Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

...

Danny died, away from the mortal realm, stuck in the center of a small universe forming. He wasn’t alone - there were eyes on him, shocked, filled with tears, horrified - at first, but the portal pain accident took his life and breath away just as much as it did his ability to look back.

So.

Danny died.

One moment there was a quiet hum of electricity running through the wires, Tucker’s disappointed mumbling - he was probably expecting something more from a lab Danny witnessed metal getting dissolved in - and the quiet clicking of Sam’s camera. She was so excited.

Then, a moment in time, caught between one eternity and another, a photo printed on Danny’s retinas. The floor covered in wires, some hastily left behind half-covered, walls vanishing into the darkness - the chamber of the portal so deep it made him uncomfortable even before the accident. Why did it have to be so deep? he thought, the black nothingness associated with a gaping maw of a snake, two hanging wires at the front eerily similar to fangs.

He, for some reason, also remembered a conversation that came before as something that happened next.

“Come on, Danny”, Sam rolled her eyes, poking him in the shoulder, “It doesn’t even work. And how would you know if it is dangerous unless you actually check it out?”

“I don’t know”, he chewed on his lower lip, “That’s kind of the only thing my parents told me not to do, besides what we’ve already done”, his voice turned into concerned whisper by the end.

“Just for the photo?” She smiled, and Tucker nodded.

When his hand stumbled upon a small bump on the wall, the click of the ‘on’ button was indistinguishable from Sam’s camera taking a shot.

...

.

Danny didn’t like to think about Vlad. That made him feel all twisted and wrong on the inside - the same way his reflection made his throat burn. They just didn’t mix, with Vlad’s fire - or something - and Danny’s ice - or something. That’s what made their current predicament all the more unsettling.

“Calm down, Daniel”, Plasmius rolled his eyes, making Phantom feel all more rabid inside.

“Shut up”, he choked out, head pressed against the wall and hands clenched into fists, “What the fuck do you want, fruitloop?”

They were in the Ghost Zone, somewhere on the edge of the realm - Phantom could see the edge of vast ectoplasm trickling into the void where it stopped. It shifted into a frosty blue as he looked at it, proving once again that things like space and time made no impact on the infinite realms. In Vlad’s mansion. A replica of it. What-fucking-ever.

His head was spinning. It was- kind of hard to think.

“I heard from some reliable resources that your useless father was away for the week, something about celebrating his achievements in biochemical engineering... like a fool like him would ever do something right-“, Plasmius dismissively flicked Phantom on the forehead, sounding consumed by hatred, and the younger ghost suppressed the desire to point out that if not for Jack, Plasmius would not have come to exist. “And dear Maddie and Jazz came along- which is very unfortunate, but I thought it would be a nice opportunity for us to have a chat-“

There has been a persistent itch along Danny’s arms that didn’t go away no mater how much he willed it to go away, ever since dad got a notice for the nomination a week ago. It was the first time- it was the first time he was alone inside the house since- anyway, no wonder he let himself be caught off guard by the loser-freak-psycho, there was a lot on his mind already.

Vlad was right - neither dad, nor mom offered Danny to go with them, and despite Jazz’s insistence that there would be nothing for him to see anyway, that stung. Not as much as them not even remembering a date the portal came to live fell on the middle of their trip. The first anniversary.

Phantom groaned.

“I have a test tomorrow, you prick”, he kicked Plasmius in the knee, dangling in the chains made from whatever. Didn’t feel like ectoplasm, but if it was fully from earth, he would have fazed through them ages ago.

Phantom suppressed a shudder, deciding to keep the fact he was also sick - probably banged his head on something, even if he didn’t remember it happening - a secret. It was fine, and Vlad didn’t need any more things to use against him.

“Oh, I called your school”, the mayor of the city - their government was a joke - smiled. It made Phantom feel weird, like he was back in time, to the first month of- after the accident. Out of control. “They were very understanding about it, said it would of course benefit you, a problem child, to spend some time with an elongated gentleman like myself”.

Phantom’s lips thinned. He licked them slowly, because his entire body just suddenly ceased to produce- wait, shit, he wasn’t in a body that was supposed to produce fluid. Normally Danny was better at differentiating between his states of being.

“So?” He asked, a snarl forming on his face despite actively trying to suppress it.

That made Plasmius pause. “What do you mean ‘so’?”

“What’s the game plan? The genius scheme of making me become your little mini-me-“ there were definitely at least a few problems with that sentence, and mr. Lancer would not have been proud of it, but it was- genuinely, what the hell was up with Phantom’s brain lately?! “and helping you steal Maddie from Jack and have a little perfect family of three with just enough ectoplasm for one ghost. That plan”.

Plasmius rolled his eyes, as if that wasn’t a reasonable question. “I suppose, you could consider me confining you here a ‘plan’, but I merely call this is a loose direction in which events are going to go”.

“Have already gone”, Phantom almost didn’t recognize his own voice with how dry it sounded. Something was very wrong, fuck.

“No, no, no, Daniel”, Plasmius clicked his tongue, patronizing. The casual dismissal with which Vlad always treated Danny made something inside him curl angrily. Fucking prick. “These are just for now - very inconvenient, aren’t they? And uncomfortable. All that pressure on your core and everything”.

“If you are telling me you tested this on yourself with this sentence, I don’t believe you”.

“Of course not, I got an ectopi for this”, Plasmius grinned, sharp teeth that never bothered Danny before suddenly very pronounced. They weren’t like his own fangs, more needle-like. Unnatural. “When the time comes, you’ll be transported into a very comfortable room somewhere around here with an ecto-shield around it”.

Probably when Danny inevitably tried to escape, because of course the entire success of this plan relied on mind games. Phantom knew Plasmius well enough to predict this. He wanted to dramatically roll his eyes, but felt control over his core slipping.

There was a flash of light, and Danny felt an almost familiar sensation of being settled inside his own body, so warm and alive. Normally, that was comforting, with a threat of his parents gone for as long as he stayed human, for however long that was, but that was- that felt just like his accidental transformations after the accident.

He squirmed, breathing in shakily. Fuck it. Fake it ‘till you make it - his existence’s entire motto.

Danny pretended he planned to do it and did what he was planning to do originally - rolled his eyes, scowling. “I’m not going to try to break out. Wait ‘till Sam or Tuck figure out you’ve kidnapped me, again, you’ll wish you actually died from ecto-acne”.

That shut Plasmius up, for once. He considered Danny quietly, standing very still. Even his ever-moving cape that denied all laws of physics fell down. Which was- unnerving. Uncanny.

“Little badger”, he started, which was uh oh, bad, they’ve kept away this nickname for a reason. “I will now proceed to leave you alone and unguarded here, and we’ll see how well your ‘no escape’”, Plasmius did audible air quotes, which only worked to unsettle Danny further, “plan is going to hold up”.

Danny squirmed again, head fuzzy, and watched as Plasmius strolled out of the lab that looked just familiar enough to invoke the instinctive shudder of otherness, turning back into Vlad just as he walked out of Danny’s field of view.

He looked around. The lab was more technologically advanced that anything the Fentons could ever afford.

But there was no portal.

He didn’t know whether that was a comforting thought or not.

Danny looked at what skin on his arms he could see from his less than comfortable position. It felt fine, not so cold it was in all-engulfing, burning pain. It looked fine, not the the sickly white it was when fucking Freakshow was controlling him. No scars, no gashes, no cracks and missing bits. It was still there, not incinerated, not floating somewhere-

It was fine.

The insistent burning in Danny chest - he didn’t dare to guess whether it was his core or his heart - was screaming it wasn’t.

Maybe it was a bit of both - after all, if it was burned away once, was it being ‘normal’ by human standards really a fine thing?

...

..

There was nothing but pain for an eternity and beyond - or maybe for a second, set time was a human concept, why would he bother with it now that he was so much different? He wasn’t dead, not yet, but every lightning and impact it had brought him closer to crossing over with every painful infinity.

Thump-thump. The deafening beat of his heart that was forced to deal with more signals than it ever was before made Danny’s head hurt. His vision was getting blurry - even if there wasn’t much to see.

His eyes melted a long time ago, but he didn’t stop seeing. The world split and came together, twisting and swirling like a galaxy. Danny tried grabbing the elusive wisps of air, but his fingers already evaporated.

Thump.

Danny realized then - even if it was more of a momentary stupor, ‘oh, that’s unfortunate’ type of thing, compared to an all-encompassing shock of the first lightning going through his spine - that his body was gone. That was why there were no booming beats of heart anymore - he didn’t have a heart anymore, just a phantom, a mirage of a consciousness floating in the vast nothingness.

He - it? Would it be right to assume Danny was something that had a right to a name? An identity? - felt unexplainably settled, like being was what it was always meant to do. Simply existing, a small, tiny, unnoticeable part of the whole. It-

That was everything came down to, in the end.

...

.

When, suddenly, his body was back - or it never went away, and the pain came, slammed into him full force, like never before. Danny screamed, and was surprised he still could do that. Produce a noise that registered as human, that is.

When before he knew he was dying, his mind slowly giving under the weight of inevitability, now his body was livid with energy, thrashing and changing, agonizingly slow. Danny was being turned from inside out, wrang dry, all for his tattered mind and - whatever it was that started humming in his chest - to survive.

Danny didn’t want to survive. He had just seen what comes after, and it was peaceful, he wanted that. He didn’t want the agony of living, because with every changed cell, with every breath his lungs forced him to take - it was not worth it. He didn’t want it at all.

But he changed.

Slowly, slowly.

Danny gasped when his hand - it was there, how was it there? - turned white. That wasn’t the color it was supposed to be.

As the deafening thunder of portal’s lightning started to die down, Danny thought to himself, the star that formed inside of him pulsing and screaming.

This was not supposed to be.

Regret never quite stopped eating at him.

..

.

Danny blinked slowly, fog swallowing most of his vision, like during a bad migraine. It has been- a few hours? Maybe less, it was hard to measure time in a state he was in. And that was another thing - Danny wasn’t feeling well. Like, ‘right after the accident’ bad bad. Which was weird. Wasn’t it? It was.

He was getting loopy, too.

Fuck, Danny sighed, annoyed. Why did Vlad have to kidnap him now? They had a truce going, or at least Danny thought they did, with him decisively ignoring any dumb decisions Vlad made as a mayor while he left Danny and his family (mostly, Phantom knew when to admit defeat) alone. Maybe he was deluding himself.

Vlad was a dick. A bastard that nobody could or should trust, because when you think he has any redeeming qualities, he pulls the ground from under your feet, and you don’t know anything, and everything is colors and flying- and suddenly, you’re making the wrong decisions.

Danny groaned again. Fuck Vlad. He may be preaching about being the same as Danny, a halfa, half alive, half immortal, but he was nothing more than a pathetic, useless waste of space that had no right to his identity, the image he had and wealth- why could he have all that- why could he have people’s love when Danny- Phantom-

Fuck. Vlad.

Where were Sam and Tucker anyway? His body was acting weird - it always did, but it was much more noticeable now, when every movement, be it of his body or core, were being constricted with a rope uncomfortably. He- fuck, Danny needed to get out now.

There it was- an uncontrollable burst of anxiety, uncertainty. He tried to suppress the instinctive reaction, but his core already pulsed, turning him into Phantom.

Okay, fine, Phantom thought, it was fine, he didn’t use any active powers that would send him- wherever Vlad decided to lock him up in. He could still just stall it out- his thoughts were interrupted by a pang in Phantom’s- suddenly Danny’s- chest as the core flickered and started leaking, like a faulty faucet.

That was-

Where were Sam and Tucker?

“Not here, let me tell you that, Daniel”, Vlad said, venom in his voice, from a distance that was- Danny should have noticed him walk in, at least. Also- did he say it out loud? “Yes. Yes, you did”.

Oh. Danny blinked, or at least tried to open his eyes - when did they close? - but the only things he could see were the blurred shapes of the lab and Vlad. Or Plasmius? Danny could never tell without seeing the bastard first.

Well. That isn’t good, is it? “No, it isn’t”, Vlad commented quietly, and if Danny didn’t know him as well as he did, he would call his voice at the moment gentle. “I’m not, you are just’.

“’m not, it got better yesterday”, Danny rolled his eyes, but his head stubbornly refused to move and he was forced to stare at the floor. He was a little feverish then, that was one of the reasons his parents and Jazz left him at home - Jazz was stubbornly refusing to, somehow, and was very upset when Danny insisted he didn’t need to be babied at the age of fifteen - but it was fine now, he went to school today.

Vlad crouched down, or at least Danny guessed that’s what happened, because his face - fugly bitch - was suddenly in his line of sight, and stared at him, eyes narrowed. He attempted to kick him in the balls, but the legs - oh, he was Phantom now, or- shit, was that a tail made out of meat? Ew. Danny stuck with sticking out his tongue.

“I think you might need help”, fruitloop murmured, and his hand on Danny’s forehead felt almost surreal, now that any sensation could be described as stomach churning.

“Look who’s t’king’, he whispered.

Ughhhhhh, he didn’t feel good.

“I need you to turn, right now”, Vlad commanded, pronouncing the words in a very silly way, slowly and almost syllable by syllable. Danny laughed. He wasn’t a baby! He knew this loser had a fixation on the entire son thing, but that was just silly. Also what did he mean by turn? Forgot about the ropes?

That’s when Danny realized he forgot about the ropes and shut down the thought process.

“Turn into the Phantom, you absolute fool”, Vlad hissed, shaking by the shoulders, but one of the hands slipped through when Danny’s core violently convulced. That was more like it. “Oh, for Ancients’ sake!”

The boiling hot energy poured into Danny’s veins and ectoplasm and he tensed up, trying to fight it, but the control failed him once again and.

Nothing.

Finally. Maybe when Danny woke up he wouldn’t be afraid to look in the mirror again.

..

...

.

Danny’s death was over fast, relatively speaking. Later, much later, he would speak to other ghosts, when the impending reality of them also being real souls of people who succumbed to the inevitable eternal sleep dawned on him, and it would strike him that his death was merciful. There was no real pain, just a feeling of twisting and pulling, wrongness seeping into his body-

His death wasn’t painful. It was fast, not really traumatic, really, honest.

What was much worse came after.

Dying was the easy part.

Forming a core and growing into it was when it got... let’s just say, the mornings he started by meticulously checking all over his face for pimples were much darker, him stumbling in the dark, afraid to open his eyes as Danny stuffed his insides back where they were supposed to be.

Sometimes his guts were realistic and had weight and blood in them, their sheer essence of living disgusting but disturbingly reassuring. Other times, they were like galaxies, expanding all over the room, the alien dimension invading reality.

In other words, Danny’s body wasn’t just a body anymore.

Chapter Text

...

Vlad loved Maddie.

It was a fact that has always been true. He watched her as she built contraptions fitting for a torture movies with a sinking feelings in his stomach, watched as she ran into the university cafeteria to buy the last sweet bun with a quiet laugh, and loved her through it all. He was her best friend, someone she looked at with a lovely squint to her eyes, someone who was reflected in them often enough Vlad felt dizzy with the power rush he got from it.

Then, there was a look of horror mixed with sickening fascination, the glare filled with nothing but pure impulse, desire, lust for knowledge, no matter what. Vlad was reflected in the eyes of a person looking at her best friend’s convulsing, dying body and saw an opportunity, and he was.

He looked.

...

Lovely. Vlad loved Maddie, before she was Maddie Fenton, and well after.

Vlad loved hearing her say his name. She could be angry with the university, sad about her parents, happy because of a new breakthrough in ectology, but the sound of her voice was music to Vlad’s ears all the same. Sha could be saying anything at all, really.

“This is just so unfortunate”, she said, bending over him, the light from lab’s lamps a halo behind her hair. “I’m so sorry, Vlad”, Maddie lamented, shaking her head. “And the experiment was going so well...”

Anything she said was a good memory in his mind.

Vlad thought Maddie was a lovely person before the accident, and he maybe could have loved her, once he got over that awkward stage of a crush, when every other person seems like a threat and the only thing you can do instead of confessing to the other person is grumble under your breath. But, well. Maddie wasn’t just a person anymore, but the last face Vlad had got to see as Vlad Masters, and he wanted to rip her throat out for this.

Vlad couldn’t let go of Maddie because it meant hating her.

...

.

Daniel was in Vlad’s arms, slumped over, shocks still rocking through his body despite relaxed muscles. His sleeping face was as much that of a child as that of a monster, blinding green of his eyes visible even from under the closed eyelids. They almost seemed to follow Vlad’s movements, unsettlingly aware for an unconscious person.

He looked like he could be Vlad’s son, with the visible fangs and wispy hair. He wished for it more than anything at the moment. Vlad could feel the momentary worry for Daniel’s well-being dissipate, instead replaced with delight. There was no reason to worry about something so casual - death anniversaries and subsequent reliving of one’s death were so common they became annoyingly hard to schedule around at some point.

But.

No ghosts experienced death the way halfas did. They spoke of the great beyond like something inevitable, something you couldn’t come back from - even then, Vlad had to force that information out of them, one way or another. Being scared of something that was incapable of acting by itself. Ridiculous. But halfas like him did come back from it. They went to it and decided not to.

Either because of that, or their unexplainable biology - probably the latter, as much as Vlad loved to coax poetics - halfas’ death anniversaries were more severe than that of an average ghost’s. All this time, he has been suffering like that by himself, but with Daniel...

Vlad looked at the boy’s arm slowly dissolving with a hiss and knitting itself back together in a moment. Well, their suffering might just be different... that realization hit him with the strength of a hammer. He didn’t know anything about Daniel’s death. What if he would just die when he experienced it fully? What if that would turn him into a full ghost?

No.

No no no. Vlad couldn’t afford that. He couldn’t lose Daniel that way, because of something he couldn’t even control.

He has just recovered enough from his own death day to execute this scheme, the opportunity came to him in a moment of weakness and distress. This week wasn’t going to end in a disaster if Vlad had anything to say about it.

Vlad looked at the surgical table and at Daniel. It was best the boy was to be observed.

...

..

Love. Love. Love.

As Vlad laid on the hospital bed, skin bubbling and rough, his vision degraded slowly into colors and endless string of whispers, the only comforting presence in the contamination ward. They told him he was loved, that the universe wanted him and wanted to assimilate him into it, for Vlad Masters as an entity to stop existing within the layers of reality, the endless space of infinite realms, to become something else, completely separated from his like until now, down to molecular level.

And Vlad, really, found the idea rather lovely.

But.

Before that boundless, all-encompassing love, Vlad felt small. All of his supposed struggles, pain, stupid, insignificant crush, useless money that nobody would need in the end. The real end. And Vlad, beyond the promised peace, wanted that. He wanted to have more like it, wanted to feel like it, be like it, and the more Vlad desired it, the closer he felt to the physical.

The sensation of the hospital bed beneath his hand was a bother.

Eventually, months later, Vlad opened his eyes, sat up and saw his flawless skin, untouched by ghastly ghost acne.

More.

More.

Beyond love, want. Pain, Vlad was consumed by. Well.

He forgot at some point.

...

.

When Vlad talked with director Ishiyama and maybe, possibly, slip something into her - the school’s - pocket, he didn’t even have to lie about being excited to spend time with Daniel.

Vlad’s death anniversaries were usually a miserable experience. He spent them alone, tucked away in the dark corner of his lab, holding out the futile hope that it was going to be better this time.

It, for all Vlad’s effort to research and develop the cure, was not.

It started with the sudden heat, a fireball inside of him desperately trying to come out, and then it grew, turning liquid and ravishing his insides with its molten flames. His core hasn’t started forming until Vlad started to mentally prepare himself to give up, but its intensity shocked him out of it.

The core didn’t heal him, but it made Vlad’s future possible, and he could care less about throwing his intestines up, spending days in fever-induced hallucinations, calling out to Maddie, torn between human pain and ghost’s hunger (for life desire acceptance drive), or slowly bleeding out through his pores - Vlad was going to exist past that.

Walking out of the hospital with an actual beating heart was more of a pleasant surprise than anything.

The painful seizing was just as powerful as the real one, and even if his insides were now colored green, they were still slipping out of him in the most gruesome of manners. At first, he imagined it was Maddie’s hand that inexplicably grabbed his heart at some point during the event, squeezed it, squeezed, pushed until he was gone. Later, when he decided no to go to Maddie Fenton’s wedding, he started seeing Jack.

This year, it was Daniel, and instead of humanly disposing of Vlad with a tug, he ripped his heart into pieces with monstrous bites - like Vlad would have done himself.

There was something especially painful about this year’s long week of suffering, really. Vlad spent it in front of Daniel’s clone’s (so brilliant, made just for him, just like him, perfect, perfect) incomplete body, suspended in contamination pod, wishing for one and only thing: for this miserable, unfulfilling existence to end. He could have a family instead of the empty mansion and dead body that slowly became something else, alone. Forgotten. Locked away to rot.

After that sudden drop of his condition into something beyond horrible, Vlad was looking forward to being next to Daniel for the next week. Even if the boy was a little bit too much like Jack, and, worse, so much like Maddie in all the ways that mattered to Vlad - the wit, the smarts, the stupid puns that made him want to tear his hair out. It annoyed Vlad as much as it endeared him.

Daniel really could have been his son. If only.

Vlad didn’t know how to comment on it. Maybe it sounded pathetic.

He painstakingly prepared his lair’s empty rooms for the day, feverishly.

Maybe it was a bit too far. Even if Vlad really, really wanted to.

..

.

Being just a man again was confusing. There were no real changes after he walked out of the hospital, Vlad was just a guy that spent a few months in a ward with an unknown disease for everyone around him. Even Maddie and Jack, who were now engaged - they apparently had a cute story to tell, how Jack tripped during the date he wanted to propose at and the ring fell out of his pocket, ruining the surprise. Even then, Maddie said yes, - told him they weren’t really worried.

Because it’s you! was something he heard at least ten times in the first day out.

His heart was still beating, he was still breathing, his blood was still red - and sometimes, all of this wasn’t true at all. Suddenly walking out in broad daylight when something in him completely, irrevocably changed was surreal. And horrible, yes.

There was no trial period, no malfunction to his newfound abilities - that has happened during the months - months! - he spent dying on that stupid bed. Vlad’s body got used to what it became and now functioned normally. As much as that was possible.

There was just one thing that reminded him of how horrifying his true nature was to others.

Vlad convulsed in his bed, clawing at his chest. The burning, the flaming drive he first felt during the stay wasn’t dying down. I got worse, hotter over time, and now that molten feeling was making his currently painfully human body destroy itself over and over again, every night.

But, really, it was all quite worth it.

Even if Vlad never got rid of that alien feeling.

Well. He didn’t need such a stupid thing like humans.

..

...

.

Vlad checked out the clock. It has been two hours in human time since Daniel fainted. He knew from personal experience the time gaps during the death day - more like death week - could reach seven hours. He hoped it wouldn’t happen, because the silence was starting to gnaw on him already. The loneliness was already painful in his real mansion, but the Ghost Zone had the habit of making already striking things extreme. The lair wasn’t just silent, it was deafening.

The results of his correspondence with the Fenton family came back after he texted them the pre-taken picture of Daniel and a ‘he fell asleep after doing his chores <3’ text were sent to the group chat created specifically for this trip. Jack spammed him with words of gratitude written in all caps lock.

Jazz wrote him privately, a word of warning. She was sure Daniel’s friends were going to get here soon. Vlad doubted it, considering the map they used to get around was only suited for ghosts, and if humans wanted to use it without one... well. It was better they didn’t, which was Vlad sure they were aware of.

Maddie wrote, dryly, ‘I hope you’re happy about this’. And wasn’t that just. Lovely.

Vlad heard a sound coming from the operation table. When he turned his head, he saw a pair of blinding green eyes staring at him. They were wide open, striking Vlad as weird with the endless, vast horror in them.

Daniel woke up.

And he was feverishly tugging at his restraints.