A/N: Happy Holidays! I know some of you probably hope for another Heroic story but given the season and that this story is more complete, I really wanted to put this out first. Enjoy!
The Partner
Fluffy snowflakes floated gently to the ground, alighting on glittering faux fur coats wrapped around cold-resistant blue and orange hazmat and decorating shopping bags bloated with Christmas gifts, sparkling red, green and white wrapping paper and giant bows in silver and gold. Flakes carefully settled on cheerful Santa hats, touched cheeks red with cold and bright smiles.
At their feet, snowflakes drowned in green blood.
Danny Phantom fought gravity, but every time he lifted his body an inch, the earth's force multiplied tenfold, as though he drowned at the bottom of the ocean. Every harsh breath burned like a thousand hot coals. Up his head came, slow as the downed fox bitten and clawed by hounds to stare at their master's gun. Ectoplasm melted the snow all around him, pooled beneath him, soaked his suit and the alleyway as it dried, clotting his wounds until a single twitch split them open again with a fresh burst of pain. Muscles trembled with exertion as though he'd run two marathons; the ghost hero tried to pull his arms beneath his body and prop himself up. Any position was better than lying prone before ghost hunters. Torn muscles screamed like tortured prisoners from the weight of his body. Gnashing teeth, unwilling to give in the ghostly superhero pressed further as though climbing a rope parted to a thread.
That thread of strength snapped. Eyes flew wide like his heart had given out, agony redoubled like an extra weight flung upon a bowed back, sending him crashing into the snow once more. His chest strained for every burning breath, feeble puffs of air passed broken ribs and scattered snowflakes onto two pairs of snow-boots that had stopped mere inches from his face.
Phantom lay like a stag at the end of a bloody trail that could go no further, nor put up any fight. The very last vestiges of his strength had been expended dragging his battered, beaten body through a fortuitous portal back to the human world.
"Typical luck," he muttered. He had crawled with every inch of speed his tortured, broken body could muster only to find himself crumpled at the feet of the infamous Fenton doctors. They blotted out the cheery Christmas decorations of shops with their bulk.
"Jack," whispered Maddie, her eyes never leaving weary green ones as Danny struggled to get his arms beneath him.
"I've got an emergency ecto-net in the GAV," Jack said breathlessly.
"Good, then go get it. Hurry."
Unable to crouch, unable to crawl, Danny mustered the last fragments of his power to escape—intangibility, flight, anything was better than staying. With his gristly fate looming like the specter of Christmas future, Danny cared nothing for his pride, but before he could so much as twitch a finger his own mother pounced upon him. With feline swiftness her hands closed around his right arm and wrenched any looseness from the limb and a scream from his lips.
Phantom gasped again, air rushing into his lungs like broken glass as Maddie's hold tightened, broken bone twisting and scraping on other broken bones like raw nerves against concrete. Beneath her hands his muscles went rigid with protest. Escape was futile. The lock not only immobilized the powerless limb but further twisted torn ligaments while her fingers pressed deeper into the wounds wrapped around his wrist. Pain stabbed him through burned skin and Danny trembled from the force of the agony, clenching his teeth around a scream. Intangibility, normally effortless, was far beyond his reach now, on the other side of the ocean of agony engulfing him.
"You're not getting away this time ghost." Her grip tightened.
Pain slammed him in the gut, ripping air from his lungs. Danny tried to twist his body to relieve the tension within torn tissues but the first roll of muscle gave him away to his mother. Wrapping one arm around his right to secure it, she grabbed hold of his left arm and yanked it from beneath him. Again Danny collapsed in the snow, chest pressing into gravel beneath gray slush. White-hot agony slammed into his back like a guillotine as a hundred and thirty pounds of muscle centered on less than four square inches of knee forced him further to the ground. The superhero felt his legs go numb, as though they couldn't stand to feel the pain anymore.
Was his back been broken?
Crawling through the pain like he'd desperately crawled through the ghost zone, Danny focused only on intangibility. It streamed slowly through him, like his rings the first time he'd transformed and his body turned more to mist than true intangibility. A hundred and thirty concentrated pounds of force sank a fraction of an inch deeper. Bony knee hit bony spine.
Despite his torn throat, broken ribs and acidic air in his lungs, a scream ripped from his lungs like a gunshot, so loud, so sudden his mother flinched from the sheer sound. Danny's voice was high and rough and harsh like a dying animal; he thrashed like a fish speared straight through as misty muscles snapped solid again. The rawness of his throat, like his windpipe had been scraped clean of flesh with a razor, was mere background pain to the unceasing drum of agony in his back. His senses drowned in pain.
"Got the net!" Jack bellowed.
"Good, he's trying to escape," said Maddie.
With both arms twisted behind his back in his mother's iron-sure grip, his whole upper body pinned beneath her ax of a knee, Danny couldn't do more than kick if he wasn't torn to hell and back. The weak twitches did nothing against the steel-strong, flexible strands of anti-ecto energy Jack flung onto him. Freezing the net did nothing, not with his powers so drained. He doubted either ghost hunter realized his latest escape attempt.
Maddie coiled strands of net around his limbs, hopelessly entangling them in a thousand nooses and cutting off flight as she bound first his left arm, then his right. Without the need to pin him to the ground she was able to rise and bind his twitching legs just as harshly. Danny's lungs filled with air like acid, shaving off the dizziness clouding his eyes.
"Don't." The word was a whisper against a northern gale, issuing from bloody, cracked lips, followed by a wet cough. That soft plea only encouraged his parents. Coils of ghost-trapping fibers resistant to liquid nitrogen temperatures ensnared his throat, choking further words. Once they backed off Danny Phantom was wrapped up just like another Christmas present.
"We went out Christmas shopping and got the best present of our lives." Jack's squeal belonged on a little kid on Christmas. Danny had never heard his father so excited.
"Yes, lets hurry up and get home so we can unwrap him," Maddie gave him a peck on the cheek before hoisting the ghost hero's shoulders off the ground. Jack grabbed his legs and the pair heaved him up with more difficulty than they would have needed in previous years.
"He's heavier than I remember," Jack commented. "I could've sworn he was only half my size."
His stomach wrenched all its bile away. He gagged without release, as though his vomit had spread to the rest of his guts. Danny floated in a haze of wanting desperately to scream in agony and vomit in agony and unable to do either, which was more painful still.
"How fascinating, we need to compare with our files back home but I think the facial features have aged like a living teenager." Danny's heart froze, but his mother only gave the sort of laugh that comes from hearing something preposterous expressed.
Holiday crowds should have choked their progress to the GAV but Jack had driven the whole vehicle over rather than just retrieved the net. And when Jack drove, everyone fled. In only a few short steps Danny hung in front of it. The Fenton Specter Container sprang open and the two paranormal scientists pushed him, net and all, inside the Fenton invention.
Danny was thoroughly trapped. His injuries made focusing on his dwindling powers like climbing a mountain after hiking ten miles to get there. Intangibility didn't even phase him. The net's coils didn't loosen in the slightest. These feeble shreds of effort ate at his sight, darkening his surroundings as exhaustion pulled him under like the ocean against a castaway.
The world brightened as his face smashed against the glass-like containment unit. The car twisted as though balanced on two wheels. Anything not nailed or glued down pitched sideways as the world turned inside out. Jack had pulled a u-turn. The GAV straightened out and Danny was flung back to the other side, the laws of physics taking vengeance against his skull. This did not mercifully make him blacken out. Merciful blackouts, in his experience, were too rare and too short. Turning his head slightly to ease this new migraine, Danny's eyes met the glowing green stare of an ecto-gun. Despite the driving that would ensure them back at the house within five minutes regardless of traffic, Maddie's aim with the weapon never wavered. Like a professional bull-rider her lower body moved with every crazy whip-lash Jack executed at the helm of the wheel while her upper body was poised motionless as a hawk's head.
Staring beyond the merciless eye of the ghost weapon and into the reddened, insect-like goggles that hid his mother's eyes, Danny attempted to sway her with what little breath he had regained.
"You can't…let me…go?" he rasped in a voice that sounded like torture even to his own ears. "In…Christmas s-spirit?"
"No," said Maddie harshly.
"Why does Christmas matter to a filthy ghost?" Jack asked, honest bewilderment coloring his boisterous attitude as traffic dodged him.
"Christmas…matters," Danny whispered softly, but with powerful conviction. After Ghost Writer…after he had so thoroughly ruined Christmas, his friends had taught him that.
"Only to the living, now ghost unless you have something useful to say, stay silent, we don't want to wake Danny up," Maddie ordered.
Hysterical laughter bubbled up in his throat. Oh the irony. "I…hah, ohh…don't think…he…you need *snicker* to…worry." Oh, laughing was so not the best medicine. Splatters of ectoplasm stung his tongue. His laughter trailed off to a wet-bubbly hiss as his ribs staged a revolt against the rest of his body.
"Danno doesn't get enough sleep anyway so shut it," Jack added.
Danny had one more chance to escape. Every breath he took was to bolster himself as much as possible. This time he practically wrung his ghost core of all the power he could. He didn't move, didn't dare give his mother a twitch of a hint of his thoughts. Click went the containment unit. His father grabbed the net first.
Now!
Danny slipped through the coils like water between fingers. Coils tightened around a wrist, snagging him like a hook on a fish. Yanking his wrist, it pulled free with a sickening crack and got to his feet.
Like a leopard Maddie Fenton pounced again on him, one hand gripping his broken wrist. Another flash of blinding pain froze him. Another bungle of coils as the insidious net—how he hated nets—was flung over him, its coils strangling his movements. If he hadn't been in so much pain Phantom would have been embarrassed at how easily Jack and Maddie caught him and hauled him away.
Adrenaline slipped away. Once more the core of agony beat in his chest, pulsed in his limbs down to his fingers. Phantom could feel every wound as though every nerve was focused only on their emanating pain. They hauled him none-too-gently in the house. The door swung closed, edge digging into a gash on his shoulder. His leg hit the corner of the hall, jostling a torn tendon. His damaged wrist smacked against the doorknob to the lab. Down the stairs they carried him but occasionally a food or ankle would hit the stairs, jolting his aching body.
They let him drop on one of the many cold, metallic dissection tables. Danny let out a scream as every wound, torn tendon and broken bone got a re-run. Panting harshly, every breath spattering more ectoplasm on his lips, he tried to manage the pain as it rolled over him in waves. Each wave united, gathering their strength, crashed over him and never pulled back. These he bore with struggling breaths through gritted teeth, with cries strangled in a raspy throat that could not do his pain justice. He wanted to curl in a ball, reach into himself and tear out that pulsing heart of pain. The gaping wound it would leave would be a relief.
"…make sure he doesn't get away this time," he heard of his mom's voice.
Cold metal hit his tongue, thrust through his jaws to scrape the back of his throat. Danny gagged as the device wrenched his jaws apart. His garbled plea was muffled before he could even voice it as a rubber and steel contraption was forced in and around his mouth. A gag. A thought struck him. True terror flooded his nerves, excited his tendons and muscles and pushed away the pain from his conscious thought. If he did not reveal his secret now he might not get the chance to…at least, not until after. Danny Phantom reached within the core of himself, for the warm pulse of life that was centered within and protected by his ghostly form before his parents could make the most irreparable mistake of their lives.
Cuffs snapped around his wrists like jaws, another set seized his ankles and the grasp he had upon that beat of life loosened. Phantom's breath condensed to liquid in his lungs. Had he forever lost his human half, his connection to life?
No, no of course not, common sense said. Cuffs could not kill him, but they could muffle his powers as the gag muffled his voice. After all the time and effort he had spent to conceal his secret was the entire universe now so against its exposure? Only an incomprehensible muffled confession escaped the gag. The bitter rubber flavor was overwhelmed with the noxious acidic taste from a hundred bleeding captives. Phantom tried to spit the accursed thing out but it didn't move. Bile crawled up his throat instead and he had to relax his jaws and breathe shallowly. His vision was enveloped by teal before black blotted it out. Chilly hazmat fabric clung all around his eyes and upper half of his face. A startlingly loud click pierced his ears as a metallic clasp pinched a throbbing knot at the back of his head. With vision vanished and speech strangled he had only his ears and nose to inform him about the familiar lab and his parents. Through the filter of two senses these household things became alien and horrific as all ghosts knew his parents' lab.
The acidic stench of ectoplasm clogged his nose and reached into his brain, ghosting over primal terror. The smell was inescapable, on the gag, on his parent's hazmat suits, flowing from his wounds, in beakers and jars and needles. The blood of ghosts. Fresh and old, burnt and liquid and solid on the floor. To his ghostly instincts the lab was as horrific as any torture chamber, so consumed with the stench of ghost blood his nose could scent nothing else.
But he could hear.
"Definitely not getting away again. Do you have that new invention set up?"
"In a minute." That would be his dad. "Just a few more calibrations. Isn't this exciting! I've always wanted to rip a ghost apart molecule by molecule and this baby should let us do it. And it couldn't have happened to a better ghost."
"Yes dear, eventually but first the samples. We should keep him intact as long as possible."
Which option was least horrific? His father's or his mother's. Danny's best efforts only pained him more. Strength oozed out of him with his blood. His wounds were crusting over, but too slowly and the world tilted oddly. Collapsing against the table, his head lolled toward the cuffs, the blindfold and gag digging into the sides of his face. No eyes were needed for him to know the cuffs were even stronger than the slender cables of the net. As the dizziness subsided he lifted one arm, attempting to reach beyond the table the cuff clasped him to. Nothing, not the slightest squeak to hint his strength was even close to overcoming the cuffs.
"Try breaking those cuffs again and I will shoot you," said Maddie, voice harsher than the ecto-gun's whine. "I don't need you completely intact to understand your anatomy."
A wince escaped Danny, though not from imagined pain. The mere thought that his parents would, in their ignorance, harm their own son kept him still. When or if he ever revealed his secret—and he really should, like now—they would never forgive themselves for any harm to him. So out of fourteen years of pure love for them, he remained still. Another bout of dizziness overcame him and he closed his eyes. Why was it taking so long for his wounds to close?
Would everything be better if they didn't, if he simply faded away before his parents could actually do anything? Better than having them forever carry the price of his secrecy.
"I can't believe we let this get so cluttered." He could hear his mother's footsteps, unsteady and careful in the manner of someone picking their steps amid ruins.
"Well we weren't expecting to capture Phantom on this night of all nights. Where's the ecto-infiltrator? Need to test that out."
"You have the ghost security engaged?"
"Of course!"
Finger pads pressed along the sides of his wrists on the boundaries of the cuffs. Nails pricked like teeth against the thin barrier of hazmat suit. Had Danny lost a little more blood, been a little dizzier, he could believe nothing was different. Her hands could be checking his wounds, her touch could be soothing, her soft motherly murmurs relaxing.
"There. Don't want you escaping like every other time ghost." A harsh, bond-testing tug.
…Almost.
"Found it!" Jack bellowed. "Now let's fire this baby up."
His excitable father fell silent. Clicking buttons and the occasional shift of weight alone kept the lab from peace. The oppressive quiet lingered and loomed like another shade of pain. Simultaneous gasps penetrated Danny's foggy hearing just before his mother's voice continued. "Honey…how is this possible?"
"I don't know, but it practically upends twenty years of research and theories and conclusions," said his father. "Maybe he's a new breed of ghost or something!" said Jack. "Imagine the possibilities! The discoveries!"
"And this is why we need to preserve him."
Danny fought against the cuffs, straining to reach something—anything other than laying helplessly. Every contortion felt like bone scraping against bone. The minute movements peeled open wounds glued with blood, freeing a fresh supply of ectoplasm. Spots of color dotted his darkened sight. Danny took several deep, steady breaths through nose and gag, desperately clinging to consciousness.
Maddie Fenton knew how to imprison better than any enemy and hadn't missed any means of escape. Even his neck was bound to the table, what little movement the manacles allowed was only good for tearing open his wounds. Danny struggled with everything he had left. He couldn't resign himself to his worst nightmares, to this reality. No—he had to escape.
One more reason Christmas was such a horrible holiday for him.
"…the best holiday present ever!" Jack crowed.
"Present?" Maddie stopped. "Jack, the presents. Oh damn it's almost Christmas," said Maddie.
"Not to worry, we're talking about Danny up at the crack of noon Fenton," said Jack. "Plenty of time to get some molecule ripping done."
"But Jazz is home from college and she's always been an early riser," said Maddie. "I don't like it any more than you do but family…family does come first. Always."
"You're right Maddie pie," said Jack, "Besides, between the two of us Phantom's not going anywhere. Let me start up the Fenton security system and then we'll go and wrap those presents!"
"We should cage him just in case," Maddie added. "We won't have to wait long. You know how attached Danny is to his friends," said Maddie. "He might want to go visit them with Jazz and then we'll have the house to ourselves."
"That's the spirit!" added Jack, "Or we could get the kids to bed early," his voice dropped to a suggestive tone Danny could have gladly spent his entire life without hearing, "And have the whole night of studying to ourselves."
Blood loss and pain took its toll. When the cuffs snapped open Danny could barely manage a half-hearted jerk toward the illusion of freedom. A pair of hands hauled him over a beefy shoulder like a sack of flour, bringing enough pain for bile to pierce his tongue and colors blasted sightless eyes. His remaining senses drowned in pain. When at last the torturous jerking and twisting of his limbs stopped, a solid metal column stood between his body and the cuffs, his arms curled around it. From memory alone he knew that solid bar of metal was buried in both floor and ceiling. Even if he managed to rip it out—a feat he couldn't manage at less than full strength—the whole lab would collapse upon his freedom.
A door whined shut. Their retreating footsteps were muffled on the metallic floor and his father spoke with a muted voice.
"Just a moment, ah here we go. Now don't you move ghost because this whole system is now targeted for your unique ectoplasmic signature. Even think about stepping or phasing a limb out of that cage and you'll be Swiss cheese. "
"Just to make certain," Maddie checked off precautions: "Gag, blindfold, hands and feet cuffed, collared, chained to the floor, caged and Fenton security system on. Yes, he can't possibly escape. But wait; let me put the security camera on auto-alert, just to be safe. He's a slippery one."
"Well he's not slipping away this time."
Their confidence was not without reason. In full command of his powers, Danny could have phased his arms into tentacle-like limbs to free them and slipped the ankle cuffs with his ghostly tail. Though his father had excitedly babbled of the Fenton Ecto-Container's intangibility imperviousness and ecto-blast invulnerability—the material of the walls and ceiling would burn any spirit—Danny was certain his ghostly wail could blast through.
Beyond the cage, should he escape such an impenetrable barrier, lay the Fenton security system, no ghost land, which had nearly taken his head the last time he had been fool enough to venture to the lab without turning it off. Weakened from escaping the cage, he would have found it a daunting challenge.
But he hadn't command of any of his powers. Wounded, steadily losing more blood, tired and dizzy, blinded and gagged, without the ghostly energy to turn his pinky invisible, he hadn't a prayer. Yet he had to try. He couldn't let his mom and dad do this. For their sakes, he had to escape.
"Just a few hours, we can even slip out and check on him every hour or so just to make certain those bonds are tight," said Maddie as they left the lab.
"This will be the best Christmas ever!" added Jack confidently.
The door slammed shut, leaving agonizing silence in its wake. The new Fenton ghost cage easily filtered out the familiar electrical hum of the lab. Danny attempted once more to contort his body out of its bonds, but they held fast. A fresh wave of starry spots greeted him before darkness. By the time the blackness of unconsciousness receded to the blackness of blindness minutes or hours might have passed. No chill of fresh ectoplasm bit his skin. Mere struggle was not enough; his thumbs would heal quickly again. All he needed was a simple, clean break. Nothing new.
Bracing himself for more pain and turning his thumbs at just the right angle, Danny thought: this is the worst Christmas ever.
Then he jerked violently, smashing fragile bones onto cuffs with the whole of his body weight.
At least the gag muffled his scream.
Fentonworks was festooned with decorations: wrapping paper, ribbon, bows and cards. Green Ghost-shaped Christmas lights, Fenton preceding their name, coiled around the Christmas tree, the staircase, bordered the doorways and hung in a misshapen lump off the roof to light those last few hours of night. Amid all this was the couch, buried beneath the trappings of Christmas surrounding Maddie and Jack.
"Oh, I found the name tags." Jack pulled a crumpled paper of holiday stickers out from beneath his bottom, which was now marked 'to honey, with love, hubby.'
"Thank you dear," said Maddie, "Now this one is for Danny." She handed him one of the new DOOMED games, snatching a psychology book away just in time. While Jazz was resigned to the occasional present mix-up and would spout little more than a minor psychoanalyzing lecture, Danny took it more personally. His shoulders would slump a little more and he was usually so gloomy around the holidays anyway, they didn't need to add to it. Especially not after their annual argument almost ruining Christmas for everyone.
Well, and that no-good ghost.
For this one day she could keep her mouth shut about every scrap of scientific evidence proving Santa's impossibility. Provided her husband kept his ridiculous ideas to himself.
"Oh right, almost forgot myself," said Jack and began wrapping the present. "Sure hope this helps. Danno's been a little down in the dumps lately."
"Yes he has," Maddie trailed off, trying to remember a time when her son hadn't been down in the dumps. Teenage years made new people out of beloved children but Danny—sometimes he just looked so tired. A disturbing sort of tired too, no mere lack of sleep from movie or game marathons.
"This actually looks kinda interesting." Jack broke her musings. "A pity it's all zombies, zombies, zombies. Imagine a ghost game."
"Not a bad idea," Maddie commented, "But no game could possibly compare to the real thing."
"True, true. Would be nice to get Danno into the family business though. Then we could all go ghost hunting! A perfect family get-together."
"There's still a chance dear," said Maddie, curling the last ribbon on Jazz's present with a swipe of scissors. "Look at Jazz. Two years ago ghosts didn't exist in her mind; now she's blazing a trail into para-psychology."
"Right you are, though I don't see the interest in ghost minds. Always obsessing over one thing and not a thought to anything else."
"Like you."
To experienced ghost hunters the oddly-echoing voice was no more frightening than an old friend's, if not nearly as welcome. The pair whipped around as one, drawing ecto-guns—Jack fumbling, Maddie smoothly—to face this new threat.
The glowing, floating form was impossible. Even in a world where ghosts were accepted to exist this was wrong. Jack's heart suffered the blow of a bullet, sharp and numb and white-hot agony all at once. His brain locked only on impossibility.
Maddie's brain broke but her heart remained intact. In a trice she was between the ghost and Jack. That was when the lack of alarm hit her.
They had painstakingly designed, built, re-designed, modified and repaired the Fenton security system to automatically alert them if a ghost so much as set an intangible toe in their house—without going off around their son, of all the strange things. For a ghost to break into Fentonworks wasn't impossible; it happened surprisingly often. To do so silently was.
Yet Jack and Maddie had heard an echoing voice and their security system stayed silent.
This couldn't be.
Ghosts were literally Maddie and Jack's bread and butter. Their familiarity with the paranormal was such that even the godly form of Pariah Dark or the inhuman displays of power from Phantom elicited little more than a bat of an eyelash. Missing heads, malevolent shadows with glowing red eyes, corpse-blue skin or slimy tentacles could not faze them anymore. Ectoplasmic entities had lost the ability to cause a shiver of horror through the spine of either husband or wife.
Until now.
For Jack, to look at the specter was to do so through the eyes of a terrified child, before he'd understood what he was staring at, but knew instinctively was wrong. Merely glancing at it brought ancient fear to the surface. The monster shouldn't exist, especially not here. Surrounded by the glitter and life and trappings of Christmas was death. It didn't belong. This thought produced the instinctive trigger-finger reaction in Jack and a bolt of ectoplasm shot out of his bazooka.
It missed, blowing a hole in the center of a Christmas wreath hanging from their closet door.
Similar emotions coursed through Maddie's body, dragging her back to a silly young teenager whose well-honed martial skills could do nothing against ghosts. The intangible claws no block could deflect, the unnaturally glowing eyes no strike could close had elicited a helpless sort of fear Maddie absolutely hated. Deep in her, alongside fury and fear and drive to never be so defenseless again, was the urge to rip away the veil of ignorance and panic with cold, hard scientific fact.
This ghost brought youthful horror forth once more as no undead creature they had seen before, completely lifeless in a way even the blobs or black shadowy ghosts could never be. Phantom, for all his power, had convinced most people he was practically human for good reason. Lively was an excellent description of him. Trapped and wounded in their lab, he clung to the facade of life as all ectoplasmic slime did.
This ghost looked dead. Not dead as a door-nail, but dead as a coffin nail.
All color had been leached out of the spirit like an old picture left to the weather's ruthlessness, shrouding the ghoul in grays. Its glow was dead. The ghoul's aura devoured the cheery Christmas tree glow, the amusing ghostly decorations, the lamp-light and even the luminous Fentonworks light though the door-windows. This spirit leeched away light like a black hole. The creature's infectious grays dimmed the vibrancy of their room's festive colors. Air grew colder and stale; the couple breathed deep of the grave. To describe this ghost's phantom as death no one bothered to warm over would give the undead too much life. Neither ghost hunter could believe such a monster could have ever had a semblance of being.
Its hazmat suit was like theirs: thick, flexible and tight. But this trapping of life was painted over with tones of death. Rot sunk into the fabric, eating away at the torn and frayed material and into the weakest points like a pestilence. Decay of fabric exposed decay of flesh. Old wounds gaped; a ghostly maggot crawled through folds of diseased ectoplasmic flesh. All the bugs imprisoned within the ghost were as dead as the one feeding them.
Death was its being, making home in its rotted heart. Other ghosts might have cores of ice or fire or even plants and emitted cold or heat or make nearby flowers bloom but not this ghost. Within that immobile chest, next to the deathly still heart loomed a core of death, pulsing forth putrid energy that rotted dead flesh, rusted knives of iron and silver, sullied containers of salt and crumpled blood blossoms to ashes. Even those ancient ghost hunting tools took on the pallor of death; they too were ghosts and in death caused the monster terrible agony.
Rusted, ancient, gnarled, lifeless chains coiled around its chest so tightly all missing breath was wrenched away. Leaden links sunk into softened flesh and brittle bones. Great, heavy manacles bowed once-proud shoulders; they sloped down like ancient mountains worn by endless eons of time. Massive loops of iron bit into bared arteries and veins as they strangled its neck before falling to the floor in a great robe of such heft that each step quaked. Each movement from the ghost brought forth an odd, shuddering sound of hundreds of iron cuffs clanking like the toll of a thousand deaths. Yet the ghost's entrance was silent, its movements not enough to rattle the deathly soundless aura permeating Fentonworks.
But all these horrors were mere window-dressing, relieving compared to the face neither chains nor instruments of torture dared touch. That deathly face was left excruciatingly intact, ravaged only by the monster's deathly core permeating every cell of fetid ectoplasm. Stringy strands of hair latched onto a skull as desperate as blades of grass clinging to life in the godforsaken desert. Lines carved by age—more age than mere life could justify—crisscrossed those sharp features like the scars of some ancient, battle-hardened warrior. Death had been brutal to the long face, battering it so many times the whole structure was misshapen as the twisted wreck of a car cruelly crashed. A pit gaped where once an eye had lingered, the skin peeled away to bare the boney socket. The other eye, still intact and all the more horrible for its wholeness, neither Maddie nor Jack could bear to stare at.
That eye was death itself, the lifeless core deep within the cavity where once a heart might have resided gaped within it. Out of that eye poured hollow despair so deep, so powerful that death only prolonged and worsened it. The eye trapped pitiless abyss. Jack and Maddie turned away, unable to stand such a gaze. Nor was the alien sight of death emanating from that intact organ enough to cow them, rather it was the unfathomable, unmentionable kinship present in the specter's deathly gaze that averted their stare.
So warped and twisted and rotted and faded the face was nigh unrecognizable, but worse still for its familiarity. One by one these slivers of identification condensed within Jack and Maddie's minds to an identity of one they had known well. But no, their minds balked at the idea, cringing away with great tremors of fear at the mere thought that this horrific, lifeless ghoul could have once been who they thought it was. Yet lips turned traitor, giving voice to the idea.
"Vlad?" Maddie whispered in the deathly silence.
Adding to their horror, the monstrous visage nodded in confirmation of its former name before speaking in a voice as torturous to the ears as the features were to the eyes. Death hadn't held back ghastly torture from that tone. Its voice was hoarse from the final shriek of death, harsh from the rot of time and torment, dry from death. Sandpaper dragged across a chalkboard would have been more melodious.
"I will be brief, as your hatred of ghosts surpassed mine in life."
"This can't be you!" Jack shouted, his face struck with the same horrific realization Maddie had come to only moments earlier. As open as his mind was, he could not see this death-cored, beaten monstrous ghost of a ghost as the same man he had seen so alive, so vibrant, so ready to take on the world.
"This is my fate." His leaden-against-concrete voice echoed. Gesturing to his chains he added: "In life I wove these chains with my acts of hatred and prejudice towards beings I refused to accept as my fellows."
"What hatred?" asked Jack, honestly shocked. "Vladdie loves people enough to risk himself against ghosts for strangers. Maybe he doesn't like to show it but he has a heart. I haven't met a less hateful person, except my dear Maddie."
The ghost ignored his words. "I was sent here with a warning: you wear such chains yourselves! And if this continues your fate will be far more terrible than my own."
"We have no chains and anything a ghost throws on us will be shot," Maddie said. Her gun had slackened slightly but at those words she brought it firmly to this false-Vlad's head.
The specter shook his head regretfully, "I foraged these chains without spirit to aid me, as do you. My wounds, my chains, my eternity as the very thing I had so passionately and bitterly hated… those are my punishments but far worse awaits you upon your deaths!"
"Bah! We're not coming back as filthy spooks," said Jack, grinning brightly. "No Fenton has ever become a ghost."
Dry, crackled, rotted lips twisted in some nauseating impersonation of amusement, as though the monster caught a terribly ironic lie in Jack's words, but a moment more it too died. "I have also been sent to tell you of three spirits come forth to haunt you."
"Drop the Dickens act," Maddie ordered. "There must be many actual Scrooges who could benefit from this spiel, rather than people who know the importance of Christmas. We even put off the opportunity of a lifetime in honor of this special day."
"And that alone has saved you from becoming completely irredeemable…and worse. Listen to the message of the three; for you have time. Three more come. Heed them."
"Well then they'll meet the Fenton best!" Jack hefted his bazooka with satisfaction, "There's plenty more where this came from so you can tell those ghosts to send their worst."
"They will send their best and I beg you to heed their words as I did not." Its voice dropped, as though the act of speaking wore away at whatever vitality the spirit possessed. "If not…for yourselves then listen…for the sake of your son."
A pair of glowing green weapons, like two burning, vengeful eyes glared at Vlad's spirit, pinning him to the floor beneath two protective parents. Jack, normally so boisterous and light-hearted, reminded people of a teddy bear. Now all joy and jolliness drained from him, leaving features stern as granite. He did not snarl, nor narrow his eyes but his featureless expression was far more terrible for it. Any observer was immediately reminded of the sheer amount of strength packed in massive, tense muscles over a frame better suited to a giant than a man and how devastating such strength would be unleashed in fury.
Maddie's features hardened cold and grim as the finest steel, forged so pure that fire or frost no longer had power to warp or bow it. She held her gun with the steady ease of one for whom using such a weapon was as inconsequential and everyday as using a fork. Her smaller frame hadn't the volcanic threat of her husband's massive form but her martial stance and steady, tactical gaze spoke of still greater danger. The peril of a cold, remote glacier, the greatest of its terrible power hidden beneath deceptively calm sea.
Vlad's expression did not change an iota. He looked neither fearful, nor grateful at this terrifying threat of imminent destruction, as though the Fentons were no more a threat than mice.
"No one harms Danny!" Jack boomed.
"Tell us where he is and we'll rip you to pieces!" Maddie spat.
In the same calm, creepy voice Vlad reiterated, "Learn from the spirits. They will reveal what you desperately need to know in order to prevent your terrible fate. And your son's." The spirit faded away as an echo after utterance.
Maddie's trigger finger twitched, but finely honed self-control kept her from blasting the floor where the ghost had been. Should still be. One of the many upgrades the Fenton couple had made over the years was to make the walls, floor and ceiling invulnerable to intangibility, even if the security system was off and smashed to pieces. No ghost could have simply left Fentonworks.
"Danny! We need to check on him!" said Jack.
"And keep an eye out for other ghosts. That thing said there were three others and we need to find them before they find him," Maddie added ominously.
The couple slipped upstairs to Danny's room, dread quietly condensing to lead within the pits of their hearts. Many an ectoplasmic monster had threatened them with dire tortures but none considered going after family. Ghosts—in their experience—simply didn't understand empathy enough to threaten loved ones.
In that, it appeared, they were wrong.
"No sign of any spectral scumbags," Jack whispered as they stalked up the stairs.
"If that…spirit is following the Christmas Carol they won't appear all at once and not for another hour," Maddie whispered. "But if we're Scrooge…he didn't have children. Danny would never fit into any role of the story."
She paused, the leaden lump in her heart dropping to her stomach, "Unless…Tiny Tim."
"No," Jack whispered desperately, mind scrambling for a less horrific conclusion. "That would make us…the Cratchits. Vlad was…Vlad was…but we just saw him alive and that ghost was definitely not newly dead."
"A shape-shifter," Maddie postulated. "Something to throw us off. Honey…whatever you see of Danny…he might only be the shape-shifter in disguise. Not our son."
Jack's vivid imagination brought forth his son in the place of Vlad but before he could go mad from the sight of his precious danno's blue eyes replaced by abyss, his brain tore the image away. "Yeah," he whispered, clinging tightly to the feeble filament of hope as one by one its strands parted.
With the silent grace of predators Jack and Maddie stepped softly on the second floor, the halls standing just as they had before, undisturbed by any specter. No flashes of poisonous green light or rumbling explosions broke the deathly stillness. Was their son dead? Rotting as that ghost was? Had a ghost sneak in and possess their son? Holding him in an ectoplasmic grip stronger than steel. Dread, worse than any fear, gnawed like an ulcer in their bellies. Danny's door loomed ominous as a coffin lid.
Both parents regarded the doorknob with rising bile and sinking chill in their bodies. Reluctance leadened their limbs and stoned their muscles. They did not want to know, not for certain, what lay beyond that door. If the corpse of their son, cruelly murdered while a facade of Vlad distracted them, lay behind that door Maddie and Jack wished for ignorance of the matter.
Or worse than a corpse of their son, a ghost of their son—a familiar, cherished face painted upon the ectoplasm of their worst enemy. And if their son was a ghost he would have no choice to be evil, as all ghosts were, and they would be forced to End him for the good of others, of their darling Jazz, of every other child in Amity Park.
This fear more than any other held their hands over the doorknob, unmoving. Time moved as if under the throes a nightmare until they could take no more indecision. Finally courage overcame fear and together their hands twisted the cold metal of the innocent doorknob. Yet they could not open the door.
Why them? They fit no criteria of a Scrooge. The hour before they had been full of Christmas spirit and being forced to leave their daughter at college only made them all the more grateful for family and Christmas.
Sweeping away such reason they turned the doorknob with the swift suddenness of setting a dislocated shoulder and entered the room, weapons primed to fire at any ghost dwelling within. Maddie, smaller and slighter, slipped in first—gun and ecto-staff primed to kill any threat to Danny. Jack loomed behind his wife, bazooka powered up like a canon upon a rampart. No dirty, filthy ghost should be causing any trouble on Christmas, but what could anyone expect from ghosts. They held nothing sacred. Look at Phantom, probably demolishing buildings on the same night that Santa flew around to give gifts to children everywhere. No doubt a ghost would kidnap Danny on Christmas.
Or worse.
If a specter was present no glow betrayed it. Fear once again crawled up their spines to nestle in their minds. A vision stung their brains of that Vlad-like ghost, the shape-shifter, deathly core sucking away life as it did life while hovering above their son's sleeping form like a spectre of death. Both parents snapped free of their paralyzed dread and flicked on the light.
They hoped within hearts full of Christmas spirit to see only their son relaxed in the depths of dream-time, sleeping the sound sleep of one untouched by ghosts. Pillow half-covering his face, one hand draped over the edge of the bed, his blankets cocooned around him. Their eyes adjusted to the sudden brightness, able now to pick out distinct shapes. Before their color-sparked eyes lay their son's bed, clear and neat as a Christmas present.
Without Danny.
A/N: Personally I would have loved to have seen a Danny Phantom-style Christmas Carol instead of the Christmas episode that was aired but this would have been awful dark to air right after the Ultimate Enemy. Hope you enjoy my take on Dickens tale ;)
