it? You killed someone? You’re admitting to murder and you think I won’t do anything about it?”
Anger flashed like a storm across Vlad’s face. His aura swelled, pressing down with a pressure on Danny as Vlad halted and cast his shadow clear across Danny, coating the back wall. “The killing of other people with the wanton carelessness of half-baked machines is the domain of Jack and Jack alone. I’ve brought no such harm onto anyone else.”
“Then how do you have this portal?”
“This portal? This portal that I’ve had for 20 years? Which I opened when I solved the piece of Jack’s broken math that he was never able to solve until this morning?” Vlad stalked closer, hunched, imposing. Danny stepped back. “My boy Daniel you’ve had it so easy. You had it so simple. A truly clean break. So clean so lucky. A single lethal dose of electricity and it was already over. I’m jealous. You never even suffered.”
Vlad stepped closer, striking distance, arm extended. Danny flinched, but Vlad only swept his cape around, clenched in his fist, and pivoted to approach the portal.
“Put out of your misery before it even started.” Vlad slammed his fist against the portal rim, and the explosive metallic clang bounced through the rooms. His laugh belted out. “I should have been so lucky.”
19. Vlad Masters was 19. A sophomore in college. A man actively in the midst of sabotaging his social life to chase a woman who was already deeply in love with Vlad’s best friend who he hated more every day. He wasn’t sure what he ever enjoyed about Jack’s bumbling ineptitude, or his loudness, his brashness, his poor social skills, his bad breath, his mullet. Maybe Vlad had gravitated to Jack because deep down he loved how superior it made him feel to surround himself with the likes of Jack Fenton… And now, he hated how enragedit made him to watch Maddie’s eyes skip past his to focus on Jack Fucking Fenton again and again and again and again.
But surely there was hope still. Surely it was a matter of time before the rose-tinted glasses fell away and Maddie saw bumbling and inept and every such word in the basket when she looked at Jack. There’d come the day she tested the waters with Vlad to complain about one of Jack’s little quirks, and they’d find solace together in all the things Vlad was that Jack wasn’t, and all the things Vlad had that Jack didn’t. And he’d be gone, back to bumble elsewhere, and it would be just them.
The day didn’t come. It wouldn’t come. And maybe Vlad needed to change himself for Maddie. If he listened to her and Jack’s ghost ramblings, if he could put Jack in his place and solve the things Maddie couldn’t, it would show her. She’d understand.
Because that was the thing about Jack. His math was never right. Enduring Calculus 1 with Jack was all it took to prove this to Vlad. How many times he’d caught a single error on a single line for Jack, like a dropped stitch that would unravel the whole sweater. Every problem, without exception. Jack only passed on his homework grade with Vlad’s help. On his tests, he failed.
So Vlad was staring at Jack’s equation, full of bogus math, which Vlad knew was wrong because Jack had penned it, and Vlad had not yet fixed it himself.
“I’m telling you Jack, it won’t work.”
“Bogus V-man it totally will!”
It wouldn’t. But Vlad wouldn’t fix it for him. Not yet. Vlad would let Jack embarrass himself first, fully in front of Maddie, watching on, judging. Vlad would solve it for her. After. Once Jack had made a fool of himself for the hundredth time since college began.
He leaned in to study the portal frame. The gears were turning in his head already. He didn’t hear the whir of the power source catch.
…
19. Vlad Masters was 19. A tube ran down his nose and into his lungs, supplying oxygen for lungs which were failed by a diaphragm sloughing itself away. He was poisoned from the outside-in. Irradiated by ecto-energy none of the nurses or doctors could fully understand. It damaged his DNA. First obvious in the skin of his face where the blisters of his ecto-acne drained and sloughed. “Acne” was the wrong word. An unkind word. They were boils where the blast had cooked his skin, microwaved his cells. The skin on his body blackened over time. Organs decayed. Vlad Master read a lot about radiation sickness. He knew everything he had to expect.
Jack and Maddie had stopped visiting. They were dating now. It was on their last visit they’d told him, and Vlad hadn’t taken it well, and he’d perhaps burned a few bridges with the words he chose. It was deserved. Considering what Jack did to him.
He’d found the error in Jack’s math, by the way. Errors, but all the rest paled in impact compared to the lambda. The ecto-energy. The necessary ecto-potential to pull the Ghost Zone here. How stupid. How idiotic. For Vlad to die to a machine so botched in its construction.
When Vlad was released from the hospital, it was not because they’d cured him. It had been because there is a certain cruelty in making a 19-year-old live the last of his days bedded down in a white-walled room with just his books, his equations, and no one coming to visit anymore.
He was released with bedrest instructions. Vlad did not heed them. In his beater car, every cell of his body aching, he drove. At the materials lab, he disconnected his oxygen tank and moved through the lab space with the tube dangling loose from his nostril. No one was Vlad Masters’ friend. No one cared to stare long at his ugly boil-ridden face. No one stopped him as he hauled sheet metal, and supports, and bolts and wiring and resistors and power tools, checked out with a valid student ID, from the lab. The lab inventory room would not be seeing these back.
It was a prep bunker, buried beneath a vast lot of empty Wisconsin land, that Vlad hauled his materials. He and Jack had discovered it as freshmen. Poked through its bowels with flashlights and quipped and laughed over how eerie it was. Deep beneath the sheetrock, boxy rooms carved out of walls of stone. Shelf upon shelf of dusty canned foods, and shotguns sealed in cases fastened to the walls. The locks had rusted with water damage.
His arms ached until they throbbed, dragging beams of metal across the stone floor, scratching chalk-mark stains into the ground. His skin sloughed, inflamed, burning to the touch. Vlad didn’t bother to rest, because these injuries would never heal anyway. He hauled, and welded, and wired up his circuitry and resistors with a care and caution Jack would never have bothered to practice. He checked it against his math by flashlight. He took naps on the cold stone floor and woke with deep purple bruises on every part of his body that had pressed against the ground.
His appetite left him. His lungs filled with mucus. The boils on his face had spread down to his chest, his shoulders. The touch of his shirt chafed them, so he worked without one, a figure of skeletal rib ridges jutting from tight skin that bloomed with the projection of his shadow against stone walls.
He knew why Jack’s math was wrong.
A silly mistake. A stupid mistake. Anyone with half a mind for the paranormal should have realized the Ghost Zone was not so easily at your beck and call. Not without chumming the water with something it would rise to feast on.
And in that violent death, what would happen to the ghost? It would stay, wouldn’t it? If it successfully anchored the Ghost Zone to the portal it stood inside, then by definition the ghost would stay?
And was that death? Yes, in a way. But it was a death one would get to keep living. As opposed to the death Vlad was headed for, whose coldness and finality scared Vlad more than anything he could put to words.
He’d fixed the oxygen tank back to himself. He couldn’t work without it, hauling it about on a little dolly with him, back and forth, while he fetched and affixed the last of the plating he needed to craft the frame of his silent soulless portal.
He’d stolen a generator from the sports storage shed. It was meant to be enough to power the portable stadium lights they hauled onto the fields for late games, an absolute obelisk meant to cast light across an entire football field.
Surely, it contained enough power to kill one simple human.
Vlad fixed the last bolt in place. Jumper cables clamped generator to portal wiring. It was a pure skeleton. A paltry thing, like the bones of something already picked clean. Built in haste, sloppy, by a 19-year-old whose fingers were too inflamed to clutch a wrench any longer.
He could have asked Jack for help. Maddie. But he wouldn’t let them have this. They had to solve the portal on their own. They didn’t get to know his hard work. They did not get to save him.
Vlad would save himself.
A ghost anchored to a body. What was that? What monster was that?
Vlad moved. He coughed mucus from his lungs. It made it hard to breathe. So he moved slowly, and crouched, bony jutting angles, painted blotchy purple, all bruises and skin, sloughing away.
He crouched, because the portal he’d constructed was not large enough to hold him standing up. He bowed inside it, a small thing, a pathetic man of little life. He wheezed. He hurt. His eyes burned.
And he held in his hands the remote to flip the generator switch, and connect the circuit, and bring to life the math Vlad had so kindly corrected out from under Jack’s grip.
Vlad did not. Because throwing the switch would kill him.
Deep in his animal brain, his dying brain, he knew this intimately. It filled him with a drowning fear like paralysis. He did not want to die.
He would die if he did nothing.
It would be this one throwing of the switch which could save him. Which would burst the portal to life right through his heart. Electrocute it out of its rhythm, slaughter him like a pig on spot and… maybe… hopefully… drag the Ghost Zone here. And whatever he was, dead, would stay.
And whatever he was, dead, would be better than this.
Vlad held the remote in his clammy hands.
And from within the humming skeleton of his portal, his fingers caressed the on button.
…
The portal sung its happy contentment, mused in its healthy green aura, staining all the slabs of rock wall. Danny swiveled his head, recognizing now the bunker this had been before it had been a laboratory.
“I’ve harmed no one, Daniel,” Vlad concluded, his voice too measured for the horrors it had spilled forth. Too calm against the blossoming terror its words had wrought across Danny’s face. “I opened the portal to save myself. You’re lucky, Daniel. It was because of my fast thinking that your father is not a murderer. I took that honor from him.” Vlad’s head tilted to the side, suddenly sympathetic. “Although, you’ve maybe made the title whole for him.”
Vlad reached out, Danny shot away.
“Dad didn’t kill me,” he choked. “I did this to myself.”
“How lucky Jack is, to always dodge responsibility for his actions.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Of course you don’t. If you believed me, you’d have to accept you’re not wriggling out of this. There’s no denial you can bring home to your parents. If you believe me, then this is reality.” Vlad smiled, a playful glint to his fangs. “I suppose I should have more sympathy. I quite like being this way. It is so much nicer than wasting away to death, like I was. But you. You were healthy before this. This killed you, and it didn’t save you from anything.” Vlad cocked his head. “Such tragic fates, both of us, due to the carelessness of Jack Fenton.”
Danny shook his head. His heart beat—his human heart beat—all too fast in his throat. It made him sick. It made him feel like the walls were closing in around him. This was Vlad’s doing. Vlad’s trap. Vlad’s prison he’d been forced to join.
“Of course not,” Vlad said, sweetly. “How sweet denial is. Deny it if you like. Call me a liar. But if you ever want to come to terms with what your father did to you, consider coming to me. I understand you in a way no one else will.”
Danny gave no response. He gave no acknowledgement of Vlad’s words. He took to the air, phased himself up through the sheetrock that had been packed atop the doomsday prepper bunker. Up through the mansion, which had been built atop the portal beneath it, and not the other way around. Into the open sky, he breathed fresh air not stagnant and damp beneath the ground, bathed in light pure white from the sun and not tainted green like the bowels underneath him.
And he flew back toward the portal that made him, leaving Vlad with the from which portal he’d made himself.
...
(inspiration post from @ciestess)
Ghost Boy? In my college class? It's More Likely Than You Think
[ao3 link]
Warnings: None Words: 6,031
****
College was crazy.
Okay?
There was absolutely no reason why college had to be as insane as it was.
Alright, maybe there was a reason. A reason called, "We have four years to make these students professionals in their chosen field, and some even less time than that."
Danny understood. He really, truly did. He knew that to work in his dream job at NASA, he needed to learn not just how to locate the constellations in the night sky, but also about subjects like chemistry, biology, calculus, physics—a lot of physics.
But seriously, when the hell was a guy supposed to sleep?
Last night's problem set only had five questions, theoretically. But it was run by a completely sadistic site that Vlad himself must have designed—that bastard—because while submitting a correct answer seemed to mark one of the five outlined stars in gold, the site also seemed to be more than happy to remove the gold star if he got a problem incorrect.
Which meant that the theoretical five-questioned assignment ended up taking Danny many, many more questions than that.
Just when he had thought the hell was over, he realized he still hadn't begun his paper for his mandatory freshman writing class. So then, he got the absolute pleasure of writing an essay about a stupid, Victorian-era play he didn't read regarding the symbolism of a hat as it related to...foreshadowing, or something.
He didn't read it. He only signed up for this dumb writing seminar because the timing worked better on his schedule. He'd much rather be taking the writing class about horror novels. But unfortunately, that one happened during his mandatory physics course.
When it was all over and he finally caught sight of his pillow, he was pretty sure he’d shed a single tear. Did he remember sinking into the mattress? Closing his eyes, and drifting off?
No. He didn't.
He was fucking tired.
But apparently, the universe did actually hate him because instead of being roused by his alarm the next morning, instead he was shaken by his ghost sense.
Oh yeah, apparently Skulker found his dorm.
Joy!
No seriously, fuck that guy.
What the hell kind of sick weirdo wants to make a rug out of someone else's skin, anyway? Not to mention that Skulker had no conception of what a good time to hunt was, considering he seriously was trying to start chaos at five in the fucking morning.
Again, fuck that guy.
He only just barely had enough time to fly home, shower, hastily read over and submit his essay (he'd long since learned from high school that he couldn't trust himself that late at night to be coherent), and make a mad dash to his favorite bagel spot on the way to class.
However, the bagel guy—he had a name, Danny was almost sure—must have been under the weather today because, for some reason, he could not stop staring at Danny.
The instinct to run his hand over his face to check for post-fight ectoplasm splatters was a learned reaction, at this point. But this time, he couldn't feel anything off. His skin was dry. Cold, like usual, but dry.
"Uh..." the bagel guy continued staring at him slack-jawed.
"Do I have something on my face?"
That seemed to shake the bagel guy out of his stupor. He blinked, his eyes darting around to catch the eye of a few other customers who, for some reason, were giving Danny a really wide berth.
Did he smell or something? Had he forgotten to put his deodorant on?
Oh god, did his parents do something to make national news again? Did the news use a family photo when reporting the story or something? Why was everyone looking at him? Seriously, what the hell was going on today?
The bagel guy locked eyes with Danny once more, briefly, before darting back down to the register and handing Danny his change. "One everything bagel with cream cheese for the, uh—for—coming right up."
"Thanks," Danny said, trying to be as friendly as possible. Jazz always said that he shouldn't judge people for acting strange. That they could be going through something personal.
So, Danny shook it off. Maybe he missed a chunk of ectoplasm on his hair when he was showering. Skulker had nailed his shoulder pretty well. The green, ecto-infused smoothie he'd sipped that morning was working its magic to mend his skin, but who knew? Maybe a little bit of blood was leaking through his shirt. It wouldn't be the first time that happened, anyway.
Or the last.
Amazingly, he did get his bagel. But when the man handed it to Danny, his eyes were almost popping out of his skull. His heavily accented, "Ah, here is one—ah, your—your bagel," sounded especially halted today.
But no. The big, gruff bagel guy wouldn't have stuttered. He wouldn't have been nervous to pass a bagel to a tired-looking college student either.
Danny must have misheard.
He darted down the sidewalk. He was going to be late for class. And it was because of his internal panic that he didn't notice the girl with her nose buried in her cell phone at first. Not until she almost crashed into him, looked up, and nearly jumped out of her skin.
"HOLY SHIT!" she yelled, her hands flailing beside her. Her phone flew out from her fingers and clattered on the pavement.
"Sorry!" Danny scooped up her phone from the ground and handed it to her.
She stared at him as if he were completely insane, making no move to take the phone until Danny leaned forward a little closer and pointedly said, "Here."
Whether or not this girl was hungover or still drunk from whatever party she'd been at the night before, Danny did not have time to work around her brain. He was going to be late for class!
"Fuck," she said, eyes still glued on Danny. She did, however, finally reach out and gently take the offered cell phone.
Which was all he needed.
Mission accomplished, he whirled back around intending on continuing his fast-walk-nearly-run pace to the science building, but caught the eye of a biker who seemed to go into a similar trance as the bagel guy and ended up crashing straight into a parked car.
"Oh my god!" Danny darted over to the strewn biker. "Are you okay?"
"I'm fine! Stay back!" the man yelled, struggling up and holding his hand out to block Danny from seeing his face.
Was this guy...cowering at him? Like he was some sort of ghost?
No, no. This was silly. Now Danny was just being paranoid.
"Just stay back!"
An oddly phrased demand, and a little biting at that, but the biker did just crash into a parked car because of Danny and that other girl—who was currently holding her phone up at Danny—so he guessed he could forgive this random dude for being a little snappish.
Danny didn't have time to dwell on this stranger anyway, because holy shit his class was starting in ten minutes and if Danny didn't get his ass to the room right now he was going to be screwed.
So with one more apology to the biker, and one more glance to the strange phone-obsessed girl, Danny adjusted the strap of his bag back over his shoulder and took off down the road.
Not literally took off. Though, he really wanted to jet through the air today. He'd had these urges to duck out of sight and fly to class before, but it never felt so compelling before.
Unfortunately, the street was crowded as shit, and in between classes as it was, the building would likely be crowded too. Finding a discrete place to transform would probably take just as long as running to the classroom like his half-life depended on it. And so, the latter option it was.
Somehow, he managed to make it to class with five minutes to spare. Okay, maybe not somehow. Maybe he did risk using his flight to propel him forward a little bit. Could anyone blame him?
College was crazy. And anyone who thought they saw a guy not quite touching the ground when he walked could have just as easily been sleep-deprived and were almost certainly hallucinating. Humans couldn't fly! Only ghosts could fly, and Danny Fenton was clearly a human college student just running to class.
Gaslight, gatekeep, ghostboss—or whatever the saying was.
Energy was buzzing in Danny’s veins, and he found it a little difficult to stay in his seat. An aftereffect of only barely using his flight powers, he was sure. His body got a taste of being airborne, and now it didn't want to return to the laws of gravity.
Danny could forgive his ghost core for that. Gravity could be very exhausting sometimes. Especially when he was in the middle of a ghost fight and his enemy was hurling him to the ground.
But he was in a lecture, and it would look weird if this random college student was hovering over his seat, so Danny forced his butt onto the chair as he dropped his bag beside him.
Whispers fluttered around him, which wasn't too unusual. People often talked in pleading freak-out whispers to their friends after an especially grueling night of homework.
Danny was about to turn to his chemistry lecture buddy and do the same—because seriously, he was going to have nightmares over that damn assignment for weeks—when he realized that his chemistry buddy was not in his usual seat.
And then, a whisper caught the attention of his enhanced eardrum.
"...ghost..."
"...Phantom..."
Ah, that explained it.
Oh yeah, it was all coming together now.
They must have been talking about the ghost fight from this morning, the one with Skulker. This city wasn't Amity Park, so the students here weren't exactly used to ghost attacks. Of course, the initial fight was probably very exciting for them.
And, well, his parents probably were on the news that morning, but likely only to be interviewed about the attack. Maybe they ended up rambling about ghostly habits and migration patterns or whatever other bullshit theories they’d been churning with recently.
So then, the bagel guy must have recognized Danny as a Fenton, a child of Jack and Maddie, the infamous, kooky ghost experts.
The effects of that realization were delayed, but when they finally hit, he felt like his brain was hit by a semi-truck.
Because, shit. He didn't know if he could deal with his bagel guy knowing who he was. He was going to have to find a new bagel spot, wasn't he?
Danny craned his neck over to the door. The lecture was supposed to be starting, but his chemistry buddy was nowhere to be found.
But then, to his immense relief that he wouldn't have to suffer through this lecture by himself, the door opened to reveal the tall, lanky form of Cameron, his chemistry buddy.
Danny eagerly moved his bag out of the way of Cam's seat, his woes of that fucking assignment hot on his lips, but before he could begin his trauma-dumping session, something strange happened.
Really, really strange.
As Cam began habitually walking over to his seat, he looked up, caught Danny's eye, and froze.
His mouth parted into a perfect 'o,' his lips widened, and his eyebrows disappeared under his hairline. Then, he backed up, caught the bewildered expression of another student near him, and moved to another aisle.
Danny sat there too stunned to call out to Cam, though the intent was at the precipice of his being. Hurt stabbed his gut, and the social anxiety the A-List had trained his brain for in high school started creeping up his spine.
Did Danny do something wrong?
Why had Cam moved away?
What did that look to the other kid mean?
He tried to think of a reason why Cam might have suddenly decided that Danny was a weirdo freak that should be avoided, but the only thing he remembered doing between yesterday and today was the two texts he'd sent at eleven last night complaining about the assignment. But surely, everyone had complained, right?
Or was the assignment genuinely effortless for everyone? And Danny was just an idiot who didn't understand some really simple concept, and now Cam had suddenly realized that he'd picked the wrong chemistry buddy to sit next to in class?
That must have been it.
Why else had he moved away?
Danny turned around, looking to the back of the lecture hall. But all he could see was a sea of faces all looking at him.
Okay, honestly, what the fuck was wrong with everyone today?
He whipped out his phone, paranoia striking through his gut like a spear. Maybe he'd accidentally revealed himself during the fight? But he checked Google, searching for Phantom's human identity, but all he got at the top of the search were old Reddit threads theorizing about which historical figure he could have been, and celebrity news sites spouting completely absurd clickbait-type theories about his past.
Is Danny Phantom Napoleon's son?
Could Danny Phantom be Related to George Washington?
New Theory Suggests Danny Phantom is Alexander the Great!
Yeah, like Danny was leading legions of ghosts around Europe anytime soon.
As Danny wracked his brain for what the hell he'd done to deserve the wrath of having his class stare at him like he was some sort of weird alien species and his classmates were plotting on how to initiate first contact, the side door opened and the professor came darting in the hall with a stack of folders all but falling out of his hands and a muttering of breathy, "sorry, sorry," light on his lips.
The muttering broke out into jilted, uncomfortable laughter, and Danny still couldn't help the feeling that they were laughing at him.
He tried to brush that off as just the remnants of his high school on him and keep his attention focused on his short, salt-and-pepper-haired professor who looked like he couldn't remember if he was going to the beach or Burning Man today, and decided to dress for both.
Yang put the manila folders down on the front table, miraculously without spilling any of the contents inside, set his bag down on the rolling chair beside him, and picked up a piece of chalk to face the board.
He held a hand up and began writing Chemistry 101 — Stoichiometry on the board.
Behind Danny, the snickers grew louder.
Was there some inside joke that he just wasn't getting? Had his classmates prepared some sort of prank for the teacher today and Danny hadn't read the email? Was it April Fool's Day, even though logic and reasoning told Danny that it was only October?
"Sorry I was late, everyone," Yang began. "Now if you don't mind, I want to begin by going over a few problems from last night's assignment. I noticed a pattern in the problems everyone was getting wrong..."
Someone coughed rather obnoxiously behind him.
Danny felt ice begin to build in his stomach.
"...so as you can see here, I noticed a lot of people forgot to calculate the used excess of iron to find the amount of excess reactants. Remember, guys, you can't just subtract the bigger and smaller masses in the problem..."
Another obnoxious cough.
Yang didn't break stride. "...you have to actually convert it to moles and set up your mole ratio, and then convert back to grams. I mentioned this in class but it seemed like too many of you—"
"Professor Yang?" the impatient voice of Brittany, one of his classmates, said from behind.
The class broke out in a fit of whispers and giggles, this time not even trying to hide their restlessness.
"What is it?" Yang turned around, his chalk still hovering on the board.
And then he looked at Danny. His eyes bugged out like a cartoon, sticking out beyond the rims of his glasses. His jaw opened and closed like a fish, and he dropped the chalk on the floor.
Now, the class was roaring with noise.
Danny stared eye-to-eye with the professor for ten seconds or ten minutes. He didn't know which, and it didn't matter anyway, because then Yang's thin lips opened to exclaim a word that may as well have electrocuted him all over again:
"Phantom?"
Confusion and panic hit Danny like a sledgehammer.
How did Yang know he was Phantom? Had he been revealed? Did everyone know he was Phantom?
And then he heard the whispers.
"It's really him! It's Phantom!"
"Why is he here?"
"It's Phantom!"
No!
No!
How did everyone know his secret?
Danny had to stop this.
He had over four years of hiding his ghost half from his parents, the world, and most impressively, his parents. Over the years, he'd honed his ability at lying and using his silver tongue to smooth over situations with such practiced ease, he was expecting his Oscar in the mail any day now.
Which is why, like an utter pro, he jumped up from his seat and shouted, "It's a lie, I'm not a ghost!"
The room went silent, and then was launched into a frenzy.
"Phantom!"
"Is he delusional?"
"It's really him! It's Phantom!"
His panic was bordering on hysteria as it stampeded over him, beating his core so furiously that Danny thought it was going to jump through his ribcage.
He stood, his gloved hands held out in front of him as he began his best at pleading with the masses, but before he could grovel too much, Professor Yang's voice sliced through him like a knife, calling out, "Phantom! What are you doing in my class?"
Wait...
Gloved hand?
Danny looked at his hands again. They were gloved.
And glowing.
The relief was so heavy on his shoulders, his back, and every inch of his skin. It was also mortifying.
Because here he was, in his Chemistry 101 class not as Fenton, but as Phantom.
"Holy shit," Danny muttered.
What. The. Hell.
No, really.
What the hell?
How was this happening?
Had he really been so tired that he'd forgotten to change out of his Phantom form that morning?
No, hang on—had he been walking around in his Phantom form all morning?
How had he not noticed?
Then all the memories came flying back to him at once. The bagel guy acting weird, staring at him like he wasn't sure if he should seriously give a ghost a bagel because "Do ghosts need to eat? Is human food poison?"
And then the girl. She hadn't screamed because she nearly crashed into a stranger, she screamed and threw her phone in the air because she'd nearly crashed into Phantom. And that's why she was recording him after, too. She was recording Phantom, a ghost that wasn't native to this college town.
Danny thought he'd die of cringe-fail right there because that meant she also recorded the biker crashing into a parked car and was probably uploading it to TikTok later. He was sure it would be trending in minutes.
That was, if she hadn't already uploaded it to Tiktok, and it wasn't already trending. His phone suddenly felt heavy in his pocket.
He looked around at the faces of intrigue and excitement, feebly attempting to squash the anxiety that was currently tap dancing over his skin. Okay, so his initial attempt at acting hadn't gone so well. That was okay; nobody could be perfect all the time. If he just channeled the inner cool and suave hero that he was, he could totally save the situation.
For sure.
He floated a few feet in the air. His legs felt awkward sprawled out, and he tried to form a ghost-tail, but somehow his sense of self was too strong for that today. No matter, to balance it out, he splayed his arms out wide and began doing jazz hands, saying, "It's me! Danny Phantom! Just here checking your classroom for ghosts!"
There was a moment of collective pause before his brain caught up with what his mouth said, and then he scrambled, making a big show of ducking around the room to search for...ghosts, or something. He lowered to the floor to check under the auditorium chairs, flew to the front of the room to peek around the tables, and finally went up to the ceiling to glance around the four corners of the room.
Once he felt embarrassed enough, he stopped in the center of the room, puffed out his chest, and said, "Good news, citizens! There are no ghosts in this room!"
Whispers and mutters once again broke out from his classmates, along with a few giggles. In the front of the classroom, Yang's head was craned up to look at him, his expression showing pure bafflement.
Okay, Danny was bombing this set. He was catching onto the vibe of the room, and had come to this very astute conclusion: there was no saving this.
Time to abort the mission.
"Well, that will be all! Have a fun class learning about chemistry!"
And then, without another word, he jetted through the wall and into the hallway of the building, turning invisible immediately. Fortunately, with classes having started several minutes ago, the corridors were mostly empty. Only a few stragglers remained, booking it down the halls and trying to duck inconspicuously into their classrooms.
Danny cut around a corner of the hall where, thankfully, no one was standing. That didn't stop him from triple-checking over his shoulder (all that was there was the water fountain, Danny) before he let his ring wash over him.
Then, when he was sure he was human again this time, he ran down the hall and pushed open the auditorium door to his class which, by the looks of things, hadn't calmed down from their encounter yet.
The door hit the wall with a bang—oops, he thought he hadn't pushed so hard—and then every head was turned to him.
"Sorry!" Danny rubbed the back of his neck and gestured vaguely to the clock on the wall. "I lost track of time."
The room was...silent. Incredibly, confoundingly silent.
That wasn't good.
On instinct, Danny glanced down again to make sure that he was wearing his red hoodie and blue jeans and not his Phantom black and white jumpsuit. He was, in fact, wearing the right clothes. And out of the corners of his eyes, he saw the glint of his black bangs.
So then, what the fuck?
Alright, there was no need to panic. He was human, his classmates were human, they'd just met Phantom, and now Danny was busting in the classroom late. It wouldn't be the first time he was late to class, anyway. Lots of students were late for Chemistry!
With his brain sufficiently pep-talked, he pointed as inconspicuously to his seat as he could and said, "I'll just...take my seat."
No one responded, so he took that as his cue to begin his walk of shame up the steps of the auditorium aisles to his usual seat near the front, which was still amazingly void of students anywhere near it.
"Phantom?" a voice rang out from the spattering of students around the room.
Danny missed the next step and ate shit on the floor. His bag hit his back heavily, and he could have sworn his shoe nearly flew off his feet. He scrambled to stand, his hand missing the railing only once, before he managed to stand back proud and tall. Sort of. His backpack had slid off one shoulder, and his body was hunched forward and he tried to regain his breath because holy shit, it actually really hurt for his torso to land on the corner of the step.
He rubbed his sternum, sure it was going to bruise, and coughed out, "Uh—what?"
"Phantom!" the voice, now too familiar, repeated. "You're him. Phantom."
Danny glanced up, and dread not only slammed into him with the force of a semi, but also backed up and floored it into his soul again. And again.
Because that voice was none other than his Chem 101 buddy, Cam.
No, Danny was a magnificent actor. He surely could save this one.
What did people always say? Something about the third try being a charm?
He could really use a charm right now. Unfortunately, Murphy seemed keen on watching him suffer instead.
"No—no way! I'm not a ghost! I'm totally human, guys! See?" Danny said with quite a lot of conviction, waving his hands beside his body like some sort of circus display.
It was so conclusive of a performance, that Cam simply laughed.
Shit. This was not how he wanted today to go at all.
"I can't believe I never put it together before! Did people really buy that in your hometown?"
"What act? I'm not acting!" Danny insisted.
But his classmates, it seemed, were even less convinced.
"Seriously, it's so obvious."
"How did no one notice?"
"They're literally the same person it's crazy."
"What? No! No we're not the same person!" Danny insisted, trying not to sound desperate and hopelessly failing. "He's my—uh—twin? Yeah, that. He's my twin."
"He's obviously not," a classmate said.
"He is. He died in the womb," Danny refuted.
"Okay, now you're just being ridiculous."
"Does it sound better or worse if I say that my mother drank ectoplasmic smoothies while she was pregnant and that's why he turned into a ghost?"
"Fenton!" Professor Yang called out.
Danny felt his blood turn so cold they started forming frost in his veins.
And then, he refused to look down because he was pretty sure ice crystals were glueing his feet to the floor.
In his panic, he'd totally forgotten that this was, in fact, a classroom. With a professor. And not just any professor, his chemistry professor. As in, the guy that had the sole power of crushing all of Danny's dreams of working for NASA via the power of the curve.
Yang took a step back, colliding with the chalkboard behind him and smearing white dust all over his brightly-colored shirt. But he ignored this, instead finding it more pertinent to fold his arms and regard Danny with a look of pure incredulation. "Are you really Phantom?"
"What? No!" Danny said. However, as luck would have it, that gasping answer caused him to inhale the wrong way, and coughs shot up his throat to overtake his body.
And then like the valiant superhero he was, he began having a coughing fit. In front of his classmates.
He knew Sam and Tucker always called him a dork, but this was really unfair.
"You okay, Phantom?" one student asked.
Danny tried to argue, "I'm not Phantom," but unfortunately for him, he hadn't stopped coughing yet.
Taking his silence for a confirmation that he was in fact the elusive ghost known as Phantom, another classmate commented, "I didn't know Phantom breathed."
Not-so-quiet whispers and mutters broke out around the class at once discussing theories of his cardiovascular system.
All while Danny was doubled over, trying desperately to reclaim what little of his dignity was still left. As well as reclaim some of the oxygen that his body seemed more than willing to push away for some reason.
Seriously, was he out of karma yet?
Okay, Universe, if this is your way getting back at me for reading the Cliffnotes of that book for the essay last night, I get it. Cheating is bad, blah blah blah. I'm very sorry in a deeply remorseful way, so can we please stop ruining my life now?
"...so he wouldn't need to breathe!" A classmate's voice had stepped above the rest.
"That's what I said!"
"Dude, he's literally fallen asleep on my floor once. I'm telling you he needs to breathe."
That voice must have been Cam's.
Danny took a deep breath, regaining control of his lungs. "Wait, guys!"
But it was too late. And, oh god, why were people now giggling over their phones? Had someone taken a video of him earlier? Was he trending online right now?
If this got back to Sam and Tucker, he was never going to live this down.
"Okay, okay!" Yang's voice rose in volume. "Class, settle down!"
The class went silent.
"Alright, I know we are all curious to know about Fenton's secret double life—"
"I don't have a secret double life!"
"Sure you don't, Phantom," Cam said.
"—But please, we do actually have quite a bit of material to cover today, judging by the very impressive homework scores from last night. And, by the way, class, might I remind you all that my office hours are on Mondays and Wednesdays from two to four. I won't name names, but I'll just say that if you need to make it a point to come for some review, you know who you are."
Was Yang looking at him?
"Regardless, if Fenton is done screwing around with his ghost powers, we do need to get through the material sometime this year."
"But I'm not a ghost!" Danny protested.
"Dude, you're standing in a block of ice," a classmate argued.
"Holy shit, he froze his legs to the floor!"
Danny felt frost on his cheeks. "The A/C system is broken! Everyone knows that!"
"The ice is glowing."
"So? A lot of ice glows."
"Fenton, please." Yang had never sounded so disappointed in his life. "I'd expect anyone in this class to know that ice is made of which elements?"
Danny hated where this was going. "Hydrogen and oxygen."
"And please describe the bonds to me."
"The hydrogens have a double bond with the oxygen, and then there's two pairs of electrons leftover."
"What shape?" Yang pressed, pushing his wiry glasses up his nose.
"Bent."
"Good, thank you. So we have two hydrogen and one oxygen in an H20 molecule, yes? And so tell me, would that configuration with those two elements cause anything to glow?"
"Um, no." Danny had the sudden urge to die. "Water does not glow."
"But, interestingly, ectoplasmic water does glow, correct? Because....?"
They'd touched over ecton science earlier in the semester. "Because ectons are larger and can sit closer to the nucleus which results in atoms fusing and due to the greater amounts of energy they emit, some this excess energy can be seen in our visible spectrum."
Yang smiled and then gestured to the seat devoid of any humans near it that Danny, previously Phantom, had been sitting in at the start of class. "Thank you, Mr. Phantom. Now, if we're all done dillydallying, we have some stoichiometry to go over."
It took Danny more than a second of the awkward silence that followed to realize that oh yeah, his feet were literally frozen in place.
"So..." He glanced around the room, meeting the expectant gazes of his classmates. "Just to be clear, none of you care that I might potentially be..."
A ghost?
Phantom?
Some sort of weird mutant hybrid thing?
"Danny, you're the only one making a big deal out of this," a classmate answered.
Danny guffawed.
"Yeah, it's whatever. You're dead, so what? We're all dead in college. You're not special."
"I have a biology lecture later right after this for my weed-out course and going to that is basically the same thing as dying, I'm pretty sure," Cam joined in.
Danny resisted the urge to smack his forehead with his open palm.
He turned back to Yang. "And if I were maybe the—uh—being that kind of has saved humanity from being invaded by ghosts give or take one or two times, would that maybe get me extra credit on the next test?"
"No."
Well, that was a brutally quick response.
Danny shrugged. "It was worth a shot." He reigned in on his core's fluttering, and the ice began to melt around his feet.
He tried to ignore the obvious phone flipped his way as he did.
Shit, this was going to be all over social media later. How embarrassing. He could only hope that Tucker wouldn't find it. But who was he kidding? If he checked his phone, he bet he already had about sixteen messages from Tucker laughing at his misfortune.
Once he finished freeing himself from his ecto-ice like some ghost toddler, he began a very graceful and humiliating trek to his seat, complete with multiple instances of him bumping into chairs as he trudged down the row. When he finally reached his seat, it was just his luck that the rusty hinges let out an obnoxious creaking wail as he lowered himself down. He winced, hissing out apologies, but in the silent hall, the sounds of the withered metal were almost too much to bear.
It was for that reason that his entire body refused to unclench until the professor was well underway with his lecture about excess reactants and whatever else they were going to be quizzed on next week.
He tried his best to pay attention and not check his phone for the no doubt endless notifications. He'd already made his presence too obvious in this hall, anyway. Professor Yang would have been thoroughly annoyed if, after everything, Danny decided to spend the remainder of the class on his phone.
Miraculous as it was, he did manage to survive the lecture.
After class when he finally was able to check his phone, he saw that the world was too focused on the viral posts about Phantom being spotted outside of Amity Park to give any attention to the little itty bitty post of Danny, in human form, frozen to his lecture hall floor.
As it turned out, that post only had two likes—one of them was Tucker—and one comment from a random user reading, "lol why phantom freeze that dweeby kid to the ground???"
Danny didn't resist the urge to facepalm this time, and in fact did it so hard he was surprised he didn't give himself a concussion.
Well.
At least his secret was safe.
****
"You really don't care that I'm Phantom, do you?" Danny asked, looking up from the barely clean dorm room floor that his back was currently stretched out against.
"No?" Cam glanced from his notebook. "Why?"
"Uh, I figured the whole part where I'm a part ghost would have been a little weird?"
Cam's thin brows shot up to his hairline. "You're only a part ghost?"
"Yeah? Why, what did you think?"
"Oh, I just figured you were legit dead or something."
Cam uttered those words with such nonchalance, that Danny reacted almost immediately, shooting up from the floor so hard, he accidentally switched into his Phantom form.
"You thought I was dead?" His voice echoed when he spoke, and his ghostly tail wiggled underneath him.
Cam's pointed look and handwave were explanation enough.
"Okay, you know what? That's fair." Danny swiped his notebook off the floor and forced his adrenaline-spiked body back into human form. "That's actually super fair."
"Yeah I mean, being a ghost is sort of Phantom's whole shtick, anyway."
"Right but like...wait, you didn't even care that you thought I was a fully dead and deceased ghost taking college classes? And you still wanted to do homework with me tonight?"
Cam, once again, only gave a very lazy shrug. "Well, yeah. I just want to pass this class, dude, and we've already established that we should tag-team team this class instead of trying to rawdog it by ourselves."
"I mean...I guess?" Danny blinked at his friend, his mind reeling with astonishment. "You're weird, you know that?"
"Says the ghost-human person or whatever. Now, are we gonna finish this prelab assignment, or are you gonna keep having an existential crisis about your place in the Universe?"
Danny slid back on the floor, propping his knees up to lay his notebook against. "No, you're right. We need to finish this prelab."
"Thank fucking god."
****
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