Red eyes stared at the metal furrows that decorated the metal walls of his prison. Blood shaded orbs filled with rage, an emotion that was never far from his mind now, in his worst moments that single burning purpose was his sanity, his life. It kept him from descending into the inane madness of a psychopath. An ironic thing for him to say many wold probably think, that is if survivors of his now defunct future still existed within time. All his long years of terror gone, now he only existed here, and within the memories of a group of teenagers.

But he was not insane, not as his past self might like to imagine him to be, the little shrimp probably believed in the hopes of making himself feel better about the possibility of becoming so hopelessly evil. In the twisted parody of court he sometimes imagined to amuse himself he would not plead insanity, he would step up and proclaim all his deeds with pride and a mocking mirth at the jury. Whose faces he knew so well.

Family and friends stood to denounce and disown him, and he laughed in their faces, pointing out their stupidity and ineptitude.

He was getting off topic, he didn't want to think about them right now, he was busy contemplating his state of mind. All he had to do in this prison inbetween his attacks on the casing was think, so he took and examined each subject at length while his powers regenerated. Picking them apart, piece by piece, memories and musings and anything else that drifted by. Sometimes he could hear Clockwork speaking to those observant fools or simply musing to himself, the time master had never said a direct word to Phantom since informing him that the timelines had been changed and his world would never come to pass.

But he still existed, he could damage the Fenton Thermos, bend its shape and weaken the metal. He would be free, eventually. Whether it took a year or a century he would break this joke of a prison. Only Jack Fenton would have created such a thing, the man had watched too much Ghostbusters.

But back to the subject of his sanity -why was he letting his mind wander so easily?- he was a logical creature with no time for such things as unstable emotions, and insanity was a state of illogical behaviour. What was the classical definition now? A man who repeats the same action time and again and expects to get a different result? That he had never been subject to.

After all, when he repeated an action they always died, just like he expected them to. Okay so maybe they died differently, but the end result was the same, one last piece of human scum polluting the earth. Or in some cases one last ghost who would dare to trespass to this side. That had always disappointed him, that inability to truly kill a ghost who were after all, technically dead. Even the true ghosts, the race who were born that way (that annoying brat Box Lunch came to mind) maintained a form of immortality he couldn't destroy. He could injure them, maim them into forms more twisted than the ones they already possessed, but ultimately they just kept on un-living.

It didn't matter though, he was the strongest of them all, they fled before him. Had (he amended) plotted their revenge from the Ghost zone like squabbling children, the Box Ghost no longer the buffoon, still an idiot but a more dangerous one. Pain had been his catharsis into a more vicious form just as it had been to Phantom, just on a vastly weaker scale. Others like Johnny 13 he had crippled, broken. Ruining Ember's vocal chords... now that had been a stroke of genius, her anguish had been absolutely delicious. All of them, all the pathetic ghosts who had threatened and annoyed Danny Phantom had suffered for it.

He'd rampaged through the ghost zone soon after his birth, destroying everything that was an annoyance and asserting his dominance over its inhabitants whilst discovering the range of his new power, and sorting through the ienvitable jumble that the merging of two very different personalities brought.

Well... he supposed that was one form of madness they could attribute to him, he did have multiple personalities, though Plasmius was very far down on the awareness scale. Nothing more than a slight influence on his habits and some parts of his appearance, the fangs, he rather liked those. He ran his forked tongue over them lavishly, splitting the flesh slightly until he tasted ectoplasmic blood. Yum.

He killed without remorse, without any thought to his victims pain, except perhaps a sadistic delight at how they suffered, at seeing the way their flesh disintergrated in the force of one of his ectoplasmic beams or hearing their bones and flesh break with the sheer brute force in his body. He shuddered in pleasure at the memories, momentarily rising slightly in his levitation.

Odd, when his weaker self had sucked him into this he hadn't known what to expect, would he be squashed in like a contortionist, unable to move an inch? Or maybe he would be shrunken down to a miniscule size. Both were wrong, in fact he'd soon learned that he could control his own form, much like the way he had shapeshifted into Danny Fenton or had created clones of himself for battle. If he imagined himself small enough to sit comfortably inside then it became so, if he wanted no form at all then that manifested as well. He could throw blows at the walls anyway he wished, even using his most powerful technique, the Ghostly Wail.

To use one of Clockworks favourite expressions, it was simply a matter of time until he gained freedom. Time was all he had now until that day, which was why he made such good use of it.

He thought out everything he would do once he got out of here down to the minutest detail, how he would make his younger self suffer now that he no longer had to worry about killed the weak little child. After all, he was the strongest ghost that had ever existed, a miracle of science and the supernatural combined into a perfect being. An accident maybe, but such a beautiful one, not that his -Danny's he hurriedly rectified in his head- parents would approve of what their errant ghost-fighting creations had produced.

He'd have to give them a lovely surprise when he got out of here, tell Danny's secret all over again, see the expressions on their faces... and then there was Jazz, dear Jazz who had ruined everything. She would be first he decided, then the parents, last would be Sam and Tucker. He wanted Danny to suffer before he died, and killing his family and friends was the best way to do such a thing. It was that suffering that had created him in the first place. Oh, and he supposed he shouldn't forget old cheesehead, Vlad for short. Who had given Danny his only way out of the Ghost zone so that he might ruin the past. It was all so terribly obvious.

A wicked grin painted itself on his lips, maybe he should absorb both ghost halves again in this reality! Imagine how powerful he would be then! If it were possible... yes, he added it to his mental list of 'things to do'. No one, not even Clockwork could stop him then.

He climbed to his feet and stretched langidly, his fingers stretching into claws blazing with ecto-energy. he slashed at the furrows he'd already made, watching as the metal was gouged that little bit deeper, again, and again. On and on until his fingers started to bleed green. Then came the unearthly wails, the pounding of fists as he felt that rage well up inside, pushing him on to more powerful destruction on the flask.

"I will be FREE!"

----

Clockwork turned his gaze away from the time portal momentarily, his red gaze alighting upon the thermos situated ever so carefully on the worktable. He heard the roar of the occupant and smiled, "Yes, you will be, but not yet."

Small dents appeared alongside the others, the flask trembling, threatening to break, but it wouldn't, he knew.

"It is not yet the time." Clockwork spoke out to himself, looking to the screen once more where the fourteen-year-old Danny Phantom sped cross the night sky of Amity Park. "He must be ready for you first... I know, for I know everything."

He was already turning at the clang of the Fenton Thermos hitting the floor when one of Dan's blows toppled it. Floating over he picked the battered prison in a temporarily childlike hand and set it back upright with surprising care. The future would hold surprises, for both incarnations. He had only to wait.

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Hey there, this is my first venture into Danny Phantom fanfiction. So far I've stuck to Devil May Cry, but recently I've become literally obsessed with this show. And after watching The Ultimate Enemy I was hypnotised. It is simply one of the best animated features I've ever seen, the opening completely got me hooked and Dan, or Dark Danny, whatever you prefer to call him. Best Villain Ever. I had to write something about him, but seeing as how I have no plot ideas as of yet I settled for a stream of conciousness.

I just have a thing for white-haired evil men XD