Nest Swap 8

Nest Swap 8

Masterpost

He did not go to bed. He went to the computer and he searched up Batman. Wikipedia had the same article. He clicked on it and scrolled down to the list of associates. It was… 

A really long list. Tim’s eyes crossed. There were a whole bunch of boring irrelevant people in other states. But more importantly, there was a list of speculated Robins. Robins, as in plural. 

“Four or five, depending on who you believe,” Tim muttered incredulously to himself. The original Robin, one next, then a girl, and now a short one. That was so many Robins. It was perhaps too many Robins. There should have just been the one. The others were fakers. He scowled at his screen, a little offended for Dick.

At least he knew, now. That was what Oracle meant by ‘the birds’. Tim put his face on his hands and tried not to feel small and silly. She meant the robins.

Tim closed the tab and tried to feel ready to search up the Waynes to confirm his theory. 

The second Robin would have been Jason. He had no idea about the girl or the new one, but doubtlessly Bruceman BatWayne had adopted them. If he searched Bruce Wayne’s name, he’d see it.

Tim closed the laptop. He didn’t need to see it to know that he was right. And honestly, he was tired. He dragged a lap blanket off the back of the couch and made it into a cape for comfort. He trailed around the empty, quiet apartment and tried to feel better. He would not be able to sleep if he went to bed like this; he just knew it. 

‘Why didn’t Jason come?’ He hugged his blanket to his body and wished he felt warmer. ‘You’re supposed to like your boyfriend. I’ve been here for days and no one tried to see me before those two. Why did he not come home?’

Maybe they were fighting. Maybe that request for surveillance meant something. Tim craned back to remember Jason’s exact wording. The first relevant thing he’d said had been…

 “I picked up on something - I think one of my ongoing cases dips into your patrol area. You gonna come out tonight?” 

Then Tim said no, because he was 9 years old. Then Jason said a bad word. Then he said “Fair enough. Uh, think you could do some surveillance for me?”  

Tim ran it back and forth a couple of times. He didn’t see any subtext. So… No. he decided no, Jason hadn’t been communicating anything that indicated a particular problem in their relationship. Maybe he was just out of town.

He poured himself a glass of milk and challenged himself to drink it as slowly as possible. By the time it was gone, Tim sort of felt better. He went back to the guest room and crawled into bed. 

Despite his feeling that he wouldn’t sleep, it was like he just laid down and blinked to see it was the morning. Tim snuffled and pushed his hair out of the way. He sat up slowly. Man, he felt crummy. Unenthusiastically, he swung his legs over the side of the bed and scooted down to the cold floor. 

Bleh.

“I want Mom,” Tim said. No one answered, because the apartment was big and empty and there was nothing to indicate that anyone who loved him lived there. He felt kinda empty in his chest as he walked himself to the kitchen. He wasn’t even hungry, but it was just the law for people that you have to eat in the morning. 

He put bread in the toaster. He got out the pan but it just seemed like too much work. He left that on the counter and then climbed onto the counter to dig out the peanut butter from the cupboards. 

Okay. Peanut butter toast. That was pretty good. Tim snagged an apple off the counter and started peeling it. 

“Ow!” He dropped the peeler with a clatter. The apple landed on his foot and rolled away. He was too busy sucking on his finger to do anything about it. Tim danced in place for a minute, tearing up in pain. It hurt so bad! He ran to the sink and put his finger under the water, scared to see how deep he had cut himself.

In the clear stream of water, he could see that it was a cut that made a flap of skin. There wasn’t any bone or anything. It was fine. He was fine. He just needed a bandaid.

Tim burst into genuine tears. He sat on the floor and cried his heart out. He didn’t want to be here anymore. He wanted to go home. He was tired of being too small for his life. His sobs gradually petered off into sniffles. 

He picked himself up and wrapped a paper towel around his finger so that it didn’t bleed on anything. He hunted down the apple and threw it away. He unpeeled a banana instead, because a banana never hurt anyone aside from the pain of it tasting bad. He poured himself milk and juice and he put peanut butter on his cold toast. He ate it all, feeling numb. He had to, because no one else was going to. After that, he went looking for bandages. At least big Tim had a lot of them. Big Tim was really prepared to get hurt and have no one to help him.

So lucky.

The apartment felt a lot less fun now.

It was hard to even work up enthusiasm for Miss Tamara, but it was his job. So Tim reluctantly dragged himself to the laptop and opened the email to see if she’d said anything.

She had. She said to call her.

Tim went looking for the phone. It turned out to be under the sofa for some reason. He didn’t remember why. He hit the power button, discovered it was dead, and then he plugged it in. He waited around and fidgeted while it charged enough to turn on. He called Miss Fox right away.

She picked up on the third ring. “Tim, good to hear from you,” Tamara said easily.

…It felt nice to hear that. Tim swallowed. “Is there a situation?” he asked. 

“The opposite, thank you for that documentation,” Tamara said. She sounded like the pretty version of a shark somehow. “I confronted the employee with it and they did admit to some malfeasance. They were hiding an earlier error. Of course, I went and confirmed that mistake made sense. Thank you for including your exhaustive list of theories.” She sounded amused by that. “Never change, Tim.”

That hit him in a weird way. Tim rubbed at his chest, wondering what that meant. He’d just been thinking that he really needed to change and grow up. “I’m glad that I could assist you,” Tim said. “Thank you for telling me how you resolved the situation.”

“No problem,” she said crisply. “Will I see you in the office on Monday?”

Tim looked at his wall. He could see his reflection in a picture frame. It was mostly blocked out by the bright colors in the photo behind the glass. It was just obscuring enough that he could imagine how his face was going to look when he met Miss Fox. “I hope so.” He didn’t know who Zatanna was, but Oracle seemed efficient. She had probably made the correct staffing decision, just like Miss Fox would. 

The day seemed a little brighter after that. Tim picked himself up with a new feeling of determination. He hadn’t ruined things. Sure, he hadn’t been totally successful. But so what? Who won every game they played?

He went back to studying. He barely registered it when the bell rang.

When Tim lifted his head, he was mostly just grabbing around for the phone on autopilot in order to make it quiet. “Shush,” he said, trying to shut off the alarm.

He hit ‘accept’ on the phone call instead.

That woke him up. Tim stared at the timer counting up from 0 seconds to 1, 2, and then hastily lifted it to his ear.

“Hey?” 

“Jason,” Tim breathed.

“That’s my name,” Jason agreed, sounding weirdly uncomfortable. “You’re still sick? Jeeze. You aren’t dying or anything, right? You’ve been out of the field for a while.”

“I’m perfectly healthy,” Tim said. “I will see a specialist, though.” He left off any estimate of time, since Oracle hadn’t said how long it would take. “I apologize for my failure to make progress on your case. I’ll get it done today.”

“...That’s not terrifying or anything.” Jason sighed. “I thought this was a cold. I, uh.” He cleared his throat. “There’s some chicken soup outside your door. Take it or don’t. I don’t care.”

“What?” Tim asked.

“Back off,” Jason snapped back. 

…They sat in silence for a couple of seconds. On Tim’s end, it was a confused silence. But he felt a little warmed. “You made me soup,” Tim said aloud. “Right?”

Jason said another bad word. “Eat it,” he snapped. “I just don’t want you to waste away before you do that surveillance. I know you don’t eat enough. I’m going to bed.”

The dial tone rang out in Tim’s ear. Dazed, it took him a couple of seconds to lower his phone. He put it on his lap and recalibrated. 

“He loves me,” Tim said, choked up.

He cried about it a little. But it was a good cry this time! Tim was happy that someone cared about Big Tim. The idea that he was going to grow up to live in this big empty place with no friends or family around had been scaring him. The fact that he was wrong sent so much relief through his body. 

He retrieved the soup and ate it. He cried a little more when he realized the dumplings were homemade.

When he was done wrestling with big feelings, Tim knew what he had to do. He went back to his studies with renewed determination. He was going to get Jason the right information about the Sausage man, no matter what.

the catholic church just called and said the 7 deadly sins are now gooning, price gouging, FOMO, binge watching, ragebait, mukbangs, and reaction videos with just someone in the corner pointing at the content and nodding along

inktober #5

in which i draw the same pose a second time

also ocs

All right you got my creative juices running with part five of Klarion is Dan yes the first series I ever came to you with

To find him Klarion isn't the only one living in the DC dimension in like the word of protective mother Danny is he sent one of clarion's older siblings to go with him Larsal/Lassie

She was one of the clone children that was created long before Danny knew that was trying to clone him she was one of the first failures

She doesn't really have a physical form as much she is more of like a big pit of water that has like a spiritual like form like Dr Fate

She hates Vlad so much that the entire League of assassins who's also hit him even though they don't know who he is but know that Danny got from Clockwork was about her and visiting

Klarion knows about the quote as the same thing last knows about him being a villain they keep each other secrets cuz they know they make Mom disappointed

When they do have somewhat of a physical form it's a cowgirl with a horse made entirely of Lazarus Pits

Along with that Vlad making surprise visit after feeling someone's littering his name more than usual it's like a call about anytime he knows his children or Daniel is talking about him

Also Batman's freaking out after I think that one of Danny's kids is such a little hater that they made a cult just despite their father which makes the Justice League think Vlad really that bad

This is just the funny idea and I know it's not a good prompt I'm still trying to think of more sorry

Oh I love this! Thanks you!

This is going to be fun in a way I hope! Enjoy~

----------------------------------

Danny barely avoided getting questioned further about his relation to Vlad when he noticed the green post-it note and made a grab for it. "Oh would you look at that! Pop is sending us a message!"

Okay maybe he said that louder than necessary but he needed to change the topic. He didn't need more people on to torment the fruitloop. His own kids were already giving the man enough grief as it was. He didn't need distant cousins or an entire hero society of another dimension coming after the fruitloop too. Not that he would mind that much but some mercy towards the redeemed man would probably be appropriated.

Either way Danny focused his attention on the note only half heartedly listening as Klarion continued his family tree explanation to his little hero friends. He blinked at the note several times before laughing happily. "Would you look at that! Lassie is going to come by! Your Granpa Clock is giving us a heads up, so I can prepare a fresh batch of ectoplasm for her to stay healthy!"

Whatever Klarion was explaining right now was abandoned as he sat up straight. "Lassie is coming too?"

"Well of course she is." Danny hummed happily, thankful for the chance of seeing both his kids that liked to life in the same dimension.

"Lassie?" Red Robin piped up questioning. Oh looks like this is one of Klarions siblings they hadn't gotten to yet regarding explanations.

"Yes my fourth oldest but unofficial second oldest." Danny nodded with a proud mother smile on his face. "She lives in this dimension too to keep an eye on Klarion so he would stay safe and dosen't over do it."

Klarion on the other hand groaned. "I don't need Lassie to baby sit me!"

"Klarion, sweety you were new to the whole living alone in another dimension thing. You spent the longest in FarFrozen and the Ghost Zone with me because of your destabilisation." Danny reprimanded him softly and the teen heroes snickered behind Klarions back to which the witch boy turned to glare at them with a greenish blush across his cheeks.

"So what does that sister of yours look like?" Impulse asked to change the topic and because he took a bit of pity on Klarion for the way his Mom was apparently embarrassing the witch boy. His question resulted in Klarion flipping though the photo album before stopping at an image of Klarion next to a pit of green something. Impulse arched an eyebrow and was about to comment when he got pushed roughly to the side by Red Robin.

"THAT'S A LAZARUS PIT!"

The way Batman's chair clattered to the ground as the man stood up looked every bit like he was going to rush over to the teens spoke for the shock that Red Robin shout had caused. The Ghost King and Klarion on the other hand looked rather calm as they barely reacted to the shout and Danny even motioned to Batman to sit back down again, as the chair that fell rightened itself again.

"Calm down. Lassie is a good child. She wouldn't hurt a fly." Danny told them smiling, not realising that both Batman and Red Robin were giving him increadulous looks behind their mask.

"A.... good child?" Batman repeated his slowly his voice even more tinged with his usual gruff gravel in a way that both Superman and Wonder Woman side eyed him worried while Flash snacked on a pack of melon flavoured ships he snacked from a table.

"She doesn't have a physical body, that is why she is relying on the pits of natural ectoplasm your dimension has. There was a little problem with her physical form and we just couldn't restore it and she refuses to get a unoccupied clone body like Klarion has." Danny explained further not minding the stares he or Klarion were getting.

"Pits of natural ectoplasm?" Batman reiterated, his tone clearly questioning, to which Danny only blinked a couple of times surprised. "I thought your dimension knew what they were? Sure the way you guys use them is strange and Lassie did sound a bit concerned when she told me about it but I didn't think you guys weren't aware what they were."

"No that is not...." Red Robin started but then but himself of as he turned around hurriedly in a defensive position as he noticed someone coming in through the window. He wasn't the only one. All the heroes reacted as one at the new presence, however what they didn't expect was a member of the League of Assassins blinking up at them stunned after climbing in through the window lifting their hands palm up in a gesture of peace.

"Woah hey there calm down! Klarion what the fuck? Why are there so many heroes in your Apartment?" The LoA member spoke up and all eyes turned to Klarion who instead only deadpanned. "I told you Mom was visiting to meet my 'friends'"

"Lassie, what did I tell you about possessing bodies?" The Ghost King piped up in a disapproving tone and they heard the distinctive tone of someone knocking their head against the table, probably Constantine.

"Sorry Mom but there are not Pits of ectoplasm near baby brother I could use to form a body." The LoA member, apparently possessed by Klarion's elder sister replied sheepishly. To say Red Robin was weirded out was an understatement. Usually if he encountered LoA members they were aggressive and most likely there to take him or one of his siblings out.

"That's an League of Assasin member...." He muttered under his breath to which said member laughed. "This guy was the closest to me to use for the moment. Don't worry I will release him later and he won't even remember a thing. I got my little sheep's well trained."

"Little sheep's?" Wonder Girl repeated a hand on her hip as she stared sceptically, to which Klarion face palmed and muttered a low "Sis shut up...."

"No Lassie, don't shut up." Danny intone from the kitchen table he was still sitting at with the other adults, his head was now resting on his hand as he stared at his two kids who visibly flinched.

The LoA member, possessed by Klarions sister, scratched the back of is head nervously as they faced the Ghost King. "Ah Mom, uhm hehe you know funny story..."

The heroes were pretty sure that the room had gotten several degrees colder and they weren't sure if that was because of the mood of a parent about to interrogate their child or because of the Ghost Kings power. (At a later time Constantine swore it were the Ghost Kings powers.) There was a awkward moment of silence the heroes weren't sure if they should be present for that or not especially when Danny stood up and walked over to the teens.

On reflex Wonder Girl, Superboy, Impulse and Red Robin made room for Danny to walk past them as they watched on torn between curiosity and pity, because clearly Klarion and his sister Lassie must have done something they weren't supposed to do. And honestly they were more curious what they did, after all the Ghost King hadn't been that faced when it got revealed that Klarion was more of a Villain than a Hero to them.

"Lassie, what did you do?" The teen heroes couldn't see Danny's face but from the tone they had a feeling that Danny was arching an eyebrow at his children.

Lassie laughed awkwardly once more. "So... you know how grandma Pandora kind of thought us about how our own emotion can influence those around us exposed to our ectoplasm over a long period of time?"

"Lassie..."

"I might have raised something akin to a cult on accident and passed on my personal grudge and hate towards the fruitloop along to them and they might now have the subconscious drill of attack on sight if Vlad ever makes an appearance in this dimension...." The LoA member slowly spoke up which had several of the adult heroes blinking in disbelief.

Batman especially was in shock of hearing about this since had the most interaction with this 'cult' as apparently one of the Ghost Kings children liked to call the League of Assassins. The bat suit wearing hero was about to interject and ask more but stopped when the Ghost King let out a suffering sigh like the most tired parent in existence. "And you didn't think about telling me this sooner because?"

"We don't like to disappoint you Mom." The two children of the Ghost King replied simultaneously like one united front. Danny in response gave his kids a light chuckle. But before Danny could go on any further Red Robin decided it was probably a good time to interject and remind the Ghost King of their presence.

"I got a question if you don't mind..." He lifted his hand like he was in school as he pulled the attention towards him. His curiosity won over his caution of the situation. "Klarion if the Lazarus Pits are actually 'ectoplasm' as you mentioned before, and are largely influenced by your sisters emotion. What happens to guy that bath regularly in them or someone that got thrown in there and game back out rage filled?"

"Red Robin!" Batman call out reprimanding instantly knowing where Red Robins line of question was going.

The possessed LoA member on the other hand blinked at them before scratching their head sheepishly. "I think I know who your talking about. I am still sorry about that second guy. When he got dunked into my ectoplasm, I kinda just came back from a visit home and had a bad fight with Vlad and was especially rage filled towards him."

"So does that mean...?" Red Robin inquired further ignoring Batman's silent glare towards him for even bringing these questions up and just as Lassie was about to answer Danny interjected.

"Lassie, go fix your cult." Another green note at materialised out of nowhere and had fluttered in the air before him and caused the Ghost King to face palm the moment he read it's context.

"Mom?" Both Klarion and Lassie asked with a shared worried glance.

"Vlad has come into the dimension for some reasons and is currently getting chased down by your cult."

There was a stunned silence after which Klarion and Lassie, in the body of the LoA member, broke out laughing hysterically which only caused Danny to lightly glare at his children. Meanwhile the teen heroes weren't sure if they should feel sorry for the old man called Vlad but considering all the red flags they had picked up from what Klarion told them, they felt a little like the man deserved that.

The adults on the other hand felt slightly torn, well mostly Batman. It was clear that this Vlad was a bigger threat than both Klarion and the Ghost King were making him out to be, considering the entire existence of the Lazarus Pits hated that man. But on the other hand as heroes they probably should feel obligated to help the man especially if, according to the Ghost Kings words, he was currently gotten chased in their dimension by the League of Assassins.

Danny on the other hand never felt more like a tired mother than he did right now. Sure he knew about his unofficial second oldest hatred towards Vlad but this certainly was a new level of hate. Especially since she apparently 'accidentally' (he doesn't by that at all) raised an entire cult that subconsciously hated him too.

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 enraged it 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.

"That's not true. I'm not like you."

“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 portal from which he’d made himself.

...

(inspiration post from @ciestess)

This is gonna be a doozey